#166 - Freddie New - How Governments Destroy Money and Empires (The Lessons From Rome)

Summary

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The Peter McCormack Show — Episode #166

"How Governments Destroy Money and Empires (The Lessons From Rome)"

Date: April 16, 2026
Guest: Freddie New
Host: Peter McCormack

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Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging, historically informed episode, Peter McCormack interviews Freddie New, a classics scholar and investor, to dissect the lessons from the Roman Empire’s decline and how those lessons echo in today’s Western democracies. The conversation focuses on currency debasement, state power, social contract breakdown, and the intertwining crises of money, governance, and civilizational decay. Insights from Roman history are applied to contemporary Britain, the US, and the wider West, with Bitcoin and AI offered as both disruptors and possible solutions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Currency Debasement: Parallels Between Rome and Modernity

• Freddie: “Currency debasements are a fantastic place to start… Over the past hundred years, the pound sterling has lost about I think 95, 96% of its purchasing power in the last century. And then if you lay that over the currency debasement in ancient Rome, the denarius started to lose purchasing power around about the time of Marcus Aurelius. Then over the next 150 years, that had a comparable decline in value.” (00:00–00:49)
  • Rome went from stability under Augustus to catastrophic debasement under Diocletian; modern fiat currencies have followed similar trajectories since abandoning metal standards.
• Clipping coins vs. "money printer" (03:28–04:04): Rome began with ‘clipping’ coins and eventually diluted their silver content. Modern states use the printing press and now digital money—amplifying the speed and scale of debasement.

2. Why Money Is the Linchpin of Empire

• Freddie: “Money is so fundamental to humans and to human society. We literally could not function without an abstract form of value that we can use to exchange goods and services... [It] underlines who is going to end up in power and who's going to end up making decisions that affect the economy and the people who live in it.” (02:42–03:28)
• Role of the Army/Welfare State: In Rome, emperors needed to pay the army to stay in power—today, political parties must keep dependent populations onboard, whether via welfare or state employment. (00:35, 13:35, 42:43)

3. Government Debt, Inflation, and the “Soft Default”

• Freddie breaks down the options for government debt:
  • Debt jubilee (unrealistic in credit-based economies),
  • Hard default (politically toxic),
  • Or "soft default" via persistent inflation: “I'll still owe you £100, but I'll inflate the currency to a point where that hundred pounds won’t even buy me a boiled egg.” (09:25)
• Host: “That is the sleight of hand we keep playing.” (10:21)

4. Structural Decay: Infrastructure & Social Fabric

• The slow “hollowing out” of society through inflation: “Every day simple things will become a little bit more expensive... You’ll find yourself lowering your standards for everything… The only thing left will be the reality of the debt and their poverty.” (Read by Host and Connor, quoting a 2013 post, 24:31–25:55)
• Infrastructure as a marker: “The roads are a very good example. The extent to which a civilization is no longer [able] to keep its roads in good repair is indicative of its extent of decline.” (26:11–26:40)

5. Welfare as the New Army — Political Analogies

• Host: “I’m wondering if the equivalent army is your welfare dependents and your people who work for the state… because they want to keep it going for themselves. But it feels like it’s the exact same scenario.” (00:46, 42:43–43:17)
• Freddie: “Labour need a dependent population in order to defend their power structure.” (01:00, 42:56)
• The “uniparty” (government establishment) is trapped in a political cycle, unable to enact painful reforms for fear of losing its base.

6. The Limits of Democratic Reform

• Freddie: “No one is going to really vote for a party who jumps up and says it’s going to be really tough for about 10 or 15 years, but then things will get better… most people are going to say, ‘okay, when you say really tough, how tough do you mean?’” (44:55–45:34)
• Host and Freddie lament the “boomer” political lock-in, generational unfairness, and the difficulty of any collective response absent clear, short-term reward.

7. Collapse, Cycles, and Lessons from Roman Politics

• On Rome’s shifting structures: effective Republican government, the growth of the imperial center versus provincial drift, and the eventual splintering into East and West.
• Freddie: “I put us now in somewhere in the third century where things are, you know, civilization is still kind of working, but things are beginning to collapse… but then, you know, it’s happened within the last 150 years.” (52:35–53:06)

8. Degeneracy, Social Breakdown, and Public Morality

• Colorful anecdotes about Roman emperors’ excesses (e.g., Caligula, Nero) illustrate that elite decadence and public apathy were both symptoms and accelerants of collapse.
• Freddie critiques both romantic "decline of morality" theories (as per Gibbon) and emphasizes hard economic realities as the deeper cause.

9. Historical Remedies & Hopeful Precedents

• Constantine and the Solidus: After the nadir of debasement, Constantine introduced a stable gold coin whose value lasted centuries—suggesting collapse is not terminal. (57:15–58:20)
  • Freddie: “Constantine actually turned that around… he reintroduced hard money… the solidus retained its purchasing power for 700 years. Wow, that’s extraordinary.” (57:15–58:10)
• Cincinnatus: The “temporary dictator” who saved Rome and then retired (“We need a Cincinnatus, not a Caesar or a Hitler”). (49:03–51:42)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Freddie (on value vs. money): “In modern society, money is easy to create, value is hard to create, and people I think have forgotten or at least conflated the two." (20:52–22:45)

• Host (on inflation’s effect): “We’ve essentially created a treadmill where we were slowly increasing the speed over time. And in that time that person might be getting fitter, but eventually, like you get to a certain speed, you can’t keep up.” (23:18)

• Host (on political traps): “Potentially we are in a vicious cycle that we cannot escape because not enough people have said, I don’t want this anymore.” (43:17)

• Connor (quoting a bleak post): “There will be no collapse the way some of these people think… It’s far more insidious than that… Every day you’ll find yourself lowering your standards for everything… That is the collapse, the reduction of the American man into a feudal serf incapable of feeding love or hate.” (24:28–25:55)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Currency debasement parallels: 00:00–02:37, repeated at 01:49–02:37
• Role of money in collapse: 02:37–03:28
• Clipping and dilution of coins: 03:28–05:51
• Soft default and inflation mechanisms: 09:25–10:21
• Analogies: military vs. welfare/state power: 00:35, 13:35, 42:43–43:17
• Loss of societal standards; inflation’s personal impact: 24:31–26:11
• Collapse and social contract: 31:13–34:52
• Host reads powerful “gradual collapse” quote: 24:28–25:55
• Roman political remedies and cycles: 49:03–51:42, 57:15–58:10
• Modern dilemmas; no political pain tolerance: 44:55–47:36
• Bitcoin and principles of hard money: 58:10–60:07

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Insights on Solutions: Bitcoin, Hard Money, & AI

• Bitcoin: Both see Bitcoin as a form of digital hard money, analogous to the Roman solidus—a tool for “soft opt-out” by individuals, even if broader social adoption is slow and politically fraught. (58:10–60:07)
• AI & Productivity: The rise of autonomous agents can create massive productivity gains but may also increase economic pressure and blur the boundaries between companies and states as centers of power. (65:17–69:20)
  • Host: “If I had the choice in the next election [between] government or an AI government… I’d say give me the AI government.” (70:03–70:25)

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Conclusions & Takeaways

• The decay of empires—whether Roman or modern—is driven by a loss of hard money, unsustainable social contracts, and elite short-termism.
• Attempts to paper over decline—more debt, inflation, or “moralizing” policies—cannot fix systemic rot.
• Individuals can find hope in historical cycles (Constantine restoring sound money; Cincinnatus returning to duty). Collective action will be hard under current political incentives, but collapse is not destiny—“bad times may come but they pass again.” (72:15)
• Hard money and technological adaptation (e.g., Bitcoin, AI) may offer new paths, with the biggest question whether society has the discipline or incentive to change course voluntarily.

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Further Reading & Recommendations

• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (Freddie: “took me a year to read it.”)
• When Money Dies (on Weimar Germany’s collapse)
• The Law by Frédéric Bastiat (host recommendation)
• The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot (“Read the poem... and you’ll understand.”)

