TRASHFUTURE - The Empire's New Clothes feat. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

TF Season Three continues as ancient history Patrick Wyman (@Patrick_Wyman) from the Tides of History podcast joins the gang to discuss what went exactly went wrong with the Roman Empire. Why did it collapse? What can we learn from this experience? Why were Roman death cults way cooler than our death cults? If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ 

Welcome back to this week's free episode of TrashFuture Season 3. Season 3. It's me, Riley. I'm here not in studio with Milo. Hello, it's me, your boy, Social Distancing. I am actually healthier than I've ever been. I'm eating like balanced meals because my mum's cooking and I'm like exercising every day.

This is wild. A pandemic has made me healthier. What the hell? What was wrong with my life before? We also have Alice in Quarantine Glasgow. Salute Omnice, looking forward to like using all of my useless classical education on this one. That's right.

Itawero. We also have Hussein calling in from a sunny southwest London. It is not sunny. Actually, no, it is kind of sunny. I just have my, I've had my blinds down. I haven't like opened any of my blinds since I quarantined two weeks ago. Yeah, exactly. You're doing the reverse.

You're doing the reverse of miasma theory of disease. We are also very excited to be joined by Patrick Wyman, who is the host of Tides of History podcast and who also hosted the Fall of Rome podcast, which is a self-contained series you can find. I heartily recommend both. You should pause this and check them both out now if you haven't. But Patrick, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you so much for having me.

So we decided to have Patrick, who's a specialist in late antiquity, and let's say the decline of what you'd consider the Roman Empire on for just coincidence, actually. We've had it. Yeah, we've had it. We've had it booked for like two years. It's totally a coincidence. But like we said, it are in the first episode of season three, trying to understand the ways in which, let's say the neoliberal order might be coming apart at the seams a little

bit when faced with any pressure that requires it to have slack in the system. Like we said, that's doing gravity lessons when we've already stepped off the ledge, learning from these previous imperial falls to try and understand what's going on in the moment of rupture. Yeah, it's a bit late. We're doing loony tune shit. We're walking off the cliff, but we're still going in a straight line until we look down. Yes, that's what we're doing.

This episode will be an hour of us just looking down before we start falling. I mean, like, do we have ACME painted anywhere just to like, just to make sure we're getting the brand integration? That's right. Matt Hancock running into a huge black circle painted on a cliff face. Even better, did we see Dominic Cummings doing his Roadrunner act out of the front door of Downing Street? So, yeah, it's...

He's sprinting out. I would find it very... Yeah, that's great. I would find that very funny if he was running out, but it was where completely unrelated coronavirus reason. Like, he has this massive backpack. You don't know what's inside the backpack, but it's like a completely unrelated thing. That's like...

Oh, no. I have to make this delivery. Right. He's actually like doing side hustles as a delivery guy. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. My postmates. I want to make Cummings just doing Death Stranding in real life.

All right. But before we get into talking about history, I want to talk a little bit about death cults because I think we may have identified a modern-day Mithridotic cult. Wait. I didn't know we were doing an episode about the Republican Party. The damn clowns in Congress. Yes. Finally, someone's going to speak truth to the clowns in Congress.

So what's happened is some Federalist morons and various Republican governors exemplified by Jesse Kelly, who's, I think, one of the Federalist idiots, said, if given the choice between dying because of going to work and catching coronavirus and plunging the country I love into a depression, I'd happily die. That's it. We have Fedayeen for the Dow Jones. They finally got their war. It's great.

We feel so grace about it. This is what it is. It's like it's American jihad, right? It's like... But it's like it's American jihad in the sense like the principle is the same, i.e. like you're sacrificing your body and your soul for God. In this case, like God is the stock market. God is like General Motors, Facebook and McDonald's.

And the thing about like Islamic jihad is that at least you kind of like the reward that comes out of it provides a decent incentive. You know, you get the 72 virgins and you get like the palace and everything. Whereas like in America, it's like, but jihad doesn't even pay off, right? You just like leave generational debt. Right. You get aspirational jihad. In American heaven, you get all the mountain g you can drink.

Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. I want to turn to Patrick and I want to I want to say how does this compare to Roman death cults? How does this compare to Roman death cults? This one is not as cool. I think that's fairly straightforward. Like it's not as it's not as interesting like dying for a blooming onion or like some mid-range boneless buffalo wings as it is to, you know, die for some sort of like really

like like there were some cool death cults and there was like the Romans did cool stuff with death. Like if nothing else, it was it could be mass entertainment, but like there's nothing fun or interesting about like drowning in fluid alone in a hospital room like or or like a parking garage or something, which is probably where we're headed. You subscribe to my only fans. We get it. That's not nearly as much fun as like getting eaten by a tiger for the like to the cheers

of a few hundred drunk Romans like this is not as interesting or as fun. We should do the thing that Alan Sugar believes Russia actually did of letting loose lions on the streets to encourage self-quarantine. Alan, Alan Sugar fucking rules. I love that guy. Like a guy invented like a big clunky landline phone you can send an email from in 2002 and then for some reason he was in the government for a while, because that's just Britain. But I also love the idea that's like in in in ancient Rome, like you kneel down and be

covered by the blood of a slaughtered bull as you were inducted into like the death cults in her circle. Here you just, yeah, you walk out the door and you say, I am not willing to sacrifice my treats. I will sacrifice my life before I sacrifice my treats. Dolce et decorum pro patrio Wendy's. Yeah, it's so important for me to to give the shnippers delivery guy a big wet kiss on the lips.

Yeah, look, like that in the United States, if you can't drown in ranch dressing, then you're not really living. Like that's the that is the point of living in the United States is that like you can get a tub of ranch or blue cheese or just like a literal gallon of soda and kill yourself. And that's like that, but that's the United States. Like if you can't do that, then you're not really alive. People but farm hands been drowning on this farm for many a long year, drowning in that they're a silo ranch dressing know what I cared before.

The the other the other the other thing I want to talk about. Yeah, because it's crazy that right like United States like has dropped nuclear bombs, obliterated like millions of lives caused untold misery everywhere just to keep this consumer economy going and now they're like I will die for the tater tot also when when faced with the prospect of people like getting support through this time when they can't go to work or they'll die in the UK where we don't have a president who's just being like well fuck it go back to work anyway see if you live it'll make you stronger builds character Douglas Carstwell the former leader of UKIP and noted fucking moron the proof

that Oxford doesn't make you smart said that any kind go to Oxford. Unfortunately, yes, even by Oxford standards, that one's a slip up. Shut the fuck up. Carstwell said oh a basic income for like freelancers and people off work was tried by the Romans in 123 BC and it specifically destroyed the Republic. Patrick, what do you think? Is why they continue to do it in the Empire? Yeah, I mean, I would say like on the grand list of things that destroyed the Roman Republic

on a scale from aristocratic self-interest and private armies to nailing Cicero's hands to the Senate door like the the the Anona was not like high up on the list. I mean, also, that's just one man's opinion. It's just one man's opinion. It's such a bad analogy for UBI because what it was was a corn. Like they just gave people corn. It's food stamps. That's what it is.

