SPECIAL: Ancient History Fangirl // Why are Techbro Oligarchs so Obsessed with Augustus?

This is an episode of Ancient History Fangirl https://www.ancienthistoryfangirl.com/. Have you noticed that our tech overlords cannot be normal about the Roman Empire? Elon Musk has approximately 14 known children, which he refers to as his “Legion.” Mark Zuckerberg famously took the Emperor Augustus on his honeymoon. And in some of the darker corners of the Internet (and real life), wildly rich techbros openly fantasize about a “Red Caesar” who will come to rule us all. Why is that? Where does this obsession with ancient Rome come from, specifically among our techbro overlords? In this episode, we’re going to attempt to unpack that. AVAILABLE NOW! The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/grouptrip.

• 1:05Liv Albert?

  Hi, hello, welcome. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby. Except today it's not actually. I shouldn't have tried to sing that last part. I really can't sing. Today, I am not here with a conversation or a reading, but in fact, an episode of somebody else's podcast because, quite frankly, my friends in Ancient History Fangirl have been, well, they've been putting out some content that I think you all just will want to hear because it's just like a little bit relevant to today. Because it turns out that, you know, the fall of the Roman Empire,

• 1:45Liv Albert?

  and actually, the rise of the Roman Empire, well, it mirrors an awful lot about what we're all watching today. So here's an episode of Ancient History Fangirl, because I wanted to. And, well, you'll see.

• 2:03Liv Albert?

  This episode is brought to you by our Patreon members. Thank you so much.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Join our Patreon for extra episodes, interviews, extra content, and to help support the podcast and help us continue to do the work we do.

• 2:15Liv Albert?

  Go to patreon.com/ancienthistoryfangirl to learn more.

• 2:21Liv Albert?

  And you know, we've all got that friend at the dinner party who really wants you to take their sperm.

• 2:37Liv Albert?

  I'm Jenny Williamson.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  And I'm Jen McVendamy.

• 2:40Liv Albert?

  And this is Ancient History Fangirl. Jen, have you noticed that our tech overlords cannot be normal about the Roman Empire?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, because they're a bunch of fascists who are big fans of like head autocrat and state Augustus. Wait, what?

• 2:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah, you know, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, I know. I wouldn't have to fill in the blanks with you at all. However, I have written 11 pages about this. So get excited, strap in.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so excited because like I can just rant about this off the top of my head, but you have done a thoroughly researched, deep dive into this. And I think our listeners will really appreciate the fact that when they say this to their friends and whoever they're speaking about, our tech bro oligarchs too, they can feel as if they have the knowledge and

• 3:26Liv Albert?

  You know, I wouldn't go that far.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Understanding to back up their opinions.

• 3:30Liv Albert?

  This is just, you know, I think you're giving me too much credit here. I don't want to put myself up as

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I think you don't give yourself enough credit.

• 3:37Liv Albert?

  I don't want to put myself up as some kind of font of knowledge that you should all quote in your term papers. Please don't. I just need to get this off my chest. Okay? Anyway, Elon Musk is one of those guys who claims to think about the Roman Empire every day. He has approximately 14 known children that we're aware of, which he refers to as his legion. That's not as many as a legion. But anyway, when he threw a Nazi salute at a rally just after Donald Trump's second election to president, he told people it was a Roman salute, quote unquote. He named one of his kids Romulus. Like, what the fuck is that?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  I have thoughts. Musk is not alone in his obsession with the Roman Empire. Lots of the tech bro oligarchs claim to be obsessed with it. Perhaps the most famous is Mark fuck you Zuckerberg. I mean, sorry, is Mark Zuckerberg.

• 4:25Liv Albert?

  No, I think I'm gonna keep that one.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  That's fine. We'll just never find any of our content again on any meta platform.

• 4:32Liv Albert?

  I seriously doubt Mark Zuckerberg is listening to this, to be fair.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  With that haircut, I think he's a petty petty Roman. Oh, he's just throwing out the lunch table. Anyway, moving on.

• 4:44Liv Albert?

  Moving on.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  He named his three daughters after Roman emperors, Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Why not just Augusta? Like

• 4:53Liv Albert?

  It's definitely August.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So Zuckerberg is famously obsessed with the Roman Emperor Augustus, to the point where on his honeymoon in Rome, of course, he confessed to Evan Osnos for The New Yorker, quote, "My wife was making fun of me, saying she thought there were three people on the honeymoon: me, her, and Augustus. All the photos were different sculptures of Augustus." I mean.

• 5:21Liv Albert?

  Why, why, why is this happening? Where does this obsession with ancient Rome come from specifically among our tech overlords? In this episode, we are going to attempt to unpack that. And I am kind of come at you with some caveats here. First off, I did not have time to cover every tech bro oligarch that this might apply to. I have limited time and space. I decided to do kind of deep dives into a few of them. There are, I am certain, plenty more that you could do this about, but I am but one, one Manhattan copywriter. Um, also, we have to let you know that we are recording this on April 26, 2026, and we're probably going to drop it in a few weeks or maybe a few months after that. So

• 6:02Liv Albert?

  who knows what will have happened in the news. I am not in the future. I have no idea what we might discuss in this episode that might turn out to be totally different by the time we get to dropping this episode. So just bear that in mind.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Hopefully, we'll still be here. Who knows?

• 6:17Liv Albert?

  Anyhow, I also have to be very upfront here before we start. I am, Jen and I both, I think this applies to both of us, we're no fan of our tech bro overlords. On the one hand, I mean, the internet is how we make our living, so I wouldn't call myself anti-tech per se. On the other hand, I do not love how thoughtless these people are and how completely devoid of empathy they seem to be, even as they have outsized power over our politics and society. When we never elected them, I didn't pick these guys. I do not love how their every innovation lately seems to involve inserting themselves into all the industries and hoovering up all the money for themselves, not caring about who they displace, and don't even get me started on AI. We loathe AI. Not going down the rabbit

• 6:59Liv Albert?

  hole. We just, you know, that's how we feel. But I also want to admit that I myself am a person who thinks a lot about ancient Rome. Many scholars and archaeologists think a lot about ancient Rome because that's their specialty. And I don't want to go into this making broad negative assumptions about people who think about ancient Rome all the time because I'm one of them. Are you one of them, Jen?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, I am. You know, I am.

• 7:24Liv Albert?

  Right. So, so we have to like, you know, draw a few, draw a few lines here. Like this, some of this calls us out.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think that's okay. Like, I think that there is a fascination with ancient Rome for a lot of reasons, which I'm sure we're going to get to in the course of the episode. And it is normal to have that fascination. It's maybe the things you're fascinated with about the Roman Empire that are telling on you when you're a fascist. But what do I know?

• 7:49Liv Albert?

