Speaker 1: Welcome back to the deep dive. We are jumping straight
into a phenomenon that really sits at the core of
so much contemporary paranoia.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 1: It's this blend of pop culture, psychology, and well the
deeply strange world of high level conspiracy theories. Our central
question today is can fiction actually predict the future? And
if it can, are we talking about magic or is
it just math?
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate plot twist, but playing out in real life.
We're going deep into the belief system known as predictive programming.
Speaker 1: And to really get why this idea is so powerful,
so persistent, we have to start with the most chilling example,
I mean, the one that always.
Speaker 2: Comes up, the one that is almost impossible to explain away.
We have to talk about the pilot episode of a
very short lived X File spinoff, The Lone Gunman, a.
Speaker 1: Show that was, let's be honest, an instant flop. But
that one pilot episode, which aired back on March four,
two thousand and one, it achieved this this unnerming infamy
just six months later. Right, And if you've you've never
seen it, or maybe you've tried to forget it, you
really need to understand the level of detail we're talking
about here.
Speaker 2: The episode's plot centered on this really complex conspiracy inside
the US government. The whole thing involved agents working for
an American arms manufacturer and their goal. Their goal was
to remotely hijack a commercial airliner.
Speaker 1: And the target wasn't vague at all. The target for
that remotely controlled hijacked plane was the World Trade Center
Towers in New York City.
Speaker 2: That specificity, yeah, it's just staggering. A hijacked plane, remotely controlled,
aimed directly at the WTC. That's what creates that immediate,
powerful shock.
Speaker 1: But the fictional motivation is just as important, isn't.
Speaker 2: It absolutely, Because in the show, it wasn't foreign terrorists
being blamed. At first. The plot was that it was
a government.
Speaker 1: Backed scheme orchestrated by a domestic arms company, all for
profit exactly.
Speaker 2: The idea was to pull off a successful false flag attack,
blame it on foreign enemies, kickstart a very profitable war,
and then just watch Defense Spend Skyrocket.
Speaker 1: When that aired in the spring of two thousand and one,
it was it was just an obscure piece of television.
Nobody really talked about it.
Speaker 2: But after September eleventh, that timing that terrifying specificity. It
just demanded an answer.
Speaker 1: Was this just a one in a billion coincidence, a
random fluke, or was this some kind of deliberate signal
based on actual foreknowledge.
Speaker 2: And that tension right there, that's our emission for this
deep dive. We're going to rigorously analyze this predictive programming phenomenon, this.
Speaker 1: Belief that elites are using mass media everything from The
Simpsons to the Lone Gunmen to what to warn us
or condition us for things they've planned.
Speaker 2: And we're going to examine the two competing theories. On
one hand, the idea that this is intentional, almost ritualistic
signaling by some clandestine elite, and on the other hand,
the explanation that's rooted in well the cold hard facts
of statistical probability and cognitive distortion.
Speaker 1: Okay, before we jump into that whole conspiratorial worldview, we
should probably pause for a quick but really important clarity note. Yes,
if you're a computer scientist listening to this, you might
hear the term predictive programming and think of something completely different.
Speaker 2: Right, there's a formal technical definition a theoretical method for
program specification invented by Eric Kanner.
Speaker 1: We are absolutely not talking about that today, not at all.
Speaker 2: We are talking about the cultural belief that mass media
is being used as a tool for intentional forewarning. It's
vital to keep those two concepts separate. They exist in
completely different worlds.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's unpack the core idea of the conspiratorial thesis.
The foundation, the premise of it all is that major
global events.
Speaker 2: Things like pandemics, huge cyber attacks, political violence. Right.
Speaker 1: The idea is that these things are not the result
of chaos or incompetence or just natural disorder. They are engineered,
They're orchestrated, and.
Speaker 2: They're orchestrated by what adherents just call the elite.
Speaker 1: Which is a pretty nebulous term.
Speaker 2: It is. It's very vaguely defined, but it's consistently associated
with figures in international organizations like the World Economic Forum,
powerful corporations, global banks, intelligence agencies.
Speaker 1: That kind of group, and the mechanism they supposedly use
isn't It's not like old school propaganda, right, It's more subtle.
Speaker 2: Much more subtle. It operates through these advanced warnings planted
in fictional content, and the goal is to desensitize and
normalize the public to what's coming.
Speaker 1: So the logic is, if you see a terrifying event
like a catastrophic power grid failure or a civil war,
if you see that play out over and over again
in movies and TV shows.
Speaker 2: Then when it happens in the real world, you're already
prepared for it.
Speaker 1: Conceptually, they're less shocked, less resistant.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and therefore you're more likely to accept whatever official
narrative you're given, even if it seems a little off.
The trauma has been sort of pre softened by familiarity.
Speaker 1: We see this applied to new releases all the.
Speaker 2: Time, constantly. Take the Film's Civil War from twenty twenty four.
