Speaker 1What is it like being tased?
Speaker 2So it's really interesting. It's terrifying while it's happening because you lose control of your body and there's like these waves of energy. Five seconds while you're being hit with a taser seems like a very long time. And I had long enough to like have this philosophical like realization about what it must be like for people who can't control their body. And then the current was off. But it's not fun. But when it's off, it's off. Like you're right back to normal the second it's off.
Speaker 1Am I the only person who thinks that there's a great content business in body camps? There's just so much good content that comes out of these things. Like, is that just crazy? It's not just valuable from a social perspective, but it's like, there's a ton of entertaining content. Well, there was a company that, remember Live PD?
Speaker 2I don't know if you remember that. There was a show that did just Live PD on Friday nights.
Speaker 1Yeah, cops, remember cops? This kid I went to high school with, his dad produced cops on TV. Yeah, I guess it's always been interesting.
Speaker 2Yeah, so Live PD was the new version of cops. And their twist was that it was live so people would tune in on weekend nights because they're like, oh, I want to see what's happening, like a live sporting event. But then they got canceled after the George Floyd incident. You know, I think the production companies were afraid to be sharing, you know, pro police. So we actually ourselves had done Axon Studios for a period of time to try to do exactly what you're talking about, like a live content business out of the body cameras. But it's just, you know, you got to know your corporate DNA. We are too, like, pro police. And we're like, you know, we're a big corporation that wasn't going to do the edgy things you would need to do to make that a great content business.
Speaker 1But I think it's there for somebody to do it. Yeah, well, YouTube works. I'm going all in. Applovin started with an $8 domain, no VC funding, and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Now that same engine powers Applovin ads for e-commerce. Your ads run inside mobile games, reaching over a billion people with full screen distraction-free attention. The platform finds buyers and optimizes for profit. You see the target, it does the rest. One cookware brand went from 4 million to 16 million, turned profitable, and is on pace for 80 million this year. Visit applovin.com slash all in to launch your first campaign today. Rick Smith, CEO of Axon. Welcome to the All In interview. It's awesome to be here. Thanks. I'm glad we could make this work out. I know we had talked about having you come out to the summit and got delayed, missed that window, but I'm really glad that this has worked out. You know, your business history is fascinating. I would love, if you're okay with it, maybe to go back a little bit to the beginning of the business. Your company used to be called Taser. I think we all remember the original Taser name and product. But maybe you could take us back, like we can do a real quick recap how the company got started in the early days.
Speaker 2Yeah. So, we started in the early 90s. So, this is the only job I've ever had. Started in 93 in a garage in Tucson. The sort of lead up to that is I was in graduate school in Europe. And a bunch of the European students were saying they were afraid to come to America because of all the gun violence they were seeing on TV. And I would tell them like, you know, look, that's not, not everything is like what you see on the news. And one of them asked me if I knew anyone who'd been shot and killed. And, and it just struck me as like, wow, actually I do. There were these two guys that played on my high school football team that were shot and killed in a road rage incident. And we knew a couple of friends of the family. By the time I added it up, it was like maybe five or six people. And the thing that struck me was, why is it that like bullets are still a thing in 1993, much less 2026? And what I mean is like, it's a pretty old technology, right? I mean, bullets have been around for many centuries. And the simple insight was if we had Captain Kirk's phaser, like people would choose not to kill other people because they'd have a more civilized way to stop somebody who's threatening them. And one thing led to another. I discovered this device called the taser had been invented back in the 1970s by a NASA scientist who lived in Tucson, Arizona. I found him through his patent filings. I just called him up and I said, hey man, whatever happened to this, this tech? It seems to me like this is something the world could use. And shortly thereafter, he invited me down to his house. And here I am this 23, old kid and a 73-year-old man. It sounds like, I don't know, a comic book sort of plot. But we started in his garage to build new tasers. And I can tell you at the beginning, everybody thought I'd lost my mind. In fact, I have a great video of Emil Maiku, who's one of the leaders at Uber. He's now the undersecretary of war. Came to visit me when he was 23. And they filmed a spoof video making fun of me, just how crazy this idea was that I was going to go make electrical weapons.
Speaker 1You found the inventor of the taser? You found the inventor of the taser device through a patent filing, go and visit him and buy it or license it and form a company around it?
Speaker 2Yep. In fact, I convinced him to do it with me to come out of retirement and sort of show me the way. So we were building the first tasers in his garage from parts from Ace Hardware. Because the first thing we had to do was to get federal government approval that the new taser would not be considered some sort of illegal weapon. And that would require a regulatory approval. As I look back, you don't realize how fast you move. When you're a startup relative to the rest of the world. Like we built our first prototype in 30 days from go, you know, now I've got 6,000. What year was this? It was 93.
Speaker 193. And you started a company right away and built the first prototype with your own money.
Speaker 2Uh, yeah, it was friends and family. My, now my dad was a serial entrepreneur, uh, and he had had one successful company in Silicon Valley. So he knew a lot of the VCs, but no VC would touch us, right? We weren't the internet in late nineties. It was right in the peak internet boom. Um, and again, everybody thought we were this sort of oddball, uh, oddball thing. And I'm actually pretty proud now that we've seen enough success that, uh, and with the changes in the world, that defense and policing technology is now much more mainstream than it was back then.
Speaker 1But this was a handheld taser device. What, what was the market initially? Was it to sell into police forces? How did you think you were going to go to market and what was your first sale?
