#156 - Jake Muise: Humanely harvesting axis deer while alleviating its impact on Hawaii's vulnerable ecosystems

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in 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 peterattiamd.com 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've 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 Axis deer and what that technically means. And 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 conceptually understand that 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 want to 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 Nui 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. 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 Nui 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 Muse. All right, Jake, looking forward to talking about a lot of things today here. Thanks for. 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, you know, I'm like pointing to Toronto and that 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. 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 to the Northwest Territories. And who was I? I was just having a conversation yesterday with somebody about ice fishing. Like, you try and explain ice fishing to your kid, and they're just like, wait, what are you talking about? Like you just sit in a box, like in a hole that's potentially like four feet deep. Oh, that was the conversation we were having yesterday was I remember my dad at 6ft tall having one of the ice augers where he 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 a, it's such an amazing experience and obviously lots of resilience comes 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?

Oh no, we were 14 hours north of Edmonton.

So you weren't going to Oilers games or anything?

I went to one Oilers game. 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 Gretzky and, and Messier and like I can still remember walking in and not under 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, I mean ultimately I think where this, 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'd had a huge trailer that we'd take back up with us to this small town. I think it was only a couple of thousand people. And part of that was she wasn't bringing any steaks. Like she like I remember telling us stories like we ate pheasant 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. 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. Did you ever have to shovel the roof?

No, I never. 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 never. 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.

You'd avalanche. Yeah, yeah, 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 snowbank. And, like, we had all, like, igloos. 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 onsets 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.

Did you live in proximity to people who were generationally there, Inuit? I don't know what. What we would call. I don't know. I mean, we called them Inuit when I was growing up. I don't know if 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. It was odd as, 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 have been so curious to know what their hunting methods were there, you know, because you want to talk about people who have truly adapted to that climate. Yeah.

And for eight to 10 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 fair obviously the vast majority of their diet was meat because that was the only thing available I can remember the taste of moose meat. Like moose, moose. The nickname up there was they were called swamp donkeys because the vast majority of the summer they spent their time in swamps and they're eating all of these like 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, 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. I grew up in Canada, but go to Montreal, went to Quebec City once, never been to Nova Scotia, which is something I always want to see because the east coast of Canada looks breathtaking to me in many ways with 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 there's still like slush that forms in the seawater 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 know ups and downs and that was where talk about freezing, that was where we started. I started surfing. So like you, you've experienced this in the Great Lakes. Like the biggest waves were like these wind waves and when like wind swell on a 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 in, 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 going to Happen. And he 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 and me and my, like, little brother looked at each other and we were just like. Like, we were done. We were like, we need to do that. And that started a long and semi dangerous 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 used to wear toques. What are they? They're called beanies. Here in Hawaii, we used to wear a toque in the water and try not to duck dive, 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, end of September, October. And then you literally couldn't even get in the water, it was so cold. And then I remember getting the first. The first wetsuit I got was an old Navy dive suit, and it was 4 millimeters, and, like, literally could not move my arms. Like, it was just like a. It was so thick and. But we. I mean, we didn't. 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, you can imagine the University of Hawaii calling and saying, we want you to come out here. I was like, wait, where do I sign?

Yeah, 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.

You're the oldest. So whatever Josh did, I did. And Josh started playing volleyball. And I remember just going to a couple 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 to 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, saying, like, we're just going to stick him 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, you know, 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. 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 of 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. I guess they were on the fence about me because I'm small. Like, I'm only 6ft tall. And he had, like, he fought for me, saying, if this kid can do this, whatever, we're going to get, like, the level of resiliency we're going to get out of him is going to be like, it's going to be worth it, even if we're losing a couple inches. So, yeah, it helped me get there, and volleyball's taken me all over the world. It's been amazing.

So you arrive to this amazing Division 1 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 Kauai or something. 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. Like, I remember. Oh, here's a 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, like, 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.

Go for it.

We're going to pick up, like, tomorrow. And they had dropped me off at my hotel. And you're. You'll love this. As a Canadian, I go to put the board shorts on, and I'm like, well, where's the liner? Like, where's the. 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 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 tighty whities 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 then paddling out with, like, the tighty whiteies hanging out the back. And, like, locals are looking at me and just shaking their head like, oh, what are we? 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. Recruiting trip 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 and opening up the door, and they're all sitting around playing music. They're playing, like, playing their ukulele. And the biggest person I'd ever seen in my life, like, six to 300 pounds, had an ukulele that looked like, this big. Like, 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 there's 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, oh. And true Molokai fashion, true aloha fashion. Best friends, 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 mind until you don't. And it was 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 Lanai. But Molokai 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. So 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 has, I think, stayed the same for. 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 like 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 on Molokai that are hungry. Like, 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, 50 comes from the ocean or comes from the land. So they're either either a subsistence hunting, so there's deer, black buck goats and pigs on that island, or more importantly, they're the ocean. They have the longest standing reef in Hawaii on the south shore of Molokai. The ocean is teeming with. I mean, it's still teeming with fish and people are constantly eating it. So all of these things, like, they've fought to protect all of these natural resources. They fought to protect their way of life because Molokai's beaches are extraordinary. Like, there's no. They're probably the nicest in the state. Like you could easily put up a Ritz Carlton 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, Laal Point. And they fought for years and years and years and they won. And that comes with consequences as a function of economics and all. 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 Waikiki. 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.

So every long weekend or Christmas break or any, like, they picked me up. And like the family said, you're coming with us. It was just an overnight. They call it hanai. It's the Hawaiian word for adoption. So I was hanai'd by the same family as Mike, good friend of mine, incredible human being, incredible hunter. So I was hanai'd 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 certainly 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 end up having a very successful career at the University of Hawaii. You guys win the NC2A 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. Incredible program integrating that into just regular college life as a whole. Tossing on top of that, like, a student athlete schedule, I think 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 Molokai and learning more about that culture, learning more about Axis Deere, it was an amazing experience. And as an athlete, and I don't think I really realized this TILL, like, the third year, because your first two years, you're still 19 and 20, you're probably, you're 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 bringing like, we were broke, like, how to starve through college without access deer. 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. We're like, hey, 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 axisdeer here. Yeah. So they kind of all got intertwined and college was just such an amazing experience to combine those two things.

Obviously we're going to talk in such depth about access deer 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 how much did you understand the history of how they got there and what the true significance ecologically was? Did you know any of that at the time?

I honestly didn't. It was entirely recreational. It was only later. It was only later when I saw like the first instance of like, there's these periods where there's too many axes to air and essentially they'll lay down and die. They don't have any feed. It was only when I started seeing the Impact act that I started saying, wait a second, because that animal on the island of Molokai is revered. Like, nobody's running around Molokai calling it an invasive species that's been a part of that culture for a hundred 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. And you decide you're gonna 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 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. I closed my contract in Bali a month early, flew back to Canada to, like, make it to tryouts. Thought I had, like, an incredible tryout. And they just had this guy that it. And his guy had looked up to. He just had this guy there for eight years, and he was so calm and such a phenom. And. And Canada had one of its best teams ever. So it wasn't like, this is going to be a building year. This was like, we're going to try and get our best placement in the Olympics ever. And. And they did. And they just. Yeah, they said, you're one short. And it was amazing because 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, I just remember thinking, like, well, what now? And the first thing was, well, I'm going to Molokai. Had zero plans. My plan was I was going to stay in Canada indefinitely and 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 want 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 deer. 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 non profit called the Access Deer Institute. And well you're, you're a 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 you know how you get like 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 actis deer or biological. Like I was trying to figure it out and nobody would give me any information. So I started a non profit called the Access Deer Institute. So when I emailed somebody I could say, hey, this is Jake Muse with the. I'm the executive director of the Access Deer 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 like 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 pastime 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 tier? 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 going to make it. And like I didn't even have a return flight. I was like, this is one way. And I called my mom and I said I'm going to Hawaii. And interestingly enough I landed, went straight to Molokai and four days later met my wife Almolke. 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 let's go home and do this thing. Let's 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 back. My way back to Hawaii permanently was through Molokai and my wife is from Molokai and Axis Deer was already, it 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 axis deer 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 deer can only be described as a love at first sight. Growing up in Canada, you see whitetail all day long. I basically just saw them as things not to hit with your car. It was basically like, this is a thing you don't want to hit. 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 stories north of Toronto where we would spend some time. That's where you would really see the whitetail. 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. That's regal, 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 Kamehameha V hired the Matheson Trading Company to get them out of India. My wife, Ku, she translates Hawaiian newspapers. 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 Lakhnagar, them arriving on Oahu. There were two bucks and five does.

And just for folks who maybe aren't familiar with deer, the bucks are the males, the females are the does.

