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

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.

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 slash Tim,

all spelled out, eightsleep.com slash Tim

and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.

That's eightsleep.com slash Tim.

Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada,

and the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.

Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Tim

to save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.

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,

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 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 slash 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 slash Tim.

One more time, shopify.com slash Tim, all lowercase.

Optimal, minimal.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile

before my hands start shaking.

Can I ask you a personal question?

No, I just didn't have that big of a time in there.

What if I did the opposite?

I'm a cybernetics organism, living this year

over a metal endoskeleton.

Me, Tim, Paris, Seoul.

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,

the 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 access to your 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 top restaurants

across the country, including Alignia,

which featured very heavily in The 4-Hour Chef.

It was a big section entirely,

because it's so impressive.

The French Laundry and Céce en,

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-decade-long project

focused on Axis Deer

and their long-term management in Hawaii.

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, et cetera,

at Maui Nui, venison.

I'm shocked those handles were available.

Okay.

And I think we will start.

We're all good stories.

Let's start, and that's with Lava.

Oh, wow.

Fast-moving Lava.

Yeah.

So 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.

Well, it's great to see you.

We're going to have a blast.

Lava.

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 Kapoho,

which had amazing hot pools and tide pools.

And well, 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.

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 dear.

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, like, 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.

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,

and it's hanging from a hundred foot line below a helicopter.

And so a helicopter's 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 then 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.

Got it.

So the frame is basically a rectangle or a square.

It's an octagon, yeah.

Yeah, octagon.

Okay, got it.

So federal, PETA, everybody gets ahold of us

and says like we need to get these cows out of here.

That's because it was known

at least to some subset of folks that you had this,

you developed this live capture system.

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 ahold of us, they run us through

like what they want us to do.

Of course I had to like sit down on 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, who's gonna say no to that one?

And it 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 and there had 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 bowled 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 Fissure 8.

It's fountaining 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 of this.

We can put it in the show notes for people.

It's crazy.

And he goes to pick up the first cow,

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 have my monitor 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, we'll give it another tug

to see if you can get 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 going to do.

We're going to use the heat from the lava flow

to give us a boost.

Ride the thermals.

We're going to ride the thermals up

with this cow underneath us.

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 out,

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 a hundred feet lower than us.

And this cow swings out and then as it passes

over the top of the flow, all we see is just smoke.

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

Watching a cow get vaporized.

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 on my go-go and I had forgotten

that it was pouring rain.

Ah, right.

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 vapor 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 got a little crazy.

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.

You have like these lava bombs going off

and 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.

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

of Hawaii 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 the lower 48

or continental US, many people have not been to Hawaii.

And certainly people overseas,

many of them will not have been to Hawaii.

But what does Maui Nui refer to?

So Maui Nui refers to the three islands

of Maui, Moloka'i and Lena'i.

And epochs ago, they used to be joined.

They used to be one giant island.

It's like the Pangea of Hawaii.

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 access to your are located on those three islands.

So we landed at Maui Nui as kind of the name.

And Nui is, is it fair to say a suffix that is used

or maybe it's just the order of kind of now an adjective,

but big.

Yes sir, good job.

So you can say mahalo nui, like thanks a lot.

Also for people, this may be a way to get

into the history also.

Because we were chatting a little bit about it.

I've been spending more time in New Zealand

and I'm fascinated by the Maui culture.

And there is a very close relationship

between what we're talking about

and the culture in New Zealand.

Could you speak to that a bit?

Sure.

And then after that, and you can tie this in however you like,

but speak to sort of the agriculture

of pre-colonized Hawaii.

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

Right.

And actually let's hit pause for a quick second.

Cause I think it's worth mentioning up front.

So a company you co-founded in 2017.

Who is your co-founder?

My extraordinary wife, Kuu Ulanee.

She's amazing.

Yeah.

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

Sure.

Kuu Ulanee.

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.

Hey, 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.

How long has her family been in Hawaii?

Well, she'll tell you forever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she also, if I'm remembering correctly,

looks at old microfiche newspapers.

Yeah.

And sort of excavates and translates.

So post-Western contact,

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.

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.

Also, I mean, she's very much a multi hyphenate polymath

because she's also an incredible designer.

Yeah.

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 at the 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-clonial agriculture

and the tie between New Zealand.

