 Now, welcome back to Fake Tech. This is Community Matters, different kind of community today, though. The title of our show is You Are What You Eat. You've heard that before. At this time, it's You Are What You Eat, if you can find it. And it's about fruitarianism, which has defined the life of our guest here today, Rick Rocker. It's a study of how to live on indigenous foods, and we're going to discuss this with him because he has devoted a lot of time and energy and philosophical expression to this subject. Welcome to the show, Rick. Thanks very much for having me. So the first thing I want to know is your 1968 arrival on these shores, how you got here, and who you were at the time. And by the way, we have pictures, so we know what you looked like. That was actually a lot later than 1968. But I came here, and in 1968, I didn't know anybody who had ever been to Hawaii. And I was having dinner with some woman, and she described this whole scene and told me that I should go to Maui. And I asked her what Maui was, and she said, Maui's an island in Hawaii. And I said, well, my geography textbook had one dot, and it said Hawaii, and I didn't realize there were any other islands. And so she told me about Maui and had a friend there that I could stay with. And the next day, she took me to the airport. I walked up to the United Airlines counter, dropped my $100 bill on their desk. I was on my way to Honolulu, and the flight from Honolulu to Maui was a whopping five bucks. Wow. I'm sorry, I can't even remember that. But you were in an Ivy School. You were either a graduate or a dropout of an Ivy School, so you came with a certain kit bag. What was your orientation at the time that you should go to Maui? Well, I was eating raw foods, and Maui was a place that had a ton of fruit, and I had never had a fresh mango, a fresh papaya, any of these things. And I was fascinated to be able to have access to these foods. And so I went to this guy's house, then I could stay out in Ka, and I started just cruising around the island and eating fruit. It's a wide fruit. I mean, one isn't about fruit. It's been an important thread in your life about fruit. Wide fruit. Well, this is getting into another story. When I first came over here, I got arrested. And when I got arrested with this guy, who's become my lifelong best friend. And when we got arrested, we... That brings people together, doesn't it? You get arrested together. You make lifelong friends. And this was a time where there was no cell phones. So to be able to show up in court together, we decided we had to live together. Otherwise, we'd never make it to these court cases. So we ended up moving in together, and we were thrown in jail, and we were denied all our constitutional rights. And the American Civil Liberties Union read about it because I took it to the media, and they came over and they bailed us out of jail, and they fought our case to the Hawaiian Supreme Court, which took two years. And when we got out of jail, we had no money, and we couldn't leave the island. So we looked at each other and said, well, we got two choices here. We can either go figure out how to get these green pieces of paper that everybody loves so much, or we can figure out how to stop using them. And this was 1968. So what were you arrested for? We were arrested for a law called common nuisance, and the statute read that we had to commit an act that was against common decency and or common morality. And I don't think we ever did that, but the courts found us guilty. The circuit court found us guilty. The district court found us guilty. The Hawaiian Supreme Court found us guilty. And we appealed to the United States Supreme Court, and they said that it was too trivial. And I said that this was the first time I had agreed with the courts. And so this time we got out of jail, we decided, hey, we're not going to use money. And then we looked at each other and we said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to eat only what we can gather with our bare hands, eat in its unadulterated form the way we found it, unseasoned, uncooked, and uncombined, and enjoy it. That was the rule. And if you apply that axiom to nature, pretty much all you can eat is fruit. I mean, I literally sat on the side of the ocean for hours until I finally caught a fish with my bare hand. And I threw it in my mouth like a bare wood. Didn't taste very good. Interesting. But you need protein, don't you? I ate nothing but fruit for three and a half years. Well, it must be the most. You need some protein and fruit. Well, I don't know. You know, there's all these words, cows eat nothing but grass, you know, they get meat built on their bodies. I don't think you need to eat meat to become you know, healthy and alive. Okay, but it didn't stop there, did it? You were eating fruit for three and a half years, and then you made a trip for additional fruit, right? Can you talk about it? Well, we basically, you know, we did this trip for a prolonged period of time on the big island and then when the whole thing was over, we decided that we wanted to find a place where people still lived. And this is when I started eating cooked food. We wanted to find a place where people still lived in the real old style. And this was the first year that continental airlines flew a route called Air Micronesia, and they went to all these little small islands. And we ended up on an island called Panape, which was, to me, the most remarkable place I ever have been in my life. Was there a dot on the map for Panape? I don't know. When we got on the plane, we were the only