Oh. You're joking!
Oh my god...no
It was not recording. F**k
There's no way.
Hello everybody.
Welcome to our house.
I know that last time you saw this house,
we were just moving in.
We're a bit more moved in.
We're going to do a house tour in a little bit.
You can already see some of the
elements popping up behind us.....
things that reflect our personality.
And speaking of personality....
today is a different video.
I'm going to share some things from my life
to help you get to me a little bit better.
There's not really any natural way
to start this, so I'm just going to start,
and we're going to go from there.
My real name is Mark, but I have the nickname
Marko because my mom used to speak Italian.
She's not Italian but she loves Italian culture,
and when I was a kid she'd call me "Marko Mio."
My friends heard my parents answer the phone
and started telling me...Oh, Marko
That's my nickname.
Yeah, It kind of stuck.
I used to sing in Danish when I was a kid.
I had a Danish nanny, and she would
teach me songs.
There are videos somewhere of me....
singing in Danish.
I can barely see out of my right eye.
I had two injuries. First,
when I was born, they used forceps to
take me out of my mom.
It pinched the eyeball.
And secondly, I had a fingernail to the
eyeball during middle school.
When I need to shoot a gun or bow and arrow,
whatever as one does,
I have to do it left handed.
I also think this has dramatically reduced my
hand-eye coordination and ability to play
ball sports because I can't judge distance
very well.
I'm a man of many mustaches.
I've had a Frenchy mustache,
handle-bar mustache.
I've even had a monkey tail,
which is when you shave everything
besides what would resemble monkey"s
tail creeping around your face.
Check out my ID.....
I don't want to share all this information.
Gets me out of speeding tickets all the time.
Officer says," You know how fast you were going?
Let's see some ID.
That's a good mustache,"
I was on the high school wrestling team.
I weighed 112 pounds.
And that's probably why I'm short.
I studied Latin in middle school.
Didn't want to .. It was required,
but it has helped me learn other languages since.
I am an autodidact.
Ding. I always believe that you can't let
your school get in the way of education.
I've taken it upon myself to learn
as much on my own as I can.
I learned Spanish at a late age when I was 24.
I learned French after that.
And then learning a little bit more Italian
and Portuguese as well.
My first favorite book was Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck.
It's about these guys during the Great Depression
who are all unemployed and homeless.
I think it really taught me empathy
for the poor and for the homeless at a
young age, and it stuck with me ever since.
I am obsessed with old maps.
That one over there. I just love
the sense of adventure you get
when you look at our globe and you just
imagine adventures happening.
And old ones are even cooler
because it shows what they perceived
the world to be back then.
In 2008 I joined something called
The Dirty Hands Caravan.
It was a volunteer trip organized by
the actor Sean Penn to go to from
Coachella Music Festival to New Orleans
to rebuild houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina,
volunteering along the way.
I'm double jointed in my thumb.
I'm an obsessive note- taker.
I've got dozens of old Moleskin notebooks
that I used to carry in my back pocket.
Now, I use Evernote.
I use it all the time. I clip articles,
save into Evernote, but I still
use paper notebooks for the initial thoughts.
I've been regularly journaling since I was 20.
I've got dozens of full notebooks
that are getting my thoughts clear
by journaling every morning.
There have been times that I've done it
every single day; there have been days when
I haven't done it for months at a time.
But it has been a big part of my life for the last 10 years.
My ideal dinner party with anyone dead or
alive would include the following people:
Hunter S. Thompson,
Oscar Wilde,
Frieda Kahlo,
Sir Richard Burton,
and Bill Murray.
I probably would invite some other people too,
but those are the first ones that came to mind.
When I was in college, I was the social chairman
of Sigma Pi Fraternity at UCLA.
I really love throwing parties.
I am a very social person.
I love meeting people and inviting them
and hosting.
I think that since we've been traveling,
not being able to host people has been
one of the biggest frustrations of my life.
Now we have a house,
and I can't wait to host some people over here.
That being said, I can be quite shy,
especially around girls.
I actually get really shy around girls.
I don't know why, but I do sometimes.
I once bought a $300 motorbike
in Ho Chi Minh city, or Saigon
and tried to ride it all the way across Vietnam.
