Top ROMAN Expert REVEALS How Rome Fell & Turned Into the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH! with Jeremy Ryan Slate

Jeremy Ryan Slate 0:00
To Romans the bridge and religion would have been political. So when Christians don't want to sacrifice to the Emperor, it would have been seen as a political act and an insult, whereas they're just like, Well, no, I don't see him as God, so I'm not going to sacrifice to him. So the Romans, the reason they would get upset about that is because they saw this as a political act. Roman religion is very different than we perceive religion, and because you would have the god Jupiter, but you could worship His as Jupiter, or Jupiter Optimus Maximus, like the king of the gods. Or you could worship Him in His form, as the sun god. Or you could worship Apollo, or different appearances of Apollo, so you would worship like different appearances of the Deity.

Alex Ferrari 0:36
I'd like to welcome show Jeremy Ryan Slate, how you doing Jeremy?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 0:49
Doing alright, man, this a awesome place. I'm stoked to be here.

Alex Ferrari 0:52
Thank you so much man, I appreciate it. Man, I am so excited to have you here, man, because I've, we've never discussed this topic on the show before, and I wanted to bring an expert on and we're going to talk about Rome and all things Rome. It is apparently one of the most fascinating, most searched things on the internet. People are fascinated more than Ancient Egypt, more than Atlantis, more than any of that stuff. And I was surprised by that, because I was like, it's Rome. Like, there's so much documentation, so much information about Rome. But yet people are still fascinated. One of the things I love kind of diving into is power structures throughout history, whether that be in ancient history, even in Atlantis, if we get in for any information, of it Rome. And then one of my favorites is the Roman Catholic Church, which, by the way, I only discovered it the Catholic Church's connection to Rome when I was in the Vatican. And I just, for some reason, go Roman, Roman, the Rome. Oh, my God, it was Rome. Rome. A little slow. Yeah. Only took me about 48 years, 49 years or so, to figure that out. I really never can. I always called it the Roman Catholic Church. I never connected Rome with Catholicism. Catholic just means universal, by the way, right? Yeah, exactly. So from my understanding, and when you said there was some trouble with the Christians, Rome has a long history with the Christians. Yeah, they're throwing them to the lions and then eventually going, No, no, no. Now we're Christian. If you don't believe, you get thrown to the yeah kind of thing. To my understanding, Rome, when it fell, it essentially just didn't go away. All that wealth, all that knowledge, all the booty that they had stolen throughout.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 2:35
It's a great word, by the way, booty.

Alex Ferrari 2:37
Ohh yeah, it's booties. It's Pirates of Caribbean. So all this kind of stuff, all this treasures that they've stolen from around the world that didn't disappear went to the Vatican. It went straight to the Vatican. So is that, can you kind of walk people through the fall? Don't walk through the whole fall of the room. Let's say the Roman Empire is now gone. Yeah. At what point did someone decide, hey, let's move this over to this other new entity where we can continue rule, but in a different way.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 3:04
So let's back it up a little bit, because I think it's important to know like one thing first. Because I think the major confusion for people was when they hear Rome, they just think of the Roman Empire, and they're like, Yeah, Julius Caesar, he was the first emperor, right? Which he wasn't. So I think it's just important to know kind of like, what our ground looks like before we kind of build on it. Sure. So Rome in and I'm going to use the words BC and AD. I don't like BCE and CE. That's just his story in its preference. But Rome is founded as a kingdom in 753 BC. It's founded by a guy named Romulus. There are seven traditional kings. He's the first of them out of all the historical study I've done, He's the least likely to actually have been real of the seven, because they have a lot of things that they don't know who to attribute them to. So like, Oh, Mr. Rome, right. You know where it came from, that guy. So we don't know whether he gave his name to the city or the city gave its name to him, but he's traditionally the founder of Rome in 753 BC. It goes from 753 BC to 509 BC is the kingdom. Then the final King, which is Tarquin the proud is assassinated by a guy named Brutus. Brutus is the same name of the guy that's gonna actually assassinate Caesar, you know, 500 years later. So in 509 we had the Republic, and Brutus is your first consul. So consuls are the guy that kind of like the president of Rome. But President of Rome, but they have two of them at a time, and they only rule for a year, because after having kings, Romans didn't want one man have all the power. So that was really important to them. So then you have the the Republic last from 509 BC to 31 BC. The final like Republic character is Julius Caesar. So he's assassinated in 44 and the last kind of 10 years are his adopted son, Augustus and his top general, Mark Antony, chasing his assassins around Europe and then eventually chasing and killing each other. It's kind of the problem you have there. Mark Antony actually ends up committing suicide for fear of what Augustus will do to him once he eventually. Catches him so Augustus actually becomes your first emperor. Now he doesn't become emperor because he says, like, Hey, I'm the Emperor. Come worship me. He's brilliant. He's one of the smartest politicians in history. In my opinion, Caesar is a brilliant military tactician, but he made a lot of political blunders. As I mentioned earlier. The major one is he institutes some great laws in his first years as dictator. The first is the calendar we still use today. The Roman calendar was missing about 30 days, and every couple years they'd add a month onto it to try and make things work out so their seasons would be all over the place. So what Augustus ends up doing is he brings peace, and then he says, Okay, I'm gonna retire. They have to think the Roman Civil War that had ended here was about 100 years so people are pretty beat up. They don't like the idea of war. They want peace. So if Augustus goes away, well, they're afraid of what's gonna come after. So what do they say? They say, Augustus, please come back and please, you know, have ultimate power, you know, be our man in charge. And he doesn't want the word title, or the title King. So he takes the title first citizen, or Prince, where we get the word prince from, because he's the first citizen in front of everything in the republic that already exists. He doesn't change anything. Right? The Senate's still there, the offices are still there, but there's just this new guy in the front, the first citizen, so that for the next 503 years is going to be your empire. The Empire itself breaks down into two time periods. The first half is called the Principate, and it's this actually pretty good time period where things are doing well. There's good rulers. Marcus Aurelius, lives during this time. Hadrian lives during this time. A lot of the most successful Roman emperors come during this time period. In 284 it breaks down into what's called the dominate, dominate coming from the word Dominus or Lord. So what ends up happening is there's so much of a collapse in kind of the power structure that these guys are grasping for power. So it becomes this authoritarian, very hard rule, very difficult time period. Your first ruler of this is a guy named Diocletian. The second is a guy named Constantine, who is the one that actually bring Christianity into the Empire. So I'll get back to your original question now. But just that we kind of understand everything. The western part ends in four, in 476, AD, the eastern part, which is the the Byzantine Empire, ends in 1453, they wouldn't have called themselves Byzantines. They would have called themselves Romans. So to them, in 800 ad, when Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor, they're like, What do you mean? Holy Roman Empire? We still have a Roman Emperor. So it was very confusing to them. So that's kind of the lay of the land now looking at Christianity and how it affects the Empire. And if I go for, if you need to stop me anywhere, go for. No no. Go for, no no. Go for, as I said, some of this stuff's kind of long winded, because to have a kind of full conceptual understanding, you got to back up

Alex Ferrari 7:47
No, no, that all this, all this, this foundational stuff, is actually really interesting but sorry. So then the Christians, there's this guy named Jesus, yeah, causing all sorts of havoc.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 7:58
Do you know his so when you look at so there's the Bible about him, like of the Scripture about him, but there's actually just one historical mention about him,

Alex Ferrari 8:07
Historical meaning in within the, within the,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 8:09
Not a Christian text, not a biblical text.

Alex Ferrari 8:11
Roman text

Jeremy Ryan Slate 8:11
By Roman text by a Jewish author, okay, named Titus Flavius Josephus. Okay. And it just, it's literally a one line mention of a upheaval in Palestine, which is where this guy, Jesus, of Nazareth, that's it. That's the only mention of him, but there is. That's how they're able to corroborate, historically, that Jesus existed, because he's at least in this one historical text, interesting. So okay, that's what happens Christianity is, it's a very minor cult, and that's how the Romans would have looked at it, right? And that's not, that's not my viewpoint on it, but that's how the Romans, would have called it.

Alex Ferrari 8:43
They would have called it's not a minor cult. If you want to call it a cult, it's a

Jeremy Ryan Slate 8:47
I'm a Christian, by the way. Don't want to upset anybody out there.

Alex Ferrari 8:52
I'm busting balls. Go ahead.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 8:52
Um, but it would have they would have called it like in there. The Romans would have seen it as a cult. Sure, they would have been something minor to to what they did. Roman religion is very different than we perceive religion. And because you would have the god Jupiter, but you could worship as as Jupiter, or Jupiter Optimus Maximus, like the king of the gods. Or you could worship Him in His form, as the sun god. Or you could worship Apollo, or different appearances of Apollo, so you would worship like different appearances of the Deity. Now, most of us were going to church on Sunday. We're doing things like that. That's not how the Romans would have done it. They saw politics and religion as really the same thing, like the state and the church were the same thing. To them, it was no different. And that's actually part of we get into a bit why the Roman Catholic Church forms the way it does. But to them, they would just go once a year on that feast day and offer sacrifices, and those that temple that God was likely locked other days of the year, and people wouldn't be in it. So religion, for them, it's really interesting, because they're a very religious people. That's not very religious, that that makes sense. Do you know what I'm saying? They're very they're not in the practice of it, but when they need to be, yeah. But there are different things they would look at, like bird signs. You know, our word inauguration comes from the word augury, or looking at bird signs to see, like, is this a good time to do this? Or they might cut out the entrails of an animal and see, based on how these intestines look, should we do this today? Wow. So they would look at it for a lot of like, important decisions. But it wasn't that, you know, they were weakly having their practice of going and praying to their God. It was very much like, very much like, Okay, we need this now. So it was very functional to them, rather than like, I guess, like a lifelong practice.

Alex Ferrari 10:29
Let me stop you there for a second. So as of So, because the the Catholic, the Catholic, the Catholic religion in general, especially when it starts, is it's all about control. It's about controlling the masses. As far as fear, fear based kind of stuff, the Roman doesn't seem to be that.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 10:47
It's not. And I think the thing you have to understand, and I wouldn't necessarily agree, 100% that it's all fear based,

Alex Ferrari 10:52
But there's some, there's there's a fear and control now,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 10:54
Because you have to understand, like, what they're going through too, like they're in a time period where, like, it's a very different time. It's a very different time, sure, sure. But the thing I the thing I would say, is Rome, Roman religion was very permissive of other religions, because you have to think about like they're bringing all these other cultures into their society. And they wouldn't say to them, Hey, you have to worship Roman gods if they wanted to. Great. But they actually wouldn't stop others from doing it, very similar to what we do here in this correct in the States. So when you see the persecution of Christians, the only time it happens is when you have a really weak emperor. So you have somebody like Nero, extremely weak emperor, and may or may not have burned down part of the city so he could build his new golden palace. And who does he blame it on? The Christians, right? Because so it's, it's the Christians are always there when they needed a group to blame. But the Roman Empire was actually very permissive of religion as a whole, because there it was very cosmopolitan and bringing other religions,

Alex Ferrari 11:41
It doesn't, it sounds like not much has changed. There's always a group that, regardless of there's always a group that that power goes there. They're the reasons why your life is bad. Yeah, and the Christians happen to be at that time period.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 11:52
Well, and also it's, it's, I think part of it is how Christianity was, as opposed to how other religions were at the time. Because, you know, all the pagan religions that were around, you know, because I guess, I guess anything other than Christianity, I guess you'd consider to be pagan during this time period. Oh, yeah, the Druids, right? There were a lot like those things existed and they were around. There were actually bands against worshiping Druidism in Rome, though, because the the emperor was a little bit worried about that. Kind of taken focus off him, of course. But the thing that that ends up happening is times get hard, and they go after the Christians. And I think that's important to say, but the the and I'm trying to remember, I think it was Pliny, the elder, that actually wrote about this. So I don't remember. It's the plenty of the elder, plenty of the younger. It's one of the two, and he's writing about Christians to the Emperor. And the confusion he has is that they don't see religion as political. Because to Romans, the original religion would have been political. So when Christians don't want to sacrifice to the Emperor, it would have been seen as a political act and an insult, whereas they're just like, Well, no, I don't see him as God, so I'm not going to sacrifice to him. So the Romans, the reason they would get upset about that is because they saw this as a political act, whereas other pagan faiths would say, okay, like, I don't exactly agree your emperor is divine, but hey, whatever, I'll act while firm and sacrifice. So that's really the major issue, is they actually saw it as a political act, and they saw it as kind of this rebellion and upheaval. When for Christians, it was more or less like, well, it's a religious act for me, because Romans couldn't understand how religion and state were different because they were just the same thing to them.

Alex Ferrari 13:23
Okay, so what? So what point do the Christians become a problem? Where Constantine goes? We're going to lose this. And please correct me if I'm wrong to my understanding, constancy is like these Christians are getting out of hand. They're taking a lot of people are starting to follow them, and we can't control it anymore. So instead of beating them, fairly true, yeah, I want to hear so

Jeremy Ryan Slate 13:44
When you look at so in 312 there's a battle called Milvian Bridge. Okay, this is kind of right after so Diocletian is emperor in 284 to about 305, I think. And he splits up the Empire. So the Empire had a tendency to split it between East and West, but he actually officially splits it up because it's just too big for some one person rule. So you have a senior emperor in the west and a senior emperor in the east, and a junior emperor in the west and a junior in the east. What would happen is now you have all these emperors. Well, they start fighting each other for who's kind of the big cheese, of course, el Grande fermagio. So they're kind of like fighting for who's in charge, and Constantine is fighting against another emperor who he actually, basically, you know, wants to be the big the big cheese. And he's kind of the final guy to actually reunite Rome before it breaks up again. And this Battle of Milvian Bridge, it's right outside of the city of Rome. He has this vision. And it's he in the vision, he sees under the sign you will conquer, and he sees the two Greek letters Chi and Rho. That's like the P and the x that we see. So he takes this and it's a Christian symbol, so he has all his soldiers put it on their shield, and he wins the Battle of Milvian Bridge. So for him, after that, he likely starts practicing as a Christian. I'm all in, yeah, but he doesn't. To actually become baptized until he is on his deathbed. Because during that time period, it was different too, because they saw baptism as removing your sins, and so, you know, you might as well get them all in before you wipe them away, right, right? So they would wait a lot of times they were waiting to the end of their life to get baptized. So he's Christianity doesn't become the Roman religion, and only about 2% of the Empire is Christian at this point in time. It just for him, it ends up working out, okay, so, so it wasn't it was before this, before this, too, he had actually worshiped a god called Soul Invictus, or the immortal son, which is, if you look at a lot of if you look up Sol evictus Invictus, the symbology is very similar to like the idea of Christ. So for him, the change wasn't that dramatic to actually go from Soul Invictus to Jesus Christ.