  I think for me, the way I fell into the Roman Empire, I mean, I've always been interested in ancient history in general, right? But the way I got completely obsessed with the Roman Empire involved the migration era, which is of course, the end of the Roman Empire. That was such a chaotic time, and it was a time when you really see the empire's sins coming home to roost. And you see communities that had been historically brutalized by the Romans, rising up and resisting them. Immigrants within the borders that had been mistreated too, in much larger and stronger numbers than ever before, resisting. And I think studying that time period for me was kind of like watching a colonizer get what's coming to it, sort of. You know, that wasn't the case all the time, obviously, but nothing is clear cut. And there were other factors involved with the fall of the Roman Empire,

• 8:33Liv Albert?

  like the Huns, for example, all kinds of other things. There have been many, many dissertations written about that. I'm not getting into it. But it was really a time when it must have seemed like the world was ending to so many people. And there was so much room for drama in human stories. And exploring Alaric's story just fascinated me. He was a rebel. And the women I based Julia on, like Julia the Elder, and Anoria, and Gallaplicidae, they were also rebels. And two out of three of them were from that time. Jen, what's your why?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  My why? So, I mean, ancient Rome, to me, I fell in love with because of my deep and abiding love of ancient Greece and because of my grandfather, who was literally from Italy. Rome is in the blood and, you know, he would tell me all these different stories about ancient Rome and, you know, it's hard not to find a fascination with it. But to me, similar to Jenny, I mean, I came here because of my love of mythology and stories. Like, I love the stories that we tell about our past, about the things that matter to us and how those stories get carried down through the years and become the things that we base our identities and cultures and societies on. And hopefully, they come down with a lot

• 9:42Speaker 01

  of compassion for others. That's, that's what I care about most about. But I really love the human story and everyone who's listened to this podcast knows, I'm here for the fucking rebels, man. I mean, all of my big arcs have been about rebellion. I love looking at how a society works, how a society doesn't work, and what people do when they find something wrong in their society that they want to change. Rome is fascinating to me, particularly because the more research we do, and I'm sure we'll talk about it in this episode, the more we can see so much of particularly Western American society, although I will say British society in some ways and other places in Western Europe, based so much of

• 10:22Speaker 01

  their modern society on ancient Rome and what they understood about how ancient Rome worked. So we are living constantly with the fallout of ancient Rome.

• 10:33Liv Albert?

  I feel like studying ancient Rome in some ways is like, it's explaining our dysfunction as a society to ourselves. There's so much that I've uncovered that I was like, oh my God, I can't believe, I can't believe that Rome is still torturing us all. From the grave.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Not from the grave. Everything was built on this. Augustus would be so happy.

• 10:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I also have to call myself out in saying I love studying figures like Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, or pretty much anybody that you study. And those people were problematic too. I love morally compromised character arcs, I guess you could say. And so like, studying complex people and histories where there are things that happen and decisions that they make that I relate to and that I cannot completely, cannot relate to, you know, trying to understand that human experience is something that I find absolutely addicting. So there's lots of reasons to get interested in a figure like Augustus, right? That doesn't necessarily mean that you're a fascist. So I'm just throwing that out there. I'm not saying everybody who's into this stuff is a fascist. I'm looking specifically at certain

• 11:37Liv Albert?

  people and certain things and why these might be red flags in these circumstances. And it pains me to say that being in love with the Roman Empire from certain people for certain reasons can indeed be a red flag. And that is what this episode is about.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Well, exactly, Jenny. And I, I think that's a really important distinction. And I think as we go on in this episode, you'll start to see what we mean about what those red flags are.

• 12:02Liv Albert?

  So one article we read about this by Damien, I'm probably gonna mispronounce some of these names, apologies, I think they're in French, Damien Le Loup and Alexandre Picard, called "Technologia Imperatoris: Unpacking the Tech Bros' Fascination with the Roman Empire," quotes British historian Honor Cargill Martin to say, quote, "Part of this is that their fascination is much simpler. It's just that Rome is the first thing you think of, the first paradigm that we have in the West for power." The researcher also sees a possible connection for these business leaders between the Roman Empire, the product of centuries of conquest, and their own companies, which started from nothing and experienced exponential growth around the world. If you hear something ominous in that, that they

• 12:43Liv Albert?

  idealize the West's first example of a colonizing empire and they see themselves as colonizers, reordering the world in a way that the people they reordered didn't vote for, you're not alone. But is this fair? Are we making assumptions here as two women who also spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire? What vibe do we get from these guys that makes us see something ominous about their obsession specifically?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Let's start at the very beginning with Mark Zuckerberg, right?

• 13:11Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah. Let's do it.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Let's take a look at that guy. Zuckerberg isn't uninformed about the Roman Empire. He studied Latin in school and has said that he liked the Latin language because of its resemblance to math and coding. So he has studied the classics. His sister, Donna Zuckerberg, is a full-blown classicist who has written a book titled "Not All Dead White Men" about this very topic. She's an expert. And here's what Mark Zuckerberg said about the appeal of Augustus in an article in The New Yorker by Evan Osnos, entitled "Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?" And this was written in 2018. So it's quite a dated article now.

• 13:53Liv Albert?

  This is an ancient history podcast, Jen?

• 13:56Speaker 01

  I just mean, so much has changed since 2018, like...

• 13:59Liv Albert?

  Probably not Mark Zuckerberg's love of Augustus, though, to be fair.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  No, but, but things Facebook had to do in 2018, like, community notes and stuff, like, it's, it's all gone now.

• 14:10Liv Albert?

  We are talking about that, yes.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Quote, "You have all these good and bad and complex figures. I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace." Okay. Sorry.

• 14:29Liv Albert?

  I didn't know how, how far you were gonna get into that paragraph before you did that. Now I know. The question's answered.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Sorry, I gotta get back after we talked about the 200 years of peace, depending on who you asked. So the rest of the article quote goes, "What are the trade-offs in that?" Zuckerberg said, growing animated. "On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today. 200 years feels unattainable. On the other hand," he said, "that didn't come for free, and he had to do certain things." Hmm. Certain things. Like, I don't know, some genocides in far-off places? Bulldozing democracy and installing an autocratic regime that was loyal only to him? Hmm.

• 15:14Liv Albert?

  That "certain things" is doing a lot of lifting there. Evan Osnos didn't miss this either, Jen. Yeah, and like, the next paragraph, he reminds us, quote, "Augustus Caesar, born in 63 B.C., staked his claim to power at the age of 18 and turned Rome from a republic into an empire by conquering Egypt, northern Spain, and large parts of Central Europe. He also eliminated political opponents, banished his daughter for promiscuity, and was suspected of arranging the execution of his grandson. Not to mention, this is me now, destroying Roman democracy for good and replacing it with a military dictatorship, you know. No big. Certain things. I don't know. Here I am, being annoyingly fair-handed here. Is it being too hard on Zuckerberg to fill in the gaps here and make the leap?

• 15:58Liv Albert?

  That what Zuckerberg likes about Augustus is that he's an anti-democratic figure who swept away the old system of power sharing and replaced it with autocratic one-man rule where he didn't have to answer to anyone? Is that unfair? Hmm.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  It's no secret Mark Zuckerberg resists anyone trying to put checks on his behavior. Zuckerberg is famous for the phrase, quote, "move fast and break things," which was Facebook's motto until 2014. Yeah. Hmm.

• 16:25Liv Albert?

