The Steve Dangle Podcast - Foundation | June 7, 2020

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

On this episode of The Steve Dangle Podcast, EA Sports commits to fixing the rampant racism in Chel (00:00), Tori Hunter speaks about being black and playing for the Red Sox (16:15), Jesse attended the protests in Toronto on Friday (23:30), Shannon Sharpe, Drew Brees, and the NFL's response (30:00), let us not forget that the Ottawa Senators are a catastrophe (37:30), Neil Young's Pono (58:00), Jay-Z's role in the NFL (1:01:00), Adam's History Corner! (1:05:30), and the press conference: holes in straws, Last Dance Leaf teams, and more! (1:19:00). Originally aired: June 7, 2020 Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/rsH4CdATk4U Merch: https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/fancydangleshirts Follow us on Twitter: @Steve_Dangle, @AdamWylde, & @JesseBlake Follow us on Instagram: @SteveDangle, @AdamWylde, & @Jesse.Blake Subscribe to us on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/steve-dangle-podcast/id669828195?mt=2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

panago pizza presents s d p the steve dangle podcast with your host steve dangle adam wild and jesse blake let's go well doozy of a week um i think the first thing we're going to talk about is just a bit a bit of a scheduling thing because technically speaking i guess right now we're in the off season and uh sort of middle of season so what's what's going to happen here and i think james myrtle talked about this in the athletic recently is it's going to be a while probably before the schedule ends at the end of june or sorry in the middle of june and then we have the draft and we do free agency on that same time frame it could be three four years before that that actually leans out to be that way again as we readjust for us um you know one of the things

obviously that's happened is that we realized we're going to be probably working pretty intensely as soon as August hits, uh, cause we'll actually have games to talk about, which is amazing. Um, and that could go to three months. So right up until the end of October. And then our off season after that, it's going to be like 45 minutes. Yeah. I think the month of November and then it's back into it in, in mid December. So, um, so what we're going to do is we're going to reduce the amount and up the quality. Uh, And what I mean by that is obviously there's been a ton lately in the news that's been newsworthy and talk about, and it's crossed over into hockey,

and we've discussed it. The murder of George Floyd, the protests, the pandemic, the scheduling, who's doing what draft, you know, all that stuff has kind of all been a part of this show. But as we inch closer to that, we also kind of want to get our rest and be ready to go and have some semblance of an offseason. So we're going to reduce it down after this week. So you'll still have this Sunday show.

And then Wednesday after this week, you'll get one on Wednesday, every single week up until the new season starts. We're going to treat it basically like July and August in June. Cool. There you go. Sounds good. I'm down.

Everyone listening also said, sounds good, boy, whatever, man, whatever. I, you know,

it's, it, it, it, it, part of it comes from the fact too, that it's like, okay,

So, you know, we have had the debate about, well, how are they going to do the schedule about 40 times? And I think at a certain point you realize, okay, I'm going to have, we need an off season and we need, we need, we need to fuel up. And a lot of us have gone through a lot of changes and big things lately. And, and, and, you know, it's, it's the summer things are happening. So I think we'll, we'll, we'll get to that point. The first thing though, I really want to talk about, and I am so proud of this because I

had nothing to do with it, but very proud. is the is jesse along with two other people on twitter getting a hold of ea sports to make a change in the nhl game and i want to know jesse i want you to kind of recap this because it it it's both sides of what we've been talking about it's the um it's the protests it's the injustices and it's our favorite sport being involved in it and uh in this particular case the the one video game company that's allowed to make a game regarding that sport so can you talk about your experiences and then and then how one tweet sort of changed things yeah so one thing that's been happening over the last like month or so before even the movement to support the black

community after george floyd's death is um on twitter uh myself and a couple other people kind of kick-started a movement to get um racist names banned in ea shl because it's it's uh not mince words about it it's terrible uh rampant it's rampant sorry that's what i was looking for it's rampant every time you log on if you play multiple games you're gonna come across someone with a racist name and they target the black community mainly it's it's very offensive and for um for i don't know it was probably about a week or so when the akim aliyu story came out myself and everybody who engaged with the tweet just tweet out all of their screenshots of all these names tic-tac-toe mar every day every day man and we're like hey EA if this if we're gonna

try and make hockey for everyone we can't have this and they dropped the ball completely the last decade they've been running with this game because they've done nothing about it they don't have a system where you can easily report these people for being racist and get their accounts banned they're they haven't created a system for that and it's unacceptable and it has always been unacceptable and no one's ever really called them on that it's kind of just been accepted in hockey culture in chel culture that it's gonna you're gonna have racist kids on in the game which is just a shame so finally uh just a twitter storm we kind of called them on it And then nothing came of it. Month later, now George Floyd happens. Now we see the world shift to where the entire world is talking about, hey, we can't just be against racism. We have to be anti-racist. We have to fight racism.

And EA came out with a statement on June 5th, which is Friday, where they said EA Sports will not tolerate racism of any kind, and they will start taking action against these racist acts in their game. So they've committed to eliminating these people from the game because they have no right to be in these communities. And hopefully now I, I sent out a tweet when they sent out this message, I said, thank you for listening. Cause that's, that's the first step and they did it. A lot of people don't want to give EA sports any credit, even if they do anything,

a lot of people just hate the brand and they don't want to give them credit for anything, but you got to give, you got to give them credit for listening and saying that they will do something and now it's about them backing up their words they put out a long statement like so many brands have been doing so many companies so many people have been saying hey we're gonna support the communities we're not gonna we're gonna be anti-racist and they said they're gonna do that so i believe they're gonna do that and now we better see some action and you know a few things there so there's been a few accounts for at least months now i'm not sure how long you could

send these screenshots to and they would try to do something about it um so you know people have been trying to make an impact i think i think more now it's about ea devoting more resources to this because it should be if you've seen the amount of names you know we're probably going to need more than two people to to handle this problem uh there were a lot of people going well isn't this more of a psn issue um because it's their username on their playstation network that is maybe part of the issue but we're talking about in-game player names in-game team names uh that are absolutely wild the the simplest solution is in the game when you get to that screen or you're matched up with the other team and you see their uh their psn name plus their chel player name

it needs to be a button. You click right there that says, Hey, this is racist. This is against the rules and regs in your game right now. I'm going to hit this button. It sends it off to EA and they get banned. And that's never been implemented. And hopefully this leads to that implementation. Yeah. And people, people talk about, you know, maybe abusing that function. That's, that's EA's job. EA's job is to go through all that. And so you don't worry about that. You don't work for ea and if you do that's your job you know it's it's their job to go through all that make sure it doesn't get abused and make sure that we don't have to put up with this shit anymore and so many people keep saying yeah oh you wouldn't last in uh what what is it modern

warfare uh lobby it's like okay that's bad too exactly that's bad comma t-o-o fix it all man fix it all and that's like that's like getting bombed and then being like fuck at least it's not nuclear bombs am i right yeah i mean like what a dumb what a terrible line of argument and even to that point like i'm not worried about myself seeing those names because i'm i'm a grown-ass man i've seen that a hundred times i can take it i'm worried about the 15 year old kid who also plays chel and he's a little black boy and he's seen these racist names every time he pulls up the game he goes online it's ridiculous the game on the cover has a little thing that says e for everyone it's targeted for all ages yeah how can you have this in your game it's funny uh

the amount of people that said if they don't do something at least this is what i saw and i could be wrong but there were people last week that were starting to say i will never buy another game if you don't do something and it seems as though it was like oh now now that and then i don't i don't imagine the guys on the actual nhl level because they're a multi-cultural multi-racial team like on the production team yeah the production team the team that's behind this i don't think it's i don't i don't think it's that they are like well i'm i'm against filtering this doubt i think sometimes with a major corporation you have to show them that their revenue is in jeopardy and um when you start saying stuff like i will never buy this game again until you solve

this problem that's the kind of stuff you can run up the chain to management go look how many tweets about this we've had um this will continue to spread if we do nothing so and and and you and you say well you know they should have they should have um they should have done it anyway and you're right but they didn't so now the way to do to get people's attention to say i'll just never buy your i'll never buy your product again i just will never i will not play hockey don't care and uh And I think that may have gotten people's attention. One thing with the statement, though, and I'm not going to not give them credit, but there isn't an acknowledgment, at least from what I saw.

