Transcription
We're going to get into Alan Liman's bold predictions for the year 2025. Where do you want to start, Dad?
Take them for what they're worth; don't take it too seriously, though. These are not based on a model; they're not scientific predictions. They are simply based on my gut, and I'm simply throwing them out there for your consideration.
Yeah, everybody said, you know, he got his prediction wrong. He got a prediction wrong. We thought, let's double down and make more predictions. What the hell? People are already criticizing him at every left turn. Let's just keep going, right?
It's not enough to have 42 years of correct predictions. I got one wrong in a totally unprecedented, extraordinary election, and of course, people have been jumping all over me. That's fine. You know what? No one gives you credit for is that you predicted that Trump was going to get impeached too. You predicted he was going to win in 2016, and you predicted he was going to get impeached at the same moment.
Plus, who was the strongest critic of what the Democrats were doing in openly trashing Joe Biden and pushing him out of the race? Exactly. So they set up a situation that I had warned against. I'm not backing off the fact that I was wrong.
In all my interviews, I was very clear. I said, of course, I can be wrong. A, I'm a human being. Human beings are, you know, frequently wrong. And B, you know, I'm not Jean Dixon with a crystal ball. My system is based on history.
And who was the first analyst to call Trump's win? Me. I'm going to start with a positive prediction that, despite what you've heard from all kinds of commentators, your Social Security, your Medicare, and your Medicaid—and that covers, you know, the vast majority, probably, of the American people, or at least a huge swath—food stamps, I would include within this, the Affordable Care Act.
Despite all you've heard, it's going to be safe. We know that Donald Trump has set up a Dodge commission, the government efficiency Dodge, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. If you think these billionaires have your interests in mind, not their own pocketbooks in mind, I have a big bridge in my hometown of Brooklyn to sell you.
You always use that line; it's a great line. Okay, but no one's taken me up on it, so I can keep using it, right? This has been tried before. This is not something new. Under what president was this tried before? Ronald Reagan.
Remember Ronald Reagan? He had those big tax cuts, and he wanted to offset the lost revenue from those tax cuts by setting up a commission on government efficiency to cut out government waste. How do you think it turned out, Sam?
I don't think they were successful. It was a huge bust for the simple reason there are only four areas that are the biggest spending components of the federal government. You know what they are: Social Security, Medicaid, the military, servicing the debt.
There's nothing to cut there. You can't cut the servicing of the debt; you're obligated to do that. You're not going to cut the military at a time when China is challenging the U.S. for military predominance.
The truth is, there's almost no waste whatsoever in Social Security and the medical programs. They're basically check-writing operations. This was found 40 years ago, and it's even more true today. That's why the Grace Commission was a huge bust.
So I think that the commission will be a huge bust, and they're not going to cut into the bone and muscle of Social Security, the medical programs, food stamps—the things upon which people depend.
And that's the good news. Good news first prediction. Good news. All right, what's your second prediction?
2025 will be a terrible year for the planet. You know, Donald Trump says on day one he's going to be a dictator to do what? Drill, drill, drill, drill, drill. In other words, we're going to have extractive industries run rampant, greenhouse gases exploding, sanctuary areas for wildlife and fisheries exploited for extractive industries.
It will be an awful year for the planet. The critical point, and I don't understand why this isn't a bigger issue for people, particularly for you young people, right? It's an issue for me.
Yeah, climate change is not a theory anymore. It's not a scientific projection. What do we have right next door to us, Sam, right now? A mile or two away? This prediction is already true because Los Angeles is on fire right now.
Los Angeles is on fire. People are abandoning their homes, fleeing for their lives, and uncontrolled wildfires are just one of many components of catastrophic climate change that is going to get worse starting in 2025.
There are the floods, the hurricanes, the droughts, the tornadoes, the Arctic polar explosions, weather extremes of all kinds. But don't take my word for it. Way back in 2009, a group of businesspersons understood the dangers of climate change.
They wrote to newly elected President Obama, "Unless we do something now and drastic to deal with climate change, the results are going to be catastrophic for our planet and its people. And we can do it and actually improve the economy as we transition away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable sources of energy."
So businesspeople understood that 15 years ago. And you know who signed that, Sam? The Trumps. All of them. What changed? Politics.
We're going to have a very sad reckoning, unfortunately, with our planet and, you know, with our wildlife. It's just very, very sad.
Next prediction: the collapse of the media. The role of the media is to be a check on the rich and the powerful, to give us the kind of information we need to make rational decisions in our own interest, not in the interest of the very few rich and powerful.
And we've already seen the media capitulating to Donald Trump, and it's only going to get worse in 2025. We saw editorials endorsing Kamala Harris killed in two of our greatest national newspapers.
It hasn't stopped. The Washington Post just killed a cartoon from their prize-winning cartoonist showing their head—the guy who owns it—and we have different pronunciations, right? Bezos or Bezos?
