The Chaser Report - How to Always Win the Lottery | JUST THE GIST

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Dom has been cheating on us by appearing on other podcasts, so we're uploading it onto our feed. Join Dom and Jacob Stanley as they unpack how to always win the lottery on an episode of Just The Gist. Listen to more episodes of Just The Gist here! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, it's Dom Knight here. Welcome to The Chaser Report. This is a bit different today's episode. You see, earlier this year, I found myself seeing other podcasts, specifically one other podcast called Just the Gist. I don't know whether you've heard it before, but it normally features the very funny,

Rosie Waterland and Jacob Stanley. essentially Jacob researches a fascinating true story and Rosie asks questions about it. Now Rosie's been away a bit lately. So I was honored to be invited to be the honorary Rosie for one episode of Just the Gist. And I've got to say, the story that Jacob Stanley researched was so interesting that I barely even made ridiculous interjections in it. It's a tale of a couple and really their whole family who figure out how to hack a lottery. They managed to work out somehow mathematically how you could make sure that you won far more than you lost

in a particular lottery. How did they do it? Well, there's maths involved. I'm terrible at maths and even I was able to understand it somewhat. So sit back and relax and enjoy this episode of the Just the Gist podcast with me and Jacob Stanley. And if you enjoy it and you will, do subscribe to Just the Gist. All right.

Are you ready? Always. All right. Lindsay. Hello, Jacob. We're back again. How are you this week? I am terrific.

Oh, love the enthusiasm. Why terrific? Oh, we've got a really exciting recording coming up this afternoon, recording last week, episode last week was really good, just in high spirits. Good time to be a just now. Just floating through your days. Love to hear it.

Hey, guess who's launching a new podcast? Who? It's someone who's been a subject of one of our favourite episodes on Just the Gist, recently released from prison to go into house arrest. Is it Anna Delvey? It is Annadelvie. Wow, they'll let anyone have a podcast. I can't wait to see what she calls it.

It'll be something lame like delving deeper with Anna Delvey. It's something crap like that. I just want her to call it, why are you poor? One of her iconic catchphrases, something along those lines. But yeah, she's out and about ish. She's in a Manhattan apartment. Have you seen the photos? No.

Oh, so she's not allowed on social media. This is one of the conditions of her bail or whatever house arrest. Yes, it is. And so because she can't have her own Instagram, TikTok, whatever accounts running, instead she organized a full photo shoot in her apartment and on the roof of her building because she's not allowed to leave that building. She's got an ankle monitor. So, yeah, she's sort of invited the media there

and then all the paparazzi were downstairs taking photos of the photographers who were taking photos of Anna. So, yeah, she's really milking her time in the spotlight and, yeah, she's claimed that she's going to go down the Kim Kardashian route. Do you know if Anna's podcast is, if she's doing it independently or is she part of, is it going to be like a Spotify original or something?

Yet to be announced. Look, I wouldn't be surprised if there ends up being a bidding war for it because so many people are going to be curious to see how much of a train wreck that ends up being because it's pretty much guaranteed it's going to be disastrous. Yeah, I feel like it's probably one of those things where a lot of people will tune in for the first episode and then probably not to the any subsequent ones.

Yeah, agreed. I think she's become really, really cringy in the last year or so. But yeah, there you go. Oh, I have a reco. We haven't had a reco for ages. Have you heard of a TV? series on Disney Plus called Reboot. Reboot, no. I stumbled across it and I wanted to make sure that I put the word out to everyone

because I think it's one of the best TV shows I've seen this year. It is about a TV writer who decides that she wants to reboot a really cheesy, lame sitcom from the 90s that her own father was the creator of. And so in doing this reboot, it means that she's got a sort of work with her father um so the premise you know fairly basic it's really just about the fantastic writing and the performances and it's got rachel bloom from crazy ex-girlfriend and judy greer from arrested development she was kitty um one of my favorite characters of all time unfortunately i have seen neither of those shows i don't know the reference what do you watch youtube no i don't really watch any shows at all. I have cancelled my subscription to Stan and Netflix. I don't have Disney

Plus or Apple TV or anything. Basically just watch YouTube. This is why you've got so much time to read a new book every single week. Speaking of, have you read anything good lately? I am reading this really, really, speaking of cheesy book at the moment called Double Book. It's just like a rom-com of this young British woman who's engaged, or soon to be engaged, at least where I'm up to this man. And then she goes to her best friends are lesbian and she goes to this lesbian night

and makes eyes with one of the artists in the band that she's gone to see, and now she's having like this moment. So just like fun, silly, fluffy stuff. But so far so good. Uh-huh. Okay, terrific. Do you want to pop the link to that in the show notes?

Oh, if anyone... Yeah, if anyone, it needs... It's a bit like a pellet cleanser book. So if you've read like a lot of kind of nonfiction or anything, it's a bit hard to get through, it's an easy one to settle back into. Good one. We all need that a bit from time to time.

And reboot. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Yes. Do yourself a favour. Check it out. And just before we get into preparing for this week's episode, I just wanted to say once again to all of you who have been sending such lovely support.

messages to me, to Rosie, to Lindsay, thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you again to all of you for sticking with us as we sort of muddle our way through with all these fantastic guests that we've had. Thank you for being so supportive of them as well. In particular, I wanted to let you know, Emma Malick, who is the first ever guest who put her hand up and said that she would like to tell a story. Very brave. Yes. She did a fantastic job and she was really, really grateful for all of the encouragement and enthusiasm that you guys showed to her. So thank you all so much for that. Now, we should probably get into this week's story,

which is about some professional lottery players. They spotted a loophole in the lotto, and they decided to go ahead and exploit it to the tune of millions of dollars. So you've had a week to reflect on the story, Lindsay. What do you think about it? What do I think? I really, really loved this story. thinking about it more over the past week,

I can see elements of myself in the main character. I think I mentioned this in the actual story itself, but there are parts of the main character that do give off a bit of like a Lindsay Green lining up to see the Queen's body kind of energy just because I really love mindless, boring, repetitive tasks, which this story revolves around. and I have also been thinking about over the past week

like who am I to yuck someone's yum just because someone else's hobbies are not the kind of things that I would probably choose to spend my time doing. It's kind of my business how people choose to spend their time. What a wise reflection. Yeah. Yeah, you did express that once we stopped recording last week

because throughout the recording we were all sort of laughing at the main character and what he chose to do. do as a hobby and then pretty much as soon as we stopped recording you were like well actually come to think of it I love a mindless repetitive task so maybe that is the sort of thing I'd get into I also love not that they're saving money they're making money but I do love this like specific niche on YouTube of like early 2000 saving money kind of content like extreme cheap skates and that's the sort of stuff you're watching and an extreme couponing which I think the main character in this story

gives me that kind of energy as well. For sure, yes. All right, well, let's go ahead and jump into the story. Special thanks, of course, to our wonderful guest, Mr. Dominic Knight. Enjoy everybody. Bye-bye. Hello, and welcome back to Just the Gist, a weekly-ish podcast in which ordinarily Rosie Waterland

and I, Jacob Stanley, give you just the gist of what you need to know about a story. We think you'll find interesting enough to discuss at a dinner party As you all know, Rosie is taking a bit of time out to look after her health. And so we've got a selection of extra special guest hosts who've been coming on board. And this week we have Mr Dominic Knight. Dom, welcome to Just the Gist. Hello, I'm so glad to be here. I'm massive Rosie Woodland fan as we all are.