Speaker 2Yeah. No, our first, our, our first market was consumers. So, uh, you know, police could buy the original taser, but due to basically the original taser was a firearm, but it looked like a flashlight that puts it into this category two, which is like a sawed off shotgun, which effectively makes it illegal. Very hard to buy, but police could still buy them. So our theory was if we made this new taser weapon using compressed air instead of gunpowder, it would not be a firearm. And then people like my mom could go buy. And she had recently bought a gun around that same time. So we started in the consumer market and we struggled and we didn't really succeed. And what we heard from consumers was, Hey, if this thing, you know, really works, why aren't the police using it? And so we basically realized we need to go prove this works in policing. So after seven years of struggling and failing, we pivoted into the police market in late 99. And that's when the business took off. But like MacArthur to the Philippines, I will return to the consumer market. Once we have. Proven with police that the taser is as effective or even more effective than a gun. And that will happen in the next five years.
Speaker 1And so you spend seven years developing the market, trying to find product market fit all off of friends and family money. What was keeping you in it? Was there a point where you said, Hey, I'm going to throw the towel in. We should go do something else with my life. I mean, this is kind of a classic entrepreneur. You know, how many times are you willing to pivot question?
Speaker 2Yeah. So we, we had. We had two failed product launches. And then in 1998, I was visiting some of my friends up in Silicon Valley who'd taken jobs, you know, at companies with dumb names like Yahoo. Of course, they were all making money hand over fist. It was the Internet gold rush. And here I just failed on my second product. And I remember going to my dad. It was it was him and one of his friends that were funding this. And I said, look, I think we should just shut it down. You know, we failed twice. And my dad looked at me and he said, well, you know, it would have been nice. It would have been nice to figure that out a couple of years ago because we owe Silicon Valley Bank about $2 million. I have $500,000 and I'm on the hook. So if we shut down, the bank has taken everything. So we have no choice. I'm putting my last $500,000 in. And the other investor was a guy named Bruce Culver. Shout out, Bruce, if you're watching. Bruce matched him. And so we that was going to be the last $1 million we would ever get. We would have to survive on it. And with that, we managed to design tools. We will manufacture and launch the police taser and then shoestring it along to cash flow, break even and eventually an IPO two years later.
Speaker 1So you go public around the end of the dotcom boom, right? So the market's kind of tanking generally. And there's an opportunity because you guys now have revenue you're selling into what police forces. That's the primary market at that point.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was actually looking back on it. It was just an alignment of the fates. So, yeah, the Internet bubble popped in 2000 and in late 2000. And an investment bank came to one of our training events and they basically were like, oh, my gosh, you're not Internet. You guys make a physical product. You have real revenue. We're taking you public. We went public specifically, I think, because banks needed deals and we were not Internet and we went public at a massive about twelve million dollar valuation.
Speaker 1Well, and that was a big that was a big outcome, though, right? You guys owned 100 percent of the company. You didn't have VCs or institutions. traditional guys on the cap table.
Speaker 2That's right. Yeah. I mean, we were a tiny, tiny market cap to go public. But because of that, we ended up being the highest return I think that investment bank Paulson out of Oregon ever had. And for us, I'll tell you, for me, it was such a relief that we were able to raise enough money to be able to pay off some shareholder notes so that I knew my dad wasn't going to end up in the poorhouse. That was, to me, the biggest relief is not destroying your family. And then everything from there has been gravy.
Speaker 1How do you cross that chasm those early days, you show up to a police force, you've got this handheld device that shoots out these electrodes that go into someone's skin and zaps them and they fall to the ground, they get incapacitated. What was the way that you kind of got these guys who had never heard of or seen anything like this before? To make those first POs? How do you start to get those orders to come in? Yeah. And was there a moment where suddenly enough police forces had this where everyone's like, we all got to have this? Yeah. And then you start to get those orders to come in. Yeah. And was there a moment and then the market just kind of took off?
Speaker 2Yeah. So I mean, this is one of those things where look, you just don't overcomplicate life. We didn't have enough money to do anything fancy. And the main thing was we had solved a real problem. So the early generation tasers were not powerful enough. Like Rodney King was shot with an LAPD taser and it did not work. And they went to the batons with catastrophic consequences. So taser had a terrible reputation in the late 90s. And it because I had sent several demos of our first generation product that also didn't stop somebody who was focused and aggressive, they could fight through the pain. So the thing we had done was we had basically done some animal testing to go tune the amount of nerve stimulation so that it would actually paralyze somebody. Once we did that, the launch was pretty simple. We didn't have money for a big ad campaign. We hired a former Marine and put him in a Winnebago going around the country with $100 bill. And he would go into a police department, explain to them what we're doing. Up until then, nonlethal weapons were seen as kind of snake oil. Like, yeah, pepper spray hurts, but you can fight through it. We had the first weapon that could actually stop somebody. And cops are an interesting crowd. There's a fair amount of bravery, shall we say. And so they weren't afraid. They're like, OK, you think this will work? Fine, let's give it a try. And we would offer them $100 if they could come and take it. And we'd hit them. They would fall down. They'd dust themselves off and go, oh, my God, that was way more powerful than I was expecting. Some would try again. And then immediately, they would go, oh, my God, that was way more powerful than I was expecting. And then immediately, they saw the value. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had cops tell me, my gosh, this would have prevented me from shooting someone or getting in a knockdown, drag out fight with a very dangerous person. So the value prop was so simple. We just had to convince them it worked. And we did that with very simple demos. And from that, you could see suddenly purchase orders started coming in. And we could track where Hans was going across the country, our trainer. And within a year, we hit cash flow break even.
