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It's the evening of December 10, 2017, and Elon Musk is where else? On Twitter, he announces that if his tunnel building operation, the Boring Company, sells 50,000 baseball hats, it will also start selling flamethrowers. It starts as a joke, but being the richest man in the world has its benefits. One of those is being able to turn a silly idea into reality, and quickly. In January 2018, boring starts taking pre orders for flamethrowers. Each one costs $500. Video even surfaces of Elon trying out the expensive new toy, which looks like an airsoft gun that shoots a plume of fire. He goes on to sell 20,000 flamethrowers. He also imagines another product he calls a snow thrower. This is how the Guardian describes it. Another weapon out of the fantasy villains playbook. Which brings me back to the clip of Elon blasting a flamethrower. The first time I watch it, it feels familiar. Almost like I'd seen it before. The truth is, I had on the long running animated series the Simpsons back in 1996, Homer Simpson takes a new job. His new boss's name is Hank Scorpio. He's also a tech billionaire who has a flamethrower. The similarities between Hank Scorpio and Elon Musk don't stop there. Both are boyish, often hilarious, intentionally and unintentionally. Oh, and they both seem determined to take over the world. It's not surprising that the Simpsons predicted the idea of Elon Musk years before most of us had ever heard of him. Because in the eyes of many of its fans, the show is a soothsayer. We've all seen the headlines 10 Ways the Simpsons Predicted the Future. The 15 Most Unexpected Simpsons Predictions that Came True. 34 predictions from the Simpsons that actually happened. The further down Google you go, the bigger the number gets. The highest we could find is 1,224. According to the Internet, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and even baby Maggie have joined together to become the modern day Nostradamus. Collecting all those moments is fun, but Listicles might be underselling the Simpsons predictive powers. According to one theory, the show might not even be predicting anything at all. It could be intentionally preparing us, the public, for the future, showing us what's to come. Which is a sobering thought since no TV show has been better at showing us exactly where the world is headed. To an absurd and dark place. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. We would love to hear from you so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Or check us out on Instagram. Heconspiracypod. This episode contains discussions of death. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us.
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on AMC and AMC. I am the vampire Lestat. I'm a rock star now. I'm a little killer.
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I'm a moon.
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From Anne Rice's immort universe comes what Vulture calls the most momentous event in fictional rock history.
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Thousands of fans love you. I want millions.
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It's my era. Anne Rice is the vampireless dot. All new Sundays at 9, exclusively on AMC and AMC stream now.
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Now on Acorn TV, there's a killer on the loose. Brooke Shields stars in the new original murder mystery. You're killing me. You spit some crackpot theory and I find the evidence. I solve mysteries for a living. I think I'm good to go. Murder has met its match.
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You cannot be here. This is a police investigation. I've written you. What does that mean?
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He was a big city cop with a small jurisdiction. Boomers are so cute when they flirt. You're killing me. All new episodes now on Acorn TV.
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The Simpsons has been on the air since 1989. Almost 40 years, over 800 episodes and counting. And that's not including the animated shorts from the Tracey Ullman show before they spun off on their own. In that time, the show has predicted everything from smartwatches to civilians in space to not one, not two, but three super bowl winners. Perhaps the most famous prediction that Donald Trump would become president. In an episode titled bart to the future, a fortune teller reveals that Bart will grow up to become a struggling musician while straight a student. Lisa, his little sister, ends up in the white house. And since this fortune teller is extremely detailed, we learn that Lisa is elected president immediately following the tenure of Donald Trump. The episode airs in March of 2000, 16 and a half years before President Trump wins his first election. Sixteen and a half years? The apprentice isn't even in production yet. Okay, well, maybe that could be a lucky guess. Okay, but how about the time Homer predicts the mass of the Higgs Boson, aka the God Particle? In the 1998 episode the wizard of evergreen terrace, Homer becomes an inventor in one shot. He's hard at work writing out an equation on a blackboard, as all inventors do right now. If you look at the blackboard, there's. Well, there's PI, some exponentials. I'm pretty sure that figure there is ohm. But the equation goes by in a flash, and it mostly goes over everyone's head. Well, 14 years later, physicists at CERN make a groundbreaking discovery. Today's results suggest the existence of the Higgs boson. But they are by no means conclusive. The reason there's such a buzz in this room is. Is that the higgs is so fundamental to physicists understanding the universe that even a hint of its existence is a scientific milestone. CERN later confirms they have indeed found the Higgs boson, a particle that had been proposed back in 1964, but never proven to exist until now. But unless you count homer's blackboard, according to science author Dr. Simon Singh, the equation Homer writes out in that 1998 episode comes extremely close to the mass of the Higgs boson. Suddenly, the lucky guess theory sounds a little less plausible. The list of simpsons predictions that end up coming true goes on and on. A three eyed fish found near a nuclear plant in argentina. Nobel prize recipients. Fox selling to Disney. We have to wonder, are these really predictions? Because some of the family's exploits just get things a little too right. In fact, the simpsons has been so prescient for so long that people believe it doesn't just predict what's going to happen. This show actually knows what's coming because they've been told by the people who make our future a reality. Okay, now stay with me here. We're about to dive into a theory known as predictive programming. Despite the name, predictive programming isn't exactly a psychic prediction. It's more like exposure therapy. According to author Alan Watt, Hollywood and well, the entire world is controlled by an elite group. They go by many names, depending on who you ask. The Illuminati, the new world order, lizard people, etc. For simplicity's sake, we're just going to call them the elite. According to the theory, ever since ancient Greece, each major world and societal change has been planned out far in advance. From the advent of using DNA in police investigations to 911 to Covid, they were all meticulously calculated by the elite, including when to introduce these events to the public. The concept of predictive programming is that the elite can't just spring these things on us. They have to prepare us, get us used to the idea that the entire world can change in an instant before they unleash their plans. Otherwise we would riot. This is when the media comes in, or so the theory goes. The elite supposedly plant seeds of an idea or even a tragedy into popular movies and TV shows to get the public familiar with it. Take COVID 19, for example. It happened in 2020. But in 2011, there was the film Contagion, which was eerily similar to how Covid wreaked havoc on the world. Almost like a roadmap for the public on how to navigate a global pandemic in quarantine. Okay, you may be wondering, Carter, were you here in 2020? The public went into a frenzy about COVID Well, theorists would likely say that if we weren't subject to predictive programming, it would have been even worse. Complete civil unrest, wars, explosions in the streets, total end of the world behavior. But instead of all that, we more or less listened to the government's orders. Stay home and keep your distance. The Simpsons also had a plotline that seemed to nod to a life during a pandemic in 2007's the Simpsons Movie, the entire town of Springfield is quarantined in a giant dome. Now, if the elite did plan Covid, they probably wanted the world to blindly follow their quarantine guidelines. Homer and the rest of the family managed to escape their dome. So it's not a perfect one to one comparison, but there are people who believe the Simpsons specifically has primed us for major world events. To show you what I mean, let's go back to April 19, 2024. Inside a Manhattan courthouse, jury selection is underway for