Shawn Ryan Show - #281 Jeremy Slate - The Fatal Decisions That Doomed the Entire Roman Empire

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Jeremy Ryan Slate is the CEO and co-founder of Command Your Brand, a leading podcast PR agency that helps entrepreneurs, authors, and thought leaders build authority and grow influence through top‑tier podcast appearances. He is also the host of The Jeremy Ryan Slate Show, where he explores how power truly operates—through history, empires, and modern influence networks. A bestselling author, global speaker, and authority strategist, he equips founders and executives to turn their stories into credibility through precise messaging and strategic media placement. He holds both a BA and an MA from Seton Hall University, where he studied Catholic theology and World Religions. He also studied literature at Oxford University. From newspaper routes and gym management to teaching and entrepreneurship, he built his career from the ground up, launching his breakout podcast in 2015 and his successful agency a year later. Today, he continues to empower creators, leaders, and visionaries to command their brand and shape the modern narrative. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Put your money to work with Stash—visit get.stash.com/SRS to receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and view important disclosures. Upgrade your wallet today! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code SRS at https://www.Ridge.com/srs #Ridgepod Go right now to http://hillsdale.edu/SRS to enroll. There’s no cost, and it’s easy to get started. Receive 30% off your first subscription order at https://armra.com/SRS or enter code SRS at checkout. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/srs Jeremy Slate Links: X - https://www.x.com/JeremyRyanSlate FB - https://www.facebook.com/Jeremyryanslate IG - https://www.instagram.com/jeremyryanslate LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-ryan-slate-bb7b284a Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I started my business back in 2014. That was like literally one of the first, I have no business background. One of the first books I read was for our work weeks. That was pretty cool. Really? Yeah, I did his diet for a couple of years too, with all the cold showers and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Right on. Yeah. Man, I found you like last week. Yeah. So this is crazy. Yeah, I was in Puerto Rico.

I was like, holy shit. But I've been talking to Jeremy for a bit, and he's like, hey, Sean's interested. I'm like, oh, sweet. That's what, yeah, I sent him, uh, he said he'd been chatting with you for some time. And I, um, at the beginning, at the end of last year, I was like, we should start getting into some history shit. Yeah. And, uh, because I, I don't know anything.

I'm definitely not like the world's top expert, but I can talk to regular people, which is what matters. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's what works. Yeah. But, um, but, um, but yeah, I saw your, I saw something. I can't even remember what it was, but I was like. You had your pinpost about, um, like, kind of the current scene. Yeah. And, uh, I wrote a thread around that.

about the fall of Rome and how it makes sense. Yes. That is how we found it. That's how I found. Yeah, you wrote, which post was it? Was it the one where I was going off about how the government's fallen to fraud, waste, and abuse? It's that one, I believe. And then I, like, quote, tweeted that and wrote a thread with it.

What did you say? I can't remember. Just basically describing how Rome fell and kind of how those processes mirror, like, what we're dealing with today. Yep, that's a lot of... Crazy shit, man. That is definitely what... It's a pattern. It is.

Like, it's something that applies to literally any societal collapse. They screw with their money. They stop giving a shit about their borders. And politicians become short-sighted and just kind of want to deal with what gives them power right now. Wow. Yeah, that sounds very familiar. But if you fix your money, you could do all the other stuff a lot longer.

Do you think we can fix our money? No. I don't either. No, and Ron Paul talks about, like, the person that does is not going to be very popular. because we're so far over our skis, it's going to be painful. Man, I watched this way back in probably like, I'll bet like 2008.

I watched a documentary, and I think it was Ron Paul on the Federal Reserve and when we came off the gold standard. Yeah. And I was like, holy shit. Well, that was a free license to do where they want. And money legitimately is worth nothing. Yeah.

And you kind of see it. I mean, look, I'm no economist. I don't know. I'm not either now. But gold is at $5,000 an ounce. This year went up like $1,000, man. $5,000 in ounce. Silver went to what, over $100 an ounce?

When 2020 is when I started, because COVID stuff, right? Yeah. I started buying, that's when I started looking into precious metals. We have physical gold, yeah. Everybody was freaked out about everything, right? But I remember gold in 2020 was about 2,000. $2,000 an ounce. So if it took thousands of years to get to $2,000 an ounce, and then five years, it goes to $5,000, it over doubles in five years. I mean, and then if you think about it, is gold really going up? It seems like gold would kind of be... The price of everything is going down. Gold's not changing. That's what I'm so. That's what I think. That's how inflation works. It's just your dollar doesn't go as far. Because it's like the... So our money has, it's, it's, it's, it How do you say it?

Our money is worth two and a half times less, if you look at the gold. Yeah. If you look at the price of gold today, in five years, our money is two and a half times less, or I guess six years, two and a half times less than what it was six years ago. Well, because people don't get it because they just see, oh, the prices are going up. It's not that the prices are going up is your dollar isn't go as far. That's what I mean. And the Federal Reserve uses the word.

They like to use funny words, hoping people don't understand them. they use the word quantitative easing. What that means is they made more money. There's more of a quantity of money. And they have different numbers for money supplies. Like there's the M1 money, which is like older money. M2 money is kind of the newer money. And it's like 80% of it was printed since COVID.

So it's like... 80% of the M2 money supply was printed since COVID. Wow. Have you seen... Are you following this Epstein stuff at all? Yeah, pretty intensely, actually. Have you watched the Epstein interview with Bannon? I have it bookmarked.

I haven't watched it yet. I was watching the Rogan Mike Ben's thing this morning. How was that? It's eye-opening because he goes through the networks of how they move all the money around and how Epstein was probably not just one country but several countries and it's interesting. Yeah, I know, I know.

He was talking about how Epstein was talking about, and I don't understand this shit, but he was talking about how most people don't understand money and most world leaders are elected because of popularity, not because of their ability to run the country. And he gives examples. Reagan was an act. I mean, Reagan.

But that goes back to Rome, right? Because if you look at it, people, like, what would happen is, in the late empire, the guys that kind of become emperor are just military commanders. And there were two things they would do. When they became emperor, they would do something called a donative. Donative comes from the Latin word to give, and they would give a giant bonus to all the military when they became emperor, and then they would double their pay. So they end up

becoming more loyal to that emperor because he's the money guy. And that process continues again and again again until the money's worth nothing. Man, you know, I mean, that actually sounds better than what we do because we don't pay our warrior shit. We just get it all overseas. We don't take care of them, especially the VA. We just pay everybody else's warriors that we fought, like the Taliban. Yeah. But, you know, we're paying those guys $87 million a week. Is that the number? That's the number.

That's insane. That's the number. That's insane. That's insane. That's insane. But, yeah, that's, so yeah, I wanted to talk. I've just been looking for somebody that can relate the Roman Empire to kind of what we're seeing, the collapse of the Roman Empire to what we're seeing today.

And everybody has like these little nudge. Yeah. You know, but it's not enough for a full-blown conversation. Yeah, I'm like weird because it's like if you ask me about literature, I don't know a ton about it. I know the history and the patterns. So it's like I can connect all those things, but like I know a little bit about stoicism enough to talk about it, but like I'm not an expert in it.

I'm kind of like I get Roman history and how it works together, you know? Yeah, yeah, right on. Well, I got a hot question here for you. The Roman Empire existed during the time of Jesus. Jesus and early Christianity. How did Rome's power and policies shape the spread of Christianity and did the Romans realize how significant that movement would become? So I don't think initially because you have to look during the time of Jesus, they couldn't tell the difference between Christianity and Judaism. There wasn't a big ability to tell a difference

between that. They thought it was kind of a sect of Judaism. And it's a small percentage of the actual empire. You're looking like 1% or less during the time of Christ. And there's really only one Roman historian that actually even writes about Christ. He's, his name's Titus Flavius Josephus. He was a Jewish historian that when Palestine is conquered and that area is conquered, he comes and lives in Rome and he works for the emperor. And if you read letters of the emperors, I'm trying to remember which one it is. It might be Vespasian, and he's writing to one of the governors and he's trying to explain Christianity to him. And he just doesn't understand it because he's like, wait, they,

They eat the body of someone, and he just didn't understand it. And he's like, well, I think it was plenty of the younger that's writing to Vespasian. And he's like, well, what do we do with these guys? He's like, all right, just leave them alone. Because for the most part, unless you're causing upheaval, Rome was very permissive. And that's because they brought in gods from all the other empires and territories and things that they conquered. They brought in gods from all the other empires? Correct.

So you would have, you could live in Rome, but you might worship ISIS, which is an Egyptian or you might worship Apollo because they had their traditional pantheon of 12 gods, but they also borrowed gods from other societies they conquered or basically annexed. So it became very popular to do that. Now, when you say borrowed, do you mean accepted? Accepted. Accepted. You could have individuals.

Basically it was freedom of religion. It was yes and no, because the thing you have to look at is the Romans believed in this thing called the peace of the gods. And when things were going well, it meant they'd achieve the peace of the gods. So when things aren't going well, that's when you're going to have persecutions of Christians and other groups. So like, you see this during the time of Nero. There's the great fire of Rome in 64 AD. And Nero gets blamed very heavily for it.

So the thing he's going to do is persecute Christians because he has to blame it on someone. And you move further down the road. And in around 250 or 251, there's an emperor named Dishis, and they're experiencing climate change. so they don't kind of know what to do about it. What? One of the things that allowed the Roman Empire to rise is something called the Roman climate optimum. It means from 200 BC to about 280, they had perfect weather.

So they could grow food in areas that now you couldn't. And as climate starts changing, as they start having difficulty with their borders, with money and things in the mid-third century, Dysius makes a law that everyone has to sacrifice to the Roman gods because it'll restore the peace of the gods. And when Christians don't do that, there's a huge persecution of Christians that happens. That's what triggered it. Yeah.

So they were open to it. Unless things weren't going well, then they kind of needed somebody to blame. So then Diocletian's going to do that again in the 280, well, around 300, he's going to be persecuting Christians because he's trying to restore the peace of the gods. But anytime things aren't going well, an emperor thought he needed to restore the peace of the gods, which meant people needed to be on the same page with Roman religion. Wow. Because Romans couldn't see a... difference between political life and religious life. To them, it was the same thing. Interesting. Do you think the Roman Empire unintentionally spread, wildly spread Christianity by suppressing it?

I don't think that's really the case. There's a battle in 311 called Milvian Bridge. And what ends up happening in that time period is you're kind of getting out of the time period where people are declaring themselves emperors, they have an army behind them, they're fighting each other. But you have the end of this. You have Constantine, who wants to be the emperor of the full empire in the east, and then you have this guy named Maxentius in the West, but Constantine wants to rule the whole thing. So he has this vision, and he sees a giant cross in the sky. Well, actually, it's the Kai in the row, which is the Greek symbols for Christ.

