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

About this episode

(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.