Interview: Daniel Sailofsky, Sociologist of Sport and Law, on Saying Goodbye to His NFL Fandom
In this episode Shireen Ahmed interviews Daniel Sailofsky, a lecturer in criminology and sociology at Middlesex University London, whose research examines gender and gender-based violence, masculinity, sport sociology and labor, and the sociology of law. They discuss Sailofsky's recent article in The Guardian called, "NFL season is here but I won’t be following anymore. I can’t un-see the harm it causes." They talk about his decision to say goodbye to a longtime NFL fandom, which includes known reports about the damages of CTE to players and the way the league does not care about violence against women perpetrated by the league's members.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Shireen: Hey, flamethrowers, Shireen here. Football has begun. And when I say that, I don't mean proper football. I mean American football. And to discuss this, this week's guest is Dr. Daniel Sailofsky. He is a lecturer in criminology and sociology at Middlesex University in London, whose research examines gender and gender based violence, masculinity, sports, sociology, and labor, and sociology of law. Daniel has also worked as an assistant coach in both women and men's basketball at the collegiate level in Canada, and is rooting for the Aces, and is a huge Toronto Raptors fan. And we love that on this show. Welcome, Dr. Sailofsky.
Daniel: Thank you so much. I'm so, so happy to be on with you. Big fan of the podcast.
Shireen: So, before we get into the really important stuff, like your piece that just came out in the Guardian, and I'm really interested to know more you as somebody who not only researches and talks about systems in the NFL, you are a fan.
Daniel: Yeah.
Shireen: Tell me a little bit about who you rooted for, how that started? Particularly you being Canadian. How did that start? And then when did you start studying it?
Daniel: Yeah. So, I'm a Canadian. I was born and raised in Montreal. So this is actually important for the the football part of it, because when you're in Canada and you’re – this is the early to mid 2000s – and don't have a satellite dish or don't have one of those fancy packages of the NFL, you get CBS, Fox, and the one o’clock, four o'clock games generally. And there's just a few teams in the northeast that are generally the teams that are on at that time. So it's the New York Giants, the New York Jets, the Miami Dolphins, the New England Patriots. The Buffalo Bills are on a lot as well. So basically the NFC east and the AFC east divisions. And I became a New York Giants fan. The 2000 Super Bowl against the Ravens, and the Giants got actually crushed in the game.
But my dad always taught me, like, you should cheer for the underdog in games. So I was like, okay, the Giants are the underdogs. The Ravens have given up like 12 points in the entire playoffs at this point. So, okay. I'm gonna be a Giants fan. I was somewhat of a Giants fan in elementary school. And then when high school started, made some friends who were also NFL fans, and I kind of made that a part of making friends and, you know, talking about our favorite teams. One guy was an Eagles fan. One guy was a Cowboys fan, same division as the Giants. So that kind of expanded the fandom a little bit. Became a big fan in high school. It didn't hurt that they won a championship in 2007 and then 2011. So, that was a lot of fun for me as a football fan.
Shireen: And was your family historically a fan too? Because a lot of the time NFL fans, it's like a generational thing. Like, they inherit the fandom. Like me, I'm a Habs fan because of my mom, right? Like, I’m begrudgingly a Habs fan.
Daniel: I am a begrudging a Habs fan as well. That I got from my dad and from my parents for sure. But they didn't really have a football team. Interestingly, my grandmother, who I never met, she passed when my dad was 22. She was a huge Miami Dolphins fan.
Shireen: Wow! [laughs]
Daniel: Yeah, very weird. But it is actually more common than you think that Jewish people in Canada become Miami Dolphins fans because they travel to Florida in the wintertime. And the Miami Dolphins are there. So it's more common than you'd think. And the Miami Dolphins were really good in the 70s. So a lot of people's parents are fans. But I always tell the story about how my grandmother, she used to knit socks when the Dolphins were playing or when the Habs were playing. And when she would be really nervous, she would knit like super fast. So whenever the Habs were on a playoff run or anything, my dad would have 20 new pairs of socks, always, because that was her nervous habit while she watched the games.
Shireen: So, your bubbe is like a huge NFL…I love the sock story. I love this story so much.
