Origin Story

Welcome back to Origin Story, where we’re discussing the concept of economic growth. Growth is the world’s great obsession. When it’s booming, it makes everything easier. When it stagnates or goes into reverse, everybody panics. But what exactly is it, what drives it and what does it cost us? For most of human history economic growth didn’t exist. The average person was no better off than their di...

Welcome to the first ever episode of Origin Story dedicated to a planet. We’re taking a long look at the place of Mars in the popular imagination, from ancient civilisations to fin de siècle Mars mania to the current techbro obsession with exploration and colonisation. Is there life on Mars? Let’s find out. The ancients associated the red planet with gods of war. With the invention of the telescop...

Welcome back to Origin Story and join us as we wrap up the story of appeasement. It’s 1938. After the Anschluss, Hitler makes his bid for the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and tests the moral and strategic arguments for appeasement to breaking point. While Chamberlain insists it would be madness to go to war over “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” oppo...

Welcome back to Origin Story. This week we turn to the story of the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s. With appeasement in the news again in relation to Ukraine, understanding the mistakes of 90 years ago is urgently necessary. How did noble impulses like optimism, fairness and the desire for peace lead to history’s most infamous foreign policy disaster? During the 15 years followin...

We had a very good time at Origin Story Live at 21 Soho on Wednesday night. Thanks to everyone who showed up or watched the livestream. The theme of the show is the American inferno and how to think about it. In part one, Normalisation, we use British responses to Hitler in the 1930s to explain how normality bias prevents much of the media from facing up to the crazed extremism of Donald Trump and...

Welcome back to Origin Story, where we’re concluding the story of the partition of India and Pakistan. We resume in March 1947 with the arrival of the last viceroy of the Raj, Lord Mountbatten, and his formidable wife Edwina. They find a country on the precipice of civil war, with the Punjab consumed by ethnic violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Nehru, Jinnah, Gandhi and the British haggle...

Welcome back to Origin Story. This week we begin the immense story of the partition of India and Pakistan at midnight on 14-15 August 1947. In a stroke, 340 million people gained independence from the British Empire but a day of celebration came in the midst of horrific ethnic violence which left between 1 and 2 million people dead and more than 15 million displaced in the largest ever movement of...

In part two of Thatcherism, Margaret Thatcher has survived a grim first term and her political and economic bets have paid off. She’s ready to wage war on everything she considers socialism: trade unions, local councils, nationalised industries, the BBC, you name it. The Britain she leads is wealthier and more dynamic yet more divided and unequal — a land bisected into winners and losers, where he...

Hello and welcome to season seven of Origin Story, where Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey continue to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. We hope you’ve enjoyed all the bonus episodes. We’re starting with a topic that’s been on our shortlist since the very beginning, and it’s a big one: Thatcherism. By that we mean Margaret Thatcher herself, born 100 years ago, and...

Season seven is almost upon us and we’ll be starting with an epic two-parter on Thatcherism, so consider this bonus episode a warm-up. We’re unravelling the unusual story of Kemi Badenoch and what her vexed leadership says about the state of the Conservative Party. As soon as Badenoch became an MP in 2017, she was tipped for big things: a black woman with a compelling backstory, a Thatcherite hear...

Welcome to another Origin Story bonus episode. This week we’re discussing the conspiracy theory of Cultural Marxism. In the 1990s, cultural conservatives in America began pinning everything they hated, from feminism and gender studies departments to pop music and horror movies, on the legacy of the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals who came together at Frankfurt University in 1923...

Travel into the furthest reaches of space and time as we investigate the history of Doctor Who. From its inception in 1963, as a longshot gamble to fill a hole in the teatime schedule, to its current status as British television’s biggest international drama, we track the story of the eccentric alien with two hearts and what the Doctor’s adventures have to say about modern Britain.  Doctor Who was...

