In this exclusive interview, we delve into the captivating world of wildlife adventurer and YouTube sensation, Coyote Peterson. From his childhood fascination with animals to the inception of his Brave Wilderness series, Coyote shares intriguing insights into his daring encounters with stings, bites, and even jaguars. Join us as we uncover his most memorable adventures, his thoughts on aliens, and his invaluable advice for aspiring content creators.
Coyote Peterson Interview | Student Pocket Guide
Can I start, Coyote, by asking you, what were you like as a kid and where did your fascination for wildlife come from?
Yeah, as a kid, wow. My fascination for wildlife started when I was very young. There is the kind of public story of Coyote Peterson’s first animal adventures. Then there’s like the one that maybe wasn’t as exciting to put in a book or a video. The first animal I ever caught was an American toad when I was four years old. I caught it in my backyard and it lived by this little rain pipe. My mom let me keep it in a shoebox overnight because animals belong in the wild. She was like, “All right you’ve got a curiosity about these things, we’ll put it in a shoebox”, and I remember putting little leaves and rocks and building it in its little environment and keeping it overnight next to my bed. I was hooked from there forward. And of course, toads are a very safe amphibian species for a young nature admirer to interact with. So that was it. The seed was essentially planted. I just became fascinated with everything that was reptiles, and amphibians, and then it escalated into a world of all other animals, dinosaurs, you name it. I was just in it from then on in.
How did the first idea come about to start filming yourself getting stung and bitten by insects and animals?
Oh, boy. So that’s a that’s a much longer answer. How did it get into being bites and stings? Well, I’ll get to the bites and stings in a second. I will say that when it comes to being a wildlife presenter, usually the number one rule is to not get bitten and stung by things. So that’s where it became just this very interesting twist to the whole story when getting bitten and stung ended up being the things that were getting the audience hooked on the content.
I went to school at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, which is where Brave Wilderness is currently based. I got a degree there in screenwriting, producing, and directing. So I was very much interested in specifically telling stories and then figuring out how to take those stories and turn them into something that people could watch visually. I’ve got a very extensive background in the art of wildlife, the art of entertainment, as I sometimes put it. My number one passion is writing and then turning that writing into something that can visually be enjoyed by a larger audience.
When I graduated from college, there was a very tragic event that happened for all of us who love animals, Steve Irwin passed away in 2006. And when that happened, I think a lot of us sort of saw that, wow, there’s this massive gap that has happened in between a super passionate, outgoing, brilliant personality that loves animals and promotes conservation was just taken from us out of nowhere.
I sort of said to myself, maybe that’s something I would be interested in doing. At the time, Bear Grylls, who was doing Man Vs. Wild, was making his meteoric rise to fame. And Bear’s style was great storytelling. His team did an amazing job making you feel like you were immersed in the environment with him. But of course, Bear was doing a survival show. So he’s catching and eating animals to sustain his nourishment within the wild.
Whereas somebody like Steve Irwin was just loving these animals and then putting them back and telling you why we should protect them. So I was like, all right, how do we combine those two worlds together?
And then it became my ability to tell stories, my knowledge of how to capture those on camera, the love for Bear, the love for Steve, and boom, it was all created. And we launched Brave Wilderness officially in September of 2014.
There was a solid, a very solid four, almost five years of development before Brave Wilderness ever became something that people knew publicly. And the whole bite and sting phenomenon didn’t start happening until early 2016.
We had filmed some stuff in 2015 that we didn’t know if we were ever gonna release or not because honestly, we didn’t feel the production quality or the idea had been executed exceptionally well. That was an episode where I was intentionally quilled by a porcupine and then also intentionally stung by something called Harvester ants in Arizona. Long story short, we ended up releasing that content.
It did exceptionally well. And then boom, we took off on this whole, you know, cataclysmic, volcano eruption rise of climbing up Justin Schmidt’s insect sting pain index. And actually, I have Justin’s the late great Justin Schmidt’s book right here, The Sting of the Wild. That is the roadmap that I took. Almost the Steven Spielberg design of take a book and turn it into the movie entertainment form. So that’s what got us to being ultimately the bites and stings.
In terms of the bites and the stings, the pain side of things, what’s been the most painful sting zone or bite that you’ve experienced?