Speaker 1And then you had a decade where we were like, oh, my gosh, this is going to take a lot of money. And then we hit cash flow break. A lot of people think like, okay, you go public, this thing's going to take off, we're on some growth trajectory. But again, after how many years, seven years of being a private company, eight years of kind of getting to that point of having an IPO, you then spend another decade kind of with this valuation in this range of a couple bucks a share, right? Oh, yeah. No, actually,
Speaker 2it's more exciting than that. So seven years of like, are we going to survive? We can't pay the light bill. Then we go public in 2001. And the next four years are insane. We're growing it like we're tripling every year. In 2004, we were the number one performing stock in the world. I have the Wall Street Journal article on the wall on a one and three year return basis.
Speaker 1We were number one. Does your Google went public?
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. I mean, we were on fire. Then what happened in late 2004, we got we got hit with an SEC investigation. There were allegations we'd lied about the safety of our products in order to pump up the stock price. Now we do a whole hour on this. There was a short selling attack. We had big short positions in the stock. My personal assistant was actually a mole for short sellers who was selling. It was crazy. It sending internal documents to short sellers that were giving them to the New York Times who was then disclosing they were getting internal confidential material, non-public information from short sellers who were selling them to the New York Times. And they were getting it out of our company. So that was miserable. 2005, our stock dropped from thirty three to seven dollars a share. And it was yeah, it was miserable. I mean, you're wondering if you're going to survive. Our customers are police. So they stopped buying from us. They're like, look, dude, you're under federal investigation. I can't go to my city council until this is over. So ignoring my lawyer's advice, I walked into the front offices of the SEC office in San Francisco with boxes of documents and said, hey, guys, I want to help you complete your investigation. And I said, because I may go out of business if this drags on. And then that's when the long doldrums began, like the stock never fully recovered from there. And we were massively-
Speaker 1But what happened with that investigation? That investigation, you moved on from it?
Speaker 2Oh yeah. I mean, they don't give you a gold star when they're done and tell you good job. They just say no findings and they move on, which is as good as it gets. Turns out though, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In that case, we had gone from zero lawsuits to hundreds of lawsuits. We were being sued obviously by shareholders. We were being sued by plaintiffs of anybody who got shot by a police taser was now suing the police and us because we were all over the news. And we did a couple of things there.
Speaker 1And sorry, what's your market cap during this time?
Speaker 2It peaked about 2 billion in late 2004, and then it was back to about 100 million.
Speaker 1So you get hundreds of lawsuits when you're kind of like a hundred million dollar market cap company that you're dealing with.
Speaker 2Yeah. We should have gone under. We should not have survived. Yeah. It was only by pure grit and frankly, a little bit of craziness. Like we, our, our, our insurance company, cause we have insurance like everybody. And we go to trial on our first cases. Our insurance company wanted to settle this first case for like around $2 million. And we said, hell no, you can't. If you settle this case, we will get swamped in litigation. You're putting our business at risk. If you settle the case, we'll sue you, but we're going to give you an out. If you will pay the plaintiff $2 million, we'll take a little bit less. You can pay us and we'll sign away our liability and we'll take it across the goal line. We did that twice. We actually made money on those cases because we won. But the point is this was, this was slightly what was considered crazy behavior that we would settle with our own insurance to prevent them from giving a dime to the plaintiffs because we believe we were right. And it worked like today for the first time, I should knock on wood for the first time in decades, we now have zero litigation cases because if you sue us, you better bring your A game. Like if we, now, if we did something wrong, we're going to be rational and we will settle it. We're reasonable people, but you sue us on something where we think, you know, we're in the right. We will, we dig in like religious fanatics to defend our belief system. And that's important. And that's what protected our business.
Speaker 1This lasts for years, right? These lawsuits, this market cap kind of being static. This, this went on until what, about 2012 or so. And Rick, a buddy of mine, Hadi Partovi is on your board, right? He is. Yeah. And so he's been on your board for a long time. First of all, how'd you guys meet? And second of all, he mentioned some story about the role he played early on and keeping the business alive. Can you tell us what happened?
Speaker 2Oh yeah. I cannot overstate his importance. So Hadi and I were friends in college. So he was one of my buddies who was out making a bunch of money in the internet boom in the late nineties when I was struggling to get this taser business off the ground. Then what happened around 2007, eight, nine, we were working on our body, camera business. And, uh, we, we launched, we were initially operational around 2010 or so. And I frankly had a disaster on my hands. I had never built a software company. I'd hired a team. Um, and let's just say we were struggling hard. And so I called Hadi and I was like, Hey man, uh, I need some help. Like I've started this software company. I, you know, I built the original tasers in a garage. I feel like I got my hands around this, but this software company, I built the original tasers in a garage. I feel like I got my hands around this, but this software thing, you know, it turns out the guy I'd hired is probably, you know, not the right, not the right guy. We were having technical issues. And frankly, I was struggling to wrap my head around, uh, like how, how do we staff and grow this business? This is pretty new to me. And so I asked Hadi if he would join the board and he came on, he was effectively, he was a board member, but he was really my part-time CTO for about five years where he helped me sort through, get the right business and get the right team in place. We moved, like we were originally building our own data center that we were going to manage for our customers. We had a near catastrophic outage where we nearly lost all our customer data. And, you know, Hadi was like, Hey man, like there's plenty of hard things to do in this world. Like trying to figure out how to run your own data center is not one that's worth the squeeze. So we moved over to the cloud with AWS and then with Azure. Um, and yeah, so I, I like to say Hadi saved the business because he came in. He was the guy who helped me navigate how to build a software business from scratch inside a weapon business. And by the way, as we were doing this, our shareholders thought I'd lost my mind. They're like, Rick, you're trying to turn a weapon company into a software company. And I guess I was like many entrepreneurs. You don't realize what a crazy idea that was. And Hadi was the guy who helped me do it. Did he stay on your board? Yeah. He's still on my board.
