Professor Jiang’s Interview on Jack Neel Podcast (Transcript)

And if right now your concern is gas prices, it probably means you don’t really care about winning this war. Because if this war continues, it’s not just gas prices that are the problem. It’s going to be a national draft. It’s going to be economic collapse. It’s going to be riots in the streets. It’s going to be almost civil war in America. That’s what you have to do if you actually want to win this war.

That’s how wars are fought and won in the modern age. Total commitment, total focus in winning this war. And again, the question is, do the Americans have the political will to fight and to win this war? And this is a big question mark.

Mustering Political Will: From Liberty to Authoritarianism

For America to muster the political will, you would also need to see a radical transformation in American society from one that’s focused on more liberty, individual rights, to more authoritarian mechanisms. The national draft, of course, is the classic example. And so there are ways that you can muster political will.

False flag operations are one way. So back to World War II, what dragged America into World War II? Pearl Harbor. Before Pearl Harbor, most Americans were dead set against intervening in the wars in Europe and in Asia. But Pearl Harbor changed all that.

It’s possible that as this war drags on and more and more Americans die, then there’ll be a surge of patriotism and more Americans will volunteer to fight this war. It’s also possible that as the economy gets worse and worse, as people lose their jobs, as the stock market falters and people feel a deep sense of anxiety and desperation, they believe that it’s important to maintain the empire. So these are all possibilities, but you will have to make this transition in order to sustain this war. And right now we’re not really sure if America is willing to make the sacrifices necessary.

The Manufacturing Crisis

So that’s one big question, political will, and you will need this in order to fight total war. The second problem is manufacturing capacity. So again, the issue is that these past 20 years, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the coming of the unipolar moment, America has financialized, meaning that America is the world’s hegemon. And so everyone wants to invest in America because they believe it’s the safest and best place to invest. And so you have all this money coming from the Middle East, from Japan, from China, from Russia, from Europe. And so Wall Street takes this money and then recycles it into the American economy and creates all these risky financial assets called derivatives in order to recycle all this excess capital, all this liquidity.

This is what led to the 2008 subprime crisis when Wall Street thought that it was invincible. It was too big to fail. It started to engage in all sorts of risky behavior and it collapsed the global economy. And it was only quantitative easing, the intervention of the Federal Reserve that saved Wall Street as well as the American economy.

But the problem with 2008 is nothing changed. I think that only one mid-level executive was put in prison. And in fact, there were many executives who got bonuses after they collapsed the economy. So we are still in a period in America where there’s massive financialization, where it seems as though the entire economy is a Ponzi scheme.

And so there are two major bubbles right now. There’s the AI data center bubble, which is these companies, seven of them spending trillions of dollars and building these data centers, creating a product that no one actually needs or wants. That’s the first problem. Second is the private credit bubble, which is very similar to the 2008 great financial crisis. So America is addicted to finance, or another way of saying that is America’s addicted to gambling. So if you’re rich, you put your money in the stock market, but if you’re not rich, if you’re young, you gamble. There are all these gambling sites now that are very popular and accessible.

JACK NEEL: Meme coins as well are a great example of financialization.

PROFESSOR JIANG: It’s gambling. Cryptocurrency, gambling markets, it’s all this get-rich scheme that’s being promoted in America. So in order to fight this war, you can’t do that because you need to move towards manufacturing. You need to move towards resource exploration and exploitation. And Americans don’t really want to do the gritty work anymore.

So back in the ’50s and ’60s, Americans were proud to be factory workers, to actually create stuff. And now I think that blue-collar work is sort of like what illegal immigrants do. It’s not what real Americans do. I’m sure there are lots of Americans who would love to work in a factory until they actually work in a factory and recognize how hard it is.

So that’s the second question. Are Americans willing to return to the factories and do the hard work of building the manufacturing sector in order to win this war?

The Question of Casualties

The third big question is just casualties. Are Americans willing to die in the Middle East? And the problem is that, again, Americans don’t really know what war is. All around the world, if you fight a war and you lose the war, well, your kids die, you die, your family dies, your nation dies, the memory of who you are dies. War has consequences.

But these past 40, 50 years, America has fought many wars and it’s lost many wars. It lost Vietnam, it lost Afghanistan, it lost Iraq. And the consequence for America is this. You have these 4-star generals put in front of Congress where for a couple of hours they’re harangued by congressmen and they feel kind of uncomfortable. That’s it. There have been no real consequences for America when America loses a war. And that is ahistorical. That’s not normal.

Unfortunately, this time it’s different. If America goes into Iran with ground troops, if it’s committed for 4 or 5 years, if America loses this war, it means the collapse of the American economy. It means the collapse of the global economy, and it means the collapse of the petrodollar, the American dollar as a world reserve currency. It basically means Americans are now poor.

Summing Up the Three Big Questions

PROFESSOR JIANG: So these are 3 big questions. One is, is the nation able to unify politically around the idea of winning this war in the Middle East, to believe that it is a cause worth dying for? Second question is, is America willing to transition its economy from financialization back to manufacturing, which would actually mean radical social transformation? And the third big question is, how much sacrifice are Americans willing to make in this war? Are they willing to die in the Middle East? And again, these are the three big questions. And given what I’ve seen, given past behavior, I think it’d be very hard for Americans to make this transition.

JACK NEEL: On the manufacturing, I just want to clarify that. Are you saying like military, like firearms, tanks, that type of manufacturing, or you just mean general manufacturing?

The Economics of Modern Warfare

PROFESSOR JIANG: As a whole? Let’s put it very simply, okay? You need drones to win this war. Why? Because right now you have asymmetry going on, which is to say the economics of war don’t make any sense. Right now, America, because of the military-industrial complex, it’s put billions of dollars into this expensive air defense network, right? So you’ve got the THAAD system, thermal high-altitude air defense. You’ve got the Patriot systems.

And the military-industrial complex, it’s not designed to win wars. It’s designed to transfer taxpayer money to a transnational elite, right? It’s meant to line the pockets of the national security apparatus, the deep state. And so they build these expensive weapons and they look really fancy and they’re really impressive, but they’ve never been tested in war.

Okay, so now we’re seeing what these systems look like in war, and it’s been an embarrassment for America because you’ve got these aircraft carriers, the Gerald R. Ford nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the most advanced in the world, $13 billion price tag. It’s done nothing in this war. In fact, it sort of ran away from the theater because of this laundry fire. And people are speculating that it’s not really a laundry fire. It was like they were hit by a drone or a ballistic missile. So the Iranians have proven that they can actually attack and sabotage these supposedly invincible war machines. So $13 billion, zero forward, and it’s afraid to fight.

Okay, that’s number one. Number two is you’ve got these most advanced airplanes, the F-35, the most advanced in the world. Cost $100 million each, took 26 years to fully develop. It’s supposed to be stealth. You can’t see it. The Iranians shot one. It was forced to make an emergency landing.

JACK NEEL: What did they shoot it with?

PROFESSOR JIANG: We’re not sure, but it was probably a missile of some sort. So meaning the Iranians were able to, with their low technology radar, lock onto an F-35 the heat signature and launch a missile at it.

And also, let’s be realistic. These are very complex machines that are being asked to fight a war of attrition, meaning they’re going in every single day for a long time. And when you have this very expensive technology, eventually you’re going to have maintenance issues. So these machines were not designed to fight a long war. They were meant to do at most a 2-week war. Okay, so it’s showing the wear and tear of the American military machine. Okay, so that’s the F-35.

And then you have the Patriot systems. And unfortunately, if you look at what’s happening in the Middle East and in Israel, there’s a lot of leakage. Okay, these things are billion-dollar machines and they’re supposed to defend your air, but these cheap Iranian drones are getting through. So let’s go back to the economics. Right now, a Patriot missile, to shoot one Patriot missile in the air costs about $1 million. The Iranians use the Shahed drones, which cost anywhere between $20,000 to $50,000. You will need about 2 to 3 Patriot missiles to shoot down one of these drones. So the economics doesn’t make any sense.

For you to win this war, you have to shift the economics to make it much more sustainable. And that basically means mass manufacturing drones. That also means, unfortunately, ground troops, right? Because the problem with air defense is it defends against air. So it is silly for America to send in these advanced fighter jets into Iran against their air defense systems. It doesn’t matter even how low-tech their air defense is. Eventually, they’re going to shoot down some planes and they have shot down 2 planes already. Yesterday, it was reported they shot down an F-15 and now they’re looking for the pilot.

The way you counter air defense is you use ground troops, use infantry to clear the air defense so that you can establish aerial supremacy. But it’s almost impossible to establish aerial supremacy against an opponent without ground forces. Okay, so if America is to win this war, it needs ground forces and it needs to have factories mass produce drones as much as Iran is producing drones.

So look at the war in Ukraine. If you just go to the front lines, it’s just all fiber optics, right? You go to these villages, it’s like webs of fiber optics. Why? Because the drones have fiber optics attached to avoid jamming. So that’s what modern warfare looks like. And so you need to make mass-manufactured drones. Right now, Iran can manufacture about 500 drones a day. America needs to produce about 1,000 to stay competitive.

Asymmetric Warfare Explained

JACK NEEL: Why is Iran a perfect example of asymmetric warfare? And can you define asymmetric warfare just simply?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Asymmetrical warfare means that the opponent does not fight you on equal terms. The opponent is fighting you asymmetrically and using fewer resources to accomplish more strategic objectives.

Okay, so in the Cold War, it was symmetrical warfare between the Soviet Union and America because they were competing with the same metrics. So for example, how many nuclear weapons did you have? Did you have access to hydrogen weapons? How many tanks did you have? How many infantry did you have? Okay, so these were the metrics we used to judge the Cold War because America and the Soviet Union were symmetrical opponents.

Asymmetry happens when you fight, when the opposing sides are not equal in terms of economics, demographics, and geography. So in the Iran situation, the Iranians had at least 20 years to prepare for today. Okay, so you’re an Iranian strategist and you saw what happened in 1991, the Persian Gulf War. You saw what happened in 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom. And you know how the Americans fight. Americans fight using air supremacy. They come in, it’s shock and awe, they blow everything up. The ground forces come in and sweep everything up. Okay. So you know it’s fast, you know it’s deadly, but you also know it’s expensive. You can also make the assumption that Americans don’t like to fight a war of attrition because then it becomes politically unviable.

Okay, so if you’re an Iranian strategist, what you recognize is that to beat the Americans, you can’t fight on American terms. You can’t use advanced weapons. You can’t go head-to-head. You don’t want to mass your forces. So what you do is you hide yourself in the Zagros Mountains. You prepare for a long war. I’m talking like 10 years, possibly 20 years, right? You decentralize your forces.

The Iranians use something called the mosaic defense, which is to say it’s almost like a spider’s web where each part, each node is responsible for its own local defense. And if any part breaks down, the surrounding areas come in to fill out their defense. But it’s decentralized, meaning that the American strategy of shock and awe, decapitation strikes don’t really work because this system is much more resilient, much more fluid than Americans are used to.

And you try to inflict not military damage because the Americans can withstand that. What you do is you attack economic chokeholds, for example, the Straits of Hormuz, for example, the oil fields of the Middle East. Right. So that’s the idea of asymmetrical warfare.

Rallying Public Sentiment and the Draft

JACK NEEL: And the other point I wanted to touch on is you said that it would be hard to rally American sentiment like a 24-year-old kid like me to want to enlist and go fight an American war in Iran. If you had to guess what kind of event would happen that would actually rally sentiment of, I don’t know, Gen Z, people under 35, people eligible for the draft, what kind of event would that be?

PROFESSOR JIANG: My best guess is it’s very hard to create an event that rallies Gen Z, right? But there is a solution because the idea of fighting this war is you need ground troops to soak up the air defense. You need ground troops to soak up the artillery and the drones, right? This is the economics of war, meaning you’re trying to win this war more efficiently than your opponent, right? So if they have $50,000 Shahed drones, then you need a resource, a weapon that’s cheaper than that.