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 El Taroa.

So El Taroa was settled from Hawaii.

And for people who don't know the matching,

so El Taroa is the Māori word

for what is also known as New Zealand.

They kept such amazing records of their voyages.

My brother-in-law got to spend a whole bunch of time there

with Māori in different communities.

They have the actual boats, the canoes,

that were settled from Hawaii.

They know the lineage of 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.

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

and they were feeding like an extraordinary population

with extremely finite resources

and somehow were able to maintain all of the biodiversity

that 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 were.

They had these amazing, they call them Lokoia

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 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, how the food was grown,

how like it entered the water,

everything was built to maintain good clean water.

So let's segue from that to access steer.

What on earth are access steer?

Number one, what is the history of their presence

in Hawaii?

Why did they end up there?

And then I have follow up questions that relate to water.

Yeah.

So in 1868, the then Kamehameha the fifth

was given this gift.

Who was the leader at the time?

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 Moloka'i

only 40 miles long, 10 miles wide.

And then a Kapu, which is a restriction was placed on them

for about 15 to 20 years.

What does that mean?

A Kapu is like nobody was allowed to hunt them

or touch them.

And how many?

Dear?

Seven.

Seven.

Yeah.

And as early as 1898, there's literature that says

they hired sharpshooters from California.

Well, that was 1902.

They brought sharpshooters in from California

because there was already six to 7,000 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 right the year.

And when that happens, their testosterone levels

drop significantly and their sperm is no longer viable.

So Axis Deer, 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.

The current math that we have is they are 94 to 95% of them

are either lactating or pregnant year-round.

So they just introduced an extraordinarily viral species

and have had profound impacts with that type of growth rate.

So if we then flash forward to roughly 10 years ago

or 12 years ago, what did the situation look like

in a way with respect to Axis Deer,

which have no natural predators?

Yeah.

On that land mass.

Yeah, on Molokai.

In India they certainly did.

So no natural predators, the capability to breed year-round

extraordinary 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.

What do the numbers look like?

70,000 and there's only 7,000 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 40 to 50 animals just like lying there,

lethargic, essentially dying of malnutrition.

And it was an animal that was introduced to me

as like something to love and it was precious.

Like for the people of Molokai,

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...

Overpopulation, famine, and then it corrects.

Yeah, and then it corrects,

they lose about like a third of the population

every seven to 10 years.

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.

They are able to,

because they can eat so closely to the ground

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.

I guess there are multiple issues,

consequences of that.

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.

What is the effect that has on runoff?

So when you think about it from like a,

they call it mocha to 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 dye.

So there's huge tracks of what used to be

some of the most pristine reefs in the world

that are now dead.

And that also then impacts near shore fisheries.

So we just had this amazing conversation

about producing millions of pounds of fish

pre-wrestling contact.

And now a lot of those reefs have some 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 $45 a foot.

Yeah, that's not true.

No, so it's also having a severe impact

on our food system.

So ecosystems, food systems, near shore fisheries

and reefs is a compounding conversation.

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.

OK.

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 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 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

and 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 through your hunt.

So the Access to 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 Access Deer were illegally introduced

to the Big Island of Hawaii.

So we've talked about Moloka'ilana'i and Maui.

So four Access Deer were illegally

introduced to the Big Island of Hawaii,

which was about 10 years ago.

And the Big Island is 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 food on the Big Island.

And the impacts of Access Deer were already really well known.

So it was a state emergency when these animals were found.

And the Access Deer Institute happened

to be one of the few people that knew a lot about Access Deer.

So we were given that responsibility and contract

to try and find and remove four deer from a 100 square mile area.

So they didn't know where they were.

Yeah, and these aren't elephants.

Oh, no.

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

150 pounds.

Think about them standing three and a half, four feet high,

maybe six feet long.

What are the biggest differences for people

who might be more familiar with, say, a whitetail?

Well, the biggest difference is where they evolved.

Access Deer evolved with Bengal tigers

and leopards in dense jungle.

They have this crazy sixth sense.

Yeah, their agility is unbelievable.

And their vigilance and sensory perception

is incredible to observe.

And I think because they didn't deal

with some of the evolutionary stresses of 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.

But when they find a safe spot, they

will stay in a very small area for an extended period of time.

I see.

