I honestly can’t listen to Kyrie Irving talk about his thoughts on the Earth being flat anymore. First, he said it was flat. Then, he said he was just trolling everyone. Then, he said he thought it was flat again. And now, well, now he just seems amused over the fact that everyone is so hung up on his opinion on the shape of the Earth. It’s maddening, to say the least.
But Irving is still talking about his flat Earth theory, and fortunately, there are other people out there who are listening to him talk and trying to make sense of it all. On Friday, J.J. Redickdebuted a new episode of his Ringerpodcast, and Irving, who has been over in London with Redick for a Celtics/76ers game, was his special guest. And they wasted absolutely no time getting into Irving's thoughts on flat Earth and other conspiracy theories. It all starts at about the 1:45 mark of the clip below.
I spent about 45 seconds listening to it before I started banging my head on my keyboard and couldn’t take it anymore, but Ball Don’t Lie blogger Ben Rohrbach did us all a favor and listened to Irving go on (and on and on and on…) about his takes on different conspiracy theories, and he shared some of the high—and low—lights.
Irving and Redick started things off by speaking about Irving’s original comments about flat Earth last February, and Irving revealed that he made the comments after learning about different flat Earth theories on…Instagram. No, really, that was what started all of this.
Redick and Irving moved on to talk about conspiracy theories in a more general sense, which is when Irving touched briefly on geo-engineering and chemtrails, which are things that you should not Google under any circumstances unless you want to spend (waste?) the rest of your afternoon jumping down rabbit holes that will impossible to get out of. Irving said the things he read on such theories made him "think twice about shit."
From there, Redick revealed he isn’t 100 percent convinced dinosaurs existed (oddly enough, he's not the only pro athlete who thinks this) before the two players moved on to talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories. At this point, Rohrbach considered turning away and shutting the podcast off, and we wouldn’t have blamed him at all for doing it. But he soldiered on and shared what Irving had to say about the 9/11 conspiracy theories he’s seen.
After that, there was even some Illuminati talk! Irving asked Redick if he had seen the new Taco Bell commercial that references the Illuminati, and Irving shared his thoughts on the Illuminati and talked about how he has "been seeing the all-seeing eye for about six months now."
The conspiracy segment then ended with Irving going all-in on his thoughts on spiritual alchemy and—wait—Jim Carrey? Yup, this podcast appearance took even more twists and turns than anyone could have possibly predicted.
The thing is that, even after allllllllllllll of this, I actually still think Irving is probably making a larger point here that is very valid. That point being that people should use the resources available to them to do the necessary research to learn the truth about things, rather than just accepting the truth from others. But the fact that he seems to be relying on random Instagram accounts to learn the "truth"—and that he seems to be dabbling in so many conspiracy theories at once—is what makes it all so facepalm-inducing in the first place.
If your brain can take it, you can check out what else Irving had to say on the podcast—there was even some stuff that didn’t have anything to do with the shape of the Earth or chemtrails—in the video above.
