281. Luck vs. Skill: The Scary Truth—Dr. Mike Orkin, Professor Emeritus of Statistics

Do you consider yourself lucky? Or do you consider yourself have earned it by working hard? Or, is it both? Our guest today is Dr. Michael Orkin, is a statistics expert and he shares with us some surprising insights.

TODAY'S WIN-WIN:
In order to increase your chances, you need to put yourself in positions where opportunities can occur and create more chance.

LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:

• Schedule your free franchise consultation with Big Sky Franchise Team: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/. 
• You can visit our guest's website at: 
  • https://drmikeorkin.com/
• Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop:  
• https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
• Connect with our guest on social:
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-mike-orkin-5600584/recent-activity/all/

ABOUT OUR GUEST:
DR. MICHAEL ORKIN is a distinguished professor, consultant, researcher, and author with a wealth of experience that offers unique insights into the concepts of chance and luck. He holds a BA in Mathematics and a PhD in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout his career, Dr. Orkin has made significant contributions to the field of statistics, particularly in the gaming industry, where he frequently serves as a consultant. His extensive research has been published in numerous academic papers, and he has delivered invited talks on these topics, including a notable presentation at Google Tech Talks. Dr. Orkin is a Professor Emeritus of Statistics at California State University, East Bay, and he currently serves on the mathematics faculty at Berkeley City College. His expertise and experience make him a leading authority on the statistical principles underlying games, chance, and the role of luck in various aspects of life.    

ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.

The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any business decisions. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host, Big Sky Franchise Team, or our affiliates. Additionally, this podcast may feature sponsors or advertisers, but any mention of products or services does not constitute an endorsement. Please do your own research before making any purchasing or business decisions.

Chapters

• 0:01 Setting Up The Luck Question
• 0:31 Meet Dr. Michael Orkin
• 2:10 Why Write The Story Of Chance
• 4:06 Lottery Math And The Power Of Scale
• 6:20 Putting Yourself Where Luck Can Strike
• 7:13 Correlation Pitfalls And Hidden Variables
• 10:09 Paul The Octopus And Selection Bias
• 13:31 Data Mining, AI, And False Patterns
• 16:16 Expected Value, Risk, And Ruin
• 20:16 Kelly Criterion And Money Management
• 22:39 Where To Find The Book
• 23:24 Misses, Fits, And Career Choices
• 25:02 A Win: Building A Search Engine
• 27:00 Multipliers: Brand, Network, Experts
• 28:54 Defining Success On Your Terms
• 30:05 Extra Insights And Book Teasers
• 31:34 Three Key Takeaways Recapped
• 34:00 Win-Win And Final CTA

Transcript

Tom DuFore: 0:01

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky franchise team. And as we open today, I'm wondering if you consider yourself lucky, or do you consider yourself to have earned it by working hard and making good choices? Or maybe is it a little bit of both? Well, our guest today is Dr. Michael Orkin, and he's the statistics expert, and he shares with us some very surprising insights. Now, Dr. Orkin is a distinguished professor, consultant, researcher, and author with a wealth of experience that offers unique insights into the concepts of chance and luck. He holds a bachelor's in mathematics and a PhD in statistics from the University of California in Berkeley. Throughout his career, Dr. Orkin has made significant contributions to the field of statistics, particularly in the gaming industry, where he frequently serves as a consultant. His extensive research has been published in numerous academic papers, and he has delivered invited talks on these topics, including notable presentations to Google Tech Talks. Dr. Orkin is a professor emeritus of statistics at California State University, East Bay, and he currently serves on the mathematics faculty at Berkeley City College. His expertise and experience make him a leading authority on statistical principles, underlying games, chance, and the role of luck in various aspects of life. You're going to find this one really, really fun and interesting. So let's go ahead and jump into my interview with Dr. Michael Orkin.

Dr. Michael Orkin: 1:41

Okay, my name is Mike Orkin, and my my official title is I have a PhD and I'm a professor at Berkeley City College in Berkeley, California. But right now I do a lot of consulting. I have my own consulting business, and I also do a fair amount of writing. I've written a couple of books recently, and I'm also on have an active Substack account right now.

Tom DuFore: 2:09

Fantastic. Well, purpose really of wanting to have you on the show is really to start talking about data. And I think the title of your book, I think would be a great place to start. The title is The Story of Chance Beyond the Margin of Error. And I'd love for you to talk about some of what led you just to write the book.

