Jeremy Ryan Slate | Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed: The Three Failures That End Every Empire and the Men Who Rewrite the Record | Part 1 of 2

In the year 284, a loaf of bread in Rome cost 15,000 percent more than it had a lifetime earlier. The silver coin that bought it had been quietly hollowed out until almost no silver remained in it at all. And the people carrying those coins to market got up, went to work, paid their taxes, and told themselves everything was fine.

Nobody in Rome ever woke up and announced that the empire was over.

Our guest tonight has spent his life studying that silence. Jeremy Ryan Slate earned his master's degree studying the propaganda of Rome's first emperor. The machinery that convinced an entire civilization it still lived in a republic, long after the republic was gone. He studied at Oxford. He built a media company out of nothing. And he has become one of the most listened to voices connecting the fall of Rome to the world outside your window right now.

He calls it the Roman Pattern. Three things, he says, happen every single time a civilization comes apart. The money gets hollowed out. The borders stop meaning anything. And the people in charge stop thinking past the next election.

Tonight we take that pattern apart, piece by piece.

We go inside the Praetorian Guard. The protectors who murdered an estimated 17 of the emperors they were sworn to defend, and who once auctioned the throne itself to the highest bidder. We go into the crisis of the third century, when 27 men claimed the empire in 50 years, and almost nobody teaches it. And we ask how much of Roman history is even true, when fewer than one in 10 Romans could read, and every writer who could was writing for a man who could have him killed.

Then we ask the question underneath all of it. If collapse is slow, and quiet, and completely ordinary, how would any of us know we were already living inside one?

Slate has an answer. You may not sleep especially well after you hear it.

This is Part 1. Part 2, and all 886 interviews going back to 2008, are at https://veritas7.com/subscribeveritasplus.php