Welcome back listeners to the overlap podcast.
If you are just joining us for the first time, my name is Joshua.
And with me is my co-host, Will.
We talk about weird things, a combination of politics and AI and
technology and things that are going on today, as well as history and
historical lessons viewed through our current lens or something to that effect.
Today, we have a fantastic episode for you called, can this country be saved?
Can this country be saved?
Talking about, you know, not our country, but a civilization that's currently in
decline, can they recover?
Is it possible?
Welcome to the overlap.
If you are joining us after listening to us for a couple of times, you know, how
we typically go, so if you just wait just a second, I'm going to cue in the audio.
Like I said, welcome to the overlap.
I'm Joshua and I'm will, and he is will.
Will, how are you doing today?
I'm doing my brother.
I'm doing sometimes it's a hard day.
Sometimes it's a long day.
But it's always a good day for the overlap and all days got in.
That's the good thing, right?
Exactly.
And we're coming to the close of one now.
So look, we live in a period of cognitive dissonance, right?
A time of AI driven, slop art and a looming climate crisis.
That's going to probably end up with all of us just exploding into the sun.
Kind of a time of instantaneous global communication and brutal
19th century style land wars.
A time of billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and what's the Bezos guy?
Doesn't he own Amazon?
Of course he does.
Planning to colonize Mars while our own planet's ecosystems completely collapse
from the ceiling to the ozone layer, to the ground.
Yep.
And completely on brand.
We're going to call this time period in which all of these things
are converging, the overlap.
Meh.
Not to be confused with the wonderful, phenomenal show, The Overlap, which
is available on many platforms.
Although I find his platforms, this is, this is the moment when the systems of
the old world and the old world, which is, you know, the, the, the sort of the past,
right, the yesteryear, the thing that our grandparents and great grandparents
wistfully longed for when those systems are decaying, but the new world, for better
or worse, has not yet fully arrived.
You know, it's that, that, that new year's baby hasn't been born yet.
You're probably feeling it right now.
You felt it all along.
You're like, why is it weird?
Right.
And you're living in two timelines and you're seeing them, like converge and
collide in that feeling of dissonance, the sense that progress and profound decay
can exist at the exact same time is the classic feeling of a civilization in
transition.
Or more to the point, a civilization in decline.
Dun, dun, dun.
Which brings us to kind of the central question of this episode and kind of the
point, right?
A question that's become both impossible to ignore and also impossible to quantify.
We're kind of living in our own crazy, absurd, over the top overlap.
And yes, sorry, if you're, if you're, if you're not in the branding world, you
might start to hate how many times we use the overlap in this episode, but in the
United States, essentially we've witnessed a president who, after an election,
allegedly of dual, you know, certification and all that stuff by, by the Supreme
Court and no, Supreme Court doesn't certify elections.
The vice president of the United States, Congress, the Senate, yada, yada, yada
attempted to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, uh, who's spoken of being a, a
dictator on day one and who's stated political goal is the executive
aggrandizement, the systematic dismantling of every single institution that are
designed to check the power of the office of the president.
And historians and political scientists are now, I mean, it's not too recent, but
it's getting more obvious, they're drawing parallels to the fall of the Roman Republic.
We're seeing a tyranny, um, I hate this word, but unprecedented in its history,
uh, the replacement of the rule of the people with the domination of one man and
his wealthiest friends.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So like, I mean, I guess the big question that we're, we're trying to answer and
we're, we're having for ourselves and we hope, we hope our listeners out there are also
experiencing this same existential crisis, but can it even be saved?
Can, can a country, can a civilization, can an entire culture in decline ever
actually return to greatness.
Yeah.
This is that moment when you watch the action movie and the, the plane is
about to crash, or the building at the end of the runway and they're pulling back
and they're yanking back on the stick as hard as they can, and you're asking
yourself, is this, is this going to be permanent?
Is this like, are they, are they dead forever or is there something that they,
can they turn it around?
And, uh, history as it turns out.
Yeah.
We're the narrator that pops in, right?
Like, will they ever pull up?
Are they going to survive?
Check out next week on.
Exactly.
Tune in next week on the Bee Team.
But, uh, history as it turns out has some very specific and often
uncomfortable answers to this question.
