Jeremy Slate – 3 Things That Happened in 1913 That Changed the World (Transcript)

I was watching the Rogan-Mike Benz thing this morning.

SHAWN RYAN: How was that?

JEREMY SLATE: 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 working for one country, but several countries. It’s interesting.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. He was talking about how Epstein was saying that 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 — you know, Reagan was an actor.

Rome’s Pattern: Military Loyalty and Monetary Collapse

JEREMY SLATE: I mean, but that goes back to Rome, right? Because if you look at it, what would happen is in the late empire, the guys that became emperor were 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 the military would become more loyal to that emperor because he’s the money guy. And that process continues again and again and again until the money’s worth nothing, man.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, that actually sounds better than what we do, because we don’t pay our warriors anything. We just — especially the VA — we just pay everybody else’s warriors that we fought, like the Taliban. We’re paying those guys $87 million a week.

JEREMY SLATE: Is that the number?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s the number.

JEREMY SLATE: That’s insane.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s the number — 40 to $87 million a week. But yeah, I wanted to talk to somebody who can relate the collapse of the Roman Empire to what we’re seeing today. And everybody has these little nuggets.

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: But it’s not enough for a full-blown conversation.

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah, I’m kind of weird because if you ask me about literature, I don’t know a ton about it. I know the history and the patterns. So I can connect all those things. I know a little bit about stoicism — enough to talk about it — but I’m not an expert in it. I get Roman history and how it all works together.

Rome, Jesus, and the Rise of Christianity

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, right on. Well, I’ve got a hot question here for you. The Roman Empire existed during the time of 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?

JEREMY SLATE: So I don’t think they did initially, because during the time of Jesus, they couldn’t tell the difference between Christianity and Judaism. They thought it was kind of a sect of Judaism, and it was a small percentage of the actual empire — you’re looking at 1% or less during the time of Christ.

There’s really only one Roman historian that actually even writes about Christ. His name is Titus Flavius Josephus. He was a Jewish historian who, when Palestine and that area was conquered, came to live in Rome and worked for the emperor.

And if you read the letters of the emperors — I’m trying to remember which one it is, it might be Vespasian — he’s writing to one of the governors and trying to explain Christianity to him. And he just doesn’t understand it. He’s like, “Wait, they eat the body of someone?” I think it was Pliny the Younger writing to Vespasian. And he’s like, “Well, what do we do with these guys?” And the response was, “Just leave them alone.” Because for the most part, unless you were causing upheaval, Rome was very permissive. That’s because they brought in gods from all the other empires and territories they conquered.

SHAWN RYAN: They brought in gods from all the other empires. Correct.

JEREMY SLATE: So you could live in Rome and worship Isis, which is an Egyptian god, 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 annexed. So it became very popular to do that.

SHAWN RYAN: Now, when you say borrowed, do you mean accepted? Basically, it was freedom of religion?

The Peace of the Gods and the Persecution of Christians

JEREMY SLATE: It was yes and no. Because the Romans believed in this thing called the “peace of the gods.” When things were going well, it meant they’d achieved the peace of the gods. So when things weren’t going well, that’s when you’d have persecutions of Christians and other groups.

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 what he does is persecute Christians, because he has to blame it on someone.

And then moving further down the road, around 250 or 251, there’s an emperor named Decius. They’re experiencing climate change and don’t quite know what to do about it. One of the things that allowed the Roman Empire to rise is something called the Roman Climate Optimum. It means that from 200 BC to about 200 AD, they had perfect weather, so they could grow food in areas where you couldn’t today. And as the climate starts changing, as they start having difficulty with their borders, with money and things — in the mid-third century, Decius makes a law that everyone has to sacrifice to the Roman gods, because it will restore the peace of the gods. And when Christians refuse to do that, a huge persecution of Christians happens.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what triggered it.

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So they were open to it.

JEREMY SLATE: Unless things weren’t going well, then they needed somebody to blame. So then Diocletian is going to do that again around 300 AD — persecuting Christians because he’s trying to restore the peace of the gods. But anytime things weren’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.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JEREMY SLATE: Because Romans couldn’t see a difference between political life and religious life. To them, it was the same thing.

The Roman Empire and Its Patterns

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. Do you think the Roman Empire unintentionally, wildly spread Christianity by suppressing it?

JEREMY SLATE: 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 chi and the ro, which are 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 A.D. he’s going to take Christianity. And though Romans hadn’t gone 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.

SHAWN RYAN: A lot of people are saying, and I tend to believe it, that the more the government removes God from our culture, from our schools, from discussions, from government, from everything — it seems like they’re trying to get him to disappear. Did the Roman Empire do that too? Now you have all this other s, all these perversions, perverted s that’s happening.

JEREMY SLATE: That was actually the second and third century for Romans. When things aren’t going well, you have a lot of the perversion and things like that. There’s an emperor in the early 220s, he’s a teenager and his name’s Elagabalus. And he’s the priest of a cult called Elagaba, 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 in 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. 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 is actually dragged through the streets. But if you look at things, they actually improve spiritually 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, 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’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 mints 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 had been created when it was a pagan empire, so spirituality alone couldn’t really fix that. The kind of levers of power were broken.

The Punic Wars: Are the U.S. and China Rome and Carthage?

SHAWN RYAN: I got a Patreon account — a subscription account — and the members have been with me here since the beginning. To be honest with you, they’re the reason I get to sit down here with you today, so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is Chad Postion: “My favorite story is that of Scipio Africanus. Do you think the US and China are a parallel of Scipio and Hannibal? If so, who are we and how do we use that to our advantage?”

JEREMY SLATE: That’s a really difficult question because he’s talking about the Punic Wars, which are in the late Republic, and there are three of them over about a 150-year period. I don’t know if I would completely make that comparison. Well, I guess maybe you could, because if you look at one of the things that the Punic Wars do, they start to heavily — Rome had always been a very military society, but it starts to become heavily militarized in that time period.

I think it’s hard to say who is who, but I think we lean more towards being Romans. Because if you look at it, 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. 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.

If you look at a lot of what’s happening with US and China relations right now, a lot of policy is made because of what’s happening between the two countries. And even more in the last couple of years, it’s also been the US and Russia. 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 Wars were for Rome. It changed from more of a citizen soldiery to becoming more of a standing private army. And people stopped having real allegiance to Rome and more to their commander. 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 in, where people aren’t as loyal to the group they’re part of, but more loyal to a person.

So I think that’s a pattern that repeats. But I think it’s hard to say definitively, is the U.S. Rome in this case and is China Carthage?

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Makes sense. All right, one last thing.

JEREMY SLATE: Yes, sir.

SHAWN RYAN: Everybody gets a gift. There you go. Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears. Made in the USA, legal in all 50 states.

JEREMY SLATE: Thank you, sir.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re welcome. You ready to kick it off?

JEREMY SLATE: Let’s do it, man.

SHAWN RYAN: All right, here we go.

JEREMY SLATE: So I actually have something for you too.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, perfect.

JEREMY SLATE: So this is actually — I have a coin supplier I work with, Kinser Coins, by my friend Dean Kinser, 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 die to hammer them. And when you have the bleed over on the edge, it means they made a lot of coins that year, so they’re not as sharp.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JEREMY SLATE: So that is a mid-third century coin. This is Constantius II, who is the son of Constantine, so that would have been mid-4th century. And this is a City of Rome coin, which is a coin that Constantine minted to basically solidify his power — it served a propaganda purpose too. And this is two different half coins, first century coins from Augustus and his top general Agrippa.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, this is cool. Thank you.

