Speaker 1: Hi, it's Westkasova. We're taking a break this week, so
Speaker 1: here's one of our favorite episodes you might have missed
Speaker 1: and an update since this show aired. People who pre
Speaker 1: ordered Biofire smart guns can now expect delivery in late
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, and larger runs of the weapon are
Speaker 1: planned for early next year. From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: it's the Big Take. I'm Westkasova today, a gun designed
Speaker 1: to reduce accidental deaths and suicide. We're faced all the
Speaker 1: time in the US with horrifying news of mass shootings
Speaker 1: and the go nowhere arguments that follow over what can
Speaker 1: be done to keep f arms out of the hands
Speaker 1: of those who intentionally use them to kill others. But
Speaker 1: accidental gun injuries and deaths, especially among kids and teenagers,
Speaker 1: as well as people who use guns to take their
Speaker 1: own lives, are also a large and growing problem. Now,
Speaker 1: a young inventor in Colorado named Kai Kluppfer is working
Speaker 1: on a new handgun specifically designed to prevent these tragedies.
Speaker 1: It uses technology to stop it from being fired by
Speaker 1: anyone but its owner.
Speaker 2: The key thing that we are trying to solve for
Speaker 2: which I think we could completely solve is children and
Speaker 2: teenagers getting access firearms. We think that by building technology
Speaker 2: that basically works with the gun owner to enforce what
Speaker 2: they're already looking to do, allows us to really actually
Speaker 2: address that portion of the challenge of busy gundests in America.
Speaker 1: In a new Business Week story, Bloomberg reporter Ashley Vance
Speaker 1: writes about how the gun works.
Speaker 3: So as you're walking up to it, this white light
Speaker 3: sort of goes off, and that signals, hey, the gun
Speaker 3: knows somebody's getting near it, somebody's about to hold it.
Speaker 1: And whether gun rights advocates will embrace this new safety
Speaker 1: feature or oppose it.
Speaker 3: You can look back going twenty years at different efforts
Speaker 3: to make smart guns, most of them not terribly inspiring.
Speaker 3: The trend seems to have been to try to slap
Speaker 3: a fingerprint sensor onto an existing gun, or a lot
Speaker 3: of them had watches that were compared to the gun
Speaker 3: to give you some kind of location to the person.
Speaker 3: But pretty much they all required just too many steps
Speaker 3: and often failed in demos, and really did the smart
Speaker 3: gun effort no favors to date?
Speaker 1: Why have people tried to develop them? Like, what is
Speaker 1: the appeal of a smart gun?
Speaker 3: It has a couple different fronts to it. One is
Speaker 3: just if you think of it. I almost started thinking
Speaker 3: of it almost just like a seatbelt in a car.
Speaker 3: It's just this extra thing we're putting on, something that
Speaker 3: some people use all the time, and it's this extra safeguard.
Speaker 3: And so on the one hand, you could vent accidents
Speaker 3: in the home. Obviously, a kid finds a gun and
Speaker 3: pulls the trigger and it's loaded. This would stop something
Speaker 3: like that happening. There's the thought that this could also
Speaker 3: prevent a lot of suicides. It would make it that
Speaker 3: much harder, especially for a young person to find a
Speaker 3: gun that they could get their hands on. It would
Speaker 3: give them this extra moment of pause to think about
Speaker 3: what they were doing. The last big bucket is someone
Speaker 3: like a police officer who's afraid that their weapon might
Speaker 3: be turned against them. And so again you have this
Speaker 3: extra safeguard.
Speaker 1: And obviously we're having yet another year where we're seeing
Speaker 1: a lot of mass shootings, just another one very recently.
Speaker 1: Is there any argument why a smart gun might bring
Speaker 1: down that sort of violence.
Speaker 3: On the mass shootings? Not really, if we're being honest.