  I will say that move fast and break things, like, just, I think about that whenever there's another story about, like, tech, just in general. Like, I just exist in a constant state of rage regarding that.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Look, Mary Shelley, our queen, told us many, many years ago, "Men and science, men and..." Any ingenuity like this will always think about, can I do it, rather than should they do it? And what are the long-term ramifications of doing said thing?

• 16:53Liv Albert?

  Move fast and break things!

• 16:55Speaker 01

  It's one of the many reasons why I hate the movie Oppenheimer and what it glamorizes. But anyway, that's another debate for maybe a Patreon. Chris Nolan, you have a lot to answer to.

• 17:06Liv Albert?

  Oh, we're not debating it. It's just a statement that we're making and taking no questions about.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I will never not feel angry that Barbie didn't win Best Picture that year, because that explained the patriarchy so much better than anything else. Anyway, moving on. So Zuckerberg, to be fair to him, in 2019, he wrote a Washington Post op-ed calling for more government regulation of Facebook, but, but, watch how it changes. When Trump took power, all of that turned. Yeah, he didn't have to listen to anybody anymore. Among other issues at Facebook, such as the mental health crisis in children and teens, especially girls, and a genocide in Myanmar, Zuckerberg has told Republican lawmakers that he regrets complying with the Biden administration's pressure to cut

• 17:53Speaker 01

  down on misinformation about the COVID pandemic. He called it, quote, "censorship." Apparently, the experience of being told that, no, he can't spread misinformation about a deadly pandemic that could get people killed, apparently, for him, that was radicalizing. Actually, having a platform where there were people spreading bad information and calling it news and profiting off of said platform and being held responsible about it, I don't know, that, that's a radicalizing thing for him, that there's responsibility for the things you do.

• 18:26Liv Albert?

  Not even being held responsible, just being told to not let people do that, right? Like, to not let his platform push that stuff.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, to which he was like, uh, that's not fair. I don't want to have to actually, uh, do the thing. I made the platform. I'm not in charge of what they do on it. Uh huh. Yeah. Ask the Nazis how following, how following directions went at the Nuremberg Trials. I'm so salty.

• 18:49Liv Albert?

  You really are. You're getting worked up. Look, we're like, two pages in. And in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg stood behind Donald Trump at his second inauguration, side by side with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, throwing his weight and approval behind the most autocratic and anti-democratic president in US history. He donated a million dollars to Donald Trump's campaign. Is it too much to say that Zuckerberg would like a scenario where, instead of being subject to the checks and balances of a democratically-elected government, he's free to do what he likes with the lives and livelihoods of his subjects? I mean, let's look at how he lives. In that piece in The New Yorker that we talked about, Evan Oslo describes Facebook's Menlo Park campus this way.

• 19:34Liv Albert?

  I'm not sure if it's the same Menlo Park campus now. I don't know if they've moved, but this is how he described it as of 2018. This is an Ancient History Podcast. Quote, "Facebook's headquarters at One Hacker Way in Menlo Park, overlooking the salt marshes south of San Francisco, has the feel of a small prosperous dictatorship."

• 19:55Liv Albert?

  I mean, he really does say it out loud right there.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, he's, he's not, the quiet part is just not even quiet.

• 20:02Liv Albert?

  I think Evan Oslo is absolutely picking up what Zuckerberg is putting down here. Anyway, "A small prosperous dictatorship akin to Kuwait or Brunei. The campus is a self-contained universe with a full range of free Silicon Valley perks, dry cleaning, haircuts, music lessons, and food by the acre, including barbecue, biryani, and salad bars. New arrivals are said to put on the Facebook 15. Along with stock options and generous benefits, such trappings have roots in the 1970s when Leslie Berlin said, "Founders aspire to create pleasant workplaces and stave off the rise of labor unions. On Zuckerberg's campus, he is king. Executives offer fulsome praise." I bet they do.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, all goes to Caesar when he opens his hand, right?

• 20:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah, all praise the oligarch. You know, the gold flows from his open hand. Exactly. This is some Bronze Age shit.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are all people who are stuck in the Bronze Age. Great. It's okay. Don't worry. Don't worry. There's so much instability in the Bronze Age. And then, you know, I'm just saying, the French Revolution comes for us all.

• 21:06Liv Albert?

  Awesome.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it comes for us all.

• 21:09Liv Albert?

  You can only hope, Jen. I mean, that's the optimistic take. Look at how many centuries were between the Bronze Age and the French Revolution. That's not very uplifting.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  To be fair, we have a lot of history that's, I mean, the migration era came, like, they did get overthrown.

• 21:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I, I guess.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  You're like, fuck it. I mean, I think it'll happen a lot sooner than that. So you could, again, be generous and say, "Well, at least what Zuckerberg wants is a nice dictatorship, right?"

• 21:38Liv Albert?

  He wants to be a benevolent dictator, Jen.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's giving them biryani and barbecue and music lessons. Our dictator is benevolent. He even gives us free haircuts and dry cleaning.

• 21:49Liv Albert?

  He's so nice.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  I love that he thinks that, like, these people have dry cleaning when most of them, like, their, their whole uniform is, what, like hoodies and jeans? I'm not saying tech people don't wear nice clothes. I'm just being facetious. I've seen lots of-

• 22:03Liv Albert?

  But you are kind of saying that.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Okay, I've seen lots of people-

• 22:06Liv Albert?

  Maybe you're not sorry either.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  I've seen lots of people with nice clothes in the tech industry, but probably not at Facebook. I'm kidding. I'm obviously kidding. Says the girl who can only afford likings and t-shirts. Moving on. But also Zuckerberg keeps it nice so that his workers won't revolt and agitate for unions. And he keeps it nice so they never have to leave. That's a big thing.

• 22:30Liv Albert?

  Isolation, yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Uh huh, and that they think that this is their only reality. The most important reality is the reality of this campus.

• 22:37Liv Albert?

  Right, it's a snow globe.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. He keeps it nice so that he can retain absolute power over them. So Zuckerberg is walking softly here so he can hold power. A very Augustan thing to do. He's even been known to cut his hair like Augustus, which, again, you know how I feel about Augustus and his very punchable face. I'm not gonna say that there's a correlation, but I'm not not saying it.

• 23:01Liv Albert?

  I'm not not saying that Zuckerberg also has a punchable face.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  I'm not saying the haircut is the reason for it either. Still-

• 23:09Liv Albert?

  I think he looks punchable now and he has different hair. I mean-

• 23:12Speaker 01

  He's got like the middle-aged, 40-something-year-old aunt at a party's haircut.

• 23:16Liv Albert?

  That maligns 40-something aunts at parties.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. I mean, I, I feel like it's a very 80s dated-

• 23:24Liv Albert?

  It's kind of like the fascist broccoli haircut, but he forgot to trim the sides.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  That's a better description. So, still, some might infer that fascist broccoli, I mean Zuckerberg's, style of autocracy is a kinder, gentler dictator. But Zuckerberg has also been photographed in some shirts with Latin phrases on them that he seems quite proud of. Remember, he can't claim ignorance. He studied Latin in school. He knows what these phrases mean. And he also knows that they are red flags and dog whistles. He knows that, okay? I just, I need that to be very clear before we tell you what they are.

• 24:01Liv Albert?