JEREMY SLATE: Yes, sir. Thank you. It’s always nice to hold a piece of history, and you have a lot of it here too.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, look, these are going to look great here in the studio. I’ll probably get them framed, hang them up. Thank you.

JEREMY SLATE: Oh, you got it, man.

Why Rome Still Matters Today

SHAWN RYAN: Very, very kind. Thank you. So why does Rome still matter, in your opinion, for today?

JEREMY SLATE: 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, 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 in 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 are three things that tend to happen most often, in different ways. The first is they don’t handle their money well. 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 store. And by the time you got to the store, there wasn’t enough money in the wheelbarrow to buy the bread.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JEREMY SLATE: Inflation is something I think a lot of people 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.

The second thing is immigration and poor border control. Because if you’re not handling your country, your empire, your civilization, and there are a lot of people that don’t define themselves by that civilization — that’s not to say you have to be the most 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 are places the cops won’t even go in 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 what’s happening right now and how they’re going to handle the next election cycle. And when you start doing that, you’re creating future time bombs for your civilization.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s all happening right here, right now.

JEREMY SLATE: 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.

SHAWN RYAN: How long was the Roman Empire? What was the run?

The Accuracy of Roman History

JEREMY SLATE: 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.

It comes to be the last king of Rome — Tarquin the Proud — who is the most hated. His son is in the military, and he likes that man’s wife. And because she’s supposed to be the most upright and most chaste woman, 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. 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 family 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 was by having money and possessions and things like that. They voted, yes, but not as individuals — in what are called voting centuries. 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 what, who was going to hold a political position. If you didn’t have money or you weren’t literate, you didn’t have the ability to do a lot.

So that goes until 31 BC, and then from 31 to 476 is the empire. In the east, we end up calling it the Byzantine Empire, but they wouldn’t have called themselves that — they would have called themselves Romans. That goes until 1453. So it’s basically an almost 2,000-year history of what the Roman Empire was.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow. And we’re at 250 years.

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah. I think that’s something to consider. When I was studying in England — I studied at New College Oxford for a bit — if you look at a lot of the buildings there and just how old they are, our oldest buildings aren’t as old as their newest buildings. American society isn’t that old.

SHAWN RYAN: 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 history repeats itself. But like you say, it rhymes. And I think we see that.

JEREMY SLATE: It was actually Mark Twain that coined that phrase, so I can’t take credit for that.

SHAWN RYAN: One question I have just from diving into our own history —

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: How accurate do you think history of 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 f*ing happened. And a lot of this is to protect the institution. You think about it — I’ve just dove into a couple of institutions, and there’s got to be close to a thousand institutions in this country.

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Whether it’s churches, government, whatever it is. And just in the SEAL Teams, there’s a lot of recorded history that is just a flat-out lie. And so it’s like, well, if the SEAL Teams did it, then this did it and this did it and this did it. Every institution is doing this, and 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 lying and manipulating history, and 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.

JEREMY SLATE: And that’s a pattern that doesn’t change, because it goes back to who’s in power. And it goes back to who’s literate. If you look at Rome, less than 10% of their society was literate. 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 history you’re getting. And you can look at that in any society.

My degree is actually in the propaganda of the first emperor, Augustus, because he had to 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 start commissioning works of literature. The Aeneid is written during his time. The famous Roman historian Livy writes his Roman histories during that time. There’s a poet named Ovid who wrote what’s called erotic poetry, which Augustus didn’t like because he was very naturally conservative — so Ovid is kicked out of Rome. A lot of those things were very manicured in that way.

So the history you’re getting is often going to reflect the power structure it’s written in, because you don’t want to upset the people in power. You don’t want to upset the emperor. You want it to describe things in a way that gives people a certain vision. And it’s that way in the Republic too — you want to show the republic as something powerful that honors tradition. And if things don’t honor that, well, you’re not going to write about them.

The 476 fall date of Rome is also something that’s heavily debated. As I said, in the east, the emperor Justinian, in the late sixth and early seventh century, decides he wants to reconstitute the Roman Empire. The west had fallen into barbarian kingdoms for some period of time. So what he ends up doing is, by force, under a general named Belisarius, trying to reconquer the Western Roman Empire — and a lot of it is destroyed during this period.

So a lot of the writing you’re getting that says Rome fell in 476 is going to come from the east, because Justinian’s going to look bad if it says he burned down the empire to reunite it. You have to look at the power structure that dictates the literature you’re getting. Very often, you’re not going to write things that make the group in power look bad.

How Much Can We Trust Ancient Sources?

SHAWN RYAN: And so how much confidence do you have in Roman history?

JEREMY SLATE: Enough that we can understand what happened to a degree. And that’s the thing about ancient history — when you look at American history, we know for the most part exactly what happened during that time because we have a lot of primary sources. We’re going to still have the narratives of what people want to say, but we know a lot more about it because it’s more recent.

Ancient history has a lot of sources missing. Part of it is just that they’re writing on papyrus and things similar to that, which don’t last as long. And part of it is that things are going to be destroyed. The Library of Alexandria is burned, I think, three times — one time under Caesar. So there’s just not enough work surviving.

You’ll get a lot of theories around ancient history, and historians will say they’re very correct, while another historian will have a completely different theory and also be very correct — because we just don’t have as much data as we’d like to actually know what happened. So we can surmise, we have some primary sources, but you also have to understand where your primary source is coming from, whose opinion it reflects, and who they support.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. How much contradiction have you seen between people who have recorded it?

JEREMY SLATE: You have to look at the time periods when people are writing. If you look at a historian writing during the life of Nero, he’s going to talk great about Nero because he’s the emperor. But then after Nero dies, the things written about him are terrible. So very often, when people feel safe, they’ll say what they really think. But when they don’t feel safe because that person is in power, they’re going to be a bit sycophantic and talk about the emperor in glowing terms. You see this with bad emperors like Caligula, Caracalla, and Nero. The history you’re getting has to make the person in power look good, or your life is kind of in peril.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense, man. It’s like scary s* to think about — everything we think we know, maybe…

JEREMY SLATE: Well, in a lot of ways we don’t. In a lot of ways we don’t know s*. Plato has what’s called the Allegory of the Cave. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this.

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JEREMY SLATE: So the Allegory of the Cave is this: there are people who live their entire lives in a cave, and the only thing they know about life are the shadows they see on the walls. When they come outside, they can actually see what’s happening and what’s occurring. But their whole life has been defined by those shadows. A lot of what we get in history, in media, and in opinion out there is just shadows. We don’t always have the full background, man.

The Pyramids and the Limits of What We Know

SHAWN RYAN: I was just watching two of my friends have a podcast last night — AJ Gentile from the Why Files and Tucker Carlson — and they were talking about the pyramids.

JEREMY SLATE: Oh, I listened to that one.

SHAWN RYAN: You listened to it?

JEREMY SLATE: I did. It was really good.

