Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fago. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
Speaker 3: they don't want you to know. One of the memes
Speaker 3: we were talking about before we started to roll today
Speaker 3: was the old don't tase me bro meme. A lot
Speaker 3: of people when they hear the question about whether or
Speaker 3: not you've ever endured the pain of being tased, hearing
Speaker 3: that question and may conjure images of Jackass style pranks.
Speaker 3: But tragically, for many, many more people, this conversation will
Speaker 3: immediately bring to mind over one thousand deaths at the
Speaker 3: hands of taser wielding law enforcement officers.
Speaker 2: Doesn't it also kind of remind you that there were
Speaker 2: two potential presidential elect candidates that were in skull and bones,
Speaker 2: and somebody wanted to know about it and ended up
Speaker 2: getting taste. Sorry, don't mean to derail. That's what reminds me.
Speaker 3: Of sure, or the larger deeper conversation about non lethal
Speaker 3: versus less than lethal, or the larger deeper conversation about
Speaker 3: corruption in law enforcement. Alternatives to firearms. Look, tasers are
Speaker 3: sold everywhere and affordable to the public. We'll get to
Speaker 3: a lot of deep water here, but before we before
Speaker 3: we really dive in, We've got to tell you, folks,
Speaker 3: we recently listened to Lava for Good's new hit podcast
Speaker 3: Absolute Season one. Taser Incorporated explores much much more than
Speaker 3: the headlines regarding the story of tasers, especially the story
Speaker 3: of tasers as told by the companies that manufacture tasers,
Speaker 3: and we are always looking for primary sources. Today, we
Speaker 3: are thrilled to be joined with the creator of the show,
Speaker 3: the one and only Nick Bredini. Nick, thank you so
Speaker 3: much for sharing some time with us today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you, guys, I'm a huge fan. It's great
Speaker 4: to be here.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we've collectively spent a lot of time
Speaker 2: with your podcast, with other work you've done and writing
Speaker 2: you've done, and we are filled with questions for you,
Speaker 2: and it's tough to know really where to start, but
Speaker 2: I think maybe a good place would be, well, we
Speaker 2: want to know about you too, but I think I
Speaker 2: think this question will get to who you are too.
Speaker 2: Please tell us who was Stanley Harlan, what happened to him,
Speaker 2: and what about his story inspired you, as a student
Speaker 2: at the University of Missouri to create a documentary about him.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Really take us back in time here, because this is
Speaker 3: your origin story. This is the part of what launched
Speaker 3: you into a decade plus investigation. So if you could
Speaker 3: set the scene, You're a journalism student at University of
Speaker 3: Missouri and you receive an assignment right just given to you,
Speaker 3: and all they tell you at first is a man
Speaker 3: has died while in the custody of law enforcement.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, I mean one of the unique things about
Speaker 4: going to school at the University of Missouri, where I
Speaker 4: also sort of happened to play basketball as sort of
Speaker 4: like my fun fact about me is that I was
Speaker 4: the worst player on a high major Division one basketball
Speaker 4: team where I got dunked on and practice a bunch
Speaker 4: of times. But it was nice to be cool for
Speaker 4: a few years there. You still get the all the
Speaker 4: part works that come with the starters, you know, in
Speaker 4: terms of popularity. So that was fun. But I had
Speaker 4: spent most all my life thinking about wanting to work
Speaker 4: in basketball or sports to some degree, and had kind
Speaker 4: of this plan where I was going to go, you know,
Speaker 4: off to law school and be an agent, or I
Speaker 4: was going to work for some NBA team. I really
Speaker 4: grew up in sports, and when I went to Missouri,
Speaker 4: the best degree you could get was a journalism degree.
Speaker 4: And naturally, everybody who goes to the broadcast school then
Speaker 4: the television news school is interested in sports, right They
Speaker 4: all want to be the next analyst for ESPN, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. And one of the unique things that happened
Speaker 4: to me and why the journalism school at Missouri is
Speaker 4: so great, is that you actually have to work as
Speaker 4: a reporter for real local affiliates. If you're in the
Speaker 4: magazine school, you have to work for a real magazine.
Speaker 4: If you're in the newspaper, we have a you know, Columbia,
Speaker 4: Missouri has its own you know, city newspaper that's staffed
Speaker 4: by student reporters and their editors are prof Basically that's
Speaker 4: true of the NBC affiliate as well. The local NBC
Speaker 4: affiliate is staffed by professors who are the you know,
Speaker 4: news directors and news managers, but the reporters are students,
Speaker 4: and I, because I was playing basketball, had to basically
Speaker 4: push off a lot of my advanced level classes that conflicted,
Speaker 4: you know, with my schedule until I was done playing basketball.
Speaker 4: So I got this like fifth year student experience where
Speaker 4: I was hanging out basically doing nothing but partying and
Speaker 4: going to the news room basically. And you've dunked a
Speaker 4: few times. I do, but in my best days, with
Speaker 4: enough of a running start, I could definitely dunk just
Speaker 4: a little bit, just enough in warm ups to show
Speaker 4: off a little lot of things. Yeah. But so I
Speaker 4: just was working one of these overnight shifts where you
Speaker 4: work the morning newscast basically, and you're staffed to say, okay,
Speaker 4: you're the general assignment reporter, you may go cover you know,
Speaker 4: one one one freezing ass morning. I was standing outside
Speaker 4: assault depot because there of fear that there would be
Speaker 4: assault shortage, you know, as the winter was coming, right,
Speaker 4: you just do kind of whatever the producers decide this
Speaker 4: show is going to need for that newscast, and breaking
Speaker 4: news is a huge part of that of course. Right.
