4 Million Subscribers! (how we got here)

Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention, please? We have a special announcement to make. The couple there in the back just reached 4 million subscribers on their YouTube channel.

Oh, lovely. I'll clean that up later to help you celebrate. Why don't you two come up here to the very front of the plane to first class in these big comfy seats while will pour you a glass of champagne on us to help you celebrate even more than you already are.

Wow, she's really excited.

Sorry, excuse me. That was very unprofessional of me.

Go nuts, kids.

Wow, this is so exciting. An upgrade. Cheers. 4 million to 4 million.

This is a set. We're on an airplane that's sitting in the middle of a parking lot right now.

That wasn't really a flight attendant, that was me.

But it felt like the perfect backdrop for telling the story of nine years on YouTube and how we got to 4 million subscribers. Before we dive in, I wanted to quickly remind you that our Black Friday sale is still going on. You can currently get $50 off Daily Drop Pro and a set of six custom packing cubes. It's only going to last a few more days. Link in the description.

We uploaded our very first video to this channel on January 11, 2016, which means we've now been on YouTube for almost nine years.

I feel so old. We never thought we would still be doing YouTube nine years later, much less calling this our career and still traveling or sitting on an airplane set in la. So before we left to go travel, I had a small printing company and Kara was a nanny.

We were not special in any way.

So to celebrate reaching 4 million subscribers, we wanted to take a nostalgic look back at how we got here and try to make it make some sense. At this point, our channel is a very random mix of videos. We have physical challenges, first class flights, trains, van life, traveling to 100 countries, health challenges. It's all over the board. So the plan for today's video is to basically take you year by year and talk about the different seasons that this channel's been through and the pivotal moments that we feel like have shaped this channel and gotten us to where we are today. Let's start with 2015, the year before we started YouTube. So this might be a surprise to you, but the plan was never to become YouTubers. The whole plan was to take a year off and go travel. So in 2015, we spent a year saving up miles and points, and at the end of that year, we had $35,000 and 2 million miles in points and a lot of credit cards. And the plan was to travel for a year or until the money ran out. Then a few months before we left to go travel, we discovered this guy named Casey Neistat who was making daily videos of his life in New York. Believe it or not, this was the first time we had ever watched YouTube or like, realized that people had YouTube channels.

I had no idea.

The only thing we knew before that was like, somebody would send you a funny video of like a cat or something. But I didn't realize, like, you followed people's channels until a few months before we left to go travel.

So on a whim, completely randomly, we bought a point and shoot camera to maybe do some vlogs of our channel. I thought vlog was the weirdest thing ever, but we were like, could be fun, who knows?

We figured like, 2016 is going to be the coolest year of our entire life. And if we make these daily videos, best case scenario, it turns into something. Worst case scenario, we can look back on these videos of the best year of our life. But we bought the point and shoot camera in 2015, I'm sure we'll come back to one of those terrible videos. This is video diary day one. And we're up. Yeah, let's go ahead and jump to 2016.

Five years ago, we made an hour long documentary about our first four years of YouTube and full time travel. So we're going to kind of breeze through these first four years because I assume most people have seen that, but if not, we'll link it below.

So long story short, January 10th of 2016, we took our first one way flight from the US to Japan and started filming for this channel and started traveling in general.

Welcome to my new life. Chasing Nate to our gate. What a wild week that first week was. We had no idea what we were doing with the camera.

The funny thing is, the first week I edited all of the videos. Kara has edited every video since week one. There's no way I could edit one of our videos now. Really. Year one was just us having fun and figuring things out. The camera followed us around, we picked it up, we said what we were doing. Casey Neistat made daily vlogging look super easy. And we thought that's what it would be. And we quickly learned that it's actually a lot of work.

I actually remember week one of daily travel vlogging. I kind of had this moment of, I don't want to do this anymore.

We almost quit. We spent one week in Japan. We flew to the Philippines. And I can picture the hotel that we were sitting at. We were sleeping in this attic upstairs because all the hotels were full when we got there.

And I said this is not fun. I just want to go to the beach. But instead I'm trying to find royalty free music. I don't even know what that means. It could have been over.

