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

In this episode, Peter and Rick discuss Rick’s Moonshot of cutting gun-related deaths between police and the public by 50% in 10 years and his company, Axon. You will learn about: 05:35 | The Story That Began Axon's Journey. 22:47 | Creating A Weapon That Police Want To Choose Over A Firearm. 56:22 | Are Tasers & Electricity Really The Best Non-Lethal Options? Rick Smith, CEO of Axon Enterprise, founded the company in 1993 with a mission to protect life and render bullets obsolete. His dedication to public safety has led Axon to pioneer TASER energy weapons, revolutionize the body camera industry, and develop the world's leading digital evidence management platform. > Learn about Axon. > Learn about his Moonshot. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor: I use AG1 literally every day. Build a foundation for better health with Athletic Green’s AG1. Try it today. If you want to try House of Macadamia products for yourself, you can get 20% off your first order by using the code PETER20 at checkout. Just go to houseofmacadamias.com/peter and enter the code PETER20 at checkout. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:08Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  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 a 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 nearby.

• 1:49Peter Diamandis?

  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 gonna 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

• 2:34Peter Diamandis?

  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 Moon Shots 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 gonna save lives and change culture, and it's just the right thing to do. It was a conversation we had years ago at an X Prize event, and Rick

• 3:16Peter Diamandis?

  has taken up the mantle. I'm here with none other than Rick Smith, the founder and CEO of Axon, the creator of the Taser. Rick, I love seeing you in your spaceship, buddy.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  All right. You gotta, you gotta kind of live the moment, you know, we, 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.

• 3:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, well, and, 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, you know, one of the things I loved about the Star Trek universe and its abundance vision and model was, you know, you didn't have these devices that killed people instantly. You had these that you could set the stun. And, you know, if you didn't know... How dangerous the person was, you could just stun them. And I, let's begin with, pal, just to share with the audience here. What is your moonshot?

• 4:22Peter Diamandis?

  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?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:41Peter Diamandis?

  So cutting the public killed by policemen and policemen killed by public by 50%?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, cut it in half.

• 4:51Peter Diamandis?

  Cut it in half. And what's the absolute number right now? How many people die in gun-related incidents between the public and police?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a little over 1,100 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.

• 5:14Peter Diamandis?

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

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Well, if you kind of go back to first principles thinking, you know, it's always helpful in just about any problem you're going after. You know, you mentioned earlier in Star Trek, you could use the phaser if you didn't know if someone was dangerous or not. It 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 really dug in. That the fact a gun kills somebody is actually a huge negative.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  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 of killing someone and stopping them reliably. Or 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.

• 6:35Peter Diamandis?

  So, um, I, I, let's, let's begin with, I mean, people have heard about a taser. Some people may have a taser, uh, but, uh, I want to go back to your story. I'm going 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, uh, how you became the CEO and founder of Axon and, and took over this amazing technology. Do you mind sharing your, uh, that founding story with us?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Sure. Uh, so we wind the clock back to 30 years ago. Uh, it's our 30th anniversary this year. And 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. You know, there's many great things to love about the US. Uh, one of them asked me if I knew anyone who'd been shot and killed. And that really drove the point home. So I am a bit of a science fiction geek. Uh, I also, uh, studied neurobiology in college.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  So I originally wanted to work on Luke Skywalker's robotic limb. I thought like the idea of the human machine interface, this idea that the human nervous system might control machinery that augments us, uh, would be a really cool thing to work on. Then in graduate school, Cory and Todd got shot and killed. And I had this sort of epiphany, well, wait a minute. I could reverse the sequence. What if I could build a machine that could control the human body? And 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 19, early 1960s, he was one of the leaders of the Apollo project.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  And 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 dealt out 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 had kind of an odd couple, 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.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I've got a few of the data points here that I looked up for our show. And the numbers are interesting, 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.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's one I actually have to be pretty careful with because some people will, will say we're being, you know, we're downplaying the risks, you know, 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.

• 10:32Peter Diamandis?

