Ep 18 | Andy Middleton | The Man Who Sacked His Biggest Client — and Never Looked Bac

Andy Middleton is a pioneering force in sustainability, ecologic thinking, and biomimicry - and he happens to be based in one of the most breathtaking corners of the world: St Davids, West Wales. As founder of the TYF Group, co-creator of the World Freestyle Kayaking Championships, and a key contributor to Wales' groundbreaking Future Generations Act, Andy has spent decades helping individuals, communities, and businesses think - and act - differently.

In this conversation, we explore how growing up on the Pembrokeshire coast shaped his worldview, why he believes shareholder capitalism is in its "death days," what biomimicry and ecologic thinking can offer a world in crisis, and why the most powerful conversations happen not in boardrooms but in nature.

We also dig into the DO Lectures, the dangers of AI singularity, legacy, family, and what it truly means to be a maverick.

🌊 Topics covered:

• Growing up in St Davids & founding TYF
• Coasteering, kayaking & being #2 in the world
• From adventure business to sustainability pioneer
• The Future Generations Act & Wales as a global model
• Biomimicry, ecologic thinking & the rules of physics
• The DO Lectures & community on the edge
• AI, singularity & upgrading our "maverick quotient"
• Legacy, George Bernard Shaw & being "fully used up"

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to Inside the Maverick Mind. Today's guest is my neighbour in West Wales and a force of nature, Andy Middleton. He's the founder of the TYF group in St. David's, a pioneer of coastering and sustainability, and an advocate for ecologic and biomimicry long before most caught on. He's helped shape movements like the Do Lectures, and his work challenges us to think in longer cycles. Andy and I have walked and cycled the Pembroke Coast many times. I always say if we lived on Planet Andy, we'd all be living and thriving in a better world. This is a conversation about values, legacy, and how to think long-term in a short-term world. Andy Middleton is our guest. Let's get inside his Maverick Mind. Welcome Andy. Great to be here. Absolute pleasure. Oh. And so tell us a little about how you set up TYF, the outdoor activities in Pembrokeshire, and its legacy today.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

There's not many things I've put down to luck, but being born in Therry was one of them. Yeah. You know, so I was born in St. David's, I grew up there, and I had the had the pleasure, I guess, of parents who gave me the freedom to explore. And when I was about 10 years old or 12 years old, the national park created a footpath around the Pembroke coastline. So from the age at which I had full freedom to go exploring, you could get on foot to every bay and every cove on the entire coastline that I could walk or cycle to. So nature was my kind of backyard, and I spent my childhood exploring caves and driftwood collecting and all this kind of stuff. And I learned life-saving and rock climbing and various bits. And after coming back from travelling, rediscovering Pembrokeshire's amazing coastline and seeing it from a different perspective, we realized that the stuff that we'd done as kids was not familiar to people who were new to the area. And over a period of time, we ended up starting coastering and surfing and kayaking and then created a business that took like 200,000 people to play and learn in nature. So it was down to luck that my childhood gave me the experience of doing that. But a luck of place and good parenting.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

But you were a champion kayaker, so that was in the mix somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Sure. So just off the coast from St. David, you know, as you as an area you know well, there's a tidal rapid on Ramsey Island called the Bitches. And if you wanted to concentrate the tide in any country, you'd you'd look at the headlands. If you want to do it further, you'd have an island next to that. And if you want to do it further, you'd put a reef next to that. And all of those things are present on the coast of Ramsay Island, which means that when the spring tides, the big tides are flowing, you get this incredible force of tidal flow funneling through a narrow gap. And we ended up exploring that in a different way in new kayakes that were around and created from scratch the World Freestyle kayaking championships in there with mate Charles Willis. And it was my playground. I was out there every time the tides were flowing, and we ended up bringing the world's best paddlers to come and play with us. And it was an amazing experience. And so I was I was practicing in my backyard, had you know, and I was on the competed and had a good time, and I was number two in the world.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Number two in the world, he casually says. No, I love that part of the world is treacherous over ships and whatever. But I often go out on the rib, and you need to time it perfectly exactly. You know, a navigator or a pilot that knows what he's what he or she is doing. Tell me, you've you've changed the business now. I I was inspired by what you did with it.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

