Barry Strauss has spent four decades studying how empires rise and fall. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Ten Caesars and Jews vs Rome, he argues the West is repeating a pattern the ancients would recognise instantly: a rich, comfortable society clipping its own coinage, softening its people and assuming nobody could ever take it away.
Barry and I discuss the inflation crisis that nearly destroyed third-century Rome, why every generation raised in comfort produces a softer one, the cost of immigration without assimilation, why the middle class is the backbone of any republic, and why Russia and China already have plans to break America into pieces.
But Barry is not fatalistic. Rome faced plague, invasion and currency collapse in the third century and reformed its way out of it. He argues that soft lands make soft people, that suffering teaches and that if we want the things that matter to stay the same, almost everything else has to change.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Decline Of The West
00:01:13 - How Often Do You Think About Rome?
00:07:04 - Everything Must Change To Stay The Same
00:09:44 - What Actually Makes A Great Leader
00:12:51 - Netanyahu, Trump And Flawed Greatness
00:17:32 - The Immigration Experiment
00:19:04 - Not All Cultures Are Equal
00:21:46 - Ibn Khaldun And The Cycle Of Civilisations
00:23:07 - Soft Children And The Raiders From The Desert
00:25:04 - Has Any Nation Reversed Its Decline?
00:28:34 - Rome Needed A New Religion
00:33:32 - Democracy Has To Be Hard, Not Soft
00:38:13 - El Salvador, The Gangs And The Walls
00:41:27 - Soft Lands Make Soft People
00:42:39 - Why Education Went Soft
00:51:06 - Clipping The Coins: Rome's Inflation
00:57:49 - America Blindsided By Drones
00:59:13 - No Republic Survives Without A Middle Class
01:06:08 - They Have Plans To Break Up America
01:12:39 - Where The Hope Is
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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
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CONNECT WITH BARRY STRAUSS
› Website – https://barrystrauss.com/
› Hoover Institution – https://www.hoover.org/profiles/barry-strauss
› Antiquitas Podcast – https://barrystrauss.com/podcast
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/barrystrauss
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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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