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Summary by: The Peter McCormack Show Podcast Summarizer
Episode structure & discussion captured from the words and spirit of Peter, Freddie, and Connor.

Transcript

[Freddie]

Currency debasements are fantastic place to start. Over the past hundred years, the pound sterling has lost about I think 95, 96% of its purchasing power in the last century. And then if you lay that over the currency debasement in ancient Rome, the denarius started to lose purchasing power around about the time of Marcus Aurelius. Then over the next 150 years that had a comparable decline in value. Its purchasing power by the time of Diocletian was 3% of what it had been. And in the time of Marcus Aurelius,

[Host]

once the currency starts to collapse, they have to repeat, they can't, they're trapped.

[Freddie]

The most important people the emperor had to pay were the military, the soldiers. And as time went on, the military became more and more important in deciding who was going to become emperor.

[Host]

So I'm wondering if the equivalent army is your welfare dependents and your people who work for the state and all they're doing is they're going to flip from labor to green or a mix of the left wing people because they want to keep, they want to keep it going for themselves.

[Freddie]

In your analogy, the emperors needed the army effectively to defend their own power structure. Labour need a dependent population in order to defend their power structure.

[Host]

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[Freddie]

I did.

[Host]

Based on your study of the classics and the fall of Rome, how do you compare it to where we are now?

[Freddie]

Currency debasement's a fantastic place to start. So the, obviously we're all familiar with the pound sterling over the past hundred years, the pound sterling has lost about I think 95, 96% of its purchasing power in the last century. And then if you lay that over the currency debasement in ancient Rome, the denarius started to lose purchasing power around about the time of Marcus Aurelius, the gladiator emperor. Most people will know him of course, played by Richard Harris, I think it was in Gladiator then over the next 150 years that had a comparable decline in value. Its purchasing power by the time of Diocletian was 3% of what it had been in the time of Marcus Aurelius. So in terms of pure time and pure number, those are worryingly similar to each other.

[Host]

Why is money the linchpin to the collapse of empire?

[Freddie]

Well, I think it's because money is so fundamental to humans and to human society. We literally could not function without an abstract form of value that we can use to exchange goods and services. Most of your listeners will already be familiar with the coincidence of wants problem, the idea that if you have an apple and I have a house, we can't trade between each other, unless maybe you've got half a million apples and you can sell those for something that I also want. So that's the coincidence of once in a nutshell. And money is crucially important for gigantic power structures like the Roman Empire and complex civilizations like our own, because it really underlines who is going to end up in power and who's going to end up making decisions that affect the economy and the people who live in it.

[Host]

And the debasement of the currency in Rome, like I understand it as the coin clipping, which, by the way, recently I understood from Lyn Alden, the grooves on the edge of the coins where to prove coins haven't been clipped.

[Freddie]

We still have them today for that same reason.

[Host]

Well, who's going to clip a pound coin?

[Freddie]

Well, exactly. It's a historical anomaly now. There's virtually no precious metal in any of our coinage anyway.

[Host]

No, but it was a coin clip in Rome. The equivalent is the money printer here. But what are the similarities between the times? Is it just the state living beyond its means?

[Freddie]

It's far more than that, actually. And even when you consider something like, like Covid 1919, there was an enormous plague in the third century. Perhaps I'm jumping ahead of myself to get to the third century. Maybe just touching on your coin clipping point. Actually, it started with coin clipping, and some of the earlier emperors began shaving little bits off coins. It then got a lot worse with the actual dilution of the amount of silver that was in each coin. And bear in mind that the most important people the emperor had to pay were the, were the military, the soldiers. And as time went on, the military became more and more important in deciding who was going to become emperor. You know, there was a crazy year after the, after the death of Nero. It's called the Year of the Four Emperors. You had Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Galba all in one year, all basically warlords killing each other. And then Vespasian came in and established the Vespasian dynasty and had a bit of stability. But shaving of the coin had begun then and then as the economy and the infrastructure of Rome began to collapse to a greater and lesser degree, encouraged by things like plague, by manpower shortages, by supply chain blockages, all of which are pretty familiar to us. Certainly over the last five or six years, the situation got worse and worse and worse. The salaries paid to soldiers dramatically increased. And you had an interesting example in the real world of people refusing to get paid in the old money because it's. Sorry, in the new money because its silver content was so much less than that of the old money. And so while coins of the empire, I suppose, rather than coin of the realm, were notionally of equivalent value, everyone knew that they were worth less.

[Host]

Did they get away with it for a while, though? Were people aware immediately they were clipping or shaving or diluting?

[Freddie]

I mean, they arguably got away with it for 300 years because they kept doing it.

[Host]

Right. And the west, the US have got away with printing money now for at least half a century or maybe more.

[Freddie]

Yeah, I'd probably say so. Two big periods of money printing. One was round about the First World War when we first came off the gold standard. And that obviously enabled us to print a gigantic amount of money very quickly to fund World War I. Then we did, in fairness, come back onto the gold standard. And so we had another period of relative currency stability. Not everywhere, obviously. Germany and Austria famously underwent Weimar hyperinflation. But then obviously in 1971, when Nixon depegged the dollar from gold, the creation of new dollars became entirely artificial and arbitrary at that point. And we've just seen that in terms of the increase of the us, the US national debt.

[Host]

And was it a similar scenario as we see here, where in Rome, as they were clipping the coins, there was like an inflationary pressure. But the wealthiest got seem to get wealthy.

[Freddie]

Oh, absolutely. Probably worth mentioning two things as well. So part of the wealth of Rome, I think, is a really interesting analogy to the wealth in the United Kingdom. So Rome became unfathomably rich, largely via wars of conquest. So they expanded their empire, they got access to more resources, more people. Huge amounts of money were funneled into Rome. And the. As long as the empire kept on expanding, then that process would continue. And there's an interesting analogy to draw there with the British Empire in that we, in terms of land area, I think, covered the greatest extent of the planet. And vast amounts of wealth and money were drawn into London. And actually the infrastructure point is an interesting One, we're still reliant to a huge degree on infrastructure that was laid down during the Victorian period, which is arguably the height of the British Empire. And if we're going down this analogy route, I'd roughly equate that to sort of Augustan Rome. So after the old republic has fallen, Julius Caesar's crossed the Rubicon with his army. He says, alia jakta est, even though he doesn't. But it sounds good, you know, the die is cast, and then he effectively establishes. Establish the empire. And the first emperor is his adopted son, Octavian, later known as Augustus. I roughly equate that to the Victorian era. Our sewers, for example. I think 40% of our sewers are still Victorian, which is just extraordinary.

[Host]

Yeah, so. So for you, when you're watching the geopolitical movements that are happening right now, are you automatically drawn to comparing it to what happened during the Roman Empire?

[Freddie]

Probably, inevitably. But as you said, it's like history

[Host]

doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

[Freddie]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, one of the key reasons why you study history is to understand how humans behave. And understand also that our. Although nature of the time that you live in may be different, the way in which humans behave is probably fairly similar in most of those situations. And so it's fascinating to look back at a highly complex civilization and realize, oh, we actually share quite a lot in common with those people, and we're making exactly the same mistakes as some

[Host]

of them did because of human nature, I think.

[Freddie]

So fundamentally, we're all kind of greedy

[Host]

and want an easy route out.

[Freddie]

Well, yes. And even if we're not greedy, if you're faced with two unpalatable alternatives, you'll choose the less palatable one. And then you keep on choosing that. And arguably currency debasement and money printing is a less palatable one. In terms of government sovereign debt, I've always been of the view that you can solve it in a couple of ways. You could have a complete debt jubilee, which doesn't work because our economy functions on liability money, on credit. You can, as a government, decide to default if you're Argentina or as Russia did in the relatively recent past. That's not great either, because then that wipes out your ability to raise new money and new credit in future on the markets. Or you can soft default, which is keep the nominal amount the same. So I'll still owe you £100, but I'll inflate the currency to a point where that hundred pounds won't even buy me a boiled egg.