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

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It was, well, our first product failed. So Jack had failed twice in the seventies, the eighties. So two companies had 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 of 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 would take. And we went and we did the hard science of, okay,

• 11:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:44Peter Diamandis?

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

• 11:48Speaker 02

  That would have been in late nineteen ninety six that we did the first pig experiment.

• 11:53Peter Diamandis?

  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?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  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, you know, fell down. They all fought through it. And we realized, my gosh, like 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 two thousand five hundred dollars. One pig, one test session, and we happened to find a professor at University of Nebraska,

• 12:46Speaker 02

  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 when 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, you know, 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.

• 13:26Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, it's Peter. I want to 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 and 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 the best on the market by a huge margin. First of all, it actually tastes amazing.

• 14:10Peter Diamandis?

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• 14:53Peter Diamandis?

  That's athleticgreens.com backslash moonshots. Check it out, you'll thank me. Without question, this is the best green drink product, the most nutritious, the most flavorful I've found. All right, let's go back to the episode. You know, one of the things that I love doing is inspiring entrepreneurs to take moonshots. I think it's one of the most important things. And moonshots are hard, and we're going to come back to, you know, the challenges you've had to take on with your moonshot here on cutting gun-related violence by 50% in police public interactions. But, and you've been a member of the Abundant 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

• 15:37Peter Diamandis?

  MTPs have to come from 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.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  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. You know, 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

• 16:39Speaker 02

  we became about it. And I think that's what 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 going to find it a valuable problem if you solve it. And from there comes the source of all value.

• 17:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, again, I want everybody to hear this, you know, literally seven years to hit almost rock bottom, right? I'm going to be spending some time with Elon, same thing with him, right? He was on the brink of bankruptcy, you know, 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.

• 17:27Peter Diamandis?

  And now, how, if I might ask, Axon, which owns Taser and all this technology, is a public company, how big is the company today?

• 17:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:47Peter Diamandis?

  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 dollar company. So, what kept you going? Was it just the, that, was it, I mean, some people keep going because they've 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 there?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  So, I'd 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 in 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, 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

• 19:04Speaker 02

  I'm down to my last $500,000, and I signed a guarantee at Silicon Valley Bank for a million, a 1.7 million dollar 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 an office in the Bay Area with beanbag chairs where everybody's getting rich. But no, I'm slogging it out. But I, at that point, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't let him get wiped out. So...

• 19:38Peter Diamandis?

  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. Right. 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.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'd say that's

• 19:58Speaker 02

  the mission plus that people responsibility. I mean, we learned this from, you know, people going to the military, like when you when you're a 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 you and it has to be authentic though, too. Like as an entrepreneur, you see a lot of companies that try 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 a mission first. And really, okay, does this make sense? Is it authentic? You know,

• 20:40Speaker 02

  is this gonna be the thing that motivates us? Because that authenticity is, I think, what grabs people by the heart.

• 20:44Peter Diamandis?

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

• 20:51Speaker 02

  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, you know, scientifically, you can you can contract the dead frog's 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.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  So we knew it could be done. And I just realized that they had never done the science work early on. They just they read a bunch of underwriter lab studies on electrical safety and then made some assumptions and engineered to it. So for us, it was that moment when we did that pig study. And we 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 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 Hand Combat for the Marine Corps, challenged him to rematch. When I shot him with an early

• 22:00Speaker 02

  taser weapon, he stood there and had a conversation with me. He didn't even flinch. And so I figured, if we can 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, then he pops up and he says, he, he, he starts to give me this very spiritual talk about what it's like to kill people. You know, he said, look, I've been in special forces. I've done it. I've, I trained people to kill with their bare hands. That means I've, 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

• 22:44Speaker 02

  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, you know, all the expenses and payroll, we had to pay for tooling, you know, initial inventory. We had nothing left for the launch. So when we launched, we actually, it was Hans Marrero, this, this Marine in a Winnebago going cross-country, doing demos at police departments. And the weapon was so effective, he would come in, in, with a hundred dollar bill. And he'd say, okay,

• 23:28Speaker 02

  who's the toughest guy in the department? If you can come get the hundred bucks, it's yours. And then we just saw the, the, 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.

