Hi, everybody. This is the reason interview with Nicholaspe, a show where I talk with the artist,

entrepreneurs, politicians, policymakers, and visionaries who are making the world more libertarian,

or at least more interesting by challenging worn out old orthodoxies and ideas.

Today we're doing a special live edition with my longtime reason colleague and sometimes co-author

Matt Welch.

Matt, thanks for talking.

Thank you for having me, Nick.

And I regret that we can't just talk about Gorman Thomas for.

Yeah.

No, no. We can. We're talking Gorman Thomas for other people. Yeah. No, no.

We can't.

We're talking, you know, on 9-11, which is a day that lives in infamy, the largest act of political terrorism or terrorism, I guess, on American soil.

Obviously happened in 2001.

And then yesterday, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

The topic today is political violence.

And Matt, I guess the first question that I want to talk about with you is, are we in an era of heightened political violence? And if so, how do we know that?

I presume that we are without having the handy-dandy spreadsheet that reason writers, like

Jesse Walker and others, like to go to whenever we talk about mass shootings and other things.

Right. Just that, you know, you and I both became teenagers at the end of that era of assassination.

Basically, Ronald Reagan was the last major assassination attempt after a really long and awful series, basically between 1963 and 1981.

I would even add John Lennon to that, not necessarily political.

No, it's not political, but it's definitely violent, yeah.

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