Speaker 3: The biggest case for smart guns, at least it seems
Speaker 3: to me is that we have a lot of people
Speaker 3: who are eighteen or under who are not supposed to
Speaker 3: be buying guns. They're not allowed to buy guns. Mostly
Speaker 3: this is aimed at these kids who shouldn't be able
Speaker 3: to get a gun, and if they do now, they
Speaker 3: wouldn't be able to use it. You know. In a
Speaker 3: lot of these shootings, sadly, we see people coming in
Speaker 3: with assault rifles and weapons that are sort of beyond
Speaker 3: what these measures would protect.
Speaker 1: So, as you say, people have been trying to develop
Speaker 1: this technology all different kinds of ways for a long
Speaker 1: time and they haven't been able.
Speaker 3: To do it.
Speaker 1: But now you write about a young man named Kai
Speaker 1: Kluppfer who seems to have kind of unlocked the coat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's only twenty six now, he's been working on
Speaker 3: this since he was fifteen. So you've got kind of
Speaker 3: the person on a quest, this young man who was
Speaker 3: possessed by this idea of making a smart gun and
Speaker 3: was very committed to it and has seen it through
Speaker 3: all these years. And then I think it's also the
Speaker 3: technology has really gotten to the point where this is
Speaker 3: a lot more feasible than it used to be. Kai's
Speaker 3: company is called biofire, and they have a smart gun
Speaker 3: that has a fingerprint reader on it, and it has
Speaker 3: facial recognition on it. It's a lot like your smartphone.
Speaker 3: And so you know, this is technology that Apple and
Speaker 3: Google and Samsung and everyone else has really refined over
Speaker 3: the last ten years to make it work very well,
Speaker 3: work cost effectively. And so Kai is the first person
Speaker 3: that I've run across who really took this ground up
Speaker 3: approach to starting from scratch and really making a gun
Speaker 3: that works, but with all this stuff baked into it
Speaker 3: as opposed to just slapping things on an existing weapon.
Speaker 1: And Ashley, you got a chance to speak to Kai
Speaker 1: Klupp for about this gun. Let's listen to what he
Speaker 1: had to say.
Speaker 2: The number one kind of key challenge here is building
Speaker 2: something that is reliable enough both that is always going
Speaker 2: to be locked when the owner needs it to be locked,
Speaker 2: but also that is always going to be unlocked when
Speaker 2: the owner needs to be unlocked. And both of those
Speaker 2: are really important. You can't just have one or the other.
Speaker 2: And we've never seen, in some of the kind of
Speaker 2: failed attempts from other folks in the past, we've never
Speaker 2: seen people actually achieve both of those In most cases,
Speaker 2: they don't achieve either of them.
Speaker 1: Tell us about Kai klup for and how he came
Speaker 1: to develop this gun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he grew up in Colorado. His parents were lawyers,
Speaker 3: but he was always this tinkerer at home. He was
Speaker 3: at the age of eleven making customs circuit boards of
Speaker 3: the family garage. He was always running around with his
Speaker 3: engineering textbooks, just one of those people who's wired that
Speaker 3: way and had been entering science fairs and things like that.
Speaker 3: When he was fifteen, the Aurora shooting happened, where a
Speaker 3: gunman went into a theater and killed about a dozen
Speaker 3: people and injured many dozens more. This one hit very
Speaker 3: close to home for Kai physically and emotionally. It was
Speaker 3: about a half hour from his house.
Speaker 2: For me growing up, you know, I was fortunate enough
Speaker 2: to not have to think about gun violence or gundests,
Speaker 2: and that was really my first sort of encounter with
Speaker 2: the topic.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: I was just starting to grow up, just starting to
Speaker 2: think about these kind of topics as a fifteen year
Speaker 2: old and really start to think about how how can
Speaker 2: we do something about this?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Like, how could we you know, start to kind of
Speaker 2: give away the problem in some way.
Speaker 3: And so you had this fifteen year old who saw
Speaker 3: this as his calling. He didn't think that he could
Speaker 3: stop mass shootings, but he wanted to do something to
Speaker 3: try to curb gun violence. And so he really settled
Speaker 3: on this idea of a smart gun, and he began
Speaker 3: just chasing after his usual sort of science fair exploits.