Jesse, do you still have it in front of you? Yeah, it's sitting in front of me, yeah. There's not an acknowledgment of a pretty major problem, which is, what, every two, three games you can run into this stuff? At least. Yeah, at least. So it's rampant. And so it's not – it's like all it says is we won't tolerate it,

yet they have to this point and i wish there had been an acknowledgement just right off the bat saying this is a problem just start your statement with online gaming is a nightmare well and and yeah but again who's creating the games so who's responsible right well we acknowledge that we have done nothing about the fact that online gaming is a nightmare yeah i can read the opening line for you guys sure as we're constantly taking action to maintain a culture of inclusion toxic behavior changes and evolves rapidly and we recognize that we need to do more to actively monitor and remove those individuals who perpetuate racist xenophobic homophobic and sexist behaviors in our games it's good i mean listen there's nothing wrong with it it's just to me my my one

criticism would be just own the fact that you have a rampant issue now yeah that again would not be the nhl team that would be the pr department sanitizing it running it 40 times and and and that's what they're paid to do and you know if you write that down you know does that come up later in a case or something like that like that's how they're thinking so i understand why it wasn't in there i just think it's disappointing that it wasn't um i agree and uh and and and so now as jesse you mentioned it's time for to see what the action is and so i'm curious about this because obviously each game has a scheduled date for release and usually nhls is in september is it not so i wonder about this year's nhl game they must be delaying it and

they'll still get it is i think they'll still get it out before christmas during the buying season and in fact i would argue a better season to release it is november because you're that much closer to christmas um but in this particular regard so if we don't see it till november they've got six months to figure out how to do this whatever this is and they've got six months to um perfect it and i would like to see what the turnaround time on that is and you know what i've played a billion other ea games they do shooters they did star wars they do um uh the battle battlefronts uh sorry battlefront and battlefield um i'd like to see that happen there as well and uh and and continue on i mean if they find a way to do this in an expedient

fashion that pulls the names quickly um but that doesn't pull other people's psns unfairly right because that's the that's the worry is that oh no somebody who's not racist might get pulled well let's focus on pulling the races down first and somebody if they have to go for 24 hours without playing a game i'm sure they'll be okay but um you know uh i think that they want to figure out a way where they're able to quickly decipher between the two that's on them but if they figure this out for the nhl this could be an industry-wide change instantly yeah one thing that a lot of people tweeted out under the uh esports statement was uh screenshots of things that were going on in fifa which they all yes i can only imagine i've never played fifa but apparently

it's a huge problem just as it is in chow well playing fifa online is just a huge problem uh but playing yes there's a ton of racist names playing fifa online is the most frustrating thing you'll ever do in your life um but why is that yeah why because people are so fucking good at it um like you don't like there's okay there's people that are like nash is good whatever like they're good these people in fifa i don't even think the game developers knew that this could these things can happen and the game is so much better anyway right it's so much more money put into it it's worth so much more you know but these it's art the way they play these games and if you run into like if you're playing base level shit you're gonna have some guy and it's probably some

guy that's been playing for 20 years come in and just wreck you and you'll get wrecked again and wrecked again and wrecked again and i have a friend who snapped his controller in half and plays it all the time i i only play when i buy fifa i only play um i don't play online i flat out i just won't have any fun i love building you know you could build a franchise and move it and do you do crazy soccer transfers or you can do your own be a player which is awesome but dude like the worst worst worst thing you can do is play fifa online and then couple that with the insane amount of racism that happens it happens to exist and the reason i would say for that is it's proportional to the amount of people that are playing right i mean you have the whole world

playing and the world's a pretty racist place and uh and so it's unfortunate but i i can't for the life of me understand why this wasn't a bigger priority company-wide you know we i think we've accepted for too long that the internet has been this way so therefore it will always be this way and i know it's well i don't think that's a realistic way of looking at it because we were always like well the internet's slow and it's on dial-up so that's the way it'll always be we'd still be on fucking dial-up but here we are not on dial-up anymore we're on wi-fi it's great 5g we're all going to turn into aliens it's wicked it's it's that it's that um you know oh you wouldn't survive in a modern warfare lobby well i don't think you're making the point that you

think you're making right yes you know what i mean people seem to be looking at the internet I was like, oh, it happens on the internet and the internet's wild west. We can't police it. Well, you can, and you probably should, you know? And I feel like companies and people have given up and they're like, ah, if it goes on the internet, it's fair game, but that's not how it should be. No, no. We should have respect for people, which is, it's crazy that that's a big thing to ask. Right. Well, I'm not sure.

I want to get your thoughts too. Tori Hunter came out today or two days, sorry, not today, yesterday with a statement about never wanting to go to Boston. Now, I don't want to single out the city of Boston in any regard here because I've never played in front of fans in Boston, but Torrey did. And he said, essentially, and I'm paraphrasing here, that every contract he ever signed, it's one of the best center fielders we've seen in our generation. Every contract he's ever signed had a no trade clause to Boston. And the reason for that is because he said, every time it goes to Boston, he's called the N word. And he said, it's happened well over a hundred times. And he said, I don't blame the teams. I don't blame

the ushers, the teammates, the, the, like the, the coaching staff, anybody, I blame you who sat beside the guy in the stands who said nothing. And I thought that was a pretty powerful statement. I think that can happen anywhere. I mean, you ask Wayne Simmons, uh, what happened to him in his junior career can happen anywhere uh Torrey Hunter's just that just happened to be Boston for him um it's a uh it's a thing that I think you know even those those things that that you know it seems so um it seems so easy to say in a vacuum yeah I would say something what happens if that guy's six four 250 pounds and he's drunk and you're at the socks game and he says that what do you say then and i think a lot of people go well that's stupid and i would i would just you

know i'll just mind my own business leave and be i don't know if we can do that anymore i think you call ushers over i think there's other ways to deal with it you don't necessarily need to go in yourself um but it i thought it was a very interesting perspective on things i was curious to hear i mean steve i'm not sure if you've even read that jesse i'm sure you saw that tory hunter yeah yeah so i just wanted to get your thoughts on that well i mean it's his own experience right you know i saw a bunch of people writing it off and all of this that i mean it's his own experience how are you going to tell him he didn't hear what he heard you know and how are you going to tell him it was uh it wasn't disproportional uh to boston um i mean it'd be