I made it about two thirds of the way
until I crashed it in the jungle
and then eventually had to leave it
on the side of the road.
I gave it to a farmer and hitchhiked my way
to Hanoi because my visa was expiring,
and I had to get out of the country.
Amazing adventure.
I'd love to redo it with a proper motorbike.
Turning down a job onetime saved my life.
After college, I was living in Mumbai, India
doing an internship in Microfinance.
At the end of my internship, I was offered
a full-time opportunity to live in Mumbai,
but I turned it down to pursue my passion
of writing and travel writing,
which I had done a lot of while I was in India.
A couple days after I left
were the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.
They targeted all the places where I used
to hang out, including the bar
where I would go everyday after work
Leopold Cafe.
I don't know if I would have been there,
but it felt like if I had taken
the job, I very well could have been
in that...in that cafe
where they shot and killed many people.
It's not something I take lightly,
but I did kind of feel that my decision to
follow my instincts and to trust my heart
lead me out of that city
and that if I were to pursue
a creative path that I should try to use it
to prevent those sorts of misunderstandings
that create problems like terrorism in the first place.
I one time tried to memorize all the
capitals in the world using note cards.
I got pretty far.
I once worked as a deck hand on a ship
in the Mediterranean.
I started in Mallorca. We went to Ibiza,
Barcelona, South of France,
Italy, Corsica, and Sardegna.
I love writing and performing slam poetry,
but I don't do it nearly enough.
When I was in college, I wanted to be a diplomat,
and I interned at the Department of State
in Washington, D.C.
My favorite director is Wes Anderson.
As you can tell........
I love all of his movies.
My favorite one is probably The Royal Tannebaums.
This is an embarrassing one.
I have lumps behind my nipples
of male breast tissue.
That's no easy way to say that
so I'm just going to show you and stop
rubbing myself off camera.
You can't really see it,
but there are definitely lumps there.
When I was in high school that happened,
and I felt super insecure.
I had some pretty mean nicknames at points,
and I didn't really feel very confident about that,
especially when combined with braces
and acne...yeah.
It wasn't really a nice period of time.
They are still there. Apparently they are not cancerous.
so don't worry.
I've checked it out. I'm still here.
I've survived.
It's just part of me.
One time when I was a kid, I almost lost
both these nipples.
I went head over heels on a bicycle trip
with my dad, mountain biking.
Long story short...let go of the brakes
at the wrong time, flew past my dad,
went over the handle bars.
Bike comes over like a scorpion,
hits me in the back of the head.
I slid forward on my chest,
shaved off the majority of both nipples,
but again, survived.
I'm a survivor.
My father's mother's side of the family is
French Huguenot......
as in Protestant French who fled to England
to escape persecution.
One of my ancestor's [on my mother's side] arrived on the Mayflower,
and I am a Son of the American Revolution.
I'm totally an old soul, which is why I love
wearing three piece suits,
old mustaches,
driving retro motorbikes.
Even though it's way too hot to wear
three piece suits in California,
I still love doing it.
I camped in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street.
I spent one month walking 800 kilometers
of the Camino de Santiago.
I have a fake front tooth.
This one right here is half fake.
I got it knocked out twice.
First, a door slammed into my face.
And secondly,
I fell on my skateboard
and swallowed it.
I'm horrible at beer pong,
but I'm pretty good at flip cup.
I've been subscribed to the Economist magazine
and New York Times since I was 20,
and I read both publications,
especially The Economist religiously.
I was on the snowboard team at UCLA.
It's still my favorite sport.
My first album was Elton John.
Yep, it's because of The Lion King.
That was a great song.
And my second one was NWA
because I went to middle school and
learned about rap music.
I've been kind of balancing out that sort
of sensitivity with street creed, ever since.
One of my life goals is to give a TED Talk.
Earlier this year, I gave a TEDx talk.
It was really cool.
I'll also include a link to that below.
Generally, I just really love public speaking.
To me, it's actually easier than
vlogging in many ways.
Maybe not now, but in the beginning.
I had taken public speaking classes in college,
working the crowd, looking at eyeballs
in the audience.
It's more natural for me than
picking up a camera.
My hair alternates from curly to straight,
to curly to straight every seven years.
Here's a picture of me freshman year of college.
