Since the dawn of time there have been an infinite amount of
individuals willing to look past their own setting to imagine the world of the beyond.
Some don't have vision,
many can't find purpose,
but then some people...
"Don't have a cow, man"
First airing in 1987 as part of "The Tracey Ullman Show"
and later in 1989 as its own standalone entity,
The Simpsons has become famous and infamous for just about everything that a television show ever could be.
And people have eventually started to realize that this little show that certainly could,
had quite the reputation for predicting the events that would follow in the real world.
Examples of these are certainly not hard to track down.
You'll find that for many of the small joke plot points
there's some real-world equivalent out there somewhere.
As Buzzfeed reports in their article "21 times the Simpsons bizarrely predicted the future",
the world has witnessed the rise of radiation mutated tomatoes,
games about farming,
baby translators,
stolen cooking grease, and even a three-eyed fish Fed by water from a nuclear plant.
In their article, "11 times the Simpsons predicted the future with eerie precision",
Yahoo! News adds to the list: The Simpsons predicted the NSA spying on Americans,
The Higgs Boson particle,
the economic collapse of Greece, and even the catastrophe of the FIFA scandal.
But none of you are likely coming here because of any prediction that small.
In March 2000, an episode of The Simpsons was released set in the Far Future of the Year 2030.
This featured a story line of Lisa Simpson becoming the first female president who wasn't gay.
In one sequence, making reference towards the Country's poor state, Madam president Lisa states:
"As you know we've inherited quite a budget crunch from president Trump"
to many people this has solidified The Simpsons stance as a predictor for the Future of the World and America.
And there's been many other attempts to show instances of The Simpsons predicting things,
although these have often been far less sound.
Simpsons predicted watches that you can talk through,
Simpsons predicted technology not being very good in the future,
Simpsons predicted phones with cameras on them,
Simpsons predicted Harambe,
Simpsons predicted phone games,
Simpsons predicted Ebola still being a thing in the future.
"Forget school, we have to get to the mesa!"
"We're not going anywhere except to bed"
"but my prediction says-"
"you couldn't predict six o'clock at 5:30!"
Now let's stop beating around the bush.
Let's get down to why The Simpsons has been able to get right so many moments in recent history,
be it political or social or based in technology.
Well, the answer is a lot more obvious than some of you would probably expect.
Indeed, the real phenomenon behind this has in fact had a name for years,
and we've just failed to recognize that this is another mutated wave of the same situation instead of a new problem.
You see ladies and gentlemen,
when we're looking into things like Trump becoming president,
or The Rolling Stones going on a tour in the 2010s,
we truly look at the comparison not out of wonder for how these situations have lined up,
but instead we look at reality in frustration.
Reality is running out of ideas,
going through old ones that the TV shows from the 1990s had already done much better than anyone else really could.
In other words...
"Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!"
"Simpsons did it" is the widely supported belief that if a television show is left to run for long enough,
it will eventually go through so many potential ideas that it will become impossible for other shows not to rip them off.
"The Simpsons have done everything already, who cares?"
"Yeah, they've been on the air for like thirteen years of course they've done everything"
"Every idea has been done, Butters, even before The Simpsons"
When one truly considers that there is no real difference between an animated series
accidentally doing a similar storyline to one in the simpsons and
Reality repeating something that was also on The Simpsons once.
When someone does one thing enough times and then allows
literally all of time to pass between the creation and the end of existence
Then they're bound to get a few things right even South park the show which coined this often-quoted
concept has been known to have a few instances of
accidentally predicting future events while trying to make comedy the 2002 episode
Jared has aids featured a media outcry at the belief that Jared Fogle from Subway
was a pedophile [and] then
Sometime after that it turned out that Jared Fogle from Subway
Was a pedophile however to say that South park has a clean record for predicting things isn't
Exactly correct if they had such a talent they likely wouldn't have built their entire
20th season around the pretense that Hillary Clinton was going to win an election of 2016
Not to mention the story butters very own episode where there are several jokes based
Entirely around the concept than the ramseys were both guilty of their respective accused crimes
The thing about such ideas as the simpsons predict everything theories is that they only can exist because of explicit
confirmation bias and because of exactly how people report these sorts of things
We never hear about the predictions that the simpsons get wrong
We never hear about the things that they say about the future that don't turn out to be true
How the very same episode that predicted the presidency of trump also
Specific we designed Elisa to look Like Hillary Clinton
[so] no matter how the election of 2016 would have turned out they would have gotten one thing right and one thing wrong
Stuff like this happens a lot in folklore for instance
There's this old story that was featured on unsolved mysteries about a chair that
Supposedly kills people who sit in it based around how they presented it seems totally
Indisputable, but when you really consider the thousands of people who must have sat [in] this chair just for the thrill of it
It suddenly seems far [less]
Important that five or six people died in a car accident after going to this pub and that's the thing the simpsons
predicting things is just
undisputed Folklore for a Modern age
let's go back to that yahoo article and study a prediction so impressive that they put it at the very bottom in this example a
2010 episode showed several of the Characters making a nobel-prize betting pool pay attention to that name that has been circled
now ignore that name
we're looking for only one of the names where Milhouse has predicted an
economics prize for Bank Tower Holmstrom
And this is supposedly one of the most impressive Simpson predictions of all time because Bengt R. Holmstrom
Did win a nobel [prize] in 2016 but think about this again
All that happened here is that the writers of the Simpsons wrote down all [of] the people most likely to win a Nobel prize
And then they showed that on a piece of paper and out of all the guesses present that didn't turn true the one that did
Didn't even happen the same year [that] the episode came out this show made twenty random guesses
And it took six years for even one [of] them to come true, and this is supposed to be
Impressive and that is nothing sometimes the simpsons will just make fun of a thing that
Exists and people will still somehow convince themselves that they predicted the phenomenon when it resurfaces
even the trump prediction the supposed big moment that revealed the illuminati truth behind the fact that the Simpsons
writers apparently have their own sword of omens was really just a spoof of the fact that trump ran a
third-Party campaign in the year 2000 you might as well say
Trump running for president in 2000 sure predicted that trump was going to run for president at some point
What you could [admit] about the simpsons is that it's not a show that's trying to predict things rather
It's just been trying to be entertaining
[well] certainly at some points anyways
But what baffles me is the numerous figures in the last several centuries?
Who have immortalized their legacies by doing the exact [same] thing that the Simpsons does
But on purpose and on a professional basis think about people like the famed
Nostradamus who wrote books
Upon books about the future but out of those books there are less than 20 predictions that people can openly claim any
Sort of resemblance to the future history and when you read those passages that are supposed to have predicted these things
You'll realize that much like the simpsons [all] they tend to be is pieces of history which tend to repeat written
extremely vaguely
Nostradamus spoke of young people defeating old people in battle of enslaved people
Overthrowing the elite of a man dying by lightning and another by night and how people would be upset by this
I'm not going to tell you what those were supposedly
Predictions of because the real point is that of course all of those things were going to happen
It's statistically improbable that this wouldn't be the case look
Predictions are dirt easy you can do it. You just don't know it yet
You notice a trend you think about where
Society is headed and then you write down as much fake shit as you can think of
so that some day long after you're dead all of your
individual predictions and sayings will have some correlation in the world because if people are willing to autocorrect lightning to Magic Bullets and
hipsters to Hitler and they're going to forget all of the times that famous predictors were just
wrong, and they're going to say that the simpsons predicted trump running for president because they made fun of the fact that
trump wanted to run for president [then] there is nothing stopping a new generation of people just
Making stuff up while knowing that the world is stupid enough for half of the lines to someday come true
I have a patreon that's all you need