Origin Story

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 even to his foes as Bibi rebound from so many scandals and defeats to become the dominant force in Israeli politics, and what does that say about the country Israel has become? If you haven’t heard our two-parter on Zionism, now is a good time – Apple / Spotify – because these episodes are a kind of sequel.

We begin with the influence of Bibi’s father and grandfather and the flinty, paranoid doctrine of revisionist Zionism. Netanyahu’s aggressive, ultra-conservative worldview was also shaped by his studies in the US, his combat experience in Israel’s wars of survival, and the dramatic loss of his beloved older brother Yoni during the 1976 raid on Entebbe Airport. After the revisionist party Likud ended Labor’s three-decade hegemony, he found his calling as a great communicator, bullishly promoting Israel’s interests, from television to the United Nations, throughout the 1980s.

Netanyahu’s first eight years in the Knesset coincided with the First Intifada and the Oslo peace process. In a time of hope for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he offered cynicism and fear. When peacemaking prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Netanyahu was blamed for stoking the far right and he seemed finished politically. Yet within a few months, he was Israel’s youngest ever prime minister.

What has influenced Netanyahu’s bleak and spiky understanding of Jewish history and his role in it? How did such a widely disliked character achieve such surprising success? And how did Israel itself change during those tumultuous decades of frequent wars and elusive peace? To understand where the country is now, you need to understand the man.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

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Reading List

Books

Neill Lochery - The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Benjamin Netanyahu - A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993)

Benjamin Netanyahu - Bibi: My Story (2022)

Anshel Pfeffer - Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu (2020)

Ari Shavit - My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel: Updated edition (2015)

Avi Shlaim - The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)

Articles

David Margolick - ‘Star of Zion’, Vanity Fair (1996)

David Remnick - ‘The Outsider’, New Yorker (1998)

Joshua Leifer - ‘The Netanyahu doctrine’, Guardian (2023)

David Remnick - ‘The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition’, New Yorker (2024)

Donald McIntyre - ‘How Netanyahu gambled with the Fate of Israel’, Tortoise (2024)

John Jenkins - ‘Netanyahu’s all-out war’, New Statesman (2024)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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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 Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams and Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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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 for global politics.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams and Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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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. Others worry that it will simply deliver disastrous outcomes on the basis of badly established requests. For instance, if you ask a highly advanced machine to create paperclips, with no additional restrictions, it might end up killing everyone in its relentless pursuit of its task. Are either of these ideas remotely believable? Are they remotely likely?

Then we look at the possible repercussions of more modest outcomes. What happens when everyone on earth is equipped with their own genius machine, which can assess global corporate law in seconds, or make millions on Amazon Marketplace? Will we use it for good or ill? (Spoilers: It'll be bad) 

How confidently can we accept the predictions of AI theorists? Are they really right that this is all inevitable? Or is history, and technological development, far more chaotic and unpredictable than their models allow?

Finally, we look at the impact on humanity as we are all suddenly enveloped in AI art. Will an AI song ever move us to tears? And if so, what does that say about who we are and what we look for in the world?

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Susie Alegre - Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being human in the age of AI (2024)

Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Daniel Crevier – AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)

Pedro Domingos - The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake the world (2015)

Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (2022)

Walter Isaacson – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014)

Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

John Markoff - Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015)

David G. Stork (ed.) – HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997)

Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar – The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future (2023)

Michael Woolridge – The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI (2021)

Articles

Alan Turing – ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind (1950)

Brad Darrach – ‘Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person’, Life (1970)

Jeremy Bernstein – ‘A.I.’, New Yorker (1981)

Raffi Khatchadourian – ‘The Doomsday Invention’, New Yorker (2015)

Ted Chiang – ‘Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear’, Buzzfeed News (2017)

For the full reading list join our Patreon.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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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 craving for simple explanations in a chaotic and unpredictable world to spin bogus narratives of evil cliques, shadowy plots and do-or-die conflicts between Us and Them. 

