August 6, 2025 • 50 mins
Nowadays, everyone knows what a taser is. Manufacturers, politicians and law enforcement have long championed these devices as "non-lethal" and "safe" alternatives to firearms. Yet this is far from the truth. In the first part of this two-part interview, the gang welcomes journalist, filmmaker and podcast Nick Berardini, the creator of Absolute, Season One: Taser International to learn more about his decade plus investigation into the corporate corruption, conspiracy and crime surrounding tasers.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fago. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. One of the memes
we were talking about before we started to roll today
was the old don't tase me bro meme. A lot
(00:52):
of people when they hear the question about whether or
not you've ever endured the pain of being tased, hearing
that question and may conjure images of Jackass style pranks.
But tragically, for many, many more people, this conversation will
immediately bring to mind over one thousand deaths at the
hands of taser wielding law enforcement officers.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Doesn't it also kind of remind you that there were
two potential presidential elect candidates that were in skull and bones,
and somebody wanted to know about it and ended up
getting taste. Sorry, don't mean to derail. That's what reminds me.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Of sure, or the larger deeper conversation about non lethal
versus less than lethal, or the larger deeper conversation about
corruption in law enforcement. Alternatives to firearms. Look, tasers are
sold everywhere and affordable to the public. We'll get to
(01:55):
a lot of deep water here, but before we before
we really dive in, We've got to tell you, folks,
we recently listened to Lava for Good's new hit podcast
Absolute Season one. Taser Incorporated explores much much more than
the headlines regarding the story of tasers, especially the story
(02:17):
of tasers as told by the companies that manufacture tasers,
and we are always looking for primary sources. Today, we
are thrilled to be joined with the creator of the show,
the one and only Nick Bredini. Nick, thank you so
much for sharing some time with us today.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Yeah, thank you, guys, I'm a huge fan. It's great
to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Well, you know, we've collectively spent a lot of time
with your podcast, with other work you've done and writing
you've done, and we are filled with questions for you,
and it's tough to know really where to start, but
I think maybe a good place would be, well, we
want to know about you too, but I think I
think this question will get to who you are too.
(03:05):
Please tell us who was Stanley Harlan, what happened to him,
and what about his story inspired you, as a student
at the University of Missouri to create a documentary about him.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Really take us back in time here, because this is
your origin story. This is the part of what launched
you into a decade plus investigation. So if you could
set the scene, You're a journalism student at University of
Missouri and you receive an assignment right just given to you,
and all they tell you at first is a man
has died while in the custody of law enforcement.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Yeah. So, I mean one of the unique things about
going to school at the University of Missouri, where I
also sort of happened to play basketball as sort of
like my fun fact about me is that I was
the worst player on a high major Division one basketball
team where I got dunked on and practice a bunch
of times. But it was nice to be cool for
a few years there. You still get the all the
(03:59):
part works that come with the starters, you know, in
terms of popularity. So that was fun. But I had
spent most all my life thinking about wanting to work
in basketball or sports to some degree, and had kind
of this plan where I was going to go, you know,
off to law school and be an agent, or I
was going to work for some NBA team. I really
grew up in sports, and when I went to Missouri,
(04:21):
the best degree you could get was a journalism degree.
And naturally, everybody who goes to the broadcast school then
the television news school is interested in sports, right They
all want to be the next analyst for ESPN, et cetera,
et cetera. And one of the unique things that happened
to me and why the journalism school at Missouri is
so great, is that you actually have to work as
(04:43):
a reporter for real local affiliates. If you're in the
magazine school, you have to work for a real magazine.
If you're in the newspaper, we have a you know, Columbia,
Missouri has its own you know, city newspaper that's staffed
by student reporters and their editors are prof Basically that's
true of the NBC affiliate as well. The local NBC
(05:04):
affiliate is staffed by professors who are the you know,
news directors and news managers, but the reporters are students,
and I, because I was playing basketball, had to basically
push off a lot of my advanced level classes that conflicted,
you know, with my schedule until I was done playing basketball.
So I got this like fifth year student experience where
(05:26):
I was hanging out basically doing nothing but partying and
going to the news room basically. And you've dunked a
few times. I do, but in my best days, with
enough of a running start, I could definitely dunk just
a little bit, just enough in warm ups to show
off a little lot of things. Yeah. But so I
just was working one of these overnight shifts where you
(05:47):
work the morning newscast basically, and you're staffed to say, okay,
you're the general assignment reporter, you may go cover you know,
one one one freezing ass morning. I was standing outside
assault depot because there of fear that there would be
assault shortage, you know, as the winter was coming, right,
you just do kind of whatever the producers decide this
show is going to need for that newscast, and breaking
(06:10):
news is a huge part of that of course. Right.
So I'm standing there in the newsroom not sure what
my assignment's going to be sometime around you know, close
to midnight, I want to say it was. And then
the police scanner right goes off with reports about an
incident at a town just sort of outside of Columbia,
about thirty miles north, just a smaller town called Moberly,
(06:32):
about this young man who's been taken to a hospital,
right because there's been an incident where he suffered some
sort of cardiac episode after being tasered by cops. And
then not long after that scanner, we get a phone
call from Stanley Harlan's mom, directed to the newsroom, and
she's screaming and crying, the police killed my son. The
(06:52):
police killed my son. And she's, as you can imagine
any parents, just absolutely, you know, completely losing her in
a way that I'll never forget the rawness of that,
you know that she was just screaming about how the
cops killed her son. And so as the reporter, what
you do, You hop in the car and you you know,
you race out there, You go right out there. So
I drove, you know, thirty miles eash north in the
(07:15):
middle of the night out to this town and arrived
on the scene and was being roped off, and you know, investigators,
State State police were on the scene because they were
there to investigate. And the thing that just struck me
right away was the family wasn't there. They had obviously
gone to the hospital at that point to identify the body,
do the things that come with you know, and in
(07:38):
custody death. But I was talking to neighbors who watched
this scene play out right in front of Stanley's house.
He had been followed by police home. They basically were
they were. The police were trying to say it was
a duy stop that was later sort of contested. But
he is gotten out of his car and Stanley, the
(07:59):
tragedy of it is, is on the phone with his
mom as he's getting pulled out of the car because
he wants her to come outside to make sure nothing
bad happens to him right in front of his house.
And so the officer that taser Stanley doesn't realize the
officer who pulled him over has allowed him to do this,
comes tries to take the phone out of his hand.
(08:21):
Stanley pulls away right because he thinks he's allowed to
be on the phone calling his mom, and very very
quickly after that, he puts his hands in the air
and says, you know, one of the officers, one of
the sergeants or the commanding officers on the scene, says,
just haser and he puts his hands in the air
and says, taser me. Why you're gonna taser me? And
(08:43):
they shot him in the chest with a taser for
thirty seconds, and he died right in front of his mom.
And one of the haunting sort of images of the
film I made is you could see his mother come
across the dash cam screen. It's sort of in her
pink robe as the incident happens a bit off screen.
But that phone call and then talking to those neighbors,
(09:04):
I think it was seven of them who said they
did not there was no violence here. He put his
hands in the air and said, why are you going
to taser me? And then they shot him, and then
you know, within minutes he was dead. And that became
for me as someone who was already leaning toward a
(09:25):
life outside of television news. I think I had kind
of I had been involved in acting as a kid.
I had a real fascination with long form. I wanted
to be a writer. I wanted to be a lot
of things. I did not want to be a local
TV news reporter. And so as that story progressed throughout
that fifth year of school that I had, I was
(09:46):
thinking about doing a big investigation into what really happened
to Stanley Harlan, and that investigation we ended up doing
several you know pieces for the TV station over the
course of the next you know year that I would
still in school. And then my mentor basically said, you
want to get into film, you want to do this
sort of thing. I think you have a documentary you
(10:07):
know right here, and that basically advice, that terrible advice,
sent me on the path to making a you know
film that took about four years to make that transformed
from being a story about a small town that was
grappling with police violence because there had been a history
sort of with that department of them going too far
until then they had finally now killed somebody. That spiraled
(10:30):
into the film that I ended up making, which was
this film about the one company that made tasers at
the time. You know, they're so much bigger than this now,
but at the time, this was the story of this company,
the only company who really made tasers for police, Axon.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Well, now, axon, Yeah, the critically acclaimed documentary Killing Them Safely,
and folks, this is not a plug nick to embarrass you,
to put you on the spy here, but this is
this is a pretty brutal and unrelenting piece of journalism
and documentary work. This also informs so many questions because again,
(11:13):
what we see is from that initial call, like you said,
in the middle of the night and the horrific things
happening to Stanley Harlan and his family. You keep finding
more and more disturbing stuff as you're digging in. So
maybe for this, now that we have the origin story,
(11:35):
maybe for people who are unfamiliar in the audience tonight,
could you explain what a taser is, how a taser works,
how did they become so common?
Speaker 4 (11:49):
Yeah, So why this became a film about this company
was because I had heard of a taser. I had
seen the Hangover. I had watched you know, Galfanakis gets
shoot in the face and laughed like everybody else because
it's genuinely incredibly funny. It's a moment in a movie, right,
But the familiarity with it. What struck me was the
(12:12):
taser is basically shaped like a gun. It looks very
similar to what you would expect from a handgun. It
fires two probes, at least this model of the taser.
