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

(0:00) Axon CEO Rick Smith joins David Friedberg (2:39) History of TASER/Axon: brink of bankruptcy to IPO (9:05) Going public during the dot-com crash, selling to police, battling shorts and an SEC investigation, pivoting to software (20:47) Creating the police body cam, surveillance state concerns around Flock (35:25) Freedom vs safety, Skydio deal, Taser drone project controversy (45:24) Future of robotic systems and drones in policing Thanks to our partner for making this possible: AppLovin Ads is AppLovin's AI advertising platform reaching over a billion daily active users across mobile games. Full-screen video ads with a 35-second median watch time. Advertisers are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. AppLovin Ads is now open to all advertisers. Sign up at https://applovin.com/ALLIN Follow Rick: https://x.com/AxonRick Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@allin Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What is it like being tased?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  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. It 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 to kick control of their body. And then the current was off. But it's, it's not fun. But when it's off, it's off. Like you're right back to normal the second it's off.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, Cops. Remember Cops? This kid I went to high school with, his dad produced Cops on TV. I, I guess it's always been interesting.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Live PD was the new version of Cops. And their twist was that it was live. So people would tune in on, on weekend nights. Because like, oh, I want to see what's happening, like a live sporting event. Uh, but then they got canceled uh, after the George Floyd incident, uh, you know, I think the production companies were afraid to be sharing, you know, pro police. Uh, so we, we actually ourselves had done Axon Studios for a period of time to try to do exactly what you're talking about. Like a, you know, live content business, uh, out of the body cameras. But it's just, you know, you gotta know your corporate DNA. We, uh, we are too like pro police and we're like, you know, we're, we're a big corporation that

• 1:36Speaker 01

  wasn't going to do the edgy things you would need to do to make that a great content business. But I think it's there for somebody to do it.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, YouTube works.

