Kevin Espiritu runs Epic Gardening, one of the clearest examples of a creator-led media business that became much more than content: YouTube, commerce, products, books, and Botanical Interests.

This conversation covers why Silicon Valley is suddenly fascinated by new media, what Kevin learned from the old SEO and affiliate-marketing era, why creators over-optimize the wrong things, how Epic Gardening thinks about products, IP, TV viewership, brand deals, channel strategy, and what it actually takes to build media that lasts.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Media is soil
0:27 Why new media week starts with Kevin
1:38 Silicon Valley discovers creators
3:26 From SEO hacks to durable media
7:03 True outliers are one-of-one
10:19 Why creators get platform-stuck
12:33 Products, IP, and real media businesses
17:25 Brand deals without draining trust
21:03 YouTube is becoming TV
23:22 Format experiments and channel strategy
30:31 Packaging before production
35:07 Scaling beyond the founder
40:03 Tommy's media company, live consult
45:30 Broad vs niche audiences
50:02 Raising money and the next creator companies
56:06 Cultural campfires

LINKS:
Epic Gardening: https://www.epicgardening.com
Botanical Interests: https://www.botanicalinterests.com
Kevin Espiritu on X: https://x.com/KevinEspiritu

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LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Tom Krcha founded Pencil.dev after years inside the design tooling cycle, from Flash evangelism to creating Adobe XD, which gives him a rare view of where AI design tools are actually heading.

This conversation covers why agents are best at the first 80%, why designers still need the last 20%, what a headless design tool means, how Pencil is building for swarms of AI designers, and why taste comes from still putting your hands in the work.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Headless agents inside design tools
0:31 Why design tools are splitting
1:36 Tom’s path from Flash to Pencil
5:13 Stochastic vs deterministic design
6:16 Why designers still need the chisel
9:18 How Pencil started inside Cursor
10:19 Designer as orchestrator and final authority
12:05 Canvas, tweaker, and headless agents
14:16 What “headless design tool” means
15:52 Context as the portable briefcase
17:09 — Pencil as an agent-first canvas
20:53 Building tools that build tools
24:52 Why users create 50-artboard files
26:26 Agent specialization and subagents
27:35 Why vibe coding feels like Flash
29:38 Can agents create happy accidents?
31:17 The canvas as a crime scene
32:28 Does AI make you a better author?
35:06 What designers do with 60 agents
36:38 Pencil’s roadmap and the future of iteration
38:22 Taste comes from participation

LINKS:
Pencil.dev: https://pencil.dev
Tom Krcha on X: https://x.com/tomkrcha

FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/tommygeoco
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco

Hannah Ahn is designing healthcare in the exact moment AI is making it easier than ever to take control of our health.

She leads design and marketing at Superpower, a health startup building an AI layer across bloodwork, labs, genomics, and medical records. Before that, she came up through product management at Canva, which makes her a useful kind of design leader right now: practical, visual, brand-sensitive, and allergic to treating velocity like the whole job.

We talk about designing trust around health data, why Superpower rolled out Claude Code to the design team in January, how she hires for team composition, and why the most underrated signal in a designer right now is still love of the game.

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CHAPTERS:
00:00 Designing trust when AI touches your health
03:06 PM to designer was the practical path
06:41 How Superpower runs a five-person design team
10:34 Hiring for composition, not clones
13:55 Love of the game beats credentials
16:46 Rolling Claude Code out in January
21:47 When velocity starts producing slop
24:41 The 1% that makes people trust you
33:23 The junior ladder is breaking
36:31 Designers as architects, not prompt operators

LINKS:
Superpower: https://superpower.com
Hannah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahnhannah/

FOLLOW ME:
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
IG: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco