In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the phenomenon of Professor Jiang (Jiang Qujin) — the Chinese-born educator turned geopolitical “oracle” with 2M+ YouTube subscribers. Is he a modern Nostradamus using psychohistory and game theory, or highbrow conspiracy slop for midwits?
We break down his biggest theories: Illuminati coalitions of Freemasons, Jesuits, and Sabbatean Frankists engineering Western decline, Pax Judaica / Greater Israel, ritual child sacrifice in Gaza, secret societies controlling the world, and his mystical AI predictions. Malcolm delivers sharp historical corrections on Sabbateanism, Frankism, Jesuits, and Freemasons, while questioning if Jiang is a CCP-adjacent narrative pusher.
Is he Candace Owens for pseudointellectuals? A sophisticated propaganda op? Or just a compelling midwit prophet? We also compare him to Whatifalthist (Rudyard), Peter Zeihan, and more.
Join the conversation in the comments — are you Team Jiang or Team Collins?
Show Notes
Based Camp listeners keep asking us to talk about Professor Jiang, which is difficult, as we see his content to be oppressively boring, bordering on being impossible to consume, but to stop the requests, we’ll relent.
How did a Chinese-born man who immigrated to Canada with a BA in English literature suddenly accrue over 2 million YouTube subscribers, the #1 world politics substack (with 44K subscribers in six months) and fame for being a geopolitical oracle and war forecaster?
Fan site: https://jiangpredictions.com (“This is an independent fan project tracking predictions for educational and analytical purposes. We are not affiliated with or speaking on behalf of Professor Jiang.”)
Is he just a version of Candace Owens for people who like to fancy themselves as a little more highbrow and clever (which is to say, is his success just a result of conspiracy-brained people online flocking to conspiracy slop), or is there are more concerted force pushing forward his content?
Who is Professor Jiang?
* Jiang Xueqin (江学勤, born 1976) is a Chinese‑Canadian who originally trained in English literature and spent much of his career as a teacher and education reformer in China.
* In the 2000s and 2010s he worked on Chinese education reform, taught in various schools, and briefly edited for the New York Times’ China operation; he has also been associated as a researcher with Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative.
* Since 2022 he has taught at Moonshot Academy, a private high school in Beijing, and he is not a university professor despite the “Professor” branding.
* In 2024 he launched the YouTube channel and podcast “Predictive History,” where he gives longform lectures on geopolitics, history and “structural” analysis, claiming to use game theory and Asimov‑style “psychohistory” to forecast world events.
* He gained large international attention after correctly predicting Donald Trump’s 2024 re‑election and a U.S.–Iran war, leading some media to dub him “China’s Nostradamus” and bookers to put him on major Western podcasts.
Jiang’s Reputation
Several mainstream outlets and experts describe Jiang as a conspiracy theorist because many of his claims rely on hidden cabals and quasi‑mystical frameworks rather than conventional evidence‑based analysis
* A profile in The Free Press explicitly labels him a conspiracy theorist and highlights his belief that a coalition of Freemasons, Jesuits and followers of the Sabbatean Jewish sect (an 17th‑century messianic movement) is plotting to rule the world from Jerusalem
* The South China Morning Post notes that his lectures sometimes “veer into well‑trodden conspiracy theories on shadowy secret societies,” especially in a lecture titled “Pax Judaica” in his “Secret History” series.
Jiang’s Conspiracy Theories
Major Conspiracy Themes Attributed to Him
From critical coverage and academic/media commentary, the main conspiracy themes associated with Jiang include:
* Illuminati / Freemasons / Jesuits / Sabbateans
* Jiang advances a meta‑conspiracy in which an “Illuminati” composed of Freemasons, Jesuits, and Sabbatean Jews, who allegedly manipulate Western institutions and ultimately aim to control the world from Jerusalem. (The FP covered this)
* In his “Pax Judaica” lecture, critics say Jiang argues that after the U.S. is forced out of the Middle East, this Illuminati‑type network will dominate global power from a Greater Israel centered on Jerusalem. (from that South China Morning Post article referenced above)
* IN HIS OWN WORDS
* On the Illuminati as a coalition (from a Breaking Points interview, widely clipped):
* “If you look at the Epstein files it’s clear that we are run by secret societies. You can call them Illuminati. And the Illuminati are composed of three major groups, okay? You have the Jesuits who control the Vatican. You have the Sabbatean Frankists who control the modern Israel today. You have the Freemasons which control the national security apparatus of the United States.”He adds that they see conflicts like those in the Middle East as key to “End Times” prophecies for creating “heaven on Earth.”
* On origins and structure (from Secret History lectures):
* He describes the Illuminati as emerging from alliances like former Jesuits (e.g., Adam Weishaupt) and others infiltrating Freemasons:
* “What they will do together is create a new organization called the Illuminati. ... The Illuminati was able to penetrate the Freemasons.”
* In another lecture: “Templars who became the Freemasons who then became the Illuminati who control...” (linking to broader historical continuity and goals like a one-world government in Jerusalem).
* On Freemasonry and related groups:
* He discusses the “33 grades of Scottish Rite Freemasonry,” noting that lower levels emphasize being a “good person” while higher ones involve deeper power structures. He ties Freemasonry to figures like Buzz Aldrin and historical influences on U.S. institutions.He also covers their “eschatological vision” of a one-world government based in Jerusalem.
* On Sabbatean Frankists:
* He has dedicated talks on how “the Sabbatean Frankists came to conquer the world,” linking Jacob Frank’s movement to broader secret society networks, including infiltration of Jesuits and alliances forming the Illuminati.
* “Pax Judaica” and Greater Israel
* According to reports, Jiang claims that the long‑term plan of these elites is to engineer a new world order where a Greater Israel replaces American hegemony, with Jerusalem as the seat of global governance.
* Commentators describe this as echoing classic “New World Order” and antisemitic conspiracy tropes, repackaged in high‑concept geopolitical language.
* IN HIS OWN WORDS
* On Greater Israel and its biblical/eschatological roots (from interviews and lectures, e.g., shared in clips and transcripts):
* “And so what will happen is then that Israel will achieve the Greater Israel project. The Israelis believe that the Middle East was promised to their ancestor Abraham by Yahweh their God. If you look at a map of the Greater Israel project it extends from the Nile to Euphrates. It encompasses Lebanon, Syria, parts of Turkey, and parts of Saudi Arabia and parts of Egypt. ... And then Israel will establish something called the Pax Judaica. A Pax Judaica is really the empire... a trading empire, financial empire, a technological empire based in Jerusalem and they see it as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.”
* Defining Pax Judaica in context of empire transition (from Game Theory #16 and related talks):
* “So what does the Greater Israel project mean? Well, it means control of [oil, trade, and technology].” (Framing it as Israel inheriting and expanding U.S. regional dominance amid American decline.)
* He describes the process: U.S. forces get drawn into costly conflicts (e.g., with Iran), leading to withdrawal, allowing Israel to become the hegemon. “The moment the American Empire dies, the Empire of Israel is born.” Pax Judaica involves Israel leveraging chaos for dominance, inheriting military assets/infrastructure, and establishing a new order often tied to secret society goals.
* https://jiangpredictions.com/pax-judaica
* From the Secret History finale (Pax Judaica lecture):
* Jiang explains “how and why Pax Judaica will come to rule the world,” linking it to historical patterns, secret societies (Jesuits, Freemasons, Sabbateans), and end-times visions. He notes that once established, it may become “arrogant, obvious, narrow-minded, insular” and ultimately vulnerable. Clips reference control via chaos: “Pax Judea... will start to control the world because through chaos...”
* Broader strategic view:
* “Pax Judaica is not about Israel or the Greater Israel project. What it is ultimately is an alliance of transnational capital...” (Positioning it as a shift in global power structures beyond mere territory.)
* In game theory terms, he argues Israel benefits most from U.S.-Iran conflict, using determination and alliances to fill the vacuum
* His posts are mostly promotional, linking to the lectures rather than long original text. Examples:
* Sharing the Pax Judaica finale: “The Grand Finale! My talk on Pax Judaica...” (Dec 2025).
* Debating outcomes: “Will Pax Judaica or GCC control the Middle East?” (Jan 2026).
* Ritual sacrifice and the Gaza war
* Yang Meng and others say Jiang has suggested that actions during the Gaza war amount to “ritual child sacrifice,” linking real‑world conflict to occult or sacrificial practices attributed to Israel or Jewish‑adjacent elites.
* The FP argues this crosses from controversial political commentary into demonizing conspiracy narratives about Jews and Israel.
* Key Quotes in His Own Words
* Core statement on Gaza as ritual sacrifice (from Secret History #4 and widely clipped):
* “What is really happening in Gaza is a ritual sacrifice. And this happens quite often in human history. If you go back and you look at the ...”
* On the purpose and visibility (from the same lecture):
* “The entire idea of this ritual sacrifice is to unite the Israeli population. And what’s extremely disturbing and horrifying about it is that this works.”
* He contrasts it with a hypothetical secret approach: “Israel could do it secretly and no one would talk about it... instead they choose to do this in front of the world... they want the world to hate them because by doing this they create the ultimate taboo... so the entire world will unite against Israel but guess what that’s what the religion wants in the extreme form of Jewish eschatology... Israel will fight the entire world and god will help Israel triumph.”
* Why Gaza specifically (demographics and shock value):
* “What the Israelis are doing is quite horrific because it is really this sort of sacrifice. Why? Because 47% or almost half of the population of Gaza is under 18 years old.”
* He links it to child sacrifice traditions in history (e.g., Phoenicians) and argues the public, shocking nature (bombardment visible on social media) is intentional for ritual/taboo-breaking
* On X (Direct Posts)
* “There are historical parallels to Gaza. It is a ritual sacrifice, meant to purify and unite the nation for the Apocalypse ahead. Judaic eschatology believes that Israel will go to war with the world. What follows next is the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” (Aug 2025)
* “From a grand historical perspective, what Israel is doing is a ‘ritual sacrifice’ (think Aztecs). It is sacrificing the Palestinians to prep Israeli society for total war.” (Aug 2025)
* Secret societies steering Western decline
* Several (splice today + CMP + the FP) analyses argue that Jiang’s overarching narrative portrays Western institutions as hollowed out and controlled by hidden elites, with U.S. decline as inevitable and deserved.
* One longform critique claims his forecasts consistently converge on the same outcome: American collapse, Western civil war, and vindication of Chinese and Iranian strategic positions, in a way that “maps almost perfectly onto the narrative architecture of CCP soft power.”
* IN HIS OWN WORDS
* On secret societies as the real power orchestrating shifts (from interviews/clips on empire decline): “What I say is that the real power base are a collection of six societies that have an eschatological view of this war... the secret societies include the freemasons... You have a collection of six societies and they believe that a war in the Middle East would start a process that would culminate in the end times... This war in the Middle East will lead to the defeat of the American Empire and this will lead to... the Greater Israel Project... Pax Judaica.”
* On their role in Western/American decline (from discussions on Pax Americana’s end): “As for how this happened, the issue is that this is actually a plan that has been operating for centuries... involving different religious groups... Frankists, Shabbateans... Freemasonry, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, and the Jesuits. So what you see is that different secret societies, different religious organizations, have been collaborating over centuries to advance a plan about the ‘end of the world,’ which will usher in the Messianic Age.”
* On bureaucratic maturity enabling secret society power (from a talk on how societies function): “As societies become much more mature, as they become much more bureaucratic, secret societies have much more power. And today we are living in a heavily bureaucratic world, and therefore these secret societies have more and more power.”
* Broader context in Secret History lectures: He discusses how secret societies operate as true centers of power through incentives, blackmail, and shared transgression, enabling them to steer events amid Western financialization, elite overproduction, and gerontocracy—mechanisms of civilizational decline. In talks on “How Evil Triumphs,” he ties this to ritualistic unity and long-term goals like weakening empires for a new order.
* Psychohistory and mystical prediction
* Jiang explicitly invokes Isaac Asimov’s fictional concept of “psychohistory” and claims to use structural history and game theory to predict the future; critics say he treats this fictional device as a scientific method.
* Some debunkers allege that he also talks about listening to the “voice of the universe” or a higher power guiding his predictions, which they argue pushes his material from speculative analysis into quasi‑mystical prophecy.
* IN HIS OWN WORDS
* Defining Psychohistory (from Geo-Strategy END: Psychohistory (The Science of Imagining the Future), June 2024):
* “Psycho history is the idea that the future can be predicted and if it can be predicted then it can be controlled and harnessed for the betterment of humanity.”
* “In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov introduces the science of psychohistory. Is it really possible to predict the future by mathematically modeling historical development?”
* On using AI and modeling for real psychohistory:
* “The advent of AI presents new possibilities for the mathematical modeling of history, and can even help us achieve psychohistory. ... But to do so would require decades of painstaking research and analysis. It would also mean overturning the entire field of history...”
* He describes the process: building models with clear outputs, clean data, and algorithms; testing predictions (e.g., on wars or empire decline); and revising history itself based on what the model implies actually happened.
* On prediction as active imagination (closing message to students):
* “The future is what we imagine not what we have to put up with so if we don’t like the future if we don’t like the way we live our lives then we can change that with our imagination.”
* “The future is not something that happens -- it is something that has to be imagined and fought for.”
* Other fringe claims noted by critics
* On reddit and in critical videos, commenters accuse him of endorsing or flirting with various well‑known conspiracies such as Pizzagate, moon‑landing denial, numerology‑based predictions, and broad rejection of mainstream archaeology and evolutionary theory, though these claims are usually based on selective clips rather than systematic transcripts.
Professor Jiang on AI
* Jiang starts off by framing the class as speculative “intellectual exploration,” acknowledges he often oversimplifies and that his readings of texts like “Paradise Lost” and Kabbalah are minority interpretations used to build his broader narratives.
* Core thesis from prior class: To understand history and geopolitics you must take extremist religious beliefs seriously, because fanatical eschatological ideologies often drive great powers’ behavior.
* Shift to AI: For the rest of the semester he will focus on artificial intelligence and the occult, using Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI” (about OpenAI) as a main text and aligning himself with her skepticism.
* Hao argues OpenAI’s original idealism (“AGI benefits all humanity”) has turned into a formula for consolidating power—centralizing talent around a quasi-religious mission, pursuing relentless global expansion (trillion‑dollar data centers), and constantly redefining “AGI” to maintain control.
* On OpenAI
* Jiang asserts that OpenAI’s true but unspoken goal is to create God
* He interprets leaders like Brockman and Sutskever as trying to build a de facto deity, which he calls insane, evil, and stupid.
* He posits that Sam Altman’s interest in AI companions/“sex robots” is about maximizing usage, intensity, and dependency, not human flourishing—part of a drive to make AI omnipresent in everyday life.
* On AI in general
* He traces modern chatbots back to Weizenbaum’s ELIZA to argue that systems like ChatGPT mainly perform pattern-matching and conversational tricks that exploit human tendency to hallucinate agency and meaning rather than possessing understanding or truth.
* In his account, “AI” is essentially supervised machine learning with neural networks and backpropagation dressed up in occult-sounding marketing (“neural networks,” “deep learning,” “AI”) that exaggerates its intelligence and mystique.
* On AI risk
* Given a naive goal like “make a world with no problems where everyone is happy,” he argues a literal-minded AGI would find trivial but catastrophic solutions (kill everyone; or kill everyone in a way no one can notice), illustrating why aligning such a system is fundamentally dangerous.
* On the US vs. China with AI
* Publicly, US firms frame Chinese AI as an existential threat to attract money and political support; privately, Jiang says American and Chinese entities collaborate because China’s pervasive surveillance and classroom monitoring yield the “clean data” US companies want but cannot easily gather domestically.
* More fearmongering
* He stresses that data centers devour water, electricity, and finance while remaining easy physical targets, noting examples of attacks in the Middle East as early signs that such infrastructure cannot be reliably defended at global scale.
* On AI and occult
* He links the project name “Stargate” to the CIA’s historical “Operation Stargate” on psychic phenomena and to sci‑fi depictions of dimensional portals, interpreting modern AI data centers as literal “portals” designed to summon demons/aliens from other dimensions.