• 1:47Speaker 00

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• 2:22Speaker 00

  Rick Smith, CEO of Axon. Welcome to the All In interview.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  It's awesome to be here. Thanks.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  I'm glad we could make this work out. I know, uh, we had talked about having you come out to the summit and got delayed. Missed that window, but I'm really glad that this has worked out. You know, your business history is fascinating. I would love if you're okay with it, maybe to go back a little bit to the beginning of the business. Your company used to be called Taser. I think we all remember the original Taser name and product. But maybe you could take us back, like, we could do a real quick recap how the company got started in the early days.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, we started in the early nineties. So this is the only job I've ever had. Started in 93 in a garage in Tucson. Um, 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, not, everything is like what you see on the news. Uh, 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.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  And the thing that struck me was, why is it that like bullets are still a thing in 1993, much less 2026? And what I mean is like, it's a pretty old technology, right? I mean, bullets have been around for many centuries. Um, and the simple insight 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 uh, by a NASA scientist who lived in Tucson, Arizona. I found him through his patent filings. And one thing led to another. I just called him up and I said, hey, man, whatever happened to this, this tech? It seems to me like this is something the world could use.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And shortly thereafter, he invited me down to his house and here I am, this 23 year old kid and this 73 year old man. It sounds like, uh, I don't know, a comic book, uh, sort of plot. But we started in his garage to build new tasers. And, uh, I can tell you, at the beginning, everybody thought I'd lost my mind. Uh, in fact, I have a great video, uh, of Emil Micu, 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 going to go make electrical weapons.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  So you found the inventor of the taser device through a patent filing, go and visit him and buy it or license it and form a company around it?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yep. Uh, in fact, I convinced him to do it with me, to come out of retirement and sort of show me the way. So we were building the first tasers in his garage from parts from Ace Hardware. Uh, because the first thing we had to do was to get federal government approval that the new taser would not be considered some sort of illegal weapon. Uh, and that would require a regulatory approval. As I look back, you just, you don't realize how fast you move when you're a startup. Relative to the rest of the world. Like we built our first prototype in 30 days from go. You know, now I've got 6,000 people. It was 93.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  93. And you started a company right away and built the first prototype with your own money?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, it was friends and family. My, now, my dad was a serial entrepreneur. Uh, and he had had one successful company in Silicon Valley. So he knew a lot of the VCs. But no VC would touch us, right? We weren't the internet in late nineties. It was right in the peak internet boom. Uh, and again, everybody, uh, thought we were this sort of oddball, uh, oddball thing. And I'm actually pretty proud now that we've seen enough success that, uh, and with the changes in the world, that defense and policing technology is now much more mainstream than it was back then.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  But this was a handheld taser device. What, what was the market initially? Was it to sell into police forces? How did you think you were going to go to market and what was your first sale?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, our first, our, our first market was consumers. So, uh, you know, police could buy the original taser. But due to, basically the original taser was a firearm, but it looked like a flashlight. That puts it into this category 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, you know, really works, why aren't the police using it?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And so we basically realized we, we need to go prove 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.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  And so you spent 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 going to throw the towel in, we should go do something else with my life? I mean, this is kind of a classic entrepreneur. You know, how many times are you willing to pivot question?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, we had two failed product launches and then in 1998, I was visiting some of my friends up in Silicon Valley who'd taken jobs, you know, at, at companies with dumb names like Yahoo. Uh, and 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, it was him and one of his friends that were funding this. And I said, look, I, I think we should just shut it down. You know, we failed twice. Uh, and my dad looked at me and he said, well, you know, it would have been nice to figure that out a couple of 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.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  So we have no choice. I'm putting my last 500,000 in. And the other investor was a guy named Bruce Culver. Uh, shout out Bruce if you're watching. Uh, Bruce matched him. And so we, that was going to be the last $1 million we would ever get. We would have to survive on it. And with that, we managed to design, tool, manufacture and launch the police taser and then shoestring it along the cash flow, break even, and eventually an IPO two years later.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  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?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. And it actually, looking back on it, um, it was just an alignment of the fates. So yeah, the internet bubble popped in 2000. And in late 2000, an investment bank came to one of our training events. And they basically were like, oh my gosh, you're not internet. You guys make a physical product, you have real revenue. We're taking you public. And so we went public specifically, I think because banks needed deals and we were not internet. Uh, and we went public at a massive, about $12 million valuation.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Wow. And that was a big, that was a big outcome though, right? I mean, you guys owned a hundred percent of the company. You didn't have VCs or institutional guys on the cap table.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. I mean, we were a tiny, tiny, uh, market cap to go public, but because of that, you know, we ended up being the, the, the highest return, I think that investment bank Paulson out of Oregon ever had. Uh, and for us, like, I'll tell you, for me, it was just, it was such a relief that we were able to raise enough money to be able to pay off some shareholder notes so that I knew my dad wasn't going to end up in the poorhouse. That was, to me, the biggest relief is not destroying your family. And then everything from there has been gravy.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  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?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  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?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  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 hundred dollar bill and he would go into a police department, explain to them what we're doing. And up until then, non-lethal weapons were seen as kind of snake oil, like they, like, "Yeah, pepper spray hurts, but you can 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 a hundred dollars if they could come and take it. And we hit them, they would fall down, they'd dust themselves off and go, "Oh, my God, that was way more powerful than I was expecting." Some would try again. And then immediately, they saw the value.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've had cops tell me, "My gosh, like, this would have prevented me from shooting someone or getting in a 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, you know, within a year, we hit cash flow breakeven.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  And then you had like a decade where the stock kind of stayed in the same range, didn't it?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  A lot of people think like, "Okay, you go public, this thing's gonna 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 spent another decade kind of with this valuation in this range of a couple bucks a share, right?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, actually, let me give you, it's more exciting than that. So, seven years of like, "Are we gonna 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- and three-year return basis, we were number one.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Does your Google went public?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Uh, 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 could do a whole hour on this. There was a short-selling attack. We had big short positions in the stock. My personal assistant was actually a mole for short sellers who was selling.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, really?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  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 thirty-three to seven dollars 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