And he hears the words, under this sign you will conquer. And he wins that battle. So then he has this idea, well, the Christian God is now supporting me. So then in 313 AD, he's going to take Christianity, and though Romans hadn't went after Christians, unless times were bad, Christianity was technically illegal. In 313, the Edict of Milan makes Christianity legal. And he will start to move it from being more of a pagan empire

to a Christian empire. And it's going to be fully a Christian empire in 380 under Theodosius when he names it the official religion of Rome and they get rid of their pagan gods. So Rome became... A Christian empire in 380. A lot of people are saying, and I tend to believe it, that the more the government removes God from everything, from our culture, from our schools, from discussions, from government, from everything. Yeah. You know, it seems like they're trying to get him to disappear. Did the Roman Empire do that too?

Because now you have all this other shit that's popping all these perversions, perverted shit that's happening. So that was actually the second and third century for Romans. Like things are not, when things aren't going well, you have a lot of the perversion and things like that. There's a emperor in the early 220s. He's a teenager, and his name's Eligabalus. and he has, he's the priest of a cult called Ella Gabble, which is from Syria, and they worship a conical black rock.

So he has a wedding for his black rock where it's carried through Rome and a chariot. He was personally pulled by a chariot of prostitutes. He married a vestal virgin, and he put his hairdresser in charge of the grain supply. So he was also having parties where he was pushing the Senate to basically have orgies, which they were not. super happy about. So things are really bad in the third century. He's assassinated and his body's actually drugged through the streets. But if you look at things actually improve spirituality-wise and it starts to become more of a Christian nation, but the problem is the West's sins had been so deep it was hard to fix. And if you look at Constantine, though he brings

Christianity to a higher standing, the thing that's really important about him, which doesn't get talked about a ton is he actually fixes the currency. He takes and he'll repossess a lot of the pagan temples and he starts minting gold coins from them. And in the year 314 in Trier, Germany, he mince less than 100 gold coins. And he's going to actually follow that process until he dies in 336. And by the time he dies, Rome is now on a gold standard. He's done it gradually every year until he dies. that currency is going to go without inflation until about the year 1000. So that's actually the thing that helps the East to survive. But a lot of Rome's sins have been created when it was a pagan empire.

So just spirituality couldn't really fix that the kind of levers of power were broken. You don't need to overhaul your life to start investing. Just automate it. With Stash, your New Year money goals can quietly run in the background while you focus on everything else. Stash isn't just another investing app. It's a registered investment advisor that combines automated investing

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See the advisory agreement and deposit account agreement for details. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk. This is going to be awesome. I'm pumped. All right. Let me give you a proper introduction here. Jeremy Ryan Slate, CEO and co-founder of Command Your Brand, a PR agency.

a podcast PR agency, host of the Jeremy Ryan Slate Show, which features work from your channels, Hidden Forces and History in the Roman Pattern, Best Selling Author, Global Speaker, and Authority Strategist, husband to Breel, who is your co-founder, it command your brand. Yeah. And then a couple of things here. I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account, but they've been with me here since the beginning. And to be honest with you, they're the reason I get to.

to sit down here with you today. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is Chad Paustian. My favorite story is that of Scorpio Afrikanus. Skipio. Skibio. Do you think the U.S. and China are parallel of Scipio and Hannibal? If so, who are we, and how do we use that to our advantage?

So that's a really difficult question because he's about the Punic Wars, which are in the late Republic, and there's three of them over about 150-year period. And I don't know if I would completely make the... Well, I guess maybe you could, because if you look at one of the things that the Punic wars do, is they start to heavily... Rome had always been a very military society,

but it starts to become heavily militarized in that time period. And I think if you look at... It's hard to say who is who. but I think we go more towards being Romans. Because if you look at in a lot of ways, especially in the last 50 years, we've hyper-militarized in this country. It's a very big section of the economy,

a very big section of what defines things. But I think in a lot of ways, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, right? So I think it's hard to say exactly that we are Rome and China is Carthage. But I think those patterns are similar because what ends up happening is global events will happen because of certain things that are currently afoot. And what I mean by that is if there is a constant state of war, well, decisions are going to be made to handle that situation, right? And if you look at a lot of what's happening with U.S. and China relations right now, a lot of policy is made because of what's happening between the U.S. and China.

And even more in the last couple years, it's also been the U.S. and Russia, right? So a lot of policy is made often short-sighted because of the situation we're dealing with now, and that's a lot of how the Punic War was for Rome, the Will of Puneic Wars, is it changed from more of a citizen soldiery to becoming more of a standing private army, and people stop having real allegiance to Rome and more of their commander. And that's actually going to be one of the big things that causes the empire to rise and also the empire to fall, because that is a very dangerous situation to be. where people aren't as loyal to the group that they're part of,

but more loyal to a person. And so I think if you look at that, that's a pattern that repeats, but I think it's hard to say, is the U.S. Rome in this case, and is China Carthage in this case? Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. One last thing.

Yes, sir. Everybody gets a gift. There you go. Vidjones elite gummy bears made in the USA legal in all 50 states. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. You're welcome. You ready to kick it off? Let's do it, man.

All right, here we go. So I actually have something for you too. Did you want me to? Oh, perfect. Yeah. So this is actually, I have a coin supplier I work with, uh, Kinzer coins by my friend Dean Kinzer. And he sent us a few things here.

This is a Claudius Gothicus coin. And the cool thing about this is if you see on the edge here, they use what's called a dye to hammer them. And when you have to bleed over on the edge, it means they made a lot of coins that year, so they're not a shark. Wow. So that is a mid-third century coin. This is Constantius II

who is the son of Constantine So that would have been Mid-fourth century And this is a city of Rome coin Which is a coin that Constantine minted To basically solidify his Coins served a Propagandic purpose too

So this was the really solidified power And this is two different half coins First Century coins from Augustus And his top general of Grip up Man, this is cool Thank you Yes, sir. Thank you. It's always nice to hold a piece of history, and you have a lot of it here, too.

Yeah, yeah. These are going to look great here in the studio. I'll probably get them framed, hang them up. Thank you. Cool. You got it, man. Very, very kind. Thank you.

So, why does, in your opinion, why does Rome still matter for today? Well, I think when you look at it, as I said earlier, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme in a lot of ways. And I think if you understand patterns. that happen in history, you can understand a lot of what's happening in your world today, because I think we look at modern politics and we see the things that are happening, and we try to say, okay, well, if we just make this solution now, it'll solve it. And if we look at earlier empires, especially Rome, it's something that those short-sighted solutions often don't fix things.

And when I look at Rome, I see something I like to call the Roman pattern. It's the three things that if you look at empires and decline, you can look at the Eastern Roman Empire, which historians in the 16th century start calling the Byzantine Empire. You can look at the Mongol Empire and a lot of how that collapses. It's similar patterns, even Weimar, Germany. And there's three things that tend to happen most often and in different ways. But the first is they don't handle their money well, right? They start inflating it to a point that the money is absolutely useless.

There's a story about Weimar Germany that when you wanted to buy a loaf of bread, you would fill your wheelbarrow with money and get to the story. store and by the time you got to the store, there wasn't enough money in the wheelbarrow to buy the bread. Wow. And so inflation is something, I think, for a lot of people, they don't really understand, but it is the number one thing that causes empires and societies to collapse. Because if your money is worth nothing, well, then you start to have nothing, right? And the other thing is immigration and poor border control, because if you're not handling

your country or your empire, your civilization, and there's a lot of people that don't define themselves by that civilization. That's not to say, you know, you have to be the most, you know, American person out there, but it is to say you need to be loyal to the country that you're in. If you look at places like Minnesota and other places, they're starting to lose their identity as America. There's places the cops won't even going at this point. So those are things you start to see in a societal collapse. And the third is that politicians start getting so short-sighted that they just care about, you know, what's happening right now and how I'm going to handle this next election cycle.

And when you start doing that, you're creating future time bombs for your civilization. That's all happening right here, right now. Yes. And the thing people get upset with is saying, oh, we're Rome. I'm not saying America is Rome, but I am saying it's a pattern that applies to how societies collapse. How long was the Roman Empire?

What was the run? So if you want to look at it, it's an over 2,000-year history. It's founded in 753 BC as a kingdom, and there's traditionally seven kings of Rome from 753 to 509 BC. And because of those initial kings, Romans hated the idea of kingship. And it comes to be the last king of Rome, the seventh, Tarkwin the proud, is the most hated. His son is in the military, and there's another man in the military that he likes that man's wife. and because she's supposed to be the most upright and most chaste woman.

So he has his way with her. It's called the rape of Lucretia. And because of this, it ends up really blowing up on Tarquin. And there is a family called the Brutus family, which is actually the same family that's going to assassinate Caesar, and that's an important point, that actually removes Tarquin and his son from Rome. Now, some people say he was killed.

Others say he was just kicked out. but that's the end of the kings of Rome. So the Romans hated the idea of kingship. Now, from 509 to 31 BC, it's a republic. But it's not a republic in the way that we think of republics. It's more of an oligarchy in a lot of ways. The way you had power is having money and possessions and things like that.

They voted... Yeah, they voted not as individuals, but in what are called voting centuries. And the centuries are actually originally based off of the idea of military centuries. But the richest 10% of Rome held 90% of the vote. So they could basically decide no matter who was going to have a political position. If you didn't have money or you weren't literate, you didn't have the ability to kind of do a lot.

So that goes until 31 BC. And then from 31 to 476 is the empire. And the empire in the west, in the east, we end up calling it the Byzantine Empire, but they wouldn't have called themselves that. themselves that, they would have called themselves Romans, that goes until 1453. So it's basically like a almost 2,000-year history of what the Roman Empire was. Wow, wow. And we're at 250 years. Yeah, and I think that's something to consider is we're not as old as when I was studying in England, I studied New College Oxford for a bit. And if you look at a lot of the buildings there and just

how old they are, and our oldest buildings, buildings aren't as old as their newest buildings a lot of times. It's American society isn't that old. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to see, I mean, I think you're going to tie a lot of parallels to what we're seeing today. There's a lot. Towards the end of the Roman Empire. And a lot of people do say, you know, history, history repeats itself. Like you say, it rhymes. And I think we see that. But, you know, it was actually Mark Twain that coined that phrase too. So I can't take credit for that. Um, you know, one question I have, just from diving into our own history. Yeah. How accurate do you think history in the Roman Empire actually is?

And the reason I ask this is you see all these institutions just in America, just in this lifetime, that are lying and changing history, things are being recorded, not how they fucking happened. And in a lot of this is to protect the institution. You know, and you think about it, and I've just doven into a couple of institutions. Yeah. There's probably, there's got to be close to a thousand institutions in this country. Yeah. Whether it's churches, government, whatever it is.

And in just in the SEAL teams, there's a lot of recorded history that is just a flat. out lie, you know? And so it's like, well, if the SEAL teams did it, then this did it, and this did it, and this did it. It's just, it's like, okay, every institution is doing this. This is just one country. So then think about all the institutions in the world. And then you think if every institution in the world is doing this and lying and manipulating history, and we're just this, we're just one little sliver in time that's infinite. How do you know, because the Romans had to have been manipulating history as well. And the Greeks and everybody. It's a pattern that doesn't change. It's a pattern that doesn't change because it goes back to who's in power, right? And it goes back into who's literate, right? If you look at Rome, less than 10% of their society is literate, right?

