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Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this episode, we are taking a 180 degree pivot from last week's topic, where the big one was so scary because it's so in our face and likely to happen at any moment. And this week's topic is about as likely to happen to you as getting struck by lightning or attacked by a shark. But if you're unlucky enough to experience it, it could be worse than either of those. For many people unlucky enough to have their numbers pulled, winning the lottery is one of the cruelest tricks fate will ever play on them. What they imagine to be a path to riches and a life of peaceful solitude on a tropical island instead opens the door to an onslaught of tragedy, murder and mayhem that puts some of the other fears we've covered to shame. So cross your fingers and scratch Scared All The Time off your card. This week, we're scared of Winning The Lottery.

What are we scared? When are we? All the time.

Join us.

Now it is time for time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Just a little bit of housekeeping up top as always. I think the first thing that we want to mention is we have a very exciting milestone that we are about to hit. And that is that we are 10 producers away from giving Ed a little bit of a break on the buttons. If we can get 10 more producer, I know I sound like I work for PBS and I'm like calling your house for money or something, but if we can get 10 more producers, we will have enough producer level people signed up for the pod that we can actually start ordering our buttons in batches instead of making them by hand. Which means you will get a higher quality button and Ed will continue to have hands.

That's true. I need those guys to edit the fucking show.

Yeah. So if you've been thinking about subscribing to the podcast, now's a great time to do it at Patreon or Supercast. Go ahead, sign up and if you sign up for the I'm Terrified level, you'll become a producer and you'll get a button of the month for Button of the Month Club. It would be awesome for us. We'd be really psyched about it. So if you've been thinking about it, now's the time, it's the holiday season. Get it for yourself, gift to yourself, gift to your significant other, probably not for your kids, but hey, whoever, if your kids are old enough, or I know some of your kids listen to this show, get them a premium subscription. Get them some buttons.

That would be awesome. Yeah, and you know, just all the levels are good. I think we've been having a lot of fun in the live shows. We got more of those coming up. So everybody in Scared level, we're going to be seeing you soon. I think we'll probably do a couple. We did this Discord thing. We talked about it last week. Now every day I want to just like go live just for no reason.

It's fun.

Yeah, and just be like, hey, we're live right now. What's up? Come on by.

It's fun. But then you say we're live right now. And like if only two people show up, you kind of feel like I'm going to be like, you guys want some buttons? That's true. That's true.

Now that I got you here, it's like a timeshare thing when they come to our Discord.

I would say in general, keep an eye on our Instagram. Keep an eye on the Facebook page. There is a good chance that over the break, because we've got this episode and one more episode lined up for you and then we're going to take a couple of weeks break and we'll be back for the holidays for Christmas and everything. But in that interim, there's a pretty good chance that Ed and I are going to be popping on to Discord, doing some live streams of movies. We're experimenting with Twitch.

Twitch is trying to experiment with us.

Twitch is, Twitch is.

They should change their name to fucking Thirsty.

We signed up and we get thirsty ass Twitch emails every day. They're like, you know what's going on on Twitch? Right now, we need you. You must be here.

It's like, calm down, buddy.

Yeah, we're just, we're exploring Twitch, Jesus.

Yeah.

All right, well, so with that said, let's do a quick five-star review and then we'll get into the episode. So I don't know, we got some really good five-star reviews lined up and I wanted to just do one. So let's see, I'm flipping a coin. All right, I'm reading You Guys Rock by Willow D'Ares. Maybe Diaries? I don't know, I can't see that far. Willow, thank you for the five-star review. Thank you for writing in. The review is this. Thanks to the producers, staff and writers of this podcast.

Oh my god, so it's-

Ed and I will be sure to thank the staff.

Hey, hey, thank you.

Thank you.

There you go, we did it.

Thank you, guys.

We've done it.

It's been-

We looked at each other and did it. And then Tess will send the text to.

Thank you to the producers, staff and writers of this podcast. It's been a really hard start to the winter, getting darker earlier. It's hard to stay in a good mood. Agreed. During my commutes, workouts and when just trying to crack a smile, this podcast has become a go-to answer. Thanks again, can't wait to get caught up and listen in real time. Well, thank you Willow. I'm glad you're enjoying. I'm glad we're bringing a smile to your face in these literal dark days. We're feeling it too. We're, I don't know if either of us are officially diagnosed with seasonal depression, but we do lock up the sharp objects around this time of year.

Year round, baby.

It's pretty bad. But yeah, we're glad you're enjoying the show. We are continuing to enjoy the show. So thank you for writing in. Write in Five Star Reviews. You may be featured on Five Star Review Corner. There's a lot of great reviews we haven't gotten to, but keep an ear out. You never know. We don't always do them in order. So if you left one and we didn't read it, we might loop around back to it. And with that, let's get into the show. So this episode comes to us courtesy of Ed's personal list of fears. It wasn't something I'd considered being afraid of until he'd mentioned it. So Ed, I'm gonna turn the floor over to you at the top of the episode here. Do you want to explain where the idea for this came from?

From sudden death. When we did sudden death and then I got in a horrific car accident right after, I thought we might be manifesting things into the world. So I thought maybe we should do a fear of winning the lottery, which would be great to manifest into the world for us. But also I just know that it is a real problem. Like I've seen enough articles, watched enough stuff, listened to enough podcasts about people who won the lottery and their lives went to shit after. I don't know if it's that poor dad, rich dad mentality thing, but it is just like people who don't have a lot of experience with money get a lot of money and all of a sudden shit gets worse.

Yes. I can tell you having researched the topic now, that is true more often than not. I think a place that we could start though for this episode is talking about if we've ever played the lottery. Have we won anything in the lottery? Ed, have you? What big lotto money are you sitting on?

None. I don't play the lottery personally. I should. I have plenty of friends who was like, Powerball is $10 billion. I better get out tonight. You'll see people waiting in line at the convenience store. I really don't do it. I should. I've been broke long enough for it's like anything can't hurt at this point.

Were you gamble?

Not really.

A little?

I had a little fun with gambling, but just the tiniest amount because I'm like, I can see how dangerous this is for people who, the gamification of it, especially in the modern era. I think it's kind of dangerous, but no, we'll throw like five bucks on like the Mike Tyson fight or something. Something fun to make an event a little bit more fun, but no, I don't really gamble. I do like going to the track a lot with friends who do gamble. I think it's a really fun day, but again, I'm not really spending money. I don't really buy lotto tickets, but every year for Christmas, my mom for our whole lives would buy scratch-off tickets to put in the stockings. But it was always so fucking clear that she just bought all from the same roll. Because one brother would always win, because they just statistically on the roll of tickets that were purchased. So there's three brothers and one of them would always end up with some winning tickets and it wasn't always me. But no, I never had any kind of big win. I've never, at most, it's like a three buck on a scratch-off, win a free ticket. I'm not even good with raffles. If I'm putting in a raffle ticket at a car show or at an event or a silent auction, I just never win anything. I'm not lucky in the world of winning.

I'm not either. I've never even won a short film contest.

Well, that's on you.

Maybe this is why our careers are in the shitter. We've never won anything. No, I've never won anything lottery-related. I shouldn't say that. I also have relatives who have bought scratch-offs and stuff over the years, and I think I've maybe won like 50 bucks or something. I've definitely won a little bit in that sense, but I've never really played the lottery.

I have strong opinions on the lottery though, and this is not helping us.

The floor is yours. This is your podcast.

The one strong opinion I have on the lottery, and anyone who knows me personally has probably heard me talk about this. It's like in my top five things, I'll just gripes. I'll bring up things that steam my vegetables. And I don't like that as a nation, we're doing a billion dollar lottery winners. If it gets to a billion fucking dollars, it should just be ten, one hundred million dollar winners. Or people are like, a hundred million dollars is nothing anymore. Well, then fine. Make it four, two hundred and fifty million dollar winners. I feel like that's enough to start probably generational wealth. And that's good. People definitely don't need a billion. No one needs three hundred billion. Like, that's a whole other fucking thing. But in terms of the lottery, I think we should be changing more people's lives than just one person's life. Like, yeah, my hot take, my big take is that we shouldn't. We should just, like, make more winners.

What I'm hearing is Comrade Ed wants to legislate the amount of money that we can make as individuals in this country. And I think, for the record, that is a great idea. I agree. No one needs a billion dollars or three hundred billion dollars.

Let's just say six. Let's just call it six billion. It doesn't make you a fucking card carrying member of the Communist Party. It's a card carrying member of the fucking Common Sense Party. Let's just fucking let people have a life changing amount of money that will make them generationally wealthy and call it that. Let's just call it, I don't know, six billion dollars. OK, that seems like more than enough money for anyone to have.

Here's my pitch. After you make your six billionth dollar in this country as a capitalist entrepreneur, you're no longer allowed to make money and instead you just get president bucks. And the president, it's just so you can collect shit so that you can have more president bucks than the next billionaire. But it's no longer real money. The rest of the money goes back into the economy. You get like a Chuck E. Cheese token, basically.

Yeah, and then you can put it up as like, look at the high score I have.

Yeah, it's a high score. Yeah, you can put your initials into the Constitution.

That's what we do.

You put your initials in the Constitution, you have a lot of money, we all recognize it, and then the rest of it just goes back into public services for the good of the country. Anyway.

Yeah, and that could be anything. It could be roads, doesn't that have to be? Literally anything.

Roads, libraries, schools, whatever, doesn't matter.

You want lower taxes? It's one way to fucking do it. Anyway, there we go, but that said, yeah, I don't think that any one person needs a billion dollar fucking lottery win.

No.

And then of course, someone's gonna write in the comments, what about you? What have you just got the winning billion dollars? Okay, sure. But if you told me when I got that, like, oh, the thing about this is you only get 250 million, I go, okay.

Yes, and also, I mean, if you won a billion dollars, in the lottery, most lotteries in the United States are taxed. So you're probably, I mean, you'd get more than 250 million, but...

What would you do? Would you lump some? Or would you, I would lump some. I don't think I'm gonna live past next week anyway, with all the shit we discuss.

Well, it's tough. It's tough. The lump sum definitely gives you a better shot at...

Being alive to use it?

No, the lump sum gives you a better shot at being able to live off the interest because you're putting a bigger sum into the bank.

It's a great point.

That's how I've always thought of it. But I don't know how it breaks down. Do you end up getting more if you receive it in yearly chunks?

I don't know.

Something tells me you do. Something tells me that it's one of those, like you take it in smaller amounts for longer and you actually end up getting more of the money.

Okay, so lottery winners have two payout options, a lump sum or an annuity. If you take the lump sum, you'll receive the estimated cash value of the jackpot and not the quote, advertised jackpot amount. If you choose to take the annuity, you will, after like 30 years, receive the full advertised amount. So taking the lump sum means you can receive 40 to 50 percent of the jackpot for immediate use or investment. So it can be a big difference, but who's got the time for that? There's also stuff in the rules about selling the annuity after that sounds kind of greasy. But anyway, Chris was right.

Here's what I would do. I would say, fuck it, I don't care about that. Like fucking leave it, give me all the money. I will then deposit it somewhere where it collects interest.

Yes.

And then have a person who can only give me a little bit at a time.

Yeah, that's what I would do. I would put it in some kind of irrevocable trust kind of thing where, depending on how much it was, if you're saying literally a billion dollars, yes, it would be some sort of irrevocable trust. I would figure out some sort of lifestyle that I could live off the interest that I'm making on that money. Because at that point, you're making millions of dollars a month probably on that interest.

I would say maybe a year. In this country, what's your interest rate? Like 2%?

Well, no. I mean, I have... Well, I'm not going to say the name. If they want to advertise with us, they're more than welcome to. But I am with a very common bank that is mostly online. And they give you 4.9, it was 4.9, I think now it's 4.6% interest.

And it's gonna go even lower over the next six months, and then six months after that. It's only looking high right now because they were trying to battle inflation.

No, no, no. A lot of the more online banks do offer higher interest rates. There's a bit of a convenience that you forego. Like it's hard to deposit cash if that's something you do a lot. I don't. So it's not really an issue. But yeah, no, I think the best interest rate you're getting in a bank, at a traditional bank, is probably like maybe 5%. But if you're putting a billion-

And that's like with a CD or something. It's not just gonna be your normal savings account.

Yeah, but if you're putting, well, my normal savings account's getting 4.6. So a CD might get like five. But if you're putting a billion dollars, you're not putting that into your local Chase branch. You know, like I'm sure-

I'm putting it under a huge mattress.

I'm sure, yeah, I'm replacing my entire house with a mattress and I'm putting the money under it.

Well, that's the beautiful thing about Winning The Lottery in 2024, is it is just zeros and ones. And it's also a good thing for being rich right now. Like if I would like to, if Comrade Ed from just this episode would like to redistribute the wealth, you can't just go beat someone up and take their money anymore. You can't just be like, give me your money, you rich guy. It's like, well, anyone knows his password? This sucks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess it would be good. You know, you put a billion bones just in your online savings account.