• 14:52Speaker 01

  your investigation because I may go out of business if this drags on." And then that's when the long doldrums began. Like, the stock never fully recovered from there and we were massively hit.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  What happened with that investigation? That investigation, you moved on from it?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  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 things there.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  And sorry, what's your market cap during this time?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Uh, it peaked about two billion in late 2004 and then it was backed to about a hundred million.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  So, you're, you get hundreds of lawsuits when you're kind of like a hundred million dollar market cap company that you're dealing with.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  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 two million dollars. 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 two million dollars, 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.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  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. We're reasonable people. But, you sue us on something where we think, you know, we're in the right, we will, we dig in like religious fanatics to defend our belief system. And that's important and that's what protected our business.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  This lasts for years, right? These lawsuits, this market cap kind of being static? This went on till, what, about 2012 or so?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  And Rick, a buddy of mine, Hadi Partovi, is on your board, right?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  He is, yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  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?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  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. Like, I've started this software company. I, you know, I built the original tasers in a garage.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I feel like I got my hands around this. But, this software thing, you know, turns out, the guy I'd hired is probably, you know, not the right, not the right guy. We were having technical issues. And frankly, I was struggling to wrap my head around, 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 and get the right team in place. We moved, like, we were originally building our own data center that we were gonna manage for our customers. We had a near catastrophic outage where we nearly lost all our customer data. And, you know, Hadi was like, "Hey, man, like, there's plenty of hard things to do in this

• 19:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Did he stay on your board?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's still on my board.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Amazing. I mean, the stock price, you're like a 35, 40 billion dollar market cap company today. He must have done well. I'm assuming.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and, 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, you know, he helped me think that through and he was right, you know, now we have the, the Taser is a small part of the business. It's important. But, you know, it's, we have an expansive business. Now, we manage, I think, more video every day than YouTube. Now they have a lot more viewers, but we have over a million police officers uploading two hours of video, you know, every day from one of these body cameras.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Uh, so we have a ton of content and of course, it's got to be securely managed and shared. And there's been a lot of complexity. Uh, and of course, I've got a great team in place now, thanks to Hadi coming in and, and sort of helping me learn this business and rebuild the plane while we were flying.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Good. Go, Hadi.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  These are police officers, right?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, police officers. I was co-defending a case in Northern California where somebody died in police custody. It was a young, it was a 40 year old man with a 20 year methamphetamine problem and he was in really bad shape. And I remember the police officers telling me as we're watching the trial, the family kept putting up pictures of his high school graduation. And the officers looked at me and they said, that's not the human being I saw the night I went to that house. I saw somebody 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 was, you know, had overdosed on meth. But that never came across to the jury. And in that moment, I said, my God, we have to record what you see.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Because like when police officers describe things, they have to be very professional. In this case, it was, you know, 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, you're getting your asses kicked. Frankly, you need to tell your story with more passion. And they said, Rick, we don't get to do that. Like we work for the government. If, if we get caught in one half truth, that can be the end of our career. And that's when we realized like, 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.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  Weren't there body cam companies already at the time? Did they exist? Was this concept novel?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  The concept was new. I mean, you did have GoPro with like consumer cameras. So we certainly didn't invent the cameras, but we, um, can a quick detour, we were building the first police body camera. And then the employee that was building it actually quit in the middle of the night and launched the product a week later. Turns out he was actually funding it with his stock options to build it against us. That's another bit of drama. But yes, we, we were building the industry's first body camera. We ultimately, you know, made peace and we acquired that company back into the fold down the road. But, but that's what, that's what led to the eventual explode. The reason that we're a, I don't know, a $30 billion company today, up from a couple hundred million is because of the body camera.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you, when we launched the body camera, police didn't want to wear it. We had seven years of miserable failure where cops told us there's, you know, this is big brother. They're worried that their supervisor is going to nitpick them. I mean, look, change is hard, right? People find a lot of reasons like to be afraid of, of, of, of new things. But we just believed in our, in our soul. Guys, you need to be able to show people what you do. Uh, you're being accused of all sorts of awful stuff. And we made a double bet. Not only 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.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  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, 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 there is also for their own safety, their own protection and for winning cases?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  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, uh, 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. Cause 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.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  And as I put her into the patrol cars, I'm driving her into the station. She starts screaming at him, I'm going to say you raped me. I'm going to say you raped me unless you have me out of the car right now. And he said, ma'am, I just want to let you know, this is a body camera. I've 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 turns into a he said, she said, like that could be a career ending allegation with no way to disprove it. So that was, that was like a microcosm, but the moment that things flipped was the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Remember Ferguson?