Yes. Yeah, it's not a universal basic income. Like the the Romans, like it's just like everything about that was dumb. Everything about it was it was a bad like attempt to shoehorn in what I assume is probably a God awful book. And so like I give him credit for trying at least, but wow, not good. Before we move on to the meat of this topic, though, right, I want to also want to reflect on something. All these people like who are promising to die for the economy or who are willing to like just torpedo millions of lives to like the the liberal job market stays exactly

as it was, which of course is eternally true. It's never been anything different. What the fuck are Jesse Kelly and Douglas Carstwell going to do by going to work that's going to save the economy? They're both professional simple things. They're both going to they're going to kiss the delivery guys. They're going to go into into work and like type out the same fucking article about how there's too many genders.

And actually, that's quite like Aligabilus. And then like all the time is great. Trouble with Heli Agabilus was he refused to pick one gender. If he'd have just picked one, he'd have all been fine. I mean, I mean, if they if they die in the last thing that they write is the same gender joke about identifying as an Apache helicopter, like that is technically martyrdom, right? So this is like that is your heart. I have like a Roman shithead being like, actually, I identify as a war chariot.

No, actually, I'm Spartacus. All right, all right, all right. All right, settle down, children. So I want to move to our main topic, which is the fall of Rome. What was it? What does it mean? How should we understand it in the context of what's going on now? And I guess I'll kick us off not with the correct view that we'll explain later,

but the commonly held and deeply wrong view, the one that we get from British historian Edward Gibbon, which is essentially that morally degenerate emperors spent too much time getting sucked off and doing cosmopolitan weird elitism and not doing good British, sorry, Roman values. His main culprit was a concept called decadence. Patrick, can you explain a little more of this theory? Okay, so in Gibbon's mind, decadence encompassed a few things. But yeah, I mean, I think the getting sucked off and doing weird cosmopolitan elitism thing was a big part of it.

In Gibbon's mind, persona, that was the adoption of Christianity was the big piece of evidence for that or the big manifestation of his concept of decadence and that Christianity in particular, in this kind of broader idea of decadence, decoupled the Romans from their traditional civic values and virtues and those in Gibbon's mind had underpinned the empire. They lost track with real America, with Main Street. Exactly. They lost touch with the Chili's and the Applebee's and at that point, the empire fell. All the guys who owned like horse-drawn jet ski dealerships were just absolutely furious with the emperor. The moderate Latifundia we thought would rally against Nero.

This is all wrapped up in the year 476, when the last sort of properly quote-unquote Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, is like the last of a series of pretty much bad leaders. But that's not just Gibbon's propaganda. Romulus Augustulus sounds deeply like a SoundCloud rapper. But that's not just Gibbon's propaganda about Britain because most historians tend to write to make an argument, or many historians, especially ones in 18th century Britain, were writing to make an argument about their present day. It's also even the product of Emperor Justinian's propaganda about reconquest. This idea that there was a dramatic fall because

of some bad leaders, it's just layers and layers of propaganda of people trying to make a point about their own time. Exactly. So the 476 date, as far as we can tell, actually comes initially from a source called the Chronicle of Marcelinus Comes, Marcelinus the Count, who was an official in the court of Justinian, late 520s, early 530s. He wrote a chronicle. It's an interesting chronicle, lots of good stuff in there. But this is the first time when we get to see the 476 date. But the whole point is that that comes out of Justinian's circle. It is quite literally propaganda, especially because there was still a guy claiming to be the Western emperor until 480, Julius Nepos. So the 476 date, if you're looking for that, isn't even a good one.

Romulus Augustulus is pretty unimportant. It matters a great deal if you're Justinian. 50 years later, trying to make a good argument as to why you should sweep back and reclaim the Western Empire. That's the context in which it makes sense. And I think the reason I'm talking about this now is that it's really important to compare this story and the sort of falseness of this story, the propagandistic nature, to all of the people who are saying that Trump is the problem of why we can't respond to this crisis. We have to go back to before the psychic trauma of 2016. Listen, I've had Jared write a chronicle. It's a beautiful chronicle. Really explains all the problems going on today. A lot

of very nasty problems that we're going to get to the bottom of. I love that is Trump getting Jared to write a chronicle about which of the decadent magazine editors have been very unfair to him. Very cool. But the idea is there is this idea. I think it's a fundamentally liberal one that we can just go back to normal if we remove the Trump or the Johnson or undo the Brexit and that without these things causing chaos everywhere, we would not be experiencing such difficulty in the face of a system testing pandemic. And it's like people who have been saying this, like maybe they were saying in 480 in Rome, man, I wish we could go back to the 212 Olympic Games opening ceremony put in by Karakala. That was the high point of our society. I just want to go back

then. Because that would require in Rome, acknowledging that by the year 212, which I think it had, the rot had already set in. You can't go back. These aren't short-term problems. They're long-term problems that just all become apparent at once. But have you considered Orange Man bad? So Patrick, I'm going to quote from your article here because from Mother Jones, which I thought was really excellent. The popular story version of this particular falling empire might focus on a twice-divorced serial Philandra and bullshit artist and make him the villain, rendering his downfall or ultimate triumph the climax of the narrative. But it's far more likely that the real meat of the issue will be found in a tax code full of sweetheart deals for the

ultra-wealthy, the slashed budgets of county public health offices, the lead-contaminated water supplies, probably literally for Rome, and that's to say nothing of the decades of pointless self-perpetuating and almost undiscussed imperial wars that will produce no victories but plenty of expenditures in blood and treasure and a great deal of justified ill will. So can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah, so this is basically an argument for deep, long-term structural processes being more important than these individuals like Trump and Boris Johnson. Like, it's not to say that they don't matter at all. Like, I think as we're seeing fairly clearly with regard to the pandemic, the responses of people at the top who are making decisions do

matter to some extent, but the context has already been set. The context has been set long before. It doesn't matter whether Donald Trump is in charge or Joe Biden or whoever. It doesn't change the fact that you don't have a functional system of public health in the United States. It doesn't change the fact that you don't have single-payer health care. It doesn't change the fact that when millions of people lose their jobs, as they would have under absolutely any circumstances, that those people were going to lose their health insurance in the face of a pandemic. It doesn't change any of that. It doesn't change the fact that county public health offices have been getting their budget slashed, especially for the last decade since the Great

Recession, but also for much longer than that. It doesn't change regional inequality. It doesn't change the decades and decades of growing inequality within society. Like, it doesn't change any of that. Like, all of those are the set conditions within which our feckless leaders are playing. This being the gravity, right? This is the materialism. Exactly. Yes. This is the materialist explanation. By the way, if you're listening at home, please imagine all of us standing just like one meter off of a ledge holding up all of this on a sign. This is the like the big road closed sign that we just like have bashed straight through.