So they move less than, say, a whitetail, so everything.

Therefore, they're better able to denude a concentrated area.

So they'll find these little cubby holes, these safe areas,

and they'll 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.

Did they multiply in the meantime or no?

Yeah, we ended up removing five.

But it was this extraordinary exercise.

It took us seven months.

Like, you think you're going on 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, 100-square-mile area.

We hiked every day.

Piece of water, you mean, ponds or lakes?

Ponds, blue rock that water would pool in,

anything we could find, water troughs.

Any water sources?

Yeah.

So we finally get a camera trap image.

We're like, OK, we have an idea of what could this animals.

It takes us another four months to get the first one.

What do you do between, so you set up the cameras.

You're like, we know these animals need water.

Yeah.

And set up the traps and it takes seven months.

So you get an image.

Yeah.

Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

Oh, my God, we got our first image.

And then it takes another, how long?

Three months.

OK, what are you doing in those three months?

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.

You used an expression, transect something or other?

Transects.

So you're breaking into grids.

Do you know what you've covered or not covered?

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 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.

So forward-looking infrared, FLIR?

FLIR, yeah.

FLIR is, can we think of this as sort of black-and-white

predator vision from the Schwarzenegger movie?

Yeah, okay.

Exactly, you put the mud on it 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.

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

with your first subscription purchase.

So learn more, check it out.

Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim.

That's drinkag1, the number one.

Drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Check it out.

I posted a video you sent me of flora footage from a drone,

which if you want to see the scope,

the magnitude of the problem

in terms of just the volume of animals

in respect to access to your ear,

you have to see this video.

It'll blow your mind.

I put it on Instagram.

We'll link to that in show notes as well.

Yeah, and we ran out of range.

Yeah, exactly.

It's not like they stopped,

but it looks like a veritable New York City of Axis tier

at night, unbelievable.

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.

When was this?

What year was this?

11 years ago.

11 years ago.

So you had been using,

were you using quadcopters or a different type of drone?

No, we were flying out of a helicopter.

I was gonna say,

it should have been very early days

with any type of drone technology.

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.

Yeah.

That will make you motion sick or anything.

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

Anyway, takes us another two years essentially,

but utilizing that technology,

we were able to find and remove all of those deer,

including the two that had been born.

And there were 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.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

So the perfect place to grow anything.

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 Koi?

Oh, I love this story.

Oh, okay, here we go.

Yeah.

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.

Oops.

Oops, like giant oops.

And guess what?

Mongoose are really good at killing other things.

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.

Why don't they have mongoose?

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 drowned at 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 30 minutes

on the side of the road.

So wild.

I mean, these highly biodiverse isolated environments

are so beautiful and compelling

and also so fragile to disruption.

True with New Zealand as well.

I mean, in terms of biosecurity,

it is the highest, one of the highest priorities.

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 access 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.

And you have this technology.

So what we also developed with that third technology

is highly accurate surveys.

So within 95% we can tell you exactly

the number of deer that are there.

How do you do that?

So transects again at 400 meters.

And then you take a sample.

No.

You don't do a sample count

because a lot of people do that, right?

And then they multiply it out.

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 of 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.

And it's a tool, it's just super important

because otherwise I think what we do

would be irresponsible without that level of data.

Yeah, without that level of...

Precision.

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 Moloka.

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.

And that's hence the spotted rats.

Yeah, and that like dappled coloring was used

in those like those jungled environments.

And they just, they camouflage between their grasslands.

Like it's amazing.

Japanese deer have the same similar pattern.

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 need 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.

Well, it was just considered off the table.

Yeah, yeah.

So there are rules that just never been applied

to this type of harvesting.

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.

So I'm going to do a little like flashback,

Austin Powers style on our Wayne's World maybe.

Get my Mike Myers stuff mixed up.

Did you learn about confidence intervals

playing volleyball?

I think actually, no, it was in the worst class of my life

with business statistics and college.

But ended up being useful.

Yeah, I can't, you can't imagine

how much of that stuff actually comes back.

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.

Sure.

Where does volleyball fit into your life

and where does free pizza fit into your life?

Okay, was a classic Canadian kid played a lot of hockey

until we were too broke to play hockey anymore.

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

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

Oh, right, I forgot about that.

Right, it would be like replacing your ski equipment

every year or two.

