May 21, 2025 • 34 mins
Rick Smith wants to make violence obsolete via technology - he has a vision of this ideal world and he is working to build it, one taser at a time. Meanwhile, police departments have been searching for a non-lethal weapon they can rely on for years. At the LAPD, Greg Meyer is in charge of finding the right tool, but nothing works well until Rick Smith helps invent the Taser X26 – a weapon that can take down even the strongest, most motivated attacker.
Absolute, Season 1: Taser Incorporated is a production of Lava for Good™ in association with Signal Co. No1.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're right where you are, We'll throw you a gun.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Gun violence is surging across the US.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
So far there is a soon with a gun.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What would it be like to live in a world
where none of this is possible? One man had a vision,
a vision of a new reality.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
The whole reason we started this company is we don't
get people stop killing each other.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
And in order to.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Do that, he was going to make it happen with
an invention.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Technology has the power to elevate us. It can bring
out the best in humanity. It makes the impossible possible.
It can make dreams real. It can make tomorrow different
than yesterday.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Rick Smith is building this new reality in a real place.
I visited the Space Age headquarters, rising up from the
Arizona Desert. My tour guide put his eye up to
a retinal scanner to get me into the building. The
steel doors retracted slowly, like we were entering a vault.
(01:37):
I walked through a wide hallway and saw catwalks criss
crossing above me. Employees in glass conference rooms drew equations
on the windows. I watched as an assembly line of
workers built this future weapon called a taser. Electricity buzzed
through the air. It felt like science fiction, but they
(01:57):
were really doing it. I was in side this world.
I could see what this new technology could be capable of,
and I wanted Rick's stream to be real. This is absolute.
Season one, Taser incorporated a story about unchecked power. I'm
(02:20):
Nick Beredini. Episode one whips, Poles and Chains. I know
(03:12):
a lot of cops and they get asked all the time,
have you ever fired your gun? Rick Smith in his
space age outpost was trying to build a world where
the answer would always be no. But if you were
a cop before that, like my friend Matt Masters, you
were skeptical. Matt had been trained. If you think your
(03:33):
life is in danger, shoot.
Speaker 5 (03:36):
Door comes flying open and dude's running out. He's got
the cash register in one hand and a gun in
the other, and I'm like, robbery, robberie robbery. So we
bail out of our car in the middle street. I
think the kid just didn't even like realize that the
cops were there. So as he's running, he turned like,
(03:56):
oh shit kind of thing. The gun was pointed at
me at that point I just reacted, and I mean
he wasn't stopping, and I opened fire on him. I
shot shot him like five times, and so he went
down right there and dropped the cash register, dropped the gun.
I'm standing in the street, put out on the radio.
(04:18):
Shots fired, you know, also involved shooting whatever. Whatever I said.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
It wasn't until you rolled him over that you realized
how young he was, right, Yeah, yeah, no, what did
he look like? He looked like he looked like he
was a fourteen fifteen year old kid. You know what
did that feel like?
Speaker 6 (04:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
It bothered me.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
You know, I remember the kid looking up at me
and he's like.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
You shot me. Matt says he did what he was
trained to do, aim for the chest, but he also
did what a lot of cops do under pressure. He missed.
Cops call it dipping. He told me he didn't mean to,
but he lowered his arm hit the kid's legs.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
I was just glad that I didn't killing because I
think that would have been a different I think that
would have been different emotions that I would have had
to process. Ended up being a BB gun, there's a
replica that look like a real gun. There's no way
I would have been able to know that that was
a BB gun. But I don't know that I needed
to shooting. So I think that part kind of bothers
(05:24):
me a little bit, like knowing that I didn't have
to shoot him.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Why does an officer ever need to use lethal force?
Police don't use lethal force because it's lethal. They use
it because it's reliable. It's the most effective way to
stop a threat.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
In a marketing video from twenty twenty three, Rick Smith
tells us not anymore. He shows us the newest Taser,
a black and yellow gun shaped device. Instead of one barrel,
it has ten holes to shoot out ten little darts.
The darts are attached to electrified copper wires, so when
they shoot out and puncture your skin, the current makes
(06:08):
your muscles lock up. You can't move, but when it's over,
you can get right back up.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
I feel a sense of true hope watching this technology
be adopted, and I can't wait to see where the
coming years will take us.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Walking through the Taser headquarters blew me away. While I
was there, I sat down with a VP and he
told me how proud he was to work for the
company Tasers saving lives. That's the business that we're in.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
We're protecting the truth and we're protecting lives.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I was impressed. As I walked back through the steel
double doors and into the desert that day, I also
wondered was what he said too good to be true?
I threw myself in a half decade into that question.
I even made a movie about what I found. That's
how I met Officer Matt Masters. I was answering questions
(07:05):
on Reddit about the movie. He left me a comment, Hello, Nick,
I was thrust into the reality of tasers just over
a year ago. I didn't see it at first. I
only caught it because a friend asked later if I'd
talked to this guy Matt yet. When I finally met him,
he'd been a cop for nineteen years. Crew cut, blue eyes,
(07:27):
tattoo of an archangel slicing a demon's neck. He opened
up right away. He laughed a lot, especially when he
was talking about something that might make him cry. We
had dinner at a restaurant and we talked for hours.
Matt's wife, Stacy was there too, dark straight hair, dark
brown eyes, feather tattoo. She's part Shawnee and sometimes wears
(07:50):
a t shirt that says no More Stolen Sisters. We
started talking because Matt and Stacy were trying to make
sense of something that happened to them.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
Fucking just get out out right now.
Speaker 7 (08:03):
Out of the car, Out of the car. Taylor appointment
on the ground, out of the car, on the ground,
on the ground.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
The taser changed everything for cops, changed everything for math too.
(08:55):
There was a time when police didn't use tasers, and
I wanted to know how I had become so popular
with cops. So I went to meet a former police
officer who was the very first in the country to
arm his department with tasers.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
Yeah, people have this idea, ye know. Oh wow, that'd
be a police officer, you know, how exciting or how
dangerous or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Greg Meyer is retired now, but he was a cop
with the Los Angeles Police Department back in the seventies.
