The Man Who Changed Policing In America - EP 33 Rick Smith

How much electricity does it take to incapacitate someone? And I'll tell you, nobody knew the answer because who— like, why would somebody ever do that?

Right.

And so we went, we did the basic science work, got a bunch of patents around it, and then launched— well, when I say a bunch, one initially, and then launched the M26 taser with zero money left in the bank in December of 1999. And its whole promise was simply that we could lock up the musculature of even the toughest, most focused people, even if they're on methamphetamines or PCP. And it worked.

Yeah.

And just the fact that we delivered on the core problem that we promised to solve ultimately made the company quite successful. Rick Smith.

Co-founder and CEO of Axon. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me here.

Appreciate having you here. Obviously, we're going to get into your life and all that Axon does, but I was going to start this in a slightly different place than usual, which is that there's a guy named Glenn Kelman. He is the CEO of Redfin, although I guess I think they got acquired. So anyway, he started Redfin. He's a longtime friend of mine. He is unique, I would say, among execs that I know in the sense that he has really good journalistic instincts and he sends me story ideas from time to time. And I don't want to disparage tech execs and CEOs, but they don't always have a sense for like what appeals to a journalist. But he really— he has a good nose for what journalists are into and what I'm into. And a couple of years ago, he sent me this note and he's like, You gotta talk to Rick Smith. He's, he's your kind of story. I'm gonna embarrass him and possibly you. I don't think so, but I'll, I'll read the description.

Embarrass me, you win the stuff, Dan.

I'll read the description that he said. He said, he said, Rick, someone who's a little bit crazy and totally sane at the same time. Um, and compulsively interesting and unapologetically himself and important to our society. So that's, that was all pretty good. Um, And then I thought I'd read some of this because it gives a little bit of your background. He said, you know, you've been working on this company, done nothing else in your professional life since graduating from Harvard 30-plus years ago. Your goal is to replace the gun with the taser in order to save lives. He's the one who put body cameras on just about every police officer in America, which we'll get into. He's been tasered himself 8 times.

8, 8 times now.

Yeah, 8 times. Okay. And he noted, you know, you guys have some critics, but he said you've done 7 AMAs on Reddit to, you know, try to address things head on. I was reading a couple of those last night and then I won't belabor this too much more, but he said it's a miracle his company even exists. The maker of a taser is always going to get sued. Early in the company's history, when his insurer wanted him to settle a claim, for $1.5 million. He got the insurer to pay him $1.45 million and then fought the plaintiffs all the way through the trial and won. And anyway, he paints this picture of you as, you know, this man possessed by this quest and who's kind of gone to great lengths to see all this through. And I feel like from my reading last night that that checks out.

Well, thank you. That's kind. And I do have to say, the thing that stands out to me about Glenn— I only met him on that one trip. He is one of the kindest human beings I've ever met. And there's this, you know, sort of image that to be a successful CEO, you have to be a bit of an asshole. Yeah. And he is the, you know, the proof that that theorem is wrong because he's been successful and just a super, super nice human.

He really is. He really is. He's always been good to me. I don't know how he is to his employees, but he's nice to me. I think he's probably a good guy.

He may have fooled me, but as far as I can tell, he's an amazingly nice guy.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of— there's a lot to get into. I mean, like I mentioned in the intro, obviously people know the TASER product. I think you guys have— that's where you started, but you've expanded your product line. I think people certainly know body cams. They must have seen, seen these. And then you guys have gotten into drones. You've gotten now into kind of merging AI into some of this stuff. And then you also do all these services to manage all this data coming into the police departments. Your massive company that I— again, I'm not— I don't mean this offensive, not like a household, like a household name that would come right to the top of people's minds, but they know all your products and then you're a massive, massive company.

Yeah, it's, it's been a wild ride. People would know us had we kept our name Taser, but that we changed the name of the company when we started doing other things because that is such a sledgehammer of a brand. When you say Taser, it immediately brings out strong emotions and people think about electrified weapons. Yeah, cops think of it very positively, and people that have negative views of policing think of it very negatively. And it, it just was something we finally said, you know what, let's let that be the product people associated with it. We need a broader umbrella brand where we can do more things.

Then you got to Axon. Yeah, I didn't know until last night researching this that— I can't tell if I should be ashamed or not— TASER is an acronym.

Uh, that is, uh, you shouldn't be ashamed. It's a, it's a little bit of trivia. But yeah, yeah.

And so, so, and it goes, you guys were there at the beginning. So there's this, there's a NASA scientist that comes up with this idea and then, and then it seemed like he, you and your, your dad co-founded the company along, alongside him.

Yeah. So, so if we roll back, TASER actually came from Tom Swift and his electric rifle. It was from, apparently there was this famous science fiction series.

I saw. Okay.

From the 19— early 1900s. In fact, I'm a huge futurist fan of Ray Kurzweil, and he, I guess, as well grew up a fan of the Tom Swift series.

Okay.

So science fiction from the early part of the century. And Jack Cover would go on to be one of the chief scientists at North American Aerospace on the Apollo project. And in the 1960s, he was reading in a newspaper that, you know, amidst all the turmoil and the National Guard actually opening fire on Americans and all that, the President had a blue ribbon commission that said we need non-lethal weapons. And so he quit. He said, I'm going to go make Tom Swift's electric rifle. And he originally named the company T-S-E-R Systems.

Right.

And it was funny when I was— when he was showing me his files, I had always assumed tasers like Coca-Cola. Well, you probably had some big branding company to figure this out. Totally random circumstance. They got tired of saying I'm from T-S-E-R Systems. They threw in the A and Taser was born.

Okay, so it doesn't even stand for some weird technology, um, your usual acronym.

But my co-founder actually was my brother Tom Smith.

Okay.

And so some people will jokingly say it's Tom Smith's electric rifle.

Okay. All right, what do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex, because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies. 30,000 companies from startups to world's largest corporations rely on Brex's technology for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses, and Brex's AIs and software run right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money, and take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. CoreMemory and Brex. Okay, so you guys kind of start there. You see he's working on this invention. And I read in the early days, I mean, it seemed like it relied on— it had some kinks. And in order to turn this into an actual product, it was a journey.

Oh, it sure was. So Jack was a brilliant inventor. But look, technology sometimes takes a while to, to mature. The early generation tasers, they didn't realize they would be classified as a firearm because they used a small gunpowder propellant to launch the dart. Under federal law, if you use an explosive to launch something, you're a firearm. They didn't even know that. And so they had shipped thousands of units in the mid-'70s when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms came knocking and said, you guys are selling unserialized, unmarked, illegal firearms, and that effectively shut the company down. He tried to redo it again in the '80s. It failed again. And then in 1993, when I was 23 and he was 73, I found him through 411, which— Yeah, some of your viewers may not know what that is. Before Google was a thing, I got his phone number, called him, and showed up on his doorstep. And there's this sort of magic moment where this 73-year-old, you know, colorful, brilliant, at times difficult inventor, like the stereotype of the mad scientist, and me, the 23-year-old kid fresh out of college, like, hey, let's give this another shot. Next thing I know, a couple of weeks later, we're building stuff in his garage.

And you— I read it at Harvard. You studied— was it computer science or—

It was neurobiology.

Neurobiology, right?

Although they don't have a specific categorization for that. So it was biology in general. And then I did coursework focusing on neurobio.

And were you thinking of heading in a more medical science Direction.

So I actually showed my son my, my Harvard application. We found it when my parents passed away. It was in their house. And I wrote my college entrance essay that I wanted to build robotic limbs. So like I wanted to build Luke Skywalker's robotic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was fascinated. So I wanted to study neurobiology because I was just fascinated by this idea of the human-machine interface. And it turned out to be surprisingly useful. I had no idea I would end up here, but once I did, it is actually really useful because we're a nerve stimulator. Like, we, we are a machine that interfaces to the human body, but for a different reason— to temporarily swamp your communication system with electrical overload so that we can paralyze your muscles and put you down as safely as possible.

Yeah. Okay. And because, I mean, it is a thing for a— to Glenn's point, There's this element where this is always going to be a journey. You've got the whole firearm thing, you've got the liability thing, you've got just the nature of what you're trying to do, whether, whether people see this as helpful or harmful. It seems like a thing that it would take a 23-year-old to want to go do, because if you, if you knew what you know now, you know, you might not have gone on to try to tackle this.

Oh boy. Yeah, the first 7 years were brutal. I had friends who came out to visit me and mocked me incessantly. I've got a video of one of them. He went on to be one of the senior guys at Uber and different tech. And there's a video of him when I was 23. They came to visit me and they would film me in my little office park office excitedly talking about the taser. And then when I'd leave the room, they would film each other making fun of me. They're like, shocky, shocky gun. We tried to raise money from VCs like nobody would touch us over the first 7 years. We basically drained my parents completely financially. And I was, I was of the belief it was going to fail. I thought it was, we were at the point of no return. Told my dad, stop putting money in, it's over. And he pointed out, well, we owe Silicon Valley Bank $1.5 million. If this fails, I'm getting wiped out. And so we, okay, Dad, he put the last of his money in. Our other investor, Bruce Culver, matched him. And we had $1 million for our third attempt And that was what finally hit.

