Who is Raúl Falcón?
Hello! My name is Raúl Falcón. I was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2002. I spent my childhood in the suburbs of Puerto Rico. My father introduced me to Walking with Dinosaurs 1999 at a very young age, and I recall he still had the video files for each episode instead of watching them on a streaming service. I was a passionate lover of prehistory, biology, zoology, science, and took notes and notes and notes of my favorite animals. I even had these note papers that I made for myself where I added “name”, “distribution”, “diet”, – small fact files for each animal that I studied, and I learned so much!
I was also living around the time when school libraries were a thing, and where you could read the cryptid picture books and the Guinness Book of World Records and had seemingly unlimited time during school breaks to read How To Train Your Dragon, Harry Potter, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Magic Treehouse, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, National Geographic, and so much more.
This was my nurturing ground for my creativity and passion for prehistory. They once made a bookmark contest that I participated in and was able to win precisely because I had learned what great bookmarks were like from reading so much. I loved my middle school environment. Precisely around 2012-2015 were the most important years of my childhood, where the Spinosaurus find shook the world in 2014 and Five Nights at Freddy’s began to spike in popularity and YouTube really took off by that time. I listened to The Living Tombstone, Minecraft parodies, and enjoyed Gangnam Style, Niga higa, Smosh, PewDiePie, LEGO tutorials, and Markiplier.
The first YouTube video I made is still on my secondary channel, Rawr!, and you can still watch it here. It was one of those note fact files that I made for Diatryma, a terror bird. I edited the whole video on iMovie, added music, did research, gathered images, and made a simple video that when I released it, got 400 views in one month (Now it has 27,000 views).To me, that was mindblowing; to know that there was an audience for this type of thing on the Internet. Lightbulb flashed on!
I was quite academically devoted, so I did not always find time to make videos, and I ended up making more than 30 from 6th to 7th grade. The original name for that channel was MadWizard38, my Xbox username. In 8th grade to 12th grade, I did not make a single video, and instead became caught up in academic work and competitive sports. Because I am 6”4, I was a bit pressured to play volleyball and I was quite good at it, being part of the Puerto Rico National Volleyball team by age 15.
However, by that time, I had enough, where I realized that my creativity and time to make art was being severely limited by school and sports. So I quit volleyball at the height of my career. Little did I know that in that year I took off I would experience a breakthrough. I do not really want to get into the details of anything that happened yet because I would like to find the proper format to share this. It might not belong on my personal website, since the story is extensive. Eventually, I might make it into a documentary if it truly feels necessary.
I returned from that experience and participated in several highly prestigious film competitions (and I was grateful to win many). In 12th grade, my mother told me “Hey, you… you should make videos. YouTube. Make some YouTube videos! I know you like it!” and I got the idea to start Enchiridion. I was incredibly lucky to have started the channel precisely around the time when we went on lockdown for COVID-19. This was perfect, because I had at least 4 hours added to my day, every day. I could manage making one video a week, and at a time I made 2-3 videos a week.
They were still very rough, since I had not gotten to After Effects in years, but I pushed through a whole year (52 weeks) of weekly uploads. I grew my audience, and at the end, I had been accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and I was studying Industrial Design, so I thought that I would not be able to do YouTube videos and so I would need to be making my last few videos. That was actually true.
You cannot make a successful YouTube channel of my kind while succeeding academically, exercising, maintaining your health, and producing videos at the same time. It is way too much, contrary to popular belief. RISD classes are studios that are 5 hours long, and on many occasions they meet 3 times a week, in addition to 2-3 more classes. You can pretty much tell that intrinsically the classes take so long you just do not have the hours necessary in your equation. You should not believe what people say to you if they want to force you or they ask about you not having uploaded any videos at college. Ignore them.
So my last video was going to be Spinosaurus, my biggest and most well-researched fact file, prior to the advent of ChatGPT, and it took off and just kept going and going when I released it. It has since become one of the top 100 paleontology videos of all time on YouTube. I won my 100,000 subscriber plaque shortly after. After that, I did not upload for three years until Junior Year summer. I actually had to take a whole year off due to another breakthrough, and by 2025 I was completing a chunk of my Junior Year and my Senior Year. This is where I made history.
I believe my life is still a focused list of things to do, and I just need time to live and realize these goals.
For example, I have never produced or directed an original feature film from an IP that I created myself. This is one of the things I TRULY want to do. I believe the date when I can start thinking about this is around 2035-2045. And not just one, but numerous IP’s. I have many great ideas. If you had $500M, what would you use it for? For me, I might use a large chunk on a highly ambitious film, hyperobsess and go all in, and hopefully it is an exceptional, original art piece that makes double or triple or four times or more revenue and I can make some more.
Another thing would be making a product. I studied Industrial Design (ID), and I’M HUNGRY TO MAKE PRODUCTS, but the problem is that it is not easy to make a product company straight out of college. You do not have money, customers, or a product. It is very complex. Some people are going to argue with me and say you can, and I would like them to prove it, because I have not seen it, not even in my highly competitive RISD class or adjacent ID universities. Hard tech product straight out of college? Doubt it. But I WANT to do this. And it needs to tie in with Enchiridion! I believe it will come naturally to me once I grow this venture, but for now… It’s slowly growing. And Manufacturing!!! I want to know what it is like to manufacture and produce things. Excited!
And finally, I’m just going to say two words… Global Issues. I want to address those through my company, products, and movies. I want to one day team up with top companies to decrease inequality worldwide and provide opportunities for people to do great stuff. I am inspired by the work of Norman Borlaug (though some people consider him controversial), the philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ventures like Khan Academy, WWF, National Geographic, etc. Doing stuff like putting 1M people out of poverty? Saving 1,000 species from going extinct? Decreasing the global CO2 ppm? There’s so many great things to do! I would be gifted if I had the opportunity of doing anything like that!
Obviously, I will continue pushing with Enchiridion to make them as successful as possible within their niche. 1B subscribers? Seems crazy, but I believe we have time…
Wish me luck.
**If I do not meet any of these goals, they may have been too ambitious, and that’s okay. I just use them as motivational reference, not as strict, YOU NEED TO FINISH THIS-type of requirement. It needs to be fun, and realistic, but also blue sky is nice.**
Me in May 2025
3D model, Sketchfab
6"4
