– Hi, everybody. Welcome to After Burner. I'm Bill Little. Well, the most recent Power Ball lottery had a jackpot of about $1.7 billion and yes, it's true. A few people won that money and are gonna become overnight multi-millionaires. And people say that a dollar is a small price to pay for a dream and that the money goes to education and all the rest. And finally, I know that a lot of people play the lottery and what I'm about to say is gonna make a lot of you angry which is not something that's my intention, but it's also not something I'm afraid of because while it may make you angry, perhaps it's gonna make you think a little bit about how evil the lottery really is. Look, I could talk about how seven percent, maybe 12% of all the money actually goes to education, or how 50 cents of every dollar you spend on the lottery ticket goes right back to the government to pay for bloated public sector retirement funds and all the rest, but that's kinda trivial compared to the main point, and the main point is you're not gonna win the lottery. I'm sorry to break it to you, but it's true and we both know it's true. You're never gonna win the lottery. Someone's gonna win the lottery, but it's not gonna be you. You know, the best argument I've ever heard for not playing the lottery was on an ad for the lottery. It was a series of commercials for why people play the lottery and in one of them, a guy announces that he's a statistician and that his winning numbers are one, two, three, four, five, and six. Statistically, he says, these are likely to win as any other six numbers, and of course, he's absolutely right. So, what are the chances that the winning lottery numbers are gonna be one, two, three, four, five, and six? Well, it's the exact same chances as if they were three, seven 11, 18, 23, 28, and 33, but since those numbers are not sequential, they seem attainable somehow. If you fill out every lottery ticket you ever buy with one, two, three, four, five, and six, you have exactly the same change to win as with whatever numbers sound good and that chance is so close to zero, is to be zero. But all of that's really, utterly trivial because the main reason in my mind that the lottery is pure evil is because precisely what people who play the lottery says it gives to them and that is hope. The lottery does not give you hope. The lottery gives you false hope, and by giving you false hope, it steals from you real hope, actual hope, concrete hope, genuine hope. Achievable hope. Look, I can't tell you how many times I've heard friends say you know when I win the lottery, i'm going to just, fill in the blanks. That's why the lottery's such deadly poison. For a dollar a week or $100 a week, for five or whatever, you get the hope for the things you want in life, and when you lose, you spend another dollar and spend another week hoping. And because it gives you this false hope, it steals from you the ability to actually get some of the things you really want. Let's say you wanna win the lottery and then you're gonna tour the world. Well, with five or 10 years of hard work and discipline, you can save enough money to travel the world. With enough hard work and discipline, you can improve your earning potential by taking online courses or going to night school or whatever. If you wanna own your own ATVs and truck and trailer, let's say, you can buy a lottery ticket every week and die without ever getting them, or you can work extra hours, partner with someone who has the same dream and over the course of a few years of hard work and discipline, you can buy your own actual, real world ATVs and truck and trailer and actually get them. Okay look, you can laugh at that if you want to. Maybe you're a dock worker in Baltimore and you wanna live on a mansion in a Caribbean island, get out of the freezing winter and sit on the beach and drink beers all day. Look, I am an idiot sometimes but I'm not so much of an idiot to suggest that a dock worker in Baltimore can scrimp and save $50 million for his own island, but I am enough of an idiot to believe that such a person could, through hard work and some savings become a dockworker down in Jacksonville and buy a house on or near the water and sit on the beach on evenings and weekends drinking actual beer and soaking up actual sunshine. That's not as nice as owning your own island, but you're not gonna get your own island. Dreaming of life on your own beach keeps you from living on a real beach. When you get down to brass tax about what people really want when they think about winning the lottery, it comes down to things like having nice stuff and leaving a job that they hate so, for a dollar a week, they spend the rest of their lives dreaming about nice things that they're never gonna get and staying in a job that they hate and are never gonna leave. If on the other hand, they gave up this false hope and put away this narcotic and replace it with an actual plan, then there's not a person in the world who cannot work and save and partner with other like-minded people to find a better job or start their own business even in especially something like a janitorial business, let's say, and maybe not have a million dollar imaginary house, but a very nice real one. And the final and most corosive point is this. People think, if I win the lottery, I'll never have to work again. Folks, there's nothing more corosive to happiness and real fulfillment than unearned money and endless leisure. That's why something like 70% of all lottery winners are broke after five years, and in many cases, they're friendless and emotionally destroyed. They didn't earn it. They never developed the skills and the habits to keep it. Their friends resent them for not handing over hundreds and thousands of dollars in unearned wealth and they're lives are pretty much ruined. Look, I'm speaking from some experience here. I started with nothing. I'm a college dropout. I was well into my 40s before I consistently had four figures in my bank account. I'd always wanted to fly high performance jets for the air force, but that didn't happen. So I could have played the lottery and dreamed of making millions to buy an incredible jet toy and never work again or, I could have done what I actually did which was study, read, arrive early, stay late, take risks, fail, try again, fail again, learn my lessons, find some help, work hard, save some money, get out of the habit of splurging on little things and get to the big things, and generally, work like an animal because I knew what I wanted and I didn't like the one in 200,000,000 odds of getting it. The chance of getting the things I want with just the method I outlined is not 0.00000 000001%. My odds are 100%. And while put in 10 hours a day, I haven't been to work in 10 years because I found a way to do what I love. And while I don't own a supersonic fodder jet, I do own this. And I'm here to tell you, it's pretty damn close. And I would much, much rather fly this than something nicer that I don't have. I worked very, very hard for this airplane. So go out and make your own luck. Give up this narcotic and spend the five dollars on a legal pad and some pens. Make a plan, figure out what you have and don't have, find friends or relatives or strangers who know things that you need to know and just make it happen. It's gonna take years! But years is better than never, right? This is America, man! Get to work! Make it happen! Do it! (airplane landing)