That’s such a great question and I’ve gotten it many times, and not to say that I’ve heard it too many times, obviously, people want to know the answers to that. We started to quantify it, and we’ve just released a compilation episode that is just the most painful experiences because bites and stings are categorised as two very different things. And they have to do with an animal’s defence versus an animal’s desire to take down a prey item. So that balances out one versus the other. A bite versus a sting also quantifies a certain yield of venom.
Stings usually have less venom as compared to a bite. But when you compound stings, that means taking more than one sting at once, it escalates that venom yield very quickly. So, the most painful single sting has been something called an executioner wasp. The most painful intentional bite has been something called a giant desert centipede. But the most painful experience that I have been through, and this is so dumb, and I love admitting publicly that this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done… Sticking my arm into a box with 200 yellow jackets, where I then was stung 100 times in about 10 seconds. And that is far and away the most painful ordeal I have ever dealt with. Now as a single sting, it only ranks as like a two on the insect sting pain index. But if you take that and times it by 100, and you don’t think about it just being a single stinger insertion, but something grappling onto you inserting that stinger and pumping yield after yield of venom from the venom sac, you can understand why it was an extremely painful day for Coyote.
According to Google, a bulldog ant has enough venom to kill a human or an adult human in 15 minutes and you put your arm in a box full of them…
Um, you know, look, there are various species of bulldog ants. You gotta not necessarily always trust the internet and what Google might tell you. Here’s the thing to know about ants, different ant species, bulldog ants, whatever the ant species might be, have they killed people before? Yes, it has happened. But very, very, very few cases. And in almost every instance, and don’t quote me on this, but it may be every instance, that happened as an allergic reaction to the venom. So anaphylactic shock or your body going into some sort of an allergic reaction to that venom is what’s most likely to kill you.
Take this for context. The most painful ant sting in the world is the bullet ant. Now I’ve done a single bullet ant sting. There is an Indigenous People’s ritual where young boys will transition from boyhood to manhood by putting their hands into gloves of bullet ants and being stung hundreds of times over the course of five, 10, 15 minutes based on where they are in their transition ranking upwards. This doesn’t kill 14-year-old boys. A bulldog ant sting is very unlikely to kill a human. Honestly, the sting of the bulldog ant was very, very mild. It has a very sharp initial onset of pain. The pain is gone within about five minutes from a single sting. So, the bulldog ant as an individual insect only ranks as a two on the insect sting index. I think that’s according to Justin Schmidt and according to what I sort of ranked it as. So, per Google’s “the venom can kill a human with a single sting”. I find that very unlikely to be true. And if it did ever happen, it was probably due to an allergic reaction.
Goes to show don’t always trust what you read on Google, eh?
Exactly. And you know, look, bulldog ants, again, they’re a various species. It is a painful sting, but an ant is something that if you find yourself stumbling into an ant nest, you very quickly can brush those things off you, walk five feet and you’re out of the danger zone. Very different from an insect like a yellow jacket or a paper wasp – you disturb a nest and those insects are going to swarm you and follow you for a considerable distance.
Are you ever fearful for your own life when dealing with insects that have enough venom to potentially kill you?
The only insect sting that I was very hesitant about was the Japanese giant hornet. As it is a very large insect with a very large venom yield, and it is a fact that multiple people are killed usually a year by these hornets. But again, that comes from a swarm situation where somebody disturbs a nest and is stung multiple times. They could potentially close off your airway or send you into an extreme allergic reaction situation.
So, with that one specifically, because it’s, of course, something I’ve never been stung by before, I was very nervous. It was very, very painful. It ranks as the second most painful single insect sting I’ve ever taken.
But to answer your question more directly, no, I’ve never actually been in a situation where I was like, uh-oh, I’ve gone too far, I’m fearing for my life here. If you’re going to have an allergic reaction, you’re going to know within the first five minutes of that venom interaction. We always have multiple epinephrine pens on location with us. So if I were to go into anaphylactic shock, we’ve got the ability to essentially stop that process and get me to medical attention very quickly.
Coyote Peterson Interview | Brave Wilderness
If you could be a flying insect with a sting, who would you target?