SHAWN RYAN: And I’ve been hell-bent on this history thing because I haven’t even released this interview yet. But I interviewed this guy and it was all about recent Global War on Terrorism lies. And so that really got me thinking about what I was just saying — like, man, if it’s just this one institution… All these things you look at around Egypt —

JEREMY SLATE: The things we don’t know, and the things that have been altered because of the opinions and the things that

SHAWN RYAN: they taught us that are complete bullshit. I remember looking at pictures of slaves picking up these huge blocks with sticks in my history books.

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And I’m like, holy s. Like, this is just fing garbage.

JEREMY SLATE: Well, it might not even be logistically possible.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JEREMY SLATE: They didn’t have the technology to do it.

SHAWN RYAN: And then I just found out — did you know they’ve never found a mummy in the pyramids?

JEREMY SLATE: I heard that in that episode. I did not know that until I heard it.

SHAWN RYAN: Me neither. And so it’s just like, holy —

JEREMY SLATE: Because he was saying maybe they came from an earlier civilization or something. He’s making the claim that

SHAWN RYAN: a lot of this stuff 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.

The Slow Collapse of Rome

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah. So when you look at that, when you’re living through something a lot of times — 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 downslides. You just kind of alter your daily life just enough to get by.

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 cost. 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 it’s 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 postscript 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.

I think it’s really important to understand — like the American Revolution — 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. It’s decades, not just something that happens suddenly.

I think people watch a lot of movies and they have this idea that there are 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. And so how long was the process for Rome?

Edward Gibbon and the Decline of the Roman Empire

JEREMY SLATE: So the most famous work on the Roman Empire is Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It’s written in 1776 in seven volumes. So it’s like really great as a doorstop if you want something to hold your door open.

But you have to understand Gibbon’s world — that’s 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. 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.

The Five Good Emperors and the Turning Point

And when you look at that though, the thing I think he is right about — and that I do agree with wholeheartedly — is that 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 them 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 — in 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 Romana, or the Roman Peace.

The thing that Aurelius does differently — 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 Commodus. And he knows, though he’s worked with Commodus, he’s still 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 Commodus 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,” that basically it’s starting to disintegrate. So it’s like a 300 year downslide. But it is a real process you can look at, because the next emperor after Commodus really changes the way the Empire functions.

SHAWN RYAN: Commodus.

JEREMY SLATE: Commodus dies in 192.

SHAWN RYAN: And so it started with Marcus Aurelius.

JEREMY SLATE: Well, Marcus Aurelius was seen as a good Emperor. His son Commodus, who he names to be the next Emperor, is seen to not be such a great Emperor.

SHAWN RYAN: So that was the spark.

The Year of Five Emperors and the Praetorian Guard

JEREMY SLATE: It was the spark. And Commodus 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 Pertinax. 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 to be the next Emperor?”

SHAWN RYAN: Who’s they?

JEREMY SLATE: 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. If they weren’t happy, they might kill the emperor. And this happens on a number of occasions.

SHAWN RYAN: So was this like a shadow government?

JEREMY SLATE: It’s like a shadow government in a lot of ways.

SHAWN RYAN: Did the citizens know about it?

JEREMY SLATE: 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.

Septimius Severus and the Seeds of Inflation

So in this Year of Five Emperors, you have Pertinax being the first to buy the empire, then there’s another named Didius 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 — 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 are other things fueling inflation, but that’s one of the key things. 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 the pay. So by the time you get to 284 AD, they’re at 15,000% inflation. Their silver coin that was 95% pure in the first century — those coins I gave you that are bronze — they’re 5% pure by the late 270s. So the money is worth almost nothing.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy sh.

JEREMY SLATE: So his death opens the door to this new pattern of how emperors are made. Now he’s not the first of what are called the Barracks Emperors — it’s going to be a guy named Maximinus Thrax. But Barracks Emperors, meaning military barracks — these are basically guys that 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.

SHAWN RYAN: So that’s a bad thing.

JEREMY SLATE: That’s a bad thing, man.

SHAWN RYAN: I would think it’s a good thing.

JEREMY SLATE: Well, what ends up happening is power starts to centralize more and more and more.

SHAWN RYAN: Let me tell you why I think it would be a good thing, in my opinion. I’ve always thought this — I thought it would be good to have somebody that’s fought for the country, running the country.

JEREMY SLATE: I don’t disagree with you.

SHAWN RYAN: Now you get these scumbags that just show up.

JEREMY SLATE: Not much else you can say about that.

SHAWN RYAN: But anyways — that was bad in Rome.

A Transactional Military

JEREMY SLATE: It’s bad because that goes back to the military reforms I talked about earlier. 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.

SHAWN RYAN: A transactional military.

JEREMY SLATE: Correct.

SHAWN RYAN: 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?

The Transactional Military and the Crisis of the Third Century

JEREMY SLATE: They’re in it for the pay, and they’re in it for the power. 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, and Caesar had his German guard that protected him. So there, to a certain extent, had always been barbarians coming into 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. Then in Latin, they use the word “barbary” for beard. So they were basically “these bearded guys.” 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 considered 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 third century, they start bringing more and more barbarians into the Roman legions. They start to become less and less Roman. And by the time you get to the end of the third century, Constantine is going to create a group called the Foederati, 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 of what is a Roman and what is the Roman army.

SHAWN RYAN: So I’m still at transactional military and you’re moving into immigration. Because what it sounds like is they work together.

JEREMY SLATE: They do.

SHAWN RYAN: Because I see a transactional military — for money and for power. And what do we see right now? I’m a military guy. I have friends that are still in. This is what I hear from a lot of people: “I’m just waiting for retirement.”

JEREMY SLATE: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: “I don’t even believe in what we’re doing anymore. I’m just waiting for retirement.”

JEREMY SLATE: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: Because I have so many years and just waiting for retirement. And then on the other side, you have the flag officers who will do anything, lie to anybody, f anybody over, do anything they possibly can just to get that next star. And we’ve covered that time and time again on the show — these fing generals and admirals that will do anything they can to get that next star, which is transactional, and it works for them. Our leaders have been that way for quite a while.

JEREMY SLATE: But you could say that about the Roman military as well.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, that’s the parallel I’m drawing here.

Loyalty, Salt, and the Shifting Allegiances of Rome

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah, 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, the fall, and the first century, 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, or your money’s worth less — well, I’m not your guy.” Have you ever heard the phrase “worth your salt?”

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JEREMY SLATE: 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. 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 lose value, you see loyalty start to change.

You’ll see a barbarian fighting in the Roman army one day, and then fighting with his tribe the next. Someone like Alaric, who is the Visigoth commander that sacked Rome in 410 — he had worked in the Roman army and was actually trying to get a position in the Eastern army. The Eastern army and the Western army had been using him against each other. And then eventually he realizes neither of them is going to give him what he wants. So he sacks Rome in 410.

And this is a pattern you’re going to start to see — these loyalties that just change and shift based on, “What stuff can you give me? What money can you 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Let’s move into the immigration stuff. Can we start there?

Immigration, Citizenship, and the Edict of Caracalla

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah. So if we’re looking at the third century, it’s kind of a broad spectrum of things. As I mentioned, there had always been, to some extent, 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.

SHAWN RYAN: People wanted citizenship.

JEREMY SLATE: It was a very valuable thing.

SHAWN RYAN: Like today. People want American citizenship.

JEREMY SLATE: When I had a conversation with your team before for Patreon, one of the questions asked was, “What was the most valuable thing for a Roman to have?” And it’s citizenship. Because if you look at St. Paul in the Bible — he’s a Roman citizen. And because of that, he had the right to address his grievances directly to the emperor. He couldn’t just be killed without getting to speak to the emperor. That was a right they had. So citizenship had a ton of value.

Early on, when Rome is expanding — it’s not quite an empire yet, it’s a burgeoning republic — 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, “We want citizenship.”

If you look at the late Republic, the Latins were people that lived in Italy but weren’t Roman. So there was a big fight over whether they could have citizenship. Citizenship had a ton of value. And as you get into the late Republic, it has even more value when things like the grain dole pop up. The Gracchi 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, 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, also had a lot of taxes built into it — one of them being a big inheritance and death tax. So he gives 30 million people citizenship overnight, in what’s called the Edict of Caracalla. That, to me, is the moment when citizenship starts to lose its value even more.

SHAWN RYAN: 30 million.

JEREMY SLATE: 30 million people overnight. So now you’re responsible for feeding those people, but you can tax them. So that’s great, right? Those short-sighted solutions — do they work? That is a real problem.

So citizenship had value and people wanted to be Roman citizens because you could live in a territory like North Africa but hold Roman office. There was a pathway, if you could get citizenship, to be in government, to have certain jobs, to advance in your career. So citizenship had a ton of value. 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?

The Crisis of the Third Century and the Collapse of Borders

JEREMY SLATE: So we’re looking at the immigration conversation. Initially, people want to be part of Rome and they want to serve in the legions because that is a pathway to a better life. What starts to happen in the third century is these Roman commanders — in a 50-year period, there are 27 different men who 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, just a couple of years. It’s a very hectic period.

And what happens during that time is the empire in the west actually starts to break apart. The part of it in the west becomes what’s called the Gallic Empire. This general, Postumus, 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 break off called Palmyra, and there’s a woman named Zenobia who actually manages to rule it for a period.

So the empire is starting to disintegrate, and it doesn’t have money to really pay for a lot of these things. They start making agreements with barbarian tribes: “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 so-called barbarian invasions start happening — because Rome makes agreements, they can’t keep them, and the barbarians start coming across.

If you were living in that third century, it would have felt like your world was falling apart. The empire is disintegrating, you’re starting to have more tribes coming in from the north. And the real citizenship and immigration conversation is — they were so busy fighting each other, like our politicians now. Maybe our people aren’t raising an army against each other, but that’s all our news is, right? This politician against that politician. This about Lindsey Graham, or this about Barack Obama.

SHAWN RYAN: A propaganda war.

JEREMY SLATE: Correct. It’s a propaganda war. General Flynn calls it fifth generational warfare — it’s more of a psychological type of warfare. So it’s a similar component. When that’s all they’re worried about, your borders start to break apart. And that’s the real problem that Rome starts to have in the third century — they just start having people pouring in because they’re more worried about fighting each other.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JEREMY SLATE: And if you look at what we have now — how many million people do we have here that we don’t know about?

SHAWN RYAN: I lost count.

JEREMY SLATE: Nobody actually knows. Have you been in New York recently?

SHAWN RYAN: Mm.

JEREMY SLATE: There is — I think it’s the Roosevelt Hotel — where they’re housing a lot of illegals.

SHAWN RYAN: I have no idea. I get out of there as fast as possible.

JEREMY SLATE: I live like 40 minutes from there. One of the big places they house them is in hotels that aren’t really functioning anymore. If you walk past the Roosevelt Hotel, it’s real. There’s a dumpster out front with brand new things — strollers and things — just thrown in there because they didn’t even want them. So it’s like we’re giving so much stuff to people that aren’t even here legally. Well, that’s causing an inflation problem. It’s a similar pattern that you see in history.

SHAWN RYAN: We’re just giving people free stuff.

JEREMY SLATE: 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

The Road to Empire: Rome’s Collapse and the Lessons for Today

JEREMY SLATE: 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 the society? And that’s where you see these enclaves start to break apart, like in Minnesota and Michigan and areas like that, with all the stuff with the Somalians happening recently. I know you had Nick on not long ago to 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 till they can get them. And that’s a real problem, when people start to be short-sighted and not worrying about what is the future I’m creating for this system.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Let’s talk about the road to an empire — kingdom, republic, empire, world.

From Kingdom to Republic: The Roman Foundation

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah. So as I mentioned, Rome is traditionally a kingdom first, and there are seven traditional kings. That’s from 753 to 509. Now, the Republic, as I mentioned, is 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. There’s an author named Ronald Syme who 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 BC and think that’s how it ended. But for the most part, it’s a climate, if that makes sense.

You have the Gracchi brothers that start doing these more public-minded reforms. Then, around the 100s BC, you have these two generals, Marius and Sulla. Sulla, by the way, is Elon Musk’s favorite Roman, so I don’t know if that tells you anything about him. Marius was this commander and Sulla was a guy that fought under him. They’re fighting against a barbarian tribe commander named Jugurtha. Sulla manages to capture Jugurtha, but 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. All of the soldiers would be under arms, because it was technically illegal to have weapons within the city walls — the city walls are considered sacred. But for a triumphal parade, you could have that. They would also carry behind them the people they had captured. So Jugurtha is going to be paraded, and Marius is taking all the credit.

The Breakdown Begins: Marius, Sulla, and Civil War

So Marius and Sulla start to have this disagreement on who’s the most powerful man. Later on, going into the 80s BC, there’s going to be a problem with pirates — not that we don’t modernly have a problem with piracy; these things seem to continue. 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 it for 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. Marius is going to flee, and he eventually dies of old age. He also held the political position of consul seven times. Now, consul is kind of like the idea of being president. Romans didn’t like one man holding power because they hated kings. So every year they’d have two consuls who would equally hold power, so that not one man held it. You were supposed to hold that position every ten years. Marius held it seven times and didn’t live to be 70 years old. So he starts breaking this pattern of how you get offices.

You start to see this breakdown — 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 82 BC is attack Rome and 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 down your arms. Sulla holds that power for four years. So he starts to really break down again what an office means.

Proscriptions and the Rise of Caesar

He creates this process called proscriptions. What proscriptions were was a list of names — all of those people were to be killed. If you brought that person’s head to the Forum, you would get their land, their goods, and possibly their titles. So what ends up happening is people’s names — not necessarily people Sulla didn’t like, but people somebody else didn’t like — would get put on the list because somebody wanted their stuff. You start getting this breakdown of what societal norms and the way society functions really mean.

So Sulla is a really big breaking point. On that list of proscriptions, there’s an 18-year-old named Julius Caesar. Caesar was supposed to be killed because Sulla wanted him to divorce his wife — he didn’t like that Caesar was married to the wrong political person. Caesar decides he’s not going to do that. And Caesar’s mother, who is very well connected, gets him removed from the list. So Caesar survives the proscriptions.

Sulla dies in 78 BC. Then, going down the road, Julius Caesar takes political power in 59 BC. He takes the consulship that year, and the man who is consul with him is named Marcus Bibulus — basically a frontman for another politician named Cato the Younger. And Cato the Younger did not like Caesar. So anything Caesar did politically, it didn’t matter if it was right, wrong, or indifferent — Cato would block it.