Speaker 6 (09:25):
I always say, well, it's a fun job, but somebody
has to do it.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
I was honestly scared to call him at first. Everything
I knew about the LAPD came from TV police chases
and movies like Training Day. I was twenty three and
reporting on small town cops in mid Missouri. I wasn't
sure a retired captain from the LAPD would want to
give some kid journalist a history lesson how'd you guys
kind of get started getting getting tisgered on the street
(09:51):
from there. But Captain Meyer loves history.
Speaker 6 (09:54):
LAPD had looked at the taser three or four years.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Greg told me the story of how why he brought
tasers to the LAPD like he was my grandpa telling
me about the war.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
So in January third of nineteen seventy nine, in South
Los Angeles there was a very tragic police shooting.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
A widowed mom named Ula Love was killed by police.
It was all over the news.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
On Focus tonight.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Police brutality a topic of intense national interest nowadays because
last January a black woman named Ula Love was shot
by two policemen.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
She threatened the officers with a knife.
Speaker 8 (10:29):
They fired twelve times and killed her.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Ula Love hadn't paid her gas bill, and when the
collector came, she threatened him with a shovel. When he
called the cops, Ula Love threatened them with a knife.
They could have subdued this lady without using the weapons
that they used. They could have took her alive plant simple.
(10:57):
Even the mayor made a statement.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
There is a WHI I'd spread feeling which I share
that the shooting might have been avoided.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
That Ula Love shooting put the city of Los Angeles
on edge and set the LAPD on a mission.
Speaker 6 (11:16):
The boss has decided, we got to find a better way,
and that's how I ended up with the Non Lethal
Weapons Project.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
The department started looking for a non lethal weapon that
could stop a shooting before it happened.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
I had no idea that was going to become my
life's work. I actually wrote an article forty years ago
or so, the title of which was Tasers, tear gas, whips,
poles and chains your non lethal weapons Alternatives. And that
came about because I was given carte blanche, look at
everything that we could that's out there.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Greg told me the LAPD actually sent out a survey
to the fifty biggest police departments in the US. They
were asking, how do you stop someone with hurting them?
Speaker 6 (12:01):
What do you guys use besides you know, the baton
and the handgun and the SAP and the handcuffs to
subdue people.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
But cops everywhere were kind of in the same boat.
Everything they could use was pretty brutal. Like if you
don't know what a SAP is, it's basically a leather
club with a lead ball at the end of it.
It can cause a ripping laceration to the face. Sounds
like something from Bravehearder Game of Thrones. Greg told me
(12:32):
he was so stuck he even ran ads in the newspaper.
Speaker 6 (12:36):
And so people would write us letters. Doctors would write
us letters. People make phone calls to the office making
the suggestion, and.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
When they say there's no bad ideas in a brainstorm.
Speaker 6 (12:49):
Whips, poles and chains. I'm not kidding. We actually had
a guy in Australia say that we should use bull
whips on people because that's what they use. And it's
like what several people, including some doctors wrote in that
we should try tranquilizer guns, like they tranquilize animals with
little drug cocktails. So I actually spent a day out
(13:12):
at the Los Angeles Zoo with the head veterinarian at
the zoo. Okay cool, except what he told me was, yeah,
the media never seems to find out the animal would
die half the time. So we kind of blew by that.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
One doesn't scream LAPD a more humane way of policing.
But Greg didn't give up. He looked into a metal
chain hooked up to a seven foot shoust. Honestly, I
can't believe he looked into that one. It has chain
in the name, Greg, it.
Speaker 6 (13:44):
Was called an action control chain, and you would try
to wrap the person up with that and then knock
them down with a big long, six or seven foot
baton and then get them handcuffed. And it's like, yeah, okay,
we didn't have a lot of luck with that.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
And then he considered they're a giant fishing net.
Speaker 6 (14:03):
Now the guy's all wrapped up, and then they get
him into the station and behind closed doors, get the
net off, and then the fight would be on.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
There was pepper spray, but even the environmentalists got in
the way.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
The state of California did not allow pepper spray. It
was banned. The state Department of Health Services said, no,
we don't want the pepper spray. We're not sure what
effect it would have on the ozone layer. So we're
out there kicking people with combat boots and beating them
with metal pipes and we can't use pepper spray because
(14:37):
they're worried about the ozone layer. It was nuts.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And then Greg found this news clip about a former
NASA scientist working on some kind of electric gun. This
wasn't Rick Smith, it was before his time. The guy
in the clip was named Jack Kover got.
Speaker 8 (14:56):
Her a new space age weapon that stuns but does
not kill.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
I picked up the phone and I called Jack Kover,
who was the taser inventor. His little factory was here
in southern California, in the city of Industry, and I
went out there and met him. Jack was a very
impressive guy. Jack had been a World War two airplane
test pilot, okay, and he was part of the Apollo
(15:25):
moon landing program.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Jack explained the concept to Greg.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
I remember he asked me. He said, Greg, did you
ever work on a car? Did you ever do it
tune up on a car? And did you ever like
you know, did you ever touch the distributor cap and
get a short circuit through your body? And I go, yeah,
that happened. That happened once, he says, But it didn't
kill you, right, No, but it really startled you, right
(15:51):
And I go, well, yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Jack showed Greg a prototype and he was sold. Soon
the laped had a few hundred tasers. The concept of
the taser was so good, but they weren't reliable. They
were shaped like a flashlight, hard to hold and hard
to aim. Plus they were big and bulky. Some cops
had to keep them in the trunks of their squad cars.
(16:16):
But the biggest problem was that a lot of times
they just didn't have enough power to stop an assailant,
which of course made the news.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Officers trying to take a man into custody, they used
a taser.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
The tasers should have dropped him.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Long enough for the officers to take control.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
It didn't stun guns to tasers.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
They can be effective, but have never been totally reliable
against focused, combative attackers.
