Podcasts about nineties

This week, we're settling into New England in the early 1960s with Cher and Bob Hoskins.SUPPORT THE SHOW: PATREONSHOP THE SHOW: TEE PUBLICFOLLOW THE SHOW: INSTAGRAM // TIKTOK // YOUTUBEEMAIL THE SHOW: abreathoffreshmovie@gmail.com    

In this episode, our Year of the Nineties continues as Nate and Adam review the 1996 western drama from writer/director John Sayles, "Lone Star", starring Chris Cooper! Listen now!

In this episode, our Year of the Nineties continues as Nate and Dylan discuss the highly-acclaimed drama from director Mike Leigh, "Naked", starring David Thewlis! Listen now

Herzlich willkommen in Folge 112 von Die Sucht zu SEHEN, dem Grisebach-Podcast. Alle zwei Wochen sprechen wir hier mit Menschen, die etwas in der Kunst – oder über sie – zu sagen haben. Heute zu Gast ist Jenny Schlenzka. Die gebürtige Berlinerin hat zwanzig Jahre in New York gelebt, dort hat sie auch studiert und unter anderem als Assistentin von Klaus Biesenbach gearbeitet. Vor bald zwei Jahren aber ist sie in ihre Heimat zurückgekehrt, um die Leitung des Gropius Baus zu übernehmen, bekanntlich eines der ganz wichtigen zeitgenössischen Museen Berlins. Was den Gropius-Bau von anderen Berliner Häusern unterscheidet, welche Ausstellungen Jenny für die kommenden Jahre plant und warum Konkurrenzdenken doch sehr Nineties ist, erzählt sie uns jetzt, herzlich willkommen bei die Sucht zu SEHEN, liebe Jenny Schlenzka!

The amazingly talented, down-to-earth Dominique Gordon joins us this week—our second-ever guest in show history!

In this episode, it's time for another one of our monthly Roundup episodes! We go around the room and discuss the other movies we watched this month, including "Sinners" (2025), "Thunderbirds" (2025), "Birdman" (2014), "The Killing Fields" (1984) and more! We also preview upcoming June releases, and reveal our Year of the Nineties picks for the following month! Listen now!

Legit watch this movie... Samuel L. Jackson leads, Paul Giamatti supports, directed by F. Gary Gray (Friday, Fate of the Furious, "Waterfalls" by TLC)... this movie has everything! Gun fights, double crosses, conspiracies... erm, and Kevin Spacey... BUT it's worth the watch!DISCLAIMER: Language and Spoilers!! ... and Kevin Spacey...THE NEGOTIATORdir. F. Gary Graystarring: Samuel L. Jackson; David Morse; Kevin Spacey

In this episode, we continue our Year of the Nineties selections with the 1994 Western spoof, "Maverick", starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner! Listen now!

Guest: Chad GentryOrganization: Nineties Worship Night ProductionsPosition: PresidentGuest: Jeff DeyoBand: SonicfloodPosition: Former Lead VocalistDocuseries Episode: Nineties Worship Night Docuseries Episode 1: Revival Fire Fall Website: ninetiesworshipnight.com

Guest: Chad GentryOrganization: Nineties Worship Night ProductionsPosition: PresidentGuest: Jeff DeyoBand: SonicfloodPosition: Former Lead VocalistDocuseries Episode: Nineties Worship Night Docuseries Episode 1: Revival Fire Fall Website: ninetiesworshipnight.com

The 1995 Casper movie turns 30 this week. Is this an nineties classic? Or is has it not aged well. Was it ever good? Lets find out as I review it with my cousin Monica.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (2022)

Mike Irish is his actual name. Welcome to my episode with the current (it no longer works to say “new”) owner of one of my favorite places in San Francisco—Emmy's Spaghetti Shack. I'm not sure where to begin, but I suppose a sprinkle of backstory can't hurt. Back in 2022, I recorded an episode with Emmy Kaplan, then the owner and forever the founder of Emmy's. It was a fun interview, and through that chat with Emmy, we discovered that we had been across-the-street neighbors in the Mission back in the early 2000s. Fast-forward to summer 2024 when I applied to be on KQED's Check Please! Bay Area and rated Emmy's as my No. 1 pick among the three spots I proposed. Then a funny thing happened—before we shot the Check Please episode, Emmy sold her restaurant to one of the bartenders at the place—Mike Irish. That brings us to this episode. From the first time Erin and I met Mike at the bar at Emmy's, I knew I liked the dude. Now let's get to know Mike together as he approaches the one-year mark of owning his first restaurant, an SF institution. Mike was born in Houston, but he didn't stay there long. His dad ran catering trucks for restaurants, and soon moved around bit before settling in Arizona, in the Phoenix area, where Mike mostly grew up. He came of age in the late-Nineties/early 2000s. Being in Arizona, Mike tells us some of the things about life there that he just considered normal, things like wearing oven mitts to get into your car in the summer. It was hot, but swimming pools were easy to find. Sports was pretty central to young Mike's life. He played basketball, baseball, soccer, and other sports. His dad coached some of the teams he was on. He was a good kid. Basketball took over, eventually. He looked up to local players, especially Charles Barkley, whose number Mike shaved into his head. But after a couple years playing in high school, basketball started to fade and was replaced by theater and drama. Looking back, he calls it a “hard turn,” but we both recognize the plasticity of that age—the teen years. In his drama classes, Mike gravitated toward writing. He played guitar and wrote songs. He wrote a play for his school. All that young talent and creativity led to Mike and his friends making movies. He was also in bands playing mostly folk music. With all this going on, he met his first girlfriend. They dated briefly, didn't talk for 20 years years, and today are married. But we'll get to that later. Mike graduated from high school and went to New York City for college pretty much right away. He had visited NYC once before and liked it. He got into film school there, beginning a journey that lasted until three years ago or so. And so, for nearly 20 years, Mike Irish existed as a filmmaker in New York City. The school and his place were both in Manhattan. When he first arrived, he knew one guy from a band they'd both been in, and Mike was grateful for that. But of course they didn't become close in their new hometown, as they attended different schools and made new friends. Mike made student films, and kept going after he graduated. To survive and pay rent, he started bartending, something that, later in life, would prove crucial to where he is today. I ask him to name-drop some of the bars in New York where he worked. He rattles off several, then summarizes by saying he worked at possibly 50 different sports in NYC. We talk about the films he made over that almost two-decade span. Some won awards, both domestically and internationally. The most highly acclaimed of his movies was The Life of Significant Soil, which Mike says he's seen being played on airplanes. Another movie, Permanent Collection, premiered in San Francisco at the Roxie. Mike came out here for that and stayed for a week. That was February 2020, weeks before COVID shut The City and the world down. Going back to his first girlfriend, whom Mike had met in high school, she already lived in San Francisco. They had lost touch over the years. But she noticed his name on a movie showing at The Roxie and came out to the premiere. A reconnection was made, but Mike returned home to New York after that week. Still, the two kept in touch. Once it was possible, one would fly out to be with the other, either in New York or here in San Francisco. That eventually gave way to Mike's decision to move to The City. Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of our episode about Mike Irish. We recorded this podcast at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in the Mission in April 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