Okay, so it’s possible to use drones, but you also need ground forces. And so where can you recruit expendable ground forces? And it’s going to be illegal immigrants, right? So the idea that you’re going to have a national draft and all these Gen Z kids who have pretty comfortable lives compared with their parents’ generation, right? And they’re going to go off to a desert, a mountain fortress, and they’re going to go and die and be basically cannon fodder. That to me sounds a bit absurd.

But what you can do is you can organize a national draft and then have so much political fervor. People are protesting so much because quite honestly, Gen Z would rather go to prison than go to Iran, I would think, right? But then what you can do is you can transition and say, fine, let’s do a compromise. Let’s have the illegal immigrants do this, right? So it’s your choice. You can either go back to Latin America, or you can go to Iran and win citizenship for your family. Not just for you, but your immediate family, your children, your parents, your wife. And quite honestly, I hate to say this, but for a lot of illegal immigrants, this is actually a pretty attractive offer.

So if I have to guess, I think they will try false flags, and I think they will have a national draft, and I think this will not work out. And so they’ll get desperate and they’ll start to recruit illegal immigrants to fight this war.

JACK NEEL: And what state has the highest number of illegal immigrants?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Yeah, I’m not actually sure. Yeah, I just—

JACK NEEL: I was trying to guess where an event might happen. That logic’s out, and it seems like sentiment is definitely anti-illegal immigration, at least in the US.

Targeting America’s Financial Infrastructure

PROFESSOR JIANG: I also say that there’s going to be another false flag that people don’t anticipate, which is an attack on America’s financial infrastructure. Okay, so the data centers that undergird the banking system, right? So you have a bank account, right? And it’s all stored on a server somewhere. What happens if that server gets blown up?

JACK NEEL: Money’s gone.

PROFESSOR JIANG: Then your money is gone, right? And so I point this out because America has a huge problem, which is there’s too much liquidity in the system. And so if you’re trying to run a financial system, you can’t have that. Because if there’s so much liquidity, no one actually works, right? If you got a million dollars sitting in a bank, you’re like, okay, I could just sit at home and gamble with it or do OnlyFans, or I could go to work from 9 to 5, put up with an asshole boss, do work that is meaningless and get paid nothing for it, right? So you have the situation where no one wants to work anymore.

So the only solution to that is you just destroy the banking system. You burn out people’s cash. So now they’re forced to work. You’ve got these boomers who sit, these boomers might have like $3 million in a bank account and then much more in stock market, right? And then much more in real estate. And so they can just support their kids and their grandkids. You can’t have that, right?

Is Trump Trying to Lose the War on Purpose?

JACK NEEL: If you’re going to transition back to a manufacturing economy, based on what you’ve said, I think it would be unreasonable to say that Trump’s ego is so large that he thinks he would win this war. Do you think Trump is trying to lose the war in Iran on purpose?

Understanding Trump: Strategy, Motivation, and the Second Term

PROFESSOR JIANG: That’s a really good question, and I think it’s a very complicated question. So I want to break it down into parts.

The first part I want to look at is: what goes on in Trump’s head? What motivates him? He is a reality TV star. He spent all his life in the tabloids, right? And being in the tabloids means that you’re just constantly curating, manufacturing your image in the public. So in the ’80s, his image was that of a billionaire playboy, right? He’s always with these beautiful models.

But the thing that people don’t recognize about Donald Trump is he’s very, very strategic and he’s very manipulative and he’s very deliberate in everything he does. And I’ll give you an example of that. I didn’t know this until about 2 years ago, but I just found out that Donald Trump does not drink. He’s never drunk. He refuses to touch alcohol. And that’s cognitive dissonance, right? Because you imagine while you’re building a Playboy image and you host the most lavish parties in New York, you are dating supermodels and you are hanging out with these celebrities. So you don’t drink?

Picture this: it’s a ballroom. You got 1,000 of the most beautiful, wealthiest people in America, and they’re getting drunk and they’re doing drugs in the bathroom. And Donald Trump, he’s the host. He’s going around and he’s shaking hands, conversing with people, taking pictures, but he’s not drinking. What kind of man does that? Why would he do that?

Trump’s Long Game: Planning Since the ’80s

So my only interpretation is that Donald Trump is deliberate. He’s been planning this for a long time. If you go back to the late ’80s, early ’90s, this guy is going to the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, he’s talking to CNN. He’s saying, “You know what, I should run for president. And if I ran, I would win.” So people don’t really appreciate this about Donald Trump.

That’s the first point I make. The second point I would make is Edwin thinks Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. But my question is this: if he were in the Epstein files, wouldn’t Joe Biden and his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, wouldn’t they have exposed this during the 4 years they were in office when they had access to all the Epstein files?

And people also forget that Donald Trump is hated by the elite. He was hated by Jeffrey Epstein. Why? Because he didn’t play by the rules. He wasn’t part of the club, right? So you look at all these people who are flying to Epstein Island: Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Steven Pinker — just the most elite in politics, in finance, and in academia. And Donald Trump, he maybe did go, but he wasn’t part of that club, right?

Trump as the Outsider

So Donald Trump was an outsider for most of his life. If you go back to the ’80s and you were to survey the most powerful men in New York City — the people who actually ran New York City — every one of them would say, “Donald Trump? This guy’s a clown. He’s stupid. He’s useless. He’s bankrupt. It’s just his dad’s money. He’s playing with his dad’s money.”

So Donald Trump has always been an outsider. He’s always felt persecuted. So I would just put everything together. This guy has been planning something since the ’80s. He’s very deliberate. He’s very disciplined. He’s not part of the elite the way that it’s traditionally understood. If he were, he’d be best friends with the Clintons and the Obamas, and no one would oppose him in 2016 when he became president.

People forget that in 2016 when he was president and he had this inauguration, no one went because no one wanted to be associated with this guy, even though he was president of the United States. And the media mocked him every single day.

Russiagate and the Epstein Files

And people forget this, but in 2016, the big thing was Russiagate — where Donald Trump was clearly an agent of Russia, Putin had blackmail on him, and Putin put him in office. That was the idea of Russiagate. And that was something that the mainstream media promoted every single day. And it turned out to be a nothing burger because Robert Mueller did an investigation. And if you just look at the Mueller report, he said it very clearly: there’s no evidence at all linking Donald Trump and his family to Vladimir Putin.

And I would say the same thing about Jeffrey Epstein, where I’m sure that Merrick Garland had a huge team looking for anything that could incriminate Donald Trump. There was nothing in the Epstein files. So this is a guy who associates with the most perverted, the sleaziest people on the planet Earth, but he himself is not implicated in whatever they do. That’s really strange.

All I’m saying is that I think Donald Trump is much more deliberate, much more methodical, much more strategic than people give him credit for.

What Does Trump Really Want?

The issue though is: what does he want? That’s the second part of the question. What does he really want? Americans think that Donald Trump is corrupt, that he wants to be the richest man in America. And that doesn’t really hold water because if you want to be the richest man in America, why is he pissing everyone off like this, right? Why doesn’t he just sell himself out to these secret societies, these billionaires? Why antagonize them the way he’s done? In 2016, he was like, “Let’s kick out these illegal immigrants, let’s not go fighting more wars. These billionaires have been stealing from the country all their lives.” Why antagonize the powerful like this, right? So the idea that Donald Trump is only interested in money doesn’t really hold water.

Here’s my theory of Donald Trump. He believes in his heart he is on a mission from God to save America. That’s literally what he believes. He believes every day when he’s alone in the bedroom doing Twitter or watching Fox News, God is whispering in his ear. He feels he has a divine connection to God that no one else does. He feels that he’s almost like Jesus, where he’s on a secret messianic mission that only he understands, but no one else does. But that’s the curse that he has to suffer in order to save America. That’s what he believes.

Trump’s Worldview: America Corrupted by the Transnational Elite

And then the question is: what’s his mission? If you just look at his rhetoric, if you look at his actions, he has a certain worldview, which is that America has been co-opted and corrupted by the transnational financial elite — Wall Street, the City of London, the Bank of England, the Bank of International Settlements — just the transnational capital. And as a result, America has lost its purity. America fought a revolution to get rid of these guys, right? And now they’re back and they control the Federal Reserve. They control the military industrial complex. They control the deep state. It’s all the same people really.

And so America is forced into these wars overseas. America is forced to allow illegal immigration, which dilutes the purity, the heritage, the culture of America. Without identity, without culture, without history, who are you? What are you, right? It’s these people that promote DEI, that promote woke politics, which intentionally brainwashes and indoctrinates young people into believing the most absurd things about themselves and the world, which reduces the capacity of American men to be strong, to be masculine. So that’s what he believes.

The First Term Betrayal and the New Strategy

And then the question is: if you believe this, and you believe that only you can save America, how do you do so? Well, in his first term, he surrounded himself with generals. He surrounded himself with people who knew Washington, D.C. well. And he played by the rules, and what happened? They cheated him, right?

In 2020, he won that election fair and square. The American people supported everything he did. He worked hard for America, and his entire cabinet betrayed him. The deep state spent $6 billion to rig that election to steal it from him. And then they staged January 6th, which was a protest gone amok, but they called it an insurrection and they impeached him. And they tried to put him in jail, or at the very least prevent him from ever standing for reelection again. They tried to destroy him.

Then after he goes home to Mar-a-Lago, they raided his home. For what exactly? For having confidential information? Listen, in Washington, D.C., everything is confidential. If I give you a piece of paper and I sign my name on it, it’s confidential, right? And you take it home, well, now you have a state secret sitting in your garage. Joe Biden had state secrets in his garage in Delaware. Hillary Clinton had her own private email server. There was no FBI raid on their homes.

Then you have lawfare against Donald Trump. Lawsuit after lawsuit. They tried to bankrupt him. They tried to put him in jail.

The Second Term: A New Tactic

And so Donald Trump recognized that the strategy of trying to work with the deep state, the strategy of trying to confront these guys head on, that’s not going to work. So in the second term, he’s changed his tact. His strategy is now: “I’m going to give these guys all that they want. I’m going to do exactly what they tell me to do.”

And the strategy here is actually interesting because in China, there’s a strategy that managers use to destroy people who threaten them. It’s called peng sha in Chinese. The idea is you flatter someone to death. In the Greek world, the worst thing is the idea of hubris. The gods, who the gods want to destroy, they first make proud, right? And what that means is you put your enemies on a pedestal, you give them whatever they want, you shine a spotlight on them, and then whatever happens is going to blow up in their face, and they get all the blame for it. Whereas before, in the first term, it was Donald Trump that got all the blame for everything that happened.

The Jared Kushner Question

I will give an example. Everyone thinks that Jared Kushner is the puppet master, right? He’s the one who is manipulating things behind the scenes. He’s the one who’s actually controlling Middle East policy in America. And the evidence is, he goes to Ukraine and negotiates with Putin on a peace deal. He goes to Gaza to negotiate the peace deal there. He creates the Board of Peace and he goes to Iran to negotiate a peace deal. Why is this guy, who’s not even an employee, involved in the most high-stakes political negotiations for America — him and his buddy Steve Wolkoff, right?

And so everyone just says, “Well, Jared Kushner is the one who’s controlling Donald Trump.” But let me ask you this question: if you were the true puppet master, would you put yourself on stage? Would you have that spotlight shone on you so that if something goes wrong, everyone blames you? Everyone now thinks if this war in Iran goes sideways, it’s Jared Kushner’s fault. If this war in Ukraine explodes, it’s Jared Kushner’s fault. If things don’t work out in Israel, it’s Jared Kushner’s fault. It was never Donald Trump — it was Jared Kushner.

And so that’s what Donald Trump is doing this term: letting his enemies get on stage and make complete jackasses of themselves.

But you’re like, “Wait, Jared Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law. They’re not enemies.” Yes, they are. If you know Trump’s personality, he values one thing and one thing only: loyalty. Jared Kushner is not loyal to Donald Trump. And we know because after January 6th, when everyone was distancing himself or herself from Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and Ivanka disappeared. Just go back to that time when Trump’s cabinet was quitting on him, when the Republicans were calling for his impeachment. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who made a lot of money in Trump’s first term, they disappeared because they didn’t want to lose their friends. They didn’t want to be associated with the dumpster fire that was Donald Trump. Do you think that Donald Trump might have a grudge against Jared Kushner?