Speaker 6 (16:43):
It just wasn't ready for prime time.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Then the taser was featured in primetime in March of
nineteen ninety one. The world watched as three LAPD officers
beat Rodney King. While many people were appalled to see
police nearly beat a black man to death, lots of
cops noticed something else too. The LAPD had tried to
fire the taser twice before the brutality began, two taser
(17:13):
shots that failed to keep King on the ground before
the other officers could put him in handcuffs. Greg moved
on from tasers, The weapons stayed on the fringe of
law enforcement until a bright young man from Scottsdale, Arizona,
had an idea. At the same time as Rodney King
(17:41):
was in the news. Rick Smith, the guy who had
changed tasers forever, had just graduated from Harvard. He was
getting his MBA, and he'd grown up watching his dad
try out business after business. Rick told the story to
my colleague Matt Stroud a few years ago.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
He started a restaurant at one point failed bottom batical
distribution business fail.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Finally Rick's dad got in on the ground floor of
a Silicon Valley startup and made millions.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
And you know, it was pretty cool, Like dad went
from struggling and then they's buying a Ferrari.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Rick says he made up his mind that by the
time he finished business school, he wanted to start his
own company. He just didn't know what kind yet. And
then he heard some news from back home in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Two guys he knew from playing high school football, Todd
and Corey, had gone speeding down Scottsdale Road in a
white Chevy Camaro and cut off a guy driving a
(18:32):
Honda a Cord.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
They don't go to a party on a Friday or
Saturday night, and this guy follows him and they probably
got out of their car. There's yelling, there's tempers. This
other guy sees two big guys. He takes a guy
out in the glovebox, and he ends up shooting and
killing them both.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Todd and Corey's death changed Rick's life. Rick was ambitious.
He didn't want to leave school and just get a job.
He wanted to do something big, and this shooting started
making him think about the scale of gun violence in
the US. How many thousands of people are killed by
guns every year. He wanted to do something about it.
(19:13):
Rick had heard of a taser. He'd seen it in
movies like The Enforcer, and he was a Star Trek fan.
Captain Kirk didn't have a gun. He had a phaser,
a weapon that stuns but doesn't kill. Rick didn't understand
why wasn't the taser already a smashing success.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
I'm convinced there will come a day with the idea
of blowing holes in people is going to seem horrific
and outdated. I think, yes, Pa, we can take some
inspiration from science fiction. Right, How bizarre were to look
at Captain Kirk whipped out a glock and blew a
hole in a Clayton Right.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Rick says, he saw the patent for the taser was
owned by a guy named Jack Kover, and Rick wanted in.
He convinced his dad to put up some money, and
he took his parents' camper two hours south of childhood
home to park it in Jack's driveway. They were kind
of an odd couple. Rick was the young and ambitious businessman,
Jack was the crotchety old scientist ready to give the
(20:10):
taser one last try. They bought parts at the local
hardware store and got to work in Jack's garage. Within
a few months, they had built a new prototype, the
air Taser thirty four thousand. They marketed it to civilians
who wanted to protect themselves, not police. They went on
sale in the Sharper Image catalog in nineteen ninety four.
(20:33):
It was a disaster. Rick thought that regular people would
(20:57):
jump at the chance to buy tasers for their self defense.
But what he didn't really consider was that most people
bought guns because they liked guns. They know what they
are and how to use them. They didn't like tasers.
I'm three years in. Rick was running out of cash.
By then, Jack Kober was gone. Rick was on his own.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
Millions of dollars went into this basically wiping out my dad.
My mom at that point was super upset with us
because she was watching the nest egg Windel.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Rick told another journalist that his mom was so upset
she didn't even go to his wedding. He was scared.
He would stay up late filling orders himself, drinking beer
and wondering if everything he had put into this dream
was even worth it.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
By now, I to be honest, I was on my
friends from Harvard. We're doing these startups up in Silicon Valley.
They were at these companies with goofy names like Yahoo,
and at this point I just sort of frank job
wanted out. But we had no choice.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
As Rick tells it, his dad had signed over everything
he had to get the bank loans Rick needed. If
Rick couldn't pay him back, the family would lose everything.
Rick thought hard about his company. He still believed in
the mission to replace guns and by doing so, save lives.
(22:23):
He just needed customers, and if the sharper image crowd
wasn't buying, maybe police would. So he called the first
cop to ever give tasers a shop, Greg Meyer, from
the lapd. Rick invited him to dinner at Musso and
Frank's big red booths, white tablecloths, big steaks, A century
(22:43):
of Hollywood power brokers making deals.
Speaker 6 (22:46):
Musso and Frank is more than one hundred years old.
Now it's a Hollywood hangout restaurant. All the stars would
hang out there and all that.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Greg talked about all the ways the taser needed to
be better, and.
Speaker 6 (22:58):
What law enforcement need, and what the strengths and weaknesses are.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Shape it like a handgun to make it easier for
cops to point and shoot. Make it smaller. All these
tasers were way too big. But most importantly, make sure
it worked every time.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
And we had a wonderful dinner, and I wished them
well in their venture.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Rick heard Greg loud and clear. He knew how important
it was for the taser to be reliable. He'd seen
his taser fail before a couple of years earlier. In
nineteen ninety eight, Rick had taken the airtaser to a
police convention and he was giving a presentation to a
couple hundred cops when he asked if anyone would like
to volunteer to take a hit from the air taser.
(23:45):
He thought he'd fire it. The volunteer would drop to
the ground and everyone would get a laugh. But you
know that old saying, don't ask a question you don't
already know the answer to. A man named Hans Morrero
raised his hand a volunteer.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
I shoot him and literally doesn't plage.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Rick shot Hans with the taser, but he didn't go down. Instead,
he told Rick that the taser shock was making him uncomfortable,
which is, you know, not what you want to happen
when you're demonstrating a new weapon that's supposed to incapacitate
an attacker, and.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
The whole audience roaring with laughter.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Everyone was laughing for the wrong reason. Later that night,
Rick Smith was down in the hotel bar, head down
and embarrassed. Hans found Rick and they started chatting.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
And I asked, you know, so I started asking in
questions and he starts explaining to me. He's as well,
yeah we know, sir, I've studying marcial arts at the
He's two years old.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
He's like a karate kid meets the terminator.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
So he tells me about this and I said, hey, look,
we're we're working on a new system.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
I think you are the ultimate test.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Rick and a small engineering team launched Project Stealth. It
was an all out effort to build a taser strong
enough to take down anyone, even Hans, a former chief
instructor of hand to hand combat for the Marines. A
year later, Rick was holding a new mup, the Advanced
Taser M twenty six. It was smaller, lighter, and easy
(25:19):
to use because it was shaped like a handgun. But
the biggest breakthrough was that it was more powerful. Who
was almost four times stronger than the airtaser twenty six
watts instead of seven. Rick flew Hans out to a
warehouse in Arizona to test the new taser on him.
