#678: Jake Muise — The Relentless Pursuit of Innovation, Quality, and Meaning

Brought to you by Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business; Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover https://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating; and AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement. Jake Muise (@mauinuivenison https://www.instagram.com/mauinuivenison/?hl=en) is CEO at Maui Nui Venison https://mauinuivenison.com, a company he co-founded in 2017 that works to balance invasive axis deer populations on the island of Maui, channeling that management into incredible nutrient-dense food. Maui Nui was selected for Fast Company’s “Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Agriculture of 2023,” and its venison has been served in restaurants across the country, including Alinea, The French Laundry, and Saison. Prior to Maui Nui, Jake was executive director of the Axis Deer Institute for 12 years, part of a two-decades-long project focused on axis deer and their long-term management in Hawai’i. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Shopify http://shopify.com/tim! Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required. Go to shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim to sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period. It’s a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today by visiting shopify.com/Tim http://shopify.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. * [06:05] Lava cowboys. [14:00] What does Maui Nui mean? [15:07] A Hawai’i history primer. [22:26] The problem with (and delicious solution to) axis deer in Hawai’i. [30:18] The three-year hunt that became the Maui Nui springboard. [43:54] The life-changing power of volleyball and free pizza. [52:18] Seven on, seven off. [57:01] Processes, metrics, and moon-fluence. [1:00:41] Surpassing USDA regulations — in the wild. [1:07:59] A typical night of harvesting. [1:15:09] The humble, hungry, and smart way to build a world-class team. [1:21:46] Feedback that separates the As and Bs from the Cs. [1:30:21] Assigned and recommended reading. [1:35:01] Nutrient density. [1:46:10] Clawback allowances. [1:49:20] Secret Pinterest boards. [1:52:59] The old lady on the couch game. [1:57:06] Tug of war. [1:59:57] Can the business sustainably scale up without selling out? [2:03:57] Jake’s billboard. [2:06:00] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual-zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees.

• 0:41Tim Ferriss?

  I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. So go to eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. That's eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada and the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  Again, that's eightsleep.com/tim to save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.

• 1:31Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas, products and so on to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations. and third-party apps from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots,

• 2:15Tim Ferriss?

  anything you can imagine. They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008 when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience

• 3:00Tim Ferriss?

  required. Access powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day-to-day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed. And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome, the Build a Business competition and other things. Plus, with 24/7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support, you have resources, you don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you, and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a $1 per month

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  trial period. It is a great deal for a great service, so I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting Shopify.com/Tim. One more time, Shopify.com/Tim, all lowercase.

• 3:58Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:21Tim Ferriss?

  Muse, Jake Muse. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview friends, foes, everyone in between. But the common thread is world-class performance. And the attempt is always to dig, to excavate, to deconstruct the lessons, thought, frameworks, and so on, that you can apply or test, or simply ponder in your own lives. My guest today is a friend, Jake Muse. Jake Muse is CEO at Maui Nui Venison, a company he co-founded in 2017 that works to balance invasive Axis deer populations

• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  on the island of Maui, channeling that management into incredible nutrient-dense food. Maui Nui was selected for Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Agriculture of 2023, and its venison has been served in top restaurants across the country, including Alinea, which featured very heavily in The 4-Hour Chef. It was a big section entirely because it's so impressive. The French Laundry, and Saigon, where I just mentioned I was one of the very first investors when it was a pop-up with 12 seats, something like that. Josh Skeens, everybody should check him out as well. Prior to Maui Nui, Jake was Executive Director of the Axis Deer Institute for 12 years, part of a two-decades-long project focused on Axis deer and their long-term management in Hawaii.

• 5:47Tim Ferriss?

  You can find them at Maui Nui, I'll spell that out for folks, M-A-U-I-N-U-I, venison.com, and you can find them on Instagram, Twitter, etc., @mauienuivenison. I'm shocked those handles were available.

• 6:04Tim Ferriss?

  And I think we will start where all good stories start, and that's with lava. Oh, wow. Fast-moving lava. I'm going to use that as the cue, and I'm going to let you run with it. But let's begin with that. Well, thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. It's great to see you. We're going to have a blast. Lava.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  So in 2018, a fissure started erupting on the east rift zone on the Big Island. And it was an area that was a lava zone previously, but had since been built over. So lots of homes. There was this beautiful area called Copo, which had amazing hot pools and tide pools. And while it's now gone, unfortunately. So anyway, fissure eight starts erupting. It splits into two and it basically cuts off a several thousand acre area, homes, people. And this lava flow is moving very quickly, 20 miles an hour. So then a 24 hour period is about three miles up the coast.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Like it's moving slower at the front, but like essentially cuts off this entire area. State and feds arrive way to way, they start helicoptering people and different people out. People, plants, pets, whatever the people are holding there. And then a cattle rancher had been cut off. And there were still 50 plus animals left between these two flows. And you can imagine, like it looked like Mordor on the ground, like their sulfur was terrible. There was lava bonds, the fissure was constantly spewing at about 100 to 200 feet. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's not a simmer.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  No, it was 20, I think they said it was 26,000 cubic meters of lava per minute. It was, it was absurd. It was like one of the fastest moving flows they'd ever seen. So anyway, Rancher did his best job to get the majority of his cows out. But there are 50 plus animals trapped between these two lava flows. And that's when you saw the bat signal in the sky. Well, kind of. And we had happened about a year ago to develop the first of its kind. Live capture net system that with a helicopter, you can essentially pick up cows live and get them out of there. So if you can imagine a cone shaped net with a 20 foot diameter frame on the bottom.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  And it's hanging from a. Hundred foot line below a helicopter. And so helicopter is moving and this net is kind of flowing back and forth and you place the net over the cow. And then there's a switch at the top of the cone. And there's two lines and then as the animal tries to move outside, you let the first switch goes at the top of the cone. And the net basically falls on top of it and you just pick up the frame. And it's essentially sitting in a big bag evenly distributed and then you fly it out. And you put this bag down and you put the frame over and it just stands up and walks away.

• 9:07Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So the frame is basically a rectangle or a square?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  It's an octagon. Yeah.

• 9:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, octagon. Okay, got it.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So federal PETA, everybody gets a hold of us and says like, we need to get these cows out of here.

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  That's because it was known at least to some subset of folks that you had this, you developed this.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:26Tim Ferriss?

  Live capture system.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  We were previously using it to try and get cows out of high elevation, critical watershed areas. Where they were causing extensive damage. So they get a hold of us, they run us through like what they want us to do. Of course, I had to like sit down with the team and say like, do you want to try and rescue cows over a 20 mile per hour lava flow? And I think one of the guys turned over and he's like, we would get to be a lava cowboy. And I was like, oh, man.

• 9:52Tim Ferriss?

  Like, come in.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Who's going to say no to that one? And ended up like doing our due diligence. It was pretty safe to do, but. Long story short, we got them all out, but the first couple of days were so intense. And we're driving out there in the morning. It literally looks like Mordor, like. The flow is creating its own weather system. It's raining, it's dark. It's a two mile flow. So it's like lighting up the entire area in like dark red. And you're driving towards it and you're thinking, oh, and you're passing all these national guards and you're just like, this doesn't. Seem like a great idea on your way out. And we get all loaded up in the morning. The head of PETA is there. It's this huge thing. There had been so much. Loss already. They had lost that entire community, hundreds of homes gone.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  And there'd been so much loss and it's, the community was kind of starting to gather around this idea of. These things that were left behind, we could actually get them. And. Get there in the morning, we get all set up, get dialed in with the pilot. He had actually never done it before, but it was the only helicopter big enough that we could pick up those particular cows. Name's Calvin Dorn, he's just an absolute legend. So we fly out first thing in the morning, like heading towards Fisera Eight. It's fountainning 200 feet in the air, like there's lava bombs like that look like they're going at the height of the helicopter. The cows are trapped like right underneath it. There's video this, we can- Put it in the show notes. Oh man, it's crazy. And he goes to pick up the first cow,

• 11:18Speaker 03

  grabs the first cow, does it all right, and then he goes to lift and he's like, "Oh, this might be too heavy. I have my sulfur dioxide, like I have my monitors on, like we're not supposed to get on the ground." And the net is attached to the helicopter and he's like, "What do we do?" And I was like, "Well, give it another tug, see if you can get it off the ground." So he gives another tug and he gets a little bit off the ground and I'm like, "Okay, can we head downhill and you can get some elevation?" He's like, "Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna use the heat from the lava flow to give us a boost." Ride the thermals. We're gonna ride the thermals up with this cow underneath us

• 12:00Speaker 03

  and it should give us a big enough boost, we'll have enough elevation and then like we'll be able to get down to the corral system. It's crazy enough that it just might work. And I'm thinking, I mean, you don't really, you don't really have a choice. You're like, "Sure, let's try that." So he gets this cow off the ground and he's moving at like a good speed and we're picking up a little bit of elevation and I can see like the lava flow coming at 500 yards, 400 yards, 300 yards. And we hit the flow and it's like somebody kicked us in the nuts. We just went straight up in the air. There was so much heat coming off the flow and I looked down to see what was happening to the cow because the cow is 100 feet lower than us and this cow swings out

• 12:40Speaker 03

  and then as it passes over the top of the flow, all we see is just smoke.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  And I thought like the head of PETA is sitting down.

• 12:51Tim Ferriss?

  Watching a cow get vaporized.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  I'm going to jail. Something terrible is going to happen to us. This thing is over. And we gain elevation and we start to come out over the flow and I'm looking down. I'm like, oh God. And I had forgotten that it was pouring rain.

• 13:04Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, right.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  And it was soaked and all of that water, it just instantly vaporized and it looked like the whole thing was essentially on fire for a second. So we come out and like, I see all of the water reaper clear and I'm like, oh, thank God. And come down, land that animal, gets out, walks away, happy as can be. And then I think we got like seven or eight more that day before they kind of shut us down and it got a little crazy. And, and we ended up getting all 50 animals out of that place and happened to be one of the most intense moments of my life. Certainly maybe not the most dangerous, but I thought we were in a lot of trouble for that one. But it was just such a viscerally intense scenario.

• 13:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  You have like these lava bombs going off in these two flows and it was a, but a really cool experience in that community. Like there was this celebration when everything for months had been just a lot of loss.

• 14:01Tim Ferriss?

  Let's set the stage a bit by talking about the history of Hawaii.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 14:07Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe we could start for a second, just with the name Maui Nui. What does Maui Nui mean? Because even people who live in lower 48 or continental US, many people have not been to Hawaii.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:20Tim Ferriss?

  And certainly people overseas, many of them will not have been to Hawaii. But what does Maui Nui refer to?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  So Maui Nui refers to the three islands of Maui, Molokai and Lanai. And epochs ago, they used to be joined. They used to be one giant island.

• 14:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's like the Pangaea of Hawaii.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  And you can see it when you look at topo maps or Google Earth, like you can see they used to be joined. So that's when we were deciding on a name, we didn't know where management might take us, but Axis D are located on those three islands. So we landed at Maui Nui as kind of the name.

• 14:54Tim Ferriss?

  And Nui is, is it fair to say a suffix that is used, or maybe it's just the order of kind of noun adjective, but big?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 15:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right? So you could say mahalo Nui.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:06Tim Ferriss?

  Like, thanks a lot.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:07Tim Ferriss?

  Also, for people, this may be a way to get into the history also.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:11Tim Ferriss?

  Because we were chatting a little bit about it. I've been spending more time in New Zealand and I'm fascinated by Maori culture.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 15:18Tim Ferriss?

  And there is a very close relationship.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:21Tim Ferriss?

  Between what we're talking about.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:22Tim Ferriss?

  And the culture in New Zealand. Could you speak to that a bit?

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 15:27Tim Ferriss?

  And then after that, and you can tie this in however you like, but speak to sort of the agriculture of pre-colonized Hawaii.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  So I'm going to speak to this as best I can.

• 15:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And actually, let's hit pause for a quick second, because I think it's worth mentioning upfront. So a company you co-founded in 2017, who was your co-founder?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  My extraordinary wife, Kuulani.

• 15:50Tim Ferriss?

  She's amazing.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:52Tim Ferriss?

  Can you say a little bit about Kuul for a second?

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 15:55Tim Ferriss?

  Kuulani.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  A, I mean, first and foremost, a mother of three amazing children, a brilliant person all around, funny, smart, beautiful, but she is a genealogist and a bit of a historian, and she helps, A, she guides a lot of culture within what we do, but she has a, such an in-depth understanding of our place. She'd be somebody amazing to have on if you ever wanted to really dig in, but she's just this anchor for me personally and professionally to how we should be operating in this place.

• 16:31Tim Ferriss?

  How long has her family been in Hawaii?

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Well, she'll tell you forever.

• 16:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And she also, if I'm remembering correctly, looks at old microfiche newspapers.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:43Tim Ferriss?

  And sort of excavates and translates.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  So, post-Western contact.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  When they didn't have a written language prior to, but post-Western contact, they became the most literate society in a matter of like 50 years. I think 93 to 94% of the entire population could read and write. And in doing so, they created hundreds and hundreds of newspapers. That like she shows me newspapers where like, there's a picture of like a drawn picture of a zebra. Like, oh, this thing is from Africa. Like, it was extraordinary, the level of information that they had. And I think they were also in understanding their place post-Western contact and how quickly their populations were declining. They were using it as this historical record. And so they were just writing everything down.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  And so what she helps to do is only 2% of those newspapers have been translated. 98% of what could be like their culture is sitting in these newspapers, ready to be discovered. And it's just like a treasure hunt for her every time she looks like, like she's, she comes out and it's just like, her eyes are giant. She's like, I found a new name for this rain. And she's just like, she, she's gonna write an amazing book one day.

• 17:56Tim Ferriss?

  Also, I mean, she's very much a multi hyphenate polymath because she's also an incredible designer.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:04Tim Ferriss?

  Really incredibly good and gifted. I hesitate to say gifted. She is gifted, but that maybe it sounds like it minimizes the hard work and dedication required to get good at it. And an incredible writer also on top of that. So I wanted to mention that because that underscores the connection that she has and that you as a family feel with the land. So I wanted to just mention that upfront. And then we can go back to the pre-colonial agriculture and the tie between New Zealand.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  So. I mean, I think you could define this culture as literal geniuses. They were able to navigate all of the Pacific Ocean with extraordinary accuracy. And directly speaking about Aotearoa. So Aotearoa was settled from Hawaii.

• 19:02Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who don't know the matching, so Aotearoa is the Maori word for what is also known as New Zealand.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. They kept such amazing records of their voyages. My brother in law got to spend a whole bunch of time there with Maori in different communities. They have the actual boats, the canoes that were settled from Hawaii. They know like the lineage of like who came on the boat and they know where the boats are. They have them hidden and they know where the boats are. And that's how strongly they can connect their ties back to Hawaii. And you just have to imagine that somebody that could navigate the Pacific with that much ease and accuracy. And it's extraordinary to hear these stories. They also were dealing with, they're on the most isolated landmass on the planet with the most finite resources.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  And so they developed, as far as I know, some of the most ingenious agricultural systems I've ever heard of. Great example, they're called the Kohala Field Systems. They had 500 miles of what looked like from the air, like swaled permaculture lines. And they used 273 different varieties of sweet potato. They are producing now yields 60% better than current sweet potato yields. And you have to imagine pre-Western contact, there were up to a million people in the Hawaiian Islands. And there's only 1.4 million people now. So they had a million people on the most isolated landmass on the planet.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  And they were feeding like an extraordinary population with extremely finite resources. And somehow were able to maintain all of the biodiversity that.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  I think they only know of like a couple of small species, like a flightless bird that was just too easy to eat. Like, they maintained extraordinary biodiversity, which just really points to how connected to that place where they had these amazing, they call them loko ea, but they were fish ponds. So I don't know if you remember when you were there, but there's these huge rock walls that come out into the ocean near shore. Some of them, like 600 acres. And they had these amazing aquaculture systems where they were able to harvest fish constantly. And they said at peak performance, there were 500 plus fish ponds across the Hawaiian Islands, producing 3 million pounds of fish. And that's like,

• 21:33Speaker 03

  apart from what they were also catching outside of those ponds as well. Innovation is culture in that place. And she continues to like, help point me back to like, I don't know, like, we're gonna figure this out. We're a part of this place. Like, we're gonna figure out how to find balance in these places. Yeah, they just had some amazing, both agriculture system, but also like economics and social systems. They had a particular system called an ahupua system. And it was mountain to ocean land segregations that entire communities lived in and managed. And they were managed as like these individual land segments. And the entire system was built from top to bottom to protect water. Every feature of that system,

• 22:18Speaker 03

  how the food was grown, how like it entered the water, everything was built to maintain good, clean water.

• 22:26Tim Ferriss?

  So let's segue from that to Axis deer. What on earth are Axis deer? Number one, what is the history of their presence in Hawaii? Why did they, why did they end up there? And then I have follow up questions that relate to water.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in 1868, the then Kamemera the fifth was given this gift.

• 23:01Tim Ferriss?

  Who was the leader at the time?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  The then ruler of the Hawaiian Islands, yeah. Came from India, down the upper Ganges to Hong Kong. She helped translate like the story, my wife did. And then they were moved from Oahu where they landed and they were moved to the small island of Molokai, only forty miles long, ten miles wide. And then a kapu, which is a restriction, was placed on them for about fifteen to twenty years.

• 23:27Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 23:28Speaker 03

  A kapu is like, nobody was allowed to hunt them or touch them.

• 23:30Tim Ferriss?

  And how many deer?

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Seven.

• 23:32Tim Ferriss?

  Seven?

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And as early as eighteen ninety-eight, there's literature that says they hired sharpshooters from California. Well, that was nineteen oh two. They brought sharpshooters in from California because there was already six to seven thousand of them. And what's really unique about Axis deer is they're one of the only deer species in the world that can breed year round. So most other deer species will cast their antlers, their antlers fall off during the year. And when that happens, their testosterone levels drop significantly and their sperm is no longer viable. So Axis deer are one of the only deer species in the world that sperm stays viable year round. So it doesn't matter if a doe is missed in estrus.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  The current math that we have is they are ninety-four to ninety-five percent of them are either lactating or pregnant year round. So they just introduced an extraordinarily virile species and have had profound impacts with that type of growth rate.

• 24:30Tim Ferriss?

  So if we then flash forward to roughly ten years ago, or twelve years ago, what did the situation look like in Hawaii with respect to Axis deer, which have no natural predators?

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 24:45Tim Ferriss?

  On that landmass?

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, on Molokai.

• 24:48Tim Ferriss?

  In India, they certainly did.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  So no natural predators, the capability to breed year round, extraordinary, like food sources and being able to move up and down elevation to find what they need. So on the island of Molokai where they were introduced, they're now at a, sustainable capacity is the wrong word, but their population is only going up and down with available feed every year. And what's happening is they just have massive die-offs.

• 25:13Tim Ferriss?

  And what do the numbers look like?

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Seventy thousand and there's only seven thousand people. It's actually one of the reasons I got so interested in the subject as a whole is I think it was my second. Year in college and introduced this amazing family and I was there hunting, trying to fill up my freezer for college because I was broke and I was there during a die off. And I remember coming around this corner and seeing forty to fifty animals just like lying there lethargic, essentially dying of malnutrition. And there was an animal that was introduced to me as like something to love and it was precious. Like for the people of Molokha, it was this amazing food source, but it's just this, that's the only way they're currently balancing populations is just this really sad thing that happens every

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Overpopulation, famine, and then it corrects.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then it corrects. They lose about like a third of the population every seven to 10 years.

• 26:07Tim Ferriss?

  And what is the impact on the various islands ecologically? Because I remember watching the first time this video that you guys produced in collaboration with a number of other folks and hearing voiceover, I think it was, with people talking about flying over certain areas and saying, oh, wow, we didn't know the wildfire reached this far. And the answer was, that's not wildfire.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, they are able to, because they can eat so closely to the ground and in such large numbers, there can be herds of like four to 5,000, they're able to denude landscapes in days. And the real issue with that is when they do that in our watershed areas, our high elevation areas, those trees developed over epochs, thousands and thousands of years to capture water. And what ends up happening is when we have like some data from this from a recent study, those watersheds are operating at 50% of their previous capacity.

• 27:13Tim Ferriss?

  I guess there are multiple issues, consequences of that, right? One is you're just not capturing water, which is important if you're in the middle of the ocean, unless you have a massive desalination program, you need the rainwater.

• 27:26Tim Ferriss?

  What is the effect that has on runoff?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  So when you think about it from like a, they call it Maokuta Makai, but like mountain to ocean impact, all of that denuded landscape is anytime we get any type of like significant rain, even like a decent, like a medium rain these days, it's pulling all of that topsoil, which took thousands of years to make, and then it's depositing it on our reefs. And what ends up happening is they're smothering both like new and old coral and the coral die. So there's huge tracts of what used to be some of the most pristine reefs in the world that are now dead. And that also then impacts nearshore fisheries. So we just had this amazing conversation about producing millions of pounds of fish

• 28:11Speaker 03

  pre-guesting contact. And now a lot of those reef systems are being like very negatively impacted by that sediment deposit from runoff. And then when you look back up slope, mid-range, call it like a thousand to 6,000 feet is where our food systems in Hawaii are. So it's where cattle ranchers operate and farmers and coffee and all of these different, really important as a function of food security, like all these amazing foods that we're trying to grow there. And you can't grow them unless you have a 10 foot fence at $45 a foot. And even then like

• 28:44Tim Ferriss?

  $45 a foot?

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:46Tim Ferriss?

  That's not cheap.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  No. So it's also having a severe impact on our food system. So ecosystems, food systems, nearshore fisheries and reefs is a compounding conversation.

• 28:59Tim Ferriss?

  To then take a look at how seriously people in Hawaii are taking this, let's talk about the three-year hunt. And we'll build from there.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:14Tim Ferriss?

  And actually, I'll just add one sidebar. I'll put this in the show notes as well. For people who are interested in learning more about the navigate, the incredible navigational skills that you're referring to, there's a really beautifully written detailed chapter in a book called The Wayfinders by Wade Davis that talks about the sort of Polynesian diaspora.

• 29:36Tim Ferriss?

  And their ability to navigate and it is mind blowing. It's a real mistake to think of some of these ancient technologies as primitive. They're not always primitive. They're just different sets of skills and technologies, but they would have the captain as one person, the head of the ship, just making everything orchestrate. The navigator would be a separate person and they would basically sit like a Zen monk and not sleep at all because they're tracking multiple currents. They're keeping track of where the boat is in space, even when it's totally overcast and they can't use the stars. I mean, it's unbelievable. So I recommend people check out The Wayfinders by Wade Davis, Three Year Hunt.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  So the Axis Deer Institute, which was what I started in college initially as a means to collect information because nobody in India would answer me and then became like very much a way to learn more and facilitate some research. Four Axis deer were illegally introduced to the Big Island of Hawaii. So we've talked about Molokai, Lanai and Maui. So four Axis deer were illegally introduced to the Big Island of Hawaii, which was about 10 years ago. And the Big Island is, it's called the Big Island for a reason. All of the Hawaiian islands can fit inside the Big Island. And it is also like the food hub of Hawaii. We grow all of our, like the vast majority of deer food on the Big Island.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  And the impacts of Axis deer were already really well known. So it was a state emergency when these animals were found. And the Axis Deer Institute happened to be one of the few people that knew a lot about Axis deer. So we were given that responsibility and contract to try and find and remove four deer from a hundred square mile area. So they didn't know where they were.

• 31:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and these aren't elephants.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 31:29Tim Ferriss?

  What's the size profile, just so people can conjure an image?

• 31:32Speaker 03

  150 pounds. Think about them standing three and a half, four feet high, maybe six feet long.

• 31:39Tim Ferriss?

  What are the biggest differences for people who might be more familiar with, say, whitetail?

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Hmm, well, the biggest difference is where they evolved. Axis deer evolved with Bengal tigers and leopards in dense jungle. They have this crazy sixth sense.

• 31:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, their agility is unbelievable.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:57Tim Ferriss?

  And they're just vigilance and.

• 32:01Tim Ferriss?

  Sensory perception is incredible to observe.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And they, I think because they didn't deal with some of the evolutionary stresses of like seasons in India, they've also developed this amazing ability to adapt their home ranges to very safe areas. On a typical home range could be like a mile and a half to three miles in a given day. And, but when they find a safe spot, like they will stay in a very small area for an extended period of time.

• 32:29Tim Ferriss?

  I see. So they move less than say a whitetail, is what you're saying?

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:32Tim Ferriss?

  And therefore they're better able to denude.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:36Tim Ferriss?

  A concentrated area.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  So they'll find these little cubby holes, these safe areas, and they'll kind of completely denude these areas and they move on to these next places. But for the project on the big island, which was literally a three-year hunt, we worked every single day except Sunday for three years to find these four animals.

• 32:53Tim Ferriss?

  Did they multiply in the meantime or no?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we ended up removing five, but it was this extraordinary exercise. It took us seven months. Like think, you go on like an average hunt, like it's three or four days and you're already tired. It took us seven months to get a camera trap image of the first one. We had 50 plus camera traps out over every piece of water we could find in this like hundred square mile area. We hiked every day.

• 33:21Tim Ferriss?

  Piece of water, you mean ponds or lakes?

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Ponds, blue rock that water would pool in, anything we could find, water troughs.

• 33:28Tim Ferriss?

  Any water sources.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  So we finally get a camera trap image. So we're like, okay, we have an idea of what this animal is. It takes us another four months to get the first one.

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do between, so you set up the cameras, you're like, we know these animals need water.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:43Tim Ferriss?

  And set up the traps and take seven months? So you get an image?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God, we got our first image. And then it takes another, how long?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Three months.

• 33:56Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, what are you doing in those three months?

