The Peter Attia Drive - #156 - Jake Muise: Humanely harvesting axis deer while alleviating its impact on Hawaii’s vulnerable ecosystems

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Jake Muise is an avid hunter, environmentalist, and advocate for the preservation of Hawaii’s natural resources. He is the founder of Maui Nui Venison, a company which actively manages Hawaii’s imbalanced population of axis deer by harvesting them as a food resource. In this episode, Jake tells his unbelievable backstory growing up in Northern Alberta before landing in Hawaii on a volleyball scholarship where he fell in love with the islands and the people. Jake explains how axis deer—a non-native species—were brought to the islands and how they have since become imbalanced to the detriment of Hawaii’s precious ecosystems. He goes on to explain the incredible lengths that his company has taken to ensure the most humane harvesting techniques imaginable resulting in a food source that is as clean and healthful as can be. Additionally, Jake and Peter examine what makes meat from axis deer one of the most nutrient-dense red meats on the planet.   We discuss: Upbringing in Northern Alberta, a diet of moose meat, and learning to surf in Nova Scotia (3:35); How volleyball brought Jake to Hawaii where he met the Molokai people (14:00); Jake’s introduction to axis deer (26:30); Pro volleyball in Europe, missing the Olympic team by one spot, and his return to Hawaii (29:00); History of axis deer in Hawaii—how a non-native species came to the islands, and the superpowers that make them so hard to hunt (34:00); A potential catastrophe avoided on The Big Island—The amazing story of how Jake tracked and found axis deer that were secretly brought to The Big Island (52:15); Jake’s work helping ranchers on Maui (1:08:15); The detrimental impact of an imbalanced axis deer population (1:10:30); The incredible evacuation of farm animals from lava-locked land due to a volcano eruption (1:17:00); The creation of Maui Nui Venison—going above and beyond USDA requirements (1:27:00); The most humane way to harvest an animal—the unmatched standards Maui Nui Venison uses to harvest axis deer (1:32:00); Why meat from axis deer is nutritionally superior (and tastes better) than other meats (1:46:00); Why axis deer meat is the best option for those reluctant to eat meat: True nose-to-tail nutrition and ethical harvesting (1:58:15); What a truly balanced population of axis deer on Hawaii would look like (2:06:15); Maui Nui Venison’s charitable work during the COVID crisis (2:12:45); and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/jakemuise Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content and health and wellness. Full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe.

Now without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Jake Muse. Jake is a close friend and we've gotten to know each other very well over the past couple of years and I wanted to sit down with him for quite some time because as I've gotten to know Jake, I've gotten to really understand what it means to harvest true wild game, something that truthfully I'd never really been exposed to until I was introduced to hunting in Hawaii. Jake has an unbelievable backstory which we start with growing up in the Arctic and moving

to the easternmost coast of Canada before getting a scholarship to come to the University of Hawaii to play volleyball. But ultimately what rings true here is Jake's unbelievable passion for Hawaii and for the conservation and preservation of its resources. In this episode we get into a lot of details and truthfully some of them might be difficult for people to understand. I do point that out when we get to them. We talk about the harvesting of access deer and what that technically means. I guess I would encourage you to sort of work through your discomfort. If you are a meat eater, which I am, I think it is important to have some understanding of what is involved in that process.

I think most people can sexually understand it when you go to the grocery store and you buy a steak, it didn't just miraculously show up there, there was a process, but it was only when I became deeply involved in this, that I understood the impact that growing and harvesting food could have on our health. So I do point that out as a point of caution, once we get into this episode, if folks wanna skip ahead, when we get into some of those details.

The other thing I want to say is I have to disclose something, which is that I am an investor in Maui, Newi, Venison. That is the company that Jake is the founder and CEO of. As you can probably tell when you listen to this episode, I'm incredibly passionate about the work Jake is doing. And once we met and I got to understand the impact that they were having on the community, I wanted Jake to scale this thing up and have a broader impact and basically share this with as many people as possible. And so that's why I've become an investor in his company. And I think it's very important that you understand that I have a financial

interest in the success of Jake's company. Finally, along with this podcast, we're going to also announce a subscriber-only benefit. So if you're a subscriber and you would like to try Maui Newy Venison after listening to our conversation, you can head on over to our website and learn more. And of course, if you're not a subscriber and you want to understand those benefits, you can learn more of those as well. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Jake Mead. All right, Jake.

Looking forward to talking about a lot of things today here. Thanks for taking time out of work today. I know it's a busy time of year for you guys. My pleasure, man. I'm definitely looking forward to it. So I don't even know where to begin, man. I almost feel like the easiest way to begin this is to sort of have people kind of get to know your story a little bit sort of the way I've gotten to know it. We're both Canadians. I guess we have that going for us for better or worse. I was reading my son a book yesterday about Canada that one of his Canadian cousins got him.

And I was kind of trying to explain to him, Canada is like the United States. It has provinces instead of states, and he wanted to know which one I was from. And I'm like pointing to Toronto and dead at all this stuff. And then he's looking at the Northern part and he's like, well, what's up there? And I was like, yeah, that's the Arctic. Like most people don't live up there. But of course, most people isn't Jake. So you're growing up in the Arctic, right? Which is kind of

not normal. Yeah. So we grew up in a small town called Rainbow Lake. And Rainbow Lake was technically in the Arctic circle, right up on the Northern Alberta border, closer than the North-Earthors territories. And who was it? I was just having a conversation yesterday with somebody about ice fishing. You try and explain ice fishing to your kid,

and they're just like, what are you talking about? You just sit in a box, in a hole that's potentially four feet deep. Oh, that was the conversation you're having yesterday was, I remember my dad at six feet tall having one of the ice augers where you cut that hole in the ice. And him going all the way down, like burying it at six feet and being like, damn it, and like pulling it out of the hole and not getting to the water. Like, that's how cold it was.

It was a great conversation because I can't wait to introduce my kids to that. It's such an amazing experience and obviously lots of resilience come from living in a place like that. But yeah, we started out. My dad was in the oil industry and we moved around a lot, but it was mostly in northern Alberta and we ended up in a town called rainbow lake that was. A seven hour drive from any other town meaning you were seven hours north of Edmonton all no we were. We were 14 hours north of Edmonton so you were going to like oilers games or anything i went to one oilers game i got to see i would have been. I got to see I would have been eight or nine and we drove all the way down. It took like a day and a half and I got to see Gratsky and Messier.

And like I can still remember walking in and not understanding why they were so big. Like having never been to like a professional sports game before and and just seeing on TV. Like you walk in and the players are huge. Like they just look like giants. So yeah, but part of that isolation was, my dad was a subsistence hunter. And like, I mean, ultimately, I think that's where this conversation goes.

But my dad every single year would shoot a moose. And that's what we ate all winter long. And we would go down to a place closer to Calgary for the summer just to get out of the, like, you remember you got mosquitoes like this big, right? Just to get out of there. And I remember my mom having to essentially pack for eight months, like eight to nine months, she would be collecting groceries like all summer long. And we had a huge trailer that we'd take back up with us to this small town. I think it was only a couple thousand people. And part of that was she wasn't bringing any stakes.

Like she, like I remember telling a story, he's like, we ate fesent Pablo as kids and moose meat. And yeah, so we were definitely, we were definitely way up there. What kind of chores did you have as a kid because I'm Like this morning I asked my daughter to do the dishwasher and then it's like taking the trash out Like these are sort of the these are the chores you do if you live in Toronto or Austin What are the chores of the Arctic?

Well, there was always the inside chores and I remember getting relegated to the bathroom and with three boys That was always a mess, but like I remember having to clean bathrooms, but I remember getting relegated to the bathroom and with three boys that was always a mess, but I remember having to clean bathrooms, but I remember, did you ever have to shovel the roof? No, I was the snow shoveler, and I loved shoveling snow. I did too. Because it was such a good workout, it was amazing. But I guess we never had enough snow

that the roof was at structural risk. So one of the regular chores was you had to shovel the roof. And so you had to like get up there and you would like, you could never do it like from the top because like if everything came, you'd like do it in chunks from the edge. You'd avalanche. Yeah. And then you would of course strategically do it. So you would pile it all up so you could jump off after and have fun. But I remember several winters, the snow bank connected to the roof. And we were able to like

snowboard off the roof into the snow bank. And like we had all it like igles and it was such a yeah, such an interesting experience to live up there. And then you remember, like I can remember being so cold, like you would stop moving. Like I think the early on sets of like hypothermia. And like having to like come in the house and get warmed up and then go back outside. Like I remember my dad telling us, like if you start to feel tired,

you need to come in the house. And he realized that was potentially, like the early onset of hypothermia. And we just thought like, oh, if we're tired, we should come in the house and he realized that was potentially like the early onset of hypothermia and we just thought like, oh, if we're tired, we should come in the house. Did you live in proximity to people who were generationally there, Inuit? I don't know what we would call, I mean, we called them Inuit when I was growing up. I don't know what there's, there's maybe some new politically correct term for Eskimo Inuit. No, we didn't. I think we were primarily in these oil towns.

I remember meeting them because it was odd. It was like a function of diversity. I mean, it was amazing, but it wasn't something that we were really connected to at that point. The reason I was asking is I would be so curious to know what their hunting methods were. Oh, there. Because you want to talk about people

who have truly adapted to that climate. Yeah, and for want to talk about people who have truly adapted to that climate. Yeah. And for eight to ten months, there's not a single leafy green available. Like, you want to chew on a pine cone, it's fine. But, and I think, and I don't know this fear, obviously, the vast majority of their diet was meat. Because that was the only thing available. I can remember the taste of mousse meat.

Like mousse, mousse, the nickname up there was called swamp donkeys. Because the vast majority of the summer, they spent their time in swamps and they were eating all of these legumes or lily pads or all of these things that were floating around. And there was like a really distinct taste to them. It was so interesting.

So, and then all of a sudden, everything would melt. Like, it was this extreme melt-off. Everything would be like absolutely muddy for an entire month. Like, you couldn't move anywhere. Like, it was such a mess. I just remember my mom yelling at us about, like, mud being in the house. And then we'd pack up and head south for the summer. And it was this this cycle for several years before I moved out to Nova Scotia, Canada, on the east coast of Canada, when we were 16. The other thing that came out of reading my son this story yesterday was explaining to him that I'd never been east of Quebec City, which is kind of weird. Like I grew up in Canada, but

you know, go to Montreal, went to Quebec City once, never been to Nova Scotia, which I always, is something I always wanna see, because the East Coast of Canada looks breathtaking to me in many ways. You know, I'd love to see St. John's. I'd like to go to the very tip of Canada. So Nova Scotia is obviously like, you might as well be moving to the Caribbean

from the Arctic, but it's still cold water, right? Yeah, I mean, it's, there's still like slush that forms in the sea water during the winter. It's still absolutely freezing. And there was still tons of snow, but the temperatures were just so much more moderate throughout the year. There was, like, there wasn't these crazy, you know,

ups and downs. And that was where, talk about freezing. That was where we started where I started surfing. So, you've experienced this in the Great Lakes. Like, the biggest waves were like these wind waves and like, wind swell on the lake was like the greatest thing ever as a kid. You were just like, these are the biggest waves of my life.

And we showed up and I remember like, getting to Canada and one of the first things my dad did was take us to the beach. And I think he already knew what was gonna happen and took us to the beach and we just couldn't believe like the size of these waves and we were playing in the waves and then we thought we saw Seals out at one of the points and Then one of these seals stands up on a surfboard Because they're in like a full black wetsuit and one of these seals like stand and I can remember it like they stand up on the surfboard because they're in like a full black wetsuit. One of these seals like stand and I can

remember it like they stand up on the surfboard and me and my like little brother looked at each other we were just like like we were done we're like we need to do that. And that started a long and semi-dainery career in surfing in Nova Scotia. It was just so cold and the best swell was always during the winter months and we couldn't afford like good wetsuits and we still wear tukes. What are they called beanies here in Hawaii? We still wear a tuk in the water and try not to ductive thinking that like that would help. And how many millimeters were your wetsuits? Well, we didn't have any to start.

So we would go for as long as we could like into September, October, and then like you literally couldn't even get in the water. It was so cold. And then I remember we're getting the first, the first wetsuit I got was an old Navy dive suit. And it was four millimeters. And like literally could not move my arms like it was just like a, it was so thick. Literally could not move my arms like it was just like a thick and But we I mean we did my parents couldn't afford any of that stuff like I couldn't extend my hockey career because my dad couldn't afford Skates fast enough. We were growing out of them like the first surfboard we made we went to what is Canadian tire went to Canadian tire and

Bought a bunch of styrofoam and duct taped it together and that was like our first surfboard And then gradually things got better like instead of shoveling snow for money I started a little grass cutting company of my own in our neighborhood and we started saving money and we were able to Buy like our first real wetsuit and then buy like our first real surfboard and and just fell in love with the ocean and then obviously I mean it's jumping forward, but the move to Hawaii after that. He can imagine the University of Hawaii calling and saying, want you to come out here. I was like, wait, where do I sign?