Speaker 3: He began trying to make prototypes of this smart gun
Speaker 3: for science fairs and did quite well at it. He
Speaker 3: wins first prize. It's some very prestigious science fairs, and
Speaker 3: this gets the attention of there's a gentleman named Ron
Speaker 3: Conway in Silicon Valley who's a very famous angel investor.
Speaker 3: After Sandy Hook, another tragedy shooting, he had been looking
Speaker 3: to fund some smart gun type technology and so Kai
Speaker 3: got a fifty thousand dollars grant as a high schooler
Speaker 3: to pursue the prototype some more. And so he just
Speaker 3: kept at it. He went to MIT, he was there
Speaker 3: for two years. He wasn't able to work on his
Speaker 3: prototypes as much since it was a university setting and
Speaker 3: they didn't want him experimenting in his dorm room. But
Speaker 3: he worked a lot on his business plan around what
Speaker 3: a company might look like. That made this and after
Speaker 3: two years at MIT and a gap year, he dropped out.
Speaker 3: And then Peter Tiel, one of the most prominent and
Speaker 3: controversial venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, one of the original
Speaker 3: backers of Facebook. He actually has this program called a
Speaker 3: Teal Fellowship where he pays usually undergraduates one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: dollars to drop out of college and start a business.
Speaker 3: And so, so Kai had already dropped out, but he
Speaker 3: was qualified for this Teal Fellowship, So he got one
Speaker 3: hundred thousand dollars to formally create Biofire as a company.
Speaker 3: And so at that point he's around twenty years old,
Speaker 3: and he starts this company. He hires a couple people,
Speaker 3: he keeps working on these prototypes, and at that point,
Speaker 3: after a little while, he moves the company from Boston
Speaker 3: back to Colorado.
Speaker 1: And you spend quite a bit of time with him
Speaker 1: when you were reporting the story.
Speaker 3: What's he like. He's sort of this old soul. He's
Speaker 3: just always incredibly well prepared for any question you can
Speaker 3: send his way. He could tell you all the merits
Speaker 3: of smart guy us back and forth. He's clearly an engineer.
Speaker 3: I mean, he could talk very technically about this guy.
Speaker 2: I've been working on smart guns broadly for over ten
Speaker 2: years now. It's about forty percent of my life, which
Speaker 2: is sort of scary thing about. I was always an engineer.
Speaker 2: There's some pretty hilarious photos out there of me, like
Speaker 2: running around at like summer camp with an electional engineering textbook.
Speaker 2: I think everybody thought I was just absolutely insane. And
Speaker 2: so I'd always loved building things. I'd done a whole
Speaker 2: series of different projects, none of which had any i think,
Speaker 2: like societal value or anything, but were you know, just
Speaker 2: ways for me to learn and you know, try lots
Speaker 2: of different things. Yeah, and so I started thinking about
Speaker 2: this concept of a smart gun, and in particular, after
Speaker 2: I started digging too this again, I was no expert
Speaker 2: on gun deaths or public health issues or anything like that,
Speaker 2: I started to realize that, to my surprise, over two
Speaker 2: thirds of all gun deaths are the result of suicides
Speaker 2: and access. That was true ten years ago, it's true
Speaker 2: today as well. In fact, the percentage has only gotten larger.
Speaker 2: And so where you know, what I'd heard about was
Speaker 2: always the mass shootings, the violent crime homicides. The fact
Speaker 2: that two thirds are the sort of like silent you
Speaker 2: know kind of portion where you almost never hear about
Speaker 2: suicide and access right really sort of startled me. And
Speaker 2: it also lends itself to an engineering or technical based
Speaker 2: solution much more effectively.
Speaker 1: Can you describe it? What does it look like? How
Speaker 1: does it work?
Speaker 3: It's called the biofire smart gun. It's a handgun. It
Speaker 3: looks quite similar to standard handguns, very similar to a glock,
Speaker 3: except it's a bit larger. It's got all of this
Speaker 3: electronics packed in there, so you know, around the handle,
Speaker 3: the grip it's a bit fatter, it's quite larger where
Speaker 3: there's a battery. I should mention this is a it's
Speaker 3: an all electric gun. It does have some mechanisms inside
Speaker 3: of it, but at it's heard it's an electric gun
Speaker 3: and so and then you know on the grip it's
Speaker 3: got a fingerprint sensor. And then right at the back
Speaker 3: it would be a bit above your hand if you're
Speaker 3: holding the gun, there's this facial recognition system. And then
Speaker 3: there's a little device that goes with it. It's about
Speaker 3: the size of a smartphone. They call it a dock
Speaker 3: and that where you can can figure up to five
Speaker 3: people have their put their fingerprints on, have it recognize
Speaker 3: your face, and so you become this registered user.
Speaker 2: Basically when you first plug it in, it walks you
Speaker 2: through the onboarding screen and then you can enroll your
Speaker 2: biometrics basically directly to the firearm. Just like all the data,
Speaker 2: this is stored encrypted locally on the device, biofire has
Speaker 2: no access to your biometrics. We don't process your biometrics anyway.
Speaker 2: It's all happening inside of the gun. It walks you
Speaker 2: through the steps. You basically grab it a couple times
Speaker 2: to enroll your fingerprints, sort of like old Apple Touch ID. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then you do the same with your face. You know,
Speaker 2: you look at it, sort of take your head around,
Speaker 2: et cetera, and it captures your fingerprint in your face.
Speaker 2: Biometrics stores inside the firearm. From that point forward, the
Speaker 2: only person that can make any changes or configuration changes
Speaker 2: to the firearm is the owner. You can have permanent users,
Speaker 2: you can have temporar users, but basically, you know, let's
Speaker 2: say you have a spouse and want them to have
Speaker 2: permanent access to the firearm. You can easily enroll them
Speaker 2: just via the touch screen. Let's say you have, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe a teenage child that you want to take to
Speaker 2: the range and only have them have access for an hour.
Speaker 2: You can do that as well, and then it'll be automatically.
Speaker 3: Disabled in full transparency. In my experience on this demo,
Speaker 3: it was a little finicky when my finger went on there.
Speaker 3: Other people seem not to have that problem, and I
Speaker 3: was shooting a prototype which the company said they had
Speaker 3: noticed this fingerprint issue and have fixed it on the
Speaker 3: gun that's actually going to go on sale. But you
Speaker 3: do not have to have both the fingerprint and the
Speaker 3: facial recognition work and so on. The couple instances where
Speaker 3: my finger was a little off, the facial recognition had
Speaker 3: already seen me and the gun was ready to fire anyway.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I tested it out. They had a firing
Speaker 3: range there, and only the people who had gone through
Speaker 3: this process were able to have anything happen when they
Speaker 3: pulled the trigger. I had sort of two rounds at
Speaker 3: the shooting range, all standard ammunition. It worked pretty flawlessly.
Speaker 3: So when you walk up to this gun, it also
Speaker 3: has a sensor just for somebody's presence, So as you're
Speaker 3: walking up to it, this white light sort of goes
Speaker 3: off and that signals, hey, the gun knows somebody's getting
Speaker 3: near it, somebody's about to hold it, and then right
Speaker 3: when you pick it up, your finger sort of naturally
Speaker 3: to this sensor and as you're picking it up, the
Speaker 3: facial recognitions looking for you in this green light comes
Speaker 3: on the gun, which means you know, now it's ready
Speaker 3: to fire. And you know, I mean, it just never glitched.
Speaker 3: We had people come in who were not registered and
Speaker 3: try to fire it. Like I said, in the past,
Speaker 3: demos have been the undoing of many of these weapons,
Speaker 3: and this one worked flawlessly.
Speaker 1: And so you say it has a button for a
Speaker 1: trigger as opposed to a traditional trigger.
