0:00What is it like being tased?
0:01So, 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. 5 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.
0:20But it's it's not fun.
0:22But when it's off, it's off. Like you're right back to normal the second it's off.
0:25Am 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.
0:39Well, there was a company that remember Live PD.
0:42I don't if you remember that.
0:43There was a show that did just live PD on Friday nights. They were cops. Remember Cops? This kid I went to high school with, his dad uh produced Cops on TV. I Yeah, I guess it's always been interesting.
0:54Yeah. So Live PD was the new version of Cops and their twist was that it was live so people would tune in on on weekend nights because like oh I want to see what's happening like a live sporting event. Uh but then they got cancelled after the George Floyd incident. Uh you know I think the production companies were afraid to be sharing you know pro police. Um, so we we actually ourselves had done Axon Studios for a period of time to try to do exactly what you're talking about like a, you know, live content business uh, out of the body
1:23cameras, but it's just it, you know, you got to know your corporate DNA. We, uh, we are too like pro police and we're like, you know, we're a 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.
1:40But I think it's it's there for somebody to do it.
1:42Yeah. Well, YouTube works. Going all app started with an $8 domain no VC funding and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Now that same engine powers app ads for e-commerce.
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2:22Rick Smith, CEO of Axon, welcome to the all-in interview.
2:26It's awesome to be here. Thanks.
2:29I'm glad we could make this work out. I know uh 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 could do a real quick recap how the company got started in the early days.
2:57Yeah. So, uh, we started in the early 90s. So, this is the only job I've ever had. Started in 93 in a garage in Tucson. Um, the sort of leadup 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. Um, and one of them asked me if I knew anyone who'd been shot and
3:26killed. And it just struck me. I was 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 friends of the family. By the time I added 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. Um, and the simple insight
3:55was 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 and one thing led to another. 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
4:24shortly thereafter, he invited me down to his house, and here I am, this 23-y old kid and this 73 year old man. It sounds like, I don't know, a comic book uh sort of plot. But we started in his garage to build new tasers.
4:36And uh I can tell you at the beginning, everybody thought I'd lost my mind.
4:40In fact, I have a great video of Emil Michael, who is one of the leaders at Uber. He's now the under secretary 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.
4:55So 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.
5:04Yep. 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. Uh 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. Uh and that would require a regulatory approval. As I look back, you just 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,
5:34you know, now I've got 6,000 people.
5:3793. And you started a company right away and built the first prototype with your own money.
5:43Uh 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 90s. It was right in the peak internet boom. U 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
6:12policing technology is now much more mainstream than it was back then. But 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?
6:25And what was your first sale?
6:27Yeah. No, our first our our first market was consumers.
6:31So, 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 2, which is like a saw-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 it to defend herself. And she had recently bought a gun around that same time. So we started
7:01in 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 we need to go prove this works in policing so after 7 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 of the Philippines I will return to the consumer market once we have proven with police that the taser
7:30is as effective or even more effective than a gun. And that will happen in the next five years.
7:36And so you spent seven years developing the market trying to find product market fit all off of friends and family money.
7:44What 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?
7:56Yeah. So we 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 at companies with dumb names like Yahoo. Uh, of course, they were all making money handover 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 I think we should just shut it down. You know, we failed twice." Uh, and my dad
8:25looked at me and he said, 'Well, you know, it would have been nice to figure that a couple 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. Uh, shout out Bruce if you're watching. Uh, Bruce matched him. And so, we that was going to be the last $1 million we would ever get. we would have
8:53to survive on it. And with that, we managed to design, tool, manufacture, and launch the police taser and then shoestring it along to cash flow, break even, and eventually an IPO two years later.
9:05So, you go public around the end of the dot 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?
9:14Police forces. That's the primary market at that point.
9:17Yeah, it was. and and actually looking back on it um it was just an alignment of the fates. So yeah, the internet bubble popped in 2000 and in late 2000 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." And so we went public specifically, I think because banks needed deals and we were not internet. Uh, and we went public at a
9:45massive about $12 million valuation.
9:50Wow. And that was a big that was a big outcome though, right? Like you guys owned 100% of the company. You didn't have VCs or institutional guys on the cap table.
10:00That's right. I mean, we were a tiny tiny uh market cap to go public, but because of that, you know, we ended up being the the the highest return I think that investment bank Pollson out of Oregon ever had. And and for us, like I'll tell you, for me, it was just 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 poor house. That was to me the biggest relief is not destroying your family. And then everything from there has been gravy.