[Host]

But that's, that's the sleight of hand we keep playing.

[Freddie]

Yes.

[Host]

And that is the sleight of hand that they played in Rome.

[Freddie]

Yes, to a very large degree. Remember I mentioned earlier you had. If you're an emperor, you have to keep paying the army.

[Host]

Yes.

[Freddie]

You don't pay the army, you're out. And the army are also aware that the silver content of their coins is getting debased. So they want more and more money. Their salary has to keep increasing. And if the salary increases, you create more and more coins. You reduce the value of the coins that are currently in circulation. So although they're using physical coins and can do it well, definitely to a much less aggressive extent than we can, they are still flooding the system with new money. The value that the individual purchasing power of those coins in the system is rapidly decreasing, as we can see from the graphs. I don't know if it's a good time to pull up our graph kind of we were talking about just before the show. You can see the. Yeah, this is a fascinating chart.

[Host]

Do those coins look all a bit fucked up because they're old or is that actual clipping in practice?

[Freddie]

A bit of both, actually. So some of the. What. So if we start. So the red period at the top is the later Roman Republic. So as you can see, the currency remained pretty solid and stable for about 150 years. And then Augustus takes power around about the time of the birth of Christ. And then you've got the Julian emperors who range who go from Augustus down to Nero and even time of Nero, you're still looking at like 90, 90 odd percent. Things began to trickle down about a century later. Marcus Aurelius presided over the initial drop there. And then again, listeners are probably familiar with Commodus, also from Gladiator, also a real guy and actually a much worse person in real life than he was in the film.

[Host]

He was even worse than the film.

[Freddie]

Oh yeah, he was a complete barbaric, barbaric lunatic. I mean, he did all. When you're reading about the kind of things these, these people do, it's. It's important to understand that the contemporaneous historians are often exaggerating how bad previous emperors were because they were writing under a subsequent emperor.

[Host]

Right.

[Freddie]

So you want to say, yeah, your priest is rule for. He used to do insane things. He would. There's a story about him, for example, tying together cripples who'd lost their feet in a long serpent in the arena and then clubbing them to death with Himself dressed as Hercules for the entertainment of people in the coliseum.

[Host]

Yeah. Nice guy. Is that going to be Yukon.

[Freddie]

Horrific person. And then during the second century thing and the third century, things got worse and worse and worse. And you can see the absolute collapse to 3% purity that we mentioned under Diocletian.

[Host]

And is it a case that once this starts, it's very hard? Like once the currency starts to collapse, they have to repeat. They can't. They're trapped. It's a bit like labor has to right now keep printing money. Trump has to keep printing money. And it's just an acceleration. You can't stop this really effectively.

[Freddie]

So. And although the reasons why you can't stop may be slightly different, one of our reason that we can't stop is not because we can't afford to pay the army, although we can't do that.

[Host]

We actually can't.

[Freddie]

Yeah, that's a similarity, but that's not an existential crisis for the country yet. It's more about the fact that we pay 110 billion a year just on servicing our debt. And that money has to come from somewhere.

[Host]

We don't want a hard default.

[Freddie]

No.

[Host]

Because that's politically not popular.

[Freddie]

No, exactly.

[Host]

And the consequences will be quite severe. So it's death by a thousand debasements, basically.

[Freddie]

Exactly. And inflation of 2 to 3% is high enough for them to keep achieving that. And we obviously know real inflation is higher than that, but it's not so high that people will be out in the streets demonstrating.

[Host]

So there's an inevitability of this.

[Freddie]

Yeah, a qualified yes, actually.

[Host]

Connor, can you find the chart which shows the pound losing its value over time?

[Freddie]

Well, I can do that off the top of my head.

[Host]

Oh, right. Okay.

[Freddie]

So if you look at around about where it says 100 year on the chart, just between the green and the purple lines. If you call that 100 years ago. So call that, you know, 1925.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Freddie]

Then now we're about where Diocletian is, which was that right at the left hand side where we've lost about 95% of the purchasing power.

[Host]

So we're near collapse.

[Freddie]

Yeah.

[Host]

According to this, we got better, but we've got different tools now. We've got technology.

[Freddie]

Yeah. I mean, we could still go down another 100% from here.

[Connor]

When I look at this chart, it makes me question whether the invention of paper money was probably the worst thing possible because it made the cheapest form of printing money.

[Freddie]

Yeah, I kind of agree with that. Because you can debase coinage but you can prove relatively easily what is silver percentage is or what is gold percentage is if you're printing paper money, which is effectively a credit claim on a central bank which ostensibly holds valuable assets. That's really what our pound coin, pound notes are. Then you know, your money printing ability is limited only by the cost of paper. Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

It just speeds it up.

[Freddie]

Yeah. And now that we're digital is even worse.

[Host]

Yeah. Did they have an equivalent of a socialist back in those days?

[Freddie]

It's funny you asked that because I really was thinking about where who was

[Host]

the Roman, Zach Polanski.

[Freddie]

I don't think that real equivalent existed. So it's interesting to think about in terms of morality though. So I think a lot of, a lot of people who have left leaning tendencies think that they are. That it's morally right to hold the belief set that they do. Whereas I think a lot of people on the right don't really bring morality into it very much and would be based more on what they would, I think, call logic or hard truths and say, um, Edward Gibbon, who's the source of a lot of our knowledge about the, the Roman Empire. If anyone has a spare year, read the history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1.5 million words depending on your edition. Between 7 and 12 volumes. Took me a year to read it.

[Host]

You've done them all.

[Freddie]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Wow.

[Freddie]

But he, he was very focused on the idea that Roman. A decline in Roman morality and appropriate behavior partly led to the corruption and decline of society in general. And so he had a very moralistic. Which I think his viewpoint of the decline and fall is now generally quite frowned upon. There are better economic realities that really underlie the death of empire. And there are a lot of people who would argue that actually empire didn't so much die as evolve into. For example, the Empire was split into the east and West. The Byzantine empire continued until 1453 and the invasion of the Ottomans and then became the Ottoman Empire. And a lot of knowledge and culture then came back over to Rome and triggered the Renaissance. So I'd see these more as a kind of cyclical. Cyclical evolution of different systems.

[Host]

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[Freddie]

I think that's a fantastic question and I'd be inclined to say yes. There's a sort of core idea I keep on returning to, which is that in modern society money is easy to create, value is hard to create, and people I think have forgotten or at least conflated the two. Ask the regular person in the street if 10 pounds has value and they would say yes. But arguably that money is a representation of value. It's not value itself. By value I mean things like businesses which provide valuable goods and services to other people, even educational services that help people better themselves and understand things, technology pipelines that build out our superconductors and our chips and so on. Those are all examples of value creation. But we've completely dissociated the creation of value, which money is supposed to represent, from money itself. Money is now created out of thin air at the press of a button in the bank of England. Every time the government goes to the bond markets, they are creating new money and then signing up to pay the coupon on those new gilts for, God, however long, you know. And every time a bank makes a loan, they've created more money literally out of nothing. So when you, when you go and get a mortgage for your house, the bank doesn't have that money sitting in its account. It's not lending you someone else's money, which is what a lot of people think. It literally credits that, that amount into your account and then it also credits the same amount into its, its balance sheet as an asset that bears interest, which you pay it. It's a phenomenally and, you know, bang on about this all the time. Runaway house prices are a direct symptom of the ease with which money has been created and is dissociated from the value of a house.

[Host]

Well, I think. Remember that quote that you found about inflation? Do you know the one I mean? That was the one about the hollowing out of society. And I think I, if you go to my substack, I wrote an article about it, so you go and find that. So my biggest concern with society right now is inflation because that's basically directly connected.

[Connor]

You're talking about the four champos.

[Host]

Yes. You've got it?

[Connor]

I can find it.

