Freedom vs. Safety: Axon CEO Rick Smith on the Future of Policing

What is it like being tased? So it's really interesting. It's terrifying while it's happening because you lose control of your body and there's like these waves of energy. Five seconds while you're being hit with a taser seems like a very long time. And I had long enough to like have this philosophical like realization about what it must be like for people who can't control their body. And then the current was off. Yeah. It's not fun. But when it's off, it's off. Like you're right back to normal the second it's off. Am I the only person who thinks that there's a great content business in body camps? There's just so much good content that comes out of these things. Like, is that just crazy? It's not just valuable from a social perspective, but it's like, there's a ton of entertaining content. Well, there was a company that, remember Live PD? I don't know if you remember that. There was a show that did just Live PD on Friday nights. Yeah, Cops. Remember Cops? This kid I went to high school with, his dad produced Cops on TV. I guess it's always been interesting. Yeah, so Live PD was the new version of Cops. I see. And the twist was that it was live. So people would tune in on weekend nights because they're like, oh, I want to see what's happening, like a live sporting event. But then they got canceled after the George Floyd incident. I think the production companies were afraid to be sharing pro-police. So we actually ourselves had done Axon Studios for a period of time to try to do exactly what you're talking about, like a live content business out of the body cameras. But it's just, you gotta know your corporate DNA. We are too pro-police and we're a big corporation that wasn't going to do the edgy things you would need to do to make that a great content business. Yeah. But I think it's there for somebody to do it. Yeah, all YouTube work. ♪ I'm going all in. ♪ Applovin started with an $8 domain, no VC funding, and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Now that same engine powers Applovin ads for e-commerce. Your ads run inside mobile games, reaching over a billion people with full screen distraction-free attention. The platform finds buyers and optimizes for profit. You see the target, it does the rest. One Cokeware brand went from 4 million to 16 million, turned profitable, and is on pace for 80 million this year. Visit applovin.com slash all in to launch your first campaign today. ♪ I'm going all in. ♪ Rick Smith, CEO of Axon. Welcome to the all in interview. It's awesome to be here. Thanks. I'm glad we could make this work out. I know we had talked about having you come out to the summit and got delayed, missed that window, but I'm really glad that this has worked out. You know, your business history is fascinating. I would love, if you're okay with it, maybe to go back a little bit to the beginning of the business. Your company used to be called Taser. I think we all remember the original Taser name and product. But maybe you could take us back, like we can do a real quick recap of how the company got started in the early days. Yeah, so we started in the early 90s. So this is the only job I've ever had. Started in 93 in a garage in Tucson. The sort of lead up to that is I was in graduate school in Europe and a bunch of the European students were saying they were afraid to come to America because of all the gun violence they were seeing on TV. And I would tell them like, you know, look, that's not, everything is like what you see on the news. And one of them asked me if I knew anyone who'd been shot and killed. And it just struck me as like, wow, actually I do. There were these two guys that played on my high school football team that were shot and killed in a road rage incident. And we knew a couple of friends of the family. By the time I added it up, it was like maybe five or six people. And the thing that struck me was why is it that like bullets are still a thing in 1993, much less 2026? And what I mean is like, it's a pretty old technology, right? I mean, bullets have been around for many centuries. And the simple answer was if we had Captain Kirk's phaser, like people would choose not to kill other people because they'd have a more civilized way to stop somebody who's threatening them. And one thing led to another, I discovered this device called the Taser had been invented back in the 1970s by a NASA scientist who lived in Tucson, Arizona. I found him through his patent filings. And one thing led to another, I just called him up and I said, hey man, whatever happened to this tech? It seems to me like this is something the world could use. And shortly thereafter, he invited me down to his house and here I am this 23-year-old kid and a 73-year-old man. It sounds like, I don't know, a comic book sort of plot. But we started in his garage to build new tasers. And I can tell you at the beginning, everybody thought I'd lost my mind. In fact, I have a great video of Emil Maiku who was one of the leaders at Uber, he's now the Undersecretary of War, came to visit me when he was 23 and they filmed a spoof video, making fun of me, just how crazy this idea was that I was gonna go make electrical weapons. You found the inventor of the Taser device through a patent filing, go and visit him and buy it or license it and form a company around it? Yep, in fact, I convinced him to do it with me, to come out of retirement and sort of show me the way. So we were building the first tasers in his garage from parts from Ace Hardware. Because the first thing we had to do was to get federal government approval that the new taser would not be considered some sort of illegal weapon and that would require a regulatory approval. As I look back, you don't realize how fast you move when you're a startup relative to the rest of the world. Like we built our first prototype in 30 days from go. Now I've got 6,000 people. What year was this? It was 93. 93. And you started a company right away and built the first prototype with your own money? Yeah, it was friends and family. Now, my dad was a serial entrepreneur and he had had one successful company in Silicon Valley. So he knew a lot of the VCs, but no VC would touch us, right? We weren't the internet in late 90s. It was right in the peak internet boom. And again, everybody thought we were this sort of oddball thing. And I'm actually pretty proud now that we've seen enough success that, and with the changes in the world, that defense and policing technology is now much more mainstream than it was back then. So this was a handheld taser device. What was the market initially? Was it to sell into police forces? How did you think you were gonna go to market? And what was your first sale? Yeah, no, our first market was consumers. So police could buy the original taser, but due to, basically the original taser was a firearm, but it looked like a flashlight. That puts it into this category two, which is like a sawed off shotgun, which effectively makes it illegal, very hard to buy, but police could still buy them. So our theory was if we made this new taser weapon using compressed air instead of gunpowder, it would not be a firearm. And then people like my mom could go buy it to defend herself. And she had recently bought a gun around that same time. So we started in the consumer