He brought a video crew with him to film the
whole thing. The video starts.
Speaker 8 (25:45):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
White text pops up on the black screen. It says
non lethal weapons cannot stop a focused, motivated attacker until
now the challenge Hans versus the Advanced Taser M twenty six.
Hans comes onto the screen, fists up standing on a
boxing mat. He's wearing white shorts, socks and sneakers and
(26:10):
nothing else. His muscles are on full display, like twelve
pack apps buys bigger than an NFL running back, huge
biceps in chest. The background is all black. He takes
a deep breath and gets in a fighting stance. He's
gonna go try to grab a gun on the ground
(26:30):
five feet in front of him. Every time I watch,
I kind of think he'll get it, but of course
he never gets the gun. The taser shoots electricity through
his body. Hans drops to the floor. Rick sent that
(26:54):
video to police departments around the country. It was like
the trailer for a summer blockbuster, and Hans was the star.
That video of Hans gave officers proof proof that the
taser was a weapon they could rely on and that
it wouldn't fail. Rick actually hired Hans to teach other
cops how to use the taser and lead a brilliant
(27:14):
grassroots marketing campaign. They started visiting police departments across the country.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Our sales pitch was really easy.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
We would go around the police departments and we'd say, hey,
who's your biggest, topest guy.
Speaker 8 (27:27):
Bring you in.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
Okay, Spinky could beat this. Here's a one hundred bucks.
We pin them with the taser to boom down. They
would go.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Greg Meyer from the LAPD finally found that non lethal
weapon he'd been looking for, and as he remembers it.
Speaker 6 (27:48):
It is a big hit. The public would come out
and see the police action. They were used to seeing
the police get in a big fight with these guys.
Now you've got the police stand in ten or twelve
feet away and launching these electric probes at the guys.
And what was also beautiful. When you have a naked
(28:09):
PCP suspect, they're usually all sweaty, And guess what, sweat
is a great electrical conductor. The salty sweat on your
body is a great and so it would make this
fascinating blue and purple light show on the person's body
while they're being taken down. So the public's standing there
(28:29):
on the corner clapping and cheering when the officers would
take these guys down with a taser, and nobody's getting
beat up, nobody's getting hurt. So it was like revolutionary.
Speaker 8 (28:40):
If your local police officers are not get armed with tasers,
chances are they will be soon.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution.
Speaker 8 (28:49):
These stun guns are growing in popularity as a way
to stop violent suspects without killing them.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
The taser was doing everything that Rick Smith promised. It
was back in the national news, and this time for
a good reason.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Last year in Phoenix. Gun shootings by police went down
by half and fatal shootings dropped by a third. Thanks
to its reputation, there's a twelve week backlog in demand.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Thousands of police departments started buying the weapon. Rick took
Taser International public in May of two thousand and one
and raised about eight million dollars. Three years later, the
company was worth one point nine billion. The money was nice,
but for Rick it was always about the mission.
Speaker 4 (29:37):
I remember why nottuly Ki up to me to tell
me a story about a thirteen year old girl that
was suicidal and was rightening to kill herself and then
slash her own risks. The officers are called to the
scene and she charges at them with a knife and
she screaming, killed me or something that's effect.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
They'd taste her. They dropped her, and.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
The officer said, I can tell you Rick one center.
We didn't know her device. Would he killed her an
exciting We didn't get in this business to kill thirteen
year old girl.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Stories like that one aren't science fiction. There really is
someone who is alive today because she wasn't shot with
a gun when she was thirteen, alive because of Rick's weapon.
The company studied the impact of the Taser and found
they were saving roughly fifty people's lives a day. I
left Taser's sci fi headquarters in Arizona with my own
(30:24):
mission to know everything I could about the Taser and
Rick Smith. Rick's whole thing is that he's working to
make the impossible possible, and as I'm reading about him,
he constantly references Star Trek and the show's technology as
his inspiration phasers that don't kill people. If the headquarters
(30:49):
is his star Fleet ship, he's Taser's Captain Kirk. So
I started reading more about Captain Kirk, and what's interesting
to me is how he got a start. There's a
simulation that's part of his training. It's a test. Kirk
has to make a choice save a ship of innocent
people from certain death and kill his own crew in
(31:10):
the process, or save his crew and let the civilians die.
There's no right choice. In the show, the whole point
of the test is to teach leaders about no win situations,
but Kirk doesn't believe in no win situations. He realizes
the game is rigged, so he decides to rewrite the rules.
(31:33):
He secretly reprograms the game so he can save the
ship and his crew. He becomes a captain, even though
technically he cheated. That's what Rick says he's doing, creating
technology to prevent lethal situations for cops and the people
they serve. But then I began to wonder if Captain
(31:54):
Kirk cheated, did Rick Smith cheat too? This season on
Taser Incorporated.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
Look, I've been hit with this thing seven times. Every
senior employeet this company has been hit with a taser.
Many of our wives, many of our children have been
hit with tasers. So we believe this is the safest
way to get a violent person under control.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
That's huge.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
We're very proud of what we do, and it is
like a religion to us.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
At the end of the day, if you have to
put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody,
why risk that you can just shoot them on the taser.
So it became more of a compliance tool, in an
everyday compliance tool where hey, put your hands behind your back,
fuck you, okay, watch this, you know, And it was,
you know, a taser deployment, and that was how we
(32:49):
were trained.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
I get right back there, and it's bad, It's really, really,
really bad.
Speaker 5 (32:57):
And I'm just like, why don't cops know any of
this stuff? Like, if you knew this, you wouldn't use
this thing.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
They said, We've now warned you, and if you do this,
guess what it's on you. Absolute Taser Incorporated is a
(33:25):
production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company
Number One. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,
and threads at Lava for Good. Follow me at Nick
Beredini on Instagram and Twitter. Taser Incorporated is written and
produced by me Nick Beredini. Our executive producers are Jason Flamm,
Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wordis. Kara Kornhaber is our senior producer.
(33:49):
Jackie Paul is our producer. Hannah Biel is our writer
and producer. Joe Plored is our sound designer. Music composed
and produced by Alexis Quadrado at The plot Azza Rojas Studio.
Marianne McCune is our editor, fact checking by Danya Suliman.
