Future-predicting Pop-Culture. Or: Coincidences and Biases & how we like to cherry-pick what to believe

Let’s explore what The Simpsons can show us about foresight, bias, innovation, and how these ideas intersect with our creative and professional lives

Have you ever considered how weird it is that the Simpsons was spot on about SOOO many things “from the future”?

From the election of Trump (again!), the Ebola virus and pandemics, smart phones and smart gadgets, and maybe even some other things that we ended up living through on this planet where people’s skin is not bright yellow…

I mean… Trump for PRESIDENT? Before 2015, how could that even be something considered?

First: let’s try to check with a very scientific poll.

Maybe we need to dive deeper. Did they really believe the future? At first glance, even I will probably thing: oh my God! That’s so weird!

But then I remember that actually, why should it be weird?

People forecast all the time. I’ve even studied forecasting in university, and use the frameworks of futures thinking at work, so why does one think that the Simpsons are not any different?

The creators of The Simpsons have a product that has been running for 36 seasons now, with (until last week) 774 episodes so far! It is a product as is anything else, and it needs ideation sessions, strategy meetings (with some forecasting of some wild ideas that could happen, while also maintaining it mostly fiction), and even marketing.

Are we losing the line between fiction and reality? Should we fear the end of the world, if The Simpsons ever have such an episode?

Why do we believe that these events (originally and intentionally for content-creation and entertainment), are actual proof that the producers are onto something and that our future can be read and predicted by a TV show, sometimes more than a decade in advance?

Well… Have you ever dreamed and then something like that happened? Are you an oracle, or a future-teller? Or was it just a likely scenario?

Also, it seems that I do have a birthday with Bart? The most recent’s season has started on my birthday. The Simpsons predicted… my birthday twin??? Screenshot from Wikipedia taken November 17, 2024.

The Simpsons as a "Fortune Teller"

Over its decades-long run, The Simpsons has made hundreds (maybe even thousands?) of jokes, and ironic or satirical pokes at everyday topics, fears, and main themes from our culture, technology, politics. Some of these seem eerily spot-on and prophetic:

• Donald Trump as President: In the year 2000, they aired an episode "Bart to the Future," where Lisa says something in the lines of, "We’ve inherited quite the budget crunch from President Trump." And somehow in 2016, Trump’s actual election sent the the main social media timelines and even TV channels into a swirl, thinking Matt Groening and the other The Simpsons creators have some weird ability to predict reality.

  Even the escalator screenshot puts everyone thinking that we’re living in some matrix, but… Trump has a lot of buildings. They do have escalators. If an episode revolves around Trump, it’s normal that they’d make it… make sense? So it’s not adding to the fuel, it’s just making it feel present, even on a wild idea that he’d run for President.

• Smartwatches: A 1995 episode, "Lisa's Wedding," shows a character using a wristwatch to make a phone call! And this was a decade before the first smartwatches hit the market!

• Disney Buying 21st Century Fox: In 1998’s "When You Dish Upon a Star," a sign reads, "A Division of Walt Disney Co." Nearly two decades later, the merger actually happened. Is it that uncanny for the Hollywood reality?

• Here’s more examples. I could link more than 10 other websites, from BBC, New York Times even!

  

  This one is a gem. From the year I was born 29 years ago, we expected that a dial phone would have a screen. Somehow in 2010 we’d have TVs to see each other talk but the phone didn’t totally modernize or have touchscreens.

I told you! There’s a lot of sources and articles on this!

But are the writers really fortune-tellers? Or are we simply seeing patterns because we want to?

Initially, if we were to catalog all jokes, episode topics and ways they depicted them, we’d probably see that the failure rate of “predictions” is quite high. But we’re cherry-picking them.

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The Bias Behind the "Predictions"

What’s a Bias? Bias is a mental shortcut that helps us process information quickly. These shortcuts can also lead us to make assumptions or draw connections where none exist. It’s not always good to connect the dots on auto-pilot. There’s many many biases, from anchoring to confirmation bias, even the survivorship bias I covered this week. When it comes to seeing the The Simpsons as a fortune-teller, we’re actually having a few biases impacting our judgment.

Confirmation Bias
We notice examples that align with our expectations and ignore the rest. With over 30 seasons of material, The Simpsons is bound to occasionally stumble into real-world parallels. When we see Trump as president, our brains light up: “They predicted it! How in the world did that happen?” What we ignore are the countless predictions that never came true.

1. Availability Heuristic
   A meme about The Simpsons predicting the future is something that can easily go viral. The more memorable something is, the more likely we are to think it’s common or meaningful. So, what we’re having is a bias, making us overestimate the show's predictive power while forgetting its primary purpose: to be an entertainment show

2. Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (or Frequency Illusion)
   Ever learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere? This happens when we start paying attention to something specific and subconsciously filter out unrelated information. If you’ve recently read about The Simpsons, every real-world connection to the show jumps out at you, reinforcing the idea of its "predictions."

