Ayn Rand is named in five episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, but never as the subject of an episode. She appears as an influence claimed by the host, as a name on the cover of a guest’s book, as a foil for a guest’s account of libertarianism’s reputation, and as the philosophical backdrop to a psychologist’s critique of Nathaniel Branden’s theory of self-esteem. The excerpts contain no discussion of her biography, her novels beyond a passing reference to Atlas Shrugged, or the content of objectivism as a system.
Bob Zadek’s stated debt
In the opening of the episode on Hollywood and television propaganda, Bob Zadek describes his own intellectual history. He says he is a libertarian and that he likes to think he became one by reading Ayn Rand and by studying libertarian free-market economists, a process he characterizes as a complex, high-integrity intellectual journey that he selected because it was consistent with his own moral fiber. He then undercuts that account, telling the audience that his guest got him thinking and that he now realizes he became a libertarian because of his steady diet in the 1950s and 1960s of watching Dragnet and Gunsmoke and other right-wing entertainment. On this revised telling, television, not Rand, influenced his behavior and political views Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011).
The same episode’s framing question — who controls your cultural well-being, the free market or the left — is Bob’s, not a claim about Rand.
Rand as a label for libertarianism’s reputation
Introducing Matt Zwolinski, Bob Zadek raises the phrase “bleeding heart libertarian” and calls it almost internally inconsistent. He notes that libertarians in the extreme, if reviewed from the standpoint of perhaps Ayn Rand and other libertarians, are looked upon as somewhat materialistic and selfish, and says that Rand has a point of view that invites those labels. He then says libertarianism is not at all that, and that the label is false Matt Zwolinski on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism (2014).
Zwolinski does not take up the characterization of Rand directly. His own contribution to the exchange is to say that there might be a somewhat more active role for government in addressing poverty, but that this should not be the start of the conversation, and that if what we care about is results, the conversation has to start with getting the government out of the way. He adds that he is writing a book on the history of libertarian thought and that nineteenth-century libertarians or proto-libertarians wrote a great deal about the poor and about what government was doing to create and sustain poverty.
Rand in a guest’s intellectual lineage
In the introduction to the episode with John Allison, Bob Zadek says that Allison’s book The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure assimilates the collective wisdom of Aristotle, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Ayn Rand John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015). The attribution is Bob’s framing of the book, not Allison’s own statement in the excerpt.
Later in the same episode, in a passage on the nature of government, Bob Zadek argues that government is special because it is the only institution authorized to use coercion, force, and take away liberty, and that to the extent power is allocated to government rather than to individuals, power is allocated to the only institution that can coerce. Allison agrees, saying that government is dangerous, that throughout history next to old age and disease government has killed more people than any other cause, that governments have slaughtered hundreds of millions of human beings, and that government is needed to protect individual rights but must be very limited. Neither speaker ties this argument to Rand in the excerpt.
The objectivist theory of self-esteem
The most sustained treatment of Rand’s intellectual influence comes in the episode on staying sane in a statist world. Charlie Deist asks Dr. Michael Edelstein about his two main mentors, Murray Rothbard and Albert Ellis, noting that he read that both shared a dislike of Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy. Deist also refers to an exchange Edelstein had with one of Rand’s disciples, Nathaniel Branden, about self-esteem, and to Branden’s book The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, which Deist describes as rooted in objectivist thinking that elevated the individual as a potential paragon of virtue How to Stay Sane in a Statist World (2017).
Edelstein declines the framing of objectivism as a libertarian heresy, saying he would not call Branden a libertarian heretic, because if someone’s psychology is unreasonable that is not necessarily a reflection of their political philosophy. He then describes Branden as the main proponent of Rand’s idea of the importance of self-esteem, and lists the six practices Branden set out: living consciously, self-acceptance, acting responsibly, being assertive, living purposefully, and having personal integrity. Edelstein says he is in favor of all of these and helps his clients achieve them, but that Branden goes overboard and overgeneralizes from doing well on these things to saying that therefore you are a good person.
Edelstein’s objection is methodological. He says that in his ABC model, Branden is treating the practice as A and high self-esteem as C while leaving out B, the belief “I am assertive, that’s good, therefore I am a good person.” He calls this a behaviorist model in which the situation or practice leads directly to a good feeling about yourself. He argues that doing well at a task or trait is not the entire person, in part because humans are a process and are always changing, so you could be assertive today and not assertive tomorrow. He offers Charles Darwin as a difficult case: a great naturalist and pioneer in science who suffered from debilitating panic attacks and depression, withdrew from life for periods, and did not write or do research — so did he do poorly in personal freedom but well in science, and is he a good person or a bad person? Edelstein says people are too complex to make a reasonable decision about that.
Bob Zadek’s response to this is an aside about Charles Darwin and Donald Trump, in which he says he was a strong adherent of the approach summarized as survival of the fittest until Trump became president, and that Trump personifies and proves beyond a doubt that Darwin did not know what he was talking about. The remark is Bob’s and is not about Rand.
Rand as a contrast to empirical governance
In the episode with Casey Mulligan, Bob Zadek asks whether the President has a governing philosophy and a set of core values — economic freedom, federalism, moving policy down from the feds to the states — or whether he is more pragmatic, deciding each issue on its own. Mulligan pushes back on the word philosophy, saying he would not call the President an ideologue, and that it is not like he read Ayn Rand and said he understood the world and would organize what he does accordingly You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020). Mulligan describes the President as more empirical, not a young person, someone who continued to learn while in the White House and reapplies patterns that work. He gives federalism as an example, saying the President arrived at it from a practical point of view, seeing it work and seeing that when somebody was not doing federalism it did not work, and that he grew increasingly attracted to the approach. Mulligan recounts advising people going into Oval Office arguments to give their position a federalism angle, and cites a recent battle in the administration over Ben Carson’s agency’s regulations around zoning in suburbs, where in the end the President wiped out those agency regulations that had been in place since the Obama administration.
Here Rand functions as the name for the doctrinal alternative — the thinker whose reader would arrive at policy deductively — against which Mulligan defines the President’s method.
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Rand. She is invoked in 2011 as the source of Bob Zadek’s libertarianism, in 2014 as the standpoint from which libertarians are called materialistic, in 2015 as one of four names in a book’s intellectual lineage, in 2017 as the backdrop to a critique of Branden’s self-esteem theory, and in 2022 as the type of the ideologue. The only episode that engages an idea associated with her at any length is the 2017 conversation with Michael Edelstein, and that engagement is with Nathaniel Branden’s popularization rather than with Rand’s own writing. No speaker in these excerpts quotes Rand, summarizes her arguments, or responds to a specific passage of her work.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when or where Rand was born, when she died, what she wrote beyond a reference to Atlas Shrugged and the phrase “Who is John Galt?”, or what objectivism holds. They do not describe her relationship with Nathaniel Branden beyond Deist’s description of Branden as one of her disciples and Edelstein’s description of him as the main proponent of her idea of the importance of self-esteem. They contain no discussion of her views on government, ethics, or economics in her own words, and no guest in these excerpts is presented as a scholar of her thought.