The Genesis of Predictive History: Professor Jiang's Intellectual Ambition and Educational Journey

Professor Jiang introduces himself, sharing his personal background as a Chinese immigrant to Canada, his education at Yale in English literature, and his subsequent career in education reform in China across all levels. He discusses his current personal circumstances, including his health concerns, family life with three young children, and an impending move to Toronto. He also touches upon the alarming geopolitical situation, specifically the conflict between Israel and Iran, which he sees as an acceleration towards a potential World War III, a prediction he had made previously but is surprised by its rapid timeline.

The core of the episode revolves around Professor Jiang's development of "Predictive History," an intellectual movement born from his experience teaching a comprehensive human history course to Chinese students who lacked historical context. He outlines three ambitious goals for this new form of history: to connect past events into a coherent narrative, to explain the present, and crucially, to predict the future. This concept is deeply inspired by Isaac Asimov's "Psycho-history" from the Foundation series, which proposes mathematically modeling the past and present to forecast future societal trends. Professor Jiang aims to build the intellectual foundations for this possibility.

He reflects on the unexpected growth of his YouTube channel, initially created for his students, and expresses gratitude for the global audience's overwhelmingly positive feedback and support. Despite the challenges of managing a young family, health issues, and teaching responsibilities, he endeavors to engage with his community. Looking ahead, Professor Jiang details his summer plans for deep reflection, reading, and self-improvement, specifically mentioning a need to strengthen his knowledge in philosophy (Marx, Hegel, Kant) and classical economics (Adam Smith) to enhance his historical and geopolitical analysis.

Professor Jiang outlines his future course plans, including a more condensed and coherent iteration of his human history course in the fall, followed by a second semester focused on geopolitics, current event analysis, and future predictions. His long-term ambition is to establish his own school, a "Plato's Academy" or "Jedi Temple," dedicated to teaching the liberal arts and humanities, and to serve as a hub for developing psycho-history. He envisions training future intellectuals, writers, and historians to lead humanity forward, emphasizing his commitment to his global audience and the continued development of his educational mission.

it seems we are headed towards World War II far faster and and um far harder than I could um ever imagine.

I want to create a new intellectual movement a new sort of history and I call it predictive history

The first goal is um to connect the events of the past into a coherent story. Second is to help us understand explain the present. And the third goal is to be able to predict the future.

I think that if what we teach accomplish all three goals, then it must be true history.

Isaac Asmar proposed the idea of psycho history uh which is the idea that we can mathematically uh model the present and the past so as to predict the future

I want to build build intellectual foundations for the possibility of psycho history and that's my long-term thinking.

I don't have enough classical economics in my background to fully um comment on what's happening economically in in the world.

My long-term ambition is actually to set up a my own school uh that specializes in the teaching of the liberal arts of the humanities and build a foundations for psycho history.

I want this like Plato's academy. I want this to be like the Jedi temple where I'm train I'm training like the intellectual Jedis of the future.