ZadekpediaCharlie Deist is a guest host of The Bob Zadek Show, filling in for Bob Zadek on episodes concerning capitalism, governance innovation, and public health policy. Deist appears as an interviewer and moderator rather than as a guest, guiding conversations with figures including Michael Strong, Joe Quirk, and Ron Jones.
On the show
1 appearance, 2015.
- 2015-08-20 · Joe Quirk on Seasteading 3.0 · 51:37 — Seasteading and the Future of Autonomous Floating Cities. With Joe Quirk.
Guest hosting and interview style
Deist introduces himself on air as the guest host, telling listeners he is “filling in for Bob this Sunday” and inviting calls to the show’s number Michael Strong on Creating a World in Which All Humanity Flourishes (2017). He frames the program as “the show of ideas, not attitude” and describes its subject matter as the ideas at the heart of Western society—education, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. In the same introduction, he notes that asking ten libertarians what capitalism is would likely produce at least twelve different answers, a remark that sets up the episode’s discussion of definitional disagreement among libertarians.
On the 2020 episode, Deist again identifies himself as filling in for Bob and notes that Bob will return the following Sunday Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020). He uses the host’s chair to connect guest commentary to recurring themes of the program, including Frédéric Bastiat’s distinction between the seen and the unseen.
Capitalism, governance, and seasteading
In the 2017 episode, Deist hosts Michael Strong and Joe Quirk. He introduces Strong as a self-described radical social entrepreneur, founder of several charter schools, and co-founder with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey of Conscious Capitalism Inc., which Deist says was founded to promote voluntary exchange and entrepreneurial solutions to the world’s problems Michael Strong on Creating a World in Which All Humanity Flourishes (2017). Deist also names Strong’s book Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems, and mentions that Strong was soon to move from Austin to the San Francisco Bay Area to start another school.
Deist introduces Quirk as his co-host in studio in Sausalito and as the author of Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians. He notes the sailboats visible on Richardson Bay near the Golden Gate Bridge, calling them related to Quirk’s line of work only tangentially. The episode’s stated topics include capitalism, entrepreneurship, global poverty, governance, seasteading, education, conscious capitalism, and economic freedom.
The 1918 pandemic and lockdown trade-offs
In the 2020 episode, Deist interviews Ron Jones, identified as the host of The Lean Berets podcast and a physical educator and historical kinesiologist Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020). Deist invokes Bastiat’s parable of the broken window to argue that COVID reporting emphasizes visible costs—people dying and getting sick—while neglecting unseen costs, including the effects of keeping people indoors from an already sedentary baseline. He says policymakers have deferred to unelected health officials who are not necessarily looking at the big picture because their careers have focused on identifying infectious diseases.
Deist also discusses Essential Liberty: Finding Freedom in a Post-COVID World, a book featuring Bob Zadek’s interviews with thinkers on what a proportional response to the pandemic would look like. He contrasts that approach with the suggestion from Governor Cuomo and other policymakers that if actions save even one life they are worthwhile, saying that following such logic leads to a very different world than rationally assessing the appropriate balance.
Across episodes
The episodes show Deist hosting episodes on two distinct topics—entrepreneurial capitalism and pandemic-era public health—with no shared question argued across both. The 2017 episode concerns governance innovation and poverty; the 2020 episode concerns lockdown trade-offs and physical fitness. The episodes show no development in Deist’s role or approach between the earlier and later treatment.