2025.10.24: The Puppy Timeline

It's the wrong situation against different people than we are. We're not muscle, Tom.

I never killed anybody. I used a little information for a chisel.
That's all. It's my nature, Tom.

Hey! We're recording the podcast! Get up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is

for October 24th, 2025. How was I so early? My name is Bernie Burns.
Sitting right over there, she's just awash in hi Ashleys. It's Ashley Burns.
Say hi to Ashley.

You're early because it's early. We're recording early today.
I have learned that a lot of people say hi to Ashley. This keeps coming up over the course of this week, that people say hi to Ashley.

I'm happy to be here. Hello.
Hello, everybody.

No shade. Happy to be here.
I promise. I promise.
No shade. So, yeah, we had a,

if we sound a little bit off today, we had a... Long night last night.
It was such a night. We got woken up by kids like two or three times.

And then the kids that woke us up from all their wingling and crying about scared of what monkeys was that

slime is the new slime right i don't i don't know where these things come from the two-year-olds afraid of slime right in at night somehow and uh then the fire alarm went off at like five in the morning five in the morning and we're racing around trying to figure it out it told us like where the problem was and everything like that checked everything that's fine the kids slept through it yeah no like after keeping us up for like

over absolutely nothing, then an actual like fire alarm happens and they're like, oh,

oh, peace.

This is nice. It's the chaos that they wanted.
This is nice. That's what they wanted all along.
It was too peaceful. I don't want peace.
I want problems always.

But big news today in the world, heading into the weekend, the big news is that there's been a massive bust.

NBA head coach and player charged in sprawling sports betting and mafia-backed poker schemes. Now, that's the headline.
Well, these are two things. They lump these together.

I want to be clear about something because I had seen the headline flying around and thought, I definitely have to look into what this is. So let me read this really quickly.

Portland coach Chauncey Billips was charged with participating in a conspiracy to fix high-stakes card games tied to organized crime families that cheated unsuspecting gamblers out of at least $7 million.

So the coach, the head coach, that's a huge headline. Head coach busted in a gambling bust and fixing games.

He was charged with fixing card games. Yeah.
A lot of people can say, you know,

if he's going to do that, and he's also the head coach for a sports team, that implies that he would probably be, you know, involved in something like that. Totally get that.
But

the headlines do make it sound like a head coach was involved with an NBA gambling scheme.

The player, though, who is the guard for the Miami Heat, he's actually directly charged for helping to fix games in the NBA. I'll read this really quickly.
In the sports betting scheme, Rogier.

who is the guard for the Miami Heat and other defendants are accused of accessing private information from NBA players or coaches that could affect the player's performance and giving that information to others so that they could place wagers.

Players sometimes altered their performance or took themselves out of games early to rig prop bets, a type of wager that allows gamblers to bet on whether a player will exceed a certain statistic, such as total number of points, rebounds, or assists, according to the indictment.

In one instance, Rozier, while playing for the Charlotte Hornets in 2023, told people he was planning to leave the game early with a supposed injury, allowing gamblers to place wagers, earning them tens of thousands of dollars.

Authorities said that game against the New Orleans Pelicans raised eyebrows at the time. Rogier played the first nine minutes and 36 seconds of the game before leaving, citing a foot issue.

He did not play again that season. And there's actually, they went back and looked at some of the forum posts when that game took place.

And in the betting forums, people were like crying foul left and right about this. Oh, really? So it's like

they're like, really? Ankle?

My big takeaway from that is that the New Orleans has an NBA team called the Pelicans. Yeah, they used to be

They used to be the Charlotte Hornets, I think, and they moved over. Is that what they were? When they were the Hornets, they moved over, and then they changed their name to the Pelicans.

Look who's talking over there, Ms. Utah Jazz.

We stole them from New Orleans. Right, guess where they came from to begin with.

I always thought that was a weird name for like the Utah sports team. They need to get the B's going.
Or the Los Angeles Lakers.