• 33:59Speaker 03

  So, two things are happening. One, we're doing ground transects looking for sign. So you would love this. You're tracking every single day. You're just looking for the tiniest sign that they're in an area.

• 34:12Tim Ferriss?

  You used an expression transect something or other?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Transects.

• 34:16Tim Ferriss?

  So you're breaking into grids, you know, what you've covered, not covered.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  You're gridding at, we think we're doing 10 meters, like massive areas. But what we also did in the process, which we'll move into like our later story is, we had to find a way to increase detection rates. And so we started and we, it was such a huge emergency that the military was involved as well. So we got to work with the military and utilize some of their forward looking infrared, both helicopter mounted and binoculars. And the minute we started using that tool, we knew instantly like, this is the tool that's going to be able to like find these animals.

• 34:49Tim Ferriss?

  So forward looking infrared, FLIR?

• 34:52Speaker 03

  FLIR, yeah.

• 34:53Tim Ferriss?

  FLIR is, can we think of this as sort of black and white predator vision? That's from the Schwarzenegger movie?

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Okay, exactly. You put the mud on you, like it's detecting heat and turning it into a visual image for you to use. And if you're cool and or like not emitting heat, can't find you.

• 35:12Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs

• 35:55Tim Ferriss?

  with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 36:16Tim Ferriss?

  I posted a video you sent me of FLIR footage from a drone.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:20Tim Ferriss?

  If you want to see the scope, the magnitude of the problem in terms of just the volume of animals with respect to access deer, you have to see this video. It'll blow your mind. I put it on Instagram. We'll link to that in the show notes as well.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we ran out of range.

• 36:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. It's not like they stopped.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:40Tim Ferriss?

  But it looks like a veritable New York City of access deer.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:44Tim Ferriss?

  At night.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:45Tim Ferriss?

  Unbelievable.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  So this particular technology, which significantly increases detection rates, both from the ground, but from a helicopter platform as well, especially when looking straight down, you don't have the vertical layering of vegetation. You're able to kind of look straight down through vegetation and pick up different heat signatures. That's actually how we ended up finding them after the camera trap image. Is we started flying on a constant basis and then we figured out where they were. Took a week to kind of put a plan together and then we were able to remove.

• 37:15Tim Ferriss?

  When was this? What year was this?

• 37:17Speaker 03

  11 years ago.

• 37:18Tim Ferriss?

  11 years ago.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:19Tim Ferriss?

  So you would have been using, were you using quadcopters or a different type of drone?

• 37:23Speaker 03

  No, we were flying out of a helicopter.

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna say, this would have been very early days with any type of drone technology.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we were out of a helicopter, leaning out of the helicopter with a binocular. Yeah, it was not a lot of fun. And we were doing it four or five hours a day.

• 37:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  And.

• 37:39Tim Ferriss?

  That won't make you motion sick or anything?

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yeah, well, I've got lots of those stories.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Anyway, takes us another two years essentially, but utilizing that technology, we're able to find and remove all of those deer, including the two that had been born. And there are very few invasive species projects that are successful in Hawaii, period. Really cool fact, introduction of species to Hawaii pre-human contact was every 25 to 50,000 years. It was whatever came through like wind or water, right? There is a new species being introduced every eight days at this point.

• 38:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the perfect place to grow anything.

• 38:25Tim Ferriss?

  So side note, and this might be a total useless side alley that I'm taking us down. Why are there so many? Chickens in

• 38:34Speaker 03

  Oh, I love this story. Okay, here we go.

• 38:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  They bring in mongoose. The powers that be decided, we're going to get rid of the rat population by bringing in mongoose, one of their predators. Well, they didn't realize that mongoose are awake during the day and rats are awake at night.

• 38:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oops.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Oops, like giant oops. So

• 39:00Tim Ferriss?

  And guess what? Mongoose are really good at killing other things.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  So like including our native birds, which is just like the introduction of some of these species are so absurd. Anyway, so on the big island, Maui, Molokai, they have mongoose and there's no chickens. Guess which island doesn't have mongoose? Kauai.

• 39:19Tim Ferriss?

  Why don't they have mongoose?

• 39:21Speaker 03

  They came to the dock, like they're introducing them to each island. They came to the dock and somebody at the dock was smart enough and he like booted them off and drowneded them. He like booted them off the dock and drowned them. And it's just this amazing like contrast of you can't find a chicken on another island on the side of the road and you can drive on Kauai and see a thousand chickens in

• 39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  30 minutes on the side of the road.

• 39:46Tim Ferriss?

  So wow. I mean, these highly biodiverse, isolated environments are so beautiful and compelling and also so fragile to disruption. True with New Zealand as well.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:57Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, in terms of biosecurity, it is the highest, one of the highest priorities.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  And they do an amazing job. Hawaii is doing better, but they've done a very poor job over the years in restricting what's coming into the island. So back to that three year hunt. So successful in removing an invasive species that there could have been a million plus axis deer on the big island. That's how large the big island is and would have been absolutely devastating as we've talked about for like food systems, watersheds, near shore fisheries, et cetera, et cetera. And then that was actually the Jumping off point for what is now Maui Nui is some ranchers on Maui said, well, wait a second. You guys actually did that?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  And you have this technology. So what we also developed with that third technology is highly accurate surveys. So through within 95%, we can tell you exactly the number of deer that are there.

• 40:54Tim Ferriss?

  How do you do that?

• 40:55Speaker 03

  So transects again at 400 meters.

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  And then you take a sample.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:00Tim Ferriss?

  So you don't do a sample count. A lot of people do that, right? And then they multiply it out.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they do something called distance sampling, which is they fly a certain number of transects and then use math to basically extend what they've found and make a guess over a period. We do a complete transect of the entire area at 400 meters with a 20% overlap. So we can have a confidence interval of like the number of times we've detected deer twice. And we have done several projects where it's in a large fenced area of a couple thousand acres. And we survey, we remove deer, we survey again, and we're never off by more than like 5%. So we have a tool that can accurately tell us the exact number of deer and the impact of our management.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  And it's a tool, it's just super important because otherwise I think what we do is there would be irresponsible without that level of data.

• 41:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, without that.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:52Tim Ferriss?

  Level of precision.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  The folks on Maui said like, if you can do that, come over here. And they were still calling them spotted rats. Like that was their relationship. They had been introduced to Maui in 1959 and 1960. So they weren't as culturally ingrained as they are on Molokan.

• 42:08Tim Ferriss?

  And just to paint a picture for folks, so the spotted, the Axis deer, please fact check the shit out of this if I get anything wrong. But they're very streamlined animals. They're not as beefy as whitetail. Their antlers are angled more backwards and they have, I'd say, just generally speaking, a very tawny kind of burnt orange color with white spots.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:32Tim Ferriss?

  And that's hence the spotted rats.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that like dappled coloring was used in the like those jungled environments. And it just, they camouflage between there and grassland. Like it's amazing.

• 42:45Tim Ferriss?

  Japanese deer have the same similar pattern.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So it started the, well, wait a second. If you can be successful with a project at that scale, what can you do over here on Maui? And that was actually the first phone call to the USDA to say, how do we use these animals? Because they were talking about having us remove thousands and thousands of animals and they didn't care what we did with them. They knew there wasn't a solution. Like we couldn't use them for food and we couldn't donate them. Like they still needed to come under on some type of like food safety inspection program in order to donate them to food banks and stuff. So that was the first call to the USDA to say, well, wait a second. What would be the process? Because there were no rules in place.

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it was just considered off the table.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:36Tim Ferriss?

  So there are rules that just never been applied.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:38Tim Ferriss?

  To this type of harvesting.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that three year hunt was the springboard into successful project completion in that place where there's still no deer and potentially have had a massive impact. And then the springboard to Maui to try and do something more.

• 43:55Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to do a little like like flashback, Austin Powers style or Wayne's World, maybe. Get my Mike Myers stuff mixed up. Did you learn about confidence intervals playing volleyball?

• 44:07Speaker 03

  I think, actually, no, it was in the worst class of my life with those business statistics in college.

• 44:14Tim Ferriss?

  But ended up being useful.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't, you can't imagine how much of that stuff actually comes back.

• 44:19Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So of course I'm teasing a bit by bringing up the volleyball. Just briefly, so people have a little bit more color.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 44:27Tim Ferriss?

  Where does volleyball fit into your life? And where does free pizza fit into your life?

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Okay. Was a classic Canadian kid, played a lot of hockey until we were too broke to play hockey anymore.

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, too broke to play hockey, just too much gear?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, too much gear, growing too fast, like.

• 44:40Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, ah, right, I forgot about that, right. It would be like replacing your ski equipment every year or two.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Sitting down and being like, I know you love it, but you need to pick a different sport. And they're like, volleyball requires kneepads, that's all you need.

• 44:51Tim Ferriss?

  Your knees shouldn't grow as much.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Here's a great sport for you to try.

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Ended up falling in love with it, just an extraordinary sport, redirecting balls, moving 100 plus miles an hour. Luckily got pretty good at it, spent a lot of time with our Canadian national teams in different forms. And then was recruited to play at the University of Hawaii. I was a decent enough player, I actually think it was, I sent them a video of surfing. We started surfing on the east coast of Canada when we moved out there and there's like six feet of snow and a tiny little like ice floating around and they're like, well, if this kid can do this, like, he'll probably turn into a good player. Played four or five years there where became a family member for that family on Molokot you were, we talked about earlier, like was able to travel because the east coast of Canada was so far. Really lucky to play professional volleyball for three years.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Got to play in throughout Europe, the Maldives, Indonesia.

• 45:43Tim Ferriss?

  So pause, can you frame for folks who don't have the context, a lot of people won't? How popular is volleyball? It's not something that people in the US generally watch at all.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, in Canada, there was nobody. It was my mom and dad cheering us on. But Hawaii happened to be, it's the Mecca of volleyball.

• 46:04Tim Ferriss?

  Worldwide or just in the US?

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Oh, just in the US. They actually won the last two national championships over the last couple of years. But they have a 20,000 seat stadium that they filled on a regular basis for men's volleyball.

• 46:18Tim Ferriss?

  And then you go overseas to Europe, do people watch volleyball in Europe?

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's huge. So volleyball is kind of the second sport to football or soccer. So you were associated with another club. And you just got basically spillover of all the soccer fans or football fans. But a huge professional league there that for great players pays extraordinarily well. And for me, which was not a great player, was this amazing opportunity to go to Europe, see all of these different places and the professional teams only ever accepted two international players. So you were embedded and immediately assimilated into whatever culture you were in. It's just such an amazing way to be a part of those places versus some outsider, right? So that leads into the story of free pizza.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  So my first week playing in Groningen, which was in northern Holland. Kuzendt. Yeah, yeah. Well, that plays into this story.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  I was, I had had like a week of practice and our first game was coming up and I was still very much like getting used to the language. The coach was this like six, eight Olympic legend. He was like this legendary Dutch player. And I think he was kind of happy I was there, but like I was, I was just another player and you're paid to be there. So you play really well. He's trying to mime with you to get things done, right? He's not giving it a lot of effort.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  And then we're playing one of the best teams in the league for the very first game. We're doing really well. He puts a play together to finish the game. I had no idea what he was saying.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Okay. What could go wrong? Completely screw it up, like embarrassing level screw up. And we lose. And after the game, he comes aside and broken English and he's just like, you play better or we fire you. Like you weren't playing for fun anymore in college. Like you were getting paid to play really well. And I didn't understand the reason I didn't play well is because I didn't, couldn't understand what he was saying. So the very next day we were reviewing film and he was going off again and I didn't understand what it was. And I just remember putting my, like putting my hand up and say like, does that mean we get free pizza after the game? And he's like, what? And I was like, does that mean we get free pizza after the game? He's like, no, that's not what it means.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  And then like, you could kind of see his brain be like, and he explained like, no, we're going to be committing on this individual. Like he explained it in English to me. Half an hour goes by, he's like getting ready to tell us the bus schedule. It's all in Dutch. I have no idea what's going on. And I'm like, put my hand up and it's like, does that mean we get free pizza?

• 48:55Speaker 03

  He's just like, he's getting irritated and then he, I think it finally clicked and he was like, wait a second, we need to be a little bit more patient with this guy. And, and I tell it as a funny story because it's, I used that phrase as I went to Indonesia and the Maldives and it was this amazing way for me to ask dumb questions. Because otherwise I was lost and it has translated to like one of, and I know you've talked about this in the past, it's translated to one of these small superpowers that I have, where I am never afraid now to ask the dumbest question in front of some of the smartest people through kind of that practice. And it really is, it's a superpower.

• 49:41Tim Ferriss?