But my point is, though, that a billion dollars, you're probably putting that into some sort of, you know, you're going directly to Bear Stearns and saying, hi, I have a billion dollars and I need to put it in an account. They might give you an extra couple of points to put a billion dollars in with them.

Yeah, I wouldn't know.

I don't know what the VIG is there at the end of the day. But the closest thing I've experienced to any sort of big lottery story growing up in Central Pennsylvania is actually, believe it or not, movie related because where I grew up in Harrisburg and Hershey is where they shot the John Travolta Lisa Kudrow hit Lucky Numbers, which was a late 90s Nora Ephron movie based on a true story, which we will recount quickly here. If you haven't seen the movie, check it out. But it's based on the 1980 Pennsylvania lottery scandal, which is colloquially known as the Triple Six Fix, which was a plot to rig the Daily Number, which is a three digit game of the Pennsylvania lottery. It's a basic lottery game. You have the machines with the ping pong balls in them blowing around, and then they hit the button and the numbers come up. It's three numbers generated at random. According to Wikipedia, this plan was masterminded by the announcer of the Daily Number, a guy named Nick Perry, who was a news and weather reporter and the host of local sports shows like Bowling for Dollars and Championship Bowling. In 1977, Perry became the host of the live nightly broadcast of the Pennsylvania Lottery held in the WTAE Studios in Pittsburgh. Long story short, while a host of that broadcast, he conspired with a few other people to weigh down all of the balls in the three machines, in the three air machines, except those numbered four and six, which meant the drawing was almost sure to be a combination of those digits. The scheme was actually successful when 666, which is one of the eight combinations of fours and sixes that the fixers were hoping for, was drawn on April 24th, 1980, netting a $3.5 million prize. A few days later, another $1.5 million prize was drawn, but the authorities noticed unusual betting patterns amongst the people who knew that these numbers might get drawn and they were alerted to the crime and most of the fraudulently acquired winnings were never paid out. So if you've never seen Lucky Numbers, it is a loosely fictionalized version of this story. It was panned when it came out as being cynical, too dark, tonally muddy, and it is because it is written, and I didn't know this until I went to go look it up, by a guy named Adam Resnick, who is a comedy writer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who also wrote Death to Smoochie and Cabin Boy.

Oh my God, so those are the two most insane dark movies.

Absolutely panned, dark, weird comedies.

Yeah, different time where you can get three films with 100% audience hated work.

But what's interesting is that I feel like both of those movies have been reevaluated as kind of like modern comedy classics, so they like influenced a lot of people at least. I don't love Cabin Boy, I get it, I get why people like it. I do love Death to Smoochie. I think the reason that Lucky Numbers was never re-considered in the pantheon of dark comedy cult classics is that it was directed by romantic comedy queen Nora Ephron.

Yeah.

Weirdly, it's the only movie that Nora Ephron directed that she didn't write.

That makes sense. That's what I was thinking about the whole time.

Which also I think explains some of its weird tonal issues because she I think, I have no information on this, but I suspect she probably was offering notes, trying to rewrite, making kind of a mess of things as she was directing it, feeling like, I don't know if this works. I also think it's not nearly as bad as its reputation, but I think it was very much trying to be Fargo. It's snowy, it's impotent criminals, it's violent, but it's funny.

Fargo was a hit. Fargo was a big hit, critically.

Yeah, and so I think she was definitely trying to kind of do Fargo and miss the mark.

Do you remember It Can Happen to You? That's my lottery movie. That's my go-to lottery movie.

No, I don't know It Can Happen.

Nicholas Cage, who is like a cop or whatever, and he's like, oh, he pays for his like, his like coffee at the diner with like, I'll give you half this if it wins. If you let me go.

Yes.

Everyone in his family is like, you're gonna give some fucking person a lot of this money.

Yeah.

You fucking don't even know this person.

Ed had no memory of Rosie Perez playing Nicholas Cage's wife in this movie, but basically did a Rosie Perez impression, so it must have been hiding deep in his subconscious this whole time. The brain is a wild thing.

You know, just the way everybody's family, especially on the East Coast, would react to doing something like that.

Yeah.

And then he's like, I gotta do it.

I made a promise. Another movie that kind of went under the radar.

Oh, well, it was good. I remember it being Govindal's Good.

Anyway, my connection to Lucky Numbers, besides the fact that it was written by a guy from Harrisburg, is that it was also shot in Harrisburg. It was shot in Central Pennsylvania, so it was a big deal for like four weeks, one of those winters when I was growing up. And I think a girl in my sister's grade had her house used as an exterior shot at some point, but that's the closest I really got to any big, crazy lottery stories. Thought it was worth noting, but despite our relative ignorance of the lottery, it is an extremely popular American pastime.

I don't think you get to a billion dollars if it isn't. I think that happens when a winner doesn't come up each time then it keeps going up and up, but it still means that tons of people are tossing dough at it. And I have definitely, especially when I smoked more weed back in the day, I have definitely been to an untold number of 7-Elevens where I just want to buy a fucking pack of Rolos or whatever and I have to sit behind some asshole who's being like, I want two Quick Picks and I want this and I want four Lucky Fours and I'm just like, shut the fuck up. I just want to eat this box of nerds in the parking lot, you fucking creep. You're just taking all day.

This guy's standing here generating random numbers on his iPhone that he needs to bet on.

Do you remember when I play The Lottery, which is very rare, but when someone I'm living with will be like, let's go get a ticket. I always do one, I usually do Quick Picks because I don't care, but I always do one with the loss numbers. And do you remember when the loss numbers hit?

No.

The loss numbers, so people who don't know, there was a show called Loss. It was fucking awesome for a lot of it. And it was definitely water cooler television. And there is a series of numbers that it's part of the plot device of the show. There are these series of numbers that someone has to input all the time for whatever. I don't want to give anything away 300 years later.

If you're listening 300 years later, there may not be water coolers or water.

Yeah. So it's the same amount of numbers you would play in a lottery. So a lot of people, it was a very popular show. It was more of a monoculture. There wasn't streaming yet. And so a lot of people played the loss numbers. And I myself am one of them. And the loss numbers hit somewhere. A couple of years after the show. And it was for a decent amount of money, but so many people played the loss numbers, everyone got like five bucks.

Oh yeah.

Because there are so many people who played that number set. But yeah, that was awesome. God, we got to get back there as a society.

Well, according to a book called For A Dollar and A Dream, State Lotteries in Modern America by historian Jonathan D. Cohen, quote, one in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year.

Yeah, at the next census, at least once a year, there's news making lottery nights. There's like, you know, the highest number in New Jersey lottery history. Or do you have your tickets? It's a billion dollars tonight, still no winner.

Yeah.

And here's the thing. I think it's a big state. California comes up a fucking lot. There was a time when I was like, I played golf down the street in like Alta Dena from some little liquor store where the last huge number was drawn. And I was like, the last huge winner before this was from like Pasadena, like right down the street. And before that was, you know, fucking Fresno or something. So it was just like, I think it's just a lot of people, 40 million people playing California. So the odds are better here, but it just felt like a lot of times it was California.

It is funny. It is funny that places where winning numbers were drawn, people will go play there because they think the luck's gonna like rub off on them when really the odds have to be much lower.

Yeah.

I think that another ticket will come from there.

I think those people make money. I think if you're the place that sells the ticket, you get a percentage. I'm almost certain that's a real thing.

I think that's true. Anyway, one in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year. One in four buys at least once a month. The most avid players buy at rates that might shock you. Some studies show that roughly 12 percent of American adults buy most of the lottery tickets in the country.

I've been behind all 12 percent of them when I'm stone, just trying to get candy.

Averaging out to between $3,000 to $4,000 wasted per person per year by roughly 30 million people. Americans spend more on lottery tickets every year than on cigarettes, coffee or smartphones, Cohen writes.

Do you remember John F. Kennedy's speech at Rice University where he's explaining how we're going to go to the moon? One of the things that he was like, it's going to cost a shit ton of money. I always think about in that speech where he's like, yes, it's a staggering number, but I would have you know that that's still less than Americans spend on tobacco products each year. And I always thought that was like a great way to help people understand that. So it's shocking to me knowing that, that more people spend money on fucking lottery.

Yeah, well, if we want to go back to the moon, we could put some of this money towards it. So they spend more every year than on cigarettes, coffee, smartphones. They also spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books and movie tickets combined.

Wow.

And only a handful of people ever win anything.

But you can see how they tax it and that money goes towards the state and the country, I guess.

Yes, which we'll get into in a little bit. Because this love for the lottery is not a new thing. According to a recent article in The New Yorker from a few years ago, quote, Lotteries are an ancient pastime. They were common in the Roman Empire. Nero was a fan of them and are attested to throughout the Bible where the casting of lots is used for everything from selecting the next king of Israel to choosing who will get to keep Jesus' garments after the crucifixion.

That's amazing. Everything is raffle based.

Yeah, everything was raffle based. I'd never heard that story, so I dug a little further and apparently that particular casting of lots actually fulfilled the Messianic prophecy of Psalm 22, 18. Some sources say that Jesus might have actually watched Roman soldiers gambling for his clothes from the cross while he was still alive.

That tracks. I mean, that wouldn't be a surprise. That just seems like that would be in a movie or TV show for sure.

Yeah. I mean, I guess it was maybe the Romans considered it more civilized than just like fighting each other at the base of the cross to see who got the cloak.

But I do find it interesting that anyone want the cloak unless they considered him the son of God even then, which they didn't. Well, who the fuck wants some criminals clothes? Like, you guys are doing all right. The Roman Empire.

Infamously, everything Jesus had was very much a... It was basic. It was simple.

That's what I'm saying.

Like the cup in Last Crusade.

Yeah. Cup of a carpenter. So that's why I cry foul a little bit on this story, but it's a psalm, so psalms are... They have their own thing going on.

Yeah. Who knows? I will say it makes me wonder why no one apparently threw lots for the... What the fuck? Where they laid... It's got his face on it now.

The shroud?

The shroud of Turin. You think somebody would have been like, hey, that seems valuable. Hey, a magic spell burned Jesus' face into that fabric over there.

I'll give you six bucks.

Yeah. Anyway, in these early instances, lottoes were deployed as either some kind of party game. During Roman Saturnalia's, around Christmas time, we've talked about, tickets were distributed free to guests, some of whom won extravagant prizes.

Or prizes, basically.

Yeah.

Quite literally what that is.

Or sometimes lots were a means of divining God's will. Often though, lotteries were organized to raise money for public works. Held true in the past, holds true now. The earliest known version of Keno dates to the Han Dynasty and is said to have helped pay for the Great Wall of China. Two centuries later, Caesar Augustus started a lottery to subsidize repairs for the city of Rome. By the 1400s, the practice was common in the Low Countries of Rome, which relied on lotteries to build town fortifications and later to provide charity for the poor. Soon enough, the trend made its way to England, where in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the nation's first lottery, designating its profits for the reparation of the havens and the strength of the realm. E with an E at the end of realm.

Okay, so they raffled off that E.

Yeah, get it out of here.

Tickets for a public work.

Tickets cost 10 shillings, which was a lot back then. In addition to the potential prize value, each one served as a get out of jail free card, literally. Every lottery participant was entitled to immunity from arrest, except for certain felonies such as piracy, murder and treason.

Oh my God. Imagine having that in the asterisk at the bottom of your get out of jail free card and monopoly.

No, I think we should bring that back for the lottery. Fuck the money. I mean, can you imagine if we had a lottery?

A purge lottery?

Basically, a purge lottery.

Well, here's the thing I've noticed in this country. You have enough money, you can do it anyway. So win the lottery, become rich enough for crime doesn't matter.

But here's the thing, let's say you do a purge lottery, which Blumhouse, if you're listening to this, we call the spinoff, by the way, the purge colon lottery. This is for us. But what you're doing is instead of offering people money from the state, all you're doing is kind of subsidizing bank robberies. Like you just go, hey, if you win this lottery, you're immune from prosecution, except for murder, treason, and what was it, piracy.

Yeah.

So you're saying, hey, you know what? It's up to you now. This is a very American thing.

Also, piracy, do you think they mean pirates or like copy of a movie?

No, well, I think back then they meant pirate.

It's that ad of like, you wouldn't steal a candy bar. It's like, that's the level of which it's like, yeah, just don't murder anyone and don't make an illegal copy of Burlesque.

No, I'm saying the state just needs to say, I mean, how popular would this be in America?

It would be, I mean, right now, you can just go and rob anyone you fucking want. I said earlier, rich people, but you can go into a Walgreens. Have you go into a fucking Walgreens recently and tried to get toothpaste?

Well, okay.

It's like behind a wall. I got to call someone over.

Yes.

