The Jordan Harbinger Show - 693: Lottery | Skeptical Sunday

Episode Date: July 3, 2022

Millions of people play the lottery every day. Is it just a harmless game, or something more insidious? Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and fact-checker, comedian, and podcast host David C. Smalley break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/693 On This Week's Skeptical Sunday, We Discuss: How much do people really spend on lottery tickets, and who does most of the buying? Winning an Oscar, being struck by lightning, or becoming an astronaut are just three things you're more likely to do than win the lottery. What do governments do with the money brought in by lottery sales? At least some of it is put to good use, right? Why winning the lottery isn't a guaranteed way to fulfill your dreams -- and is more likely to turn your life into a nightmare. Why you're better off using the money you'd spend on lottery tickets on almost anything else. Connect with Jordan on Twitter, on Instagram, and on YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know! Connect with David at his website, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, and on YouTube, and make sure to check out The David C. Smalley Podcast here or wherever you enjoy listening to fine podcasts! If you like to get out of your house and catch live comedy, keep an eye on David's tour dates here and text David directly at [phone] for tickets when he comes to your town! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider leaving your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show, I'm Jordan Harbinger, and this is Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where fact-checker and comedian David C. Smalley and I break down a topic you may have never thought about, open things up and debunk common misconceptions, topics such as why the Olympics are kind of a sham, why expiration dates are nonsense, why tipping makes no sense, ear-candling, banned foods, toothpaste, chem trails, and a whole lot more. Normally on the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We normally have long-form

interviews and conversations with a variety of incredible people from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, our episode's starter packs are a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by popular topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. topics like persuasion and influence, negotiation and communication, China, North Korea, failure, resilience, crime and cults, and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start, or take a look in your Spotify app to get started. Today on Skeptical Sunday, millions of people play the lottery every day. But is it a good idea?

Is it just a harmless game? Or is something more insidious going on here? Comedian David C. Smalley is with me once again on this skeptical Sunday to make us all feel very uncomfortable about something. we either love to do or, if you're like me, try to ignore. Hey, Jordan. Yeah, man, most adults have played a lottery at some point. There are only five states that do not have the lottery in the U.S., by the way. Alaska, because I'm assuming there's just not enough people, Hawaii, because according to

their debates, they don't want those kinds of people to visit. Wait, they don't want people who play the lottery to be anywhere near Hawaii. Something like that, yeah, those kinds of people. It's literally word for word from an actual debate. amongst the legislature. Like anyone's going to fly to Hawaii and then buy lottery tickets? It's going to be locals, but okay. Maybe so.

Utah, for very obvious Mormon reasons. Okay. Yes, the state constitution bans all games of chance. So I guess if it's not rigged by Joseph Smith, you can't play it in Utah. Okay. Alabama, for non-Mormon, but still very much Jesus reasons. And then, oddly enough, Nevada, because if you're going to be homeless, the casinos should cause it. Right.

Like, if you're going to be wasting money on something, it's, better be in this venue. They don't want the competition, man. That's right. They don't want the competition. No, that totally makes sense. And all of those check out and are very unsurprising. Although I would say Alaska, you'd think, would have a lottery, but you may be right. It may just be too dang hard to assemble a jackpot when it's this sparse population. Although, they could just have a lower jackpot. I don't know. So how much are people really spending on lottery tickets? I see the power ball and it's just, it's always like $365 million. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of tickets.

Well, Americans spend over $80 billion every year on the lottery. That is $228 per American. And not all Americans play. No. If you just count the adults, it would be like $400 per person. And not all adults play. So the people who do spend quite the chunk of chains on chasing those millions. And the overwhelming maturity, of course, spoiler alert, do not win.

