The Investing & Crypto Expert: "We Only Have 6 Years Until Everything Changes!", "The S&P 500 Isn't Worth Your Time!", "Don't Keep Spare Cash In A Bank!"

**Raoul Pal** (0:00)
We've got about six years before everything changes, and we thought money in the bank was safe. We thought our house was safe, but none of that is true. And the moment you put your money and your savings in the bank, you don't own anything. And your future self is getting poorer by 11% every year. And that's a problem for financial security and wealth creation. But I know where the opportunities lie, and I've got answers.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:20)
So could you explain it to me through the context of this?

**Raoul Pal** (0:23)
Okay, so...

**SPEAKER_3** (0:24)
Raoul Pal is one of the most influential voices in the ever-changing world of modern finance. Unpacking the secrets of crypto. And how to build wealth in an uncertain future.

**Raoul Pal** (0:33)
People know their future is f***ed. They can't afford to buy a house. They have less savings, debts from university, people in their 30s, the first generation that won't be as rich as their parents.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:42)
So what advice would you give to set myself up for wealth in the future?

**Raoul Pal** (0:45)
You start investing.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:46)
But what about the people that no matter how hard they work, they still don't have that excess income to invest?

**Raoul Pal** (0:50)
You don't need huge savings. You just need to understand how to look for opportunities. For example, the S&P 500 is not worth your time. Real estate doesn't really make you any money. Those days are gone. Gold actually lost you money. But investing in crypto like Bitcoin gives us stupidly higher returns in short periods of time, growing at 150% a year, scaling at twice the speed of the internet. So now the guy with $500 can get rich.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:13)
I have a question for you then. So I'm now 30 years old-ish. Have I missed the boat?

**Raoul Pal** (1:17)
No.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:18)
Much of the reason why I think people don't invest in crypto is they've heard stories where people have put too much in and they've lost it all. So what if you're wrong?

**Raoul Pal** (1:23)
We're going to talk about how not to f*** it up.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:25)
And then how do I invest in crypto?

**Raoul Pal** (1:27)
It's really simple, you're gonna start somewhere, so do that and you'll make money.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:40)
From a very high-level perspective, and I'm being unspecific here, so I'm looking for an unspecific answer, what exactly is the mission that you're on in this season of your life? Like, what are you doing and who are you doing it for?

**Raoul Pal** (1:53)
So obviously, you do it for yourself, but really, I think that I've been armed with tools and knowledge over the years, my 30-year career, that I kind of have a decent sense of where the world is going, where the opportunities lie, and where the risk lies for people. And I can see the problems people are facing, and I think I've got answers. So what I want to do is help as many people as possible in that journey. And why that happened to me was I was in Spain back in 2012 and also during the financial crisis 2008 And I was writing macroeconomic research for my research service Global Macro Investor. And I had seen it coming. I predicted it. I knew what was coming. I knew the problems. I warned all of my friends that nobody listened. Nobody understood about the financial crisis, what was going to happen. And most of them, because I was living in a beach town in Spain, they were in real estate.
They all went bust. But worse than that was that when we got to the European crisis, when basically the governments of Europe ran out of money, the banks also ran out of money. And as opposed to being bailed out, they got what's known as bailed in, which means that they took your savings to pay the debtors.
And friends of my parents and friends of friends were wiped out and they were like, why didn't we know? I'm like, that was a question that sat with me for a while. Why didn't we know? And I saw that everybody had lost total faith in the system. So Occupy Wall Street happened at the same period. And it was people angry, it's like we thought money in the bank was safe. We thought our house was safe. We thought the system was there for us. And suddenly they all wake up and realize the system was not there for them. It was actually for other people. People talk about bankers never went to jail. There was that sense that it was never concluded. And it sat with me for a long time thinking, what can I do about this? Because I was writing super high-end research for hedge funds and big asset management firms. And so it wasn't accessible to people. And then I wrote a couple of articles. One got leaked in zero hedge in its early days, and it became super viral. And I thought, maybe there's something here that I could reach a broader audience, because then I can help these people. And that's when we came up with the idea of Real Vision, which was the idea of interviewing the people at the very heart of the system and kind of sharing the details, because these people weren't hiding it. They wanted to help people as well. Everyone had that sense that we could help people. So I'm still on that journey. And that journey kind of has taken a multitude of paths, starting businesses, but also just trying to educate people on why they feel the way they do. You know, why politics is so polarized, never used to be this bad. You know, what's really going on and who really to blame and what to do about it.