JACK NEEL: That would make sense to me.

PROFESSOR JIANG: I would think so. And do you think Donald Trump is a guy to just go, “Well, you know, yeah, he betrayed me, but at the same time, he’s still my son-in-law. He’s a father of my grandchildren and he’s a husband to my favorite daughter, Ivanka”? No, he’s like, “Screw this guy. First of all, he stole my daughter from me. Second of all, he made her convert to Judaism. What is that crap? And third of all, when I needed him the most, he ran away.”

Jared Kushner’s Role and Trump’s Strategy

PROFESSOR JIANG: So Jared Kushner comes back from exile and now he is the most high-profile member of Trump’s team in the Middle East. Do you think that’s a good thing for him or a bad thing for him?

JACK NEEL: I think he thinks it’s a good thing for him.

PROFESSOR JIANG: He does, right? But that’s why Trump is so good, because he gives you what you want, right? If you love someone, you want to protect that person. You want to do what’s right for that person. You don’t give that person whatever he or she wants. I have this child, my boy, he’s like 4. Every day he’s saying to me, “I want candy. If you don’t give me candy, I hate you. You don’t love me.” And I’m like, “Okay, I don’t love you then.”

JACK NEEL: Right. I will say, just to close the loop that people might be thinking about, is I don’t think the average individual is thinking that Jared Kushner is making all the decisions. But I think that the most important people in D.C. and the most important people in the media assume that to be true. So the second-order effects, if something does go bad in Iran, would be that the media will put the blame on Kushner and people — the average American will start to put the pieces together there. I don’t think they’ll just be like, “Oh, it was Trump’s fault,” because the media will feed them that it was Jared Kushner. Is that right?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Right. That’s part of it. But the thing about Donald Trump is he is a reality TV star. So he’s thinking in terms of plot lines and narrative.

So what’s happening is that Donald Trump has betrayed MAGA because the first thing that he’s promised MAGA is no more wars. So he started this war unprovoked against Iran. And this is seen as a betrayal. And that’s why so many influential MAGA people such as Tucker Carlson have come out and opposed this war, because it’s a betrayal of all that MAGA stands for, which is America First.

So he’s doing this again to put his enemies on a pedestal, to give them whatever they want, to collapse the military-industrial complex and the financial sector, who are his enemies really from the first term. But he also has to think ahead and say, “How do I redeem myself in the eyes of MAGA? How do I get out of this dumpster fire? What’s my off-ramp?”

And so at some point when it’s clear this war is just a complete dumpster fire and he needs to bail, he’s going to bail because he’s not invested in this war. He’s got no ego in this thing. His job is to get a third term so that he can save America. And whether or not America wins this war, loses this war, he doesn’t really care. It’s not a factor in his calculations, but he needs to figure out how to create an off-ramp.

So ask yourself this question: why is Tulsi Gabbard in his cabinet? Why is she Director of National Intelligence? Where did she come from? She’s a Democrat. Why would she be given such a powerful position in Washington, D.C.? And the reason why is everyone associates her with anti-war. Everyone associates her with anti-military-industrial complex.

In other words, Donald Trump came into a second term creating two camps. You have the anti-war camp — JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard — and you have the pro-war people — Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Peter Hegseth. So it’s clear that there’s this massive division in the White House.

So why would Trump do that? Because Trump is trying to create a narrative where at first he was bamboozled by Marco Rubio and Peter Hegseth and Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, but then JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard, they pray to God or whatever, and he saw the light and then he joined JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard in opposing this war. And that’s his off-ramp. And then JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard will say to MAGA, “We have to forgive him because he’s our only hope to stop this war.”

How Professor Jiang Predicts the Future

JACK NEEL: Before we get into some of your other predictions, I want to understand how you make them. What would you say is the most important framework you use for evaluating the past, present, and the future? Like, how do you predict the future?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Sure. So in my predictive model, there are three pillars. The most important is game theory. Second is historical patterns. The third is eschatology. So I’ll explain one by one.

Game Theory

Game theory — I used to play a lot of poker, Texas Hold’em poker. And when I’m playing poker, it’s usually tournament poker. So I have a lot of time to kill. So I spend a lot of time just analyzing the metagame. Who are these people? Why are they doing what they’re doing?

And what I discovered playing poker is that there are no dumb players in the game. They’re all rational, but they have their own different perspective on how the game should be played. So the worldview drives their strategy, which drives their action. And if you spend enough time just analyzing a player, you can figure out the person’s entire strategy.

And then I recognized that we can apply this metaphor to geopolitics, which is to say that each nation state has its own particular worldview as determined by its culture, its history, its political system. And then it’s going to take this worldview and develop a strategy for how to navigate the world. And sometimes these worldviews will come into conflict with each other.

So once you start to recognize that the world is not set by a universal standard, but rather that the world is flexible and dynamic and open, and that each player is participating in a zero-sum game and trying to optimize his or her advantage in this game, then the world makes a lot more sense.

But the problem with this is to do game theory properly, you would need perfect information. So go back to the poker table analogy — if I’m able to see everyone’s cards, if I’m able to see everyone’s minds, then I can predict exactly how they behave. But you don’t have that perfect information. You can only make guesses. And this is even more true in geopolitics because you don’t have access to the nation’s top minds. You don’t know who the leaders are. You don’t understand how the political system works. You don’t understand this dynamic. So it’s very hard for you to gauge their behavior.

Historical Patterns

So what I do next is: fine, I don’t have this perfect information. In fact, I don’t have most of this information, but am I able to go back in history and look at events that are similar to today? And then am I able to draw analogies between the past and the present? And this will help me.

Eschatology

And the third thing I would look at is eschatology. Do you want me to explain what eschatology is?

JACK NEEL: 100%. Yeah.

PROFESSOR JIANG: Okay. Eschatology comes from the Greek word “eskaton,” which means “the end.” So literally it means the study of the end. What it means is that each religion has its own understanding and theory of how the world ends or how we become reunited with God.

Eschatology is often connected with the most extreme religious elements. And the reason why is that eschatology is very compelling. It’s like a movie script, and it’s as though people want to act it out. Because if you see the ending — if you know that Jesus can return, if certain things were to line up together, if they were to align, then Jesus would return — that makes you much more determined and motivated to actually fulfill this prophecy. So the prophecy becomes a plan.

And why eschatology is important is that people who do believe in this eschatology are much more motivated than others, much more energetic, much more cohesive than others, which means that they have more power than other people. And so they are the players to watch out for in this game.

And so if you look at what’s happening in the Middle East, you can make the argument that a lot of it is driven by eschatology — in that you have these Christian Zionists, you have these religious Jews who believe that by manipulating certain events in the Middle East, by provoking a war there, basically you will usher in the end times. For Christians, it means the rapture and the return of Jesus. For religious Jews, it means the coming of the Messiah and the building of the third temple and the coming of the Messianic age.

But also what people don’t appreciate is that not only is eschatology a prophecy and a plan, but it’s also a hidden history. And the reason why is that we don’t have much written history, maybe since the Greeks. The Greeks go back around 3,000 years, so it’s not that much. We’ve been around for at least 10,000 years. You go back to Gobekli Tepe, the ice age cave paintings. So we go back a long time. We don’t have that history. In fact, we don’t have most of our history.

So what religion does is that religion takes the broad history and allegorizes it into narratives, into stories, into religious beliefs that capture the essence of this history. So if we believe that history repeats itself, or there’s a certain pattern to history, what religion is, is it deciphers for you or reveals to you these patterns of history.

Think of astrology. Astrology is trying to reveal to you the patterns of the stars, the movement of the stars, which then determines how events unfold in the real world. Well, eschatology is very similar to astrology in this way, in that eschatology is not just a plan, it’s not just a prophecy, but it’s also a hidden framework of how events will turn out.

And if you look at eschatology, it’s mainly about the decline of empire, the decline of civilization. And this has happened a lot in human history. And if you look at what’s happening today from a historical perspective, it is the decline of empire, the decline of civilization. It’s almost like the Bronze Age collapse. And so eschatology provides you with a pretty good framework of how this thing will unfold.

Why Eschatology Matters: A Simple Example

JACK NEEL: I think the eschatology portion is where a lot of people tune out of your work. They think “conspiracy theorist,” this doesn’t make any sense that people would act in a certain way based on the end times. Can you give me a really simple example of how if you and I shared an eschatology, it would lead to our decisions in life being different? Like, can you give an example of this?

Jewish Eschatology and the Law of Eschatological Convergence

PROFESSOR JIANG: Sure. Okay. So let’s look at the most dominant eschatologies. Okay. So you have first start with the Jewish eschatology. And the Jews believe that they are the chosen people. And they are God’s, Yahweh’s favorite people. And the highlight or the apex of their civilization was King David’s kingdom, the Davidic kingdom, and King Solomon. Okay. And this was when King Solomon built Solomon’s temple, which was the house of God. And this was where Yahweh lived to be with his people.

But unfortunately the Jewish people were not loyal, they were unfaithful, so they started to marry foreign women, which brought in foreign gods, and Yahweh became annoyed, angry at the infidelity of the Jews, so he left, and this allowed invaders such as the Babylonians and Assyrians to conquer Jerusalem. And eventually this led to the Jewish diaspora, the scattering of the Jews. But even in the diaspora, they longed to return to Jerusalem, to be reunited with their God.

And in the Jewish tradition, what the rabbis tell the Jewish people is when God is ready, when the Jewish people are ready, for this reunion, the Messiah will come. The Messiah will lead the Jewish people back to the promised land. He will build the nation of Israel, and he will summon the diaspora to return to Israel, and he will build the third temple so that God will come. Eventually, he will face his enemies in the War of Gog and Magog, but he will triumph, and this will usher in the Messianic Age.

So as Jewish people, our main responsibility is to reflect deeply on who we are, engage in spiritual alchemy, and once we engage in a long process of redemption, and once our hearts open up to God, then God will send his Messiah. So be a good person and wait and be patient. Okay. So that’s the standard mainstream Jewish understanding.

But then you have these extremists who believe that is not God’s intention. God’s intention is for the Jews to prove that they love God. And they will, they desire reunion with God. And so it must be the Jews to act out first before God sends his Messiah. And that means you must first resurrect, reconstitute the nation of Israel. You must build the third temple. You must fight the war of Gog and Magog. And when the Jews have done all they can, but the entire world seems to have united against Jews because that’s what the world does, actually, unite against Jews. And when God sees that his people are in most desperate need, but he sees that his people have redeemed themselves, have repented, and yearn for reunion with God, then God will intervene and set the world right. And that is when the Messianic Age will occur. But you must first make the sacrifice necessary in order to welcome the Messiah and the coming of Yahweh.

Okay. So you can see how in the first iteration, yeah, it’s interesting, but in the second iteration, there’s sort of a passion and energy and excitement to it, which is like, wow, this is a grand historical script being played out. It’s all part of God’s divine plan. And I can play my part in achieving this divine plan. So why shouldn’t I? If I’m truly faithful, I’m true. If I truly believe in God, if I want to prove myself worthy, shouldn’t I do my part to achieve this plan? Okay. So does Jewish eschatology make sense to you?

JACK NEEL: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And I do want to clarify for people that you’re not saying that these eschatologies are necessarily real. You’re saying that this is what the people believe, so it changes the way that they act, and that’s how you use it to predict the future. Do you think it’s important for people to understand the law of eschatological convergence to understand how you predict the future?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Sure. Sure. Okay.

The Law of Eschatological Convergence

PROFESSOR JIANG: So there are different eschatologies, okay? So I just mentioned the Jewish eschatology, but there are others. There’s an Orthodox eschatology, there’s the Catholic one, there’s the Protestant one, the Christian Zionist one, there’s the Mormon one, okay? There’s a Freemason one. So there are all these different eschatologies out there.