I like that question. This is one of the most original questions I’ve gotten. Now, I could approach this from a number of different perspectives. And I’m going to go the sports route because I’m a very big NBA basketball fan. Now, the tarantula hawk is a spider wasp species that stings its target. So female tarantula hawks will sting a tarantula, essentially send them into paralysis, drag them into a burrow, and lay an egg on them. That egg will hatch. The pupa will go into that spider while it is still alive and eat it from the inside out. Horrific story, right? Just setting us up with what the tarantula hawk can do. Now, if I had the power of a tarantula hawk sting, I would sting LeBron James, not because I would want to lay an egg on him, but I would want to slow him down just enough to play him in a game of one-on-one basketball in the hope that I may be able to score a single basket on him. So, if a tarantula hawk can completely paralyze a tarantula, I think my venomous sting would only slow LeBron down enough for me to score a single bucket. So I feel that’s a pretty fair answer. Not that I think LeBron’s ever gonna hear that, but if he does, that’s the level of respect that I’ve got for that guy. And certainly, the desire to ever have the chance to play basketball one-on-one against him.
Brilliant, I hope that game happens.
Yeah, well, I’ll let you know if it does, and I’m pretty sure that I will not be able to sting him, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t score that basket, but I sure as heck would try my hardest.
If you could create a super insect, a combination of any of the other insects, what would it be like?
Oh, man. I’m gonna combine insects and arachnids together, it’s like that whole category of creepy crawlies. One of the insects, that has been most terrifying to me has been the giant water bug, also known as a toe-biter. This was something that I was bitten by as a kid mucking around in the swamps looking for snapping turtles. And it is just an excruciating pain. They have this thing called a rostrum that is kind of like a needle that shoots out the front of their face, injects digestive enzymes into their prey and essentially melts their inside so that they can drink it up like a milkshake or a slushy. So that creature’s ability and its grappling arms, its rostrum, I would combine with a praying mantis. So now you’ve got this ability to have two sets of grappling arms, that rostrum, the alien-like look. And last but not least, the stinger and tail of a scorpion. So now you’ve got a digestive enzyme potency on the front end, a venom on the back end and the ability to not only stab something with two points but to grapple it with arms that are like, you know, grappling hooks and you’re going to be unstoppable. And then add a bunch of size to it, multiply it by like a hundred and you’ve got like an alien-type creature that you would never want to mess with.
There’s a movie idea right there…
I know, right, somebody’s going to hear this and be like, huh, water bug meets praying mantis meets scorpion. Yep, that sounds like the next alien invasion movie.
Do you think that aliens exist?
Oh, I am beyond fascinated with the idea of aliens. And I don’t want that to come across as in like I’m like this conspiracy theory believest or something like that. That’s not the case, but I love alien movies. I’ve been fascinated with aliens since I was a kid. I’ve seen every single episode, maybe more than once of Ancient Aliens. I love that show, Unexplained with William Shatner, I love Unsolved Mysteries. I love the idea of the what if, right? I personally have never had an alien experience. Like I’ve never been abducted. I’ve seen some weird lights in the sky before where I’m like, was that something different? I’m sure it was just a satellite. So, I have nothing to speak on experience-wise.
But when it comes to aliens, I 100% believe that if our sun is a star and we’ve got the solar system that we exist within, and our chain of planets revolves around this, how can there not be something else out there? And with all the stuff that’s come out recently with the footage, the military footage, the tic-tac things we have no explanation for. I mean, have I seen these things with my own eyes? No, am I watching content created and sculpted a certain way by producers and directors? Yes, but I still find it fascinating. I mean, Steven Spielberg, one of my biggest inspirations as a kid and now planted that seed for me.
I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind with my mom as a kid before I ever saw E .T. That movie terrified me because the little boy who gets abducted, I was about his age when I saw that movie.
