Future of Progress w/ Rick Smith, CEO of TASER

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE WITH RICK BELOW

A pioneer of technology with the vision of making the bullet obsolete, Rick founded the original company, TASER, in 1993. As the TASER device became ubiquitous in law enforcement, Rick pushed the company beyond weapons technology and towards a broader purpose of matching technology to public safety needs in order to make the world a safer place. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a garage in Tucson to a NASDAQ-listed global market leader in conducted electrical weapons, body-worn cameras and software. Rick was winner of the Ernst and Young 2002 Entrepreneur of the Year. Rick graduated from Harvard with a B.S. in Neuroscience (Cum Laude) and later earned a Master in International Finance from the University of Leuven in Belgium and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The gun is antiquated technology, and it is responsible for tens of thousands of senseless killings every year. Humanity has accepted that killing is an unavoidable fact of life―but Rick Smith argues that it doesn’t need to be this way and that we have the means to make the bullet obsolete in our lifetime.

Smith is the founder of TASER (now Axon), and in his new book, he demonstrates that we are on the cusp of a world in which killing is neither required nor acceptable. That change won't come by way of stricter gun control laws. No, what holds us back from making an overdue and necessary shift in how we think about weapons is our skepticism about new technologies and their potential.

Smith has devoted his career to understanding why and how we kill each other. In The End of Killing, he reviews the history of weaponry and warfare as well as the latest technologies in crowd control, surveillance, and artificial intelligence. He delves into the big, thorny questions about how technology is creating more tools for police, homeland security, and military, and offering more options for our personal safety and our justice system. With clarity and conviction, he challenges the conventional wisdom on these subjects, showing how technologies that appear strange and scary at first can be the key to making the gun a relic of the past.

In our current impasse of dead-end debates about gun violence and police brutality, Smith offers us a clear roadmap into a safer future. Thought-provoking, insightful, and controversial, The End of Killing will make you reconsider the violent world you inhabit―and imagine the safer world on the horizon.

- https://www.axon.com

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