Dr. Michael Orkin: 2:29

I've been in this business, in this game for many years. My PhD was in statistics and probability. And I've been most of my career involved in things involving chance and games. I could do a lot of consulting for game developers who want to need a professional assessment of whether the game is a game of skill. And so I teach mainly online now. My students, the class I teach is elementary statistics or beginning statistics. And so rather than have the students buy an expensive textbook, 50% of which we never use, I decided I'd use my own material, write my own material, so to speak. Now I've done this before in the past, but now things have changed a lot. And so I wrote a book. The second edition is out now. It's called The Story of Chance Beyond the Margin of Error. You can get it on Amazon. And I wrote it in such a way that it would be interesting to the general reader, not just to the introductory statistics student. And that makes it interesting to the introductory statistics student as well. It covers a little bit of math, but it's got mainly concepts about chance and elementary statistical topics that are important for anyone who runs a small business or a medium business who doesn't have a team of statisticians working for them.

Tom DuFore: 3:56

Thank you for that overview. And I know in speaking of chance and just thinking about the effects of chance, just talk a little bit about that and what that means.

Dr. Michael Orkin: 4:06

Okay, so let me start with a little analogy. The Mega Millions Lottery. The Mega Millions Lottery, I'll give you a couple of little examples like this. The Mega Millions Lottery is played across this country. The chance, the jackpot, they changed the rules a little bit a couple months ago, but it's still essentially the same game. But now the minimum jackpot size is $50 million. And the chance of winning it is about one in $290 million. And so that is uh extremely unlikely. You can play if you if you buy 50 tickets a week, you'll win on the average of once uh every about 115,000 years. So it's very unlikely that you win the lottery. But there are winners periodically. Every few weeks, in fact, there's typically a winner. You can't predict exactly which drawings there'll be a winner, but it happens with surprising frequency. Not every drawing. When nobody wins, the jackpot prize gets bigger because the current jackpot rolls over to the next one, so more tickets are sold, and which increases the chance of someone winning. So here's the here's the here's the interesting thing. Why why are there winners? Well, there are winners because so many tickets are sold. And that brings up this very important fact about chance that some people call the law of very large numbers, which is given enough opportunity, any weird thing will happen just due to chance. Well, winning the lottery jackpot is certainly a weird thing because it's so unlikely. So any weird thing means very unlikely. That's why there are winners. But so how does that serve as a metaphor for other things? Well, for one thing, it means that if you're going to be successful, first of all, you have to realize that chance plays a role. If you think back on your success points over your career, you will realize that chance was involved. Oh, I just happened to get this particular consulting job that then led into a full-time job that then led into uh running my business. So chance plays a big role. And in order to have that, in order to, you like to use the term multiplier, in order to multiply that chance, you have to put yourself in a position where there's opportunity. So get yourself in a position, you're not gonna be able to force things, but you can get yourself in a position where there's opportunity for success. Now, I can't give a magic rule because it depends on what business you're in. But if you just sort of hide away and think, oh yeah, I'm gonna just be be great, you have to do stuff. You have to get out there and you have to allow for opportunity to take, to take effect. So that's one thing they talk about.

Tom DuFore: 7:06

Fantastic. And one of those things that as I'm thinking about the effects of chance, you mentioned the lottery. It makes me also think about data interpretations or maybe misinterpretations. And so I'd love for you to just talk about data analysis, analyzing things in that regard.

Dr. Michael Orkin: 7:25

Okay, so Tom, that's that's an extremely important thing these days because of the availability of data and the availability of software to analyze it. So now everybody can be a data scientist, doesn't mean that they're particularly good at it, but data is at our fingertips thanks to the internet and thanks to recent advances like computing power, very fast chips, and of course, the emergence of AI. But people can still have access to data, and it's it's a double-edged sword because it's very good, but on the other hand, you can make mistakes in interpreting it. So I'll give you a couple classic examples. Around the time that the polio vaccine was being developed, a researcher, this was way back in the late 1950s, a researcher discovered, much to his surprise, that there was a positive correlation, a very strong positive correlation between polio, between polio incidents and Coca-Cola sales. Now, this was before the vaccine was developed. The vaccine basically wiped out polio, but this was while it was being developed. People were looking around to try to find the causes of polio. So this got a lot of press because there are lots of people who think that, you know, junk food and soft drinks are not good for you, which may be true. However, does it cause polio? Well, that's what this researcher's conclusion was. But further investigation showed that drinking Coca-Cola does not cause polio at all. It has no effect. The problem was this was an observational, but the researchers' study data was correct. It was observational data. And observational data is something in which you can find correlations, but correlation does not mean causation. So that's like the first thing I say to a class. Correlation does not mean causation. In this case, Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola cells and polio have a strong positive correlation. But there's a hidden variable. That hidden variable is the weather. As the temperature increases, more people drink soft drinks, and the polio virus gets more active. So those the so that the weather makes those two things correlated, but they the they have nothing to do with each other. One does not cause the other. So people make that mistake all the time. People who should know better.

