Stopping Police Shootings with Revolutionary Tech w/ Rick Smith | EP #43

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So at Axon, our moonshot is to cut gun related deaths between police and the public by 50% by 2032.

So gun deaths are currently growing at 3% annually. 72% of police related shootings could be avoided using non lethal tasers and drone technology. The injury rate of a Taser 10 is lower than collegiate volleyball.

Yeah. So every other weapon in history has been about causing injury to someone. Whether it's a stick or your fist or a bullet or spear. We could envision, as Gene Roddenberry did, a world where we might have things that are even more effective at stopping someone immediately and yet without having this horrific side effect that it leaves a dead body when you're.

Hi everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. We're about to dive into a conversation with a dear friend, a brilliant entrepreneur and CEO, Rick Smith. He's the CEO of Axon and his moonshot is to reduce gun deaths between police and the public, and public and the police by 50%. In the next 10 years, you're going to hear the story of a true entrepreneur who after seven years was on the verge of bankruptcy and kept going and today has built a company worth some $16 billion. Rick Smith is a technologist and someone who's combining all of the exponential technologies. He's the author of a book called End of Killing. Come and hear about his moonshot that will save lives around the world and his moonshot to transform how we deal with gun violence, how we get rid of it. For me, this is a massive moonshot worth pursuing and keeping track of. All right, let's jump into this episode with Rick Smith, CEO and founder of Axon. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with a dear friend and someone who's got an extraordinary moonshot. A moonshot I am excited to not only tell you about, but to see it happen. It's something that's going to save lives and change culture and it's just the right thing to do. It was a conversation we had years ago at an XPRIZE event and Rick has taken up the mantle. I'm here with none other than Rick Smith, founder and CEO of Axon, the creator of the Taser. Rick, I love seeing you in your spaceship, buddy.

Hey, you gotta kinda live the moment, you know, in our offices as well, we really lean into the science fiction vibe. So anywhere you go to one of our offices, you might think you're in a spaceship.

Yeah, well, and the stuff that you're doing, you know, I've got behind me here a Star Trek phaser. Not quite a Taser, but when I think about what you're building. One of the things I loved about the Star Trek universe in its abundance, vision and model was you didn't have these devices that killed people instantly. You had these that you could set to stun. If you didn't know how dangerous the other person was, you could just stun them. And let's begin with pal, just to share with the audience here, what is your moonshot? And then we're going to talk about how you're doing it, the amazing progress you've made. So let's kick it off. What is Axon's moonshot?

So at Axon, our moonshot is to cut gun related deaths between police and the public by 50% by 10 years from now, by 2032.

So cutting the public killed by policemen and policemen killed by public by, by 50%.

Cut it cut in half.

And what, what's the absolute number right now? What, how many people die in, in gun related incidents between the public and, and police?

It's a little over 1100 right now. And every year the number is going up slightly, typically about 3% per year that it's rising. So we have to reverse a rising trend and then cut it pretty dramatically if we're going to hit this.

And you think you can actually make that happen? I mean, why do you think you can make that happen?

Well, if you kind of go back to first principles thinking it's always helpful in just about any problem you're going after. You mentioned earlier in Star Trek you could use the phaser if you didn't know if someone was dangerous or not. But actually turns out in policing it doesn't really matter whether you're dangerous or not per se, no matter what. When they are using lethal force, it is never for the purpose of killing someone. So police use lethal force not for its lethality but for its reliability. And this has been a really interesting concept to tease out with people over the past decade as we've really dug in, that the fact a gun kills somebody is actually A huge negative. It's something we just accept as this terrible side effect if you want a highly effective weapon. And it's so ingrained in our culture, this idea that killing someone and stopping them reliably, it's so intertwined, it takes people a moment, and you've got to kind of walk them through it. No, no, no. We could envision, as Gene Roddenberry did, a world where we might have things that are even more effective at stopping someone immediately, and yet without having this horrific side effect that it leaves a dead body when you're done.

So let's begin with. I mean, people have heard about a taser. Some people may have a taser. But I want to go back to your story. I want to come back to this moonshot of how you're doing it. And I've seen the technology, and it is just one step removed from a phaser, as I think about it. I mean, some of the coolest tech that I've seen. But I want to go back to how you became the CEO and founder of Axon and took over this amazing technology. Do you mind sharing that founding story with us?

Sure. So we wind the clock back to 30 years ago. It's our 30th anniversary this year. I was in graduate school in Belgium, and I had two friends that were shot and killed in a road rage incident at a golf resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, and living overseas. I was having conversations with all these Europeans who just frankly, had a pretty dim view of America. Many of them said I would never go there. It's too violent. From everything I see on the news. And when I mentioned to them, oh, it's not exactly like that, there's many great things to love about the U.S. one of them asked me if I knew anyone who'd been shot and killed. And that really drove the point home. I am a bit of a science fiction geek. I also studied neurobiology in college. I originally wanted to work on Luke Skywalker's robotic limb. I thought the idea of the human machine interface, this idea that the human nervous system might control machinery that augments us, would be a really cool thing to work on. Then in graduate school, Corey and Todd got shot and killed. And I had this epiphany. Well, wait a minute. I could reverse the sequence. What if I could build a machine that could control the human body effectively? I'd heard of the Taser weapon. Actually, Taser is a brand name. It's a very powerful one. But it was created by a NASA scientist named Jack Cover, who In the early 1960s, he was one of the leaders of the Apollo Project. He left in the mid-1960s when President Lyndon Johnson created a call for the nation to develop non lethal weapons so that we would never have to have the National Guard open fire on protesters on American universities again. But like many technologies, the early Taser weapons of the 70s and 80s were buggy and not very reliable. And so in 93 I literally dialed 411 to get this guy's phone number to discover whatever happened to his invention. And at 23 years old, I showed up on his doorstep. And so we kind of an odd couple at 73 and 23, we started in his garage and I convinced him to give it one more shot and kind of teach me the ropes of how these things worked. And here we are now, 30 years later, where the technology. We still have a lot of work to do, but at least it's become pretty widely accepted. Almost every police department in the western world is carrying Taser weapons.

I've got a few of the data points here that I looked up for our show and, and the numbers are fascinating. Right? So gun deaths are currently growing at 3% annually, which is pretty powerful. 72% of police related shootings could be avoided using non lethal Tasers and drone technology. And I love this one. The injury rate of a Taser 10 is lower than collegiate volleyball.

