How Brave Wilderness Turned Wildlife Education Into A YouTube Empire

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We sit down with Coyote Peterson to trace how Brave Wilderness goes from TV rejection to a multi-platform wildlife brand built on relentless reinvestment and smarter production. We dig into the real origin of the bite and sting videos, the safety lines he refuses to cross, and what YouTube demands now that attention spans keep shrinking.
• film school roots and years of pitching an animal adventure series to television
• shifting from a behind-the-scenes role into the on-camera host
• early YouTube skepticism and how audience comments became the first real signal
• turning ad revenue into a reinvestment engine while keeping day jobs
• avoiding creator burnout by hiring editors and scaling a team
• the unseen workload behind a major creator brand and seasonal production planning
• side projects including documentary work, a series in development with Bear Grylls, and dinosaur excavation storytelling
• building episodes when animals are unpredictable and plans collapse in the field
• the porcupine quill moment that revealed a new audience hook
• safety precautions, allergy risk, and why venomous snake bites are off-limits
• how the algorithm and short-form habits make clicks and retention harder
• shifting to lighter gear and more immersive filming for 2025 and 2026
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Transcript

Cold Open And Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:00

But you literally consciously say, I'm gonna get bitten or stung by this thing. Why? It was our first video that made it to a hundred thousand views on less than ten thousand subscribers. Every time that algorithm shifts, it affects the organism as a whole. But it is harder to get the audience to want to not only click on a video, let alone have an attention span to stay connected to it.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hey, welcome to the only podcast that'll go to the ends of the earth to get you some of the most interesting people on the podcast. My name is Travis. I'm here every single week and I have an incredibly special guest, and a lot of you are going to recognize him. He is the one, the only. Wait, what's your name again?

SPEAKER_00 0:41

I'm Coyote Peterson from Brave Wilderness. I'm a wildlife adventure educator and conservationist.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

And we all knew this. I'm joking along because I've actually been watching Brave Wilderness for a long time, uh, giving Coyote a little bit of a hard time. But if you're new here, we love to help you grow your YouTube channel. We do it in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes we'll answer your questions directly, and other times we'll just talk to some creators that are doing really amazing things. And that's what we have today. If you're listening to the audio podcast, you'll have links in the show notes. And if you're watching on YouTube, of course, it'll be in the description. So Coyote is here and not an easy guy to get a hold of, but thankfully has uh gonna give us some of our time between getting bitten by snakes and every other thing to come here in a in a nice environment and talk about YouTube. So how are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:25

I'm doing great. I'm in between travels right now. So uh being in the office, getting the chance to talk to you today, Travis, is a nice break from the craziness that the rest of my year is gonna present.

Film School And TV Rejection

SPEAKER_01 1:37

I can't wait to talk more about that and stuff, but let's let's rewind a little bit. Let's go back to the much younger coyote of over a decade ago before YouTube started, before you started uploading on YouTube, what were you doing? Like, where were you in your life and what was what were you doing for a job and like what all that stuff? What were you doing?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah, it's crazy to think that Brave Wilderness has been uploading content for 12 years now. Every time that I talk to somebody about that, I'm like, wow, we have been going for a minute. Old timey days is what it seems like. Um, so pre-2014, which is when we launched our YouTube channel, uh, I was, I had a day job, but I was constantly with my business partner Mark, trying to figure out how we were gonna break into this world of entertainment and then entertainment combined together with the world of animals, which I'll say are two of the hardest fields to break into because you can't exactly go to school and say, I've got a degree, now place me in a job. And when I was in college, I went to the Ohio State University, and at the time they didn't even have a film program, so I had to create my own major, something that was called a personalized study program that was specifically in screenwriting, producing, and directing. So that became a really important launch point for what then became my career in understanding sort of the logistics and the routes to take in storytelling before we ever even incorporated animals and my love for the great outdoors into that combined space that, of course, then became Brave Wilderness. So, um, you know, to answer your question more directly, for five years, Mark and I were developing the consent, the concept of an animal adventure series, thinking we would land it on television, but only to have everybody tell us that wildlife presenters interacting with animals just doesn't work anymore. Nobody's interested in seeing what that is. Thanks for bringing us the idea, we're gonna go ahead and pass. So it was a lot of closed doors that eventually became the right open window when we discovered YouTube as a distribution platform. And as where YouTube's at now today, everybody sort of learned what we learned back then, which is like if you've got a great idea and a story to tell, put it on YouTube and you've got the chance to build an audience.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

That's amazing. Were you always going to be the host for the show?

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Originally, no. So being a writer and producer and director behind the scenes, I had conceptualized the show originally for a friend of mine, and I was off camera catching animals, and then you know, we'd cut cameras and I bring an animal in, show them how to handle it. Here's the facts I need you to say, and then we'd be like, okay, action. And that worked very subtly for a couple of shoots. And then we realized and looking at what was the footage we were capturing of me like jumping in and catching snapping turtles, we're like, this is the really interesting stuff. You catching the animals, why don't you get in front of the camera and do this? But I never had a desire to be a in front of the camera personality. Um, while I knew what the camera probably wanted, and I knew what the post-production process needed from a storytelling perspective, it was a pretty easy transition for me to go from just director to then wearing that final hat of actor, well, or presenter, director, producer, show right, showrunner, writer, and then editor in the early years of Brave Wilderness as well. So I know how to do it all.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

You are everywhere. So at the very, very, very beginning of the YouTube uploads, uh, you were in front of the camera at that point, or did you still have the other person?

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Yeah, no, I was I was always in front of the camera once we started uploading to YouTube and the years before that, too. So the the development period of putting somebody else in that show host role was honestly a short-lived, probably six and a half to eight month period that you know we realized really, really quickly like, okay, we got to pivot. I gotta be the one hosting.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

That's really interesting. So it's that's a pretty interesting um like uh precursor to the way things are now because what could have happened if that host had just you know worked out? Like it's so interesting that your life completely changed because of it. Um, you've always had a passion for animals?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Oh, yeah. Ever since I was uh a really young kid, you know, four years old is when I think I caught my first toad, which is like the safest animal on the planet to catch when you're growing up in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. And, you know, where I'm based out of, uh currently Columbus, Ohio, which is where Brave Wilderness is is centralized. Um, you know, I grew up in the Cleveland area, and the most dangerous thing I ever had to interact with was common snapping turtles, which is a pretty aggressive turtle if you're gonna, you know, crawl into a swamp and catch one and interact with it. But, you know, when it comes to apex predators, we've got nothing. When it comes to venomous species, we really got nothing. So I had a pretty safe childhood growing up interacting with the species that were in my own backyard. But it was my my passion and love for animals of all species. And what really began with dinosaurs and then transcended to animals just became the entire world's sort of playground, if you will, as I got older and then realized, man, can I combine my love for animals with my desire to tell stories and see these things all sort of come together in parallel with each other?

SPEAKER_01 6:38

So interesting. What so you guys have been doing this for a while before you went to YouTube. Now, I gotta be clear, YouTube was a very different place over a decade ago. So it's not exactly the same thing, and it's not apples to apples. A lot of times I like to ask the content creators what they thought uploading at first because a lot of people started around 2020, somewhere around in there, and it blew up because of uh all the lockdown and everything. But you started way before that. So, what were your expectations coming to the platform? Again, the platform was way different. It is, it is the place to be right now, but back then it was kind of this weird little secondary channel or uh secondary platform that was kind of cool, but like it wasn't where it is today. What were your what were your experiences early on?

Discovering YouTube As A Platform

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Early on, I was very anti-YouTube. I won't lie, and I'm very, very public about that. Uh, back in those days, let's call like 2012 and 13, like I definitely knew what YouTube was, and it was cat videos and prank videos. And I never saw myself fitting into that universe because the production quality that was coming out on YouTube at that point in time was pretty low bar, right? And and that's not throwing shade at anybody out there that was creating content at that point in time, but the skill set that I specifically came in with was setting schedules, pre-producing content, creating scripts or shot lists. It's like most people on YouTube are like, let me grab the least expensive camera I can or my phone camera and record something and pop it up there. So when I say anti-Youtube, I just didn't think that there was going to be a longevity to be had there. And we had our site set on the idea of television distribution where there would be well-structured stories and we would have significant budgets to be able to travel and tell the tales that we wanted. When you think about telling animal adventure content, there's a very finite amount of creation that can be done from any one location, right? So we ran out of content in Ohio, theoretically in our own minds, very quickly. Like we had to expand. People only have enough uh temperament to see snapping turtles so many times before they're like, my guy, we we've got to see lions, we've got to see bears, we want to see you catch crocodilians. So all that, you know, was something that we had to strive towards, and we didn't see how YouTube was going to become the financial backbone that would drive a revenue stream that would allow us to take that kind of travel on. Fortunately, it did, but when we initially were looking at YouTube, we didn't think there was value there. How we ended up landing on YouTube, truth be told, was doing a partnership with at the time what was called Discovery Digital Networks. Now, to my knowledge, DDN does not exist today, but during the time of the whole, let's call it the web distribution boom, every network or every substantial organization was like, you know what we need? Content on the internet. And Mark and I had this opportunity, and this is something I want to clarify because there's a lot of people think that Brave Wilderness was started by Discovery Communications. It was not. They never gave any financial support to us getting started, but what they did give us was the opportunity to distribute on a platform they were creating called Animalist. Animalist was going to be launching on YouTube and their like in-house network at the same time. And Mark and I saw this opportunity to be like, yo, is Animalist going to be Animal Planet for the future? We thought that might lead to a television deal at some point. And truth be told, that whole concept eventually fizzled, that being Animalist and DDN and that whole arm of discovery essentially went under. But in the process, we were able to launch Brave Wilderness as our own independent thing, sort of cross-collaborate with them, and that gave us the momentum that we needed to essentially launch what became Brave Wilderness in 2014. Wow.