very easy for me to be like i've been to boston for sporting events and i've never had a negative experience in my life but i have had a very different uh sporting experience in boston than tory uh hunter had and it's funny because you know i watch bostonians fight amongst themselves on twitter all the time and they're the ones who go no we're not and they're the other ones who go yeah we are um and you know it's one of the in terms of northeastern uh american cities it's the one that gets talked about uh the most so i mean it's tory hunter's experience jesse um i was listening to a podcast recently with um cc sabathia and they asked him about how uh carl crawford didn't work out in boston and he talked about how um carl crawford he likes he likes just

going out to dinner after a game he likes just being out in the city going to grocery stores and he talks about how that was impossible in boston because he he can't go anywhere without being harassed he can't go anywhere without a red sox fan running up to him in a place like new york it's so big where in a place like la as well just so big that you can walk around as a celebrity at times in pockets and live somewhat of a normal life even though it's kind of secluded and carl crawford's like a d-lister in la right right and all the celebrities that are there exactly no people aren't running up to carl tmz is not really hunting down carl crawford when he's in la there's a million more stars that are bigger but if you if you're a baseball player in boston

you're you're it like that's the only thing anybody cares about and i and i wonder just that when people get that passionate about sports you see it bleed over into who they really are like it comes out in sports and if someone has that hatred within their heart and their team something's going wrong with their team and it'll come out and it's a shame that um it it bleeds out that way and these players have to be the brunt of it and i hope that with the conversations that are having now those things can change and that the the sports just aren't an outlet for when you're angry you know right and sometimes you got to let these guys live they're just people right yeah and I thought it was great insight and just why his career there didn't work out and

now you hear the story that Tori Hunter told and you're like yeah that makes a lot more sense because Crawford didn't he's well Sabathia talking about Crawford he didn't mention any of the racism involved you're just talking about him going out in the city and how you can't move in Boston if you're a baseball player but I wonder if a lot of that has to do with just the attitudes of people and people who aren't the best people and that coming of which there are in every city by the way yeah just throw that out there that's a blame that is equally shared i i hate uh and i hate to interrupt you jesse but i also want to say i hate it when people are like well it's boston fans or avalanche fans am i right no everybody's got and it's a small percentage of

just shitty people and they're shitty people they cheer for the same team you do um you wouldn't have them in your house you wouldn't invite them over for a beer they happen to own the same jersey that you own and cheer for the same team and maybe be from the same city but that's about all you guys have in common and every fan group has it and it proportional to sport and popularity there are a lot more shitty red socks fans and there are jays fans like blue blue jays fans because the red socks are that much bigger they're way bigger um that you know and if you were to compare shitty leafs fans to shitty florida panthers fans you'd probably find a lot more leafs fans that are shitty than florida panthers fans because at least have more fans yeah um well and and for the for

the hundreds of uh you know inbound what about isms yeah those are bad too yeah once again by the way too you should look up the origins of what about ism if you want to get into a adam's history corner with what about ism was it the dawn of man no well it was sort of but the the it was a huge tool used by the uh by the uh soviet union against uh dissidents within their own and and uh and internationally in politics and it was sort of it's funny to see it adopted so much in the states right now because that's essentially politically that's exactly what they're they're doing it's it's it's um leader does something bad people say hey that's wrong leader supporters go oh you just don't like him. Or, well, what about when your guy was in? Well, no, no, no, no. Let's bring it

back to the actual issue. And so when people do that, just understand whether you're the one doing it or you're the one catching it, that's what they're doing. It's just a, here's a shiny thing over here. Every conversation is conversation. Well, anything but that conversation and nothing ghost anywhere yeah exactly it the whole point of it is to stymie dialogue it's to prevent because a good conversation is one foot in front of the other right it's to make you sidestep and screw up the conversation and make it hard to follow so um but in in regards to um where we're at now jesse i know you were at some protests on friday i was did you go saturday as well or is just i was not there saturday not there saturday friday can you tell us a little bit about um what it was like

on friday because i i talked to you a bit about it seemed pretty powerful yeah it was uh it was beautiful is how i described it um if anybody knows toronto we marched down young street west on dundas then north on bay and it was just kind of a circle in the main core of downtown and we slowly marched around in that circle with different chants for about two hours just um we made our voices heard we everybody had signs it was thousands of people um me and my girlfriend we went down there and then we joined as it was already starting to march and we're at the back and then just like 15 minutes later you turn around and there's another thousand people behind you it's like when you're at a concert and you join the end of the pack and then you just turn

around it's like oh this whole thing is filled so that was great to see and then at the end um it started raining on everybody and that just made everything more beautiful and poetic it was poetic and then it's awesome we started chanting the rain won't rain won't stop us and it just it just made everybody just get reinvigorated because the sun was getting really hot and then the rain came down we're like this is exactly what we need and that was a great moment and at the end we all saying happy birthday to Breonna Taylor because that was her birthday was on Friday we all stopped at uh Young and Bloor um right outside the subway there the whole the whole crowd paused for a moment we sang happy birthday and then we took a knee for a minute and it was peaceful my favorite

part I think well one of my favorite parts of the whole thing was how young everybody's face was the the people who were out there were the next generation the people who will be making a difference in 10 to 15 years and that was beautiful to see yeah it was a lovely peaceful protest it's interesting we were on the air on uh friday morning about 7 30 steve and we didn't know this was going to happen obviously there's been some looting and stuff in other cities um so a lot of businesses boarded up downtown and mid mid show big board comes up over our window and it's pulled up yeah really and yeah because they're just trying to protect the building right and i i get that um because there are agitators that are not a part of this movement at all uh that are being

arrested oh yeah yeah that's not you pulling it out of your ass no no there's a there's i mean you can look up the record there are anarchists coming in and they're doing this um and uh and and it's it's so shitty because it distracts from the movement um and that's what these people do i I mean, their whole thing is they all think they're the Joker, right? They all think they're from – they all think that they're like, I don't stand for anything. Like, shut up. Go away.

You just want attention. So anyway, so we had to – they boarded up for that reason. And to hear Jesse's experience, because that's a very – I don't know how to describe it other than it's a very jarring experience when you're on the air to have that happen. Because you're on the air and you're very vulnerable. You're supposed to put yourself out there, right? And so when that happens, it's weird. So it was great to see such a peaceful but effective protest.

You know, every news outlet in the country is covering it. Everybody's there. The interviewers, the media who are there are interviewing people who have who are like, I don't know if they're designated spokespeople, but they were certainly well spoken. And they were all young, as Jesse said. And so I'm watching at home because I'm with Everly. and uh and just kind of taking that in and from my perspective was sort of like wow this just looks so well put together and um it's so effective yeah so one of the other great things was just the people who are standing around uh watching the protests go by and uh whenever there was a car it would all be applause and honks and cheers it was like the entire city was out watching uh the protesters and just supporting them like a sports team you know it was just they we'd walk by a

group and they would all clap and they would all cheer and they would join in on some of the black lives matter chants and then we'd walk up a little a car uh section because the police were uh the police were actually leading most of the um where the protest was walking because we had our path i described and the police would block off the street so that cars knew like hey you can't can't walk here you can't drive here for this little amount of time and the cars that were stopped they weren't angry they would they would stop they would look out they would roll down their windows they would honk their horns they would start clapping and they they understood what was going on it was great so yeah the whole city seemed to just be on the right side of history

in that moment at least the people who were out there at the time it's it's been wild to see how uh widespread it is um there was there was video from bristol in england today um i saw like a uh there's a there's a black lives matter march in guelph which no offense to guelph like guelph would not have been on my list just it's not it's not big thursday oh it feels a little bit bigger yeah but it's still cool like you go yeah you don't expect those things in the suburbs like i grew up in mississauga and i would have never thought of a protest happening in in mississauga so just as now growing up and hearing that something happened in oakville and a bunch of people got together to protest and uh support the black community like that's great to hear