Yeah, yeah. That's when I actually have to be pretty careful with. Because some people will say we're being, you know, we're, we're downplaying the risks too much, we're not taking it seriously. But that is statistically true. The injury rate in the field being hit by a police officer is three injuries out of every 1,000 uses. And the NCAA stats for injuries requiring medical care for collegiate volleyball is higher. I believe it's four or five injuries per thousand human exposures to a collegiate volleyball practice.

So you partner with this, the inventor, and you start developing the Taser. I mean, it's an overnight success after 30 years of hard work.

Oh yeah, it was. Well, our first product failed. So Jack had failed twice in the 70s, the 80s, so two companies have gone bankrupt. We started. Our first product was actually focused on the consumer market and it failed. Then we did a second product in desperation, a car security product that in retrospect was a terrible idea, that one failed. And it was our third, our third product of this third company in the generation or in the lineage that finally got it right. And that's when we pivoted and we went into Policing. And we had to fix the underlying science. If I were to encapsulate what was wrong with the early Taser weapons is they were engineered to assumptions about how much electricity it would take. And we went and we did the hard science of, okay, let's measure doses of electricity into mammalian muscle tissue using pigs to measure exactly the right waveform and intensity it would take to paralyze muscle tissue temporarily.

And when was this? This is how many years after you guys got together?

That would have been in late 1996, that we did the first pig experiment.

So you're sitting there literally with a taser or some version of it, or just sticking electrodes into the. Into the pig and trying to shoot enough amperage into it?

Yeah, well, early on. So what happened when we first launched our consumer Taser, we started having failures where in demos where people could fight through it. And I had one catastrophe in Prague in the Czech Republic, where I went to demo to their national police force, and we had seven volunteers in a row. Nobody even fell down. They all fought through it. And we realized, my gosh, this thing isn't doing what it's supposed to. And so when we designed that first pig experiment, I actually remember it well, the total cost was $2,500. One pig, one test session. And we happened to find a professor at University of Nebraska who, by luck, also was a pig farmer and had been one of the guys who researched, published some research in this space. And then we went, we built a test rig. I mean, this is like pretty standard science, right? We built a test rig where we could add one, two, three, or four capacitors. One, two, three, or four sets of batteries. And then we could ramp up or down the intensity using some pretty gross system adjustments. And just doing that experiment and then observing the muscle contractions of that pig, we were able to very quickly identify what we needed to change. And then from that came the first of now over 100 patents that have given us a huge IP portfolio.

Everybody, it's Peter. I take a break from our episode to talk about a health product that I love. It was a few years ago. I went looking for the best nutritional green drink on the market. So I went to Whole Foods and I started looking around. I found three shelves filled with options. I looked at the labels, and they really didn't wow me. So I picked the top three that I thought looked decent, brought them home, tried them, and they sucked. First of all, they tasted awful. And then second, nutritional facts actually weren't very impressive. It was then That I found a product called AG1 by Athletic Greens. And without any question, Athletic Greens is, is the best on the market by a huge margin. First of all, it actually tastes amazing. And second, if you look at the ingredients, 75 high quality ingredients that deliver nutrient dense antioxidants, multivitamins, pre and probiotics, immune support, adaptogens. I personally utilize AG1 literally every day. I travel with an individual packet in my backpack, sometimes in my back pocket and I count on it for, you know, gut health, immunity, energy digestion, neural support and really healthy aging. So if you want to take ownership of your health, today is a good day to start. Athletic Greens is giving you a free one year supply of vitamin D and five of these tribal packs with your first purchase. So go to athleticgreens.com moonshots that's athleticgreens.com moonshots check it out. You'll thank me without question. This is the best green drink product, the most nutritious, the most flavorful I found. All right, let's go back to the episode. You know one of the things that I love doing is inspiring entrepreneurs take moonshots. I think it's one of the most important things. And, and moonshots are hard. And we're going to come back to, you know, the challenges you've had to, to take on with your moonshot here on cutting gun related violence by 50% in police public interactions and you've been a member of the Abundance 360 community for some time now. And one of the things I talk about is that moonshots need to come from an emotional energy or MTPs have to come from an emotional energy someplace that even when you hit wall after wall after wall, you don't give up, you keep going. And was it your friends deaths or was it just the taste of what was possible? What gave you that emotional energy to go. Because it wasn't easy in the first decade.

No. And I actually share that a lot. When people are considering entrepreneurship I will tell them it is far more important to work on something you're passionate about than something where you think you're going to make a lot of money. When you're passionate about something, you're just going to be better at it. You're going to care more. The people around you are going to care more. Like I would never have stuck with this for those first seven years. I mean we literally wiped out my parents who were my dad was financially backing the company. We took him to the brink of financial insolvency. We wouldn't have done that if it was just a business to go make money. But it was a problem we were all very passionate about. And the more we dug in, the more passionate we became about it. And I think that's what hopefully ultimately leads to really valuable businesses is not when you focus on making money, but you focus on solving some problem that you are deeply passionate about. And you know, those are the problems that if you're passionate, chances are other people are gonna find it a valuable problem if you solve it. And from there comes the source of all value. Yeah.

Again, I want everybody to hear this. You know, literally seven years to hit almost rock bottom. Right. I'm gonna be spending some time with Elon. Same thing with him, Right. He was, was on the brink of bankruptcy seven years after starting SpaceX. Maybe there's something to that seven year mark back when in 2008 for him. And then finally, because you haven't given up. And now if I might ask, Axon, which owns Taser and all this technology is a public company. How big is the company today?

So we're about 3,000 people now and our market cap as of today is right around 16 billion, which is just unfathomable from two guys in a garage 30 years ago.

So this is, you know, people hear about all these successes and they think about, oh, how easy it was. Yeah. After being on the verge of bankruptcy over and over again and 30 years of hard work. Yeah, you can build a $16 billion company. So what kept you going? Was it just the. That was it. I mean some people keep going because they've in invested so much time and money. Some people keep going because they can see what's just on the other side of this. What was that energy that kept you going here?

So I would say most of the energy during those first seven years just came from just the passionate belief that, you know, we can do better than blowing holes in people with a bullet. It's a crazy thing to me that that is the state of the art and technology, I mean bullets are almost a thousand year old technology. And every other industry has changed so much. So part of it was the passion and kind of the theory that you know, we just had this belief we could do better. But then candidly, also part of it was that because my family, my dad was funding it, when we got to late 99, I did not think we were going to make it. In my heart I couldn't recommend he put any more money in. And when I told him to stop, he said, well you're a little late, son, because I'm down to my last $500,000. And I signed a guarantee at Silicon Valley bank for a million, a $1.7 million loan. So if this goes under, I'm toast. And I had friends who were working at Yahoo and AOL. I mean this is the Internet craze of 99. So personally I was exhausted and I thought, oh man, I'd love to just go, you know, working in office in Bay Area with beanbag chairs where everybody's getting rich. But no, I'm slogging it out. But at that point, I couldn't let him get wiped out there.