I remember my dad sitting down and being like,

I know you love it, but you need to pick a different sport.

And they're like, volleyball requires knee pads.

That's all you need.

Your knees shouldn't grow as much.

Here's a great sport for you to try.

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 you'll probably turn into a good player.

Played four or five years there

where became a family member for that family on Molokai

where 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.

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

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 U.S. generally watch

at all.

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.

Worldwide or just in the U.S.?

Oh, just in the U.S.

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.

And then you go overseas to Europe.

Do people watch volleyball in Europe?

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 spill over

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.

So my first week playing in Honegan,

which was in Northern Holland.

Gesundheit.

Yeah, well, that plays into this story.

I had had a week of practice and our first game was coming up.

And I was still very much getting used to the language.

The coach was this six, eight Olympic legend.

He was this legendary Dutch player.

And I think he was kind of happy I was there.

But 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.

And then we're playing one of the best teams of 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.

OK?

What could go wrong?

Completely screw it up.

Like, embarrassing level screw up.

And we lose.

And after the game, he comes aside and broke into 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 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 hand up and to 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.

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 block.

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?

And he's just like, he's getting irritated.

And then he I think it finally collecting.

There's like, wait a second.

We need to be a little bit more patient with this guy.

Yeah.

And I tell it as a funny story because it's I use that phrase

as I went to Indonesia and the mall dies.

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.

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 about 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,

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 look stupid or ABCD or E.

But in fact, it's a really important question.

Yeah. When I was playing in 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.

Just to put a bow on the chapter of volleyball.

So you mentioned that you were not like the Ronaldo volleyball.

Yeah.

But you ended up kind of taking an oblique angle

and extending your career related to volleyball.

How did you do that?

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?

Just be 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.

OK, so let's come back to Maui Nui.

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 Nui 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, 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 they're just 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.

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

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's extraordinary, expensive

and we wanted to be as responsible as possible.

So we have two full teams, everybody that works seven days on

and the team comes in, we essentially work nonstop.

We have two teams switching back forth.

So we offered them unlimited overtime.

Can you guess what happened?

Tell me. Nobody took it.

So explain for a second what that would actually mean.

What is unlimited overtime?

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.

And no one did it.

Nobody did.

And it's just this amazing.

What do you make of that?

Time. They were just happy with.

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?

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, we'll get used to it.

Find some hobbies.

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 a hundred percent

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

a hundred percent 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.

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

component of the things like I've through COVID when nobody could hire

anybody with 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.

So let's talk about some of the.

Processes and metrics that inform that output and efficiency.

Sure. Because it doesn't happen by accident.

No.

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?

Sure.

And then we'll segue from that into let's.

Have you describe what a shift actually looks like 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.

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 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 plays influences deer.

We call it like moon fluence and we have these giant KPIs and sheets

that basically deep performance indicators that dictate where we go,

what we do and then who we put in different places.

Actually, 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 1014.

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 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.

If you don't measure it, you won't know if it's actually work.

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 that we are constantly iterating and constantly

collecting data to see like, are we producing a better product faster with more quality?

So let me come back to the USDA or maybe not directly USDA, but Comparables.

And then we'll go from there to a sample night,

kind of what the run of show looks like in 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 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?

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 Maui, New 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 at their local grocery store.

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

to 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 shoot 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.

So we had to follow those exact same rules in the field

and with no control of the animal.

The rules meaning humane, safe to eat, but not following that process.

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 about 30% of the time.

So just to paint a visual for people.

So two inches, it's a little bit bigger than, say, like a silver dollar.

Yeah. 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 silver dollar.

That's what we're talking about.

Yeah. And then you need to make sure your aim point

is in a place that never can create injuries.

Because if you miss high, nothing happens.

That animal runs away.

And so we actually operate at about a 99.9% rendering efficiency.

And what is the brick and mortar average?

Ninety eight off of like thousands and thousands of animals.

So we were able to meet and exceed those guidelines or those rules.

And in the wild, in the wild with animals moving around.

Yeah, the combination of so you can imagine,

and this maybe like leads into what 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 which like comes into play for nutrient density.

There is no stress.

Yeah, they're not flooded.

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 an animal within our food system.

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.

Yeah.

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

So a elk in Montana is a native species

and it is owned by the public.