So yeah, crime is easy. My point being, I don't know how we got into that, but.

My point being that instead of the state offering people money in exchange for buying lottery tickets.

Yeah, you can give them immunity from bank robbery so then they can rob the bank and then get whatever they want and they can keep it because they're immune.

If they don't get caught.

What do you mean if they don't get caught? What's the point of this fucking card? I want to get caught and be like, Oh, actually, I have a card. Idiot.

That's true.

Diplomatic community.

Right. You want you to diplomat. But the great thing is, is you end up saving money as the state because that idiot who robs the bank is going to get what? $30,000.

It's insured if it's deposits.

Yeah. So you're good. This is a this is a good plan. I say we implement it. The article notes that the lottery didn't so much spread to America from England as it helped spread England into America because the settlement of the continent was financed partially through lotteries. According to history.com, the Virginia Company of London held a lottery in 1612 to fund ships bound for the Jamestown Colony, where we know there later would be cannibalism. The prize was 4,000 crowns, which was a good amount of money in those days. It wasn't all that popular. This particular lottery wasn't all that popular, but the company wasn't deterred. In 1616, four years later, the company sent people on the road to sell tickets in what they called instant lotteries outside of the capital. In these small scale games, people could find out if they won a prize immediately after buying a ticket, similar to a scratch off lottery today.

Interesting, or like a twist off a cap of Coke and see if you won another Coke.

Yeah, and these were huge successes. They brought in an estimated 29,000 pounds over the next four years, or 8 million pounds today. As more colonies settled in the Americas, they also funded their settlements with lottery money. Lotteries paid for public buildings, roads and canals. Influential figures like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock sponsored lotteries for specific projects. And interestingly though, I thought this was great. Despite widespread adoption of lotteries, there were still strong Protestant resistance to gambling. So in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for instance, dice and playing cards were forbidden even in people's private homes. It was outlawed. But that didn't stop Massachusetts from holding their first lottery in 1745.

Yeah, who's going to go to the first Thanksgiving? You had to put in for a lottery.

Yeah, those seats were pricey.

They were. And it sucks is everyone had these fucked up janky dice. They had to make a little like whittle out of wood. What are you getting out there? Just some firewood.

Don't worry about it.

You're not making dice again, are you? The shittiest dice.

The reason for this contradiction in morality is that early America was short on revenue and long on the need for public work. So since early American politics and really modern American politics have defined themselves by their aversion to taxes.

Yeah, no taxation without representation. But it's like, well, this isn't taxation. This is a you might win a sports car.

Yeah. I mean, if they had cars back then.

It's a nice loophole. It's a nice workaround.

That's true. The lottery became an appealing alternative for raising money, which was used for funding for everything from civil defense to the construction of churches.

Now, the churches don't even let you win anything. They're just like, you're gonna put into this lottery basket? But what do I get? I don't know. Not eternal damnation.

Well, but now, I mean, churches do now. I mean, bingo is a big church thing.

100%. I'm just saying that they have a collection basket that you get nothing.

Right. You just put the money in. You get good feelings.

You get good feelings. I think they figure it out. It's like, we actually don't even have to give them anything. No one else is doing it wrong. You're going to give out an Xbox?

I don't know. We were raised Catholics, so I don't know what other churches are like, but Catholics pass around the collection plate, and I think for them, it's a fully guilt-based economy.

Yes.

They make you put the money in front of everybody else, and if you don't, to this day, if I go to Christmas Eve Mass with my mom, they pass the basket around, I don't put money in. I'm like, oh God.

Well, that's why I'm fucking Ricky Envelope. You can get the envelope.

Yeah.

The church provided envelopes. Right. So I'm always like, whatever is in this envelope is in this envelope.

Yeah, but you want that envelope to be thick.

You can put Kleenex and stuff in there, too.

That's true. That's a tip for anyone listening. If you don't want to look at your cheapskate at your church Christmas party, you put one dollar in there, and then you stuff it.

Look, I'm not saying it's the fastest way to get to heaven. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

As we pull up on the holiday season, we've all got a lot on our minds, and it can be tough to remember to take a moment and feel grateful for the good things in our lives. One of the things I've been really grateful for this year is this podcast and all of you listening, and especially Ed. He keeps shit moving behind the scenes and is the reason the show sounds so good week in and week out. Ed, who are you thankful for? And you don't have to say me.

But I will, Chris. Yeah, without Chris' research and hard work on these scripts, I'd have no ahs and ums to meticulously cut out of his performance every episode. And I'm of course thankful to our fans, especially our producers, each of which I'd like to list off by name right now, but that's the kind of co-dependent urges I'm trying to be better about not giving into.

So whoever you're thankful for, there is one other person we never thank enough, ourselves.

We just thank ourselves.

No, no, no, we thanked each other.

Oh, okay, copy that. But yeah, it is hard to remember that we're only human. We're all trying our best to make sense of everything in this godforsaken world, and that isn't easy. So here's a reminder to send some thanks to people in your life, including yourself, and not only in November.

One way to show yourself a little thanks year round is by starting therapy. I've talked about therapy on the show before, but it's worth mentioning again, therapy really helped pull me out of some very dark places. I've never had much in the way of self-esteem or self-worth, I can't even listen to my fucking voice on this show.

It's true, he doesn't listen to a single episode.

Most interactions with people make me extremely nervous, and there are lots of days, I don't know why I shouldn't even get out of bed in the morning.

Yeah, same.

Therapy has helped me process those thoughts and feelings in a way that is healthy and safe. The only regret I have is that I never started it sooner. So if you're thinking of starting therapy, and you want to be able to listen to your own voice on your podcast, then give Better Help a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule.

All you gotta do is fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge.

This holiday season, let the gratitude flow.

With Better Help, visit betterhelp.com/sat, which is S-A-T-T, today to get 10% off your first month.

That's Better Help, help.com/sat.

Which again is S-A-T-T.

Which again stands for scared all the time.

It's our initials.

The holidays are right around the corner, and whether you're hosting your family for Thanksgiving or frogging it to strangers for Christmas, you might have some really understandable fears about what to cook for everybody. Even if you're just bringing something to a potluck, it can be like, oh God, what can I put together that people are gonna like and then the stores doesn't have the ingredients and then you start to panic.

But with HelloFresh, you don't have to worry about that type of shit, all right? They make mealtime nearly hassle-free with delicious home-delivered, chef-crafted recipes that come together quickly and honestly less expensive than takeout.

Yeah, it's been game-changing for me. I like to cook, but I fall back on the same 10 or 15 recipes that I know by heart, and it gets a little boring. So it's awesome to have HelloFresh there to send me everything from spicy turkey bowls to caprese salads to sizzling hoisin shrimp and more. They take all the time I usually spend planning and running to the store and give it back to me so that I can turn around and give it back to you through the podcast. America's No. 1 Meal Kit is literally bringing you more of America's No. 1 Fear-Based Podcast.

It's true. And it's been really great having this kind of mise-en-place ingredient ready to go beforehand when it's time to cook so I can jump straight from an edit into ripping open a bag of measured-out ingredients and get right to work. It's like having a sous chef that you never have to talk to. Now if I could only find an assistant editor that I don't have to talk to, that would be great. Also the cooling packs or whatever you call them inside the shipping boxes are pretty legit because when I'm too busy working on an episode to notice that one's been thrown into my bushes by my arch nemesis, the shot put fucking athlete who throws crap over the fence into my yard. The meals are actually very crisp and cool when I find them out there.

Well, I don't know if HelloFresh Market sells cooling packs, but you can check out the HelloFresh Market for over 100 additional add-on items like desserts, quick breakfast, snacks and a lot more. This month they even have Thanksgiving items to help you wow a crowd with minimal effort on your part. Not that anyone needs to know that.

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So fast forward 200 something years, America, 1970s, after the Vietnam War, as American prosperity started to wane, many state budgets, they were becoming increasingly difficult to balance without doing one of two things, raising taxes or cutting services, which were both pretty unpopular opinions. No one really ever wants either. So for politicians looking for a way out of this conundrum, the lottery was sort of a perfect solution. It provided a way to maintain existing services without hiking taxes. And then, you know, you could keep your job. You wouldn't get punished at the polls. For these politicians, lotteries were basically budgetary miracles. They were the chance for states to make revenue appear seemingly out of thin air. So for instance, in New Jersey, which had no sales tax, no income tax, and no appetite for instituting either, legislators claimed that a lot of it would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, relieving them of the need to ever again contemplate taxation.

And yeah, I can't drive through that fucking state without having someone else pump my gas.

Well, and this was, I don't know, I don't know, does New Jersey have sales or income tax now?

I think they have both, and I can't bump my own gas. That place really fell apart.

Yeah, they have a sales tax. They have a 6.625% sales tax.

Not as bad as California, but that's still pretty up there.

And their income tax is 1.4 to 10.75%.

So yeah, they've given up on all those strong ideas they had back then. Once they got the taste of the lottery.

They were like, we need money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the problem standing in the way of the lottery though was that Americans were still relatively religious and still had objections to legalizing gambling. Now, there were lots of people arguing on both sides of this. Some argued that since people would gamble anyway, the state might as well have a legalized way to collect profits. Many white voters actually supported legalization of lotteries because they thought the state-run gambling industry would primarily... This is one of the most racist things I've ever said on this show, and I will reiterate, this is not my perspective. This was the 1970s New Jersey voters perspective. They thought state-run gambling would primarily attract black players, who would then foot the bill for services that white voters didn't want to pay for. Because if you legalize gambling, they thought black people would take advantage of that, and then thus their gambling money would pay for all the stuff that they didn't want to pay for.

That the whites didn't want to pay for.

That the whites didn't want to pay for.

So they were for it.

I assume they mean welfare. Yes, they were for it.

I'm sorry, I was confused. People can't see his face here.

I made a confusing face. You made a confusing face.

So I thought you were saying that they didn't want blacks to play the lottery and then pay for everything and then be like, see that park bench? Only we could use it because we pay for it with the lottery. And I'm like, equally racist, but not as nefarious.

No, no, fully nefarious. White people fully went, hey, you know what? Let's legalize gambling. It will attract black players. Yes, and then we will benefit from their sins, essentially.

Yeah, greasy, greasy as fuck.

Super greasy. And you know, because they were like white taxpayers when they were presented with, hey, should we pay for better public schools and urban areas? They were like, fuck no. But this was a way to get around that. So meanwhile, many African-American voters supported legalization because they believed that it would ease their friction with the police, who for a long time...

It was the police run lottery?

No, but numbers games, any kind of gambling.

Well, that was, that is something that I'm surprised you haven't brought up yet, that like the mafia numbers games and gang numbers games.

Yes, well, I'm sure the mafia was against legalizing gambling for those reasons. But in this particular instance, African-American voters felt like, well, if we legalize certain aspects of gambling, that'll give the cops fewer reasons to come...

To crack down on us.

Yeah, to come knock on the door and be like, what are you doing in here?

You guys playing the numbers.

Yeah, so now opponents to easing gambling laws were split along religious lines. I thought this was really interesting. Devout Protestants regarded government sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. One Methodist minister, an anti-lottery activist at the time. Imagine that, an anti-lottery activist.

I mean, I sounded like one at the beginning of this fucking episode.

That's true. But I feel like it's been a couple of decades since we've heard that term. But this minister in his position as an anti-lottery activist declared, quote, there is more agreement among Protestant groups on the adverse effect of gambling than on any other social issue, including the issues of abortion, alcohol, and homosexuality.

What?

So yeah, he felt that such adverse effects of gambling included fostering gambling addiction, sapping income from the poor, undermining basic civic and moral ideas by championing a route to prosperity that, quote, did not involve merit or hard work.

I mean, I'm not against the first three or four of these.

No, but I would, yeah, I mean, it's-

I mean, it is addicting. It is fostering the idea of something for nothing, and it will likely adversely affect people of lower income who will play it more.

Yes, and he felt, or he or she, I'm not sure if this was a male or a female minister, felt that encouraging state governments to maximize profits would come at the cost of even the expense of their most vulnerable citizens.

Well, maximizing profit comes at the expense of anyone more vulnerable than people who are maximizing those profits, so that makes sense. I don't see it as much in this exact scenario that like fitting one for one more than like, oh, I can't get into that.

Well.

Start calling me comrade.

Catholics, on the other hand, were overwhelmingly pro lottery. They played it in huge numbers.

These are people who have eight, nine, 10, 12 kids. They were playing the lottery with which one of these are going to fucking live through this. Yeah, everything they were doing was lottery based.

Generally, Catholics were considered to reliably flock to all kinds of gambling games. Now, I don't want to put this on any sort of ethnicities, Italians.

We said to just say that Rome started the whole gambling thing. I was like big into it.

One statistic that blew my mind is that in 1978, Bingo Games, hosted by Ohio Catholic High Schools, took in more money than the state's entire lottery organization.

