In Part 2 of his interview with Jack Neel, Professor Jiang explains why he believes elites may stage a fake alien invasion, why money no longer works as a tool of control, and how an AI bubble collapse, planned blackouts, and a national draft could reshape America. He also discusses Donald Trump and the Stockholm syndrome, the engineered 2008 financial crisis, cryptocurrency as a workaround for the US debt, and why pattern recognition drives his geopolitical predictions. This interview was premiered on October 3, 2026. Read the full transcript of this interview below:
Why a Birth Draft Won’t Happen
JACK NEEL: (00:00:00 – 00:00:05): Did you want to address the birth draft or the nuclear war, or did you want to go for aliens?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:00:06 – 00:00:08): Okay. Okay. The idea of the birth draft. Okay.
JACK NEEL: (00:00:08 – 00:00:09): Right.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:00:09 – 00:00:09): Okay.
JACK NEEL: (00:00:09 – 00:00:16): And just to restate the idea, governments would introduce a birth draft where people are forced to have kids. Yeah.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:00:17 – 00:01:07): So you would only introduce a birth draft if you lack labor. Okay, so the idea is humanity has been depleted so much that you need to force women to have lots and lots of kids. So, think of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Okay, that’s really what you’re referring to, right? A Handmaid’s Tale world where women are seen as reproductive devices. That won’t happen.
And the reason why is there are places in the world where the population is booming, okay? And these places are Africa, the Middle East, and India. These places will suffer from mass migration over the next 20 years.
JACK NEEL: (00:01:07 – 00:01:08): Why?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:01:08 – 00:02:44): Because they’re completely screwed. All right, so first of all, these places are all heavily overpopulated. Second of all, they lack water, they lack resources. Africa, Middle East, India, they suffer from drought. And third of all, these places cannot sustain their populations. They require access to cheap energy as well as fertilizer.
Guess what this war in the Middle East is doing? It’s cutting off fertilizer and cheap energy to these places. Over time, you’ll have starvation and famine, especially in Africa, which will cause civil war, which will cause mass migration northwards to Europe, right?
So you could, if you lack labor, choose to implement a birth draft. But if you got these hundreds of millions of poor people fleeing famine in Africa and elsewhere, you don’t need a birth draft. You can just absorb this immigration and you will absorb this immigration because you need this population in order to work as slaves for the elderly. You need people to take care of the elderly. You need nurses, right? You need home care, you need cheap labor. And so you will just choose to let these immigrants into your country.
Empires and Trade Routes
JACK NEEL: (00:02:46 – 00:03:06): Yeah, I think an important concept to understand— I believe you’ve covered this, and correct me if I’m wrong about it— but the way you used to grow an empire was expand land, get control of more resources. But today it seems like it’s import people, right?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:03:06 – 00:03:21): The easiest way to grow an empire is actually to control trade routes. Okay, okay. So the reason why you don’t go after resources is it’s a pain in the ass to actually mine, control, and develop these resources. You’re better off just being a pirate, right?
JACK NEEL: (00:03:21 – 00:03:22): So maritime is more important.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:03:22 – 00:03:39): That’s right, that’s right. You control access points, you control roads. Okay, that’s what the Mongol Empire did, that’s what the Roman Empire did, that’s what the British Empire did, that’s what all empires do. That’s what empires are. Empires are able to exert control over key maritime choke points.
JACK NEEL: (00:03:41 – 00:03:50): Now, I never grasped onto that until now, but that makes sense. There’s a popular trend online about a year ago. It was, “All roads lead to Rome.” Yeah, I don’t know if you saw that.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:03:50 – 00:03:50): That’s right.
JACK NEEL: (00:03:51 – 00:03:52): That references this idea.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:03:52 – 00:04:08): Yeah, that’s what empires do. Empires, they facilitate trade, so, and they build roads, they build ports in order to facilitate trade. And they collect the tax based on trade. And that’s just the easiest way to run an empire and to grow it.
Why Money Is Fake
JACK NEEL: (00:04:10 – 00:04:12): So you think elites will stage an alien invasion?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:04:14 – 00:04:32): Okay, so let me explain how power works for us to appreciate why the elites must stage an alien invasion. So people don’t appreciate this, but money is fake. Okay? Money doesn’t do anything.
JACK NEEL: (00:04:32 – 00:04:33): Okay?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:04:33 – 00:04:55): So let’s go back to the time of Sumerians. So for most of human history, people practice egalitarianism. Why? ‘Cause there was not enough people to go around. There might be 50 people, 20 people. You couldn’t have an elite because everyone had to work in order to sustain the village. But as the population grew, you had an elite.
