Bonsaify Your Life w/ Eric Schrader - Ep 15

Welcome back to the Bonsai Builders Podcast. I'm your host, Addison Golembos. Today we're talking to a guest who epitomizes the word "builder" in our show's title. He didn't just transition from hobbyist to professional, he built an entire ecosystem around his passion. My guest is Eric Schrader, the force behind BonsaiFI.com. He runs a massive grow operation, teaches countless classes, and is the organizer behind one of the premier events in North America, the Pacific Bonsai Expo. We're going to dive into the sheer drive it takes to generate so much material, the reality of turning your obsession into a business, and where he sees the future of American Bonsai Exhibitions heading. Eric, thanks so much for taking the time. My pleasure. So, for most of the guests that come on, I'd like to start with just having them give a kind of a short synopsis of their Bonsai journey to date, how they started any kind of pitfalls they felt like they ran into, and any things that they think helped accelerate them to get to where they're at today. Well, I started in in one or two thousand and two. I was living in an apartment here in San Francisco, I didn't have a lot of space, and thought maybe it would be interesting to grow some Bonsai. I don't need a lot of space for that. Of course, we all know that that's not true, but, yeah, I mean, my parents were both avid gardeners, and so as a kid, I was exposed to a lot of horticulture. I think if there was like a trigger for me getting into Bonsai, it was probably the. I went to the San Francisco Flower Garden Show in 2001, and there was a giant Bonsai Exhibition there. I've said it a few times, but the tree that really hooked me was a coastal redwood that was being exhibited by Tim Kong, and it was sort of just. it struck me that I had thought of Bonsai as sort of just a ship in a bottle miniature trees, and this was the point at which I realized that it was more like plant sculpture, and that was the really important distinction for me in terms of my interest. Interesting. You mentioned ship in a bottle. Do you also have an interest in like miniature dioramas, or like that kind of small scale construction, or something like that, or is that just a. No, it's just an example. I find it. You know, when you're trying to replicate something in miniature, that's a whole different endeavor than using something as a sculptural medium. Yeah, kind of the debate between is Bonsai like a scale representation of a tree, or is it a sculpture, right? Well, I don't know that there's much debate around that, but I think there's, you know, people that might be someone's first impression that it's like, "Oh, we're trying to make this scale representation of a tree." That's definitely what I thought when I was young. Yeah. So, and you learned with Boone, or like, how did you get started in your learning journey of Bonsai? Was it like self-study, or did you instantly join some kind of club, or how did you get started learning? I pretty quickly joined the San Francisco group, Bonsai Society of San Francisco, and attended their monthly meetings, and was exposed to quite a few people have been doing it for a long time. John Boyce, Tim Kong, Steve Zhang was active in the club at the time, and some of those, and Jay goes back that far. Some of those people kind of showed me some stuff. I was impressed by some of the trees that I saw there. And going to shows, I started going to shows pretty much immediately every show that I could find to go to. I would take one day of the weekend, and go over to the show, kind of see what I wanted to see. And it was really interesting to kind of just dive in like that. And then after I saw the BIB show, probably in 2003 or 4, I got really interested in studying with Boone because I felt like the aesthetic that the club was producing was at higher level than what I was seeing in any of the other shows, and at least in the Bay Area. And it turns out that, you know, he was really cultivating a group of people. And so I joined his club. I was studying with him for over 10 years, basically taking a full-day workshop once a month, or maybe 10 months out of the year for that 10-year period. And during that time, I started doing more growing, tried to figure out exactly how to take care of Black Pines, but he was really good at teaching that. So I credit him with a lot of the foundational experience and knowledge that I have to this day. Makes sense. It's interesting that you had such a focus on shows, both in that it seems like that gave you some energy to your passion to, you know, create something like the Pacific Bonsai Expo to give that experience to others. But then also, I feel like the Bay Area is kind of a unique place in that nowhere else in the US would you have been able to see that high of a density of shows. In some areas of the country, you might be lucky to have one show a year, right? Whereas it seems like you were able to take in these shows from different clubs around the Bay. So kind of just speaks to like a testament of how special the Bay Area is in relation to Bonsai. I don't know if you feel similarly or not, or if that's a, there's a, there's a really long history locally. And I think that definitely feeds into the ability for people to find things to inspire them. And that's what I was looking for when I was going to the shows. I had always had an interest in hiking and looking at trees out in nature. And I grew up out in the middle of nowhere. So I was exposed to lots of oak trees and redwoods and whatnot in the North Coastal ranges of Mendocino County. But I was still sort of exploring that that epiphany that I had at the show, which was, you know, there's a real difference between an actual tree and a Bonsai. And I wanted to see the different interpretations of aesthetics that the shows would provide. Very cool. And that was a big focus area of Bons' classes and group. B-I-B, right? It was the actual showing and the aesthetics related to creating trees for exhibition, right? So that probably meshed pretty well with your desires or your interests. Well, it was an express purpose or rule of the club that you had to have two show trees and that you had to be working your trees towards show condition. So I don't think that most clubs are that prescriptive in terms of the, the goal that the organization has. But Boone was very organized and he was very adamant that he was going to put on an annual show and that the annual show was going to be one of the top shows in the United States. And he really did a good job of driving the entire organization in that direction. So I think that Jonas and I both sort of getting our feet wet in that type of environment is really what led us to do some of the things that we've done later in our Bonsai journeys. Makes sense. So kind of speaking of one of the reasons I was really excited to talk to you is because one, we're both San Franciscans. Well, at least living in San Francisco, I don't know if I count as a San Franciscan, but maybe I disqualify myself by even saying that. But the other reason was you have a really broad skill set in that you're able to both grow trees at a really large volume and put, you know, trees in like show quality trees into an exhibition that you've made. And I've often heard from people that growing and refining are two different skill sets. So it must be difficult to be able to do both of those well. So I wanted to get your take on that. Like, do you think they're related to each other? And how much synergy is there between those two things? And how do you balance like having refined one side trees in your collection and running a business growing material as pre-bonsai? Yeah, I think I started off from the very beginning with doing bits of propagation. Even the first year I was doing Bonsai and started batches of 25 oak trees, I think was the first batch that I collected the acorns from a really beautiful giant tree up in Sacramento and started those the same year that my older son was born. And then the following year, I started a batch of black pines and then the year after and so on. So it wasn't very long until I had a yard full of very young trees that I was trying to bring along to become Bonsai. And meanwhile, you know, Boon was always of the express opinion that you should be working on young material because somebody has to make the young material and you should also be working on show trees. And you have to work on both because it's two different skill sets and you won't learn how to grow young trees by working on old trees and you won't learn how to work on old trees by growing young trees. So don't start with just young trees and don't start with just old trees. So I guess it was both Boon's influence as well as just my natural tendency to be a propagator at some level. Yeah, there's definitely certain people or there's a certain archetype of Bonsai enthusiasts that can't help themselves. And I'm included in this. And every time they, you know, trimming a tree or something like that, it's like, oh, these could be cuttings. And then my problem is I have so little space that I end up with, you know, it's fine when the cuttings all fit in a little seedling tray, but then, you know, they each need their own three inch pot and then they each need their own gallon pot. And it's like, okay, well now you've got, you know, hundreds of gallon pots. But you've managed to turn that ability into a superpower in terms of your business, right? So I guess was, what was your reasoning behind getting into Bonsai as a business? Well, I think there are a few different factors, but what I had seen, so I moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years, around 2010 and I moved back, I believe in early 2013. And when I came back, I was struck by, I was teaching classes at BSSF at that point and I became president for four years, I think, or vice president than president for four years. And during that time, I was teaching a lot of beginner's classes and I would go look for material to teach those classes. And after the first couple of classes, I had sort of exhausted all of the actual nurseries that I had available to me within a reasonable drive, or at least the material that they had that was, in my opinion, suitable for beginner's classes. So that opinion may have changed over time, but in any case, it was frustrating to me and not be able to find the type of material that I needed to teach those classes. And I was already growing at a lower level in terms of volume. And that just sort of pushed me in that direction. I think some of the other factors are that, you know, I was working a corporate job that I really didn't enjoy and it had morphed from one semi-artistic thing to not so artistic basically lots of spreadsheets kind of thing. And that was pushing me away from wanting to continue doing that. So it was, I don't know, it was, I want to say that I just had an epiphany one morning. And in fact, I remember it was September 1st of 2019 that I just like turned to my wife and I said, I think I want to go after part of the mass market of bonsai. And that was, we started discussing, you know, how that would work and what we would need in terms of logistics to set up a nursery, which is not a simple thing to do in the Bay Area. There's a lot of restriction in terms of available properties and the weather is not uniform or particularly great. So we sort of made a five-year plan and then took it from there and it's mostly gone to plan. I won't say that it's completely gone to plan. That's awesome. Is your wife very involved with the business as well? Like do you guys co-run the business essentially or how was that structured? For sure. So my wife has a background in marketing and she was working for a tech company, software company, doing marketing for them for about the last 10 years. So she had already been in that position for a number of years when we decided to try to start the business up. Ever since we started, she just, you know, takes on her for free time to do, you know, want to teach me about marketing and to tell me to stop being, you know, reticent to promote myself or to, you know, promote products on a web, on a YouTube video or something like that. You just have to do it if you want to sell things to people that you have to tell them that you want to sell things. So she's been really good at pushing me to be a business person rather than just an artist. And from a nuts and bolts standpoint, you know, we run the, the web store together. She does most of the marketing kind of planning. We have a part-time employee that does the actual execution of posting images and those sorts of things. But she's, she's definitely, and now she's doing a lot of customer service because I don't really like answering the phone. So yeah, tell me about it. My first job out of college I was a technical support rep. So, you know, just eight to five on the phone. It was pretty, it was pretty intense. But we made it, we made it through. So did, did your career in the corporate world kind of help you transition well into running your own business or where there are skills that you, I mean, it seems like there's also a lot of skills that you're, that are complimentary with your life, with your wife that you're learning from her as well. But I'm curious where there are things where you're like, oh yeah, I'm already really good at this. So really well positioned to do this within the bonsai, you know, entrepreneur space because you had kind of had exposures to them during your corporate career. I'm not sure. I mean, my corporate career was intellectual property tracking. It was what I, the thing that attracted me to it was the photography aspect. So I was working for textbook publishers and they needed to replace images that they had licensed for textbooks that were problematic from a licensing perspective. And I, they had actually asked me to shoot replacements. So I have a degree in chemistry and I was working on chemistry books, taking photographs for chemistry books to illustrate the concepts that the students were trying to learn. And that sort of morphed into less photography and more tracking of image rights and whatnot. But I did definitely take the photography skills that I developed during that time, the studio photography skills and apply those to the business because I, you know, it was apparent to me that the prettier the picture is that you see on your screen, the more likely it is that you are going to be interested in buying it. So there was no question in my mind that that was going to be an important skill. I think there's definitely other things, you know, I had another business owner tell me that I was really good at dealing with logistics, just the sort of practical things. He would interact with other business owners who didn't know how to order fertilizer. And I just sort of scratched my head and said, I guess, you know, everybody has their own problems and whatnot. So yeah, I mean, I don't know that the corporate world was super helpful in terms of starting my own business. But my parents also were business owners when I was growing up. So it wasn't like it was completely foreign to me. Okay, cool. What, what you spoke of like challenges that other people had, what would you say would be your like most unexpected challenge throughout the business or what part has been the artist to get right? Well, timing is everything. I think that, you know, our five year plan was to use a piece of property in the East Bay to get things started and then transition to a larger facility. And for a combination of reasons, that's sort of gotten delayed. I bought a larger piece of property in Placerville, California, and I haven't been able to get the government to give me water, a water meter. So, but in terms of challenges, I don't know, the growing plants in containers at volume turns out to be an order of magnitude harder than growing just one or two. And in fact, I just spent pretty much all day today shooting and editing a YouTube video about how to manage juniper scale because when you have a field full of junipers and one of them gets scale and you decide, ah, it's not that big of a problem. I'll just let that go for a little while because I'm busy doing this other thing. Then all of a sudden, every juniper that you have is covered in juniper scale and you really need to figure out how to deal with it. So the scaling of the business has been challenging and I think everything else has been a little bit more simple, though this year I've tackled a separate problem that we could get into if you want, but yeah. Yeah, I'm curious. I mean, I think this is a journey that not like very, very few people have done. I mean, people start businesses, but the combination of starting a business and in the US and having it people, once I related, I think is fairly unique. So I think people would be interested, or I'm certainly interested in hearing about like those challenges that arise because I don't, I mean, there's not a lot of people doing what you're doing at the scale you're doing with the like the kind of modern online approach to doing it. So, you know, I think it's a, I think it's kind of an interesting topic. Yeah. Just starting earlier at the beginning of summer, I had been trying to basically, when we started the business, I had hooked up with a local potter who was able to create a reasonably, not a large volume, but a good volume of pottery that we could use to pot up the trees that we wanted to sell. And a lot of that was, you know, three, four, five, six inch container. So nothing really big, nothing really complicated, but he, he grew up in Japan and his, his wife is from Asia, I believe, too. And they create and sell pottery from a studio in San Jose. And so it was a really good fit for us in terms of business. He was looking for wholesale clients, and I was looking for sources of pottery that were not mass market pottery, you know, like so we see inexpensive containers coming in from China and mass. We see craftspeople in the United States using techniques to create bonsai pots. And there's a fairly large disparity between what you see produced in Asia and what you see produced in the United States in terms of aesthetics. Same thing could be said about the difference between the US and Europe and the difference between Asia and Europe. But the couple that I was working with were really