Speaker 4: So I'm standing there in the newsroom not sure what
Speaker 4: my assignment's going to be sometime around you know, close
Speaker 4: to midnight, I want to say it was. And then
Speaker 4: the police scanner right goes off with reports about an
Speaker 4: incident at a town just sort of outside of Columbia,
Speaker 4: about thirty miles north, just a smaller town called Moberly,
Speaker 4: about this young man who's been taken to a hospital,
Speaker 4: right because there's been an incident where he suffered some
Speaker 4: sort of cardiac episode after being tasered by cops. And
Speaker 4: then not long after that scanner, we get a phone
Speaker 4: call from Stanley Harlan's mom, directed to the newsroom, and
Speaker 4: she's screaming and crying, the police killed my son. The
Speaker 4: police killed my son. And she's, as you can imagine
Speaker 4: any parents, just absolutely, you know, completely losing her in
Speaker 4: a way that I'll never forget the rawness of that,
Speaker 4: you know that she was just screaming about how the
Speaker 4: cops killed her son. And so as the reporter, what
Speaker 4: you do, You hop in the car and you you know,
Speaker 4: you race out there, You go right out there. So
Speaker 4: I drove, you know, thirty miles eash north in the
Speaker 4: middle of the night out to this town and arrived
Speaker 4: on the scene and was being roped off, and you know, investigators,
Speaker 4: State State police were on the scene because they were
Speaker 4: there to investigate. And the thing that just struck me
Speaker 4: right away was the family wasn't there. They had obviously
Speaker 4: gone to the hospital at that point to identify the body,
Speaker 4: do the things that come with you know, and in
Speaker 4: custody death. But I was talking to neighbors who watched
Speaker 4: this scene play out right in front of Stanley's house.
Speaker 4: He had been followed by police home. They basically were
Speaker 4: they were. The police were trying to say it was
Speaker 4: a duy stop that was later sort of contested. But
Speaker 4: he is gotten out of his car and Stanley, the
Speaker 4: tragedy of it is, is on the phone with his
Speaker 4: mom as he's getting pulled out of the car because
Speaker 4: he wants her to come outside to make sure nothing
Speaker 4: bad happens to him right in front of his house.
Speaker 4: And so the officer that taser Stanley doesn't realize the
Speaker 4: officer who pulled him over has allowed him to do this,
Speaker 4: comes tries to take the phone out of his hand.
Speaker 4: Stanley pulls away right because he thinks he's allowed to
Speaker 4: be on the phone calling his mom, and very very
Speaker 4: quickly after that, he puts his hands in the air
Speaker 4: and says, you know, one of the officers, one of
Speaker 4: the sergeants or the commanding officers on the scene, says,
Speaker 4: just haser and he puts his hands in the air
Speaker 4: and says, taser me. Why you're gonna taser me? And
Speaker 4: they shot him in the chest with a taser for
Speaker 4: thirty seconds, and he died right in front of his mom.
Speaker 4: And one of the haunting sort of images of the
Speaker 4: film I made is you could see his mother come
Speaker 4: across the dash cam screen. It's sort of in her
Speaker 4: pink robe as the incident happens a bit off screen.
Speaker 4: But that phone call and then talking to those neighbors,
Speaker 4: I think it was seven of them who said they
Speaker 4: did not there was no violence here. He put his
Speaker 4: hands in the air and said, why are you going
Speaker 4: to taser me? And then they shot him, and then
Speaker 4: you know, within minutes he was dead. And that became
Speaker 4: for me as someone who was already leaning toward a
Speaker 4: life outside of television news. I think I had kind
Speaker 4: of I had been involved in acting as a kid.
Speaker 4: I had a real fascination with long form. I wanted
Speaker 4: to be a writer. I wanted to be a lot
Speaker 4: of things. I did not want to be a local
Speaker 4: TV news reporter. And so as that story progressed throughout
Speaker 4: that fifth year of school that I had, I was
Speaker 4: thinking about doing a big investigation into what really happened
Speaker 4: to Stanley Harlan, and that investigation we ended up doing
Speaker 4: several you know pieces for the TV station over the
Speaker 4: course of the next you know year that I would
Speaker 4: still in school. And then my mentor basically said, you
Speaker 4: want to get into film, you want to do this
Speaker 4: sort of thing. I think you have a documentary you
Speaker 4: know right here, and that basically advice, that terrible advice,
Speaker 4: sent me on the path to making a you know
Speaker 4: film that took about four years to make that transformed
Speaker 4: from being a story about a small town that was
Speaker 4: grappling with police violence because there had been a history
Speaker 4: sort of with that department of them going too far
Speaker 4: until then they had finally now killed somebody. That spiraled
Speaker 4: into the film that I ended up making, which was
Speaker 4: this film about the one company that made tasers at
Speaker 4: the time. You know, they're so much bigger than this now,
Speaker 4: but at the time, this was the story of this company,
Speaker 4: the only company who really made tasers for police, Axon.
Speaker 3: Well, now, axon, Yeah, the critically acclaimed documentary Killing Them Safely,
Speaker 3: and folks, this is not a plug nick to embarrass you,
Speaker 3: to put you on the spy here, but this is
Speaker 3: this is a pretty brutal and unrelenting piece of journalism
Speaker 3: and documentary work. This also informs so many questions because again,
Speaker 3: what we see is from that initial call, like you said,
Speaker 3: in the middle of the night and the horrific things
Speaker 3: happening to Stanley Harlan and his family. You keep finding
Speaker 3: more and more disturbing stuff as you're digging in. So
Speaker 3: maybe for this, now that we have the origin story,
Speaker 3: maybe for people who are unfamiliar in the audience tonight,
Speaker 3: could you explain what a taser is, how a taser works,
Speaker 3: how did they become so common?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So why this became a film about this company
Speaker 4: was because I had heard of a taser. I had
Speaker 4: seen the Hangover. I had watched you know, Galfanakis gets
Speaker 4: shoot in the face and laughed like everybody else because
Speaker 4: it's genuinely incredibly funny. It's a moment in a movie, right,
Speaker 4: But the familiarity with it. What struck me was the
Speaker 4: taser is basically shaped like a gun. It looks very
Speaker 4: similar to what you would expect from a handgun. It
Speaker 4: fires two probes, at least this model of the taser.