it's cool it's amazing yeah um so uh you know it's just it's nice to see that all happen and it's a i i don't know um i mean obviously we have to keep the momentum going here but it just does seem like there's there's things already i just i feel like there's a bit of a shift in a lot of people's consciousness and and hopefully that continues and um you know we all are sort of rowing in the same direction now a little bit more i think and uh interesting to see the um the colin kaepernick stuff come back up too um you know drew breeze you know coming out this week you're saying anybody that disrespects the flag and then you know what the best take on that the best take on that and and i drew to his his credit apologized after but reese right now is

the biggest advocate for uh protests right yes he is yeah shit shit shit backpedal backpedal backpedal um um so so so the funniest thing about that was i i don't know if you guys follow shannon sharp on uh on instagram but shannon sharp to me you know that that show i didn't think that skip baylor show had it but man um undisputed with him and shannon sharp is so good and shannon is the star and that's it and so the best thing and i love the way shannon does that because he says skip and then and then uh and then he gets into skip here's what i think and and it's he's like otherwise it's normal but it's skew there's all the different tones of skip too and he goes through every octave in the middle of his six minute rant and best dressed man on television far none but

his thing was and this was the headline for the video drew brees needs to retire and he said if you can go through high school college and almost a 20-year nfl career with all of those black men and not understand this then you're not paying attention and there's no way that your team can rightly follow you in now and look how quick he got it yeah after after 49 other guys on his team came at him and were like hey yeah we're not gonna block for you offense the offensive line isn't gonna block for you as soon as you get a snap you know unless you get this all the people so many people were like oh but you know the the conversation and learning wasn't that beautiful i'm like he's had that conversation before it's impossible that he has

it's simply impossible no backs are sort of untouchable in that room i don't know i don't know it doesn't sound based on what he said it didn't sound like he had which is freaky in itself or he forgot like i i don't know the whole thing here is making sure people get it and he got it in a matter of three days so yeah and then i trump tweets about him and then he he responds to trump and says actually but actually trump all of a sudden drew versus chrissy teigen with the tweets you know yeah the president yeah the breakneck speed of 2020 can be captured in just the nfl over the last i don't know four days yeah because it was drewby drew drew breeze saying what he said him getting corrected en masse the president supporting his first statement

him going to the president no no no no no and also the nfl social team supposedly going behind the nfl's back going to all these different african-american nfl players and getting them to release their statement and roger goodell issuing a sort of apology not directly to colin kaepernick but just in general he owes them an apology though he 100 direct apology he 100 does he 100 does but the the break next beat that is just nfl related stuff and i've probably missed some i've probably missed them that's just nfl stuff over the last three or four days yes adam oh we've lost him or at least i think we've lost have i lost you both no no we're here sorry i saw you i thought you were like reading something adam can you hear

us can you hear us i think his connection uh yeah oh hello hello i lost you yeah oh your internet's i think a little wonky your internet's wonky freaking your internet's walk wonky go put it in the freezer yeah maybe i will it's right over there so um anyway yeah it was that that was a very interesting back and forth um and and you know uh uh we've we've even had messages directly that say you know i was on one side and i see the other side now it's a tough it's a tough thing because um i think that there is um i think you have to accept sometimes that there's stuff that you don't know and that's really fucking hard for people there's things that you that you assume about yourself that are not true and this one plays to um a character a characterization of

oneself that if, if you thought, well, I'm not racist. Well, that's, that's the thing is that it's not even about that. And well, it is about that, but it's also about more than that. And I think that this has all played into that. And I think there's been a, a lot of, I think the last four years, at least I can tell you for me, they have, they've been a lot of questioning, a lot of stuff, a lot of things that you go, man, I gotta do, I gotta soul search that one. But it's nice to see somebody like drew breeze get it it was nice to see his teammates come out and say uh yeah he screwed up no question but you know we uh you know some of us i'm sure some of them talked to him um and it seemed as though they were like okay we'll forgive this we'll move on he seems to get

it now right that's also important um because it's growth together on that one and that's that's sort of the reason um you know we're not the same show we were in 2013 when we began like there's we don't think the same there's there's been growth there in it and I think you know I'm 32 now so the difference between me and when I was 22 just coming out of school is I'm much more ready to admit that I don't know or understand something now than when I was 22 and knew even less you know what I mean not even that I thought I knew everything maybe a little bit but also I thought you needed to put up a front that you knew everything yes otherwise you weren't going to get taken seriously uh you know you weren't going to get hired for certain things and that

was a big priority of mine when i was you know 22 just coming out of school when in fact the more you're willing to admit you don't understand something um the more people see you as someone who's maybe more mature and willing to learn and trust what i mean trustworthy is a good one too yeah just just you have your head on right my favorite phrase favorite phrase is uh i don't know i don't have an answer for you but i'll get back to you on that don't say i don't know just say i don't have an answer for you right now i'll get back to you on that gino retta hated i don't know hated i don't know when i worked for him because i don't know passes the buck yeah i don't know but i'm gonna go find out yeah all right yeah he hated i just i don't know by itself hated it

I learned to get rid of it very fast. Yeah, my bad. Now, let us not, gentlemen, let us not be remiss and forget that the Ottawa Senators had another week to remember. Only the Ottawa Senators, in the midst of what's happening right now, could wait 10 days to put out a statement decrying what happened to uh well but what happened to every like all of the people that we've been discussing yes and and that they're anti-racist thank you ottawa senators appreciate

that they were i think the second last team because new york is the last team new york is still last yes they will well there's reasons for that apparently new york refuses to say that racism is bad right yeah yeah be hilarious if the knicks just refuse to play the the only thing they've done since our last show they still have not tweeted since may 30th and their own their most recent tweet is a retweet of anson carter which is a cop-out it's it's amplifying a black voice absolutely do that say your own shit you're you're putting you're putting you're putting the uh burden on him one thing the senators i'm sorry sorry sorry sorry no now you You got me fucking working up about the Knicks.

So, we saw it with Donald Sterling. The L.A. Clippers almost didn't walk on the floor one night. Or not even the L.A. Clippers. I think it was the All-Star. It was either the All-Star game or the Clippers themselves. Almost didn't walk on the floor for – no, it was a playoff game. And they didn't have – they had their jerseys inside out or something like that, right? Yes.

They threw them to center court. They almost didn't play a damn basketball game that was about to be nationally televised. so if something doesn't happen in new york meaning hey maybe we should get rid of this owner out of this little club i i don't know what's gonna happen with those players because they're not gonna stand for that i hope not they're not included in this 2014 play-in that the nba is doing so we won't know until november or december part of me is worried that the opportunity will have been not necessarily forgotten but but you know if they were playing now now would be the time not that they would be playing now either because they were so bad but i hope that if

they're players on that team because it's a big risk for them they're not a good team and the players are either extremely young um or they're not superstars right um you know they they worry about not getting a contract the next year whatever the same things anybody else worries But I hope that they still take that opportunity to do that. And I'm half invested in that team because they got R.J. Barrett down there. That's a Canadian kid who's got to play for James Dolan, who seems like the worst owner in sports right now. Scary, isn't it?

