Episode 30: Susie Jaramillo | Canticos Club - Bilingual Nursery Rhymes & Kids Songs
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Canticos Bilingual Nursery Rhymes & Kids Songs With Susie Jaramillo #nft
Timestamps
00:00 - 00:44 - Crypto Sapiens Introduction
00:46 - 01:38 - Encantos, and creation of Canticos, What the project entails
08:15 - 11:07 - NFt content & community ownership - Canticos NFt roadmap
01:40 - 04:27 - Susie Jaramillo introduction, background and the scope behind Encantos project
04:29 - 08:13 - What the Encantos project is solving with NFT in web3
11:08 - 14:40 - How Canticos NFt aid to assist people of color majorly the Latinos
14:42 - 17:34 - How consumers and anyone that’s not a project owner can contribute to the Encantos project
17:36 - 19:53 - How contributors without infant (investors) benefit and trust the Encantos project and the Canticos NFT
19:54 - 22:22 - Susie Jaramillo and her team’s track record
22:24 - 25:28 - How Encantos project is different from other NFt project
25:30 - 28:56 - Future expectation from Encantos, Onboarding kids into the tech and web3 space
28:58 - 31:19 - What Story telling entails according to Encantos
31:21 – Outro
Humpty Calderon: Welcome to Crypto Sapiens, a show that hosts slight discussions with innovative web3 builders, To help you learn about decentralized money systems, including Ethereum Bitcoin, and DeFi. The podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and it is not financial advice.
Cryptos Sapiens is presented in partnership with Bankless DAO, a movement for pioneers seeking freedom from the limitations of the financial system. Bankless DAO will help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Crypto Sapiens, and today we are talking with Susie Jaramillo, the co-founder of Encantos, creators of Canticos. In our conversation with Susie, we discussed building a brand, launching a media platform, serving bilingual educational content to families worldwide and what it means to bridge traditional media to web3 using NFTs, we explore the vision of the canticos NFT project, including the producer circle that invites holders to participate in pitches of upcoming series and virtual and in-person events that connects creators, agents, and educators to help kids learn and fulfill their potential. I found this discussion especially interesting because of the target demographic of the project. Rarely do we see projects that wish to meaningfully engage our children and provide valuable educational experiences for them. Without further ado, let's get started.
Susie Jaramillo: My name is Susie Jaramillo and I'm an artist, first and foremost went to Pratt, and just painter, storyteller and just really developed a gift for telling stories with purpose that would inspire kids to learn something important, something that I felt was important. At the time, I was conceived of canticos, I was having babies and was frustrated that there was really nothing out there that represented my culture. I'm from Venezuela and half learned as well and half Ecuadorian Irish. A hundred percent Latina and a hundred percent New Yorker. I really felt that my kids are going to grow up in this country and there's nothing really out there that's going to really make them be proud of who they are and, one of every three kids under 10 in this country are Latin and the United States is the second largest spanish speaking country in the world, right? and yet there's no beautiful preschool brand out there to help us raise bilingual kids. And there's many benefits to bilingualism. So with all of that at the time, I had built an advertising agency. I knew how to build a brand, I knew how to run teams. I was directing by then and You know what I was like, I'm going to sell this and focus on what matters because I kind of feel like life is short. I have a gift, and if I don't put it to use, I'm going to be a very frustrated old woman, and I also believe that an artist can be of service to the community. If you have a gift and you put it to use, helping build bridges between communities, that is kind of the ultimate way to serve. I went into business with another Latino family. My co-founder is from the Dominican Republic. His wife is Slovenian, and my husband is Colombian and we founded Encantos and our flagship brand, our very first property was canticos and canticos draws its inspiration from the iconic Los Boto song. If you are from Latin descent, odds are really high. You've heard it before, in english we call it Little Chickies, and it started with our three little chickies and from that song Springs and Little Kiki chickie, who is the star of our NFT collection, and we produced three seasons of canticos and they ran on Nick Junior and you can now find them on Amazon Prime and on YouTube but then a bunch of other places and Now we are just really set on just producing much more of canticos and much more content like canticos that's different, that teaches different things. So that's what we're on, just a mission to help to tell stories with purpose that represent what kids look like today and help them learn important skills that they need to learn.