So if you're not literate, you're not going to be writing. And I think that's an important point. So if you look at a lot of the history you're getting, you have to understand what the power structure is at the time because the power structure is going to dictate what the history you're getting is. And you can look at that in any society. But if you look at, my degree is actually in the propaganda of the First Emperor Augustus because he had to taste basically make people think they were still living in a republic, even though it didn't exist anymore. So one of the major things he does is he starts commissioning works of literature. So the Aeneid is written during his time. The famous

Roman historian Livy who writes during that time, writes his Roman histories during that time. There's a poet named Avid who wrote what's called erotic poetry, which Augustus didn't like because he was very naturally conservative, so he's kicked out of Rome. So a lot of those things were very manicured in ways. So the history you're getting is often going to reflect the power structure it's written in because you don't want to piss off or upset the people in power, and you don't want to piss off or upset the emperor, right? You want it to be something that describes things to give people a certain vision.

And it's that way in the Republic too. You want to show the Republic as a powerful, something that honors tradition. And if things don't honor that, well, you're not going to write about them, right? You want to, the 476 fall date of Rome is often something that's heavily debated as well. And as I said, Western Rome. the emperor in the east, Justinian, in the late fifth and early, well, late sixth and early seventh

century, is going to decide that he wants to reconstitute the Roman Empire. And the West, for some point in time, had fallen into being these kingdoms of just barbarian kingdoms. So what he ends up doing is by force, under a general named Belisarius, tries to reconquer the Western Roman Empire. And a lot of it is destroyed during this period of time. So a lot of the writing you're getting that says Rome fell in 476, well, that's going to come from the East because Justinian's going to look bad if it says, you know, he burned down the empire to reunite the empire. So you have to look at the power structure that dictates the literature you're getting.

And I think very oftentimes you're not going to write things that look bad for the group in power. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so how much confidence do you have in Roman history? Enough that we can understand what happened to a degree, and that's the thing about ancient history, is when you look at American history, we know, for the most part,

because we have a lot of primary sources, exactly what happened during that time. You know, we're going to still have the narratives of what people want to say. We know a lot more about it, because it's more recent, we have more primary sources. Ancient history, there's a lot of sources missing. There's, because part of it is just

they're writing on papyrus and things similar to that, which just don't last as long. The other part of it is things you're going to be destroyed. The Library of Alexandria has burned, I think, three times, one time under Caesar. So there's just not enough work surviving. So you'll get a lot of theories around ancient history, and those theories, the historians will say they're very correct,

when another historian will have a different theory, and they're also very correct, because we just don't have as much data as we'd like to have to actually know what happened. So we can kind of surmise, we have some primary but you have to also understand where your primary sources coming from and whose opinion are they and who do they support. Gotcha. Gotcha. How much how much difference have you seen between people that have recorded it or contradictory? So you have to look at the time periods when people are writing because if you look at a historian that's writing during the life of Nero,

he's going to talk great about Nero because of the emperor. But then if you look after he dies, the things about Nero are terrible. So it's very often when people feel safe, they'll say what they really think. But when they don't feel safe because that person's in power, well, they're going to be a bit sycophantic and kind of talk about the emperor in glowing terms. And you see this with bad emperors like Caligula, Caracalla, Nero. So the history you're getting has to make the person in power look good or your life is kind of in peril. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Makes sense. It's like scary shit to think about, you know, everything we think we know. Maybe...

Well, in a lot of ways we don't. In a lot of ways we don't. We find out no shit. We, it's, there's the... Plato has what's called the allegory of the cave. I know if you heard of this? No. So the allegory of the cave is there's people that live their entire lives in a cave.

And the only thing that they know about life are the shadows they see on the walls. And when they come outside, they can actually see what's happening and see what's occurring. But their whole life is by these shadows. A lot of what we get in history and in media and in opinion out there is just shadows. We don't always have the full background. Man. You know, I was just, I was watching, I was watching two of my friends have a podcast yesterday, last night, AJ Gentile from the W. Files and Tucker Carlson.

And they were talking about the pyramids. Oh, I listened to that one. You listened to it. I did. It was really good. And I've been hellbent on this history thing because I haven't even released this interview, but I interviewed this guy and it was all about kind of recent global war on terrorism lies. And so that really got me thinking about what I was just saying like, man, it's just if it's just this institution, all these institutions do this.

When you look at around Egypt, like the things we don't know and the things that have been altered because the opinion that... In the things that they fucking taught us that are complete bullshit, I remember looking at pictures of slaves picking up these huge blocks with sticks. in my history books. Yeah. And I'm like, holy shit, like, this is just fucking garbage. Well, it might not be logistically possible. Yeah, it's like... They didn't have the technology to do it.

And then I found out... I didn't even know this. Did you know what money? I guess you do, because you watched it. They've never found a mummy in the pyramids. I heard that in that episode. I did not know that until I heard that. Me neither.

And so it's just like, holy shit. Is everything we know a fucking lie? Yeah, maybe they came from an earlier civilization. or something he was making the claim of. A lot of this stuff though throughout the world. But one thing, I think I want to start here with you, most people misunderstand collapse as a moment and not a process.

Yeah. So when you look at that, when you're living through something, a lot of times, like, and this is the same for Romans, you're still paying your taxes, you're still going to work, you're still doing a lot of the things you usually do. And that's what happens in these downsides. You just kind of alter your daily life just enough to get by, right? Like if you look at even during civil war in certain countries, I went to Athens

in 2013 and that's when they were having all the fires in the middle of Athens and they were protesting. As long as you didn't go to that little square section, life was normal. And I think that's what people don't understand when things are starting to collapse. The thing you see is how much things costs and you start to see getting a little dimmer about your future. But for the most part, life carries on as normal. I think for some reason, and a lot of its propaganda, people have this idea that there's this moment and after it everything is different. But if you even look at when Rome falls in 476, it doesn't fall. It really fades in a lot of ways. And life is going to continue as normal. They're still going to be wearing similar clothing. They're still going to be holding similar

positions. The first barbarian king actually spends money to rebuild a lot of Roman temples and things like that because he wanted to keep the grandeur of the city. So the system itself can fade away and change, but oftentimes we're getting our history in a post script where we can see now at a 30,000 foot view, well, that was a really important moment of time. For people living in it, they don't exactly have that experience and we see that in history, right? I think it's really important to understand, like the American Civil War. It wasn't like, okay, so we are now at war because this battle happened. Well, something happens, something else happens. It's a 10-year period. And then finally you're at war. I meant to say the American Revolution, but it's very, it's decades,

not just something that happens suddenly. I think people watch a lot of movies and they have with this idea that there's these great cataclysms. Sure, those things might occur, but they're part of a broader spectrum of things that occur and lead you someplace. It's not often a cataclysmic event. Makes sense. And so how long was the process for Rome?

So the most famous work on the Roman Empire is Edward Gibbons, Declin and Fall the Roman Empire. It's written in 1776 in seven volumes, so it's like really great as a door stop if you want them to hold your door open. But you have to understand Gibbon's role is important too. He's born as a Catholic, but to get more political power, his father convinces him to convert to the Church of England.

So he's going to have a lot of problems with the early Catholic Church that's rising in Rome, and that's actually in his work, and he gives Christianity a lot of flack for the collapse of Rome. When in all honesty, it really had nothing to do with it. Now, the other thing he's dealing with at the same time is, the American Revolution. So he's writing this in seven volumes. Initially, things are going really well for the British. Then they start going worse and worse and worse and worse.

And that's going to affect how he's writing. So once again, it's important to understand the world of a writer. And when you look at that though, the thing I think he is right about, and that I do agree with wholeheartedly, is Marcus Aurelius is what's called the last of the five good emperors. And the thing that they did differently is they didn't take their natural-born son. and make the next emperor because that had gotten you a whole mixed bag of emperors. You might have a good one like Vespasian, but then you get his son Domitian, who is terrible, or you might get a Caligula, or you might get a Nero, because you don't know how qualified that next person is.

The thing that they do is an ancient society you could adopt an adult. What that meant is they got your titles, your name, your riches, and they would adopt the next closest qualified person, And this works really well from 93 AD to around the death of Marcus Aurelius, which is 180 AD. They're called the Five Good Emperors. This is very often referred to as the Pax Roman or the Roman Peace. The thing that Aurelius does different, and at times you have to feel for him as well, is those other four didn't have natural-born sons. Aurelius does. He has this son, Cometus.

And he knows, though he's worked with Cometus, he's stuck. not really qualified to be the next emperor, but if he doesn't name him emperor without killing him, he would probably raise an army and try to create a civil war in Rome. So he names his son Comedus to be the next emperor. And Gibbon calls this the real downslide of the empire. There's a quote from Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I'm paraphrasing here.

I don't remember exactly what it was, but it's that Rome goes from a society of marble to one of steel and rust. and rust that basically it's starting to disintegrate. So it's like a 300-year downside, though. But it is a real process you can look at because the next emperor after him really changes the way the empire functions.

After Arraylius? After Cometheus. Cometheus dies in 192. And... So it started with Marcus Aurelius. Well, Marcus Aurelius was seen as a good emperor. His son, Cometus, who he names to be the next emperor, is seen to not be such a real emperor.

a great emperor. So that was the, that was the, that was the spark. It was the spark. And there's, the commonus is emperor, the last year of his rule, he dies in 192, is what's called the year of five emperors. And there's the emperor right after him named pertinacs. The Praetorian Guard actually auctions the empire to him. So he pays a certain price and he gets to be emperor. And after around 80 days, they kill him. And they say, hey, the empire's for sale again. Who wants? wants to be the next emperor. Who's they? The Praetorian Guard, because they had become the power behind the throne.

And they're responsible for killing somewhere around 17 different emperors that we know of. You know, if they weren't happy, they might kill the emperor, and this happens on a number of occasions. So was this like a shadow government? It's like a shadow government in a lot of ways. Did the citizens know about it? For the most part, they would have known. The person in charge of the Praetorian Guard is the guy called the Praetorian Prefect, and he would have been seen as kind of the most powerful man in Rome. because they were responsible for protecting the emperor,

but they also made and unmade emperors. So in this year of five emperors, you have pertinax being the first to buy the empire. Then there's another name Didis Julianus that buys the empire. And then the last one that comes in that year is a military commander named Septimius Severus. And he comes in with his legions and actually conquers Rome. And the thing that he changes is he enlarges the Roman army.

He's going to remove all the Praetorian Guardsmen and put only his loyal men in the Praetorian Guard. So he's changing the guard. And he's also going to double the pay of the legions. And that's something that for the next 200 years, emperors after him are going to follow, is they're going to start doubling, tripling, quadrupling the pay of the legions. And that's something that's going to start fueling inflation. There's other things fueling inflation, but that's one of the key things fueling inflation. And when someone became emperor, they would give a gift to the legions.

That's called a donative. It comes from the Latin word to give. So they would give a bigger donative, and they would also double, triple, quadruple to pay. So by the time you get to 284 AD, they're at 15,000 percent inflation. They're silver coin that was 95% pure in the first century. Like those coins I gave you that are, those are bronze coins, because they're 5% pure by the late 270s. So the money is worth almost nothing.

