The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast
The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast explores pressing cultural issues from the perspective of Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism.
Episodes
June 7, 2025 • 54 mins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A28R9JnfNro
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The ARI Bookshelf, Elan Journo, Mike Mazza, Nikos Sotirakopoulos and Robertas Bakula discuss The Technological Republic, the recent New York Times bestseller by Alexander C. Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, and Nicholas W. Zamiska, the company’s head of corporate affairs and legal counsel.
Karp and Zamiska argue that America’s future grea...
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June 2, 2025 • 69 mins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY3NY7gFYtw
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Ben Bayer and Tristan de Liège examine Douglas Murray’s recent critique of Joe Rogan and other influencers who share their platforms with unreliable pseudo-experts. They explain why Murray fails to clarify the standards for distinguishing expert from non-expert testimony.
Among the topics covered:
Why Doug...
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June 1, 2025 • 60 mins
https://youtu.be/iVJOTxv-tWk
Podcast audio:
American schools have long performed dismally at providing the education children need to read well. A movement in favor of systematic phonics instruction offers hope for improvement, but while phonics is essential to teaching children to read, they need further education to become highly capable readers. This talk by Sam Weaver defines a properly aspirational goal for reading ...
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May 30, 2025 • 95 mins
https://youtu.be/o615h8druDE
Podcast audio:
The creation of the atom bomb during WWII was an extraordinary achievement, dramatized in part in the movie Oppenheimer. What were the three greatest challenges in making the bomb and how does the success in overcoming those very difficult obstacles illustrate the application of objectivity? Which great scientists’ work were most essential to the success of the project? As Ayn ...
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May 19, 2025 • 67 mins
https://youtu.be/VUYooprteeU
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Onkar Ghate and Agustina Vergara Cid analyze how the Trump administration’s immigration policy has escalated attacks on due process, legal immigration, and the broader American system of government.
(Since the recording of this podcast, Rümeysa Öztürk has been granted bail by a federal judge and released after more than six ...
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May 16, 2025 • 87 mins
https://youtu.be/RclwB5luKek
Podcast audio:
Ayn Rand denounced racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” She also rejected as collectivist many of the measures being advocated to combat this evil, including what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On the sixtieth anniversary of that law, Dr. Greg Salmieri revisited the themes of Rand’s classic article “Racism,” relating them to present-day Ame...
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May 13, 2025 • 59 mins
https://youtu.be/2yQWRvrbVUI
Podcast audio:
Foreign policy is both a political activity and a field of applied ethics. However, the metaphysical and epistemological premises held by theorists and practitioners shape their view of ethics. The lack of an objective view of the world has led to theories and policies that do not support, and are often harmful to, the role of a proper government. However, as Scott McDonald exp...
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May 12, 2025 • 83 mins
https://youtu.be/LVNSnbdEo0o
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The ARI Bookshelf, Onkar Ghate, Tristan de Liège, and Robertas Bakula discuss Abundance, the recent best-selling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has gained traction in liberal circles.
Klein and Thompson acknowledge the failings of past liberal policies and present what they call the “abundance agenda” as an alternative. The agenda emphasizes st...
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May 12, 2025 • 54 mins
https://youtu.be/0R_RjyOJeI4
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Ben Bayer, Robertas Bakula, and Tristan de Liège explore how the mixed economy enables the unjust exploitation of society’s most productive individuals.
Among the topics covered:
Why, contrary to Marxist claims, businesspeople are the most exploited group in a mixed economy;
How antitrust laws enable the government an...
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May 8, 2025 • 89 mins
https://youtu.be/7Wjrmh8CjAk
Podcast audio:
As a historian and philosopher of biology, much of Dr. James Lennox’s research has focused on the philosophical foundations of history’s two greatest biologists: Aristotle and Charles Darwin. Historians and philosophers often portray these two giants as diametrically opposed in their approach to the study of life. But were they? In this talk, he provides a novel answer to that ...