The Expert from 1995 stars Jeff Speakman, and that should sell this movie to you on its own... but it also has a James Brolin and Jim "Ernest" Varney! Ever wonder what would happen if you did an action film and add scenes from a horror film in an absolutely unbalanced plot? Wonder no more!!DISCLAIMER: Language and Spoilers!!THE EXPERTdir. Rick Avery; William Lustigstarring: Jeff Speakman; James Brolin; Jim Varney

If you're a fan of '90s music and want to unearth hidden gems from the Grunge era, check out this podcast episode. Celebrate the end of the segment 25 Years Ago in The Nineties by exploring a list of fake one-hit wonders. These would be songs that people mistakenly think musicians only had one mainstream popular hit but had more and continued to produce more hit music  

Matt and Daryl team up with Nicolas Cage (and Willem Dafoe) expert Darryl Edge to tackle one of the greatest action flicks of the Nineties, John Woo's Face/ Off. Darryl is the host of the Cage Rage podcast, and co-host of the Getting Dafoe You podcast. These are available via all good podcatchers, and they are a thorough recommend from Team Dano! You can find all season artwork designs (from the ridiculously talented Stephen Trumble) on our Teepublic store. We also have our old intro themes and interludes over on Bandcamp. The intro theme was performed by Daryl Bär. Please drop us a Five Star Review us at Apple Podcasts, or a Five Star Rating on Spotify. Find us on Twitter and Instagram (@ispauldanook), and drop us an email at ispauldanook@gmail.com 

A trip from Louisville to South Carolina is on tap for the April 2025 New Music Train. That means Adam Coop and Harris King and great new music picks. Adam discusses a new live album from Nineties favorites Soul Coughing, while Harris goes for new songs from Girl and Girl and Florist.  Rockin' the Suburbs on Apple Podcasts/iTunes or other podcast platforms, including audioBoom, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon, iHeart,Stitcher and TuneIn. Or listen at SuburbsPod.com. Please rate/review the show on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. Visit our website at SuburbsPod.com Email Jim & Patrick at rock@suburbspod.com Follow us on the Threads, Facebook or Instagram @suburbspod If you're glad or sad or high, call the Suburban Party Line — 612-440-1984. Theme music: "Ascension," originally by Quartjar, next covered by Frank Muffin and now re-done in a high-voltage version by Quartjar again!  Visit quartjar.bandcamp.com and frankmuffin.bandcamp.com.

Tune in as Eric Miller sits down with Chad Gentry from Nineties Worship Night to uncover the heart behind a bold calling—making a documentary film series about the worship leaders and songwriters who shaped the '90s. Discover the untold stories, divine prompting, and the passion to bring these voices to life. It's not just nostalgia; it's the journey behind the songs that moved a generation. Don't miss it!   Watch Chad Gentry's first docuseries episode Revival Fire Fall on YouTube. To find out more about Nineties Worship Night, visit their website.    Click here to go to the official Revival Cry YouTube channel. To see the Revival Cry podcast on another streaming service, click here.   Listen to Revival Cry on Mango Radio every:  ⏵ Thursday evenings | 6:30pm — 7:00pm PHT ⏵ Saturday mornings | 6:30am — 7:00am PHT available at: ⏵ 102.7 FM (Davao)  ⏵ 91.5 FM (Zamboanga)  ⏵ or listen online via TuneIn   To support Revival Cry or find out more information, go to revivalcry.org Email us at info@revivalcry.org  Follow @RevivalCryInternational on Facebook and Instagram.   Purchase Eric's 30-Day Devotional Books:  ⏵ “How to Become a Burning Bush”, available in English and Italian ⏵ “Hearing God through His Creation”, available in English, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese

In this episode, we continue our Year of the Nineties picks for the month of May, with the 1994 drama from writer and director Atom Egoyan; "Exotica", starring Bruce Greenwood, Elias Koteas and Mia Kirshner! Listen now!

Will and Matt had SO much fun covering the first and last of the franchise, they decided to go back and visit the second! The 3 Ninjas are at it again... except... well... it's only one of the kids who returned to his role, but hey, Victor Wong is still in it! This time the ninjas decided to mix their antics with baseball and a trip to Japan... and potentially smuggling people? DISCLAIMER: Language and Spoilers!!3 NINJAS KICK BACKdir. Charles T. Kanganisstarring: Max Elliott Slade; Sean Fox; Evan Bonifant

Gina Davis and Matthew Modine in a pirate movie by Renny Harlin? What could possibly go wrong? Well... everything... Will and Matt review a film that tanked a studio!DISCLAIMER: Language and Spoilers!CUTTHROAT ISLANDdir. Renny Harlinstarring: Gina Davis; Matthew Modine; Frank Langella

In this episode, we kick off our Year of the Nineties selections for May with the 1991 dark comedy from director Terry Gilliam, "The Fisher King", starring Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams and Mercedes Ruehl! Listen now!

Who are the other singing drummers? Has Usher had a Cheryl Baker moment? Were Doop the Wagner of the Nineties? Can we shoehorn in a gratuitous Star Wars reference? And what's the current state of the Master Scoreboard? All will be revealed in our latest results bulletin! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, it's time once again for our monthly Roundup segment where we go around the room and discuss the other movies we watched in the month of April! This month included "Sinners" (2025), "Presence" (2025), "We Live in Time" (2024), "Heretic" (2024), "Jojo Rabbit" (2019), "Hot Fuzz" (2007), "Pather Panchali" (1955) and more! We also reveal our Year of the Nineties selections for May. Listen now!

Direct-to-video. Erotic thriller. Nineties vampires. Wings Hauser. These are just a few phrases we could use to describe Pale Blood, V. V. Dachin Hsu and Michael W. Leighton's underground vampire movie. Some of these descriptions — or maybe even all of them — would be enough to get the average horror fan to add Pale Blood to their watchlist. But is there more to the movie than nineties nostalgia? That, and so much more, is the focus of this episode with film critic and The Scares That Shaped Us host Matthew Jackson.