So I apologise in advance for not having quite, you know, Rosie's unique combination of amazing stories and penetrating women. But I'll do my best to be Rosie as much as I can. I'm sure you'll be iconic. But we'd love to get to know a little bit more about you, Dom Knight. So could you maybe give us just the gist of who you are and what you do? Well, back in the year 1999, last millennium, I was at uni and a few friends of mine and I made a very stupid decision,

as it was then, and it seems even more stupid in hindsight, we thought it would be a good idea to start a newspaper. And so one of my friends Charles Firth had finished uni and he edited the student newspaper on Esau, we decided to start a thing called The Chaser. And the concept was, you get all your weeks media consumption and then you have a chaser at the end of the week. And we had an even stupider idea than starting a newspaper.

The concept was that it was going to come out on Sunday. Soon learnt that was impossible because it's very expensive. So I had no idea. But we managed to, I guess, through probably credit card fraud, borrowing money from parents and anyone we could find, really. We started this company, me, Craig Rucastle, Julian Morrow and Charles became the editors of the Chaser. We put out this newspaper and somehow it muddled on for five years and we did, I think about 90 odd editions of the thing. But the thing was because we put this thing out semi-regular and it was, we didn't know what the rules were.

We were very rude and fairly outrageous, not really by intention just because we had dark sense of humour. people in the industry discovered us quite early on in the piece and so people like the amazing John Clark somehow John Singleton found it and the ad guy yeah and he gave us all this money which we used to buy a printer

and then Andrew Denton came across it and he was at the time actually working for this fine organisation he was the breakfast host on Triple M in Sydney and he was getting a bit over it he'd done it for a long time, sick of the hours or not that kind of stuff and he saw this newspaper as well, these guys keep writing jokes that I like.

And so even though so many of our jokes were awful in hindsight and poorly written and poorly judged, he went, well, look, there's something here. These people are producing content semi-regular and I kind of like at least some of it. So we met up with him and he said the most magical words you could ever hear at this lunch we had with him in Glebe in Sydney. He said, I want to make a TV show with you.

And we just could not believe that. And so kind of going, Okay, Mr. Denson, sir. Somehow, we got a TV show up on the ABC called The Election Chaser in 2001, and they let us loose on the federal election in that year, and we did stunts, some of which worked, some which didn't, and that's what the chaser was.

So probably no one listening will remember it. But for a while there, we had a lot of fun doing some quite cheeky TV. We got into trouble, some of it trivial, some of it quite serious. And most of us are still bouncing around the comedy industry today, We do a podcast called The Chaser Report that comes out daily-ish and various other projects here and there. So somehow in our mid to late 40s in some cases, we're still bumming around the comedy industry, trying to get laughs from the general public, but also particularly from our

colleagues, really, because the ultimate goal in the Chaser is to make someone else in the Chaser laugh, where an annoying, tough audience to work with. And yeah, so that's why we're still doing it. and I still get into little rooms and make podcasts with some of my oldest friends slash enemies. Tough gig. What can people expect from the Chaser report? Well, it started out as a daily news satire podcast,

making fun of whatever the news was in that given day. But in the 2022 incarnation of it, it's still daily, but it's not always topical. Sometimes we'll go on a rant about Optus. Sometimes our good friend Sammy Shah will just talk about some bizarre aspect of his life experience or some of our kind of younger friends like Gabby Bowles or Floyd Alexander Hunt will share stories of doing comedy.

Gabby's from Bathurst, which is always good for a laugh. So it's just a conversation really. And it's a bit of a nostalgic thing, I guess, but we still try and be funny about whatever's in the news in a particular way, kind of here and there at some point. So yeah. Because you've mentioned stunts a couple of times, we'll jump straight to asking you,

what would you say is maybe the most memorable stunt? you pulled with the chasing team. I mean, I didn't pull many of them. I did a lot of filming, particularly in the early days when we couldn't afford extra camera operators. I did a lot of holding up a cheap digicam high up in the air. But for me personally,

the most Maren Ball stunt that I was involved with myself, because I didn't do many of them, we decided to take advantage of my relative obscurity on election night. And I snuck onto the stage at John Howard's victory party. I think it was 2004. So the last election, he actually won before Kevin Rudd defeated him. And at the time, George W. Bush had just been re-elected,

and all of his supporters were chanting, four more years, four more years. And the big debate over John Howard was, is he going to step down and hand over to Petty Costello? And everyone thought he'd do it in about a year. So I got all of his supporters to go, one more year. And they were very, very pissed. So they didn't think about the notion that I was sort of saying, hey, John Howard's about to step down.

And then, yeah, so it was on the stage at the Wentworth Hotel. And about one minute into it, security realized that I wasn't supposed to be there. And it escorted me out, and the manager came and told me, you were no longer welcome in the hotel. I think I'm allowed to go back now. But, yes, I was told I would be trespassing if I returned. So that was great fun. Is there a video of that on YouTube somewhere? It went to air.

We put it on air. So it was really fun for election night. Okay, can we find the link for that? And then, so that was taking advantage of my obscurity. But, I mean, I guess the APEC stunt was the one that is most talked about, where we went and infiltrated APEC in a motorcade. What's APEC for those who don't know? APEC is, yes, APEC's a big political shindig that happens every couple of years

where leaders from the Asia Pacific get together in ridiculous shirts. That's basically the vibe. So there was one in Sydney in 2007, I think it was, yeah, I think it was 2007, where it was supposed to be John Howard's big swan song and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on security and turned Sydney into a fortress. But unfortunately, it was a fortress that proved to be penetrable by a fake motorcade

with ID that said, Chaser, this is not a real ID on it. And we just got waved through. Apparently the story behind that was that a real motorcade had been locked out. Someone had lost the padlock key. So they said, oh, just wave all motorcades through. So, yeah, that was a big hole in the security.

But you didn't see coming. You didn't think you were going to get in. Yeah, we didn't think we'd get in. And so the reason that the charges got dropped eventually was because I think it was Julian was who was walking on the outside being a security guard and went, whoa, we're not supposed to be here. Turn it around, turn it around. And the joke was meant to be that we'd get barred.