Holy shit. So he kind of, his death opens the door to this new pattern of how emperors are made. Wow. Now he's not the first of what are called the barrack emperors. It's going to be a guy named Maximinus Thrax. But barrack emperors meaning military barracks. These basically guys that they weren't politicians, they hadn't been through Roman office, they just have an army, a lot of steel.

and a lot of power. And that is basically how the third century is going to really start compounding this collapse. So that's a bad thing. That's a bad thing. Bam, that's a bad. I would think it's a good thing. Well, it's because what ends up happening

is power starts to centralize more and more and more. Let me tell you about something you carry every day but probably haven't upgraded in years, your wallet. I didn't realize how overdue mine was until I switched to Ridge. My old wallet was stretched out, overstuffed, and just a pain to carry. Moving to Ridge was an immediate difference. It's a slim, modern design that still holds up to 12 cards plus cash without feeling like a brick in your pocket. It's built from premium materials like aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber, so it's made to last.

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the stories in the book of Genesis, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, and you can go even deeper on the American founding in the Constitution, and it's all for free. You all know I'm always trying to understand how we got here, and these lessons connect the dots in a way that actually makes sense to me. Go right now to Hillsdale.edu slash SRS to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale.edu slash SRS to enroll for free. Hillsdale.edu. slash SRS. I'll tell you why I think it would be, in my opinion, why it's a good thing.

I just, I've always thought this. I thought it would be good to have somebody that's fought for the country, running the country. I don't disagree with you. get these fucking scumbags that, you know, they just show up. There's not much else you can say about that. But anyways. Well, no, I don't disagree with them. It's bad because that goes back to the military reforms I talked about earlier.

Because what ends up happening is their loyalty is just to that general. And it's not to Rome as a whole. So it ends up creating these fractures within how the society actually functions. A transactional military. Correct. We're going over this later in the outline. But I think we're seeing that right now. I mean, I think we're seeing a transactional military right now.

How would you describe a transactional military? They're in it for the pay, and they're in it for the power, right? And if you look at the military changes a lot in the second century. There had always been barbarian tribes that have fought in the Roman military. There's what's called the Roman auxiliary. So, and Caesar had his German guard that protected him. at him. So there to a certain extent had always been barbarians coming in the military. And I guess to just handle that word barbarian, it comes from the Greek word,

because Greeks would hear barbarians saying bar, bar, bar, bar, because they didn't understand it. They spoke Greek. So they would call them barbarians. So then in Latin, they used the word barbary for beard. So they were these bearded guys, is basically the thing, because Romans until the mid-second century didn't really have beards. The Emperor Hadrian, who was from Spain, was the first person to actually be an emperor and have a beard. It was good to shave your face in that period of time. So these bearded Germans were seen as barbarians. And when you look at how the military changes over the 3rd century,

they start bringing more and more and more barbarians into the Roman legions. They start to become less and less and less Roman. And by the time you get to the end of the 3rd century, Constantine's going to create a group called the Fodorati, which are basically military but barbarians, and they don't have to follow Roman law, and they live on the borders. So you start to have this real disintegration

on what is a Roman and what is the Roman army. This is fucking crazy. Right? You're going so... I'm still at transactional military, and you're moving into immigration. Well, because they work together. They work together.

They do. Because I see a trans... In the way you just described a transactional military, for money and for power. And what do we see right now? This is, I'm a military guy. I have friends that are still in. This is what I hear.

This is what I hear from a lot of people. I'm just waiting for retirement. Wow. I don't even believe in what we're doing anymore. I'm just waiting for retirement. Wow. Because I have so many years in. Just waiting for retirement.

And then on the other side, you have the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, will do anything, lie to anybody, fuck anybody over, do anything they possibly can just to get that next star. Wow. And we've covered that time and time and time and time again on the show, these fucking generals and admirals that will do anything they can to get that next star, which is transactional. Mm-hmm. And it works for them.

Yeah. I mean, look, our leaders are shit. Yeah. So they have been for quite a while. But you could say that about the Roman military. as well. Well, that's drawing a parallel here. Yeah, you could you could say that about the Roman military as well, because if you look at the third century, which to me is the most pivotal time in history and nobody seems to talk about it, they talk about the fifth century of the fall

and the first century of the end of the republic, but they ignore the third century, which to me is the most vital time period. And if you look at that, you do have that more transactional type of military, where if you pay me more, hey, I'm your guy. You pay me less. You pay me less. You. You or your money's worth less, well, I'm not your guy. Have you ever heard the phrase worth your salt? No. So the phrase worth your salt, meaning you have value. One of the other things that military commanders did

is they paid their men in a certain amount of salt because salt had a lot of value. It could add flavor to food, it could preserve food. So they're paying them in coin and also in salt. So if you could give them a lot of the right coin and your coin still had value, well, then that's great. But if your coin starts to not have value, you see loyalties start to change. And you'll see a barbarian fighting in the Roman army one day, and now he's fighting with his tribe the other day.

So you see someone like Olerich, who is the Visigoth commander that sacked Rome in 410. He had worked in the Roman army, and he had actually was trying to get a position in the Eastern Army. And the Eastern Army and the Western Army had been using them against him. him against each other. And then eventually, he realizes neither of them are going to give him what he wants, so then he sacks Roman 410. And this is a pattern you're going to start to see

of these loyalties that just change and shift based on what are the stuff you can give me and what is the money you can give me. It becomes extremely transactional. And when people also don't have the identity of being Roman, well, it becomes even more transactional and even easier to change that opinion. Makes sense. Make sense.

Let's move into the... immigration stuff that you were talking about. Can we start over there? Yeah, so if we're looking at the third century, it's kind of a broad spectrum of things that we're looking at. If you're looking at, as I mentioned, there had always to some extent been barbarians in the Roman army, and there had always been people that weren't exactly Roman

but might get citizenship at some point. And if you fought in the Roman legions for 25 years, you could get citizenship. People wanted citizenship. It was a very valuable thing. Like today. Yeah. People want American citizens.

When I had a conversation with your team before for Patreon, one of the questions he asked was, what was the most valuable thing for a Roman to have in its citizenship? Because if you look at St. Paul in the Bible, well, he's a Roman citizen. And because of that, he had the right to address his grievances directly to the emperor. And he couldn't just be killed without getting to speak to the emperor.

That was a right they had. So citizenship has a right. ton of value. And so early on, when Rome is expanding, it's not quite an empire yet. It's a burgeoning republic. And one of the things they're going to do to enhance their military force is they're not going to ask for taxes. They're not going to ask for tribute. They're going to say, you give us a certain amount of military men and we'll protect you. And then later on, those conversations become about, well, we want citizenship. And if you look at the late Republic, the Latins were people that lived in Italy, but they weren't Roman.

So there was a big fight for, can we have citizenship? So citizenship had a ton of value. And as you get into the late Republic, it has even more value when things pop up like the grain dole. The Groghye brothers in 133 BC, one of the reforms they do is they create something called the grain dole, which meant that citizens were guaranteed a certain amount of grain to be able to feed their families. And that's why the climate change I spoke about happening in the mid-third century is a real problem for that. Because when grain prices start going up, well, that's going to fuel inflation even more because you have to feed everybody. So as you get into the third century, in 212, the emperor Caracalla has basically bankrupted the treasury.

And citizenship, though it had a lot of value to it, it also had a lot of taxes that were built into it. One of them was a big inheritance and death tax. So he gives 30 million people citizenship overnight and what's called the Edict of Caracalla. So that, to me, is the moment when citizenship starts to lose its value even more. 30 million? 30 million people overnight.

So now you're responsible for feeding those people, but you can tax them, so that's great, right? So those short-side solutions we talk about. If they work, yeah. So that is a real problem. So citizenship had value, and people wanted to be a Roman citizen because you could live in a territory like North Africa.

but you could be a Roman holding Roman office. So there was a pathway for you if you could get citizenship to be able to be in government, to be able to have certain jobs, to be able to advance certain ways in your career. So citizenship had a ton of value. So people wanted that. And it's going to start to lose its value later on

because, well, if Rome doesn't really have coin and if Rome doesn't really have power, why do I care about being a citizen of it? So that's something that's going to start to change. So when we're looking at the immigration conversation, initially they want to be part of Rome. And initially they want to serve in the legions because that is a pathway for them to a better life. What starts to happen in the third century is these Roman commanders, there's in a 50-year period,

there's 27 different guys that are going to claim to be emperor. It's called the crisis of the third century. They're basically going to have a military behind them and see whoever they can kill to become the next emperor. You're going to have emperors that rule for months and just a couple years. So it's a very hectic period. And what happens during that time period is the empire in the West actually starts to break apart. The part of it in the West becomes what's called the Golic Empire. This general named Posthumish just decides, well, you can't stop me and this is my land.

He'll have the Roman Senate. He'll have everything. In the East, you're going to have a territory breakoff called Palmyra. And there's a woman named Zinobia that actually manages to rule that for a period. So the empire is starting to disintegrate. And the empire doesn't have money to really pay for a lot of these things. So they start making agreements with barbarian tribes in the north of, you come here, we'll make you safe, we'll feed you.

But then since they don't have the money and politicians are corrupt, they stop having the ability to keep those agreements. So that's where the quote-unquote barbarian invasions start happening. Because Rome makes agreements, they can't keep the agreements. and the barbarians start coming across. So if you were living in that third century, it would have felt like your world was falling apart because the empire is disintegrating.

You're starting to have more tribes coming in from the north. And the real, I guess, citizenship and immigration conversation is they were so busy fighting each other, like our politicians now. You know, maybe they're not... And our people. Maybe they're not raising an army against each other, but it's all our news is, right,

is this politician. against that politician or this about Lindsey Graham or this about Barack Obama. A propaganda war. Correct. It's a propaganda war. The way it's more of that, I think General Flynn calls it fifth generational warfare. It's kind of that more of a psychological type of warfare. So it's a similar type of component when that's all they're worried about, well, your borders start to break apart.

And that's the real problem that Rome starts to have in the third century, is they just start having people pouring in because they're more worried about, fighting each other. Wow. And if you look at what we have now, how many million people do we have here that we don't know about? A loss count. Nobody actually knows.

I am. And if you look at even, have you been in New York recently? Mm-hmm. There is, I think it is at the Roosevelt Hotel where they're hosting a lot of, like, illegals? I have no idea. So there's actually... Out of there as fast as possible.

They get a lot of free... I live like 40 minutes from there. So, like, they live... A lot they had one of the big places they house them is in these hotels that aren't really Functioning anymore if you walk past the Rose about hotel that shit's real there's a dumpster out front With brand new things like strollers and things that are just thrown in there because they didn't even want them So it's like we're getting giving so much stuff To people that aren't even here legally

Well that's causing an inflation problem right so it's it's a similar pattern that you see in history we're just giving people free shit and they're throwing into the dumpster. You can walk right down the street past the Roosevelt Hotel. There's a dumpster out front with stuff in it that is brand new. Wow. So it creates a situation where when the only reason people are here is for the stuff, or the money, when the money doesn't have value, well, what loyalty do they have to society? And that's where you see these enclaves start to break apart, like in Minnesota and Michigan

and areas like that where sure they're here or, you know, with all the stuff with the Somalians happening recently. I know you had Nick on not long ago talk about what's happening with Somalians. Well, they're here for the goodies they can get. And they're just going to rig the system until they can get them. And that's a real problem when people start to be short-sighted and not worrying about, well, what is the future I'm creating for this system. Wow. Let's talk about the road to an empire. Kingdom, Republic, Empire, World. Yeah. So as I mentioned, Rome is traditionally a kingdom first, and there's seven traditional kings, and that's from 753 to 509.

