We’ve got an exciting show for you this week, featuring political commentator and author Andrew Yang on his latest book — and how political-thriller fiction might offer prescient insight into the precarity of American democracy. Watch below:

What would it mean for there to be another civil war in the United States? Under what conditions could it happen? Yang’s recent book, The Last Election, captures a nation beset by systemic corruption, on the brink of collapse. Yang himself has been thinking about how intense political polarization — an increasingly hostile struggle between right and left — may lead to intense political violence, and his fictional work taps into what he imagines could become reality. In our conversation, he nods to the role of mainstream news and social media in sharpening divides between Republicans and Democrats, creating the conditions, as he sees it, for more widespread political violence that meets the criteria for civil war.

“Civil war” isn’t the term we’d use to describe the growing conflict resulting from an emboldened far right — but thinking back to the January 6 riots of nearly three years ago, we see potential for increased political instability, particularly in a political system with a corrupt and increasingly unpopular establishment. Our conversation with Yang becomes an opportunity to hash out what is most contributing to this conflict, whether The Last Election could play out in our own political reality, and what we can do about it.

You can listen to this episode as a podcast once it’s released tomorrow evening on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, and more.