Now, you could point a finger at my mom and be like, what were you doing, letting like a six-year-old kid watch Close Encounters? But that seed that planted in me opened up my world to moviemaking. It opened up my world to thinking about what else could be out there. So do I believe aliens could exist? Absolutely. Would I love to have an experience of my own? Unquestionably! If somebody were to come down from another solar system somewhere and be like, do we have any volunteers? I’d raise my hand and be like, can I bring my camera crew? Because I’m telling you, we’ll make the greatest episode ever. Put me on the ship, let’s do some experiments. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, only push it so far. If I can document it, count me in. I’d gladly get abducted by aliens, get put back down here and would love to tell the story. So, you know, if any of them are out there listening, I think they already know that I’m thinking this way. So, you know, hey, I’m all about it. And if it one day comes to fruition that there are other life forms elsewhere that are not hostile to our planet because obviously that’s its own direction. I always think of aliens as being more sentient beings who would be looking at our planet as something to help versus hurt. And I just like to keep that mindset that this would be something that hopefully we as humans would be open to and could make a greater connection that would maybe one day help our planet, that could find a way to affect in the right direction global climate change, some of the pollution that we have done or the effects that we have had as a planet on this specific subject. So, you know, I try to keep it positive and hope that, look, if it is real that I at least get to know it for definitively within my lifetime, I think would be a pretty cool thing.
If you were to meet an alien, what would be the first thing you would say?
“You want to do a collaboration?” That’s where my head goes immediately, the storytelling side of it. Like, “what are you comfortable with me catching on camera?” And “what are you comfortable with me, you know, sharing with the world?” I would have an endless list of questions because, you know, I’m a chatty Cathy. That’s one of my things that I think ultimately ended me up in front of the cameras. I’ve always got a lot to talk about.
I think my biggest thing would be. “What’s outside of where we can reach as humans? Where else have you gone?” Like “what’s out there beyond the solar system? Where’s your ship? Can I drive it? Where’s your planet? Can I come there? Can I be the guy that brings a camera team on your ship to get to this planet to document those species to come back and share that with the world?”
Coyote Peterson Interview | Brave Wilderness
Are there any unexplained mysteries that fascinate you the most?
Bigfoot is a huge one and we did a Bigfoot episode a couple of years ago that got a lot of bad flak because we marketed it the wrong way. I won’t go down that whole rabbit hole. But it was it was a big one. That was one of our biggest digital mess-ups. It was meant to be completely harmless but it really made a lot of people angry.
I’m a huge Bigfoot fanatic and have been for a very, very long time. I read my first book on Bigfoot when I was in fourth grade. I checked it out at the library where I grew up always wanted to know is there a missing link between homo sapiens and the bridge between the great apes right. I mean I certainly never looked at a Bigfoot or Sasquatch whatever you want to call this wide variety of possibly upright walking great apes to be. Why don’t we have more evidence? Why is it unbelievable that it could exist? I have tons of theories as to why we haven’t found something like this at this point because animals are amazing at staying hidden. So, you know when it comes to a science slash cryptozoology-oriented mystery, that one is probably the one that fascinates me the most. Always has, and always will.
Are there any species that you haven’t filmed that you would like to?
Oh gosh, you pick up an animal encyclopedia, open the book to any page and point to finger and you’re probably going to find something that I haven’t filmed, considering the fact that we’ve got almost a thousand videos on the Brave Wilderness channel at this point. But one animal specifically that’s eluded us for many years isn’t so much that we can’t find it. It’s just the logistics, the permissions, the shutdowns with COVID and the extreme expense of getting to this spot and doing it the right way is a lot. The Komodo Dragon is probably number one on my bucket list and it’s a target that we’ve been working on for a number of years. There is the possibility that we’ll end up filming it in 2024. It’s just a matter of again getting the right permissions and being able to go in and craft the right story. Getting to Komodo Island and seeing these animals in Komodo National Park, not a difficult thing if you really want to see Komodo dragons, right? Tourists can go and do this, but we want to get to one of the more remote outskirt islands and film the largest dragons that are not habituated to humans. And what that means is that, you know, and again, this is not to downplay the danger of a Komodo dragon in any way whatsoever. I don’t want this to be mistaken. But the dragons that are on Komodo Island in the National Park are used to seeing people. Like they’ll lay around, they’re moving at different speeds, different times of day. It’s not necessarily the level of danger that you would have from some of the surrounding islands where the dragons there are very much the apex predators. And it is a dangerous situation that we would want to be able to go in, document and film the right way. I mean, we’re talking about the closest you will ever get to physically filming something that is like a living dinosaur. And while Komodo dragons are no way related to a dinosaur lineage, it’s a big, scaly, prehistoric-looking thing that certainly would be intense to film in a very remote situation. So Komodo dragon number one target.
What is the perfect day for Coyote Peterson?