They're a bit more advanced now, but this model of
the taser became that made the company so successful. Basically
fire two probes kind of looked a little bit like
fish hooks attached to copper wires. And the idea is
(12:34):
that it delivers electric current inside of your body that
is at a threshold that is essentially affecting the nervous system,
so you are unable to control your muscles. That's what
I call it, muscular incopacitation, neuromuscular incapacitation. But the current
is safe enough to not affect your heart or electric
you to you right, People say that a lot. That's
(12:56):
not what happens when people die. The current is not
strong enough to electric cue someone. And the thing that
struck me though, was I had heard of a taser
and understood just the basics of how they worked. But
why I became so interested in the company was this,
adamans this no gray area, black and white. These weapons
(13:18):
cannot kill, not in a circumstance other than you shoot
somebody off of a ledge and they fall and they die.
Sure they can. Everybody knows you could fall off a
high ledge and be killed. But the electric current itself,
in no way, ever, under any circumstance, no doubt about it,
is not capable electrically, scientifically, not capable of killing someone.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
I think, even to like, you know, someone that's uninitiated
in these kind of things, that just seems like a
really absurd claim, exactly me. And there's so many variations
and intervening circumstances and health conditions. I mean, it just
seems on its surface to be way outlandish to be
able to unequivocally say this with out any question.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Yes. And what drove me to the company was this
conflict of They were also the ones who wrote these
training programs and conducted this training for police officers. So
you have the one company with a monopoly on the
weapon telling tens of thousands, at that point, hundreds of
thousands of police officers across the country. These weapons, under
(14:23):
no circumstances other than lighting someone on fire accidentally because
they spark someone covered in gasoline, or some shooting someone
off of a ledge and they fall down. These weapons
do not kill in any circumstance.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
That Nick, what's that one quote that the CEO Rick
says at multiple points they say, if the taser is harmful,
it's really the person using correct taser.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
It was. It was essentially the quote you're thinking of.
Is a really important moment in the company's history. In
early two thousand and four, CBS News did a kind
of big investigation into tasers and into the companies. The
first deaths really started to pile up, and basically, you know,
White Andrews, the reporter is saying to Rick Smith, you're saying,
(15:13):
this is a coincidence that these people would have died anyway,
and he says, in every single case, these people would
have died anyway. And the implication being right, some other
drugs what became very controversial. I'm sure we'll talk about
excited delirium, some other condition. At the exact moment of
(15:33):
this tasering, right was responsible for somebody else's death. And
even as a twenty three year old with not a
lot of like worldly knowledge yet like making my way
in the world as a reporter, just felt like, okay,
the company with a monopoly on the weapon, doing all
of the training and telling these cops that it can
never kill doesn't seem like a promise or a claim
(15:56):
that is going to be able to hold up under scrutiny.
And I went to the company kind of half expecting
there was some misunderstanding that like, Okay, I get, maybe
these are like really safe and actually this isn't supposed
to have but maybe Stanley Harlan is like one of
these rare freak occurrences where like you can't shoot someone
(16:16):
in the chest with electricity for thirty seconds and not
expects there's a chance they could die. And that's not
how my one day that was supposed to be multiple days,
but the one day that I spent at the company
that I've ever been allowed to be inside, that one
day I was allowed to be inside really changed everything
because we couldn't get it, felt like we couldn't come
(16:39):
to some sort of common understanding of just like the
sky is blue right right, like.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
A lot of the conversations feel the way we learn
about them in absolute and the way that we learn
about them and killing them safely. You're doing your due
diligence as a reporter, and you're asking your refrain to question.
Sometimes you're saying like okay, again, could I get a
direct answer and the person you're speaking with I believe
(17:07):
Tuttle Yes? At that Why, Yes, Steve Tuttle is doing
kind of a matrix dodge or some parkour for every
direct question you're asking, and at times contradicting his previous statements.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
Yeah. The thing you learn about corporate spin and why
this is a film really about the way in which
the film is about a lot of corporate rhetoric is
because companies are really good, I think, especially in controversial
industries at the sound bite. They know how to package
their messaging and their rhetoric into very concise talking points.
(17:46):
But if you just kind of unravel a story and
you ask to hear the story, which documentary film allows
you to do, right, I like writing magazine journalism and
doing profile journalism. Now I love this pot test we made, right.
These are long form stories and you ask someone to
tell you their story, and if you sit there long
(18:06):
enough to hear a story, you can't put that messaging
you know, so tightly into these neat talking points because
as you follow up, you're digging your own rabbit hole
that you can't escape from. Right, Because the narrative you've
created the mythology you've created doesn't actually match with the
(18:27):
reality that's right in front of your face, which is
sort of where the absurdity of the film in particular,
right that it's a lot of it structured around this
messaging it comes into play because it just becomes so
bizarre because we know what's real, and yet we're being
handheld and walked through this like, you know, incredibly elliptical
(18:50):
and bizarre, sort of like you know, dreamscape of the
story of just like who are you and how did
you get here?
Speaker 5 (19:00):
Hey, let's take a quick pause right here here a
work more sponsor, and then come back with more from
Nick and we're back. Let's jump right back into this conversation.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I want to talk about the way Taser was born,
because at least of the way you discuss it in
the podcast and the way I've seen you write about it,
it seems to have been born from a pretty noble goal,
and then when that goal is is it has to
(19:35):
be changed and altered a little bit because of commerce,
because of the needs of you know, building a company
and paying off loans and all these things that just
the capitalist system kind of does to everything and every
idea that comes around to it, it has to change,
and then there has to be a belief in it,
Like we're talking about almost a supreme belief in the reality.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Of it, a philosophical kind of shift a little bit, right,
because I mean, initially, wasn't it meant to be a
non lethal form of self defense, you know, to cut
down on gun violence? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Can you tell us a little bit about how how
it became a thing? Like, really, why Taser International became
a thing?
Speaker 4 (20:12):
Yeah, Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things
that I really emphasized about Rick Smith. He's the He
and his brother co foundered the company, but Rick is
the visionary. Tom his older brother kind of just like
you know, came along for the ride because it was
a family business. They used their dad's seed money. They
used their dad's money from a from a startup that
(20:33):
he'd invested in that did ended up doing quite well
to fund the original idea, which was we are going
to make a star Trek phaser. Because to high school acquaintances,
there's a lot of controversy because Rick had previously called
them his friends and then he fact checked it and
it's like they you know, maybe known each other a
little bit, you know, they were the guys. These guys
(20:55):
he calls his friends, end up being much older than
he was, and so they never really went to high
school together. But the story goes that Rick is basically
in business school and he has already graduated from Harvard.
He's an incredibly smart, accomplished young person from kind of
a one percenter suburb, right, who can be anything he
(21:16):
wants to be. Really, he's got that kind of he's
like made in a lab to be either like a
politician or like a successful businessman or you know, whatever.
He wants, whatever his heart desires, and he wants to
be like his dad. He wants to be entrepreneurial, he
wants something of his own. And so he's in business
school when these two acquaintances are killed in a road
(21:38):
rage shooting. And it's that shooting that Rick always cites
as the sort of catalyst for him understanding gun violence
and thinking about how many people are actually killed by guns.
And this is back in nineteen ninety one, So this is,
you know, thirty forty years ago now where the idea
(21:59):
of of having a weapon to defend yourself, right that
isn't a gun is like kind of this violent crime
era of America where people are like seriously considering, can
we do better than guns? Now, what I always say
is that, like, it's an incredibly naive concept because a
lot of people buy guns because they like guns. It's
(22:22):
not just to defend themselves, right, American gun culture is
bigger than just I need a revolver to protect myself
from a road rage shooting.
Speaker 5 (22:31):
It's like phasing out car culture, you know, yeah, right right,
something that people are enthusiasts about, right, collectors, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
It's tied to identity for many people.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Yeah, But he has this twenty three year old, you know,
like moment of inspiration where he thinks, I'm going to
take my dad's money. I love star Trek, I want
to basically make He does some research and he finds
there was this guy named Jack Kover who would a
originally invented the taser, which.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Was shout out to Taser Tron.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
To shout out to Taser Tron, a kind of failed
company that had tried previously to bring tasers to market
as a self defense weapon. Is kind of a big
bulky weapon shaped like a flashlight. The key sort of
red tape. There is that it used gunpowder to fire
those probes, and so it was regulated like a firearm,
(23:25):
and a lot of people, basically a lot of average
citizens needed to go through a similar process to buying
a firearm if they wanted one. They were just too
expensive and too clunky and too sort of ahead of
its time to compete seriously in a self defense market.
But Rick has an idea to work with Kover to
license that technology from him to create a taser that
(23:48):
uses compressed nitrogen to fire, thinking they'll avoid all the
sort of ATF regulation that comes if they do that,
and they're just like, the two guys, it's like this
great story about they're in Rick's you know, parents camper,
and they're like they're tweaking this thing in this just like,
you know, great entrepreneurial origin story. We're gonna change the
(24:11):
world in this you know, desert camper that we're in together,
and it's just an absolute disaster, right Like, Rick tells
this great story that's in our podcast. Not to spoil it,
but it's one of my favorites where they hire out
a call center and they do a promo on the
local news and Phoenix back in nineteen ninety four, when
they're going to launch the company, and they are basically
(24:34):
expecting a flood of calls to come in ordering this
taser when people see it demonstrate it live on TV,
and like nobody calls. The only call, he says, he
gets is from his mom the entire night, and she's like,
how's it going, Ricky?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You know?
Speaker 4 (24:48):
And this is just like this incredibly human moment of
a young entrepreneur with this grandiose idea where at the
very first meeting, the very first board meeting of his
company with his parents and his brother, says, we're gonna
make the bullet obsolete, right, that's the real ambition, and
like they are right from the start. Pardon my French,
(25:10):
but like it's that bad. And so they spend years
trying to figure out how to save this idea, and
that ultimately leads to police because the idea of a
taser is a natural fit in policing, and they the
real key moment in the company's history is realizing the
(25:31):
original taser that Jackober had developed and then Rick Smith
tried to perfect just wasn't strong enough for police to
take seriously. And Rick makes a fateful choice between sort
of the company going under or building a taser that
is strong enough to basically take law enforcement by storm,
and he chooses the stronger taser. They engineer this weapon,
(25:53):
and that's about you know, that's roughly nineteen ninety nine,
and they just within five years the company had gone
from near bankruptcy to being worth about one point nine
billion dollars.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And I would say at this point, as well, I
love the way we're exploring the SNICK. I would say
one thing that stands out to me here is that
Rick Smith. Yes, ambitious, yes, quite intelligent, and as we'll find,
quite litigious. But Rick Smith is above all a storyteller
(26:25):
as well. And he is you know, anybody familiar with
a C suite or upper management, A lot of it
is kind of storytelling, no offense.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
Smith making, creating the more of something.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
The storytelling here seems to be a shift not just
in goal, but a shift in narrative. Right, what is
the story I tell to law enforcement? Let me find
a story that will be championed by police and elios alike.
Speaker 5 (26:55):
Well, I was going to say too, I mean, before
that that kind of crossover moment that you're getting to,
all the ad campaigns around these devices were like for
taking hiking, you know, like this sport model with like
a with with a included fanny pack, you know exactly.
This is all on their website on the accident, there's
a timeline there and it shows a lot of ads
and it's kind of comical.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
They thought that their mom was going to be one
of their best marketers because they imagined like tupperware parties
of like women telling stories about each other.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
Right.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Because this, this is ultimately why I think techno optimism
can be really dangerous, is because you have a really
bright person who's capable of a lot. Like I said,
he could have been anything he wanted, but he doesn't
have any of the context of violent crime when he
jumps into this business. In his world, these two guys
(27:50):
from the rich suburb that he's from are gunned down,
and God, that should not happen in our gated community, essentially, right,
And I'm sure I have not looked at this specifically
because I didn't want to make that much of a
point of it, But there was probably a shooting in
North Phoenix the same weekend that happens all the time
to some disenfranchised community in some place that he has
(28:14):
no right connection to and in his thinking is he's
literally said, I was going to go to Arizona and
scratch and claw and dig, and I thought there would
be gold in those hills. And he's talked about the
riches that should bestow a benevolence creator of a device
like the taser. Right, this is a money making operation,
is a business opportunity, but you're talking about public safety.
(28:38):
You're talking about violence that impacts communities and ways he
had no understanding of. And so of course they failed
early on because trying to just say, well, the reason
we haven't solved gun violence is because governments are too
corrupt and politicians are too stupid, and nobody has really
thought about this in my genius Harvard way. Yet we'll
(29:00):
just give everybody Captain Kirk's phaser and then nobody will
shoot each other anymore. It's like it's a little more
complicated than that, my man. You know, you can't just write,
like just decide one day to solve gun violence.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Especially the police that are going to end up being
your largest customers and the politicians that are that are
going to end up being your some of your largest benefactors.
If you're telling that story, you're kind of dunking on
those guys.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
You know what I mean, Yeah, it was one hundred percent.
It was the idea that technology. The theme of this
story of fifteen years of covering it is that we
have such an instinct to treat the entrepreneur, to treat
the business person, to treat technology as the hero, right,
the idea for as much as we love science fiction
(29:52):
as a culture and as many you know, I robots
and AI movies as we can come up with, we
don't don't take seriously enough the repercussions that can come
when you just basically do the Silicon Valley thing of
move fast and break things like they moved fast and
broke things modeled after Silicon Valley innovation, and that they
(30:14):
broke cannot be repaired.
Speaker 5 (30:15):
You're talking about the stuff, you know, as they it's
rolled out with such a kind of lack of foresight
that it's staggering. And this is a similar situation, if
not the exact same. You're totally right.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Well, let's talk about that business pivot from a self
defense mechanism to a police weapon, something that can be
on the side of you know, in the in the
vision there at Taser international of every police officer that
walks the planet, that shift, and then the need to
make it more powerful to take down you know, larger
(30:51):
guys in order to just impress you know, officers like
law enforcement officers who can then watch a demonstration and
then say, oh wow, yeah, that would take down on somebody.
For sure, it took down our biggest guy, that shift.
And then the need to sell to more and more
and more and more police departments because you're selling these individually,
you know, as packages to police departments. The need to
(31:15):
do that to make it more powerful. It feels like
that is where maybe the actual problem arises because of
the strength of the actual current that's going through there.
But then also the concept that this is to be
used to take down someone that a police officer is pursuing, right,
(31:36):
someone that a suspect that an officer believes needs to
be taken down. That an officer would have used perhaps
a side arm like a forty five or a nine
millimeter to incapacitate that person. Now I can shock them.
How in your exploration, how has the usage of a
(31:57):
taser by police officers change or did it change or
was it always the same, or just how are they
used in the field.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
This is the most genius thing that they did this case.
They took the marketing and rhetoric of the original idea
of an alternative to guns, and that is the public
facing city council pitch idea, Right, hey, this is going
to reduce police shootings because what we have is an
(32:28):
electric weapon that can stop somebody. They didn't say it
was effective as a gun, it's not like they said that,
but the idea would be, you can prevent shootings now
because we can control violent and dangerous people with this taser.
But the marketing to police, the sort of way in
(32:48):
which this weapon took off. There was no outside advertising
to police. This was what they called the Master Instructor program,
where they basically hired off do cops who in their
capacity as law enforcement officers, would take the company written
training material, take the device, and Rick himself and some
(33:09):
of the marketing people were brilliant at going on their
own grassroots campaign. They would go department to department in
the early days, and they would show these cops. They
would walk in and say, bring us your toughest guy,
bring us the stud bring us whoever, and all the
cops would watch as their friend who was the badass
(33:30):
right would just fall and scream. And I tried for
years to find videos of anybody who could sit there
and take it without yelling and screaming as loud as
they can. And this grassroots marketing demonstration for cops directly
was how cops believed the taser would be used, because
(33:52):
the pitch was this weapon runs the gamut of use
of force. You no longer have to put your hands
on people who don't want to sign the back of
a speeding ticket for you because they're arguing with you,
they're not being compliant. Just taser them, get them in
a handcuffs, and deal with it later. But it's like,
(34:13):
it's it's it was. It's genuinely hilarious to watch all
of these cops lose their sh as there being, you know,
tasered in these controlled settings where everything is designed. Many shocks,
many of these demonstrative shocks were for less than a second.
They would later call these human studies. They would later
call these proof of the taser safety. But you're talking
(34:34):
about cops who were basically shocked for a second or less,
many of them, and they would go down and everybody
would laugh and The idea of the impression you would
get was maybe that hurt for that second, but everybody's fine. Now,
we're all laughing about it. And when I go off
into the field, when I go use this weapon on
real people out there, the same thing is going to happen.
(34:55):
If they're going to give me attitude and not going
to comply with my orders, I met taser them, teach
them a and they'll be fine at the end of
the day, and I'll get the result. I want now
to the politicians, to the city councils who this was
pitched to, the idea was, you need to spend all
this money. You need to spend money on a weapon
that's twice as expensive in a lot of instances as
(35:17):
this as their actual guns, right because it's going to
reduce the deadly force or the real violence that an
officer faces. And what happened was it disonned the cops
who would actually use them, so they felt comfortable using
them in all manners of situations, to the point that
criminologists would later claim the phrase lazy cops syndrome to
(35:40):
describe the sort of epidemic of cops who were willing
to just tazer somebody for whatever reason they saw fit
and because the weapon did have risks that the cops
were not aware of based on their training, then people
like Bryce Masters, like Stanley Harlan, these people then were
put into situations where they were hurt or killed in
situations where they never really should have had their lives
(36:02):
put at risk, you know.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
I mean, I've been seeing I think this is a
positive thing, a real uptick in these lazy cop kind
of videos circulating, you know, on on streaming sites, on
you know, TikTok on Instagram and stuff, Folks taking cops
to task with their dash cams and kind of refusing
to comply and things like that. And I think for
refusing to comply in a positive way where cops are overstepping,
(36:26):
you know, what they're supposed to be able to do,
and how quickly that taser comes out is staggering as
a threat, as a you know, a way of forcing
you know, compliance in situations where they're already overstepping. I
also want to add, I maybe this is obvious to everybody,
but I did not think about this until this conversation.
