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

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Shawn Ryan Show #281 — Jeremy Slate: The Fatal Decisions That Doomed the Entire Roman Empire

Date: February 19, 2026
Host: Shawn Ryan
Guest: Jeremy Ryan Slate (CEO, historian, author, podcast host)

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Episode Overview

This episode features historian and podcast host Jeremy Ryan Slate, who joins Shawn Ryan to dissect the patterns underlying the collapse of the Roman Empire and draw uncannily relevant parallels to the present-day United States. Their candid, conversational approach covers monetary policy, border security, political decay, the reliability of historical narrative, citizenship, societal values, and the often-misunderstood nature of collapse. Jeremy’s grounded historian’s insight brings new clarity to how fatal decisions doom empires—with plenty of memorable analogies and blunt commentary.

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Key Sections, Insights & Timestamps

1. Meeting Jeremy—From Social Media Thread to Studio

[01:34 – 03:02]

• Shawn found Jeremy via a Twitter thread drawing parallels between Rome's fall and modern political dysfunction.
• Jeremy emphasizes he’s "not the world's top expert," but excels at connecting complex history to regular people.

Jeremy: "It's a pattern. It is... something that applies to literally any societal collapse. They screw with their money, they stop giving a shit about their borders, and politicians become short sighted and just want to deal with what gives them power right now." [03:04]

2. Patterns of Collapse—Currency, Borders, Short-Sighted Leadership

[03:19 – 05:54], [23:31 – 25:28]

• Discussion of inflation, the collapse of the dollar, and parallels to the collapse of Roman currency.
• Debasement, uncontrolled borders, and politicians thinking only of the short term are seen as universal signs.
• 80% of the modern money supply was printed since COVID.
• Jeremy: “If you fix your money, you could do all the other stuff a lot longer.”

3. Rome & Christianity—Religious Policy, Change, & Persecution

[08:19 – 13:34]

• Rome tolerated different religions, but enforced religious unity during crises, leading to persecutions.
• Christianity goes from minor sect to dominant force via political adoption (Edict of Milan, Constantine).
• Suppression, ironically, often strengthened Christianity’s growth.

Jeremy: “When things aren’t going well, that’s when you're going to have persecutions... 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.” [11:31]

• The switch to a Christian empire (Theodosius, 380 AD) and its impacts on politics and currency.

4. Rome’s Structure: From Kingdom, to Republic, to Empire

[62:36 – 73:40]

• Rome's evolution: Kingdom (753–509 BC), Republic (509–31 BC), Empire (31 BC–476 AD in West, to 1453 in East).
• Breakdown of the Republic through powerful individuals usurping tradition: Sulla, Marius, Caesar.
• Caesar’s dictatorship for life and the erosion of Republican tradition is compared to contemporary executive power.

5. Historical Record & Manipulation

[28:05 – 35:09]

• Institutional history (even American SEAL teams) gets manipulated for those in power.
• Roman literacy below 10%; history written by elites, skewed heavily by power and propaganda (ex: Augustus).
• Jeremy likens much of what we know to Plato's allegory of the cave: mere "shadows" of actual events.

Jeremy: "The power structure is going to dictate what the history you’re getting is... You don’t want to piss off or upset the people in power..." [29:42]

6. Collapse is a Process, Not an Event

[36:31 – 39:04]

• Jeremy: “Most people misunderstand collapse as a moment and not a process.”
• Daily life mostly continues, with incremental adaptation to worsening conditions.
• Even after 476, Western Roman Empire's disappearance was a slow fade, not a sudden crash.

Jeremy: "[Collapse] really fades in a lot of ways and life is going to continue as normal... we're getting our history in a postscript..." [38:59]

7. The Crisis of Empire: Money, Military, and Borders

[39:04 – 57:15]

• Under Marcus Aurelius and especially his son Commodus, the empire spirals into brutal instability.
• Praetorian Guard emerges as the real power, openly selling and auctioning the imperial throne.
• Military loyalty becomes transactional: soldiers loyal to paymasters, not Rome.

Jeremy: “It’s a very dangerous situation... where people aren’t as loyal to the group... but more loyal to a person.” [19:36]

• Mass immigration into the legions and empire, at first desirable (for citizenship) then leading to Rome’s loss of identity.

8. Immigration, Citizenship, Loss of Identity

[54:44 – 62:29]

• Citizenship once highly prized, but devalued by mass grants (Edict of Caracalla: 30 million get instant citizenship in 212 AD).
• Shift from integrating ‘outsiders’ to waves of newcomers demanding benefits, not loyalty—parallels to current U.S. debates.

Jeremy: “When the only reason people are here is for the stuff or the money, when the money doesn’t have value, what loyalty do they have to society?” [61:45]

• Modern cities compared to cities in Empire’s last days—visible enclaves where central authority is absent.

9. Bureaucracy, Loss of Social Mobility, Failed Reforms

[99:29 – 104:39]

• Diocletian’s reforms: divides empire, tries price controls, locks people into professions, massively expands bureaucracy; mostly proves futile.
• Constantine’s successful reform: gradual return to sound money (gold standard), centralized Christianity for unity and legitimacy.

10. Social Change, Decay, and the Erosion of Trust

[96:57 – 116:49]

• Centralization of power, emergency measures becoming permanent, and moral/ethical confusion, including gender fluidity and “woke” culture, appear as repeating patterns.
• Regular people’s voices and needs get lost in the clash of elites.
• When culture is lost—when no binding ethics or identity are shared—only money remains, and when even that goes, "you don't have a civilization anymore."

Jeremy: "Culture is what holds us together. Culture is, is the glue that holds us together." [116:02]

11. Are We Living Through a Collapse? Lessons for Today

[116:49 – End]

• Parallels today: short-sighted politics, transactional leadership, devalued currency, fractured borders, lost civil identity, massive brain drain due to lack of practical education.
• Fixes? Likely painful: sound money, production/industry return, educational overhaul.
• The fall is usually recognized only in hindsight—"it's more of a fade away than an actual collapse."

Jeremy: "If we don't fix currency, we are absolutely screwed... [but] we'd have to base our money on something." [118:11]

• Both men acknowledge the lingering influence and value of Roman history as a warning—and as a tool for navigating the present.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jeremy: "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme..." [23:31]
• Shawn: "That all sounds very familiar." [03:19]
• Jeremy: "It's 15,000% inflation by the 280s, which is insane." [98:18]
• Jeremy: "Every time things changed, they would alter how they did things... Rome did not have a written constitution." [84:00]
• Jeremy: "When you look at early empires, especially Rome, it's something that—those short-sighted solutions often don't fix things." [23:31]

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Key Parallels Drawn

• Currency Debasement: From denarius to hyper-inflated Roman coin, and from gold standard to U.S. monetary policy.
• Open Borders & Lost Identity: Once-valuable citizenship diluted, enclave societies, “barbarians” within.
• Transactional Military & Leadership: Loss of loyalty to nation/empire, mercenary mentality.
• Political Polarization: Republic eaten from inside by short-term, “team sport” politics.
• Collapse as a Slow, Unnoticed Drift (not a single moment).
• Institutional Trust: Erosion as rulers become detached and self-serving.

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [03:04] – Universal pattern of collapse: money, borders, short-sighted rulers
• [08:19–13:34] – Rome and the spread of Christianity
• [24:46–25:28] – The three-part “Roman pattern” of collapse
• [28:05–35:09] – Can we trust the Roman historical record?
• [36:31–39:04] – “Collapse is a process, not a moment”
• [42:19–45:19] – The rise of the Praetorian Guard’s power
• [54:44–62:29] – Evolution and devaluation of Roman citizenship, immigration problem
• [84:00] – The dangers of “unwritten constitutions” and tradition without structure
• [96:57–99:28] – Centralized emergency powers, cultural and ethical confusion
• [116:49–127:17] – Parallels drawn: today's America and late Rome; attempts at reform and possible futures

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Closing Reflections

Rome still matters today, Jeremy argues, because its mistakes are not unique—they are recurring pitfalls for any complex society. This episode highlights the value of recognizing these patterns, not to predict imminent doom, but so we might have a chance to steer away from the rocks.

Shawn: "Do you think we're witnessing the fall?"
Jeremy: "I really hope not... I just think that if we don't handle the economy soon, at some point in time, it's going to end like the petrodollar is propping us up. But if that changes, then things could change on a dime." [126:57]

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Recommended Guests by Jeremy:

• Nick McKinley (child protection advocate)
• Caleb Gilbert (security industry)
• (and “the Fourth Turning” author, for cyclical history analysis)

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Transcript

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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[Sean Ryan]

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[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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[Sean Ryan]

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[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Started my business back in 2014. That was like literally one of the first. I have no business background. One of the first books I read was Four Hour Work Week, so that was pretty cool.

[Sean Ryan]

Really?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah. I did his. His diet for a couple years too, with all the cold showers and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Right on. Yeah, man, I found you like last week.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

So this is crazy.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah. I was in Puerto Rico quick.

[Sean Ryan]

I was like, holy.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

But I've been talking to Jeremy for a bit and he's like, hey, Sean's interested. I'm like, oh, sweet.

[Sean Ryan]

That's what. Yeah, I sent him. He said he'd been chatting with you for some time. And I. At the beginning, at the end of last year, I was like, we should start getting into some history shit.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And because I. I don't know anything.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I'm definitely not like the world's top expert, but I can talk to regular people, which is what matters.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. I think that's what works.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

But, but yeah, I saw your. I saw something I can't even remember what it was, but I was like,

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

you had your pin post about like kind of the current scene.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

And I wrote a thread around that about like the fall of Rome and how it makes sense.

[Sean Ryan]

Yes. That is how we found each. That's how I found. Yeah. You wrote which. Which post was it? Was it the one where I was going off about how the. The government's fallen to fraud, waste and abuse?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's that one, I believe. And then I like quote, tweeted that and wrote a thread with it.

[Sean Ryan]

What'd you say? I can't remember.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Just basically describing how Rome fell and kind of how those processes mirror like, like what we're dealing with today.

[Sean Ryan]

Yep. That's a lot of my attention.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Crazy, man.

[Sean Ryan]

That is definitely.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's a pattern. It is like, it's. It's something that applies to literally any societal collapse. They screw with their money, they stop giving a shit about their borders, and politicians become short sighted and just kind of want to deal with what gives them power right now. Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, that sounds very familiar.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

But if you fix your money, you could do all the other stuff a lot longer.

