SPEAKER_08: Apple Card is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. Apple Card subject to credit approval, savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Today we start out with something a little different. Love.
SPEAKER_03: The typical story. Love story.
SPEAKER_08: Costis Mitsotakis says it's a typical love story. But it's not that typical. It began like this. In the early 2000s he was living in Greece, where he's from, when...
SPEAKER_03: I met a Spanish girl.
SPEAKER_08: Her name was Sandra Del Pozo.
SPEAKER_03: One thing brought the other and we decided to, for me, I decided to give up everything and sell everything and she decided also to give up her job.
SPEAKER_08: The two bought a small RV on eBay and started driving across Europe in the direction of Spain, where Sandra is from.
SPEAKER_03: She told me once, what do you think if we go to see my grandma?
SPEAKER_08: Sandra's grandmother lived in a small farming town in the northeast corner of Spain called Sodeto.
SPEAKER_07: Sodeto is one of about 300 little farming villages that the dictator Francisco Franco built in Spain in the 1950s. He wanted to bring people and agriculture to some of the more desolate parts of the country.
SPEAKER_08: Producer Katie Mingle traveled to Sodeto, Spain recently.
SPEAKER_07: All the towns built during this time look similar and Sodeto is no exception. There's a church in the center of town and one bar, which is also the one restaurant, which is also the one place to hang out, as far as I can tell. There are about 200 people who live in Sodeto permanently, all in homes built from stone the color of sand with red tile roofs.
SPEAKER_03: You always see at the front the main house and at the back is for the animals.
SPEAKER_07: That's Costis giving me a tour of this little town. After he and Sandra came to visit her grandmother here, they ended up staying.
SPEAKER_03: So that's Sandra's house. On the right we have Sandra's house.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, and Sandra and Costis, they're not together anymore. They actually broke up years ago.
SPEAKER_03: That was Edu, which is the new boyfriend of Sandra, the daddy of the two girls.
SPEAKER_07: After Costis and Sandra broke up, they both stayed in Sodeto, went on with their lives, and then something really incredible happened.
SPEAKER_08: Something that brought everyone in this small town into the streets to celebrate all day and all night into the wee hours of the morning.
SPEAKER_08: On December 22, 2011, almost everyone in this town won a piece of the biggest lottery jackpot in Spain.
SPEAKER_07: By chance, Costis Mitsotakis had found himself in the luckiest town in the world. I've never heard of an entire town winning the lottery. Maybe a group of friends or coworkers. But more often than not, in the United States, the lottery winner is just one person. In Spain, though, they do lottery differently. First of all, it's a countrywide obsession.
SPEAKER_03: The Spanish lottery is a really big deal. They are nuts. They're completely crazy. If you are not from Spain, you cannot understand it. You are surprised by the, there are people that are taking the day off to watch the lottery.
SPEAKER_07: There's more than one lottery in Spain, but the one that Costis is talking about that people go nuts over, it's called La Loteria de Navidad, the Christmas lottery. And it has incredible buy-in from the population. Almost 75% of Spaniards participate.
SPEAKER_08: The Christmas lottery is also the oldest running lottery in Spain and one of the oldest in the world. The drawing has happened every single year since 1812. This includes the years of the Spanish Civil War and all the way through the Franco dictatorship.
SPEAKER_07: For better or worse, lotteries have long been considered a useful way for governments to raise funds for things like infrastructure projects and public programs. Colonial America was basically built using lottery revenue.
SPEAKER_08: But in the early 1800s, opposition to the idea of lotteries was growing all over the world, especially in Europe. Lotteries were, and still are by the way, thought to be a regressive tax on the poor. Churches found lottery play to be blasphemous and superstitious. And intellectuals like Karl Marx thought that public lotteries were a sinister instrument of the capitalist state, designed to convince the proletariat that there was an easy way to escape poverty. In 1826, the British outright banned the lottery for nearly 100 years.
SPEAKER_07: And in 1862, Spain responded to the opposition as well, by redesigning their national lottery so that it wouldn't take as much money from the poor. They decided to make the tickets very expensive.
SPEAKER_04: And the rationale was that if these are unaffordable, poor people won't buy them.
SPEAKER_07: That's Berta Estevé Volart. She's an economist at York University in Toronto who has studied Spain's Christmas lottery. She says the Spanish government figured that if they set the price of lottery tickets really high, only rich people would buy them. But that's not how it worked out.