We almost quit very early on. But at the time we were sharing our videos on Facebook and people who like we had gone to school with people who were just like friends of friends were commenting on those videos and we almost felt like we would be letting them down by not continuing to post these videos.

So many people have reached out and encouraged us and texted us, like I'm so proud of that version of us for sticking with it. Like for better or for worse.

Way to go 2016 Kara. Way to keep editing.

I'm tired and there's no coffee here. I'd say 2016 was one of the best years of my life.

If there was like one superpower that I had, it would be to not get used to anything. Like I so wish I could put myself back in my own shoes and brain of 2016. To just be completely in awe of everything in the world of just going and walking around the streets and eating street food and all of that just felt so crazy and amazing. But for better or for worse, things do become normalized in your life if you do them enough. So year one we visited 30 different countries, posted 276 videos and gained 27,000 subscribers.

2017.

So at the beginning of 2017 we had a big decision to make because our one year of travel had come and gone, we had 27,000 subscribers on YouTube and we would have done anything to keep traveling. So at that point we saw the YouTube as the best thing we had going for us to be able to afford to keep traveling.

We decided if we were going to keep traveling, we needed a goal.

And I feel like in the first year we had kind of become the people that traveled really quickly and went to a lot of countries. And 100 was a nice round number really. The first four years of our channel was going to 100 countries. We didn't know that during year one, but years three through four that was the focus of the entire channel which felt completely crazy at the time because I actually used to keep track of our income and expenses on our website. And looking back at the beginning of 2017, we lost money the first three months and we didn't have any more money to lose. So the craziest part about setting that goal was it felt financially impossible.

So given our budget or lack thereof, we like to refer to 2017 as our year of free stuff.

A lot of bunny years here.

It's honestly hard to imagine YouTube this way in today's world. But it was the wild wild back then. We pitched so many people, so many companies experiences. Like, we're Karen Nay. We have this YouTube channel. We make travel videos trying to get free stuff. And one day we would get turned down for an eighty dollar bungee jump. You know, like, they'd be like, no, we're not into that. And then the next day, a luxury Galapagos cruise would be like, yeah, come on. You know, seven nights for free. Like, it was just so random.

Every night I was sitting on my computer sending emails, trying to get stuff for free. But it wasn't like it is today where I'm sending emails and saying, ooh, look at my channel. I was sending emails, trying to explain what YouTube was to people.

And now, you know, there are whole jobs devoted to like, social media marketing. It just wasn't that way.

Okay, so I think one pivotal moment to point out from 2017 is that we rode the Trans Siberian Railway all the way across Russia. And I believe the first video we posted riding the Trans Siberian was our first video to ever hit a million views. And the series as a whole just did way better than we had ever seen anything perform on our channel.

It was the first thing that we felt like really went viral and elusive.

So I feel like today if you see us doing train travel on the channel, it really came from this Trans Siberian trip. And then we did a bunch of overnight trains as we continued to travel.

I'm nervous. I just nervous. I had a whole snickers.

Now it's turned into luxury trains. But it all started back in 2017. We said the first four years were going to be short. I don't feel like it's been that so far. So we'll try to speed it up. In 2017, we traveled to 36 more countries, made 193 videos, and gained 60,000 subscribers.

Man, I was an editing machine.

You were looking back at 2018, I feel like that's when the channel really started to gain momentum because at the beginning of the year, we hit 100,000 subscribers. When we were in Oman, which just felt like the world's most massive milestone.

Last night we got 100,000 subscribers.

And in the same 48 hours, we got nominated for a shorty award.

We were on top of the world like Nothing could bring us down.

It didn't matter what the award was. Just the fact that somebody was recognizing us for something.

I felt like a Hollywood movie star. It might as well have been a Grammy.

Honestly, it was really validating.

Karen needs.

2018 was a real turning point, and, like, we're actually gonna do this.

Around the time we hit 100,000 subscribers, we were making at least $75 a day. And it was the first time that it didn't feel like finances were gonna hold us back from visiting 100 countries. Then it was just if we could, like, keep up the stamina to keep going.

But at that point, we're going so.