Get back to the Senators. Senators. So it's not often that you hear of a pro sports franchise and its charity divorcing. yeah but the ottawa senators and the sense foundation are divorcing the license agreement is up the sense foundation is called the sense foundation meaning that if they're going to continue to be a foundation they can't call themselves the sense foundation anymore they've got to be something else so they released a statement saying very quickly that they were

proud of the partnership thank the senators organization moving on the senators also released a statement which was much longer i feel so bad for whoever had to write it yeah me too it seems by and large good people work for the ottawa senators sure i'm sure good people work for the knicks and rangers too the ottawa senators organization extends its gratitude and appreciation to the current board of the foundation for serving the charitable organization with distinction uh the ottawa senators have provided more than 110 million dollars to the community initiatives in the last 16 years uh it gives them the accomplishments the senators look to look forward to continuing to build on the legacy of success and expanding our philanthropic

reach for years to come now one of the stories one of the parts of this that i found the most interesting, is Eugene Melnick rented the Senator's Foundation offices. And one of the things that you normally don't see with a charitable organization, especially one associated with a team, is charging them rent. And the big bone of contention with the SENS Foundation was, hey you're charging us hundreds of thousands of dollars of rent per year from money we raised from the community to put back into the community but it's going to eugene so that apparently was one of the major sticking points and the reason for this split um it was you think about that now like one of the things a bit of a dark side of sports

unfortunately and there's another there's a charity in town i'm thinking of but i'm not going to mention it name them i will not name them name and shame i will not name and shame shame but there is there are many professional sports teams because it's the sad thing is that there are laws about how much of your charity needs to be a charity to be considered a charity right there needs to be those laws meaning if you have a charity and you give back, I think the law here is 20%. You're a charity. You're a not-for-profit.

Was it last year the list came out of the Canadian? Did it? Yeah. We talked about it on the show. Okay, so then we have chatted about it. Yeah, from the team charities that go to charity. The list was leaked online, and we talked about it briefly on the show. Now, you've got to keep in mind they have salaries to pay,

benefits to pay offices to have expenses they gotta throw events to raise money like i get it i get it not every some dollar has to go to upkeep and just what it takes to run an organization one of the things eric lindros takes a lot of pride in with the eric lindros celebrity hockey class for easter seals is the percentage of the money that goes towards easter seals on right yes which is important do you know that off hand it starts with an eight can't remember you it's high hopefully it's 88 hey wouldn't that be perfect put that in your contract so in a lot of cases a business that runs you know 20 to 30 percent profits pretty good right in a charity's case if you're giving you should be giving somewhere in the neighborhood

in in a perfect world like 60 to 70 percent that's a lot of this a lot of these sports charities from these major sports brands are given like 20 percent 25 and then the 80 is operational costs bingo which can help upgrade offices computers oh that computer ended up on someone else's desk that doesn't work for the charity uh well it's still owned by the charity it just it just happened to end up on this executive's desk it's a it's a write-off right I mean, ultimately, from a tax perspective, that's what a charity is for a lot of these organizations. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying, because if there wasn't a tax write-off, a lot of them wouldn't do it at all.

I think that's the problem. Well, I don't think you're going to change that. I think, though, it's important to recognize that the situation in Ottawa runs so deep that there will be no recovery until Eugene Melnick is out. You know, you read a story like this and you think, that's not even the 10th worst thing I've heard about this person. And it's not even that he's evil. It's that he's greedy and incompetent. Perceptually. Perceptually.

That's the allegation. Do you disagree, Steve? No. It's just he said that. Well, that's the allegation. I don't have direct dealings with Eugene Melnick, so I can't tell you what it's like to deal with Eugene Melnick. But if you have a charitable foundation,

a charity that's getting charged hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, or sorry, a year in rent, if you have a charity that's like it's so bad here that we can't even be a charity with a major sports brand in the city the major sports brand in the city it's making us look bad or we can't survive that really says something it is too financially taxing to work with this national hockey league team yes when you have a guy like tom and sell me who worked for the least for a long long time made a lot of a lot of people really critical of tom and sell me but richard Petty, Tom and Selmy, and a lot of those guys made a ton of smart foundational business decisions

for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment that to this day, they still stick to. They were ultimately not the guys that led the Leafs and Raptors to where they are now in terms of on the court and on the ice. But those guys put together the business plans that brought the Leafs and Raptors together, put them in the Air Canada Center, now Scotiabank Arena, did all these amazing things. Tom Anselme goes up to Ottawa for like six months and can't work with Eugene Melnick. This man knows he is paid because he knows how to make sports organizations money,

which is not always what they do. They don't always make money. And this guy knows. And you have the LeBreton flats that you'll fall through. And you have your charity walking away. You have your best player in a generation saying i would just die to be here and you can't even offer him a proper contract extension i mean and regardless of what your thoughts are on whether or not eric carlson should assign that

or san jose should have you know linked up eric carlson the reality was with that saga it never needed to be a saga right it could have been a bad contract in the end or whatever but tell me if what happened with Eric Carlson and the Ottawa Senators, and I understand there's the Mike Hoffman angle in that too, but tell me how that was beneficial for them. And to me, it all comes back to, I feel bad for Pierre Dorian because I think he's done a very good job

despite whatever storm clouds are above him. And I didn't really have a lot of faith in him to start. And he has really surprised me. They've got a good young group of people. I think that Brandestrom kid's going to be amazing. I thought that was a great pickup for Mark Stone. But there's another guy who all he wants to do is stay. And you can't run him out of town fast enough.

At a certain point, the NHL needs to take a deep look at its brand in Ottawa. And I understand that in terms of brand priorities for the NHL, it's probably 27, 28 on the list. it's not a key market for them it's not even a key market television revenue wise in canada it's not it's not it's not i know but it really it really could be though but it bingo when you look at exactly that steve when you look at potential in ottawa so right now the revenue is it's huge because it's that's it there's not even cfl at that time of year that's it and the sends are deeply ingrained in the community there are people that absolutely love that team ride or die with

the senators will not go to a game not just because of where the arena was because they used to sell out but just because the guy that owns the team doesn't give a shit and so uh and not only does he not give a shit he's actively doing things that are alienating almost everybody from the team. When your hardcore fans can't get behind what your team stands for, you've got these brand values and every corporation has them. The senators have them too. And the core values are not even shared by the guy that owns the team. I mean, I don't know how the NHL doesn't look at that and go, listen, we could probably be doing 50 to 60% more revenue in this market if we could just get rid of this guy and there are ways there are ways to we saw it with donald sterling now donald

sterling went on a racist tirade it was released it was an easy pr move they and the and the owners kicked him out but but this is a this is a gary betman priority whether he sees it or not there's a gigantic amount of money to be made in ottawa and you know they blame well it's a government town. There's no corporate sponsors. There would be corporate sponsors. They don't have to live there. Corporate sponsorship, like the funny thing about corporate sponsorship is the head office of that particular organization does not need to be in that city for them to want your team, for them to want to pay big money to be on your arena, for them to want to pay big money to be on your boards. Canadian Tire, it's a Toronto product. They have the Canadian Tire

center. That's who sponsors their arena. That doesn't matter. What matters is how great is the brand. The brand was amazing. 2007 Spezza, Heatley, Alfredson, all these, you know, Mike Fisher, that team that went to the cup. Chris Phillips, Zdeno back in the day. You know, there is a great rich history of recent success in that market. I mean, they just went to the conference finals three years ago and we're a puck away and it's just funny to me we keep reminding them yeah it's just very funny to me that this continues to be an issue and i just wonder how much scorched earth is the nhl gonna see before they step in like they did with the coyotes The Coyotes have been on life support for 95% of the last 20 years.