[Sean Ryan]

Do you think we can fix our money? No, I don't either.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Ron Paul talks about like, the person that does is not going to be very popular because we're so far over our skis. It's going to be painful, man.

[Sean Ryan]

I watch this way back in probably like, I'll bet like 2008. I watched a documentary and I think it was Ron Paul on the Federal Reserve. And when we came off the gold standard.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And I was like, holy shit.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, that was a free license.

[Sean Ryan]

To do whatever they want legitimately is worth nothing.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And you kind of see it. You. I mean, look, I'm no economist. I don't know.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I'm not either.

[Sean Ryan]

But gold is at $5,000 an ounce this year.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It went up like a thousand bucks, man.

[Sean Ryan]

$5,000.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

2025. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Silver went to what? Over $100 an ounce from when 2020 is when I started. Because Covid stuff. Right.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

I started buying. That's when I started looking into precious metals.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

We have physical gold. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Everybody was freaked out about everything.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Right.

[Sean Ryan]

And I. But I remember gold in 2020 was about $2,000 an ounce. So if it took thousands of years to get to $2,000 an ounce, and then five years, it goes to 5,000. You know, it. It over doubles in five years. I mean, and then if you think about it, is gold really going up? It seems like gold price of everything is going down.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Gold's not changing.

[Sean Ryan]

That's what I'm. That's what I think.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

That's how inflation works. It's just your dollar doesn't go as far as. Because it's like.

[Sean Ryan]

So our money has. How do you say it? Our money is worth two and a half times less. If you look at the gold. If you look at the price of gold today, in five years, our. Our money is two and a half times less or I guess six years. Two and a half times less than what it was six years ago.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, because people don't get it because they just see, oh, the prices are going up. It's not that the prices are going up is your dollar doesn't go as far.

[Sean Ryan]

That's what I mean.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

Have you, if you seen. Are you following this Epstein stuff at all?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah, pretty intensely, actually.

[Sean Ryan]

Have you watched the Epstein interview with Bannon?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I have it bookmarked. I haven't watched it yet. I was watching the, the Rogan Mike Benz thing this morning.

[Sean Ryan]

How was that?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's eye opening because he goes through the networks of how they, like, move all the money around and how Epstein was probably not just one country, but several countries. And it's. It's interesting.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I know, I know. He was talking about how Epstein was talking about. And I don't understand this shit, but he was talking about how most people don't understand money. And most world leaders are elected because of popularity, not because of their ability to run the country. And he gives examples. Reagan was an actor, but that goes back to Rome.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Right? Because if you look at it, what would happen is in the late Empire, the guys that kind of become emperor are just military commanders. And there were two things they would do when they became emperor. They would do something called a donative. Donative comes from the Latin word to give. And they would give a giant bonus to all the military when they became emperor, and then they would double their pay. So they end up becoming more loyal to that emperor because he's the money guy. And that process continues again and again and again until the money's worth nothing, man.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, I mean, that actually sounds better than what we do because we don't pay our warrior shit. We just get it all overseas, especially the ba. We just pay everybody else's warriors that we fought like the Taliban. Yeah, but you know, we're paying those guys $87 million a week.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Is that the number?

[Sean Ryan]

That's the number.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

That's insane.

[Sean Ryan]

That's the number. 40 to $87 million a week. But. But yeah, that, that's. So, yeah, I wanted to talk. I've just been looking for somebody that can relate the Roman Empire to kind of what we're seeing, the collapse of the Roman Empire to what we're seeing today. And everybody has like these little nuggets.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, but it's not enough for a full blown conversation.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, right on. Well, I got a. I got a hot question here for you. The Roman, the Roman Empire existed during the time of Jesus and early Christianity. How did Rome's power and policies shape and shaped the spread of Christianity? And did the Romans realize how significant that movement would become?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So I don't think initially, because you have to look during the time of Jesus, they couldn't tell the difference between Christianity and Judaism. There wasn't a big ability to tell a difference between that. They thought it was kind of a sect of Judaism and it's a small percentage of the actual empire. You're looking like 1% or less during the time of Christ. And there's really only one Roman historian that actually even writes about Christ. His name's Titus Flavius Josephus. He was a Jewish historian that when Palestine is conquered and that area is conquered, he comes and lives in Rome and he works for the emperor. And if you read letters of the emperors, I'm trying to remember which one it is. It might be Vespasian. And he's writing to one of the governors and he's trying to explain Christianity to him and he just doesn't understand it. Cause he's like, wait, they eat the body of someone? And he just didn't understand it. And he's like, well, I think it was Pliny the Younger that's writing to Vespasian. And he's like, well, what do we do with these guys? He's like, just leave them alone. Because for the most part, unless you're causing upheaval, Rome was very permissive. And that's because they brought in gods from all the other empires and territories and things that they conquered.

[Sean Ryan]

They brought in gods from all the other empires. Correct.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So you would have. You could live in Rome, but you might 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 basically annexed. So it became very popular to do that.

[Sean Ryan]

Now, when you say borrowed, do you mean accepted? Accepted the gods.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

You could have.

[Sean Ryan]

Basically, it was freedom of religion.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It was yes and no. Because the thing you have to look at is the Romans believed in this thing called the peace of the gods. And when things were going well, it meant they'd achieved the peace of the gods. So when things aren't going well, that's when you're going to have persecutions of Christians and other groups. So, like, you see this during the time of Nero, there's the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, and Nero gets blamed very heavily for it. So the thing he's going to do is persecute Christians because he has to blame it on someone. And you move further down the road and in around 250 or 251, there's an emperor named Decius, and they're experiencing climate change, so they don't kind of 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 from 200 BC to about 280, they had perfect weather so they could grow food in areas that now you couldn't. And as climate starts changing, as they start having difficulty with their borders, with money and things. And the mid third century, Decius makes a law that everyone has to sacrifice to the Roman gods because it'll restore the peace of the gods. And when Christians don't do that, there's a huge persecution of Christians that happens.

[Sean Ryan]

That's what triggered it.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

So they were open to it.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

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

[Jeremy Ryan 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 is the Greek symbols for Christ. And he hears the words under this sign, you will conquer. And he wins that battle. So then he has this idea, well, the Christian God is now supporting me. So then in 313 A.D. he's going to take Christianity. And though Romans hadn't went after Christians unless times were bad, Christianity was technically illegal in 313. The Edict of Milan makes Christianity legal and he will start to move it from being more of a pagan empire to a Christian empire. And it's going to be fully a Christian Empire in 380 under Theodosius when he names it the official religion of Rome. And they get rid of their pagan gods.

[Sean Ryan]

So Rome became a Christian empire in 380. A lot of people are saying, and I tend to believe it, that the more the government removes God from, from our, from our cult, from everything, from our culture, from our schools, from discussions, from, from government, from everything.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, is, is it seems like they're trying to get him to disappear. Did the Roman Empire do that too? Now you have all this other.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Not really.

[Sean Ryan]

All these perversions, perverted shit that's happening.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So that, that was actually the second and third century for Romans. Like things aren't going well. You have a lot of the perversion and things like that. There's a emperor in the early 220s. He's a teenager and his name's Elagabalus. And he has. He's the priest of a cult called Elagabal, 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. So he was also having parties where he was pushing the Senate to basically have orgies, which they were not super happy about. So things are really bad. In the third century, he's assassinated and his body's actually drugged through the streets. But if you look at things actually improve spirituality wise, and it starts to become more of a Christian nation. But the problem is the West's sins had been so deep it was hard to fix. And if you look at Constantine, though, he brings Christianity to a higher standing. The thing that's really important about him, which doesn't get talked about a ton, is he actually fixes the currency he takes. And he'll repossess a lot of the pagan temples. And he starts minting gold coins from them. And in the year 314 in Trier, Germany, he 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 till 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 just spirituality couldn't really fix that. The kind of levers of power were broken.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So that's a really difficult question because he's talking about the Punic wars which are in the late Republic and there's three of them over about 150 year period. And I don't know if I would completely make the. Well, I guess maybe you could because if you look at one of the things that the Punic wars do is they start to heavily Rome had always been a very military society, but it starts to become heavily militarized in that time period. And I think if you look at it's hard to say who is who, but I think we go more towards being Romans because if you look at in a lot of ways, especially in the last 50 years, we've hyper militarized in this country. It's a very big section of the economy, a very big section of what defines things. But I think in a lot of ways history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, right? So I think it's hard to say exactly that we are Rome and China is Carthage. But I think those patterns are similar because what ends up happening is global events will happen because of certain things that are currently afoot. And what I mean by that is if there is a constant state of war, well, decisions are going to be made to handle that situation. Right. And if you look at a lot of what's happening with US and China relations right now, a lot of policy is made because of what's happening between the US and China. And even more in the last couple years, it's also been the US and Russia. Right. So a lot of policy is made often short sighted because of the situation we're dealing with now. And that's a lot of how the Punic War was for Rome. The Punic wars is it changed from more of a citizen soldiery to becoming more of a standing private army. And people stop having real allegiance to Rome and more to their commander. And that's actually going to be one of the big things that causes the empire to rise and also the empire to fall. Because that is a very dangerous situation to be in where people aren't as loyal to the group that they're part of, but more loyal to a person. And so I think if you look at that, that's a pattern that repeats. But I think it's hard to say, is the U.S. rome in this case, and is China Carthage in this case?

[Sean Ryan]

Makes sense. Makes sense. All right, one last thing.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yes, sir.

[Sean Ryan]

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

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Thank you, sir. You're welcome.

[Sean Ryan]

You're welcome. You ready to kick it off?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Let's do it, man.

[Sean Ryan]

All right, here we go.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So I actually have something for you too. Did you want me to.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, perfect.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah. So this is actually, I have a, a coin supplier. I work with Kinser coins from my friend Dean Kenzer. 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So that is a mid thir 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 coin served a propaganda purpose too. So this was to really solidify his power. And this is two different half coins, first century coins from Augustus and his top general Agrippa.

[Sean Ryan]

Man, this is cool. Thank you.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yes, sir.

[Sean Ryan]

Thank you.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's always nice to hold a piece of history and you have a lot of it here too.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. Look, these are going to look great here in the studio. I'll probably get them framed, hang them up. Thank you.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

You got it, man.

[Sean Ryan]

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

[Jeremy Ryan 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, it's something that those short sighted solutions often don't fix things. And when I look at Rome, I see something I like to call the Roman pattern. It's the three things that if you look at empires 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's three things that tend to happen most often and, and in different ways. But the first is they don't handle their money well. Right. They start inflating it to a point that the money is absolutely useless. There's a story about Weimar Germany that when you wanted to buy a loaf of bread, you would fill your wheelbarrow with money and get to the store. And by the time you got to the store, there wasn't enough money in the wheelbarrow to buy the bread. Wow. And so inflation is something I think for a lot of people, they don't really understand. But it is the number one thing that causes empires and societies to collapse. Because if your money is worth nothing, well, then you start to have nothing. Right? And the other thing is immigration and poor border control. Because if you're not handling your country or your empire, your civilization, and there's a lot of people that don't define themselves by that civilization. That's not to say, you know, you have to be the most, you know, American person out there, but it is to say you need to be loyal to the country that you're in. If you look at places like Minnesota and other places, they're starting to lose their identity as America. There's places the cops won't even 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 I'm going to handle this next election cycle. And when you start doing that, you're creating future time bombs for your civilization.

[Sean Ryan]

That's all happening right here, right now.

[Jeremy Ryan 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.

[Sean Ryan]

How long was the Roman Empire? What was the run?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So if you want to look at it, it's an over 2000 year history. It's founded in 753 BC as a kingdom. And there's traditionally seven kings of Rome from 753 to 509B. And because of those initial kings, Romans hated the idea of kingship. And it comes to be the last king of Rome. Vii. Tarquin the Proud is the most hated. His son is in the military. And there's another man in the military that he likes that man's wife because she's supposed to be the most upright and most chaste woman. So he has his way with her. It's called the Rape of Lucretia. And because of this, it ends up really blowing up on Tarquin. And there is a family called the Brutus family, which is actually the same family that's going to assassinate Caesar. And that's an important point that actually removes Tarquin and his son from Rome. Now some people say he was killed, others say he was just kicked out, but that's the end of the kings of Rome. So the Romans hated the idea of Kingship. Now from 509 to 31 BC, it's a republic, but it's not a republic in the way that we think of republics. It's more of an oligarchy in a lot of ways. The way you had power is having money and possessions and things like that. Yeah, they voted not as individuals, but in what are called voting centuries. And the centuries are actually originally based off of the idea of like 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 have a political position. If you didn't have money or you weren't literate, you didn't have the ability to kind of do a lot. So that goes until 31 BC. And then from 31 to 476 is the empire. And The Empire in the west, in the east, we end up calling it the Byzantine Empire. But they wouldn't have called themselves that. They would have called themselves Romans. That goes until 1453. So it's basically like a, almost 2000 year history of what the Roman Empire was.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. Wow. And we're at 250 years.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah. I think that's something to consider is we're not as old as when I was studying in England. I studied at New College Oxford for a bit. And if you look at a lot of the buildings there and just how old they are, and our oldest buildings aren't as old as their, their newest buildings, a lot of times it's American society just isn't that old.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to see. I mean, I think you're going to tie a lot of parallels to what we're seeing today. There's a lot towards the end of the Roman Empire and a lot of people do say, you know, history, history repeats itself. Like you say it rhymes and I think we see that. But you know, it was actually Mark

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Twain that coined that face to phrase too. So I can't take credit for that.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, one question I have just from diving into our own history.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

How accurate do you think history in the Roman Empire actually is? And the reason I ask this is you see all these institutions just in America, just in this lifetime that are lying and changing history, things are being recorded, not how they fucking happened. In a lot of this is to protect the institution. And you think about it, and I've just dove into a couple of institutions. There's probably, there's gotta be close to a thousand institutions in this country.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Whether it's churches, government, whatever it is 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. It's like, okay, every institution is doing this. This is just one country. So then think about all the institutions in the world. And then you think, if every institution in the world is doing this and lying and manipulating history and we're just one little sliver in time that's infinite. How do you know? Because the Romans had to have been manipulating history as well. In the context.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's a pattern that doesn't change because it goes back to who's in power. Right. And it goes back into who's literate. Right. If you look at, look at rome, less than 10% of their society is literate. Right. So if you're not literate, you're not going to be writing. And I think that's an important point. So if you look at a lot of the history you're getting, you have to understand what the power structure is at the time, because the power structure is going to dictate what the history you're getting is. And you can look at that in any society. But if you look at my degree is actually in the propaganda of the first emperor, Augustus, because he had to basically make people think they were still living in a republic, even though it didn't exist anymore. So one of the major things he does is he starts commissioning works of literature. So the Aeneid is written during his time. The famous Roman historian Livy, who writes during that time, writes his Roman histories during that time. There's a poet named Ovid who wrote what's called erotic poetry, which Augustus didn't like because he was very naturally conservative. So he's kicked out of Rome. So a lot of those things were very manicured in ways. So that's the history you're getting is often going to reflect the power structure it's written in, because you don't want to piss off or upset the people in power, and you don't want to piss off or upset the emperor. Right. You want it to be something that describes things, to give people a certain vision. And it's that way in the Republic, too. You want to show the republic as a powerful something that honors tradition. And if things don't honor that, well, you're not going to write about them. Right? You Want to. The 476 fall date of Rome is often something that's heavily debated as well. And as I said, western Rome, the emperor in the East, Justinian in the late fifth and early. Well, late sixth and early seventh century, is going to decide that. He wants to reconstitute the Roman Empire. And the west, for some point in time, had fallen into being these kingdoms of just barbarian kingdoms. So what he ends up doing is, by force, under a general named Belisarius, tries to reconquer the Western Roman Empire. And a lot of it is destroyed during this period of time. So a lot of the writing you're getting that says rome fell in 476, well, that's going to come from the east, because Justinian's going to look bad if it says, you know, he burned down the empire to reunite the empire. So you have to look at the power structure that dictates the Literature you're getting. And I think very oftentimes you're not going to write things that look bad for the group in power. Mm.

[Sean Ryan]

And so how, how, how much confidence do you have in Roman history?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Enough that we can understand what happened to a degree. And that's the thing about ancient history, is when you look at American history, we know for the most part, because we have a lot of primary sources exactly what happened during that time. You know, we're going to still have the narratives of what people want to say. We know a lot more about it because it's more recent, we have more primary sources. Ancient history, there's a lot of sources missing. There's. Because part of it is just they're writing on papyrus and things similar to that, which just don't last as long. The other part of it is things 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. So you'll get a lot of theories around ancient history, and those theories, the historians will say they're very correct, where another historian will have a different theory, and they're also very correct because we just don't have as much data as we'd like to have to actually know what happened. So we can kind of surmise we have some primary sources, but you have to also understand where your primary source is coming from and whose opinion are they and who do they support.

[Sean Ryan]

Gotcha. Gotcha. How much difference have you seen between people that have recorded it or contradictory?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

Makes sense, man. It's like scary shit to think about, you know, everything we think we know maybe.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, in a lot of ways we don't. In a lot of ways we don't.

[Sean Ryan]

We might not know shit.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

There's Plato has what's called the allegory of the cave. I don't know if you heard of this.

[Sean Ryan]

No.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So the allegory of the cave is there's people that live their entire lives in a cave. And the only thing that they know about life are the shadows they see on the walls. And when they come outside, they can actually see what's happening and see what's occurring. But their whole life is by these shadows. A lot of what we get in history and in media and in opinion out there is just shadows. We don't always have the full background. Man.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, I was. I was just. I was watching. I was watching two of my friends have a podcast yesterday, last night, AJ Gentile from the Y Files and Tucker Carlson, and they were talking about the pyramids and.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Oh, I listened to that one.

[Sean Ryan]

You listened to? I did.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It was really.

[Sean Ryan]

And I've been hell bent on this history thing because I haven't even released this interview, but I interviewed this guy and it was all about kind of recent global war on terrorism. Lies. And. And so that really got me thinking about what I was just saying. Like, man, it's just. If it's just this institution, all these

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

institutions you look at around Egypt, like the things we don't know and the things that have been altered because the

[Sean Ryan]

opinion that in the things that they taught us that are complete. I remember looking at pictures of slaves picking up these huge blocks with sticks in my history books.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And I'm like, holy shit. Like, this is just fucking garbage.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, it might not be logistically possible.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's like they didn't have the technology to do it.

[Sean Ryan]

And then I've. And then just in. I found out. I didn't even know this, that did you know, a money. I guess you do because you watched it. They've never found a mummy in the pyramids.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I heard that in that episode. I did not know that until I heard that.

[Sean Ryan]

Me neither. And so it's just like, holy shit.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

This is what he was saying. Like, maybe they came from it earlier. Yeah. Maybe they came from an earlier civilization or something. He was making the claim of a

[Sean Ryan]

lot of this stuff, though, throughout the world. But you know, one thing I think what I want to start here with you. Most people misunderstand collapse as a moment and not a process.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah. So when you look at that, when you're living through something a lot of times, like, and this is the same for Romans, you're still paying your taxes, you're still going to work, you're still doing a lot of the things you usually do. And that's what happens in these, these downslides. You just kind of alter your daily life just enough to get by. Right. Like if you look at even during civil war in certain countries. I went to, to Athens in 2013 and that's when they were having all the fires in the middle of Athens. 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 the 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. Right. I think it's really important to understand like the American Civil War, it wasn't like, okay, so we are now at war because this battle happened. Well, something happens, something else happens. It's a 10 year period and then finally you're at war. I meant to say the American Revolution, but it's very, it's decades, not just something that happens suddenly. I think people watch a lot of movies and they have this idea that there's these great cataclysms. Sure those things might occur, but they're part of a broader spectrum of things that occur and lead you someplace. It's not often a cataclysmic event

[Sean Ryan]

makes sense. And so how long was the process for Rome?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So the most famous work on the Roman Empire is Edward Gibbons, Decline and Fall the Roman Empire. It's written in 1776 in seven volumes. So it's like really great as a doorstop. If you want someone to hold your door Open, but you have to, it's to understand. Gibbon's world is important too. He's born as a Catholic, but to get more political power, his father convinces him to convert to the Church of England. So he's going to have a lot of problems with the early Catholic Church that's rising in Rome and that's actually in his work. And he gives Christianity a lot of flack for the collapse of Rome, when in all honesty, it really had nothing to do with it. Now the other thing he's dealing with at the same time is the American Revolution. So he's writing this in seven volumes. Initially, things are going really well for the British, then they start going worse and worse and worse and worse. And that's going to affect how he's writing. So once again, it's important to understand the world of a writer. And when you look at that though, the thing I think he is right about, and that I do agree with wholeheartedly, is Marcus Aurelius is what's called the last of the five good emperors. And the thing that they did differently is they didn't take their natural born son and make the next emperor, because that had gotten you a whole mixed bag of emperors. You might have a good one like Vespasian, but then you get his son Domitian, who is terrible, or you might get a Caligula, or you might get a Nero, because you don't know how qualified that next person is. The thing that they do is 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 different and at times you have to feel for him as well, is those other four didn't have natural born sons. Aurelius does. He has this son 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, 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 though. But it is a real process you can look at because the next emperor after him really changes the way the Empire. After Aurelius, after Commodus.

[Sean Ryan]

Commodus.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Commodus dies in 192.

[Sean Ryan]

And so it started with Marcus Aurelius.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, Marcus Aurelius was, was a, 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.

[Sean Ryan]

So that was the, that was the, that was the end. That was the spark.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It was the spark. And there's 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?

[Sean Ryan]

Who's they?

[Jeremy Ryan 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. You know, if they weren't happy, they might kill the Emperor. And this happens on a number of occasions.

[Sean Ryan]

So was this like a shadow government?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's like a shadow government a lot of ways.

[Sean Ryan]

Did the citizens know about it?

[Jeremy Ryan 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. So in this year of five emperors, you have Pertinax being the first to buy the Empire. Then there's another name, Didius Julianus, that buys the Empire. And the last one that comes in that year is a military commander named Septimius Severus. And he comes in with his legions and actually conquers Rome. And the thing that he changes is he enlarges the Roman army. He's going to remove all the Praetorian Guardsmen and put only his loyal men in the Praetorian Guard. So he's changing the guard and he's also going to double the pay of the legions. And that's something that for the next 200 years, emperors after him are going to follow is they're going to start doubling, tripling, quadrupling the pay of the legions. And that's something that's going to start fueling inflation. There's other things fueling inflation, but that's one of the key things fueling inflation. And when someone became emperor, they would give a gift to the legions that's called a donative. It comes from the Latin word to give. So they would give a bigger donative and they would also double, triple, quadruple the pay. So by the time you get to 284 A.D. they're at 15,000% inflation. Their silver coin that was 95% pure in the first century, like those coins I gave you that are, those are bronze coins because they're 5% pure by the late 270s. So the money is worth almost nothing.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So he kind of, 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 barrack emperors. It's going to be a guy named Maximinus Thrax. But barrack emperors, meaning military barracks, these basically guys that, they weren't politicians, they hadn't been through Roman office. They just have an army, a lot of steel and a lot of, and a lot of power. And that is basically how the third century is going to really start compounding this collapse.

[Sean Ryan]

So that's a bad thing.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

That's a bad thing, man.

[Sean Ryan]

That's. I would think it's a good thing.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, it's because what ends up happening is power starts to centralize more and more and more.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I don't disagree with you.

[Sean Ryan]

Now you get these scumbags that, you know, they just show up.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

There's not much else you can say about that.

[Sean Ryan]

But anyways.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, no, I don't.

[Sean Ryan]

But that was bad in Rome.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's bad because that goes back to the military reforms I talked about earlier. Because what ends up happening is their loyalty is just to that general and it's not to Rome as a whole. So it ends up creating these fractures within how the society actually functions.

[Sean Ryan]

A transactional military.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Correct.

[Sean 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?

[Jeremy Ryan 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 in the military. And I guess to just handle that word barbarian, it comes from the Greek word because Greeks would hear the hear barbarians saying bar, bar, bar, bar, because they didn't understand it, they spoke Greek, so they would call them barbarians. So then in Latin they used the word barbary for beard. So they were these bearded guys is basically the thing. Because Romans until the mid second century didn't really have beards. The Emperor Hadrian, who was from Spain, was the first person to actually be an emperor and have a beard. It was good to shave your face in that period of time. So these bearded Germans were seen as barbarians. And when you look at how the military changes over the. Over the third century, they start bringing more and more and more barbarians into the Roman legions. They start to become less and less and less Roman. And by the time you get to the end of the third century, Constantine's going to create a group called the Fderati, which are basically military, but barbarians. And they don't have to follow Roman law and they live on the borders. So you start to have this real disintegration on what is a Roman and what is the Roman army.

[Sean Ryan]

Crazy, right? You're going, so I'm still at transactional military and you're moving into immigration.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, because they work together.

[Sean Ryan]

Sounds like they work together.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

They do.

[Sean Ryan]

Because I see a transmit trans in the way you just described a transactional military for money and for power. And what do we see right now? This is. I'm a military guy. I have friends that are still in. This is what I hear. This is what I hear from. From a lot of people. I'm just waiting for retirement.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

I don't even believe in what we're doing anymore. I'm just waiting for retirement.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Because I have so many years in just waiting for retirement. And then on the other side, you have the flag officers who will do anything, lie to anybody, fuck anybody over, do anything they possibly can just to get that next star. And we've covered that time and time and time and time again on the show. These fucking generals and admirals that will do anything they can to get that next star, which is transactional and it works for them.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, look, our leaders are shit.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

So they have been for quite a while. But.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

Well, that's drawing a parallel here.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah, you could. You could say that about the Roman military as well. Because if you look at the third century, which to me is the most pivotal time in history, and nobody seems to talk about it, they talk about the 5th century, the fall and the 1st 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?

[Sean Ryan]

No.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So the phrase worth your salt meaning you have value. One of the other things that military commanders did is they paid their men in a certain amount of salt because salt had a lot of value. It could add flavor to food, it could preserve food. So they're paying them in coin and also in salt. So if you could give them a lot of the right coin and your coin still had value, well, then that's great. But if your coin starts to not have value, you see loyalty start to change. And you'll see a barbarian fighting in the Roman army one day. And now he's fighting with his tribe the other day. So you see someone like Alaric, who is the Visigoth commander that sacked Rome in 410, he had worked in the Roman army and he had actually was trying to get a position in the eastern army and the eastern army and the western army had been using them against him, him against each other, and then eventually he realizes neither of them are going to give him what he wants. So then he sacks Roman 410. And this is a pattern you're going to start to see of these loyalties that just change and shift based on what are the stuff you can give Me and what is the money you can give me? It becomes extremely transactional. And when people also don't have the identity of being Roman, well, it becomes even more transactional and even easier to change that opinion.

[Sean Ryan]

Makes sense. Makes sense. Let's move into the immigration stuff that you were talking about. Can we start over there?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah, so. So if we're looking at the third century, it's kind of a broad spectrum of things that we're looking at. If you're looking at, as I mentioned, there had always, to some extent, been barbarians in the Roman army, and there had always been people that weren't exactly Roman, but might get citizenship at some point. And if you fought in the Roman legions for 25 years, you could get citizenship.

[Sean Ryan]

People wanted citizenship.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It was a very valuable thing.

[Sean Ryan]

Like today. Yeah, people want American citizenship.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

When I had a conversation with your team before for Patreon, one of the questions he asked was, what was the most valuable thing for a Roman to have in its citizenship? Because if you look at St. Paul in the Bible, well, he's a Roman citizen, and because of that, he had the right to address his grievances directly to the emperor. And he couldn't just be killed without getting to speak to the emperor. That was a right they had. So citizenship has a ton of value. And so early on, when Rome is expanding, it's not quite an empire yet, it's a burgeoning republic. And one of the things they're going to do to enhance their military force is they're not going to ask for taxes, they're not going to ask for tribute. They're going to say, you give us a certain amount of military men and we'll protect you. And then later on, those conversations become about, well, we want citizenship. And if you look at the late republic, the Latins were people that lived in Italy, but they weren't Roman. So there was a big fight for, can we have citizenship? So citizenship had a ton of value. And as you get into the late republic, it has even more value when things pop up like the grain dole. The 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, well, that's going to fuel inflation even more, because you have to feed everybody. So as you get into the third century. In 212, the Emperor Caracalla has basically bankrupted the treasury. And citizenship, though it had a lot of value to it, it also had a lot of taxes that were built into it. One of them was a big inheritance and death tax. So he gives 30 million people citizenship overnight, what's called the Edict of Caracalla. So that to me is the moment when citizenship starts to lose its value even more.

[Sean Ryan]

30 million.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

30 million people overnight. So now you're responsible for feeding those people, but you can tax them. So that's great, right? It's those short sighted solutions if they work. Yeah. So that is a real problem. So citizenship had value and people wanted to be a Roman citizen because you could live in a territory like North Africa, but you could be a Roman holding Roman office. So there was a pathway for you if you could get citizenship to be able to be in government, to be able to have certain jobs, to be able to advance certain ways in your career. So citizenship had a ton of value. So people wanted that. And it's going to start to lose its value later on because, well, if Rome doesn't really have coin and if Rome doesn't really have power, why do I care about being a citizen of it? So that's something that's going to start to change. So we're looking at the immigration conversation. Initially they want to be part of Rome and initially they want to serve in the legions because that is a pathway for them to a better life. What starts to happen in the third century is these Roman commanders. There's in a 50 year period, there's 27 different guys that are going to claim to be Emperor. It's called the crisis of the third century. And they're basically going to have a military behind them and see whoever they can kill to become the next emperor. You're going to have emperors that rule for months and just a couple years. So it's a very hectic period. And what happens during that time period is the empire in the west actually starts to break apart. The part of it in the west becomes what's called the Gallic Empire. This general named Posthumous 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 that actually manages to rule that for a period. So the Empire is starting to disintegrate and the Empire doesn't have money to really pay for a lot of these things. So they start making agreements with barbarian tribes in the north of you. Come here. We'll make you safe, we'll feed you. But then, since they don't have the money and politicians are corrupt, they stop having the ability to keep those agreements. So that's where the quote unquote barbarian invasions start happening. Because Rome makes agreements, they can't keep the agreements, and the barbarians start coming across. So it's. If you were living in that third century, it would have felt like your world was falling apart because the empire is disintegrating. You're starting to have more tribes coming in from the north. And the real, I guess, citizenship and immigration conversation is they were so busy fighting each other, like our politicians now, you know, maybe they're not people, maybe they're not raising an army against each other, but we're. That's all our news is, right. Is this politician against that politician? Or this about Lindsey Graham, or this about Barack Obama?

