Welcome everybody to Crystal Kyle and Friends. You may notice we have the friend today, but

not the Kyle. Kyle is home in New York getting ready for the holidays, but we are very lucky

to have a wonderful guest here, Maximilian Alvarez. Guys probably know him already, one

of our stalwart. You were routinely always everybody's favorite guest on rising. So glad

to get to catch up with Max. He is editor in chief at The Real News, host of Working

People podcast and author of a forthcoming book that I've just been reading called The

Work of Living and it is always wonderful to see you my friend. Thank you Crystal. It's

great to be here. I really wanted to talk to you first and foremost, then we're going

to get into your book a bit about all of the many labor struggles that are going on out

there because you are an activist and a believer. You're also a journalist covering these

stories over at The Real News. So let's start with kind of the high level picture. What do

you think is going out there, all out there among America's workers? Because you see not

only a wave of strikes, which in some ways is kind of a continuation of the teacher strikes.

You see mass rise ignations, even among white collar workers, you see workers who aren't

unionized just straight up walking out of their workplaces on mass. You see all these signs

of resistance. You see Starbucks workers in Buffalo for the first time a unionized shop

in the US, which is incredible and against all the odds. So what do you think is going

on out there? Yeah, it's been it's been a very interesting year. And I think like from

the outset, there is something unremarkable about it in that, you know, if you look at US

history in the kind of immediate period after war and pandemics, like you usually do see an

uptick in labor militancy, like this was the case a century ago around 1919. You know,

you had the Spanish flu, but you also had workers who had made a lot of sacrifices for

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