"Professor" Jiang's Broken Classroom

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]When someone clicks on a YouTube video, there's an expectation that comes with it. Maybe someone is expecting a music video or a cute clip of a cat. But if there's a guy standing in front of a blackboard with the title of a lecture underneath it, you're expecting something educational. All you really have to go on is the aesthetic of an educator, but it primes you to think you're about to learn something. In 1973, the Journal of Medical Education published a paper titled The Dr. Fox lecture, a paradigm of educational seduction by Naftalin Wear and Donnelly.

[00:00:30]It details a study where an actor was hired to play a fictional professor named Dr. Fox.

[00:00:35]>> We go in one door, we go all the way around, we come out the same way. I think the word was communication.

[00:00:41]We ourselves do not listen.

[00:00:43]>> The actor was trained to give a completely vacuous lecture that had all the aesthetic hallmarks of a real lecture. dressing the part, being given phony credentials, and using rhetoric that had the appearance of academic rigor with none of the actual content.

[00:00:56]Audiences were captivated by the actor, not because he had anything of value to say, but because of the educationally themed aesthetic he used to present it.

[00:01:03]The title of Dr. Fox's lecture was mathematical game theory as applied to physician education. And in 2026, we have a new fake professor lecturing his audience using game theory. Jang Chu Chin, or Professor Jang, as he is often called and refers to himself, is not an actual professor, but a high school teacher at Moonshot Academy in Beijing.

[00:01:24]A few years back, he began uploading his lectures to YouTube under the channel title Predictive History. Recently, his channel began to take off after some of his claims went viral, and his lectures are now getting hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of views. The three predictions he made in 2024 that put him on the map were that Donald Trump would win the 2024 election, President Trump would then invade Iran, and that the US would lose that war. The fact that Jiang is not a real professor gets overstated a bit because YouTube is not a space where people typically check things like credentials or even sources. What matters is that Jang has the aesthetic of a professor and is committed to the performance of teaching, creating the impression that his YouTube videos are educational. I'd like to take a closer look to what that education actually entails. How to predict geopolitical events is not a likely course for high school students. And that probably isn't the name of the class Jang actually teaches. According to his profile on the Moonshot Academy website, he teaches Western philosophy, a year-long survey course that introduces students to the major ideas and books of Western civilization. On YouTube, these are broken up into several different sets of videos, including game theory, secret history, and great books. The predictions that made Jang famous, Trump's win, the war with Iran, and its failure, are emblematic of his work.

[00:02:39]Taken in small bite-sized sharable bits, it's somewhat compelling. But when you take a closer look, things start to fall apart very quickly. For instance, looking at his prediction that Trump would win also includes a prediction about his running mate. It's very likely that Trump will become president of the United States again um in November and he will pick Nikki Haley as his VP. To be fair to Jen, he does mention JD Vance in the video where he first makes this prediction, but only at the very end does he briefly consider him a possibility. But what makes the Haley prediction especially bad is that almost a week prior to Jang posting this video titled Why Trump will win and pick Nikki Haley as VP, Trump posted this on Truth Social. Nikki Haley is not under consideration for the VP slot, but I wish her well, DJT. His prediction about the war in Iran was similarly filled with things that didn't happen, such as the US being part of an international coalition. And Trump goes on TV. He announces operation Iranian freedom, a fullscale US invasion of Iran along with Israel, Saudi Arabia as its main partners, but the United Kingdom, UK will be involved, Australia will be involved, UAE will be involved, Poland will be involved. The United States only had Israel as an ally when this war began. The failure of the US's invasion of Iran seems likely at the moment, but I suspect it won't go down the way Jang predicts it will.

[00:04:14]>> A massive invasion force is sent to Iran in the south. 100,000 US troops land. Maybe 200,000 Saudi Arabia troops land. Okay, that you think they're soldiers, but they're not. What they really are hostages.

[00:04:31]You have too many people in the country, so you can't get them out of the country, but you don't have enough people to actually launch a strike against Tran. You can't resupply them, and they've been encircled by Iranian forces. This is all in the future, though, so perhaps they will send 100,000 troops in through Iraq only to see them stranded and become hostages.

[00:04:52]I'm a bit skeptical of that one, though.

[00:04:54]This is a pattern that holds pretty regularly when watching Jiang's commentary. predictions and sometimes conclusions can sound sensible or compelling when you look at them from a distance without much detail or specificity. But when you get a closer look at how he reaches those conclusions or what those predictions more specifically contain, they don't hold much water. And they frequently reveal that Jang is uninformed about the topics he's discussing. And there are also predictions that seem completely ridiculous, like this one. If you know game theory, okay, and you understand the principles that we've learned today, then you're forced to conclude that in East Asia, North Korea has a better future than China.

[00:05:31]>> To understand what drives someone to say that North Korea has a brighter future than China, we have to get into the nitty-gritty of how he constructs his predictions. One of the major keys to understanding Jang's theories is that they are above all else narratives.

[00:05:45]Although he makes references to theoretical models and historical patterns, they always exist in the same structure of a narrative. Narratives exist to explain most of how we see the world. But Jiang uses concepts like game theory to give them all an academic vibe. For those unfamiliar with game theory, it is described a mathematical theory about how decisions are made in situations where one person's decision affects another. It is used in many fields such as economics, psychology, and biology. Jang has a number of lectures supposedly covering game theory, though his use of game theory is a lot like the title of professor. It's one that serves to confer legitimacy to a narrative rather than actually educating people. Although I'm not an expert in game theory myself, his lectures don't really conform with the definition I just read or other examples I found while researching this video.

[00:06:34]According to Jang, understanding what he calls game theory will make his students better people, help them understand the world, and provide the tools to make predictions. Jang's use of game theory is used to describe a dynamic, the players involved, their motivators, and then their reactions, typically grounded in a concrete example, or at least that would be the goal if his lectures were strictly about game theory. What often follows instead in his lecture is a series of assumptions that spiral out of control. In his first lecture on game theory, he provides the example of a dating game where five boys and five girls want to get married. And then he ranks their attractiveness based on three factors.