• 23:46Peter Diamandis?

  So we're seeing that all the classic elements here of, you know, of getting the tech working and getting the product market fit correct. In this case, it was police departments. It wasn't, you would try going direct to consumer. And did you make the flip at that point to law enforcement?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, what, uh, so when we were in the consumer space and consumers, now we launched with the sharper image catalog, if you remember them.

• 24:10Peter Diamandis?

  I remember it. I had zero G flights in the sharper image catalog.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, which maybe wasn't perfect for credibility. Uh, you know, 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. Uh, 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. Um, now since then, we've 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.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  But first, we've got to win in policing. And once people see that, you know, the real eureka moment is when a cop will choose our weapon over a gun, not because they're, uh, 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, the brain stem. So, um, 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. Uh, and, and I think

• 25:42Speaker 02

  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, uh, that is just a huge advantage. You know morally and legally and from a liability perspective.

• 25:55Peter Diamandis?

  And I 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, you know, cheaper to operate. I mean, and good for the environment, as one would say.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Hey, you know, I I use that analogy all the time, like the the brilliance. You know, when electric cars were like shitty little golf carts, nobody was gonna use them, right? You can't, we're not gonna solve climate crisis by taking away something people love. And people love their guns. In our R and D labs, we were working on next generation taser weapons that it would be more fun to own than a gun. Uh, 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.

• 26:43Peter Diamandis?

  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 a when a law enforcement officer makes a decision to use their weapon. They're not aiming to maim somebody. They're they're taking aim to to end that life. Right? It's and and so you don't have an option. You don't have a phaser on stun option. Um, and I'm sure the psychological impact to individuals who have taken lives is significant.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  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. Um, 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. Uh, turns out the 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, "Man, what a terrible outcome." You know, we all know what happens if the human brain, when you're afraid and you're surging with adrenaline

• 28:04Speaker 02

  and your cognitive functions are not fully there, you're fighting your own fight or flight response. And 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.

• 28:17Peter Diamandis?

  So let's go back to the moment of your, of your moonshot. We've talked about when the, you know, did you, let me back for a second. Did you have what we now in our parlance called a massive transformative purpose?

• 28:30Peter Diamandis?

  Back when you started this company? And I want to transition to the moon, to the moment where you came up with this moonshot.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  It was less well-developed. I mean, I think our idea has always been to create an alternative to firearms for self-defense.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  And I think we went after the consumer market first, and then we learned, oh, we've 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.

• 29:31Peter Diamandis?

  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 timeframe 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.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Well, I would tell you, it actually is a result, direct result, Peter, of attending a Bennett 360 and working with you. So we had, 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, or other tech conferences, right? You take inspiration about what's possible. And in particular, the work you've done around, around 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 in our team internally, where I started saying, "Look, our moonshot is to outperform the pistol,

• 30:38Speaker 02

  not to sell the next generation taser. We don't want to get stuck in this incrementalist loop where the iPhone 14 is a little better than the iPhone 13. We have got to, 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 could 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

• 31:20Speaker 02

  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 is, 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." And so that's where we then broadened it to say, "Okay, we're going to add up the sum total of everybody who gets shot and killed in police incidents, including the cops."

• 32:03Speaker 02

  And that is sort of, that's when we hit this resonance where we had police unions and civil rights advocates all agreeing, "Hey, this..."

• 32:12Speaker 02

  This is a good goal that's kind of inclusive of all stakeholders.

• 32:15Peter Diamandis?

  And it is. For those who have ever used a Taser or who own guns, let's take this, 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 you know, with little to no training, was able to hit my targets and felt good about it. Can you, so dive in, describe this device to us. Describe what it looks like, how it works. Get people excited about the alternative.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  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 caused so much pain, or ultimately they've just died.

• 33:20Peter Diamandis?