SPEAKER_04: What happened is instead of people not buying lottery anymore, they decided to turn to their networks and start syndicate playing.
SPEAKER_08: People began syndicate playing, or playing in groups. And the lottery became more popular than ever.
SPEAKER_04: So people in the same neighborhood or family or friends, they would buy one ticket by putting together their money.
SPEAKER_07: The Christmas lottery works like this. There are 100,000 possible numbers ranging from 0 to 99,999. When you go to the lottery office, they'll tell you what numbers are available in your area and you pick one.
SPEAKER_08: But it's really expensive to own an entire number, like tens of thousands of euros. What is much more common is that an organization will buy a share of a number and then sell off even smaller shares to individuals. Five euro shares or two euro shares, thousands of people may own small fractions of the same number. The smaller the share you have, the less you get of the total jackpot if your number should win.
SPEAKER_07: And one of the things that this has done is to turn this Christmas lottery into a huge social event. Local organizations sell tickets at a markup for fundraisers, so your soccer team might be selling shares of a number, the school your kids go to may be selling shares of a different number. Most Spaniards have a stack of tickets, all different tiny shares of different numbers that they've been talked into buying by someone.
SPEAKER_08: The numbers go on sale in the summer, and then on December 22, all of Spain tunes in to watch the drawing.
SPEAKER_03: Every year it's been done the same way in the same theater in Madrid. It starts at I think at eight o'clock in the morning, and the TVs and the radios are always everywhere on showing this thing.
SPEAKER_08: If you turned on Spanish TV that morning, here's what you'd see. There's a stage, and on it are two giant golden orbs. One contains balls with all the possible lottery numbers printed on them. The other smaller orb has balls with the prize money amounts. While one orb spits out a number, the other drops down the corresponding prize amount.
SPEAKER_07: After the balls drop, a couple of Catholic school kids in their uniforms sing the numbers and prizes out loud in a kind of Gregorian chant. The whole thing goes on for several tedious hours.
SPEAKER_08: And the kids aren't particularly great singers.
SPEAKER_07: There are a bunch of small prize amounts that drop, but at some point the orb spit out the biggest prize of the day and its corresponding number. This big prize is called el gordo, the fat one. The total jackpot for el gordo can be close to a billion dollars.
SPEAKER_08: When el gordo drops, reporters all over Spain rush to figure out who has won the jackpot. But it's almost certain that the winning number isn't held by a single individual. It's held by hundreds, or even thousands of people who probably all live in the same geographic region of Spain. Reporters scramble to find out where the winning number was sold.
SPEAKER_07: And on December 22, 2011, everyone looked to a little farming town in the northeast corner of the country.
SPEAKER_03: I got a phone call from a friend of mine that he was on the train.
SPEAKER_07: That's Kostis again.
SPEAKER_03: He was telling me that something is going on in Sodeto because I'm in the train and everybody's on the phone talking on the phone and I hear all the time, Sodeto, Sodeto, Sodeto.
SPEAKER_07: 58,268. That was the lottery number that had won el gordo. The winning tickets had been sold all over Sodeto by the Housewives Association, a group of women who host parties and activities in town. The association sold lottery tickets door to door for six euros, five euros for the lottery share and one euro for their fundraising.
SPEAKER_06: Hi, I'm Mari Carmen Lambella. Hi, I'm Mari Carmen Lambella.
SPEAKER_05: And I chose the winning number in Sodeto when I was the secretary of the Housewives Association.
SPEAKER_07: When Mari Carmen heard that their number had won el gordo, she started calling friends. No one could believe it.
SPEAKER_08: On a PA system that the town normally only used to announce water shortages, the mayor came on and said,
SPEAKER_02: Congratulations, Sodeto. We have just won the lottery. Come to the plaza to celebrate.
SPEAKER_06: That experience, you can't really explain it.
SPEAKER_05: If you didn't leave it, you can't imagine if you had been there in the moment, you would have thought these people have gone completely crazy.
SPEAKER_07: The residents of Sodeto frantically searched for their tickets. Had they bought one from the housewives, each six-year-old ticket the housewives had sold was now worth a hundred thousand euros. How many did each person have?
SPEAKER_08: Soon the entire town was congregated in the plaza.
SPEAKER_08: People chanted their winning number as cars drove through the streets honking their horns.
