Good evening, current affairs podcast listeners. I am your editor-in-chief, Nathan J. Robinson,

and I am here tonight with an incredibly special guest, a man who I absolutely love talking to

and who I think you'll probably love listening to me talk to. This is a dear, dear friend

of the magazine who has written his first piece for us in our

new edition, Issue 15, which is called Can the Working Class Speak? His name is Maximilian

Alvarez. He is a columnist for the Baffler magazine, and he is a brilliant writer,

and has written this beautiful, beautiful moving piece that I've been trying to get everyone to read.

And he's also the host of the podcast, Working People, which is what we're going to talk a lot about tonight.

Maximilian Avarez, thank you so much for being with me here. I'd like to start with the story you tell

in the piece about your own dad, because you talk very movingly about how growing up, you

interpreted his silences, and you know, you kind of, you and your family learned to read him, but there

was so much that he never said, but clearly felt, and that it sort of came out when you first

started interviewing him after. You say that you regret not really getting to know him until

after the world broke him. What do you mean by the world

broke him? And what do you mean by getting to know him? And what did you find out? Well, you know,

like I said in the piece, I mean, my dad's not, you know, a big chatterbox. But, you know, especially

as he's gotten, you know, a little bit older and as we've gotten a bit older, he has opened up more.

And, you know, he's really the kind of guy that, like, you know, you just got to, you got to find, you know, the stuff that he likes to talk about.

And then, you know, he'll, you'll have great conversations with them.

So, you know, it's, so it's not as if he's just kind of always been super taciturn,

but there are things that I've realized now that I'm grown up, that there were so many things

that he really, you know, kept inside and, you know, I don't, but apart from my mom, I don't think he had really ever, you know, kept inside and, you know, I don't, apart from my mom, I don't think he had really

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