SHAWN RYAN: This sounds just like today.

Caesar Crosses the Rubicon

JEREMY SLATE: So what ended up happening is they had political mobs at that point in time. Marcus Bibulus is forced out of the Senate and into his home for the rest of the year. They end up calling it “the consulship of Julius and Caesar” because he rules the whole year by himself.

After that period, he ends up getting what’s called a proconsulship — like a governor outside of the city of Rome. That’s where, if you’ve heard of the Gallic Wars, Caesar basically goes and kills about a million people and conquers deep into France.

While he’s in his last couple of years of this, he hears word that Cato has decided to raise political charges against him. And the way Roman society functioned — there’s often this trope about it — 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 avoid prosecution.

Caesar owes a lot of money to a man named Marcus Crassus, and a lot of what he did in Gaul paid off those debts. But back in Rome, Cato starts creating charges he wants to bring Caesar up on when he returns. And when you’re consul or proconsul, you can’t be brought up on charges — you’re immune from prosecution.

Rome has a culture of being elected in person. So in order to be elected consul again, Caesar would have to show up in Rome to be voted for. He writes a letter to the Senate and gets something passed allowing him to be voted for in absentia — which doesn’t really happen — because his thinking is: if I come back to Rome, they’re going to arrest me for these crimes, whether they’re real or not. Cato manages to get that order rescinded. So now Caesar has to come back to Rome, and that’s a real problem.

This is where the idea of Caesar crossing the Rubicon comes in. The Rubicon is a 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 Milan. Caesar has about ten legions. He leaves nine of them at the river, and in 49 BC, he crosses with one legion and marches on Rome.

What ends up happening is those politicians — including Cato, Pompey, and many others — leave the city. So Caesar comes into Rome, fights no one, and has the city. The Senate had actually given Pompey the power to fight Caesar. So over the next couple of years, Caesar will be chasing Pompey around Europe and fighting him. Eventually, the Ptolemaic king simply beheads Pompey and gives his head to Caesar.

The Collapse of the Republic

That is how you get to the collapse of government. And because people will often say things about Caesar — of all the bad things he did — I’m not saying he’s a good guy or a bad guy, but I am saying the people in political power did push him to do what he did. They created an environment where he had no choice, right, wrong, or indifferent. They created a situation where, if I come to Rome, I’m going to be arrested and tried, regardless of whether these things are true or not.

So Cato is going to commit suicide by disemboweling himself. Pompey is going to be killed. And then you get to the situation where Caesar is now in control of Rome — he’s named dictator. Later on, in 44 BC, he’s going to be named dictator for life, which is something unheard of. It’s akin to being a king.

Now, if you remember, I mentioned earlier that the last king of Rome is removed by a man named Brutus. Caesar is going to be later assassinated by two men 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 wax death masks of people who 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.

When you look at how Rome collapses in that last hundred years, it heats up with Caesar, but it’s a gradual degradation into that position. And if you look at what happened modernly, even with Trump — they’re pushing charges, pushing charges, pushing charges. Well, you put someone in a position where what do you expect them to do? And I think that is where the system can actually cause itself to collapse and become something else.

Augustus, who is the first emperor, walks into the situation of a hundred years of civil war. He brings peace. And then — I do think this is a bit of a ruse — he says, “Okay, I’m going to retire.” And the Senate in 23 BC demands that he stay in power. That’s where they give him the title Augustus.

So it really is an interesting position to be in. It didn’t become an empire because one man took power. It became an empire because political people fought for a hundred years, and then the last man standing was actually asked to stay.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

JEREMY SLATE: That was long-winded. I apologize.

SHAWN RYAN: Where are we at? Are we an empire?

1913: The Year That Changed Everything

JEREMY SLATE: 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 are three things that happened that year.

The first is — 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 is passed over the Christmas break.

SHAWN RYAN: When going to that — do you know about this?

JEREMY SLATE: I don’t know a ton about it, but the famous banking families go off to Jekyll Island. The Warburg family, 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 doesn’t have any reserves. It’s basically a cartel. It’s owned by member banks, and a lot of the member banks are banks you’re aware of. The bigger investor in them is the BIS — the Bank of International Settlements in Basel. So it really is a cartel of banking.

So they establish 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. 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 —

SHAWN RYAN: This is not even drawn up by government.

The 17th Amendment and the Erosion of the Republic

JEREMY SLATE: 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 than that, because he’s kind of the person that forms something totally different. He’s elected to the presidency four times, creates the New Deal, starts ruling more by executive order. And if you look at executive power now, the executive power far outweighs the other two branches of government.

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 that’s a real problem, because people didn’t vote for executive orders. You’re ruling by mandate, and that’s dictatorship in some ways — 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 it 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 the early Roman Empire — what’s that?

SHAWN RYAN: Over a hundred years?

JEREMY SLATE: Over a hundred 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.

The Roman Empire’s Monetary Collapse

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Jeremy, we’re going on about how empires break, specifically the Roman Empire, and we’ve talked about reoccurring patterns — monetary breakdown, debasement, inflation, loss of trust. How did that happen in the Roman Empire?

JEREMY SLATE: Well, that kind of ties back to —

SHAWN RYAN: Loss of trust in American government.

JEREMY SLATE: 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 knew 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, you could see on the coin that the die that’s used to cut the coin was used so many times it wasn’t even cutting the coin properly anymore.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s why that happened.

JEREMY SLATE: So they physically know that this coin doesn’t have the value. So you’re going to have black markets popping up. This is a big problem. And Diocletian is going to do reforms in the end of the third century.

SHAWN RYAN: Fake currency.

JEREMY SLATE: Not fake currency. People literally trading, going back to how they did things. You give me a sheep, I’ll give you some grain. Going back to black market trading. And we were talking about gold prices earlier — in the late third century, they start hoarding gold because they know the so-called “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 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 people in their retinue — that’s an easy way to put it — who know that if this guy becomes emperor, they’re probably going to get a certain 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.

From Terms to Lifetime Rule: The Fall of the Roman Republic

SHAWN RYAN: Can we stop right there? So how long was it — it went from terms to just life? What do you mean, Caesar? Correct?

JEREMY SLATE: Oh, okay. So yes, you went from —

SHAWN RYAN: You went from having a set amount of time, like today, what we have — you have eight years potential being a president.

JEREMY SLATE: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: And then Caesar comes along and it’s just a lifetime.

JEREMY SLATE: 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.

SHAWN RYAN: It was an oral constitution.

JEREMY SLATE: It was an oral constitution. Now, there were certain things — in the early Republic, there’s something called the Twelve 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. This is the way we’ve always done things, this is the way we’re always going to do things. And they would alter it when a crisis would come. And that’s how you start to get some of these strange things happening. But Rome did not have a written constitution.

SHAWN RYAN: Would it be that — it seems like that would have been maybe a major, major reason for the downfall.

JEREMY SLATE: Yes.

SHAWN RYAN: If there’s no written —

JEREMY SLATE: But it worked for 400 years. 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 ten years before you have a consulship. 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 consul. They had something called the Cursus Honorum, and there was a list of political offices you would have to go through before you could actually be a consul. Because of that, people would be more seasoned by the time they reached 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 he 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 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 consul. 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.