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Happy new year, Origin Story listeners. We’ll be releasing regular bonus episodes between now and the launch of season seven in April and we’re kicking off with a sequel to the finale of season three: Elon Musk and the Death of Twitter. With jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes information from two recent books, Dorian explains how and why the richest man in the world wrecked its most influential social...

•Fill in our listener survey for a chance to win an exclusive Origin Story t-shirt. Welcome to part two of the story of the Daily Mail. We pick things up with the disastrous reign of Esmond Harmsworth and his wife Ann, aka “the Monster”. The paper loses direction, readers and money until, in 1971, Esmond’s eccentric son Vere proves his doubters wrong by relaunching the Mail as a tabloid under edit...

•Fill in our listener survey for a chance to win an exclusive Origin Story t-shirt. Welcome to the season finale of Origin Story. We put it to the vote and Patreon supporters chose the Daily Mail — the newspaper that loves to hate, and be hated. We thought this would be just one episode but the story is so juicy that it ended up as two, so we’re releasing both parts on the same day as a festive bo...

Welcome to part two of the story of the BBC. The Second World War is over, radio is booming and television is back. The BBC is stronger than ever, with new talent, new formats and new opportunities. But there are new challenges too: stormy waters over the Suez crisis and a brash new competitor in the form of ITV. Under director general Hugh Carleton Greene, the BBC plugs into the revolutionary ene...

So far this season we’ve had to deal with Russell Brand and Benjamin Netanyahu, and we’ve got the Daily Mail coming up, so we all deserve a more uplifting tale. This week we commence the epic story of the British Broadcasting Corporation — the BBC. “Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling. 2LO calling. This is the British Broadcasting Company. Stand by for one minute please!” With those words, at 6pm on Tuesday...

This week we complete the story of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s most politically successful prime minister — and its most divisive.  We pick up the story in 1996, with Netanyahu’s first term in office, clashing with both President Clinton and his hard-right coalition partners over the future of the Oslo peace process. We follow his subsequent decade in opposition, as the dwindling of hope and the...

This week we commence the story of Benjamin Netanyahu. The 75-year-old has become Israel’s longest serving prime minister despite never winning the love of his people, his international allies or even his political colleagues. Now he is accused of prolonging Israel’s horrific wars in Gaza and Lebanon to preserve his own power and save himself from prosecution for corruption. How did the man known...

Part two of Ian and Dorian’s post-Presidential Election show at the Tabernacle in West London, recorded on the 7th of November. After signing books (have we mentioned there are Origin Story books out?) Dorian and Ian returned to continue the analysis of what the hell just happened. They also considered what a Trump win means for the UK and answered some excellent audience questions. • Get the Orig...

Part one of Ian and Dorian’s post-Presidential Election show at the Tabernacle in West London, recorded on the 7th of November. The show turned into a group therapy session, after Trump won to become the first convicted felon to be elected to the highest office in America. Listen back to Dorian and Ian beginning the process of coming to terms with this world-changing outcome and its implications f...

The final episode of our two-part story of Artificial Intelligence. Having looked at the emergence and development of AI in part one we now turn to the future and assess the dangers and possibilities it raises. We weigh up two arguments concerning existential risk. Some AI theorists believe the technology has the possibility of becoming sentient and then behaving against humanity's interests. Othe...

It can seem like conspiracy theories have travelled at warp speed from the eccentric margins to the heart of modern politics. But in fact conspiracism has always been one of history’s darkest forces, from the witch hunts to the Holocaust. In this exclusive audiobook extract from the prologue to Conspiracy Theory: The Story of an Idea, Ian explains how conspiracy theories exploit the human brain’s...

This week we begin the story of Artificial Intelligence. Since the launch of Chat-GPT in late 2022, we have been more excited, and anxious, about AI than ever before. It’s become a daily obsession. But the key question we are grappling with is the same as ever: can machines really ever develop human-style intelligence or merely imitate it? And what is human intelligence anyway? In part two we’ll b...