10:28How 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. when they get incapacitated.
10:43What 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?
10:52And was there a moment where suddenly enough police forces had this where everyone was like, "We all got to have this and then the market just kind of took off."
10:59Yeah. So, I mean, this is one of those things where look, you just don't over complicate life. Um, we didn't have enough money to do anything fancy and uh 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 '9s and it was deserved uh because I'd sent several demos of our first
11:29generation product that also didn't stop somebody who was focused and aggressive.
11:33They 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 a $100 bill and he would go into a police department, explain to them what we're doing. And up until then, non-lethal weapons were seen as kind of snake oil. Like they like, "Yeah, pepper spray hurts, but you can
12:02fight through it." We had the first weapon that could actually stop somebody. And cops are an interesting crowd. You know, there's a fair amount of uh bravery, shall we say. And so, they weren't afraid. They're like, "Okay, you think this will work? Fine.
12:13Let's give it a try." And we would offer them a $100 if they could come and take it. Uh and we 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. Uh 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, like this would have prevented me from shooting someone or getting in a knockdown dragout 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
12:41very simple demos and and 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. Um, and you know, within a year we hit cash flow, break even. And then you had like a decade where the stock kind of stayed in the same range, didn't it?
13:00A lot of people think like, okay, you go public, this thing's going to take off.
13:03We'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 spent another decade kind of with this valuation in this range of a couple bucks a share, right?
13:18Oh, yeah. No, actually, let me give you It's more exciting than that. So 7 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 at like we're 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 in threeyear return basis. We were number one.
13:42That was the year Google went public.
13:44Uh yeah. Yeah. I mean we we were on fire. Then what happened in late 2004?
13:49We got we got hit with an SEC investigation. Uh there were allegations we'd lied about the safety of our products uh in order to pump up the stock price. Now, we could do a whole hour on this. There was a short selling attack. We had uh big short positions in the stock. My personal assistant was actually a mole for short sellers who was selling.
14:10It was crazy. at 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 somehow getting it out of our company. Uh so that was miserable. 2005 our stock dropped from $33 to $7 a share. Uh and it was uh yeah it was miserable. I mean you're wondering if you're going to survive.
14:35Our customers are police so they stop buying from us. They're like look dude you're under federal investigation. like 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 because I may go out of business if this drags on." Um, and then that's when the long doldrums began.
14:58Like the stock never fully recovered from there. Uh, and we were What happened with that investigation?
15:04That investigation, you moved on from it.
15:06Oh, 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.
15:14Um, turns out though, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Uh, in that case, we had gone from zero lawsuits to hundreds of lawsuits. I mean, we were being sued obviously by shareholders. We were being sued by plaintiffs of of like anybody who got shot by a police taser was now suing the police and us because we were all over the news. Um, and we did a couple things there.
15:34What's your market cap during this time?
15:36Uh it it peaked about two billion in late 2004 and then it was back to about a hundred million. Uh so you're f you get hundreds of lawsuits when you're kind of like a hundred million dollar market cap company that you're dealing with.
15:48Yeah. We should have gone under like we should not have survived. It was only by pure grit and frankly a little bit of craziness. Like we um our our insurance company because 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.
16:13Um, you're putting our business at risk.
16:15If you settle the case, we'll sue you, but we're going to give you an out. If you will pay the pliff $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 believed we were right and it worked. Like today, for the
16:44first time, I should knock on wood. For the first time in decades, we now have zero litigation cases. Cuz if you sue us, you better bring your agame. 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.
17:09This lasts for years, right? These lawsuits, this market cap kind of being static. This this went on till what about 2012 or so? And Rick, a buddy of mine, Hottie Parti, is on your board, right?
17:22And 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 in keeping the business alive.
17:31Can you tell us what happened?
17:32Oh, yeah. I cannot overstate his importance. So, Heidi and I were friends in college.
17:37So, he was one of my buddies who was out making a bunch of money in the internet boom in the late 90s when I was struggling to get this taser business off the ground. Then what happened uh around 2007 89 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.
18:04Um, and let's just say we were struggling hard. And so I called Hottie 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 thing, you know, 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
18:34business? This is pretty new to me. And so I asked Heidi 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 5 years where he helped me sort through get the right business in 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.
18:54We had a near catastrophic outage where we nearly lost all our customer data.
