Stuff You Should Know - How Lotteries Work

Episode Date: March 17, 2010

In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the history, practices and controversies of lotteries. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant. Stuff You Should Know. What do you think?

Good. Was it? Yeah, it sounded like a current affair or one of those tablet shows. Hard copy. Remember that? Yeah. Are they still around? I think some of them are.

Thankfully, I don't watch television at 4.30 p.m. No. You have a job. I wouldn't know. Yeah. Here in Georgia, we had this thing called the Hope Grant. I think we still do. I think so.

We're like, if you keep a B plus average or more in high school, if you graduate with a B plus average and you can maintain it through college, you get a free ride to a state school and it's funded by the lottery. Yeah, that came along after I was there. It started actually when I went to college. I think it was the first year. There have been tons and tons of studies done on who's going to college. It's generally white upper middle class kids who are benefiting from the Hope Scholarship.

Then it's poor minorities who are playing the Lotto and in effect putting white kids through college whose parents could otherwise pay for it. Yeah. A lot of people have called it attacks on the poor and the anti-Robin Hood take from the poor and give to the rich. Should we talk about some stats? Sure. Should we get that out of the way?

Yeah. I've got a few for you, Josh. There is one study in California where they have shown that the racial and household income lines match up with how California is divided. Oh yeah. Sure. Has that been disputed at all? Yeah.

There are a lot of books. Oh really? They'll ask questions like, have you played the lottery in the last month? But they don't say, have you bought 15 scratch off tickets per day from the last month? Yeah. That's a good point. So they don't really dive in there. I was reading a story I think from CBS News, Texas in 2007.

They found that blacks and Hispanics play the lottery twice as much as whites do, regardless of class. Yes, and scratch off tickets are apparently the crack cocaine of lottery in Texas is the first state to offer a $50 scratch off ticket. Holy cow. You pay 50 bucks to buy this thing. Have you ever gone on like a little scratch off bender? No.

I have before and when you get in the grips of it, you might as well be huffing ether. There is no way out. Well, it's Massachusetts, one third of the calls to the gambling addiction hotline are from lottery players. Really? Yeah. I don't play it. I'm surprised it's just a third actually.

Yeah. It's like alcoholism and beer. You can buy beer, you can buy liquor, and in a lot of states, you have to buy it from a state store. This is the same thing. These are state run vice operations basically. Yeah, pretty much. And people have a real problem with them, but the state is just making so much cash

off of these things that they aren't really doing a whole lot about it. Yeah, and here's the other thing before we get on with just what the lottery is. We should talk about a little more malfeasance. Apparently, not very much money at all is going to K through 12 education. Oh yeah? Most lotteries go toward education. Right. That's how they sell them.

Yeah. It's all going to college. They said that less than 1% in half of the states that play the lottery go to K to 12. Really? And the other hinky thing is they sell it to you as a benefit for education, like all over the marketing, but the legislation now in many states are starting to kind of use it for whatever they want according to their budget. Like in Missouri when it started, I think it was like 52% was supposed to go toward education,

and now it's like 30%, and they use it for budget shortfalls and whatever they need. Wow. They'll just rewrite the law. How grim. I know. Especially when you consider all the people who are just blowing cash on scratch off tickets or Lotto tickets and have like real gambling problems. Yeah.

Huh. So that's the controversy. And actually this problem goes back pretty far, right, to the 16th century, I believe? Yeah. Florence? Firenze? Oh, was it Italy? Yeah.

That's where the Lotto comes from. And I think the term Lotto is based on lots, like drawing lots, game of chance, luck. Yes. Right. And so the first Lotto that anybody is aware of where there was a cash prize given out was the Lotto di Firenze. You want to say it? Lotto di Firenze.

Nice. Thank you. And that was, again, in the 16th century in Italy. And in the U.S., we've always had something of a little bit of a fever for the Lotto, haven't we? Yeah. Apparently the colony of Virginia was founded by raised money from lotteries, and there were 200 lotteries permitted between 1744 and the Revolutionary War that funded roads,

libraries, colleges, bridges, churches. Yeah. A lot of them were for civic projects, right? Yeah. Yeah. And Princeton and Columbia universities were built on Lotto money. Yeah. Did you know that?

I did. In Latin, I can't remember what it is in Latin, but the crest for Princeton translates to daddy needs a new pair of shoes, and there's some dice on this shield. Cool. I know if you have 15 grand, you can go to eBay and buy a lottery ticket with George Washington's signature on it. Sweet. Pretty cool, huh?