market and we struggled and we didn't really succeed. And what we heard from consumers was, hey, if this thing really works, why aren't the police using it? And so we basically realized we need to go prove that this works in policing. So after seven years of struggling and failing, we pivoted into the police market in late 99. And that's when the business took off. But like MacArthur to the Philippines, I will return to the consumer market once we have proven with police that the taser is as effective or even more effective than a gun. And that will happen in the next five years. And so you spend seven years developing the market, trying to find product market fit, all off of friends and family money. What was keeping you in it? Was there a point where you said, hey, I'm gonna throw the towel in, we should go do something else with my life? I mean, this is kind of a classic entrepreneur, how many times are you willing to pivot question? Yeah, so we had two failed product launches. And then in 1998, I was visiting some of my friends up in Silicon Valley who'd taken jobs, companies with dumb names like Yahoo. Of course, they were all making money hand over fist. It was the internet gold rush. And here I just failed on my second product. And I remember going to my dad, it was him and one of his friends that were funding this. And I said, look, I think we should just shut it down. You know, we failed twice. And my dad looked at me and he said, well, you know, it would have been nice to figure that out a couple years ago, because we owe Silicon Valley Bank about $2 million. I have $500,000 and I'm on the hook. So if we shut down, the bank has taken everything. So we have no choice. I'm putting my last $500,000 in. And the other investor was a guy named Bruce Culver. Shout out, Bruce, if you're watching. Bruce matched him. And so that was going to be the last $1 million we would ever get. We would have to survive on it. And with that, we managed to design, tool, manufacture, and launch the police taser, and then shoestring it along to cashflow break even, and eventually an IPO two years later. So you go public around the end of the dot-com boom, right? So the market's kind of tanking generally, and there's an opportunity, because you guys now have revenue. You're selling into, what, police forces? That's the primary market at that point? Yeah, it was. And actually, looking back on it, it was just an alignment of the fates. So yeah, the internet bubble popped in 2000. And in late 2000, an investment bank came to one of our training events, and they basically were like, oh my gosh, you're not internet. You guys make a physical product. You have real revenue. We're taking you public. And so we went public specifically, I think, because banks needed deals, and we were not internet. And we went public at a massive, about $12 million valuation. Wow, and that was a big outcome though, right? I mean, you guys owned 100% of the company. You didn't have VCs or institutional guys on the cap table. That's right, yeah. I mean, we were a tiny, tiny market cap to go public, but because of that, we ended up being the highest return I think that investment bank, Paulson, out of Oregon ever had. And for us, I'll tell you, for me, it was such a relief that we were able to raise enough money to be able to pay off some shareholder notes so that I knew my dad wasn't gonna end up in the poorhouse. That was, to me, the biggest relief is not destroying your family. And then everything from there has been gravy. How do you cross that chasm those early days? You show up to a police force. You've got this handheld device that shoots out these electrodes that go into someone's skin and zaps them and they fall to the ground, they get incapacitated. What was the way that you kind of got these guys who had never heard of or seen anything like this before to make those first POs? How do you start to get those orders to come in? And was there a moment where suddenly enough police forces had this where everyone's like, we all gotta have this, and then the market just kind of took off? Yeah, so I mean, this is one of those things where look, you just don't overcomplicate life. We didn't have enough money to do anything fancy. And the main thing was we had solved a real problem. So the early generation tasers were not powerful enough. Like Rodney King was shot with an LAPD taser and it did not work. And they went to the batons with catastrophic consequences. So taser had a terrible reputation in the late 90s. And it was deserved because I'd sent several demos of our first generation product that also didn't stop somebody who was focused and aggressive. They could fight through the pain. So the thing we had done was we had basically done some animal testing to go tune the amount of nerve stimulation so that it would actually paralyze somebody. Once we did that, the launch was pretty simple. We didn't have money for a big ad campaign. We hired a former Marine and put him in a Winnebago going around the country with a $100 bill. And he would go into a police department, explain to them what we're doing. And up until then, non-lethal weapons were seen as kind of snake oil. Like, yeah, pepper spray hurts, but you can fight through it. We had the first weapon that could actually stop somebody. And cops are an interesting crowd. You know, there's a fair amount of bravery, shall we say. And so they weren't afraid. They're like, okay, you think this will work? Fine, let's give it a try. And we would offer them $100 if they could come and take it. And we'd hit them. They would fall down. They'd dust themselves off and go, oh my God, that was way more powerful than I was expecting. Some would try again. And then immediately they saw the value. I can't tell you how many times I've had cops tell me, my gosh, this would have prevented me from shooting someone or getting in a knock down, drag out fight with a very dangerous person. So the value prop was so simple. We just had to convince them it worked. And we did that with very simple demos. And from that, you could see suddenly purchase orders started coming in and we could track where Hans was going across the country, our trainer. And within a year, we hit cashflow break even. And then you had like a decade where the stock kind of stayed in the same range, didn't it? Yeah. A lot of people think like, okay, you go public, this thing's going to take off. We're on some growth trajectory. But again, after how many years, seven years of being a private company, eight years of kind of getting to that point of having an IPO, you then spend another decade kind of with this valuation in this range of a couple bucks a share, right? Oh yeah. No, actually, I mean, it's more exciting than that. So seven years of like, are we going to survive? We can't pay the light bill. Then we go public in 2001. And the next four years are insane. We're growing at like, we're tripling every year. In 2004, we were the number one performing stock in the world. I have the Wall Street Journal article on the wall. On a one in three year return basis, we were number one. Doesn't your Google went public? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were on fire. Then what happened in late 2004, we got hit with an SEC investigation. There were allegations we'd lied about the safety of our products in order to pump up the stock price. Now, we can do a whole hour on this. There was a short selling attack. We had a big short positions in the stock. My personal assistant was actually a mole for short sellers who was selling- Oh my God, really? It was crazy. Sending internal documents to short sellers that were giving them to the New York Times, who was then disclosing they were getting internal confidential material, non-public information from short sellers who were somehow getting it out of our company. So that was miserable. 2005, our stock dropped from 33 to $7 a share. And it was, yeah, it was miserable. I mean, you're wondering if you're gonna survive. Our customers are police, so they stopped buying from us. They're like, look, dude, you're under federal investigation. Like, I can't go to my city council until this is over. So ignoring my lawyer's advice, I walked into the front offices of the SEC office in San Francisco with boxes of documents and said, hey guys, I wanna help you complete your investigation because I may go out of business if this drags on. And then that's when the long doldrums began. never fully recovered from there. And we were massively- But what happened with that investigation? That investigation, you moved on from it? Oh yeah, I mean, they don't give you a gold star when they're done and tell you good job, they just say no findings and they move on, which is as good as it gets. Turns out though, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In that case, we had gone from zero lawsuits to hundreds of lawsuits. I mean, we were being sued obviously by shareholders, we were being sued by plaintiffs of like, anybody who got shot by a police taser was now suing the police and us because we were all over the news. And we did a couple of things there. And so what's your market cap during this time? It peaked about two billion in late 2004 and then it was back to about a hundred million. So you get hundreds of lawsuits when you're kind of like a hundred million dollar market cap company that you're dealing with. Yeah, we should have gone under, like we should not have survived. It was only by pure grit and frankly, a little bit of craziness. Like we, our insurance company, because we have insurance like everybody and we go to trial on our first cases, our insurance company wanted to settle this first case for like around $2 million. And we said, hell no, you can't. If you settle this case, we will get swamped in litigation. You're putting our business at risk. If you settle the case, we'll sue you. But we're gonna give you an out. If you will pay the plaintiff $2 million, we'll take a little bit less, you can pay us and we'll sign away our liability and we'll take it across the goal line. We did that twice. We actually made money on those cases because we won. But the point is, this was slightly what was considered crazy behavior that we would settle with our own insurance to prevent them from giving a dime to the plaintiffs because we believed we were right and it worked. Like today, for the first time, I should knock on wood, for the first time in decades, we now have zero litigation cases. Because if you sue us, you better bring your A game. Like if we, now, if we did something wrong, we're gonna be rational and we will settle it. We're reasonable people. But you sue us on something where we think we're in the right, we will, we dig in like religious fanatics to defend our belief system. And that's important and that's what protected our business. This lasts for years, right? These lawsuits, this market cap kind of being static, this went on until, what, about 2012 or so? And Rick, a buddy of mine, Hadi Partovi's on your board, right? He is, yeah. And so he's been on your board for a long time. First of all, how'd you guys meet? And second of all, he mentioned some story about the role he played early on in keeping the business alive. Can you tell us what happened? Oh yeah, I cannot overstate his importance. So Hadi and I were friends in college. So he was one of my buddies who was out making a bunch of money in the internet boom in the late 90s when I was struggling to get this Taser business off the ground. Then what happened, around 2007, eight, nine, we were working on our body camera business. And we launched, we were initially operational around 2010 or so, and I frankly had a disaster on my hands. I had never built a software company. I'd hired a team, and let's just say we were struggling hard. And so I called Hadi, and I was like, hey man, I need some help. I've started this software company. I built the original Tasers in a garage. I feel like I got my hands around this. But this software thing, it turns out the guy I'd hired is probably not the right guy. We were having technical issues. And frankly, I was struggling to wrap my head around like how do we staff and grow this business? This is pretty new to me. And so I asked Hadi if he would join the board, and he came on. He was effectively, he was a board member, but he was really my part-time CTO for about five years where he helped me sort through, get the right business, get the right team in place. We moved, like we were originally building our own data center that we were going to manage for our customers. We had a near catastrophic outage where we nearly lost all our customer data. And Hadi was like, hey man, there's plenty of hard things to do in this world. Like trying to figure out how to run your own data center is not one that's worth the squeeze. So we moved over to the cloud with AWS and then with Azure. And yeah, so I like to say Hadi saved the business because he came in. He was the guy who helped me navigate how to build a software business from scratch inside a weapon business. And by the way, as we were doing this, our shareholders thought I'd lost my mind. They're like, Rick, you're trying to turn a weapon company into a software company. And I guess I was, like many entrepreneurs, you don't realize what a crazy idea that was. And Hadi was the guy who helped me do it. Did he stay on your board? Yeah, he's still on my board. Amazing. I mean, the stock price, you're like a 35, $40 billion market cap company today. He must've done well. Yeah, I mean, and Hadi also is the guy who pushed for us to change the name from Taser to something else, which became Axon. Because, and look, at the time that was hard, we're really invested in our brand. We're proud of the Taser. We didn't want to feel like we're retreating. And Hadi's point was like, hey man, the Taser is a kind of a, it's a sledgehammer brand. It means electric weapon to people. And you do a lot more than that. And so, he helped me think that through and he was right. Now we have the, the Taser is a small part of the business. It's important, but we have an expansive business. Now we manage, I think, more video every day than YouTube. Now they have a lot more viewers, but we have over a million police officers uploading two hours of video every day from one of these body cameras. So we have a ton of content. And of course, it's got to be securely managed and shared. And there's been a lot of complexity. And of course, I've got a great team in place now, thanks to Hadi coming in and sort of helping me learn this business and rebuild the plane while we were flying. Good, go Hadi. Yeah, so there's one other thing