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

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36:53i 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 with respect to access theory you have to see this video it'll blow your mind i put it on instagram we'll link to that in the show notes as well 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 access to 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.

37:35You'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 yeah so you would have been using we're using quadcopters or a different type of drone no we were flying out of a helicopter i was gonna say this would have been very early days with any type of drone technology yeah so we were out of a helicopter leaning out of the helicopter with a binocular yeah it was not a lot of fun um and we were doing it four or five hours a day yeah and that won't make you motion sick or anything yeah so yeah well i've got lots of those stories um anyway takes us another two years essentially but utilizing that technology we're able to find and remove all of those deer including the two that had been born And there were very few invasive species projects that are successful in Hawaii period.

38:39Really 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. 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.

39:25well they didn't realize that mongoose are awake during the day and rats are awake at night oops oops like giant oops so 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 moloka 'i they have mongoose and there's no chickens guess which island doesn't have mongoose kawaii why don't they have mongoose they came to the dock like they were 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 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 kawaii and see a thousand chickens in yeah 30 minutes on the side of the road.

40:24So 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 axis deer on the big island that's how large the big island is and would have been absolutely devastating as we've talked about for like food systems watersheds near shore fisheries etc etc 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 flur technology is highly accurate surveys so through 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 so 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.

41:50We do a complete transect of the entire area at 400 meters with a 20 % overlap. So we can have a confidence interval of like the number of times we've detected deer twice. And we have done several projects where it's in a large fenced area of a couple thousand acres. And we survey, we remove deer, we survey again, and we're never off by more than like 5%. So we have a tool that 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.

42:31The 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 Molokai. 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.

43:09Yep. And that's hence the spotted rats. Yeah, and that dappled coloring was used in those jungled environments, and they camouflage between there and grassland. It's amazing. Japanese deer have the same, similar pattern. 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 right yeah so there are rules that just never been applied yes to this type of harvesting yeah so that three-year hunt was the springboard into successful project completion in that place where there's still no deer and potentially have had a massive impact and then the springboard to maui to try and do something more so i'm gonna do a little like like flashback Austin Powers style or Wayne's World maybe get my Mike Myers stuff mixed up did you learn about confidence intervals playing volleyball I think actually no it was in the worst class of my life with those business statistics in college but ended up being useful yeah I can't you can't imagine how much of that stuff actually comes back yeah 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 ah right i forgot about that right it would be like replacing your ski equipment every year 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.

45:28Your 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 a hundred 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 uh played four or five years there where became a family member for that family of 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 want 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 years but they have a 20 ,000 seat stadium that they filled on a regular basis for men's volleyball.

46:55And 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 spillover of all the soccer fans or football fans, but a huge professional league there that for great players pays extraordinarily well and for me which was not a great player was this amazing opportunity to go to Europe see all of these different places and the professional teams only ever accepted two international players so you were embedded and immediately assimilated into whatever culture you were in it's just such an amazing way to be a part of those places versus some outsider right so that leads into the story of free pizza so my first week playing in Hroningen which was in northern holland gesundheit yeah yeah um yeah well that plays into this story um i was i had had like a week of practice and our first game was coming up and i was still very much like getting used to the language the coach was this like six eight olympic legend he was like this legendary dutch player and i think he was kind of happy i was there but like i was 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 um and then we're playing one of the best teams in the league for the very first game we're doing really well he puts a play together to finish the game i had no idea what he was saying okay what could go wrong completely screw it up like embarrassing level screw up and we lose and after the game he comes aside and broken English and he's just like you play better or we fire you like you weren't playing for fun anymore in college like you were getting paid to play really well and I didn't understand the reason I didn't play well is because I didn't couldn't understand what he was saying so the very next day we were reviewing film and he was going off again and I didn't understand what it was and I just remember putting my hand like putting my hand up and say like does that mean we get free pizza after the game and he's like what and i was like does that mean we get free pizza after the game he's like no that's not what it means and then like you could kind of see his brain be like and he explained like no we're going to be committing on this individual like he explained it in english to me half an hour goes by he's like getting ready to tell us the bus schedule it's all in dutch i have no idea what's going on and i'm like put my hand up and like does that mean we get free pizza and he he's just like he's getting irritated and then he i think it finally collecting is like wait a second we need to be a little bit more patient with this guy yeah and and i tell it as a funny story because it's i used that phrase as i went to indonesia and the maldives and it was this amazing way for me to ask dumb questions because otherwise I was lost.