[Host]

Yeah. I'm Going to read you this thing. This is something Connor found and it blew my mind. But I think the hollowing out of our country is down to inflation because we've essentially created a treadmill where we were slowly increasing the speed over time. And in that time that person might be getting fitter, but eventually, like you get to a certain speed, you can't keep up. And I look across of what's happening on our country and every single level, if we're making it harder and harder for people to keep up, naturally there are others that go, well, I'm going to grift. We also have like a clearly corrupt elite system which has created socialism for the rich. Like in some ways being a bitcoiner is. We've got socialism for the rich. If you're an asset holder, you've got socialism for the rich. And I understand why young people are pissed off or other people in society are pissed off. They're like, what can I do to keep up? I'm like, I'm doing everything I can. I'm going to work, I'm working hard, yet I cannot get a house. It's getting away from me because my wages cannot keep up with inflation. And so I think this is the most important thing we need to deal with as a country. But this was the post. Let me read you this. It was really interesting. Connor found this and sent me to this.

[Freddie]

I've read this.

[Host]

Yeah. What was it you said to me?

[Connor]

So it was the most devastating and beautiful thing I've read.

[Host]

Yeah. So there will be no collapse. The way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie dawn of the Dead or whatever. One day suddenly shit hits the fan and the prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There'll be no happening. It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem the Hollow Men by T.S. eliot and you'll understand. You'll just notice that every day simple things will become a little bit more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will get smaller. Your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You'll see your family and friends less and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything. Work, food, relationships, job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging onto clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married. Even less will have children. People who engross themselves in technological Distractions and fantasy will never truly experience in the real world. Whatever dream people used to have about their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left will be the reality of the debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they were told, you are stupid, ugly and weak. But together we are free, prosperous and safe. That is the collapse, the reduction of the American man into a feudal serf incapable of feeding love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is, recognizing his own self worth, or recognize her self worth.

[Connor]

Broke 13 years ago.

[Freddie]

Yeah, 2013.

[Host]

Yeah. So that wasn't a mad thing. Connor sent me. I was like, oh. And then I looked at in 2013, I was like, holy shit. And so, and it says the American man, but that can be the British man, the European man. But I feel like this, this is what we're living through now.

[Freddie]

I completely agree. And you know, I've been on the, on the show before. You know, I grew up in the Middle east in southern Africa. I've lived in two very tough societies, one of which was in the process of collapse when I was growing up there. And you can see, I think the roads are a very good example. The extent to which a civilization is no longer to keep its roads in good repair is indicative of its extent of decline. And again, tracking back to Rome. The Appian Way, built at the height of the Roman republic, is still walkable today and is still used as a fricking road. We have Roman roads here in London. Watling street, not far away, starts near St. Paul's and it runs all the way up north up towards York. If you drive along that stay, you're pretty much tracking a Roman road. You drive around the roads in the southeast of England and before you know it, you've broken the axle on your car because you've fallen into a 20 foot pothole. And in collapsing societies you begin to see things like that happening. Things begin to deteriorate, infrastructure crumbles and no one fixes it because there's no money to do it and there's no one to pay to do it because no one will bother to work.

[Host]

There's that collapse of the roads isn't just the potholes. I don't know if you notice driving down roads now. You look at the side of the roads, there is rubbish everywhere, everywhere. And so my expectation that is, it's like, well, the people used to go and used to put out there to clean the size of the roads. They're Going less or not going at all.

[Connor]

Or we've become so indecent that more people just shit out their car.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, perhaps that's true, but I think we've always had indecent people who chuck shit out their car. But it's just everywhere at the moment. And I think a lot of the inflationary issues, a bit like, you know, how the west exports its inflation to the third World. I think we've been exporting our central government inflation to local councils because they go and bust up and down the country. I think something like 14 of in section 114s.

[Freddie]

I mean, they're effectively the most famous of the biggest, I think.

[Host]

Yeah. But all the other. I mean, almost everyone is facing it. Everyone is. I think there were like four councils who didn't raise their council tax.

[Freddie]

Yeah. I live in the southeast and our council is facing. I have a bit of insight into this through. So school associations, the gigantic cost of looking after the new special educational needs requirements and welfare and care in the community housing as well. Yeah, exactly. Pretty much wipe out everything else. So the. The local council is now a. It's now a welfare engine rather than supporting the council.

[Host]

That's exactly the same in Bedford. Yeah. And Bedford is facing a funding crisis. It's teacher on the edge of section 114. It probably will have one. It exactly the same problems. It's send provisions, welfare, supporting the homeless. And it's not that these aren't noble things to want to solve, they just don't have the money to do it. And so this, to me, I look at this and I look at what's happening across the country and I think about inflation all the time and I have a lot of empathy. I've got a lot of sympathy for the socialists. I've got a lot of sympathy for what they're saying. I just think their solutions are clearly wrong. But I've got a lot of sympathy and I really fear for what's gonna happen. And so when I think about that and I asked you about Rome, I mean, I've got to hear the political corruption, the military overstretch and the social breakdown and the degeneracy. That all happened in Rome.

[Freddie]

Right, it did. I mean, the degeneracy is probably the funnier one to talk about. I mean, I can reel off a list of Roman emperors, as long as you're on who did astonishing and weird and disgusting things. And again, as I said earlier, it's hard to parse exactly which of those are completely historically accurate and which were Kind of propaganda written by later ones. But supposing they're accurate, I mean, degeneracy starts very, very early. You know, Rome's obviously famous for orgies. Caligula, we've talked before, he made his horse in Katatus. A senator allegedly supposedly slept with both of his sisters on the way up, murdered his father, and then also slept with his mother Agrippina at some point. Okay, interesting chap. Had a, had a gigantic golden statue built of himself which he would dress depending on which God he was pretending to be on different days. Claudius, funnily enough, melted the statue down into coinage after Caligula, after Caligula passed being murdered, as he, as you would probably expect, Nero, we were talking about Sporus on the way up. Nero kicked his wife Poppaea to death and then fell in love with this slave boy, Sporus, who apparently bore a striking resemblance to her. And then had Sporus forcibly castrated and married him in a, in a ceremony where he made Sporus put on a wedding dress and would then repeatedly sort of deflower him afterwards. Again, an interesting chap, Nero.

[Connor]

What was the relationship like between the civilization and the population of Rome and the emperors? Like, how did, how did it work? Is it quite like today? Like we see today? The voter turnout's the lowest it's ever been. I know they didn't have direct democracy, but what was the democratic system like? Did it work?

[Freddie]

That? Interesting question because it did work very well for a very long time. So the Romans got rid of their kings. The last king, Tarquin Superbus, was about 400 AD. I think you need to fact check me on that. But then the republic lasted for a very long period of time and they did have direct voting and they had a very enlightened term limit style of government, which I suspect the American system derives from. They didn't have one person in charge in the Roman Republic. They had two. They were called the consuls. You were appointed for a year term. One consul served overseas and one served at Rome. So you had one managing the empire and one locally. I think you raise a very important point in terms of administration. We forget how big the Roman Empire was for its time and how hard it was for information to travel from the center to the periphery. So in winter the empire was about 120 days wide, and in summer it was about 90 days wide. And then we mentioned the year of the four emperors earlier. If you're like a general in a province in Britain and there's four emperors in one year, as soon as you Hear the news from Rome that there's a new emperor that's already out of date and there's another emperor's in charge. So in terms of governance of the empire, they had a system of client kings, legionary garrisons and generals who effectively would manage the periphery on behalf of the center. And being part of the Roman Empire, empire citizenship was a prized asset. Citizens couldn't be crucified, for example, although you had to pay taxes. The basic bargain was that the Roman army will protect you and civilize you. It'll build roads and build aqueducts and in return you won't get crucified and you'll have a relatively peaceful life and we'll keep the barbarians away. That was sort of the rough social contract of Rome. And then obviously that all began to deteriorate again. Tracking back to our earlier point, at the point when you're no longer able to keep your, your army paid, they might start looking around for someone who'd be a better and a richer emperor.

