S3 Ep7 3rd Yr in Review, Sparkletack Interview Host Richard Miller

Listen to me fan girl Richard Miller, the host of Sparkletack. The original podcast on San Francisco history, 2006 - 2009. 

I modeled my podcast after Sparkletack so getting to interview him was a huge honor. 

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Transcript

Happy third anniversary, dear listeners. Three years of doing the Monkey Block podcast project. If you’ve been a listener for all three years, thank you for sticking around. If you’re a new listener, welcome aboard. 

In my, I think it was my first ‘year in review’, I mentioned I was inspired by a podcast I listened to a long time ago, Sparkletack, which ended in 2009. I never stopped thinking about it and I always hoped that he’d either come out of retirement or that someone would jump in and become the 2.0 of this endeavor, I knew there was a listenership for it. 

Honestly, truly, and without one moment of consideration, did I think it would be me. I never thought about doing my own podcast. Never to do one with my voice and my own thing. 

I started a new job just before the second shelter in place and HR asked every new employee what they would do if they could do anything, and money wasn’t an object. Just to say something, I said I’d do a podcast on San Francisco history. But, that thought was not there before answering the “Get to know your new coworker” questionnaire. 

But, something landed with me, in a strange way, after answering that question. “So why am I not doing a podcast? Why is it just a dream? And, that’s when and why I decided I would somewhat pick up where Sparkletack left off. Inspired by. Closely based on a true story. 

For this third year in review, I planned something different. I won’t lie, it was for my own selfish reasons, but also because I know a good portion of my listeners were also Sparkletack listeners. I gathered up the courage to reach out to Richard Miller, the host of Sparkletack to thank him all these years later for inspiring me to do a podcast in his honor. I did not think he would respond, so I was surprised when he did. 

A few weeks after my initial thank you for your podcast email, I asked if he’d be interested in doing an interview with me. He agreed!

I directly modeled my podcast off his style with the intro and the storytelling. Here’s my inspiration, my unaware mentor, whom I’m going to meet and interview for my podcast!

Okay, Girlina, you can do this. Don’t get nervous. You can do this. Don’t fangirl. No matter what, do not fangirl the man. 

Alas, I fangirled a few times and edited out my nervous giggles as best I could. And, after listening to the playback, I thought I accidentally sped up the soundtrack. But, no. It’s just me, talking fast, being nervous and starstruck. For the record, I completely enjoyed speaking with him. 

Without any more rambling, I happily and excitedly ask you, are you ready? Here we go! 

I’m willing to bet there are a portion of you that were Sparkletack listeners back in the day, that are now Monkey Block listeners. And, who I have today is Richard Miller the host of Sparletack!

Welcome, Richard.  Thank you so much, Girlina. Thanks for inviting me. I was just delighted to get that, to get that notice. 

So, for the listeners, after three years, I finally felt confident enough to reach out to Richard and let him know, “Hey, it was your podcast that inspired me to go on to create monkey block. My podcast is directly influenced by your format.” I started listening in 2008. You started in 2005, 2006?

Something like that. 

And then you ended in 2009.  

Yes. I'm actually on my long on hiatus website right now and looking at the dates. Yeah. It looks like the last episode, was in May of 2009. 

I never stopped thinking about your podcast. I still was really into San Francisco history and I'd meet other people and your podcast came up all these years later continued to come up. And it was always rattling in my head that I wish someone would do a 2.0. But it never occurred to me that I would do it. That, was never in my, my consciousness, 

In the last three years, there's been more than a few times where people have compared me to you. And it's such a compliment that I would be put into the same sentence. 

Uh, your, your show is terrific. I feel like that's a compliment to me.  

You don't very often get to speak to the person that influenced you to go on to do something. Usually this person is so out of reach that you'll never get the chance to meet them and tell them, thank you. You're the one who inspired me. So this is a big treat to speak to you today. 

Oh, wonderful.  

I, think I know the answer, but I'll ask you. How did you think the podcast experiment would go? Because back in 2006, that was early days.  