Bridge out. But this is also the narrative of people like Sarah Kendezor, Andrew Adonis, and Edward Gibbon. It's that there is one particular short-term malin influence, and they're awful just cascades down and make society bad. So whether that's Nero or Romulus Augustulus or Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, it doesn't deal with the fact that even a good leader wouldn't have been prepared to face this crisis. They may have faced it a little bit better, but they would be using the same decayed set of tools to do it. I just love the idea that fucking Suetonius or whoever would just have been a poster,

would just have done the like, listen up, fuck knuckles, it's time for a thread. Suetonius is probably my favorite Roman historian, because he just includes like absolutely mental spurious details in every account that he gives. There's like no evidence for like when it's just a bit where he's like, well, you know, the thing about Tiberius was that he used to go swimming and then like make boys like nibble his nuts while they were swimming around. Well, like the thing is right. One of the things that I feel like we're learning from our present time is that like all of the stuff that we know deeply in our bones to be true is incredibly stupid. So I feel like in in 500 years time, even as little as that, we'll be like, and they thought

there was a tape of Trump like watching sex workers peeing on a bed. No, come on. It couldn't have been as venal or as stupid as that. I've just been reading the account of one jolliest morno of the famous Brexit debate in the Senate. Yeah, it's like that's I think one of the big lessons of history is that it is always that stupid. Like it's always that dumb. Like Martin Luther for like just to just to move us ahead about a thousand years, Martin Luther was obsessed with scatological humor. Like he just always made shit jokes 100 percent of the time. And every metaphor that came into his mind was one of was one of just like shit or some other equally like equally gross bodily function. That's just how he thought. But like we tend to write that out

of share the door of a church. Some of it will stick. So my exact. So Martin Luther would have been an anime guy in 2020. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm a Twitter guy who's just like has a bizarre knowledge of like animated anime titties. No, he'd be so gone of a card. I won't explain further. I want to I want to go back to something that you another thing you've written Patrick because I think we've we've thoroughly poo pooed the idea that because this great man theory of history that sort of comes up every once and again or the great man or awful man or individual. So the way you talk about the fall of Rome, I'm going to read from your article again. The idea of a fall is now passe and for for better and for worse. Scholars prefer to speak of a

transformation of the Roman world taking place over centuries or better still a long culturally distinct and important in its own right late antiquity spanning the Mediterranean world and beyond. If the Roman Empire ever did come to a real end, it was a long slow process spanning many lifetimes, hardly the stuff of dramatic narratives. And one of the things I think that you explain very well about this is how the event the fall of Rome in capitals and quotation marks would be experienced differently in like York versus Ravenna versus Provence like that the fall of Rome is not the same thing to these people just as the fraying of the American polity is not the same thing in California as it is in Kansas or in England as it is in Scotland

and so forth. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. I mean, whenever you have a any polity is going to include a diverse set of conditions, right? And that was true. That's very true of the United States right now. It's true. It's true of Britain. It's true of and it was true of the Roman Empire like the that whenever you have that much variation in terms of the density of urban populations, the military presence, what the economy looks like, how connected you are to kind of the core Mediterranean area, it's going to look and feel a lot different. It's going to look different if you're a soldier stationed on the frontier than if you're a sailor who's working out of Carthage. It's going to look different, which will look different still than if you're a wealthy aristocrat

at your summer house and at your summer house in the countryside. Like each of those is a different experience of of this and it's going to look different at different times too. Like it depends on whether you're talking about the year 400 or you're talking about 450 or 500 or 550. Like each of those different times and places is going to is going to experience this set of processes much differently. I think in our current context, that only really became clear to people with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump that like these these twin shocks that like if you're living in a rotted out industrial town, your like what you think 2016 looks like is very different than if you're living in a posh apartment in London or Los Angeles or New York.

Like your your thought of what the baseline state of the world is and therefore your experience of this person or people or message is going to look much different. It's going to feel much different and you're going to respond to it differently. Now I'm just imagining like Roman Libs having their brain melted by Donald Trump or his equivalent being elected and claiming that it was all Visigoth interference. One thing I did want to put to you Patrick and we kind of talked about this. We kind of preempted this by talking about Justinian is if you just talk about the fall of Rome as being this like long kind of very highly variable process, you kind of you can get the sense well why why do we have this idea of a capital F capital R fall of Rome? Why do we have

this idea of there being one thing that happened? And I think it's worth saying that like it's always been a useful a useful idea for all sorts of political purposes to be like Rome has fallen and like Romans themselves love this shit right. They love to be melodramatic and they love to say ah I have stubbed my toe this is the collapse of the empire and all of its values right. Oh yeah 100 percent. The Romans started talking about Roman decline before the before the republic had even gone away like they were like you know there's this there it was in it was a deeply Roman thing to compare your to compare yourself to your ancestors and find yourself wanting like that there was nothing more Roman than than thinking that your grandpa was

just a bad ass old shithead and that like and they say the elders whole vibe is just like everything is bad now past good. Exactly it's like it's the whole like the Romans were doing the pacification of America a long time before those articles appeared in the Federalist you know what I mean like that was so there's nothing more deeply Roman than that and yeah it was a useful idea it was a useful cudgel with which to beat the present day or or whomever with with the the the sense that there was something wrong that something had gone wrong and that it was fixable if only we did this and it that's the same reason it's useful now it the the same reason that people talk about the fall of the Roman Empire now is because it's a dramatic cudgel with which to beat

I'm loving the idea of Sulla just rolling his eyes at the woke starsy of the Brackeye in 753 BC honestly if the people if the people who went around seizing women from nearby states could see this but like I'm so glad that you said that because I wanted to include that a little bit of like self-criticism because it's not to say that like this is not a useful framework for exploring a lot of the things that have gone wrong right it's just that like that there is a certain element where we can say oh you're doing a podcast about the fall of Rome is is is not really a like that doesn't mean that we're talking about a thing that we can definitely say has now happened right it's we're doing politics here yeah yeah and like I would never like it's partially just

because I'm a miserable bastard to start with right and so like I'm drawn to I'm drawn to this kind of framework like I think it kind of fundamentally accords with the way that I understand the world and so like that's a framework that's always made sense to me I think I'm I think it's worth arguing about what it is and what you do with it the the biggest reason that I think it's worthwhile and this would be my this would be my basic defense of the framework of fall or end to use those kinds of terms instead of transformation or even just the long late antiquity is I think it's important for us to understand that things can come to an end I think the reason why the 90s were the high point of this transformation stuff was because at that point in the in the wake of

the end of the Soviet Union we're living in Francis Fukuyama's end of history does there was no real sense that anything could ever get worse that I think it's really bound up with this kind of implicit narrative of progress that that you know the moral arc of the universe has to bend toward justice and so the reason why I would go in the opposite direction this is not it's not solely to be contrarian it's because things can get worse people can die you can have pandemics and plagues the economy can fall apart political order can fall apart violence can increase like I think it's important for us to be able to just say that this is a possible range of outcomes it's not to say that things get worse for everybody you know what is better what

is worse if you're a peasant living in the late sixth century you're probably you're probably better off than you would have been living on some shithead roman landlords like a state life has not necessarily gotten worse for you but there may be half as many people so trade-offs you know what I mean we're kind of skipping ahead here because we do have some stuff about like the various possible outcomes of this but like yeah but I also like what I want to sort of go into that a little more right where we talk about well are you better or worse off so what I always keep thinking of in this case is when polities of a certain size collapse or rather they become unable to support the institutions that keep them running so for example like the money economy that was centered

in Rome kept Britain in fungible currency and made it possible to say be a specialist potter living in a market town or a trader living in a market town or a cleric of some kind and that the moment that the money that the roman state lost its ability to continue shipping coins to Britain Britain then became a less complex less specialized more diverse more sort of feudal society pretty quickly because those institutions from the center center of the polity were not able to continue to support that level of social complexity yeah and this is something that historians love to argue about what the end of Rome and Britain looked like and right now we're in a phase where like oh well was it really that extreme was there really that much migration

and their point is well taken like I understand that there were probably some that there were really worse some like long-term continuities between Rome and Britain and the Anglo-Saxon world that followed I get that but yes people did arrive there was a lot of migration we can tell this from a whole bunch of different sources migration is actually the simplest explanation for why you end up with the English language for why you end up with the kind of genetic patterns that you that you end up with in the in the English population um like well because back then you could say you were English whereas I mean it really just like I I mean I don't know like to some extent I'm just kind of like are you crazy like there were cities and then there weren't cities

like people were making wheel throne pottery and then they weren't people were building in stone and then they weren't like even if that's not a catastrophe you don't have to call that a catastrophe that's a pretty marked shift and it happens pretty dang fast like it happens within the course of a lifetime or a generation and a half like you could literally experience the end of the Roman economy as a thing where the state is continuously pumping money the state is a fiscal mechanism is continuously pumping money through the provinces you could experience the end of that the end of urban life and the arrival of a whole bunch of people who didn't used to live there within one lifetime that seems like uh that seems fairly marked to me yeah imagine that sounds

I love the idea of like a shithead Roman nationalist and I know these guys existed and I know there's like a surprisingly good analog to this of being like hmm the only mechanism of governance that we know how to do to expand the empire is to do war and then to create client states and then to destabilize those client states why now is there mass migration this is going to be the fall of Rome because of the migrants I wonder I wonder if there was like roman paul joseph watson I just remembered like remember remember like oh yeah imagine my shock a much smaller map on the wall well yeah I mean that's the like one of the things I tried to do when I was doing fall of Rome what seems like a many many many years ago now is that like especially the visigoths when

they crossed the danube and in 376 and it's like oh this is the end of the this is the beginning of the end of the roman empire they were refugees they cut a deal like they were going to do military service in return for being settled on land like that was they they held up there into the deal the romans didn't minimizing the roman empire is it I it's well it's like I read they were refugees I read somewhere perhaps in like a w.h. smith book um that there was a visigoth doctor that was like secretly converting like babies and that began that was like the beginning of the end of the roman empire I can't remember who it was like I got thick no go zone in my cities there's just a bunch of guys standing around wearing helmets with nose guards looking sinister yeah they're

they're wearing trousers it was a whole thing like trying to trick you to whispering mysterious gematic chants and shanty would it be it would be um gall would do gall would do a ban on the trouser yeah so I want to but I want to I want to refocus us on this idea going back to the idea of well we know that this the the the capacity of the polity whether that's conceived of as the roman empire or the imperial household or the roman state or whatever you want to call it the the reduction in capacity and that being down to tons and tons of small decisions all sort of being taken they're all the wrong one things getting underfunded payments not arriving it'd be a bribe being paid in lieu of taxes and

I think that we can see this kind of we can take gibbons idea of decadence right this idea that there are just bad people in charge and reframe it to be a structural force right we can say that the real problem is a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a shrinking elite whose interests weren't immoral and weird and foreign like gibbon thought they were so which as they were just disconnected from and frequently at odds with the interests of the polity it's not getting sucked off in the domesoria that makes you the bad person the bad person is having the domesoria in the first place uh it's not that you lose touch with like main street Rome or whatever it's it's that you have a fundamentally inimical or at the very least indifferent class interest

at work there right i love that we i love that we need to we need to reconnect government with your ordinary we are apia roman i love the idea that there was like a roman bill clinton just like getting getting sucked off in the emperor's office so uh patrick can you sort of speak to the problem of inequality and its root and its presence at the root of the decline of Rome should you want to call it that yeah so this is it there is no better parallel i think in terms of the sheer level of inequality and the sheer wealth concentrated in very few hands for the present day as the western roman empire where you had all of these old senatorial families these like incredibly inbred incredibly wealthy like effectively each of these families is a large multinational

corporation you know you have you have estates in north africa and you've got estates in italy and you've got estates in various parts of gall and you've got estates in spain and you're doing business on this insane scale and so the marriage of two members of two of these families is essentially a corporate merger on an enormous scale that is the closest parallel for the kind of wealth in private hands that we have in the present day i think um and why this matters is that yes their interests were incredibly disconnected from those of the state because the state was not drawing from from that group of people to serve as bureaucrats and military officers like the like the aristocrats were off doing their own thing um their thing was basically you know getting sucked

off in their in their enormous bill is um they like they were incredibly disconnected from the processes of doing power um and so when they got other offers or when they had the opportunity to disconnect from the power structures that were you know taxing them or making them do things that they thought were beneath them um they they took that like if a barbarian comes through and says okay i'm king of this place now you can pay me half of what you were paying them in taxes and i'll leave you alone like that's a deal that roman aristocrats took over and over and over and over again whenever they were presented with the opportunity to do it i wonder if they were that annoying that you have like fucking claudia metelli is on the view talking about her dad

yeah i mean they were definitely that annoying what damn like the the the the parallel i see there right between this sort of the political and economic elite just becoming having their interests just disconnected from the society who's who they went that they run uh is also like look at all of those senators who were briefed on coronavirus on january 24th and sold off a bunch of stock made millions of dollars and then blithely told the public nothing was going to go wrong it's called a free market there's um something i've been thinking about for a long time and i'm not entirely sure how to go with like where it leads but yes there i think there's it's not even just the ultra wealthy

it's that the wealthy wealthy i think are increasingly disconnected from their localities like i think we have much more of a kind of a i don't know if even cosmopolitan is the right word but it's like you know in my part of the world where i grew up um there were a lot of very wealthy like agricultural families like they were all into commercial agriculture but like they didn't increasingly they don't spend their money in the in the town where i grew up they spent their money in hawaii or palm springs or like arizona and so and where they would just go and hang out with other similarly rich people from elsewhere and that was what shaped their understanding of the world it had absolutely nothing to do with their employees or the place that they were from like