Humpty Calderon: I can't help but talk about this project without smiling or hear some talk about this project without smiling. I mean, if you are on the Discord while we're recording this live, look at the imagery and tell me you're not smiling. They are adorable, and now hearing the backstory of really where you came from and the meaning behind the development of this product, of this story, of these of this community as it starts to develop around you know this vision. it's not just inspiring, but it really just reinforces to me in a kind of like what this has represented to me, what it's represented to my daughter, because not many people might not be aware of this, but I'm also Latino descent. I might not be so loud about my background but I think that to your point there is a need for creating content and art that is representative and inclusive of people from all around the world so that they feel like their history matters, their heritage matters, that their representation matters and so they can use that as a bridge to participate in an ecosystem, which I think we hear a lot in the web3 space, we hear a lot of people saying, Look, this needs to be more inclusive of people from all backgrounds, not just necessarily from your heritage, but your preference in terms of who you want to be with, your gender and all of this. It's really interesting to think of it from that point of view and see people building projects that align with different communities and using that as a bridge to onboard people into this ecosystem. So I'm curious now that we've heard a little bit about your story and how that inspired encantos and canticos as a property, as a brand, what was that Inspiration to say, you know what NFTs are a thing and we want to bridge canticos into this world of web3.
Susie Jaramillo: So it's funny,I think I have to give credit to Gary Van for saying this, that the NFT space is for artists, while social media was for people with personalities, right? It's a place where you can go and you can truly truly build a tribe with people who want to invest in your vision and who want to see the same things you want to see in the world, right? And instead of, Honestly it is a source of frustration when you look at the fact that there's much content that people put out into the world for in social media, and all they get is likes, they get an audience but they don't really own that audience, right? It's not really under their control. They don't really always have the access they might want to have to those audiences and at any given point moment, you know those powers that be could change, could decide to change their minds right?
Humpty: Right
Susie: and for whatever reason, you lose that audience.
Humpty Calderon : Right
Susie Jaramillo : So in the web3 space, you can actually build an audience and get them to invest in your long term vision. And for that reason that's kind of the most important reason. We were like not only can we get an engaged community of supporters . We also get an engaged community, like a sounding board, a community where we can get ideas by a community that can help us bring things to life and help us decide what makes the most sense and a community that becomes just our base, our launching pad with how we are going to market and it just made. We also believe that this space is here for the long term. We think that this is the future and we think that honestly, you know five, eight years from now, everyone is going to be in this space and we wanted to get in as early as possible.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah, You mentioned something here that I think strikes a chord with a lot of our community and that has to do with ownership. In the web2 world and the traditional social media space, you know you are bringing a lot of value to these platforms. But the creators, the people that are actually building communities on these platforms retain no value. The likes can go away as easily as someone shutting down your account tomorrow. Monetization while available to some is very limited and I think for most people not representative of the work that they're putting in. So the space of web3 and NFTs in particular, certainly I think open up that opportunity for people to be able to retain value from the work that they do or the value that they're creating in the space. And just generally in web3, that's kind of that, one of the pillars which we're building. So in terms of the canticos NFTs, like, what's the thought behind ownership for both the brand and the community that's supporting it?
Susie Jaramillo: So If you're buying into canticos NFT, first of all you believe in buying into content that is in the development of content that's going to help kids learn. For one thing, kids are important and the content available to them is important to you, that's number one. Number two, there's absolutely going to be like airdrops actually for those that have minted our first I think 300, we are airdropping an extra NFT to all of this community just because we did something to the code where a couple of things that I wanted to be limited actually were not limited and things that I didn't want to happen happened. Like you got glasses on top of the day of the dead faces, which are a lot of fun, but at the same time, I feel like obscuring the faces, so all of those NFTs right now are rare because you're going to get another one for free and you absolutely going to get airdrops and exclusive passes. But even more important to me from my perspective is that you're going to be a part of our producer's circle, and so We have an animated pitch for Kiki Candace series, and you are going to be our sounding box, and I can't wait to sort of do presentations and talk about the animated series that we're developing with this community. In addition to that, you're also going to get limited merch because when we sell out a certain amount of canticos NFTs, we're going to be producing limited merchandise for our NFT holders and then of course there's the charity component because we believe in supporting our community. We have a partnership with the Latino and I think it's a donor community. I'm forgetting the exact name of the charity, but anyways it supports education, It supports a lot of services and so those are the main pillars of our NFT roadmap.
