Kevin Espiritu on Gardening, Gaining over 6 Million Followers, and Self-Discovery

Kevin, thank you so much for being here today. Really excited to be here. This one Likewise, man Likewise. So one thing that kind of cracks me up when I was thinking about this episode was how you've made your money and what you've really created, as your passion is gardening and creating content, and those are two very non-traditional ways to make money and to have a career. What do you think you'd be doing if you didn't do those things?

I think it depends on if I was down the traditional path or not. If I was down the traditional path and like didn't sort of have the realization that you didn't have to go that way, I would probably be an accountant right now, because that's what I came out of school with an accounting degree from UCSB and maybe would have realized it wasn't that fun, maybe not, maybe it would have been resigned to it. I have no idea. If this had not worked out man, it's hard to say I would imagine maybe like an e-com business or something in the realm of do not have to go into an office world, something like that. But it's really hard to predict.

Do you think you would have been still drawn to gardening eventually?

I would hope so. Yeah, just based on what it has given me for sure. But who knows, it could have been carpentry or cooking or baking, some sort of like skill set. That's ancient, I suppose I would have always landed on something like that.

Do you think it's in the watching things grow? I think it's in the like.

It's like this. It's a slower version of building like a universe, I suppose, compared to let's say I don't know, like scaling up a software company or something. It's like this slow shaping of the world, I guess, or your little pocket of it.

What's the most rewarding part of that?

To me it's like, if we're talking straight up gardening, it is watching your plan come to life over the course of seasons, and so you know, you'll plant some trees and orchard. You'll finally get the fruit of that. Or you have some idea? The citrus orchard that I planted, that I planted them really close together, like four feet apart, which you really normally wouldn't do that, but my idea was, well, I'll hedge them all as if they're one large, you know, 20 foot long plant, and that was two years ago and it's finally starting to actually look exactly like that. And so you're like, oh okay, I was right, and this actually plays out the way I wanted it to.

It's funny because it seems like it's kind of the same thing with content as well, like having this idea in your brain and then bringing it into reality.

It's almost the same thing, yeah, I think so, especially if you get into multiple platforms and how those platforms interplay with one another and how you might introduce new, new talent or new characters or new concepts, and how you can see the sort of effect of that cascade into the platforms you're building in general.

It's very interesting and when I was scrolling through your content, the thought popped into my head if you had no constraints financial, physical and you were to build the garden of your dreams, where are you building it and why?

Yeah, where is interesting? I mean, I've looked at Michigan a good amount.

Michigan. That surprises me.

Yeah, look at Michigan. I mean you have the freshwater source right and then you've got I think it's like 20% of all the freshwater on earth is in those lakes. Then you've got relatively protected climate from most major disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes and like all that stuff doesn't really happen. There are no earthquakes, the land's relatively affordable. So maybe there I'm not quite sure It'd be nice to do it somewhere here, but that would be quite expensive. And then what would I build? I think it would go far beyond a garden. You'd have like silva pasture where you're running animals through open fields. I'd get into some sort of forestry, get into building a lake. I once did a celebrities garden and we're out at her house and she had built a quarter acre lake. I was like, okay, you know, not quite at that level yet, but it'd be interesting to do. So I think I'd just get into ecosystem design almost.

It's such a fun world. It's a very interesting, cool world, and it seems like more and more people have this inkling to go back to that and to kind of live a life that's more aligned with nature. I even saw a company recently that was doing like homestead real estate developments, and it just seems like the more and more people have this desire to either live on a farm or live with a lot of animals. Have you thought about that at all, like why that would be?

I mean, my thinking is that the stuff that has made us happy and fulfilled across, you know, many millennia is basically the same, and the stuff that we've added via society, technology, it's supposed to enhance it, but at the point we're at, it seems to be also detracting from it at an equal or greater rate. And so I think you're getting this like return to natural lifestyles that people are sort of yearning for, like what has always made us happy. I guess that's the best theory I have, especially because we come more industrialized, more urban, that you're just completely removed from all of that and people just want to be more like that all of the time, but not sacrifice all the modern technology that we've developed.

Yeah, it's a cool balance that you've developed with modern technology but also returning back to nature in a way. It's a very cool thing to see. So I was curious with that. Obviously people have a lot of those ideas and they think that they want that life right, but the reality is probably much different than that when they actually do it From the other side of things. Are there some unforeseen benefits that those people don't realize in the enjoyment of that process?

Yeah, I mean, I think, the result, because everyone's trying to get the result right I want the eggs, or I want the produce, or the milk. If you have a cow or something like that, it's like sure, that's like the baseline result that you would get, thinking about it as an input output type of system. But if you think about it as like the things that surround your life, right, and those are ever present, and so if I walk outside, I always have a garden there, I always have chickens there, it's the daily experience. I think that's more rewarding. Of course, the table stakes that you're going to get the tomatoes, you're going to get the eggs, it's fine, and then you can share that with people as well. It's a more rich tapestry to life than it might otherwise be To me, compared to someone who's like I don't know, a pharmaceutical sales rep living in Miami in a high-rise condo, outsourcing every other aspect of their life besides income-maxing. That one job. To me, that's not how I would prefer to live, and it seems like a lot of people are going. Maybe I don't prefer to live that way either.