[00:07:09]>> The first is genes, the second is wealth, and the third is status.

[00:07:19]>> When he brings up factors that control the various elements of these games, they're always a bit suspect. He might describe one in detail, but then will offer a few quick sentences to describe the others and then moves on. It's also a little weird that he almost always has three things to list.

[00:07:34]>> To win a fight, you have to have three things. Focus, um, clarity, and resolve. And they are intelligence, spies, basically, crime, and science.

[00:07:48]And these agents, of course, are called uh there's three of them. Okay. Well, there's actually a lot. Another question I'm left with is how he quantifies any of these in the dating game example in his first game theory lecture. How does one quantify genes? Okay, so genes is very simple. It means that you're good-looking.

[00:08:09]It means you're tall. It means you're healthy. You will live a long time.

[00:08:12]Okay, genes is pretty simple to understand.

[00:08:16]>> Attractiveness varies across time and culture. And even within cultures, people can vary considerably in what they find attractive. This example only works if all the participants are in full agreement on what they find attractive, which is possible if you're only talking about 10 people. In the context of an abstract dating game in a high school classroom, it's not that big a deal that he leaves things simple. But this game starts to drift further from the initial premise. Here's a quick breakdown of how this game evolves. All the girls want this one guy, okay? And maybe number four. They're set for number four. But 321 they don't want all the women in the world. Many not all but many just want to marry actors like Brad Pitt and 32 and one they what do they do? Well they watch Netflix they watch porn. They play video games. They've given up on life. Okay.

[00:09:08]They're like we don't care. We call these people incelss. Right? This entire competition is between number five and four for all the women in the world. And this is again suicidal. This will lead to the death of humanity.

[00:09:23]>> That section was not over the course of an hourong lecture. All of that happened within the same 5 minutes. We went from a cute little game about dating to a story about how when a wider reality is mapped onto that game, we see that women are so obsessed with status that they are destroying civilization by wanting to date highranking men and are responsible for creating incels. What started as a basic game that might have been helpful for learning some abstract concepts has turned into a justification for Jiang's own assumptions about the way society is working. The purpose of this scenario was not to teach people about game theory, but rather to use what Jiang is calling game theory to explain why the world is the way it is.

[00:10:03]This becomes more obvious as he then moves away from the small example to this larger discussion about these superructures controlling society by changing the games we play. And that this will help us determine the life cycle of a civilization, particularly how they decline. And here's how he describes how that happens. The moment you give women choice, they choose to improve their lives by marrying someone better.

[00:10:29]Okay? Not all, but most. And so over time what happens is your society collapses. If you look at history the best indicator that a society is about to collapse is if the women who are wealthy and well educated if they refuse to have children. This the same this is what happened to the Romans.

[00:10:48]>> Rome did not collapse because of women.

[00:10:51]Historians have argued a number of factors that led to the fall of Rome.

[00:10:55]And Jiang's reading of history is a reductive one that only serves to feed his pet theory that giving women freedom is a signal that civilization is beginning its decline. This theory is of course not unique to Jiang as it's often echoed in online communities that have a lot of hostility towards women. We're starting to get a small hint of what Jiang's media diet is and how it's affecting the way he sees the world. But wasn't this lecture supposed to be about learning game theory? Why are we getting history lessons about Rome? This is just a product of what his lectures are like.

[00:11:25]Spiraling out of control and diving head first into his own pet theories about how the world works. But believe it or not, this first video is probably the one that comes the closest to being a lecture about game theory. But instead of learning anything about game theory, what we're learning is that Jang has a very troubling reading of history and current events. Out of interest, I looked up a few lectures on game theory from other sources on YouTube, such as a series of lectures from Yale professor Ben Pollock. His lectures are dramatically different from Jiang's using abstract examples that highlight the different types of games being played. They are a lot more informative and dare I say genuinely educational.

[00:12:00]>> Rational choice can lead rational choices can lead to bad outcomes. We put it more graphically before, but that's fine.

[00:12:05]>> He also engages his students, encouraging them to play along with the game examples and having them discuss their ideas in class. In general, it seems like a much better environment for learning than Jang's classroom. Jang's lectures often seem more about advancing his bizarre theories of the world than actually teaching the students anything.

[00:12:22]To make these theories works, Jiang constructs elaborate models containing a sweeping story of different political, historical, and psychological forces that shape the world as we see it. All of it is reduced to a few simple factors that will be given extraordinary explanatory power. A great example of that is in one of his next Game Theory videos titled The World Game, where he identifies the factors that determine how likely a society is to triumph long term. And you better believe there are three of them.

[00:12:49]>> Energy, openness, and cohesion.

[00:12:54]>> While he'll define what each of these terms means, he doesn't explain how he can assess cultures on whether they have these factors or how much of these factors exist. How do you measure whether or not a country has energy or how much of that energy they have? He never really explains it. He just asserts that this country has it and this one doesn't. To describe Jen's larger argument, he believes that powerful nations become lazy and complacent, allowing the smaller ones, which have more energy, openness, and cohesion to eventually rise up and topple them. Which brings us back to his ridiculous example of North Korea.

[00:13:28]>> Poverty leads to creativity.

[00:13:31]Okay.

[00:13:33]Noticing this is that if I were to surmise the future, I would say right now in in East Asia, I would think that North Korea has a better future than China.

[00:13:42]>> But North Korea isn't the only example he gives. He mentions three other nations that are supposedly poised to become empires.

[00:13:49]>> Germany. Why? Because he lost World War One and lost World War II. Japan.

[00:13:54]Because Japan lost World War II. And the last country, of course, is Israel. What makes these predictions so incredibly silly is that they don't operate within a specific time frame. Japan and Germany have recovered well after World War II, though some of that was due to international support. But neither of them are poised to become an empire right now. The example of Israel is even more ridiculous as Jang mentions persecution going back thousands of years as a motivator. When will any of these countries rise up alongside North Korea? He can't tell us. But since it's been almost a century for two of those three options, it seems there's no expiration date for these predictions.