Speaker 3: It has an actual trigger. The trigger might as well
Speaker 3: be a button. It could be anything, because the trigger
Speaker 3: is not actually connected to the firing mechanism. It's what
Speaker 3: you would call fire by wire. It's sort of like
Speaker 3: a modern car. When you hit your brakes in the car,
Speaker 3: it's really just sending a software signal to your brakes,
Speaker 3: and this is very very similar. You pull the trigger
Speaker 3: and they've made it feel given it some resistance to
Speaker 3: feel like a trigger, but it's really it's just sending
Speaker 3: a signal to all these computing systems that are throughout
Speaker 3: the gun.
Speaker 1: And how long after sure you pick it up, are
Speaker 1: you able to fire? Is it immediate or just take
Speaker 1: a while to figure out who you are?
Speaker 3: It was way faster than I ever would expect. It
Speaker 3: goes faster than like human perception. You know, this presence
Speaker 3: sensor really does notice when somebody is already coming near it,
Speaker 3: and when I pick it off the table, any change
Speaker 3: in weight. It knows now there's a human who's touching
Speaker 3: this thing, So it sort of puts it in this
Speaker 3: primed state. And then the second it catches your face
Speaker 3: or your fingerprint, we're not quick enough to notice the
Speaker 3: time it's less than a millisecond.
Speaker 1: After the break. Who will buy this gun and who won't?
Speaker 1: And since it's an electronic device, does it suffer from
Speaker 1: the usual things of software updates? So the battery is
Speaker 1: going to die or it'll become obsolete in a few years,
Speaker 1: Whereas you know, somebody who owns an analog gun can
Speaker 1: keep that thing forever and it'll just keep working.
Speaker 3: This is a really triggy issue. There's a couple things
Speaker 3: I could say that are basics that, yes, you have
Speaker 3: to keep this charged. The company says it takes about
Speaker 3: an hour to charge it up, and it'll last for
Speaker 3: months in that state and be ready to fire. There's
Speaker 3: also the computing device I mentioned is it serves also
Speaker 3: as a dock, and so you can leave that plugged
Speaker 3: in the wall and have the gun in there if
Speaker 3: you so choose. On the updates thing. Now, this is
Speaker 3: where there's like controversy because a lot of people in
Speaker 3: the pro gun rights crowd have not been a fan
Speaker 3: of these guns being connected to the internet, having any
Speaker 3: sort of information about the owner who's firing it, seeing it,
Speaker 3: you know, as another means of sort of government control
Speaker 3: or trying to track where you are. And so the
Speaker 3: gun itself has no wireless communications, no Bluetooth, no Wi Fi,
Speaker 3: no Internet.
Speaker 2: It's totally off the grade, right, and that's because you know,
Speaker 2: we've got a pretty streme links to ensure that all
Speaker 2: the data that's inside of the firearm is encrypted. It
Speaker 2: can never be accessed by anybody, including biofire and it's
Speaker 2: or very securely inside of the fire arm.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Our customers do very clearly do not want us to
Speaker 2: have some sort of ability to access additional data anything
Speaker 2: like that, and so we've worked with some of the
Speaker 2: best folks in the cybersecurity space to design what is
Speaker 2: honestly a massively overdesigned cybersecurity implementation to ensure that everything
Speaker 2: is encrypted locally on the device using credentials that are
Speaker 2: generated by the device during manufacturing that biofire has no
Speaker 2: access to. We further enhance that security by having it
Speaker 2: be wired only. Right, there's no wiress communication in the firearm.
Speaker 2: There's no ability to wirelessly talk to or potentially disrupt
Speaker 2: the functionality of the fireman anyway.
Speaker 3: If you choose to update the gun, you can connect
Speaker 3: it to this dock and update the software that way. Otherwise,
Speaker 3: you can also just leave the dock completely off the Internet,
Speaker 3: and the company says, you know, it'll fire for many
Speaker 3: years without doing any updates, so you can sort of
Speaker 3: choose which lifestyle you want to lead.