Caesar’s Calendar and the Rise of the Praetorian Guard

SHAWN RYAN: So —

JEREMY SLATE: 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 Bibulus.” That’s how they marked their years. That’s going to change under Caesar, because he’s actually the one that creates the Julian calendar. Romans had this problem where their calendar was missing like 30 to 50 days. So every couple of years the seasons would get way off — their calendar would say it’s summer when it’s actually winter, and they’d have all these strange things. So Caesar creates the Julian calendar to try and fix that. 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 a bad emperor, you kind of buckle up, because you’re going to be in it for a very long time — 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, “We don’t like this guy, we’re going to kill him.”

And that’s what happens. The first emperor for that to happen to is Caligula. His father Germanicus was in the Roman army, and Caligula’s name would have been Gaius Germanicus. But “Caligula” is actually a nickname. When his father was in the military, they dressed him up in a little military uniform. The name “Caligae” is the name for Roman boots. So “Caligula” means “bootikins.” He’s killed by the Praetorian Guard and his uncle Claudius is put in his place. So you do have this sense that when things aren’t going so well, the Praetorian Guard is going to take out the guy in power.

SHAWN RYAN: So with the Praetorian Guard — where do they get their decision making from? Are they of the people?

JEREMY SLATE: So they are the —

SHAWN RYAN: Are they the pulse of the people, or are they strictly a shadow government?

JEREMY SLATE: So they were originally the private bodyguard of the Emperor Augustus, and they just become the protectors of emperors. They wouldn’t have cared what the people thought. They would have cared about being 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 him.”

SHAWN RYAN: Because they’re the only ones that determine that the current emperor — king, whatever, ruler — is crazy. It’s not —

JEREMY SLATE: So it’s not like they take into account —

SHAWN RYAN: The citizens of Rome. It’s not —

The Praetorian Guard: Power Behind the Throne

JEREMY SLATE: There is even a process. They’re just looking at political positioning. It’s not like, “Oh, things are going bad. The Praetorian Guard’s going to get rid of the Emperor.” They’re looking at it and they’re saying, “Okay, this is bad for our future. We’re going to take out this guy.”

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 leaves Rome. He lives on the island of Capri, and he has a sex palace there. He would have prepubescent boys swimming in his pool that he called his “little fishes.” So he was abusing children.

They look at why Caligula might have been so crazy because he was living at Tiberius’s palace. So he likely saw a lot of things as a kid, in addition to having some sort of a fever later that they can’t quite identify. 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 clear line where the Emperor stops and the Praetorian Guard begins. It’s all about where can I get political positioning and where can I set myself up to rule?

SHAWN RYAN: How do you get into the — how do you say it?

JEREMY SLATE: The Praetorian Guard.

SHAWN RYAN: Praetorian Guard. How do you get in there?

JEREMY SLATE: You’re selected by the Emperor.

SHAWN RYAN: How many of them are there?

JEREMY SLATE: I don’t know the numbers.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re selected by the Emperor.

JEREMY SLATE: It changes over the years. So I don’t know the exact number. The Praetorian Prefect would have been the most powerful of them.

SHAWN RYAN: So each Emperor picks the Praetorian Guard and then they kill him.

JEREMY SLATE: He’s going to pick new ones. You would have that position as your military position until you retired. But he might add new ones. The only time that they totally change is when —

SHAWN RYAN: So this would be kind of like the Supreme Court.

JEREMY SLATE: It’s kind of like if the Supreme Court —

SHAWN RYAN: — one’s done, you get to pick another one, but you don’t get to pick them out.

JEREMY SLATE: 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. They did a lot of things. You could look at them really as the power of the deep state behind the throne.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, okay.

JEREMY SLATE: And there are times when all of them are replaced. As I mentioned, Septimius Severus, after the death of Didius Julianus, replaces all of them and puts his own men in there. He executes a bunch of them and kicks others out of Rome. And in 311, when Constantine takes power, he actually disbands the Praetorian Guard. So that’s the end of the Guard. They had this stronghold called the Castra Praetoria, which was kind of like their military stronghold. So they really do become almost like an empire of power within the empire.

Parallels to the Bible and Modern America

SHAWN RYAN: Have you read Romans in the Bible?

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Reading that, it sounds like you’re reading what’s happening today, too. In my opinion, I’ve made a —

JEREMY SLATE: I’ve made a lot of comparisons between what you’re seeing happen with the FBI and what you’re seeing happen with Trump, for example. It’s people that have been there for a really long time, they’ve decided he’s not going to do what he wants 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. We talked about demographic and border pressure — pretty much immigration. What are the people thinking of all of that? Do the people even matter at all?

The Lives of Ordinary Romans

JEREMY SLATE: There’s not a lot of history about the people. I like doing Great Courses — I don’t know if you’ve ever done that before, but they’re lecture series you can get a hold of. One of my favorites is by a guy named Dr. Gregory Aldrete, and he talks about how, in Roman history, one of the biggest missing pieces we have is what did the regular people do during their lives?

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 political matters. And as you get into the later empire, a lot of them would have never even seen an Emperor. Their life is just so drastically different from those that have money or political power. They’re just worried about survival.

They lived in these giant apartment buildings called insulae — just these giant tenement-type buildings. And when people think about going back to Rome, the thing that you wouldn’t quite expect to be a big deal is that it would have smelled God awful at all times. Yes, they had a sewer system, but it only worked in the houses of people who had the money for it. There were sewers in the street, so people were expected to go down their apartment building and throw waste in the drain. But that’s a lot of floors to go down. They would dump it in the streets.

If you’ve ever seen imagery of people being carried around on litters through 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, if you’ve ever been to Pompeii, the curbs are very high — because the streets would have been filled with urine, excrement, horse dung, and all sorts of things.

SHAWN RYAN: Like San Francisco.

JEREMY SLATE: Exactly. Exactly like San Francisco.

Emergency Authority Becomes Permanent

SHAWN RYAN: Centralization of power. Emergency authority becomes permanent.

JEREMY SLATE: That’s a really important point. 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.

If you look at that with a lot of things we’ve experienced — the War on Terror, 9/11, a lot of these different events — the Patriot Act has dramatically changed our lives. We’re not going back. That exists. And there are a lot of things that have changed our society because of various crises. Rome was very similar in a lot of ways. An Emperor gives away citizenship because he needs to handle the treasury. Christians are being persecuted because they want to bring back the peace of the gods. They’re trying to handle whatever’s in front of them right now because they couldn’t think about the future.

Especially in the third century, these guys are living such a short period of time that 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 — as I mentioned — there were at least 27 of them. There’s been some research where they found coins of other emperors, and that’s how you would know somebody was Emperor. You can find coins that prove they existed. So you’re not going to have somebody rule again for 20 years until Diocletian in 284.

These terms are so short, they’re just thinking about survival. And that’s when the empire starts to change dramatically. We can see that now with each crisis altering how we operate. Even with a lot of the woke stuff that’s happened — the language we used to use, we can’t use anymore.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what I was kind of getting at with the Bible — a lot of the woke stuff, a lot of the gender stuff. That was all happening in Rome, correct?

JEREMY SLATE: Yeah. One of my all-time favorite movies is Tropic Thunder. You could never make that movie now. Things have just changed so much. Robert Downey Jr.’s character is hilarious, but you could never do that now.