fantastic to work with, but ultimately after about four years, they decided that they didn't want to be making bonsai pots. And so this year, I went a year trying to ignore the problem, and that didn't work out too well. And so at the beginning of the summer, I actually started trying to teach myself how to use CAD software so that I could 3D print bonsai pot molds and then use that as the beginning of the ceramics process. And the hardest parts, I think, you know, things get harder to learn as you get older, I think, but software might be in a special category all by itself where there's just really a lot of just things to memorize. And it took me a couple of months to really get over the hump in terms of this CAD software to the point where I could print the models that I really liked. So essentially long story short, I've been from start to finish reinventing, I'm good at reinventing the wheel. So I've been reinventing the Asian pottery techniques that have been used in Japan and China for creating bonsai pots with the goal of basically creating our own line of ceramics to go with the line of trees, because we haven't been able to we haven't been able to find other people that want to do it in the US so far. Yeah, now gave a really fascinating talk to GSBF, like on the Golden Zooms, right, when he was talking about, you know, we have this underserved market of like well-produced scale out large-scale production pottery in the US, right, where it's all this kind of artisan made at low scales and like with like high quality, but not standardized shapes and things like that. And it's very cool to hear that you're you're moving into that. Is that kind of the the newest area within the business or like what you're most excited about in terms of like a new product? Yeah, probably. I mean, to the to the thing about now for everyone listening, if you haven't seen, I think it's an hour, maybe even two hours long, a video from GSBF on YouTube. Now kind of dropped so much knowledge in that. I think it probably took him 15 years to learn what he summed up in that. And I learned a ton from listening to that, and then I actually went and pestered him in person to fill in a few gaps in terms of what I wanted to. But yeah, there's there's the business has always been aimed at supplying the market with starters and supplying the market with a higher quality product than what we typically see online. But I am not usually trying. So most of the product that I create, I'm not trying to compete with, you know, the higher level, you know, expo level material. That's not the aim of the business. And so the the same thing is true of the pottery line. I don't I don't want to import pots from China because those already exist. And you know, they are what they are, whether you like them or you don't like them. And I don't want to import pots from Japan because most of the kilns in Japan are shut down or at least at a much lower level than they were. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And I just have this bad habit of not delegating things. I tend to I tend to just sort of be like, okay, I can do this and then just take it and run with it. So that's what this latter half of this year anyway has been. Yeah. Now's talk was very inspirational. It made me think of like, is there is there some kind of group that can form that can help nurture, you know, maybe it'd be the pottery industry or the growing industry or various things, right, with like finding people who are passionate about doing this, but maybe lack funds and kind of facilitating angel investments or like connections to people who have the knowledge that would make these people successful. Definitely more of like a longer term type thing, but now I think we need that kind, like we need people that are making pots in the US. We need people that are growing, we definitely need people growing material in the US, right? Or it's just a lot of things that we want to do as a club or as organizations or just as hobbyists in the US are not are just kind of out of reach without those kind of systematized resources. Yeah, actually you asked me what the biggest hurdle earlier was and I didn't think of this one, but I had a long conversation with Dill and Ferrer of Cedar Rose Nursery who's in Placerville and a good friend of mine and he has struggled with the same things that I've struggled with in terms of starting up a nursery and they're just very simple things. I said I couldn't get water to the property that I had. Well, you know, getting a property in order to turn it into a nursery is not a small endeavor. Most people are, you know, they pay their rent, they pay for their car, they pay for their insurance and you don't have a ton of money left over. Luckily, we were able to save up enough to, you know, I'm 50, so it's not like I haven't been working for a while. We were able to save up enough money to be able to buy a small property in the East Bay and then an additional property in Placerville for the business. I would never have done that if I wasn't trying to grow plants in the sun because I wouldn't need it, but Dill and I faced the same problems and that was that just what you said, there's nowhere to do it, right? And there's nobody that you can turn to to say, oh, I just want to put these 10 trees in the ground. Do you have like a irrigation setup or a space where I can do that? You could ask your relatives or whatever, but there's no organization that's encouraging people. And the same thing is true for bonsai pottery, you know, the pottery community in the Bay Area and in the US, it's a very strong community and it has very strong traditions. Unfortunately, those traditions don't really mesh with what a bonsai pot is. It's just different techniques and a different approach than what we're doing or than what I've been doing recently, what now does. And I think you're absolutely right. It would be so valuable in terms of the overall community to have a place where people could go to learn how to create bonsai pots or just a place to go to, you know, they want to run 100 square feet so that they can grow 25 trees or something like that and just, you know, pay a minimal amount per year or something. So those types of things, those big chunks, those big sort of hurdles that you don't really think about until you actually have to go do something or really challenging to overcome. Yeah, there's that like initial startup cost that, you know, there's really no avenues for getting support with that other than, yeah, whatever you do yourself through your own, you know, means. And then you have to be comfortable enough to be able to take that risk to start your own business, right? Or if you have property or family or something like that, that can help out, right? So it just makes it without like an established path to success. It's really, it's difficult to make that leap to even if you have the passion for it. But it's cool that more people are getting into bonsai as a business and we've got events like the Pacific bonsai expo that are helping drive the community forward in my mind. Yeah, I think that, you know, in my discussions with Jonas and in my discussions with Dylan and other people, we've thought of like, oh, now we have a nonprofit that runs a show. Maybe we could make a nonprofit that runs a learning facility and have that, you know, provide that support that I was just talking about, but so far that hasn't happened. So I think what if it's going to happen, I'm going to have to get the properties set up with with municipal water and space. And then I'll have to figure out how to do it after that. Yeah, yeah, hey, we've got time to figure these things out. So it's exciting to hear that people are kind of thinking about this though. And I think it bodes well for the future of bonsai in the U.S., which is cool. So, you know, I want to actually dive in a little bit deeper on the growing side and the business side. So one thing that's kind of challenged me or like challenges me at like the small scale of growing, like stuff in my backyard is there's the shipping hurdle to overcome, right? Like if you're, if you're going to sell material, like you can sell at local shows and maybe on like Facebook or something like that, but assuming that you're selling a lot more volume of material through your online store via shipping than like at local events and things like that. Correct. Yeah, I would say that 95% of the business we do is online. And I do some services for clubs and we sell it a few California events, including the expo. But most of what we're growing is being shipped. Some of that is just locally we're shipping it, but you know, the model is to actually ship things. The relationship of shipping to a growing operation is kind of interesting. I think it drives kind of a, so shipping gets astronomically expensive as the boxes get larger and heavier. And if you think about an 18 inch tall tree, then going into a 24 inch tall box and it weighs 20 pounds and you're shipping it to New York, that's, you know, a hundred or more dollars. Whereas, you know, a six inch tree going into a 12 inch box might only be $20. And so when we were thinking about starting the business, I really did believe