[00:14:29]This makes these predictions unfalsifiable, which makes them effectively useless. It's like predicting that at some point aliens will visit the Earth. It could happen, sure, but if you're not going to say when, you can't be proven wrong because it hasn't happened yet and possibly could at some point in the future. But whenever Jang is faced with real criticism, he retreats to one of his more common defenses. I I'm just proposing to you a theory of how to understand the world. But what's actually going to happen, I can't actually tell you, right? But according to this theory, um Germany and Japan and Israel will be the three great nations.

[00:15:03]He says this a lot to understand. He's presenting a model that has a set of predictions that may or may not come true. But if there's no way to reach the may not part, how can this model be tested? And if it can't be tested, it's not very useful. Jenang likes to use a lot of historical examples to support the models he constructs. From this lecture, he went all over the place. He was talking about the waring states of China in 250 B.CE. Alexander the Great's Macedonia in 500 B.CE and the Spanish colonial project in Central America in the 16th century. All of this interwoven with assessments of the cultures involved and attitudes of their respective people. We can't really assess how he knows any of this when he says this culture is higher in energy or this one is higher in openness because he doesn't really cite any sources or tell us how he's measuring any of this.

[00:15:51]But academic rigor is beside the point here. What's more effective than having any kind of academic standards is the impression that these rapid changes in topics creates. By flying through so many different times and places, it presents the portrait of someone very well- read and educated. That Jiang is a polymath. That there can be a person so learned that they can synthesize knowledge across disciplines to create these rich theories of how the world works. And Xiang is presenting his game theory framework as something of that caliber. Not just skipping across different periods of history, but as we'll see later on, entirely different disciplines, including science and literature. as a self-contained theory, all of it actually holds together pretty well because there's a lot of internal consistency. He's clearly put some time into constructing all of this. But it's very easy to create a model like this when you're only looking at things in the vaguest of details. When that model eventually comes into contact with the real world, we can see just how shabby it is. For instance, when he takes that model and applies it to more recent history.

[00:16:52]>> Don't worry about America, its technology. Don't worry about the economy. Don't worry about these things.

[00:16:59]Okay? Just wor ask yourself one question. Is Iran transforming as a society? Are people becoming much more motivated?

[00:17:09]>> In the previous lecture, the examples he presented all featured one supposedly weaker side conquering land from a stronger side. But I highly doubt Iran is going to be conquering any part of the United States. That said, we can see how Jen tries to map his ideas on the current conflict, and it gets pretty silly. The Shia are not afraid to die.

[00:17:29]And because their great religious leader, the Alatona Kinai was assassinated by the Americans and Israelis, they are motivated to seek vengeance, to martyr themselves for the greater good, to seek eternal uh paradise. Okay, jihad. This is how he talks about the people of Iran, completely ignoring how unpopular the religious leadership of Iran actually is and all the oppression required to keep the population under control. While this doesn't mean the people of Iran want American bombs dropping on them, I also don't think they're about to start a jihad because their leader was killed.

[00:18:04]Here's another silly point he makes to show how the Iranian soldiers aren't afraid of death.

[00:18:08]>> Their soldiers are not afraid of death.

[00:18:10]And we're already seeing that where where the Americans have already blown up and destroyed the Iranian navy.

[00:18:16]>> The details of the operation, what defensive options the navy had, and the motivations of everyone involved is never explored. It was just those darn Muslims on one of their jihads. If all of this sounds incredibly simplistic and silly, it's because it is. And when looking at his models in a modern context, it also reveals that they don't quite have the predictive power that he claims they do. He's simplified the story of history and is trying to map it on to a version of the present that he is also similarly simplified. It may make for a nice easy story that you can digest, but it doesn't actually constitute a real or deep knowledge of anything that's happening. There's an interesting turn in later lectures where he starts walking things back.

[00:18:58]>> This is a class focused on intellectual speculation. It's meant to be fun. It's meant to to make us more curious about the world. Well, it's supposed to heighten our critical thinking skills.

[00:19:09]>> And in a later lecture, he walks it back even further.

[00:19:12]>> So, I'm not an exppert. I'm not even a professor. Yes, I understand. But what I do is I engage in speculation for fun, for entertainment. Okay? So, just see this as a fun class where we're going to explore some fun topics that have no scholarly basis. Okay? Imagine your teacher opening up your class saying, "We're just going to have some fun speculating on some stuff with no scholarly basis." The timeline here is really important, as these lectures, where he starts sounding more defensive, began to happen after he started blowing up in March of 2026. I suspect he's doing this in response to the increased criticism he's been getting now that his profile has significantly risen. The problem with this defense is that he frequently makes predictions and frames them as tests to his theory for validity. Some of these predictions aren't falsifiable, which he never says, but some of them absolutely are. And he sees the results of those predictions as a means of adjusting the theoretical framework. This isn't just entertainment. He's trying to present a working model of the world to his students that supposedly responds to new information. And as we'll see later in this video, Jen is perfectly happy to share his ideas outside of the classroom as serious geopolitical analysis. if he thinks this is all entertainment, he shouldn't be presenting his understanding of the world as something to be taken seriously. In a later lecture, when Jiang is talking about the factors that help inform his lecture, there are of course three of them. He lists them out and debate and doubt are fine, but the third one he mentions is troubling.

[00:20:41]>> I will say things that are imaginative, that are speculative, but which is not backed up by any evidence. Don't be afraid to do that. Okay? If you want to seek the truth, you have to make some imaginative leaps.

[00:20:56]>> Speculating without evidence sounds like a terrible piece of advice, especially coming from a teacher. While a healthy imagination can be fun, it's particularly unhelpful when speaking on subjects that someone doesn't have a deep knowledge of. Jen would be perfectly within his right to be making these imaginative leaps if we could trust him to have a good grasp on the subjects he's discussing. That is if he was making educated guesses. But as we'll see in the next section, his confidence hides a lot of ignorance.

[00:21:22]It's tough to catalog all the things Jang gets wrong, in part because he speaks on so many different things and often explains them with vague terms.

