When you are Kyrie Irving, you have handles like nobody on the planet and you made one of the most famous shots in basketball history to win Cleveland’s first NBA championship, seemingly by divine intervention, it’s understandable why you might have a different view of the world than everyone else.

We learned just how different Irving’s perspective is during his appearance on the Road Trippin’ podcast, hosted by teammates Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye, along with Fox Sports Ohio’s Allie Clifton. A wide-ranging interview that began with a discussion on hotel aliases and childbirth quickly turned to aliens and conspiracy theories, at which point we discovered Irving believes the Earth is flat.

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I don’t know how many flights Irving has taken as a professional basketball player. I’m sure it’s a lot. But I guess he’s never seen the curvature of the Earth. I’m not sure why he thinks he plays NBA games in different time zones, but I now know that he doesn’t believe it’s because the globe is rotating.

Irving touched on several conspiracy theories — some not so wild, like his belief that “there are extraterrestrial beings that exist in the universe,” and some definitely wild ones, like his position that the CIA assassinated Bob Marley because “he tried to bring people together and the fact that it was fundamentally built on love and truth and we kill people for doing the right thing like that” — but things really got interesting when he unveiled his flat-Earth theory. Have a listen, via r/NBA.

After Jefferson and Frye agreed the Earth is a sphere, because they are sane human beings, Irving said, “The Earth is flat,” and then repeated it three times. Insinuating that much of our education is a farce that needs to be independently researched on the internet, Irving launched into a series of truly amazing diatribes, all of which were interrupted by Jefferson or Frye before he could finish his point.





Irving is a man known for his human highlight reels, but nothing will ever top this series of stunners:

“The fact that in our lifetimes there are so many holes and so many pockets in our history. … History is history, and it’s happened long before us, and it’s going to happen after us, and it always repeats itself somehow, in some way. All these things that they keep giving to us, all this information, I’m just saying that all these things that used to put me in fear, it makes you not want to question it naturally, because of how much information you actually can figure out and how much information there actually is out there. It’s crazy. Anything that you have a particular question on, OK — Is the world flat or round? — I think you need to do research on it. It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us.”

[…]

“For what I’ve known for many years and what I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round, but if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that — can you really think of us rotating around the sun, and all planets align, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these ‘planets’ and stuff like this.”

[…]

“Everything that they send [to space] doesn’t come back. It doesn’t come back. There is no concrete information, except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe, and the truth is right there. You’ve just got to go searching for it. I’ve been searching for it for a while.

[…]

“Everything that was put in front of me, I had to be like, ‘Oh, this is all a facade.’ Like, this is all something that they ultimately want me to believe in … but now there is a certain aspect of life in which I want to tell people about, which is this true journey of really becoming a complete individual and total freedom of thought. Do you know what I’m saying?

“Question things, but even if an answer doesn’t come back, you’re perfectly fine with that, because you were never living in that particular truth. There’s a falseness in stories and things that people want you to believe and ultimately what they throw in front of us.”