Chaz would jump out dressed as a son-in-Larden and he'd go, hey, I'm a world leader. I'm supposed to be an APEC. And that was the joke. Because usually Chase's stunts ended with we can't get. into the place, so we have a little joke. And it turned out that what we didn't realize was that right next to where the motorcade was, within 50 metres or so, George W. Bush was sleeping in his hotel room. And so when that happened, Secret Service snipers had Chaz's head in their sights.

Yep. And I said to him, weren't you worried about that sort of thing happening? He said, oh, no, I figured they can tell real assama from a fake one, which I think is quite brave. Oh. My other favourite factoid is that if I remember correctly, the security guard who waved them through held a seminar that morning for members of the AFP, the federal police,

on how to recognise the chaser. Stop. So that was quite fun. So my role in that, I wasn't there on the day, I didn't get arrested, thank goodness. But we did a follow-up because they weren't allowed to go near APEC, though I told you can't come near,

you'll be committing a crime. But I think it was Craig, Chris and I had not been told that. And so we said, okay, so they didn't recognise that motorcade. How pissy a motorcade will it take for them to turn us away? So we strapped cardboard cars to our bodies and walked down to the barriers and said, hi, we're a motorcade, let us in, and they turned us away. And that apparently was not an offence. So that was quite fun.

So, yeah, look, a lot of adventures over the years, a little bit of trouble. I spent a lot of time chasing after John Howard on his morning walk around the Kiribilli foreshore. Once dressed as a sheep, I don't remember why. I was dressed as a sheep, but I'm sure it had some very sharp strategic context at the time. They were fun days. We had a great time making that.

And yeah, it's bizarre we got away with it. These days you wouldn't, I don't think. All right, so let's get into two truths and a lie, something we've been doing to get to know our guests each episode. So you're going to tell us three statements, and Lindsay and I are going to try. try to pick which one is the false one. Okay, so the theory of my three truths, one of which is actually a lie.

First, I'm a classically trained trombonist who once considered trombone as a career before all this comedy stuff took off. That's number one. Number two, I'm not allowed to enter the United States without first going to the US consulate and confessing to my past run-ins with the law. I won't have me in the country. And the third one, I once filmed a chaser sketch in a full-on B&D gimp suit

and whips were involved. Which of those things do you reckon I'm made up? For the trombone, the US and the gimp suit. Uh-huh. Was the gimp suit on CNNN? Because I might, it rings a bell. I feel like that might be true. It doesn't necessarily mean it was you,

but I feel like I might have seen a gimp suit on CNNN at some point. Well, you never know who's inside a kimp suit. That's part of the fun of a kimp suit. Yeah, that's right. I'm actually wearing one now for the record as how I feel comfortable. Okay, so the US, they are pretty strict about who can and can't come in. And they've got a lot of different rules to do with different felonies.

But you weren't actually arrested or charged with anything to do with that eight more. Maybe. And then trauma. So you've definitely got, there were gimp suits, that's true. There were some people who got in trouble with the law. And then there's the trombone. What do we think? I'm going to say, okay, I'll say the trombone's a lie.

Okay. I'll go with the US immigration is a lie. Lindsay's got it. Yeah. Oh, my winning street comes to an end. And no, I, I wasn't, you're right. I was a museum, though I was never, you know, going to be. become a professional music. I play the double bass

and the bass guitar. I know this. It's a deep chase of cut. It's your favourite item in your home because it makes you look really soulful and musical. Yeah, very musical and soulful. So yes, the the gimp suit was me. It was in CNN. I'm very impressed that you do you still fit into it? Oh, I don't have it anymore, which is a shame. Which makes me think that somewhere in ABC wardrobe,

there is a gimp suit still to this day. The weird thing about working on comedy for a very long time is I have absolutely no idea why I was wearing it. The context is completely lost. But I have photos on my phone of me in the Gimp suit with Anna Skelon, who did one series of CNN with us whipping me. It was weird. It was a weird day at the office.

There were many weird days like that. We will be asking for those photos to post on our Instagram. Thank goodness this is an audio medium. And no, the thing that I'm, the reason I'm not allowed to go to the US is because there was an early chaser stunt that involved arrests before APEC. Back in the day, Vodafone, the telco, sponsored the rugby. And there were these two guys who decided

that they wanted to streak the wallabies. And they said to Vodafone, this was quite a notorious case back in the day. They said, if we streak with Vodafone logos on our bums, like painted on our asses, will you cover our legal costs? And that happened. They went ahead and did it.

And Vodafone got in huge trouble for interrupting their own game that they'd sponsored. It's a bizarre decision to say yes. So anyway, they had a court date, and Andrew Hanson and Julian Morrow streaked the foyer at the courtroom with Vodafone logos and the words not guilty written on their bottoms. And, yeah, they ran nude into the foyer of Burwood Local Court.

I was filming from across the road with my other colleague, and it was a complete success. We got the footage. It was all good. But being stupid, we had a step two to the stunt, which was that when the actual guys turned up, we wanted chaz alongside them naked, except for a barrister's wig,

pushing a trolley with like law books and stuff, as though he was their naked lawyer and saying, no, guys, the strategy is we're going to plead this and, you know, whatever. So he was hiding under a bush nearby. We were in the car waiting for them to arrive, looking at the footage of the stunt. So when the police came 40 minutes later, it was not hard to identify us as the people who'd filmed it.

So I got charged with aiding and abetting offensive behaviour. And the moment that the young police constable brought us into the police station, the serge, was like, well done, boys. And they had to charge us. He would have said, you know, this is a bit of silliness. But yeah, so we had a court date, and I pleaded guilty and got a section 10, which means no conviction recorded. So nothing on my record, thank goodness.

but whenever I go to the US I have to go to the consulate and say I got arrested making a TV show and when I said that at the border entering the US for the first time the guy got angrier and angry the passport control guy and I was really worried he's going to say you know get back on the plane

from LA back to Sydney you're not allowed in you know you're a felon he was like that was a TV show man you can't get arrested for filming a TV show free speech and I was like I love America USA all the way So, yeah, that never even made it to TV, that stunt, because part of the settlement was we agreed to not do the footage.

Just been it. Oh, shame. It's probably a funnier idea to talk about than to actually watch because no one wants to see Jules and Andrews's naked asses. And the best bit of the footage, which we didn't actually record, well, the best bit of the stunt which we didn't actually record, was that they were both in a toilet cubicle in Burwood Shopping Center with pink paint painting each other's bum.

things you do in the service of the chaser. Oh gosh, you've had a wild and varied career. We love it. We have. It was fun. All right. Well, are you ready to jump in and hear a little bit of a story that you might care to share at a dinner party at some point? All right.

So today I'm going to go ahead and serve you the story of a retired couple in America who spotted a floor in the design of a state-run lottery and over the course of nine years playing that lottery, they became some of the biggest winners in history without ever winning a single jackpot. This is just the gist of Gerald and Marjorie, Selby, aka Jerry and Marge.

