so it acts on our moonshot is to cut gun related deaths between police and the public by 50% by 2032 so gun DS are currently growing at 3% annually 72% of police related shootings could be avoided using nonlethal tasers and drone technology the injury rate of a taser 10 is lower than Collegiate volleyball yeah so every other weapon in history has been about causing injury to someone whether it’s stick or your fist or a bullet or a spear we could Envision as Gene rotenberry 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 [Music] done hi everybody Peter dandis 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
[00:01:01] 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 can to hear the story of a true entrepreneur who after 7 years was on the verge of bankruptcy and kept going and today has built a company worth some $16 billion uh Rick Smith is a technologist and someone who’s combining all of the exponential technology he’s the author of a book called end of killing come in here about his moonshot that will save lives around the world and his moonshot to transform how we deal with gun violence how we get rid of it for me this is an a massive moonshot worth pursuing and keeping track of all right let’s jump into this episode with Rick Smith CEO and founder of axon everybody Welcome to moonshots and mindsets I’m here with a dear friend and someone who’s got an extraordinary moonshot a
[00:02:00] moonshot I am excited to not only tell you about but to see it happen it’s something that’s going to save lives and change culture and it’s just the right thing to do it was a conversation we had years ago at an ex prise event and Rick 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 hey you gota you got to kind of live the moment you know we in our offices as well we we really lean into lean into the science fiction Vibe so anywhere you go to one of our offices you might think you’re in a spaceship yeah well and uh and the stuff that you’re doing you know I’ve got uh behind me here uh a Star Trek phaser um not quite a taser but uh when I think about what you’re building you know one of the things I loved about the Star Trek universe and in its abundance vision and model
[00:03:00] was you know you didn’t have these devices that killed people instantly you had these that you could set set to stun and you know if you didn’t know how dangerous the other person was you could just stun them um and I let’s begin with pal uh just to share with the audience here um what is your moonshot and then we’re going to talk about how you’re doing it the amazing progress you’ve made so let’s kick it off uh what is axon’s Moon shot so it acts on our moonshot is to cut gun related deaths between police and the public by 50% by uh 10 years from now by 2032 so cutting uh the public killed by uh policemen and policemen killed by public by by 50% yeah cut in half in a DEC cut in half and what what’s the absolute number right now what how many people die in in gun related incidents between the public and and and police yeah it’s a little
[00:04:01] over 1100 right now and every year the number is going up uh slightly typically about 3% per year that it’s rising so we have to reverse a rising Trend and then cut it pretty dramatically if we’re going to hit this and and you think uh you can actually make that happen what I mean why do you think you can make that happen 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 um 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 um it doesn’t really matter whether you’re dangerous or not per se uh 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 uh and this has been a really interesting concept to tease out with people over the past decade as we’ve really done dug again that the
[00:05:01] fact a gun kills somebody is actually a huge negative it’s something we just accept as this terrible side effect if you want a highly effective weapon and it’s so ingrained in our culture this idea that killing someone and stopping them reliably or it’s it’s so intertwined it takes people a moment and you’ve got to kind of walk them through it that no no no we could Envision as Gene rotenberry did a world where we might have things that are even more effective at stopping someone immediately and yet without having this horrific side effect that it leaves a dead body when you’re done so um let’s let’s begin with I mean people have heard about a taser um 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 uh but I want to go back to uh
[00:06:01] 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 sure uh so we wind the clock back to 30 years ago 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 Scottdale Arizona and 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 um so I am a bit of a science fiction geek uh I also uh studied neurobiology in college so I originally wanted to to work on Luke
[00:07:00] 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 uh 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 the sequence what if I could build a machine that could control the human body uh and effectively I’d heard of that 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 uh and he left in the mid1 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 uh but like many Technologies the early taser weapons of the 70s and 80s were buggy and not very reliable and so in ‘93 I
[00:08:03] literally I dialed 411 to get this guy’s phone number to Discover whatever happened to his invention and at 23 years old I showed up on his doorstep and so we kind of an Odd Couple it’s 73 and 23 we started in his garage and I convinced him to give it one more shot and uh kind of teach me the ropes of how these things worked and here we are now 30 years later where the technology we still have a lot of work to do but at least it’s become pretty wide accepted almost every Police Department in the western world is carrying taser weapons yeah I’ve got a few of the data points here that I looked up uh for our show and the numbers are in are fascinating right so gun deaths are currently growing at 3% annually which is pretty powerful 72% of police related shootings could be avoided using non-lethal tasers and drone technology um and uh I love this one the injury rate of a taser 10 is lower than Collegiate
[00:09:01] volleyball yeah yeah that’s one I actually have to be pretty careful with because some people will uh we’ll 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 and human exposures to a Collegiate volleyball practice so you uh you partner uh with this the inventor and uh you start developing the taser I mean it’s an overnight success after 30 years of hard work is that oh yeah it was well our first product failed so Jack had failed twice in the 70s the 80s so two companies have gone bankrupt we started our first product was actually focused on the consumer Market uh and and it