Why are conspiracy theories so alluring, how have they shaped history and how can liberal democracy survive if its citizens no longer inhabit a shared reality? Featuring JFK, David Icke, Princess Diana and the Wu-Tang Clan, this is our introduction to a weird and wild story. You can listen to Ian and Dorian read Conspiracy Theory: The Story of an Idea, along with its sister Origin Story publications Fascism and Centrism, on Audible, Spotify or your favourite audiobook platform. Or buy the physical books  on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory.

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

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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 be exploring the possible ramifications of AI, from the utopian to the dystopian and all points in between. But first, we explain how humanity’s long, ambivalent fascination with artificial life has brought us here.

We start with premonitions of AI, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and Ada Lovelace, the original AI sceptic, to Alan Turing and his famous test. Artificial Intelligence itself — the term and the field of study — began in 1956, at a summer school at Dartmouth University. While most computer scientists were working on ways for machines to partner with human intelligence — the personal computer, the internet — AI researchers dreamt of replacing it.

For decades, AI development was a cycle of boom and bust. Extravagant claims attracted funding, talent and media attention, then their failure to materialise caused all three to collapse. AI became tarnished by its broken promises. But in the 21st century, the availability of vast troves of data and powerful new processors finally solved such stubborn challenges as image recognition and automatic translation, leading to the current AI gold rush. Along the way, we meet gamechanging scientists like Marvin Minsky and Geoffrey Hinton as well as landmark machines like ELIZA, the first chatbot, Shakey the robot and AlexNet, deep learning’s great leap forward.

Why does the prospect of machine intelligence enthral and unnerve us? Why has AI proved so much more difficult than its pioneers imagined? How have fictional AIs like HAL and Skynet shaped the mythology of AI? And are Large Language Models like Chat-GPT just glorified autocomplete or a historic turning point in our relationship with machines?

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Susie Alegre - Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being human in the age of AI (2024)

Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Daniel Crevier – AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)

Pedro Domingos - The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake the world (2015)

Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (2022)

Walter Isaacson – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014)

Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

John Markoff - Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015)

David G. Stork (ed.) – HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997)

Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar – The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future (2023)

Michael Woolridge – The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI (2021)

Articles

Alan Turing – ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind (1950)

Brad Darrach – ‘Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person’, Life (1970)

Jeremy Bernstein – ‘A.I.’, New Yorker (1981)

Raffi Khatchadourian – ‘The Doomsday Invention’, New Yorker (2015)

For the full reading list join our Patreon.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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This week we finish the story of the suffragettes. We pick up the narrative in 1912, when parliament’s failure to deliver women’s suffrage triggered a new phase of violent escalation. No suffragette was more extreme than Emily Wilding Davison, whose death at the hooves of the King’s horse turned a liability into a martyr. Meanwhile, the whole country was convulsed by arson and bomb plots and the Pankhursts’ autocratic leadership was alienating some of their closest allies, including members of their own family. It took the First World War to stop the “reign of terror” and ultimately give women the vote.

Was violence morally justified when peaceful solutions failed? Did it hasten suffrage or threaten to derail it? What might have happened if the war had not intervened? What do the strange and divergent afterlives of the suffragettes tell us about the movement? And what can modern activists like Just Stop Oil learn from the suffragettes?

Behind the sanitised, sentimentalised version of the story lies a thorny tale of the validity and efficacy of violence in a just cause, taking Edwardian Britain to the edge of chaos.

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018)

Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020)

Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015)

Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995)

Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924)

Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931)

Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953)

Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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This week we begin the tumultuous story of the suffragettes. In 1903, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. Sick of waiting in vain for women’s suffrage, they decided to secure it by hook or by crook. By 1906, the so-called suffragettes were the most exciting, audacious activists in the land, with their banners of purple, white and green. They then took on the might of the British state with ingenious protests and hunger strikes before agreeing to an uneasy two-year ceasefire while parliament wrestled over whether to give women the vote. We conclude part one at the end of 1911, with political failure and the dawn of a new phase of militancy.

Who were the Pankhursts and their inner circle? How did they interact with Millicent Fawcett’s moderate suffragists? Why were Liberal politicians so determined to deny women the vote? And could it all have worked out very differently? 