Humpty Calderon: You know, I really like what you've said here in terms of the membership, almost what you are able to construct, be a part of when you pick up one of these NFTs. And for me, honestly growing up as a PBS kid,so for those of you who are not in the United States, PBS is a public broadcasting system and there was a lot of programming built for children. That was for me, very formative. It influenced a lot of my interests in reading, in science to always be curious, to ask questions to demand for representation because, Sesame Street that was very important to me. I was like, Oh my God, I see brown people, that’s nice so there's people like me on tv. So Totally when, when I think of the canticos NFT and when I think of that type of programming that I had around when I was a kid, I think of like owning NFT from canticos almost like what I do still today which I am a contributor to PBS, to NPR, you know to these organizations
Susie Jaramillo: Yes, me too
Humpty Calderon: that are producing content, right? So go on, It sounds like you have something to say on that.
Susie Jaramillo: No,I just want to clarify it's Latino Community Foundation actually, I got that wrong and my business Steven won. And another benefit that you're going to get from owning a canticos NFT is that you're going to be on the presale list for when we launch other IPs, so for example, one of our partners, one of our studio partners is Elhenio the best, or those of you I don't know if there's any Acapulco fans in the house, or Coda fans or people that have seen his work on Telivisa and on Univision, and he's got a show on Amazon, but he's a very very funny man who puts out really funny content, and with him, we're co-producing a show about a maker kid who basically is really talented. He's an engineer, but he's not a nerdy engineer. He's actually an engineer that's wicked, smart and funny and it's a STEM show that's a comedy. And we want to inspire kids to be engineers and to solve problems with their hands and to think mechanically. But we also want to encourage their social skills and show people how these two things can go together. It's going to be a Latino family in LA and it will launch with NFTs as well. And if you have a canticos NFT, you're already going to be on the in for that second IP NFT, Which is the, it’s called the OhMateo. We're going to announce this is like you guys are getting a scoop. We're going to announce it in the next couple weeks, but you'll already be on the preset list for the OhMateo. And then there's a skeleton in the in between world and skeleton in the in between world is a property actually that was created by myself. I used to suffer from really intense nightmares. My daughter does too. Gay Latina is a little girl who lives in the in between world and helps kids deal with their nightmares. So it'll be a property that helps kids deal with fears and anxieties, and there will be NFTs associated with that content as well. So I f you can see a theme here of every single creative IP property that comes out of encantos, we will put out our NFTs first. And we see them as like our Mickey Mouse cells, our very first iterations of what this can be. And people that support us early on will get all of the benefits we can think of to be honest with you.
Humpty Calderon: I really love it. I think what Canticos, what encantos is doing with all of these properties and really kind of starting it off with canticos is what we see from these really big brands. You alluded to Mickey Mouse, so the Disney you know behemoth that is in terms of the number of IP that they have and kind of how they're building this out. I mean, it's nice, don't get me wrong. I do appreciate some of that, but, A lot of that is really far removed from me, like I’m really just a consumer, both in terms of their content, their merch, and any kind of experiences like their theme parks. I am just someone who participates in something that they've built, but what I really like to harken back to something you said early on was this platform that you're creating is opening it up for everyone to participate and have a voice in the type of content that comes through it as well as a producer circle. So I'm curious
Susie Jaramillo : Exactly, yeah
Humpty Calderon: if you could touch on that a little bit more, because I think that that is very different in this space and I think, I don't think that at least we've had an opportunity to talk to someone who is building something like that in terms of like allowing for people to be a part of almost everything like the pitch process and development process
Susie Jaramillo : Yeah
Humpty Calderon: in the content creation.
