How Mike Corey's Tattoo Got Him a TV Show

Defining online success with travel YouTuber Mike Corey

Mike Corey is one of the first travel YouTubers I ever met. We both entered a travel filmmaking contest back in 2013 and have since led parallel, yet different lives.

Mike stands out not just for his incredible talents - he’s a trained marine biologist, a legit breakdancer, a podcaster, an author, the filmmaker behind his Fearless and Far YouTube channel, and the host of his television show Uncharted Adventure - but also for his tenacity.

Despite starting his channel over 10 years ago, Mike struggled to find his audience for nearly a decade until finally having breakout success after he stopped doing what he thought he should be doing and started following his heart. The result? His channel grew from 20,000 subscribers to well over a million in just over a year.

Mike’s story is an inspiration to anyone who is scared about reaching out for their dreams. He recently passed through Mexico City while filming the second season of his show Uncharted Adventure and had time to tell an epic story at Cuéntame - and sit down for an interview with me. His show is now streaming on The Weather Channel and available on YouTubeTV. See his video below for more deets, and enjoy our convo!

Marko: Mike, we have had some really interesting discussions here in Mexico City that I am excited to share with a wider audience. Let’s start by talking about what you’re doing here in Mexico.

Mike: I’m in Valladolid in the Yucatan peninsula filming for my TV show. This was a small town when I was here 8 years ago but now Yucatan has just blown up. 

Marko: Yeah, and they’re constructing the Train Maya, a huge infrastructure project proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to develop the south of the country by connecting places like Valladolid by high-speed rail. But construction is running into tons of problems - it’s over budget, it’s being done shoddily, and it’s going over the largest underground river in the world and through jaguar sanctuaries. Engineers and environmentalists are freaking out. 

Mike: I thought it was just going to link Tulum to Playa del Carmen, Cancún, and Mérida, but it’s going all the way to Chiapas over soft stone that’s porous with cenotes. How can you keep the structural integrity of the train when you’re building over an anthill? There’s no guarantee it won’t collapse.

Marko: The irony is that this same president canceled the major replacement of the Mexico City airport, which was going to turn the city into the transport hub of the entire continent. He thought it was too expensive and full of cronyism, and cancelled it after construction had already started. But now he’s making this controversial project, which will change the Yucatan forever. Anyways, tell us more about what you’re doing there. 

Mike: I’m filming the second season of my TV show Uncharted Adventure, which is on The Weather Channel. We have filmed 11 one-hour episodes in the States and Europe and now four episodes in Latin America and I was so happy to see we were coming to Mexico. I used to think that the Yucatan Peninsula was really overrated - you know, Cancun and Tulum. But it’s one of the most diverse places in the world. I always say Mexico is one of my favorite countries in the world. There is nowhere like it on Earth.

Marko: I’ve seen you in Mexico City four times in the last year. What brings you back? 

Mike: Mexico City is my happy place. You can go down to the town square and see a guy offering toques electricos or go an hour in any direction and you’re in mountains and jungles. Mexico is filled with unique things and - Mexico City is emblematic of that. And people think they know Mexico - that its dangerous or TexMex food - but they’re wrong. And I’m addicted to that. 

Marko: What got you into making travel videos in the first place?

Mike: Growing up, I would find snakes, spiders, and salamanders and my parents would encourage me to put them in an aquarium and study them. My friends would say they were poisonous, but I knew it wasn’t true. That’s where I developed the mentality that the world isn’t as dangerous as people think. I started looking for ways to explain how the things we think are scary are just misunderstood. Fear is just a lack of knowledge - whether it's a fear of swimming or cooking. But once you learn the basics, you can fall in love with it. 

Marko: A lot of people don’t realize this, but for someone as eloquent as you on camera, you started off with a major fear of public speaking. How did you conquer it? 

Mike: There’s a quote by Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist, which says that “the cave you fear to enter hides the treasure that you seek.” Around the world, we have this recurring theme of dragons and monsters in caves; but it’s a reflection of ourselves. We all have monsters under the bed that we fear. Travel taught me that my fears around public speaking were the same - I had just never done it. But once I tried taking a Toastmasters class, doing some improv, failing a few times - I realized I was actually pretty good at it. And if you keep practicing, you will often get better than the people who are naturals because you tried harder because you’re more self-conscious. 

Marko: Totally. When we first started Vagabrothers, my brother was a natural but I was so camera shy. As a writer, I would write essays in my head and then get tongue-tied when I tried to spit them out. I had to work deliberately at overcoming my flaws. 

