Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and with me is today's guest, Professor

Jason Brennan. Jason is a professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown

University, and he's the author of seven books, most recently Against Democracy, which is the

book that we're going to be talking about in today's episode. It lays out the case that democracy is not actually the best system of government, either

from a philosophical or moral perspective or from an empirical perspective.

So Jason, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I'll just to kick things off, tell you the moment when I decided I wanted to have an

episode about objections to democracy.

It was during an interview where I was myself being interviewed.

And I was being asked about motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases and how they

sort of undermine the democratic process and, you know, introduce all these problems into our

political discourse. And so I was talking about all of these flaws with democracy. And then I

hastened to add, but of course, you know, that doesn't mean we shouldn't

have a democracy. And as I said it, I had this moment where I realized, you know, I'm, I didn't

say that because I believe it's true. Like, I may well believe it's true, but that wasn't what

motivated me to say it.

I said it because I felt like I had to. I think that the position that, hmm, maybe democracy is

not the best system after all is kind of one of those things you can't say that Paul Graham wrote

about in his essay, things you can't say, where there are positions that are sort of off limits enough in our current climate that it's like hard to think and especially talk sort of clearly about them, which seemed bad.

So I like even before we get into the specifics of your case against democracy, I think I just want to make the meta point that I think it's good for discourse that you're raising these questions.

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