They just keep tossing their money down the drain. I can hear the comments now. But David, it helps the schools because when I was a kid, that was the idea behind the lottery, right? It was supposed to fix funding for the schools. Yeah, it kind of does. So is it all bad? Still yes. But I'll address that in a bit. I'll get to the school thing. I promise. Bill Nye calls the lottery a tax on people who don't know math. And according to national statistics, the lottery is a shameful exploitation of poor people. In 2018, the average American spent $200 on lottery tickets. In 2019, that number jumped to $320. And as of 2020, we were sitting right around $400 per person on lottery. And that's just the national average. If you

isolate it by state, it gets so much worse. New York spends about $441 per person. Delaware is like $455 each. Rhode Island is $508, and in Massachusetts, it's $765 per person. So there are really people just considering the lottery some kind of investment from the sound of it. It's disturbing. So in 2014, Derek Thompson, who's a writer for the Atlantic, published a piece on the growth of the lottery. And he noted this. He said, people spend more money on playing the lottery just in 2013 than on books. books, video games, movie tickets, and sporting events combined. Wow.

And he was shocked to learn back then. He was shocked to learn back. I think he wrote this in 2014, but he was analyzing 2013. He was shocked that Americans back then were spending $70 billion per year on the lottery. And that has jumped by an additional $10 billion in just nine years. To me, that signals desperation. So it's not just like, oh, people love to gamble. There's something else going on here, right?

Like the wealth gap or desperation. has increased to a point where we're spending an additional $10 billion on the lottery. I mean, 80 billion is just a staggering amount. A thousand dollars a year for a lot of people is a huge portion of what they take home. Yeah. And you have people offsetting that, right? So when the mega millions jackpot reached over 1.6 billion a few years ago, wow. One woman walked into a convenience store. And this is on video. You can go find this. She walked into a convenience store and bought 5,535 tickets and lost. So yeah, I would say Desperate is a good way to describe that.

Aren't there people that crack the lottery code and they win the lottery a bunch of times or it's like syndicates of people? Yeah, so there was one guy who did it. His name was Stefan Mandel. He figured out a system of the Australian and UK lotteries. Okay. So his system was basically just kind of developing a company and getting investors to just buy tons of tickets and then distributing the winnings. He worked out the odds and figured if you buy a certain amount, you're almost guaranteed to win something. his company end up winning the lottery 14 times. Wow. They weren't all jackpots, but he ended up winning over $30 million and then paid out a lot of dividends or whatever.

But those federal governments quickly changed the laws and rules to shut him down. And then our government saw it and went, okay, we're going to get ahead of the game and shut it down so that no one could ever do that here in the States. Free enterprise, unless you figure out how to screw us while we're trying to screw you, in that case, no. Yeah, like the casino's going, no counting cards. That's unfair. Are you kidding me?

You might actually win something. We don't want that. Have a free drink. Right. So whatever chance we had at sort of the card counting of the lottery, figuring out how to crack the code, that's out the window. And I wanted to ask about both things that you opened with. We'll get to Bill Nye's thing in a moment. He was episode 366, by the way. And we'll get to that in a second. But why do you say that this is a shameful exploitation of poor people or attacks on the poor? I've heard that before. Yeah. So according to research by the journal on gambling studies, the vast majority of tickets are

sold to low-income Americans in poor neighborhoods. So poor people spend much more on lottery tickets than the general population. The Atlantic cites a Duke University study from the 80s, way back in the 80s, showing that the poorest one-third of households bought half of all lotto tickets. And mostly because lotteries are aggressively advertised in poor neighborhoods. A North Carolina report from NC Policy Watch found that people living in the poorest counties by the most tickets. And the North Carolina Justice Center noted that out of the 20 counties with poverty rates, higher than 20 percent, 18 of them had lottery sales topping the statewide

average of $200 per adult. So the poorer the county, the more people spend on this stuff. That is horrible. I mean, look, yes, maybe it's the advertising that we put in those areas, but can it also just be that people who need money really bad are willing to do more and more desperate things to get that money, you know, because I don't play the lottery. I know the odds, but also, I'm trying to say this without something like an A-hole, if I won like a hundred grand, it's not going to be something where I would make a special trip to go and do that, knowing the odds of me actually winning that. You know, $1.6 billion? All right, maybe I go pick up, maybe I'll go pick up a couple tickets. But that's it. It has to get to like an extreme level before I get out of

