Introduction
Nick Watson is a former Royal Marine who moved to Dubai in the late 1990s and later founded Team Angel Wolf, a nonprofit built around his son Rio, who is 23 and lives with a rare chromosome condition. The wider mission behind Team Angel Wolf, teaching communities and schools across the UAE what real inclusion looks like.
Show Notes
0:57 Nick and Spencer meet after 21 years of near misses
2:12 Why Nick says the timing wasn’t right before now
2:56 Growing up in Cornwall and his parents’ cafe in Falmouth
4:06 Leaving school at 16 and the family’s move to central France
5:38 Discovering art and the dream of designing cars
6:31 Finding triathlon and building a community in Toulouse
9:56 Choosing the Royal Marines over art school
10:35 Joining the Marines at 21
13:19 The hardest decision of his career, stay or leave
14:50 Meeting his wife Delphine on a personal training course
16:15 The conversation that led them to Dubai
16:56 Arriving in Dubai in 1996 with £850 to his name
18:41 What Dubai looked like before the Marina and the Burj Khalifa
22:06 Rio is born in 2003
23:44 “Something’s not right”
24:18 The first time Rio stopped breathing in the bath
26:05 It happens again, and the hospital sends them home a second time
27:16 The four and a half year search for a diagnosis
29:41 The call from Paris confirming Rio’s chromosome deletion
30:08 What Rio lives with today at 23
38:02 Holidays, and the last one they took 10 years ago
39:19 Delphine, the backbone of the family
40:30 Tia, and her bond with her brother
41:43 A day in the life of the family
44:37 Why Team Angel Wolf was founded in 2016
46:24 What inclusion actually means to him
47:56 Whether organisations are genuinely inclusive or just ticking boxes
48:44 The four step plan behind Team Angel Wolf
53:01 What it would take to fund the mission properly
55:56 Three practical tips to become more inclusive
58:29 Whether he sees himself as successful
1:00:22 How hard it is to ask for help
1:01:41 A brush with clinical depression
1:05:44 The conversations he has with Tia about the future
1:07:00 What he’d ask of Spencer’s audience
1:09:37 How to follow and support Team Angel Wolf
1:11:38 The advice he’d give himself, looking back
1:12:58 End