So it wasn't that the Christians were getting out of hand and they had to take over. It was something that he kind of found him. He found him. He found God around Jesus, essentially.

And I guess the thing I have to consider is that the emperor is a very political creature too, of course. So if your empire is breaking apart, you might as well unite people under something,

Alex Ferrari 16:01
Right! You know what I mean, and the old and so what was the old religion prior to that?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 16:05
It was just a combination of different hodgepodge so many pagan gods. Okay? So it's different ways of of worshiping all of them. As I mentioned, like, you know, the wine God Bacchus. They had the the worship of Him. They also had a cult called the cult of the Bucha, where they would take these grapes covered in mold. Mold gets you high as hell. So they would actually end up drinking this moldy wine, and they would, you know, see all these visions and make predictions that would never come true because they were just high. They were not seeing. It was a psychedelics, right? But there were different ways you could worship gods, and it was very different, as opposed to what comes after. So then what ends up happening is, once again, it's, we don't know as much of how people feel, felt, rely on time, unless you're reading it from Christian writers, but you got to understand there's going to be, there's a viewpoint in that, right? So we just, we really don't know 100% of what how things went at that time, because you're going to have the viewpoint of what the Roman historian said, but you're also going to the viewpoint of what the Christian historian said, which one's, right? It's 1000 years ago. We really don't know, but you start to have what Constantine started doing was favoring Christians in political positions. So you're gonna see people becoming Christians and getting political positions. Now, it doesn't become a actual Christian empire until Theodosius in the 370s This is 312, so we're like, oh, 50 50, years. Okay, so pretty quick to take, but it still takes a while, right? Like, and you start to see, you know, the kind of this changeover, because it's literally because, okay, I'm a Christian now, and he starts favoring other Christians. So then people start converting to Christianity. And then, you know, after that, you have, you know, the Council of Macy and other things that do occur after that, where they try to figure out, okay, like, what do we believe?

Alex Ferrari 17:42
So, so, yeah, so let's, let's dive into that a little bit. So, because that's one of you know, when I heard about the Council of my state of my head exploded. I was like, what? Because I was raised a Catholic.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 17:53
So Catholic grammar school

Alex Ferrari 17:56
I still feel guilty, yeah,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 17:59
The same as Jewish go, because I feel like, I feel like

Alex Ferrari 18:00
It's a slightly different flavor of guilt, but it's still guilt, sir. Okay, so when I heard about the Council of Nicea, I'm like, wait a minute, there was a group of guys that got together to kind of organize it. So to my understanding, and this is where there's a misconception, is that there that the Bible was made at the Council of nicer, not at nice, yeah, not an IC. It was done later. Later. Can you explain what happened at the council NSC, and then at what point did they all sit down and go, No, we don't need the Book of Enoch. Let's pull that out and that kind of stuff,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 18:27
Which I've read some really interesting apocryphal Bible books, really interesting stuff. But anyway, Book of Enoch is wild, by the way. Danikin, oh my gosh, amazing. Eric Von Daniken, taking a rabbit hole, and then sorry to the gods. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But I guess when you look at that council, the thing you have to understand is there the problem they had at that time was this thing called there's this preacher going around named Arius, and you start to have what's called this Arian heresy, heresy, you know, meaning like, Hey, this is something we don't believe in. It's something that church

Alex Ferrari 19:02
Is that with Chris, with Christianity? Is he a Christian sect or not?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 19:04
It was a Christian sec, but it was on the true nature of Christ. This is where the idea of the Trinity comes from. Like, is he full? Is Is he god? Is he man? Like, what is he? So they have this. It was creating this big break between the different Christian sects. And interesting enough, like a lot of the barbarian tribes that invade Rome are actually Christian, but they're Aryan Christians. They're not, you know, what were, I guess, Catholic Christians early on, and they become, you know, Eastern Orthodox after that. You know, in the 1000s, you kind of have that, that breakdown between those two. But the thing you have is the true nature of Christ. Is the thing they want to figure out first, like, is he god? Is he man? And what they they come to this, this decision of, you know the Trinity that we all know about, fully God, fully man, but three persons in that Trinity. The Arians didn't believe that, but that's what the becomes official Catholic Church doctrine. They also decide like, when is the date of Easter and which is still connected to the resurrection? Right, right? And the Nicene Creed comes out too, if like this is what we believe, and we still use that creed to this day. With small, you know, changes in it. But the but Easter was a pagan holiday. It was, but that's early Christians. What they would do is they would put Christian holidays on pagan holidays to make that transition a lot easier. Like, historically, if you look at it, Jesus was actually more likely born around the time of Easter, right? Instead of, yeah, Chris, instead of Christmas. But they wanted to take feasts people are familiar with and make it that transition a bit easier,

Alex Ferrari 20:23
Right! Because, again, the internet wasn't around back then, so they couldn't just send out an email blast, yeah? So they had to, like, what are we doing today? Oh, okay, Christ, okay, okay. Christopher was born on this day. All right, come I can roll with kind of, kind of the kind of the way they did it, yeah, I always wondered about that, because these were pagan. I mean, it's not exact

Jeremy Ryan Slate 20:39
What's a pagan empire that becomes a Christian empire, so you have to make it palatable for people, right? Like, you have to make it that God transition easier. And once again, like, you know, there's, there's certain viewpoints that say, you know, Constantine had become a very devout Christian, and there's others in Roman sources that say he hasn't. So it's like, once again, viewpoints obscure things. And this is 1000 you know, 1000 plus years ago, so we don't fully know exactly,

Alex Ferrari 21:02
I mean, and Romans probably one of the most, you find the most documentation, yes, out of any empire in history.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 21:09
But let's think about how wild that is, though to a a small group that's about 2% of an empire in forms of religion somehow becomes the dominant religion within 50 years. How that's wild

Alex Ferrari 21:21
That is, that is pretty, that's pretty insane, but it all happens because of the Constantine battle and bridge. Yeah, that battle is the thing that switches him. And you switch the guy at the top, then everybody else starts to follow the top down, and he's also doing political moves, yes, like, oh, you're a Christian.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 21:38
You can you guys, as I said, for Romans. Like, if you look at it, like church and state were the same thing, so Constantine would see no difference, right? It was no separate and even if you look at the early Constantinople, there's still, he's still putting up a lot of pagan statues, you know? So it's this transition does take time.

Alex Ferrari 21:53
Okay, so, so constant so now what, what so console and I see is when they kind of sit down and discuss, what do we believe? Lays out the kind of framework of Jesus's the belief systems of their Christianity, sure, which is basically the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church. Eventually, when do they sit down and write, put the Bible together?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 22:13
Well, there's just a number of councils later on that do that. So there's multiple, there's multiple, yeah, because there's, there's different translations of the Bible. There's the Greek translation first, which was the Septuagint, then you have a Latin translation later on. So it takes a very long time.

Alex Ferrari 22:26
When did, when did the so, I mean, from, and again, I'm from.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 22:30
I don't know all the dates on all of this. Fair enough, you're taking me out of Roman territory,

Alex Ferrari 22:34
But let's say, but let's say the, I understand that the Torah was the Old Testament, essentially, yeah. And then the New Testament was written by the, you know, the books of the apostles and so on and so forth. Were they just kind of loosey goosey walking around like, Hey, did you pick up the new book of John?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 22:52
A lot of them would have been, it would have been oral tradition, right? So, it would have been oral tradition that was passed down. And these things are written down much later on. Like, if you even look at a lot of the Gospels, they're, they're written long after these guys had passed.

Alex Ferrari 23:02
Right! So then, so then this is the point where these other councils are when they sit down and, like, let's write. Hey guys, can we all sit down? You tell the story. Okay, you tell the story. Okay, you tell the story of the same story, right? For me, there would have been so many stories going around,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 23:16
And you have to understand, like, you want people on the same page, right? Like, I think that would be important. So it was an organizing factor. Like, okay, we're gonna take this. And it's not just like one spot where they all said, where they all sit down and say, All right, these are the books like, it does take a it does take a several councils to kind of come in,

Alex Ferrari 23:27
And there's a good amount of, I'm assuming, editing between the four or five different stories. Let's say that they're hearing from four or five different secs

Jeremy Ryan Slate 23:33
That I don't that I don't know. I don't have any data on that. But generally speaking, it would have to assume that's the case.

Alex Ferrari 23:38
You assume that's the case, that there's editing going on, and that there are books being pulled out or pulled in.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 23:43
And I think the thing that's interesting too, I guess, just to, just to think out loud with this too, is like, even look at, to me, I guess it's kind of strange, like you even look at like, kind of the early gospels, and how they talk about, like, Pontius Pilate, and they talk about Tiberius like they actually don't put a great viewpoint on people that were kind of their predecessors, if that makes sense, which I guess just an interesting kind of side note.

Alex Ferrari 24:05
Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so, all right, so, so we've gone through the Council of Nicea. We've gone the Bible is now written. Yeah, it's been putting together. And we're still in Rome. We're still in Roman times. At what point does Rome start to decline to the point where this transition between Rome, the Roman Empire, and the Roman Catholic Church. What time period did that happen? And how did that happen?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 24:27
So I guess let's go further back and then go forward. Sure, because there's the church verbiage is Roman verbiage. But if I get to that now, then the rest of it will make sense, sure before. So we're going to take a long journey on this one. Okay, I guess, I hope you are just ready for this.

Alex Ferrari 24:41
We are. We are ready. Let's, let's

Jeremy Ryan Slate 24:44
So Gibbons decline and fall of Roman Empire is kind of the most famous work about the fall of the Roman Empire. And number one, there's going to be 1000s of people that disagree with me on this, 1000s that agree with me, and 1000s that tell us we're both crazy, because this, it's the most debated thing in history. Like, when did Rome fall? Really, when did it start to fall. Really, absolutely,

Alex Ferrari 25:02
I would think that that's like the easiest things the winds are still fighting about to this day. Really,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 25:06
Yes, when did Rome fall. Yes, I just finished a book by Dr Brian Ward Perkins, and it's, I forget the name of it. It's like the fall of Rome and the entrance of the barbarians, or something like that. And his whole viewpoint is, is this down in flames? You know, people running naked through the street, stuff on fire. And my viewpoints very different than that. So I guess, just to back it up, you have, in 180 your new emperor is Marcus Aurelius, and he's the last of what are called the five good emperors. So the first, I guess, 100 years of emperors, you have the Julio Claudian emperors are the first ones that are related to to Augustus, and then you have a couple other dynasties, dynasties after that. But what they actually end up doing is taking their closest related blood relative, and they make him male blood relative and making him the next emperor. And it's a mixed bag. Man. You get some really good ones. You get some really bad ones. It's how you get people like Caligula. You read my mind, Caligula, by the way, his name is actually Gaius, and his father, it would have been Gaius, Julius Caesar. Germanicus would have been his actual name. His father, Germanicus was a very successful general. And by the way, Robert Graves wrote a great story. It's fiction, but wrote a great story called I Claudius, kind of that was, it wasn't that the movie was based on that. It's based on Caligula, and it's very interesting, if you ever get a chance to read it. It's not historically accurate, but it's fun. So Caligula, his father, Germanicus, is a very successful general, and actually was expected to be Tiberius successor. Tiberius is your second emperor. They would take Caligula into the military camps when he was a kid, and all the troops would dress him up in this little military uniform with like, little military boots and stuff. So Caligula, in Latin, actually translates to little boots or booty cans. It's a terrible name,

Alex Ferrari 26:57
You know, it doesn't, doesn't.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 26:58
They should have called him Gaius, but they called him booty cans

Alex Ferrari 27:02
if you're going on to the battlefield. Oh, General bootikins. Bootikins is there doesn't, doesn't send fear up the spines of the enemy. Bootikins, right?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 27:11
So he rules for about four years. First a quick, it was a quick, it was a quick rule. And initially it's, it's not bad, but he ends up having this fever, yeah, and we don't know, like, did he go nuts? Are we just kind of biding his time till he was gonna go nuts? To go nuts? So you have fair enough him that's crazy. You have later on you get Nero out of his mind. You know, the number of times that man tries to kill his mother and doesn't succeed is insane. I think the last time he builds her a boat and makes the boat so it'll fall apart thinking she can't swim. And it turns out she can swim. So she gets back to the land, and he has a servant knife her instead. And did she survive that? No, she died. Okay, okay. And because she was kind of like the check on Nero's craziness. So then once he's once she's gone, he goes full crazy. So you have Nero, which is not a mixed bag Christian persecutions, Domitian. If you get a chance to read about Domitian, they would say he would actually sit in his room and pull the wings off of flies. And so that the thing that they would say about Domitian is the Emperor by himself. Yes, not even a fly, they would say about emperor Domitian. Wow. So it was a very mixed bag of what you would get, okay, and you had some very good ones and some very bad ones. Vespasian, who's a very great one comes after Domitian. There's two kind of guys that barely rule for a year. But so anyway, you have this mixed bag of emperors. Nerva becomes emperor in, I think it's 96 or 98 and he's really old. When he becomes emperor, he rolls for a short period of time, but he actually, what's what he does is they look around and they say, okay, who's the most qualified, either politician or military man to be the next emperor. So what he would then do is adopt him and be like, I know this guy is really old, but he's my kid now, you know. So he would have that they start this process, and it creates what's called the five good emperors. So you have Nerva Trajan, Hadrian, Antonis, Pius Lucas, vernas and Marcus Aurelius, are your five good emperors.