[00:21:30]There are statements he makes that can very much be fact checked. And when you do, you start to find mistakes that reveal how little he really knows about the subjects he discusses. A great example of just how badly he gets things wrong can be found in one of his earlier lectures in the Secret History series.

[00:21:44]For some context, he's trying to explain the limitations of science. And he hones in on specific concepts. And of course, he's got three of them. The Big Bang, evolution, and how memories are formed.

[00:21:56]>> This is all that science knows. I mean, this is pretty simple, but this is what science tells us about where we came from, who we are, where we're going.

[00:22:04]>> He then tries to point out problems with all three of these ideas. He seems to think the concept of dark energy disproves the Big Bang theory.

[00:22:12]>> It's cheating. Okay, so let me give an example. Let's just say you take a math test and the teacher asks you 1987 plus 25 and your answer is 20. Okay, that's obviously wrong, right? So your teacher says this is wrong. And then you say, "Oh, I know how to fix this." Plus dark energy.

[00:22:36]Problem solved. To use his math example, if someone wrote 1987 + 25 = 20 plus dark energy, where dark energy is an unknown variable X, that would still be mathematically correct, even if you got a bad mark on a test because your teacher doesn't like you giving such a cute answer. Jung does absolutely no work to reckon with the evidence that supports the Big Bang theory because that would require a little bit of effort to understand cosmology. Instead, he uses his own ignorance to frame the concept of dark energy as cheating. that disproves the Big Bang theory. His commentary on evolution is similarly uninformed. He believes it's true for other animals, but not for human beings.

[00:23:16]>> Now, what scientists will tell you is, well, before there were different species, the anthol, the crowagnan, and then gradually homo sapiens took them over.

[00:23:29]And that's and you can believe that, but it's problematic because according to evolution, there should be many many different types of humans. Okay? Maybe some with six fingers, some with three eyes. I don't know where this is coming from. How many other mammal species are walking around where each member has a different number of eyes. He also makes other small mistakes like attributing the term survival of the fittest to Charles Darwin when it was actually coined by Herbert Spencer. But generally speaking, he doesn't seem to have a good grasp of evolution either. Later on, when he starts getting into the subject of psychology, he tries to explain how we contextualize our experiences within our minds. He uses the terms worldview and personality interchangeably, which is already problematic, but it gives him the opening to say he believes that without a worldview, our minds would not be able to handle all the sensory information around us. Your if your brain were to absorb all the experiences, your brain will explode because there's too much information to process. Therefore, your world view pro processes different experiences. It differentiates between experiences that are important and experiences that are not important. And experiences that are important, of course, goes into your long-term memory.

[00:24:42]>> This isn't really true. Not having a worldview doesn't mean your mind is incapable of sifting through information it receives. It only means that you haven't developed more sophisticated understanding of the context you live in, which is what makes his next point especially ridiculous.

[00:24:58]>> In theory, babies should not have a worldview. They should not have a personality. But if that's the case, then how do they process memories? How do they know what memories to store?

[00:25:08]What memories not to store? Where does the personality come from? And why is it embedded in us from the very first day?

[00:25:18]Are babies born with personalities? They appear remarkably close-lipped about it.

[00:25:23]So perhaps there's a dark secret they're hiding from us. Or perhaps, much like language, being able to sit up without falling over and how to feed themselves.

[00:25:31]Children gradually acquire the many things that make them who they are as they become older. There's actually a whole field that studies that called developmental psychology. When it comes to personality in infants, the closest measure we have is to look at their temperament, which is not the same as a worldview, by the way. just a general way to describe the traits of some infants compared to others. Babies appear perfectly capable of perceiving the world without needing to contextualize everything through a worldview. So, Jiang's objection again doesn't reflect the science he's trying to debunk. All of these misunderstandings reveal a startling lack of scientific knowledge for someone lecturing on the subject, particularly if the point he's trying to make is the limitations of these sciences. So, it's not a surprise that he eventually ends up here. If you look at every major silent discovery, it all came to the person in a dream or when he was or it sort of popped into that person's head.

[00:26:28]>> He applies this to himself and how he writes.

[00:26:31]>> What am I going to do if I have no ideas? I can't write anymore. But what happens is the next day I get up and I have new ideas and I write it back and I write it down again. Okay? So it's not like I am generating these ideas. It's more like I'm receiving these ideas.

[00:26:46]>> And that's how he teaches too.

[00:26:48]>> I'm always accessing a higher force and I'm receiving this information that I can then articulate to you in class >> because he believes coming up with ideas is channeling the divine.

[00:27:00]>> No scientist in the history of humanity has ever come up with a great idea using this method.

[00:27:09]I guarantee you they've all came up with a great idea through their imagination, through their intuition, by channeling the divine. What started off as a lecture about science and its limitations, all coming from someone who clearly doesn't understand the parts of science he's chosen to talk about, has devolved into a complete mess where he's claiming that great ideas and discoveries are channeling some kind of spiritual dimension. And that this spiritual dimension reflects an even bigger theory of how the world really works. As secret societies manipulate events to press their own occult beliefs onto all of us, >> the people in charge, the secret societies, they are interested. They must make heaven in make hell into heaven and heaven into hell. They must invert the world in order to maintain their power. You you don't know this, but all science it's not about discovering reality. It's about reinventing reality in a way that serves power. That's what science really is.

[00:28:05]And how will this all end? Well, we can only hope that Elon Musk will save us.

[00:28:10]>> So, there are all these different failsafe systems in there in here to make sure that um hell can never triumph. And that's why Ellen Mus is wants us to go to Mars. Okay? Even though God and Satan are just projections of our imagination, they do help us understand the world better. So, heaven and hell are metaphors and projections of our imagination, but somehow they help us understand the world better because of the existence of these secret societies who apparently believe all of this. You probably noticed I spent very little time trying to debunk these last few claims. That's because there's nothing of substance there. It's all an imaginary hypothetical asserted without any real evidence, all predicated on a man's inability to understand science.