49:57And 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.

50:34He's from Texas, and he'll be like, you know, I'm just a country boy. I move a little slow, so bear with me. 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 want to look stupid or A, B, C, D, or E.

51:13But in fact, it's a really important question. 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 a 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 get stuff done so much faster.

51:50And 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 of 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 players that that i knew that said like you're not that good how did you get like just being honest here like you're not that good how did you get a contract in europe and i said well i just called everybody till they kept answering and was kind of working with this other player agency anyway found a great way to find mediocre players teams and some of them were only getting a thousand euros a month but they didn't care it was the best thing ever and then got a small percentage of that salary and yeah it was an amazing way to kind of extend that life and it was a lot of fun okay so let's come back to maui nui and there are a whole different number of angles that i i want to take to cover some of what I think are interesting features of things.

53:10And 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.

54:01And also everything is fucking delicious and I like delicious, healthy things. Let's talk about the seven on seven off because this will sound at first description to be a little odd for a lot of folks. 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. And we wanted to give our harvesters enough space to essentially like recover and feel good and be able to come back to work.

54:44And 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 is extraordinarily expensive and we wanted to be as responsible as possible. So we have two full teams, everybody that works seven days on and another team comes in. We essentially work nonstop. We have two teams switching back and forth. So we offered them unlimited overtime.

55:22Can 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 it 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 like it's day four and they're like i haven't had a seven day vacation in three years like what am i supposed to do i'm like 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 100 retention of the people we want and they come back on the start of their seven days and they are the most extraordinary person coming back to us and then they work amazingly well for seven days like that age-old adage of like one person is better than two average is 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 and that combined with other things like i have 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 sure when you're going out at night and you can feel free to switch back and forth or do one first and 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 phase 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 haven't i don't think i've told you this but we just submitted a grant to nasa harvard and mit these phds at harvard and mit found out about what we did, found out we keep an absurd amount of data compared to most agricultural companies.

59:34And 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 the 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.

1:00:17I was freaking out when they were 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 worked. And we are just constantly changing and measuring things.

1:00:49And 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. It 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 like 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 chutes and so on.

1:01:50What 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 wanted 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.

1:02:50Sure. um part of the systems we had to build were we had to follow the federal meat inspection act which the usda is present to make sure that animal is supposed to be harvested humanely ultimately after that animal is processed make sure it's safe to eat that's their two primary functions and in a and i know this is hard for people to hear but if you eat meat like it's what it is in a typical brick and mortar facility that animal is coming in on a trailer moving through a 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 yes 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 yeah paint a visual for people so two inches it's a little bit bigger than say like a silver dollar.

1:04:39So 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? 98 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, with animals moving around.

1:05:24Yeah. With a combination of, so you can imagine, and this may be like leads into what like a night in the field looks like, but you have these Mad Max looking UTVs with forward-looking infrared screens essentially attached. The USDA inspector is sitting right beside you the entire time. And the technology is so good that the heat, the friction the bullet makes passing through the air, the USDA inspector is actually able to see that bullet hit the head of every single animal. And it's just an extraordinary process where the animal is unaware that you're there. And so it is truly, truly wild until the second harvested 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 animals dying and then they agree and connect strongly with that process like it's truly the only stress-free harvesting or slaughter of a animal within our food system 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.

1:06:48So 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 am, love Maui Nui.

1:07:40I'm an investor. So of course I'm biased, but it all came down to, and I think we were initially introduced by Peter Atiyah, the quality, just the pure quality and nutrient density of the product for me, right? 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 at a 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 ate 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 wild harvested.