Yeah.
When you hear the word societal collapse, what do you see Will?
Well, so I'll tell you what most people seem to see is that they see the Mad Max,
right?
They see these ruined cities, biker gangs, cannibalism, you know.
I mean, eventually.
Eventually, right.
Yeah.
The decline leads to a cannibalism.
It's not immediate.
It's not like tomorrow we'll, it's not like tomorrow we all start painting
ourselves in our neighbor's blood, but you know, whatever.
Somebody is wanting out there, hopefully not in our audience, that's listening,
like I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I hope it comes tomorrow.
You know, like I really want to eat Susan.
Right.
Uh, but that's almost entirely wrong about how civilizational collapse has happened.
The academic study of collapse is a little more boring, unfortunately.
But of course it is.
This is the overlap.
Right.
But perhaps more useful.
One, the man who sort of wrote the book, as they say on, um, on civilizational
collapse is an anthropologist named Joseph Tainter.
No, I wish it was, I wish it was, but that's, uh, that's unfortunate.
A real guide and our intellectual guide for this journey.
Yeah.
His 1988 book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies" is sort of the, the cornerstone
text for which the later academics built on.
And his definition of collapse is famously uncinematic, right?
It's not going to be something you hear in a world.
In a world.
He writes that a society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss.
Of an established level of level of sociopolitical complexity.
I mean.
It doesn't fit in a movie trailer.
Yeah.
A rapid loss of sociopolitical complexity.
You mean the end of the middle manager?
Oh, one of the things.
Making, making problems seem, seem simple when they're really much more complex.
Right.
But also removing the complexity that adds to the, or the bloat that
adds to the complexity.
So it gets complicated.
It's the sort of a chicken and the egg.
It was a Michigan versus chicken or the egg and the answer is yes.
Um, but, but basically what this rapid loss is, is a rapid simplification.
And Taylor's big theory is why this happens.
For decades, everyone had a different pet theory.
Right?
There's resource depletion.
Right?
Everybody just used up the tragedy of the commons or whatever they used the
bullet they had and then when it all ran out, they just fell apart.
Climate change, right?
Climate change.
That's, that's a nice one to point to when civilizations get wiped off the map.
Invaders, the classic, right?
Uh, that's us by the way.
Genghis Khan came in and destroyed our society.
Yeah.
Or, or the Europeans came in and wiped out the native Americans
with indigenous people in America.
We don't talk about that.
Right.
And sorry, sorry, I forgot what podcast was on here.
I mean, I mean.
Awkward, awkward, awkward.
Yes.
Then we have class conflict, elite mismanagement, right?
Um, these are the like, unfortunately genetically limited offspring
of repeated dynasties.
Yeah.
We'll go into that.
You know, inbreeding, it was, it was inbreeding.
Yeah.
Uh, so Taylor reviewed all of them and found them all lacking.
Basically said, look, none of those things explain what he's,
what he's finding in the history.
Yeah.
I mean, so ultimately he wasn't a big fan of like these mystical theories that had
this like simplistic single answer and it brought down the entire, you know, like, because
we had food stamps, it brought down the entire empire.
Unfortunately, people like, like Oswald Spengler or also Arnold Toynbee.
I don't even like the name, but you know, Toyn, sorry, T O Y N B E E Arnold
Toynbee, who we will put, um, list their contributions to this podcast in our show notes.
Right.
So, so Spengler and Toynbee saw civilizations as living organisms.
I hate they thought that they're born, they grow, they get older and they die.
And if you see that as like the typical path, right.
Then it's not so surprising or upsetting when a civilization passes on.
It's just that it's lived out its lifespan, right?
It's contributed all it can.
It's grown to the extent that it can, and then it gets old and it dies.
And the way they describe it is, is losing their creativity or their, it'll all be tall.
We're embracing, we're embracing our Louisiana roots here.
Right.
So Taynors theory is far more brutal though.
That's, that's the, the alternative theory.
Taynors theory is that because it's not mystical in any way, he's saying
it's an economic theory and there's one sentence explanation for why society's
collapse is that the collapse, the collapse of a society is a response to declining
marginal returns on investment and complexity.