Speaker 1Amazing. I mean, the stock price you're, you're like a 35, $40 billion market cap company today. He must've done well. I'm going to say, yeah,
Speaker 2I mean, and, and, uh, and Hadi also is the guy who pushed for us to change the name from Taser to something else, which became Axon because, and look at the time that was hard. We're really invested in our brand. We're proud of the team. We didn't want to feel like we're retreating. And Hadi's point was like, hey, man, the taser is a kind of a it's a sledgehammer brand. It means electric weapon to people. And you do a lot more than that. And so, you know, he helped me think that through. And he was right. You know, now we have the the taser is a small part of the business. It's important. But, you know, it's we have an expansive business. Now we manage, I think, more video every day than YouTube. Now they have a lot more viewers, but we have over a million police officers uploading two hours of video every day from one of these body cameras. So we have a ton of content. And of course, it's got to be securely managed and shared. And there's been a lot of complexity. And of course, I've got a great team in place now, thanks to Hadi coming in and sort of helping me learn this business and rebuild the plane while we were flying.
Speaker 1Keep going, Hadi.
Speaker 2Yeah. So there's one other thing that happened in there. So while we were defending ourselves in all the litigation, we also went on offense and we created the body camera. And the reason we created the body camera was, you know what? The only way to defend ourselves and look, our customers were being accused of doing horrible things with taser weapons. These are police officers, right? Yeah. Yeah. Police officers. I was co-defending the case in Northern California where somebody died in police custody. It was a young it was a 40 year old man with a 20 year methamphetamine problem, and he was in really bad shape. And I remember the police officers telling me as we're watching the trial, the family kept putting up pictures of his high school graduation. And the officers looked at me and they said, that's not the human. I saw the night I went to that house, I saw somebody who was literally like out of The Exorcist movie. This cop told me he'd been a cop for 26 years, had never been afraid in his career until the animalistic rage he had to deal with. And this person who was, you know, had overdosed on meth, but that never came across to the jury. And in that moment, I said, my God, we have to record what you see, because like when police officers describe things, they have to be very professional. In this case, it was, you know, when Mr. Heston did this or that. Very professional. The family that's suing the police, they would use very emotional, colorful language. And I was like, guys, you're getting your you're getting your asses kicked. Frankly, you need to tell your story with more passion. And they said, Rick, we don't get to do that. Like we work for the government. If we get caught in one half truth, that can be the end of our career. And that's when we realized we need to record this so that you can show people what it is that you saw, what it is you did, rather than having to try to explain it.
Speaker 1Weren't there body cam companies already at the time? Did they exist? Was this concept novel?
Speaker 2The concept was new. I mean, you did have GoPro with like consumer cameras. So we certainly didn't invent the cameras. But we can a quick detour. We were building the first police body camera. And then the employee that was building it actually quit in the middle of the night and launched the product a week later. Turns out he was actually funding it with stock options to build it against us. That's another bit of drama. But yes, we we were building the industry. He's first body camera. We ultimately, you know, made peace and we acquired that company back into the fold down the road. But but that's what that's what led to the eventual exploit. The reason that we're a I don't know, a 30 billion dollar company today up from a couple hundred million is because of the body camera. And I'll tell you, when we launched the body camera. Police didn't want to wear it. We had seven years of miserable failure where cops told us there's you know, this is Big Brother. They're worried that their supervisor is going to nitpick them. I mean, look. Change is hard, right? People find a lot of reasons like to be afraid of of of of new things. But we just believed in our in our soul. Guys, you need to be able to show people what you do. You're being accused of all sorts of awful stuff. And we made a double bet. Not only do we bet on body cameras, but we bet on the cloud because we realized the only way this would ever scale is if we put these videos into cloud infrastructure. Otherwise, you have 18000 departments all trying to figure out how to run video servers securely.
Speaker 1But this. Creates a ton of liability for these police forces, doesn't it? Like now, all of a sudden they're being held accountable. By the way, I love watching body cam videos. The cop did something wrong. The criminal did something wrong. I mean, there's always just drama to these stories. Yeah. But I've got to imagine a lot of these police officers because there's a lot of these stories that they're using the body cam or they don't they don't realize the body cams on and they get themselves in trouble. And so isn't there a bit of a liability issue? And how do you end up selling your customer on putting themselves at risk? Or do they view it as a double edged sword that they're also? Oh. For their own safety, their own protection and for winning cases.
Speaker 2So you are articulating the exact concern people had up front. That's why they didn't want to wear it, because they had that perception. However, once actually a police union leader told me famously, he said, no cop wants to wear a body camera until they've worn one for 90 days and then they will not go on patrol without it. Because what you don't realize, police are arresting criminals all the time and criminals have no compunction about lying about what happened. The number of false allegations are incredible. I'm going to give you one example. I'm on a ride along with a cop in Phoenix, and this is in the early days of body cameras. And I said, how's it going? He said, well, I didn't like this, but let me tell you what happened to me last week. I was arresting a prostitute. She was basically more than half naked. She was high on some sort of drugs. And as I put her into the patrol cars, I'm driving her into the station. She starts screaming at him. I'm going to say you raped me. I'm going to say you raped me unless you get me out of the car right now. And he said, ma'am, I just want to let you know this is a body camera. I've been recording this entire interaction. You're free to say whatever you want, but it's all being recorded. And he said her demeanor changed completely. She calmed down. And he said, now imagine what I would have gone through if I didn't have a body camera. If I had a woman accusing me of raping her and it turned into a he said, she said, like that could be a career ending allegation with no way to disprove it. So that was that was like a microcosm. But the moment that things flipped was the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Remember Ferguson? Yeah. White officer, black subject. Now, Michael Brown was unarmed, but he was significantly larger than Officer Wilson. And according to Officer Wilson, they were fighting over the gun. Like the officer, you know, an officer brings a gun to every fight they get in. And once they're fighting over the gun, you know, he's justified to defend himself. But if you remember the stories, the family was saying things like, remember, hands up, don't shoot, that Michael Brown was trying to surrender. If that's true, then that was a. Full blooded murder. But if you listen to the officer, he says, hey, I was being attacked. In fact, I think he had a broken eye, a broken bone above his eye. The subsequent review ended up showing that the officer was largely correct, but you couldn't prove it. And it was out after that case. Michael Brown's family said we want body cameras and the police union said, you know what? We want them because we at least want the world to see what's happening. And now, as I sit here today, what's interesting, some of these civil liberties groups. That were big proponents of body cameras are now saying that they're turning against them. They're saying they're broken because they're not finding all these bad cops, that there's something wrong with the body cameras. I have a different point of view on that is you have to accept the possibility that the vast majority of cops do a good job and they're falsely accused. And I think that's what body cameras have proven.