  They bled to death, yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  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 designed 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. And 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.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  The muscles are locking up and that means you can't, 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. It 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.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  We've copied a lot of user interface because firearms are shaped the way they are for very good reasons. You know, over hundreds of years, we've really refined like 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.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:13Peter Diamandis?

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

• 35:18Speaker 02

  It'll go out to 45 feet.

• 35:20Peter Diamandis?

  What's interesting for me was, once you've hit the target, and if the target is partially disabled, you, the person you're aiming at, you can send another bolt of current down the wires, right? You can hit them without actually having to fire again. You can, you can charge, you can send a charge down the wires again.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yep, you can re-energize by just tapping the safety switch.

• 35:47Peter Diamandis?

  And that, that feels like the ability to make sure that you're able to have control of the situation and be safe.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, long term, you know, I mentioned, so 45 feet is as far as you can go with the handheld device. And we think that's approaching a limit. And we might be able to get to 50 or 60 feet. But beyond that, and 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 50 feet, 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 100 feet, I can go a mile. And in fact, I can begin to remove the human operator from harm's way.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  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. Like, 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 and starts, you know, 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 can get to a point where we have technology that can safely come in and subdue them without requiring, you know, our sons and daughters in uniform, another person put

• 37:22Speaker 02

  themselves in risk, I think we get 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.

• 37:34Peter Diamandis?

  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 AR, augmented reality, into the Axon world as well?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're very focused on VR right now. And part of the reason is, if I take a step back...

• 38:04Speaker 02

  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 a 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 have, you'll compete in terms of speed and score.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  So up until now, training with a taser has frankly been kind of boring. They're about thirty dollars 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 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, 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. It makes it very intuitive as you start to realize, okay.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  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 fascinates 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, and build all the right skills through high repetition.

• 39:43Peter Diamandis?

  How many times you've been shot?

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Eight.

• 39:46Peter Diamandis?

  Eight times by this. Does it get any easier?

• 39:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  It's a, it is one of my least favorite parts of the job. It's a. It's a very odd sensation. It's more, it's, it's frankly a little more scary than painful, just because you lose control of parts of your body or seizing up. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

• 40:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I tried to volunteer once at Singularity University to, to take it, but you said no. Probably, probably smart.

• 40:16Peter Diamandis?

  Did people tell you were crazy to go after this moonshot?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Yeah, yeah, I actually recently found a video from a couple of my friends who came out in the spring of 1994 when 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 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.

• 40:51Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, let me take a quick break from our episode to talk about something important for your diet. Now, as you know, I'm a huge longevity and health champion. Part of my focus is on exercise, sleep, and diet. And when it comes to diet, I'm super careful on what I eat. But throughout the day, when I need energy, I'm looking for a snack. And one of my favorite options is macadamia nuts. And there are four reasons. I want to share them with you. First, macadamia nuts are high in mono unsaturated fats, which are the good fats for your heart. It lowers LDL and raises your good cholesterol. Second, they taste great. And they're rich in fiber, which helps with digestion and

• 41:32Peter Diamandis?

  gut health. Third, macadamia nuts contain antioxidants and flavonoids, which protect your cells from damage and inflammation. And finally, macadamia nuts have a low glycemic index, which means they don't spike your blood sugar. They truly are the king of nuts. I get mine from House of Macadamia, which offers the best macadamia nuts in the world. They're sourced sustainably from South Africa. They offer a huge range of delicious nutritious products, including roasted and dipped macadamia nuts, macadamia nut bars, macadamia oils, which are actually Better than olive oil for cooking? If you want to try House of Macadamia products for yourself, you can get 20% off your first order by using the code PETER20 at checkout.

• 42:17Peter Diamandis?

  Just go to houseofmacadamias.com/peter20 and enter the code PETER20 at checkout. That's houseofmacadamias.com/peter20. And then again, use the code PETER20 to get that 20% off. Trust me, you'll love them as much as I do. Now, back to our episode. You know, one of the things I'd love is, is let's crystallize some of the, uh, the learnings you had on building this extraordinary company as a, uh, as an entrepreneur and getting to this moonshot.