The Goo Goo Dolls -- John Reznick and Robby Takac -- join Phil and David for Buffalo Wings and a spicy and funny conversation with Buffalo, New York's greatest gift to rock & roll. John and Robby share amazing stories of their long and sometimes bumpy musical journey from Polka to Punk to massive success as a rock band starting in the Nineties. For more on Goo Goo Dolls and their Summer Anthem Tour 2025, go to https://www.googoodolls.com. To learn more about building community through food and "Somebody Feed the People," visit the Philanthropy page at philrosenthalworld.com. 

Introducing the Band:Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are joined by Andrew Stuttaford. Andrew needs little introduction as the editor of NR's Capital Matters. Find him online right here at National Review or at @AStuttaford on Twitter/X.Andrew's Music Pick: Brian EnoHere he comes, the boy who tried to vanish to the future or the past. Yes, it's time for Political Beats to celebrate one of the most influential musicians in the history of modern recorded sound -- a man who, ironically enough, is at pains to characterize himself as a non-musician. Children of the Eighties and Nineties may primarily understand Brian Eno as the producer who took U2 to megastardom, but his work as a producer is properly only a footnote to his work as a songwriter and (most importantly of all) a conceptualist. Eno first achieved fame with Roxy Music as their "noise man," providing outrageous sounds alongside "treatments" -- electronic reprocessing -- of the rest of the group's instruments. But Roxy Music was ultimately pianist/vocalist Bryan Ferry's baby, and so Eno soon struck out on his own, for a solo career that would bring him into collaboration with some of the best and most innovative musicians of the Seventies as he put out a sequence of four "lyrical" albums which bent the definition of "popular music" well past its breaking point and into the avant-garde. At the same time, Eno was creating an entirely new genre of recorded sound: so-called "ambient" music, written and recorded in such a way as to (per his maxim) "reward your attention without demanding it."This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg in a career that also includes brilliant songwriting collaborations with Robert Fripp, David Bowie, and Talking Heads among others. All of this and much more are discussed on a episode Political Beats has been waiting to do for eight years: Brian Eno played an enormous role in inventing the sonic world we still live in, and also made some of the most unexpectedly profound and beautiful music while doing so. We are lucky to be joined by NR's own Andrew Stuttaford for this episode, who lends particular credibility to the discussion as a fan from all the way back in 1972, during the Roxy years. Enjoy stepping into another (green) world.

Michael Biehn from Terminator and Park Joong-hoon from Nowhere to Hide face off against the Yakuza and a mafia led by Bob Pinciotti of That 70's Show... I mean that just sounds like it can't be bad... right? Right?DISCLAIMER: Language and Spoiler!AMERICAN DRAGONS/DOUBLE EDGEdir. Ralph Hemeckerstarring: Michael Biehn; Park Joong-hoon; Don Stark

Did you think Script Apart was going to let the 30th anniversary of one of the most iconic teen films ever just pass us by? In the words of Cher Horowitz – “as if.” On today's episode, we're joined by Amy Heckerling, the writer-director who, three decades ago this summer, gave Jane Austen's Emma a Beverly Hills makeover to remember. You may also know her for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Look Who's Talking and Vamps, but Clueless is the film that she's best-known for – a Nineties treasure trove of high school hilarity that's still beloved today. So much so that a musical adaptation, also written by Amy, just opened in London's West End. In the conversation you're about to hear, Amy tells Al about the spirit of kindness that runs through the movie. We get into the TV pilot for Clueless – then titled No Worries – that was turned down across Hollywood, and discuss what was going on in Amy's life at the time of writing Clueless. The story of the film is one of a sunny optimist named Cher who's ready to take on the world. For Amy, though, that was hardly the case as she wrote the hit comedy. “I was feeling very depressed, which is how most stories start,” she teased in an interview in 2016. In this episode, she tells us why. Support for this episode comes from Final Draft.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we continue our Year of the Nineties with the controversial 1995 drama from director Paul Verhoeven, "Showgirls", starring Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan and Gina Gershon! Listen now!

Books are a bit like buses for author Abigail Johnson, who signed a two-book deal after taking a punt on a creative writing course during the pandemic. Fast forward a few years, and Abigail's debut novel The Secret Collector is out now. Jen catches up with Abigail to talk about loneliness, learning from our elders (and indeed youngers), and the best bug that never happened. The Secret Collector is available now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spin Doctors have their first album out in 12 years, Face Full of Cake — and it's quite good. Lead singer Chris Barron joins host Brian Hiatt to go deep on the band's Nineties triumphs and mistakes, why he doesn't envy Phish, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Case study: Amazing tales of a motorcycle-loving teen from Washington.I Was A Teenage Know Nothing is a teen tale about dating, motorcycles, car races and movies.However it is also full of tough lessons, tested emotions, patience and optimism.⇨ YOU WILL LEARN: * What this Nineties life story is about* How Ownbey started and finished this memoir* Tips for creating a first draft and beyond* Whether young or old, you can write a life story!⇨ FULL ARTICLEClick to read: https://foreveryoungautobiographies.com/i-was-a-teenage-know-nothing/ ⇨ VIDEO PODCASTClick to watch: https://youtu.be/VC-iDor_yAw ⇨ FREE GIFTYour Family Stories System: Easily capture your loved ones' memories for future generations. FREE sections, click to sign up: https://wp.me/P8NwjM-b5⇨ YOUR SAYWhat type of life story are you planning to create? Leave me a comment below or here https://www.foreveryoungautobiographies.com/contact/⇨ RELATED LINKSPublishing: The ultimate guide to publishing a life storyhttps://www.foreveryoungautobiographies.com/publishing/ Sit, Cinderella, Sit: A puppy love memoir by Lisa Cheekhttps://foreveryoungautobiographies.com/sit-cinderella-sit/   First draft: Don't start writing a first draft before reading this! https://www.foreveryoungautobiographies.com/first-draft/ How to write a good story: The flashback, parts of a story and reflective writinghttps://www.foreveryoungautobiographies.com/write-good-story/  Ask Nicola Q&A: How to take the headache out of high-resolution images https://www.foreveryoungautobiographies.com/high-resolution-images/  ♡ Thanks for listening! Please subscribe if you are new and share or review the show if you found it helpful!Happy writing!⇨ ABOUT MEG'day! I'm Nicola, the founder of Forever Young Autobiographies. I've been a daily print journalist for decades and know how to create life stories! Now I help others do the same to share with family and friends so that unique memories live on.⇨ WEBSITEhttps://www.foreveryoungautobiographies.com⇨ YOUTUBEhttps://www.youtube.com/c/ForeverYoungAutobiographies⇨ FACEBOOKhttps://www.facebook.com/foreveryoungautobiographies⇨ INSTAGRAMhttps://www.instagram.com/foreveryoungautobiographies/

From Ernest Dickerson, comes a new vision on a classic tale... but whereas the original lacked the legendary action star Ice-T... this updated retelling of The Most Dangerous Game is full of it... DISCLAIMER: LANGUAGE AND SPOILERS!!SURVIVING THE GAMEdir. Ernest Dickersonstarring: Ice-T; Rutger Hauer; Charles S. Dutton

durée : 00:57:37 - "My Old Flame" (Arthur Johnston / Sam Coslow) (1934) - par : Laurent Valero - "Chanson écrite pour le film de Leo McCarey "Belle of the Nineties". Le personnage principal, est une chanteuse incarnée par Mae West. Chanson écrite pour elle par le parolier Sam Conslow et c'est elle qui imposa Duke Ellington pour l'accompagner à l'image dans le rôle du pianiste." Laurent Valero

durée : 00:57:37 - "My Old Flame" (Arthur Johnston / Sam Coslow) (1934) - par : Laurent Valero - "Chanson écrite pour le film de Leo McCarey "Belle of the Nineties". Le personnage principal, est une chanteuse incarnée par Mae West. Chanson écrite pour elle par le parolier Sam Conslow et c'est elle qui imposa Duke Ellington pour l'accompagner à l'image dans le rôle du pianiste." Laurent Valero

Adam White and Dawfydd gather themselves to talk about 1990's best film, the Sci-Fi roller-coaster that is Total Recall!

On today's show we chat with Chad Gentry with Nineties Worship Night!Nineties Worship Night is a movement created by husband and wife worship leaders Chad and Karen Gentry. The Nineties Worship Night brand includes a Docuseries, Podcast, Music, Record Label, and Live Events.The Docuseries airs episode one on April 4th on YouTube!ninetiesworshipnight.com@ninetiesworshipnightchristianmusicguys.com@christianmusicguys

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 SF Heritage. 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 dad's mom was single and fell on hard times in Texas. She came to San Francisco, where she had a step-brother. Woody's parents met at the Donut Bowl at 10th Avenue and Geary Boulevard (where Boudin Bakery is today). Donut Bowl was a combination donut shop/hot dog joint. At the time the two met, his dad worked as a cook there and his mom was in high school. His mom and her friends went to nearby Washington High and would hang out at the donut shop after school. The next year or so, his parents had their first kid—Woody. They came from different sides of the track, as it were. Woody's mom's family wasn't crazy about her dating his working-class dad, who didn't finish high school. But once his mom became pregnant with Woody, everything changed. The couple had two more sons after Woody. One of his brothers played for the 49ers in the Nineties and lives in Oregon today. His other brother works with underserved high school kids in New Jersey, helping them get into college. Woody shares some impressions of his first 10 years or so of life by describing The City in the mid-Seventies. Yes, kids played in the streets and rode Muni to Candlestick Park and The Tenderloin to go bowling. It was also the era of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jonestown, and the Moscone/Milk murders. But for 10-year-old Woody, it was home. It felt safe, like a village. Because I'm a dork, I ask Woody to share his memories of when Star Wars came out. Obliging me, he goes on a sidebar about how the cinematic phenomenon came into his world in San Francisco. He did, in fact, see Star Wars in its first run at the Coronet. He attended Sacred Heart on Cathedral Hill when it was an all-boys high school. He grew up Catholic, although you didn't have to be to go to one of SF's three Catholic boys' high schools. Woody describes, in broad terms, the types of families that sent their boys to the three schools. Sacred Heart was generally for kids of working-class folks. After school, if they didn't take Muni back home to the Richmond District, Woody and his friends might head over to Fisherman's Wharf to play early era video games. Or, most likely, they'd head over to any number of high schools to talk to girls. Because parental supervision was lacking, let's say, Woody and his buddies also frequently went to several 18+ and 21+ spots. The I-Beam in the Haight, The Triangle in the Marina, The Pierce Street Annex, Enrico's in North Beach, Mabuhay Gardens. There, he saw bands like The Tubes and The Dead Kennedy's, although punk wasn't really his thing. Woody was more into jazz, RnB, and late-disco. We chat a little about café culture in San Francisco, something that didn't really exist until the Eighties. To this day, Woody still spends his Friday mornings at Simple Pleasures Cafe. And we end Part 1 with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley (one year) and the real reason he even bothered to try college. Check back next week for Part 2 with Woody LaBounty. And this Thursday, look for a bonus episode all about We Players and their upcoming production of Macbeth at Fort Point. We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Let's re-imagine the classic movie Die Hard, but instead of Bruce Willis we cast 1982 Playmate of the Year Shannon Tweed, and instead of Alan Rickman we cast Andrew Dice Clay... no, this isn't an April Fools joke... but it does feel like someone told us "Honey, we have Die Hard at home..." Join Will and Matt as they laboriously work through this disasterpiece of 90's cinema!DISCLAIMER: Language and Spoilers!!NO CONTESTdir. Paul Lynchstarring: Shannon Tweed; Andrew Dice Clay; Robert Davi

A new book, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, is full of fascinating unearthed stories about the most important festival of the 1990s. Authors Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour join host Brian Hiatt to break down some of the book's best moments: Eddie Vedder joining the freak show, Sinead O'Connor freaking out Courtney Love, Nine Inch Nails' equipment literally melting down onstage, and much more Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, we continue our Year of the Nineties with the 1991 indie romantic drama from director Mira Nair, "Mississippi Masala", starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury! Listen now!