Yeah, and just having those skills right. I mean, I've been freaked out with AI a bit recently in all this whole world and it made me have the thought of just like I need to be able to fend for myself and to have that self-sustaining ability is crucial.

Yeah, my harsh take, I guess, is like I see these folks everywhere on Twitter or whatever, and they're like here's how I've outsourced everything. I have a trainer, then I have a meal delivered, then I have a cleaner, then I have this, and I employ some of those services as well, for sure. But if you have all that and you have no ability, no self-sufficient abilities, to me I think it's sort of a weak approach to life. I don't think it fosters like a deep sense of capability within oneself you know.

So when it comes to that outsourcing like in my mind, when I think about having this self-sustaining homestead and something that I'm trying to build later on I would love for it to happen in a way that wouldn't require so much effort on my end, selfishly. Is that possible? Is it easy to accomplish? I know it depends on where you are, but is there a way where you can do it where your outputs are far greater than your inputs?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, you'd have to not be like me, you'd have to just do it for the output right. And in that sense you might think about it more as like a farming system versus a gardening system. So you could say you know, I'm going to grow the highest calorie crops, only that are the easiest, so like I'm going to do beans and peas or something like that. You know, chickens are actually relatively low input, especially if you get them when they're older. If you raise them from baby chicks, it's pretty high input at the start, but if you get them when they're older they're called pullets and you put them in the coop. There's really not a whole lot to do to care for them and you'll get quite a bit of eggs every single day. So yeah, I think, if you go in with that framing, for sure you could do it.

Is it a pretty cool synergistic effect between those animals and the plants?

Yeah, yeah, my hens have now learned to fly out of the coop. I built this little outdoor section of the coop that I thought was tall enough and it's not, and so every morning I'll walk out and they're out there running through the garden. Most of the time there's enough insect population there that that's what they're eating. Sometimes they'll mess with the garden a little bit, but you're getting them cleaning up the insects. Of course they're converting that protein into an egg for you, but then they're droppings. They'll either leave in the coop or in the henhouse and you can clean that out, compost that through and cycle that back into the garden as fertilizer. And so that's why you get into these systems in like smaller farming operations, like backyard farms or regen agriculture, where you'll have chickens on tractors moving from plot to plot, or larger animals will run through those systems as well.

Would you ultimately like to get into some regenerative agriculture, like a bigger farm where you have more things?

Yeah, I think so. I think it'd be very interesting to get into something like that. I don't know if it would be, I'm farming for the living itself. I think it'd be interesting, at Epic, for example, to do a larger plot and have it run more like a regenerative system. But in our case that would of course be to teach and to make content about, maybe to show other people, instead of running it like as a profitable operation itself. Maybe it would be still, but that wouldn't be the explicit goal.

When you get those people who reach out to you and I'm sure you got a ton of DMs and all stuff like that of just people reaching out Are there some common questions that are good, questions that you see over and over again?

Yeah, I mean, it's really just like what can I grow in my area? Is is a really common one, I think. When you start out, you just have no idea what to plant, where, when, how, and so that's, by and large, that's the most common question. And then it would be the basics of like you know what kind of soil to use, how much water should I be doing? Where should I plant this thing? And then, once they have it planted, it'll be what pest is this, what disease is this, or what you know what's happening to this plant that doesn't look normal. So what's happening to it? It's that realm of questions that ends up coming through.

Very interesting, yeah, so there's not some like very generalized questions where you can give like a blanket answer. It's very individualized. That's the tough part, yeah.

Yeah, that I mean. That's the tough part. It's like, right now it's a great time for, let's say, me to start cabbage, right, and if I'm in San Diego, I don't have a winter it doesn't freeze in my area, maybe gets to like 45 degrees or so, which cabbage can easily withstand. And so for me, counter-intuitively, growing cabbage through the winter is the best time to grow it because it gets cold enough and it prevents the pests that destroy it. But if I told that to you know someone who lives in Michigan, that would be a terrible advice, right? And so everything's bespoke to the exact situation someone's living in. And when you're a beginner it's really difficult because you don't want to hear that like very personalized advice. You just want to hear, like plant this, put it here, do this. But you have to give them a little like preamble before that they can actually get going.

So what do you think some of that advice would be for yourself when you were just getting started, Like if you were to have a conversation with you right before you started this gardening and the content? What would that conversation look like? What would some of those pieces of wisdom that you would have given to your past self?

Yeah, I mean I would say, with gardening, I would have told myself to grow what I like to eat more instead of what's easy, because everyone would say, well, what's the easiest thing I can grow, just to get started, and if that doesn't also map to something that you enjoy eating, then it's kind of a waste, because you're just like. Radishes is a great example, super easy to grow. A lot of people don't like them, especially freshly grown, like they don't really know what to do with them, and so it's like, okay, cool, well, what was the point of growing it then? It might have been easy, but that's not super enjoyable. The end product for content, I think I would have said it's gonna take longer than you think to get the flywheel going. But and you should also probably hire help sooner than you did is what I would say there.

That whole world is. You know, it's something I'm starting to realize for myself with the content stuff, and I think the analogy holds true with gardening as well. As that, once you start and you get a little momentum and you start almost like running downhill and you're almost in too deep and you're on this roller coaster you can't really get off of. Does it feel like a trap sometimes, like with the garden and with all these responsibilities at home? With the content, do you feel like you can't allow yourself the time to travel or to just unplug and turn off?

Yeah, for a while it was like that. I mean, to some degree it still is, but it's getting better now that we have a much larger team to support. But for I would say I used to go on this vacation with my cousin every January. We do like a week somewhere, so we'd go to, like you know, barcelona, mexico City, all these different places, and then 2019 that stopped. I think that was the last year I did it because I started doing a product, so I started offering product at Epic and the YouTube channel was growing and the podcast was growing right. And from 2019 until 2022 summer, I don't think I went on a vacation in any reasonable sense, like maybe a little weekend thing here or there, but nothing like more than three days. And so, yeah, it's a real thing, especially with my craft, because if I was a carpenter, right like I could just close the shop up. It's not like things are happening while I'm gone, but in the sense of gardening, it definitely is a garden to get totally out of control, or a video you were working on that plant is going to die, right, and then where's the video? And so there's all sorts of stuff like that. Fortunately now it's a little better spot, but it's still a real thing.

Yeah, do you like? Do you have any regrets from that? Because I find for myself right now there is a trying to figure out like I love what I'm doing and I'm really enjoying the podcast and all this stuff, but is there a point that when you look back, you will regret being so all in? Have you found that?

I would say in hindsight, given the level of success, no, but if I had not succeeded at this level, maybe I would have said yes, right, so the juice is worth the squeeze, given that I got to squeeze the juice, so it gets it gets a little bit recursive, I suppose. But no, I mean, I think it's, it's all tradeoffs and I still think it was probably the right tradeoff. At that time I was that building period was like my 32 to 35 ish or 30 to 33 ish, I would say, and I, you know I would. I would say if I had regrets it would be before that point. It wouldn't be, it during that building phase because I was very fun in its own way.

Right.

You're not. You're not going to Hawaii and surfing or whatever, but there's certain experiences that money can't buy. Oh yeah, and that would be. That would be the building phase of that. I would say I wasted more of my earlier 20s than I did my building phase of my 30s.

Why do you say that? Why do you say that you think you wasted some of your 20s?

Yeah, I mean, I think I was just kind of like lost. I didn't really know what was going on, I didn't know how the world worked very well, and so I came out of school with a accounting degree, knew I didn't want to do it because I was. I was playing online poker to pay for school, and so that set me on this path of like. I don't want to be working at Deloitte making 60 K, your 80 hours a week. It's just bad trade. And so I was like, well, I'm just not going to get a job, then I'll play some poker, then I'll figure something else out. But I didn't like the wheels were not spinning very fast back then, and so I thought I was way more elite than I was. If you get a job, like you're dumb, like you're someone else's slave or like all these sort of things, it's just very odd belief system. Maybe I was consuming the wrong books, the wrong content at the time, and so I was too high on my own supply, while also not being successful at all. And so it was like you know, it was like a total clown setup of beliefs, right, and so that stalled me out because I didn't want help from anyone, I didn't want to ask for support. I could have worked a job where I would have maybe, let's say, mentored on or someone really skilled and learned a lot faster, and I did not do that. Meanwhile I was like toiling away trying to do these little business projects and failing when, if they were going to fail anyways, maybe I should have gone on some more trips in my early twenties or something. Or maybe I should have done like a gap year and traveled around the world or something, because I would have had the same amount of money at the end because I was losing money doing the business stuff you know. So it's hard to say like everything in retrospect you can always like. You just can't play out the counterfactual Like if I didn't fail all those businesses, maybe this wouldn't have happened right. So I can't necessarily be that mad at it, but you do look back and go. Man, I was kind of dumb back then.

It brought a smile on my face when you said you paid for school through online poker and something else would be said in the past. But how the hell did you get so good at poker that you were able to do that? Yeah.

I mean. The thing is I wasn't that. I wasn't that good. I was in a group. There's a forum called twoplustwocom and I found that forum pretty early I think, and that's where I met some of these players who were really skilled. And then it turned out the really skilled players were in an IRC chat called MSNL and medium stakes, no limit, and it was just the group of people who wanted to chat about poker, not just on a forum. So it was like a little IRC chat. And I got into that and I was probably the worst person there for a while and would watch all these players discussing their hands we call it a hand history, right. And so you'd post a hand history and you'd say where you were, where the other player was, how they'd been playing, how you'd been playing, the stack sizes, all that kind of all the data, right. And then people would just analyze it. They'd say like no, in this situation I would always go all in or I would instantly call this person, or that's. You know, 87% of the time that's a bluff or whatever. And you go like wait, how do you know that? And so you'd ask them all these questions, right, and they'd break down the science and the sort of intuition of the game. And then you would try to notice those patterns when you were playing and apply the logic in those situations. And then the added wrinkle is like how well could you control your own emotions? Like what was your level of emotional control? Cause you could be highly, highly skilled, but if you have low emotional control then you actually could be worse than someone who's worse than you. Right On a technical level and this was actually the case with some of the really good players is, when they were on, no one was better. No one could beat them right On a long enough timeframe, no one could destroy them. But the second you did something that made them upset you like beat them in an improbable way or whatever. They would just lose their minds and they start dumping like tens of thousands of dollars to you. And so there were players that were like that. There were players that and I was more in this latter category there were players that I had some problems with emotional control, but generally I was pretty good. But also, um, I what my skill bar? I was above average. I was never like very, very good. So if I was above average in skill and my emotional control was like maybe a B plus, then I could go to tables and and grind it out, basically. So I'd have a small edge and you play a small edge over a long enough period of time you're just going to grind out money. And that's kind of the position that that I was in, because I could never fully divorce myself from the value of the money that I was playing with, like some of these more skilled players they would. They would say you know, in the end it's, it's all, just blinds, it's a, it's a. You know, if you're playing 200, 400 with a $40,000 buy-in, that's still. You still have a hundred blinds worth of a stack, right. If you're playing a $200 buy-in with $1, $2 blinds, it's still a hundred blinds worth of a stack you're playing with. And they were able to divorce that and say like, yes, just, it's just a percentage of a stack, there's no monetary value to it. I could not do that when I was playing and so if I lost I would be mad. It's like I just lost a thousand dollars in one hand, right. Whereas they would say, yeah, you know I lost, I lost a stack of of of blinds. Basically and probabilistically was the right move. Like you go in with all aces pre-flop, you're going to lose 20% of the time, but you would always do it, and so why? Why be mad that this time was the 20% you know? So I would say that's my little spiel on poker. A lot you can learn from it, though as a as a craft, I would say.

It absolutely seems like there's a lot you can learn from it, just about life and emotional control, like you just said. It reminds me of this quote from me and Motomu Sashi the samurai, which is when you know the way broadly, you see the way in all things, like as you were talking about poker. It's like kind of reminded me of playing baseball and of building a business and of and just of pursuits in general that are meaningful and hard. It seems like there's a lot you can learn about life through that.

I think so. I mean, I think I don't even know if this is the right quote and obviously he's had a bit of a glow down lately but I think Kanye had a quote where he said like everything's the same to some interviewer. He was on some random interview and they asked him something, maybe about music or fashion. I think they asked him about fashion, I think, because he was doing his Yeezy's right at the time and they're like well, what makes you think that you can get into this? I don't know if I'm remembering this, but I think that's what it is. And he was just like everything's the same. And the person clearly did not understand what he was saying. But what I? What I think he was saying is like once you see the patterns of how things happen, it's replicable everywhere else. It has a different flavor, has a different formulation, but the sort of the building blocks of it are all are all tied together with with.

No matter what you do, Do you feel like you've seen that in your own life?

I've seen it in a few things at least. I mean, I've seen it in poker business and nature and gardening, now right, and so that's three sort of, I'd say, poker business relatively close together, but but the garden is quite different. And I've seen, I've seen those patterns in the garden map to something I noticed that's similar, let's say in in business, right, and so I go huh, I guess things are the same in that way.

Do you have an example of that?

Yeah, sure. So, like you know, when I first moved into my house here it's a third of an acre or so Um, when I moved in it was a flipped home, and so what they did is they just scraped off all the sod and put some very simple wood chips down and there was really nothing else. There's no other plants or anything like that. And so the first year was um really bad pests, like I had earwigs, those little like weird little bugs, tons of them, like way, way more than I've ever seen in any other garden. Well, why? Because they're decomposers by nature. That's like sort of the role they play in the ecosystem, and they typically decompose um recently dead material, like recently dead plants or something like that. Well, all the wood chips are a ton of that and there was nothing else, right. And so there probably weren't that many earwigs until they did that. And then earwigs proliferated, that little ecological system, right. And then when I started adding in garden beds different um different, like trees and shrubs and stuff like that, well then what happened with? Birds came in? There was less, there was less material for the earwigs to eat. There were more species of insects as well, some that predate on the earwigs and you start to see the population come back into order. And you could map that very much to, let's say, a business that finds a competitive advantage in a certain way, like, let's say, uber in the early days against taxis. Right, they found this sort of hack in the system where they're like well, we're just not going to use the medallion system, we're going to use an app and we're sort of going to float these regulations and loosely interpret them or disregard them. You might map that sort of thinking to hey, there's a entire field of wood chips I can just eat right now and I will massively increase my population size. That's basically Uber saying that same thing to themselves. But I'm going to gain market share, right. So it's very similar thing. So like untapped resource or maybe a resource that always existed but no one had seen it before. They scale to the moon through that, but then eventually they get big enough that they actually sort of cut themselves down to size on, not because they wanted to, because it had to happen, right, you get big enough and then a pest, so to speak you know local government goes hey, actually, you actually really need to follow these regulations, so I'm going to cut you down and I don't know, utah or something like that. Like Utah's like yeah, no, you're not going to do this. It's something like you know, it's very similar, right, like the expansion and contraction of like a market or a company within a market. You might say is similar to like a pest exploiting a particular ecosystem until it can't anymore because it's gotten too big or something else has come in to stop it. So that's just one example, but that's the type of connections that I've started to see just from doing this type of thing.

Put a smile on my face because it isn't the analogy or the example. I should say that I thought you would say because. But it is like the perfect analogy, like they saw opportunity and they took the opportunity and then they got too big for their own good. But when you think about that, I mean that's a almost a universal story, right? People getting too, big for their own good, and now you're doing something that's getting pretty big with the content with the social media with YouTube. Do you do you? How do you do you think about those two things?

Yeah, I do. I mean, I think where does it end? Right? Because, because growth can't, you can't grow forever, otherwise every business would, would outscale, you know, the earth itself, and so things, things do have to hit a natural limiter, which you might say is your TAM right, your total addressable market, or something like that, or or you might, you might stumble along the way and the cracks in the system start to start to appear. So I'm always thinking, okay, what would that be for us, like, how could that happen to us? Or how would, how might we engineer our way out of that situation? Or at some point you got to say, like, well, should we like, is there such a thing as a company that needs to grow forever? My opinion is no, like, I don't, I don't, I don't think so. I think some businesses there's that whole idea, I think, in German culture, of like the middle, middle shot or something like that, where the business's goal is to keep being a business. That's about it, right, and so, like they put aside a certain amount of money for R&D, you know, paying, taking profit out of the system, so making sure they're keeping up with the times, but they're not, you know, not plowing 100% back in and taking outside capital to grow. They're just sort of going along with with through the sands of time, which is it's just a totally different philosophy, right? Or like the Japanese businesses that have been handed down by 10 generations. It's not like they're trying to scale to the moon like like a lot of the people in in America are.

So the goal in this German is to in this German phrase is to just stay in business, so essentially win through insurance.

I don't even think they think I mean look, I'm not some pro here of understanding, but I'm going to look it up right now. I think it's just to keep being a business, doing the thing that they're doing, like if you're a tailor or something you're a tailor Like people will always need clothes to be tailored and you just do that and pass it through the sands of time to the next whoever wants to run it next, and the the fact that it still exists is the win. It's not that it exists and other things don't exist, or something like that right.

It's interesting because we hear so much nowadays, especially on social media, and people get business advice and it's like think bigger, think bigger, scale to the moon. 10x everything in your business, make it as big as possible. I wonder if the mindset of just staying alive allows you to have more success than that's 10xing type of mindset.

I think it's two different games, you know, and I think if you raise any sort of money, you just de facto opt into the former game. Like you, you, you have to, you have to grow. There's no choice. Because? Why? Because the people who gave you the money wants you to grow and they exert some level of control, right, but yeah, I just found it the middle, middle, stunned, I think. But anyways, it says family ownership, family like corporate culture, generational continuity, long-term focus, independence, nimbleness, emotional attachment, interesting investment into the workforce, lean hierarchies, social responsibility and regional ties, which is so opposite to what you would do if you were doing that 10x play right, and if you were playing poker, yeah yeah, yeah attachment.

It's very different.

It's saying. It's saying this is what I want to do and I don't want to exit it. There isn't an exit. My exit is death. Right On this business, which is a cool. It's a cool philosophy, it's a cool way to operate. It's like a sort of a hardcore way of doing it. It reminds me that, like that classic, like fisherman parable, right, the fisherman and the businessman where the guy's like, well, you could scale this out and you could do this, you could do that. And he's like well, for what? And he's like, well, then you could sit on the beach and fish. And he's like what do you think I'm doing? Right, it's sort of the realization that that's what would happen to you anyways and just saying, okay, I'll just stay this way then. Which is it's you got to respect it.

That's an interesting analogy for what you do, right, because on one hand, you're a gardener. But, on the other hand, you're this business man. He scaled it and is growing it, so you, ultimately, can go and do the gardener again, do you? Think about that what.

I do. Actually, it's kind of counterintuitive, right. I think it's interesting, I like, I like interesting things, I like things that interest me, and so figuring out how to grow something, it's just, it's just inherently interesting to do, and so that part's fun and enjoyable Sometimes. Sometimes it's not, sometimes it's, you know, a pain and very stressful, but in some way that also is fun, right, it's not like fun is only things that give you a dopamine hit or something, at least to me. So in some way, that's the challenge is, is is a deeper level of fun. And then you get into this, this whole idea of like, well, why are you doing it? You, you would probably just be a gardener at the end of the day, build a nice home and chill, and it's like, yeah, I probably would. But for me, there would, there would always be something else I would be trying to do, just because, just because it's interesting, and so to me so far, right now, in this moment of life, it feels like the right hybrid thing to be doing.

Yeah it reminds me of this quote from Jordan Peterson, which is like humans are made to walk uphill. I don't know the exact quote, but essentially along the lines was like the fun is in the climb and it's not in the wind itself. And I wonder do you think about, with with the content stuff, especially that it's grown so much and it's been such a success? Do you feel like you've already won that game or do you feel like there's more mountains to climb, I would say I've won.

Anyone might say that I've won it right. It reminds me of the Pewdiepie sort of discussion of who who did YouTube the best. And a lot of people I think at least some, some friends of mine as well think it was Pewdiepie because he Played it in a pure way. He didn't like try to. You know he didn't go the mr V's route, which is nothing wrong with he, just he went his own way, put out what he wanted, grew the way he wanted, had fun with it, dealt with the stresses that came with it and then when he realized which for him, was hitting a hundred million subscribers, which is pretty big- you know. But here, when he was like, look, there's nothing else, here, there's, there's the 110th million sub. It doesn't matter, like it, there is no end to that, and I've already gone well beyond what I would imagine I had. I've made more money than I would imagine I've had, and so I'm just gonna move to Japan with my new wife and vlog about Japan whenever I want, and that's just what it's gonna be. So he said goodbye to everyone on the channel, but he wasn't leaving, but he was in a certain way and he sort of signified that by he, he, he will sometimes do videos where he says you know, featuring PewDiePie in the video that he'll release, signifying that, I think, to him he feels like he's Felix. Now, he's not PewDiePie, pewdiepie is dead, but he could, he could recall him from the grave and feed that person, that persona, in a video in a sort of tasting of the past way. But but he's not that the guy anymore, and so in a sense, I would say he has retired and in another sense, you might say he's just begun his next iteration.

Reminds me of the stuff I've heard you say in the past that you've learned from, like Eckhart Toll and that whole world of Philosophy that you're. There's almost no you, it just yeah, continually changing.

Yeah, I mean I, I want to. I want to say that's when I realized. That was when I read the power of now was like 2010 or 11 or something like that, or you know what it was that. And then there was this really weird DVD I found a long time ago. There's this company called real social dynamics that made like social skills training and I think it was loosely affiliated with like the pickup artist stuff or something. And at the time I read I there's this DVD called like the blueprint decoded, and it wasn't about, you know, picking up women or anything like that. It was about like your own identity and how you, how your, the identity you think is your identity is not. It was given to you by your mom and your dad and your friends and your teacher and all the different sort of actors and society, right, and it was basically saying like, well, all that was given to you, so you can also shed it if you, if you so choose, you could say, well, you could question all of it and say like, okay, well, do I have to do this, do I have to do that? Well, no, why? Why do I have to? Well, my teacher told me I have to go to college. Well, why did they tell you, know you? You ask the why is all the way down, you realize it's all. It's all nonsensical To some degree, which could be very terrifying, right, or it could be very freeing, probably combination of both. And that's when I realized that there isn't, there isn't really a coherent identity that's persistent over time. So, yeah, it was, it was sometime around there, it's, it's. It's still a very weird thing to think about, right, because you think you know that, that you're one person, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

Why do you think that was so impactful for you at that time?

I think it's because I really thought I was. I was a person, you know, I was like a. I Really thought that there was a cabinet, will it would exist from birth to death right. That's why because it broke that forever for me I was like, oh shit, like that's not, that's not how it works. Because I remember I watched that DVD and then I slept like 12 hours a day for three days Just because I was so tired. But I didn't know why I was tired, because I didn't like work out or anything Right. So I think I just was, my brain was like whoa, like this, the whole world's different. Now, you know, I don't know. It was a very weird experience. It's a very interesting experience.

I almost don't know what to make of it right, like that, sleeping 12 hours after you, hearing that information, feeling I don't either and I'm not like.

I'm like, not the kind of guy to be like. Oh, like you know, the mystic spoke to me here. Anything it's. It's nothing like that, it's just, it's just very weird Experience. I don't have an explanation for it.