Adherents of this theory immediately branded it as a clear,
purposeful attempt by the elite to foment and normalize the
idea of internal conflict in the US.
Speaker 1: They see it as conditioning programming the audience to see
a domestic civil war, not as this unthinkable horror, but
as I don't know, applausible, maybe even inevitable outcome.
Speaker 2: And they'll often link it directly to past events too. Yeah,
they'll look at the twenty twenty one Capital assaultants a
see that wasn't a one off incident.
Speaker 1: They see it as a prelude, a.
Speaker 2: Stage prelude to what the film is now programming us
to accept as the next step.
Speaker 1: Another really potent recent example is that movie Leave the
World Behind, the twenty twenty three thriller.
Speaker 2: HM, the one about the blackout and societal collapse from
a huge cyber attack.
Speaker 1: And because that film was produced by Barack and Michelle
Obamas company and had all these high level political figures involved.
Speaker 2: It was immediately flagged as explicit programming for a coming
cyber pandemic.
Speaker 1: And what's fascinating is how they create this visual link.
You see it all over social media.
Speaker 2: Yes, adherents will constantly create these split screen videos. On
one side you have a scene from Leave the World Behind,
a city losing power, satellites.
Speaker 1: Failing, and on the other side a clip.
Speaker 2: From say World Economic Forum panel where they're discussing hypothetical
future cyber attack scenarios.
Speaker 1: And that visual pairing draws this explicit and i'd say
manipulative line between the fictional warning and the alleged real
world planner.
Speaker 2: What's so interesting about this whole framework is is its
psychological utility. I mean, for anyone who feels like the
world is just increasingly.
Speaker 1: Chaotic, which is probably a lot of us.
Speaker 2: Right with climate threats, economic instability, political extremism. This theory
offers a complete, coherent, alternative explanation for everything.
Speaker 1: It's actually really comforting in a very dark way.
Speaker 2: It is it replaces the anxiety of randomness with the
certainty of control.
Speaker 1: If the world is falling apart because things are just
messy and people are incompetent, that's terrifying.
Speaker 2: But if everything is controlled, if it's all part of
a highly orchestrated plot, well at least there's a sense
of order, and the person who believes they've cracked the code,
they feel like they're one step ahead of everyone else.
Speaker 1: This speaks directly to that fundamental skepticism so many people
feel toward mainstream institutions and media.
Speaker 2: It's the foundation of it. When that trust is gone
and the established media is seen not as a news
source but as a dangerous tool of the elite, this
theory becomes a necessary narrative. It gives you a single,
all encompassing answer to the question why is all this happening?
Speaker 1: But we have to be really careful here. We need
to distinguish this theory of a cult forewarning from the
acknowledged real world power of media influence.
Speaker 2: That's a critical distinction.
Speaker 1: Because media can and does intentionally influence public policy and
social attitudes. It's not a conspiracy, it's just effective social persuasion.
Speaker 2: And our sources point to a perfect historical case for this,
the nineteen seventy three TV movie The Day After.
Speaker 1: I remember the stories about that. It was a graphic,
horrifying depiction of the act for math of a nuclear war.
Speaker 2: And its social impact was absolutely seismic. It genuinely terrified
the American public and the global political establishment, and.
Speaker 1: That profound social impact is widely credited with pushing President
Ronald Reagan to fundamentally change US nuclear policy.
Speaker 2: It is the emotional urgency created by that film help
set the stage for the nineteen eighty seven US USSR
Treaty on Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces. That's a documented, massive
political and social influence.
Speaker 1: A fictional story acting as this powerful tool of lobbying
and persuasion.
Speaker 2: But here's the key difference. This was acknowledged social impact.
It wasn't a secret, ritualistic foreplanning by some hidden.
Speaker 1: Cabal, right, No one was claiming Reagan was getting coded
messages from some interventional beings.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it was just effective storytelling aimed at changing the
world for the better. The predictive programming thesis demands that
the influence be secret, manipulative, and ultimately malicious.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's move away from the geopolitical conspiracies for
a moment and turn to the statistical beast of predictive
programming lore.
Speaker 2: Ah, Yes, the Simpsons.
Speaker 1: The Simpsons. If the Lone Gunman is the high specificity anomaly,
Springfield is the high volume certainty, the Internet is just
a library of clips claiming the show has predicted hundreds
of future events.
Speaker 2: And this is where we have to introduce a crucial
mathematical concept. The apparent predictive success of The Simpsons is
overwhelmingly a consequence of what's called stochastic likelihood, or.
Speaker 1: In simpler terms, probability.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's governed by the law of large numbers.
Speaker 1: That sounds a bit dense, but it's actually pretty simple
when you just look at the sheer scale of the show.
Speaker 2: Right Since it debuted in nineteen eighty nine, the show
has produced what is it now, over seven hundred and
ninety episodes and it's still going.