Tom DuFore: 10:02

I know before the show we were talking about this octopus's story. Tell us about that. Okay, well, that's a very interesting story.

Dr. Michael Orkin: 10:09

It's a true story. A few years ago, so this story is about predicting the results of European soccer matches. And there was an octopus named Paul the Octopus who was kept at a zoo in Germany. And Paul the Octopus was trained to pick the results of soccer matches. Now, sports betting is one of the most popular gambling activities in the country right now, thanks to FanDuel and DraftKings and online sports betting, which has become available over the last few years. But Paul only picked soccer games, and his handlers would put out two bowls of food, one for each team, whenever there's a soccer match, especially playoff matches. And when whichever bowl of food Paul the Octopus picked, that would be his prediction for the winner of the soccer match. So, okay, great. You can train an octopi octopi are very smart, and you can train them to do things like pick some food out of a bowl, one of one of two bowls. So, you know, lose a publicity stunt. But then Paul picked the winners of 12 out of 14 soccer matches, which has a very low probability of doing it if you're just guessing. So he became famous. And of course, Paul's handlers became famous, got a lot of press. And so the chance of doing that is less than one in a hundred. You could think about it, well, maybe there could be some cheating, like there's always a favorite and an underdog in any sports event. And so maybe Paul's handlers were putting the better food in the favorites bowl. Maybe, maybe other things were going on. But still, he picked 12 out of 14. And putting the better food in the favorites bowl was kind of, it wasn't probably wasn't the reason. So what was the reason? Well, maybe Paul was skilled. Uh to pyre very smart animals, as I said. But there's another reason, and it's the same reason that people win lottery jackpots. Namely, it turns out there were lots of other animals predicting soccer matches. There was a death cat in Russia, there was a monkey, there was all kinds of other animals. So the question is, why do people win lottery jackpots? And the answer is because so many tickets are played. And the correct question isn't what's the chance that this guy won? It's what's the chance that someone wins, which grows as more people buy tickets. Well, the same with Paul. When you add in all the other animals and you ask the question a little differently and say, what's the chance that some animal wins, then that probability becomes much larger. So that's the real explanation of why Paul won. And it's an interesting explanation, same as the lottery explanation, because in this case, if you're just doing things at random, then a winner is determined not just by that winner, not just by Paul and his expertise or by the person who wins a letter jackpot, but by all the losers. Because the more losers you have, the more likely it is that someone or thing will be the winner. So that's another example of this weird phenomenon about chance that's given enough opportunity, that is, in this case, lots of animals predicting soccer matches, there will be any weird thing will happen just due to chance, or in this case, there will be a winner. So that's the story of Paul, which is the same as the story of the lottery.

Tom DuFore: 13:44

Aaron Powell You started talking a little bit about some of the common misconceptions around these areas. Are there others you think might be worth noting or discussing here?