So we what started as a straight adventure business. You know, we're just like going, what what's the asset we have in our have in our backyard? And it was the coastline. So things like sea kayaking and all of the activities we did were were brilliant. And we were, it's it's a growing the business there was a little bit like having a business in extreme in an extreme version of the Galapagos Islands. So there was nobody else to learn from. The only other people who'd been to that same space as us were based in the mountains of Scotland or Snowdonia or the Lake District. There was nobody within two hours' drive who did anything like we were trying to do. So our the culture that we created learned more in many ways from surfing than it did from the mountain, kind of, you know, old men with white beards kind of climbing mountains in winter. So the whole cultural side of what we did is different. And that that was that was important. And a few years in, we ended up buying a hotel tour develin, which is where the name, you know, the name of the business came from. And that was like running like an adventure lodge, and 12 of our customers got married as a consequence of meeting in our bar. It was because people met real humans face to face in a way that you don't in in any other environment. And what started as this adventure business ended up, we ended up running training programs. One of our first clients was British Gas, who said, Hey, can you do something with a bunch of apprentices? And we ended up working across the UK, Northern Europe, Asia, with companies wanting to help train people to think differently. Did a massive amount of work with the Japanese companies in South Wales, but companies from American Express to the Bank of England to Body Shop were our customers, bringing people down to learn how to think differently through not through rock climbing and kayaking, but we, you know, we'd use coastering often as a way of recalibrating play and teamwork. But that became a way of informing, I guess, so much of what became my work in sustainability was saying, how do you not only care for something, but act in a way that's congruent with that? And you was it a management, was it a staff buy?

SPEAKER_01 5:31

What happened in the end?

SPEAKER_00 5:32

So we ended up we we were trying really hard to create uh an employee owned business and signed the paperwork, and the guy who was who'd been putting it together on the staff side ended up leaving at short notice and it kind of fell apart. And one of my lessons from that was to, you know, I'd have put another five years of work in up front behind it. Because taking responsibility, even though it had been run by the staff every day, it meant there was still someone there to pass the difficult decisions to. So my my own view is that you know shareholder capitalism is in its death days right now, and some kind of stewardship ownership business is the only way forward where employees own the businesses they work in and really take all the decisions about its well-being. Because this top-down stuff has never worked, and that was not how we worked, but it so we so we ended up um we ended up then selling the business to a guy called Rich Carpenter, who'd been our head guide, and I'm out of it completely, but still good friends with the guys who worked there.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Your father was a huge influence on you, as mine was to me. What values did he pass on that still shape you?

SPEAKER_00 6:34

I think there was something about the way he was a doctor in a rural area. He was, you know, he was born in 1922 and and lived to just over a lived to just over a hundred years.

unknown 6:43

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

So there's something around the care that he had as a value, and not just my my father, but my grandparents, my maternal grandparents, you know, were were pioneers in trying to change the system from the edge. And I think, you know, they reckon he was this is way, way before, you know, 50 years before the internet, where St. David's was the end of the line, but he was changing immediate care, he was changing the way the lifeboats ran, the way that the Coast Guards ran from this kind of surgery on the edge of Wales. And I think there's something about care and persistence and clarity, I think there was some of the it was a huge part of what he did. Is there something he taught you that became clearer as you got older? I think it was that you don't need to be in the middle of things all of the time to make change happen. Or sometimes the centre where change is happening is not in the middle of London or the middle of Cardiff, but actually is where the action happens on the edge. So I think that and recognising that that's that was a constant theme, I think, to his belief and the way he worked.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

I can see how it's rubbed off on you. I know your family is everything to you. Have they followed your ethos? Uh, what's the typical day in the Middleton household?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

I'm so, so fortunate. I've got four kids, as you know, live close to two of them and tour in Bristol. And I would think that any outside observer would kind of go, yeah, the the apples didn't fall so far from the tree. You know, my oldest daughter is a health estate massage therapist, so she spends her entire work time is caring for people, and she does, she has amazing healing hands that uses for that. My son Jack was is an operations director for an educational recruitment company that was up until recently, you know, a big big B Corp, and they they've changed the way they're valuing that, but very much his values. Another daughter Jasmine is work is raising kids at the moment, but it's hugely has those same values, and my younger daughter works for a B Corp environmental consultancy and comms company, so that they all have those values. And I think that if you give them the chance to experience the same kinds of things, both the care of nature, but also the ability to get things done, that's huge. And so we we did a lot of cycling and adventuring, as you'd expect, with our kids. And one of the huge bonuses at the time when my kids were young is having you know a stack of kayaks and wetsuits and safety kits, so you could take out hordes of these young kids who are now in their 30s doing amazing things with theirs.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

That play was so essential for their they're very creative, I know this. And Sarah, your wife, spoke at the do lectures, which we'll come on to. Everybody's thinking in your house there's not a TV or a PlayStation inside. They're either outdoing or making.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

I think the the doing bit, I think, is just so, so important. And it's you know, the time that we value most is things like when we're when we're cycling and doing things together. My wife, Sarah and I cycled across France last year. We're going to continue that journey to cycle from the west coast of France to the Black Sea over the next couple of years, and it's about three and a half thousand kilometres. But just being outside doing things is is so so important. In the winter, we'll watch a bit of Netflix, but then in the summer, the TV just never never, of course it's not on because there's life is too short for that.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

