FACTORALY - E16 PREDICTIONS

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

This week, Simon and Bruce check out the future - or at least the various ways of predicting it. From the Soothsayers to the Simpsons, there are so many ways of knowing what's to come. Think of a number between 1 and 10. And, the number you thought of was... 7. Spooky. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello it's that time of the week again it certainly is whichever time you are listening to us this is the time this is the time and welcome to fact orally glad to not quite see you all yes exactly do you know i knew this episode was going to happen i knew you were going to say that and i knew you were going to say that oh did you i didn't because this week we are talking about prediction we are which isn't always weirdo but obviously not always but it does have a certain overtone to it doesn't it yes yes except when you use the word which i'm going to later go on economic oh oh there's nothing spooky or eerie about an economic prediction no absolutely nothing um but so let's not start there though no let's not no let's start somewhere more in entertaining

so we start with fortune telling oh how exciting how mysterious i'm not going to go into this in massive detail okay because there are so many ways of telling the future yes i mean you've got tarot cards not only have you got tarot cards there are three different sorts of packs are there really tarot cards there's the rider pack which everybody knows right and cards. There's the Rider pack, which everybody knows. Right. And then you've got the Zen pack. Right. And then you've got the Rune pack. Oh.

They're called decks, apparently. Okay. And I was looking into reading tarot cards, and I just got bored because everybody has different interpretations of what each card does. I see. I think it's fairly straightforward. The only thing I did find out is that if you ever have your tarot read,

you shouldn't go back for another six months because they say it only lasts six months. Really? If you're going to get a new reading, wait six months. Okay. So their fortunes are only good for six months and then they alter. Yes. Interesting. Then you've got crystal balls.

Mm-hmm. Thank you for noticing. I noticed the noise as you walked. One has, there are such things as balls made of crystal glass. Yes. And they reckon that's a way of sort of like getting into a meditative state. It's not actually that things appear in the crystal hall. It's just a way that, because there are floors in a large ball of crystal yeah that you can actually

use it as a meditative something to focus on yeah you know when you do meditation they sort of say imagine a a single candle flame and stuff like that it's it's similar it's a way of getting your brain into a place where there's that i have. I don't know whether you've ever done this in your voiceover career, Bruce, but I have recorded some meditation stuff in the past. It is very much like that. It is sort of focus on your breathing, focus on the position of your feet upon the floor. It's focusing in on a thing.

It's all about focusing on one thing so that your mind sort of clears of all the clutter. So that's what a crystal ball is for. And that's what a crystal ball does for a media. No, I'm going to stay. Okay. I am skeptical. I'm going to try not to be on this podcast.

I am skeptical and I'm going to jolly well remain that way. So you haven't read your tea leaves either? Not lately, no. I'm more of a coffee bean man. That's a Chinese thing. Is it? And apparently it can.

I mean, I've read spookily accurate things where people have said, oh, I made a note of what this person said when they read my tea leaves. And 10 years later, it all came true. Okay. Yeah. But, you know, it could have come true at any point. We'll get back into that in a minute. Okay. Yeah, but, you know, it could have come true at any point. We'll get back into that in a minute. Yes. So we've got tarot cards, crystal balls, tea leaves.

Have you ever had your palm read? I haven't, no. Have you? I think I have. And they say that your left palm is the one that you come up, that's your fate. And your right palm is what you do with it. Oh, I see. So if you look at like your lifeline and

i'm showing you on my it's useless isn't it to do this on a podcast so like your lifeline and all that sort of yeah mound of venus and all that stuff um yeah i it's fine um of course then you've got the the the norse tradition you've got the rune stones where you cast runes. Yeah, yeah. Chicken bones, Africa. Okay. Oh, yes. Oh, what's that song?

There's a song called Roll of the Bones. Can't remember it now. But yeah, something about rolling the bones. I'll tell you who will know. Who? Our listeners will know. Oh, that lot. They'll know.

They're very clever. And do you know what they'll do? What will they do, Bruce? They won't stay quiet. They'll know. They're very clever. And do you know what they'll do? What'll they do, Bruce? They won't stay quiet. They will comment. They will. They will comment galore. They will. In fact, I expect to have a lot of commentary

after this, because we're going to be quite contentious, I imagine. Excellent. Yeah, well, don't hold back, folks. If you're either totally pro or totally anti this stuff, tell us about it. Tell us about your experiences. But be nice to each other. So, I mean, so apart from tarot cards, crystal balls, dealies, palms, runestones, chicken bones, numerology, dream interpretations, altars and clever ones.