Susie Jaramillo: So funny story is we need you as much as you would like to participate with us, we love the idea of having a soundable board, of having an audience we can test ideas with, of having you know just you know, Hey, what do you think of this premise versus this premise or this character design versus this character design? Or, Hey, we're thinking of these kinds of personalities or these kinds of scenarios, or what I mean is just having that group of people that we can use as a solid diverse sounding board is really exciting for us right? and we know that there are peeps, they're going to support us and they're going to want us to do the right thing. The producer circle is actually really exciting and then, Hey you never know, maybe we need a voice and we need to do casting and we cast with our NFT holders first.
Humpty Calderon: That's fun.
Susie Jaramillo: Or just fun things like that with the canticos, we've done many photo shoots for canticos I mean and I used to do casting calls on my Facebook page all the time. So pretty much all of my friends' kids have been in our different ads. But what if we now make that a part of our producers' full thing so we use kids in our advertising, we give the opportunity to our NFT holders first. I feel like there's like a bunch of different perks and benefits and just fun things that can come out of producers also just like you get to see the content first. You get the music first. You get the screenings first. Everything will absolutely, you will be prioritized and be first consideration for everything you do.
Humpty Calderon: For me, at least as a parent, and as again, someone that likes to consider myself a patron of these public goods, if you will like NPR and PBS and certainly public goods get used a lot here in the web3 space. It makes sense to me to just participate in this and again also more because my daughter is like a huge fan. But what would you say to someone who doesn't have a three-year old who's watching this show? Like what's the plan for like onboarding maybe someone who may not be familiar with the content that you're creating today and the value that you're bringing to these children today?
Susie Jaramillo: No That's an excellent, straight up investor that is looking at us versus the gazillion other NFTs in the market. Why should I choose this one and I would say, look, I think we're going to be valuable on the resale market quite frankly. We are going for IP that's only going to get bigger and if you look at my background, if you look at the background of my partners, like we have a track record for getting a lot of things done right? We're not necessarily new to creative projects and to building out, but like we can deliver on what we say we're going to deliver on, and our track record shows it. So if you're going to place a bet, You've already got a brand that has millions of views around the world that has you know tens of thousands of fans on social media, and has already people throwing birthday parties around the world on a regular basis for canticos right? I love it because it's the one place where social media very much makes me happy when I see all these canticos parties happening all the time . And so you know you're placing a bet on something that has a track record, and that's really solid. it's sort of like in a world where there are pretty loose, which is the NFT world, where you've got your superstars, you've got your aides, you've got your doodles, and then you've almost got everything else, World of women or whatever. But there's almost everything else you really have to figure out where you're going to place bets. And I think I you can place bets on a studio that has traction on a team, that has traction on a plan that seems legit or you can you know, roll the dice any way you choose.
Humpty Calderon: I kind of want to go back to what you said in terms of track record, because I think that is a huge piece for those who are maybe a little more degenerate, The degens of this world, they're not necessarily looking at that, they're just rolling dice and they're like whatever I'm going to speculate and number always goes up. That's the hope, But really, I think the one thing that is valuable, at least to me, this is something that has gone very slowly into the NFT universe because I am very late to the game, I was in the room where they were minting board ape and I said, It’s not for me. So that goes to show, I think in terms of maybe over studying and saying like really this needs to mean something to me. This is really not just about the number or the hype. I really think that we don't pay enough attention to the track record of the people that are building these projects. So what does that mean to you and what does that mean to your team and what does that mean to your community in terms of track record and with what you're building With the canticos of this entire intellectual property library around encantos.