Yeah. So I had no idea that lotteries were this entrenched in the founding of our country. All right. Well, they kind of fell out of favor. I imagine probably in part because of the temperance movement in the 19th century. Temperance. And then in the 20th century, about the mid-20th century, Lotto fever could not be suppressed. Right.

The inoculations ran out, and everybody was like, give me some tickets. Yeah. And New Hampshire led the way in 1964 with its first state-run lottery of the 20th century. I mean, I don't play the lottery myself at all, but I definitely see the irresistible lure of a dollar winning you millions of dollars. I don't know, man. Let's just get this out of the way. Would you want to win the lottery, honestly?

And if so, what's the minimum amount you would have to win to not just blow it? I'm going to say no. I wouldn't want to, either. Because stress and anxiety and complications, I want to make my life keep it as simple as possible, and that would just complicate everything. Oh, it definitely would. And all kinds of jerks come out of the woodwork. Yeah.

And I think you're kind of like, I don't have an uncle from Venezuela. Right. Or do I? Right. Exactly. Well, I guess it's possible. This guy wouldn't be saying he was my uncle, so I could hear some money. Yeah.

I should invest in his coffee bean field. Right. Exactly. Or get some Nigerian general out of trouble via email. So Chuck, I would not necessarily want to win the Lotto, either, unless it was such a vast amount that I couldn't possibly run through it. And I'd probably go off and travel or do whatever. Yeah.

I'm also one of those jerk-offs who thinks that, like, working for your money is kind of the thing to do. Chuck works hard for his money. You know, I would feel like I think I'd be very unfulfilled if someone just gave me a pile of cash. Right. Yeah. And that's an excellent point, too, because if you think about it, let's say you did win

a million dollars. Let's say you won 10 million dollars, and we'll get into how that trickles down to almost nothing by the time it gets into your pocket. Right. But let's say you won 10 million dollars. And after a couple of years, you've blown through it, right? Yeah. You've done nothing to earn that money.

Right. So therefore, you could never get it back. It was just blind luck. Yeah. If you make 10 million dollars writing a book or writing a movie or in business or in real estate, you can make that back again, actually, if you blow it all. Right. Because you've done something for it.

You've used your own wits and skill, but with Lotto, no. It's just a trip to Easy Street that turns out to be hell. Well, that's why it appeals to so many people, except for the hell part. Yeah. You know? And that's why people see it as a tax on the poor, because it's like, even the scratch off tickets, you know, just a chance to win like a couple of hundred bucks. Right.

It's kind of sad. At the same time, though, you have to add a little perspective to it. You and I don't really play Lotto. Like I said, I've done some scratch off benders here and there, but nothing more than like five or 10 bucks, right? I've gotten the occasional powerball, occasional powerball, but I'll admit that. But rarely. But consider this.

You and I are upper middle class, white guys, aged 18 to 49. Pretty much the entire country is based on whatever we want. All of the focus groups, all the studies, all of the pharmaceutical tests, they're based on us. Right. Right? Like we have it so ridiculously easy that I think it's entirely possible that we're blinded to why people play the lottery.

Sure. If you don't have a leg up, if there's nothing you can do, if you're being kept down economically, socially, or whatever, there is this promise of, I could really use a couple extra million bucks and I don't care if some jackass does come out of the woodwork and says he's my uncle. Like I think it's easy to criticize people who play the lottery as stupid. Right. Right.

But at the same time, I think that reveals a misunderstanding of where somebody's coming from. Of course, there are just some jackasses who play the lottery because they're bored or people who do have a gambling problem. Right. But I think that there is some promise of a lottery and I think that the state preys upon that through their lotteries. Yeah.

I mean, it's easy for us to sit here and say, well, if you'd spend $2,500 a year on scratch off tickets, if you had invested that in a Roth IRA, then you could potentially have a retirement account and it's just shut up. Yeah. I've been poor man and I can tell you the poor mentality is tough to break out of. Yes. I was, I was poor at one point myself. Yeah.

It sucks. And I was a lottery scratch off fiend. Yeah. Not true. Yeah. 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com.

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No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page and enter our code STUFF. Hey, everybody. It's a new year and it's a good time to take a look at your website and if you take a look and you decide it looks kind of black, then it's time to head on over to Squarespace to create a new one. That's right, especially if you have, oh, I don't know, some kind of audience like we

do. Squarespace member areas connect with your audience and generate revenue through gated members only content. You can manage your members, send email communications and leverage audience insights all on one easy to use platform. Yeah. And if you have a big social media presence, you can display posts from your social profiles on your website.

