I’m in my Basketball Feelings right now, in a bad way.
I’m realizing at the end of all these recordings, because we are chatting on Zoom with cameras on, that they just feel like getting off a really good, long, rambly phone call where you walk around your place from room to room, pick things up, put them away, fiddle with stuff, smile out the window, lie down, get up, and laugh a lot. I’d told Ashtyn the rundown was Flagrant, Russ and a Portland temperature check, but that the podcast was “mostly talking around things”, and boy, did we deliver.1
Ashtyn Butuso (I should introduce her first) is a cofounder of the wildly smart, beautiful, very cool and desperately needed Flagrant Magazine, she’s also instantly disarming, generous and very kind, and one of the funniest and best dressed people in the expanding vortex that is NBA Twitter. One thing about learning people through a vacuum like NBA Twitter is you see their fandom first, before you know them, and it pre-informs you a little, sometimes to its detriment. So I wanted to know why and where — if she could pin it — her Blazers support started.
We also got into the origin story of Flagrant, like way back to when and how everyone met (this is a success story across state lines), why Russell Westbrook makes so many people so mad, delved into Damian Lillard hopefully chilling, the population of Canada (I’m very wrong, Ashtyn is closer), fans as martyrs, the wonder of modern mail, Jerry Krause, grocery store cakes, and wanting to live in Wyoming.
If you’re seeing this whole episode in your inbox, or browser, and you aren’t a paid subscriber, you haven’t pulled off a genius heist (sorry) I just liked this one so much that I decided to make it available to everyone. Enjoy!
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