Now, the Republic, as I mentioned, it's a bit more of an oligarchy, but it is a much better place to live under. The Republic itself starts to disintegrate in the last hundred years. It's what's called the, there's an author named Ronald Seim, and he wrote a work called the Roman Revolution, and that last hundred years is called the Roman Revolution. There's a lot that happens in that time period. I think often people hear about Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49, and that's how it ended. But for the most part, it's a climate, if that makes sense.

You have the Glocki brothers that start doing these more public-minded reforms. Then in the around the 100s, you have these two generals, Marius and Sulla. And Sulla was actually a... Which Sulla, by the way, is Elon Musk's favorite Roman. So I don't know if that tells anything about him or whatnot if you hear a little bit more about Sala. But Marius was this commander and Sulla was a guy that fought under him. And they're fighting against a barbarian tribe commander named Jigurtha. And Sulla manages to capture Jigurtha and Marius takes the credit by getting the triumphal parade.

The Roman triumph was a parade where a military commander would march through the streets of Rome, dressed as the god Jupiter, with his face painted red, and all of the soldiers would be under arms because it was technically illegal to have weapons within the city walls, because the city walls are considered sacred. But for a triumphal parade, you could have that. And they would also carry behind them the people they captured. So Jagurtha is going to be paraded in this parade, and Marius is taking all the credit. So Marius and Sulla start to have this disagreement on who's the most powerful guy.

Later on, as you go into the 80s BC, there's going to be a problem with pirates. Not that we don't modernly have a problem of piracy, right? These things seem to continue. And Sulla gets the consulship to basically go handle the pirates. But Marius uses his political connections to get that position taken away from Sulla and get that position himself. So then Sulla is going to raise arms against Marius, which has never happened before. You don't have Roman commanders fighting against each other. So Marius is going to flee to Greece.

He's going to die. He's of old age at this point in time. And he also held the political position of Consul seven times. Now, Consul is kind of like, if you looked at the idea of being president, Romans didn't like one man holding power because they hated kings. So every year they'd have two consoles. and they would equally hold power so that not one man held power. You were supposed to hold that position every 10 years.

Marius held it seven times. He didn't live to be 70 years old. So he starts breaking this pattern of how do you get offices? So you start to see this breakdown, right? Of first we're breaking down how the military functions, then we're breaking down how offices function. And then what Sulla is going to do in the year 70, is he's going to attack Rome.

I'm sorry, 82, he's going to attack Rome. And he's going to get the title of dictator. Romans had this idea that if you have an emergency, having multiple people handling it was too much of a problem. So for six months, you would get this power called dictator. And after six months, you were expected to lay it on your arms. Sulla holds that power for four years. So he starts to really break down again what an office means.

And he creates this process, called proscriptions. Now, what prescriptions are was there was a list in the form of names, and all of those people were to be killed. And if you brought that person's head to the forum, you would get their land, their goods, you could possibly get their titles. So what ends up happening is people's names that weren't people solid didn't like, but somebody else didn't like, would get their name on the list because somebody wanted their stuff. So you start getting this breakdown of really what are societal mores and the way society functions. So Sulla is a really big breaking point.

Now, on those list of prescriptions, there's an 18-year-old named Julius Caesar. Caesar was supposed to be killed because Sulla wanted him to divorce his wife because he didn't like that Caesar was married to the wrong political person. So Caesar decides he's not going to do that, and Caesar's mother, who's actually very connected, gets him removed from the lists. So Caesar survives the prescriptions. Sulla's gonna die in 82, and then if you go down the road, Julius Caesar takes political power in 59 BC.

He takes the consulship in that year. And the guy that's consul with him is this guy named Marcus Biblius. And Marcus Biblius is basically a front man for another politician named Cato the Younger. And Cato the Younger did not like Caesar. So anything he did politically didn't matter if it was right, wrong, indifferent. He would block anything politically Caesar did. Shit, this sounds just like today.

So what ended up happening is they had basically political mobs in that point in time. And Marcus Biblius is forced out of the Senate and into his home for the rest of the year. So they end up calling it the consulship of Julius and Caesar because he rules the whole year by himself. And after that period, he ends up getting what's called a pro-consulship. So pro-consulship is like a governor outside of the city of Rome. And that's, if you've heard of the Golic Wars, that's where Caesar basically goes,

kills about a million people and conquers deep into France. While he's in his last couple years of this, he hears word at the Senate that Cato has decided that he's going to raise political charges on him. And the way Roman society function, there's often this, this trope about it that your first year in political office, you were paying off your debts

because these people were heavily indebted in order to raise the money to become politicians. The next year, you were building your wealth. And the third year, you were building whatever you could to not get prosecuted with what you did during that year where you built your wealth. So Caesar owes a lot of money to a guy named Marcus Crassus. And a lot of what he did in Gaul paid off those debts.

But then back in the money, in Rome, Cato starts creating charges that he wants to bring Caesar up on when he gets back into Rome. And when you're consul or pro-consul, you can't be brought up on charges. You're immune from prosecution. So Rome has a culture of, if any of this is redundant, you can always stop me. Rome has a culture of being elected in person. So in order to be elected for consul again, Caesar would have to show up in Rome to be voted for. So he writes a letter to the Senate, and he gets something passed that he can be voted for in abstentia,

which doesn't really happen. Because he has this idea, if I come back to Rome, whether they're going to arrest me for these crimes that may be real or not real. Cato manages to get that order rescinded. So now Caesar has to come back to Rome again, and that's a real problem. So this is where the idea

Caesar crossing the Rubicon comes in. The Rubicon is this river in northern Italy. Modernly, we don't actually know where it is because the landscape has changed so much, but it was the northern border of Italy, likely somewhere near Milano in the north. So Caesar has about 10 legions. He leaves nine of them at the river,

and in 49 BC, he crosses the river with a legion, and he marches on Rome. So what ends up happening is those politicians, including Cato, Pompey, and a lot of others, they leave the city. So Caesar comes into Rome, fights no one, and he has the city of Rome. And the Senate had actually given Pompey the power to fight Caesar.

So over the next couple years, Caesar will be chasing Pompey around Europe and fighting him, and eventually the Ptolemy king is just going to behead Pompey and give his head to Caesar. So that is how you kind of get to the collapse of government. And because people will often say about Caesar of all the bad things he did. Now, I'm not saying he's a good guy, bad guy, but I am saying the people in political power did push him to do what he did. You get what I'm saying?

They created an environment where he had no choice. Right, wrong, or indifferent, they created a situation where he had no choice, but if I come to Rome, I'm going to be arrested. I'm going to be tried. It doesn't matter if these things are true or not true. So Cato's going to commit suicide by disemboweling himself, pompy. he's going to be killed, and then you get to the situation where Caesar is now in control of Rome. So he's named dictator, and later on in 44, he's going to be named dictator for life, which is something unheard of. It's akin to a king. Now, if you remember I mentioned earlier,

the last king of Rome is killed by a man named Brutus. Caesar is going to be later assassinated by two assassins named Brutus and Cassius. When you look at family ties in Rome, not upsetting your ancestors is very important. A Roman house would actually have these wax death masks of people that have lived before them to remind them of what their ancestors did. So to Brutus, it was seen as a responsibility to remove someone they thought would be a monarch. And when you look at how Rome collapses in that last hundred years, it heats up with Caesar, but it's a degrade into that position. And if you look at modernly, even what happened with Trump, you know, they pushing charges, pushing charges, pushing charges, well, you put them in a position where what do you expect them to do?

And I think that is where the system can actually cause the system to collapse and become something else. And Augustus, who's the first emperor, walks into this situation of 100 years of civil war. He brings peace. And then I do think this is a bit of a ruse, but then he says, okay, I'm going to retire. And the Senate in 23 demands that he stay in power. and that's where they give him the title Augustus. So it really is kind of an interesting position to be,

and it didn't become an empire because one man took power. It became an empire because political people fought for 100 years, and then the last man standing was actually asked to stay. Interesting. That was long-winded, I apologize. Where are we at? Are we an empire? I think we've been an empire for a long time.

And I think that because are you familiar with what happened in the year 1913? What happened? Under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It's a very pivotal year. There's three things that happened that year. The first is, you know, a lot of people will be familiar with the Jekyll Island meeting that created the Federal Reserve. That happens in 1913. And the Federal Reserve Act has passed over the Christmas break when...

Go into that. Do you know about this? I don't know a ton about it, but the famous banking family... Banking Families go off to Jekyll Island. The Warburg family, who's one of the German banking families, is there. The Rockefellers are there, and they basically decide that they want to prop up a central bank because they want to protect their own assets. Because if you look at the Federal Reserve, it's not federal and it's not, you know, it doesn't have any reserves. It's basically a cartel, and it's owned by member banks.

And a lot of the member banks are banks, you know, you're aware of. And the bigger investor in them is the BIS or the Bank of International Settlements in Basel. So it is really a cartel of banking. So they established this thing in 1913. The other thing that passes that year is the 16th Amendment for income tax. Because now, if you have this bank, you have to have a way to fund it, right? And they're going to fund it by taxing people. They had tried taxes after the Civil War to this extent, and it didn't last very long. But the income tax amendment sticks. The other thing that passes is the 17th Amendment.

And this gets almost... So this is not even drawn up by government. The other thing that passes that year, which no one seems to talk about, and this actually would have been pivotal during COVID. I was talking to Jeremy about this before we got started here. It's pivotal.

The 17th Amendment makes it so senators are no longer selected by state legislatures. They're selected by popular vote. So what that means is the Senate and the House are voted for in the same way. And the reason that the Senate was voted for differently is so that states would have representation and the people would have representation.

And if you look during the pandemic, a lot of states, their state legislatures wanted to do something, but they couldn't because they didn't select their senators. And the reason they were doing this was to solve corruption because governors were naming their friend or their biggest donor to be the senator, which to me,

you handle the corruption. you don't change the system. But if you look at 1913, we become less and less of a republic. And the presidency of FDR is even more pivotal in that, because he's kind of the person that forms something totally different. He's elected the presidency four times, creates the New Deal, starts ruling by more by executive order. And if you look at executive power now,

the executive power far outweighs the other two branches of government. And, you know, it, I liked Trump a lot when he got elected. I like him a little bit less now for how some things have been handled, especially the Epstein files, but he's also ruling by executive order. And that's a big problem. Bush did it, Obama did it, Trump has done it,

and it's, that's a real problem because people didn't vote for executive orders. You're ruling by mandate. It's a dictatorship. In some ways, yeah. Pretty damn close. It becomes an imperial presidency. And if you want to look at the moment that changed, Wilson is kind of the moment

where really starts to tip because I don't know if you're aware of this but during the First World War Wilson passed something called the Alien and Sedition Acts where he could lock you up for talking against the war efforts in America

and then you have FDR that totally changes the system so to me we haven't been a functional republic in a very long time and if you look at early Roman Empire what's that? Over a hundred years

over 100 years So we haven't been a functional republic in a very long time. There's still some remnants of it, some vestiges of it, but we have not been a functional republic in a very long time. Let's take a break. Let's take a quick break. We track our sleep, fine-tune our macros, and try every biohack under the sun.