(36:47):
But you can get tasers on Amazon like tons of
different like rhinestone, be dazzled ones. Not that that's neither
here nor there necessarily for the cop discussion, but maybe, yeah,
could you maybe respond to a little bit about these
lazy cop videos that are kind of making the rounds
and I'm just seeing more and more of and getting
more and more kind of freaked out about the quickness
(37:09):
with which they reached for the taser.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Well, yeah, there is a real difference between the civilian
taser and the cop taser. That's important to note because
civilian tasers, the whole point was that they actually didn't
work that well. And that's why, you know, if you're
trying to kind of think about defense weaponrylike they never
(37:32):
really took off that much with civilians because the marketing
didn't click. And also in practicality, they're not necessarily the
best weapons for like if you're truly being attacked, you know,
in this situation, and that was true of police too.
The weapons are most effective in these static situations of
non compliance. If you're in a real fight in you're
(37:54):
a cop and you pull your taser out, especially these
older models where there was one shot deal and you miss,
you're in big trouble, right, Like, that's that's where things
do escalate. And one of the most fascinating things that
happened in the in the you know, long decade two
decade long story of the taser is that the company
eventually did sort of very surreptitiously reduce the charge of
(38:18):
modern of the newer models of tasers, which started leading
to more police shootings because cops were pulling tasers in
situations where there was a fight and the taser wouldn't work,
and then that would escalate to an actual shooting. And
that's why they're not necessarily great civilian self defense weapons.
When you're in a fight, you want to know you're
(38:39):
going to win, right, And that's that's why, like some
people are more comfortable just taking their chances with Mason
running away than you know, trying to fire a taser
and miss. But the lazy cop syndrome things directly tied
to the fact that the weapons are most effective and
get the results you want, the lower the level of
use of worce fine argue with you guys, and you
(39:01):
two you guys are pulling me over and I'm just
you know, kind of not wanting to, you know, like
do what you say or whatever it is you taser me,
I'm like standing still usually, but if you pull me
out of the car and I'm ready to fight and
I'm coming at you and you try to taser me
and you miss, the next thought in a cops mind
is this guy can get my gun. And if we're
(39:23):
in a situation where this guy can get my gun,
that's that skin that is dangerous for cops. And so
it became just the way they were used because the
emphasis in training was about don't put your hands on
people anymore, don't do the verbal judo skills that you've learned,
don't waste your time taser these guys. Now, that's evolved
(39:45):
quite a bit in twenty years because we saw departments
have to change their policies when bad started to happen.
That's the sad thing is that bad things had to
happen in order for the weapons to be given the
wait in the seriousness of which they're capable of.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
And before we move on, let's take a word from
our sponsor and we'll be right back. And where you're back.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Let's go back to the hypothetical situation you just set
up here. Nick you're pulled over by three, I don't
think we would be very great cops, guys, but you're
pulled over by the three of us. Slide Yeah, we're
for some reason in the same car. This sounds like
(40:39):
a scenario or a safety study that Taser International as
it was being called back then, would not have approved.
One of the astonishing things we see over and over
again is that the story that Taser tells already, right,
(41:00):
telling a couple of different stories to a couple of
different audiences. But they're also kind of telling stories to
any governmental agency that would have conducted some sort of
review or at least like a four point thirty pm
on a Friday check in. So can you tell us
(41:22):
a little bit more about why there were not real
reviews by governmental agencies or how this company managed to
conduct its own test, its own quote unquote studies on
its own products. What happened there.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
It's really one of the fascinating things to me about
the way that, especially our American system works, because we
do want to encourage, we want we want capital, we
want business to take risks. We want them to feel
like the market doesn't have so many barriers to entry,
(42:01):
whether that's regulatory or whether that's competition, that you can
go you know, pursue a bold idea. But the regulatory
system in the United States, if you're not talking about
finance and you're not talking about you know, like pharmaceutical
basically in healthcare, is basically the product liability bar, which
(42:22):
means that like a company invents a thing or sells
a product, makes a claim and then if something really
bad happens, the company gets sued. But what that inherently
means is that companies, basically right get to do stuff
until there's harm or until there's damage, and then there's
repercussions and then maybe they have to change. And the
(42:42):
taser what fascinated me about it with so many people
would make the comparison to the FDA and say, this
is a weapon, but it's not really a medical device,
so it's not under this FDA scrutiny. Not that the
FDA is perfect, but we describe how like when you
introduce a new drug, it's typically a ten year process
(43:04):
from concept to market. Right for a new drug with
the taser, what they did was they faced this choice.
Rick Smith's dad is going to lose all his money
if he doesn't figure out a working taser, and so
rather than fold, they increased the power to get the
effectiveness they needed. They ran around using literature from the
(43:26):
old versions of tasers that were less powerful, and said
this is completely safe. And there was nobody to look
at them and go, like, prove that, how do you
prove that? He did one study on one pig on
an experimental device that didn't cause the pig to have,
you know, heart trouble. They did a study on five
(43:47):
dogs on the production model of the more powerful taser
that were all five seconds or less, one hundred and
fifty two shocks for five seconds or less. And then
they did these demonstrates on cops themselves when they were
doing their little road show, basically a lot of shocks
for less than a second, and said this was the proof.
(44:08):
And because there was no third party or regulatory authority,
you had the one company who had an entirely obviously
vested interest, I mean, the family fortune was at stake,
making one weapon and running around telling now again what
was very quickly tens of thousands of cops. By two
thousand and four, we're talking about over one hundred thousand
(44:30):
police officers, so more than ten percent of the police
officers in the United States within five years are carrying
these weapons right telling them this cannot kill, and nobody, genuinely,
nobody is there to say, like, prove that in the literature,
prove that in the science. And one of the most
interesting people I've met in my life covering this, who
(44:51):
is not actually in the podcast, but I'm hopefully going
to do maybe a bonus episode or about this guy,
is that is a cop named Andrew Dennis, who happened
to be a trauma surgeon for the area departments when
when Swatt needed somebody, you know, because if somebody got
shot or something. He's a Cook County Chicago trauma surgeon
and he was sitting in his taser training he was like,
(45:12):
this seems like both Frankly, the science doesn't seem good.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
You can spook somebody to death if they have a
heart condition, you know, I mean, truly, it's just it's
mind blowing to make this rhetoric.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
No offense to you know, no offense to people in
the audience tonight who are not surgeons but or trauma surgeons.
But spoiler alert, they're a little more up to date
on medical information. So it makes sense that this guy
would be sitting there and increasingly feel like he is
(45:46):
getting built where his colleagues are getting kind of swindled.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
Yeah, he's able to see the because they present a
lot of the literature in the training and they show that,
you know, they have this thick stack they would call
the research compendium, which was hundreds of pages of you know,
at a certain point, then thousands of pages. That just
looks like a great prop because it looks like it's
all of this proof that the weapon is safe. And
(46:11):
they show some of the slides and some of the
science of how they came to this weapon, and he's like, nah,
that's that's not that doesn't seem right. And he did
his own studies, and he was one of the very
first to do his own independent research. He got money
at a lab in Chicago to do some research to
show no, this electric current can affect you know, a
(46:33):
human heart. But that was years after. By the time
he's doing those studies, this is the most popular weapon
in police buy a long shot. It's not even close.
And so to unwind the understanding for police that actually
there is some risk. It was so entrenched in their
minds at that degree that I'm sure we'll talk about him,
(46:54):
but that's masters is a Kansas City police officer who
is so convinced the taser cannot affect the heart that
when his seventeen year old son is taseredd as a
cardiac arrest and the surgeon at that hospital tells him
the taser caused the cardiac arrest. This is in twenty fourteen,
he still doesn't believe the surgeon who's telling him that
(47:15):
because his training has been so effective that that weapon
cannot do what it actually did to his kid.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah, his son was tased for a long time. And
to me, that length of time, like you're saying, Nick,
is really the issue. How long do you hold down
that trigger after those nodes have gone into somebody, right,
especially somebody who's just being non compliant or someone who
(47:43):
is just standing there when you hit them.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
And folks, we're going to pause here for a moment.
This interview segment ended up being a two parter. There's
so much more we want to get to. In meantime,
you can tell that Nick Berdini has indeed spent more
than a decade and a half investigating this story. We
(48:10):
can't wait for you to hear absolute season one Taser International,
and we can't wait to hear your thoughts about it,
so please contact us. You can find us on email,
You can call us on a telephone. You can find
us on the internet correct.
Speaker 5 (48:24):
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where
it gets crazy, on x FKA, Twitter, and on YouTube
with video kind of galore for you to just dive
right into. On Instagram and TikTok. However, we're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
If you want to give us a call, our number
is one eight three three STDWYTK. When you call in,
it's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Give yourself
a cool nickname and let us know if we can
use your name and message on the air at some
point within the message. If you'd like to send us
words or not send us an email.
Speaker 3 (49:01):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive, and it doesn't have to be just words,
anything you'd like. We got some cool music recommendations quite
recently that bluebe Away so joined us out here in
the dark Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fago. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. One of the memes
we were talking about before we started to roll today
was the old don't tase me bro meme. A lot
(00:52):
of people when they hear the question about whether or
not you've ever endured the pain of being tased, hearing
that question and may conjure images of Jackass style pranks.
But tragically, for many, many more people, this conversation will
immediately bring to mind over one thousand deaths at the
hands of taser wielding law enforcement officers.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Doesn't it also kind of remind you that there were
two potential presidential elect candidates that were in skull and bones,
and somebody wanted to know about it and ended up
getting taste. Sorry, don't mean to derail. That's what reminds me.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Of sure, or the larger deeper conversation about non lethal
versus less than lethal, or the larger deeper conversation about
corruption in law enforcement. Alternatives to firearms. Look, tasers are
sold everywhere and affordable to the public. We'll get to
(01:55):
a lot of deep water here, but before we before
we really dive in, We've got to tell you, folks,
we recently listened to Lava for Good's new hit podcast
Absolute Season one. Taser Incorporated explores much much more than
the headlines regarding the story of tasers, especially the story
(02:17):
of tasers as told by the companies that manufacture tasers,
and we are always looking for primary sources. Today, we
are thrilled to be joined with the creator of the show,
the one and only Nick Bredini. Nick, thank you so
much for sharing some time with us today.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Yeah, thank you, guys, I'm a huge fan. It's great
to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Well, you know, we've collectively spent a lot of time
with your podcast, with other work you've done and writing
you've done, and we are filled with questions for you,
and it's tough to know really where to start, but
I think maybe a good place would be, well, we
want to know about you too, but I think I
think this question will get to who you are too.
(03:05):
Please tell us who was Stanley Harlan, what happened to him,
and what about his story inspired you, as a student
at the University of Missouri to create a documentary about him.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Really take us back in time here, because this is
your origin story. This is the part of what launched
you into a decade plus investigation. So if you could
set the scene, You're a journalism student at University of
Missouri and you receive an assignment right just given to you,
and all they tell you at first is a man
has died while in the custody of law enforcement.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Yeah. So, I mean one of the unique things about
going to school at the University of Missouri, where I
also sort of happened to play basketball as sort of
like my fun fact about me is that I was
the worst player on a high major Division one basketball
team where I got dunked on and practice a bunch
of times. But it was nice to be cool for
a few years there. You still get the all the
(03:59):
part works that come with the starters, you know, in
terms of popularity. So that was fun. But I had
spent most all my life thinking about wanting to work
in basketball or sports to some degree, and had kind
of this plan where I was going to go, you know,
off to law school and be an agent, or I
was going to work for some NBA team. I really
grew up in sports, and when I went to Missouri,
(04:21):
the best degree you could get was a journalism degree.
And naturally, everybody who goes to the broadcast school then
the television news school is interested in sports, right They
all want to be the next analyst for ESPN, et cetera,
et cetera. And one of the unique things that happened
to me and why the journalism school at Missouri is
so great, is that you actually have to work as
(04:43):
a reporter for real local affiliates. If you're in the
magazine school, you have to work for a real magazine.
If you're in the newspaper, we have a you know, Columbia,
Missouri has its own you know, city newspaper that's staffed
by student reporters and their editors are prof Basically that's
true of the NBC affiliate as well. The local NBC
(05:04):
affiliate is staffed by professors who are the you know,
news directors and news managers, but the reporters are students,
and I, because I was playing basketball, had to basically
push off a lot of my advanced level classes that conflicted,
you know, with my schedule until I was done playing basketball.
So I got this like fifth year student experience where
(05:26):
I was hanging out basically doing nothing but partying and
going to the news room basically. And you've dunked a
few times. I do, but in my best days, with
enough of a running start, I could definitely dunk just
a little bit, just enough in warm ups to show
off a little lot of things. Yeah. But so I
just was working one of these overnight shifts where you
(05:47):
work the morning newscast basically, and you're staffed to say, okay,
you're the general assignment reporter, you may go cover you know,
one one one freezing ass morning. I was standing outside
assault depot because there of fear that there would be
assault shortage, you know, as the winter was coming, right,
you just do kind of whatever the producers decide this
show is going to need for that newscast, and breaking
(06:10):
news is a huge part of that of course. Right.
So I'm standing there in the newsroom not sure what
my assignment's going to be sometime around you know, close
to midnight, I want to say it was. And then
the police scanner right goes off with reports about an
incident at a town just sort of outside of Columbia,
about thirty miles north, just a smaller town called Moberly,
(06:32):
about this young man who's been taken to a hospital,
right because there's been an incident where he suffered some
sort of cardiac episode after being tasered by cops. And
then not long after that scanner, we get a phone
call from Stanley Harlan's mom, directed to the newsroom, and
she's screaming and crying, the police killed my son. The
(06:52):
police killed my son. And she's, as you can imagine
any parents, just absolutely, you know, completely losing her in
a way that I'll never forget the rawness of that,
you know that she was just screaming about how the
cops killed her son. And so as the reporter, what
you do, You hop in the car and you you know,
you race out there, You go right out there. So
I drove, you know, thirty miles eash north in the
(07:15):
middle of the night out to this town and arrived
on the scene and was being roped off, and you know, investigators,
State State police were on the scene because they were
there to investigate. And the thing that just struck me
right away was the family wasn't there. They had obviously
gone to the hospital at that point to identify the body,
do the things that come with you know, and in
(07:38):
custody death. But I was talking to neighbors who watched
this scene play out right in front of Stanley's house.
He had been followed by police home. They basically were
they were. The police were trying to say it was
a duy stop that was later sort of contested. But
he is gotten out of his car and Stanley, the
(07:59):
tragedy of it is, is on the phone with his
mom as he's getting pulled out of the car because
he wants her to come outside to make sure nothing
bad happens to him right in front of his house.
And so the officer that taser Stanley doesn't realize the
officer who pulled him over has allowed him to do this,
comes tries to take the phone out of his hand.
(08:21):
Stanley pulls away right because he thinks he's allowed to
be on the phone calling his mom, and very very
quickly after that, he puts his hands in the air
and says, you know, one of the officers, one of
the sergeants or the commanding officers on the scene, says,
just haser and he puts his hands in the air
and says, taser me. Why you're gonna taser me? And
(08:43):
they shot him in the chest with a taser for
thirty seconds, and he died right in front of his mom.
And one of the haunting sort of images of the
film I made is you could see his mother come
across the dash cam screen. It's sort of in her
pink robe as the incident happens a bit off screen.
But that phone call and then talking to those neighbors,
(09:04):
I think it was seven of them who said they
did not there was no violence here. He put his
hands in the air and said, why are you going
to taser me? And then they shot him, and then
you know, within minutes he was dead. And that became
for me as someone who was already leaning toward a
(09:25):
life outside of television news. I think I had kind
of I had been involved in acting as a kid.
I had a real fascination with long form. I wanted
to be a writer. I wanted to be a lot
of things. I did not want to be a local
TV news reporter. And so as that story progressed throughout
that fifth year of school that I had, I was
(09:46):
thinking about doing a big investigation into what really happened
to Stanley Harlan, and that investigation we ended up doing
several you know pieces for the TV station over the
course of the next you know year that I would
still in school. And then my mentor basically said, you
want to get into film, you want to do this
sort of thing. I think you have a documentary you
(10:07):
know right here, and that basically advice, that terrible advice,
sent me on the path to making a you know
film that took about four years to make that transformed
from being a story about a small town that was
grappling with police violence because there had been a history
sort of with that department of them going too far
until then they had finally now killed somebody. That spiraled
(10:30):
into the film that I ended up making, which was
this film about the one company that made tasers at
the time. You know, they're so much bigger than this now,
but at the time, this was the story of this company,
the only company who really made tasers for police, Axon.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Well, now, axon, Yeah, the critically acclaimed documentary Killing Them Safely,
and folks, this is not a plug nick to embarrass you,
to put you on the spy here, but this is
this is a pretty brutal and unrelenting piece of journalism
and documentary work. This also informs so many questions because again,
(11:13):
what we see is from that initial call, like you said,
in the middle of the night and the horrific things
happening to Stanley Harlan and his family. You keep finding
more and more disturbing stuff as you're digging in. So
maybe for this, now that we have the origin story,
(11:35):
maybe for people who are unfamiliar in the audience tonight,
could you explain what a taser is, how a taser works,
how did they become so common?
Speaker 4 (11:49):
Yeah, So why this became a film about this company
was because I had heard of a taser. I had
seen the Hangover. I had watched you know, Galfanakis gets
shoot in the face and laughed like everybody else because
it's genuinely incredibly funny. It's a moment in a movie, right,
But the familiarity with it. What struck me was the
(12:12):
taser is basically shaped like a gun. It looks very
similar to what you would expect from a handgun. It
fires two probes, at least this model of the taser.
They're a bit more advanced now, but this model of
the taser became that made the company so successful. Basically
fire two probes kind of looked a little bit like
fish hooks attached to copper wires. And the idea is
(12:34):
that it delivers electric current inside of your body that
is at a threshold that is essentially affecting the nervous system,
so you are unable to control your muscles. That's what
I call it, muscular incopacitation, neuromuscular incapacitation. But the current
is safe enough to not affect your heart or electric
you to you right, People say that a lot. That's
(12:56):
not what happens when people die. The current is not
strong enough to electric cue someone. And the thing that
struck me though, was I had heard of a taser
and understood just the basics of how they worked. But
why I became so interested in the company was this,
adamans this no gray area, black and white. These weapons
(13:18):
cannot kill, not in a circumstance other than you shoot
somebody off of a ledge and they fall and they die.
Sure they can. Everybody knows you could fall off a
high ledge and be killed. But the electric current itself,
in no way, ever, under any circumstance, no doubt about it,
is not capable electrically, scientifically, not capable of killing someone.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
I think, even to like, you know, someone that's uninitiated
in these kind of things, that just seems like a
really absurd claim, exactly me. And there's so many variations
and intervening circumstances and health conditions. I mean, it just
seems on its surface to be way outlandish to be
able to unequivocally say this with out any question.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Yes. And what drove me to the company was this
conflict of They were also the ones who wrote these
training programs and conducted this training for police officers. So
you have the one company with a monopoly on the
weapon telling tens of thousands, at that point, hundreds of
thousands of police officers across the country. These weapons, under
(14:23):
no circumstances other than lighting someone on fire accidentally because
they spark someone covered in gasoline, or some shooting someone
off of a ledge and they fall down. These weapons
do not kill in any circumstance.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
That Nick, what's that one quote that the CEO Rick
says at multiple points they say, if the taser is harmful,
it's really the person using correct taser.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
It was. It was essentially the quote you're thinking of.
Is a really important moment in the company's history. In
early two thousand and four, CBS News did a kind
of big investigation into tasers and into the companies. The
first deaths really started to pile up, and basically, you know,
White Andrews, the reporter is saying to Rick Smith, you're saying,
(15:13):
this is a coincidence that these people would have died anyway,
and he says, in every single case, these people would
have died anyway. And the implication being right, some other
drugs what became very controversial. I'm sure we'll talk about
excited delirium, some other condition. At the exact moment of
(15:33):
this tasering, right was responsible for somebody else's death. And
even as a twenty three year old with not a
lot of like worldly knowledge yet like making my way
in the world as a reporter, just felt like, okay,
the company with a monopoly on the weapon, doing all
of the training and telling these cops that it can
never kill doesn't seem like a promise or a claim
(15:56):
that is going to be able to hold up under scrutiny.
And I went to the company kind of half expecting
there was some misunderstanding that like, Okay, I get, maybe
these are like really safe and actually this isn't supposed
to have but maybe Stanley Harlan is like one of
these rare freak occurrences where like you can't shoot someone
(16:16):
in the chest with electricity for thirty seconds and not
expects there's a chance they could die. And that's not
how my one day that was supposed to be multiple days,
but the one day that I spent at the company
that I've ever been allowed to be inside, that one
day I was allowed to be inside really changed everything
because we couldn't get it, felt like we couldn't come
(16:39):
to some sort of common understanding of just like the
sky is blue right right, like.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
A lot of the conversations feel the way we learn
about them in absolute and the way that we learn
about them and killing them safely. You're doing your due
diligence as a reporter, and you're asking your refrain to question.
Sometimes you're saying like okay, again, could I get a
direct answer and the person you're speaking with I believe
(17:07):
Tuttle Yes? At that Why, Yes, Steve Tuttle is doing
kind of a matrix dodge or some parkour for every
direct question you're asking, and at times contradicting his previous statements.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
Yeah. The thing you learn about corporate spin and why
this is a film really about the way in which
the film is about a lot of corporate rhetoric is
because companies are really good, I think, especially in controversial
industries at the sound bite. They know how to package
their messaging and their rhetoric into very concise talking points.
(17:46):
But if you just kind of unravel a story and
you ask to hear the story, which documentary film allows
you to do, right, I like writing magazine journalism and
doing profile journalism. Now I love this pot test we made, right.
These are long form stories and you ask someone to
tell you their story, and if you sit there long
(18:06):
enough to hear a story, you can't put that messaging
you know, so tightly into these neat talking points because
as you follow up, you're digging your own rabbit hole
that you can't escape from. Right, Because the narrative you've
created the mythology you've created doesn't actually match with the
(18:27):
reality that's right in front of your face, which is
sort of where the absurdity of the film in particular,
right that it's a lot of it structured around this
messaging it comes into play because it just becomes so
bizarre because we know what's real, and yet we're being
handheld and walked through this like, you know, incredibly elliptical
(18:50):
and bizarre, sort of like you know, dreamscape of the
story of just like who are you and how did
you get here?
Speaker 5 (19:00):
Hey, let's take a quick pause right here here a
work more sponsor, and then come back with more from
Nick and we're back. Let's jump right back into this conversation.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I want to talk about the way Taser was born,
because at least of the way you discuss it in
the podcast and the way I've seen you write about it,
it seems to have been born from a pretty noble goal,
and then when that goal is is it has to
(19:35):
be changed and altered a little bit because of commerce,
because of the needs of you know, building a company
and paying off loans and all these things that just
the capitalist system kind of does to everything and every
idea that comes around to it, it has to change,
and then there has to be a belief in it,
Like we're talking about almost a supreme belief in the reality.
Speaker 5 (19:56):
Of it, a philosophical kind of shift a little bit, right,
because I mean, initially, wasn't it meant to be a
non lethal form of self defense, you know, to cut
down on gun violence? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Can you tell us a little bit about how how
it became a thing? Like, really, why Taser International became
a thing?
Speaker 4 (20:12):
Yeah, Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things
that I really emphasized about Rick Smith. He's the He
and his brother co foundered the company, but Rick is
the visionary. Tom his older brother kind of just like
you know, came along for the ride because it was
a family business. They used their dad's seed money. They
used their dad's money from a from a startup that
(20:33):
he'd invested in that did ended up doing quite well
to fund the original idea, which was we are going
to make a star Trek phaser. Because to high school acquaintances,
there's a lot of controversy because Rick had previously called
them his friends and then he fact checked it and
it's like they you know, maybe known each other a
little bit, you know, they were the guys. These guys
(20:55):
he calls his friends, end up being much older than
he was, and so they never really went to high
school together. But the story goes that Rick is basically
in business school and he has already graduated from Harvard.
He's an incredibly smart, accomplished young person from kind of
a one percenter suburb, right, who can be anything he
(21:16):
wants to be. Really, he's got that kind of he's
like made in a lab to be either like a
politician or like a successful businessman or you know, whatever.
He wants, whatever his heart desires, and he wants to
be like his dad. He wants to be entrepreneurial, he
wants something of his own. And so he's in business
school when these two acquaintances are killed in a road
(21:38):
rage shooting. And it's that shooting that Rick always cites
as the sort of catalyst for him understanding gun violence
and thinking about how many people are actually killed by guns.
And this is back in nineteen ninety one, So this is,
you know, thirty forty years ago now where the idea
(21:59):
of of having a weapon to defend yourself, right that
isn't a gun is like kind of this violent crime
era of America where people are like seriously considering, can
we do better than guns? Now, what I always say
is that, like, it's an incredibly naive concept because a
lot of people buy guns because they like guns. It's
(22:22):
not just to defend themselves, right, American gun culture is
bigger than just I need a revolver to protect myself
from a road rage shooting.
Speaker 5 (22:31):
It's like phasing out car culture, you know, yeah, right right,
something that people are enthusiasts about, right, collectors, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
It's tied to identity for many people.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Yeah, But he has this twenty three year old, you know,
like moment of inspiration where he thinks, I'm going to
take my dad's money. I love star Trek, I want
to basically make He does some research and he finds
there was this guy named Jack Kover who would a
originally invented the taser, which.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Was shout out to Taser Tron.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
To shout out to Taser Tron, a kind of failed
company that had tried previously to bring tasers to market
as a self defense weapon. Is kind of a big
bulky weapon shaped like a flashlight. The key sort of
red tape. There is that it used gunpowder to fire
those probes, and so it was regulated like a firearm,
(23:25):
and a lot of people, basically a lot of average
citizens needed to go through a similar process to buying
a firearm if they wanted one. They were just too
expensive and too clunky and too sort of ahead of
its time to compete seriously in a self defense market.
But Rick has an idea to work with Kover to
license that technology from him to create a taser that
(23:48):
uses compressed nitrogen to fire, thinking they'll avoid all the
sort of ATF regulation that comes if they do that,
and they're just like, the two guys, it's like this
great story about they're in Rick's you know, parents camper,
and they're like they're tweaking this thing in this just like,
you know, great entrepreneurial origin story. We're gonna change the
(24:11):
world in this you know, desert camper that we're in together,
and it's just an absolute disaster, right Like, Rick tells
this great story that's in our podcast. Not to spoil it,
but it's one of my favorites where they hire out
a call center and they do a promo on the
local news and Phoenix back in nineteen ninety four, when
they're going to launch the company, and they are basically
(24:34):
expecting a flood of calls to come in ordering this
taser when people see it demonstrate it live on TV,
and like nobody calls. The only call, he says, he
gets is from his mom the entire night, and she's like,
how's it going, Ricky?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You know?
