#166 - Freddie New - How Governments Destroy Money and Empires (The Lessons From Rome)

The Peter McCormack Show

Peter McCormack

Politics, Society, Markets, News, Society & Culture, Technology, Inflation, Finance, Economics, Government, Power, Bitcoin, Money

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2026

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Freddie New studied the classics and has spent years obsessing over one question: how does a superpower destroy itself? The answer, he argues, is always the same - it starts with the money.

In this conversation we map the fall of Rome directly onto the West today. The Roman denarius lost 97% of its purchasing power over 150 years. The British pound has lost 95% of its in the last century alone. The parallels don't stop there - military overstretch, a dependent population kept loyal by the state, leaders who can't stop the printing even when they know it's killing them. Rome couldn't stop. We can't either.

Freddie has read all 1.5 million words of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In this conversation he explains what that teaches us about where we are right now - and whether there is a way out.

In this episode:

•⁠ ⁠How Rome debased the denarius from 100% silver to 3% over 300 years

•⁠ ⁠Why currency debasement always starts slowly and why it can never be stopped

•⁠ ⁠The eerie similarity between Rome's military dependence and modern welfare states

•⁠ ⁠What Diocletian's price controls tell us about every government's response to inflation

•⁠ ⁠Why Constantine's hard money reset saved the empire for another generation

•⁠ ⁠What hard money offers that fiat never can

•⁠ ⁠Whether the West can course correct or whether collapse is now inevitable

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Currency Collapse Starts

00:01:17 - Rome vs Britain

00:05:00 - How Debasement Spreads

00:09:52 - The Soft Default

00:18:02 - The Grift Economy

00:22:18 - The Hollowing Out

00:30:19 - How Rome Worked

00:35:00 - Why Collapse Happens

00:39:08 - Welfare And Power

00:46:28 - War Footing Debate

00:52:33 - Are We In Decline?

00:57:54 - Constantine Solution

01:05:22 - AI And Power Shift

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact

› Email – me@petermccormack.com

› Instagram – /mccormack555

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH FREDDIE NEW

› Twitter – https://x.com/freddienew

› Website – https://bitcoinpolicy.uk/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Currently debasements are fantastic place to start. Over the past hundred years, the pound sterling has lost about, I think, 95, 96% of its purchasing power in the last century.
0:10.9	And then if you lay that over the currency debasement in ancient Rome, the DeNarius started to lose purchasing power around about the time of Marcus Aurelius.
0:19.8	Then over the next
0:21.0	150 years, that had a comparable decline in value. Its purchasing power by the time of Diocletian
0:27.0	was 3% of what it had been in the time of Marcos Aurelius. Once the currency starts to collapse,
0:33.0	they have to repeat. They can't. They're trapped. The most important people the emperor had to pay were the military, the soldiers.
0:41.0	And as time went on, the military became more and more important in deciding who was going to become emperor.
0:46.8	So I'm wondering if the equivalent army is your welfare dependence and your people who work for the state.
0:51.9	And all they're doing is they're going to flip from labor to green
0:55.8	or a mix of the left-wing people because they want to keep it going for themselves.
1:00.6	In your analogy, the emperors needed the army effectively to defend their own power structure.
1:06.7	Labour need a dependent population in order to defend their power structure.
1:13.0	This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron, the AI cloud for the next big thing.
1:18.7	Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure,
1:24.1	all powered by renewable energy.
1:26.2	Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters
1:29.2	or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more,
1:35.2	which is iranen.com. Right, Freddie, last time we had you here, I learned that you studied classics.
1:43.4	I did.
1:48.9	Based on your study the classics and the fall of Rome, how do you compare it to where we are now?
1:52.1	Currently, the basements are fantastic place to start.
1:56.0	So obviously, we're all familiar with the pound sterling.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Peter McCormack, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Peter McCormack and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.