That's weird. Why don't they change the names of the teams when they moved? Well, speaking of Los Angeles.
That's like a nice day on the lake in Los Angeles.

There is some Los Angeles-related news happening as well. And that is

the trial is starting for the suspect who is accused of starting the Palisades fire. Oh, boy.
And I always find like... I guess fire and arson very interesting because fire is so destructive.

And especially with something like the Palisades fire, the scale is so astronomically huge that I don't know how you go. You go, it started here and here's how it started.

Cause it's just, it's so big. How do you like trace it back? And then how do you go, this was clearly set and we know who did the set, right? Like that seems like a really difficult thing to do.

Unless,

unless someone types in, like asks chat GPT, hey, can I get in trouble if my cigarette started a fire? Oh, no, really?

Yeah.

Well, why would you, I guess you would think you were in the area at the time and you were smoking and you just chucked a lit cigarette

into the forest. So the

accused is a former Uber driver who, I guess, like went up to this Lachman area, which is where there was a fire the week previous, which I guess they thought they got out.

It must have just stayed underground, like in this magical way that fires do. Like I always thought backdraft was a myth and it's not.
Everything that fires can do, fires are crazy.

And then like a week later, it popped back up and became the Palisades fire. So

he kind of started an eight-acre, I think, fire, the Lachman fire, that then ballooned into another fire. Wait, so the guy who's on trial right now started a fire that went out and then restarted?

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, like first responders got the Lachman fire out. Okay.

And then a week later, it rekindled itself, came up from like, I don't know, its underground hiding spot and turned into the Palisades fire. And so they then subpoenaed all of his chat GPT logs?

Right. Guess you can.
Yeah.

And so he, you know, and they knew because he'd been driving, he'd been driving Uber and he dropped some people off near there and then like walked up into this Lachman area and I guess like had a cigarette and was agitated

and, you know, accidentally started a fire with his cigarette.

I like that when they tried to come up with how technology was going to fight crime in the future and they made movies like Minority Report, right?

And they had like precogs and psychic abilities built into it. They didn't just figure out that people were just asked the giant computer how to get away with crimes.
It's like all the people that

live stream their crimes.

Did you hear about the Atlanta airport

shooting that was prevented? Yeah, I did hear about that. So they busted a guy who was planning to have a mass shooting at the Atlanta airport.

And if you're not from the United States and don't fly through the South Africa. It's a very important airport.
It's a huge airport for the U.S.

It's the hub for Delta, I believe. And it's one of like the major overseas hubs as well for international travel.

so um it was like this uh i guess his his family as well called the the authorities uh and were saying that there were these issues and these issues and these issues and then he was also live streaming himself

live streaming himself doing what like like he was talking about let me see if i can figure it out but he was basically like live streaming on his way to the airport oh so they busted him like on the way this wasn't a plot that was like a week out or something no no no they they got him at the airport he he didn't have the the weapon on him at the time He left it in the car, I guess, to go in and like scope it out.

Dear Lord. Okay.
Well, it's one of those things that, like, I don't know about you. I tend to stay away from stories like that.
You know, reading about gun violence in America.

I can only read so much, you know?

But it's that like people live stream their own crimes. It's insane.

And all the time, it's like whenever you see something too, like, here's footage of the defendants beating the hell out of somebody on the street.

And then you realize one of the defendants is shooting it, like literally filming it i should say what's the right word there and then then you have to take the logical progression of then they uploaded it to social media you know what i mean it's like with all their faces in it it's like people are just insane people are crazy people are stupid they're just dumb i mean it's not even insane it's just that's just dumb you can be crazy and also be smart right right that's just pure dumbness yeah look crazy and smart you heist the loop okay right crazy and dumb you live stream it what you do is you scatter a crown and get everybody talking about the crown that's a little

dummy decoys what that was, I'm sure, at this point.

There's footage of those guys.

I saw there's a clip. Someone was, like, of all things, someone was just recording people in like this bucket, like a bucket truck.
Like a church truck.

Yeah, the lift coming down. And they probably had no idea what it was at the time, but like, why were they filming this particular bucket truck? Was it too early in the morning?