So it's on public.

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 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.

So what and I bring this up, I mean, obviously look, I 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 the pure quality and nutrient density of the product for me.

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, etc.

that people might buy out of whole foods or something is farmed.

100% 100%.

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 eight.

Yeah. Right.

So if let's say deer and 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 is wild harvested.

So I don't want to skip too far ahead.

Let's talk about a night out, just what that looks like.

And then we'll talk about nutrient profile.

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 PM, 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 branches 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 rendered, it has to be back to the facility,

cleaned, processed without a single hair on it in an hour.

Yeah, it's pretty mind boggling.

Yeah.

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

that's on YouTube, because if people think about that.

I mean, it's pretty mind boggling to think about.

So we're asking our name.

Maybe you can walk through how that's accomplished.

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 skill sets.

It's the funnest thing to watch a guy in his first week.

Access to your decathletes.

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 two hundred and fifty pound animals

across like razor sharp lava or all like.

Two hundred and fifty, that's a big boy.

You have these giant bucks like.

Anyway, we're moving mobile slaughter facilities

and we're getting all set up and stage 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 of 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.

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're 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 of 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 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

reconditions, 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 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 all collect a couple of 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 just 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 seven minutes.

So 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 UCVs 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 in the coach

and just an amazing experience to do one of these hunks.

Yeah. So just to define terms also, if people don't know what you TV means,

it's kind of like a super tactical Mad Max golf cart.

There you go. That's a bit larger. Yeah. Right.

So people may have seen like Clarice 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.

Yeah. 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. Yeah.

And it's an unusual work culture.

So what are some of your framework systems criteria for hiring,

but also training once people are in the position?

Great people already 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.

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.

The communication, how do you get on it?

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

that 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 Humble, Hungry, Smart.

OK, gotcha.

So it's a Canadian.

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.

And that's in the recruiting vetting process.

Oh, yeah. So.

How do you measure those things?

Humility.

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 made a ton of hiring mistakes in the past where you get past this

honeymoon phase and people turn into grouches and it's just there's people

who first met how these involves.

And I remember a guy that we were going to hire that was on a brilliant

electrical engineer who 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 to reward you.

If you're a B, we like find immediate improvements that you need to make

within some of these categories.

And if you're a C, we let you go on the spot.

No questions asked.

And you set that expectation up front.

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.

And the team, are they sent on like a test evening prior to hiring?

Or I guess they just know that once they start going out.

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, 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.

How many people are on a given team?

Eight to 10.

Got it.

Yeah.

So it's a good average.

So if somebody.

Yeah.

If somebody's got a bug up their ass about somebody, it's just one person.

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.

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.

How do you give feedback?

Let's say they come back and they've got a bunch of bees.

Yeah. So we, what's the big boss do?

Yeah. So we sit them down and we say, is that the royal we or is it just you?

No, no, it's, it's multiple people.

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

Got it. 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 onto 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.

Yeah. They used to be the, yeah.

Like right striker or whatever.

Exactly.

Just got replaced.

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.

Yeah.

So there's these.

That's hard.

Oh, this whole, like I have.

That's, 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 honest with myself.

I think that'd be hard.

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.

Was that your delivery or the measurement where you just like,

it was just the mess and fuck this.

It was the measurement was wrong.

It's sick or swim.

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.

I assume that the responses are all anonymized.

Yeah, everything's anonymized and then average.

For what it's worth, I've done what's called a 360 interview.

All right.

And I know people who as executives or founders have had these done.

And with that exception, 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 and I basically had like a nervous breakdown crisis of meaning.

What do I do?

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

holy shit.

Yeah.

The first time we did it with a large enough team that I included myself in

it, because 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.

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.

Yeah.

And I mean, with repetition, I imagine it's like exercise, right?

It's like, okay, you're going to do plyometrics once a year.

You're going to be very, very, very sore.

Yeah.

And you might even hurt yourself.

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 that 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.

They started hearing about this accountability process to ensure you're

attracting better fits.

Oh yeah.

So coming back to, so you're not saying, Hey fuck face in like the fourth,

fifth, 10th, 20th iteration.

Yeah.

What's the language that you use if somebody has growth opportunities?

So it's great.

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

Right.

But like, that is a meeting start.

Okay.