bed, so to speak. Because you're doing okay. And that's kind of the point, right? Yeah, that's my idea. For a lot of these people, $100,000 feels like $1.6 billion. And that's kind of the point, right? These people, they're being advertised that the lottery can change your life. It's not just, hey, the lottery is in town or, hey, it's a dollar a ticket. It's not that simple. It's emotionally charged. It's things like, you can't win if you don't play. Then they bring people on to go, what are you going to do with your millions. And then they'll bring somebody on and be like, I'm going to take a vacation or I'm going to get my house repaired. I'm going to pay for my students college. Well, you can't win if you don't play. Here's the lottery website. And then it's just drilled into their heads over and over and over

that this is a way out of poverty when it's just not. It's just not. It's not even feasible for it to happen to the vast majority of people, but people like to feel special. So the lottery kind of taps into that with their advertising and goes, what if you're the one? What are you going to do with that money? It's so unfair to manipulate people that are so incredibly poor. Yeah, there's, I mean, I don't, I don't love gambling by any means, and I certainly don't love negative use of influence like that. When Bill Nye says this is a tax on people who don't know math, I assume he's talking about the odds. Absolutely. So a California study shows that rich people play for fun, and poor people play as an actual investment. Like, they believe their chance

are higher than they really are. Casino.org notes that if you're playing a typical lotto game where you pick six numbers from a pool of 49, your odds of choosing all six correctly are about one in nearly 14 million. And in many famous lottery games, the odds are even much worse than that. It's one in 45 million for the UK lotto. It's one in 140 million for the euro millions. And the power ball you were talking about? Yeah. One in 292 million. for the United States. Right, because that's the whole country. It's not just like Massachusetts. Right. State lottery. Yeah. The Powerball, that's the one that always has the billboards where it's like $796 million jackpot and it ticks up every day and then it hits the news and then it goes up by another

50 million. Yep. All right, so let's unpack that for a moment. I don't think people actually grasp what that means. One in 292 million. We're not wired to wrap our heads around numbers like this. Exactly. You can't even really fathom what it means. And you're right, most people can't grasp, but I saw this video. They were trying to demonstrate this where they were on the street. They were trying to have people point to a graphic to indicate what does one in one million look like. And most people pointed to the graphic that was like one in 10,000 or one in 100,000. So we don't even really know what it means. So like even the one in one million is unfathomable for a lot of people. So turning that into one in 292 million, is basically impossible. There's this really fun video done by Good Magazine on their YouTube channel. I want everyone to go watch it. It's, it's adorable. And if you want to send it to someone who really, like, depends on playing the lottery, you should probably send it over to them. So, they do this illusion with bananas, illustration. Sorry, not an illusion. Hold on. Illusion. No. This sounds like something different, and my mommy told me not to talk to people.

Sorry, yeah. This is this woman who made a banana disappear. Totally different video. I was on the Totally different video. Not on YouTube. It was a different kind of tube. Anyway, okay, so they show this illustration with bananas of what it means to be one in 292 million. So they say the average banana is seven and a half inches long. Well, that's because we all lie about the size of our bananas. Okay. Insert fifth grade joke right there. Good job. It's that. So now think about how long it takes to drive to work, right? How long does it take you on your commute? Now think about a road trip you've taken, where you drove for like seven hours or 20 hours or three or four days if you drive across the country. It's like you with your comedy tours. Absolutely. I'm gone for months and it's

terrible. A lot of bananas. Now I'd take a lot of bananas when I'm out there. So now think about if you could just keep driving and drive the entire circumference of the earth. And you were driving next to a line of bananas that wrapped around the earth. The circumference of our planet is 24,9001 miles. The bananas are average. That would be 210,363,68 bananas, assuming, like I said, that they're all average. And there is nothing wrong with average. I just want to say that. That's why they call it average. In case my ex-wife is listening. But even that, around the entire planet, is 210 million after going around the entire Earth. You'd have to add another 81.8 million bananas extended out into space, which would add an additional 10,000 miles to this road trip.

So winning the Powerball is equivalent to you seeing a 35,000 mile chain of bananas wrapped around the entire Earth and extended out into space and you picking the right banana. That's a really interesting way to explain this, because if you laid bananas out from one end of your road to the next, which is a tenth of a mile if you got a decent size street, you can you pick the right banana you're still not going to pick the right banana you're still not going to pick you can lay bananas down your driveway and not pick the right banana very easily right now you have to do it with bananas wrapped around the whole planet and then just extending a couple hundred or a couple thousand miles into space exactly and you got to pick the right banana right

that's a really good way that's a really good way to explain this 10,000 miles into space yeah yes there's no freaking way you're doing that right it's pure luck right you're more likely to do well you're more likely to do just about anything that humans do on the earth, more likely to do that. You're more likely to win an Oscar. Yeah. You're more likely to be struck by lightning or become an astronaut or to drown. Okay. Or to drown specifically in a bathtub.