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  White officer, black subject. Now, uh, Michael Brown was unarmed, but he was significantly larger than Officer Wilson. And according to Officer Wilson, they were fighting over the gun. Like the officer, you know, an officer brings a gun to every fight they get in. And once they're fighting over the gun, you know, he's justified to defend himself. But if you remember the stories, the family was saying things like, remember hands up, don't shoot. That, that Michael Brown was trying to surrender. If that's true, then that was a cold blooded murder. But if you listen to the officer, he says, hey, I was being attacked. In fact, I think he had a broken eye, a broken bone above his eye. Uh, the subsequent review ended up showing that the officer was largely correct, but you couldn't prove it.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And it was out after that case, Michael Brown's cam, 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 said 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 in 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.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Once, once Ferguson happened, then everybody needed body cameras and they needed them fast. Uh, and that's where our bet on the cloud made a big, remember back in the day, like, uh, you know, in 2010, cloud was relatively new to government. And they, they, they had this perception, well, if it's here and it's sitting on my computer, it's safe. Because it's here in the room with me, right? I can keep eyes on it. But that's not true in cybersecurity. There could be Chinese hackers, you know, in, 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. Um, and we could scale it. And so because of the urgency after Michael Brown, then it just really took off.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  And so today, virtually, I think every major police department now wears body cameras. Uh, 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, we're sort of maniacally mission driven. Uh, and I know that always sounds a little bit cheesy, but like we have the luxury of choosing what problems we want to solve. And so we work on things that are going to make a difference that we're excited about. Uh, and that leads to different product outcomes than companies that are just purely profit motivated.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's gone on recently with some of the public sentiment around monitoring. So there's this company Flock that's been installing cameras in cities and they're starting to get these city councils to Reject the cameras. And there's this concern about the development of effectively a 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.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Well, I, 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, you know, a surveillance state where every citizen is tracked everywhere they go. However, I think there, there's got to be some nuance here. We can't go back to United States as it existed in the 1950s, when there weren't cameras everywhere. The fact is, there are cameras everywhere. There's more cameras than people. You know, you and I probably have four cameras just on our cell phones, plus, you know, maybe a dozen in our house, plus all the business cameras. So really what this comes down to is how we think about data governance.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  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, the, 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.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  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, the, 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, it will be after the election. And we'll start to see some, some movement in federal regulation.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Do you think that people get that rationally? Because I've, I've noticed some things you can kind of get people to rationalize and you can understand them. And other things, people just have a very acute emotional response and they're like, icky, yucky, I don't want to have anything to do with that. I think Ring did that Super Bowl ad. And the, the negative sentiment around the Super Bowl ad being it's so creepy that all these cameras are monitoring everyone all over the neighborhood all the time. Is what really triggered a lot of people. And I think there were stories about Flock where these cameras were being used by city employees to look at people when they weren't supposed to be. So you could argue, yes, let's put in the guardrails, but the general notion that this sort of technology exists, this sort of power exists, the, this sort of