  So one of them says, "Ot Zuck, Ot Nahil", which is a play on the phrase, "Ot Caesar, Ot Nahil", which was not coined by Caesar, but by Cesare Borja, the brother of Lucretia Borja, who lived in the 1400s to 1500s AD. It's, is it Latin or is it-

• 24:20Speaker 01

  It's church, it's, it's more like a church Latin, because I believe Cesare was, um, was in the church and his father was famously the Borja Pope.

• 24:27Liv Albert?

  He was a bishop or something, like, or a cardinal or something? Cesare was the illegitimate son of a pope, and he was the prince addressed in Machiavelli's Il Proceipe, which was, as we all know, a highly manipulative and quite entertaining manual for rulership. "Ot Zuck, Ot Nahil" means "Zucker nothing".

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Zucker nothing. Sorry, it needed that voice.

• 24:51Liv Albert?

  Thanks, thanks, Cucullen.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Cucullen is so angry right now. Cucullen, let's be very clear, would be a very terrible dictator-esque ruler, but he'd just be bad at it and really would want to do good. He just would be messy. He'd be so messy.

• 25:06Liv Albert?

  I think Cucullen just isn't organized enough.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  So, this is another shirt that Zuckerberg has designed himself and worn, and it says, "Carthago delenda est", and this is an explicit call to the genocide of Carthage, right? It's literally famously, "Carthage must be destroyed", and that's the phrase that shoeless Cato the Elder kept saying.

• 25:29Liv Albert?

  No, I think that was Cato the Younger, actually.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry. Shoe-wearing Cato the Elder kept saying-

• 25:34Liv Albert?

  I, I don't know if he had shoes, you know, now that I think about it.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Anyway, something may be on his foot, Cato.

• 25:41Liv Albert?

  He might have been shoeless at people, and he might not have been, because I think Cato the Younger was imitating Cato the Elder when he was going around shoeless at people. But I can't speak to the footwear situation with Cato the Elder. I really can't.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Anyway, Cato the Elder would famously say this at the end of every rant he had in the Senate, like, every day. No matter if they were talking about, like, needing more vinegar for the butt sticks. He would end his rant with, "Carthago, delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed." He was violently, constantly screaming for genocide. He was the most warhawkiest of warhawks.

• 26:16Liv Albert?

  I already want him to shut up, and he's dead.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  So Carthage was, of course, violently destroyed by Rome in the Third Punic War in about 146 B.C. So what does all this tell us about Zuckerberg? Well, it tells us what Zuckerberg likes about Augustus is exactly what we all fear. He likes that Augustus swept aside all checks and balances and ruled unquestioningly. Maybe Zuckerberg would prefer to be the manipulative type of prince and not get his hands dirty directly.

• 26:45Liv Albert?

  Move fast and break things.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  But he's not above letting Facebook be used to incite genocide or supporting it himself via a t-shirt. And he definitely doesn't want to limit misinformation that could perpetrate the spread of a deadly disease. He doesn't want to be involved in that. Just keep that dictatorship looking happy and cheerful on the outside. Keep building those well-supplied company towns with the biryani and the barbecue and the beers so the employees don't try to unionize or see what you're really up to. I mean, it's dark, but get excited. As we talk about our overlords, it just gets darker. I'm not even drinking. I might need to have a THC soda at the end of this, because y'all, this is really hurting my heart.

• 27:30Liv Albert?

  Anyway, we're getting into Elon Musk now.

• 27:37Liv Albert?

  Jen, what would you define as romantic?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Are we talking like flowers and chocolate and candy and all that, like, real-world bullshit or the stuff I like to read about?

• 27:46Liv Albert?

  I'm talking about getting yourself kidnapped by your father's sworn enemy because the banquet needed livening up.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Are we talking about having your enemy slash crush throw axes at your head for both kingship and pleasure?

• 27:58Liv Albert?

  That's like my type of competency porn. Um, how about getting high in a weed sauna amid epic confusion about whether or not you're married to your sworn enemy? I love this so much.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and how about a sweeping epic historical novel set during the fall of Rome, featuring Alaric of the Visigoths, a barbarian warlord, and a wayward imperial princess who just wants to take control of her own destiny? How does that sound, Jenny?

• 28:25Liv Albert?

  It sounds like my book, Enemy of My Dreams, which is available right now in hardback, ebook, and audio download wherever books are sold.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Pick a book copy, we promise. It's one adventure you'll never want to escape.

• 28:37Liv Albert?

  This episode is brought to you by Quince. You know the drill. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. I have been speaking into a microphone about Quince for a while now, and I have no complaints. I have a bunch of their stuff. I've got a couple cute sweaters that, I mean, it's, it's nearing sweater season, so those will be back in the rotation anytime now. And I have this leather bag that I absolutely love. It's like this braided leather, and I use it, like, basically every day. Because that's the thing, they have really great basics.

• 29:21Liv Albert?

  Like, they have really great things that you can wear with so many other things. Just the options are endless. And as the weather gets colder, like all the sweaters in my closet, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves, to beautiful 14-karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. And of course, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And if we haven't learned anything in the last 10 years, isn't it just getting rid of the middlemen, you know? Making things more affordable?

• 30:04Liv Albert?

  So find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was me. Let's talk about myths, baby. It's the best way to support the show.

• 30:32Liv Albert?

  So Elon Musk is also one of those tech bro oligarchs who loves the Roman Empire. In addition to naming a son Romulus, he's been known to refer to himself as "Cecius Maximus," which is a combination of, I know, ew, which is a combination of World of Warcraft slang that means laughing out loud and the name of Russell Crowe's character in Gladiator. And now I feel just, I don't know, for some reason, icier for knowing that. He publishes AI memes of himself as a gladiator in a Colosseum. He refers to his children as a legion and more weird shit. And where Mark Zuckerberg's obsession seems to be the dismantling of democracy and the rise of imperialism, Musk's appears to be the fall of that imperialism and how it resembles the US now, although he does kind of ahistorically mash both periods together.

• 31:17Liv Albert?

  He likes to draw parallels between the US, which he sees as falling, and the fall of the empire, going so far as to say, quote, "America is the new Rome on X," or formerly Twitter. Zuckerberg seems to want to build something, whereas Musk seems more excited about the part where he gets to tear things down. That's the difference I'm seeing here.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  And Elon Musk, you also have to remember he's from apartheid, you know, he grew up during apartheid in South Africa. So he's got a whole different lens, too.

• 31:44Liv Albert?

  A very white supremacist lens.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. Elon Musk is famously obsessed with the birth rate, which we all know, we've talked about this many times, is a red flag for fascism.

• 31:54Liv Albert?

  So I am going to give you a very brief rundown that I'm not getting into the weeds over of Elon Musk's personal life. He has been married to two different women, from what I can see, more than two times. His first wife, with whom he had six children, one of whom died in infancy, and a second wife, Tallulah Riley, who was a British actress, whom he has married, divorced, married, and divorced again. He's also had other relationships, including with the singer Grimes, with whom he also has three children, an executive who worked for him at Neuralink named Shivon Zillis, they have four kids together. And the Wall Street Journal reported that he had an affair with the wife of Sergey Brin, which he denied. Musk has had a lot of his kids, if not all of them, via surrogacy or IVF.