I'll take the Oscar, I think, out of those choices. You're more likely to, listen, you're more likely to die from being left-handed using a right-handed object incorrectly. That hits close to home as a lefty. You're more likely to visit the ER for a pogo-stick-related injury or being. killed by a vending machine. Like, it's insane. You're not going to win the powerball. How many people die from vending machines? That's what, that's the real question. How many people die from vending machines? I guess, I don't know, but there's the ratio to vending machines falling on people to people existing is more likely than people winning the lottery to people

existing. The power ball anyway. Yeah, the power ball. Okay. Fair enough. I do have some good news, though. You are more likely to win the lottery than to get a perfect NCAA bracket. Okay. To shuffle a deck of cards into perfect sequential order or be hit by a meteor or to not get offended by a skeptical Sunday episode. Okay. Right. Yes.

The emails we have gotten about things that we did not think were offensive at all are, it's just a, these must be popular. The funny thing is to me, people angry about things they thought we said that we didn't actually say it at all. These socialist pigs you want to do it? No, no, no. That was what we said. I went back and listened to an entire episode that we did just to make sure.

sure I didn't say the thing and I'm like I didn't say that thing. What are we? Right. What are we so angry about? But yeah. And dude's like, I must have been tired. I just misheard of you. We're like, uh, all right, next time we're asking for timestamps. Yeah, send some timestamps. How about you double check that before you fire off an angry email? Just go, go fact check it. That's kind of what the show's teaching to begin with. All right. So we've all heard about the, I guess they're tragic stories of people winning the lottery and it kind of ruins their life. I've had lottery winners email me on this show and they all kind have that cyclical story. Like, yeah, we got a bunch of Nintendo games and we got some new cars and

then everything just kind of went back to normal. Or, oh yeah, it's sort of upped our teenage years a little bit and then back to normal. I wouldn't say it's life changing. And then you see the ones on TV that are like the lottery actually ruined my whole life. I think there's a show called The Lottery Rewnd My Life. Literally is. It's a whole TV series. Yeah, the lottery ruined my life. There's documentaries, uh, the curse of the lottery. So one study shows that 44% of lottery winners are broke within five years. Wow. And 70% are broke within seven years. You know, I was working with a very wealthy investor one time and I tried to do a fundraiser. He had helped me on another fundraiser because we do a lot of that through my podcast. And I had an idea, like, it's very small organization that I

wanted to raise a bunch of money for. And he's like, you got to be careful because when these small organizations have two or three employees and it's a nonprofit, if you get on your show and you raise $500,000 for them or $200,000, they've never had that much money to manage, and things typically go south. And so if it's a small organization, you want to raise small amounts of money, not that they can't do it, but that things typically do not end very well when someone who's not used to managing a bunch of money suddenly has hundreds of thousands of dollars dumped in their plate. So the same is true for personal individuals, right? You've never made more than $30 or $40,000 or $50,000 a year. Suddenly you have, you have.

$170 million. Like, they bring so many problems with it. You know what's not a scam run by the state you live in. Define products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Apartments.com. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. I love the fact that you come here for these conversations.

All the deals and discount codes that help support the show, they're all in one place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And of course, you can search for sponsors using the search box on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com as well. So please consider supporting those who support us. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. A fame example is a little bit better. A guy I know, I gotta be careful here, a guy I know made a video that went, I will say viral, but what I mean is half of the Western world saw this video in the span of a few months. I mean, it was just,

and it was early. This is like 2011 or so, and it didn't have him in it or anything. It was just an explanation of a big problem, and it went viral. And his organization, raised a just an absolute ton of money. And fast forward a few months later, and there's a video of this guy walking around naked, outdoors, and screaming and jumping up and down on cars. And I knew this guy. He was a very normal guy. He didn't have a drug problem. He was like kind of a hippie-dippy normal dude. And he lost his mind. He had a breakdown. And nothing bad had happened to him objectively. He just raised and he had so much attention, so much money, positive. all of it, he couldn't handle it. And you think, oh, like, the guy's a weirdo, this guy's crazy.