Is that right? When you are the entrepreneur, when you're running the moonshot and you're taking people's money because they're investing in you. At the end of the day they're investing in the idea, but they're ultimately investing in you, there is an incredible sense of responsibility.

Yeah, and I'd say that's the mission plus that people responsibility. I mean we learned this from people going to the military. When you are part of a team, your commitment to your teammates and to the people around you will motivate people to give their own lives to protect them. That's like the ultimate sacrifice. And I think that's the dynamic. And it has to be authentic though too. As an entrepreneur, you see a lot of companies that try to, to wrap frankly kind of a BS mission into around something where it just doesn't fit. It's like, oh, you're trying too hard. You know, I think it's, you need to start mission first and really. Okay, does this make sense? Is it authentic? You know, is this going to be the thing that motivates us? Because that authenticity is I think what grabs people by the heart.

Take me to that turning point. What was the turning point for the company? Was it tech related decisions related business?

So for us, I had just had several catastrophic demonstrations, like I mentioned the one in Prague. And we considered shutting the company down. But I remembered, look, scientifically you can contract the dead frogs, frog legs of electricity. And in fact the early taser inventor built a buffalo gun, literally a large unit that was used to drop buffalo. We knew it could be done. I just realized that they had never done the science work. Early on they read a bunch of underwriter lab studies on electrical safety and then made some assumptions and engineered to it. For us it was that moment when we did that pig study and we could see the early Taser had almost no muscular effect. The pig was anesthetized by the way, it felt no pain. And when we hit it with the early generation of Taser, it would just quiver a little bit. When we ramped up the output, you would see these massive contractions. We then got our first human volunteer. I called the toughest guy I'd ever met, a former head of hand to hand combat for the Marine Corps, challenged him to rematch. When I shot him with an early Taser weapon, he stood there and had a conversation with me. He didn't even flinch. And so I figured if we could drop this guy, we're in business. And we did. I flew him out to Arizona. We dropped him. He looks at me and he says, well, now that I know what's coming, I can beat it. Let's give me a second chance. And on the second, he went down just as fast. And then he pops up and he says. He starts to give me this very spiritual talk about what it's like to kill people. Look, I've been in Special Forces. I've done it. I train people to kill with their bare hands. That means I've used these techniques myself, and I see their faces in my dreams. And. And he goes on to tell me, you know, I can't even give it justice. Just this very deep understanding about how transformative this would be if we could create something that stops people reliably without killing them. So he came on as our chief instructor. And then from there, it was a. It was one year of grueling. That's when I went to my dad, who basically said, hey, I'm. I'm putting it all on black because it's the house's money. Anyways, he put his 500 in. He convinced our other investor, guy named Bruce Culver, to match. So we had $1 million to get this tech to market. And to do that, we had to survive for a year. All the expenses and payroll we had to pay for tooling, initial inventory. We had nothing left for the launch. So when we launched, it was Hans Marrero, this Marine in a Winnebago going cross country, doing demos at police departments. And the weapon was so effective, he would come in with $100 bill, and he'd say, okay, who's the toughest guy in the department? If you can come get the 100 bucks, it's yours. And then we just saw the back then the fax machine lighting up with orders as he was going across the country. So it was really getting the product right, and then just a lot of legwork of demos.

So we're seeing all the classic elements here of getting the tech working and getting the product market fit correct. In this case, it was police departments. You had tried going direct to consumer, and did you make the flip at that point to law enforcement?

Yeah. So when we were in the consumer space and consumers now, we launched with the Sharper Image catalog, if you remember them.

I remember it. I had zero G flights in the Sharper Image catalog.

Yeah. Which maybe wasn't perfect for credibility. What we learned from consumers is they said, I don't know, this seems like a gadget. You're in the Sharper Image, and if this thing is so effective, why aren't the cops using it? And so we pivoted into policing largely to prove the technology worked. And our belief was once we proved that it worked in policing, then consumers would follow suit. And there's actually some great case studies. The Glock handgun, the Maglite flashlight did similar things where consumers would then buy what the pros are using now. Since then, we found a great market in policing. And our current moonshot is to cut gun deaths in policing. But our mars shot that comes after this is to cut gun deaths in the general public. But first we've got to win in policing. And once people see that the real Eureka moment is when a cop will choose our weapon over a gun, not because they're willing to put their own life at risk to try to save somebody else, but because, in fact, our technology works better. It turns out, you know, when you shoot somebody, it is a gruesome thing you're doing to their body, but it's not always immediately effective. It can take minutes to hours for somebody to die from a bullet wound unless you happen to hit them in the upper central nervous system, the brain or the brain stem. So once we get there, and that's what we'll do by the end of this decade, then watch us. We're going to pivot and then go into the consumer space. And I think for most consumers as well, hey, if you don't have to take a decision to take somebody's life in that moment when you want to stop a threat, that is just a huge advantage morally and legally. And from a liability perspective.

And I love what you said, when you can choose this because it's better, it's like choosing an electric car because it's faster, higher performance, cheaper to operate, and good for the environment.

As one would say, hey, I use that analogy all the time. The brilliance. You know, when electric cars were like shitty little golf carts, nobody was going to use Them, Right. We're not going to solve the climate crisis by taking away something people love. And people love their guns. In our R and D labs, we are working on next generation taser weapons that it would be more fun to own than a gun, more practical to use, more integrated tech for gaming and oh, by the way, more effective when you go to defend yourself with it and you don't have the liability of having to kill someone or God forbid, one of your kids getting a hold of it or you know, a suicidal loved one or all that.

Yeah, it's, it's accidental deaths at home. That is for me the biggest selling point. I mean, you had to overcome policemen saying I need to be able to defend myself. And, and you know, but the challenge is, and you've taught me this, right? When, when a law enforcement officer makes a decision to use their weapon, they're not aiming to maim somebody, they're taking aim to end that life. Right? And so you don't have an option, you don't have phaser on stun option. And I'm sure the psychological impact to individuals who have taken lives is significant.

