In this episode, Y TREE’s Harriet Johnston is joined by a psychotherapist and a financial journalist for a conversation about the relationship between money and psychology. Lucy Beresford is a broadcaster and psychotherapist, and former investment banker. Robin Powell is the founding editor of the Evidence Based Investor blog. Learned behaviours – many of which we are not aware of – so often define our decision-making about our financial lives. Learning to transcend them can be difficult, and...

What does it mean to be truly successful? In the latest episode of our series in which Y TREE speaks to the people we admire about what success means to them, Harriet Johnston is joined by Niall Mills, the Managing Partner of Igneo Infrastructure Partners, for a conversation that seeks to get to the heart of this age-old question. Drawing on Niall’s upbringing, his early passion for getting to the bottom of how things worked, and his career to date, Harriet and Niall delve into questions...

In this episode, Kamal Ahmed is joined by two bestselling authors: a life designer and a behavioural scientist to discuss the tools and insights that we can use to build happy and healthy lives. A mechanical engineer by training, Dave Evans teaches the overwhelmingly popular Designing Your Life courses at Stanford, and is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Dr Grace Lordan is an Associate Professor at the London School of...

In this episode, Y TREE’s Harriet Johnston is joined by two trailblazing women, Sharmadean Reid and Debbie Wosskow, for a conversation about their journeys as entrepreneurs and working mothers. What more needs to be done to support female entrepreneurs – and women more broadly – to ensure combining work and motherhood isn’t financially punitive? What can the entrepreneurial community do to ensure more female founders receive financial backing? And, why is investing in women simply good...

What does it mean to be truly successful? In this episode, Y TREE’s Head of Brand and Marketing is joined by former barrister, police officer, educator, and author Adam Pacifico for a conversation that seeks to get to the heart of this age-old question. Drawing on his learnings from talking to guests on his own podcast, ‘The Leadership Enigma’, Adam and Harriet delve into questions around meaning and fulfillment; whether having more money really does improve our wellbeing; and, how to decide...

Not many of us can claim to have hunted with the Bushmen of the Kalahari; been detained for spying by the KGB; or smuggled ourselves over a border into an active war zone under the floorboards of an ambulance. Yet, for our latest guests on the Futureverse, this is all in a day’s work.  The Sunday Times’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Christina Lamb, who has been covering conflict around the globe for over three decades, does not regard herself as a risk taker, though. It was not an attraction...

On the face of it, Michael Welch OBE seems to have it all: he’s the President and CEO of America’s largest tire distributor, and he sold his previous business – Blackcircles – to Michelin for £50 million in 2015.  But, Michael’s start in life was not straightforward. Adopted as a baby and stymied by dyslexia and dyscalculia, he ended up working in a local garage, having left school at fifteen with no qualifications. Redundancy followed, but, supported by a grant from the Prince’s Trust, he...

In this episode, we are introducing a theme in the Futureverse – risk.  Over the next few weeks, we will hear from an adventurer, a war correspondent, and an entrepreneur about their relationship with risk – in business, and in their lives more broadly.  And, we begin with financial risk.  What is financial risk? Why is it important to set a financial risk level? What is your financial risk level? These are questions we often assume are best avoided – many of us go through life burying our...

In the UK, more than a third of us struggle to talk to anyone about money, with one in ten not even willing to discuss finances with their partner. Yet, opening up conversations about money, learning the tools and techniques for making these conversations productive, and understanding the pressure points around an individual’s financial situation can be totally life-changing. Wealth gaps between families; financial issues between couples; young people with large inheritances; sudden lifestyle...

Married couples often comprise a CFO spouse and a non-CFO spouse. That’s how the wealth management industry has historically approached things: one partner, more often than not, the man, is responsible for the family’s finances; the other, more often than not, the woman, is sidelined. As a result, women have traditionally felt unwelcome in the wealth management space.  In this episode, Y TREE’s Head of Brand and Marketing Harriet Johnston and Head of Financial Life Strategy Eliana Sydes are...