that most of the product, the vast majority of the product would be about showing size, you know, something in the six to eight inch range, maybe going up to 12 inches. And that that kind of controls the, at least the cost for the consumer or the cost for shipping to a certain extent. And then there's other tools that you can use. I think that once people get used to shipping trees, it becomes kind of a skill and into itself. I don't think it's particularly difficult, but I, it did tip me a little while to figure out exactly how I was going to do it. And then in terms of cost, there's actually some really good websites out there pirate ship, I think, is maybe one of the more popular ones where you can just get the best discounts that businesses usually get on a one off basis. So we use Shopify on the back end of the business for all the the web interface. And that has built in shipping capabilities as well as email capabilities for the customers to track the shipments and so on. The level of automation that the business employees is actually reasonably high on the customer service and storefront aspects where the back end of the operation is the exact opposite. You know, there's just no real automation other than some irrigation. Yeah, yeah, for twisting up the trees or watering them. Yeah, exactly. I had dreams of a robot that would wire whips for me. Maybe we'll see probably another five years at least. Yeah, that's very interesting. Okay, so that's, I wonder if that will shape the one-sided market in the US. The because we're so big and shipping has to be a component of any scaled-out business. Thus, trees will remain small for like mass adoption. Maybe in relation to Japan where you can more easily like, you know, it's a smaller country, right? And it's like a less surface area. So potentially there's a higher density of trees and maybe larger trees. I don't know. I'm curious to what extent the bonsai industry in Japan relies on shipping versus in the US. Maybe it's the same, but I don't know. That I don't know. In the, I would say that in the US that traditionally, and even now, most bonsai businesses are local or regional. And even with shipping, I can ship plants within California for a fraction of the cost of those that same box going to Louisiana or New York or something like that. So in terms of moving into larger material, it makes more sense for the businesses to be regional. To the point where if I was a little bit more ambitious and I really wanted to be shipping higher volume to the East Coast, I would be trucking truckfuls of plant material or setting up a separate facility on the East Coast to reduce the shipping cost because it is, it does become a significant cost. And if you think about Amazon, they have facilities all over the place where they're shipping and they're using their own. Yeah, there's no distribution centers and stuff. But they don't, I mean, you couldn't warehouse through Amazon plants, right, like living things. Yeah, there's, there's no warehousing services that are available for plants that I know of. And even if they were, I'm not sure that they would be able to deal with the logistics of bonsai. In fact, you know, even within the small operation, I mean, you called it large, but from a, from a business perspective, it's very small. You know, we photograph and post batches of trees to the website on a basically monthly basis. And then we have perennial products that we ship throughout most of the year or starter material and whatnot. And just making sure that that material stays reasonably close in appearance to the photos that are on the website over the course of time is actually one of those things that you just don't expect to be a problem. And then it just ends up being way more of a problem than you think. And that's either a byproduct of me not having gone to school for horticulture. And so I don't know the tricks or whatever or it's just the reality of it. And so we find that like during the middle of summer, all of a sudden, I'm getting emails from customers saying, this tree got dried out and transit. Can you send me a replacement? And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll send you a replacement. And then I, after dealing with the customer problem, I think to myself, well, should I actually be shipping this right now? Because it's too hot. And you know, the plants are being exposed to too much heat. So obviously there's different ways of dealing with that sort of thing. But it's interesting to try to maintain and deliver the products you're around. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking of, you know, it's the heat of summer or the coldest of winter in some areas. We don't have to deal that with that in the bay at the origin point, but it might have to deal with that getting to the customer, right? So yeah, very interesting. So I wanted to ask you for some advice for all the builders at home in terms of what's one of the, what's some of the biggest mistakes that you run into or you've noticed in people that you've teaching as they're growing material from scratch? Yeah, just like some, I know you've got great insights in this on, in your online courses. I've had a lot of friends and checked out some of your material around growing showing junipers and things like that, which has been awesome. But I was wondering if you take some tidbits from that and your experience and kind of give us some thoughts on what we should avoid when growing material at home and like what we should do when growing material at home. Sure. Yeah, I actually might be interesting to take maples as an example since I haven't done an e-course on that. I have spent the last ten or so years creating a, probably about a 24 inch Japanese maple in a moyogi style. And the challenge has been completely different than creating showing material or either juniper pine showing material. So if you are a bonsai nerd, you know the name Ebihara and I was lucky enough to visit his nursery on my first trip to Japan. Boon was sort of taking a group of us and we went by there and I got to speak to his apprentice and we met him and looked at his work and it was, it was just kind of mind-blowing to see that work the way that he was applying different techniques to maples. And so when I came home, I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to give this a shot. So up to that point, I had seen growers like Jim Gremble growing maple trunks, Japanese maple. He's her Paul Maidum trunks of, you know, many different varieties. And they would grow out the trunk and then make a trunk chop and then grow out another section and make a trunk chop. And you end up with this trunk that has all of these scars on it. And what Ebihara was doing was, apart from the root part, which he's actually a little bit more famous for probably, he was essentially his, his technique was to grow whip to about a little bit longer than the height of tree that you're trying to create. So if you want an 18 inch tree, grow a 24 inch whip, put a piece of wire on it and bend that whip into the exact shape that you want the eventual trunk to take. In other words, that is the moment of creation where you are creating your bonsai and it is not going to change. From that point, you identify sacrifice branches, three separate sacrifice branches, one at the bottom, third of the trunk, one in the middle, third and one at the top. And then you let those run while containing all of the other branches so that you can essentially create the taper over time using those three branches without creating any more scars than that those three branches are going to create. It's, you know, it was a kind of frustratingly slow process at the beginning. He uses ground grain techniques. And so once I bought the property out in the East Bay, I put the tree, escapherated in an Anderson flat and allowed it to escape. And so just in the last couple of years, the trunk is now, you know, the Nibari six inches across and the trunk is probably the size of my wrist or a little bit bigger. And it looks like a beautiful sort of not mature Japanese maple, but it's heading in the right direction. All I have to do now is 27 extra steps, but there's, I think that that technique I was trying to explain it to a student in a workshop just the other day and I ended up drawing some sketches to sort of delineate exactly where the sacrifice branches would be. The, I guess the tip is that the most common way of growing something isn't always the best way of growing something. And it seems to be that the folks that are get into bonsai that have. Abihara was a retired engineer and he really took that engineering skill and applied it to creating bonsai. And if you think about the process, I mean, the e-courses that you mentioned, the I wanted to give people a view of the entire scope of creating that material from beginning to end because we so many times have seen the, the styling of material that you didn't have any input into when it was younger, or the creation of young material and you'd ever get to the point where it's mature. So where's the gap? And so if you literally say, okay, and you're one, you do this and you're two, you do that, and et cetera, et cetera. That