Speaker 1: And each one of those episodes is packed with dozens
of jokes, background gags, satirical plot lines, throwaway cultural references.
Speaker 2: It's an immense, sprawling data set of fictional scenarios that
spans more than three decades.
Speaker 1: Aid, So the law of large numbers dictates that when
you have a massive enough volume of.
Speaker 2: Attempts, some percentage of those fictional scenarios are statistically bound
to correspond to later historical events. It's almost a certainty.
Speaker 1: If you make ten thousand predictions, getting fifty of them
right isn't.
Speaker 2: Prophecy, it's just probability.
Speaker 1: This whole idea is also supported by how the show
is made right. The writers aren't trying to be.
Speaker 2: Profits, no, not at all. They are keen, incredibly informed
observers of society, culture, and politics. Their whole goal is
deep satire.
Speaker 1: Which often involves taking plausible scenarios based on real world
trends and just pushing them to their most absurd fictional extremes.
Speaker 2: And these writers are smart, many of your graduates of
top universities with backgrounds in economics, literature, politics. They're essentially
running thought.
Speaker 1: Experiments, thought experiments about societal collapse, political insanity, corporate greed.
Speaker 2: Right, So it would actually be more shocking if over
seven hundred and ninety episodes they didn't manage to get
some of the big trends correct.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the most famous example, the granddaddy of
them all, Donald Trump's presidency.
Speaker 2: From the two thousand episode Barked to the Future.
Speaker 1: In it, Lisa Simpson as president and she inherits a
crippling budget crunch from the previous president, President.
Speaker 2: Trump, and this aired a full sixteen years before he
was actually elected.
Speaker 1: This case perfectly illustrates the difference between prophecy and just
really sharp, calculated satire.
Speaker 2: It really does. The episode's writer Dan Greeney, he talked
about the intent behind it. He said they put the
idea because it represented the logical last stop before hitting
bottom for American political sanity.
Speaker 1: So, back in the year two thousand, presenting Donald Trump
as a future US president was the most over the
top farcical political joke that could possibly make.
Speaker 2: It was a punchline, a joke about America potentially going insane,
and the fact.
Speaker 1: That the jokes stopped being a joke sixteen years later
is well it's a powerful commentary on our own cultural descent.
Speaker 2: Not evidence of a coded warning from the ilumni.
Speaker 1: But the claims go so far beyond politics. They get
into details that are truly baffling, which is why the
theory is sore appealing.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, Let's dig into some of the other specific
examples that people always bring up.
Speaker 1: Okay, what about the corporate mergers. The show depicted Disney
acquiring twentieth Century Fox years before that deal was ever finalized, and.
Speaker 2: That deal happened in reality over twenty years after the
episode aired, which you have to admit, shows a pretty
impressive understanding of consolidation trends in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: And you have the cultural and logistical stuff. I mean,
think about the absurdity of that nineteen ninety six episode
where the rap group Cypress Hill accidentally books the London
Symphony Orchestra.
Speaker 2: A very specific, very ridiculous scenario.
Speaker 1: And it became an actual reality decades later in twenty
twenty four. This isn't just informed speculation. That's a specific,
bizarre operational error that actually came true.
Speaker 2: That one is pretty strange, I'll grant you.
Speaker 1: This is where I have to step in and apply
a little friction. Wait a minute, if these are just
keen observers, how do we explain the really granular stuff
like the show foreshadowing the twenty fifteen FIFA corruption case
that required a pretty deep knowledge of international organizational scandals.
And then there's the Millhouse case, which people always cite.
Speaker 2: Is the clincher, the Nobel Prize prediction.
Speaker 1: Right in one episode, Milhouse correctly predicts that bend Or
Holmstrom will win the Nobel Prize in economics.
Speaker 2: He did this six years before Holmstrom actually won the
prize in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: That feels like it requires more than just general observation.
How does the statistical argument account for something like that.
Speaker 2: It suggests either a massive amount of luck or that
the writers were doing very deep, very specialized research into
some pretty obscure academic fields.
Speaker 1: So which is it.
Speaker 2: I think it's a mix of both. In the case
of the Nobel prediction, Holmstrom was already a highly respected
and frequently discussed name in macroeconomic.
Speaker 1: Circles, so he was on the radar.
Speaker 2: He was consistently on the shortlist of potential winners because
of his ground breaking work on contract theory. He wasn't
a random guess. He was an educated, high probability guess.
Speaker 1: But the timing is still remarkable.
Speaker 2: The timing is statistically remarkable, no question, But we are
still talking about a pool of very educated writers making
thousands of educated guesses over decades. The most informed guess
still looks like prophecy if it happens to come true.
Speaker 1: And we can't ignore the architectural foresight. The nineteen ninety
six episode Lisa's Wedding where they imagine a futuristic London.
Speaker 2: Yes, with the flying cars in the.
Speaker 1: Background skyline, there's a building that looks almost exactly like
the Shard.