Yeah, that's not going to work for me.
Maybe we could, maybe we could like work that out in English or something that
our listeners are going to understand.
All right.
Let's, let's give it a shot.
We'll give it our best try.
All right.
Human societies are at their core, problem solving organizations, right?
The reason we collectivize, the reason we get together is because they're, we're
trying to figure out some problem or solve some issue that we can't do on our own.
Cause if we can do it on our own, we'd, we'd go do it on our own.
It's a lot easier.
Roads, bridges, pyramids.
Like, I mean, exactly.
There's a problem to solve.
Infrastructure, defense, all sorts of things, right?
Logistics.
Um, so-
Houston on defense.
All right.
Yeah.
Or war, if you want to rename it.
Okay, fine.
So we invest in complexity to solve it, right?
We, we take off, we take on sort of knowingly take on the things like when
you, when you have a problem and you want to solve it, right?
Like I said, you need to take your own solution and go after it.
What if you're wrong, right?
What if you're making a mistake or you're wasting time?
You might want to consult some other people, but then once you bring in a
committee, it's inevitably complex, right?
There's going to be discussions that you would have had-
Different opinions, different views, different ideas.
Yeah.
Exactly.
What we call diversity, which, which I see as a strength, the show sees as a
strength ultimately becomes a problem.
Right.
Because of the complexity of it, right?
Like that's where it comes down to, is we start, we start solving the simple
problems and then the more complex problems come in, you added the complexity
of the people solving it and then it just becomes a cycle.
Yeah.
Should healthcare be a human right?
You know, complex problem.
And then more, more like how do we pay for this human right?
Right.
How do we make it all available and sure make it help people.
So, um, the, uh, the core of the problem is that complexity has a cost, right?
It offers massive advantages in the sense of resources and other people, but it
also has a huge cost and it requires energy and resources to maintain, right?
That's, that's part of it, like, even though it doesn't see it as a living organism,
it's still something that consumes our resources.
And eventually you hit the point of diminishing returns.
The more, the more complexity you throw at a problem, you're just, it's just not working.
Right.
Um, you've already solved the low hanging fruit and now you have to spend
the exponentially more to just get a tiny marginal benefit, right?
So it's like 90% of the way to like, to universal healthcare, maybe one level,
but they may take a thousand times as much to get that final 10%.
And that's where we're into the problems.
So, Taylor cites four key areas in which we see this happen.
These are the products of society or civilization.
Agricultural production, which gives you more labor for less return per worker.
Knowledge production, you have to spend exponentially more to sustain existing
growth levels, right?
And that's where you start to see people have to specialize in like really tiny
niche areas of science in order to advance our understanding.
Those are valuable.
I want to say, I just want to point out.
Those, those specific scenarios are very valuable.
Like we, we particularly, especially love those, like really unique weirdos who have
like, I don't know, they hone in on one very specific thing.
They're like, I really love birds in Southwestern Oklahoma, and I'm going to
devote my life to recording them and putting them out there into the world.
Yeah.
I think it is more like, you know, when you get into like the subatomic level, right?
And again, still value for these things, but like, when you talk about, okay, we
study atoms and we study the reactions and atomic, atomic particles, right.
At that level, you can do that in a basic lab, like maybe a high end lab, a lab
that's, you know, not, it's reasonably priced or any single university or something
like that, but then you want to start.
That lab gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper because industrialization.
Right.
But on the other hand, you get the large hadron collider, right?
If you want to study what happens at the moment of the big bang or something like
that, that's going to be a lot more expensive as we've seen.
That's a big donut.
It's a big donut.
That's right.
So much icing.
Hard to swallow for a lot of a country's budgets.
You know.
But, yeah, so that's, that's the trade off for knowledge production is once
you solve all the easy problems, solving the harder problems becomes that much
more difficult to much more expensive.
Still, still again, we're not talking about valuation, not whether this is worth it
or not, just this is what happens.
Next step you have bureaucratic power.
You get administrative bloat and anybody who's worked in a university or been
around universities has seen this.
You have more costly administrators and less frontline work.
You don't have money to pay professors, tenured professors, so you hire adjuncts
and you pay them next to nothing.
