#48 - Daniel Francis, Founder & CEO of Abel Police

0:00How do you ask a cop, can I just get in the passenger side and drive around with you? Just go up to any cop you see in the street and just ask them.

0:10I'm just kidding. Don't do that. This is Daniel Francis. He is the founder and CEO of Able Police. Daniel, what do you say about the allegations? What allegations? Next question. Backpacks? Love them. What about them? Backpacks, honestly, are all you need to travel. Not a lot of people realize this, but most people could easily travel with just a backpack. I spent two months in Japan with a 13 liter backpack. But really to unlock the power of the backpack, of course, you need merino wool. Merino wool? Yeah, merino wool. Because merino does not smell. It's amazing. You can wear merino for weeks and it won't smell.

0:55Have you done that? Of course. That's disgusting. Doing it right now. That's really gross. that's fine um are you here to interview me about merino kind of kind of it's a good podcast yeah yeah um merino is an amazing fabric it's miraculous really and um the only problem is it's expensive uh so people who get uh 30 views per episode on their podcast probably can't afford it probably not probably not is that is that why you have a sheep uh no i have a sheep because uh there's actually two reasons for the sheep uh one there's like a meme in police culture uh that police are sheep dogs they're like watching out for the herd and so there's that aspect and then the second one is of course abel sacrifices sheep to god uh which please god don't laugh it's the bible it's based i think right tell me if i'm wrong it's based there we go but you gotta be Yeah, I handle it a little bit more reverence.

1:55All right. It's based. You've done a number of things where the best way I can describe them are extremely stressful situations that very few people find themselves in. Yes. What about you is attracted to those types of situations?

2:13Have you ever heard the saying, we didn't do it because it's easy? We did it because we thought it would be easy. That's what I do. Yes, that's it. But I guess I choose cooler things than a podcast. Tell me about the most stressful situation outside of Elon, the most stressful situation that you've ever been in. I was in a police chase and we hit 130 miles an hour on the highway. But even crazier than that is we hit 50 miles an hour in the Oakland Hills. And if you've ever been in the Oakland Hills, that's wild because that was those are very narrow, scary roads. So but yeah, it was great. it was so much fun wasn't that like an hour and a half too or was it like 47 minutes yeah when you find yourself in that situation what are you thinking uh no i was just pumped i was having the best day that was the best day of my life yeah i waited for that for so long that was that was awesome um so yeah i guess i was just thinking i'm very happy to be alive right now what do you think the other guy was thinking the guy who's running yeah uh apparently he was thinking how do i ditch this firearm which he then did in someone's front yard and we saw it and they went and got it incredible amazing yeah yeah turns out you can't have a nine millimeter uh on you when you're on parole so that's why he ran are guns even legal in california guns aren't legal weirdly enough but a lot of times they talk like cops talk about them like they're illegal because there's a pretty narrow scope in which you can be driving around with a firearm in your car in california what was the guy on parole for uh i have no idea but he was on parole that's why he ran and then how do you ask a cop can i just get in the you know passenger side and drive around with you you just go up to any cop you see in the street and just ask him i'm just kidding don't do that uh no you go to the station they have a station they go back to and there's like people there that do paperwork so you have to fill out a form and then they do some research to make sure that you uh you know don't kill cops for fun and stuff like that or that you've never been to prison you haven't recently escaped from prison that kind of thing and how long does that process take no two days two days yeah and then you're in the car with someone and then they tell you yeah schedule it i mean obviously it's different everywhere but one of my number one piece of advice is definitely go on a ride along it's so much fun oh it's so good okay what's the best thing about it uh okay first off it's free all right that's great free ride yeah free ride uh second off um cop policing is way different than people think like in what ways um so policing is kind of like first off it's a service job like people think it's more like the military the best type uh my favorite type of cop like my favorite prototype of a police officer former bartender what yeah why does that make the best because because policing is a service job uh and but if you're a bartender you you have that right combination of like service but also like not you might be able to throw the guy out yeah yeah like like and you can definitely talk shit right which is an important thing for a police officer to be What's the worst type of police officer?