And booking places for me and Mayer on that next cycle trip.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Your ideas, ecologic, biomimicry, tell us what they could bring to our world.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Well, a lot of my experience growing up, as I mentioned earlier, was you know deep in nature and becoming really aware of the damage, the the impact that we have on that as humans. And when I was in my early 20s travelling, I spent um I spent about eight months working in the mines in Western Australia, digging up first iron and then gold. And we were mining gold at 99.997 in efficiency. We could justify mining gold at three grams of gold in a mine in a ton of rock, blasting the desert into dust to be able to do that, and mixing the rock with mercury and cyanide to get out. And it's so so clear in those travels that you know the way we're working, the way we're doing things, kind of doesn't make sense. And I spent a bunch of time as a non-exec director, as a council member on the national park, and then council council for Wales, Natural Resources Wales, and got involved because my business background, you know, said, Hey, tap on the shoulder, would you like to be on the audit committee? And my first thoughts were, oh my god, I can't imagine anything worse than being on the audit committee. It'd be like you turning up to an amazing gig with Tom Jones and you're on cloakroom duty. You kind of you don't get to play. But what was so interesting is that realizing that those organizations had a completely different view of risk to the way I to everything I'd learnt at TYF. When I when we took those hundreds, hundreds of thousands of customers out to play and learn, they were safe because the adventure guides were ready for the conditions that might happen on that day. And even if something happened that they weren't ready for, they were more prepared than they than anybody else around. They're as prepared as they could be. And the governance around most organizations today, businesses, government, third sector, is based on what's already happened, not what's coming. So the startling thing, the startling realization, I guess, is that we don't value being ready in society at any level. The share price of businesses, the returns of businesses are nothing to do with being ready for what's coming. So most of my focus now is on saying how do we weave together the networks of organizations who can help communities, SMEs, corporates, business understand the risks ahead around climate, around nature, but also around things like AI and recognize what role they've got to play on a day-to-day basis. So I'm working worldwide with people in data, environmental protection, conservation, business, working with some of the biggest family-owned businesses in the world, part of a network with unreasonable who are impact accelerators. I've coached 150 chief execs of the fastest growing impact businesses. But all of them recognise we need to be doing things radically differently. And I think the question is, how do we do that? Demonstrating in small countries like Wales what's possible with only three million people if we can't do this. But we are doing it. We are doing it, but not fast enough to get to the place that we need to get to by sundown.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Yeah, we ride at daybreak. Ideas like these can sometimes feel too big for the antiquated systems we have. When have you been most frustrated trying to get them across?

SPEAKER_00 13:19

I guess, you know, for a long time, you know, I guess b being frustrated is almost like a conditioned taught response to things not working. Nature doesn't get frustrated. Animals don't get frustrated, they just learn. One of my learnings is that when things don't work, just learn faster. Because being frustrated is a bad mindset to be, to develop the kind of creativity or relationships that we need to find different ways of doing things. Otherwise, I think you'd be frustrated the whole time because nobody's ready to ride at dawn, you know.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

But when people aren't ready, how would you decide whether to push harder or step back? Because not everybody can see the vision.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

No, no. I think there's a there's a couple of things. I think there's something about it's rather than kind of pushing forward or stepping back, I think there's something about listening more. So how do we listen in more to what's happening? But not just listening to what people are saying, but help those people listen to what nature's saying. Ask people to say, what do you think the river would say? What do you think the forest would say about the way that it's being used? What do you think future generations would say about your choices? And I think the startling thing is that our grandchildren, if they have kids, which I imagine you know some of them will, those kids at my dad's uh age would still be alive in 2150. So your grandchildren's children, mine, could be alive in 2150. But nobody ever talks about that year as though it's going to exist. And so we've really got to stretch. I think, and that's just that's only the lifetime of our grandchildren's children. So how do we radically shift our thinking? I think everybody's got it in them to think differently about that, but sometimes we need to we need to help them see differently. And I was um I was joking with a friend who had asked me the awkward question as to what do you do for a living? And I said, Well, I'm a I'm a window cleaner. So how does that work? And he said, Well, I'm I run a company called Snow White Windows. And what we do is we turn up with a gang of people and we we help people find the transfers stuck on the inside of the windows that make it look as though the world's okay outside, like the magic mirror on the wall. And we help them peel the transfers off and see the world as it actually is, and then find the joy and the possibility in that rather than believing that doing everything we're continuing to do is gonna work out okay, which it's not.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

But I think Wales definitely took a big bold step forward with the Future Generations Act, and you're very much a part of that background.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