And what’s really interesting is at certain points, they converge together, meaning they align at certain points, meaning that these are different religious traditions. Again, we’re talking only about a minority, these extremists, right? Maybe 1% of the entire cohort, okay? But these are the most energetic, they’re the most unified, they’re the most determined, right? And if they’re working together to achieve a certain script, and if the script is similar at certain points, then you can be certain or confident that these things will turn out because at the end of the day, we’re the players in this grand historical narrative. So what we do is what determines the history.

So if you just look at certain convergence points, it’s amazing how they align, okay? So one major convergence point is the reconstitution of the nation of Israel. This happened in 1948. Then another convergence point is war and chaos in the Middle East, which is happening right now. Another convergence point is the building of the Third Temple. And this is problematic because right now the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the third holiest site in the Muslim world, it actually sits on where the Third Temple should be. And so you need to destroy the third holiest site in the Islamic world in order to build your third temple.

JACK NEEL: Is that in Jerusalem?

PROFESSOR JIANG: It is. It’s all in Jerusalem. Yes. Yes. And so if the Al-Aqsa Mosque would be destroyed, this would trigger a religious war. But again, if these eschatologies are really powerful and true, they all agree there will be a religious war in the Middle East, which will lead eventually to the War of Gog and Magog, which is also what they agree on.

They also agree, this is really interesting, is that America will not be part of this narrative, right? America does not participate in the Middle East. So in other words, what they all believe is that America will lose this war against Iran and retreat back to North America and be engulfed with civil war. That’s what they all believe. They also believe that China will not participate in the Middle East affairs and China will probably retreat also into its own borders and turtle up. Yeah, so you have this convergence and that’s how I’m able to make these predictions because, well, if they want to behave in this way and they’re powerful people, well, they’ll probably succeed.

Predictions for 2027

JACK NEEL: You made a series of predictions and I have some dates here. What’s your prediction for 2027?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Sure. Okay, so let’s look at some major events that are happening right now. Okay, so you’ve got this war in Iran that seems to be escalating day by day. You have the midterms coming up in November and people expect the Democrats to sweep the House, in which case they will probably impeach Donald Trump. And you also have basically global economic collapse because the Iranians have closed the Strait of Hormuz. And so fertilizer and oil, LNG, are not able to be transported around the world. So the Middle East provides about 20% of the world’s oil supply and is also high quality that the rest of the world can’t actually replicate. So these are all very pressing issues right now, right?

So my prediction for how things will unfold is that number one, I think this war between the United States and Iran will only escalate. There can be no off-ramp because first of all, Donald Trump sees this war in Iran as crucial in achieving his messianic mission, which we talked about earlier. The military-industrial complex, Pentagon, the military, once they get into a war, they don’t back out. It’s human nature, right? It’s sunk cost fallacy where you’ve already invested so much into this war and you’re not going to say, you know what, I’ve lost enough, I’m going to go home, right? It’s like going to a casino and you’ve lost $1 million. You’re not going to go home after losing $1 million. You’re like, no, no, no, my luck will turn around, right? And also, if I go home, my wife is going to shout at me for the rest of my life. So screw that, I’m going to stay here. Right? So sunk cost fallacy, mission creep, the Pentagon will not abandon this war. It will only escalate. You’ve got tens of thousands of troops being transported to the Middle East anyway, right? So all the ingredients are in place for major escalation.

Okay? So you’ll see a ground invasion of Iran, in which case it’s going to be a quagmire. America’s going to be stuck there for 4 years, I think is optimistic. 4 years is optimistic, possibly 10, 20 years. Okay. So that’s one prediction.

Another prediction is that the midterms will not go the way people expect them to go. I’m not saying they’ll be canceled, but what I’m saying is that right now, Donald Trump and the Republicans are trying to pass something called the Save America Act. Which is to say that they want voter ID. Now, the Democrats are saying that voter ID is akin to voter suppression. And the reason why is, if you have voter ID laws, then you need ICE officers in the polling stations. And we know what ICE is like, right? So we can imagine that there’ll be intimidation. There’ll be some fraud going on in November. There may also be a cancellation of certain elections.

I don’t know how the midterms will turn out, but what I will say is that it’s almost insignificant how the midterms turn out because it’s possible the Republicans stay, they maintain the House and the Senate. In which case Donald Trump continues his war. It’s also possible the Democrats put up people called the blue dogs who are national security apparatus people who are Democratic. So these are people who are CIA, who are Pentagon, and they would support this war. So they come into office and they would impeach Donald Trump if he did not continue this war. But it’s also possible the Democrats sweep, and they impeach Donald Trump. And this won’t change anything because he still has the power to fight this war to the bitter end. And if he gets impeached, you can imagine that he’d be even more determined to fight this war.

So I don’t know what the midterms will turn out, but I will say that it will not be the way people expect it to work out. I think there’ll be a lot of surprises. Now, I will also say it won’t change the trajectory of this war. I think the trajectory of this war is already set.

Okay. I will also say that by 2027, you should have the framework for national draft already in place. It is possible they’ve already passed legislation to create the national draft, or it’s possible that certain people have already been drafted. I think by 2027, ICE will be much more powerful than people imagine. I think they want to deploy National Guard to all major cities in America because they’re preparing for economic collapse, preparing for financial collapse, preparing for the national draft. They will need law enforcement and National Guard in all the major cities, especially in Democratic cities like Los Angeles and Boston and Chicago, where they expect the resistance to be the greatest.

By 2027, all the ingredients for civil war should already be in place. I don’t mean actually two militaries fighting each other, but I’m saying like nationwide discontent and riots and protests and insurgencies. Okay, so this is going to be low-level conflict, but it’s going to be what the civil war will look like for the next few years. So the global economy should have collapsed by 2027. So JP Morgan has reports saying that the world will run out of oil by the end of this month.

JACK NEEL: And that’s because of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Risk of Nuclear War

PROFESSOR JIANG: That’s right. Because of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. But the problem of the world is that people are used to efficiency, which is to say getting resources as cheaply and as quickly as possible. And the entire world is structured around efficiency. And the problem though is that efficiency and resilience are at odds with each other.

So the example is just-in-time inventory, right? Companies don’t have inventory because they don’t want to bear the cost of inventory. So they just use just-in-time supply chains, meaning you will only keep this thing in place for a couple days before you ship it to another place. But what happens if there’s a chokehold on a supply network like the Strait of Hormuz? Well then, your entire system implodes because there’s not enough inventory to go around. People aren’t stocked up on necessities, right?

So this crisis that we’re seeing in the global economy will only get worse and it’s going to extend to every aspect of life where you think, okay, well, I don’t drive a car or I don’t fly a plane for next year. No, no, no, that’s not how these things work, man. Cheap energy is the foundation of the entire modern global economy. So it’s not just travel, it’s also food, man. It’s possible they have to start rationing food.

A few days ago, Prime Minister Albanese of Australia and Prime Minister Kirsty of the UK started to address their nations. And basically their point is — and it’s very subtle language — but their point is, buckle up guys. Because right now it’s going to be food shortages, but imagine if there is food rationing going on, right? So this is a world that’s unimaginable for most people, but it’s a world of limited resources. It’s a world of resource conflict. And it’s a world in transition of collapse. So buckle up.

JACK NEEL: Would you predict that by the end of 2027 will be the destruction of Al-Aqsa?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Yeah. Okay. So let’s go into what we know about Al-Aqsa so far. So there was a Jewish rabbi who’s very well known in Israel. But last June, during the 12-day war between Israel, the United States, and Iran, he said basically, this war would be the perfect opportunity to stage a false flag operation where the Iranian missile is flying over Al-Aqsa Mosque, we demolish it, and we blame it on the Iranians. Then the Persians and the Arabs would go to war against each other and we could laugh our heads off. What a great way to resolve the conflict in the Middle East.

So that’s one piece of evidence. Another piece of evidence is the idea of the red heifer. The Messianic Jews want to rebuild Solomon’s temple, build a third temple. But to do so, you need to consecrate the ground. So you need to make a red heifer sacrifice. But according to the Bible, the red heifer has to be perfect. And so there’s this farmer in Texas who spent years and years and millions of dollars genetically engineering perfect red heifers. Then he shipped them to Israel. And so once they have — once it’s destroyed — they make the red heifer sacrifice and then build the Third Temple.

The Third Temple itself has already been designed and built brick by brick. There’s something called the Temple Institute in Jerusalem, and they have built the Third Temple. And all they do is move the Third Temple from the current location to the Al-Aqsa Mosque location. So this can happen right away. That’s another piece of evidence.

Also, we know that there have been archaeological digs under the Al-Aqsa Mosque these past 2 years. So if you want to do a controlled demolition, well, that’s what you do. You pretend it’s an archaeological dig, you implant explosives under the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and then you pretend it’s an Iranian missile and then you blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and then you palm it off, right? It’s not us — we didn’t do it. It was the Iranians who blew it up.

Then you had Netanyahu last week say that an Iranian missile was just so close to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And he said, oh, it was so close and there’s a great danger that the Iranians will blow up all these holy sites — the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Iranians are that crazy. So watch out, it could happen.

So you have all these things lined up, and you have to believe that given the fact that right now Israel is run by these religious fanatics, given the fact that for decades these religious fanatics in America — the Christian Zionists — have been supporting Israel, given the fact that this war provides the perfect pretext and excuse to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, they’ll probably try something.

But when — I can’t say. It could be 2027. It depends on how the war goes. And also, the thing about these religious people is they believe in astrology, they believe in numerology. So if they were to do this, there has to be a ritual and there has to be an astrological alignment, right? So they have a plan, but I don’t have access to this information, so I can’t tell you. But they probably have a plan and they’ll probably enact a ritual involving a false flag in order to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque. That’s my guess.

JACK NEEL: That part really fascinates me, and I think we’ll touch into that later in the interview. But what would that trigger theoretically, the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Right. So I think they’ve already telegraphed the plan, which is they’ll pretend it’s an Iranian missile. And then they’ll do a controlled demolition of the mosque and they’ll blame it on the Iranians. And at this point, the war will be so confusing because Americans have sent in ground troops and the war is raging on multiple fronts where the Iranians are also destroying the oil refineries, the desalination plants of the Middle East. The whole world, especially Africa, is in a terrible economic situation. There might be a food shortage in Africa. There could be a famine in Africa.

And so the entire world is sort of distracted, right? So then the Al-Aqsa Mosque is blown up and people are like, what? What was that? What is the Al-Aqsa Mosque? Because people don’t have enough food to eat. There’s rioting in the streets. The grocery stores are empty. People are going to be like, okay, well, I don’t have a job and my bank account has gone to zero and there’s no food and everyone’s fighting each other. Like, who cares about the Al-Aqsa Mosque? Right.

JACK NEEL: Because it was an accidental destruction in theory. Do you think we’re heading toward nuclear warfare?

Nuclear Warfare and Political Transformation

PROFESSOR JIANG: I am convinced nuclear weapons will not be used in this war. And the reason why is, according to game theory, Iran, Israel, and the United States do not benefit at all from the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Okay, so let’s go with Iran. Iran could in 3 weeks build 10 nuclear devices because they have the uranium and the technology. The technology to build a nuclear weapon is actually open source. You can actually go online and find this information. It’s not that hard. If Pakistan can build a nuclear weapon, so can Iran.

But Iran’s not going to do that. And the reason why is that for them it’s very important to maintain the moral high ground. And also, the only way they can lose this war is if nukes start flying, right? So you have 10 nukes, you might destroy Israel, but then America has thousands of nuclear weapons to destroy you, right? So that’s not strategic. And the Iranians have demonstrated that they are very strategic and very thoughtful in their actions. They’ve shown a lot of restraint in this war so far. So Iran’s not that interested in using nuclear weapons. They probably don’t even want a nuclear weapon.

Israel is getting all it wants, right? Because Israel’s trying to achieve the Greater Israel Project. It’s trying to control the Middle East. So it needs America and Iran to destroy each other. Right now they’re trying to target Iran’s critical civilian infrastructure, including desalination plants, including power plants. In fact, Donald Trump has threatened to blow up every single power plant in Iran if he’s losing this war. Recently, the Americans blew up a civilian bridge. So as this war escalates, the Americans are going to blow up every single piece of critical civilian infrastructure in Iran, including bridges, power plants, reservoirs, and desalination plants. So that’s going to take a few years for Iran to recover. So Iran’s not going to be a threat to Israel in the long term.