actually, that information exists in Japanese books and there's different techniques, not everybody does it the same, but that was the idea. And that's kind of what I think people should think about when they're growing maples too, you know, you have to think at the beginning of the process, you have to think to yourself, what do I want this tree to look like when it's done? And that's probably the hardest thing to do, but spend some time and see if you can do it. Yeah, that's definitely something that I've recently in the last year been very interested in making shoheen junipers. And like you said, it's hard to, you know, the decision that you make in year one or year two when you're first twisting up that whip, like that has far reaching impacts, right? You do that and, okay, I made my curves really tight. Well, suddenly this tree is 10 years later and well, it might mean it wouldn't have even gotten there because you would have had to take it out of the growing process earlier and make a smaller tree than you expected, right? Because of how you treated it in those first two years, right? So one thing that was helpful for me too was now, like as you think about it, you start to form hypotheses and then when I was in Japan, we went on this trip with Jonas and Andrew and went to all these different nurseries growing shoheen material. You can kind of start to reverse engineer the process as you really look at it and they've got like their crop of year one, year two, year three. So I think the structure that you have for your courses, like showing folks how it, but goes over the life cycle, like it's hard, it's really hard to learn that unless you see it in that kind of format, I think. Yeah, I mean, Jonas and I actually did. I think a whole podcast episode on BonsaiWire about how you're growing junipers wrong or was it having growing pines wrong? Yes, yes, yeah. There's no as junipers. Yeah, it was junipers, yep. Yeah, and the the E course, I feel like it's I'm still pretty happy with it. I think that with the pine course, there's some revisions that I want to make, but in what you said, absolutely, like you have to you have to think about what is this, you know, I'm going to twist up this thing that's essentially the size of a wire and I'm going to I can put it as close or these bends as closer as far together, you know, or far apart as I want and what you're not thinking about is well, how thick is that wire going to get over time, but in doing large batches of them, so one thing I would say is do batches. Don't do one. I was going to ask you about that. So for a hobbyist, who wants to end up with, with, you know, the top quality showing juniper or trident maple or whatever species that they're looking to grow, what do you think is they want to end up with two of them after 15 years or whatever, two winners, right? You know, what do you, how many, how many trees do they need to grow to end up with those one or two that they're really happy with in your experience? My best example would be my first batch of pines, which I started about 125 and then as you said earlier, as soon as they had to put them in three inch containers, I was like, holy cow, that is a lot of soil and then they went into, you know, two gallon pond baskets and I was like, wait a minute, where am I going to put all of these things? So the, I think 125 or 100 is probably more than most people are going to tackle, but what I did relatively quickly, so say year two, they were going into baskets, I gave away probably half of them. So I was down to say 50 or 60 and then by about year six or heading towards year six, I had whittled it down to more like 35 or 40 and by the time that they were into ramification, the trunks, you know, getting closer to the size that I want and just sort of working on the branches at the same time, I got down to about 25. So that was, and I think you could take the same approach with your junipers, like, so if you start 100 junipers and you say, okay, I'm going to start these 100 junipers and then a year later you're going to have a different perspective on the bends that you put into those trunks, then you do when you initially did it and you might come back and say, well, what the heck was I thinking here? And you immediately get rid of, you know, your friends are super happy because you decided to sell 25 twisty junipers that are only the size of a pencil, but they're twisty. So that's fun. So the batch thing is, I think it's really helpful for the learning process, but it's also really helpful in terms of if you as the original grower want to keep just the, you know, two or three best out of that, or that even if they're not the best, they're just your favorites, maybe, then whittling down from a larger batch to a smaller batch. And I've always told people that I think a reasonable batch is about 20 to 25 trees and you're not going to, there's many benefits to doing batches. And if you have just a couple of trees and one of them dies, then you and you don't really know what happened, but if you have 25 trees and one of them gets sick and you're just like, well, wait, what's going on with this one? And you investigate it, teaches you things to be able to compare the trees to each other. Yeah, I love that. Or you might, you know, do A and B experiment experiments with those as well, right? To optimize future batches. Like how aggressive you are with the roots with that species or at what point you do the bends or, you know, what soil you use. I think that the, in term, back to the junipers, in terms of what we were, what you're trying to do. One of the things that I think is the biggest question in my mind still is when do you start creating shari? So bending and twisting is one thing, but bending and twisting doesn't create irregular shapes in the trunk, which is what creating shari does. So do you grow out a large chunk of wood, potentially creating swelling in places like you're saying if the bends are too tight, or do you grow it out to a certain point and strip the bark off of the interior of turns and start the journey towards the the trunk being a more complex shape earlier in the process. And I think, you know, Jonas says that in Japan, pretty much they're just growing them out to some particular size and then cutting them back to the lowest branches and going from there. And part of the reason is that they're trying to avoid rot in the deadwood for as long as possible. I think that's limiting, you know, you're doing it sort of bonsai by subtraction instead of a more complex kind of engineered approach to addition, subtraction, addition, subtraction where you grow it out for a couple of years, then cut it back and reorient. And I find that in my juniper growing, things definitely don't go to plan. And I tend to create shari early in the process even as early as like your two, like I'll strip one side of a straight whip and then bend and kink it up, twist it, stripping that one side allows you to more easily see how much twist you've gotten into it. And it starts the irregularity. Sometimes those initial strips when the the trunk is young will actually just heal right back over, but you still have a little bit of a visible reminder. Yeah, I've been thinking long and hard about that with my crops. I think what I've kind of run into is that I either, I mean, the ones that I saw in Japan that were the most impressive were, I mean, it was like a thick like soda can thick tree that they let grow to that kind of thickness. And it had very like that initial movement put in it was probably very subtle for it to still have like a curve whenever it's a soda can thickness, right? And then they do all this intricate like peeling of the deadwood. And they might also to like make those fins, you know what I'm talking about, but but that's like a large plant that I would assume has some degree of ground growing to have gotten to that thickness in any appreciable amount of time. Maybe not for a long time, but maybe like two or three years or something. I don't know, but but I have other material where like I put tighter curves into it. And so if I would have let it get to that pop can thickness over a 10 year period or whatever, like it would just be a puddle. With that material that has more curves in it, like I think you have to put the shari in earlier in the journey. Otherwise, if you want to, if you want to retain that like angular movement and not have those like puddles of like the curves kind of growing into each other. So I think over time, you know, just over my time in Bonsai, the way that things are done with showing junipers in Japan has actually changed a little bit. If you look at it, if you look back at the gaffer 10 books from 20 to 30 years ago, there was a there seemed like there was a wave of junipers that were very ribbon shaped, very intentionally ribbon shaped. And so they would usually have two lifelines and what you would see in them between the two lifelines near the base is all these kind of vertical ridges or ridges following the contour of the trunk. And I don't know how those were made. I mean, I have ideas about how they're made and I don't know who made them, whether they're made in Japan or China or some other