It's funny. How do you think like you, as Kevin, have changed from gardening? What do you think it fundamentally has changed about you? Yeah, I mean, I think it.

Connected me back to the actual systems of the world, the actual earth itself. So I realized how difficult, let's say, it is to grow food or to produce food without it having pests, or to Transport that food or to process it into the things that I might like to eat or grew up liking to eat, like a potato chip or something like that. But it connects to everything, right? So you see the garden. You say, well, if I plant these sorts of things here, I put this pond here, I put these trees here, well, I see the birds come back in this way, I see the mammals come back in this way, and I see this and I see that and I go. Well, we've been doing the opposite for the last, however, many hundred years. We were removing all of the environment and then sort of lamenting the decline of certain species or this or that, and you go well, yeah, well, but you're the one doing it. So what are you complaining about? You know you can't throw a tweet up about. You know we need to save the pygmy, marmoset or whatever, and then consume the products that are being deforested. You know they're deforestation the rainforest where that particular mammal lives. At the same time, like immediately after you send the tweet, it's like it is count. It is all paradoxical, right, um? So it opened me up to sort of that aspect of of modern living when do you first start your? garden, I think the first one I ever had would have been 20, 20, 13. 2013. So 10 years ago, yeah, which was just an indoor hydroponic garden at the time in a little townhouse. But yeah, it was about 10 years ago.

It seems so crazy that just 10 years ago your first gang started and now you are the guy for gardening.

I know, yeah, well, I think isn't that interesting, right, like because there's people that are older than me, for sure, and definitely have more. You know what? Because I think I have a lot of gardening experience, especially across different domains. But there are still people you know there's always going to be in the world of gardening and tree care and roses and these sort of things. The older you are, the better you are. You've seen more seasons, right, and so there's always going to be someone better than me at trees, at roses, at a tomato. I know the guy who named some of the most popular heirloom tomato varieties. He's grown 6,000 maybe at this point, different types of tomatoes. Like I'll never get there right, but I think maybe that's perhaps why it worked out so well, because I came in with something fresh you know something a little different. I was not the expert, so, preaching down from the top, I was like, hey, like this seems cool, I'm going to figure this out and I'll share what happens along the way.

So really it was, was you documenting your journey? That was the thing.

Well, I think at the start it was a great thing to have realized at the start, I think, is that I am going to just not say I'm an expert, right, I'm just going to be like hey, look, like this is what I'm doing, here's what I've learned and this is this is what's worked for me. It makes you way more relatable. It wasn't like some masterful plan or anything like that. It's just like that's. I didn't have the credibility to lean on right, and so I was like well, I can lean on the opposite of credibility then that I don't know exactly what I'm doing.

It's a great piece of advice for people who are trying to get started in that world, because there is just such a sense of like imposter syndrome.

I think so. Yeah, yeah. I think the the solution to that is so easy and no one wants to do it. It's just being like yeah, I don't know exactly what I'm doing. It's there's nothing wrong with that you know nothing wrong with saying that and it, weirdly, will make you know people will relate to you better.

It almost just reminds me of like. It's a paradox I learned when I was in college of the more authentic you are means the weirder you're going to be or the more different you're going to be, but paradoxically, that makes people like you more.

Yeah, yeah. So when you learned that in college, like what made? What was the experience that made you learn that?

I was trying to, like I was starting to get into like self improvement stuff and I was like, all right, I don't want to go out anymore, I want to be the guy who's eating healthy and not drinking beer and going to bed at 10 pm and all these type of things, and I was like I'm scared to embrace being that person or to just own the person I wanted to be. And then when I started to do it, you realized that like, oh, people love when you're just authentic.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's like the biggest. It's cool that you had the realization in college. I did not. I had it after college. I wish I had it in college, because then college would have probably gone better, you know, I would have had more true enjoyment out of it. But yeah, that is, that is the paradox, right, it's like if, if there's no point in being anything but yourself because no one, no one actually cares about you, right, and in that, like that's not accurate. But you get my point Like no one's, no one's waking up every day, going like man, I wonder what Ryan's having for breakfast today. It's probably healthy, that healthy dude you know what I mean. Like no one's, no one's thinking that. And the second you tell someone like I don't drink, for example, like I currently barely ever drink Not that I'm not like sober, I wouldn't say I'm like sober or anything but I just barely ever drink. And I learned that in maybe 23, 24, 25, I did this thing with the UCSF where I was like going out to bars and giving surveys and it was about people's smoking habits and so you'd get paid five bucks to do a survey, to like administer the survey, and they would get five bucks for, like, a drink or something like that. So I go out to these bars, but you could not be smoking or drinking when you were doing the survey because you were like, you know, the professional or whatever. So you're 23, 24, 25 doing these surveys and I'd go out and I'd give them out and I would have to talk to people, talk to strangers, right, and learn that not only is it pretty fine to talk to strangers, especially if you're giving them something like $5, they're not, they're okay with it, but you know they'd be like, are you drinking tonight? Like I'll buy you the beer with my $5. I'm like, oh, no, like. For a while I said like I can't drink because of the survey, because I wanted a convenient excuse that it wasn't. It wasn't my choice, it was their choice. I was being forced to not. And then I was like why am I saying that? Like I don't even really drink that much anyways, like why am I trying to pretend like I'm the one who wishes I could, right? And so then I said, oh, yeah, yeah, I don't really, don't really feel like it, it's not really. You know, just kind of brush it off and then your whole point is true. Like they would be like, wow, that's pretty cool, like you can just be in a bar without you know drinking. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I've been doing this for a while now Because no one really seems to care. I'll just get like a, you know a soda water with some lime, and everyone thinks you have a jacket or a tequila lime anyways. So it doesn't matter, right? So yeah, it's, it's. It's the most counter-intuitive thing. And I think a lot of people just like literally like die and don't ever realize that you know they might get to 80 and they just like never realized that's how things work, you know.