[00:28:55]Jenang's constructed vision of reality has no basis in the one we seem to exist in. He did something similar in another Secret History video where he speculated that ISIS was created by the United States using brainwashing interrogation methods that were identical to ones used by ancient Egyptian priests on their leaders in special ceremonies thousands of years ago. Here's how he tries to connect those two stories. Isis, Islamic State.

[00:29:21]Isis is the name of what? the Egyptian goddess who saved Osiris, right? And who father Horus. Do you think it's a coincidence? Maybe not.

[00:29:31]>> Yes. It's that the acronym of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, and the name of the Egyptian goddess ISIS, sound the same. That doesn't really make sense because ISIS, the terrorist group, don't use the English language. They speak Arabic and call themselves a name I'm putting on screen because there's no way I can pronounce it. The acronym for their name in Arabic is Desh, not ISIS. He also doesn't engage in any of the hard work of linking specific torture victims of the US government to the creation of ISIS.

[00:30:01]Something that would be doable since the names of these victims are documented.

[00:30:05]Also, the existence of torture is not the same as brainwashing. He would need to provide far more evidence than the presence of psychologists who were overseeing some of the torture. The other big problem is that story about the priests who were doing brainwashing back in Egypt. That one he made up >> 5,000 years ago in Egypt. They were doing this and but again, okay, it's what's really important is this is all speculation and it's really important for you to doubt and question me because we don't actually know that this happened. All the records have been lost to us and obviously this would be the greatest state secret of Egypt. But from my perspective, it makes sense. Who the hell cares if it makes sense to this guy if he can't provide evidence of any of this having happened? How is that any better than pretending any other story someone else imagined is real? He similarly seems to have no clue what he's talking about on other subjects.

[00:30:58]Here's his description of how capitalists created communism to destroy socialism. In many ways, communism is a creation of capitalism as a weapon to destroy capitalism's major enemies.

[00:31:13]Capitalists hate democracy.

[00:31:16]Why do they hate democracy? Because if you think about it, if people had power, the workers had power, they would all get together and vote to redistribute wealth, right? To make the rich pay more taxes. We call this socialism. After once again hedging that none of this may be true, he then spins this wild story of how Karl Marx was a tool of the English elites who want to pit the workers against the bourgeoisi through a messy propaganda campaign that also kicked off anti-semitism. He then provides an example of what he calls evidence that communists were operating in a secret society, one that was intentionally made discoverable because they were a scop that used anti-semitism to vilify itself because it was advancing the interests of capitalists.

[00:32:03]>> Why would they admit we are a national conspiracy? We're secret society. This is a secret document that we read amongst ourselves. But it's also possible for you to steal and show that yes, there is this secret society and that's a conspiracy of Jews who are trying to destroy the world. If this sounds ridiculously convoluted, that's because it is. This secret document being shown is the Communist Manifesto and Jiang is presenting the idea of international solidarity as some kind of poorly hidden conspiracy. Except this book was widely published and available to read all over the place. At no point was this a conspiracy. It wasn't poorly hidden. It just exists. The anti-semitic conspiracy theories were put onto it.

[00:32:47]Because it turns out creating anti-semitic conspiracy theories is a long-standing tradition in Europe going back centuries. A more modern example would be how political parties often vilify immigrants to disguise their own economic agenda that's more centered around providing tax cuts for the wealthy rather than providing services for people who actually need them. It turns out we have a model of history that explains all of the events Jiang finds mysterious that work just fine without entertaining this secret society hypothesis that Jiang finds so compelling. The fact that history seems implausible to Jenang is hardly grounds for his speculation. But as you might be able to tell, we're starting to get into some dicey territory here. And it certainly isn't the only time we see troubling theories popping up from the ideas Jen wants his audience to consider. Here's an example of him supposedly reading a map that measures academic performance.

[00:33:36]>> Muslims don't do well on the pizza.

[00:33:40]That's why there's great fear that uh Islamic countries will fall behind economically. While he briefly mentions the predominantly Christian, Central and South America, which are also in red, he only brings up religion when he's talking about Muslim majority countries, and without any evidence, asserts that their religion explains their poor performance on this academic test. This is characteristic of how Jang talks about Muslim people in general, such as when he hypothesized that Iranians were all ready to start fighting a jihad.

[00:34:10]According to what I've learned from his background, he spent a brief time teaching in Afghanistan, but somehow his understanding of Muslim people seems to be limited to stereotypes that sound like generic fear-mongering that followed September 11th. This video highlighting educational disparity is about immigration, and he spends some time talking about the discrimination immigrants face. To be more specific, though, he really only talks about the discrimination faced by East Asian men like him. of the two main types of discrimination he mentions, and I'm genuinely shocked he used two instead of three. One of them is that there are a limited number of CEO positions available to East Asian men. The other form of discrimination is that East Asian men do poorly on dating apps. In this section, it's very strange how he fixates specifically on white women. A white woman will be attracted to the average white guy and she will only be interested in the highest earning Asian guys.

[00:35:10]>> How he talks about women in general gives off some negative vibes. It's easy for them to find someone off their status or below, but it's very hard for East Asian man to actually marry up and improve their status and social economic standing.

[00:35:27]>> Jen talks about women like their symbols of status, which is a pretty bad way to approach dating. And I'd wager treating women like that is going to hurt your chances far more than being East Asian.

[00:35:37]By the way, I want to make it clear that it is true that East Asian men, women, and non-binary people do face discrimination. It's an unfortunate truth and it should be called out. The problem here is that Jiang is doing a very poor job of making that case and it seems more self-erving than trying to speak for any kind of community. And he eventually uses his own personal story to go to a much darker place where he explains that East Asian men are suckers for playing the game. that is to be an immigrant who integrates into their new culture because it allows white men to marry their best women while other minorities cheat the system.

[00:36:13]>> The most attractive of all Asian women will be married off to white guys whereas East Asian guys will make their money and then stay at home and play video games all the time.

[00:36:24]Okay, the game is rigged. So the only logical strategy according to game theory to this situation is to break the game, cheat. Okay? And that's what the other minorities are doing.