Meanwhile, you have to, somebody managed all these adjuncts, so you have to hire
administrators, you get paid more than all of them combined.
I would argue in, not just in the academic world, like almost every business world,
once you have these really high paid managers who are implementing, you know,
agile and safe and all this other stuff, you've got, you don't have a whole lot of
budget leftover to actually hire the people who do the work.
Right.
So that just feeds itself like everything else.
And then economic productivity, which is the whole system just gets sluggish, right?
Money doesn't move efficiently.
People sit on their, their horns of wealth and, um, it just, the whole system bogs
down and that's where you get that complexity that ends up killing your civilization.
Yeah, this sounds familiar.
I mean, the sense that like modern society and the world we live in is a mess, right?
Like a world that's so complicated that no, no ordinary man, no ordinary man can
fully conceive everything that's actually happening.
Right?
So it's basically beyond any single human's control except for either exceptional humans.
Very best high IQ you ever seen human beings.
Big, beautiful human.
Big, beautiful humans.
Yeah.
But you know, let's get back to Tainter.
Yeah, this is, so this is where his theory connects with our own modern political
crisis, which is this ever-increasing complexity and the diminishing returns
that it now creates is what fuels the popular resentment that populists exploit, right?
Because what you see is back in the early days when we were solving the
low-hanging fruit problems, everybody was benefiting, right?
Everything was just rolling, you know, we were getting more and more.
Yeah, like water.
We're taking care of water filtration, like sewer, you know, taking
care of the basic needs of human beings.
But also like, you know, the new advances were big, right?
So I mean, you know, streaming, streaming content on online or like
the internet or things like that.
The iPhone.
Yeah.
That reinvigorated the phone.
All being made possible through all this.
But then once you start getting the admission returns, once you're at iPhone
75 and it's like indiscernible from iPhone 71, people start to get ticked off.
And that's basically what we're seeing now is like, you know, government 3.0 is
no better than government 2.5.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
So iPhone 74, trademark, by the way, we do have to point that out.
They've already trademarked it, but that's not true.
I mean, I don't know.
It might be, who knows.
iOS 74 is probably much higher up on their, their rings, but wrongs.
But basically people feel like these, these like incredibly complicated,
overwhelmingly, amazing.
What's another word?
Labyrinth, right?
Like a labyrinth.
Labyrinthine.
Thine?
Is it thine?
I think it's thine.
Labyrinthine.
Okay.
So labyrinthine.
Gross.
I don't, I don't ever want to use that word again, but the ideas of trade, being
basically a labyrinth of policies and ideas and thoughts, technology, population
movement, and also the, the agreements that we, we come to with other countries.
We have, you know, I mean, and look, it's a lot we have, we have North
American Trade Organization, NATO.
We've got the UN, we've got the AMBLA.
No, that's Manbla.
That's men loving.
No, no.
Men loving a different thing.
Anyway, point I'm trying to say is we have all these organizations, we
have these different treaties, we have these different trades, these different
ideas, right, like, ultimately we're responsible for them.
We sign them, we agree to them.
And every organization within, I say every organization, no, every, every
part of our government has a responsibility ultimately to adhere to
these international agreements.
They, they basically, they don't provide recognizable benefits to the average
human being, and we're seeing it now, right?
I mean, this isn't, this isn't a labyrinthine, hmm, to use a very, very
PhD kind of word, um, this, this, this labyrinthine idea, we, we get it now,
like we're living it, because we're responsible to so many things that you
need, and an example I think of this is, is like, like law, dealing with, with
simple ideas of labor law and paychecks.
And, and you have to pay me within a certain amount of time and these sorts
of things, like that reality is so incredibly complex that we've put a
whole computer system that can answer those questions into our, our realm for
the purpose of answering these complex questions, but back out just a second.
I went a little bit deep there.
The whole point is when it's so incredibly complicated that you need
additional parties to help you parse the information, it kind of becomes an
ethereal blend of fog.
It's completely unrecognizable in the terms of what we agreed to.
So benefits to us that we don't even recognize anymore.
Will, do you agree?
Yeah, I don't feel like the benefits we used to expect when it's things like, and
just get so complicated, it's exhausting to even think about, like when I think
about taxes, like you said, the tax code or things like that, it's just exhausting.