Hard, we both look back at how many videos we post it and how quickly we traveled and just wonder how.

There was something about the adrenaline rush that we would have on this daily basis. We're traveling the world and making money. Like, that was just all that mattered was, like, staying on this wave.

It all felt too good to be true, and we felt like it was gonna be over at any moment. So while we're in it, let's make the most of it.

Oh.

In 2018, we did our first brand deal.

We were big time.

DJI sent us this little gimbal thing for your phone, and I remember they asked us to film an entire video on it. Back in the day, phones weren't as good as they are now, but we did because they were paying us fifteen hundred dollars, and we thought we were rich.

We would do anything for $1500.

In 2018, we visited 22 countries, made 134 videos, and gained 389,000 subscribers.

We made a video called Thoughts on New DFW Centurion Lounge. Times were simpler.

Okay. We started 2019 in Cuba. I think this might have been my favorite year on YouTube. 2016, the first year we started in 2019. If I could go back and relive any two years, it would be those 2019. We have really hit our stride on YouTube. We only had 12 countries to go to get to 100 countries. We decided, like, let's slow down. Let's stretch this thing out and just enjoy it as much as possible.

We knew that this was the best year of our lives. Like, in the moment, you know, we were very intimidated by what would happen after 100.

So it had taken us three years to get to 500,000 subscribers. So the idea of getting another 500,000 subscribers in a single year was unfathomable. But at the end of 2019, we stepped foot in our hundredth country of Fiji. And literally the week that we were there, we hit 1 million subscribers.

The timing is impossible.

If everybody wants to hit subscribe right now, that would be amazing. Took a long time to get to four, but there's just something different about a million. Yeah, that's all I'll say. That was, I mean, I was going to say the most special week of my life and then I felt like, oh, maybe I shouldn't say that because, like, we got married.

No, it was.

I know.

In 2019, we visited our final 12 countries, published 116 videos and gained 578,000 subscribers.

And that brings us to 2020. Like we said before, we had already recapped and reflected on those first four years in our 100 country documentary. But once 2020 happened, we haven't really reflected on these last four. Almost five years until now, really.

I feel like we learned a lot of things about ourselves over the past few days thinking about this video.

So buckle up, fasten your seat belts.

There might be turbulence stuck down in the seat. Hurry, we're heading the.

Real quick. Want to say a big thank you to the sponsor of today's video, who I feel like is a very fitting one because they are our longest ongoing sponsor of the channel. I remember doing our first ad for surfshark back in 2020 on the way to Antarctica and they are still supporting the channel today. If you don't know what Surfshark is, it is the best VPN on the Internet. And VPN stands for Virtual Private Network which encrypts all the data sent between your computer and the Internet so that no one can steal your sensitive information. As we're traveling, we're always connecting to public WI fi. Those public WI fi's can be a gold mine for hackers because you never know who's lurking around. And unfortunately hackers are really smart. We actually know personally two people who have had their social media channels hacked, like people who do social media for a living. So this was a really big deal and we were on a trip with somebody when he had his identity stolen. This is a real problem that we've seen multiple people go through. And the easiest way to protect yourself is with a VPN if you don't already have one. We highly recommend Surfshark. It is in our opinion the best VPN on the Internet and it's the only VPN to offer one account for unlimited devices.

Plus if you go to our link surfshark.com Karen Nate, you can get get four months for free at an unbelievable price.

And there's a 30 day money back guarantee, so there is no risk to try it out. To get started, either scan the QR code here on the screen or click the link in the description below. So at the beginning of 2020, remember this is pre Covid didn't happen in January, it happened a few months later. We felt so much pressure on what we were going to do after hitting 100 countries.

That is all we had strived to do for four whole years. And we felt very directionless.

And we were going so hard during that time that we didn't have time to plan out what happens next. All of our brain space has been used up and we just haven't had time to figure this out yet. And we don't want to rush into anything. I think we always thought after we hit 100 countries we would like go home, get normal jobs, have kids. But we never expected to have a million subscribers and YouTube have turned into a job. But we obviously weren't going to go back and get real jobs when we could keep traveling and making videos.