It was early days. And in fact, I was thinking about that this morning, sort of, preparing for this, for this interview and trying to remember what was going through my mind.

How did I think it was going to go? I did not think anyone was going to ever hear it. I really felt like, especially the first, let me just look at my website again here. I'm refamiliarizing myself with some of the stuff, I did the first, I don't know, dozen or so, maybe podcasts.

I really felt like I was just sending them out into the void. It was for my own amusement.  And just like, Oh, there's this, I have always been a lover of radio. Always. And that's, I mean, that's something that I would have going back in time. What, what would you do if you could do anything? It would be radio, but in the past, since radio is not really a thing anymore, podcasts are what radio is now.

So I just, I just thought I'd have to, I, heard about podcasts and I understood. Slowly, because what is pod? What does the word mean back in the mid two thousands it was a new thing. It was a mysterious, kind of a goofy sounding name. But when I realized that it was basically self-hosted radio, I thought I'm just going to try that.

And I think if you listen to the first few episodes, you can see that I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm talking about different subjects. Like San Francisco is a subject. Generally, I love living in San Francisco, even though I haven't lived there for a long time. I'm still.   smitten with the city. 

Um, so, it sort of felt like an obvious choice just to talk about it. So recording, learning about software, buying the toys and a microphone. And I felt like an old time radio guy, you know, and it was fun and it was for my own amusement. So I really didn't think it was going to go anywhere. It's the shorter answer to your question.

But you just start recording and you don't know if one person or 100 people are listening.  You said something interesting. And I found this to be true as well. I thought I knew what I wanted the personality of my podcast to be. But, in the first few episodes, I was still formulating that. And it sounds like you said the same thing that, the first few episodes you're trying to find your podcast personality. What do you want this podcast to be? What do you want the format to be. I cringe when I listen to my first few episodes.

I mean, just the experience of hearing your own voice recorded, if that's new to you is like, Oh, is that me? Help. 

I have to assume, you know, that in 2024 years later, your podcast is legendary that people still refer to your podcast when I mentioned that I have a podcast on early San Francisco history. Your name comes up. I hope that you know how legendary it is in the world of San Francisco history.

I don't know that. I mean, you're, you're telling me that. I'm hearing this and it's, it's sort of hard to take in. So I don't get it since it's, since it's been on hiatus for so long. I don't get much feedback. I think people find it on various, uh, you know, various services. Maybe they come to the website, which is kind of half broken at this point.

It's still up. Cause I want people to be able to hear the stuff, but, uh, people don't contact me through it. I think like, Oh, he stopped doing this. He's probably doing whatever the heck he's doing. And so, I really don't hear anything. So, getting the email from you was, was a wonderful, I don't know, Pat on the back. 

Oh, that's really nice to hear. Um, yeah, you are on Apple. They host your episodes. 

Okay, great. 

At least some of them. It sounds like you're not aware, but I'll tell you, were you surprised by the way and the attention that your podcast caught fire because you were getting accolades from like the San Francisco public library endorsed you. That's huge. 

Well, I, I didn't know about that either. I mean, this, yeah, this is, I feel very distanced from it now. I'm not hearing any of these things, but it's wonderful to hear. And my God, I shout out the history room and just about every episode. Once I discovered them was like, this is exactly what I need. And they're so nice and helpful. And there's so much here. Just incredible. 

I'm curious, since you were early days of podcasting, was there a way to track statistics? Could you see how many listens you had per episode back then? 

Uh, I could, but unreliably is what I was led to believe. It was more of an estimate than a, than an actual count. And I hope you don't ask me what the listenership was because I truly do not remember. I don't remember.  The way I measured engagement was, I ask at the end of every episode for, people to send me questions or, I came up with little ways to get people engaged.

And when I heard from people, that was the measure to me of success.  

Yeah, I was curious how that worked back then because there weren't the tools and the metrics that we have now and I jokingly say that, today, podcasting is such a saturated market that everyone and their yoga teacher has a podcast.

Right, it's a punchline almost. 

Yeah, I’m one amongst many podcasts that are out there, but what's so unique about yours is not just that it was done in the early days, is that people still refer to yours. 

That's fantastic.  

The listeners can't see the face he's making, but it's obvious he's having a hard time believing it. But I assure you, um, the times I've met my listeners or spoken to them, they say, you know, you really remind me of this other podcast, Sparkletack. And that's such a compliment.

I love it. I will say when I when I first listened to yours, the introduction that you recorded the audio introduction or sound effects or whatnot. It's, I can it feels to me as though it was inspired by mine. It doesn't sound like it but it has the same rhymes with it in a way. Does that make sense? 

Yeah.  

I was like, Oh, I love this. 

It was your intro, like the seagulls, pulled you into every episode. And I knew in my head that I wanted something similar to that, like a sound that was the same at the beginning of every, uh, episode. And that it would pull you in, in a way, and that you would know the beginning and the end of an episode just by the sounds. 

Right. Exactly. 

Those would your cues.

Yeah.  

You, I think like me, have no background in this. You just went for it. You just decided, I'm gonna do this and I'll figure it out along the way, what were some hard learned lessons? Like what were some things that.  You learned that, okay, that didn't work.  

Well, I think the biggest overall lesson that I've learned, and this is really after the fact, when I've gone back and listened to things and thought about some of the sources that I used and, and so on and so forth.

What I, what I learned in retrospect is that it's something that everybody knows now, but I was not a trained historian, and the internet was still sort of young in those days. It feels like, um,  that you can't necessarily trust sources, even if they were on the spot, even if they were there and alleged to be telling you the story of what happened, uh, history is rife with unreliable narrators.

Oh, Richard, you have no idea. 

Audience. If you could see the faces she's making right now, it is that of recognition.   

And this is why it takes me a month and a half to do one episode is because I have learned the hard way. One newspapers of the time were highly unreliable. There was not such a thing as fact checking. People were trying to sell newspapers. Even people's like diaries of the time, well, the person was there. Clearly they know what happened. Sometimes you're reading through people's biases. Whether it's, things that they bring to the table, their perception of the world, the way their prejudice, or even just their sheer misinterpretation of what actually happened.

Right.

Or just poor, recording like they get the name of the person so wrong. In my case, it only becomes harder because I'm talking about a time that's before 1849 when a lot of the sources were written in Spanish. And I'm at the mercy of the person who translated it way back when, um, and just there's just not a lot of material before 1849. 

But I think you're speaking to the same problem I'm having is that some things you need to make sure a second and a third source said the same thing so you're not saying a fun story, but… 

Right. And then that's really what I mean, especially in the early days, that's really what I was doing was telling stories, rather than, I think I characterized myself as an amateur historian, but I don't I think that's even really going too far. I think especially in the early episodes what I was doing was. looking around San Francisco for interesting historical stories, finding what I could, and then just here's what I found. Let me tell you guys about it, uh, without much analysis, really focusing more on the good story, just like they did back in the day.

So yeah, discovering the library's history room and running into specific like, Oh shit, this, this book that I depended on exclusively for this story is this guy, I think made most of this up. 

One of my favorite books about early San Francisco really turns out to be essentially a collection of exaggerations and tall tales based on kernels of truth. I still love it, but you cannot trust it at all. Herbert Asbury's “Tales of the Barbary Coast”.  

I have that book on my nightstand. And, I've just flipped through it once or twice, and know that's not how that was. It's a fun story, but that's not what happened. 

Right. It's sensationalized to the nth degree. And it's very entertaining, but, yeah.

And I'm up against that quite a bit when I meet people in person. When maybe they don't know I have a podcast and they'll tell me a fun story. And I'm always caught between, do I just continue on like agreeing with the fun story that we both know? Or do I say, yeah, but that's not how that happens. Stories are fun. That's what they are. You know? 

Yeah, exactly. And you don't want to bring them down. This is, we're just having fun. This isn't serious. 

Right. 

Maybe they might like to know the real story. I don't know. 

Yeah. How deep do you want to go? 

Yeah. I've run into that myself.  

How long did it take you to put together an episode from start to finish. I mean, you were doing these weekly. So that is…

I was, yeah, exactly. Um, well, I don't know if you've noticed this phenomenon, but there's a, they get longer and longer as time goes by. As I start to realize that I need to do more research and understand the context and multiple sources and so on and so forth. So it started really taking a long, taking a long time. I would say it would take me 20 hours an episode by the end cause I, wrote scripts and I didn't do interviews. It was all just me talking.  Um, so in between the writing, recording, carefully editing out all the little pops and hisses and you know, the fire truck going by and the dogs barking in the distance, all of that little stuff. Yeah, I would say it was a, it's a part time job.  

That's about like 20 hours at the minimum, um, up to 40 hours for one episode, for me. There is no way I'm going to do hour long episodes. That is too much work.  

Exactly. I think the last one that I did that was that long was about, um, Alma Spreckles.  That was so long. I wish I had kept track. It would be amazing to know how many hours I put into that. But, following that episode, I realized I started on an episode after that I just can't do it. I can't do it. There aren't enough hours in the week, you know, to do an episode per week. So I have to do something different. And I don't know if this is picked up on Apple podcasts or whatever, but at a certain point I switched from the San Francisco stories to doing a kind of time capsule. 

Go to a, you know, on this date in history, go to the newspapers and hear some interesting stories. That made it possible to maintain the podcast, come up with an almost random assortment of interesting historical tidbits, and not have it consume my entire life. 

Yeah. That's a tough call.  This is just a labor of love. This is something you're doing for fun. And back then there wasn't the opportunity to monetize. 

Yeah, exactly. 

You're not going to retire early having a podcast. That's for sure. Were you able to monetize at all? 

Um, I, uh, I did. I did. What was, uh, you know, what was common in the day, uh, where we used to tie onions to our belts is I had a tip jar. And occasionally people would toss in, you know, five bucks, 10 bucks. I'd say over the entire run of the podcast, I probably took in a couple of hundred dollars. 

Okay. That's pretty good. 

Which is, nice. I mean, it's really not, I think at that level of money, what we're talking about isn't so much financial compensation as physical expression of appreciation. So, you know, it's meaningful when somebody gives you a, I love this so much that I'm giving you a complete stranger, you know, 5 bill out of my pocket digitally, that has more meaning than, what the 5 is worth. 

Agreed. The person that goes through the trouble of intentionally finding you to give you some token of their appreciation is what makes it meaningful. 

I'm going to ask you a question that you have been asked many times before, but I'm going to ask it here on this podcast on this episode.

Public record. Here we go.

So, I am aware sparkletack is a made up word. Was it already in your vocabulary when you decided this would be the name for your podcast? Or how did you come up with sparkletack?  

Even back in the old timey days of the early two thousands, it was difficult to come up with short domain names. That was important to me. I have the idea. I want to do a podcast. Uh, I don't know what it's going to be about yet, but I had that feeling of I got to get a domain name before they're all gone. You know, it almost felt like a gold rush. You know, to get something good, and I realized all of the names that I came up with that just sounded good to me. Uh, and what I mean by sounded good, is a nice sounding word that could really mean anything, because I don't know what I'm doing yet. 

So, everything I came up with was registered already, and I realized I had to make something up. So, I just started. I don't know what the specific, uh, inspiration was, but, uh, the short version is that I combined two words that sounded good to me, that evoked something in my mind.

Sparkle. I've always been attracted to sparkly things, like a crow. Uh, tack. It just has a nice punchy sound. The word just wraps up very tightly. Sparkletack in the 2K. It just sounds good to me. I wish I had a deeper story, but it just sounded nice. 

It works and it's memorable and I think that's the important part about it, is it's memorable. 

Yeah. And it's, and it's short.

I'm glad I by accident followed something very similar. 

Well, monkey block is great. I mean, even if nobody knows what the reference is. It, has, it works in a similar, it does work in a similar way, doesn't it? The two Ks. Yeah. That's, that's nice.  It's easy for me to remember.  