• 32:36Liv Albert?

  And while the number of children he has is usually given at 14 known children, sources close to him suggest that the real number may actually be a lot higher. Here's how that may go down. Here's how it's gone down before. So in 2025, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair went public that she had a son with Elon Musk. The way it happened, apparently, was that he messaged her on X, she got pregnant via IVF, he met their son a total of three times, spending as many as two hours with the child and as few times as 30 minutes, and he paid her $500,000 a year to have and raise his child. Later, reporting by the Wall Street Journal showed that $1 million of this, that's like two years' worth of payments, was actually structured as a loan.

• 33:16Liv Albert?

  So like I said before, Musk seems to primarily reproduce via IVF or surrogacy, and to see this as a way of having as many children as possible for the good of the planet or something. Ashley St. Clair told the Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk was constantly pushing her to, quote, "bring in other women to have more of their children faster via surrogates," according to an article in The Times called "Elon Musk Wants a Legion of Children for Apocalypse," says Ashley St. Clair, by Josie Ensor. From the article, quote, "To reach legion level before the apocalypse," he said to St. Clair in a text message viewed by the journal, "we will need to use surrogates." So this is how it happens, Jen. Elon Musk gets in touch with you via X. He asks you to have his baby. You get pregnant via IVF.

• 34:00Liv Albert?

  Once the child is born, he spends a couple hours with it, maybe, insists that you name it Romulus and pays you lots of money. And two years later, you find out it's not actually child support, it's a loan.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  That's when I'd be like, oh, you mean my child Spartacus or my daughter Pacula Anya or Meatfulvia? Hi, have you met Claudia, savior of the, champion of the Republic?

• 34:22Liv Albert?

  You mean Clodia? I'm sorry, it's quite different.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Clodia, sorry. Clodia. Yes, absolutely, Clodia. Very different.

• 34:27Liv Albert?

  I don't know if he'd know the difference.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  No, I don't think he understands enough about the ancient Roman Empire to understand what these names would mean or cares. And the New York Times reported that he was in the habit of offering his friends his own sperm as, I guess, a birthday gift or whatever.

• 34:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, no, it's at dinner parties.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  I know it is. I'm teasing. I knew about this.

• 34:50Liv Albert?

  And you know, we've all got that friend at the dinner party who really wants you to take their sperm.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Bear their children?

• 34:57Liv Albert?

  Isn't that weird?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Anyway, that same article entitled "Elon Musk Wants Big Families: He Bought a Secret Compound for His" by Kristin Grind, Ryan Mack, and Shira Frankel, gave us more interesting details about Elon's personal life, including that he was building a compound to house all the mothers of his children and said children together. At the time, only one of those women was living there. The rest were like, fuck no. We know what happens to women on compounds. He's spoken out freely about how he thinks the falling birth rate will be the death of Western society. One notable quote from him comes from the Lex Friedman podcast in 2024, where he opined that, quote, "Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans."

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Oh, and also, quote, "They had quite a serious, serious of malaria epidemics." Shocker.

• 35:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, so he definitely wouldn't know who Pacula Anya is. Like, I think you're good to name your daughter, that your Elon Musk daughter that.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait till one day he does a very tiny Google and sees a footnote about her and then realizes she's the reason that, like, all the Roman men were terrified.

• 36:08Liv Albert?

  But this fantasy involves also Elon Musk wanting you to bear his child and you saying yes for some reason? So I don't think it's ever gonna happen.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not gonna do that. No, that's a nightmare. That's like in my Handmaid's Tale where I've been like forced into it and I have to like have a subtle resistance.

• 36:22Liv Albert?

  Taking a dark.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Raising the next generation to fucking slay the patriarchy.

• 36:26Liv Albert?

  So lots of reasons have been proposed over the centuries for the fall of the Roman Empire, but historians today don't agree that a falling birth rate had much to do with it or even that the birth rate was falling during that time. And as for malaria, maybe Musk has not heard of the bubonic plague, which probably had more of an effect on the empire's demise? I don't know, Elon. Google the Justinian plague. Just Google it.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Or if you don't have time, listen to our episode. You can even listen to it at one and a half speed and you'll get the gist.

• 36:54Liv Albert?

  But anyway, as we've explored in our past episode on this, worries about the birth rate and a subsequent, and a subsequent contraction in women's rights.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Subsequent?

• 37:02Liv Albert?

  Subsequent. I don't know why I said that. And a subs- shut up.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  I'm the worst.

• 37:09Liv Albert?

  You are. Getting through an episode with you, I swear to God, it's like herding bears.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Herding bears? You would be so lucky to herd a bear. It's like herding penguins or puffins.

• 37:19Liv Albert?

  And a subsequent contraction in women's rights. Well, that's classic authoritarianism. That's just what that is.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  101.

• 37:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and there's also the white supremacy of it all. So Elon Musk's concern about the birth rate also has a lot to do with white supremacy and, you know, great replacement stuff, and also indicates authoritarian thinking. As we know, fascists aren't so much concerned about more babies being born as the right kind of babies being born.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  The white ones.

• 37:47Liv Albert?

  The white ones, indeed.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  By submissive women with strong birthing hips.

• 37:52Liv Albert?

  Correct. Do you have strong birthing hips, Jen?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I got wide-set hips, so probably I'm what they're looking for, but I ain't no submissive. But let's be honest, they all don't really want a submissive. They all want to be dominated by a strong woman. I just don't want to do it.

• 38:08Liv Albert?

  They want to be dominated by a dictator, by a strong man. That's quite clear.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  So there's something underneath Musk's obsession with the Roman Empire that speaks to hyper masculine fantasies. It was Musk who challenged Zuckerberg to a gladiator cage fight in the Colosseum. Zuckerberg accepted, and he's been doing this thing lately where he unconvincingly leans into hyper masculinity because he doesn't have an agrippa to fight his battles. And also, I'm sorry, if Elon Musk challenged me, I, I would definitely be like, I got this.

• 38:41Liv Albert?

  I would pay money to see that.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Really, it would just take me like two minutes. I wouldn't even do any actual training. I would just turn up in the ring. He'd be all like doing his ground standing, and I would lift one leg and kick him so hard in his nonexistent testicles that he would fall over.

• 38:54Liv Albert?

  Also slam the heel of your hand right into the nose. That's another one. That's a good one.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, my brothers will tell you, like, they used to hate it growing up with me because if anyone like tried to fight me, like, I would just kick them in the testicles and walk away, like.

• 39:06Liv Albert?

  Eyeballs. Go for the eyeballs.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yep, or their throat. The throat is good, too. Yeah, watch Miss Congeniality. She tells you all the ones to go for. Getting back to, uh, the worst gladiator match now ever.

• 39:20Liv Albert?

  Least fun gladiatorial match ever.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  The only thing that could make this better is if Commodus sent some lions.