So the question was we just went to 100 countries. We published a documentary about that journey. How do we follow that up? Like, where are we supposed to go now?

But we thought the only way we could possibly follow up 100 countries was going to our seventh continent of Antarctica, which ended up being what I think we both still refer to as the best trip of our entire lives.

We were still riding that wave, baby. I mean it was so cool.

But I do remember this is when the first grumblings of COVID happened. We passed our coronavirus test. We're allowed to get on the ship, so it's actually happening. When we got on the ship, it was the first time we ever had our temperature taken going in somewhere. And I thought it was so ridiculous.

It felt like I remember being like, ooh. And you even can tell in the videos when we're talking about it at the time, like we're calling it the coronavirus. Like it's just like this thing that we're like checking our temperature.

Quick secondary screening to make sure we don't have the coronavirus. The words we won't speak of. We spent two weeks going to Antarctica and back. And by the time we got back.

A lot had changed in the world.

We have therefore made the assessment that.

COVID 19 can be characterized as a pandemic.

We were still naive enough to think that there's no way there could really be something that's going to shut down the entire world. World we Already had a trip to the Philippines booked, and we thought, people are blowing this out of proportion. Let's fly to the Philippines. So we're sitting on this private island in the Philippines. Our host, who didn't speak good English, comes to us, shows us something on our phone that basically says, you have to leave right now because they're shutting down the Manila airport, which is the capital city of the Philippines, and if you can't get back there, you're not going to be able to get out of the country. And we call our friend who used to be an epidemiologist, and we say, hey, is this actually as serious as people are making it out to be? She says, I think it's a pretty big deal, which, looking back, maybe should have been obvious at that point. And we're like, what should we do? So she says, I would fly to Singapore because they have good health care there, and you can sit there and kind of like, wait it out and see if this is actually as big a deal as everyone thinks it is. So the next morning, we're on a boat at 2am it's dark. We get to the airport, it's complete chaos. We barely escape the Philippines, and we fly to sink Singapore. And we stayed in Singapore for an entire month and watched the world shut down around us.

Gosh, that was crazy.

And then we receive an email from the government that says, hey, you're an American. Overseas, there's going to be four more flights from Singapore to the US Be on one of those flights, or we can't guarantee that we can get you back to our country.

So we took that as a sign that we should probably go home against our will.

So we get on the weirdest fight of our life. We fly back to the US and we rent this cabin in the woods. And because we don't want to contaminate the rest of our family with our travelers, Covid we weren't sick, but, you know, and we sit in this cabin in the woods for a month trying to figure out how we're going to keep a travel channel going during a global pandemic.

In, like, the weirdest way, this was good timing for us.

We needed to pivot the channel to something new, but we didn't know what that was going to be. And then Covid happened, and everybody had to pivot. So that kind of gave us the opportunity to start doing something new. At the same time, everybody else was so, like, it made sense. After a month of sitting in the cabin, we had a few ideas of what we could do next. We thought maybe we could buy and renovate an Airbnb for when travel comes back. We could buy a sailboat. Looking back, I don't think those people had very much freedom either. That was a bad idea.

We actually put Bike Across America on.

There or buy a van. And we literally put this up for a vote on Instagram, and the van won and we bought a van.

That is how we fell into van life. This is our biggest, most adult purchase we've ever made together.

We bought our van in April, which was apparently before people realized that you could go outside without getting Covid. Like, it hadn't become a trend yet. So we actually bought the van and basically like a fire sale. We got a great deal on it from somebody who was just trying to get rid of it because nobody knew it was going to happen. During COVID a month later, you couldn't find a van for sale, and if you were going to buy it, it was going to be crazy expensive. So we got super lucky. And at that point, the channel transitioned to van life, really. In the beginning, it was us figuring out how to live in a van. Just carry my pee bucket across the campground. Me figuring out how to work on a van.

It's leaky. I feel like the reason people liked it is because during COVID we were all having to figure out new things that we weren't good at. We were all having to make changes and do things that were uncomfortable, and people were getting to watch us basically go through the same thing that they were going through in their life. In some sense, not that bad.

I think it felt good to us to be actually just doing something again.

Anything except for sitting in that cabin.