America will send in ground troops into Iran at some point to win this war. It’ll be a quagmire for the Americans. They might send 100,000, they might send 500,000, who knows? But regardless of how many they send in, they’re still going to lose the war because Iran is much too big and the Iranians are much too determined, right? So it’ll be like another Vietnam, in which case Americans are forced out of the Middle East. The entire American military infrastructure then goes to Israel, right? Israel now becomes the dominant power in the Middle East. So from Israel’s perspective, you don’t even want to win this war. You don’t even want to participate in this war. You just want America and Iran to duke it out for as long as possible, right? So why use nuclear weapons?

If you’re Donald Trump, you’re trying to rebuild America and you don’t really care what happens in the Middle East. You win this war, great. You lose this war, I can deal with that. You care more about what happens in America. You care about using the national draft. You care about ICE. You care about election tampering in order to consolidate your power in America.

That’s the thing about war. War drives political transformation. And so Peter Hegseth yesterday fired 3 top military generals. You can do that in a war, because they’re not obeying you, they’re not following their orders, right? So war is a great mechanism of political transformation, and that’s what Donald Trump is focused on, right? So you want to drag this war out as long as possible because that gives you more power, right?

So there was a press conference between Vladimir Zelensky and Donald Trump, and basically a reporter asked Zelensky, “Hey, when are you going to retire, man? You’ve been president for how long?” And Zelensky’s like, “Well, we’re in a war, so we’ve suspended the constitution.” And Donald Trump’s like, “You can actually do that?” And Zelensky said to him, “Oh yeah, you like that, don’t you?” Right? So he’s telegraphing to you his intentions. They’re not joking here, right? So the longer this war drags on, the more that America is mired down in the Middle East, the more Donald Trump benefits politically and personally. So why would he use nuclear weapons?

Money as Alchemy and the Perfection of Slavery

JACK NEEL: Professor Jiang, a lot of what you predict is driven by economics. So before we get into your next major prediction, you said money is alchemy used by the elites to enslave us. Why do you think consumerism is the perfection of slavery? And why do you see money as alchemy?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Sure.

The Philosophy of Money: From Plato’s Cave to Capitalism

PROFESSOR JIANG: Okay. All right. So this is a really complicated question. So I want to introduce two philosophers to help us structure our discussion. The first is Immanuel Kant. What Immanuel Kant says is that there’s no objective reality. Everything is a creation of our imagination. So he differentiates between nōmena and phenomena. Nōmena are the things in themselves. The phenomena are the things to us. And so what we do every day is we participate in reality. We create reality because we filter reality using time and space. So time and space exists to us. They are what is called the ego. But time and space don’t actually exist outside of us. And so that’s a really important idea to understand, that reality is a hallucination. It’s a collective creation. So whatever we imagine reality to be, reality becomes.

So that’s the first idea. Second idea is Plato’s cave. So in his book, The Republic, Plato writes about the allegory of the cave. So imagine a cavern, and everyone, about a million people, are living there. They’re all lined up one by one, staring at a wall. And they’re chained to this wall, and their necks are shackled down, so they can’t even move their necks to look around them. They can only stare directly into the wall, and behind them are some people, they. Plato never clarifies who they are. It doesn’t really matter who they are, but what they do is, there’s a fire behind them and they take puppets and they reflect these puppets onto the wall. And so we, the only thing we can see is the wall. So we see these shadows and we think that this is reality itself.

We know that you and I know better, but the people inside the cave, because they’ve never been outside, they’ve never seen sunlight, they don’t understand the concept of shadows. So they think these shadows are reality itself. And so what they do is they give names to these shadows. They create stories out of these shadows. They create a religion out of these shadows. So what these shadows are, are a way to structure and direct and focus our attention. And in our world, that’s what money is.

Money is alchemy. It doesn’t exist outside of us. It’s only because we believe it has value. It has value.

The Vikings and the Original Social Currency

So now the question is, how did we get to this system? How was this system created? Well, believe it or not, but for the longest time, money was not an issue for people. So for example, let’s go to the Vikings. If you’re a Viking, what you did was you spent most of your time farming or fishing, but now and then you and your mates got together and you go and raided an Irish village or an English village for fun. And you would target monasteries because in monasteries there was a lot of gold. They would print books and then the book covers would have a lot of gold. Especially Bibles. And then they would take this gold and maybe sell it. They might capture some slaves and then they would sell it to the Ottomans or the Byzantines, whoever. And so they would make a lot of money in these raids. The moment they got back home, they spent all this money on a feast for the community. And that’s literally how people spent their money. They didn’t save it because there was no point.

What, I mean, you could save your money by digging a hole and putting all the gold in the ground, but why would you do that? That was pointless. What you cared about was your reputation among your peers. What you cared about was a community. What you cared about was leaving a legacy, a memory. And so the memory was not money. The memory was the stories. And that’s why they went and raided these Irish villages and these British villages, not because they want the gold. The gold was useful, but what was more useful to them was the stories that they could tell their friends about how they went over and killed a lot of people and did all these amazing things. That’s what their social currency was.

What they wanted to do was sit in their longhouses in the cold of winter and there’s a fire and they would tell each other these stories of, you know, this great hero who went to Iceland and found the colony there, and then he died for some silly reason. But they had all these great stories and we still have them today. The sagas, the Norse sagas. And they’re wonderful stories. And that’s how most people live their lives in human history.

1694: The Birth of the Modern Financial System

This changed at a very particular time in human history. The year is 1694. The reason why is The Bank of England was chartered in England at this time. 1688 is something called the Glorious Revolution. So think of the Glorious Revolution as a marriage between two Protestant empires, the British and the Dutch Republic. And at this time in history, the Dutch Republic were the wealthiest people in the world because they controlled the spice trade in the Far East. So their ships went to the Far East, collected spice, and then sold it throughout Europe. And spice at this time in history was the most valuable commodity in the world because it made your food taste better. You couldn’t actually use gold, but you could use spices. So spices were the most valuable commodity in the world, especially from the Far East. Cinnamon, nutmeg, peppercorn, these things.

The problem with the Dutch Republic is that it was inland. And so the Catholic Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish would come and conquer you. So there’s this real anxiety where they were generating so much wealth, but they had to protect this wealth. So they decided the best place to put your wealth was an island somewhere that no one can invade. And that was of course England. So you have this marriage between England and the Dutch Republic. And now the question then is, okay, you have all this wealth generated by the Dutch. But how do you use it? How do you store it? How do you make more wealth creation?

Calvinism and the Psychology of Wealth

And wait, sorry, I missed a very important point. Before, no one cared about wealth creation. There was no point. But suddenly the Dutch cared about wealth creation. And the reason why is they were Calvinists. So before the Protestant Reformation, everyone was a Catholic in Europe. And they believe that if I do good works, if I obey the church, I would go to heaven. So it’s called justification by works. If I just obey the Catholic church, I could go to heaven. But over time, the Catholic church started to abuse this privilege. It became very corrupt. It started to sell privileges to people. You know, if you were a terrible, terrible aristocrat, you committed all sorts of sins, but you had a lot of money, the Catholic Church will be like, “Oh, that’s fine. We’ll forgive you.”

JACK NEEL: And that’s indulgences?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Exactly. The word is indulgences. That is correct. And the idea of indulgences is that you don’t go to hell, you go to purgatory. And then you go to heaven because technically, you know, if you’ve done all this evil in the world, you should go to hell. But if you paid the Catholic Church enough money, the indulgence, then you could go to purgatory and shorten your stay there. And in order to build these monumental churches like St. Peter’s Basilica, the church was selling indulgences left and right to anyone. So it was this massive corruption scam.

And so obviously a lot of people would be very angry at this. And so people like Martin Luther and John Calvin, they started to question the authority of the church. And their main dispute, theological dispute, is you shouldn’t be able to go to heaven just because you have money or because you bribed the priest. You should go to heaven because you have faith. But then the question then is, how do you prove you have faith? And so John Calvin proposed the idea of double predestination. And the idea of double predestination is that at the beginning of time, before God created anything, he determined who would go to heaven and who would go to hell. That’s double predestination. So it didn’t really matter if you obeyed the Catholic Church, it really didn’t. The Catholic Church had no authority over you. So just ignore it and focus on your own internal salvation.

JACK NEEL: Right.

PROFESSOR JIANG: But then the question is, okay, then how do you know that you’re one of the elect? Well, because you’re successful in life. Because of your wealth. So the more wealth you generate, the more you know that God favors you, but it was important not to spend this wealth because then you show you are lustful, you are sinful. So this creates a very complex psychology where you are anxious to make as much money as possible, but you can’t spend any of it because you don’t want to show that you are sinful. And this is what led to the modern financial system, because now the Dutch Republic, everyone’s putting their money in the bank. And so the Dutch Republic can now take this wealth and then invest it in other places. And this is what leads to capitalism.

JACK NEEL: And why is wealth specifically a sign that you’re favored by God?

Wealth as Divine Favor

PROFESSOR JIANG: So the question is, how do you prove you’re one of the elect to yourself as well as to others? And the answer is through your success. Because at this time in history, people believe in God and everyone believes that God is a source of your luck. So if you have a good life, it means because you’ve been a pious person and God favors you. If you became a very wealthy person, that also shows you that God favors you. So wealth is the clearest indicator to the community that you’re a good person. Because before it was about storytelling, like how good of a storyteller were you? Now it’s about wealth creation. How good of a businessman are you?

JACK NEEL: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think it’s the concept of resourcefulness because the claim is that people throughout history didn’t value money, but they always thought that having resources was a sign that you were favored by the gods.

PROFESSOR JIANG: That’s right.

JACK NEEL: Okay.

The Origins of Transnational Capital and the Bank of England

PROFESSOR JIANG: Yeah, that makes sense. And they define resources differently in different types. So the Dutch Republic has all this wealth. It can’t spend it, but if this leaves in a bank, all this gold, the Spanish are going to come and steal it. So they transfer all this gold to England, which has a Royal Navy and which can protect this gold.

But now the question then is how do you ensure that this gold creates more wealth? Because it’s important to create wealth to show you are part of the elect. So in 1694, they created something called the Bank of England. And the idea of the Bank of England is very simple. This should be a private bank. Meaning if you put this gold into this bank, it’s your gold. It’s private because you have to prove to yourself and to God that you are wealthy.

And the deal is this: Parliament, the nation state, would borrow this money from you in order to finance wars. Because before, wars at this time were fought by mercenaries. So you need a lot of gold, a lot of capital. And so kings would borrow money from merchants usually. The problem is that the king could die, the king could lose the war, or the king could just be like, “I don’t need to pay you back because I’m the king and you’re not.” So there’s a real risk when you lend money to the king.

But now that you lend money to parliament, it’s safe because every person in a country is obligated to, must pay back the debt regardless of how poor this nation becomes. As long as the nation state is still standing, as long as parliament has authority, parliament must pay you back.

So the idea is the Bank of England has all this private wealth and now it lends this money — what we call money printing — to parliament in order for parliament to finance public works projects, finance wars, finance everything. And this led to the creation of the British Empire.

The Expansion of the British Empire and Transnational Capital

The problem with this is now Parliament needs to expand this wealth. And how do you do that? Well, you conquer other territories. You go start wars. And this is what led to the expansion of the British Empire. This is what led to the colonization of India. This is what led to the Opium Wars in China where Britain forced drugs upon the Chinese population. Because you’re constantly looking for new markets in order to extract wealth. And this is what creates the idea of transnational capital.

The first principle is the question of wealth for the purpose of wealth creation. No other ends. It’s not to make a better society. It’s not to make a better world. It’s not to improve the lot of humanity. It’s just wealth creation. And that’s all they care about. That’s number one.

Number two is it’s transnational, meaning what they care most about is the liquid movement of capital around the world. So wherever there’s an opportunity, they want to move that capital.