that happened in there. So while we were defending ourselves in all the litigation, we also went on offense and we created the body camera. And the reason we created the body camera was, you know what, the only way to defend ourselves, and look, our customers were being accused of doing horrible things with Taser weapons. I remember I was- These are police officers, right? Yeah, yeah, police officers. I was co-defending a case in Northern California where somebody died in police custody. It was a 40-year-old man with a 20-year methamphetamine problem. And he was in really bad shape. And I remember the police officers telling me, as we were watching the trial, the family kept putting up pictures of his high school graduation. And the officers looked at me and they said, that's not the human being I saw the night I went to that house. I saw somebody who was literally like out of the Exorcist movie. This cop told me he'd been a cop for 26 years, had never been afraid in his career until the animalistic rage he had to deal with in this person who had overdosed on meth, but that never came across to the jury. And in that moment, I said, my God, we have to record what you see. Because when police officers describe things, they have to be very professional. In this case, it was when Mr. Heston did this or that, very professional. The family that's suing the police, they would use very emotional, colorful language. And I was like, guys, you're getting your asses kicked. Frankly, you need to tell your story with more passion. And they said, Rick, we don't get to do that. We work for the government. If we get caught in one half-truth, that can be the end of our career. And that's when we realized, we need to record this so that you can show people what it is that you saw, what it is you did, rather than having to try to explain it. Weren't there body cam companies already at the time? Did they exist? Was this concept novel? The concept was new. I mean, you did have GoPro with consumer cameras, so we certainly didn't invent the cameras. But we, again, a quick detour, we were building the first police body camera, and then the employee that was building it actually quit in the middle of the night and launched the product a week later. Turns out he was actually funding it with his stock options to build it. Yes, that's another bit of drama. But yes, we were building the industry's first body camera. We ultimately made peace, and we acquired that company back into the fold down the road. But that's what led to the eventual explosion. The reason that we're, I don't know, a $30 billion company today, up from a couple hundred million, is because of the body camera. And I'll tell you, when we launched the body camera, police didn't want to wear it. We had seven years of miserable failure where cops told us this is Big Brother. They're worried that their supervisor's gonna nitpick them. I mean, look, change is hard, right? People find a lot of reasons to be afraid of new things, but we just believed in our soul. Guys, you need to be able to show people what you do. You're being accused of all sorts of awful stuff. And we made a double bet. Not only did we bet on body cameras, but we bet on the cloud, because we realized the only way this would ever scale is if we put these videos into cloud infrastructure. Otherwise, you have 18,000 departments all trying to figure out how to run video servers securely. But this creates a ton of liability for these police forces, doesn't it? Like now, all of a sudden, they're being held accountable. By the way, I love watching body cam videos. The cop did something wrong. The criminal did something wrong. I mean, there's always just drama to these stories. But I've got to imagine a lot of these police officers, because there's a lot of these stories, that they're using the body cam or they don't realize the body cam's on and they get themselves in trouble. And so isn't there a bit of a liability issue? And how do you end up selling your customer on putting themselves at risk? Or do they view it as a double-edged sword, that it's also for their own safety, their own protection, and for winning cases? So you are articulating the exact concern people had up front. That's why they didn't want to wear it, because they had that perception. However, once, actually, a police union leader told me, famously said, no cop wants to wear a body camera until they've worn one for 90 days, and then they will not go on patrol without it. Because what you don't realize, police are arresting criminals all the time. And criminals have no compunction about lying about what happened. The number of false allegations are incredible. I'm going to give you one example. I'm on a ride along with a cop in Phoenix. And this is in the early days of body cameras. And I said, how's it going? He said, well, I didn't like this, but let me tell you what happened to me last week. I was arresting a prostitute. She was basically more than half naked. She was high on some sort of drugs. And as I put her into the patrol car, as I'm driving her into the station, she starts screaming at him, I'm going to say you raped me. I'm going to say you raped me unless you get me out of the car right now. And he said, ma'am, I just want to let you know, this is a body camera. I've been recording this entire interaction. You're free to say whatever you want, but it's all being recorded. And he said, her demeanor changed completely. She calmed down. And he said, now imagine what I would have gone through if I didn't have a body camera. If I had a woman accusing me of raping her and it turned into a he said, she said, like that could be a career ending allegation with no way to disprove it. So that was like a microcosm. But the moment that things flipped was the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Remember Ferguson? Yeah. White officer, black subject. Now, Michael Brown was unarmed, but he was significantly larger than officer Wilson. And according to officer Wilson, they were fighting over the gun. Like the officer, you know, an officer brings a gun to every fight they get in. And once they're fighting over the gun, you know, he's justified to defend himself. But if you remember the stories, the family was saying things like, remember hands up, don't shoot, that Michael Brown was trying to surrender. If that's true, then that was a cold-blooded murder. But if you listen to the officer, he says, hey, I was being attacked. In fact, I think he had a broken eye, a broken bone above his eye. The subsequent review ended up showing that the officer was largely correct, but you couldn't prove it. And it was after that case, Michael Brown's family said, we want body cameras. And the police union said, you know what? We want them because we at least want the world to see what's happening. And now, as I sit here today, what's interesting, some of these civil liberties groups that were big proponents of body cameras are now saying that they're turning against them. They're saying they're broken because they're not finding all these bad cops, that there's something wrong with the body cameras. I have a different point of view on that is you have to accept the possibility that the vast majority of cops do a good job and they're falsely accused. And I think that's what body cameras have proven. And so you get out