Jaden Ivey Lost His Mind And Then His Job

In the first of the recent rambling Instagram Live sermons that got him fired by the Chicago Bulls, Jaden Ivey hunts through a Bible for passages to share with his followers. He evidently did not do the prep work to place sticky tabs or bookmarks in there, so there are awkward moments of silence while Ivey flips back and forth and sniffs and mutters. It's a lot of very tedious work for almost no payoff: Every passage Ivey selects is a threat of damnation, and the most he ever wrings out of his selections, by way of translating them into plain language, is a superficial and increasingly whiney exhortation. You guys, don't you see how this further goes to show that you are going to go to hell?

He winds himself up like this, so that by the end of the video his voice has risen half an octave or more, as if he has been waiting for some tangible sign of breakthrough and feels his audience is to blame for not having produced one, perhaps due to their inner hypocrisy. But it's a pretty friendly audience, judging by the comments: If recent studies about sycophancy in AI chatbots reveal anything broader about online psychosis, Ivey is absorbing a dangerously potent wallop of behavioral reinforcement. He spent several hours over the weekend preaching to this crowd, much of it from the interior of his car, hammering the same talking points about how to avoid eternal damnation, not refining his message too well but certainly gaining steam through repetition.

It's not surprising then that some of the confessions Ivey struggled to articulate in the making of his first video are shouted with authority in the most recent one, which came after his employers decided they'd seen enough of this shit. "God saved me from a life of fornication," Ivey professes early in the first video, in an affectless bass, looking away from the camera. "He saved me from a life of drunkenness, he saved me from a life of, um," and here there is a pregnant pause before Ivey completes the sentence with "pornography." Later in the session, repeating the same point, Ivey record-scratches on that pornography bit, stares blankly, and then moves to another thought. By Monday's video, he'd gotten the hang of it. "I was a fornicator! I was a pornography addict! And I used to get drunk! That's all I knew!"