Transnational Capital and America’s Gilded Age

An example of course is America’s Gilded Age when America was rapidly industrializing. And so the City of London, the Bank of England shifted a lot of transnational capital to America. The problem with America though is Americans hated the British at this time and they hated transnational capital because they saw transnational capital as a source of all evil.

So what they did, which was very clever, is they had agents that they handpicked in order to promote transnational capital in America. And these people are called Johnny Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Commodore Vanderbilt. That’s how they became very wealthy. Because think about this, how Johnny Rockefeller came from nothing and before he died, he monopolized the entire oil industry in America. How did he do that? Just do the math. It’s impossible to monopolize an entire nation’s oil. You can monopolize maybe Ohio or Florida, sure, I can understand that. But when you monopolize the entire nation of America, that’s ridiculous.

So I think the best logical explanation is that transnational capital recognized the potential and backed him and gave him the financing to buy all his competitors, which makes the most logical sense. So that’s what transnational capital does. It’s only interested in wealth creation. It moves capital around from place to place. It has absolutely no loyalty to nation and it believes in open borders. It sees religion as a threat. It sees monarchies as a threat.

Transnational Capital and the Financing of Marxism

And most people don’t appreciate this, but transnational capital also financed the creation of Marxism. In two aspects. The first aspect is if you go and look at the life of Karl Marx, he was being bankrolled by Friedrich Engels. Friedrich Engels’ father was an industrialist. So this is transnational capital. And why would they finance Karl Marx? Karl Marx spent most of his life in Britain. So that’s the first example.

The second example is if you look at the Bolsheviks, this was an extreme political party in Russia that no one liked. Everyone thought these people are crazy, they’re fanatics, but they had access to transnational capital. They were financed by Wall Street. And so during the Bolshevik Revolution, transnational capital was bankrolling them so that they could hire mercenaries to fight the war. They could bribe foreign governments not to intervene. They could pay off generals of the White Armies. And that’s how they won the war with the help of transnational capital.

So this dichotomy between capitalism and communism, it’s all a false dialectic. It’s meant to deceive you. Ultimately, what transnational capital is interested in is seeking better investment opportunities. And Bolshevism made Russia a better investment opportunity for transnational capital. Because before you had the czar and you had the Orthodox Church, and both were opposed to transnational capital. They saw it as the Antichrist system. They still call it the Antichrist system.

JACK NEEL: Are you saying that communism was created by capitalists?

Communism as a Tool of Transnational Capital

PROFESSOR JIANG: Yes, in order to pave the way for the infiltration of transnational capital into the world. Because who opposes money? Well, the king opposes transnational capital because he doesn’t want the national sovereignty to be destroyed. Kings oppose transnational capital. Who else opposes transnational capital? Religious people, because they see money as a source of all evil. Like, “Guys, let’s not focus on making money. Let’s just focus on praying to God, on being good people.”

So with communism, communism is considered the apex of Enlightenment because it puts reason above everything else. It puts reason above God, country, and king. And no other philosophy did that before. So communism was crucial to the development and conquest of transnational capital.

JACK NEEL: Was it a controlled opposition for them? Pretty much. So it was made to be an enemy, so people promoted capitalism, which in turn promotes transnational capital.

The Philosophical Foundations of Transnational Capital

PROFESSOR JIANG: Right. So what we need to understand is for transnational capital to win, it needs to create an entire worldview, an entire religion, an entire philosophy so that it can infiltrate your mind. Because again, throughout most of human history, we didn’t care about money. We cared about the community. We cared about our status in the community.

So what transnational capital did was not only did it sponsor Marxism, but also sponsored other movements as well that were key to creating the world that we live in. One person that they sponsored was John Locke, who proposed that private property is an intrinsic right given to you by God. And this was new at this time. At this time in history, people were pious and they didn’t really care about private property. They cared about their faith. They cared about the community. They cared about the relationship with God. Now John Locke is saying that private property is something given to you by God, and therefore it is protected by God.

Another idea he promoted was something called empiricism, which is to say you can only know things that you experience. And this is again a radically different concept from religion, which is you should feel God in you. And there are these spirits, holy spirits around you. And John Locke is saying, “No, guys, you’re just hallucinating. You’re delusional. Things only exist if you can experience them yourself. You can’t just imagine things, you just can’t believe these things. You have to be able to see these things.”

And this gives us David Hume, who promoted the idea of skepticism, which is to say, “You know what, even things you see may not be true. You have to be skeptical about everything you believe because a lot of things you believe may just be a product of custom and memorization as opposed to reality itself.”

So he gives an example. Let’s just say you’ve seen 10,000 white swans. Now you can induce the idea of induction that all swans are white, but is that really true? Well, it’s not true because there are black swans — not that many, but there are — which would just say that all knowledge is based on induction. Because it’s impossible for you to see all swans. If you’ve seen 10,000 swans and they’re all white, you have to believe that all swans are white. But that’s not true. Which is to say that your inductive ability is very limited. So David Hume is questioning the very project of philosophy. He’s questioning the very project of Enlightenment and science.

Utilitarianism and the Materialist Worldview

So that’s Hume. Then you have Jeremy Bentham, and his idea is this. You can only know things that you experience. And even these things you experience, you cannot know to be true. So you can’t actually appeal to universal principles. So what’s the solution to this crisis? Utility. If it’s useful to you, it must be good. What is useful? It gives you pleasure, it must be good. How do you know money creation is good? Because money creation, you can buy things, and buying these things gives you pleasure. Therefore, you know it’s good.

And then from Jeremy Bentham, you have John Stuart Mill, his protégé. And John Stuart Mill takes this idea of utilitarianism and applies it to all society, which is to say, how can we judge whether or not social policy is good or not? Because it’s useful, because it appeals to our sense of pleasure. Therefore, feminism is good because it brings women into society. Therefore, liberalism is good because it empowers the individual. And all these ideas together then form the framework for our society.

But again, what’s important is these ideas are an outgrowth of transnational capital and its demand to control reality itself, our perception of reality itself, by making the world more materialistic, by making money the main organizing principle of reality, whereas before it might have been God or love or family or community.

JACK NEEL: Do you think people in the West are more free today than slaves were?

The Philosophy of Freedom, Love, and Consumerism

PROFESSOR JIANG: Yeah. So what I’ve argued before is that if you take the principle of empiricism, skepticism, and utilitarianism to its logical extreme, you end up with consumerism. And I’ve argued before that consumerism is the perfection of slavery because what makes us free — and I’m going to get a bit wonky here, okay? It might confuse you. So feel free to interrupt, feel free to ask me any clarifying questions.

But what makes us free is our connection to the divine. Because once you recognize that our ego is an illusion, time and space is an illusion, and what we are are psychic beings that are interdimensional, that are unified with the universal consciousness, that have access to God, then what you recognize is this: death does not matter. Death is a release. Our souls can escape our husk and return to the Divine. And we are only here to experience the world for what it is, which is a material world.

But at the end of the day, this material existence is just a small speck of our entire consciousness or of our entire existence of our soul. So don’t be so focused on material acquisition in this world, because once you leave it, you can’t take it with you. But what you can take with you are memories, experiences that shine a light on the universe. We’re here to shine a light on the universe by doing things, by engaging in activities that are not available to the Divine Consciousness. And one example is to fall in love with someone. You can’t do that up there because we’re all one, we’re all one being, we’re all unified.

But here, because we are trapped in our husk, our bodies, and there’s a Divine Light that shines in us — our divine light aspires to return to the divine, and the body traps us with these animal instincts, right? So the body wants sex, it wants money, it wants pleasure, but the divine spark wants unity, it wants coherence, it wants creativity, imagination. So these are two competing forces within us, and we’re trapped in this body and we believe that this body is who we are.

So how can we actually ignite that spark in us and connect more with the divine consciousness? And the answer is by finding another spark and finding connection with that spark. And then together you reflect each other’s light and then you grow and grow. And that opens your mind and connects you to divine consciousness while simultaneously you’re still living your life. That’s why love is important, right?

And Dante talks about this in the Divine Comedy, where love is about generosity, it’s about kindness, it’s about forgiving. So find someone you love and just love that person for the rest of your life. And that’s how you can truly be human. And that’s the path to enlightenment. That’s a path to freedom.

But without that, without believing in God, without love, we’re always trapped inside ourselves. And we try to escape this trap by indulging in material pleasures, which actually increases the strength of our prison. Freedom is to believe that you are both nothing and everything. Freedom is to believe that love conquers all. Love will set you free. That’s what freedom is.

Transnational Capital and the God of Money

JACK NEEL: I guess to understand how this relates to the future of where we’re going in the world — do the people making the decisions that are important to kind of unravel history over the next 100 years, do they believe in the — do they live their life based off consumerism, off of hoarding wealth, or do they live their life off of what you had referenced with prioritizing love?

PROFESSOR JIANG: So Transnational Capital is first and foremost focused on wealth creation. And that basically means creating more materialism in this world. So these people are still Calvinist, right? So Calvinism is what sparked this intellectual revolution, but over time this idea of wealth creation becomes an end to itself.

Because of the Enlightenment, before, you created wealth in order to be closer to God, to prove that God favored you. And then with the Enlightenment, with the Scientific Revolution, with secularism, materialism became an end onto itself. Wealth creation became an end onto itself.

And the reason why is, as long as people believe in God, there’s a check and a balance to wealth creation, right? Because we have to remember that we’re creating this wealth to show our faith in God, but what matters is our faith in God. But that’s problematic because maybe other people don’t really believe in God, right? So in China, we don’t really believe in God. In East Asia, we don’t believe in God, or maybe other people believe in different gods, or maybe people are not Calvinists. So if you really want to expand wealth creation, you have to make it a universal idea, right? And the way you do that is by making money itself the god.

The World in 2030: Systems Change and Systems Collapse

JACK NEEL: The next date I have here for your predictions is 2030.

PROFESSOR JIANG: Okay.

JACK NEEL: So in the year 2030, what does that look like?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Okay, so we’re going through a tumultuous period of systems change, which will ultimately lead to systems collapse. So let me explain to you what the system is today.

So transnational capital is a very important concept, right? But I want to show you how it creates this world and structures this world. So at the very core of our world is the idea of empire. And the empire, of course, is Pax Americana, basically the ability of America’s military to project power anywhere in the world, creating the aura of inevitability and invincibility. That’s the basis of everything. People’s fear of the empire.

And then the empire allows this game to be created. And these are the financiers. So this is transnational capital basically, but they create the game that we live in because again, money is not valuable. Money is just a mechanism to store and extract wealth, which is what? Which is our attention, our consciousness. Because our consciousness is the source of all reality. So if you control and focus a person’s consciousness, you can create reality itself. So money is a mechanism to focus our attention and then extract our attention to store it properly.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that I asked you to make a vase to sell. While you’re making this vase, you’re indifferent. You’re like, whatever, I don’t really care. So you listen to music, you’re watching TV as you make this vase, you’re not really attentive. Well, the vase is going to be pretty ugly, which means you can’t sell it for that much.

But let’s say for some reason you want to make the most beautiful vase in the world. You’re completely focused on it. You see a purpose and a meaning in creating this vase, maybe because you’re giving it to your mother or your wife or whatever, but you spend days and days just pondering, just focused on it. It becomes your life itself. It creates a sensation in you called flow, which is a concept coined by a psychologist named Csikszentmihalyi, but it’s the most creative stage anyone can achieve where you lose a sense of time and space itself, where you just focus on the act of creation so that you become the act of creation itself, right?

So a painter goes through this where a painter is drawing a picture and he or she becomes so enamored with this picture that he or she doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink water, doesn’t go to the bathroom because he or she’s so focused on it. That’s attention. And when you do that, whatever you create is going to be valuable, right? And then money is a way to store and extract that value. But what created this value was your consciousness, was your attention. And that’s a really important principle to understand.

So the finance people use money as a mechanism in order to extract and store your attention. And the way they do that is by making money universal, which means that everyone has to use it and money can be used for anything. That’s the idea of universality. And this creates the global economy. Because basically the entire global economy is run on the US dollar. It’s what facilitates trade, right? It’s why we go to work, it’s how we pay for things. So that creates a global economy.