Oh, absolutely. There's a high suicide rate among cops who've killed in line of duty. Many of them end up leaving, you know, the career or look, if you make a mistake, we can all criticize, you know, these officers. Like, I don't know if you remember, there was a, an officer in Columbus, Ohio last year who shot and killed a man who was in bed. Turns out the guy who was in bed had a vape pen, not a gun. But if you go back and look at from the moment that officer opened the door until the shooting happened, it was less than a second. And so, you know, while we all can look at, well, man, what a terrible outcome. We all know what happens to the human brain when you're afraid and you're surging with adrenaline and your cognitive functions are not fully there. You're fighting your own fight or flight response. That's where I think we'll be able to make the biggest difference, where it's like, you know, what if, God forbid, you made a mistake, you can take it back.

So let's go back to the moment of your moonshot we've talked about when the. Did you. Let me back up a second. Did you have what we now in our parlance call a massive transformative purpose back when you started this company and I want to transition to the moon, to the moment where you came up with this moonshot.

It was less well developed. I Mean, I think our idea has always been to create an alternative to firearms for self defense. And I think we went after the consumer market first and then we learned, oh, we got a lot of work to do. And even as we sit here today, the, the Taser, even as it's used by police, they actually don't use it to defend themselves. They will use a taser weapon to capture somebody who's exhibiting signs of resistance. But if an officer is actually defending themselves from an attack, they'll typically go to their gun. That is the Rubicon that we believe we are in the process of crossing right now with our new Taser 10, which is a massively multi shot, 10 shot magazine reloading system. And so it's taken us 30 years to get to this point where we're about at parity. And over the next few years we need to sort of leapfrog over the effectiveness of the gun.

So where were you when you came up with this moonshot idea? And saying that's, you know, and a moonshot, you know, is a very clear objective goal within a certain time frame that you know when you hit it and the world knows when you hit it. And your moonshot, as you've described it, you know, cutting gun related deaths in police and public activities in 10 years, very clear. It's a beautiful moonshot. I love it.

Well, I would tell you it actually is a result, direct result, Peter, of attending Avenus360 and working with you. So we had a general concept of what we wanted to do. And then over time, you know, when I would go to your conference or other tech conferences, right, you take inspiration about what's possible and in particular the work you've done around the ran moonshots and the specificity, you know, it forced another level of thinking. So I would say the first thing that happened around 2018 or so, I began using an internal moonshot with our engineers and our team internally, where I started saying, look, our moonshot is to outperform the pistol, not to sell the next generation taser. We don't want to get stuck in this incrementalist loop where the, you know, the iPhone 14 is a little better than the iPhone 13. We have got. We're not competing with ourselves, we've got to stretch and take some risk. And then really that became to then externalize. Okay, how are we going to measure that when we outperform the gun? Like what's the measurable goal? And then what's something that's very internally focused I can use to push My engineers. But is there something that's more inclusive that we could use to create a kind of an industry partnership with our customers? And that's where we shifted to this results orientation of, okay, if we're really meeting this performance level, we should begin to see shootings come down. And then you start digging in. Okay, let's go, let's go. Read 500 Use of Force incidents and categorize which of those we think we could have intervened in. And that's where we get to between 40 and 70%. To get to 70%, we need drones and robotics in addition to handheld weapons. But it was that process of just trying to keep crystallizing it down. And then part of it too was we originally were going to talk about just cutting police shootings in half, but then we had discussions with police unions and others who would say, hey, wait a minute, I'm worried you're going to encourage cops to put their lives at risk. So if you cut police shootings but you get a lot more cops killed, that's not success. That's where we then broaden it to say, okay, we're going to add up the sum total of everybody who gets shot and killed in policing incidents, including the cops. And that's when we hit this resonance where we had police unions and civil rights advocates all agreeing, hey, this is a good goal that's kind of inclusive of all stakeholders.

And it is for those who have ever used a Taser or who owns own guns. Let's take, let's jump in the technology. Because the Taser 10 is a state of the art, a unique piece of tech. I had a chance to actually try it out and use it at your recent summit. And it's amazing. And with little to no training, was able to hit my targets and felt good about it. So dive in, describe this device to us. Describe what it looks like, how it works, get people excited about the alternative.

Yeah. So first, let's go back to the first principle. What we need to do. The goal of this device is to temporarily impair your nervous system. So every other weapon in history has been about causing injury to someone. Whether it's with a stick or your fist or a bullet or a spear, you're physically damaging their body to stop them. And typically that means either you've stopped them because you've broken such big bones they can't continue or cause so much pain, or ultimately they've just died.

The difference here is they bled to death.

Yeah. So the difference here is we're going after your command and control system. So the human body uses these networks of nerves. They're all electrically connected, and those electric signals control muscle movement. And so we design a system to tap into that. And to do it, we basically have to get two electrodes connected to your body spread about 12 inches apart. The reason we need that spread is that the size of the electric field we create in your body is sort of a square function of the distance. Think of it like the area of the circle. If you were to put these two probes kind of on the perimeter of a circle and that surface area picks up more nerve tissue. And once we get a critical mass of that, you get this electric storm going through your body. The muscles are locking up and that means you can't use them in that case. Now, to do that. So we've got to get two darts onto the target with a fine filament that comes back the wires back to a handheld unit. And we then transfer power through that circuit. The new Taser 10. What's big and different is we've gone from two shots up to 10. And so now you've got 10 total darts, each with its own wire attached. And then we've got a bunch of intelligence inside the weapon, so you don't have to think about it. It will select which darts are furthest apart in three dimensional space, and it will deliver electric charge across those longest connections. But if anyone's ever fired a gun, it's actually very similar. We've copied a lot of the user interface because firearms are shaped the way they are for very good reasons. Over hundreds of years, we've really refined what fits in the human hand in a way that's very intuitive to operate. And so we've got a safety, you operate with your thumb, a trigger you operate with your trigger finger. We make them bright yellow so you won't confuse it with a gun. But then you just have to point and basically pick two locations. Get two darts on target. And again, if they're 12 inches apart or more, we got you.

There's a laser sighting. And how far does the electric wire reel out?

It'll go out to 45ft.

What's interesting for me was once you've hit the target, and if the target is partially disabled, the person you're aiming at, you can send another bolt of current down the wires.

Right.

You can hit them without. Without actually having to fire again. You can, you can charge. You can send a charge down the wires again.

Yep. You can re energize by just tapping.

The safety switch and that. That feels like the ability to make sure that you're able to have control of the situation and be safe.