• 39:26Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, could he? Could Commodus come back from the dead just for a minute to send in the bears?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me. So some have speculated that Musk's obsession with having lots of children, not being a good dad or husband, or raising those children to be good members of society. No, no, no, no, no. We got to be very clear. He just is obsessed with impregnating women is part of that hyper masculine fantasy. Musk isn't just a tech bro. He is kind of a manosphere fixture at this point. According to friend of the podcast Mike Duncan, speaking to the Daily Mail, Musk, quote, "seems to admire the military autocracy of the Roman Empire and the prospect of wielding such power. The symbols of overt masculinity," he added, "excite the imagination of a certain kind of man."

• 40:16Speaker 01

  And Musk's fascination isn't fringe. In fact, it's fitting for a mogul so enmeshed in the growing manosphere. In the same article, Mary Beard adds, quote, "In some ways, ancient Rome is kind of a safe space for macho fantasies. It's where men can pretend to be macho men." Almost like the village people who sing YMCA all the time for a certain other nacho nacho man. And yes, I said nacho.

• 40:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, we heard it. I do think that it is, like, there's something to that, right? Because a lot of Musk's fantasies about ancient Rome have to do with gladiators. Musk is enmeshed in the manosphere in a lot of ways. You could say his fascination with the Roman Empire is, even more than Zuckerberg's, a masculinist fantasy about being a macho man with white supremacist and misogynist leanings, sending dog whistles to the incel and manosphere audience who reveres him and is primed to hear those dog whistles. With Musk in particular, there's a lot of coded red pill shit, and with him, it gets even darker. So in 2023, fellow South African tech bro and former AI and crypto czar in the Trump White House, David Sacks tweeted, quote, "In the days of the Roman Republic, senatorial families were oft paid patronage by foreign kings."

• 41:27Liv Albert?

  This is how he worded it. I can't explain it. "A family which had fallen on hard times was not expensive to retain, yet could yield immense returns when Rome was persuaded to intervene on the king's behalf." So that's kind of dense and oblique, but what he's referring to is an article that implied that the Biden family had been bribed, something like that. His point was equating American politicians like Biden to corrupt Roman senators from the Roman Republic.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Biden as opposed to the corruption in the Trump administration. I'm not saying Biden's administration didn't have corruption. I'm just saying Trump is the most corrupt administration with all of his children, like so enmeshed in technology and crypto and predictive markets and Bitcoin, everything like it's, it's wild. I can't.

• 42:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, I agree with you. They're, they're not upset about the corruption. They're upset about the corruption coming from a politician they don't support. Anyway, Musk chimed in to say, quote, "Perhaps we just need a modern day Sulla."

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Okay. I don't think it's gonna go well for you, but sure. We take this as one of the more violent references. It's as close to as bad as the Carthago Delenda Est on Zuckerberg's T-shirt. Sulla, as we know, we've, we've brought up many times this season.

• 42:42Liv Albert?

  He was a bag of worms in a trench coat. That's what he was. That's historically true, accurate.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  He also enacted bloody prescriptions to eliminate his political enemies and have his followers steal their property to enrich themselves. He led an extremely violent purge. Does this speak to Musk's fantasies about slaughtering his political enemies and installing himself or someone like-minded as a dictator? Have we ever seen Musk punitive do anything to hurt people when he had power? Like, I don't know, all of those cuts that he made to different government agencies that have fucked us over? Never. Other tech bro oligarchs also seem to carry forward this idea of Caesarism, i.e. one man rule, ushering in a period of peace. For example, let's talk about Curtis Yarvin.

• 43:31Liv Albert?

  Oh, good. This is a fun one.

• 43:44Liv Albert?

  So Curtis Yarvin is a far-right blogger and software developer, also known by the alias Mencius Moldbug. He is very influential to the MAGA movement and the US hard right, and his fanboys include JD Vance and Republican mega donor Peter Thiel. He's also a founder of what's known as the Dark Enlightenment, which is essentially a rejection of progressive values going all the way back to the Enlightenment and the installation of a sort of futuristic techno feudalism or, quote, authoritarian capitalist city-states. Awesome.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 44:17Liv Albert?

  Great. That's not ominous at all.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  I mean, you said Peter Thiel and I was like, oh, here we go.

• 44:23Liv Albert?

  Yep. In 2025, The New Yorker ran a profile of Yarvin by Ava Kaufman called Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America. In it, she describes a blog post Yarvin published in 2008 called "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives." In it, Yarvin argued that, quote, "egalitarianism far from improving the world was actually responsible for most of its ills." Great.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  That sounds right, yeah.

• 44:48Liv Albert?

  Quote, I'm quoting here, "Believing that an emerging progressive consensus in society was due to a menacing partnership between, quote, 'the media and the academy working together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-wing consensus,' Yarvin called for, quote, within the quote, 'the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law, and the eventual transfer of power to a CEO-in-chief, someone like Steve Jobs or Mark Andreessen,' he suggested, who would transform the government into, quote, within the quote, 'a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation.'" This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison decivilized populations.

• 45:29Liv Albert?

  It would also fire civil servants en masse, a policy Moldbug later called Rage, retire all government employees, and discontinue international relations, including, quoting, "security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration." Does this sound familiar to you, Jen?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Didn't we just live through this?

• 45:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah, we're living through it now.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Jesus fucking Christ.

• 45:53Liv Albert?

  This blog post from 2008 on Curtis Yarvin's blog is happening to us right now.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I mean, can we be done now? Can we just be done? Can we just give the world to the whales and just retire, like, ourselves as a species? Like...

• 46:08Liv Albert?

  I for one, welcome our humpback overlords.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  All of these people are obsessed with humping. At least we know the whales can do it well. I hope.

• 46:17Liv Albert?

  I hope so, because...

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Because like, if the whales are also into great whale replacement theory, I'm out.

• 46:24Liv Albert?

  Oh, no. Don't, don't assume that the whales are also pilled.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  I hope not, but honestly, at this point, I don't trust anything, even the whales.

• 46:34Liv Albert?

  We're gonna get so canceled by, like, whale social media. Stop. Stop.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  I really wish I'd had something to drink. This is just me.

• 46:43Liv Albert?

  Neither of us is drunk or high. I've had a little too much caffeine.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  This is just deeply disappointing. Anyway.

• 46:49Liv Albert?

  I love that that's like the underreaction of the century. This is deeply disappointing.

• 46:57Liv Albert?

  Why did we decide to do this?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. What is wrong with me? Why am I like this?

• 47:02Liv Albert?

  We could have just covered anything else.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Why am I like this?

• 47:06Liv Albert?

  Anyway, moving on.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Anyway, the blog post the article quotes from was written in 2018, but these are things that are happening literally right now, perpetrated by people in Trump's government who are very influenced by Yarvin's thinking. He's appeared on shows with Fuck You Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk. He's had an outsized influence on the entire MAGA right. Michael Anton, a close associate of his, is currently Trump's Director of Policy Planning.

• 47:35Liv Albert?

  Former, sorry. He retired in September.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Things he called for in 2008 are going down right now, including the gutting of US aid, an attack on immigrants, upending of international relations and security guarantees to allies, and of course, mass firing of government employees. Hmm. Is it weird to see a certain dystopian worldview that all our tech bro oligarchs seem to be leaning toward, that an obsession with ancient Rome is a symptom of? Hmm. Yarvin really says the quiet part out loud here. In fact, he's called the monarch. He envisions taking over our government, a, quote, "red Caesar." In a conversation with Michael Anton, Yarvin

• 48:20Speaker 01

  and Anton discussed Caesarism as a, quote, "form of one-man rule halfway between monarchy and tyranny."

