2020 vision: new year, new us.

Same us.

Yeah.

Just different.

Well, what's up everybody?

I'm Alex. I'm Marko.

You are watching Vagabrothers.

Welcome back to the channel.

It's a new year, a new decade.

There's a ton of stuff going on in both of our lives,

and we figured it's the perfect opportunity to

sit down with you all and just talk.

Yeah, I mean it's been a while since we've checked in.

We're always trying to give you guys really

factual travel content, inspirational vlogs and stuff.

But every now and then,

we've got to just check in and speak person-to-person.

You might have noticed that in 2019,

we published a little bit less frequently.

The truth is it was a really difficult year for us.

We had a lot going on.

First and foremost,

our mother was diagnosed with breast cancer,

and she's a huge part of our lives.

Luckily, she has been a total trooper throughout

the entire process and is feeling much better.

So that's a huge relief.

I feel a lot of gratitude for

the way that it's played out so far and

just so much love for Mom and for her

indomitable spirit, really.

Personally for me I also felt a slowing down,

not like kind of in the same time period,

but if you notice I didn't go up Mount Kilimanjaro

And I found out this year that I have arthritis

in my ankle from an old injury,

and it really slowed my body down

and forced me to really confront

the fact that I've been running for so long.

I moved to India a week after college in 2008.

Last year marked 11 years

of pretty much straight traveling.

I needed some stillness in my life and to take

a moment away from the road

and also a moment away from social media

because that can also be its own form of pressure.

We've had the opportunity through this channel

to reach millions of people and

inspire tons of journeys around the world.

But personally this year,

I kind of felt both of those things:

the pressures of travel and the pressures of

keeping up on social media really got to me.

I just needed a little bit of break from both of them,

and so I took some time away to do that.

And some of you been asking

why I haven't been posting so much,

and that's part of it.

There's a whole journey behind that

that I'm happy to tell you about in another time

on my own channel or my own Instagram.

I'm going to start posting more around that journey

and the inner journey that I've been going on,

but that's kind of made 2019

a challenging year for me, in that respect.

One of the challenges that we had to overcome in

2019 was just being out of rhythm with each other.

I think that as Mark was feeling the need to slow down,

I was kind of feeling the opposite.

I was feeling more inspired than ever.

I wanted to take on challenges like Kilimanjaro,

but also just wanted to continue

to explore and document it

and share all of these incredible experiences

and opportunities that were presenting themselves,

not only with the people that I love in my life,

but also with all of you out there.

2019.. you know, the end of a decade.

I personally feel, just more than anything,

just immense gratitude for all of the incredible

life experiences that this channel has given us,

and therefore that you out there have given us

by subscribing, by interacting with the content and

getting these messages from all of you

about how videos that we've made

or experiences that we've had

have positively influenced you

and even caused you to go out and explore a country.

That for me was just like this incredible,

closed-circuit loop.

Every time I would make something and share it

and people would interact positively,

I felt that much more inspired to do more.

It was challenging because we were firing on different cylinders.

Coming in 2020, we're getting older

I'm 33 years old. That's my Jesus year.

I'm trying to grow the beard out to match that look.

We've both made it past terrible 27s.

and I think that we're coming into our 30s strong.

There's a ton of incredible stuff happening...

I'm engaged. I'm getting married in May to Carrie Rad

who is an incredible person.

She's the love of my life,

She said yes! She said yes!

and I feel so much joy around that,

so much excitement.

But also the channel is approaching

a million subscribers.

Wow.

That is something that you and I have been working

together towards for almost a decade in itself.

It's been like seven or eight years.

Yeah, it's nuts. We started off this channel.

We were like 24, 26..

just backpackers teaching English in Spain.

Two guys with a GoPro duct-taped to a broomstick,

up against the world.

Alex got a Hero 1.

This dude invented the selfie stick.

I'm giving him credit for that.

If only I had actually patented it.

He literally had a broomstick and duct taped it to the Hero 1 GoPro

and started vlogging.

I was so nervous, I could barely stand in front of the camera.

