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Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8)

Storied: San Francisco

Release Date: 02/25/2025

Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus) show art Lincoln Mitchell on His New Book About George Moscone (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Check out my conversation with previous guest as we chat about Lincoln’s new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco. Look for Lincoln at the following events for his new book: April 29: He will be in conversation with Bill Issel discussing the book and what it can teach us about San Francisco today. Hosted by the at the Roar Shack, 34 7th Street, from 6–8 p.m. May 1: He will be in conversation at the University Club with Corey Busch, who served on Moscone’s senate staff, was a senior member of Moscone’s mayoral campaign staff, press...

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Kundan Baidwan, Part 2 (S7E12) show art Kundan Baidwan, Part 2 (S7E12)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, Kundan tell us about her decision to move to San Diego for college, where she would join her older sister, who’d been there for several years. But before that move south, she joined her sister and her sister’s friends on a backpacking adventure in Europe. After some time there, Kundan and her sister went to India to visit family there. Then she came back to go to school. What began as the study of psychology gradually gave way for Kundan to take more and more art and film classes. Eventually, she re-declared as an art major. She graduated in five years, and among the friends she...

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The 68th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival (S7 bonus) show art The 68th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Listen in as SFFILM Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks and I discuss this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. Topics include: SFFILM’s festival spotlight The film Please visit for more info, including where to RSVP for free events and where to get tickets for ticketed events. We recorded this episode over Zoom in April 2025.

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Kundan Baidwan, Part 1 (S7E12) show art Kundan Baidwan, Part 1 (S7E12)

Storied: San Francisco

It’s not often that I feature someone for the first time who’s already been on the podcast … not once, but twice. Such is the case for my friend, artist/bartender/nonprofit arts organizer Kundan Baidwan. Before we dig into this one, please go back and check out Kundan’s previous appearances on the show: (2018) (2024) Those podcasts were about important things in Kundan’s life—the legendary SF bar where she’s bartended for more than a decade, and the Indian arts nonprofit she started with friends just within the last year or so. This episode is all about Kundan herself. We...

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The Tenderloin Museum Turns 10 (S7 bonus) show art The Tenderloin Museum Turns 10 (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

The Tenderloin Museum turns 10 years old this summer, and I for one am here to celebrate that. We first visited early last year, when we talked with museum Executive Director Katie Conry. This bonus episode is all about the many, many programs going on as they approach a milestone anniversary. To start us off, we hear from Program Director Alex Spotto. Alex shares many (but not all) of the upcoming events Tenderloin Museum is either producing or affiliated with. They include: a new production of the (opens tomorrow, April 11!) an art show by (up through May) (film screening and...

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Woody LaBounty, Part 2 (S7E11) show art Woody LaBounty, Part 2 (S7E11)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley across The Bay. During that one year of college, he lived at his grandmother's house in the Outer Richmond. His parents had recently split up, and both his parents moved, separately, to Marin.   In fact, Woody says, his parents' moves north forced him to think about and start to consider that San Francisco was and would perhaps always be his home. Time has proven that to be true, of course. But to his young-adult mind, it just felt right for that moment. He'd spent a little time in Marin, and it...

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We Players’ “Macbeth” at Fort Point (S7 bonus) show art We Players’ “Macbeth” at Fort Point (S7 bonus)

Storied: San Francisco

Ava Roy grew up in rural Western Massachusetts, in an area rich in literature and theater. Ava met Ann Podlozny back east before Ava came to California to attend Stanford, which is where she created a theater production group. Today, Ava is the founding artistic director of , a 25-year-old theater company based in San Francisco. Ann, who’ll play Lady Macbeth in an upcoming, all-woman production of Macbeth, is based in London and came back to be in the play and to support her friend Ava in whatever way she can. While at Stanford, Ava let her art play, in the sense of public displays such as...

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Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11) show art Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11)

Storied: San Francisco

On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850. In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of . But he’s so, so much more than that. He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco. On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His...

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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street.   The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events...

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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10) show art Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10)

Storied: San Francisco

This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer. Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back. One...

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In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his hometown of San Francisco.
 
The first was when he went to college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed, he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the Comedy Underground, in fact.
 
As he describes it, to say that he bombed that first time would be an understatement. "It's the closest I've ever come to literally shitting my pants." Nato then does a rendition of his first joke that night. Audible growls are heard in our recording.
 
Nevertheless, he did a few more open-mics at that spot in Seattle. He liked it enough. But after graduating from college and moving back to The City, he dedicated his life to being a union organizer.
 