So, yes, I mean I was like many people who are working in that space, I was part of the the team who helped to shape that and I did some of the work on the regulatory assessment for the act. And I think a good a really good example of where where Wales is at now, there's a kind of courage starting to develop. And last week a report came out called the State of Natural Resources Report from Natural Resources Wales, which plaints a pretty bleak picture of the state of our nature. And the the chair, the new chair of uh Natural Resources Wales said this cannot be fixed by regulations or recycling, but we need to completely rethink this. Derek Walker, who's our future generations commissioner, said this is a matter of life and death. And I think there's this kind of creeping realization that like 2026 is the year when businesses realise for both AI and nature, is the time we start, you know, the rubber hits the road, and rather than being another year sometime in the future, that we start to make decisions that count, that's that year is now.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

I I hear you, and um I asked you about frustration because it feels like you're on a broken record sometimes. Um I remember you getting consent for the stadium to speak to all the all the children in Wales. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

So years back I was talking to colleagues at the um at the WRU out after a Global Welsh event, I think it was at, and and gently kind of teasing them a bit, saying, you know, you could do more. And you know, it's great to stop with clubs, but you could do more. And I said, Well, what might that look like? And the conversation ended up with me being offered the entire stadium for free as a classroom, you know, as a 70,000-seat classroom, which would be enough to bring every child in South East Wales under the roof for a day to listen to music, to sing together, to learn, and hear, for instance, about why getting involved in politics matters. You know, why why your voice might count. And if anybody wants to make that happen, then let's let's do that.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Um, let's bring it home a bit. Uh, you're based in Pembrokeshire, one of the most beautiful places to live and work. I sadly am Cardiff and Pembrokeshire, and I'm incredibly jealous of you, and I must say, I mean it's a decision I might have to make. How does your day-to-day life there shape your work?

SPEAKER_00 18:06

I think you know, that the pre- that at last having decent internet and stuff makes a huge difference because we could we can work from everywhere. You know, my uh my daughter-in-law Olivia is a radio presenter. We're you know, work in Virgin and other radio stations from a converted barn, you know, up the coast from me in Kroisgorg, which is amazing, you know, so being able to do digital work. So my day-to-day stuff is talking to people in you know, New Zealand or in Mexico or in states, you know, Indonesia, wherever, about this kind of work, weaving those networks together and then interspersing that whenever I can with like walking or cycling conversations with people doing the same work. And it's it's amazing how West Wales is like a magnet to people who care about this stuff because there's some really good stuff happening there that are good people, and it's an incredible place of you know, for for working professionals in their mid-40s who care about nature and kids. There's no better place to bring them up. So I'm I'm you know, in a joyous space when I meet good people and have a walking conversation that's remembered by what you were talking about when you're next to the island or the headland or whilst watching the seals, it's a really different conversation to one in a windowless basement with a flip chart.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

But we have tried to pioneer that with way out west together and the kind of people that came there, they're so receptive to that kind of context.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

I think there's something about experience, you know, that there's something somatic about experiences at a body level that when you are when you're looking at these things over, you know, experiencing nature and then seeing the relationship between walking and creativity because you feel it, it's really, really hard to forget that kind of stuff. So I think conversations in places that matter is one of the most important things. And then it's something that every child in Wales should experience is the beauty and the power of being that close to nature, but also being able to have a watch the stars. You know, we had an incredible Aurora Borealis a couple of weeks back, stunning, in our backyards, and it's like such a privilege, but everybody has a right to experience that.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

I remember Lucy Stone speaking at the way at West and talking about uh the wow book that she has, which is we don't say wow enough. When we were children, we'd say wow all the time. But because we were in Pembrokeshire, you see the wow so much and it touches your heart.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

And I think there's something about noticing, you know, that sense of awe of seeing the sky, the you know, seeing the sky, the clouds, the you know, the rising, you know, the rising daffodils and the snow drops coming out is something that when we're we're trained so deeply now to find the wow on Instagram or on TikTok or other things and read recalibrating our vision to see it and both the you know the human and natural relationships around us is something that doesn't happen necessarily by itself. So I think guiding people towards that is super important.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

My and my wife went to with me to um a weekend at the do lectures, and she came away with one saying from David Hyatt, and that was before you look at your mobile on the phone, look at a cloud, uh, look out of the window. And she's been doing it, it's just most annoying because she leaves the curtains open. But I get it, Dimmy. We do tend to go straight to our mobiles or our diary, and we don't see what's around us. So I I couldn't I couldn't agree more.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

And I guess this we were talking with colleagues at home, the other friends, the other home the other day, about a six-year-old who was like who couldn't stop gaming. And you're kind of going, how do we find a way of getting kids, not just kids, but getting people addicted to caring for nature rather than someone that's driving screen time? And that means recalibrating pretty much everything we know about education, about the way we work in the outdoors, but bringing all those different bits of the system together, that's the bit that I think is so exciting.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

So I band around the term maverick very often, and it can be quite intimidating. What would your advice be if somebody wants to think differently, does think differently?