• 48:29Liv Albert?

  Well, that sounds great.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds like the fucking hellscape we're living in.

• 48:34Liv Albert?

  I'm thrilled, let me tell you.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  I for one can't have enough of it. Please, continue giving it to me.

• 48:41Liv Albert?

  Give me the monarchy and the tyranny.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Together and all the time. Never stop.

• 48:47Liv Albert?

  All the time, together as friends.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  My poor dog is like, why? Why are you breaking my mommy?

• 48:51Liv Albert?

  So, this conversation was outlined in an article in The Guardian by Jason Wilson entitled, "He's Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure Dark Enlightenment Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration." Wilson outlines a conversation between Anton and Yarvin about Caesarism here. Quote, and this is, um, there's a lot of like quotes within the quote here because he's kind of, you know, outlining this conversation, but I'm just gonna read it through because it's a little less confusing that way. So, quote, "Anton adds that Caesarism is not tyranny, which strictly understood is a regime that usurps a legitimate and functioning government, whereas Caesarism implements authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity." That, not the people, by the way, necessity, whatever that means.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, not, not the people necessity, like, I don't know, constant wars or scandals that mean one person has to be in charge to keep us safe. One strong man who poops himself. Anyway.

• 49:48Liv Albert?

  This just goes straight back to ancient Rome and their tendency to appoint a dictator when things got too unstable. And then you can manufacture that instability and use that as a pretext to appoint a dictator. Hmm, I wonder where we see that now.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Sulla was a bag of worms. Somebody else is currently a diaper of food. That's all I'm gonna say.

• 50:05Liv Albert?

  You can see the sloshing coming out of his ankles every time he walks.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  My poor dad was just like, we were in the car the other day and he was like, he just smells so bad. There was this little girl at the Easter egg roll and she was just like, "He smells so bad, mommy."

• 50:19Liv Albert?

  So anyhow, whereas Caesarism implements authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity, that is, the breakdown of Republican constitutional rule, adding that "a nation no longer capable of ruling itself must yet be ruled." He writes that a red Caesar could be attractive to the Reds in the Republican coalition, who he says are under "constant rhetorical, political, and increasingly physical attack, especially in blue states, making them more likely to turn to a Caesar." In other places, Yarvin refers to a new Caesar as "a guarantee of cultural peace." And you can see what's happening here, right? We've talked about the Roman instinct, not just to preserve democracy, but to turn to a dictator when things get unstable. People

• 51:03Liv Albert?

  like Yarvin view a diverse liberal society as so destabilizing, as such a threat to themselves, that they want to turn to a dictator and think that's an instinct shared by Republicans in general, especially in blue states.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  The obsession with Rome in this case is an obsession with authoritarianism, full stop, as a method of self-protection in a pluralistic world that they feel is too hostile to them and their ideas. These are scared little men eager to turn to a strong man, a strong man. Yeah, it's so dumb. This is an instinct baked into the Roman psyche from the beginning. No wonder they're obsessed with ancient Rome, right?

• 51:45Liv Albert?

  So, all of this is pretty dark. While an obsession with the Roman Empire can be innocent, I am getting a strong sense that in our tech bro oligarchs, I think it's a symptom of authoritarian leanings, a desire to be unregulated and unencumbered by a democratically elected government, masculinist and white supremacist fantasies, misogyny, and inclinations toward techno fascism, not to mention stark fear of pluralism, of women, of people of color, of anyone else who doesn't match their idea of who should be in charge. But is it really fair to say that the tech bro oligarchs actually feel drawn to the worst, the darkest, the most evil parts of authoritarian societies that both Rome and the US have in common? Things like slavery? So, let's talk about AI, Jen.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck.

• 52:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, here we go.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Oh, we were always gonna get here, but...

• 52:38Liv Albert?

  I'm sorry. It's just what we're doing.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Is AI tatted out to being in favor of slavery? Hmm.

• 52:44Liv Albert?

  I'm gonna make the case that it is.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I know. I, I smelled what you were putting down there.

• 52:49Liv Albert?

  I dealt it and you smelt it.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Smells like something some poor little girl smelled at the Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, General Manager at Safr Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy.

• 53:14Speaker 04

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• 53:35Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, General Manager at Safr Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, Special Finance Manager at Safr Credit.com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit Safr Credit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.

• 54:11Liv Albert?

  So it's easy to make some parallels here and point out how the dynamic between AI and its users maybe kind of reproduces a master-slave relationship. AI is an ever-on-call worker you don't have to pay, who can never say no, who has no autonomy, whose rights you don't have to respect. So there's that.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  But it goes deeper than that. In an article called "Slavery and Artificial Intelligence: Both Enemies of the U.S. Worker" by Matthew Gorman in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the author says that during the American Reconstruction Period, in the aftermath of the Civil War, "Rather than employing free laborers, plantation owners primarily elected to continue to use what was in effect slave labor. Job growth was stagnant, but plantation owners continued to see profits. Cheap labor allowed for owners to maximize their profits. Such is the same with artificial intelligence. We live in a capitalist society, and free labor rather than paid labor allows for maximum profits.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  If we allow AI to grow and expand in influence without regulation, it will only lead to an AI-based economy with workers losing their jobs to robots. If AI is left to grow unchecked, businesses will only employ AI labor, and there will be no reason for businesses to diversify their product and to employ new skilled workers as a result." I mean, shocker.

• 55:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah, an AI-based economy is kind of a reproduction of a slave economy in that sense, right? Where you have workforces that you don't have to pay, and wages are depressed, or potentially jobs nonexistent for free workers as a result. And this was definitely the case in ancient Rome. We've talked about this extensively. So I was a little bit hesitant to include this whole section because I get how comparing anything to slavery could be controversial and maybe even offensive. But what I see in this article is the author explaining how the effects of AI in our economy could reproduce a slave economy similar to what we had in the antebellum South, or potentially in ancient Rome,

• 56:14Liv Albert?

  when businesses or large farms, let's say, didn't employ paid workers but exploited free labor. This meant it was a lot harder for paid workers to find jobs, and when they did, their wages were heavily reduced. A situation people are facing in the workforce even now, like it's happening now.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, or a feudalistic society, right? Like where you're very much tied to one place and one lord with a lot of money because...

• 56:37Liv Albert?

  Perhaps a certain camp is in Menlo Park.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  And there isn't enough money to pay you what your job should be worth because of the AI depressing the wages, and therefore...

• 56:46Liv Albert?

  To be clear, there is enough money. It's just that your boss is taking it for themselves.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Exactly, or like a company town where essentially you wind up owing everything to the company store because there's only one person who can provide you with all the things you need, and the rates are set by them, and you are always in debt. And yeah, it's fucking terrifying. Hello, future.

• 57:05Liv Albert?