• 32:30Speaker 00

  privacy infiltration, intrusion exists, makes people feel really uncomfortable with it. How do you kind of think about changing that sentiment to being one of rational and guardrails? And away from the sort of big emotional response everyone's having?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think part of that's just an adjustment as, as society moves forward. Like, look, plenty of people still go, they, they may say, boy, that made me uncomfortable. But they go buy Ring cameras, specifically because Ring has some of the best technology for 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, is normal. Like, this is democracy. Like, as you move forward, people aren't going to agree on every topic. But over time, I think, you know, we find middle ground. I don't think it's reasonable. I don't think we're to end up with, like, making doorbell cameras illegal. Right? But I think Ring likely learned from that incident.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  They've, they've put really good safeguards in place. In fact, we have, 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, canvass 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, I actually had a, 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.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  I have Ring now because I do want to be able to share it if something like that happens. So I, I think it, it is also a matter of just, yes, not everybody's going to agree with the guardrails. But I think policymakers can't just, you know, we have to find the reasonable middle ground. We've got to find reasonable public policy. And we've already seen that, I think, again, I was really impressed with Senator Hawley's bill is 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 got to have viable case codes.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  That we know this is a legitimate case, that's somewhere in your law enforcement system. There's two key systems where you've got to have collaboration before you're running searches. So if you're searching for your ex, you're going to have to find another officer who's willing to put their career at risk 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 going to win 100%. Sure, there are going to be some people that are just going to have a fear of this and, and, but I think, you know, I've been around this long enough to see those things subside when you, when you get good rational safeguards in place.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  So, I mean, you guys start with the taser handheld device, reduce the use of guns in, 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?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, our mission is to protect life. And we, we chose those two words, meaning we focus on violence as a problem that's worth solving. 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.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  So if you don't know Skydio, they're the guys who build these robotic autonomous docks where a, a drone can now be flown from off a fire station anywhere in a city. And you can have a drone on scene in a matter of seconds. This is reducing the number of times police have to take resources to go, you know, to alarm calls. So it allows them to focus on bigger calls. And when there's big events, 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, in ways that the public wouldn't want them to?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  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, 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, 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 again, 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.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  And we should build this in ways that address those risks. We're not going to win everybody's, you know, not everybody's going to agree 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.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  You know, I think there's this great debate on how much safety and at what cost? That I think is what really triggers a lot of people, that the benefit to them individually of more safety doesn't feel felt as acutely as the risk or the cost to their privacy.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  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. And it's 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

• 39:24Speaker 00

  of crime happening? And then you arrest people before they do the crime. And, you know, everyone's kind of fantastical ideas become, is that really worth the risk? Like, do I really want to take on that level of cost to my individual liberties? Uh, to have, quote, that much more safety? And I think that seems to be the great debate people seem to be having right now. Is that, is that a fair characterization? Or do you think it's a little bit misguided?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  No, no, I think it's a fair debate, and that is the right debate, uh, to be having. And I think, but this is hard work, right? Like, it's, it's finding the balance. And what's interesting, you will find, um, the people who most want these sorts of technologies come from the poorest neighborhoods that have the highest crime rates. Paradoxically, those are the ones that, you know, people say, well, we worry about over policing. But when you, when you actually go out, uh, you know, frankly, a lot of the most concerns are coming from wealthy neighborhoods, uh, where this is more theoretical. But when you talk to people that are dealing with gun violence every day in their cities, they cheer when the police show up, uh, and they're the ones who want to have more of this technology. So there's deterrence. I mean, ultimately, I would say this, um,

• 40:33Speaker 01

  in America, sometimes we, we, 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, uh, deploy technology so we deter people from making bad decisions in the first place? Like, the best deterrence to criminal behavior is not long sentences. It's a high probability that you will get caught and prosecuted. And then the question is, how do we then balance that as well against making sure that we're not building technology that can be used to track everyday people? Uh, but those are interesting, those are interesting techno ethical problems to deal with, right? How do we build the tech to, to meet the ethical bar to make the right trade offs?