A perfect day for Coyote Peterson. A perfect day breaks down depending on what my, you know, sort of required responsibility is for the day. If I’m on a production day, I have one sort of set of expectations. If I have an off day, it’s another set of expectations. But everybody loves an off day. So I’ll combine an off day together with a little bit of work with it. When I’m in the office, a lot of times I’m doing things like this. I love to be a part of a podcast or interviews. It really feels like I’m getting to share the story of Brave Wilderness and my passion for the great outdoors and conservation initiatives. So, getting the chance to talk with somebody about what it is that I love doing feels like the greatest job always in the world. Accomplishing these sorts of elements in the office as a start to the day is always great. Then I love to get outdoors, and do a little bit of exploration, whether that’s on my own, just enjoying nature, getting to go out to search for creatures, or going out to search for lost artefacts, skulls, or anything like that. I get a lot of enjoyment out of whether it’s by myself or with my camera team. And then I’m also very athletic. I play a lot of basketball. On any given day, you may catch me and some of my friends shooting hoops. We are very competitive when we are doing that. After that, if I haven’t hit the gym beforehand, I’ll actually go to the gym after playing basketball, catch a good meal, and then I actually like to absorb a lot of content in the evening.
One of the things that gets me to wind my creative brain down is to actually watch the work that other people have done. So whether it’s Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Disney, Apple TV, I got multiple series that I watched, documentaries, old movies, you name it. I will absorb anywhere from two to three hours worth of content a night just to keep my creative juices flowing because I get so much inspiration from watching the work that other people have done. So I guess that’s kind of in a nutshell.
Coyote Peterson Interview | Brave Wilderness
What’s been one of your most standout adventures and why?
Wow, most standout adventures and why. Every adventure has its own unique, like, incredible celebratory moments. When you go out into the wild and you do what it is, we do. We have this running joke that is, you know, animals don’t have a call sheet. And what that means is that you can’t go out looking for something and just expect that species to show up when you need it to so that you can get it on camera, whether that’s filming it from a distance or physically being able to engage, whether that’s catching it, getting super close, getting yourself in a position to get unique shots while you’re talking about it. You just never know what’s going to happen. Each trip has its celebratory moments. But I’m currently working on a documentary feature film right now that’s a very fascinating story. This is my sort of directorial debut when it comes to documentary feature films. We just filmed the first two acts of a project that follows four college wrestlers from Wyoming who were last year attacked by a grizzly bear. Two of the boys were mauled very badly and they survived to tell the tale. It’s a story of heroism, selflessness, what to do and not do when you find yourself in a worst-case scenario, how to enjoy the outdoors of the wilderness in areas where apex predators exist and how to enter those areas safely.
So that recently has been the most successful adventure I’ve been on, and I was just literally on location two weeks ago filming this. We had absolutely every domino fall in the direction that we needed it to and when I say every domino, going into a very, very, very most dangerous bear situation I’ve ever physically ventured into being there and having no bear experience happen, which is what we didn’t want to happen. We didn’t want to repeat it because we took these boys back to the exact site where the mauling took place on the date of the anniversary. One year after the attack happened. So everything just worked out perfectly. And we’re very excited about the project. I can’t tell you the title of it yet, but it will hopefully become available for everybody in 2025.
We filmed the final act of it this coming year, 2024 on Kodiak Island, where we’re taking the boys out to see giant brown bears in the wild. And we will live amongst them for a week, which is going to be pretty crazy.
So, it’s a very meaningful project for me. Again, it’s my directorial debut when it comes to documentary feature films. And it’s the best, greatest success we’ve had in the past month.
Wow, congratulations.
Yeah, thanks, mate, appreciate it. Very, very needless to say, very, very excited about it. It’s a super cool project. And I know when it becomes available and is distributed internationally for everybody, people are going to be like, wow, what a crazy story of survival. And these boys who are the stars of the story, they’re just the kindest, humblest guys on the face of the planet. We’re very excited to share their tale with the world.
What is the craziest thing that you’ve ever done?