white people on the plane, me, my wife and my little baby. And the rest of the plane was all islanders. And when the plane reached cruising altitude, the guy in front of us stood up, picked up our little white baby, and passed this kid down every row so that everybody in the entire plane could hold this little white child. And I looked at my wife and I said, Yeah, this is where I want to be. So yeah, that tells you a lot about the people. What are the people like? What were they like? And I guess to the extent you've followed them since that time, what are they like? Well, what are they like? I don't know because I haven't been there since 1972. What were they like was they were the most wonderful people I have ever met in my life. They were incredibly industrious. They had been conquered by the Japanese in 1914, and were freed by the Allies at the end of World War II in 1945. But when they were freed by the Allies, they sort of said to the Allies, Thanks. See you later. We have our trip together. We don't need you guys. And they went back to their traditional lifestyle. And that's when I bumped into these people. And they were 100% self sufficient and 100% food secure. And they were, they were brilliant people. And they knew how to live. They just knew how to live. And when I got there, I said to these people that I had been looking for a mentor all my life. And I had never found anyone that I wanted to let mentor be. And yet I could take all the men on this island and put them in a circle and spin a bottle. And whoever appointed to could be my mentor, because all of these men knew the same things. And they knew what I wanted to learn, which was how to live sustainably on the islands. So the fruits in Bonnipé are different than the fruits on Maui or the Big Island. What kind of fruits did you find there? Well, Bonnipé wasn't about fruits at all. Bonnipé was about carbohydrates. There were fruits on Bonnipé, but they were insignificant to the Bonnipéans. What, what they lived off of was carbohydrate rich starches, which were red fruits, taro, a plant called Uhi in Hawaiian, which is a canoe plant that is almost forgotten here, but it's the true yam, tapioca, sweet potato, banana, and then coconut. And between those plants and fish, they survived wonderfully. Oh, you're telling me that red fruit is not a fruit? I guess, I guess red fruit is a fruit. You know, I don't think of red fruit as a fruit, but I guess it's a fruit and grows on a tree. But it's... Ulu, Ulu, right? Ulu. But red fruit, Ulu, is not what nature gave to humans. What nature gave to humans was bread and nut, which is a breadfruit with seeds in it, like any other fruit that you could propagate by seeds. And in each of the cultures in the Pacific, some groovy farmer selectively bred the seeds out of seeded breadfruit until they created Ulu, breadfruit without a seed, an asexual plant that cannot be planted by seed and must be planted by taking the genetics from the tree and coercing it to grow. So tell me more about your interaction with the people there, what they taught you, what you taught them, maybe? I didn't think they're very... I taught them what not to be like. These people were brilliant. I mean, you know, these people were very simple. They had three different styles that related to eating. One, you could never eat alone. Two, you always had to share whatever you had with whoever was there. And three, you could never walk past somebody carrying food without offering them some. And if you apply these things to life, it makes for a very pleasant life. And these people were just... they were very pleasant people and they were very smart people in knowing how to take care of themselves and grow the foods and prepare the foods that they needed so they didn't need anything, any imports from anybody, and they were totally self-sufficient. So can we look at that picture again? Is that a picture taken in Panape? No, that was a picture taken from my middle son's first baby Luau. That was taken... he's 42 now, so that was taken 41 years ago. And you can't blow up on this picture, but if you could blow up on the picture, I'm sitting in front of all the foods that I have made movies about. And so I have been eating these foods since 1972, and I have been trying to encourage people to eat these foods because they grow here. And I see all these seminars and focus groups and all this stuff talking about sustainability and food security in Hawaii as if it's something that we have to figure out. Let's talk about that. But first I want to ask is the picture, is that the real you? Or is the real you joining us today on Zoom? They're both the real me. I still do this now. I'm dressed up for this interview, but I don't normally wear, you know, spiff street clothing. I live pretty simply and I still grow or gather a great percentage of what I eat. So this morning before I have a phone with you, I harvested a stalk of bananas on my property here. I have lots of fruit grown. Beautiful. So talk more about what you did when you came back from Panape and how you got to make films and write cookbooks and develop a real estate practice and a website that sells all kinds of stuff, but not not including sarans. I don't even know I have this website. So I'm gonna have to figure this out after the show. But basically, when I came back from Panape, I wanted to recreate everything I had learned from these people. And I wanted to grow these foods. And so I recreated. I got a peat. I got a kuleana in Hona now. And I planted basically all of the foods that I've made movies about, except breadfruit, because