there, the market starts moving, and I'm assuming it just becomes de facto, right? I mean, all over the country at this point. I mean, maybe you can just share a little bit about the scale of the business today. Oh yeah, yeah. Once Ferguson happened, then everybody needed body cameras and they needed them fast. And that's where our bet on the cloud made a big sense. Remember back in the day, like, you know, in 2010, cloud was relatively new to government and they had this perception, well, if it's here and it's sitting on my computer, it's safe, because it's here in the room with me, right? I can keep eyes on it, but that's not true. In cybersecurity, there can be Chinese hackers, you know, in the server in my building, no problem. It comes down to the technology and the stack and the people you've got. And so, like, from a first principles, we knew the cloud could be safer than your average police department and we could scale it. And so because of the urgency after Michael Brown, then it just really took off. And so today, virtually, I think every major police department now wears body cameras. And we have, the vast majority are on our system, I think partly because we are first, but also because we tend to be, we're sort of maniacally mission driven. And I know that always sounds a little bit cheesy, but like, we have the luxury of choosing what problems we want to solve. And so we work on things that are going to make a difference that we're excited about. And that leads to different product outcomes than companies that are just purely profit motivated. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's gone on recently with some of the public sentiment around monitoring. So there's this company Flock that's been installing cameras in cities and they're starting to get the city councils to reject the cameras. And there's this concern about the development of effectively a surveillance state. And that government agencies, police forces, getting all of this monitoring technology creates a bigger, more powerful state that's monitoring us all the time. No citizens want to have that. And obviously there's the public safety argument, but maybe you could just kind of frame up what's going on with public sentiment right now and these issues. Well, I think this is part of a larger concern about AI in general and the proliferation of cameras and sensors. And look, it's not unreasonable. Like I don't think any of us want to live in China, meaning a surveillance state where every citizen is tracked everywhere they go. However, I think there's gotta be some nuance here. We can't go back to United States as it existed in the 1950s when there weren't cameras everywhere. The fact is there are cameras everywhere. There's more cameras than people. you and I probably have four cameras just on our cell phones plus, you know, maybe a dozen in our house, plus all the business cameras. So really what this comes down to is how we think about data governance. Like how should society, under what circumstances should we share those camera feeds to the government? How should they use that? I think in general, we try to distill things down to simple, you know, principles about, okay, what would we be proud that we've built? Like what would be good for society? And if we build that, it will be durable. And so in the example of cameras, look, we build license plate reading cameras too. I think we've been pretty thoughtful about the security controls we put in place to try to avoid some of the issues you've seen. What people are really upset about are things like when a police officer can go in and do searches on their, you know, ex-girlfriend. Like those sorts of things are morally offensive to folks. Or if you could track every American everywhere they go, like we don't want that. But like tracking a stolen vehicle, you know, finding, being able to look up license plates that are around the crime scene of a violent crime. Like people agree that those are reasonable use cases. And even the critics, like Ben Jordan has been a very thoughtful critic. I think he kind of started this. He will tell you if you listen to him, he's not saying to get rid of this technology. We just need good guardrails and we need safeguards. And so I'm a big proponent. By the time this webcast actually hits, I think, you know, we'll be after the election and we'll start to see some movement in federal regulation. I'm a big supporter of what Senator Hawley's doing to introduce guidelines and oversight so that we can get the benefit of this, these technologies to fight crime, but safeguards to prevent them from tracking everyday Americans. Do you think that people get that rationally? Because I've noticed some things you can kind of get people to rationalize and you can understand them. And other things, people just have a very acute emotional response and they're like, icky, yucky, I don't want to have anything to do with that. I think Ring did that Super Bowl ad and the negative sentiment around the Super Bowl ad being it's so creepy that all these cameras are monitoring everyone all over the neighborhood all the time is what really triggered a lot of people. And I think there were stories about Flock where these cameras were being used by city employees to look at people when they weren't supposed to be. So you could argue, yes, let's put in the guardrails, but the general notion that this sort of technology exists, this sort of power exists, this sort of privacy infiltration, intrusion exists, makes people feel really uncomfortable with it. How do you kind of think about changing that sentiment to being one of rational and guardrails and away from the sort of big emotional response everyone's having? Yeah, I think part of that's just an adjustment as society moves forward. Like, look, plenty of people still go, they may say, boy, that made me uncomfortable, but they go buy Ring cameras specifically because Ring has some of the best technology for being able to protect your home or if you need to share videos with police because you had a crime at your house. And so I think there is a little bit of back and forth, which is normal. Like, this is democracy. Like, as you move forward, people aren't gonna agree on every topic, but over time, I think, you know, we find middle ground. I don't think it's reasonable. I don't think we're gonna end up with like making doorbell cameras illegal, right? But I think Ring likely learned from that incident. They've put really good safeguards in place. In fact, we have a partnership with Ring where we're both very focused on how do we enable homeowners to share Ring camera video if there's a crime committed with the police, but actually make it really hard for people to enable. Like, we don't enable police to just go out and randomly, you know, canvas those videos. There's a ton of privacy work that goes in so that people know these are my cameras. I control how they're used. And, but if I, you know, I actually had a car stolen from my house years ago, and it took me days. I had to get a technician to come download the video from this like, you know, homegrown camera system. I couldn't get it to the police for days. I have Ring now because I do wanna be able to share it if something like that happens. So I think it is also a matter of just, yes, not everybody's gonna agree with the