5:35The worst type of police officer? Honestly, lazy cops. Damn. Yeah. Cops can be lazy. Yeah. How often? Sometimes. Sometimes? Sometimes you see lazy cops. A lot of times, I mean, it depends on how the local agency is, but it's like once you're a lazy cop, then you are putting a lot of weight on your fellow officers. And so even the union will kind of stand back and like let you get fired if you're like persistently lazy. You've been on 30, I think, ride alongs at this point. Is it more? 32. 32. What was the next one that was the most exciting? I saw a guy got hit by a train. What? Yeah. It was horrifying.

6:20It was really bad. You shouldn't laugh. Yeah, the guy got hit by a train. It was like a ball of flesh. wow because like the skin kind of ripped off and was like you saw him yeah and you couldn't like really tell what part of his body you were looking at like you suppose it's his leg because that's the biggest part of someone's body but i don't know maybe he's fat i'm looking at that i don't know it was really gross that was bad and like after after that experience you could like go home that night like what are you are you a little bit shell-shocked was in a great mood no yeah i i'd seen dead bodies before honestly the worst is when uh people have been dead for a few days like a lot of times that happens where it's like you know do a welfare check we haven't heard from you know you know uh grandpa frank or whatever in a while and then you go up and he's been laying in bed and then it's like got this like the house will get this like kind of sickly sweet it's like yeah the fact that it's kind of sweet makes it really gross that is disgusting part of your mind is like yes yes because it's sweet you know all right what part of your mind for a second you're like wait so you go into some dead person's home and you think isn't it weird it's kind of sweet and you thought that was weird a second ago because it is weird it is weird okay to be clear i don't know if i would be like nice it's it's a little nice smelling that's the messed up thing about it all right based it uh it reminds me actually the first time i got to the first time i went to china i i got there at like 1 a.m and nothing was open but i was like i want to have a drink you know i'm so excited you know and so and i was alone so i was just like okay i just went down to like the convenience store and i just bought the nicest looking bottle they had it was so ornate and i got back to my little airbnb and i poured myself like a glass of it or like a shot and i drank it and i thought that i had accidentally uh purchased and consumed cologne like it was like so sweet it was so disgusting it's this like liquor that they drink in china that's so offensively sweet it's like overpowering and it's like why do they drink it i don't know man i don't know i got used to it after a while um you didn't you thought it tasted horrible and you did it again uh that one i didn't drink but i ended up going to a friend's uh family for um chinese new year okay and the dad and the uncles all drank like every single meal like insane amounts i met this friend in china this is a china story i met this friend in china and i was explaining uh alcoholism and uh he's like i know what that is no no he did it like i was like explaining it and uh i was uh i was like yeah because some people in my family are alcoholics i'm like yeah they just drink too much they drink way too much and it like really damages their lives and their personal relationships and the family will get estranged all these things he was like i don't think we have anything like that in china like i never heard of that yeah it's like how amazing how amazing yeah it was like what nation of supermen that they don't have this and then i figured out everybody every male in china is an alcoholic that's just standard like i regularly see them putting it in their coffee and stuff like it was like everywhere i'm pretty sure that the like biggest i don't know if it's the biggest company in china but like one of the top companies just makes one beverage and it's like i think it's like mao tai or something yeah it's like the alcohol that's the kind of alcohol it's byju is yeah i'm altize the brand but byju is the kind of liquor yeah and apparently it's just like on every table and deals and like all sorts it's just everywhere there's no way you have one no way no is this the stuff that's the stuff oh goodness i know right it almost smells like sake it it's much this is what it this is what it looks like this is what a body that has been decomposing in a house for seven days goodness smells like and you like that smell wait so you like the smell but you don't like it was weird that it was sweet right you know it's just like it's very confusing when you walk in and you're like this is a place of death and then you're like kind of like a cologne but like a good one not a good one not a good one what makes that tea so special uh that tea is pu-erh tea it's fermented in this particular brick of pure tea it's fermented for 30 years have you done a little bit of research on that fermentation process what that looks like no not at all nothing to say you just like to say that it's been fermented for 30 years i mean it's just like stored in a warehouse for 30 years it just interview over that's fucking over guys all right so you talked about police conferences and apparently those are just not the way to spend the money no police conferences are the best uh so why are police conferences the best way to spend you can't break in otherwise right like they don't know who you are and if you literally when i started this i was like going around um east bay the little flyer that my girlfriend made and i was like here's my little startup can you you do you want me to do your reports for you yeah i'll do ai reports for you and they're like i don't think that's legal kid like get out of here and uh it really took like an act of god it was miraculous that i got into my first agency um but other than that it's like you need to actually go and like where are the cops like where's command staff meet they meet at state conferences so um cal chiefs california chiefs of police who was the first person that just like opened the door to the first police station for you um it was richmond california it was actually so i ended up talking to um he was san pablo which is a smaller city next to richmond and they were like hey we can't do this but you should talk to this guy at richmond and he's a captain there eric smith and it's basically like chief assistant chief captains then lieutenant sergeant officer so he's like pretty high up in the chain but i talked to this like i came in and i had like my i'd made a fake body camera video by the way you should probably explain what my company does you can do that okay go for it he'll explain what the hell we take body cam footage from police and we turn it into police reports for them because the police spend one third of their time writing reports so used to used to boom it's changing so uh i came in ai changing the world everything's changing ai in the title so people know to click ai is the future oh i'm sure you will um but uh yeah so i came in with a demo i had taken uh my phone and held it to my chest and uh warned my friend for littering in this fake body cam video i made and then i built like a demo model stack that could like interpret this and then start filling out a police report and i came in and i showed it to this captain eric smith at richmond and i like the like he sat there and watched the whole thing and he watched the whole thing fill out and the video ends and he just sits there in silence staring at the screen and he said that was bitching that was bitching that's good he said you got to do that here i was like yes brother i will do that here not letting on that i'd just been rejected by like 10 agencies i was like all right i'll think about it you know you're in the running you're in the right immediately i was like yes i definitely will do it here richmond was great and then he brought it to uh the chief visa visa french and um and she loved it and i was like hell yeah like immediately it was really amazing because at the time uh nobody it was nobody thought that was legal like everyone was like i don't know what to do with that you're not allowed to put use ai to like transcribe what's happening to generate a report that's legal yeah it seemed very uh because an officer's report is like something he swears to and so like if officers are like just getting these reports generated for them it seems like to a of older cops especially like it was what command staff tends to be right like it said it sounds really fishy right when you get up on the stand uh as an officer and you have to testify and the defense asks you did you write this report right and like well kinda ai kinda but the thing is uh richmond is not richmond was more recent than most in having transcription for having scribes that you call in reports so it used to be a long time ago cops would go find like a payphone and then call in a report and they would there would be like the records gals back at the headquarters and they would do the write-up yeah and they would write it up for them and then they would come in and at the end it would say you know this was transcribed by you know jhl or whatever their initials are and then the cop would sign off on it read it over and sign up and so when eric smith all this he was like yeah that's like literally what we used to do before they cut our budget and they had to fire all the records people and so now cops have to write their own reports but it's like that seems unnecessary right like it's literally the same thing and so yeah and then a few months after i started uh axon announced they were doing draft one and axon is a really really big company publicly traded worth like 60 billion dollars and axon said they're going to do the same thing wow yeah did that kind of open up the doors for a lot of different police departments to kind of say we're adopting this technology yeah so it was weird when i was doing it but then axon says it it's normal kind of unfair that does suck but no it was great axon made it normal and then axon did a really terrible job at it just so they announced this is the future and yeah and then literally it's their crappy transcriptions which are fine for uh like like in custody like interviews or like you know in station interview room cold room interviews uh but it's terrible out in the street where people are arguing over each other and drunk and there's road noise and all this stuff like it's like very difficult to get good transcriptions in that environment uh difficult for other people not for us uh and so they have bad transcriptions and then they just shove it through chat gpt it's like so lazy that's not how you do it oh no there's so many layers it's very sophisticated oh dude there's so many layers i know well the thing is like i said i didn't do this because it's easy all right i did this because i thought it would be easy turns out it's very difficult but we got it how did you get in touch with the first one the first you know the first time that rejected you how did you get first driving around handing out little flyers literally two cops yeah i would go to the station and be like do you have like a captain i can talk to what was their response just no they would look at it and they would be like like it's like totally so out of left field and i'm just some random like guy you know and And basically what the deal is, is like, I want all of your body cam videos, which is not something that's public record.