Can you think of any other way of telling a fortune? Absolutely not. You've covered them all i think i've got that is all of it so you've you've been looking into into prediction as well what what sort of thing have you discovered so i've gone i've had a look at a few different things just um sort of examples of famous predictions um and and how accurate they are and how accurate they are not and that sort of thing and And I had a look at, I sort of had a look at fortune telling through the ages. And I recently found just this week, I'd never heard of this before, but apparently there were these four cone shaped golden hats actually made of gold.

That looks suspiciously like the modern day idea of a wizard's or witch's hat. Oh right, so con hat. Oh, right. You know, sort of wide brim. Yeah, conical. Wide brim, pointed tip, made out of pressed, layered gold. And these things are roughly several thousand years old. They're not quite sure how many thousands, but they're sort of, they're bronze age, you know. And there have been four of these hats found over the last 150 years,

most of them from Germany, one of them from France. And these hats, if we can find people a picture to look at, these hats are incredibly ornate. They've got all of these symbols and figures engraved and embossed onto these hats. And the theory is that they were worn by local um i suppose soothsayers or or seers um fun fact soothsayer literally means truth teller yes there you go etymology yeah there's a lot of that like clairvoyance is like seeing clearly and oh is that right i just thought it was a woman called claire whose surname happened to be Voyance. Who knew? But yes, these symbols all over the hat sort of seem to be a little bit of a mixture of everything you've said.

There are some numbers. There are some pictures of sort of mystical animals and creatures. There are symbols of the weather. You know, going back to the Bronze Age, you know, we do it so easily now predicting the weather. But back then, that was seen as a superpower, you know. So these people who were wearing these golden hats, having the ability to predict various things, the theory is that it was probably used for, you know, predicting agricultural outcomes. When is the best time to plant my crops, O soothsayer? Kind of thing, you know. So some of these hats have been found over the years.

The most recent one was only found in 1953. So they're still finding these things. There used to be things, almanacs used to be published, which had all sorts of, in fact, I think the old Moors almanac is still published every year. Right, okay. And that has all these mystical, magical information like solar eclipses. Right, okay.

For the next year, all the things are going to hit. And you can kind of say it's like magic if you know these things are going to happen. Yeah. Old Moors also predicts that the following year, it was published in the previous November. So the current one would have been published in November 2022. Okay. And so it's predicted, it's Irish in origin.

So there are a lot of predictions about Ireland. But they've predicted for this year, a bad winter for Russia. Right. A health warning for trump well you can't i mean that he's an old man it's likely that's gonna be a recession which they predicted before there was one right okay quite good okay um some unusual alien news standard which may or may not happen but it also predicted a submarine drama. Oh, interesting.

And we've had one of those, haven't we? We certainly have, yeah. So yeah, it's been published for two and a half centuries. I love this guy's first name. Moore's first name is Theophilus. Theophilus, that's a great name, isn't it? Yeah, it's really good. They called him the Irish Merlin. Travelers used to have like a whole bunch of almanacs with them,

and they could use them as sort of currency to go and stay in farmhouses. So they'd kind of go around and go, would you like to know what's going to happen for the crops or whatever? I mean, I suppose back then that was a vital service, wasn't it? If someone could accurately do these things, if someone could have some kind of method of telling the local farmers what was going to happen agriculturally, that must have been incredibly useful. And even if they weren't wearing a strange conical golden hat. Even if that.

So what other ways of predicting have you come across in your travels? So, I mean, there are so many, as you've said, it would be impossible to name them all. But I started looking into the Mayan calendar. Do you remember that whole thing in 2012 where people were interpreting the Mayan calendar was saying that the world was going to end? At the end of the world, yes. Yeah, essentially. Total misinterpretation, but there we go uh it's easy for me to say that because the world didn't end there you go so these calendars in one calendar there were there were three separate items there were these three circular calendary looking things that all worked together

in conjunction with each other and the Mayan year went in a sort of a or you know the mayan timeline went in cycles so it sort of went in cycles of x number of days x number of years and then at the end of a cycle it was traditionally seen that something was going to happen either something apocalyptic or just the start of a new era or a new whatever it might be um and this one particular entry on the mayan calendar went in a cycle of 5126 years and it just so happened that that cycle ended in 2012 oh wow um specifically on the 21st of december 2012 so people were looking at this calendar and saying oh well it doesn't go any further than that. That must be the Mayans' prediction of the end of the world. It wasn't. It was just

the end of a particular cycle. And nothing came of it. But descendants of the Mayans have actually sort of been quite outraged by this idea that everyone was saying it's the end of the world. That's not what our ancestors were saying at all. You've misread it. But I think this is the problem with many of these forms of future prediction is that they're very, very open to interpretation. None of these predictions are, well, set in stone. The Mayan calendar was literally set in stone. So that's a bad example. But, you know, very few of these predictions say i predict that on date x person y will befall fate z they're very very open they're very ambiguous ambiguous that's the word ambiguous i'm going to come on to ambiguity because i think ambiguity is a really important part of telling the future.