SPEAKER_00 21:56

I think there's something around you know, I d I don't believe The idea that you know mavericks are born that way necessarily, although I'm so I'm sure that some have a great sense of mischief. But I do certainly think there's something around like growing your maverick capability almost. And that might start with just challenging the system in a really small way and then growing it. And I think that sense of there's something around kind of sense of justice and possibility, I think that drives me that we can practice on a day-to-day basis by just stretching the imagining, imagining it's a muscle, and sometimes it'll feel stiff, and if sometimes you feel like you might stretch it too much. But if you practice building it, we get to a point where we can help other people, I think, build that too.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

Brilliant. Well, I think we're all conditioned from school to nothing differently. You know, I was the worst pupil looking out the window because I was curious. I was done how the world works, necessarily not listen, but you know, I think that kind of early cultivation of, you know, Maverick behavior, perhaps, is what I should say.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

And I think we what's interesting as well, and that, you know, particularly now in early 2026, you know, that there are there are a bunch of tech, you know, observers and reviewers suggesting that like in the last week we might have started to step into the singularity where where computers are capable of making, starting to make decisions by themselves, or AIs are making decisions without humans. Now, when we're so when we're talking about being a maverick, we also have this other much wider potentially dangerous, um, dangerous construct of you know you know augmented intelligence to take into consideration. Because if you have 50 million, the the equivalent of 50 million genuses working against you, we probably we may well need to upgrade our kind of maverick quotient, our kind of MQ, to say how how do we imagine a future where actually humans stay in the right relationship with intelligence and data, recognizing that that may not be how AI wants it to go. And the conversations about the risk associated with this are not in government today.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

When you think about legacy, whether it's for your family or the wider community, what's the one thing you hope you're leaving behind?

SPEAKER_00 24:13

I live in a privileged world, as you know, like place-wise and doing doing what I do, in that the experiences that we create and you know, the stuff we did at TYF was designed to change people's lives. That was that was the reason that we existed as a business, and we were pretty good at doing it. And you know, on a couple occasions I saved people's lives, you know, so physically saved, I was at the beach on different occasions and saved two people from drowning. I know I made a difference to their lives. But at a wider level, it's it's there's a huge pleasure getting the occasional email from people saying, You changed that conversation or that bit of advice changed my life, and that's that's a pleasure. But for me, the the biggest satisfaction is about um being fully used up. And there's a there's a quote I often use that I read at my dad's funeral um from George Bernard Shaw, and it's a it's a combination of two quotes, and it says, This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty one. I no longer want to be a feverish, selfish clod of grievance and ailments, complaining that the world do not devote itself to making me happy. I believe that my life belongs to the whole community, and that the harder I work, the more I live. And I want my life is like a brief candle, and I want to hold it up and make it burn more brightly before handing it on to future generations. And and for me, if we can find that candle and in context and understand what it means to do that, that that's a good enough legacy for me.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

You always do oh god, anyway. Um we'll have to stop for a minute. You see, he's good in me. Um because you've lived it, that's why. Oh, right perfect. So I'll I'll try and recover. Um you were part of the creation of the do lectures uh that's got such an enduring legacy. How did it come about?

SPEAKER_00 26:19

So, way, way back when the kind of the jungle drums in West Wales kind of start alerted me to the fact that someone new had come down to the West Wales with a different background. Did the same with me. You know, and and it was um and and way, way back, I'd I'd you know, David, David was David Hyatt was um David and Claire were still running Howie's, you know, they just left, just left Sachi were running this um clothing company um from a from a creaky old bit of a flat in a in a mansion up in the Tyvee Valley. And we we caught up and talked and stuff and uh and got it got on well. And a few years later, they created a thing called um Little Big Voice, where David pulled together, it was like a tiny event, like it was a free event up held held up at Forest, um, which is this amazing kind of glamping site in the Tyvee Valley. And David brought together about 12 or 15 speakers, of which I was one, to give activists and social, so you know, social entrepreneurs a bigger voice, little big voice. And they brought together people who had the remarkable skills of doing things like building a website in just a day, which is you know something you can do with an agent now, but then was remarkable photographers and filmmakers and uh and brand led um brand specialists. And then a couple years later, um David was running this thing called an earth tax with a business, taking 1% of their sales and putting it into good causes, and decided to start this thing called the Do Lectures based on a kind of provocation from Tony Davidson about what is it we that we'll do. And and from that tiny thing where we'd say, well, let's see if we can make it to another year, and and then suddenly we're like, you know, getting on for 15 years in. And it, you know, the do lectures brings together this incredible range of thinkers and doers with no badges and no lanyards and no no status. You the volunteers are are the gods because they make things run. They have the special t-shirts on, but everybody else is just there to learn and share stories, and it's it's an incredible meeting place that has the ability to give people who might be experts in one domain, just let go of that completely and just be a guest, talking about something completely different, and it brings together really powerful stories of both what's possible but also stories of ordinary change. And I think many people come there who've achieved the peak of traditional success, but know that's not what it's all about, and it gives a space to be completely honest and open with strangers about what's different, and you know, you you know from your own experience how transformational that is for how many people.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