Jeff Cliburn is our head of marketing and operations. Our
social media director is is Marie Guarda Rama, our social
(34:13):
media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and our art director is
Andrew Nelson additional reporting by Matt Strapp,
You're right where you are, We'll throw you a gun.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Gun violence is surging across the US.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
So far there is a soon with a gun.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What would it be like to live in a world
where none of this is possible? One man had a vision,
a vision of a new reality.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
The whole reason we started this company is we don't
get people stop killing each other.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
And in order to.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Do that, he was going to make it happen with
an invention.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
Technology has the power to elevate us. It can bring
out the best in humanity. It makes the impossible possible.
It can make dreams real. It can make tomorrow different
than yesterday.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Rick Smith is building this new reality in a real place.
I visited the Space Age headquarters, rising up from the
Arizona Desert. My tour guide put his eye up to
a retinal scanner to get me into the building. The
steel doors retracted slowly, like we were entering a vault.
(01:37):
I walked through a wide hallway and saw catwalks criss
crossing above me. Employees in glass conference rooms drew equations
on the windows. I watched as an assembly line of
workers built this future weapon called a taser. Electricity buzzed
through the air. It felt like science fiction, but they
(01:57):
were really doing it. I was in side this world.
I could see what this new technology could be capable of,
and I wanted Rick's stream to be real. This is absolute.
Season one, Taser incorporated a story about unchecked power. I'm
(02:20):
Nick Beredini. Episode one whips, Poles and Chains. I know
(03:12):
a lot of cops and they get asked all the time,
have you ever fired your gun? Rick Smith in his
space age outpost was trying to build a world where
the answer would always be no. But if you were
a cop before that, like my friend Matt Masters, you
were skeptical. Matt had been trained. If you think your
(03:33):
life is in danger, shoot.
Speaker 5 (03:36):
Door comes flying open and dude's running out. He's got
the cash register in one hand and a gun in
the other, and I'm like, robbery, robberie robbery. So we
bail out of our car in the middle street. I
think the kid just didn't even like realize that the
cops were there. So as he's running, he turned like,
(03:56):
oh shit kind of thing. The gun was pointed at
me at that point I just reacted, and I mean
he wasn't stopping, and I opened fire on him. I
shot shot him like five times, and so he went
down right there and dropped the cash register, dropped the gun.
I'm standing in the street, put out on the radio.
(04:18):
Shots fired, you know, also involved shooting whatever. Whatever I said.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
It wasn't until you rolled him over that you realized
how young he was, right, Yeah, yeah, no, what did
he look like? He looked like he looked like he
was a fourteen fifteen year old kid. You know what
did that feel like?
Speaker 6 (04:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
It bothered me.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
You know, I remember the kid looking up at me
and he's like.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
You shot me. Matt says he did what he was
trained to do, aim for the chest, but he also
did what a lot of cops do under pressure. He missed.
Cops call it dipping. He told me he didn't mean to,
but he lowered his arm hit the kid's legs.
Speaker 5 (05:01):
I was just glad that I didn't killing because I
think that would have been a different I think that
would have been different emotions that I would have had
to process. Ended up being a BB gun, there's a
replica that look like a real gun. There's no way
I would have been able to know that that was
a BB gun. But I don't know that I needed
to shooting. So I think that part kind of bothers
(05:24):
me a little bit, like knowing that I didn't have
to shoot him.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Why does an officer ever need to use lethal force?
Police don't use lethal force because it's lethal. They use
it because it's reliable. It's the most effective way to
stop a threat.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
In a marketing video from twenty twenty three, Rick Smith
tells us not anymore. He shows us the newest Taser,
a black and yellow gun shaped device. Instead of one barrel,
it has ten holes to shoot out ten little darts.
The darts are attached to electrified copper wires, so when
they shoot out and puncture your skin, the current makes
(06:08):
your muscles lock up. You can't move, but when it's over,
you can get right back up.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
I feel a sense of true hope watching this technology
be adopted, and I can't wait to see where the
coming years will take us.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Walking through the Taser headquarters blew me away. While I
was there, I sat down with a VP and he
told me how proud he was to work for the
company Tasers saving lives. That's the business that we're in.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
We're protecting the truth and we're protecting lives.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I was impressed. As I walked back through the steel
double doors and into the desert that day, I also
wondered was what he said too good to be true?
I threw myself in a half decade into that question.
I even made a movie about what I found. That's
how I met Officer Matt Masters. I was answering questions
(07:05):
on Reddit about the movie. He left me a comment, Hello, Nick,
I was thrust into the reality of tasers just over
a year ago. I didn't see it at first. I
only caught it because a friend asked later if I'd
talked to this guy Matt yet. When I finally met him,
he'd been a cop for nineteen years. Crew cut, blue eyes,
(07:27):
tattoo of an archangel slicing a demon's neck. He opened
up right away. He laughed a lot, especially when he
was talking about something that might make him cry. We
had dinner at a restaurant and we talked for hours.
Matt's wife, Stacy was there too, dark straight hair, dark
brown eyes, feather tattoo. She's part Shawnee and sometimes wears
(07:50):
a t shirt that says no More Stolen Sisters. We
started talking because Matt and Stacy were trying to make
sense of something that happened to them.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
Fucking just get out out right now.
Speaker 7 (08:03):
Out of the car, Out of the car. Taylor appointment
on the ground, out of the car, on the ground,
on the ground.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
The taser changed everything for cops, changed everything for math too.
(08:55):
There was a time when police didn't use tasers, and
I wanted to know how I had become so popular
with cops. So I went to meet a former police
officer who was the very first in the country to
arm his department with tasers.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
Yeah, people have this idea, ye know. Oh wow, that'd
be a police officer, you know, how exciting or how
dangerous or whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Greg Meyer is retired now, but he was a cop
with the Los Angeles Police Department back in the seventies.
Speaker 6 (09:25):
I always say, well, it's a fun job, but somebody
has to do it.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
I was honestly scared to call him at first. Everything
I knew about the LAPD came from TV police chases
and movies like Training Day. I was twenty three and
reporting on small town cops in mid Missouri. I wasn't
sure a retired captain from the LAPD would want to
give some kid journalist a history lesson how'd you guys
kind of get started getting getting tisgered on the street
(09:51):
from there. But Captain Meyer loves history.
