From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In a political season that has featured the predictable parade of

Gaffs, game changers, and polls, there's been an interesting twist this week when the media

decided that the juiciest line of inquiry about the GOP's newly minted vice presidential nominee,

Paul Ryan, was how deep his allegiance was to the late and to some lamented objectivist

political philosopher and novelist Ian Rand and her advocacy of ethical egoism, also known as egoism.

He requires his staff to read Ein Rand's novel,

Atlas Shrug, and calls Rand the reason I got involved in public service.

Ultra capitalist Ein Rand, of whom he has spoken glowingly. What is your view of

Iron Rand? Are you an Ein Rand disciple? The New York Times op-ed board recently featured a

nearly 1,000-word essay written by a Stanford history professor about how Iron Rann wouldn't have approved of Ryan.

Not to be outdone, MSNBC found footage that they say proves that even Johnny Carson didn't approve of Ian RAND.

You do not believe in.

I assume they do not believe in existence of a supreme being or God or creator or whatever.

No, I do not.

Beneath this fixation about Ryan's Iron Rand fandom is the notion that Atlas shrugged might be the urtext that reveals Ryan's hidden more extreme ideology.

Later in the show, we'll explore America's enduring fascination with Rand, but first we asked Slate political reporter Dave Weigel for some background on Ryan's relationship to Rand.

Paul Ryan got to D.C. pretty much directly from college and worked his way up in the kind of conservative Republican

infrastructure, which was quite strong. I mean, he took over Congress in 1994. He got to Congress

only four years later. And so Ryan gave this speech to the Atlas Society, a kind of Randian

objectivist group that's very involved in politics, gave a speech to them in 2005 and gave

examples of Rand's work,

...