The Political Orphanage

Andrew Heaton
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Politics
  • Updated weekly

Politics minus bile plus jokes. Comedian and avowed independent Andrew Heaton interviews authors and thought leaders about policy and big thinky stuff.

  1. 6 hr ago

    (Preview) The Socialist Who Bought a Town

    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 industrial town at New Lanark became world famous, attracting kings, intellectuals, and even the Tsar of Russia.  But success convinced Owen he could go further. So he sold everything and moved to Indiana to build a socialist utopia from scratch. What followed was a chaotic experiment involving communal child rearing, endless committee meetings, militant intellectuals, religious clashes, labor shortages, and eventually… the ghost of Thomas Jefferson. In this episode, Heaton travels to Scotland to explore the strange rise and catastrophic collapse of Robert Owen's alternate-universe socialism—and asks whether history might have looked very different if Owenism, rather than Marxism, had become the dominant socialist tradition.

    8 min

  2. 1 day ago

    The Emperor of Epcot: Walt Disney and Company Towns

    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, but a living futuristic city under a climate-controlled dome, where corporations tested new technologies on actual residents. Was Disney imagining a dazzling city of tomorrow, or accidentally inventing a family-friendly version of Brave New World?

    1hr 9min

  3. 3 Jun

    Privacy Through a Cop's Eyes

    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 like in practice versus online panic? And are privacy advocates sometimes overlooking the realities of violent crime investigations? A nuanced, surprisingly civil conversation about policing, technology, civil liberties, and where the balance ought to be.

    52 min

  4. 27 May

    The Old Political Order Is Dying: Stephen Davies on the Great Realignment

    "Leftwing" and "Rightwing" don't mean the same thing anymore–the battle lines are redrawing. The twentieth century was about economics: low taxes or big government. The twenty-first century will be a fight over something else. Historian and political theorist Stephen Davies joins to discuss his book "The Great Realignment" and the reshaping Western politics, and the collapse of the old left-right order.

    1hr 21min

  5. 20 May

    The Great Baby Shortage

    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 surprising reality of global depopulation. Why are birth rates collapsing across the developed world—and increasingly in the developing world too? What happens to economies, innovation, retirement systems, and civilization itself when populations begin to shrink? Along the way: Paul Ehrlich's failed predictions, the legacy of the Population Bomb era, why people stop having kids when they get richer, and whether humanity should actually be worried about a future with fewer humans.

    1hr 6min

  6. 14 May

    Falsely Convicted of Murder (Bonus Sample)

    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. To hear the full episode, become a patron: www.patreon.com/andrewheaton www.thepoliticalorphanage.com

    19 min

  7. 13 May

    Fighting Crime Like an Economist

    How can we make America safer and save money to boot? What approaches don't work and what can we steal from other countries? Jennifer Doleac is the executive vice president at Arnold Ventures in charge of criminal justice, and the author of "The Science of Second Chances, a Revolution in Criminal Justice."

    1hr 3min

  8. 6 May

    The Non-Profit Industrial Complex

    Is it a charity or a tax loophole? That's what Steve Hodge, President Emeritus of the Tax Foundation, is concerned with. And if there are effectively large corporations, which get tax breaks due to superior branding, how much money is the government leaving on the table, and how does that warp the economy?

    1hr 8min
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Hosts & Guests

5
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

Politics minus bile plus jokes. Comedian and avowed independent Andrew Heaton interviews authors and thought leaders about policy and big thinky stuff.

Information

  • Creator
    Andrew Heaton
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    633
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Andrew Heaton
  • Show Website
    The Political Orphanage

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