Speaker 6 (09:54):
LAPD had looked at the taser three or four years.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Greg told me the story of how why he brought
tasers to the LAPD like he was my grandpa telling
me about the war.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
So in January third of nineteen seventy nine, in South
Los Angeles there was a very tragic police shooting.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
A widowed mom named Ula Love was killed by police.
It was all over the news.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
On Focus tonight.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Police brutality a topic of intense national interest nowadays because
last January a black woman named Ula Love was shot
by two policemen.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
She threatened the officers with a knife.
Speaker 8 (10:29):
They fired twelve times and killed her.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Ula Love hadn't paid her gas bill, and when the
collector came, she threatened him with a shovel. When he
called the cops, Ula Love threatened them with a knife.
They could have subdued this lady without using the weapons
that they used. They could have took her alive plant simple.
(10:57):
Even the mayor made a statement.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
There is a WHI I'd spread feeling which I share
that the shooting might have been avoided.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
That Ula Love shooting put the city of Los Angeles
on edge and set the LAPD on a mission.
Speaker 6 (11:16):
The boss has decided, we got to find a better way,
and that's how I ended up with the Non Lethal
Weapons Project.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
The department started looking for a non lethal weapon that
could stop a shooting before it happened.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
I had no idea that was going to become my
life's work. I actually wrote an article forty years ago
or so, the title of which was Tasers, tear gas, whips,
poles and chains your non lethal weapons Alternatives. And that
came about because I was given carte blanche, look at
everything that we could that's out there.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Greg told me the LAPD actually sent out a survey
to the fifty biggest police departments in the US. They
were asking, how do you stop someone with hurting them?
Speaker 6 (12:01):
What do you guys use besides you know, the baton
and the handgun and the SAP and the handcuffs to
subdue people.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
But cops everywhere were kind of in the same boat.
Everything they could use was pretty brutal. Like if you
don't know what a SAP is, it's basically a leather
club with a lead ball at the end of it.
It can cause a ripping laceration to the face. Sounds
like something from Bravehearder Game of Thrones. Greg told me
(12:32):
he was so stuck he even ran ads in the newspaper.
Speaker 6 (12:36):
And so people would write us letters. Doctors would write
us letters. People make phone calls to the office making
the suggestion, and.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
When they say there's no bad ideas in a brainstorm.
Speaker 6 (12:49):
Whips, poles and chains. I'm not kidding. We actually had
a guy in Australia say that we should use bull
whips on people because that's what they use. And it's
like what several people, including some doctors wrote in that
we should try tranquilizer guns, like they tranquilize animals with
little drug cocktails. So I actually spent a day out
(13:12):
at the Los Angeles Zoo with the head veterinarian at
the zoo. Okay cool, except what he told me was, yeah,
the media never seems to find out the animal would
die half the time. So we kind of blew by that.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
One doesn't scream LAPD a more humane way of policing.
But Greg didn't give up. He looked into a metal
chain hooked up to a seven foot shoust. Honestly, I
can't believe he looked into that one. It has chain
in the name, Greg, it.
Speaker 6 (13:44):
Was called an action control chain, and you would try
to wrap the person up with that and then knock
them down with a big long, six or seven foot
baton and then get them handcuffed. And it's like, yeah, okay,
we didn't have a lot of luck with that.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
And then he considered they're a giant fishing net.
Speaker 6 (14:03):
Now the guy's all wrapped up, and then they get
him into the station and behind closed doors, get the
net off, and then the fight would be on.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
There was pepper spray, but even the environmentalists got in
the way.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
The state of California did not allow pepper spray. It
was banned. The state Department of Health Services said, no,
we don't want the pepper spray. We're not sure what
effect it would have on the ozone layer. So we're
out there kicking people with combat boots and beating them
with metal pipes and we can't use pepper spray because
(14:37):
they're worried about the ozone layer. It was nuts.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
And then Greg found this news clip about a former
NASA scientist working on some kind of electric gun. This
wasn't Rick Smith, it was before his time. The guy
in the clip was named Jack Kover got.
Speaker 8 (14:56):
Her a new space age weapon that stuns but does
not kill.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
I picked up the phone and I called Jack Kover,
who was the taser inventor. His little factory was here
in southern California, in the city of Industry, and I
went out there and met him. Jack was a very
impressive guy. Jack had been a World War two airplane
test pilot, okay, and he was part of the Apollo
(15:25):
moon landing program.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Jack explained the concept to Greg.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
I remember he asked me. He said, Greg, did you
ever work on a car? Did you ever do it
tune up on a car? And did you ever like
you know, did you ever touch the distributor cap and
get a short circuit through your body? And I go, yeah,
that happened. That happened once, he says, But it didn't
kill you, right, No, but it really startled you, right
(15:51):
And I go, well, yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Jack showed Greg a prototype and he was sold. Soon
the laped had a few hundred tasers. The concept of
the taser was so good, but they weren't reliable. They
were shaped like a flashlight, hard to hold and hard
to aim. Plus they were big and bulky. Some cops
had to keep them in the trunks of their squad cars.
(16:16):
But the biggest problem was that a lot of times
they just didn't have enough power to stop an assailant,
which of course made the news.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Officers trying to take a man into custody, they used
a taser.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
The tasers should have dropped him.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Long enough for the officers to take control.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
It didn't stun guns to tasers.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
They can be effective, but have never been totally reliable
against focused, combative attackers.
Speaker 6 (16:43):
It just wasn't ready for prime time.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Then the taser was featured in primetime in March of
nineteen ninety one. The world watched as three LAPD officers
beat Rodney King. While many people were appalled to see
police nearly beat a black man to death, lots of
cops noticed something else too. The LAPD had tried to
fire the taser twice before the brutality began, two taser
(17:13):
shots that failed to keep King on the ground before
the other officers could put him in handcuffs. Greg moved
on from tasers, The weapons stayed on the fringe of
law enforcement until a bright young man from Scottsdale, Arizona,
had an idea. At the same time as Rodney King
(17:41):
was in the news. Rick Smith, the guy who had
changed tasers forever, had just graduated from Harvard. He was
getting his MBA, and he'd grown up watching his dad
try out business after business. Rick told the story to
my colleague Matt Stroud a few years ago.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
He started a restaurant at one point failed bottom batical
distribution business fail.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Finally Rick's dad got in on the ground floor of
a Silicon Valley startup and made millions.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
And you know, it was pretty cool, Like dad went
from struggling and then they's buying a Ferrari.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Rick says he made up his mind that by the
time he finished business school, he wanted to start his
own company. He just didn't know what kind yet. And
then he heard some news from back home in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Two guys he knew from playing high school football, Todd
and Corey, had gone speeding down Scottsdale Road in a
white Chevy Camaro and cut off a guy driving a
(18:32):
Honda a Cord.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
They don't go to a party on a Friday or
Saturday night, and this guy follows him and they probably
got out of their car. There's yelling, there's tempers. This
other guy sees two big guys. He takes a guy
out in the glovebox, and he ends up shooting and
killing them both.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Todd and Corey's death changed Rick's life. Rick was ambitious.
He didn't want to leave school and just get a job.
He wanted to do something big, and this shooting started
making him think about the scale of gun violence in
the US. How many thousands of people are killed by
guns every year. He wanted to do something about it.
(19:13):
Rick had heard of a taser. He'd seen it in
movies like The Enforcer, and he was a Star Trek fan.
Captain Kirk didn't have a gun. He had a phaser,
a weapon that stuns but doesn't kill. Rick didn't understand
why wasn't the taser already a smashing success.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
I'm convinced there will come a day with the idea
of blowing holes in people is going to seem horrific
and outdated. I think, yes, Pa, we can take some
inspiration from science fiction. Right, How bizarre were to look
at Captain Kirk whipped out a glock and blew a
hole in a Clayton Right.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Rick says, he saw the patent for the taser was
owned by a guy named Jack Kover, and Rick wanted in.
He convinced his dad to put up some money, and
he took his parents' camper two hours south of childhood
home to park it in Jack's driveway. They were kind
of an odd couple. Rick was the young and ambitious businessman,
Jack was the crotchety old scientist ready to give the
(20:10):
taser one last try. They bought parts at the local
hardware store and got to work in Jack's garage. Within
a few months, they had built a new prototype, the
air Taser thirty four thousand. They marketed it to civilians
who wanted to protect themselves, not police. They went on
sale in the Sharper Image catalog in nineteen ninety four.
(20:33):
It was a disaster. Rick thought that regular people would
(20:57):
jump at the chance to buy tasers for their self defense.
But what he didn't really consider was that most people
bought guns because they liked guns. They know what they
are and how to use them. They didn't like tasers.
I'm three years in. Rick was running out of cash.
By then, Jack Kober was gone. Rick was on his own.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
Millions of dollars went into this basically wiping out my dad.
My mom at that point was super upset with us
because she was watching the nest egg Windel.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Rick told another journalist that his mom was so upset
she didn't even go to his wedding. He was scared.
He would stay up late filling orders himself, drinking beer
and wondering if everything he had put into this dream
was even worth it.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
By now, I to be honest, I was on my
friends from Harvard. We're doing these startups up in Silicon Valley.
They were at these companies with goofy names like Yahoo,
and at this point I just sort of frank job
wanted out. But we had no choice.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
As Rick tells it, his dad had signed over everything
he had to get the bank loans Rick needed. If
Rick couldn't pay him back, the family would lose everything.
Rick thought hard about his company. He still believed in
the mission to replace guns and by doing so, save lives.
(22:23):
He just needed customers, and if the sharper image crowd
wasn't buying, maybe police would. So he called the first
cop to ever give tasers a shop, Greg Meyer, from
the lapd. Rick invited him to dinner at Musso and
Frank's big red booths, white tablecloths, big steaks, A century
(22:43):
of Hollywood power brokers making deals.
Speaker 6 (22:46):
Musso and Frank is more than one hundred years old.
Now it's a Hollywood hangout restaurant. All the stars would
hang out there and all that.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Greg talked about all the ways the taser needed to
be better, and.
Speaker 6 (22:58):
What law enforcement need, and what the strengths and weaknesses are.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Shape it like a handgun to make it easier for
cops to point and shoot. Make it smaller. All these
tasers were way too big. But most importantly, make sure
it worked every time.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
And we had a wonderful dinner, and I wished them
well in their venture.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Rick heard Greg loud and clear. He knew how important
it was for the taser to be reliable. He'd seen
his taser fail before a couple of years earlier. In
nineteen ninety eight, Rick had taken the airtaser to a
police convention and he was giving a presentation to a
couple hundred cops when he asked if anyone would like
to volunteer to take a hit from the air taser.
(23:45):
He thought he'd fire it. The volunteer would drop to
the ground and everyone would get a laugh. But you
know that old saying, don't ask a question you don't
already know the answer to. A man named Hans Morrero
raised his hand a volunteer.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
I shoot him and literally doesn't plage.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Rick shot Hans with the taser, but he didn't go down. Instead,
he told Rick that the taser shock was making him uncomfortable,
which is, you know, not what you want to happen
when you're demonstrating a new weapon that's supposed to incapacitate
an attacker, and.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
The whole audience roaring with laughter.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Everyone was laughing for the wrong reason. Later that night,
Rick Smith was down in the hotel bar, head down
and embarrassed. Hans found Rick and they started chatting.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
And I asked, you know, so I started asking in
questions and he starts explaining to me. He's as well,
yeah we know, sir, I've studying marcial arts at the
He's two years old.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
He's like a karate kid meets the terminator.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
So he tells me about this and I said, hey, look,
we're we're working on a new system.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
I think you are the ultimate test.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Rick and a small engineering team launched Project Stealth. It
was an all out effort to build a taser strong
enough to take down anyone, even Hans, a former chief
instructor of hand to hand combat for the Marines. A
year later, Rick was holding a new mup, the Advanced
Taser M twenty six. It was smaller, lighter, and easy
(25:19):
to use because it was shaped like a handgun. But
the biggest breakthrough was that it was more powerful. Who
was almost four times stronger than the airtaser twenty six
watts instead of seven. Rick flew Hans out to a
warehouse in Arizona to test the new taser on him.
He brought a video crew with him to film the
whole thing. The video starts.
Speaker 8 (25:45):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
White text pops up on the black screen. It says
non lethal weapons cannot stop a focused, motivated attacker until
now the challenge Hans versus the Advanced Taser M twenty six.
