The Prophetic Professor Jiang (Premium E329) Sample
Professor Jiang, a game theorist and YouTube sensation with over 65 million views, applies systems analysis to history despite hosts Liv Agar, Julian Fields, and Travis View's skepticism regarding his "town liar" status. While the trio critiques his primary school lecture style and satirical AI imitators, they acknowledge his massive following across Substack and Instagram, noting his controversial predictions like a potential US invasion of Iran. Ultimately, the discussion highlights how global uncertainty drives audiences toward trusted mentors, even when their expertise is questioned, while promoting the podcast's Patreon for exclusive content. [Automatically generated summary]
As always, we are your hosts, Liv Agar, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Everyone has something they turn to when the complexity and uncertainty of the world becomes too overwhelming.
Yeah, it's called the QA podcast.
Baby baby!
Yeah, that's my number one choice.
Yeah, but sometimes they might also turn to like a wise friend or colleague.
That's a good one.
Or a trusted news source or watch a comforting movie or they read a book that has stood the test of time.
Good thing I started working with a man called Professor Zhang.
Trusted colleague, mentor.
What I like to do, I like to read about early American politics to remind myself that bullshit and corruption are nothing new.
And like the people in those times, I'm not exempt from the tide of history.
For example, did you know that in the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson paid a man named James Callender to publish smears about his opponent, John Adams?
And after Callendar was jailed for those smears under the Sedition Act and Jefferson was elected, Jefferson pardoned Calendar.
So yeah, the spoil system that outrages us in the Trump administration is, you know, is par for the course in American history.
Callendar also the person who invented keeping track of time by the month visually.
Yeah, he invented that.
And in fact, he used to wear a onesie with a bunch of really hot firemen all over him.
But over the past year or so, a shocking number of people have tried to make sense of our transforming world by listening to a middle-aged Chinese Canadian man named Jiang Shui-Chin, better known as Professor Zhiang.
Now, have you heard of him before now?
No.
No.
I have not listened.
I made sure to not listen to him at all before this episode.
So it's going to be very exciting to have Travis be my filter here to protect me from what is sure to be a deluge of incredibly good ideas.
I also have tried not to listen to him, which is a shame because all his ideas sound very correct and true based on my first glance.
No.
Yeah, I think Jiang combines, I think, some of your favorite things, Julian, international schools and bad geopolitical takes.
Fuck you.
God damn.
That's actually like the best burn you've ever delivered to me.
Holy hell.
My understanding of this is one of the like a long-standing tradition of guys who get famous because like they're the town liar and like this just like kind of exported to a larger scale of like lecturers who like maybe have some sort of expertise.
A lot of times they're like a physicist or a mathematician.
Then they like try to like, you know, they're basically like, well, okay, I've hit the age of 40 and now I understand everything.
And I can just like, I can Wikipedia skim about history and then I can lecture about it.
And, you know, I'm more correct than everyone in this field.
Well, what's interesting with town liars is that there are, there's a scale on which any town will fall into like how much they respect and love and adore and hold up their liar, right?
And then, so, you know, logically that would also happen in countries.
And it turns out Canada incredibly good at loving their liars.
We're great at that, yeah.
And exporting them.
Thank you for Peterson.
Thank you for Jiang.
And Levant guy, of course.
Yeah, massive liar.
Yeah, no, Canada just like didn't have any culture at all that was like distinct from either Britain or America.
So in the 60s, we just like invented it.
That was a big part of it is we have our town liars.
We're very proud of national subsidy programs.
Yeah, and you stand out among three people on this current episode that are all lying about their names.
Yeah.
But very basic.
Yeah.
Jiang runs a YouTube channel called Predictive History.
Now, the majority of his content consists of like 40-minute to hour and a half-long lectures on topics related to history, literature, or geopolitics, and sometimes related topics.
Now, there's really nothing flashy in his videos.
They all consist of just like a single, unbroken take of a man in glasses and a little bit of gray in his hair talking while writing on the whiteboard.
Or in more recent videos, he has an interactive smart board.
He got some of that YouTube money.
He upgraded his gear.
Yeah.
They sent him the plaque and they sent him like the Glenn Beck board.
Yeah.
And the content of the lectures is at first glance, you know, totally benign.
So this will be a fun class today.
We are doing the Great Pyramid.
Okay.
So the Great Pyramid was built about 2,500 BCE.
That's 4,500 years ago.
By a pharaoh named Curfew.
I mean, you watch that, you think, I'm settling in for like a pretty slow, pretty simple ancient history lesson.
Yeah, there's a problem.
Like, there needs to be some sort of verification system here.
Because I know like there are like real actual academic lectures that are uploaded onto YouTube in like this exact identical style, which is just someone like recording a graduate seminar, let's say, or like a higher level undergraduate course.
And then, yeah, there's really no way to distinguish it, at least from what I've seen now, from those people who like presumably actually have qualifications.
I mean, the Great Pyramid definitely reads like primary school type lecture.
Like, what the fuck are we doing?
That is the first sentence of Wikipedia level stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, I feel like, yeah, he, I think he like takes advantage of like a hack in like most people's brains if they went through conventional schooling, which is that if there's a person, if there's a, you know, a middle-aged person in glasses in front of me writing on a blackboard or a whiteboard, I should listen to them and they're credible.
I think also he's taking advantage of the hack that most people are now completely stupid and they're just taking in whatever's there.
But what separates him from other YouTube lecturers is his stunning and recent popularity.
So he has posted 138 videos, which have earned him a stunning 2.14 million subscribers and over 65 million views.
His substack has over 91,000 subscribers.
His Instagram account, which mostly consists of clips of his lectures and interviews, has nearly 1 million followers.
And since his breakout popularity, he's been interviewed by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan.
Professor Zhang is a game theorist, best known for his popular predictive history YouTube channel, where he applies his systems of analysis to the past in order to predict the future.
Yeah, just like pseudo-history stuff.
I mean, that used to be like how like everyone did history like 200 years ago.
It was like, you know, the theories for like how history works.
It was like, yeah, usually people in the South initially are really powerful and then more northern people eventually take over.
That was like a comparison of like Rome versus like, you know, Germany's later industrialization and then like the American South and the American North.
I would have to assume it's on like that tier of prediction level.
Sending Piers Morgan back in time so he can be like, Welcome to the show, Professor Nostradamus.
Yeah.
And the crazy thing is that we see that he has, he's built up like this army of fans who like take offense at the idea that he's, you know, not what he's cracked up to be.
If you don't already, I urge you to please go follow Professor Jang from Predictive History.
So I'm listening to one of his lectures and sometimes you just got to pause and be like, listen to what some of the things he says.
And it's, he's like spot on, not popular opinions at all.
But oh my goodness, if you don't go with main, like the mainstream line of thinking, you have to watch him.
It's so much worse that it seems like kind of apolitical.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, he seems a bit like a kind of entry to like hotep type thinking as well about the pyramids and stuff.
Yeah, it's like I'm sure the unpopular opinion is like Iran is going to be invaded by the United States in the next five years.
In fact, Jiang is so popular right now, there is currently a YouTube channel with 20,000 subscribers that features a fake AI generated Professor Zhang, which says things that the real one never actually said.
Okay, so today I want to break down something that most people are completely missing about this war.
And I think this is the most important analysis you will hear about what is really driving America's role in this conflict.
I mean, it can't be worse than the real guy, right?
Like you've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QA podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com/slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverse with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com/slash QAA.
Well, that's not an opinion, it's a fact.
You're so right, Jake.
We love and appreciate all of our listeners.
Yes, we do.
And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe?