- Bob Thiel is nothing more than an astrologer, palm reader, fortune teller, or other sort of cold reader.
His "prophecies" are generalized statements about often mundane things that it's not hard to forecast based upon the past or upon current trends, couched in metrics so vague you'd be hard pressed to say if many of them had come true or not. He carpet bombs with a couple dozen of these so-called "prophecies" and then waits for 6 months, a year, two years or more, until he can arguably say this one or that on "came true." Of course, it's so vague there's little basis to say so one way or the other for sure. But as long as he can crow victory eventually over 10 or 15 of them, that's all that matters to Bob. The rest he'll keep quiet about, and hopefully those who notice the failures won't be enough to notice. You'll certainly never find Bob admitting to having uttered any "prophecies" that turned out to be false. It's kind of like prophesying that the price of an ounce of gold or a barrel of oil will hit $x. Sure, given enough time, it's bound to happen sooner or later. And when it does, does that make you a "prophet"? Of course not!![]()
If Bob really were a prophet, that is to say, receiving information from "beyond" about the future, he wouldn't need to resort to these well-known cold reading techniques. No, he'd be making highly specific predictions about things that matter, that shift the balance of power in the world. And he wouldn't need to carpet bomb. He could pronounce them one at a time, and he could predict the timing as well. And he could nail every single major event without missed opportunities or missteps. Instead his "prophecies" have the grubby fingerprints of a hoax all over them.
But not Bob. No, Bob is a "prophet" in the same sense that a "magician" is one who works "magic." He's not breaking the laws of physics, there's nothing supernatural about it, just sleight of hand. The only difference is that a magician deceives people honestly, for entertainment purposes. Bob deceives people dishonestly, to enrich himself at other's expense. Bob has to know there's nothing supernatural about his deliberately vague and often inconsequential prognostications.