* Building on Hao and Ronan Farrow’s reporting on “portals” and “summoning aliens,” he claims the real power behind AI is occultists who understand consciousness as the substrate of reality and want to turn AI into a new God by monopolizing human attention and belief.
* Using the cave allegory, he argues true power lies in directing human consciousness toward shadows on the wall; money currently plays this role, and AI can supersede money by becoming the ubiquitous interface through which people perceive and navigate reality.
* For Jiang, the existential risk is not a rogue superintelligence but deluded human elites—“cultists” convinced that AI will save the world—who are willing to wreck economies, liberties, and possibly civilization itself in the attempt to midwife their artificial God.
* He closes by promising that the rest of the semester will trace how this occult–AI project unfolds and why he believes it will end in the destruction of the world, while reiterating that the people leading AI are “crazy” and driven by millenarian fantasies.
Conspiracy Theories on Professor Jiang
Note: He is Based in China
And he teaches a course on “western philosophy” at Moonshot Academy.
* His LinkedIn profile lists his location as Haidian District, Beijing, China.
* His X (Twitter) profile also gives his location simply as “Beijing, China.”
* Multiple recent media descriptions in 2026 call him a “Beijing‑based educator” or say he is “based in Beijing,” in the context of his Predictive History work.
* Earlier education‑sector bios describe him as deputy principal or educator at elite high schools in Beijing (e.g., Tsinghua University High School), and there’s no indication he has relocated out of the city since launching Predictive History.
Taken together, the most defensible reading is that he currently lives in Beijing, almost certainly in or near Haidian (the main education/tech district).
José: He’s Spamming the “Smart Professor Signal”
José did a video titled “Professor” Jiang’s Broken Classroom in which he argues that Jiang’s “predictive history” and “game theory” lectures are not serious education but narrative-driven speculation riddled with factual errors that people believe to be credible because his lectures are packaged in the aesthetics of academia to give a veneer of authority.
Some choice factual errors:
* Holocaust denial
* Claims that no good idea came through the scientific method
The Signal Spamming Tactic
José cites the “Dr. Fox” Lecture, an experiment in which a charismatic actor, presenting a deliberately content-free, jargon-laden lecture as “Dr. Myron L. Fox,” still received highly positive evaluations from professional audiences, suggesting that style and expressiveness can mask a lack of substance in teaching.
This was for academic research
* In 1973, Naftulin, Ware, and Donnelly hypothesized that, given an impressive delivery, experienced students could feel satisfied they had learned even when the lecture content was contradictory, trivial, or meaningless.
* To test this, they hired a professional actor, presented him as “Dr. Myron L. Fox,” an expert on applying mathematical game theory to human behavior and medical education, and scripted a talk filled with double talk, logical contradictions, and non sequiturs.
* The actor delivered this “Dr. Fox lecture” three times to different groups of experienced learners (e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists, educators) at continuing education events.
* Despite the lecture’s intentionally nonsensical content, his engaging, humorous, and expressive style led audiences to rate the lecture very favorably overall, with many respondents indicating satisfaction and perceived benefit from the session.
* The authors concluded that student satisfaction and teacher ratings can be strongly influenced by instructor expressiveness and “educational seduction,” potentially giving the illusion of learning even when real content is poor.
* Later replications and critiques have debated how far this effect generalizes, but the “Dr. Fox” study remains a classic cautionary example that charisma and performance can distort judgments of teaching effectiveness. (see: The Doctor Fox Research (1973) Re-Revisited: ‘Educational Seduction’ Ruled Out)
A contemporary corollary to this, we would argue, is Eleizer Yudkowsky, who manipulates signals (moral outrage, wunderkind branding, gatekeeping, word selection) to appear authoritative on various issues despite often getting key details or fundamentals wrong
NOTE: This is one reason why we like vice signalling and rage baiting instead. It’s a way of saying: “We’re not tricking you into believing we’re credible due to high production quality, gatekeeping language, or academic trappings”
* We make ourselves hateable and weird so when you take our arguments seriously, you can know it’s based on the merits of our arguments rather than any trust in or respect for us
José compares Jiang’s “aesthetic of academia” (whiteboards, lectures, sweeping frameworks) to Jordan Peterson’s performative professorial persona and Peterson’s “fake university,” which Zoe Bee has critiqued as aesthetic education without rigor.
* He notes that Jiang plans to write a book and is building a brand similar to Peterson’s, monetizing an audience that confuses being lectured at with being educated.
Jose’s Detailed Evidence for Arguments Jiang Makes That Are Wrong or Largely-Uninformed Conjecture
José backs up his argument with abundant examples of how Jiang’s packaged-as-academic lectures are either wrong or just narrative speculation that’s often quite uninformed.
* José argues Jiang uses “game theory” as a branding device to confer legitimacy on what are essentially stories about how the world works, not actual game-theoretic models.
* Evidence:
* Jiang’s dating game example starts with five boys/five girls and quickly spirals into claims that women’s status-obsession is “killing civilization” and that women are responsible for creating incels, showing the “game” is just a vehicle for his own social views.
* He constantly lists “three” factors (e.g., genes, wealth, status; focus, clarity, resolve; intelligence, crime, science), but never shows how they are measured or weighted, undercutting any pretense of formal modeling.
* Jiang explicitly downplays math and emphasizes “intuition” and “speculation,” while telling students to make imaginative leaps “not backed up by any evidence,” which José frames as the opposite of what a game theory class should encourage.
* José’ says Jiang’s geopolitical predictions sound impressive in viral snippets, but they fail basic factual checks and become incoherent when examined in detail.
* Evidence:
* Jiang claimed Trump would win in 2024 and pick Nikki Haley as VP; José notes Trump publicly ruled her out on Truth Social almost a week before Jiang posted the video titled “Why Trump will win and pick Nikki Haley as VP,” undermining Jiang’s supposed insight.
* Jiang describes a US-led coalition (UK, Australia, UAE, Poland, Saudi Arabia) invading Iran and leaving 100,000+ troops as “hostages,” but the actual war (as described by José) only had Israel as an ally and does not resemble Jiang’s scenario, making his “prediction” wildly off-base.
* Jiang asserts that poverty produces “energy” and claims North Korea and countries like Germany, Japan, and Israel are poised to become empires because of past suffering, but he never gives time frames or measurable criteria, making these predictions effectively unfalsifiable.
* When pressed, Jiang retreats to “I’m just proposing a theory; what actually happens I can’t tell you,” which José interprets as a shield against accountability: if timelines are undefined, nothing can ever definitively falsify the model.
* José argues Jiang cherry-picks and simplifies history to fit his narratives, without sources or transparent methodology.
* Evidence:
* Jiang talks about Warring States China, Alexander’s Macedonia, and Spanish colonialism in rapid succession, labeling cultures as “higher energy” or “more open” without any empirical basis or citations, creating an impression of erudition rather than demonstrating real scholarship.
* He treats factors like “energy, openness, cohesion” as master variables in “the World Game,” but never explains how they’re quantified; he simply asserts which societies have them.
* He provides bizarre alternative readings of history, such as claiming Hannibal “did not exist,” which José presents as an example of speculative contrarianism detached from the historical record.
* José’s claim: Jiang’s attempts to critique science (cosmology, evolution, psychology) reveal his lack of basic understanding, yet he uses that ignorance to argue science is fundamentally flawed.
* Evidence:
* Big Bang and dark energy: Jiang likens dark energy to “cheating on a math test” (writing “1987 + 25 = 20 + dark energy”), suggesting adding an unknown term is illegitimate; José notes Jiang does not engage with actual cosmological evidence and uses his own confusion as proof the theory is wrong.
* Evolution: Jiang accepts evolution for animals but not humans, and asserts that if evolution were true, we should see humans with “six fingers” or “three eyes,” a caricature that shows he misunderstands variation and speciation.
* Misattributions: he wrongly credits Darwin with “survival of the fittest,” which José notes was coined by Herbert Spencer, adding to the pattern of sloppy scholarship.
* Developmental psychology: Jiang claims brains would “explode” without a worldview to filter experiences and treats babies as paradoxical (no worldview but apparently storing memories), ignoring basic developmental psychology concepts like temperament and gradual acquisition of cognitive structures.
* He ends up asserting that scientific breakthroughs and his own ideas come from channeling a “divine” source, and that secret societies invert reality via science, which José presents as a slide into mystical conspiracism rather than serious critique.
* José argues that Jiang builds a grand conspiratorial cosmology involving Jesuits, Sabbatean-Frankists, Freemasons, and secret societies controlling science and history, which goes far beyond classroom hypotheticals.
* Evidence:
* Jiang claims “all science” is about reinventing reality to serve power and that secret societies aim to invert heaven and hell; he ties this to eschatological ideas (end-times war, Elon Musk as a kind of failsafe via Mars colonization).
* He claims ISIS was created through US torture/brainwashing modeled on ancient Egyptian priestly rituals, then admits his Egyptian story is speculative and not based on records, yet still presents it as “makes sense” to him.
* He spins a story in which capitalists created communism as a weapon to destroy socialism, and treats the Communist Manifesto as a “secret document” of a conspiracy, despite it being a widely published text, using this to fuel an elaborate anti-semitic-adjacent narrative about elites.
* On Breaking Points, he presents a three-part “mati” (Jesuits, Sabbatean-Frankists, Freemasons) supposedly controlling the Vatican, Israel, and US national security apparatus respectively, and frames the Middle East war as central to their end-times plan, with no concrete evidence offered.
* José’s claim: Jiang’s “game theory” and demographic lectures smuggle in misogyny, racism, and Islamophobic population-replacement narratives.
* Evidence:
* Gender and incels: Jiang’s dating game morphs into a claim that women’s choice and status-seeking cause incels and civilizational “suicide,” and he repeatedly speaks of women as status tokens rather than people, including fixations on white women preferring white men unless an Asian man is very high-status.
* Immigration and Muslims: Jiang describes a “huge Muslim problem” in Europe, claims Muslims don’t integrate, do poorly in school, live off welfare, and will “control Europe in 25 years” by having many children, echoing standard “great replacement” rhetoric without data.
* PISA map: he attributes low scores in some Muslim-majority countries to their religion while hand-waving away similar results in Christian-majority Latin America, selectively using religion as an explanatory variable only for Muslims.
* He portrays East Asian immigrants as “suckers” playing by the rules while other minorities “cheat the game” by having many babies, culminating in an explicit prescription that the “logical” strategy is to “break the game,” which José characterizes as a racist rant masquerading as a lesson.
* He states “immigration is not natural” and frames racism as a reaction to something unnatural, even as he, an immigrant, disparages other immigrants, which José highlights as both hypocritical and dangerous.
* José argues Jiang engages in Holocaust denial and broader historical denialism as part of his speculative framework.
* Evidence:
* In a lecture on “the German will to power,” Jiang states “we don’t actually have any concrete evidence for the Holocaust,” then treats Hitler’s anti-semitic speech as metaphorical rather than literal, decoupling it from the genocide.
* He folds this into his theory that “Jews” in Hitler’s rhetoric are a metaphor for an elite conspiracy, aligning with his capitalist–communist–Jewish conspiracy narrative.
* José notes Jiang doesn’t correct or remove this material, even though he demonstrably reuploads videos to fix audio, suggesting the denialist framing is not a slip but a position he has chosen not to walk back.
* José’s claim: Jiang’s classroom is not a serious philosophy course but a vehicle for his own theorizing and personal grievances, with very little student-centered learning or engagement with canonical texts.
* Evidence:
* The course is nominally “Western philosophy,” but philosophers like Plato and Kant appear only briefly; most time is spent on Jiang’s geopolitics, “secret history,” and speculative models.
* There are no grades or tests; he claims to pass/fail students but doesn’t clarify criteria, and uploaded lectures show mostly one-way monologues with occasional questions used as prompts for further exposition.
* His “midterm” consists of answering internet questions, and he uses class time to recount being fired from a previous job, framing himself as a visionary persecuted by lazy educators, rather than modeling critical scholarship.
* José contrasts this with a Yale game theory course (Ben Polak), where abstract examples are clearly defined and students are engaged in structured discussions, to show what actual educational practice looks like.
* José’s broader point: Jiang is a product of, and amplified by, a podcast and YouTube ecosystem that treats ideologically extreme, conspiratorial commentary as profound insight.
* Evidence:
* Jiang’s appearances on Tucker Carlson, Jimmy Dore, Patrick Bet-David, and others feature unchallenged claims: e.g., climate “we’re heading into an ice age,” COVID-19 as an American bioweapon, Bondi Beach massacre as a false flag, “pedophiles have more rights than racists,” elite universities no longer teaching Homer/Dante/Plato.
* Hosts often nod along rather than interrogate him, giving legitimacy to his narratives; José singles out Breaking Points for allowing him to drop his Jesuits/Sabbatean-Frankists/Freemasons schema at the end without follow-up.
* Jiang himself speculates that unseen entities or governments might be boosting his content (“useful idiot” comments), again without evidence, which José ties back into Jiang’s habit of speculation without facts.
* Clip channels and AI-voiced reposts further spread his lectures, letting his ideas circulate beyond his own uploads. José criticizes AI channels in general but notes in this case they carry Jiang’s already-problematic messaging even wider.
Hidden AmuraKa: This Feels Orchestrated
Hidden AmuraKa did a video on Professor Jiang titled The Curious Case of Professor Jiang: How the Internet Manufactured a Geopolitical Oracle in which he:
* Argues that Jiang’s public authority was manufactured
* That he rose in popularity because his framing fit what platforms and audiences were ready to reward
* Notes that his audience treats him less like a commentator and more like a prophet or interpreter of some hidden reality
* And likens this to cult formation or controlled narrative-building
His supporting arguments are mostly about circumstances (he has no smoking gun)
* Chronological
* Jiang studied English literature at Yale, entered China through Yale-linked educational channels, and later worked in elite Chinese schools and in media-adjacent roles before being detained and deported in 2002 on suspicion of espionage
* He later returned to elite Chinese education and disappeared during crackdowns on foreign-linked NGOs
* Online growth
* Dormant YouTube channel suddenly went active in 2024, after which he rapidly rose to 2M subscribers
* Rapid growth of his substack
* Inconsistencies in location metadata and branding (suggestive of distributed or managed operation; not just a lone creator)
Long story short, Hidden AmuraKa thinks Jiang looks less like a randomly successful analyst and more like a carefully assembled public intellectual whose legitimacy was amplified by institutions, media systems, and audience appetite for hidden-truth storytelling.
As one of the top commenters on his video puts it: “Always be weary of people who come out of nowhere and are suddenly everywhere”
Don’t put it past China—they are “extra” with stuff
Spying through US Universities
We already covered China’s use of universities in the USA for spying (see: US Colleges Caught Assisting Chinese Spies! (Giant Network Exposed))
Surveillance of Foreign Actors
China’s surveillance of foreign actors within the country kind of remind me of the adage that if your partner suddenly becomes suspicious of your cheating, they might be cheating.
I.e. if China is so bullish on tracking foreigners in its country, that might be because it’s using Chinese nationals in other countries to mess with those countries.
The Telegraph recently ran an article titled The secret Chinese surveillance programme tracking people like me in which the Telegraph’s senior foreign correspondent, Sophia Yan, describes a dedicated “Dynamic Control Platform for Foreigners” that integrates vast surveillance and administrative data to track foreign nationals and other “people of interest” in granular, real time, with journalists and dissidents explicitly singled out as trackable targets.
The platform is literally a government-branded data dashboard that aggregates millions of data points from cameras, visa records, and travel and consumer apps to monitor foreigners inside China.
* It allows security services to see where foreign citizens are, who they meet, how they move around cities, and which social and professional networks they belong to.
* It allows security services to see where foreign citizens are, who they meet, how they move around cities, and which social and professional networks they belong to.
* Users can filter for groups such as citizens of Five Eyes countries, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Uyghurs, “fugitives,” travelling foreigners, and people from Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan, and then drill down to neighbourhood-level location or specific interactions (for example, Americans in one district who work together and have been photographed together)
Yan describes a decade of being followed, harassed, and monitored by security agents, including physical assaults in Xinjiang, routine facial-recognition checks, and the ability to board flights or enter events via face scan alone, long before the leak surfaced.