Speaker 4: They're a bit more advanced now, but this model of
Speaker 4: the taser became that made the company so successful. Basically
Speaker 4: fire two probes kind of looked a little bit like
Speaker 4: fish hooks attached to copper wires. And the idea is
Speaker 4: that it delivers electric current inside of your body that
Speaker 4: is at a threshold that is essentially affecting the nervous system,
Speaker 4: so you are unable to control your muscles. That's what
Speaker 4: I call it, muscular incopacitation, neuromuscular incapacitation. But the current
Speaker 4: is safe enough to not affect your heart or electric
Speaker 4: you to you right, People say that a lot. That's
Speaker 4: not what happens when people die. The current is not
Speaker 4: strong enough to electric cue someone. And the thing that
Speaker 4: struck me though, was I had heard of a taser
Speaker 4: and understood just the basics of how they worked. But
Speaker 4: why I became so interested in the company was this,
Speaker 4: adamans this no gray area, black and white. These weapons
Speaker 4: cannot kill, not in a circumstance other than you shoot
Speaker 4: somebody off of a ledge and they fall and they die.
Speaker 4: Sure they can. Everybody knows you could fall off a
Speaker 4: high ledge and be killed. But the electric current itself,
Speaker 4: in no way, ever, under any circumstance, no doubt about it,
Speaker 4: is not capable electrically, scientifically, not capable of killing someone.
Speaker 5: I think, even to like, you know, someone that's uninitiated
Speaker 5: in these kind of things, that just seems like a
Speaker 5: really absurd claim, exactly me. And there's so many variations
Speaker 5: and intervening circumstances and health conditions. I mean, it just
Speaker 5: seems on its surface to be way outlandish to be
Speaker 5: able to unequivocally say this with out any question.
Speaker 4: Yes. And what drove me to the company was this
Speaker 4: conflict of They were also the ones who wrote these
Speaker 4: training programs and conducted this training for police officers. So
Speaker 4: you have the one company with a monopoly on the
Speaker 4: weapon telling tens of thousands, at that point, hundreds of
Speaker 4: thousands of police officers across the country. These weapons, under
Speaker 4: no circumstances other than lighting someone on fire accidentally because
Speaker 4: they spark someone covered in gasoline, or some shooting someone
Speaker 4: off of a ledge and they fall down. These weapons
Speaker 4: do not kill in any circumstance.
Speaker 3: That Nick, what's that one quote that the CEO Rick
Speaker 3: says at multiple points they say, if the taser is harmful,
Speaker 3: it's really the person using correct taser.
Speaker 4: It was. It was essentially the quote you're thinking of.
Speaker 4: Is a really important moment in the company's history. In
Speaker 4: early two thousand and four, CBS News did a kind
Speaker 4: of big investigation into tasers and into the companies. The
Speaker 4: first deaths really started to pile up, and basically, you know,
Speaker 4: White Andrews, the reporter is saying to Rick Smith, you're saying,
Speaker 4: this is a coincidence that these people would have died anyway,
Speaker 4: and he says, in every single case, these people would
Speaker 4: have died anyway. And the implication being right, some other
Speaker 4: drugs what became very controversial. I'm sure we'll talk about
Speaker 4: excited delirium, some other condition. At the exact moment of
Speaker 4: this tasering, right was responsible for somebody else's death. And
Speaker 4: even as a twenty three year old with not a
Speaker 4: lot of like worldly knowledge yet like making my way
Speaker 4: in the world as a reporter, just felt like, okay,
Speaker 4: the company with a monopoly on the weapon, doing all
Speaker 4: of the training and telling these cops that it can
Speaker 4: never kill doesn't seem like a promise or a claim
Speaker 4: that is going to be able to hold up under scrutiny.
Speaker 4: And I went to the company kind of half expecting
Speaker 4: there was some misunderstanding that like, Okay, I get, maybe
Speaker 4: these are like really safe and actually this isn't supposed
Speaker 4: to have but maybe Stanley Harlan is like one of
Speaker 4: these rare freak occurrences where like you can't shoot someone
Speaker 4: in the chest with electricity for thirty seconds and not
Speaker 4: expects there's a chance they could die. And that's not
Speaker 4: how my one day that was supposed to be multiple days,
Speaker 4: but the one day that I spent at the company
Speaker 4: that I've ever been allowed to be inside, that one
Speaker 4: day I was allowed to be inside really changed everything
Speaker 4: because we couldn't get it, felt like we couldn't come
Speaker 4: to some sort of common understanding of just like the
Speaker 4: sky is blue right right, like.
Speaker 3: A lot of the conversations feel the way we learn
Speaker 3: about them in absolute and the way that we learn
Speaker 3: about them and killing them safely. You're doing your due
Speaker 3: diligence as a reporter, and you're asking your refrain to question.
Speaker 3: Sometimes you're saying like okay, again, could I get a
Speaker 3: direct answer and the person you're speaking with I believe
Speaker 3: Tuttle Yes? At that Why, Yes, Steve Tuttle is doing
Speaker 3: kind of a matrix dodge or some parkour for every
Speaker 3: direct question you're asking, and at times contradicting his previous statements.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The thing you learn about corporate spin and why
Speaker 4: this is a film really about the way in which
Speaker 4: the film is about a lot of corporate rhetoric is
Speaker 4: because companies are really good, I think, especially in controversial
Speaker 4: industries at the sound bite. They know how to package
Speaker 4: their messaging and their rhetoric into very concise talking points.
Speaker 4: But if you just kind of unravel a story and
Speaker 4: you ask to hear the story, which documentary film allows
Speaker 4: you to do, right, I like writing magazine journalism and
Speaker 4: doing profile journalism. Now I love this pot test we made, right.
Speaker 4: These are long form stories and you ask someone to
Speaker 4: tell you their story, and if you sit there long
Speaker 4: enough to hear a story, you can't put that messaging
Speaker 4: you know, so tightly into these neat talking points because
Speaker 4: as you follow up, you're digging your own rabbit hole
Speaker 4: that you can't escape from. Right, Because the narrative you've
Speaker 4: created the mythology you've created doesn't actually match with the
Speaker 4: reality that's right in front of your face, which is
Speaker 4: sort of where the absurdity of the film in particular,
Speaker 4: right that it's a lot of it structured around this
Speaker 4: messaging it comes into play because it just becomes so
Speaker 4: bizarre because we know what's real, and yet we're being
Speaker 4: handheld and walked through this like, you know, incredibly elliptical
Speaker 4: and bizarre, sort of like you know, dreamscape of the
Speaker 4: story of just like who are you and how did
Speaker 4: you get here?
Speaker 5: Hey, let's take a quick pause right here here a
Speaker 5: work more sponsor, and then come back with more from
Speaker 5: Nick and we're back. Let's jump right back into this conversation.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about the way Taser was born,
Speaker 2: because at least of the way you discuss it in
Speaker 2: the podcast and the way I've seen you write about it,
Speaker 2: it seems to have been born from a pretty noble goal,
Speaker 2: and then when that goal is is it has to
Speaker 2: be changed and altered a little bit because of commerce,
Speaker 2: because of the needs of you know, building a company
Speaker 2: and paying off loans and all these things that just
Speaker 2: the capitalist system kind of does to everything and every
Speaker 2: idea that comes around to it, it has to change,
Speaker 2: and then there has to be a belief in it,
Speaker 2: Like we're talking about almost a supreme belief in the reality.
Speaker 5: Of it, a philosophical kind of shift a little bit, right,
Speaker 5: because I mean, initially, wasn't it meant to be a
Speaker 5: non lethal form of self defense, you know, to cut
Speaker 5: down on gun violence? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Can you tell us a little bit about how how
Speaker 2: it became a thing? Like, really, why Taser International became
Speaker 2: a thing?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things
Speaker 4: that I really emphasized about Rick Smith. He's the He
Speaker 4: and his brother co foundered the company, but Rick is
Speaker 4: the visionary. Tom his older brother kind of just like
Speaker 4: you know, came along for the ride because it was
Speaker 4: a family business. They used their dad's seed money. They
Speaker 4: used their dad's money from a from a startup that
Speaker 4: he'd invested in that did ended up doing quite well
Speaker 4: to fund the original idea, which was we are going
Speaker 4: to make a star Trek phaser. Because to high school acquaintances,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of controversy because Rick had previously called
Speaker 4: them his friends and then he fact checked it and
Speaker 4: it's like they you know, maybe known each other a
Speaker 4: little bit, you know, they were the guys. These guys
Speaker 4: he calls his friends, end up being much older than
Speaker 4: he was, and so they never really went to high
Speaker 4: school together. But the story goes that Rick is basically
Speaker 4: in business school and he has already graduated from Harvard.
Speaker 4: He's an incredibly smart, accomplished young person from kind of
Speaker 4: a one percenter suburb, right, who can be anything he
Speaker 4: wants to be. Really, he's got that kind of he's
Speaker 4: like made in a lab to be either like a
Speaker 4: politician or like a successful businessman or you know, whatever.
Speaker 4: He wants, whatever his heart desires, and he wants to
Speaker 4: be like his dad. He wants to be entrepreneurial, he
Speaker 4: wants something of his own. And so he's in business
Speaker 4: school when these two acquaintances are killed in a road
Speaker 4: rage shooting. And it's that shooting that Rick always cites
Speaker 4: as the sort of catalyst for him understanding gun violence
Speaker 4: and thinking about how many people are actually killed by guns.
Speaker 4: And this is back in nineteen ninety one, So this is,
Speaker 4: you know, thirty forty years ago now where the idea
Speaker 4: of of having a weapon to defend yourself, right that
Speaker 4: isn't a gun is like kind of this violent crime
Speaker 4: era of America where people are like seriously considering, can
Speaker 4: we do better than guns? Now, what I always say
Speaker 4: is that, like, it's an incredibly naive concept because a
Speaker 4: lot of people buy guns because they like guns. It's
Speaker 4: not just to defend themselves, right, American gun culture is
Speaker 4: bigger than just I need a revolver to protect myself
Speaker 4: from a road rage shooting.
Speaker 5: It's like phasing out car culture, you know, yeah, right right,
Speaker 5: something that people are enthusiasts about, right, collectors, et cetera.
Speaker 3: It's tied to identity for many people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But he has this twenty three year old, you know,
Speaker 4: like moment of inspiration where he thinks, I'm going to
Speaker 4: take my dad's money. I love star Trek, I want
Speaker 4: to basically make He does some research and he finds
Speaker 4: there was this guy named Jack Kover who would a
Speaker 4: originally invented the taser, which.
Speaker 1: Was shout out to Taser Tron.
Speaker 4: To shout out to Taser Tron, a kind of failed
Speaker 4: company that had tried previously to bring tasers to market
Speaker 4: as a self defense weapon. Is kind of a big
Speaker 4: bulky weapon shaped like a flashlight. The key sort of
Speaker 4: red tape. There is that it used gunpowder to fire
Speaker 4: those probes, and so it was regulated like a firearm,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people, basically a lot of average
Speaker 4: citizens needed to go through a similar process to buying
Speaker 4: a firearm if they wanted one. They were just too
Speaker 4: expensive and too clunky and too sort of ahead of
Speaker 4: its time to compete seriously in a self defense market.