Daniel: Yeah. I never met her, unfortunately. She passed, but she was a huge Habs fan and a huge Dolphins fan. My dad always says it's too bad that we never met, because she was a much bigger sports fan than my grandfather is, who’s still alive. But I actually wasn't a Dolphins fan. My best friend growing up was a Dolphins fan. And so I would go to his house a bunch during my high school years and kind of early twenties. And that's a little bit something I mentioned in the piece, which is part of the ritual of football as well, which is as much a part of the fandom I think as just the game. Like, I love the strategy and kind of the cat and mouse game between coaches and that kind of thing. It's always been appealing to me. But just the ritual of football has been really important to me. I think it's really important to a lot of people. So, the idea of hanging out with your friends on Sunday. And this kind of is something that brings people together in a lot of ways, not just the people playing it, but people watching it.
So I had the tradition of going over to my friend's house, 1:00pm eastern, make sure we're there before that. His mom would cook up a feast of food, which is like, another commentary about kind of gender roles. She would be in the kitchen and we'd be watching the game, which it's not the greatest, obviously. But she would cook up this feast. We would hang out, I'd hang out with his brother, with his dad. Other friends would come by too. And this is something I did every Sunday of every football season for years. So honestly, losing that is just as big a part as anything else. I live in London now, so I wouldn't have that anyways, but group chats, a point of conversation – losing that part of football is honestly just as big as anything else.
Shireen: And your decision to not watch football anymore after being a fan and having this history of like community and familial ties through sport, which is quite common as well, is, you know, really interesting, because you talk about having a more critical eye after learning more about it and studying sociology, but also looking at the systems about it. And like you said, whether they’re public spending…And these are all things that we've, you know, gone into depth on Burn It All Down. But something you talk about a lot in the article is also CTE and the concern about that and the effects that it has and the unknown effects that we actually don't even know how much further things can go. But you point very much to that. And you know, the concussion epidemic, as you call it, which is very much foundational in the sport, because it's literally a sport where you bash your heads against each other. So like, how do you reconcile? And you're talking about your difficulty. So essentially, this is about you breaking up with football right now. You're separating right now from football.
Daniel: That's it. It's funny, in the first draft of the article, that's sort of what I wrote about. I actually had a line in there, something like, “Breakups are hard, even if it's the right thing to do.” And it is that kind of thing. Like, sometimes I feel a little bit like self-righteous talking about it in this way, but it is still…It’s a relationship I've had with an institution and with a sport for a long time. And I'm severing that relationship. But it's because of the things that we've talked about and that I've written in the article, which is it's just become too hard for me to kind of ignore and unsee kind of the harms that come with the sport. It doesn't hurt that there's other sports and there's other kind of amusement and fun that I can get from other places, right? Like, I watch a lot more women's basketball now, which is still going on. I watch a lot more basketball in general. Still, losing football is a big one.
But the moment for me really happened, I guess, this summer. I've been doing some research for a project that I'm working on, and I really started digging into some of the concussion stories more so than just the statistics. So, I kind of…I knew about the statistics, and I mentioned this in the piece, but it's really one thing to know statistics, and it's one thing to, you know, hear that a bunch of NFL players are filing a lawsuit against the NFL. There's this many players who have CTE after. And it's another thing to actually hear the stories. And this is when really good investigative journalism comes in and is so important. And you hear the stories about players who are, you know, 49 years old, and when they, after dying, the report comes out that they have the brain of a 90 year old with Alzheimer’s. Or that one of the players, in the last days of his life, was, the quote is, “occasionally catatonic in the fetal position for days at a time.”
Shireen: Wow.
Daniel: Knowing that this is the legacy of football for a lot of these men, and in seeing the kind of different reaction and different understanding of their own careers that a lot of these men have after is over…It became just impossible for me to swallow. I remember even the moment I was just sitting there reading this and reading another piece about another player who committed suicide or a player who died in prison or players who were suffering from dementia in their fifties. And I just remember thinking, like, I cannot continue to support this. And I said that months ago now, but now's the time I guess. And yeah, that was the straw that broke the camels back, if you will. But there's a whole bunch of other issues associated with football as well that we can definitely get into.
And these are things like the labor issues and the way that players are paid and not paid at the collegiate level. The way that they deal with violence against women, right? The way that there's this profit above all ethos in the NFL, and in professional sports at large, where players are kept on teams or they're still acquired as long as they continue to perform, no matter really what the allegation of violence is against them. That's another issue that we see in the NFL. So, this is the kind of combination, this cocktail of harm and violence that really pushed me towards this decision where…I mean, I'm not some hero because I'm deciding not to watch football, but it’s the decision I made. And I want to kind of explain why that decision is important to me and why I think maybe, other people, it'll be important to them too.