Speaker 2: A massive skyscraper that was built over a decade later,
between two thousand and nine and twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: How does that happen?
Speaker 2: Again, it's case of observing trends and extrapolating. In the
mid nineties, London was already undergoing these huge, ambitious urban
planning changes. Okay, the idea of a massive modern glass
spire dominating the financial district was not an alien concept.
It was a plausible extrapolation of existing architectural trends, just
placed into a fictional future setting.
Speaker 1: So the lesson here is that while the hits are
really impressive. We have to apply a critical filter yes,
and claims about technological foresight, like predicting smart watches or
autocorrect they often fail this filter absolutely.
Speaker 2: When people claim The Simpsons predicted the smart watch, they
conveniently ignore that the concept of a wristwatch communicator was
already everywhere in fiction. Dick Tracy, James Bond.
Speaker 1: It was a standard sci fi trope.
Speaker 2: Right, and the joke about an autocorrection device was almost
certainly based on existing but very niche real world.
Speaker 1: Devices like the Apple Newton exactly, the.
Speaker 2: Apple Newton, which was on the market in nineteen ninety
three and was famously, hilariously terrible at correcting text.
Speaker 1: So The Simpsons teaches us that massive output, combined with
highly intelligent, culturally informed satire.
Speaker 2: It guarantees a regular stream of apparent foresight.
Speaker 1: It's statistical certainty that's just dressed up to look like prophecy.
Speaker 2: It's the statistical beast always churning out enough content that
a few fragments will inevitably align with reality, and then
those are the ones that get cherry picked and amplified online.
Speaker 1: So now we have to pivot from the statistical certainty
of Springfield back to that single massive statistical anomaly, the
Loan Gunman. This is the one case that predictive programming
advocates claim statistics just cannot explain away, that's right.
Speaker 2: Unlike The Simpsons, which had hundreds and hundreds of chances,
this was one single, highly specific plot element in a
standalone pilot episode of a show that barely lasted.
Speaker 1: For it to combine a hijacked plane, the WTC target,
and a false flag.
Speaker 2: Motive, the pure probability of that being a coincidence is
extremely low. It's near zero.
Speaker 1: And the detail that the fictional airliner reportedly took off
from Logan International Airport in Boston.
Speaker 2: The same airport where two of the real nine eleven
planes originated.
Speaker 1: It just compounds the sense of impossible coincidence.
Speaker 2: So if the law of large numbers fails us here,
what explanation is left that doesn't immediately jump to clandestine foreknowledge?
Speaker 1: That's the question.
Speaker 2: We'd argue that this is best understood not as prediction,
but as cultural prescience.
Speaker 1: Cultural presence, what does that mean exactly?
Speaker 2: It means the fictionalized maximal exploration of a known, high
risk societal vulnerability.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's dull into that idea. The entire x Files
universe was built on tapping into these deep, widespread public
anxieties of the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: Totally anxieties about government misconduct, unchecked military secrets, the pervasive
nature of the deep state.
Speaker 1: The writers who operated in that genre, they specialized in
taking those public anxieties, the most paranoid what ifs, and
pushing them to their absolute logical narrative extreme.
Speaker 2: We call that a maximal narrative extrapolation. And the writers
were essentially asking themselves a question, which was, if the
government or the shadow military industrial complex is willing to
orchestrate events for profit, what is the single most destructive,
most profitable, and most symbolic act that could possibly commit
on US soil?
Speaker 1: And the answer they came up with was a false.
Speaker 2: Flag attack targeting the nation's most recognizable financial symbol, the
World Trade Center, using the very method remote hijacking that
seemed technologically cutting edge but also horrifyingly plausible at the time.
Speaker 1: And it's also important to remember the WTC was already
a known target. This wasn't an unimaginable scenario, not at all.
Speaker 2: The nineteen ninety three bombing had already shown its vulnerability.
There were multiple foiled plots in the nineties involving planes
and explosives, all targeting.
Speaker 1: The towers, So the concept of a successful devastating attack
on the WTC was already It was floating around in
the cultural ether.
Speaker 2: As you said exactly, it was a plausible target for
writers looking for maximum drama, and tragically a plausible target
for terrorists looking for maximum impact. The writers weren't getting
coded messages, they were just analyzing the thread environment for
the most compelling story they could tell.
Speaker 1: But the power of this anomaly really comes from the
audience's memory, which is where the cognitive biases we're going
to discuss later start to kick in.
Speaker 2: That's so true when you look back at the actual viewership,
A lot of people, even diehard X File superfans, had
no actual memory of that plot until after September eleventh.
Speaker 1: The episode got decent ratings for a pilot, but then
it was just forgotten. It vanished into the cultural landscape.
Speaker 2: Right. The plot element only became overwhelmingly salient, emotionally and
historically significant after the real attacks happened.
Speaker 1: The sheer trauma and historical weight of nine to eleven
retroactively imbued that obscure piece of fiction with this overwhelming
sense of intentionality.
