The National Lottery

So you can go online, purchase a ticket like you would for a raffle, and that will enter you into a draw for whichever prize you've chosen.

Omaze chooses to donate a portion of its ticket sales to charity, but it's not obliged to do that in the same way that the National Lottery has a more long-standing partnership with Good Causes.

So effectively, the best way to think of it is as a digital raffle.

You can pay for entry and winners are drawn through a sort of random number generator, so much like the lottery.

There are other companies as well.

I mean, it's very much in keeping with the past trends in this space, you would think, or existing trends as well.

The National Lottery you mentioned, the likes of premium bonds as well, very British kind of things.

I mean, in some ways, these are all... maybe more genteel versions of the prediction markets boom we've seen in the US in particular, and certainly less deleterious than those markets.

What's up with you? You feeling lucky? Bruce exploded into hysterics and legged it.

That night, Jones has sat down to watch the National Lottery.

On the edge of his seat, Jones was fizzing with raw energy at the pure excitement of his plan.

He got the first four balls, then the fifth, then the sixth ball landed.

Yes.

Yes, who was on the National Lottery in the UK.

Yeah, what happened to her?

I don't know.

She was the most interesting part of the National Lottery.

She would turn up and make an obtuse, uh, uh, observation or prediction.

With a voice like this.

No.

It's, it's hard to prove exactly to the level of criminal proof, as the police discovered, uh, in the early 2000s when they tried to get Tony Blair's Labour Party for selling peerages.

But some researchers at, at Oxford University put it very well when they looked at people who got peerages, who gave money to political parties, and said the odds of it being a coincidence that, in other words, that their peerages had absolutely nothing to do with the cash they'd given to the political parties were, and I'm quoting here, "Approximately equivalent to entering the National Lottery and winning the jackpot five times in a row." Well, I mean, I hate to get biblical with you.

I hate to turn to an Old Testament prophet, but our sins are finding us out, aren't they? Because we never tackled big money in politics, because we never cleaned politics up, we are now in our age of extreme wealth, in our age when we can even j- d- no longer talk about billionaires, we're talking about trillionaires, seeing people who are rich beyond the dreams of avarice using what to us is a fortune, but to them is just small change, to buy an entire political party.

This is what has happened with Reform.

Is there any evidence that, um, adversarial states are involved in funding them to destabilize the UK? 'Cause that's my gut instinct, is this is what's going on.

Well, just look at things like the lottery, the, the National Lottery.

You know, people think that they're, you know, they, they pay a quid, and it's going to Sport England, which is great.

Uh, it's going to village halls, communities.