Susie Jaramillo: I mean We're a team of guns. It's not like Hello guys I can’t shoot mine as an artist, Look as an artist, as someone who's put over 30 books out into the world, someone who's an Emmy nominated director, built and sold an ad agency, work with the big brands, Cola to Verizon to wireless to you know whatever Macy's client agency of record for many years but then there's my team, like I've got a senior character illustrator that comes from Dreamworks, we have like, it’s just really rockstar talent on our team making IP with us and from the junior kids straight out of the best art schools in the world, to the seniors that come from really really great studio. We have, I think like to say it's the multicultural Avengers. We've assembled a really great team of seasoned professionals that I think are playing a different game at a different level. And so what we, NFTs are a way to build tribes and to establish our foothold in the web3 space, but it's not the only thing that we're doing. It's one of the many different things that we're doing and we're just in this for the long haul. I don't know how else to explain it
Humpty Calderon: I think you did a stellar job at that , thank you for tooting your own horn, because I think that is super valuable. I mean Honestly, I think that there are certain individuals who let their work speak for them which is absolutely great, but I think we should take that opportunity whenever it's given to us too, to say look, this is why I am in this space. This is how I'm clearly different from all of these other projects that are being built. Good for them If they're building a community around them and you trust and support them, that's wonderful. But really, here's where I'm drawing the line in the sand in terms of who I am and the value that I bring into this space. So I appreciate you sharing that information with us because to me really what that says is the space is reaching a point of maturity, right? Really that's why I invited you to share that information because I want to highlight that the creators that are coming into the space now are very different from the creators that were coming into the space maybe a year or two ago.
Susie Jaramillo: Well, and to that point like my friend, I have a friend who's doing NFT consulting for Sony, Disney just hired a team of NFT experts to counsel them as they figure out how to release the Disney NFTs. And when Disney does release their NFTs, I'm sure they're going to be beautiful but guess what? Not a single Disney artist is going to make a penny from that right?
Humpty Calderon: Right
Susie Jaramillo: and that's where we are different. I think that it's important to know that again, I think that we're in the infancy of the space and I think that every major brand in the future will have NFTs and it would be, you know, I see them like loyalty cards almost in the same way you might have like a special Nike membership, you'll have a Nike NFT, or wherever your concert venue or your arts or your museums or your favorite brands you'll have an NFT and I think that one of the other things that attracted us to the space is like, Hey, we can get in there and be first movers of the space. You can’t you almost can't do that anywhere else. So, we're here trudging it out, figuring it out, making sure that we deliver the most to value. One of the things that I wanted to start doing was using our discord more to figure out also how we could bring more value to our community, whether it's coaching sessions because I bet a bunch of people out there also have ideas that they want to bring to help kids learn. So, can and It's so mysterious how to get a book published. How to bring a property to life like all of these different things that people want to do but don't have a roadmap and have no clue as to how to bring it together, is there coaching we could do there right? Is there creative coaching we can offer the community? there's just a lot of different ways we were looking at providing value to our NFT holders to again build communities which is important to us.
Humpty Calderon: One of the things that really for me struck a chord is this coaching session. So my wife, she's an educator. She's been a teacher for oh my gosh, like six years. She's an amazing teacher, she loves her students, she got her graduate degree in educational technology, she knows the value of technology in terms of how it can be used to help students learn better, to really teach them in the way that they're familiar with learning today. So they will probably go home, they're familiar with using their iPads and logging into applications, so she's trying to bridge that right? and so when you say there's an opportunity here to engage people in the community that they can learn how to use the technology that you're now using to facilitate education in a different way in a way that is kind of more emergent and consistent with some of the, what we're doing in web3. I tell you there is already one person lined up as long as you are willing to loan my daughter canticos NFT so that she can use that as her membership to that programming, that would be amazing
Susie Jaramillo: I'm sure we can make that happen. However, I have to say my kids use educational technology, seesaw and that kind of stuff right? I think PowerSchool seesaw. Those things are not my area of expertise.
Humpty Calderon: Oh no, yeah
Susie Jaramillo : What I would love to talk to educators a lot more about is just helping kids learn through stories.
Humpty Calderon: Yeah
Susie Jaramillo: You know, I was, I had a call with my daughter's teacher the other day, we were talking about the frustrations about getting kids to write and, we talked about what if they wrote dream diaries and they got to tell you stories that bothered them when they woke up, what they kept on thinking about, or their what ifs, how do you put little thought starters to make it more narrative and to make things more story and emotional driven. Because when kids are emotionally engaged, they learn best and there's data around that right?