JACK NEEL: (00:04:56 – 00:04:56): Why?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:04:56 – 00:10:44): In order to manipulate the land in order to feed more people. And that usually involves irrigation, canal building, okay? So now you need to divert part of your population from the fields to canal building in order to grow your city, to grow your population. But you need to feed them. So how you fed them was by using ration cards. And that’s the birth of writing. Does that make sense? Ration cards.
So rather than you grow your own food and then feed your family, you go work in the canals and we’ll give you ration cards.
So we are now facing a huge monetary problem. And the huge monetary problem is there’s way too much money in the system. So imagine back to Sumeria, if they for whatever reason decided to print too many ration cards, no one would work anymore because they’d be like, “Wait a minute here, I have 100 ration cards for one day, which means that now I can sell it to my friends, which means I can give to my kids. My kids don’t have to work anymore. I need to save my ration cards. I get 10 ration cards. I only need to use 1 a day. I got 9. So I’ll just let my kids inherit my ration cards,” right? You have too many ration cards, the system breaks down.
Same thing today where you have too much money flowing around and the system breaks down. Why are young people like, “Screw this system, I’m not going to work for the man, I hate my corporate gig, I’m going to go gamble on cryptocurrency”? The reason why is they think their parents are rich, right? It’s very common for these baby boomers, these middle-class baby boomers to be sitting on $3 million, $5 million in the bank cash. They have these stock investments that are worth a lot of money. They have their own house, which they think is worth a lot of money. So they think that my children, my grandchildren are good, which means they don’t have to work. All right?
In this scenario, it’s hard for the elite to exert authority and pressure on the population, in which case you need to destroy this wealth. And historically, there have been 2 ways to destroy a lot of wealth really quickly. The first is through financial collapse, which I think is coming, and then war. Okay?
But when you do these things, when you destroy wealth because you have no choice in the matter, otherwise your population will not work, you have a problem. How do you control people now, right? Because when people see their wealth destroyed, they get very angry, they get very emotional, and they might rebel against you. So you need an event, you need a reason to corral the population and make them obey you. And there are different possibilities. Okay? There are different possibilities. So let’s just list them. Okay?
One is a great enemy that you must fight to liberate humanity. And before, you had things like fascism, communism. Today you have China. The problem with China is no one is afraid of China, okay? It doesn’t sell. You say to the American people, “The Chinese are going to come and take us over,” and the American’s like, “I was at school and there was this Chinese kid in my class and he was not a threat to me. And have you seen a map? China’s kind of far away, man.” It doesn’t sell, man. Communism sold. The Nazis sold, okay? The Islamic terrorists sold, but not China. It doesn’t sell, all right? And we can go over the reasons why, but China does not sell. It will never sell. So China is not on the table, okay? So this external threat, this great enemy, they can’t manufacture, right?
Another possibility is the promise of paradise, right? So that’s how communism works. The idea is you sacrifice for 20 years and then we will achieve abundance and then we’ll have paradise on earth. And that is what AGI is, right? If you think about it, AGI is a promise of eternal salvation and redemption if we just invest in it enough today. So let’s just go all in in AGI and then we’ll be good. This doesn’t work either because people hate data centers. Okay? People hate not only data centers, but people hate Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk. Okay? These people are not charismatic. People refuse to follow them to heaven. So AGI doesn’t work.
Now you’re like, “What are my other options?” So aliens may or may not work, but they’re kind of desperate. China’s not working, AGI’s not working. Let’s try aliens and hope for the best.
JACK NEEL: (00:10:45 – 00:10:47): And you mean as the distraction for—
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:10:48 – 00:12:09): Let’s go over the logic. The system of money as a means of incentive and control, it’s no longer holding because there’s too much money in the system. And there’s really no value in money. Okay, I mean, honestly, in the ’70s and ’80s, a dollar would be worth a lot. If you offered a kid a dollar to do a newspaper route, he’d be very happy. Now, if you offer the kid $100 a day to do a newspaper route, he probably will say no. Okay. I mean, most kids.
So the value of money has gone way down and people say, “Well, it’s inflation.” No, no. It’s just people’s sense of money is no longer as strong as it used to be. Money is no longer seen as valuable as before. Okay. And we can go over the reasons why. Okay. But what kids want to do nowadays is make as much money as possible within a month or a year and then retire. That is the new American dream. Whereas before it was understood that you needed to work hard for 40 years and then you could be rich. Am I wrong?
JACK NEEL: (00:12:10 – 00:12:11): It’s very accurate.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:12:11 – 00:13:09): Yeah. Okay. And that just shows you money no longer works as a means of control. Okay, so in order to reassert the power of money, in order to reassert the power of the elite, you need to destroy a lot of wealth. So you need to cause a lot of destruction, right? But once you cause this destruction, you need to impose a new mechanism of control.
And there are different possibilities. The first possibility is an external enemy that the people can rally around. They want that to be China. It’s not working. Or the dream of a paradise, and that’s AGI. That’s not working either. Okay, so another possibility is an alien invasion to make people afraid to create a one-world government, because only a one-world government can respond to an alien invasion.
Are Aliens Real?
JACK NEEL: (00:13:10 – 00:14:21): And you think aliens are real?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:14:22 – 00:14:23): I don’t think aliens are real.
JACK NEEL: (00:14:23 – 00:14:24): How would they do that?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:14:26 – 00:17:32): So that’s a really good question, okay? But let’s go over what we know about aliens so far. So, not a lot. Not a lot. Okay. So, but for decades, there were stories of alien abduction of people in rural Kansas being abducted by little green men. Okay. So there’s quite a few stories like that. There have been lots of reports of spacecraft that defy the laws of physics, defy the laws of gravity. And often it’s these military pilots who witness this spacecraft that is able to travel and accelerate at an incredible speed, and that defies his understanding of modern physics.
We also hear people like Tucker Carlson talk about how the spacecraft are actually embedded in the oceans and they come out of the oceans. Okay, so, and the White House has been talking about UFO disclosure for the past few months, and they say that they will actually disclose the UFO files at some point. So this is what we know, which is not a lot.
So I don’t think aliens are real. And before, I used to believe aliens were real because when I was a young person, when I was a teenager, I read a lot of science fiction. I watched a lot of Star Trek and I played a video game called StarCraft. And I was really big into aliens. I really wanted to explore the cosmos. And now I think it’s all nonsense.
And the turning point was when I realized the moon landing was faked, when we didn’t actually go to the moon. Lots of evidence suggests we did go. There’s lots of evidence we did not go. Okay, but let me give you my reasoning as to why we didn’t go.
Usually, my first reason is usually when there’s a major technological breakthrough our world changes dramatically. So think of World War II, the Manhattan Project, and how that led to the computer revolution, the transistor revolution, and how it basically led to the world that we live in today, right? Nothing came out of the moon landing revolution. Nothing. They lost all the technology, all the telemetry data, and the video footage. They lost it all. We have to start from scratch. Okay, so the fact that we didn’t have major consumer innovations that came out of the NASA space missions makes no sense to me.
JACK NEEL: (00:17:32 – 00:17:32): Filmmaking.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:17:35 – 00:19:32): Okay. I mean, sure, that’s point one. Point 2 is, for the past 50 to 70 years, depending on who you talk to, there’s been no major breakthrough in physics, theoretical physics, right? So if we’re able to go to the moon, it’s often because the theoretical physics have enabled us to develop the technology to go to the moon. So my question is, okay, if you look at the Manhattan Project, there were certain breakthroughs in theoretical physics which enabled us to build a nuclear bomb. But why is it that the moon landing did not provide new insights into physics? That makes no sense to me.
And I know you can cover up the technology, but you can’t cover up the theory, because scientists need to work in an open environment. Okay, and that’s why I also don’t believe we have secret alien technology, because if we did have secret alien technology, that would change your understanding of theoretical physics, which would be discussed in academia, not in the general public, but among elite members of science. And no one’s— and it’s not being discussed, which tells me there’s been no secret alien technology discovered in our lifetimes. We would see changes in theoretical physics. We have not.
So that’s why I don’t think aliens exist. That’s why I think the moon landing was faked. And that’s why I think we don’t have access to secret alien technology because there’s been no real changes in our everyday lives brought about by this technology. And we haven’t seen any real changes in our understanding of the cosmos in theoretical physics.
JACK NEEL: (00:19:34 – 00:19:34): Right.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:19:36 – 00:19:42): Yeah. So I think aliens are fake. And so they’ll fake an alien invasion.
A Fake Alien Invasion or a Fake Messiah?
JACK NEEL: (00:19:42 – 00:19:53): Do you think they would be more likely to fake an alien invasion or more likely to fake maybe some non-real messianic figure like a messiah?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:19:55 – 00:22:06): That’s a really good question. And I think there may be a blurring of these 2. So if you are able to fake an alien invasion, you can also fake the return of God, the return of Jesus. Okay? I mean, just from a logistics organization perspective, it’s really the same project.
