Name: Will America Collapse Like Ancient Rome?
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T22:02:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Will America Collapse Like Ancient Rome?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Will America Collapse Like Ancient Rome?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-17. Transcript available.

Will America Collapse Like Ancient Rome?

you know you you always hear people say now well um we're gonna fall rome fell
uh the society
american society will fall um what comparisons do you see between the two or
what or is there any
like footprints in the sand that you can that you can follow to see a path to
see like a a story arc
of how societies fall do we like are we parallel enough to rome to even have
the same
trajectory as them what do you think about some of that there there is i mean
like
it's like both simultaneously right because on the one hand all civilizations
and all societies are
unique unto themselves and it's not the case that we just are reliving some
thing over and over again
there there actually is like a a cycle to these things that is objectively true
and and we're just
sort of bit players in a in a historical a historical force that's beyond our
control um but also we are
humans who have come together and humans are often behave in very similar ways
and respond to certain
things in very similar ways and yeah i mean rome is a huge civilization that we
see the entire course of
it from from its founding to its growth to its peak to its decline to its fall
was it even a fall was it
merely a transformation it's probably just a transformation calling it a fall
is probably
too dramatic and of course the eastern empire is going to keep going for
another thousand years
and like is america going to fall the way that rome did um well number one the
united states of america
is going to go away eventually there's no timeline that you can extend out far
enough that does not
involve the united states eventually disappearing from the face of the earth
that's just what's going to
happen really what makes you say that well we're not going to last for 10 000
years we're not going to last for a million
years the united states will eventually not be a thing anymore i'm not saying
it's going to happen
20 years from now or 100 years from now million years from now are we here no
dang no no of course
not of course we're not here what's gonna happen so live it up yeah yeah live
it up because we're not
going to be here in a million years so you may may as well get your kicks in
now
exactly and so um but like we talked about the very beginning you know our
society is rooted in roman
history like and a lot of the things that stamps our political our economic our
legal and social culture
like comes from rome comes from the roman experience and so it's not outside i
don't think it's out of
bounds to say like yeah like there's probably going to be some some
similarities into how these things
progress how great empires rise and fall like we've seen this happen before um
so where are we
in the roman timeline right like are we at the end are the barbarians at the
gate you know is america about
to fall um i certainly don't think so you know that's that's not my opinion at
all i don't think we're
anywhere close to the end of this and i certainly don't think that like uh poor
people coming from
guatemala or el salvador are like literally the goths which is you know how
they're often portrayed
in in media they're like oh you know the roman empire fell because of
immigration um now the roman
empire number one didn't really fall because of immigration and number two like
trying to make
the huns or the goths analogous to you know the kinds of people who are moving
to the united states
today is like wildly it's like insanely uh inaccurate yeah i don't know if i
ever would think that the
problem is at the everyday man level to me the problem is at the top you know
the problem is at
the in that upper aura you know i think that you we've started to fall apart of
having a purpose and
feel a connection to our country and i don't know why i mean there's a ton of
different reasons for that
and there could be different reasons for people that have even different
political beliefs or different
ideologies um but it certainly used to feel like we were all americans and now
it still feels like
we're all americans but people have a lot of different thoughts about it yeah
and so i don't know how
that like kind of permeates as time goes on well so so much so like when i look
back on this and
actually my first book which is called the storm before the storm the beginning
at the end of the roman
republic um is about the decline and fall of the republic not the whole empire
right so that was
when the republic turned into the roman empire when the road when the republic
becomes an empire and
what i went and what i was curious about is when caesar comes along and crassus
and pompey come along
and effectively destroy the republic but then goes to octavian and antony and
octavian wins that battle
like what was going on 50 years before that 80 years before that that sort of
starts knocking out
the foundations of republican society the roman republic lasted for 500 years
they went through a
lot they went through huge wars they went through huge upheavals there was you
know there was ambitious
men coming and going left and right for hundreds of years and the republic
continued to persist there was a
senate there was assemblies they you know this republican project continued um
so what is it that started to
go wrong prior to the collapse of the republic and and then it turns into this
authoritarian military
dictatorship that's what the roman empire was the roman empire becomes an
authoritarian military
dictatorship after the fall of the republic what octavian did when he becomes
augustus which is like
you know he's the first emperor of rome though he doesn't say like i'm an
authoritarian dictator now he
doesn't say like i am now you know the emperor he did they didn't even call
themselves emperors that's
just something historians call them to describe the person who had all of the
sort of powers of the
republic they were simultaneously a tribune and a consul and a pro consul and
an edile they had they
they themselves had they were the pontifex maximus they were the head of of
sort of the roman the roman
religion so they were the senate they were the um uh representatives yeah they
were every they were
the senate they were the congress they were the yeah it's it's it's as if one
person was president
and speaker of the house and majority leader of the senate and ruler of the
military and the and of
course commander-in-chief of course commander-in-chief of the military four-star
general um and five-star
chef even no no they pay for the five-star chefs they they don't cook for
themselves and then also like
governor of 25 of the 50 states right that's what augustus did augustus did
this like power sharing
thing with the senate when he was trying to settle things afterwards and he's
like okay we'll divvy
up the provinces you can run half of them i'll run half of them um every
province that augustus had
were the provinces with armies and all the provinces the senate was allowed to
govern were the provinces
that did not have armies so you know like who's actually in power here but you
know the stuff that
went on prior to the collapse of the republic is the stuff that when i look
around in contemporary
american society you know i wrote that book because i was like i sure see a lot
of echoes here you know
like is it is it going to proceed exactly the same no but you know can history
rhyme yeah i think history
can rhyme a little bit and there's a quote from plutarch that i use in my book
that's just like
if you know if if the stuff if if the sort of the constituent parts of a
historical moment are the
same here and the same there it's not unreasonable to think that like the
outcome will be the same or
at least very similar and if we're studying history there is a point at which
like what is the purpose of
studying history it's a little bit to learn what happened before what mistakes
were made what
you know how events unfolded so that we can like maybe do it better well for
surely it's like why
it's like re-watching a football game it's like why you were in these plays
they were in these plays
then this happened and this happened this didn't let's never run that play
again and then we don't
do that again and then over time you have tons of games you're like okay these
are the plays and then
you have a little bit of statistics so at a certain point yes you could i mean
i'm surprised it's not on
draft kings yet whether or not there will be a you know a spread on on the fall
of america what were
some of the early things that you noticed um well one of the biggest is there
was runaway economic
inequality um that was happening where you know like we talked about how you
had to like have a
certain amount of property in order to join the legions and when they got into
these like protracted wars
people would be brought into the legions they would have to go off and fight in
spain for like five
years and while they were gone their their little plot of land back in italy
would fall into disrepair
and you wouldn't really be able to make it productive maybe you'd be down on
your luck
financially and you would sell it off to your rich neighbor and the richest
component of rome the
senators there had always been stratification in the wealth there had always
been rich there had always
been poor but the rich started becoming like super rich during the roman empire
during the roman republic
the later the later days of the roman republic okay yeah you said that exactly
when you start getting
these large estates like insanely large estates as opposed to merely big estates
that were surrounded
by people families who had their own individual plots and the basically the
small holders of italy are like
pushed out of uh of the picture they kind of don't exist anymore in roman
history and so there is that
there is an economic inequality that is unfolding at the time uh that puts
stress on the society because
now they can't uh recruit for the legions for one thing um because you can't
recruit for the legions
because they don't respect you anymore because they don't meet the property
qualifications oh that's
right so then what you got to do is you got to lift the property requirements
and say okay now we
can recruit anybody and they will be paid and who's going to pay them that they're
going to be paid by
the person who's organizing that legion where's that money going to come from
it's probably going
to come from them conquering something or defeating something and getting the
spoils of war so now
we're going off and we are conquering things not just for political reasons but
also to sort of enrich
the army and then this is where you get personalist armies where the legions
aren't fighting for rome
they are fighting for caesar for marius for sulla i'm i'm i'm i'm here to fight
for sulla that's who
i'm fighting for and so that has a major effect on the internal coherence of
the roman republic i don't
know if we're there like in a in a war sense but we're there in a uh we're
there in a um capitalistic
sense it feels like yeah and i mean one of the things that gives me some hope
is that one of the
things that augustus did during during his settlements to kind of because the
romans lived through like a
50-year period of non-stop civil war and one of the things that augustus did
accomplish was like ending
those civil wars and one of the things that he did was he regularized the pay
of the legions he he put
out these mints you were paid by the central state you were no longer getting
your money from your local
commander you were getting it from the central state so like a ubi kind of well
and it's basically like
what we have in the military today and one of the reasons we don't have to
worry about the army or the
navy or the marines like hauling off and following some general uh or some
political leader as opposed
to like sticking to the constitution is because their paycheck is coming from
the centralized political
authority not from somebody else and so dismantling that creating private
armies