Here's a picture of me as a baby.
In general, my hair is just...
I don't know. I want it to be better,
but it's kind of untamed and gnarly.
Creatively, I think I have been most
influenced by two groups of people:
The Beat Generation in the 1950s, which includes
Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsburg, the poet.
My favorite of all time is Jack Kerouac,
reading his prose over Steve Allen playing the piano.
Search for that, and you'll see what I mean.
It's just amazing.
My favorite meal is breakfast.
I believe that is a meal you should almost
always eat alone.
When I was four, I told my mom about the
person who I was before I was Marko.
It freaked her out.
I told her this whole story about how
I had been this other person
before I came down from the sky in a parachute.
I said... that's what I send to my mom.
Growing up, one of my biggest inspirations
was Tin Tin.
Tin Tin, if you don't know who he was,
is a Belgian cartoon.
He's basically like a journalist
with a little dogs named Snowy
who he goes around the world solving mysteries.
I definitely think that my
sense of curiosity,
the appeal of journalism,
definitely came from Tin Tin.
Although, later on, would have been also
influenced by other journalist like
Hunter S Thompson, Tom Wolfe,
and the whole new journalism movement
of the 1960s was a huge influence on
"going gonzo"
just reporting something by being there,
experiencing it and then telling your audience
about it directly from your own experience.
Now, that's kind of what we do.
I guess that's the progress..from Tin Tin,
to Thompson, to vlogging.
I got pulled out of kindergarten on day one
because I had a Kiwi accent from my dad.
He's from New Zealand.
They thought I had some sort of speech impediment.
The first day I came back and told my dad,
"Dad, it's not 'gair-age' it's 'garage'."
They really just got the Kiwi accent out of me.
Even though now,
my brother and I do a lot of different accents
and impressions, Kiwi is still the hardest one
for me because it was forced out of me.
I also had a lisp.
I couldn't say "J's."
I said, "Th."
My mom's friend's name was Joanie,
and I called her "Thony."
I'm a work in progress.
And if I were not doing YouTube right now,
I think I'd most certainly be a journalist,
probably a foreign correspondent for
either a paper or Vice, something like that.
I really respect what those guys do.
Hopefully, in the future I'll be able to do a
little bit of YouTube, a little bit of journalism,
some creative fiction writing.
I would live to have some sort of way of
doing all those things at once.
My favorite way of travel is by train.
I think this is probably because
my grandpa took me to the model train museum
when I was a kid.
I've taken the Trans Siberian Railroad
from Beijing to Moscow.
And actually, I took the train from Lhasa, Tibet
to Beijing
and then took the Trans Siberian.
So really, I went on a really long train ride,
and I had such a blast.
I just loved it.
I love trains.
Even if it's cheaper, even if it's more
convenient or faster to get from A to B
by plane, I still prefer to take the train.
If there's one thing that I have to do before I die,
it's to write a book.
I have written guide books before.
I wrote one on Argentina
and one on the Basque Country.
But I want to write either a piece of fiction
or I want to write a non-fiction,
a meditation on a subject.
I don't know. It's just a part of me.
Part of me has to write every single day.
If I don't get out thoughts,
they die within me, and it makes me
more sad.
It's kind of hard to explain.
I have to actually express myself.
Now that we've been doing YouTube,
I still am creating a lot.
I write the episodes,
do the research,
and focus certain aspects of storytelling.
It's not writing in the sense of prose.
Of course, it's not just me.
My brother is doing a ton of input, as well.
Although this is creatively fulfilling,
at some point before I die,
I certainly want to write a piece
of writing...like a book.
Expect a book, hopefully soon. We'll see.
All right, guys. That's it.
Thanks for watching.
Hopefully.....blah
Ok, guys. That's it. Thank you for watching.
Hopefully you know a little bit more about me.
If you have any other questions,
drop them in the comment box,
and don't forget,
my brother and I have both started our own channels.
We're going to be doing other smaller videos.
Go check it out for more personal content.
In the meantime, you know what to do:
stay curious, keep exploring,
and we'll see you guys on the road.
And don't forget to like this video,
give it a thumbs-up,
share it with your friends,
and subscribe to Vagabrothers
for more travel video from all around the world
every single week.
All right guys, peace.