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Why Bias Matters in Innovation

Bias isn’t inherently bad, it’s a survival mechanism. It helps us make decisions quickly in a world where information overload is quite easy to have. But unchecked, it can limit creativity and innovation:

• Good Bias:
  When you're innovating, biases can help you recognize patterns or take leaps of faith based on intuition. For instance, intrapreneurs or innovators often rely on mental shortcuts to spot opportunities others miss.

• Bad Bias:
  Bias can also blind you to alternative solutions or reinforce outdated thinking. Imagine dismissing a game-changing idea because it challenges the "way we’ve always done things." Other “bad biases” is anchoring your ideas based on your (uninformed? untested? stubborn?) beliefs.

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How to Spot and Overcome Bias

To innovate effectively, whether you're writing for Substack, developing software, or pitching an idea at work, you need to become aware of your biases. Here’s how:

1. Practice Awareness
   Why do you think The Simpsons predicts the future? Could there be another explanation? Apply the same questioning to your creative or professional projects. Challenge your assumptions!

   Psssst: sometimes people alter the reality and create fake news so that The Simpsons seems like some illuminatti conspiracy theory, those are also proven fake quite often. So practice awareness in that too.

2. Diversify Your Inputs
   If all your influences share the same perspective, you’re more likely to fall into groupthink. Try to get out of the echo chamber, bubble effect! Surround yourself with people and ideas that challenge your thinking.

3. Test Your Ideas
   Don’t just trust your gut. Experiment with your concepts, get feedback, and iterate. This ensures your ideas aren’t constrained by unconscious biases.

I could write more about the creative process they might have, but I’ll leave it for Wednesday for a more scientific or actionable approach… so stay tuned! If you’re interested in reading that post, then:

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Real-Life Examples of Bias at Work

Bias doesn’t just live in TV memes, it’s actually in a lot more realities and places:

• Crutches Everywhere!
  Ever break a foot (I had this bias myself when I broke my foot… twice) and suddenly notice people with crutches all around you?
  That’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon! The crutches and people using them were always there, but you’re only now facing the same thing, so you notice it more. This might also happen with pregnant women seeing more pregnant women, for example.

• Ideas in Echo Chambers
  You pitch a great idea at work, and it gets denied because "it’s not how we do things here." For instance, because the team's confirmation bias favors familiar solutions over new ones.

  If somebody tells you no and explains it might be for reason XYZ, once ZYX happens, they’ll say they called it, because they were “expecting” it would happen, so they were more tuned in when something similar happens - confirmation bias all over again.

• Writing, ideating, etc. for an Audience
  As a writer, you might assume your audience shares your perspective. Have you noticed how I’ve been including polls lately? That’s because I’m trying not to have bias on that! This bias can lead you to overlook topics or angles that could resonate with a broader audience.

  As an innovator, are you putting yourself in the shoes of the people you’re building the product for? If it hasn’t been a product until now, have you tried validating why?

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What The Simpsons Teaches Us About Innovation

While The Simpsons doesn’t actually predict the future, it does reflect the present - something they have to build well in advance, as they make the episodes up to 10 months in advance!

That’s what makes its humor and satire so powerful. The show’s writers experiment with ideas, push boundaries, and riff on culture without worrying about being "right." So next time you think that you’re having really wild ideas in an ideation session, think: could this wild idea end up happening, like Trump for President or phones having video-call features?

As a Substack writer, intrapreneur, or creator, you can take these lessons from The Simpsons:

Be Observant: The best ideas often come from paying attention to the world around you.

Take Risks: Not every joke, or idea, will land, but the bold ones are the ones people remember.

Embrace Your Biases: Use them to spark creativity but question them when they hold you back.

Next time you see a The Simpsons "prediction" trending online, think about the biases at play, and consider: how was THAT creative meeting going? How could they possibly come out with yet another outcome so far-fetched… and yet, it happened? I wonder how many sheets of paper are they “amachucating” (portuguese word for turning papers into balls) when the idea is not good enough, or maybe a bit too wild? In the Simpsons, never! But you? Maybe quite often.

That’s it for today, folks. Let’s let this inspire our week ahead!

And who knows? Maybe you can predict the future too. Sometimes, the future we “predict” is just the one we’ve been trained to see.

What was your favorite The Simpsons (or any other tv show) prediction you’ve seen? If you’re an E-mail reader and don’t have the Substack app, you can reply to this e-mail! I’d love to read your answer!

See you on Wednesday!