And I kept feeling so, so self-conscious on camera,

and Alex pushed me to feel comfortable and that

is really what allowed this whole process to happen

And so, you know, the channel's evolved.

We started off in the beginning... we were making like..

kind of documentary style things that were.....

It was kind of like a Discovery Channel or like Vice style

depending on what the subject was and

then we kind of became... We won this contest;

we travel around the world for six months

We then kind of got on the daily vlogging mix.

That was wild. It's just been an evolution.

And when you think back about how

much content we've made.

We've made hundreds of videos-

like over 500 videos- I was looking the other day-

from dozens of countries... I don't even know how many.

People ask me. I don't know,

Now we're approaching a million subscribers,

and it's just a moment for both of us to pause...

to thank you guys, to thank each other,

to thank our family for putting up with two

family members going into business together.

We do a lot of this. You've got to hug it out.

You know, but like dude, here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

We're brothers. We're both creative people.

We're both driven and we have our own visions,

and a lot of the time, 99 percent of the time,

those visions overlap.

And when that happens, it's incredible.

And then sometimes we have different interests

where one of us is like, yes.. I'm excited about that,

and the other person is like..,

I'm not so excited about that.

Yeah, and that's life.

So you're probably wondering what's in store for 2020?

Well for me, I've had a very surprised,

unexpected offer that came to me.

I got the opportunity to

work as a producer on a new travel television show,

and I hadn't expected it.

I was kind of like a little bit confused,

but then I started thinking about it and

I know that Alex and I have been working

together hand in glove for the last 7 years,

and this is obviously something

that I will have to step away from the channel to do.

But I thought about it,

and I really realized this is the right direction.

It's a six month job,

and I will be making two seasons of a television show.

So I will be traveling for the next six months straight.

Television for me has been something that like although growing up,

I'm the person that always loved to read books,

and it was always like... no, no TV.

The reality is we're living in the Golden Age of television,

and I personally,

if you had to talk about the type of content I like to make,

I like to make deep, long-form, highly produced content,

and we've done a lot of that on Vagabrothers,

and I do think that there's a lot of room to still do that.

However, television still is really the gold standard for

long-form highly produced content,

and taking an opportunity, a short -term opportunity,

to really dive into that......learn and grow because

the weird thing that you might not see from there

is that we don't have bosses, which is like

a blessing in many ways,

but sometimes you just want to be like,

"Dude, what do I do right now?" because there's no one.

When you're on YouTube, you're blazing the path,

and sometimes you get to a situation,

you're like, "How do we deal with this?"

And you don't know.

One of the things I'm stoked about

is the team that I'm working with..

the producer's.. really really..

There's a couple producers

who are really, really well experienced. It's a great team.

I'm obviously bummed to be leaving my brother

for the next six months because I love him.

I love the channel and I know there's some great things

in the pipeline for Vagabrothers that I'm going to

unfortunately not be able to participate in.

There's a lot of room to grow and I'm just grateful for

the opportunity and for my brother to help me

accommodate the situation so I can do it.

Yeah, you know the thing is this:

you are a great producer.

That's the skill- set that you've developed over the last

seven or eight years of us working together,

and you excel at it.

And this is an opportunity for you to take that skill- set

to where it's most needed and to grow it

and to learn new skills and to learn

new things and to try out a different form of creativity.

And I think that that in itself is great.

It's immensely beneficial.

I think that this is like honestly,

the universe is opening the right doors at the right time,

and I don't look at it like a sad thing.

I look at it as a happy thing.

Not only is this an incredible opportunity for you..

to learn, to increase your skills, and to diversify,

it's also coming at a great time for me.

I'm getting married in May. I have a lot of plans.

There's a honeymoon coming up.

There's also on the work front

a ton of really interesting opportunities.

I want to continue to improve my craft, my storytelling.

I want to make content for the Vagabrothers channel,

but also for my personal channel,

and I just really want to increase productivity.

I want to share more. I want to create more,

and I want to maybe stop holding back.

I feel like in the last year there were a lot of

ideas that I wanted to do,

but it just didn't feel like the right time,

and I think that here in 2020,

I'm going to have more time

to kind of think bigger picture

and to try different forms of storytelling