This is the reason interview with Nicholas B, where I go deep with the artist, entrepreneurs,

thinkers, and oddballs who are making the 21st century more libertarian, or at least more interesting

by challenging old worn out ideas and orthodoxies.

My guest today is Jacob Soum. I'm not sure,

Jacob, where you fit into that. Maybe you're an oddball or an artist or a thinker or maybe all

three, not really an entrepreneur, but he's a reason senior editor, syndicated columnist,

and he's author of the great new book, Beyond Control, Drug Prohibition, Gun Regulation, and the search for sensible

alternatives. Jacob, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for inviting me. I want to point out

that, that according to Jake Tapper, I'm not just a thinker, but one of the country's most original thinkers.

There you go. Very nice to hear. It has to be true because it's on the front cover of my book.

Yes, that's excellent. And we're going to talk about the book, which looks at the similarities between century-old efforts to control guns on the one hand and drugs on the other.

And we're going to take some questions from the Internet, hopefully.

But before we get to the book itself, Jacob, I want to ask you about some breaking news.

That's relevant to the themes that you are discussing in the book.

There are reports today, whatever today is Thursday,

and I'm looking at my calendar Thursday, September 4th. Pam Bondi, world's greatest attorney

general, is floating the idea of banning gun rights for transgender people because of the recent

church shooting in Minneapolis, which was carried out apparently by a transgender woman who killed

two kids, injured 21, and then shot herself as well. I want to ask two questions about this.

The first is, is there really

anything that can be done to stop these kinds of mass shootings at schools or churches that

we're not doing now? I mean, there are simple things. In some of these cases, basic precautions were not taken, such as locking doors that

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