Happy almost new year!

2025 has been a big year for this GD podcast. It’s the year of our birth, of course, but we didn’t stop there. We hosted live shows, got rebranded, created merch, and even made some news. An enormous thank you to everyone who joined us this year 🙏. You made this all possible.

2025 was also a big year for America. We began our semiquincentennial year, for the second time ever a U.S. president was inaugurated to a nonconsecutive term. The country also got a rebrand of sorts. There’s more gold detailing on the walls these days and the East Wing no longer exists.

A lot more happened, but I don’t want to give away today’s episode. To mark the end of 2025 we are building a time capsule and filling it with numbers that represent the year in politics.

I asked friends of the podcast Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe to choose five numbers each they’d like to place in the capsule. I also have plenty of numbers of my own. The bad news is that only 10 numbers fit in the time capsule, so we have to duke it out to see who gets their way. We also shared new year’s resolutions for the two parties and ourselves in 2026.

As a sneak preview, here are the 10 numbers we settled on, without any indication of what they represent. See if you can guess!

This is the second installment of “Roman Empire” elections, in which friends of the podcast Jacob Rubashkin and Leah Askarinam join me to discuss the elections that we just can’t stop thinking about.

If you missed the first installment, definitely start there. We talked about the 2000 election (of course), the crazy turn of events that indirectly resulted in Glenn Youngkin becoming the governor of Virginia, and the even crazier turn of events that links the election of Barack Obama to the reboot of Star Trek.

Today the fun doesn’t stop. We discuss the nomination of Andrew Johnson at the Republican convention of 1864 (he ended up taking the oath of office blackout drunk), the story of the only dead person in U.S. history to win an Senate race, and how the Republican party might be different today if Mitt Romney won the presidency in 2012.

Today’s episode is for paid subscribers and will cut off shortly for free subscribers. If you are not a paid subscriber, now is a great time to upgrade! If you are a paid subscriber, thank you! Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

In 2022, a Swedish influencer told her followers on Instagram to ask the men in their lives about the Roman Empire. Her instinct was that men, for some reason, have plenty of thoughts about the ancient civilization. She turned out to be correct.

The suggestion led to a proliferation of videos on social media of women asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire. For some men, it was daily. For others, weekly.

(This is the part where I admit that as a teenager I got a large SPQR henna tattoo on my forearm, although technically those are the initials of the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire, and with that distinction, I am probably already telling on myself.)

In any case, a meme was born. What began as a question of how often men think about the Roman Empire, morphed into the idea that any topic that occupies an inordinate amount of one’s mental space is one’s own personal Roman Empire.

For example, someone might say their Roman Empire is 2003-era pop culture or The Titanic. You can quickly fall down a Reddit rabbit hole where people share obsessions as wide ranging as women’s bible studies groups and Chicago’s alleyways.

Now that I’ve got all of the Boomers who listen to this podcast up to speed (hi, dad), you have the context for today’s episode, which is “Roman Empire elections.” Not elections that happened in the Roman Empire (which, again, wouldn’t be possible because the start of the empire marked the end of representative government), but instead American elections that take up an inordinate amount of our mental space.

Dear friends of the podcast Leah Askarinam, Jacob Rubashkin and I came up with this idea while we were recording a different podcast a while back, so this week we are actually indulging. Part 2 will publish Tuesday, December 23rd for paid subscribers.