breadfruit doesn't grow at the elevation of where my farm was. And I grew breadfruit on another on a Bishop lease down on rock bottom road that was at a lower elevation. But I grew the traditional food plants and I tried to teach people as best I could how to grow these plants and how that they could be more self-sufficient while they were living here. And it's funny. It's like Hawaii realizes that we have a problem in that we don't have food security here. We have very little food growing in relationship to what we would really need if there was a disruption in the food chain. And so there's all this talk about food security and food sustainability. And it comes across as if, like I said, as if it's something that we have to figure out. We don't have to figure this out. This has been figured out on every island in the Pacific, including a viney free contact. All we have to do is look back and say, how did these people live? What did they eat? And if we just find what they ate and reproduce it, we'll have food security. And I don't think that sustainability is a supply side issue, which is the way all these focus groups act. They act as if there's not enough food growing here, which there isn't. But that's not the problem. Currently in Ponipae, 38% of the population has diabetes and 70% of the population is either overweight or obese. None of this existed when I was there in 72. And so what's happened is it's not like Ponipae doesn't have the food. Ponipae has all the food. People aren't eating it. This is not a supply side problem. This is a learn how to eat what grows problem. We've all been spoiled by Costco. And we think that we can have blueberries 12 months a year and strawberries 12 months a year. And we can have whatever we want whenever we want it. We can't. We can up until the supply chain breaks. But when it breaks, all hell will break loose. Yeah, reality is good. When you talk about we talk about everyone, when you talk about the people in Ponipae, talk about everyone, but it's hard to get everybody to do that. Because we're acculturated to foods that are not healthy. And you told me that something over 90% of our food is imported. And therefore, we've given up cultivating it ourselves. We used to be an agricultural state, but we're near that now. And I think it's hard to change the way people operate. And sometimes, you have to have a bad time to teach you an important lesson and think we're going to have a bad time to teach us that lesson. And you have this movie. I like it very much. The movie I looked at is very professional and it's very watchable and it's very educational. How can I find that movie on the web? Is it available? I made the movie with Cahilu Theater. And if you go to Cahilu.tv, it will take you to their website. And if you go to their search bar and you just type in Ulu, the other four episodes that I've made are already shot. They're all in post-production. And hopefully, we'll get them out there soon. Okay, and you wrote a cookbook. I'm writing a cookbook, but I basically copied the recipes that I learned in Panipay. None of this is my stuff. This is all copying. Am I going to enjoy the taste of it? Because my palate is kind of ruined by foods that are not so healthy. How am I going to react? It's funny. I sold real estate to wealthy people at a period of time in my life. And my closing gift to people was that I would cook dinner and I would cook a traditional meal. And the reason that I'm making these movies, a big part of it, is that a lot of people don't know how to harvest these foods. They don't know how to prepare these foods. And they don't know how to cook these foods. So they harvest them incorrectly, they prepare them incorrectly, and they cook them incorrectly, and they end up saying, Ulu doesn't taste good, or poi taste like wallpaper paste. There's all these little sentences that people have. I cook these things for people and they love them. And you have to learn how to cook these things, just like you have to learn how to cook anything. Before you cook them, you have to get them. And I wonder if that's covered, really. I mean, you've been putting out things that advocate for this, and it's hard to actually get traction on this kind of new model, of course, because people are used to the old model, and not enough to change overnight. Or have their children change or teach their children to change and all that. So the question is, how do I get these foods? Do I buy them in a safe way? Do I go to the farmers market for them? Should I put them in my backyard? Should I get together with some people in the neighborhood and form a co-op to grow them? Should I contact you to buy them? How do I get them? You get on all kinds of ways to get them. Probably the best way to buy them is at a farmer's market. They don't sell it in supermarkets very frequently, because it has a very short shelf life. You can find taro in supermarkets. You can find sweet potato in supermarkets. Sometimes you can find tapioca in sweet supermarkets. You can always find banana. And sometimes you can find ooty. But all of these plants grow here. They grow at different elevations and under different soil, climates and situations. But they all grow here. And one of the things that I would love to see is for our state to create community gardens. It's something that they have all over the mainland. One of the big problems in Hawaii is that people don't have access to land to grow food. And there is all kinds of governmental land that's not being used or that's being mowed into lawns over and over that could be turned