country, but there was definitely quite a few of them. And now if you look at the gaffer 10 books for more recent years, you just don't see as many of those. They're still around some of them are still around, but there's definitely not as many and there's more junipers that are created in the style that you're talking about where they let the trunk get to the large size. Now, for if anybody's seen the Seedow books by Chang Chang, he goes through the green wood stripping process where he takes like a trunk that's fully round and big in this case, much bigger than the show he and he strips it down and then does all the dead would work basically at once and then grows out the branches and he's done with the tree. So obviously you can do it both ways. I just think that in doing it in doing the majority of the styling at the end and just bulking it in the beginning, you are definitely missing some of the natural aspects of what junipers have to offer. And the one that I can use to clearly illustrate that is that when you kill a branch on a juniper trunk and you leave a piece of deadwood sticking out, the lifelines reroute around that piece of deadwood and essentially swell to create sort of like a almost like an eye shape in that gin. And you're never going to get that if the if the trunk is never dying back or if branches are not dying in the middle of the process. So there's there's I think there's a lot of different approaches and I think you're going to get a lot of different results by taking different approaches. I don't know that any of them are clearly better than others. I do think that there are approaches that I like more. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, hopefully, hopefully, the hard part is, you know, it takes 15 years or whatever to go from cutting to, you know, well, it depends on what size you're looking for, right? But like, and some of these trees in Gotherton and things like that, they're probably 60 plus years old. You can see the aging in the deadwood when it was made 40 years ago and it's had time to weather or something like that, right? And so it's it's hard to even imagine the journey that those trees went through throughout their life, right? But yeah, I'm very interested in it. And I hope and we both are making some cool showing junipers or just there's more showing junipers that are being made in the US because a lot of that material to like do that, you know, they've had multiple generations of growing this material in Japan. So even if it wasn't grown in the optimal way, there's things that you can, you know, pick up off the shelf and do that with, right? But there's really not that in the US today, at least. The risk of promoting a competitor, I think Ed Clark is the is probably the currently the best source of a decent volume of material that was twisted up young and then grown out. And you used one of his grown trees for the recent Joshua Roth competition at GSBF bought a couple of the ones where so I don't like it when people leave the wire and just let the tree grow around the wire and he did that in some of his early batches. But what I saw when I was at his nursery was that it's actually kind of interesting. It gets to the stage where it's all swollen up and twisty and weird looking and then at some stage beyond that, it sort of overcomes a lot of the artificial looking twistiness and just rerouts itself again, right? So I picked up a couple from him that were actually decently good. They were from that batch and there's still like a couple of places. If you look really carefully, there's wire embedded in the in the deadwood on the underside or something. But the materials, it's not prevalent, but there is some availability. Ed Clark, I would say, is one of the unique examples and obviously you're like multiple years in now to growing this material. So there are pipelines cropping up. But yeah, I really, I really, that's exactly it. I would love to have more material like Ed Clark's available because it's so that material for me at least was so fun to work with in the rendezvous. And I mean, the material in the rendezvous was a little bigger, right? That's not a show heen. It wasn't the curves that are put into it aren't in pursuit of a show heen tree, right? And there's no lower branches. So those wouldn't, those would not be like show heen material, but like a true heen size tree or something like that. I think, you know, that's some of the top material in the US for making that. So I would love to have more of that available because I really love working with that kind of nursery stock trees. I mean, I say nursery stock, by like pre-vontime material. Yeah, as a grower, it's hard for me to like decide which ones to give up on or which ones to pass along to the next artist, I guess, is the best way of putting it. So I have certain sub parts of batches where I'm just like I put them over in a quarter and people are not allowed to look at them because I know you don't want to sell them. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Is this, is this business all just an elaborate front to, to produce the top material for yourself? Well, I will advocate that to anybody who's a grower, you should always keep your favorite trees for yourself. Now, the tricky part comes in how many is that? Ed has his own trees that he's grown for many years and I think most growers do that same thing. Yeah. So growing on from this part of the conversation, I wanted to ask you about the Pacific bonsai expo. So obviously this is a child of you and Jonas originally and now Andrew's helping out. I wanted to hear about it a little bit from your perspective, like what caused you to create the expo and what parts are you most passionate about within the expo? So I think that the, I would really like to credit Jonas more than myself for the creation of the expo as well as the the actual ongoing running of it. Now we both work really hard at it, but we have very different sort of, not different skills, but sort of different interests maybe. And Jonas has really gotten his hands dirty in terms of some of the back-end messy accounting and that kind of things. This is just really not fun to do for a non-profit or for a business. You know, like you don't want to, just like a, you don't want to fill out government forms. Right. Exactly. It can just be a nightmare of that kind of thing. So glossing over all of that and giving Jonas credit for taking the hit, it was, you know, we, we both exhibited at the Arsons Cup in 15 was that? And, you know, the story is, which is truth, on the way back we were discussing. I'm not sure it's the first time we discussed it, but we discussed on the drive back from Portland starting our own show. And it wasn't clear at the time whether Ryan was going to be doing more or not, and he still hasn't done another one. So after a while, we, it was actually around 2019 where we started really more seriously discussing it, but then COVID hit and it didn't actually happen until 2022 for the first show. So I think that, you know, coming from the, the background of being in Boone's club where showing was the point of doing Bonsai. We really wanted to take a step beyond just it being a club show, which we always felt that Boone's show was really beautiful. Lots of nice trees, but it was just a club. It was exclusive of people that weren't in the club. In other words, in order to be in the show, you had to be in the club. And we wanted to move past that and say, okay, we want the focus not to be on who owns the tree. We want the focus to be on the tree and the quality of the tree. So we've said a number of times that we don't really care who owns the tree. The submissions are taken for the purpose of evaluating the trees. And that's what the jury does in terms of selecting the best trees that are available that are submitted. So we actually had some trees change hands between acceptance and exhibition last time, which absolutely no problem. So it's been a interesting ride. I don't know if that really answered your question. No, I appreciate you kind of giving your perspective on it. It's definitely a labor of love. And I mean, my personal opinion is that you know, I'm surprised that Boone's eye was thriving and existing in the form that it was before the expo. Maybe this is a very like local take, right? Maybe it has a different impact on the local Boone's eye economy and practice than, you know, maybe farther away areas. It isn't as big of a big of a thing. But to me, it's like something as a, you know, relatively early hobbyist that it's like driving my this singular event is like driving how I think of and strategize within the hobby and like what I spend my time on and things like that. So to me, it's become such a meaningful event within the community. And yeah, just thank you so much for expanding that energy to create this. And I hope that it's been fulfilling for you and Jonas and Andrew and looking forward to many more years of it. Do you have any like specific goals for the expo or like are there areas that you're interested in exploring further as you guys are getting your kind of sea legs under you in terms of running these big events? Well, I mean, there's a lot of different aspects