Yeah. And so they stay on the ship on Oahu. And actually on the way from Oahu to Molokai, a baby buck was born. And they named it King Kamehameha V. And they arrive on Molokai. So they're only placed on the island of Molokai. None were put on Oahu. And they put a kapu they put a restriction on harvesting them for the local people. There they were. They were at that point the king's deer. And they didn't understand this animal. I don't. I still don't know why he sought this particular animal. At that point, Hawaii was trading with people all over the Pacific, and they could have done whitetail or el. 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 this small island of Molokai 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 like describing in the upland forests. And the subsequent year, there's an article about them hiring shooters. They called them sharpshooters from California. And the sharpshooters from California recorded killing 5,000 deer. And it's amazing, at the same time, a couple 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 going to continue to destroy our upland forests. So as far back as. What is that? That's 100 years ago. As far back as 100 years ago, people were already recognizing the impacts Axis deer were having on the communities.

What's their replication cycle, how long is their gestation cycle, how many babies, and blah, blah, blah.

Gestational period is 238 days.

It's very similar to humans. Yeah, right.

Yeah. So three fawns, so 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 on the planet that are like, this is a deer every year is called casting their antlers. So a deer, every year 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, so throughout the winters, et cetera, et cetera. So Axis deer 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 King Kamehameha V had no idea that was the case. And you toss in, 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 deer we've harvested, of those does, of those females, 89% 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, they 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 were 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 mean, 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 the 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, least use its capacity for smell, which is so far in excess of ours, to your advantage. We've talked about mouflon, right? Mouflon have a superpower of sight. It's sort of comical what they can see. The thing I sort of explain to people when they ask me, why are you so interested in this Axis deer is I say, as far as I can tell, they have three superpowers. Their sense of smell, their vision and their 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 100 yards of. You have to be doing everything right to get within 100 yards of it. And that's not close enough to take a shot. By the way, with the 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. But then you look at how axis deer, like what their natural habitat is. And they're these. 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. Wind's perfect. I'm like, there's no way. And I think they. To evade tigers in dench 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, 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 aerial unless they are completely oblivious. So you, I mean we've. How many times have you.

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 area to 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 axis 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 Molokai. Are you now back in contact with Mikey? What is he doing at this point in time? 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 going to go with those axis deer 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 like an adopted son to this family. And Mikey's one of my first phone calls after knowing I was going to Molokai. Because I'm like, mikey, what are you doing? I'm coming home. The plan was we were going to put our backpacks on and we were going to 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 going to 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 my partner. So in coming back, it actually took a little while. There was no opportunity 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 going to 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 Deer Institute was still going. We were collecting all of this information. We're starting to actually help other folks better understand Access Deer 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 Deere. And we happen to be the Axis Deer Institute, but me and Mike happen to be the experts on axis deer. Maybe accidentally.

Wait, just hit 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 so old. You can have it.

All right.

I actually 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 deer. Lanai and Maui. How and when did that happen? Relative to the 1860s with the initial.

Introduction to Molokai in the 1920s, the then owner of the island of Lanai. A really amazing story about how they round up all the deer. But they chose to introduce deer from Molokai to Lanai. Lanai 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 fawns are surviving. And a survey five years ago, there was 21,000 Akstyr on this very, very.

Small island, which topographically doesn't have anything in common with Molokai. I mean, Molokai, 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.

And I think to that point shows how adaptable axis deer 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 it correctly, they had about 20 deer in a pen on Lanai, 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, like, reading stories about, like, national park reps from across the country. Like, 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, we think it's in the island's best interest to move more of these axis 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 really reach carrying capacity. So this year we estimate the population on Maui to be about 60,000 deer, but the population will max out at 210,000 deer. 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 fill themselves in unless we're able to, you know, get ahead of that.

And just to round it out, where is Molokai today?

Population wise, it's an estimate because we don't have a full survey, but I would say Molokai 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 of Austin?

Yeah, we're three hours from. I mean, we're, 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 other state in the US has access deer besides Hawaii and Texas.

No. Where I'm going with this is I remember reading a whole bunch of studies on deer densities per acre. And Texas Hill country had the densest deer deer acreage or densest number of deer per acre at about 6 per 100 acres. And like Wisconsin and Mississippi was behind that. Hawaii, in established areas, has 25 deer per hundred acres. So at least 3x whatever the densest 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 4.

2 and 2.