Right. I wanted something that if you knew what monkey block was, the name would catch your eye. 

Absolutely. 

And if you didn't, it was still kind of a fun combination of words. 

Yeah. It sounds good. It's interesting. And it, it evokes that, wait, what, what is that? Maybe I'll just click on it to see what it is. 

This is going way back in your memory. But was there any constructive criticism that helped you or on the opposite of that just didn't help you with your podcast?

Um, I did get complaints about the music in the background that I used was too loud or distracting in some episodes, especially when I'm again in the early days when I was experimenting with mixing and. Again, no audio training, I'm sure like yourself and I'm just, does this work? How does this sound? What is compression? How do I, you know, trying these different things. So criticism about that, I took to heart and dialed those way back on the background sound. I do like still the idea of a little, because of the way I told the story, I think a little mood setting something in the background is nice, but I ended up pulling way back on that after I got the criticism and re listened to some of those episodes.

That's something I have to be aware of, that my sound effects are great if they aren't overpowering and you can hear my voice, but on the opposite side of that, if it's so low and you're in your car listening to an episode. 

Right? 

You're not going to be able to hear what I just paid 15 dollars for that sound effect. You're not going to be able to catch that sound of a foghorn or a horse galloping. 

Right, exactly. 

And I paid for that. I want people to hear it. 

Yep.  Get your money's worth.  

I'm so flattered that you've listened to some of my episodes. I'm putting you on the spot. Is there any advice you have for me as the person who walks in your shadow? 

Honestly? No, I really enjoy what you're doing. Um, the interviews that you've, uh, that you've, been able to snag, have been great. It's really fun to listen to you talk to someone who maybe is a quote unquote, actual expert in a subject. That's, it's very satisfying to hear that. 

I listened to the, uh, I can't remember the guy's name, but I listened to this morning, the interview that you did with the architectural historian about Juana Briones and finding where she lived. And I, I just loved that. In fact, listening to you talk about maps and trying to find locations.  Oh man, I can relate to that.

Yeah, walking around San Francisco going, where the, it should be, but that doesn't make sense. Am I in the right street walking around and around the same block and what he said about, 

I know this isn't what you asked me, but, the way he mentioned pattern recognition and the certain things you start to be able to see in cityscapes of like, Hey, that. You know, that's different than the other things, that's at an angle, that's at a different height. It's clear that all the other buildings are a different age than this building. There's a, there's a story there, that's from the before times. What is happening there? I just find that absolutely fascinating.

Um, but as far as advice to you, I have no advice for you. It's going great. 

Thank you. I really appreciate that. I honestly was not sure if sending you an email so many years after you stopped your podcast, if you even checked the email address. So, I was so thrilled when you returned my email. Do you get emails anymore from people?

I get a couple of emails a year, I would say at this point.  And I also, what's interesting is I get emails less from San Franciscans who live in San Francisco. It's almost exclusively from expats, like myself or people from, they tend to be from Europe who are visiting and want to have done some like, okay, I'm visiting San Francisco, this famous place. Let me go on the internet and see if there's anything I can find that will tell me about the place before I go there. And they find me that way.  

All these years later. I mean, that has to be a compliment. 

Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. I love it. 

The majority of my downloads are in San Francisco. But I do get people from other parts of the country. And I wonder if that's because I'm so history based, like I'm so in the weeds.  

That could be, yeah. You've, you've gone deeper than I have in many cases. So, that, that may be the case.  

That is a blessing and a curse all at the same time. Like, and I'm sure you found yourself raising the bar on your own episodes and what you wanted to achieve in the next one. And all of a sudden, this is going to take three people to be able to achieve this every single episode.

Exactly.  Yeah. That's that's, it was at that point where I, where I switched to the time capsule style as opposed to the single, you know, hour long episode just to make it achievable. 

So part of the reason I, mentioned earlier that I was attracted to podcasts because I'm a radio aficionado. So I love old time radio dramas and comedies and, noir detective serials and things like that. And there are a handful that are set in San Francisco. And one of my favorites is, one of the very rare female detectives, detective series, Candy Mattson. They're hilarious.

