If you think history is boring, chances are that you've never listened to today's guest, Tom Holland.

He's a best-selling author and co-host of the ultra-popular podcast, The Rest is History.

I'm not exactly sure how they do it, but he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook,

can find a way to make just about any historical event fascinating. I think that the stories

that cultures tell about themselves, about their past, these are, and with all respect,

are as important to understanding the past as, say, a knowledge of

economics or of sociology.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Of course, the purpose of history isn't just to entertain, it's also to help us better

understand what's happening in the world today. With that in mind, I started off our conversation

with a question that I think a lot of Americans have on their mind these days. My whole life,

I've taken for granted that democracy and political representation are a natural

state of the world. If you ask me whether the United States, 200 years from now, will still have a

smoothly functioning democracy, without really thinking, I'd say, of course. But I wonder whether I'm

being naive. Tom Holland wrote a book called Rubicon that tackles the downfall of Rome's democracy.

So I asked Tom whether a more accurate reading of history would conclude that democratic governments are both extremely anomalous and quite fragile.

I think so, yes, because if you look at the broad sweep of the world and the many

centuries and millennia of human civilization, democracies are fairly abrant and unusual.

And you mentioned Rubicon, which is a book I wrote in the early years of the 21st century.

There was this kind of drum roll of 9-11 and the build-up to the Iraq War going on in the

background.

And I realized when I reread it a few years ago for a new edition, just how much that sense of the imperial public of Rome was reverberating into the 21st century with the Imperial Republic of the United States.

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