I feel like normal people can just lose, absolutely lose their minds from things like this, this pressure. And Shep Gordon, who's been on the show, famous sort of rock band manager, managed Alice Cooper and all these guys, he told me once, people always ask him to make them famous because that's kind of what he does. And he goes, it's never been good for anyone who that's happened to. He's seen it up close and personal since 1960 or whatever. And he's like, It ruins 100% of people that it touches fame. Yeah. Money seems similar.

I totally get that. So there was a pastor in Texas who won $30 million and he killed himself within 20 months. Unreal. Just because of the pressures and the family problems. Oh, yeah. You're stingy if you don't give me this. Why aren't you helping your uncle? Yeah.

If you do give and give and give, you're going to be like the 70% that are broke within seven years. I mean, it's just like the odds don't make sense to us. The amount of money doesn't make sense to us either. It feels like it's more money than it is. And then you have taxes, you have other fees, and then you have people. Even when you help someone, that person thinks that now you're an endless source of money. Sure. Because they don't grasp how much you have.

They always think you have more than you do. And the social pressures are just insane. And I've got a couple of friends who are incredibly wealthy. And when we all go out together, I always make it a point to pay for my own food, to buy them a drink. I want to treat them like a person. I want them to know I don't expect anything out of their funding because they probably have hundreds of people around them that do and that kind of corner them. And I had one of them on my show one time, like questioning a millionaire. He let me just ask him anything I wanted,

even if it was inappropriate. It was so fun. Like, how much money do you have? And what, do you, do you buy your cars? Do you pay a mortgage? What, you know, how does this work? That's an interesting show. Yeah. And some of the stuff he would answer and some of the stuff he'd be like, no. And I'm like, well, I'm going to read an article about you and you tell me if this is true. And he would just laugh and be like, I'm not Batman. That's bullshit, you know? Yeah. And so it was a really fun, it was a really fun. episode. But, you know, anytime I go out with him, he told me one time that a guy cornered him at a bar because he knew who he was and was like showing him pictures of like his kid, like dead in a coffin

and like, yeah, like a four-year-old who died from something. He's like, we need money for this and we need money for that. And he's like, I just got to get the hell out of here. Like, he's like, if you have several million, how do you not hand that guy five grand? But if you do that, how do you not hand everybody $5,000 or stop and give every homeless person 20 grand? Like, you're going to be one of those people if you don't have some. boundaries. And so it can feel selfish, but really it's about sustainability. He wasn't wealthy before, and he had a whole team of people around him, including his family and his father and other people to go, listen. And by the way, he went to college for strategy. So he was wrapping his head around,

you know, how do I strategically make this money work for me instead of just handing it out? So he just has a policy. He doesn't give money to individuals. He'll do it to certain nonprofits, but he won't give money to individuals. He's a very, very generous person. Despite that, He gives so much money to charities. And I've been out with him before, he'll rent out some very expensive location and be like, I'm taking care of this. You buy your own drinks, you know,

and he'll invite a bunch of people. So it's just important to do it the right way. And most people don't have that training. They don't have that wherewithal. They don't have that support group. And like I said, that pastor killed himself within 20 months because of the pressures. There was a man named William Post,

who won $16 million. I think he was in Texas. And his girlfriend sued him saying she was entitled to some of that money. Okay. And she actually won in court and got a huge chunk of it.

Okay. And then one of his brothers was arrested for hiring a hitman to try to kill him because he was next in line to inherit the money. And then his other brothers got him to invest

in some failed companies. So he survived the hit. His brother ended up in prison, but he ended up in debt eventually owing over a million dollars. And then he spent some time in jail himself for shooting at a bill collector. He ended up living on Social Security

until his death in 2006. Oh, that's super tragic. Yeah, there was another guy named Jeffrey Dampere who won $20 million, and he was actually smart with his money. So if you're out there thinking, that wouldn't happen to me, I'd be smart, or I wouldn't tell anybody. In some states, it's required by law that your name is listed. So you can't always be anonymous when doing this.