And it worked. And you'd have this one product in the middle of this steering wheel anti-car, anti-theft device that sounded like it gave people a shock if they tried to steal the car. And that, that, that one did not work.

That did not work. It was a great learning lesson. So we started with the taser for consumers. It never really took off. Consumers were skeptical. They thought this thing seemed like a gimmick, but we had a number of consumers say, hey, I'd like to rig this up to protect my car. So as startups do, we rapidly put something together, like literally over Christmas holidays, 1996, we built a prototype and took it to the Consumer Electronics Show of a steering wheel lock that would shock you if you didn't turn it off with the remote. And we had the Auto Taser Challenge in our booth. We'd have people grab it and then we'd challenge them how long they could hold on and it would shock them and they would scream and let go. And there was this circus-like energy We had the busiest booth at CES. We were convinced we were going to make a ton of money. None of us were really passionate about it. And one of the things I share with people, you think about doing a startup, like do something you're really passionate about. If it's authentic, you'll stick with it. When we finally realized what we had built was kind of a freak show product that made for great demos, but nobody was actually buying it. That took us 2 years and again had drained the company to the point I didn't think we'd make it. And what saved us was we pivoted back to, okay, what's the problem we're really trying to solve? Like, we're passionate about creating an alternative to guns. And if we're going to succeed, we had seen some of the warts of the early tech. It was underpowered. Rodney King was shot with an LAPD taser.

I remember that.

Yeah, didn't work. So they went to their batons with catastrophic consequence. And so because I had this neuro-bio background, I was like, okay, let's go design a lab experiment. Let's, let's start back at the basics. How much electricity does it take to incapacitate someone? And I'll tell you, nobody knew the answer because who— like, why would somebody ever do that? Right. And so we went, we did the basic science work, got a bunch of patents around it, and then launched— well, when I say a bunch, one initially, and then launched the M26 TASER with zero money left in the bank in December of 1999. And its whole promise was simply that we could lock up the musculature of even the toughest, most focused people, even if they're on methamphetamines or PCP. And it worked.

Yeah.

And just the fact that we delivered on the core problem that we promised to solve ultimately made the company quite successful.

When you're a startup, who tests that product for the first time?

Man. So again, this is one where it's a good thing we were a startup that didn't know too much because had you approached this like a medical device, you would've been stuck in testing land for a decade. So I knew enough to be, quote unquote, dangerous. So when we first determined our first product, we built using the same electrical output as the original taser from the 1970s. And they had done a fair amount of medical testing and Jack used some like NASA-related doctors. And so there's enough foundational stuff for like, look, we're just going to stay with that. Then when we saw people fighting through it, it wasn't working. So, oh boy, we got to start over. So we, we teamed up with one electrophysiologist, a doctor named Dr. Stratbuck around Nebraska. And now before we did that, we actually did some safety testing on ourselves or effectiveness testing. It was literally like the Pepsi Challenge. We wouldn't— you wouldn't— there'd be two circuits behind a box and we would change a variable between them and we'd hook it up to our forearms because basically you can't shock yourself into an atrial fibrillation, ventricular fibrillation from your arm. And so we would shock ourselves. We were drinking Jack Daniel's, listening to Guns N' Roses, and it'd be like, okay, which was worse, A or B? We did that for about one afternoon and like, this is not scalable. So then we realized we had to pivot and we started doing some animal testing. Okay, so anesthetized pigs, it wouldn't feel anything. And really the test that put the company on the map cost us $2,500. It was one pig. Dr. Stratbucker also happened to be a pig farmer. His family lived on a farm. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Yeah, such coincidences. And so he hired a veterinarian and we did this one test where we built a test rig. And the one thing about like foundational science in some cases is the answer is so glaringly obvious from that one pig. We could see, well, if we just tune up the capacitance basically to about 4 times the output, we could see these massive contractions of the muscles on a pig that's anesthetized. So you could perform surgery, it wouldn't feel anything. So once we realized, okay, that's the effect we're going for, we tuned it up and down a bit. We then went to University of Missouri to repeat it. Animal cardiac safety studies. We paid Dr. Stratbucker to compare the output to published electrical safety standards. Then we went into human testing. I was one of the first, along with others. And, you know, today we're far more rigorous. We have a lot more resources. So everything we, we do now, we have extensive medical testing across all the key variables. Early on, I think history has proven we were right. You know, based on the scientific literature, we have a pretty big safety margin below the level that'd be dangerous for the heart. But, you know, The New York Times came after us pretty hard saying we didn't do a large quantity of medical testing. And that's true. Although over time, I think it's borne out that in fact the theory was right. We had a pretty big safety margin.

You mentioned you have more resources, I think about $2 billion in revenue per year, or is it We are heading towards 3.

We're between 2 and 3 billion now.

And then I didn't check the market cap this morning. It was somewhere around 40 billion when I was—

Yeah, I think we're around— we peaked up around 60.

Okay.

Might be around 50. We're a bit volatile.

Okay. Okay. And so it— what, like, how have tasers changed over— what is the state of the art? Like, what are the knobs that we're still turning on tasers these days?

Okay. So the thing that is kind of magical, the thing that we developed in 1999 is the core sort of operating system for a less lethal weapon. That is, if I can hook up two points connected to your body 12 inches apart, we have a 99.9% effectiveness rate. It is immediately effective and down you go. Now, the problem we have is people out in the real world don't stand still unless you put electrodes on them. And so the first two generations of the TASER, so between 2000 and 2010, were all a single-shot device. So it's sort of like a muzzleloader.

Okay.

So our big Achilles heel, if we got hit with two projectiles and they would come out at an angle and spread. So a little complex to get two darts on somebody, get it through the clothing, make sure they both hit, make sure you're not too close where the darts are too close together. You're too far where the bottom one misses. And so that was kind of the state of the art. Then around 2010, we started getting up to a two and three-shot weapon. The three-shot was so big, customers refused to carry it, literally. We had to cancel and shut that platform down. It's called the X3. And then we get through the 2010s and then most recently in 2023, we pivoted. So the original TASER I told you is a firearm. To avoid that in all the modern era, we engineered in a compressed air cylinder.

So instead of gunpowder, you had nitrogen.

Well, we had gunpowder and nitrogen.

Okay.

So we literally took the same explosive that could launch the darts and we inserted a gas cylinder in front of it. And then that was filled with compressed air. And when you fire the explosive, it would push the cylinder onto a pin, release the air, and the air or CO2 or actually nitrogen in our case would launch the darts. So we were engineering around the federal firearms laws and we tried to make a 3-shot, but just the physics of everything was too big. And so I remember going to our board saying, look, you know, we, if we are going to begin to become a true alternative, we need more shots. Cops don't carry Derringer 2-shot devices. They carry Glock with a spare magazine with like, you know, 30 rounds or more. And we had devised a plan that said, look, we get rid of all the extra compressed air stuff. And if we lower the voltage down below 1,000 volts, we can reduce the size of all the components. Uh, and we could get to a 10-shot system. But it would require that we accept becoming a firearm. And because of the long history, that was anathema. It was the, like, one of these sacred cow issues. And I remember saying, well, look, like, cops buy guns, police agencies buy guns. If we have to be regulated as a firearm company, so be it. Now, you can imagine by then we were already a, let's see, in 2023, like a probably $10, $20 billion company. A lot of our valuation comes from tech. You know, we run huge software platforms in the cloud and sensors and all this other stuff. And so our board was rightfully concerned, like, hey, are we going to be valued like Smith Wesson instead of, you know, a tech company? Right. But this is where I think kind of having a North Star for us, it was like, look, this is what it takes. We have no other path to actually start to challenge the effectiveness of a firearm. So we're going to have to become one. And so we did. And so our newest weapon, TASER 10. So long-winded answer to your question. So it's now 10 shots. You have to get 2 out of 10 on target.

So it fires, it fires 10 at once, or you can, you can pull the trigger 10 times.

You pull the trigger 10 times. Okay. Now, another thing, this was really interesting.

And you have to connect 2.

You have to hit 2.

Okay.

And we have— so the big thing we have to train police officers is you always have to fire at least 2. Once it's go time, it's 1, 2. But you pick your locations, whereas historically we'd shoot 2 darts at once. It turns out that's sort of like trying to, you know, shoot 2 free throws at once. It's hard because he's moving, I'm moving, you know, I've got an angle between these darts. It's a lot of complexity.

Yeah.

And when we asked our customers what they thought about the idea of 1 dart per trigger pull, actually they hated the idea. They said, no, no, no, it's got to be 2. It's always been 2. But we built a prototype to test. And this was one of the really interesting things I've seen in my career. You can ask people about an idea, they'll tell you it's a terrible idea, but until they experience it, you can't really believe because they just don't know. And so we put, I remember put 10 cops through a training session and they all got to fire this prototype and they said, wow, this is so much easier to use. I just, I'm not like doing angles and trying to figure out where the person is. I can just pick my two locations and I go pop, pop.

Yeah.