into a community garden where people could start to plant these plants and start to have a relationship with the foods that they eat. So you made the movie, which I like to tell you. I liked it very much, but the cookbook is not on video. Wouldn't it be helpful to actually make a series of movies on exactly how you cook so that you can catch your hands on the breadfruit? You can make it tasty. That's one of the things I want to do. You know, right now I'm just learning how to do this. I wasn't born a filmmaker and it was the last thing I ever thought I would do. But this one particular plant, which I adore and which in Panape is called Kep. And in Panape, Kep is the most important food plant. And a man's status on the island is determined by how well he grows this one plant. And it's this, you know, are these plants like a chocolate mousse? No, they're not like a chocolate mousse. They're like mashed potatoes. They're like starches. These are simple plants. And Ouhi cooked in coconut milk, I call tropical mashed potatoes. Sort of tastes like mashed potatoes, but you don't need butter and you don't need Korean and you don't need anything. You just need Ouhi and coconuts. And the man who is the star of my Ouhi show, and who's a man named Lassie Sakona, who's just a wonderful man from Tonga, is getting old. And at some point he's going to stop growing these plants. So Rick, what about the notion of synthesizing? In other words, you take the red fruit and has its own taste, maybe not appealing to people whose tastes have been wasted on food that's not healthy. And you say, hey, I'm going to put a little chocolate in that. I'm going to put a little other food that may not be so healthy as red fruit. I'm going to mix it all up. So I'm going to wean them off their existing diet and move it into red fruit. And over time, maybe they'll appreciate red fruit a little more. What do you think? That's what, there's the Hawaii Ulu Co-op, the red fruit co-op that's on, we started on the Big Island and is now, I believe, on all the islands. And the managing director is an incredibly wonderful and dynamic woman named Donna Shapiro. And they have produced red fruit chocolate mousse, which is delicious, and red fruit hummus, which is also delicious. And Donna's major challenge is trying to figure out how to get this plant that has a very limited shelf life from the tree, from the farmer to the co-op, to production, and out to the consumer in a timely manner. And it's a difficult challenge. And she's created frozen products, and she's created these other products. And I'm sure there's more in the pipeline. Yeah, maybe that's the website I saw. These integrated ingredients. And so I want to talk about policy for a minute if you don't mind. So 92% of the food comes in. The other thing that's happening, and I'm sure you're very sensitive to this, is climate change. And you know, where you'd receive these storms and floods everywhere, everywhere. And for the best, 10 years at least. And we don't connect the one with the other. But in a way, we really better do that. Because we could have extreme weather, sea level rise, whatever, all kinds of, you know, disaster things that will ruin our economy, and more importantly, our food chain. And so we really have to do something. We have been talking about diversified agriculture since the plantations closed, because we have all this land and, you know, all these elements that we can use. But we haven't done it. And the efforts of the government to actually encourage and incentivize this have been weak. So the question is, where do we go from here on a macro basis? Not just the truck farms, you know, a handful of farm, not just the farmer's market, not just a website with exotic combinations. But but you know, feeding the people, making sure there's a backup food so they won't starve when the supply line is cut in an extreme storm or other disaster created by climate change. Well, you know, it's like we import 80 to 90% of our food, but we import 99.5% of our carbohydrates, which is basically white rice and white potatoes. That is what has to be replaced if we are ever to have any semblance of food security or food sustainability and white. And it's like I said, I look at all these shows, I watch this PBS show and it was talking about different things, and it was showing different farmers increasing their production of X, Y or Z. The reality is we're never going to be sustainable eating arugula. We're never going to be sustainable eating broccoli. Sustainability comes from carbohydrates. And the carbohydrates that I'm making these movies on are the ones that grow readily and easily in Hawaii. And after doing research in Panape and seeing that even though the people had these foods, they weren't eating them. This all has to start with education. Somehow we all have to humble ourselves and get off our egos that we as human beings can have whatever we want. It's not true. We can have what the INE provides us. That's true. And the INE is very gracious and very giving if we will just pay attention to her and listen. And these are the plants, these plants that I'm making these movies on. Ulu, Talo, Uhi, Kapioka, Uwala, Maya, Niu. This is what we'll say for Hawaii. And our government should be planting these plants instead of planting abstract trees wherever they have properties. You know, I watch the DHHL give out leases in South Kona. Why isn't there a breadfruit tree on every lease? Why isn't there a coconut tree on every lease? Why aren't we planting these foods that we need to sustain our lives? Why are we just going