[00:10:00] failed then we did a second product in desperation a car security product that in retrospect was a terrible idea that one failed and it was our third our third product of this third company in the generation of or in the lineage that finally got it right and that’s when we we pivoted and we went into policing and we had to fix the underlying science uh if I were to encapsulate what was wrong with the early taser weapons is they were engineered to assumptions about how much electricity it would take and we went and we did the hard science of okay let’s measure doses of electricity into mamalian muscle tissue using pigs to measure exactly the right wave form and intensity it would take to paralyze muscle tissue temporarily and when was this this is how many years after you you guys got together that would have been in uh late 1996 that we did the first Pig experiment so you’re sitting there literally with a a taser or some version of it or just sticking Electric TRS into the into the pig and trying to shoot
[00:11:01] enough amperage into it yeah well early on so what happened when we first launched our consumer taser we started having failures where in demos where people could fight through it and I had one catastrophe in Prague in the Czech Republic where I went to demo to their National police force and we had seven Volunteers in a row nobody even 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 uh and so when we designed that first Pig experiment I actually remember it well the total cost was $2,500 one Pig one test session and we happen to find a professor at University of Nebraska who by luck also was a pig farmer and had been one of the guys who researched published some research in this space uh and then we went we built a test rig I mean this is like pretty standard science right we built a test rig where we could add one two three or four capacitors one two three or four
[00:12:02] 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 a huge IP portfolio hey 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 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 tast it awful and then second nutritional facts actually weren’t very impressive it was then that I found found a product called ag1 by athletic greens and without any
[00:13:02] question athletic greens is the best on the market by a huge margin first of all it actually tastes amazing and second if you look at the ingredients 75 high quality ingredients that deliver nutrient DSE antioxidants multivitamins pre and probiotics immune support adaptogens I personally utilize ag1 literally every day I travel with an individual packet my back backpack sometimes in my back pocket and I count on it for you know gut health immunity energy digestion neural support and really healthy aging so if you want to take ownership of your health today is a good day to start athletic greens is giving you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five of these tribal packs with your first purchase so go to athletic greens.com moonshots that’s athletic greens.com back/ moonshots check it out you’ll thank thank me without question this is
[00:14:00] the best green drink product the most nutritious the most flavorful I found all right let’s go back to the episode you know one of the things that I love doing is inspiring entrepreneurs to take moonshots I think it’s one of the most important things and and moonshots are hard and we’re going to come back to you know the challenges you’ve had to to take on with your moonshot here on cutting uh gun related Violence by 50% in in police uh public interactions but and you’ve been a member of the abundance 360 Community for some time now and one of the things I talk about is that moonshots need to come from an emotional energy or mtps have to come from 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 your friend’s deaths or was it just the taste of what was possible what gave you that emotional energy to to go cuz it wasn’t easy in the first decade no and I actually share that a lot with when people are considering entrepreneurship
[00:15:01] 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 uh 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 back in the company we took him to the brink of financial insolvency uh we wouldn’t have done that if it was just a a business to go make money but it was a problem we were all very passionate about and the more we dug in the more passionate we became about it and I think that’s what 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
[00:16:00] the source of all value yeah I again I want everybody to hear this you know literally 7 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 uh uh SpaceX um maybe there’s something to that sevene Mark back when in 2008 for him and and then finally because you haven’t given up and now how if I’m might ask uh axon which owns taser and all this technology is a public company how big is the company today so we’re about 3,000 people now and our market cap as of today is right around 16 billion uh which is just unfathomable from two guys in a garage 30 years ago so this is you know people hear about all these successes and they think about oh how easy it was yeah after being on the verge of bankruptcy over and over again and 30 years of hard work yeah you can build a $6 billion company so um
[00:17:02] what kept you going was it just the that was it I mean some people keep going because they’ve in in invested so much time and money some people keep going because they can see what’s just on the other side of this what was that energy that kept you going here so I would say most of the energy during those first seven years just came from just the passionate belief that you know we can do better than than blowing holes people with a bullet it’s a crazy thing to me that that is the stateof thee art and Technology I mean bullets are almost a thousand year old technology uh 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 uh when we got to late 99 I did not think we were going to make it in my heart I couldn’t re recommend he put any more money in and when I told
[00:18:00] him to stop he said well you’re a little late son because I’m down to my last $500,000 and I signed a guarantee at Silicon Valley Bank for a million a $1.7 million loan so if this goes under I’m toast um and and I had friends who were working at Yahoo and AOL I mean this is the internet craze of 99 so personally I I was exhausted and I thought oh man I’d love to just go you know work in an office in Bay Area with bean bag chairs where everybody’s getting rich but no I’m slogging it out um but I at that point you know I couldn’t I couldn’t let him get wiped out so 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 and but they’re ultimately investing in you there is an incredible sense of responsibility yeah and i’ say that’s the the mission plus that people