I came there on your recommendation, and I remember the Land Rover with the sign on it, the end of normal. I knew this was going to be an interesting weekend in the middle of the field and camping and whatnot, and in a barn with a hundred people streaming worldwide. But it I came at a pivotal moment where I was thinking of buying my company back from Sky Studios. It was a big decision, and I came from there with the decision because, in the context of those mavericks that we were listening to, it was incredible, it was inspiring. I came back as a speaker then and saw the other side of the machine to recognize the people in the t-shirts and everything else, and the sense of ownership everybody has in it. But it goes on beyond that, doesn't it? People get together. It's if you see somebody with a what do you call it, one of these um bags with do lectures on on the beach somewhere in in America, you're bound to go and speak to them.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

You know, there's a there's a there's a real sense of community. And the people I met there like 15 years ago, you know, for relatives for minutes, will always pick up the phone or respond or something. So there is there is an incredible community and it's yeah, and and just shows what's possible again on the edge. Yeah, yeah. You know, in an amazing landscape and so on.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

I'd recommend anybody who's listening to this to uh check out James Hill's episode with us and also the incredible Michael Dixon, uh, both people we met through the do lectures. So we're on to the Maverick maxims next, Andy, and that's quickfire questions, whatever comes to your mind, and I'll just be drilling you with these now. Sure. Um, what's a belief about success you've completely rejected?

SPEAKER_00 30:26

I think when I started a business, you know, apart from kind of getting over oh, I've got a business thing. There's so much there's so much in success is about success being defined by how much you've got, how much money you've got, how much status you've got, and so on. And it's and that's got nothing to do with it. You know, I don't know, I don't know any good entrepreneurs or mavericks are defined by that. Most of them are defined by the freedom of being able to come up with good ideas and implement things that matter, but it's not about status or wealth. You know, great having financial freedom to make things happen is brilliant. But I think so often we talk about growth, we talk about business growth and you know exp expansion and so on rather than impact. So I think I let go of that a long time ago.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

I agree 100%. What's one uncomfortable truth you think society is avoiding?

SPEAKER_00 31:13

We're still pretending that the laws of physics and biochemistry don't apply to humans. The life on earth has been around for about 3.8 billion years, and there's around maybe 10 million species alive on Earth today. We don't know the names of most of them, but there's around about 10 million species. One of those species, quite an odd one, the bipedal thing called Homo sapiens, thinks that the rules of physics don't apply to it. And the hard truth is recognizing that physics gets to bat last. Physics really doesn't care how whether or not our children thrive, because it happens anyway. And I think recognizing you cannot live as though there are three or four planets with resources to extract is not built into our economy or thinking or our teaching yet. And this year, I think was gonna be would be the time at which we have that uh moment of going, uh-huh. Uh-huh. It's starting to happen. And this report that came out, the Sonar report or last week, a um a suppressed government report on biodiversity came out saying the the downside of this, if we don't address this, is you get billions of people looking for water and food. And they're not going to stay in countries where there isn't any.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Yeah, super. And I think we're we're just not waking up to listen to the message.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

It is starting to happen. You know, and and the we have the capability to respond, we have the creativity, and we need to create the governance that allows the collaboration. But that I mean there are an amazing number of people start caring about this. We just need to find a big magnet to put under the table and align those stories so that they point in the same direction. If we do that, we can move at incredible speed in the right direction.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

It's so heartbreaking when you have such a um big leader as in the state saying, you know, drill, baby, drill, and that example, that I think it's probably had the counter-effect of us realizing we can't be doing that, the extremity of the, you know, drill, baby, drill is ridiculous.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

It is, and I think and it was interesting to see yesterday that even though that they tried to stop, you know, wind farmers being developed, four out of the five that he stopped have now got permission to go ahead again. It gets in the way, but there is a but again, there is a way of thinking that physics doesn't count. If you grow the economy, it's all gonna be okay. And that's not the answer. So there's gonna be this massive realignment, and the kind of question that some people talk about is do we choose to bend or break? Because one of the two will happen, and I'd rather kind of we bend the way we do things. And you know, there are so many possibilities. And I mentioned Unreasonable earlier, you know, unreasonable group, who run these accelerators for high impact businesses. And I I regularly meet people who are doing things like, oh yeah, can we reducing the impact of methane in cows by 90% by the addition of red seaweed extracts. I mean stuff that's like right on the boundaries of your imagination. So that there's so much cool stuff is possible. We just need to get it evenly distributed. And I was I was um posted something a couple of days ago about the future of food, which again, due to climate impacts, is is compromised. And it would take about one and a half percent of Wales's pensions and ICEs to buy all of the land in Wales that would be needed to buy all of it, to grow all the vegetables we could eat and put it in trust forever. Come on, that's doable. So, how do we make these big things happen and make them the conversations we have, you know, online or in the cafe?