Comments Spark The Commitment

SPEAKER_01 10:19

That's when did things start to turn around to the point where you honestly felt like, okay, this is a platform we need to reinvest in? Because you said at first you were kind of, eh, I don't know about this thing, but at some point something must have the the switch must have flipped. What was it? Uh, what was the time like and and what was the conversations like with your business partner?

SPEAKER_00 10:38

It was within a month, month of launching content on YouTube because in order for us to be able to put content through the closed circuit animalist distribution line that Discovery had, we had to have our own YouTube channel. And what was unique is that we're uploading to YouTube and you're seeing likes and you're seeing comments, that became such an important motivator. And that's why we always look back to the audience that we've built and we always say we are so thankful for the people that clicked, subscribed, watched, continue to watch for these past 12 years, because that was the thing that showed us, oh, we're actually reaching an audience here. And for a lot of new YouTube creators that are out there nowadays, you realize that there's quite the reward, even if it's not monetarily based, in receiving the accolades of those that are watching your content, either sort of professing their excitement for the quality or the subject matter. And then you've seen that that build up. And within a month of us releasing probably our first six pieces of content, we saw there was actual action happening with an audience beginning to follow us. That, of course, then gave us that motivation to be like, well, we've got to keep going because these consistent audience members that are writing in in the comments and that we're responding back to are like, what's next? What are you guys gonna, where are you taking us? What are you gonna show us? So that became a very early motivator before there was any revenue actually being generated out of the channel.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Wow. And you know, revenue has changed over the years and over the decades. I don't know like what the CPMs and stuff were back then, but uh, how long did it take before the financial aspect of it actually was significant or something that you guys felt like, oh, we can even expand the team?

Turning Ad Revenue Into Growth

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Yeah. It's it's funny to talk about this stuff. And and honestly, I love talking about it because it really takes you back to a time where people didn't understand that there was revenue to be generated and eventually the structure of a business to be had if you're distributing content on a platform like YouTube. And I remember when it was pennies, I remember when it became dollars, I remember the first day that we hit$100 on YouTube ad revenue, and we were like, whoa. And Mark and I would sit down and we would do calculations to be like, if we can repeat this for this number of days in a row, or we get it to this number, like we had this like graph in our office that we shared, um, where we still had our day jobs, mind you, between 2014 and June of 2016, Mark and I had day jobs five days a week, nine to five, and every spare hour was spent working on the channel, uploading content, filming, editing, you name it. And it wasn't until June of 2016 where those numbers had grown to the point where we said, okay, now the equation is this plus this equals Mark's amount of money he's making, the amount of money Coyote's making, and the amount of money for us to be able to travel and do what it is we're doing, and for us to be able to hire our first official employee. So we didn't just run out and say, cool, now we can quit our day jobs and buy a car or buy a house. It was how do we reinvest in the business as quickly as possible so that we can find a way to escalate the entire scale of content.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Yeah, I've talked to a couple of creators recently who talk about that. They, you know, the a lot of the money that first came in, they would reinvest into their channel. And it sounds like that's the same thing no matter what size you are, whether it be, you know, a brand new creator or you guys are almost at 22 million subscribers on the main channel. So I feel like that's something that needs to be talked about more, which can be small things. For example, uh, if you're shooting all your stuff on your phone, which by the way, phones nowadays, the footage and quality is amazing. Like you can totally do that. Um, the first thing you might want to invest in is some type of microphone, whether it be like a lav mic or something like that. Um, or even list like a little gimbal or something to keep your shot steady or whatever it is, could be something so simple. And it sounds like you guys have have kind of uh done that as well and seen the the obviously what the return on investment has to be made, right? So if you're gonna purchase something for the channel, it still has to kind of make the money back in some way. Um, would you say that you guys have been pretty good about that?

Editing Help And Burnout Prevention

SPEAKER_00 14:50

I'd say one of the things that is equated to us being able to have the longevity of 12 years worth of existence in the digital distribution space YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, you know, the whole spectrum of it all, because you've got to really be involved in all places to build a brand. We uh built the success of this brand based on our dedication to reinvesting back into what the product was and who the people were that were helping us make the product. Because at the end of the day, you're you're you're keeping the sustainability in this space specifically, I'm sure we'll get into talking about this a little bit more. It's difficult. And it was difficult back in the 15, 16, 17, 18. And I remember reading articles in like Variety Magazine because there was such an impact that YouTube was having on the entertainment industry as a whole. But people were really focused in on creator burnout, which was a huge thing that different creators faced, where it's like the algorithm is expecting you, especially people that were doing vlogs, to upload every single day. And for people that don't make content, you don't understand how hard it is to not only find the right subject matter, get that on camera, but then by the end of the day, say, now I'm gonna edit this all together, have it uploaded and released by eight o'clock the next morning. It was really burning people out substantially. And the way that we avoided that burnout, again, from the investment perspective, was to bring in our first round of editors. That was the first thing that we relieved from my duties, which was, you know, hosting and also editing every episode from 2014 through basically the end of 2016. I was cutting all of the content, um, which is tough to be in front of the camera and then also edit yourself because nobody's gonna be more constructively criticism of one's performance than the person giving the performance. So it was a huge mental lift for me to put the editing responsibility on somebody more talented than myself when it came to cutting the story.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Yeah, I bet that um that's one of the things that a lot of people say, you know, if you ever get to the point where you can expand and hire out editing tends to be one of the first things. I actually just got done talking to a person who says that he would never uh outsource it because instead of being a creator who has to edit, he said he could he considers himself an editor who happens to create. So that's different. I mean, every person's a little different. But for me personally, yeah, like having an editor is is a godsend for a lot of this stuff. Yeah. When you how how big is your team now-ish?

SPEAKER_00 17:17

So Brave Wilderness, we've got a division here in Columbus, we've got a division in Boston, we've got a very small team out on the West Coast, and in total, I think we've got 16 employees full-time with the brand as of today. But we ebb and flow based on, and that's like full-time employees, but we ebb and flow based on projects and bringing in freelancers, whether that's additional camera team or larger producing partners when we're working on something bigger, like a TV show or uh a specialty project for a studio or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

So let's talk a little bit more like their your day-to-day. Um let's start there and we'll talk more about projects and videos specifically. But what does your day look like generally? Like you wake up and then what?

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Well, I must say every day when I wake up, I consider myself the luckiest person in the world because I am truly somebody who is excited to get to work every morning. Not only am I surrounded by a lot of my closest friends that I work with on a daily basis, but we really enjoy what it is that we're doing. And when you think about you went to school to try to become somebody that made it into the entertainment industry from Columbus, Ohio, of all places. I feel pretty fortunate to be running, you know, a brand like this and didn't have to move and go anywhere that I didn't want to go to fall into the rat race, so to speak. So, you know, the day-to-day basis can vary whether I'm in office or I'm on location. So right now we're just at the end of what we call our slow season, which is usually January through March, which we are pre-producing and lining up a lot of either brand deals or partnership deals for the year and determining what are the biggest locations that we're securing to go out and produce the content. So we're just now beginning to ramp up into a full production window, which usually lasts from March until September or October. And then we get into the holidays and we sort of recalculate and get, you know, sort of end-of-the-year content through post-production, try to get ahead for the beginning of the year, and the system repeats itself. But what most people probably don't realize is that while you may see me on the channel a lot hosting content, what you see on YouTube or on any of our social feeds for that matter is really only the tip of the iceberg of what we do at Brave Wilderness. Um, I'm involved in in about seven or eight other projects at the moment, some that are more public than others, but all of it pertains to this bigger universe that we've created. So I'm pretty much 12 hours a day worth of go, go, go, go, go for the most part.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

Wow. So could you give us like an example of what an extra project would be? Because to your point, like we would only know you from the YouTube channel unless we've seen you elsewhere, but you said some things are not public and whatnot, uh, without like breaking any secrets. Like, what kind of things are you doing that that takes up your time?

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Um, so recently I just directed a featured documentary film about grizzly bear attacks that we currently just finished through post-production and are in the process of shopping to networks, which is a very complicated time to shop anything to anybody right now, but we won't get into that story in the in the state of the current industry. Um, I've got a larger treasure-oriented television series that I'm currently developing with one of my business partners who most people probably know, Bear Grills. We're partnered together with his uh Natural Studios division, and we're working on a uh television show development right now. Um, also working on a couple of big dinosaur projects, one specifically being the unearthing of two tyrannosaur skeletons out in Montana at the moment. So that's something that is a little bit more public through social media, but we've also filmed some content around, and we're now developing a documentary that is about the unearthing of these dinosaur skeletons, one of which may end up be a world record size for a T-Rex, which will be a huge story uh if this skeleton does in fact come out of the ground this summer and it's a world record. I mean, it's it's gonna be worldwide news. So pretty cool to be involved in all this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

You're you're you're documenting that process, is that of what they're uncovering?

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Yep. We've already found the skull and many of the teeth that belong. So basically, if you're talking about treasure hunting from a paleo perspective, finding the skull of a tyrannosaur is the the ultimate find in the world of fossils. Um, and this all happened at the very end of 2025. So now as we're getting into the 2026 dig season, we're bringing in several other partners into the project and trying to determine, you know, is for sure that skeleton going to be in the ground? Finding a skull is one thing, finding the majority of the dinosaur skeleton is another. And then, of course, you go from dirt to display to what will then ultimately be auction house, which the market right now for dinosaur fossils is just beyond anybody's wildest expectations. And for context, for anybody listening or watching, the highest current selling record for a fossil was a stegosaurus known as Apex that sold at Southern. Bees two summers ago for$44.1 million, or right in that realm, right? So a$40 plus million dollar fossil. So you can see the value in the idea of a tyrannosaur coming out of the ground. And whether or not that is going into private hands or the world of academia, we want to be a part of documenting the journey of that dinosaur from dirt to display to its ultimate home, which hopefully will land in the right place for science.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

I'm super curious about that. I don't want to take too much time with this, but I am really curious about this. So I assume someone like reaches out to you and says, hey, we got this thing, it'd be great if you documented it. But how long is this going to take for them to unearth it and find the parts? And like, are you just going there? I mean, so often do you have a cinematographer just lives there for a while, or how does that work?