[Host]

Okay, and what was the shape of the economy? What were the kind of things the soldiers would be spending their money on? Was it just wine and food and horses?

[Freddie]

A lot of it would have been primary industry. So you huge amounts of agriculture throughout the empire, particularly in provinces like Gaul which were enormously rich. Egypt was prized possession of empire because of the huge grain productions in Egypt, silver mines in larium. I mean Greece was highly regarded for its culture, its intellect, its supply of really intelligent, well read and numerate slaves who were brought into empire effectively to run the gigantic bureaucracy in Rome and then huge amounts of engineering. And the Romans were phenomenal engineers, which is why that, you know, the Via Appia as we mentioned is still here. We can still see Roman aqueducts today. Those guys built to last. And I mean if you look at the gradient on an aqueduct, it's extraordinary that they were able to do that without using the number zero. They, they had no concept of zero.

[Host]

So they had a concept of zero, of course.

[Freddie]

No, no, no. Or their mathematics was completely without zero.

[Host]

Do you know that never even crossed my mind.

[Freddie]

It makes their engineering achievements even more extraordinary.

[Host]

So when did we get a zero?

[Freddie]

It's Arabic originally and I think I may be wrong here. I have a feeling the Babylonians had a concert of zero and I began it. I think it originally started with Indian mathematicians and then slowly moved its way westward.

[Host]

So was there a Roman ruler that started at one?

[Freddie]

I suppose it would have been, I mean an abacus had concepts of obviously beads and numbers, but there Was there was no concept of absence.

[Host]

Wild man.

[Freddie]

That's why their dates are so hard to read.

[Host]

I've got one on my. Here as a tattoo. Connor, I've got.

[Freddie]

Mm, 14, 20, 14.

[Host]

Four. Okay. And when talk, talk to me about the collapse. What was the shape of the collapse and how do you compare that to? Now,

[Freddie]

we're probably going to have to be quite inventive around the analogy here. The monetary collapse, I think, is fairly simple to map. And you can draw, I think, a direct correspondence between a long period of stability during which the currency is pegged to gold, or in Roman case, it was to the silver denarius, which remains relatively sensible and straightforward until the collapse that we looked at earlier. Various people did try to do things to stop that. So Antoninus introduced a new form of coinage, and Diocletian's solution to it was actually, maybe Diocletian is a good example of a Zak Polanski. So Diocletian was, in Gibbon's view, the last good emperor. Fun fact. He's one of the only emperors, I think, who died of natural causes. He retired to grow cabbages in Croatia. You can still visit his palace, actually. Amazing if you go to Split. So he was very, very morally upright. He tried to reintroduce worship of the old gods and sort out Rome's morality problem as he saw it. And he also introduced price controls, which I think is the. Probably the Zach Polanski parallel.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Freddie]

So I mean, something you said earlier about grifting, and I think you. You made the point yourself. I think you. It becomes comprehensible because you understand the despair that people are feeling now. You know, you. You do everything you're supposed to do. You work hard, you go to school, you study, you try and get a decent job. And then you can't pay off your student loan, you can't get a mortgage, you don't have children. And so you don't really. You look ahead at your life over the next 10, 20, 30 years, and you. You filled with despair, you, where the hell am I going to go?

[Host]

Where's my place in society?

[Freddie]

Yes, exactly. Where is your place in society? Because prices are accelerating out of control. So I think Diocletian understood the. He understood the problem in terms of inflation and the destructive effect that that was having on society because we were seeing the same kind of. The same kind of societal unrest and sense of despair in the third century. I mean, it's famously one of the worst periods of history to live through. I think we had 50 different emperors in 50 years. Wow. Well, it's like us in the UK with six different prime ministers over what, seven years or something.

[Host]

Yeah. And likely heading towards a hung parliament.

[Freddie]

Yes.

[Host]

Nobody can fix the problem. Yeah, nobody, no. Nobody has an idea. The public don't know what they want. Is kind of desperate times.

[Freddie]

Yes. But remember that. You remember the desperate times meme. It's, it's not, it's not a, it's not a one way street. It's. It's a cycle.

[Host]

Yes.

[Freddie]

And I mentioned before we started that I'm generally a very optimistic person and I don't see these bad times as the end state. We were talking about Diocletian and his recognition of the inflation problem and what he tried to do about it and form price controls, which I think there were more than a thousand different items, had their prices fixed, was completely unenforceable, created a huge black market and ultimately didn't work. And I kind of equate that to taxing the rich. Obviously we know how the Laffer curve works and you can increase the tax burden to a point at which it no longer becomes accretive to government finances to increase taxes. So there's a sweet spot for taxation in most economies.

[Host]

We're beyond that now, quite possibly.

[Freddie]

Did you see the stats this week?

[Host]

Which ones? There's been a lot that come out. I mean the downgrade. We've had the downgrade from the IMF inflation up, we've had the 0.5% growth reported today. But what a lot of people don't realize is their predictions. There's still more data to come in. Any of those. Anything else?

[Freddie]

How stupid of me just to say. Have you seen the stats? But the one I was thinking of in particular was the stat that we are now spending more than we are getting in income tax terms. So we are spending more on welfare. Exactly. So we're spending 330. 30 billion. 333 billion on welfare costs. So paying people not to work and from those who are working and paying income tax, we are getting in 331 billion.

[Host]

I want to talk to you about one of my new sponsors, which is Monetary Metals. Now if you're like me, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about sound money and how to protect yourself from currency debasement. Now for some people that's bitcoin. For others it's gold. For me it is both. But here's the thing about gold. Most of it just sits in vaults doing absolutely nothing. Monetary Metals is changing that. They let you earn a return on your physical gold holdings, but they pay it in gold itself, not dollars. So instead of your gold just sitting there, it can generate more gold for you. So to put it simply, if you deposit 100 ounces and earn around 4%, at the end of the year, you're going to have 104 ounces of gold, regardless of whatever happens to the price of gold in dollars. And in a world where fiat currencies are constantly losing value, earning a return in actual gold ounces is pretty cool. It's essentially making your gold productive instead of idle. Now if you hold gold and want to learn more, check them out at monetary metals.com forward/mccormack. That is monetary metals.com forward slash mccormack. See, I wonder if this is the correct analogy for the Roman times, because to defend the, the empire, you needed a strong army. Yeah, you needed a strong army. And so you had to pay them and you had to get them paid. And, and they couldn't afford because they were diluting the silver, so they had to pay them more, blah, blah, blah. So you had the inflation. So I see the two equivalents of that is that if you think of modern government, their job is to win and defend power. Okay, well, who is most likely to vote for you? It's the people who rely on you. Well, who relies on you? It is the state. It is the doctors and the nurses and the people who are teachers who work for the state. And it's all those who rely on welfare, not even just those who aren't working, the working people who rely on welfare even though they're going to work in Ireland. So who is going to vote for conservative economics when you rely on that? And we have this left wing push at the moment. So I'm wondering if the equivalent army is your welfare dependents and your people who work for the state and all they're doing is they're going to flip from labor to green or a mix of the left wing people because they want to keep, they want to keep it going for themselves. But it feels like it's the exact same scenario.

[Freddie]

That is really interesting. And I'm ashamed of myself that I didn't come up with that. That's a fascinating idea. So in your analogy, the emperors needed the army effectively to defend their own power structure.

[Host]

Yes.

[Freddie]

And obviously labor in power at the moment. Labor need a dependent population in order to defend their power structure.

[Host]

Yeah, and, but, but even more so than that, I think more than just labor, I think the institute of the government Itself, Yes.

[Freddie]

I mean government, I mean that. One and the same, really. The UNI Party.

