Shaquille O’Neal may not agree with everything Kyrie Irving says, but they seem to share the same curiosity about the Earth’s shape.
Earlier this week, O’Neal joined popular Australian radio program The Kyle & Jackie O Show and the basketball Hall-of-Famer was asked about flat earth comments he made more than five years ago.
“It’s a theory. It’s just a theory,” O’Neal told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson. “They teach us a lot of things, it’s just a theory. For example, I flew 20 hours today. Not once did I go this way,” the Inside the NBA analyst explained while making a circular motion with his hand. “I flew straight, I didn’t tip over, I didn’t go upside down. So, it’s just a theory. A conspiracy theory.”
Sandilands made the astute point that if you fly to Australia from Los Angeles, you can take off in either direction, flying east or west to reach your destination. But O’Neal didn’t waver from his “conspiracy theory.”
“It’s still a straight line,” O’Neal said. “I didn’t go under.”
O’Neal made his first public flat earth comments in 2017, shortly after Kyrie Irving defiantly declared his belief that the Earth was flat.
“It’s true. The Earth is flat,” O’Neal said during a 2017 episode of The Big Podcast with Shaq. “Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind—what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school, the first thing they teach us is, ‘Oh, Columbus discovered America,’ but when he got there, there were some fair-skinned people with long hair smoking on the peace pipes. So, what does that tell you? Columbus didn’t discover America.”
“I’m just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me,” he continued. “I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle and all that stuff about gravity. Have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It’s not. The world is flat.”
Less than one week after the podcast was released, O’Neal claimed to just be “joking, you idiots.” Now more than five years later, O’Neal didn’t categorize the flat earth theory as a joke during his appearance on The Kyle & Jackie O Show and he even went further with another conspiracy theory that goes against science.
“You know how they say world is spinning? I’ve been living in a house on a lake for 30 years,” O’Neal said. “Not once did the lake rotate to the left or rotate to the right.”
I bet there’s more data available to prove the Earth is round and the world is spinning other than O’Neal’s flight to Australia or his lake house. But this is why O’Neal earned the nickname “The Big Aristotle” earlier in his career.