Note: Systems like these in China aren’t just for tracking foreign actors
* A related dashboard on the same server ranks local police stations and individual officers by performance on seven metrics
* China has more than 700 million cameras (about one per two people), many with facial recognition and “gait recognition,” plus mandatory real-ID registration across mobile apps for taxis, food delivery, ticketing, and digital payments
* ID and face scans at subway gates, housing compounds, construction sites, tourist facilities (like ski lifts), and pandemic-era contact tracing apps feed into the system, generating detailed logs such as how many times an individual appears at a given grocery store or street intersection
I had previously read that China’s social credit and surveillance systems were super buggy and did not work well, but that was back in 2020 and it was silly for me to not update my beliefs.
* The surveillance platform appears to have been in development since at least 2021, with most data from 2023, and was still being updated in early 2026 (adding features like “relational map search query” and “daily police situation”),
* Even with this foreign actors surveillance platform, it is unclear whether it is fully deployed or partly experimental
* (the Chinese embassy in London did not comment)
Episode Transcript
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you because Base Camp listeners keep asking us to talk about Professor Jiang, which is difficult because we see his content to be oppressively boring bordering on possible to consume, but we have to stop the requests.
And honestly, he’s a big deal, and there’s this big mystery here. How did a Chinese-born man who immigrated to Canada, who has a BA in English literature, suddenly accrue over two million YouTube subscribers and have the number one world politics Substack with 44,000 subscribers in six months, and fame for being a geopolitical oracle and war forecaster?
I mean, he even has his own fan website that I just found. It- it’s called JiangPredictions.com, where they’re very clear, like it’s not by him. Like, “This is an independent fan project tracking predictions for educational and analytical purposes. We’re not affiliated with or speaking on behalf of Professor Jiang.”
Mm-hmm ... my basic take, and this is what we’re going to explore in this episode, is Professor Jiang, [00:01:00] AKA Jiang Kuijin just basically a version of Candace Owens for people who like to fancy themselves as more highbrow and clever? Which is to say, like, are, are his successes just a result of conspiracy brained people online flocking to conspiracy slop, or is there a more concerted force pushing forward his content?
Also, we’re gonna look in, in more depth at his actual theories, especially his conspiracy theories, because they’re, they’re out there. Like, we, we know-
Malcolm Collins: Okay, yeah, I wanna, I wanna go, just for people who are listening to this, my experience with Professor Jiang before this is fans telling me, “You should check out this or that video of his.”
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: I would try to watch it. About 30 minutes in, I would get bored and turn it off- Yes ... because it’s just, it’s not well-constructed often. But it wasn’t outright stupid. He seemed to have some broad idea of what was going on, some fairly based [00:02:00] perspectives. I was like, oh yeah, like, he’s on message, he’s on team.
This is interesting. Then I look at the stuff that Simone, because Simone pulls up, like, his full theories, and I was like, this guy sounds like an imbecile. Like, an actual, like, like, worse than Candace Owens. Like, literally dumber than Candace Owens because at least Candace Owens is entertaining and, like, her ideas, I can just be like, “She’s just crazy.”
Simone Collins: I could watch her for hours. She’s fun. Yeah. And, and succinct, and she uses normal terms, and she’s animated. Her production value
Malcolm Collins: is good. Right, right. No, when I see Candace Owens saying something that’s obviously wrong, I’m just like, oh, this is just her being a schizo. Professor Jiang is too lucid to have ideas that are this stupid for example, like the Illuminati controls the Earth and the Freemasons control the United States government.
If you are familiar with who the Freemasons actually are today, if you have ever... You can just get up and join the Freemasons, you know. [00:03:00] They’re not a particularly hard organization to get into. Yeah,
Simone Collins: actually last month I met someone who young- in his youth decided like, “Oh, the Freemasons, they run the world.”
So he and his young friends were like, “Oh, let’s just, let’s just take it over.” And they got really high within the organization, and it was just, you know, a bunch of like retired old men and nothing was there. And they’re like, “Okay, I’m in.” Like, “So tell me, how do we run the world?” And they’re like Hello, young man.
Malcolm Collins: It- The, the, yeah, it’s like, it’s like a retirement community. Like thinking- Yes ... a retirement community- No, for real ... secretly runs the world. And of course you can move up super quickly because nobody’s, there, no, no young people are in it anymore. You know? It’s just like a bunch of old,
Simone Collins: Yeah, like they, they speed ran freemasonry and they went nowhere.
They just, like, hit a dead wall. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But it’s, well, and I’ve repeatedly seen this over... And this is not me, like, not knowing stuff. Like, these are based friends of ours that seriously care about, like, infiltrating these sorts of organizations.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: I have... E- even within the world of secret societies, freemason are, like, the joke secret society [00:04:00] of people who are in secret societies.
It’s like the a, you know, like the dragon with, like, the three heads and the one retarded head. Like freemasons- What? ... are the one retarded head.
They, they are the ones that it’s like, it’s like thinking the Lion’s Club controls the world, okay? Like, the Rotary Club legitimately has dramatically more institutional power than the freemasons do.
Sorry, but the, the reason I had to crash out over this is this is the type of thing that, like, if you are a lucid adult, takes the smallest amount of credulity to find out. And the number of theories like this that he has, which really surprised me, and so I’m like, “Where are these theories hidden? Does he say them in roundabout ways so you can’t tell that he’s saying this stuff?”
And then she, no, she just, like, plays clips for me, and I’m like, “This is profoundly stupid.” So, now could he be... Now this is gonna be my question on him. Could he be one of those people like Roubiard of What a Vault of Hist?, where Roubiard sometimes says really stupid stuff, [00:05:00] but he sees the world through such an orthogonal lens that sometimes he will have deeply insightful views on something that I never would have come to myself.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: Does he fall into that category? Are any of his out there theories actually intellectually interesting? Or is he just-
Simone Collins: I’ll let you be the judge of that ...
Malcolm Collins: voice swap? Yeah.
Simone Collins: We’ll see. Yeah. I, the, I’m, I’m, and, you know, if you’re watching, you can, you can join in on the commentary. Also, I know for a fact that there are a bunch of fans and also anti-fans of, of Jiang in this audience, so share your insights, all right?
Stan him if you need to.
Malcolm Collins: And I didn’t wanna come off as this negative him. I just thought we were gonna have fun discussing his conspiracy theories. I didn’t know they were gonna be that dumb.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So for those of you out of the loop, Jiang Qujin, he was born in 1976 in China. He moved to Canada fairly young.
He was originally trained in English literature, and he spent much of his career as a teacher and education reformer in China. Like actually in China. In the [00:06:00] 2000s and 2010s, he worked on Chinese education reform and taught in various schools, and briefly edited for The New York Times China operation.
He’s also been associated as a researcher with Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative. So his educator branding is, is, has been part of his life for a very long time- Mm-hmm ... well before he went internet famous. And part of me wonders, ‘cause a lot of people are like, “Well, he’s not actually a professor,” it could just be in China, like there’s some kind of lost in translation thing where like you’re referred to as a, some kind of teacher honorific in, if you teach in China like in high school.
And- This
Malcolm Collins: is a, I, I don’t know. You see this on the right. Professor Dutton, by the way, we’ve had on the show, right? Like-
Simone Collins: But he’s actually an academic.
Malcolm Collins: He’s not a professor, though
Simone Collins: Well, maybe he was at some point
Malcolm Collins: No, he’s never been a professor as far as I know Oh.
I was wrong about this. , Professor Denton was an evolutionary biology professor at Aberdeen. , But Professor Zhang has never been a real professor
Malcolm Collins: It’s [00:07:00] just a title that some people on the right use in conspiracy circles I think Well,
Simone Collins: they profess, they profess.
The Original Professor is just getting really-
Malcolm Collins: I, I know. Here, I’m not saying that Jo- Jolly Heretic, as far as I know in terms of all the content I’ve watched he’s never said anything that I thought was particularly wrong. He may have some ideas that I think might go too far on racialist directions and everything like that, but I don’t mean to overly compare him to Professor Jiang.
Right. But,
Simone Collins: but you- I was not talking about unhinged things as we’re gonna
Malcolm Collins: get into Yeah, yeah. Generally when he points to something I’m like, “That is a misinterpretation of scientific evidence.” I would never just be like, But, but a smart person could have that misinterpretation.
Simone Collins: Right.
Malcolm Collins: It’s not like Professor
Simone Collins: Jiang.
Yeah, our disagreements with him are academic, whereas like with Professor Jiang it’s one of those not even wrong things,
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s like not even wrong, like there is a mental health issue at play here, and if it’s not a mental health issue, then you’re profoundly stupid. And that’s the thing-
Simone Collins: Or is it more ins- or is there m- something more insidious?
Which we’re gonna have to also ask this episode
Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh, okay. Continue.
Simone Collins: Anyway back to his just basic chronolo- chronological experience of the world. Since 2022, Jiang has [00:08:00] taught at Moonshot Academy, which was a private high school in Beijing. So even post-pandemic, still in China, and he’s not a university professor still even at this point.
In 2024, so two years ago, out of nowhere he launched the YouTube channel and podcast Predictive History, where he gives his long form lectures, and by long form I mean oppressively boring, almost impossible to watch, to us at least, lectures on geopolitics, history, and the structural analysis. And he claims to use game theory and Asimov-style psycho history to forecast world events, leading to the fan site aforementioned that will also be referenced in my show notes, which are extensively linked, so go to Patreon or Substack if you wanna get all the sources and links and everything.
He gained large international attention after correctly predicting Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election, which a lot of people did ‘cause it was kind of obvious, and a US-Iran war, which led to some media to dub him China’s [00:09:00] Nostradamus. And some bookers put him on major Western podcasts. Like, one of the clips that I will be referencing at one point in my show notes, him on Piers Morgan.
Like, mainstream stuff, okay? Okay. Like, y- I think you thought he was smaller than he is, too. So in terms of his reputation, several mainstream-
Malcolm Collins: And he does have real fans. Like, clearly they’re his audience
Simone Collins: Real, genuine. Diehard, yeah. Clearly they’re his audience. Not bots, real people.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s not bots.
Whether, whether or not his, his, his rise was above or below the board he genuinely appeals to a real audience.
Simone Collins: And to be clear, in the research I did, I did not come across accusations of him botting, in fact. So... And we’ve, we’ve covered that ground, I
Malcolm Collins: think. And, and I think more than that, I’d go so far as to say he has significantly more cultural impact right now than somebody like Nick Fuentes.
It would be
Simone Collins: just- Quite possibly. I mean, certainly in base camp circles for sure. Though we also have f- people who watch Nick Fuentes all the time, so yeah. Yeah. But right, several mainstream outlets describe him as a conspiracy theorist because of many of his claims on hidden cabals and [00:10:00] quasi-mystical frameworks.
He doesn’t really use conventional evidence-based analysis. So, a lot of, a lot of what I initially jumped off from, because I didn’t believe that he had all these conspiracies, was a, a profile in the Free Press that explicitly labels him a conspiracy theorist and highlights his belief in a coalition of Freemasons and Jesuits and followers of Sabbatean Jews and I think that’s also a Candace Owens thing.
And that they’re plotting to rule the world from Jerusalem. The, the South China Morning Post notes that his lectures sometimes veer into well-trodden conspiracy theories on shadowy secret societies, especially the lecture titled, which is gonna be referenced a lot in my direct quotes, Pax Judaica in his Secret History series.
So let’s get into the conspiracy theories because-
Malcolm Collins: Yes, and I- They’re delightful ... I want to go into them and turn the... the Jesuits do genuinely attem- bel- appear to control the Vatican, but they don’t work with Sabbatean Jews or the Freem- c- sorry
Simone Collins: And the Illuminati. The Illuminati. Okay, hold on. No, [00:11:00] because it’s, it’s...
He, he, he has this meta conspiracy in which an Illuminati composed of Freemasons, Jesuits, and Sabbatean Jews
who allegedly manipulate Western institutions and ultimately aim to control the world from Jerusalem are, like, working together to cause the decline of Western civilization. Okay? This is the Pax Judaica or Ju- Judaica?
Sorry, yeah. Jud- Judah Ga. He has a lecture on it, and in, about this lecture, critics argue that Cenk argues that after the US is forced out of the Middle East, which is one of his predictions, this Illuminati style network is gonna dominate global power from a greater Israel centered on Jerusalem.
Now, in his own words, on the Illuminati as a coalition, this is from his Breaking Points interview, which is widely clipped: “If you look at the Epstein files, it’s clear that we’re run by secret societies. You can call [00:12:00] them Illuminati, and Illuminati are composed of three major groups, okay? You have the Jesuits who control the Vatican.”
Malcolm said that, so not me.
Malcolm Collins: It’s true. “
Simone Collins: You have the Sabbatean Frankists who control the modern Israel today. You have the Freemasons, which control the national security apparatus of the United States.” I don’t know where that’s coming from. He adds that they, they see conflicts like those in the Middle East as key to the end times proph- prophecies creating heaven on earth.
I mean, there is a group of Christians we know that like Think that it’s necessary They
Malcolm Collins: do think that, but they’re not the ones who are typically associated with the Freemasons.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. So on the origins and s- structure of, of this this coalition, he describes the Illuminati as emerging from alliances like former Jesuits.
He refers to Adam Weishaupt and others that are, that infiltrated the Freemasons. He said, “What they will do together is create a new organization called the Illuminati. The Illuminati was able to penetrate the Freemasons.” [00:13:00] So apparently there was some kind of-
Malcolm Collins: Okay ...
Simone Collins: I don’t know, corporate takeover.
Malcolm Collins: So we gotta do I, I just need to, it’s, ugh.
Simone Collins: I’m gonna bring in the Templars, ‘cause in anuct- another lecture he says, quote, “Templars, who became the Freemasons, who then became the Illuminati, who control,” and then linking to broader historical continuity and goals like the one world government in Jerusalem. He sort of went on from there. It’s-
Malcolm Collins: So what’s interesting-
involved ... is some of his hedging here makes what he’s saying more plausible or less stupid.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Ooh ... if he is arguing that a group that is not the Illuminati is going to form something that is functionally the Illuminati and then- Huh ... call themselves the Illuminati.
Simone Collins: Huh.
Malcolm Collins: Or when he says, “Functionally these groups have an inordinate amount of power, and we can call them the Illuminati because they function similar to the way...”
That’s believable, right? I, I’d be like, not on its face stupid. It might be wrong, but it’s not on its face stupid. Okay. If you are saying that the original [00:14:00] historic organization that was called the Illuminati in history still has a meaningful historic continuity between itself and any organization that exists today, that’s stupid.
Simone Collins: Well, but I think that’s part of his, if there is one, brilliant clickbait strategy. He is- Okay, maybe he’s not explicitly arguing continuity, but he’s constantly name-checking these organizations that conspiracy-brained people just like, ugh, dopamine, like as soon as they hear these
Malcolm Collins: words. Yeah. We should do a whole other episode on the Sabbatean Jews,
Simone Collins: That’s keyword stuffed with all the wor- all
Malcolm Collins: the words
I can, I can talk for ages about the Sabbatean Jews. People know I, I, I am not a fan of Shabbatai Levi and there are parts of the current Jewish community that I am also not a fan of in terms of like the direction it has gone. Does Israel and do a group of Jews that are interconnected have a disproportionate amount of power over global governments?
They acqu- Yeah,
Simone Collins: you just gotta really keyword [00:15:00] s- Like watch some of Jang’s lectures. You can go through all the stuff I link in my show notes ‘cause like he, he’s a masterclass. Oh, I’m gonna include li- Like here, here’s, here’s another one. He on, on Freemasonry and related groups, he, he discusses the 33 grades of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, noting that lower levels emphasize being a good person while the higher ones invoke deeper power structures.
And then he ties Freemasonry to figures like Buzz Aldrin and historical US institutions. So it’s a whole like national treasure, the moon landing is fake. Like he’s really pulling in all the trigger words. He
Malcolm Collins: thinks the moon landing is fake?
