Are we actually less capable of handling collapse than past generations—or are we just adapted for a different kind of world?

In this conversation, Dan Carlin (Hardcore History / The End Is Always Near) breaks down why modern society may be more fragile than we think: not only because of disease, war, or shortages—but because fear and system dependence can stop essential services fast. We talk about the Spanish Flu (1918–1920), “toughness” as a moving target, and how complexity creates new failure points.

In this episode:

• Why fear can break society before disease does

• Spanish Flu as a warning for modern cities

• What “toughness” actually means (and why it’s hard to define)

• Redundancy vs complexity: why modern systems fail differently

• Collapse scenarios we can’t predict—until they arrive

Question for you: If something major hit tomorrow, what breaks first—social trust, supply chains, policing, or healthcare?

Subscribe for more investigations into the hidden forces behind history—same playbook, different century.

Most people think collapse is an explosion.

A wall falls. A city burns. A single date on a timeline.

But that’s almost never how it happens.

Rome didn’t “fall in 476.” That’s the lie.

Rome faded — slowly — through a series of rational “fixes” that hollowed the system from the inside.

In this flagship episode, I explain what I call **The Roman Pattern**:

When a civilization gets stressed, it adapts… and those adaptations repeat in predictable ways.

Rome’s pressure points were always the same:

1) Money (debasement → inflation → trust collapse)

2) Borders & people (migration stress → deals → fragmentation)

3) Power (emergency authority → permanent rule by decree)

And here’s the twist:

Rome survived again and again — by becoming something else.

Until “Roman” stopped meaning anything real.

If you want to spot collapse signals in real-time — and understand what today is rhyming with — this is the foundation.

Subscribe for more episodes breaking down the patterns of empire decline.

👇 QUESTION FOR YOU:

Are we living in our own “Third Century”… or are we already closer to Rome in 470?

In 1938, Nazi officials stripped the Warburg name from a Hamburg bank.

At the same time, another Warburg was embedded inside the architecture of the American financial system.

This episode investigates how one banking family helped design the operating system of modern money—and why that system outlived empires, republics, and dictatorships.

From merchant banking in Hamburg, to German war finance, to the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Warburg story reveals a quieter form of power:

• Design the rules of credit

• Build institutions labeled “independent”

• Become indispensable to every regime

They served the Kaiser.

They navigated Weimar.

They were persecuted by the Nazis.

They returned after the war.

And the central banking system they helped shape became the backbone of the world’s reserve currency.

This isn’t a story about conspiracy.

It’s a story about incentives, institutions, and survival.

Same playbook. Different century.