[00:36:38]>> This racist rant is supposed to be a lesson in game theory. By the way, which supposedly explains why these other minorities are grouping together and having lots of babies so they can take over. He eventually goes back to being bigoted towards Muslims specifically.

[00:36:51]>> In Europe, they have a huge Muslim problem. These Muslims are less likely to integrate. Uh they don't do very well in school, but they will claim welfare.

[00:37:05]They will have lots and lots of babies, which is a drain on the uh economy of these nations. So if trends continue then it is most likely that Muslims will will control Europe in 25 years time. Okay.

[00:37:27]>> For Jiang, I'll do my own list of three here. Muslim people operating in unison, never adjusting to the culture in their new home, and wanting to take over is part of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been used against every immigrant group for decades. It's never been true, and I don't see what makes Muslim people uniquely threatening, especially since we're reducing people that can come from entirely different parts of the world down to their religion. I'd wager someone who immigrates from Indonesia probably has a very different experience than someone who is immigrating from Pakistan. This map he's so worried about doesn't just include newly arrived immigrants. It would include second, third, and later generations as well.

[00:38:03]People who were not only born in Europe, but have families that stretch back decades. Do they not get to be European?

[00:38:09]or can they never be part of the only culture they and their family have ever known because of their religion? The reductive way of looking at the world Jiang frequently uses unsurprisingly leads to conclusions like these ones, where his own ignorance simplifies diverse populations into easily understood threats. In this case, turning his classroom lecture into a rant about population replacement that wouldn't be out of place on an episode of Tucker Carlson, where Tucker Carlson frequently cries about white people being under attack. Unsurprisingly, Jiang's a big fan of his. Well, thanks so much for inviting me to talk. I'm a huge fan. I've been your work for a number of years now.

[00:38:44]>> While Jen predicates some of what he says about immigration on Europeans being racist, he makes this important point towards the end of the lecture.

[00:38:51]>> Immigration is not natural. If you're born into a community, what is natural is for you to want to help this community grow and develop. You want to contribute to this community. What is not natural is for you to say, you know what, this community sucks. I'm going to go find a new community.

[00:39:13]>> Jen is arguing that racism present in Europe is a response to something unnatural. All while Jiang does some racism of his own. It's a nasty bit of business where someone who was an immigrant himself seems to have learned the worst lessons of any discrimination he may have experienced. And there's another moment in one of his lectures that also requires some discussion, and that's where Jiang denied the Holocaust.

[00:39:34]This comment is brief but can be seen in the video titled the German will to power.

[00:39:39]>> We don't actually have any concrete evidence for the Holocaust. Okay. So, one piece of evidence for the Holocaust is this speech by Hitler.

[00:39:50]>> The context here is that he's examining an anti-semitic screed from Hitler and trying to argue that the term Jewish is a metaphor. It's a Jews who are a metaphor for a national elite group of individuals who are conspiring to undermine the vitality and the strength of the German nation. Like everything he discusses in his lectures, he doesn't linger too long on this point. And it's part of a much larger framework I mentioned earlier about how anti-semitism was used to mask the real origins of communism, which was apparently the capitalists. I'm not sure if he means that Hitler saw through this ruse or if we should understand his words in that context rather than what they literally mean, but to even go down this road has put us in some alarming territory where these abstract hypotheticals have Gang engaging in some kind of denialism that divorces us from history as we understand it and instead the fantasy world he's creating. This particular lecture isn't a part of his game theory series, but rather one titled civilization, where he provides other absurd alternative readings of history, such as the Carthaginian Hannibal not actually existing.

[00:40:53]>> Hannibal Barka did not exist as per as a person.

[00:40:55]>> While incredibly silly, his commentary on Hitler and the Holocaust can't be so easily laughed at. And if he can upload new versions of lectures to fix audio issues, I think he can upload new versions of lectures that supposedly have him accidentally denying the Holocaust. At least accordance to his audience, that's the defense I saw most frequently. It seems like that would be a really good thing to fix. But as we step out of the classroom, maybe we'll get a little more information on what he thinks about this. A question that kept popping into my head while watching these lectures was, how is this a class?

[00:41:27]Although Jiang teaches a course called Western philosophy, he only mentions philosophers in passing and instead subjects his students to long discussions about modern-day geopolitics and his bizarre theories on world history. Occasionally, he'll try to connect Plato or Kant to his lecture, but it's hardly a suitable amount of material for a real lecture on those subjects. Jang's teaching methods are unorthodox, but it seems to fit the vibe of the school he teaches at, Moonshot Academy. I can't speak to what the average high school is like in China, but this one seems unique with a striking interior design and small class sizes of less than 10 students per teacher. I don't know what any of these other classes are like, but I hope these kids are getting a better education than what they're getting in Jang's class.

[00:42:08]Jung does talk about his previous experiences in education at other institutions. Notably, he spends one of his lectures complaining about how he was fired from his previous teaching job. The word that everyone used to describe me was not reformer, not visionary, not idealist, not dreamer, but dictator.

[00:42:30]Okay.

[00:42:32]Or another word that they used that was that was more common was this guy's an [ __ ] Okay. This guy's a complete [ __ ] I'm not sure talking about how you lost your last job is suitable for a lecture, but he eventually turns this personal anecdote into a story about how everyone involved with education is lazy and not operating out of a deep love of brightening young minds like he is.

[00:42:56]Listening to his lecture on that experience of getting fired, the big takeaway I got was that it sounded like his experimental curriculum design had very tough grading, which annoyed some people. His current class doesn't have grades, though. It doesn't have tests either. Students either pass or fail.

[00:43:12]How he assesses their learning is never made clear since most of his classes are typically him lecturing with the odd question every now and again. Before the school's break for midterms, Jang's class featured a midterm he designed where he answered questions from the internet.