Were they about to file a noise complaint?

But someone has footage of them lowering it down and has no idea that in that frame, somewhere in that bucket is like $100 million worth of jewels. Right.

Or why are these construction workers wearing crowns and carrying scepters? Best part, at least one of the heisty types was wearing high-s.

Is that true? They had a high-vis vest on.

Hide in plain sight.

Do it.

But I don't read, like, I don't like articles about, oh man, I don't like articles about. gambling and I've just talked about it.
Haven't been able to hide my feelings very well on this podcast.

I hate all that shit. Like going back to this NBA story, it's just like now, I don't know when it happened, but gambling became just like this normal thing in the U.S.
and it's legal everywhere.

And it's one of the reasons why we had this funny thing, remember, earlier this week, where somebody had a kind of a rage bait title of a Reddit post. And I made a joke in there.

I said, you're all getting ads on the podcast tomorrow. And then the joke, I thought, I'll go ahead and I'll put the ads on.

But then I looked at it and I realized I couldn't restrict because I'd never done it before.

if there was a way to restrict what categories of ads i could put on it i couldn't do that uh and i didn't see any option for it and i wanted to restrict like gambling stuff or spotify the platform one of the platforms we use to publish this podcast is now having ice recruitment ads yeah that's that's on there and it's like i couldn't turn that stuff off so it's like I don't want to run the risk of putting that kind of stuff on the podcast.

There's never been a better time to be ad-free. Never been a better time to be ad-free.
Exactly. And this, this gambling stuff drives me nuts.

It's like, I just, it's, there's certain industries that prey directly on people's addictions.

And gambling stories, people who suffer from gambling addiction, those are some of the saddest, worst stories. It's just horrible.
It's horrible.

And then you see stuff like this where it like then starts to corrupt sports. And it just, it drives me mad.
And where it's just like, it's like, we, we already had it fixed. You know what I mean?

It was such a fight to get gambling out of this stuff, at least, you know, or put it underground. And now it's like, nah, they just like, it's too much money and they're working their way back in.

And now it's, now it's going to be a problem again. We don't even know.
Be like, ah, it's no big deal. It's everyone's personal choice and everything like that.

Gambling is like such a pure exploitation because you're just using it to siphon the money from people. Like you're using greed to exploit greed.
There's nothing in between the two things.

It's just like, I can't stand it. Well, there's also a celebration within the gambling industry itself that the house always wins, which means that ultimately the people that are gambling lose.

Like in the in the larger algebra, right? That means that if the house wins, the everyone else loses. Yeah.

And they celebrate that, right? It's one of like the major mottos of gambling is the house always wins.

And yet,

and yet people do it because you could be, there's a chance, right? There's, you tell me there's a chance. I could win it big.
Right.

And stuff like, you know, even like stuff like the lottery, I don't like it.

But if people want to spend a buck and have like a fun little fantasy conversation with their family and stuff like that i'm not i don't know how much a lottery ticket costs what is it still a buck i have no no idea i i don't know now that they're doing beg mega billions and you can get the double downs and the extra multipliers yeah i have no clue yeah the super

i stay as far away from it as i can yeah and then uh you know if they want to do that stuff and it's fun i that's it's totally fine right you know what i mean and people have personal choices there's got to be lines but like man the stuff that just exploits people and then they start to exploit the athletes or participants if it's based on something like It's terrible.

Speaking of all this, the World Series, by the way, is starting this weekend. So there's an interesting thing taking place now where Toronto's playing the Dodgers.

Clearly, I'm a Dodgers fan, but like I said, sports are low stakes to me. I got to say this, man.

Canada has had a tough year. I like really good stories in sports and all this stuff about the Dodgers being this huge, unbeatable team.

There's this one lone team in Canada, you know, and Canada has just been fucked over over by the U.S. this year.
I don't know.

If you don't watch sports at all, it's like maybe pay attention to this one, you know? You think that like this could be, this could be one of those feel-good stories.