So we sit down and we were going to give them paper and we say like, okay, you're a

B minus.

Yeah, Tim, we put a 250-pound L on your back.

You crumpled into an origami crane and you couldn't get up.

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.

Got it.

So they're not cut if they have a C in a particular review point.

It's the average.

Yeah, got it.

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.

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.

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah.

Tim, the blog slash 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.

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 A's, 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 your extraordinary ethic things, being able

to reward and compensate somebody for that and have a measure to do so.

We say compensate.

So let's say they have, because I know this is getting the weeds a bit, but I feel

like that's where a lot of the good stuff is hiding.

So how many questions were there again?

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

six on emotional intelligence.

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

Yeah.

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

We just did it because it was 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, which is the average for them.

Which is the average.

How do you reward or compensate the A's?

If they're in their first six months of employment and they get two A's or A

pluses in a reward, we give them a raise based on that contribution.

And then we celebrate with the team like, now was an A this last quarter.

We make sure the team knows the contribution that they're having.

And it's already, it was 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.

And every single one of those A plus people are 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 a 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, but I very much considered skills, just waited themself out.

It's been really cool to see people grow and like, 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, OK, I'm going to be trying to be more consistent.

Like they know what they're working on.

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 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.

I mean, 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 and it really works.

And you could do this.

I'm just thinking out loud, obviously, I was going to say he's talking out loud,

but that's if they were done it, 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,

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.

And I want to give credit where it's like do the book, the ideal team player,

which is what a lot of 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 design the questions.

And yeah, it's been incredible to 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

because it's an uncomfortable thing to like talk to somebody about their body language.

And you get to do that immediately because the team has framework

and language to say, like, hey, listen, brother, in three weeks,

you're going to 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, get a better score.

You're going to get a better score. We like you.

We want to keep you around.

Yeah. Yeah.

If you happen to come in late, set up front, like it's not impromptu,

improvised. Yeah. There's 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?

So the ideal team player, Lindsey,

only this is a signed reading.

Yes, this is an assigned reading.

Do you have any other assigned reading?

Not for field teams.

We have them focus on that one for sure.

We've got for some of our other staff, we have confessions of a pricing man.

Simon, I think is read that book.

It's really good.

I have like a lot of anybody that deals with any type of like product strategy

and make sure they read that one.

And I haven't I haven't thought of that for a long time.

Oh, it's so good.

Confessions of a pricing man.

And then the the road less stupid.

OK, I don't know this one.

It is it is one of my favorite like general

business books and drawn a blank on the.

It's OK. It's memorable.

I've read a lot.

Actually, Chris Aschenden recommended it to me.

So those who don't know,

Chris Aschenden is the founder of AG1, previously athletic greens.

Yeah, he's been an amazing guy who's always handed me homework.

He's a great operator.

Yeah. So again, and 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 in 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 with us.

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?

We could start at when this is true for plants.

Yeah, also true for meat.

Anything you put in your mouth has a certain composition.

And just because it's called the same thing, banana, banana, banana.

Yeah. Green bean, green bean, green bean

does not mean they are equal in nutritional value.

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.

Meaning having an indicator on a label, some type of measurement.

Just like you look at calories, just like you look at film.

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.

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

And we got away 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 FSNS lab to make our label.

And I remember them, yeah, they called me

and they said, something's wrong 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 some form of like protein powder

or additional collagen in there because it tested 33 percent 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 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 Gustin?

Who, Dr. Anthony, we got to Anthony Gustin.

I don't think so, but I do know.

I know who he is. Absolutely.

So we're working with.

He's helped other people, I know.

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.

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

You've made a lot of them, my friend.

Yeah, it's possible.

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 percent on a label,

which is a whole other story.

Anyway, Dr. Anthony Gustin.

Yeah, people who are packaging things

have more wiggle room than a lot of consumers.

Twenty percent wiggle room.

Yeah. Up or down, whichever one favors them.

Yeah. So 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 a thousand plus biochemicals

through advanced metabolic testing.

And we just happened to get like tossed in at the end of it.

So there's like 200 plus spritz of access to here.

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 two to four X, the phytochemicals.

So all of the good stuff from plants that gets transferred into meat

were two to four X were eight to 64 X, the omega threes.

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.

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

like 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 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.

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

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 Atias 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 aggro, like 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.