• 42:52Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, financing was never easy. And this, you had financing principally from family and friends, right? This is the most traditional early stage. Did you end up taking outside capital before taking the company public?

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Oh, man, we tried. So the, my dad made his money out in Silicon Valley, uh, in the eighties. And so he had raised money from venture capitalists. So he was pretty well connected, but nobody, but friend, my, 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.

• 43:30Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  We got nosed from every VC. We talked to, you know, 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.

• 43:44Peter Diamandis?

  Like a familiar story, you know? 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, 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, um, you have, it's a digital outcome.

• 44:08Peter Diamandis?

  And, and sometimes you don't win, but, uh, but you knew in your heart that there was a there there, yes?

• 44:14Speaker 02

  We did. I mean, look, there were dark days. There, 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. Cause 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've just got to have faith.

• 44:42Peter Diamandis?

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

• 44:52Speaker 02

  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, I got really burned out, you know, even after we finally made it, you know, successful.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  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, cause 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 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.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  That now the company scales and uh and and we you know, we we hire slow and we fire fast. Uh if we find people are not a culture fit, we move them out quickly. Uh and uh spend spend a lot of time trying to get the team right because if you get the team right, everything else takes care of itself.

• 46:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I just uh I want to put an exclamation point on the fire fast. You know, there's you're a super nice guy and uh I've known you for a while now and I think probably want people to do well. And there's an 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 the kindest thing you can do is is move them out to where they can find something that works for them. It's really hard. Uh any any more thoughts on that?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  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. Like, you know, I get people excited about the mission. I struggle, you know, giving people hard feedback. Uh but I've learned, you know, at least I'm self-aware and I've I've got a chief operating officer who's really good. He's a fantastic, you know, head coach and and.

• 47:40Peter Diamandis?

  A hard ass.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, he's kind of a hard ass and and you mean that and it actually works well for the company that we've separated those functions. Um it it gives a little bit of a separation, you know, for me and my sort of brand within the company from, you know, the inevitable 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.

• 48:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I would say.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Many times you regret waiting too long, never regretted doing it too fast. And everywhere those people's landed on their feet, the thing that used to kill me was I don't like that feeling of all this guy's got kids and a family and. Uh you know, I'm going to ruin her life if we fire like that's not true. They everybody ends up landing on their feet somewhere else and they're usually happier.

• 48:26Peter Diamandis?

  Um they know it and you know it and they're wondering when it's going to happen and it starts to degrade rapidly. Um pal, what other lessons as a, you know, an extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur would you would you put out there? Was there um when you were looking for this moonshot of reducing it by 50%?

• 48:46Peter Diamandis?

  Did you have other moonshots in mind? Or did that one sort of just feel right in the sweet spot?

• 48:53Speaker 02

  This one, I mean, tuning the numbers, you know, 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 continue to add more focus and clarity to our mission.

• 49:14Peter Diamandis?

  So let's take, 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 Axon beyond the Taser 10?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, 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, we should not accept that killing people is okay. Now, that's not to say you're never going to be a sicko or a serial killer. But like, 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 like, to me, that is an animating concept that, and, and 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.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Like, if this ends very badly for Mr., you know, Mr. Putin and, you know, sends a very strong message that this is not a successful strategy to engage in, you know, war is 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, right? And 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.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  And with fairly basic machine vision processing would fly up autonomously. They, you know, you'd send them into area coverage. And then if it's a tank, they'd take out the turret. They'd, you know, drop a thermite, uh, 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. Uh, but again, it's sort of not how we think. We tend to think of, uh, oh, no wars are like about killing people. No, they're not. They're about how do you degrade the enemy's capability, uh, to do what they want to do. So, you know, I'm interested in, we're starting to approach more aggressively the military,

• 51:38Speaker 02

  uh, 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. You can just wipe out their capabilities and, uh, do it in the most moral, high ground way, which is not killing a bunch 18 to, you know, 25 year old kids.

• 52:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Kids is the right, right, uh, uh, you know, descriptor for someone in the military at age 18, 19, 20.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Well, I think about like 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. How do you end up with 150,000 of these young Russian kids, you know, doing the awful things they're doing in Ukraine? You know, there's, uh, most of them didn't end up wanting to be there. And the experience of, of like what Putin's doing to his own people, I think is every bit as horrific as what he's doing to, uh, 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. Uh, I think humanity can, can kind of rise above that level of thinking.

• 52:55Peter Diamandis?

  It's almost like, uh, again, the Star Trek universe having a deflector, uh, shields, um, to, 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?

• 53:24Speaker 02

  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 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 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 911? She says, no, no, no, I've got the taser, I'm going downstairs, I'm sweeping. No, no, no, baby, like, stop, call 911. And so I'm imagining this, so today if you want to protect yourself or your family or loved one,

• 54:09Speaker 02

  you, 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? The 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, Mr. Smith, this is 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 with police dispatch, they're on the way. Think like a personal concierge with a professional weapon system operator.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  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 you know, you go 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 going to want to have very tight system control. So there's some local physicality that has to happen. It'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.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 55:43Peter Diamandis?

  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 X Prize at a visioneering years ago was how do you, how do you protect our schools, our places of worship without making them lockdown zones?

• 56:05Speaker 02

  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 of it was

• 56:17Peter Diamandis?

  Why's that?

• 56:18Speaker 02

  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, I like you, I like all of us, I get tired of Sandy Hook and then, you know, Marjorie, whatever the, the high school in Florida, right? It's, it's just, it keeps happening.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Long term, I think there will be a technology element. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to work, but we, at minimum, we need to give the police better tools to be able to go in rapidly. And I think, you know, without sending cops bristling with lethal weapons into the building to have to bring somebody down.

• 57:15Peter Diamandis?

  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 hitting your command and control?

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you want to bring somebody under control without causing injury or death, 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.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Chemical inhibition is hard. You can do it with inhalants. Nerve gas is one, for example. But it becomes highly illegal.

• 58:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, where it goes.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, or the Russians tried the, I 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 as the primary immediate impact. But you could have a layered defense as well, where you might hit somebody with electricity, put them down, and then dose them with, you know, with a tranquilizer.

• 58:27Peter Diamandis?

  So interesting, right, because the tranquilizers take time, and you don't know what the dose is, depending on the person's weight, and, you know, 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 knocks, literally knocks you off your feet, how long are you out for typically, or how long are you disabled for?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  So the effect is kind of like a light switch. So like, right now, I'm contracting the muscles 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 the 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,

• 59:34Speaker 02

  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 three, four, five, five-second bursts till they can get the handcuffs on.

• 59:46Peter Diamandis?

  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, you know, I mean, a lot of the Robocop movies of the past portray, you know, robotic, AI-driven. And Axon is in not just the, in the taser business. You also make body cameras. Can you talk a little about sort of where the technologies are beyond just the taser? And where you think they might be going?

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  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? It's a fairly challenging problem. So today, we run one of the largest data sets in the world on Microsoft Azure. We're 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, would want, at least any time soon,

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01:50Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, 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.

• 1:02:03Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think, do you think the public's ready for robots taking action? We've seen, 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.

• 1:02:23Peter Diamandis?

  Where, how far are we from seeing, you know, robots and drones in the public sector? The public legal sector, you think?

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  So interestingly, last summer, after we had the, the whole debate about the, 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.

• 1:02:51Peter Diamandis?

  I would be, yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Now, the, yeah, I mean, most people are much more rational. Yeah, 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, the, the public overall is a pretty rational head on its shoulders. And given the epidemic of, 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, we're personally going to be working very closely on developing the right ethics

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  frameworks and working with the right regulatory bodies. This is a place where we will move methodically and not try to jump the gun.

• 1:03:44Peter Diamandis?

  And, and do you, you know, what's the mindset from the police force? I mean, because you're dealing at all, all levels. I mean, are they welcoming? Are they 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?