18:58And you know, Heidi 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 Hottie 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
19:28company into a software company." And I guess I was like many entrepreneurs, you don't realize what a crazy idea that was. And and Heidi was the guy who helped me do it.
19:36Did he stay on your board?
19:37Yeah, he's still on my board.
19:39Amazing. I mean, this the stock price, you're you're like a 3540 billion market cap company today. He must have done well, I'm assuming.
19:47Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and and uh and and Heidi also was the guy who pushed for us to change the name from Taser to something else, which became Axon because and and look, at the time that was hard. We're really invested in our brand. We're proud of the taser. We didn't want to feel like we're retreating. And Hottie'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 he helped me think that through and and he was right. You know, now we have the the taser is a small part of the business.
20:16It'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, you know, every day from one of these body cameras. Uh, 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. Uh, and of course, I've got a great team in place now, thanks to Hottie coming in and and sort of helping me learn this business and rebuild the plane while we were
20:45flying. Okay, go hottie.
20:47Yeah. So, now 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. I remember, right?
21:07Yeah. Yeah. Police officers. I was co-defending a 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 uh 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 being I saw the night I went to that house. I saw somebody that was literally like out of the Exorcist movie." This cop told me he'd been a cop for 26
21:37years, had never been afraid in his career until the anim animalistic rage he had to deal with in this person who was, you know, had 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."
21:51Because like when police officers describe things, they have to be very professional. In this case, it was, you know, when Mr. H did this or that, it 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 if we get caught in one halftruth, that can be the end of our career." And that's when we realized like, "We need to record this so that
22:19you can show people what it is that you saw, what it is you did, rather than having to try to explain it."
22:26Weren't there body cam companies already at the time? Did they exist? Was this concept novel?
22:32The concept was new. I mean, you did have GoPro with like consumer cameras. So, we certainly didn't invent the cameras, but we um again 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 his stock options to build it against us. That's another bit of drama.
22:57But yes, we we were building the industry'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 explo the reason that we're a I don't know a $30 billion 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.
23:25They'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. Uh, 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
23:5418,000 departments all trying to figure out how to run video servers securely.
23:58But 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.
24:12But 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 cam's 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 it's also for their own safety, their own protection, and for winning cases?
24:32So, 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 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
25:00along 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 in the patrol car, as 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 have 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
25:29been 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.
25:37She 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 turns 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?
25:59White officer, black subject. Now, uh, 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.
26:20But if you remember the stories, the family was saying things like, remember, hands up, don't shoot. That that Michael Brown was trying to surrender. If that's true, then that was a cold-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." Uh 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 cam family said, "We want body
26:48cameras." 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. and 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 and 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
27:18that's what body cameras have proven.
27:19And 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 a little bit about the scale of the business today.
27:30Oh yeah. Yeah. Once once Ferguson happened, then everybody needed body cameras and they needed them fast. Uh and that's where our bet on the cloud made a big sense. You remember back in the day like uh you know in 2010 cloud was relatively new to government. And they they 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 cyber security there could be Chinese hackers, you know, in the server in my building.
27:59No problem. it comes down to the technology and the stack and the people you've got. And so like from a first principles, we knew the cloud could be safer than your average police department. Um, and we could scale it.
28:11And 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 where's body cameras. Uh, and we have the vast majority are on our system. I think partly because we were first, but also because we tend to be we're we're sort of maniacally missiondriven. Uh, 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
28:40excited about. Um, and that leads to different product outcomes than companies that are just purely profit motivated. Maybe 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 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
29:08surveillance 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 and these issues.
29:29Well, I I think this is part of a larger concern about AI in general and the proliferation of cameras and sensors. Um, and look, it's not unreasonable.
29:40Like I don't think any of us want to live in China, uh, meaning, you know, a surveillance state where every citizen is tracked everywhere they go. Um, 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.
29:58There'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? Um 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
30:26be good for society and if we build that it will be durable and so in the example of cameras um look we build license plate reading cameras too uh I think we've been pretty thoughtful about the the security controls we put in place to try to avoid some of the issues you've seen. Uh what people are really upset about are things like when a police officer can go in and do searches on their, you know, exgirlfriend.
30:50Uh 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, uh you know, finding uh being able to look up license plates that are around the the the crime scene of a violent crime, people agree that those are reasonable use cases. And even the critics like um I think Ben Jordan has been a very thoughtful critic. I think he kind of started this. Uh he will tell you if you listen to him, he's not saying to get
31:19rid of this technology. We just need good guardrails uh and we need safeguards. And so I'm a big proponent uh by the time this webcast actually hits. Uh I think you know we'll be after the election and we'll start to see some some movement in uh federal regulation.