[Sean Ryan]

A propaganda war.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Correct. It's a propaganda war. The way it's. It's more of that. I think General Flynn calls it fifth generational warfare. It's kind of that. More of a psychological type of warfare. So it's a similar type of component when that's all they're worried about. Well, your borders start to break apart. And that's the real problem that Rome starts to have in the third century is they just start having people pouring in because they're more worried about fighting each other.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

And if you look at what we have now, how many million people do we have here that we don't know about?

[Sean Ryan]

I lost count.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Nobody actually knows. And if you look at even. Have you been to New York recently?

[Sean Ryan]

Mm.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

There is, I think. Is it the Roosevelt Hotel where they're hosting a lot of, like, illegals?

[Sean Ryan]

I have no idea. So there's actually out of there as fast as possible.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

They get a lot of free. I live like 40 minutes from there. So, like, they live a lot. They have. One of the big places they house them is in these hotels that aren't really functioning anymore. If you walk past the Roosevelt Hotel, that shit's real. There's a dumpster out front with brand new things like strollers and things that are just thrown in there. Cause 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. Right. So it's a similar pattern that you

[Sean Ryan]

see in history we're just giving people free shit. And that's.

[Jeremy Ryan 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So it creates a situation where when the only reason people are here is for the stuff or the money, when the money doesn't have value, well, what loyalty do they have to society? And that's where you see these enclaves start to break apart. Like in Minnesota and Michigan and areas like that where sure, they're here or with all the stuff with the Somalians happening recently, I know you had Nick on not long ago, talk about what's happening with Somalians. Well, they're here for the goodies they can get and they're just going to rig the system till they can get them. And that's a real problem when people start to be short sighted and not worrying about, well, what is the future I'm creating for this system.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. Let's talk about the road to an empire, Kingdom, Republic, Empire, world.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah. So as I mentioned, Rome is traditionally a kingdom first and there's seven traditional kings and that's from 753 to 509. Now the Republic as I mentioned, it's a bit more of an oligarchy, but it is a much better place to live under. The Republic itself starts to disintegrate in the last hundred years. It's what's called the. There's a author named Ronald Sime and he wrote a work called the Roman Revolution. And that last hundred years is called the Roman Revolution. There's a lot that happens in that time period. I think often people hear about Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49 and that's how it ended. But for the most part it's a climate, if that makes sense. You have the Gracchi brothers that start doing these more public minded reforms. Then in the around the 1000s you have these two generals, Marius and Sulla. And Sulla was actually a. Which Sulla by the way, is Elon Musk's favorite Roman. So I don't know if that tells you anything about him or whatnot. If you hear a little bit more at Saleh. But Marius was this commander and Sulla was a guy that fought under him. And they're fighting against a barbarian tribe commander named Jugurtha. And Sulla manages to capture Jugurtha and Marius takes the credit by getting the triumphal parade. The Roman triumph was a parade where a military commander would march through the streets of Rome dressed as the God Jupiter with His face painted red. And all of the soldiers would be under arms because it was technically illegal to have weapons within the city walls, because the city walls are considered sacred. But for a triumphal parade, you could have that. And they would also carry behind them the people they captured. So Jugurtha is going to be paraded in this parade and Marius is taking all the credit. So Marius and Sulla start to have this disagreement on who's the most powerful guy. Later on, as you go into the 80s BC, there's going to be a problem with pirates, not that we don't modernly have a problem with piracy. Right. These things seem to continue. And Sulla gets the consulship to basically go handle the pirates. But Marius uses his political connections to get that position taken away from Sulla and get that position himself. So then Sulla is going to raise arms against Marius, which has never happened before. You don't have Roman commanders fighting against each other. So Marius is going to flee to Greece, he's going to die. He's of old age at this point in time. And he also held the political position of consul seven times. Now, consul is kind of like if you looked at the idea of being president. Romans didn't like one man holding power because they hated kings. So every year they'd have two consuls and they would equally hold power so that not one man held power. You were supposed to hold that position every 10 years. Marius held it seven times. He didn't live to be 70 years old. So he starts breaking this pattern of how do you get offices? So you start to see this breakdown, right, of first we're breaking down how the military functions, then we're breaking down how offices function. And then what Sulla is going to do in the year 78 is he's going to attack Rome. I'm sorry, 82, he's going to attack Rome and he's going to get the title of dictator. Romans had this idea that if you have an emergency, having multiple people handling it was too much of a problem. So for six months you would get this power called dictator. And after six months, you were expected to lay down your arms. Sulla holds that power for four years. So he starts to really break down again what an office means. And he creates this process called proscriptions. Now, what proscriptions are was there was a list in the form of names, and all of those people were to be killed. And if you brought that person's head to the Forum, you would get their land, their goods, you could possibly get their titles so what ends up happening is people's names that weren't people Sulla didn't like, but somebody else didn't like would get their name on the list because somebody wanted their stuff. So you start getting this breakdown of really what are societal mores and the way society functions. So Sulla is a really big breaking point. Now. On those list of prescriptions, there's an 18 year old named Julius Caesar. Caesar was supposed to be killed because Sulla wanted him to divorce his wife, because he didn't like that Caesar was married to the wrong political person. So Caesar decides he's not going to do that. And Caesar's mother, who's actually very connected, gets him removed from the list. So Caesar survives the prescriptions, Sulla's going to die in 82. And then if you go down the road, Julius Caesar takes political power in 59 BC, he takes the consulship in that year, and the guy that's consul with him is this guy named Marcus Biblius. And Marcus Biblius is basically a frontman for another politician named Cato the Younger. And Cato the Younger did not like Caesar. So anything he did politically didn't matter if it was right, wrong, indifferent. He would block anything politically. Caesar did shit.

[Sean Ryan]

This sounds just like today.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So what ended up happening is they had basically political mobs in that point in time. And Marcus Biblius is forced out of the Senate and into his home for the rest of the year. So they end up calling it the consulship of Julius and Caesar because he rules the whole year by himself. And after that period, he ends up getting what's called a proconsulship. So proconsulship is like a governor outside of the city of Rome. And that's if you've heard of the Gallic Wars. That's where Caesar basically goes. Kills about a million people and conquers deep into France. While he's in his last couple years of this, he hears word at the Senate that Cato has decided that he's going to raise political charges on him. And the way Roman society functioned, there's often this trope about it that your first year in political office, you were paying off your debts because these people were heavily indebted in order to raised the money to become politicians. The next year you were building your wealth, and the third year you were building whatever you could to not get prosecuted for what you did during that year where you built your wealth. So Caesar owes a lot of money to a guy named Marcus Crassus, and a lot of what he did in Gaul, paid off those debts. But then back in Rome, Cato starts creating charges that he wants to bring Caesar up on when he gets back into Rome. And when you're consul or proconsul, you can't be brought up on charges. You're immune from prosecution. So Rome has a culture of, if any of this is redundant, you can always stop me. But Rome has a culture of being elected in person. So in order to be elected for consul again, Caesar would have to show up in Rome to be voted for. So he writes a letter to the Senate and he gets something passed that he can be voted for in abstentia, which doesn't really happen, because he has this idea if I come back to Rome, where they're going to arrest me for these crimes that may be real or not real, Cato manages to get that order rescinded. So now Caesar has to come back to Rome again. And that's a real problem. So this is where the idea of Caesar crossing the Rubicon comes in. The Rubicon is this river in northern Italy. Modernly, we don't actually know where it is because the landscape has changed so much, but it was the northern border of Italy, likely somewhere near Milano in the north. So caesar has about 10 legions. He leaves nine of them at the river. And in 49 BC, he crosses the river with a legion and he marches on Rome. So what ends up happening is those politicians, including Cato, Pompey, and a lot of others, they leave the city. So Caesar comes into Rome, fights no one, and he has the city of Rome. And the Senate had actually given Pompey the power to fight Caesar. So over the next couple years, Caesar will be chasing Pompey around Europe and fighting him. And eventually the Ptolemy king is just going to behead Pompey and give his head to Caesar. So that is how you kind of get to the collapse of government. And because people will often say about Caesar, of all the bad things he did. Now, I'm not saying he's a good guy, bad guy, but I am saying the people in political power did push him to do what he did. You get what I'm saying? They created an environment where he had no choice, right, wrong or indifferent. They created a situation where he had no choice. But if I come to Rome, I'm going to be arrested, I'm going to be tried. Doesn't matter if these things are true or not true. So Cato's going to commit suicide by disemboweling himself. Pompey's going to be killed. And then you get to the situation where Caesar is now in control of Rome, so he's named dictator. And later on in 44, he's going to be named dictator for life, which is something unheard of. It's akin to a king. Now, if you remember I mentioned earlier, the last king of Rome is killed by a man named Brutus. Caesar is going to be later assassinated by two assassins named Brutus and Cassius. When you look at family ties in Rome, not upsetting your ancestors is very important. A Roman house would actually have these wax death masks of people that lived before them to remind them of what their ancestors did. So to Brutus, it was seen as a responsibility to remove someone they thought would be a monarch. And when you look at how Rome collapses in that last hundred years, it heats up with Caesar, but it's a degrade into that position. And if you look at modernly, even what happened with Trump, they pushing charges, pushing charges, pushing charges. Well, you put them in a position where what do you expect him to do? And I think that is where the system can actually cause the system to collapse and become something else. And Augustus, who's the first emperor, walks into the situation of 100 years of civil war. He brings peace. And then I do think this is a bit of a ruse, but then he says, okay, I'm going to retire. And The Senate in 23 demands that he stay in power. And that's where they give him the title Augustus. So it really is kind of an interesting position to be in. It didn't become an empire because one man took power. It became an empire because political people fought for 100 years, and then the last man standing was actually asked to stay.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

That was long winded. I apologize.

[Sean Ryan]

Where are we at? Are we an empire?

[Jeremy Ryan 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's three things that happened that year. The first is, you know, a lot of people will be familiar with the Jekyll island meeting that created the Federal Reserve. That happens in 1913. And the federal Reserve act is passed over the Christmas break.

[Sean Ryan]

When going to that. Do you know about this?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I don't know a ton about it, but the famous banking families go off to Jekyll Island. The Warburg family, who's one of the German banking families, is there. The Rockefellers are there. And they basically decide that they want to prop up A central bank, because they want to protect their own assets. Because if you look at the Federal Reserve, it's not federal and it doesn't have any reserves. It's basically a cartel, and it's owned by member banks. And a lot of the member banks are banks you're aware of. And the bigger investor in them is the biz or the bank of International Settlements in Basel. So it is really a cartel of banking. So they established this thing in 1913. The other thing that passes that year is the 16th amendment for income tax. Because now if you have this bank, you have to have a way to fund it, right? And they're going to fund it by taxing people. They had tried taxes after the Civil War to this extent, and it didn't last very long, but the income tax amendment sticks. The other thing that passes is the 17th amendment. And this gets.

[Sean Ryan]

This is not even drawn up by government.

[Jeremy Ryan 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 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. And, you know, 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. It'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 really starts to tip. Because I don't know if you're aware of this, but during the First World War, Wilson passed something called the Alien and Sedition Acts, where he could lock you up for talking against the war efforts in America. And then you have fdr. That totally changes the system. So to me, we haven't been a functional republic in a very long time. And if you look at early Roman Empire, what's that?

[Sean Ryan]

Over a hundred years?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Over 100 years. So we haven't been a functional republic in a very long time. There's still some remnants of it, some vestiges of it, but we have not been a functional republic in a very long time. Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, go. That kind of ties back to huge

[Sean Ryan]

loss of trust in American government.

[Jeremy Ryan 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 know that the money doesn't have the value it did. So, like with those coins I gave you in the beginning, as I showed you, 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.

[Sean Ryan]

That's why that happened.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So they physically know that, well, this coin doesn't have the value. Right. So you're going to have actually black markets popping up. Like this is a big problem. And Diocletian, that's going to do reforms in the end of the third century. Fake currency, not fake currency. Like people literally trading, going back to how they did things. You give me a sheep, I'll give you some grain. Like going back to black market trading. And people are, we were talking about gold prices earlier in the late third century and earlier, they start hoarding gold because they know the quote, unquote, silver they're using, which is now very obviously bronze, doesn't have any value. So the gold isn't really in circulation because everybody's holding it. So you start to have this real problem of people not trusting money and it starts to break the economy because now trade is breaking down. You also start to have the problem of people not knowing how long the person that's calling himself emperor is going to be in power. So that's also going to change loyalties because a lot of times you're going to have, I guess people in their retinue is an easy way to put it that, no, if this guy becomes emperor, I'm probably going to get this job. So those things are going to start to break down and they're going to kind of roll the dice with whoever they think has the most power.

[Sean Ryan]

Can we stop right there when you're talking? So how long was so when to. It went from terms to just to life.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

What do you mean?

[Sean Ryan]

Caesar? Correct.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Oh, okay.

[Sean Ryan]

So yes, you went from. You have X amount like, like today, what we have. You have, you know, eight years potential. Be the president.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Right.

[Sean Ryan]

And then Caesar comes along and it's just a lifetime.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

It was an oral constitution, it was an oral constitution.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Now, there were certain in the early Republic, there's something called the 12 tables, which are kind of the basic laws of what the rich people couldn't do to the poor people. But it wasn't a written constitution. It was oral. They were very much based in tradition. So that's. This is the way we've always done things. This is the way we're always 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 weird things happening. But Rome did not have a written constitution.

[Sean Ryan]

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

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yes.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, if there's no written.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

But it worked for 400 years, right? So it worked for 400 years. And it was only when you get someone like Gaius Marius saying, well, you know what? I know you're supposed to wait 10 years before you have a 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 corsa senorum and there was a list of political offices you would have to go through before you could actually be a consulate. And so because of that, people would be more seasoned, I guess, by the time they get that political position. But that also starts breaking down because Pompey the Great, the great conqueror of Rome, was a kind of sub general under Sulla that we talked about earlier. And he ends up becoming consul without holding any of the other political offices because Sulla just says you could be consul. So these norms start breaking down, but for a really long time they held in place. So, yes, it wasn't written, but they were very much based in tradition of how we do things. You know, you have to be 35 years old before you can do this, 40 years old before you can do this. You can only be a senator once you've already been a 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. So. And they even mark their years by who is in office. That year, it wasn't like it's the year 20, 26. It was, this is the year of Caesar and Biblius. That's how they mark their years. That's going to change under Caesar because he's actually the one that creates the. The Julian calendar. Because Romans had this problem where their calendar was missing like 30 to 50 days. So every couple years, the seasons would get way off. Like they, their calendar would say it's summer when it's actually winter, and they'd have all these kind of weird things. So Caesar creates the Julian calendar to try and fix the calendar. That's one of the reforms that Caesar does in his time as dictator. So after that, you are going to have people that are in office for life. And that's why when you have an emperor, if you have a bad emperor, kind of buckle up because you're going to be in it for a very long time period until either he dies of natural causes or somebody kills him. And that's where the Praetorian Guard, being the power behind the throne, becomes very important because they can decide, okay, we don't like this guy, we're going to kill him. And that's what happens. The first emperor for that to happen to is Caligula. And Caligula, which, by the way, his father Germanicus was in the Roman army and Caligula's name would have been Gaius Germanicus, but Caligula, the name is actually a nickname. When his father was in the military, they dressed him up in A little military uniform. And the name Caligi is the name for Roman boots. So Caligula means bootikins. So he's killed by the Praetorian Guard and his uncle Claudius is put in his place. So you do have kind of this. Things aren't going so well. The Praetorian Guard's gonna take out the guy in power.

[Sean Ryan]

So with the Praetorian Guard, are they. Where do they get their decision making from? Are they of the people?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So they. Are the.

[Sean Ryan]

Are they the pulse of the people or are they strictly a shadow government?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So they were originally the private bodyguard of the Emperor Augustus and they just become the protector of emperors. They wouldn't have cared what the people thought. They would have cared about being so close to the wheels of power. So for them, that's why they're looking at, well, this situation isn't going so well. This guy's crazy. I need to get rid of him.

[Sean Ryan]

Because they're the only ones that determine that the current emperor, king, whatever, ruler is crazy now.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's not so it's not like they

[Sean Ryan]

take into account the citizens of Rome.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's not that there is even a process. They're just looking at political positioning, right? It's not like, oh, things are going bad, Praetorian Guard's gonna get rid of the Emperor. It's just they're looking at it and they're saying, okay, this is bad for our future. We're gonna take out this guy. And you do often have, like, if you look at the second emperor, Tiberius, he has his Praetorian prefect, Sejanus, actually tries to replace Tiberius with himself. And Tiberius is a wild guy, by the way. He lives on the. He leaves Rome, he lives on the island of Capri, and he has like a sex palace there. And he would have prepubescent poise swimming in his pool that he called his little fishes. And so he was abusing children. They look at why Caracalla might have been so. Or Caligula made him so crazy because he was living at Tiberius's palace. So he likely saw a lot of things as a kid, in addition to. He later had some sort of a fever that they can't quite say what it is. But during this time period, Sejanus actually tries to position himself to be emperor. All decisions have to go through him, all laws have to go through him. Because Tiberius is off not even caring about ruling the country. He's off with his little fishes. So it's a very weird system in the way it operates. There's no. Like, this is where the Emperor stops, and this is where the Praetorian Guard begins. It's. Where can I get political positioning and where can I set myself up to rule?

[Sean Ryan]

How do you get into the. How do you say it?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

The Praetorian Guard?

[Sean Ryan]

Praetorian Guard. How do you get in there?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

You're selected by the Emperor.

[Sean Ryan]

How many of them are there?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I don't know the numbers.

[Sean Ryan]

You're selected by the emperor.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It changes over the years, so I don't know the exact number, but the Praetorian Prefect would have been the most powerful of them.

[Sean Ryan]

So each Emperor picks the Praetorian Guard and then they kill.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

He's gonna predict. He's gonna. He's gonna pick new ones. Right. You would have that position kind of as your military position until you're retired. But he might add new ones. The only time that they totally change is when.

[Sean Ryan]

So this would be kind of like Supreme Court.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's kind of like if the Supreme

[Sean Ryan]

Court one's done, you get to pick another one, but you don't get to kick them out.

[Jeremy Ryan 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. You know, it's kind of like.

[Sean Ryan]

Sounds horrible.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

They did a lot of things. Like, you could look at them really as the power of the deep state behind the throne.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay. Okay.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

And there are times when all of them are replaced. Like, as I mentioned, Septimius Severus, after the death of. After the death of Didius, Julianus replaces all of them and puts his own men in there, and he executes a bunch of them and lets. And takes others and just kicks them out of rome. And in 303, 11, when Constantine takes power, he's actually going to disband the Praetorian Guard. So that's the end of the guard. They had this stronghold called the Castra Praetoria, and it was kind of like their military stronghold. So they really do become almost like an empire of power within the empire.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, if you read Romans and the Bible.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

In that reading that. It sounds like you're reading what's happening today, too, I think. Well, my opinion.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I've made a lot of comparisons between what you're seeing happen with the FBI and what you're seeing happen with, I guess, Trump, for example. You know, it's this. People that have been there for a really long time, they've decided he's not going to do what he's going to do and they're going to stop it. The Praetorian Guard would have been the same way. They have their own political leanings, they have their own things they want done. And they're responsible for protecting the emperor, so they have the best opportunity to kill the emperor.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting. We talked about demographic and border pressure. Pretty much my immigration. I mean, what are the people thinking of all of that? Do the people even matter at all?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So you have to understand, like, there's not a lot of history about the people. And there's one of my favorite, like, I like doing great courses. I don't know if you've ever done that before, but they're like lecture series you can get a hold of. And one of my favorite is by a guy named Dr. Gregory Aldreti, and he talks about in Roman history, one of the biggest missing pieces that we have is what did the regular people do during their lives? Because for them it was survival. They were worried about flooding. The Tiber river would flood every year. They were worried about disease, they were worried about dying from random things. They were worried about being able to pay for things. They didn't really have time to care about those things. And as you get into the later empire, a lot of them would have never even seen an emperor, Right? So it's. Their life is just so drastically different than those that have money or those that have political power. They're just worried about survival. They lived in these giant apartment buildings that were called insulae, and they were just these giant, like tenement type buildings. And when people think about going back to Rome, the thing that you wouldn't quite think of that would be a big deal is it would have smelled God awful at all times. Yes, they had a sewer system, but it only worked in people's houses that had the money for it to work. There were sewers in the street, so people would go to the bathroom in copper pots and they were expected to go down their apartment building and throw it in the drain. But that's a lot of floors to go down. They would dump it in the streets. So if you've ever seen these imageries of people being carried around on these, they're called litters. Carried around the city. It's literally because they didn't want to step in urine and excrement because it would have just been everywhere. That's why the. If you've ever been to Pompeii, the curbs are like very high because the streets would have Been filled with lots of urine and excrement and horse dung and all their sorts of things.