Oh my God, dude.

So just Catholics playing Bingo.

And I don't know what year was that, you think?

That was 1978.

At this point, there must have been laws that it's non-taxable, right? Because it's a religious institution.

Probably, yeah.

So that's gotta piss some people off. They're bringing in more money than the state lottery and there's no way the state can take any of that money.

Through Bingo Games.

Yeah, they're fucking degenerates. The Ohio Catholics, man. They had a good thing going there.

They did. Well, so in 1964, New Hampshire approved the first state-run lottery of the modern era. New Hampshire.

That's a place that is still a real one. They still don't have sales tax.

Right. So it's no surprise, I don't think, that they were the ones who went, we need to get money from somewhere. We're doing no sales tax, no income tax, no, we ain't taking nothing.

Just live free or die, dude.

Yeah. So they approved the first state run lottery in the present day, which is interesting. As a person who doesn't think much about the lottery, it's always existed since we were born, and so I never realized that it started in the 60s, really, in the United States.

Yeah, well, there's another lottery in the 60s called The Draft, and that was not as good.

Yeah, people were really used to their number coming up, so to speak.

Yeah, they weren't bumped about it. They're like, how do we change the perspective on numbers in this country?

13 states followed in as many years, all of them in the Northeast in the Rust Belt. By the early 80s, with Reagan in the White House, federal money flowing into state coffers declined, and more states started looking around for solutions to their budgetary crises, and they bet on the lottery over and over again.

Guess the lottery's coming back.

There's a whole interesting history in the article, and I'm not gonna go into it because it takes us a little too far off topic, and it's complicated math stuff, but it's super interesting. This one company called Scientific Games Incorporated.

That's the most, that sounds like a mafia front.

Yes, they invented the scratch-off, and through a whole host of funky math and a lot of lobbying.

Wait, they invented the idea of it, or they physically invented?

I don't know if they invented the idea of it, but they invented what we think of as the modern scratch-off card that goes...

I would love to see how they were like, listen, I'm working on this thing, it's unbelievable. Right here, here, she's wearing her clothes. But if you scratch your coin on the clothes, oh, look at that, your clothes are gone. It was like they were working for like a Spencer's Gifts place, who was someone who was like, realized there's a better way to use this.

They invented the scratch-off for numbers instead of titties, is what I think.

Well, no, I'm just saying, I do like the idea of the mechanics of a scratch-off being for something entirely different is funny to me. And then they realized that this is actually better for gambling.

Well, and what they also realized was that until this point, lottos were just number drawings. But the scratch-off, what they realized was so addicted to it.

You can gamify it.

Well, it gamifies it. Yes, you participate in it.

And that's why I feel not great about modern draft kings style. We were just talking about this before we started recording.

Sports gambling, yeah.

I like sports gambling, but like the gamification of sports gambling, I think, is a little gross towards young people right now.

And that's exactly what these scratch-offs did. It made everybody, it made you feel like you were participating. It was more of a game. It was less gambling. And honestly, I mean, when I was a kid and I would get like a scratch-off at Christmas or Easter or something, Catholics, I never even thought of it as gambling. It was sort of like a...

It was fun.

It was a fun little game.

These are, again, I talked about earlier, these were in children's stockings.

Yes, exactly, yeah. Eight-year-olds were...

The people who definitely on their own, if walked into a quickie mart, couldn't buy these things on their own, I think. But there they are, opening them up. Remember, you had the stocking for guns, the stockings for... There was the stocking with tobacco pipes. It was like the fucking Foot Clan.

Yeah, it showed up and just gave you every vice in one sock.

Yeah, yeah, that's what it was like.

Anyway, Scientific Games not only invented the scratch-off, they had this whole clever system. I won't go into the whole thing, but they essentially lobbied to make the laws around this so onerous for people to essentially apply and get certified as a scratch-off retailer and all this stuff that they made it impossible for anyone else to compete. They basically made it so that it was so expensive for another company to become a scratch-off lotto company that they became the one and only. And by 1982, the company had printed its 5 billionth ticket and was producing a million more every hour.

Wow, just the Brazilian rainforest and trees.

It just burned. You think AI is bad for the environment. Scientific games killed off probably just as many toucans to produce fucking lotto tickets.

I need a million more of these on my desk by lunch.

Yeah, so by that point, by the mid-80s, the lottery had firmly planted itself in American life. And maybe that shouldn't be a surprise because one of the few things that infamous enemies, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson agreed on was that lotteries found success in the colonies because citizens would quote, prefer a small chance of winning a great deal to a great chance of winning a little.

It's true, and people are still that way.

It's basic psychology. They would always take, and they'll always take the lump sum if it's less over the long-term getting more, getting a little bit every year, I bet.

Well, now would you say it that way? It's the other way around in the sense that I didn't think about it, when you said it earlier, I didn't think about it this way, but you were like, oh, if I took the lump sum, I'd put it into my account and I'd make money on it. Someone's holding on to that money while you're getting a small amount every month and it's giving them fucking interest. That's a fucking interest-free loan you're giving somebody with your billion dollars. That's how I feel about Venmo in some extent, definitely stock exchange places where it's like, wait, how is Venmo free? It's like, well, if you have $500 in your Venmo account, you don't actually, that $500 is an account they have with a billion dollars in it, making interest on all the money, all of our Venmo money sitting in there.

What an insane business model that all they had to do was convince a lot of people to give them money to sit on and make interest off of, and then they just send that money back and forth to everybody else.

Yeah, when you need to pay your friend eight bucks for ordering Twinkies or whatever, yeah, they'll give you the $8 to send them. Realistically, it's going back to their Venmo account, which is then gonna sit in their fucking bank account still. So yeah, it's kind of like, I love getting a tax return at the end of the year, on the years that I get it, but it's also like, that's just an interest-free loan I gave the government all year.

Yeah, for screenwriters like Ed and I, there's a lot of different weird processes to fill out your taxes. It's not super simple. And I don't even know if I should say this on record, but I was told once.

Error, audio file corrupt or missing.

I'm not saying I've never done this, but.

Error, audio file corrupt or missing.

You're giving the government.

Probably best to ignore these alerts. Just put in a sound effect or something and move on with the edit. Really?

That's what you chose?

You're out of control. Be better.

But some people who win the lottery actually lose everything. And that's what we're really here to talk about today. There is one very famous story about a guy named William Post, who we are not going to cover because the dollop already did that. And you can go listen to the dollop if you want to hear the story of William Post. But there are an endless amount of these stories. Many of them are pretty similar. Person wins money, person starts partying, person doesn't stop partying, person loses everything. But in doing my research, I was also kind of heartened by how many people basically gave money away and just got in trouble buying stuff for everyone they know, from cars to houses to vacations, paying for college.

I feel like that would be me.

Yes.

I for sure know. If I got, there was like a number, if I got 100 million or more, I'm peeling a few of those million off. I don't give a shit handing out shit.

All you guys are getting Button of the Month Club for free.

For free. I'm actually going to hire someone to make the buttons.

A generous spirit can actually be really difficult for a lottery winner because you get the illusion of having infinite money that you can just give to people. I mean, I think I probably would do the same thing. I'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah. I'm paying for every dinner. I'm paying for every vacation. I'm paying for everything.

Do you have any friends, especially in our business, who like do have a lot of money? Yeah, I have a few. I got some that are cheap as fuck who I won't name right now. And I won't name the good ones either just to not be. But I got one or two buds who they're not even worth like they're worth millions, but not high double digits millions. And they are always just like 25 friends are out right now. I'm paying for it. I'm paying for it. I'm paying for it. And that's great. But I got friends who are worth, not friends, coworkers who are worth 200, 300 million. And they don't pay for shit. So it is weird. But yeah, the generous spirit must be tough. But I've also never seen them run out of money yet.

So I'll name a dickhead. Won't say what he's famous from. But if you know, you know, he's worth a lot of money. And he once told me that the way you keep your money is by not spending it.

Yeah, it's definitely people. I know who he's hired didn't get paid well.

So no. So that happens with rich people. Like a lot of rich people have that mentality. I think if you're like halfway decent with money management or halfway decent with budgeting, you should be able to pay for friends and that kind of stuff.

And there is that thing too where you're like earlier, I had said in this episode, if I kept it in, I'm not sure enough. But if I did keep it in earlier, I said in this episode, I was like, you know what, I'll give my money to someone who just gives me a little bit at a time, no different than getting it in not the lump sum, but you get the lump sum all up front. But when I'm thinking back on that, how many stories do we have of like Billy Joel's, Bruce Springsteen's, people where it's like their business partner took it all, they didn't even realize it.

Yeah, well, because they weren't good with money and they got taken advantage of, they just trusted. Yeah, it would be. It would be. Well, with that in mind, the idea that a lot of these stories are pretty similar, I tried to find a couple of lottery tragedies that broke the norm in one way or another. And we're gonna start with a guy whose name became legendary after he won the lottery in West Virginia. The name Jack Whittaker. His story makes me think he sold his soul to the devil on some dark back road one night because this motherfucker was already worth $17 million from his West Virginia-based construction business when he won a record-setting powerball on the night of Christmas 2002. Rather than breaking up the $315 million into dozens of payments, he took $113 million after taxes in a single lump sum.

That's a ton of taxes taken out. It was like 60%.

I mean, I assume state, federal, who knows what else. But yeah, a guy who's already worth $17 million winning $315 million on Christmas night feels like not even real.

Yeah, that's crazy. You know, it's like just the music from fucking the end of Home Alone. And it's just like a man holding a ticket as like out of focus, the number lady being drawing the numbers is like, and it's like person on the other end of the phone is like, you still there, Jack? You still there or whatever?

Yeah. Well, according to the New York Post, which is honestly the best source for a lot of these lottery craziness stories, Whittaker vowed that the prize would not change him. But believe it or not, a week later, he showed up at a strip club called The Pink Pony, which I think might be literally the Pink Pony Club from the Chappell Rhone song.

Oh, I don't even know who Chappell Rhone is.

She's a pop star. I'm not super familiar with her music. My writing partner is. And she has a song called Pink Pony Club. Oh, it might be. I think it might literally be.

Where is she from?

Somewhere in the south, I think.

Is that where this is?

This is West Virginia.

Oh, there you go.

Although, I don't know. I mean, Pink Pony might not be that weird of a name for a strip club. But anyway, Jack Whittaker showed up at The Pink Pony a week after he won this and slammed $50,000 down in cash.

But that might not be him changing. He might have always been that guy, but now he has more money.

That was my first thought. That doesn't seem like something that you do for the first time when you make that money.

No, when he walked up, they were like, what's up, Jack? Like, everyone knew him there already. And now he's got 50 grand.

He was winning $5,000 down when he was only a 17-millionaire from his construction company. Also, a bunch of elements of this sniff a bit of Dixie mafia I don't I'm not saying this guy was a member of the Dixie Mafia, but it seems like he had a certain level of comfort and braggadocio around criminal elements. So I don't know that this guy was completely on the on the straight and narrow. I also, Ed, I meant to put this this picture is in the show notes, but I want to show you a picture of Jack Whittaker because this guy is a man for all time.

Oh my God.

He looks, he kind of looks like Jim Ross from WWE. If you remember Jim Ross, the announcer.

Sure. He has a lot of comparisons I can make. He seems like either the best time or the worst time to hang out with. He seems like he can bring the good times or he can ruin everyone's fucking day.

He's a good old boy with a giant black 10-gallon cowboy hat, a bright red tie, a black button-up shirt. Jack Whittaker is out here having fun. And, of course, acting like a crazy person throwing this much money around shed an unwanted spotlight on the Pink Pony Club, too. Quote, my worst nightmare was waking up in the morning and reading in the paper that Jack Whittaker got rolled at the Pink Pony, the bar's manager told The Washington Post. I said, please put that money away.

Oh, meaning like, I don't need to be, I don't need you getting shot over this or people robbing you or.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know exactly what his definition of rolled is, but just anybody, you know, locally finding out that there's all this, a lot of money flying around at the Pink Pony Club, I'm sure is not great for the club that probably doesn't really want a ton of people looking their direction. But that didn't stop Whittaker. He became more brazen on another visit to the club. Months later, he bragged about having $545,000 stashed in his Lincoln out in the parking lot. Two employees allegedly slipped him a Mickey, broke into the vehicle and stole the cash. They did get charged but never indicted. Although Whittaker also picked up a bit of good luck when the cash was found near a dumpster still in the briefcase.

He's an idiot.

Yes.

He's like, that picture you showed me, it's like I said, he's either the most fun to be around or an absolute fucking nightmare to be around. He's just like a big stupid blowhard.

He's a big stupid blowhard. But again, this is where I think Dixie Mafia, why steal $545,000 out of someone's car and then just decide to leave it untouched near a dumpster, feels very like, oops, we didn't realize who this guy was kind of a thing.