31:35Uh, I'm a big supporter of what Senator Holly 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.
31:47Do you think that people get that rationally? Because I've 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, "I icky, yucky. I don't want to have anything to do with that."
32:01I think Ring did that Super Bowl ad and the 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
32:28exists, the 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?
32:43Yeah. Well, I think part of that's just an adjustment is as society moves forward. Like look, plenty of people still go they they may say, "Boy, that made me uncomfortable, but they go buy Ring cameras specifically because Ring has some of the best technology for a being able to protect your home or if you need to share videos with police because you had a crime at your house."
33:03Um, and so I think there is a little bit of uh back and forth which is 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. Um, I don't think it's reasonable. I don't think we're going to end up with like making doorbell cameras illegal. Uh, right.
33:23But, uh, I think Ring likely learned from that incident. They've they've put really good safeguards in place. In fact, we have uh uh 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 we don't enable police to just go out and randomly, you know, canvas those videos.
33:49There'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.
34:06It I couldn't get it to the police for days. Uh I have Ring now because I do want to be able to share it if something like that happens. So I I think it it is also a matter of just yes not everybody's going to uh agree with the guardrails but I think policymakers can't just you we have to find the reasonable middle ground. We've got to find reasonable public policy and we've already seen that. I think uh again I was really impressed with Senator Holly's bill is very rational. It's got criminal penalties if police officers
34:35individually misuse this for personal purposes. I believe there's criminal and civil penalties and then there's going to be safeguards from manufacturers like us and Flock that are going to require that before you can run searches, you've got to have viable um 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
35:04before 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 and and but I think you know I've been around this long enough to see those things subside when you when you get good rational safeguards in place. So, I mean, you guys start with the taser handheld device, reduce the use of guns in in
35:32policing, 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?
35:40So, 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? Yeah. So, uh, we our mission is to protect life and we we chose those two words, meaning we focus on violence as a problem that's worth solving. Um, 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
36:09of 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 partnered with um uh Skyo on drones. So in fact uh we recently will have become the uh largest investor in America's leading drone company. Uh, so if you don't know Skyo, they're the guys who build these robotic autonomous docks
36:37where a 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, you know, to alarm calls. So, it allows them to focus on bigger calls. And when there's big events, uh, 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 uh the service to the community. Now again,
37:06drones 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, you know, using these uh in ways that the public uh wouldn't want them to? And so Skyo, 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 on patrol missions. They very specifically fly
37:35them only to the site when they've been called where somebody is calling for help and you get a drone there quickly.
37:41That can help get 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 I think the whole idea is across the board of all the things we do um 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 uh on
38:11everything, 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 uh and find the right balance along the way. You 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
38:40as 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 guard rails 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
39:09don'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
39:36liberties uh 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 is that a fair characterization or do you think it's a little bit misguided?
39:47No, no, no. I think it's a fair debate and that is the right debate uh to be having and I think but this is hard work, right? Like it's it's finding the balance. And what's interesting, you will find um 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 overpolicing."
40:10But when you when you actually go out uh you frankly a lot of the most concerns are coming from wealthy neighborhoods 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
40:38spectrum 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
41:08to track everyday people. Uh but those are interesting those are interesting technoethical problems to deal with, right? How do we build the tech to to meet the ethical bar to make the right trade-offs?
41:17You're right. I don't live or work in neighborhoods where I'm experiencing a lot of violent crime. I 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 calls luxury beliefs. I think there was an incident in, 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
41:46shootings. 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?
41:59Uh yes, that project is continuing and that's that's why they quit. That was look, life can be challenging at times.
42:05I 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 uh and other technologies. Now, on this case, um we had been working with them for about a year on the idea that we could have a taser capable drone to be used in
42:34extreme 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?
42:47We got to wait for the police with a gun.
42:49Yeah, we send in more people with guns and they have a gunfight.
42:52Like this is the wild west, guys. Like, is that really the best we can do as a society? And so, 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
43:22die. But even there, like anytime you have more bullets introduced, there's innocent bystanders get killed all the time accidentally. And so I continue to believe and we are doing R&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
43:50our advisers were worried about getting cancelled 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.
44:16Many 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 overpolicing, it is primarily from underrepresented, you know, communities.