Speaker 2: It's a textbookcase of an event being so shocking that
the human mind demands an explanation for the coincidence that
feels equally significant.
Speaker 1: A random statistical fluke just feels too chaotic to arbitrary.
Speaker 2: It feels insufficient, so the necessity arises for an external,
high level explanation.
Speaker 1: And this is why we see the proliferation of these claims,
often cited by prominent figures in the conspiracy world, suggesting
that the show's creator, Chris Carter, was told to make.
Speaker 2: That episode, maybe by a high ranking intelligence figure or
someone in the know, and.
Speaker 1: That theory, however unsubstantiated it is, serves a critical cognitive function.
Speaker 2: It provides a necessary piece of high level foreknowledge to
account for the shocking anomaly. It shifts the event from
being an unnerving fluke to being a necessary, intentional part
of a planned deception.
Speaker 1: So when we contrast our two main case studies, The
Simpsons is all about statistics and satire. It's designed for
high volume and occasional educated accuracy, while the.
Speaker 2: Lone Gunman is a statistical fluke, a highly specific and
improbable hit which was then magnified retrospectively by an immense
national trauma.
Speaker 1: But for the true believer in predictive programming, the underlying
mechanism doesn't even matter, does it not.
Speaker 2: Really, they both serve the same purpose. They reinforce the
idea that someone knows what's coming, whether it's through luck,
informed pres fence, or something much deep, deeper and far
more sinister.
Speaker 1: We've gone through the statistical and the psychological explanations for
why people believe in this, but for millions of adherents,
this isn't just about probabilities. It's a deeply spiritual, almost
religious conviction that.
Speaker 2: The elite are required to forewarn us exactly.
Speaker 1: We have to pivot now to the magic ritual component
of this. This is the esoteric mandate that really provides
the spiritual scaffolding for the whole conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2: The belief is that the ruling elite, whether you think
their interdimensional entities or global financiers, are bound by these
ancient occult.
Speaker 1: Laws, and these laws dictate that they must subtly disclose
their plans to the public before they carry them out right.
Speaker 2: The disclosure is a key required part of the ritual itself.
It's this moment where they have to acknowledge their actions,
even if the general public has no idea what they're seeing.
Speaker 1: This view often falls under that contemporary umbrella of conspirituality, which.
Speaker 2: Is the fusion of New Age beliefs, spiritual seeking, and
political conspiracy theories. A prime example is the cosmology promoted
by figures like David.
Speaker 1: Dick Right, the idea that humanity is secretly ruled by
interdimensional reptilian beings called arcans or the Illuminati.
Speaker 2: In that cosmic model, fictional media is transformed. It's no
longer just entertainment. It becomes a mandatory, esoteric broadcast. The
manipulation becomes ritualistic.
Speaker 1: A necessary act of spiritual disclosure that these ruling entities
must perform, maybe to satisfy some cosmic law or to
achieve a kind of unconscious public consent.
Speaker 2: But this raises a really critical question. Where did this
idea that digital creation and modern technology are inherently magical
or occult even come from.
Speaker 1: To understand that, we have to look back at the
philosophical and cultural origins of early cyberspace development.
Speaker 2: Our sources cite this fascinating history from the nineteen nineties
when some of the foundational coders and visionaries in Silicon
Valley adopted a distinctly technopagan worldview.
Speaker 1: A pagan religious view towards cyberspace and virtuality.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Mark Peshi, who was a key figure in developed
VRML that's virtual reality modeling language. He was central to
this movement, and.
Speaker 1: Pesse explicitly asserted quote that the divine is present in
all creation.
Speaker 2: So for these thinkers, technology wasn't just a practical tool,
it was a sacred spiritual environment.
Speaker 1: So the act of coding was less like engineering and
more like spiritual creation.
Speaker 2: Pretty much pess essentially replaced the word of God or
logos with code as the primary force shaping this new
digital world. He argued that this new environment could only
be properly described using ancient magical.
Speaker 1: Concepts, suggesting that technological and magical ways of seeing the
world were converging.
Speaker 2: And he even structured the foundational manual for VRML to
reflect these beliefs. The manual was reportedly built like a
pagan ritual, with its four parts dedicated to the four
cardinal directions east, southwest, and north.
Speaker 1: That's incredible so the early digital architecture was intentionally infused
with these magical and esoteric beliefs as from the very beginning, and.
Speaker 2: This belief in the sacredness of code extended to the
objects created within it. What do you mean, Well, Pess
made this striking assertion. He said that since every object
in cyberspace is just made epistoles that all the users
agreed to treat as the object, an avatar or virtual desk, whatever, OK,
then every object in cyberspace is a magical object. It's
an item that is imbued with power and function solely
by our collective consensus belief.
Speaker 1: This philosophical history provides the intellectual source code for the
whole predictive programming thesis.