And it works. And now we train them in VR where we can put them through a bunch of repetitive training skills. And so with 10 shots, with good training and a 45-foot range, you know, we believe we have the potential to be up in the 99%+ effectiveness rate. We have one remaining hurdle, and that's heavy clothing because we have to get a contact to the body. And so this winter we are beginning testing what we're calling the Apollo Dart. We ourselves pay homage to the moonshot. The moon landing, our moonshot's to cut non-decimaleasing in half. And so the Apollo Dart is our new dart system that is designed to penetrate through heavy clothing very reliably. It's actually easy to get through clothing. The hard thing is to get through heavy clothing and stop before it penetrates too deep.

Like you said, you still have to hit the skin. I feel like, you know, I don't pay attention when I'm watching these videos. I just— I feel like I always see— I'm like on Instagram or something and somebody's getting tased. I don't know. I seem to find myself Yeah, I don't know what this says about me, but, and I've never paid attention. I mean, you're talking about heavy clothing. Can it hit like a t-shirt and still work or—

Okay, so I'm going to talk about the older tech. Yeah. So historically we would use high voltage like 50,000 volts, but low current. And the reason we use the high voltage is high voltage, like when you walk across the carpet in some parts of the country, you get a static shock that can be 40,000, 50,000 volts itself. The voltage allows you to get electrons to get a lot of like electromotive force behind them. It's like the pressure pushing an electric flow and it'll jump across an air gap. And so that was originally done back in the '70s. We did it as well. And it was— it would allow you to get the darts close and then the electricity could jump an air gap. It could jump into the body. But it turns out it's not super reliable because the dart has to be pretty close. If it hangs more than like 3/4 of an inch away, the circuit breaks and it can be just sort of not super reliable. And so when we designed this new weapon, we said, look, we got to be reliable. We can't rely on this, like, sometimes works if it arcs through clothing. So we're just going to punch through and just get a direct connection. And even with our previous systems, so we have this small— it looks like a fishhook on the front and about 65, 70% of the time it already penetrates. And then about 35% of the time it gets stuck in the clothing. The new dart that we're launching that's going to the field now has a tungsten core, which is something they use in, you know, like armor-penetrating rounds. Yeah, because it's very dense. And that tungsten core can just slice right through clothing. It'll go through— it has about a 7-inch leash, it'll go through 7 inches of clothing, which is a lot. The key is, and what we've spent years working on, is how do we get it to stop once it punctures in the skin? And the trick we figured out is when you go from sort of this fibrous, relatively dry clothing into the body, the thing that changes, you're now in this thick, wet fluid environment. And we can use that as soon as it punches through the skin. We can force fluid to go certain places. It goes up the nose of this projectile and it creates pressure that deploys a brake. And so it stops when it gets through the skin. Really cool stuff.

And you, you do all this R&D in Arizona?

We do.

Okay. I mean, yeah, this sounds serious, man. I mean, how many people work on this?

So all in, we've got about 1,500 people in engineering. Now, most of those are software engineering. I actually have the greatest job on earth. So as the founder CEO, I have one direct report. He runs the company and I work with our customers. Like today, I was out meeting major police chiefs. Here in California, and then I work with our engineers. So actually, there's a team of about 4 people that were working on this DART system. I was one of them. And at least for parts of how the design works, I've got the prototype in my home office made from a toilet— I'm sorry, a paper towel tube. Yeah, that I sliced up with a razor because I actually don't know how to use CAD software. So I'll sit with an engineer and I'll try to sketch it or literally, again, cutting up cardboard and stuff. So that's kind of cool. Yeah.

Yeah, it is. And okay, so that's the state of the art on the taser. Like the vast majority of police departments in the US use that product. I mean, what is it, like 4 out of 5 or something?

It's— well, there's, for example, there's, I think, 66 major cities. All of them have tasers except one. Okay. Can you guess which city?

My head immediately goes to some California city, but I don't—

Okay. Yep. You're getting warmer. Keep going.

San Francisco.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, of course. Okay. So I look, I went to Palo Alto High School. I've lived out here, you know, just San Francisco.

What do we do? We just have like a— we hand you drugs when you're getting arrested or you—

frankly, they kill a lot of people they could avoid. And it's sad. And look, it'll be something like a homeless man with a razor blade who is approaching an officer and the police officer, you know, they— if you come at them with an edged weapon, they're trained to defend themselves. And then the police chief will go to the city, city council and others and say, look, can we please look at tasers? Because it could have made a difference in this scenario.

And San Francisco sees it as— I mean, it is— there is controversy around this. San Francisco's objection is that it's, it's encouraging the officers to use excessive force or something like that.

Yeah, that becomes it. It ends up I'll try to articulate— I obviously don't agree with this position, but they'll say cops will be more abusive because it doesn't kill somebody and it doesn't leave a mark. They're going to, like, torture people with it. And these things are way more dangerous than the manufacturer will admit. And there are— look, there are cases where people have died after being shot with a taser, for sure. There are about 28 where the taser caused a death. And so people will say, oh, we deny that there's any danger. No, we don't. The deaths that are clearly attributable relate to falls, about 20 of them, and about 8 where a flammable fluid was ignited, like gasoline. By the way, our newest taser actually won't ignite flammable liquids. That's something we've designed out of it with this new design. But the ones that tend to be quite controversial usually involve drugs. And look, like I've had the methamphetamine— it's, you know, epidemic has hit my family. So I don't say this from a position of judgmentalism. But when you have people who've overdosed on stimulants, it is not a gentle process. You become, in many cases, quite psychotic in your behavior, really stimulated, like their clothes are coming off because their body is heating up. They can become quite violent. People tend to call the police. And look, I'll tell you, looking at this over the last 25 years, the easiest thing in the world would be for us to put out something that says, hey, police, don't use this on people that are under the influence of drugs. Because when you do it, we're both going to get sued if something goes wrong. However, from like my worldview, the taser is the only non-lethal weapon that will actually work on somebody who's not feeling pain, because you can pepper spray them all day long, their eyes burn, they're not going to care, they'll fight right through it. Other than that, you can try to beat them to submission, which is an incredibly brutal, far higher injury rate, um, or you shoot them with a gun. And so in that limited group of, of options, the taser is the best. But some of those people are in the midst of a fatal overdose. And those are the ones that tend to be in the news because we do stand our ground. We say, look, we— and we've studied this and we have experts who look at this and look, you can find experts that will take a contraposition. But of the available options, like, we are the best one. And we, in those cases, in the vast majority of cases, I think it's pretty clear the taser didn't play a role, but it's much more newsworthy to have a controversy around whether the taser did. And unfortunately, I think that leads to, you know, people die when police don't have the right equipment and they have to go to their gun.

Okay. Since day one, the Core Memory podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. How do other countries treat this? Are tasers prevalent in Europe?

And yeah, they're— so every constabulary, which is a police department in the UK, has taser weapons. We're about 20% of taser— of officers in the UK have them. So we have a higher penetration. Most police departments in the US give a taser to every officer now because they figure, look, if you've got a gun, we've already given you the power to take a life. Want to give you all the tools to avoid it. In Europe, like in the UK, their officers don't have guns. So we are currently used by more specialty officers. And I think that's because up until now, the taser with 1 or 2 shots, what the, what the police have told us there, the police leaders, they say, well, it's not really reliable enough that we would use it as a self-defense tool. We'll use it as a tool to help assist in capturing somebody who's violent and dangerous. I think this new device, the new TASER 10, we have the Nordic countries are now saying we actually think this is a suitable replacement for a firearm where they are not yet armed with firearms. They're considering it. We believe in the next— they're testing this winter. If the testing goes well, we will become the standard weapon for many of the Nordic countries. And I actually think this, this new weapon now positions us for everywhere but the United States. The US is unique because of our gun prevalence in society. I think in the rest of the world, we could become their primary self-defense weapon.

And in the US, for police departments that have a Taser, how— what percent are Axon-branded tasers versus competitors?

100%. So Taser is a brand, is a trademark. So if you notice, I keep saying a Taser device or a Taser weapon. So it is like Kleenex. Yeah. And we have really good patent protection. So through all of Europe, through basically countries that respect patent law. We have 100% market share. And then like in China, we do have some copycats. They have not yet copied the current product, but they don't sell in markets because we are aggressive in protecting our IP. But we also can't sell in China under U.S. law. And so it's actually one of these things where it's like a parallel universe. We have people who copy us there. They sell it, but it doesn't really impact us. Because we just have these separate worlds.

And for the, for the body cam, are the numbers— are you, are you 100% there?

No, we're not. So Motorola is our biggest competitor. You know, they're actually today a bigger company than we are, though we're catching them.

Okay.

And then Panasonic and then there's some smaller companies. So the body camera space has a lot of competitors. But we do have— I would say we have a majority of market share. And I think it's because we, we really execute well. We're very— we're sort of maniacally mission-driven and that ends up paying off. Yeah. You know, you do well in the market when we're, we're very focused on— I learned from that Auto Taser when we make products with the, you know, to try and go make a buck, the universe slaps me and says, don't do that. When we focus on problems that we're really passionate about, then the money follows. Yeah.

Not to be a jerk, but isn't that— wouldn't that patent be kind of old by now?

No, no, that's a good— I love the way you're looking at it. Yeah, you could. So the original patent was 1999. It's expired.

Oh, but I— because I didn't know if it went back to Jack and the NASA— the NASA's coming out of NASA stuff.