SPEAKER_01 34:35

Let's have a coffee about that. Absolutely. Um, I think we all have to do something. My son Oshan, who was on who was on the eco comes in school, the big journey we're on together to um is to secure a net zero future for broadcasting. So we've bought this, well, the first in Wales battery, which is basically four Tesla cars on top of each other. And I know that we'll be reducing carbon footprint through that. We did the edit they stuffed last year, was uh two years ago, 63 tons of CO2. That's the equivalent of flying to Australia nine times around the equator, seven times, did it the year after without even trying with hydrogen and batteries, 15 tons. And next year we're going to be net zero. So if we all took ownership on what we do, it's gonna have a massive impact, I think.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

It's 100%. And I think you know, one of the things that we've been playing around with is to say, you know, understanding the idea of tipping points, you know, what does a positive tipping point look like, after which point it becomes really unlikely that you won't get the good positive outcome? And that might a population look like. How do we how do we get like a billion people confident to make a change and acting on what matters in uh in three or five years? Because that's about the time it is happening. It's quite possible if you align musicians and sport and things like that. So once we've kind of once you've activated people's attention, what are the networks we can connect them to where that stuff counts and then learn from each other so that all of the people running OBs are learning from anybody in the world who's doing the best stuff. And as you know, there are some good networks in your world already doing that.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

You see, this is the planet Andy, I love. You see, I want to live on your planet, except we're living on this planet, Earth, and that's why we need to wake up and protect it. What's one habit people could change tomorrow that would improve the planet?

SPEAKER_00 36:19

I think it's partly it's focusing the shifting the time scale of our conversations or the time framing of our conversations. I'd quite often be out with out in the pub or whatever, and not suggesting a little pub lots, but in in a public and the conversations are always about what has happened. Yeah. And guessing often and why people did things. I wonder why Emmy or Andy did that, rather than talking about the world today or what's coming. So I think shifting our focus to what's happening around us more would make a huge difference and and recognizing that all of us have agency. All of us have that ability to make change happen just because we we're the person who wrote the letter that was the straw that persuaded a politician to do something. You know, it's institutions that need to change, and they respond to people's individual, individual people making change happen. So I think there's a huge amount that we can do, but looking forwards and talking about that future that we want, as well as which bits of the present do one let go of. You know, there's a report in the Guardian yesterday saying that ultra-processed foods should be treated like cigarettes in terms of health risk. Well, we could let go of that. But what does the world look like? What does Cardiff look like? What does a country look like when we start to let go of food that's that's not designed to make us healthy? And how does how do we reinvent that? Those are the conversations that we could be having every day that would make that world more likely to happen. They grow the soil for that world to grow in. What do most leaders get wrong about sustainability, would you say? For a long time, and this would have been really prevalent at Davos a couple of weeks ago, is that everybody's talking about the business case for sustainability. And as I said a minute ago, physics doesn't give a shit about the business case. There is a case, there's a life case for sustainability in recognising that in the medium term, if your business isn't part of the solution of creating a livable planet, it'll become an ex-business. And sure, on the way, some businesses that are fast movers or early adopters who are doing the things that matter will profit faster. But it's not about just trying to make one money. It's saying how do we work backwards from the idea of a livable planet for our grandchildren's children in 2150 and say what's the role of business between now? And then it's not about economic growth because actually we could consume far less and be just as happy. But it's about imagination more than the business case. But it's that's so so we've got to let go of just being the business case. Sure, you can make money at times, but it's about change. When you look at the future, are you more hopeful or more angry? I don't I try not to get angry about it because it's um it's it's not a helpful mindset, it's not a helpful headspace to be in. At at Christmas, I was I was sick with the bad flu and I couldn't even think, and being aware of what's going on in the world is like it's just it fills it with despair if you're not careful. And I think hope by itself is a dangerous thing if it's hoping that someone else can do this. But what what what does give me um a positive mood, if you will, on the on much much of the time is recognizing that in general we haven't tried the cool shit yet. We haven't we haven't, you know, in the well-being of few generations out that you mentioned, there is a legal duty to maximize your contribution towards the well-being goals if you work in public sector. It's a legal duty. Yeah, most people have no idea what's possible in terms of how healthy you could make school meals or how much difference it makes if kids walk to school or what it means if all of your council employees are trained to a functional level of literacy. We have no idea what's possible yet. Partly because if you worked in the public sector, you weren't allowed to look at YouTube to watch the videos. But so it gives me real hope that just by spreading the practical stories of what's possible that do save money, that do make people happier, that do make people healthier, can make it much easier for people to the right thing really quickly.