As a history student at Reed, he'd written a thesis about the anti-Chinese movement in San Francisco in the 1870s. Nato then explains how the series Warrior is based on this time in SF. There's bits in the story about the incredibly racist and anti-union human for which Kearny Street is sometimes attributed to. That thesis is what got Nato interested in doing labor work.
 
He resumed going to comedy shows, but not getting up on stage. Around the time he turned 30, he found himself laboring over the jokes he'd tell at all the weddings he'd go to. He was also asked to give talks at labor conferences, which doubled as canvasses for Nato to deliver more of his own comedy material.
 
All of these comedic sprinklings led him back to the stage. His first regular spot back in SF was the BrainWash (RIP) on Folsom Street. Once again, the jokes bombed, though his pants fared better this go-round. He offers up another telling of a joke from that era of his. You've been warned. As he left the BrainWash one of those nights, local comedy legend Tony Sparks asked him to come back the next week, and he did. Eventually, Nato invited his friends to come see him perform.
 
He'd moved back to San Francisco in 1997 to do union organizing, as we've mentioned. Two years before that, John Sweeney had been elected president of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney pushed to "organize the unorganized" and bring young people into the labor movement. Nato was part of this wave. He got a job at Noah's Bagels and organized a union there.
 
He went to anything he heard about that interested him. He and his then-girlfriend/now wife would attend talks and rallies together. Nato would sometimes find himself that only ally at, say, LGBTQIA union meetings. This was well before we even used words like "ally."
 
Nato was approached to organize workers at the Real Foods on 24th Street. Then the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was beginning to organize bike and car messengers in San Francisco. Nato worked as a car messenger, which he did for three years, and helped organize his coworkers. We go on a short sidebar about bike messenger culture in The City in the late-Nineties. It was huge.
 
A few moves from union to union here and there, and Nato found himself raising money and helping to open a low-wage workers' center for young and immigrant folks in the service industry. That center is still around today.
 
The second time Nato left San Francisco was in 2012. This flight took him to New York City, where he relocated to write for his friend W. Kamau Bell's first TV show, Totally Biased. As Nato puts it, he "got the chance to be a Jewish comedy writer living in Brooklyn for six months." Then, in 2018, he and his family moved to Havana, Cuba, for six months while his wife worked on her PhD research.
 
Nato says that the only time he was tempted to relocate permanently was during his time in NYC. His kids liked it there. They looked at different neighborhoods and even schools. But Nato wasn't all that happy in New York. The experience took a toll on his friendship with Kamau (they've since moved on and are tight once again). And then the show got canceled. The universe had spoken.
 
That center he'd helped to found back in San Francisco had passed the nation's first minimum-wage municipal law. In 2006, they helped pass paid sick days here in The City. Nato had left the organization just before that to join the California Nurses' Association (CNA). Through that org, he was part of the ultimately successful effort to keep St. Luke's hospital open.
 
It was after his time with the CNA, 2011 or so, that Nato returned to doing stand-up.
 
He recorded his first comedy album and went on his first comedy tour (with Kamau). In 2014, he returned to organized labor, joining Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1021. He works there today, as head of collective bargaining.
 
We return to comedy and Nato lists off some more folks doing open-mics with him a decade or so ago who've moved on to various levels of fame and recognition—Ali Wong, Chris Garcia, Shang Wang, Kevin Camia, Moshe Kasher, and Brent Weinbach, to name a few.
 
Nato takes us on yet another sidebar, but it's a good one. It's all about the "Punchline Pipeline," the system by which local comics can test their chops for a while until they're ready (or not) to move on to bigger and better things.
 
It took Nato three years to work up to the level of paid host at The Punchline. Around 2006, to go back, he and Kamau started doing political comedy shows together. This was during the George W. Bush years, when "leftist," "liberal" comedy was big. Then Obama got elected and that type of comedy cooled off considerably. Nato started to host shows at The Make-Out Room monthly. He credits that stint as the time that he "figured it out."
 
Nato still does stand-up, though not with the intensity with which he performed in his Thirties. Today, he contributes regularly to The Bugle Podcast. He works with Francesca Fiorintini and her Bitchuation Room show. He's also trying to find time to write a book—a funny take on union organizing. And he's kicking around the idea of another comedy album, which would be his third.
 
Follow Nato on Instagram and Blue Sky. His two albums are available to stream or buy on BandCamp.
 
We end the podcast with Nato's thoughts on our theme this season: Keep It Local.
 
We recorded this episode at Nato's home on Bernal Hill in January 2025.
 
Photography by Nate Oliveira