SPEAKER_04: Ana, the bartender, had won.
SPEAKER_07: Paco, the farmer, and his wife Marisol, the hairdresser, had won. Rosa, the mayor of the town, had won. It seemed that every single resident of the small town of Sodeto had bought a lottery ticket from the housewives and won a piece of el gordo.
SPEAKER_03: The whole village. Everyone. Everyone except one.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, there was one person who didn't have a ticket. And who was it?
SPEAKER_03: That was me.
SPEAKER_07: Costis did not have a ticket. Costis, who had moved to the town for love and stayed even after he broke up with his Spanish girlfriend Sandra, who, yes, had a ticket.
SPEAKER_08: Costis lived on the edge of town and somehow the housewives had missed him when they went knocking on doors.
SPEAKER_03: They drove everywhere except at my place, which they didn't do it on purpose. It just is the only one which is outside, you know, from the village. So they do feel a little bit guilty.
SPEAKER_08: The people of Sodeto were not the only ones to win on the number 58,268 in 2011. A few thousand other people also had small shares of the number, mostly scattered around in towns nearby. The total Jack bought that year for el gordo was about 750 million euros, but it was divided by thousands of people. In Sodeto, the people who bought more tickets got more money and everyone got at least 100,000 euros. Everyone except Costis.
SPEAKER_03: 6 years later, Costis still lives in Sodeto.
SPEAKER_07: He and Sandra are good friends now. She lives in the center of town and he just outside of it in a barn that he's turned into a house that still feels kind of like a barn.
SPEAKER_07: He has a couple of big German shepherds. You can hear one of them jumping into my mic.
SPEAKER_07: When I ask Costis if he felt or still feels any regret or jealousy about not having a ticket, he laughs like it's a ridiculous question.
SPEAKER_07: For a while after Sodeto's win, reporters swarmed the little town. They especially wanted to talk with Costis, the one unlucky guy who was left out of the lottery. But Costis doesn't feel unlucky. In fact, if anything, he feels like he got something that day, too. He's a filmmaker, and the day the town won the lottery, he grabbed his camera and went to the plaza.
SPEAKER_03: The moment that that happened, it was literally like somebody was giving me a script in my hands.
SPEAKER_07: He filmed all the celebrating and he's been filming ever since. He says it's been really interesting to see what happens when a whole town gets wealth all at once.
SPEAKER_03: The whole thing is like a social experiment with really fast results to study and see what an event like this can do to people. It's not always for good.
SPEAKER_07: Costis thinks the people in Sodeto have become a little more insular since the win, more focused on the nuclear family and less on the town as a community.
SPEAKER_03: You do see how it's affecting, how they have changed, how they have closed before that, all the doors were constantly open.
SPEAKER_07: The way he talks about it makes me wonder if the people in the town will like the film when they see it. But Costis says he thinks they will. Mostly.
SPEAKER_03: Maybe a few small things they might not like it, but that's reality.
SPEAKER_07: One thing about Sodeto, there are birds. A lot of them. Luckily, this is also one of the things I'm able to say in Spanish.
SPEAKER_07: Another thing about Sodeto, it's hot. Marie Carmen, the former secretary of the Housewives Association, tells me it's not usually this hot until later in the summer.
SPEAKER_07: This heat, she says, I just can't with this heat. As we walk around Sodeto, she's pointing out a few houses that have been fixed up with lottery money.
SPEAKER_07: But mostly, Marie Carmen says, the town hasn't changed that much. Sodeto is a town of farmers, and some of them installed new irrigation systems or bought new tractors. Some people made modest additions to their homes, but nothing that extravagant. Unlike Costis, Marie Carmen hasn't noticed the town being more closed off since the lottery. She thinks there have been some little jealousies here and there. Not everyone won the same amount. But overall, she thinks it's been an incredible thing for everyone in this little working-class town to live without the worry of debt. She's been battling cancer, which keeps going away and coming back, and the money's allowed her to stop working and not worry.
SPEAKER_05: For me, personally, the lottery has just brought a sense of calm. I don't know, like, to have the day-to-day coverage, you know?
SPEAKER_08: And that's the thing with this syndicate-style lottery. Unlike the Powerball track pot, which heaps hundreds of millions on one or two lonely winners, the money from the Christmas lottery gets divvied up among thousands of people. And they don't generally win enough to buy mansions and yachts. They win enough to pay off their debts, maybe buy a Honda Civic. The lottery brings wealth to a whole geographic area and distributes it relatively evenly, at least among those lucky enough to have a ticket.