I think a lot of people probably look at the bites and the stings are the extreme stuff. I wouldn’t say that’s any of the craziest stuff, maybe the dumbest stuff that I’ve ever done. The craziest stuff, I guess, usually is the big adventures that we embark upon. You know, crazy is all based on somebody else looking at a scenario and saying, wow, I wouldn’t ever do what that is. I’ve certainly put myself in some situations where I’ve looked back on them and been like, man, that was adrenaline. That was the desire to capture something unique on camera. And you did it and you got away with it unscathed. But holy cow, like, don’t ever do that again. One specific thing that comes to mind was we were filming a series for Animal Planet called Brave the Wild. We did 18 episodes for them for this series. And one of the episodes was an episode that we never intended to make happen. It was about jaguars in Brazil. We found ourselves in the right place in time when we happened to be able to film a mother jaguar and her cubs. Without knowing that the jaguar was in the area, we had gotten off the boat that we were on, and went deep into this underbrush and found ourselves, myself, and a very small camera team, on our hands and knees, crawling like jaguars through these weird tunnels that have been carved out by animal movement, deep in this underbrush. Like from the outskirts, when you’re on the river and you look at the brush, you’re like, that’s impenetrable by any human. Nobody would ever go in there. But we found this little opening and went in and we’re like, holy cow, it’s like a maze of pathways, clearly being used by jaguars. Well, let’s go in here and set up a camera trap. So, we’re literally like army crawling on hands and knees because while jaguar is a big cat, like, you know, on all fours, it’s, you know, two and a half, three feet high. As a human, you gotta be down on jaguar level. Well, we’re in what is essentially a jaguar superhighway and the birds around us start signaling that there is a cat in the area. Unbeknownst to us, we got off this boat, went through this gateway and went left to the right is exactly where the jaguars were sleeping. So, these cats watched us enter, go to the left set up a camera trap and then come back and get our boat and leave. And how do we know those jaguars were there? Because as we were backing up, the female took her cubs and swam across the river and we caught all this on camera. So, it’s like, oh my gosh, like, there you are, literally in a jaguar den and those animals that just goes to show you how even predators are like, I don’t want to interact with a human. She took her cubs and went the other way as opposed to being like, all right, well, I’m gonna come in here and cat scratch the heck out of these guys and turn this into a bloodbath. I look back at something like this, and in the moment, even once we see the Jaguars, and we’re filming this situation, we’re extremely excited. But then you get back to base camp that night, and you’re like, wow, that was a foolish play. But again, in the moment, you don’t think about it until you then realise that was crazy, we were right next to those Jaguars. So, you know, that’s just one that comes to mind, I guess, when you ask that question.
Have you got any tips you can share for content creators and YouTubers?
Yeah, absolutely. It is a very daunting process for anyone to have an idea and be like, man, it’s a really good idea, but how do I turn that idea into something more than what’s just up here and into something tangible that you can share with other people? Just starting and having the confidence in yourself to begin is always going to be the first step. If you could take that step, then you can turn an idea into something that you whether we’re talking about video production specifically or it doesn’t matter what it is But let’s just use video as an example, and then you can capture something on camera and then you can get that through post-production and then you can distribute it on the plethora of digital distribution platforms that we have today, you know YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, you know what I mean? The opportunity for people to share their work is now greater than it ever has been and if you can get that far the commitment becomes then repeating the exercise. It’s just like anything practice is just going to make you better. You’re never gonna reach perfection. This is something that I struggle with as an artist and an A-type personality – I always want to get better. But you have to be able to look at your work and say this is as good as what I was able to do with the resources I had. That’s awesome. That’s practice. What’s the next rep? How do I get to the next level? How do I stay committed to my vision of pushing this forward? So, for any digital creator to break that down more simply you got to start. You have to stay committed and you have to keep going through those repetitions and that consistency then becomes volume. Volume becomes a catalogue that an audience can adhere to and then it becomes an expectation. Those expectations from the audience that something new is coming are what’s gonna help your brand, your channel, your vision grow and grow. If you stick with that consistency, you’re gonna build that following and that’s exactly how we did it with Brave Wilderness. All it was in its most simplistic form was hard work and consistency to stay committed to believing that we would achieve some sort of success from this. And success can be broken down in so many different ways. It doesn’t have to be financial. It doesn’t have to be notoriety, it can just be the accomplishment of getting something done. Whether one person or a million people are watching it, getting it completed and sharing it with somebody is what I consider success at the end of the day.
Was there a pivotal moment in your career when you realised this is taking off seriously?