Dr. Michael Orkin: 13:52

Aaron Powell The landscape has changed over the last two years because of the computing power, because of the ability to f to do things on a computer. And so that's something that people have to realize. And when you're if you're trying to be successful nowadays in running your business, then you have to open yourself up to some. So of course, your skill is obviously a key part of it, but there's also a chance element. And nowadays you have to sort of expose yourself to opportunity and make sure you're you're out there and getting publicity or just getting your brand known is different than it was, say, even 10 years ago, because now there are podcasts, as we know, and there are their sub stack. I have a sub stack, but it's it's just to promote some of my writing. That's one one element. Nowadays, people need to understand that the way of getting your getting your brand known is different from the way it was just a few years ago. Also, artificial intelligence, AI, is an extremely powerful thing, but it makes mistakes. So you can just look up AI hallucinations on Google and find all kinds of situations where that happens. So you have to take AI with a grain of salt. Having large amounts of data presents another issue, and it's good, it's a good thing, but I mean, having large amounts of data is a good thing. But a few years ago, a friend and I wrote some software, fine patterns in football games. Professional football, we also do professional basketball, NBA, NFL. We found these incredible patterns. By patterns, I mean like, oh, the New England Patriots won 10 times out of 11 every when they were playing on the road, they'd lost a previous game, and they were underdogs or something like that. I just made that. So that's called the situation. We didn't write this program to become sports betters. We wrote it to demonstrate what searching data or data mining can do in terms of finding crazy patterns just due to randomness. So you have to be careful when you find crazy patterns that they may just be due to chance and the fact that data is so widely available and lots of data, and the ability to search it. So here's another example. Most of you out there may probably have heard of SBF or Sam Bankman-Fried, as he's as his name is, who was the crypto king a few years ago. Crypto's back in the news these days, because there's lots of people who want to make crypto important. But uh Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the originators, and he became, he had a couple of websites, and he's a young guy. He went to MIT, he had a degree in physics and math, and he was a very smart guy. And by the age of 30, he was a billionaire because of his crypto websites and because of his activity in buying and selling different crypto stocks. So a guy named Zeke Foe wrote a book called Number Go Up. It was all about Sam Bankman-Fried, and he interviewed him many times in numerous interviews, and it turns out that uh Sam Bankman-Fried knew about certain things in the laws of chance. Namely, there's something called expected value or EV. EV means you have a good bet in a certain sense. For example, if I played a game of craps in a casino and bet on seven, I won't I will have negative EV because the casino always makes a profit. So I'm only doing it for fun. I know I'll lose money in the long run. If I bet on seven, there's a one-sixth chance I'll win and a five-sixth chance I'll lose. And if I mean the payoff odds are four to one, so the casino has a 17% ED. That is, the casino has a positive expected value. So what does that say? It doesn't say anything about me getting lucky on the next bet. What it says is that if I do this over and over again, I'll eventually lose, and the casino will eventually win. Casino doesn't need to think about eventually, because if there are lots of people playing, they win almost every time. Okay, now are there any other casino games that have give the player a little better opportunity? And one of them is blackjack. Blackjack, for an ordinary player, doesn't is basically a slightly negative EV, but people who know how to count cards, and this was first popularized in the early 1960s, can have positive EV. They can have about overall about a 2% advantage over the casino in ideal playing conditions, which are hard to find these days. But what does that mean? That means if you keep playing, you'll win in the long run. And Sam Bankman-Fried knew about positive EV. In the stock market, there are many opportunities with positive EV, although it's much harder to compute because you don't really know the probabilities. However, let's go back to blackjack. Let's say you have a 2% chance of winning each hand. It's actually sort of averaged out, but let's just say that. So that means if I play and play and play hours and hours and hours, I'll win. And how much I win depends on how big my bankroll is. But let's say I've got everything I have. Well, even though I have positive EV, if I lose the hand, I'll go broke. And there's a pretty good chance that I will lose the hand. So positive EV is not enough. And Sam SBF didn't realize that, at least according to this book. Well, the book just talked about positive EV. It didn't talk about the fact that you can't just bet everything whenever you have positive EV. So if you have a good game, whether it's in gambling or whether it's whether it's trading crypto, doesn't matter. If you bet everything or almost everything, each time you get positive EV, you'll soon go broke and you won't have a chance to make money. And that's the trap that SPF fell into. And he didn't know what was going on because his computations, though usually on the back of a napkin or something, were correct in that he had positive EV, but he didn't consider the fact that even if you have positive EV, you can go broke. And so instead of reassessing what was going on, trying to figure it out, he kept betting more and more, which is sort of like the double-up strategy, which is another very bad thing to do in gambling. You should never some people call it double-down strategy. That's not a good thing to do, just like not employing proper money management is not a good thing to do. And Sam Badman Fried started borrowing other people's money to bet with, thinking that since he has positive EV, he's got to win. That didn't happen. And he went down the slippery slope of doing things he shouldn't do to get more funds. And he wound up in prison, which is where he is today. Now there's a money management strategy developed. It's called the Kelly system, it was developed by a mathematician named John Kelly back in the 1950s, that says you should use a if you're going to start taking risks when you invest, which is what every small business has to do, you should be careful, even if you have positive EV, you should only bet a fix always bet a fixed fraction of your money. Now, that's not a sometimes that's easy, sometimes that's not so easy to figure out how to do that. But in blackjack, it turns out, or in games that are just win-loss games, you should bet the fraction, a very simple fraction of your money. And that means that if you as you make more and more money, you bet more and more, and as you lose what you you are going to lose some of the time, you bet less and less. That's called a fixed fraction betting system. It's called the Kelly system. Ed Thorpe, who popularized Blackjack, wrote a book about the Kelly system as well. But that's the bit that's another big mistake that people make when they're trying to make smart investments and they see they have positive EV or some maybe intuitively figure out, hey, this is a good good investment opportunity. They invest too much and they take a big risk of going broke before they have a chance to realize the fact that they really do have a good investment opportunity.

