Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe

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becoming one. I'm here with Stephen Marsh. Stephen, thanks for joining me.

Pleasure.

So I read your, I think it's your latest book, The Next Civil War Dispatches from the American Future

with great interest. It came out in 2022, however, so I'll be interested to see if your view

has darkened or not in the meantime. But before we get

into the book, what is your background as a journalist and writer? What kinds of issues have you

focused on? And how do you view that? Well, all of them. I mean, basically anything that I've had

a very strange career. By the time I was 30, I was a Shakespeare

professor in New York. And then I became a sort of freelance writer. I was a columnist for Esquire

for many years. I've written cover stories and features for the Atlantic and the New Yorker

and the New York Times and pretty much everywhere else.

And so, you know, in 2016, I was commissioned to write a piece for a Canadian magazine about the inauguration of Donald Trump.

And that's sort of where this project began and where I really started to work on what

is happening in the United States.

So your book, as you know, paints a very grim picture of the American future and also

the American present.

Before we jump into the book itself, how are you viewing America from Canada at this moment?

I'm gathering that you guys are not eager to be the 51st state.

Can you give us a Canadian's eye view of

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