No. So he had some patents. Those have expired. Okay. Our 1999 patent expired. Our next product was the X26. We made it much smaller. There's a host of patents in that. Those have all expired. But the new TASER 10, we've got a whole tranche of new patents that just hit. This new Apollo Dart has some patents on it. So I'm actually pretty proud of this, that we have continued with this idea that we have to disrupt ourselves. We've got to make sure we have new things that are so good people wouldn't want to buy the old ones. And so I started this at 23, and our current patents, which I think our new products are so much better than the last version. So I'm 55 now. We just filed. So I'll be— we'll make it through my career having had continuous patent coverage the whole time.

And so the That makes it almost— I know you're saying TASER is a trademark, a similar device. It makes it almost impossible for somebody. There must be other companies if this market is this valuable, at least we've had a few.

We've successfully enforced our patents on a few. Yeah, but look, they could come and make the old TASER weapons like we made in '99 up to 2003. It's just the newer stuff. Or somebody could out-invent us. You could come out with some totally new technology, come take us out. But, you know, the thing about patent law, it rewards research and development. If you develop something new and it's describably new so you can get a patent, the government says, okay, we protect you for 20 years. Yeah. And we have invented continuously enough that the new stuff is so much better than the 20-year-old stuff we had that hasn't enabled somebody to come compete with us. We compete with ourselves.

I didn't know this until I was doing the research for talking to you. I guess it should have been obvious in some ways. It looks to me like from the body cam footage that, that you guys are selling a service that is in— please correct me if I'm wrong, but it looked to me like that all that footage gets ingested somewhere and it has to be managed and that, that you guys have a service that actually does this. I guess I assumed in my head I just pictured it would be an IT technology nightmare, but that the individual police departments were all doing this themselves. But, but these things have become centralized.

Yeah, we do it all in the cloud. We have a service called evidence.com. Uh, so funny story, like my life story starts with no. Uh, the taser was a hard no. Cops didn't, cops didn't want to carry it at first. They thought it was a gimmick. Body cameras, cops were like, I don't want to wear that. It's Big Brother. But when I was standing, when we were investing in the camera business, and by the way, we created body cameras. It was no big strategic insight. When tasers became controversial, we were getting sued. Our customers were getting sued. The news media had all these negative stories. We said, look, we got to protect ourselves and our customers. They need to record what they're doing. And if they're doing the right thing, it'll protect them. The insight turned out to be right. The path to convince people was really hard. But as we were getting ready to roll it out, you know, with the Taser, we actually also had a little bit of technology. We would ship it with a, like a CD with a small utility app on it, and you could download every time you squeeze the trigger, it would have a log. Simple logging. Yet most of our customers, or a large part of our customers, would FedEx the taser weapon to us and have us download it. And we'd say, why? Why? We— you've got the disk, you've got a USB cable, just do it yourself. And they would say, well, you know, IT won't let us install any software. And so we— that insight turned out to be really useful. Well, wow, if they can't install the simple download app, there's no way they're going to be able to manage video. Yeah. And so we You know, a lot of things, it's just the simple insights are the important ones. As we were looking at it and having conversations, you know, somebody on our team pointed out, hey, look what Apple did with the iPod. You know, these iPod, iTunes, the last thing the world needed was another MP3 player in the late '90s. It's that sort of magic. And then iTunes moved to the cloud. I didn't even know what the cloud was when we were first talking about this. And it just made so much sense. It's like, yeah, you're right, we should do this in the cloud. And it was a double way because when we launched the body camera, police were not using the cloud. And so they were like, no, we don't want our cameras in. Hell no, we're not putting our evidence in some cloud thing.

That's what I was thinking about.

Yeah, yeah. There's total resistance to it. They would tell us it's illegal. But, you know, as an entrepreneur, you have to get past no and then scratch out, okay, what's the real— oh, the real issue you're worried about is data security. And then I would go talk to the, you know, more technical people because I was not yet a software CEO. I'm learning about this., but it became glaringly obvious, like, dude, your average police department in the United States has less than 50 people. They have zero full-time IT people. There's some IT guy over in the city who supports them. They for sure back then had nobody with a title that had the words information security in it. And so looking at that, it's like, yeah, this is glaringly obvious from a just sort of physics standpoint, doing this in the cloud with an Amazon or a Microsoft, which has large InfoSec teams. We would build a team. And of course, that turned out to be right. So over the past 15 years, many agencies who did this themselves have been hacked, have had ransomware and data leaks, and at least knock on wood, the cloud's proven to be much more resilient. So anyway, the first, like 2009 through 2013, it was a miserable failing business. We— many people in the business wanted to shut it down. And then Ferguson, Missouri happened. Yeah. And that was the moment where the world changed.

Yeah. And we're not— this is not a trivial amount of data. I mean, you guys, don't you— I read somewhere it's like as much as flows through Netflix, maybe on—

I think our video library is significantly larger than Netflix, and I think we're comparable now to YouTube. They have a lot more viewers than we do, but we have around a million cops worldwide that are uploading, and they're uploading 2 hours of video. So it's not like little snippets. It's a whole, you know, all the incidents from a shift. Plus hundreds of thousands of in-car video cameras and a growing number of drones. And now we also acquired— we're in both the drone and the counter-drone space. So we have hundreds of drone detection sensors on all the major sports stadiums in the US and hundreds of them spread across the front lines of Ukraine.

And I'm going to try to find a way to ask this eloquently. I don't know if I'll succeed, but your business strikes me— it's interesting because it's something like the body cams, you're, you're keeping the cops in check. And that's what they were originally worried about. But then I read enough to see it goes both ways because then they're also getting cleared in, in cases and where people had filed lawsuits before and it's like, oh no, well, it turns out we didn't use too much force or anything there. So it's kind of both sides. Taser, similar.

We've also, we have put some, we've put some cops in jail. You have bad cops who did bad things and they thought, you know, right.

That's what I mean. This cuts both ways in, in, in very nuanced. It's, it's complicated. And then the taser, similar thing, right? Like, far better to be, be tased than shot. But like, are the cops sometimes using the taser when they shouldn't? How do you— now you have so much of your business. You're this— when we think about the taser, the body cam, this data, service, you're so inextricably tied in with law enforcement at this point. I would feel like from where you started to where it is today, it's come very far. You're, you're like almost— you are this part of the police force. How do you not just get totally co-opted into whatever they want?

You know, I hear you 100%. Yeah. So look, for example, we actually just got flamed at a major law enforcement conference, we had a viewer stand up, an attendee stand up and say he was really mad at us because we have our EEAC, which is our Equity and Ethics Advisory Council. And he was reading off the names of the people we have on this council. And look, they're critics of police. They say some pretty harsh things about police. And this guy would say, well, you know, why are you aligning with these people? And our point was like, look, we need to hear the other voices, especially I think we have because we do have very large market share. Agencies really rely on our platform. There's a big responsibility for us to get it right. And, you know, this might sound a little cheesy or naive, but it's like, look, if you take the time to try to do things the right way, you want to do things in a way you're going to be proud of. Like now I'm thinking about, you know, I'm in the back half of my career and throughout the organization, you know, when you, when you attract really smart, talented people, We really pride ourselves on authenticity. It's like, hey, we do the best we can. We may be— we are imperfect. People are imperfect, organizations are imperfect. We're going to do our best. And that also means, you know, and look, like our software development office is in Seattle. It is, you know, pretty far on the liberal end of the US spectrum that, you know, and not to like tie people's views on policing, but they do fall differently on the spectrum. Of different cities, etc. And so, you know, our employees look at us to say, okay, they're asking me a lot of critical questions. How do we not become co-opted into negative influences or one side of a political argument? And I think you just have to be open to listening. And now we don't shy away from controversy. I actually think one of the things that for us has become a superpower.

Yeah, you don't.

We will step right into it. And it's But we're going to do it in a way we'll be proud of. That doesn't mean we're going to win the argument with everybody and we're going to get some negative news stories. We're going to take some arrows. Yeah, I've certainly gotten used to it. I do have to remind myself when we have new employees and you get a negative news story and your stock drops 30%, I have to remind myself to have empathy. Hey, some of our employees, this is their first rodeo. Yeah. Okay, everybody, don't freak out. Like, we feel confident. I mean, John Oliver, who I'm a fan of, did a 30-minute show on us.

You guys got it.

He spanked us pretty hard. Uh, I actually— we— I started my own podcast, uh, to tell sort of the stories of Axon, and we did, uh, we did two sessions.

Can we get into this for a second?

Yeah, sure.

Okay, I want— I want— I really want to get into the drones and where, you know, I'm super into technology in the future, and so I want to get— I'm good. Look, we're gonna do the mean part of the podcast.

Let's do it for a second, and then we'll get there.

So John Oliver, yeah, he spent 30 minutes going at you guys. I would say he raises this question of, um, are the tasers really harming people? Are the police using them, um, excessively? It was interesting, he didn't get into like the body cam, the rest of your business at all. It was very taser-focused. Um, he gave you a very hard time on that stuff. Um, so, and then And then I, I didn't watch the whole thing straight through. Unless I'm wrong, you guys didn't really get to reply in, in the show, or did you guys send a statement or— We sent a short statement. Okay. So what would be— okay, so just for people who haven't seen it, he gives you a really hard time. I mean, he's basically— tasers are potentially— at the very end, in 30 seconds, he's like, he's like, oh, this is a useful tool, but we need to be much more cautious about how we use it. Much, much more cautious about how we use it. Although in the previous 29 minutes and 30 seconds, he made it out to seem like you guys are just incarnate evil. What— give me like your— what were the one or two things that bugged you the most?