Tom DuFore: 22:39

How can someone get a copy of your book or connect with you or learn more about what you're doing?

Dr. Michael Orkin: 22:44

My book, The Story of Chance Beyond the Margin of Error, is available on Amazon. You can also go to my website, which is dr my dr drmikeorkin.com, and I have a link to get the book there. And then you, if you go to Substack and look me up, my uh Substack is called the Neutral Zone because I try to be neutral about things like politics. And so those are the best I'm in on LinkedIn too. But if you just go to my website, drmikeorkin.com, or just go straight to Amazon and look me up, you'll get my book there, the paperback. The story of chance beyond the margin of error.

Tom DuFore: 23:24

Well, Dr. Mike, this is the time of the show, and we like to ask every guest the same four questions. And the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

Dr. Michael Orkin: 23:36

I've had a couple of misses in my journey, but now I've always wanted to do what I'm doing right now, so that's an important thing. From the time I was in college, I just sort of drifted from one, you know, thing that I like to another, but all in the same field of probability, chance, statistics. But there were a couple of I uh one thing that was amiss. I was a professor for a long time at a California State University, and then I was offered a nice job by a consulting company that does statistical analysis, a big company that has offices all over. And I found myself in this position where I wasn't able to be creative. I just had to do whatever the company wanted. And I mean, I understand the company's position, but it was definitely a miss. I was there for more than a year, but it was it was like keeping me from doing what I wanted to do, even though the general area was the same. So that was that was a big miss because it it um made me very uncomfortable with what I was doing for at least a year. So I would I would chalk that up to a miss. I was had a couple consulting jobs that I guess I would call a miss. I didn't like the way they turned out. But the main one, I think, we're just talking professionally rather than other areas. I would have to say that that was the big miss. Let's talk about a make or a win or a highlight. I had a consulting, another another consulting job. Some were highlights, some weren't, but this was a highlight when I back way back a long time ago, before the internet had become uh available, and I was working with some attorneys in a mass murder case to do some statistical stuff. So they asked me to now I'm not a programmer, I'm not a coder as it's called these days, but I know a little bit about it. And back then, coding wasn't so automated. Now you can have AI write programs for you. But the idea was to write a search engine because this trial was a retrial of someone who had been convicted of 25 mass murders. The name was Juan Corona, it happened in Northern California a long time ago. But I had the opportunity to write the search engine for 50,000 pages or so of police reports that would allow the attorneys and the judge and whoever wanted to use it, search through and say, well, what happened at the Guadalajara Cafe? Or when was the machete involved? So it was great fun, and I got to learn a programming language, and I got to write now I now, because of that consulting experience, I learned I learned how to write a search engine similar to what's on Google now. Not AI, however. I went back to my my teaching and other consulting, and so not much ever came of it. I've had a couple of other, and then the internet came along, and then I was going to be partners with these attorneys, and for some reason that just didn't happen. We sort of had it falling out. But anyway, the upshot of it was that I learned a lot of stuff and have been able to use it at some of my other work, but I did not become my my my software did not become a widely used search engine, unfortunately.

Tom DuFore: 26:50

Dr. Mike, the name of the show is Multiply Your Success. And I'd love to know if you used a multiplier to grow yourself personally, professionally, or any organizations you've run.