guardrails, but I think policymakers can't just, you know, we have to find the reasonable middle ground. We've gotta find reasonable public policy. And we've already seen that. I think, again, I was really impressed with Senator Hawley's bill. It's very rational. It's got criminal penalties. If police officers individually misuse this for personal purposes, I believe there's criminal and civil penalties. And then there's going to be safeguards for manufacturers like us and Flock that are going to require that before you can run searches, you've gotta have viable case codes that we know this is a legitimate case that's somewhere in your law enforcement system. There's two key systems where you've gotta have collaboration before you're running searches. So if you're searching for your ex, you're gonna have to find another officer who's willing to put their career at risk before you can do that, right? Those sorts of safeguards, I think, will get the 90% of people that are rationally paying attention to this to, but you're not gonna win 100%. Sure, there are gonna be some people that are just gonna have a fear of this. But I think, you know, I've been around this long enough to see those things subside when you get good rational safeguards in place. So, I mean, you guys start with the taser, handheld device, reduce the use of guns in policing, move to the body cam, and now you guys have this framing, I believe, on being the operating system for public safety. What else does that encompass? So is it similar to Flock's business and maybe help explain some of the other products that come out now and in time to realize that mission? Yeah, so our mission is to protect life. And we chose those two words, meaning we focus on violence as a problem that's worth solving. And that means with a taser, our goal is how do we reduce the number of times police actually have to shoot and kill someone? With a body camera, it's how do we reduce the risk of police using too much force? And how do we protect them when they're doing this job that is dangerous and risky so that they don't have to worry about being falsely accused of things? And then we persist that all the way through. We're partnered with Skydio on drones. So in fact, we recently will have become the largest investor in America's leading drone company. So if you don't know Skydio, they're the guys who build these robotic autonomous docks where a drone can now be flown from off a fire station anywhere in a city, and you can have a drone on scene in a matter of seconds. This is reducing the number of times police have to take resources to go to alarm calls. So it allows them to focus on bigger calls. And when there's big events, they're able to get a drone on scene sometimes before the 911 operator has even finished entering the call for service. So that's improving the service to the community. Now, again, drones are also an area where people would say, well, there are things like, how are these being used? How do we have safeguards to know the police aren't, you know, using these in ways that the public wouldn't want them to? And so Skydio together with us, we've developed controls. For example, agencies can share their mission profiles with the public. So if the public has concerns, they can see how they're being used. And most agencies have policies where they're not just flying drones around on patrol missions. They very specifically fly them only to the site when they've been called, where somebody is calling for help and you get a drone there quickly, that can help you see what's happening. And in some cases, they've even flown a drone down and been able to distract or we've had people surrender to drones. So the whole idea is across the board of all the things we do, we look for how do we connect these devices together in a way that's going to make us all safer, but also acknowledge that yes, there are risks of abuse and we should build this in ways that address those risks. We're not going to win everybody's, not everybody's going to agree on everything, but we've so far been able to get to a point where we're finding that right balance so that we're using these things to make the world safer and protect privacy and find the right balance along the way. I think there's this great debate on how much safety and at what cost that I think is what really triggers a lot of people that the benefit to them individually of more safety doesn't feel felt as acutely as the risk or the cost to their privacy or their personal space, this Orwellian idea that the state has so much power, that the government, that the policing force has so much power that they can effectively, if they chose to, there may be guardrails, but if they chose to, they now have such supremacy over the citizens. This Orwellian idea that now the state can determine, hey, I don't like the speech that you're using or I don't like whatever it might be. There's all these reasons why people can feel like there's an infringement of that power of force upon them. It's almost like how far do you take it? Like the movie Minority Report, I think, did a good job exploring this, where it's like at what point do you become predictive with AI of crime happening and then you arrest people before they do the crime and everyone's kind of fantastical ideas become, is that really worth the risk? Like, do I really wanna take on that level of cost to my individual liberties to have, quote, that much more safety? And I think that seems to be the great debate people seem to be having right now. Is that a fair characterization? Or do you think it's a little bit misguided? Yeah. No, no, no, I think it's a fair debate and that is the right debate to be having. And I think, but this is hard work, right? Like it's finding the balance. And what's interesting, you will find the people who most want these sorts of technologies come from the poorest neighborhoods that have the highest crime rates. Paradoxically, those are the ones that, you know, people say, well, we worry about over-policing. But when you actually go out, you know, frankly, a lot of the most concerns are coming from wealthy neighborhoods where this is more theoretical. But when you talk to people that are dealing with gun violence every day in their cities, they cheer when the police show up and they're the ones who wanna have more of this technology so there's deterrence. I mean, ultimately, I would say this, in America, sometimes we have these simplistic notions, like, you know, frankly, in the political spectrum, sometimes there's just lock everybody up or no, no, no, like abolish the police. Like, come on, like neither of those are the right solution. I think the right solution is how do we deploy technology so we deter people from making bad decisions in the first place? Like the best deterrence to criminal behavior is not long sentences. It's the probability that you will get caught and prosecuted. And then the question is how do we then balance that as well against making sure that we're not building technology that can be used to track everyday people? But those are interesting techno-ethical problems to deal with, right? How do we build the tech to meet the ethical bar to make the right trade-offs? You're right. I don't live or work in neighborhoods where I'm experiencing a lot of violent crime. I'm driving through San Francisco