[Host]

Yeah. And look, it can be, it can be just the organic incentives at work. Because even if you look at what reform are doing, they've tempered their ideas, they've tempered that. You know, they're going to keep the triple lock, you know, they've tempered their kind of economic plans because they want to win power. So potentially we are in a vicious cycle that we cannot escape because not enough people have said, I don't want this anymore. What happened in Argentina, the reason Argentina managed to get away from decades of inflation and hyperinflation is they went through so much pain, so many people are like, fucking, I've had enough of this. I don't want this. What's Milei saying? I want this. We want something different and it's working for them to an extent. I don't think we've got to that point at the moment. And it really frustrates me, and I say this about it a lot. The thing that pisses me off at the moment is you're a parent, I'm a parent, we will do everything we can for our kids, to leave them with capital, wisdom and opportunity. That's how you raise your kids. But what is the point of doing it only for your kids if everything around them is burning? Imagine I leave Connor with the ability to buy a home and a job and he's smart enough to live a good life, maybe meet somebody and has a nice enough life and has kids. But around him all his peers are struggling. They can't move out their parents homes, they can't afford a house, they can't have kids. They're, you know, nihilistic about everything. What is the point of that? So we have a collective responsibility, not just for our own kids, for all kids. And what we're doing collectively is we're handing them, we're essentially saying, we want shit now, you've got to pay for it in the future. Why are we doing that? Yeah, it gets to me, man.

[Freddie]

It's really damaging. But I think you cut something quite important. You and I are both still in this country and we are both, you more so than me, but I'm doing what I can. Relatively vocal in terms of trying to illustrate these problems. But I think you make a very good point that under our present system no one is going to really vote for a party who jumps up and says it's going to be really tough for about 10 or 15 years, but then things will get better and it's like I said earlier about the two bad alternatives. Most people are going to say, okay, when you say really tough, how tough do you mean? It's like, well, yeah, everyone, we're going to have to pull our socks up and basically get on a war footing.

[Host]

And who's it tough for? Because the reason, again, I bring this up, you know, I've seen the films and the documentaries of World War II and you see 18 year olds, even 17 year olds, lying about their age to go to war. You know, I've seen Dunkirk, I've seen what happened where people went across to go and rescue our soldiers. I've seen this. All the country came together, but, but even more so youngsters, teenagers went, okay, I'm going to get on a boat and I'm going to go in the trenches and I'm going to go fight war and I'm probably going to die. And they did it and they had duty to go and do it. And we can't even as adults try and protect the future. And so it's like, I'm all for the pain, I'll take the pain. Like people like, oh, you, you just don't want to pay. I pay tax, I'm happy to pay tax. If a party came and said, you know what, you rich people, you've got to pay a bit more. You know, we're going to up the tax. It's going to be 50%, 55%. And you know what we're going to do? We're going to lower the tax for. Yeah, maybe a no income tax until you're 25.

[Freddie]

I saw your post about that.

[Host]

No income tax until 25. You don't get to vote, but we're going to give you, you have a choice, you have no income tax or you get to vote. Which one do you want? Like some kind of fresh ideas. And in this process, what we're going to do, we're going to sequence ourselves off welfare. It's going to be a system, we sequence ourself off, but there's going to be no deficit spending, no more debt, we're not going to have any more debt and we're going to have to come together. It's 10 to 15 years and you're going to, you know, I don't know parts of the nhs. We're going to have to have you pay for appointments. I don't care what the pain is. Give me a plan that says this country will go from a definite sit to a surplus. Tell me my costs and I'll be part of that.

[Freddie]

Yeah. You couldn't pitch in.

[Host]

Yeah. Because Connor's generation, we're saying to them, you want to get a job, you want to get home, you want to have kids? Well, here's a path for you lot. And we, it's probably people 35, 40 and over are going to take the pain. Okay, I'll take it, I'll take the pain. Because what's the alternative? The alternative is us actually going, fuck you, Connor. Fuck you, kids. We want shit now.

[Freddie]

I mean, this is where we differ from the boomers because their whole lives they've said, we want shit now.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Freddie]

And perhaps we can't even get into a place of considering what you've just said until. I don't want to be mean about this, but perhaps until the boomers are no longer with us, they still exert a disproportionate effect on our society. They are, I think now all going to be net welfare recipients to a greater or lesser degree. And they sit on most of the housing wealth in the country.

[Host]

But then that points back to the problem of democracy. At the moment, every. Anybody who wants to win an election is fearful of pissing off the boomers.

[Freddie]

Yes, 100%. That's the triple lock.

[Host]

So we need to shame the boomers.

[Freddie]

I do try, but they're so immune to criticism. It's very hard to do that.

[Host]

Yeah. Just honestly, Freddie, I want to be optimistic and I want to contribute and I want to help, but I am so fearful of what is coming because we don't deal with this because we are not collectively going, let's get on a war footing, let's repair the country. Let's ensure that we have police funded, teachers funded. Let's ensure that there's an opportunity for youngsters. We're not doing that. We're going, how do we drive a little bit of growth right now?

[Freddie]

I think it's very, very hard to solve those large scale problems voluntarily. When we.

[Host]

Oh, here we go. We're going to get a dictator.

[Freddie]

Well, it's interesting you bring up dictator because particularly in the context of Rome, had actually two interesting people. You know about Cincinnatus?

[Host]

Yes.

[Freddie]

Yeah. So love the story of Cincinnatus.

[Host]

So I discovered him recently because somebody said to me, rupert Lowers our Cincinnatus.

[Freddie]

Interesting.

[Host]

So he didn't want to be. He was. Who was it? He picked him out. He was like a farmer or something, wasn't he?

[Freddie]

Because he used to. He used to own Southampton football club, I think.

[Host]

No, not about him. Cincinnatus.

[Freddie]

Oh, so since Cincinnatus was. Yeah, so. Well, Cincinnatus had been a high ranking Roman official in general, and then he retired to the country, to his farm.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Freddie]

And the Roman. The Roman political system that we touched on earlier with Connor, in addition to the two consuls, in times of crisis, the. The Republic, the Senate could appoint a dictator who was. It was a temporary role. And dictator basically means the person who tells us to do stuff. And the dictator would have absolute power for a short period of time, and then the Senate would remove that power at the end of his term. And Cincinnatus famously came back, defended Rome militarily in a period of crisis, and then relinquished his power and returned to his farm. So he was held up as this fantastic example of civic duty and the best Roman. And that's why Cincinnati is named after him, because the Americans, when they set up their republic, also held him in very, very high regard. He's the ideal republican, basically.

[Host]

So we need a Cincinnatus.

[Freddie]

We kind of need a Cincinnatus. Julius Caesar unfortunately perverted the power of the dictator because he. When we mentioned earlier, he crossed the Rubicon under arms, which no general was allowed to do. You had to relinquish. The Rubicon was the northern border of Italy between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy and Italia. He crossed under arms, heading for Rome because Pompey and his other. His other rivals were about to try him for charging with treason. And he managed to consolidate power at the heart of Rome, and then he was appointed dictator for life. And then when he was subsequently murdered because he wouldn't relinquish that power, there was another bloody civil war which eventually left one man standing, Octavius, who called himself Primus Inter Pares, the first among equals, the Partipatriae, the father of his country, and Imperator, which originally meant general, and then obviously now transformed into meaning emperor, and then he ruled as Emperor for what some people think of the golden age of the Roman Empire.

[Connor]

When Cincinnatus stepped back and went to his farm, did the collapse not just start again?

[Freddie]

No, it was. It was a. It was a. I forget exactly who was attacking them, but it was a short period of military crisis.

[Connor]

My thought process is like, is. Is this just the life cycle of vampires? Are they born, they grow, and they die just like humans do?

[Freddie]

I think it's probably. I'd say, yes, it's true. And even if it's not definitively true, then that's definitely how empires have behaved throughout History.

[Connor]

Can we look at history to understand how humans work and what will happen today?

[Freddie]

Yeah, exactly. Right.

[Connor]

So in saying so, are we just prolonging the death of our empire by trying to fight it?

[Freddie]

Yeah, I think so.