Mike: What helped you overcome your resistance to being on camera? 

Marko: Initially I would share facts over emotions. My brother would shove the camera in my face and said “How do you feel?” And I started spouting off historical facts because my intellect was my crutch. And it’s been a journey toward being more comfortable with myself and expressing my emotions. If the internet gives you enough positive reinforcement you realize, ‘Maybe I’m not so bad at this.’ But if you respond too much to audience feedback, it can be easy to start making content just to please your audience, get likes or be surfaced on the algorithm. Your journey has been one of persistence over years of getting relatively low views before going viral. How you have navigated making what you want versus what gets traction? 

Mike: In the beginning, I wanted to do what we all wanted to do - be a YouTuber and get a million subscribers. You’re not thinking long term - you’re making daily vlogs, clickbait or thumbnails with a girl in a bikini. But if you’re not being true to yourself, then you get burned out. And you see a lot of creators take off but then they are not around in a few years or they have a breakdown. It’s hard to be an artist, but on these platforms, we have to play the game of the algorithm without selling ourselves out. That’s the eternal struggle. 

I had this channel called Kick The Grind, where I did videos about the Top 10 Best Beaches or Street Foods. But it wasn’t making me happy. I wanted to visit remote people who eat bugs and show people why they ate them – and that it wasn’t gross! But I was scared people wouldn’t like it. Then I realized that if my videos weren’t getting many views, I might as well make what I love and not what I hate. People tell you just be yourself - but it’s not that easy. You have to hit a breaking point. You have to hit rock bottom before you can make a change.

For example, I wanted to get a sleeve tattoo, but I didn’t because David Attenborough didn’t have a sleeve tattoo. But then I said Fuck it. I got the tattoo, I started to change the type of content I was making, and three months later, one of my videos got a million views. And I got contacted about hosting a show for the BBC - the network I thought would never hire me with a tattoo! 

Marko: You went to the depths of your cave, lived through those dark moments and now you’re living a more integrated success. What does success look like for you now? 

Mike: Just focusing on making another top hit is not sustainable. When I started focusing on the theme of fear on Fearless and Far, I realized that fear is a compass. And when I wasn’t making content that expressed that, I got lost. Two years ago, my channel had 20,000 subscribers. Now it’s got 1.4 million. Everything changed when I started doing what I love.

Marko: That’s amazing. And congratulations on your success, by the way. But I’m curious about how you think our genre has changed with the pandemic.

Mike: Before the pandemic, there was a lot of… I hesitate to even call it “travel” content, because it was more glamorous lifestyle fused with travel. Maybe it was Instagram, or maybe it was more luxurious destinations…

Marko: It was the blue ass water! 

Mike: That’s right! But it’s now people want to see something deeper. Creators like Bald and Bankrupt or Indigo Traveler are showing faraway, misunderstood places. My content is the same. The more we show what Yemen or Somalia are really like, the more we see they are not necessarily horrific. And the same for Mexico. If all you hear about are about narcos - and yes, that’s a very real thing - but if all the data points you have are negative, then the average impression will be negative. But if you start seeing more positive stories, more people smiling, more generosity - it can change the world.

Marko: I’ve had a very similar philosophy, but my time in Mexico City has shown me the limitations of that approach. People used to think that Mexico was all about narcos, crime, and pollution. But now Mexico City’s reputation has improved so much that it’s causing an influx of tourism that’s sparking a backlash. Some say tourism is a bad thing. I’ve always believed that showing the good sides of a country is a way of improving the world, but now it’s clear that there are limitations to that. 

Mike: I first visited Mexico City in 2015 and lived there from 2016 to 2019. Rarely did you see many foreign tourists or be able to speak English. It felt very local. Now it’s definitely changed. I went to Lucha Libre and it was 50% white people in the crowd - and this is in Doctores, not Roma or Condesa. I haven’t received much criticism for being there, but I know you have. I’d love to know your thoughts on the matter. 

Marko: Social media is intersecting with globalization and travel. Globalization tends to reward outsized power to a few winners - and so does social media. So when many of the same destinations are featured on these viral Buzzfeed lists, we start seeing a concentration of people in just a handful of few places. I recently saw a Vox article about how Positano is flooded with tourists because it’s so viral, while the villages just a few miles away are empty. So I think a lot of the criticism being directed at visitors in places like Mexico City is more about larger macro trends that are intersecting. There is such a concentration of attention on so few places that they are just exploding. And I think the responsibility of content creators is to try to spread this influx to the less obvious places - within cities, within countries or around the globe. But it’s definitely a challenge and I don’t think we have figured out how to navigate it. 