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and we've talked about a reoccurring pattern, monetary breakdown, debasement, inflation, loss of trust. How did that happen in the Roman Empire? Well, that kind of ties back in... So it's a huge loss of trust in American government. Well, it ties back to money, really, because the thing you have to look at is people weren't willing to accept the amount of money they were receiving because they know that the money doesn't have the value it did. So like with those coins I gave you in the beginning, as I showed you, like, you could see on the coin that the dye that's used to cut the coin was used so many times

it wasn't even cutting the coin properly anymore. That's why that happened. So they physically know that, well, this coin doesn't have the value, right? So you're going to have actually black markets popping up. Like this is a big problem. And Diocletian that's going to do reforms in the at the end of the third century. Like, fake currency? Not fake currency. Like people literally trading, going back to how they did things. You give me a sheep, I'll give you some grain.

Like going back to black market trading. And people are, we were talking about gold prices earlier. In the late third century and earlier, they start hoarding gold because they know the quote unquote silver they're using, which is now very obviously bronze, doesn't have any value. So the gold isn't really in circulation because everybody's holding it. So you start to have this real problem of people not trusting money and it starts to break the economy because now trade is breaking down. You also start to have the problem of people not knowing how long the person that's calling

himself emperor is going to be in power. So that's also going to change loyalties because a lot of times you're going to have, I guess, people in their retinue is an easy way to put it, that know if this guy becomes emperor, I'm probably going to get this job. So those things are going to start to break down and they're going to kind of roll the dice with whoever they think has the most power. Can we stop right there? When you're talking, so how long was, so it went to, it went from terms to just to life.

What do you mean? With Caesar, correct? Oh, okay. So yes. You went from, you have X amount, like today, what we have. You have, you know, eight years potential be a president. Right. And then Caesar comes along and it's just a lifetime.

That is what ends up happening. But the thing you have to understand is it's kind of... So first of all, the Roman Constitution wasn't written. It was an oral constitution. And every time things changed, they would alter how they did things, right? It was an oral constitution? It was an oral constitution. Now, there were certain...

How is that work? There's something called the 12 tables, which are kind of the basic laws of what the rich people couldn't do to the poor people. But it wasn't a written constitution. It was oral. They were very much based in tradition. So that's... this is the way we've always done things,

this is the way we're always gonna do things. And they would alter it when a crisis would come. And that's how you start to get some of these weird things happening. But Rome did not have a written constitution. Would it be, that seems like that would have been maybe a major reason for the downfall. Yes, no. I mean, if there's no written...

But it worked for 400 years, right? So it worked for 400 years, and it was only when you get someone like Gaius Marius saying, well, you know what? I know you're supposed to wait 10 years before you have a consul ship. I'm going to have seven of them. So it held pretty true for a long time until you get people that start deciding they're going to break those norms of the way we do things.

Because Romans were very based on tradition. Tradition was very, very important to them. And even political office, you couldn't just be consul if you wanted to be console. They had something called the courses of norm. And there was a list of political offices you would have to go through before you could actually be a consul.

And so because of that, people would be more seasoned, I guess, by the time they get that political position. But that also starts breaking down because Pompey the Great, the great conqueror of Rome, was a kind of sub-general under Sulla that we talked about earlier. And he ends up becoming consul

without holding any of the other political offices because Sulla just says you could be consul. So these norms start breaking down, but for a really long time, they held in place. So, yes, it wasn't written, but they were very much based in tradition of how we do things. You know, you have to be 35 years old before you can do this, 40 years old before you can do this. You can only be a senator once you've already been a console. So they held very strongly to tradition. It really did tie them.

But after those ties start to break, it becomes much, much easier to break them. So, and they even marked their years by who was in office that year. It wasn't like it's the year 2026. It was, this is the year of Caesar and Biblius. That's how they mark their years. That's going to change under Caesar because he's actually the one that creates the Julian calendar. Because Romans had this problem where their calendar was missing like 30 to 50 days. So every couple years, the seasons would get way off.

Like, their calendar would say it's summer when it's actually winter and they'd have all these kind of weird things. So Caesar creates the Julian calendar to try and fix the calendar. That's one of the reforms that Caesar does in his time as dictator. So after that, you are going to have people that are in office for life. And that's why when you have an emperor, if you have a bad emperor, you know, kind of buckle up because you're going to be in it for a very long time period until either he dies of natural causes

or somebody kills him. And that's where the Praetorian Guard, being the power behind the throne, becomes very important, because they can decide, okay, we don't like this guy, we're gonna kill him. And that's what happens. The first emperor for that to happen to is Caligula.

And Caligula, which, by the way, his father Germanicus was in the Roman army, and Caligula's name would have been Gaius Germanicus. But Caligula, the name, is actually a nickname. When his father was in the military, they dressed him up in a little military uniform. And the name Caligai is the name for Roman boots. So Caligula means booticants. So he's killed by the Praetorian Guard and his uncle Claudius is put in his place. So you do have kind of this, things aren't going so while the Praetorian Guard's going to take

out the guy in power. So with the Praetorian Guard, are they, where do they get their decision? making from. Are they of the people? So they are the pulse of the people, or are they strictly a shadow government? So they were originally the private bodyguard of the Emperor Augustus. And they just become the protector of emperors. They wouldn't have cared what the people thought they would have cared about being so close to the wheels of power. So for them, that's why they're looking at, well, this situation isn't going so well, this guy's crazy, I need to get rid of them. Because they're the only ones that determine that the current emperor king, whatever, ruler is crazy.

Now, it's not, they don't take into account the citizens of Rome. It's not that there is even a process. They're just looking at political positioning, right? It's not like, oh, things are going bad, Praetorian Guard's going to get rid of the emperor. It's just they're looking at it and they're saying, okay, this is bad for our future. We're going to take out this guy. And you do often have, like if you look at the second emperor Tiberius, he has his praetorian prefect, Sejanus, actually tries to replace Tiberius with himself. And Tiberius is a wild guy, by the way.

He lives on the, he leaves Rome, he lives on the island of Capri, and he has like a sex palace there. And he would have prepubescent poise swimming in his pool that he called his little fishes. And so he was abusing children. and they look at why Caracalla might have been so, or Caligula made it be so crazy, because he was living at Tiberius's palace. So he likely saw a lot of things as a kid, in addition to he later had some sort of a fever that they can't quite say what it is. But during this time period, Sejanus actually tries to position himself to be emperor. All decisions have to go through him, all laws have to go through him,

because Tiberius is off not even caring about ruling the country. he's off with his little fishes. So it's a very weird system in the way it operates. There's no like, this is where the emperor stops and this is where the Praetorian Guard begins. It's where can I get political positioning and where can I, I guess, set myself up to rule. How do you get into the, how do you say it?

The Praetorian Guard. Praetorian Guard. How do you get in there? You're selected by the emperor. How many of them are there? I don't know the number. You're selected by the emperor? It changes over the emperor.

changes over the years, so I don't know the exact number. But the Praetorian prefect would have been the most powerful of them. So each emperor picks the Pretorian Guard, and then they kill him? He's going to pick new ones, right? You would have that position kind of as your military position until you retired. But he might add new ones. The only time that they totally change is when... So this would be kind of like Supreme Court?

It's kind of like if the... Supreme Court. One's done. You get to pick another one, but you don't get to pick them out. But it's also like in terms of function, you could look at it as if the Supreme Court, the CIA, the FBI, and the Secret Service had a baby. You know, it's kind of like a... Sounds horrible. They did a lot of things. Like, you could look at them really as the power or the deep state behind the throne. Okay. Okay. And there are times when all of them are replaced. like, as I mentioned, Septimius Severus after the death of Didius Julienus, replaces all of them and puts his own men in there.

And he executes a bunch of them and takes others and just kicks them out of Rome. And in 311, when Constantine takes power, he's actually going to disband the Praetorian Guard. So that's the end of the guard. They had this stronghold called the Castro Praetoria, and it was kind of like their military stronghold. So they really do become almost like an empire of power within the empire. You know, have you read Romans and the Bible? Yeah.

In that, reading that, it sounds like you're reading what's happening today, too, I think. Well, in my opinion. I've made a lot of comparisons between what you're seeing happen with the FBI and what you're seeing happen with, I guess Trump, for example. You know, it's this people that have been there for a really long time. They've decided he's not going to do what he's going to do, and they're going to stop it. The Praetorian Guard would have been the same way. They have their own political leanings.

They have their own things they want done. And they're responsible for protecting the emperor. So they have the best opportunity to kill the emperor. Interesting. We talked about demographic and border pressure pretty much, my immigration. I mean, what are the people thinking of all of that? Did the people even matter at all in the Roman Empire? Like there's not a lot of history about the people.

And there's one of my favorite, like I like doing great courses. I don't know if you've ever done that before, but they're like lecture series you can get a hold of. And one of my favorite is by a guy named Dr. Gregory Aldreddy. And he talks about in Roman history, one of the biggest missing pieces that we have is what did the regular people do during their lives? Because for them, it was survival. They were worried about flooding. The Tiber River would flood every year. They were worried about disease.

They were worried about dying from random things. They were worried about being able to pay for things. They didn't really have time to care about those things. And as you get into the later empire, a lot of them would have never even seen an emperor, right? So their life is just so drastically different than those that have money or those that have political power. They're just worried about survival.

They lived in these giant apartment buildings that were called Insuli. and they were just these giant like tenement-type buildings. And when people think about going back to Rome, the thing that you wouldn't quite think of, that would be a big deal, is it would have smelled god-awful at all times. Yes, they had a sewer system,

but it only worked in people's houses that had the money for it to work. There were sewers in the street, so people would go to the bathroom in copper pots, and they were expected to go down their apartment building and throw it in the drain. But that's a lot of floors to go down. They would dump it in the streets. So if you've ever seen these imageries of people being carried around on these, they're

called litters, carried around the city, it's literally because they didn't want to step in urine and excrement because it would have just been everywhere. That's why the, if you've ever been to Pompeii, the curbs are like very high because the streets would have been filled with lots of urine and excrement and horse dung and all their sorts of things. Like San Francisco. Exactly, exactly like San Francisco. Centralization of power, emergency authority becomes permanent.

So that's a really important point, because as I mentioned earlier, Rome had an oral constitution. And when a crisis arose, they would alter it to handle the crisis. But the problem is, once you do that, you don't go back. And if you look at that with a lot of things we've experienced, the War on Terror or 9-11 or a lot of these different things that happen, the Patriot Act has dramatically changed our lives. We're not going back. Like, that exists. And there's a lot of these different things

that we've changed our society because of. You know, Rome was very similar in a lot of ways. You know, an emperor gives away citizenship because he needs to handle the treasury. Or Christians are being persecuted because they want to bring back the peace of the gods. So they're trying to handle whatever is there right now because they couldn't think in the future, right?