Yeah, let's let's back up for a second. In all of this business, where do you discover your passion for volleyball? Because that's obviously what got you out to Hawaii. The last year we were in Northern Alberta, you know how it goes, you always do what your older brother does, right? You've got an older brother or is he younger? No, no, I'm the oldest. Here the oldest. So whatever Josh did, I did. And Josh started playing volleyball.

And I remember just going to a couple of practices. And I don't know if it's because we jumped on the trampoline so much as a kid, playing volleyball and I remember just going to a couple of practices. And I don't know if it's because we jumped on the trampoline so much as a kid, or I did martial arts for a while, I did Taekwondo. We picked it up pretty fast because we were coordinated. And then we moved and it was probably my saving grace when we moved into Nova Scotia because it was a skill set I had that let me meet a whole bunch of people and I think my parents just doubled down on it and saying like we're just going to stick them in a whole bunch of volleyball like whether it was middle school or club ball,

it was just such a great way to integrate us into a new community at the age of 15, 16 when it's pretty awkward. And I did I think every other sport under the sun, like through high school, but it was the one that stuck. And it was one of those things, like, you know, driving or bow hunting for you, like you just never hesitated to do more and more and more of it.

So it was something that we fall in love with and got to do that at a really high level for, like through the teens, including like Canada's Youth Olympic program, and then like junior Olympic programs and then it was actually at a junior Olympic program that the University Hawaii saw me play and you know what was hilarious is I found out later what sealed the deal was so Tino Reyes who was like the assistant coach, I sent him pictures of us surfing

with icebergs in the background. And I guess they were on the fence about me because I'm small, like I'm only six feet tall. And he fought for me saying, if this kid can do this, whatever we're gonna get, like the level of resiliency we're gonna get out of him, it's gonna be worth it,

even if we're losing a couple inches. So yeah, that helped me get there. And I mean, volleyball's taking me all over the world. It's been amazing. So you arrived to this amazing Division I volleyball school at literally the furthest place you can go. I don't think you can stay in North America and go further than Nova Scotia to Oahu. Can you, I mean, I guess you could have gone to...

Maybe somewhere in the future. ...co-a-tea or something. Yeah. But okay, so you've gone as far as possible. How much of a culture shock is that and how quickly do you kind of assimilate? Because there's actually kind of some similarities, I think, in the culture as well, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think the initial shocks were tiny.

I remember, oh, here's the good one. When I came on my recruiting trip, they were obviously really smart. They were like, here's the university. Here's this amazing stadium that holds 10,000 people. They got their best attendance for volleyball in the country. And then they take me to the beach and they're like, here's a pair of board shorts and here's a surfboard goal for it we're going to pick up tomorrow.

And they had dropped me off at my hotel. And you'll love this as a Canadian. I go to put the board shorts on. And I'm like, where's the liner? Like, where's the white stuff? like, where's the liner? Like, where's the white stuff? Like, where's the liner? And obviously every pair of shorts I'm wearing, like we didn't even, board shorts didn't even exist in Canada in 1999.

And like, I remember like being so confused and I was like, what must mean I have to wear my underwear with these things? Which of course you're not supposed to do. So I put the tidy whiteies on, underneath the board shorts, tie them up, head out to like Kaiser bowls, which is like a straight local break. Like it was right in front of the hotel. And I'm paddling out with like the tidy whiteies hanging out the back.

And like locals are looking at me and just shaking their head like, oh, what a like and pasty white. So like there were definitely some incremental culture shocks, including realizing that your shorts didn't have to have liners in them. And then when I got to the University of Hawaii, so that would, Richard and Chip was the spring before,

and then when I arrived in September, also like a accidental shock, which turned out to be the best, probably the best thing in my life, was they messed up my dorm assignment. And they put me, and this is where, like, all of the folks you know come into play, they put me in the dorm for all of the local kids that didn't have good enough grades, so they were taking the summer program to get into school. And they happened to throw me in the wing with all the molokai kids. And the recruiting trip was so short, like I remember seeing different things, but like, I had never been around a Polynesian population before. And you're astounded how big these people

are. And so I remember walking in the front door at Johnson Hall, opening up the door, they're all sitting around playing music. They're playing ukulele. The biggest person I've ever seen in my life, like six, two, three hundred pounds, had an ukulele that looked like this big, like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, he's playing music.

And they're like, you in the right place? And I was like, Johnson Hall B? They're like, yeah, I was like room 201. And I was like, yeah, and they're just like dead silence. And there's like eight of them. And they're like, yeah, I was like room 201 and I was like, yeah, and they're just like dead silence. And there's like eight of them. And they're like, the biggest one was like, boy, we're gonna eat you. And I was just like, and true, monocultie fashion, true, a lot of fashion, best friends, like literally after that statement. They're like, well, you're here. We're gonna take care of you. like literally after that statement. They're like, well, you're here,

we're gonna take care of you. And that's like there's this resounding theme here that they'll always give somebody the chance up front. They will always assume everybody's best interest in mine until you don't. And there's the best thing that ever happened in my life. They took me under their wing and all of the best parts of my life

have come from walking into the wrong dorm for sure. Let's hit pause for one second and give people a little bit of an understanding about what is so unique about Molokai because for many people listening to this podcast, they'll certainly understand the big island, Kona, and most people have, you know, if they've gone to Hawaii, they've probably been to Maui and people understand that, you know, Honolulu sits on Oahu and that's the most populous island. So you've sort of got these three islands that get all of the attention. But then there's some other islands that are a little less understood.

And sort of, you know, you go into the more exotic, you go out to Kauai and people would maybe even go to Linae. But Mola Kai is very rarely touched. I feel privileged to have been there several times. It, to me, is a very special place, but I think it's worth spending a few moments diving into what you just talked about, which is, tell us about this island, both from its geography and perhaps more importantly,

its culture, and why that would lead you to conclude what you've concluded since. I mean, no part of what I'm about to say is going to justify how special that place is. I'll start there. It's 10 miles by 30 miles. I think it's about 180,000 acres. And there are 7,000 people. And that population is, I think, stayed the same for a long time. And of those 7,000 people, I would guess 6,000 of them are true locals. Like it is very much an island of a local population and certainly one of the higher per density populations of Hawaiians as well. What makes it so special is they have fought for years and years and years to keep Molokai

the exact same way it has always been. There's no stoplights, there's no major resorts, me. There's a few that came up in the 80s. No escalators. There's actually a town ordinance that says no building can exceed the height of the tallest palm tree on the island. Yes, and the people there are so active in maintaining this community. There's no people I'm gonna cut you that are hungry, but you don't see homeless people downtown.

It's an extraordinary place. They really do care for all of the members of their community as best they can. And on top of that is, I think the vast majority of the food there, maybe not vast majority, but I'd say 50 Fissi, comes from the ocean or comes from the land. So there either are subsistence hunting, so there's deer, blackbuck, goats, and pigs on

that island. Or more importantly, the ocean, they have the longest standing reef in Hawaii on the South Shore of Mollokai. The ocean is teaming with I mean, it's still teaming with fish and people are constantly eating it. So all of these things like They fought to protect all of these natural resources. They fought to protect their way of life because Mollika is beaches are extraordinary like there's no They're probably the nicest in the state. Like you could easily put up a rich carl tin or something else there, but the community has said no. There was a failed

attempt to put up a fancy resort on the North Shore, wasn't there? Yeah, La-Au Point, and they fought for years and years and years, and they won. And that comes with consequences as a function of economics, and they don't care. Like everybody said, this is the way we want to live. The community at large has said, we don't need to look like a wiki ki, we don't need to look like a Maui. And coming from Northern Alberta and Canada as a whole, I think, there are so many similarities in culture. I think that's what made it really easy for me to assimilate into that place and like

find so much comfort in those visits. And part of that was the East Coast of Canada was so damn far that I couldn't afford, but I couldn't go back. It was just too much of a haul to go back and forth. So every long weekend or Christmas break or any like they pick me up and like the family said they're coming with us. It was just an overnight they called it Hanai. It's a Hawaiian word for adoption. So I was denied by the same family as Mike, good friend of mine, incredible human being, incredible hunter. So I was denied by that same family and

it's history. Like I've been a part of that family as long as I've been a part of my, you know, that family in Canada. So yeah, just so lucky and so fortunate to get to be a part of that place and part of my adult life. Like I grew up as a function of that place and the cultural values it has. Yeah. Well, we're going to come back to Mike. I'm sure because he's one of my favorite people on the planet and some of my favorite images are just the thoughts of Mike as a teenager, like the concept of high school Mike is so funny to me just. Oh, man, it was the best. Yeah, yeah, I love that idea. Yeah, we'll definitely get back into that for sure. So let's just briefly kind of get through, so you you end up having a very successful career at the university, Hoai.

You guys win the NCAA title during one of your years, right? Oh, man. Yeah, we win it and then it gets taken back. Oh, I don't think I knew that part. A little bit of a, like, well, it's a long story, but we win the title. Some rules get changed after the title is won for political reasons.

Then they take the title away. It was a mess, but yeah, we were top three in the country every single year. An incredible program in integrating that into just regular college life as a whole, tossing on top of that, like a student athlete schedule. I think you lots of lessons learned there as well? And then obviously post college, I continued that career into Europe. But that entire time like being, you know, being able to go to Moldocut, and learning more about that culture, learning more about access to your, it was an amazing experience. And as an athlete, and I don't think I really realize this till like the third year, because your first two years,

you're still 19 and 20, you're probably an idiot anyway. Like, I remember in my third year thinking, I feel so much better when I have deer meat in my freezer. So we were going back and hunting and bring, like we were broke, like, I had a starve through college without access to you. Like, we were going back hunting, jumping on like the super tiny plane like filling up coolers that were way overweight and then bargaining with people on our floor for freezer space were like okay we'll give

you a couple pounds if like you store 10 pounds in your freezer and I remember in my in my third year as I like I think I started like realizing how the benefits of building strength and lifting weights and all of those things. And I remember thinking like, man, I feel so much better when I have access to your year. Yeah, so they kind of all got intertwined. And college was just such an amazing experience to combine those two things. You know, obviously we're going to talk in such depth about access to your at the time how much did you understand was it frankly just like oh yeah this is kind of a local pest here and you know this is something

that we hunt here because it's so prevalent or did how much did you understand the history of how they got there and what the true significance ecologically was but did you did you know any of that at the time I honestly didn't. It was entirely recreational. It was only later when I saw the first instance of... There's these periods where there's too many access to you and essentially they'll lay down and die. They don't have any feed. It was only when I started seeing the impact

that I started saying, wait a second, because that animal on the island of Molocai is revered. Like nobody's running around Molocai calling it an invasive species. That's been a part of that culture for 100 plus years. They find extreme value in it. They understand the detriment that it's there. And I think there's hope for better management options in the future. But when the family introduced me to it, they didn't introduce it to me as the idea of it's an

invasive pest we need to control. It was introduced as this is an amazing resource that we get to utilize and something we really enjoy recreationally. And I didn't know anything more than that. It wasn't, again, it wasn't until I experienced or saw some of those things that started to kind of put it together. So post college you go off to Europe, you're playing professional volleyball, and you decide you're going to try out for the Canadian Olympic team. Obviously you don't get to make that choice just willy-nilly. You have to be invited, you're good enough, you go to camp and you come up one short, right? Yeah.

Which by anybody's standard is remarkable, right? To be the last guy that almost made it to the Olympic team and Canada's a very good team in volleyball, right? Yeah. They're top 10 in the world. Yeah, it's like in swimming in the United States, that poor person who finishes third at the Olympic trials, because the United States, that poor person who finishes third at the Olympic trials, because the United States only takes two per event,

that person who finishes third would easily be in the finals for most events in swimming. So it's sort of similar how heartbreaking is this? I mean, I was honest, I don't think I've ever talked about this with anybody. I was devastated. Like I flew, I closed my contract in Bali a month early, flew back to Canada to like make it to tryouts. I thought I had like an

incredible tryout and they just had this guy that and it's guy I'd looked up to. He just had this guy there for eight years and he was so calm and such a phenom. And Canada had one of its best teams ever. So it wasn't like, this is going to be a building here. This was like, we're going to try and get our best placement in the Olympics ever. And they did. And they just, yeah, said you're one short.