Speaker 1And so you get out there, the market starts moving, and I'm assuming it just becomes de facto, right? I mean, all over the country at this point. I mean, maybe you can just share. We'll talk a little bit about the scale of the business today.
Speaker 2Oh, yeah. Yeah. Once Ferguson happened, then everybody needed body cameras and they needed them fast. And that's where our bet on the cloud made a big sense. Remember back in the day, like, you know, in 2010, cloud was relatively new to government. And they had this perception, well, if it's here and it's sitting on my computer, it's safe because it's here in the room with me, right? I can keep eyes on it. But that's not true in cybersecurity. They're going to be Chinese hackers, you know, in the future. I can keep an eye on the server in my building, no problem. It comes down to the technology and the stack and the people you've got. And so, like, from our first principles, we knew the cloud could be safer than your average police department. And we could scale it. And so because of the urgency after Michael Brown, then it just really took off. And so today, virtually, I think every major police department now wears body cameras. And we have the vast majority are on our system, I think partly because we were first, but also because we don't have a lot of people. We tend to be, we're sort of maniacally mission driven. And I know that always sounds a little bit cheesy, but like, we have the luxury of choosing what problems we want to solve. And so we work on things that are going to make a difference that we're excited about. And that leads to different product outcomes than companies that are just purely profit motivated.
Speaker 1Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's gone on recently with some of the public sentiment around monitoring. So there's this company, Flock, that's been. They've been installing cameras in cities, and they're starting to get these city councils to reject the cameras. And there's this concern about the development of effectively a surveillance state. And that government agencies, police forces, getting all of this monitoring technology creates a bigger, more powerful state that's monitoring us all the time. No citizens want to have that. And obviously, there's the public safety argument, but maybe you could just kind of frame up what's going on with public sentiment right now. Well, I think this
Speaker 2is part of a larger concern about AI in general, and the proliferation of cameras and sensors. And look, it's not unreasonable. Like, I don't think any of us want to live in China, meaning, you know, a surveillance state where every citizen is tracked everywhere they go. However, I think there's got to be some nuance here. We can't go back to United States as it existed in the 1950s when there weren't cameras everywhere. The fact is, there are cameras everywhere. There's more. cameras than people, you know, you and I probably have four cameras just on our cell phones plus, you know, maybe a dozen in our house plus all the business cameras. So really what this comes down to is how we think about data governance. Like how should society, under what circumstances should we share those camera feeds to the government? How should they use that? I think in general, we try to distill things down to simple, you know, principles about, okay, what would we be proud that we've built? Like what would be good for society? And if we build that, it will be durable. And so in the example of cameras, look, we build license plate reading cameras too. I think we've been pretty thoughtful about the security controls we put in place to try to avoid some of the issues you've seen. What people are really upset about are things like when a police officer can go in and do searches on their, you know, ex-girlfriend. Like those sorts of things are morally offensive to folks. Or if you could track every American everywhere they go, like we don't want that. But like tracking a stolen vehicle, you know, finding, being able to look up license plates that are around the crime scene of a violent crime. Like people agree that those are reasonable use cases. And even the critics, like Ben Jordan has been a very thoughtful critic. I think he kind of started this. He will tell you if you listen to him, he's not saying to get rid of this technology. We just need good guardrails and we need safeguards. And so I'm a big proponent. By the time this web cast actually hits, I think, you know, we'll be after the election and we'll start to see some some movement in federal regulation. I'm a big supporter of what Senator Hawley is doing to introduce guidelines and oversight so that we can get the benefit of this, these technologies to fight crime, but safeguards to prevent them from tracking everyday Americans.
Speaker 1Do you think that people get that rationally? Because I've noticed some things you can kind of get people to rationalize and you can understand them and other things. People just have a very acute. Emotional response and they're like, icky, yucky. I don't want to have anything to do with that. I think ring did that Super Bowl ad and the negative sentiment around the Super Bowl ad being it's so creepy that all these cameras are monitoring everyone all over the neighborhood all the time is what really triggered a lot of people. And I think there were stories about flock where these cameras were being used by city employees to look at people when they weren't supposed to be. So you could argue, yes, let's put in the guardrails. But the general notion that this sort of technology exists, this sort of power exists, this sort of privacy, infiltration, intrusion exists, makes people feel really uncomfortable with it. How do you kind of think about changing that sentiment to being one of rational and guardrails and away from the sort of big emotional response everyone's having?
Speaker 2Yeah, well, I think part of that's just an adjustment as society moves forward. Like, look, plenty of people still go, they may say, boy, that made me uncomfortable. But they go buy ring cameras, specifically because ring has some of the best technology for being able to protect your home or if you need to share videos with police because you had a crime at your house. And so I think there is a little bit of back and forth, which is normal. Like, this is democracy. Like, as you move forward, people aren't going to agree on every topic. But over time, I think, you know, we find middle ground. I don't think it's reasonable. I don't think we're to end up with like making doorbell cameras illegal. Right. But I think ring likely, learn from that incident, they've, they've put really good safeguards in place. In fact, we have, we have a partnership with ring, where we're both very focused on how do we enable homeowners to share ring camera video if there's a crime committed with the police, but actually make it really hard for people to enable like that we don't enable police to just go out and randomly, you know, canvas those videos. There's a ton of privacy work that goes in so that people know these are my cameras, I control how they're used. And, but if I, you know, I actually had a car stolen from my house years ago. And it took me days, I had to get a technician to come download the video from this, like, you know, homegrown camera system. I couldn't get it to the police for days. I have ring now, because I do want to be able to share it if something like that happens. So I think it is also a matter of just, yes, not everybody's going to agree with the guardrails. But I think policymakers can't just, you know, we have to find the reasonable middle ground, we've got to find reasonable public policy. And we've already seen that, I think, again, I was really impressed with Senator Hawley's bill is very rational. It's got criminal penalties, if police officers individually misuse this for personal purposes, I believe there's criminal and civil penalties. And then there's going to be safeguards for manufacturers like us and flock that are going to require that before you can run searches, you've got to have viable case codes, that we know this is a legitimate case, that's somewhere in your law enforcement system. There's two key systems where you've got to have collaboration before you're running searches. So if you're searching for your ex, you're going to have to find another officer who's willing to put their career at risk before you can do that, right? Those sorts of safeguards, I think, will get the 90% of people that are rationally paying attention to this to, but you're not going to win 100%. Sure, there are going to be some people that are just going to have a fear of this. But I think, you know, I've been around this long enough to see those things subside when you get good, rational safeguards in place.
Speaker 1So, I mean, you guys start with the taser, handheld device, reduce the use of guns in policing, move to the body cam, and now you guys have this framing, I believe, on being the operating system for public safety. What else does that encompass? So is it similar to Flock's business and maybe help explain some of the other products that come out now and in time to realize that mission?
Speaker 2Yeah, so we, our mission is to protect life. And we chose those two words, meaning we focus on violence as a problem that's worth solving. And that means with a taser, our goal is how do we reduce the number of times police actually have to shoot and kill someone? With a body camera, it's how do we reduce the risk of police using too much force? And how do we protect them when they're doing this job that is dangerous and risky so that they don't have to worry about being falsely accused of things? And then we persist that all the way through. We're partnered with Skydio on drones. So in fact, we recently will have become the largest investor in America's leading drone company. So if you don't know Skydio, they're the guys who build these robotic autonomous docks where a drone can now be flown from off a fire station anywhere in a city and you can have a drone on scene in a matter of seconds. This is reducing the number of times police have to take resources to go to alarm calls. So it allows them to focus on bigger calls. And when there's big events, they're able to get a drone on scene sometimes before the 911 operator has even finished entering the call for service. So that's improving the service to the community. Now, again, drones are also an area where people would say, well, there are things like, how are these being used? How do we have safeguards to know the police aren't using these in ways that the public wouldn't want them to? And so Skydio, together with us, we've developed controls, for example, agencies can share their mission profiles with the public. So if the public has concerns, they can see how they're being used. And most agencies have policies where they're not just flying drones around on patrol missions. They very specifically fly them only to the site when they've been called where somebody is calling for help and you get a drone there quickly. That can help you see what's happening. And in some cases, they've even flown a drone down and been able to distract or we've had people surrender to drones. So again, I think the whole thing is across the board of all the things we do, we look for how do we connect these devices together in a way that's going to make us all safer, but also acknowledge that, yes, there are risks of abuse and we should build this in ways that address those risks. We're not going to win everybody's, you know, not everybody's going to agree on everything, but we've so far been able to get to a point where we're finding that right balance so that we're using these things to make the world safer and protect privacy and find the best way to do it. Find the right balance along the way.
Speaker 1You know, I think there's this great debate on how much safety and at what cost that I think is what really triggers a lot of people that the benefit to them individually of more safety doesn't feel felt as acutely as the risk or the cost to their privacy or their personal space. This Orwellian idea that the state has so much power that the government, that the policing force has so much power that they can effectively, if they chose to, there may be guardrails, but if they chose to, they now have such supremacy over the citizens. And this Orwellian idea that now the state can determine, hey, I don't like the speech that you're using or I don't like whatever it might be. There's all these reasons why people can feel like there's an infringement of that power of force upon them. It's almost like how far do you take it? Like the movie Minority Report, I think, did a good job exploring this, where it's like, at what point do you become predictive with AI of crime happening? And then you arrest people before they do the crime. And, you know, everyone's kind of fantastical ideas become, is that really worth the risk? Like, do I really want to take on that level of cost to my individual liberties to have, quote, that much more safety? And I think that seems to be the great debate people seem to be having right now. Is that a fair characterization? Or do you think it's a little bit misguided? No, no, no.