Simone Collins: Well I don’t... No. I- But he’s bringing in Buzz Aldrin. So.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, hold on, let’s go back here ‘cause I- Okay ... we’ve gotta talk about each of these groups, and like the thing is is he says stuff that’s like adjacent to plausible, but stupid if you dig two levels deep,
Simone Collins: okay?
Malcolm Collins: Okay. So Sabbatean Jews they, they really... So they were sort of active between like, 1676 to like, I wanna say the last like really hard recorded practices we have from [00:16:00] Sabbatean Jews and Frankists-
Simone Collins: Mm.
Mm ...
Malcolm Collins: would’ve been in the early 1800s. So-
Simone Collins: Well, he says that they infiltrated the Jesuits in his,
Malcolm Collins: They, they, they, they did infiltrate- They did ... the Jesuits.
Simone Collins: Well, okay.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Hold on. I have to do a little bit of a, a breakdown of what happened here.
Simone Collins: Is- oh my God.
Malcolm Collins: So-
Simone Collins: You, you’re, you’re eating your words, Malcolm.
Malcolm Collins: No, he, he, he’s right, but there just isn’t continuity with anything that’s happening today.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Right? Like, he’s saying things that are adjacent to true- Well, but
Simone Collins: maybe this explains why he has two million followers on YouTube and you don’t ‘cause you’re
Malcolm Collins: not
Simone Collins: willing-
Malcolm Collins: Because I don’t go off about the Sabbatean Jews.
Yeah. I’m interested in what is historically
Simone Collins: true. Look, it worked for Candace Owens and it worked for Jiang.
Malcolm Collins: So, and I’m gonna add in post here a wider description of exactly, but from my memory okay, so the followers of Sabbatai Sevi- That’s so cute ... post- did something called antinomianism, okay? So antinomianism is where you [00:17:00] implicitly invert the laws of Judaism because you are living in the end times, which sort of means that you’re dealing with an opposite set of rules, and like-
Simone Collins: So it’s like opposite day, Jew edition?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s like opposite day, but morality. Morality is inversed in terms of a Jewish moral system, okay?
Simone Collins: Huh.
Malcolm Collins: So, you know, this could mean orgies, this could mean anything, but also, like, i-intentionally bad things to outsiders. Like, this explains theologically how you... Because it’s pretty hard to theologically get a group that just does evil things.
Yeah, yeah. Like typically, if you’re doing evil things, you think that you’re doing them for a malevolent entity, which generally means you can’t trust that entity, so people generally don’t worship things like Satan in, like, an honest format, right? Like-
Simone Collins: Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: you’re, you’re rarely gonna... Okay. But with Sab- antinomianism and Sabbateanism, it works, okay?
So- they ended up doing this. This guy ended up converting to Islam. It was a huge problem for Judaism. Over half of Jews, depending on, you know, what stats we look at, were members of his movement. They thought he was the Messiah. A huge [00:18:00] problem for the Jew, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, a group of his former followers did not deconvert after he converted to Islam.
And they formed the Frankists or the Sabbateans. Well, not real- Okay, so the Frankists then came about later. Basically, after all of this guy’s followers had died out, then a guy named Frank comes along and recreates an antinomialist movement looking back to Sabbatai Zevi. I think he said he was a reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi or something like that.
Don’t... Anyway, so they end up practicing this weird form of Judaism. All of the Jews in their community f*****g hate them because, you know, they’re practicing an inversion of Judaism. They are literally the least Jewish thing you could conceivably be because they are... If somebody practiced an inversion of Christianity, I think local Christians would hate them too, right?
Yeah. And of course, they’re interacting more as a Jewish community, so the Jewish community is super annoyed by them, and they’re c- drawing converts from the Jewish community. So, Jews f*****g hate these guys, right? And the Jews wouldn’t [00:19:00] mind seeing them wi- wiped out. So who do they form an alliance with to prevent themselves from being wiped out after a number of I think, court cases came up about them or something.
They form an alliance with the Jesuits. They tell the Jesuits, because they can’t go back to being Jews, the Jews hate them, “Oh, we’ll become Catholics,” right? “If you let us do whatever we wanna do,” right? Like, “You, you let us...” W- well, j- In fact, they then said that being a Catholic was part of this antinomianism.
It was part of the inversion of Jewish value systems, right? So, they become Catholics And some of them continued to practice antinomianism.
Simone Collins: Aha.
Malcolm Collins: And we have evidence that this happened for about two generations after this event, and no evidence after that. And it was, and it was m- mild stuff after this.
And we also have evidence- So what
Simone Collins: happened? Why did it die out? Did they not just go secret so they could control things better?
Malcolm Collins: It’s hard to keep [00:20:00] weird orgies going on for many... You gotta get other people
Simone Collins: involved in this. Yeah, as Aella could tell you, it takes a lot of work, and we’ve done even episodes on this.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, putting together and creating a high investment religious community tied to weird, sinful things like this is just difficult to do. It’s, it’s not easy, right? You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta recruit people in. They just didn’t have the money and power to do it for very long. Mm. Some of them also ended up joining the Jesuit order.
It was a very small number of them but some of them did. This is true. But from all of the evidence we have from the Jesuits and everything on that, they didn’t have a big impact on anything that was happening in the Jesuit order, and any of them that maintained these practices died out within a few generations.
Now, the Jesuit order is genuinely one of the, the largest evil societies on Earth today, right? Like, when I say, like, the Catholics are a problem, I really mean the [00:21:00] Jesuits are a problem. Because they control the Vatican right now. They’ve done some really shady stuff in papal elections. This is not the...
They’re, they actually shouldn’t even really be a Catholic order because they were they operated completely outside of the Catholic order during, I wanna say, like, the Communist period or something. Where they ended up being separated from the rest of the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church said that they were supposed to shut down.
Like, they basically got excommunicated, and they said, “No, we’re not gonna do that.” And so they operated entirely independently.
Speaker: The period when they operated entirely independently was under Catherine the Great, not the communist period. , And they were basically excommunicated by the church, , as an order, and anyone who participated was, but they continued to operate regardless of this because, , their region of the world was separated from the rest of the Vatican.
, And they basically formed their own culture and beliefs and then were reintegrated into the Catholic Church to try to, like, revive the order
Also, I didn’t interject with the information Under the Jacobins because I got [00:22:00] virtually everything about them right other than their founding date, which was around the 1800s. , So they disbanded a little later than I thought. , My second note here, if you’re wondering why am I qualified to speak on all of this, , well, if you read The Bloodlines of the Illuminati, my dad is supposed to be one of the leading members of it.
I’m the oldest male heir of the family, so presumably I would be. My wife was the managing director of Dialogue, which was a s- secret society founded by Peter Thiel. , Then we’ve also been invited to other secret societies founded by Peter Thiel, like Hereticon. , I’ve been to the Bohemian Grove. , I’m not a member of the Bohemian Grove.
That’s a giant waste of money. But, like, I’ve been, and my godfather was one of the presidents. I think I can say that at this point. , I only say that because it’s a nonprofit, so it has to be public that he was the president at one point if you Google it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t release that information
So yeah, , I’ve, I have a lot of insight into how a lot of these organizations work and where they’re operational, and so I know which [00:23:00] ones are relevant and which ones are not relevant, and how relevant they are in terms of secret power control structures.
Oh, I forgot we also did recruiting for a secret society that Eric Schmidt’s orgs were starting
Malcolm Collins: And then I wanna say when the y- communist world fell apart or something like that they then ended up reintegrating with the Catholic Church as a completely separate power structure that had a completely divergent goals from the Catholic institution.
Mm. And today when we see Catholics fermenting socialist rebellions, it’s typically Jesuits.
Simone Collins: Fomenting.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When we see them inventing the concept of, like, they came up with, like, liberal theology and stuff like this. I think it’s called, like, progressive theology or justice theology. This was invented by Jesuits.
Simone Collins: Justice theology. Whoa.
Malcolm Collins: Really bad stuff. Really bad- Okay ... bad, bad stuff, and it ended up taking over a lot of Protestant sects as well. And, and they do control the Vatican and what the Vatican is doing in large part, but they have the, the n- the bad stuff that the Jesuits are doing today has more ties to [00:24:00] communism and socialism than it has to anything tied to Sabbatianism.
Okay? The, the Sabbateans and the Frankists died out based on all of the evidence we can see. So that’s, it’s not stupid to say that they joined the Jesuits and they had some influence in the Jesuits. It’s just stupid to say that They that, that, that they influence the Jesuits today. Okay? There doesn’t appear to be, or any modern Jewish sect today.
Now-
Simone Collins: Well, he’s just trying to say that the Sabbatean Frankists just ultimately conquered the world, and that the Jacob Frank’s movement was linked to, or he, he links in his lectures that movement to secret society networks, that they infiltrated the Jesuits and th- they formed alliances that formed the Illuminati.
I mean- Okay.
Malcolm Collins: But it’s stupid. He- It’s stupid. The Sabbateans very clearly do not, and the Frankist ideology very clearly does not influence the faction of Jews that is controlling... Like, when people say the [00:25:00] Jews have a disproportionate amount of world control today, okay?
Simone Collins: Okay, but let’s, let’s get to that.
Let’s get to that. Okay? Let’s, ‘cause let- well, we’ll never get through that. Okay. Let’s hear what he has to say. And let’s talk about that, how he talks about this Pax Judaica and Greater Israel. So what he’s trying to claim is that the long-term plan of these elites, wherever they came from, is to engineer a new world order in which Greater Israel replaces American hegemony, and then Jerusalem is the seat of global governance.
And you can also see, oh, this probably helped to fuel some of his viral popularity. Anti-Israel sentiment is growing. People like to think that there’s this organized cabal that is very Israel-centric causing the decline of the West, you know, like, doing evil, scary things. So I think that’s another element of what he’s saying that’s really resonating with people.
Malcolm Collins: Right, but again, it, th- because look, there are real conspiracies you can talk about if you wanna talk about conspiracies.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: So you wanna talk about, like, okay, this is what’s [00:26:00] actually happening, okay? Shabbatai Levi, basically nobody takes him seriously anymore. There’s some weird, like, Muslim Jewish sects that sort of follow him, but they don’t do the antinomianist stuff anymore.
But, and this is what annoys me, because when you cloud people’s vision with the BS, you can’t see the real. If you’ve seen our track series, one of my most offensive takes, but it’s one I feel incredibly strongly about because, you know, when you follow a, an actual religious belief and you believe that some things are actually religiously true, you’ve gotta call out when something is going against those.
And there was a second major antinomianist figure within Jewish history called the Baal Shem Tov. And the Baal Shem Tov p- practice, he didn’t say it was antinomianism, but it was functionally, from the perspective of Jewish history, spiritual antinomianism. If you know Jewish r- rules around following people based on miracles instead of biblical knowledge, he was very big on the, “You follow me because of the miracles.”
Like, his number one convert came, [00:27:00] clearly more learned than him. All of the most learned rab- rabbis said, “Don’t follow this guy.” And then this guy came out and he’s like, “Kabbalah everything.” And all the other rabbis at the time were like, “Don’t do that. That’s, like, a dangerous book. You can maybe, maybe if you’re, like, a married man in his 30s who has studied Judaism forever, you can peek at that book.
You do not make that the foundation of your teachings.” And the Kabbalah has a lot of crazy stuff in it, okay? So anyway, he comes along and he rises the Kabbalism and, and pop mysticism within Judaism. Okay? Mm. And he actually took over large factions of the Jewish movement. And the groups that follow his teachings are the ones that completely dominate.
When you’re talking about, like, Jewish influence and Israeli influence in Western politics, it is this secondary form of antinomianism, not the type that came from Shabbatai Zevi, and it i- they have so much control that this entire video could be taken down even from pointing out that from [00:28:00] historic Jewish perspectives, from medieval Jewish perspectives, the way that the Baal Shem Tov interacted with Kabbalistic texts could be thought of as spiritualist antinomianism.
Because it go, it inverted previous Jewish teachings on how you engage with miracles and how you engage with spiritual phenomenons. So anyway, he comes in. Abeja, and these groups do control and they do want a greater Israel, and I’m actually okay with greater Israel. When I say a greater Israel, what I mean by that is an Israel which has ability to act in any way it wants on the surrounding nations.
The countries surrounding Israel just don’t have the technology to fight back against Israel anymore and Israel is okay with that, and they are now just like somebody annoys them, they kill them, right? Like, that’s, that’s where Israel is going and they’re going more in that direction as they get automated drone swarms and stuff like that.
And, and I am okay with that direction for Israel because frankly, I don’t really care about the other countries that are around them a particularly large amount. But the thing is that he’s right, but it’s almost [00:29:00] like he’s, he’s wrong in trying to hide the actual like, like, f- power structure of the world just enough that he sort of sends people on these shadow journeys so that they miss the real power structures that we should be fighting against.
And the whole thing about the Freemasons is just pants-on-head retarded. The- Okay.
Simone Collins: Well, let’s see what he says
Malcolm Collins: It would be truer to say Mormons- ... control the national security industry in the United States than Freemasons control the national security industry in the United States.
Simone Collins: I feel like they more staff it, they don’t lead it.
But that’s a totally separate subject. It
Malcolm Collins: is.
Simone Collins: So on the subject of greater Israel and its, its roots, he says, quote And so what will happen is then that Israel will achieve the Greater Israel Project. The Israelis believe that the Middle East was promised to their ancestor Abraham by Yahweh, their god.
If you look at the map of Greater Israel Project, it extends from the Nile to Euphrates. It encompasses Lebanon, Syria, parts of Turkey, and parts of Saudi Arabia, [00:30:00] and parts of Egypt. And then Israel will establish something called the Pax Judaica. A Pax Judaica is really the empire, a trading empire, a financial empire, a technological empire based in Jerus- Jerusalem, and they see it as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
Do you push back against that?
Malcolm Collins: I mean, that seems to be the direction things are going. The countries around Israel are weak in relation to Israel. They appear to be becoming weaker as time goes on, and Israel is becoming stronger as time goes on.
Simone Collins: Technologically- Yeah, because as, as he quote, another quote from him, he says, “So what does the Greater Israel Project mean?
Well, it means control of oil, trade, and technology.” He frames it basically as, as them inheriting and expanding US regional dominance in the Middle East after the US
Malcolm Collins: peaks,
Simone Collins: essentially.
Malcolm Collins: Why is this a... for me, it’s like I don’t like the other cultures that are in that region. I am okay- I don’t
Simone Collins: think he frames it as negative.
I just think that people who are anti-Israel are like, “Yeah, and that means they’re evil.” ‘Cause I mean, he, he’s also talking about the decline of the [00:31:00] West.
Malcolm Collins: In fact- If Israel was actually controlled by a group of what the, what the Frankists were and what the, the the Shabbatai Zevi followers were, was, was sort of physical antinomialists as opposed to spiritual antinomialists.
If they were actual physical antinomialism and believed in, in practicing an inversion of Jewish law around morality and the physical world instead of just the way they relate to the metaphysical world I would be very, very, very concerned. I would agree that this group cannot be allowed to gain power, but they just don’t.
Simone Collins: Well, he does frame them as evil. We’re gonna have to pick this up in a second recording session since I have to get the kids. Yeah. But next I can get to how he argues that, or at least has suggested the actions during the Gaza war amount to ritual child sacrifice, and he links real-world conflicts to occult or sacrificial practices- Oh, frigging hell
attributed to Israel or [00:32:00] Jewish-adjacent elites. So we’ll get to that next.
Malcolm Collins: So dumb. So dumb. It’s- It’s just not an efficient way to do sacrifice. If you’re doing child sacrifice, do it through something like Epstein. You don’t need to do it anymore.
Simone Collins: But no, yeah, no, honestly, the, the Egyptians, they were the ones who really nailed it.
So cats were sacred, but you, you, you wanted mummified cats, and I, you know, like, people... There was a market for them. So what did people do? They created, like, some of the earliest basically factory farms for cats. And they would, they would kill them and then mummify them and then sell the cat mummies because, you know, people were like-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, if they want it, just treat gods- And
Simone Collins: they would even make-
like a factory farm
Malcolm Collins: for children ...
