Hi YouTube. This is Professor Jang. Um, today is my last day in Beijing. Tomorrow morning I bought a flight with my two boys for Toronto, Canada. That's where I was uh that's where I grew up.
My parents are there. So, it's really the first time my kids are seeing u their grandparents and everyone's very excited about it. Um this morning my wife and I, we sent our three kids to kindergarten. Then we went to the hospital um so I could do some blood work. Um I have high blood pressure.
I'm I turned 50 next year. So um my wife is very anxious about my um my health. Um and then after the hospital, I checked the news and Israel is is attacking um Iran. So, um I in my previous pre previous videos have said that this would happen, but I am surprised by the accelerated timeline. Um it seems we are headed towards World War II far faster and and um far harder than I could um ever imagine.
Um so um like everyone else um I'm I'm just praying and um hoping that things turn out for the best, but also preparing for the worst. So, this is really the first time that I've had a chance to talk directly uh to you guys. Um so, let me let me tell you about myself. Um why I'm teaching this course and what my plans are for the future of this class. So um I was born in China in 1976 but when I was six my family and I immigrated to Toronto, Canada and um my family was poor.
Uh but I worked really hard. I got a full scholarship to go to Yale University and I was really thankful to my teachers and the opportunity to empower myself for education. So after I graduate from Yale with with a um degree in English literature, I returned to China and I've been ever since working in education um doing everything I can I could possibly do in order to promote education reform in China. And I've worked various capacities. I've um obviously worked as an English teacher, but I've also worked as a principal, a curriculum director, a teacher trainer.
I've worked um in all levels of education in China, kindergarten, primary school, junior high, high school, university as well. Um 3 years ago, I got hired at this school that I'm at now, a private school in Beijing that helps students um go abroad. And I first came in actually as a curriculum director um overseeing the uh humanities curriculum at the school, which is what I specialize in. Um, but the school needed teachers because of COVID. Um, it was really hard to recruit teachers back then.
So, I I I was teaching AP English and it was my first touch first time teaching advanced placement English. I really didn't know what I was doing. So, I just thought that we would just read a lot of books. So, the kids and I we read Julius Caesar, uh, Paradise Lost, uh, Virginia Wolf, uh, Dante Divine Comedy, The Iliad. Um, and the kids loved it and I love teaching it.
So um in the second year I built a great books program at the school and again it was extremely successful. We read uh the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Iniad, the Bible, the Divine Comedy and the kids loved it. But while teaching it I recognized there was a problem and the problem was the kids being Chinese had absolutely no historical context to work with. So this year I started to develop a new program uh which which is the program that you've experienced you've been experiencing for the last 60 classes. Uh my goal this year was to teach the entirety of human history from the Ice Age up until the American Empire uh which is what I taught uh yesterday.
And again it's been great for uh for the kids. uh and it's been great for me because it's really offered me an opportunity to think very deeply about history. Um specifically it's given me an opportunity to think about the possibilities of history and over the course of teaching this course um I've decided that I want to create a new intellectual movement a new sort of history and I call it predictive history and the idea is that uh in the future I hope that history is able to accomplish three major goals. Uh 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. And I think that if what we teach accomplish all three goals, then it must be true history. And I think if we have true history then we humanity the world can better organize um can better um control our future and uh that's my ambition. Um as you can imagine I was deeply inspired by the works of Isaac Asimov. Um as a young boy growing up in Toronto, Canada, I didn't have that many friends but I read a lot of books and uh one of my favorite series was the foundation series and in it 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 and that I think is will be my future ambition moving forward.
Um I want to build build intellectual foundations for the possibility of psycho history and that's my long-term thinking. Um so about this course so um I I initially uploaded the classes so that my students can review uh the lectures because these are Chinese students and their English is not that great. Um and um there were a couple hundred subscribers initially and everyone was fantastic. I'm so thankful for these um initial subscribers because they believed in me. They commented, give me valuable feedback and I try to interact with them as much as possible this past month.
Something odd happened. Uh my channel just blew up. Uh, I went from like 300 subscribers and at the beginning of um May to about 20,000 um as we speak right now and it's constantly growing and um the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. So, thank you so much for subscribing, for liking, for commenting. Uh I try to read every comment, but as you can imagine, um there's just so many comments and I would like to respond to every one of them.
But again, um there's so much going on in my life. I have three young kids um that I have to take care take care of my with my wife. Um I also have to prep for classes and because I have three young kids, I've been sick a lot. Um it's allergy season in China. CO's still going strong.
So um um um I'm trying I'm I'm just trying my best right now to um take care of my my kids. So, my apologies if I don't respond. Um, I will try to respond over the summer, but again, I'm so thankful for all the support, all the positive feedback that I've received um recently. Um, so I finished teaching the course yesterday. Um, 60 classes coming the entire span of human history.
And a lot of you are curious as to what the what the plans are moving forward. Well, tomorrow I'm going back to Toronto to rest, recuperate, um, relax. Um, it's also the summer is also a really good time for me to reflect on what I've taught and how I can improve the course. I'll also be doing a lot of reading. Um, some of you have suggested email Todd, which I will go into deeply this summer.
Um, I'll also look at Oswwell Spangler very carefully. Um, some of you have commented that I'm very weak in terms of philosophy. uh Markx Hegel Kant um are pretty weak. I'm pretty weak at and I I admit that. So this summer I will try to brush up on my philosophy.
I also need to study economics in depth as well. So Adam Smith um and other economists because that really right now is the weak point in my analysis. I don't have enough classical economics in my background to fully um comment on what's happening economically in in the world. So, uh that's my plan. When I return to Beijing in mid August, I'll be teaching a new iteration of this course.
So, rather than 60 classes, I'll try to try to cram everything in into 30 classes. Now, some of you um have bravely watched all 60 classes. I guarantee you uh in this new series, you'll be really impressed and you'll really enjoy it. I'm gonna add tons of new material and I'm going to make the themes much more salient, much much more coherent so that you can see the um underlying structures of human history much more clearly. Second semester uh which starts in February will be a lot of fun.
Um second semester I'll be teaching geopolitics. So what I'll be doing is I'll be looking at current events um trying to analyze why these events are happening and making predictions about uh what will happen. Um so um the second semester will be a lot of fun. Some of you are really enjoying this channel and I'm so grateful that that you are. And don't worry, I mean, I love being able to uh teach to a global audience, and I'm gonna keep keep on doing this for as long as um I can.
Um some of you may be curious as to what my long-term ambitions are. Well, as I said, I have three kids. I love teaching and I really want to develop a psycho history uh to its fullest possibility. So 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 the school to be the best ever.
Okay. Um 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. These will be the future intellectuals, the future writers, the future historians uh of humanity and I hope that we together um when we build this community will able to lead humanity uh forward and that's really my ambition. So um again thank you so much for um watching my lectures.
Um, I'm really thankful. Um, some of your comments um have really made a deep impression on me and they're going to really help me improve uh the course for next year. So, I promise you that I will offer a much more um lean, much more clean uh much more enjoyable viewing experience in September. I will also try as best as I can to fix my hair uh because I know that's been a concern for um a lot of you. Okay.
So, um enjoy your summer. Um I'm going to engage in a process of deep reflection and deep learning, deep reading this summer so that in September, uh in the fall, I can deliver deliver the best quality content I can to everyone. uh because I'm so grateful uh to everyone for watching. Okay, well that's it for me for me. Um enjoy your summer and I will see you in mid August.