Yeah, yeah, you know, maybe, you know, maybe this is put, put your toe in the water.

Root against America.

Give me a little fun. Have fun with it.
Just give it a try.

See how you feel about it.

No, but it's interesting because, you know, it's like, I really want the Dodgers to win, but if the Blue Jays swept the Dodgers 4-0, you would also feel like I was

kind of satisfied about that. Yeah, yeah, that's still a great story.
I got to admit, man. I got to admit, God, it's just been like Canada.
We, Canada is owed this year. They are owed, Ashley.

There is a debt to be paid. Right.
So, Blue Jays, no pressure. No, no, no, no pressure.

Actually, maybe some pressure. Yeah, 100%.
You're not even supposed to win this one, right? You know, you're just happy to be there kind of a thing.

But if you swept the American juggernaut forward to nothing, that'd be pretty cool, too. Speaking of things that make you happy,

Bernie is so Japan recently had this great deal where Japanese McDonald's were selling Pokemon themed happy meals. Yeah.
Right. To make everyone happy.
That's a good thing, right? It's like for kids.

They get a Pokemon, like a little figure. They get a Pokemon card.
All sounds great until you add the people element to it. Right.

And there were so many people just like buying happy meals and then taking the Pokemon card out and like throwing it away and then putting the card for sale online for like, you know, $100 or something.

That McDonald's had to stop selling those Happy Meals.

They had to put a hold on it. Because it was causing too much waste.
Yes. Yes.

Wouldn't the solution be?

They sold out of the Happy Meals stock they had in like a day. Oh, it's not so Happy Meal then, is it? Yes.

So they've pulled them and they're not going to like bring them back until they can figure out a way to avoid the food waste because they're like, that's not what this is about.

That's not what this is for. We don't want this.
And so it's going away. I mean, I guess it's easy to go away because they sold out in a day.
But

and we're not going to bring it back until you guys basically get your shit together and behave like, well, like the adults that are buying the happy meals. Right.
What do you think is

the top age for the targeted age range of a McDonald's happy meal? What's the upper limit of that? 12? 12? You get 12-year-olds getting a happy meal?

I would say eight, seven eight i mean look at some point you get the burger the fries you get the like you get a little drink uh and then the toy's a bonus i should put a caveat in here uh assuming in a world where millennials don't exist what's the upper age limit for it i gotta say i gotta say this i see a lot of like clips online of people being mad about people like scalpers going in and grabbing an entire shelf of pokemon cards from walmart oh i saw saw there were, there were videos of people like taking these enormous boxes.

Like it was a frenzy in a Costco or something, like grabbing these enormous boxes of Pokemon the second the forklift put them down. Yes.

And it was just, it was one of those things like, oh my God, I'm, I've never been so glad that I don't care about Pokemon cards.

Well, that's the thing is what I always read from these outrageous posts, right? Where the rage comes from is look at these adults ruining this thing that's for kids. What kids? Like, what?

We have kids. What kids under the age of 10 are into Pokemon right now? Look, I don't know.
You know, a new Pokemon game just came out and it's already sold like 6 million copies in the first week.

Yeah, all those eight-year-olds buying 6 million copies of games. Yeah.

I really think this is like

adult kids that are all preying on each other. Like, I don't think there's any kids in the mix here at all.

It is true that, like, I don't, I guess I, we should maybe ask Finn this, like, do, do some research on the local children and fauna.

Uh, but, like, how many, like, kids his age are really into, like, Pokemon at school, not Pokemon, the video games, but Pokemon, the cards. Oh, let's talk about Pokemon cards, right?

Yeah, like, this is, this is now a collectible that targets a specific group of people that are no longer kids. I guess that's true.

People that are buying these things and the people that are mad that they can't get them, those aren't, those aren't kids. You know, the crazy thing?