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Yeah, great question. So I happen to be right place in time when the the remains of this dinosaur were first coming out of the ground. And this is with a group that I've been working with for uh a couple of years now, phenomenal independent paleontologist named Clayton Phipps and his two sons, Luke and Daniel, known on the internet as the Hell Creek Hooligans. And we've just got a wonderful working relationship. They know what my passion is for dinosaurs. I love supporting the work that they do through the uh any social media promotion. And we've got a much larger project that I can't necessarily talk about right now that does pertain to dinosaurs, but these skeletons directly are tied to that future vision that we have for bringing more dinosaur education and experiences to people directly. When it comes to the amount of time that it will take for this dinosaur to come out of the ground, given the fact that we know that this is a T-Rex and we've got the skull, it's full court pressed this summer. So between May and October, if that dinosaur is in that hillside, trust me when I say we're gonna be getting it out of there. But what that means is bones locked in matrix that then have to be prepped, that then have to be put on armature. So there's quite the process that can take at fast pace two years to go from dirt to display. Um, and given the fact that this is gonna be such a monumental fossil, it's probably gonna happen pretty quickly. And when it comes to the documenting, digging bones up isn't necessarily the most action-oriented, keep you glued to the screen sort of content. So the documentary is being designed to follow not only the parallel story of the skeleton being unearthed and prepared and sent to auction, but also the story narrative of what this dinosaur's life would have been from egg to its final moments in the Cretaceous period, you know, roughly 66 million years ago. So um, it'll be rather complex, and we're in the process of developing all those narrative ties now and how they will seamlessly weave together with the real world versus the paleo world throwback that'll be done through all digital effects and stuff like that. Wow.

Planning Episodes Without A Call Sheet

SPEAKER_01 24:40

That's incredible. That's I'm excited to see how that turns out. My uh my best friend's son is really into dinosaurs, like he's super into dinosaurs, has been his entire life, and reptiles, which I guess we'll talk about here in a minute. Uh, so I'll make sure to tell him to take take a look. I'm sure he'd be really excited about that. Um, let's talk a little bit about like your videos now. I I look at your thumbnails and they're they're excellent, but they creep me out because you're you're around some of the creepiest, crawliest things uh on the planet. Um how do you how do you start the process of coming up with a video idea through the all the way to the point where you're editing? I mean, the editing part we can leave by itself, but like you have to come up with a concept where this thing's gonna be, what the animal's gonna be, what are the scenes gonna be? Like, how do you get all that going?

The Porcupine Video That Changed Everything

SPEAKER_00 25:25

That's such a great question. And it's such a such a complex answer when you go at it from the way that we produce content. And I think that's one of the things that, again, appreciative of the audience, and I think that they've recognized over the years, is we always say animals don't have a call sheet. And 98% of the stuff that we do on Brave Wilderness happens from being in the right place at the right time. Now, we do do careful pre-production work. We do reach out to specific wildlife reserves or protected areas or experts working in a field, so that we have to show up in some country and be like, well, hopefully, we're gonna wander around today and find this species. Because it really doesn't happen like that. So, what we'll do is a lot of research on many species that are in a specific area, and we go in with the best intention to be able to find and then get these moments in front of the camera. And where it gets really complicated because the world of animals is so unpredictable, is that not only are you dealing with nature itself and the weather and time of year and migratory patterns, and I mean, you name it, something is going to come into factor how you produce an episode, but you just really have to be constantly prepared for any situation to present itself. Actually, right before I jumped on this podcast, we were in a pre-production meeting on an episode for us that's in post-production, where it started with us looking for two snake species. We found one, we didn't find the other one, then we found this giant centipede, then I didn't get bitten by the centipede because we didn't know how bad it was going to be. We left the scene, thought about it overnight, went back, and we're like, maybe we can find the centipede because now I do think I want to get bitten by it. Couldn't find it again, found this other thing called a whip scorpion that was the biggest one I'd ever seen. It was like this big, and I end up getting bitten by that. And the episode concludes with us actually answering this question. People always want to know, Coyote, do you always find the animal and does it always work out? And the answer to that is no. It only works out 50% of the time. So there may be content you don't see, or we are just very calculated in the field to know how to pivot and construct a given scenario into something entertaining that can then turn into something in post-production and be something for the audience to watch. So it is really complicated, and you've got to get really lucky a lot of times. And for 12 years, somehow we've managed to keep it going.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

There was a moment somewhere in your content creation uh upbringing or coming up or whatever. There was a moment where you said, I'm gonna get bitten by this thing. And it has become part of your channel, which is the wildest thing to say. I've never had to say this to any other creator, that you literally consciously say, I'm gonna get bitten or stung by this thing. How? Why? How did that start?