So I think we’re moving towards is a period of tremendous suffering, tremendous agony brought about by a perfect storm of crises. Okay? You have financial collapse, but you also have the possibility, the very strong possibility of blackouts in the United States very soon. I’m not sure if you’ve seen this, but Donald Trump, if you look at his White House statements, his major concern is not the war in Iran or the war in Ukraine or a possible war with China. The White House has been saying that the major threat is to the homeland, domestic security. Okay, and what do they mean by that? They usually mean attacks on American infrastructure, which includes the electricity grid, which includes data centers, which includes the financial system.
So the reality is that right now Americans are very unhappy with the way things are. You’ve got runaway inflation, gas prices are going to go will skyrocket. The economy is entirely built on the AI bubble. Once that collapses, you’ll have millions of people losing their jobs and livelihood. So you need to distract people, you need to shift the blame, and false flag attacks on the electricity grid makes perfect sense, I think. Right? If people—
JACK NEEL: (00:22:06 – 00:22:10): That’s the one thing people actually care about is their electricity going up.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:22:10 – 00:22:40): Well, you starve without electricity. You can’t— imagine if you live in New York City. Okay, we’re in New York City now, right? Do you know what would happen if there was a blackout? You would starve, right? Your fridges don’t work. All the food goes rotten in a day. Where are you going to get your food from? And also, by the way, you have 10 million people in New York City, all who need access to food and water.
Planned Blackouts and the 2028 Election
JACK NEEL: (00:22:41 – 00:22:42): Do you think there will actually be a blackout?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:22:43 – 00:23:00): I think they’re planning it. Yeah. I think if you looked at the recent White House statements, they have basically foreshadowed or forecasted the possibility of blackouts. Yeah.
JACK NEEL: (00:23:00 – 00:23:05): Do you think that’ll be 2027, 2028?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:23:06 – 00:24:04): I think that’s a good timeframe. I think it’ll be soon, possibly around the midterms, possibly around the general election in 2028.
Right now, people don’t appreciate this, but when a politician like Donald Trump really screws up, meaning he takes the United States to this unwinnable war in Iran, when he is threatening to invade Canada, when he is causing all this domestic turmoil in the United States. Again, this is human psychology people don’t appreciate. But voters, people become even more emotionally attached to him. Does that make any sense to you? They call it the Stockholm syndrome, right? Right.
Donald Trump and the Stockholm Syndrome
JACK NEEL: (00:24:04 – 00:24:08): Where— so when he’s painted as evil, people like him more is what you’re saying?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:24:08 – 00:25:58): No, people don’t like him, but people are now dependent on him, right? Right. Because the Stockholm syndrome is these bank robbers in Sweden, they go rob a bank and they hold the hostages. They have hostages for a long time. And over time, what they discover is the hostages are more attached to them than they are to the police. They see the police as a threat now.
Okay, so it’s very weird, but we have lots of examples of this where these women who suffer from domestic abuse, they love their husbands even more. Not because they like their husbands, but it’s because they are now emotionally dependent on their husbands as a source of security and safety. Right? Because I know it sounds weird, it’s very hard to explain what’s going on, but I think that we as humans, when we are afraid, we want security. And so we will latch onto the person who we feel can provide security. And that often means a thug, that often means a gangster, right? And Donald Trump is a gangster.
Okay, so imagine we’re in 2028 and the United States is completely and utterly f***ed because this war in Iran has gone sideways. There are now ground troops in Iran. Maybe not a lot, maybe 10,000, okay? But they’re kind of trapped and there’s a draft being called and there are protests all around the United States calling for Donald Trump’s impeachment. If you are just an average American, okay, and you see this entire world going to s*** and you have a choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who would you pick?
JACK NEEL: (00:25:59 – 00:25:59): The gangster.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:26:00 – 00:26:14): The gangster. Okay. Now let me ask you this question. What if it were a choice between Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump? Who would you pick? The devil you know, not the devil you don’t know. If it were between Obama and Donald Trump, who would you pick?
JACK NEEL: (00:26:15 – 00:26:16): In a time of crisis?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:26:16 – 00:26:16): Yes.
JACK NEEL: (00:26:19 – 00:26:19): I’m not sure.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:26:20 – 00:26:48): I would pick Donald Trump because there’s a picture of Obama when Special Forces went after Osama bin Laden. Have you seen this picture? Okay, can you find it? This is Barack Obama, Situation Room, Osama bin Laden. This one? That’s it. Yeah. Look at his face. Do you really want this guy to lead you in a time of war?