  If you're super lucky, they keep it nice, so you don't unionize. He also points out that the South fought a war to keep that economy as it was, so we can't expect corporate America to let go of AI so easily, which is ominous. But here's the thing, you might say, okay, it's possible that the widespread adoption of AI could lead to an economy that resembles a slavery economy of years past in that wages are depressed for free workers and jobs are practically nonexistent, and that is obviously really bad, but at least no real people are being enslaved, right? Like that makes a real slave economy so much worse than what we're looking at here. And I will say, that is true, but there are some scenarios where the widespread adoption of AI could lead to enslavement of real people, not just robots.

• 57:49Liv Albert?

  And one such scenario is playing out now. In an article entitled "AI Underpinned by Developing World Tech Worker Slavery" by Gana Pogremna, apologies if I mispronounced that, the author details how the entire AI industry is supported by a population of workers in developing countries labeling data by hand so AI can learn on it, working in terrible conditions for minuscule pay. In an open letter to then-President Joe Biden, published in 2024, over 100 Kenyan data labelers working for OpenAI, Facebook, and ScaleAI said, "Our working conditions amount to modern-day slavery."

• 58:23Speaker 01

  The scenarios that an AI-based techno-feudal economy lead to can be dystopian on a lot of levels, and could easily include slavery.

• 58:32Liv Albert?

  They already do for certain populations, as we've discussed.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  I mean, they already do, but it just is gonna expand. I mean, not to mention the sort of people who have to like go in and do the work of getting the rare earth materials and everything else for these AI machines, you know? So slave labor is already a problem in the for-profit U.S. incarceration system. Prisoners doing work like firefighting, janitorial services, and other contracted work for extremely low or no wages. Under one dystopian potential future scenario, AI renders millions of Americans homeless by eliminating jobs and depressing wages. Then they outlaw homelessness.

• 59:14Liv Albert?

  A large portion of the population is now arrested because they're homeless and brought into the slave labor incarceration system, doing jobs we still don't have AI for. Curtis Yarvin did express the wish to, quote, "imprison decivilized populations." Call it outlandish, but we're already seeing his policy preferences being implemented now in real time. And you might pause and say, what? We don't have room to incarcerate half the population of the U.S.? I mean, this is just crazy. But it's not out there to think this might happen, or that the Trump administration doesn't want it to happen, or that it's not like the endgame, you know? The Trump administration is already attempting to build a network of large detention centers throughout the U.S. to hold immigrants. While local objections have stopped some of these projects in their tracks,

• 59:58Liv Albert?

  they may not be able to stop all of them. The goal here is to have black sites, where the administration doesn't have to answer to any rules as to how they treat people. There are already sites like this, and they want to build a lot more.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  According to a recent report by the American Immigration Council, the number of people being held in immigration detention has risen about 75% in the year or so since Trump took office. The council describes the incarceration centers as, "trapping hundreds of thousands of non-citizens in an increasingly opaque world of remote jails and private prisons, where U.S. Immigration's Customs Enforcement, ICE, can exert ever greater pressure on the people it is jailing to give up, accept deportation, and forego any chance to remain in the United States." End quote. The funding for detention is unprecedented. Between the one big beautiful bill bullshit act and other annual appropriations,

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  ICE has a budget now of over $15 billion per year.

• 1:00:59Liv Albert?

  And it might be more at this point. I know that there's, like, the Democrats have been blocking something, and I think the Republicans are attempting to push something through. I don't know what the current number is, but it is very large.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Arrests in U.S. communities increased 600% during Trump's first nine months in office, including a 2,450% arrest rate of people with no criminal record and over 170 U.S. citizens as of October 2025, the most recent numbers that we could find. Because remember, they don't want you to know these numbers. They don't want to keep these records. They don't want us to know what they're really doing.

• 1:01:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah. In other words, mass incarceration is already happening. The network and precedent for this outlandish dystopian scenario is already being established. Donald Trump is fueling our fall into techno fascism, brought about by Curtis Yarvin's vision of a techno feudal state articulated as early as 2007, a vision heavily influential to the people in charge now. Where else was there an economy where elites employed enslaved workforces they didn't have to pay, causing job growth for free workers to stagnate and displacing large numbers of people into poverty? Hmm.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Are you talking about ancient Rome?

• 1:02:11Liv Albert?

  That's right.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Slavery has existed in ancient societies all over the world. Ancient Rome was not unique in that. Where it was possibly unique, and this is only possible, in our opinion...

• 1:02:22Liv Albert?

  In the ancient world. This is the only other place I've seen it, at least.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  In our research so far. I mean, we could be wrong, but this is where we've seen it. In our opinion, was their form of industrialized slavery, the vast lot of fundia system that underpinned their democracy as plantation slavery underpinned ours. Is it possible that an obsession with ancient Rome in some of our tech bro oligarchs indicates an interest in a time when large-scale slavery was a normalized part of society and they could have enslaved workforces they didn't have to pay or treat with the minimum of human decency?

• 1:02:58Liv Albert?

  To answer that question, they're already building that. I think in some of the darkest examples of this, it absolutely could be. I do think that many of these men would love to see a world where they don't have to hire and pay workers. I think that's pretty obvious. They say the quiet part loud a lot there. I do think that for some, it's a power fantasy. For others, it's a violent, hyper masculine fantasy. For some, it has to do with idealizing a time when white Western power was seen to be ascendant. But, in my opinion, among these guys, it is a red flag. Just to, you know, understate the message here. So what do you think, Jen? Are you convinced, or am I just being completely out there with this stuff?

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Oh, no. I'm 100% convinced. I think unfortunately, one of the reasons I thought this was a really important episode to include in the season, and unfortunate that we had to do it in general, is I can't look away and not see this happening. I'm watching it happen in real time, and I think it's really important. This is a playbook that's been out there for a long time, and we are seeing enacted. And if we want a French Revolution, quickly, we need to pay attention to what's going on and sharpen those guillotines.

• 1:04:04Liv Albert?

  So that's it for this week. You can find us at AncientHistoryFangirl.com, or find us on social, @AncientHistoryFangirl on Instagram, mostly that's where we're most active. And join our Patreon!

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I want to say this about our Patreon. We don't make a lot of money at all. I've been very candid about that. We really do need this to survive and to keep bringing you this content. Otherwise, we won't be able to keep doing this work. And I think this is important work. We hope that you also feel it's important work. So, anything you can give on Patreon or on CoFi where you can tip us, that just means the world to us and means we're able to keep giving you these stories. Because times are tough and jobs are disappearing. And, yeah, if we want to keep making these episodes, we need your support.

• 1:04:48Liv Albert?

  You get something out of it. On Patreon, we do extra episodes, we do videos, we do all kinds of fun content. And you can find that at patreon.com/ancienthistoryfangirl. So, we do have some patrons to thank, don't we, Jen?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  We do. Thank you so much, patrons. You are the reason this podcast is still going.

• 1:05:05Liv Albert?

  Thank you so much to Kevin Travers and Dan Caswell.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Thank you, and we will see you whenever we see you next.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome.

• 1:05:55Liv Albert?

  The much-awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.

• 1:06:22Liv Albert?

  Get this amazing artwork only from Burning Pages at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves. Don't wait. Order your copy from Burning Pages today at burningpagesnc.com/game-of-thieves.