All right, so first thing I would tell you is I have a podcast called the Boldly Go podcast, and we're not even focused on viewership. It's just to tell our stories. And I have 6 hours of podcast time dedicated to medical safety and 3 hours or John Oliver. So it takes a lot to go deep. What I would tell you is it's, it's very one-sided in a misleading way. Like he talks about people who've died in custody. There was an interview I did with Wyatt Andrews on CBS News in 2004, and I did like a 4-hour interview. And what I learned is don't do long interviews with the news because they'll take the snippet that's unfriendly. And we actually— that's why we didn't give— we could— his staff, we knew it was a hit piece. We're like, look, if we give you 60 pages, you're going to pick the least flattering stuff. So we're going to give you a short statement and then we'll now just respond on our own. And so one of the samples I got from this interview from 20 years ago, somebody died up in Colorado. And I said— they said, oh, Rick, you're saying he would have died anyways? And I said, yes, I'm saying he would have died anyways. And when they edited it, I looked like a jerk. I didn't like myself.

Yeah, I remember this part. Yeah.

But let me give you the background. The guy who died, I think his name was Glen Leyva. He had more than 10 times the accepted lethal dose of cocaine in his bloodstream. The medical examiner did not attribute any causality to the taser and said this was multiples of the lethal levels. And the death happened sometime well after the application of the taser. So if when, when, when people say that the taser weapon killed somebody, the immediate thing is, oh, it electrocuted them, it stopped their heart. That's a very well-understood phenomenon. If electricity stops your heart, it's immediate. You are unconscious in less than 5 to 10 seconds. That clearly didn't happen here. Now, I've since learned— I'm not my earlier, more pugnacious self— it came off wrong. But the fact of things still is true. The taser— there's no evidence that the taser weapon killed him in this case. And we have a very glaringly obvious case. It was a cocaine overdose. And I could go through all of the different scenarios. The other cases he mentioned there, we were sued in them and we won in court.

What about—

so the courts agreed with us.

What's that? What's that condition he kept citing? It was two words.

It's excited delirium.

Excited delirium. And so, you know, he pulls up these clips where again and again and again, this is cited. As the cause of death in a, in a taser. And it— yeah, I mean, it paints a decently compelling— if you watch his thing, it's like, oh, well, they're, they're falling back on this one term every time.

Yeah. Well, let me— so excited delirium is a name for a condition that you would never take yourself to the hospital for. So, yes, it is not recognized as like a normal medical condition, but it describes a condition where somebody is out of control, overexerting themselves, having experienced some sort of psychotic break. And this happens. It actually goes— but there have been multiple names for it over time. It was called Bell's Mania back in the 1800s, where they had people in asylums that would exert themselves to death. All right. Now, it sounds a little strange, but let me explain the core phenomenon. If you and I get in a wrestling match or even watch a professional boxer after the first minute or two, They're slowing down. They— we get fatigued. I can't keep going. So what's happening inside your physiology is your brain is monitoring your blood chemistry. It's like, whoa, it's getting acidic. You're building up lactic acid and carbon dioxide. That manifests as exhaustion, and we slow down and we feel like we just can't go on. That fatigue is saving your life, because if you keep exerting yourself, your blood pH starts at 7.4. As it becomes acidic, it starts to drop and it's a logarithmic scale. Once you go below 7, it's quite dangerous. If you get down to 6.8, you will go into cardiac arrest and you will die with near certainty. Like, this is— there's nothing controversial about this last part I told you. Metabolic acidosis is well understood and it is irreversible. So another thing that's important, if electricity— if you shock somebody's heart into fibrillation, you can shock them right back out. And we know because doctors do it hundreds of thousands of times a year. When they do a pacemaker, they shock your heart to stop it. They do a little procedure, they shock it back. But these— if your blood chemistry drops below 6.8, or I'm saying it like it's very precise, there's some shades of gray in there. You cannot shock somebody back because the shock doesn't change their blood chemistry. And so how you get there, and this has been the subject of many of the lawsuits that we're in, And when you hear about these people in excited delirium, the, the concept is these people are in a very agitated state and they are exerting themselves beyond their body's capacity. And you want, you want to get them under control. And in fact, there's some medical centers, they actually don't even like to be drawn into this because of the controversy. Doctors have been threatened to be fired over this issue because it's so— especially post-George Floyd, it was so controversial. But you got to do something with these people. And some of the best protocols say get them under control quickly. And frankly, the taser is the best way to do that. Sedate them, usually with ketamine, and then actually administer a buffer into their bloodstream, which will bring the pH back up. Uh, agencies that do that have a higher survival rate. However, just an example of how the sensationalism can be counterproductive. There was a newspaper that ran an exposé on a police department and a medical center that were doing this. And the headline was, this local medical center is using a date rape drug on Black people when— so that the police can knock them out and arrest them. I mean, I'm paraphrasing. Yeah, but it drew the— it brought in the racial element and it called it a date rape drug. Like, ketamine is actually— it is chosen for this purpose because it actually has a high safety index, meaning the ratio where it becomes lethal to effective is high. You can inject it intramuscularly. You can't go intravenous on somebody who's fighting with you. So there's actually a lot of good science for doing it. But, but yes, some people also use ketamine as a date rape drug. So anyways, it is complicated, complicated. But there's a downside to this sort of the simplistic, well, excited delirium is just a cover-up. It protects the police.

He, he seemed to be— I don't even know suggesting is the right word— that it was this catch-all, that when something went wrong, then you guys would reach out to the police department and with your PR team and say, tell them it's excited delirium.

We did far more than that. We actually— it's included— it was included in our training and we supported a group called the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths that would train officers in this phenomenon as well. So it wasn't just like we would tell them at the end when we're training to use a taser, look out for these symptoms. And if you see these symptoms, you should be very concerned that this is a person who's at high risk of death. And we would give them safety procedures like call for medical, avoid using any force if you can, because even though they appear very violent, these people are fragile and you want medical there. So if you get them under control, you want them in medical care fast, frankly. And look, sometimes you have to come train police for their own self-preservation. You don't want the— if this person is at high risk of dying, you don't want that happening in your patrol car. You want to hand them off to medical as fast as possible. It's best for them and it protects you. Now, because of all, you know, California, he uses an example that California has banned the term excited delirium. Well, great. That's actually not very productive. In fact, it's counterproductive because now we are forbidden from training officers to recognize excited delirium. We cannot use the term in police training. It's now illegal. This is one of those things where it sounds great at first blush, but like banning the words doesn't make the problem go away. We have a meth epidemic. You still have people who have these issues and now police can't talk about it in their training. And guess who was behind the bill in California? The plaintiff's attorneys.

Okay, sure.

Yeah. Like the— it was a family of somebody who died in police custody. And look, I'm a father. I get it. Like those people are in a lot of pain. So I'm not blaming them, but I would say the attorneys can be pretty brutal that come after police departments. And we were winning. We've won. We've been sued like 400 times. We've won all but 1 or 2 cases. And yes, excited delirium was a part because that's part of the story. And when you present it to juries and I can show you cases where no taser was used and somebody died and a case where the taser was used and you'd be, wow, the symptom pattern is very similar. And so I think this is where we can have a fair debate. People who disagree with me say, yes, police may overuse the term, sure. But when you make the term go away, now you're ignoring something that is a real problem, because what the other side is saying, that every time somebody dies in police custody, it's the cop's fault. Yeah, that's equally, or I would say even more egregious. So again, there's a lot of complexity behind this. Police deal with incredible complexity, and they deal with all these medical situations. And with the explosion of designer drugs— are not made by like Calvin Klein, they're— they're— people are making toxic, dangerous stuff and taking it, and it's dangerous. So I'll end with this one simple analogy. Last year, probably a million people died after being transported in an ambulance. Of course, we don't blame the ambulance ride. It is coincident. That was part of the therapy. Now, people may say this is a little outrageous, but I would say the taser, if you're dealing with somebody who's violent and has to be contained, we are part of the therapy protocol because step one, you have to get them under control and restrained. And we're the best way of doing that. But it's not risk-free. So anyways, we can go on for hours.

No, no, no. Again, and but my sense is he— this bugs you, though, a bit, right?

Yeah. It's like it's like Uh, taser technology is my baby.

Yeah.

And when people say it's a murderer, I get emotional.

Yeah.

No, it's not. Especially when I— you know, and look, we accept it, it has killed people. But let's— those cases, what's amazing, we don't get sued. When somebody has fallen or ignited in flames, their families are just as sad. It's still as big a human tragedy. Those don't make the newspaper though, because it doesn't have this controversy element. It's easily understood. Yep, the fall caused a fatal wound. It's this middle ground case where it's very murky and unclear, where controversy swirls. And that's the one where all the debate lies.

I mean, like you, I enjoy John Oliver. I mean, he did— he did go out. He goes, I, I don't know enough about any of this to be super effective. I did find one— the one frustrating thing to me on that episode was it really was 29 minutes and 30 seconds. And then in that last bit, he did say like, well, we— the tasers are, you know, this is a useful technology, but he hadn't really spent much time on that. All right.