  I want to highlight this because it's really important. I have another friend, Mike Maples Jr., and oftentimes when he wants to ask a question that no one else is going to ask, but it's an important question, but people are nervous to ask it for any number of reasons. And he'll go something along these lines. He's from Texas and he'll be like, you know, I'm just a country boy. I move a little slow, but so bear with me, but let me ask you. And he's actually razor sharp, right? But he has that as a way to sort of wrap a question that needs to be asked in the same way that you were able to buy yourself permission to ask these questions, which by the way, a lot of the dumb questions are on everyone else's mind,

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  not in this particular case with everyone else who speaks Dutch. But there's so many circumstances where there's some type of pink elephant question, but people are nervous to ask it because they don't want to look stupid or A, B, C, D, or E. But in fact, it's a really important question.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. When I was playing Indonesia, we had a Brazilian guy that spoke even less English than me. And he, after my third day of asking for free pizza, he came up to me and he was like, thank you so much. Like, I wouldn't know what's going on unless you were like asking these questions. And now it just translates to like, last week, we're building an API, which I have no idea what the hell this thing. And like, I just kept saying like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And I kind of had a clue, but I could see like the blank looks on the Zoom calls. Nobody knew what they were talking about. And it just gets stuff done so much faster. Yeah. And it's just been this like amazing thing in my life that has worked really, really well.

• 51:19Tim Ferriss?

  Just to put a bow on the the chapter of volleyball. So you mentioned that you were not like the Ronaldo volleyball.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:28Tim Ferriss?

  But you ended up kind of taking an oblique angle and extending your career related to volleyball. How did you do that?

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Ended up starting a or helping other players find contracts. So I had a couple of players that that I knew that said like, you're not that good. How did you get a contract? Just being honest here, like, you're not that good. How did you get a contract in Europe? And I said, well, I just called everybody till they kept answering and was kind of working with this other player agency. Anyway, found a great way to find mediocre players, teams, and some of them were only getting a thousand euros a month, but they didn't care. It was the best thing ever and then got a small percentage of that salary. And yeah, it was an amazing way to kind of extend that life and it was a lot of fun.

• 52:18Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so let's come back to Maui Newey and there are a whole different number of angles that I want to take to cover some of what I think are interesting features of things. And a lot of them tie into why Maui Newey became my first ever. Really, if you look at my portfolio, food investment in 2000. When was it 2019? So it was a while ago. Part of it was, I think there's a myopia perhaps with many people who specialize in some form of early stage investing.

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just say tech to associate innovation purely with technological advances in a certain medium or in a certain capacity. But I saw a lot that you guys were doing that reflected a level of experimentation and sort of unorthodox thinking that was super attractive to me, that made me think it would be in combination with other things like nutrient density, which we'll talk about attractive and also everything is fucking delicious and I like delicious, healthy things. Let's talk about the seven on, seven off. Because this will sound at first description to be a little odd for a lot of folks.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Sure. So we have a very. Unique schedule for our team members and all of our team members work seven days on, seven days off and they get a great compensation package, great benefits. And it was originally designed to deal with flipping back and forth from the sleep schedule. All our harvesting operates at night. We wanted to give our harvesters enough space to essentially like recover and feel good and be able to come back to work. And when we started to grow, we decided to keep that system for essentially almost all of our field and butcher staff, like the vast majority of who we are. And it's turned into this extraordinary

• 54:24Speaker 03

  benefit that we didn't see kind of coming. And we did a little experiment last year because we wanted to make sure we're living in Hawaii is extraordinarily expensive and we wanted to be as responsible as possible. So we have two full teams. Everybody that works seven days on and another team comes in, we essentially work nonstop. We have two teams switching back and forth. So we offered them unlimited overtime. Can you guess what happened?

• 54:47Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Nobody took it.

• 54:49Tim Ferriss?

  So explain for a second what that would actually mean. What is unlimited overtime?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we said, on your seven days off, you can come in and work every single one of those days you weren't at time and a half, like at an overtime rate.

• 55:01Tim Ferriss?

  And no one did it?

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Nobody did. And it's just this amazing.

• 55:06Tim Ferriss?

  What do you make of that?

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Time.

• 55:08Tim Ferriss?

  They were just happy with.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  A, there's nothing more important than time. B, lots of them, it's been this really interesting and amazing thing to watch them. Seven days is a long time. Like when we hire somebody, almost inevitably their first week off, they call me and they're like, what am I supposed to do? Like it's day four and they're like, I haven't had a seven day vacation in three years. Like, what am I supposed to do? I'm like, well, get used to it.

• 55:34Tim Ferriss?

  Find some hobbies.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's been amazing to watch them like become a better community member or start a food truck or start their own company. And they come back, like, we essentially have 100% retention of the people we want. And they come back on the start of their seven days and they are the most extraordinary person coming back to us. And then they work amazingly well for seven days, like that age old adage of like. One person is better than two average is 100% true. And we have data to support that in how we look at production and stuff now. And so the other thing that I think is really important for the people we hire, which are hyper local people, we're looking for like people of those places,

• 56:19Speaker 03

  is you're giving them an opportunity to leverage that place and enjoy it. So half of them will just fish for six days or like go hunting or enjoy surfing or something else. And it's just this amazing schedule that really allows them to enjoy the place that they are from and live in. But more importantly, we have an extraordinary group of people. And it just had to roll over the hill a little bit in that combined with other things. Like I've through COVID, when nobody could hire anybody, we had stacks and stacks and stacks of resumes on my desk. It's just has turned into this amazing work environment. And we've had no lack of essentially efficiency or production.

• 57:01Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about some of the processes and metrics that inform that output and efficiency.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 57:11Tim Ferriss?

  Because it doesn't happen by accident.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 57:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I've visited your operation a few times now. And I've always been, this won't surprise anyone who's followed me for a while. I'm always impressed with very finely tuned tracking. So could you speak to some of the metrics that you track? And why they're important?

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 57:37Tim Ferriss?

  And then we'll segue from that into let's have you describe what a shift actually looks like.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 57:45Tim Ferriss?

  When you're going out at night and you can feel free to switch back and forth or do one first and then the other afterwards.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  So the harvest side of what we do, which is really the unique aspect of what we've built is these field harvesting systems that comply fully with USDA standards, i.e. everything that operates in a brick and mortar, we're able to do in the field through a combination of forward looking infrared and these different like software systems that we've built. And we were only able to create those systems and levels of efficiency with what you're pointing to is an absurd amount of data that we keep. So we keep track of. Every mile, every bullet, every time we stop, the moon phases, how the moon flays influences deer.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  We call it like moonfluence and we have these giant KPIs and sheets that basically

• 58:38Tim Ferriss?

  Key performance indicators.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  That dictate where we go, what we do, and then who we put in different places. Actually, I haven't, I don't think I've told you this, but we just submitted a grant to NASA. Harvard and MIT, these PhDs at Harvard and MIT, found out about what we did. Found out we keep an absurd amount of data compared to most agricultural companies. And NASA has a grant available for ag companies where they'll fly this amazing satellite. Comes over Hawaii at 10:14. We just finished putting this giant grant together, crossing my fingers. And it's so detailed that these amazing people at MIT and Harvard believe they'll be able to detect deer with the satellite. And then use the information and data we collect every single night on when we're seeing them and how and how we're interacting with them.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  To incorporate with a machine learning to create route planning for us. So they think a combination of satellite data and the ground data that we keep combined will be able to tell us on the next day where to go. I was freaking out when they're explaining all of this and lots of dumb questions that went along with it. Yeah, but they were shocked at the amount of data we keep. And they even got to see like, we've run lots of different experiments of how we collect data. And I think maybe what you're pointing to is just this constant iteration of we're going to try this thing. We're going to keep data and if you don't measure, I think there's that great saying, measure what matters.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  If you don't measure it, you won't know if it's actually worked and we are just constantly changing and measuring things. And so we've actually taken that philosophy into our butcher facility, which is a very well-known industry with well-known inputs and production efficiencies. And we're crushing those numbers and we're just doing it through constant iteration. Doesn't matter if like the angle of a table or this machine or like the different knife that we use. We are constantly iterating and constantly collecting data to see like, are we producing a better product faster with more quality?

• 1:00:41Tim Ferriss?

  So let me come back to the USDA.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Or maybe not directly USDA, but comparables. And then we'll go from there to.

• 1:00:53Tim Ferriss?

  A sample night, like what the run of show looks like and the process. And the reason I want to talk about these two things is that in the field, things are harder to control than you would find in a facility, where you're using, say, cattle shoots and so on. What does your, and people are not going to like some of these words, so apologies to those people, but it's, I think it's fascinating and important to cover these things. What does your, say, kill efficiency or measurements of humane kill look like compared to sort of a conventional facility?

• 1:01:35Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason I want to talk about this, there are quite a few, but one is that I know that a decent portion of your customer base is vegans or vegetarians who make a sole allowance for Mamiety venison, which is maybe a sort of a head scratcher for a lot of people. So let's talk about sort of your field efficiency compared to what most people are indirectly experiencing when they buy something just wrapped in styrofoam

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Tim Ferriss?

  at their local grocery store.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Sure. Part of the systems we had to build were, we had to follow the Federal Meat Inspection Act, which the USDA is present to make sure that animal is supposed to be harvested humanely. Ultimately, after that animal is processed, make sure it's safe to eat. That's their two primary functions. And in a, and I know this is hard for people to hear, but if you eat meat, like it's what it is, in a typical brick and mortar facility, that animal is coming in on a trailer, moving through a chute system, going into a press most often. So that animal is completely stationary and then it's, the language is called rendered, but it's then essentially shot in the head.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  So we had to follow those exact same rules in the field and with no control of the animal.

• 1:03:02Tim Ferriss?

  The rules meaning humane, safe to eat.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:05Tim Ferriss?

  But not following that process.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  But not following that process, yeah. So we never pen, bait, we don't interact with these animals at all prior to that rendering or harvesting process. They are entirely wild. And what we developed was a Particular shooting system that allows and or standardize our shooters to miss on purpose 30% of the time. And that sounds weird, but what it is, is we are essentially making sure every shot that we hit that animal is perfect and there's never any outside injuries. And to do that, if you shoot a two inch group at 200 yards, which is difficult to do, and you aim at the very, very top or tip of a head, you are going to miss

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  about 30% of the time.

• 1:03:53Tim Ferriss?

  So just to

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  paint a visual for people. So two inches, it's a little bit bigger than I say, like a silver dollar.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:04:02Tim Ferriss?

  So imagine you have something that's slightly bigger than a silver dollar and you put it 600 feet away. You need to put every shot inside that

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:10Tim Ferriss?

  silver dollar. That's what we're talking about.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then you need to make sure your aim point is in a place that never can create injuries. Cause if you miss high, nothing happens. That animal runs away. And so we actually operate at about a 99.9% rendering efficiency.

• 1:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  And what is the brick and mortar average?

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  98 off of like thousands and thousands of animals. So we were able to meet and exceed those guidelines or those rules. And

• 1:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  In the wild with

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  In the wild.

• 1:04:45Tim Ferriss?

  With animals moving around.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, with a combination of, so you can imagine, and this maybe like leads into what like a night in the field looks like, but you have these Mad Max looking UTVs with forward looking infrared screens essentially attached. The USDA inspector is sitting right beside you the entire time. And the technology is so good that the heat, the friction the bullet makes passing through the air, the USDA inspector is actually able to see that bullet hit the head of every single animal. And it's just an extraordinary process where the animal is unaware that you're there. And so it is truly, truly wild until the second harvest and then dies immediately. So there's no

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Which like comes into play for nutrient density. There is no stress.

• 1:05:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they're not flooded.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Prior to harvesting. And I think when we get about like a message a week from a vegan that says like, I'm finally able to come back to eating meat because they understand why the animal has to be managed and why that animal is dying. And then they agree and connect strongly with that process. Like it's truly the only stress free harvesting or slaughter of a animal within our food system.

• 1:05:59Tim Ferriss?

  Could you talk for a second about why this is so rare, right? Because people might think, well, can't you just go like, go hunting and sell the meat? You cannot do that.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  So what makes you able to do this for people who don't have that background?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  So a elk in Montana is a native species and it is owned by the public. So.

• 1:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's on public.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  It's on public land, even on private land, that animal, the management of that animal is dictated by the state. It is still owned by.

• 1:06:31Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  The people, right? So an invasive species on private land in Hawaii is the liability and ownership of the landowner. So it is a very unique situation in which you can actually like, do this process legally. And it's only in the instance where it is a invasive species on private land. We're not allowed to operate on public land in Hawaii.

• 1:06:58Tim Ferriss?

  So what, and I bring this up, I mean, obviously, look, I am love Maui Nui. I'm an investor. So of course I'm biased, but it all came down to, and I think we were initially introduced by Peter Tia, the quality, just this pure quality and nutrient density of the product for me, right? That's, that's what it came down to. But I think as means of just educating people about game meat and the sale of game meat in general, or let's just call it sort of atypical proteins like venison elk and so on. How much of the venison, elk, et cetera, that people might buy at a Whole Foods or something is farmed?