President Trump's trial for falsifying a payment to Stormy Daniels. Reporting live just outside is CNN anchor Laura Coates. Then the live report is interrupted by a commotion mere feet away. A man named Max Azzarello has set himself on fire. Police officers huddle around Max to put out the flames which have spread out into the park around him. He's taken alive to Cornell's burn unit, but he left something at the park pamphlets which he threw into the air before setting himself ablaze. The pamphlets lead to Max's substack, where he labels his self immolation as an act of protest. According to him, we're all part of a totalitarian con. He writes, our own government, along with many of their allies, is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup. Max also believes that Americans have been brainwashed into accepting our doom by none other than a beloved TV family, the Simpsons. While his theory may not use the words predictive programming, it basically outlines the same concept. According to Max, cryptocurrency was intentionally made by the government to trigger an economic doomsday. And on the government's payroll is Harvard University. Max says that the institution is an organized crime front that churns out billionaires and also, of course, Simpsons writers. And yes, the Simpsons writers room is famously well stocked with Harvard graduates. Well, Max believes these grads come to the Simpsons to fulfill their brainwashing duty. We, the public, are all Homer, a worker drone who slaves away for an evil billionaire. Max's substack mentions an episode where Homer's boss, Mr. Burns, gives him a sign that says, don't forget, you're here forever. By the end of the episode, Homer covers portions of the sign with pictures of his baby daughter, Maggie. Now the sign reads, do it for her. It's a heartwarming moment that reminds us why we work so hard to provide for our families. Max, however, doesn't think it's that sweet. To him, it's actually a message from the government. They are telling us that we have no choice but to work for evil billionaires for the rest of our lives. This all propels Max to fight back in the form of protest. Shortly afterward, he dies from his resulting injuries. So it seems that predictive programming isn't just fodder for clickbait listicles. It's something people really believe. And the Simpsons is an easy target for that theory because they've covered just about every topic, and they've happened to get it right a shocking number of times. Edward Snowden wasn't the first to reveal that the NSA is listening in on our conversations. The Simpsons movie was. And don't forget about the 2014 Ebola outbreak. They predicted that, too. And there's the infamous shot of Lisa holding a magazine advertising trips to New York. It's from a 1997 episode and the magazine has a big nine on it next to the silhouette of the World Trade center looking like the number 11. Some believe this was a subliminal message Preparing us for for 9 11. Now longtime Simpson showrunner Al Jean calls that one an insane coincidence, not brainwashing. I mean, it's not like the government has officially been rewriting movie and TV scripts for decades. Except for the fact that they have.
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Looking back on almost 40 seasons of the Simpsons, viewers have noticed strange similarities between decades old jokes and current events, which has led some to theorize that the Simpsons is priming us for a future that's all planned out by an elite global cohort under the theory of predictive programming. These elite rulers naturally include the US Government. Now, we've claimed that the government has done a lot of shady things on this show, but what I'm about to say next is proven. They have been not so secretly controlling Hollywood since essentially the birth of cinema. Think of your typical war film, or even a Marvel movie. You know those scenes featuring military helicopters, tanks or navy ships? They're not always cgi, nor are they vehicles that a production assistant picked up before the shoot. Oftentimes they're on loan straight from the US Government. In exchange, Uncle Sam asks the movie studios for one teeny tiny favor. You can use our vehicles, but we get to read your script and change whatever we want. Specifically how we're portrayed. Is Iron man going to reference soldier suicides? Well, not if you want to use our tanks. Take that line out. The Hulk is going to reference Vietnam. James Bond is to. Mm, mm. No, that won't make us look good. Uh, rewrite. These are real examples, by the way. When it comes to Hollywood, the government wants to look like heroes. Initially, they didn't want their influence to be too obvious. That's why they helped out on anti war films too, like 1925's the Big Parade and 1941's Dive Bomber. But once the Cold War kicks off in 1945, the government goes all in on making Hollywood a pro America machine. A whirlwind of propaganda emerges in those years from both sides. The US and the Soviets. They each have to show their citizens why the other world power is the bad guy. One way the Soviets do this is by highlighting America's blatant racism towards African Americans. The CIA can't let that stand. So in the 1950s, they team up with Paramount