Will the philosophy of selfishness spread through a theme-park-style experience?
What’s the best way to experience Ayn Rand?
One can, of course, rifle through the 6,000 combined pages of her fiction, non-fiction, and drama.
The cinephile has a couple of options, but they barely hit the mark. Still, during her lifetime, Fountainhead conquered the silver screen, with a King Vidor’s adaptation that stayed true to much of her dialogue and plot, but nonetheless left Rand unimpressed.
I am still surprised she had not returned from the grave in anger to condemn the horrid Atlas Shrugged movie trilogy, as it was the sort of train wreck that even Taggart Transcontinental couldn’t salvage. Yet objectivist film buffs should brace themselves and prepare for impact. The rights to adapt Atlas Shrugged now reportedly belong to Ben Shapiro. One can only wonder what cinematic torment the Daily Wire might yet unleash upon Rand’s legacy.
For us nerds, the Atlas Society decided to hire Dan Parsons to draw a comic version of Rand’s Anthem. The dad music admirers will, of course, cling on to Rush, and the more brave music aficionados will find the truly obscure Barry Kuzay’s metal composition titled “Wyatt’s Torch”. Last year, I even saw an artist live paint Atlas overshadowing the Tbilisi valley, over the course of an entire afternoon of lectures at ReasonFest.
And yet, something is still missing, the depth and energy of a strong in-person experience just isn’t quite there in most of these ways of exploring objectivism. Rand becomes evermore distant every year as her fiction grows foreign to the modern reader, the reader who is no longer too fond of reading at all. The Ayn Rand Institute may just have found a never-before-seen solution to the problem at hand.
Boston
As Objectivists gathered for the third day of their annual meeting at Boston’s Westin Hotel, Tal Tsfany, the CEO of the Ayn Rand Institute, came armed with more than just talking points; he had a few aces up his sleeve. During his customary address, A Vision for ARI’s Future, he delivered a series of announcements that clearly caught the audience off guard.
Through the halls of the ballroom, a ripple of excitement spread as new words of Ayn Rand came to life once more. ARI’s archivists had unearthed long-lost footage of the novelist from the basement of the Boston Public Library, just across from the Westin. The Archive team has been painstakingly reconstructing the record of Rand’s life, moment by moment, in search of any lost artefacts from her life, and have been rather fruitful on their quest. One of their recent triumphs has been the recovery of a third Rand–Wallace interview, recorded on March 17, 1961, found in the archives of Syracuse University.
The Ayn Rand Institute is thriving by the numbers. In 2025, its total assets are on track to hit $55 million, all while supporting a robust annual budget north of $10 million. They had similar success boosting the readership of Rand’s novels through a “free books for students” campaign and a fierce essay competition.
Still, the most important part of their work must be the mission to build a powerful cohort of intellectuals who will bring Ayn Rand’s ideas into the public discourse. Central to this effort is the Intellectual Incubator, a selective and demanding training program for young thinkers. ARI makes no secret of its rigour. From the outset, the program declares itself: “selective and rigorous, like law school. (…) practice-focused and individualized, like an apprenticeship (…) advanced and demanding, like graduate school. But (…) differentiated by a startup ethos of uniting ideas with action.”
Is objectivism breaking into the mainstream? One of the more striking moments in Tsfany’s speech came when he noted that Rand’s Atlas Shrugged hero had surfaced in the pages of Abundance, used casually as a synonym for an entrepreneur.
“Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are assuming everybody knows who John Galt is. They’re not explaining it. It’s like: if you’re intellectual enough to read their book, of course, you’ve read Atlas Shrugged. And where did they get Atlas Shrugged from? From us. So I’m very proud of this. You see it everywhere—on Twitter, or X now—good or bad, characters being debated. Everybody’s reading, everybody’s talking. I get a daily Google feed of all the mentions. It’s amazing. I’m very proud of that almost under-the-radar impact we’re having.”
The Ayn Rand Immersive Experience
Yet as always, Tsfany left the biggest announcement for the very end of his talk.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m so excited to announce that we’re going to build the Ayn Rand Immersive Experience. I’m going to show you about one-third of the first experience out of five or six that we’re in the process of building. We’re working with Hollywood screenwriters, producers, and experience builders—people who’ve worked with Disney and similar immersive storytelling teams. And the more we work with them, the more phenomenal their capabilities reveal themselves—especially when powered by great stories.”
The project, Tsfany explained, is not primarily for the faithful who already know Rand’s work, but for the next generation. “Imagine you take your son, daughter, grandson, or granddaughter—someone who hasn’t read Ayn Rand yet, but you have. Who is this experience for? It’s designed for them, not for you. Of course, you’re going to enjoy it immensely, but it’s for the next generation.” The point, he emphasised, was to let newcomers feel the drama and stakes of Rand’s ideas before ever opening a book.
He then walked the audience through the opening scene: “Picture this: you arrive and are welcomed in. You enter the experience, and the first thing you see is a dark room with visuals all over the walls. There’s a narrow phone booth that leads you in. You step inside, close the door behind you—now you’re in this claustrophobic little space. From there, visitors are scanned, renamed, and thrust into the world of the Council of Vocations. They read your new name and pronounce your assigned role: ‘You will be a ditch digger for the rest of your life.’ Your image is projected—you see yourself ageing, year after year, digging ditches forever. How awful.” Then, with a touch of theatrical suspense, Tsfany teased the audience: “And then—someone holding a light appears at the back of the room.”
For any more details about what comes next, one will likely have to wait till 2nd September 2028. This is the expected date for the opening of the giant book-shaped Ayn Rand Centre in Austin, Texas. Conceived as a literal monument to her work, the building is designed to resemble a row of books, casting light into the culture, hovering above the earth, and reaching toward the sky. Its form draws inspiration from Roark’s unbuilt temple to the human spirit in The Fountainhead.
It will surely be no easy task for the project to live up to the full grandeur of Randian aesthetics. Will Austin transform into the beating heart of a new Objectivist era? We will have to wait and see. Or act to make it happen.
