Episodes
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https://youtu.be/jSUq16CPQwc
Podcast audio:
In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Onkar Ghate and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss the reaction to the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and the hatred towards businessmen in America.
Among the topics covered:
Examples of the culture treating businessmen as a persecuted minority;
How CEOs provide value in health care despite government controls;
Why saying that denying medical claims is violence perpetuates real violence;
How seeing health care as a “right” distorts people’s view of insurance companies;
How socialized medicine turns health care providers into serfs, not traders.
Mentioned in this podcast is Ayn Rand’s lecture “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” also available in her book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal.
The podcast was recorded on December 13, 2024 and posted on December 18, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/rqSHMPIurKM
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Brandon Lisi and Agustina Vergara Cid discuss the backstory of the newly-published “lost” Mike Wallace-Ayn Rand interview from 1960.
Among the topics covered:
Historical background of the “lost” interview;
Rand’s role as a public intellectual during the 1960s;
How Rand’s intellectual confidence shines through in the interview;
How the Ayn Rand Archives recovered the recording;
Upcoming projects of the Ayn Rand Archives.
Mentioned in this podcast are Rand’s first and fourth interviews with Wallace, Letters of Ayn Rand and the online archive exhibit, and Rand’s letter “To Senator Barry Goldwater”
The podcast was recorded on December 10, 2024 and posted on December 12, 2024. Listen to the discussion below. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here. -
Missing episodes?
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https://youtu.be/UA8uWCfm81k
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Ben Bayer and Agustina Vergara Cid discuss Donald Trump’s promise to enact mass deportations of millions of illegal immigrants.
Among the topics covered:
How Trump’s plan to enact mass deportations would have massive costs;
Why the Alien Enemies Act does not justify mass deportations;
How the Alien Enemies Act would grant Trump immense new powers;
Why mass deportations would fail to secure our borders or enhance national security;
Why mass deportations would threaten the rights of American citizens;
The importance of respecting the rule of law while also treating peaceful illegal immigrants justly.
Mentioned in this podcast is the New Ideal podcast episode with Ben Bayer and Agustina Vergara Cid “The Absurdity of Calling the U.S.-Mexico Border Crisis an 'Invasion'.”
The podcast was recorded on December 5, 2024, and posted on December. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/ZNmERj5xVww
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Onkar Ghate and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian war in Western media.
Among the topics covered:
The corruption of the Western media’s reporting of the conflict;
Why reporters can’t escape moral judgment;
The anti-Israel bias of the media;
How the conflict could be reported objectively;
How altruism drives the non-objective anti-Israel reporting.
The podcast was recorded on November 18, 2024 and released on November 27, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/vCiKkxLAFJY
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Sam Weaver and Tristan de Liège discuss Atlantic writer Derek Thompson’s idea that Americans are afflicted by a religious obsession with work that he calls “workism” and their view of the role of work in human life.
Among the topics covered:
Thompson’s view on work and why it's worth talking about;
Why making work central to one’s life doesn’t entail adopting a religious perspective;
Understanding what causes burnout and lack of fulfillment in work;
The Objectivist perspective on work.
Mentioned in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, her essay “Causality Versus Duty”, Gregory Salmieri’s essay “The Act of Valuing (and the Objectivity of Values)” in A Companion to Ayn Rand edited by Allan Gotthelf and Salmieri, and de Liège’s Ayn Rand University course Philosophical Perspectives on Work.
This podcast was recorded on November 7, 2024, and released on November 20, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4kQrSryOiQ
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Elan Journo, Ben Bayer, and Onkar Ghate discuss the 2024 U.S. election results.
Among the topics covered:
Why the Democrats and Kamala Harris didn’t deserve to win;
How Harris should have dealt with the failures of the Biden administration;
The American sense of life vs. the view of the elites;
Why Trump didn’t deserve to win;
The Republican Party’s capitulation to Trumpism;
How policy will change under the new administration;
The Trump campaign’s appeal to the worst in Americans.
The podcast was recorded on November 13, 2024 and posted on November 15, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/rPsgR0WCqxw
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Elan Journo and Ben Bayer discuss Ayn Rand’s radical view on abortion rights and the debates over abortion as an election issue.