Shireen: So, there's two things that I wanted to expand on, is one, that I understand very much what it's like to have a turbulent relationship on and off again. And I've tried to break up with the Habs many, many times. Thanks, Geoff Molson. Like, really that whole situation…
Daniel: That last Cup run pulled us in, eh? Pulled us in again.
Shireen: It pulled us in! And I called my mom. And then just, it was a lot. And then they draft Logan Mailloux, and I'm like, I'm out. I’m out!
Daniel: Yeah.
Shireen: So many layers of that, of drafting someone who didn't wanna be drafted, someone with a sexual assault misconduct record, like, you know, no. There’s so many, again, layers of that, but just like this idea of why, why do we feel we need to explain our decisions with this? Is it like, does it…Where does that come from? Does it come from the communities we're part of? Is it like this sort of self-loathing at the time? Like, because I felt very much the same way I've gone again. I talked to my mom about this for the podcast. Why are we stuck here? And why do we feel the need to explain why when we decide to leave?
Daniel: It's a really great question. And what I haven't really considered, but the first thing that comes to mind is just the elevated place that professional and elite sport has in the world is it's such a cultural touchstone where it's expected that you'll at least have a passing knowledge of a lot of things. It's expected that the great game that happened yesterday, that you will have watched it, right? And there's just, especially for people who have been sports fans before, you are kind of part of this community. And one of the other reasons I think that people expect…And maybe this is a bit cynical of me, but I think that when you leave, it forces other people to consider their own staying. And I don't think people want to do that necessarily. And it's not a comfortable thing to do, right? It's not comfortable to interrogate your own tacit involvement or your own involvement in any way in systems of harm, right? The same way that people don't want to consider necessarily the exploitation that might be going on behind some of their favorite consumer products, right? Because people don't really want to deal with that. And when other people leave the sport institutions that they're also fans of, it forces a little bit, sometimes, maybe it does, forces an interrogation of some of that.
Shireen: Exactly. And I think that's one of the things that we do. We interrogate so much on the show, but then we also have…We struggle with it. Like, we love this. Like, I will have a continual struggle with the Men's World Cup and the Women's World Cup as a result. I'm a huge lifelong soccer fan and player, but that entire mafia organization is corrupt to the hilt, but then how do I reconcile that? And I've spoken with this at length with Dr. Jules Boykoff, who’s a friend of the show.
Daniel: Absolutely.
Shireen: I'm like, Jules, how do I do this? And he spoke with me once about this and said there's a way to not. And we were talking about the Olympic context, but athletes don't have a choice of where they go and where they decide and, you know, there's layers of it. And like I say all the time, and I've learned from academics on the show and my friends who are academics in the community, it’s complicated, Daniel. Like, it is.
Daniel: People hate that response.
Shireen:[laughs] But it’s true.
Daniel: I mean, we often search for these kind of binary good versus evil narratives. But I mean, there's a lot of evil out there and there's a lot of good. But the institutions themselves are so mixed up with both that it's not really possible to uncritically love something and uncritically…And when I say uncritically, I mean without at least thinking about and talking about when it's necessary, some of the inequities and some of the harm that's involved, right? The FIFA example is a really, really good one. Like, you love football. Of course. And more than that, I think is another thing, is that you love the players. And that's part of how I at least think about it in my own way. I do think of it from kind of a labor perspective, right? So I think about the fact that do I dislike a lot of what Amazon does? Yes. Do I have a problem with like the people, most of the workers at Amazon? No, not at all. I understand that they're working because they have to and they're doing with their life what they can given the structural constraints that exist there. And it's the same with athletes. And I write this a little bit in the piece, and I can't get into it as much as I would like to, but the difficult part is that I want to see the players who have been sacrificing their bodies actually get paid properly for their work.
Shireen: Yeah. You talked about compensation.