Speaker 2: It does it transforms fictional content into a mandatory subtle
forewarning that's required by cult doctrines.
Speaker 1: And this esoteric mandate gets worven right into the very
language of computing, specifically hexadecimal coding.
Speaker 2: Base sixteen calculation, which is used for color description in
web design.
Speaker 1: Right, hex code uses sixteen distinct symbols, the number zero
to nine and the letters A to F, so that's
ten plus.
Speaker 2: Six, and conspiracy theorists draw these really compelling, though definitely
esoteric connections.
Speaker 1: Here they connect the sixteen symbols to the sixteen figures
of geomancy, an ancient system of divination.
Speaker 2: And the hex part itself using the number six, is
often linked to the six sided hexagram, reinforcing a linguistic
link to the German root hexin, which means which.
Speaker 1: This is how digital engineering gets layered with all this
magical significance.
Speaker 2: But the ontology goes even deeper, drawing connections between cyberspace
and West African vodoom traditions.
Speaker 1: Which Pesia himself cited as a twin ancestry for virtual reality.
Speaker 2: And this connection is drawn through the binary structure of code.
Cyber Reality is symbolized by the damballa double snake Dambala
and his partner Ada Weed coiling together in a way.
Speaker 1: That precisely mimics the DNA double helix right, so.
Speaker 2: It represents the binary structure of life's beginnings and the
dualistic nature of creation.
Speaker 1: That's a powerful metaphor the fundamental building blocks of life.
DNA are structurally mirrored in the fundamental building life of computing,
the binary code of zeros and ones.
Speaker 2: And this link was absorbed and amplified by influential.
Speaker 1: Sci fi writers like William Gibson exactly.
Speaker 2: Gibson famously populated his vision of cyberspace with the Vodu
Loa or gods in his Sprawl trilogy.
Speaker 1: In Count zero, the Lowa Dumbala is depicted as a
serpent or an icebreaker program that rides the hackers when
they connect to the net.
Speaker 2: The idea is that cyberspace isn't just a structure, it's
a vector, a medium through which these spiritual entities can
operate and influence our reality.
Speaker 1: And the mathematical roots of this are even older.
Speaker 2: Ethnomathematics research suggests that African geomancy, which is built on
a long tradition of binaries in base two calculation, might
actually pre date comparable Arabic systems.
Speaker 1: This tradition involves something called iterative looping.
Speaker 2: It's where you pass the output of an operation back
as a new input in this reflexive self generating process.
It's mathematically similar to how complex nonlinear systems operate, and
is the core mechanism of Bamana sand difis.
Speaker 1: So in this divination, you draw random dashes in the sand,
you pair them up and you record odd or even
results to generate a binary symbol.
Speaker 2: And this looping process creates self generated variety. It seems
to perfectly mirror the complex iterative processes of computing and
even artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: And central to this whole system is the trickster god Legba.
Speaker 2: Legba is the guardian of the crossroads. He controls communication
between worlds. He's the ultimate communicator and miscommunicator, and he
uses inverted logic and paradox.
Speaker 1: That sounds exactly like the complex, unpredictable nature of emergent
behavior in digital systems.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the divination mythology captures this paradox. In faw divination,
Legba places one palm nut in the Godfa's hand to
indicate two eyes should be open, but two nuts to
indicate only one eye should be open.
Speaker 1: So it's this inverted logic where the input doesn't cleanly
match the expected output, and that.
Speaker 2: Reflects the pairing of determinism and unpredictability that characterizes digital
existence and algorithm make complexity.
Speaker 1: So we can conclude that this rich, deep occult ontology
provides the necessary spiritual justification for the predictive programming thesis.
Speaker 2: For the adherent. This explains why the elites must hide
their plans in plain sight. It's not just a game.
It's a non negotiable spiritual obligation that's written into the
very fabric of the digital world.
Speaker 1: We've established that the mechanism is either statistics or this
deeply complex occult ritual rooted in the history of coding.
Speaker 2: But what is the mechanism that holds this entire belief
structure together. Regardless of whether you prefer the statistical or
the magical explanation.
Speaker 1: The answer lies inside your own head.
Speaker 2: We have to shift our analysis now entirely to the powerful,
ubiquitous cognitive biases that sustain this belief. These biases act
as highly effective filters, making selective evidence seem like definitive,
irrefutable proof of a conspiracy.
Speaker 1: And the ultimate unifying psychological factor here is confirmation bias.
Speaker 2: This is the hardwired human tendency to actively favor, seek out, interpret,
and recall information that already confirms your pre existing beliefs
or values.
Speaker 1: This isn't a modern failing, it's a historical constant. Thinkers
throughout history have observed it.
Speaker 2: The philosopher Francis Bacon noted that This biased assessment is
what drives all superstitions, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments.
Speaker 1: Or the like. Bacon described it perfectly. He said, once
the human understanding has adopted an opinion, say that Hollywood
is controlled by a secret cabal, it then draws all
things else to support and agree with it.