Among the topics covered:
Why Ayn Rand defended abortion rights as a matter of individual freedom;
How to understand abortion as an election issue after the Dobbs decision;
How to evaluate recent Democratic arguments for abortion rights;
How state ballot initiatives on abortion fail to uphold women’s right to life;
What the future holds for abortion rights as an election and moral issue.
Mentioned in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s entry in the Objectivist Lexicon on “Abortion,” Ayn Rand’s essay “On Living Death,” and Ben Bayer’s essay “Ayn Rand’s Radical Case for Abortion Rights” and book of essays, Why the Right to Abortion is Sacrosanct.
The podcast was recorded on October 21, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/MLF5deQWbrc
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Aaron Smith interviews Elan Journo to discuss his critical evaluation of two popular but deeply flawed biographies of Ayn Rand: Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Among the topics covered:
The standards of objectivity that the biographies fail to meet;
The authors’ disregard for how Rand thought of herself and her work;
Examples of the books’ lack of objectivity;
How the authors mishandled the biographies' sources;
Why ignoring Rand’s philosophy makes the books less interesting and intelligible.
Recommended in this podcast are Journo’s articles “‘Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right’ Is Worse than Incompetent” and “Postscript: ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made’ Is an Exploitative, Tabloid Biography,” and Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri’s book A Companion to Ayn Rand.
The podcast was posted on October 23, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/wgKovwvgEs0
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Mike Mazza and Sam Weaver discuss the enduring value of The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of Ayn Rand’s essays on ethics, on its sixtieth anniversary.
Among the topics covered:
Why Ayn Rand wrote and collected the essays in The Virtue of Selfishness;
How Ayn Rand’s essays address questions central to living a good life;
How Ayn Rand presented a radical new way to think about morality;
How Ayn Rand challenges conventional ways of thinking about morality;
How Ayn Rand provided novel ways of evaluating many moral issues.
Mentioned in this podcast is Ayn Rand’s essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness.
The podcast was recorded on October 8 and released on October 18, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/Lsm2sRbywwg
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss Western misconceptions around October 7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Among the topics covered:
Why the war is really between Israel and Iran;
How pragmatism effects the West’s inability to understand Iran;
How Palestinian grievances help pragmatists evade Iran’s ideology;
Why most Palestinian grievances are deliberately made up;
How October 7 demonstrates the power of philosophy.
Mentioned in this podcast are Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism and Elan Journo’s book What Justice Demands.
The podcast was recorded on October 4, 2024 and posted on October 7, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/IBopAUk3s4A
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Mike Mazza and Tristan de Liège discuss the private space industry and Ayn Rand's philosophical thoughts on the subject.
Among the topics covered:
How state monopolization forestalled the development of the private space industry;
Why Rand saw the Apollo 11 mission as a philosophical, not a political achievement;
How pull peddling threatens space entrepreneurship;
How the goal of making a profit enables progress in the private space industry;
What's wrong with the objection that private business will corrupt science;
How space exploration benefits us.
Recommended in this podcast are Rand’s piece “Apollo 11,” the essay “Common Fallacies About Capitalism” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Keith Lockitch’s “Ayn Rand on Apollo 11.”
The podcast was released on October 2, 2024. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/5Bpu-bAQXMs
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal Live, Ben Bayer and Robertas Bakula discuss the recent antitrust case against Google and what it reveals about the nature of antitrust law.
Among the topics covered:
Why Ayn Rand regarded antitrust law as immoral and un-American;
What evidence the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google is based on;
How antitrust law is non-objective in theory and in practice;
Why the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google is non-objective and unjust;
How antitrust law criminalizes businesses for being successful as such;
How the DOJ’s antitrust case equivocates political and economic power;
Why we need to fight for the moral right of businesses to be successful.
Mentioned in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s articles “The Age of Envy,” “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” and “Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason,” as well as our previous New Ideal podcast episode “Recent Antitrust Attacks on ‘Big Tech’.”
The podcast premiered on September 25, 2024. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/pKCfFCED9XA
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal Live, Agustina Vergara Cid and Ben Bayer analyze the anti-American immigration platforms of both the Trump and Harris campaigns.
Among the topics covered:
The tribal and arbitrary nature of Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric;
Why Republicans rely on fear-mongering to push their anti-immigration agenda;
Harris’s shameful evasion of the immigration topic and the racism of her opponents;
How both Democrats and Republicans share a collectivistic view of immigrants;
The role of altruism in shaping the anti-American approach to immigration.
Mentioned in this podcast are Vergara Cid’s essay “Rethink the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant,’” Ayn Rand’s essay “‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing” and her answer to “Should There Be Open Immigration?” Also referenced are the New Ideal Live episodes “The Problem With Pro-Immigration Arguments,” “A Legal Crisis in Immigration,” and “Who Is a Communist?”
The podcast was recorded on September 20, 2024. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/emKgc2aO7x8
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Agustina Vergara Cid interviews Gregory Salmieri about his essay “Free Speech as a Right and a Way of Life.”
Among the topics covered:
What free speech is and why a defense of it is needed;
How to respond to acts of de-platforming and cancellation;
Why the right to free speech is absolute;
How public education violates free speech;
Non-governmental violations of free speech;
The difference between thought and action;
When protests and civil disobedience are justified;
How to promote a culture of free speech.
Mentioned in this podcast are Gregory Salmieri’s essay “Free Speech as a Right and a Way of Life” and Tara Smith’s book The First Amendment: Essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedom.
The episode was released on September 18, 2024. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C-eEwx1jv0
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Onkar Ghate and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss the question of whether Kamala Harris is a communist, and if not, what the real problem with her views is.
Among the topics covered:
The essence of the Marxist ideology;
Why Harris is not a communist;
How the “communist” label helps New Right tribalists hide their own anti-Americanism;
The importance of using concepts precisely;
How mislabeling someone as “communist” whitewashes real communism.
Recommended in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s article “The Left: Old and New” and Sotirakopoulos ’s lecture at AynRandCon Europe 2024 “Lessons From the Intellectual Success of Marxism.”
The podcast was recorded on September 9, 2024 and released on September 14. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here. -
https://youtu.be/FpjW9B8aE8Q
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal, Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss how the failure of American post-9/11 policy led to the October 7 attacks.
Among the topics covered:
How the failed American response to 9/11 paved the way for October 7;
How religion and altruism undermined the response to Islamic totalitarianism;
How the West lies to itself about the nature of Hamas;
Why there are no voices articulating a positive strategy for the Middle East;
The need to rethink the philosophic principles guiding American foreign policy.
Recommended in this podcast are Ghate and Journo’s book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11 and Journo’s Winning the Unwinnable War: America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism.
The podcast premiered on September 11, 2024. Listen and subscribe from your mobile device on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. Watch archived podcasts here. -
The new Right’s absurd positions cannot be explained by their adherence to any coherent ideology, but only by their tribal view of the world.
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We must understand the philosophical foundations of the right to free speech to apply it to contemporary controversies.
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https://youtu.be/sdNoDhkU_eA
Podcast audio:
In this episode of New Ideal Live, Elan Journo and Harry Binswanger analyze Alexandra Popoff’s new biography, Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success, particularly its portrayal of Rand as a “Jewish thinker.” They address the false attempt to link Rand’s “ethnicity” to her philosophy.
Among the topics covered:
The determinism of labeling Rand as “influenced” by her ancestry vs. the central role of choice in her thought and life;
The irrelevant evidence offered for Rand’s “ethnic” identity;
Spurious evidence of Rand’s reaction to Soviet injustices in her political thinking;
Why Rand’s novels put plot first and were not merely a vehicle for ideas;
How The Fountainhead is Rand’s rejection of Nietzsche’s ideas;
How Popoff’s book fails to engage with Rand’s rejection of the tribalism central to the concept “ethnicity”;
Why Ayn Rand called herself a Jew in response to Antisemitism;
How Popoff’s book rehashes the same errors of older flawed biographies.
Mentioned in this podcast are Ayn Rand’s essay “What Is Capitalism?” and her lecture “Global Balkanization.”
The podcast was broadcast on September 6, 2024. Watch archived podcasts here. - Show more