Because especially in the third century, these guys are living such a short period of time. they're thinking about what do I have to do to live? What do I have to do to survive? One of the last emperors to even rule 20 years is Severus Alexander, who dies in 238. That doesn't happen again until 284 because these guys are just, as I mentioned, 27 of them. Wow. At least. There's been some research that they found coins of other emperors. That's how you would know somebody who was emperors.

You can find coins that prove they existed. So you're not going to be. to have somebody rule again for 20 years until diocletian in 284. So these terms are so short, they're just thinking about survival. And that's when the empire starts to change dramatically. And we can see that now with each crisis altering how we operate, right? You look at even with a lot of the woke stuff that's happened, like the verbiage we used to use. We can't use anymore. That's what I was kind of getting at in the Bible is a lot of the woke stuff, a lot of the gender stuff, a lot of, that was all happening in Rome, correct? That was all happening in Rome.

Yeah. Like one of my favorite all-time movies is Tropic Thunder. You could never make that movie now. You couldn't because things have just changed so much. Like Robert Downey Jr.'s character is hilarious, but you could never do that now. But if you look at, especially in the third century, we mentioned Elagabalus. Like he's, there's even stories that he had his own genitalia removed because he wanted to be the other gender. So there's... All these things start to happen. things start to happen where, you know, gender becomes more fluid. Mores start to change and alter. Morals start to change. We start to do whatever we have to do with our money right now, right? If you're debasing currency, you're not thinking about what's going to happen 10 years from now. So a lot of these one-time crisis handlings become a future solution. You know, an emperor holding power by having a military behind him becomes the way things go after the crisis of the Third century. So if you don't have the right military, you're not going to be emperor. That's not how it worked early on. What were people putting their money in to save value? Did they realize it was

happening? Did they realize they had to have? Well, for regular people, there wouldn't have been much understanding. It's just, as I said, survival. For the rich, there was problems of them stealing public land for themselves and farming on it because there was nobody to really stop them. because Rome had a lot of public lands. So that's something you're going to see, but you're also going to see they're putting their beans more in political power, right? Because they don't know where the money's going,

but they're hoping that this next guy could be the guy that gives them something. So that's really what you're going to see in terms of, like, where people are putting their money because the money's changing so dramatically. It's 15,000 percent inflation by the 280s, which is insane. I don't know what percentage we're at now, But it's not good.

I know Thomas Massey wears that pin that shows the national debt just rolling over and over and over again. It's worth nothing. At this point it is. And the person that fixes it if they did isn't going to be very popular because we'd have to deal with what we've done. And I think that's the point you get to. Did they try to deal with it? They did in a couple of different ways. There's the unsuccessful way and there's the successful way.

So the crisis of the third century, as I mentioned, goes from 238 to 284. And that's where the empire breaks off in the east, breaks off in the west. You start to have more barbarians pushing in. And in the 270s, there's this emperor named Aurelian. And in five years, he puts the whole thing back together. He brings the east back. He brings the west back. And he puts the borders back where they are.

So the gratitude he gets is he's killed by his secretary. And then the next gentleman that they pick is an old, senile type person that doesn't not want to be emperor. He does not want the job. So they basically push him into being emperor because it starts to become a death sentence. By the time you get to 284, when Diocletian takes over, he's a military man. So he looks at how you run a country very different or a civilization very differently. And so he divides it up differently.

The word diocese, which is used by the church now, is the actual divisions that he created within the empire. Earlier and still at this point, they're going to have the larger sections which are provinces, but then he breaks them down into military sections called diocese. And he also puts the borders, he puts better control on the borders. So then he creates these two new positions. One is called a dukes, which is later going to become Duke in the Middle Ages, and the dukes is responsible for handling one of these dioceses militarily.

And then on the borders, he puts these guard post that are called cometes, run by someone called a comets, which is later going to become the word count. So he really starts to share up the borders in this way. But the other thing he does is he creates something called the Tetrarchy, which means rule by four. So he creates two senior emperors, including himself, and two junior emperors, because this empire is too big for one person is what he realizes. And he's still always the one that's the most senior, but now he has a colleague and he has two junior colleagues. And that's the thing they actually do to get to stabilize it. So the border stabilize, the civil wars start to stop, but what he does to fix other things doesn't really help. Like he does something called the edict of maximum prices, which is price controls. And you can see that in any society when you put in price controls that really doesn't work.

Because that fuels the black market we were talking about earlier even more. So you're going to see the black market start to get even more prevalent. Another thing he's going to do is he's going to dramatically increase taxes because the empire needs more money. Another thing he's going to do is he's going to start making it so it's less easy to have like social movement.

So if your father is a farmer, well, you're now a farmer. So he starts to lock social positions. So you can kind of see, and I've had some disagreements with medievalists about this, but you can start to see the beginnings of what becomes the Middle Ages, right, how some of these things start to function. We're not all the way there, but we start to get there. He also changes the way he's presented. He's the first one to wear a golden diadem, which is a crown.

And that's something that you're going to see after this point, all emperors wear. He also changes the kind of political class, and he greatly enlarges the political class and starts to have people that their jobs are just being professional politicians. It is their own job. Bureaucrats. He creates a massive bureaucracy. So now he's really started to build a court around himself. And he's actually going to move the power center from Rome to a city called Nicomedia in the east, which is closer to where he's from. He's from a city called Split, which is in Croatia.

So you're going to see Rome become less and less important. And actually by the late empire, the Western Emperor is actually going to be based in Ravenna, which is in the swamps and kind of northern Italy. So you really do see his reforms are an attempt to fix something. You can see what he's trying to do, but it doesn't actually fix anything long-term. And I think Constantine is really the better version of how you fix things.

The number one thing he does, as I mentioned, is monetary reform. He puts them on a gold standard, and that really does help the East. He also understands that people need to believe in something. Like, it is important to have people believing in something. And I think that's, he has this religious awakening, but I think that's also something he's considering, is that people need to have some cohesion. So Christianity is a big part of creating this cohesion of the Eastern Empire.

So if you look at that, that's how, you know, you can kind of do it the right way versus the wrong way. But there are different ways that were tried to restore the power. How did Constantine do that? How did he bring in Christianity? So it's kind of a gradual thing, but he has... How do you do that? How do you... I mean, so what was the...

What, everybody was worshipping the Roman gods and the ones that they brought in? And the ones that they brought in. And then they try to bring in Christianity. How did they do that? So Christianity is about somewhere between 2 and 5% of the empire at this point in time. So it's not like a big important thing. But by what he does, it makes it more important. I had mentioned earlier after the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he has this vision.

And he beats his, Ms. Maxentius, who's the guy he's fighting about who's going to be emperor. And after that, the first thing he starts to do is he starts to put more Christians in political positions. So that's going to start causing people to convert to Christianity for that. So it is initially, I guess, more of a political move, but at the same time, he had to believe something happened. You know what I mean? And it's often something that's cited that he believes that because of this spiritual awakening he had, he was able to be in his position. And I guess the thing you have to look at is it has to be something God-given or something spiritual for something that is such a minor thing to become such a major thing. You know what I mean?

It's how else does that happen? Well, I mean, introducing, I mean, I see, now I see how he did it, but I mean, this is, this is a tale as old as time. I mean, wars start because of religion and then he's imposing Christianity. on the Roman Empire. I was curious how it went because generally, no matter what religion you're pushing it doesn't. It seems that it went well because less than 100 years as a Christian empire.

Yeah. When was the Vatican introduced? That's way down the road. Oh, okay. So that's, you're looking towards the Church of St. John Lateran is one of the first, like, main Vatican churches that's built. That's like an early medieval church. Okay.

So we have this. The current St. Peter's, I think, isn't built until, it's like after Julius II or something like that, Pope Julius II. So we're looking at like the 15 or 1600s. Okay. So it's, and the medieval papist, like the early, so this time period is called late antiquity when you're trying to classify it. And, excuse me, the Pope during this point is really just another bishop, but he's the bishop

of Rome. The way that he ends up becoming more powerful is you have all these other different Christian beliefs and they're trying to agree like, what do we believe? And they start using the bishop of Rome to basically arbitrate between them. So that's how the papacy starts getting more power is people start looking to Rome to handle a lot of these other situations happening outside and kind of the provinces. With the immigration stuff, what's considered an immigrant in the Roman Empire. These are these lands they've conquered and then they're bringing the people in?

That's a very tough question. You're talking about readjusting borders and all this stuff. So, I mean, how are they readjusting borders? I wouldn't imagine they shrank. Yeah. Well, the furthest extent of the empire is in 117 under Trajan.

And they kind of changed their policy of conquest after that because Rome had grown by continually conquering new land and bringing in new people. And you'd have some... some that become slaves, some that are offered in to become, you know, more Roman in a way. So that's going to change in terms of, you know, how the empire starts to change, because the empire is not conquering anymore. It's just trying to put things together.

And in the 120s, Hadrian's going to build the wall in Britain to kind of keep the picks out and a lot of those people in Scotland. So that does change, number one, how wealth flows into Rome, because wealth would come in with conquest. But then as well, it's saying who is an immigrant is a very, very hard thing to do. Because if you look at it, Emperor Hadrian, well, he was born in Spain. Septimius Severus, he was born in North Africa, right? So it's like these lands that start to get annexed, well, people with political families are going to have a pathway where they could be emperor or be in the Roman legions or anything like that.

So saying what is an immigrant is actually very hard. I guess if you want to really say what is an immigrant like in the third century and so, it starts to be the people that don't want to be Roman, if that makes sense. Because those early ones are looking at it for what are the political positions I can achieve because there is a pathway for me, right? You look at somebody like Diocletian who's born in Croatia. Like he shouldn't have had a path to be emperor, but he did. or you look at someone like Maximinus Thrax.

He's from the Greek city of Thrace. So there was a pathway for these men to hold position, but they're not Roman, but they are Roman by citizenship, right? So I think saying what's an immigrant is a very difficult thing to say because Rome in a lot of ways is very cosmopolitan. But if you look in the third century, what starts to change is kind of how the military is set up and how the borders are set up,

because now you have people starting to live within the borders and the outskirts of the borders that are living in their Visigoth tribe or their Ostergoth tribe or whatever, they're not really integrating. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, does make sense. So it's kind of a, it's a hard question to answer

because a lot of people stop being Roman after a long time. You know what I mean? It starts incorporating other territories. Do you think that's part of, I mean, did they get greedy with conquering? and that's part of this whole thing and how they collapsed because if you're saying it was an immigration problem

and the immigrants are people that don't want to be Roman anymore but probably that means people that have been conquered that just do you know what I mean? No, I know what you mean. Once again, it's kind of a hard thing to answer because things change so much, right? So it's like if you look at early on, if they fought in the legions,

they could get citizenship. But then the legions need so many more men because these emperors are attacking each other. In the 160s, AD there's a plague called the Antonine Plague where 10% of the empire dies. They're not quite sure what it is. It might have been smallpox. It might have been something like it. So now you have a much more of a need for people. So there is just this also need for people along with this need for fighting men. So it becomes a much more, I guess a way to put it a much more mercenary culture, if that makes sense. So this brings me to another point. I mean, what was the reproduction rate?

