Why Gen Z Economy is Basically The Roman Empire

The Roman Empire had emperors, debt collectors, and slaves fighting other slaves in a cool-looking pit. Gen Z has billionaires, Klarna, and actually I don't care how long this takes. >> pretty much the same thing. Rome's economy screwed over everyone without a name or a bloodline. But the people that history actually remembers weren't emperors. They were broke weirdos who couldn't even get hired. And they went so deep on their own thing that the empire actually went crawling back to them. Thankfully, they've left us three pillars for surviving the next decade. Let me explain. But first, confession time. When was the last time that you took a without pulling out your phone while you did it? Spoiler alert, don't tell me because that's [music] gross and I don't even know you. But second, because I already have the receipts. 82% of people in North America cannot remember the last time that they took a without scrolling. Our brains are starting to forget how to exist in these empty but essential spaces of boredom and forced contemplation. Turns out 1,800 years ago, Romans couldn't put their version of phones down either. And it's the first reason why their entire civilization collapsed. 200 AD, this Christian lawyer named Tertullian visits a Colosseum, an arena in Carthage. There's 40,000 people in the crowd watching a man get his limbs torn off by a lion and turned into cat food. Tertullian looks at some of the faces in the crowd, but rather than horror or disgust pure captivation. Cheers. Talk about retention editing. So he goes home and he writes this treatise called De Spectaculis warning his fellow Christians of what happens when you let Rome's spectacle inside you. There's one section of the book that feels particularly relevant as it comes to today's arenas. We were not given eyes to minister to lust, the tongue for speaking evil with, the ears for being receptacles for such evil speech, or was the soul placed in the body to be a thought factory for snares, fraud, and [music] injustice? He's basically asking, were we designed just for this? Were our ears, our brain, our mouth designed just to consume spectacle [music] forever? The answer that he arrives to in his book is no. The answer that Rome arrived to was also no, just 200 years too late. 1,800 years later, we have come full circle and invented another arena. It's smaller, fits in your pocket, messes up your fertility a little bit. By age 90, the average Gen Zer will have spent 14 years of their life looking at one of these. The Romans, just like us, became addicted [music] to the spectacle, the totality of it all. They overrode the boring, the contemplative, the spiritual for the captivating and the immediate. Our entire economy is built around the byproduct of the arena. Buy now, pay later, literally and spiritually. But surprisingly, it's Gen >> [music] >> Z, the first generation born not knowing a world without these things, that actually wants to break their insipid spells the most. I spent almost 6 hours on social media alone and picked up my phone 106 times in 1 day. >> this [music] phone. This this very phone I'm using to record. >> Most of you won't be able to experience this, [music] but the ability to not go on your phone for multiple days in a row is life-changing. >> I bought a flip phone. No social media, no scrolling, no Apple Pay. 63% of Gen Z reports [music] lowering their screen time year over year, more than any other generation. Sales of dumb phones have gone up 148% in the last year. Tertullian even noted that [music] the royals and the intellectuals were endlessly present at these lion [music] feedings. They invented the dopamine machine and they got captured by it, too. Check out how often the two most powerful people on earth are tweeting or truthing. We can't wait for these people. You want to break the spell? You got to go first. Try it. One week, no notifications, >> [music] >> no social apps. Take all the time you reclaim from the arena and [music] use it to try and get to know yourself a little bit better. Then we can talk about the economy. >> [snorts] >> Speaking of which, what the frick is going on with Gen Z and the job market? >> How am I supposed to tell my parents I can't get a job? No one is hiring. >> I've applied to over 1,300 jobs and absolutely heard nothing back. >> Computer science grads are struggling. >> And jobs get 100 applicants in minutes. >> be surprised if buying a lottery ticket is a better use of my time, financially speaking, than applying for a job. >> Today's subject, slavery. >> You might have seen that super cool, totally not demoralizing stat about how college graduates actually have a worse unemployment rate than non-graduates right now. But I'll do you one even better. Hiring for 65-plus [music] has surged by 80% in the last 4 years. Your boomer grandma is on indeed.com right now and she is locked in. The bottom rung of the career ladder is getting absolutely obliterated by AI. Entry-level coding, junior analyst, paralegal, customer support, [music] all clawed now. So, what does any of this have to do with the Roman Empire? Ah, I am so glad that you asked. Rome, 30 BC, the economy is completely bifurcated. All the laborious jobs like farming, road building, construction, are all done by literal slave labor. The fruits of Rome's many conquests. The higher-level jobs, law, civil admin, military, are all gatekept by patronage. You needed [snorts] the right name or the right bloodline [music] to get them. So imagine you're this dude named Horace. You're not a slave, but you are the son of a former slave, so nobody's going [music] to hire you. So, you get really good at writing poetry. You