But you cannot allow people to think this is how the system works because then people lose faith in this system, right? If people understand that money is just a currency, no different from monopoly money, then people aren’t going to work hard at it. So they need to create an artifice, a superstructure to disguise the fact and give meaning and value to money itself. And you do that by creating something called the rules-based international order — the UN, the World Trade Organization — and this becomes the substitute for the financiers who have the real power. And the financiers include Wall Street, City of London, The Federal Reserve, Bank of International Settlements. It’s one group, one group of people in different guises.

So now you have the rules-based international order and then you create culture, media, and education in order to brainwash or indoctrinate people into believing that this rules-based international order is the basis for reality itself, as opposed to our imagination.

And that’s why people are saying, “Oh, Donald Trump went to invade Iran. That’s against international law. He should be tried at Nuremberg. There should be a Nuremberg trial for Donald Trump.” That’s silly, man. I mean, it’s the empire that controls everything. But people, for whatever reason, believe there is a rules-based international order. If you defy it, the police will come and arrest you and put you on trial. They literally believe that.

But then you ask them, “Well, then who’s going to do that?” And they’re like, “Well, the United Nations.” Like, okay, does the United Nations have a military that can defeat the American military? It doesn’t make much sense, but they don’t really care. It’s their sense of reality itself. Because it’s been brainwashed into them through popular culture, through media like the New York Times and BBC, and through the education system, the universities basically. And then this creates the values and norms. So this is the superstructure of the world. Does this make sense to you?

JACK NEEL: I believe so. Can you summarize it one more time?

Plato’s Cave: A Summary of the System

PROFESSOR JIANG: All right. Let’s do it again. So think of Plato’s allegory of the cave, right? Where everyone is chained to the floor and they can only stare at the wall in front. The empire is what chained people to the floor and makes them think they’re powerless to resist.

But then you have people in the background creating the illusion, creating the reality itself with these puppets that are reflected off the fire onto the wall. These are the game masters. These are the financiers. And then when people look at this wall, they create a reality off it. They play a game of giving names to the shadows, of pretending there’s stories behind these shadows. And this is the economy, the global economy.

And then you have to explain, okay, how does this world work? Well, you can’t see the people behind you. So you say, well, it comes from God or a spiritual force. And that’s the rules-based international order. And then you need to indoctrinate children into the system. So you have teachers, you have propagandists, journalists, you have priests who teach children to believe the system the moment they’re born.

JACK NEEL: And those people believe it too, so obviously —

PROFESSOR JIANG: Right, right. Because they can’t see behind themselves. If they turn around, they see who’s really pulling the strings, but they can’t turn around. So they only stare in front.

Why Money Is Not Real

JACK NEEL: So transnational capital is trying to make us, or has made us believe that money is God. But what’s the — I know this is a complex topic, but what’s the single most important thing people need to know about money to know that it’s fake and something that they can —

PROFESSOR JIANG: Yeah. Really simple idea.

JACK NEEL: Okay.

PROFESSOR JIANG: So there’s a bank and people think that a bank is a place where they take the deposited money and they use it to fuel the economy by lending to entrepreneurs. And that’s what drives the economy. But here’s the problem though. You’re the bank. Depositors put $1 million into the bank. You take that $1 million and then you give it to entrepreneurs to open a restaurant. Question is, how much money is in the bank now? The answer is not zero, which is what the math says, right? The answer is actually $2 million. And you’re like, okay, that’s kind of stupid. Where does that come from?

It comes from early banking. It comes from Venice basically. So back then they didn’t have money. They had gold, right? So you put a million dollars of gold into the bank. Now the bank is going to lend this million dollars probably to merchants who engage in trade. But the problem is that you don’t want to physically give people the gold because it’s dangerous. It doesn’t really do anything. So what you do is you give them a receipt for the gold, right? So you say, a million dollar receipt for the gold.

JACK NEEL: Hmm.

The Parasite System: Intelligence, Crime, and Science

PROFESSOR JIANG: Does that make sense? Yeah. So now in your ledger, you have $2 million. Because that gold didn’t go away. But then you also create a receipt for that gold, which becomes currency in itself, as long as people are willing to believe that this contract has value. And that’s how money works.

Wars and the Global Economy

JACK NEEL: So how does this relate to the concept of, I guess, what happens in 2030 and why do wars— like, why are wars so important for the global economy?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Okay, so you have this system in place, okay? And this is the host. Let’s just call this a host. Now you need to extract value from this system and you do that through 3 major mechanisms, okay? You do it through intelligence, spies basically. You do it through crime and you do it through science.

And the example of course is Jeffrey Epstein who was at the epicenter of both intelligence networks, criminal networks as well as science networks, right? And this becomes the parasite system, right? Because once you create value, you have to extract it, right? And so these three things, intelligence, crime, and science is what allows you to extract value from this system.

So then the question then is who controls the parasite system? Well, it’s going to be transnational capital. Does it make sense so far? Okay. The problem with the system is if you are the host and you look at the system, you think this is not really fair, man. Why is it that these guys get to extract rent from everyone else? So you’re like, is it possible to create a new system in which case I’m the one extracting rent and not these guys, because all I have to do is become the game master. Right. Okay.

And so this idea, called elite overproduction. And this was coined by a historian named Peter Turchin. And his argument is this, eventually societies reach a point where power ossifies, becomes bureaucratic, in which case what’s really important is who controls the power as opposed to wealth creation. Because whoever controls the power is able to use government to extract rent from everyone else. But the problem is you have too many people in the elite and too few positions of power. So they start to compete against each other for these positions of power.

And then your question then is, okay, well, if the people in finance have all the power, who’s challenging them? Who wants their power? And the answer is the tech sector, Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley wants to be able to replace finance and become the game master of this world. And so what’s their main mechanism? Artificial intelligence, right? AI, because money is God, but so is AI. Because remember, God is the force that focuses and directs your attention. So money can do that, but AI is better because go back to this wall, right? Everyone’s with money. Everyone’s staring at the same wall. But with AI, this wall becomes individualized. So you’re staring at your own individual wall that speaks back to you. So that captures your attention even more.

Replacing Money with AI

JACK NEEL: So your thesis is transnational capital, the way they’ve designed our world, is that money is our god and that the only way to beat that system isn’t to take all their money, it’s to—

PROFESSOR JIANG: Well, they could take all the money.

JACK NEEL: It’s replace money.

PROFESSOR JIANG: That’s right.

JACK NEEL: With AI.

PROFESSOR JIANG: That’s right. Because you have to replace God with some other god. You can’t just not have God.

JACK NEEL: So where does that lead us by 2030?

The Civil War: Globalists vs. Nationalists

PROFESSOR JIANG: Okay, so once you understand this, okay, we understand what’s going on in the world, which is at the end of the day, there’s a civil war going on. Okay. And I would say there are 3 ways to conceive of the civil war. Okay.

The first way is just to see it as a struggle between the left and the right, which is how most people understand what’s going on in America, right? You’ve got this left and right divide, but you go deeper, it becomes one of globalists versus nationalists, right? So globalists are people who believe that the rules-based international order, the Transatlantic Alliance, NATO, United Nations, EU, are all worth preserving because they allow for elites around the world to congregate and to negotiate peaceful settlements.

But if you’re a nationalist, what you say to that is, no, that’s not true. What this global system allows the elite to do is steal money from the nation and funnel it to themselves. So the globalists are parasites, right? So you have all this corruption around the world. Why? Because the elite can take all this ill-gotten wealth and move it to Hong Kong, move to Dubai, move to New York, move it to London. That’s the root of all evil.

If you are not allowed to move money around, then they’re stuck taking care of their own people. They’re stuck rejuvenating their own nation. They’re forced to make their own home a better place because they have to live in it. But with transnationalism, with globalism, well, I can screw up my African country as much as I want because I’ll be able to move my money, my children, all my assets to London or Dubai.

And so there’s this huge conflict going on between the globalists and the nationalists. Okay. And then if you go deeper, it’s also a conflict between finance versus the tech sector. Okay. Silicon Valley, because finance wants to maintain money as a god and the tech sector wants to promote AI as the god. Okay. So this is a way I think you can frame all the conflict in the world.

And once we have this framing, we can actually see how things will progress where the tech sector is trying to replace finance, but finance is like, screw you. I’ve been in power for like hundreds of years. I’m not going to go away peacefully. So what’s going to happen is something called a rupture where nation states divide. Okay? Because this conflict is going to happen within nation states, not across nation states. And whichever nation is able to emerge out of this series of civil wars intact will prosper.

Okay, so 2030, we will see nations at civil war. America is going to be at civil war because Donald Trump represents the nationalists, MAGA, right? He represents Silicon Valley, the tech people, and he’s going to try to implement their vision. But the financial people are not going to go away quietly in the night. Would you, right? You’re going to fight to the end. And so you have this massive civil war break out in America, but not just America, Europe as well.

Think about why Donald Trump hates Europe so much. He sees Europe as a source of transnational capital, right? So civil war is going to break out in Europe as well. The EU, Brussels is completely controlled by transnational capital. But who is Donald Trump promoting in Europe? He’s promoting Poland, Hungary, Austria. He’s promoting these nationalist parties in Germany, AfD, Vox in Spain, Marine Le Pen’s party in France. That’s where the civil war’s going to be.

So the grand irony of all this is that Putin and Trump are aligned. They want to move the world towards a more nationalistic direction, and the globalists are the ones fighting back, right? So it’s not a war between America and Russia. It’s a war between the globalists in America who are aligned with the globalists in Europe, the globalists in China, the globalists in Russia versus the nationalists in these countries.

The Three Signs of Imperial Collapse

JACK NEEL: We’ve talked about the three signs that an empire is going to collapse is elite overproduction, financialization, and rat utopia, which is essentially the concept of quiet quitting where people feel like they can’t get ahead in life. All three of these are happening simultaneously right now in America, here and in Europe as well. Do you think we’re heading toward a global reset by 2030?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Right. So I think that a lot of people among the elite recognize that decline is happening and there’s no way around it because of these three reasons. Right. Elite overproduction. Rat utopia. Another word for rat utopia is the aging crisis, right? Where you have these old people who just won’t give up power. You’ve got people like Chuck Grassley in the Senate. He’s 94, I think. That’s ridiculous. Like what? You’re over 90 years old and you’re still sitting in the Senate? But so you’ve got these baby boomers who refuse to surrender power, which makes the society more ossified. There’s no social mobility anymore. So that’s the idea of rat utopia.

And then you have financialization, which enables the elite to be parasites, right? They do nothing to collect rent from everyone else. That’s what financialization is. If you open a business in America, your return on average might be 2%. You put your money in the stock market, it’s 5%. Who’s going to go start a business? But it’s starting a business that creates wealth. That generates jobs, that makes America strong. Okay.

So America, the entire world, it suffers from these three issues. And so there’s a decline. So there have been different conceptions to deal with this. Okay. There’s a concept called managed decline, another called the Great Reset. Okay. But it’s the same idea, which is in a time of decline, how do we, the elite, maintain our privilege and our power? And that’s an impossibility because there’s too many of you parasites. Okay. Only one faction can win out.

So that I think is the real issue facing the world where the world is in decline, wealth is decreasing, and the elite are determined to maintain their power and status and stamp out any counter-elites or revolutionaries who want to wrest this power away from them. And that’s what’s happening behind the scenes in most major countries.

A Market Crash Before 2030?

JACK NEEL: Would you guess that we’ll have a major market crash by 2030?

PROFESSOR JIANG: I think we’ll have a major market crash by the end of this year. I don’t think we have to wait till 2030. You’ve got massive asset inflation all around the economy. You’ve got a private credit bubble, you’ve got an AI bubble, real estate bubble. I mean, it’s just one bubble after another.

And so what transnational capital has to do is it needs to destroy a lot of this wealth in order to exert more control over society. Right. And what I mean by that is, again, remember, this is really important. The point of the system is to store and extract wealth by focusing your attention and making you work hard. But if you have a lot of money in the bank, you’re not going to work hard. If your dad has a lot of money in the bank, you won’t work hard. So they have to destroy this wealth in order to create more wealth.