to wait for that catastrophe, that bad news, so that we can learn that we weren't prepared? It seems like now is the time that we should wake up and look around us and see the things that are going on in the world don't look very good. And all it's going to take is one chaotic incident and we're SOL. And I think that we should be planting Ulu by the groves and coconut by the groves to plant food on these arguments. Oh, DLR could, you know, write that into its leases. That wouldn't be a constitutional amendment. All it would be is a regulatory thing. Somebody could say, if you want this lease, you have to promise to put X percent of the land into production on breadfruit. For example, I wouldn't even let them do it. I would plant it and I would put a deed restriction that you couldn't cut it down. And I would get good varieties of breadfruit. And I'd study this and get it really right. Because without getting into it, there are lots of varieties of breadfruits. And I think that some are dramatically better than others. This raises an interesting question. You know, in Apollo, years ago, the university developed using what they call genetically modified crops to create a new kind of colo that was resistant to all diseases that affected colo. And they patented this as a plant pat, which you can get. And the Native Hawaiian community opposed that, said that colo should belong to everybody. And so the university actually surrendered its patent. It tried to transfer the patent to Native Hawaiian organizations and they said, we don't want any patent. We want you to, you know, make the patent disappear. And they did. And the problem then is that this particularly attractive aloe plant was now in the public domain. And, you know, it just, it wasn't protected, if you will, because for the lack of a patent. And so I worry about, and this happened with papaya too, you know, there was a guy actually on the big island. He was trained in Cornell. Then he came back and developed a GMO papaya, which saved the industry because they were suffering. And so if you go big, not breadfruit or any other plant, you have to worry about its natural enemies. You have to worry about, you know, finding a way to make the plant sustainable and not succumb to the natural enemies. So what can we do about that? If we're going to do large scale production of ulu and colo and other things, how do we protect the better variety? Well, it's funny. In Panape, they had so many ulu trees. I mean, I always say to people that the reason that people can't figure out what sustainability looks like is because they'd never seen it. If you haven't seen it, it's hard to imagine it because to be sustainable, you've got to have a lot of food. So in Panape, they had a zillion ulu trees and a zillion coconut trees. They had no diseases whatsoever. I think that you get into diseases like papaya that you're talking about the circular rot that the papayas got, which I think was caused by doing production papaya origins by putting too many papayas in one place. And I don't know the story on colo, but I'm guessing that it's got to do something to do with growing it, forcing it, pushing it, and the response to the plant is getting a disease. But I think there are ways, first off, there are smart farmers. And there are very good ways of using organic farming to deal with these issues. The issue that you're describing comes from people that are profit-oriented, and they're trying to do the least expensive inputs and the most expensive outputs. Sustainability is not about that. Sustainability is not about getting rich. Sustainability is about living wisely and living in harmony with the land on which your feet step and paying attention to the land and paying attention to the ocean. You know, I was involved in fishing years ago, and I fished opelo in a kulee. And when they fished a kulee, they would surround these huge schools of a kulee. And the Hawaiian kapu said, you had three days. You could harvest for three days. And on the day, the third day, you had to let all the fish go. Modern style, if you go, I went years ago, I went with a buddy on his boat up to Alaska, and we spent the night in a little cove and we pulled out in the morning. And there were so many salmon boats, ursine boats, that I looked at this guy and I said, it looks like they don't want to leave one fish in the ocean. They want to catch every single fish. You can't do that. It doesn't work. You have to pay attention to nature. She's very generous, but there comes a point where you've just asked too much. And then she rebels. And we don't want to be around when she rebels, because she is a very powerful, powerful woman. And when she rebels, we're in serious trouble. Yeah. Well, if they used to say, don't let mother nature, don't make mother nature manage you. So, and you know, to me, the big issue here is, and it's really a critical issue, what you're doing, what you're writing about, you wrote a kind of biography, autobiography too, which I saw. It's 160 pages or so, it's first person. It's all the things we've been talking about. So it's a matter of getting that out there, getting it published to the world, and getting your movies finished and out there published the world. And, you know, whatever websites and products and all that to enable people. But I just wonder, you know, what the progression is. So, okay, here you can do it in your backyard, like aquaponics. Some people used to do that. I'm not sure it's as popular today as it was before, to grow tilapia, whatnot. And you could have restaurants. And there were a couple of