And it was amazing because that was the last goal I had. That was the last goal I had. That was the last goal I had for my volleyball career after, who even knows hundreds of thousands of hours, and just remember thinking like, what now? And the first thing was, well, I'm going to motify. Like, like, I had zero plans. Like, my plan was I was going to stay in Canada for the indefinitely in train with the Olympic team. That was the plan. I hadn't thought of any other alternative.

Yeah, so this is Athens game. So did you think that, okay, I'm going to make the Olympic team, we're going to go off to Athens, I'm going to come back and then I'm going to do what? Did you think I'm going to coach or did you always think you were going to go back to Hawaii? So I had to take a little step back

because my capstone class in college for marketing and management, I wrote a business plan that actually won to mimic the model of New Zealand and domesticate access to year. So near the end of college, I started to formulate these ideas of what could we do that was a better option. And so, the two years in Europe, I started a nonprofit called the Axis Deer Institute. And well, you're good, buddy, so I can tell you this. It was a complete farce because nobody would give me any of the studies out of India.

So, now you get those little snippets when you go on Google, you can like pull up a study and you get the snippet, but you can't download the whole thing through the Capstone class in college. I was trying to collect all of this population information on an act of steer or biological like I was trying to figure it out. And nobody would give me any information. So I started a nonprofit called the Access De-Institute. So on an email to somebody, I could say,

hey, this is Jake Musuthy. I'm the executive director of the Access De-Institute. I'm still in college now. We'd love to get this study to incorporate with what we're doing here in Hawaii. And all of a sudden, all of these studies started flooding in. I was like, this is amazing. So I had all of this information

and that came with me to Europe. That was like kind of my past time in Europe was digging into all of those things. So to answer your question of what was the plan after that, at that point it was, what can we do? That was like the next obsession and passion was, what can we do to better manage access to here? So that was already a part of the thought process. So there was a little bit of a backdrop when

I remember sitting in front of the two coaches and them saying, yeah, you're you're not gonna make it. And like I didn't even have a return flight because like this is one way. And I called my mom and said, I'm going to Hawaii. And interestingly enough, I landed when straight to Molocai and four days later met my wife on Molocai. And that started, I mean, started a whole bunch of things, but spent the summer there, played another year in Europe. And while in Europe, she said, well, what are we doing?

Like, let's go home and do this thing. Make babies, let's just do it. And that was it. Like, that was the trigger to say, okay, like we're going home. So that's how I found my way back to Hawaii permanently was through Moldoka-E, and my wife is strong Moldoka-E. And Axistir was already there. Well, I didn't know what I was going to do, but it was there.

Let's now go back and explain to folks what these Axistir are, how they got to Hawaii, how many of them there are, where they are. Because again, now it starts to kind of dovetail into my obsession, which is relatively new. This is an obsession for me personally that's only been going on for two years, and that coincides with when you and I met. So before you give the real story, I will just say at a distance that my attraction to access to you can only be described as a love at first sight. Growing up in Canada, you see white tail all day long.

I basically just saw them as things not to hit with your car. That is basically like, you know, this is like, this is a thing you don't want to hit. Yeah. They weren't an issue in Toronto where I grew up, but because my dad had a quarry outside of Toronto, my dad had a couple of quarries north of Toronto where we would spend some time. That's where you would really see, you know, the white tail. But it was something very different the first time I laid eyes on an axis deer, which was, oh, that's a totally different animal. Like that's regal, right? That's that's breathtaking. And obviously, as we get more and

more into this discussion, when you start to talk about what it means to hunt that deer and what it means to harvest that deer and what it means to eat that deer. Again, it just lives in kind of its own category. But this is obviously not a species of deer that is native to Hawaii. So how did it get there and where did it come from? Okay. 1868, King Camemia, the fifth 1968 King Kamehameha the fifth Hired the Matheson trading company to get them out of India My wife Kuhu she translates Hawaiian newspapers Odd sidebar here only 5% of Hawaii's newspapers are translated

So 95% of their history is buried in there. So she helps translate newspapers But she's found she can search them digitally by Hawaiian words. So she's found all these incredible articles and the article explains them coming down the Yangtze River on a boat called the Loch Nagar. Them arriving on a Wahoo, there were two box and five doves. And just for folks who maybe don't aren't familiar with the ear, the box are the males, the females are the doves. Yeah.

And so they stay on the ship on a Wahoo. And actually, on the way from a Wahoo to Muala Kahi, a baby Bach was born and they named it King Kameh with a fifth. And they arrive on Muala Kahi. So they're only placed on the island of Molokai. None were put on a wahu. And they put a kapu, they put a restriction on harvesting them

for the local people there. They were at that point, the King's deer. And they didn't understand this animal. I still don't know why he sought this particular animal. At that point, how are you was trading with people all over the Pacific and they could have done white tail or elk, I mean, who knows?

So it's really interesting to understand, like, I don't know why he picked that particular animal. I mean, it is beautiful. Exactly. Yeah, and maybe that's what it was, but they get to the small island of Molokite and they start to proliferate very quickly. And I think as early as, I think it was 1898,

there's articles about them thinking there was estimating, there were 7,000 deer, and they were already decimating what they were describing in the Upland Forest. And the subsequent year, there's an article about them hiring shooters, they called them Sharp shooters from California, and the Sharp shooters from California recorded killing 5,000 deer. And it's amazing, like, at the same time, a couple of years later, there's an article in the then, what would have been like territorial government about them arguing over the management of Axis deer and

Two of actually the Hawaiian reps were saying we have to do something about this Like they're gonna continue to destroy our upland forests So as as far back as what is that that's a hundred years ago as far back as a hundred years ago people were already recognizing the impacts of access to your having on the communities. What's their replication cycle? How long is their gestation cycle? How many babies and, you know, bubble blah? Gestational period is 238 days.

It's very similar to humans, yeah, right? Yeah, so three fawns, sort of three baby deer, every two years. They don't do twins, but what makes Axis deer so prolific and they're one of the very few deer species in the planet that are like this, is a deer every year, it's called casting their antlers. So a deer every year, their antlers fall off,

and during that period where their antlers fall off. And during that period where the antlers fall off, their testosterone levels drop and their sperm is not viable for reproduction. So you'll see those long periods and I'm sure that's evolutionary throughout the winters, etc. So access to your are a tropical species. And when they cast their antlers, their testosterone levels stay high enough to breed year round.

So their population dynamics look like 33% a year. Like they look like those hockey stick curves once they get started. And I'm sure Kim and me have a fifth had no idea that was the case. And you toss in, I I mean you've seen these animals They're extraordinarily healthy We take data on every single animal we harvest and of the 15,000 year we've harvested

Of those doves of those females 89% are lactating or pregnant at the time of harvest so are lactating or pregnant at the time of harvest. So, they are such a prolific species. And then you put them in Hawaii where there's obviously no predators, perfect feed that can jump six to eight foot fences and move wherever they need to to maintain their own health. And you've got a pretty astounding,

well invasive species, but also resource. That's part of the thing too, is, you know, the other day I posted something on Instagram, something archery related, and, you know, someone asked a comment, which was, I don't see the sport in this, how hard can it be to shoot a deer with a bow and an arrow? They're actually very inquisitive. Like, you know, again, I'm not normally one to get into discussions on Instagram, but you could tell this person really asked from a point of inquisition. And that's not an uncommon question. And I didn't get into it on Instagram. But if I'm in, if someone asked me that question,

I typically say, look, you're absolutely right. I mean, there are some animals where shooting a pig isn't the hardest thing in a world, but every animal does have a superpower, and you need to know that. So for example, with pigs, their superpower is smell. They can smell you at a very great distance. And so if you are not downwind of them, they will sniff you out. You don't just walk up to a pig and take a shot at it.

You have to at least use its capacity for smell, which is so far an excess of our as you're advantaged. We've talked about mouflon, right? Mouflon, we have a superpower of psych, and it's sort of comical what they can see. The thing I sort of explained to people when they ask me, why are you so interested in this access, dear, is I say, as far as I can tell, they have three superpowers. They're sense of smell, they're vision, and they're hearing. They're preternatural. I mean, this animal is so superior to us on at least those three senses that it's about as hard as any animal to get within a hundred yards of. You have to be doing

everything right to get within a hundred yards of it, and that's not close enough to take a shot, by the way, with a bow. So then you really have to do something heroic if you want to be able to take that shot. So that's sort of an aside, but I think it comes to this point, which is this is an animal that spent a billion years evolving to escape tigers. And jaguars? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like it honed its skill in an evolutionary environment that was remarkable.

And you know, when you consider how clumsy we would be relative to the animals it evolved to avoid. In some ways, it's amazing we can ever get near them. Yeah, and it goes a little bit deeper because you look at, I mean, tigers are probably one of the most efficient predators on the planet. Tigers are probably one of the most efficient predators on the planet, but then you look at how Axis deer, like what their natural habitat is, and there are fringe grazers throughout the Indian, like forests and plains. So they had to evolve all of these evasive skills

in thick jungle. And I think there's a fourth sense sometime because I'm like they didn't see me, they didn't hear me, it wins perfect. I'm like there's no way. And I think they to evade tigers in dense brush and foliage and like they would have had to have such incredible observational skills. And I think that's where you see it in India, they team up with monkeys. And they use like monkeys as alarms in Hawaii. They'll team up with like minor birds. Like they are so advanced. And you're right. Like 100 yards and you're like, this is amazing. And then even if inside of 50 yards,

they can dodge an arrow unless they are completely oblivious. So you, I mean, we've, how many times have you seen this? We'll come back to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll come back to that for sure. I agree with you, by the way. I think there's a pattern recognition that they have, that other animals might not have to the same extent, which is, it's like they know

in a certain situation, even if they can't smell, see, or hear you, there's the potential risk that something could be there, and that's enough to make them skittish. Yeah, they are relying on third party information. Like they're not relying on just their own, they're so tuned in to their environment. And I think it plays into,

they have one of the smallest home range of deer as well. So they encompass and they're highly opportunistic, so they'll bounce around from the area. So I think when they find places that are safe and they recognize that both as a function of probably like feed and water, but what inputs they're getting from their surrounding environment, they stay there. So to the person's point on Instagram, I mean, you'd hear this from every hunter.

Like if you can successfully harvest an access deer with a bowl, you can do almost any other animal on the planet. And to your credit, you're getting pretty good at it, my friend. So let's go back to your arrival to Molocai. Are you now back in contact with Mikey? What is he doing at this point in time? And because obviously I know where I want to go with this story is how you guys get into basically the rescue side of this.

And the most amazing story is where we're gonna go with those accesses here that make their way over to the big island. Help me with that path. Well, Mikey's always my first call. And so for the folks listening, Mikey is the second adopted son to this family. So we're both an adopted son to this family.

And Mikey's my first, one of my first phone calls after knowing I was going to Monica because I'm like Mikey, what are you doing? I'm coming home. The plan was we were gonna put our backpacks on and we were gonna go hunt at least four or five areas that we'd never been to. We weren't even sure if you could walk to. But we're like we're gonna find out what's over there. I met my wife and Mikey was like, what happened to our plans? And I'm like, well, but Mikey was always that first call for me. He was he was my partner. So in coming back, it actually took a little while. There was no opportunity to

do rate in front of me. And I didn't have like, I had a little bit of money saved up via volleyball, but I also didn't have like the answer yet. I didn't quite know what was gonna do. So like, it was always this like instance of learning more and Mikey was my hunting partner and great story. I actually bought and sold a real estate publication for a year. I then got a job managing a pest control company.