[Sean Ryan]

Like San Francisco.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Exactly, exactly like San Francisco.

[Sean Ryan]

Centralization of power, Emergency authority becomes permanent.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So that's a really important point because as I mentioned earlier, Rome had an oral constitution and when a crisis arose, they would alter it to handle the crisis. But the problem is once you do that, you don't go back. And if you look at that with a lot of things we've experienced, the war on terror or 9, 11, or a lot of these different things that happen. The Patriot act has dramatically changed our lives. We're not going back like that exists. And there's a lot of these different things that we've changed our society because of. You know, Rome was very similar in a lot of ways. You know, an emperor gives away citizenship because he needs to handle the treasury. Or Christians are being persecuted because they want to bring back the peace of the gods. So they're trying to handle whatever's there right now. Because they couldn't think in the future. Right. Because especially in the third century, these guys are living such a short period of time, they're thinking about what do I have to do to live? What do I have to do to survive? One of the last emperors to even rule 20 years is Severus Alexander, who dies in 238. That doesn't happen again until 284. Because these guys are just, as I mentioned, 27 of them. Wow. At least there's, there's been some research that they found coins of other emperors. That's how you would know somebody was emperors. 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. So these terms are so short, they're just thinking about survival. And that's when the empire starts to change dramatically. And we can see that now with each crisis altering how we operate. Right. You look at, even with a lot of the woke stuff that's happened, like the verbiage we used to use, we can't use anymore.

[Sean Ryan]

That's what I was kind of getting at in the Bible is a lot of the woke stuff, a lot of the gender stuff, that was all happening in Rome. Correct? That was all happening in Rome.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah. Like one of my favorite all time movies is Tropic Thunder. You could never make that movie now. You couldn't because things have just changed so much. Like Robert Downey Jr. S character is hilarious. But you could never do that now. But if you look at, especially in the third century, we mentioned Elagabalus like he's. There's even stories that he had his own genitalia removed because he wanted to be the other gender.

[Sean Ryan]

So there's all these things, all these

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

things start to happen where, you know, gender becomes more fluid, mores start to change and alter morals start to change. We start to do whatever we have to do with our money right now. Right. If you're debasing currency, you're not thinking about what's going to happen 10 years from now. So a lot of these one time crisis handlings become a future solution. 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Early on, what were people putting their, putting their money in to save value? Did they realize it was happening? Did they realize they had to?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, for regular people there wouldn't have been much understanding. It's just as I said, survival for the, the rich. There was problems of them stealing public land for themselves and farming on it because there was nobody to really stop them because Rome had a lot of like public lands. So that's something you're going to see. But you're also going to see they're putting their beans more in political power, right, because they don't know where the money's going. But they're hoping that this next guy could be the guy that gives them something. So that's really what you're going to see in terms of where people are putting their money because the money's 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 and over again. It's worth nothing at this point. It is. And the person that fixes it, if they did, isn't going to be very popular because we'd have to deal with what we've done. And I think that's the point you get to.

[Sean Ryan]

Did they try to deal with it?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

They did in a couple 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 country very different or, you know, a civilization very differently. And so he divides it up differently. The word diocese, which is used by the Church now is the actual divisions that he created within the empire earlier. And still at this point, they're going to have the larger sections, which are provinces, but then he breaks them down into military sections called diocese. And he also puts the borders, he puts better control on the borders. So then he creates these two new positions. One is called a 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 comaes, which is later going to become the word count. So he really starts to shir up the borders in this way. But the other thing he does is he creates something called the tetrarchy, which means rule by four. So he creates two senior emperors, including himself, and two junior emperors, because this empire is too big for one person is what he realizes. And he's still always the one that's the most senior. But now he has a colleague and he has two junior colleagues. And that's the thing they actually do to get to stabilize it. So the 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. Even more so you're going to see the black market start to get even more prevalent. Another thing he's going to do is he's going to dramatically increase taxes because the empire needs more money. Another thing he's going to do is he's going to start making it so it's less easy to have social movement. So if your father is a farmer, well, you're now a farmer. So he starts to lock social positions. So you can kind of see, and I've had some disagreements with medievalists about this, but you can start to see the beginnings of what becomes the Middle Ages, right, How some of these things start to function. We're not all the way there, but we start to get there. He also changes the way he's presented. He's the first one to wear a golden diadem, which is a crown. And that's something that you're going to see after this point, all emperors wear. He also changes the kind of political class and he greatly enlarges the political class and starts to have people that their jobs are just being professional politicians. It is their bureaucrats. He creates a massive bureaucracy. So now he's really starting government. 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 actually going to be based in Ravenna, which is in the swamps in kind of northern Italy. So you really do see his reforms are an attempt to fix something. You can see what he's trying to do, but it doesn't actually fix anything long term. I think Constantine is really the better version of how you fix things. The number one thing he does, as I mentioned, is monetary reform. He puts them on a gold standard. And that really does help the East. He also understands that people need to believe in something. Like it is important to have people believing in something. And I think that's. He has this religious awakening, but I think that's also something he's considering is that people need to have some cohesion. So Christianity is a big part of creating this cohesion of the Eastern Empire. So if you look at that, that's how you know, you can kind of do it the right way versus the wrong way, but there are different ways that were tried to restore the power.

[Sean Ryan]

How did Constantine do that? How did he bring in Christianity?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So it's kind of a gradual thing, but he has.

[Sean Ryan]

How do you do that? How do you. I mean, so what was the. What everybody's worshiping the Roman gods and the ones that they brought in and

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

the ones that they brought in.

[Sean Ryan]

And then they, and then they try to bring in Christianity. How, how did they do that?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So Christianity is about somewhere between 2 and 5% of the empire at this point in time. So it's not like a, a big important thing, but by what he does it, it makes it more important. I had mentioned earlier, after the battle of Milvian Bridge, he has this vision and he, he beats his, his Maxentius, who's the guy. He's not in, he's fighting about who's going to be emperor. And after that, the first thing he starts to do is he starts to put more Christians in political positions. So that's going to start causing people to convert to Christianity for that. So it is initially, I guess, more of a political move, but at the same time he had to believe something happened, you know what I mean? And it's, it's, it's often something that, that's cited that he believes that because of this spiritual awakening he had, he was able to be in his position. And I guess the thing you have to look at is it has to be something God given or something spiritual for something that is such a minor thing to become such a major thing. You know what I mean? It's.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, I mean, this is introducing. I see now, I see how he did it. But I mean, this is, this is a tale as old as time. I mean, wars start because of religion and he's imposing Christianity on the Roman Empire. I was, I'm curious how it went because generally, no, no matter what religion,

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

it seems that it went well because less than 100 years, it's a Christian empire.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. When was the Vatican introduced?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

That's way down the road. Okay, so that's, you're looking towards the church of John. St John Lateran is one of the first, like main Vatican churches that's built. That's a, like a early medieval church.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So the current St. Peter's I think, isn't built until it's like after Julius II or something like that. Pope Julius II. So we're looking at like the 15 or 1600s. So, okay, so it's. And the medieval Papist, like the early. So this time period is called late antiquity when you're trying to classify it. And. Excuse me, the Pope during this point is really just another bishop, but he's the Bishop of Rome. The way that he ends up becoming more powerful is you have all these other different Christian beliefs. And they're trying to agree, like, what do we believe? And they start using the Bishop of Rome to basically arbitrate between them. So that's how the papacy starts getting more power, is people start looking to Rome to handle a lot of these other situations happening outside in kind of the provinces

[Sean Ryan]

with the immigration stuff.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

What's considered an immigrant in the Roman Empire? These are these lands they've conquered, and then they're bringing the people in.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

That's a very.

[Sean Ryan]

Readjusting borders and all this stuff. So, I mean, how. How are they. How are they readjusting borders? I wouldn't imagine they shrank.

[Jeremy Ryan 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. And you have some that become slaves, some that are offered in to become, you know, more Roman in a way. So that's going to change in terms of, you know, how the empire starts to change, because the empire's not conquering anymore. It's just trying to put things together. And in the 120s, Hadrian's gonna build the wall in Britain to kind of keep the Picts out. And a lot of those people in Scotland. So that does change, number one, how wealth flows into Rome, because wealth would come in with conquest. But then as well, it's saying who is an immigrant is a very, very hard thing to do. Because if you look at it, Emperor Hadrian, well, he was born in Spain. Septimius Severus, he was born in North Africa. Right. So it's like these lands that start to get annexed, well, people with political families are going to have a pathway where they could be emperor or be in the Roman legions or anything like that. So saying what is an immigrant is actually very hard, I guess, if you want to really say what is an immigrant, like in the third century. And so it starts to be the people that don't want to be Roman, if that makes sense. Because those early ones are looking at it for what are the political positions I can achieve? Because there is a pathway for me. Right. You look at somebody like Diocletian, who was born out in Croatia, like he shouldn't have had a path to be emperor, but he did. Or you look at someone like Maximinus Thrax, he's from the Greek city of Thrace, So there was a pathway for these men to hold position, but they're not Roman, but they are Roman by citizenship.

[Sean Ryan]

Right.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah, does make sense.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So it's kind of a, it's, it's a hard question to answer because a lot of people stop being Roman after a long time. You know what I mean? It's, it starts incorporating other territories,

[Sean Ryan]

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[Sean Ryan]

Do you think that's part of, I mean did they get greedy with conquering and that's part of this whole thing how they collapsed. Because if you're saying it was an immigration problem and the immigrants are people that don't want to be Roman anymore, but probably that means people that have been conquered that just. Do you know what I mean?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

No, I know what you mean. Once again, it's kind of a hard thing to answer because just because things change so much, right? So it's like if you look at early on, if they fought in the legions, they could get citizenship, but then the legions need so many more men because these emperors are attacking each other. In the 160s AD there's a plague called the Antonine Plague where 10% of the empire dies. They're not quite sure what it is. It might have been smallpox, might have been something like it. So now you have a much more of a need for people. So there is just this also need for people along with this need for fighting men. So it becomes a much more, I guess a way to put it, a much more mercenary culture, if that makes sense.