Like, we tried to make a few compilation videos. Terrible idea. Like, we don't enjoy just making videos to make them, you know, like, we like doing stuff. And yeah, we compilated some videos. We did, like, a.

His complex word. I think you compile. So, on the one hand, 2020 was amazing because our channel was growing faster than it ever had before. But also, 2020 was, without a doubt our hardest year on YouTube. We couldn't do anything right if we were wearing mask in public or, like, while we were getting gas in the van. We were taking Covid too seriously. And if we were out in the woods in the middle of nowhere, we were spreading Covid. I think 2020 was the year that we learned that you can't please all the people all the time.

It was really taking the fun out of YouTube for us for a little while.

Even though 2020 was completely crazy, we still managed to squeeze in some really fun adventures.

Look how much sand is just caked everywhere.

The highlight of 2020 was the Colorado trip trail. So that was me, Rick, and my brother riding our bikes 450 miles across.

Colorado, which left me and Beck and the girls driving our vans alone to the craziest mountain roads. I'd never done van life alone. I had hardly driven the van. So it was an adventure for both of us.

I had only been on a mountain bike three times. This sounded like a completely crazy idea, but when Rick invited me to do it, it was 2020. I thought we'd be out in the woods for three weeks. Like, what else do we have to lose?

I remember being a bit concerned, though, about making, like, a biking video on our channel.

We'd never done a physical challenge on.

YouTube, and that was the craziest three weeks. I still think the craziest three weeks of our lives.

This is terrifying. So if you see different physical challenge videos on our channel, anything from surviving on a deserted island to running 100 miles to biking across the U.S. all of that comes from this trip and falling in love with the feeling of pushing ourselves physically and coming out on the other side of it feeling super accomplished.

We were not, like, physically adventurous people.

It's now such a part of us that it's really cool to be able to trace it back and see where it came from.

Thank you, Rick.

Okay, so in 2020, we visited no new countries, published 61 videos, and gained 920,000 subscribers.

Almost as many as we got in the first four years.

Our channel doubled again.

2021.

Weird year.

Very weird year. Like weirder than 2020, I think. We decided we were over Covid and we were gonna move on with our lives.

But apparently you don't get to do that. I remember I spent December of 2020 watching a bunch of Mr. Beast videos and what I thought was, like, learning how to create a successful YouTube channel. So we came out of the gate in 2021, traveling, which was the wrong thing to do, and also trying to turn our channel into the Mr. Beast of Travel. Basically, that just meant to us, like, doing really crazy things and also, like, cutting out all of our personality and making the video as fast as possible. We quickly learned that we were not Mr. Beast. It wasn't our vibe, that our personalities is what made up our channel. But I mention it because I think it was a good exercise for us in storytelling. I feel like before this, the camera was really just following us around. And when the day ended, the video ended.

A lot of times it was very all consuming, which worked for a long time.

And in 2021, we learned to focus on a singular story and a video. And then we kind of had a.

Life outside of really for the first time. And I'm kind of thankful that we learned that lesson, really, just because of COVID because we weren't doing as many things every day. So when we were doing something cool, we were filming these massive trips, like the Colorado Trail, editing that. That was still when I was the sole editor on our channel, and it almost broke me.

The biggest thing that came from 2021 is we hired our first editor, Brooke.

Who is still with us.

She's amazing.

She really, really continues to make our lives so much better. Like, it had gotten to a point where it was just too much to do alone.

And to make it possible for us to jump from one big thing to the next. Like, having a team behind us now allows us to be out on the road doing more, doing these, like, big, epic adventures, being off the grid. And none of that would be possible without our predators.

All right, that's one of the best decisions.

What else do we have in 2021?

Rocks.

They came out with the vaccine, and the world opened back up again, and we were ready to go travel internationally. That had been our life for four years, and it was taken away from us for 18 months. So as soon as they said, if you get the shot, you can go travel again, we were the first in line to get the shot.

And what a trip that was.

We flew to Italy, got a swab stuck up my nose further than it's ever been stuck. But ultimately, that meant that we could sit on the street at a beautiful restaurant and eat real Italian food.