Where's that sort of support for the Senators? I guarantee you, if the NHL did what it did with the Coyotes and it stepped in and bought the Senators off Eugene Melnick, the Senators' ticket sales, the entire aura around that team changes like that. Ottawa comes back, and then it's an attractive market, and then they sell the team at a profit. I just don't understand. And it would take two or three years of community building again, get a charity back on board, start building sales relationships, and you would start to see some real revenue kick out of there.

An exciting young core. Well, you're never going to make the money the Habs are or the Leafs are. It's not a big enough city yet, but it's growing hugely. Like, people don't know this, but Ottawa is expanding rapidly. Housing prices are skyrocketing. There is money there. it's just that nobody wants to support an organ an organization run by this person that's all it is and at a certain point the nhl needs to look at that and say

we probably could make some action here and the great thing is for the nhl canadian dollars 60 cents on the american dollar right now cost them nothing cost them nothing well and it's also incentive to get it done now because uh the last time the dollar was this bad We lost the Jets and the Nordiques Right That was also before revenue sharing and all the other things Of course Of course but maybe pitter patter get at her

With regard to the Ottawa Senators I find Gary Bettman Boring and annoying I don't think he's dumb He's not dumb And I got to imagine this is really high on his priority list And I was just In the middle of you talking Adam

I was picturing The sigh Gary Bettman lets out When his phone lights up with Eugene, this guy, like how out of all the owners, he's got to be one of the most taxing. He's got to be the Eugene again. Dude, I've been trying to prop this league up for ages. I've been trying to fix the Arizona thing. I've actually done a decent job with the Arizona thing in recent years.

We got Vegas. Look how good that's worked out. we're trying to include seattle and we're in the middle of a holy smoking pandemic and you lost your foundation huge i'm sick of hearing from you you lost your own foundation you were a cartoon idea of a villain what the hell is what i imagine he would say but he works for him technically technically technically technically i don't know what else could be said about you covered you covered it all we just need v steviano now to come back and release some tapes about him if anybody knows where she's doing that's the donald sterling's

girlfriend remember her with her freaking visor and she was on tmz for 15 minutes and they followed her around and she's i don't want to see the second uber video that's the that no i'm no i'm saying yeah what maybe she drives uber now no i don't know i don't know yeah i don't know it's very well said adam and i yeah i just agree wholeheartedly with everything you said they need to do some major building there and you know what you know if if i was rogers if i'm Bart Yabsley, if I'm – who's the CEO of Rodgers now? Adam, now you're asking me to – I don't know titles. I didn't know Tom Anselmi's title when I worked for the Leafs.

Okay, well, if I am – I think it's J.D. Bunkus. Ah, J.D. Bunkus. No, it's not. Vice President Ben Ennis. If I am the CEO of Rodgers and I've committed to this league for seven more years, I think, after this? Six more years?

um i'm calling gary and saying listen i'm paying an enormous amount of money for these hockey rights and this guy is just making a cartoon out of this franchise um this is not what i invested in do something because you could make the argument that by not looking after that team they're devaluing the product which is not good for business practice you can make that argument if you sign a deal with somebody and they go out of their way to destroy the thing that you've signed the deal for now i eugene would argue that he's doing his best but um you can you can say you can say in a court uh they destroyed the thing that they said that like neil young had he signed a record contract at the beginning of the 80s released three terrible albums and the

record company sued him and said he's trying to make anti-commercial music we can't sell this and and because neil's a dick let's just be straight like he's awesome but he's also sort of a dick and and uh would do that um and uh and i think i think that there is a you've got a i i think everybody at this point has got a point at the senators point at them and say what are we doing here now where are we going with this because it's sort of listlessly been been going this way since the outdoor game nothing's changed course i think we need a strong man in there with some real power gary bevin and it's time to solidify that canadian market there's no reason for that franchise not to succeed wild wild amount of potential wild amount of potential

cap room young players um you're in a school town you're in a government town you're wild amount of potential by the way president and ceo of rogers is joe natale which translated from italian to english is joe christmas i've met i actually met joe natale when i when uh when i was there now i remember that he has big hands big i believe did you know that did you know that neil young once tried to build his own uh mp3 player yes they had the pono yeah so it was better quality sound or something yeah you tried to make a high def mp3 player after in like this is like 2005 uh 2015 or something after everyone already had songs on their phone it was right around the time that the the zune came out do you guys remember that i remember the zune no this was

long after the zoo was it yeah time ago yeah the zoo i just remember that because it was featured in uh the in commons video um uh universal mind control what a what a great song ruined by that zune commercial that it became but uh um um but the yeah so the neil young thing from what i remember was that he's like people want better sound quality and the people are like we listen on shitty headphones we actually don't really know the difference and he's like yes you do and Axl Rose actually back in the day wanted to put out Guns N' Roses second album but only release it in a format that is meant for people that have five different speakers so it would have sounded great in this one I forget what kind of stereo this was but this was this five-piece stereo that

had you know your highs your lows and your mid-ranges and it really you know pushed the music out there and slash said to axel he's like most of our fans are poor and they listen on one shitty speaker if it only works in a five speaker scenario they're not gonna be able to listen to the album and axel didn't get it like you didn't understand it was just it's anyway great story from the slash book you should read slash um and and let me just say this in front of jesse listen to your producer yes they always know yes exactly anyway sometimes um uh a few other things that happened this week i'm not sure if we want to get into any of them um because a lot of it's at this point old news to be honest um did it happen five minutes ago yeah it's old news

it was great to see uh uh great to see a bunch of nhl players come out and say the things that we were asking them to um and uh and you know we've said that the last couple episodes there's just been an outpouring of that uh we also would like to shout out um the staff from the athletic uh eight percent of the staff 46 people were let go this week and it obviously has to do with the fact that um um new subscriber growth growth is down there's no podcast ad revenue we can speak to that it's tough um because of the pandemic um i feel like once things get rolling again um i hope that they're able to just rehire all those people uh in the meantime uh shout out to those people uh each and every one of you are extremely talented otherwise you wouldn't

working at the athletic and uh i sincerely hope that this uh moment in time in your life which is undoubtedly brutal um does not last so we're hoping for that we're hoping for to get sports back soon as soon as we can obviously um uh you also have the nfl coming out with their statement roger goodell saying what he said supporting things unequivocally would have been good four years ago but we'll take it uh we were wrong we were wrong i was stunned to see him say that it's rare really rare do you think jerry jones approved that message well well i don't know i don't know if the owners were necessarily consulted well it was the right thing to do for the league and you know people gave jay-z a really hard time

when he, I forget what the title is, but he is signed with the NFL to help them talk about this sort of stuff, to help them understand this sort of stuff. And they gave him a hard time because it's like, why would you work with these people? And a guy like Jay, to me, seems like the right guy because he's as rich or richer than a lot of the owners

while he's getting there anyway. But beyond that, he's a well-spoken, well-thought-out guy who can speak directly to the plight uh that these owners would never understand and so it seems like and i hope this is the case that that maybe there was a little bit of that jay-z influence on what happened with roger goodell maybe it's roger goodell understanding okay i'm out of my depth here i need to hire somebody great jay to me seems like a good guy i don't know it's important to have those voices in the room just that that perspective and if jay-z had to get because