Humpty Calderon: Right
Susie Jaramillo: To us it's more about how you present things. This morning I woke up with a bang and I started drawing and whenever I draw, I listen to podcasts. There's this wonderful new podcast out from Wondery, that I started listening to and it's biographies but it doesn't tell you whose biography it is. You start listening to it. By doing that, they remove any kind of unconscious bias that you might have of I don't want to hear this person's story or whatever. That feels like a history lesson, or whatever and they just immerse you in these, first person descriptions of these people's lives as if you were the one experiencing it . So they put you in these main character shoes. And so I woke up at four and by nine o'clock in the morning I had experienced the lives of Steven Spielberg, Langston Hughes, BluPaul, and Katherine Graham, and they were just all fascinating shoes to be in and I don't know that I would've chosen, I want to listen to this biography or that biography, but I loved that you know, I just blindly got Introduce to these stories and I feel like this is an example of really great story teaching, where you find ways to really generate like an empathy on behalf of the audience to the subject at hand and then you can really get an idea across.
Humpty Calderon: So this is a word that I hear you use in a lot of your materials, like marketing materials, including your website story teaching. What does that mean? because I've heard of storytelling. Like what's the difference there?
Susie Jaramillo: I mean, story teaching is storytelling with a purpose to inspire kids to learn. It's that simple. So it’s it’s, I like to say the story matters, the storyteller matters more and the moral of the story matters the most. And stories with purpose, especially stories that inspire kids to learn a specific thing or what we call story teaching. I have resisted the notion of teaching for a really long time because I was like, I'm not a teacher I don't have a masters in education blah blah blah. However, I've also come to terms like within the past couple of years, and wait a second, I'm a parent and I care deeply about what I put out into the world, that it teaches what I think are fundamental skills and it turns out that a lot of what I thought were fundamental skills are 21st century skills as dictated by the World Economic Forum right? like learning literacy, and life skills. Learning skills include things like leadership, communication. I might have them backwards actually. Learning skills are skills like creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication. Life skills are things like leadership, grit, perseverance, optimism, all of those things are really important life skills. And then you've got literacy skills, but it goes beyond, it goes beyond ABCs. It’s Things like digital literacy click on every link that they get or know how to behave in social media or understand the process of seeing whether information has been verified and it is a reliable source or not or environmental literacy, which can make them more selective consumers, or civics right? They can be more important participants in our democracy. So All of these different skills aren't really taught to children in school and so I, We bake them in, like we figure out ways that we can bake these skills into the concepts that we bring to life the stories that we bring to life, so the kids learn these stories, yea sorry and learn these skills in ways that they enjoy.
Humpty Calderon: That's wonderful, so as the canticos encantos universe continues to grow and canticos itself continues to grow as an IP. What's the vision here in the next couple of months, because web3 does move quite rapidly and how does that, I guess vision adapt, continue to grow over the next year and, including some of the new IP that you were talking about earlier?
Susie Jaramillo: Two things I know for sure and I can give you our short term plans. One is that all canticos NFT holders are going to get a new chickies, which is very exciting for every NFT you already have, you're going to get another one. Just because we want to make sure that you have the ones that we were really meant to put out into the world that has the metadata it's supposed to have, and then all of that good stuff.
Number two, the next IP that we are putting out into the world is going to be Ohanio and there's going to be a press release to that effect. And the property is called OhMateo. And like I said, it's a STEM comedy show for kids. And though that will be coming out to the world. And then the other thing I can say is that our discord is going to be more and more active. We are going to look for better ways to serve our NFT audience as we start to activate our producer circle, where we’re right now we are in some studio conversations, we're bringing to life on that front, we haven't had the need yet to start to like bring that to life yet, but we certainly can and we're just trying to really figure out when the right moment to do is
Humpty Calderon: That's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did.
If you'd like to learn more about canticos, go to nft.encantos.io and on Twitter @canticosnft. Thanks for listening to Crypto Sapiens . Please give us a follow, like in a five star review wherever you enjoy your podcast. And stay tuned for our next discussion.