and I got three speeding tickets. I'm like, get rid of those damn cameras. My reaction is, why are these cameras here? It's what this guy Rob Henderson calls luxury beliefs. I think there was an incident, and I have this in my notes, in June of 2022, you had some members of your advisory board who quit in protest after you guys announced plans to develop a taser-equipped surveillance drone that you were designing to stop school shootings. And I think the board had voted against the project due to ethical concerns and whatnot and privacy concerns. Can you tell us a little bit about kind of that incident, what you've learned from it, and does that project still continue? Yes, that project is continuing, and that's why they quit. Look, life can be challenging at times. I was very disappointed. We set up an AI ethics board to give us feedback, frankly, not from pro-police people, but from civil liberties groups that are concerned about policing, right? And that's been a very useful function. That's one of the reasons we've got, I think, great safeguards in how we built ALPR and other technologies. Now, on this case, we had been working with them for about a year on the idea that we could have a taser-capable drone to be used in extreme circumstances, like a school shooting was the incident there. But today, for example, if you have a person with a gun show up in a building anywhere in America, do you know how we stop them? We gotta wait for the police with a gun? Yeah, we send in more people with guns, and they have a gunfight. Like, this is the Wild West, guys. Is that really the best we can do as a society? And so what we're saying is, rather than waiting and sending a person with gun to have more bullets flying, we could send in a drone or a robot armed with a non-lethal weapon. This is a key distinction. You'll never get a cop that will take a non-lethal weapon up against somebody with a gun. But if we can send in a small drone or robot, then everything shifts. They're like, oh, wait a minute, now I can use non-lethal force. Now, we can argue whether or not the criminal deserves to die, but even there, like, anytime you have more bullets introduced, there's innocent bystanders get killed all the time accidentally. And so I continue to believe, and we are doing R&D on this, that using non-lethal force safely deployed from a distance via drone or robot is in everybody's best interest compared to having more gunfights in society. Now, because the way that went down, frankly, I think this was post-George Floyd, some of our advisors were worried about getting canceled over this issue. I mean, many of them worked in universities and they were already being accused of being pro-police. And so I think there was some personal dynamics. Many of the people on the board privately agreed with me that like, you're right, Rick, this is a better solution than what we have today with sending in cops with body armor and assault rifles, but it was too politically risky and it blew up. But I'll tell you one thing I'm proud of, we didn't give up. Many companies have now canceled their ethics boards. We dug in, we reconstituted, we still have. It's been rebranded as our Equity and Ethics Advisory Council. And frankly, it now has more black and brown voices on it where previously it was more academically focused. Like if you wanna talk about the concerns of over-policing, it is primarily from underrepresented communities. And one of the criticisms we had gotten from in that whole process was that we didn't have the right people in the room. If you wanna talk about, again, the concerns of over-policing, it should be from communities who are most affected. And so you live and you learn, we've recalibrated, but we've continued to bring in people who have. critical views of policing because we think those are important for us to understand their concerns. And by doing it early, we actually learn in many cases we can build safeguards into the product if you listen and you do it up front. It's much better for us to do that and hear the critical voices early in design process rather than after we've launched it because then all we can do is sort of argue about things. We've lost the ability to make significant design changes. Let's just talk about the future 10 years from now. I think there's five companies launching humanoid-like robots for commercial sale in the next 12 to 18 months that are going to be available here in the US. $10,000 to $30,000 price ranges have been kind of talked about. Do you think the future of policing involves humanoid robots, other types of robots and drones? Give us a sense of a decade from now or 15 years from now what local community policing looks like with all this technology that's coming to market. Well, first I would say policing is still fundamentally a human job. Any decisions about using force on another person will be made by humans and that's a bright line for us. So even with the Taser drone you and I talked about earlier, part of what we learned from the concern was people are worried about misuse, abuse, how these things will be used. So any of the robotic systems we're involved in will not only have required human oversight but we're building multi-key processes. So for example, you could set it up so that before any officer could operate even a non-lethal weapon from a drone or robot, we can set it up so that there's required real-time approval from an administrator. So we're actually going to be building the least abusable technology in the history of policing. Like today, you give a cop a gun, they walk out the door. You have no control over what they do with it. You can prosecute them later. These robotic systems will give us the ability to have institutional decision-making with multiple parties in real time, which I think will lead to far less mistakes, less concerns about abuse. And I do believe both humanoids, I think drones will be bigger, faster. Humanoids are coming as well. But again, that's why we invested in Skydio. We bought almost half the company. We wanted to buy about as much as we could because we're big believers that there's going to be millions of drones in the next few years deployed in the U.S. But we also actually felt in this case, it was better for us to leave it as an independent company that could move at startup speed and continue to raise and spend capital in ways that maybe weren't constrained by being part of a public company. And yet at the same time, we've secured the exclusive rights so we will be the exclusive channel into the markets that we care about. Because we believe that is absolutely going to be one of the biggest parts of the future is drones and robots arriving on scene way before people have an opportunity to get there. And the whole idea is to just let's understand what's happening. Let's make sure we're making the best decisions possible. And the idea is to keep everybody as safe as we can. How do citizens feel like they can maintain their individual liberties from being overwhelmed by a state that is equipped with this much technology? I think that's really where I react personally to think about as more of a libertarian. I'm a big proponent of the role of government being public safety. So let me be clear on this. But this idea that you're creating a significant concentration of this extraordinary power, and it's hard for the citizens to be able to ultimately protect themselves against a government that decides to overwhelm voices and individuals at some point in the future. Just gotta do is take a step back and look in the world as it exists today. So let's imagine, David, that police have got a tip that there's a dangerous felon in your house. This has happened, right? We've all seen cases where police go to the wrong house and they're doing an entry. So today, the way that works, if they believe that you're a dangerous felon, they may come through the door in your house, and you're going to be dealing with multiple officers that are suited up with body armor with lethal weapons in their hands who are going to have to make a life or death decision instantaneously while their own adrenaline is surging. Human beings don't make good decisions under the fight or flight. So the fact is the government already has a monopoly on the legal use of force, and it's almost... Every one of those officers has lethal force, and I will tell you, if they feel their life is at risk, the thing in their hand will be a gun. By comparison, if those police are going to come into your house, imagine a future where if they do have to do this mission, and again, we can debate about under what conditions they should do it, now they're going to be sending in a drone or a robot. So the operator is going to be a team of people, not it's not going to be a person who's in the fight or flight response, afraid for their own safety, shaking with their finger on the trigger, and if they make a mistake, you're going to get hit with a taser or a pepper spray or some non-lethal weapon. And, oh, by the way, the whole thing will be recorded, because to even operate these things, you have to have camera systems on them. Many police shootings today are not recorded. And so I think it just comes back to how do we... We just need to sort of take a step back and understand how the job is done today and how we can do it in the future that is safer for everybody, and then answer legitimate questions about what are the controls in place. Things like multi- key authorization. We will work with our customers to push hard that every one of them has an oversight function, so anytime one of these robotic systems is used, that there's independent civilian oversight and review. So I think, again, this just comes down to it's not an unreasonable concern. These things could be misused. However, we also don't want to... I don't want to live in a world where everybody else has robotics and AI and the police are showing up in a 74 Chevy with an old radio. They're going to need enough tech to keep up with the rest of us, and then the laws and regulations and oversight are going to have to evolve to make sure that we are controlling the government as the people and that we've got a good judiciary and good balance of power so that they can't do abusive things without being held accountable. And what's your view on the shifting political landscape, the rise of a DSA political class today that's calling for defunding the police, and what do you think happens to communities and cities over the next couple of years if and as more of that voice becomes elected? Well, if you actually defund the police, we will get some social experiments. I can tell you you don't need an experiment to show what would happen. It will be catastrophic, but democracies recover. And I'll give you an example. I think it was in 1968, the police in Montreal, Canada went on strike for no other reason. It was overpay. There was no George Floyd type situation. This was just a labor relations strike. And looking back on it, that is now known as the Night of Terror because criminals heard the police were on strike, and the city went crazy. In fact, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who's sort of famously both liberal, but also very rational. He wrote Better Angels of Our Nature. And this is his example on you need a functional police force because it is the glue that holds society together so we have rules that we can all trust we're going to abide by. And so I hope we don't see major examples of that. We started to see some of that, frankly, with some states had decriminalized shoplifting, as you recall, in the post-George Floyd. And that led to catastrophic consequences where you saw major... Downtown San Francisco got abandoned. I've seen it myself. Yeah. And then with that, you get the jobs flee. You get these deserts where there's no economic activity because it's just not safe for people to do it. The business models implode. Now I think, in your example, I think San Francisco has already begun to swing the other direction and take corrective action. And so I try to stay out of politics too much. I think things will swing one way or the other, but we have corrective mechanisms that over time will kick in. I think non-lethality is a great mission. I think public safety is critical to the underwriting of all of our other social contracts. Without good public safety, none of the other social contracts work and the systems don't work. And so I think, obviously, it's an important mission and important work you do. Congrats on the business, on the progress, on the Skydio investment. Obviously, there's a lot of, I think, social challenges ahead here with this big debate that's going on right now on the limits of that and the limits of technology. Well, I'll tell you as well, there's a lot of uncertainty right now. The Economist, I think, four months ago had a cover that the AI jobs apocalypse, and then a couple months later, there's the, hey, wait a minute, no, AI is making millions of jobs. People don't know what to think. And we are at this point where the acceleration of technology is leading to massive amounts of uncertainty. And what I tell our customers is like, guys, we need you to stay strong. Policing might be the glue that needs to hold society together. Hopefully, we don't see the sorts of things we're seeing in France right now and the social upheaval. But God forbid if we do, we need the men and women of law enforcement to be ready to stand up and help us keep order as we get through. I'm a huge optimist. I think 10, 20 years from now is going to be a near utopian society. Maybe I'm a little out over my skis, but I think technology is going to cure many diseases, many ills. I think we're going to see Elon's idea of universal high income will be fantastic, but we may have some difficult moments as we get through the transition. And our view, our role at Axon is like, how do we arm the police for that? In a way, we'll look back and we'll be proud of the way that we did it to help them do this the right way. I mean, it's going to be perfect, but let's put some good controls in place and help make people more comfortable that we're going to get through this together okay. Rick, I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm glad we got to finally do this. Thanks for joining us on the All In interview. It's been great. It's been a lot of fun. Anytime. I'm going all in. All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could sit here and talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions, I admit it. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What do you guys think? That was fun. That was great. I'm going all in.