In both a figurative and literal sense, we’ve now officially come full circle on the Kyrie Irving Is A Flat Earth Truther story. It’s been one year since Irving revealed at All-Star Weekend that he believed the Earth might not be round.
It became the talk of the weekend in New Orleans, and in the time that the globe has traveled once in its orbit around the sun, the story has changed and shifted a bit. Irving has gently denied fully being a truther, instead stressing that people need to form their own opinions and that it was more of a thought experiment.
His intellectual dishonesty has been the topic of much debate among scientists who think an influential figure like Irving saying nonsense about pseudoscience is not a great look.
Irving is appearing in his fifth All-Star game this weekend in Los Angeles, and he appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show on Thursday night to discuss the event, his Uncle Drew movie and, of course, his thoughts on the Earth being flat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_trulM9Ht4E
Irving doesn’t say much groundbreaking throughout the interivew, though it is entertaining. By the end, Kimmel brings up the Flat Earth inquiry and asked him if he wanted to backtrack the claim on national television.
“You’ve always tried to come back, take the statement back,” Irving said, laughing and pretending to reel in a fishing pole. “On that podcast I was just really like, ‘Man what’s going on within our world?’ Just a whole bunch of truth and conspiracy and I was just like ‘Whoa this is too much for me.’ And then I come out and say that and hoo. The reaction it got.”
Kimmel suggested that people thought his “brain collapsed,” which is a pretty good Flat Earth joke, actually.
“It didn’t,” Irving said. “I’m actually intellectually stable.”
To finish the segment, Kimmel gave Irving a basketball made up to be a globe of the Earth.
“Maybe you can, like, at work, you can look at this — this is a gift for you — that’s one of a kind there. And you can just ponder the potential realities of the world and its possible roundness.”
Irving took it all in stride, but I don’t think Kimmel publicly shamed him into taking down his Illuminati photos on Instagram. That’s where he learned about the Earth’s flatness in the first place, you know. On Instagram. Where the science lives.