Studios. They instruct the studio to cast well dressed African Americans in their movies. And they make sure that they will refer to themselves as free men. The CIA isn't the only organization doing this. From the 1930s into the 60s, the FBI rewrites movie scripts that have their agents performing wiretaps on communists. All those scenes have to go now. It's possible the FBI does this for legitimate reasons. What if a communist sees this movie and realizes that we're wiretapping them? It's a security risk. But the Bureau also has movie producers delete scenes where their agents drink alcohol or rest their feet on tables. They need the FBI to be heroes, not drunks with no table manners. You may be wondering why the studios allow the government to do this. What happened to freedom of speech? What happened to art? Well, for one thing, the producers want to play with the government's toys. You know, big guns and helicopters. But also the producers want to get their movies made and make their money back. Some of them are probably just choosing the path of least resistance. With their Hollywood dreams and jobs on the line, producers comply with the government's demands. This involvement really comes to a head in the 1990s when the CIA starts their public Entertainment Liaison Office. The star of this division is former CIA operative Chase Brandon. He consults on movies and TV shows to make sure they are accurately portraying the CIA. And of course, making the agency look cool. He tells the Guardian that the CIA has always been portrayed erroneously as evil and Machiavellian. It took us a long time to support projects that portray us in a light we want to be seen in. Chase starts to work on high profile intellectual property, such as the 1990s Jack Ryan film franchise. The titular character, played by a list stars like Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck is a CIA analyst and eventual deputy director. He gets into shootouts, rappels off helicopters into submarines. Yeah, I mean, that is a pretty badass scene and is essentially America's James Bond protecting our country. It is a propaganda. If you're a fan of this show, you're probably not surprised to hear that the government does whatever they can to look good. But what does this have to do with predictive programming? Well, let's move past the 90s and into the wake of 9 11. According to an article in the Atlantic by journalist Nicholas Skau, the CIA really embeds themselves into Hollywood after the attack on the World Trade Center. At the time, the US is understandably in a panic about terrorist threats. And the CIA seemingly uses that to their advantage. After 9 11, some Americans likely turned to entertainment to see us beat the terrorists. But some of the TV and movies they're watching shows the US winning in an alarming torture. Now, torture is a hotly debated topic amongst US citizens. Some are against it, some think it's an unfortunate but necessary tactic. But Perhaps, perhaps the CIA sees how devastated Americans are after September 2001 and gets an idea. Enter Jack Bauer. The main character on Fox is 24, which aired its first episode on November 6, 2001. Jack is a counter terrorist agent played by Kiefer Sutherland. He protects the nation by any means necessary, including torture. The hit TV show airs two months after 9 11, so the timeline is already a little suspect. In addition to the timing is the show's content. Imagine if the elite wanted torture to be more widely accepted. A popular show that glorifies the acts might be a stealthy way to pull that off. By the way, after the first few seasons of 24 in 2005, a bombshell hits the news. It's revealed that post 911 the Bush administration did officially torture terrorists. Now if you're a 24 fan, maybe the news doesn't surprise you. You may say, well of course they torture terrorists. Don't you watch 24? And if you do, then maybe predictive programming did its job. And 24 isn't the only CIA backed piece of media to feature torture around 2012. The filmmakers behind Zero Dark Thirty have seemingly unprecedented access to the CIA. The movie is about the real life SEAL Team Six mission to capture Osama Bin Laden. And to make the most accurate film possible, the agency gives the production team insider knowledge, right down to replicating the floor plan at CIA headquarters in Langley. The Agency even helps write the script and edit the final cut of the film, and in doing so, they make torture seem instrumental in capturing Bin Laden. Now, officially, torture wasn't used in the Real Life Seal Team 6 mission. But if that's true, then why does Zero Dark Thirty feature it so heavily? This is just conjecture, but Osama bin Laden was America's number one enemy after 9 11. If the public saw that waterboarding helped capture him, then maybe they'd support its use. No one would be up in arms after the film is released. However, Zero Dark thirties torture scenes are the subject of much controversy. The movie gets called out as blatant torture propaganda. According to some accounts, a third of the entire film is one terrorist getting tortured and waterboarded. That is a nearly hour long sequence. It probably made viewers uncomfortable. But what would happen if those scenes were in the