How The Simpsons Predict The Future

there's a conspiracy that's so intricate that it's gained a cult following I've heard of it and so have you but it's getting out of hand nine months ago a post appeared on Reddit it asks the question does The Simpsons predict the future from predicting the 2020 election of Donald Trump to Lady Gaga's Super Bowl halftime show the question in this post has been asked many times something really bothered me about this post with zero-up votes the responses to the latter half it was a catastrophic flood of deranged theories responses based around the idea of a new world order explaining that The Simpsons is the vessel used by the ruling Elite to tell us what's coming and it wasn't just this thread the dialogue is everywhere the show's Creator is a Freemason Jeffrey Epstein September 11th these theories are endless but they still leave the question open the predictions how are they doing it you've probably heard the conspiracy theory that the Simpsons can predict everything about the future who are the world's greatest accurate predictions predicted the future some of these predictions are clearly surface level others are alarmingly sophisticated so for the past four months we've been searching for an answer one that will finally satisfy us we listen to Common theories and we had assumptions of our own we went the extra mile collecting data that we couldn't find on the internet hiring statisticians and interviewing experts at times it felt ridiculous but when we ran the numbers one explanation stood Above the Rest so everyone is wrong one that was left of the mainstream narrative almost entirely this video was meant to be a counterbalance to the flood of derangement but it turned out to be the kind of thing that makes you stop look at yourself in the mirror and say holy [ __ ] this is a story about the undeniable humor of our reality and how the human brain interprets the world around us what is the mind is it just a system of impulses or is it something tangible [Applause] [Music] what is mine no matter what is matter never mind you know I've owned this mic for years and this is my first time using it [ __ ] that opening was pretty dramatic I'm sorry but I had to for real the story is super interesting I want to show you for years even the mainstream news has been asking how and they seem to have come up with the most simple explanation so that's where we started so Simpsons predicted part one The Simpsons predicting the future their explanation is based off a quote from an assistant math professor Assistant math professor at the University of Albany here's how the logic Goes The Simpsons is one of the longest running shows of all time in 29 Seasons 120 000 jokes 8.54 jokes per minute they say it's just a numbers game this only comes down to about a 1.6 success rate the Chalk's too big they compare it to Star Trek which has had a similar number of episodes Star Trek comprises over 760 episodes of television and 13 feature films Star Trek has also predicted the future wait a second what other television show has over 700 episodes so these shows have just had more opportunity to be right with that many predictions they essentially just got lucky they argue that there's nothing special about the Simpsons predicting the future because other shows have done it too it's luck I was disappointed too until we took a closer look the theory rests on this Foundation alone that the two shows have a similar number of episodes and that they have a similar number of accurate predictions but that's not true The Simpsons have had more predictions come true than other shows like by a lot the answer really feels like it's missing something like it's only half of the explanation transporter room energize and look at this Star Trek predicted [ __ ] like flip phones prepare the beam Scotty onboard flat screen TVs they're really easy to dismiss as coincidence luck whatever you want to call it from Star Trek it's all of them and The Simpsons they have some of these two video calls autocorrect The Coincidence explanation makes sense here these shallow predictions don't Merit screaming headlines nobody's talking about them certainly not Reddit they don't make it to the conspiracy boards those boards are focused on things that are more elaborate and intricate alarmingly sophisticated predictions the reason that the it's a numbers game narrative feels like only half of the truth is because it is the mainstream theory is answering a question that no one is asking scientists believe they are getting closer to proving the existence of the Higgs boson the hypothetical subatomic particle thought to supply Mass to the matter that makes up our universe an experiment is to resume Wednesday at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva designed to catch a glimpse of the so-called God particle in 2012 scientists at CERN discovered the missing God Particle a previously unknown building block of our universe today known as the Higgs boson it fundamentally changes our understanding of the universe a massive Discovery for quantum physics there's nothing else like pigs in nature this is a completely new kind of scientists believe that without the Higgs there would be no gravity and no Universe 15 years earlier in the 1998 episode Homer wrote this equation on the Blackboard the viewers it meant nothing it was absolute jargon at that stage so this is a