And that is when I cried over carbonara. I think I'm sleep deprived. It was just this moment that I felt like I had been dreaming of since the day we had to flee from the Philippines and this whole crazy thing started.

We've been back to that restaurant since. That carbonara is good. It's not cry worthy. It just represented freedom.

As romantic as that evening was in Italy, eating carbonara and crying, we did realize it still wasn't the best time to be traveling abroad. So we kind of got that trip out of our system and then committed to moving back into the van for the rest of the year.

Towards the second half of 2021, we really leaned into the physical, physical challenges. And we also started exploring some other vehicles, like swapping vehicles with friends Renting other ones, those videos were crushing.

Yes, that was like the golden era.

Of 2021, but also we enjoyed doing it. So now I think when you see us like renting these random vehicles in other countries.

This is kind of where those videos come from. That trend has come and gone, but we still personally enjoy it.

It seems obvious that we should just do what we enjoy and make videos about it. But, like, there are temptations to just do things because you know they're going to do well. But we've really learned about ourselves that we do not like making videos just for YouTube. If it's not something we're really excited about, it becomes this drag.

Like the way we decide what videos we film is. We always think about it as a Venn diagram. So we have like, things that we really enjoy doing and things that people enjoy watching. And then where those two circles intersect the middle of the Venn diagram, those are the videos that we film. Last notable thing to mention that happened in 2021 is I had skin cancer cut out of my head. So I used to wear a hat from time to time on this channel, but I didn't wear one every day. But if you see, can you see the bald spot? That's where I have had skin cancer cut out. And then I got self conscious. And that is why I now wear a hat in every single video. Not to, like, bring down the mood. That's just where the hat comes from. And I feel like that's kind of like the whole goal of this video is to point out pivotal moments. And that was a pivotal moment.

Yeah, we made a whole video about that. So we won't go into extreme detail, but it was, yeah, this moment where we realized, like, wow, we're really lucky. That could have gone very differently. Oh, yeah, one more thing about 2021, we went and met Eamon and Becky for the first time.

We started making friends with people in 2021. Like, our social life came back.

Our circle of our people are all people that we live miles and miles and hours away from. These first couple years of the pandemic. Yeah, we really made some of our most special friendships. I'm really grateful for that.

In 2021, we posted 55 videos, visited no new countries and gained 830,000 subscribers. Another good year on YouTube.

Really good. I mean, people being at home during the pandemic was, I think, a big reason for that and van life.

Wow, 2022 is a big one.

It really is.

So we knew 2022 was the year that we wanted to get back to international travel. But before we officially called it quits on van life, we dreamed up one last grand finale trip. We decided we'd drive the van all the way down to the very bottom of the baja peninsula and surf along the way.

At this point, our relationship with our van had been a roller coaster. It was rocky, but we were finally in this place where we had dialed in everything in the van to work the way that we needed it to in order to enjoy van life. And, yeah, we just kind of wanted to end it in the best way we knew how, because in our hearts, we were still international travelers. Like, we weren't the van life channel, we're the international channel, Even though the.

Majority of our subscribers at this point had come in during the time that we lived in a van. So that's very much what people thought of us as, but that's not who we wanted to be.

Yeah, we really embraced van life, and it is our home, and I love it, and I would be very sad without it. But we weren't fully convinced.

I mean, honestly, the majority of the time that we were in the the van during the pandemic, we felt trapped. But I think after that trip to Italy in 2021, when it was an option to get back out there and travel, we came back to the van, and we kind of looked at it through a new lens.

Yeah, our road trip down the baja peninsula is, to this day, one of the best things we've ever done.

It's for sure the best thing we've ever done in the van. We dreamed it up as the grand finale, and it was the grand finale.

It was. We were sleeping on the beach. We were eating fresh tacos. We were surfing the dream.

So then In March of 2022, it was back to international travel. Yay. But this time, it looked very different than the first four years of international travel. The channel had grown. We had grown as people.

It really felt like a fresh, new era of our life.

We were living in vehicles in other countries. We were doing physical challenges in other countries, and we weren't focused on taking off new countries. We were going back and revisiting countries that we had fallen in love with during our first four years of travel.