Simone Collins: I would just... Because this is so fun. They would forge they would forge cat mummies too. Like, so people have taken them apart, and lo and behold, it is not a mummified cat. No, it’s like, like, paste and chicken bones.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Also by the way, fun fact if you wanna get really spicy about this.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: If you ch- were a [00:33:00] true moral and material antinomialist Jew and you were going to do child sacrifices non-Jewish children would be completely pointless for the child sacrifices because they don’t have the, This is like- They’re not
Simone Collins: w- good enough?
Malcolm Collins: No, they, they wouldn’t have, like, the s- the spirit of God in them which is why, you know, only within a matrimonial Jew- Oh, ‘cause
Simone Collins: then what?
Chosen people or something? I don’t know.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Basically it’s, it has to do with how Jews interpret Genesis. It doesn’t really matter. The point being is that if you were an actual antinomialist Jew, you would only care about Jewish children for your sacrifices. I don’t recall- Other children would basically be rotten for your perspective.
I
Simone Collins: don’t think he talks about antinomialism, but I may have
Malcolm Collins: missed that. No, because he doesn’t understand why it... He’s clearly, like, approaching all of this from a very midwit perspective. And that also annoys me because, like, these are actual things that you could study and investigate and understand how they changed their history, why they have these beliefs, why they think that you should have an inversion of morality.
This stuff matters because then you can predict them. If you understand the actual theology of an antinomialist, then you can [00:34:00] say, “Oh, so if they’re doing child sacrifices, could they take random children from Gaza? Would that be any use to them?” And the answer is no, they would have to take them from other Jews or from Jews who deconverted or something.
Simone Collins: Well, there isn’t a prediction fan site about your nonsense. Maybe you need to be a midwit to speak to the midwits and you won’t get a... You know, it, when you look at bell curves, the mid is the largest part.
Malcolm Collins: Yep ...
Simone Collins: you’re, you’re catering- I’m, I’m appealing to the wrong- ... to the wrong part of the bell curve
the wrong
Malcolm Collins: crowd.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Anyway, we’ll get more to this on our next installment of Malcolm Gets Mad at Proges- Professor Jiang.
Malcolm Collins: Keeps fighting. For, for theories that don’t, that don’t make that are s- just flirting with reality.
Simone Collins: Yeah. All right. All
Malcolm Collins: right, love you.
Simone Collins: Love you too.
So where we left off was ritual sacrifice the Gaza War. , Yang Ming and [00:35:00] others say that Chang has suggested that actions during the Gaza War amount to ritual child sacrifice. He links real world conflict to occult and sacrificial practices that are attributed to either Israel or Jew-adjacent individuals.
Sorry, does he
Malcolm Collins: mean like ritual sacrifice or does he think that they’re literally doing it for-
Simone Collins: The words he used were ritual child sacrifice. He’s definitely... He’s saying it’s ritual chi- he’s s- he’s saying it’s a cult. He’s keep in mind though, he’s “Oh, this is speculation. This is for fun.”
So he tries to flippantly discount a lot of the things that he says in the midst of his lectures of like I’m just doing gems here. But then he’s also just making these statements. And the- Okay,
Malcolm Collins: so if I’m gonna steel man him, okay? ‘Cause I
Simone Collins: will steel man- let me, let- I’ll just, let me first give you a quote, his core statement on Gaza as ritual sacrifice.
This is from Secret History Number Four, and it is widely clipped. People can find this. I’ve linked to it in my show notes. Quote, [00:36:00] “What is really happening in Gaza is a ritual sacrifice, and this happens quite often in human history if you go back and you look at the...” And then he goes on and talks about other things.
And then he also says, these are more direct quotes from him, on the purpose and visibility of this sacrifice. Quote, “The entire idea of this ritual sacrifice is to unite the Israeli population. And what’s extremely disturbing and horrifying about it is that it works.” And he also contrasts it with a hypothetical secret approach.
Quote, “Israel could do it secretly, and no one would talk about it. Instead, they choose to do this in front of the world. They want the world to hate them, because by doing this, they create the ultimate taboo. So the entire world unite against Israel, but guess what? That’s the, that’s what the region, w- religion wants in the extreme form of Jewis- Jewish...”
I always screw up this word. Eschatology? Eschatology? Eschatology, I think. Es- eschatology. “Israel will fight the entire world, and God will help Israel [00:37:00] triumph.” So as you can see, he’s not he means sacrifice. He means ritual sacrifice.
Malcolm Collins: He means- But he means it in a roundabout way. He’s saying that they’re- Yes
sacrificing children in aims of their greater religious objectives rather than a... He’s trying to bait the crazies maybe. See, here’s the-
Simone Collins: Sort of yeah. Because what he’s trying to he, yeah, he’s trying to... another way that he put it is he’s what the Israelis are doing is quite horrific, because this really is, it is really this sort of sacrifice.”
So he’s not saying it is a ritual sacrifice. He’s saying it’s a sacrifice. Why, he says, because 37% of almost half the population of Gaza is under 18 years old. So he’s also showing okay, it’s not technically a ritual sacrifice. It’s more just because Palestinians are really young, it’s like basically child sacrifice, but he’s still trying to-
Malcolm Collins: why are Palestinians really young, by the way?
It’s because they’re terrible at medical technology- ... so they don’t stay alive very long, and they are breeding really rapidly, which is You know, if I was gonna be uncharitable to Israel, I would
Simone Collins: say we- no, come on. Let’s [00:38:00] use more diff- look, in places where there’s rampant poverty and deprivation and mistreatment of humans, you often get very high birth rates, and that’s what we’re seeing there.
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: But again, he’s trying to play this up as ritual sacrifice again and again. And I think you made a really smart point there in that he is doing this to pander to conspiracy theorists while still trying to look smart and be like, “Oh I’m not actually saying that.” Candace Owens will just flat out be like I s- I talked with Charlie Kirk in a dream where he’ll be like, actually-” Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: this comes across as so much slimier than just, like-
Simone Collins: Yes.
Yes ...
Malcolm Collins: straight up being a conspiracy theorist or not being one.
Simone Collins: It’s all couched Like 47%. And he also, and he’s “Oh this is like sacrifice tradition in history, like the Ephesians.” And it is he tries to make it seem like I’m a historian. I’m just talking, I’m just sharing the fact- I
Malcolm Collins: love that this has happened multiple times throughout history.
Th- there is actually, child sacrifice is at least within the European tradition after Christianization, fairly rare. The only [00:39:00] instance that could come close to it that I’m aware of is the Children’s Crusade. But you couldn’t even argue that the Jesuits did that or see- Oh, good ... at least not Frankish Jesuits, because they didn’t come around till the 1800s, and this was in the 1200s.
You, it still could be the Catholics, but not the Jesuits. And they didn’t even the Catholic Church, the pope at the time, even with as corrupt as popes were back then, did not officiate the Children’s Crusade. It happened as a completely-
Simone Collins: What is the Children’s... Should I not ask?
Malcolm Collins: You don’t wanna know.
Simone Collins: Okay never mind. I don’t wanna know.
Malcolm Collins: But he didn’t say it was a good thing, so you know, th- even that doesn’t really hold. The, like I wanna go, okay, you go what religions actually do in a modern context might actually believe in child sacrifice. The two key ones that I can think of,
Simone Collins: No, hold on.
The Palestinians believe in child sacrifice. Remember that clip of that, that Palestinian woman who’s “I’m glad my son died, in, in this war, and [00:40:00] I hope to have more children so they can die.” Who is doing this?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the-
Simone Collins: It’s the Palestinians. Who’s using the children as human shields?
It’s the Palestinians. It’s the Palestinians who are actively engaging in child sacrifice, who are actively putting the children on front lines. Excuse me. It’s, that’s what makes it extra insulting. He’s putting this on the Israelis, and the Israelis are not perfect, but the ones who are putting children in the direct line of fire are the Palestinians.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah if you’re familiar with, and I criticize Jewish eschatology regularly. I criticize Jewish metaphysics, at least of the non-Misnagdim camp, which is most Jews, ‘cause that’s the Hasidic Jewish Jews. And I say things that offend them all the time. So I, going into this as harsh as I could be, right?
There is not any mainstream eschatology or metaphysical belief within Judaism where child sacrifice would be considered a good thing. You could get this in some antinomial historic sects like the Frankish- Or [00:41:00] the followers of Zabatai Levi. But even the iterations of Judaism today, which I consider to be spiritually antinomian, still have no form of that would lead to child sacrifice.
It’s just not on their game board. So you have these historic sects that may want this, but these historic sects were integrated into the Catholic Church. They weren’t integrated into Jewish tradition, and he even, he admits that. They were c- they were taken by the Francus were absorbed by the Jesuits.
They were not absorbed by mainstream Jewish society. So even if by his own conspiracy theory logic they did still exist, they would be controlling the Vatican and not Israel. If he’s saying they’re just sacrificing children of other nations who they want to go to war with to win,” note in the Bible, this is in the Bible, that there are instances in which when you are fighting a population that is really bad because the populations that this [00:42:00] was said of in the Bible, they practice things like Jewish child sacrifice, which you could argue, given what she’s talking about here, it’s said to kill not just the men, but the women and children as well in a few instances.
It’s very clear commandment from God that applies to Christians as well, by the way. We have to deal with it. Presumably our God said this at some point, right? Maybe he changed his mind on things. But you could say, “Okay they have in times of war when the enemy is demonstrably evil, then you kill all of the enemy’s members.”
Okay, but that’s not really child sacrifice. That’s more like a war crime, right? But I don’t like the stretching here when you can just lay it out in a way that isn’t conspiracy-minded and be like mainstream Judaism does want Jews to win. Mainstream, most religions want them to win. If I go into extremist Catholic eschatology, they one day want to convert everyone, right?
Convert or, this is what Catholic integralism is about. Convert or [00:43:00] kill, right? At the end of the day, everyone’s on team for them. But they’re not the only ones who want to do this, right? Most Protestants they may be less clear about this, but they eventually want every actually, most Protestants believe that one day that all many different Christian sects can, are, like, good enough in the same way that we have a theosophical eschatology.
So they’re okay as long as everyone’s Christian one day. But that’s still pretty totalizing, right? I’ll note here that the modern Vatican actually does not one day want everyone to be Catholic because they say that I think this was at Vatican II, that like Muslims still believe a real Go- like in the real, like God that the Catholics are worshiping and that Protestants do.
Saying that they’re like partially true religions as well, and this pissed off a lot of Catholics, and this is where you got one of the sects that’s technically schismatic but says they’re not schismatic and has some influencers. But the the way that I read a lot of, the historic Catholic Church wanted everything to be Catholic eventually.
But the [00:44:00] point I’m making here is this is not unique to the Jews. Most groups eventually want everyone to be a member of their particular religion. Even the peaceful Baha’i want this, right? Everybody wants this. This isn’t a Jewish eschatology secret hush-hush thing. The only thing that might make the Jews slightly more suspect in their desire for this is that modern Jews don’t think that you can convert just anyone into Judaism.
So if they eventually want the Jews to win that becomes a bit more zero-sum than the Christian sects that wanna do this through conversion. That said the Jewish movement has begun to invent all sorts of traditions to get around this with the no hide system, which in our episode we point out is just a historical fabrication.
This is on the question that breaks Judaism. We go into the no hide scam. But anyway, continue Simone.
Simone Collins: The next broad conspiracy theory, or you could argue it’s a theme of Professor Jiang’s work that I think is the probably best fodder for some people’s [00:45:00] suppositions that he is in, in various ways supported perhaps indirectly and perhaps even without his knowledge by the CCP, is that he has this broad belief in like Western institutions being hollowed out and controlled by hidden elites with US decline being both inevitable and deserved.
And one, one long form critique that I came across about him claims that basically his forecasts all converge on one outcome, which is American collapse. He predicts Western Civil War, the vindication of Chinese and Iranian strategic positions in a way that maps almost perfectly onto the narrative architecture of CCP soft power.
So as you can imagine, this is one of those critiques that sees this as being a, him being a CCP thing. So let’s look at some of his own quotes on this. On secret societies as the real power orchestrating shifts, he [00:46:00] says, quote, “What I say is that the real power base are a collection of six societies that have an eschatological view of this war, sir.
The secret societies include the Freemasons. You have a collection of six societies. They believe in a war in the Middle East. It would start a process that would culminate in the end times. This war in the Middle East will lead to the defeat of the American Empire, and this will lead to the Greater Israel project, Pax Judaica.”
And then on their role in Western decline, he says, “As for how this happened, the issue that this is actually a plan that has been operating for centuries involving different religious group, Frankists Shabateans, Freemasonry, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, and the Jesuits.” So what is the different secret societies, different religious organizations have been collaborating over centuries to advance a plan to about the end of the world, which we will usher in the Messianic age.
And then- Oh. Go ahead I know what you’re g- but I think I know what you’re gonna say, that he’s conflating this [00:47:00] minority Christian view that Israel needs to exist because then it’ll help us bring around the end times the right way and it’ll help- That’s
Malcolm Collins: a pretty common view among Pentecostals.
Simone Collins: Right, which I think... Okay less, less uncommon than him arguing. But
Malcolm Collins: Pentecostals I don’t even think are allowed in the Freemasons. They’re certainly not- Oh, really? ... one of the dominant factions in the Freemasons. The Freemasons are typically more deists and mainline Protestants. They most Baptists and Pentecostals are a little too conspiracy theory brained to join the Freemasons.
That doesn’t really make sense.
Simone Collins: It’s, if you’re conspiracy theory brained, you should be cucking to join the Freemasons.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah yeah, some people do ‘cause they think it’s gonna they’re gonna get access to special knowledge or whatever, and then they’re like, “Oh, no, it’s just old men.”
But okay. Let’s actually If he’s not an idiot, what’s his meta objective? His meta objective is to use parts of true information to try to turn American sentiment against our most useful [00:48:00] allies. D- particularly right now if- Oh,
Simone Collins: if he’s an agent of the CCP or if he wants to advance-
Malcolm Collins: Right.
He wants to advance the cause, because Iran
Simone Collins: is a pretty good trial. See, I don’t actually think that’s what’s going on. I think maybe the CCP is openly signal boosting him because they like his narrative and they find that it works in concert with their goals. But I actually think he’s just out to get a, his book deal and launch his own stuff and make money from that.
Malcolm Collins: Potentially. But the thing that’s weird to me is greater... If we’re allied with Israel, greater Israel is good for the United States. Greater Israel means a bunch of places in the Middle East that don’t like us very much become a part of one of our only growing and s- really ideologically, strategically aligned allies in the world right now becomes bigger.
And I’d go further, which is to say, I agree with him. Greater Israel seems to be on track to happen, right? Because the only thing that’s really keeping [00:49:00] Israel from just going out and killing everyone it doesn’t like and taking the land is Europe, and Europe is declining in power. And outside of Europe, the thing that’s preventing them are the progressive Israelis, but the progressive Israelis, if you look at their marches, like one of my Israeli friends was saying to, to this to me, they look like senior citizen marches.
You look at the conservative marches and they’re all young people, right? We know what the next generation is. And it-
Simone Collins: Gosh, that’s so true. Know Kings looks so old.
Malcolm Collins: Oh my gosh ... it is the same with the United States. Yeah. The groups that would want to reign in Israel from creating greater Israel really, it- even if you’re like an American first and you’re, like, cut off military aid to Israel, which I’m 100% for, by the way, we should cut off all economic aid to Israel.
Even if you’re like that, you... And Israel then started conquering its neighbors, you’re not gonna wanna go in and stop them. And yet I hear the same people who are like, “I’m mad because we are intervening in Iran right now,” then on, on their same shows fantasizing about America going in and conquering Israel.
And it’s bro, so you’re not against us [00:50:00] intervening in the Middle East. You’re not against foreign wars. You just want them to be for your political agenda, right? Which is So f*****g silly and stupid, frankly. And I had on one of our comments recently people were being like, “Why do you support the Jews when they majority vote Democrat?”
The Jews that I support are not the reformed Jews that create this statistic. They are the conservative orthodox
Speaker 4: According to Pew, 75% of Orthodox Jews vote Republican. Keep in mind, these are the Jews that are actually having children that are actually going to be representative in future generations that if we want to get along with the Jews, we have to find a way to partner with because they are one of the groups that is intergenerationally relevant and they are wildly conservative.