Should Nick Ball have been thrown out of his fight with TJ Doheny after booting him in the leg? That question, alongside analysis of the fight, is in sharp focus this week.We also examine the £100,000 fine dished out to Chris Eubank Jnr and explain both why it was so high and where the money goes.And in This Week we go back to the Nineties and a Mike Tyson undercard that featured one of the most unappreciated technicians of them all - Mr Ricardo Lopez. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet Josiah Luis Alderete 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 City Lights Bookstore 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 of his coworkers at City Lights came up with the idea of doing poetry out the window onto Columbus Avenue. The first poet to read up there was Tongo Eisen-Martin. Josiah says that the reaction from passersby, the looks of joy on their faces, is one of his favorite memories from this time. Then we talk about Josiah's monthly Latinx reading series, Speaking Axolotl, which has been going strong for more than six years now. It started pre-pandemic in Oakland, pivoted to Zoom from early in the pandemic, and resumed in-person in the Mission once that was possible. But we're getting ahead of ourselves now. Josiah reminds us that he was evicted from his home in the Mission back during the first dotcom wave of the Nineties, and that he hadn't been able to move back until recently. Before getting the job at City Lights, he owned and ran a taco shop up in Marin for 20 years. He told himself toward the end of that long run that he never wanted to own a business again. But then he went into Alley Cat Books one day and was talking with that store's owner, Kate Razo. Josiah had been putting on events at Alley Cat for his friend for years, but now, Kate mentioned that she was considering selling the bookstore. To explain his reaction, Josiah begins to talk about how much the Mission means to him. Having given so much to him, his life and his poetry, Josiah felt he owed the neighborhood. He knew that if he didn't step up and take over the space as a book store, it would be prone to whatever trendy gentrifying business happened to move in. But he also knew that it would take a lot of work and a lot of money to do what he felt had to be done. And so he assembled a group of folks and they approached Kate Razo with an offer. That was in August. They opened Medicine for Nightmares a few months later, in November. He originally envisioned keeping his job at City Lights while helping to open the new store in the Mission. But the enormity of the task had other ideas. Some of those folks he'd gathered to do the work also fell off, which seems natural in hindsight. Nonetheless, defying odds and perhaps expectations, the new book store opened. Originally, after having gone through the Alley Cat book inventory and given much of that back to Kate, they opened “bare bones.” Around Day 2 or Day 3 of being open, Josiah realized that he couldn't be both there and City Lights. It was obvious that he needed to quit his job in North Beach, a tearful process he describes. We end Part 1 with Josiah taking listeners through the space that Medicine for Nightmares inherited from Alley Cat Books. Check back next week for Part 2 with Josiah Luis Alderete. We recorded this podcast at Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore and Gallery in February 2025. Photography by Mason J.

In this episode, we discuss our latest Year of the Nineties entry; the 1993 biopic "In the Name of the Father", starring Daniel Day Lewis, Peter Postlethwaite and Emma Thompson! Listen now!