[00:19:00] responsibility I mean we we learned this from you know people going to the military like when you when you’re 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 right that’s like the ultimate sacrifice uh 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 to wrap uh frankly kind of a BS Mission into around something where it just doesn’t fit it’s like oh you’re trying too hard uh you know I think it’s you need to start Mission first uh and really okay does this make sense is it authentic you know is this going to be the thing that motivates us because that authenticity is I think what grabs people by the heart take me to that Turning Point what was the turning point for the company was it um Tech related decisions related business so for us uh 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 I you
[00:20:03] know scientifically you can you can contract the dead frog 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 uh so we knew it could be done um and I just realized that they had never done the science work early on they just in 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 the 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 handhand combat for the Marine Corps uh challenged him to to rematch when I shot him with an early taser weapon he
[00:21:01] stood there and had a conversation with me he didn’t even Flinch uh and so I figured if we could drop this guy we’re in business and we did I flew him out to Arizona we dropped him he looks at me and he says well now that I know it’s coming I can beat it let’s give me a second chance and on the second he went down just as fast uh and then then he pops up and he says he he starts to give me this very spiritual talk about what it’s like to kill people you know say look I’ve been in Special Forces I’ve done it I’ve I train people to kill with their bare hands that means i’ I’ve used these techniques myself and I see their faces in my dreams and and he goes on to tell me you know I can’t even give it justice just this very deep understanding about how transformative this would be if we could create something that stops people reliably without killing them so he came on as our chief instructor and then from there it was a it was one year of grueling that’s when I went to my dad who basically said hey I’m I’m putting it all on black cuz it’s The house’s money anyways he put his 500 in he
[00:22:01] 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 morero this this Marine in a Winnebago going cross country doing demos at police departments and the weapon was so effective he would come in with a $100 bill and he’d say okay 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 uh as he was going across the country so was really getting the product right and then just a lot of leg work of demos so we’re seeing 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 had tried going Direct to Consumer um
[00:23:00] and did you make the flip at that point to law enforcement yeah what uh so when we were when we were in the consumer space and consumers now we launched with The Sharper Image catalog if you remember them I remember it I I had zero g flights in The Sharper Image catalog 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 police in largely to prove the technology worked uh and our belief was once we proved that it worked in policing then consumers would follow a 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 dust in policing but our Mars shot that comes after this is to cut gun deaths in the general public but first we’ve got to win in policing and once people see that
[00:24:01] you know the real Eureka moment is when a coule twos 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 if 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 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 uh you know morally and legally and from a liability perspective and I I love what you said when you can choose this because because it’s better it’s like choosing an electric car because it’s faster higher performance
[00:25:01] you know cheaper to operate I mean and good for the environment as one would say Hey you know I use that analogy all the time like the the Brilliance you know when electric cars were like shitty little golf carts nobody was going to use them right we can’t we’re not going to solve a climate crisis by taking away something people love and people love their guns in our R&D Labs we are working on Next Generation taser weapons that 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 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 uh when a law enforcement officer makes a decision to use their
[00:26:01] 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 phaser on stun option um and I’m sure the psychological impact to individuals who have taken lives is significant oh absolutely there’s a high suicide rate among cops who who’ve killed 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 the guy who was in bed had a vape pen not a gun but if you go back and look it from the moment that officer opened the door until the shooting happened it was less than a second and so you know uh while we all can look man what a a terrible outcome you know we all know what
[00:27:00] happens to the human brain when you’re afraid and you’re surging with adrenaline and you’re your cognitive functions are not fully there you’re fighting your own fight ORF 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 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 up a second did you have what we now in our Parliament called a massive trans formative purpose um back when you started this company and I want to transition to the moon to the moment where you came up with this moonshot it was less well-developed I mean I think our our idea has always been to create an alternative to firearms for self-defense uh 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 as we sit here today the the taser even as it’s used by police they actually don’t use it to to defend themselves they will use a Taser weapon to capture somebody who’s exhibiting
[00:28:01] 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’re in the process of crossing right now with our new taser 10 which is a massively multi-shot 10 shot magazine reloading system um and so it’s taken us 30 years to get to this point where we’re about at parody and over the next few years we need to sort of leap frog uh over the effectiveness uh of the gun so where were you when you came up with this moonshot idea and saying that’s you know and a moonshot you know is a very clear objective goal within a certain time frame that you know when you’ve hit it and the world knows when You’ hit it and your moonshot as you’ve described it you know cutting uh gun related deaths in police and public activities in 10 years very clear it’s a beautiful moonshot I love it well I would tell you it actually is a result direct result Peter of uh attending abundance 360 and