1:08:36So 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 p.m. making dinner and breakfast together. Some of them are diesel engines. 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.

1:09:10We have these primary sites on all of the different ranches that we work with. So the first thing we're looking at each evening is moving our mobile facilities to another site to get closer to the deer. And the reason is, one of the other rules we have to follow is after that animal is 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. 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...

1:09:49And 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 axis to your decathlete yeah well we have to pick up every single one of these animals and carry them on our backs because you're not allowed to drag them you can either introduce contaminants and or like bruise the meat and it's actually one of my favorite parts of the night is it is the complete opposite of the rest of the meat industry after you've killed this animal for food you're carrying this animal on your back into its next stage of life with the food and there's an individual connection with each one of these animals and it's something that every guy on our team like really takes pride in is being able to like pick up these giant 250 pound animals across like razor sharp lava or all like super 250 that's a big boy yeah 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.

1:11:02You 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.

1:11:43I 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 what 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 great 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 the air to give us a picture of a couple thousand acres to say like deer are going to be in these areas as we get started the forward-looking infrared binocular system that we use i can tell you the difference between a goat and a deer at seven miles so at 150 yards you can see like every hair any abscess like the The USDA being able to say that animal is healthy is achieved through that technology.

1:12:45And 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-free conditions if they're still 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 uh we have a roving team they're called so we have a team of rovers that essentially are the mad max team where they'll collect a couple deer and then they'll move as fast as they can back to where the mobile slaughter and processing facilities are stationed and so they are just cycling back and forth between the harvesting team and the processing teams so it's just this intricate dance and this is all at night on this is 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 and we're like we need to do that in three minutes and they're just like what like we need to do that in three minutes or it's not like you were not going to get back in time and 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 utv means it's kind of like a super tactical mad max golf cart there you go that's a bit larger yeah right yeah so people may have seen like polaris 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 yeah 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 they could use like reminder instead of like get this thing done like we really focused on like individual language and then we basically built a language of harvesting so we have all of these key words so we have all these key words that we use so people don't get confused with what's going on so we've created kind of our own harvest language that allows people not to get confused when we're going really fast and then ultimately we built a system called hhs which stands for humble hungry smart and is largely based on Humble, hungry, smart.

1:18:03Okay, gotcha. So this is 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 okay humility yeah so we created essentially a scorecard it has six questions per category so six for humility six for work ethics six for emotional intelligence questions like do the energy they bring every night is it consistent as in it positive.

1:18:57So 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 there's people's personalities involved and i remember a guy that we were going to hire that was a like brilliant electrical engineer he wanted to quit his job come work with us because he heard about the seven and seven schedule and thought it'd be the best thing ever and then he read it and he didn't call me back i really wanted to hire him and I called him back and I said, any reason you didn't call me back?

1:19:52He's like, I have terrible body language and I'm not willing to quit my job and take the chance within the first month that I get fired for bad body language because we score them. If you're an A, we celebrate and figure out a way for you, reward you. If you're a B, we like find immediate improvements that you need to make 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 do they are they sent on like a test evening prior to hiring or i guess they just know that once they start going out yeah so we call them tryouts but when somebody comes to try out with us which means we give them a month we hire them on but we call them a tryout and at the end of that tryout though which is typically a one month period they get graded by their entire team and they know it's this like really tense moment where how many people are on a given team eight to ten got it yeah so it's a good average so if somebody yeah if somebody's got a bug up their ass about somebody doesn't matter just one person it always ends up being like a great average and it always ends up being a great measure of that person.

1:21:13And 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 people from a field position into a management position. And then all of a sudden their work ethic score started coming down.

1:21:56And 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 we what's the big boss do yeah so we sit them down and we say is that the royal we or Or is it just you?

1:22:34No, no. 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 into the best positions, we immediately move people around positions based on their skill sets. So somebody has to be genuinely happy to train somebody that may replace them in a role that they may enjoy. Yeah, they used to be the right striker or whatever, and then just got replaced.

1:23:08And 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 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 what was that your delivery or the measurement where you just like It was just the measurement was wrong.

1:24:01It's sink 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 averaged. For what it's worth, I've done what's called a 360 interview. And I know people who as executives or founders have had these done and without exception 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 oh and i basically had like a nervous breakdown crisis of meaning the 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.

1:24:59It 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 gonna apply metrics once a year you're gonna 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 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 tenth 20th iteration.

1:26:38What's the language that you use? If somebody has growth opportunities, let's call them. It's really specific to which of the 18 categories they're struggling in. Right, but how does the meeting start? Okay, so we sit down and we're going to give them paper and we say like, okay, you're a B -. Yeah, Tim, we put a 250 pound L on your back, you crumpled into an Oregon crane and you couldn't get up. So you're a B - 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 seas 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 oh absolutely the question So we'll put that in the show notes as well at tim.blogs.podcast because I'm incredibly curious to check it out myself.

1:28:02It's 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 you say compensate so let's say they have because i know this is getting the weeds a bit but i feel like yeah that's where a lot of the good stuff is hiding.

1:28:54So 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 there's seven days of the week. And we talk about like being at excellent every day. So it's one through seven. And then we add up all the scores, which is 126 total, and they get a percentage. So if they're an 87, we give them a B plus. Which is the average for the total. the average how do you reward or compensate the a's if they're in their first six month 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 not always an a this last quarter we make sure the team knows the contribution that they're having and it's already 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 our most highly skilled people as well they just when you operate with a certain level of humility you are more willing to learn and you learn faster and every single person that's come through our program that was like a b minus or a c that was like highly skilled and made the choice not to get better at these like what i very much consider skills just weighted themselves 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.

1:30:50I need to bring more consistent energy every night. Like we've got guys that go up and down and up and down and they're like, okay, I'm going to be trying to be more consistent. Like they know what they're working on. 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.

1:31:26And 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 okay if it were just one person i could maybe dismiss it but no now i'm getting this from multiple people I respect. And it works, man. It really works. And you could do this. I'm just thinking out loud, obviously.

1:32:10I was going to say talking out loud, but that's a bit redundant. I'm just talking out loud here, folks. But you could use this outside of an employment context, right? You could take this HHS and give it to five to 10 people you know and just ask them to be honest. 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, dude, 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.

1:32:51And then we basically design the questions. And yeah, it's been incredible. you get young 25 year olds that come in and their first couple of weeks they're sitting in a meeting and they're hunched over and like they got their hood on and typically that's a hard conversation to have with somebody to say like i need you to sit up take your hood off be an active listener 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 you're gonna get a better score we like you we want to keep you around yeah yeah if you happen to come in late 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 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 linds sioni this is a assigned 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 i've read that book it's really good i have like a lot of anybody that deals with any type of like product strategy i make sure they read that one and i haven't i haven't thought of that book in a long time it's so good confessions of a pricing man and then the the road less stupid okay i don't know this one it is it is one of my favorite like general business books and I'm drawing a blank on the.

1:34:52It's okay. It's memorable. I've read a lot. Actually, Chris Ashton recommended it to me. So those who don't know, Chris Ashton is the founder of AG1, previously Athletic Greens. Yeah. He's been an amazing, the guy's always handed me homework. He's a great operator. Yeah. So again, I'm happy to share like all of the questions. And I think when people see the questions, you can actually, they're tailored to our teams, but it's actually pretty easy to tailor those questions to your specific work format. I haven't quite found a way to move them into the virtual Zoom world, because a lot of them are so tactile in how people work together in workflows.

1:35:28And 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 that. 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... Because 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.

1:36:06Yeah. 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. If you walked into a store tomorrow and you flipped it over and there was two blueberries and one said 92 and one said 76.

1:36:44And 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 it for a long time. And now we're coming back to it.

