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American Prestige

Special - The US Military’s On-Base Slot Machine Racket w/ Molly Longman (Preview)

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

News, History, Politics

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe now for the full episode! Danny and Derek speak with freelance journalist Molly Longman about ⁠her piece for Wired ⁠detailing how the US military makes over $70 million annually from slot machines on overseas bases, and the implications for exploitation, addiction, and security risks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:02.0

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0:42.3

Hello, prestige heads and welcome to American Prestige. I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson.

0:47.3

And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Molly Longman, Molly is a freelance journalist,

0:52.3

and we've invited her to talk about her piece

0:55.8

that she recently wrote for Wired, the big money and high cost of the U.S. military's on-based

1:02.4

slot machine. So, Molly, thank you very much for joining us.

1:06.5

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

1:09.9

The pleasure is all ours.

1:11.9

But before we get into it, why don't we talk about it?

1:14.5

I'm mostly interested in this because I want to put a slot machine in the American prestige break room.

1:18.8

Yeah, just basically force Jake to go into debt.

1:21.9

Yeah.

1:22.8

With incredibly usurious terms.

1:26.4

This is a wild story. Yeah. Go, go, go. Oh, I was going to say, yeah, you should think about it. You know, they're in some interesting places. Like, one time I was on a road trip to Missouri, I'm from Iowa, so I was close by. And there were just like, yeah, slot machines and like the gas station for like while you're waiting for your tire to fill up.

1:46.5

So they're everywhere.

...

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