Speaker 4: But Rick has an idea to work with Kover to
Speaker 4: license that technology from him to create a taser that
Speaker 4: uses compressed nitrogen to fire, thinking they'll avoid all the
Speaker 4: sort of ATF regulation that comes if they do that,
Speaker 4: and they're just like, the two guys, it's like this
Speaker 4: great story about they're in Rick's you know, parents camper,
Speaker 4: and they're like they're tweaking this thing in this just like,
Speaker 4: you know, great entrepreneurial origin story. We're gonna change the
Speaker 4: world in this you know, desert camper that we're in together,
Speaker 4: and it's just an absolute disaster, right Like, Rick tells
Speaker 4: this great story that's in our podcast. Not to spoil it,
Speaker 4: but it's one of my favorites where they hire out
Speaker 4: a call center and they do a promo on the
Speaker 4: local news and Phoenix back in nineteen ninety four, when
Speaker 4: they're going to launch the company, and they are basically
Speaker 4: expecting a flood of calls to come in ordering this
Speaker 4: taser when people see it demonstrate it live on TV,
Speaker 4: and like nobody calls. The only call, he says, he
Speaker 4: gets is from his mom the entire night, and she's like,
Speaker 4: how's it going, Ricky?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 4: And this is just like this incredibly human moment of
Speaker 4: a young entrepreneur with this grandiose idea where at the
Speaker 4: very first meeting, the very first board meeting of his
Speaker 4: company with his parents and his brother, says, we're gonna
Speaker 4: make the bullet obsolete, right, that's the real ambition, and
Speaker 4: like they are right from the start. Pardon my French,
Speaker 4: but like it's that bad. And so they spend years
Speaker 4: trying to figure out how to save this idea, and
Speaker 4: that ultimately leads to police because the idea of a
Speaker 4: taser is a natural fit in policing, and they the
Speaker 4: real key moment in the company's history is realizing the
Speaker 4: original taser that Jackober had developed and then Rick Smith
Speaker 4: tried to perfect just wasn't strong enough for police to
Speaker 4: take seriously. And Rick makes a fateful choice between sort
Speaker 4: of the company going under or building a taser that
Speaker 4: is strong enough to basically take law enforcement by storm,
Speaker 4: and he chooses the stronger taser. They engineer this weapon,
Speaker 4: and that's about you know, that's roughly nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 4: and they just within five years the company had gone
Speaker 4: from near bankruptcy to being worth about one point nine
Speaker 4: billion dollars.
Speaker 3: And I would say at this point, as well, I
Speaker 3: love the way we're exploring the SNICK. I would say
Speaker 3: one thing that stands out to me here is that
Speaker 3: Rick Smith. Yes, ambitious, yes, quite intelligent, and as we'll find,
Speaker 3: quite litigious. But Rick Smith is above all a storyteller
Speaker 3: as well. And he is you know, anybody familiar with
Speaker 3: a C suite or upper management, A lot of it
Speaker 3: is kind of storytelling, no offense.
Speaker 5: Smith making, creating the more of something.
Speaker 3: The storytelling here seems to be a shift not just
Speaker 3: in goal, but a shift in narrative. Right, what is
Speaker 3: the story I tell to law enforcement? Let me find
Speaker 3: a story that will be championed by police and elios alike.
Speaker 5: Well, I was going to say too, I mean, before
Speaker 5: that that kind of crossover moment that you're getting to,
Speaker 5: all the ad campaigns around these devices were like for
Speaker 5: taking hiking, you know, like this sport model with like
Speaker 5: a with with a included fanny pack, you know exactly.
Speaker 5: This is all on their website on the accident, there's
Speaker 5: a timeline there and it shows a lot of ads
Speaker 5: and it's kind of comical.
Speaker 4: They thought that their mom was going to be one
Speaker 4: of their best marketers because they imagined like tupperware parties
Speaker 4: of like women telling stories about each other.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: Because this, this is ultimately why I think techno optimism
Speaker 4: can be really dangerous, is because you have a really
Speaker 4: bright person who's capable of a lot. Like I said,
Speaker 4: he could have been anything he wanted, but he doesn't
Speaker 4: have any of the context of violent crime when he
Speaker 4: jumps into this business. In his world, these two guys
Speaker 4: from the rich suburb that he's from are gunned down,
Speaker 4: and God, that should not happen in our gated community, essentially, right,
Speaker 4: And I'm sure I have not looked at this specifically
Speaker 4: because I didn't want to make that much of a
Speaker 4: point of it, But there was probably a shooting in
Speaker 4: North Phoenix the same weekend that happens all the time
Speaker 4: to some disenfranchised community in some place that he has
Speaker 4: no right connection to and in his thinking is he's
Speaker 4: literally said, I was going to go to Arizona and
Speaker 4: scratch and claw and dig, and I thought there would
Speaker 4: be gold in those hills. And he's talked about the
Speaker 4: riches that should bestow a benevolence creator of a device
Speaker 4: like the taser. Right, this is a money making operation,
Speaker 4: is a business opportunity, but you're talking about public safety.
Speaker 4: You're talking about violence that impacts communities and ways he
Speaker 4: had no understanding of. And so of course they failed
Speaker 4: early on because trying to just say, well, the reason
Speaker 4: we haven't solved gun violence is because governments are too
Speaker 4: corrupt and politicians are too stupid, and nobody has really
Speaker 4: thought about this in my genius Harvard way. Yet we'll
Speaker 4: just give everybody Captain Kirk's phaser and then nobody will
Speaker 4: shoot each other anymore. It's like it's a little more
Speaker 4: complicated than that, my man. You know, you can't just write,
Speaker 4: like just decide one day to solve gun violence.
Speaker 3: Especially the police that are going to end up being
Speaker 3: your largest customers and the politicians that are that are
Speaker 3: going to end up being your some of your largest benefactors.
Speaker 3: If you're telling that story, you're kind of dunking on
Speaker 3: those guys.
Speaker 4: You know what I mean, Yeah, it was one hundred percent.
Speaker 4: It was the idea that technology. The theme of this
Speaker 4: story of fifteen years of covering it is that we
Speaker 4: have such an instinct to treat the entrepreneur, to treat
Speaker 4: the business person, to treat technology as the hero, right,
Speaker 4: the idea for as much as we love science fiction
Speaker 4: as a culture and as many you know, I robots
Speaker 4: and AI movies as we can come up with, we
Speaker 4: don't don't take seriously enough the repercussions that can come
Speaker 4: when you just basically do the Silicon Valley thing of
Speaker 4: move fast and break things like they moved fast and
Speaker 4: broke things modeled after Silicon Valley innovation, and that they
Speaker 4: broke cannot be repaired.