[00:29:02] 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 or other Tech confer right you take inspiration about what’s possible and in particular the work you’ve done around around moonshots and the specificity uh you know it forced another level of thinking so I would say the first thing that happened around 2008 18 or so I began using an internal moonshot with our engineers and our team internally where I started saying look our moonshot is to outperform the pistol uh not to sell the Next Generation taser we don’t want to get stuck in this incrementalist Loop where the you know the iPhone 14 is a little better than the iPhone 13 we have got to we’re not competing with ourselves we’ve got to stretch and take some risk uh 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
[00:30:00] I can use to push my Engineers but is there something that’s more inclusive that we could use to create a kind of an industry partnership with our customers and that’s where we shifted to this results orientation of okay if we’re really meing this performance level we should begin to see shootings come down and then you start digging in okay let’s go let’s go read 500 use of force incidents and categorize which of those we think we could have intervened in and that’s where we get to between 40 and 70% uh to get to 70% we need drones and Robotics in addition to handheld weapons uh but it was that process of just trying to to keep crystallizing it down and then part of it too was we originally were going to talk about just cutting police shootings in half but then we had discussions with police unions and others who would say hey wait a minute I’m worried you’re going to encourage cops to put their lives at risk so if you cut police shootings but you get a lot more cops killed that’s not success and so that’s where we then broaden it they say okay we’re going to add up the sum total of everybody who
[00:31:00] get shot and killed in policeing inance including the cops 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 this is a good goal it’s kind of inclusive of all stakeholders and and it is uh for those who uh have ever used a taser or who own guns um let’s take let’s jump into the technology cuz the taser 10 uh is a state-of-the-art A Unique Piece of tech I had a chance to actually try it out and and use it at your recent Summit uh and it’s amazing and you know with little to no training was able to hit my targets and uh felt good about it can you so dive in describe this device to us describe what it looks like how it works yeah get people excited about the alternative yeah so first let’s go back to the first principle what we need to do the goal of this device is to temp temporarily impair your nervous system so every other weapon in history has
[00:32:01] been about causing injury to someone whether it’s with a stick or your fist or a bullet or a spear you’re physically damaging their body to stop them and typically that means either you’ve stopped them because you’ve broken such big bones they can’t continue or cause so much pain or ultimately they’ve just died the difference here they bled they bled to death yeah 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 in that uh and to do it we basically have to get two electrodes connected to your body spread about 12 in apart and the reason we need that spread is the 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 the area of the circle if you were to put these two probes kind of on the perimeter of a of a circle Circle and that surface area picks up more nerve tissue and once we get a critical
[00:33:02] mass of that you get this electric storm going through your body 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 uh 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 uh each with its own uh wire attached and then we’ve got a bunch of intelligence inside the weapon so you don’t have to think about it it will select which darts are furthest apart in three-dimensional space and it will deliver electric charge across those longest connections but if anyone’s ever fired a gun it’s actually very similar we’ve copied a lot of the user interface uh 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 uh and so we’ve got a safety you operate with your thumb a trigger you
[00:34:00] operate with your trigger finger we make them bright yellow so you won’t confuse it with a gun um but then you just have to point and basically pick two locations uh get two darts on Target and again if if they’re 12 in apart or more we got you there’s a laser sighting um and how far does the electric wire reel out uh it’ll go out to 45 ft what’s interesting for me was uh once you’ve you’ve hit the target um and if the target is partially disabled you the person you’re aiming at uh you can send another bolt of current down down the wires right you can hit them without without actually having to fire again you can uh you can charge you can send a charge down the wires again yep you can re-energize by just tapping the safety switch and and that that feels like the ability to um make sure that you’re able to have control of the situation and be safe yeah long term you know I mentioned so 45 ft is as far as you can go uh with
[00:35:00] the handheld device and we think that’s approaching a limit we might be able get to 50 or 60 feet but beyond that um 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 a really clear answer but the wires work great uh when we want to go beyond 40 or50 ft 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 uh and in fact I can begin to remove the human operator from Harm’s Way so over the next 10 years we’ll start to see uh my personal belief is we need to change the way we think about violence like violence is just bad we shouldn’t celebrate it uh we still sort of think of this like today the technology in the world is if a gunman shows up somewhere it starts you know a mass shooter event the only way we stopped them was we send