Daniel: Right. I wanna see them be emotionally and socially fulfilled. I want to see them be treated fairly and equally. But at the same time, the institution itself is rotten, and that's a really hard situation to kind of reconcile, because you have these two competing interests and you want to support the workers, the athletic workers who are doing this labor, who are suffering, who are being exploited in a lot of cases. But at the same time, as I said, I wanna find another way that these athletes can get that same economic stability, that emotional fulfillment, that community, without having to bash their brains in for it, right? Without having to sacrifice years of their lives and more than just years of their lives, but years of good living, right? So maybe they live for a long time, but they have constant migraines or they have constant memory issues or their knees are unable to move properly so they can't play with their kids and their friends' kids, right? All these other issues. I want to find a way…I’m hoping that we can find a way to have sport, have the fun and the competition and the joy, the community, have all of that without having the exploitation and the destruction of people's bodies, right? That's the kind of difficulty that we live in.
Shireen: You talked about the players being workers who use their bodies. What about evil that emanates from those players, like sexualized violence? Because it does come up. Like, we've talked about Watson a lot on the show, but you mentioned the Buffalo Bills as something you got to see and watch. And I'm in Toronto and, because of the proximity to Buffalo, there’s a lot of Bills fans here and, you know, talking about the Buffalo Bills and player Matt Araiza and the allegations against him. Like, I’ve seen people not care about that. In the case of Deshaun Watson, I remember seeing a meme that somebody had shared, and it was a picture of her father with a young son and it said something terrible.
Daniel: Awful.
Shireen: Like, just in a sense of dismissing all of the allegations and all of that behavior, all of it. Just say, you know, we wanna watch our game. We support our team no matter what. Now, why is this issue with NFL culture so polarizing? And is it just those systems of toxic masculinity that are prevalent here? Because that photo with that young boy was so upsetting. I expect that the father, there's fans that will do that, but to teach your son to dismiss allegations at all and dismiss women, essentially – what is that? And how much did that play in your decision to step away?
Daniel: Yeah, it played quite a big role in my decision not to watch anymore. And this is the crux of a lot of my earlier research and still research I do now about violence against women and NFL players. And yes, some of it is the masculine cultures, right? So, the toxic masculinity, the hegemonic masculinity that we see in sport cultures, whether that's hockey locker rooms, baseball fields, football stadiums. It happens in all these places, right? Where there is this masculine culture that privileges this sort of dominant, physically violent, physically superior and dominating form of masculinity where men are valued more for their control and dominance of women. And we see that manifest in violence. But I think there is even more to it in the professional sport case, which is that a lot of these decisions are made not from any harm reducing perspective, right? Whether that's harm for the players or harm for the victims. It’s made in a very crass dollars and cents decision, right?
So we see players like Tyreek Hill, who had a violence against women allegation when he was in college. I think it was choking his pregnant girlfriend at the time. I believe he then had a child abuse case with the kid that was eventually born a few years later once he was already in the NFL. But he’s a supreme, supreme talent, right? There's no denying his talents on the football field. He's probably the fastest player in the NFL. He's extremely valuable to his teams. And because of that, he signed a 120, I think it is, million dollar contract this past year for three or four years. And maybe I'm not getting the numbers right, but around there. And he's had an illustrious and will continue to have an illustrious NFL career.
And we don't always see that though in the sense that we don't always see every player who has an allegation just brush it aside. If a player is a third string tight end, if they’re, you know, the seventh offensive lineman or the eighth offensive lineman on a roster, teams do deem that they're “not worth” keeping around, even if they've just been accused. And this is where some of the tension comes, I think, because you have this commentary from people who want to support the Deshaun Watsons of the world, who say, hey, we live in a criminal legal system where we're innocent until proven guilty. So, sure. Deshaun Watson's been accused 24 times by 24 different women. And there's even more women who have not accused but have talked to journalists. But that doesn't matter because he hasn't been tried in a court of law, and we deal with innocent until proven guilty. To be clear, I’m talking about this hypothetical person saying this. This is not me saying this. I hope that's clear. But that's the kind of argument we get on the other side.
And what I will always point to is that if that even is an argument that you want to make, if that is an argument that you wanna make and you want to just completely decontextualize the situation, you wanna take away all the power relationships that exist between a professional athlete backed by a multibillion dollar organization. You wanna get rid of all that, and you wanna just say, well, the NFL should just deal with whoever's actually guilty. Then we have examples on the other side, where players who are not super valuable get cut instantly once there's reports of any kind of allegation of anything really, because they're just not valuable to their team, they're not worth he harm that they've caused or allegedly caused.
Shireen: But I don't hear about them. Like, it's very interesting to me that you're talking about this, because you don't hear about them in mainstream media.