SPEAKER_01 40:19

I am particularly proud that Wheels brought the Future Generations Act, because that's a world beater to you. It just shows we're looking to the future, to your point, and that you know, there's a responsibility on us all, of course.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

100%. And and I think it's very, very easy for people to go, well, what can I do? Because it's just me or whatever. And you know, the what the the well-being Future Generations Act is a really good example. And it's like I think there are 14 countries and regions now adopting elements of the Act. So, you know, one country has inspired 14 others, and I think you're saying, well, why couldn't cities do this or small countries take that take that lead?

SPEAKER_01 40:58

I think for me, you've always been a huge maverick. I I recognise my tribe, and that's because you think differently. You question everything. You when people say you can't, you say, watch me. What I'd like to do is to talk about your maverick moment. When did you realize you were building something that didn't fit the usual models?

SPEAKER_00 41:18

I think when fairly early on, and in in the days of the business that became TYF, you know, we said we started my first business as a windsurfing school, and nobody was windsurfing in the UK, or hardly anyone was doing it, so that was kind of easy to do. But I think when we started to get a bit of pace under the business and realize that there were no rules for what we're doing, it's back to that Galapagos thing. There were no rules because nobody had done it before. We ended up with having the the executive of the health and safety of the HSE, health and safety executive, came to see us for coffee. Because they just wanted to, they were interested in this new sport that had developed and wanted to know how we were approaching risk. Not as a not as a formal assessment, but just as a dialogue around risk. And it was a fascinating experience. And I guess from then realizing that so much of what we were doing was in an area where that there were no rules to follow, so we had to follow kind of the rules of nature and the that kind of conscience about saying how do we align this with a better future? And so from really quite early on, and there's massive disadvantages of growing a business in St. David's where you're surrounded on three sides by sea. So there's no customers out there, there's no people to learn from to the north, the west, or the south. So it's kind of like it is like being on an island. And that has a and you there's a price to pay for that. But I think now with with good communications and people appreciating the magic that happens there, it you it feels much more like being at the front edge of things now, not the back.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

But when you were doing that, was it exciting or did it feel isolating at first?

SPEAKER_00 42:52

It felt really exciting, I think, partly because we were we were we were recognized really early on as pioneers by the you know by the media. This is way, way before YouTube and stuff, as you'd appreciate. But we had acres and acres and acres of of media coverage. You know, anybody who was covering in extreme white water or the coastering or adventure would be would be would be picking us up. And we were covered worldwide on that. And that we didn't for 15 years we didn't spend anything on marketing at all. We just we'd buy beers for journalists when they came down. But and and we got really good at how to tell those stories. So we tell them where to put the cameras, all the stuff that you know when you have a good relationship with a venue, they know what works as well as there's a good level of respect. So that was hugely important.

SPEAKER_01 43:38

What's the best decision you've made on your journey? Um, something you do again in a heartbeat.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

I think it's it was when I when I came back from travelling, it was my heart that gave me the first signal that I was in the right place. And, you know, when I came back to St. David's, I'd always loved it, but went, huh, this place is kind of special. You know, I'd been to places elsewhere in the world that had bigger cliffs or bigger beaches or whatever, but this like condensed beauty was so close, you know, and culture so close was super special, but it was my heart that gave me that signal first. So I think it's listening to your heart as well as your head and do those at the same time, and they can often give quite different messages. And I think if if business leaders listened to their heart, they would make different decisions.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

You had to go away to come back in many ways, didn't you? I think so.

unknown 44:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:30

What's the decision that taught you the most, even if it didn't feel like a mistake at the time?

SPEAKER_00 44:36

I think one of the one of the decisions that that we made quite early on is our our one of our our first, our very first corporate client, proper corporate client, was um British Aerospace. And we were working with the planes division and various other bits, but we ended up sacking them as a client. Because then they were they were our biggest client by far. But we sacked them because we couldn't reconcile the things that we were talking about with the fact that they were a weapons manufacturer too. And it was like we we gave we gave away about 25% of our revenue to that single client, but just couldn't countenance, couldn't, couldn't see ourselves standing up and talking about one thing and doing another. Wow. No. Because it's the start of a journey about doing what really matters rather than pretending. We finish every episode with this, complete the sentence, a maverick is someone who I think a maverick, particularly I think in the current context, a maverick is someone who sees a pattern in the noise that other people can't hear or see, and and takes that pattern and puts it into a with a kind of sense of resonance and coherence into world that makes sense for other people and then makes it possible and accessible and desirable to reach.

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Good answer. Andy, your vision is as big as the bay we both look out over and as grounded as the past we walk over. Thank you for such a brilliant and inspiring conversation to think longer, live lighter, and act with more care for those who come after us. Sometimes the Maverick move is choosing responsibility over convenience. We'll see you next time on Inside the Maverick Mind.