[00:36:00] in more people with more guns and they have a gunfight uh I think we need to get out of this mindset that it’s not like this medieval battle between good and evil it’s like people that are committing violence are doing a bad thing and if we could get to a point where we have technology that can safely come in and subdue them without requiring you know our sons and daughters in uniform uh another person put themselves at risk uh I think we get have a fundamental shift in we think about this to where violence is just less interesting even for people to think about doing it in the first place you know another part we talk a lot about exponential Technologies on this program and uh one of the areas that I used before going up and using the taser 10 was I trained in VR um uh how much is VR playing a world uh and and are you bringing AR augmented reality into the into the axon world as well yeah so we are very focused on VR right now um and part of the reason is um if I take a
[00:37:02] step back police are very comfortable with their guns and they have a very intimate relationship with their guns and part of that’s because the risk of the job right and this is the ultimate thing that stands between me and potential death I I have to be very familiar with it but there’s also a very practical basis they train with their guns a lot uh 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 uh so up until now training with a taser has frankly been kind of boring they’re about $30 a shot so they’re very expensive to train with uh and 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-in spread um if you’re firing at a tar Target other than the instructor telling you oh yeah you need your darts for their part in VR we can
[00:38:01] animate that so if you get the two darts too close together you see this wimpy little effect uh that obviously doesn’t happen in the real world but in video games we’re used to these sort of visual feedback and makes it very intuitive as you start to realize okay I now kind of understand on an intuitive level how far apart I’ve got to get my darts to get that big glowing effect that really incapacitates the target so VR just gives us a creative C to be able to do superhuman levels of training uh 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 with through high repetition how many times You’ been shot eight eight times by this does it get any easier no no it’s uh it is one of my least favorite parts of the job it’s uh uh it’s a very odd sensation it’s more it’s it’s frankly a little more scary
[00:39:00] than painful just because you lose control of parts of your body are seizing up and uh there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it yeah I tried to volunteer once at Singularity University to uh to take it but you you said no probably probably smart uh did people tell you were crazy to go after this moonshot oh man uh yeah yeah I I I actually recently found a video from a couple of my friends who came out and 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 um the moonshot uh you know in its current iteration as we’ve as we’ve crystallized it down I we actually haven’t had too much skepticism there because we’ve uh you know we’ve already built a lot of credibility with the taser but I would say the early taser everybody thought i’ lost my mind 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
[00:40:01] 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 monounsaturated 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 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 sore sustainably from South Africa they offer a huge range of delicious nutritious products uh including roasted
[00:41:01] 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 peter2 at checkout just go to House of macadamias dcom back/ peter2 and enter the code peter2 at checkout that’s house of macademia decom peter2 and then again use the code peter2 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 uh the learnings you had on building this extraordinary company as a uh as an entrepreneur and getting to this moonshot um I mean financing was never easy uh and this you had financing principally from family and friends
[00:42:00] right this is the most traditional early stage did you end up taking outside Capital before taking the company public oh man we tried so the my dad made his money out in Silicon Valley uh in the 80s and so he had raised money from venture capitalist 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 that put money into this the first outside dollar we raised was in the IPO wow we got nose 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 that like a familiar story you know and I 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 world and if you believe in yourself enough and you believe in your
[00:43:00] technology enough and you’re willing to go and go and go um you have it’s a digital outcome um and and sometimes you don’t win but uh but you knew in your heart that there was a there there yes we did I mean look there were dark days there there was about a year where I had lost hope but was still you know struggling through but you’re absolutely right like raising money is so so disheartening uh because you assume that these people are smarter than you right they’re managing money they’ve seen all these Investments and and uh you know we we batted zero uh and it still worked out for us you know so sometimes you just got to have faith amazing other lessons what about uh you know your partners and finding your uh you know those individuals that stuck with you um any any lessons around that you know one thing I would say that if I could go back to my myself 30 years ago
[00:44:00] and 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 um early on I’d say I 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 um I I got really burned out uh you know even after we finally made it you know successful and it was until about probably 15 16 years in somebody had me watched that famous Netflix uh talk on you know we’re building a pro sports team not a family uh about how to think about because I was thought of hiring is like oh God it’s something I’ve just got to do uh you know I hate doing it it’s like an administrative task I want to go solve interesting technical problems um but then we really
[00:45:00] made a hard pivot uh to really focusing on not just hiring nice people but really kickass you know people that are legitimately smarter than you at the thing you’re hire them for it everybody says that but a lot of people don’t believe it uh that was pretty transformative to where the now the company scales and um and and we you know we we hire slow and we Fire fast uh if we find people that 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 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
[00:46:02] 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 you AG 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 at least I’m self-aware and I’ve got a chief operating officer who’s really good he’s a fantastic you know head coach and and a hard ass yeah it’s kind of a hard ask and and you need 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 in in negative inevitable negative feedback that does need to happen but I would just I would say in my entire career