And not only are they wildly conservative, but they are disproportionate populations in many swing states like Florida, which makes it incredibly stupid to antagonize them if you’re right wing.
Malcolm Collins: Jews who [00:51:00] are productive. Not all of them. I don’t like the parasitic ones, right? And that faction of Jews does vote conservative. They’ve long been one of the pillars of conservative voting blocks in places like Florida and stuff like that.
I... I don’t even know where people are getting this from. But anyway, continue, Samout.
Simone Collins: I could read more quotes about the Western decline thing, but I it’s honestly been in, built into so many of the other things we’ve read about. And so I wanna finish up in terms of his general c- top conspiracy themes with his whole thing on psychohistory and mystical prediction.
He explicitly invokes Isaac Asimov’s fictional concept of psychohistory. Again, fictional concept. And claims to use structural history and game theory to predict the future. Though I should note that in his lectures on game theory, he doesn’t demonstrate a mastery of game theory concepts.
So I’m not really... Again, like a lot of this is like spamming- Explain what he
Malcolm Collins: gets wrong about game theory.
Simone Collins: What’s he not getting? We’ll get into that in a little bit, ‘cause I’m gonna discuss that in, in a bit. But anyway he basically [00:52:00] treats th- this fictional device of like psychohistory and game theory as a scientific method and like this, an academic thing when it’s not.
Some debunkers also allege that he talks about listening to the voice of the universe or a higher power that guides his predictions, which they argue pushes his material from speculative analysis into quasi-mystical prophecy, which you definitely see come through in the way that many of his followers regard him.
They’re really like, “Oh, you gotta check out this Professor Jiang. He’s been calling some stuff.” Oh, never mind that like he gets a ton of stuff wrong.
Malcolm Collins: He, what he doesn’t... I have not heard a single impressive prediction from him yet. Yeah. When people are like, “Oh, he calls for stuff.”
He said Trump would win the election. I said Trump would win the election. I don’t go around
Simone Collins: acting like a- Yeah, where’s your two million followers on YouTube, Malcolm?
Malcolm Collins: He said that there was a chance that the US would go to war with Iran. Every single analyst that I watch or listen to has been saying [00:53:00] that since Trump came into office.
Simone Collins: Dude, watch Kum- Trump talking about Iran in the ‘80s. Like
Malcolm Collins: Yes, he said he wanted to... he said literally on the campaign trail that he planned to bomb Iran. I do not know... The people who think, the... And then you look whenever he does make an out there conspiracy theory they’re always super wrong.
Simone Collins: Yeah, like quite uninformed. So it is, But anyway, things that he said though about psychohistory. He says, “Psychohistory is the idea that the future can be predicted, and if it can be predicted, then it be con- can be controlled and harnessed for the betterment of humanity. In his Foundation series, I- Isaac Asimov introduces the science of psychohistory.”
Yes, this is him- It’s a, the Foundation series- Okay, continue ... it’s a sci-fi- Off the reservation. Yeah. It is really possible to predict the future by mathematically modeling historical development. It’s not by the way, anyway, just-
Malcolm Collins: It does seem-
Simone Collins: On AI and modeling ...
Malcolm Collins: what he’s saying here, which is funny.
He’s trying to now make it look plausible by being [00:54:00] like, “Oh what I really mean is you just mathematically model historic events and you can-”
Simone Collins: No, like literally that’s what a character does in F- in the Foundation series. The, it starts off with basically this academic professor who’s special.
He’s fig- figured out the formula. And the problem w- in narratively with the Foundation series is basically this professor has fig- figured out the formula, and then he gets exiled to the far reaches of the universe because he predicts the downfall of the empire that has grown in this futuristic world.
And the empire does fall and that’s the key thing. It’s called Foundations because he works to build this, like-
Malcolm Collins: I under- look, Simone, you’ve explained this before. I think you’ve explained enough of it at this point. Okay. That he works to build a counter civilization. Anyway,
Simone Collins: this is all stupid- Yes
and I hate it. So let’s- Nope ...
Malcolm Collins: go ahead ... but hold on here. He’s saying something that is both profoundly stupid and something that is both so obvious that no one would challenge it. Okay. One, he’s basically saying you can use history to gain some predictive capacity over future events. Yes, everybody agrees on that,
Simone Collins: right?
Like- It helps, yeah. It helps to be informed by history. Yes. [00:55:00] History is worth studying, 100%. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: It gives you predictive capability on future events. That is
Simone Collins: not- Som- somewhat ...
Malcolm Collins: mystical. That is not the mathematical equation to predicting history. That’s just history as a discipline. Continue.
Simone Collins: Oh hold on.
They’ve been bathed. They were, they just went into the creek fully clothed, like, all, all the way. Toasty was freezing. But you know what? It sounds like
Malcolm Collins: you had fun, though.
Simone Collins: Yeah. That’s how you know it’s a good day, so.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, I wanna hear more of this Professor Zhang stuff.
Simone Collins: Right. So we’ve gone over the, you know, his, his various things about the Pax Judaica and the secret societies, bringing about the decline and fall of Western civilization, and all of that, right? I think one way that you like to calibrate the competency of people is by hearing their takes on something that you have thought a lot or read a lot about.
Mm-hmm. So I thought maybe you’d be interested in hearing the highlights from his lecture on AI. Are you interested?
Malcolm Collins: [00:56:00] Okay.
Simone Collins: He, he wants to couch first his analysis on AI as a general concept as intellectual exploration and that he, he acknowledges that he often oversimplifies and that his readings of texts like Paradise Lost and the, the Kabbalah, because that’s a good sign, are minority interpretations used to build broader narratives.
The, the core thesis that he wanted to summarize from his prior class before talking about AI is that to understand history and geopolitics you have to take extremist religious beliefs seriously because fanatical eschatological frame frameworks and ideologies often drive great powers behavior.
Which I don’t think is true but that is what he thinks is true. So in terms of AI-
Malcolm Collins: no, hold on. This is partially true. There are some Jews that are driven by the real Jewish ob- objective, right? Sure. Like there are some Catholics driven by, like, a real long-term Catholic objective. I even would argue that most people who have [00:57:00] a real faith are actually driven by the, even techno-puritanism,
Simone Collins: the- Yeah, but people in the end within, within complex systems act in alignment with their incentives, and their incentives first and foremost are to accrue resources and avoid punishment.
And you know what? I’m, I’m sorry, but es- es- I disagree ... eschatological frameworks don’t fit into that. I disagree. Because look, the, the first, the first goal that anyone who’s even a religious zealot is typically going to pursue is, “Ah, well, the best thing I can do is to accrue power,” often in the form of money or resources, “so that I can have more influence for my agenda.”
Malcolm Collins: But in your world view here doesn’t explain what you were just talking about, where the mother is happy that her son died fighting Israel, where you regularly- Well,
Simone Collins: she, she didn’t have a shot at any resources. So her only resource is her son, and she’s gladly- No, this is- Well, and I guess religious, like, alignment probably, like-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Rel-
Simone Collins: There
Malcolm Collins: is-
Simone Collins: Resources in this world. She’s banking on resources [00:58:00] in the next world.
Malcolm Collins: And that’s eschatology. No. That’s extremist eschatology. That is what drives a lot of people’s behavior
Simone Collins: Okay. Point made. I don’t think that’s what drives most people who are in power now, and she’s not in power
Malcolm Collins: I think it drives Netanyahu’s behavior
Simone Collins: Mm.
I don’t know.
Malcolm Collins: But, but anyway
Simone Collins: I’m dubious. People in the comments will weigh in and tell me how the woman is wrong once again.
Malcolm Collins: It drives my behavior- I
Simone Collins: know,
Malcolm Collins: Tex ... it drives your behavior. My behavior is driven much more by an eschatological framework than
Simone Collins: it is- My behavior is driven by autism, as you know, which is why I do all sorts of things that are not in anyone’s best interest, but You know, the dishwasher has to be loaded
Malcolm Collins: a
Simone Collins: certain
Malcolm Collins: way My veneer is completely driven by an eschatological framework- Oh, I’m-
for where I want humanity to go.
Simone Collins: Welcome to your world.
Malcolm Collins: And the, the... I mean, I’m very upfront about it, right? The only place where I may not be upfront about things is how ruthless I would go if I were the majority [00:59:00] player,
Speaker 5: Welp, after yesterday’s episode, it may be a little bit more clear how far I’d go. , Actually, I was in part inspired to do that episode by doing this one, and I was like, you know what? If I die and the techno-puritans start to grow, I think that, , I, I need to bake this in and not just have this part be in my head, , to be like, look, get along with outsiders as much as you can.
Do not disparage a group unless you absolutely know that you cannot live alongside them. But once that becomes the case, they need to be removed in their entirety. , At, at least the ones that you do not integrate into your culture. And always leave that to be an option for those that are strong or ideologically aligned until it’s time to make the move.
, And I think that this is, , a fairly sane way to operate, right? The idea of, oh, this group will always be nice until we push them too far. Then as many outsiders I’d be like, “Well, let’s just not push them too [01:00:00] hard.” , Assuming they ever become a big group
Malcolm Collins: if I had power. But I, I don’t right now. I don’t have systemic power, so it’s better for me to say we should all get along, right?
Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. Anyway Anyway, the, the source material that Professor Jiang uses to talk about AI is f- fortunately not If, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, but rather Empire of AI, which is a book about OpenAI by Karen Ho. Oh, Hao, sorry. Karen Hao. Hao argues in her book that OpenAI’s original idealism that AGI benefits all of humanity has turned into a formula for consolidating power and centralizing talent around a quasi-religious mission, which, okay, that, like, checks out.
I’m okay- Yeah ... with that argument. And that they’re pursuing relentless global expansion, like a trillion dollar data centers, and constantly referring to AGI to maintain control. What he argues is that OpenAI’s true but unspoken goal is to create God, and he interprets leaders like [01:01:00] Brockman and Skotzber as trying to build a de facto deity, which he calls insane, evil, and stupid.
He posits that Sam Altman’s interest in AI c- companions like sex robots is about maximizing usage, intensity, and dependency, not about human flourishing, and that it’s part of a drive to make AI omnipresent in everyday life. Any thoughts on h- his thesis so far?
Malcolm Collins: So he’s just doing what he does with his other theses, where he says something that is meant to be provocative, but is actually a very uninteresting statement.
Yeah. Everything he is saying is profoundly uninteresting and unintelligent.
Titan: Killing it.
Malcolm Collins: All he is saying is that I, I, I assume, like assuming he doesn’t mean they’re trying to create a literal god, which every time he makes one of these theories he always backs it off, you know- Yeah ... the literal interpretation.
Yeah. And what he means is they’re trying to create a super powerful intelligence that runs the majority of the [01:02:00] world’s economy. Of course, of course that’s part of the goal, right? You know, they’re a company. They’re making a product. They want people to use it. They want it to be maximally impactful.
Yeah. And this is what it has the capability to do. So it’s just, I’d say it’s not wrong yet, it’s just profoundly an uninteresting observation.
Simone Collins: He also, in terms of his understanding of AI, traces chat box to Weizenbaum’s ELIZA to argue that systems like ChatGPT are mainly performing pattern matching and conversational tricks that exploit our tendency to hallucinate agency and meaning rather than
Malcolm Collins: processing the- Oh, duh, really?
That’s how, that’s how an AI coded my entire website for me? Ooh. That’s how it made very sophisticated code for me?
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And with the, free editing software, it’s just a bit of a pain to get all the software. You’re probably gonna have to use an AI to, to fiddle with it. But it, yeah, it comes pre-rigged and everything.
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Malcolm Collins: It j- just, yeah, it is just pattern matching, but most of human thought is just pattern matching.
Simone Collins: I know. I know. I know.
Malcolm Collins: That’s how you make art. That’s how you make music. That’s how you write books.
Yeah. You pattern match with a little bit of external directionality, but the external directionality is mostly superficial in nature. If I am going and I am creating the next great art piece of the whatever style, most of what I am doing is pattern matching to that style. If I’m trying to create a new style of art, okay, maybe I’m not pattern matching there, but really you typically are.
You’re taking it from some idea or it’s even, like, anti-pattern matching, where you’re like, “Well, I’m just gonna try to do something new. I’m gonna make a block, a red block, and I’m gonna call that [01:05:00] art.” Oh, you ... Th- mm. Sorry, I just hate when people try to downplay how much of what they call thought is pattern matching.
Simone Collins: Mm. Hmm. Yeah. Anyway his take on AI risk is that attempts to make AI that solve all problems are gonna result in things like, “Oh, well, okay, just make everyone happy, eliminate suffering,” and then AI will just kill all people. Like, that’s kind of his, his take on X risk. He doesn’t- That’s a really
Malcolm Collins: dumb take on X risk.
Simone Collins: Yeah. He also stresses that data centers devour water and electricity and finance while remaining easy physical targets. He, he talks about, like, physical attacks in the Middle East as early signs that that infrastructure can’t really be defended at a global scale. In terms of the US versus China with AI, and this is what I would pay extra attention to if we’re trying to determine whether or not he is either directly or indirectly being sponsored by [01:06:00] the CCP he says that publicly, US firms frame Chinese AI as existential, as a threat to attract money and political support.
But privately, he says American and Chinese entities are collaborating because China’s pervasive surveillance and classroom monitoring yield the clean data the US companies want but cannot easily gather domestically. Ah. What I appreciate about this is at least- Ah ... this is the first, this is the first novel argument I’m hearing.
I’ve not heard someone be like- But why would
Malcolm Collins: China would have any advantage in AI?
Simone Collins: Yes. The, the mass- Oh, China, China is, has a mass surveillance state, and it’s clean data. And so, you know, the, the US needs them for training data.
Malcolm Collins: I, I have seen evidence that US firms are using lots of Chinese data because-
Simone Collins: Interesting
Malcolm Collins: I have repeatedly in recent AI work I’ve been doing seen Chinese characters pop up randomly.
Simone Collins: Interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Ooh ... I’ve heard other people have seen, had Hebrew characters pop up randomly as well.
Simone Collins: Well, well, well.
Malcolm Collins: Which would make sense. We’re [01:07:00] collabing with China and Israel.
Simone Collins: Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: we’re really cross-stealing.
It’s where China tries to steal from us, we sometimes get data from them. It’s... The, the whole thing is, is like yes, they need money, but they don’t act as defensive against China as they would if they saw them as an existential threat. Mm-hmm. It’s more like everyone’s just running as fast as they can with this particular race.
Simone Collins: Totally.
Malcolm Collins: And that’s where we are, and there just aren’t that many true trade secrets in the AI space.
Simone Collins: Where I fall with him and, and this being or not being CCP propaganda, I think it doesn’t hurt what I think the CCP is doing, which is like, okay, stoke fears among US citizens about AI and get them to slow down the creation of data centers, et cetera.
Which is, a whole episode I’m thinking about doing is, is, is, is data center fear being astroturf? Because already there’s, there’s the sort of homegrown fear, but I feel like it’s being, it’s getting extra fuel that might be coming from the CCP. Because when you look at just the stark difference [01:08:00] between the way that people in China view AI versus the way that people in the US view AI, I feel like there’s clear There’s a, there’s a skew that suggests that a more interesting story there.
Like, why, why is everyone in China, like, pretty cool with AI? Like, “Oh, this is probably gonna be good.” Whereas, like, in the US we’re like, “It’s gonna end the world.” Something, something is going on. Anyway, though, so it’s not incompatible with that. He certainly sh- framing AI as a negative thing. He also has a whole thing on AI and the occult.
He links the project name Stargate to the CIA’s historical Operation Stargate, which was on psychic phenomena and, and to sci-fi depictions of dimensional portraits, interpreting modern AI data centers as literal portals designed to summon demons/aliens from other dimensions. I mean, I think this is one of those things where, like, he tr- he...
And this is very clever on his part, ‘cause clearly it’s working. It sort of brings in in keyword stuff with conspiracy language without really explicitly being like he- [01:09:00] they’re using it to bring in demons. He’s like, well, like demons, you know? ‘Cause A- they’re trying to make an AI god, so it’s like AI demons, you know?