they thought of themselves as kind of like i don't know if cosmopolitan's the right word because they were not like we can do the alex jones thing globalist right because as a result of a process of globalization rather than meaning it with the like fucking brackets around the side of it listen i'm a cosmopolitan i've been to every cheesecake factory in the united states and to be clear when we say cosmopolitan or globalist we do not mean it with the alex with the parentheses like alex jones might no i am not touching the reverb dial yeah um so but that's the gender dial what we can think about there right is that is that like quite often the fall of an empire whether it's rome or america or whatever is portrayed as this big tragedy

and there's no big imperial tragedy to to rome or even ourselves it's it's simply that people like kelly lofler or julius nipos or richard branson or jeff bezos or elon crassus musk are never ever going to be able to donate enough ventilators or masks or grain to staunch the bleeding because the wound is one that they made and that they constantly remake by continuing to reproduce their own wealth and power yeah it's it's not it's not a moral issue it's not a question of vice and virtue the fact that a lot of these people are themselves deeply immoral uh it doesn't really enter into it right because it's it's a question of their class interest you can be a massive philanthropist and still have this this interest where you just like uh oh i just have the

amount that it would take to have several thousand ventilators just kind of chilling in my account and i'm not gonna do anything about it well that's how you start a civilization on mars by having that kind of amount of money in your bank account how else are you gonna go to mars and have your head explode i can tell or recall i i i love to remember the time when jeff bezos said that he talked about his money as his winnings which is very revealing but then he said that he couldn't think of anything more productive or anything else to do with it other than space exploration uh yeah that's great i love to think about that they're just practicing millionaire billionaire self care right it's the idea of well you could use like you know you could spend your life you

know devoting yourself to other people's needs but then you're neglecting yourself at the same time so if you really think about it blowing yourself up in space is more important than spending your money on ventilators space jihad what is what is gondom wing other than space jihad this is some memory tv shit that i predict will come true so that i mean that's how you end up with like all of these roman aristocrats in the fifth century building themselves ever larger and more opulent villas um while there while nobody is funding like defense against raiding barbarians what's the roman equivalent of space exploration what's the thing you can just throw money into a pit about and be like well couldn't think of anything else for this the church

i mean really like they just donated huge amounts of money to the they just donated huge amounts of money and and land and all sorts of valuables to the to the church which is why the church builds up and it's enough institutional foundation to survive the next several centuries right yeah yeah marcus agripper has built himself a large fortified camp in novizilandia so i mean what you're saying is that like churches basically kind of operate back then in the same way but like startups do now right um yeah they're more they're more durable like once you get a little further into the a little more durable um but once but yeah i mean they're like the church is one place where aristocrats would go to where aristocrats would go to make themselves feel

better about their money churches are like so her houses of of uh post but i i want to move on i want to move on quickly though uh which is that like we wanted to how we can talk about an actual example um again in both of roman roman the roman polity and today of the interest of the wealthy becoming becoming deeply at odds with the general interest of the polity which is basically the fact that like the romans they had steam power like they they they did knew about it they they even used it for like fripperies and desk toys and making church doors open so it looked like god was doing it but massive dependence on slaves from like wealthy established aristocrats and landowners basically forestalled steam power from ever becoming anything actually industrial right

i hear if you sit on your arm for like half an hour before you jack it it feels like god's doing it so uh patrick can you can you go into that a little bit yeah so basically the argument that that economists would make is that that and i think it's a fairly convincing one is that there's very little incentive for for that kind of innovation um you know just to use the most buzzwordy terms we can possibly think of like you're never going to get to the kind of continuous industrial growth um that we uh that we expect from our present from our present day circumstances if you have an enormous population of slaves and and also where you're expressing your social status as a member of the elite through your ownership right through your ownership of slaves and through

your ownership of property like what are you trying to get out there and and like perform growth for if um if you've got what you wanted and what you wanted is social status as reflected through your ownership i i'm so glad that we don't have an easy analog to something that prevents us from developing new technology because it's abundant and it allows and like an easy show of wealth i say as i sit my fucking Brent crude yeah i mean well like that's really exciting for a ceo to get buried with hundreds of delivery riders i mean we're not that far from that like just to bring it all the way back around to what we were talking about at the very very beginning uh yeah but i mean like that's one of the interesting and useful things is that like roman society and the ancient

world was not capitalist right like there there were capital it was not capitalism there were capitalists i think you can say i think you can look just about anywhere in history and find capitalists in terms of people who are using their money in the interest of generating profit for themselves um they who are who are investing who have an eye toward it toward growing their growing their resources those people exist but it's not the same thing as having a system that values and places that kind of investment and growth as the the set goal um if that makes any sort of sense at all yeah and like i think that's what i'm governing things yeah exactly like they didn't have the line that was only invented later what i think i think the point i'm trying

getting to here right is that a political economy keyed to the enrichment of the people in control of that political economy will tend to hold back on delivering improvements that deliver quality of life changing like inventions so like the robins the incentives in ancient rome were around status and so on was and the large amount of slaves and wars of conquest meant that the slave economy was durable and it was very difficult to develop things that were ultimately better for people's quality of life and it's the same thing it's the same thing in our case where we have this massive dependency on oil but like like shelled new that that global warming was going to destroy the world and by the way that's the thing that's still coming to destroy the world it hasn't stopped

it hasn't been replaced by another crisis but they deliberately sat on it and so you can you can see right like that the people controlling the energy work at shell just as the people could control the rome economy like they just not only were the in were there strong incentives for low level corruption and bad decision-making at a social level there were also no incentives to her improvements to happen when it was profitable for the people in control to not improve and that's why this podcast is this is why you have the question why do we have all of this abundance and why is it producing these perverse sort of useless googles instead of say I don't know ventilators what why is it giving me a smart salt shake or why is it giving me a fucking a van that

cooks the pizza in the back of it while it delivers it to me instead of health care and I'm just spitballing here but like what if we got people to be more scared of climate change by rebranding it something like uh Chinese warming like is it really a crisis if you can't identify it with a scary other exactly but so but like patry like like the late robert empirely it wasn't a poor place right no huh no there was they it was economically sophisticated the the material standard of living for a lot of people was higher than it had been in a very very long time or would be again um for another thousand-ish years like in terms of your access to consumer goods like you could get fancy-ass pottery you could get really good you could criticize the empire yet you're

writing that on a fancy pot curious exactly look at look at how nice your wax tablet is look at that papyrus yeah i mean in terms of materials pure material sophistication the variety of consumer goods you could acquire the amount of wealth and circulation in society state capacity yes the roman the late roman empire could do more than any state before or than any state before or after for a very very very long time your average person had access to goods from much further away than than they would before their per you know per capita GDP in the roman world was higher than it would be again for a very very long time but yeah it's a question of incentives who has the money what are they doing with it and what's the what's the point and the point was not to make the

