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When author and historian Dominic Sandbook started The Rest Is History with his long-time friend and colleague Tom Holland in 2020, he says they 'never anticipated that we'd have any listeners at all'. But in just five years, what started as a lockdown side project has turned into a podcasting powerhouse. Since their first episode speculating about what constitutes 'greatness' in history, the pair are just shy of their 800th episode, having covered topics as serious as the Holocaust and the slave trade and as silly as history's top monkeys and mad Victorian era sports. It's now the world's most popular history podcast – and is a regular in the top 10 Australian podcasts across all genres – with more than 12 million downloads and 1.2 million YouTube views per month across a broad demographic of people, more than half of whom are under 40. But Sandbrook says that it wasn't until they started to get listener questions and suggestions from Australia that they realised just what a global phenomenon the show had become. A sold out theatre tour here in 2023 – tickets were also snapped up quickly for their coming live shows in November and December – brought the point home in the most satisfying way. 'I thought it'll be great to have a jaunt to Australia,' recalls Sandbrook of his initial scepticism over Zoom from his UK home, with Holland on a separate screen from his. 'It'll be embarrassing, obviously, when we do the shows and there's nobody there but that's the price worth paying for the flights. 'And then to arrive and to find that actually there were people who wanted to come to the show and they were very enthusiastic and they knew loads about history, it was lovely. It was one of those moments that I will never forget because it really brought home that we had an international community.' Sandbrook admits that prior to starting the podcast his knowledge of Australian history was 'literally nothing'. And apart from an interest in our megafauna from a previous visit to these shores, Holland's knowledge was largely limited to cricket. A passionate fan and enthusiastic player of the game, the coming tour sits neatly between the first and second Ashes Tests, timing he jokes is 'entirely coincidental'. 'I would say that my knowledge of Australian history is largely mediated through defeats of the England cricket team,' Holland says. 'And of course, our one glorious victory under Douglas Jardine in the Bodyline series.' Their joint historical blind spot also made things challenging when they decided to reward their Aussie fans with a 2022 series on Australian Prime Ministers – Julia Gillard was also a guest on one of their bonus episodes later the same year – to coincide with that year's Federal Election. Sandbrook, whose area of expertise leans more to modern history, while Holland is more of an antiquity specialist, was worried whether there would be enough of interest for even one episode. The pair were surprised and delighted – thanks in part to Malcolm Fraser losing his pants in a Memphis hotel, Harold Holt drowning and then having a swimming pool named after him and Tony Abbot biting into a raw onion – that there was 'unfathomable riches' in their political shenanigans to blow the series out to three full episodes. 'That was our first real engagement with Australian listeners because obviously we got quite a lot of feedback from that,' recalls Holland, with a laugh. 'Including my misuse of 'g'day'. I used it as a farewell rather than a salutation and I bear the shame of that to this day.' Just prior to their last Australian tour, the podcast released a two-part series on Captain James Cook, titled History's Greatest Explorer. 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In other words, we started in 2020 at the height of all the breast-beating about history and we didn't really engage in those debates at all. 'We were just doing our own thing, talking about the past. We both have a massive and unquenchable enthusiasm for the stories of the past and I would hope that comes through. 'Some people, particularly academic historians look at the past through with slightly narrowed eyes and pursed lips. They disapprove of people in the past, and they're disappointed by what happened.'

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