44:38And 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 overpolicing, it it should be from uh from communities who 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
45:06actually 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 because then all we can do is sort of argue about things. We we've lost the ability to make significant design changes.
45:24Let'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 US. 10 to $30,000 price ranges have been kind of talked about.
45:40Do 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.
45:56Yep. Well, first I would say 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 we're involved in will not only have required human oversight,
46:25but we're building multi-key processes.
46:29So, 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 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 decisionm with multiple parties in real time which I think will
46:58lead to far less uh you know mistakes uh less concerns about abuse and I do believe both humanoids I think drones will be bigger faster. Uh humanoids are coming as well but again that's why we we invested in SkyO. Uh we we bought almost half the company. We we wanted to buy about as much as we could because we're big believers that there's going to be millions of drones uh 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 a as an independent company that could move at startup speed and continue to raise and
47:28spend capital uh in ways that maybe weren't constrained by being part of a public company. And yet at the same time we've secured the um 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 uh you know have an opportunity to get there and the whole idea is to just let's understand what's happening.
47:53Uh let's let's make sure we're making the best decisions possible. Uh and the idea is to keep everybody as safe as we can. How do citizens feel like they can maintain their individual liberties from being overwhelmed by a state that is equipped with this much technology? I think that's really where I react personally to think about as a more of a libertarian. I'm a big proponent of the role of government being public safety.
48:17So, let me be clear on this. But this idea that you're creating a significant concentration of this extraordinary power and it's hard for the citizens to be able to ultimately protect themselves against a government that decides to overwhelm voices and individuals at some point in the future.
48:34Just got to do is take a step back and look in the world as it exists today. So let's imagine, David, that police have got a tip that there's a a dangerous felon in your house. This has happened, right? We've all heard of cases where police go to the wrong house and they're doing an an entry. So today, the way that works, like if they believe that you're a dangerous felon, they may come through the door in your house and you're going to be dealing with multiple officers that are suited up with body armor with lethal weapons in their hands
49:03who are going to have to make a life ordeath decision instantaneously while their own adrenaline is surging. Right?
49:09Human 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 uh and 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 police are going to come into your house imagine a future where if they do have to do this mission and again we can debate about under what conditions they should do it now they're going to be sending in a
49:36drone or a robot. So, the operator is going to be a team of people, not just one. It's not going to be a person who's in the fight orflight response, afraid for their own safety, shaking with their finger on the trigger. And if they make a mistake, you're going to get hit with a taser or a pepper spray or some non-lethal weapon. And oh, by the way, the whole thing will be recorded because to even operate these things, you have to have camera systems on them. Many police shootings today are not recorded.
50:03And so I think it just comes back to how do we you know we 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. Uh we we will work with our customers uh to push hard that every one of them has an oversight function.
50:29So anytime one of these robotic systems is used that there's independent civilian oversight and review. Um so I think again this just comes down to it's not an unreasonable concern. These things could be misused.
50:42However, 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 regulations 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, you know, being held accountable.
51:12And 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?
51:31Well, if you actually defund the police, um, you know, we 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.
51:53There 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 that 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
52:23have rules that we can 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 downtown San Francisco got abandoned. I've seen it myself. Yeah.
52:44Yeah. 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 models implode. Uh now I think in your example I think San Francisco has already begun to swing the other direction and take corrective action. Um and so I I try to stay out of politics too much. I think you know things things will swing one way or the other but we have corrective mechanisms that over time will uh will kick in. And I think non-lethality is a is a great
53:13mission. Um I think public safety is critical to the underwriting of all of our other social contracts. without good publica 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 on the business on the progress on the SkyO investment.
53:34Obviously there's a lot of I think social challenges ahead here uh with this big debate that's going on right now on the limits of that and the limits of technology.
53:42Well, I'll tell you as well like you know there's 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 a couple months later there's the hey, wait a minute.
53:53No, 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 is 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. this sort of social upheaval, but god forbid if we do, we need the men and women of law enforcement to be ready
54:22to stand up and and help us keep order uh as we get through to what I'm I'm a huge optimist. I think 10 20 years from now is going to be a near utopian society. Again, for 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.
54:45And our view, our role at Axon is like, how do we arm the police for that in a way we'll look back 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 and help make people more comfortable that, you know, we're going to we're going to get through this together, okay? 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.
55:12Been a lot of fun. Anytime.
55:16All 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 in a minute. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What do you guys think? That was fun. That was great.