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  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's it. I would tell you the the new Taser 10 we just launched. We are continually hearing the word game changer and a lot of a lot of positive feedback. I think part of that is also, you know, the the feedback loop of just what's happening in the public. Like when I started in 1999 in policing, when we entered policing, one of the most common pushback we got back then was like, look, some people just need killing.

• 1:04:48Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  And you do not hear that anymore, like literally that's gone. And I think part of it is what's happened with body cameras and the whole public debate and iPhones. Right? I mean, cameras are everywhere now. We see, I think, as you 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 and it's out there.

• 1:05:11Peter Diamandis?

  And people are less violent when when you're being observed, right? People act differently when they're being watched.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:05:17Peter Diamandis?

  In in that regard, you know, 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 and robotics at some point, and the police department is dealing with old school responses. Do they hear that message?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  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 in, 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 and 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

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  it's something they're going to carry or in their tech stack.

• 1:06:27Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. 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 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 a week,

• 1:07:06Peter Diamandis?

  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 demandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. So you launched this specific moonshot, how long ago?

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:45Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:56Peter Diamandis?

  Nice. And your confidence level is high?

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  I am. Yeah, it is I. One of the things we're working on now, I've challenged the 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 those 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

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  officer has a TASER 10, they now go into the new cohort that we're going to measure against the historical cohort. And we're going to, that's going to be our first canary in the coalmine. Can we begin to move the needle in those agencies who deploy early?

• 1:08:59Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely. What we might learn, like, maybe shootings don't drop in those agencies. Well, we damn well want to know that. Like, hey, why not? Like, what did we get wrong? Like, 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, you know, for the business. So, I think, we try to design our incentives so we make more profit and more money when we do the right things. So you want to, you know, have your business model reinforce your mission.

• 1:09:52Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  The other thing that's, that's, 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 to work on them, just like a, you know, 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?

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, obviously, we're looking at things like AR experiences and, you know, other 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.

• 1:11:11Peter Diamandis?

  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 with Taser and about your moonshot?

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Yep. So we have a website set up, thisismoonshot.com. And that's really geared as a 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 the how do we get a solutions mindset about how we can make leasing better? Or the company's main website, which is just axon, A X O N dot com.

• 1:11:51Peter Diamandis?

  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 it's fraught with challenges. Is it worth it? What's your what's your message or inspiration for them?

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely. People want to be inspired. Like they don't want to just go to, well, you know, our, our basic needs, if you've got a decent job, your basic needs have been met in Maslow's hierarchy, you know, 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, grab hold of. So, uh, I've also seen cases where it's clearly inauthentic and you've got things that just make you wince when you hear it, like, oh God, like that doesn't feel real. So I, 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, and that, yeah, this makes sense.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  And we're doing it for the right reasons, not to just, you know, put a gloss, uh, you know, on a, on a money-making venture.

• 1:13:06Peter Diamandis?

  And, uh, you know, you just mentioned something that's important to point out. There is a, a positive impact on, uh, your employees and also a positive impact, I think, on how the world views your company and helping you attract new talent. You know, 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?

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Like the, uh, Jeff Cunnens is, uh, my chief product officer. Uh, he was running Alexa Entertainment at Amazon a few years ago. Now, this is before the formal moonshot, but well, God, I mean, he read my book, The End of Killing. Uh, and that's, that is what got him to leave, you know, a fantastic job at Amazon to come join us was the mission. Uh, and, and we're, you know, the moonshot now has become central to pretty much every time we talk about the, you know, the company, including in our recruiting.

• 1:14:02Peter Diamandis?

  That's amazing. I, I don't think people realize the value that moonshots can have on the perceived value of your company, both to investors and to, uh, your employees. And in success, pal, um, countless lives will be saved and I think, um,

• 1:14:21Peter Diamandis?

  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 Binance 360 community and excited to come back and report to everyone listening, how you're doing. When's the next major milestone for you, I think?

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  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. You know, 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. This was right as we were, 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.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:15:35Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Peter.