to it. I think that I tend to to trend towards the wacky like not non-traditional displays. And I was very excited for the first for the 2022 expo when Aaron Packard, the Pacific Bonsai Museum set up a non-traditional display. And then I had my, you know, John Nakka, how big was John Nakka's bird exhibit in the center of the room. So I did the same thing for the second show in 24 with a large wooden structure to sort of give a centerpiece and that sort of thing. And I realized that I was sort of putting too much work into those things that the expense of maybe Jonas having to work too hard on the less fun things. So moving forward, we're still planning for for 27 now because it's it's going to be in early February of 27 rather than having a full show. We're going to have a true winter show still planning to do some something unusual. We haven't 100% locked down what that's going to be. But we want it, we want, we always want the show to kind of surprise people or delight people a little bit. And that's what I try to work towards. And for the first show, apart from the birds, which were actually created by someone else, the one of the largest lifts that I did personally was fabricating all the backdrops from scratch. And not just fabricating, but, you know, sourcing materials discussing with Jonas, you know, is this going to work? And then setting up a test, you know, we literally just did like two panels or something on the sidewalk outside of my house. And then, you know, filling out the entire room with backdrops that we were happy with, you know, just a very clean sort of look so that the trees could stand out. You know, moving forward, we're going to try to try to keep doing stuff like that. We didn't change the backdrops for 2024. It might end up having to be different for 27. We haven't made that determination either. But it's been a really interesting ride. And to your point about about it changing your outlook on how you do bonsai, I think that was, it's definitely part of the reason why we wanted to do it. Because if you don't have examples of really high level bonsai available to actually study in person, because pictures are just really not adequate for describing the trees and even 3D scans are very limited. It just doesn't give you the same sense. So giving that that example of like great trees in a room and having people be able to interact with the trees in each other in front of the trees is really valuable. And I think we just need to keep that going. And I hope that it does inspire people. I think one of the funny things after the 22 expo, Jonas and I were kind of putting stuff away. And you know, for the week or two after the show, and we kind of looked at each other and we were just like, wait a minute, how many trees in in my yard actually could make it into the expo? And we started thinking about, well, would this tree make it into the expo or would it not? And do I want to have any trees in my yard that wouldn't make it into the expo? Like essentially as a quality bar, like that black and white sort of Yaynay test, is this good enough or is it going to be good enough eventually to make it into the expo? And if not, why am I growing it? You know, not everybody's going to take that approach. And I've said this to quite a few people that you don't, not every tree in your yard has to be a showstopper. You can have trees that are, it works in progress. You can have trees that are just a little fun things. And not everybody's going to be shooting for the expo anyway. But it is an interesting sort of metric that we almost accidentally created. Exactly. Exactly. I think there's a certain, there's a certain persona or personality type that that kind of larger scale or like that kind of standardized bar to shoot for is important for keeping their interest within the hobby, right? And so absolutely 100% agree that you don't have to do bonsai to get your trees in the expo or win a category or something like that. That does not have to be your, your drive. But I think for people that want to be competitive or people that want to have some external bar for them to measure themselves against, this provides that. And without this, I guess I could have had that bar be something like nationals. But you know, am I real, am I realistically going to drive my tree to New York? Like probably not, right? So, and then, you know, a local club show, like there are awesome and a great place to exhibit trees and have fun with friends. But it's not that same, there's not that same focus on quality, at least in our club or acknowledgement of quality, right? And so I think that having that standard there is important for, for helping people push themselves. You can actually take a step backwards from what I said and say that one thing that the expo aims to do is actually just inform people about what a good tree looks like. So if you don't have the opportunity to see good trees and in the context of people telling you why it's good or, you know, discussing the background of it or anything like that, then how are you going to understand? If you don't even know what you're shooting for eventually, how are you going to understand how to do it? And so for club members, the value is not just in being able to see the trees, but being able to understand the potential scope of what they can do with a tree over time. Exactly. I mean, I think that brings up a whole another topic of like what, how do you standardize the, the scoring and like the characteristics that are important for a quality bonsai, right? But we don't have to get, we don't have to dive into that, that topic, but that's something that's very interesting to me as well as like, if I once I get a tree into the expo, it would be really helpful for me as a practitioner to get detailed feedback and scoring on my tree, right? So that I continue to improve and refine it as well as the other trees in my practice. That's, that's something that I would personally be interested in whenever I get to that exhibition phase. Yeah, I mean, it's actually been a point of discussion and someone brought it up to me that providing the exhibitors with more feedback would be a valuable thing. And I think I, I didn't say so far that I've always felt like being accepted as an exhibitor is the prize. Like I don't, I don't know if my, like I have this, I don't know what, what it is, but I, I've had a Utah juniper that I collected, I don't know, 20 years ago, almost that I still haven't wired. And it's an illustration to me that I have more of an interest in creating quirky little things myself than I have in creating a massive, impressive bonsai. And there's different flavors of bonsai. And so for me as an exhibitor, I want to create a tree that's interesting, as unique as possible, maybe something of a style that you're not going to create by collecting a tree, for example. And so the prize in my mind has always been that getting in as an exhibitor, having a tree in the expo is the prize, not winning your category or the, the best in the show or something like that. But to that point, as an exhibitor, we, we try to treat the exhibitors as VIPs. We feel like, if you're an exhibitor, you've done something that is really impressive. And again, it doesn't matter whether you own that tree for just a month or whether you created it from scratch over the course of 30 years. There's something impressive to both of those things if you've developed the eye to be able to really buy a high quality tree or if you've developed the tree from scratch. So moving forward, I think Jonas and I just talked about the idea of providing more feedback. And we haven't locked down the mechanism for that because the current dumb, the judging system doesn't really do that. The judging system wasn't designed to do that. It was designed to pick the winners. It wasn't designed to rank the trees from top to bottom and say, well, this tree is better than that tree. And you know, number 34 is definitely better than number 35. That's, it doesn't do that. So it does pick the winners and, you know, it's a consensus vote among the exhibitors. Moving forward, I think that the additional, like the sort of value add that we're hoping for exhibitors is to give them that type of feedback that you're talking about in more detail. So hopefully we can make that happen for 20s. I think it'd be pretty exciting to be able to do that kind of thing. And acknowledging that Ryan did it in 2015, I don't know why we haven't done it up to this point. Yeah, I guess this is just my personal thing. It's like, I'm trying to improve and like the journey of this podcast that I'm kind of documenting is, I want to be able to do, like, build a high quality tree from a craftsman. Kind of how now describes it as like, he doesn't want, you know, he wants to focus on creating a, like, objectively well-crafted item with his pots. And then, you know, he can stretch that and do artistic things. But the first like the, I guess I relate with that like craftsmanship ethos of like, oh, I want to get really good at like doing this thing with my hands and like kind of go from ground to from seed to tree. And so there are like objective criteria that you can use to to rank someone's