It’s a fiery story of courage, conflict and missed chances, as British women found their political voice for the first time.

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018)

Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020)

Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015)

Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995)

Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924)

Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931)

Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953)

Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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What the hell happened to Russell Brand? Ten years ago, the comedian and actor was the loudest voice on the British left as his florid calls for spiritual and political revolution won him the support of politicians and journalists. Now he is a full-time conspiracy theorist and disgraced exile from mainstream culture, conducting prayer meetings with Jordan Peterson and flirting with Donald Trump. The fall of a celebrity is not usually Origin Story material but Brand’s transformation epitomises the political chaos of the last decade: how populism and paranoia scramble conventional notions of right and left to create a volatile third category.

In the first episode of season six, Dorian and Ian reassess Brand’s extraordinary rise to fame in the 2000s in light of recent allegations of sexual misconduct and explore how British culture gave him a free pass. In 2013 Brand swapped sex and fame for a new compulsion, reinventing himself as a flamboyant agitator to great acclaim. In the void between Occupy and Corbynism, his verbose mishmash of self-help and socialism briefly made him a lion of the left. During the pandemic Brand embraced a darker shade of politics, promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19, Ukraine and much more besides. After the allegations broke last year he went full crank, aligning himself with Robert F Kennedy Jr, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones in the paranoid space.

What does Brand’s journey to the fringes tell us about the shifting political landscape? Did he really switch sides or were the red flags flying all along? What can the left learn from its haste to turn a motormouth comedian into a radical icon? Is Brand’s latest incarnation sincere or opportunistic, and does it really matter? And which of his tomes makes for the most painful reading today: Revolution or My Booky Wook?

This is a bizarre story of celebrity and conspiracy, addiction and attention, which says a great deal about where we are now.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory – out 17th Oct

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Russell Brand - My Booky Wook (2007)

Russell Brand - Revolution (2014)

Anna Merlan - Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2019)

Naomi Klein - Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023)

Video and audio

Russell Brand at parliamentary select committee on drug addiction (2012)

Newsnight debate on drug addiction with Peter Hitchens (2012)

Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman (2013)

Newsnight interview with Evan Davis (2014)

Brand: A Second Coming, directed by Ondi Timoner (2015)

Russell Brand: In Plain Sight: Dispatches (2023)

Russell Brand podcast archive

Articles

Michael Kelly, ‘The Road to Paranoia’, New Yorker (1995) 

Piers Morgan, ‘Russell Brand’, GQ (2006)

Miranda Sawyer, Brand on the run, The Guardian (2008)

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: “I always felt sorry for her children”, The Guardian (2013)

Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”, New Statesman (2013)

Brian Logan, ‘Messiah Complex – review’, Guardian (2013)

Mark Fisher, ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, Open Democracy (2013)

Justin Gray, ‘The Sneaky Smarts of Russell Brand’, Vulture (2013)

David Runciman, ‘Revolution by Russell Brand review’, Guardian (2014)

For complete article list see Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Sex! Violence! Censorship! These days the British Board of Film Classification rarely makes headlines but it was on the cultural frontlines throughout the 20 th century, from Herbert Asquith and the dawn of British cinema to Mary Whitehouse and “video nasties”. Through the turbulent life of one institution, Ian takes Dorian through a century of moral panics, censorship and furious debates about cinema’s influence on the life of the nation. This (literally) cinematic tale ranges from The Birth of a Nation and Nosferatu to Cannibal Holocaust and The Life of Brian, and has an unusually uplifting ending. Won’t somebody think of the children?!

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

The Miracle Of The Movies by Leslie Wood, Burke Publishing 1915

Obscenity and Film Censorship: An Abridgement of the Williams Report edited by Bernard Williams

The British Board of Film Censors: film censorship in Britain, 1896-1950 by James Robertson, Dover, N.H. 1985

Censoring the moving image by Phillip French Seagull Books, 2007

See no evil: Banned films and video controversy by David Kerekes, Headpress 2000

Ban The Sadist Videos: 2005 Documentary 

ScreenOnline: Duval, Robin

Mark Kermode interview with Robin Duval: Guardian 2004

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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