Adrian Wojnarowski posted the latest episode of his The Vertical Podcast this morning, when he sat down with Brett Brown and Joel Embiid. They talked the election, family, growing up, and “the process.” Woj asked Embiid what it was like to be hailed as the Sixers’ savior, and what’s the deal with “The Process”?

Injuries are something you can’t control. People always on social media and walking on the street, people asking you when you’re going to play and basically people are saying you’re faking the injuries because you don’t wanna play. That played a big role, and it was hard. I was the third pick, so people expect me to come in and dominate and just bring the Sixers back to where they used to be. But going through those injuries, one thing I learned was patience.

About the process: When I’m always mentioning “process” people think I’m maybe talking about the team process and I don’t know whatever that was going on before I got here, but that’s where they got “the process” from, but when I always talk about process, I feel like it’s my process. I always say my life is a movie. I started playing basketball in 2011 and then getting a chance to come to the states and play JV my junior year in high school and transfer to another school my senior year. Get offers just like that, and then go to Kansas, play a couple pick up games against the guys. And from getting dunked on I decided to go talk to coach and tell him that I want to redshirt and tell him that I wasn’t ready. Just like that, he tells me “you’re going to be the number one pick in two years.

And people told me college coaches always lie, so I’m like “you lyin'” and he just told me to keep working…people start talking about you being a number one pick out of nowhere so everything just happened so fast for me. Coming to Philly, getting injured, having to get two surgeries, and finally getting back on the court. It’s hard, but I feel like that’s “the process.”

Later, when talking about how people assume he grew up because he’s from Cameroon, Embiid said “Americans, I feel like, they don’t really have any idea of what’s going on in the world, especially us Africans. When they think about Africans they think of us running around with lions and tigers.” He’s not wrong.