SPEAKER_07: After a short walk, Marie Carmen and I arrive at the new office of the Housewives Association, which now, to be more modern, is officially called the Women's Association. But everyone still seems to call it the Housewives Association. Back in 2011, when they were selling lottery tickets, the group kept four for themselves, which ended up winning them 400,000 euros. At the time, enough to cover their budget for the next 200 years.
SPEAKER_07: With all the new money, they fixed up an old school building in town and made it into their office-slash-community center. It has a nice kitchen for parties, a laundry room, and a fitness center.
SPEAKER_06: You see, all of this was made with lottery money.
SPEAKER_05: This living room was built, this kitchen.
SPEAKER_07: And the association gave Costis some money for his film.
SPEAKER_05: We gave him, I don't remember how much, if it was 15,000 euros or how much. I don't know, it was a good bid.
SPEAKER_07: But she also mentions that he hasn't finished it yet. And everyone is waiting.
SPEAKER_06: No, it still hasn't come out in theaters or anything yet.
SPEAKER_05: The people here in the village are waiting, like, what's up? We gave you money.
SPEAKER_07: Marie Carmen isn't the only one to mention this to me. It actually seems to be the talk of the town. A little later that day, I run into a group of older guys. When I tell them I met with Costis, one of them says, the one who made the movie?
SPEAKER_07: But he hasn't even come out with it yet. I tell him I think it'll be another year before the film is finished. And he says, but it's already been five.
SPEAKER_07: Another guy chimes in and says, Costis didn't win the lottery, but he's done quite well for himself. He says he's been getting paid for all the television interviews he's done. Then they talk about how much he's been getting paid.
SPEAKER_07: For the record, Costis told me he's never been paid for any interviews. Conspiracy theories aside, I got the feeling the people in Soreto liked Costis, this strange Greek artist who lives on the outskirts of town. But I also wondered if they see him as an outsider and if the lottery has made this even more pronounced. When I asked Marie Carmen about this, she says, no, he's one of us. We just wish he'd come out with that movie.
SPEAKER_08: Economists have long struggled to figure out why people play the lottery. It's not a rational investment of your money. The odds of winning are terrible. Worse than blackjack. Worse than slot machines. Worse odds than any other form of gambling. And yet, it's the most popular form of gambling. But in Spain, it's pretty obvious why people play this lottery. It's a social thing to do. You buy a ticket because the Housewives Association will pester you until you do it. You buy tickets because your friends are buying tickets. You buy because you don't want to be that one guy in town who doesn't win. You don't want to be Costis.
SPEAKER_07: The Housewives Association continues to choose a number each year for the Christmas lottery and sell tickets in Soreto and in the surrounding little towns. And while they used to knock on doors for months, they don't have to do that anymore. Now the people come to them, and tickets sell out in a few days. They were lucky once, and they could be again, people say. And no one wants to be left out.
SPEAKER_08: 99% Invisible was produced this week by our Senior Producer Katie Mingle. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif. The Digital Director is Kurt Kohlstedt. The rest of the team includes Delaney Hall, Avery Treffelman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taron Mazza and me, Roman Moors. Find out more about Costis' movie, which he's working on with his film partner Lars Sorenson at QuandotoCo.com. We'll put a link on our website because I am not going to spell it for you. While you're there, check out some beautiful animations of this story by Benjamin Stark. Music in this episode was composed by Jenny Conley-Drizos, John Neufeld, and Nate Querrey. They were a part of the team that also scored the Jeannie Chance story and toured live with us. They are the best. We had additional songs composed by our own Sean Real. Carmen Vidal did the English voiceover for Marie Carmen. Special thanks to Roberto Garvia and Zach Froelich. We are a project of Radio-Topia and KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world. And the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_08: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P-I org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want to read Kurt's story about that time we tested guided missiles for postal delivery, that really happened. You can find out all about it on our website at 99 P-I dot org.
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SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruuuuuuuuuuuuut Loops, just so you know.
SPEAKER_01: Fruit? Fruuuuuuuuuuuuut. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruuuuuuuuuuut Loops, the same way you say Stuuuuuuuuuuuuuudio.
SPEAKER_02: That's not how we say it.