JACK NEEL: (00:26:49 – 00:26:54): So this is, for context, I’ll pop the photo on screen. This is after he learned what exactly—
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:26:54 – 00:27:52): No, no, no. This is during the raid. Special Forces went into Pakistan. And there’s a live stream to the Situation Room in the White House. Biden was there, the VP. Hillary Clinton was there, the Secretary of State. And Obama was there, the president. He looked— I mean, he was completely out of his element, whereas Biden, Hillary Clinton were like, “Yeah, yeah, we’re getting him.”
Okay, you need a psychopath to lead you in a time of war. Obama is not a psychopath. Trump is a gangster. You want a gangster in charge. So it’s really strange. And people don’t appreciate this, but this is this basic human psychology. If you want to understand geopolitics, if you understand how the world works, you need to figure out basic human psychology. And so the more problems Trump caused, the more the American voter becomes dependent on him emotionally. And that’s why he’s doing this. He understands this basic human psychology.
JACK NEEL: (00:27:52 – 00:27:56): Right. And you think all this sets him up to be reelected?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:27:57 – 00:28:01): Well, he’s getting a third term. How so? I can’t really say, but I think I predict he gets a third term.
The National Draft and Who Gets Drafted
JACK NEEL: (00:28:01 – 00:28:14): You kind of insinuated that there will be a national draft. You’ve noted that there’s already legislation in place for people ages 18 to 25 to automatically be registered for the draft in December.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:28:14 – 00:28:14): Yes.
JACK NEEL: (00:28:14 – 00:29:01): And that’s in December. So, yeah. I’m in that. I’m going to connect a couple of different ideas that you told me on our last podcast and elsewhere, and let me know what you make of all this. So in April, you said illegal immigrants would be offered citizenship to fight America’s next war. You said every man 18 to 25 gets automatically registered for the draft, and this is pulled straight out of the government databases. And elsewhere you’ve called Palantir, the company that builds those databases, more powerful than Elon Musk. If Armageddon is coming or is already happening, what kind of people do you think will be drafted for World War III?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:29:03 – 00:30:47): So one thing that I’ve recently learned is this year, and it’s the first time in, I think, 10 years, the United States military was able to fill its recruitment quota. It did it very early. And you’re like, “Wait a minute, was it before they couldn’t fill these recruitment quotas, but now they’re able to do so?” They offered hefty bonuses before. What’s the difference between before and this year? And I think it’s just because you have a lot of illegal immigrants who believe that to stay in the United States, I need to join the military. There are lots of young people who see the economy and like, “I don’t have that much job prospects, so I’m better off joining the military.”
I’ll be very honest with you. If you’re a young person and you’re not rich, your best option for the next 10 years is to join the military. Today. Go to your recruitment office and sign up today. Why? Because the national draft is coming. If you volunteer now, you will have an option of where to go and what to do. This is what they did in Vietnam. If you volunteer, you could choose a pen pusher job, but if you were drafted you were sent off to Vietnam.
So if you want to be smart and you want to protect yourself and your family, I would say if you’re a young person, and again, if you’re just a normal person with very little career prospects and your family’s not rich, your best option is to join the military today.
JACK NEEL: (00:30:49 – 00:30:49): Okay?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:30:51 – 00:32:26): The draft, don’t think of it as being sent off to Iran. Think of the draft as a bureaucratic solution in a time of economic collapse. So think of the 1930s, right? 1929, the stock market collapsed. 1930s, you have millions of people unemployed. So what did the government do? The government basically drafted everyone and had them work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, basically gave them jobs. So that’s what I think the national draft is. You’ve got these young people with nothing to do. So the bureaucratic solution is just to draft them and teach them some skills and have them do something. Okay?
And again, if you join the military now, you’ll be in a much more advantageous position than if you were to wait to be drafted. The difference is, let’s just say you join the military today. Well, in 2 to 3 years’ time, you would’ve built up enough experience to be sent off to be a colonial administrator in Venezuela. Or Colombia or Canada or Greenland. Who knows? Okay, but you would stay within North America.
If you wait 4 years until this war in Iran gets really, really bad and they need to send cannon fodder to stop the damage, they’re going to send you, man. Okay, so those are 2 options. You join now, you might— you’ll be a colonial administrator in Canada or Venezuela in 4 years’ time. You wait 4 years and you might be sent off to Iran. Because this war in Iran will only get worse. It will not end.
Is Palantir Tracking What You Watch?
JACK NEEL: (00:32:27 – 00:32:32): Do you think I’ll be more likely to send off to the Iran war if I watch Professor Jiang videos?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:32:34 – 00:33:27): That’s a really good question. You’re absolutely right. So Palantir is everywhere and they are tracking what you do online. And there’s a huge question as to why is it during COVID there’s a huge social media crackdown. But today, with the world going to s***, with the war in Iran, people like me are just allowed to speak our minds. And not only that, but we’re often promoted on social media.