[Sean Ryan]

So this, all this brings me to another point. I mean, what was the reproduction rate? Do we have any idea what the reproduction rate is? I mean, because we see a lot of countries, we're getting close look at Europe, completely, totally different dynamic over there in the past decade than what it used to be. I mean, you see all these declining birth rates all around the world, and you see, you know, other demographics with rising birth rates. And a lot of people say that will be the downfall of China, of Europe, of the US of, you know, I mean, so was. What was the, what was the reproduction rate back then?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So if you look at kind of the early empire, and this is actually there was a big to do on X not long ago between Elon Musk and a guy named the Roman helmet guy, and they were going back and forth about reproduction because if you look at it, it's actually an early empire issue. One of the things that Augustus.

[Sean Ryan]

What do you mean by that? In early empire, one of the things

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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. We will. He starts enforcing marriage more. He's really trying to handle this problem. So towards the late republic, this is already a problem. And in the late republic, I forget the name of the historian offhand, but he's saying that Romans were more concerned about their fish ponds than about their actual, you know, running anything. So you do have a lot of this in the late republic, but. And that issue is just going to continue to get worse, that Romans aren't having as many children in terms of the rich classes. But you also have to look at as well, there was, I think the woman's name was Claudia, that she had 11 children. It was the mother of the Gracchi brothers, that she had 11 children. And the two brothers were one of only three that survived. So you also have to look at that is birth rates are lower, but also there was a lot of danger to people not living to adulthood. So that's a major problem. So that's not really going to correct. And that becomes one of the reasons that they need to keep bringing in more people, because you need to continue to Repopulate. And if you look at what we're seeing now, well, you know, people aren't having as many kids, especially in Europe. You look at what's happening in the UK right now, the UK is becoming less and less and less recognizable everywhere over there. And you go to.

[Sean Ryan]

Don't even recognize it.

[Jeremy Ryan 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.

[Sean Ryan]

You've systematically, completely, you've changed your culture.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Correct.

[Sean Ryan]

It's, it's, it's just not.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, culture is what holds us together. Culture is, is the glue that holds us together.

[Sean Ryan]

And we don't have that introduced so much of a different culture into your, into your country that the new culture now overwhelms the original culture.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And then everything completely changes.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, and you don't have a glue holding together. You don't have an ethos. Right. You don't have something that you live by. And that starts to become a real problem. And in that point in time, the only thing that matters is money and power. And when money doesn't exist anymore, well, you don't have a civilization anymore. Right. Like that's, that's the point you get to. Towards the end of a decline,

[Sean Ryan]

How did people start to lose trust in the, in the, in the institutions? I mean, the state survives, but the legitimacy does not.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, because Rome couldn't care for them anymore. I think that's the biggest thing. Like you start to see. If you look at the last 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 them. The son of Emperor Theodosius in the late 4th century, Honorius is more worried about his chickens that he's raising than his actual people. And that starts to become the problem you have where they couldn't care about the people that they're supposed to be responsible for. And I think you see that a lot with our politicians now. They're more worried about, I guess one part of, is protecting what they've done and don't want us to know about it. The other part about it is they couldn't give two. You know what's about us regular people because it doesn't affect them. And I think that's. You start to develop this separation and that becomes a real problem because they're making decisions for regular people that they're never going to have to live with. And I think that's a major, major issue.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow, where do we go from here?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, we gotta 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 balls to do that. But that is the thing that has to happen in terms of, I mean,

[Sean Ryan]

how would we do that?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I am not an economist, but I

[Sean Ryan]

mean if we just talked about, you know, the Federal Reserve, which I actually knew that was. It sounds like a government organization.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It's kind of like Federal Express though.

[Sean Ryan]

But it's, you know, but it's not. Yeah, people don't know that. And so how would you begin to fix it?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, I think one part of it

[Sean Ryan]

is getting paying off the national debt,

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

which, well, money has to mean something. Again, 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, they think the tariffs was more of trying to get production back in America. Because if you look at it, we're just a service based economy. We don't really build anything, we don't really make anything. You look at the rust belt. Wasn't always the rust belt, but now it's hollowed out. So I think one is getting industry back here. We need to produce things, make things, and that, that needs to exist. The other part of it is handling currency because if you handle currency then you have the ability to fix a lot of your sins. But we'd have to base our money on something. And I don't know, I don't trust cryptocurrency or some of those so much. I'm more of a precious metals type of person. So could you get back on gold? I don't know. We might be too far over our skis. But I think the other bigger part that doesn't get enough play is education. Like we're turning out people that don't know how to do anything. And I think that is a huge problem that we're starting to suffer with now because we have kids that have degrees, massive debt, and they don't exactly know how to do anything right. I have a history degree. I got very lucky that somehow people cared about the Roman Empire. But it's not an actually very useful degree in the world. And there's a lot of people getting degrees they're not going to use. There's a major thing that's missing in the world. And if you look at the trades, they still have that. And that's the idea of apprenticeships and apprenticeships before the kind of turn of the century, meaning that the 1900s were a very big thing in a lot of different fields. And it serves a couple different purposes. The first to give you experience and the second is to help you decide, do I want to do this right? Am I meant for this? But I think unless we handle education, we don't know people that know how to run this system. Right. If you look at when aqueducts fell apart, it wasn't because people didn't care about having water. They cared about having water. They lost the know how to know what to do with them. And I think that's the biggest problem we're going to run into is this brain drain and this inability to do things. And everyone eats, everyone's gotta 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.

[Sean Ryan]

I do think we still make stuff, I think. And I could be totally off here, but I think about this all the time. And I do want manufacturing and all these things to come back. I think it's extremely important. But I don't think that the narrative that we don't make anything is 100% true because we are very good at tech, software, stuff like that.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, and, and, and so, and then we, we sell this stuff to all these other countries. And, and so we are kind of. Look at Silicon Valley, I mean, California.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I'm looking more at like production and manufacturing. Like, you're 100% correct about tech.

[Sean Ryan]

Yes. And all I'm saying is that, you know, the world has evolved since then.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And so, yeah, while we're not. And I do want to be making all these, I want to be manufacturing. And I think that's important to come back. But I don't think it's necessarily fair to say we don't. Purdue, maybe we don't make anything. We don't, but we do produce things we have, in my opinion.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Well, no, I can agree to that because there are certain things we make, but we just, we don't really have manufacturing anymore. And for a lot of, like, a lot of small towns, like, I grew up in a very small town, everybody worked in manufacturing. And the manufacturing isn't there anymore.

[Sean Ryan]

Same here.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

So then what happens is the people aren't working as much, the drugs are coming in, the places start degrading. So it's like that. We either need a different way to look at things, or we need to figure out how to bring manufacturing back in some ways, because that is how a lot of people do provide for themselves, and that does make the economy stronger, because then we're not so reliant on Mexico, where we get a lot of our automobiles from, and a lot of other places. It's about autonomy. You know,

[Sean Ryan]

When the Romans were expanding the empire, were they. Were they going after strategic locations for resources and things like that, or was it just.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

It was very strategic.

[Sean Ryan]

It was.

[Jeremy Ryan 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. So that land. After Alexander the Great dies in 323 BC, his generals basically divide up his empire amongst themselves. The last remaining of those are the Ptolemies, which is under one of his generals, Ptolemy. So the famous Cleopatra, or Cleopatra vii, is the final Ptolemaic ruler. And after her death, the Romans basically take over this area, and that becomes the breadbasket of the empire. And what would happen is the Nile would flood every single year, and that delta would become very rich. And it was a great place for growing grain and other things that could feed people. So they were looking at that, or if you look at when Trajan conquered Dacia, he was conquering that because they were silver mines there. So they're looking at, where can we bring in resources? Like, it's very strategic on places they're conquering. It's not just, hey, we want land. It's what are places that are very strategic for us, Caesar was a little bit of, we just want land and glory. But when they are conquering, they're looking at, what are these strategic resources we can have? The Punic Wars. Carthage was the biggest shipping power in the world at that point in time. And to have that area would make them much more powerful in shipping. So those are a lot of the things they're looking at, is how do we bring in more resources to run this empire?

[Sean Ryan]

Makes sense. Makes sense. What are we missing in the Roman Empire that parallels what we're seeing today?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

I think that's a big part of it, man, is just, 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. And I don't exactly know how we fix that? Because electoral politics has really become more of a whose team are you on every four years? So I think that is a major problem because they don't care about fixing the other two. So I don't know how to fix that one. But that is a major problem.

[Sean Ryan]

When did the empire realize that it had collapsed?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

That's really hard to say because if you go back again to that regular person living in there, he would have noticed that he's still paying taxes because the kings of Italy after the Roman Empire would have been charging you taxes, would have been charging you tribute. They hadn't seen an emperor in years. So I think to them it's hard to say when they, when they stop realizing they're an emperor, it's just, you know, more of a fade away than an actual collapse. You know, one day you just realized the civilization you lived in isn't here anymore. It's hard to say when that is, and that's why, sure, 476 is an endpoint, but I don't know that people in that year would have felt any differently than they did in 400.

[Sean Ryan]

When do you think we'll know when a president becomes a tyrant?

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

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

[Sean Ryan]

Do you think we're witnessing the fall?

[Jeremy Ryan 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 like 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, man. Well, this was a fascinating conversation.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Yeah, I appreciate it, man.

[Sean Ryan]

Thank you. If you had three guests to recommend for the show, who would they be?

[Jeremy Ryan 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 like, really well known people named Caleb Gilbert. Absolutely brilliant guy. I'm trying to think of who else would be a great.

[Sean Ryan]

Because of course, give me another historian.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

Another historian. I actually think he's not a historian, but he looks at cycles. He wrote the book the Fourth Turning. I'm trying to remember what his name is. I'd have to look it up for you. But he wrote the book the Fourth Turning.

[Sean Ryan]

We'll look it up.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

And the guy is absolutely brilliant. He looks at economic cycles and how they change every 40, every 80 years, and it actually can predict what's coming next.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, man, you gotta do that. That's awesome. Right on. Well, Jeremy, thank you, thank you, thank

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

you for having me. Appreciate it.

[Sean Ryan]

I hope to see you again. Yeah. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, 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. Ever since I started serving cut water canned cocktails to my guests. Hey. Hi.

[Jeremy Ryan Slate]

How are you?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, going through. I've gone from host to hero. Thanks to Cutwater, I can make real, perfectly mixed cocktails and seconds. It's as simple as garnishing a glass, cracking my can of cut water open and pouring it over ice. Cut water, real cocktails, perfectly mixed. Copyright 2025 Cut Water Spirits, San Diego, CA. Enjoy responsibly.