What is leeward mean?

It is the windward or the the windward side of a slope.

Got it. Yeah.

Hawaii, Haleakala has a very particular soil called andesoles.

And then there are three types of andesoles.

Andesoles 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 andesoles 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 that's wild.

So we happen to be luck of the draw.

Yeah. Again, like this was never our mission.

The 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 Vleet 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.

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 lipidologist if that's the right term.

I think there is. Yeah.

Yeah. So on the omega three side, is eating Axis Deer

in terms of levels of omega three is 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?

Well, we don't know the answer to that yet

because the study measured it in comparison to beef.

All right. I see. Right.

So the percentages and so on were benchmarked to beef.

So the new piece of equipment that Dr. Van Vleet has coming in,

we'll 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.

Odysseus 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 threes that

for some people that don't eat fish, like it goes a long way. Yeah.

Yeah. So, OK, a little inside joke.

Because before we press record, we're talking about some very,

very well known professional sports teams who are using

Maui Nui to feed their players and some of these players for whatever reason.

What just won't eat fish, but they will eat Maui Nui.

Well, I mean, blood tests 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.

Yeah, that's cool. On these athletes.

That's so cool.

So just really, again, like never part of the mission for us,

but an understanding of place.

And this is what gets cool, Lani, 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 Hawai'i now imports 95 percent of its food in half of its

Twinkie level, like nutritional value.

It really points back to our places in forming what we're doing.

And it's really fun to have such a strong connection to place.

And it helped to inform your solution.

So connection to place, you have kuhu, Lani, you have the little ones.

Oh, yeah. Right. You live in Hawaii.

Let's talk about the family for a second. Oh, oh.

Clawback allowances.

Oh, man, I get to give you credit for this.

Wait till you hear this one.

Yeah. OK. Fire away.

John List.

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

John List, 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.

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?

Exactly. So the latter.

We had been struggling with equals a lot more 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 cool, 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?

I 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 do now and we change 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, Polyquo, can you go feed the dogs?

And he's like, we just walked 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?

Like, do you have any on the ship?

And revolt turned into a little bit of sarcasm.

I'm 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.

I looked at who was like, that actually just work.

And they don't get me wrong.

Don't get me wrong.

They're amazing kids.

The 99 percent of the kids.

Yeah, they're little humans.

And now just a couple of weeks ago, I came home and like Polyquo was like,

I just I cleaned the car.

And I was like, what was 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.

Yeah.

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

But like I think you're pretty good parents.

That's what I can tell.

Small trick.

Yeah.

Oh boy.

Yeah.

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

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.

Yeah.

Secret Pinterest boards.

Oh man, this is another one.

For the relationship between you and your wife.

Yeah.

All right.

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

Yeah.

Just us sitting on this table.

Well, I've actually not millions of people.

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 exclusive here first time fair show.

So all of it, 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 of 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 it's just like the worst person ever to try and buy stuff or 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.

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 in birthdays anyways.

And she's like, I will pretend that you did it in every single stage.

No, this is the most important part.

Okay. Yeah, right.

My children think I'm a genius.

Like they'll 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 my girls will look at me like, how did this amazing dad?

Like, how did you know she does it so well?

Half the time I think like, oh my God, I'm amazing.

Like 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

Pinterest 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 from be able to like figure this thing out.

And they all believe it.

And we're never allowed to tell anybody about it.

Oh, what a great secret.

Oh, it is.

So she's done it in front of couples when the guys are just like, how the hell?

Like, how did you know?

I'm like, I just, I just pay attention and I just figure 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 their mama's around

and she looked at me like she was going to kill me.

She's just like, we don't talk about it.

Or else it goes away and it doesn't work.

You know the rules.

Oh, man, bite your tongue.

It's so good.

It is.

She has to not say she has to pretend it's it's real.

And I feel amazing.

And win, win.

Yeah.

Oh, win, win, win, win, win, win on so many levels.

All right.

So I'm going to let you choose where we go next.

Okay.

A whole lady crying on the couch game or tug of war.

Okay.

I'm going to, I'm going to stick with the, my wife's a genius one here

and we'll give her the old lady on the couch game.

Is 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 coach 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 old.

And she's amazing.

Like she really like closes her eyes and she pretend she's 80 years old.