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 1:07:40Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred percent. So I bring this up just to say that people say you are what you eat. That is true, but you're also like what you eat ate.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right? So if let's say deer or elk is being fed, who knows? Corn feed and all sorts of stuff and given antibiotics potentially. It's very different from something that is wild harvested. So I don't want to skip too far ahead. Let's talk about a night out is what that looks like. And then we'll talk about nutrient profile.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Got it. You can imagine a bunch of like hyper local Hawaiians who I love getting up, rolling out of bed. We all sleep on site. We've got all these cubby holes for them to sleep in. We all sleep on site. We're getting up like 10 p.m. Making dinner and breakfast together. Like some of them are diesel engines. Like you really got to shake them to get going. And we are constantly moving. So we have mobile facilities where we're moving from site to site to do this process. We have these primary sites on all of the different ranches that we work with. So the first thing we're looking at each evening is moving our mobile facilities to another site to get closer to the deer. And the reason is, one of the other rules we have to follow is after that animal is

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  rendered, it has to be back to the facility cleaned, processed without a single hair on it in an hour.

• 1:08:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's pretty mind boggling.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Tim Ferriss?

  So we'll also link to a video that shows kind of snippets of this.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's on YouTube because if people think about that, I mean, it's pretty mind boggling to think about.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  So we're asking our-

• 1:09:11Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe you can walk through how that's accomplished.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  So we're asking our team members to be snipers, rally car drivers, CrossFit athletes, butchers. The people we have in our teams just have these extraordinary skillsets. It's the funnest thing to watch a guy in his first week.

• 1:09:28Tim Ferriss?

  Access to your decapitated.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, we have to pick up every single one of these animals and carry them on our backs because you're not allowed to drag them. You can either introduce contaminants and or like bruise the meat. And it's actually one of my favorite parts of the night is- It is the complete opposite of the rest of the meat industry. After you've killed this animal for food, you're carrying this animal on your back into its next stage of life with the food. And there's an individual connection with each one of these animals. And it's something that every guy on our team like really takes pride in is being able to like, pick up these giant 250 pound animals across like razor sharp lava or all like

• 1:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  250, that's a big boy.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, these giant box like, anyway, we're moving mobile slaughter facilities and we're getting all set up and staged. And you've got these like Mad Max UTVs and everything is getting ready for what we call the performance period. And the USDA shows up and it is essentially game time. You have a finite period of time, which for a long time was only three hours. So you have all of the variability of a wild animal and you have to make it all work in a three hour period. Like your entire business comes down to your mission, business, how you operate, comes down to managing variance within a three hour period. So nobody walks, everybody drives faster than they'd like to. And we've never had more than like a cut finger, knock on wood.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  And we expect just extraordinary people and athletes to come work with us. We have had lots of people that have come and been with us for a week and said, I can't do this. I can't do this every night. Like it's impossible.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  So USDA comes, we have this very defined performance period where we're going really, really fast, under control and getting as many animals as we can, getting them back and processing them. And then before you know it, the sun has come up and the night is over.

• 1:11:25Tim Ferriss?

  Now, just so we understand some of the tools of the trade that go into this. You're using night vision scopes? How is the technology layered to make this work?

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  The first piece of technology that will start the night is these forward looking infrared drones. So a drone is going in there to give us a picture of a couple thousand acres to say like, deer are going to be in these areas as we get started. The forward looking infrared binocular system that we use, I can tell you the difference between a goat and a deer at seven miles.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  So at 150 yards, you can see like every hair, any abscess, like the USDA being able to say that animal is healthy is achieved through that technology. And there's no lights on like it's completely black. Deer has no idea what's going on as they are being like evaluated by the USDA. And then the shooters also have forward looking infrared scopes. So you never have to introduce light into the scenario to scare them. And that's what allows you to like harvest enough animals every night to make it work. So you come up over a hill, you see a couple deer, all of the lights go off, all of this forward looking infrared equipment comes on instantly. So the USDA is able to view it. He's able to look at those five animals and say, yeah, you're able to take those animals and he has to like verbally, like we need to

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  wait. He has to verbally say those things. Oftentimes you can shoot several of those animals because they don't actually know what's going on. It's the middle of the night and the minute they don't feel safe, they just run. So you know, you're still harvesting them under stress free conditions. If they're just standing there, half the time they'll go back to feeding. Animals are rendered properly, they go down immediately. And as soon as our shooter says clear and the USDA says clear, people are like sprinting into the bushes to find these animals. Again, it's the middle of the night. If the grass is four feet tall, we have laser pointer systems that come off of the UTVs to like show them the right direction. And animal gets picked

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  up, brought back to the UTV and then we'll collect a couple of them. We have a roving team, they're called. So we have a team of rovers that essentially are the Mad Max team where they'll collect a couple deer and then they'll move as fast as they can back to where the mobile slaughter and processing facilities are stationed. And so they are just cycling back and forth between the harvesting team and the processing teams. So it's this intricate dance. And this is all at night on just not paved roads. These are like rough off-road scenarios. And so one of my favorite things to do is the first week we train somebody, we have a course. That they have to run and we let them run the course once and it takes typically takes like

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  seven minutes and we're like, we need to do that in three minutes and they're just like, what? Like, we need to do that in three minutes or it's not like you were not going to get back in time. So it's always fun to sit in that seat and we have these very specialized UTVs that are essentially impossible to tip over, but it is so fun to watch these amazing local guys develop all these incredible skill sets and every morning the sun comes up and everybody's just like grinning ear to ear. It's very much feels like a sports team and obviously with my history, I run it kind of like a sports team and the coach and just an amazing experience to do one of these hunts.

• 1:14:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So just to define terms also, if people don't know what UTV means, it's kind of like a super tactical Mad Max golf cart.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  That's a bit larger.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Tim Ferriss?

  So people may have seen like Claris is one brand name. There are many others. There are other terms used to refer to these things, but that's what we're talking about.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Tim Ferriss?

  So what are some of the other keys to selecting or building a team like you have built? Because you're asking a lot of these people.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Tim Ferriss?

  And it's an unusual work culture. So what are some of your framework systems, criteria for hiring, but also training once people are

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Tim Ferriss?

  in the position?

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Great people, Arding being there to train great people like really, really goes a long way. And we can talk about kind of that system we built later if you want, but the communication and people being patient is probably the most important thing. You have to imagine. You're doing almost everything through radios. So you sound like Kermit the Frog all night long. And you only catch half of it sometimes, but you're moving really fast. And the expectation is like, you keep moving fast. And so somebody has to be patient enough when like, oh, I didn't get that message. Or I didn't know what's it like. Communication is so key when you can't see body language. You can't hear properly. And everybody's operating out of a headlamp.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  So you have this little 10 degree view of what you can see through light. And I'm sure it's the most critical thing in like a lot of businesses. But when you're operating like that at night, it just becomes this amplified skill. That if you don't have, we just, we get on it so fast.

• 1:16:38Tim Ferriss?

  The communication, how do you get on it?

• 1:16:40Speaker 03

  I've never been or had a hard time talking, like kind of having hard conversations. So I would talk to people about tone and approaches and different words they could use. Like reminder, instead of like, get this thing done. Like we really focused on like individual language. And then we basically built a language of harvesting. So we have all of these key words. So we have all these key words that we use. So people don't get confused with what's going on. So we've created kind of our own harvest language that allows people not to get confused when we're going really fast. And then ultimately we built a system called HHS, which stands for humble, hungry, smart. And is largely based on

• 1:17:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hapa was the first?

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  Humble, hungry, smart.

• 1:17:26Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, gotcha. So as a Canadian.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And it's largely based on a book that Patrick Lencioni wrote called The Ideal Team Player. And it is a peer to peer evaluation system that measures humility, work ethic, and emotional intelligence. It became so important for us to have the right people. The biggest risk we have every single night is safety. And it became so critically important to have the right people and the right personalities that we had to build a system to measure those personalities.

• 1:17:59Tim Ferriss?

  And that's in the recruiting vetting process?

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So.

• 1:18:03Tim Ferriss?

  How do you measure those things? Humility.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we created essentially a scorecard. It has six questions per category. So six for humility, six for work ethic, six for emotional intelligence. Questions like, do the energy they bring every night? Is it consistent as in it positive? So we talk about body language and emotional intelligence and all these different things within these questions. And I'm happy to like, provide this thing. And we use it in three ways. We give it to the person on the second interview and we're hiring somebody. So we say, here's the HHS system. This is the only thing you're accountable to in your first month. And two things happen. They read it and they go, or actually, they just don't call back. And I've

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  made a ton of hiring mistakes in the past where you get past this honeymoon phase and people turn into gourches and it's just, there's, there's people, first mentality's involved. And I remember a guy that we were going to hire that was like brilliant electrical engineer. He wanted to quit his job, come work with us because he heard about the seven and seven schedule and thought it'd be the best thing ever. And then he read it and he didn't call me back. I really wanted to hire him. And I called him back and I said, any reason you didn't call me back? He's like, I have terrible body language and I'm not willing to quit my job and take the chance within the first month that I get fired for bad body language. Because we score them. If you're an A, we celebrate and figure out a way for you, reward you. If you're a B, we like find immediate improvements that you need to make

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  within some of these categories. And if you're a C, we let you go on the spot. No questions asked.

• 1:19:39Tim Ferriss?

  And you set that expectation upfront?

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  Oh, so we set that in the interview. They have to like, agree to this system coming in. They're evaluated by their entire team, including them doing a self eval, which is a part of the overall score. They get to like, grade themselves.

• 1:19:54Tim Ferriss?

  And the team, do they, are they sent on like a test evening? Prior to hiring, or I guess they just know that once they start going out.

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we call them tryouts, but when somebody comes to try out with us, which means we give them a month. We hire them on, but we call them a tryout. And at the end of that tryout, though, which is typically a one month period, they get graded by their entire team. And they know it's this like really tense moment where.

• 1:20:20Tim Ferriss?

  How many people are on a given team?

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Eight to 10.

• 1:20:23Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's a good average. So if somebody.

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if somebody's got to bug up their ass about somebody.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  Just one person.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  It always ends up being like a great average and it always ends up being a great measure of that person. And it's been this extraordinary filter for hiring. Asshole is the wrong word, but when we figured out how to use that system, we now grade every person at their first month, we grade every single person quarterly, including me. Every single person gets graded. And there's questions on there like, do they try or ask to do more than is required of them every day? And it's been so amazing to see the mistakes I make in, when we're hiring new people or moving people around, like a great example is, I moved a couple of people from a field position into a management position.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden their work ethic score started coming down. And it wasn't because they weren't working any harder. It was I didn't do a good job defining to the team what their new responsibilities were. So they saw them sitting on a computer and doing these things and they're like, well, they're not in the field helping us. And so it's just this amazing quarterly exercise that just pulls out all of the tension within your teams and creates framework for people to address those tensions. And then ultimately what's amazing is to watch people grow.

• 1:21:47Tim Ferriss?

  How do you give feedback? Let's say they come back and they've got a bunch of bees.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we, we.

• 1:21:52Tim Ferriss?

  What's the big boss do?

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we sit them down and we say.

• 1:21:55Tim Ferriss?

  Is that the royal we or is it just you?

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  No, no, it's.

• 1:21:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's multiple people.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's me and like the two or three other harvest managers.

• 1:22:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Great example. One of the questions we asked talks about are they genuinely happy to see their teammates succeeding? Because safety is such an important part of what we do. When we bring somebody in that's more talented, we will, just like a sports team moves the best people into the best positions. We immediately move people around positions based on their skill sets. So somebody has to be genuinely happy to train somebody that may replace them in a role that they may enjoy.

• 1:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they used to be the, like right striker or whatever. And they just got replaced.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  And it's amazing to watch somebody that really wants to be there because they find purpose and they really love the schedule. And they know the impact that they're having to our community have to make the decision to be better for their teammate every night. To be like celebrating that person's growth, even though it's potentially coming at the cost of something that they enjoy.

• 1:22:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  So there's these.

• 1:22:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's hard.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Oh, this whole, like I have.

• 1:22:57Tim Ferriss?

  That's asking, I mean, I'm not saying it's unreasonable, but that, I mean, that's asking a lot of, a lot of people. I mean, I don't know if I would be, if I'm being honest with myself, I think that'd be hard.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Here's the thing, like, it's been such a amazing exercise with lots of iterations, right? The first three iterations, I made so many grown men cry and I felt so bad.

• 1:23:19Tim Ferriss?

  Was that your delivery or the measurement where you just like, hey, listen, fuck this.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  It was the measurement was wrong.

• 1:23:24Tim Ferriss?

  Sink or swim.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  No, you're getting evaluated by your peers on your personality and the value it's bringing to your team. And you have to sit down quarterly and be told your humility is not good enough for this team.

• 1:23:40Tim Ferriss?

  I assume that the responses are all anonymized.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, everything's anonymized and then averaged.

• 1:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  For what it's worth, I've done what's called a 360 interview. And I know people who as executives or founders have had these done. And without exception, and myself included, every time that I spoke to somebody who's experienced this for the first time, they're like, I went and they sat in my car.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:24:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I basically had like a nervous breakdown, crisis of meaning. What do I do?

• 1:24:09Tim Ferriss?