Do we have any idea what the reproduction rate is? I mean, because we see a lot of countries, we're getting close, look at Europe, completely, totally different dynamic over there in the past decade than what it used to be. I mean, you see all these declining birth rates all around the world. and you see, you know, other demographics with rising birth rates. And a lot of people say that will be the downfall of China, of Europe, of the U.S. You know, I mean, so what was the reproduction rate back then? So if you look at kind of the early empire, and this is actually, there was a big to-do on X not long ago between Elon Musk and a guy named the Roman Helmet guy.

And they were going back and forth about reproduction. Because if you look at it, it's actually an early empire issue. One of the things that... What do you mean by that in early empire? One of the things Augustus is trying to handle is that rich Romans had stopped having children. So he starts enforcing laws on trying to help people have children. Basically, we'll give you money.

He starts enforcing marriage more. He's really trying to handle this problem. So towards the late republic, this is already a problem. And in the late republic, I forget the name of the historian offhand, but he's saying that Romans were more concerned about their fish ponds than about their actual running anything. So you do have a lot of this in the late Republic,

and that issue is just going to continue to get worse, that Romans aren't having as many children in terms of the rich classes. But you also have to look at as well, there was, I think the woman's name was Claudia, that she had 11 children. It was the mother of the Grockai brothers, that she had 11 children, and the two brothers were one of only three that survived.

So you also have to look at that, is birth rates are lower, but also there was a lot of danger to people not living to adulthood. So that's a major problem. So that's not really going to correct, and that becomes one of the reasons that they need to keep bringing in more people because you need to continue to repopulate.

And if you look at what we're seeing now, well, you know, people aren't having as many kids, especially in Europe. You look at what's happening in the UK right now. The UK is becoming less and less and less recognizable. Everywhere over there. And you go to... Don't even recognize it. Well, you go to Italy because you want to be in Italy.

Or you go to France because you want to be in France. And what happens is these countries are starting to lose their identity. Yep. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't come from a different country and be in a place, but that country should continue to have an identity or you start to lose a civilization. You've systematically completely, you've changed your culture.

Correct. It's just not... Well, culture is what holds us together, right? Culture is the glue that holds us together, and we don't have that. You've introduced so much of a different culture into your country that the new culture now overwhelmed,

the original culture. Yeah. And then everything completely changes. Well, and you don't have a glue holding together, and you don't have an ethos, right? You don't have something that you live by. And that starts to become a real problem. And in that point in time,

the only thing that matters is money and power. And when money doesn't exist anymore, well, you don't have a civilization anymore, right? Like, that's the point you get to towards the end of a decline. How did people start to lose trust in the institutions? I mean, the state survives, but the legitimacy does not. Is it... Well, because Rome couldn't care for them anymore.

I think that's the biggest thing. Like, you start to see, if you look at the last 100 years of the Western Roman Empire, after the 410 sack of Rome, the emperors really are men that are just held up by barbarian generals. So it's well known that the emperor isn't doing much to they care of them. The son of Emperor Theodosius in the late... fourth century, Honoreus, is more worried about his chickens that he's raising than his actual people. And that starts to become the problem you have where they couldn't care about the people

that they're supposed to be responsible for. And I think you see that a lot with our politicians now. They're more worried about, I guess, one part of this, protecting what they've done and they want us to know about it. The other part about it is they couldn't give to, you know, what's about us regular people because it doesn't affect them. And I think that's, you start to develop this separation, and that becomes a real problem because they're making decisions for regular people that they're never going to have to live with. And I think that's a major, major issue. Wow. Where do we go from here? Well, we've got to fix our currency. I think that's the bigger problem. If we don't fix currency, we are absolutely screwed. We really are. And I just don't know if we have

the ball is to do that. But that is the thing that has to happen. In terms of... I mean, how would we do that? I am not an economist, but... I mean, if we just talked about, you know, the Federal Reserve, which I actually knew that was... It sounds like a government organization. It's kind of like Federal Express, though. But it's not. Yeah.

People don't know that. And so how would you begin to fix it? Well, I think one part of it is... Other than paying off the national debt, which... Well, money has to mean something again. I think that's one part of it. And that's why, like, when I look at some of the things that Trump started to do, like, they think the tariffs was more of trying to get production back in America. Because if you look at it, we're just a service-based economy.

We don't really build anything. We don't really make anything. You look at the rust belt wasn't always the rust belt, but now it's hollowed out. So I think one is getting industry back here. Like, we need to produce things, make things, and that needs to exist. The other part of it is handling currency. Because if you handle currency, then you have the ability to fix a lot of your sins. But we'd have to base our money on something.

And I don't know, I don't trust cryptocurrency or some of those so much. I'm more of a precious metals type of person. So could you get back on gold? I don't know. We might be too far over our skis. But I think the other bigger part that doesn't get enough play is education. Like, we're turning out people that don't know how to do anything. And I think that is a huge problem that we're starting to suffer with now.

Because we have kids that have degrees, massive debt, and they don't exactly know how to do anything, right? I have a history degree. I got very lucky that somehow people cared about the Roman Empire, but it's not an actually very useful degree in the world. And there's a lot of people getting degrees they're not going to use. There's a major thing that's missing in the world. And if you look at the trades, they still have that. And that's the idea of apprenticeships. And apprenticeships before the kind of turn of the century,

meaning that the 1900s were a very big thing in a lot of different fields. And it serves a couple different purposes. The first to give you experience, and the second is to help you decide, do I want to do this? Right? Am I meant for this? But I think unless we handle education, we don't know people that know how to run this system, right?

If you look at when aqueducts fell apart, it wasn't because people didn't care about having water. They cared about having water. They lost the know-how to know what to do with them. And I think that's the biggest problem we're going to run into is this brain drain and this inability to do things. And everyone eats. Everyone's got to have a place to sleep.

But if they're not able to provide for themselves, it's not the government's job to provide for them. I do think we still make stuff. I think, and I could be totally off here, but I think about this all the time. And I do want manufacturing and all these things to come back. I think it's extremely important. But I do, I don't think that the narrative that we don't make anything is 100% true

because we are very good at tech, software, stuff like that. Sure. You know, and so, and then we sell this stuff to all these other countries. And so we are kind of, look at Silicon Valley. in California. Well, I'm looking more at like production and manufacturing. Like, you're 100% correct about tech. Yes.

And all I'm saying is that, you know, the world has evolved since then. Yeah. And so, yeah, while we're not. And I do want to be making all these, yeah, I want to be manufacturing. And yeah, I think that's important to come back. But I don't think it's necessarily fair to say we don't produce. Maybe we don't make anything. We don't, but we do produce things.

Yeah. We have, in my opinion. Well, no, I can agree to that because there are certain things we make, but we just, we don't really have manufacturing anymore. And for a lot of, like, a lot of small towns, like I grew up in a very small town, everybody worked in manufacturing. And the manufacturing isn't there anymore. Same here. So then what happens is, you know, the people aren't working as much. The drugs are coming in.

The places start degrading. So it's like that we either need a different way to look at things or we need to figure out how to bring manufacturing back in some ways because that is how a lot of people do provide for themselves. And that does make the economy stronger. Yeah. Because then we're not so reliant on Mexico where we get a lot of our automobiles from and a lot of other places. It's about autonomy, you know?

When the Romans were expanding the empire, were they going after strategic locations for resources and things like that? Or was it just... It was. It was. For example, as I mentioned, Rome had to feed a lot of people. The best place for growing grain was actually Egypt and Asia.

So that land, after Alexander the Great dies in 323 BC, his generals basically divide up his empire amongst themselves. The last remaining of those are the Ptolemy's, which is under one of his generals, Ptolemy. So the famous Cleopatra, or Cleopatra the seventh, is the final Ptolemaic ruler. And after her death, the Romans basically take over this area. And that becomes the breadbasket of the empire.

And what would happen is the Nile would flood every single year. And that Delta would become very rich. And it was a great place for growing grain and other things that could feed people. So they were looking at that. Or if you look at when Trajan conquered Dacia, he was conquering that because they were silver mines there. So they're looking at where can we bring in resources? Like, it's very strategic on places they're conquering. It's not just, hey, we want land.

It's what are places that are very strategic for us? Caesar was a little bit of, we just want land in glory. But when they are conquering, they're looking at what are these strategic resources we can have? The Punic Wars, Carthage was the biggest shipping power in the world at that point in time. And to have that area would make them much more powerful in shipping. So those are a lot of the things they're looking at

is how do we bring in, more resources to run this empire. Makes sense. Makes sense. What do we miss it in the Roman Empire that parallels what we're saying today? I think that's a big part of it, man. It's just if we can handle our currency, if we can fix our borders,

but politicians have to start carrying again. And I think that's a major problem. And I don't exactly know how we fix that because electoral politics has really become more of a, whose team are you on every four years. So I think that is a major problem because they don't care about fixing the other two. So I don't know how to fix that one, but that is a major problem. When did the empire realize that it had collapsed? That's really hard to say because if you go back again to that regular person living in there, he would have noticed that he's still paying taxes

because the kings of Italy after the Roman Empire would have been charging you taxes, would have been charging you tribute. They hadn't seen an emperor in years. So I think to them, it's hard to say when they stop realizing they're an emperor. It's just more of a fade away than an actual collapse. You know, one day you just realized the civilization you lived in isn't here anymore. It's hard to say when that is. And that's why, sure, 476 is an endpoint, but I don't know that people in that year would have felt any differently than they did in 400. When do you think we'll know when a president becomes a tyrant? That's a very good question.

I think it's hard to know, honestly. I think it's, you look at what happened in Germany in the 30s and 40s. You know, people didn't really know how bad it was until they didn't have the ability to say things that Hitler didn't like, or, you know, he starts closing Jewish businesses and rounding people up. So I think that's something you really have to watch for. But at the same time, I think it's hard to know until you're there. Like, it's not really something you can predict. Do you think we're witnessing the fall? I really hope not.

I like my country. I like living here. I just think that if we don't handle the economy soon at some point in time, it's going to end. Like, the petra dollar is propping us up. But if that changes, then things could change on a dime. And next thing you know, your loaf of bread is $100. Those are the things you really got to worry about. Yeah.

Man. Well, this was a fascinating conversation. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. Thank you. If you had three guests to recommend for the show, who would that be? Oof. Three guess. Well, there's one I definitely have in mind is Nick McKinley, and he's doing a lot to

protect kids online. There's another who's in protection, and he works. with a lot of like really well-known people named Caleb Gilbert. Hmm. Absolutely brilliant guy. I'm trying to think of who else would be a great. Give me another historian. Another historian.

I actually think he's not a historian, but he looks at cycles. He wrote the book, The Fourth Turning. I'm trying to remember what his name is. I'd have to look it up for you, but he wrote the book, The Fourth Turning. We'll look it up. And the guy is absolutely brilliant. He looks at economic cycles and how they change every 40- every 80 years, and it actually can predict what's coming next.

Oh, man. You've got to do that. That's awesome. Right on. Well, Jeremy, thank you. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. I hope to see again.

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