The American economy is growing, and, in many ways, it's looking a lot like the 1990s. Upward trends in productivity growth and employment paired with downward trends in inflation are cause for optimism. The question is whether we will maintain this trajectory or be derailed by this emerging era of uncertainty.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Skanda Amarnath about trade policy, fiscal and monetary policy, AI advancement, demographic trends, and how all of this bodes for the US economy.Amarnath is the Executive Director of Employ America, a macroeconomic policy research and advocacy organization. He was previously vice president at MKP Capital Management, as well as an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.In This Episode* The boomy '90s (1:24)* Drivers of growth (7:24)* The boomy '20s? (11:38)* Full employment and the Fed (22:03)* Demographics in the data (25:37)* Policies for productivity (27:55)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. The boomy '90s (1:24)The '90s stand out as a high productivity growth, low inflation, high employment economy, especially if we look at the years 1996 to the year 2000.Pethokoukis: What got me really excited about all the great work that Employ America puts out was one particular report that I think came out late last year called “The Dream of the 90's is Alive in 2024,” and hopefully it's still alive in 2025. By '90s of course you mean the 1990s.Let me start off by asking you: What was so awesome about the 1990s that it is worth writing about a dream of its return?Amarnath: The 1990s — if you're a macroeconomist, at least — had pitch-perfect conditions. Employment was reasonably high, we achieved the highest levels of prime-age employment relative to the population. We had low and declining inflation, and that variable that we use to say, this is the driver of welfare over time, productivity outcomes, the amount of output we can spin up from finite inputs, was also growing at a very strong rate, and one that we haven't really seen replicated since or really in the decades before.The '90s stand out as a high productivity growth, low inflation, high employment economy, especially if we look at the years 1996 to the year 2000. We'd had high productivity maybe even afterwards . . . but that was also a period where a lot of that productivity was gained from the recession. When employment falls really quickly, productivity can go up for illusory reasons, but it's really that '90s sweet spot where everything was kind of moving in the right direction.Obviously, over the last several years, we've seen a lot of those different challenges flare up, whether it was employment during Covid, but then also inflation over the last few years. So . . . a model to build towards, in some ways.Some of us — not me, and I don't think you — remember the very boomy immediate post-war decades. Probably many more of us remember the go-go 1990s. One thing I always find interesting is how gloomy people were in those years right before the takeoff, which is a wonderful contrarian indicator that we had this period [when] we appeared to have won the Cold War but we had a nasty recession early in the decade, kind of a choppy recovery, and there was plenty of gloom that the days of fast growth were over. And just as we sort of reached the nadir in our attitudes, boy, things took off. So maybe that's a good omen for right nowIf we're a contrarian, and if the past can be present, maybe that is a positive indicator to consider. In some ways, it's a bit surprising how much you hear the talk about growth [being] stuck in a very low-growth environment. Over the last two years, we have seen above-trend real GDP growth, above-trend productivity growth. We're going to get some productivity data revisions tomorrow. Again, this measure of productivity is output per hour, so it's basically, to a first approximation, real GDP divided by hours worked. We've seen that the labor market has, largely speaking, held itself up over the last few years, and yet, at the same time, real output has accelerated.So that's at least something that suggests better things are possible. It's a sign that productivity can accelerate, and with the benefit of revisions tomorrow, we are likely to see at least . . . I'd say if you take a fair reading of the pre-pandemic trend on productivity growth, so five to 15 years, maybe you want to include the financial crisis and what happened before, maybe you don't, but you end up with something like 1.4 percent is what we were seeing. 1.4, maybe 1.45, that's a pretty generous view of pre-pandemic productivity growth.I would like to do better than that going forward.I would too. And since 2019 Q4, with the benefit of data revisions, until now, we're likely to see something like 1.9 percent — 50 basis points higher, 0.5 percent higher, we could ideally like to do even better than that. But it's 0.5 percent better over a five-year horizon in which whatever labor market weirdness spanned Covid, we've largely recovered from that. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that have changed between now and five years ago, but at least the data distortion issues should hopefully have been filtered out at this point. And yet, we probably are posting much better real output outcomes.So through a lot of this turbulence, through a lot of the dynamism that's kind of transpired over the last few years, especially in terms of business formation activity, there was a high labor turnover environment in '21 and '22. That churn has come down in more recent quarters, but we have seen better productivity outcomes.Now, can they sustain? There's a lot of things that probably go into that. There are some new potential risks and shocks on the horizon, but at least it tells you better things are possible in a way that if — I'm sure you've had these discussions throughout the previous decade, in the 2010s, when people made a lot of claims about why productivity growth was destined to be stuck, that we were either not innovating enough, or we were not able to capture that into GDP, or else there are just some secular reasons, and so I think it's an instructive moment. If people are actually looking at the data, the last two years, real output and productivity growth has been very impressive, objectively. And it's not just about, “Hey, we're reverting to the pre-pandemic trend and nothing more.” I think there are signs that this is something at least a little different from what an honest forecast pre-pandemic would've suggested.Drivers of growth (7:24)The three-legged stool is one where you want have a labor market that's strong, fixed investment that's growing (ideally faster than usual), and on the third leg it's the set of things that you can do to control really salient costs that everyone's paying.Let's talk about those signs, but first let's take a quick step back. When you look at what drove growth, and productivity growth, specifically, in the '90s, give me the factors that drove growth and then why those factors give us lessons for policymaking today.I think there are three drivers I can point to that are a little bit independent of each other.One is we had — I don't want to say a tight labor market, but especially a fully employed labor market is helpful in so far as, and we see this now over multiple episodes, especially when you're at high levels of prime-age employment, that's typically a point when there's a lot of human capital that's accumulated. People who have been employed for a while, they've been trained up, there's a little more returns to scale, they can scale revenue, they can scale output better. You don't need to add an additional worker to add additional unit of GDP.In the more tangible sense, it's that people are trained up, they have more tangible experience, productive experience. You're able to see output gains without necessarily having to add hours worked. We generally saw over the late ‘90s: Hours worked slowed down, but real GDP growth held up very well.The labor market wasn't contracting by any stretch, it was just, largely speaking, finding an equilibrium in which employment levels were high, job growth was solid if not always spectacular, but we were still seeing that real GDP growth could still be scaled up in a lot of ways. So there is a labor market dynamic to this.There is a fixed investment dynamic. Fixed investment growth is very strong in the late '90s. That was about information processing equipment, IT, software. We did telecommunications deregulation in 1996, which is meant to really expand and accelerate the rollout of things. That became the fiber boom. We saw a lot of construction that went into those sectors, and so we saw it really touch construction, we saw it touch equipment, and we also saw it effect intellectual property.An investment to prevent the millennium bug?There was probably a lot of overinvestment that also was born of some of that deregulation, but at least in terms of it adding to our welfare, making it easier for us to use the internet and the long-term benefits of that, a lot of that was built in the late '90s. You could probably point to some stuff in policy, obviously interacting with technology that was very favorable.The third thing I would say is also probably underrated is inflation fell over that whole period. While some of that inflation falling would've been some fortuitous dynamics, especially in the late '90s around food and energy prices falling, the Asian financial crisis, there were also things that were very important for creating space for the consumer to spend more. Things like HMOs. Healthcare inflation really fell throughout the '90s.Now, HMOs became more unpopular for a lot of reasons. These health management organizations were meant to control costs and did a pretty good job of it. This is something that Janet Yellen actually wrote about a long time ago, talking about the '90s and how the healthcare dynamic was very underrated. In the 2000s, healthcare inflation really picked up again and a lot of the cost-control measures in the private sector were less effective, but you could see evidence that that was also creating space in terms of price stability, the ability for the consumer to spend more on other types of goods and services. That also allows for both more demand to be available but also for it to be supplied.I think with all these stories there's a demand- and a supply-side aspect to them. I think you kind of need both for it to be successful. The three-legged stool is one where you want have a labor market that's strong, fixed investment that's growing (ideally faster than usual), and on the third leg it's the set of things that you can do to control really salient costs that everyone's paying. Like healthcare, obviously there's a lot of cost bloat, and thinking about ways to really curb expenditure without curbing quality or real consumption itself, but there's obviously a lot of room for reforms in that area.The boomy '20s? (11:38)Right now, you have still an increasing number of people who have had meaningful work experience over the last one, two, three, years. That human capital should accumulate and be more relevant for GDP growth going forward . . .So you've identified what, in your view, is a very successful mix of these very critical factors. So if you want to be bullish about the rest of this decade, which of those factors — maybe all of them — are at play right now? Or maybe none of them!Right now, the labor market is still holding up rather well. While we may not be seeing quite the level of labor market dynamism we saw earlier in this expansion, at the same time, that was also a period of great turbulence and high inflation. Right now, you have still an increasing number of people who have had meaningful work experience over the last one, two, three, years. That human capital should accumulate and be more relevant for GDP growth going forward, assuming we don't have a recession in the next year or two or whatever.If we do, I think it obviously would mean a lot of people are probably likely to not be as employed, and if that's the case, their marketable and productive skills may atrophy and depreciate. That's the risk there, but, all things considered, right now, non-farm payroll growth has been roughly speaking 160,000 per month. Employment rates adjusted for demographics are a little higher than they were before the pandemic. It's pretty historically high. That's not a bad outcome to start with and those initial conditions should hopefully bode well for the labor market's contribution to productivity growth.The challenge is in terms of real GDP growth. It's also a function of a lot of other factors: What are we going to see in terms of cost stability? I would generally say there's obviously a lot of turbulence right now, but what's going to happen to a lot of these key costs? On one hand, commodity prices should hopefully be stable, there's a lot of signs of, let's say, OPEC increasing production.On the other hand, we have also things about tariffs that are pretty significant threats on the table and I think you could also be equally concerned about how much this could matter. We've already had a bigger run-through of this with a lot of this supply chain turbulence, pandemic error stimulus, and how that stuff interacted. That was quite turbulent. Even if tariffs aren't quite as turbulent as that, it could still be something that detracted from productivity growth.We saw, actually, in the first two quarters of 2022 when inflation exploded, there were a compounding number of shocks on the supply side with the demand side that it did have a depressing effect on productivity in the short run. And so you can think if we see things on the cost side blow out, it will also restrict output. If you have to mark up the price of a lot of things to reflect different costs and risks, it's going to have some output-throttling effect, and a productivity-throttling effect. That's one side of things to be concerned about.And then the other side of it, in terms of fixed investment, I think there's a lot of reasons for optimism on fixed investment. If we just took the start of the year, there's clearly a lot of investment tied to the artificial intelligence boom: Data centers, all of the expenditures on software that should change, expenditures on hardware that should be upgraded, and there's a whole set of industrial infrastructure that's also tied to this where you should see capital deepening really emerge. You should see that there should be more room to scale up in capital formation relative to labor. You can probably point to some pockets of it right now, but it hadn't shown up in the GDP data yet. That was the optimistic case coming into this year and I think it's still there. The challenge is there's now other headwinds.The tariffs make me less optimistic. I really worry about the uncertainty freezing business investment and hiring, for that matter.I share your sentiment there. I think we learned in 2018 and -19, there were tariffs being implemented but on much smaller scale and scope, and even those had a pretty meaningful or identifiable impact on the manufacturing sector, leave aside even the other sectors that use manufactured inputs from imports or otherwise. So these are going to be likely headwinds if you're any kind of company that exports at any point in time to something across borders, you have to now incorporate higher costs, more uncertainty. We don't know how long this is supposed to stick. Are you supposed to assume this is going to be a transition period, as Treasury Secretary Bessent said, or is this something that is just like a little negotiation tactic, you get a win and then we move on?I don't think anyone's quite sure how this is supposed to play out and I worry both for the manufacturing sector