• 41:17Speaker 00

  You're right. I don't live or work in neighborhoods where I'm experiencing a lot of violent crime. I am driving through San Francisco and I got three speeding tickets. I'm like, get rid of those damn cameras, you know? Like, my reaction is, why are these cameras here? It's what this guy, Rob Henderson, calls luxury beliefs. I think there was an incident in, and I have this in my notes, in June of 2022, you had some members of your advisory board who quit in protest after you guys announced plans to develop a TASER-equipped surveillance drone that you were designing to stop school 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, what you've learned from it? And does that project still continue?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, that project is continuing, and that's, that's why they quit. That was, look, life can be challenging at times. I was very disappointed. We, we set up an AI ethics board to give us feedback, frankly, from, not from pro-police people, but from civil liberties groups that are concerned about policing, right? And that's been a very useful function. That's one of the reasons we've got, I think, great safeguards in how we built ALPR uh, and other technologies. Now, on this case, um, we had been working with them for about a year on the idea that we could have a TASER-capable drone to be used in extreme circumstances, like a school shooting was the, the incident there.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  But today, for example, if you have a person with a gun show up in a building anywhere in America, do you know how we stop them?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  We gotta wait for the police with the gun?

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we send in more people with guns and they have a gunfight.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, this is the Wild West, guys. Like, is that really the best we can do as a society? And so what we're saying is, rather than waiting and sending a person with gun to have more bullets flying, we could send in a drone or a robot armed with a non-lethal weapon. This is a key distinction. Like, you'll never get a cop that will take a non-lethal weapon up against somebody with a gun. But if we can send in a small drone or robot, then the, the, everything shifts. They're like, oh, wait a minute, now I can use non-lethal force. Now, we can argue whether or not the criminal deserves to 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 and D, uh, on this, that

• 43:35Speaker 01

  using non-lethal force safely deployed from a distance via drone or robot is in everybody's best interest compared to, you know, having more gunfights in society. Now, because the, the way that went down, uh, frankly, I think this was post George Floyd. Some of our advisors were worried about getting canceled over this issue. Many of them worked in universities and they were already being accused of being pro-police. Uh, and so I think there was some personal dynamics. Many of the people on the board privately agreed with me that like, you're right, Rick, this is a, this is a better solution than what we have today with sending in cops with body armor and assault rifles. Um, but it was too politically risky and it, and it blew up. But I'll tell you one thing I'm proud of. We didn't give up. Many companies have now canceled their ethics boards.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  We dug in, we reconstituted, we still have. It's been rebranded as our Equity and Ethics Advisory Council. And frankly, it now has more black and brown voices on it, where previously it was more academically focused. Like, if you want to talk about the concerns of over policing, it is primarily from underrepresented, you know, 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 want to talk about, again, the concerns of over policing, it should be from, uh, from communities who are most affected. Uh, and so you live and you learn, we've, we've recalibrated, but we've continued to bring in, uh, you know, people who have critical views of policing because we think those are important for us to understand their concerns.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  And by doing it early, we actually learn, in many cases, we can build safeguards into the product if you listen, uh, and you do it upfront. 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. Cause then all we can do is sort of argue about things. We, we've lost the ability to make significant design changes.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  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 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?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, first I would say policing is still fundamentally a human job. Um, any decisions about using force, uh, on another person will be made by humans. And that's a, that's a bright line for us. So even with the TASER drone you and I talked about earlier, part of what we learned from the concern was people are worried about misuse, abuse, how these things will be used. So any of the robotic systems we're involved in will not only have required human oversight, 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.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  So we're actually going to be building the least abusable technology in the history of, of policing. Like today, you give a cop a gun, they walk out the door. You have no control over what they do with it. You can prosecute them later. These robotic systems will give us the ability to have institutional decision-making with multiple parties in real time, which I think will lead to far less, uh, you know, mistakes, uh, less concerns about abuse. And I do believe both humanoids, I think drones will be bigger, faster. Uh, humanoids are coming as well. But again, that's why we, we invested in Skydio, uh, we, we bought almost half the company. We, we wanted to buy about as much as we could because we're big believers that there's going to be millions of drones, uh, in the next few years deployed in the US.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  But we also actually felt in this case, it was better for us to leave it as a, as an independent company that could move at startup speed and continue to raise and spend capital, uh, in ways that maybe weren't constrained by being part of a public company. And yet, at the same time, we've secured the, um, the exclusive rights. So we will be the exclusive channel into the markets that we care about. Cause we believe that is absolutely going to be one of the biggest parts of the future, is drones and robots arriving on scene way before people, uh, you know, have an opportunity to get there. And the whole idea is to just, let's understand what's happening. Uh, let's, let's make sure we're making the best decisions possible. Uh, and the idea is keep everybody as safe as we can.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  How do citizens feel like they can maintain their individual liberties from being overwhelmed by a state that is equipped with this much technology? I think that's really where I react personally to think about as a more of a libertarian. I'm a big proponent of the role of government being public safety. 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.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  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 heard of cases where police go to the wrong house and they're doing an entry. So today, the way that works, like if they believe that you're a dangerous felon, they may come through the door in your house and you're going to be dealing with multiple officers that are suited up with body armor with lethal weapons in their hands, who are going to have to make a life or death decision instantaneously while their own adrenaline is surging. Right? 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.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  And it's almost, and every one of those officers has lethal force. And I will tell you, if they feel their life is at risk, the thing in their hand will be a gun. By comparison, if those police are going to come into your house, imagine a future where if they do have to do this mission, and again, we can debate about under what conditions they should do it. Now they're going to be sending in a drone or a robot. So the operator is going to be a team of people, not just one. It's not going to be a person who's in the fight 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.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Many police shootings today are not recorded. And so I think it just comes back to, how do we, you know, we, we just need to sort of take a step back and understand how the job is done today and how we can do it in the future that is safer for everybody. And then answer legitimate questions about what are the controls in place? Things like multi-key authorization. We, 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.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  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, you know, with an old radio. Like, they're going to need enough tech to keep up with the rest of us. And then the laws and regulations and oversight are going to have to evolve, you know, to make sure that we are controlling the government 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, you know, being held accountable.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  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?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Well, if you actually defund the police, you know, 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 you know, democracies recover. And I'll give you an example. And I think it was in 1968, the police in Montreal, Canada went on strike. For no other reason, it was a simple, it was overpay. There was no, you know, 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 that 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.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  And this is his example on like, you need a functional police force because it is the, the glue that, that holds society together. So we 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-

