Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he ...
May 29, 2024•58 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In part two of George Orwell, Dorian picks up the story in 1941, with Orwell taking a job at the BBC. The war grinds on, and so does George, until his anti-Stalinist fairy tale Animal Farm changes everything. We’re on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four but it is littered with obstacles: grief, madness, bombs, tuberculosis. After the war, Orwell...
May 22, 2024•56 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this opening two-parter Dorian bows to the inevitable and tells the story of the subject of his book, The Ministry of Truth. When George Orwell died on 21 January 1950, at the age of 46, the phenomenal success of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it international news. The obituaries hailed him as a beacon of decency, sanity and wisdom d...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve covered ideas, phrases, people and historical events. Now Origin Story profiles its first building: Number 10 Downing Street. Following Dorian’s bonus episode about the birth of end of the world fiction, based on his new book Everything Must Go, Ian goes deep on a topic from his bestselling book How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t. He explains how a house built on marshland by a 17th century scoundrel gradually became the prime minister’s official residence, and how its cramped, chaot...
Apr 24, 2024•38 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast • Join Ian and Dorian for Origin Story Live in London on Tue 7 May. They’ll be looking at how the Conservative Party got addicted to conspiracy theory, and more. This time: The Illuminati were a group of Enlightenment idealists who existed for just a few years in 1780s Bavaria. Or were they? The Illuminati have since been blamed for everything from the French Revolution to communism to 9/11. How did a powerless club of intellectuals become reimagined as the secret rulers of the world? And how di...
Apr 17, 2024•43 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast For 1800 years, Western conceptions of the end of the world were dominated by the Book of Revelation: Armageddon, the Millennium, Judgement Day. But in 1816, political upheaval, Enlightenment science and the Romantic imagination converged to give birth to a radical idea: the end of the world without God. When Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley came together beside Lake Geneva that summer, a volcanic eruption was producing endless rain and apocalyptic prophecies. Drawing on his new book E...
Apr 11, 2024•38 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast In the last episode of season four, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey discuss effective altruism. Last month the US entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the dramatic collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was also a prominent advocate of effective altruism, a philanthropic movement based on utilitarian philosophy, and the scandal has thrown the EA community into crisis. Dorian and Ian explain how two maverick young Oxfor...
Dec 11, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast In part two of the history of eugenics, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey explain how the pseudo-science of “racial hygiene” seduced everyone from feminist birth-control pioneers and social democrats to the ardent white supremacists whose screeds shaped US immigration laws and influenced Hitler. Then they turn to the rise of eugenics in Germany and how it enabled the Nazis to introduce massive programs of sterilisation and extermination. After the Second World War, the name of eugenics was discredited...
Dec 04, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast This week, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey get started on the history of eugenics, the idea of finding biological solutions to social problems. Say the word now and it calls to mind skull-measuring cranks or Nazi death camps but for decades it was a mainstream project in many parts of the world, attracting not just white supremacists and elitist snobs but liberals, socialists and feminists. Winston Churchill, HG Wells, Nikola Tesla and John Maynard Keynes all expressed an interest. How did bad scien...
Nov 27, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Born in Haitian folklore and inadvertently reinvented by director George A. Romero, the zombie is the most flexible metaphor in horror fiction, if not all of popular culture. It can represent a war, a virus, a natural disaster, terrorism, capitalism, climate change and much more. In fact, it’s hard to tell a zombie story that isn’t political in one way or another. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey follow the trail of the walking dead from the Caribbean to Night of the Living Dead and the global outbre...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast In Part Two of John Maynard Keynes, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt reconnect with Keynes in the 1930s, as he slowly pulls together his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This book changed everything for Keynes, and the rest of us, by establishing Keynesianism as a new way to understand both the economy and society. Ian and Dorian discuss the last decade of Keynes’ life, from the New Deal to the Second World War to the Bretton Woods conference which established the po...
Nov 13, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey discuss perhaps the most extraordinary individual they have encountered so far: John Maynard Keynes. The most significant economist since Adam Smith rewrote our understanding of the relationship between the state and the market. But Keynes was also a philosopher, a statesman, an aesthete and a hell of a writer: a one-man advertisement for the virtues of refusing to stay in your lane. In part one Dorian and Ian track Keynes’ remarkable life in the fifty years leading u...
Nov 06, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast This week, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt look at the most powerful and divisive generational cohort of them all: boomers. The people born between 1946 and 1964 have been credited, and blamed, for creating the world we live in. They’re the 60s generation, the Me generation, the Reagan generation and the Third Way generation. Where they lead, the world follows. Now that most of them have passed the age of 60, they are allegedly at war with millennials over their legacy: OK, boomer. But does it reall...
Oct 30, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast This week, it’s part two of the riddle of Jordan B Peterson, the bestselling author and culture warrior. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey dig into his two megasellers, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, and try to understand why these very strange cocktails of self-help advice, comparative mythology and biological essentialism resonated with millions of readers, especially men and boys. Do his ideas add up to a coherent view of how to live? How does he reconcile mythology with zoology? What on earth...
Oct 23, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Origin Story is back. The critically-acclaimed podcast uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew. To kick off Series 4 Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey turn their sights on Jordan B Peterson, the bestselling author, diehard culture warrior and, allegedly, the most influential intellectual in the western world. In part one they discuss Peterson’s life up to the publication of 12 Rules for Life in 2018, from his childhood in rural Canada to his first book, Maps...
Oct 16, 2023•58 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Christopher Nolan has been generous enough to put together a full-on Origin Story film, combining key elements from the Nuclear War and McCarthyism episodes. So Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt put on their Oppenheimer cosplay outfits including suit trousers waisted up to the chest, and set off to the cinema to watch it. Here's what they had to say… Support Origin Story on Patreon for more bonus episodes: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod Reading List: Luis Alvarez – Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist M...