Speaker 5: You're talking about the stuff, you know, as they it's
Speaker 5: rolled out with such a kind of lack of foresight
Speaker 5: that it's staggering. And this is a similar situation, if
Speaker 5: not the exact same. You're totally right.
Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about that business pivot from a self
Speaker 2: defense mechanism to a police weapon, something that can be
Speaker 2: on the side of you know, in the in the
Speaker 2: vision there at Taser international of every police officer that
Speaker 2: walks the planet, that shift, and then the need to
Speaker 2: make it more powerful to take down you know, larger
Speaker 2: guys in order to just impress you know, officers like
Speaker 2: law enforcement officers who can then watch a demonstration and
Speaker 2: then say, oh wow, yeah, that would take down on somebody.
Speaker 2: For sure, it took down our biggest guy, that shift.
Speaker 2: And then the need to sell to more and more
Speaker 2: and more and more police departments because you're selling these individually,
Speaker 2: you know, as packages to police departments. The need to
Speaker 2: do that to make it more powerful. It feels like
Speaker 2: that is where maybe the actual problem arises because of
Speaker 2: the strength of the actual current that's going through there.
Speaker 2: But then also the concept that this is to be
Speaker 2: used to take down someone that a police officer is pursuing, right,
Speaker 2: someone that a suspect that an officer believes needs to
Speaker 2: be taken down. That an officer would have used perhaps
Speaker 2: a side arm like a forty five or a nine
Speaker 2: millimeter to incapacitate that person. Now I can shock them.
Speaker 2: How in your exploration, how has the usage of a
Speaker 2: taser by police officers change or did it change or
Speaker 2: was it always the same, or just how are they
Speaker 2: used in the field.
Speaker 4: This is the most genius thing that they did this case.
Speaker 4: They took the marketing and rhetoric of the original idea
Speaker 4: of an alternative to guns, and that is the public
Speaker 4: facing city council pitch idea, Right, hey, this is going
Speaker 4: to reduce police shootings because what we have is an
Speaker 4: electric weapon that can stop somebody. They didn't say it
Speaker 4: was effective as a gun, it's not like they said that,
Speaker 4: but the idea would be, you can prevent shootings now
Speaker 4: because we can control violent and dangerous people with this taser.
Speaker 4: But the marketing to police, the sort of way in
Speaker 4: which this weapon took off. There was no outside advertising
Speaker 4: to police. This was what they called the Master Instructor program,
Speaker 4: where they basically hired off do cops who in their
Speaker 4: capacity as law enforcement officers, would take the company written
Speaker 4: training material, take the device, and Rick himself and some
Speaker 4: of the marketing people were brilliant at going on their
Speaker 4: own grassroots campaign. They would go department to department in
Speaker 4: the early days, and they would show these cops. They
Speaker 4: would walk in and say, bring us your toughest guy,
Speaker 4: bring us the stud bring us whoever, and all the
Speaker 4: cops would watch as their friend who was the badass
Speaker 4: right would just fall and scream. And I tried for
Speaker 4: years to find videos of anybody who could sit there
Speaker 4: and take it without yelling and screaming as loud as
Speaker 4: they can. And this grassroots marketing demonstration for cops directly
Speaker 4: was how cops believed the taser would be used, because
Speaker 4: the pitch was this weapon runs the gamut of use
Speaker 4: of force. You no longer have to put your hands
Speaker 4: on people who don't want to sign the back of
Speaker 4: a speeding ticket for you because they're arguing with you,
Speaker 4: they're not being compliant. Just taser them, get them in
Speaker 4: a handcuffs, and deal with it later. But it's like,
Speaker 4: it's it's it was. It's genuinely hilarious to watch all
Speaker 4: of these cops lose their sh as there being, you know,
Speaker 4: tasered in these controlled settings where everything is designed. Many shocks,
Speaker 4: many of these demonstrative shocks were for less than a second.
Speaker 4: They would later call these human studies. They would later
Speaker 4: call these proof of the taser safety. But you're talking
Speaker 4: about cops who were basically shocked for a second or less,
Speaker 4: many of them, and they would go down and everybody
Speaker 4: would laugh and The idea of the impression you would
Speaker 4: get was maybe that hurt for that second, but everybody's fine. Now,
Speaker 4: we're all laughing about it. And when I go off
Speaker 4: into the field, when I go use this weapon on
Speaker 4: real people out there, the same thing is going to happen.
Speaker 4: If they're going to give me attitude and not going
Speaker 4: to comply with my orders, I met taser them, teach
Speaker 4: them a and they'll be fine at the end of
Speaker 4: the day, and I'll get the result. I want now
Speaker 4: to the politicians, to the city councils who this was
Speaker 4: pitched to, the idea was, you need to spend all
Speaker 4: this money. You need to spend money on a weapon
Speaker 4: that's twice as expensive in a lot of instances as
Speaker 4: this as their actual guns, right because it's going to
Speaker 4: reduce the deadly force or the real violence that an
Speaker 4: officer faces. And what happened was it disonned the cops
Speaker 4: who would actually use them, so they felt comfortable using
Speaker 4: them in all manners of situations, to the point that
Speaker 4: criminologists would later claim the phrase lazy cops syndrome to
Speaker 4: describe the sort of epidemic of cops who were willing
Speaker 4: to just tazer somebody for whatever reason they saw fit
Speaker 4: and because the weapon did have risks that the cops
Speaker 4: were not aware of based on their training, then people
Speaker 4: like Bryce Masters, like Stanley Harlan, these people then were
Speaker 4: put into situations where they were hurt or killed in
Speaker 4: situations where they never really should have had their lives
Speaker 4: put at risk, you know.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've been seeing I think this is a
Speaker 5: positive thing, a real uptick in these lazy cop kind
Speaker 5: of videos circulating, you know, on on streaming sites, on
Speaker 5: you know, TikTok on Instagram and stuff, Folks taking cops
Speaker 5: to task with their dash cams and kind of refusing
Speaker 5: to comply and things like that. And I think for
Speaker 5: refusing to comply in a positive way where cops are overstepping,
Speaker 5: you know, what they're supposed to be able to do,
Speaker 5: and how quickly that taser comes out is staggering as
Speaker 5: a threat, as a you know, a way of forcing
Speaker 5: you know, compliance in situations where they're already overstepping. I
Speaker 5: also want to add, I maybe this is obvious to everybody,
Speaker 5: but I did not think about this until this conversation.
Speaker 5: But you can get tasers on Amazon like tons of
Speaker 5: different like rhinestone, be dazzled ones. Not that that's neither
Speaker 5: here nor there necessarily for the cop discussion, but maybe, yeah,
Speaker 5: could you maybe respond to a little bit about these
Speaker 5: lazy cop videos that are kind of making the rounds
Speaker 5: and I'm just seeing more and more of and getting
Speaker 5: more and more kind of freaked out about the quickness
Speaker 5: with which they reached for the taser.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, there is a real difference between the civilian
Speaker 4: taser and the cop taser. That's important to note because
Speaker 4: civilian tasers, the whole point was that they actually didn't
Speaker 4: work that well. And that's why, you know, if you're
Speaker 4: trying to kind of think about defense weaponrylike they never
Speaker 4: really took off that much with civilians because the marketing
Speaker 4: didn't click. And also in practicality, they're not necessarily the
Speaker 4: best weapons for like if you're truly being attacked, you know,
Speaker 4: in this situation, and that was true of police too.
Speaker 4: The weapons are most effective in these static situations of
Speaker 4: non compliance. If you're in a real fight in you're
Speaker 4: a cop and you pull your taser out, especially these
Speaker 4: older models where there was one shot deal and you miss,
Speaker 4: you're in big trouble, right, Like, that's that's where things
Speaker 4: do escalate. And one of the most fascinating things that
Speaker 4: happened in the in the you know, long decade two
Speaker 4: decade long story of the taser is that the company
Speaker 4: eventually did sort of very surreptitiously reduce the charge of
Speaker 4: modern of the newer models of tasers, which started leading
Speaker 4: to more police shootings because cops were pulling tasers in
Speaker 4: situations where there was a fight and the taser wouldn't work,
Speaker 4: and then that would escalate to an actual shooting. And
Speaker 4: that's why they're not necessarily great civilian self defense weapons.
Speaker 4: When you're in a fight, you want to know you're
Speaker 4: going to win, right, And that's that's why, like some
Speaker 4: people are more comfortable just taking their chances with Mason
Speaker 4: running away than you know, trying to fire a taser
Speaker 4: and miss. But the lazy cop syndrome things directly tied
Speaker 4: to the fact that the weapons are most effective and
Speaker 4: get the results you want, the lower the level of
Speaker 4: use of worce fine argue with you guys, and you
Speaker 4: two you guys are pulling me over and I'm just
Speaker 4: you know, kind of not wanting to, you know, like
Speaker 4: do what you say or whatever it is you taser me,
Speaker 4: I'm like standing still usually, but if you pull me
Speaker 4: out of the car and I'm ready to fight and
Speaker 4: I'm coming at you and you try to taser me
Speaker 4: and you miss, the next thought in a cops mind
Speaker 4: is this guy can get my gun. And if we're
Speaker 4: in a situation where this guy can get my gun,
Speaker 4: that's that skin that is dangerous for cops. And so
Speaker 4: it became just the way they were used because the
Speaker 4: emphasis in training was about don't put your hands on
Speaker 4: people anymore, don't do the verbal judo skills that you've learned,
Speaker 4: don't waste your time taser these guys. Now, that's evolved
Speaker 4: quite a bit in twenty years because we saw departments
Speaker 4: have to change their policies when bad started to happen.
Speaker 4: That's the sad thing is that bad things had to
Speaker 4: happen in order for the weapons to be given the
Speaker 4: wait in the seriousness of which they're capable of.
Speaker 2: And before we move on, let's take a word from
Speaker 2: our sponsor and we'll be right back. And where you're back.
Speaker 3: Let's go back to the hypothetical situation you just set
Speaker 3: up here. Nick you're pulled over by three, I don't
Speaker 3: think we would be very great cops, guys, but you're
Speaker 3: pulled over by the three of us. Slide Yeah, we're
Speaker 3: for some reason in the same car. This sounds like
Speaker 3: a scenario or a safety study that Taser International as
Speaker 3: it was being called back then, would not have approved.
Speaker 3: One of the astonishing things we see over and over
Speaker 3: again is that the story that Taser tells already, right,
Speaker 3: telling a couple of different stories to a couple of
Speaker 3: different audiences. But they're also kind of telling stories to
Speaker 3: any governmental agency that would have conducted some sort of
Speaker 3: review or at least like a four point thirty pm
Speaker 3: on a Friday check in. So can you tell us
Speaker 3: a little bit more about why there were not real
Speaker 3: reviews by governmental agencies or how this company managed to
Speaker 3: conduct its own test, its own quote unquote studies on
Speaker 3: its own products. What happened there.
Speaker 4: It's really one of the fascinating things to me about
Speaker 4: the way that, especially our American system works, because we
Speaker 4: do want to encourage, we want we want capital, we
Speaker 4: want business to take risks. We want them to feel
Speaker 4: like the market doesn't have so many barriers to entry,
Speaker 4: whether that's regulatory or whether that's competition, that you can
Speaker 4: go you know, pursue a bold idea. But the regulatory
Speaker 4: system in the United States, if you're not talking about
Speaker 4: finance and you're not talking about you know, like pharmaceutical
Speaker 4: basically in healthcare, is basically the product liability bar, which
Speaker 4: means that like a company invents a thing or sells
Speaker 4: a product, makes a claim and then if something really
Speaker 4: bad happens, the company gets sued. But what that inherently
Speaker 4: means is that companies, basically right get to do stuff
Speaker 4: until there's harm or until there's damage, and then there's
Speaker 4: repercussions and then maybe they have to change. And the
Speaker 4: taser what fascinated me about it with so many people
Speaker 4: would make the comparison to the FDA and say, this
Speaker 4: is a weapon, but it's not really a medical device,
Speaker 4: so it's not under this FDA scrutiny. Not that the
Speaker 4: FDA is perfect, but we describe how like when you
Speaker 4: introduce a new drug, it's typically a ten year process
Speaker 4: from concept to market. Right for a new drug with
Speaker 4: the taser, what they did was they faced this choice.
Speaker 4: Rick Smith's dad is going to lose all his money
Speaker 4: if he doesn't figure out a working taser, and so
Speaker 4: rather than fold, they increased the power to get the
Speaker 4: effectiveness they needed. They ran around using literature from the
Speaker 4: old versions of tasers that were less powerful, and said
Speaker 4: this is completely safe. And there was nobody to look
Speaker 4: at them and go, like, prove that, how do you
Speaker 4: prove that? He did one study on one pig on
Speaker 4: an experimental device that didn't cause the pig to have,
Speaker 4: you know, heart trouble. They did a study on five
Speaker 4: dogs on the production model of the more powerful taser
Speaker 4: that were all five seconds or less, one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty two shocks for five seconds or less. And then
Speaker 4: they did these demonstrates on cops themselves when they were
Speaker 4: doing their little road show, basically a lot of shocks
Speaker 4: for less than a second, and said this was the proof.
Speaker 4: And because there was no third party or regulatory authority,
Speaker 4: you had the one company who had an entirely obviously
Speaker 4: vested interest, I mean, the family fortune was at stake,
Speaker 4: making one weapon and running around telling now again what
Speaker 4: was very quickly tens of thousands of cops. By two
Speaker 4: thousand and four, we're talking about over one hundred thousand
Speaker 4: police officers, so more than ten percent of the police
Speaker 4: officers in the United States within five years are carrying
Speaker 4: these weapons right telling them this cannot kill, and nobody, genuinely,
Speaker 4: nobody is there to say, like, prove that in the literature,
Speaker 4: prove that in the science. And one of the most
Speaker 4: interesting people I've met in my life covering this, who
Speaker 4: is not actually in the podcast, but I'm hopefully going
Speaker 4: to do maybe a bonus episode or about this guy,
Speaker 4: is that is a cop named Andrew Dennis, who happened
Speaker 4: to be a trauma surgeon for the area departments when
Speaker 4: when Swatt needed somebody, you know, because if somebody got
Speaker 4: shot or something. He's a Cook County Chicago trauma surgeon
Speaker 4: and he was sitting in his taser training he was like,
Speaker 4: this seems like both Frankly, the science doesn't seem good.
Speaker 5: You can spook somebody to death if they have a
Speaker 5: heart condition, you know, I mean, truly, it's just it's
Speaker 5: mind blowing to make this rhetoric.
Speaker 3: No offense to you know, no offense to people in
Speaker 3: the audience tonight who are not surgeons but or trauma surgeons.
Speaker 3: But spoiler alert, they're a little more up to date
Speaker 3: on medical information. So it makes sense that this guy
Speaker 3: would be sitting there and increasingly feel like he is
Speaker 3: getting built where his colleagues are getting kind of swindled.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's able to see the because they present a
Speaker 4: lot of the literature in the training and they show that,
Speaker 4: you know, they have this thick stack they would call
Speaker 4: the research compendium, which was hundreds of pages of you know,
Speaker 4: at a certain point, then thousands of pages. That just
Speaker 4: looks like a great prop because it looks like it's
Speaker 4: all of this proof that the weapon is safe. And
Speaker 4: they show some of the slides and some of the
Speaker 4: science of how they came to this weapon, and he's like, nah,
Speaker 4: that's that's not that doesn't seem right. And he did
Speaker 4: his own studies, and he was one of the very
Speaker 4: first to do his own independent research. He got money
Speaker 4: at a lab in Chicago to do some research to
Speaker 4: show no, this electric current can affect you know, a
Speaker 4: human heart. But that was years after. By the time
Speaker 4: he's doing those studies, this is the most popular weapon
Speaker 4: in police buy a long shot. It's not even close.
Speaker 4: And so to unwind the understanding for police that actually
Speaker 4: there is some risk. It was so entrenched in their
Speaker 4: minds at that degree that I'm sure we'll talk about him,
Speaker 4: but that's masters is a Kansas City police officer who
Speaker 4: is so convinced the taser cannot affect the heart that
Speaker 4: when his seventeen year old son is taseredd as a
Speaker 4: cardiac arrest and the surgeon at that hospital tells him
Speaker 4: the taser caused the cardiac arrest. This is in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 4: he still doesn't believe the surgeon who's telling him that
Speaker 4: because his training has been so effective that that weapon
Speaker 4: cannot do what it actually did to his kid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his son was tased for a long time. And
Speaker 2: to me, that length of time, like you're saying, Nick,
Speaker 2: is really the issue. How long do you hold down
Speaker 2: that trigger after those nodes have gone into somebody, right,
Speaker 2: especially somebody who's just being non compliant or someone who
Speaker 2: is just standing there when you hit them.
Speaker 4: M hm.
Speaker 3: And folks, we're going to pause here for a moment.
Speaker 3: This interview segment ended up being a two parter. There's
Speaker 3: so much more we want to get to. In meantime,
Speaker 3: you can tell that Nick Berdini has indeed spent more
Speaker 3: than a decade and a half investigating this story. We
Speaker 3: can't wait for you to hear absolute season one Taser International,
Speaker 3: and we can't wait to hear your thoughts about it,
Speaker 3: so please contact us. You can find us on email,
Speaker 3: You can call us on a telephone. You can find
Speaker 3: us on the internet correct.
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