we messed up.

Well, we made it to 99 countries and published almost 700 videos without having to make one of these. But here goes. Our first apology video. On behalf of both of us, I wanted to say that we, we tried something new last night and we made a mistake. We are really sorry that our decision to release the documentary the way we did hurt so, so many of you. I responded to over 400 emails last night, so I feel like at this point I have a pretty good sense of how it made a lot of you feel. And hurt and betrayed are two words that I heard echoed over and over again. Obviously this was, this was not our intention. We've spent years sharing our life with, with this community and we would never do anything to intentionally break your trust. What I'm trying to say is we messed up and we really are truly sorry. What we should have done was immediately release our Hundredth country vlog and then done a better job of setting expectations on how we were going to release the full length documentary. We want to fix our mistake the best way that we can at this point and we hope that you'll allow us to do that. But I know there's still some of you that are hurt and angry and I feel like I owe you an explanation. I'm not trying to make excuses we've messed up. But I wanted to give you the thought process behind releasing the documentary the way that we did. We've had the idea to create a documentary after we finished our Hundredth country for a long time. And a few months ago we saw another channel release a documentary this way. And from the outside it looked like it went really well. With the way YouTube is set up, it doesn't really make sense for us to spend 10 times longer working on a long form video like this documentary. And so we wrongfully thought this would be a good time to explore a different way to release long form content. We had been planning to release this documentary to test the pay what's fair model for the past few months. But we did a terrible job at setting expectations. We sprung it on you from completely out of nowhere and that was wrong. And to make things much, much worse, as we were working on this documentary over the last couple weeks, I had this really bad idea that that a great way to end the documentary would be just to squish the Hundred country video on the end. Because it's really, it's a celebration and it's a culmination of our journey. And it felt like the perfect ending. But now I realize how wrong it was to Include that video in the documentary that we hid behind a paywall. Everyone was ready to celebrate our hundredth country with us, and we didn't let you do that. Now it's easy to see that instead of this being met with excitement, it was being met with frustration. And that's because we did a terrible job of setting expectations. So when you clicked on the video, instead of getting to celebrate with us, you were disappointed and angry and rightfully so.

Looking back, if we had this to do all over again, we would have liked to have released the Hundredth country vlog and the full length documentary separately. But because we have made such a complete mess of things, I think the best thing to do at this point is to release the full length documentary as soon as possible. Kara is working on making some final tweaks. Then it needs to be exported, which will take a few hours because it's a huge file. Then it actually needs to be uploaded. So most likely as soon as possible is going to be tomorrow. So in the morning you'll be able to watch our 100th country video here on our channel for free, just like you have all of the videos from our last 99 countries. And we've already emailed everyone who contributed to the documentary and offered them a full refund since we're releasing it much earlier than expected. Also, I turned off the comments on the last video because I couldn't watch my wife cry anymore, but I'm going to turn those back on now that we've had a chance to respond. Just remember that we're real people and we know we've messed up.

Once again. We are, we're really sorry that we handled this the way that we did. And we're even more sorry that it left so many of you feeling hurt and betrayed. And we hope that you can still enjoy the video because we're still really excited to share it with you. I knew when I sat down to record this video it was going to be impossible to make a million people happy all at once. But we've done our best to do what's right in the current situation, given the mistakes that we've already made. I'll end by saying that no matter what it's looked like over the last 24 hours, we know we wouldn't be here without you. We are so grateful for all of your support over the last four years and I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this video.