Speaker 2I think it's a fair debate and that is the right debate to be having. And I think it's a fair debate but this is hard work, right? Like, it's finding the balance. And what's interesting, you will find the people who most want these sorts of technologies come from the poorest neighborhoods that have the highest crime rates. Paradoxically, those are the ones that, you know, people say, well, we worry about over-policing. But when you, when you actually go out, uh, you know, frankly, a lot of the most concerns are coming from wealthy neighborhoods, uh, where this is more theoretical. But when you talk to people that are dealing with gun violence every day in their cities, they cheer when the police show up, uh, and they're the ones who want to have more of this technology. So there's deterrence. I mean, ultimately I would say this, um, in America, sometimes we, we, we have these simplistic notions, like, you know, frankly, in the political spectrum, sometimes there's just lock everybody up or no, no, no, like abolish the police. Like, come on, like neither of those are the right solution. I think the right solution is how do we, uh, deploy technology so we deter people from making bad decisions in the first place. Like the best deterrence to criminal behavior is not long sentences. It's a high probability that you will get caught and prosecuted. And then the question is how do we then balance that as well against making sure that we're not building technology that can be used to track everyday people. Uh, but those are interesting. Those are interesting techno ethical problems to deal with, right? How do we build the tech to, to meet the ethical bar to make the right
Speaker 1trade-offs? You're right. I don't live or work in neighborhoods where I'm experiencing a lot of violent crime. I am driving through San Francisco and I got three speeding tickets. I'm like, get rid of those damn cameras. You know, like my reaction is why are these cameras here? It's what this guy, Rob Henderson called luxury beliefs. I think there was an incident in, I, and I have this in my notes in June of 2022, you had some members of your advisory board who quit in protest after you guys announced plans to develop a taser equipped surveillance drone that you were designing to stop school shootings. And I think the board had voted against the project due to ethical concerns and whatnot and privacy concerns. Can you tell us a little bit about kind of that incident? What, what you've learned from it? And does that project still continue?
Speaker 2Yes, that project is continuing and that's, that's why they quit. That was, look, life can be challenging at times. I was very disappointed. We, we set up an AI ethics board to give us feedback, frankly, from not from pro police people, but from civil liberties groups that are concerned about policing. Right. And that's been a very useful function. That's one of the reasons we've got, I think, great safeguards in how we built ALPR and other technologies. Now on this case, um, working with them for about a year on the idea that we could have a taser capable drone to be used in extreme circumstances, like a school shooting was the, the incident there. But today, for example, if you have a person with a gun show up in a building anywhere in America, do you know how we stop them? We got to wait for the police with the gun. Yeah. We send in more people with guns and they have a gun fight. Yeah. Like, yeah, this is the wild west guys. Like, is that really the best we can do as a society? Well, I think what we're saying is rather than waiting and sending a person with gun to have more bullets flying, we could send in a drone or a robot armed with a non-lethal weapon. This is a key distinction. Like you'll never get a cop that will take a non-lethal weapon up against somebody with a gun. But if we can send in a small drone or robot, then the, the, everything shifts. They're like, oh, wait a minute. Now I can use non-lethal force. Now we can argue whether or not the criminal deserves to die, but even there, like anytime you have more bullets introduced, there's innocent bystanders get killed. And so I continue to believe, and we are doing R and D, uh, on this, that using non-lethal force safely deployed from a distance via drone or robot is in everybody's best interest compared to, you know, having more gunfights in society. Now, because the, the way that went down, uh, frankly, I think this was post George Floyd. Some of our advisors were worried about getting canceled over this issue. Many of them worked in universities and they were already being accused of being pro police. Uh, and so I think there was some personal dynamics. Many of the people on the board privately agreed with me that like, you're right, Rick, this is a, this is a better solution than what we have today with sending in cops with body armor and assault rifles. Um, but it was too politically risky and it, and it blew up, but I'll tell you one thing I'm proud of. We didn't give up. Many companies have now canceled their ethics boards. We dug in, we reconstituted, we still have, it's been rebranded as our equity and ethics advisory council. And frankly, it now has more black and Brown voices on it where previously it was more academically focused. Like if you want to talk about the concerns of over-policing, it is primarily from underrepresented, you know, communities. And one of the criticisms we had gotten from in that whole process was that we didn't have the right people in the room. If you want to talk about, again, the concerns of over-policing, it should be from, uh, from communities that are most affected. Uh, and so you live and you learn we've, we've recalibrated, but we've continued to bring in, uh, you know, people who have critical views of policing, because we think those are important for us to understand their concerns. And by doing it early, we actually learn in many cases, we can build safeguards into the product. If you listen, uh, and you do it up front, it's much better for us to do that and hear the critical voices early in design process rather than after we've launched it. Cause then all we can do is sort of argue about things. We we've lost the ability to make significant design changes.
