Why Will Smith believes answers live beyond comfort zones

Dubai: Will Smith has spent the last two years travelling from the South Pole to the North Pole, and the experience was apparently as terrifying as it sounds.

Speaking at the 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai, the actor opened up about his upcoming National Geographic and Disney+ series Pole to Pole with Will Smith, which documents his 100-day journey through some of the planet's most extreme environments. You can expect him skiing across polar ice, scuba diving under frozen Arctic seas, and trekking through jungles and deserts.

One of the wildest moments from his documentary was: Extracting venom from a rare spider in the Amazon. Smith joined scientists to show how something dangerous can actually become life-saving medicine when studied properly. It's a metaphor that runs throughout the series: confronting what scares us can lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

"From your darkest difficulty, right in the centre of the pain, is where the cure lives," he told the audience.

The journey wasn't just about adrenaline or ticking off extreme locations. Smith met Indigenous hunters in the Kalahari, elders in the Amazon, and island communities dealing with rising seas. These encounters shaped his view that solutions to global problems often come from the margins, not the centre. "The solution to many of Earth's problems is there at the edges," he said.

It's a perspective that challenges the usual approach of looking to major cities or research institutions for answers. Instead, the series highlights the knowledge and resilience of communities living on the frontlines of climate change and environmental challenges.

He also got honest about fear. Whether it was spiders, extreme cold, or diving beneath ice, the trip forced him to face what terrified him. "If you are scared, you cannot really enjoy this world. Fear is the greatest enemy of our wildest dreams," he explained. The actor described learning to manage his mind during moments of absolute panic, treating fear not as a reason to stop but as a threshold worth crossing.

The seven-episode series, filmed over two years, premieres on 14 January. Smith described it as both beautiful and terrifying, calling it "heart-warming" and suitable for family viewing despite the extreme nature of the expedition.

It's less about spectacle and more about what happens when you push past comfort, listen to people living at the edges of the world, and find meaning in the uncomfortable bits. The kind of journey that changes how you see the planet and your place in it.