The 100 country goal was such a beautiful gift, because we would just pop over to random countries if there was, like, a cheap overnight train or cheap flight or a bus, just to, like, add one to the list. And some of those countries were some of my favorite memories of the whole thing.

And the other thing was, in 2022, the channel had grown a lot and we had more money. We weren't on the backpacker budget anymore, so we could splurge on some experiences. And I feel like in 2022 is kind of when our luxury travel era started. Every time I say era, I think of Taylor Swift. And I'm not a swifty, but I feel like that word's been thrown around so much this year that I'm using it.

We love it.

We rode the orient Express in 2022. We went to the North Poll in 2022. And the cool thing was as we did more of this luxurious stuff and it performed well on the channel, I was able to send more emails and get to do more of it for free in exchange for like making a video. But we never want it to be the people who only did and could only enjoy luxurious things.

If we just like pause for a minute and think of how we sound like, I know it sounds so crazy be like we didn't want to like.

Be too spoiled, but we could do that every single single video.

Yes.

It was like one minute we'd be surviving on a deserted island, the next minute we'd be flying Lufthansa first class.

Cannot believe I'm doing a wine tasting on an airplane right now. And that balance was so satisfying.

In 2022, we posted 53 new videos, gained 562, 000 subscribers, which is the first year that we hadn't gained more subscribers than the year before. So that was like something mentally to deal with.

Like is this is the beginning.

And we went to our first new country since before COVID which was country number 101 of Bulgaria with our friend Nathaniel Drew. And I'm third wheeling this whole trip. We learned that we like making videos at the extreme ends of the spectrum. And I feel like this is the year that we really leaned into that.

Extreme luxury and extreme challenge. Looking at you. Monkey run, Peru. If this was day one motorcycle driver Cara, I would have been in the fetal position at the bottom of this mountain crying.

We went from sleeping in an ice cave to sleeping in a million dollar camper, from driving tiny motorcycles across Peru, to flying in Singapore suites, from surviving on a deserted island, to staying in Bora Bora's most expensive overwater villa, and from riding a three seat bike across the US to staying in an underwater hotel in the Maldives. In this season of life, this is what we enjoy most is bouncing back and forth between these streams.

2023 was a huge learning curve for me. We used to Make a video in, like, one or two days max. Now we're filming for like, seven or eight full days to get one video. So mid year 2023, I realized, like, Brooke and I can't do this on our own anymore. Like, this is getting crazy. We're posting every week. So we hired a second editor, ot, who I will never forget. He's like, day one, and we had just finished biking across Peru on these tiny, terrible motorbikes. One of the craziest things I've ever done. And I was like, welcome to the team. Here's an entire video with four different GoPro ankles. We need your help. But it was time, like, I realized, like, we really are evolving so much.

We actually hired two team members in 2023. We also hired Shannon, who works behind the scenes. So basically, Kara's role was editing the videos. So she got Brooke and Ott to help her, and I was still over here on my own, trying to plan all the travel.

Nate does literally everything else in both our business and personal lives. All I do is the videos and feed us.

In 2023, we also hired Shannon, who I don't know how now I would live without.

Now our chief everything.

She's the one chief problem solver, chief travel booker. She does everything behind the scenes.

Just takes care of us emotionally. I mean, she's just.

Shannon's amazing. So our team now is me, Kara, Brooke, Ott, and Shannon. But that is our core team that brings all these videos to life every week or every other week. In 2023, we posted 47 videos, gained 344,000 subscribers, and visited five new countries, turning into a nighttime flight. 2024, present day. Another weird year. Almost another 2020 for us. One thing that we didn't mention about 2023 is I think at the core, the reason that we hired two new people is because we were starting to experience the dreaded burnout.

Mostly me.

I feel like almost every YouTube channel that exists on the platform for almost 10 years goes through a burnout phase. And we were trying to get ahead of that by hiring people, but I think it was too little, too late.

Yeah, it was really a core issue. I think that no matter how many people we hire, we needed to address.

We really went into all this on the eamonbeck podcast, if you, like, really want to take a deep dive on burnout. That's linked down below.

It's still hard for me to fully express what we went through.

