Okay, we're live. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show. I have a very special guest. His name is Stephen Marsh. His last name spelled M-A-R-C-H-E. He's just published a book January 4th, 2022. Really a fascinating book. Very timely book. I enjoyed reading it. The title of the book is The Next Civil War Dispatches from the American Future.

And Mr. Marsh is a novelist and culture writer who has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times,

The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Esquire, and pretty much everywhere else.

His books include three novels, The Hunger of the Wolf, Raymond and Hannah, and shining at the bottom of the sea,

as well as the unmade bed and how Shakespeare changed everything. And he's from and lives in Toronto with his wife and

children. But really interesting book. Highly recommended. I think that it's kind of quasi-nonfiction

fiction or something, but there's a lot of references to real events,

but speculative future events.

But he can talk more about that.

So Stephen Marsh, welcome to the show.

Pleasure to be here.

Awesome.

So thanks for agreeing to the interview.

And for people who may not have heard some of your earlier books or your other writings

in some of these publications.

Can you talk about your background and what led you to write the next

Civil War? Well, I mean, I'm a novelist and a journalist. I do both of those things. And this book

sort of is both of those hats. I mean, it's really, it's speculative nonfiction. That's what I'm

calling it. So it's imagined scenarios of future civil war in the United States, but based on research.

There's not a word in this that isn't based on research.

It's really not a work of imagination so much as it's a, you know, I interviewed about 200 people for it.

And it's drawn from the best possible models.

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