The Political Orphanage

Zuby is a British rapper who spent his childhood on a Saudi Aramco compound—a sprawling corporate community complete with schools, recreation, housing, and services. We discuss what it was like growing up in a place where one company effectively functioned as the local government, and whether company towns deserve their bad reputation.

Then the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Having also lived...

Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing, built the modern automobile industry, and amassed one of the greatest fortunes in American history. Then he decided to conquer the Amazon. In this installment of our series on company towns, we explore Fordlandia—the bizarre Midwestern utopia Ford attempted to build in the Brazilian jungle. It had golf courses, square dancing, vegetarian cafeterias, anti-soccer p...

George Pullman built his employees a sparkling company town with clean homes, parks, libraries, luxury trains, and some of the best living conditions in the country—but demanded obedience in return. When recession hit and workers rebelled against wage cuts and paternalistic control, the conflict exploded into one of the most violent labor crises in American history. Featuring Eugene V. Debs, federal troops in Chi...

Robert Owen was a factory owner, a social reformer, the father of British socialism… and possibly the nicest company-town tyrant in history. 

Long before Karl Marx called for revolution, Owen tried to build a kinder version of capitalism: humane factories, universal education, shorter work days, and workers treated like human beings instead of expendable machinery. 

His model ...

What if your landlord was also your boss, mayor, bartender, and moral hall monitor? This week, Andrew Heaton talks with Brian Brushwood about the strange history of company towns—from industrial utopias to corporate feudalism—and the thin line between benevolent planning and creepy social engineering. Then they venture into Walt Disney's original vision for EPCOT: not a theme park,...

Mike is a twenty-year police officer and current sergeant supervising a squad of violent crime detectives. After Andrew's recent conversation with Naomi Brockwell about surveillance, encryption, and the slow erosion of privacy in the digital age, he reached out to offer respectful pushback from the other side of the badge. 

How much surveillance power do police actually have? What do warrants, metadata, and phone tracking look...

For decades, intellectuals warned that overpopulation would trigger famine, ecological collapse, and mass death. Instead, humanity may now face the opposite problem. In this episode of The Political Orphanage, Andrew Heaton talks with Dean Spears about his book After the Spike and the...

Jeffrey Deskovic spent sixteen years in prison, from ages 17 to 32. Wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a teenager. After obtaining exoneration he became an attorney, and now heads The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which aims to free similarly falsely imprisoned innocents, while also pursuing policy changes aimed at stopping those injustices from happening in the first place.

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Sociopaths and narcissists are both drawn to politics. How do we spot folks with faulty moral compasses before they get elected, and what do we do when they slip by?

Bill Eddy is a therapist, lawyer, and mediator. He is the Director of Innovation at the High Conflict Institute. He is the author of over twenty books on high-conflict behavior and how to manage it, but we will be discussing the most pertinent...