Alex Ferrari 29:02
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Jeremy Ryan Slate 29:38
Aurelius and Vernis are adopted brothers, and they rule at the same time. And then finally, Aurelius rules by himself after after vernas dies. So Aurelius changes the process, and he goes, I know that whole Julio Claudian thing didn't work. And we got Caligula, and we got Nero and Domitian, but I got this kid, and his name's Commodus, and much later on, Ridley Scott will make a movie about him. And. So Commodus ends up really being your first character that creates this decline in the empire, because what he ends up doing is he doesn't want to rule.

Alex Ferrari 30:09
Yeah, is that the Phoenix character? Joaquin

Jeremy Ryan Slate 30:13
Joaquin Phoenix. The movie is not historically accurate at all. Fantastic, fantastic movie.

Alex Ferrari 30:17
I'm looking forward to two.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 30:18
I don't know they brought. It's kind of, it looks like, I don't know, it's like training day two, but in Rome,

Alex Ferrari 30:23
Hey, listen, hey, listen, it's really Scott in Rome. I'll go see it,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 30:28
Right. It's about to do well. But anyway, so that ends, he ends up being just a terrible emperor, yeah, and he's, he doesn't really want to rule. He wants to fight in he does want to fight in the the gladiator rings and all those things, and he also fights animals and stuff in there, but they put him on a platform because he didn't want to truly be threatened, so he'd like shoot him from above him. So what ends up happening is the political class gets fed up with this, so they get the Praetorian Guard, the people responsible for protecting the Emperor, that oftentimes kill the Emperor. Out of 77 emperors, 13 of them are killed by the Praetorian Guard that were supposed to be protecting them, about 20% so that's kind of scary. So what ends up happening is there's a the Praetorian Guard gets in touch with Commodus, his wife, pretty bad if your wife also wants to kill you. So they work together to poison him, and they get him so drunk, he throws up the poison and doesn't die. So the next thing they do is they hire a wrestler to strangle him to death. So then Commodus finally dies. Hulk Hogan comes in, got it? Comes in. You know? You know, brother, we're gonna end this Roman Empire. We're gonna do it right here, brother. So, like this, changes a lot of the power structure in Rome, and what ends up happening is you have this time period now around 192 when he dies. It's called the year of the five emperors, because nobody can hold power, because it's just wow. Because the issue you get if there's no direct descendant, well, who's the guy? Whoever the strongest is, right? That's the problem. When Alexander, the great gunfire, dies, he has all these generals, and they say, Alexander, who will you give your empire to? And he goes to the strongest. And really bad advice, yeah. So this, it ends up you have five emperors. And what it transitions to what's called the barrack emperors. Barrack coming from the word military barracks, you would have a general that would grab his army and say, I'm the boss now. And they would all fight each other decide, has to do it. So this be creates what's called the crisis of the third century. Now, the actual crisis doesn't happen till later on. But after a little bit of fighting, you get this guy, Septimius Severus. He's the first black emperor, by the way. He's from North Africa, and he creates a little bit of stability for a while. His son, quite famous, Caracalla, is his name, and he's actually in the new gladiator movie. Probably would have looked much more Northern African and not blond haired, blue eyed with a I guess they gave him a gold tooth too in this movie, pointing out, why not so. And he's actually a very good military leader, Caracalla, which is another thing that I've seen. The previews they don't show you that movie. The name Caracalla actually comes from the type of cloaky war. It was called a Caracalla. So that's where his name actually comes from in 212 Caracalla takes all of the people in the provinces of Rome and gives 30 million people citizenship overnight. So now you have this idea of citizenship is watered down, and you have all these military commanders fighting each other. So what do you need? Well, you need more troops. So they start bringing in the barbarian troops to fight in their armies. So now the armies are less Roman and more barbarian. Well, what do you need to pay an army? Well, you need money. So what do they do with the money? They start bringing devaluing the and it's different than it is now, where it's like ones and zeros in a computer. They're literally like, re smelting it and shaving, shaving pieces, bringing in different metals. So you have inflation is kind of going crazy. You have the Empire is becoming less and less Roman. And what happens now, from kind of the third century until, like the two 284 is it is chaos, and the Empire should have fallen apart on like three or four separate occasions. You get this guy in the 270s named Aurelian.

Alex Ferrari 33:58
And real quick, before you get that, when did, when did Constantine do The Council of Nicaea? was like three. Oh, so we're still, we're still, we're still leading into,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 34:08
I can't remember who it was, 326, or 331,

Alex Ferrari 34:10
We're leading into it still.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 34:11
Yeah, we're taking a while to get as I said, this isn't like a sure. It's not like a boom, it's over. It takes a long time to get there because, but it's really important to understand Commodus, because it creates this power vacuum that changes the way the whole thing functions. So you have, we go through these different emperors over like a 20 year period, the last of this, well, not the last of this. That the last is a guy named Severus Alexander, but the one right before him that really upsets the military is this guy named Elagabalus. If you ever get some time, man, do some reading, Elagabalus is fun. He would hire people in political positions based on the length of their member Wow. He was pulled around Rome in a chariot of prostitutes. He married a Vestal virgin, put his hairdresser in charge of the grain supply, and he was just absolutely wild. So it's. Oh, man. So basically that he ends up getting killed by the Praetorian Guard. They bring in his Absolutely, they bring in his, and I will tell you, by the way, so communists and Elagabalus are the only two emperors to ever actually be had their dead bodies pulled through the Roman streets with people spitting on them because they hated them that much. Very Mussolini, very muscly like so then his son, Severus Alexander is kind of the last one that leads into what's called the crisis of the third century, where it is just chaos for about 3030, to 50 years, really.

Alex Ferrari 35:28
So it just, it's just, there's nobody.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 35:30
Rome was falling at this point. They thought this was the end. And then what ends up happening is this guy, so Rome breaks up, not because somebody did it, because it happens you get a break off empire in the West, called the Gallic empire, a break off empire in the east, called the pimerian Empire. And you have all of these barbarian tribes coming in from the north. So it's, it's getting kind of crazy, and the barbarians are basically dramatic. So they would have been Germanic. But like, Germanic is a very broad they would have been Belgians. That the bell guys are the Belgians. They would have been like French, Northern Italian. Like, it's just all of these groups kind of get put together. You have the Ostrogoths, which are the East Goths, the Visigoths, which are the West goth so it's like they become all these places. How about the north, the North, the Norse? They wouldn't the Vikings wouldn't have been as much of a problem. Yet, what you do have is you have, you know, the Vandals coming in from Northern Africa. You have the the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and you have the Huns coming from the north. So the Huns coming in from the north starts to push all these guys down.

Alex Ferrari 36:32
When was the time of Genghis?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 36:37
I'll be honest, I don't remember offhand on that one. Okay, yeah, because it wasn't, was it wrong? It's later on.

Alex Ferrari 36:41
It's later on. It's later on.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 36:43
It's during the it's like, it's after Hadrian Opal, which is in 378 it's after the fall. Yeah, well, it's the falls in 476 but Hadrian Opal is kind of the last major battle against the barbarians before Rome really doesn't fight back anymore. It's act in 410 it's sacked again.

Alex Ferrari 36:57
So, so, so really quick before we continue the the Roman, the Roman guard, you know, military guard, yeah,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 37:06
The ones that Protect the Emperor, just the Legions in general, just in general.

Alex Ferrari 37:10
These were basically hired soldiers, essentially, essentially, was there any patriotism? So what happened?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 37:16
You have to understand that this, this is a big there's a big difference in the Republic. Men would have served because they wanted to and because they and because they were required to, by law, sure, if you had enough money, you were required to serve in the military, and you actually required to pay for your stuff. Oh, that's nice. So what ends up happening is, in the late Republic, as I mentioned, the last year is the last 100 years. Is kind of like a civil war 133, to 31 the first guy that comes around in this time period is, is Gaius Marius. I was trying to remember all these names, to remember them all. Gets a little crazy, dude, you're doing a fantastic Gaius Marius is kind of the, the biggest military reformer. And if you've you know the Roman standard, like the eagle, yeah, of course. So he's the guy that actually ends up making the Roman Eagle the standard of the military. Got it. So he does this massive military change because he's what's known as a novice homo or a new man, meaning he wasn't, like, of an acceptable, you know, like he didn't have enough money, so he wasn't a, you know, patrician, and so he would he wasn't really acceptable to get into the political position he did. So he's actually a guy that reorganizes the army and starts bringing all of the people that weren't really patricians into the army. So that's where you go from kind of a citizen soldier to more of a you're enlisting in the legions to become a legionary. And then what ends up happening is you have the legions, which are Romans, and you have the Roman auxiliaries which are barbarians. So barbarians fought alongside Romans for quite a long time. And if you fought for this changes throughout the time of the Empire. Early on, it's 20 years at the end, you'd get citizenship. Later on, it becomes 30 years at the end you get citizenship,

Alex Ferrari 38:45
It'll be dead by then. Well, he would hope not I mean, but I mean 30 years in the if

Jeremy Ryan Slate 38:49
You can live it out, it's pretty good man, because if you get citizenship, you there was a lot of rights of citizenship. There's, there's two types of citizenship with in Rome, there's citizenship with the vote and citizenship without the vote. Sure, so, but you sit with a vote. Well either way, like, if you don't get it, you could hold political position. You were eligible for the grain dole, meaning they would feed you. So, like, there was a lot of great things about citizenship. And even in the gospels, the apostle Paul actually gets to address regress. Addresses regression to the Emperor, because as a Roman citizen, you were actually allowed to do that. So citizenship has so many rights. So even if you kind of died on the way there, it was really worth it, if you could eventually get it

Alex Ferrari 39:29
Alright. So before we keep going down this, this other side track, I'm sorry

Jeremy Ryan Slate 39:33
I can sidetrack you all.

Alex Ferrari 39:34
No, no, no, it's my fault. I have a significant amount of time to talk about, yes, yes, it's my fault. I started you down that road. Okay, so back to, back to the fall of the Roman Empire. Alright. So we were 300 and something.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 39:44
No, we were in we were in the 250s Okay, so the actual, like, as I said, there's kind of like, there's the pre crisis of the third century, and there's the actual crisis of third century. So there's guys. So now the problem that these emperors have is, number one, they're not living long enough. Like, it's a real. Problem you're having pretenders pop up all over the place saying, I'm in charge. I have an army try and kill me. So you have the issue is these barbarian tribes now start coming in closer because you can't fend them off. And also, at the same time, you're bringing them into your army. Needless to say, in the 180s in the time, during the time of Marcus Aurelius. There's also a plague where 10% of the Empire dies. Oh, this is Eve fighting men to begin with. You know, these things kind of happen throughout history. So you have this massive problem of, there's nobody really protecting the borders. They're all fighting each other for who's in charge. So the Empire starts to break up. You have an Eastern you have a the Gallic Empire, the pimerian Empire. Now you have all these, these barbarian tribes in the north. So what you have is you have, in the 270s finally, so we've jumped like 30 years, here you have this guy named Aurelian. And what he ends up doing is he actually reunites the whole empire, because he's able to really get himself in a good political position where nobody's going to kill him. He goes to the western border, conquers it, brings it back in. Goes to the eastern border, conquers it, brings it back in. So he actually reunites the Empire. Then he makes the mistake of getting off his horse to take a pee, and the Praetorian Guard, just like they do to Caracalla before him kill him. So then that's once again, you're an upheaval. So in 284 you get the great reformer, Diocletian. He's kind of one of the last like three that's going to rule over United Empire. You're going to have him, you're going to have Constantine, you're going to have the doses that really roll, really United Empire. But he's the great reformer. So what he ends up doing is he creates the tetrarchy. So that's the rule by four, four emperors. Now he also reforms the monetary system, because by 284 they had 15,000% inflation. Because you're you're paying for all these troops, of course, and that's something Rome's never gonna recover from, by the way, there's like, I would definitely tell the people watching to, like, go check out some graphs on this, because it's gonna freak you out. So he put does these reforms, and things get good for a little bit, and it's kind of stable through Constantine, but you just have the same problem of now you're fighting off barbarian tribes. We go right back to emperors raising armies and killing each other. So it's this whole instability, inflation. And eventually, what ends up happening by 410 Rome gets sacked by the Visigoth Alaric, and after 410 they're paying annual tribute to the to the Goths, basically just giving them money. Giving them money every year to not attack them. So the last about 70 years of the Roman Empire, you have emperors that are in power in name, only half of them are children, and they're actually just being controlled by barbarian kings. So in 476 this general named Odoacer ends up taking the last emperor. His name is Romulus Augustus, and says, Okay, so I know you're a kid. I know you think your boss, but you're gonna retire. So he they put him into retirement. They end the Empire. They actually give him a they give him money every year, like give him an allowance and stipend. That's where the Kingdom of Italy starts. So you have several very strong Italian kings. You have odo Walker, you have Theodoric. But this whole idea of the fall of Rome, the Eastern Emperor empire, Emperor Justinian, ends up wanting to reunite the Empire and put it all back together. So what does he do? He raises an army, sends his general, Belisarius, into Rome to bring it back. He attacks Theodoric and his Goths, and he burns it down in order to save it. And that ends up being like, how your actual like, fall of Rome happens,