Look, I try to be open-minded. Yeah. A lot of the show was funny. Look, he's a funny guy. I still enjoy his show and I actually aspire to be like— I don't want to be the guy who tunes him out.

Yeah.

Because he made fun of me. I look at this as, you know what, I work on these controversial things. He brought up legitimate positions. Yeah, I disagree with them. And he's a funny guy. So, but I don't want to, like, go into this world where, you know, okay, you disagree with me. I'm going to just tune you out. I still watch your show.

All right. I'm going to ask you one more nasty question.

All right, let's go.

All right. The— he brought this up. I remember this Reuters story from 2023. So you have— you have a founding story where you— you talk about a couple of friends who were killed in high school. And then— and this helped spark your interest in getting into this field. Reuters and John Oliver was essentially rehashing what this Reuters story had brought up, was they went back to members of these kids' family and they said, well, we don't know, we don't know Rick, and, and, um, or we didn't know Rick, our kids didn't know Rick, and, and he, he didn't go to high school at the same time as these kids. There's no way this could have been like the this founding origin story. I remember reading the Reuters piece and I went back and checked last night. I mean, you guys gave a short statement in that, um, John Oliver didn't let you respond or it wasn't in your statement. So I, I don't know what the answer— I, I actually don't know what your take is on this. I mean, you— and I apologize if you've answered this before, I didn't see it.

Don't apologize. Look, if you offend me, you win a stuffed animal. It's the business I'm in. Okay, so this is one— I'm just going to tell you the story. And it's— so I moved to Arizona in 1986. My name is Patrick. In high school, I went by Pat Smith. Now, when I moved in '86, I played football. So I started in the summer football program. Todd Bogers and Corey Holmes were two of the seniors who had just graduated. So, yes, it's true. We were not in school together. However, they were— they went to the local community college and they were very ingrained. These were like this, you know, the guys who just graduated, like the Horace Priest football team. And Todd played the same position I did. He was the nose guard. So he was like the last guy before me. And so I would see him. They would still come to some of the high school parties. I would— I met them. I never would have had occasion to meet their parents. We weren't— like super close, but they were, you know, kind of like, okay, those are the seniors, two guys, two years ahead. And then it was a few years later, they were shot and killed. And I don't think I've ever held this out as a deep personal tragedy, and I apologize to the family if it ever came across that way. But when they were shot and killed, it was, it was impactful. Everybody was talking about it. Hey, these— everybody knew Cory and Todd. They got shot and killed. This happened in the in the parking lot of the Hyatt Regency Golf Resort, like where I went for prom. So this is like in my neighborhood. This isn't in some faraway crime-ridden city. This is Scottsdale. And it wasn't like in that moment per se, but a couple of years later, I'm in grad school, I'm in Belgium, and I'm talking to Europeans who are saying things like, I'd never go to America because of all the gun violence. Like, hey, you know, it's not what you see on TV. I'm— I love America and Arizona. You should come to my hometown. And one of them asked me, do you know anybody who's been shot and killed? Well, shit, I do. In fact, by the time I add it up, I know about 4 or 5 people. And so when I've described it, I said, you know, I had friends in high school who were shot and killed. If I could wind it back, I guess I should have babysat acquaintances. Like, we can debate. I've never said they were my best friends. I still think, like, acquaintance is disrespectful in its own way. And so that's the backstory. And yes, their parents don't know me. It adds more confusion that I switched to Rick later in life. My grandma— that's a really weird story, but my grandmother had a stroke and she lost her speech and the only thing she could say was Ricky. Okay, so Ricky and home were her two words. So yeah, she would say sentences would be like, Ricky, Ricky, Ricky, home, Ricky, home. Well, when I was very young, I was Ricky. And then my brother used to call me Rick the Dick in elementary school. Seriously. And I was traumatic. He was older than me. And so I switched to Pat so he couldn't do that. And later, you know, I got out of college and the business was failing. I was going through a crisis of identity personally. I felt like I was 2 years into this business. I was feeling like a real loser. I didn't have any friends. I was working all the time. My grandmother has a stroke. She's calling me Ricky. And so I like literally went through this thing. Okay, I've got to reinvent myself. I've got to like, uh, so it was over the holidays, uh, I, I, that, that year I was like, okay, I'm going back to Rick, the name I had as a kid.

So anyways, way too, way more detail than you need, but, but in the story you've just told, you know, John Oliver did rehash this thing, and when I was digging around last night, I mean, I haven't seen what you just told me. Have you said that before? Have you put that?

I, I did put it into, uh, my Boldly Go podcast, which has a very low viewership. It's again targeted very specifically. People want to go deep on our company.

I think this may be the first place we get broad, you know, okay, because people really were whacking you as like, oh, the guy made up his origin story. And, and yeah, I think I may have covered it on Reddit or something.

Okay. The one thing, like, I hate to say it like this, but one thing we've learned is when you know there's a hit piece coming.

Yeah.

The best, like the more you give them, the more it gets edited. And so we, you know, you give, we want to control what you're going to say. So we're going to give you enough that you can't choose from an encyclopedia of stuff. And so that was one again, and think how long it took me to explain that. Like it feels like a lot of time.

I understand. I just felt, I actually, I was just curious.

Well, and look, I feel like a jerk. Like I don't know their parents. Like I think as a parent, I can imagine like, especially because the way it gets built up. Could be weird. I could be really unlikable if they think I'm outstanding.

Well, they're probably like, oh, there's some billionaire guy running around saying this stuff. But I pictured in my head that like you, um, that on that friends point, I mean, it's like anybody would say that, right? I mean, I mean, some kids from your school have this traumatic thing. It's like, like, like exactly like you said, you're not going to be like my acquaintances. I mean, it's like, oh, these kids that I, that I knew, um, this thing happened. And then I could totally picture your It's like the early days of your company. You're trying to describe why you got into this thing. And then, you know what I mean?

It's, it's, it's, it's, uh, yeah, life's complicated. Yeah. And, um, the whole point is actually the opposite. It's not that it was a deeply personal tragedy that's unique to me. It's more like, wow, this gun violence is a big thing. Like it affects all of us. Yeah. Like everybody, I bet, you know, people who've been shot and killed.

I, uh, I, I do. And then I've had a gun pulled on me. I mean, I wasn't shot and killed, but I, I've had a gun pulled on me. I've, I've actually, I actually, I was arrested one time in my youth when I was, uh, 17 or 18, I think 17. We were drinking beers in a park and this was in Houston. I ended up going to Harris County Jail, which is no joke. It's like, It's probably one of the biggest. It's all walks of life.

Yeah.

It's inside of there. And, uh, the cops were trying to teach us a lesson. They were, um, they were, they, they really were interested that we were all going to college and, and they didn't seem to like that. They just kept reminding us like, call this college boy and all this stuff. And, and I had long hair.

This was pre-body cameras.

Well, so this is, this is why I have respect for what you guys do. I, I had long hair. There were 11 of us, but the 2 longhairs and our Black friend, we went on a special adventure inside of Harris County Jail, part of which included— I got sort of thrown in the public intoxication tank, which was amazing. And then they would bring you out to get fingerprinted on this digital fingerprint machine. And while I was standing there, they brought in this African-American guy that they had kind of like I guess like hogtied with handcuffs. He had his hands and his feet were handcuffed and his hands were behind him and they sort of carried him in. You know, he was horizontal and they like plopped him about as far away as you and I are. And I was already, you know, this was already a lot for me. I wasn't really a bad kid or anything. I was way in over my head at this point. And now I'm just freaking out. And the cops, I'm not joking. I mean, it was the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. They started hit— he was passed out and they're like, Don't make us take you back to the hospital. Wake up. And they kept hitting him with their billy clubs. They kind of got around him. Yeah. And they were keeping track of points of how high his limbs were raising up off the ground when they hit him. And they just kept yelling at him like, don't make us bring you back to the hospital. As if like hitting him was going to help. And then, then this guy in the drunk tank was like, leave him alone. And then they all turned and went to that guy. When I went back to see that guy, He was on the ground with blood coming out of his mouth. All his teeth were on the floor thing.

Anyways, what year was this approximately?

This was like '96. And then when I went to my hearing, so this is the part where the body cam thing comes in. Look, we were privileged kids. Most of us were like the children of lawyers. So we said nothing to the cops the whole time this was going on. And when I got into the court proceedings, there were these massive statements of like everything we had said, like conversations that had never happened. It was like, yes, officer, I am your dope boy. And like, you know, like all these, these things. And I was like, man, this is crazy. I actually, I was very naive and I assumed like, God, I hope this is not normal. Maybe it is. But I was like, wow, I did not— I didn't know you could just like make things. You just legit just, just make up this whole thing. It was wild. The whole experience was wild to me. And I was like, somebody should be keeping an eye on some of this stuff.

Life is complicated. Like that can be true. And at the same point, cops can deal with all sorts of horror shows out in the real world and, you know, do difficult things. And like, and unfortunately I think people tend to polarize into these like simplistic worldviews that cops are heroes and never do anything wrong. And if you, you know, if you obey the law, then whatever happens to you is your business. Of course, on the other side, like, all cops are bad.