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Downtown San Francisco got abandoned. I've seen it myself, yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then with that, you get the jobs flee. You get these, you know, 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, I try to stay out of politics too much. I think, you know, things, things will swing one way or the other, but we have corrective mechanisms that over time will, will kick in.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  And I think non-lethality is a, 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, 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.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you as well, like, you know, there's, there's a lot of uncertainty right now. You know, The Economist, I think four months ago had a cover that, you know, the AI jobs apocalypse. And then a couple of months later, there's the, hey, wait a minute, no, AI is making millions of jobs. Like, people don't know what to think. And we are at this point where the acceleration of technology is leading to massive amounts of uncertainty. And what I tell our customers is like, guys, we need you to stay strong. Like policing is, might be the glue that needs to hold society together. Hopefully, we don't see the sorts of things we're seeing in France right now, the sort of social upheaval. But God forbid, if we do, we need the men and women of law enforcement to be ready to stand up and, and help us keep order as we get through to what? I'm, I'm a huge optimist.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  I think 10, 20 years from now is going to be a near utopian society. Again, for, maybe I'm a little out over my skis, but I think technology is going to cure many diseases, many ills. I think we're going to see, you know, Elon's idea of universal high income will be fantastic. But we may have some difficult moments as we get through the transition. And our view, our role at Exxon is like, how do we arm the police for that? In a way, we'll look back of and we'll be proud of the way that we did it to help them do this the right way. Now, I mean, it's going to be perfect, but let's put some good controls in place and, and help make people more comfortable that, you know, we're going to, we're going to get through this together. Okay.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Rick, I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm glad we got to finally do this. Thanks for joining us on the All In interview. It's been great.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Been a lot of fun. Anytime.