Hans comes onto the screen, fists up standing on a
boxing mat. He's wearing white shorts, socks and sneakers and
(26:10):
nothing else. His muscles are on full display, like twelve
pack apps buys bigger than an NFL running back, huge
biceps in chest. The background is all black. He takes
a deep breath and gets in a fighting stance. He's
gonna go try to grab a gun on the ground
(26:30):
five feet in front of him. Every time I watch,
I kind of think he'll get it, but of course
he never gets the gun. The taser shoots electricity through
his body. Hans drops to the floor. Rick sent that
(26:54):
video to police departments around the country. It was like
the trailer for a summer blockbuster, and Hans was the star.
That video of Hans gave officers proof proof that the
taser was a weapon they could rely on and that
it wouldn't fail. Rick actually hired Hans to teach other
cops how to use the taser and lead a brilliant
(27:14):
grassroots marketing campaign. They started visiting police departments across the country.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
Our sales pitch was really easy.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
We would go around the police departments and we'd say, hey,
who's your biggest, topest guy.
Speaker 8 (27:27):
Bring you in.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
Okay, Spinky could beat this. Here's a one hundred bucks.
We pin them with the taser to boom down. They
would go.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Greg Meyer from the LAPD finally found that non lethal
weapon he'd been looking for, and as he remembers it.
Speaker 6 (27:48):
It is a big hit. The public would come out
and see the police action. They were used to seeing
the police get in a big fight with these guys.
Now you've got the police stand in ten or twelve
feet away and launching these electric probes at the guys.
And what was also beautiful. When you have a naked
(28:09):
PCP suspect, they're usually all sweaty, And guess what, sweat
is a great electrical conductor. The salty sweat on your
body is a great and so it would make this
fascinating blue and purple light show on the person's body
while they're being taken down. So the public's standing there
(28:29):
on the corner clapping and cheering when the officers would
take these guys down with a taser, and nobody's getting
beat up, nobody's getting hurt. So it was like revolutionary.
Speaker 8 (28:40):
If your local police officers are not get armed with tasers,
chances are they will be soon.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Across the country, cops call this taser the revolution.
Speaker 8 (28:49):
These stun guns are growing in popularity as a way
to stop violent suspects without killing them.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
The taser was doing everything that Rick Smith promised. It
was back in the national news, and this time for
a good reason.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Last year in Phoenix. Gun shootings by police went down
by half and fatal shootings dropped by a third. Thanks
to its reputation, there's a twelve week backlog in demand.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Thousands of police departments started buying the weapon. Rick took
Taser International public in May of two thousand and one
and raised about eight million dollars. Three years later, the
company was worth one point nine billion. The money was nice,
but for Rick it was always about the mission.
Speaker 4 (29:37):
I remember why nottuly Ki up to me to tell
me a story about a thirteen year old girl that
was suicidal and was rightening to kill herself and then
slash her own risks. The officers are called to the
scene and she charges at them with a knife and
she screaming, killed me or something that's effect.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
They'd taste her. They dropped her, and.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
The officer said, I can tell you Rick one center.
We didn't know her device. Would he killed her an
exciting We didn't get in this business to kill thirteen
year old girl.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Stories like that one aren't science fiction. There really is
someone who is alive today because she wasn't shot with
a gun when she was thirteen, alive because of Rick's weapon.
The company studied the impact of the Taser and found
they were saving roughly fifty people's lives a day. I
left Taser's sci fi headquarters in Arizona with my own
(30:24):
mission to know everything I could about the Taser and
Rick Smith. Rick's whole thing is that he's working to
make the impossible possible, and as I'm reading about him,
he constantly references Star Trek and the show's technology as
his inspiration phasers that don't kill people. If the headquarters
(30:49):
is his star Fleet ship, he's Taser's Captain Kirk. So
I started reading more about Captain Kirk, and what's interesting
to me is how he got a start. There's a
simulation that's part of his training. It's a test. Kirk
has to make a choice save a ship of innocent
people from certain death and kill his own crew in
(31:10):
the process, or save his crew and let the civilians die.
There's no right choice. In the show, the whole point
of the test is to teach leaders about no win situations,
but Kirk doesn't believe in no win situations. He realizes
the game is rigged, so he decides to rewrite the rules.
(31:33):
He secretly reprograms the game so he can save the
ship and his crew. He becomes a captain, even though
technically he cheated. That's what Rick says he's doing, creating
technology to prevent lethal situations for cops and the people
they serve. But then I began to wonder if Captain
(31:54):
Kirk cheated, did Rick Smith cheat too? This season on
Taser Incorporated.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
Look, I've been hit with this thing seven times. Every
senior employeet this company has been hit with a taser.
Many of our wives, many of our children have been
hit with tasers. So we believe this is the safest
way to get a violent person under control.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
That's huge.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
We're very proud of what we do, and it is
like a religion to us.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
At the end of the day, if you have to
put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody,
why risk that you can just shoot them on the taser.
So it became more of a compliance tool, in an
everyday compliance tool where hey, put your hands behind your back,
fuck you, okay, watch this, you know, And it was,
you know, a taser deployment, and that was how we
(32:49):
were trained.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
I get right back there, and it's bad, It's really, really,
really bad.
Speaker 5 (32:57):
And I'm just like, why don't cops know any of
this stuff? Like, if you knew this, you wouldn't use
this thing.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
They said, We've now warned you, and if you do this,
guess what it's on you. Absolute Taser Incorporated is a
(33:25):
production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company
Number One. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,
and threads at Lava for Good. Follow me at Nick
Beredini on Instagram and Twitter. Taser Incorporated is written and
produced by me Nick Beredini. Our executive producers are Jason Flamm,
Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wordis. Kara Kornhaber is our senior producer.
(33:49):
Jackie Paul is our producer. Hannah Biel is our writer
and producer. Joe Plored is our sound designer. Music composed
and produced by Alexis Quadrado at The plot Azza Rojas Studio.
Marianne McCune is our editor, fact checking by Danya Suliman.
Jeff Cliburn is our head of marketing and operations. Our
social media director is is Marie Guarda Rama, our social
(34:13):
media manager is Sarah Gibbons, and our art director is
Andrew Nelson additional reporting by Matt Strapp,
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