Have Faith (That's it!)
Sunday night here in Austin, I was lucky enough to go to a talk that Professor Jiang gave. He is the guy from Predictive History, and he uses classic books and knowledge from the past to get stuff right and to figure out what's coming.
It's pretty amazing. I don't remember how it came into my algorithm, or what the first few things I watched were, but I've been following basically since whatever my first video was. (YouTube @ its most YouTube!)
He did a presentation, and that'll probably be up on YouTube (I'll come back to this entry and link it), a fireside chat, a Q+A, and then we had cocktail hour.
A lot of the talk could be seen as completely depressing, because he was predicting a Trump third term, predicting the USA taking over Greenland, Canada, Mexico, and Latin America down to Colombia. And at some point, there'd be a kind of civil war here.
Great.
One optimistic part is that he said the new cultural center of America will be centralized, and he thinks it'll be Austin. So, being a selfish jerk, I thought that was awesome.
Again, optimistically, it's interesting that all of his stuff lately has brought him to faith over the past couple of years--specifically the Monads (look it up--insane). He said at the end of the day, you should act like the kingdom of heaven is coming and repent. Not in an evangelical way, just in a funny kind of, hey man, this is what I believe. Serious but without a hint of condemnation.
He believes the most important things are family, treating your kids with love and respect, and not giving any of your attention to social media.
Your humanity is derived from your attention. Oof. This was the biggest takeaway for me, honestly. Not all this geopolitical stuff. His warning was: you really, really, really need to guard your attention at the highest level.
He is optimistic about the future. He said, no matter what happens in the U.S., it's a lot worse other places, and here we're all in a pretty good position.
He doesn't believe in an AI bubble. I'm reading between the lines here, but he seems to believe that it's absolutely here to stay, and that these big companies have everything so, so hard-bet on them that there's no way they don't get bailed out by the U.S. when there's a problem.
He thinks huge fuel prices are imminent. And he also believes in a U.S. ground invasion of Iran.
But I do want to stress again that he was really kind of optimistic, that this is change, and change feels like this, and that whatever the world looks like after all of this has the potential to be a better place.
So ultimately, what it all equals is a white-collar reckoning, whereas before, you know, blue collar has been wiped out, and now it's white collar's turn. Easy to agree with for sure!
How to guard yourself from all of this? He said you really need to act morally, act right, because these things build upon your humanity.
So, if you're a liar, or if you're a bad person, or if you're hiding something, it comes up in the end. And you're not able to reach a level of humanity that you can, because words matter, and thoughts matter, and it's all very cumulative.
Overall, an oddly optimistic talk.
I feel really privileged to have talked to him and said hello. I'm not a selfie person, so no proof.
Anyway, amazing guy. Can't wait to see what he comes up with in the future (from the past).
Lastly, when talking about absolutely not selling out (example: no way would he do a $100m podcast owned by big media, etc.), he said that if he did anything, he would start a school where parents and kids learn beside each other, like side by side. He said largely, most schools are just lobotomizing kids to prep them for the system.
Kind of in the same way he said, when he was talking about Jesus, he's like, everything he said was great. He was a poetic speaker.
What really hit hardest for me was the fact that all of this, and all of the reading, has totally brought him to faith. Believing in the Monad, a God, and that Jesus was a true prophet, but also saying that Jesus wasn't a Christian. He didn't go to church. All you need are his words. He's a poetic guy. He absolutely believes in prophets, and it's easy to see how something--which I don't know what it is--could be working through this guy to get the message out.
At the end of the day, I've touched on it here a bunch of times: act morally and keep the faith and things will be okay.