Boston Celtics guard Kyrie Irving has something of a confession: He was not totally serious about being a big-time flat Earth guy, even though he spent a lot of time playing the part of a fake-deep intellectual. At a panel today, Kyrie blamed an algorithm-fueled YouTube binge for his incorrect beliefs on the shape of the world.
Here’s an example of the kind of shit Irving was saying, in a New York Times interview from June:
You’ve been coy about what you really believe so I’m hoping you’ll clarify here. Do you or do you not believe the Earth is flat? Or do you not know?
That’s what I’m asking you. No, no, no. Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round? Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know. I was never trying to convince anyone that the world is flat. I’m not being an advocate for the world being completely flat. No, I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s fun to think about though. It’s fun to have that conversation. It is absolutely fun because people get so agitated and mad. They’re like, “Hey man, you can’t believe that, man. It’s religious, man. It’s just science. You can’t believe anything else. O.K.?” Cool, well, explain to me. Give me what you’ve known about the Earth and your research, and I love it. I love talking about it.
Kyrie is now sorry he questioned whether the Earth was “constitutionally round.”
“Hopefully after this, I’m done answering these questions,” Irving said in a clip taken by Boston.com’s Nicole Yang. “At the time, I was huge into conspiracies, and everybody’s been there. Everybody’s been there. Like, ‘Yooo, what’s going with our world?’ You know, you click the YouTube click and it’s like, how deep the rabbithole goes.”
“At the time, I just didn’t realize the effect and I was definitely at that time, like, ‘I’m a big conspiracy theorist. You can’t tell me anything.’ So, I’m sorry about all that, for all the science teachers. Everybody coming up to me like, ‘You know I gotta reteach my whole curriculum!’ I’m sorry. I apologize.”
Although Kyrie has broken character on this topic—hopefully Geno Smith follows suit—he still plans on being odd in other ways: