#165 Gardening in the Digital Ecosystem — Kevin Espiritu on his fascination with the early Internet, how Poker broke his brain on money, starting his YouTube channel, Epic Gardening, taking a long term perspective, how to structure a video, transforming his YouTube channel, introducing new people to his audience, the probabilistic mindset and what he learnt from poker that helps him in his life

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. So today I am talking with Kevin Espiritu. He's the founder and creator of Epic Gardening, a YouTube channel with nearly 3 million people tuning in to all his videos. He's expanding that and growing it to a much larger ecosystem of a media company and exploring all sorts of different products that he is sharing with people from all around the world. But today I'm more excited to talk to him because I think he's playing a deeper journey.

He's done all sorts of things over the years, dabbling with poker, book publishing, a stint with video games, and he owns a small plot of land in San Diego where he does have what appears to me to be an Picardian. He's a principle-driven creator and cares deeply about the game he's playing, and is something I really admire and am excited to explore with him today. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin. Thank you, dude.

[02:06] Kevin Espiritu: I appreciate that. Cool to be on.

[02:08] Paul: Excited to dive in today. The question I start with, with everyone, is similar. What are the stories and scripts you grew up with that shaped how you were thinking about the world growing up?

[02:22] Kevin Espiritu: I think it's a question I, I guess I haven't considered all too much, which is an interesting realization right there. But I mean, I could just go to the makeup of the family. You know, I grew up half Filipino, half white, but in the rarer scenario where my dad was Filipino, my mom was white. And so typically when you have Asian mom, you more often get more of that sort of Asian achievement philosophy. And I didn't not have it. My mom would— she married an Asian guy, right?

So I think she had a little bit of that in her. I grew up Catholic. So you have this sort of good, bad, you know, sin, goodness thing going on. And then if you think about the theology of Catholicism, it's, it's more of a works-based faith. And so you get this idea in your head when you're young that if you do bad things, you're actually a bad person and you will be punished for that. And so, that was in my head for a while.

And I think to some degree, that little program will always run in the background. From an achievement or from a success or finance perspective, I don't think I ever had any, you must do X type of thing. There was no, you know, the Filipino nurse pipeline is strong. I didn't really have that put out to me. And I didn't have, you know, go for being a doctor, lawyer, dentist type of thing. But I did have, you know, you're expected to get good grades, you're expected to go to college, you're expected to do something with that degree afterwards to pay for your life.

But there wasn't a deeper— you know, it wasn't much beyond that. It was like, if you can get a good job and pay for things, then you're good. And so that's kind of where it began for me.

[04:05] Paul: What were some of the things you were most curious about as a kid?

[04:09] Kevin Espiritu: Back as a kid, I think I was a collector, so I would collect coins. I think early on it was coins and rocks and gems, and I would collect little bugs and I'd even like go buy like bigger bugs, like a little dried up centipede or something and like put it in a little thing. So I would, I would do that. I was into all sorts of different sciencey things, like, you know, the science camps you can go to when you're a kid. My mom would send me to one of those every single summer. So sometimes it'd be like collecting rocks or sometimes it'd be polishing, polishing those rocks or a skate camp or a fish camp.

So there's a lot of outdoorsy, sort of natural world type of things. And then the internet came and it took a lot of that away.

[04:54] Paul: In what form was that? Were you on AIM? I think you're similar, similar age to me. I think late '90s. I was very into AOL, AIM. Like Proggies and stuff and eBay.

And I was even trading like Beanie Babies.

[05:11] Kevin Espiritu: Oh, were you? So I think so. I'm 36, so born in '87 and the internet probably went out at scale in like '95, '96 for us. So I wasn't super old then. I was like 8 or 9. But yeah, late '90s is probably when I started getting into it.

And early on it would have been— we had a Macintosh computer and my dad had I forgot what it was called. I think it was Macworld Magazine, and they'd ship you a Macworld Magazine with a CD in every single issue. And then you'd pop that CD in, or maybe, I think it was actually a floppy, but either way, um, there'd be games on that, right? And so my brother and I would take turns playing games. I think Power Pete was one of them, Lode Runner. We played all those kind of early games, and that got me into that.

And then once like the PlayStation came around and you're playing Final Fantasy. But yeah, I was on AIM from maybe 6th, 7th grade onwards.

[06:07] Paul: Looking back, is it— I noticed this with so many other people doing internet stuff broadly now. It's like so many people have that early origin story of just sort of playing around online. Do you look back at that and go, oh, this makes sense now?

[06:23] Kevin Espiritu: Oh, totally, man. So all the stuff I just mentioned. But then I would say maybe in 1999, 1998, 2000-ish era, my cousin and I— my cousin's 2 days younger than me, so we're basically the same age— we would be on— I think this is even before GeoCities. Everyone I talked to doesn't remember it, but it was cjb.net, I think it was called. And so we had like a blog called howtodrawanime.cjb.net. And we didn't know how to draw anime.

We were like learning to draw it. But early on we would draw like an anime eye and then I'd scan it in the computer and I'd put it on a blog post and say like, this is how you draw an anime eye. And I had like just learned 10 minutes ago. So we were creating, I guess, content early on, not to say it was any good, but then yeah, you've got your GeoCities and you're learning HTML and then when MySpace comes out, you can customize it with CSS and HTML, you know. So yeah, I think a lot of it stems from that. Just something about a certain type of mind gets fascinated by the internet.

[07:22] Paul: Yeah, I was on Tripod and GeoCities. Yeah, yeah.

[07:26] Kevin Espiritu: AngelFire.

[07:27] Paul: AngelFire as well. I think I had something registered on AngelFire, but I don't know if I built anything, but I was doing like wrestling sim leagues, NBA sim leagues. I was, I was doing these, uh, did you ever do those banner things where you'd like run the banner and try to get paid for it?

[07:45] Kevin Espiritu: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, I remember getting fascinated by the like very early make money things that you'd have to do. Like those crazy weird like hoops you'd have to jump through. I forgot about the banner thing. I remember playing actually, did you ever play Neopets?

[08:02] Paul: I did not play Neopets. I was doing Tamagotchi, but Neopets was like the digital version of that, right?

[08:09] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. Neopets. I was on. I think pretty early. It was like a Flash. I think it was a Flash game with all sorts of different pages you could go to and you could have these different pets.

And I remember they launched the Neopia stock market and I like YOLO'd all my Neocoins into like one, whatever the stock was. And I made so much that my cousins who are all younger than me because I'm the oldest in my family, I had like 180,000 Neocoins, some, some insane amount. And so I just like give them coins to do chores and stuff for me because they were—

[08:43] Paul: they were— they worth money or is it just like—

[08:47] Kevin Espiritu: and there's no off-ramp. There was no like way to convert it. But I guess I found one in the form of favors, you know?

[08:54] Paul: That's awesome. So was there— was there sort of an off-ramp from some of that stuff to the poker?

[09:01] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. I mean, I think that stuff would have been 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 type of age. And then from 13 to about 18, there was no poker yet. 18, it's like 17 probably. There's this guy Chris Moneymaker, if you know that guy. He won the World Series, right, from an online qualifier, and he started the wave, right?

Perfect name, perfect story. All the kids are like, oh my gosh, I want to be like Chris. So we started playing limit poker just at home with, with our friends for $5 or something like that. And then when I turned 18, I put $100 on— I forgot what site it was, maybe Ultimate Bet or Full Tilt Poker. I think it was Full Tilt, maybe PokerStars. Actually, it was PokerStars, the classic.

And yeah, we just kind of took it from there.

[09:51] Paul: And so if I understand, this sort of took off and you ended up paying for a large portion of college. And you've also talked about how this sort of broke your brain in terms of like how you were thinking about employment and making money and all that. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

[10:11] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, so what happened was when I was 18, I put the $100 on. I was playing limit hold'em on like a table of 10 people. So it was a very— the upside of that game is relatively small because you can't— it's not no limits. You can't take advantage of someone's mistake to the maximum, but I sort of grinded out, you know, a stack of maybe $800 and $1,000, and then I started moving up in stakes and playing no limit. And of course, if you're good there, you can take advantage of mistakes more, you can increase your stack. And then I just discovered the, I guess, the beauty of the game, because there's a level of luck to it, of course, there's probability on what cards are coming next, but there's also statistics and sort of heuristics and pattern recognition that goes into how a person might play.

So if I was to play you, I might figure out what your general, you know, disposition is. Maybe you're fearful of losing, right? Or maybe you really want to win, and that'll change your sort of quick snapshot of what heuristically you might do in a situation. So I might say like, okay, well, Paul might have— Paul's like pushing all in right now on the turn or something like that. And I would say, you know, most people in this situation would never do it in this particular way, but because I know Paul, I know that like it's way more likely than that he might, and you'd make a call. And so it taught me a lot about kind of acting with imperfect information, which is just how life is.

And then you're right, like I would say maybe 2-ish years in, and this would have been end of freshman, sophomore year of high school or of college, excuse me, I was earning what I would have earned coming out with the accounting degree that I had. At, um, at college. And then I was watching all my friends who were in accounting kind of teeing up those summer internships and teeing up studying for the CPA. And I was like, it just doesn't seem worth it to do that. I'm not in love with accounting, so why would I go make $65,000 there when I'm making more than $65,000 doing this? Obviously there's some flaws in that as well, but it seemed like the better trade at the time.

And it also broke the brain of you don't have to ask someone to give you money, a.k.a. work a job. You don't have to. There's nothing wrong with it, but you don't have to do that. There's other ways to do it. So that was kind of the major— some of the major lessons I learned.

[12:27] Paul: What were people around you saying about that at the time? Were your parents or anything saying, I should grab the internship? Yeah, I got to go to PwC.

[12:37] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. You know, I'm curious. So my dad passed when I was 13. I'm curious what he would have thought. I think he would have thought it was cool, but I had my mom, right? And my mom is the more conservative financially.

She's a little bit more risk-averse. And so she did not think it was certainly a career. And frankly, I kind of agree with that. It's not like a true career, but she didn't really like poker for a while. And I don't think she ever will truly love that that's what I did. But I think she understands now where it took me in my development.

I think she can maybe appreciate that. Um, because I remember like when I was playing poker, she would send me resume articles like, here's how to apply for a job, here's a resume, this and that. And then once I started doing well, um, with Epic specifically is the thing I started doing well with, she would send me like, here's how to be a better entrepreneur, you know? And I was like, oh, that's— now I know she's kind of accepted the reality, you know? But yeah, the people around me, like my friends, I had some friends that played in college, but not too many. And so it was a lot of like, online friends going back to that whole, that whole thing.

There was an IRC chat called Medium Stakes No Limit, and I still know 5 to 7 guys that were in that chat, and I was probably in the bottom 10 to 20% of skill set and success. I mean, we're talking some of the best players on earth were in the chat, and so you could talk to them about hands and discuss like, okay, well, why did you do this in this situation? And they give you this whole breakdown. So it taught you how people thought. And it also showed me that like, okay, well, I'm making this realization, making— I think I probably made $200,000, $250,000 total from poker. I mean, I have friends that made that in a day or in a hand.

So it taught me like, okay, there's a bigger game at play here if you wanted to play it.

[14:23] Paul: Poker is interesting. I, I now have a bunch of friends who are former poker players, and I think the challenge with poker is, like you were alluding to earlier, is it's really hard to do it over a long period of time. It's just a very intense sort of stance toward the world. And it's also like a very solo pursuit. So talk to me about, I know you kept doing that for a bit, but when did you sense that was coming to an end?

[14:50] Kevin Espiritu: I think the first memory I have of going, I don't know about this, is I met some of those guys from the chat in person in San Diego. They had all like rented a house for the summer, and they were all 4 or 5 years older than me, and I probably was— it's probably 21, so you're 25, 26. And so I come into the house and I see table— like, it's messy, right? Because when you're playing poker, you're probably playing 6 to 12 tables at a time for many, many, many hours a day. You know, it's the whole— it's a stereotype of like a gamer, right? You like You're bang energy sitting on the thing and there's pizza, whatever.

But also there's just like rolls of cash sitting on the tables, like $10,000, $30,000. And I'm like, it's just a weird scene, you know, like I played only online. I never played in person. So walking into that sort of sloppy rich scene, I guess is what you'd call it. I was like, okay, interesting. We go out for dinner.

They rolled, they threw their credit cards in a hat and gambled for who has to pay because that's like a, that's sort of a poker thing that people do. I never really liked to do that, but I threw it in. Fortunately, I lost, so I got the meal for free. There was a guy, I forgot his name, but he was smoking from a bong like this huge bong, like I'm talking like 4 feet tall. I don't know why he was so high. He like knocked it over and broke it and then he just went to the store and bought another one for $600 that he had bought the day before, you know.

And so there was this like this total disconnection from the value of money. Which you have to have to be well, be good at poker. But at the same time, I was like, dude, I don't actually think I want to be this in 4 or 5 years if this is what I do, you know, like, this isn't very cool just to me. And so that, that planted the seed. So I started studying at the time for real estate, my real estate license. And while I was doing the real estate license, I was simultaneously playing a poker tournament on the side.

So like split screen. I usually played cash games. I didn't play poker tournaments, so it's kind of unfamiliar to me. But I won the whole tournament. It was like $5,000 or $6,000. And I said, you know what, I'm literally studying for a different thing while I'm playing this.

Why don't I just quit now and try to figure out what to do next? Because I have enough money to survive. And so that's what I did. I just stopped that day and I haven't really ever played since.

[17:17] Paul: That's pretty incredible. You never hear of people that actually walk away. On top. Um, where do you think that discipline came from? I mean, was it just seeing the sort of like nihilistic poker scene and being like, that is not where I'm headed?

[17:33] Kevin Espiritu: And you know, I don't want to say that necessarily because those two events were pretty far apart. I gave myself a good like 4 or 5 more months of that. I think there was just some sort of weird realization moment, and I maybe wasn't as in love with poker as I thought. I'm sort of— it's like the ghost of a habit still getting played out. And so something about it, like my brain was just like, you know what, I think I'm done with this. And I just stopped, which is really weird because, you know, normally with some sort of— because it can be addictive, right?

Like some sort of addictive type thing. It's hard to do that.

[18:04] Paul: Yeah. I mean, especially something you're good at that produces money by sitting on the screen.

[18:09] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, exactly.

[18:10] Paul: Which is similar to what we're still doing, but in a, in a different way. So you've talked about how you got into sort of a deep dive into video games after this. I'd love to hear a little bit about that period and some of the stuff you struggled with. Yeah.

[18:28] Kevin Espiritu: So I think I'd always liked video games, like growing up, like I said, Final Fantasy and you're playing some of these games, World of Warcraft, played it for like 6 months hardcore in, in senior year of high school and then stopped because that poker started, right? So when poker left, the vacuum in your brain was, was vast. And so I had nothing to fill it with. And I also felt like I teed up some job to go do, so I had nothing to fill it with. And so the next closest analog would be like a real-time strategy game, um, like a, like a Dota or a StarCraft 2. So I remember early on after quitting, it was StarCraft 2 forever, like hours and hours and hours and hours a day.

League of Legends was a huge one, hours and hours and hours every day because it hits that same circuitry. There's more of a skill set, you know, there's more of a mechanical skill set with playing the actual game, but it's still a game of imperfect information. It's still a competitive game. It's still basically a zero-sum, like if you win, you win type of thing. And so that was, that's what supplanted the poker. Just because I didn't have another, like, more animating thing to do besides that.

And then that got so consuming that I started doing the gardening thing with my brother that summer and kind of popped me out of it. But it wasn't all just that. It was— I was like, yo, I need to actually make some money somehow. So I started designing websites and I started gardening. And then the gardening got me out of the house, but the websites kept me in the house. So I made a gardening site about— or website about gardening.

As like a business card for the website design business. And then it all kind of, you know, goes on from there.

[20:10] Paul: And what year was that?

[20:12] Kevin Espiritu: That would have been 2012 or '13, somewhere in that range. I want to say, because I know I registered the domain, which would become Epic Gardening in February, I think, of 2013. So it must have happened before that.

[20:29] Paul: It's interesting to look back because over and over again I see these patterns of 7 to 10 years is when people sort of like start things and one thing start to like take off in a crazy period. Like my book didn't really take off until the second year after it published, and that was about 7 years after I started writing. And so I was looking back Your first video on your channel is a hydroponics walkthrough, and that was posted about 10 years ago. So what were you thinking about when you posted your first YouTube video?

[21:09] Kevin Espiritu: The truth is I was thinking about how to use YouTube to get more traffic to my blog because I was a blogger before I was anything else. And the reason I made a hydroponics video is because I had a hydroponic article. It was, I think it was a deep water culture video, which is a technique where you grow in a, basically a tote. And I, that article was doing well and I, I figured, well, if I make a video, people will watch the video on YouTube and then they'll click and read the article, which is a hilariously backwards way of thinking today. Uh, back then actually there was probably some validity to it, but even then it wasn't that smart. So that was the logic.

And as you can see, if anyone wants to go watch that video, the way I made that video is I drew in Photoshop each layer of this graphic and I put all this text on. So it was like 15 layers and I just unhit each layer as I was talking on the mic to like animate the video. So it was like so, so bad because that's 2013. Like that's already the second wave of YouTube. 2005, 2010-ish is the first wave. I'm already in the second wave and I'm doing like below first wave level content.

It was really, really bad, but it was pretty much the best video at the time on that topic. So it did well regardless.

[22:28] Paul: Yeah, I love that. I, I'm laughing because I think I made some videos in PowerPoint using basically the same technique. Yeah.

[22:37] Kevin Espiritu: Why should I just use PowerPoint?

[22:39] Paul: Oh, you didn't even use PowerPoint?

[22:41] Kevin Espiritu: No, I used Photoshop.

[22:42] Paul: Oh wow, that's so painful.

[22:45] Kevin Espiritu: It was so bad. Yeah, I think it's because I needed to draw, you know.

[22:48] Paul: But that's awesome. Um, and so you're doing the blog, and the blog makes perfect sense because blogging was the portal to like doing a thing on the internet back then. You had people like Tim Ferriss and others who it was all about blogging.

[23:05] Kevin Espiritu: That was it.

[23:07] Paul: And so It seems like you got pretty into the blogging world and did that for a while, but you were also sort of exploring other startup ideas. You ended up taking a job at one point at what was then Book in a Box, now Scrap Media. So you're very much in an exploratory state. What, what were you thinking about? Like, did you have specific goals at the time?

[23:34] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I think if we look at the period of, let's say, 2012-ish to 2016-ish, it would have been a phase of just trying to figure out why I couldn't get the things I was trying to get, because it was just always striving. I remember early on there were some guys I would talk to again, similar to the poker thing, like there was a crew of bloggers that were either making it or trying to make it. And you're kind of all together on the internet like, hey, what are you doing for this? What are you doing for that? And so there was a, there was a couple of guys that were ahead of me and I could even go back on the Facebook chats and be like, if I could only get to $2,000, you know, in my monthly blog, like, that'd be great. Or if I could get to 5 then, and then they'd go 5 to 10, you know, and as soon as you get to 10, you're like, oh, it's 6 figures.

And then so it was always kind of these monetary hurdles until I kind of, I guess, mentally grew out of that way of thinking about it. And went into more of a business strategy or a mission-focused thing. But yeah, those early years I was just trying to figure out like why was I not getting to certain levels? So I was reading all sorts of different business books or self-improvement books. I thought I could— I think it's important, like I thought I could solve the world in my mind and then go do the successful things correctly, like at a 100% hit rate. So I'd be like, well, if I read all the knowledge, I'll know all the knowledge and I could just go do all the knowledge in the real world.

Which obviously doesn't work that way. So taking the job at Book in a Box, which is now Scribe, I probably shouldn't have even gotten the job. Tucker said I was one of the worst interviews he's ever had. But Zach O'Bryant, who's one of the, the co-founders of the company, kind of went to bat for me. So I'm very grateful to him for that. But I feel like I learned how to think more independently at Book in a Box because that's just how those two guys are.

So that osmosis into my brain And then after I left there, going full-time on Epic, I was like, oh, I actually understand how to grow this in a real way instead of just like looking to other people to tell me what to do, you know?

[25:36] Paul: Yeah. So I know Zach and I messaged him. I was like, what should I talk to Kevin about? And he was curious on your reflections on sort of your last few months at Scribe. He was like, we loved him so much. And he, he was so valuable there.

But it was like clear you were heading towards your next chapter. Do you think there was any sort of like alternate reality where you didn't leave and start Epic, or was it very clear you had to take that leap at that point?

[26:08] Kevin Espiritu: I think I had to because the thing that Tucker asked me on the interview that I really liked and I had never done a job interview, so I didn't know if that was standard or not. I don't really think it is, is he was like, First of all, he wasn't even on the screen. So I was interviewing against his book cover as his Skype avatar. So I was just talking to his book cover, which was intimidating. But he kind of was getting annoyed by my answers. Fair enough.

And he was like, dude, just tell me, like, what do you want? Like, what are you trying to get for yourself? Like, selfishly, what do you want? Why do you want to work here? And I said, even then, I was like, the reason I want to work here is because you guys have something cool going. It's clearly working.

And I don't know how to do something like that yet. I keep trying and I'm not figuring it out, but I know a lot of stuff that you need and I just need to figure out for myself, like, how to do the thing you're actually doing at a high level so I can do that on my own. He's like, okay, cool. So you want to like put some time in and then eventually do your own thing? I was like, yeah, that's the idea. And so I was probably left about 15, 18 months in and what was happening at the time is they had hired actually one of our clients as the CEO.

So Tucker replaced himself as CEO. I think both of them were maybe starting to step back, maybe Zach a little bit less. I don't really know. And what was happening is we were going from a team initially of like 4 of us to maybe 13, 14, 15. And so my marketing and book marketing role was getting split into 3 different roles. One-third of what I did would be what I'd have to do all the time.

So it was like either pick one of those 3 or maybe this isn't the place for you anymore. And I think I basically got managed out, but I wasn't aware that's what was happening at the time. Now I understand that's kind of what was happening with the, the CEO. So if I hadn't decided to leave, I probably would have left regardless. But yeah, that's my perspective is I felt like I'd watched us grow from maybe $200,000 in revenue to maybe $2 or $2.5 million. I'd launched 30, 40 books for authors.

I'd seen like processes built and scale and I was like, you know what, I think, I think I could probably do something like this for Epic. So why don't I just like try to do it? And that was, that was the impetus to leave.

[28:24] Paul: Yeah. And when you, when you left, what was the focus? Was it around the YouTube channel and blog at the time?

[28:33] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah.

[28:33] Paul: Where were you thinking about investing your energy?

[28:36] Kevin Espiritu: The truth is Epic had existed for a few years, but it was always a hobby. And I think it was making $400 or $500 a month when I quit. So clearly it wouldn't make, make me well off or even enough to live off of. So what I thought I would do is genuinely I thought I would farm for a living. So I thought I would be farming in people's front yards, harvesting the produce, selling it to markets and restaurants and make like $5,000 a month or something doing that. And then maybe I could scale that to like different locales.

And then I did some, some other like farming ideas, but I was like, you know what, why don't I just try to make the blog— it's a going concern, so why don't I try to make it make $3,000 a month so it pays the bills so that I can just do any of these other ideas for free, right? What happened is that it started working really quick. Like it took maybe 2 months to get it to $2,000 or $3,000. It took another 2 months to get it to $5,000 or $6,000. And I was like, Okay, why don't I just keep, keep going on this and not do the actual farm for a living thing, just kind of teach and show what I'm doing. And yeah, it started with blog.

So blog was probably the primary focus for the next year and a half at least. And then YouTube started to kick in and then product and then, you know, you sort of keep adding.

[29:54] Paul: Yeah. And you, you experienced —like the pandemic was probably a pretty interesting experience for you because similar things sort of happened with me. I wrote about our relationship to work and then the pandemic happened and suddenly there was this explosion of people that wanted to talk to me about their relationship to work. Similar, everyone was baking sourdough bread and suddenly starting a garden. How early did you realize, oh wow, this is something that's happening and I'm going to be leaning into this?

[30:31] Kevin Espiritu: I would say I remember it was the very end of January 2020 when I did the— I sort of did like the rough math on like virology stuff. And I was like, wait, if this is spreading like the way it seems like it is and, you know, we didn't know— we didn't know back then. I was like, this could actually be like a really bad virus. And so I didn't play out the like biology-esque second to third order effects of, you know, perfectly predicting everything that would happen. But I was sort of concerned at that time for sure. And then it took about another 6 weeks and then we— I think the lockdown order came in somewhere around early March.

And this almost the second that happened, I woke up and our subscribers were going up by like 10,000 a day. And I think I had 220,000 at the time. And so I didn't— I never really considered myself a YouTuber. I just published when I published, and I was working on the blog and working on a bunch of other things, kind of desperately focused. And I remember texting my editor and I said, we're going to stick to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 3, 3 videos a week. And I told my writer, I was like, we're doing 30 articles a month, so we're doing one a day.

The podcast fired up. A little bit more aggressively. I was like, let's just go, like, let's just make these videos. Everyone wants to learn about it. Like, let's do it. And I think that year the platforms grew like 3 or 4x or something like that, something crazy.

And I remember thinking at the time, I was like, man, I don't know if it'll ever be like this again, so you better cherish it while it's here, you know? And to some degree that was true. And in another way, it's, it's bigger than it ever it ever was back then.

[32:12] Paul: Yeah. What, what was that like? I'm curious if you see parallels with sort of how your relationship was to poker and video games and then sort of doing the content thing at the similar time. How was it different?

[32:27] Kevin Espiritu: How was it the same? I think to me it feels pretty different and to me it feels better suited to me. I don't think I'm much of a a 1v1 or 1vmany direct competitor type personality, although I could do well enough at least. I think what, where it's different is it's a, it's a sort of complex system that has all these different variables and components to it that if you know how to create, you know, you know how to create like a multiplicative effect to grow an audience of people that, that like what you're putting out. And enjoy it and you can make a living doing that. And so almost in the same way a garden is like that, a digital ecosystem is very similar, right?

Like, you know, in a garden you have plants, you have pollinators, you have the soil, you have the life within the soil, you have the sunlight and the wind and the rain. And you could think you could map that in a sense to like the different platforms or the different ways you could create on a particular platform and how you connect all those different things together. Like, you know, one thing in video might be short-form video, obviously really popular right now. So you could be making very high-reach short-form concepts that aren't really super in-depth, but they hook someone into, hey, maybe I would like to try gardening. And then they go, what's this guy about? Then they go to the YouTube and they go, oh, he's not just this like clown who makes viral videos.

There's a 45-minute video on how to grow this exact plant. Oh, I'm really in, you know, And so I guess in that way it like suited my brain better than, than the more competitive realm of poker or, or video games.

[34:05] Paul: Yeah, it has an interesting offline long game too, right? Because like the content, if you're just doing content, can be super short-term and just like what works, what's the response? But the reality of gardening is sometimes you're planting stuff that's not going to grow for months. So you sort of embed that longer-term perspective. Do you think that's been a key thing in helping you have a healthy relationship with it?

[34:32] Kevin Espiritu: I think, yeah, I mean, I think so because when I look at other creators and someone just wants to talk like content with me, which I love, their minds are sort of jumbled on what's important and what's not. And so if you think about like, think about an annual vegetable versus a perennial vegetable, like maybe a, you know, a Satsuma orange tree that's gonna pay you off for many, many years. Versus just growing a head of lettuce in 35 days and then you have to grow another one. When you think about like content, it's very similar, like a blog. If you can rank via Google, you have a long-term asset or call it a perennial content asset. You could, you could call it that.

Versus if you're just one of these short-form creators who has to keep creating clapper videos and then you can't monetize the back end of it, it's sort of like you're just a dancing monkey on the internet and you're not really actually getting compensated for it very much. And so you know, there's times where we put out videos. I remember I put a video on how to grow corn from seed to harvest. So I grew it from seed to harvest, which takes months, filmed all the process, and then put it out in July, which is a really bad time because you can't grow corn starting in July. You have to grow it starting months before that. So the video came out and on YouTube it got a 10 out of 10, which means it's the worst video of the last 10.

And it was a very, it was very much below even 9. And so I was like, oh my God, man, like I put so much time into this video and I was like, but it's a search-focused concept. Like people are going to want to know how to grow corn in the future. So they'll type that in Google. And when spring comes around, it'll probably do well. And that's what happens.

I think it's like 700,000 views now after 2 seasons. So sometimes it's like totally counter to YouTube, normal YouTube strategy, but I'll put something out and it just completely tanks now. And I go, okay, dude, I would just chill cuz it'll do well in spring.

[36:27] Paul: That's so cool. So you're like, your whole strategy is so grounded in the actual, like basically laws of nature. Um, and so if you're seeing people give like YouTube advice, you're probably like, okay, this is not going to help me.

[36:45] Kevin Espiritu: Not for me at least. Right. Uh, there's other channels, like you have to do it that way. Like if you look at some of those big creators that are commentary creators, like they don't make a video on that thing, it's done, right?

[36:56] Paul: Yeah, but it's much more sustainable. And another thing I heard you talk about, which was really cool, which was— I'm going to get this wrong, but the planters, that's the, the thing you invested in during the pandemic. You were sort of saying like, I don't actually want to do anything unless I'm completely being pulled by it. Right? You know, people want it. You know, there's actually an opportunity there, which is very counter to like how like big companies operate, which luckily you haven't had to experience and sort of deprogram from.

But yeah, yeah. All right. We come up with the product, then we come up with the marketing plan, then we figure out and— but you're just in the flow of like, where am I being pulled? How can I react to that?

[37:43] Kevin Espiritu: I think I'm in a transitionary field of that because as we've grown, you sort of have to try and find stuff like that instead of let it find you because you have a growth goal and you're trying to hit it. And so there's a little bit of that that comes into it. But I do try to mostly listen to that for, for some of these ideas. The problem sometimes is like you're— you might get pulled by a little small idea that, that doesn't necessarily move the corporate needle, but it moves a subset of the audience. Like I might think of plant tags. Like, I really think there should be a more durable metallic, like stamped plant tag that you can just wipe clean and use over and over and over and over again.

But, you know, how many plant tags would I have to sell to move a revenue needle? Quite a few. That being said, I think it's still really cool. So we're still going to do it. But at the same time, we're, we're also doing a top-down approach sometimes and saying, okay, well, what markets should we play in that we're not? And it's more of that you know, corporate strategy type of logic or like more of like an MBA type of logic, which takes some getting used to.

And obviously it works to some degree, uh, but I'm always gonna be more excited by like, what is the audience shouting at me to do? And I just have to listen to succeed. Yeah.

[38:57] Paul: And how has that recent evolution gone? I know you've taken some investment, uh, which definitely makes sense. I mean, just running a product-based business is, very challenging just from like the working capital perspective and things like that. But how has that transition gone and what have been some of the challenges or things where you're like, oh wow, I didn't even realize the opportunities here. I sort of underestimated things.

[39:26] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I would say when, when we did that deal, I was running with myself my garden assistant Jacques, who was also doubling as our warehouse manager, my EA, who was also customer service, Chris, and then an editor, Josh, and then Lauren on our team was my first hire ever, who's our lead writer. And they're all still here today. And we did, I think in 2021, some, somewhere in the $7.3-ish million range. And that was $0 paid ad spend, you know, just very weird, sort of an anomalous direct-to-consumer style business. And then we raised some, some money and you hire off of that. I think the challenge is like when you go from being this ragtag org, like you against the world to like, no, there's structure here.

There's levels of management. There's processes. You can't just kind of fire things off to people all the time because, you know, there's, there's, they have a manager and you maybe you should talk to them first. You know what I mean? So yeah, I think getting used to a structure in general, not necessarily even like a company or corporate, like really like button-down structure, but just a structure in general instead of just kind of running and gunning it has been a challenge. And then just the organization of all of those people and things, especially when you're growing fast or you're trying to grow fast, then people are coming in.

They need to get familiar with the company and how we do things or You know, we purchased a seed company a year and a half ago, and that was a founder-led 30-year company. So you're bringing along a lot of team members and it's just a different culture. It's not bad or good. It's just these are different human beings who've lived in a different work culture. So you have to thoughtfully figure out, okay, how do we become one team? So there's just a lot of things like that, man, that I just could never have predicted.

[41:22] Paul: Yeah. And looking back, are there things you're like, oh, wow, like, I wish I had done this earlier?

[41:30] Kevin Espiritu: I think, man, it's really difficult because sometimes you think I should have hired more senior earlier and then let that person build a team. And then sometimes you go, well, if that hire is incorrect, then the team de facto is incorrect underneath them, right? Not saying that happened at Epic or anything, but there's— it's like the sequencing of events is really difficult. I used to always say in the earlier days before raising any money, Knowing what to do isn't actually that difficult because it's kind of obvious. Like if you need to sell more, if you need to cut costs, like it's sort of all right there, but it's the order and sequencing of which you do those things. I think that's more important.

And that's what I wish I could have retroactively fixed in the last couple years. It's just sequencing and priorities is the biggest problem.

[42:22] Paul: Yeah. What do you think you put ahead of things? Like, did you put the content ahead of other things? Because you enjoyed the content the most? That's often what I see with creators.

[42:34] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, I mean, I'm always gonna, I'm always gonna like the content, right? That's just my natural state. I think, yes, I mean, I think we could have probably spent a little bit more money, for example, on paid advertising, given that most D2C companies spend 30% of their revenue sometimes on that. And we don't spend, we didn't spend any, right? So we could have competed there a little bit more effectively. I think it's tempting when you raise and you have a lot of people, they will all want to help.

There's so many things you could do, right? You could create a course or a membership or this or that. But it's like honing back down on the core, like what are the things that move the needle for us product-wise, content-wise? Are they as good as they can humanly be before we start to expand? Like, let's say your product line. And then if you were to expand your product line, let's say for us, we sell raised beds and now we sell seeds and we sell some seed trays.

So you can see how that they all fit. Like you need something to grow in. If you want to grow from seed, you need seeds. If you are growing seeds, you need a tray to put them in. But we have, we've launched, you know, some things where you go, how does that fit with the ecosystem? How does that fit with the world?

It's like too left field, you know? And so it's intelligently expanding. In a thoughtful way that, you know, we got ahead of ourselves sometimes and sometimes we hit it out of the park.

[43:54] Paul: If someone hasn't seen your videos, I think they might be listening to this and thinking, okay, seeds, planters, plants, whatever. But I remember one of the first videos of yours I watched, which was taking ginger and planting it and growing ginger. And it was like, it was so down to earth and so simple. I was like, First of all, I had no idea you could grow ginger from ginger.

[44:20] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. That's our, that's our biggest video still. Took me an hour and a half to film and edit.

[44:25] Paul: Yeah. That was an hour and a half to film and edit? Yeah.

[44:30] Kevin Espiritu: That was one of the first ones. I think, I bet if you look at the date, it's in March of 2020 or maybe April. And yeah, I was like, you know what, what's like the easiest thing I could get someone interested in gardening? And it's, it's novel, right? That you could just go to the grocery store and grow ginger. And ginger is a very popular plant globally.

So I went to the grocery store, grabbed some and just put it in a pot and show people how to grow it. And I think that's at like 10 or 11 million views now. Yeah.

[44:54] Paul: 10 million views. Yeah. That's awesome though. But you sort of had that taste for like how to approach things and communicate these things. Like, talk to me a little bit about that because That is such a strong competitive advantage in a world of like, when I think of gardening, I think of like Better Housekeeping magazine or like, or like stuff like that that is like so polished and like I would never think I would be interested in it because there's no on-ramp for someone like me.

[45:25] Kevin Espiritu: That's what it was like for me though. If you think early on, like I didn't grow up doing it. And so when I started doing it in my early 20s, I was like, Yo, what is it all these, what do all these words mean? Like, I don't know what any of this terminology is. And you're right. Like the average person that was educating in gardening was much, much older than me, different generation, different terminology.

They liked to grow hydrangeas. I just wanted to grow a cucumber and now I like hydrangeas, but it took me time to get into that, you know? And, and so I was like, okay, maybe I should just start this blog and like translate this into normal person English so other people can understand it. And so it was the same idea on video. Like if you watch, like we, we generally don't use horticultural terms, or if we do, we'll try to analogize them immediately. So we'll say like, oh, you know, this is a cotyledon.

Basically it just means it's the first seed that comes out, the first leaf that comes out of the seed. Right. And so people will get the term and they'll go, oh yeah. Okay. If I hear that, it just means the first First Leaves to try to unfancy the craft. And I think, I hope, I mean, I think that's what's helped us do well.

Yeah.

[46:32] Paul: And I think a lot of people, when they're thinking about sharing stuff online or communicating ideas, they look at other people already doing what they're doing and are like, there's no space, this is already covered. But I think there's enormous space for basically communicating ideas to people like you in it who either aren't doing the thing, probably some of your audience, or are and just like haven't been communicated to in the right way. So how do you think about like that sort of cultivating of taste and communicating in a specific way?

[47:11] Kevin Espiritu: I mean, I don't know that I have a really good systemized answer for that, except for that when you write, you have to structure your thinking, right? So, you know, 500, 600 blog posts deep on how to grow plants and how to deal with this pest and how to do this. There is a way that article makes the most sense, especially when it's so informational. It's not like an essay, you know? And so, you know, if you're doing a how to prune tomatoes, you'll say, okay, well, tell me why I need to tell me What types of tomatoes exist? Do you have to prune them all the same way?

Okay, how do you prune each one? Where and why and when and how and all that sort of stuff. And so then when you translate that into video, it's— you can't just give the information because then you're just reciting facts. And so you have to weave in, you know, the personality or a story or good visual, etc. And so I think you're just sort of layering on a base structure of information. And I think that's where a lot of people, especially in the educational space, can go wrong, or they'll wonder, they're like, why am I not getting these views?

Or why am I not growing? And if you watch the content, there's a million things that could be wrong with it. But I mean, a lot of the time it's like dryly presented, poorly structured information, and your brain just completely turns off and you're like, okay, I'll just go somewhere else. You know? So I don't have a great answer, but that's, that's one of them.

[48:37] Paul: No, I think that is the answer, right? You're communicating in ways you actually want to communicate and that you probably want to read yourself. And then just sort of like the A/B testing it from blog posts, you start to develop, okay, I can write in this way and it sort of works, so let's keep going with it. How are you thinking about— I know you're in this sort of a transition of going from Kevin as Epic Gardening to potentially a cast of characters as Epic Gardening. What are some of the role models? I know I mentioned like Bill Simmons does this really well with sports, but what are some of the models and sort of playbooks for how you're thinking about doing this?

[49:23] Kevin Espiritu: I think there's a few. One weirdly would be something like an ESPN. I'm not really a sports guy at all, But if you think about what they do, you know, when, when golf is being covered on like a main show, the golf dude is always commentary. He's always coming in and feeding on that show. And so if you think about create it like create like a fictional network about gardening or just say it's Epic, like call, call our main channel the channel on Instagram, on, on YouTube, on TikTok, etc. That's our channel.

And then we have these, we have hosts of which I've, I've always been the main host. But even before raising any capital, my initial garden assistant, I sort of put him on the channel and said, hey, you know, Jacques here helping out and we film funny moments or whatever. And then he started to build familiarity with the audience and then they wanted to hear what Jacques had to say about a certain thing or Jacques knew more than me about a certain thing. So I said, Jacques, why don't you tell them, you know, And so you cultivate that and you kind of have to like boil the frog. You can't just hard pivot because the audience can be like, yo, I didn't sign up for Jacques. I don't know who this guy is, you know?

So what we've been doing is slowly adding in faces and talent and seeing how the audience reacts and responds. And if they don't respond well, it doesn't mean that person's like a bad talent or anything. It's just it wasn't hitting for our particular audience. And then just watching and saying like, oh wow, people really like this creator. You know, we just, we just brought on someone to do like herbal gardens and sabs and tinctures and stuff. And I'm just never going to be the guy that knows that much about that compared to this creator Anna that we're testing out.

And so that's kind of how I think about it. If you think about the digital world, I think Barstool Sports is probably the best example to have ever done it. But then there's, there's like Babish. If you think about Binging with Babish, classic cooking channel that blew off pretty much off the back of Reddit, I would say. And now he's rebranded to Babish Culinary Universe and he's got at least 2 other hosts that are on the channel, if not more. And so there's a lot of different ways to do it, but that's kind of the direction I want to go.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

[51:33] Paul: I think I feel like this is going to be a big trend because so many people have built things around themselves. I sort of have built 2 separate channels and they're so centered around me and I have this consulting skills channel and I'm sort of going through the process of, well, how do I unpair this from myself? And it's, it's not a straightforward thing to do. So no, I'm sure you're growing.

[51:59] Kevin Espiritu: Probably the hardest problem we're going to see in the next 4, 3 or 4 years is people trying and failing or succeeding. Because the truth is, like, for myself as, as the owner of the business, but also especially if you bring on an investor, they're, they're terrified of if you get killed or whatever, right? I mean, right, you get bored. I mean, that could happen. And so the idea is you need to build something that's greater than yourself. And when you bring a team on too, you can't have dozens of people, you know, living and dying off the fact that you don't want to do something anymore or you're not as good as you once were or whatever the case might be.

So there's no other way. I mean, you see this trend of these YouTubers quitting now, like MatPat, I think is a really good example. He has 4 channels, right? One of the most legendary YouTubers ever. And what he's doing is he's giving the channels— I don't think in a true ownership perspective, but I could be wrong— but he's letting his lead writers of each channel become the new hosts. And he's like, this is the next generation, because what else is he going to do?

He's chained to it for life at the cadence he set in the early days. Unless he does something like that, he has no choice.

[53:05] Paul: Yeah, it's fascinating to watch. It's still so early with all this internet stuff and Like every week I'm learning something new. And the big challenge of this internet stuff, I think, is one is you do need to pay attention to what other people are doing because that's how you learn about different opportunities and different ways of doing things. But also, you should probably ignore 90% of what other people are doing because you don't have a similar wiring as them. You don't have the same competitive advantage. And it almost seems like you, you're set up really well to handle that one, because gardening is different in the real world and you have some of the experience from doing other things like poker that you sort of got caught up, caught up in and also knew how to leave.