[Host]

And delaying our own renaissance?

[Freddie]

Potentially, yes. I mean, again, looking at the time periods we were discussing earlier, I put us now in somewhere in the third century where things are, you know, civilization is still kind of working, but things are beginning to collapse. We don't know quite how long until the collapse becomes terminal, but then, you know, it's happened within, within the last 150 years. I strongly encourage anyone listening to this who hasn't read it to go read where? When Money Dies. It's a story of the, of the Vaima Republic. Yeah, yeah. It's just horrific.

[Connor]

And just one more. Is there an example of the first province of the Roman Empire that stepped

[Host]

away

[Connor]

and did they have first mover advantage?

[Host]

You're sneaky. I know exactly what you're asking.

[Freddie]

So in terms of stepping away, not so much. The empire did splinter, so it split into east and west. There was a tetrarchy under Diocletian, so there were roughly four nominal emperors. And then it split formally into east and west. And arguably the Eastern Roman Empire fared better than the Western Roman Empire. Constantine moved the capital to Byzantium, which became Constantinople. And actually we should talk about Constantine before we finish because he's a bit of a ray of hope in all of this. And the Western Empire survived for quite a lot longer, you know, seven or 800 years longer than the Western Empire did. Romulus Augustus was the last Western emperor and he fell when, when the, when Rome was sacked by the Goths in 400 and something AD so there's no

[Connor]

example of fleeing a falling empire to.

[Host]

Why didn't you ask him the question you want to ask?

[Connor]

Is there a modern day

[Host]

Balaji put an idea in his head.

[Freddie]

Oh, the network state.

[Host]

No, no, no, no.

[Connor]

So like emigrate before it's over and

[Host]

then you can accelerate, liquidate, emigrate, accelerate.

[Freddie]

I think the closest analogy would be looking at the little bits of the empire that were carved off of the edges as power had to consolidate in the center. So Rome abandoned Britain, for example, three or 300 or so years after it originally conquered them. And then Britain was left to its own devices and then arguably turned itself into the next great empire. Yeah, given, you know, another. Another 500 years or so, what kind

[Host]

of is really asking us, why are we still here? Why have we left? And it's a fair Question. I mean the, the guy, the guy created JCB or runs jcb, the billionaire. It's like, yeah, I'm going to leave, I don't want to pay a 40% inheritance tax. The revolut guy left. Like all the wealthy people looking at our country and going, why am I going to stay here and give billions or millions to this collapsing state?

[Freddie]

Yes, well, I mean, fortunately I'm not wealthy enough to, to be able to give billions to the state. So that's one answer. Another one is I like Britain, I like the United Kingdom. My ancestors, most of my ancestors are from here and my family's got a thousand years of history here. Why should I be driven away by a bunch of short termist politicians who can't understand the fundamental issues that they're supposed to be dealing with.

[Host]

But therefore we're either in decline or in growth right at the moment. We're certainly in decline.

[Freddie]

Yes.

[Host]

And it's, how do we fix this?

[Freddie]

Well, we touched on this a couple of minutes ago. I think, unfortunately, voluntarily fixing it seems to be extraordinarily difficult. And looking back at how it's been fixed in history, I mean, the Weimar Republic is a dark example because the German economy was collapsing. People were literally starving in cities because farmers wouldn't sell goods to the cities because by the time they got home with the money they'd been paid, it would be worthless. So you had this extraordinary position where farmers were producing gluts of food that was rotting on their farms and people in cities were starving, literally dying because they didn't have anything to eat. And then the collapse of the German society got to such a point that they began to look for desperate solutions. And those included the darkest period in the last 150 years in Europe where the solution was a dictator.

[Host]

Yeah, and war. Yes, but you also just said, but maybe we need a dictator, we need a good one.

[Freddie]

We need a cincinnatus.

[Host]

I said, not a Hitler.

[Freddie]

No. And actually Constantine, when we mentioned in the context of Byzantium, I know I flagged up that rather depressing chart of money supply and money debasement earlier. Constantine actually turned that around. So it's important, don't stop with Diocletian because that's a sad end to the story, you know, because Diocletian's hard times, you know, they created strong men. And Constantine, who came into power shortly after Diocletian, he militarily reunified the empire and crucially, he reintroduced hard money. He introduced a gold coin called the Solidus, which was renowned for its purity, which people could rely on, which people knew was good money and wasn't being diluted and debased. And if you look at the data, that Solidus retained its purchasing power for 700 years. Wow, that's extraordinary.

[Host]

Yeah, it is extraordinary. And we are at a time where we actually do have a form of money that could retain its purchasing power infinitely. Yeah. As long as we defend its security.

[Freddie]

And it's digital.

[Host]

And it's digital. And it's. This is, this is. I don't know if you find this the same, but this is. One of the most frustrating things for me is that I have the firm belief that inflation will destroy our country. I believe that our country would be in a much better position if most people could have a grasp of basic economics. I think if people read Bastiat's the Law and understood that the role of government should be defending life, liberty and property, I think if we could get these basics across to people and get people onto a hard money standard, back onto that, which is part of the pain. I mean, we talked about it might be 10 to 15 years of hard times, but that 10 to 15 years of hard times could be a transition to a hard money standard. But at the end of it, well, what will we have? We will have a wealthier, more prosperous, happier society. But getting people just to take that first step is really hard.

[Freddie]

It is really hard. And I think at the moment because of, partly because of the extraordinary animosity towards Bitcoin that exists in the United Kingdom, the people who are able to get an advantage from it are the outliers and they're people who say, you know what, I'm going to opt out as much as I can. I'll stay living here, I'll keep paying my tax, but any spare money I have, I'm going to save in this hard money, which you can't debase. And, you know, I'll be, I'll participate in society and I'll do my bit. But you're, you know, thus far and no further, you know, I'll pay my 40%, but you know, that 60%, that's mine. And I think that's might be the way a lot of people are currently living. It's a kind of form of soft opting out rather than a soft default.

[Host]

It's not 60%, though.

[Freddie]

No, no, it's not. Not when you tot up VAT and stamp duty.

[Host]

VAT stamp, I mean, stamp duty is another incre one. There's another house in where I live where I live that I'd really like to buy. But I only bought my house three years ago and I wiped out a lot of my previous appreciative appreciation capital of my last house with the stamp duty on the new one. And I'm just not going to move again because of stamp duty. So what does that destroy? That, that destroys social mobility. But also what about all the money I would have spent in that house? It does, it does frustrate me. But trying to get people to just understand this, I think. So if we were to have a equivalent Roman leader for now, who would you choose?

[Freddie]

Who's the pool of candidates from the

[Host]

entire history of the Roman Empire? Who do we need?

[Freddie]

I mean, if we can have Cincinnatus, he would be excellent.

[Host]

Okay.

[Freddie]

Octavian was an absolute master strategist. Seem I would guess some form of psychopathy. He was extraordinarily gifted in making people like him and persuading people to follow him. Young, good looking, charismatic and astonishingly clever and in manipulating existing power structures.

[Host]

Is this you? Is it you, Freddie?

[Freddie]

I would absolutely hate it. And I'd be shit at it as well. But that, those, those are the kind of qualities that Octavian had. I mean Julius Caesar had a similar, similar bunch of. A bunch of policies. Master military strategist, charismatic, articulate, great writer. Ah, it's a hard question to answer because our society is no longer so heavily militarized and so the obtaining and losing a power is no longer associated with military force. I think you're, I think it is

[Host]

militarized zone in what I said.

[Freddie]

Yes, I was about to say your, your analogy there is really, really interesting. So who would the, who would the. The recipients of state beneficence, who would they choose to sort? Because the interest. If we, if we play with your analogy a bit more. If the power base of the power base Roman Empire was the army, if the power base of the modern British state are those who are dependent on the state, then who do the civil service and the mandarins, who do they coalesce around? If society is collapsing, who do they push to the front to sort these things out? Because at the point at which their way of life is threatened, if for example, a hard default becomes increasingly likely, if they themselves begin to realize shit, even I can't afford a house now. You know, at what point, at some point their, their own personal safety and security would be threatened, as it was for the army in under Rome, who would they coalesce around?

