Here's just something fun and interesting to listen to. It's a short form six and a half minute.

True Story. It is a future release going to come out officially in a few months on my second podcast.

True Stories with Seth Andrews. That shows getting notice. We just crested 350,000 downloads on

114 shows. And we had billboards up around my hometown for four weeks and you made that happen.

And it's just so exciting. So listen, enjoy, and then go subscribe to true stories with Seth Andrews

on all major podcast apps and then share it on your social media and tell your family and friends

about it. Help me get the word out. Today six and a half minute feature is called the Slots of Sin.

I'm Seth Andrews and what you're about to hear is a true story.

January 24th, 1942, New York City. Police headquarters had received a surprise visit from the mayor.

Fiorello, LaGuardia. And the matter he wanted to discuss was an urgent one. There was an

enemy of the people out there. It threatened the city and state of New York and even the entire

United States, its economy, its morality, its future. It was Slot machines. Gambling was a vice

assassin, a blot on polite society. And mayor LaGuardia issued the order every available

patrolman was to report for duty to conduct a raid on a local establishment that had slot

machine gambling going on inside its walls. I guess every generation has seen its moral panic.

We saw the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. In the decades after that, the media was literally

whitewashed. So many things were forbidden to be shown on television, including toilets.

In the mid-20th century, you could not show a toilet on TV, married couples, they couldn't be

in the same bed, even fully closed, preparing for sleep. No, no, they had to be placed in separate

twin beds. Elvis Presley performed his music on the Ed Sullivan television show, but the cameras

would only show him from the waist up because his gyrating legs were far too suggestive and

sexual. Comic books were a demune from moral panic. Graphic novels considered too sinister,

...