I think we want to begin on the tax code.
But, you know, that's what allows an insurgent politician, so to speak, to come
in and offer simple answers, right?
Slogans like take back control or make America great again, direct response to
the feeling that complexity is becoming an unmanageable burden.
People, people obviously, I mean, they choose the simplicity and locality over
their complexity and they choose their own individual identity over internationalism.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
I mean, ultimately at the, at the personal level, right?
This has become exactly this.
It's become this country and this gubernatorial isolationism from our perspective.
I mean, I'm speaking only for the United States and what I'm seeing in the world,
in mainstream media, it's internalized, right?
There's this idea that it's easy.
It's an easy fix.
All we have to do is eliminate migrants, eliminate minorities, eliminate women,
eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, take out just, just not with a scalpel,
but with a chainsaw, let's remove every portion of our lives that bring about
equality, which is what we set out to be.
We set out to be equal.
We set out to be putting everybody on the same playing field.
We tried to create equity at a base level, but they became so complex
that just like Tainter's theory, which really, I mean, his theory is not just
about a society or a civilization in decline, it's about, it's about being
exhausted because that's what Donald Trump sold to the public was this idea of,
well, we're just tired of doing all of this stuff.
Tainter agrees and it supports Tainter's idea that says that society is so bloated
and bureaucratic, that it can no longer actually afford to actually write the check
to be what it is to uphold those rules and laws.
This is really where Tainter's theory hits its most scathing point, which is he
removes morality and collapse is not a tragedy, it's an economic correction, right?
So again, these sort of dry objective bases.
When the cost of maintaining the complex state becomes a greater burden than the
benefits it provides, collapse isn't just a disaster, it becomes a rational choice
for the average person to simply walk away.
They abandon their cities, they stop paying taxes and revert to a simpler local life.
Hey, libertarianism!
Welcome back.
Right.
Like, literally anybody like me who's gone from what I would call mainstream
right wing to somewhere in between, like a libertarian viewpoint.
Now I did embrace libertarian ideals for like a Fortnite.
So, you know, I'm giving myself a little bit away here, but so when I, when I upheld
these ideals, I said, like I said, a Fortnite, the logic didn't last for very long.
I mean, ultimately it was like, well, we have to all stop paying taxes and we need
to revert to this simple, do it yourself philosophy.
Everybody lives on their own five acres of farmland and we negotiate every time
we want to go anywhere further than our own home.
It got so incredibly simple by being incredibly complex, but the state as
it exists doesn't get conquered, right?
It gets, it gets divorced.
It gets like, oh, so long, girl.
Bye girl.
No, thanks, girl.
Don't call me anymore.
Block that number because it's no longer worth the amount of money that we're putting in.
And look, a lot of us are feeling that right now.
Well, you're certainly feeling that right now.
Absolutely.
We're putting in so much of our tax dollars and look, I specifically still very much
identify with the libertarian ideals of this because when you look at what the like
Northern Finland and Scandinavian countries pay in taxes, it's like 2% more than we're
currently paying, like 2.7%.
I compared it.
I did the math.
I looked at the numbers.
We pay about 2.7% less and they have universal health care and they have guaranteed vacation.
They have up to 36 months of parental leave for new parents.
Paid.
Like, what are we doing?
That feels gross.
Yeah.
And when you get to the point, like, like we all, I think, I think collectively we're
becoming to the point of it's not worth how much we pay in taxes and how much we do.
It's not worth the investment.
No, thanks.
And so at that point, it's a rational thing to just walk away, opt out.
Exactly.
So now, now we're going to turn to some examples of this throughout history.
I will have the familiar ones that you may have heard of you listen to this before.
So feel free to skip forward or whatever is new for you.
But.
We're going to start with the gold standard for this sort of economic collapse or
civilizational collapse, which is drum roll, wait for it.
The Roman empire.
Yeah, Rome the OG, the hardcore first, first to die OG collapse.
The one that literally launched a thousand decline and fall of books.
And those are just the ones written by Edward Gibbons, but.
Thanks Edward.
We appreciate you on this podcast.
Feel free to sponsor it.
Right.
