Been down a rabbit hole lately listening to Professor Jiang Xueqin (the "Predictive History" guy) and his theories on secret societies. For those who don't know, he's a Chinese-Canadian teacher in Beijing who's blown up on YouTube with 2M+ subscribers after correctly calling Trump's 2024 win and the US-Iran war.

His framing on why secret societies actually run things is interesting. It's not just some grand conspiracy for the sake of it. His argument, boiled down, is basically:

Capitalism is a rigged game, and to win, you need insider information.

Here's how he lays it out:

1. Capital isn't wealth—it's "energy extraction"

Jiang redefines capital not as money or assets, but as a mechanism to extract human energy—specifically attention and focus. The evolution from grain → gold → abstract money has made capital increasingly effective at capturing human attention. Money is presented as "both nothing and everything," a pursuit that can occupy an entire lifetime without leading to fulfillment.

2. Anxiety is weaponized

He argues that anxiety is deliberately created through debt, inequality, and wealth destruction (wars, depressions) to keep people in a cycle of anxious labor. If you're worried about paying rent or your 401k, you're not paying attention to who's actually pulling the strings. You're just grinding.

3. Secret societies = information cartels

Here's the core of his theory: transnational capital relies on secret societies (Freemasons, Jesuits, Sabbatean Frankists, Illuminati coalitions) to maintain trust and coordinate actions among elites. Think about it—if you're playing a high-stakes game where information is the ultimate currency, you need a way to share intel with people you can actually trust. Public markets are too transparent. Governments are too leaky. So you build shadow networks.

These societies provide:

• Trust networks—shared rituals create bonds that transcend national borders
• Psychological manipulation—exploiting authority and group conformity to enable morally questionable actions
• Plausible deniability—members can disconnect from individual agency through rituals and appeals to abstract deities

The capitalism angle

Jiang essentially argues that capitalism is supposed to be a "fair" game on paper—equal access, open markets, meritocracy—but the people at the top realize they can't win without cheating. And the ultimate cheat code is information asymmetry.

If you know what's going to happen before it happens, you can position yourself accordingly. Wars, elections, market crashes—these aren't random events. They're predictable if you have the right information networks. The elite don't just react to events; they help shape them, using their coordinated power to warp reality to fit their beliefs.

What's the endgame?

According to Jiang, these different secret societies (Frankists, Masons, Christian Zionists) all converge on a single point: Jerusalem. They're working through shared end-times beliefs to orchestrate something—Greater Israel, an AI surveillance state, the collapse of the American Empire. He sees figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as "techno-prophets" positioning themselves for a post-collapse world.

Is he full of it?

He's been called "highbrow conspiracy slop for midwits" and compared to Candace Owens for pseudo-intellectuals. The guy claims Bitcoin was created by the CIA. He's definitely out there.

But his core thesis—that capitalism incentivizes information hoarding and that elite networks exist to facilitate that—isn't that crazy when you look at how the world actually works. Insider trading is illegal, but what if the real insider trading happens at a level so high that it's just... how the system operates?

What do you all think? Is this just another flavor of conspiracy brain rot, or is there something to the idea that secret societies are essentially just really exclusive networking groups for people playing the capitalism game on hard mode?

TL;DR: Jiang argues secret societies run the world because capitalism is rigged and you need insider information to win at the highest level. Secret societies = information cartels that coordinate elite action across borders.