Alex Ferrari 43:26
The fire and everything like that, right? And then, all right. So now they said, there's a lot to that to try and get where you got there, okay, all right. So, so now Rome is burnt. Rome is burning, as they say, and and the after, the after the fall of Rome, it, um, it doesn't recover, obviously, right? It doesn't recover at all.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 43:49
Well, in the west and the east, it keeps going. So, right? So in the West. So the Western meaning is Rome itself. Rome itself, Italy. East would have been everything around Constantinople. And so when you how long does that keep going? For 1453, under the Ottomans. So another lady, basically, it becomes the Ottoman Empire later on. Oh, which during world war one they call the sick man of Europe. So it it lasts for a very long time. And if you think about the Ottomans, just end up taking it over. So it lasts even longer. Like it's pretty interesting that

Alex Ferrari 44:15
I didn't know that. So then from so the east part of the Roman Empire turns into the Ottoman Empire, which runs 1000 years, essentially,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 44:22
Well so not even that like so it doesn't become the Ottoman Empire, not time period. So it's, it's the Eastern Roman Empire from 476 still until 1453 and they would call themselves Roman they call themselves Romans. Byzantine is a word we call them to have a way to define them. The Ottoman conquest doesn't happen until 1453, so for 1000 years, they're still Romans. They're still out there, but it would have been very different than what we would have seen as Romans. It would have been much more Greek. Is what, how we would have seen them,

Alex Ferrari 44:49
Right! And then it's not considered, I guess, the classical concept,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 44:53
It's not the classical common Roman Empire, but it's still, and there's a lot of people out there that get really angry, if you talk about it falling in 476 because they. They look at the eastern empire, okay? So that kept going basically to the 1400s Yeah, and they have a line of emperors, and they continue going, Oh, really. And it's, it's nowhere near as strong as it would have been earlier on. But I think the thing you have to understand is, why does the eastern empire last? Well, there's a lot of different reasons for this. It's 1000 years. Number one, Rome, like the whole north is very open. It's very easy to attack. So, like, that's one part of it, another part of it. So Constantinople itself, which is why Constantine picked it was very hard to attack. And then they had the walls. Were enormous, which are, which are added later on. But also, as well, they had the richer tax bases. They had Egypt, they had Palestine, and they had a lot of those areas. So what in Roman its heyday, most of the money came from Egypt. In those areas. There was a lot of money in that area. So to cut that off from the main empire, like you're cutting up, like you have inflation going wild, you have immigration out of control, because you're bringing all these barbarians, and now there's no new money coming in. So the eastern empire gets all the money, sure, and they have kind of just the best territory in order to defend it. So they have 1000 years more of history,

Alex Ferrari 46:07
And the way, and Rome has no possible way to deal with it.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 46:10
And Empress had kind of moved away from Rome anyway, it really hadn't become the political center anymore.

Alex Ferrari 46:14
Okay, so now that. So now the Rome has fallen. Rome, the actual city and that empire, who and what decided to turn that air, that part of the Roman Empire, into the Roman Catholic Church.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 46:28
I don't know if it was really a decision. I think it was because you think someone had to put it together, yeah. And I don't know as much about this, so I'll kind of give you what I know, and the rest of my knowledge is spotty, sure. So I guess going back to 284, to Diocletian, the reformer. If you look at a lot of like early Catholic Church words, they're actually words that Diocletian unit started using when he reorganized the Empire. So like, for example, the word diocese that the church uses, well, it was how Constantine divided or not. Constant Diocletian divided up the Empire. They had these different areas called diocese. The man in charge of a diocese was called a vicar. So where we get the word from? If you look at the word pontiff that we use for the Pope, the chief priest of Rome was the pontiff is Maximus. So it's just what ends up happening is I and once again, this is my interpretation. Interpretation of it is, since there's no like political and spiritual separation, even though the Empire Falls, the church still exists. They're going to use the same verbiage. They're going to use going to use the same structure, because that's how they how they did things. That's how the church was established

Alex Ferrari 47:26
And and they're using the resources that were left behind. I guess as far as, like, the there was some money left there, obviously, because, yeah,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 47:34
So I don't know how the I do know that, as you said, the Catholic Church has, like, so much of, like, history and thing. I don't know how they end up getting it, honestly,

Alex Ferrari 47:41
When did, when was the the St Peter's basilical,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 47:46
I don't know built. I don't know if you

Alex Ferrari 47:49
Okay, yeah, cuz, I mean, I've been there a couple times, but I have it's found it's amazing.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 47:52
Yeah, catacombs. I've seen, yeah, me too, yeah. And seen the bones, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 47:56
I saw, I saw Peters, great, wasn't it? Yeah, I would turn the corner. I'm like, What's that room?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 48:01
Like, no pictures are there, though, man, like, all the skeletons and stuff, it's wild,

Alex Ferrari 48:05
Yeah, the cat, I mean, you just see, like, oh, there's a Pope from 1300 Yeah? Like, it's just insane. Yeah, it's the catacombs. Is pretty but when I turned and I saw St Peter, I was like, what is it? Just the room, everything was just a different vibe. That place is a very interesting yeah.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 48:21
So I don't know as much about the early history, like I do, like, as I said, I know where the verbiage comes from. The verbiage comes from, like, hey, these were words that Diocletian used when you reorganize the Empire. And as it's only about 20 years after that, when Christianity, through Constantine comes into Rome, is really like, as I mentioned, had been there, but like, actually comes to somewhat of power. So they're gonna use the same words,

Alex Ferrari 48:42
So it seems like there's an overlap. It's not like on on Friday, we the Roman Empire dies. On Monday, we start the Roman Catholic Church, correct? No, it's an overlaps and underlap hundreds and hundreds of years. Then eventually the power structure disappears, and the church is still there. And the church just kind of takes, yeah, it starts.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 49:00
So they would have had all these, like the diocese and everything would have been a would have been established, and they wouldn't have said, Okay, well, I guess we're not Christian now, sorry, guys,

Alex Ferrari 49:06
And I guess, and because they were a religion, and the church there was a different they didn't attack them. They didn't well and

Jeremy Ryan Slate 49:13
But what happens, as I mentioned, like a lot of these barbarians would have been Aryan Christians, well, what starts happening is, in order to get the right political positions, because, as I said, These guys don't really attack. They blend in and eventually take over. A lot of the generals that end up running the Roman emperors that are barbarian are there because they were hired by the Romans. And you want to get a good job by the Romans, well, you got to be Roman Catholic. So do you get what I'm saying? So it's not like they wouldn't have really had any problems with them because they're all the same agreement level by that point, gotcha, and that kind of, and that kind of, so the transition makes so much sense, and it's an easy transition correct over hundreds of years, because they wouldn't have been really Aryans by that point anymore,

Alex Ferrari 49:52
And they wouldn't really have a reason to attack them. It wasn't like correct, you know, a completely different religion, the druids all showed up and

Jeremy Ryan Slate 49:58
Right like I. Could see that being a problem. But for them, they're like, Okay, well, this is kind of the same power structure, because you have to understand as well. People didn't come into Rome because they wanted to destroy it. They came in because they wanted all the goodies. Like, that's why people came into Rome like they wanted the things Rome could give them. So even after odo Walker becomes the first king of Italy, he does a huge building product in the city of Rome. Because what happens in that last 100 years is, with the money disappearing, things were going into disrepair. So if you kind of look at the last there's some great videos on YouTube. I can't remember the name of the channel of like, this one channel that actually shows you, like how it would been degrading over the last 100 years, because they're just not repairing things, and things are breaking down. And there was an earthquake in the last 100 years. But odo Walker actually goes on a building project to put a lot of the stuff back together, because they like the idea of Rome. But the problem is, like they had gotten rid of most of the people that knew how to do it. Does that make sense? Because you're kind of transitioning into a barbarian empire. So they wanted to be Romans, like, that's what they thought they they were trying to do and trying to recreate, but it ends up just kind of dividing along tribal lines.

Alex Ferrari 50:58
So I wanted to, I wanted to go down another road of thought here.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 51:02
This is awesome, by the way. I'm really enjoying my I'm like, so I've done a lot of conversations on this, and I never get to go into this much detail.

Alex Ferrari 51:09
Oh, dude, this is why I'm here. I always go down from going down a rabbit hole, we're going down the rabbit hole. Yeah. So the thing I when I was when I was in Rome, and I was looking at the construction, and, I mean, they are legendary for their engineering. I mean, the aqueducts are still there. I mean, you you walk around the Coliseum, and it's just now you're still in awe, even with everything we could do today. You walk and you just look at the Coliseum, you're like, man, it's impressive. What are some of those techniques. And I'm not sure how much you know about

Jeremy Ryan Slate 51:44
I don't really know much about that. Like, I do know, like, I think one of the cool things about the Coliseum in general is I had mentioned with Nero, that's where he builds his golden house. And people really hated him for that, because it took so he basically bankrupted Rome to build this thing after the roll.

Alex Ferrari 52:00
I think I saw, yeah, I think there was when I was there. It's in the the forum,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 52:04
Right. So, so, so, yeah. So in this he has a giant, naked, golden statue of himself, as we all should, yeah. So what happens is, when I'm 20, so not so much now. So there's, there's kind of like there after that, there's kind of, like a bunch of, like, transitional emperors. I kind of get you through a year, and then you have the next guy that comes to power. Is this guy, Vespasian, and what he ends up doing is he's the one that does the building project to create the Colosseum. So he knocks down a big part of the Golden house. He takes the statue of Nero, and they do some little edits, and they make it a statue of the Sun God, and said, and that's where the name Colosseum comes from. It comes from. It comes from this statue being a colossus is where the idea comes from.

Alex Ferrari 52:43
When did the Coliseum get built around

Jeremy Ryan Slate 52:45
In? I think it was in it was in the late 70s or early 80s. Ad was some around there.

Alex Ferrari 52:51
Oh, so what it was like? So was around Christianity was starting to come.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 52:58
Vespasian is actually the guy too. He was Nero's top general, by the way. He was actually the guy that goes and conquers. And conquers and kicks the the Christian, the the Jews out of Israel. Okay, so vespasians, that guy, all right, so when the call in the Coliseum is just built for entertainment, it's built for propaganda and to build up control propaganda. From the perspective of, you know, how powerful? Well, not even that. They wanted people to forget about Nero and think of this giant, golden Colossus. So they build the Coliseum on that spot.

Alex Ferrari 53:25
So it's, it's, in many ways, it's what the media does for us today, correct? It's, it's, it's to to just look at the shiny light. Look at the shiny right. Look at the shiny light. They didn't have our technology at that time, but the Coliseum was that correct for them, and as well as also to control the masses to give them something to do, to watch, and that's what media has been doing, yes for for a long time.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 53:48
Yes, yeah. Follow the what is it? The White Rabbit is the song by Jefferson Airplane.

Alex Ferrari 53:52
Yeah, exactly. Follow the white rabbit. So, all right, so is there any kind of in the legends of Rome. Is there any lost technology that you heard of? They're like that. It's gone. They're like you. It once was, but not well.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 54:08
So I guess one of the things that gets forgotten for a long time is their plumbing technology, which is, which is pretty amazing, okay, and the lead pipes may or may not have driven them crazy in the last couple 100 years, but had drinking lead. Yeah, they're a lot of their, their the plumbing is incredible. They actually, like

Alex Ferrari 54:24
They had indoor plumbing. They were they the ones that created,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 54:28
If you've ever been to Pompeii, there's actually, there's, have you seen the water heater they had? They had an in house water heater, stop it in one of the one of the homes, it would have been made of lead. So a little bit scary. But the plumbing is incredible. Like how these, how the Roman latrines were built, and how the they would have running water, like, a lot of those things are incredible. Pompe was amazing. And, I mean, that's one of the issues they have in the kind of the early Middle Ages, is, like, sanitation is a huge problem. Yeah, of course, yeah. Now plague Rome wouldn't have smelled great. It would have smelled terrible, but like, the sanitation was much better than the time period right after that. So sanitation is huge. Huge, and you mentioned the plague, that's one of the reasons that the black death happens, is because sanitation is so bad, but people forgot how to do those things. Literacy, early on, starts to disappear, like literacy is a lost technology, and that's why we don't know as much from a Western viewpoint of the Roman Roman Empire fall, and we know more from an Eastern because they only because they had an Eastern emperor, they had more scribes, they had. So literacy is a big part of that. I'm trying to think of what else as well.

Alex Ferrari 55:26
I mean, just the mortar that they put together. Have you seen how they make it? It's incredible. It's like, I asked, I wouldn't, when I was there, I was asking the guides. I'm like, can we make this? They're like, we can't. It's just too expensive.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 55:36
Concrete was it was a Roman idea.

Alex Ferrari 55:38
But the way their concrete works, and it's strong. You know, their concrete is so much strong, a whole bunch of other things. Yeah, they ill last. It's lasted for 1000s of years. I'm like, why is it like, every 5200 years, we gotta update our concrete? And they didn't. It's expensive in the reunion, I guess. Well, there's that, there's there's that, but, but the cost of it was extremely expensive. It's not a law that's not lost. We know how they did it, right?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 56:04
We do. And there's, actually, there's YouTube videos for this. If you look up Roman concrete, there's some really cool videos and how to do it. But the issue is, as you said, it's so expensive. So they can't, you can't do the mass building projects they did. It's just it's so expensive,

Alex Ferrari 56:15
Yeah. Well, it's like, now, I mean, try to build the the Hoover Dam now, yeah, it's impossible.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 56:21
Well, it's once again. But we're having the inflation problem too. Because if you look at a lot of like Roman buildings that were built early on, they were built, the major buildings were built early in the empire, before the money got out of control. Because, as I mentioned, like in the late fifth century, you're seeing buildings go in disrepair because they don't have the money, the ability, or the or the actual know how, to fix a lot of these things.