So, but specifically here, we have to remember that we're talking about
the Western Roman empire, right?
So what we think of as the Roman empire is the part that one ruled by, you know,
I guess, well, up until Constantine, it was the whole thing, but then.
I was gonna say it like, like Rome, Italy.
Yeah, Rome, exactly.
The Roman empire, the Eastern empire, which was Constantinople and.
Istanbul and all that.
Yes.
That's the, that's the, that's actually, I'm sorry, I hate to interrupt you.
It's Istanbul, not Constantine Opal.
Is that what it is?
I thought it was Istanbul now, Constantinople.
That's yeah.
Nope.
It's not.
Unfortunately, it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Got it.
All right.
Yeah.
Well, so when we're comparing this to the U S we're comparing.
Trump, Donald Trump, president Trump to like Caesar or Caesar or someone like that.
Those are the ones we're looking at.
So yeah, I mean, that's kind of what he'd like to be compared to.
I think, I mean, Trump is no Caesar.
Like he, that's literally what he dreams about.
And I think he puts it on truth social that about his dreams.
Imperial designs.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So the alternative parallel that has greater resonance here is not
the story of the emperors.
So we're not focusing on the emperors that we're focusing on the processes through
which the empire emperors came to power in the first place.
Right.
For those who value America's democracy, the fall of Rome's Republican
experiment provides the clearest parallels and the most severe warnings.
Yeah.
So we're not.
Go ahead.
No.
Okay.
We're not in the empire phase, right?
Like we're living through the collapse of the Republic, meaning this is like, this
is like 30 years after they have breads, they have circuses.
And they're living out both.
This is the collapse.
They're trying to convince people that their far reach is normal.
Their soldiers dying is part of the, you know, it's part of a
landscape of building an empire.
It's, you know, collapsing Greenland, the United States, it's annexing Canada.
It's, you know, these bags must be broken for them.
Exactly.
It's the collapse of the Republic.
And there's some eggshells here and there.
Right.
So let's look at some of the parallels.
After Rome became the undisputed power of its world, the first and only super at
the time, the only superpower in the Western world anyway, immense wealth became
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Imagine that later.
This led to the age of the great men and dictators.
These were popular generals who bound their allegiance to them with
oaths of personal fealty.
Again, never heard of that.
Anyway, continuing on.
What was that?
They were defined by populist mobilizations based on immense wealth, the capacity to
purchase public affection, and the ability to defy one's cherish and conventions with
impunity.
Yeah, I mean, you know, that sounds, uh, sounds par for the course.
That sounds, uh, as I would call it, Mar-a-Lago.
I mean, I can't help but feel like this is literally the exact moment we're
living in right now.
I mean, uh, this podcast is not shy away from overlaps, you know, AKA our branding,
but ultimately this is exactly what we're talking about.
This is the moment where that we're currently living in the United States is
currently looking directly on Fox news, on CNN, on MSNBC, and all of the other, the
other private networks looking at a completely unprecedented, and I will say
unprecedented tyranny and its history.
Right.
The replacement of the rule of the people, which is exactly what a democracy
stands for with the domination of one person.
Um, I'm just going to put a little star here and all of his wealthiest and most
beneficial friends like Elon Musk, like Jeff Bezos, like Metta, like all of the
little millionaire billionaire fanboys that donated billions of dollars to
Donald Trump's presidential library.
Yeah.
So we're left with the leader who defies, openly defies the constitution by talking
about third term as president.
I mean, again, it's in plain written English in the constitution.
I will say, I will say.
He did recently, very recently, and that makes this episode, not as evergreen,
but he recently said, it seems pretty clear.
I'm not going to have a third term.
And he gave a speech after some really fantastic election wins this past season,
a season of November that specifically kind of highlighted exactly that he felt
it would be conducive for him not to have a third term, which means he's coming
around at least to the idea that he doesn't get to be a king despite other
facts that we'll talk about later.
Unless this is all just more distraction and this whole thing's a red herring.
But we have this Trumpist movement that undermines the institutions, conventions,
and culture that have governed democratic lives in the American Republic.
Yeah.
So ultimately, Caesar, quote, "did not destroy the Republic," as one of the
historians that we researched wrote about.