Speaker 4 (24:48):
And this is just like this incredibly human moment of
a young entrepreneur with this grandiose idea where at the
very first meeting, the very first board meeting of his
company with his parents and his brother, says, we're gonna
make the bullet obsolete, right, that's the real ambition, and
like they are right from the start. Pardon my French,
(25:10):
but like it's that bad. And so they spend years
trying to figure out how to save this idea, and
that ultimately leads to police because the idea of a
taser is a natural fit in policing, and they the
real key moment in the company's history is realizing the
(25:31):
original taser that Jackober had developed and then Rick Smith
tried to perfect just wasn't strong enough for police to
take seriously. And Rick makes a fateful choice between sort
of the company going under or building a taser that
is strong enough to basically take law enforcement by storm,
and he chooses the stronger taser. They engineer this weapon,
(25:53):
and that's about you know, that's roughly nineteen ninety nine,
and they just within five years the company had gone
from near bankruptcy to being worth about one point nine
billion dollars.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And I would say at this point, as well, I
love the way we're exploring the SNICK. I would say
one thing that stands out to me here is that
Rick Smith. Yes, ambitious, yes, quite intelligent, and as we'll find,
quite litigious. But Rick Smith is above all a storyteller
(26:25):
as well. And he is you know, anybody familiar with
a C suite or upper management, A lot of it
is kind of storytelling, no offense.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
Smith making, creating the more of something.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
The storytelling here seems to be a shift not just
in goal, but a shift in narrative. Right, what is
the story I tell to law enforcement? Let me find
a story that will be championed by police and elios alike.
Speaker 5 (26:55):
Well, I was going to say too, I mean, before
that that kind of crossover moment that you're getting to,
all the ad campaigns around these devices were like for
taking hiking, you know, like this sport model with like
a with with a included fanny pack, you know exactly.
This is all on their website on the accident, there's
a timeline there and it shows a lot of ads
and it's kind of comical.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
They thought that their mom was going to be one
of their best marketers because they imagined like tupperware parties
of like women telling stories about each other.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
Right.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Because this, this is ultimately why I think techno optimism
can be really dangerous, is because you have a really
bright person who's capable of a lot. Like I said,
he could have been anything he wanted, but he doesn't
have any of the context of violent crime when he
jumps into this business. In his world, these two guys
(27:50):
from the rich suburb that he's from are gunned down,
and God, that should not happen in our gated community, essentially, right,
And I'm sure I have not looked at this specifically
because I didn't want to make that much of a
point of it, But there was probably a shooting in
North Phoenix the same weekend that happens all the time
to some disenfranchised community in some place that he has
(28:14):
no right connection to and in his thinking is he's
literally said, I was going to go to Arizona and
scratch and claw and dig, and I thought there would
be gold in those hills. And he's talked about the
riches that should bestow a benevolence creator of a device
like the taser. Right, this is a money making operation,
is a business opportunity, but you're talking about public safety.
(28:38):
You're talking about violence that impacts communities and ways he
had no understanding of. And so of course they failed
early on because trying to just say, well, the reason
we haven't solved gun violence is because governments are too
corrupt and politicians are too stupid, and nobody has really
thought about this in my genius Harvard way. Yet we'll
(29:00):
just give everybody Captain Kirk's phaser and then nobody will
shoot each other anymore. It's like it's a little more
complicated than that, my man. You know, you can't just write,
like just decide one day to solve gun violence.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Especially the police that are going to end up being
your largest customers and the politicians that are that are
going to end up being your some of your largest benefactors.
If you're telling that story, you're kind of dunking on
those guys.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
You know what I mean, Yeah, it was one hundred percent.
It was the idea that technology. The theme of this
story of fifteen years of covering it is that we
have such an instinct to treat the entrepreneur, to treat
the business person, to treat technology as the hero, right,
the idea for as much as we love science fiction
(29:52):
as a culture and as many you know, I robots
and AI movies as we can come up with, we
don't don't take seriously enough the repercussions that can come
when you just basically do the Silicon Valley thing of
move fast and break things like they moved fast and
broke things modeled after Silicon Valley innovation, and that they
(30:14):
broke cannot be repaired.
Speaker 5 (30:15):
You're talking about the stuff, you know, as they it's
rolled out with such a kind of lack of foresight
that it's staggering. And this is a similar situation, if
not the exact same. You're totally right.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Well, let's talk about that business pivot from a self
defense mechanism to a police weapon, something that can be
on the side of you know, in the in the
vision there at Taser international of every police officer that
walks the planet, that shift, and then the need to
make it more powerful to take down you know, larger
(30:51):
guys in order to just impress you know, officers like
law enforcement officers who can then watch a demonstration and
then say, oh wow, yeah, that would take down on somebody.
For sure, it took down our biggest guy, that shift.
And then the need to sell to more and more
and more and more police departments because you're selling these individually,
you know, as packages to police departments. The need to
(31:15):
do that to make it more powerful. It feels like
that is where maybe the actual problem arises because of
the strength of the actual current that's going through there.
But then also the concept that this is to be
used to take down someone that a police officer is pursuing, right,
(31:36):
someone that a suspect that an officer believes needs to
be taken down. That an officer would have used perhaps
a side arm like a forty five or a nine
millimeter to incapacitate that person. Now I can shock them.
How in your exploration, how has the usage of a
(31:57):
taser by police officers change or did it change or
was it always the same, or just how are they
used in the field.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
This is the most genius thing that they did this case.
They took the marketing and rhetoric of the original idea
of an alternative to guns, and that is the public
facing city council pitch idea, Right, hey, this is going
to reduce police shootings because what we have is an
(32:28):
electric weapon that can stop somebody. They didn't say it
was effective as a gun, it's not like they said that,
but the idea would be, you can prevent shootings now
because we can control violent and dangerous people with this taser.
But the marketing to police, the sort of way in
(32:48):
which this weapon took off. There was no outside advertising
to police. This was what they called the Master Instructor program,
where they basically hired off do cops who in their
capacity as law enforcement officers, would take the company written
training material, take the device, and Rick himself and some
(33:09):
of the marketing people were brilliant at going on their
own grassroots campaign. They would go department to department in
the early days, and they would show these cops. They
would walk in and say, bring us your toughest guy,
bring us the stud bring us whoever, and all the
cops would watch as their friend who was the badass
(33:30):
right would just fall and scream. And I tried for
years to find videos of anybody who could sit there
and take it without yelling and screaming as loud as
they can. And this grassroots marketing demonstration for cops directly
was how cops believed the taser would be used, because
(33:52):
the pitch was this weapon runs the gamut of use
of force. You no longer have to put your hands
on people who don't want to sign the back of
a speeding ticket for you because they're arguing with you,
they're not being compliant. Just taser them, get them in
a handcuffs, and deal with it later. But it's like,
(34:13):
it's it's it was. It's genuinely hilarious to watch all
of these cops lose their sh as there being, you know,
tasered in these controlled settings where everything is designed. Many shocks,
many of these demonstrative shocks were for less than a second.
They would later call these human studies. They would later
call these proof of the taser safety. But you're talking
(34:34):
about cops who were basically shocked for a second or less,
many of them, and they would go down and everybody
would laugh and The idea of the impression you would
get was maybe that hurt for that second, but everybody's fine. Now,
we're all laughing about it. And when I go off
into the field, when I go use this weapon on
real people out there, the same thing is going to happen.
(34:55):
If they're going to give me attitude and not going
to comply with my orders, I met taser them, teach
them a and they'll be fine at the end of
the day, and I'll get the result. I want now
to the politicians, to the city councils who this was
pitched to, the idea was, you need to spend all
this money. You need to spend money on a weapon
that's twice as expensive in a lot of instances as
(35:17):
this as their actual guns, right because it's going to
reduce the deadly force or the real violence that an
officer faces. And what happened was it disonned the cops
who would actually use them, so they felt comfortable using
them in all manners of situations, to the point that
criminologists would later claim the phrase lazy cops syndrome to
(35:40):
describe the sort of epidemic of cops who were willing
to just tazer somebody for whatever reason they saw fit
and because the weapon did have risks that the cops
were not aware of based on their training, then people
like Bryce Masters, like Stanley Harlan, these people then were
put into situations where they were hurt or killed in
situations where they never really should have had their lives
(36:02):
put at risk, you know.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
I mean, I've been seeing I think this is a
positive thing, a real uptick in these lazy cop kind
of videos circulating, you know, on on streaming sites, on
you know, TikTok on Instagram and stuff, Folks taking cops
to task with their dash cams and kind of refusing
to comply and things like that. And I think for
refusing to comply in a positive way where cops are overstepping,
(36:26):
you know, what they're supposed to be able to do,
and how quickly that taser comes out is staggering as
a threat, as a you know, a way of forcing
you know, compliance in situations where they're already overstepping. I
also want to add, I maybe this is obvious to everybody,
but I did not think about this until this conversation.