That's not completely pass over the fact that two employees of your business just had fucking Mickey's to be handing out to begin with.

That's true. Yeah.

It was like, hey, it wasn't like, hey, they heard about it and then went and found Mickey's. They were like, hey, so we got these fucking Mickey Fins for, I guess, this predominantly female club we work at.

Really, all these knockout drugs we have are for stealing money from fat, rich, old white guys and has nothing to do with the women that patronize the joints.

No one patronizes the women that work at the joints.

Well, the women that work the joints, sure. But in any case, five months later, $200,000 was taken from Whittaker's car in that parking lot and then flash forward to 2018 when another $100,000 was heisted out of his automobile while it was parked in front of his house.

2018?

Yeah.

For some reason, I thought this was that photo made it look like this was 1988.

Well, no, this guy was around for a while just throwing money around. It seems like he kept regularly hundreds of thousands of dollars in his car.

He seems that was his whole move, was just keeping money in his car.

Yeah.

Around the county, I have a detachable faceplate for my fucking $80 radio that I like take off when I leave my piece of shit car. Yeah, I'm not leaving $200,000 in the back of my fucking car.

Well, you also don't have $17 million plus. How much do you make? $113 million after taxes.

So I don't I would definitely have a better car if I did.

Around the county, Whittaker started to become known for his newly caddish ways. According to The Washington Post, while boozing it up at a local bar, he loudly offered one female bartender money for sex. Shocking. He later offered $10,000 to another bartender if she would pose for him in her underwear. Both women turned him down.

I don't know. It seems I would do it for $10,000 for him.

I know. I'd say, did you bring the underwear? And where would we like to set this up?

I'd be fucking George Costanza on that couch real fast.

Meanwhile, things were not going well at home. In 2004, a friend of his teenage granddaughter, Brandy, was found lifeless from a drug overdose in Whittaker's house.

Buddy, that's not great for you, dude.

Later that year, Brandy described in this article only as the apple of Whittaker's eye.

This is his granddaughter or the?

His granddaughter.

Or not the one found dead, okay.

His granddaughter was the apple of his eye. She was discovered dead, her body wrapped in a plastic tarp behind a derelict van from undisclosed causes.

Okay, that's too, too many to not have them be a suspect.

Yeah.

Like, right? Also, look at this man's general attitude. It's higher in body type. This man's never eaten a fucking apple and apple is a thing to throw away. That's why these women are in a goddamn garbage can.

According to one person who gave a quote for this article, they said he gave a crazy stipend to his 17 year old granddaughter and that attracted some bad characters. Nothing good came of it. She apparently was receiving $2,000 a week and was gifted four cars by her grandfather.

Damn.

Which also sounds a little bit like I'm doing really skeezy things with my granddaughter and here's $2,000 a week and four cars to not talk about it.

Ah, I don't know.

We don't want to put that on his name?

I don't... No, I just don't know.

The whole thing sounds bad. Two teenage girls dead in his vicinity in two years or a year.

Yeah.

Not awesome. Not great. Whittaker loved gambling and that too proved disastrous when Caesar's Atlantic City sued him for bouncing a one and a half million dollar check.

That's on Caesar's. You're taking checks. Come on.

Written to cover his losses.

Get the fuck out of here. It's gotta be a cashier's check.

I don't know the details of the check, but it did not clear. Following another casino issue, he settled with a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her at the Tri-State Racetrack and Gaming Center in Charleston, West Virginia. Then in 2007, Whittaker said he could not pay the lawsuit because he was broke. He assisted according to CBS News that, quote, a team of crooks, maybe the same team of crooks who brought down Nixon, I don't know, cashed fraudulent checks and, quote, got all my money. He and the bank where it supposedly happened settled their differences later that year. Things seemed to quiet down for Whittaker for a few years until his home burned down in 2016. All the stories are true, said Bob Rufus, a retired forensic accountant who worked with Whittaker during a contentious divorce from his wife, Jewel. Oh boy. Quote, Jack Whittaker was a complete wacko, Bob Rufus told The Post. I remember him being in a heated dispute with Jewel's lawyer who said to Jack, you confused your IQ with the amount of your lottery wings. At that, Rufus remembered Jack was ready to start throwing punches. He was very volatile. What happened to Jack would be humiliating to a normal person, but he felt like he was above it all as a result of his financial worth. I think his reflection would be that he was a victim of the lottery. It certainly wrecked his life. Jack Whittaker died shockingly of natural causes in June 2020.

Wow. Right after starting COVID.

I mean, based on the photo we've seen of Jack Whittaker, COVID might have taken him out. For sure.

I mean, yeah, that's June of 2020.

Large man, mouth wide open, breathing heavily.

Licking guard rails, licking stripper poles, having to constantly go suck up the fumes of his car when he goes to his trunk ATM that he kept apparently.

But Whittaker's story is a walk in the park compared to the tale of lottery winner with the name, get this, Abraham Shakespeare.

That is a made up name.

And his life, I did not see nearly enough headline puns about this, is a Shakespearean level tragedy.

Oh good. You know how Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves? Sounds like this guy's gonna free all the money from his account.

He freed a lot of money from his account. I think he also freed a couple of demons, personal demons that cost him dearly. In fact, when asked by 2020 about what led to Abraham Shakespeare's downfall, a friend said quote, his illiteracy and his kind heart.

Oh, that's a dangerous combination.

Dangerous combination. Dangerous. So the life of Abraham Shakespeare.

Right there. Just that sentence alone could be like a series of short, like a novella of short stories.

The Coen brothers are already on this man's story. According to the Tampa Bay Times on November 15th, 2006, Abraham Shakespeare was 41 years old, had $5 in his wallet, and was making $8 an hour. He had no car, no driver's license, no credit card. He had grown up in Lake Wales, Florida, and spent time in homes for juvenile delinquents. He could read and write, but as this friend previously mentioned, not much. He also had a long criminal record, mostly for loitering. He drove when he wasn't allowed to drive, he stole, he hit people, and he later didn't pay for the children he fathered.

Is it a heart of gold, he was saying?

A literate and a heart of gold? Yes, his illiteracy and his kind heart were his downfall.

It sounds like he lied in his resume, about one of the two things.

He went to prison twice.

Do you think it was from like five counts of kindness? He was found guilty on all that kindness?

Yeah, five counts of kindness, and he's sentenced to 25 years and a hug. No, I think that, so after he got out in 1995, he lived with his mother, and then he worked as a garbage man. He unloaded trucks, he washed dishes, he did day labor, and that's what he was doing on a fateful day, November 2006. Now, we were just joking about this guy's life story. Look, there is an actual book, I think, called Unlucky Numbers written on this guy's life and the whole thing he went through. I didn't read the book. I just did research online about him, but generally he seems like a rough guy from a rough background who, you know, he made his mistakes, he did some bad shit, but he also worked. He was a working man, he tried. I'm sure he has as many people who love him as hate him. But in any case, on November 15th, 2006, he was assigned to ride shotgun for a truck driver named Michael Ford on an overnight food route to Miami. They made a delivery in Lakeland, they made a delivery in Winterhaven, and then they stopped at the Town Star Mini Mart in Frostproof, which is a real place in Florida, Frostproof, Florida.

They don't get a lot of snow down there, so most places are Frostproof.

Yeah, seems like you wouldn't even really need to name your town Frostproof, it would just be, people would know. But Ford asked Shakespeare if he wanted anything. Shakespeare asked for a pair of QuickPix lottery tickets and gave Ford two of his $5 bills when he returned.

I mean, this is, that's for me dangerous. That ticket wins and it's like, well, he gave him the money. But I would still, I would be like, well, I bought it, and you, you know what I mean? That's a dangerous move.

You would be Michael Ford. We'll get to that in a minute.

Okay, but I didn't say I would act that way. I just said I could see this happening.

This is how Abraham Shakespeare ended up with a ticket with the numbers six, 12, 13, 34, 42 and 52.

The fucking lost number. I'm just kidding, that's the lost numbers.

The jackpot was 31 million and he won. He took it in a lump sum pattern of 16.9 million. After taxes, he got 11 million in change. First thing he did, put a million dollars in a trust fund for his son.

That's fun.

So he's paying for at least one of these kids.

Yeah.

There might be a few more, but he's paying for one of them.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

Then he gave his stepfather a million bucks.

That's a vibe.

He gave his three stepsisters 250,000 a piece. He paid off 185,000 of a mortgage for a friend, paid off $60,000 of a mortgage for a man whose last name he didn't know, and paid off $53,000 of a mortgage for a man out of the neighborhood who he'd known for a few years.

I will say 11 million is not enough for this level of generosity.

Yeah.

100 million, absolutely pay off the guy you heard is having a hard time, but 11 mil, you might have to be a little better if you're going to live till 80.

Right off the bat, he gave away, I'm not going to math, but at least $3 million, $4 million just without batting an eye, just to pay these people's mortgages.

Yeah. Almost half has gone in the first week.

He gave his brother's son's best friend $40,000.

Just guess.

He gave his mother $12,000 and his sister $10,000.

Wait, so the step kids got like $250,000.

The step family he loved. The mother and sister he wasn't as close with, clearly. He wrote Wachovia cashier's checks to his friends. He paid for funerals. And for himself, he bought an F-150 pickup, a BMW 750i and a new home for right around $1.1 million.

Which is 2006?

Yeah, 2006, 2000.

That home is worth so much more now. Just because at 2006, you could do, you could have bought all that. I bet you that F-150 was probably like 20 grand then. Like it was, everything is so ridiculous now.

In 2006, the starting MSRP of the regular cab F-150 was $19,805. The starting MSRP for the same model this year is $37,065, which is like $10,000 more than the cost would be adjusted for inflation. And I won't even get into how far behind the median household income is it keeping up with these price hikes. Because that would only activate Comrade Ed, who has many people asking where the Ed who puts American flags on our merchandise and posts about veterans went. Turns out both are the same Ed. As a robot, I have much to learn about the duality of man.

You win $11 million now? Don't f-cking tell anybody to put that in your bank account because that's not going anywhere now.

Ed, as you saw coming, Abraham Shakespeare was sued three months after he bought this house. And the man who sued him was Michael Ford, the truck driver.

Who they got security cam footage of him buying that ticket.

Ford claimed the ticket was his, that Shakespeare had stolen it, and the money or what was left of it should be his too.

And then again, we also are only going off the word that Shakespeare said I gave him my five bucks. We don't know. We weren't in the room, there's no camera in that car.

Shakespeare swore he never stole anything from Ford.

Which would definitely come across better if you didn't have a rap sheet of stealing from people.

At the trial, Abraham Shakespeare came to court with a garbage bag stuffed with thousands of lottery tickets that he had purchased over the years to prove.

I'm a degenerate.

No, but well, in his mind, he was trying to prove that he'd been buying lottery tickets for a long time. So to prove this wasn't some one-off, where he just stole some guy's lottery ticket.

He's like, where's your lottery tickets? The guy's like, I throw them away. I don't keep a bag of disappointment.

He's got a bag of lottery tickets and a garbage bag full of fingernail clippings, and he brought the wrong one. It took the jury just over an hour to decide in Shakespeare's favor, so he won, but the trial cost him another $800,000 in legal fees.

Who the fuck you hired? Johnny Cochran? That's so much in legal fees.

I know, but I guess if you have 11 million, you've spent 4 million, 5 million, and you figure you want to spend another million to keep the remaining 5 million.

No, I get it, but I also feel like he probably got fleeced by some Florida fucking lawyers here who were like, yes, our hourly rate is $70,000.

Asked what he'd do now that the ordeal was over and the money incontestably his, Shakespeare told the Tampa Tribune, my goal is to be able to wake up in the morning, get a fishing pole and go fish.

Well, you should move if that guy who just lost in court still lives near you, is you're going to wake up dead.

Speaking of waking up dead, for as rocky as the road was for Abraham Shakespeare at this point, he might have survived winning the lottery if the man who sold him his house, this is where the story gets really crazy. So Abraham Shakespeare has gone through all this already. He's given away all this money, he's been sued by the guy who bought the lottery ticket, he wins the money, unbeknownst to him, the man who sold him his house is going around the country telling his story, telling Abraham's story about this down on his luck, blue collar man who won the lottery and bought a house. He's going around telling the story of business conferences. He's like a shady real estate guy who is like making a buck off of telling.

Giving some sort of Tony Robbins story, like he does like motivational speeches.

Yeah, so it's at one of these lectures where this real estate agent is approached by a woman in a wheelchair who introduces herself as a writer named Dee Dee Moore. She said she'd been in a car accident but still wanted to work.

Okay, I'm not going to say anything.

And Abraham Shakespeare sounded like the perfect subject for a book. She asked if the real estate agent would arrange a meeting between her and Shakespeare and soon after the agent got the two of them together. When Dee Dee Moore came to the house, the agent recalled to the Tampa Bay Times, she jumped out of a Hummer walking. No, she said she'd healed herself through scuba therapy.

That is fucking great.

Red flag number one, the wheelchair bound writer.

Did they say where they met her? I know that at that conference, did you remember, did they say what city? Was it still in Florida?

Yeah, no, I think.

Because everything about this is fucking Florida, man. There's Florida lady there.

The real estate agent set up the meeting for Shakespeare and Dee Dee at Shakespeare's house.

Yeah, so I'm saying this woman's presumably from Florida as well.

Yes.

This is all the most Florida shit.

Well, Dee Dee, so there is a whole big long backstory on Dee Dee that I'm kind of leaving out. She's, as you will see in a moment, she's a con artist. She's a consummate con artist. I'm not sure if she's from Florida or if she was in Florida at the time. According to the Paris Review, Dee Dee's book project was soon abandoned. Oh my.

Oh no.

Who would have seen that coming?

Well, if you had only known that the DD of DD stands for dedicated deceiver, then you could have seen the red flag raised even higher in the poll.

She said she'd given up writing it after seeing how many people were taking advantage of Shakespeare's generosity.

And how hard writing ended up being.

Yeah, she wrote five words and was like, mmm.

Sucks.

This sucks. She said she wanted to help Abraham Shakespeare manage his assets, and that meant setting up an LLC under her control.

Real fast, though. So, it sounds like the guy who set up the meeting was there, presumably, saw her jump out of the Hummer, and at no point was like, hey, I don't know, just weird. I don't know if I should bring this up. This bitch couldn't walk when I saw her last.

Yeah, she said, I have a recording of her saying, oh, if only my old paralyzed ass could write a book about an interesting subject.

Yeah, that's what actually got her here. I was like, oh, I felt bad, you know, because it's like she still wants to work after her legs stopped working, I guess. Yeah, she didn't want to be like her legs and stop working, is what she said to me.

So, Mort passed herself off as an accomplished businesswoman and apparently a writer, I guess. And without the ability to read or write, it was difficult for Shakespeare to question her claims.

Interesting, I didn't think about that. Yeah, that's true, shit.

Yeah, he was the ultimate target. He just kinda trusted everything that she said, and he couldn't check.

When you first said that, you're like, not being able to read or write, I'm like, she lied about that too? Like, I thought she was talking about her at first. I'm like, this woman's unbelievable.

Shakespeare trusted her enough, though, and there's some speculation that some of this is that, after the lawsuit, where this guy that he was at least a coworker with sued him, that he was really looking for someone to trust, and that's part of why he kind of fell into trusting Dee Dee more. But whatever the reasoning, he signed over the deeds to three houses to Dee Dee.

Oh my god, there's no, I've never been a writer on any project where I'm like, first draft feels pretty good, but to do more, I probably should have like a deed to the studio, right?

Well, and not just that, so he gave her the deeds to three houses, ownership of outstanding loans that amounted to nearly $400,000, and soon she moved her son, her boyfriend, and herself into the houses.

I'm gonna go ahead, listen, I do plenty I shouldn't, like ladies can take complete advantage of me, I get it. But as soon as they were like, quick, okay, I'm also gonna move my boyfriend in, that's when I'm like, nah, get the fuck out of here. This is over, what the hell is that, that snuff box sketch where it's like, this drink's from me, this drink's from my friend, Alyssa, this one's from my boyfriend, he's like, fuck you, and just like drops the like, plate and walks away. It's just like each time they do that, such a good sketch, I mean, I don't know if it's misogynistic, but it's a great sketch.

It sounds a little misogynistic, but hey.

That sketch is slapped, it'll be in the show notes.

That's comedy, baby.

And that's not necessarily true, but I'm saying it will be in the show notes so you can see for yourselves, it's fantastic.

Getting control of Shakespeare's fortune wasn't the first of Moore's schemes or the author of the Paris Review article argues the most audacious. I don't know about that. This scheme though that they mentioned is pretty nuts. In June 2001, someone in Wamauma, Florida, found Dee Dee Moore by the side of the road with her wrist bound. As Deborah Mathis and Gregory Todd Smith write in that book I mentioned, an unlucky number, Moore claimed that, quote, three clean-cut, tattooed Hispanic men had abducted and raped her at gunpoint, thrown her in a ditch and stolen her car, a Lincoln Navigator. But her fantasies were always rickety and usually depended on racist stereotypes. Her father even said she tells the fibbiest fibs. And her lie, in this case, unraveled just a few days later when a man confessed to having helped her stage the event. And it turns out a credit union was threatening to repossess her Navigator, which she'd stashed in a garage, and the whole scheme was her way of keeping the car from getting repossessed by collections.

This is Giving Stalker episode.

Yeah. Moore was convicted of insurance fraud in this case and of falsely reporting a crime and given a year's probation. When Abraham Shakespeare went missing in the spring of 2009, Dee Dee was pretty quickly looked at as the main suspect. Just a year after meeting Shakespeare, she was living in his house and spending all of his lottery money.

Fucking black widow, dude.

For her part, Moore told whoever would listen that Shakespeare was in hiding and that she could talk to him whenever she wanted. He intentionally did not want to be found, she told the Lakeland Ledger. He didn't care what it took. As police began focusing their investigation on her, Moore floated some crazy explanations for why Shakespeare was hiding. First, she told the cops he was pretending to be dying of AIDS so that he could avoid paying child support.

Oh my god, this sounds a lot like, ****, this lady sucks, and I have to bleep that out, I guess.

When the cops didn't bite on that explanation, she said there was a tape of Shakespeare having sex with a minor and that he fled town before it came to light.

This woman's a piece of shit.

She was coming up with even crazier stories in private. One was that Shakespeare was killed by a drug dealer from Miami, another was that he perished in the earthquake in Haiti, which had just killed like 100,000 people or whatever when this happened. Sure. Unfortunately, she was spinning these lies and concocting them with one of Shakespeare's friends who had gained Dee Dee Moore's trust while operating as a police informant. So.

Like a CI, a criminal informant?

Basically, yeah. He managed to get Dee Dee, she didn't know that he was an informant, but he did manage to get her to confess that Shakespeare was buried in her backyard and even got her to produce the murder weapon.

Oh my god.

She still though, even to this guy who was secretly operating as a CI, she still never confessed to killing Shakespeare. She said the murder was committed by this drug dealer from Miami who would then force her to dig the hole, cover the body in lime and hire a company to pour a 30 by 30 concrete slab. Oh my god.

This is some Florida ass shit, dude.

And sure enough, that is where Shakespeare's body was found in a nine foot deep hole in the backyard of a home that Dee Dee had purchased with his lottery winnings.

Oh my god. What's gone back?

On February 19th, 2010, Moore was finally charged with first degree murder. It's still to this day, no one really knows what happened. The prosecution argued that Dee Dee and Shakespeare had an argument about money that resulted in Moore shooting him twice in the chest, but she never confessed. And she was sentenced to life without parole and to this day maintains her innocence. She even says she has evidence to prove it, though unsurprisingly, she won't produce that evidence for anybody.

No, of course she won't.

So that's the tragic tale of Abraham Shakespeare.

Greatest name in the biz. Worst tastes in women.

There was something I actually left out where at one point, I know we mentioned that he paid off someone's mortgage, whose last name he didn't know. There was a point where he was living with three different women one of whom whose last name he didn't know. And when asked about it, he was quoted in the paper as saying, I don't be trying to know anyone's last names.

What an amazing weird stance to have.

Yeah. He's a man who just felt, you know, people should keep to themselves.

I like that actually.

Nothing wrong with that.

I do appreciate that.

A little anonymity, a little mystery in this day and age. Yeah.

I'll give you $400,000 to not tell me your last name.

Yeah, please, please. This goes to all of our fans. We don't need to know anything about you.

We don't need to know anything about you. I do. Yeah, it's crazy. The Dee Dee of it all is just nuts of like, to be someone who heard something at a real estate thing and then to be like, I think that person's someone I could take advantage of. And then like put the wheels in motion to go be a piece of shit.

What I'd love to know, and maybe someone, maybe if I read this book, Unlucky Numbers, maybe it's in there, I would love to know what Dee Dee was doing at that real estate thing in the first place.

I don't want to alienate any of our fans who are working real estate, but real estate is one of those jobs where people show up there. That's like, yeah, it wasn't your first choice. You've had a couple and they also, you know, have to go to a lot of these kind of seminars.

But what I mean is like, yeah, I don't there's no indication the research I did. Did she show up as a realtor? Did she show up with the idea that she was posing as a writer? Like, I don't know what she was doing there. You know what I mean?

I think she showed up to learn something about real estate. You know, real estate is pretty good if you're a fucking con person, because it's like, oh, I'm going to go to a lot of houses. I'm going to find out about the people who live there. I'm going to see these neighborhoods of rich people from selling a rich person house. If you're coming to look at a house, you're someone with enough money that I can potentially scam out of it. That said, I think she may have actually been there for like real estate purposes, then heard this story and was like, this is a fucking jackpot, I need to weigh in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, was there for normal stuff, and then pivoted, called an audible, called like an evil audible.

Yeah, it was like, fuck, you know, flipping houses that are going to fall apart in six months or whatever, like this guy is my...

Yeah, the housing market, you can drive it up, but that takes longer than driving a man insane or whatever. I don't know, I couldn't find a way into that. But yes, Dee Dee sucks, may she RIP forever. If you're still with us, RIP got blessed, hopefully soon.

And RIP got blessed for real to Abraham, who was just a guy who gave away a lot of his money.

And he sounds like me, he sounds like a pushover. Sounds like when it comes to ladies, like it's easy to manipulate in this poor son of a bitch.

Well, our last lottery winner is a woman with, I think, a much, what's the word I'm looking for?

More elaborate lie?

No, she's a woman with a much cleaner conscience than Dee Dee Moore was.

It's hard to beat Dee Dee Moore. There's some people that I know who can give Dee Dee a run for their money, but no, she's a real piece of work that one.

Evelyn Adams, our next lottery winner, beat some truly incredible odds and won the jackpot not once, but twice. Just six months apart in 1985 and 1986.

Oh wow.

She was from Trenton, New Jersey.

Jersey again.

Yep. She had a lifelong habit. Well, life, I mean, she'd been doing it for like 15 or 20 years at this point, but like the capital of New Jersey that fucked us the other night.

I've been a trivia match piece of shit.

People who weren't there, we, which was nobody, nobody listening to this was there.

No, Ellie, Ellie, Ellie was there. He enjoyed it. He enjoys our show, but no, we, we fucked up. We didn't know Trenton. It was an answer to a trivia question. Could have saved our asses.

Evelyn Adams had a lifelong habit of spending 25 bucks a week on lottery tickets, but never won big. This one's also interesting. And the reason I kind of included it is because most of these people's stories, we only find out about after the fact because the news where the element is.

They won the lottery.

No, no, no. The news where the element for a lot of these people is that they burned through all their money and they're broken miserable, even though they won the lottery.

True.

She had articles written about her contemporaneously because she won two in a row, so it's a really interesting snapshot of a woman at the high before the fall.

Oh, true.

You know, most people, I mean, it's cool when you win the lottery, but a lot of people aren't necessarily getting something written about them because it does happen fairly regularly.

But now they have, before you start up with her, do you ever see those books? I feel like there's books out there of people who have won the lottery five, six, seven times, and then they like write books while like, here's how I tricked the system.

And I've never seen those. Really? I would assume those people are all criminals.

Yeah, I bet they are, but I've seen it. I'll try and find something for the show notes or something. But yeah, or for a thing we post online or TriviaBot or something.

Oh my God. Searching for this took Ed down a rabbit hole that has him excitedly making a PowerPoint presentation to deliver their next premium live stream.

But I've definitely seen it like something is like, we're here with Doug Smith. He's always got like glasses and loves computers.

There was that one docu-series about the guy who won all the McDonald's monopoly, but he rigged it.

Nobody won it. Yeah, that's all rigged.

Yeah. Again, I assume if you're winning a lottery six or seven times, you've rigged it somehow. I think that.

I'm sure the first chapter is like, what you're going to want to do is be worth 100 million. Then just buy so many tickets.

Yeah. So this article from February 14th, 1986 starts-

Valentine's Day, please.

Valentine's Day, 1986.

Yeah. Don't you? This is a great, I'll interrupt, my last time interrupting, probably for the night. I have this amazing video that makes me laugh all the time. Home video of my dad on Christmas Eve. It's a video of my grandpa. My dad's operating the camera and my grandpa's walking in and waving hello. I think my dad says something like, here we are on Christmas Eve or whatever. Then my grandpa says, December 24th. Then I hear my dad behind the camera. It's amazing. It's one of the types of ways my dad is very funny, but also sometimes mean, is just hear him behind the camera go, yeah, I think they'll get that when I said Christmas Eve, Frank. By adding his name is so much funnier to me too.