Speaker 1: The gun movement has been against the development of smart
Speaker 1: guns for all kinds of reasons for a long time.
Speaker 1: How are they responding to this one.
Speaker 3: Nobody's really seen this, and I'm quite curious to see
Speaker 3: how the gun advocates react to this thing, because I
Speaker 3: do think it's certainly far more sophisticated than anything's come before.
Speaker 3: So I think this is sort of the moment where
Speaker 3: we find out what happens when something that actually works
Speaker 3: is out there and how people react to it. There
Speaker 3: have been attempts in a couple states to begin putting
Speaker 3: legislation in place for if a smart gun that is
Speaker 3: viable exists, this is how we're going to react to that.
Speaker 3: New Jersey's sort of the most famous or infamous example,
Speaker 3: depending how you want to look at it. But they
Speaker 3: had put a law into place which said if a
Speaker 3: viable smart gun was available, they wanted the entire industry
Speaker 3: to move towards smart guns and require that to be purchased.
Speaker 3: And as you can imagine, people got extremely upset and
Speaker 3: you hated the idea that they were going to be
Speaker 3: forced to buy something. And this happened at a time
Speaker 3: when when a real smart gun really didn't even exist,
Speaker 3: and so it was a huge blow to the smart
Speaker 3: gu gun advocates because it was sort of going through
Speaker 3: all this turmoil before you even had a product that
Speaker 3: could maybe test and appeal to people and show them
Speaker 3: the capability of this technology. And so New Jersey, after
Speaker 3: many years, changed that law and now it really is,
Speaker 3: if a smart gun exists, you must at least carry
Speaker 3: one of these in your store. And so it's pulled
Speaker 3: back a lot. In California many years ago, there was
Speaker 3: a company that had an early smart gun prototype and
Speaker 3: one of the stores that was quite excited to sell it.
Speaker 3: They faced all these protests from people and it never
Speaker 3: even got to the shelves. They had to pull it
Speaker 3: from the shelves due to all this controversy.
Speaker 1: Is there any concern that if you have a smart
Speaker 1: gun you sort of have a false sense of safety
Speaker 1: and security in how a gun works and how you
Speaker 1: have to behave around a gun.
Speaker 3: Yes. The gun rights advocates I talked to basically said
Speaker 3: I was a problem number one in some of this,
Speaker 3: and that I am the kind of person who is
Speaker 3: not that comfort around guns but sees this as a
Speaker 3: safer option, might be something I would bring in my house.
Speaker 3: But they said, look, you're you're not going to go
Speaker 3: do classes, You're not gonna go do training. You just
Speaker 3: become this huge problem. We end up just putting more
Speaker 3: guns into the supply overall, and now we have a
Speaker 3: class of people who are not doing the work that's
Speaker 3: needed to really operate a firearm safely, and now they
Speaker 3: have guns.
Speaker 1: And what is the argument from gun advocates again, smart
Speaker 1: gun technology, except for they don't want to be told
Speaker 1: what they can buy and not buy.
Speaker 3: That's probably reason number one is we see where this
Speaker 3: is heading, You're just gonna start putting more and more
Speaker 3: controls on what we can do. Then it quickly because
Speaker 3: we can't really trust these guns. I'm not gonna trust
Speaker 3: my life to some computer gadget that I don't know
Speaker 3: if it's going to work or not. And so that's
Speaker 3: where the argument begins. Some of the more nuanced arguments
Speaker 3: would be around does this even make sense? You know,
Speaker 3: if somebody is the type person that has a loaded
Speaker 3: weapon in their house that their child might find, is
Speaker 3: that the same person who's going to go out and
Speaker 3: buy a smart gun that, at least for now, is
Speaker 3: more expensive than a regular gun. People do concede that
Speaker 3: this could help with the prevention of suicides by putting
Speaker 3: this extra hurdle, and the numbers there are quite high
Speaker 3: on the number of suicides that happened per year, although
Speaker 3: the you know, the gun rights advocates say this even
Speaker 3: there would be a relatively small percentage.
