Jan Czarnocki is a new kind of punter. The odds of a boxer on the comeback, the performances of obscure basketball players or the tips on a prodigious nag do not interest him. His thing is geopolitics, and his PMU, like that of hundreds of thousands of others, is called Polymarket, this controversial platform which allows you to bet in dollars and cryptocurrency on almost everything, including on the upheavals of a world in flames.
Controversies are increasing there, particularly around those close to the Trump family, suspected of inventing a new insider trading. Probability of an Israeli bombing, legislative results of a Central European country, number of Tesla cars sold in the last quarter: everything has an odds – By 2026, weekly betting volume has consistently exceeded $1 billion.
So, as soon as he wakes up, Czarnocki catches up on the night’s news, reads his favorite geostrategic newsletters, then immerses himself in the world of Polymarket. His routine is strictly regulated. By day, this Polish thirty-year-old works professionally as legal director of Elastics, a start-up designing AI agents (a kind of autonomous robots thanks to artificial intelligence) to scour these predictive markets. Out of work, he places his personal bets on the dilemmas of the day.
Game theory and religious sources
One evening in March 2026, while Tehran is pounding its Qatari, Emirati and Saudi neighbors in response to the Israeli-American offensive, a bet opens on Polymarket: “Will the Gulf countries retaliate before the end of April?” Jan Czarnocki has no doubt: we must invest in the “no”. His conviction is contained in one sentence: “Jiang Xueqin announced that this would not happen.”
Let’s go back a few weeks earlier. At the end of February, while Israeli and American fighter planes tore up the sky over Tehran, a funny teacher of “Western philosophy” exulted from his residence in Beijing. Jiang Xueqin, the man of baleful joy, has for years been distilling his great predictions on the progress of the world to his captivated students and his zealous subscribers on social networks, through an approach combining mathematics (the famous “game theory”), analysis of historical dynamics and religious sources. So, the one who, from 2023, announced to anyone who would listen that “Trump would be re-elected, would go to war with Iran, and the United States would become entangled in this conflict.” can only congratulate himself: his prophecy has been combined with reality. Global chaos is his personal triumph.
« Protégez cet homme à  tout prix »
At the turn of fifty, Jiang Xueqin’s hour of glory arrived. Now, his YouTube channel called Predictive History is followed by more than 2.6 million subscribers. Viral excerpts of his geopolitical predictions are sweeping the Web, and his newsletter exceeds 110,000 subscribers, making it the sixth most popular in Substack’s “international politics” category. From the champion of American nationalist populists Tucker Carlson to the British polemicist Piers Morgan, from the masculinist streamer Sneako to the entrepreneur-influencer Steven Bartlett, the creators of the most listened to podcasts – who are also, generally, the most conservative – are scrambling for interviews with millions of views.
“Protégez cet homme à tout prix” declaim in the comments of his videos his most obsessive fans, self-proclaimed “jiangsters”. A handful of sites even list in real time the predictions produced in industrial quantities by the teacher – from a future revolt in Bahrain to the upcoming reconciliation between the Orthodox and Muslim worlds under the aegis of Vladimir Putin – to carry out the exegesis and calculate their success rates. To set foot in the world of “Professor Jiang” is not only to tread the territory of a talkative and affable Web star, but to enter the kingdom of an oracle and his faithful followers.
I came into the world to change it, and I must dedicate myself to this mission.
Jiang Xueqin
Going to meet Xueqin also implies plunging into the abyss of falsehood, as this “jiangamania” reflects contemporary digital dizziness. On YouTube, hundreds and hundreds of channels pretend to be him, between usurpers looking for buzz, accounts generating deepfakes of the “professor” spouting random predictions fomented by artificial intelligence, and translators keen to share these analyzes in French, Portuguese, Spanish or Arab… He seems to be satisfied with it. “The free flow of ideas is necessary to share knowledge and make people smarter, assure-t-il à Revue21in a three-hour video interview spread over two days. I concentrate on my teachings. I came into the world to change it, and I must dedicate myself to this mission.”