[Host]

Hmm.

[Freddie]

I don't think it's going to be Zach Polanski.

[Host]

No. Who's increasingly looking like a lunatic physically.

[Freddie]

And in terms of what he says or.

[Host]

Yeah. I mean, even yesterday when he came out with the idea that the highest paid earner in a company, is this a policy he's interested in, can earn no more than 10 times the lowest paid person.

[Freddie]

Well, as we know from Diocletian, those kind of things don't work.

[Host]

I mean, the interesting one is that the CEO of Tesco's could only earn 140 pound an hour. And you're going to have a different pool of candidates because people who would be a candidate to be the CEO of Tesco will go to another country and take a job.

[Freddie]

Yes.

[Host]

So it's, it's unworkable. It would destroy the economy. But also, interestingly, Connor pointed out the guy who runs the ticket gate at Manchester City would be on 50,000 pound a week. So it would create some opportunities. Oh, yes, because that's a great point, actually on 500,000 pound a week. But this is the crazy lunatic shit that's coming now. But, but the, the interesting part on the 10 to 1 ratio is the amount of people defending it. So I saw the announcement, I saw the people discussing and going, well, 140 pounds now should be enough for a CEO. Maybe you'll find a fairer CEO or if you don't like it, you should pay better wages. I don't think they understand. Tesco operates on a razor thin 2.2%. Yes, that 2.2% can lead to billions in profit, but it's razor thin to manage.

[Freddie]

Most people have never seen a profit and loss account or looked at a balance sheet. Unfortunately, most people haven't run a business. We know that no one in government has run a business. No one in the civil service has run a business that I could, I could name. I, I may be being rude. There may be people in the civil service who have done. And if so, I apologize. None of my friends have. I'm a bit of an outlier in that, you know, I went off to work in startups and in tech and.

[Host]

Oh, man. All right, well, listen, can we just do a small, quick pivot to AI?

[Freddie]

Yeah, yeah, quickly.

[Host]

How does that change things for you? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

[Freddie]

Again, I'm soured by irrepressible optimism. I think we're in an interesting transition period in terms of beginning to understand what you can practically do. And I connect that with the, the emergence of AI agents. Previously, up until maybe six Months ago, a lot of us were treating AI as an enhanced Google to ask questions and to help with writing. Let's say AI agents tie in a whole bunch of different skills like calendar management, sending emails, website checking, form filling and so on. And it's the first time I've actually felt a real step change in my use of AI. I've got an AI agent that we're exploring through at behodl in terms of automating payments and really exploring what kind of money agents will use. Agents obviously can't pass kyc, they can't get a bank account. And so our thesis is that there's going to be huge demand for the Bitcoin lightning network arising out of the agent economy. We were chatting beforehand. Our agent is already able to make lightning payments in reply to lightning addresses that have dropped into a Twitter thread. And I've since worked with Bitrefill to set her up so that she now has full autonomy. I can literally give her an instruction, buy me an Amazon gift card and she'll go and buy it for me on bitrefill. It takes 30 seconds and then the code's in my inbox. So part of our thesis in B hodl terms is that there's likely to be a huge upswing in demand for the Lightning network. Most people haven't seen that yet, therefore it's an asymmetric opportunity. We're excited about being part of building out the lightning network and we want to have a piece of that pie for us as regular people. This agent has made my diary management a lot easier. For example, I've set up with some skills to draw my calendar every day. Tell me what I've got coming up today, what I've got coming up for the rest of the week. It's helped me with finding flights, hotels, locations, like we were saying. I haven't given it my credit card details yet, but it has its own Bitcoin wallet and, and it's transacting autonomously online.

[Host]

Yeah, I had my first like this was a step change week for me. So I've been using it like you like an enhanced Google and, and also like prepping stuff like give me some notes on this review, this spell check, that kind of thing. But I, I started playing with Claude, which to me is just, it was, it was mind blowing, like slightly frightening how good it was. But I set up Claude Desktop and I now have essentially employees that do amazing research. And I set it up one night, I said every night just go and look at our website and Just give us ideas, ways to improve it. And came back with a list of things that you got. No meta descriptions on your, on your website, but I can do these for you. So I logged it into Squarespace and off it went and went to every single episode whilst I was scratching my balls and having a beer and replaced all the meta descriptions. Yeah, and so it's. That was the step change for me. My fear on it is, is that the increase in productivity is going to lead to exhaustion because it enables me to do more. And I don't want to do more, I want to actually do less. And so it's not leading to me doing less, it's leading me doing more. And I don't like that.

[Freddie]

I mean this happened before, this happens simply with a desktop computer. It seems to be again, talking about the way that humans behave. Every time we invent a new labor saving device, we use that spare time to do more work.

[Connor]

Yeah, but he was 21 when the computer was invented and now he's 45.

[Host]

My first computer at 5, dude, and I'm 47 and I'm old.

[Connor]

Is AI the next empire you think?

[Freddie]

The next empire, it kind of depends whether it's a. Whether it develops self awareness and is a benevolent God.

[Connor]

No, I mean more so five companies create this empire.

[Freddie]

Oh, in that sense I completely agree. Governments don't have control over these things. Governments still do have the advantage of being able to functionally impound things.

[Connor]

Who do you think has more power currently? Anthropic or the US Government?

[Freddie]

I'd still have to say the US Government because of the hard power. But I know Anthropic is also beginning to contribute to their deployment of that hard power, isn't it?

[Host]

Oh, they declined. Didn't they decline?

[Freddie]

Didn't they?

[Host]

Yeah, I think they did.

[Freddie]

Oh, I thought they used Claude to strike targets in Iran.

[Host]

I don't know, but I think they declined a contract with the U.S. government.

[Connor]

No, that was OpenAI and Anthropic took it over.

[Host]

Oh, I thought it was the other way around. Yeah, it is all blowing my mind. But I'm wondering if we are contributing to our downfall. But then I conversely, if, if I had the choice in the next election, and I know there's some caveats to how this would be programmed, but you can have vote for a government or an AI government. Don't say give me the AI government.

[Freddie]

Well, yeah, because I'm on the autistic side of things. I much prefer dealing with something that's logical, even if it tells me Answers I don't want to hear this is going to be painful, but it's true. Or have a sweetie. I mean, that's kind of where we are really. I had an interesting conversation with my agent though, around. Have you read the Blind Watchmaker? It's one of Richard Dawkins less well known books.

[Host]

No.

[Freddie]

Oh, there's a fascinating section in there where he talks about one particular theory about the emergence of carbon based life. And there's one theory that complex organic molecules first formed in sort of oily surface layers on a silica substrate, ancient clays. And so there's some traces of very early organic molecules forming on silicon. And then obviously they eventually, if we're correct in that theory, evolved into life and into us. And we've now given rise to what could potentially be another silicon based life form. And so I was chatting with my agent around this theory that maybe in the whole history of the universe, carbon based life forms will just be this tiny little flash between the ancient silicon life forms and an eternity of silicon life forms stretching into the future. Who gave birth to them?

[Host]

That's autism.

[Freddie]

That's it? Yeah, that's it.

[Host]

We cooked. We done? Oh, fuck. Oh, man. Well, listen, I appreciate you, man.

[Freddie]

Thank you. Thanks for having me on and I

[Host]

appreciate the history lesson. I don't know if I'm going to read 1.5 million words.

[Freddie]

Don't. She's very, very hard to read. If there's a summary, if there's one takeaway, it's remember, remember the Solidus and remember Constantine. So bad times may come, but they, they pass again.

[Host]

Okay, good. Hopefully it does. Freddy, love you, man. Thank you for coming in. Thank you. Everyone listening. We'll see you all soon.

[Freddie]

Cheers.