Do you know anything about this story at all? I vaguely remember a movie in this space, but I don't know anything about it. I can't remember any of the details. My main question at this point is, is this able to be copied on any of the Australian lottery? So I'm getting my pen and paper ready. trying to work out if there's any flaws in our lotto?

The answer is no as far as I'm aware, but as you'll probably see, while I'm trying to explain what happened, maths and statistics are not my best friends. Do you think any of the information we're about to reveal could be used to hack the sunrise cash cow? Because, you know. If anyone can use this information to make that happen, please, yes, get in touch.

Lindsay, do you know anything about this one? Nothing. Nothing at all? No. Well, you're correct on the, yes, A movie came out recently, and I'll touch on that towards the end. It's, yeah, a movie that came out just earlier this year called Jerry and Marge go large, mostly based on fact, but with a lot of, you know, dramatic liberties taken along the way.

This is the true story of what happened in reality. So Marjorie and Gerald Selby, they were both born in the 1930s, and they went to school together in the 1950s, fell in love when they were only 15 years old, got married a couple of years later when they were 17 and Gerald was still in high school. Wow. Over the next 45 years they had six kids. For a long time, Jerry had a job at a cereal factory

and he also went on to study at university and at graduate school to study mathematics. He was one of those people that just had a brain for numbers. And Marge stayed home and raised the kids. Then once all the kids had moved out of home, they bought a corner store in the 1980s in this tiny little town in Michigan, fewer than 1,900 residents.

Everyone there knew everyone. And they ran that store together for 17 years, opened it every morning at 7 in the morning, closed it at midnight. They were open 365 days a year, very, very rarely took holidays. And they made most of their money in those 17 years selling alcohol

and cigarettes and lottery tickets. Right. So the American dream of finding a partner, getting together, Cravenless crap drudgery. So they had a horrible life, is what I'm hearing. Yep. Exploiting people's vices.

Yeah, there you go. They themselves never drank, never smoked, never gambled, and they were able to save a very comfortable amount of money over the years. So then in 2001, they could sell their store and retire and go on to just live the good life. They were in their mid-60s. They were already great grandparents. And they were happy to just live this sort of simple.

existence for the rest of their days. They're already great grandparents in the mid-six. They don't muck around in America, do they? Oh, yeah. That's what you get when you don't, when abstinence is your sex education. Teenage pregnancies in the Midwest. So, yeah, they didn't really have any ambitions for the rest of their life. But then, in 2003, Michigan lottery officials announced they were launching a new type

of lottery game called Winfall. And they designed this game in response to players who had been called calling for a game with better odds of winning. Right. That was the outcome of their market research. People who said, I'd play the lottery if there was a greater chance I was going to win. That's so funny.

I wonder what pokey manufacturer research would say. Maybe don't put it where there's booze, yeah. Okay, so this is a lottery with better odds. What an unusual idea. No wonder if it goes horribly wrong for the lottery company. So I'll explain how it works. they're a little bit different to a normal lottery. They introduced a feature called a roll-down.

So in Winfall, like all lotteries, every time there's a draw and the jackpot isn't claimed by anybody, the money rolls over to the next draw, the jackpot grows. But what made windfall different was that the jackpot was capped at $5 million. So once it hit 5 mil, if no one claimed the jackpot with a winning ticket that had six of the six correct numbers that draw, then the jackpot was split. between the people who had four numbers, five numbers, or three numbers.

Oh, okay. Correct. So basically, in a normal week, if you had a ticket with three of the six winning numbers, you would get $5. But in a roll-down week, if you got three numbers, you could win between $50 and $800, depending on how many other people were sharing the pot. And of course, you'd get even more with four or five correct numbers.

So it was a very clever marketing concept. you didn't have better odds of winning, but if you bought enough tickets, then you had better odds of winning more money for getting fewer correct numbers. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah.

It got people buying more tickets in weeks when a roll-down was announced because they thought they had a better chance of making a better return on their investment in tickets. Now, Jerry learned about this new game when he picked up a brochure that was advertising it at the corner store he used to own, immediately, his mathematics brain spotted a loophole, a flaw in the concept.

He did one of those brilliant mind-type calculations just in his head. Giant whiteboard scribbling and... But he didn't even need that. He just figured it out in his mind. Within seconds, he figured out that you could safely win with very minimal risk, provided you bought enough tickets and provided nobody won the jackpot just based purely on statistics.

He calculated that based on probability if you bought more than 1,100 tickets, you'd likely get at least one ticket with four correct numbers and about 20 tickets with three correct numbers so you'd end up winning more than the tickets cost, possibly by quite a large margin. Does that make sense so far?

Yes. And Jerry was like, can't possibly be the only person who's figured this out, right? Like, surely the people who are running the lottery know their maths well enough to know that they've designed a game that can be, for lack of a better word, exploited, and surely a lot of people are going to figure this out and they're only going to play this game once and then they'll have to shut it down because they've realized they've made this terrible error.

He kept his insights to himself until the roll down week came around for the first time and he ran a little test game for himself on paper just to see if his calculations and his assumptions were accurate. He wrote out 1,100 dummy entries, just random selections of six numbers each. And then he compared them to the actual numbers that were drawn after the draw took place and found sure enough he was correct. If he had bought those tickets in real life, he would have turned a really decent profit just from the threes and the fours he would have had.

so he waited till the next roll-down happened a couple of months later and he was excited and nervous to put his theory into real-world practice and he didn't want anyone to know he was gambling and of course everyone in town knew him so he drove miles and miles hours out of town to a place where he knew he wouldn't be recognized he didn't see what he was doing as gambling because he had a system but a lot of people with a gambling problem say they have a system, so he just didn't want anyone to be aware of what he was doing when he walked into that store and bought 2,200 tickets at $1 each. Then the night of that first draw, he calculated his earnings

and he was certain he was going to win, but he lost. Oh, no way. Only by $50, he was very close to breaking even, but a loss is a loss, and that forced him to revise his math, and he realized the problem was he just hadn't bought enough tickets to dilute the risk of losing enough. And he was certain that if he just increased his bet by another thousand tickets, he'd almost guarantee a profitable win. So there's one thing that a gaming counselor would tell you not to do,

it's chase your losses and go back in with more money. That's right. I can win it back. Perhaps on this, you're a mathematical genius. Mm-hmm. along the way here there are so many red flags that for an ordinary gambler

you'd think that is the moment to back out. Do we know with a March new and approved to scheme at this point? She was in the dark completely and very intentionally. He hadn't mentioned a word about this and he was trying very hard to keep hidden from her. Bad mathematician.

He waited another three months for the next roll-down to happen. Once again, he drove hours out of town and this time he bought 3,000 four hundred tickets, again, $1 each. Is he paying for this in cash? He was withdrawing it from the bank and taking it with him at this point. How do you explain that?

