What it’s really like to win the lottery | Matt Pitcher

0:06You'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?

0:54In 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.

1:44They 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 cheque to the home. And in what must have been somewhat of a comedown for them, a fortnight after the win would organise a meeting with an external money advisor. I had the extraordinary privilege for over a decade to be one of those money advisors.

2:38I 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.

3:37They're catapulted from whatever their situation is into being millionaires in an instant. Two-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 it's a boiling hot summer's day and I'm sat in an office with broken air conditioning. I have very unwisely chosen to wear a dark suit and I can feel sweat starting to run down my tight shirt collar.

4:38Sat opposite me is the most miserable man I have ever met. This man has just won the lottery. Two weeks ago, he was a happy and contented man. He and his wife were due to retire quite soon, and their pensions were ready to cover their outgoings. They had a good relationship with their adult children who lived nearby, and a great network of friends. They lived in a local community that they felt a part of and felt valued by. They'd worked hard for an entire lifetime to build a simple but happy life. Into that context, the injection of a lottery win was causing more harm than it was good. The win, as it sometimes happens, had become known locally.

5:41Friendships had started a sour through jealousy. The family members were popping out of the woodwork and claiming an entitlement to a share in the win, and in some cases demanding of them some of the money. Two weeks after that initial euphoric feeling of winning and having your numbers come up, this man was realizing that it was going to be life-changing, just not in the way he'd anticipated. In fact, by the time I got to have the meeting with him, he and his wife were already planning a move to a different part of the country. You see, all of us have two budgets to spend when we start in life.

6:30The time that we have left and the money that we're going to accumulate along the way. Most of us, if you're like me, you start life with lots in the time budget and not very much in the money budget. and we will start spending time acquiring, amongst other things, some of that money. At some point, we probably reach a point in life where we feel a little bit more financially comfortable, but that often coincides with a sense that maybe the time budget is starting to shrink. That, of course, can trigger that classic mid - or later-life crisis. You see, for our first winner, he had the balance right, and then the finger of fate pressed down on the money side of the scales and unbalanced everything for him.

7:22Our second winner, by complete contrast, was absolutely over the moon when I met him for the first time. He did not want to hear about the potential pitfalls of a win. He didn't want to hear about my, in my opinion, very clever planning strategies. Or the ways in which the wing could support him for the rest of his lifetime. He was beautifully clear-eyed about what he wanted. And that was an expensive car. He threw me at first when I met him because he confessed very early on that he didn't have a driving license.

8:02Nor had he, it turned out, any plan to get one. Now, lottery winners will, on average, buy five cars with their win, but typically that's to share amongst family members. This winner was planning on spending the majority of his entire win on a single car for himself. Much as we would have done with our donkeys and our cattle hundreds of years ago, he was even planning to build a new house so that he could live in a room above his new car. He'd even faxed in a window in his floor so he could sit up in bed and stare at the car. It was a case of the purest consumerism, owning an object simply to get that warm glow of the ownership, not to do anything with it.

8:59On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with him spending his win on something that's going to make him happy. It is, after all, his win. But all the research tells us that the endorphin rush we get from the acquisition of an object is fleeting. It is not something that hangs around for us. So our last winner for today is the one that has stuck with me the most vividly over the years. They were a young couple who worked full-time, both of them, to support their young family when the win came along. They didn't want to spend it on an exotic car, but actually planned to spend half of the win on their home, and they gave up their jobs and lived on the other half.

9:5418 months later well they had blown through the entire fortune they had to return to their jobs and their old lives pre-wim but actually this one isn't a cautionary tale in this case what I haven't told you is they had a young son who was severely disabled and needed round the clock care The home improvements weren't for the installation of an indoor swimming pool or gold-plated taps, but rather adaptations to the ground floor of their house so their son could live more comfortably. They saw their lottery win for what it truly was, a one in 45 million chance to live life as a family. yes 18 months later the money was gone but so was their son they traded in that fortune for a lifetime of memories in my 25 years as a financial planner this remains the best investment i've ever seen anyone make

11:11hopefully as we've seen winning the lottery is not a ticket to some kind of utopia it's more of a test of our existing values so if we're to learn anything from these winners we need to examine how we're living our own lives how are you spending your time and your money budgets? Are you acquiring life's real luxuries, quality time with other people, health, sleep, and guilt-free relaxation? Now, the good news is, whether you feel like it or not, the fact that you have the time and resources to be here today listening to these wonderful TEDx speakers means that you've already won the global lottery.

12:06All of us here have in fact won the lottery of life already. And so it just remains for me to wish you all the very best in how you spend and invest those winnings. Thank you.

12:27That was Matt Pitcher speaking at TEDx Winchester in the UK in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faze Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.