There are things that are very ambiguous, like horoscopes. Yes, of course. Oh, do you know what? I hadn't even thought about horoscopes. Crikey, that's a big thing, isn't it? Big deal, horoscopes. Have you ever heard of Margaret Ann Lake? No. Okay.

Another word for Margaret? Maggie. Shortened? Mag Margaret Ann Lake? No. Okay. Another word for Margaret? Maggie. Shortened? Mag. Or Meg? Meg. Mystic Meg. Mystic Meg.

Margaret Ann Lake. The thing is, she died, and the sun went, what the hell are we going to do because we can't have Mystic Meg anymore? So they found another psychic called Maggie Innes. So technically, still a Meg. Wow. So the original Mystic Meg came to fame because she was predicting the lottery. Now, you talked about, before we started, you mentioned about the lottery.

So shall we talk about the lottery, and then we'll come back to astrology in a minute? Now, so I'd forgotten all about Mystic Meg. I never followed the lottery. I have never, ever bought a lottery ticket. I never watched the National Lottery, except to appreciate the fellow's voice who draws the numbers. So I don't even remember who Mystic Meg was and what she did.

But anyway, so the National Lottery, obviously it's a big thing. A series of balls, for anyone who doesn't know about it, like me, a series of balls with numbers are drawn at random from a tumble dryer looking machine. And if you happen to have picked the same numbers as what come out of the machine, you win lots of money. And people go to great lengths to try and work out what these numbers are going to be.

People are very formulaic. They always pick the same numbers, often based on their birthdays or, you know, anniversary dates or, I don't know, their favourite football shirt number. The number of their house on the street. Yes. How many kids have they got? All that sort of thing. Their national insurance number.

And there just is no way of predicting it. You know, these numbers come out at random. But that doesn't stop very, very large numbers of people, even organizations online, from claiming that they have wonderful new technological methods that will accurately predict the National Lottery numbers next week. I was looking into Nostradamus. Of course you were, the ultimates in predicting the future. Indeed, yeah, yeah. So this chap, Michel de Nostredame, he went by a Latinized equivalent of his name, Nostradamus, because it sounds cooler.

He was a French astrologer, scientist, seer, prognosticator in the early 1500s. And he made an awful lot of predictions. They often came in poetic form. And there was a book of these predictions, which contained 942 predictions. But they're all written in very sort of ambiguous prose. He made a prediction about two Eastern cities being destroyed by steel, fire, plague, and famine, which people have taken to refer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the dropping of the bombs. Because it fits that description. Like I say, he didn't say an actual date. So if you leave it open enough and broad enough um then it could apply to anything so there's someone sitting there with a little checklist going oh yeah that one fits that one

fits ergo some of his predictions have come true in adverted commas so this is this is the more um popury, silly side of my research. We've done Nostradamus. We've done the Mayans. We've done Mystic Meg. Now we're going to move on to the meaty stuff. Back to the Future and The Simpsons. Both of which have made some... Well, again, they didn't make predictions.

They came up with suggestions as to what would be interesting for the future to look like some of those things have yes well i'm still waiting for my flying delorean that hasn't happened yet um but in back to the future 2 when they visit 2015 which was now a long time ago i showed the back to the future movies to my son a few weeks back and he looked at it going a this film is actually quite old now for my point of view for his point of view b their future is now in my past and c where's my where's my flying delorean um but in back to the future or skateboard or hoverboards yes exactly that as well so in back to the future, we see characters having a video call, wearing wearable tech, watching multiple TV screens that are voice controlled, using thumbprints to open doors, using camera drones for video recording, wireless payment, and video glasses. Wow. wow so all of these things are shown in back to the future too those things have come to pass possibly because a fan of back to the future too thought hey that looks like a good idea i'm gonna

make it so like a self-fulfilling prophecy um another uh another source of future predictions quite an unlikely source is uh the the popular american cartoon the simpsons ah and um the right that the simpsons have actually gained a little bit of a following for being fairly accurate in their predictions so episodes of the simpsons have again incredibly vague predictions that have come true and some eerily accurate ones as well for example well the vague ones again like back to the future in episodes of the simpsons we have smart watches we have auto correct on your computer For example? and therefore that's fine. But the more specific ones, there was an episode in which Lady Gaga, the popular singer, flies in on a wire in the American Super Bowl.