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May 6, 2025 • 59 mins
https://youtu.be/sNtIs4UmXns
Podcast audio:
The most pernicious ideas are often injected into the culture by the method of “package-dealing” — the attempt to integrate the unintegratable. Expanding on previous material he has presented on this subject, Mr. Peter Schwartz offers a more advanced analysis of the mechanics of the package-deal. He addresses such questions as: Can the same word stand for both a valid concept a...
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May 5, 2025 • 50 mins
https://youtu.be/S53avG169mw
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Elan Journo and Ben Bayer discuss the Trump administration’s move to restart nuclear talks with Iran by rehashing Obama’s failed deal.
Among the topics covered:
How the Trump administration’s new Iran deal essentially recycles Obama’s failed policy;
Why hopes for diplomacy with Iran evade the regime’s totalitarian nat...
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May 1, 2025 • 88 mins
https://youtu.be/Ff78OyGNA40
Podcast audio:
This sample class by Gena Gorlin is based on the full-length ARU course of the same name. The full course explores the major schools of thought, methods of inquiry, and empirical findings taught in a typical introduction to psychology course. But it explores how to understand and evaluate these theories, methods, and findings from an Objectivist perspective. Students learn how ...
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April 29, 2025 • 60 mins
https://youtu.be/oMFbMFvDJ50
Podcast audio:
In this talk, Dr. Amesh Adalja details innovative new developments in science that will enhance the lives of individuals. Topics include transplantation of pig hearts and kidneys into humans, cell-based therapies for cancer, genetically modified mosquitoes, new vaccines and vaccine technologies, AI-discovered antibiotics, CRISPR therapeutics, and more.
Recorded live on June...
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April 28, 2025 • 44 mins
https://youtu.be/pWpAiAioZTE
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Robertas Bakula and Mike Mazza explore the themes from Mazza’s upcoming essay, which argues that freedom, not government control, is the true engine of progress in the space industry.
Among the topics covered:
How NASA’s monopoly led to decades of stagnation in space innovation;
How economic freedom has fueled the rec...
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April 24, 2025 • 59 mins
https://youtu.be/79fT9VIDkVs
Podcast audio:
As Ayn Rand wrote, “The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully—and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it.” We can see this failure of understanding in the view, advanced by many conservatives and libertarians today, that the concept of individual rights ultimately derives from ...
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April 22, 2025 • 57 mins
https://youtu.be/UaRhK2N8m6Y
Podcast audio:
A continuation of Dr. Harry Binswanger’s Saving Math from Plato (OCON 2023): how the Aristotelian, perception-based approach to mathematics refutes or re-interprets wrong ideas advanced by figures such as Russell and Cantor. Topics include number, infinity, limits, and the axiomatic concepts of mathematics. (The lecture assumes no knowledge of mathematics beyond beginning algeb...
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April 21, 2025 • 58 mins
https://youtu.be/qctS25KQzrs
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Sam Weaver and Ben Bayer discuss the Trump administration's decision to cut federal funding to Columbia University in response to its handling of pro-Hamas protests. They argue that government involvement in universities makes such coercion possible and threatens intellectual freedom.
Among the topics covered:
How to thi...
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April 17, 2025 • 85 mins
https://youtu.be/VaNHaT-xlOU
Podcast audio:
The new ARI Bookshelf podcast series gives you a window into ARI’s educational programs by showcasing our faculty as they discuss books of recent interest. This episode discusses Ta-Nehisi Coates's book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Message. Panelists included Elan Journo, Greg Salmieri, Ibis Slade, and Mohamed Ali.
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April 15, 2025 • 60 mins
https://youtu.be/RKtLU6ntECU
Podcast audio:
“Socratic Wisdom” — knowing our own ignorance — is the ability to differentiate what we do not know from what we do. This is a key component of objectivity, vital for properly weighing and implementing the knowledge we possess and directing ongoing investigation and inquiry.
In this talk, Jason Rheins discusses the nature and importance of this introspective clarity and how...
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