Bob Zadek (Robert A. Zadek), the San Francisco attorney and host of The Bob Zadek Show, has self-published five books. Four are drawn from and organized around interviews conducted on the show; the fifth, Make Immigration Legal Again, is a direct argumentative essay. All five are independently published (CreateSpace / Amazon KDP) rather than issued by a traditional publisher.
Secret Sauce: The Founders’ Original Recipe for Limited American Democracy
Year: 2017 · Format: Paperback, Kindle · ISBN-13: 9781546752950 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Sauce-Founders-Original-Democracy/dp/1546752951
Condenses the best interviews from The Bob Zadek Show — California’s longest-running libertarian talk show — into a single persuasive argument for a return to constitutional principles. Seven top scholars are interviewed on their respective specialties in the legal, political, and economic history of the United States, exploring the squabbles and compromises of America’s founding period and how the original safeguards against an all-powerful federal government can be restored. The book asks whether there is such a thing as too much democracy, and argues the Founders thought so. Contributors include Thomas Fleming, Ilya Somin, Todd Zywicki, Alex Nowrasteh, Don Boudreaux, William Maurer, and Clark Neily III.
Power to the States: How Federalism 2.0 Can Make America Governable Again
Year: 2018 · Format: Paperback, Kindle · ISBN-13: 9781728973296 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Power-States-Federalism-America-Governable/dp/1728973295
Argues that America’s political divisions — urban versus rural, red state versus blue — are inevitable, and that the Constitution has held the solution since the beginning: federalism. Compiled from interviews on The Bob Zadek Show with professors, former senators, and sitting state supreme court judges, the book explores the federalist revival from eight different perspectives, making the case that states can serve as testing grounds for competing policies while citizens “vote with their feet.” Offers both a philosophy of liberty through federalism and a political strategy to realize it.
The Bubble: How Higher Education Abandoned its Mission and Became America’s Most Over-Rated Product
Year: 2019 · Format: Paperback, Kindle · ISBN-13: 9781795599849 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1795599847
Collects interviews from The Bob Zadek Show on the crisis of free speech and intellectual conformity on American college campuses, arguing that safe spaces, microaggression policing, and trigger warnings reflect a pathological victim mentality that began on campus and has since spread into society at large. Zadek connects three seemingly separate problems — the free-speech crackdown, the $100-billion-a-year federal subsidy of higher education, and the looming student-loan debt bubble — into a single argument that a college degree has become an overrated, debt-financed product sold on the false promise that it is necessary for a successful life. Each guest has authored a book examining a different facet of the story, and Zadek positions this volume as a shortcut through all of them. Featured guests include Bryan Caplan, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, Harvey Silverglate, Jonathan Rauch, and R. Shep Melnick.
Essential Liberty: Finding Freedom in a Post-COVID World
Year: 2020 · Format: Kindle · ASIN: B08DVFFXDV Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Liberty-Finding-Freedom-Post-COVID-ebook/dp/B08DVFFXDV
Examines the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic through a libertarian lens, structured as a compilation of edited interviews with contributors from Reason Magazine, Marginal Revolution, Cafe Hayek, the American Institute for Economic Research, and the Cato Institute. Zadek argues that the “lives not livelihoods” framing conceals real trade-offs, and that the emergency curtailment of economic and personal freedom in response to the pandemic echoes prior “temporary” expansions of state power such as the income tax and the PATRIOT Act. Featured guests include Jeffrey Tucker, Jacob Sullum, Donald J. Boudreaux, Alex Tabarrok, Frank H. Buckley, Randal O’Toole, Brent Orrell, John Tamny, and Jeffrey Singer.
Make Immigration Legal Again: The Case for Restoring America’s Original Open Borders Policy
Year: 2023 · Format: Paperback · ISBN-13: 9798388233196 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Immigration-Legal-Again-Restoring/dp/B0BZFLRS3M
Departs from Zadek’s usual interview-compilation format to make a direct constitutional and moral argument: the Founders’ original policy under the Constitution placed no restrictions on who could enter America, and today’s immigration debate conflates opposition to “illegal” immigration with opposition to immigration itself. Zadek argues that if illegality is the true objection, the remedy is to expand legal pathways rather than restrict entry, and he works through five of the most common objections to open borders — economic, cultural, and security — to make the case that restoring America’s original open-immigration posture is both practical and just. The same argument also runs as a companion essay series, “Let Them All In,” on bobzadek.substack.com.
Note: this list reflects only books Bob Zadek himself authored, confirmed via his Amazon author listings and Goodreads author page (5 distinct works). The bobzadek.com site is dead (no Wayback capture of the /books/ page could be retrieved), but Goodreads’ author page surfaced all five titles directly. No sixth title was found as of 2026-09-11.