100%. 100%. Um, I have a big picture question. So you guys have done all this technology. I mean, you've been on this quest to, to lessen gun violence. Obviously, you know, you've been at this for 25, 30 years. It's like, we're not doing great as a country writ large. I mean, you guys are doing your part, but— and I know at one point you were looking at some technology to stop shootings at schools that ended up being a little controversial. You were talking about like an automated kind of drone taser system that would spot these people coming in. But like, my big question to you is, yeah, we're clearly not in a better place with all this stuff. You guys have invented these tools to help along the way. But yeah, so how does that make you— how do you assess all this and like, have you fulfilled your goal? And is there still— is there anything that can be done?

Oh, man. No, we have not fulfilled our goal. And I've used this. This was the core theme when I went to our board and our engineers. I'm like, guys, we are failing. The job is not to sell more tasers. The job is to cut gun violence. And we have anecdotes. We have lots of— I can show you tons of incidents where a taser was used in a situation that could have lended in lethal force, but the numbers keep creeping up. And so I use this moonshot analogy, you know, we're saying, look, we need— let's set a specific goal and let's use that to drive our behavior. And part of it was also to help us deal with some of the critics because we knew, look, if we launch a 10-shot capable TASER weapon, there are going to be critics that will say, well, if cops are abusive with a 1-shot, you give them 10-shot. Okay, so we need to frame the why. And the why is when you mess with the taser weapon, you get a clothing disconnect or the wire breaks, you have— you're out of— you're done. You have to escalate. And I mean, some of the critics, the most valid critique that just hits me in the gut is when people say tasers are ineffective or unreliable. Yeah, we are not there. We're— we've done as good as we can.

Yeah.

The new ones are stretching upward. This new clothing penetrating dart, I think this next year we will finally be getting to a position where it's like, okay, we finally got this dialed in and we're setting up programs to measure it. Agencies like, okay, we're now going to measure the before and after. Do shootings actually go down? And our goal is to prove that in the next 2 to 3 years. We'll be at year 5 of our moonshot at that point. That gives us 5 more years to scale it. So we're really serious. Like, we think we can do this. Yeah, this is the first year. Gunshot. Gun fatalities between police and the public are down slightly from last year. It's early to say we're having any influence, but we have sold about 200,000 of these new TASER 10s. We have lots of anecdotes where they've saved a life. So, you know, give me another 6 years. I don't feel like we've— we're not done for sure. We haven't delivered on our core promise.

Because your goal, you've said, I mean, it would be to also have the US police not have guns, maybe, right?

Well, no, no, no. I have to be very careful about this. Yeah. Um, we stay outta the whole gun debate. Um, cops in the US, as long as the public has a lot of guns, which they will, it's in our Constitution, police are gonna need guns. But until now, what happens right now when a police officer is going through the door and they don't know what's on the other side, the thing in their hand is a gun. I wanna change that, and I've gotta earn the right to say, you know what, having a gun in your hand, bad things can happen. When you open the door, you have enough to make a life or death decision. Literally in less than a second sometimes. And I don't know if you saw that incident in Columbus, Ohio a couple years ago. White cop going through the door, canine is barking like crazy. They told him there's nobody in the house, so somebody's lying to him. There's somebody in there. He opens the door, there's a fast movement, boom, he shoots and kills him. It's a young Black man who's in bed. The thing in his hand was a vape pen. Exploded. And right, this, the community was outraged and rightfully so. Now, I think it's unfair to say that cop was a racist. He didn't have time to be a racist. That he had a gun in his hand. He had his training that says, hey, if something's moving, it's dangerous, you fire. You can't take that back. So I want to get to a point where we've earned the right where officers are like, you know what, I'm learning that my TASER 10 is so effective, or TASER 11 in a few years, is so effective. I'm going to have that in my hand. I still have my gun if I need it, but until I know it's a lethal force situation, That's how we're going to get— and I think we can get to, uh, well, with a highly effective taser weapon that's handheld, we can get to about 40% of police shootings are, are possible. We can get up to 75% if we had a drone with a taser on it. And yes, that was controversial. We got spanked badly in the public media. I think it's because we tied it to school shootings and there's a lot of emotion around that. And look, for me, it was emotional. I have twins that are the age of all those kids in Uvalde. And I believe rather than waiting 90 minutes for the police to show— and look, the police mishandled that badly. But even waiting 10 minutes for the SWAT team to show up, we should have taser-capable drones we can send in because the way we stop a person with a gun today is the same way we did in the Wild West. The sheriff shows up with a gun and you have a gunfight. Yeah, that's the world we live in. That shouldn't happen. We should send in a drone or a robot with a less lethal weapon. And now it's safer for the kids. Like, when you come in guns a-blazing, you miss. People get hit by accident. The officers are at risk. They make bad decisions because when your life is at risk, your higher-order thinking is offline. You can't— you can't use your higher reasoning. The fight or flight means your vision is narrowed.

But these would be like indoor drones? Uh, these would be indoor or outdoor, and they would be So if it's outdoor, well, I could see where a police first was— they could see and send something from the police department. But you're kind of talking about like drones installed at the school, right?

Or long— I would say in the near term. Yeah, that's probably a bridge too far. In the near term, it would be with the SWAT teams or pre-installed, but always human controlled. Yeah. And so I'll actually give you this. We are working on the taser-capable drone. I walked back that we're going to do it for schools. Now, I've met with many schools since then to understand the problem. But here's the paradigm I'm using. When you look at what people said, what they were— when they were— there was a lot of negativity about the taser-capable drone. They said, number one, cops are going to abuse it. They're going to use it on protesters. Number two is that the Terminator scenario is going to happen. These things will like go around tasing people. Yeah.

Okay.

By the way, these are solvable problems. And so the paradigm in my head is I want to design this thing with such good product safety design that I can go sell it to the San Francisco PD who will not buy our existing handheld taser weapons. Okay, so if I, if you're a cop and I give you a gun or I give you a taser weapon or a baton, I can tell you what your policy is, but I actually can't stop you from doing something terrible. With a drone. I actually met with the military, uh, the guys who ran the drone program, and I said, hey, I have this thesis that drone operators make more thoughtful, better decisions than guys that are in foxholes getting shot at. And he said, hey Rick, that's a really interesting, uh, observation, but you're actually thinking this the wrong way because in the military drone operators don't make the decisions. They're part of a team, and there's a lawyer who understands the laws of war, there's a commander, in some cases there's the President of the United States in the Situation Room. And I think that's a great analogy. So if we gave taser drones to the San Francisco PD— and I know their concerns are going to be, what about abuse? Great. You can assign a human rights officer or multiple of them, and anytime that drone is activated, they're watching.

Yeah.

And it cannot fire until the human rights officer or one of them has given the approval. It is a connected piece of technology. The operator will make better decisions. They have— many times they say police have an excuse. Oh, I was afraid for my life. Many times they were. Maybe sometimes they weren't. Here we know that drone operator is not afraid for their life. They're safe. So we break that psychology. We can institute institutional multi-party decision-making. And we know we'll always have a video because you have a camera to operate the darn thing. So I actually think this will be the least abusable weapon in the history of policing technology when we finally launch it. And it will not only— it will not be able to autonomously fire at people. You have to have a credentialed operator and they— we know who the operator is. Like, I could take your gun, go shoot somebody. We don't have a record of that. To use the Taser drone, you'll have to be an operator who is credentialed by a law enforcement agency, has been given authorization, and will have different levels of authorization. Like they may say, okay, Ashlee Vance, you're a highly trained SWAT guy. You have authority to fire all on your own. Rick Smith, you're a patrol guy. Eh, you have to wait till the human rights officer slides it to green. So I'm really excited about this. I think the last thing I would say is gun violence is also a social epidemic. And in particular, these mass shootings, people that go into a school to do a mass shooting have no delusions they're coming out alive. They have this sick, twisted fantasy they're going to go down in a gun battle like they've seen in a video game or in a movie with the police. They want a gunfight. I want to take that away from them. No, no, you show up and you go into the city hall with a gun, they're going to deploy a drone or a robot very quickly. You never get your gunfight. We don't have the risk of additional bullets going downrange. You're incapacitated, you're arrested, you don't make the news, your manifesto isn't read worldwide, right? We need to break that And I think we just got to get out of the business that gunfights are how we deal with gun violence.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Last question then. Just along these lines, I mean, you acquired a drone company to get in some of these businesses.

Yes.

Okay. And then what you just talked about again is in the—

actually, I'm going to cut you off.

Okay.

I bought that drone company to make the Taser drone.

Okay.

Because drone companies were terrified of the controversy. And my core belief is if we do this right, this will be transformative. We will break the back of the gun violence cycle and we will save lives and we will do it the right way. And I'm going to buy a drone company so we can make this happen.

And then, and then I was wondering, I mean, then I saw, you know, so there's that, that quest and then there's the work that you guys do with police departments. Then I saw some stuff about Ukraine and then in where you guys were going with the drones. I mean, are you, are you looking to compete? Are your drones just meant to be focused on these jobs so close to your current business, or are you guys trying to, you know, America has a huge drone problem right now. And so I'm always— I've been following Anduril, I've followed all the US drone makers. I didn't see them, the young ones, get wiped out by, by China. Anyway, so I'm very curious if— how ambitious you guys are.