17:28No. You see body cam video on like YouTube and stuff, that stuff's redacted. They put a huge effort into redacting it, right? Like it's very costly to redact that. I need all the unredacted body cam video. And I would also like to see all your police reports unredacted as well so that I can learn how to write them. and they were like yeah i don't think that's gonna happen so when you got that first you know police station to sign on that was like a huge win oh that was like life-changing honestly i mean that's what take it from that's what took it from like a weird project to like oh okay like this is actually a thing and then that helped me raise money was there ever kind of like a situation where you're after the like fifth rejection and you've gone talk to five different police stations or whatever and they're like this is definitely we're never going to adopt this were you kind of like maybe they won't actually adopt it no it seemed inevitable because i figured what was going to happen is that um police would start using chat gpt in the field and there's something called sieges and i knew sieges was really important sieges is like sock two for policing it's the criminal justice information security services yes it's the protection of criminal justice information cji and um chat gpt is not cgis cgis is a really it's like soc 2 for policing it's very niche um vanta does not have a cgis product like becoming cgis was a massive headache because i had to do it like we had to figure it out ourselves basically yeah um and so i knew that that was going to be a problem so i was like ai is going to come for everything and it's going to come for really specific workloads and um it's going to be really poorly handled by general tools but if you can have a very specific tool and you at least for a long time will have the sieges mode like open ai is not going to go become sieges it's just it's too niche yeah i mean it's just not worth their time yeah but also isn't open ai or most of the chats just public so if you do actually start like feeding it is it different through the api uh so they have the weights and So AWS GupCloud has waits for Anthropic.