Oh yeah, for sure. You know, with the work that we did with Brave Wilderness, my business partner Mark and I were in the very, very early days of Brave Wilderness because it wasn’t always Brave Wilderness. We didn’t really kind of have the name Brave Wilderness honestly until a solid year into launching our YouTube channel. So, you know, for the old-time people that started following in 2014, the channel was originally called Breaking Trail because that was the series we were producing, and then we started growing this bigger vision for what became Brave Wilderness. But there was definitely a moment in 2016, I mean the very pivotal release of me getting stung by a velvet ant which was also called the Cow Killer – the episode that came out in September of 2016, so we are talking almost to the date, two years into hustling with the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel. And we’re talking Mark and I essentially doing this ourselves, a couple of our friends coming in to help us with cameras and some advice in editing. But Mark and I were essentially kind of running the ship ourselves for two straight years without making a single dime at it. When I say not a single dime, I mean we weren’t getting paid anything. Any tiny bit of revenue that was trickling in, we were recycling back into the idea of taking our vacation time from our day jobs to go out and produce more videos. But that Cow Killer video in 2016, when it exploded and went viral. I mean that is no question to the Genesis moment of what sent Brave Wilderness from just being guys trying to be an animal channel to holy cow, Brave Wilderness is the animal channel in the digital space. And we kind of never looked back from there. So very, very grateful that we stumbled into what we stumbled into at the time and that the audience embraced it and enjoyed it. We wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for the audience because that’s how the digital world works. There was no financial backing into Brave Wilderness. I know there’s myth and word out there on the internet that discovery communications came in and fueled this thing financially. We never got a dime from anybody other than a very small private investment from a close family friend of mine that said, “hey guys, we believe in what this is, we’re gonna help you get this thing launched.” And again, that was just the resources to literally go out and produce filming on a couple of locations to get us there. Airplane tickets, all sharing the same hotel room, fast food for meals and a couple of cameras and go-pros to make it happen. So very much the grassroots approach, but again, the commitment to believe that we had something special and lightning in a bottle could strike more than once.
Are you able to break down the size of the team now?
Oh yeah, so it varies based on like a project. Like for example, when we just did this documentary feature film, we brought in a separate team that is not employed full-time by Brave Wilderness. We’ve got freelancers that we’ll work with on a per-project basis, but full-time from Brave Wilderness, we have 15, full-time employees that make up two different divisions of the brand. We’ve got a brand that produces a lot of our content out of here in Columbus, and then we’ve got a division that’s based out of Boston, where my business partner, Mark, lives, who also does some hosting on the channel.
We sort of divided and conquered, again, with this idea that we want this brand to grow and grow and grow. And next year, in September 2024, we’ll officially turn 10 years old. So we’re very excited to hit this decade mark. I mean, to hit a year in the digital space and to be able to stick with it, to hit five years, to hit 10 years, we’re just very excited to be like, man, we consider ourselves kind of the old timers now in the digital space. I mean, I started out with no grey hair in my beard, and this grey started to creep in there. But we love what we do, and it keeps us young. We feel like kids. And I think the whole mentality behind the Brave Wilderness brand and all of our employees is to just really enjoy what it is that we are doing and know that we’re doing, to the best of our ability, a lot of good for education, conservation, and people’s enjoyment of the great outdoors.
What’s your favourite place on the planet and why?
It’s tough to ever really pick a favourite place. There are different favourite places when it comes to places I filmed, and places that I’ve just gone for enjoyment. But to kind of keep it centric of this conversation, when it comes to filming, Alaska is honestly, I think I pin as the grandiose, greatest place I’ve been. It is such a wild frontier. And the thing that I always say to people is that everything there is bigger, the rivers, the mountains, the rocks that make them up, the trees that blanket the sides of them. Until you go to Alaska and you absorb this, I mean me as a kid who grew up in Ohio and have travelled quite a bit, in the United States as a kid and then travel quite a bit more with Brave Wilderness and have been to some of the most amazing places. But Alaska is bigger and more beautiful than almost anything I’ve ever seen. The second follow-up to that and a very close second is Japan. Japan is just phenomenal. It’s like you’re on a whole other planet.
Like if you had been abducted from your bedroom, a mask put over your head and you were to be thrown out into the Tottori Prefecture of Japan, which is where we did a lot of our filming. You would probably think that you were launched back in time or launched to another planet. It is that cool, that unique and that amazing.