And one theory is, well, they’re trying to track people and try to figure out their thinking and their intentions and their motivations, right? So before they would just, they wanted access to your library card, to know what books you read. Well, now all they need is your browsing history, right?
JACK NEEL: (00:33:27 – 00:33:31): Did they actually do that? They would get access to people’s library cards?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:33:31 – 00:34:52): After 9/11, they demanded to see people’s library history and the librarian said, “No, f*** off.” Huh. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it is entirely possible they are just allowing people to go wherever they want and post whatever they want in order to create a psychological profile on that person to figure out where to put that person when a draft comes. Obviously, the most outspoken, the most opinionated will be the first to send off to die. And the most obedient, the most compliant may be given a bureaucratic position somewhere.
But honestly, I don’t know what watching my videos, how that would be translated in the Palantir database. Because I mean, I’ve done a lot of meetups and I met quite a few of my fans. It’s a pretty diverse group of people, man. And I feel as though people who watch my videos are more savvy, more aware, than other people. And it’s very hard to categorize my followers. Whereas I think if you follow Nick Fuentes or something like that, it’s pretty easy to categorize your mentality.
JACK NEEL: (00:34:53 – 00:34:55): Love to set up a conversation with you and Nick.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:34:55 – 00:35:00): Yeah, I would love to do it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’d be a conversation, I think, not a debate.
Who Decides When the AI Bubble Pops?
JACK NEEL: (00:35:02 – 00:35:19): So you’re talking about the AI bubble. On our last podcast, you predicted a major market crash by the end of this year. Who actually decides when the AI bubble will pop? And do you think that’s something that happens before the end of this year?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:35:20 – 00:36:50): My personal feeling is these market crashes are not organic, don’t happen by accident. Often they are engineered in time to maximize the benefit of certain groups. An example is the 2008 great financial collapse, the subprime bubble. It burst, and when it burst, it allowed certain individuals to profit greatly. So John Paulson was a hedge fund manager. His company made $20 billion off the subprime crisis.
And I think it was an engineered event because I live in China and the real estate bubble did burst, but the market didn’t collapse because the real estate market burst. So it’s perfectly possible to actually paper over these events and just let them continue naturally. Let’s use a counterfactual and say, let’s just say the government did not allow the market bubble to burst. What would have happened instead? Well, rather than Lehman Brothers going bankrupt— no, sorry, Lehman Brothers did not go bankrupt. Bear Stearns went bankrupt, but Lehman Brothers was under a lot of stress.
JACK NEEL: (00:36:51 – 00:36:51): Lehman Brothers did.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:36:51 – 00:39:55): Yeah. So Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Okay. The government could have bailed out everyone. Okay. Basically it said, “We’ll cover both the losses of Wall Street because they’re too big to fail, as well as the homeowners because we wanted to save the American middle class. We wanted these homeowners to still have a house.” Okay? So basically the government comes out and bails out everyone. And if the government chose to do that in 2008, the United States would be a very different place. And you wouldn’t have the sort of political polarization, the inequality, and the sort of despair that you have today.
And that’s basically what happened in China. Where the stock market did collapse, but homeowners just lost value. They didn’t lose their homes. Whereas United States homeowners lost their homes. So the question then is, why did the bubble burst? And the answer is to benefit a certain elite that is able to control the policy levers of Washington, DC. And John Paulson was a member of this elite, but I mean, so was Goldman Sachs. Because if you remember, Goldman Sachs actually profited from the subprime crisis, not only because it bet that the subprime would collapse, but also they were able to absorb a lot of assets in the aftermath, in the fallout. And you could make the argument that Goldman Sachs and others engineered the collapse.
I’m not sure if you ever saw the movie The Big Short. Yeah. So Michael Burry had this bet with Goldman Sachs, right? And the bet was very simple. Goldman Sachs agreed to bet with Michael Burry that the subprime market would never ever collapse, right? Okay. Defaults would not reach a certain point. Okay.
And remember how Michael Burry won the bet, but he could not get in touch with Goldman Sachs. And eventually Michael Burry was able to get in touch with Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs says, “We’re ready to honor our agreement. We’re ready to tell you you won your bet and we’re ready to give you money and we’re sorry for the delay.” Michael Burry’s like, “You’re not sorry. You just waited this long because you needed time in order to trick other people to take the other side of the bet so you could profit.” Does that make sense?
JACK NEEL: (00:39:56 – 00:39:56): Yeah. Okay.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:39:56 – 00:40:54): And that’s how financial markets work. It’s not a fair game. It’s completely rigged. There are predators and there are prey. If you control the policy apparatus in Washington, DC, if you’re backed by powerful politicians, you are the predator. If you’re everyone else, you’re just the prey. You will lose money eventually in the system. Do never bet against the market because the market is rigged.
So I think we are facing a similar situation. The question is, when does the AI bubble burst? Okay, theoretically, it can choose to never ever burst, right? Because the difference between the subprime bubble and the AI bubble is the subprime bubble, you had too many defaults. Okay, you had too many homeowners who could not pay the mortgage, and this caused a contagion throughout the system. Okay, so there was always a point when the bubble was going to burst naturally, and what they did was engineer a point where the elite could benefit the most.
JACK NEEL: (00:40:54 – 00:40:55): And who bought all those houses?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:40:56 – 00:40:58): Well, private equity bought all the houses, right?
JACK NEEL: (00:40:58 – 00:40:59): Right.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:40:59 – 00:41:00): Right.
Why the AI Bubble Will Burst
JACK NEEL: (00:41:00 – 00:41:02): So if the AI bubble bursts, theoretically—
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:41:02 – 00:41:32): Okay, right. So, but let me finish our point. Okay. The AI bubble is different because it’s almost like a circle jerk where these companies are just supporting each other. Now, the problem with the AI bubble is they need continuous investment for them to sustain themselves because it’s so costly to run these data centers. But theoretically, they could keep on going for a very long time, right? They will burst the bubble maybe next year.
JACK NEEL: (00:41:33 – 00:41:33): Why?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:41:34 – 00:43:23): Number one, problem number one is they were getting a lot of investment from the GCC. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait. Now they’ve lost access to all this liquidity. Okay. So they’re not able to refinance as fast as they used to. Okay. That’s problem number 1. Problem number 2 is these data centers are costing a lot of money. Okay. And then problem number 3 is they have not found a sustainable business model. Okay, so they need to build more data centers, but they’re not able to generate enough income to justify these data centers, and they’re losing investors because of the war in the Middle East.
Okay, so they want to engineer a collapse in a way that forces the federal government to come in and bail them out, because when that happens, when the government takes over these data centers, they’re able now to socialize the losses and privatize the gains. So OpenAI is not able to generate income because they have to absorb the cost of the data centers. Government comes in and then declares these data centers military installations, then OpenAI is now profitable, right? Okay, so that’s the play.
Okay, so they have to do this. But they have to time it in a way in which they are able to play the market, they’re able to maximize their gains, their cronies are able to short the market and get a lot of winnings, but they also need the Trump administration to come in and bail them out. And I think all the pieces are already in place. It’s just a matter of when, now, right?
The Debt Crisis and Cryptocurrency
JACK NEEL: (00:43:25 – 00:43:44): And on the debt crisis itself, you referenced two laws that are quietly meant to resolve it. Do you think Americans will be forced to use digital currency when the AI bubble burst?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:43:45 – 00:46:22): Okay, so the United States has $40 trillion in debt. So if you are in Washington, D.C., you ask yourself, “How can I resolve this debt issue?” Okay. And the current strategy seems to be twofold. The first is you make others dependent on you for energy, right? So Japan, China, South Korea need to buy LNG from you in order to fuel their economies. And they have to do that with US dollars. Okay? That’s one solution.
Another solution is through cryptocurrency. And the idea here is what you want to do is you want to offload your debt onto the average retail consumer around the world. All right, so right now you’re a Chinese person. You’ve got a lot of money in the bank, but it’s renminbi. You don’t want your money in renminbi because it doesn’t grow. Okay, you would rather have your money in US dollars. It grows a lot faster, and you’re able to have more options with the US dollars. Government’s not going to allow you to buy US dollars because that would cause a collapse of the renminbi, right?
So what’s a workaround? A workaround is the government allows you to buy certain cryptocurrency that is backed by US Treasuries, and these examples include Circle and Tether. And when you do that, what you’re really doing is you’re basically buying a share of US Treasuries. So that’s a workaround. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. And because of that, now you’re able to refinance the sovereign debt.
Will that work? Probably not. Probably not. And the reason why is the United States has a huge problem. The problem is we are at the end of empire. The United States is an empire in decline, and so people have become speculative. They become extremely selfish, and they’re pretty exhausted. Okay, meaning people are going to do the least amount of work in the shortest amount of time for the quickest return.
JACK NEEL: (00:46:22 – 00:46:22): Right.