19:44Okay. And then Azure Government Cloud has the OpenAI waits. Interesting. And those are clean room CIGIS environments. Yeah. But it's not really accessible to a consumer. And to put it in perspective, so I think you said that roughly like one third of the cop's time was spent writing reports. and i mean i don't know exactly what the numbers are for sfpd but that's something north of like 150 plus thousand dollars per officer per year which means that probably like 50k per officer is spent on just writing reports yeah and like how many officers does sfpd have yeah 1600 so 1600 times 50 000 that's like not a small number it's a very large number yeah that's like more than a billion dollars in reports yeah it's uh for one police department spending a lot of money reports insane yeah isn't is policing like super fragmented there's just a bunch of random extremely fragmented uh there's 18 000 police agencies in the u.s 18 000 yeah wow it's a lot are they all using like different software and stuff uh many of them are awesome which is really convenient for us it's not it's a pain in the ass yeah do you just like chewing glass uh yeah i mean uh well to me it's like every every hardship is an opportunity right so it's like yeah we um what do we have to be really good at you know we have to be really good at api design and building around other people's apis right we have to be really good at uh having scalable systems engineering right like these are things that like we are very strong at and and it's not like minor to do that well for ai because a lot of those playbooks aren't written yet um and so like having really gpu intensive uh workloads that we have to do in a scalable way um we figured a lot of that out when you're thinking about some like stunt or going on a cop car trace or whatever um how do you kind of go in your mind really the biggest problem with life is that it's boring you ever seen that uh you've seen that uh when that clip from the sopranos when christopher moltesanti is talking and he's just like it's just the regular list regularness of life is i can't take it right i feel the same way i feel like um and it's funny because i come from a family of like alcoholics like in that show he's an addict right and i but i think that's what makes people act like that it's just like the regularness of life is just so mundane unbearable yeah and so yeah i would love i mean sometimes i get mad in here is drive out to richmond and go on a ride along like i i gotta go do something right like i gotta go i can't can't do another day of this can't do another day of a 17 viewer podcast you know what's been the craziest thing you've done outside of riding ride-alongs?

22:34I guess when I went to China so I saw do you know I know you're like 14 years old but there used to be a website called Scott's Cheap Flights and it got acquired and now it sucks but it used to actually have cheap flights and they'd send out notices for mistake fairs and there was a mistake fair that was to Asia business class on Hong Kong air and it was $500 for like five different cities so I was like immediately I didn't ask my boss I just went and bought it right and it was like at the time I was like a data engineer and I was I don't know bored and um yeah going to China totally alone I had uh broke I'd broken up with a girlfriend I'll do it a few months before yeah I was just kind of like man I'm so bored like and so I just went to China and it was great it was so much fun I had a great time um but what'd you do uh I just traveled around um met a girl had a great time uh i'm just saying and uh but no i went to i went up to so i went to shanghai went to beijing went and walked on the wall um and then i had to come back and then i was like like i was like this honestly it sucks to be back my boss was like yeah you're like like a back-end systems engineer like you could honestly go work remote in china for a quarter if you wanted to and i was like all right bye and i went back to china for like three months So you like get back to the US.