the deal was with rock nation right and through rock nation jay-z also signed to amplify uh the league's social justice efforts that's pulling up the uh nfl's official pr statement at the time back in september and if that's the way that these 30 i think it's 30 white women and 30 white men get to hear um an alternate voice here some a guy who literally came from nothing and worked his way up to become what he is if they if they hear his voice now in a boardroom behind closed doors like that's that's important uh there was also the story this week about um uh serena williams husband also co-founder of reddit alex ohanian um stepping down from the board of directors of reddit and asking them in his place to replace him with um a black person somebody who could speak to

some of these things and I thought you know not out not not all of us have that the option to do that the guys made so much money he never has to work again but oftentimes those people are the people that are like no I can't stop I must continue and he was smart enough to say you know what for the future of this company which he still owns it's better that we have a different voice in there and that's not easy you're giving up control of the thing that you found it which is a force a major force in the internet and will be for years to come the front page of the internet yeah yeah yeah really um it's amazing what what reddit's been it's also been it's fermented a lot of crazy crazy shit too let's be honest uh which they've cracked down on recently but um i i had to say i

was really impressed by that because i know for someone like that it would be pretty tough to give up control and i really respected that he did it um because it's not about money at this point for these guys they're billionaires it's control and a lot of billionaires control freaks really tough for them to give it up so good for him uh and hopefully he gets to spend a little more time with his daughter too because their kid is so flipping cute it's ridiculous it's funny i didn't I didn't, I didn't really care much about people's kids. Like it's not like I didn't like them, but it was just sort of like, they were just there. Now that I have one, I'm like every, every kid,

I'm like, so flippant. You are a treasure. You are a golden shining treasure. You're adorable. It's the weirdest thing. A big old softy now. So with that, I think we were just going to jump into the press conference. You guys cool with that? Yeah. The Steve Dangle press conference. All right.

We've got a ton of questions. I'm going to save a lot of these for Wednesday. We'll do an extended press conference Wednesday. We'll do half an hour show, half an hour press conference. Awesome. Yeah, because a lot of people tweeted back a bunch of questions. Unless something mental happens. And then that changes again.

It's the five-year plan that changes every day. Right, Steve? We changed our mind. The NHL starts today. I'd believe it. I'd believe it. Sorry, Jack Eichel, you're still not invited. and they're all outdoors in july in vegas and chicago plays every game yep and they also just

win and like because all right scott matla wants to know for adam's history corner can you talk about rasputin please oh i don't know where this uh what this means or where this is going but please give it a go adam so rasputin is one of the most infamous characters in history i want you to look google him right now both of you google oh i i am aware i'm aware of rara rasputin lover of the russian queen absolutely gregorio rasputin yeah see his picture yeah see those eyes yeah so they said so this guy is an alcoholic womanizing priest priest from i believe the is he from the caucasus region of russia anyway it doesn't really matter where he's from he's an alcoholic womanizing guy who it's so strange because he had he came from no money and russia

at this time and this is right before and during the first world war is a very class-oriented society and there are very few people with money and then everybody else is dirt poor and he came from the dirt poor and somehow with that beard never showering never bathing um went got into the russian court which was very refined and was able to he would he would charm people they said so much that like he would whisk men's wives off um and the men would be okay with it and like this happened at the at russian court now the real reason he was there was because um and i you'll have to forgive me on this one czar nicholas's son and czar nicholas is an interesting cat in him in and of himself czar nicholas used to get made fun of by his friends because he

actually loved his wife which at the time in russian nobility was like what do you mean you actually love your wife you're supposed to love like your mistresses and stuff like that your wife's just there for you know kids and what i'm not saying it wasn't backwards just the way it was he loved his wife he loved his family and his son i believe is alexander um correct me on that if i'm wrong but his son had uh the disease where and i can't think of it right now your blood won't clot so is it anemic i think he's anemic yeah i think that's what it is so if he falls you imagine like you're like six years old and you're out there and you scrape your knee and it's life threatening they have no cure for this at this time and and so the entire he had a bunch of

sisters but the entire russian monarchy rests on this kid surviving and so they rasputin believed and people believed him especially the czarina uh that that he could heal and every time this kid got injured you know they'd banish Rasputin from the court they'd say get out of here you take your drunken womanizing shitty ways with you every time this kid got hurt they'd call him because for whatever reason and this is probably confirmation bias they would bring him back kid would get better and you could argue that if they didn't bring him back the kid probably would have got better but the the understanding of medicine in 1912 is not great in russia it's just not um and what i what i find particularly fascinating about this

man is he was such a striking figure and such a personality that he was famous all over russia and this is a a country that in many ways at the time was was very rural not urbanized at all and yet everybody in every city in every town would have been able to recognize rasputin because of how striking he was and because of the force he had and what ended up happening is there was obviously um uh as the as the first world war wears on um citizens are not able to eat because all the uh the food is going to the army so people are hungry they're starving they're waiting in bread lines for 12 hours um and they start to believe that this Rasputin guy not only because again very superstitious not a well-educated society um uh they start to believe that he's got

the the czar and the czarina the king and queen under a spell and that they're not acting in their right minds because they're around him all the time like he's a genie essentially that yes yeah you got to remember like you got to look him up man he's like russia russia at this time is like 200 years behind every other power in terms of structure of military economy um they were modernizing very quickly which is part of the reason why world war one started because germany said in three years we can we can beat them now but in 1917 we probably won't be able to beat them just because they're so big and i don't know whether that would have been the case or not you can speculate to death uh but they were building railroads and they were figuring it

out and they were starting to bring russia into the century and you know you couple the idea of the people believing that their czar who they're devoted to um is not acting in his right mind you add that with a war and new ideologies on politics you know this this is a a regime that you know czar nicholas's grandfather had opened up things and he started a uh a parliament which i think it's called the i forget what it's called it's still there it's the boond i don't i don't know what it's called anyway um there's a russian parliament that started and then his son said screw that i am the czar i'm gonna do whatever i want and this nicholas guy is sort of like not really a big power politics guy so he doesn't really get involved as much

um and so you've got the people feeling really disenfranchised with the government you've got communist ideologies you know coming out of everywhere and and agitators happening everywhere people aren't eating and it pushes the country towards revolution in 1917 and it's so funny because they saw the czar and the czarina as like a god right as somebody who had to be devoted to you were fighting for the czar and the czarina and everybody that fought for the Tsar and the Tsarina went to the front and they died. So that leaves the people who are not necessarily as loyal in the major cities, who don't believe that the Tsar and the Tsarina are acting in their right minds. And there are all these new ideologies coming out of nowhere that

are like, oh, we could share the wealth. I mean, we could all kind of work together. That's crazy. And so what Rasputin becomes is a cog in the wheel of the Russian Revolution. He helps people with sort of the guilt of turning on something, on an institution that they thought was sacrosanct. So you imagine like you have – it's almost religious, right? You have to – when kings and queens and that sort of thing, there was a point in every country where that was almost a religious belief that these people were ordained by God. And in Russia, that still was the case. But because of Rasputin, their brand with their people is hurt. And so when people say, yeah, we need to get rid of these guys, we need to depose these guys, it becomes a lot easier for them to say, yeah, you know, we had to get rid of them because they weren't acting in the right minds.