Let’s move on from megalomania. Let us not dwell either, at least not yet, on his erroneous predictions and his methodology which is as extravagant as it is unfounded. Jiang Xueqin’s popularity is a perfect reflection of the times. When the world is drowning in a never-ending flow of contradictory and anxiety-provoking information, from the unpredictability of Trump to technological disruption, success belongs to those who claim to feel the flow and make sense – spectacular is better – to chaos. Especially when reading the future means being able to invest in the future.
Mathematics on steroids
When, in 1944, John von Neumann published his work with Oskar Morgenstern Game theory and economic behaviora sum of models supposed to anticipate all possible interactions between competitors, the military world was seized with passion, and the Hungarian mathematician wasted no time in playing the logical oracles to American commanders and tactical think tanks, all too happy to apply these marvelous formulas to the world of war. Nearly eighty years later, “Professor Jiang”’s theory of games on steroids is being courted by the new world of predictive markets.
On these platforms where dollars circulate by the billions, from Polymarket to its main rival Kalshi, good prediction is the key to success, and a profile like Jiang Xueqin necessarily arouses interest. Jan Czarnocki, the Polish trader, knows something about this. Like his bet on the non-response of the Gulf States, the predictions of “Professor Jiang” became the compasses of his speculative adventure. “When I discovered it, I was quite cautious, remembers this trained lawyer. His demonstrations were too grandiose, his use of game theory was very amateurish. But something fascinated me about him. Not everything he says is precise, but it makes sense. He has a well-rounded approach and manages to make connections that most don’t recognize at first glance.”
De son côté, Jiang Xueqin swears to have à l’écart des marchés prédictifs. “Sometimes fans come to me and ask me to make special videos, to say what to bet on. It would get millions of views, that’s for sure! But that doesn’t interest me.” Ditto when the interest does not come from bettors, but from the platforms themselves: “In the summer of 2025, as my YouTube channel began to emerge, Polymarket contacted me to offer a commercial partnership. There too, I said no.”
“Mon père me défonçait la gueule ”
So many others would have said yes and cashed in tons of dollars. But the self-proclaimed oracle is an unusual breed of influencer. He seems not to chase money, does not sell online training, no merchandising, no overpriced seminars. “Thanks to my thousands of paying subscribers on Substack, I earn $500,000 per year, he reveals. I have a comfortable house, a wife and three children. That’s more than enough for me.” Paradoxically, this disdain for mercantile considerations only adds to the vagueness of his motivations. And of his very person, the most obsessive mystery of “jiangology”.
Let’s start again in order. Young Jiang was born in 1976, in a small village in southern China. Poverty and hunger shaped the experience of his first years. He was only 6 years old when his family moved to Toronto. Chinese immigrants, they quickly adopted Canadian nationality. Her mother became a seamstress. His father, not fluent in English, was unable to return to his job as a teacher and ended up as a kitchen dishwasher. Are “Professor Jiang’s” teaching desires the legacy of this broken paternal destiny? “Maybe, I don’t know, does he discard. I honestly don’t care what my parents think or do.” The surprisingly brutal sentence undoubtedly finds its source in the soothsayer’s painful Canadian adolescence. “I was bullied at school, and when I came home, my dad would beat the shit out of me,†he confides, with the same voluble tone he uses to declaim his visions. He continues in the same mode: “I often wanted to kill myself, and the only thing that stopped me was knowing that I had come into the world to change it.”
La révélation Asimov
Salvation comes the year he turns 14, in the form of a ray of interstellar light coming from the municipal library. This is the novel Fondationa gargantuan intergalactic saga published in 1951 by the American Isaac Asimov. “I fell in love with his writing, and above all with his concept of “psychohistory†.†In this cult work of science fiction, “psychohistory” refers to the method developed by a hyper-statistician named Hari Seldon, who manages with his scholarly calculations to predict the future of cosmic civilizations over tens of thousands of years. From then on, an obsession seizes the young Jiang Xueqin: What if it was possible to crack Seldon’s equation to apply it to the real world?
After high school, the Chinese-Canadian joined Yale, one of the universities of the very prestigious Ivy League, and graduated with a degree in English literature – this will be his only academic certification. But rather than embrace a career as a North American academic, he returned to his native China. There, the young man becomes an English teacher. It was there, in 1999, that he had a decisive encounter with a legend of American letters: Gay Talese. The founding father of “new journalism” was then in Asia for six months of investigation. “There I met Jiang, who not only served as my interpreter throughout China, but who assisted me in many ways, remembers the 94-year-old writer in an email he sent to us. He impressed me with his intelligence, his wit, his curiosity, his charm. We subsequently became close friends, and he came to visit me in New York. He even helped translate some of my books into Mandarin.”