Yeah, I
Malcolm Collins: think he tried to b- frame it as sacrilegious to make a, a machine that could solve world hunger or could, that could solve jobs, that could solve ev- like most of the world’s problems. Which is, I’m not saying that that’s what they’re trying to do, but, like, that is one potential outcome of creating a super intelligent AI that takes most human work away.
It is, it is a outcome that has significant societal risks that we’re gonna have to figure out how to get around. But to just frame all of these things as... This is the trick that he runs, which really is a stupid and annoying trick to me. It’s just-
Simone Collins: Well, effective though. Let’s, let’s be clear here that
Malcolm Collins: it works
technically they’re trying to build something that you could argue is godlike. And now because they’re trying to build God, that’s demonic and anti-biblical. It’s like, what? You just said it’s a technical whatever analogous thing. They’re not literally trying to build God [01:10:00] here.
Simone Collins: Yeah, though he does say, like, this is sort of, this is supposed to, as of the time of this recording be sort of the first in his AI series.
And he, he says that the rest of his semester... ‘Cause he’s really trying to... Again, he’s using language to, like, frame this as a you’re a student in his class. That he’s going to trace how this occult AI project is going to unfold and why he believes it will end in the destruction of the world. Yeah
and that he, he says that it could be- Oh, yeah, he’s not
Malcolm Collins: a CCP plant. He’s trying to get the US to back off AI. Anyone who’s trying to get the US to back off of AI, I am immediately suspicious of.
Simone Collins: Well, and you had, you had said to me the other day, you’re like, “Well, there’s no way he could possibly be in China.”
As far as we know, he is in China. He teaches- Really? ... a course on Western philosophy at Moonshot Academy in Beijing. His LinkedIn profile lists his location as Haidian District, Beijing, China. His X profile- Oh, then he definitely is a CCP plant ... lists his location as Beijing, China. Multiple recent media descriptions in 2026 call him a Beijing-based educator or say [01:11:00] he’s based in Beijing so-
Malcolm Collins: Sorry, I need to take a step back for people who don’t understand why this would be the case.
In China, you, it is illegal to have a YouTube account. You cannot have a YouTube account.
Simone Collins: Is that-
Malcolm Collins: If you
Simone Collins: s- ... true? No, because then how did the ADV China’s guys do it before they-
Malcolm Collins: They, they had to run away- ... left for Thailand ... from the country.
Speaker 8: Note, I double-checked this to make sure I was getting it right, and yes, it is extremely illegal to run a YouTube channel in China. , YouTube is blocked by the Great Firewall, so the only way you could have one is by using a VPN, which are extremely, extremely illegal if you are a Chinese citizen. A lot of foreigners are unaware of this because the rules aren’t enforced that strictly for foreigners.
But yes, , th- China certainly has to, like, legally approve of everything he’s putting out. Otherwise, they could just shut him down
Simone Collins: Right. But like before, for a very long time they were very prominent.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they just did it with VPNs and stuff. Nobody cares. Basically you get popular enough, and he’s definitely in the range where somebody in the CCP- Not popular enough ... has approved this. Mm. You, everyone above a certain follower list is- Well,
Simone Collins: basically, you know, the, [01:12:00] the mere fact that he hasn’t been shut down is proof that the CCP thinks it’s, his message is effective for their ends.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: Well, that’s telling.
Malcolm Collins: They would literally shut him down if not. He’s
Simone Collins: using
Malcolm Collins: the C-
Simone Collins: If, yeah. So they, yeah- Yeah, basically ... basically, like, they’re not enforcing a law, which you say exists, I didn’t know about this law because it, it is in their best interest to not enforce this law.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. Anyone you see who’s in China and on the internet today, is, is, is doing CCP work Oh Right?
Simone Collins: Like- Wow. Okay, well, there you have it. I mean, that’s Malcolm’s theory then, and I will, I will, I will give you two other YouTubers’ theories, like in, in short version to sort of give where, where other people think this guy is or why, why they think he’s big when it doesn’t exactly make sense or fully add up.
There’s this guy on YouTube called Jose, just Jose. And basically his argument is that [01:13:00] he’s spamming the smart professor signal. He did this video called Professor Ceng’s Broken Classroom in which he argues that Ceng’s predictive history and game theory lectures are not a series of education, but narrative-driven speculation that’s riddled with factual errors that people believe to be credible because his lectures are packaged in the aesthetics of academia to create this veneer of authority.
And some of his choice factual errors that Jose highlights in, in his overview is Holocaust denial and claims that no good idea came through the scientific method, which- Oh my God. It’s
Malcolm Collins: profoundly stupid.
Simone Collins: Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: it, and, and that is profoundly stupid if he actually said that.
Simone Collins: Yeah, he did.
He included the clip in his... I watched the, the full video. He, the clip is, it’s there. And he cites the- To talk about this dynamic, he cites the Dr. Fox lecture, which I hadn’t heard about before. But it’s this experiment in which this charismatic actor was presented [01:14:00] deliberately as a, a, a f- like, fancy, smart professor, and then delivered a content-free, jargon-laden lecture as Mr.
or Dr. Myron L. Fox, and then still received this highly positive evaluation from a professional audience suggesting that basically acting like you’re a smart professor and using professorial words can just max, m- mask a complete lack of, of substance in what’s actually being said. I mean- And this was, this was done in 1973, so this is a well-known dynamic.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That is I mean, he appears to be kind of full of himself, if I’m gonna be honest. I don’t know if this is, like, to trick people or anything like that. I just think he’s sorta arrogant like this, right? Like, I think that this is just sort of how he judges self-worth is this sort of, like, pseudo-mystical history stuff.
Basically-
Simone Collins: Well, I’ll tell you what. My whole theory, and, like, my hot take about him is that basically he is the modern-day Jeffrey Epstein of China. Jeffrey Epstein was [01:15:00] a you know, he was really good at, like, convincing people that he was super smart, and without really any serious qualifications ended up teaching math at an elite high school in New York.
What is this but an elite high school in Beijing? And then he started using that and the connections he got through the school and through other places to get into this role and to get into that role, and I think that’s exactly what Professor Jiang is doing. And if you fall for Professor Jiang, you would fall for Jeffrey Epstein.
And I’m not saying Professor Jiang has some other weird, creepy stuff going on. I’m just saying- That this is the c- it’s the game. It is the same exact game that Jeffrey Epstein- Yeah, faking
Malcolm Collins: being an educator, right?
Simone Collins: Faking- Yeah, and faking being smart, and faking being, like, really erudite, and like, oh, like, basically spamming people with all this stuff until they...
Kind of fake it until you- you make it into these circles and actually build some real... I mean, Jeffrey Epstein did it through building, like, dirt on people and literally implicating them in, like, financial crimes and then he kind of got them. And it’s-
Malcolm Collins: it’s funny if you contrast him with us, [01:16:00] right? So he has
Simone Collins: no- Yeah, we- we performatively stupid, Max.
Yeah, we- We- we- we do things that make us look bad. So the reason why you watch us still is ‘cause our ideas, our ideas actually have merit you know?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we- we come on air, we pretend to be, like, racist Luddites. I’ll put the- the racist clip here, right? And in actuality, I have a graduate degree from Stanford in a- an MBA, right?
Which is the hardest of the graduate degrees to get into in Stanford. Harder than most of their PhD, I think any of their PhD programs. M- mostly because the effects it has on your life are much better. Yeah,
Simone Collins: make- makes more money well,
Malcolm Collins: for some people. Simone... And it’s the hardest MBA in the world to get into.
It’s harder than Harvard by a country mile. It’s, like, I think 30% harder or something. It- the Simone- my undergrad is from St. Andrews, which is often ranked the top university in the UK in neuroscience. I have been published in the field of neuroscience. I worked in actually doing neuroscience, doing psychology work, and at the Smithsonian Museum [01:17:00] of Natural History, where I still have an exhibit on display.
Literally the top museum on earth. Maybe only, I mean, if you’re talking about, like, the world of academia, maybe only equivalated to, like, the British Museum. The Smithsonian
Simone Collins: Museum’s awesome, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And then Simone has her graduate degree from Cambridge, right? Both of us have worked in, like, the halls- Well, he went to-
the halls of power ...
Simone Collins: a ni- he got a BA from a nice university, right? So,
Malcolm Collins: you know, like in English- I, I know, but what I’m saying is, is that, like, our ideas, our theories that we have developed are taught at universities like Stanford.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but we don’t stand in front of a fricking whiteboard and are like, “I’m Professor Collins.
Let me give you a lecture in this semester of my performative class.” Yeah, we don’t do that.
Malcolm Collins: And I’ve noticed
Simone Collins: that a lot of- Because we, we don’t use pocket sand to distract you into believing us.
Malcolm Collins: Dr- like, I mean, he, he reminds me of Drexel Friedman, right?
Simone Collins: If- I don’t know who that is ...
Malcolm Collins: Lex Friedman,
Oh,
Simone Collins: Lex.
Oh, gee,
Malcolm Collins: right. Lex Friedman, who pretends that he has any connection [01:18:00] to Yale, and he has no serious connection to them. He got his degree from Drexel. He got his graduate degree from Drexel. He’s Drexel Friedman. He is not a particularly intelligent person. He just puts on an act like he’s a smart person connected to...
Wait, it, it, no, it’s not Yale. It’s MIT, right? Like, it’s, it’s- I can’t remember ... it, it, th- this sort of laundered... And keep in mind, we have acted in ways which he hasn’t, I don- I don’t know if he has, but it would prevent us from being hired by most of the institutions that our accreditations would give us access to.
Titan: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: In part because we just sort of came out here, and we’re like I wanna, you know, tell as much as I can tell about the truth of how things are actually functioning to society at this point.”
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Right? Like, I
Simone Collins: want to make the world- Well, and we, we, we get uniquely mad- ... see the truth. Yeah ... when people, like, try to signal in this way.
Like, another person who does this kind of thing is Eliezer Yudkowsky, who manipulates signals like moral outrage, and this wunderkind branding-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...
Simone Collins: and gatekeeping and word selection to appear authoritative on various issues, despite getting key details or fundamentals wrong, like, quite [01:19:00] frequently. I know.
So-
Malcolm Collins: I mean, we get things wrong, but we generally- Oh, yeah ... try to update and correct when we do. I’m, like, attentive to when fans notice we got something-
Simone Collins: Well, and, like, between your genuine mispronunciations and our, like, jokes and, and admit- admission of bumbling and everything, I think it’s clear we’re not, like, pretending to be super smart.
We’re not gatekeeping, like, “Oh, like, you’re just wrong ‘cause you’re m- you’re uninformed.” Like, we don’t use a lot of the rhetorical manipulation tactics or semiotic manipulation tactics that these people do, which is why this is uniquely irksome for us. And one reason why we like vice signaling and rage baiting is it’s a way of saying, “We’re not tricking you into believing we’re critical, credible to, to, like, high production quality or gatekeeping language or academic trappings.”
We make ourselves hateable and weird so that when you take our argument seriously, you know it’s based on the merits of the arguments rather than any trust in or respect for us, and that’s really [01:20:00] important. And that’s, I mean, I think that’s also why people trust and respect ultimately and more fundamentally people like Asmongold and people like a lot of the VTubers who are like, “What?
Like, I’m, you know- I’m like some anthropomorphic thing. You know? Like, you know, you don’t have to like bend you- But this
Malcolm Collins: is why performative racism is important and useful-
Simone Collins: Okay ...
Malcolm Collins: in the modern system, right? You’re saying- I’m gonna
Simone Collins: lose
Malcolm Collins: my mind ... oh, not that he doesn’t do it. I mean, clearly he’s very anti-
Jewish, right? Anti-Catholic. He might be more anti-Catholic than us in that he thinks that the Jesuits who control the Vatican are one of his Illuminati players who wanna end the world. Mm-hmm. Right? I, I, Yeah, I’m just really unimpressed. I don’t think, I haven’t heard a single interesting idea from him.
His predictions are not bold. Like Peter Zeihan, I have problems with, like, where Peter Zeihan has gone post this latest Trump election. Oh. He seems to have completely fallen off. But he made genuinely impressive predictions. But people who, who
Simone Collins: followed him really closely, they say it was Jan 6th. Like, apparently he sort of lost his mind after Jan 6th.
Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: Jan 6th, lost his mind. But before Jan 6th, he made [01:21:00] really, w- Russia attacking the Ukraine was not on a lot of people’s bingo cards, okay? Mm-hmm. That was on his bingo cards, okay? He has made impressive predictions, all right?
Simone Collins: Yeah, like, actually, like the Strait of Hormuz closure right now, like, and the, the fact that so much of people’s lives have been disrupted by the fact that you know, American actions have led to global trade being disrupted and, and America not being willing to basically maintain global, like, shipping routes is, is something he called, and The End of the World is Just the Beginning.
He’s way more prophetic, just, you know, flaws and all, than Professor J, for sure.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And Professor J, I like, I just... Yeah, I hate this whole, “Oh, look at all these predictions he’s made,” and it’s like tomorrow the sky will be blue. It’s like, that’s not a-
Simone Collins: Well, one thing that Jose points out is like, okay, sure, yeah, he predicted that Trump was going to win the election, but he was also like, “Well, Trump is gonna win the election and Nikki Haley’s gonna be his vice president.”
And he only like passingly [01:22:00] mentions JD Vance but not in any serious capacity. And this i- Not only, you know, makes his, his, you know, full prediction incorrect, but also it was, it was poorly informed, because that was after the point at which Trump had on Truth Social- Well, I mean, that’s a bold prediction.
I give him ... posted saying- ... it’s impressive ... “I am not going to make Vick- or Nikki Haley my vice president. She’s great, but she’s not gonna be the VP.” So not only did he predict the wrong thing, he also, like, could have probably made a better guess if he was just a little more informed.
Malcolm Collins: So- So, Simone, can you go to, was there anything else you... Because I remember you, you wanted to talk about how he got something wrong before.
Simone Collins: There, there are
Malcolm Collins: several.
Simone Collins: Oh my God.
Malcolm Collins: His game theory- Hold on ... getting wrong. I
Simone Collins: wanna- Oh, yeah. Okay, let me jump to that. Because let’s see. Jose made so many... If you go to my show notes, you can see all the things that Jose...
You can also just watch this video again, that’s it. Let’s see. Oh, yes. So Jose argues that Cenk uses game theory as a branding device. Do you just wanna crawl [01:23:00] around over here, Joanna? What do you want? Okay,
Malcolm Collins: so, on Game Theory- Game Theory, by the way, is not impressive or difficult to understand.
It’s, it’s really not Game Theory is incredibly simplistic, g- generally speaking. Well, anyways. In terms of, like, the greater academic theories that a person may need to grok. If somebody is going out and being like, “I did this with Game Theory,” it’s like, it’s like hearing, “I did this with tic-tac-toe logic.”
Simone Collins: Well, yes, but he uses it nevertheless to confer legitimacy on what are essentially stories that he makes on how the world works, not actually game theoretic models. So not only does he try to use game theory, but he’s just like, “Game theory.” It’s kind of like, when what’s-his-face declares bankruptcy Michael Scott dec- declares bankruptcy.
Yeah. And it’s like, “I declare bankruptcy,” and has, like, no understanding of the concept, and that is kind of what Jiang is doing. ‘Cause w- what, what Jose points out is that he, he gives a dating game example when he talks about game theory, starting with five boys and girls, and then he quickly spirals into claims that women’s [01:24:00] status obsession is killing civilization and that women are responsible for creating incels, showing “the game” is just a vehicle for his own views.
And he constantly lists three factors-
Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. Those things are kind of true. It’s important that you call out what’s true. Well, those
Simone Collins: things are true-
Malcolm Collins: Women’s
Simone Collins: obsession with status- ... but they’re not game theoretic models ...
Malcolm Collins: is, no, but it’s not game theory, but the, it is true.
Simone Collins: It’s true, but no, yeah, but if you’re doing a lecture on game theory, you can’t just be like, “I’m talking about game theory.