  Like, these are names everybody would recognize, but they were just like, holy shit.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. The first time we did it with a large enough team that I included myself in it. Cause we were just so small early on. It was like, I think like the third iteration. I was like, I need to be a part of this. And I got all of the feedback back. I was just like, oh my God.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  But if we really want to build extraordinary teams, like I realized my approach to some of our conversations had to be so much better and nuanced to make them better. It wasn't the right approach and you learn all of this. You end up reading this thing like braille after doing it. I've done it like hundreds of times now.

• 1:24:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I mean, with repetition, I imagine it's like exercise, right? It's like, okay, are you going to apply metrics once a year? You're, you're going to be very, very, very sore.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Tim Ferriss?

  And you might even hurt yourself.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  But it was amazing to see what happened is we built this system because we knew we had to go from like eight people to 45 in a really short period of time to hit our mission goals about a year and a half ago. And I had made poor hiring decisions in the past and they were mostly personality based, or they were, that person was operating amazing when I was around, but the minute I left, they turned into a different person. And then there's this he said, she said game. This completely erases all of that because it's anonymous team scoring and the manager doesn't have a unweighted vote on whether that person stays around. And what ended up happening is that HHS program started attracting people.

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  They started hearing about

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  this accountability process to ensure.

• 1:25:52Tim Ferriss?

  You're attracting better fits.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:54Tim Ferriss?

  So coming back to, so you're not saying, hey, fuckface in like the fourth, fifth, 10th, 20th iteration.

• 1:26:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Tim Ferriss?

  What's the language that you use? If somebody has growth opportunities, let's call them.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  It's really specific to. Which of the 18 categories they're struggling in?

• 1:26:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Like, how does the meeting start?

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  Okay, so we sit down and we, we're gonna give them paper and we say like, okay, you're a B minus.

• 1:26:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Tim, we put a 250 pound L on your back, you crumpled into an origami crane and you couldn't get up.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  So you're a B minus, and then we celebrate first, some of the categories that they're doing really well in. Like, some of the categories that point to professionalism, or energy, or all these different things. We celebrate right away because they're, each one of the 24 segments have different scores within them that have been averaged throughout their team. And then we address the ones that they're like a C in.

• 1:26:45Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So they're not cut if they have a C in a particular review point. It's the average. Yeah, got it.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  So the C average, it's been amazing to see that system work. I've let go several people that were Cs that I would have never let go.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  I wouldn't have known to let them go. Like, wouldn't have known that that was the impact they were having on the team at large. It just would have never come out.

• 1:27:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I would love to, you mentioned, I think you offered to maybe share

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:27:17Tim Ferriss?

  the question. So we'll put that in the show notes as well.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Tim Ferriss?

  At timdublogs/podcast, because I'm incredibly curious to check it out myself. It just, at least at face value, it seems like a very elegant solution to a lot of problems that can seem like fragmented, separate problems you have to address in different ways.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  And again, like, I'm just a system builder, and by no means is it perfect. But I've heard lots of people speak to how important these different personality traits are and how they reward them. And more importantly than the C or the As, being able to, like, say to somebody, this incredible combination of like humility, work ethic, and emotional intelligence is making your whole team better. And your whole team is telling you you're extraordinary at the things, being able to reward and compensate somebody for that and have a measure to do so.

• 1:28:09Tim Ferriss?

  When you say compensate, so let's say they have, because I know this is getting the weeds a bit, but I feel like

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:28:15Tim Ferriss?

  that's where a lot of the good stuff is hiding. So, how many questions were there?

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  There's 18 questions, six on humility, six on work ethic and six on emotional intelligence.

• 1:28:25Tim Ferriss?

  And they get this like A, B or C for each of those questions?

• 1:28:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they get, it's graded one through seven.

• 1:28:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  We just did it because there's seven days of the week and we talk about like being at excellent every day. So it's one through seven and then we add up all the scores, which is 126 total and they get a percentage. So if they're an 87, we give them a B plus.

• 1:28:43Tim Ferriss?

  Which is the average for the total.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  Which is the average.

• 1:28:45Tim Ferriss?

  How do you reward or compensate the As?

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  If they're in their first six month of employment and they get two As or A pluses in a reward, we give them a raise based on that contribution. And then we celebrate with the team like, Naow was an A this last quarter. We make sure the team knows the contribution that they're having and it's already, which is so interesting. They already all know, but to not have framework to reward them for being amazing people has always been this fuzzy place for me where I couldn't reward or compensate that person for being an extraordinary individual that was making their whole team better because it didn't fit into what the classic hard skills define as like, they're a great shooter or they're a great driver or one of these different things.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  And every single one of those A plus people are our most highly skilled people as well. They just, when you operate with a certain level of humility, you are more willing to learn. And you learn faster. And every single person that's come through our program that was like a B minus or a C that was like highly skilled and made the choice not to get better at these, like, what I very much consider skills, just weeded themselves out. It's been really cool to see people grow and like,

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  you're in this camp and you see these guys with their, a lot of them will tape their score up above their bed and they'll like, look at it in the morning and say like, I was a B minus in this thing. I need to bring more consistent energy every night. Like we've got guys that go up and down and up and down and they're like, okay, I'm going to be trying to be more consistent. Like they know what they're working on.

• 1:30:21Tim Ferriss?

  You know, this gave me a flashback because when I was in high school and I wasn't a particularly, I just, for whatever reason, I mean, I trained my ass off, but I was not the most gifted wrestler. But I was pretty tough and. Not 10 out of 10 tough, but I ended up reading this book. It's, I'm sure dated in a million ways, but it was called Mental Toughness Training for Sports. And there was an assessment. And it was actually, now that I think about it, pretty similar to HHS. And I gave the assessment to like five or six people. And they did the assessment and then I took my score and that became my reminder. And that is when in a single season, I mean, I went from kind of middle of the pack to

• 1:31:05Tim Ferriss?

  almost entirely undefeated until the very end of the season. And it's not because I was the most gifted, but it's in part due to having a constant reminder that is not from one person. You spot patterns and you're like, okay. If it were just one person, I could maybe dismiss it, but no, now I'm getting this from multiple people I respect. And it works, man, it really works. And you could do this, I'm just thinking out loud, obviously I was gonna say talking out loud, but that's a bit redundant. I'm just talking out loud here, folks, but you could use this outside of an employment context, right? Like you could take this HHS and give it to five to 10 people you know,

• 1:31:50Tim Ferriss?

  and just ask them to be honest. Like that's the prereq. I'm not asking you to be nice, I'm asking you to be accurate.

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  And I want to give credit where it's like, dude, the book, The Ideal Team Player, which is what a lot of the like, the questions aren't based on it, but this idea that the original name, Humble, Hungry, Smart, is from that book. And so when somebody comes in, they have to read that book and it gives them the base principles of what we're talking about. And then we basically designed the questions. And yeah, it's been incredible. You get young 25 year olds that come in and their first couple of weeks, they're sitting in a meeting and they're hunched over and like they got their hood on. And typically that's a hard conversation to have with somebody to say like, I need you to sit up, take your hood off, be an active listener. Cause it's an uncomfortable thing to like, talk to somebody about their body language. And

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  You get to do that immediately because the team has framework and language to say like, "Hey, listen, brother, in three weeks, you're gonna get graded." "One of those things is body language." "And if you just sit up in the meeting, take your hood off and make sure like you're looking at the person talking."

• 1:32:54Tim Ferriss?

  Get a better score.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  "You're gonna get a better score. We like you. We want to keep you around."

• 1:32:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  If you happen to come in late-

• 1:32:59Tim Ferriss?

  Set up front, like it's not impromptu improvise.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Tim Ferriss?

  There's-

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  It's, it gives them the ability to have hard conversations when somebody rolls in a little bit late, which is already unacceptable, but if they don't genuinely apologize, somebody gets to come to them and say like, "One of our questions is about being like genuine about your apologies." "If you've made mistakes and we're allowed to make mistakes here, we make a lot." "But like you come in and being like, 'Oh, sorry, guys, don't do that next time and it will be better.'" "So it's outside of me, it's given everybody else framework to have uncomfortable conversations and/or celebrate people, right?"

• 1:33:36Tim Ferriss?

  So the ideal team player, Lencioni, this is a assigned reading.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:33:39Tim Ferriss?

  This is an assigned reading. Do you have any other assigned reading?

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  Not for field teams. We have them focus on that one for sure.

• 1:33:46Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  We've got, for some of our other staff, we have Confessions of a Pricing Man. Simon, I think is the last name.

• 1:33:53Tim Ferriss?

  I've read that book.

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  It's really good. I have like a lot of, anybody that deals with any type of like product strategy, I make sure they read that one.

• 1:33:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I haven't, I haven't thought of that book in a long time.

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so good.

• 1:34:02Tim Ferriss?

  Confessions of a Pricing Man.

• 1:34:04Speaker 03

  And then the, the Road Less Stupid.

• 1:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I don't know this one.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  It is, it is one of my favorite like general business books and I'm drawing a blank on the-

• 1:34:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's okay, it's memorable.

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  I've read a lot. Actually, Chris Ashenden recommended it to me.

• 1:34:19Tim Ferriss?

  Uh huh. So for those who don't know, Chris Ashen is the founder of AG1, previously Athletic Greens.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's been an amazing, the guy's always handing me homework.

• 1:34:27Tim Ferriss?

  He's a great operator.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So again, I'm happy to share like all of the questions. And I think when people see the questions, you can actually, they're tailored to our teams, but it's actually pretty easy to tailor those questions to your specific work format. I haven't quite found a way to move them into like the virtual Zoom world, because a lot of them are so tactile in how people work together and workflows. And there will be several iterations. We just changed it again. But in its current format and framework, I think it could be valuable to people and happy to share.

• 1:34:58Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes for folks to check out. I promised it earlier, so I want to not be remiss and come back to it as this conversational boomerang returns to me. Nutrient density. How should we tackle this? Where would you like to start?

• 1:35:16Speaker 03

  Uh, we could start at when.

• 1:35:19Tim Ferriss?

  This is true for plants.

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:20Tim Ferriss?

  Also true for me. Anything you put in your mouth has a certain composition. And just because it's called the same thing, banana, banana, banana.

• 1:35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Tim Ferriss?

  Green bean, green bean, green bean does not mean they are equal in nutritional value.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  I'll start at maybe the end. I think nutrient density, i.e. food quality, and being able to measure that accurately and someone be able to understand it in its simplest form, i.e. on a label, is going to completely change our food system and be the lever for regenerative agriculture.

• 1:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning having an indicator on a label, some type of measurement, just like you look at calories, just like you look at.

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  You walked into a store tomorrow and you flipped it over and there was two blueberries and one said 92 and one said 76. And you knew that 92 meant that was that much better for you. Measuring thousands of biochemicals that they now can through metabolomic testing. You're going to buy the one. And what's so amazing about the conversation of nutrient density is that is nutrition of place. And when you think of regenerative agriculture practices, which is basically just layering conservation practices, like we're taking care of soil, we're taking care of water, we're doing these different things.

• 1:36:35Tim Ferriss?

  Which people have done for a long time in certain cultures.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  And we got away for for a long time and now we're coming back to it. And if you knew the quality of your food, not measured by the five metrics that are currently available, but measured by the thousands of biochemicals that we can now test for, both good and bad. Billions of dollars going into this, like the Patagonia provisions that were like, this is coming for sure. And what was really interesting for us is we got to be one of the first people to be fully tested. So. About two years ago, we submitted our bone broth to a typical USDA FSN lab to make our label. And I remember them, yeah, they called me and they said, something's wrong

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  with these bones. And I was like, we sent you like the bone broth that were made from regular bones. They had thought we had put like a some form of like protein powder or additional collagen in there because it tested 33% higher in protein per ounce than anything they'd ever seen. So they had to like retest it. And it came out the exact same way. And our mission was never nutrient density. Our mission was to balance populations. And I always knew it was better for me because that animal had a choice to eat. But when we got that testing, we were like, wait a second, like, what is going on here? So we sent more like we sent livers and hearts and different cuts into a conventional lab for testing. Sure enough, lab emails me in the middle of it. I remember this one. They're

• 1:38:04Speaker 03

  like, there's something wrong with the hearts. They have too much choline. I'm like, there's nothing wrong. We just sent you a heart. And we were working with, did you introduce us to Anthony Guston? Who, Dr. At, we got to Anthony?

• 1:38:20Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think so, but I do know. I know who he is. Absolutely. So we were working with, he's helped other people I know.

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  We were trying to figure out and compare after we got that information to a typical comparison to beef. And what he pointed us to, which was crazy and scary, is the vast majority of the USDA databases from the 1930s.

• 1:38:41Tim Ferriss?

  I wonder if I made that intro. It's possible.

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  You've made a lot of them, my friend. But what we found out is that the nutritional comparison to beef weren't even actually able to do it because the data was so dated and you're able to be off to within 20% on a label, which is a whole other story. Anyway, Dr. Anthony Guston.

• 1:39:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, people who are packaging things have more wiggle room than a lot of consumers.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  20% wiggle room. Yeah. Up or down, whichever one favors them. Yeah. So.

