Hi, everybody. I have a very special guest here today, a man who I have come to call my friend,

and I'm honored to be able to say that. Max Alvarez is the editor and chief of the Real News Network

in Baltimore, and host of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles

of the working class today. He is the author of the work of living, working people talk about

their lives and the year the world broke, which is a collection of interviews with workers

conducted during the height of the COVID pandemic that will be published by OR Books. His work has been

featured in a range of outlets, including The Nation, In These Times, Boston Review, and The Baffler.

You can also find Max on Twitter at at max million underscore Alv.

Hi, Max. How are you?

Hey, Marianne. Great to be with you again. Thanks so much. Thank you.

You are someone I learned from, not only in your professional capacity, but also personally,

I feel that I can sometimes say, okay, can you give me the scoop as it were? What's the deeper story?

What's going on? So I want to talk to you about two things. I want to talk to you about how you see

this resurgence of the modern labor movement right now. Sarah Nelson, Christian Smalls,

yourself, so many people who are out there. And also specifically, I'd like to talk about East

Palestine, if we might. So I want to throw it over to you. Give us your general sense of any of

the above and all of the above so we can start talking. Yeah, well, so we got a lot to dig into,

as always. And again, I'm very grateful to be here with you to do it. And I appreciate you

lifting up these stories because they're very, very important. And as we have seen time and time

again, the mainstream media keeps getting chances to course correct its coverage on these things

and very seldom takes those chances. I will say that the coverage of the catastrophic train

derailment of the Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio has gotten better

...