Rare Earth

How Conservation Might Kill the Most Important Forest in Micronesia

Today's toast is to the conservation officers we met in Kosrae, or as Evan now likes to call them, our mangrove brothers. 

They were two very nice and interesting guys who were in Micronesia to study the mangroves. To find out more about their research, we crashed their dinner a couple of times. I hope they didn't mind too much.

Cheers to them and love to you all,

Kata and Evan

Help This Man Save A Nearly Extinct Species By Eating It

There are a few clams we call the giant, but the Tridacna Gigas is king of them all. It is likely the most important animal in the history of the Pacific, and unfortunately, in much of its historical habitat it happens to be functionally extinct. But here in Kosrae island Martin Selch and his team at the Kosrae National Aquatic Center are aiming to save it. And that's not an idle boast. After a successful spawning in 2020, just this month they've begun reintroduction of the Gigas to the Kosra...

What Winning a Multi-Million Dollar Resort Did to a Pokémon Quiz Master

Hello everyone, welcome to Kosrae! A truly beautiful island, truly in the middle of nowhere.

After we got home, we realized that most of the episodes that came out of Kosrae were about expats/foreigners, which for us feels rather unusual. Normally when filming, for the most part, we do our best to avoid non-locals. But in Kosrae, nobody can be avoided. Film the island for three days and cars full of strangers will already honk their way by and scream out your name in greeting. A couple ...

Tojo's Timebomb: How Japan's WW2 Ghost Fleet Still Threatens the World (And Might End Up Saving It)

My longest ever title. "How will the YouTube recommended bar react?", he asks with bated breath, already knowing the answer.

Rather than discussing the episode contents I am dedicating the rest of this description section to an aside:

The problem with writing scripts while filming on the road is that surely, by the time we get home to edit them, all I can think is how much I want to change certain elements that aren't perfectly stated in my 16 hour speed-writing.

The probl...

The Island Where Women Ate Their Husbands

It's virtually impossible to find accurate and trustworthy information about Micronesia on the internet. Plus, the region isn't just understudied, most of the sources are quite old. But this meant that Evan and I read pretty much every single research article and documentation we were able to find on Chuuk, as well as on the other islands we visited.

Today's episode stems from perhaps the most grotesquely human story we've ever found in all our years of research. Although the...

Who Owns the Skulls of Chuuk Lagoon?

New season!

Twenty episodes from Micronesia and the Marshall Islands starts today in Truk/Chuuk Lagoon. It's probably the single best dive spot on the planet, with dozens of accessible wrecks in near-perfect visibility. But it's also an underwater graveyard for over 4000 Japanese invaders.

And the real question I'm asking today is, what is Chuuk supposed to do with their skulls?

Love to you all,
Evan and Kata

p.s. It has been an extremely fast summer helping out...

Please Ask Mr. Beast to Watch This Video

Hello again from Micronesia - another post scheduled ahead of time

I don't know if Mr. Beast will ever see this, but I made a promise to a friend. And this is me fulfilling it.

Thanks for watching and supporting. We love you all!

Should We Save This Boy?

Hello from Micronesia - actually we have scheduled this video in advance as we probably won't have internet access for some time.

Fajar asked us to make this video. It was more important to him than even a piano.

I hope you can feel through the screen a little of what it meant to us to be able to make this, even from such a distance.

I cannot express in words the thanks I give to the entire staff of We Love Reading (but most especially Lina and Mays), to my sister, to the go...

The Long Forgotten Secret of the Dead Sea

Dearest Patrons, sorry we don't produce as many videos as quickly as before. But with over 20 scripts yet to be written and us heading out tomorrow morning for yet another 3 months of filming, it's safe to say there is plenty of Rare Earth yet to come.

I'm back for the time being with a very short season in Jordan, which begins here, on a vacation day in the Dead Sea (with a bit of a throwaway episode). I thought it might be a nice palate cleanser before we head into the refugee camps ...

Are the Azores Atlantis?

There were so many comments this season that I had to take a long break during my normal filming and editing plans and write out this episode. It isn't our normal style, that's for sure, but deep down I knew I'd never be able to move on unless I covered it.