So doing fumigations, those huge tarps on your back. And the place was a mess, guess who the first person I called was. I was like, Mikey, you're going to be my lead fumigator. We're going to show everybody, like, Mikey's putting like 200 pound tarps on his back and like going up and down ladders like he's a squirrel. Me and Mikey crushed that business for three or four years or about three years. And then in and amongst doing all that, the access to the interest that was still going, we're collecting all of this information, we're starting

to actually help other folks better understand access to with the information we were collecting. And then somebody illegally dropped off deer on the big island, which is all of the islands can fit within the big island. It's the big island for a reason it's Hawaii Island. Somebody illegally drops off Axis deer, and we happen to be, you know, the Axis deer institute, but me and Mike happen to be the experts on Axis Deer, maybe accidentally. Anyway, just wanted to pause. I want to come back to this right away. But I don't think I knew that I think I didn't know the story about you being the Axis Deer

Institute. I love that. And we're going to come up with a logo. Nick is going to come up with a logo for that. I've got a t-shirt. It's old. You can have it. Like I actually made t-shirt. It's old. You can have it. All right. Like I actually like made t-shirts. But I think one part of the story we missed was that by this point in time two other islands are now inhabited by Axis'

year. L'Anneye and Maui, how and when did that happen relative to the 1860s with the initial introduction to Muala Kaii? In the 1920s, the then owner of the island of Lonei, a really amazing story about how they round up all the deer, but they chose to introduce deer from Molokai to Lonei. Lonei is half the size of Molokai. Very, very shortly, that population became fully established at what we call carrying capacity. The overall population of deer is only going up and down each year with available feed

and or how many fans are surviving. And a survey five years ago, there was 21,000 access deer on this very, very small island. Which topographically doesn't have anything in common with Mollika. I mean Mollika, I believe, has the tallest, the highest freshwater waterfalls in the world. I mean, it looks like something out of Jurassic Park. It is not anything like what people think of when they think of Hawaii. Yeah, absolutely. And I think to that point,

it shows how adaptable access to your really are to become established so quickly, regardless of the environment. So the next phase, which is really interesting, so deer are introduced to Maui in the 1960s, but under controversy. You think, by now, there's common knowledge that there are issues with this animal. And they had, if I remember correctly, they had about 20 deer in a pan on La La Yie. And 10 of them were slated for Maui, and 10 of them were slated for the Big Island.

And the cattlemen's association on the Big Island, and I remember reading stories about like, national park reps from across the country. There's this huge outcry on the big island that said, no way. We're not bringing this animal to the big island. It'll be detrimental. And this is the state now. So this isn't like a private introduction.

This is the state saying, I think it's in the island's best interest to move more of these access deer around. So, long story short, the big island says no, they get introduced to the island of Maui. Maui's 460,000 acres. So, the population on Maui is still what we consider an emerging population. So, they're continuing to grow. They haven't reached caring capacity. So this year, we estimate the population on Maui to be about 60,000 dear, but the population will max out at 210,000 dear. And essentially, Maui is another very dynamic landscape that looks in some areas completely different than Molokai, but they'll find all of those places and they'll they'll feel themselves in unless we're able to, you know, get ahead of that.

And just to round it out, where is Molokaii today population wise? It's an estimate because we don't have a full survey, but I would say Molokaii is at about 60 to 70,000 deer. And remember, there's only 7,000 people. And probably the best way, oh, this will be really interesting. How far are you from what they consider Texas Hill country? Isn't it outside Austin? Yeah, we're three hours from, I mean, we're,

depends, but we're three hours from where the access deer are in Texas, which is, I think the only other state that has access deer, right? I don't think any of that state in the US has access to your, but that's why I'm in Texas. No. Where I'm going with this is, I remember reading a whole bunch of studies on dear densities per acre. And Texas Hill Country had the densest deer acreage, or the densest number of deer per

acre at about six per 100 acres, and like Wisconsin and Mississippi was behind that, Hawaii in established areas has 25 deer per 100 acres. So at least three X, whatever the dentist's deer populations on the continent are. So yeah, that's how they get to the three main islands. And then in, I think it was 2010 or 11, was when that introduction by private individuals, it wasn't the state, they decided they were gonna trap deer on Maui, fly them to the big island, via helicopter, drop them off.

How many deer did they take? They dropped off four. Two and two. Three doves in a buck. And they do it quietly. And nobody finds out about it till about a year and a half later. And that's when there was like, wait, there's a camera trap image. Actually, a rancher saw it.

They called me in Mike because we were already closely tied to, I mean, both my wife's family and my Hannai family are in the conservation community. And so we found out about it right away. And everybody said, if you got any chance to like finding these things, here's the two guys to ask. And we went out and looked in the area. Actually, I remember doing this, the area they dropped them off,

they didn't know where they were. Somebody had just seen one in passing on the road. The area was the size of Molokai. It was 70 square miles was like the management area. So I remember like getting to the first one and be like, we think there's deer in here. It's like a 70 square mile area. And I just remember thinking,

how the hell are we gonna find these animals? And me and Mike already knew how extraordinary these animals were to find even when there were there's thousands of them. Yeah, I mean, it's safe to say at this point, you and Mike know almost as much as any two people about their behavior now going back to Mike growing up on Mola Gai. I mean, literally walking to school every day, hunting, eating this animal every day.

I mean, and I've hunted with Mike, which is one of the most remarkable experiences anyone can have. This is basically a guy who knows everything. This is the closest human to an Axis year. Like, he's almost able to sprout antlers of his own. That's as close as we will get in our evolution to them. He just knows where they go. Yeah.

But this is the government that this is basically the state is saying we have a problem because we've got these three potentially more deer on the Big Island. And if this thing's left unchecked, it's going to be a catastrophe. Millions of deer. Yeah. And the Big Island being like our primary egg hub,

our primary food hub for, and these obviously actually deer eat almost anything. So it started a three year project and it took us three years to find those animals. And you know how difficult it is to wake up every morning and either like walk quietly enough and in tune enough to like assume you're going to see something or sit quietly enough. Like the level of like, I just remember being so exhausted mentally. And we went a year and a half before we saw a deer. And you know, Mike, like, so it's like, they're not here. There's no way. It was this constant mental battle.

We literally hunted almost every single day for a year and a half without seeing an animal. Yeah, what I think is amazing about that is everything you just said, which includes the idea that at some level in the back of your mind, you have to be entertaining the thought they didn't survive. And we could be sitting here looking for a skeleton. Yeah. And I remember being Mike being probably the perfect partner for this goes whenever I was like, there's not a chance, man. We've walked this place eight times, but part of it was so big. It was an area that has, it's very, very windy. So there's wind blown trees over the vast majority of the area.

So think about a prior grove. Literally, it was like doing yoga all day long, but you were crawling in and through all of these trees which deer love. So it was like physically exhausting, but then it was mentally exhausting because you were only covering a certain amount of acres. You're looking for like a single piece of scat or like deer feces.

You're looking for like a single rub. You're looking for like anything that would tell you that they're there. And what we didn't know was they had found a safe spot and were encompassing, it was less than a hundred acres, Peter. So we're looking in like, but part of, I think what's important of this story is, at the point we were like, there has to be a better way. That's when we learned and started like working with the military for the Flurry equipment.

And the Flurry equipment was ultimately what found them for us. So Flurry equipment picks up infrared or heat signatures from bodies and then they'll translate that into an electrical, optical image for you to be able to view. And the military was involved. Like it was such a big deal. And the military loaned us one of their binocular units. And it was that instant realization, like, how did we ever do this without this thing?

And that ultimately over a period of a couple of months, we were able to start chunking off huge areas of land in being able to view with great detail these areas from a thermography standpoint. And that's how we found them. Do you remember that first day that you actually saw one? It was crazy because Mike was looking through it and we're doing all of this in the middle of the night because you can only really use Flora effectively in the middle of the night. And I'm kind of like my seat back in the Tacoma and I see like Mike take his eyes off the binocular unit and then put his eyes on and then take his eyes off and he turned around

and he looked like he'd seen a ghost. I didn't even know what it was like. I thought he saw like a dead body or something. And the only reason we saw it, it was a fucking velvet. And the velvet antler has so much blood in it. It's so hot. And it was like five miles away. And we just saw like this velvet antler

in this super dense cover. And Michael's like, that's a deer. I think that's a deer. And so I got on the binoculars and we had been training for this forever. And so I stayed there and we cooked up via radio. And basically over the next four hours, Mike went down. I guided him in via binoculars unit. And while he was going down there, we saw several other deer. I think it was

two, three more. And yeah, Mike was able to find and get that buck. He just missed the doe that was with it. But it was a brand new realization. Like they're here. How many deer were there at the time? Was it still just four or had they reproduced like crazy? It was still just four actually. It ended up being five, but at the time, there were only four that we knew of. And it still took you another year and a half to capture them all? Yeah, because we weren't smart enough,

we bumped their home range, and they moved several miles away and we had to go find them again. At some point has the state of Hawaii forgotten that they've hired you to do this. Like, I mean, this is unbelievable. This is the longest contractor job ever, right? I think everybody assumed we weren't going to do it.

And for a couple of reasons. One, invasive species are such a prolific issue here in Hawaii. You think everything evolved here over millennia. Like anything we introduce is just like it's such a disaster. It doesn't matter if it's a frog or a plant. There's so much money spent on invasive species every year. And the vast vast majority of it, I would say, the projects aren't what we would consider to be successful.

Like we don't eradicate that animal. On top of that, everybody's basic knowledge of Axis Dior were like, these things are impossible to find. I think everybody assumed it wasn't gonna happen anyway. So we had like a minuscule budget, like as me and Mike rolling around, like in an old Tacoma that was landed to us with like half ass equipment,

Mike's shoes have duct tape all over him, funding boosted pretty quick after we got the first year, but I think everybody just assumed we would fail. And I think we would have had it not been for, I think just some of the resiliency with came with mine Mike's partnership. I would be like, this is it, this is a waste of time. And Mike would be like, oh, let's just check over here.

And then Mike would be like, this is ridiculous. Like we're not gonna find a thing, but would be like, ah, let's just check over here. And then Mike would be like, this is ridiculous. Like, we're not going to find anything. And be like, you know what? Let's like, and I think that partnership was what ultimately got us to the first year. And then once we, like, once we knew there were more deer, we could have took 10 years. We were going to find the rest of those deer. So part of that process with that flurry equipment was now we were able to, and we didn't realize how important the flurry equipment would be for us in our lives.

But is that because you didn't appreciate how nocturnal they were, or you didn't realize what an advantage you could have with that asymmetry of information at night? You nailed both of it. We didn't understand how much more active they were at night. We didn't understand all of the behavior cues of what was happening at night.

And then on top of it, we started to realize really quickly through repetition, wait, that's the same pig we saw, like we're doing these surveys via a helicopter. That's the same pig we saw three days ago. Wait, that's the same goat we saw three days ago. Wait, that's the same goat we saw three days ago. We started to then realize how accurate their equipment was in its detection rates. And so on top of being able to find more animals,

we're also getting significantly more confident in what we weren't seeing that we weren't missing anything. So we were able to start a certification process to be like, we know they're not here. And ultimately, when me and Mike realized, wait, this thing is accurate enough that we can trust it. It started like narrowing down hundreds of thousands of acres to like, wait, they're not here, we know we can go to the next place. When you're walking on the ground, and me and Micah 20 feet apart and I can't see him, you're constantly questioning did I miss something. So that was ultimately what led to finding the rest of those deer and then that tool equated to developing survey procedures for it, which didn't exist anywhere else. And that also made what's brought us to Maui. But I remember like finding and removing that last deer

and me and Mike looking at each other like, and we knew we were like, oh shit, we got them all. How did you know that was the last one? Because it would suggest that these animals were so under stress that they didn't reproduce. If they were together, but not, I mean, they certainly had ample time to reproduce, right? Yeah.

We were confident that was the last one in that area. During the process of those three years, we had sightings all over the big island that people thought were dearly. There's no way I can say there's no deer on the big island. I can confidently say at the time we were done that project, the helicopter pilot that dropped it off, who ended up being our best friend, got, his restitution was 300 hours in a helicopter with us. So think about when you sit in your car, how much area you can cover? Like we can cover 10,000

acres in an hour. We were recertifying acreage almost 10 times over with equipment we believe was like 95% accurate in detection rates. We were getting so good, we were marking beehives as our detection protocol. Okay, we're going back into this area. If we find the same beehive, we're at a thousand feet in the air. If we can find that same beehive, we're at a thousand feet in the air. If we can find that same beehive in this area, we'll consider that we didn't miss anything. Ultimately, that's what gave us the confidence to say we're done. And, I'm not sure, but anecdotally, now, eight years later, there hasn't been another sighting in the area.

And, man, talk about life lessons. So, the second half of the project. We can have every night at like six eating dinner with your family and then rolling out for 12 hours of using that fluorocryptment, not knowing what you're going to find for three year hunt. Apart from athletics, I think any level of resiliency I have probably came from came from that project for sure. What did your wife think? I mean, was this what she had signed up for?

The nighttime working husband, and you're on the big island? Was that, was she always wanted to stay on Mollokai? Her family, in her teenage years, some of them moved to the big island, most importantly her mom. And her mom are very close. And we love Mollokai, but it takes, like, there wasn't any opportunity to do that at that point. Like, after we were married, we were married on Mollokite. Like, there wasn't anything for us to do.

Like, there's no jobs on Mollokite. And if they are, there, somebody's already lined up for whenever that position opens up. So part of it was, we needed to, we had planned to start a family and wanted to start a life. And we knew we needed a little bit more opportunity to do so so we went to the big island a lot of our family were here So we did that my wife and I'll give her a shout out here and Maybe you know it's interesting because I remember you telling me something about Jill

Unrelenting support There is no way I'm where I'm at. I think I can probably say this about you without that level of support. It was always, if that's what we're doing, that's what we're doing. And she is extraordinarily talented. She's one of the best writers I know. She's a graphic designer.