Dr. Michael Orkin: 27:00

Well, there have been a couple, a few things over the years, but uh talk about most recently the whole notion. So one of the things that everyone who has a business needs to know, whether it's a consulting business or a fast food business, it doesn't matter. The thing you need to know is how to brand yourself and how to get out there. And so the multiplier I've used most recently is just to use the current methods of getting your name out there, one of them with one of them is LinkedIn, one of them is uh Substack, one of them is having your own website. And so people should use the multiplier, use various multipliers. Another multiplier, so-called multiplier, and there's a mathematical definition too, but your definition is things that you've used to multiply your chances of success, is to make sure that if you are uncertain about something or are in need of some kind of support, you should you should get people who are experts in that area. So in the past, I've used, I know people in in my world who are experts in various types of statistical analysis. And whenever I feel like, well, this is gonna take me a lot of time, and I'm not quite sure how to handle certain things, I'll call up somebody and I'll get them on board. And so the a famous uh statistician named John Tukey once said, getting an expert to help you is learning how to think with someone else's brain. And that's sort of true. You shouldn't be a you should always be open to finding people who are experts in their field and getting getting them on board to help you, whether it's just for a consulting job or or as an employee.

Tom DuFore: 28:49

Well, and Dr. Mike, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

Dr. Michael Orkin: 28:55

Okay, well, to me, success means that I'm doing something that I really like doing, so that I wake up in the morning knowing that I'm going to do something I really like and that I'm good at, and that I don't have to get another job in order to keep doing what I like doing. So to me, success means finding whatever thing you like doing. And I mean, within reason, I mean there are certain things. I mean, I used to be involved in when I was at college in sports, and I knew that I would never be an Olympic medalist in judo, which was my sport. So what I mean is that you should find something that you like doing and can do it and make a living at it. And so that's sort of what that's sort of a a goal that I have followed, and I I've sort of achieved that goal. There are I'd like to make some more mathematical discoveries, but I'm not really doing much of that these days because I'm doing stuff that's more out in the the new the new technologies. Area. That's my definition of success.

Tom DuFore: 30:04

Dr. Mike, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

Dr. Michael Orkin: 30:11

I think I covered most of the bases on my in my playbook of the types of things that are that are in my book. There are some things in my book that I talk about that are maybe too long to talk about here. But for instance, I have a chapter in my book called Was Humpty Dumpty Accident Prone? And because of course he fell off a wall. Why did he fall off the wall? Was he on drugs? Was he drinking? Or was he just accident prone? So I talk about this idea of accident proneness and how it really is similar to talking about luck versus skill. In this case, it's not skill, it's being having the predisposition to have accidents. And how do you make that determination as of statistically? And so that that brings there's one other chapter of my book about, in fact, a lot of the book is about luck versus skill. And that's what a lot of my consulting involves, and namely making writing reports for companies who need to prove that their game is a game of skill. So that's another big question. So yeah, I talk about various things like that. So you have to read, you have to get my book in order to, in order to find out the answers, so to speak. Or if you look at my Substack, you'll get short versions without all the math.

Tom DuFore: 31:34

Dr. Orkin, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when he talked about chance, and he gave that analogy of winning the lottery. And he said, for the mega millions, he said the chances are about one in 290 million that you would win that. But what I found interesting was a statement that he said for chance, when it's given enough opportunity, any weird thing will happen due to chance. And he said, any weird thing means if it's unlikely. Takeaway number two is when he talked about the difference between causation and correlation, and he gave that example of polio and drinking soda. And he said, one researcher concluded that drinking soda pop caused or increased the cause of polio. However, in that specific conclusion and instance, that was not the case. There was a strong correlation, but not causation. And what they later found out was that it was actually driven by weather and that as the weather warmed up, more people drank soda, and it also created an environment for polio to spread faster. Takeaway number three is when he talked about the fixed fraction betting system, and he described that as the Kelly system or the Kelly bet. And essentially, I thought this was just a great little summary here, but essentially to me, it's don't put all your eggs in one basket. I thought that was an interesting statistical discovery that was discovered here in the 1950s or 60s, I believe he said. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win is is it luck or is it skill? What it seems like is it's maybe a little bit of both. And I liked when Dr. Orkin said that in order to increase your chances in life and finding success, you need to put yourself in positions where opportunities can occur, therefore creating more chances for you to be successful. So I think that's great. And thinking about okay, well, how can we apply this to what we do? Maybe in your own business, giving yourself more opportunities and more chances by increasing your marketing or adding new staff, bringing new opportunities your way to increase those chances. But like you said, you can't just hide under a rock or hide in a cave somewhere. You have to put yourself and make an attempt to put yourself in a position for that to happen. So I thought that was just a great conclusion there. So that's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com and schedule your free, no obligation consultation to talk a little bit further. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.