itself because, contrary to the popular conception of it, we still export a lot of things. We still export, and the most competitive industries are exporting industries, and so that's a concern for whether you're a manufacturing construction machinery, you're Caterpillar, or if you're agricultural machinery and you're John Deere, you have to start to think about this stuff more and the risk that's attached to it. The hurdle rates to investment go up, not down.And on the other side of the ledger then we have, or at least in terms of the sectors that use manufactured inputs. Transformers are really important for building out the energy infrastructure if we're going to have load growth that's driven by AI or whatever else, we're kind of entering more uncertainty on that side as well, and not really clear what the full strategy is. It strikes me as going to be very challenging.And then on the monetary policy [side], and this is the difference, you had in the '90s a Federal Reserve which seems to have defeated the Great Inflation Monster of the 1970s while the Fed today is battling inflation.What do you make of that as far as setting the stage for a productivity boom, a Fed which is quite active and still quite concerned about that inflation surge and perhaps tariffs further playing into it going forward?I think the Fed's stuck in a hard spot here. If you think about a trade shock as likely being some mix of — well, it could be output throttling. Maybe the output throttling and the effects in the labor market are more outsized than the inflation effects? That was what we saw in 2018 and 19, but it's not a given that that's going to be the case this time. The scale of the threats are much bigger and much wider, and especially coming through a period now where there's higher inflation, maybe there's more willingness to raise prices in response to these shocks. So these things are a little different.The Fed has basically said, “We don't know exactly how this is going to play out and we're going to need to watch the data, keep an open mind, be pretty risk-averse about how we're going to adjust interest rate policy.” We've seen evidence of inflation expectations going up. That will not give the Fed a lot of confidence about cutting interest rates in the absence of other things getting worse. What the Fed's supposed to do in response to supply shock is almost a philosophical question because you obviously don't want to break things if there's really just a supply shock that is a one-off that you can see through, but if it starts to have longer term consequences, create bigger pain points in terms of inflation, it's just a tough spot.When I try to square the circle here — and this will be no surprise to the listeners — I can't help but thinking, boy, it would be really fantastic if all the most techno-optimist dreams about AI came true, and this is not just an important technology, but an unbelievably important technology that diffuses through the economy in record time. That would be a wonderful factor to add into that mix.If there are ways for that to be a bigger tailwind — and there could be, I wouldn't be too pessimistic about how that could filter through even the GDP data amidst a lot of these trade policy headwinds, we're expected to see a lot grand buildout of data centers, for example. There's an energy infrastructure layer to that.But even beyond the investment side, actually being used, improving total factor productivity. Super hard to predict, and no one wants to do a budget forecast under the assumption we're going to be doubling a productivity growth, but it would be nice to have.Sure would. I will say about one of the things on the inflation side, especially with the Fed, we've come through a period now where the Fed has kept restrictive interest rate policies, but only more recently have we seen a little bit more of that show up in financial markets, for example. So the stock market over the last two years has ran up quite a bit, historically, and only now we've seen some signs of maybe some pricing of risk and some of the issues around the Fed.Inflation data itself coming into this year, relative to the Fed's target on the Fed's gauges, it was right now about 2.6, 2.7 percent. Most of that reflects a lot of lags of the past, I would say. If you look through the details, you see a lot of it in how inflation is measured for housing rent. How inflation is measured for financial services really tracks the stock market, and then there's obviously some other idiosyncratic stuff around where they're using wages as the measure of prices in PCE, which is the Fed's inflation gauge. If you take that stuff out, we still have a little bit of inflation work to do in terms of getting inflation down, but it would sound pretty manageable. If I told you, actually, if you take away those lags, you probably get some only 2.2 percent, that seems like we're almost there.Let's take away a little more, then we get to two percent. We can just keep cutting things outAnd there would probably be conditions for a lot. But if we can give the benefit of the time and do no harm, there's probably a positive story to be told. The challenge is, we may not be doing no harm here. There may be new things that rear up, to your point. If you start just deducting stuff just because you think it lags, but you don't think about forward-looking risks, which there are, then you start to get into a more challenged view of how things improve on the inflation side.I think that's a big dilemma for the Fed, which is, they have to be forward-looking. They can't just say, well, this stuff is lagging, we can ignore it. That doesn't cash when you have forward-looking risks, but if we do see that maybe some of these trade policy risks go away, if there's a change of heart, a change of mind, I think you can possibly tell yourself a more positive story about how maybe interest rates can come down a bit more and financial conditions can be more supportive of investment over time. So I think that that is the optimistic case there.Full employment and the Fed (22:03)Taking people away from their job and then trying to just bring them back in several years later, don't expect the productivity dividends to be quite the same.For someone who cares about full employment, how would you rate the Fed's performance after the global financial crisis? Too tight?It was too tight and also it was an environment in which the Fed, at various points from 2010, maybe 2009, through to 2015, they were very eager to try and get interest rates up before the economy was giving their hard signal that it was time to raise interest rates. Inflation hadn't really reared its head, nor had we seen evidence of really strong labor markets. We were seeing a recovery that was very gentle, and slow, and maybe we were slowly getting out of it, but it was a slow grind. GDP growth was not particularly stellar over that period. That's pretty disappointing, right? We don't want do that again. Obviously, there are things like maybe fiscal policy could have been done differently, as well as monetary policy on some level, but I think the Fed was very eager to get off of zero to the point where they weren't looking at the data, just didn't like the fact they were at zero.Coming out of it, now it's like that recovery is a lot of wasted output. We lost a lot of output out of that. We lost a lot of employment out of that. It's kind of just a big economic waste. Obviously, this past recovery has been very different and Covid was a different type of shock relative to the global financial crisis.The thing that worries me is actually, when we start to look at the global financial crisis and we look at, say, even the recession from the dot com boom, or even the recession, to your point, in the early '90s, prime-age employment rates took a long time to recover and it's not ideal from a productivity perspective that you want to have people out of the labor force for long periods of time, people out of employment for an extended number of years —Also not good for social cohesion.The social fabric, yeah. There's a lot of stuff it's not great for. We don't want hysteresis of that kind. We don't want to have people who are, “Oh, because I lost my job, I'm not going to be able to get a new job in the foreseeable future.” A lot of skills, general intangible knowledge, that's kind of part of how people become more productive and how firms become more productive. You want that stuff to keep going on some level. That's also probably why even Covid was very turbulent. It's a lot of things that we kind of have in motion, we just switched it off and then switched it back on. Even that over a short horizon can be very disruptive. There was a reason, on some level, to do it, but it is also something to learn from: Taking people away from their job and then trying to just bring them back in several years later, don't expect the productivity dividends to be quite the same.So I look at those three recessions at least to say, if we're going to have slow recoveries out of those, it's going to cause problems. So it's a balance of Fed and fiscal policy, I'd say, because there are certain things — there was a 2001, -2, -3, there were attempts to lower taxes at the same time. That actually may have been the key catalyst, more so than the Fed cutting rates, but when you think about how the Fed is sometimes antsy to get off of low rates when the economy is depressed, that's not great. Right now the Fed has a very different set of trade-offs. Thankfully, on some level, for full employment especially, [we're] not in that world, we're now more trying to defend full employment, protect full employment, ideally not have a recession now, would be great.Demographics in the data (25:37)When you see how population growth has a twofold dynamic, we typically see in periods of high population growth are the periods also where you tend to see both strong investment but also inflation risk.I would love to avoid that. That's the last thing we need.I have two questions: One, how much do demographics, and there's been a lot of talk about falling fertility rates, is that something you think about much?I think demographics play a lot of tricks on the data itself. When you see how population growth has a twofold dynamic, we typically see in periods of high population growth are the periods also where you tend to see both strong investment but also inflation risk. Obviously, when you know that there's a bigger base of people who you can sell your goods and services to, you might be more inclined to go forward with a longer-dated investment with some confidence that there will be growth to validate it. On the other hand, it's also because there's more spending that's happening in the economy, that's higher growth, there might be more inflation risk.I think that those background conditions then filter in various ways. You can kind of see how Japan and Europe have, generally speaking, at least maybe prior to this pandemic-era episode of inflation, are seeing lower inflation rates, lower growth rates, though, too. So lower real growth, lower inflation, real per capita outcomes are always hard to square in terms of Japan's population is declining, but also Japan's real GDP, is it declining as much more or less? These things are very hard to identify going forward.I think it's going to just muddy a lot of different math as far as what counts as strong investment. We've gotten used to a world of non-farm payroll growth every month in the job report. If it's like 150,000 to 200,000, that's pretty solid and great. Do we need to change our expectations to it being a 100,000 is good enough because we're not actually expanding the working age population as much? Those things are going to have an effect on the macroeconomic data and how we evaluate it in real time. Even just this year, because for some people's assessments of what counts as strong payroll growth, there was a sense that payroll employment was strong in '23 and '24 because of immigration. I'm a little bit more skeptical than most of those claims, but if it's true, which I think it's still possibly true, that it's then the case right now if we do see less immigration, is that the breakeven, the place where what counts as healthy employment growth might be a lot lower because of it.Policies for productivity (27:55)Healthcare cost growth and managing it will be important both in terms of what people see in the budgetary outcomes, but also inflation outcomes.My last question for you, I'll give you a choice of what to answer. If you were to recommend a pro-productivity piece of public policy, either give me your favorite one or the least-obvious one that you would recommend.Right now, I'd say the things that worry the most in productivity, and it's on the table, is the trade policy. This stuff has adverse impacts on prices and investment, and it may have impacts on employment, too, over time, if they stick. We're talking about really high, sizable numbers here, in terms of what's threatened now. Maybe it's all bark and no bite, but I would say this is what's on the table right now. I don't know what else is on the table at the very moment, but I'd say that's a place where you have to wonder what's the merits of any of this stuff, and I think I'm not seeing it.I am more intellectually flexible than most about where sometimes some very specific, targeted, narrow trade barriers have a lot of sense in them, either because solving a particular externalities, over-capacity kind of problem that might exist. There are some intellectualized reasons you can offer if it's narrow and targeted. If you're doing stuff at a really broad-based level, the way it's currently being evaluated, then I have to ask, what are we doing here? I am not sure this is good for investment, and investment is also part of how we are able to unlock a lot of general corporate technologies, able to actually see total factor productivity growth and increase over time. So I worry about that. That's top of mind.Things that are kind of underrated that I think is really important over time, that'll probably be also important, both for people who are thinking about efficiency, thinking about where there's room for public policy to support productivity growth, I'd say healthcare is a really prominent place right now. Healthcare cost growth and managing it will be important both in terms of what people see in the budgetary outcomes, but also inflation outcomes. There's just a lot of expenditures there where there's not a lot of incentive for rationalization that needs to be brought. And there's a way to do it equitably. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there in terms of ways we can reform the healthcare system. Site neutral payments, being one easy example to point to.The federal government itself and private insurers, both of them, though, in terms of paying for healthcare, how they pay for healthcare and actually ensure cost control in that process, if we're able to do that well, I think the space for productivity is pretty underrated and could be quite sizable. That's also, I'd say, an underrated reason why the 2000s became far less productive. Healthcare services inflation, healthcare cost growth really exploded over that period, and we did not get a good handle on it, and we kind exited the '90s productivity boom phase. It was more obvious towards the latter half of the 2000s as a result.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were PromisedMicro ReadsFaster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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Send us a textCon Air - 1997Director - Simon WestWriter - Scott RosenbergMusic - Mark Mancina, Trevor RabinStars:Nicolas CageJohn CusackJohn MalkovichColm MeaneyVing RhamesDave ChapelleSteve BuscemiDanny Trejo