She's a genealogist. Like, she constantly is putting things aside for. And now she's our co-founder at this company and and one of our most important people But she constantly put things aside for what this was but part of it was these were huge ecological and community issues and she was behind me a hundred percent Would have never happened without her because Convincing any that would have never happened without her. Cause convincing any significant other to sleep by themselves every single night,

then you roll in an absolute mess in the morning, it's not conducive, so. And I remember you telling me a long time ago that you didn't even take a day off for the first year, right? Oh yeah. It was seven days a week for the first year, yeah. Yeah, because we thought we were gonna find him for the first year. Yeah. Yeah. Because we thought we were going to find them in the first week. We're like, oh, they saw them over here. Me and Mike,

you were like, we're going to walk every single day for 12 hours till we find them. And I can remember like finishing the first month. Like by the end of the first month, we were already like, oh, there's no deer here. The guy didn't see something. But what ended up spurring on the rest of it was me and Mike look through the entire, and this is why Mike is so good. Mike said, if there is a deer here, it's going to walk right there. We're going to put up a camatrap. So not like we're going to put up a hundred camatraps

and see, I think we had three camatraps. Mike was like, if there is a deer here, he's gonna walk right there, I think like thousands of acres, and sure enough, like month four, we got a camera trap image of a deer. And that was hard evidence, and we were honestly as surprised as anybody at that point,

and we're like, there's deer here. And so that obviously spurred on everything else that went along with it. So it was, yeah, I mean, you think I'll mean you've done some really hard four day hunts together. And at the end of that four days, you're just, it was a doozy, man. Now I have a better understanding of why after a hard four day hunt, that's hard for me. You look like you've been sitting at the beach all day. I put that into perspective.

So you guys go back to Maui. Is there something about the burden of access deer there that has you start to focus your effort and refine your thinking about what you and Mike can be doing specifically there, because at this point in time, it's safe to say there's no real concerted strategy around what to do. And by the way, in Maui, I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the relationship between the people of Maui and the access to your is as affectionate as it might be on Molokai, right?

I mean, I think the destruction is much greater. Yeah, I mean, the first meeting I went to on Maui, they were, well, I won't mention the person, but calling them spotted rats. I think they already for sure found value within the subsistence community as that, but they were dropped off in the central area for all ranching. And so they, they obviously directly compete with cattle for feed and they break fences and they started to see that population grow pretty quickly. And so the move from the big island to Maui was primarily because of opportunity. What ended up happening is the ranchers on Maui who are of course watching this closely and saying,

happening is the ranchers on Maui who are of course watching this closely and saying, don't let these things get established on the big island. One particular rancher on Maui said, wait, you guys actually got it done. Like you guys might know what you're doing. Like great as we close that project, they said, we've got tens of thousands of deer over here, we don't care what you do with them, just come and shoot them. And we couldn't do that. All of the learnings and experience and cultural values that came from Moloka, we're still very much like a part of who we were. And so for a rancher to be able to say,

well, just shoot them all, like, bury them, we don't care. And we had already had, like, had already done some research on, Europe has an extensive venison some research on Europe has an extensive venison industry. New Zealand has an extensive venison industry and already had like thought that thought process. And that, but that was the trigger to say, wait, there's got to be a better way. Because by this point, that was already happening on Lenei.

They were basically shooting these things out of helicopters and just letting them die on the, I mean, it sort of became this issue of, look, these things are causing so much damage. And I also want to get into some of the specifics of the damage because as I would learn and I was surprised to learn this, it wasn't just, hey, they're competing for the same resources as the cattle, which is the business here, but it's how that would even trickle into the ecology of the ocean. That was completely new to me, and I simply wouldn't have understood the nitrogen balance and the change and all of that. So the farmers understandably are saying, look, I don't care what has to happen.

If the government is willing to get into helicopters with AR-15s and shoot these things out of the air, I'm happy to have the carcasses laying around. And explain a little bit more about what the full extent of the life cycle is in terms of the disruption to the native species there from basically land to water. I mean, we have to take a little bit of a step back in terms of evolution in that, Hawaii's the most isolated landmass on the planet. Everything here evolved,

kinda textbook adaptive radiation, like everything over years we've evolved over millennia to be best suited for its environment right here, which included no large mammals apart from a bat and certainly no grazing herbivores. So like we have mints that are mint list and now we are the endangered species capital of the world We have more endangered species per acre here than anywhere else in the world. I think we're I think 30% of the endangered species list

in the US is all plants birds from Hawaii and that is a function of from Hawaii, and that is a function of the introduction of non-native species and how they affect biodiversity. So the impact of Axis deer, you know, Peter, probably the most influential impact to our communities as a whole, is at the very top of our mountains, and you've been to one of those places. They are, again, as one of the most isolated land masses, water is probably, I mean,

you guys had some issues with water this week, like water is one of the most important things for us as a community. And you guys had snow on Halaiakala recently, right? We still do. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Water is, and the Hawaiians knew this,

the word for wealth was the Viva, it was water. For Native Hawaiians knew this. The word for wealth was the vi-vi. It was water for native Hawaiians. Our watersheds are our most important resource and those watersheds developed. It's almost like in this permaculture fashion where there's these three layers and they've developed to capture all of this fog and rain and they go directly into our aquifers, any ungulate deer included, ungulate being a cloven hoofed animal, so goats, pigs, deer, et cetera, et cetera. Any ungulate in our forests, it might as well be a salad bar. They literally can eat anything. There are no protections. Those plants have developed no protections for themselves.

And once those animals affect the efficiency of our waterfeds, they affect how much water they capture at a significant rate. So their most profound effect is in our mountains and affecting how that ecosystem collects water. And so as we come down the hill, that's when they start interacting with our ranchers and farmers. And like we talked about, they directly compete for feed at a rate of about seven to one. Every seven deer equates to about one cow.

But a lettuce farmer can lose 10 acres of lettuce overnight when a herd of a thousand deer come in. Like they'll absolutely decimate that. Fencing is optional for deer. Like we've seen deer hop over six foot fences like nothing. So this downstream effect of them impacting how we capture water and then them impacting our food systems, all the time they're also degrading the understory, and what happens when we have large rain events is all of the sediment, all of our soil. I mean, if there's anything more valuable than water, it's soil. All of the soil that have taken tens of thousands of years to form on this tiny island,

especially like coming from Lava Rock, all of the soil, all of this incredibly valuable top soil will run off into our oceans. And it doesn't even stop there. Dear Scatter, extremely high in nitrogen, you kind of mentioned this, like the downstream effect of not only the soil depositing on our reefs, but also the impact of like the nitrogen from like thousands of

deer's feces starts to bleach our reefs as well. And I can't say for sure there's a direct link between that nitrogen and how it affects it. We know that may be the case with soil, but more than anything, thousands of pounds of sediment come down in these events. And when you fly over our islands, I fly every week, you just see these crazy plumes, miles and miles wide of this red dirt that is just going out and covering the reefs. And well, guess what's important about our reef systems apart from obviously the incredible ecosystems they support food. We've lost significant amounts of reef and the fish that then go along with them. So they call it moka-tumakai. There's this downstream effect of their impact. That is,

I mean I only think we completely understand the cumulative impact, but it's, we can see it every time these events happen and we can see it when we're in watersheds. And so that understanding was obviously what spurred on the want to better manage them, but along with it is, like we talked about, they're a food resource. So they're not only a food resource, but they're impacting our food security. And so when they're imbalanced, it's a double-edged sword in that they're significantly detrimental and they're impacting our food security here as the most isolated landmass on the planet. So it's just all the vast majority of their impact is not a net positive for our communities when you're at such imbalance in these populations. And as you're coming into sort of your deeper and deeper understanding of this, you're

also continuing to develop with Mike this unbelievable credibility with the community in terms of it just blows my mind, what you guys continue to do. So now fast forward to the volcano eruptions. Oh, man. So let's talk a little bit about what happened and what type of a threat that was to livestock and what you know you guys are doing with helicopters. I mean this is the stuff that's out of movies. Then again I think I'm not asking you to tell this story from the sake of boasting about what you've done but I think I think it kind of continues to round out the story of these are guys who first and foremost are here to protect Hawaii.

Yeah, I mean, with Mike as a partner, we just develop a knack to get things done. And like there was so much problem solving and as we developed solutions for Axis Deer and a couple of years in, we had a large eruption on Kilauea on the Big Island. And we had already developed, it was the first of its kind. It was a live cattle net capture system. You gotta imagine a cow's a really big thing. And basically what it was,

if I can explain this properly, it was, it was a large metal frame, a circular frame, with a triangle net. And there was, it was attached to the tip of the net, so the top of the cone, and it was attached to the frame of the circular structure. And what would happen is via helicopter, we would put the cone over the animal, we would release the top of the net. The net would fall down, the animal would walk out to the end of the net, and then we would pick up the frame, and it would be sitting in this like perfect cradle.

It was a little hammock. Yeah, so it had like, it was a little hammock ride. Well, several years ago, we had a very unexpected and very quick-moving lava flow. We're talking, it was about 500 yards wide moving at 50 miles an hour. And it ended up completely destroying an entire community. Like, it's gone. There are no remnants of it. It just completely wiped the whole community out. I mean, this is amazing community. It's still, it was a significant loss for the community. But in the process, two lava flows formed,

and they cut off a huge portion of a ranching area and including homes and a bunch of things in there. And the state needed a solution for, they wanted to find a way for these animals not to die. And me and Mike, of course, said, well, we can do that. Having zero context, we can go and do that. And I remember driving out the first morning. So we bring in all of the equipment, like got it in the back of the truck and we're driving out early in the morning and it looked like Armageddon. Like the entire sky in the middle of the night was red and roiling and like it was creating, there was so much heat, it was creating its own weather system, it was lightning, like it was such an odd experience to be driving towards

it. With the idea that we were were gonna fly around and pick these animals up flying over these 50 mile an hour lava flows. But me and Mike were like, yeah, we can do it. And at that point, we at Uka was already a part of our team and you've met Uka. So now we're talking the dream team here. And Uka's like, boys, we're gonna the dream team here. And who goes like boys, we're going to be lava cowboys. And you know, look, I'm just like, oh, man.

But I think we needed that level of positivity, like what we were facing was fairly substantial. And it was, it was risky. And I was never going to risk any of my guy's life. All of me, it was ultimately, it was my responsibility. I wasn't going to risk any of their life for a cow. But long story short, we get on site, we use the floor really quickly to figure out how many animals are there and where they are.

And then we come back and we hook the net up. And there's lots of good stories, but probably the first one is probably the most interesting. We go over to find the first one and we're working with a helicopter pilot. We'd only work with a couple times before, but he was amazing. And he goes and he puts the net over. How long do you have? Like, what's the distance? How close do you need to be to the cow? Well, we need to be, it's a hundred foot line. Oh my god. This cone is hanging under the cow.

And there's like, you your eye level with like lava flows and there's there was something called fissure eight. There's like fissure eight is blowing in front of you a couple thousand yards and you see like chunks of magma going everywhere and like you see the ground heat up on two sides. How is that heat by itself not interfering with what the pilot's able to do in terms of stabilizing the helicopter? Because the cows had moved themselves into the internal area between the two flows, so we were coming over the first lava flow, and the helicopter went like this, pink.

There was so much heat coming off the flow, it was tossing the helicopter, three, four hundred feet in the air almost instantly. And so we get to the inside, and constantly they're like, are you sure we're good? I'm like, if you're good, I'm good. And there's scope row video of all of this. So he makes not the mistake, but the cow he happened to catch first was a huge bull.

And it was right at the max lifting capacity of the helicopter. But once that bull, it has a 2000 pound animal, once that bull is in the net system, it's fairly difficult to get out by yourself. And it wasn't CO2. I can't remember what the chemical we were most worried about or what gas we were most worried about,

but we all had indicators while we're wearing indicators, and I remember having to get on the ground and seeing blue spots, the gas levels were fairly dangerous as well. So we didn't want to get on the ground. We wanted to be where airflow was good. He goes to pick it up and he can get it off the ground and he's moving and he's like, what do you want to do?

And I was like, can you get this thing across the lava floor without me getting on the ground? And he's like, what do you want to do? And I was like, can you get this thing across the lava flow without me getting on the ground? And he's like, I think so. And I'm just like, he's on a bit. He's like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to use the heat from the flow to lift us up. And I'm thinking, what if that doesn't work?