But if you look at especially the third century, we mentioned Elagabalus — there are even stories that he had his own genitalia removed because he wanted to be the other gender.

SHAWN RYAN: So there’s all these things —

JEREMY SLATE: All these things start to happen where gender becomes more fluid, mores start to change, morals start to change. We start to do whatever we have to do with our money right now. 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. 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.

Currency Debasement and the Collapse of Value

SHAWN RYAN: What were people putting their money into to save value? Did they realize it was happening?

JEREMY SLATE: For regular people, there wouldn’t have been much understanding. It’s just, as I said, survival. For the rich, there were problems of them stealing public land for themselves and farming on it, because there was nobody to really stop them. Rome had a lot of public lands. But you’re also going to see them putting their bets more in political power, because they don’t know where the money’s going. They’re hoping that the next guy could be the one that gives them something.

So that’s really what you’re going to see in terms of where people are putting their money, because the money is changing so dramatically. It’s 15,000% 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 Massie wears that pin that shows the national debt just rolling over and over again. It’s worth nothing at this point.

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.

SHAWN RYAN: Did they try to deal with it?

Restoring the Empire: Diocletian’s Reforms and Their Limits

JEREMY SLATE: They did it 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 does 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 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.

He also puts better control on the borders. So then he creates these two new positions. One is called a “dux,” which is later going to become “duke” in the Middle Ages. And the dux is responsible for handling one of these dioceses militarily. And then on the borders he puts these guard posts that are called “comites,” run by someone called a “comes,” which is later going to become the word “count.” So he really starts to shore 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 — that’s what he realizes. And he’s still always the one that’s the most senior. But now he has a colleague and two junior colleagues. And that’s the thing they actually do to stabilize it. So the borders stabilize, the civil wars start to stop.

But what he does to fix other things doesn’t really help. 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. You’re going to see the black market start to get even more prevalent.

Another thing he’s going to do is dramatically increase taxes because the empire needs more money. Another thing he’s going to do is make it so there’s less social movement. So if your father is a farmer, well, you’re now a farmer. 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. 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 you’re going to see all emperors wear after this point. He also changes the political class, and he greatly enlarges it, starting to have people whose jobs are just being professional politicians. Bureaucrats. He creates a massive bureaucracy. He 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 going to be based in Ravenna, which is in the swamps 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.

Constantine’s Approach: Monetary Reform and Christianity

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. 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 — 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 can kind of do it the right way versus the wrong way. But there are different ways that were tried to restore the power.

SHAWN RYAN: How did Constantine do that? How did he bring in Christianity?

JEREMY SLATE: So it’s kind of a gradual thing, but he has —

SHAWN RYAN: How do you do that? I mean, everybody’s worshiping the Roman gods and the ones that they brought in, and then they try to bring in Christianity. How did they do that?

JEREMY SLATE: 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 mentioned earlier, after the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he has this vision and he beats 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 put more Christians in political positions. So that’s going to start causing people to convert to Christianity for that reason. So it is initially more of a political move, but at the same time he had to believe something happened. And it’s often 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.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I mean, this is a tale as old as time. Wars start because of religion, and then he’s imposing Christianity on the Roman Empire. I’m curious how it went, because generally, no matter what religion —

JEREMY SLATE: It seems that it went well, because less than 100 years later, it’s a Christian empire.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. When was the Vatican introduced?

JEREMY SLATE: That’s way down the road. You’re looking towards the Church of St. John Lateran, which is one of the first main Vatican churches that’s built. That’s an early medieval church.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

JEREMY SLATE: Current St. Peter’s, I think, isn’t built until after Pope Julius II. So we’re looking at like the 1500s or 1600s.

So this time period is called “late antiquity” when you’re trying to classify it. 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 that you have all these other different Christian beliefs and they’re trying to agree on what they believe. And they start using the Bishop of Rome to basically arbitrate between them. So that’s how the papacy starts getting more power — people start looking to Rome to handle a lot of these situations happening out in the provinces.

Immigration and Identity in the Roman Empire

SHAWN RYAN: What’s considered an immigrant in the Roman Empire? These are lands they’ve conquered, and then they’re bringing the people in, readjusting borders and all this stuff. How are they readjusting borders? I wouldn’t imagine they shrank.

JEREMY SLATE: 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. You have some that become slaves, some that are offered the opportunity to become more Roman in a way. So that’s going to change in terms of how the empire starts to evolve, because the empire is not conquering anymore. It’s just trying to hold things together.

And in the 120s, Hadrian’s going to build the wall in Britain to kind of keep the Picts out — 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, saying who is an immigrant is a very, very hard thing to do. Because if you look at it, Emperor Hadrian was born in Spain. Septimius Severus was born in North Africa. So these lands that start to get annexed — people with political families are going to have a pathway where they could be emperor, 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 in the third century, it starts to be the people that don’t want to be Roman, if that makes sense. Because those early ones are looking at what political positions they can achieve, because there is a pathway for them.

You look at somebody like Diocletian, who was born out in Croatia — 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. They’re not Roman by birth, but they are Roman by citizenship.

So I think saying what’s an immigrant is a very difficult thing, because Rome, in a lot of ways, is very cosmopolitan. But if you look in the third century, what starts to change is how the military is set up and how the borders are set up. Because now you have people starting to live within the borders, on the outskirts, that are living in their Visigoth tribe or their Ostrogoth tribe or whatever. They’re not really integrating. Does that make sense?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, that does make sense.

JEREMY SLATE: So it’s a hard question to answer because a lot of people stop being Roman after a long time. It starts incorporating other territories.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think that’s part of — I mean, did they get greedy with conquering? And is that part of 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 don’t, you know what I mean.

JEREMY SLATE: No, I know what you mean. Once again, it’s kind of a hard thing to answer because things change so much. 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, or something like it. So now you have a much greater need for people, along with this need for fighting men. So it becomes a much more mercenary culture, if that makes sense.

Declining Birth Rates: Then and Now

SHAWN RYAN: So all this brings me to another point. What was the reproduction rate? Do we have any idea? Because we see a lot of countries — we’re getting a close look at Europe. Completely different dynamic over there in the past decade than what it used to be. You see all these declining birth rates all around the world, and other demographics with rising birth rates. And a lot of people say that will be the downfall of China, of Europe, of the US. So what was the reproduction rate back then?

JEREMY SLATE: So if you look at kind of the early empire — and this was actually a big discussion on X not long ago between Elon Musk and a guy named the Roman Helmet Guy — 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 —

The Decline of Rome and Modern Parallels

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean by that?

JEREMY SLATE: In early empires, 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. I forget the name of the historian offhand, but he’s saying that Romans were more concerned about their fish ponds than about actually 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 this as well. I think the woman’s name was Claudia — she was the mother of the Gracchi brothers — and she had 11 children, of which only two brothers were among the three that survived. So you also have to look at the fact that birth rates are lower, but also there is a lot of danger in people not living to adulthood. That’s a major problem that’s not really going to correct itself. And that becomes one of the reasons they need to keep bringing in more people, because you need to continue to repopulate.

If you look at what we’re seeing now, 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 recognizable. And you go to—

SHAWN RYAN: Don’t even recognize it.

JEREMY SLATE: 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. 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.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve systematically, completely changed your culture.