long time ago um nobody knew the mass of the hipped boson nobody even knew if it existed the equation predicted the mass of the missing God Particle so precisely that he was only this far off this breakthrough in understanding the origins of mass 15 whole years before it was discovered what this scene is by far the most specific prediction The Simpsons has made to a shocking level of accuracy the question we're asking the question that's been asked for 30 years the answer to this whole video it must be buried in this one scene the first equation on the board is an attempt to estimate the mass of the Higgs boson and as a particle physicist that resonated with me we're going to do the math [ __ ] are you serious [ __ ] I made my friend Mia watch a hundred episodes of The Simpsons randomly picked from All Seasons I couldn't get over it like the government is listening to everybody's confidence Edward snowden's NSA spying Scandal they made the prediction five years before it even came true Trump's presidency 17 years we've inherited quite a budget crunch for president Trump Disney buys Fox 19 years statue of David censorship 26 years okay it's not a deep State plot and it's not by Chance the show's executive producer Al Jean says that they're somehow predicting these intentionally any award-winning producer writer works on The Simpsons uh since the start in 1989. one overwhelming factor determines the content of the show is that we are produced a year in advance like the clip I just showed um we're actually amateur futurologists how the [ __ ] are they doing this [Music] okay I've got all the numbers I counted every time the show had a joke or had a plot device that had the potential to come true Mia's discoveries were worthy of reshaping how I perceived the word prediction up until now I've been seeing this whole Spectrum as predictions but it's really not fair to say that this is the same as this nine bucks this one's on me there was one crazy cell where Bart held up a brochure that is New York on nine dollars a day the World Trade Center this was in 1996. it was in the background so it looked like 9 11. that was insane and of course unplanned it was a terrible coincidence that was algene the show's current executive producer and former showrunner conspiracy theorists online claimed that this is proof that the Deep State masterminds behind the show knew of 9 11 5 years in advance the episode is completely absent of anything to do with the attack it's a magazine with the New York skyline that's a coincidence according to the internet there's 43 predictions that The Simpsons got right but I think 13 of them are coincidences looking at the other 30 predictions with a degree of like 95 confidence and a peace score around like 0.11 I think it's clear that she said a bunch of other [ __ ] that totally went above my head it made me realize that we needed to get a real professional involved this other part of the spectrum with 30 examples unexplained by coincidence what does it mean foreign I reached out to his statistician on Fiverr but they turn out to be a bot impersonating a crypto influencer thanks Fiverr luckily Mia knew a real professional so here's what they said hey we're rolling on both of mine okay predicting the future is notoriously difficult so the fact that the Simpsons has managed to do it 30 times could be seen as statistically significant and compared to other shows like Star Trek Futurama South Park The Simpsons does Stand Out holy [ __ ] so everyone is wrong how my name's Simon Singh I live in London and uh gosh I suppose for 15 20 years I've been writing books about mathematics and physics Simon wrote a book about The Simpsons too but he's being humble here he's a theoretical and particle physicist he contributed to other discoveries at CERN where the Higgs boson was discovered if there's one person that has the answer it's him when you have such a long-running show that covers so many different topics there are bound to be things that that turn out to be true in due course part of getting it right is luck but the big ones the ones that are impossible to explain by coincidence the ones that spark up conspiracies on Reddit those are not predictions at all so I got in touch with with the the the the writer of that episode um David X Cohen now David X Cohen did a degree in physics and then did a master's degree in computer science and then had published papers in mathematical journals so he was a smart guy he loved math and he loved physics as he wanted to create this equation and put it on the board so he rang up his friend David shaminovich who was a professor at Columbia they'd been at high school together he said to David shermanovic could you concoct an equation that would somehow give the right result all right I'm not going to use anecdotal evidence from just one example as a cop-out conclusion here while Mia was working on her research I came across something interesting our distinguished panel members with us they are award-winning writers and producers of Simpson our panelists also hold an impressive array of degrees in mathematics computer science and philosophy among others the thing is you could assemble a panel of other kinds of nerds from The Simpsons as well like like there are millions of jokes about the presidents of the United States for example I'm looking at Patrick Veron who's a presidential scholar but really there's a lot