1:37:19And if you knew the quality of your food, not measured by the five metrics that are currently available, but measured by the thousands of biochemicals that we can now test for, both good and bad, billions of dollars going into this. Like the Patagonia provisions that were like, this is coming for sure. And what was really interesting for us is we got to be one of the first people to be fully tested. so about two years ago we submitted our bone broth to a typical usda fsn lab to make our label and i remember them yeah they called me and they said something's wrong with these bones i was like we sent you like the bone broth they were made from regular bones they had thought we had put like a some form of like protein powder or additional collagen in there because it tested 33 % higher in protein per ounce than anything they'd ever seen.

1:38:14So 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 i don't think so but i do know i know who he is absolutely so we were working with He's helped other people I know.

1:39:04We 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 % 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.

1:39:4420 % wiggle room. Yeah. Up or down, whichever one favors them. Yeah. So Dr. Gustin introduced us to somebody, Dr. Van Vliet at Ustah State University, who has probably 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 disadvanced metabolomic testing. And we just happened to get like tossed in at the end of it. So there's like 200 plus beef. Little spritz of Axis deer. 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-3s so like DHA was 20 times it was just every single category was absurd and then probably the most exciting for me is they measured oxidative stress 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 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.

1:41:43the 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 production 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 Atiyah 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.

1:42:29And that will create these direct relationships with these, what will probably be regenerative agri-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 does leeward mean? It is the windward or the windward side of a slope. Got it. Yeah. Hawaii, Haleakala, has a very particular soil called andesols. And then there are three types of andesols. Andesols are some of 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 andosol soil 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 0.05 % of the world's soils.

1:43:30So we just, 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 Vliet got so excited about is he now has a marker to say when there's an extremely fertile place that's for most part well taken care of in a lot of the areas because they're able to go to the very best areas this is what nutrient density could look like and it's you know two to vitamin a was 800 times in the liver versus some of these beef livers so to come back to one point the dha i don't know if there's epa in access or i have no idea.

1:44:21I'm not a lipidologist if that's the right term. I think there is, yeah. Yeah. So on the omega-3 side, is eating axis deer, in terms of levels of omega-3s, I guess we'd have to think about the sort of concentration per ounce, but is it comparable to eating some types of fish, or would it still be significantly lower? Well, we don't know the answer to that yet, because the study measured it in comparison to beef. Oh, right. I see. Right. So the percentages and so on were benchmarked to beef. So the new piece of equipment that Dr. Van Viet has coming in will be able to give us measures in milligrams, micrograms.

1:44:58We'll know that in the near future here. And this is what ultimately, there's several companies working on this. Audacious is one of them, is an amazing company. 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, okay. A little inside joke because before we press record, we were talking about some very, very well-known professional sports teams who are using Maui Nui to feed their players.

1:45:41And some of these players, for whatever reason just won't eat fish but they will eat now i know well and they blood test every week these extraordinary athletes and we've just started working with a lot of these sports nutritionists and they're going to be able to measure for us if it's having an impact yeah that's cool 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 honey like my wife so excited she's like this comes back to that conversation of innovation is a culture and hawaiians were able to produce extraordinary nutrient-rich foods with finite resources for a million people and hawaii now imports 95 of its food and half of its twinkie level like nutritional value it really points back to our places informing what we're doing and it's really fun to have such a strong connection to place and it helped to inform your solution.

1:46:42So connection to place, you have Kualani, you have the little ones. Oh yeah. Right. You live in Hawaii. Let's talk about the family for a second. Uh-oh. Clawback allowances. Oh man, I get to give you credit for this. Wait till you hear this one. Yeah. Okay. Fire, fire away. John List. Yep. You know, I was just thinking about 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 exactly so the latter we had been struggling with equals a lot more allowances for the kids.

1:47:34And 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 like she's here 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 twenty dollars in ones on the fridge at the beginning of the month.

1:48:22And 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, Paliku, can you go feed the dogs? And he's like, oh, we just walk to the fridge and we pull off a dollar. And it was this amazing exercise over a period of three months. It was straight revolt. Like, what are you talking about? Like, yeah. 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.

1:48:59But other than that, they need to be useful people and earn their money. And so they really value the dollars they get at the end of the month. And it went from mutiny to sarcasm. And I remember it happening. And I remember like asking Leo who to grab the laundry. And she's like, sure. And I was like, wait a second. and i looked at cool i was like that actually just work and they're don't get me wrong don't get me wrong they're amazing kids they're 99 percent of the time yeah they're little humans and now just a couple weeks ago i came home and like public was like i just i cleaned the car and i was like what what's wrong with you like it was this odd thing that like a combination of the clawback allowance and training for attitude instead of them earning for a task yeah it was just this if it helps anybody again we're not amazing parents by any means but like i think i think you're pretty good parents that what i can tell small trick yeah oh boy yeah it it's been a big one for us for sure so i'm gonna 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 um yeah just us sitting at this table well i've actually not millions 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 folks tim ferris show so all of the all of the credit much of my credit goes to my amazing wife but all of the credit for this one goes to her and this has to happen in a very you have to follow the rules for this one or it doesn't work so early on in our relationship i think i'm two years in she's an extraordinary person have no idea what to buy for her i've failed several several times and she's not like she barely will spend a hundred dollars on herself a couple times a year right she's that type of person she thrifts 99 of her clothes etc etc so this is the like the worst person ever to try and buy stuff for she's so picky and she sits me down i give her a birthday if I get it all wrong.

1:51:09She 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 big on 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 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 like she she has fake cried several times she does it in front of her mom the only way this works is i believe half the time that I've done this amazing thing for like that's how important it is and it has been the greatest I never ever think about buying her anything anytime I even like have the slightest inclination I go straight to the 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 for being able to like figure this thing out and they all believe it and we're never allowed to tell anybody about it secret oh it is so she's done it in front of couples and the guys are just like how the hell like how did you know i'm like i just i just pay attention man i just figured it out and she 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 mom was around and she looked at me like she was gonna kill me she's just like we don't talk about it or else it goes away and it doesn't work you know the rules oh man bite your tongue it's so good it is she has to know she has to pretend it's it's real and i feel amazing win win yeah oh win win win win win on so many levels all right so i'm gonna let you choose where we go next okay a whole lady crying on the couch game or tug of war okay i will i'm gonna i'm gonna stick with the my wife's a genius one here and we'll give her the old lady on the couch game 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 I didn't know what was happening.

1:54:11And so I finally asked her, I was like, okay, what is that thing you're doing? And she's like, that's my old lady crying on the couch game. And I'm like, what the, like, what is that? And she said, when I'm feeling frustrated with my kids, I pretend I'm 80 years old. And she's amazing. Like she really like closes her eyes and she pretends she's 80 years old. And she says, I'm given the opportunity. It's my birthday or something. And I'm given the opportunity to use a time machine. but I am only allowed to go back to this exact moment. And she really does it. Like she closes her eyes and she opens her eyes and she's 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 my, she's so cute.

1:55:02And 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 got like, it's happening. Puberty's happening. It's happening, right? And I only have four more years with him until he graduates.

1:55:40And a couple of times I found myself frustrated with him. I closed 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. It's 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 as my friend so um she's a genius it's this in some of the most frustrating moments where you've like kids are like your greatest joy and they will frustrate you more than anybody on the planet can and she's just found this way to have gratitude for that time because it's gone and she calls it old lady crying on the couch game because she cries like she she'll like be tearing up and the kids would be like, oh God, here we go again.

1:56:26And cause they get kissed all over the face and like, oh, you're so small and cute and it's amazing. Yeah. She's, 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.

1:57:08And 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's playing with a stick and 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 yeah so thank you cool oh yeah she's again she's she gets vast majority of the credit for anything that's smart that comes out of my mouth tug war okay this one ricky lias founder of red ventures introduced to me through Peter gets all of the credit, but it was so good.