If they'd said, yeah, we had to get rid of them because it's a naked power grab, people feel guilty about that. And what ended up happening was there's a million things that go into the Russian Revolution. However, this gets so bad, the war effort gets so bad that Nicholas decides, I'm going to leave Moscow and or sorry, St. Petersburg, and I'm going to go to the front and manage the war myself. And this is a guy that's not a general. So you can imagine how well that goes. It gets so bad that there's a revolution in St. Petersburg, where the workers storm everything and take over. So he comes back and on the way on the train over, they basically tell him you can't go back. So he abdicates, passes the crown to his brother. His brother's like, I don't want that shit, abdicates, and that's the end of the monarchy. And then there's a nine-month democracy that takes over. And this is really, really basic stuff. Alexander Kerensky, who was the prime minister of that particular nine-month period, if he decides to pull Russia out of the war at that point, the communist revolution probably doesn't happen. But he says, no, we got to stick to our treaties and we got to do this. And then the communists say all they had to say was bread for all. So relating that back to Rasputin, a lot of what's said about him is just probably not true. He was a striking looking guy. He was a charmer with women. He was a drunken fool, a total hedonist, and had one of those people that had that cult of personality around him and contributed to the fall of the last Caesar. that's what czar comes from it's the last caesar in the world and it's a very it's a fascinating

story but it's really not about rasputin it's about what happened around rasputin and the perception of rasputin that makes him so famous does that make sense yeah yeah can i get in there for a sec because there adam did a lot of the like actual historical stuff and uh like political impact and whatever the myths and stuff around him are wild so myth there's there's a list here of five things myth number four he was impossible to kill rasputin's behavior and influence came to symbolize everything negative in russian politics and society at the time even prior to his final assassination other attempts on his life were made in june of 1914 a beggar woman stabbed the monk in the stomach claiming he was seducing the innocent rasputin made a full recovery even

though he had lost a lot of blood and was close to death after the incident two years later a group of nobles led by a man named felix yusupov plotted to get rid of the holy man once and for all on december 30th 1916 yusupov invited rasputin to dine at his home after a heavy meal complete with wine and dessert all supposedly heavily laced with poison the men looked on as amazingly rasputin showed no sign uh showed no symptoms that the poison was having an effect on him the men proceeded to shoot rasputin who according to legend still drew breath after a barrage of bullets uh and only died after he was thrown into an ice-cold river to drown however while rasputin's death was in fact plotted by yusupov and other nobles autopsy reports show that no

poison was found in rasputin's system uh and that they fucked up the poison part but everybody's like oh it just means the system doesn't accept poison i'm like no no no they just fucked it up and it seems that he died from a single bullet to the head well yeah well and that's so that's the interesting part there is a rumor and i don't know if this is substantiated about the way he died because russia and russia france and england are the triple entendre at this point and the war is not going well and the word is the british could have killed him uh or could have helped the plot to kill him because they knew how bad he looked uh to the russian population they were concerned about um about you know there being a revolution and they needed to keep russia in the

war because then if russia's not in the war then germany could transfer all these people over to their front they're totally screwed so they're trying to keep russia in the war and apparently they tried and i don't know if the bullet in the head thing is the part where some people have speculated that england might have been involved in in taking him out um yeah just he's got crazy stories around him but sorry i don't know the thing is is that with mystics like him i'm not that interested because i know it's all bullshit so you know what i'm interested in personally is the effect yeah well is the effect of what happened around him right that's my personal area of interest there are books written on this guy and really what it is it's the same effect

that you know steve jobs would have on people right he just has that you walk in and there are certain people that have that aura you just walk into their field and you're like you're taken and uh he's just one of those guys and uh and one of history's most notorious characters a very very interesting man so there you go you guys want one more question yeah yeah do it all right um adam we'll do a couple more questions uh rj4607604 not a real guy no why does adam think i'm a bot because well listen you haven't done a whole lot to make me think you're not a bot uh come up with a better name rj unless all those numbers are really important to him that's a lot of numbers that if if all those numbers are really important

to him then none of them are important it's too many numbers to be important to you man that's most of the numbers like you can't take all the numbers and go these are all important one of them has to be important the rest of them are just numbers that's like saying i'm a fan of all 32 nhl teams i am hardcore for all 32 nhl teams even the one that's not playing yet no no not like that they're not all special can i give a multi-million dollar idea away for free right now make the default twitter name i'm a bot so they have to change it yes in the same way that you have to prove you're not a robot when you like buy stuff online or log in i feel like that would encourage people to just leave it yeah what oh like the people who sucker you in an nhl by

just wearing the default jacket and it turns out they're sick. Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. I don't care. Someone that would get off on that, I don't care. Make the default name, I'm a bot. Yeah, Zier wants to know does a straw have two

holes or one? Oh, shit. It has one hole and two ends. Yes. Yes. Yes. yeah and now jesse will inform us whether or not we're right jesse are we right what do you mean by ends ends yeah so that's two ends why does why does it not have two holes well because okay if there's two ends then there's a hole at the top and hold the bottom i think

your logic proves you're wrong but what's separate about those holes what what is separate about one end of a straw to the other it's one continuous thing so the hole is continuous which means a hole has two parts and this particular hole has two parts to it but it's one hole now no this could get crazy though this could get crazy there was a bottom on the straw if there's something capping the other end then it has one hole but since it opens at the other side that's there's two holes a well has one hole because you can only get in one way but if a well had a hole at the other end of the earth then it has two holes adam based on our own logic does a sewer system only have one hole and a bunch of ends no it has many holes

all right fine all right i don't know damn is this not really just a liquid tunnel i don't know uh um is there anything else jess uh we could do one more julius you guys got to pick one leafs team from history to do a last dance documentary on a horror check 14 15 no leaves no the worst dance nobody's watching that worst dance the worst dance that's funny i think the 98 99 leafs kujo's first year see that's the first dance well because they were bad they were bad for three years yeah and then they were the last dance of being the last shitty dance so you gotta remember it's the leaves they haven't won anything in a long long time so the last dance is to be the last

of the bad at least for now until they're bad again or at least the kind of good they won a round like they won two sir crazy i would i have i have two answers the 67 leafs just because that was literally a team built to be in their last dance they were called they were nicknamed the over the hill gang uh a bunch of them were over 40 i think johnny bauer was like he was mad old they a lot of them were really old george armstrong was really old there was a really old team the other just because the team kept this team so sealed tight and didn't let anybody talk i would love to see a behind the scenes documentary of the 16 17 leafs they're all rookies um you know guys who are going to be cornerstones on the team for years to come

their unexpected run to the playoffs all all sorts of storylines um and a lot of a lot of the perspective we got was from like the mouth of Tyler Bozak and Nazem Kadri because they wouldn't let anyone else talk so I would love if we could go back in time and like you know see Austin Matthews and Mitch Marner and and William Nylander and and all of them coming into their own in real time that'd be cool it would be cool wilbur polak actually would probably be the most entertaining guy on that documentary right he's hilarious yeah awesome okay so we're gonna be back wednesday and then after that it's wednesdays until the season comes back and that will not be long you might think oh that's a long time it's probably like four or five episodes and then the season's back

anyway yeah it could be so uh so anyway thank you so much for listening uh we will uh we'll We'll see you Wednesday, and have a great week. Until then. S-T-E-P. The Steve Dangle Podcast. Follow the guys on Twitter at Steve underscore Dangle, at Adam W-Y-L-D-E, and at Jesse Blake. Brought to you by Panago Pizza.

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