 Alright, so I'm with Ron Finley here and we've got an apricot from his gangster garden and... Now this pit right here, this is going in the suit. So I got a Ron Finley apricot pit in the suit. Everything's better now. So I got a question, Ron. Yes, sir. Was there ever a time when you first realized the power behind food? Or is it something you always knew? I didn't know because it was food. You know, even organic food wasn't organic. It was food back in the 1800s when I was a kid. And so it wasn't this distinction between commercial and organic. Okay. But I did know that the food got real bad. Especially in the 50s and 60s with a lot of the convenient food. The food was manufactured. It wasn't grown. Was that like kind of a gradual realization? Or was it kind of all at once you saw the disparity in the disruption? It was pretty gradual. Okay. And one of the things, and I stopped eating that stuff years and years ago, one of the things that really sent me off was I picked up tomatoes and they said maybe, and they all were the same. Every tomato looked identical in this pack. And it says maybe coated with shellac to preserve freshness. And it took me back to junior high school because I used to work in wood class. And there it was like put shellac on the wood to preserve it, to protect it, you know, from the rain and everything. And I'm like, I don't really need shellac on my tomatoes. And so that was like, that was like, okay. It's super obvious from your work that you see that we need to like radically change the system. We need massive change. It needs to be burned down to the ground and rise like the phoenix. We need a new system. It's not, it doesn't work for us. You know, yeah, well, it works perfectly. And that's what most people don't get, Rob. The system works like a well-oiled machine of dysfunction, but it works. Yeah. But just don't work for us. So for it to work for us is we have to change it because we see it and they're not going to change it. To me, gardens equal freedom every day. You know, people, oh, it's laborious. No, it's not. It's like, it's freedom because now you have the tools to change your whole life, literally, and to change your health and to help your neighbors because you can't eat all the food that you're growing. It's impossible. Yeah. That would be your new job is to eat all your food. Once you're growing, it just becomes abundant. So there's so many people out there who want to get started. Like, there's so many people that are learning about food sovereignty, food freedom, and wanting to burn the system to the ground. For people that want to get their community starting growing, do you have any, you know, thoughts of like, just some ways that people can get started with taking back the streets? Take back the streets. I mean, just like I did with the parkway. I got the law changed in LA where you can plant food on your parkway. When you've been to my parkway, what do I have? It's apricots, plums, pears, oranges, bananas, bananas, apples, blueberries, blackberries, growing right on the street. So just plant. Yeah. Just make sure your soil is not contaminated or, you know, or remediate your soil. Yeah. Plant sunflowers or something like that, which is also a beautification project for, you know, trees and just plant sunflowers. It pulls a lot of the toxins out of the ground. There's a lot of things that we can do to change our environment. And that's what we need to do because we see they're not going to do it, you know. And I think one, to me, it starts with our whole educated shins system having us live in the future. Everything you do, you don't go to school for right now. Everything we've been trained to do is for the future. We don't have the future. We have now. This is like, I tell people, I don't want to get on a spaceship and go to another planet. We have the opportunity to fix this one. Yeah. If we have the people in charge, wake their hell up and see that this affects you too. This affects your kids, your grandkids. Is this what you really want to leave them? Yeah. What are some of the plans that you would recommend as like some of the first easy plans for beginner people to start with? Any favorites? For kids, I think it's radish because it's a fast-growing plant. And they see, you get to show them the alchemy and the magic and the beauty of this planet where you take a seed that you can barely see, you put it in the ground, you know, a month or so, you have something that you could eat. I mean, that's magic. Yeah. I mean, and show them that that's value. Show them, teach them that you can't buy value. I don't care if you own that car or that house, it doesn't give you value. Yep. And then that's what I think we need to learn. But as far as plants, it depends on where you are. I mean, one of the things to me, why not grow bananas everywhere that you can grow them? Or make the conditions wherever you are where you can grow them. Yep. Because it's the healthiest health and they're beautiful and they provide shade. And they just keep on getting bigger and duplicating. Exactly. And I think more people need to know about the things that are happening in these cities around the world and around us and how people are taking back their power. And growing your own food is power, you know, and it's contagious. But I think the way we change it, right, we got to make it sexy. Yeah. How do we make this just as sexy as weed in alcohol and fast food, you know, and all these designer clothes? How do we make soil that sexy? Well, I'd say that this is pretty sexy. Yeah, I'd say you're in my office. And again, I feel like the really good news is that I think, you know, just since you really got involved in this, decade or so ago, it is a lot sexier now than it used to be. I feel like today, there's so many young people out there and older people who just think gardening is sexy. And that's why they want to do it. Yeah, it is. And I'm proud to have been a part of that, that it has spread around the world. And people say, oh, maybe I should. I think it was helped. I mean, with the pandemic where a lot of people were fighting over food and I think people woke up and so, damn, maybe I should be growing some of my own food because this could happen. You know, there's no food shortage. There's distribution problems. And some of those distribution problems are by design. And that's what people need to realize. All this bad food, all these cancers, it's by design. Yeah. Who benefits from it? Yeah, that's what, who benefits from us being sick? Like one of the main missions of the Ron Finley project is to transform food deserts into food oases and paradises. Do you see that? Like, do you feel hopeful about the decade ahead? I don't have hope. I don't do hope. I see opportunity. Yeah. And I always like to say, I'll take a cup of opportunity over a boatload of hope every day. Because what can you do with hope? Hope, something doesn't happen. No, give me the opportunity to make some shit happen. And people have it. It's called air. Okay, you're up and you're here and you're breathing. That's magic. So now, how do we get people to see the opportunities around them? People don't look at soil as an opportunity. How many people become billionaires? Trillionaires with soil. But we have a negative view on it, which works for them. That life comes out of it and life goes right back into it. The earth provides us with our needs. Until people be the forest. Not the forest, be the forest. What happens in a forest? Study, you know. Right on. Be the forest, my friends. And go plant some shit. I was hoping you'd say that.