Like, we're going gonna barbecue this cow. He was confident and I've learned along the years, like you trust your pilot. They're the ones that's gonna keep you safe. And so this cow is flying under the helicopter at a hundred feet, so we're 250 feet above the ground. And as we get to the floor, sure enough, the helicopter just goes, and it lifts straight up and

I look down and it's like depth perception is pretty tough at that point. When I look down and the entire cow I thought lit up with smoke, I was like, what did we just do? Like we just burnt this cow. And state officials, humane society, everybody is at the corral system on the other side where we're bringing this cow. And state officials, you main society, everybody, is at the corral system on the other side where we're bringing this cow in. And I'm just like,

I didn't know what to do. Like, this is going to sound terrible. I honestly contemplated like, if it was dead, it's dropping it in the lava flow. And so we're flying over this lava flow. And all I see is smoke coming from this cow. And what I didn't realize is it was steam. I had forgot that it was raining

and the cow had water all over it. And I realized as we got over the flow, all of the steam came off the cow. And the cow was fine. Like it's just sitting there in its hammock. Like, and we brought that cow in. So the way it works is it's hanging and it's cradle with the frame above it like this.

And you put it down and then you put the frame right back over it and it just stands up and walks up. And so this cow just, and we have all of this on video. This cow just stands up, walks out like nothing around walks over such grabbing some feed like that's on the side. And we had never done it before. And like, who could micr look at me? Like, I was the first one in the helicopter and they're like, is it going to work? I'm like, it works.

And then we spent with four separate missions to get out all of the cows over a period of a week or two. And I think we ended up doing 40 or 50 cows. The stories are just like, you imagine like Uka every morning thriving on this like lava, like he had like lava cowboys on his coolers. But to the rancher, that was potentially gonna lose it all and two communities that were seeing all of this loss. Like there was not like there was just all of this loss from this flow. It became this really interesting rallying point for the local community. There's a it was

probably like fantastical to see, but b like, it's like, wait, we're not going to lose it all. We're going to get some of this stuff back. Yeah, a long line of projects and innovations that are like, I think we can do that. It just had a knack of like figuring it out as we go because there were certainly some bumps in that road. You imagine like me, Mike, and Lucas standing around with very limited math experience between the three of us. And we're looking at this huge cargo net

and like these pipes and we're like, I think we argued for like three hours before we built this thing. Like, God, I just, I just wish I was there for that. Like, that is, because I know how much fun it is to just be sitting around the campfire talking about the, that stove that we like, the short stove or whatever the heck it's called and getting into the math of that. So this is, you know, talking about the stakes being high. So, so how do you go from that to where you are now,

which is, you've created this company called Maui Nui, which is effectively an unbelievably efficient, humane way to operationalize the harvest thing of access to your, for food at a USDA certification, which is, it's important for people to understand, you and I could go out and hunt access deer, but that doesn't really mean anything, because that's, even if you had a hundred people hunting these things, you can't sell that to somebody.

Like a restaurant isn't going to do that. There's food safety issues. So how did you get to the formation of what it is you're doing now, which is by that point, this is about now when you and I are getting to meet each other. What was a little bit before then because after we finished the project on the big island and we went to we were getting those inquiries from Maui and. The light bulb went off like hey there's got to be a better way so we understood population dynamics we understood what we're dealing with like from an animal standpoint. population dynamics. We understood what we were dealing with like from an animal standpoint. The question was, why can't we eat these things? And we understood the legality of it. So

on the continent, all native game mammals are owned by the public. So a resident of Bozeman, Montana owns the elk that's on private property on a ranch somewhere else. Like the state owns that animal and therefore you own that animal. As a non-native invasive species in Hawaii, the ownership of that animal falls to the private landowner where that animal lies essentially and also the management of it. So you can ask, but the state isn't responsible to manage that animal on private property. State is really only responsible to manage that animal in public spaces. So we are not allowed to operate on public land.

So we only operate in privacy. And I think it's really important to understand the difference. So we knew that the landowner only animal. And so I remember one of the first calls to the USDA where I was like, hey, we want to be able to manage these animals. What rules would we have to follow? And what would we have to provide in order to have this animal be USDA inspected? I remember the guy he actually laughed. have this animal be USDA inspected. I remember the guy, he actually laughed. He just said, here's the Meet Inspection Act from 1930.

It's the Federal Meet Inspection Act. If you can follow these rules, somehow, we'll give you guys a shot. And so it's this thick. And so I remember like reading it nonstop for several days and like finding the couple of spots in there that require Humane handling and all of the things that come into the process of like harvesting an animal or like rendering an animal and I was like I think we can do this

I called them back and explain the process like we have this amazing flurry equipment where we can see these animals I believe we can render these animals So one of the most important things is we have to follow all of the rules of a brick and mortar facility, but in the field for wild harvesting, which the most important thing is how that animal dies. And it has to be done. The terminology is rendered immediately unconscious, but it has to be shot in the head. it has to break the skull cap so it dies immediately. And they doubted whether or not we could do that. And if we couldn't do it efficiently, they essentially shut you down overnight. It's one of the most important things. The other part of that

was we needed a USDA certified slaughter facility. When I did the math on it all, it wasn't possible to use the current facilities on Maui. So there were two major hiccups to start. It was like, eh, can we do this efficiently enough? And B, well, my wife let me re-mortgage my house to buy a slaughter facility, a mobile slaughter facility. And at the beginning, both those answers were no. I wasn't willing to remorage the house, knowing that we might not be efficient enough to harvest these animals, because we didn't know yet, right? So the way we started that venture, and it wasn't perfect, everything we do isn't perfect, the way we started the understanding and moving forward to be able to help those ranchers was just through pet food. So we were able to test a lot of these theories, create, it wasn't a lot, but like a super tiny margin for me and Mike to operate and get to understand what that look like.

And then it was only after six to eight months of keeping data every single night on like I was huge on this like keeping data every single night on proficiency rates and miles and occurrences like it wasn't to like justify the requirements for the USDA that I called the USDA back and said I want you guys to come view our process and if it's approved I will get the USDA slaughter facility. They came out, they were blown away by our process, so a combination of flurry equipment to view the animal. And again, this is happening all at night. Yeah, let's actually explain to people what this is. And you know, at the outset of this

podcast in the introduction, I explained that we're going to get a little bit graphic here. And I think, you know, this would be one of those moments in time where if this is a subject matter, it's very sensitive. Please hit a little bit of forward on the podcast. But unfortunately, if you choose to eat meat, which most of us do, I think you need to be familiar with what that entails. I always feel that it's wrong to consume meat without having some sense of what's involved. And if you go to a grocery store and you buy a piece of steak, you can't just assume

that piece of steak just showed up you buy a piece of steak, you can't just assume that piece of steak just showed up there without a lot of work. And I think when you contrast how that piece of steak showed up there or how that chicken breast showed up there with the work that you guys are doing in the field, you get a real sense of what the difference is and why a USDA inspector can show up and say a USDA inspector can show up and say, which I know he has said, I've never seen anything like this ever in the history of the USDA. So what was your strategy? How is it that you can most humanely hunt an animal?

We have to follow a certain set of rules. So the inspection portion of what we do in the field is called an anti-mortem inspection. And in that inspection process, the inspector has to be able to view that that animal is healthy. It has to be able to view that it's both like at rest and in motion. And typically that is done in a corral. So if you think about what a typical broad like brick and mortar looks like, there are a whole bunch of cows that get trailered in from somewhere else. They're sitting in a corral system. And the inspector is able to go outside, look at these animals very closely, view them, determine that they're they're safe for human

consumption, they're healthy. And then that animal unfortunate, like this is kind of the graphic part is, that animal goes into a shoot system, goes into a press or sometimes it's hung up alive, and then that animal is rendered immediately unconscious with a stunner, a bolt gun. And that looks like in most cases, and I know people are trying to get better at this, but that looks like in most cases, an I know people are trying to get better at this, but that looks like in most cases,

an animal that is stressed and unhealthy to be, like it's in this press and it's moving around and an employee has to then render that animal immediately unconscious. We had to follow those rules. Our process for that same anti-mortem inspection is we don't pen our animals, we don't bait our animals. Over a period of years we knew if we cover enough miles, we'll see enough deer and have

enough opportunities to harvest them. So translation, the animals you harvest are a hundred percent in their natural environment. They're not in a high fence area, let alone a pen. They're not being baited, you're not leaving a high fence area, let alone a pen, they're not being baited, you're not leaving food to lure them in. They're literally just out in the evening roaming about. Yes. And I think this is probably one of the favorite parts of what we do is, and it's similar to hunting, we're driving around looking for animals. And if we come over a hill and that animal is, this group of animals is 50 yards away

and we scare them, they hear the bike or they hear whatever else, they'll run away. That animal is already in a stressed state and it runs away and we're not able to harvest it. But if we come over that same hill two night later and an animal is out at 200 yards, and they don't hear us or they're not stressed, and they stand there, that's the indicator for us that we're able to start the anti-mortem process. And what that looks like is that same flurb

anocular unit that can pick up a deer at six miles, we use that for inspection with extraordinary detail. Like we can see abscesses, we can see old scarring, we can tell if they're pregnant, like the level of detail is actually better than an inspector standing looking at an animal in a carouse to determine whether or not it's healthy. So then the inspector is staring at this screen, all of the lights are off,

and he says, yep, all of the lights are off, and he says, yep, all of these are healthy, you can guys can go ahead. So there's a pause there, again, that animal isn't stressed, so it's not going anywhere. And then what we learned over years and years is we then have to render that animal immediately unconscious, which is shooted in the head. But that animal is in a zero-stress situation and dies immediately. Which is important to distinguish from archery. In archery, you think about like you've taken me on some amazing hunts where I've had what for archery would be considered a perfect shot where you go long, heart, long. But that animal doesn't die immediately. It takes 10 seconds to die.

And if you're anything but perfect in archery, if you hit say one lung, but not the other lung, or not the heart in the lung, I mean, it can be much longer. But at least I've never had an experience in archery where an animal died in less than a millisecond. It's always a few seconds even with perfection. And that's, I think, in part because of the nature of archery. The type of death that an animal suffers from an arrow is that of hemorrhagic shock. So they die from blood loss. Now, there's exceptions to that rule.

You can die from a tamponod, but it's still some form of hemorrhagic shock. But this is different from the wound that you inflict on the animal, because when you're putting a high-power ballistic, which is a bullet into the head, that's a central nervous system death. So that animal is dying immediately

because the brain swells. So that's a brain death versus a cardiopulmonary death, and that's why it's an immediate and instantaneous death. And by definition, there is simply no more humane way to die, because as you point out, that animal has absolutely no knowledge that that is happening, and the moment it happens, they cease to have awareness of anything. Yeah, so not only are they not aware and great explanation, but the animals that are with them in a herd, they don't even jolt.

They just they literally just drop straight down. And in almost every case, the animals that are with them won't even move. That's the part when you first told me, Jake, I couldn't imagine because I assumed you came up on a herd of six animals You would shoot one it would die the others would scatter that was it for the night with that group You would have to then drive for another 30 minutes to find another group, but I was amazed to learn that no you could probably shoot all of them because

A it's so dark. they don't see anything. And, too, there's no movement by the animal other than just falling to the ground. And that must be a common enough sound to the other deer that it doesn't alert them or frighten them. Yeah, so every situation is a little bit different. And it's highly dependent on moon phase

and the amount of illumination and what they can see. More importantly, they feel safer, most often not running. I mean, they don't have perfect night vision. It's pretty phenomenal, but they'll feel safer most often staying there. So in most instances,

and I've ever heard of 10, we'll typically harvest three or four of those animals. So that inspector has viewed that the soil process, the flour equipment is so good that the friction from the bullet passing through the air creates a tracer. So the inspector is actually able to see the bullet path and it hitting the head.