share some of this poetry on Reddit or Recitatio, basically Rome's version of an open mic night, and people start to notice. And it's not like other grand poetry at the time. It's about getting cornered by some annoying guy who won't stop talking at the forum, the feeling of getting old, running away from home, and people start to notice. To the point where Augustus Caesar's art patron, Maecenas, offers Horace a job as a private secretary, and he turns it down. Okay, so what does some poet guy have anything to do with finding a job in 2026? Well, it proves something called the lump of labor fallacy. Slaves were basically Rome's AI. Now, I don't condone slavery, but I've also seen the way that you people talk to ChatGPT. So, I'm going to run with it. For better or for worse, slaves took all the entry-level jobs in Rome's economy, and it did create a lot of unemployment. But it also created a lot of free time in which people spent [music] thinking of things that they wanted that didn't exist before. Architects, spas, poets, none of it existed before the slave economy made people idle enough to invent it. The Industrial Revolution had the same thing. >> [music] >> Mechanized labor, everybody gets desk jobs. Everybody's sitting all day. We all get flat butts. Nobody likes pancake butt, so we get personal trainers. Half the world doesn't want to put in the work, so we [music] invent butt implants and Lululemons. I could go on, you get the point. The economic pie doesn't shrink when robots or slaves [music] take your job. It just goes towards where we aren't looking yet. [music] The job market for Gen Z is brutal right now. But and it's a really big, totally not pancake butt, it's also making me realize that we each other we're willing to pay for it. Gen Z spends more on community, experiences, and third spaces than any other generation in the last 100 years. Coffee shops, gyms, churches, music venues are all seeing a renaissance right now. Maybe the silver lining of all of us being broke and alone is that we'll start spending more time together in a room. Horace would have written a poem about that. Oh, speaking of poems, holy I'm unemployed, the economy went downhill. These ad [music] reads help me fill the void. This one's for Bitrefill. Most eSIM apps, they overcharge, no lube, no warning given. You'll pay a rack for one cell bar, but Bitrefill is different. They're half the price with better [music] signal, plus 5% back in Bitcoin. 8,000 stores to spend it on makes the others look abysmal. Use my link for 10 free bucks. I promise I'm not capping. Please click the link before I'm stuck and back to posting on LinkedIn. I'm sorry, guys. Uh don't unsubscribe. All right, last point. Is it just me, or is it impossible to see or hear anything these days without [music] being advertised on a way to gamble on it? Only on FanDuel. BetMGM. PrizePicks. CNN just teamed up with a betting market. >> Oh my god, did you hear the Pope die? Do you know what that means? Means you can bet on this. The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion. By 180 AD, most of Rome already knew that it was collapsing. People just wanted two things: to numb the pain of it, but to feel like they had some sense of agency. And [music] Rome gave it to them by building the first documented experiment of betting markets in history. These bookmakers [music] named the sponsors operated openly in the Colosseum. Thousands of bets were placed daily on specific wounds, death methods, crowd verdicts. The games organizer, generally a politician, could then directly manipulate the outcomes [music] by sparing or intervening in a fight. The modern-day equivalent is kind of obvious. Trump's family is launching a new coin every other week. His Securities Commission is green-lighting them, and Robinhood [music] lets you trade them. At least Nancy Pelosi tried to be a little subtle about it. It is essentially the monetization of our financial nihilism. [music] You can't buy a house without a mortgage. You can't get a mortgage without a half-decent job. So, what do you do with money? You spend it on either things that give you immediate comfort, or you gamble it on things that give you a chance of getting an exit. Both are just still pipelines to the empire. Fear in, dollars out. Our Rome is going to try and squeeze every last cent on the way down. In 200 AD, Emperor Caracalla literally had his own co-emperor and brother Geta assassinated, and then liquidated the net worth of any family that chose to grieve his passing, [music] labeling their grief as a treasonable offense. He had to [music] pay for another one of Israel, I mean, Rome's conquests. The successful defiers of the Roman Empire all had one thing in common. They opted out and chose to fortify the smallest unit of their own economies. They pooled together capital with their neighbors and bought land outside of Rome. They traded with one another. They used a more local, sounder currency. They got really deep into faith and stoic philosophy. Epictetus was a literal slave who ended up becoming the most widely read philosopher in all of Rome. Look, I don't want to sugarcoat it. Gen Z is living through the collapse right now. Things are probably going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. But, I've also noticed that Gen Z is more aware of all of these problems than any other generation, and they're talking about it. Just like Epictetus, Horace, Tertullian, I don't think you guys just going to take it sitting [music] down. So, I don't know. Call up one of your friends that you haven't spoken to for a while, and see how they're getting through it. And uh call your mom, [snorts] too. I'm sure that she's worried sick about you.