Simpsons? If the CIA had Homer and the guys from Moe's torture a terrorist, it would likely be hilarious, filled with hijinks, and with Homer probably getting hurt more than the bad guy, it'd be a farce. America would be laughing at torture. Don't believe me? One of Homer's longest running gags, a trademark of the show, was him strangling Bart. Now, to the Simpsons credit, Homer hasn't actually done this since the show's 31st season. As Homer says in a later episode, times have changed. Let's pause here. Yeah, the CIA's involvement with Hollywood is sketchy, but I mean, come on, they can't really brainwash us, can they? I mean, especially through a crazy cartoon. Well, researchers at Princeton University beg to differ. You may remember this study from our subliminal messaging episode in 2002. Researchers have two groups watch an episode of the Simpsons, only it's been altered. The control group has at least 12 new frames added to the episode. It seems these are just plain white flashes on the screen. The test subjects, however, have a shot of a Coca Cola can inserted into 12 frames of the episode. Another 12 frames have the word thirsty. This group, who don't know that the soda messaging was added, reports that they were actually thirstier once the episode was over. About 27% more so than when it started and the control group was less thirsty. So what does this mean? That if the Simpsons did have secret messages, then we would be influenced by them? Maybe. But the subjects of this study likely didn't go running for a Coke when it was over. They may have been thirstier, but they weren't soda loving zombies needing their fix. Just like how us Simpsons fans aren't robotically saying, yes, Mr. Burns, like some Manchurian Candidate whenever our boss emails us. Subliminal messaging in general has been proven to not really work. It may influence us slightly, but that influence won't be long lasting, let alone permanent. It's kind of a wrinkle in the whole predictive programming theory. Speaking of, there's one more inconsistency in the predictive programming idea that we haven't covered yet. The elite choosing the Simpsons as their brainwashing tool may not make sense, especially when you consider that the US Government and the Simpsons were once at war with each other.
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Nowadays, the Simpsons is loved by families all over the world. If the elite's goal is to program as many people as possible, then the Simpsons is a perfect show to use. But when it first aired, there was one very famous couple who despised them. The first family. Around September 1990, first lady Barbara Bush tells People magazine that the Simpsons quote was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. The article results in a letter from Marge Simpson herself. Well, it was actually written by the Simpsons Writers Room, but the letter from Marge was published by the press. In it, Marge tells Barbara that she tries to teach her kids to be kind, which is hard when the first lady of the United States calls them stupid. Barbara, mortified, sends her own letter to the press. She thanks Marge for speaking her mind, which Barbara says she didn't know Marge had. Since Marge is an animated character, it wasn't the last time the Bush family went after The Simpsons. On January 27, 1992, President George Bush Sr. Speaks to a crowd in Washington, D.C. he talks about the decline of the American family. And he says, the next value I speak of must be forever cast in stone. I speak of decency, the moral courage to say what is right and condemn what is wrong. And we need a nation closer to the Waltons than the simpsons, An America that rejects the incivility, the tide of incivility, and the tide of intolerance for the unfamiliar. The Waltons is a 1970s TV drama about the aftermath of the great depression. It follows a conservative, wholesome family in Virginia. George thinks his comparison is a mic drop moment. However, many Americans feel that he missed the mark. As Jay leno puts it in an interview, the trouble with America is that we have too many families like the Waltons. They've got no jobs. They live in broken down shacks with no health care. At least Homer has a job and his own home. The hit ratings show that middle class America loves the Simpsons. They remind everyone of their own families. In short, the Bush quote likely doesn't win him any votes. It may even be partly why he loses the presidency to Bill Clinton. The feud between the Bush family and the simpsons also shows the simpsons writers that they are doing what they set out to do. Lampoon those in charge. It's a quality about the Simpsons that predictive programming believers may not realize. The Simpsons goes after the US Government whenever they have a chance. And not just them, but anyone in power. The police in Springfield are numbskulls. Bart's principal is a laughing stock mama's boy. And don't get them started on their network, fox. The writers love throwing jabs at them. At their core, they're anti authoritarian. So would the elite of America, which Bart at one point calls Bonerland, really choose them as their world brainwashing agent? Well, according to Alan Watt, the Simpsons may not even know they're part of the machine. Alan