"I grew up very, very angry," Williams confessed. "Francis is very close to the person that I was for the first 20 years of my life. Even today, a large portion of who I am is very, very angry. Being able to vent that anger and vent that frustration and have a character that does that is lifesaving for me." Williams' anger comes, in part, from a childhood where he suffered physical and emotional abuse from his mother on a daily basis.
"The way I grew up a lot of people knew about what was going on in our home. A lot of people didn't want to believe it. A lot of people stayed in denial. It's a small, coal-mining town—St. Paul, Virginia—so when you show up to school with claw marks on your face, it's pretty fucking obvious what's going on, and they ignored it."
And, yes, Williams says that Francis is a caricature, one with an agenda. "One of the goals that I had when I started this is I wanted to bring people in with Francis by being a shitty, detestable, laughable, fat stereotype of a nerd neckbeard," he revealed. "I wanted people to just fucking hate him. I wanted people to click the next video and hate him again. Click on the next video and hate him again. Then click the next video and see the real me, and just maybe we can change perception a little bit."
"Maybe, just maybe, we can get that 14-year-old kid who picks on the fat kid, who picks on the gay kid, who picks on the weirdo in his class every fucking day, to stop and think. 'Wow, if Francis isn't really Francis, maybe my perception of that kid that I'm beating up and being shitty to everyday is wrong too.'"
...
The unasked question on everyone's mind is 'well, how does a person get so obese?' "When I was very, very young and going into my early 20s, I didn't give a shit," Williams confessed. "I didn't care how fat I got. I didn't care if I lived or died. I was miserable and I didn't care what happened. Around the age of 30, I started having some real health issues. Sleep apnea. Lymphedema. Hypertension. I started to lose my mobility."
"It finally started to occur to me that this was no longer an issue of quantity of life, It was quality of life. That's when I finally figured out that I was not going to get the death wish I had. That I was going to have to live considerably longer than I had anticipated. I was going to have to start working on the quality of my life. I went into therapy soon after that and started working with my doctors."
Williams credits his wife Desiree with providing much of the inspiration for wanting to turn his life around. "The day I knew I was going to marry her, I knew that I had to get my ass in gear," he said. "If you look at June of 2010, that's when I kicked it up a notch. I poured my blood, sweat and tears into this channel starting on that day—the day she got back on the plane to go back to Michigan. Because I needed to have the security. I needed to have the career. I needed to have the wealth. I needed to make sure that if I was going to have this woman in my life, her life was going to be exemplary. That she would be rewarded for that decision."