SPEAKER_00 28:19

What's so crazy, Travis, is, and I love saying this statement to precursor what we're gonna get into. Any good wildlife presenter, and there have not been that many, when you really think about it and you look back over the course of history, going from like the 1950s until now, right? Look at the last 75 years. You can probably count the number of us that have been recognizable on two hands, right? And any one of them would tell you the goal is to not get bitten or stung by animals you're trying to interact with. So when we discovered this strange attraction that the audience had to me putting myself through the seemingly worst nightmare scenario anybody could comprehend, it started generating views. And the true genesis point came with us in Montana working with a wildlife sanctuary that was rehabilitating animals and some animals that they had raised in captivity that were actually used in motion picture production. So star animals, specifically, we work with a grizzly bear that had been in a number of films. Um, and that's kind of gone the wayside with the whole evolution of digital effects and now AI. It's like, is anybody ever gonna try to train a grizzly bear again? Probably not. But you know, back in the old timey days of 2014, working with a porcupine um seemed like a good idea because this was an animal that was um it was injured, it wasn't gonna be able to go back in the wild, and it was a juvenile. I mean, it wasn't full size, but still pretty robust little rodent. And, you know, porcupines have quills. And as the animal handler that we were working with brought the little porcupine out of his carrying enclosure because he wanted to put him in a natural-looking environment, he had these crazy leather gloves that like came all the way up to his bicep. And I was like, I thought porcupines can't shoot their quills. And he's like, Oh, well, they can't, but if I've got to rearrange the porcupine, all you got to do is touch the guard hairs and then they whack their rump up and you get you get quilled. And we're like, that's crazy. And then he went on to explain to us the removal process of porcupine quills, and we're like, we didn't know that. And I don't think anybody else knows that. What if I got quilled and showed people the right way to do this in case their pet gets quilled by a porcupine? And the handler was like, I guess you can do that if you really want. Sounds like a horrible idea. And I'm like, let's do it. We did it, and from a production standpoint, the episode was all over the place. We had light shifts, the porcupine would never sit still. I was flubbing my lines because the porcupine kept trying to walk off the log, and then I couldn't remember what the last thing was. I said, Long story short, we never thought it was an episode that was going to see the light of day, but it was several months after we filmed it. I brought it into Adobe and we started to edit it. And I was like, I think there's something to this. It was just funny to see me in pain and like my handful of quills. We put the episode out, and at the time we had fewer than 10,000 subscribers, and it was our first video that made it to 100,000 views on less than 10,000 subscribers. And Mark and I kind of scratched our heads and we said, wait a minute, there could be something to this. And so started this like, all right, let's see what other things there are out there that could turn into humans putting themselves in an experimental place with what an animal can do.

Safety Limits Allergies And EpiPens

SPEAKER_01 31:41

There has to be guidelines and safety precautions and everything. So can you walk through this? Because I mean, obviously, if you're gonna get bitten by a snake or stung by a scorpion or something weird like that, you have to know in advance like what the risks are and how to uh make sure that you're safe afterwards. First of all, I still think it's crazy, but uh I'm sure that in some way you know that I don't want to call it safe, but as safe as it could be for what it is, what are the different precautions you guys take?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Well, we do take a lot of precautions, right? So let's let's just really quick um sort of decipher the difference between being bitten by a venomous snake versus being stung by a bully, for example. Um venomous snakes and the components that are in the venom of an animal that is looking to subdue its prey to the magnitude that a venomous snake would be using its venom for, that's something we would never mess around with, right? Like I never intentionally get bit by a rattlesnake or a king cobra. Like that's a potential death sentence or a very expensive medical bill. What we do know about a lot of the things that I've intentionally been bitten and stung by is that while these venoms or poisons are particularly painful when subjected to you know human nerves and whatnot, unless my body has an allergic reaction, there is very little chance that I'm going to die. Now, when we started all this, in all fairness, I had no idea how my body was going to react. So people are always like, Coyote, does it become easier over time to get bitten and stung by things? And the answer to that, Travis, is surprisingly, yes, because I've been through so much pain at this point. Anything that doesn't like eclipse the highest level of pain, I'm just like, oh, cool, I'll take that in stride and go about my day. And it's strange just how much venom I've taken at this point and have, you know, knock on wood, seemingly be okay. But I must say, as a warning to anybody watching, you never know when your body's going to have an allergic reaction to the next thing. So to play that out uh uh with intelligence, we always have an epinephrine pen on location. So if I were to be stung by the next flying insect and all of a sudden my body's like, that's the one, time for you to go into anaphylactic shock. We've got an epi pen right there that will boost me up, get me to the hospital, and I should be fine. But I say that now, and at some point, somebody, if I do end up having something catastrophic happen, people are gonna be like, see, we told you eventually this was gonna happen. But 12 years so far, you know, we're just gonna keep going after it.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

It's possible that you also are a superhero and don't know it yet. I mean, through all these insects, maybe you can crawl up walls or something. I don't know. Have you tried?