Yeah, long term. You know, I mentioned. So 45ft is as far as you can go with the handheld device. And we think that's approaching a limit. We might be able to get to 50 or 60ft, but beyond that, by the way, a lot of people also say, oh, when are you going to get rid of the wires? For a bunch of technical reasons. I mean, the wireless transmission of energy over long distances is a very hard physics problem. So there's not a really clear answer, but the wires work great. When we want to go beyond 40 or 50ft, the best way to do it is actually just have a small power supply, take the whole Taser system, and then mount it on a small drone. And now we can go not only 100ft, I can go a mile. And in fact, I can begin to remove the human operator from harm's way. So over the next 10 years, we'll start to see. My personal belief is we need to change the way we think about violence. Violence is just bad. We shouldn't celebrate it. We still sort of think of this like today. The technology in the world is if a gunman shows up somewhere, inserts a mass shooter event, the only way we stop them is we send in more people with more guns and they have a gunfight. I think we need to get out of this mindset that it's not like this medieval battle between good and evil. It's like people that are committing violence are doing a bad thing. And if we could get to a point where we have technology that can safely come in and subdue them without requiring our sons and daughters in uniform, another person put themselves at risk. I think we get to have a fundamental shift in how we think about this to where violence is just less interesting even for people to think about doing it in the first place.

You know, another part, we talk a lot about Exponential technologies on this program. And one of the areas that I used before going up and using the Taser 10 was I trained in VR. How much is VR playing a world? And are you bringing Architect augmented reality into the. Into the Axon world as well?

Yeah. So we are very focused on VR right now. And part of the reason is if I take a step back, police are very comfortable with their guns, and they have a very intimate relationship with their guns. And part of that's because the risk of the job. Right. And this is the ultimate thing that stands between me and potential death. I Have to be very familiar with it. But there's also very practical basis. They train with their guns a lot and it's fun. Like you'll go to the range with your buddy and you'll compete in terms of speed and score. So up until now, training with a taser has frankly been kind of boring. They're about $30 a shot, so they're very expensive to train with. And so you can't go get that volume. Well, in VR suddenly now we can train endlessly with unlimited numbers of shots. And, and we can use visual feedback mechanisms. So like when I tell you you need a 12 inch spread if you're firing at a target other than the instructor telling you, oh yeah, yeah, you need your darts. For their part. In VR, we can animate that so if you get the two darts too close together, you see this wimpy little effect that obviously doesn't happen in the real world. But in video games we're used to these sort of visual feedback and makes it very intuitive as you start to realize, okay, I now kind of understand on an intuitive level how far apart I've got to get my darts to get that big glowing effect that really incapacitates the target. So VR just gives us a creative canvas to be able to do superhuman levels of training with feedback mechanisms that are impossible in the real world. And we think that is going to be a big part where we need to get officers as comfortable using their taser as they are with their gun and build all the right skills through high repetition.

How many times you've been shot?

Eight.

Eight times by this. Does it get any easier?

No. No. It is one of my least favorite parts of the job. It's a very odd sensation. It's frankly a little more scary than painful just because you lose control of parts of your body are seizing up and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Yeah. I tried to volunteer once at Singularity University to take it, but you said no, probably smart. Did people tell you were crazy to go after this moonshot?

Oh, man, yeah, Yeah. I actually recently found a video from a couple of my friends who came out in the spring of 1994. We were first starting the company mercilessly making fun of me for this whole idea. They thought this was crazy. The moonshot, you know, in its current iteration, as we've, as we've crystallized it down, we actually haven't had too much skepticism there because we've, you know, we've already built a lot of credibility with the taser. But I would say the early Taser. Everybody thought I'd lost my mind.

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Oh, man, we tried. So my dad made his money out in Silicon valley in the 80s, and so he had raised money from venture capitalists, so he was pretty well connected. But nobody but my dad's friend Bruce Culver and my father, they were the only two people who Put money into this. The first outside dollar we raised was in the ipo. Wow. We got no's from every vc. We talked to private investment banks, we talked to probably, I'd say all told, maybe three to 500 people we pitched over the first seven years.

And nothing sounds like a familiar story. And I think it's really important for folks to, for entrepreneurs to hear that because a lot of folks get demoralized when they can't raise capital from the outside world. And if you believe in yourself enough and you believe in your technology enough and you're willing to go and go and go, it's a digital outcome and sometimes you don't win. But you knew in your heart that there was a there there.

Yes, we did. I mean, look, there were dark days. There was about a year where I had lost hope, but was still struggling through. But you're absolutely right. Like raising money is so disheartening because you assume that these people are smarter than you. Right. They're managing money. They've seen all these investments and, and you know, we batted zero and it still worked out for us, you know, so sometimes you just gotta have faith.

Amazing. Other lessons. What about, you know, your partners and finding your, you know, those individuals that stuck with you? Any lessons around that?

You know, one thing I would say that if I could go back to my myself 30 years ago and give one piece of advice, it would really be focus rigorously on attracting the best people you can. And what I mean by the best people, smart, independent thinking. Early on, I'd say I was a bit too egotistical. I kind of felt like, well, you know, I'm the company founder, I've got to solve all the interesting problems. I just need to hire people who will do the work. And I was a chronic micromanager. I got really burned out, you know, even after we finally made it successful. And it wasn't until about probably 15, 16 years in, somebody had me watch that famous Netflix talk on, you know, we're building a pro sports team, not a family about how to think about. Because I always thought of hiring as like, oh God, it's something I've just got to do, you know, I hate doing it. It's like an administrative task. I want to go solve interesting technical problems. But then when we really made a hard pivot to really focusing on not just hiring nice people, but really kick ass, you know, people that are legitimately smarter than you at the thing you're hiring them for. And everybody says that, but a lot of people don't believe it. That was pretty transformative to where now the company scales and we hire slow and we fire fast. If we find people who are not a cultural fit, we move them out quickly and spend a lot of time trying to get the team right. Because if you get the team right, everything else takes care of itself.

Yeah, I just want to put an exclamation point on the fire fast. You're a super nice guy and I've known you for a while now and I think probably want people to do well and there's a desire to help someone see what they're doing wrong or to help coach them. But my experience is if it's not a fit and in the back of your mind, if you're starting to think this person isn't working out and isn't likely to succeed, some of the kindest thing you can do is move them out to where they can find something that works for them. It's really hard. Any more thoughts on that?