Right, you can't be anonymous in Hyde, yeah. And Jeffrey Dampere won $20 million. He was smart with his money. He invested into a business. It was actually thriving. It was doing well. Seven years into it, he got shot in the business. by his ex-sister-in-law and her new boyfriend as they were trying to steal his money.

He did not survive the attack. I've got one more story, but if you wanted to chime in on any of that, I wanted to give you an opportunity. Now, that's terrible. I mean, look, maybe not all lottery winners have horrible people around them, but you become a magnet for these types of predators, especially if your name is listed by law, because I would imagine even people weren't trying to kill you, but just lawyers and financial advisors and other sheisty types are calling you like, hey, you got to make sure you do this. Hey, do you have a financial advisor? Hey, do you have an accountant, bookkeeper? By the way, I got an investor. I mean, there's probably all kinds of just normal business people coming after you, but then you can't tell who those people are from the scammers,

from the people who are going to kidnap you for ransom or whatever. And I assume you don't get a lump sum most of the time, right? They probably pay it out over 20 years unless you select. You usually get to pick, and most people pick the lump sum. Okay. So, yeah. And even like Dane Cook. Have you heard Dane Cook story? Have you ever interviewed him or got to talk to him about what happen. I do, you know, it's funny. He listens to the show sometimes, but I didn't know anything about the lottery with him, no. No, no, it's not lottery. It's just that he, he was, you know, getting a lot of money from his comedy career, and his brother was actually managing his finances, and turned out he just stole so much money from Dane. I believe he's in prison now. That's terrible. He stole millions, I think,

from Dane over the years. And so Dane had to, like, rebuild his wealth and recover from his own brother stealing from him. That's terrible. Like, you're right. People are thinking right now, well, just like they go, well, yeah, that's the odds against me, but I'm going to be special, or yeah, I'm going to figure it out. Sure. I could handle the stress because I would do it this way. Sure, we all like to think we could. We also like to think there's nobody in our life that would do that to us.

But think about it. We all have people in our lives that we've had a falling out with that we don't talk to anymore. What if you were worth 140 million when that happened? That person goes from just hating you or typing a message on Facebook to literally trying to murder you and take your wealth. I mean, you know, you live by the sword, you die by the sword, right? So it's just a dangerous sort of place to play.

I mean, I've got one more story I want to share. And you may remember this one. It definitely made the news. In 2015, there was a 26-year-old woman named Marie Holmes. She was working two jobs. She had four kids, one of which had cerebral palsy. She won $188 million as her portion of a jackpot in North Carolina. She took the lump sum payment of $127 million.

She had to pay about $50 million in federal. taxes and then had state taxes on top of that. She publicly said, as she accepted it, she was like, I'm going to tithe, meaning give 10% to God. She bought a house, she put some money towards her child with special needs, and she donated $700,000 to her church. I wish we could just say that was the happy ending. The church was happy and everybody moved forward. Yeah. The problem is she also spent several million dollars bailing her boyfriend out of jail a few times on drug charges. Well, a few million dollars.

These are legal costs then, too, not just bail money at this point. Right. No, it got up to, I think one article I read said it got up to like $12 million, like his bail and bond and all of that. Oh, man. And then he went back to jail again after being bonded out and she had to bail him out again. To forfeit the money.

Yeah. Oh, man. And because he was charged with everything, because he was, you know, he was bonded out based on conditions, right? So when you get a second chance and then you get arrested again, you get kind of convicted for everything, including the first stuff, and then your bail is much higher. So she paid all this money. I think I saw around 12 million. One report said 20 million, but I couldn't verify it. But it was ridiculous. Yikes. Okay. So I wish the story ended there, but she started doing that.