But whoever he is, he's worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and they killed a cartoon showing him at bended knee to Donald Trump. We're seeing all of these media moguls contributing to Donald Trump's inauguration. In other words, it's a legal bribe; that's all there is.
We're seeing Meta, you know, supposedly progressive, hiring new right-wing employees explicitly. The media did a bad enough job in 2024 to counter the vast amount of disinformation that was being put out.
We're going to get closer to Russia, where there is no daylight between the Putin regime and the media. My next prediction ties into that: we are going to see an explosion of artificial intelligence in 2025, a lot of it controlled by whom? Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, of course. He's already, even in 2024, abused AI quite a bit—quite a bit. And you know, to disseminate vast amounts of disinformation.
He's continued to do that even after the election, you know, piling disinformation upon disinformation, which becomes very plausible and very persuasive through the use of AI.
Now, AI has tremendous potential for good, but unfortunately, when it's controlled by these incredibly rich billionaires, it's going to be used in a self-serving way, not to advance the interests of humanity.
The other thing that frightens me about AI and its offshoots is the remote control war that we are heading to—wars in which people are being killed and communities destroyed remotely.
My next prediction: okay, what did Trump promise about groceries before the election? That they were going to go down drastically. Then what did he say after the election? Well, it's going to be hard to bring—going to be hard to do. You know, we may not succeed.
Well, the truth is Trump's policies, if implemented—and you know, you got to take them at his word; you can't just discount what he says—are going to make grocery products not just not decline, but to increase.
So you think inflation is going to get worse? I think inflation, for a number of reasons. One, let's assume he launches his big-time tariffs. What are other nations going to do? Fight back.
We're going to have a trade war. When was the last time we had that kind of big trade war? We talked about the Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930, which helped to destroy the world economy.
You have a trade war, and that's going to disrupt what is critical to controlling inflation, and that is the distribution networks. Plus, who pays for the tariffs? Me. You do with higher prices.
You know, whatever you might be unhappy about with the cost of your groceries, it's not going to get any better in 2025. It may well get worse.
Now, here's a prediction that some of you may not care about, but depending on whether you're Yankees or a Mets fan, if you care about New York sports, you may either be happy or unhappy with this prediction.
And that is that the Yankees will beat the Mets in the Battle of New York in 2025. Wow! We know who was, you know, the great player that the Yankees had that the Mets poached—Juan Soto.
Juan? No, he was originally a National, and then everybody poached him from us. He was a Padre, then he was a Yankee, now he's a Met. And how much did they pay for him? Do you know?
Like $700 million or something like that? With incentives, it's over $800 million—shattering the biggest record payout in the history of sports, not just baseball, but the history of all sports. Imagine that!
And you have to say, on the one hand, you know, it seems obscene, but on the other hand, he at least did something to deserve it. At least Soto, you know, is a unique talent.
But $800 million, you know, is emblematic of another thing in our society: the enormous gap between the rich and the rest of us. We now have a maldistribution of income and wealth that is equivalent to that on the eve of the Great Depression.
I don't think the Yankees are going to win the World Series. I don't think so. But my prediction is that even with the Mets taking Juan Soto, the Yankees—not the Mets—will win the World Series this year.
One more prediction, which is positive—not Trump's most dire prediction for 2025 is not going to come true. What he predicted for 2025 was that an asteroid would come in a near miss to the Earth and disrupt everything on Earth—wildlife, the environment, the human ability to survive.
This would be a catastrophic event. So I wanted to close on this positive note: telling you your life is not going to be put in jeopardy by a rogue asteroid.
I'm going to make another prediction. Oh no! Oh yes! Oh God! And this one is the boldest one yet and the one least likely to come true.
Okay, Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, who's afraid of his shadow, right? Who sat for almost two years before launching necessary investigations of Donald Trump, is suddenly going to find his courage.
And regardless of the obstruction of Judge Aileen Cannon, he will release the Jack Smith report on the January 6th indictments of Donald Trump.
Okay, all right. So we just—it's going to be damning, absolutely damning. Trump, in his, you know, just—I think it was yesterday—gave a big interview in which he, you know, repeated this big lie about, you know, January 6 being peaceful.
No one was carrying a gun. You know, these are the first indictments where, you know, of an insurrection with no one carrying a gun. In fact, lots of people were convicted of carrying guns, and we don't know how many others since most of them left and were never arrested.
But again, another big lie. You know, January 6 was not a day of love. 140 police officers were injured; there were several deaths resulting directly or indirectly.
It was an attempt to overturn the peaceful transfer of power. This was a violent insurrection, the worst we've ever seen in the history of the country.
We should not allow the big lie about January 6 to consume us. And somehow, the American people still voted that guy in.
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If you want to follow us on social media, you can too, right, Dad? Of course, you're the social media maven.
I am. Well, I'm the old dinosaur. Don't look at me. True.