76ers center Joel Embiid and his head coach Brett Brown sat down for an interview with Yahoo! Sports reporter Adrian Wojnarowski recently for his The Vertical podcast, and to say that Embiid talked about some interesting topics would be the understatement of the young NBA season. Embiid—who is quickly becoming a media sensation thanks to hilarious stuff like this—talked about a range of different things during the interview. You can listen to the entire podcast here:
One of the most interesting parts of the podcast came when Embiid, a native of Cameroon, spoke on the stereotypes that Americans often have of people who live in Africa. Specifically, he talked about how he used to tell people a pretty crazy story back when he was playing for the Kansas Jayhawks. It involves a 6-year-old Embiid, a lion, the jungle, and, well, let’s let him tell it:
"Americans don’t really have any idea what’s going on in the world, especially us Africans. When they think about Africans, they think about us running around with lions and tigers and all those other animals. When I got to Kansas I kind of used that to my advantage, talking about how I killed a lion and that’s how I became a man. At six years old I had to go into the jungle and kill a lion and had to carry it on my back and carry it back to the village to show I’m a man. And they bought into it. I don’t know. It might be true or it might be false. I don’t know. But that’s the perception."
Point taken! Embiid also touched on the perceptions that he had of the U.S. before moving here. He used words like "a dream" and "heaven" to describe what he thought America was going to be like. But he said that he quickly found out that this country was "not like what I thought it was going to be." And now that Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States of America, Embiid doesn’t know what to think about the country anymore.
"With the election going on and Donald Trump getting elected, I mean, I don’t usually get into politics, but with the way he’s been acting—talking about racism and women—it’s hard to understand why people elected him," Embiid said. "It just shows you the way people think. Racism isn’t over and people are still behind him."
Elsewhere in the podcast, Embiid also revealed that he’s been receiving advice from the great Tim Duncan:
This guy just keeps getting more and more interesting.
