This video was not made for YouTube. None of Ryan's videos are made for YouTube. They're made for Mirai subscribers who are paying a pretty expensive monthly fee even for the basic version and even more for the pro version, and these are both much higher than (say) Netflix or most other video services. Those subscribers are mostly beginners relative to the average full-time professional or full-time amateur. They expect that for their money Ryan will teach them a predictable reliable way to yield an amazing bonsai out of basically any species.
Ryan has to aim for the middle because he knows most subscribers aren't repotting for hundreds of hours a year and will never be comfortable with major root disturbances. And yet, at least one or two very major root disturbances are required to get through to the main part of Ryan's "vortex" model.
The big headline:
In order for the majority of the fun stuff on Mirai videos to unlocked for a Mirai subscriber, they are required to work the roots significantly and to make progress towards a homogenous soil and a root system that is primed for fine ramification. They can't skip doing this to the core of the root ball (aka the shin/sheen/heart/core/whatever) either, or at least not for long. There's no point to any canopy design work if the roots are a sour anaerobic spaghetti time bomb.
This is why Ryan has a catch phrase that pushes the idea of taking a big deep breath and doing the risky-yet-necessary thing -- None of the rest of Mirai's teaching make any sense whatsoever if the subscriber avoids doing the necessary thing. Major root disturbance (repotting, collecting) is the riskiest operation in bonsai but Ryan is trying to communicate that
you must power through that step while making measurable progress towards your goal and while there is still a lot of stored energy in a tree. If you dawdle and slip pot instead of working the roots, you will just put off the inevitable.
As a long-time Mirai subscriber, IMO, all of this is part of a bigger struggle for Ryan which he's had for years and is a severe conceptual communication debt from which he's trying to dig out of with recent lectures. It's been hard for him to communicate the actual goals of bonsai development techniques to people who are arriving in full beginner mode and, sometimes even after watching years of Mirai videos are still asking questions like "
when I can start trimming this <tree that's still in nursery soil>" or "
when's the best time to trim a <species X that just came out of the ground or nursery>".
Similarly on reddit a lot of subscribers routinely proudly announce that they've just repotted a tree, but don't worry, "
I didn't disturb the roots and just slip potted so the tree can get bigger". Cool, but (in Ryan's Mirai school of thinking, don't shoot the messenger) this is racing away from the goal and also ignoring the steps that actually unlock morphological attributes of bonsai through deliberate root system modifications over time.
In summary, my interpretation as a long term Mirai subscriber: "kill it or make it bonsai" is about saying to Mirai subscribers "
I know it is hard to accept that root system and soil manipulation is this damn important this early on when you're just trying to find out if it's okay to fuck around with pruning or whatever this weekend but none of the rest of it works if you don't do this one thing that requires a huge leap of faith".
But yeah, as
@rockm says, if you know what you're doing from lots of exeprience, you can go farther in that first step. I've bare rooted more pines than I can count because I have pumice, lava, sun, Oregon climate, heat mats, often work with very young pines, and have zero issues with waiting for a pine to put on lots of mass before working on it. I'd also frankly with a lot of material actually kill it or make it a bonsai because I do not have room or time to screw around waiting for magic to happen in native soil. I'd rather boot up a pine in pure pumice right away knowing that in a year or two I'll be good to go for real. Better than to blow the proverbial load on fun wiring or "trimming" which then ends up wasting years.
