What happens when ordinary people win the lottery? Financial planner Matt Pitcher shares lessons from more than a decade of advising lotto winners, revealing how sudden wealth can unbalance life and spark consumerism — or create profound opportunities for meaning. This talk just might make you rethink the link between money and happiness.TED Talks Daily is nominated for the Signal Award for Best Conversation Starter Podcast. Vote here!Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What really happens when someone wins the lottery? In this TEDx talk, Matt Pitcher, who is a former financial advisor to UK national lottery winners, shares the fascinating stories of what sudden wealth can do.
From life-changing joy to personal crises, these real-life accounts reveal how money can test values, relationships, and our identities. He asks the question of all of us, what would you do if you won? And more importantly, how are you already spending your most valuable resources of money and time?
In November 1994, the then UK Prime Minister, John Major, bought the very first ticket to launch the national lottery. A company called Camelot won the contract to run that service, and they did so for 30 years, in fact, until just last year. In that time, Camelot brought millionaire riches to over 7,000 people.
You will have seen some of these people, I'm sure, on TV smiling and popping champagne. You may have read about a similar number of them in the tabloids making mistakes and going bankrupt. Behind the scenes, what you probably don't know is that Camelot made every effort to support their winners for their entire lifetime.
They understood the real impacts that a lottery win can have on an individual. To their great credit, they stuck with their winners and supported them whatever happened to them. Every winner was given a named support person from Camelot, someone who would celebrate with them, who would be there to offer a shoulder to cry on when things went wrong.
The person who actually physically brought the bottle of champagne and the check to the home. And in what must have been somewhat of a come down for them, a fortnight after the win would organize a meeting with an external money advisor. I had the extraordinary privilege for over a decade to be one of those money advisors. I saw people transported to millionaire riches in an instant.
And I think that everyone here today can learn something from the winners that I met. It may seem like quite a cruel way to view it, but the lottery is in many ways like a laboratory experiment in how we as humans react to the acquisition of sudden wealth. If you sell a business for a million pounds or you inherit a million pounds, you know to an extent what to expect.
You will have seen the money coming probably years in advance, and you will have had time to plan for and adapt to how that money is going to impact on your life. By definition, a lottery winner knows nothing until the moment their numbers are drawn. They're catapulted from whatever their situation is into being millionaires in an instant.
2 thirds of adults in the UK play the lottery at least once a year. That's over 36 million of us. Nothing else really unites us in those kind of numbers. Possibly sport, maybe politics still. I don't know. So we must be doing it because we want to win, right? Because we think that that money is going to change our lives for the better. Well, let me take you back several years.
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