This is crazy what I’m trying, but I feel like I was meant to do this. For eight years my mom organized the Chinese Summer Festival in San Jose. For nineteen years, I was the Commish of a men’s basketball league in the Bay Area called Dream League.
This is what we do, get like-minded people to congregate.
And so with that I present to you the Love Your Dubs Summit, an attempt to swing the pendulum back in an era of social media narratives, misinformation and just constant complaining online getting amplified by tech platforms because these algorithms lead to more and more corporate money — and less and less education, learning, creativity and positivity.
This leads to separation and less and less human IRL connection.
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Jonathan Kuminga, for example, has realized the same thing (entire Q&A and transcript here):
And have you searched on Ayesha Curry lately? 🙄 I think you get the picture.
How do you even begin to swim upstream when so many people are addicted to thumb-typing put-downs and throwing people under the bus?
Here’s how…
You take Kevon Looney’s tribute to DubNation as a blueprint and build a massive virtual vault of behind-the-scenes Golden State Warriors stories like his.
Actually, I had come up with Love Your Dubs concept about a month before Looney left in free agency, but Loon’s piece and the vibes it produced — despite him leaving the Dubs for New Orleans — only made me sure I was doing the right thing.
After I read the genuine words from Kevon’s voice, I instantly felt better about the summer of only nine roster spots filled as the Kuminga stalemate unfolded and reading all the dreadful fan page tweets and their replies. With all due respect to all the journalists and bloggers out there, it was like an all-time great GSW article.
They should retire Looney’s jersey based on that single post, let alone what he did on the floor. Remember the part where he said he wanted to go from the Warriors bench during the game, up to the nosebleeds and cheer with us?
Talk about speaking your mind!
So that’s what we’re doing:
💉 Construct a super-serum of gratitude, appreciation, mindfulness, empathy and respect and inject it into the fan base.
💗 Remind them of why they fell in love with their team in the first place.
What’s a summit? It’s a meeting of the minds. It’s a bevy of interviews and presentations designed to transform the audience. For an NBA fan base, I don’t think this has ever been tried.
We’ll have bonus content worth hundreds of dollars and nearly forty speakers and nearly forty hours of content! We call that The Vault.
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With The Vault, DubNation will have a permanent resource, a foundation of fandom from which to fall back on anytime something happens, like we go on a losing streak or somebody has a bad game or (gulp) the zombies on Twitter fall for some narrative designed to make you hate [fill in the blank] Warriors player.
Here’s an explanation from my livestream co-host Dean “of Positivity” Chambers and me:
Me: We’ve got some really good content here inside of our vault. Look at all these. Guess how many speakers we have so far, Dean?
Dean: I thought I heard you say 36. Is that right?
36 speakers.
That’s unbelievable, man. It’s a testament to you, too, Rich. Like I don’t think you guys understand that. Why do you come to this channel? It’s not just Rich, like, “This is what I think. I like basketball,” which is great. That’s what I do. Can’t knock it much. Rich has connections. He knows what he’s talking about and he understands journalism from many different aspects. He understands, obviously, the live stream and communicating with you guys, but he really understands how to talk to people who know basketball, who know just watch it. They’re involved with it. They’re (Tim) Kawakami, Coach Nick (BBALLBREAKDOWN), Kelenna (Azubuike), as you mentioned. I mean, reporters and staff members have been on the team for years and decades, and they respond to Rich because they know that a) it’s there to make everybody benefit. It’s not a “gotcha” piece, it’s not an argument, although we will have our own opinions always, of course. But it’s just — it’s, like, this is masterclass-level content on the Warriors, certainly, basketball definitely, but also just like what expertise looks like.
So let’s take a look at those guys because you got Franco Finn here. Take a sneak peek of Franco.
I always appreciated the homage to the Bay Artists, D-Sharp, right? Like every game, you will hear local artists.
That’s my thing. Like, I get a lot of music from a lot of artists and that pre-game is a good time to break those artists because the Bay Area is home and you want to keep that sound and that vibe going. It’s just a good time to do that, you know what I’m saying?
Thank you, D-Sharp. I want to hurry up and go to Glenn Robinson (III). Wow, that guy’s the nicest guy, man. GR3, Big Dog (Glenn Robinson, Sr.)’s son. One of the nicest human beings on the planet.
And I enjoyed the time I got to spend with him, but as I got older, I realized how much of an impact that he is had on the court, how much of an impact that he is had in my life. And it’s pretty crazy to think about. I think if it was social media now, he would be up there with guys like KD (Kevin Durant) with guys like — I don’t wanna say LeBron James, everybody gonna go crazy — but he would have that type of stardom to this day.
This is your opportunity, for everyone listening out here right now. I promise you, you’ll wish you were at the first summit because the second summit’s gonna be crowded, man, and you won’t be able to get your questions — at least that’s what we’re trying to do. So yeah, absolutely. Amazing.
Yeah, a little juicy taste of how awesome this stuff is. And if you wanna think about it’s 18 hours, 30-minute episodes. I mean, that’s 36 episodes of season one of the Love Your Dubs summit, exclusively on LoveYourDubs.com.
Aw, thanks Dean.
No one else could put this together, man, really. No other team has even tried as far as I know, so it’s just incredible stuff and there’s even more to come after that.
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I’ll be updating you all with my daily trials and tribulations from the Summit, leading right up to the first airing of the first interview, Wednesday morning, October 15th, with Nico Trong of DubNationFr (DubNation France) so that his audience in France can watch at a reasonable hour — they’re nine hours ahead of us.
We’ll air more and more “episodes” five out of the six evenings, skipping the last preseason game on Oct. 17th, leading up to Opening Night October 20th.
I suspect a few very recognizable names will be joining me on Zoom calls this week, all adding to The Vault.
🏦 The Vault 🏦
Please note, access to The Vault requires an upgrade from the free ticket and does have extras: extra interviews with more famous people, extra content, giveaways of four Shot Ready books by one Wardell Stephen Curry, and more.
Upgrading to the vault also grants you a $1 free trial to our new Behind-the-Scenes Membership!
🔬 Behind-the-Scenes Membership 🔬
The Behind-the-Scenes Membership is pretty much everything I used to do when I reported from the beat, 2013-2022, just not as psycho-day-to-day, more spread out and “humane” (to the reporter on the scene) 😅
First of all, we have photographer and media guy Riley Bermudez on the scene at various practices and games. He’s one of the photogs for Buddy Hield, too.
We have already uploaded exclusive content featuring Hield splashing away along with Moses Moody, Gui Santos, Gary Payton II and Jackson Rowe into The Vault.
The Behind-the-Scenes Membership is normally $47/month, but people who signup for the Love Your Dubs Summit and upgrade to The Vault get the first month for just $1 and $37/month through the first year.
By the way, with the Behind-the-Scenes Membership, you also get a free subscription to this Substack (usually $5/mo), as well as free VIP access to our Discord (also $5/mo).
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Can’t wait to follow up tomorrow with some detailed day-to-day Summit stuff. It’ll be like a nine-day diary leading up to the Summit start date of Wednesday, October 15th at 9:00AM Pacific time!
Expect more frequent posts here and see you on the Lakers-Warriors preseason livestream:
🫶💙💛