You can automatically push website content to your favorite social media channels. It's like the circle of life. So head on over to Squarespace.com slash SYSK for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So all right, dude, we really, usually our tirades come toward the end for some reason we front loaded this one with it. Let's talk about how lotteries work.

Yes, Josh, if you are playing a game with 50 balls, let's say 50 ping pong balls and each one of us has the number, your odds of winning is about 16 million to one. And if they just add one ball to that, so 51 balls, 51 balls, it shoots up to about 76 million to one. Right. And the real reason I don't play, that is a fantastic calculation you just did there. But and I don't mean to criticize you a surprisingly simple one actually, right? Yes.

So if you have six numbers that you have to pick out of 50 balls, your initial chance is 50 to six, or it's like, I think at 8.3 to one, right? Right. So if you go on down the line after one ball is picked, you have a 49 to five chance and so on and so on. So if you take each of these and multiply them, that's where you get that 16 million to one chance. Yeah.

Because they don't play lotteries with one ball. If they did, then what would that be a one to one chance, especially if it was just one number and they told you ahead of time, the winning number is going to be six. I'd play that lottery. So yeah, you've also got power balls, right? Which is our multi-state lotteries where everybody joins together. And the most common one is you have to pick five numbers from a set of 50 balls. So use that calculation, I just said.

But then you also have to pick one power ball number out of 36, so now you multiply that original calculation by 36 and you're up to 76.275 million to one chance. Yeah. And like I said, that's why I don't play the lottery for real. I would never, ever, ever win it, so I'd rather spend that dollar on whatever. Cigarettes. Vodka. Beef jerky.

Anything. Sure. Yeah. Chuck. Josh. Have you ever noticed that when you say win 10 million dollars, what you actually end up with is like 2.5 million? Doesn't it just tick you off?

Yeah. Well, it depends. You can choose either a lump sum payment or pay me out over the next, whatever, 25 years, I think it usually is. Yeah. It looks like from this article, the best one to go with, if you're patient, is the series of annual payments or annuity. I disagree.

Okay. Explain. Well, I mean, I would think you could make, you get about a 5% interest return that way. And I think if you have half a brain, you can get a better return than that by investing that money. And also, I think if you die, doesn't that, it's not like they start paying your next of kin or anything, right? No, they do.

They, everywhere? Oh yeah. A lot of windfall becomes part of your estate. Oh, it does? Uh-huh. Okay. And actually, since you bring that up, there's a little bit of advice. If you ever do win a major lottery or any lotto, first thing you want to do is sign

the ticket because it's a bearer instrument and whoever has it, who turns it in, is the winner. So you want to sign it. So the next thing you want to do is go talk to a lawyer. Before you go in to turn in your ticket, go get a lawyer. Yeah. You don't want to be standing on the stage with the big check without having like an accountant and a lawyer by your side.

Right. And the lawyer is going to set up a trust and a state, all sorts of other stuff. And then you go in and you claim your winnings. And the lawyer is going to take a chunk. The lawyer is going to take a chunk, but not as much as Uncle Sam, huh? Yeah. Well, that's just the case with everything. And of course, Uncle Sam is going to take a ton, about 28% in federal taxes.

Unless you win millions of dollars and it's going to shoot up to 39%, which is the highest tax bracket. Yep. And then add state and locals and you'll get about half of your money. And then if you choose a lump sum, you get less anyway. So like you said, a $10 million lump sum payment after taxes would be about two and a half mil. Right.

But you're done. That's the way I would want to do it. You're done with the annuitized payments, right? You're basically getting, you start, I think at what, 1%? Yeah. And it goes up a little bit each year. It goes up a tenth of a percent each year. So you start off, if you win 10 million bucks, you start off with 250K.

And then the last payment turns out to be 500K. And you get this check every year. And the way that this is paid for, the lottery's not just like, oh, we're sitting on this pile of cash. No, they couldn't do that. And what they do actually is they deal with bond agents, bond brokers, and they buy zero coupon bonds, right? So like you have a set price that you're paying for them that day.