It's really funny, it almost feels ahead of its time. Uh, even though there's a bunch of horrendous cliches because of the time period it was, it feels like it, there's a sparkle to it that separates it from the, from the herd. And I have a, about two thirds written script for a podcast about that radio show that's never going to happen now. Uh, because I realized I just did not have the time to do what I needed to do. 

I'm sure you run into this phenomenon where you have what seems like a simple or easily achievable story to tell, and you realize I can't understand that until I understand this context, then you research that. And that opens up another door and you realize you have to step farther back, farther back. I mean, it's, it's almost as though you find yourself going all, all the way back to the creation of the earth, you know.  

Oh, you have no idea. I've run into these rabbit holes, and I have to pull myself out of them. Like, I just wanted to tell the story of when the United States flag got pulled up in La Plaza in Portsmouth Square. But first I have to understand this. And then I have to understand that. Where do I, where do I, truncate my story where do I …

You really have to understand it thoroughly yourself so that you can break it down for your listeners like you have to you have to know so much more than you actually tell in order for what you tell to make sense, right?

Amen. 

Or what you select.  

And I have all these halfway started, uh, research pages that aren't even scripts yet that, it just made it to the cutting room floor. Cause honestly, it was an interesting offshoot of the story I was trying to tell, but I can't really insert it without taking a weird turn that's not about the topic of the episode. 

Yeah.  

Oh, it's not just me. Thank goodness. 

Oh, no, I think it's, I assume it's built into anyone who's interested in the past and telling stories.  If you're interested in stories, you cannot go backwards without the stories just, as you say, rabbit holes spreading off in all directions.

Yeah, what parts relevant to tell and what's interesting, but not relevant or, I think this is the story I want to tell, but then I start researching it. I realized that's not the story. The story is this other thing over here. Well, there goes 15 hours of research. 

I'll, um, I want to be cognizant of your time because, you know you have this other full time job in life that is no longer inclusive of podcasting. What made you ultimately decide to stop?  And the other part of this question is, Is there any chance of you coming out of podcast retirement?  

I do think I'll answer the second part, first.

I do think about, uh, I'm still the interests that I have had are generally speaking, still the interests that I have in radio and recording and telling stories. in history. Um, since I don't live in San Francisco anymore it, it doesn't make sense for me to tell those kinds of stories because you really have to be there to investigate on the ground. 

It turns out when I moved out of San Francisco, Uh, partly because it just became too, I, was having to work too hard to pay the rent to enjoy the city that I was living in, so reluctantly and knowing that it was likely given housing prices and so on and so forth, that it was likely to be a one way trip out of town. And I ended up here in Portland, Oregon, which I love. 

Uh,  and I, recorded podcasts for a year or two after that kind of long distance, but it just wasn't the same. And the motivation wasn't the same. I mean, waking up, you know, the fog horn in the introduction to, the podcast, I added that in because when I went to sleep at night, I would lay in bed and I could hear that fog horn coming in the window. 

And it, those things, when you're physically connected with the place that there's really no substitute with that for that, I should say. Um, so doing it long distance just, it just stopped working like the I wanted to do it. I had built a thing and I wanted to keep to maintain that, but it turned out to maintain the passion I had to be breathing the fog. You know?

I asked for selfish reasons. Cause I was hoping you'd resurrect Sparkletack. 

If I, yeah, if I, if I come back to podcasting, it'll, it'll be a different subject. 

I thought about doing a Portland history podcast, but there are a few up here that are, that are pretty good. And, so that's being done, but it's also, it's just with apologies to Portland. It's just not as interesting as San Francisco. Nowhere is.  

Doesn't have all the layers. 

Exactly. That's it. The layers, the intersections of different kinds of history, different populations, um, especially, I mean, the way that, uh, San Francisco is such a transitory city, both in population and just the instability of the actual ground that it's on and the fog and the tides, there's just something constantly moving and shifting amorphous about it, uh, it's endlessly fascinating. So what subject could, live up to San Francisco? I haven't found it.