Human rights are stupid values, a simple tool of Westerners to strengthen their political will.
Jiang Xueqin
In 2006, Jiang Xueqin left for educational missions with the United Nations. But the thirty-year-old is disillusioned in his new career as a humanitarian. “We weren’t doing much, we were making a lot of money, and we saw millions of people having nothing to eat. I understood that human rights are stupid values, a simple tool of Westerners to strengthen their political will.” His Afghan experience turned into a deep cynical crisis, never really healed since.
His humanist illusions lost, Xueqin became a poker player and competed in amateur tournaments in Macau, then he integrated China’s educational system. Concretely, over a decade, he built bridges between Chinese high schools and American universities, which gradually made him an important figure in local education and a bilingual interlocutor courted by the foreign media.
Deep down, however, man is devoured by frustration. He feels like a « loser ». His obsession with “psychohistory” still haunts him. Especially since this Asimovian revelation as a teenager, the world has changed, and him with it. Now an adult, he has become familiar with game theory, devoured the great religious and literary texts of human civilizations, and dabbled with the political and media worlds. The progress of predictive artificial intelligence and the new available computing powers finally convince him: it is in the analysis of “historical patterns” (these recurring patterns over the ages) and the “hidden motivations” of each state that we find the equation to predict the future of nations.
Gloubi-boulga conservative
In 2018, the future oracle is recruited by the Moonshot Academy – a strange private university in Shanghai supposed to train its students in “Prosperity of human civilization” – to teach the foundations of Western philosophy. The opportunity to test, then share, your own vision of the world. The teacher gains confidence, begins to film his lessons, and, on June 21, 2023, the first video from his Predictive History channel is online. Jiang Xueqin is a romantic character worthy of Asimov.
Of course, reality is harsher, and “Professor Jiang” is not the transposition of psychohistorian Hari Seldon into the real world. Successful predictions sit alongside failed prophecies, and his science is more akin to an intellectual gloubi-boulga balancing on a few precarious rules, the fruit of an imagination parasitized by its internal flaws and its conservative or even conspiratorial biases. So, in Xueqin’s visions, feminism has ruined human civilization, the Holocaust does not exist, “For lack of evidence”, and each nation is reduced to a hidden and eternal motivation. It does not interest them that the same people can cultivate a wide diversity of opinions. In its system, for example, Israel only aspires to expand to the borders of “Greater Israel” (the nationalist theory of a biblical kingdom from the Nile to the Euphrates), Russia only lives for the advent of the third Rome, and Iran only seeks to recompose the vast Persian Empire.
A “new variant” of conspiracy
“Jiang Xueqin appears to me to be a new variant of the conspiracy theorist, gauge Daniel Tutt, philosopher at George Washington University, specialist in the cultural mutations of capitalism. Usually, traditional conspiracy theorists fit into a well-established political spectrum: they are extreme right or extreme left. He doesn’t belong to either of them. He is a liberal with intellectual legitimacy, who never denounces anything but offers anxiety-inducing visions of the future.”
In fact, behind the figure now claimed to be the prophet, the facets of the character Jiang Xueqin are numerous. Is he just a lover of literature and geopolitics who only reads reality through the prism of (science) fiction? A confusionist theorist too clever to lock himself into a category, and too obsessive to accept the contradiction? An oracle sometimes lucky, sometimes scandalous? The product of an era where the world and its dramas are only a vast speculative matrix? Even more romantic, is he the puppet of a “psyop”, a large-scale manipulation carried out by the CIA, as a growing number of Internet users suggest?
Ironically, the person concerned does not care about the speculation concerning him. Only the future motivates him, and in particular his own, with its excessive ambitions. “I want to create a network of establishments around the world to train the elite of tomorrow. I even have a name already: the Foundation schools, he confides. And, you never know, maybe this community of thought will become a religion!” After all, in Greek myths, the oracle was the repository of the divine word.