Speaker 2: And critically, the person who believes this will systematically neglect
or despise, or just reject any contrary evidence that shows
the connection is just a coincidence.
Speaker 1: This is the exact fuel for the predictive programming thesis.
Speaker 2: Adherents actively select and amplify the hits, the WTC plot,
the Nobel prediction, the Disney merger, while completely ignoring the
massive volume of fictional plots and scenarios that never happened.
Speaker 1: This systematic selective recall and attention creates a fundamental statistical distortion.
Speaker 2: And we can see how powerful this selective recall is
in controlled psychological studies. Take that classic experiment where participants
read a profile of a woman that had a balanced
mix of traits, some introverted, some extroverted. Okay, when they
were asked to assess her for a job as a librarian,
participants overwhelmingly recalled more examples of her being introverted.
Speaker 1: But when asked to assess her for a job in
high energy real estate sales, they recalled.
Speaker 2: More examples of her being extroverted. The brain efficiently and
automatically recalled the traits that confirmed the initial hypothesis, making
her scene perfect for whatever role they were considering.
Speaker 1: The same cognitive efficiency applies to conspiracy theories. We see
this in studies about paranormal beliefs too, like.
Speaker 2: ESP right, when strong believers in extrasensory perception were shown
evidence that did not support the existence of ESP, what
happened They either remembered significantly less to that contradictory information
or and get this, they actively miss remembered the non
supportive results as actually supporting ESP.
Speaker 1: The brain literally edits the data to fit the existing narrative.
Speaker 2: And in our current media ecosystem, this selective focus isn't
just a mental flaw, it's a systemic problem. Confirmation bias
is massively amplified by the structure of social media.
Speaker 1: You mean filter bubbles and personalized content feeds exactly.
Speaker 2: Algorithmic editing ensures that you are primarily exposed to information
news and commentary that you already agree with.
Speaker 1: It creates a closed loop, contributing heavily to opinion polarization
and reinforcing the narrative that the small number of hits
you see is actually this vast, undeniable pattern.
Speaker 2: Okay, moving on. The second crucial bias is related to
the sheer emotional shock of a major world event and
how that trauma affects our memory and judgment after the fact.
Speaker 1: This is hindsight bias.
Speaker 2: Also known as the I knew it all along effect.
Speaker 1: Hindsight bias occurs when after a major event a stock
market crash, a terrorist attack, and a shock retroactively distorts
how we see the past.
Speaker 2: We judged that a past event or a coincidence like
the Lone Gunman plot seems like an intentional warning, or
that the outcome was far more predictable than it ever
really was in real time.
Speaker 1: This perfectly explains the power of the Lone Gunman anomaly.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 1: Before nine eleven, that plot was an obscure element of
a default show. After the attacks, the specificity became overwhelming.
Speaker 2: The past gets psychologically reconstructed to align with the dramatic,
tragic reality of the present. And that retrospective judgment is
what transforms mere coincidence into undeniable prophecy.
Speaker 1: It's why when you ask people after a major event
how predictable was that, they invariably rate it as much
more predictable than they would have afford happened.
Speaker 2: The outcome seems inevitable, and therefore any fictional hint of
that outcome starts to feel intentional.
Speaker 1: Okay. The third powerful cognitive phenomenon at work is the
human tendency to see non existent patterns or.
Speaker 2: Connections, which, when applied specifically to correlating events, is called
illusory correlation.
Speaker 1: This is when you incorrectly perceive a relationship between two
events that are actually unrelated in the data. Your mind
is searching for a pattern, finds a few isolated points
that match up, and then concludes a relationship exists.
Speaker 2: A great illustration comes from studies of arthretic patients. Nearly
all the participants reported that their joint pain was correlated
with the weather. They believe bad weather made their discomfort.
Speaker 1: Worse, But careful data collection over a long period showed
that the real.
Speaker 2: Correlation was zero. There was no link, So why did.
Speaker 1: They believe it so? Strongly.
Speaker 2: The illusory correlation happened because the patients were focusing intensely
on the positive positive cases at times when they had
both joint pain and bad weather.
Speaker 1: And they were selectively ignoring all the other times when
they had no pain or when they had pain during
good weather.
Speaker 2: The only recalled the matches.
Speaker 1: This perfectly mirrors the predictive programming analysis. Adherents focus only
on the hits, the movie plot that matches reality, and
ignore the immense amount of non hits, non events, and
failed prophecies.
Speaker 2: You're looking for a pattern, and your brain is designed
to give you one, even if it has to invent it.
Speaker 1: A classic illustration of this is numerological pyramidology.
Speaker 2: The practice of finding profound meaning in the proportions of
the Great Pyramid of Giza. Since the pyramid allows for
countless length measurements, angles, and combinations of those measurements.
Speaker 1: It's inevitable that by selectively focusing on certain calculations you
can find superficially impressive correspondences with things like the Earth's
dimensions or astronomical constants.