I'm trying to, trying to think about the right way to talk about this. It really, it isn't that I don't love Portland, you know, and if I live there, there are plenty of fascinating cities in this, in this country.  Chicago, New York, and New Orleans, so on. But I bonded with San Francisco in a way that I just haven't bonded with any other place. I felt something at all, but it felt like a cellular level. 

Um, and you really have to, to do something to  work on a project, uh, the kind that, that you and I both worked on that, that has to happen. It's like falling in love. I think.  

That's an amazing comparison, because honestly, it would be really easy to burn out and stop. But because you have such a passion because you're so in love with the topic. It keeps you going, even in those moments where you're saying, this is so hard. This is so much work. That it would have to be because you are in love because you are in love with the topic enamored. 

I think it shows when people are passionate about something versus going through the motions and being dedicated to one topic on a podcast. If you're not really dedicated and inspired by that topic, you can burn out very quickly. 

Yeah, absolutely. Yep.  

I did want to wrap up and say thank you so much for returning my emails, for agreeing to this, and as well as putting out your podcast and inspiring me. In my mind, I hope that 10 years after I make my last episode, I hope that I can remain in the world of San Francisco history, the way your podcast has, that is what I hope to aspire to in the future.

That's incredible. What a, what a beautiful aspiration. Do you have a, do you have a planned arc to this or are you just. As we were discussing a second ago is you're, you're just going to ride it as far as your passion takes you. 

Because I somehow chose to go chronologically in time, and I'm moving at a snail's pace. 

There's so much. You could mine it forever. 

I mean, we haven't even found gold yet. We're in 1847. I've been doing this for three years.  Um, for sure, I'm going to stop on the day the earthquake happened. But who knows, I'll keep doing this until I guess it's not fun anymore. I have to at least get to where gold was discovered. So I don't know, in another two years?

Okay. All right. Well, I, uh, I would selfishly hope that it's longer than that because I've really been enjoying it.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you and I appreciate your show and your work. 

Thank you so much. That's, that means a lot to have you say that to me. All right. Well, with that, I'll say goodbye. And, um, thank you so much for your time again, Richard. It's been a pleasure.

You're so welcome. You're so welcome.

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That just happened. That really just happened. I interviewed the inspiration for my podcast. The person who’s path I follow. I’m still digesting that this happened. I guess I did fangirl a little bit.

It was interesting watching him seamlessly move from interviewee mode, answering my questions, to storytelling. I found myself staring at the monitor, just watching and listened to him tell his story and I did that a few times, actually. 

Speaking of interviews, Richard doesn’t realize that snagging an interview with him, the inspiration for this podcast, and asking him questions I’ve had in my head for over fifteen years is the biggest interview I can get. 

And speaking of interviews, he had referenced my interview with architectural historian Jonathan Lammers whom I interviewed a few episodes ago. 

I didn’t think I’d get to three years with this project and I’m grateful for the experience this podcast has given me along the way and the people I’ve met. Today was truly a memorable moment for me and this podcast.

Id’ like to thank Richard again, for taking the time to meet with me. It was such a pleasure to finally meet him. I hope he knows in 2024, his podcast continues to have an impact.

If you want to interact with me and see what other listeners are saying, you can find me on facebook.com/monkeyblocksf. 

You can email me directly at monkeyblocksf@gmail.com. I enjoy hearing from my listeners. It’s encouraging to hear from you in the moments when this project gets hard.

If you enjoyed this episode, and this podcast, you can make a one-time donation or become a continuous contributor at buymeacoffee.com/monkeyblocksf where you can also find supplementary research for episodes and other fun items. 

Since the weather is improving I’m going to start scheduling walking tour dates so we can meet in person and take this show on the road and stroll around the old Yerba Buena neighborhood. 

And, one last thing. Sharing is caring, so please share this podcast with just one person you feel would enjoy the content.

Thank you for listening to my third year in review, dear listeners! That’s three years of saying, “Thank you for listening, this is Monkey Block. Retelling forgotten stories from San Francisco’s golden past”.