Daniel: There’s sometimes stories.
Shireen: But that's part of the problem that, you know, sports media is complicit in these systems in the way…Like, I don't hear about these players just getting cut. You hear about the ones that don't, because like you said in the beginning of this conversation, it's profit at the top, right?
Daniel: It's absolutely profit oriented, and teams know that. Like, coaches do not keep their jobs for fielding the team of the nicest players. They keep their jobs for fielding the teams that win games, right? So if coaches can decide that if they can in any way justify bringing a guy in, they will bring that guy in if he thinks that they can help the team win. And this is stemming from the way that we think about our sports, right? Where winning is so far the paramount, the most important thing that we have to deal with, that teams have to consider. It's a logical – using these constraints – decision to keep these players around and then to cut players who've been alleged of anything, right? If there’s any allegation. And they use those players sort of as props, right? They use them to say, hey, look, we really care about violence, because we cut this guy. Sure, we probably weren't gonna sign him to another contract anyways, but that's not important. We cut him because we care about violence against women.
But it's like the Seattle Seahawks are a good example of this, right? They cut Chad Wheeler after a horrific video of a violent assault he had on his, I think it was his girlfriend at the time. Cut the next day. Backup offensive lineman, doesn't matter. But the Seahawks had drafted a player a few years ago with the same kind of violent allegation, right? Like, so this kind of propping this up in this decision up as an example of how they deal with violence against women, it’s just disingenuous, I guess, is the word I would use. It's not really based in any kind of morality. Their decisions are not based in any morality. Sometimes the morality coincidentally lines up in the sense that it’s the right business decision, but it's not based in any protection of women.
Shireen: No, exactly. And I think that's really interesting because like, isn't it like 45% of NFL fans are women?
Daniel: Yeah. I mean, there’s a huge swath of women. I want to stress, though, there are lots of women who are not champions for feminist issues, right? Just having the identity does not necessarily mean that you're gonna fight for the rights of that group. I mean, we see examples of this all the time.
Shireen: Oh, we know that. We know that on Burn It All Down. Women absolutely uphold systems of toxic patriarchy. Yes, absolutely.
Daniel: Because sometimes it benefits them. It benefits them individually. I mean, we saw this…This is a different example, but the classic examples of kind of white women who, you know, did not support the advancement of women of color in a variety of different fields throughout history, right? Choosing to solidify their own position and gain whatever small amounts of power they could get, but from their status there. And so that's the first thing I'll say is that, yes, 45% of fans are women, but the NFL is banking on the fact that those women are also more concerned with the wins and losses and they can stomach the violence. And frankly, they're probably thinking, and probably correctly in some cases, that many of these women are going to side with the view where these women are just “out to get” these men, [Shireen laughs] they're out to get them for money, they're out to ruin their lives, which is just…
It’s such an absurd claim, because they usually don’t make that much money or any money from this, right? And the other thing is, the idea to minimize what coming out as a survivor of violence actually does to a person, to minimize having to talk about this with the police, with journalists, in courts. It’s just atrocious to minimize what that actually entails, and to say, oh yeah, they just go, they tell their story and they make some money. Like, that is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the trauma that's involved in being a survivor of violence. And then having to talk about it, not just to your friends, your therapist, your confidants, but to the world. To minimize that and say that, oh yeah, they just do it because it's advantageous to them…It’s frankly ridiculous.
Shireen: Yeah. I think all those things are…I mean, I grew up watching my dad with the Minnesota Vikings lose every week. He was a huge fan and he inherited that fandom because a CFL coach went, you know, from Winnipeg, went south and went to Minnesota. His name is Bud something, I can't remember right now, but the history of that…
Daniel: A lot of Bud somethings who coach football, yeah. [laughs]
Shireen: Yeah. And so he took half the roster with him. So my dad, you know, got very connected to the NFL that way. And I watched them lose. I mean, I've clearly supported Kap, so I support players. You know, Michael Bennett's a friend of the show. Like you say, you root for the people. And that's really interesting to me, you know, rooting for the people. So, as you talked about in your piece, wanting that respect and that compensation for those players in that way. Does it make you feel…And this is a bit…I’m not trying to press you here, but you know, this is a conversation. Do you feel like you're abandoning these players? Because at the same time, this is a podcast called Burn It All Down. Amira talked about this on our five year anniversary of rebuilding. So at the end of your piece, you say, I don't wanna wait too long. So who are you looking to to rebuild? And what about those players in the meantime?