Speaker 1: I want to note here that Michael Bloomberg, who's the
Speaker 1: founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg News also founded every Town for Gun Safety,
Speaker 1: which advocates for gun safety measures. How are they actually
Speaker 1: marketing this gun.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because Biofire and Kai Kai has been at
Speaker 3: this so long and he's seen these past mistakes, so he,
Speaker 3: for example, has lobbied against efforts to mandate smart guns.
Speaker 3: He does not want the gun to be seen as
Speaker 3: this enemy of gun right.
Speaker 2: One of the really key tenants to the way that
Speaker 2: I've approached this, which I think is is pretty critical
Speaker 2: the success that we've seen so far is we're looking
Speaker 2: to offer a choice, right We're looking to offer a
Speaker 2: choice that doesn't exist in the market right now, and
Speaker 2: we think there's going to be a whole lot of
Speaker 2: people that are going to choose to purchase our product.
Speaker 2: And that's awesome, right, Like, we're looking to build successful business.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, if people don't feel like
Speaker 2: our purchase are fit for their use case, their environment,
Speaker 2: their experience, their situation, that's great, right. Like, there's lots
Speaker 2: and lots of other competitive products in the market traditional firearms,
Speaker 2: and they're welcome to purchase any of those obviously, or
Speaker 2: not purchase environm at all.
Speaker 3: And the company is also not going after police forces
Speaker 3: and the military first, which is where I thought it
Speaker 3: would head, But it is actually pitching their handgun. It
Speaker 3: really people like me first and foremost, somebody who would
Speaker 3: consider having a weapon in their house to protect their
Speaker 3: family and wants the safest possible option of that. There
Speaker 3: are many people who would argue consumers only will be
Speaker 3: sold on this if they see police forces use it first.
Speaker 3: So it's an interesting strategy.
Speaker 1: When we come back. If smart guns like this one
Speaker 1: are shown to work, will the government start requiring makers
Speaker 1: to adopt this technology. You said that he's been very
Speaker 1: careful not to antagonize gun advocates. Did you ask him
Speaker 1: where he comes down on things like federal background checks
Speaker 1: and limiting sales of guns on the internet and gun shows,
Speaker 1: which are real points of conflict between gun advocates and
Speaker 1: gun control advocates.
Speaker 3: He tends to take the middle ground on all these
Speaker 3: things of never saying something that's really going to upset
Speaker 3: the NRA too much, but also trying to you know,
Speaker 3: his mission is safety. The whole origin story of this
Speaker 3: company is to try and save lives, and so High's
Speaker 3: very polished. I found it interesting, he said he fired
Speaker 3: guns a little bit as a kid growing up in Colorado.
Speaker 3: Mostly I think hunting well, mix of hunting and going
Speaker 3: to the shooting range. But since then, he has quite
Speaker 3: a number of guns now and has become quite an
Speaker 3: enthusiast on his own.
Speaker 1: On the other side, have gun control advocates embraced his
Speaker 1: smart gun technology?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, gun control advocates historically have embraced smart
Speaker 3: gun technology. I think Biofire has been a little secretive
Speaker 3: about this particular weapon that's just going on sale, and
Speaker 3: so we don't have a lot of public reaction to
Speaker 3: it yet. I think that's going to hit as our
Speaker 3: story goes out and people discover this weapon for the
Speaker 3: first time. There's been a number of researchers, both at
Speaker 3: universities and the government who have been studying this issue
Speaker 3: for about thirty years and produced data saying why they
Speaker 3: think smart guns will work. It was unsatisfying. Part of
Speaker 3: this story is that we just have no idea because
Speaker 3: you've never had this product out in the world to
Speaker 3: see what actually happens. And so I have to confess
Speaker 3: I went over a ton of the data. You know,
Speaker 3: it felt like a little flimsy to me, just because
Speaker 3: it's hypothetical.
