Today we're talking with Kevin Hoban and Jordie Simkovic, the creators and starring characters of Captain & Cat, a popular YouTube kids show with 200,000 subscribers and over 200 million views. The educational show for preschoolers tells stories using entertaining songs and narratives. They've just launched a new series called Explorasaurus: Healthy Food and You, aimed at teaching kids about healthy food and how it's grown. Their first episode about SugarBee apple growers in Washington State has over 500,000 views on YouTube.

Interview Summary

So, for people who aren't familiar with your show, for those few people out there who may not be, tell us about Captain & Cat, the characters, what they do, and how did you guys get started doing this?

Kevin - Gotcha. Well, Jordan and I have been best friends since college. We went to Northwestern University in Chicago, and we were in a band together. We would perform live on campus, in the streets. And we realized that kids would stop and really enjoyed what we were doing. And I think that was the seed of the whole thing was, "Hey, maybe our act that we have, this two-man show is something for kids." And then we graduated. We both moved out to LA. Jordan came out here to act. I moved out here to produce TV shows, and on the weekends, we started performing for kids.

Jordie - Yeah. Actually, we did a show called The Bubble Show. And we were doing probably six to eight shows a weekend for about 10 years. And then during the pandemic we started putting our stuff online because all live performances stopped. And for about three years it was nothing and crickets, and really just our parents watching. And then we won the award for best kid song of the year in 2023. And then that kinda put us on the radar of YouTube Kids who invited us to be one of the featured channels on their platform. And for a while we were doing jingles and music and educational songs and stuff like that. And then towards the end of last summer, we had connected with SugarBee Apples and that whole kind of growing cooperative out there about doing an apple song. And they actually were like, "You know what would be even cooler than that? Why don't you come out here and meet the farmers and see the harvest in action?" And we're like, "Whoa, this is really cool." And honestly, it was a life-changing experience. We now say that we have aunts, uncles, and cousins out in Central Washington. And honestly, I grew up in Miami, I went to college in Chicago, and then I've lived in Los Angeles ever since. I had never stepped foot on a farm, really, in any significant way. And just to be able to get exposure to this incredible pocket of people that otherwise I would have never had a chance to see and meet was completely eye-opening.

Kevin - I would say I went out there thinking, "This is a huge apple company. They sell them all across the country in every grocery store." I went out there thinking, "Well, this is sort of like a big industrial corporate farm," right? Must be just one giant farm with robots harvesting apples. And what we found was it was a co-op of family-owned farms. Smaller families. We met the families. We met the grandparents, the parents, the kids, the grandkids. And we learned so much about apples and how you grow them. That every apple is picked by hand, first and foremost.

Jordie - We honestly expected there was going to be like a machine just going around and shaking the apples off, you know. Because you have no idea. And there's been so much dialogue around factory farming, which has become kind of like the negative word. And honestly, yeah, as Kevin was saying, we expected just a giant faceless corporation there. And it was the exact opposite.

Can I ask you guys a question? I'd like to dive in a little deeper than this, because you're saying something that resonates with me very personally. When I moved to North Carolina from Connecticut, I was offered the opportunity through the North Carolina Farm Bureau to do a tour of farms. Two-day intensive tour of farms in Eastern North Carolina. And we went to a blueberry farm that harvests millions of pounds of blueberries a year. Soybeans, corn, hog farmers, chicken. I mean, we did everything. And it was incredibly interesting. And there was the technology part of it, or the lack of technology that I was learning about, just as you related. But there was also a very moving human part of this. The people, I thought, were really interesting. And the generational nature of farming and all. So, tell me a little bit more about the people part of it. How much that affected you.

Jordie - We met the farmer who like seven generations back, their family introduced the Granny Smith apple to the United States, you know? It's going back and we literally see it's a whole family working and living very close to where they farm. And so, kind of just, it's Uncle Farmer Peoples now, you know? And so, we were kinda talking to him about chemicals and pesticides and stuff like that off the record because we're like, "All right, so now tell us how much you spraying on these?" He's like, "Why would I ever do anything destructive to this land? This is where my family and I live."

Kevin - Yeah. And I think you also picked up on the pressure that these farmers feel to carry on the farm itself. It's been in their family for generations. They need to keep it running. And all of the pressures and anxieties that come with that just to keep this farm afloat. Because again, it's not some huge corporation, it's a family farm that's part of this co-op of other family farms. And they've all kind of banded together to pool their resources to keep everything going, which is just a wonderful... It's a wonderful lesson, I think. These farms rely on people working together day in and day out for their own collective good.

Jordie - The guy who runs the packaging facility is the brother-in-law of one of the growers. So, we thought that they were pranking us, because literally every car that drove by, they're like, "Oh, that's my brother-in-law. Oh, that's my aunt. That's my niece," in this little town right off Lake Chelan. And you really see the impact. We actually were just there last week again to film a new segment about apple blossoms and pollination and stuff like that. And one of the coolest experiences we had there was we went to an elementary school. One of the families in the co-op had donated shoes to a lot of the kids in the elementary school, and we helped go distribute them there. It's honestly so cool to see that the same way that LA is built around the film industry, there they're literally built around the apple and cherry industry, and pears. Ever since we went there, I off-camera would not, you would not catch me eating anything other than a SugarBee. And that's the truth.

You know, so interesting to hear you talk about this and your experience with the apple production facility and the people being related to one another. It's exactly what I found on a sweet potato farm here. North Carolina's the largest producer of sweet potatoes, and I visited a very large farm owned by a man and his daughter. I mean, they really ran this business. And they were farmers at their heart, but this was $100 million a year business. And they're looking at international trade markets and deciding when to release the sweet potato. I mean highly sophisticated financial decisions they were making. But at the end of the day, they were related to their land, and that's what this was all about. I mean, to say it was a spiritual relationship doesn't... I don't know what word captures it. But it was something very special in that sometimes you think about farmers exploiting the land, and that happens with the big factory farms. But in these cases, you find farmers want to be at peace with their land. And I heard it many times, that they wanted to turn the land over in better condition to their children than it was turned over to them. It's obvious from affectively and emotionally the way you're talking about it and the way I'm talking about it, something very special is occurring here. How do you communicate that in a video, especially to children?

Kevin - Well, I think for us, we always lead with the enthusiasm that we have, but then also trying to tease out the enthusiasm that the farmers have themselves. Because some of them are not used to being on camera, and certainly not on a YouTube Kids show. But once we ask the right questions and probe a little bit of, for an example, we just shot with them last week. And we asked for students that we work with around the country to submit questions. And one of the questions was, "Does the farmer talk to his apples?" And we asked one of the farmers that, and he lit up, and you just saw all the sudden that passion that he really does have for his apples. And I think the more that we can bring that out of the farmers, show kids and families how passionate and excited they are about the fruit, that hopefully that will get the kids excited as well.

You can imagine the farmer talking to an apple when it's falls from 30 feet on his head.

Jordie - They're pretty sturdy up there, honestly. And I think another way to kinda communicate the care is to show how much work goes into it. Because literally, this was informative for us just because going from the blossoms, they go through and prune by hand. And hand select it because there are so many variables involved. And what we found is the confluence of this incredible intergenerational wisdom and technique and craft that has been passed down and honed. Also, kind of meeting within the packagi...