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Speaker 1: Hi, It's Jason and I'm excited to tell you about a new show from Lava for Good. It's called Absolute Taser Incorporated with filmmaker Nick Baradini. Now, Taser Incorporated comes from the same team that worked with Gilbert King on Bone Valley, and just like Bone Valley, this podcast is a riveting listen that will open your eyes and tugg it your heart. We've all seen that taser carried by cops, seen it in the news, even in movies, but have you ever wondered how they became so ubiquitous? Nick Baradini and Laba for Good are taking a deep dive into Taser inc. Now known as Axon, the eight hundred pound gorilla in the paramilitary police equipment industry. Their story is one of ambition, hubris, and technology overtaking the very people it was meant to serve. Look for Absolute Taser Incorporated wherever you hear this and check out this clip from episode one way ride. Where you are, We'll throw you a gun.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: Gun violence is surging across the US so far.

00:01:19
Speaker 3: There is a sod share with a gun.

00:01:25
Speaker 2: 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.

00:01:46
Speaker 3: The whole reason we started this company is we don't get people stop killing each other.

00:01:51
Speaker 2: And in order to do that, he was going to make it happen with an invention.

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Speaker 3: 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.

00:02:13
Speaker 2: 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. 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 were really doing it. I was inside this world. I could see what this means technology could be capable of, and I wanted Rick's dream to be real. This is absolute Season one Taser Incorporated a story about unchecked power. I'm Nick Bendini, Episode one, Whips, Poles and Chains. I know 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 life is in danger, shoot.

00:04:33
Speaker 4: 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 of street. I think the kid just didn't even like realize that the cops were there. So as he's running, he kind of like turned like oh shit kind of thing. The gun was pointed at me, and at that point I just reacted. I mean, he was isn'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. Shots fired, you know, also involved shooting whatever.

00:05:19
Speaker 2: Whatever. I said, it wasn't until you rolled him over that you realized how young he was, right, Yeah, yeah, No, what did he look like?

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Speaker 4: He looked like he looked like he was a fourteen fifteen year old kid.

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Speaker 2: You know what did that feel like?

00:05:33
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:05:34
Speaker 2: It bothered me.

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Speaker 4: You know, I remember the kid looking up at me and he's like, you shot me.

00:05:42
Speaker 2: 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.

00:05:59
Speaker 4: 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 me a little bit, like knowing that I didn't have to shoot him.

00:06:30
Speaker 3: 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.

00:06:44
Speaker 2: 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 attack to electrified copper wires, so when they shoot out and puncture your skin, the current makes your muscles lock up. You can't move, but when it's over, you can get right back up.

00:07:12
Speaker 3: 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.

00:07:24
Speaker 2: 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.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: Taser's saving lives. That's the business that we're in. We're protecting the truth and we're protecting lives.

00:07:39
Speaker 2: 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 office. They're Matt Masters. I was answering questions 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, 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 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.

00:08:56
Speaker 3: A fucking just get out out right now, out of the car, out of the car.

00:09:04
Speaker 4: Taylor appointment on the ground, out of the car, on the ground, on the ground.

00:09:19
Speaker 5: The Taser changed everything for cops, changed everything for math too.

00:09:28
Speaker 1: Listen to the rest of Absolute Taser Incorporated, Season one on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.