life of your average um tenant farmer any better yeah and even then it's not even not to make the yet life the average tenant farmer any better but maybe that was cut out i don't know when the grack i didn't really go all the way but life you could even see why does the guy as grackers have to yell but even then it's once the you can no longer improve the lives the tenant farmer is fine but then it goes to gutting the capacity of the polity to do anything so patrick i want to go back to your article um the fall of an empire the end of a polity a socioeconomic order a dominant culture or the intertwined whole looks more like a series cascading series of minor individually unimportant failures than a dramatic ending that appears out of the blue

carts full of olive oil failing to arrive at some nameless forks of a dysfunctional military bureaucracy a corrupt official deciding to cook the books and claim taxes were not collected when they really weren't a greedy aristocat bribing the official instead of paying his bill an aqueduct falling to pieces and no one willing to front the funds to repair it a shared office space company that has somehow valued at forty seven billion dollars just so a japanese banking glomerate can avoid realizing any losses ah damn we laboro yeah i mean i think it'll be laborum righty don't try and don't try and latin me sorry patrick carry on this is such a such the fancy classics boy is an episode i think the big um that was the thing i realized like

several years into studying like the end of the roman world it was just these all these little things it's like you know you and you can see this happen like so i tracked in very great detail where letters were sent and what becomes very clear is that as the roman state falls apart like people's worlds get smaller like you can't send a letter as far there's a lot less kind of long distance communication and contact and that's reflected in the economic that's reflected in the economic picture too like goods just don't travel as far like everybody's world gets more local and it gets more smaller and i think that are more smaller jesus um it's just like and i think that's a reflection of the whole thing it's like a road falls apart and nobody repairs it you put up a

border where there wasn't a border before and now you can't now you can't go talk to your cousin um that's like small stuff but in the aggregate it matters a very very very great deal and like the fall like how a military establishment falls apart is the same deal and like there's that really uh really sad story of how the soldiers from um it's uh russia so like kind of what's now more like towards switzerland and austria like how the soldiers there sent somebody to go check on their pay and the barbarians killed the guy as he was going to look for it and then the province falls apart like that's the like that's the story like that's the story of the end of the roman empire it's not like the vizagos in rome pulling a statue down with ropes for like like you know

doing the doing statues of lenin at the end of the soviet union or sudam hussein in 2003 like that's not like the end of the empire is really sad kind of day to day stuff and i think it's the same thing now it's it's it's masks not showing up to a to a hospital fighting a pandemic it's you know the the president's son-in-law trying to do like capital d deals to get ventilators for cheaper and then nobody getting the ventilators like that's the that to me is the essence of the end of an empire or like how many bridges in the united states need to be replaced are literally falling apart or like poison or like uh building bridges in us politics we'd have to say yeah i mean it's like it's stuff like that like well the the the thing i i think about

right when it comes to this as well is the fact that in britain for like the last 10 years uh shortfalls in education funding have been such that teachers on sort of decreasing real-term salaries are having to go out and purchase school supplies for the students to continue teaching lessons yeah and so like they're that and that can tick over for a while but not forever but it's like it's interesting you said that because like patrick you mentioned uh the military aspect that's that's my vibe that's my deal um and like exactly the same thing you can fight a lot of wars you can win a lot of wars even you can if you want you can do the mithridastic wars and you can create this kind of giant middle eastern proxy that's very profitable and then

sucks in all of your establishments howdy arabia um but like eventually you start like there's a leak in that boat and it's gonna fucking build up over time and eventually you start losing in gemania you know um yeah yeah you well it's it's even like think about roads right like you can have uh you've got this enormous empire spanning series uh series of roadways right now maybe you've got like a bridge falls apart in your local neighborhood and the aristocrat is like i like that bridge i'm gonna go like i'll send my my ton of farmers down to fix it yeah yeah i'll go send them down to do that but that doesn't fix the next bridge over because maybe that aristocrat doesn't do it or maybe there isn't anybody there who decides it's a big enough deal that doesn't

fix the bridge 100 miles away that doesn't fix the road that washes away in a in a flash flood 300 miles away like that's the at some point you need to be like you need these large scale state level systems to work in order to maintain the whole um like and i think that that that's me is one of the big lessons is like even if on a local level like you see a barbarian kings would set up the occasional mile marker when they fixed a road or fixed a bridge or something and they'd be like look you know king king whatever of the of the burgundians fixed this road um but that doesn't do anything for the road that washed away 10 miles 10 miles away like this is this is why we're not anarchists i suppose and again we'll get into this i have a i have a thing later about

this yeah so but before we talk about leader we've had enough of roads here in sysalpine gall because it's all the roads that's been bringing people coming over here and that's why we need a border because you've got all these people from transalpine gall coming over here with their genders we don't want it so before we carry on till peering into the future there's one more passage from your article that i want to read patrick when the real issues come up healthy states the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction so like these roads washing away and stuff have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing towards their end but by the time the obvious glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear it's too

late the disaster whether it's a major crisis of political legitimacy the corona virus pandemic or the climate catastrophe doesn't so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was right that's an argument we didn't really break the internet she just showed how broken the internet already was we make an exception for the kardashians around here yes and i think like this this shows us right that there are some some polities are just weathering these crises differently and more effectively than others those that have decided to like policy kill those that have decided to systematically dig away at their own capacity to do anything for the purposes of line go up they're the ones that are are suffering most and the ones that

still have state capacity to respond to problems by just making solutions happen whether that's rebuilding a road rushed away by a flood or standing up a plague hospital in 10 days like they did in wuhan right like this means that different polities much like they did also and you know in ancient Rome as britain and provost and revena would have experienced the fall of room differently different polities are weathering the crisis of global neoliberalism differently and so when we can ask how this theory that these different polities weather the same crisis differently how does that auger for our future so glad we have the soundboard yeah well so i mean i think take denmark is a good example of this like denmark is not perfect

i think this is not a an endorsement of everything this the state of denmark has ever done or will do or is doing right now but look at how relatively straightforward it was for denmark to figure out how to how to keep people's people getting money and keep the economy relatively online during this pandemic right they're just like okay if you don't fire anybody you'll keep it we'll we'll send money to firms and you will keep getting paid right that only have the money from the muslim reeducation camps which we don't need yeah i mean like again not like not a not an endorsement of everything you just like skim it off of the top of the giant horde of like lucid refugee jewelry it's fine yeah exactly that's what that's where we start um but like that's a

that's a relative that's a simple straightforward viable solution to that particular problem right the that how are you going to keep people employed how are you going to bring your economy back online hopefully as soon as you don't have to be sheltering in place anymore that's how you do it that's not something that the united states is capable of doing um that is there we do not have the state capacity to handle that either there is not enough political will to do it it's a technical challenge that that the american bureaucracy cannot handle we have no way here of making that of even approaching that as an option for us to work with like that's that's a looted state can't do that i mean like how do you end up with you know a better than nothing but still