Speaker 1Let's just talk about the future 10 years from now. I think there's five companies launching humanoid like robots for commercial sale in the next 12 to 18 months that are going to be available here in the U S 10 to $30,000 price ranges have been kind of talked about. Do you think the future of policing involves humanoid robots, other types of robots and drones give us a sense of a decade from now or 15 years from now, what local community policing looks like with all this technology that's coming to market? Yep. Well, first I would
Speaker 2say, I think the future of policing is still fundamentally a human job. Um, any decisions about using force, uh, on another person will be made by humans. And that's a, that's a bright line for us. So even with the taser drone, you and I talked about earlier, part of what we learned from the concern was people are worried about misuse abuse, how these things will be used. So any of the robotic systems were involved in will not only have required human oversight, but we're building more and more of a system that's going to be able to do that. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of policing. So for example, you could set it up so that before any officer could operate even a non-lethal weapon from a drone or robot, we can set it up so that there's required real-time approval from an administrator. So we're actually going to be building the least abusable technology in the history of policing. Like today, you give a cop a gun, they walk out the door, you have no control over what they do with it. You can prosecute them later. These robotic systems will give us the ability to have institutional decision-making with multiple parties in real-time. Which I think will lead to far less mistakes, less concerns about abuse. And I do believe both humanoids, I think drones will be bigger, faster. Humanoids are coming as well. But again, that's why we invested in Skydio. We bought almost half the company. We wanted to buy about as much as we could because we're big believers that there's going to be millions of drones in the next few years deployed in the US. But we also actually felt in this case, it was better for us to leave it as an independent company that could move at startup speed. And continue to raise and spend capital in ways that maybe weren't constrained by being part of a public company. And yet at the same time, we've secured the exclusive rights. So we will be the exclusive channel into the markets that we care about. Because we believe that is absolutely going to be one of the biggest parts of the future is drones and robots arriving on scene way before people have an opportunity to get there. And the whole idea is to just let's understand what's happening. Let's make sure we're making the best decisions possible. And the idea is keep everybody as safe as we can. And you're gonna be dealing with multiple officers that are suited up with body armor, with lethal weapons in their hands, who are gonna have to make a life or death decision instantaneously while their own adrenaline is surging, right? Human beings don't make good decisions under the fight or flight. So the fact is, the government already has a monopoly on the legal use of force. And it's almost every one of those officers has lethal force. And I will tell you, if they feel their life is at risk, the thing in their hand will be a gun. By comparison, if those officers have lethal force, they're going to have to make a life or death decision. And I will tell you, if those officers have lethal force, they're going to have to make a life or death decision. will be recorded because to even operate these things, you have to have camera systems on them. Many police shootings today are not recorded. And so I think it just comes back to how do we, you know, we just need to sort of take a step back and understand how the job is done today and how we can do it in the future that is safer for everybody. And then answer legitimate questions about what are the controls in place? Things like multi-key authorization. We will work with our customers to push hard that every one of them has an oversight function. So anytime one of these robotic systems is used, that there's independent civilian oversight and review. So I think, again, this just comes down to, it's not an unreasonable concern. These things could be misused. However, we also don't want to, I don't want to live in a world where everybody else has robotics and AI and the police are showing up in a 74 Chevy, you know, with an old radio, like they're going to need enough tech to keep up with the rest of us. And then the laws and oversight are going to have to evolve, you know, to make sure that we are controlling the government, uh, as the people, uh, and that we've got a good judiciary and good balance of power so that they can't do abusive things without being held accountable.
Speaker 1And what's your view on the shifting political landscape, the rise of a DSA political class today, that's calling for defunding the police. And what do you think happens to communities and cities over the next couple of years, if, and as more of that voice becomes elected?
Speaker 2Well, if you actually defund the police, um, you know, we'll, we will get some social experiments. Uh, I can tell you, you don't need an experiment to show what would happen. It will be catastrophic, but you know, democracies recover. And I'll give you an example. And I think it was in 1968, the police in Montreal, Canada went on strike for no other reason. It was a simple, it was overpay. There was no, you know, there was no George Floyd type situation. This was just a labor relations strike. Uh, and looking back on it, that is now known as the night of terror because criminals heard the police were on strike and the city went crazy. In fact, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, who's, uh, uh, sort of famously both liberal, but also very rational. He wrote better angels of our nature. And this is his example on like, you need a functional police force because it is the, the glue that, that holds society together. So we have rules that we can all, all trust we're going to abide by. And so I hope we don't see major examples of that. We started to see some of that, frankly, with some states had decriminalized shoplifting, as you recall, in the post George Floyd. And that led to catastrophic consequences where you saw
Speaker 1downtown San Francisco got abandoned. I've seen it myself.
Speaker 2Yeah. And then with that, you get the jobs flee, you get these, uh, you know, deserts where there's no economic activity because it's just not safe for people to do it. The business model is not safe for people to do it. And so models implode. Now, I think in your example, I think San Francisco has already begun to swing the other direction and take corrective action. And so I try to stay out of politics too much. I think, you know, things will swing one way or the other, but we have corrective mechanisms that over time will kick in.
Speaker 1I think non-lethality is a great mission. I think public safety is critical to the underwriting of all of our other social contracts. Without good public safety, none of the other social contracts work and the systems don't work. And so I think, obviously, it's an important mission and important work you do. Congrats on the business, on the progress, on the Skydio investment. Obviously, there's a lot of, I think, social challenges ahead here with this big debate that's going on right now on the limits of that and the limits of technology. Well, I'll
Speaker 2tell you as well, like, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty right now. You know, The Economist, I think four months ago, had a cover that, you know, the AI jobs apocalypse and then the AI jobs apocalypse. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty right now. And then a couple of months later, there's the, hey, wait a minute. No, AI is making millions of jobs. Like, people don't know what to think. And we are at this point where the acceleration of technology is leading to massive amounts of uncertainty. And what I tell our customers is like, guys, we need you to stay strong. Like, policing might be the glue that needs to hold society together. Hopefully, we don't see the sorts of things we're seeing in France right now and the sort of social upheaval. But God forbid, if we do, we need the men and women of law and enforcement to be ready to stand up and help us keep order as we get through to what I'm a huge optimist. I think 10, 20 years from now is going to be a near utopian society. Maybe I'm a little out over my skis, but I think technology is going to cure many diseases, many ills. I think we're going to see, you know, Elon's idea of universal high income will be fantastic. But we may have some difficult moments as we get through the transition. And our view, our role at Axon is and we'll be proud of the way that we did it to help them do this the right way. Now, I mean, it's going to be perfect, but let's put some good controls in place and help make people more comfortable that, you know, we're going to get through this together.
Speaker 1Okay. Yeah. Well, Rick, I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm glad we got to finally do this. Thanks for joining us on the All In interview. It's been great. Been a lot of fun. Anytime. All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions. Admit it. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What'd you guys think? That was fun. That was great.
PodcastTranscript AI