[00:43:25]>> All right, so in this tweet, uh, Mr. Bojac said that listen, >> he does eventually give his students the chance to ask questions, though they usually just create opportunities for him to further exposit his bizarre ideas. In this clip, he's responding to a question about his theory that Israel is going to let Tel Aviv get destroyed so the more secular Israelis will die, leaving the more religious ones in charge. It's not that hard to rebuild an economy in a city. It's not okay. What is hard though is to develop the spiritual cohesion of a people to make them believe in something so that they're willing to die for it. Okay, that's what matters, right? Destroying a city, you can rebuild it in 5 years time. It's not that hard. Just hire the Chinese to do it. Okay.

[00:44:14]>> I think a country letting an entire city be wiped out so one group can consolidate their power is ridiculous.

[00:44:20]But that was only before I considered that they could just ask China to rebuild a city in 5 years. I'm sure it's just that easy. Jang cares less about evidence or mathematical models in the world, but instead he uses intuition.

[00:44:32]>> I know it's game theory. I know I know you use math, but but I'll be constrained by math. Okay. So I I use a lot of intuition. I use a lot of doubt.

[00:44:41]I use a lot of debate.

[00:44:42]>> His class, according to him, is meant to spark creativity and encourage his students to use their own intuition. The biggest problem I see with this is that his students never actually get to do any of that in this class, at least not in the lectures he's uploaded. Students should have the opportunity to create their own theories or ideas or maybe experiment with frameworks that let them challenge themselves. This class is more about challenging Jang to see if he can keep all the balls he's juggling in the air, deflecting the challenges he gets from his students. There's also the additional danger of his students and audience ignoring the game of creating hypotheticals while taking his statements about the real world and its history at face value. If Jiang wants to demonstrate the intersection between game theory and politics, he could simply use a fictional place like Westeros from Game of Thrones. So, there's no danger of anyone taking what he says about the real world seriously.

[00:45:30]But by grounding his speculation in the real world and mixing it in with his own misunderstandings, it can only serve to confuse the audience. Something that becomes apparent when you look away from the lecture videos and the common sections underneath them. Filled with people who seem to think they're learning about the world, Jiang does himself no favors when he steps out of his classroom and starts presenting the ridiculous fantasies he's cooked up to a wider audience, something he's doing more of as he started making the rounds in the podcast circuit. In a previous video of mine about Minnesota and the lies spread about that state by Nick Shirley, I paid special attention to the podcast environment that let such a clueless kid like him seem far more credible, treating his nonsense as something to be taken seriously. Jen has had a similar experience as his public profile has risen, often brought on to discuss his theories about the world as an absent-minded host nods along. Here's a quick taste of a prediction from a podcast with a guy named Cyrus Jensen I've never heard of. This was recorded a few months back. If you just look at history, if you just look at the history of humanity from a macro perspective, um ice ages are a common thing. Um so, so, so I think that uh we are looking, we're moving toward towards an ice age >> with record heat temperatures for more than two decades now. We're actually heading in the opposite direction, at least according to climate scientists who I suspect have looked into this far more than Chian has. Here's another example of him saying something ridiculous in his interview with Tucker Carlson.

[00:46:53]>> You'd be called a racist. Um because and that's the worst thing to be called, right? It's I mean like you're better off you're better off being called a pedophile, right? Pedophiles have more rights now than than than racist. I have no idea what he's trying to say here aside from playing along with Tucker Carlson to pretend like being called a racist is the worst thing that can happen to you when people like Tucker Carlson have made a pretty good living by being a professional racist. During this interview, Jen also says things that are so clearly and obviously not true. These elite universities, Yale, Harvard, they are the most critical of Western civilization. They don't they no longer teach Homer and Dante and Plato.

[00:47:30]>> Jung has a degree in English literature from Yale where he learned about all these figures. And I did a quick check and there are still several courses teaching Homer, Dante, and Plato at Yale. These interviews do strip bear the defense that his ideas are meant to be fun hypotheticals not to be taken too seriously. and he's perfectly happy to repeat them on these podcasts like the existence of secret societies.

[00:47:51]>> There will be a world war, the final war, and possibly a nuclear war. But um who Gog and Magog is is up for debate.

[00:47:59]>> Wow.

[00:48:00]>> It's a bit of a wonder where he gets this stuff from. Though, considering his media diet, it's not surprising that watching Tucker Carlson and Jimmy Door contributes to someone being this confused about the world.

[00:48:10]>> I think you're the best news source uh on TV right now, even though you're not actually on TV. And actually, you're not a journalist, but yes, I >> when Jang sits down with Jimmy Door, things start to get really unhinged, like when he calls the mass shooting on Bondai Beach that targeted Jewish people a false flag.

[00:48:25]>> There are a lot of false flags, right?

[00:48:27]So, for example, the most blatant example is Australia, Bondai Beach. But there are but you will see more examples of false flags against Jews in order to scare the Jewish diaspora to return to Jerusalem. This interview also reveals how he got turned on to some of the more esoteric beliefs in his theories.

[00:48:46]>> I spent a lot of time watching Kurt Mezer on your show and and you know he mentioned the sub Frankus. He mentioned the interdimensional digit people and that's what got got me to research these topics and then I was slowly able to connect the dots. I was curious about Jang's comment about Kurt Mezer, a comedian who serves as Jimmy Door's co-host who's somehow even dimmer than Door and I found Jang made an appearance on Mezer's podcast as well. There was more discussion about how the Bondi Beach shooting was some kind of secret plot. Though he does think that the deaths were real, at least it does get significantly weirder the deeper they get into the show.

[00:49:20]>> You look at World War II, okay, how much of World War II that we've been taught in school do you think actually happened during World War II? You know, like >> like our understand World War II, do you think that that's actually what happened? I I don't know. This certainly makes me think his earlier comment about the Holocaust wasn't Jen misspeaking, but he doesn't expand on things in this interview either. It's yet another part of his pattern of believing history that's not just comically wrong, but also conspiratorial in a way that reflects some really ugly beliefs. It was genuinely a surprise to me to find out that Jang is not a new addition to the YouTube space from an ideological perspective, but rather he's a product of the sewage system of reactionary political commentary channels. What seemed like Jang's original [ __ ] is just recycled crap from someone else's rear end. The interview Jang is probably most famous for is the one he had on Breaking Points, which has racked up 9 million views. This interview is particularly harmful because it's over 10 minutes of Jiang seeming almost respectable when he drops this at the very end. He starts with an answer about the Epstein files revealing elites operating in secret, but then he makes a huge jump to assume that it's not just sex crimes they're doing. And the mati are composed of three major groups.