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  Dr. Gustin introduced us to somebody, Dr. Van Vliet at East Austin University, who has probably been one of the most advanced food labs in North America. And he was doing the largest beef study ever done and the most in-depth, measuring 1,000-plus biochemicals through this advanced metabolomic testing. And we just happened to get tossed in at the end of it. So there's like 200-plus-

• 1:39:40Tim Ferriss?

  Little spritz of Axe Stair.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  So there's 200-plus beef samples. And then they threw us at the end and he thought like, oh, this will be really cool to see an animal that has a choice to what it eats, what that might look like in a, what we understood as a fairly fertile area. So comes out 2 to 4X the phytochemicals. So all of the good stuff from plants that gets transferred into meat were 2 to 4X, were 8 to 64X the omega-3s. So like DHA was 20 times. It was just, every single category was absurd. And then probably the most exciting for me is they measured oxidative stress.

• 1:40:23Speaker 03

  So the stress an animal goes through during that process, you can measure that oxidative stress and its impact on, there's a whole bunch of chemicals I still don't understand. I'm not a nutritionist, but they were able to measure the negative impacts of stress. And of course, ours was essentially zero and the beef stuff was all over the place. It was, it was pretty scary. But when I saw it, the most exciting thing honestly wasn't Maui Nui. It was, A, this is nutrition of place. This is a direct reflection of how well and how fertile a place is. Because all of that nutrient density is coming from the plants that they're eating, and i.e. the soil and the-

• 1:41:07Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  And the, and the water moving through the soil. And- Instantly realized if every consumer had this level of insight into the nutritional quality of their food, it'll completely change the way people look at that food system.

• 1:41:25Tim Ferriss?

  And then it'll change the entire sort of supply chain.

• 1:41:28Speaker 03

  Well, it's not a race to the bottom anymore of producing commodities, which is like the most you can at the cheapest price. I mean, this is my favorite saying, every time Peter Attia says we're overnourished, I'm just like, yes, like, we're producing an absurd amount of calories that aren't good for us. It's coming and we're going to understand the nutritional quality of our food and it will be graded and easy to know. And that will create these direct relationships with these, what will probably be regenerative agri practices that are fostering the health of these places. And then, so when we dug even further, we found out that the leeward slopes of volcanic.

• 1:42:11Tim Ferriss?

  What does leeward mean?

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  Uh, it is the windward or the, the windward side of a slope.

• 1:42:15Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hawaii Haleakala has a very particular soil called andesols. And then there are three types of andesols. Andesols are some of the most, the most fertile soils in the world. They hold water better and hold more nutrients from those waters better. And then of the three soil types, of the three andesol soils types, we have one called a U stand, and it's the most fertile of the three. So the slopes we're harvesting these deer on are actually, I think the U stands make up point zero five percent of the world's soils. So we just, so we happen to be.

• 1:42:55Tim Ferriss?

  Luck of the draw.

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Again, like this was never our mission. Our mission was just to balance populations, but we happen to have one of the most virile animals in the world that has a choice to eat exactly what it wants, moving through the most fertile slopes, maybe on the planet. And I think that's what Dr. Van Vliet got so excited about is he now has a marker to say when there's an extremely fertile place that's for most part well taken care of in a lot of the areas because they're able to go to the very best areas. This is what nutrient density could look like. And it's, you know, two to, vitamin A was 800 times in the liver versus some of these beef livers.

• 1:43:36Tim Ferriss?

  So to come back to one point. The DHA, I don't know if there's EPA in Axis deer. I have no idea. I'm not a lipologist.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  I think there is, yeah.

• 1:43:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So on the omega-3 side, is eating Axis deer in terms of levels of omega-3s? I guess we'd have to think about the sort of concentration per ounce, but is it comparable to eating some types of fish or would it still be significantly lower?

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  Well, we don't know the answer to that yet because the study measured it in comparison to beef.

• 1:44:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, right. I see. Right. So the percentages and so on were benchmarked to beef.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  So the new piece of equipment that Dr. Van Lee has coming in will be able to give us measures in milligrams, microgram, like we'll know that in the near future here. And this is what ultimately, there's several companies working on this. Adacious is one of them, is amazing company. Like they're going to be able to measure these thousands of biochemicals to the form that you need to turn them into a label. But we know, to answer your question, we know even in comparison to beef, it is about halfway to salmon. So it's actually a significant source of omega-3s that for some people that don't eat fish, like it goes a long way. Yeah.

• 1:44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So, okay. Little inside joke. Before we press record, we were talking about some very, very well-known professional sports teams.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Tim Ferriss?

  Who are using Maui Newey to feed their players. And some of these players, for whatever reason, just won't eat fish, but they will eat Maui Newey.

• 1:45:09Speaker 03

  Well, and they blood test every week, these extraordinary athletes. And we've just started working with a lot of these sports nutritionists and they're going to be able to measure for us if it's having an impact on these athletes.

• 1:45:21Tim Ferriss?

  That's so cool.

• 1:45:22Speaker 03

  So it's really, again, like never part of the mission for us, but an understanding of place. And this is what gets Kulani, like my wife, so excited. And she's like, This comes back to that conversation of innovation is a culture and Hawaiians were able to produce extraordinary nutrient-rich foods with finite resources for a million people and Hawaii now imports 95% of its food and half of its twinkie level like nutritional value. It really points back to our places informing what we're doing and it's really fun to have such a strong connection to place and it helped to inform your solution.

• 1:46:05Tim Ferriss?

  So connection to place, you have Kulaani, you have the little ones.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right? You live in Hawaii. Let's talk about the family for a second.

• 1:46:13Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:46:14Tim Ferriss?

  Clawback allowances.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  Oh, man, I get to give you credit for this. Wait till you hear this one.

• 1:46:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay, fire away.

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  John List.

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, you know, I was just thinking about John List.

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  The economist you had on the show and he was talking about using clawback allowances in a professional format, but I remember him talking about using it to potty train his kids and this idea of loss aversion, i.e. like I already have it and you're going to take it away from me being much stronger than the opposite.

• 1:46:43Tim Ferriss?

  Like how hard will you work to make $50 versus how hard will you work if you feel like $50 has been taken away from you?

• 1:46:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. So.

• 1:46:51Tim Ferriss?

  The latter.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  We had been struggling with.

• 1:46:53Tim Ferriss?

  Equals a lot more.

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  Allowances for the kids and we make lots of mistakes as parents and what the allowances were accidentally or doing where they were training them, they had jobs and they did their jobs and then they earned their money if they did their jobs. What it was doing is when we asked them to do extra stuff and be helpful, it was like, am I going to make more money? And we had taught them this system that was the opposite of what we were trying to teach them, which was to try and be helpful. And me and Kula, I remember that, like I remember her listening to it like six hours later than I did and she's like, did you hear about the clawback allowances? Like, did you hear about clawback? I was like, yes. And we both thought of it instantly like, let's do it for allowances. And so what we

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  do now, and we changed two things. We put $20 in ones on the fridge at the beginning of the month and we say, this is yours. And what we do now is we claw back those dollar bills for attitude instead of jobs. So what we do is when we say, Poliqu, can you go feed the dogs? And he's like, ah, we just walk to the fridge and we pull off a dollar. And it was this amazing exercise over a period of three months. It was straight revolt, like, what are you talking about?

• 1:48:08Tim Ferriss?

  Mutiny on the ship.

• 1:48:10Speaker 03

  And revolt turned into a little bit of sarcasm, like, yeah, fine, I'll do that. They didn't want to lose their money. One step back, we don't buy them anything. We're kind of strict when it comes to like, they get stuff at birthdays and they get stuff at Christmas. But other than that, they need to be useful people and earn their money. And so they really value the dollars they get at the end of the month. And it went from mutiny to sarcasm. And I remember it happening. And I remember like asking Leo who to grab the laundry and she's like, sure. And I was like, wait a second. And I looked at Kula like, that actually just work? And they're, don't get me wrong, don't get me wrong, they're amazing kids, the 99% of the time.

• 1:48:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but they're kids.

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:49Tim Ferriss?

  They're little humans.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  And now, just a couple of weeks ago, I came home and like, Poliqu was like, I just, I cleaned the car. And I was like, what, what's wrong with you? Like, it was this odd thing that like, a combination of the clawback allowance and training for attitude instead of them earning for a task.

• 1:49:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  It was just this, if it helps anybody, again, we're not amazing parents by any means, but like.

• 1:49:13Tim Ferriss?

  I think, I think you're pretty good parents.

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  That.

• 1:49:15Tim Ferriss?

  From what I can tell.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  Small trick.

• 1:49:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 1:49:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:18Speaker 03

  It, it's been a big one for us, for sure.

• 1:49:20Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to toggle around a little bit here. I have some notes in front of me. So we're talking about the kids.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Tim Ferriss?

  Secret Pinterest boards.

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Oh, man, this is another one.

• 1:49:31Tim Ferriss?

  For the relationship between you and your wife.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35Tim Ferriss?

  All right. I know you're not allowed to talk about it, but it's just me and you.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:38Tim Ferriss?

  Just us sitting at this table.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  Well, I've actually.

• 1:49:41Tim Ferriss?

  Not millions of people.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  I've actually tried to talk about this with a couple of our friends and this is like Fight Club level. Like you don't talk about this. So.

• 1:49:50Tim Ferriss?

  Exclusive here first, folks. Tim Ferriss Show.

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  So all of the, all of the credit, much of my credit goes to my amazing wife, but all of the credit for this one goes to her. And this has to happen in a very, you have to follow the rules for this one or it doesn't work. So early on in our relationship, I think I'm two years in. She's an extraordinary person. Have no idea what to buy for her. I've failed several, several times and she's not like, she barely will spend a hundred dollars on herself a couple of times a year. Right. She's that type of person. She thrifts 99% of her clothes, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the like, the worst person ever to try and buy stuff for. She's so picky. And she sits me down. I give her a birthday gift. I get it all wrong. She sits me down the next day and she's like, this is what we're going to do.

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  A, we're never going to talk about this conversation again. And B, I've created a secret Pinterest board that I've invited you to. Every item on there is something that I want. It's exactly what I want. It's like the link goes exactly to it, but here's how this works. You are never allowed to talk about this and you're never allowed to give it to me for like a birthday or something. It weren't bigger than birthdays anyways. And she's like, I will pretend that you did it in every single. No, this is the most important part. Okay.

• 1:51:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  My children think I'm a genius. Like they all come home and they'll just be like this random box on the table that has these beautiful earrings in them. And cool will come in and she'll just be like, oh my God, how did you know? Like this is exactly what I wanted. I can't believe you found them. I've been looking for them forever. And, and my girls will look at me like, how did, just amazing dad. Like, how did you know? She does it so well. Half the time I think like.

• 1:51:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God, I'm amazing.

• 1:51:40Speaker 03

  Like she, she has fake cried several times. She does it in front of her mom. The only way this works is I believe half the time that I've done this amazing thing for like, that's how important it is. And it has been the greatest. I never ever think about buying her anything. Anytime I even like have the slightest inclination, I go straight to the pincher's board and I just grab one thing off of it and it shows up and she does this amazing job of like, it's the biggest deal. Your dad's the most amazing person for be able to like figure this thing out and they all believe it and we're never allowed to tell anybody about it. Oh, it is so, she's done it in front of couples and the guys are just like, how the hell, like,

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  how did you know? I'm like, I just, I just pay attention, man. I just figured it out. And like, it just makes me look so good and she gets exactly what she wants. And we never, like, I tried to bring it up once when her mom was around and she looked at me like she was gonna kill me. She's just like, we don't talk about it or else it goes away and it doesn't work.

• 1:52:42Tim Ferriss?

  You know the rules.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:52:43Tim Ferriss?

  Bite your tongue.

• 1:52:44Speaker 03

  It's so good.

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  It is. She has to know, she has to pretend it's, it's real and I feel amazing.

• 1:52:55Tim Ferriss?

  Win, win.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, win, win, win, win, win, win on so many levels. All right. So I'm gonna let you choose where we go next.

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:53:03Tim Ferriss?

  Old lady crying on the couch game or tug of war?

• 1:53:07Speaker 03

  Okay, I will. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with the, my wife's a genius one here and we'll give her the old lady on the couch game. She for years, and I didn't ask about it till recently, she for years has done this thing and I didn't know what it was. When she was frustrated or something was going on, she would like close her eyes and like instantly turn into the happiest person in the world and like be loving our kids even if they were monsters. And I didn't know, I didn't know what was happening. And so I finally asked her, I was like, okay, what is that thing you're doing? And she's like, that's my old lady crying on the couch game. And I'm like, what the, like, what is that? And she said, when I'm feeling frustrated with my kids, I pretend I'm 80 years

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  old. And she's amazing. Like she really like closes her eyes and she pretends she's 80 years old. And she says, I'm given the opportunity, it's my birthday or something, and I'm given the opportunity to use a time machine. But I am only allowed to go back to this exact moment. And she really does it like she closes her eyes and she opens her eyes and she's eighty and she has five minutes to be this eighty year old lady looking at her nine year old daughter again after she's been grown up and she can open her eyes and she just like stands up and she's like, oh my, she's so cute and she kisses their face and the kids know what the game is. And there's like, oh, mom, you're doing that thing again, like, but she genuinely

• 1:54:33Speaker 03

  can put herself in the place of gratitude to be back in that moment, seeing her kids again after thirty or forty years of them being grown and old. And it's just, watching her do it is amazing. And then I have tried it several times since she told me, if you really put yourself in that situation, I've done it with my son, he's turning fourteen and it's got like, it's happening, puberty's happening, like, it's happening, right? And I only have four more years with him until he graduates. And a couple of times I found myself frustrated and I close my eyes and I think, when I'm eighty and my knees are sore, what would I feel to be able to go back and see him at fourteen when he's in this place?