No, I couldn't agree more. Now, to be honest, I do struggle with this today. So actually today we're at a scale where I'm not very involved in hiring. They use me as a cheerleader. I've learned I'm a better cheerleader than a head coach. I get people excited about the mission. I struggle giving people hard feedback, but I've learned at least I'm self aware. And I've got a chief operating officer who's really good. He's a fantastic, you know, head coach and a hard, you know. Yeah, it's kind of a hard ass. And you mean that. And it actually works well for the company that we've separated those functions. It gives a little bit of a separation, you know, for me and my sort of brand within the company from, you know, the negative, inevitable negative feedback that does need to happen. But I would just, I would say in my entire career, I've never regretted firing somebody too fast. Yes. I would say many times you regret waiting too long. Never regretted doing it too fast. And every one of those people's landed on their feet. The thing that used to kill me was I don't like that feeling of, oh, this guy's got kids and a family and you know, I'm going to ruin her life if we fire. Like that's not true. Everybody ends up landing on their feet somewhere else. And they're usually happier.

They know it and you know it and they're wondering when it's going to happen and it starts to degrade rapidly. Pal. What other lessons as an extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur. Would you put out there when you were looking for this moonshot of reducing it by 50%, did you have other moonshots in mind or did that one sort of just feel right in the sweet spot?

This one? I mean, tuning the numbers, you know, it was a process. But the cutting gun related deaths was a very natural extension of what we've always been doing. So for us, it's been, I think, just sort of taking what's fuzzy and just adding focus and clarity and continuing to add more focus and clarity to our mission.

So let's take, let's, let's head towards Mars or perhaps out of the solar system. Where is this technology going eventually? I mean, what do you, what do you dream about? What's sort of like the crazy ideas that you have for, for Exxon, beyond the Taser 10?

Yeah. So I wrote a book in 2019 called the End of Killing, and it basically is this. It's a manifesto that says, look, we should not accept that killing people is okay. Now that's not to say you're never going to get a sicko or a serial killer, but the government should not be killing its people. Now, we have to today because we don't have Captain Kirk's phaser. We have this technology limitation. But to me, that is an animating concept that. Look, before this craziness that's happening in Ukraine right now, I thought we were at the end of industrialized warfare. Now the optimist in me hopes that maybe that's true. If this ends very badly for Mr. Putin and sends a very strong message that this is not a successful strategy to engage in war as a war of choice. But I've been a little bit shaken there, but I would even say even there, if we thought about things a little bit differently, we could have built today, we could have had a technology if we'd invested in it five or six years ago where we could have shipped Ukraine containers of drones when the Russians came across the border, you could have released those drones fully autonomous. Now, by the way, there's a big ethical debate about autonomous lethal systems. And I agree we shouldn't build robots that can kill people, but we could have built drones that could recognize tanks, artillery pieces, trucks, and with fairly basic machine vision processing, would fly up autonomously. You'd send them into area coverage and then if it's a tank, they take out the turret, they drop a thermite package on the barrel, take out the treads or the engines and avoid the human compartments. And imagine if we could have ended this and had 150,000 Russians walking home because we destroyed their equipment. But again, it's sort of not how we think. We tend to think of oh no, wars are like about killing people. No, they're not. They're about how do you degrade the enemy's capability to do what they want to do. So you know, I'm interested in, we're starting to approach more aggressively the military about what sorts of non killing technologies would augment. And I don't think we can ever turn our military into, you know, flower children that don't have lethal capability. But I think the most effective military is one that can overmatch your adversaries. So well, you don't even have to kill them if you can just wipe out their capabilities and do it in the most moral high ground way, which is not killing a bunch of 18 to 25 year old kids.

Yeah, kids is the right descriptor for someone in the military at age 18, 19, 20.

Well, I think about all those. I mean they're doing some awful things but I find it's more helpful not to vilify individuals but try to understand like how systems get you there. Like how do you end up with 150,000 of these young Russian kids doing the awful things they're doing in Ukraine? Most of them didn't end up wanting to be there. And the experience of what Putin's doing to his own people I think is every bit as horrific as what he's doing to the Ukrainians. And so I find that just as a helpful way to get out of this mindset of like, oh, there's some people that just need killing. I think humanity can kind of rise above that level of thinking over.

It's almost like again the Star Trek universe having deflector shields to keep you safe. Let's go back to the home here because unfortunately gun violence in the home and accidental deaths in the home is significant. I don't have the numbers offhand. I don't know if you do, but it's extraordinarily sad. I mean, what's your message for parents at home right now?

Well, I would say stay tuned, we're very focused. We do have consumer taser products and they're a good choice for many people today. But in another five to 10 years I think we'll have some amazing products. Let me, let me take you where I think the end state is and I'll start with a story. My wife called me, she was at a, I was at a board Meeting out of town and my, my phone lights up and she sends me a text message. There's somebody in the house. So oh my God. So I step out and I call my wife and I said, hey, have you called 91 1? She says, no, no, no, I've got the taser. I'm going downstairs, I'm sweeping. No, no, no baby, like stop call 91 1. And so imagining this. So today, if you want to protect yourself or your family or loved one, most people would buy a gun or they might buy a taser. But what if. So in that moment, my wife had to become like a hero, right? Operating the weapon system operator to protect the family in the house. What if instead she could hit a button, a panic button, and five micro drones are released around the house and over the air, you know, maybe through your alexa system. Hello, Mrs. Smith, this is Captain, Captain Johnson, retired US Air Force. I've got a drone in front of each of the kids bedrooms. I've got one sweeping the property outside. I'm on the police dispatch, they're on the way. Think like a personal concierge with a professional weapon system operator. Well now I would have more confidence. Okay. My wife's not gonna have to try to figure this out while she's freaking out and afraid. But more importantly, if I have a suicidal teenager who gets a whole breaks into the box and gets the drone or a curious child. You go down the list of all the parade of horribles that can happen when you do put a weapon in your house. None of those things could happen now. There's new risks like you want to make sure you can't have bad actors who could hack into that system. So you're gonna want to have very tight system control. So there's some local physicality that has to happen that's got the right levels of controls. But I think that's where we end up in another 10 or 20 years where it's not even a human that is protecting you. We've just. If we do our job right, we make violence boring. It's no longer worthy of a movie plot because when violent things happen, it's so overwhelmingly bad and suppressed quickly that it's just not that interesting anymore.

And then the other pandemic we're having is that of school violence. Right? I mean, it's insane. What we've seen in the last few years, what's your vision for that? I mean that was a subject we were talking about at xprize at a visioneering years ago, is how do you protect Our schools, our places of worship, without making them lockdown zones.