Alex Ferrari 56:39
Was there any, I mean, because if you look into into the the UK, in that area, the nor in the Norse, you know, Sweden, Norway, that kind of area, and anywhere in the world, even Egypt, there's a mystical school there. There are the sex of mysticism. I have to believe there was some sort of sex besides the the fun the fun guy, the fun guy, the wine guys, but there had to been some other kind of mysticism around.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 57:08
I mean, for mysticism was a part of life for them, and that's what you have to like as so, so, so augury, um, as I mentioned, the augers were actually people that could read bird signs. And you got to really wonder about these guys. There's like tea it's like reading tea leaves, right? Could they actually read it? Or did they have an outcome that they wanted in mind? They just make this stuff up. Yeah. So, like, you got to wonder that. So augery was a very big thing. It's where our word inauguration comes from. They would actually be saying, okay, are the bird signs good today? Can we do something? So that's the kind of mysticism we're talking Yeah, it like, to me, that's, that's, once again, it's, I don't have knowledge about everything, but of what I'm aware of, like, augury was a big part of it. Looking at entrails is a big part of it. Jesus, you know, like, you know, what are your intestines look like? They look pretty good today. Yeah, I would love some tripe. So entrails are a big part of it. Sacrifices were important. Did they sacrifice? He's the Emperor. Actually institutes the sacrificing to the Emperor because he thought that it had become too There was too much Christianity out there, and he was concerned that the gods were getting mad at them, and that's why the crisis of the third century was happening. So I don't remember off top hand that this is something I started reading more about recently, so I don't know as much about it, but like sacrificing, they thought was something that would make the gods happy with them, to kind of stop Roman power from disappearing.

Alex Ferrari 58:27
Interesting. So sacrifice, but it wasn't. It wasn't like sacrificing to a god. What were they sacrificing to?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 58:33
They would be sacrificing like they would pick a God, typically, Jupiter, because Jupiter is the king God. I think sometimes you got to be willing to break some eggs to make an oblim,

Alex Ferrari 58:40
Listen I've been, I've been podcasting now for almost a decade as well. Yeah, when I jumped in, I thought it was late. I was like, Ah, well, you start 2015. I was already on the same time, yeah. So about 2015 I started, and I'm like, Ah, super late.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 58:54
Ah, there were only 250,000 shows when we started, man, right?

Alex Ferrari 58:56
And now there's millions. But I know when we started, it was just like, and I was going into the film industry, so I had a film, film podcast, and I was like, ah, there's so many of them out there. Now I'll just throw my hat in the ring, and I'm like, three months later, oh, I'm number one. How the hell that happened? And then it just kind of took off from there, and then parlayed that into what we do today. But yeah, if you would have told me that I was gonna be a podcaster, there's no school for podcasting.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 59:19
You know what I think the problem is, too. And this isn't to offend anybody, but I think a lot of times, like, if you end up teaching marketing at a college, well, why are you teaching it and not doing it? I think like, those are, those are kind of issues you see. And I also think you see the way curriculums work. These things are changing so fast. By the time someone's qualified to teach, it has changed. And I think that's a big issue too. Is like it the system isn't agile enough, you know what I mean?

Alex Ferrari 59:44
Yeah, no, no question. So let's dive back into into Rome, and we kind of start touching into Rome and the in the US, yeah? And that is something that a lot of people have made a comparison to, because the US is a very. Young and quote, unquote empire, yeah, you know, arguably the strongest country in the world as of, as of this recording.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:00:10
But we've really changed.

Alex Ferrari 1:00:11
It could change very quickly, but we've been around for only, you know, handbook, three, 400 years, 300 years, or something like that, 1776 Yeah.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:00:20
So that was 1776 or bicentennial. So the math on that, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:00:24
300 so 300 years and change, or whatever it is, not even, like, no, two 250 Yeah, exactly. Thank you, DC. I didn't go to so activity. So we're really young. We're a young, young country, comparatively to everything we've been talking about, yeah, what has made us so the only reason why we have been able to do what we've been able to do is our geographical location, correct? Two oceans, Canada up top, Mexico at the bottom, they both tried some stuff. Yeah, we figured it out. We tried some stuff. We figured it out. We're all friends now on our so we have no real natural enemies per se.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:01:03
So that helped a lot. In Europe, the power structure changed, no, absolutely weekly. Rome, power structure dynasty changes.

Alex Ferrari 1:01:09
You have it constantly, yeah. So can you compare what is, what happened to Rome to what our stage is now? Since it seems to we have been doing this at a beatnik pace, yeah. So what took maybe Rome 1000 years to get to we might have been able to do in 100 years technology plus, because the technology has grown so fast. But there's, there's definitely cracks in the system right now

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:01:33
Well, and I'll try to make this as like, non political as possible, please. Like when I, when I've looked at it, you know, I've been talking for the last, gosh, like, six months about, like, the crisis of the third century. And like, how, you know, you see inflation, you see, you know, the population is just changing dramatically, and it's, you know, really messing with the system. But then also you have the political class is kind of playing at their own game, right? And they're playing at the fall the Republic. So I think the thing that I think the thing that I think is interesting is you have a fall of the Republic and the fall of an empire kind of happening simultaneously. And I'm just, you know, once again, not to get too far into it, but kind of the whole Trump situation that's happening right now is very similar to how a republic fell. Now, if you look at the other side of it, our inflation is out of control. We're over our skis and spending, but that's been forever, right? But like, where it's really bad Congressman Thomas Massie, where's this, like, this pin that actually has the debt clock on it. And you go to debt clock.org if you want to see it in real time. And we are kind of speeding towards oblivion. And I think the thing that you have to understand is, I think we're somewhere around like 35 trillion in debt right now, and within the next 10 years, we're gonna be like 45 trillion. So we're going someplace fast.

Alex Ferrari 1:02:41
I mean, but how is that even? And when you and before we keep going, I just want people to understand this. When you say something like that, $35 trillion you can't even fathom how much money that money is. So much money we're never going to pay that money back. So it's just basically we're printing money to a place where we can just continuously spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. The moment we can do that, because everybody in the world agrees that the dollar is worth something, right?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:02:41
But the problem we're having now is we didn't really have a competitive currency for a while. And I guess the issue we've had is how we've run the dollar too, like we give a lot of dollars to other countries. You know, whether it's through support or aid or these different petrol dollar too. The oil markets are a big deal. And you also have, even recently, like, we've, we've said to Russia, like, Hey, we're gonna hit everything that you have in US dollars. So we're also teaching people that the dollar is a weapon, so maybe you don't want to hold it, and that's a dangerous thing to consider. So what we're seeing is, globally, have you heard of BRICS? Of course. Okay, so that you have the BRICS countries, which is, I think it's Brazil, Brazil,

Alex Ferrari 1:03:43
Russia, India, China, South Africa. I think it's South Africa.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:03:47
It might be South Africa.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:48
And what's the C? Oh, C, is b, r, i, c, yeah, South Africa, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:03:53
So, so those are, and there's other ones that have, but those are the core ones, because what happened is you started to have some trade being done in Chinese yuan. So you're starting to get off of US dollars, right? So we're able to do a lot of what we do because of people using the US dollar globally. It's become like, kind of the global currency, like English. It was basically, it's basically since World War Two, right? And it's become like how English has been, come on, global language in a lot of ways. But what's happening was, with these BRICS countries, is you're starting to see them move some trading over to kind of this basket of currencies they're putting together. And you're seeing the amount of trading globally in dollars go down. And I think, I don't have the exact numbers in this, I'm just going off of, you know what I've heard recently that we were used to be around somewhere of 70% of all transactions happening in dollars globally, we're getting closer to that 50% number, like it's going down. That's not good. And the problem is, if they stop trading oil, which is the thing that runs the world in dollars, you're gonna see overnight. You can't fill a wheelbarrow with money fast enough to go buy yourself a loaf of bread. That's the issue we're gonna have. We're able to do all this and inflate our money like we can because every. Everybody else is using our money,

Alex Ferrari 1:05:01
But we're but if someone tried to do that, our military is so powerful and we have so much correct that's their only reason it hasn't happened. Only reason we

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:05:10
We have the biggest military. And by far, the thing that's weird to consider too, and I had somebody mention this to me today, is like we have military bases in the UK. We have everyone in but nobody has military bases here, which I thought is kind of weird. So it's kind of like we're occupying the world, right?

Alex Ferrari 1:05:25
Well, we are essentially a Roman Empire, exactly, in many, many ways, right?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:05:30
So if we kill our currency, just like it did in Rome, well, there, there is no Empire anymore. And I think that's what you have to really consider, is we're telling people don't use our dollars. We're running the cash register up, like, there's no tomorrow. Eventually there's, there's kind of no off ramp, the music, the music stops playing soon, yeah. And the thing you have to consider is, okay, like, Okay, if we're going to fix that, it's still going to be bumpy, because our dollar is not based on anything. So if you try to put it back on something, well, we're so far over our skis. How do you do that? So you can't put a gold if you can't put it back in the box, that's the box, that's the problem. You put on a gold standard, well, then it's $45,000 ounce gold, right? Because the problem you would have then as well is we would also have to change like tariffs and industry and stuff like that, because we would have to bring production back here at the same time that we changed monetary policy. Otherwise we're screwed.

Alex Ferrari 1:06:19
It's it's a very the system itself right now seems to be extremely fragile globally. It does globally. Globally, everything is just like on a house of cards.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:06:29
Well, because we're not really the global hegemon anymore. And I think that's the thing that's really interesting. It's we're getting to kind of like this multi polar world, which is interesting.

Alex Ferrari 1:06:36
All right, so as far as Rome is concerned, yeah. How does Rome, uh, compare to so the fall of Rome compared to where we are in our Yeah, in our timeline, yeah.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:06:48
So I think the thing, once again, is, if you look at what killed Rome, there's so many different things, right? Like, you know, if you read the decline of fall of Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, you would think that the entire world caused the real fall of Rome. But if it's really two major things, and that's inflation and immigration. So I think what you need to take a look at is there's no problem with people coming to a country, but the problem is, if you inflate the system too fast, and the money is losing value, well then the people coming in don't really have buy into the system, and as the system collapses, well they don't need the system anymore. And that's the same thing that happened in Rome. So I think what it comes down to is just getting a handle on borders and getting a handle on your money, right? And I think if you can handle those two things, you're in better shape. But once again, are we going to I don't know. It's because if you don't have borders, you don't have a country, and if you don't have a currency, you don't have a country. So it's a real difficult place to be in, and that is what killed the Roman Empire.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:37
So is there any, is there anything we can do, or anything we can see that Rome did wrong that we can try to fix along our path, brother,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:07:47
Well, you're gonna want to get yourself some seeds. Um,

Alex Ferrari 1:07:51
Invest in bullets and toilet paper, is what you're saying.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:07:52
No, I'm just like, I think what it comes down to, and because, because, here's what you have to understand too, is people talk about Rome falling from debauchery and all this and all that. And if you look at it like at the end, it was a Christian empire, they were likely the best they had been in a long time. So the thing you have to consider is they got too far down the road where they couldn't put it back together. And I think we're very close to that as well. And I think that the problem people do is they get too into red team, Blue Team. And you know, this one's gonna save me, or that one's gonna save me. And what it really comes down to is getting involved locally. You know, working with your neighbors. You know, I have chickens. Chickens are great. I get a dozen eggs every day. You know, like we not that you have to have a barter economy, but we trade eggs with our neighbor that gives us bread, and we trade eggs that our neighbor that gives us beans and vegetables. So I think it's also about getting involved locally and not being so dependent on the system. So if things do shift, you know you can have some stabilization, because the people in Rome still live there, they still figured out how to transition through it. So I think just understanding at some point there will be some change of some sort, and have yourself prepared enough for when that happens. That doesn't mean you need a basement bunker. And, you know, you need to go

Alex Ferrari 1:09:02
Well, it's not like the Mayan empire that all of a sudden everyone just was gone, right? It's there were still people in Rome during the fall

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:09:08
And they stayed and they stayed. It just, what happened is, the the class has changed. So what happened is, you know, the Romans that had become the more powerful class became kind of this subservient class, but they still, kind of the wealthy Romans still figured out how to be somewhat wealthy in the barbarian world. So it's just kind of figuring out how to take care of yourself and your community and your kids and everything kind of through change, because at some point it's going to change. It's just how life is.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:31
So during this, during this, this, this shift, I agree with you. I think if we started to go more locally. But the thing is, though, unlike the Roman Empire,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:09:43
Well, cities are gonna be in trouble no matter what. Yeah, cities are. You don't want to be in a you don't want to be in a city. You don't want to be in a big city, because that's the system, because, and it's an ultimate because you'll have no food, and it's going to be chaos within like, five days, you know, I mean, like, it's, you know what? I mean, like, if you make it that far,

Alex Ferrari 1:09:57
Right. But the thing is that if, let's say, the. US does fall in a classical sense. Sure, you know, it's not gonna again, not the Mayan empire. Everyone's gonna stop all of a sudden. But when, if the Empire,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:10:09
That's just because I don't have a lot of faith in our politicians to handle monetary policy and handle that, you're screwed.

Alex Ferrari 1:10:14
So if that happens, though, unlike the Roman Empire, we are a global economy. We are we're connected globally. If the US does go down in power, the world will shift. Yeah, even, even someone like China, or even someone like Russia, not as much. But China, without Europe and US, they they're done. Yeah, they need us to buy their goods. If not, it doesn't work, sure. So if we go down, the whole world is going to be in chaos.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:10:45
And that's why I've been talking about, like, you know, you see, like, the fall of the Republic and the fall of the Empire, and kind of either one alone, you can kind of make it through this. This thing that we're seeing is really civilizational shifting, and I think that's the thing you have to think about, is like, you know, doesn't mean that, you know, like, we're going to lose all technology and the power is going to cause but I think the thing you're I think the thing you're going to see is the global power structure is going to change dramatically. And I think if the US goes down in premacy, like it's going to be a free for all, I'm like, you know who's going to be the most in charge?