1:57:52I 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. Okay. And it's really interesting when you have kids and you hold onto 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 like and then they get like six or seven and they give it like a little tug you're like oh well i gotta hold on to this thing and then the best part about that advice is knowing you have to lose so knowing when they're 18 or 19 you have to have fully let go of that rope and the visual that comes to my mind all the time is just this really slow steady release of that rope instead of these giant jumps or like these parenting mistakes that you're not letting them become independent and responsible and useful you're trying to teach them all of these things so that you can let go of the rope at the end of it and they're okay you're trying to spare them the feeling of being useless 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 like wants to go an hour away and sleep in a house and i would like my immediate reaction was no and then the thought in my head was like wait a second she's 12 and if you're gonna like let go of the rope of a little bit like this is probably the right situation like you're gonna have to let it all the way go this is probably the right situation to like let it go a little bit make sure it's safe and you call the parents and you figure out what it is but like it reminds me the best actionable use of it is knowing it has to be gone to do it eventually so like do you want to let go of 20 feet at once yeah not 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.

2:00:16Right. And there'll always be mine or ours, but it's one of the few parenting advice I've ever heard that created like an actionable thing where I said like, okay, I need to make this slow and smooth and the right transition for them. So it's been, thank you, Rick. It's been And 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?

2:01:02if 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 over the next few years. Okay, so I'll answer the second first in that our mission is to achieve balance. In defining balance, we don't actually get to do that, which is probably really important. So we have the tools to make sure we can measure, like we talked about during surveys.

2:01:45We 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.

2:02:28We 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? Like 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 Nui is we find the balance that's best for all of our communities, ecosystem communities, food system communities, human communities, nearshore fisheries.

2:03:12and the great part about what we've talked about today is where there's just so much iteration to what we do and it's so variable that it's the infinite game for us that we're just going to keep doing it every single year trying to find balance because some years you'll have more rain some years you won't and we'll constantly be able to go back to our community and say how is this working what does this look like and i think maybe that's the like balance is maybe my hope for like life as a whole and like personal goals i don't have 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 that rope really slowly and collectively like we've talked about today growing incredible people i never realized how much value I'd find in growing teams.

2:04:05I 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. 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.

2:04:46So 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? I remember thinking about this, listen to your podcast for years. It may not make perfect sense like when you read it, but the first business book I ever read was called The Little Red Book of Selling. It was this like tiny little thing that I got.

2:05:23And 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.

2:06:09So if it, if that billboard said, pick up the phone, that could mean something to somebody really different. Like maybe that's your mom that's calling that you don't want to like pick up the phone but for me it just it has constantly iterated and it's been this crazy thing that has stuck with me for i mean i read the book like 20 years ago and it's just this thing that plays in my head all the time like when i see something that i don't want to do or i know that has to get done immediately i say pick up the phone and i just like i'm able to just do it immediately yeah pick up the phone good reminder what a good reminder jake muse

2:06:46so nice to see you man oh always so good to see you and people can check out maui nui at maui nui venison.com on all the socials at maui nui venison i love this company i love the ethos i love your family i love the impact that it's having and this is not because we're meeting today but if you look at my backpack right now i have three of the what's the right way to describe them pepper sticks 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 just 30 grams ish of protein.

2:07:36I 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, I can't tell you how much we've appreciated the support and insight and advice. So it's been highly impactful as well. Yeah. What a gift it's been to get to know you and to realize, like you said, your family's very down to earth, but connected with the earth in a way that is very aspirational for me. I really think very fondly, I still have photos on my phone of just us sitting around a fire, you know, whether it's having a fire at night and just decompressing or having the most delicious slash shitty instant coffee in the morning, which is just fantastic though.

2:08:33It 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 elevation. And you have that coffee and you're with people you really care about and you feel close to. 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.

2:09:23Connection 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.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 till next time, thanks for tuning in.

2:10:03Mahalo 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 subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

2:10:48And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.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.

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