Speaker 2: You will find meaning if you selectively search for it
long enough, even in random data.
Speaker 1: Okay, finally, let's briefly touch on a formal cognitive science
theory totally unrelated to the conspiracy term that explains how
beliefs are formed and crucially, how they become so.
Speaker 2: Stubborn predictive coding. Right.
Speaker 1: This theory is based on Baesian inference and it describes
the brain as a prediction engine. The brain is constantly
trying to make inferences about the world by combining two things.
Speaker 2: It's prior beliefs or priors, and the incoming sensory signals
from the world.
Speaker 1: And when there's a mismatch, when what the brain expects
to see doesn't match what it actually receives, that creates
a prediction error, and that error is what drives new
learning and belief refinement.
Speaker 2: So how does this relate to the persistence of beliefs
like the predictive programming thesis, especially when faced with overwhelming
contradictory evidence like all the non hits from The Simpsons.
Speaker 1: Studies on persistent firm beliefs, often classified as delusions, suggest
that those high level abstract priors, like the conspiracy beliefs themselves,
they become abnormally strong, excessively precise.
Speaker 2: So the belief itself becomes so entrenched that it effectively
starts sculpting perception.
Speaker 1: Essentially, the foundational belief in the conspiracy becomes an impenetrable filter.
It forces the incoming sensory data, the real world events,
or the fictional content to conform with the existing high
level belief.
Speaker 2: It reinforces the idea that all coincidences are intentional, contributing
to the persistence of the belief even in the face
of rational contradictory evidence. It creates a cognitive system where
the conspiracy theory is continuously reinforced from the top down.
Speaker 1: We started with the sheer terror of coincidence and the
lone gunmen and the overwhelming mathematics of the Simpsons.
Speaker 2: We've traveled through the alleged plans of the global lead,
spiritual architecture of the digital occult, and the inescapable biases
of the human mind.
Speaker 1: So what's the synthesis We leave you with the.
Speaker 2: Most robust conclusion, the one supported by our analysis, is
that this phenomenon is driven overwhelmingly by coincidence. Apparent foresight
in media is primarily an inevitable statistical byproduct of massive
output combined with keen cultural observation.
Speaker 1: And the power of these predictions, whether they're statistical or
just anomalies, is magnified and sustained not by intentional signaling
or magic ritual.
Speaker 2: But by universal cognitive biases, specifically confirmation bias, which selects
the hits, and hindsight bias, which makes those hits feel
intentional after.
Speaker 1: The fact, and the magic ritual claims rooted in that
fascinating philosophical history of technopaganism and vodoun, they serve a
crucial function.
Speaker 2: They provide a rich, coherent ideological framework that transforms global
complexity and chaos into an understandable, controlled intention. They provide
the necessary spiritual way to validate that deep seated distrust
that so many audiences feel toward official sources.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, the predictive programming theory operates as this sophisticated psychological
framework that alleviates the acute cognitive discomfort of living in
a world of random, inexplicable, or complex global events.
Speaker 2: It gives audiences a comforting, all encompassing conclusion that everything
is intentional and if you can decoe the media, you
are protected.
Speaker 1: So if we want to build resilience against these narratives,
we need to focus rigorously on critical media literacy.
Speaker 2: Yeh, it's not enough to just debunk specific clip of
The Simpsons. We have to address the underlying mechanisms of
cognitive distortion.
Speaker 1: Which requires three primary areas of focus for you, the listener. First,
fully internalizing the law of large numbers to contextualize high
volume media output, understanding that if a show runs for
thirty years, it will get things right just by luck.
Speaker 2: Second, we have to train ourselves explicitly to recognize and
compensate for confirmation bias and hindsight bias, which.
Speaker 1: Means consciously acknowledging the vast quantity of fictional events that
never happened, the statistical distortion. Before you focus selectively on
the hits, you have.
Speaker 2: To actively look for the evidence that contradicts your belief.
Speaker 1: And finally, addressing the fundamental vulnerability, the decline of trust
in official and mainstream information sources. When people are seeking
these esoteric, definitive explanations for world events and fiction.
Speaker 2: It's usually because they have already completely lost faith in
the explanations provided by established institutions.
Speaker 1: The human mind is highly efficient at confirming what it
already believes to be true. Whether your core belief is
rooted in statistical likelihood or the concept of interdimensional entities.
Speaker 2: The cognitive mechanisms that reinforce that belief operate in the
exact same way they make the world feel predictable, intentional,
and controllable.
Speaker 1: So we leave you with this final provocative thought. Given
how powerfully our own cognitive biases reinforce the beliefs we
already hold, whether they are rooted in satire, statistics or
the esoteric. What is one deeply held conviction you are
willing to examine right now for selective evidence, and how
might that effort change your perception of reality?
Speaker 2: Think about it, and thank you for joining us for
this deep dive.