SPEAKER_00 34:17

You know, I do, thankfully, I've always been a pretty healthy person, as in Steve-off infections. Don't get, you know, little flu bugs and stuff like that very often. And there is a group overseas that we've been working with recently that want to test my blood to see if there are any specific levels of like uh resistance or antigens or something in me that's making me this resilient to all these things. And for clarity, I don't think there's anything special about me whatsoever. But it would be interesting if they did do a test on my blood. It was like, as a matter of fact, you have this and this and this, and it's why for some reason you're immune to poison ivy or mosquito bites don't do anything crazy. I mean, mosquito bites are a great example because I've done a mosquito episode before. Next week, I'm literally filming an episode at the Ohio State University with their entomology department where my head is going into a box with 10,000 mosquitoes to just let them have a blood meal off of my face. Why? Entertainment and so that we can get the education out about what they're doing with mosquito research. Hopefully, people click on it.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

I also feel like doing that blood test might be interesting. Uh maybe even for like members only or something. I mean, like, I would watch that. Like, what is what's my blood like now?

YouTube Now Attention And Algorithms

SPEAKER_00 35:32

It's the biggest problem we're having, honestly, is how we ship blood overseas safely and go through that process. So it is being worked on by my team in the background. So who knows? Maybe it's something that will end up coming to fruition.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Um, YouTube now is way different than YouTube uh even over the last five years. Tell us, in your opinion, the differences of YouTube today versus five years ago, even.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

It's hard. I mean, it's as simple as that, man. Like it's changed so much. Every time that algorithm shifts, it affects the organism as a whole. And, you know, we've also been on the platform for a really long time. And you can look at the fact that we've got almost 22 million subscribers and you know, billions of views, and our content is evergreen and goes everywhere, but it is harder and harder and harder to get the audience to want to not only click on a video, let alone have an attention span to stay connected to it. And I am, again, extremely grateful for the work that we do and the opportunities that are presented to us, but it does become mind-maddening to work as hard as you do and then realize that an episode where you once were getting millions of views, now you're lucky to get hundreds of thousands of views. And is that because Brave Wilderness has been around for 12 years? Probably a little bit in part. Is it through to the fact that we've now got TikTok and we've got Instagram reels and we've got YouTube shorts, and people are like, next, next, next, next. Give me the action immediately, and we don't want to wait 10 minutes to get a resolve. Also, probably a thing. But there's also so many people, as in everybody, that's got one of these in their hand with a camera good enough to shoot that content, edit on their phone, and upload it. So the oversaturation of content that's out there is great from the creator perspective that it's allowing people the opportunity to get their talent and their opinion and their their love for something out there, but it is becoming a more and more difficult space for any content creator, no matter what the size of your channel, a thousand subscribers or 22 million subscribers, to find the right thumbnail and title and hook that gets somebody in watching, and then that that triggers that episode to funnel onto the freeway system of the algorithm, actually pushing it as good content.

2025 Strategy Less Gear More Immersion

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Yeah, and that's that's something I think we should talk about right here because um, you know, you have a lot of data to go by. You have tons of videos, over a thousand videos, uh, tons of um platforms you're on and everything. So you probably have seen a lot of the ebbs and flows. Tell us about what 2025 and early 2026 looks like compared to previous years and what your team is focusing on to push to the next level.

Starting Over With Evergreen Ideas

SPEAKER_00 38:19

Yeah, that's such a great question. You know, we we try to shift as as frequently as we can because, you know, I can sit here and tell you about going to school at the Ohio State University in the early 2000s and then having this background in in the entertainment industry and understanding how that works. But at the end of the day, right now on YouTube or really on any digital distribution feed, most audience members don't care if you shoot on a red camera or you shoot on an iPhone. So we've realized that while over the years we've spent insane amounts of money on keeping up to date with the highest quality gear. Right now, this year, the majority of the content that we are shooting is going to be shot on DJI action cams and pocket osmos because they're lightweight, the audio is fantastic, the quality is incredible, and it's very lightweight to carry and get into the field. And it gives you a vloggy approach. We feel the audience right now, and this is just our opinion, is that they want to feel even more immersed than they felt before with our content, to feel like they're actually there on the journey. And that means not having shots that are mathematically structured or that would you would have a cinematographer in Hollywood look at and be like, wow, you actually know your rule of thirds with framing and you know, depth of field and and all these things that are like you're thinking about this like a movie maker. We have to think about it as somebody who's just getting out of their car and being like, give me an experience. I want the action and I want it quick. So this year's approach for us is very much less is more. Make the gear less, make the episodes faster, try to pump more into an episode all at once, which again can be difficult because animals don't have a call sheet. So when you go into any environment, you gotta hope that you find stuff. So we we don't know. And that's the truth. No matter how big your channel is, I think unless you're a Mr. Beast or Mark Rober, you really don't know how a piece of content is going to perform. So you just have to keep trying and trying and trying and trying and reinventing the wheel uh year after year to see if the algorithm favors you.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

So now I'm gonna ask you a question I ask a lot of creators, and it's a thought exercise. So I want you to stream of consciousness answer. So, in other words, as you're thinking it, just say it out loud. Let's say you had to start a new channel today that had nothing to do with uh the the niche that you're in now. Um you don't have any of the uh you know money or or even necessarily the equipment you have now, but you do have the knowledge that you've gained over these last couple of years. What would your channel be about? And what would be like your first two or three videos?

