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

Tim Ferriss interviews friend and Maui Nui Venison co-founder Jake Muise about turning Hawaii's invasive axis deer crisis into a quality-obsessed, USDA-compliant wild food company. Jake traces the history of axis deer in Hawaii, the ecological damage they cause to watersheds, reefs, and food systems, and the technology-heavy three-year hunt that proved his methods. He details the company's unusual operating systems: seven-days-on/seven-off schedules, obsessive data tracking, field-harvesting that exceeds brick-and-mortar humane-kill standards, and a peer-review hiring framework called HHS. The conversation closes on nutrient density (Maui Nui venison tested dramatically higher than beef in omega-3s and phytochemicals), parenting hacks like clawback allowances, and Jake's billboard mantra, 'Pick up the phone.'

• Jake's team developed a first-of-its-kind helicopter live-capture net system and used it in 2018 to rescue 50+ cattle trapped between two fast-moving lava flows from Fissure 8 on the Big Island, riding the lava's thermals to lift the cows out.
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• After four axis deer were illegally introduced to the Big Island, the Axis Deer Institute ran a literal three-year hunt (working every day but Sunday) to find and remove them; it took seven months just to get the first camera-trap image, and they ultimately removed five animals using military forward-looking infrared (FLIR).
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• Maui Nui follows the Federal Meat Inspection Act in the field with no control of the wild animal, standardizing shooters to intentionally miss 30 percent of the time to guarantee perfect head shots and a 99.9 percent rendering efficiency, exceeding the brick-and-mortar average of 98 percent.
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• The company built a peer-to-peer evaluation system called HHS (Humble, Hungry, Smart), based on Patrick Lencioni's The Ideal Team Player, with 18 anonymized questions; A-players get raises, C-average players are let go on the spot, and even Jake grades himself quarterly.
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• When Maui Nui's bone broth and organ meats were lab-tested, labs repeatedly called thinking samples were contaminated (33 percent higher protein per ounce, hearts with 'too much' choline) because the values were so far outside normal ranges.
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• In Dr. Stephan van Vliet's largest-ever beef study (200+ samples) at Utah State, Maui Nui venison tested at two-to-four times the phytochemicals, eight-to-64 times the omega-3s, and roughly zero oxidative stress compared to the beef samples.
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• Jake adopted economist John List's 'clawback allowance' idea for his kids: $20 in ones go on the fridge monthly and get clawed back for bad attitude rather than earned for chores, leveraging loss aversion to train helpfulness.
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• Post-Western contact, Hawaiians became one of the most literate societies on Earth within ~50 years, with 93-94 percent able to read and write; only 2 percent of their hundreds of newspapers have been translated.
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• The pre-contact Kohala Field Systems used 273 varieties of sweet potato across ~500 miles of permaculture lines, yielding about 60 percent better than current sweet potato yields, feeding up to a million people.
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• Axis deer arrived as a gift of seven animals to Kamehameha IV in 1868 from India; they breed year-round (94-95 percent of does lactating or pregnant) because, unlike most deer, their sperm stays viable all year.
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• On Molokai there are about 70,000 axis deer and only 7,000 people; herds suffer massive die-offs, losing about a third of the population every seven to ten years.
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• A new species is introduced to Hawaii roughly every eight days today, versus naturally once every 25,000 to 50,000 years before human contact.
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• Mongoose were introduced to control rats but are awake during the day while rats are nocturnal; Kauai has no mongoose (one was drowned at the dock) and is overrun with feral chickens, unlike the other islands.
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• After an animal is rendered in the field, USDA rules require it be back at the facility, cleaned and processed with not a single hair on it, within one hour; harvesters carry 250-pound bucks on their backs because dragging would bruise the meat.
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• The FLIR binocular system can distinguish a goat from a deer at seven miles and show every hair at 150 yards in total darkness, letting the USDA inspector verify the animal's health and even see the bullet's heat trail.
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• Maui Nui harvests deer on Haleakala's ustand andisols, the most fertile of three andisol types, which make up only about 0.05 percent of the world's soils.
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• Hawaii now imports about 95 percent of its food, roughly half of it at 'Twinkie-level' nutritional value, despite pre-contact Hawaiians feeding a million people with finite local resources.
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