And she says, I'm given the opportunity.

It's my birthday or something.

And I'm giving 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 80.

And she has five minutes to be this 80 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, I'm

like, 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 can put herself in the place of gratitude to be back in

that moment, seeing her kids again after 30 or 40 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 14 and it's got like, it's happening.

Puberty is 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 with him.

I close my eyes and I think when I'm 80 and my knees are sore, what would I feel

to be able to go back and see him at 14 when he's in this place?

Your self-care at 80 is amazing.

If you're just like, when I'm 80 and my knees start hurting, but yeah, I get it.

I got big plans and I got Peter and Tia as my friend.

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 will frustrate you more than anybody in 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'll 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.

Yeah, she's amazing at finding ways to be grateful for.

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. So 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, 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 the stick.

I'm just kind of chilling.

I asked 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.

It's so good.

And this is the perfect reboot.

So thank you, Koo.

Oh, yeah, she's again, she gets vast majority of the credit for anything

that's smart that comes out of my mouth.

Tug of war.

OK, this one, Ricky Lyas, 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 the last parenting one, I promise.

He described parenting as a tug of war you have to lose.

OK, 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 that the reason it 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.

You're like, oh, we got to 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 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 OK.

You're trying to spare them the feeling of being useless.

How does that impact that metaphor or analogy?

How did that affect how you parent or make decisions?

Good example.

Leo, who asked for her like first sleepover,

which we've been pretty stringent about because she'd 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 section, she's 12.

And if you're going to let go of the rope of a little bit,

like this is probably the right situation.

Like you're going to have to let it all the way go.

This is probably the right situation to let it go a little bit.

Make sure it's safe and you call the parents and you figure out what it is.

But it reminds me the best actionable use of it is knowing it has to be gone.

You have to do it eventually.

So like, do you want to let go of 20 feet at once?

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, OK,

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.

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 to ask very early on, which was I asked something along the lines of

how do you ensure that you do not overharvest 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?

And so maybe that ties in just in terms of rules, objectives

that you've set for yourselves as a company.

But broadly speaking, also hopes and goals for the next few years.

OK, so I said that the second first in that.

Our mission is to achieve balance and 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.

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.

And that's really my hope for what we're doing at Maui Nuri is we find the balance

that's best for all of our communities, ecosystem communities, food system

communities, human communities, near shore 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 balance is maybe my hope for

like life as a whole and like personal goals.

I don't have 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 teens.

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 Nui

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.

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.

The whole shebang.

Yeah.

Dig it.

So last question is the billboard question.

This is sometimes a dead end.

So I'll take the blame 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?

Hmm. 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.

Yeah, another book.

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 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 pick up the phone.

But for me, it just, it has constantly iterated

and it's been this crazy thing that has stuck with me for,

I mean, I read that 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. Pick up the phone.

Good reminder. What a good reminder. Jake Meuse.

Fancy. So nice to see you, man.

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

And people can check out Maui Nui at MauiNuiVenison.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, the pepper sticks.

Yeah. That fair enough?

So the pepper sticks, which are, I guess now I know what,

10 to 11 grams of protein per stick, something like that.

So I just throw three.

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 what an adventure.

Yeah. Well, can tell you how much we've appreciated the support

and insight and advice.

So it's been highly impactful as well.

Yeah. What a what a gift it's been to get to know you.

And to realize, like you said, your family is 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.

It really makes a difference when 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 that 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.

A true connection to place, whether personally or professionally

can essentially solve for anything.

Connection to place, Jake Muse.

So great to see you, man.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much, my friend.

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 Doc blog slash 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 until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Mahalo, Nui.

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 one and a half

and two million people subscribed 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.

They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

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 dot blog slash Friday,

type that into your browser, Tim dot blog slash 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?

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 spectacular.

I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time

to 7000 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 day,

which was awesome, the build a business competition and other things.

Plus with 24 seven 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 slash 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 slash Tim.

One more time, Shopify.com slash 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 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 covers 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.

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

wakeups 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 slash Tim all spelled out eightsleep.com slash Tim

and save $250 on the eightsleep pod cover.

That's eightsleep.com slash Tim eightsleep currently ships within the US,

Canada and the UK select countries in the EU and Australia.

Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Tim to save $250 on the eightsleep pod cover.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.