[00:47:02] I’ve never regretted firing somebody too fast yes I would say many times you regret waiting too long never regretted doing it too fast and every one of those people’s landed on their feet the thing that used to kill me was I don’t like that feeling of oh this guy’s got kids and a family and you know I’m going to ruin her life if we fire like that’s not true they everybody ends up landing on their feet somewhere else and they’re usually Happ um they know it 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% um did you uh have other moonshots in mind or did that one sort of just feel right in The Sweet Spot th this one I I mean to tuning the numbers you know was a process but the uh the The Cutting gun
[00:48:00] related deaths uh 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 so let’s take it let’s let’s head towards Mars or perhaps out of the solar system what 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 yeah so um so I wrote a book in 2019 called the end of killing and it basically is this it’s a Manifesto uh that says look we we should not accept that killing people is okay now that’s not to say you’re never going to get a sicko or a serial killer but like the government should not be killing its people uh 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
[00:49:00] 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 like if this ends very badly for Mr you know Mr Putin and uh you know sends a very strong message that this is not a successful strategy uh to engage in you know Wars a war of choice um but I’ve been a little bit shaking there but I I would even say even there if we thought about things a little bit differently we could have built today we could have added 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 release those drones fully autonomous now by the way there’s a big ethical debate about autonomous lethal systems and I agree we shouldn’t build robots that can kill people but we could have built drones that could recognize tanks artillery pieces trucks and with fairly basic Machine Vision processing would fly up autonomously they you know
[00:50:01] 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 andan imagine if we could have ended this and had 150,000 Russians walking home because we destroyed their equipment um 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 uh about what sorts of nonkilling Technologies would augment and I don’t think we can ever turn our military into you know flower children that don’t have lethal capability but I think the most effective military is one that can overmatch your adversaries so well you don’t even have to kill them if you just wipe out their capabilities and uh do it in the most moral High Ground
[00:51:00] way which is not killing a bunch 18 to you 25y old kids yeah kids is the right right uh uh you know descriptor for someone in the military at age 18 19 20 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 like 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 it’s almost like uh again the Star Trek universe having a deflector uh
[00:52:00] Shields um to to keep you safe uh let’s go back to the home here because unfortunately gun violence in h in the home and uh and accidental deaths in the home is significant uh I don’t have the numbers off hand I don’t know if you do but it’s it’s uh it’s extraordinarily sad I mean what’s your message for parents at home right now uh well would say stay tuned uh we’re very focused we do have consumer taser products and they’re they’re a good choice for many people today but in another 5 to 10 years uh I think we’ll have some amazing uh products let me let me take you where I think the end state is and I’ll start with the story my wife called me she was at a uh I was at a board meeting out of town and my my phone lights up and uh 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
[00:53:01] like stop call 911 and so I’m imagining this so today if you want to protect yourself or your or your family or loved one you most people would buy a gun or they might buy a Taser but what if you so in that moment my wife had to become like a hero right the operating the we the weapon system operator to protect the family in the house um what instead she could hit a button a panic button and five micro drones are released around the house and over the air you know maybe through your Alexa system hello Mrs Smith this is Captain Captain Johnson retired US Air Force I’ve got a drone in front of each of the kids’ bedrooms I’ve got one sweeping the property outside I’m on with police dispatch they’re on the way think like a personal Conair with a professional weapon system operator well now I would have more confidence okay my wife’s not going to have to try to figure this out while she’s freaking out and afraid but more
[00:54:00] 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 that’s got the right levels of controls but I think that’s where we end up in another 10 or 20 years where it’s not even a human that is protecting you we’ve just if we do our job right we make violence boring it’s no longer worthy of a movie plot because when violent things happen it’s so overwhelmingly bad and suppressed quickly that it’s just not that interesting anymore and then the other pandemic we’re having is that of school violence right uh I mean it’s insane what we’ve seen the last few years uh what’s your vision for that I mean that was a sub subject we were talking about at xprize at a visioneering years ago is how do you how do you protect our
[00:55:01] schools our places of worship uh without making them lockdown zones well that’s one where so last summer I actually did a public announcement on doing a school safety taser drone uh and look it got a ton of negative blowback in the Twitter sphere um and most was it was very emotional uh and I think what it was the the real criticism was largely from people who don’t trust police and the the theme of the feedback was cops are just going to use this on protesters and it wouldn’t be used to protect children um 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 uh we had not done our homework uh 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 uh whatever the the high school in Florida right it’s just it keeps happening um long term I think there