It's also really hard to get on camera and talk about all this amazing Stuff that we've gotten to do for the last eight years and then even mention the fact that we could possibly be unhappy.

And that's why I think it got to the point that it did, because I just kept being like, no, no, no. Everything amazing. Everything's amazing. And it all just built up to this breaking point. It still feels crazy to say out loud because I know how it looks and how it sounds, but it happened. And we just finally had to address that it was happening.

So we had been experiencing some burnout and we decided in 2024 we would cut back to three videos a week instead of a video every single week in order to make this more sustainable because we would love to do this forever. So we were going into the year already planning to slow down. And then week one of the year.

When we weren't filming, literally days after making this what felt like life changing announcement of we're cutting back, it was.

Very confirmed that we made the right choice to slow down.

Oh, gosh. How is this already happening?

I woke up to Kara having like a massive seizure. Really big, really scary. We talked about that and Kara's this epilepsy video that's all out there, which we didn't know that she had at the time, it felt very random. And even though, like the big seizure only happened once, these small seizures that you had been having that we didn't know were seizures started happening more. And the first four months of this year was like trying to figure out what the heck was going on with Kara's health and also continuing to film videos. Not necessarily because we felt like we had to, but like we wanted to. Like, we didn't.

We didn't know what else to do. It almost felt good to just act like it was fine.

We also, like, didn't want to let whatever this thing was take away the thing that we enjoyed most, which is being out on the road, traveling. So all of that's been happening behind the scenes and a little bit in.

Public every year right after New Year's, we really look back at the year and post a whole life update video. So we'll save all of those details for January, but it's been a good year, really good, one of the best. Which is crazy to say.

I feel like this has been a little bit of a depressing note to end this video on. But life goes on and continues. And this will just be one chapter of our story one day. But it is what we're living in the current moment. But to round it out in 2024, so far. Far. We visited three new countries, posted 32 videos, and gained 290,000 subscribers, which brought.

Us to 4 million subscribers on YouTube.

Ah, my hand just went into a cr.

Oh, sorry.

You squeezed it too hard.

And I really don't want it to seem like we're just caught up and obsessed with the numbers of, you know, how many videos we post, how many subscribers we have. It's so much more about the real life experiences we get to have and that we get to share with you and the people who show up to watch our videos. After all of these years, I think I'm getting emotional. Took a while. It's so much more about just the community that we get to have 4 million.

At this point, I feel like subscribers on YouTube actually don't really matter. It's just how many people show up and watch your videos every week. So this was really just an excuse for us to celebrate with you.

Yeah. It's always good to look back and. Yeah. See where this channel has taken us both emotionally, physically, creatively. So hopefully after this look back, our channel makes a little more sense. If you haven't been around the whole.

Time and if you just showed up out of the blue, it could feel pretty random.

Pretty random.

Also, we just want to say thank you to each and every one of you you thank who have ever watched one of our videos. You have truly changed our lives and given us the opportunity to live a life that we couldn't have even imagined in our wildest dreams.

Genuinely.

2016, Kara and Nate could have never fathomed that we would be renting a 737 set and filming a video. About 4 million subscribers. Having this channel has afforded us so many cool opportunities. We've gotten to do so many things, but most importantly, we've made more memories together than we ever thought we would make in an entire lifetime. I feel like we have lived three lives since this channel has started.

So thank you. And we hope that you have gotten something positive out of following our journey as well.

Just go for whatever your dreams are in life because you never know what's going to happen and go into it optimistically and go into it willing to work hard. And I think there's a pretty good chance that it'll work out. I think that's the most motivational I've ever been on this channel. Okay. Is that it?

I think that's it.

Wow.

Happy four million. Love ya.

Well, I thought you were talking to me, not them.

Love you.

Okay, should we go clean up this.

Confetti I think the flight attendant was.

Going to do that. Yeah. Great. Love that. Wow. I can't believe we're just on a movie set. I know. What a crazy time.

I've always dreamed of doing a cartwheel down the aisle. Is now the time?

Now's the time.

Watch out. I'm going to kick you. Oh, gosh.

Do you think the lavatory works?