And in one year or 10 years or whatever, this thing's going to be worth a specified amount of money. Right. So in 10 years, if you bought a $260 bond, I'm sorry, 25 years, that would be about $1,000. Right. That's how that works. And what the Lotto does is they contact about usually seven bond dealers to find out who

has the best rates. And they purchase a package of 25 bonds to cover your payout, right? And then once the bond matures, they get the money, they transfer it to you and you get a check. Done. Done. Pretty interesting. So costing them this package of bonds, about half of the jackpot, which is about what you

get when you get a lump sum. So it doesn't really matter to them either way. Yeah. I think they said about 80% of the people choose the lump sum. I can, I'm not surprised by that at all. Yeah. And Georgia actually, I know there's other states too, has one of those win for life deals where there is no lump sum, you get like $50,000 a year for 30 years or something

like that. And that's the prize. There's no like wiggle room and how you accept it. Huh. Yeah. Other states give you a choice. Win for life is a specific game. Oh, it is.

Okay. Yeah. So like if you play win for life, that's your prize. Well, some states don't give you a choice. They're like, we give out lump sum or we give out a new attire or you can choose, but when you choose, you have to choose when you buy the lotto ticket. Yeah. I think New York, you got to choose when you buy it, but most other states is like once

you've won it, they let you choose. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. Um, Chuck, did you know there's two types of lotto machines? I do now. I did. I did before.

Yeah. I think all I've ever seen is the air mix machine. Same here. I think that's what they use on channel two action news. I know that dude, by the way. Do you? What's his name? John Crow.

Yeah. He's an old friend of mine from TV production. Wow. And he was picked as the lottery lottery guy. Wow. I think it looks really good in a dress. Uh, you mean dressed up? Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. He's a nice guy. Yeah. And he's a nice guy using air mix machine. Right. And he's the one where you see the ping pong balls floating around in the air. It's like magic.

Yeah. And then the, they open the little door and one at a time, the little ping pong ball slides up the shoot, always visible. That's key. You can never have a ping pong ball go through a tube that you can't see through. That's bad news. It is. It doesn't inspire confidence.

And you'll also notice that all lotto drawings are live. Yeah. True. Uh, which is kind of a big thing too. Very important. I mean, you suspect they're live. I guess if you don't believe that the moon landing was real, you probably aren't buying that the lotto drawings are live.

Yeah. We should mention a couple of other security measures. Um, in Oregon, it's actually overseen by the state police and the detective attends each drawing. Right. I thought that was pretty cool. Balls are usually weighed ahead of time. Why?

Before and after. Why? Are we going to talk about Pennsylvania? Let's do it. All right. The triple six fix is what it's called. John Travolta. In 1980.

John Travolta. Was it a movie? I can't remember. I think it was. Well, what's he got to do with it then? He was in a movie about it. Oh, okay. But I think it was loosely based on that.

I don't think it was like a depiction of that. Yeah. Famously in 1980, the Pennsylvania lottery was rigged by a masterminded, not well because he got caught by a guy named Nick Perry. He was the John Crow of Pennsylvania at the time. He was the, the announcer and he got together with an art director and said, Hey, dude, can you figure out a way to wait these balls except for three of them or I'm sorry, two of them, four and six.

Right. And that way we know that only combinations of four or six will come up and I think there's eight combinations and a triple digit drawing and they did it. But they, you know, they got greedy and got caught. Was the art director named Phoebe Buffet? No. Okay. Was she in the Travolta movie?

Yeah. His name was Joseph Buck and he was pinched along with Perry. And then some other people they had in on the scan that Heistlinga. No. They, basically they ended up, the cops were alerted to the fact that there was a very skewed amount of numbers bought for six and four. And when it came up 666 and they had all these people clamoring for winnings, we should look

into this. I think that just the fact that it came up 666 alone to raise a few eyebrows, right? It's the number of the beast, Josh 2023 is already well underway everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right. Because with stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage and shipping labels right there from your home or office or home office.

And you know, it's ready to go in minutes. You can get back to running your business sooner than later. Yep. Stamps.com is like the post office elevated. They have rates you literally can't find anywhere else, which comes in handy because postage rates just increased again, like up to 84% off of USPS and UPS plus stamps.com automatically tells you your cheapest and fastest shipping options. See you stamps.com to print postage wherever you do business.

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And so he, you know, they were, they were tried and convicted and Perry, I think some of the other guys sold them out and he went to jail just for a couple of years, then the halfway house and then he was on probation. So yeah, not a very big deal for him. I guess not. Did he get to keep the money? No, no, they got all that back. Oh, okay.

So yeah, they were using an air mix machine. And since then, air mix machines are still used, obviously they use them. Your buddy uses it on the news. But it's not his machine. Oh, it isn't? No. Okay. He doesn't take it home and polish it at night before bed.