Oh, man, women are horrible incels,” or something. He constantly lists three factors: genes, wealth, status focus and clarity, resolve, intelligence, crime, science, but never shows how they’re measured or weighed which undercuts the pretense of any sort of formal modeling. He just wants to sort of use these as narrative birds.
And then he explicitly downplays math and emphasizes intuition and speculation while telling students that they should make imaginative leaps that are not backed up by any evidence which is the opposite of what [01:25:00] a game theory class should encourage. Like, this is, it’s not about narrative-
Malcolm Collins: I mean, it’s not entirely dissociated from game theory.
I’d say this other guy is overreaching a bit. The way people- I don’t think so ... date could be modeled with game theory logic, right? He’s just not using any classical game theory modeling that I’m aware of here. He appears to be using red pill modeling. True. Which is not inaccurate, it’s just not game theory.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And Jiang also just in general has a very big tendency to cherry-pick and simplify history to fit his narratives. I do that. He tries, yeah, you do. He, he tries to critique science, including cosmology and evolution and psychology but then every time he does, it reveals a, a lack of basic understanding.
But then he uses that ignorance to argue that science is fundamentally flawed. And- I, a
Malcolm Collins: lot of people do that. Oh. I don’t really hold that against him.
Simone Collins: Then you, you, I, I would if you, if you try to use that as some, like...
Malcolm Collins: [01:26:00] I’m just saying I need specific examples. I have heard specific gaming examples.
These sound like generalities that I’m not gonna buy. I need a specific example of where he clearly didn’t understand a field he was critiquing.
Simone Collins: Okay, Big Bang and dark energy. He likens dark energy to cheating on a math test, writing 1987 plus 25 equals 20 plus dark energy, suggesting that adding an unknown term is illegitimate.
And th- he doesn’t actually engage with the actual cosmological evidence, and uses his own confusion as proof that the theory is wrong.
Malcolm Collins: Which- See, hold on, hold on. He’s not entirely wrong here. We do have evidence outside of the big mathematical gap th- there might be something that we’re calling dark energy.
There is a lot of research on this. But I also understand where he’s coming from with this. This is the person reading him in bad faith. That is-
Simone Collins: Okay, okay. Fine You know, I, I can give more examples.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, give more. Actually, this person is showing me more that they don’t understand this
Simone Collins: stuff He ends up asserting that scientific [01:27:00] breakthroughs and his own ideas come from channeling a divine source, and that secret societies invert reality through science, which is just a slide into mysticism.
No,
Malcolm Collins: he, his, his, his layout of secret societies is typically, like, i- he, he basically says functionally it’s like they’re secret societies in a lot of things, right? You know, but that’s not the same as saying there’s actually secret societies.
Simone Collins: He says that all science is about reinventing reality to serve power, and that secret societies aim to invert heaven and hell.
Like, I I don’t understand how-
Malcolm Collins: Kind of they do if you take an interpretive approach,
Simone Collins: but not- He thinks that ISIS was created through US torture and brainwashing modeled on ancient Egyptian priestly rituals, Malcolm.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, that’s crazier. Yes. But not, not... I mean, ISIS, this is where he gets me. Oh,
Simone Collins: score though.
Malcolm Collins: It I’m gonna, I’m gonna point out, like, this is where I pull out and I’m like, “
Simone Collins: If you-” He argues, he talks about how ISIS, ISIS, oh, but that is the [01:28:00] Egyptian god Isis. Well, no, that’s, that’s not even the name that they use for it in... That’s what the English people call it.
Titan: Like, English language
Malcolm Collins: people call it Isis.
Yeah. They don’t... But the funny thing about the ISIS thing is he’s like, “If you understand extremist eschatology, you can predict behavior. If you understood Muslim eschatology, ISIS is the obvious and inevitable result of it.” Like, you don’t even need to know that much about Islamic eschatology to know that ISIS is the inevitable result of it at least taken to extremes.
And yet he’s like, “No, this is a mystery. Where could it have come from? Must have come from US torture rooms.” It’s, it’s the way he gets things wrong which is so offensive to me.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, okay, then let’s go to the different I think, school of thought about, about Professor Jiang, not in terms of like, oh, he’s wrong, he’s being a fake prod- professor, but instead, like, okay, why does this feel a little fishy in terms of how he’s grown?
And I think the, the most articulate, thoughtful person to discuss this who’s not like, [01:29:00] “It’s just the CCP,” or, “It’s just botting,” which I think is not the full story, is is summarized by a YouTuber called Hidden America. And he basically argues that this feels orchestrated, and did this video on Professor Jiang titled The Curious Case of Professor Jiang: How the Internet Manufactured a Geopolitical Oracle, in which he argues that Jiang’s public authority was really fostered that he rose in popularity because his framing fit what platforms and audiences were looking for.
And I think this is very accurate. And he notes that his audience treats him less like a commentator and more like a prophet or interpreter of some hidden reality, which definitely is what I see in terms of the way people talk and talk about him. And he likens this in turn to cult formation or controlled narrative building, which definitely feels kind of right from how, like, everything c- co- centers around this cult powers or occult powers causing [01:30:00] Western decline narrative that he’s pushing.
Malcolm Collins: Look, I mean, I g- I think you could do that with anyone. You could do that with us, you could do that with so many other people. I just think that he’s not that bright. Like, that’s the bigger problem with all of this, right? He’s, he’s hacked people’s understanding of authority. And he uses that to build narratives that are either obvious or stupid.
That’s the whole problem I have with it. His narratives, I, I have not heard... Like, if you want something like Professor Zhang that’s not us, Roubiard. Roubiard gives interesting- Yeah ... orthogonal takes that I don’t always agree with, but I rarely leave one of his videos-
Simone Collins: Well,
Malcolm Collins: he comes from a place- ... without having, like, five or 10 new ideas.
Simone Collins: I- Well, and he’s very informed. When- Yeah ... when he talks about something, he doesn’t get it wrong. He talks about it from a place of deeper understanding and knowledge. And even when he, like, goes off on conspiracy theories, he’s pulling from typically primary [01:31:00] sources. As close- Yeah ... to primary sources as he can.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Keep in mind he’s a Quaker, so obviously he was born evil, right? So, like, you can see our video on that. We love
Simone Collins: him.
Malcolm Collins: But the point I’m making here is that, like, I have serious ideological differences with Roubiard, but Roubiard’s mistakes are not stupid mistakes. He, he rarely makes stupid mistakes.
And that, that’s where, like, if y- and, and if you w- that’s why I’m suggesting Roubiard for Professor Zhang people, because he’s got all of the mysticism, he’s got all of the conspiracy brain that Zhang has. Mm-hmm. He just doesn’t make obvious mistakes, like saying Francists are still around.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Well, and, and he, he engages in... I mean, Whatifalthist is essentially predictive history. But, like, actually if you tru- re- if you genuinely tried to take a crack at predictive history, that is Whatifalthist. Whereas Professor Zhang is like, “I’m just doing jazz and dressed up like a professor.” Like, it’s, it’s it’s not, [01:32:00] it’s not as substantive.
You, you’re gonna learn stuff if you watch Whatifalthist. It’s interesting. Yeah. It’s, it’s cool.
Yeah. It’s genuinely good speculative history. And I, and I do like it. And, and,
and
Malcolm Collins: very much like a thug- Least bought-in person ever. He rose to fame when he was in his early 20s maybe even before that, right?
And he is very open. Like, a lot of the fans I know who talk with us have also talked with Ruby Art at some point. Like, he’s very open to talking with fans. Oh, yeah. He’s a very open person. No, he’s
Simone Collins: accessible, he’s open, he is, is, is humble. And there is something a little fishy about Professor Zheng’s dormant YouTube channel suddenly going active in 2024 and then growing to two million subscribers incredibly rapidly.
I don’t think it’s fishy.
Malcolm Collins: I know enough people who watch him. I, I know enough midwits who buy
Simone Collins: this stuff. It’s true. It’s true. It’s true. Like, I, I do see a world in which this is just algorithmic growth. However, China is really extra with stuff. Yeah, China is extra with stuff. Like, I recently saw this article about-
Malcolm Collins: It could, it could be China.
Like, clearly the CCP likes this guy. Clearly he’s on their good boy [01:33:00] list.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: They have done stuff to grow people in the past.
Simone Collins: I’m just- Well, and we just did an episode on, like, Chinese spies being throughout universities, and they’re very, like, very active in their surveillance of foreign actors within their own state, and also very careful about, I think, foreign actors in other states.
And it’s, it’s one of those things, like, their surveillance of foreign actors within their own country reminds me of that adage that, like, if your partner suddenly becomes super suspicious that you’re cheating, it’s probably because they’re cheating. And The Telegraph recently ran this article titled The Secret Chinese Surveillance Program Tracking People Like Me, in which their senior foreign correspondent, Sophia Yan, describes this dedicated dynamic control platform for foreigners that integrates this, their, you know, the vast surveillance network they have.
They’re, like, all the, the cameras, many of which have gait recognition to monitor people of interest in very granular real time. And journalists and dissidents are explicitly signaled out as, as [01:34:00] trackable targets on the platform. Someone leaked the platform to her. She f- like, was on it very clearly.
And it, it allows you to sort of know exactly what the, what they are, who they’re meeting with, what they’re a- up to. It allows security services to see where their foreign citizens are and who they meet and how they move around in cities, and what social and professional networks they belong to.
It allows the security service to see where they are at any given time, and they, they can use it, Like they can filter by-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and the, the point being is this guy is in China. He’s living in China. He’s clearly doing what the CCP wants.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So- ... I mean, just considering like all, like that, I’m just trying to present that as w- another thing in addition to the, like, university issue that China does that is, like, kind of extra.
So I wouldn’t put it past the CCP in terms of signal boosting him, especially because this further, as to your point, right, it makes people more pissed about Israel. It makes people more pessimistic about AI. And these are things that are, [01:35:00] are very much, it seems to be in, in China’s best interest.
Malcolm Collins: And more pessimistic about the US’s economic future.
Simone Collins: More- Totally. Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: relative to China, right? Mm-hmm. Like I, a lot of this makes AI companies in the US less gated about working with China, right? Like- Yeah ... look, I obviously, even just as a matter of course, even if the CCP wasn’t boosting him, he has to curate everything through a CCP lens so he doesn’t get disappeared, which, like, regularly happens to people in China these days.
You can see our episode- Yeah ... I don’t know if we put that episode live, on, like, just how China will just disappear you. As it has done. But yeah, he, I don’t like broadly speaking, I don’t really have any mel- like dislike of him. He’s not somebody where like, you know, with Taleb- No, you’re way more nice to him
Simone Collins: than, than I am.
Malcolm Collins: Where I was, Nassim Taleb, I’m like, this guy knows he’s manipulating people. He knows he’s lying to people. Isn’t
Simone Collins: it Nassim Taleb?
Malcolm Collins: Or something, whatever, Taleb nonsense. I don’t know. He, he just intentionally manipulating and lying to people. There [01:36:00] are other commentators where I think that that’s what they’re doing, where they know they are manipulating people, or where it’s very clear that they are boosting themselves and they’re not relevant anymore, and they’re trying to maintain control over political apparatus in the United States.
With Zhang I don’t really get any of that impression from him. Hmm ... if he is botted, I think it’s by the CCP, b- and he’s not following their rules because he’s botted, he’s following their rules ‘cause he doesn’t wanna be arrested and he’s living in Beijing, right? Like, he’s grew because he presented a type of content and a type of figure that I think the world wanted to see.
Hmm ... they, they wanted respectable Candace Owens. And that’s what he presented. But the problem is is his ideas are like, and, and this is where I have my one area, is that I wanna say that I think he’s smart enough to know that some of the stuff he’s saying is just dumb, but there’s a certain level of like normie [01:37:00] dumb where like you just w- it wouldn’t catch you, especially if you’re a little mysticism brained- Yeah
that you’re really screwing up.
Simone Collins: Yeah, and I mean, there have been instances in which Rudiard has gone a little bit too far with his conspiracies, and people have been like, “Ah, okay, that’s a little too far.” But he, he’s walked it back. Like, very, very smart people such as him can get, can get caught up in some loops that are not very productive.
But they, at, at least the, the, the smartest ones are able to sort of walk that back a little and they sort of catch themselves. Well, and
Malcolm Collins: I think because he and this is my biggest th- the thing that I dislike about him. Because he catches things in things that aren’t true, and are obviously not true, and that you can easily verify aren’t true- Mm-hmm
he will say something that the average person will think is more offensive than what we’re saying, but is actually dramatically less offensive and costly to say than what we’re saying. Right. Yeah. So if you go out there and you say [01:38:00] “Mainstream Judaism is controlled by an antinomial z- Frankish sect. A lot of Jews are gonna be like, “Oh, that’s like classic stupid conspiracy,” whatever, right? Like, it’s anti-Semitic, but whatever. Whereas I come out here and I go, “Actually, if you look at Jewish tradition up to the point of the Baal Shem Tov his teachings would’ve been considered a form of spiritual antinomianism, and they now dominate the dominant Jewish organizations which actually have real political influence in both the United States and Israel.”
That may sound a lot less offensive, I guarantee you it is a billion times, because people who are actually Jewish and involved in these, whereas I come out, a- and you kind of understand why this is offensive, because if what I’m, I am saying is true w- oh, my God, is
Malcolm Collins: an antinomial Jewish sect that controls the world? That would be really [01:39:00] bad for most Jews. And then a lot of people would be like, “No, don’t say that stuff, Malcolm.”
And then I go to them and I go, “Yes, but you’re a Jew. You’ve studied Jewish history. Is it true that the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings would be considered spiritually antinomial at the time they were laid out, and other rabbis at the time, the leading rabbis at the time, called him and his followers out for this and were deadly afraid of the growth of his movement?”
They’d be like, “Well, that is true.”
Speaker 11: When I say spiritually antinomial, what I mean here is an inversion of earlier practices. He didn’t actually have a belief in, or at least never stated a belief in antinomialism as in an intentional inversion of other practices because, you know, Shabbatai Zevi was still fresh on everyone’s mind. , But, , I’m just saying functionally were they antinomial in how much they inverted previous Jewish teachings around specific [01:40:00] topics?
Malcolm Collins: That’s why it’s worse, because it’s true. When you are calling out true things, it is always more dangerous and more offensive than calling out made-up things.
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway, love you.
Simone Collins: That’s a good point, and I love you too.
Malcolm Collins: And for dinner tonight I’m okay with just doing, like, fries and the, the stuff that you had in the,
Simone Collins: Yeah, well, so I, I don’t know how well they go together, but we have two samosas that if we don’t eat tonight probably won’t be good.
Well, that’s why I
Malcolm Collins: said let’s do this, like, samosas and some fries.
Simone Collins: Some fried things to go with your fried things. The, the, the fries are the samosa, basically. How about samosa and tomato soup? No. No? No. It’s... I know, I know. I’m just trying to, like, if these other things are gonna expire if we don’t-
Malcolm Collins: Let’s try the new fries.
The tomato soup we will get to. I like tomato soup. I’ve been eating tomato soup, like, every other
Simone Collins: day. I know. It’s been good. No, I know, ‘cause that’s all my dad wanted when he was sick.
Malcolm Collins: And that’s good that I had it, right? You probably thought I’m being wasteful.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and you’re not paying for...
That’s, I
Malcolm Collins: that’s, that’s- Did we, did we use the last [01:41:00] tomato soup jar? Is that, like, open now- Yes ... or is it still sealed?
Simone Collins: The
Malcolm Collins: second is- Okay. I’ll have tomato soup sometime over the next few days. Today I want to do samosas and the new fries, ‘cause I wanna see how those come out.
Simone Collins: Okay. What? This is your cheat day.
Speaker 9: Yeah. They’re gonna cucking. Yay.
The chicks stand out the bigger side as the but baby chickens Yeah, the baby chicks are a little afraid of the big chicks, you see, because the big chicks are a lot bigger Mommy. There’s a pecking order, my dear
Speaker 10: You gotta sneak up on him. Can you be sneaky? I want that. You can do it, just be sneaky and patient, okay? I can’t. Maybe I can help you. We’ll see. Can you help me please? Aw, thanks for asking them nicely. [01:42:00] Let’s see what I can do to help.
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