Game Theory of the Apocalypse
One Man's Predictions, the Reasoning Behind Them, and What Everyone Else Says
The concept. Tracked over twenty years, the expert who explains everything from one system forecasts worst of all. Jiang Xueqin is that profile. In June 2024 he told his class Trump would win and then attack Iran, and he has since named three conditions that would invalidate his framework, one of which has already failed. So he is read against Peter Zeihan, whose model inverts his: no plan, no author, demographics and geography grinding the order down.
How it was built. Two years of Jiang’s lectures on one side, Zeihan’s books and interviews on the other, then whatever institutions and betting markets went on record about the same event. Everything outside the closing assessments traces to a named person and a dated episode or paper.
Inside each chapter. Four movements in fixed order: Jiang’s claim and his reasoning, Zeihan’s account of the same event, the institutions and markets on record, then a verdict by the model, dated and fenced off from everything sourced. Ten predictions get it, from the petrodollar to Odessa and the end of the American empire.
Nothing is settled here and no opinion is smuggled in. The one voice permitted to judge is the model’s, labelled wherever it speaks, and everything else belongs to the person who said it, on a checkable date.