(36:47):
But you can get tasers on Amazon like tons of
different like rhinestone, be dazzled ones. Not that that's neither
here nor there necessarily for the cop discussion, but maybe, yeah,
could you maybe respond to a little bit about these
lazy cop videos that are kind of making the rounds
and I'm just seeing more and more of and getting
more and more kind of freaked out about the quickness
(37:09):
with which they reached for the taser.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Well, yeah, there is a real difference between the civilian
taser and the cop taser. That's important to note because
civilian tasers, the whole point was that they actually didn't
work that well. And that's why, you know, if you're
trying to kind of think about defense weaponrylike they never
(37:32):
really took off that much with civilians because the marketing
didn't click. And also in practicality, they're not necessarily the
best weapons for like if you're truly being attacked, you know,
in this situation, and that was true of police too.
The weapons are most effective in these static situations of
non compliance. If you're in a real fight in you're
(37:54):
a cop and you pull your taser out, especially these
older models where there was one shot deal and you miss,
you're in big trouble, right, Like, that's that's where things
do escalate. And one of the most fascinating things that
happened in the in the you know, long decade two
decade long story of the taser is that the company
eventually did sort of very surreptitiously reduce the charge of
(38:18):
modern of the newer models of tasers, which started leading
to more police shootings because cops were pulling tasers in
situations where there was a fight and the taser wouldn't work,
and then that would escalate to an actual shooting. And
that's why they're not necessarily great civilian self defense weapons.
When you're in a fight, you want to know you're
(38:39):
going to win, right, And that's that's why, like some
people are more comfortable just taking their chances with Mason
running away than you know, trying to fire a taser
and miss. But the lazy cop syndrome things directly tied
to the fact that the weapons are most effective and
get the results you want, the lower the level of
use of worce fine argue with you guys, and you
(39:01):
two you guys are pulling me over and I'm just
you know, kind of not wanting to, you know, like
do what you say or whatever it is you taser me,
I'm like standing still usually, but if you pull me
out of the car and I'm ready to fight and
I'm coming at you and you try to taser me
and you miss, the next thought in a cops mind
is this guy can get my gun. And if we're
(39:23):
in a situation where this guy can get my gun,
that's that skin that is dangerous for cops. And so
it became just the way they were used because the
emphasis in training was about don't put your hands on
people anymore, don't do the verbal judo skills that you've learned,
don't waste your time taser these guys. Now, that's evolved
(39:45):
quite a bit in twenty years because we saw departments
have to change their policies when bad started to happen.
That's the sad thing is that bad things had to
happen in order for the weapons to be given the
wait in the seriousness of which they're capable of.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
And before we move on, let's take a word from
our sponsor and we'll be right back. And where you're back.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Let's go back to the hypothetical situation you just set
up here. Nick you're pulled over by three, I don't
think we would be very great cops, guys, but you're
pulled over by the three of us. Slide Yeah, we're
for some reason in the same car. This sounds like
(40:39):
a scenario or a safety study that Taser International as
it was being called back then, would not have approved.
One of the astonishing things we see over and over
again is that the story that Taser tells already, right,
(41:00):
telling a couple of different stories to a couple of
different audiences. But they're also kind of telling stories to
any governmental agency that would have conducted some sort of
review or at least like a four point thirty pm
on a Friday check in. So can you tell us
(41:22):
a little bit more about why there were not real
reviews by governmental agencies or how this company managed to
conduct its own test, its own quote unquote studies on
its own products. What happened there.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
It's really one of the fascinating things to me about
the way that, especially our American system works, because we
do want to encourage, we want we want capital, we
want business to take risks. We want them to feel
like the market doesn't have so many barriers to entry,
(42:01):
whether that's regulatory or whether that's competition, that you can
go you know, pursue a bold idea. But the regulatory
system in the United States, if you're not talking about
finance and you're not talking about you know, like pharmaceutical
basically in healthcare, is basically the product liability bar, which
(42:22):
means that like a company invents a thing or sells
a product, makes a claim and then if something really
bad happens, the company gets sued. But what that inherently
means is that companies, basically right get to do stuff
until there's harm or until there's damage, and then there's
repercussions and then maybe they have to change. And the
(42:42):
taser what fascinated me about it with so many people
would make the comparison to the FDA and say, this
is a weapon, but it's not really a medical device,
so it's not under this FDA scrutiny. Not that the
FDA is perfect, but we describe how like when you
introduce a new drug, it's typically a ten year process
(43:04):
from concept to market. Right for a new drug with
the taser, what they did was they faced this choice.
Rick Smith's dad is going to lose all his money
if he doesn't figure out a working taser, and so
rather than fold, they increased the power to get the
effectiveness they needed. They ran around using literature from the
(43:26):
old versions of tasers that were less powerful, and said
this is completely safe. And there was nobody to look
at them and go, like, prove that, how do you
prove that? He did one study on one pig on
an experimental device that didn't cause the pig to have,
you know, heart trouble. They did a study on five
(43:47):
dogs on the production model of the more powerful taser
that were all five seconds or less, one hundred and
fifty two shocks for five seconds or less. And then
they did these demonstrates on cops themselves when they were
doing their little road show, basically a lot of shocks
for less than a second, and said this was the proof.
(44:08):
And because there was no third party or regulatory authority,
you had the one company who had an entirely obviously
vested interest, I mean, the family fortune was at stake,
making one weapon and running around telling now again what
was very quickly tens of thousands of cops. By two
thousand and four, we're talking about over one hundred thousand
(44:30):
police officers, so more than ten percent of the police
officers in the United States within five years are carrying
these weapons right telling them this cannot kill, and nobody, genuinely,
nobody is there to say, like, prove that in the literature,
prove that in the science. And one of the most
interesting people I've met in my life covering this, who
(44:51):
is not actually in the podcast, but I'm hopefully going
to do maybe a bonus episode or about this guy,
is that is a cop named Andrew Dennis, who happened
to be a trauma surgeon for the area departments when
when Swatt needed somebody, you know, because if somebody got
shot or something. He's a Cook County Chicago trauma surgeon
and he was sitting in his taser training he was like,
(45:12):
this seems like both Frankly, the science doesn't seem good.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
You can spook somebody to death if they have a
heart condition, you know, I mean, truly, it's just it's
mind blowing to make this rhetoric.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
No offense to you know, no offense to people in
the audience tonight who are not surgeons but or trauma surgeons.
But spoiler alert, they're a little more up to date
on medical information. So it makes sense that this guy
would be sitting there and increasingly feel like he is
(45:46):
getting built where his colleagues are getting kind of swindled.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
Yeah, he's able to see the because they present a
lot of the literature in the training and they show that,
you know, they have this thick stack they would call
the research compendium, which was hundreds of pages of you know,
at a certain point, then thousands of pages. That just
looks like a great prop because it looks like it's
all of this proof that the weapon is safe. And
(46:11):
they show some of the slides and some of the
science of how they came to this weapon, and he's like, nah,
that's that's not that doesn't seem right. And he did
his own studies, and he was one of the very
first to do his own independent research. He got money
at a lab in Chicago to do some research to
show no, this electric current can affect you know, a
(46:33):
human heart. But that was years after. By the time
he's doing those studies, this is the most popular weapon
in police buy a long shot. It's not even close.
And so to unwind the understanding for police that actually
there is some risk. It was so entrenched in their
minds at that degree that I'm sure we'll talk about him,
(46:54):
but that's masters is a Kansas City police officer who
is so convinced the taser cannot affect the heart that
when his seventeen year old son is taseredd as a
cardiac arrest and the surgeon at that hospital tells him
the taser caused the cardiac arrest. This is in twenty fourteen,
he still doesn't believe the surgeon who's telling him that
(47:15):
because his training has been so effective that that weapon
cannot do what it actually did to his kid.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah, his son was tased for a long time. And
to me, that length of time, like you're saying, Nick,
is really the issue. How long do you hold down
that trigger after those nodes have gone into somebody, right,
especially somebody who's just being non compliant or someone who
(47:43):
is just standing there when you hit them.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
And folks, we're going to pause here for a moment.
This interview segment ended up being a two parter. There's
so much more we want to get to. In meantime,
you can tell that Nick Berdini has indeed spent more
than a decade and a half investigating this story. We
(48:10):
can't wait for you to hear absolute season one Taser International,
and we can't wait to hear your thoughts about it,
so please contact us. You can find us on email,
You can call us on a telephone. You can find
us on the internet correct.
Speaker 5 (48:24):
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where
it gets crazy, on x FKA, Twitter, and on YouTube
with video kind of galore for you to just dive
right into. On Instagram and TikTok. However, we're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
If you want to give us a call, our number
is one eight three three STDWYTK. When you call in,
it's a voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Give yourself
a cool nickname and let us know if we can
use your name and message on the air at some
point within the message. If you'd like to send us
words or not send us an email.
Speaker 3 (49:01):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive, and it doesn't have to be just words,
anything you'd like. We got some cool music recommendations quite
recently that bluebe Away so joined us out here in
the dark Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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