restaurants in Waikiki that used only natural, local, grown food. And I don't know if they still exist. But the selling point was that it was local, natural and so forth. Couldn't there be a restaurant? Couldn't there be a series of restaurants? We call them the rocker restaurants, what do you think? The rocker restaurants all over town. And they would not only have the products and food and the special taste, they would be trying to, you know, persuade people that this is a better life. And people would go, you know, they would come for miles around, they would come from the mainland and associate Hawaii with the kind of natural approach to mother nature. Is that in the cards for you? I mean, I can do the math and I know how old you are. What's the plan? No, my plan is, my goal in this is to be a teacher, is to show people how to do these things. You know, I would, I love to cook for people. And I cook for a lot of people. And I love making emu and I love doing traditional cooking. I just don't want it to be a job because then it would be a job. I want to get a job. I want to show people and I want to get people to appreciate these wonderful foods because they're wonderful and they taste delicious. And they're part of Hawaii. They are Hawaii. And before contact, this is what all the people eat here. So the people who come to your, your, your dinners, the people who taste your food, the people you get to help you in one way or another, the people you teach, are these people going to be able to carry on, you know, this whole notion? Are they going to, are they going to be a succession of some kind? No, this is like I said, this comes down to personal taste. This comes down to every individual looking into their heart and saying, how can I live a more appropriate life? How can I have a less footprint on this earth? How can I get from this earth what it wants to give to me? This, you know, I can teach this song blue in the face. It's not going to make people eat it unless they want to eat it. And, you know, going against rice is a pretty substantial competitor. And rice is really very popular in the city. You go to any, any safe way you see. Hawaii eats the high Hawaii per capita eats the highest amount of rice of any state in the union. And we four times the national average. Yeah, on the other hand, we don't produce rice at all, right? As far as that 92% of the food that comes here, and if the supply line is cut for any reason, no rice. And I'm not sure what happens. I was going to ask you that, you know, in, I was at the Christmas Carol, the story by Dickens talks about the ghost of Christmas future. And I like to ask our guests what what Christmas future looks like. If nobody buys into this, if your dream is forgotten, and nobody is doing local foods and local agriculture, diversified agriculture falls on his face, which I believe it is doing. And we don't have supply lines. What happens to us in terms of hunger, and in terms of being in a civil society community? What's the dark side of you? The dark side, I think it's very dark. I mean, I've read quotes from people who say civilization is three days old. You cut off the internet. I tell you, we are in such a precarious place right now. As far as I see it, we've all become dependent on all these things. The internet, which came out supposedly was going to make our lives easier, and was going to make all this stuff so much better. Now we're completely dependent on the internet. You unplug the internet for three days. People are going for guns. You know, that Bob Marley had a famous line, an hungry man is an angry man. The parent doesn't know what it's going to feed his child tomorrow. All bets are off. I think this is it. I'm going to say it. I think this is upon the government of the state of Hawaii to wake up and to take care of its people, us, the residents, as opposed to the tourists who come in here by the droves, and we've got to feed and do all these things for, fine, we're going to have tourism, whatever. But it's time to wake up and realize that we have no food and that we have to plant it. Instead of talking about planting it, we have to plant it in every place, in everywhere. Ponopans, when I lived there, every two inches of land, they threw a couple of collo plants in the ground. They threw a tapioca plant in the ground. Everywhere was food. Here, everywhere is lawns. Lawn or concrete or concrete. Yeah, you know, Rick, you know, this all, this all integrates for me. You talk about coming to Hawaii, coming to the Big Island, Maui, Big Island, and Ponopai, learning all these things. So embracing the planet, embracing the pure and simple connection with nature, embracing natural foods, and you are a statement of all of that. You've dedicated your life. You've been faithful to that all this time. You've been the piper of this kind of lifestyle. You've made, therefore, a tremendous contribution, but I don't think you're at the end of it. I think you have a long way to go before you, before you finish. And I want to say that I truly appreciate your input on these issues. And I hope you, I hope you achieve all that you want, and I would support you in all that you want. I worry, as you are, I'm going to also, I also feel that you're a new, may I say, a nutritious voice. Rick Rocker, a man who has been faithful to, you know, his origins and every day of his life to his lessons and his engagements and associations with so many people. It's really wonderful to talk to you, Rick. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jay. Thanks for having me on the show. Aloha. Aloha.