Sorry, darling, I've just got to go and drive many hours to another town for no reason. And can you imagine the relief for Marge when he's not having an affair? He's just buying $3,000 worth of lottery tickets. How do you get away with that in a relationship? I've no idea. He was the type of guy that would come up with all sorts of obscure hobbies for himself. So he'd suddenly develop an obsession with wild mushrooms and would then go and disappear for a day in the woods

trying to track down wild mushrooms. That's good cover, isn't it? If you want to become a problem gambler. So if you're listening and this is the lifestyle for you, just develop interest in wild mushrooms. I'm just going to go and forage. I'm just foraging for a few days. Oh, that Jerry always foraging for wild mushrooms.

That's totally normal. Yeah, right. Something that your partner is going to have zero interest in, yes. When he got the results in the draw, he checked all 3,400 of those tickets and found that this time he'd won $6,300. So was he going through individually 3,000 pieces of paper? And honey, this is just the beginning.

How much is he paying himself for his time, you know? That sounds like, I'm sure you've won a couple of grand, but oh, so boring. Uh-huh. He just got so much satisfaction out of proving he was correct. That was the main benefit for him. with dinner parties. Jerry sounds great dinner party company. Oh man. He is actually a really great conversationalist and a very gregarious person surprisingly. I thought between the mushrooms

and the lottery obsession. We were looking at a bit of a weird dude. But no, apparently affable as well. That's good to hear. He wasn't confident enough to share his findings yet. So he was still keeping it a secret from margin from everyone else and waited another few months for the next roll-down to be announced. Again, drove out of town and this time bought 8,000 tickets. Within days, he claimed the winning tickets and took home nearly $16,000. Right. So he keeps chasing his losses, but then I guess this point he's in the, he's in the black anyway. Oh, he sure is, yeah. Wow, but at what point is you going to buy like 100,000 tickets? I'm worried for you, Jerry. I'm worried. We're building up to

that. Just you wait and see. It was time to tell Marge now. He felt really confident that she was going to be on board, but even still he wanted to wait until she was in the right headspace. So he waited till they were on holiday together. She was nice and chilled, and he felt like he was relaxed enough, she was relaxed enough for him to break the news to her. Hey, honey, I've been gambling our retirement savings, but I'm pretty good at it. I've found a way to guarantee we're going to win.

And he thought it might be a tricky sell, but she was immediately on board. She'd known he was a math genius since they were. were at high school together. He showed her the sums and she was sort of like, yeah, thank you. I actually don't need to understand it as long as you understand it, then I'm in. Okay. And she agreed she'd help share the workload with Jerry because it took a long time to buy all those tickets and then count all those tickets.

So now he was going to have a partner in crime when the next roll-down came along. They then decided that they ought to share the love and they invited their six kids. to get in on the action and start buying tickets with them. Yes. All adults at this stage all had kids on their own. Some had grandkids already. The more people who were on board, the more buying power they had and therefore the greater their chances of winning,

the bigger the payouts ultimately as well. Again, Jerry tried to explain the maths to the kids and just like their mom, they didn't get it and they didn't think they needed to. They just trusted their dad. So they each handed over a few grand for him to take can buy tickets with, but oh-oh, for the

first time they all played as a family and they bought nearly $20,000 worth of tickets. Some lucky so-and-so somewhere in Michigan picked the six winning numbers and therefore claimed the full jackpot for himself.

There was only a one in 10 million chance that was going to happen but it happened on that particular draw. There was no roll-down and Jerry and Marge and the kids lost almost all of that $20,000 investment. Daddy's ruined Christmas. And I 100% would have tapped out at that point.

But Jerry rallied the family and he was adamant that if they were willing to stick to the plan and keep buying tickets in bulk during the roll-down weeks, he could win them their money back. This guy... Get them back in the black. He must be pretty good at math to be that persuasive. Like he must be, you know, throughout the whole childhood, must have been doing weird, long division with the, you know, the cutlery at dinner or something like that.

That's bizarre that they would have gone along with it after losing 20 grand. But anyway, they did keep the faith. They kept giving their dad money and he proved himself correct. He won them a profitable amount of cash back within a couple of months. And that's when Jerry and Marge both realised they could keep this precious knowledge secret and just keep playing the windfall lottery purely for the benefit of themselves and their family or they could invite their friends to get involved

and play together with all of them to benefit the entire town. And a lot of people in that town were struggling, so they figured if they could help their friends out, then they probably should. So they set up a corporation, an investment company, and they sold their friends' shares in it, which all but guaranteed, would yield significant profits purely from playing windfall every few months.

So the money the friends invested meant Jerry and Marge could buy heaps more tickets. And Jerry and Marge would take care of all the work, but everyone who invested would get a share of the profits. And over the next two years, they played about a dozen times with 25 of their friends slash investors on board. And it was a lot of work for Jerry and Marge, as you can imagine, When a roll-down week came round, they would go to the stores, buy the tickets, they'd be there from when the store opened till after it closed, just waiting while the machine printed out tens of thousands of entries day after day, after day. But it was worth it because the company kept winning, and then they'd keep investing their profits in future roll-downs.

And so every bet was bigger than the last, and their workload kept increasing and increasing. but Jerry and Marge were having fun. They were finding it really satisfying. This was a game and they were winning and they loved that they were helping people that they genuinely cared about. And it gave them this sense of purpose that they felt they'd been missing

ever since they sold their shop and retired. So they're making lots of money for themselves and their family and taking it out of the pockets of ordinary taxpayers and schools and rides and all the other things that the lottery income was probably supposed to go to. So that's a misconception, which I didn't really understand. understand. I don't know if this is the way it's set up here in Australia, but over there with the state lotteries, the way they're run, for every dollar you spend on a lottery ticket,

40 cents will go to the state government, and it's the other 60 cents that then go into the pot for people to win. So there's already profit out of it. Okay, fair enough. That's right. So the government always gets its share, and then in theory, they put it to really good use. Anyway, then out of nowhere in May 2005, the Michigan State Lottery shut the windfall game down completely. I mean, that probably figures, right? Like the profit and loss wouldn't have been looking so good if they'd always lost. Well, they were still making their 40 cents on every dollar. So it was kind of surprising because, you know, these guys were buying more and more every couple of months.

Oh, yeah, you'd think it'd be looking more and more successful, wouldn't you? That's right. So it was very surprising and very disappointing. Jerry and Marge had won $850,000 in profit by that point. And they'd had a blast doing it. So it was pretty gutting for it suddenly to just be taken away with no warning. You know how much they invested to get that $800? So they'd played $1.8 million.

And then they'd won $2.65 million with a profit of $850K, which they'd split amongst themselves, their kids, and their friends who'd come on board as investors. So they'd done really well. They would have loved to have continued on. Jerry had to notify everyone who had a share in the company that he was going to be paying out their final payment. Now the business had no reason to exist anymore,

but then just before he shut it down, one of the friends slash shareholders told Jerry about a similar lottery game called Cash Winfall that had been running in the state of Massachusetts for just over a year. And it was just like the Michigan Winfall game, but the roll-downs happened at 2 million instead of 5 million. So in theory, that would actually happen on a more frequent basis,

which was good news. Jerry did some research, crunched some numbers, and decided it was absolutely worth heading to Massachusetts to play this game when a roll-down was announced. He struck up a deal with a guy called Paul in Massachusetts who owned a bottle shop called Billy's Beverages, where they could spend day after day after day, buying and printing tickets.