Mm-hmm.

[53:59] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. I mean, I think it's funny when you look at the people who played poker back in that day that I would still keep in touch with, like, Every single one is doing some fascinating, weird thing and succeeding. Something about that way of thinking, I think, trains you well for the real world. It helps you stay grounded on like what's reality and how to act in it. So, you know, there's a guy I know, very successful e-commerce brand. Another one's doing VR gaming.

You know, another one's a real estate guy. Like they're all doing something very fascinating and they've all cracked how to do that well. So something about the poker training is extensible to other many different fields.

[54:39] Paul: My gut tells me it's something around probabilistic thinking. I think, I think, I think our economy, economy is sort of shifting from this deterministic world to this probabilistic world. And a lot of what I write about is our relationship to work. And I think that shift is very disorienting for people who are used to like, okay, the game is work hard, follow path X, and that just doesn't deliver the same rewards in the same expected way as before. And if you don't have a probabilistic mindset, it's just totally disorienting. But if you do have that probabilistic mindset, you're seeing everything you do is sort of like, okay, there's a range of outcomes.

Some may happen, some may not.

[55:25] Kevin Espiritu: You know, that's actually— I think I'm so steeped in the probabilistic way from poker 'Cause that's all it is, right? It's, if we're playing a poker hand and I know I have, let's say, ace-king offsuit and we're playing a hand out, you can solve all of the probability. You don't need to know someone else's hand at all. You use combinatoric math and you go, okay, well, is this percent chance they have hands that beat me? This percent chance they don't based on the way they play. That's where you get into some of the fuzziness.

You go, based on the way they act, I'm shifting those probabilities and the weightings of those groupings of hands in a certain, in a certain way. And you know, like, you know, if you have pocket aces, you know you have the best hand preflop, and you also know that against any hand you'll lose 1 out of 5 times. So you'd always put all your money in the pot, and you know you'd lose that 1 out of 5 times. So if you think about that in the real world, it's, it's almost like the way I've always thought about it, I guess, is in relation to work, is like, do things that put you in a better probabilistic upside stream. If you want to call it that. And then just don't really worry if the exact thing you do hits that stream.

Like, if you stack enough of those actions up, it's like basically inevitable. It's like a limit converging on 100% certainty that you would— you'll get something that you want. And that's the way I've always sort of thought about it.

[56:45] Paul: It's, it's sort of a practice in non-attachment, right? Because you're not obsessed with the ace-king doesn't have to pay off, right?

[56:54] Kevin Espiritu: So at least not that moment, right?

[56:58] Paul: And therefore, if you're doing a video on the corn, it doesn't have to pay off now, but it's a bet. You have some probability, and then a year later you can be like, okay, yeah, that paid off, I was right.

[57:09] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. And then if you don't— like, we've had some tankers that never, never paid off— you go, okay, well, I've now gained knowledge on how to not succeed, so I'll just make sure I don't do those things in the future. And then you've reframed that as a win as well. So there's a lot of ways to look at it. I think it's interesting, dude, that you say it that way, because one of the hardest things I think to teach is the probabilistic thinking, but with the combination of understanding of leveraged action. So if you do, if you get both of those, you're like primed for the internet age.

Because you can build a system that is a high probability upside system that also happens to be high leverage if it wins. And so then you're like, okay, well, it's, it's, it's almost guaranteed that you do well.

[57:56] Paul: Yeah, it's— I think George Mack wrote something. It was like, there's people that under— that don't understand the internet, and then there's people that understand the internet but still underestimate the power of the internet. Yeah, it's like, that's true. You just know you underestimate it. Um, and it's, I've been thinking about this a lot and it, it can sort of screw you up too. Like what happened to me is Ali Abdaal shared a standalone video on my book and it probably led to about 10,000 sales and it amped up my book in the Amazon algorithm, which led to like a permanent increase in sales.

And so then it's like, well, what should I spend all my time doing, right? If should I spend all my time just trying to reach out to the, the biggest creators for them to do a standalone video on my book, right? Like, should I spend the next 5 years of my life trying to get Tim Ferriss to do an episode on my book or MrBeast to talk about my book? Perhaps, yes. But also, if I play that out at the same time, that might be a way of setting up my life that destroys my life. Right.

So, yeah, I still need to commit to an actual game I want to play on like a day-to-day and week-to-week basis while also being aware of, okay, what are the things I could like lean into, but also still in a genuine way. It's, it's a hard thing to do, right? I'm sure you have some of those opportunities as well. As you get bigger, you're probably thinking, okay, I have 3 million on my channel. How do I get to 30 million? Right.

And the bets you need to make are even bigger. Mm-hmm.

[59:44] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah. No, it's interesting you say that about the Ali Abdaal coverage because you might— I tend to take this view. I'm curious what you think of if you have to try super hard to get someone to cover it, it won't do as well when they do because the act of you trying so hard to get it means it probably wasn't good enough for them to actually want to do it on their own. And so perhaps the game, it seems like the one you've played, and you tell me if, if I'm wrong, is you just made a book. The game you played was making the book so worthy of being covered that it did get covered, right? Um, and, and that's the, the externality event is that Ali Abdaal finally did find it, right?

[01:00:26] Paul: Yeah, so I probably take this almost to too much of an extreme of not asking for help. I think I've sort of realized in the past couple of years I have a bit of a fear of asking people to help me. Like, I literally have still not asked anyone to share my book or review it in 2 years. But for me, that's sort of like a philosophically fun game to play, and I can sort of write about the experience of doing that. So it sort of all feeds to what I'm doing. Um, but the way I leaned into that is he supported my presale.

He had been reading my newsletter for years and supported me on Gumroad. He— I think he put in like $50 for the presale. So I was like, that was the biggest support. I'm like, I emailed him, I'm like, can I send you a bunch of books? I sent 25 books to his office. And so what happened is like, I love sharing my book, and a bunch of his team basically all read the book and liked it.

And so it happened to be this genuine thing. But I still play with this, like, should I lean into it 0% or like, should, should I actually lean into it like 5%? And so my solution I've come up with is I schedule ambitious afternoons every quarter now. And this is when I send the scary emails asking for help.

[01:01:54] Kevin Espiritu: I think it's a good idea because going zero, you're fully relying on the sort of chaos events to happen, you know, but going to 5, like sending the book out, like I just launched a book this month. It's the third one. And I'm, I'm kind of like you with my books. I'm kind of like, hey, if they do well, people will tell people and then people will buy the books. Like my first one, Continues to sell, right? And this time I'm actually going to take the review copies I have and actually send them to people instead of not like I mostly just don't.

And so I'm going to write them out to people we've worked with. Some are prominent, some are, some are not, and just send them out and see what happens. Because that's, that's, that's the 10% event. Like you've at least created an event in the world where someone could react positively to instead of just kind of hoping it happens.

[01:02:45] Paul: Well, and I think that's the key, right? You're saying you're just sending it to people who you think would find it valuable. You're not saying I'm only sending it to top people. Yeah. Yeah. People, people feel that when it happens.

Right. And you've built these genuine relationships over the years and you're just going to actually send it to people you've actually already built a relationship with.

[01:03:07] Kevin Espiritu: It's kind of like looking at that as the pocket aces, right? Like, hey, this is a strong strategy. but it won't work. And it's probably way more than 20% of the time. In this case, I'll send 100 books out and maybe 7 people will do something about it. And of those 7, maybe 2 will have a meaningful impact.

Um, but I don't care about any individual one that much. And in the net, I'm happy that I gave 100 people I had a relationship with a book. So if you frame the win as just giving the books out in the first place thoughtfully, and you let the chips fall where they may, then to me, that's— I always like to have like, what's my baseline win? And if my baseline win is something I can fully control, then I'm good.

[01:03:47] Paul: Yeah. And that's— so you do it— when does the new book come out?

[01:03:52] Kevin Espiritu: It's out. Oh, it's out.

[01:03:54] Paul: Yeah. All right. I'm going to link to that. And you previously had a self-published book as well. And so you have the YouTube channel, you have the products. How do you think about the ecosystem?

Like, if you have a picture of like the, the quote unquote game you're playing, does it start with the YouTube channel? Um, like what does the map of that look like?

[01:04:17] Kevin Espiritu: It probably starts with the YouTube channel and the blog are probably both at the top because those are the really— you might say Pinterest, but blog and YouTube are the only evergreen traffic sources, um, because people type in search boxes there. They don't type in search boxes really anywhere else anymore, right? So that's where you're going to get new folks. You might call paid, paid advertising another way of doing that, but that's more expensive. So besides, after that, it's the content that generates all of the sort of chaotic positive, you know, sending to a friend, sharing, emailing, whatever. The short-form stuff, specifically video, is what algorithmically brings in a new audience that wouldn't be searching but happens to find it because the content actually scales.

And then all of that, I want people to connect to the craft because like what we're trying to do is teach you how to grow. And so if you, if you land on our YouTube or use our blog as a resource and then trust us enough to say, I wonder what I should be getting, like, should I get this soil? Should I get that soil? Should I get this? Should I get that? Well, it so happens that we do have those for sale and that's where, um, we hope you, you would support us by buying some of that stuff.

But I think where the creator markets tend to go wrong is they think that just because the trust relationship is built, that the products don't have to actually be meaningfully better. And I go, okay, technically that's true because the parasocial relationship is very strong. And, you know, you see people sell creator merch like crazy and it's just print-on-demand merch. Like there's nothing special about it. So clearly that's true. But why would you not go the extra mile and have a functionally better product?

That people love to buy from you, you know, like our seed, our seeds, our trays and stuff. They're actually better than what else is out there, I believe. And so it's like, okay, why not win twice by actually making a, you know, pretending like you're just a commerce company, you know, without the audience?

[01:06:10] Paul: Well, you're sort of appearing in people's flow of life, right? They're over their friend's house. They see these trays and you come up in the conversation in an authentic, organic way. I'm sort of seeing this with the book, even like people are recommending it to people and then they're so grateful that their friend recommended it to them that they're like, who, who is this dude?

[01:06:35] Kevin Espiritu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's when, it's when the curiosity happens, like, wait, wait, wait, what's going on with this guy? And then they dive in. It takes a while sometimes. Yeah, it's a very—

[01:06:46] Paul: I think all of this is a long game and I think it's very cool to learn a little bit more about how you're thinking about this. And I think it's a very genuine long game. It is like I would not bet against a lot of the stuff you're doing. It's, it's just very strong. And I love the philosophical undergirding of it.

[01:07:10] Kevin Espiritu: Thanks, man. I appreciate that.

[01:07:12] Paul: Likewise. What, what is next for you? Like, what, what are some of the challenges and things you're working on over the next couple of years?

[01:07:23] Kevin Espiritu: The real challenge, I think, is going to be proving ourselves at the next phase. Can I build beloved educators and talents that are talking about a wide range of things that are in our world? Can I do that? And can I pair that with meaningfully better products for those people in our audience that they actually know and love and like to receive? And ideally are also good for, you know, we're not, we're trying to create wasteful things, right? So can I do those two things and can we expand through different channels such that, you know, if you don't have to know about Epic to have an interface with our product, can we, you know, be in different commercial marketplaces that you can actually find us?

Because that's, that's a weaker point for us right now. So it's kind of proving out the evolution of, of the company on the content side and the commerce side. Amazing.

[01:08:15] Paul: Do you have any path role models that inspire you or help you think about your path?

[01:08:19] Kevin Espiritu: I mean, wouldn't everyone of our generation say Tim Ferriss to some degree? I mean, everyone's got to have Tim on that list. I think— who's another interesting guy? Maybe Peter Levels. I followed him and chatted with him a bit, like maybe even 6 years ago, I think, 6, 7 years ago. But he's, he's sort of built that for himself.

And I mean, your stuff is very, very fascinating to me. I was telling my girlfriend yesterday that, like, I, for some reason, I have not read the book yet and I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm like afraid it'll take me off the current path or something. But I like the, I like the, like, conversation you seem to have started amongst all these, like, internet achievers, you know? And I think we're all experiencing some level of what, what's in that book. Once I read it, I'll be able to confirm that.

[01:09:15] Paul: Yeah, I think what you'd find is just that you're already living a lot of the things I'm talking about. So I'd be curious if you ever do read it. No expectations. But yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Tim and Peter too, because those are sort of two big role models for me because they've constantly reinvented and also have a very independent path. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:09:40] Kevin Espiritu: If you look at what Tim could have done, you know, he could have become one of those weirdo guru types like a Grant Cardone or something, and he just didn't. And there's way more money than what he does now.

[01:09:52] Paul: Or even the investing, like he could have just kept going as a venture capitalist, angel investor. Yeah. I think when I saw him do that originally, I was like, ah, that's easy. He has a lot of money now. But I think now being on my own path, I'm like, wow, that's really hard to do, to step away from that and actually just say, I'm gonna start something new.

[01:10:15] Kevin Espiritu: Even Tucker, my old boss, I mean, from a blogger to an author and made a movie to a founder of a company, he did a bunch of angel investing and I think he quit roughly around the same time that, that Tim did. Tim maybe a little bit earlier. And now he's like a homesteader rancher, you know? And so like there's like 4 paths and you could play any of those paths out to, I guess, like the ad nauseam level where no one's really interested anymore. And they, they all decided not to do that. So props on that.

Beautiful.

[01:10:47] Paul: So maybe you can give my audience a couple of things. One, where to find you. But what are, what are some of the best on-ramps to get into gardening? Would you send them the ginger video, or do you have a couple other suggestions?

[01:11:05] Kevin Espiritu: I would say, yeah, I mean, the YouTube channel is probably the best. And I would just say, type in the search box on the channel, whatever plant you want to eat the most, and we probably have something on that because wanting to eat it is a good enough reason to want to keep it alive, not just like what's easy to grow. So if you don't like radishes, they might be easy, but you don't care about them. So why, why are you going to care if you grow them or not? As far as like where to find Epic, it's just Epic Gardening everywhere. And as far as where to find me, Twitter, I think is probably my most active.

And then I just started posting on my personal YouTube channel more, which is just my name, Kevin Espiritu.