Steven Shonts

Steven Shonts has spent his career following curiosity into increasingly unlikely places — from modeling planetary systems and carbon cycles, to wrangling data pipelines in carbon markets and energy analytics, to asking the question nobody was asking: what if calamari jerky was actually good? Somewhere between earth systems science and food systems science, he found The Hermit Calamari Jerky — a venture born from the conviction that sustainable protein can be delicious, weird, and worth taking seriously. He brings the same analytical rigor to perfecting squid-based snacks that he once brought to atmospheric datasets, which is either very reassuring or mildly alarming depending on your perspective. When he's not engineering jerky or engineering data, he's probably exploring a cave somewhere in Southeast Asia.