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Oh, that's a great question. Um, wow, something that that is not animals, not outdoors, not adventure. Well, without necessarily picking the subject matter right out of the gate, I would first probably step back and say, okay, what are what are people most likely to click on these days that could keep some sort of a consistency that you can keep going? And and I'll I'll I'll stream a thought consciousness more in a second, but what we saw of animals very early on is that animals are infinite. There are so many animals on the planet, we are always going to have a subject matter. So for me, as something that I guess I would be interested in in parallel to the world of animals, honestly, would probably be the immersive state that video games are transcending into and how those create extreme watch time. Now, me personally, I'm not much of a video game player, but if you were to come to me and say, you've got no money, but what is something that you could do from the comfort of your own home, set up cameras around you, record what it is that you're doing, and also take somebody on a journey into a space where you would be able to capture their attention and hold that runtime, it's kind of been the staple since the start of YouTube, it being the video game realm. And as we're advancing in technology and immersive world video games like the Zelda Breath of the Wild, there's a new Jurassic Park game that's getting ready to come out that they've been hyping up for years. Getting somebody entrenched into that world. And if you're good at playing what that game is, that's going to keep the audience hooked. And whether you're just playing for the fun of showing them the adventure or you're playing and educating them with tips, almost like that old Nintendo call-in game line. Most people probably don't remember that either. I remember my neighbors had it back in the day. I didn't have Nintendo, but we used to call, be like, we can't get past level seven of Super Mario Brothers. What's the code for the up and down with the warp zones, you know? And like they would help you through that. Like, give people that may not be good at the game an education of what you know, and that just ups the value of the entertainment. So um I would probably go that route because what I can tell you about producing wildlife content is it is expensive. Anything that requires you to travel to a distant location puts you in airports, it puts you renting establishments for lodging, it comes with vehicles, it comes with hiring help on the ground to make sure that you're safe within countries. It means that budget goes and grows versus cool, I've got a world that I can bring you from the comfort of my own basement or man or or or lady uh cave or or your bedroom, whatever it might be, to give somebody that content that you can film and literally turn from the video game screen to the editing screen and be like, this to upload to rinse and repeat. That's how I think you could make it this day. But it's got to be what is the game and is it gonna be super entertaining? And how do you sustain the evergreen nature and longevity of it? That is one of the biggest keys for anybody watching or listening. Pick something that is evergreen because that. Makes your content relevant not only today, but a month from now or two years from now. You can go back in the Brave Wilderness Library and watch an American Badger episode that we did in 2014. And let me tell you what hasn't changed between now and 2014. Anything I could tell you about an American Badger, the animal's the same, the facts are the same. The only thing that changes is my beard is grayer, I probably have less hair on my head, and the cameras have changed. You know what I mean? Like that's it. Find something that will last for a long time.

Yard Work Rest And Goodbye

SPEAKER_01 44:30

That is such a great piece of advice. And it's something that I need to be better about emphasizing that uh I do talk about Evergreen being a great strategy, but you really uh put it into uh amazing words that people can take. So finally, I'll just ask you, what do you do for fun? Like, how do you just unwind? Or do you?

SPEAKER_00 44:51

See, that I love that question. Uh, I don't ever get asked that in interviews. People usually ask me if like they bump into me at like a restaurant or something. Like, what do you what do you do on the weekends? Uh I don't travel. Most people would be like, where do you go on vacation? I don't. I like to be at home because most of my job is traveling. And I've had so blessed to have as many incredible experiences as I've had, not only through production, but also appearances or talk shows or uh, you know, whatever, whatever it might be. That to me, because I love my job so much, is a vacation within work. But when it comes to my downtime, um, I honestly just work more, but I love to do yard work. Strangely, I love doing my own landscaping. Um, so I spend a lot of time at home in between travel so I can catch up on all the other stuff of day-to-day life for the most part, because it honestly helps me detach from the constant grinding cycle in my mind of like thinking of the next big idea that I that I want to work on. So, you know, mowing lawn, pulling weeds, uh, tweaking rocks and mulch kind of allows me to shut down the creative side and just be still outside, but at home doing something that I enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Be in the moment. I love that. Coyote, thank you so much for joining us. If you are new to this channel, of course, we do interviews like this all the time. You can hit that subscribe button. And if you like this one, of course, you hit the like button. Brave Wilderness is an incredible channel, almost 22 million subscribers, that really just goes there. And if you want to, if if listen, if you like Coyote, but you want to see him get bit or stung, that's the place to go. Uh, for whatever reason, he's going to continue to do that. And the Mosquito episode sounds terrible, but I have to watch it. There's no way I can't watch that episode. So make sure you hit subscribe over there as well. And if you want to see something just like this, we have another creator that's in this space. And I think the video should be right here. And we'll see y'all in the next one.