No, but we could get a scam together with them. We should try it. Oh, did I just blow it? Yeah. Anyway, the other type of lotto machine that's generally used that's viewed as more secure, largely because of that 1980 scam is the gravity pick lotto machine. Right? Yeah.

How's that thing work? Well, it uses like kind of rubbery balls that are heavy, right? With two paddles that spin in opposite directions that mix the balls. Right? There's no air involved. There's no ping pong balls. There's no waiting the balls. And other than that, it's virtually the same thing as an air pick ball.

This is an optical sensor, so it's high tech. And then, bam, six numbers, one after the other. And if you pick them, you won. I imagine, like I said, I don't play, I don't even want to win, but I imagine that's a very surreal moment when you look down at your ticket because there's all those numbers. It would just... I bet it's really difficult for your brain to really see that and accept that that's what it's seeing.

We used to, when I worked in New Jersey at the restaurant, we used to pull... That's really the only time I ever played that much. We'd pool our money, the waiters would, and we'd buy like a hundred tickets, you know, you'd throw in $5 and I'll all agree to split it and buy the restaurant and burn it down if we want. Nice. That kind of thing. Yeah, was that in Mexicali?

No, no, no, this is in New Jersey. Oh, okay. At the store. Nice. Did it? Yeah, that's it. Well, if you want to read about Lotto's, and we also have an article called How to Play the Lottery, Tips and Guidelines, it's pretty in depth, isn't it?

I didn't read that one. Did you read it? Oh, it is in depth, dude. Yeah. What kind of tips could there be? Well, there's like wheeling, tracking, like basically paying attention to numbers, how different people do them. Pooling is one thing.

How many members there should be in a pool, if it's a private pool, no more than 15. If it's a large, like, commercial pool, no more than 100, make sure that the people who are organizing it are reputable, et cetera, et cetera. I bet that could get messy. Look at these spreadsheets. Holy cow. Yeah. If you are interested in playing the Lotto, and you want some tips and tricks, we won't

judge you. No. You can type in lotteries on howstuffworks.com in the handy search bar, and there you will also find, in my experience, the first time I've ever seen the phrase, hotter than a $2 pistol used in an article on the site, you'll find that by typing lottery in the handy search bar, howstuffworks.com, which brings us, of course, to listener mail. Yes, indeed, Herr Clark. This is, I'm just going to call this, I can't believe this happened, email.

This is from Ben and Megan, and they said this, my wife and I married in Las Vegas recently in one of those amazing Las Vegas chapels. It wasn't a tequila-inspired spur-of-the-moment sort of thing. We planned it for several months, and you guys actually played a part in our evening. Oh, yeah. You remember this one? Yeah. Can't believe this.

To explain, before we left, I had crafted a perfect wedding night playlist on my iPod. I've also added several of your podcasts to listen to on the flight, because he's a big tall guy, and he hates to fly, so apparently we helped that. After the ceremony? What? What does him being tall have to do with hating to fly? Well, he says he gets real uncomfortable in the seat, and our podcast doesn't forget his debt.

Oh, gotcha. So he's not afraid of flying because he's taller than anything else? No. I got him just grand. So after the ceremony and dinner, we retreated to our luxe suite in the Trump Hotel, ordered a bottle of champagne, queued up the playlist on my iPod, and plugged into the room stereo and slipped into the in-room jacuzzi. First up, Al Green, then Solomon Burke, Cat Power, Elvis Costello, and then Josh and Chuck

introducing the stuff you should know podcast. It's not any worse than Cat Power. Yeah, that's true. I hadn't realized the shuffle feature would shuffle everything on the iPod, not only the songs, just in case you were wondering, we actually let it play, and that's the story of how you two took part in our wedding night. I believe that makes us, your official stuff you should know, podcast newlyweds, P.S., was it good for you?

That's awesome. That's from Ben and Megan. The only way that story could be better is if they conceived during one of our podcasts. Right. Yeah. And it was the show on, like, lobotomies. Yeah. In Utah, we'd have legal claim on that baby.

Oh, really? Yeah. If you have an awesome wedding night story, no, actually, you guys just keep that to yourself. Agreed. Yeah. If you have a story about winning the lottery and how it either uplifted your life, ruined your life, or made you cognizant of the phrase hotter than a $2 pistol, put it in an email and send it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more howstuffworks? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? You're ready to travel in 2023, and since 1981, Gate 1 travel has been providing more of the world for less.

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