And one thing to be clear on here is we're not perfect, but we've trained to be imperfect so we don't injure any animals. And so what that means is typically where the perfect target would be central to that brain cap system, we train ourselves to miss 30% of the time. A perfect evening of shooting is at 70% efficiency. But the miss is always high. The miss is always high and there's never any consequence of that. And that was hard for us to learn and develop the skillset that a perfect miss

was still perfect. Because it's an odd feeling to be like, oh, I missed. And then there's so much pressure that surrounds shooting each evening. We had to train ourselves to understand that imperfection was actually the best way to go about harvesting this animal. And in that case, that imperfection is what allows us to meet the proficiency level of a brick and mortar for the rendering process. Well, that's actually what's going to ask you, isn't your level of proficiency better than any brick and mortar? Because from a humane perspective, I think you said in the entire time you've done this operation, there has only been one bullet that hit the animal, but didn't hit it in the

skull, and it was a shot to the neck, which still resulted in an immediate death. So for all intents and purposes, it was the exact same, but it was off the target. Is that correct, still? Yeah, we've only ever been written up, again, like once for that infraction. And part of that is also,

so we train for those imperfections, but we also train for the scenario. So I think, me and you have talked about this, like, Mondays, when we're making the conversion from being awake to, like, working nights, my expectation for the boys is to shoot at 50%. And what that does is it increases their margin of error for something like bad not to happen because we now know through poor sleep It absolutely affects our nervous system in our reaction time

I didn't completely understand that until you did that podcast with with Matthew Walker, which was so cool so a brick-and-mortar facility is asked to operate at a 95% efficiency. We are operating right now at a 99.99. Well, functionally, you're operating at a 100% efficiency. And to think that a 95% efficiency is all that's being asked, that means one out of 20 animals is not dying in a humane way. Isn't that what that means? Or requires like a, they may be unconscious, but they may require an

immediate. And I think that's really different. I mean, I won't speak about anybody else's operation. I'm sure there are, I think I'm sure everybody would aim to be perfect in those scenarios. But anecdotally, I've actually had the opportunity to work in a brick and mortar. An animal that comes into a pen stressed out and is moving around, even at point blank range, is significantly harder than an animal that is at rest and just like unaware and staring. And part of that's also as we have such a, the shooter has to have such an intimate understanding of access to your behavior.

Like a right ear starts to dip and you know, like the head is going to go like a nose starts to go up and you know, it's going to start nosing like there is, there are half millisecond instances that you have to understand. This isn't something where I could bring in a military sniper and you can operate at this efficiency, I need a military sniper plus an access to your expert in order to take those shots. And that's why for so long, that was Mike and me.

And now you've met Kalena, like, it requires a very specific skill set. What's the typical range? You're 100 to 400 or 500? Yeah, 100 to now it's about 200 max. Oh, so which is very close with the you're using a 308? 308, yeah. And it's not because we're not effective past that range. We're only given a three hour window to harvest at night. What we've learned in collecting data is, we carry almost every single one of these deer on our backs. And it's an awesome way for the guys to connect

with each animal as we're doing the process. But there's also, it's also very technical in that, we don't want any bruising. We don't want to, we go to all of this effort, we don't want to like affect carcass quality after all of that work. And so you're carrying, I mean, like that last buck that you shot,

you saw him, you do it that process. You're carrying a 200 pound animal on your back over extremely varying terrain. And the record should show, that's why you had to carry my buck because I couldn't carry this 200 pound buck for that first part of the terrain. It just speaks to how pathetic I am.

No, no, no, but I mean, we've developed the perfect way to pick up a deer. Like, it took us hundreds, if not thousands, of animals to figure that out. So back to my point of range, at 200 yards with a 200 pound animal, you're getting back to the bike or truck exhausted. And so what we learned was we could actually harvest more deer in a given night, skipping

the animals that we're seeing out past 200 yards, assuming, and we knew this through data collected, we are going to see more animals at closer yardage. So we have like all of these parameters in place, these harvesting systems in place that allow us to be in a situation where in starting and even we really don't know where any animals are. Like we talked about, we're not baiting them and we have this very stringent process with the USDA. We've had to collect crazy amounts of data to be able to do so efficiently on a likely basis, and even then it'll vary. The USDA just continues to be amazed by your process because you're basically self-imposing things

that no one else really would think to do. And I think that just continues to amaze me. I guess I want to shift yours for a moment and just now talk a little bit about bringing it back to sort of my interest in this type of meat, which was, I'm still relatively new to hunting, but as you know, I've taken a real keen interest in the harvesting part of it. I'm very fascinated by the anatomy and the differences in the meat. And there's something that's very different about Axis dear. And in some ways, it sort of spoils you with respect to other types of meat. It seems infinitely cleaner,

healthier. The animal itself seems to be very clean. There seems to be something about its meat that's unique. Now, as I've gotten to learn over time, a big part of that has to do with the intramuscular fat content. Most people who have tried venison say, oh, it's okay, but it's a little bit gamy, certainly blacktail more than whitetail. But Axistir exists in its own camp, which is not particularly gamy at all. And I suspect this, it's basically 0.4% intramuscular fat. I mean, it's a very unique animal in that regard. How much have you been able to learn about their eating habits and how that contributes to what you're seeing

in terms of the meat quality beyond what you just said? So everything you just said speaks to why they don't have these high levels of cortisol and lactate at harvest, which definitely contribute to some of the taste that you can have in wild animal, you've basically eliminated the lactate cortisol response completely. But now we're talking about something that's much more long term,

plays a much longer term role in the development of the muscle. Yeah, and to your point there, that conversion of glycogen stores as that animal goes through rigamortis and what and you can walk me through this But what I assume is like that muscle trying to continue to do something so pulling on ATP and that function of that process being lactate and that lactate is so important as that that rigamortis process gradually takes place over 16 to 24 hours and the pH

level of that meat, the pH level of that meat in like it completely changes color and texture in animals that are stressed and don't have that gradual process to go through. Didn't you guys have a camera on on a deer one? Yeah, so there's so many, I'm just trying to figure out where to start. So we've done two, what are called satellite telemetry video callers. The company was low text. It was the first, some of the first like iridium satellite callers. And what that allowed us to do was a understand home range and how often they're drinking and when and what are they resting.

But there was a tiny little camera that sat right under the bottom of the collar and we got in 10 second increments 48 hours of footage of what they were eating. And what was astonishing and we already knew this based on studies in India, they are primarily grass eaters, which is not the case for most deer species, which are primarily browsers. Browsers being, they're looking for legumes and shrubs and trees that they're constantly pulling on different plant species. Axist deer are primarily grass eaters, and I think when you talk about what little intramuscular fat they do have, it's interesting to see, and we're only learning this now, like there's high omega-3s in there because they're eating so much leafy greens.

And I think that's attributed to them primarily being grass eaters. But what's crazy and we've seen this via the collar and we've seen this anecdotally is how intelligent, that's awesome, I never get to have these conversations. It's how intelligent of an eater they are. And I think that comes down to these crazy acute senses. So for example, we've seen me and you together have seen after walking three miles down a hill with dew all over our boots, we walk through an axis- access deer trail, which for all intents and purposes, there should be no scent on our boot.

Our boots are soaked, and I'm wearing boots and you're wearing socks. That's another story. And an animal, not even in interacting what that specific spot, but five yards away, that deer is picking up the scent from that bootmark, which was three hours earlier. And we see this in like the both the satellites. They are so picky in what they're eating, and not even between different plant species, but within the same species. So they're going up to one of their favorite little legumes is called glycine. They're going up to one of their favorite little legumes is called glycine. They're going up to a patch of glycine

and they have unlimited feed, so they're not eating like voraciously like a cow or something. They're going up to a particular group of glycine and they're saying like, they're smelling, smelling, smelling, saying, oh, I'm gonna eat this small patch right here. And I think what we don't understand is an animal that is that intelligent in what it eats, how that impacts its nutritional value. And we're starting to

kind of see that with some of the results we're seeing. But I think that plays into how it's short and early healthy they are. The vast majority of other animals, look at like a, you've seen a pig now in a field or you've seen like some goat, a pig plowing through a field. It's not stopping to plow in particular areas. It's getting started and it's just gonna bulldoze its way through the entire thing.

This was a really transformational thing for me. So I think I've talked about this on the podcast with John Dudley once, but I took up archery because I wanted to do archery. That was all I wanted to do. Like I just wanted to shoot a bow, and it struck me as the type of thing that you could spend a lifetime never coming close to perfection, and it scratched every itch for my obsession. It was only two years after I took up archery and

all I was doing was plowing target after target after target after target that I got invited on a hunting trip which I'd been invited many times prior to and was like why would I go waste four days to go and take two shots when I can take 150 shots a day in my backyard. Didn't seem like a good idea. But I got talked into it and JR, as you know, close to Renemind was like, no, no, this would be good for you, so let's do it. So we go and we do this thing.

And as you know, it just sort of changed everything for me in many ways, but among them is it really changed how I thought about food, because I got to see on that one first hunting trip, you know, I'm shooting pigs, goats, sheep, access deer. I mean, I got to see everything from the lowest to the highest and eat it all and realize it's hard to be healthier than the animal you're eating and it's hard for the animal to be healthier than what it's eating.

Like, this is not an accidental process. And it's never been the same since. And I was talking about this with my wife the other day. My appetite for store bought meat has never been the same since that trip. And I think that's true for a lot of people that experience really good wild game, be it Axis dear or elk, which would be for me personally my two favorite,

I think Axis dear and elk live in a different category from every other type of wild game. But even chickens, we had chickens back in San Diego. They couldn't have lived a better existence. The amount of space that they had, the amount of care we took of them, they're eating some organic, ridiculously expensive, overpriced feed, plus our leftover fruits and vegetables. Like, they're living large, they're making us these beautiful eggs. I had zero desire to eat one of them because they lived in filth. I mean, all they did was eat

their poop all day, right? It just didn't appeal to me. Even going to the store and having a steak, it's like, it's not that I don't eat those things anymore, but my appetite for the 32 ounce ribeye has pivoted a little more towards the eight ounce filet, whereas if I can eat elk and if I can eat access deer, that to me is far better. And I think part of it is the taste acquires once you kind of start to understand what's going into it, but also think a part of it is just you can't disconnect from what the process was like to produce that food that winds up on your table. And I just realized, even if I'm buying the most organic, grass-fed, beautiful steak,

it didn't have the same stress-free existence that that Axis dear had or that Elk had. But again, with Elk, it's a different situation. You have to go out and hunt it yourself. You don't have the luxury of doing the USDA certification. So, did you experience that or was that, is that so far in your rearview mirror that what I'm saying doesn't make sense? Definitely.

And anecdotally, I think it was my third year of college, and I think I mentioned this before. When I stopped pouring in Hawaii, it's access to here for most folks, it's just teriyaki. So like, you pour a whole bunch of sugar and you pour a whole bunch of shoyu. When I stopped doing that and I started eating it, like just straight steaks every night. And admittedly, it was because I had ran out of money. You couldn't afford the teriyaki sauce. No, I couldn't afford the cafeteria anymore. So I became a dorm advisor to try and like, anyway, I ran out of money and added 60 bucks

a pop for the plane flight and being able to bring back 100 pounds of meat, it was like a no-brainer. So by no means was it on purpose, but when I started eating it the right way, I started noticing it. And I think at the age of what would have been like 20, I started getting stronger, and I was really challenging my body as a function of like my vertical.

And like I realized as a small player, like I needed to start taking some of that seriously if I was going to like take the next step. By the way, what is the vertical of a six foot tall national level volleyball player at its peak? It was 43. I was going to say is it possible it was over 40 inches? Holy cow. My verticals 12 inches, I think. Yeah, it's not the case by any means anymore, but I can, I think fondly look back at pictures

when I was playing in the Netherlands. Netherlands already being the tallest people on the planet. I had two players beside me that were 6'11 and 7 feet and have these really cool pictures of blocking. So you're jumping up and putting your hands over the net and our hands are at the same height and our heads kind of match and then our bodies start changing proportion and my feet are at like their mid thigh and hip level and it's just like these comical anyway. I started to notice I was recovering better and at that point and it almost happened simultaneously I think I've told you about this. We had the opportunity to train with the Olympic sprinting team, and I don't recommend this

for anybody, but they did this workout called Gravity Drops. And so they were incorporating gravity into all of their workouts where we would be squatting and you would fall to 90 degrees and you'd try and stand up as quickly as possible. And never in my life have I felt like every day I was sore. And at that point, it was hard to make these physical gains. And every day I was sore. And then I remember making this transition to, I just needed more food like I could feel it.

And I started eating the right way, and then I started noticing, I got so strong, and I went from 190 pounds to 220 and it was all muscle. It was a function of this workout and I think the use of this ingredient. Well that's interesting because very recently like meaning in the last four or five months, you sent me the nutritional information from the company that has been looking at the bone broth because one of the things that you've done with this company that I think is so amazing is you've taken this notion of nose to tail to a whole new level, right? So it's like, okay, there's a 200 pound access to year that yields what, how many pounds

of meat for the human? I mean, the boxer on the big side of typical access to years about 60 pounds whole carcass and will yield about 50 pounds for a typical human but there's also hides and hooves and awful and all kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, so you've got the pet food, you've got the dog shoes and then I remember saying like, where's the bone broth? And then all of a sudden, you start making this bone broth and what did they say? How did they evaluate that bone broth?