Like the Nazis it inspired, seems like you can never keep Atlantis down for long enough. This is the story of cataclysm. Hope you enjoy it!

As always, thank you. It means so much to us that you're here.

Evan & Kata...

The Best Cheese on Earth

Rudy won my heart. He deserved a video commemorating his work.  

Sorry for the upload delays, Kata and I are on the road again and it's hard to both film and edit at the same time. One more from the Azores, and it'll be huge. Probably our largest video of all time, even.  

Hope you get a chance to try Sao Jorge cheese someday. It truly was magnificent.

The Town That Cooks in a Volcano

Furnas was an incredibly cool little town. They'd found a way to seamlessly integrate belching sulfur pockets into a cute botanical gardens and small town core. Multiple different unpleasant-tasting spring waters that are supposedly good for every other thing and stew cooked in the earth, just an all around cool little town.

I had only intended to visit on an off day, as a tourist. But once we got there, Francesco and Kata were adamant that I turn it into a story. They liked it, and I ...

Cows: 1, Spanish Army: 0

Sometimes, facts are just the soil that we grow our fantasies in.  

This season in the Azores is about the mythology that drives our world, and as such today's episode is only as true as we choose it to be. (I actually wasn't even all that keen on it until Kata came up with this title and now it makes me chuckle enough that I'm back to loving it.)

A sincere and continuous thank you to everyone who helps us make these. You're all Brianda to me.

Our deepest thanks,
E...

The Remote Island With A Statue That Nobody Can Explain

Today's video is a bit of a continuation of our first from this season, but the story was so uniquely its own that I decided to split it off into a unique episode. Ultimately, this is a season about myths, and today's episode is on the horseman of Corvo, the statue nobody can explain.  

Also I know you're going to ask about the coins and I looked into the coins and they were very suspicious so I left them out. If you'd like to do your own research on the coins, I recommend looking ...

The 40 Billion Dollar Pirate Treasure Just Right Over There

Today's story is about a massive pirate booty that's just right over there. 

Evan is camping this weekend, so if you urgently need the treasure coordinates, he isn't available to promptly respond to your requests. 

Thanks for watching!

Kata

When 2000lbs of Cocaine Washed Up in a Small Town

Today's episode is thanks to a comment I received from a viewer alerting me to a very important local history. It might not be my normal fare, but it was such an interesting story I felt it deserved an episode.

This is the legend of Antonino Quinci, Sicilian smuggler: the first time it snowed in the Azores.

Love to you all!!
Evan & Kata

This Cave Shouldn't Exist

Today's episode is about a cave that shouldn't exist.

Well, sort of. It's actually just an argument I had with an old man at a party. But as it turns out, they're kind of the same thing.

It'll be a shorter season in the Azores (like Guatemala), but it was a ton of fun to film and I hope you enjoy what we've found here. After all, you made it possible!

Love to all of you!
Evan and Kata

The Most Beautiful Toilet in Guatemala

Marx said that "money degrades all the gods of man and turns them into commodities". And it isn't so much that he's wrong, I just think it doesn't dig deep enough into our nature. It isn't really money that does it, but us. Gods were always commodities, that's why we made them gods.  

With that said, welcome to Lake Atitlan, one of the most beautiful toilets on earth; where God is dead, and money killed him.  

Also: Sorry for the wait for this video, and the meh qualit...

The CIA's Secret Genocide

Sorry for the delay, Kata and I ended up accidentally making this one 3x longer than our normal videos, and it took 3x as long to make.

The story of the banana republics, the United Fruit company, or the CIA intervention of the 40s and 50s are virtually impossible stories to tell correctly. They are simply too big and complicated. Mixing them together as I've done here means leaving out a vast majority of the story. A thousand unmentioned thoughts. I think, maybe, with around 3 hours o...

a 23 second video with 22 seconds of credits

Since we didn't have a new video ready for you this week, we decided to upload something silly. Just because it was funny and maybe YouTube will hate us less too if we don't skip a week. 