Alex Ferrari 1:11:12
Well, that's the thing right now. The US has been the the security guard,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:11:17
And once again, not that I agree with that. I don't know. I don't think we should be the world's police force. But like that is the structure we live in,

Alex Ferrari 1:11:22
But that is the world we live in. Like, I know, you know, I have some friends over in the Philippines are like, yeah, China just brought a battleship near us, yeah. And the US had to, like, send a battleship in the area just to make sure nothing goes on, yeah. And if the US wasn't there, I have no doubt China would be taking over places left and right.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:11:39
And I think the thing you have to get concerned about, too, is like, let's say, you know, the US breaks up into some different ways. Oh, yeah. Like, we wouldn't last as individual, because it's the fact that we're all united that makes us feel to last and have a strong country. If we break up, you're gonna have, like, Canada's gonna take this part, you know, maybe Russia comes in and takes Alaska. Like, that's the problem you're gonna have, is you're going to have other stronger countries grabbing for parts of it.

Alex Ferrari 1:12:02
And that's empire. With Roman Empire,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:12:04
Exactly what happens with the Empire so many people that start carving out their own kingdoms. Because if you look the Roman Empire went as far as Britain, you know, it was Britain and Spain and France and Germany and Belgium and all these different places that were part of the Roman Empire. You know that the heart of the Empire was Serbia and Macedonia and a lot of these places, and they all became their own countries. So the problem that you have is you're if it fails, it's not just going to fail into being a weaker version of the same thing. It's likely going to break up into something else,

Alex Ferrari 1:12:37
And the US dollar would go away, right? All that stuff would go away, right, even if we broke up into three giant sections. Let's say, yeah, the South, the North and,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:12:47
Well, you have to think about trade, right? Like, you have to think about, like, certain parts of the parts of the country don't produce certain things. Oh, God, food is mostly California, so it's going to be like, a huge problem.

Alex Ferrari 1:12:57
Oh, yeah. I mean, California was 60% of our food is California.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:13:00
I live in the Northeast. It's not a good place to live, man, I'd rather live man, I'd rather live like near Florida, where they grow things, near California, where they grow things, you know, Yeah, true. You want to be where there's food, right?

Alex Ferrari 1:13:08
And, well, Texas, not too bad. It's a Yeah, tell me about it.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:13:12
I just got back from Vegas, actually, by the way, that's very hot.

Alex Ferrari 1:13:14
That's even worse. Yeah, Vegas has nothing that does that. They produce nothing but debauchery. Yeah, and some great shows.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:13:20
I did see it. I did see a billboard. It was for a strip club, and it said, breaking up marriages for 30 years. And I'm like, oh, that's when you're running with that is your advertisement. You know. No, hope

Alex Ferrari 1:13:29
You know where you are, sir. Yeah, they're not trying to sugarcoat anything at that point the game. But yeah, this is, this is a fascinating idea of of Rome and the US, because so many people compare the two. If, let me ask you this, if Rome would be around today, yeah, in its extent, what would it look like around the world? Like? What would like if

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:13:55
The Roman Empire so it would have almost all of Central Europe. It would have a good deal of Northern Africa. It would have a lot of Britain, though they kind of stopped going a little bit further, because the pics are a really hard tribe to deal with. That's why Hadrian builds the wall. It would have Spain. It would have, gosh, it would have turkey. It would it would have, so like to realize how big this thing was. Yeah, is dramatic. It's actually, if those who out there listening get a chance look up the Roman Empire in 117 ad. So under Trajan, that's when it gets to its biggest. It's enormous. And you can understand why it's so hard to keep paying for this thing and keep this thing running. It's it's huge.

Alex Ferrari 1:14:36
So let me ask you this, because, you know, after watching 300 back in the day, and understanding going deep down to Spartan I'm sure you've probably read, Oh, absolutely, about the Spartans and their whole culture. Most empires were built upon the back of slaves. That's true. Rome was no different. That's correct. We were no different. How does. That because the power and the growth,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:15:03
They looked at it a little bit differently, though, and I think that's important to understand,

Alex Ferrari 1:15:06
Please. Yeah. Can you explain so,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:15:08
So the word slave actually comes from Slav is where the word slave comes from, but in Rome, they would have used the word servos, or slave or servant. Say what he used servos,

Alex Ferrari 1:15:18
But it was a servant without, not by choice.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:15:21
Well, so how it would work. And there's a couple different ways you can get here. So you could actually, like, let's say you had a kid and you didn't want that kid, you could expose that child and leave it, leave them out. Now, leader would just leave them on the street, leave them, leave them somewhere. Now, if somebody picked that child up, that child can now be a slave. Like, that's what you could actually end up doing, is if you raised that child, that child could be your slave. So exposure was one way people became a slave, but the number one way people became a slave was through conquest. If the Roman Empire defeated you and brought your people in, you would be sold as slaves to Romans. But now there's not kind of one overarching way they did it, but there's so many different ways they did it, like you know, maybe you might be a gladiator, right? And they might come in that way and be a gladiator, if you were very military, or you might come in. A lot of Greeks came into the Empire this way. You're a slave, but you're a teacher. So you lived very well, but you were a teacher, because they would come in as like the household tutors. What could also happen as well, and happen very often, is you would work for somebody for a period of time and then eventually buy your freedom. Your freedom. And there's actually stories, um, one of Cicero Marcus told us Cicero's slaves actually wrote about Cicero's life after he died, because he bought his own freedom and kind of moved out, and they still kept in touch, and they were friends, and you could actually become a citizen after being a slave, like you could actually get citizenship after after being a slave. Were they treated the same, though, after it's across the board, different you have to like, so afterwards, yeah, they're treated, if you had citizenship, you're treated as a citizen, citizen regardless, regardless because you have citizenship,

Alex Ferrari 1:16:51
Even if you like, Oh, you're Greek, you're a Greek citizen. You were no, you're alone. Boy, no, but, but if you were brought in as a Greek, let's say, right, you it was never like, oh, you're a Greek citizen.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:17:00
Well, it depends on when it was, so during the time of Hadrian. So that's around the 120s ad is called the hellenizing of Rome. So that's when Greek culture, like really comes into Rome. Most wealthy Romans actually spoke Greek because they would it. They didn't start that way, but they get that way after the Hellenization of Rome. So Greek culture, early on, they didn't like it, because it was seen as effeminate. Later on, it becomes one of the dominant cultures of the Empire. So they wouldn't have had that much of a problem with Greeks.

Alex Ferrari 1:17:30
And it's, it wasn't as was there Africans, like Africans in Rome, like,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:17:35
There, there was. And actually Septimius Severus, that I had mentioned in the 220s was actually likely a black Roman Emperor. Really. They had a black Roman emperor, Septimius, Severus and his son, Caracalla would have been, oh, wait, isn't that Denzel? No, I think he's Macrinus, who's also, he's a short term, short lived emperor as well, really. And he was another, uh, African emperor, yeah.

Alex Ferrari 1:17:55
How did that just, please, let me, because we have so much racism, yeah, in the world today,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:18:00
Rome was different. It was,

Alex Ferrari 1:18:02
Tell me, tell me, explain what, how it was work.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:18:04
It was, once again, it's not perfect. It's not perfect. You know, people would have had their own ideas and thought process and things like that. This was a time period where, if you had the most power, they didn't care. They didn't care. So, you know, somebody like Macrinus, if you got money and you got power, okay, fine, they'll respect you. You know it that's how they looked because they had this idea of the Greeks called Arete. The Romans call it Virtus or manliness. So if you had power, if you had money, if you had virtue, they really didn't care that much where you came from. They just care if you could wield it. And I think that's what it comes down to.

Alex Ferrari 1:18:37
So there was that was their ideology. Their ideology was power, power. So, you know, racism is not built in in power.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:18:47
And I'm not saying it didn't exist. I'm sure it existed to us.

Alex Ferrari 1:18:50
Oh, I'm sure somebody was like, people have damn Denzel, right? Yeah, that damn Denzel kind of thing, kind of, I'm sure that was that. I was sure that was something like that, yeah. But the the mentality was so different, where racism, or the concept of racism, here in the in the West, was based on color of skin, where their their ideology was purely about power.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:19:10
It was pit power, but their racism actually would have been more towards like the barbarians. So there was there wasn't right. So it's not that it didn't exist. It's how they viewed it differently. Now, if a barbarian got enough power, enough money, they'd accept him, because once again, he's power. He's got beer juice, he's got manliness. And the word barbarian, by the way, comes from the Greek word Barbary, meaning beard. Because initially the barbarians were these bearded guys. You didn't have in early Rome. People didn't have beards. It became a thing later on.

Alex Ferrari 1:19:39
So I wanted to ask you, in regards to Rome and the class system, yeah, in Rome, because, if

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:19:46
It's pretty complicated,

Alex Ferrari 1:19:49
So to to simplify the class system, yeah, at least towards the end, yeah, where we're at here as far as money and power, because there seems to be a tremendous. This amount of inequality in the US right now?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:20:02
Yeah, well, there was in Rome too,

Alex Ferrari 1:20:03
Exactly. I mean, a tremendous amount of inequality, more so than it was when I was born, when you were born to where it is now. The the gap is so massive. How did that affect Rome's downfall? And how do you feel that that might affect our downward spiral

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:20:22
Well, and that's so I guess, going back to the Roman revolution, the earliest two parts of the Roman revolution were these two brothers, Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus. And if you look at the late Republic, there's the two political classes, I guess even to go further. So the pabeans were kind of the broke people and the patricians were the rich people. So you could have a patrician name but not function like patrician because now we're getting into the politics of it, the politics you had the optimates, which were the people that did things for the rich people. They were the political party that operated for the rich and the populares, so popular. So like Julius Caesar, he's a patrician by birth, but politically, he's a popular a and if you look at his whole life, the guy was broke his entire life, though he had a famous name, and that's actually part of why he makes the decision he makes, because his entire life, he owes a lot of money to a lot of people to be able to do the things he's doing. The biggest one of these is a guy named Marcus Crassus started Rome's first fire department. He would start fires, and then people would pay him to put him out.

Alex Ferrari 1:21:28
Well, I mean, I mean, that's strategy, so good strategy to get customers, yeah, not so much morally,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:21:34
To understand that. Like, that's kind of like, politically, how you would look at it, okay, but also, like, even during the time of the Republic, the way people would vote is they would vote by like, what are called centuries. And they were originally centuries because they actually lined up with the Roman army. But the problem is, the way the centuries were set up, most of the people barely had a vote, and the rich people had all the vote. So even during this republic, when it's supposed to be the most equal time of Rome, it was still the wealthiest people making all the decisions, the kind of the rabble rousers wouldn't be making those decisions. Even though they sensibly had a vote, their votes weren't weighted very high. They actually weighted the votes

Alex Ferrari 1:22:11
Really, yes. So it would take X amount of common folk votes compared,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:22:15
They could almost never outvote the political class.

Alex Ferrari 1:22:19
Interesting, how did, but how did the the populace accept that?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:22:23
Because they had all the the political class had all the military power, right? Like, that's, that's where it comes down to who has the most power. You know what I mean? And that's, that's the difference. So Rome is very much power politics interesting. And at that time, Army, the one the power, the one that could wield it is the one that could to do

Alex Ferrari 1:22:24
You as the gold makes the rules correctly, which is a very different way of looking at how our founders found this country, yeah, which is everyone has a right to bear arms, yeah. So there's a, and I don't want to go down this road,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:22:53
But early, but early on, as I mentioned, in the Republic, like that was how it was. It was more citizen soldiers, but it's, it's actually a guy who is a popular a that actually ends up changing the whole thing, as we talked about earlier on, with the Roman standards and everything.

Alex Ferrari 1:23:08
So they, they said, Okay, everyone, we don't need to, you know, have because now, I mean, I mean, that's one of the reasons, also, that no one's ever attacked. The US is like, you can't do a land, a land well. And the thing is very difficult

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:23:20
To think is really important getting back inside, as I mentioned, Gaius Marius did those military reforms where it becomes less of your political class serving in the military that we get, like, officers, positions and things like that, and it becomes the poor people end up serving in the military. So then they serve the general that pays them best, and they serve the general that gives them the most. Because your politics, like, where today a lot of our politicians, like, I couldn't imagine some of these guys putting on army helmets and running the battle like they can you imagine, like, it'd be embarrassing. Can you it would be embarrassing? But like in Rome, like, most of the time, if you were a senator, like you were leading an army, or had led an army at some point, like it was very much part of culture. So the poorer classes are very much tied to the people that they're voting for. It's what's called a client system. And in a Roman household, depending on how close you were to the politician or person that you were a client of you would be allowed in different parts of their house. Their house is kind of like their office, and people depended on the rich people for their sustenance. You know, whether it's like getting jobs or getting different things. And there's some really interesting like, if you read some of the letters around, like the late Republic time of people writing letters to a senator to try and help get a job. Like, I know this person or that person, and this person thinks this way of me. So it was very much what's called a client system, and that's part of what keeps it together in that way, where the money and the power stays with the powerful, because they're giving things to the others to create their sustenance, and they're serving in the military under them. And that's why Caesar was able to do a lot of what he was able to do. Because in 59 BC, when he's Consul, you're consul for a year, the first thing he does is actually give land to the military. So now his troops say you. Well, my guy just took care of me, right? Like, I think, I think that's what you have to really consider. So if they keep doing that, that's why the power stays the way it is. Is people want who gives them the most?