To get live links to the music we play and resources we offer, visit www.WOSPodcast.comThis show includes the following songs:Kim Gentry Meyer - This Isn't Heaven FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYNaomie Celeste - Thank You FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYSierrah Garcia - Where I'm Standing FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYNatalie Grace - You Stayed FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYTammie Lecque - Thank You Lord Reloaded FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYSharon Hock - Saved FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYDianne Forte - God Sees Your Heart FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYNineties Worship Night - Hungry FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYThonia - You Remain KDMusic x Gillian Brown - How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYRachael Mann - Control FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYNina Grace - Overcome FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYRichelle Heacock & Mike Roy - YET (Feat. Richelle Heacock) FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYHekla Goodman - yahweh FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYOge Stan - Emmanuel FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYFor Music Biz Resources Visit www.FEMusician.com and www.ProfitableMusician.comVisit our Sponsor Diane Forte at https://open.spotify.com/artist/6wArhqufGyqcm5K3mR6WhK?si=4bw6Ti0kSECuGSnePo1FNQVisit our Sponsor Profitable Musician Newsletter at profitablemusician.com/joinVisit our Sponsor Kick Bookkeeping at http://profitablemusician.com/kickVisit our Sponsor Track Stage at https://profitablemusician.com/trackstageVisit www.wosradio.com for more details and to submit music to our review board for consideration.Visit our resources for Indie Artists: https://www.wosradio.com/resourcesBecome more Profitable in just 3 minutes per day. http://profitablemusician.com/join

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

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