There was an NBA coach that was just indicted for Pokemon cards. Right, he pulled charizard out too soon

actually wasn't the coach the coach was fixing the card game fix it fixed the deck what if the card games he was fixing were pokemon

that'd be funny like some diehard sports guy is like ah man they went after the coach he fixed a card game no big deal who hasn't fixed a poker game at some point what magic the gathering get that fucking guy out of here

by the way that was my portland accent

that's very accurate. Well, I feel like you're channeling, because it was the whole thing with this,

it was like

this gambling ring was also that it involved like mafia families, right? That there's like some like crime family that

I have not read the term Cosa Nostra since like the Godfather movies were out. Right.

So now you know what they're doing is now they're like leaning on NBA coaches to like, to what, like star in their high-stakes poker games or whatever and like be a distraction or something for the for these other like high-stakes players so that their magical card machine can organize the deck for them.

Is that what it is? Yeah, I was reading about it and it's. I stayed away from the card game one because I was like, this is mixing it up too much.
No, it was shockingly like high-tech.

Like if it was the premise of a movie, I wouldn't be surprised. But yeah, they were basically like using star power to

like at the table to either get people to the table or distract them while at the table.

And then they had this really high-tech card sorting machine that would like shuffle the deck in a specific way uh and then uh someone would signal to um everyone at the table like because basically everyone who wasn't the mark was part of the fix oh really they're all in the and they would signal like all the other players in the game about like who was gonna win the hand yeah so they knew how to bet see now i'm seeing lots of sports clips online too of like poor performances by players and now they have to explain like what now everyone's suspect at this point right it's like you got an injury explain that it's gonna have an impact because it affects affects the trust in the players to actually do their best.

Okay. So I got to bring something else up because this came up as well.
I was just doing my impression of the guy from Portland who upset

Portland accent. That the coach fixed Magic the Gathering games.
I just found out in an article about them moving the Pro Bowl festivities to the same week as the Super Bowl. What's the Pro Bowl?

Pro Bowl is kind of like an exhibition game from like the, it's like the all-star game, but they call it the Pro Bowl in the NFL.

And it was always a weird thing because it was like, you know, it's a high risk for injuries in the NFL, right? And it's an extra game with all the best players and everything like that.

And it always turned out to be kind of a lame game because everyone was playing kind of, you know, half-assed so that nobody gets hurt. I found out now, they're moving it closer to the Super Bowl.

I thought this whole thing was a worry about injuries and stuff like that.

At some point in the last few years,

they moved the all-star NFL football game. They moved it from tackle football to flag football.

And they're pushing this narrative super hard about how everyone is super into flag football all over the world. It's one of the fastest growing sports.

It sounds to me like the lamest thing I've ever heard of in my entire life. Here's what you do.
You know how you make that exciting? How? We already learned this. You put them in lingerie.
Right.

Or get puppies to play it, right? I mean, come on.

Everyone loved the puppy bowl. Everyone loved the, what was it? What was it? What did they call the lingerie when they got girls in like underwear to play football?

I don't know what you're talking about, actually.

I never looked at that in my life. I think it's called the lingerie bowl.
I think that's what it's called. Lingerie Bowl.
That was of a time, too, right? It was.

That was like very man show kind of stuff.

Well, it was also, we were, it had that nexus in our timeline, was like, hey, look, do we want to go down the lingerie path or do we want to go down the puppy path? We've got a choice here.

Here's your two options. And we chose to be the puppy.

And you know what? I think it's the right choice. Oh my God.
Bernie, what? Spot the puppy from the puppy bowl has been accused of match fixing. Oh, get the fuck out of here.
How did that happen?

Got paid off in milk bones.

Who could have seen it coming? I'm telling you, it's Ashley. Once they legalize sports betting, even the puppies are implicated.
Every, it's everyone, no one can be trusted.

All right, well, anything else? Who do we have to thank for leading us into this weekend where there will be no gambling or vices in May?

I want to say a big thank you to those whose integrity is never to be questioned. Skylar Dowell and Cody Drack.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com. All right, well, that does it for us this week ending October 24th, 2025.

We're going to be back to talk to you on Monday. We hope you will be here as well.
Bye, everybody.