Speaker 1: So if someone wants to buy one of these things,
Speaker 1: they didn't really exist yet, but they're about two. How
Speaker 1: do you go about buying one?
Speaker 3: Right you could? You go to Biofire's website and right
Speaker 3: now you would place a pre order. I think it's
Speaker 3: roughly around two hundred dollars just to get in the
Speaker 3: line to place your order, and then you're gonna have
Speaker 3: to pay about thirteen hundred dollars more. So it's around
Speaker 3: fifteen hundred dollars for this gun. And the company is
Speaker 3: saying they want to see how many pre orders come
Speaker 3: in the first people who order it. They expect to
Speaker 3: deliver the weapon early next year, they're saying. And I
Speaker 3: asked them if you could buy this in all fifty states.
Speaker 3: They did not have a great answer for me. And
Speaker 3: so there are some restrictions in some states around buying
Speaker 3: newly developed weapons. And it's going to be in the
Speaker 3: United States only for a bit, and people have to
Speaker 3: check what's going on where they live.
Speaker 1: Are they prepared to manufacture this at scale or is
Speaker 1: this going to be kind of a boutique item.
Speaker 3: I went to their headquarters, which is ostensibly where they're
Speaker 3: making them by hand right now, and they are going
Speaker 3: to set up an assembly factory, which they have not
Speaker 3: set up yet, and so to me, this is a
Speaker 3: huge question. This is always a major test when you
Speaker 3: go from a something that's beyond a prototype, but it's
Speaker 3: this early model technology object to making lots of them
Speaker 3: tends to be quite hard. I mean, again, go back
Speaker 3: to Tesla. They suffered through years and years and years
Speaker 3: of struggling to just make their car, even after they
Speaker 3: had it dialed in. So I think that's a huge question.
Speaker 3: I really got the sense that they are waiting to
Speaker 3: see what happens when they turn this ordering website on
Speaker 3: and how much reaction there is to try and gauge
Speaker 3: what they have to prepare for.
Speaker 1: Have they gone the Silicon Valley route and trying to
Speaker 1: get a lot of seed money the way startups do.
Speaker 3: They've raised about thirty million dollars in total, which is
Speaker 3: a mix of venture capital and private investment. There's been
Speaker 3: people who have been along side Kai for most of
Speaker 3: this ride who have put money in. The most prominent
Speaker 3: backer is still Peter Teel via his venture capital fund
Speaker 3: Founder's Fund, which is the major backer of the company.
Speaker 3: Thirty million dollars for a manufacturing company is not a lot.
Speaker 3: And so these pre sales I think are going to
Speaker 3: have to do some work.
Speaker 1: When you look ahead at this technology and the idea
Speaker 1: of these smart guns, where do you see it going
Speaker 1: If this gun is primarily intended or marketed to prevent accidents.
Speaker 1: A lot of accidents happen with hunting rifles, with modern
Speaker 1: sporting rifles some people call them, other people call them
Speaker 1: assault style rifles. Can we expect this technology start popping
Speaker 1: up on long guns.
Speaker 3: There are efforts to do that, and some companies have
Speaker 3: created prototypes, have gotten weapons like that in the hands
Speaker 3: of the military. It's the same sort of story I
Speaker 3: poked around all their websites. It says, we have this gun,
Speaker 3: we just don't have enough demand to manufacture a lot
Speaker 3: of them, but we could do it if you wanted it.
Speaker 3: I have to say, you know, I went into this
Speaker 3: so skeptical. Things have not gone well in the smart
Speaker 3: gun world for the last twenty twenty five years, and
Speaker 3: I have to say, I mean, at least just as
Speaker 3: a gun and as an object, it was impressive. The
Speaker 3: more I used it, the more time I spent seeing
Speaker 3: how it worked, it just it feels inevitable. Why would
Speaker 3: you not use something like this if it works well
Speaker 3: and exists?
Speaker 1: Ashley Mance, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
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