[00:56:00] will be a technology element I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to work but we at a 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 I mean for me it seems like the taser and it’s offshoots are The Logical extrapolation is there another kind of technology that goes beyond that besides just electrical current and the uh and hitting your command and control yeah so um if you want to bring somebody under control without causing injury or death you I think you fundamentally have to go out for command and control or physical restrained so we either have to build like a robot that can run up and and sort of physically restrain you pretty quickly or take down command and control uh in to do command and control there’s two ways you can do it electrically or chemically uh chemical inhibition is hard you can do it with inhalence nerve gas is one for example but it becomes
[00:57:00] control yeah where it goes yeah or the Russians tried the I remember back the the theater attack many years ago they used an inhalent that was uh an an anesthetic but the dose control was difficult like a lot of people died of overdoses Etc uh so I’m a pretty big fan of electricity as the primary immediate impact but you could have a layer defense as well where you might hit some of your electricity put them down and then dose them with uh you know with a tranquilizer so interesting right cu 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 when you get hit by a taser and it knocks literally knocks you off your feet um how long are you out for typically or how long are you disabled for so so the effect is kind of like a light switch so like right now I’m Contracting the muscle of my forearm when I stop it’s back to normal so while the taser current is
[00:58:00] Flowing you’re having these severe contractions until the moment it stops and so uh this is actually a public misconception because a lot of times you’ll hear you know people say oh the the police used a taser four times on somebody and the implication is that it was excessive or egregious well in most of those cases the taser runs for 5 seconds every time it’s discharged that’s a very short window to get handcuffs on somebody now many people will comply after they’ve been hit okay I don’t want any more of that but especially if you have somebody who’s high on PCP or methamphetamines the ones that really put you into a psychotic rage those folks do not react to the pain and those are the ones who typically might take three four five 5c burst till they can get the handcuffs on Amazing so we’re going to be seeing a new generation of humanoid robots right we’re seeing Optimus from or Tesla bot uh we we’re seeing figure we’re seeing a number of those uh do you you know I
[00:59:00] mean a lot of the RoboCop movies of the past portray you know robotic AI driven uh and axon is in not just the in the taser business you also make body cameras uh can you talk a little about sort of where the Technologies are Beyond just the taser and where you think they might be going yeah so we we started the body camera space largely did to help reduce concern about police abuse with tasers or any use of force by figuring okay let’s record what’s happening and then once we started going down the pathway of body cameras we had to build a software business like how do you handle all that data that’s a fairly challenging problem so today we run one of the largest data sets in the world on Microsoft Azure uh where hundreds of pedabytes of police videos uh and then we do incar cameras and we partner with a bunch of different drone providers uh 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
[01:00:01] good rules of the road like I personally don’t think we would would want at least anytime soon to delegate the decision to use force on a human should not be made by an algorithm that should be made by a human operator who’s taking legal moral responsibility for that decision but that’s fairly straightforward those sorts of controls um the benefits of being able to stop stop somebody without requiring another human being put themselves immediately at risk has a whole bunch of benefits so I I would view in another 20 to 30 years I think 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 uh with guns to deal with with threats anymore and you know mean I remember the way we got over the idea of humans being out of the loop in like the elevator or in the trolley car or other things it was a slow and
[01:01:00] gradual process um do you think do you think the Public’s ready for robots taking action we’ve seen the we’ve seen all kinds of movies uh 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 um uh where how far are we from seeing uh you know robots and drones in the public sector the public uh legal sector you think so interestingly last summer after we had the uh the whole debate about the the taser drones in schools we went out and we started doing some public sentent 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 uh I would be I mean 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
[01:02:01] like the rational average person thinks they exacerbate the extreme View and so I uh 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 Frameworks and working with the right regulatory bodies uh this is a place where we will move methodically and not try to jump the gun and and do you you know what’s the mindset from the police force I mean cuz you’re dealing at all all levels I mean are they welcoming uh uh are they excited about the Next Generation uh I mean there’s got to be a whole slew of like the old schoolers
[01:03:02] being resistant to change I mean are we seeing the same sort of thing that we see normally I would say in general policing is an industry that does not Embrace change it is a very traditional uh you know these organizations are typically many decades old or you know hundreds of years old steeped in a lot of tradition um that said I would tell you the the new taser 10 we just launched we’re continually hearing the word GameChanger uh and a lot of a lot of positive feedback um I think part of that is also you know 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 push back we got back then was they look some people just need killing like oh my God 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 with the whole public debate and iPhones right I mean cameras are everywhere now uh we see I think as you
[01:04:03] 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 people are less violent when when you’re being observed right people act differently when they’re being watched for sure um in in that regard you the challenge I imagine though is a lot of the nefarious characters out there are probably using advant 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 uh old school uh responses do they hear that message oh yeah for sure for sure yeah drones are a particular area like criminal organizations are very effectively using drones to move drugs across the border and in you know other areas now you know police will catch up over time and and you know you’ve got the advantage you’ve got a large community you know that’s focused
[01:05:01] on this on this issue but it does take time to adapt uh which is lucky for us you know that’s this is what we do I mean my career and our organization we we’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out the cheat codes of how to work with police to introduce new technology and ways that uh you’ve got to prove that it’s working kind of earn your right to get you know to earn a place on the Belt if it’s something they’re going to carry or or in their Tech stack hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you 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
[01:06:01] exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of use you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com blog and learn more now back to the episode so uh you launched this specific moonshot uh how long ago uh October of last year so what is that about six months ago so you’re you have n and a half years left to pull this off yep yeah we said the goal is to to to hit that 50% reduction by the end of calendar year 2032 nice and uh your confidence level is
[01:07:00] high I am uh yeah it is high 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 I’ve asked the team look we’re going to go after the smaller police departments that have the highest shooting rates on per capita BAS B and the reason we’re going to go 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 roll out so they now every officer has a taser 10 they now go into the new cohort that we’re going to measure against the historical cohort uh and we’re going to that’s going to be our first Canary in the coal mine can we begin to move the needle in those agencies who deploy early make it measurable and uh and it becomes you
[01:08:02] know once you’ve got the data it becomes inspiration for others to follow suit um AB we might 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 what we our assumptions off uh and obviously we’re hoping it does and if it does you’re right that will inspire other agencies and 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 uh I think we we try to design our our incentives so uh 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 and your marot of cutting it by 50% outside of the police Community but in in the public is really a matter of
[01:09:01] 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 the the other thing that’s a 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 uh and I know like some people who don’t appreciate guns might find that offensive that I’m characterizing gun ownership is 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 uh creative work like what could we do that would have a more technologically advanced gun ownership experience and you know obviously we’re looking at things like AR experiences and you know there things we could do to
[01:10:01] quantify when you’re firing these with your friends where you’re having a much more interactive uh gaming experience in addition to making sure the weapon is also even more effective amazing well uh I’m excited about your success my friend where should people go to learn more about what you’re doing uh at axon with with Taser and about your moonshot yep so uh we have a website set up this is our moonshot.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 policing better um or the company’s main website which is just axon axon.com and uh you’re messaged on entrepreneurs out there who have an MTP and they’re trying to decide do they want to take on a moonshot they’ve heard
[01:11:01] it can take a decade or two they’ve heard it’s hard they’ve heard it’s um it’s fraught with challenges uh is it worth it what’s your what’s your message your inspiration for them absolutely people want to be inspired like they don’t want to just go to you know our our basic needs if you’ve got a decent job your basic needs have been met maso’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 and 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 winse when you hear like oh God like that doesn’t feel real so I think if you’re going to do it it’s got to be something that you can really look yourself in the mirror and be proud of and and that yeah this makes sense and we’re doing it for the right
[01:12:00] reasons not to just you know put a gloss you know on a on a money-making Venture and you know you mentioned something I that’s important to point out there is a a positive impact on uh your employees and also a positive impact to think on how the World Views your company and helping you attrac new and talent you know we talked about the importance of tent um have you seen your moonshot used for recruiting or for inspiring your internal employees to just work those extra hours and days oh absolutely absolutely like the uh Jeff cunnins 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 what got him is 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 you know the moonshot now has become Central to pretty much every time we talk about the you know the company including in
[01:13:01] our recruiting that’s amazing I don’t think people realize the value that moonshots can have on the perceived value of your company both to investors and to uh your employees and in success pal um countless lives will be saved and I think um it’s it’s a like I said it’s a beautiful moonshot grateful for you I love having you my life thank you for the work that you’re doing thank you for being part of our abundance 360 community and uh excited to come back and report to everyone listening how are you’re doing when’s the next major milestone for you you think uh I would say probably about a year from now we’re just bringing the first cohorts live uh to where we’ll have some some real data and and by the way I’ve got to return the the compliment there Peter you know we found you I saw uh the documentary on Transcendent man on Ray Kur and uh then I asked my number two to do some research on you guys and I
[01:14:02] learned about Singularity University and uh 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 I you know I met you first at the singularity University Executive program and then you know came to the a360 it’s been transformative for me personally and for the business I mean we’ve gone from a you know a $200 million valuation taser weapon company to a $16 billion tech company and uh you know you’ve had a huge role as a mentor and a coach along the way thank you buddy thank you Rick Smith CEO founder of axon helping to cut gun violence in the public sector and hopefully eventually around the world uh the preciousness of life thank you Rick take care my friend all right thanks pet [Music] [01:15:02] here