Which by the way, we can't stop, I can't stop drinking it. Yeah, it's amazing. So we have to send all things into the USDA labs for testing and they evaluate that and then they'll put that on your nutritional panel. And we sent in the first batch of bones and they called us and they didn't call it outright. They had thought we adulterated the bones. They had thought we had done something because they tested so high in protein per ounce. And it was statistically like an anomaly.

And so we didn't know what was going on. So we sent them, I think we sent them a second batch or they retested it. And in the end, it tested 33% higher in protein per ounce than the best regenerative beef bones on the market. And I say regenerative because there is something to a regenerative agricultural process with cattle where there's additional soil health and I believe

that soil health translates into your food, but that animal is still given the grass it's going to eat. It doesn't have a choice. So we got the results back and we didn't have an explanation for it. And I mean, that's a statistical anomaly. I think the like between what we call like conventional beef and regenerative beef is about 3%. Usually they'll see a difference, but 33% is. And so essentially at like, you know, 25 grams of protein per, I think it's a hundred ounces or something. No, no, I think it's less volume. Oh, much less volume than that. 16 ounces or something. 16 ounces. Yeah. Yeah. And protein powder category as a function of protein per calorie. So we're, I think we're just, and I'm not a nutritionist,

like I'm not a biologist, I only know what I've seen over like thousands and thousands of hours of like interacting with this animal. Coming back to the previous conversation is, I think their level of intelligence in what they eat is translating to their nutritional value, and we're just starting to see that. Like me and you were emailing back the other day, like, I don't even know where to start

to better understand their fatty acid levels. And how I know there's important ratios of like omega sixes to omega three's, I don't know enough about it. But I already seeing indicators that we might have something special there as well. And why, when we're eating it, I don't feel like I need to go get like a slab of salmon, even though like I'll have one every once in a while. Like, I feel like I'm getting a complete nutritional profile from that animal and we're eating it. And my wife, my wife laughs, she calls us weagans. No. So if it's not wild and it's not vegetables, we're not eating it. And so that's actually funny because I'll tell you one of the great

joys I have is introducing people to this. And people fit into different categories, right? So you've got, you know, just your friends who are over for dinner and they'll eat anything and whatever. And then that's great. And in that category, it's usually, hey, we're having venison. And they're like, oh, I don't know. I don't love that.

It's a little gamey. And I'm like, that's cool. Just tell me what you think. And then they're always like, no, that's totally different than anything I've ever had. But truthfully, one of the more enjoyable experiences that I had was during our quarantine when our nanny was staying with us. This is at the early part of the quarantine. When for two months, we all just sort of hunkered down and our nanny is a vegan.

So luckily, we've got an infinite supply of vegetables and non-animal matter and stuff like that. But we would, you know, sort of she'd have her dinner, we'd have ours. And we were at the time, I had 500 pounds of access to you in our freezer. So we were basically eating this every single day. Because we had just come back from that huge trip like in December. But eventually she was like, you know, she wanted to try it because we would talk about it over dinner. You know, we would have this type of a discussion and.

I think for totally understandable reasons her opposition to eating meat was look she had some health concerns, but she also had great concerns over how the animals are treated. And so, night after night, she's sort of asking questions about this and asking questions about this. And then she's like, can I try a course? And, you know, I mean, needless to say, she loved it.

She had these two awesome dogs that stayed with us and it was like hands down, like, it was cracked of the dogs. So I became like the dogs best friends because I'm giving them like venous and treats every night. But to me that was like, there was very special experience, right? It was like, look, I respect whatever choice a person makes with respect to what they want to eat

and don't want to eat and what the reasons are. But it's also important to understand not all meat is created equal. And I think this is just sort of an example of that. I think we share that experience in, I had seen that in the past, like personally, and people, and it did. It really took them like listening and understanding.

And I think they recognized the crazy lengths we go to make the process technically humane. But like we love these animals. The relationship with them started in this place where there was nothing but respect for them. We didn't understand the negative portions of that relationship to our ecosystems and ecology and that's still very much the case for me. It's a continual drive to like how do we better manage this animal for us and net positive? But now with Maui Nui, we're seeing these testimonials coming in. And most of the, most times it's like them writing to us individually, like via the website

or I get a phone call. And they're just like, it's been 20 years. And I decided to have meat after watching your video or after hearing you like talk here. And I mean, that's not to my credit. I've had amazing people help us along the way. And they'll mention like, oh, I watched Kyle Spiracy. Something along the way told them it was no longer okay to eat meat.

And it's been such an amazing experience for them to see our process. And I think the intent in what we're trying to do and be like, wait, this is an opportunity to eat meat again. And completely respect everybody's body is different and you know this better than anybody. And maybe being a vegan works in most instances, but I think for the vast majority of the people,

it's important they get this protein, right? And again, you would know better than me, but it's been such an awesome experience to have somebody come to you with that level of trust and be like, I'm going to introduce this into my life again after 20 years. And you'd be like, thank you so much. Like we're so glad we can do that for you and help bring that into your home. And that's the big part of this is our mission is to balance populations. Our mission is to get rid of these animals,

like we find them, is this an incredible resource for our communities when balanced? And the only way we do that is people need to eat them. So what does balance look like, Jake? When IE is in balance at about 20,000 animals, you know, Mollika, he said it's about 60,000, it's out of balance right now.

It seems that's, that seems to be past capacity because my recollection from talking with you and Mikey and others is there's basically access deer dying on the side of the roads in mullikai. So it's, it's past that capacity. And then Maui, I think you said was one, or was 60 on the way to 210? Was that right? Yeah. What does sustainability look like? So it's a super nuanced subject because we don't have the capacity to manage deer on all lands. So like we talked about, it's a legal for us to operate on public land. And honestly, I support that.

We don't ever want to affect resource availability for a subsistence hunter. And anecdotally, we see on public lands on Maui, it's pretty hard to find a deer. I think there's a scenario where subsistence hunters play a huge role in what balance look like. But we also don't dictate balance on a private landowner's property either. They own that animal. What we're able to do is say, here's how many animals you have. Look, we understand how they, what they're doing as a liability, as a function of dry feed or watersheds or fencing or like our roadways, what a mess. We say this is how many animals you have, how many do you want. And then they say to us, well let's let's try and bring this from 6,000 to 2,000 and see what it looks like. And because we're

able to manage them with such precision via these aerial surveys, we're able to toggle that balance based on, like we're going through a printout to drought right now. We're bringing down numbers in the areas we're working in. But one of my favorite things we talk about, apart from this vegan conversation, one of my absolute favorite things is we walk into a meeting with a rancher that is calling an animal spotted rat and it only presents liability to them, right? Like of course their cowboys enjoy harvesting. Like there's there's

of course value in in them as as something being able to hunt. By the time we leave that room that animal has value because our harvesting process, we pay, it's not a lot, but we pay them a small amount per pound for that animal so that they find value in that animal. And we didn't have to do that. In other words, it's more valuable for them to let you harvest it humanely than for them to just for them to let you harvest it humanely, then for them to just shoot it and leave it sit in there. Exactly. So in varying this balance each year with rainfall and ingress and all of the different things that happen at balance, the rancher is happy because more importantly, he has optimal soil health and no runoff and he's not losing feed, but he's also making like, he's seeing a small amount of additional value from this animal.

And that combination, when we talk about like what balance looks like on a large scale, we have several ranchers that are saying like come help us. We're not there yet. We need to grow. So A, we need to like grow our harvesting capacity and we have the system to do that. Now B, we need more people to eat these animals with us and bring them into their homes. And in that scenario, we'll be able to achieve balance by both growing and then working with all these private landowners. And each one, that's the best part.

Each one's going to make their own choice. That's not up to me to decide what balance looks like for that family or individual or board or whatever it is. That's up to the private landowner. What we do know is for able to grow large enough and we are able to operate on most of the private lands. Between all of them we can find a population level that is also best suited for our community because Moloka is a great example. I mean, Maui is well right now too, but Sun goes down. Everybody in that place is doing 10 miles an hour. There are so many deer on the road.

The risk to like hitting a deer is like at those densities we discussed is profound. And on Maui, you can do 55, 65 miles an hour. So as a function of like our watershed health and sediment, like the net present value of this species at balance makes sense. It doesn't make sense to eradicate them. We talked about food security and understand this is like a hard conversation too because we're also the endangered species capital of the world. So there's a very real conversation. If I was a conservationist, I would say get rid of all of these invasive species.

And let's work to bring back or rehabilitate the endangered species in these same spaces. Is it even technically feasible, Jake? If the Hawaiian government decided tomorrow we don't want a single access deer here by 2030. Could that be done technically? No way. They're too smart. I mean, we were able to accomplish that because they were in such low numbers on the big island. I don't believe there's a way to do that. So there's no choice but to find balance and balance looks like I support the idea that there shouldn't be deer in our watersheds. There's nothing more value as an isolated landmass and a community trying to be self-sufficient, especially through COVID.

We've donated 50,000 pounds of venison, over 100,000 meals through COVID because food banks were empty. Like Hawaii's economy teeters on absolute disaster because we're so dependent on tourism. And when COVID hit and we shut the door, the vast majority of our community was in trouble. So there's this nuance between yes, like there's ecosystems and ecology we have to respect

and every native species has the right to exist in its own place. But there's also economics and food security. So it's finding a balance for where these animals should be in the long run. And that's where we produce food. It's not in our mountain where we depend on water. And that's just my opinion. But yeah, so the conversation of balance isn't just like what's the dear density in this particular place. The conversation of balance is't just like what's the dear density in this particular place. The conversation of balance is like, how do you interact with all of these things across your communities and ecosystems and all of these other things?

And I think that story about the amount of food that was donated during COVID is kind of another example of this. I think it's part of why Maui Nui has been in such high favor with local people because you know, it's a big step back for a business that's trying to grow to basically give away an enormous chunk of its product. You know, it's one thing if you're Nike and you're 50 years into your existence and you're going to give away 5% of your shoes for free or something. This is totally different.

But at the same time, it was sort of a no-brainer because it basically just meant, look, we're going to delay the growth of the business by a year and a half, but we're doing the same thing. And it still serves the same mission, which is you're feeding people and you're managing a population. Yeah, you're right. There wasn't even like a choice. And two, everybody credit on the team, because we need to grow at a profitable, healthy margin so we can scale and achieve that mission of balance. But it was like an overnight, it was like an instant decision,

because a hunter can't in Hawaii, a hunter can't go harvest an animal and take it into the food bank for donation. The food safety requirements are far too stringent. And so probably one of the things we are most proud of is we had created this system and tool that in a time of need as a function of food security, we could call on it instantly. Yeah, that's the point because if you didn't have that USDA certification already set up, you wouldn't have been able to have, you could have all the deer in the world, you couldn't do anything with them.

Yeah, and that's not to say subsistence hunters didn't rally to harvest more animals themselves and get them into the community, but doing so at a recreational or subsistence level versus a commercial level is like 50,000 pounds of food in eight months, is like that's a lot of meat and that's not possible without like systems for food safety and

slaughtering and all the other things that go into it. So as we look to our communities 20 years from now and either weather instability or governmental, all of the different things that are happening in our world economy, especially like the conversation of domestic production. Having it at home in Hawaii, a resource we can always call on, it's important. And when we look at the total value of access to your for our communities, that's important. And when we look at the total value of access to your for our communities, that's important. And that all interacts with this idea of balance. And again, there's no perfect answer one way or the other. But man, we're happy rolling two full pallets of venous into the food bank with an empty freezer. We're just like the boys, you've met the boys.

Like, you imagine the smile on like big at ease face who's been like a community member for, you know, 40 years and him being able to like have this impact at like a time of need. It's awesome. Like, you feel amazing. Jake, it's been amazing for me to sort of be a, a minuscule part of this journey along side for a couple of years and getting to know you and having you share this story

Has been great because I've never heard it in one piece and there are even pieces of this that I hadn't heard before so I know folks are gonna Have their curiosity peaked by this and and maybe some belief systems challenged But if you're not doing that then what are you doing? Yeah, absolutely And I think you underestimate the impact you've had. It took us seven years to figure out a harvesting system. But being able to take that next step in understanding how you move this into somebody's home and what e-commerce looks like. And all of these other things,

like the resource you've helped us find, we would not be here without your help in the rest of the group and we can't thank you enough for that and I mean we're just excited to see what the next couple of years look like and how we can move that mission forward and what continued good we can do within our communities yeah we can't thank you enough but I really appreciate it. Well I need more bone broth because like my wife is pretty much consumed all the bone broth you send She doesn't even let me have it anymore. It's sort of like her little secret dreams Yeah, well we can we can make that happen for sure. Thanks brother. Ah, thank you Peter

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