This worked out really well for Paul, by the way, because not only did he get a share in the company in return for cooperating with these guys, he also got a 5% agents commission on every ticket that Jerry and Marge bought on his premises. They hated flying. So when Massachusetts announced a roll-down the next month, this is August 2005 at this point,

Jerry and Marge packed up the car and drove east for about 14 hours to go and spend a week. buying tickets. They stayed in the cheapest motel they could find and they spent 12 hours a day over the next few days just doing nothing but pushing buttons to process ticket purchases

and then going home with piles and piles of these paper tickets at the end of the day. Imagine working your entire life at this convenience store that is open basically 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, finally get to retirement, think, I'm going to put my feet up, read some books, Do some travelling.

No, straight into more labour. That's true. I must say, if you pitch it to me, you can guarantee a win, but you'll have to spend 12 hours a day for a week, just pushing a button and getting paper tickets. You've then got to sift through to find the winning ones. I'd be like, fuck it, yours. I don't want to do it.

It feels to me like a special kind of hell. It feels like a punishment. They enjoyed it so much. They didn't even really care about the money. They got so much satisfaction out of the sense of purpose. they got from this and the dopamine hit they got every time they won, that they felt really motivated. And that's what happens when you have really low standards for entertainment. This is before streaming TV. I don't think you can do it today. Paul hired them as employees of

Billy's beverages. That was one of those technicalities that you weren't allowed to touch the machine unless you were an employee. So technically, they were allowed to just hit the buttons themselves, unlike normie customers. Their plan for that first trip to Massachusetts was to buy $120,000 worth of tickets, $2 a pop, $60,000 tickets. The machine printed 10 tickets about every two minutes, so that's 200 hours of ticket printing.

And then layer on top of that some of the delays they would inevitably have, like running out of ink or running out of paper, there'd be a blackout from time to time, or another customer would come in and they'd want to use the ticket machine themselves. Wouldn't you be suss if you walked in? Oh, what are you doing?

I'm just endlessly feeding money to the ticket machine. Nothing to see here. Nothing suspicious. It's a legitimate lottery. Oh, and I'm an employee of this company. Yeah, no fraud here. Even people from the lottery agency came out to inspect what was going on.

Well, imagine they would have sold more tickets than the rest of the state, but together probably for this one outlet. So they were happy to be quite, But from their point of view, all of the rules were being followed. But yes, you are correct that there were some of the regular locals who very suss about what was going on. The assumption most of them made was, oh, that person really has a gambling problem, don't they?

That's really sad. Yes, in some respects. Yes, they enjoyed this. Anyway, it turned out they couldn't possibly print enough tickets on that one machine there at Billy's beverages. So Paul helped them find another machine at a nearby diner. So then they'd be able to split up the workload. Marge would go to the bottle shop and use the machine there.

Jerry got employed at the diner so he could use the machine there. And every day, while they're in Massachusetts, they would start at 5.30 in the morning. God. Middle of the day, they'd take a 30-minute lunch break and then they'd finish at 6pm. That entire time, 12 hours, they were just printing, printing, printing, right up until the night of each draw,

after which the counting would commence. And as we've touched on already, that would mean having to manually check every single ticket and then put each winning one into a pile according to how many correct numbers it had, as well as creating piles of the hundreds of thousands of losing tickets. Just think of the trees that went to this ridiculous endeavour. And then they'd go back and they'd spend about 10 days double checking all of the losing tickets to make sure they hadn't missed any of the winners. The counting process alone took about 10 to 12 days,

working solidly for 10 to 12 hours a day. And like I said, they didn't mind. They were having fun. And then it paid off, like just that first trip to Massachusetts that brought in $75,000 profit. So they felt like it was worth the effort they'd gone to. And so from then on, they split their lives between home in Michigan, and work in Massachusetts every couple of months

and that's what they did for the next five years. Everything just ran very smoothly. Whenever a roll-down was announced the following week, they'd jump in the car. That was typically five or six times a year. One time, it was nine times in one year. And while they were there, they would just work around the clock for a few weeks

and then go home with a few hundred thousand dollars in profit and wait for the next roll-down. be announced. There was only one time in 2008 when they lost. Once again, some lucky fucker won the two million dollar jackpot and Jerry and Marge went home empty-handed, actually hundreds of thousands of dollars poorer. But just like the first time that happened, Jerry convinced everyone to just stay on course and he promised he'd win them their money back by the end of the year, which he did. Happy days. But then things started to get a bit messy from 2000. And 10 onwards because of some students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Oh, don't you hate? There's always a bigger maths nerd out there, isn't there? Because can I mention that the way you've explained it, a fairly simple game, other maths freaks would probably have seen it and gone, hmm, I wonder if there's a way to hack this and just gone, ah, can't be bothered. You'd have to have, you know, just print tickets for 12 hours a day and be employed as an employee of the diner. It's not going to do that. That's a stupid idea.

Right. But no, I mean, MIT, that's pretty bad, like some of the biggest math brains, like kind of people who do rocket calculations. Yeah, that's right. And these kids weren't alone as well. There were also another group from Boston University who'd figured out the same thing. In each case, it was a student who just happened to stumble across the game,

analyzed it, and realized it, and realized that they'd be able to use the probability to their advantage and start playing. And these kids from MIT, they'd started playing from the very beginning back in 2004 before Jerry and Marge started coming to town. So technically Jerry and Marge were on their turf. And these kids from MIT, they could tell when other big players started playing the game alongside them.

It was easy for them to recognize because their share of the winnings in each roll-down was being split across more winners and therefore their share was shrinking a little bit. So they clocked Jerry and Marge's appearance on the scene playing the roll-down games. a while in town. Mm-hmm. And they were not pleased. They decided that they wanted to try to find a way to manipulate the game, so they would be the only big player when a roll-down happened

and therefore maximise their gains. They decided to try to force a roll-down when no one else expected one to happen, so they would be the only ones who had a significant amount of tickets. They worked on this for more than two years, planning, planning, before they were ready to execute, and when they did, they pulled it off. Now, for this to make sense, I think I just need to explain a little bit more about the nature of the roll downs until this point. So every time a new jackpot kicked off in the lottery, it would start at $150,000.

As people bought tickets, the jackpot would grow, draw after draw, usually in increments of about $75,000 in between each draw. And then once the jackpot hit around one point. $6 million. That's when the big groups, as well as some of the small players, would know a roll-down's about to come. It's time to start buying tickets in bulk. And then, of course, that had pushed the jackpot over the $2 million cap.

It would trigger the roll-down for the next draw. In August 2010, the jackpot was sitting at around $1.4 million, and all the players were expecting it would be another few weeks before the roll-down madness began. So Jerry and Marge were at home in March. Michigan, thinking they still had maybe another month until they'd need to head to work in Massachusetts. That's when the MIT kids launched this surprise attack and bought more than a million dollars worth of tickets filled in by hand in the space of just a few days.

And they created a completely unanticipated roll down that no one saw coming. So everyone was caught with their pants down. The folks who run the lottery didn't have enough time to announce that there was a down imminent and none of the other players had time to buy tickets and get in the game. So the MIT kids had successfully monopolized the draw and they had 88% of the tickets in that one draw, which made them a tidy profit of $700,000 on top of their $1 million that they won back. And they technically hadn't broken any rules and they hadn't broken any laws, but this was

considered very poor form and all the other players were outraged, Jerry in particular, as you can imagine, and they lobbied for the lottery to make a change to their processes to notify the public immediately when they could start to see tickets were being purchased in bulk because that was something that they monitored and it was something that they should have already been doing. The lottery officials agreed they absolutely needed to find a solution to make sure this didn't happen again and they started working on improvements to their systems and their processes. But in the meantime, Jerry was sure the MIT group was bound to try their clever little trick again. Why wouldn't they? They'd made so much cash out of it and it seemed to have

been relatively easy for them to pull off. When Christmas Eve rolled around a few months later, he could tell they were about to strike again. He wasn't going to stand for that. So he bailed on Christmas with his family, drove to Massachusetts on his own so he could spend two days buying as many tickets as possible in that diner where he was employed and praying the whole time that he was correct and that there would be another roll down in the draw that was happening on December 27th. Otherwise, he was wasting his time and wasting his money. But it turned out he was 100% correct. The MIT kids were buying up hundreds of thousands of tickets to try to trigger this roll down. And not only that, they were monitoring ticket sales across the entire state to see if

anyone else was doing the same, if anyone had cottoned on to what they were up to. So they could tell immediately that one of their big competitors had started playing in the game when Jerry started buying all his tickets. And based on historical data that was all publicly available, they knew where that competitor would be found. So late on Boxing Day night, one of the leaders are of the MIT group rocked up to the diner where Jerry was there all alone, printing his tickets. And the MIT kid proposed to Jerry that they start cooperating with each other, that they start communicating with each other, be transparent about how much they were planning to bet in each roll-down, or maybe better yet, they could start taking turns at playing the

roll-downs, so they wouldn't be diluting each other's winnings. Obviously, Jerry had zero reason to trust this kid as far as he was concerned. The guy was a proven cheater who'd shown he was willing and able to rig the game. So he just gave a nonverbal yet resounding no by silently shaking his head and shutting the door of the diner in the kid's face. And then when he got home a couple of weeks later, Jerry had a cool $200,000 more than when he left home. on Christmas Eve. It paid off very well for him to go to all that effort of heading to work

over the Christmas period. Anyway, things went back to normal for about the next six months, but then everything started unraveling when a Massachusetts state government employee told a reporter for the Boston Globe that they thought something dodgy was probably going on with the lottery. And the reporter looked into it and it did seem to her that something Dodgy definitely was going on, possibly, maybe even probably something illegal. The public records of lottery winners showed that the same people were winning big on these roll-down games again and again. And for those of us who don't really understand statistics and believe winning the lottery

is meant to all be based on pure luck, that does seem like a pretty big red flag, the same people winning again and again. And it also seemed especially odd that this registered company from Michigan had won hundreds of thousands of dollars every time they'd been a roll-down for the last six years and all their tickets, all their entries had been purchased at the exact same two places every single time. This bottle shop and a diner seems super-sus to a layperson. Yeah, I mean, if I was putting money into the lottery, I'd probably be pretty troubled to

hear that unless I acknowledge that lotteries are really stupid and that you're going to do your money regardless of everyone else is going in it. So, yeah, this is really absorbing them. They're taking it way too seriously. Jerry, I'm not entirely buying that Jerry's good fun at this point. But look, he's good at what he's doing. How old is Jerry by this point? They're in their 70s at this stage.

So I can't afford to retire because it's America, even though they've got all this money coming in. Oh, God. Good point. Very good point. Yeah, God forbid they end up with any bad medical expenses. Anyway, a few weeks later, when the next roll-down was announced, The reporter went to this lucky diner and lucky bottle shop where she found Jerry and Marge respectively printing their own tickets behind the counter

and she tried to ask them a few questions about what was going on. They declined to answer. They wouldn't even confirm their identities to her so that made her even more suspicious of them. And then when she reached out to the lottery officials to get some comment from them, they were like, we have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. and she was very cranky to be brushed off in that way.

The next month her little expose was published and that got lips aflapen because her take on the situation, which was backed up by some other statisticians, was that Jerry and Marge and the MIT kids that she'd found out about and a few of the other big players were using really unfair advantages to rob regular players

because that's what it felt like to her. That's what it seemed like to a lot of people who were given this information. It looked like they were these big fish who were winning big at the expense of the little fish and the little fish had no idea they were being manipulated and the game was effectively being rigged. That wasn't accurate but that was the angle that she took, this sort of what about the little guy and also why is the lottery turning a blind eye to blatant corruption was what a lot of people

took from the article. She was arguing that the players who understood statistics and understood, with the rules of the game better than other people and had $100,000 or more to spend on tickets and had the luxury of time to be able to spend days buying tickets and checking tickets with the people who were winning big at the expense of other people.

Her theory was that the lottery officials knew all about this and just didn't give a shit because at the end of the day they just wanted to sell as many tickets as possible because they were getting 40% of every dollar that was spent on lottery tickets. Right. So, of course, the result of the article, public outcry. The story went international, anything lottery-related,

can grab headlines all around the world. And the Massachusetts lottery had to announce they were going to phase out the windfall game and get rid of roll-downs altogether, not because they wanted to, but just because of optics. It was a PR nightmare, really. The game had been making the millions,

but it clearly wasn't a good look to keep going because people were so furious because they felt like if they'd been playing the lottery all this time, they were getting ripped off and their money was going to the jerrys and marges of the world. So they were kind of turned into the villains in this piece, which was really not accurate. And that's what spurred Jerry on to come forward

and speak to the media and set the record straight giving his side of the story, which was that he'd done nothing illegal and unlike the kids from the MIT who sparked that roll-down, he hadn't done anything at all to manipulate the game. He and Marge didn't damage anyone else's chances of winning at all. It's just that because they were able to put in the time and put in the money, they were able to increase their own chances.

And ultimately, they were adding to the pot that everyone could win from. So in theory, they were increasing the size of the jackpot that was going to be divided. up amongst everybody. And also, he pointed out that they and all the other big players were pumping millions of dollars into the Massachusetts economy. And also without them, there would have been fewer roll downs every year and fewer tickets sold.

So what they were doing, actually, if you understood statistics, and this was kind of surprising me to wrap my head around, what they were doing was benefiting other players. They weren't taking away from other players. Still not entirely sure I have wrapped my head around this. Yeah, that sounds a little suspicious. to me. But this doesn't sound any dodgy than, I don't know, the stock market, for instance. Oh, probably less dodgy.

The big cats make all the profits. That just sounds like every single field of human endeavour, doesn't it? That's capitalism, baby. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, what he said was 100% right, but for a lot of people, it just didn't sort of feel right and didn't sit well. So he was still kind of considered a bit of a bad dude by a lot of people who didn't know him

but had read these articles about him. Then the final roll-down game happened in January of 2012, a few months after that article came out, and it was all over for Jerry and Marge. They tallied up their total scores when they got home, and in just under nine years, in the 55 roll-down games they'd played, they'd bought almost $20 million worth of tickets.

You can imagine the hours that took them in Michigan and Massachusetts, and they'd won almost $28 million. So their profit before taxes, and of course they did pay taxes, their profit was close to $8 million that they were able to share with their friends, their family, their loved ones. And then they spent their share of the profits very modestly over the years while they were playing. The only indulgence they had was buying a newish car and a secondhand caravan,

did a couple of renovations on the house. and the rest went to paying for their kids and grandkids and great-grandkids to go to college. A second-hand caravan paid $8 million. Oh, better not get a new caravan. That's what happens when you're the kind of person who finds filling out countless millions of lottery tickets. Entertaining. I suppose college fees, though, probably would have eaten up the whole $8 million. Oh, easily for just one or two grandkids probably.

I'll mention here just because we're fleshing out Jerry's character. One of his hobbies for a while was going to the bank and swapping notes money for rolls of coins, hoping he'd be able to find collector's edition coins in those roles. And he would spend entire weekends dedicated just to going through all these coins hoping he could find collector's items. Yeah. It's lucky Jerry didn't live near the ocean.

or he would have spent every spare moment just with the metal detector on the beach is going, come on, I know you're in there. Oh, I don't know. It doesn't seem why worth it to me. Yes, he made a lot of money. But the sheer amount of boring labour, the amount he would have probably earned per hour might have been, I don't know, 10 or 20 bucks in the end. I do admire, though, that he had a hobby.

I'm watching a lot of my friends' parents, particularly their dads, they're retiring and they just have no idea what to do with themselves. And for all of them, I say, they really need to find a special interest. If you know a boring retired person, suggest that they go and get rolls of coins and look for a special collectors edition. Well, I say, if you want massive amounts of labour, Jerry, if you're listening, with a financial reward, but not a great one, just pick podcasting. You can make an episode every day.

It's more fun than doing lottery tickets. Wow, that's a great story. Who's in the movie? Yeah, so the lead-up to... the movie was that their story went viral again because there was this feature article in the Huffington Post that covered the whole saga. The reporter who wrote that did a very good job summarizing all the complexities of a pretty convoluted story. And this was the first time that Jerry and Marge were portrayed as folk heroes with very pure intentions who worked really

hard to benefit their family and their neighbours as opposed to being portrayed as these villains as they had been up until that point. And then once that article came out, a bunch of people read it. Hollywood got in touch with the relevant parties and offered to make a deal to make a movie adaptation of the story. And in June last year, it was like a decade after their last hurrah playing the windfall when Jerry and Marge found out that Brian Cranston from Breaking Bad was going to play Jerry. Yeah, nice. And Annette Benning from American Beauty was going to play Marge.

and they were pretty thrilled, especially because Brian and Annette were going to come out to Michigan to spend a few days with them just living their normal day-to-day life so they could sort of get a feel for their essence. Imagine Jerry just taking Brian down to the local bank now. You have it ever been tried.

This is really fun. Get some rolls of coins. It's going to be great. We're going mushrooming, Brian. Strap in. Yeah, and then they made the movie Jerry and Marge go large. It was directed by the guy who directed the Devil Wears Prada and Marley and me

and a couple of other big movies. And it came out on Paramount Plus. I'm just thinking, though, how could you possibly capture this experience in a movie? Like, you'd need to have a 200-hour-long movie of just the Brian Cranston going, print, Brent, Brent, Brent, just to get us into the sheer mind-numbing enormity of it. Yeah, I mean, when you see the piles of tickets that the prop department have put together, it gives you a scope for how many hours and days they put in there. Yeah, like I said earlier, they took a few artistic liberties.

It doesn't necessarily stick to reality. They've, you know, added in a whole bunch of comedy, and they've really turned it into an uplifting love story between Jerry and Marge as well. And they do sound like a very sweet couple. And look, frankly, the hero in this for me is Marge, for putting up with Jerry for all these years. She got paid well to do so.

Oh, God. It's funny in the movie. She's the sort of gregarious, outlandish, one who says scandalous things from time to time. In reality, she's very pragmatic and really quite serious, whereas it's Jerry, who's the more sort of outrageous character in real life. And Brian Cranston plays him as someone who's very sort of straight-laced. But yeah, they are, they're a beautiful couple, and it's a beautiful love story, and they're multi-millionaires. but they're happy to just keep living in the same house, just rocking on their porch,

and seeing out the rest of their days in, I guess, the relaxing peace and quiet for now, at least, that they were first anticipating when they retired. And that is just the gist of Jerry and Marge Selby and their enormous lottery win, but at what cost? Well, it's, I'm inspired, Jacob, that if you manage to find a way to beat the system, You can.

The little guy and his wife can find a way to really win big if they're willing to undergo crap loads of mind-numbingly shit labour. There you go. Popular heroes. All right. So if you guys want more than just the gist, we'll post some links in the show notes. Obviously that Huffington Post article.

And also, this sounds really dry, but it's actually a very good read. The report that came out from the Massachusetts Inspector General's investigation into the lottery and the windfall game specifically. It's really, that's what really helped me sort of wrap my head around all of this stuff. So you can go large on the detail of this if you want. If you'd care to, yeah, it'll take you about an hour to wade through, but I actually really enjoyed it.

Dom, thank you so much for coming on board this week. We've loved having you. Where can everyone find you? Just head to the Chaser Report in your podcast app of choice, and you'll catch us there. Any shows or anything coming up between now and the end of the year? Yes, we are doing a live podcast, in fact, two live podcasts at the Grapes of Merth Festival. That's October the 29th and 30th, I believe, in Adelaide.

It's a festival put on by, it's coordinated by Merrick Watt, some of the funniest podcasters in Australia, can be found there in a vineyard. What's not to like? Terrific. All right, we'll pop the links to buy tickets in the show notes for that as well. Thank you. All right, well, you're off to go record some chaser content. We are, I believe.

The Epitalia podcast, it never ever stops, unfortunately. Thank you very much for having me. Good speed. Cheers. See you.