And she did actually perform at the Super Bowl. She flew in on a wire. Her performance, her outfit was very similar to what the Simpsons had predicted. There's an episode in which Homer Simpson is idly doing some maths on a on a on a piece of paper uh trying to become a scientist one of the formulas on the paper turns out to be incredibly close to the formula of the higgs boson particle there's a reason for that

which is a lot of the writers on the simpsons some of them were like harvard and princeton graduate and science graduates and physics graduates that wrote those shows. So actually, if you look at the chalkboard in the school when there are formulas on it, a lot of those formulas are actually real formulas. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, formulae. Formulae, thank you. I was about to correct you um there was um there was an episode we saw the london skyline and there was a building that looked an awful lot like the shard 15 years

before the shop was built the best one i think that um that i found was um in a very throwaway comment they predicted that donald trump would one day become the president of America. And this was in, I think the episode was in 2000. So, you know, reasonable time in advance. And on the opening of each episode, you get Bart Simpson writing a little message on a blackboard. Yes. When Trump did actually come to power, the writers had Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard, being right sucks. So yeah, some of those predictions are spookily accurate. Some of them are ambiguous. That's amazing.

I mentioned at the beginning that I was going to talk about economic forecasting. Oh yes, I've been looking forward to that. Of course you have. I mean, economic forecasting is one of those things that you need to do if you're betting on the stock market and stuff like that, or if you're looking at GDP. Do you remember that scene in Trading Places where they're talking about pork bellies? Yes, pork bellies and the orange crop. Yes, exactly. Frozen orange juice.

That's right. Exactly. So predicting what the future of prices of things is going to be is quite interesting. That's on a commodity scale. Yeah. But on a larger scale, the GDP of countries is also quite important to know what's going to happen in terms of inflation, deflation, recession, etc. And people started taking economic forecasting seriously. Can you guess when they started taking economic forecasting seriously? Ooh, somewhere around the invention of the banks.

No, much later than that, 1930s. Yeah, yeah, during the Depression. So became quite important right to measure and predict what the economy was going to do because nobody wanted to see that stock market crash happen ever again yes um and so lots of people were kind of inventing um economic forecasting ways of of predicting how countries are going to improve or whatever. One of the guys that did it, and I could talk about this guy for a long time and I'm not going to, was a guy called Bill Phillips, who is a New Zealand math teacher.

Bill Phillips invented a machine called Moniac, or Moniac, M-O-N-I-A-C, from like money. And at the time there was a computer called the ENIAC. Sure, okay. Okay, you think this is a computer? You are so wrong. This thing is basically a collection of transparent tanks and pipes and different colored bits of water. Right. water right and it's it's a bit like a heath robinson machine that he put together from bits of old lancaster bombers and things like that um and the way it works he says it uses fluidic logic

which is basically a way of saying it uses water dyed different colors um but it's amazing because you basically put in different factors into the machine. You can see one at the science museum. They've actually got a working one. Oh, right. It's wonderful. The thing about it is it's so accurate that you put in, you know, if I do this, then what will happen type of thing.

If then what? Yes. It's accurate to 2%. Oh, crikey. That's not bad, is it? And it's made from old bottles and plastic tanks and bits of water. And it is ridiculous. And this was invented in the 30s?

In 1949. 49? Yes. Wow. Moniac. M-O-N-I-A-C, look it up. It is amazing and fun. And finally, Dachs.

Bless you. Dachs is the German for badger. Let's pause there. I have zero idea where this is going i love doing this to you so imagine a badger comes out of its set after hibernating over the winter and sees if it could see its shadow does that remind you of anything right that reminds me very much of another film that i've i've suddenly realized what kind of films I'm showing my son recently. Groundhog Day.

Exactly. Yeah, it's Punxsutawney Phil. Punxsutawney Phil. So in Germany, it was a badger seeing their own shadow. And if they saw the shadow, then it meant that it was still going to be cold for a bit longer and that you had to wait. In America, it's a woodchuck or a groundhog are those the same thing i've always wondered i believe they are i may be wrong i have been known to be wrong the only thing i the only thing i know about woodchucks is um the tongue twister

how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood very good so um using animals to predict the future is a thing. Wow. And I guess to an extent that makes sense, doesn't it? Because animals are much more automatically tuned in to the weather and the barometric pressure and all these sorts of things. No one tells a squirrel when is a good time to go and look for nuts. No one tells a bear when is a good idea to go and hibernate. It's just they know. Yes, they just know. So I guess that makes sense.

Yeah. Well, there we go. I think we have probably come to the end of our official research. I'm sure there are far more areas that we could have delved into, but didn't. If anyone listening to this show has anything

interesting to add please let us know in the comments that's what they're there for and of course not just the comments uh there's the liking thing and the subscribing thing well there we go you've been listening to factorally with me simon wells and me bruce fielding if you've enjoyed it please come again soon if you haven't enjoyed it please come again soon anyway because we might be better next time just stick with it one day one day there'll be one that you like yeah exactly thank you for listening goodbye bye