Daniel: On one hand, I think that my exodus from the game is not going to be…It’s not gonna be the thing that makes so many people leave. So in that sense, the NFL is still the most popular sport in North America, definitely in the United States. So I think from that perspective, they're not being abandoned. But I am still abandoning them, which is absolutely true. And I guess I would say that my hope would be that the sport can be changed in a variety of ways that would make it safer for players, that would give them more say in their own working conditions, that would give them more of the revenue. So, having a league where teams are more player owned, where it's more worker ownership within the league and within the teams would be one avenue. And then just actually taking real, tangible steps to change the the violence of the game, right?
And to be clear, I don't really know how it can be done. I don't know how we can have tackle football the way it is and the way that athletes are much faster, much stronger, much bigger than they were in the past, and actually reduce concussions in a meaningful way and reduce brain injury and reduce injury, right? There's always the line with football that the injury rate in football is a hundred percent. You will get injured at some point. And is it possible that this is not a sport that we should have? I think about the way that we might look back at certain activities that we've done as human beings in the past. So like, bare knuckle boxing, or the way that gladiators used to fight to the death, right? And we look at that right now as barbaric, right? We look at that as like, oh my goodness, I can't believe society let people do this. I can't believe that people would cheer this on.
And sometimes they think, will we look that way at tackle football in 50 years? Will people look back in 50, 60, 70 years and be like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe that we used to play this and it used to be such a big part of culture, where all these players were eventually dying early and living horribly after their careers. And we were just okay with it. And sometimes I think that maybe there's no way to change football, but that doesn't mean there's no way to change sport, right? I do think that there's sports and there's ways that these players can…And people who wanted to play football might find outlets somewhere else, right? Whether that's in track and field, or volleyball, or basketball. I mean, I think that there are other ways, and with football, it's just very hard for me at least to, at this point, imagine a version of football that is equitable and that is safe.
Shireen: Yeah. And I mean, you have the evidence and you have the experience lived in academics to be able to back that up.
Daniel: Yeah. There's a lot of evidence, unfortunately, and we're just getting more and more of it. And that's the other thing with the CTE and the concussion issues specifically, is that we're just gonna get more and more of it, because there's no way to diagnose CTE when people are alive.
Shireen: Yeah.
Daniel: So it's only postmortem only when players agree to have their brains actually looked at. And I mean, the big study is from…I think it's 2017, where they looked at 220 something football players of any level. So that could be CFL, NFL, college, high school, any level. 220. And I believe like 190 something had CTE. But of the NFL players, which is 111 players, 110 at CTE. 110 out of 111. It's 99% – over 99% actually. And so, it's one of those things where it's like, we know the evidence, so we know it's going to keep happening. There's just no way around this. Like, it reminds me a little bit of the climate crisis in some ways, where we know these issues are going to be coming because we have the evidence, we have the models, we can predict it. There's no real way to stop those, but there is a way to stop the ones that don't have CTE yet, the ones that do not have repeated concussions yet. So that's at least where my thinking goes.
Shireen: And I don't want to, you know, leave this on a sort of a sad note, but you have embraced, as you said, women's basketball. So it's not as if you have this huge canyon of sadness and loss. Like, you love one of the greatest teams and you're good. So, I mean, I do understand, and I'm glad you spoke about the historical and familial and community connections you have to this sport. And it is sad to have to do that. But knowing what you know, and doing what you do, you know, that's a responsible…And I really do appreciate you coming on the show to talk about it. I think that these conversations need to happen so people can make actually informed decisions. And one of the problems that I think sports media, and as somebody actively in that, is that all this information wasn't readily available to fans.
Daniel: That's a great point.
Shireen: Now we're seeing dissemination of that information and, you know, the merging of journalists and academics, and Burn It All Down is, you know, huge proponents of that. And having you on is really important.
Daniel: Thank you.
Shireen: I do, however, really wanna talk to you about this aubergine peanut butter coconut dish that you made.
Daniel: Yes.
Shireen: So we're gonna pivot.
Daniel: I love a good happy pivot from the sad stuff. [Shireen laughs] So let's do it.
Shireen: So, where did you find this recipe, Daniel? And tell me why it's so good. Because you were talking about it before we started recording, and folks, let me tell you, I feel like I need to go visit you and Dr. Madeline, who is your wife, for those that don't know.