What are the top three items on your Christmas gift list?
Well, for this year, I recently somehow got sucked into the Pokemon rabbit hole. This was a whole brand that I missed as a kid because I was too old by the time Pokemon became popular. But we did a video this past year in which we kind of roped Pokemon and the idea of opening Pokemon card packs into an episode, which then subsequently got me and my entire camera team absolutely hooked on Pokemon. So, I imagine people would be getting me some Pokemon-oriented things for Christmas. I’m a huge fan of anything Jurassic Park. So, if anything Jurassic Park vintage or Jurassic Park current sort of thing shows up under my Christmas tree, I’m thrilled. And I’m also very big into sneaker culture. There is an endless possibility of different types of shoes that my friends or family or loved ones could possibly surprise me with for Christmas. So Pokemon, Jurassic Park, basketball shoes.
Can you share a funny story that your fans might not already know about Coyote Peterson?
If we talk about aliens and Bigfoot, that might be like one of the weird things that’s like, oh, I didn’t realise that was the case. But I’ll bring it back to storytelling and Steven Spielberg. I’m very public about praising my love for the work that Steven has done and the influence that he’s had on my career. And I don’t know if it’s necessarily a story. It’s, I guess kind of more of a fact, but one of the very first movies that I ever recall seeing strangely enough was Jaws. And the reason for that was Readers Digest used to combine books in these volumes that were multiple books in one book. And my mom had a subscription when I was a little kid. I mean, like a real little kid. And we got the Rear’s Digest anthology that had Jaws in it. In there was a picture of this great white shark jumping up on a boat. I was absolutely fascinated with that book and that picture. And I would spend so much time trying to draw and recreate that picture. And we’re talking like four or five, six years old. Well, you know, I was born in 1981, Jaws came out in 1975. And I remember my mom renting Jaws on VHS tape. Any of you young kids listening to this were like, what’s a VHS tape? But that’s how we used to watch movies. And my mom used to rent Jaws and she would just give me free rein of the VCR. I would fast forward to every single scene with the shark. I wasn’t actually watching the movie. I would watch the shark scenes over and over again, which is weird because they were extremely violent and bloody. But I would look for that one frame where I could pause the VCR and the screen would shake because VHS tapes, when you pause things will go fuzzy. I would put paper up on the TV and trace on the screen with paper every frame with that shark. I would then take those images and hang them on my wall and I would practice drawing that shark over and over and over again. I don’t think any of these pictures exist today. But it was interesting to me. I became interested in storytelling and filmmaking. Steven Spielberg planted for me a seed that was an interest in animals, a fascination with sharks and a desire for storytelling.
So that little-known fact or funny story is that Coyote Peterson as a very young child was tracing sharks on a TV screen made by Steven Spielberg that then became the inspiration for his career.
Wow. Very cool. Last question to wrap up. Can you, I mean, you’ve already given us some insight into your future plans, but can you maybe more broadly talk about what your plans are for 2024?
Yeah, of course. We have a huge initiative that we launched in 2022 called Save the Horns. That’s all about Black Rhino Conservation. I’m very excited to announce that that initiative helped to raise collectively enough financing to help support a number of other different groups. We have now collectively as a team, successfully transported 22 critically endangered Black rhinos to a top-secret new massive, massive expanse of land in South Africa. So, we’ll be going back to South Africa in 2024 to film a number of different procedures surrounding the success of this rhino relocation.
We’ll be on Kodiak Island filming the last part of the documentary feature film that we are currently working on. I have two massive television slash streamer series in full-on development, one of which we already shot the pilot for this year.
I have an animated series that is in full-blown development and is about to start being pitched at the beginning of 2024. And on top of that about nine different locations targeted for YouTube production.
We’ve got our seventh book that will be released just around the birthday of Brave Wilderness, which is September 2024, the 10-year celebration of Brave Wilderness. So 2024 is going to be a massively crazy busy year. An exciting one, hopefully, a successful one, and lots of great stuff to come from us. And needless to say, I’m going to be very, very busy.
Coyote Peterson Interview | Student Pocket Guide
WATCH OUR INTERVIEW WITH COYOTE PETERSON HERE:
