You're listening to the Mark Simone show.

710 W-O-R.

Well, Jake Novak, of course, the great columnist and deputy managing editor, News Nation.

Follow them on Twitter.

It's Jake, Jake, N-Y at Twitter.

Jake Novak, how you doing?

I'm doing well.

A lot of stories to follow, and, you know, we have a little bit more of an open platform right now, at least on Twitter, to find out some of these things. I don't know that you've been watching a lot of great video from China. I mean, great, kind of scary, but great to be able to see it. So I didn't get much sleep and I'm doing okay. Yeah. So they always said younger generations will come along and not put up with the what, the oppressive Chinese government or Iranian government or others. Is that what we're seeing now? Well, what we're seeing is the use of protests as something that's actually getting world attention. I can't tell you how many protests, probably that we're similar to this, maybe a slightly smaller scale that we've had in China and Iran and places like that over the years. But they were ignored. Or we didn't really feel like we could cover them. You know, the old days CNN might cover it a little bit, but, you know, we've learned a lot about CNN in the last 10 to 20 years about how they also agreed sometimes

to cover up stuff that was going on in Iraq or Iran and things like that.

So if you do really have a social media platform that is willing to at least give it a shot

for some of the stuff to come out, it can be effective.

And Mark, I can't help but think if Elon Musk wasn't in charge of Twitter today,

would we really see all these videos that we're seeing of Chinese protests? I'm sorry to say this, but the tech

CEOs other than Elon Musk, don't have a great track record when it comes to complying with

this government. So, you know, maybe this is a new era and maybe we are seeing something new.

Yeah. Hey, Jake Novak, explain the railroad strike threat here because a lot of people might be saying, well, I don't take the trains. I'm going to affect me. How big would this be in its effect on America? This would really, really hurt the country for, in a lot of ways. One of the first ways that it would hurt us would be back at the gas pump again and back at the, you know, at our eating oil or natural gas bills, things like that. And that's much of natural gas. Certainly oils and important chemicals. That's the stuff that really goes on the rails because that's the safest place to transport it. You know, a bunch of trucks driving around would be dangerous. Of course, even more safe would be oil pipelines and things like that,

but we all know how that's been going, but them getting blocked. So this would be the first major impact,

and it would really hurt a lot of other things, because as we know, when gas prices and oil prices go up,

everything else goes up, and of course we'll see a lot of food. So a lot of feed and fertilizer,

the building blocks of our breadbaskin in this country would get affected. But, you know, this is really about, Mark, the blue-collar worker shortage. You know, we're here, by the way, we're hearing very little from either side about this rail strike. You don't have a bunch of union guys going on TV every day or railroad company guys going on TV, letting us know.

They've been keeping their mouth shut about it in hopes that they don't ruin the negotiations by speaking out.

But from what I understand of when I've heard, the situation is there's just not enough rail workers.

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