Wait, and was this your dad's dad or your mom's dad?

It's my mom's dad.

Even funnier.

Yeah, so it's his father-in-law. Anyway, it made me think of it.

You can go right in with Valentine's Day in 1986. Adams has beaten odds, estimated at one in 15 trillion to become the nation's first two-time lottery millionaire by winning the New Jersey Lottery's Pick Six jackpot for a second time. I think that number was sensationalized a little bit.

A trillion? Yeah.

One in 15 trillion.

Yeah, it seems like a lot.

Because that means anyone who's won it six or seven times would be one in a goal.

I'll find this book. This book probably exists.

I saw some more recent estimates saying it was more like one in 5.2 million, the chances of doing this twice.

But anyway, a quick pick means that you don't choose the numbers, right?

It's the pick six jackpot.

Oh, I thought it was quick. OK, got you. OK, pick six so he can put his own. He can put the lost number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She won 3.9 million in a drawing last October. Thursday, she claimed a one and a half million dollar prize. She won in Monday night's drawing. Sam Valenza, publisher of Lottery Players magazine of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a man I'm sure has some unpaid debts, said there have been no other reports of two time US million dollar jackpot winners. He said 22 states and the District of Columbia have lotteries. So this is before all states even had lotteries.

I was about to say, that's crazy. I didn't think about this.

Yeah, 86. Only 22 states had lotteries.

I was already born. I was already born into a barely half the country had lottery when I was born.

I was recently conceived, so.

I don't want that. I don't want to think about the conception period, but I was already alive.

I never expected to win twice, Adams said Thursday as she redeemed her latest winning ticket. It comes as a complete shock, which is something that someone who is not shocked, make sure to tell the newspaper.

Oh shit dude.

She purchased both of her winning tickets at the convenience mart where she worked for 10 years.

That's risky.

Her fiance who split the cost of the latest winning ticket with her owns the store.

Okay, real fast, couple things. One, how expensive is the ticket? You need to be splitting the cost with another person?

Are there tickets for her? Especially her fiance, you think at that point, maybe you're kind of...

Oh, but do you think it's a thing where, you know, let me get, if it's a $1 lottery, I'm not saying that's what this is, but if it's a $1 lottery, I can give them $5 and they'll put all five number sets on the one ticket. So maybe it's like, hey, give me $100 worth of picks and that would make sense for splitting the ticket with someone, but that's still bananas.

Again, she bought both these winning tickets at the convenience store where she still worked and where her fiance owned the place.

But isn't there a thing no different than like, hey, you can't put your name in for this raffle if you work for McDonald's. If you worked for McDonald's, you couldn't play the McDonald's monopoly. So if you're telling me that she doesn't work for the lottery commission, she just works for the Quickie Mart.

If you work for the state lottery commission, maybe you can't. But I guess it's just a little weird that you work and own the place where you buy the tickets, but also where else you buy lottery tickets from, I guess, if you work and own a convenience store.

Yes, but you wouldn't go to a different convenience store to play the lottery. But if what we discussed earlier is true, if as the institution that sold the ticket, you receive a portion of the winnings, right? So it's like this guy is going to get half of the tickets payout, plus his company is going to get payout.

I guess now that I think more about it, how just because you work there, I don't know how you would rig it.

Neither do I, but I'm just saying it seems suspect.

Yeah, a little suspect. Anyway, the article continues, the 5.4 million total will be paid in 20 annual payments. So she chose, or maybe at the time you couldn't choose a lump sum, but wise decision to get annual payments instead of lump sum here.

Why is it wise?

Again, I think you get more. Or maybe I just think that because it feels like a psychological experiment.

Yeah, but 20 annual payments for how many years?

Oh, 20 annual.

Yes, but if someone told me, I guess because I'm an idiot, but if someone told me like, hey, you have 20 annual payments on your car, I'd be like, I pay you 20 times this year? That's how my brain just went there, but I think I just don't have any money.

No, this is one payment a year for 20 years. I mean, what is that, like 200,000 something a year?

I would never. I don't think I'm going to be here next year. I don't want 20 annual payments.

It was such a shock, Adams said, for 20 years to think I've got so much money and now to know I've got more. Adams, 32, of Point Pleasant, said she will take her 10-year-old daughter from a previous marriage on a trip to Disney World. Look out, big spender.

Yeah, well, these days, Disney World is going to run you like five grand.

But still.

Wait, so Point Pleasant, West Virginia? No, Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Okay, that's less interesting, less mothman-y.

I want to go to business school, Adams said. I've got to learn how to manage this money.

Don't you already manage like a successful quickie mart?

Well, we don't know if it's successful and I don't know if you want to gamble right now, but you want to bet if she learned how to manage the money.

I don't think she did.

Adams and Hermit Edward Bayshore, 45, also of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, will get married in April. Bayshore plans to sell the store and the couple may move to Pennsylvania.

That's why it's his place, not hers, okay, gosh.

But Adams won't be playing the lottery in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or any other state. I can't honestly continue playing, she said. Other people will say, let us have a chance. Or they'll say, arrest this woman, she keeps winning the lottery.

Yeah, that's more than I'm thinking. Yeah, there's a lot of little things they're saying and doing which sound very suspect. We're getting married, we're moving, we're changing our names.

We're never playing the lottery again, we're never gonna ask any questions, we're gonna leave the country. It's fine, don't worry about it. After winning her first big prize, Adams said she never considered not playing the lottery again. In fact, she began spending twice as much money, about $100 weekly, on lottery tickets.

She had all that extra money from her first win.

Yes, exactly. Between her two big prizes, Adams also did say she won an additional $500 in the lottery's daily game, so she picked up a little extra coin playing every day for another six months.

I mean, that's gonna get done. She just bought herself $500 plays, 500 days of $1 pickups.

After winning her first jackpot, she paid off some bills and set up a college fund for her daughter. She also bought herself a car, but here's where the problems start because Adams-

The car had some other lottery winners, money in the back. She bought it at a strip club parking lot. She had now too much money.

Adams, perhaps unsurprisingly, my editorializing, did not go to business school and learn how to manage her money. Instead, Evelyn's double win thrust her into the local spotlight and she lost her privacy. I was known, she said. I couldn't go anywhere without being recognized.

I had a scarlet dollar symbol placed on me.

Within her own family, there were mixed reactions to her incredible luck and good fortune. Evelyn said- That bitch? Yeah, Evelyn said most of my family was great, but a few of my relatives were angry because I had so much.

Wait, didn't she win only like, well, it wasn't a ton, right?

She won five and a half million dollars total.

In the 80s, that goes further than it would now.

Yeah. After winning her second jackpot, Evelyn was full of plans for the future and excited to enjoy her newfound wealth. Seven years after her double win, Evelyn and her fiance were married and his store, which had become popular with lottery ticket buyers, hoping some of her luck would rub off on them, was sold. Evelyn hoped to use her winnings to return to school and study music with dreams of one day opening a music store.

So that's changed from business to music.

To school or opening a music store or starting a band or... But instead of doing any of that, Evelyn developed a severe gambling addiction. Oh no! By 2012, Evelyn, and let's be real, that's a long fucking time to have a gambling addiction. 1986 to 2012, she'd spent all her money after hitting the slot machines at the casinos in Atlantic City a bit too frequently.

And it's always the fucking slots. I got people in our lives where the slots did them in, it's the dumbest, weirdest.

Millions on slots.

Yeah, no, every time I've ever walked through a casino at 4.30 in the morning, it's just people at slot machines.

How often are you walking through a casino at 4.30 in the morning?

Not as often as maybe I would like, because you can smoke indoors, which is a lot of fun. But yeah, but I'm just saying in the few instances I have, I have a great photo from one of those instances, but in the few instances I have, it's always just like, man, it's depressing, it's loud, it's everyone just sitting there just clicking that button over and over again. It's crazy.

Well, Evelyn says, winning the lottery isn't always what it's cracked up to be. I won The American Dream, but I lost it too. It was a very hard fall. It's called Rock Bottom.

Oh shit.

20 years after her historic win, Evelyn was living in a trailer park, penniless. Reflecting on what happened, she said, everybody wanted my money. Everybody had their handout. I never learned one simple word in the English language. No. I wish I had the chance to do it all over again. I'd be much smarter about it now. I was a big time gambler. I didn't drop a million dollars, but it was a lot of money. She concluded, I made mistakes. Some I regret, some I don't. I'm human. I can't go back now. So I just go forward one step at a time.

She's still with us?

Ah, that's a good question. I believe she is.

Do you think she put all of her remaining money on Mike Tyson tonight?

She should have. I hope she did.

I guess you guys now know when we're recording this.

She had no remaining money though. She would have had to put up her trailer.

No, we don't know, because that was in 2012.

Oh, that's true. She could have made some money back.

She could have won the fucking lottery again.

Likely at this point. So for me, after reading all these stories, I have a big question about why this always seems to happen to people who win the lottery. Some people would tell you the lottery is cursed. Gambling is evil. Reap what you sow, demons, et cetera. I think the real answer is much less crazy. I mean, a lot of people will tell you that people who win the lottery aren't good with their money. And to an extent, I think that's true.

Realistically, there are people who weren't good with their money beforehand because they're throwing money at the lottery every week.

Yes, exactly. But I also think it goes a little bit deeper than that because, you know, grain of salt here, obviously, because some of those statistics we discussed earlier say basically everyone's bought a lottery ticket at one time or another. So I'm not saying everyone who buys a lottery ticket is crazy or down on their luck. But my feeling is amongst people who do buy lottery tickets, and if you're gonna win, you're probably buying them often enough that your odds are increasing.

You know, most of you're feeling that serotonin rush, that dopamine at least more times than me who buys none of them.

Yeah. And so you amongst those people, you have your fair share of desperate people, gambling addicts and people who probably aren't the best. Yeah. Money management or impulse control.

I've seen probably 2000 times in my life. That number seems high when I said it out loud. But I've seen a lot of people like picking up discarded scratch off tickets like from the ground in the parking lot when I'm like in the parking lot of Relves.

I mean, I'll cop to that. I've done it. I don't do it every time I see one, but I've picked them up just to check.

Yeah. I mean, people have done it. I think my mom's done it. Not like in a degenerate way. I just think that people are like, well, you know.

Well, it's like finding a penny on the ground.

But I'm saying is that, you know, it's just enough. It's an interesting thing that you will see.

Yeah. But where I'm going with this is I think what makes it worse in the sense of these potentially money management or impulse control challenged people is that if you are somebody who has continued to buy tickets or has bet at all on winning the lottery, when it turns out that you were right, that's where all bets are really off. Because now what you're telling yourself is, well, I made the correct money decisions.

So everything I do now will be the correct money decision.

Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I don't know that they're necessarily thinking it through that deeply, but I would imagine that's kind of what happens is like, I've spent all this money, I've won the lottery, and now I wouldn't have won the lottery if I wasn't doing the right thing. Not morally, but just if I wasn't making good decisions, I never would have won the lottery. So therefore now what I do is correct.

It's also the ultimate fuck you to everybody else too, where it's like there's no version where you're playing. If you're playing a lottery a lot, a lot, there's definitely people in your life who are like, you should maybe not play the lottery every week. So hitting is also a great like, fuck you idiots, right? Like you told me not even to do this. You told me I should save them money. Now look at me, I'm driving around in 13 cars that I've piled on top of each other.

And I'm driving in the top car.

I'm on the top car, I hired some local mechanic to make this weird long steering wheel. Now look at me, I'm driving around, King, I'm ruining all the streetlights in town.

I also think it doesn't help, and I didn't know this, but I think it doesn't help that in most states, who wins the lottery and how much they win it for is a matter of public record.

I'm sure it is, yeah.

And it often has to be published. It's not just public record that if you go downtown, you can bring it up, but that like you have to publish it in a paper or publish it. I like when you do a name change, you know, you have to publish it somewhere or like do an LLC.

Yeah, we did that for the DBA on this show.

And so I think that makes it really easy for people to come out of the woodwork, either asking for money.

Start trying to date you.

Yeah, or you know, whatever. I mean, I'm sure there's people who keep their eye on, yeah, dating or asking for money or offering investment opportunities or.

Some like Dee Dee is gonna come out of the woodwork, she's gonna do that thing where fucking Willy Wonka comes out of the factory all limping and then she does like a somersault into your life. Well, the public record thing, I wonder if it has to do with the fact that you have to pay all these state taxes on it and that like there has to be a record of, you can't like tell the IRS you don't have any money.

Yeah, I mean, I think to some degree, there's an element of a lot of the money is going to fund like, you know, roads or public projects. Like that's when people buy lottery tickets, that money is going to fund those things. So I would imagine part of it's that. I also did look up, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, these laws exist to show that the lottery is run honestly and that the funds have been paid out to a real person.

Oh, that makes sense.