Aug 10, 2023•46 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey host an evening of storytelling, debate, gallows humour and intense irritation recorded with an audience on a balmy evening in Soho, London. They look at the idea of The Elite. What the hell does it mean? Where did it come from? How has it changed over the years? And why does it always seem to refer to whoever you happen to disagree with? For their sins Dorian and Ian read Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics by Matthew Goodwin and pick apart the case ag...
Jul 31, 2023•57 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew. In a first for Origin Story, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt focus on a living figure: the ubiquitous and divisive richest man in the world, Elon Musk. In the past two years the public perception of Musk has changed dramatically, from Time's Man of the Year and “real-life Iron Man" to radicalised right-wing troll and destroyer of Twitter. Ian and Dorian trace his journey from sci-fi obsessed child prodigy in Aparthe...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long, THORNY history of Zionism. In part two, the horror of the Holocaust persuades the international community to mandate a Jewish state in Palestine, with the surprising endorsement of Stalin, but Zionism remains divided. In the year of Israel’s 75th anniversary, Ian and Dorian discuss how successive governments lost the left and courted the right, what happened to T...
Jul 17, 2023•52 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics. In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long thorny history of Zionism. In part one, covering the 1890s to the 1930s, they explain how Theodor Herzl single handedly created a movement for a Jewish nation, Chaim Weizmann won over Churchill and Balfour, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky sowed the seeds of Likud. Utopian dreams wrestle with hard-nosed pragmatism as the Zionists clash with the world’s great powers, and each...
Jul 10, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew. In part two of the story of climate change denial Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey take a closer look at the techniques of the “merchants of doubt" who took the denial of man made global warming into the mainstream. Ian tells the real story behind 2009’s phoney scandal “Climategate”, while Dorian reads Michael Crichton’s crank thriller State of Fear and watches the controversial Channel 4 documentary The Great Global...
Jul 03, 2023•52 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew. This time: Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey try to cool their tempers as they take on climate change denial. They trace denial’s journey from fossil-fuel lobbyists and neoliberal think tanks into the heart of the mainstream media and lay out the dire consequences. In this first part Ian and Dorian discuss how global warming grew from a minor nineteenth-century hypothesis into the consensus scientific position by the ...
Jun 26, 2023•53 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts you thought you knew. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey pick up the story of nuclear war in the 1950s with the arrival of the H-bomb, and travel from the deadly face-off the Cuban Missile Crisis to the theory of nuclear winter and the place of nuclear weapons in a post-Cold War world. Kennedy and Khrushchev contemplate the abyss, Ronald Reagan frets about Armageddon, and Dr Strangelove brings the twisted psychology of nuclear deterrence to the screen. Plus t...
Jun 19, 2023•47 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts you thought you knew. This time: the ‘genocide machine’ – nuclear war. With Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer on its way and anxieties about Putin’s nuclear arsenal in the air, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey take us through how the human race learned to live with the first weapon that could potentially spell global annihilation. From the invention of the atomic bomb in a novel by HG Wells to the triumph of t...
Jun 12, 2023•51 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast This time: the tumultuous history of Atheism. The concept has been around since the ancient world but for centuries it was demonised and suppressed. Who could believe such a thing? Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey track the ultimate heresy from the earliest days of western civilisation to the freethinkers of the Enlightenment and the bare-knuckle oratory of the New Atheists. What’s the difference between atheism, agnosticism, secularism and deism? What does it stand for? Can it explain the world whil...
Jun 05, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt explain the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics. This time: part 2 of their Winston Churchill deconstruction. The pair chronicle the turbulent decade that defined Churchill's political legacy. From Munich and his unexpected elevation to power, from the Bengal Famine to victory over Hitler, his surprise defeat in the 1945 election and his long, gloomy decline, they look at a life which still casts a shadow over Britain. And they even read Boris Johnson’s Ch...
May 29, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast New Series! Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics. This time: Winston Churchill is caricatured as either a bigoted villain or a stainless hero. Is he neither… or both? Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt take on a Churchillian task: to avoid reducing the legacy of Britain’s war leader into a simple binary. In part one they look at Churchill’s complicated childhood, his military adventures, his surprisingly progressive time as Home Secretary, his role in the Gallipoli disaster an...
May 22, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast A between-seasons special: The Lineker Affair didn’t just expose the BBC’s fear of the Government. It triggered a flood of bad takes on whether it’s ever permissible to compare contemporary politics to 1930s Germany; BBC employees’ rights to speak their minds; the limits of Twitter; and even whether the Nazis were in fact left-wing. Spoiler: they weren’t. Seasoned spotters of bad faith arguments Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt examine a gala week of political nonsense, obfuscation, straw-manning and...
Mar 15, 2023•52 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast New series preview: How much do we really know about the people who make the headlines? In a provocative new series the acclaimed journalist Michael Crick, formerly of BBC, C4 and Newsnight, delves into the backgrounds of the powerful and the influential. In this first episode: Few newspaper editors wield as much power as the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre. Feared and courted by politicians, he’s imposed his singular vision of Britain on successive governments – while sometimes stretching the law in pu...
Feb 13, 2023•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast A taster of our new series. Search for Jam Tomorrow in your favourite podcast app or visit https://kite.link/JTS1 Episode One: Every Day Is Like D-Day. How did Britain’s dreams of a new postwar world go unfulfilled? And what does that mean for us today? In the first of a new documentary series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor looks at the legacy of the War itself. Ιdeals of the Blitz Spirit and dreams of wartime heroism still shape everything from pop culture and entertainment to...
Jan 19, 2023•16 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 