Alex Ferrari 1:25:09
So how does the inequality of that? Obviously, there's some in quality, yeah, in Rome, how do you see it?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:25:17
Oh, sorry. Okay, so getting back to how we got here. Okay, yeah. So two brothers, the gracchi, they institute what's called the grain dole. So basically Rome now, as a social program, literally feeds everyone. So what happens is, the bigger the Empire gets, the more people bring into it, and especially in 212 after Caracal, it takes 30 million people overnight and says, You're citizens. Now is this like social basically socialism, correct? So they it's and it's something that nobody ever talks about Rome like they were subsidizing grain for, like, a good deal of the Empire, and they brought in 30,000,030 and 212 that's called the Edict of Caracal. He brings in 30 million people overnight. We don't it comes from, like a fragment, so we don't actually know, like, why he did it and that. But these are people who are already in the Empire. They were the provinces. So you have Rome proper, and the provinces are the area outside of it, so that they're now citizens. So that means and they were citizens without the vote, so they couldn't vote for anything, but now they could be taxed, so the emperor could tax their inheritance and things like that. And they were now eligible for the grain Dole and some of the social programs. So these things do start to eat away at the Empire. And that's very simple, very similar to, like, you know what happens here with a lot of our social programs, that you have to pay for these things, right? And I think that's what it comes down to. So if the country is not profitable, and more going in than you know, more is going out than coming in, like, eventually that doesn't work.

Alex Ferrari 1:26:36
We have to, we have to start creating money, correct, inflating.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:26:40
You go on a computer and you say, so we're going to do this thing called quantitative easing. What's that? We're going to make more money.

Alex Ferrari 1:26:44
Exactly, exactly. Let's not go down. We can have a whole conversation about just the monetary system. Love talking about that, but we won't get into

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:26:53
I got a strike on YouTube for doing that one. So, yeah.

Alex Ferrari 1:26:58
So, so how does that, how does that inequality in Rome, like, if you over, if you overlay it to what we're going through now, because there's so much inequality here, what are the signs that you're seeing in the current US Empire versus what you saw in Rome?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:27:15
Well, the biggest one is they're saying Social Security is only going to last to like, 2035 and that's so like, that's the problem we're seeing is they're they're putting it, they're saying it's our grain system, great. They're saying our social programs aren't going to last and and you can't just tax people more, because then they can't pay for anything, and then you also have inflation. Is the tax that everybody feels but nobody realizes it's a tax, right, correct? Because then they take, like, when people think of the idea of printing money, they don't realize to print money, they're breaking your dollar in half or in a third, or whatever they're doing, like, if you want to take a look at how much it costs you to repair your car 10 years ago versus now, you're going to find out it's probably close to double. Oh, yeah, and build a house. And so that's what people don't see, is our government is inflating money to kind of do cool stuff for themselves and to also fund a lot of social programs because we're in trouble, and you can only do that so long. And that's not to say like social programs are right or wrong, but I think you have to, you have to consider your system differently if you're going to do it that way. Ours isn't built to be able to do that, just like Rome's wasn't built to be able to do that,

Alex Ferrari 1:28:15
And then so, so that's what you're seeing. Yeah, you're actually seeing that we're going we our grain says, our grading, our green system is out of control, is out of control, and that's where, and that's where it's not going to be a a nuke, or it's not going to be something that's going to knock out the US.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:28:33
Well, if you look at every empire, most empires are their own worst enemy, and they're going to,

Alex Ferrari 1:28:37
And they're going to fallwithin themselves, correct? So, and it's, do you feel it's the exact same two things that's going to be, I wouldn't say immigration per se, because we're not going to get 30 million people, yeah, citizenship right away.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:28:47
I think the thing you have to it realizes is It's expanding. That's why I'm saying, like, are we to where Rome was when it fell? No. Are we moving at a faster rate? Yes, but I think we're still, we still have enough time that we can do something. So I think it's expanding through immigration, I think, is part of the problem, but I think money is the bigger problem. If you don't fix that, you are in trouble.

Alex Ferrari 1:29:06
So one of the characters that in Roman history that I'm fascinated with this Marcus Aurelius, partly because of Gladiator, partly because of stoicism, and stoicism because I've studied a lot of his writings and things like that. Can you kind of dive in a little bit about who Marcus Aurelius was and how kind of he seemed to and please correct me, if wrong, he seemed to be kind of the oddball out from a lot of emperors in the kind of you saying he's one of the good emperors, yeah, but he, even, with, even, even within the good emperor seemed to have been an outlier. Am I wrong with that?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:29:46
You're not wrong. Though the five good emperors are a lot better than the ones before and after them. I guess if you don't consider Augustus, though, Augustus, on his deathbed, says, If I had played my part, well, give me an applause. And we're always saying, what does that mean? What was what part was he? Playing. But if you look at Aurelius, the thing I find interesting about him is, you know, the stoicism and everything comes out of him, but if you look at his actions and how he writes, are different, right? Because if he was considering doing the right thing, well, why didn't you raise Commodus better, or why didn't you pick someone else to be the next emperor? So to me, that's the big question mark I have about him, is you look at him and it's like the words and deeds thing, right? Like he does a good job as emperor, but his is, one of his final actions is nepotism, rather than figuring out, like, how do we make this thing work? Which, to me, doesn't agree with who he was as a person,

Alex Ferrari 1:30:42
Yeah. And, I mean, again, the only image I have a Commodus is Joaquin Phoenix.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:30:47
I can't get it out of my head,

Alex Ferrari 1:30:49
And he's the worst.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:30:51
As I said, there are two Roman emperors that get drugged through the streets of Rome naked. One is Commodus, and the other is Elagabalus.

Alex Ferrari 1:30:58
Did he? I mean, obviously there wasn't a character in the market, Maximus who killed them. And, no, there wasn't, no fantastic, though, but, but how did he die? Who's that? Commodus?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:31:10
Commodus is and Marcus, by the way, so both, Marcus just dies of old age.

Alex Ferrari 1:31:14
Oh, he doesn't get suffocated by Joaquin.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:31:16
He does not get suffocated by Joaquin. Okay, good. It was great in the movie. No, he just dies of old age. A lot of like, you have to understand medical technology isn't as good at this point in time. So anything could have taken these guys out. It's actually amazing that some of them live as long as they live, right? But if you look at Commodus, we actually had touched on this earlier, but if you look at communist, the way he dies is the Praetorian Guard is, like, I'm done with this guy. So they work with his wife to poison him. Doesn't work out. He throws up the poison. The final thing they end up doing is they pay a wrestler to strangle him. So it's not really Maximus, but, you know, it's a wrestler, and that ends up being how he dies.

Alex Ferrari 1:31:52
When you say wrestler, are you talking about, like, like, Greek wrestler,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:31:55
Yeah, like wrestlers,

Alex Ferrari 1:31:56
Old school Greek wrestler. Wow.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:31:59
Like, you know, Hulk brother.

Alex Ferrari 1:32:01
I don't think, yeah, the macho man is not killing him. I guess Slim Jim, exactly. So as far as the whole kind of stoicism, yeah, aspect of it was, he's one of the founding fathers of that kind of philosophy.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:32:20
So I don't know as much about stoicism. I'm not you know your Ryan Holiday type. To me, I don't have as much respect for Aurelius, just because his actions don't match up with what you would have expected from someone that states the way he writes, right?

Alex Ferrari 1:32:34
So whatever he wrote was one thing, but, but, but his deeds are different, yeah, because the way he raised his child, right? There was something off.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:32:41
There's something off, right? Like, like, let's think about it. If you're this great, stoic and you raise your kid to be a great well, he should be even a great, mediocre ruler, like a b minus, yeah, it's not a complete F. He raised an F, you know? So to me, like, you have to look at like, his product, right? You know, you look at the product he creates his a spoiled person that can't rule an empire, and I think that's a real problem. So to me, that's what I look at. His words and deeds don't match

Alex Ferrari 1:33:09
Now, going back towards signs of things that the in the fall of Roman Rome, and where we are now in the US, and by the way, I'm picking on the US is if there's any other empires that are actively out there, right now

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:33:25
Kind of the sole one at the moment, you know, we are

Alex Ferrari 1:33:27
The big we. Yeah, because, I mean, obviously the Soviet Union fell in 91 and and the fall of that was also monetary as well, right? If I'm not mistaken, the fall of Soviet

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:33:38
I don't know as much about the Soviet history out there, so I don't want to speak out of turn on it,

Alex Ferrari 1:33:41
From my understanding there was their dollar collapsed and and just, that's what, once again, that's what kills empire. And then just the whole thing just went down. If there's no money, there's no empire. So that's and that's something that I want people to listening, to understand that, that you're right. Money is the money of the country. Is what runs the country. Without that money or perceived value.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:34:02
Let's take a look at the EU right now. Like, like, like, you know, if you've been to Europe before the euro and after the euro, it's very different. Like, you know, countries like Hungary and other countries like the Euro doesn't fit as well with their economy. And I think that's what you have to think about Greece, right? Like, so the problem you have is you're saying to all these countries that geographically have different economies, you're now using the same money. Well, for some countries, it's going to be awesome. For other countries, it's going to be great. And then you have the UK that you know, that just says, Hey, we're going to use the pound sterling still. So that's the problem you have is, and that's why I think it's really interesting what they've tried to do, kind of like with the EU parliament, a lot of those things as well as they tried to kind of create a United States of Europe. And it's not going to be good for every country, because your money is money times based on your economy and your own trade. So to say, like, hey, this dollar unit handles everyone, puts some countries in a good spot and others in a bad spot, and that's eventually not going to be sustainable, right? Like, I, like, I've. Uh, last time I went to to Europe, we went to Austria, where our dollar did not go very far. We went to Hungary, where our dollar went very far. We went to Bratislava, where our dollar went even further than that. Because so now you have to think about, how has their quality of life or standard of living changed since now? They're not trading on their own economy. They're trading on the economies of all the countries around them. So I think monetary policy is one of the number one things for any country empire, whatever it might be.

Alex Ferrari 1:35:29
So are there any other signs that you see here in the US that you're like, Ooh, I saw that in the fall of Rome. And it's like these little things. It's not monetary

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:35:40
You know, I honestly, I think monetary policy is the biggest one. Like, I know we were, we were joking earlier about, like, you know, some of the memes you see online.

Alex Ferrari 1:35:47
Well, yeah, like social, well, we have social media, obviously, and our media has changed dramatically. Are, in many ways, things that were no I mean, we have evolved, and there's no question we've evolved.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:36:00
But I guess here's, here's here's one thing I take a look at. And if you look at kind of the last 100 years of Rome, and this, once again, isn't a statement about any political party, but like the guy in charge, nobody knows if that guy is actually in charge. And that doesn't matter what political party is, what you are. People have talked about, okay, well, is the FBI controlling things? Is the Secret Service Control? Is it a secret room of family? And if you look at, if you look at kind of the last 100 years of Rome, like after the Battle of Adrian Opal in 378 the Emperor Valens actually falls in battle, which was unheard of, to have a Roman Emperor die in battle after that time period. Sure, there's emperors, but they're not running anything. So to me, that's a concern, because that puts us even further down the road, because you don't actually know who's running the thing. And I And to me, that's a real problem.

Alex Ferrari 1:36:44
Is there any time in in Roman history that there was a figurehead emperor, but there was actually another power structure running behind

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:36:55
After 410, after the the sack by the Visigoths, most of the emperors that happened during that time period are just in name only. So you have, like, the one that I think of the most is the final one, Romulus Augustus. He's literally a kid. There's several child emperors in this last, you know, 50 year period. So if you want to really dive in on that one, there's a lot you can kind of go into. And I don't know all the names off hand, because there's so many changing so quickly,

Alex Ferrari 1:37:23
Well, so the the during that basically, that's the fall, that's that, that's the fault, that's the 50 years of, basically,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:37:31
It's not a collapse, it's kind of a, like a burnout. It's a burnout, you know, slowly,

Alex Ferrari 1:37:36
It's like a grinding out.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:37:38
It's a fade away.

Alex Ferrari 1:37:39
Yeah, it's a Exactly. It's not as it's not as dramatic as I say, making the movies like it's just one moment and everything's gone, no, and it's not. It's a grad gradual fade out. So I understand, like in Egyptian times, there were, you know, chill child emperors, and in many other I mean, in France and other pairs in Europe as well. But in Rome, I mean, essentially, when you have a child emperor in Rome, doesn't seem to be like it was one family throughout this entire

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:38:09
No, it wasn't. But the problem that you have is the power structure has been gradually changing, where, as I said, the military is gradually becoming a barbarian military, because they're bringing them in. So what you're having is your commanders start to be barbarian commanders, like Alaric, who saw sacks Roman 410, he's a Visigoth, but he'd been a Roman commander at one point in time. So the problem you're having is now the guys who are controlling these child emperors, or the people that are there depending on for their military dominance. Most of them, you know, maybe they have citizenship, but they likely weren't born Roman. So the problem you're having is the people running it aren't Roman, and that's the issue you're having.

Alex Ferrari 1:38:48
So

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:38:50
So to just switch over is very easy then,

Alex Ferrari 1:38:51
Sso that, alright, so during that, that downfall, who? So the Visigoths are basically the power structure behind these emperors.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:38:59
It changes back and forth, because you have the Visigoths, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the the Vandals are kind of a little bit later on. Then you have, does the Senate have any power? The Senate never really has power. In Rome, the Senate that because the Senate, you have to understand where it comes from. The Senate was a legislation body that advised the king what he should and shouldn't do. So that's not like the Senate, right? So the Senate would make recommendations, and then it would be the political offices, what's called the courses of the norm, so that the different political offices you go through, those would be the ones that would put it into action, either the console or the tribunes or whatever it might be. But they the Senate never made anything more than recommendations. Often, those recommendations would happen 100% but they never made more than recommendations

Alex Ferrari 1:39:43
During Roman times to to turn the page words, there any what was their medical technology or knowledge at that time? How? How did that during the Empire? Did that change? And did we hold on to anything?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:39:59
Because that's actually. Something I don't know much about. I don't know as much about medical technology. I know, like a lot of what they're doing would have come from Greek knowledge, right, which is much of it's lost during the Middle Ages, and that's how you get in the leeches and weird things like that. But I think medical care was actually better in Roman period than it was after that. I don't know much about the particulars.

Alex Ferrari 1:40:19
When did so the Dark Ages, Dark Ages, give me the years of the Dark Ages, four.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:40:23
Well, you'd say in the West, it's after 476, right after the President goes until the 1500s which is the Renaissance.

Alex Ferrari 1:40:32
It's almost 1000 year, over 1000 years,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:40:34
Well they've changed it like, like modern historians have looked at it much differently, where they're not really card called the Dark Ages anymore, you know, because they look at it and there was actually a lot of things happening there as Europe's kind of being born. It's just more or less like, culturally, they weren't as exciting as they were, you know, during the Renaissance

Alex Ferrari 1:40:52
Or technology. Technology wasn't moving pretty fast either. At that time.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:40:55
It really picks up during, you know, the in the late in the in the 15th century, right? Exactly. That's when the Renaissance happens, and that's when everything just starts to ramp up.

Alex Ferrari 1:41:02
But what we've been able to do in the last 126 24 years, it's unheard of. Yeah, in the history, I always tell people, I'm like, Isn't it fascinating that everything we needed to be where we're at today was here? Yeah, all the materials, it's just the knowledge that's being either rediscovered, inspired by something

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:41:22
Well, even how fast it's doing, like, like, I remember having a flip phone back in the day, man, and it's like, it's like,

Alex Ferrari 1:41:28
I remember no phones.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:41:30
I do remember no phones too. I remember, I remember happy first to go into my my 286 and type in W I N to get into Windows. That was, that was fun, yeah. But I'm saying like, it's moving so fast now, like you even look at like, AI technology and how fast that's changed in the last six months, six months, yeah, it's like nobody was using it, and now everything's AI.

Alex Ferrari 1:41:52
Yeah, it's and it's growing. It's going exponentially faster.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:41:55
And marketers are taking a little bit of advantage on that too, because they're taking things that have been algorithms for years and just calling it AI. So it's that there is a little bit of that as well, of course, yeah.

Alex Ferrari 1:42:03
Well, I mean, YouTube's had an algorithm Since 2011 Right? Which is essentially, quote, unquote, AI, but it's an algorithm essentially correct, since then, sorry, during during the Dark Ages, that time period, there was what was going on, and I guess it wouldn't have been

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:42:19
You kind of go back to being more tribal is what happens, right? Local and tribal, right?

Alex Ferrari 1:42:23
So it's now the Easter Roman, that Ottoman world, because, well, they're not Ottomans yet. They're not Ottomans till 1453 but what people would have thought it as Ottoman for lack of for me to just control, for me to understand, to put somebody out there, to be like, you are wrong, damn it. I'm sorry. No, no, it's not the Ottomans yet. We will call it the Ottoman Empire. Now, okay, fine, but it was really the Roman and the Byzantine Empire at this point. Yeah, exactly. So that area would have been, would have been the only part of Rome really that was had any power, correct, and strength still at this point. But Rome itself, and that part of Italy and all of that stuff would be shambles,

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:43:00
Yeah, it fell into separate kingdoms.

Alex Ferrari 1:43:02
It was just kind of to this, to the point where Italy comes

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:43:05
It's so interesting because if you look at early Rome, like you look at those seven kings of Rome, they're they're more likely like tribes, like they'd be more like celtach or druid tribes, if you look at it. So everything, you start at tribes, and you end right back up at tribes by the end, and they start to organize slowly into the

Alex Ferrari 1:43:19
Isn't it isn't a fascinating and it isn't fascinating that Italy. I mean, when was when did they do unite? Because they were three distinct states. What's that Italy? Right? Like Naples was its own world.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:43:30
You have no idea how long that takes. It doesn't it's not until like it like it takes so long. So one of my favorite historical characters is Cesare Borgia, and he may or may not have been the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander the sixth, and he's the first Cardinal to actually lay down his rope as a cardinal and then become what's called a condottieri, which is like a a military commander for hire so and he is one of the most brutal military commanders in Italian history, he actually serves, use the French army for a while to, kind of, like, go around Italy and conquer it. So his goal was actually to unite Italy, and this is in 1492 or after that point. So he dies in, I think, the early 15 that doesn't happen for hundreds of years, right? So it's so garibaldi, who's actually the guy that puts Italy together. Isn't until 1800s right, ever for that to happen, because these Italians just could get along, man, but could you imagine, like, you got them my pasta? You got them my pasta. I got to work with you. You know, I'm sorry Italian if I offended you out there. And I just like, I live in the New York area, and I've seen some stuff, man,

Alex Ferrari 1:44:37
Yeah, listen, I too, have lived in the New York area. I understand what you mean. But when I want to, when I was in Italy, I went to Naples, and Naples is a whole other world. It is. It's a completely different, different language, too. They have a different version of Italian down there than they do up in Rome, yeah. And then then you go from Rome, you go to Florence, and that's

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:44:57
Dramatically different. Dramatic different, Florence is. My favorite place in Italy. I've been there. I've been there three times. I went to Dante's house. You know, the poor guy. They don't even bury him there, because they kicked him out of the city. They bury him in Ravenna. But Florence is amazing.

Alex Ferrari 1:45:12
The concept of since you brought Dante up, and it's one of my favorite things to talk about the concept of hell. A lot of the imagery that we get about hell.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:45:23
I met my wife, by the way, I was working on a 20 page paper on Dante.

Alex Ferrari 1:45:27
Okay, good. So you have, you have some depth in this. So, to my understanding, I mean, and I don't want to go deep down biblical Well, yeah, we should end rabbit holes, yeah, but, but the concept of hell, and what we've been talking, you know, what we know of as hell, yeah, Dante really influences that tremendously. Am I right in the popular

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:45:47
No, he does. He does because he and it's so interesting too, because he has different guides that take him through, you know, he has the poet Virgil, which, by the way, to graduate college, I had to, I had to translate Virgil from Latin into English. They would let me graduate. So the poet Virgil ends up being his guide for a bit. And I think it's just, to me, it's so interesting, because you're like, where is Dante actually getting these things from? But during that time period, people end up picking up a lot of those things through, like, their cultural awareness, not realizing, like, hey, somebody wrote about this. I think to me, that's really interesting as well.

Alex Ferrari 1:46:21
Yeah, because, I mean Dante, I mean, to my understanding, there is no seven levels in the Bible or anything like that. No, no, no. That's all part of No.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:46:28
And even in the Old Testament, it's looked at even differently, you know, it's the fiery Gehenna, you know? And it's very different than even the New Testament looks like. So it's so interesting.

Alex Ferrari 1:46:39
Yeah, the concept of health, and it's just a really it's always find that fascinating, but that people don't understand that Dante had him.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:46:44
And then you have the Have you ever read Jean Paul Sartre?

Alex Ferrari 1:46:47
No.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:46:47
So Jean Paul Sartre has this book called he's a really interesting French writer, but he has this it's not really a book, but it's not really smart enough to be short enough to be a paper, but it's called no exit. And this character just starts out, wakes up, he's in this room with all these people, and these people are just annoying as hell. And then he finds he realizes later on, he's in hell, and he says, Well, I found out that Hell is other people. It's well, John Paul Sartre has a very interesting viewpoint on hell as well.

Alex Ferrari 1:47:15
So isn't Dante's Inferno, not technically about hell, but his own kind of personal hell.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:47:23
It's about, well, because he's not a place, no, you have to understand, with Dante, he's he's in a political class called the Guelphs, and he was very popular, like in the city. He's Italian. He had political he's Italian, okay? He had political positions for a while. And there's a lot of upheaval in Florence, because this is also Florence is just a very interesting place, but he falls out of political favor. He's actually kicked out of the city, and he can't get back into the city, and he just longs to be in Florence. So a lot of is about his feelings about life and about his experiences and his long lost love that he never actually ends up having. So I think people look at it obstensively. For, you know, visions of hell, but for Dante, like he's trying to find a way to talk about his own life experience, because he's a politician. Now that's out of politics. He's been kicked out of his country. He doesn't really know what to do with himself, as I mentioned, he's he wanted nothing more to be buried in the city of Florence, but he dies at Ravenna, and you know, hundreds of years later, his bones are moved from Ravenna back to Florence. But you know, it's really his journey, rather than just a hell journey.

Alex Ferrari 1:48:33
Jeremy, we've had. We've gone down a long journey here, sir, in this conversation, where do you see from your expert opinion from where you saw Rome, and where you see the United States right now and the world in general, where we're at. Where do you think we go in the next 50 years, if we, if we don't change our ways?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:48:52
Well, I think we, it's, it's, once again, you have to change your ways on money. And I just don't think that politicians globally are that willing to do that? Because, because they're fat, they're they're fat, and they're also, they're not the best of us. You know, I think, like, how many, like, I know, so many people that are producing, building great businesses, they have no desire to be in government. I think that's that's a problem as well, because even look at our framers, didn't want government to be a job. They wanted to be something you did for a period of time, and you go back to work. And the problem is, we've got right career politicians, it could become a political class, and they're going to do what's best for them. So I think unless we can fix that, and that's a global problem, we're kind of speeding down the money trail. And I think if you want to look at what's going to happen to to us, you look at the Weimar Republic in in Germany, after after World War One, oh, the inflation. And course, what happens when something collapses? Well, sometimes, not every time, but sometimes something terrible can come out of what rises. And that's, you know, how someone like Hitler happened, is you have this power vacuum all these angry people, and someone says they're the problem, exactly, and that's something you really have to be concerned about, is, is you could fall into something. I'm not saying we're. Going to but the concern is that is what happens when things collapse,

Alex Ferrari 1:50:03
And you being a historian, in many in what you do, it's probably fascinating for you to see how history continues to repeat itself.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:50:12
Well, it doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme in a lot of ways. And I think that's the scary part about it.

Alex Ferrari 1:50:16
It's not exact, yeah, but it definitely rhymes. Yes, it rhymes and rhymes and rhymes, and you can kind of see certain things you could see in the birds or in the entrails, my entrails, and I'm when you could see it in the tea leaves, like it's just going down the same road again. Are we gonna choose a different path?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:50:35
Well, and I think that the problem is, and I think that's why, like conversations like this are so important. Is like number one, as I've mentioned, I've had this conversation a lot, and I feel like it tends to get too politicized this. I think we were able to really discuss the things that need to be discussed. But people don't, they don't have awareness of this. And you keep making the same mistakes, if you don't know about the mistakes that have been made, right? Like it's, it's, you know, for me, if I want to learn how to do anything, I want to learn how to do anything, I find somebody that's good at it. I learn how to do it from them. The problem is, we're not doing that, and I think it's a real problem.

Alex Ferrari 1:51:07
I'm gonna ask you a few questions. Ask one my guess, yeah, what is your definition of living a fulfilled life?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:51:12
I have three little girls. I have a whole bunch of chickens. I have a happy pig and an awesome wife. So for me, that that's fulfillment, and we get to do a lot of great stuff together whenever I do a lot of speaking gigs, and when I do that, I I always make sure they come with me and stuff, and we have a great family experience.

Alex Ferrari 1:51:29
If you had a chance to go back in time and speak to little Jeremy, what advice would you give him?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:51:34
Think about the Roman Empire a little bit earlier. You're late, man, you're gonna I was too busy thinking about medieval Italy and reading the Prince and thinking about Cesare Borgia. Wow, wow. Well, I was reading at 11 years old. I was reading Tom Clancy novels. I was one of those weird people, fantastic.

Alex Ferrari 1:51:54
How do you define God or Source?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:51:57
When you look at it, I think it's that kind of divine guidance that a lot of us have, that we hope we hope we live a better and moral life and do the right things. And I think if you look at what happens to society, I don't care what religion you are, but I think when you lose that, it's when we lose a lot of what makes us better. And I think if we don't have that, we don't have kind of that, that moral guidance, or that thing that joins us, what is love, baby, don't hurt.

Alex Ferrari 1:52:23
I gonna get a ding on copyright. You can't sing that.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:52:25
Oh, okay. No, you know it's interesting, because if you look at the Greeks, they look at there's so many different types of love, right? There's there's arrows, which is kind of that erotic love, there's agape, which is more of that love of friendship. And I think love can be different things to different people, but I think it's understanding who someone is. It's accepting them for that, and it's being able to care about them anyway. I think that's a really important thing. And what is the ultimate purpose of life, to survive? You know what I mean? Like, if you look at the basic purpose of human being, it's survival. And I think that's what it is, is to survive and to survive better, hopefully than a generation before you.

Alex Ferrari 1:53:03
And where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing in the world, brother.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:53:05
So if they want to find me, I'm at Jeremy Ryan Slate on all platforms. Also my company is command your brand. So if they want to find us, we're over @commandyourbrand.com and my personal website is jeremyryanslate.com

Alex Ferrari 1:53:18
And do you have any parting messages for the audience about Rome, sir?

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:53:21
I think we need to think about the Roman Empire a lot more so we stop making some of the same mistakes. And I don't mean from the perspective of longing for Empire. I think it's so we can see the mistakes that have been made, so we make a better future.

Alex Ferrari 1:53:32
Jeremy, it has been such a pleasure, man talking to you today. I know a lot more about the Roman Empire than I did before we started this conversation. And if you just now, you've just scratched the surface of my interest of where we will continue to go down in another conversation. So brother, thank you again for coming on man.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:53:48
Absolutely. And for all your historians out there, don't hate me too much if I got something wrong, because I likely said something wrong in this two hour conversation. History people are mean man,

Alex Ferrari 1:53:59
So are YouTubers.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:54:00
I don't read my comments.

Alex Ferrari 1:54:05
Appreciate you, man.

Jeremy Ryan Slate 1:54:05
Absolutely.