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Everything Is Gambling Now, With Liz Franczak

FBI Director Kash Patel leads news conference to announce arrests tied to illegal sports betting and poker game schemes, in New York City on October 23, 2025. NBA coach Chauncey Billups of the Portland Trail Blazers and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were arrested on Thursday for alleged involvement in illegal gambling. Billups, a former Detroit Pistons star and member of the NBA Hall of Fame, was arrested in connection with rigged illegal poker games tied to the Mafia, FBI Director Kash Patel said. Rozier and a former NBA player, Damon Jones, were arrested in a sports betting case, Patel said at a press conference in New York. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP)
Angela Weiss/Getty Images

The first week of the NBA season has been overstuffed with huge news stories that call into question the legitimacy of what we are being shown on the floor—namely, Jaylen Brown's spray-on hair situation. Also, the second night of NBA hoops was followed by the arrest of a current coach and a current player, and the NBA world is making sense (often poorly!) of the biggest gambling scandal to rock the sport since at least Tim Donaghy.

To make sense of it all, we were joined by Liz Franczak of the great TrueAnon podcast. Liz is both a ball-knower extraordinaire and someone with interesting thoughts on how power is wielded, so we were thrilled she could join us. We talked about the scandal, the degree to which gambling has saturated sports media, and the ways this fits into larger-order patterns of societal atomization. Speaking of which, Daniel Kolitz just penned an opus for Harper's on gooning, and we used that as a point of reference for a discussion of the gambling stuff as a mere facet of the Total Content Immersion, Forever mindset. Also, we spent a while talking about Austin Reaves and LeBron James as paragons of millennial excellence. It's a good, stuffed episode.

You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Thanks for listening!

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