terrible corona like coronavirus relief bill because nobody like essentially nobody left in at the highest levels of american federal government has any idea how to legislate like we've just that is not a skill set that has been selected for over the past few decades like the people who are still left who know how to do that nobody's listening to them well especially i think that's true because it gets since the revolution of 1980 we reimagine government's main job as getting out of the way and so we we basically got out the party mechanisms chose a bunch of people who were brilliant at reducing the government's role in enabling the private markets everywhere they possibly could and so then you end up with something like sam brownback

who's creates like that's an urban dictionary ass name he was um it was a kansas or kentucky yeah kansas yeah kansas under sam brownback where he was like okay we're going to privatize literally everything we're not going to leave anything anything there but if you ask sam brownback or like any of the ben sass or whatever to actually do something rather than just undo something just the same thing with uh with the conservatives in power here you're asking ministers whose whole brief their whole career has been undo things undo the state it's fine you just you just let the market step in and the market will do it and the problem that you you've you've hollowed out the the state infrastructure that makes those

markets possible to the point where like you can't depend on like we talk about like the people's republic of walmart or whatever we talk about amazon amazon as as a political actor as as like a logistical actor is it has long been this kind of parasite on the u.s. postal service amongst others and for this like amazon is not going to fucking help you deliver ventilators for the same reason that during like the late roman empire you're not going to be able to keep up your business mining tin in his spania and selling it in fucking lebanon it just isn't possible anymore damn the patreon of its day truly it's so much of the so much of what used to be state capacity is now in private hands that's it reminds me a lot the situation that we're that we're edging

toward now of the later middle ages in the early modern period where states had to cut deals with non-state actors in order to perform state functions right like so to collect taxes in you know in the late 15th early 16th centuries if you're the if you're if you're the city of london and you need tax money you can't collect it yourself you have to cut deals with the guilds to get them to do the tax collecting for you um that's not just a very good deal with the guilds a fantastic deal honestly the rope makers the tailors they're going to be contacting connecting a lot of taxes and by that i mean a large amount yeah we got we got a lot from the mercers the mercers are doing great the the spices doing great things um yeah i mean i think there's yeah i mean i think there's just a

lot of like what we're realizing now as we're as we're in this situation is just how much of what was formerly state capacity is in private hands and how little you can make the how little you can force those private hands to do or how much or how little will there is to make those private hands do anything yeah we we get to my theory at this point because i developed a theory i developed a very very scientific historical theory about this about which way things can go from here about sort of which way western man uh and i i thought of the like you know the political compass where you have like authoritarian libertarian left right right i changed those axes to a very scientific good and bad and uh big policy and small policy right so depending on how things fracture um

because like as we've as we've talked about that there were like the roman empire diverse place and so you ended up with some places that remained very powerful and that's how you get the eastern roman empire so like it's entirely possible that you have a bad small policy is just like everything fractures and you work for the sports direct guys thief you work for like the guild of posters or whatever and and and their political power extends 50 meters down the road and then there's another guy who's exactly like that unfortunately mike ashley has been killed by the pathogens on an ill face of expedition and like i i think that's that's very possible uh also there is like i suppose possibly a good version of this which is like the people setting up mutual aid

networks uh which again will never be able to do state capacity stuff but we'll be able to maybe i don't know make sure that people in that 50 meter radius don't starve which is nice um whereas the big the big policies as they survive where we want to be the is the big question mark is the big policy good politics right um i don't know if that's possible i don't know what that looks like what i do know what looks like is big policy bad politics and that is california secedes is largely self-sufficient and you are bacillus gavin usum the 13th eunuchs eunuchs secretary you hate to see that that's bleak man yeah i know i know i'm i'm i'm fun at parties what i feel politics was really big black mirror

so i'm curious like how like and this is a question just for for everybody for the floor is how do we how do we feel what do we feel the potential like uh the fractures are in our society what do we think are potentially powerful actors in a in a world where like the the established order is not going to necessarily hold up do we think like china is going to remain cohesive i think probably do we what do we think about the u.s military or amazon or the e you or whatever else are we two groups of people who are going to be more dependent on the first is going to be the volunteer border guards um the home county's dads 100 like this is their moment um and i guess they they're like you know they're going to be like the modern day guilds right um and the second

are the incels who studied the blade when we were all going out to parties and now we're now we're seeking for help i love i love to like unite all of london under like the the warrior deliveru kings of wessex this guy is going around on moped's with fucking scimitar's i think that's a hilarious but b i think that like that that question does assume a lot of quite dramatic immediate collapse and right like i i think it's not necessarily i'm not saying that this is all gonna happen overnight i'm not saying you're gonna wake up tomorrow and be on mike ashley's farm i'm saying that like but like we talked about this happening within within like the scale of a lifetime do we think that we are going to be of old age in a world that still contains the united states of america

or a european union or a united kingdom so if you had asked me that question four years ago i would have laid i would have thought it was a possibility but i would have laid relatively long odds against that outcome as we look at it right now in 2020 that looks a lot more likely to me i mean the i just think there are so many fracture points and points of friction within the united states that like it's easy it's increasingly easy to foresee scenarios in which other levels of political organization either emerge or become more salient right so like imagine a hypothetical scenario here like where the trump administration says oh no we're we're gonna reopen everything we're gonna reopen everything and the governor of california and the governor of new york and the governor of

new jersey just tell him to go fuck himself which is the likeliest outcome there right so that's not an immediate thing because we're like oh trump's a joke maybe he loses in november whatever but in the long run you haven't you now have an established precedent for state governors just ignoring a federal directive right and so that's that's the scenario in which these things snowball and become increasingly salient and maybe you know you've already got the governors of the of um new york and new jersey and pennsylvania and connecticut all talking about how they're going to jointly deal with the corona virus like that's not that far to imagine how an ad hoc informal organization like that can become more formalized and represent an alternative form of political

organization um those are the kinds of scenarios that just look increasingly more likely and become increasingly more likely as you put society under pressure and states under pressure through a crisis like this i don't know wait does that make sense at all yeah absolutely and i the one the one thing i would say and as part of this like i'm not laying out my my bets here i just want to ask it as an open question and have the listener think about this i'm not making like a a 28-way parlay on this state's a season this thing doesn't or whatever food for that kind of listener yeah yeah but what i do want to i what i want to remind people of because i i always do the thing where we talk about where we talked about this stuff before the corona virus the thing i would say was we had maybe like 10

years of relative normalcy left to be distributed for climate change that's still true which is fun but also we're like maybe two weeks away from the peak of the corona virus deaths and i don't know how that's going to change masters and i want people to bear that in mind well i think people are already rationalizing it in a way is to like just uphold the current state of things it's like all the people being like and this is people who i didn't realize were like this lib like brain fucked but like all the people who are like are you know fucking bae rishi sunak and it's like he's a torii he's gonna keep doing that he is being forced to give you some shit that you want by this like world-ending circumstance and as soon as he cannot do that he will how the way i tend to