3 does and 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 and Mike because we were already closely tied to, I mean, both my wife's family and my Hanae family are in the conservation community. And so we, we found out about it right away. And everybody said, if you got any chance of like finding these things, here are 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 being like, we think there's deer in here and it's like a 70 square mile area. And I just remember thinking, how the hell are we going to find these animals? And me and Mike already knew how, how extraordinary these animals were to find even when 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 Molokai, 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. They. This is the closest human to an axis tear. 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, yeah.

And the Big island being like our primary ag hub, our primary food hub for. And these obviously axa 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 me and Mike being probably the perfect partners for this, because whenever I was like, there's not a chance, man. We've walked this place eight times. But part of it, it was so big. It was an area that has. It's very, very windy. So there's windblown trees over the vast majority of the area. So think about a briar grove. Literally, it was like doing yoga all day long. Like, 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're 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 100 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 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?

Oh, 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 Fleur effectively in the middle of the night. And I'm kind of have 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 buck in velvet. And the velvet antler has so much blood in it, it's so hot. And it was. It was like five miles away. And we just saw like this velvet antler in this super dense cover. And Mike was like, that's a deer. I think that's a deer. And so I got on the binocular 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, and I mean, like via binocular 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. 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 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 access. Deer were like, these things are impossible to find. I think everybody Assumed it wasn't going to happen anyway. So we had like a minuscule budget because me and Mike rolling around like in an old Tacoma that was lended to us with like half ass equipment. Mike's shoes have duct tape all over them. 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 my and Mike's partnership. I would be like, this is it, this is a waste of time. And Mike 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. I'd be like, you know what, let's like. And I think that partnership was what ultimately got us to the first deer. 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 behavioral 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 via like we're doing these surveys via helicopter. That's the same pig we saw three days ago. Wait, that's the same goat we saw three days ago. We started to then realize how accurate the 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, 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 Mike are 20ft 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. And that ultimately 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're 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 deer. 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're. 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 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 to the second half of the project. Waking up every night at like 6, eating dinner with your family, and then rolling out for 12 hours of using that floor equipment not knowing what you were going to find for three or hunt. Apart from athletics, I think any level of resiliency I have probably 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? Had she always wanted to stay on Molokai?

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 Molokai, but it takes like, there wasn't any opportunity at that point. Like after we were married, we were married on Molokai like, there wasn't anything for us to do. Like, there's no jobs on Molokai, 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 we went to the Big Island. A lot of her 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. And I think I could 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. And she's. She's our co founder at this company 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 100%. Would have never happened without her. Because convincing any significant other to sleep by themselves every single night and then you roll in an absolute mess in the morning is not conducive.

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 going to find him in the first week. We're like, oh, they saw him over here. Me and Mikey were like, we're going to walk every single day for 12 hours till we find them. And I can't remember, like, finishing the first month. Like, by the end of the first month, we were already like, oh, there's no deer here. That guy didn't see something. But what ended up spurring on the rest of it was me and Mike look through the entire area. 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 camera trap. So not like we're going to put up a hundred camera traps. And see, I think we had three camera traps. Mike was like, if there is a deer here, he's going to walk right there. 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 how me and you have 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. Puts that into perspective. So you guys go back to Maui. Is there something about the burden of Axis Dear 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 Axis deer 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, won't mention the person, but calling them spotted rats. I think they had 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, and they started to see that that population grow pretty quickly. And so the, 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, 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, right as we closed 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 like cultural values that came from Molokai were still very much like a part of who we were. And so for a rancher to be able to say, like, well, just shoot them all, like bury them, we don't care. And we had already had, like I'd already Done some research on Europe, has an extensive venison industry. New Zealand has an extensive venison industry and already had, like, thought that thought process. 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 Lanai. 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 AR15s 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 is the most isolated landmass on the planet. Everything here evolved kind of textbook adaptive radiation. Like everything over here has 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 mintless. 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 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 Haleakala recently, right?

We still do, yeah. Yeah.

Amazing.

Water is. And the Hawaiians knew this. The word for wealth was viva, it was water. For native Hawaiians, our watersheds are our most important resource. And those watersheds developed. It was, 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, etc, etc, any ungulate in our forest, 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 water feds, 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. And 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 topsoil will run off into our oceans. And it doesn't even stop there. Deer scat are 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, in these events. And when you, 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 Maukatu Makai. There's this downstream effect of their impact that is, I mean, I don't 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 it's just when they're imbalanced, it's a double edged sword in that they're significantly denser, habitual 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 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 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 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 got to imagine a cow is a really big thing. And basically what it was, if I can explain this properly, 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.

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. Just completely wiped the whole community out. And it was this amazing community. It's there 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, 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. We're driving out early in the morning, 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 gonna fly around and pick these animals up, flying over these 50 mile an hour lava flow. But me and Mike were like, yeah, we can do it. And at that point we, 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 be lava cowboys. And you know Uka, 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 guys life. 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 were working with a helicopter pilot we'd only work with a couple times a week before. But he was, 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 your eye level with like lava flows. And there's. There was something called Fissure 8. There's like Fissure 8 is blowing in front of you a couple thousand yards and you're seeing like chunks of magma going everywhere. And like you're seeing 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 3, 400ft in the air, like almost instantly. And so we get to the inside and constantly they're like, are you sure we, like, we're good. I'm like, if you're good, I'm Good. And there's GoPro 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 is 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, what chemical we were most worried about or what gas we were most worried about, but we all had like indicators while we're wearing like indicators. And like, I remember like having to get on the ground and like seeing blue spots. Like the gas levels were fairly dangerous as well. So we didn't want to get on the ground. We want it to be where airflow is 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 flow without me getting on the ground? And he's like, I think so. And I'm just like, son of a bitch. Like, 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 to barbecue this cow. He was confident. And I've learned along the years, like, you trust your pilot. They're the one that's going to keep you safe. And so this cow is flying under the helicopter at 100ft. So we're 250ft above the ground. And as we get to the flow, 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 in. And I'm just like, I. I didn't know what to do. Like, this is going to sound terrible. I honestly contemplated, like, if it was dead, just 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. We brought that cow in. So the way it works is it's. It's hanging in its 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 stand. And we have all of this on video. This cow just stands up, walks out like nothing wrong, walks over, starts grabbing some feed, like that's on the aside. And we had never done it before. And, like, UKA and Mike are looking at me like I was the first one in the helicopter. They're like, is it going to work? I'm like, it works. And then we spent. We had 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, 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 going to lose it all, and to 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. A, it was probably like, fantastical to C, 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. We just had a knack of, like, figuring it out as we go because there were certainly some bumps in that road. Imagine, like me, Mike and UKA 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.

God, I just wish I was there for that because I know how much fun it is to just be sitting around the campfire talking about that stove that we like, the shore stove, whatever the heck it's called, and getting into the math of that. So this is talk about the stakes being high. 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 harvesting of Axis deer for food at a USDA certification, which is. It's important for people to understand. You and I could go out and hunt Axis deer, but that doesn't really mean anything because even if you had 100 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.

Well, it 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 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 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. The state is really only responsible to manage that animal in public spaces. So we, 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 owned the 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. He just said, here's the Meat inspection act from 1930. It's the federal Meat 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 non stop 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 explained the process. Like, we have this amazing Florida 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 was like, A, can we do this efficiently enough? And B, will my wife let me remortgage 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 remortgage 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 created. It wasn't a lot, but like a super tiny margin for me and Mike to operate and get to understand what that looked 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 till I could 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 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 this would be one of those moments in time where if this is a subject matter that's very sensitive, please hit a little bit of forward word 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 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, 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 is 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, unfortunately, 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 live. And then that animal is rendered immediately unconscious with a stun or 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 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 antimortem 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 100% 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 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 about 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 nights 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 flur binocular 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 corral to determine whether or not it's healthy. So the inspector is staring at this screen, all of the lights are off, and he says, yep, all of These are healthy. You 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 shoot it in the head. But that animal is in a zero stress situation and dies immediately.

Which is important to distinguish from, 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 lung, heart, lung, 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 and the lung, I mean, it could 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 tamponade, but it's still some form of, 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 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 two, 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's not. 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, in a herd of 10, we'll typically harvest three or four of those animals. So that inspector has viewed that. So process the flur 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 skill set 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 is, 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?

Yep. We've only ever been written up again, like, once for that infraction. And part of that is also. So we. We train for those imperfections, but we also train for this 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 and 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 point point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine. 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 is we have such a. The shooter has, has to have such an intimate understanding of axis steer behavior. Like a right ear starts to dip and you know, like the head is gonna go. Like a nose starts to go up and you know it's gonna 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 he can operate at this efficiency. I need a military sniper plus an Axis deer 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. Like, 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 me 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 train. There was. 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 these parameters in place, these harvesting systems in place that allow us to be in a situation where in starting and evening 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. Efficiency on a nightly 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 gears for a moment and just now talk a little bit about bringing it back to 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 deer. 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 gamey. Certainly black tail more than white tail. But axis deer sort of exists in its own camp, which is not particularly gamey at all. And I suspect this, you know, 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 animals. 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 rigor mortis. And you can walk me through this, but what I assume is that muscle trying to continue to do something. So pulling on ATP and that ATP, like a function of that process being lactate, that lactate is so important as that that rigor mortis 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 a deer once?

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 lotec, it was 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 where 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. They're constantly pulling on different plant species. Axis 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, what's crazy, and we've seen this via the collar and we've seen this anecdotally, is how intelligent. It'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, walk through an axis 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 with that specific spot, but five yards away, that deer is picking up the scent from that boot mark, 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 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, like, group of glycine and they're saying, like, they're smelling, smelling, smelling, saying, oh, I'm going to eat this small patch right here. And I think what we don't understand is in 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 extraordinarily healthy they are, are the vast majority of other animals. Look at like a, you've seen a pig now in a field, or you seem 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 going to 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. 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 J.R. as you know, close friend of mine 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, Axis 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 deer or elk, which would be for me personally, my two favorite. I think Axis deer 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. 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, that'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 8 ounce filet. Whereas if I can eat elk and if I can eat Axis 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 I 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 access deer 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 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 Axis, dear, for most folks is 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 it admittedly it was because I had run 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 at 60 bucks a pop for the plane flight and being able to bring back a hundred 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 inches.

I was going to say is it possible it was over 40, 40 inches? Holy cow. My vertical is 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 7ft 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 like 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 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 deer that yields what, how many pounds of meat for the human?

I mean, the bucks are on the big side. A typical axis deer is about 60 pounds whole carcass and will yield about 50 pounds for a typical human. But there's also hides and hooves and offal and all kinds of.

Yeah, yeah. So you've got the pet food, you've got the dog chews. 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. 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, 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. 100 ounces or something.

No, no, no, I think it's less volume. Oh, yeah, yeah. Much less volume than that. Sixteen ounces or something.

Sixteen ounces? Yeah, yeah. In 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 6s to Omega 3s. 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 vegans now. 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 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 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 sort of. She'd have her dinner, we'd have ours. And we were, at the time I had 500 pounds of access deer 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, she wanted to try it because we would talk about it over dinner, 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 some? Of 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 crack to the dogs. So I became like the dog's best friends because I'm giving them like venison treats every night. But to me, that was like, that was a 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, personally, and it did. It really took them listening and understanding, and I think they recognized the crazy lengths we go to to make the process technically humane. But 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 forward? It's a net positive. But now with Maui Nui, we're seeing these testimonials coming in, and 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. Like, I've had amazing people help us along the way. And they'll mention, like, oh, I watched cowspiracy 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 I 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 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 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 isn't to get rid of these animals. Like, we find them is 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 Lanai is in balance at about 20,000 animals. You know, Molokai, you said it's about 60,000. It's out of balance right now, it seems. That seems to be past capacity, because my recollection from talking with you and Mikey and others is there's basically Axis deer dying on the side of the roads in Molokai 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 illegal for us to operate on public land. And honestly, I support, 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 subsistent 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 you want. 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. Oh, 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, 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 pronounced 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 of course, value in, in them as a. 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, 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 shoot it and leave it sitting 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. But B, we need more people to eat these animals with us and bring them into their homes. And in, 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 if we're 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 Molokai is a great example. I mean, Maui as well right now too. But sun goes down, everybody on 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. I 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 like we've donated £50,000 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 a right to exist in the 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. That's just my opinion. But yeah. So the conversation of balance isn't just like what's the deer 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, systems 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 it's a big step back for a business that's trying to grow to basically give away an enormous chunk of its product. 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 a choice. And two, everybody's 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, like was. 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.

And so probably one of the things we were 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 of food in eight months is like. That's a lot of. 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 Axis Deere 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, were we happy rolling two full pallets of venison into the food bank with an empty freezer. We were just like the boys. You've met the boys like you. Imagine the smile on, like, Big Eddie's face, who's been like a community member for 40 years, and him being able to have this impact at a time of need. It's awesome. You feel amazing, Jake.

It's been amazing for me to sort of be a minuscule part of this journey alongside 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 going to have their curiosity piqued by this 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. You know, 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 and 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 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 has pretty much consumed all the bone broth you sent. She doesn't even let me have it anymore. It's sort of like her little secret drink.

Yeah, well, we can, we can make that happen for sure.

Thanks, brother.

Ah, thank you, Peter.

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