Trump’s America in 2030

JACK NEEL: What do you think America will look like in 2030? You’ve said Trump is not trying to be president. He’s trying to be king. Do you think Trump will be reelected for a third term?

Trump’s Third Term and the Greater North America Project

PROFESSOR JIANG: I think Trump’s going to— will get his third term. If I were to bet good money on it, in 2028, I think Trump stays in office. How he will do so, I’m not completely sure of. And there are different possibilities. It’s possible there’s a war going on, in which case he can suspend the Constitution. It’s possible that he runs as vice president and his son, Don Jr., runs as president, and then Don abdicates. There’s actually nothing in the Constitution that prevents people from doing that. What prevents people from doing that is convention, morality, norms, values. Donald Trump doesn’t care, right? He’s fighting for his existence. He’s fighting for his life because everyone knows once Donald Trump leaves office, what will happen? The Democrats will use everything that they have to destroy this guy and his entire family for sure. 100%.

So there are different possibilities, but I think in 2028, Donald Trump will still be president of the United States, in which case the question then is, what does he want to accomplish? Well, what he wants to do is this. He wants to transition America away from the global economy, which case the global economy becomes a parasite on America, right? Because America’s the one paying for all the defense. American consumers are the one buying all the products. America is the one who’s financing the entire global economy. So he is like, why are we doing that? Screw that, right?

So what he wants to do is make America into a North American continental fortress. He wants to absorb Canada, Greenland, Mexico. The countries he’s talked about that he’s pissed off are what? Denmark, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras. That’s the entire freaking North America. That’s something called the Greater North America, which Peter Hextep has talked about and which, if you go back to the 1930s, it’s part of something called the Technocracy Movement, the TechNet, right?

And the grand vision is, if we create this Greater North America, we have labor from Mexico, we have resources from Canada, we are self-sufficient, and the rest of the world will beg us for our resources. And then we’ll be very wealthy. And this vision is correct. I completely agree with this vision. I think Donald Trump is correct to try to achieve this vision.

The problem is this means destroying the current status quo. This means destroying transnational capital. This means upsetting the current elite. So they’re going to fight you tooth and nail. For example, Canada is not a nation state. Canada is a resource colony of the City of London. It’s controlled by the British monarchy. In which case, if America would absorb Canada into Greater North America, you’re basically declaring war on Britain. Mexico’s the same situation, right?

What is transnational capital? Transnational capital are the ones financing drug trafficking around the world and money laundering, right? That’s a source of transnational capital’s wealth where during the Opium Wars, the British were selling opium to China and then funneling it through Hong Kong. Money laundering through Hong Kong. And now they have all these offshore money laundering operations around the world.

Why is Trump investing so much naval power in the Caribbean? Because he said that he wants to disrupt the drug trade and everyone’s like, that’s ridiculous. Well, what if it’s true? What if that area is a source of a lot of global drug trade? Which then fuels the transnational capital elite. If you destroy that trade, you not only hurt transnational capital, but you also hurt the deep state who are opposed to Donald Trump, the CIA, right? But again, they’re not stupid. Transnational capital knows exactly what’s happening and they’re not going to surrender all their power and wealth to this one guy, right?

Billionaires as Agents of Transnational Networks

JACK NEEL: This is a dumb question, but you said earlier that you could destroy a data center and wipe out someone’s bank account. If you were a multibillionaire, do they have data centers and that technology on various islands, theoretically, like hidden places?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Right. So again, money is a made-up concept, right? So if you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? You’re a billionaire because you’re an agent of different transnational networks. So theirs can’t be destroyed, right? Because the source of their wealth is their power, and the source of their power are these transnational networks that support them, right?

So the question is, where did Jeffrey Epstein get his money? Why is Jeffrey Epstein a billionaire? And honestly, no one knows. If you just look in his background, he was making a lot of money as an arms trafficker, and he made a lot of money when Robert Maxwell died. And it seemed as though he inherited a lot of money from Robert Maxwell. And that’s not how money works. You don’t inherit the money, you inherit the transactional network.

And so the question then is, let’s just speculate. And I don’t know for sure, but what is a potential source of Jeffrey Epstein’s wealth? And if I were to guess, I would guess maybe the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Who are these guys? Well, these guys are religious Jews who came from Eastern Europe, Belarus, Ukraine, that area. They immigrated to America in the beginning of the 20th century, and they own all the real estate in Brooklyn. Why? Because they pool their resources and they believe they have a messianic calling to save humanity. So they take their wealth and they store it in real estate. Imagine how much wealth they’ve generated this past century, right? They started buying real estate at the beginning of the 20th century in Brooklyn, and now they own all of it basically. I don’t know if it’s all of it, but it’s most of it. And then they can use this real estate wealth to do what? Well, they can promote their agenda in Washington, DC. They can find agents like Jeffrey Epstein to promote their agenda. So that’s what billionaires are. Billionaires are agents, representatives of different transnational networks.

Another point I will make is this. We know for a fact that Leslie Wexner gave power of attorney to Jeffrey Epstein, right? So the idea is once you have power of attorney, you can do anything you want with this guy. You can actually put this guy in an institution if you want, but you have control over all his finances. And you’re like, who does that? Like, you’re a billionaire and you’re still sane, you don’t have any issues, but you sign over power of attorney to this guy, Jeffrey Epstein. And it doesn’t make any sense unless you think that they’re actually just agents of a transnational network. And it doesn’t matter who the agent is.

Christian Nationalism, AI, and the Future of America

JACK NEEL: You said the Greater North America Project. Do you think America will become a theocracy by 2030?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Right. So again, there’s a civil war going on and it’s about alliances. Transnational capital is the greatest power right now. And so you need to form an alliance to counter transnational capital in America. An alliance that seems to be forming right now is an alliance between the tech sector and Christian nationalism, as exemplified by two individuals, Peter Thiel and JD Vance, right? So Peter Thiel is a tech billionaire, and he goes around talking about the Antichrist a lot. And there’s talk of how you can actually create God through AI. You can make AI sentient, and then it becomes God itself. So there’s perhaps a convergence between Christian nationalism and AI.

Think of their vision for the world as this. Think of The Handmaid’s Tale, but digitized. The Handmaid’s Tale is a book written by Margaret Atwood, and it was made into a TV series, and it’s set in the future after America has fought a disastrous civil war, and the population is very low. So what they need to do is create as many babies as possible. And so what happens is that powerful men are assigned a harem. And these handmaids are basically sex slaves to these powerful men who are often in the military, right? But behind this is the idea of Christian nationalism, which is that America should become a theocracy because how do you explain the system? And the answer is because it is God’s will, because this is a system that allows us to most worship God. Women should be at home making babies. That’s God’s role for them. Be fruitful and multiply. That’s what it says in the Bible.

And then what you do is you add a digital component to it where every handmaid is given a microchip, and this microchip becomes almost like a guardian angel, or maybe a soulmate, and this microchip is digital ID, digital currency, digital surveillance, right? At the same time, it’s talking to you all the time, giving you comfort, giving you solace in yourself. ChatGPT is doing exactly that where whatever fantasy you have, ChatGPT just reinforces your fantasy. It doesn’t actually negate your fantasy, it just reinforces your fantasy. So that, I think, is a future that they want. I’m not saying they will achieve it, but what I’m saying is that’s the future that they’re moving towards.

The Global Conflict: Nationalists vs. Globalists

JACK NEEL: The concept you’re talking about leads into what 2045 could look like. Before we get to 2045, there are 3 concepts. I’m curious if you think it’s important to talk about these. So it’s America collapses, Russia takes Odessa, NATO collapses, and then there’s a conflict between Japan and South Korea. Do you think any of those?

PROFESSOR JIANG: Yeah, it’s all aligned together, right? Where it’s all part of this larger framework between a globalist and a nationalist, because NATO represents a globalist, right? So how do you destroy NATO? You force them to fight a war in Russia they can’t possibly win. So Europe is militarizing. Reintroducing the draft. Germany just announced that if you are between the age of 17 and 45 and you’re a man, you cannot leave Germany for more than 3 months without permission. They just announced that, I think, today. So Germany is moving towards a war setting, and they’ll probably introduce the draft at some point.

Because again, we have to understand this is a war between the globalists and the nationalists. The globalists want to maintain power. They’re willing to sacrifice anyone in order to maintain power. The nationalists want to assert their national sovereignty, right? So Putin is clearly on the side of nationalists, and NATO represents the globalists. And this conflict is going to spill all around the world. It’s going to lead to civil war in America. And the civil war will never stop because transnational capital is really powerful. They’ll have resources everywhere around the world.

So imagine in 2030 to 2040, these 10 years, how the world is structured. You have Donald Trump trying to establish the Greater North America Project, and you have Russia establishing something called the Third Rome. That is your eschatology where they think that Moscow is the Third Rome after Rome and Constantinople, and there’ll be no Fourth Rome. But then you have Pax Judaica rising, and Pax Judaica is where transnational capital will base a lot of their strength and resources, right?

Because think about this, where if you’re a trillionaire or billionaire and you’re looking for the next great investment opportunity, the Middle East is the best place. Why? Because the war will have devastated the entire Middle East. And so you will have to rebuild. The Middle East is the hub of all trade in the world. So if you are Russia and you’re trying to access Africa, you have to go through Israel, the Levant, right? And third of all, you have all this oil. And what is oil good for? Powering data centers, which allows you to build the AI surveillance state. So transnational capital is like Pax Judaica, Greater Israel. That’s where we want to put our money, right?

So transnational capital reasserts itself in Pax Judaica, Judea, but it’s not going to give up the world. It’s still going to fight Russia, it’s still going to fight America, right? It’s still going to exert authority over East Asia, right? So transnational capital is very good at stoking conflict, at creating chaos. That’s how they generate their wealth, right?

But remember, as this is shaping, it’s all a dynamic situation in that each nation is trying to assert its sovereignty control over the entire world, and that’s going to lead to a lot of conflict. But then also we have to remember that a lot of these nations in Latin America will not enjoy being taken over by the Americans. So you’ll have insurgencies funded by Pax Judaica, transnational capital, right? Europe’s not going to go away. It’s going to continue to fight Russia. And in a time of nuclear war, there will be no World War I situation where armies just clash in the night and kill each other. What it’s really about is trying to use misinformation, use propaganda, use psychological warfare to undermine the domestic elite, right?

So going back to Europe, Europe’s going to break out in a civil war between the right and the left, right? The left will support the globalists, the right will want to assert national sovereignty. And Europe will become a proxy area. And then East Asia will also be in a similar situation. And at the same time, the transnational elite will try to undermine both Russia and America by funding insurgencies, by creating civil war. So it’s going to be a very chaotic situation.

JACK NEEL: So do they think that America will collapse by 2030, or roughly like 10 years from now?

PROFESSOR JIANG: The goal is for America to collapse because by collapsing America, you can reset America, right? So once America collapses, all this wealth is destroyed, then it’s easier for you to move your capital back into America and buy things on the cheap, right? You can access their— because America has a lot of wealth. So New York, Boston are destroyed, but you know what? America still has water, oil, resources, land.

JACK NEEL: So do you predict that will happen? Or that’s just their interest?

PROFESSOR JIANG: I think these people, the elite, are not as smart as they think they are. I think everything’s going to blow up in their face. I think transnational capital is in decline. I think their empire is over. I think that transnational capital will be dead in 10 years’ time.

JACK NEEL: So by 2045, and this is where it gets interesting, what do you think happens in 2045?

PROFESSOR JIANG: I think….

[Part 2 coming….]

Related Posts

• Bialik’s Breakdown: w/ Channeler Lee Harris -Part 2 (Transcript)
• Scott Ritter: Russia Threatens Strike on Finland & Baltic States (Transcript)
• PBD Podcast #778: Who Is Sadhguru? (Transcript)
• Larry Johnson: Trump’s Naval Blockade & Ceasefire Collapse (Transcript)
• Prof. Mohammad Marandi: What Really Happened in Islamabad (Transcript)