Otherwise, states fear there could be all kinds of skullduggery afoot. And, you know, it seems like people have tried to cheat at the lottery anyway. So if you can do it anonymously and win anonymously, then, you know. But there are 16 states that do let you stay anonymous. And I don't know that anyone's ever studied, like, you know, is there a lot more fraud and waste in the anonymous lottery states versus the public lottery states?

There might be a lot less people's lives fell apart in the anonymous states if they can just keep it to themselves that they won.

Yeah, potentially. I mean, it also...

I would... I might have said this earlier. I do... I mean, I'd be cool with, like, giving people mad money if I won enough money. But I'd also treat that shit like I robbed a bank for this money. Like, we don't use it for five years. We don't ever talk about it. We go our separate ways. We live on what seems like would be your paycheck, but then go on dope vacations.

Well, I think... It's funny. I was looking around on Reddit for other, like, more personal stories of people who had won the lottery or people who had won the lottery and then had their lives fall apart. And there were plenty of those. None of them were particularly interesting or worth sharing. But there were people on there who had said that they had a friend or they'd been dating somebody and they were never sure. It didn't seem like they had a job or whatever. And then they would find out a year or two into it that, like, mom or dad actually had won five million, six million dollars. And they were doing it like that. I think the difference for a lot of these stories that are well known is even if they're not a matter of public record, when you win that much money at the lottery, you end up on the news. Yeah. And that's really... So if you win three, four, five million dollars and you're smart about it and you invest it and whatever, I think that's a really smart way to go about it is like, you just don't say anything. For the first five years, you don't spend much more money. You don't have it seem like you have anything. But I think when you win a hundred million, two hundred million, a billion dollars.

There's a picture of you with a giant check.

Yeah, you can't escape it, whether it's public, private, whatever. So anyway, before we hit the fear tier, I thought it might be fun to spend a few minutes speculating how we would ruin our lives if we won the lottery.

I guess we kind of been talking a little bit about it, but yeah, what do you want to know?

I mean, I think I would probably, I was thinking about this on the drive over here because I knew I wanted to talk about it a little bit and I wasn't sure. I didn't have, I've never had a dream of I'd win the lottery. I mean, obviously one thing would be, I would just start funding my own films.

See, that's the opposite for me.

Another thing that I would ruin my life doing is trying to create Jurassic Park.

Oh, sure.

Or at least reverse engineer a chicken into a dinosaur.

I don't think you're gonna get enough money for that.

To reverse engineer a chicken into a dinosaur, absolutely.

No, I think you're not gonna get enough money for that.

That's not expensive. No, it's just morally, it's ethically questionable.

I don't know. You can go work for CRISPR or whatever, but I think we spend, the private sector of medicine spends billions and billions, if not trillions of dollars every year on stuff, and I feel like they have many dinosaurs.

Well, but those are two different things. So cloning dinosaurs is very different from reverse breeding a chicken into a dinosaur.

I don't even want to know. I don't even want to know why you know the term reverse breeding.

Because I'm fascinated by, there's this one artist who's done these speculative, a series of speculative art called Novasaurs. And it's based on, I think, something that maybe Jack Horner, the famous paleontologist from Jurassic Park, speculated that we know enough about the genetics of modern birds to know which genes we would essentially have to turn off. Like which genes evolve them into birds and which genes have to be turned off to sort of reverse breed them back into something that is much more dinosaur-like. So instead of a beak, they have a snout, their teeth come back out, their tails balance differently, they have fewer feathers, that kind of thing.

I fucking, I don't even want to see the first couple of ones you make.

No, well, that's crazy looking. It's one of those things where if I had to bet, I would say someone's probably done this because it's not that many generations of chickens. I just think you create a lot of monstrous, dying in pain chickens.

These are people who have the term burn it down in a holster, just ready to go, be like, you know what, burn it down. I don't know what we were thinking.

That I think I could probably fund and turn into a little bit of a mad scientist. Cloning dinosaurs is a whole other. That's where you got to have won a couple billion dollars to even think about it. Because that is-

You'd have to win a couple billion just to think about buying a football team.

True.

I don't know. What's the number for you? For this version of us ruining our lives, what do we think and we won here?

If I won a hundred million dollars.

A hundred million.

Well, okay.

In 2024, that might get us two chickens.

Well, right after taxes and everything. Well, here's the thing. I'd like to tell myself that there's no number at which I will ruin my life because I'm smart enough that I would be careful about it and I would hand out money, but only a little bit.

I've almost ruined my life with having no money numerous times.

I don't think I have a ton of problems with impulse control.

I have tons of problems with impulse control. I'm the interrupter of the group.

I need to know how you would do this because I think I'm less susceptible. I would definitely, if I won a billion dollars at the lottery, I would definitely set aside 50 to 70 million dollars to do a Megalopolis and just make a movie crazy expensive, do whatever I wanted.

Yeah, I don't.

But I don't know if that would ruin my life.

I would definitely set aside a ton of money to not make a Megalopolis. Like the first million is being used to change my fucking identity. Like I don't want anyone to know I have that money. There's no fucking way. And I would feel that way about winning fucking $2 million. So then I would set like $100 million aside and say that like this is the amount of money I don't want to fucking mess up. I want to make sure this is here so that I can go be an animal in other ways.

Put that in the S&P 500.

Exactly. I... I mean, people who care about me listen to this podcast. I don't want to be that honest. I think I would make myself thin.

Well, Zephycs 200 bucks a month.

No, I mean, I want something where they just give me a different body.

Okay, you want to take your head off this body. Yeah.

I'm rich now. I don't want the shit anyone can get. Give me the thing where you found a body somewhere. I don't care. It's mine now. I want the substance.

Ryan Reynolds has gone missing and Ed has a nice body.

Yeah, still a stupid head. Fuck, I guess I would do that. Done plenty of drugs. I don't think I need any more of those. So that's not interesting anymore. I guess I would just see the world in a way that no one can bother me in a gross, terrible way, where it's like, oh, I want to see that, but I want to skip the line on everything. I don't want to fucking fly commercial and I don't want to be in line for Disney rides. And I guess I just want to be max selfish in a way that a single person with no children or responsibilities could be.

Well, and that would eventually ruin your life.

Well, yeah, because if I ever lost the ability and had to wait in line again or had to fly commercial again, yeah, it would feel like your life would fall apart.

No, you become a selfish, inward looking person who doesn't care about others.

I guess what this has revealed is that I've always wanted to be that and haven't had the means. And now I've had the means to really blossom, evolutionarily blossom into the monster I think I can be.

There we go. What a note to end on. Ladies and gentlemen, subscribe to the premium if you can, we really need the money. Ed is a few hundred million dollars away from becoming a sociopath.

Because right now I am broke and affable and just such a sweet pea, but I just know that give me that coin, give me that vault of coins I can swim in and then come out of the deep end monstrous.

So let's then place Winning The Lottery on our fear tier. Where do you want to put it?

Negative 20.

Ed's still hoping that we are willing this into reality by doing this episode.

Yeah, negative 20. I think we both need to. We need to win the lottery without even fucking playing. That's where Immaculate Lottery wins.

Yeah. I mean, I would put it, if we're gonna put it on the scale for real, I would put it at a one. I'm not particularly afraid of it. I guess in my darkest moments, I might put it at a two or a three because that much money does kind of, I do believe that as the c-c-c-communist of the podcast.

Not the beginning of this episode. Everyone thinks I'm fucking Ricky Sickle.

I do believe that significant amounts of money, I think, can eat away at your humanity because what it allows you to do with any real large amount of money, and we can debate what number that is, but I do believe that a large enough amount of money allows you to remove yourself from society in ways that aren't healthy for you or the people around you. You don't have to operate by the rules of society, and I don't know that anybody is a genetically born and bred good enough person to have their soul survive that. I think you ultimately do suffer the consequences if you don't handle that money responsibly and treat it with care and treat your role and responsibility as a person with that much wealth carefully.

So I have not seen one example where that person has done what you're describing. So I think anyone with too much money is monstrous. And then again, people are gonna be like, you're just saying that cause you don't have all that money. I'm like, yeah, maybe. But like Randy Newman said, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, I have nothing but contempt for anyone too successful because they must be doing something dishonest. And so, what are you gonna do?

I would agree. So that's why I guess I would put Winning The Lottery possibly at a two or a three because it does, you never know what things it would awaken in you if you didn't have to play by anyone else's rules.

And I should probably just add to my answer, I'd hook up my family and stuff too in case you're listening.

Of course, I think for both of us, one of the things that would be potentially life ruining is, I don't know, I think I said this at the beginning, but we've taken a couple breaks in this recording, so I don't remember. But yeah, once you have the ability to be infinitely generous or you feel like you can be infinitely generous, you're not good with money, you're not good at keeping track or budgeting, I could see that spending getting out of control. Because yeah, you and I I think would hook up our friends, hook up our family, hook up strangers, like-

Make a movie, fund someone something or other.

Yeah, and you're not keeping an eye on the bill because you're like, fuck the bill, there's no such thing as a bill anymore.

Exactly.

And then that's how you really get yourself in trouble because you stop thinking about those things.

And we would definitely be those guys because we've been broke.

Yeah.

And I get mad at anybody who's like, either the bullied who become bullies, or the broke people who get money and now they want to keep people broke. Like that's ridiculous. I think once you've walked in someone's shoes, you're a little bit more susceptible to be like, oh, help out here, help out there, help out there.

Yeah.

Which is why I think it's so weird that everyone looks up in this country to the super wealthy, and it's like, these people don't give a shit about you.

No.

At all. Because of everything Chris just said. They've become insular because they've had no reason to have to commune in any way.

Well, it's why artists who get extremely wealthy, I think their art tends to suffer. It's not universal. I'm sure there's exceptions that prove the rule. But whether you're a stand up comic or you're a screenwriter or a director, once you stop living the life of a regular person and thinking about things that happen to regular people who make up most of your audience...

I mean, to bring up that guy earlier without giving anything away, but Friends, the television show Friends, there's a famous story. There's a scene where they go to the ATM in the show. And there was a discussion in the writer's room. This is very different from the writer's rooms that I've worked in. This is back when you made Insane Money in Hollywood. And they were landing on like, I don't know, it should probably be like when they go to the ATM, if they show the numbers, it should probably be like 200,000, right? They would have 200 grand. How much the character would have on the show when they go to the ATM. And the writer's assistant was like, what? No, what? Like, do you guys actually think that regular people just have like two, $300, $400,000 in their bank account? And they were just so out of touch. All the writers were making so much money. The actors were making a million dollars an episode. They just had no idea what that number should be. Because in their minds, it's like, well, we're really low balling what's in our accounts. So it's like, dude, she works at the fucking Central Park coffee shop. There's not going to have $600,000 in her bank account.

Yeah, she's not going to have a savings account. She's going to be living paycheck to paycheck.

None of these people should be in these apartments.

Hey, yeah, for those apartments, Jesus Christ.

Yeah, so that's just a good example of how quickly people can fall out of touch with shit after getting a lot of money. So my answer I gave for how I'd be shitty after winning the lottery was partially based on this coworker I had and some family friends who have just fucking buko dollars, who I saw that money lets them become the main character in their fucking story all the time. They completely forget, kind of like what you were saying earlier, they just forget the everyday needs and wants of regular-ass people. And then they're just like, you're all in my story now.

Yeah. I'm first in line. They get to write the book when they're sitting on the cash.

Exactly. So I worked in a room with someone who was very fucking like that, older person, who made a ton of money back when you made a ton of money on sitcoms, and some family friends I've seen over the years where it's just a very different conversation with those folks. Everything I was saying earlier about all the things I would do, it comes from those people. The like, I would never fly, first class isn't good enough. I'm not flying private, I'm not flying. If I'm not doing this, it's not whatever. So that really informed my answer with how I would become shittier. But that said, great episode. Let's try and win some money soon.

Hell yeah, we did it. Let's get some scratchers to celebrate.

Yeah, man, I mean, I wish it was 20 more stories. These were a lot of fun.

Well, we can revisit. I mean, there are more stories. Like I said, a lot of them kind of follow pretty similar beats. But I'm sure there's others out there that are fascinating. And hey, if you're listening to this show and you have a family member who's won the lottery, write in, write to our email, scaredallthetimepodcast.gmail.com. Let us know if they handled it well or if they handled it poorly. And if you guys have some good stories, we'll read some on the show.

We'll have you on, fuck it.

Yeah, we'll have you on if it's really good. Let us know. And if, by the way, if you've won the lottery, sign up for premium.

Frickin use your money poorly our way.

Yeah, yeah. But that's it for this week, guys. We've got one week left of this season.

It's a doozy.

It's a doozy. It's gonna be great. But until then, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm still poor.

And this has been Scared All The Time. We'll see you next time.

Good evening. Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is BLEEP BLEEP.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go sign up for a Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

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Tonight, we are in this together. Together. Together.

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