approach thinking about this kind of thing is by thinking about systems and how systems can respond and what options they have as systems to respond to challenges that are put in front of them so for example amazon is a system amazon is a system that depends on the united states postal service but also the governments of california and new york are also systems that depend on the fed producing money and for now mr child but so and so the question then is how long can the um say california new york repeat the governors who are probably going to tell trump to go fuck himself when he says to go back to work how long can they hold out when say they're not able to print their own money we actually had a comparable problem in europe uh with the euro eurozone crisis which was it was

threatening the stability of the system grace in italy and at greece in italy we're telling germany to fuck off and vice versa and you know you had this impossible trinity where they were experiencing macroeconomic shocks differently they weren't able to print their own money and yet that money was freely floating against other currencies they were in an impossible situation and austerity was the only way through that so a system placed under stress creates a norm of austerity to save itself so my question is california will just introduce elon muskbucks surely i tell you what though i'm feeling great about my one-day duolingo mandarin streak and so and so the systems of new york and california are going to be our go if they do ignore trump's order are going to be facing

another systemic challenge where they are going to very quickly right we always say where are you gonna pay for it we always say the fed print money fuck it money printer go burr but they can't make the money printer go burr no so they're going to be put into situation yes they're no but that alice that's what i'm getting to they're going to be put into a situation where they may have to make that kind of decision elon muskbucks yeah but so we're at but we're asking what the mechanism is that say leads the splintering of the us polity it is the it is the collision of um irreconcilably different forces that need to create a new system in order to both perpetuate themselves i i hope that when california starts like uh pressing coins they just do the same thing

that king offer didn't accidentally print the shahada on them right so i mean that's but anyway that's that's my two cents of how i see that california and printing the shahada on the coins i mean one option here that we haven't like that that i don't think we've fully appreciate enough is like okay so can you just keep the united states as some kind of currency union and keep the fed but ditch other federal government functions because wouldn't that be the easiest solution to this is like sure you've got a president but you just ignore him and like he's like a holy roman emperor exactly like the whole that's exactly the parallel i was going for is like everybody's just doing their thing and you've got this guy who's like gonna issue the odd proclamation but nobody

really pays attention it's just this weird inbred guy yeah yeah he's just he's got a jaw that extends out two feet um he can't he can't sire any children but you know he's there so he's from spain for some reason he hates mcdonald's just 24 hours a day yeah i i think one thing i would say is that like uh i keep coming back to this idea of claudia metelli as roman megan mccain talking about her father and i want to think about i want to like really fix in my mind the image of the roman pod save john's or the roman james ball or the roman bill crystal who is like no we don't have to change actually this is fine uh the save john's are a triumvirate of sorts i want to think about the guy who is like this this this world that we are

now i think inevitably leaving behind in some way or another had all of these virtues and better who identifies every single one of those virtues incorrectly i want to think about that guy because the thing about the roman empire was you could fucking get shnippers anytime you wanted right i know we posed a hard question to you patrick but can you think of that kind of roman version of our modern day doofus yes so there's a gallic aristocrat 100% like that oh no i have exactly the guy there was a gallic aristocrat named ruricius of limoche who wrote a bunch of letters and he managed to over the course of this this large surviving letter collection it's like 60 something letters managed to say absolutely nothing about the world he lived in um like about

the broader world that he lived in like he was just fundamentally unconcerned like he lived in what was then the visigothic kingdom um but if you're reading his letters you would never know really that anything has changed at all like this guy was just like he was doing he was doing his poetry and he was uh he was eventually the bishop but because he still had kids he was just the bishop because that's now the job that aristocrat that an aristocrat has in like this immediately post roman city like you would read this guy's letters and think that nothing important to change and be like oh you know things were things were pretty cool back then but things are pretty cool now we've still got blah blah blah blah blah blah that's the guy oh my god he's the kind of

person who like loves saturday night live clap backs about trap he's like he's like the that we could have had four years of kate mckinnon doing elizabeth warren impressions he's he's exactly charlie kirk charlie kirk like never go out of 2016 right i mean it's and it's like i kind of yeah i'm saying i'm imagining this guy more as someone who's saying yeah things would be great if only we could get that orange otowalker out of there but at the end of the day the existence of the for that guy the key point is that the existence of the orange otowalker doesn't do anything to him no right he's gonna be just fine yeah he's fun like those guys are fundamentally disconnected from any of the negative outcomes oh that makes me so angry i hope we have more of a french

revolution vibe where those guys absolutely are not fine and it drives them insane for the next 300 years i mean i just i love thinking about this doofus in gall who set up the emperor nero institute for fiscal stability there was a whole class of those dudes they kept writing letters like nothing had changed using the same god awful language that's almost impossible to translate making the same god awful jokes sending their their failsons to do the exact same thing like it's like clap backs exactly that no oh my god okay okay i was gonna say i've realized who this is visa like this is like roman julia heartley bro right we're like even though you're in the mix of a global pandemic the issue is still trans people or or it's the same thing all of their letters

actually end with an advertisement for a company that will come bring you a reclining couch and then they'll take it back after a hundred days exactly it and if you if you use amazing powders and ointments that will help the function of your animus if you if you use the promo if you use the promo code nep nepos then we'll give you 20 cisterces off if you buy on the eyes anyway so with with that with that under wraps and with now having thoroughly explored how neither the ancient roman world nor the current world orders really have the institutional options to deal with the existential threats they face towards the end of their time largely for reasons of their own doing i feel i feel a lot better yeah we all just start falling at this point

well welcome to gravity baby well feel its embrace it was the island better line history it's just one fucking thing after another sometimes very fast but patrick i want to thank you so much for coming on today this has been a blast thank you so much it has been an absolute pleasure it's been great we've got to have you back on yes absolutely love to anytime but for a silly maybe we'll like review a movie or something the 2004 masterpiece king arthur any interest yeah we should do that yeah that'd be dope hell yeah baby what about the king arthur from a couple of years ago with david becker minute for some reason oh my god i love that movie so much it was so stupid it was so stupid all right sold all right we're gonna okay thank you don't forget to

check out tides of history don't forget to check out our patreon in a couple of months we have patrick back on to watch the guy richie king arthur movie because we'll still be in quarantine i saw that on a date in russian if you just oh it wasn't a good day that story to be told in full then don't forget also you know what it is we have that patreon sign up for it for more of us and get a god damn t-shirt to wear in your house please buy a t-shirt we've not been mentioning it on the episodes but there are t-shirts by them email the address and you will have one yes you know you know what it is in the description yeah line must go up anyway the trash future line must continue to go up whatever happens to the other lines in this case the line is just

like cleanliness of milo's mum's hallway remove the t-shirts from the hallway anyway okay uh thank you all for listening thank you again patrick our theme song is here we go by jin sang catch it on spotify you've got time you have no excuse not to listen to it and we'll see you on the patreon on thursday or see you back on the free feed next tuesday later