Then a new pastor shows up. His name's Kevin Matthews. And he befriended her because he said God called him to minister to Holmes and her family. This was after she won the lottery, of course. Of course. So then he pitched an idea to her to pay $1.5 million for a retreat he wanted her to build, that he wanted to build and wanted her to fund it. He says she verbally agreed, but the donation never happened. So Pastor Matthews filed a $10 million lawsuit, claiming that he put his own money into the retreat,

thinking homes was going to pay him back. And so he sued her for emotional damage and anxiety and depression, all caused by not getting her donation. Now, again, this was not somebody she knew. This was not somebody in her circles. she was a very religious woman and donated 700K to her church. Right. And then he showed up saying, God called me to talk to you.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, con man. And so there's no public record of how this resolved. So it's pretty safe to assume it was finally dropped or thrown out or whatever. But just when you think the drama ends there, multiple family members started coming forward, accusing her of stealing the lottery ticket from her grandmother. And as far as I know, that's an internal issue. and right now the Marie Holmes Foundation is still an active thing in North Carolina,

but damn, they can keep that drama as far as I'm concerned. You know, it's funny, the grandmother thing, I don't have, this is pure speculation, but I would assume the grandmother is no longer living. And the reason the people came forward and said, hey, you stole that ticket from grandma is because when grandma died, she probably left very little to a bunch of people slash nothing. But if she stole that ticket from grandma, then that money was grandmas, which would mean that then all of the,

other A-holes that came out of the woodwork are suddenly entitled to about 10 million bucks a piece, right? So then they concoct this story about how it's grandma's lottery ticket. Right. Now, there was a TV show that covered a little bit of this, and Marie's mom told her on camera for the first time that those numbers were not random. And Marie looked like stunned. Like, what are you talking about? Because Marie had been asked in interviews before, how'd you do this? And it was like, oh, it was quick pick or, oh, it was just a random number or whatever. So why did Marie not know if she bought the ticket, which is a huge red flag, right? Oh, interesting. So you think maybe she did steal it from Grandma? Well, the mom was like, if you look at the numbers, it was your

birthday, it was your brother's birthday, it was the day someone died. Oh, so grandma's not dead? Well, this was a mom, I think. Oh, okay, okay. Oh, I see. I see. I'm confused. This is a big family tree. I know, but there is some confusion there. And whether she did it or not, who wants that, right? Who wants that level of drama? So, yeah, keep it. Yeah. So that's, that's where that ended up. with for her. But there's just so many, there's so many stories that go like that, that even if you do win, it's not like it's going to be necessarily a good thing for you. Right. So hit man, con men, suicide, depression and all these other things aside, if people play, at least they're helping the schools, right? Well, uh, so the official

California lottery website, just to pick on California, says, and I'm quoting, 95% of what you spend on lottery tickets goes back to the community. What does that mean? I got to say this, That sounds pretty sketchy. I mean, Jordan, if you pay me a million dollars an episode and I blow that on cocaine and strippers, that went back into the community. True. Yeah, it depends where your drug dealer lives, but yeah. I'm basically running a charity here, man. The site also says the lottery has given California public schools more than $39 billion. The problem is they've been counting since 1985. And that dollar amount works out to about 1% of the total state education budget. And a recent, an audit found that the state lottery has not been increasing its funding for education in proportion to its increases in revenue. And as a result, they state that the California lottery system owes the education fund $36 million in funds promised to public education, but were never paid by the California lottery. And CBS reports that the audit also found the agency, and they got to follow, stick with me for a second. This one gets a little confusing. This is a crack in the case.

Yeah. So the audit found that the agency entered into eight non-competitive agreements totaling $5.7 million and did not appear to accept the lowest bid for 17 other agreements, which they should have, valued at $720,000. And the state controller's office was also taken to task in the same audit for lax oversight of the state lottery. And here's the piece right here. Stick with me. They were taken to task for removing a significant finding from another recent audit report after the lottery disputed the finding, and then allowing the agency to submit a report to the legislature that was actually written by the lottery. And the director of the California lottery pushed back, calling it a difference of opinion.