Well, that's one where. So last summer I actually did a public announcement on doing a school safety Taser drone. And look, it got a ton of negative blowback in the Twitter sphere. And most importantly, why is that? It was very emotional. And I think what it was, the. The real criticism was largely from people who don't trust police. And the theme of the feedback was, cops are just going to use this on protesters, and it wouldn't be used to protect children. Now, I don't believe that to be true, and I actually believe you could build the right systems of controls to reduce the abuse of things. But that was. We had not done our homework. That was just an idea I wanted to put out. Because, look, like you, like all of us, I get tired of Sandy Hook and then Marjorie, whatever, the high school in Florida, it keeps happening long term. I think there will be a technology element. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to work, but at a minimum, we need to give the police better tools to be able to go in rapidly, I think, you know, without sending cops bristling with lethal weapons into the building. To have to bring somebody down.

I mean, for me, it seems like the Taser and its offshoots are the logical extrapolation. Is there another kind of technology that goes beyond that besides just electrical current and the. And hitting your command and control?

Yeah. So if you want to bring somebody under control without causing injury or death, you. I think you fundamentally have to go after command and control or physical restraint. So we either have to build like a robot that can run up and sort of physically restrain you pretty quickly or take down command and control. And to do command and control, there's two ways you can do it, electrically or chemically. Chemical inhibition is hard. You can do it with inhalants. Nerve gas is one, for example. But it becomes where it goes. Yeah. Or the Russians tried the. Remember back the theater attack many years ago. They used an inhalant that was an anesthetic, but the dose control was difficult. Like, a lot of people died of overdoses, et cetera. So I'm a pretty big fan of electricity is the primary immediate impact, but you could have a layer defense as well, where you might hit somebody with electricity, put them down, and then dose them with, you know, with a tranquilizer.

So. Interesting, right? Because the tranquilizers take time and you don't know what the dose is, depending on the person's weight and frankly, what they're jacked up on in terms of drugs. But if you can immobilize them with electricity and then dose them. So it's a long term. When you get hit by a Taser and it literally knocks you off your feet, how long are you out for typically or how long are you disabled for?

So the effect is kind of like a light switch. So, like right now I'm contracting the muscle in my forearm. When I stop, it's back to normal. So while the Taser current is flowing, you're having these severe contractions until the moment it stops. And so this is actually a public misconception because a lot of times you'll hear, you know, people say, oh, the police used a Taser four times on somebody. And the implication is that it was excessive or egregious. Well, in most of those cases, the Taser runs for five seconds every time it's discharged. That's a very short window to get handcuffs on somebody. Now, many people will comply after they've been hit. Okay, I don't want any more of that. But especially if you have somebody who's high on PCP or methamphetamines, the ones that really put you into a psychotic rage, those folks do not react to the pain. And those are the ones who typically might take 3, 4, 5, 5 second bursts till they can get the handcuffs on.

Amazing. So we're going to be seeing a new generation of humanoid robots. Right. We're seeing Optimus from Tesla Bot, we're seeing figure, we're seeing a number of those. Do you, I mean, a lot of the Robocop movies of the past portray robotic AI driven. And Axon is in, not just in the taser business. You also make body cameras. Can you talk a little about where the technologies are beyond just the Taser and where you think they might be going?

Yeah. So we started the body camera space largely to help reduce concern about police abuse with Tasers or with any use of force by figuring, okay, let's record what's happening. And then once we started going down the pathway of body cameras, we had to build a software business like, how do you handle all that data? That's a fairly challenging problem. So today we run one of the largest data sets in the world on Microsoft Azure, where hundreds of petabytes of police videos and we do in car cameras and we partner with a bunch of different drone providers and we're very interested in what's happening in robotics. I think there will be a big role for robotics. I also think, though, look, we're going to need some good rules of the road. Like I personally don't think we would want at least anytime soon to delegate. The decision to use force on a human should not be made by an algorithm. That should be made by a human operator who's taking legal moral responsibility for that decision. But that's fairly straightforward. Those sorts of controls, the benefits of being able to stop somebody without requiring another human being put themselves immediately at risk has a whole bunch of benefits. So I would view in another 20 to 30 years, I think the majority of the policing function will not. The most dangerous stuff is going to be robotics. We're not going to be sending, you know, people through the door with guns to deal with threats anymore.

And you know, I mean, I remember the way we got over the idea of humans being out of the loop in like the elevator or in the trolley car or other things. It was a slow and gradual process. Do you think, do you think the public's ready for robots taking action? We've seen them, we've seen all kinds of movies about this. But you're on the front line of this. I mean you get both the thank you so much for saving lives and people, I'm sure being critical. How far are we from seeing, you know, robots and drones in the public sector? The public legal sector, you think?

So interestingly, last summer after we had the whole debate about the Taser drones in schools, we went out and we started doing some public sentiment analysis. And what we found is 70% of the American public is supportive of the idea of using drones or robots to stop mass shooter events. I would be, yeah. I mean most people are much more rational. Like Twitter and, or media headlines are not geared to give you the answer of what like the rational average person thinks. They exacerbate the extreme view. And so I, you know, at any point these things, yes, they're going to be inflammatory in social media and in normal media, but I think the public overall is a pretty rational head on its shoulders. And given the epidemic of gun violence that we're still dealing with, I think people will be open to well designed, well considered and well regulated approaches. So we're personally going to be working very closely on developing the right ethics frameworks and working with the right regulatory bodies. This is a place where we will move methodically and not try to jump the gun.

And do you what's the mindset from the police force? Because you're dealing at all levels. Are they welcoming, are they excited about the next generation? I mean there's got to Be a whole slew of like the old schoolers being resistant to change. I mean, are we seeing the same sort of thing that we see normally?

I would say in general, policing is an industry that does not embrace change. It is a very traditional, you know, these organizations are typically many decades old or, you know, hundreds of years old, steeped in a lot of tradition. That said, I would tell you, the new Taser 10 we just launched, we are continually hearing the word game changer and a lot of positive feedback. I think part of that is also the feedback loop of just what's happening in the public. When I started in 1999 in policing, when we entered policing, one of the most common pushback we got back then was, look, some people just need killing.

Oh my God.

And you do not hear that anymore. Literally, that's gone. And I think part of it is what's happened with body cameras and with the whole public debate and iPhones. Right. I mean, cameras are everywhere now. We see, I think, as you've pointed out, there's, you know, the world is less violent than it has ever been in history, but we now see it all because it's recorded and it's out there.

So people are less violent when you're being observed. Right. People act differently when they're being watched, for sure, in that regard. The challenge I imagine though is a lot of the nefarious characters out there are probably using advanced technology. So it's like an unfair battle. If you've got professional criminals that are using all kinds of advanced AI and robotics at some point and the police department is dealing with old school responses, do they hear that message?

Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. Drones are a particular area. Like criminal organizations are very effectively using drones to move drugs across the border. And, you know, other areas now, you know, police will catch up over time and, you know, you've got the advantage. You've got a large community, you know, that's focused on this, on this issue. But it does take time to adapt, which is lucky for us. You know, this is what we do. I mean, my career in our organization, we've gotten pretty good at figuring out the cheat codes of how to work with police to introduce new technology in ways that you've got to prove that it's working, kind of earn your right to get, you know, to earn a place on the belt if it's something they're going to carry or in their tech stack.

Everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. You know, I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't, I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice, once a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR.VR blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmanandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. So you launched this specific moonshot how long ago?

October of last year. So what is that? About six months ago?

So you're, you have nine and a half years left to pull this off?

Yep. Yeah, We've said the goal is to, to, to hit that 50% reduction by the end of calendar year 2032. Nice.

And your confidence level is high?

I am, yeah, it is high. One of the things we're working on now, I've challenged a team and again, this was actually very helpful. From this year's abundance was breaking your moonshot down to, okay, what are your first year goals? Right. Like, how do you start to measure progress? So for us, the first year goals, I've asked the team, look, we're going to go after the smaller police departments that have the highest shooting rates on a per capita basis. And the reason we're going to go for the smaller agencies is they can move, they have faster decision making processes and they can roll out technology faster. Whereas, like an LAPD may take four or five years to roll out tech, 10, smaller agencies could do the same thing, just faster. And the goal is we're going to start measuring in that cohort starting from the date that they've completed their rollout. So they know every officer has a taser 10. They now go into the new cohort that we're going to measure against the historical cohort and that's going to be our first canary in the coal mine. Can we begin to move the needle in those agencies who deploy early, make.

It measurable and it becomes, once you've got the data, it becomes inspiration for others to follow suit.

Absolutely. Maybe shootings don't drop in those agencies. Well, we damn well want to know that. Why not? What did we get wrong? Where are our assumptions off? And obviously we're hoping it does. And if it does, you're right. That will inspire other agencies and then look for the business. This is one of those things where doing things the right way builds long term value. Like if we can show in a rigorous way those agencies are seeing a significant drop in shootings that's going to create just tremendous sales momentum for the business. So I think we try to design our incentives so, so we make more profit and more money when we do the right things. So you want to have your business model reinforce your mission and your marsh.

Shot of cutting it by 50% outside of the police community, but in the public is really a matter of getting those new technologies in the hands of everybody that it becomes the cheaper, faster, better, more effective solution for protecting your family.

The other thing that's kind of fun on the consumer side of things for police it has to be very utilitarian. For consumers it also has to be fun. And I know like some people who don't appreciate guns might find that offensive that I'm characterizing gun ownership as fun. But it is like people who own guns love their guns. They, they love to customize them, they love to work on them. Just like a guy with a muscle car likes to work on his car. They enjoy shooting with their friends, they enjoy hunting. And so we're doing a lot of creative work like what could we do that would have a more technologically advanced gun ownership experience? And obviously we're looking at things like AR experiences and are there things we could do to quantify when you're firing these with your friends where you're having a much more interactive gaming experience in addition to making sure the weapon is also even more effective.

Amazing. Well, I'm excited about your success my friend. Where should people go to learn more about what you're doing at Axon with Taser and about your moonshot?

Yep. So we have a website set up thisisarmoonshot.com and that's really geared as it's a non branded. It's not about sales, it's really about we're trying to shift the narrative away from there's a lot of negative energy around policing and a lot of anger and I don't find that that leads to productive outcomes. Really trying to shift to how do we get a solutions mindset about how we can make policing better or the company's main website, which is just axonaxon.com.

And your message to entrepreneurs out there who have an MTP and they're trying to decide do they want to take on a moonshot? They've heard it can take a decade or two. They've heard it's hard. They've heard it's fraught with challenges. Is it worth it? What's your message or inspiration for them?

Absolutely. People want to be inspired. They don't want to just go to our basic needs. If you've got a decent job, your basic needs have been met in Maslow's hierarchy and, and I think people are looking for meaning in their lives and in their work. And I have found they like being stretched again. That's why it's important though. It's got to be authentic. It's got to be something that people are going to really believe and want to grab hold of. So I've also seen cases where it's clearly inauthentic and you've got things that just make you wince when you hear it. Oh, God. Like that. Does it feel real? So I think if you're going to do it, it's got to be something that you can really look yourself in the mirror and be proud of and that, yeah, this makes sense and we're doing it for the right reasons, not to just, you know, put a gloss, you know, on a, on a money making venture.

And you know, you mentioned something that's important to point out. There is a positive impact on your employees and also a positive impact, I think, on how the world views your company and helping you attract new talent. We talked about the importance of talent. Have you seen your moonshot used for recruiting or for inspiring internal employees to just work those extra hours and days?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Like, Jeff Cunnings is my chief Product officer. He was running Alexa Entertainment at Amazon a few years ago. Now, this is before the formal moonshot, but what got him is he read my book the End of Killing and that is what got him to leave A fantastic job at Amazon to come join us was the mission. And the moonshot now has become central to pretty much every time we talk about the company, including in our recruiting.

That's amazing. I don't think people realize the value that moonshots can have on the perceived value of your company, both to investors and to your employees. And in success, pal, countless lives will be saved. And I think it's, like I said, it's a beautiful moonshot. Grateful for you. I love having you in my life. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for being part of our Abundance360 community and excited to come back and report to everyone listening how you're doing. When's the next major milestone for you, you think?

I would say probably about a year from now. We're just bringing the first cohorts live to where we'll have some real data. And by the way, I've got to return the compliment there, Peter, we found you. I saw the documentary on Transcendent man on Ray Kurzweil, and then I asked my number two to do some research on you guys, and I learned about Singularity University. And this was right as we were the Taser company just starting to do body cameras, and we were struggling with that transition. And so, you know, I met you first at the Singularity University executive program, and then you came to the A360. It's been transformative for me personally and for the business. I mean, we've gone from a, you know, a $200 million valuation Taser weapon company to a $16 billion tech company. And, you know, you've had a huge role as a mentor and a coach along the way.

Thank you, buddy. Thank you. Rick Smith, CEO, founder of Axon, helping to cut gun violence in the public sector and hopefully eventually around the world. The preciousness of life. Thank you, Rick. Take care, my friend.

All right. Thanks, Peter.