of people with different interests and they're all trying to cram all this stuff in unlike most other shows The Simpsons writing team consists largely of writers who are extremely educated in fields ranging from mathematics to social sciences and because of this they're also really connected to those that are on The Cutting Edge let me play this back so he rang up his friend David shimenovich who is a professor at Columbia and they high school together but they didn't just know each other from high school together they formed a gang of teenage computer programmers called The Glitch Masters they even wrote their own computer language and after studying physics at Harvard Kohan rejected a career in Academia to pursue writing shaminovic was just one of many connections of his in the field you got the math people today but this same panel could be going on in thousands of locations at the same time on different subjects you know when they came up with the equation for the Higgs boson they could have come up with any old clutch of Greek symbols but no they picked genuine physical constants when combined in the right way gave a massive Higgs boson that was plausible so they sort of said here whenever we put mathematics into the show we've got to get it right but we'll make sure it's true we'll make sure it's accurate this mindset goes beyond math for the writers of The Simpsons these aren't just random things these are equations that have a lot of thought put into them before they appear on screen earlier in this video I claimed that the equation Blackboard was precise he was only this far off but this amount of error on the particle level is incredibly significant they were way off from a possible physics point of view it's not a very good equation the content on the Blackboard was put there by a writer who had a pulse on mathematics something that's just not in the public eye it wasn't even a prediction it was a corny joke poking fun at something very real and very absurd in true satire fashion it's a pattern and it explains these this sounds like political presidential talk to me and I know people have talked to you about whether or not you want to run I do get tired of seeing what's happening with this country and if it got so bad I would never want to rule it out totally Trump hinted at the presidency 12 years before The Simpsons made this episode president Trump yet again a corny joke poking fun and something very real and very absurd but this joke is making fun of something that's not in the public eye would you would you ever probably not why would you not I just don't think I really have the inclination to do it I love what I'm doing I really like it also it doesn't pay as well yeah so here's the whole truth we can finally put it to rest The Simpsons are not predicting the future it's just intricate writing I was left with the question why why put all this effort in so I got my hands dirty I scraped the web for all of the data that I could find and I compared it to Mia's findings hundreds of lines of code later the answer revealed itself here's a chart of all of the accurate predictions made by The Simpsons sorted by season we found data that someone else collected which I Linked In the description but using it we found that it takes about 13 years for The Simpsons predictions to come true on average if you look closely a pattern merges a pattern that follows the user rating of each episode the show is a satire on American culture they're making fun of us that's kind of the whole point right good writing is socially politically scientifically aware the writers want this not only is it more fun for them but it makes the show more interesting for us at least according to IMDb here's my final case it looks messy but stick with me each of these lines is one writer for The Simpsons some only wrote One season and they never came back others wrote and they took a break for several seasons but they returned in his book The Simpsons and their mathematical Secrets Simon includes a list of some of the writers with extensive degrees what do you think do the predictions mostly happen when these writers are around one of the things about jokes and probably philosophy and perhaps math is that um once you're done with them they seem like they were obvious all along [Music] a 2001 episode involved Homer attempting to prevent his local baseball team the Isotopes for moving to Albuquerque two years later the Albuquerque minor league team was named the Isotopes the town held a vote to determine the name of the team the team president even admitted that the name came from the series our explanation is not a catch-all there's few unique exceptions here laws of Statistics are weird and they can make some truly absurd coincidences happen New York City has a population of around 9 million people and with that many people a one in a million event should happen nine times a day there as always there's room for disagreement I hope I made a compelling argument I really did feel a little bit silly making this video but I posted a promo for it and after seeing some of the comments that came out I was genuinely concerned conspiracy theories can be a real problem and seeing them proliferate it's not something that I love I don't fault people for mistaking complexity for conspiracy especially because conspiracies can be fun but often the truth can be even better thanks for watching