I have no idea how Evan managed to sit in the snow for 45 seconds (minus credits), it was almost -20 Celsius this morning. (He did jump into the shower afterwards to warm up his feet.)

Hope you all have a great Saturday!  

Love,

Kata (and Evan)

The Great Decapitation Game

Today's story is essentially made up. Apocryphal. Euphenia-esque.

My reasoning is that historians virtually don't know anything for a fact about the culture of the great cities of the Maya (explicitly, Yaxha during the post-classical period), nor precisely how the ball game operated and why it was played. But I wanted to tell a story about the unifying history of sports, based on one we often hyperbolize and misunderstand, and in turn this is crafted out of the most up-to-date research...

The Last Survivor of San Miguel

Today's story is about Eufenia, the last remaining townsperson of San Miguel Los Lotes, lost to a Volcano. But there is more than her than meets the eye, and spending a few hours with her this summer inspired me to write a story about storytelling.

I don't entirely believe the conclusion I came up with, and ultimately I failed to articulate myself exactly as I intended, but the question is this: are some stories better if you suspend disbelief?

As always, love from us both
Ev...

Maximum Man: The God of Cigarettes and Beer

Thank you so much for all the nice messages and comments! It feels good to be releasing videos again. :)

Evan is currently getting his booster, so it is my turn posting. 

Hope you enjoy this week's video on Maximon, a rather unusual God. 

Have a lovely Saturday! Hopefully, your day is not as cold as ours in Toronto,

Kata (and Evan)

The Corn Demands Your Blood

Wow! A new video? I don't believe it.

Well dear Patron, get used to it. Because we're back!*

I'm not saying that these seasons are technically the best we've ever made, this first season was shot entirely by me in two weeks and all the on-camera parts were filmed without knowing what the scripts would eventually be - but they're something. But now, having added two other short seasons into the pipeline (filmed by Francesco, our plucky cameraman returns) I have enough in stock to...

The Middle Finger Aimed at Italy

Francesco's grandmother died less than 12 hours after filming this video. Her last moments were spent recounting her past with a grandson she was able to help in his career.

It was a beautiful form of bittersweet reality that made me want to work harder, and so this video took longer for me to make.

Hope you like it. Sorry it isn't the happy 2021 content I promised. But as ever, its important.

My love to you all - I'm sending out some Larry rewards soon. Apologies as always...

Larry: Queen of 2020

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you probably already know about Larry. 

She's my sweetheart. She's my raccoon. She's the saviour of 2020.

I know I've been gone a long time, and for that I apologize. Covid hasn't been fun for me, but I'm getting back on my feet thanks to the love and support of my forest pals, and hopefully the stories I'm able to bring in 2021 will be positive remembrances that make life happier. The era of morose videos is dead, long live the happ...

An Alien in Montevideo

HUGE NEWS!  

Just before the pandemic I signed some paperwork that fundamentally changed this channel. For the better, I hope, but who knows, it’s life, right?  

Back in April, or March maybe, god this summer has breezed by... back whenever that was I signed up with an organization called Nebula. You might have already heard of them, I’m certainly not the first person they’ve signed. I really, really like what they're trying to do. It almost feels like they’re ...

The Delicious Meat Sludge Factory

I kind of want to do this story again as a real documentary, with an hour and tons of stock footage. It seems like it would be a cool 'follow the thread' type tale through a bunch of different individual experiences.

Maybe when I hook up with Nebula...  Hope you enjoy it!

Love as always,
Evan (and Kata)

Oh, speaking of which, if I ever hook up with Nebula (which I will almost certainly be doing for larger projects) I'm gonna grandfather all of you in. If you sup...

The Swiss Colony of Uruguay

Sorry we're late this week (again). It is incredibly hard to remain creative during quarantine, and we're doing our best to keep on top of all the things.

I hope you like this little story on the Volk of Uruguay and the town of Nueva Helvetica. I thought it was a cute little town.

As always, much love to everyone for the support. It means so much, now most of all.

Evan and Kata

Are the Charrua Extinct?

I'm very happy with how this video turned out. I think it is an important question, regardless of where you're from.

Love to you all from a virus free home,

Evan and Kata