But basically the Republican order was already spent, like its entire conventions,
every precedent that it had ever held true to be sacrosanct, they shredded it.
They just literally put it through a shredder, like the one my grandma was like,
"Hey, there's scammers out there that are trying to get your information."
I'm like, "Yeah, everything's online now."
Yeah.
They were, they shredded it.
They were just like, "Yeah, it's all gone.
Sorry."
All of the information that you thought was true, all the precedent that we've ever had,
yeah, we're not going to do that anymore.
Basically, every institution was undermined.
They were like, "Yeah, you know, that doesn't really fit our narrative."
He was just the near-perfect expression of that new broken political culture.
And this institutional delay we're talking about was happening long before the final fall.
I mean, look at the elite failure of the Emperor Honorius in the fifth century.
And this is a man ranked by many historians as the worst of the worst Roman emperors.
Not for his tyranny, but for his mind-numbing incompetence.
He was basically a personal power vacuum at the exact moment the empire needed a leader.
So what we see here is that when you're facing these moments of crisis, you needed a strong leader to step up, and they did not have one at that time.
These sorts of things allow for people like Caesar to come in and take over, and that's basically what he did.
He took advantage of the fact that the Senate couldn't oppose him, and the fact that people weren't really all that interested in maintaining the status quo.
If everybody's happy and well-fed and everybody's enjoying life, they might be more willing to step up and defend their existing power structure or existing civilization.
But once that starts to fail them and it no longer serves its purpose, what is their motivation for fighting for it?
Now, Emperor Honorius actually did have one competent general, Stelico, executed.
So, I mean, he not only was terrible as a leader, but he actually executed one of the best leaders he had underneath him.
And then when the Gothic leader at the time, Alaric, offered a pretty decent deal for peace, Honorius told him to pound sand basically, which led directly to the avoidable sack of Rome.
So the Goths at this point are willing to make a deal, and instead he's like, "No, I'm not making any deals with you all. See you later."
And this is the kind of elite failure that we all recognize, but his real failure wasn't just incompetence in leading the empire.
It was actually, as Tanner would predict, economic policy.
And I remember that I studied Roman history or the history of the Roman Empire, in college a long time ago.
But what I remember from one thing that stuck out with me is, every other, or every third emperor, Rome would be bankrupt.
Like they would just spend everything and empty out all the coffers, and then somebody would either execute that person or they'd run away in shame.
And then it would be left to the next person to rebuild the coffers with taxes and all sorts of other things.
Because, surprise, surprise, running an empire is expensive.
By the time we get to Nero in 64 AD, the state needed more money, but they couldn't just raise taxes because that would cause a revolt.
So Nero and the political elite discovered a means to increase the spending without raising taxes.
This sounds like a fountain of youth or alchemy, you're unable to turn lead into gold.
Well, how'd they do it?
Their magical plan, and this again will sound very familiar, was the policy of inflation.
Wait, what?
Inflation?
That's...but that...we're at an all-time high here in the United States.
That would never happen.
Gas is the lowest price it's ever been.
Eggs are the lowest price they've also ever been in the history of humanity.
Never have eggs and gasoline been lower.
How can we even have inflation?
That's fake news.
Fake news, right?
Ignore the price levels at your local grocery store.
Look not at the surrounds of you.
Don't look behind the curtain.
Just trust us, it's never been lower.
Yes.
Yeah, so they, what they did was to cause inflation, they debased the standards over a coin,
the denarius, by infusing it with cheap metals such as copper.
They also clipped coins, which is like shaving the edges of the coins to
meant new smaller ones.
So they literally invented quantitative easing, or as I like to call it,
right sizing or shrink flation.
Right.
And it worked for a little bit of time.
Yeah.
But the solution had declining returns by 200 AD, the denarius was only 50% silver,
which led to a massive rise in the cost of living.
Imagine that.
Exactly.
And here's our loop, our feedback loop, right?
The state is now paying its soldiers and worthless money can no longer afford its
own problem solvers, the army.
And what happens when the Roman state can't pay its army?
Or the government shuts down and they can't pay their army?
I mean, the army becomes the problem, right?
That's, that's the thing.
At the people that were supposed to be keeping order and keeping things in
line, suddenly they're not getting paid.
Like, well, we still got all of our weapons and all of our training.
They don't.
So let's see what we can do about this.
And that, that's when you get situations where you have a collapse, like between
two to two 35 and two 84 AD groups of military deserters, whom the Roman state
was unable to pay, roam the countryside, pillaging small towns with farms.
I mean, that makes sense.
Right.
I mean, like ultimately Roman soldiers pillaging their own towns.
I mean, yeah, that's, that's where they were, right?
That's where they could go to get the resources they need.
You got to meet them where they are.
Yeah.
And I mean, again, because you, here's the thing.
You go fight somebody else's cities, right?
You go try and sack somebody else's cities.
Their armies are going to fight you back.
But if you're the army in your own country, who's going to fight you
when you go after the towns?
You're the army.
It's like, like when the police come and do something like, you know, what
are you going to call the police?
We are the police.
So that's, that's basically the result of what happens.
The barbarian invasions were the cause of the collapse.
They were the results of a system that had already eaten itself more than.
Like so- Go ahead.
Yep.
As you say, by the time the barbarian showed up, there was just nothing
left but the bones to pick.
Yeah.
And that ultimately is the system and Arius was leading, right?
The man who, and look, I don't want to underestimate him because nowadays
you could probably, you know, really do a number on the host of your favorite
podcast, but one of his most infamous acts of oversimplification, he basically
finally told Roman Britain, now Britain at the time was conquered by Rome.
Besieged by raiders to quote, you know, look after yourself for their own defense.
He was presiding over a system that literally couldn't afford to exist any longer.
Now, wait, I just want to say, I know this sounds like exactly what Republican
senators and congressmen are telling you right now, but wait, there's more.
Yeah.
So Rome is our didn't recover case.
This is a civilization decline that clung to their complex loaded inflationary
system and that shredded Republican norms until it broke.
Yeah.
So this isn't the only way a civilization ends, right?
I mean, before we look at the recoveries, we have to clear away two popular myths.
And look, these are stories we as podcasters and as historians love to tell about the collapse.
But unfortunately for you listener, dear listener, hashtag dear listener, this
episode has now come to an end.
We are actually going to finish this episode next week.
The next time you listen to this podcast, we're going to tune in.
Will thank you so much for being here with me.
Thank you for being here with me.
Of course.
I really hope you enjoy the information in this podcast and if you didn't, well,
you know, we might not be the podcast for you.
You might want to check out.
Okay.
That's something about history with Dan something.
And, uh, what's the one?
Dan Carl.
Eating cereal with eating cereal with killers.
I don't know.
Anyway, I'm sure there's podcasts out there for you.
If this wasn't isn't for you, great.
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also share this episode with a friend.
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Will do you appreciate it?
I certainly do.
That's why I will certainly appreciates it.
Exactly.
Will is a poor, starving artist who certainly appreciates it.
And we're all poor.
And that's not true.
We're not, we're not poor.
We're not starving and we're not artists.
We, we have one goal and it's to spread the truth.
It's the spread the truth.
It's to, it's to inform the average public in a way that isn't pretentious.
We hope it's not too pretentious.
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They would love to hear it.
It's file immediately file 13.
No, seriously though, if you want to continue listening to our podcast, check us out on
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We're on Spotify as well.
You can check us out on our website at F dot foundation.
That's HTTPS colon slash slash F dot foundation.
That's friends of the future foundation.
That's us.
We are friends of the future and we are the foundation for your news.
That's weird.
We're not a news podcast, but it felt right when I was like reading it out there.
It rolled off the tongue.
It did.
It rolled off the tongue.
Anyway, we will, we will be so happy to have you back next week to conclude our episode.
They were talking about about upon whether or not declining Republics can be saved.
Will, like I said, it's been a pleasure.
It's so, it's so good to see it.
So good to be here with you.
And do you have anything else to say to our wonderful listeners?
Just thank you.
Thank you for sticking with us.
Thanks for coming back and we enjoy this.
So let us know if you enjoy it too.
Yeah, of course.
Same and peace.
Please.
We're begging, we're begging you.
Please, please.
Please.
Please, please.
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