Mike: I can understand both sides - such as if a bunch of foreigners came into my city and bought the best apartments downtown where I wanted to live, it would piss me off. But a little tourism secret - if there is a cool beach or neighborhood, 9/10 there’s another place not far away that’s just as cool that you can have to yourself. 

Marko: Totally. And I’ll add that this controversy has helped me appreciate the importance of tourism boards. I was originally brought here in 2016 by the Fondo Mixto de Promoción Turística (Mexico City Tourism Trust) to help promote the destination as the “new Berlin” by showing off Condesa, Roma and Juárez. But now the Mexican President (formerly the mayor of Mexico City) has defunded the tourism board to pay for the Train Maya and cut what he sees as cutting wasteful funding for neoliberal programs that benefit foreigners or the wealthy. So the Mexico City crisis is partially because there is no functioning tourism board to help manage the influx of tourism and to places that need it. So we’re seeing what happens when there is no considered approach to managing tourism when destinations go viral. 

Mike: Mexico was one of the only places that didn’t close during COVID, so digital nomads and content creators came here because it was the only place they could go. Then they all made content about Mexico and it caused tourism to explode. 

Note: Mexico City mayor Claudia Scheinbaum has recently announced plans to collaborate with Airbnb and create experiences to spread tourism around the city. 

Marko: So after all your travels and all the fears you’ve conquered, what still feels like and edge to you? What is a cave that you still fear to enter? 

Mike: I’m a perfectionist. And that’s really a fear of failure. One of the reasons many artists don’t break into their field is because their protective layer of protectionism is too thick. A professional creative gets over that fear that’s masked as perfectionism and gets it done even if its not perfect. Over the last ten years I’ve dealt with that. Now it’s about the fear of success. For example, I had this reoccurring dream that I was going to die on my travels, that I was climbing up a ladder and I would slip and fall. It was an ominous fear of death hovering over me. I think it was the devil on my shoulder that was telling me “Things can’t really go this well. You don’t really deserve it.” It’s something you learn as a child and perhaps never fully get rid of as you get older. You have to integrate it. I asked myself why I never celebrate things. I know I should celebrate the little wins, but am not celebrating because I don’t think I deserve to? Maybe. What about you? 

Marko: My current edge is trying to create from a place of deep authenticity rather than just trying to just please the algorithm. I want to create vulnerably and I have been practicing that offline, which has been very healing after going through a period of burnout after getting caught up in the hustle of just doing brand deals to pay the rent or following trends to get the views. But when the pandemic forced me to stop, I went through a period of deliberately letting my online persona avatar die because I had lost track of where my personal life ended and my online public persona began. It’s been healthy to let go and renegotiate that relationship, because if you think your worth is tied to your video views, then when you have a video bomb your self worth can bomb too because you feel like it’s a verdict on you as a person. That’s something I have been healing within myself, primarily through my storytelling event, Cuéntame. I started Cuentame to get back to my “why” by returning to my love of building community through intimate storytelling events. It’s really not that different that what I was doing on YouTube, but it has been powerful to see the impact that has in person. And now I’m trying to take the authenticity I’ve cultivated offline to create a more aligned expression of my creativity online and find success being fully myself.

Mike: What was refreshing about being in your storytelling event was it allows you to create live, in the moment with everyone else there. Because what we do now is create digitally. And the soul is gone. But it felt so completely different to do it in person. It made me think about how much art and expression has changed in the last 20-30 years. Before, everything was tactile - storytelling, painting, plays, performances. And now it’s all done via the screen and a camera. And I remember a story about Sir Ian MacKellan who stormed off the set of The Lord of the Rings because he had to sit down in a chair and talk to a bunch of green dots rather than people. Because that’s what filmmaking has become - a bunch of CGI and green screens. But is that what we’re meant to do? No, man. But your decision to remove yourself from all that for a while and do your offline events reminds you of the benefits of getting offline and creating in person and being able to talk about it with real people afterwards.  

Marko: Thanks, Mike. And I want to thank you for coming in with an excellent story that was prepared for Cuéntame. You’re welcome to come back and share another story the next time you’re in town. Congratulations on your show, and thanks for taking the time to share your journey with The Missive.

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Find links to Mike’s projects here and see all of his Mexico videos in the following playlist: