Speaker 1: From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's the big take. I'm
Speaker 1: west Kesova today a gun designed to reduce accidental deaths
Speaker 1: and suicide. We're faced all the time in the US
Speaker 1: with horrifying news of mass shootings and the go nowhere
Speaker 1: arguments that follow over what can be done to keep
Speaker 1: firearms out of the hands of those who intentionally use
Speaker 1: them to kill others. But accidental gun injuries and deaths,
Speaker 1: especially among kids and teenagers, as well as people who
Speaker 1: use guns to take their own lives, are also a
Speaker 1: large and growing problem. Now, a young inventor in Colorado
Speaker 1: named Kai Klupfer is working on a new handgun specifically
Speaker 1: designed to prevent these tragedies. It uses technology to stop
Speaker 1: it from being fired by anyone but its owner.
Speaker 2: The key thing that we are trying to solve, which
Speaker 2: I think we could completely solve, is children and teenagers
Speaker 2: getting access firearms. We think that by building technology that
Speaker 2: busy works with the gun owner to enforce what they're
Speaker 2: already looking to do, allows us to really actually address
Speaker 2: that portion of the challenge of busy gun doests in America.
Speaker 1: In a new Business Week's 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 trying to slap a
Speaker 3: fingerprint sensor onto an existing gun, or a lot of
Speaker 3: them had watches that were compared to the gun to
Speaker 3: give you some kind of location to the person. But
Speaker 3: pretty much they all required just too many steps and
Speaker 3: often failed in demos and really did the smart gun
Speaker 3: 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
Speaker 3: safeguard and so on the one hand, you could prevent
Speaker 3: accidents in the home. Obviously, a kid finds a gun
Speaker 3: and pulls the trigger and it's loaded, this would stop
Speaker 3: something like that happening. There's the thought that this could
Speaker 3: also prevent a lot of suicides. It would make it
Speaker 3: that much harder, especially for a young person to find
Speaker 3: a gun that they could get their hands on. It
Speaker 3: would give them this extra moment of pause to think
Speaker 3: about what they were doing. The last big bucket is
Speaker 3: someone like a police officer who's afraid that their weapon
Speaker 3: might be turned against them, and so again you have
Speaker 3: this 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 to do it. But
Speaker 1: now you write about a young man named Kai Kluppfer
Speaker 1: who seems to have kind of unlocked the coat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's only twenties now, he's been working on this
Speaker 3: since he was fifteen. So you've got kind of the
Speaker 3: person on a quest, this young man who was possessed
Speaker 3: by this idea of making a smart gun and was
Speaker 3: very committed to it and has seen it through all
Speaker 3: these years. And then I think it's also the technology
Speaker 3: has really gotten to the point where this is a
Speaker 3: lot more feasible than it used to be. Kai's company
Speaker 3: is called Biofire, and they have a smart gun that
Speaker 3: has a fingerprint reader on it and it has facial
Speaker 3: recognition on it. It's a lot like your smartphone. And
Speaker 3: so you know, this is technology that Apple and Google
Speaker 3: and Samsung and everyone else has really refined over the
Speaker 3: last ten years to make it work very well, work
Speaker 3: cost effectively, and So Kai is the first person that
Speaker 3: I've run across who really took this ground up approach
Speaker 3: to starting from scratch and really making a gun that works,
Speaker 3: but with all this stuff baked into it, as opposed
Speaker 3: 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. Listen to what he had
Speaker 1: 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 Kay klub 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.
Speaker 4: 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 gundest
Speaker 2: and that was really my first sort of encounter with
Speaker 2: the topic.
Speaker 4: 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? Really, how could we you know,
Speaker 2: start to kind of tive 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 a 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 tho 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.
Speaker 4: Starts this company.
Speaker 3: He hires a couple people, he keeps working on these prototypes,
Speaker 3: and at that point, after a little while, he moves
Speaker 3: the company from Boston back to Colorado.
Speaker 1: And you spend quite a bit of time with him
Speaker 1: when you were reporting this story. What's he like.
Speaker 4: He's sort of this old soul.
Speaker 3: He's just always incredibly well prepared for any question you
Speaker 3: can send his way. He could tell you all the
Speaker 3: merits of smart guns back and forth. He's clearly an engineer.
Speaker 3: I mean, he could talk very technically about this gun.
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 scared to thing about. I was always
Speaker 2: an engineer. There's some pretty hilarious photos out there of me,
Speaker 2: like running around at like summer camp with an electionbal
Speaker 2: and shaering textbook. I think everybody thought it was just
Speaker 2: absolutely insane. And so I'd always love building things. I'd
Speaker 2: dide a whole series of different projects, none of which
Speaker 2: had any i think, like societal value or anything, but
Speaker 2: you know, just ways for me to learn and you know,
Speaker 2: try lots of different things. Yeah, and so I started
Speaker 2: thinking about this concept of a smart gun, and in particular,
Speaker 2: after I started digging too this again, I was no
Speaker 2: expert on gun deaths or public health issues or anything
Speaker 2: like that, I started to realize that, to my surprise,
Speaker 2: over two thirds of all gun deaths are the result
Speaker 2: of suicides and access. That was true ten years ago,
Speaker 2: it's true today as well. In fact, the percentage has
Speaker 2: only gotten larger. And so where you know, what I'd
Speaker 2: heard about was always the mass shootings, the violent crime homicides.
Speaker 2: The fact that two thirds are this sort of like silent,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of portion where he almost never hear
Speaker 2: about suicide and access 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 doc
Speaker 3: and that's where you can can figure up to five people,
Speaker 3: have them put their fingerprints on, have it recognize your face,
Speaker 3: 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 into 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 of
Speaker 2: times to roll your fingerprints, sort of like old Apple
Speaker 2: touch idy. Yeah, and then you do the same with
Speaker 2: your face. You know, you look at it, sort of
Speaker 2: take your head around, et cetera, and it captures your
Speaker 2: fingerprint in your face, biometrics sores inside the firearm. From
Speaker 2: that point forward, the only person that can make any
Speaker 2: changes or configuration changes to the firearm is the owner.
Speaker 2: You can have permanent users, you can have temporary users,
Speaker 2: but basically, you know, let's say you have a spouse
Speaker 2: and want them to have permanent access to firearm, you
Speaker 2: can easily enroll them just via the touchscreen. Let's say
Speaker 2: you have you know, maybe a teenage child that you
Speaker 2: want to take to the range and only have them
Speaker 2: have access for an hour. You can do that as well,
Speaker 2: and then it'll be automatically disabled.
Speaker 4: In full transparency.
Speaker 3: In my experience on this demo, it was a little
Speaker 3: finicky when my finger went on there. Other people seem
Speaker 3: not to have that problem, and I was shooting a
Speaker 3: prototype which the company said they had noticed this fingerprint
Speaker 3: issue and have fixed it on the gun that's actually
Speaker 3: going to.
Speaker 4: Go on sale.
Speaker 3: But you do not have to have both the fingerprint
Speaker 3: and the facial recognition work and so on. The couple
Speaker 3: instances where my finger was a little off, the facial
Speaker 3: recognition had already seen me and the gun was ready
Speaker 3: to fire anyway.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I tested it out.
Speaker 3: They had a firing range there, and only the people
Speaker 3: who had gone through this process were able to have
Speaker 3: anything happen when they pulled the trigger.
Speaker 4: I had sort of.
Speaker 3: Two rounds at the shooting range, all standard ammunition.
Speaker 4: 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: goes to this sensor, and as you're picking it up,
Speaker 3: the facial recognitions looking for you in this green light
Speaker 3: comes on the gun, which means you know, now it's
Speaker 3: ready to fire, and you know, I mean, it just
Speaker 3: never glitched We had people come in who were not
Speaker 3: registered and try to fire it. Like I said, in
Speaker 3: the past, demos have been the undoing of many of
Speaker 3: these weapons, 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 you pick it up are you
Speaker 1: able to fire? Is it immediat or just take a
Speaker 1: 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 humans who's touching
Speaker 3: this thing, so it sort of puts it in this
Speaker 3: primed state.
Speaker 4: And then the.
Speaker 3: Second it catches your face or your fingerprint, we're not
Speaker 3: quick enough to notice the time.
Speaker 4: 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 4: This is a really tricky issue.
Speaker 3: There's a couple things I could say that are basics that, yes,
Speaker 3: you have to keep this charged. The company says it
Speaker 3: takes about an hour to charge it up, and it'll
Speaker 3: last for months in that state and be ready to fire.
Speaker 3: There's also the computing device I mentioned is a It
Speaker 3: serves also as a dock, and so you can leave
Speaker 3: that plugged in the wall and have the gun in
Speaker 3: there if you so choose.
Speaker 4: On the updates thing.
Speaker 3: Now, this is where there's like controversy because a lot
Speaker 3: of people in the pro gun rights crowd have not
Speaker 3: been a fan of these guns being connected to the internet,
Speaker 3: having any sort of information about the owner who's firing it,
Speaker 3: seeing it 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 gone a pretty extreme 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: stored very securely inside of the firearm. Right. Our customers
Speaker 2: do very clearly do not want us to have some
Speaker 2: sort of ability to access additional data anything like that,
Speaker 2: and so we've worked with some of the best folks
Speaker 2: in the cybersecurity space to design what is honestly a
Speaker 2: massively overdesigned cybersecurity implementation to ensure that everything is encrypted
Speaker 2: locally on the device, using credentials that are generated by
Speaker 2: the device during manufacturing that Biofire has no access to.
Speaker 2: We further enhanced that security by having it be wired only. Right,
Speaker 2: there's no wireless communication in the fire there's no ability
Speaker 2: to wirelessly talk to or potentially disrupt the functionality the fireman.
Speaker 3: Anyway, if you choose to update the gun, you can
Speaker 3: connect 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 thing yet, and I'm quite curious
Speaker 3: to see how the gun advocates react to this thing,
Speaker 3: because I do think it's certainly far more sophisticated than
Speaker 3: anything's come before. So I think this is sort of
Speaker 3: the moment where we find out what happens when something
Speaker 3: that actually works is out there, and how people react
Speaker 3: to it. There have been attempts in a couple states
Speaker 3: to begin putting legislation in place for if a smart
Speaker 3: gun that is viable exists, this is how we're going
Speaker 3: to react to that. New Jersey's sort of the most
Speaker 3: famous or infamous example, depending how you want to look
Speaker 3: at it. But they had put a law into place
Speaker 3: which said, if a viable smart gun was available, they
Speaker 3: wanted the entire industry to move towards smart guns and
Speaker 3: require that to be purchased. And as you can imagine,
Speaker 3: people got extremely upset and you know, hated the idea
Speaker 3: that they were going to be forced to buy something.
Speaker 3: And this happened at a time when when a real
Speaker 3: smart gun really didn't even exist, and so it was
Speaker 3: a huge blow to the smart gun advocates because it
Speaker 3: was sort of going through all this turmoil before you
Speaker 3: even had a product that could maybe test and appeal
Speaker 3: to people and show them the capability of this technology.
Speaker 3: And so New Jersey, after many years, changed that law
Speaker 3: and now it really is if a smart gun exists,
Speaker 3: you must at least carry, you know, one of these
Speaker 3: in your store. And so it's pulled back a lot.
Speaker 3: In California many years ago, there was a company that
Speaker 3: had an early smart gun prototype and one of the
Speaker 3: stores that was quite excited to sell it. They faced
Speaker 3: all these protests from people and it never even got
Speaker 3: to the shelves. They had to pull it from the
Speaker 3: 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 4: Yes.
Speaker 3: The gun rights advocates I talked to basically said I was.
Speaker 4: A problem number one in some of this, and that
Speaker 4: I am.
Speaker 3: The kind of person who is not that comfortable around
Speaker 3: guns but sees this as a safer option, might be
Speaker 3: something I would bring in my house. But they said, look,
Speaker 3: you're you're not going to go do classes, You're not
Speaker 3: going to go do training. You just become this huge problem.
Speaker 3: We end up just putting more guns into the supply overall,
Speaker 3: and now we have a class of people who are
Speaker 3: not doing the work that's needed to really operate a
Speaker 3: firearm safely, and now they have guns.
Speaker 1: And what is the argument from gun advocates again smart
Speaker 1: gun technology, except where 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 going to start putting more and
Speaker 3: more controls on what we can do. Then it quickly
Speaker 3: because we can't really trust these guns. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to trust my life to some computer gadget that I
Speaker 3: don't know if it's going to work or not, and
Speaker 3: so that's where the argument begins. Some of the more
Speaker 3: nuanced arguments would be around does this even make sense?
Speaker 3: You know, if if somebody is the type of person
Speaker 3: that has a loaded weapon in their house that their
Speaker 3: child might find, is that the same person who's going
Speaker 3: to go out and buy a smart gun that, at
Speaker 3: least for now, is more expensive than a regular gun.
Speaker 3: People do concede that this could help with the prevention
Speaker 3: of suicides by putting this extra hurdle, and the numbers
Speaker 3: there are quite high on the number of suicides that
Speaker 3: happened per year, although the you know, the gun rights
Speaker 3: advocates say this even there 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 company to be seen as
Speaker 3: this enemy of gun rights.
Speaker 2: One of the really key tenants to the way that
Speaker 2: I've approached this, which I think is it's 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 gonna be a whole lot of people
Speaker 2: that are going to choose to purchase our product. And
Speaker 2: that's awesome, right Like, we're looking to build sucessful business.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, if people don't feel like
Speaker 2: our are just a fit for their use case, their environment,
Speaker 2: their experience, their situation, that's correct, right Like, there's lots
Speaker 2: and lots of other competitive pducts and the market traditional firearms,
Speaker 2: and they're welcome to purchase any of those obviously, or
Speaker 2: not purchase environment 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. He's been very careful and not
Speaker 1: to antagonize gun advocates. Did you ask him where he
Speaker 1: comes down on things like federal background checks and limiting
Speaker 1: sales of guns on the internet and gun shows, which
Speaker 1: are real points of conflict between gun advocates and gun
Speaker 1: 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 is
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.
Speaker 4: But since then he has.
Speaker 3: Quite a number of guns now and has become quite
Speaker 3: an 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 4: Right? You could?
Speaker 3: You go to uh to biofires website and right now
Speaker 3: you would place a pre order. I think it's roughly
Speaker 3: around two hundred dollars just to get in the line
Speaker 3: to place your order, and then you're going to have
Speaker 3: to pay about thirteen hundred dollars more.
Speaker 4: So it's around fifteen hundred dollars for this gun.
Speaker 3: And the company is saying they want to see how
Speaker 3: many pre orders come in the first people who order it.
Speaker 3: They expect to deliver the weapon early next year, they're saying.
Speaker 3: And I asked them if you could buy this in
Speaker 3: all fifty states. They did not have a great answer
Speaker 3: for me. And so there are some restrictions in some
Speaker 3: states around buying newly developed weapons. And it's going to
Speaker 3: be in the United States only for a bit, and
Speaker 3: people have to 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.
Speaker 4: This is always a major test.
Speaker 3: When you go from a something that's beyond a prototype,
Speaker 3: but it's this early model technology object to making lots
Speaker 3: of them tends to be quite hard. I mean, again,
Speaker 3: go back to Tesla. They suffered through years and years
Speaker 3: and years of struggling to just make their car, even
Speaker 3: after they had it dialed in. So I think that's
Speaker 3: the huge question. I really got the sense that they
Speaker 3: are waiting to see what happens when they turn this
Speaker 3: ordering website on and how much reaction there is to
Speaker 3: try and gauge what they have to prepare for.
Speaker 1: Have they gone the Silicon valor 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 Peterteel via his venture capital fund Founder's Fund,
Speaker 3: which is the major backer of the company. Thirty million
Speaker 3: dollars for a manufacturing company is not a lot, and
Speaker 3: so these pre sales I think are going to have
Speaker 3: 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 to start
Speaker 1: popping 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.
Speaker 4: It says, we have.
Speaker 3: This gun, we just don't have enough demand to manufacture
Speaker 3: a lot of them, but we could do it if
Speaker 3: you wanted it.
Speaker 4: I have to say, you know, I went into this
Speaker 4: so skeptical.
Speaker 3: Well, things have not gone well in the smart gun
Speaker 3: world for the last twenty twenty five years, and I
Speaker 3: have to say I mean, at least just as a
Speaker 3: gun and as an object, it was impressive. The more
Speaker 3: I used it, the more time I spent seeing how
Speaker 3: it worked. It just it feels inevitable. Why would you
Speaker 3: not use something like this if it works well and exists?
Speaker 1: Ashley Vance, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to us Here at the Big Take.
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