[00:50:32]Okay? You have the Jesuits who control the Vatican. You have the sepatine Frankis who which control the modern city of Israel today. And you have the Freemasons which control the national security apparatus of um the United States. And they believe that Israel, this war in the Middle East is key to the end times.

[00:50:49]>> While the Epstein files obviously revealed lots of criminal activity, it was a conspiracy to commit sex crimes, not a conspiracy to bring about the end times. This is where the interview should have started. Or at the very least, they should have taken some time to ask what the hell he was talking about. Platforming is a complicated subject, and if he was a smaller creator, I think providing people like him a platform does more harm than good because he's likely to reach an audience regardless of how he's presented.

[00:51:16]However, the popularity Jen already has puts him in a category where the benefit of this appearance isn't so one-sided.

[00:51:23]But if someone like this is going to be on your show, they need to be more aggressively questioned. Media Assassan did a better job confronting Jiang on some of his more outlandish claims, even if he didn't go as far as I might have liked.

[00:51:34]>> I've blown up across the internet, and I don't think this is organic, but but so I wonder if there are some governments or some entities that believe that my message should be amplified. Um, it is it is possible I'm a useful idiot.

[00:51:50]>> It's a strange thing to say. Even though I'm critical of him, I don't doubt the ability of the algorithm to push dons without being manipulated by a nation state. I would like to see if he has some kind of evidence for his suspicion that he's being artificially boosted, but he's not really a man of facts and doesn't provide any.

[00:52:06]>> I I think that the problem with education is that it focuses too much on facts, too much on rigor, and not enough on facts. Do you hear yourself? The last interview I want to briefly mention is when Jang went on Patrick Bat David's podcast where he had a few wacky takes like that co 19 was an American boweapon.

[00:52:24]>> So I believe that this was an American bioweapon funded by 25 fi >> PBD following the pattern of most of these hosts doesn't seriously challenge him on any of these ridiculous claims.

[00:52:36]As a Canadian though I do need to push back on a comment Jang made about his former home. If if I said the certain things that I said uh in Canada, then it's possible that I get visited by the police.

[00:52:46]>> Don't worry, Jang. They don't arrest people for having a shitty YouTube channel. And he isn't the only one living off his channel. There's currently a big gold rush right now with channels posting clips of all his lectures. Some of them getting tons of views. In one place, there's a creepy AI version of Chiang that talks to the audience. I've not spoken much about AI on this channel, but if anyone is curious, I am not a fan. And I think AI videos like these are some of the worst garbage on this website. I'll give Jiang some credit here because at least he's spreading his own talking points. Anyone using AI to spread messages built on the backs of the labor of others are parasites on this website and I have nothing but contempt for them. In the comments section under Jang's videos, it was nice to see so many comments from people anxious to learn. I think that kind of enthusiasm is genuinely a good thing and it often serves people quite well in life. But Jenang is not offering a real education. Anyone who wants to learn about history, philosophy, or game theory would be better served by, and I hate to break this to you, enrolling in a school and learning from an actual professor. I know not everyone has the means to do this, and there are some decent substitutes, such as reading books or watching lectures from people with real credentials who have been adequately trained to speak on these subjects. I'm not saying you should only listen to someone on a subject if they have a doctorate in it. I am saying that when someone is offering commentary that completely upends decades of scholarship and fields of study that have tens of thousands of people working in research, consider that these new ideas might not be completely invalidating entire fields of study if they're coming from a high school teacher with an active imagination. I'm not saying it's impossible for that to happen, just that it would require a lot of work, and that level of work simply isn't being seen in Jiang's videos. Another common type of comment I saw were people comparing the lectures to watching something on Netflix. And while I strongly disagree with that, since the new season of One Piece was far more entertaining than listening to a man ramble about the Freemasons for 50 minutes, I understand the categorical difference here. A YouTube video is a great choice if all you're looking for is entertainment. I would still argue that there are far better sources for that on YouTube than Jiang, but it's not quite as disastrous as thinking he's actually teaching you anything. I can't help but see this eerie similarity between Jang and Jordan Peterson where the aesthetic of academia ramps up into a caricature of education where people are not getting the tools they need to thrive in the world but instead a perpetual daddy figure who will spoon feed them gibberish under the guise of bettering them intellectually.

[00:55:10]Jordan Peterson has parlayed his public persona into creating a ridiculous fake university that has all the aesthetics of education without any of the actual substance or value. My good friend Zoe B has a whole video about that institution and how it uses the aesthetics of learning to siphon money from Peterson's faithful audience. She was the one who found that anecdote about Dr. Fox I used in my intro. So, give full credit to Zoe for that. After a decade of watching Peterson continuously built his audience for enough money to make him a millionaire, I hope we don't have to see a repeat with that with Jang Shu Chin.

[00:55:40]Although, and he did say he's working on a book, so I guess we'll be seeing how much money he makes off of that.

[00:55:47]The idea for this video kind of came out of nowhere. I was sort of debating whether or not to cover this guy at all.

[00:55:53]But after watching a few of his lectures, I couldn't help myself. There was just too much nonsense to push back against. And I got the impression that people were seeing small pieces of who this guy is. And when you dive into the reality of what his lectures are actually like, there's a lot more ridiculousness than well, than I certainly expected. If you enjoyed this in any way, do consider becoming a patron or member for the channel. You'll get your name in the credits like the fine folks you see here, early access to videos, and other fun bonuses I throw in every now and again. You can also support me on Nebula if you follow my referral link below. If you want to support me in a non-monetary fashion, you can like, comment, subscribe, hit the bell for notifications, or share this on social media. Thank you all so much for watching.