So I, I just got back from Kyiv. I was over there, um, I wanted to learn about what's happening. They are a customer, they're using our stuff to defend their, their cities and their, their people from drones. Right now our drone business does counter-drone detection and jamming.

Yeah, you guys have some cool stuff, man. Yeah, like weird bots. Yeah.

So we can, we can detect drones, we can jam them. So we protected the Super Bowl, we protect the World Cup. It's a company we acquired called Dedrone.

Okay.

Does this. We're doing a lot of soul searching right now about, okay, in the drone wars, The new drones are going to be unjamable. The fiber optic drones, they fire with a fiber optic cable, can't jam it, or AI. So we are going to get into kinetic solutions. I've actually been personally in the lab designing projectiles that are designed to fire into the props of drones and take them down. Those will also be non-lethal. However, we're also in— and again, I share way too much. I'm actually having conversations with my board and my employees right now about this topic where, hey, If we want to sell to the military, if we take a position that like, if you buy our drones, you cannot ever use it on a lethal mission, they have told us, then we will not buy your drones. We're like, that's our— they view their mission is to kill people. Just to put it very bluntly, I want to engage because I think we can bend the arc of their thinking where it's like, look, we will never go build drones for the purpose of like just killing people. There's lots of people doing that, including Anduril. And by the way, Thank goodness for Anduril and America because war is back. In my 2019 book, I started by saying, I think we're at the end of war. Hey, I don't get it all right. I was dead wrong. And thank goodness we have this new breed of tech company. And to the degree we need high lethality, we have them. Where I think we can make a difference is we will build— like, part of the reason we're designing this drone with this system for firing projectiles We can go full autonomous AI. We don't need human approval because if we accidentally shoot somebody with it, no big deal. You just got hit in the face with a web. Like, okay, it's like Spider-Man, take it off, throw it away. Um, and but now, like, I was in Kyiv when they sent hundreds of drones into town and the area tower's going off. We want to help in that case as well. Now there we probably need to build something that's a little bit more kinetic, and we have not yet decided Actually, in a few weeks after my board meeting, we'll come back. But I stood in front of the company 6 months ago and I started this conversation. I said, look, I want to hear your feedback. How do you guys feel about this? I feel like if we engage, the world will be better than if we don't engage. But we're dealing— so as of today, we certainly won't make lethal weapons and we have avoided doing things where our weapons could be used for lethal purpose. But we're struggling, you know, with what's happening—

to figure out the future. And where do you make them?

So we have a global supply chain. We make all the TASER weapons right here in Scottsdale, Arizona today, although we're getting ready to spin up given the world tariff situation. And frankly, a lot of our European customers are feeling uneasy about relying entirely on a US supply chain. So we're starting to spin up in the EU. We'll have a new manufacturing. Our drones are currently made in Europe. Our drone team is in Belgium. We acquired, a D-drone. We make that in Germany.

Oh, wow.

We have a vision team in Finland. Yeah, sometimes I have to pinch myself. I'm like sitting atop this big organization with offices in London and, you know, like 12 different cities worldwide. Yeah, yeah.

And okay. All right. Well, fascinating. I mean, I going into this knew you guys as the taser and the body cam company. And then when I was on the website and I got into the drone stuff, I would urge people to go to the Axon website and have a peek around. You guys have some cool, cool ideas. And, and, um, you know, I think this was technology that I didn't realize. I don't know how to phrase this. I don't know if it felt the, by the, the taser stuff, I guess in my head, you know, it just felt like, oh, this is kind of a solved problem. I didn't know how far that was going. The body cam stuff, um, I assumed would be kind of cool just because of where we're heading with computer vision all the time and, and how good cameras are getting. But then I really had no idea of the breadth of products you guys make. And then clearly there's, there's these future avenues for where you're, you're heading. So yeah, it was, it was, uh, it was really eye-opening.

Well, we have one major area of controversy, so let's open it up. Yeah, let's get it. Surveillance. So we run a million body cameras. We also have a company we acquired called Fusys that allows you to take any camera from a school or business and share it to the police. Now look, most schools will tell you, I don't want the police watching my kids all day. Well, great, the police don't have time to watch it either. But if there's an active shooter, you want them to be able to see your cameras and they want to see your cameras. And so we've built a system that, that allows anybody who has cameras to integrate back to police. In fact, we earlier this year announced a partnership with Ring, the doorbell—

yeah, yeah—

company, uh, where homeowners can choose— they can't share real-time video, but if there's like a carjacking or something terrible in your neighborhood, the police— you can opt in to say, hey, the police can send out and say, hey, does anybody have video that might help with our investigation? So the reason I'm bringing this up is there's a lot of concern about surveillance, and people tend to have these very polarized positions. My view is this: we can't go back to 1950. There's cameras everywhere. I don't think we need to say, well, then let's just become China and we're going to track everybody everywhere they go. So I think this— we'd love this sort of thing and it's going to be controversial and I'm going to be hit in, you know, name your tech magazine is going to have negative hit pieces on us as we extend what they're going to call a surveillance network. And what I would say is like, I think we can all agree, like if somebody collapses on the ground in front of a camera or there's a violent attack happening in front of a camera or there's a car crash in front of a camera, we can come up with a bunch of things we all agree on. They're like, you know what? We want that camera to notify the police and open a livestream of video or the fire department. I was, I was talking with Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring, just recently, and he was like, you know what? We at Ring had hundreds of thousands of cameras. We had all the data. We could have been sharing it with police and fire and done a much better job of helping them track those fires early on. Yeah, that kind of data sharing is not yet possible. We are collaborating with Ring and others to begin to make that possible. And our guiding principle is we want to help identify bad situations, people that need help, the things we can all agree should be shared. There's a set of things we all would agree we don't want shared, like what, what bar you go to, what political rally you go to, what medical facility you go to, you know, who's in your car in the middle of the day when you go past a red light, like what? Great. Yeah, we don't need to get in people's private lives. And then there's going to be some murky stuff in the middle. We're going to have to like do some real careful thinking about those edge cases. But that's the kind of thing that excites me. It's like, wow, this is a fun, interesting project. Somebody has to solve this. We can't sit here where the Palisades burned down because those camera feeds were just locked away in an unusable state. Anyway, that will be the next big controversy is as we aggregate all these cameras together, we want to do it in a way that supports democracy. And Western— well, I don't like the idea of Western values. I would actually say civilizational values, because I think this whole West versus East thing is bullshit. Like, like Japan is probably the world's leading democratic— but they're not Western, they're Eastern. I view what's happening right now is there's a war between sort of civilization and brutality. What's happening in Russia and what's happening in the Middle East. And when we think about preserving democracy and advancing civilization, like, I want to build the world of Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek.

Do you say which way you lean politically?

Yeah, I do. I'm actually really transparent. Uh, in presidential elections, my voting record is exactly 50-50. Well, it's actually 40-40, uh, 45-45, 10 roughly. I voted independent twice, uh, and then I'm equally split. So I am the ultimate swing voter, and I am deeply disturbed by the level of hyper-partisanship and the lack of productive debate. I think, you know, with democracy, you need to have— you need to be able to disagree agreeably. And I don't like all the polarization. So I'm a flaming moderate.

Which years did you choose to go independent?

That I'm not going to answer. That gets into a little too much detail.

But, you know, on the camera stuff, one of them was Ross Perot.

I'll share that.

I had a feeling. I was going to guess, but I never know how I feel on the camera part of the stuff. I always feel Sort of seems inevitable. And for all the reasons that you outlined, you want this data. I like to think like the Americans would handle this maybe better than the Europeans. Some of the stuff that goes on in England freaks me out with all the CCTVs and everything. And then, you know, I guess Peter Thiel used to always make this argument to me about Palantir, you know, because Palantir was scaring everybody. And he's like, well, look, you know, you, You want the data and then you just want to put really great controls around it so it's not getting abused. He's like, you know, this is going to happen and it's better for you to have some record of who's accessing what and to have these, to have controls around who can get to what instead of the system today where it's just a free-for-all and, and people in the own government are looking at stuff, you know? So I mean, this is kind of the argument of like, okay, we have the data, but like, let's set up a nice structure. Around it for the, for the cameras and everything.

So, but look, I don't know, it's hard stuff. Yeah, it's like, and you're never going to be able to make everybody happy. You know, I, in this case, as we look at it, we, we generally don't take this position. I'm not saying that Peter Thiel— I agree with all the stuff you just said there. There are some folks that might say, well, somebody's going to do it, might as well be us. We tend to take the position of like, look, if we're going to do it, it should only be because we think we will do it in a way that's different in a positive way. If it's like we're not going to go do stuff like, hey, somebody's going to make a buck doing this, might as well be us. Yeah, you know, life's too short for that.

All right. Well, Rick Smith, thank you so much for coming in. I want to talk to you ever since Glenn told me I should. And it was great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Yeah, it's been a great interview. Thank you.

All right. Thanks, man. The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thanks as always to Brex and A1 Ventures for making this possible. Please visit our Substack, YouTube, and podcast channels to get more of what Core Memory makes. Thanks, y'all.