The literal translation of amateur is ‘lover of’ so why is it a word so often steeped in derogatory overtones? Why, when we’re asked for our hobbies, are we inclined to diminish their status in our lives? Our hobbies make us human. From pottery, to geo-guessing; orienteering to stamp collecting; it is in these small, often quiet, building blocks of life that we so often find true meaning and connection. In this episode, Kamal Ahmed is joined by the editor of Prospect Magazine, and amateur...

So, you’ve decided you want to begin donating to charity. But how?  In this episode, Kamal Ahmed speaks to Anna Josse, the CEO and Founder of Prism the Gift Fund, a registered charity which administers the giving of significant gifts to charities all over the world, and David Duke MBE, the Founder and CEO of Street Soccer Scotland and Street Soccer London, non-profit social enterprises that use football to help create positive change in the lives of socially disadvantaged adults and young...

What if the solution to solving extreme poverty was as simple as giving cash to those who need it?  GiveDirectly, the fastest growing NGO founded this century, does just that. By allowing donors to send money directly to the world’s poorest, it has revolutionised the aid sector. In the last decade, GiveDirectly has delivered $580M+ to over 1.37 million people across eleven countries. Cash in hand, no strings attached.  In this episode, Kamal Ahmed is joined by the President of GiveDirectly...

Some of the richest people in the world have decided against bequeathing their fortunes to their children; from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, to Daniel Craig and Michael Sheen. The proponents of this view offer many arguments, including the idea that inheriting huge wealth can detrimentally impact children, distorting anything they might do with their life. They also argue that the wealthy are morally obliged to give most, or all, of their wealth away to effective causes – children, or no...

Y TREE was founded in 2017 to give its clients insight and advice about money and life. They call this Financial Life Intelligence. At the heart of this idea sits a vision of a world where wealth is defined by how you live, not what you have. Y TREE unlocks value for its clients that goes beyond the financial. In doing so, it helps them to live more meaningful and fulfilling lives. That’s the pitch, but what does it mean in practice? In this episode, Kamal Ahmed finds out. To do so, and to...

Until very recently, female artists have occupied a tiny space of the art market, undervalued and ignored. There are no women in the top 0.03% of the auction market, where 41% of the profit is concentrated. Overall, 96.1% of artworks sold at auction are by male artists. The most expensive work sold by a woman artist at auction, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, sold in 2014 for $44.4 million—over four hundred million dollars less than the auction record for a male artist:...

How do we define value? How has this changed over time? And who decides what is deemed valuable? For centuries, society has seen value mainly through an economic lens: one takes a job because of its monetary benefits; marriage is a financially beneficial relationship that enables stability; and the true test of a business is its profit at the end of the year. But is this changing? In recent years, factors such as climate change, social justice and the pandemic have forced us to reconsider how...

The future can look like a scary place. Climate change is upon us and we’re in the throes of huge technological change without a clear idea of where we will land. Added to which, we are constantly bombarded by news of the risks we face.  But humans are creatures of collaboration and ingenuity. Sure, we might spend a lot of time focusing on external threats rather than appreciating what we have – but that survival instinct helps protect us. And it inspires many of our brightest minds to focus...

We live in a time of greater uncertainty than ever before in human history. We are poised between the twin precipices of climate change and rapidly accelerating technological development. How we manage them will determine whether our future is one where humans will thrive, falter or something in between. Welcome to the Futureverse – brought to you by Intelligence Squared and Y TREE – a space to explore the ideas that will shape our future.   In this episode, three leading thinkers come...

The future. It’s all there, in front of us. It could go wonderfully. Or it could go badly wrong. It will inevitably require our passions and our ingenuity. So how do we see the challenges early on, find solutions and help make the world a better place? For ourselves, for our families, for everyone. Welcome to The Futureverse, a new series brought to you by Intelligence Squared and in partnership with Y TREE. In the first episode of The Futureverse podcast, From the Ancients to AI, host Kamal...