JEREMY SLATE: Correct.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s just not—

JEREMY SLATE: Well, culture is what holds us together. Culture is the glue that holds us together. And we don’t have that.

SHAWN RYAN: You’ve introduced so much of a different culture into your country that the new culture now overwhelms the original culture, and then everything completely changes.

JEREMY SLATE: Well, you don’t have a glue holding things together. You don’t have an ethos. You don’t have something that you live by. And that starts to become a real problem. At that point, the only thing that matters is money and power. When money doesn’t exist anymore, well, you don’t have a civilization anymore. That’s the point you get to towards the end of a decline.

Loss of Trust in Institutions

SHAWN RYAN: How did people start to lose trust in the institutions? The state survives, but the legitimacy does not?

JEREMY SLATE: Well, because Rome couldn’t care for them anymore. I think that’s the biggest thing. If you look at the last hundred 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 take care of the people.

The son of Emperor Theodosius in the late 4th century, Honorius, was more worried about his chickens that he’s raising than his actual people. And that starts to become the problem — where they couldn’t care about the people they’re supposed to be responsible for.

I think you see that a lot with our politicians now. They’re more worried about, I guess, one part of it is protecting what they’ve done and they don’t want us to know about it. The other part is they couldn’t give two, you know, what’s about us regular people, because it doesn’t affect them. 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.

Where Do We Go From Here?

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, where do we go from here?

JEREMY SLATE: 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 resolve to do that. But that is the thing that has to happen.

SHAWN RYAN: How would we do that?

JEREMY SLATE: I am not an economist, but—

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, if we just talked about the Federal Reserve, which I actually didn’t know — it sounds like a government organization.

JEREMY SLATE: It’s kind of like Federal Express, though.

SHAWN RYAN: But it’s not. Yeah, people don’t know that. So how would you begin to fix it?

JEREMY SLATE: Well, I think one part of it—

SHAWN RYAN: —is paying off the national debt?

JEREMY SLATE: Well, money has to mean something. I think that’s one part of it. And that’s why, when I look at some of the things that Trump started to do — like the tariffs — I think that was more about 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 — it wasn’t always the rust belt, but now it’s hollowed out.

So I think one part is getting industry back here. We need to produce things, make things, and that needs to exist. The other part is handling currency, because if you handle currency, you have the ability to fix a lot of your sins. But we’d have to base our money on something. 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. 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. 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 with degrees, massive debt, and they don’t exactly know how to do anything.

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 it — and that’s the idea of apprenticeships. Before the turn of the century, meaning the 1900s, apprenticeships were a very big thing in a lot of different fields. They serve a couple of different purposes: first, to give you experience, and second, to help you decide — do I want to do this? Am I meant for this?

But I think unless we handle education, we won’t have people who know how to run this system. 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 bigger problem we’re going to run into: this brain drain and this inability to do things. 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.

Manufacturing, Technology, and Economic Autonomy

SHAWN RYAN: I do think we still make stuff. And I could be totally off here, but I think about this all the time. I do want manufacturing and all these things to come back — I think it’s extremely important. But I don’t think the narrative that we don’t make anything is 100% true, because we are very good at tech, software, stuff like that. And we sell this stuff to all these other countries. Look at Silicon Valley, I mean, California.

JEREMY SLATE: Well, I’m looking more at production and manufacturing. You’re 100% correct about tech.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes. And all I’m saying is that the world has evolved since then. While we’re not — and I do want to be manufacturing, and I think that’s important to come back — I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to say we don’t produce anything. We do produce things, in my opinion.

JEREMY SLATE: Well, I can agree to that, because there are certain things we make. But we just don’t really have manufacturing anymore. And for a lot of small towns — I grew up in a very small town — everybody worked in manufacturing, and the manufacturing isn’t there anymore.

SHAWN RYAN: Same here.

JEREMY SLATE: So then what happens is the people aren’t working as much, the drugs are coming in, the places start degrading. 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 provide for themselves, and that does make the economy stronger. 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.

Rome’s Strategic Expansion

SHAWN RYAN: When the Romans were expanding the empire, were they going after strategic locations for resources and things like that, or was it just—

JEREMY SLATE: It was very strategic.

SHAWN RYAN: It was?

JEREMY SLATE: For example, as I mentioned, Rome had to feed a lot of people. The best place for growing grain was actually Egypt and Asia. After Alexander the Great dies in 323 BC, his generals basically divide up his empire amongst themselves. The last remaining of those are the Ptolemies, under one of his generals, Ptolemy. So the famous Cleopatra — or Cleopatra VII — is the final Ptolemaic ruler. After her death, the Romans basically take over this area, and that becomes the breadbasket of the empire. The Nile would flood every single year, and that delta would become very rich — a great place for growing grain and other things that could feed people.

Or if you look at when Trajan conquered Dacia, he was conquering it because there were silver mines there. So they’re looking at where they can bring in resources. It’s very strategic — it’s not just, “Hey, we want land.” It’s about water, places that are strategically valuable. Caesar was a little bit of “we just want land and glory,” but when they are conquering, they’re looking at what strategic resources they can gain.

The Punic Wars — Carthage was the biggest shipping power in the world at that point in time, and to have that area would make Rome much more powerful in shipping. So a lot of what they’re looking at is: how do we bring in more resources to run this empire?

What Are We Missing?

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. What are we missing in the Roman Empire that parallels what we’re seeing today?

JEREMY SLATE: I think a big part of it is just this: if we can handle our currency, if we can fix our borders — but politicians have to start caring again. And I think that’s a major problem. 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. 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.

SHAWN RYAN: When did the empire realize that it had collapsed?

JEREMY SLATE: That’s really hard to say. If you go back to that regular person living in it, he would have noticed that he’s still paying taxes, because the kings of Italy after the Roman Empire would have been charging taxes, charging tribute. They hadn’t seen an emperor in years. So I think to them, it’s hard to say when they stopped realizing they were an empire. It’s more of a fade away than an actual collapse. One day you just realized the civilization you lived in isn’t here anymore. It’s hard to say when that is. 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.

SHAWN RYAN: When do you think we’ll know when a president becomes a tyrant?

Closing Thoughts and Farewell

JEREMY SLATE: That’s a very good question. I think it’s hard to know, honestly. You look at what happened in Germany in the 30s and 40s — people didn’t really know how bad it was until they didn’t have the ability to say things that Hitler didn’t like. 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 till you’re there. It’s not really something you can predict.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think we’re witnessing the fall?

JEREMY SLATE: 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. The petrodollar 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 a hundred dollars. Those are the things you really got to worry about.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, man. Well, this was a fascinating conversation.

JEREMY SLATE: I appreciate it, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. If you had three guests to recommend for the show, who would that be?

JEREMY SLATE: Oof. Three guests? Well, there’s one I definitely have in mind — his name 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 really well-known people, named Caleb Gilbert. Absolutely brilliant guy. I’m trying to think of who else would be a great fit.

SHAWN RYAN: Of course, give me another historian.

JEREMY SLATE: Another historian. He’s actually 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. The guy is absolutely brilliant. He looks at economic cycles and how they change every 80 years, and it can actually predict what’s coming next.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man, we’ll look it up. That’s awesome. Well, Jeremy, thank you, thank you, thank you.

JEREMY SLATE: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

SHAWN RYAN: I hope to see you again. No matter where you’re watching the Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you’re feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

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