The Hitman Story: How the Global Economy Works Today
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:46:23 – 00:49:14): The example is Venezuela. In theory, Americans can go and develop the Venezuela oil industry. And in the long term, this benefits everyone. It benefits the Venezuela population, it benefits the American people. But that’s a lot of hard work and it’s a very long-term investment, right? ‘Cause you first have to build infrastructure that might take 5 years. So rather than go and do it yourself, you think, “I’ll just sell the rights to the Chinese and have them do the work,” right? But then the Chinese are like, “Yeah, but I can sell it to another company to go do the work.”
Okay, so I want to tell you a story that really happened in China to illustrate the mentality of the global economy today. So in a province called Guangxi, it’s a very poor province. But a businessman was having a dispute with his partner. So he decides, “I’ll hire a hitman to kill my partner and problem solved.” Okay. And this is a real story, by the way. It’s been reported pretty widely in China and around the world.
He goes to hitman and offers the guy, and I’ll just make up the numbers. Okay. Maybe $100,000, which is a lot of money. And the hitman’s like, “Of course I’ll go do it.” And the hitman’s like, “Yeah, I could go do it, but why don’t I get another hitman to go do it for $50,000? I’ll pocket the $50,000 myself.” Okay? So then the second businessman gets $50,000 to go kill that partner. He’s like, “That’s a lot of money, but, and I could go do it, but wouldn’t it be better if I got someone else to do it for me and I’ll pocket the difference?”
So then it goes to a third person. And now it’s $25,000 to go kill the partner. And the guy, it’s the same thing. Now he goes to a 4th person like, “I’ll give you $10,000 to go kill that partner.” And then the guy’s like, “Yeah, I could go kill that guy for $10,000, but I think if I go tell the partner the truth, he’ll give me more money to rat everyone out to the police,” right? So he goes to the partner and the partner calls the police and the police go arrest all 4 hitmen as well as the business person. That’s a true story.
And this is, I think, a perfect illustration of how the global economy works today. So it’s not about getting the job done, it’s about how to rip each other off and do as little work as possible to generate as much money as possible. That’s the mentality of everyone today. And you can’t have that, right? That’s why all solutions lead to disaster because no one’s really serious about getting the job done. Everyone just wants to rip off the other person.
JACK NEEL: (00:49:15 – 00:49:18): Is there a name for that concept? Is it the law of least effort or something?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:49:19 – 00:49:22): We shouldn’t make something up. I don’t know.
JACK NEEL: (00:49:23 – 00:49:27): I feel like I read about it the other day, but that’s really fascinating. I think that applies to a lot of concepts.
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:49:27 – 00:51:08): There’s something called the Peter Principle, but that’s about incompetence. Whereas this is just about greed and laziness. So there’s incompetence, there’s hubris, but there’s something completely different. This is just taking pleasure and joy in being as lazy as possible. And that’s the stage we’re in today, which means whatever solution that you have will just blow up in your face. Nothing will work because the people responsible for implementing the solution will just screw it up. Right. That’s why this alien invasion, I think, will be a disaster. That’s why I think trying to resolve the sovereign debt crisis will end in disaster.
I mean, you look at the entire Trump administration and it’s just been one scam after another scam. That’s all they care about, right? How this war is going in Iran, no one cares. But the people around Trump, what they care about is, “Am I able to play the markets?” Right? And they made a lot of money playing the markets, right? And you look at the Trump family, they’ve made a lot of money on these cryptocurrency deals, right? They made a lot of money on these drone deals. So they’re the first family. So everyone’s just going to do what they’re going to do, which just means everyone’s just going to scam each other.
To really understand what’s going on, you can use eschatology. And you can use the school of realism in geopolitics, but it’s just much better to appreciate we’re all human beings, we’re all going to behave like human beings. And you need a pretty basic grasp of human psychology if you want to understand what’s really going on.
Predictions Through Pattern Recognition
JACK NEEL: (00:51:09 – 00:51:20): How many of your predictions would you say are just analysis of something you already observe going on and then forecasting it to the future and saying, we’re going to do more of this?
PROFESSOR JIANG: (00:51:21 – 00:52:04): You’re absolutely right. Everything I do is pattern recognition. That’s all I’m doing. But people don’t do that, whereas I do. Yes. Yeah. How do I know they would attack Iran for sure? Because it’s just part of a pattern, right? I don’t know why Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. I don’t know why he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I don’t know why he recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel. I don’t know why he promoted the Abraham Accords. I don’t know why he killed General Qasem Soleimani, but it’s a pattern. You just keep on moving. You get the attack on Iran.
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