theorizes that the bigger directors and producers in Hollywood are the ones who get instructions from the elite. What he's saying is it's possible that someone at the top is the only one who knows the predictive programming agenda. The writers have no clue. They think they're sticking it to the man, but the man is really calling the shots. As with any conspiracy theory, we can say it's all part of the master plan until the cows come home. But what does real science say? According to some researchers, predictive programming could all be something called hindsight bias, also referred to as the I knew it all along phenomenon. It's particularly common after something goes wrong. Basically, before we know the outcome, we may entertain other scenarios. But once we know what happened, we believe that the ending was obvious all along. If a plan falls apart, you suddenly know it was flawed from the beginning. Your favorite football team loses a big game. You can pinpoint exactly where they veered off course. I knew they were going to choke. Did I though? So maybe the Simpsons isn't predicting the future. We're just watching the old episodes with the benefit of hindsight and making connections. Even if the show has gotten it right by one University of Albany professor's calculations, 1224 times. Because if you ask the Simpsons writers to explain it, they'll tell you it's just a game of odds. According to Simpsons writer J. Kogan, if you make fun of everything and make impossibly silly jokes about everything, well, it turns out 30 years later, some of them turn out to be true. He's got a point. It's a satirical show written by a whole team of smart people. They don't just pull plotlines and jokes from out of nowhere. It's all based on the world around them. Even when they predicted Trump's presidency, I mentioned earlier that in Bart to the Future, an older Lisa Simpson becomes president, and she says that she inherited a budget crunch from President Trump. As it turns out, this line was written basically like a Mad Lib. According to writers, the joke began as a budget crunch from President Blank. Around that time in real life, Trump was already mentioning that he may run for president, so the writers chose Trump. They didn't know they were making a prediction. They were just trying to make their script as funny and as topical as possible. As for Homer getting shockingly close to predicting the mass of the Higgs boson, Dr. Simon Singh points out that many of the show's writers are mathematicians, and they've been hiding math jokes in the show for as long as it's been on the air. Dr. Singh even wrote an entire book on the subject. This may be a key point to how some shows seem like they have access to a crystal ball. Fiction writers try to reflect real life. Sometimes they even get help. For instance, the original Star Trek may seem like the ultimate predictive programming machine in terms of technology. Airing in the late 60s with movies released as early as the 70s, the show's communicator devices all look like precursors to modern day smartphones and watches, but that's probably because the writers consulted with someone from rand. RAND is a research facility focusing on policy changes and technological advances. This consultant helps the Star Trek writers brainstorm futuristic technology, basing it on actual research. So the show may have cell phone like communicators because the consultant, along with the writers, made an informed hypothesis about where communication tech was going. And in fact, the creator of the first mobile phone credits Star Trek as inspiration. Art imitates life, and life imitates art. To be transparent, we should note that Rand is funded by the US Government, but the Rand Star Trek consultant officially worked on the show as a private citizen and not as a Rand agent. Or that could also just be what they want you to think. You'll be shocked to learn that many years later, the Simpsons made fun of the peculiar nature of the company in a 1994 episode, there's a joke about the Rand Corporation in conjunction with saucer people and reverse vampires controlling Springfield's adults. The thing is, art and life are so connected that every plotline, every joke, every sci fi moment could be perceived as predictive programming. So is the Simpsons priming us for some kind of master plan? We don't know. But when the next tragedy, pandemic or just cool piece of tech comes along, The Simpsons at 37 seasons and counting will probably be there and they'll help us process everything with some much needed laughs. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram he conspiracypod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today's episode include Stupid tv, Be More Funny by Alan Siegel and the Listening Post episode titled Covert how the CIA Works with Hollywood. Until next time. Remember, the truth isn't always the best story and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Brandon Rizzuto, edited by Alan Siegel, Mickey Taylor and Justin Sayles. Fact checked by Sophie Kemp and engineered video edited and sound designed by Alex Button. I'm your host Carter Roy. Foreign. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have
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