Daniel: We would love that. We would love that.
Shireen: So tell me about this coconut dish.
Daniel: I'm like a pretty good cook, not a great cook. I'm like more kind of homey dishes, but I love to scroll on Instagram and I just get so many food posts. My wife's a vegetarian, I'm vegetarian at home. So we've been getting more and more veggie posts. And basically I just scroll around. And when I can't sleep, sometimes just not very good, but when I can't sleep or whenever I have a little bit of time to just mindlessly thumb around, I'm just looking at food recipes, basically. And I saw one where this guy was making peanut butter aubergine curry. They use aubergine to mean eggplant in the UK, which took a little getting used to, but eggplant is what we call it in North America. But peanut butter aubergine curry, basically it's eggplant cut up, kind of diced. Peanut butter, coconut milk, a whole bunch of spices.
I believe it's a West African dish. I don't know what part, unfortunately. The guy in the video didn't actually say it, but he served it with coconut rice and with plantains. So when I'm like really going crazy, I do serve it with the plantains, but I always make it with the coconut rice too, which is really easy to make. Much easier than I thought it would be actually. So, that brings me a lot of joy as well. And it’s probably Maddie's favorite dish that I make too, so she's always very pleased, which makes me really happy. And I still haven't made it for guests though. So really, I would love it if you could come visit us in north London, maybe see an Arsenal match, Arsenal women's match. They play a few matches at Emirates too. That would be a lot of fun. But it is a good dish. Hope we're not hyping it up too much, but I think it's a winner.
Shireen: I'm so excited. I love all that. I love food talk. It's very important to me. And London is such a great place to be for food.
Daniel: Yeah. We live in a good food area. We have the grocery stores, but we also live in a neighborhood in north London where like there's every kind of international grocery store. So there's a like Chinese grocery store. There's a few middle Eastern grocery stores near us. There's a big market of like fresh stuff. It's everything you could want. So we've got some plans if you ever cross the pond and come visit us.
Shireen: Yeah. Haven't been across the pond in a while. I need to make my way there. We will put a link to his piece in the Guardian in the show notes. I recommend everybody read it. It's also something that I find the connections as well of Canadians who really are invested in the NFL and who study it or who like it, I find that really fascinating because, you know, we don't have it here. We have our CFL here, and then that's a conversation I'll have with you another time, because I love…Honestly, we only need three downs.
Daniel: Yeah.
Shireen: Why do you need more than that?
Daniel: It's also a faster paced game. That's true too.
Shireen: Right!
Daniel: A lot of scoring. The wider field makes it, like, it's just passing all the time. It's a fun game. But a lot of the same issues, unfortunately, that we've talked about, but it is a fun one to watch.
Shireen: Yeah. And I'm so glad. And you're the first person to ever agree with me on that. Everyone else is like, pshhh. So, I'm really grateful.
Daniel: If you got the best players to play CFL football, because it's true that the NFL still has better players, like better athletes. But you got the best players to play CFL, I think it would actually be more interesting and people would realize like, oh, this version of the game is actually better. It's just that the athletes are better in the NFL.
Shireen: I love that take, and I'm gonna hold you to that. [laughs] Anyways, like I said, thank you so much for coming on Burn It All Down. Where can our listeners find your work?
Daniel: So, you can find it on my personal website, danielsailofsky.com, but also on Twitter. Also just Daniel Sailofsky. The beauty of having a name that nobody else has is all the good handles are readily available. There's like five Sailofskys in the whole world. So @DanielSailofsky, all one word, on Twitter is where you can find most of it.
Shireen: Thanks so much. And I'm someone who doesn't follow the teams or know everything, but I know about the issues and the systems in the NFL. So I really appreciate you coming to talk to me about it and explaining the way you have. So, look forward to seeing more of your work. And again, thank you for being a flamethrower and being on the show.
Daniel: Of course. Thank you so much. Aces in four is my prediction, by the way.
Shireen: [laughs] Okay. I'm so glad you said that. That's all for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web social media wizard. Burn It All Down is a part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and TuneIn. For show links and transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find a link to our merch at our Bonfire store. And of course, thank you, thank you, thank you to our patrons. Your support means the world to us. And if you wanna become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. We could not do this without you. Burn on, and not out.