Kyrie Irving sure does think he’s making you think.
The galaxy brain point guard for the Boston Celtics is switching up his social media profile shortly before things get serious in the NBA this season, and if you thought he would pivot away from the weirdness he put forth into the universe this year you’ve clearly not understood the point of Irving’s existence here on this flat Earth.
Irving famously declared that the Earth is flat at the All-Star game in New Orleans earlier this year, only to walk that claim back a bit in a radio interview earlier this week. He didn’t outright admit he was trolling, but rather conducting an elaborate thought experiment that he said worked.
People believed Irving believed that and — because the science behind his belief was absolute bunk — people made fun of him and said he was not smart. According to him, the discourse worked! But putting that kind of nonsense out into the world when you’re a prominent figure in sports can be harmful. Not that it seems to matter to him.
Irving is doubling down on his mysterious thinking man ways these days. He’s updated his Instagram profile to include some Illuminati-style graphics and asks “I Am My True Self. Are you?”
What he’s trying to do here is unclear, but it’s a long way from Kevin Durant and the Warriors embracing The Sandlot. You can take a guess with me if you’d like and say it’s some kind of higher thinking conspiracy stuff. If you google “3 6 9 illuminati,” for example, you get a YouTube video that argues that ‘Vortex Based Mathematics’ indicate there’s a ‘divine code’ in the math surrounding triangles and circles.
“If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9,” the video’s description asks, “then you would have a key to the universe.”
Which, yeah, some numbers equal other numbers if you add them together. It’s wild stuff. But I’m not sure if this is going to help me plan for retirement or find my way to love and happiness in this temporary existence that is life.
The truth is that the least intelligent smart people do work just because they think it makes them look smart. Irving might believe he’s got us all fooled, and maybe he does! But if the work is just for the sake of creating discourse and not to actually learn anything, you’re just rambling about brain usage numbers on a podcast.
The key to the universe probably doesn’t come from Kyrie Irving’s Instagram, but it does have a lot of poor camera phone pictures of basketball players, if you need them.