Do you think that that experience of learning, that authenticity was one of the things that allowed you to start creating content?

I think, um, yeah, I would say I did not have any qualms about, like, publishing content in the early days. Uh well, you know that might not be perfectly true. I did put stuff up but my face wasn't on the content at the start and when I got to 10,000 subscribers on YouTube back then at least they would give you a YouTube partner manager from YouTube to try to help you grow. So, like that bar is way higher now, so I'm really lucky I got into that at that time. But my partner, manager Hadas, she said, uh, well, you should do collabs and you should put your face on, like you should be in the video. And I was like, why? Like what will that do? What difference will that make? And she's like she was like I can't even believe I have to explain. You know that, like being in your own video about gardening might, might help you or collaborating with someone else, I was like, well, it's my channel. Like why would I collab? It was it was so I was so ignorant, I had no idea. So I think part of it was just like I was too ignorant to even know that there was something to worry about about publishing content. I was like, wow, just do it. You know.

That's so interesting. It's a, it's a funny world, that whole thing, and I want to be courteous to your time here and just ask you like, is there anything you specifically want to talk about today that we haven't discussed? I know we wanted to try to make this episode a bit different than some of your other episodes and hope we accomplish that, but is there anything?

a little more like philosophical than than prior ones, right, I don't know. I mean, I think I think this was. This was great, it was, it was fun, it was fresh, it was a little different and it was cool to chat with you. I think we could go deeper about that experience you had in college too, like that's an interesting topic that you could pull the thread on. I would. I would really be curious, like when people realized that exact thing, like you realized it earlier than I did, right, I realized it maybe 24, 25. I have people that I know in my life right now that they still don't get that. They still are not aware that the, the, the freeing thought that you can actually just be yourself. But I think the counter-intuitive part to me is that's the advice, right, like, okay, we'll just be more yourself, but how do you know what that is? It's almost easier to know what isn't yourself and just remove the things that aren't you, right? So if for you, in that case, you're like I want to eat healthy, well, you're like, yeah, I mean.

I'm not someone, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not someone who wants to eat unhealthily. The default state of what you become is just what's left, and so remove the things that you're not, and only thing that's left is is who the essence of Ryan is, or the essence of Kevin is. Right Like that. That's what I think is the more interesting way to get to that point.

I think that's such a great perspective, because so many people like they just don't understand what they want out of life. Right yeah, just understanding what you don't want.

It's easier, right so much easier.

It's a lot more powerful.

Yeah, like I don't want to live in a condo 30 stories above the ground, yes, ever again. And so default I will be on the ground wherever I'm living. Right, like it's just a tiny little point, but you start stacking all those and that's how you become un. That's how you become like uncategorizable. Right Like, oh, hey, you know, this guy, take take myself as an example. You're like, well, this guy's like making his own sourdough bread and fermenting foods and doing this and that, and then he's also, you know, making TikTok content or I don't know, like he loves rock climbing or something. Just all these random things put together, because that's all that's left. Once you remove the things that aren't, and it it, you're not following a thing. You're, you're opposite. You're you're doing the opposite of that, right, you're rejecting things, and so you don't end up looking like a facsimile of the 17 most popular people in health and spirituality or whatever that that exists on the earth, right? Huberman husband or whatever they call these people?

right, You've been watching too much TikTok.

Yeah, I don't know. The Huberman husband thing made it everywhere, right Cause it it was so polarizing, right. Everyone's like. You know this. This husband is a complete loser. You know how could this wife be with him? And the other people were like, oh wow, like this guy's so committed to his family or whatever. So it's so interesting.

It is so interesting, it's a funny spectrum, that whole world of optimization and all of that, I know, I know. Kevin, thank you so much for being here today. This was awesome. You pushed me out of my comfort zone a bit and really enjoyed having this conversation.

Yeah, dude, it was great, great chat and thanks for having me. Man, Absolutely.