• 1:55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Your self-care to eighty is amazing. If you're just like, when I'm eighty and my knees start hurting, but yeah, I get it.

• 1:55:19Speaker 03

  I got big plans. And I got Peter and T as my friend. So, um, she's a genius. It's this, in some of the most frustrating moments where you've like, kids are like your greatest joy and they're, will frustrate you more than anybody on the planet can. And she's just found this way to have gratitude for that time, because it's gone. And she calls it, old lady crying on the couch game, because she cries. Like, she, she will like, be tearing up and the kids will be like, oh, God, here we go again. And because they get kissed all over the face and like, oh, you're so small and cute and it's amazing. And like, yeah, she's, she's amazing at finding ways to be grateful for.

• 1:55:58Tim Ferriss?

  I'm really grateful you brought this up because it reminded me of something that I found super valuable for a couple of years. And then, as often happens, I just kind of forgot about it, which was, for Tribe of Mentors, in my last book, there were many people featured. And one of the questions I asked almost everybody was, when you were feeling overwhelmed or frustrated?

• 1:56:19Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do? And one of the answers was when I'm feeling overwhelmed or frustrated, I look at whatever this mundane situation is. And I'll give a personal example. Like if I'm laying in a hammock and not necessarily, I could be frustrated or preoccupied by something, but like my dog Molly is playing with a stick and I'm just kind of chilling. I ask myself like 50 years from now, how much would I pay to come back to this moment? For just 10 minutes, right? And similar trick, right? But I haven't used it.

• 1:56:55Speaker 03

  It's so good.

• 1:56:56Tim Ferriss?

  And this is the perfect reboot.

• 1:56:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Tim Ferriss?

  So thank you, Koo.

• 1:56:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. She's again, she's, she gets vast majority of the credit for anything that's smart that comes out of my mouth.

• 1:57:07Tim Ferriss?

  Tug of war.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  Okay. This one, Ricky Elias, founder of Red Ventures, introduced to me through Peter, gets all of the credit, but it was so good. I just, it's something that I started doing that I have to share. And he described, this is the last parenting one, I promise. He described parenting as a tug of war. You have to lose.

• 1:57:26Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:57:27Speaker 03

  And it's really interesting when you have kids and you hold on to them. And I've heard lots of different parenting advice. And the one, the reason it's stuck with me so well is it's such a great visual of your kids pulling a line across from you and that line moving through your hands. So when they're two and three years old, you don't even have to hold it. You're just like, whatever, you can't pull that thing. And then they get like six or seven and they give it like a little tug and you're like, oh, I gotta hold on to this thing. And then the best part about that advice is knowing you have to lose. So knowing when they're 18 or 19, you have to have fully let go of that rope. And the visual that comes to my mind all the time is just this really slow, steady

• 1:58:11Speaker 03

  release of that rope instead of these giant jumps or like these parenting mistakes that you're not letting them become independent and responsible and useful. You're trying to teach them all of these things so that you can let go of the rope at the end of it and they're okay. You're trying to spare them the feeling of being useless.

• 1:58:34Tim Ferriss?

  How does that impact that metaphor or analogy? How did that affect how you parent or make decisions?

• 1:58:40Speaker 03

  Good example. Laila who asked for like first sleepover. Which we've been pretty stringent about because she like wants to go an hour away and sleep in a house and I would like my immediate reaction was no. And then the thought in my head was like, wait a second, she's 12. And if you're gonna like let go of the rope of a little bit like this is probably the right situation, like you're gonna have to let it all the way go. This is probably the right situation to like, let it go a little bit, make sure it's safe and you call the parents and you figure out what it is. But like, it reminds me, the best actionable use of it is knowing it has to be gone.

• 1:59:16Tim Ferriss?

  You have to do it eventually. So like, do you want to let go of 20 feet at once?

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like they fall flat on their ass? Or do you want to like gradually let it go? So it's okay. And just the idea of like seeing it moving through your hands and knowing you don't want it to be this sudden jerk, has made it easier for me to make those small decisions, knowing at 18, 19, hopefully, we'll see, they're gone, right? And they'll always be mine or ours. But it's one of the few parenting advice I've ever heard that created like an actionable thing where I said like, okay, I need to make this slow and smooth and the right transition for them. So it's been, thank you, Rick. It's been, it was a good one.

• 1:59:56Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. So I want to ask, just as we start coming to a close, a few questions. One is, what are your hopes and dreams for the next few years? And I want you to also answer something, which is one of the questions, you may not remember this, but it was a very important question for me, me to ask very early on, which was, I asked something along the lines of, how do you ensure that you do not over harvest? Or end up doing more damage than good? Because people respond to incentives. If this economic model works, if the product is very, very high quality, which it is, if there is a lot of demand, how do you ensure that you're not seduced by the sirens of capitalism? And end up becoming something antithetical to your current ethos?

• 2:00:39Tim Ferriss?

  And so maybe that ties in just in terms of rules, objectives that you've set for yourselves Yeah. as a company. But broadly speaking, also hopes and goals for the next few years.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  Okay. So I answered the second first in that. Our mission is to achieve balance. In defining balance, we don't actually get to do that, which is probably really important. So we have the tools to make sure we can measure like we talked about during surveys. We have the tools to make sure we measure really accurately how many we're harvesting and the impact it's having. But the individual landowners ultimately make that decision. And then the community at large gets to weigh in as well through public lands. And so if we've done our job really well, deer will find a place within our food systems, not within our critical ecosystems that collect water and not at densities that impact our reefs.

• 2:01:37Speaker 03

  They will find a way into our food systems in these mid elevations. And the ranchers are already pointing to that. They get to decide what densities they want and they can only have densities that are healthy, i.e. they grow enough grass that those animals are healthy and sustainable. We get to be the tool to help find balance. We actually don't get to answer the question, which is the guarding agent between us doing more harm than good. They get to make that decision, which is awesome. The community gets to make that decision. And there'll be some ranchers that decide, ranchers are grass farmers, right? There'll be some ranchers that decide, I'm not doing cattle anymore. I want more deer in this area, but we have the tool to manage them the same way they would a cattle herd.

• 2:02:20Speaker 03

  And that's really my hope for what we're doing at Maui Nui is we find the balance that's best for all of our communities, ecosystem communities, food system communities, human communities, nearshore fisheries. And the great part about what we've talked about today is where there's just so much iteration to what we do. And it's so variable that it's the infinite game for us. That we're just going to keep doing it every single year, trying to find balance. Because some years you'll have more rain, some years you won't. And we'll constantly be able to go back to our community and say, how is this working? What does this look like? And I think maybe that's the like balance is maybe my hope for like life as a whole and like personal goals. I don't have.

• 2:03:05Speaker 03

  This is not a multi-billion dollar business for us. I'm so content. We already love the place that we're in. Like, I don't need bigger, brighter, shinier things. If I've done a great job letting go of that rope really slowly. And collectively, like we've talked about today, growing incredible people. I never realized how much value I'd find in growing teams. I didn't know I was going to come back to that like I did with sports. And seeing the extraordinary group of people that are now at Maui Newey. And being the shield that ensures there's only ever great people there. Ourselves included in that process. Man, that is hope enough and mission enough.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  Like, if I can do those two things really well, that'll be more than enough. And I think that'll go a long way in serving community and hopefully my kids and.

• 2:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  A whole shebang.

• 2:03:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57Tim Ferriss?

  Dig it. So, last question is the billboard question. This is sometimes a dead end, so I'll take the blame.

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  Uh oh.

• 2:04:06Tim Ferriss?

  If it goes sideways, but if it goes well, I'll give you all the credit. So, simple question. There is a billboard, metaphorically speaking, right? You can get a message out to hundreds of millions, billions of people. Could be an image, could be a quote, could be a word, could be a question, could be anything. Could also be something you want to remind yourself of. Could be any of those things. What might you put on that billboard?

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  I remember thinking about this, listen to your podcast for years. It may not make perfect sense, like when you read it. But the first business book I ever read was called The Little Red Book of Selling. It was this like tiny little thing that I got. And a quote in there stuck with me for years and it was, "Pick up the phone." And early in my career, that meant, "Pick up the phone, take any opportunity, do everything." Like, just always, always pick up the phone. And later, as I've grown, it's turned into less of like, pick up the phone and take those opportunities. But address the thing that is in front of you that you don't want to. Like, have the uncomfortable conversation, like, pick up the phone, like, just do it. And what it's resulted in is.

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  A very rapid iteration of like taking action constantly and not being a lot of downtime in between it. And now it means today, just addressing all of those hard things that are like in front of growth or with my family. So if it, if that billboard said, pick up the phone, that could mean something to somebody really different. Like maybe that's your mom that's calling that you don't want to like pick up the phone. But for me, it just, it is constantly iterated. And it's been this crazy thing that has stuck with me for, I mean, I read the book like 20 years ago. And it's just this thing that plays in my head all the time. Like when I see something that I don't want to do, or I know that has to get done immediately, I say, pick up the phone. And I just like, I'm able to just do it immediately. Yeah.

• 2:06:00Tim Ferriss?

  Pick up the phone. Good reminder. What a good reminder. Jake Muse. France. So nice to see you, man.

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  Oh, always so good to see you, my friend.

• 2:06:13Tim Ferriss?

  And people can check out Maui Nui at Maui Nui Venison.com on all the socials, at Maui Nui Venison. I love this company. I love the ethos. I love your family. I love the impact that it's having. And this is not because we're meeting today, but if you look at my backpack right now, I have three of the, what's the right way to describe them? Pepper sticks.

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:06:39Tim Ferriss?

  Is that fair enough?

• 2:06:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:41Tim Ferriss?

  So the peppered sticks, which are, I guess now I know what 10 to 11 grams of protein per stick, something like that. So I just throw, if I need to be on the run, and I need some quick pick me up for breakfast, or snack, or quick lunch, 30 grams ish of protein, I just throw three of those in. And a lot of my protein for the last several years has been Maui Nui. And I feel good about it. I feel really good about it. And I feel good overall. So.

• 2:07:13Tim Ferriss?

  What an adventure.

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I can't tell you how much we've appreciated the support and insight and advice. So it's been highly impactful as well.

• 2:07:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what a, what a gift it's been to get to know you and to realize, like you said, your family's very down to earth, but connected with the earth in a way that is very aspirational for me. I really think very fondly, I still have photos on my phone of just us sitting around a fire, you know, whether it's having a fire at night and just decompressing or having the most delicious slash shitty instant coffee in the morning, which is just fantastic, though.

• 2:07:56Speaker 03

  It is when you're out there.

• 2:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  It really makes a difference. You get up at five in the morning and it's just fucking, you know, you've been freezing your nuts off, which surprise, surprise, can happen in Hawaii at elevation. And you have that coffee and you're with people you really care about and you feel close to. It's, it puts in stark relief how much nonsense and garbage we fill our lives with when, in fact, when you just sit with close bonds, in close proximity and connection to nature, how much something very deep is nourished that alleviates much of the hunger for a lot of these trappings.

• 2:08:38Speaker 03

  A true connection to place, whether personally or professionally, can essentially solve for anything.

• 2:08:46Tim Ferriss?

  Connection to place. Jake Muse, so great to see you, man. Thank you for being here.

• 2:08:51Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, my friend.

• 2:08:52Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, we will link to all sorts of stuff, all the books, HHS, video clips, everything you can imagine that we've covered in this conversation. Probably not the secret Pinterest board, you have to make that for yourself. We'll put those in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. You can just search Jake and it will pop right up. And as always, my recommendation is be just a little bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but to yourself. And till next time, thanks for tuning in. Mahalo Nui.

• 2:09:28Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 2:10:10Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean?

• 2:10:55Tim Ferriss?

  That means in no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third-party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine. They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008 when I became an advisor, and it's been...

• 2:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  Spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them, who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required. Access powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day to day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed. And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the

• 2:12:19Tim Ferriss?

  day, which was awesome. The build a business competition and other things. Plus, with 24/7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support, you have resources, you don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you, and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to sign up for a $1 per month trial period. It is a great deal for a great service. So I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting Shopify.com/Tim.

• 2:12:58Tim Ferriss?

  One more time, Shopify.com/Tim, all lowercase. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual zone temperature control, you and your

• 2:13:38Tim Ferriss?

  partner can set your size of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees.

• 2:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  My partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting. This helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. So go to eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim, and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. That's eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, and the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/tim to save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.