So that's how that's ending. Man, the lottery brings drama wherever it is. So the lack of oversight and transparency obviously make it very difficult to determine exactly where the money goes. And of course, what they mean by community when they say the money goes back to the community. Yep. So public school review.com published an article and the title of the article, article is, do lotteries really benefit public schools? The answer is hazy. And they detail some of the mystery around how the funds are distributed. So they note that it varies by state, of course,

showing how Virginia gets about 8% of its education budget from the lottery, while California uses about 32 cents from every dollar on mega millions for schools. Sounds good. When they pay their bills, when they pay their bills. Only when they pay their bills. So they go on to say, and this is the quote that article. With states like these boasting huge windfalls and lottery revenues, it seems hard to believe that some of the same states are the same ones in the midst of cutting their education budgets. If the lotteries are thriving, why aren't the schools improving as well? Well, here's the thing. According to the Washington Post, one of the biggest problems is that the more the lotteries bring into schools, the more states cut education budgets in anticipation of those windfalls. So the Washington

Post-op-ed states, instead of using the money as additional funding, legislatures have used the lottery money to pay for the education budget and then spent the money that would have been used had there been no lottery on other things. Right. So instead of saying, hey, we're going to have the lottery to shore up your budget, now they're like, well, man, this lottery is killing it. Why don't we just have the lottery replace the education budget? And then we'll take the education budget and we'll do some other crap with it. So now there's less money going to education, as well, the lottery's not paying their bills in the state of California, but also if they have a shortfall or anything like that, well, there's no education budget. So now the lottery just has

to pay for school, and if it falls short, oh well. Right. And so the schools are not being improved. Nothing's getting better. In Virginia, money gained from the lottery is now being used by state lawmakers specifically for regular education expenses rather than additional education funding. So Kitty Boitnot, who's the president of the Virginia Education Association, told the Washington Post, quote, it's a big ruse, and I don't believe Virginians in general are aware of it, end quote. Not only are your odds ridiculously impossible and you're fooling yourself to believe otherwise, how much help it's actually providing our schools just seems to be vastly overrated. So I just hope people stay skeptical of the lottery. David, thank you very much. Off to buy some scratchers. Good luck, brother. Thanks. I know I'm going to win.

Oh, of course. Yeah, you totally will. I'm special. Yeah. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with a former pimp and how he uses mind manipulation. A pimp teaches a woman how to manipulate men. So I'm teaching her. But what she notices after the teachings or during the teachings that, hey, you're a man too. So it's only natural that she works these feminine wiles on you. A smart prostitute will make a fool out of a stupid pimp any day. So any vice you may have, they're just hooks. It gets to the point where you become a narcissistic sociopath. You become empty.

You become hollow. You experience no joy. You experience no pain. You want no love. You want no hate. You're just an empty room. You can't love money. You can't hate it.

See, the puppet master cannot have any interest, any wants, any lust, any desires, any dreams, any goals, nothing. Why? So he can control you. your lust, your dreams, your desires. You don't do anything so that you can become everything. I have an aversion for women who are six feet tall. And like one woman said, in my heels, I'm six, five, you're five, seven, but I find myself looking up to you.

See, I'm 10 feet tall around her. And she's all powerful in my presence, so we can't separate. Anything that was insecure about you that you thought it evaporates. You know, I've been shot twice. I've been stabbed once. Mexican mafia tried to kill me in my sleep. I've done three bank robberies in my life, two on purpose, one by accident. Knowing what I know, the scars I've received, the consequences that I pay, would I do it all again tomorrow?

Yeah, I would. It was that good of a ride. I would not be strong enough to resist the allure. It does have a deep psychological effect, and the only way to avoid the effects is to stay there. Even the woman I told you who lives in the $11 million house. We just got quiet one time, and I said, you ever miss it? And she said, every day. For a chilling peek into the shadow world and the life and mind of former pimp Mickey Royal, check out episode 548 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks again to everybody for listening.

I love your topic suggestions. Many of you have really, really good ones. Our list is a mile long, but that doesn't mean you should stop sending them. Definitely hit me up via email anywhere you can reach me or email me Jordan atjordanharbinger.com and give me your thoughts and suggestions. A link to the show notes for this episode can be found at Jordan Harbinger, all the resources we mentioned in the show will be linked in there as well transcripts are in the show notes i'm at jordan harbinger on twitter and instagram and you can also connect with me on lincoln you can find

david smalley at david c smalley on all social media platforms at david c smolley dot com or better yet on his podcast the david c smalley show links to all that will be in the show notes as well this show is created an association with podcast one my team is jen harbinger jase sanderson robert fogartie ed aird millio campo josh and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer, so do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. So share the show with those you love. If you found this episode useful, please do share it with somebody else who needs to hear it. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time.

This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way.

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