craftsmanship, right? It's totally separate from the artistic value of an item. And so that type of feedback for me as someone who's trying to like build trees and then improve and build better trees, I would love to get that. And I think it's hard to talk about a tree without talking like the craftsmanship of a tree without also talking about the aesthetic. So, I mean, I think those things have to be tied together. But, you know, I think that would be a big value add as an exhibitor for people that I think have a similar mindset to me of like, oh, I'm trying to make trees to hit this quality bar and I'm trying to make them myself and I want to use this as a wetstone to grind stone or whatever to help hone my abilities, right? And so getting that feedback would help you improve over time at your kind of craftsmanship. I don't know if that makes sense at all or, but yeah, that's kind of how I think of it. You have to get feedback, you know, whether you're getting feedback, you know, direct in the form of direct, you know, communication like I think that this branch should be bigger or whatever, or you're getting feedback in, you know, sort of general discussions with people. If you're not getting, you know, you can create your feedback for yourself just by self-evaluating like, well, you know, what is, how does my tree look compared to all of the other trees in the room? I used to do that when I was showing at BSSF and I was always a little bit frustrated to have Jay McDonald show up with like showtrees and showtrees. No matter how hard I work, they always seem to look better than mine. But yeah, no, it's feedback is really important if you're going to grow as a craftsperson or as an artist, however you want to term it. And I think it's a little bit easier to get feedback when it only takes you a week to make something versus taking, you know, the a third of your life. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, hopefully after like listening to these types of critiques, you should be able to go in with like a fairly accurate representation of what the judges will say, right? There's some amount of like self critique that happens and then, but, you know, there might be instances where those things don't line up and then, you know, that helps you grow, right? So, or just like hearing how people judge other trees, thus that helps you hone your internal self critique mechanism, right? So, cool. Very interesting topic for sure. The critiques would not just be for the owner of the tree or the artist or whatever you want to say. It would be a way for the community to understand feedback from people who are qualified, whether that's, you know, the professionals that are in attendance or some other experts. Yeah. The idea is to improve the judging ability of the exhibitors as well. Because, you know, some of the feedback we've gotten is that exhibitors, some of the exhibitors don't feel like they're qualified to be judges. And I disagree with that. I think that if you're an exhibitor, you've passed that bar, but that doesn't mean you can't continue to improve and that type of feedback will help the exhibitors become better judges as well as learning, you know, from the trees. And so, if we publish it all the way that we try to publish everything that the organization does, then even if you're not an exhibitor, you should be able to learn from it. Yeah. Yeah, be interesting to do some kind of like standardization testing for exhibitors prior to judging. I mean, this is a little bit too, probably a little too in depth, but, you know, you go to a class and you learn how to judge within the standard that you're chosen and then you get graded on your consistency, or maybe it wouldn't be exhibitors, maybe be like some professional group of judges or something, right? But very, very fascinating topics. I think the challenge with that, though, putting more focusing on the judging is like, suddenly, for me as a hobbyist, like if my tree does poorly, like that doesn't affect my livelihood, right? But for a professional, you know, and I guess in Japan, this is very much the case where like getting trees into CocoaFood or like how they score can make or break businesses, right? But I kind of think it kind of depends on, you know, to what extent does that already happen with the expo and to what extent do you want to like make it a area to like have professional impact come from it either positively or negatively? I think it's like an interesting subject, but most of the up to this point, at least most of the prize winning trees have been trees where the owner is working with the professional, most of the trees that have one have not been owned by the professionals. And that's a slight distinction and I'm going to definitely call out Scott Elzer because he's he hasn't been a pro and he's one of the most talented amateur's out there. I think he won the the extra large honor for prize in 24. So it yeah, you're absolutely right though. The the feedback mechanism can have consequences as well. Exactly. I think that's a good much, much more succinct way to put it than how I walked around in circles. But yeah, it makes that that makes sense. And I think there's always going to be that in any kind of comparative art judging. But cool. Well, we have we have really had an awesome conversation today. I appreciate you taking the time. Anything any kind of final thoughts on kind of your motivations in bonsai or advice for people that are trying to get to where you're at in terms of being able to build beautiful trees and kind of take their vision from a thought in their head to reality on the canvas that is the the bonsai tree. I think my advice would be do things like Addison does them. Yeah, like so so not so uh shortly I would say that in in taking up uh the the task of trying to create bonsai pots this year, I realized that people who approach hobbies or endeavors like bonsai and really attack them in a really systematic or intentional way tend to get further with them than people who are just sort of like, well, maybe I want to do this, maybe I don't know, I can't go this month or whatever. So make a decision and decide, okay, I'm going to devote this amount of time to bonsai and I'm going to this is what I'm going to try to do with that amount of time. So just like I was saying with creating a tree from scratch that you have to decide what your goal is when you start even though the process might take 20 years, the same thing is true of a bonsai journey. You really need to attack it if you if you want to be serious about it and I think that's what you've done really well. I mean starting a podcast from a hobby is definitely taking the hobby further than a lot of people would. Yeah, well, I mean the reason I was so excited to talk to you like I said at the beginning is I also feel like you epitomize that that approach and you've given multiple examples like, you know, I'm going to figure out pottery in in this podcast. So really appreciate you giving your perspective and I love that of like it's a mindset shift of not, can I get good good at bonsai? It's, you know, I will get good at bonsai and I need to take the different hits that happen throughout the process of learning and the failures and the successes kind of an equal measure and keep driving towards that eventual goal. For sure. Thank you so much for taking the time, Eric. I really appreciate it for folks that don't want to maybe start from seed and want to kind of jump start their journey in bonsai. How should they, how should they get in touch with you? How should they learn from you and, you know, where can they access the awesome material that you're growing? So we, like I said earlier, we sell material on bonsafai.com. There are both monthly releases of sort of more unique material and ongoing sales of starters and tools and some materials. So bonsafai.com, I think one of the most valuable things that people could actually jump into following this conversation is the YouTube channel that I run which so that's at bonsafai on YouTube and there's probably 200 videos that they could run across and those videos are really meant to educate people on how to use the products that I've created, right? So I'm trying to, I'm trying to let you know how to use those things and where to get them. Yeah, I've, I've used a lot of those actually throughout my journey. I think, you know, some of the practices that I have with different, like, fungicides and pesticides as well as the photography setup you have and a lot of the stuff that you've posted in videos around, showing juniper development and elms and things like that, I use those tips and tricks in my own practice. So cannot endorse enough checking out Eric's YouTube channel and is really, really well produced videos and content. So thank you so much, Eric, for taking the time and if anybody, if this struck a chord for anybody and you want to reach out to me, you're welcome to contact me on Instagram. It's @teanytrees and I love to hear from folks and get ideas for new episodes and suggestions. So please don't hesitate to reach out. All right, everyone. Have a great morning, have a great afternoon, have a great evening and talk to you all soon. [Music]