23:57How long does it take for you to just get back on the next plane to go to China? Two weeks. Two weeks. Yeah, I was like, I don't want to be here. Like, because I'm talking to those girls, like, I'd rather be in China. So yeah. Went to China again. You learned Chinese or any? No, I didn't even try. Didn't even try. Didn't even try. It's really funny. Chinese people are very nice. They really like Americans, or at least they did back then in like 2017. I don't know. Probably most of them still do. Yeah, probably. Probably. probably um but i think obviously it was a little bit more national feeling but back then they were so nice they loved americans and um and they would you would just be like ni hao and they'd be like oh your mandarin's so good you know like they were so nice about it whereas if someone has an accent in the u.s we're like fuck off idiot like they were so nice about it um did you really just learn like ni hao and shei shei and that's it yeah yeah those are my two words and but everything else is just like google translate and they were always happy to accommodate um uh china back that was extremely exciting uh i remember i took a overnight like high-speed train from shanghai up to beijing and it was so exciting it was such a beautiful like little sleeper cabin thing i got and actually cost not too much i can't remember exactly 20 bucks or something no it was definitely like it stretched me a little bit at the time but it was like totally fine doable um and i just remember walking down to the platform with all the bullet trains lined up and all these people busily going around and i was just like i don't know so inspired i was like crying you know because it was like i don't know it's like something exciting about a country that's just like bursting at the seams of growth you know it's like america in like 1870 or 1880 right just like yeah radically expanding um so yeah i uh i really liked my time in china what were we talking about china china craziest thing you ever done yeah that you got definitely just randomly going to china of bouncing around you said you backpacked around japan for two months yeah that's easy though do that though there's no danger in japan it's totally fine um yeah i that was honestly i'd sold my last company which was a fitness app and um i had gotten like postpartum depression which really happens have you talked to anyone who sells their company about it i've told a lot of people not to sell their companies they go to you for console no

26:22not once did anyone ask um uh i sold my company and it was like fine it was like it's not like i'm rich it was just like whatever and there's a lot of people that exit like that it was um and then i was like immediately the next day i just woke up in my like mid apartment in north beach and i was just like dude why did i wake up like what am i doing like and that's when i got like like postpartum depression after that um so after a while i was like let's all get out of here go to japan and uh and yeah just did just did boom what was the most interesting thing about japan it was really honestly like so there's like some things that are like i don't know i had a good time but honestly it's kind of addressing how not good of a time i had what was the worst thing about japan so the worst thing about japan is if you are you have never been alone until you are alone in Japan.

27:19It's really, it's Lawson Translation had a really good vibe for this. Like, but he had another English speaker in the hotel, right? Like, it's like, if you don't know anyone, then you, because the only people that can speak English are service people who are interacting with you. And they are so profoundly, they're so profoundly polite. And what I realized is that like uh impoliteness and like being casual with someone is a form of intimacy being casual with someone is a form of intimacy yeah it's like it's like taking a break from like the protocols of like how prop people you know people really behave and being casual with someone is like you're they're taking you uh into their confidence you know it's like it's it's it's it's kind of like uh i've never heard a phrase like that i guess that i i would agree with that yeah i hadn't put that together because you haven't been to japan alone it becomes profoundly obvious to you after a while that everyone's talking to you in the most polite manner possible everyone else can't speak english so does it feel just like you're completely cut off yeah because no one's being and you're surrounded by radically authentic and you're surrounded by people yeah yeah and uh people who uh like i've talked to japanese people who have lived in the u.s and they well two of them so it's huge end but i haven't done a survey but uh but two people have told me this that they do not like japan because they feel like people are very inauthentic there and they're all just kind of robots yeah like they're very polite well they're just like they have this like layer this presentation layer that's super thick and you cannot get past it and um and obviously if you are just a foreigner then it's very difficult so eventually like i you know i met someone who speaks english and we became friends and what a relief i met someone else the best thing that happened was do you know noah smith yes noah smith was out there the first week i was there and so i met some of his friends and like one of the guys likes to go to baseball games oh i love baseball so like we started going to some baseball games i had some friends but like on a day-to-day like i could go days without talking to someone that's crazy yeah it's insane so a little bit insane when you just haven't talked with any humans yeah i mean i thought like it was nice to have time to read and stuff but it was like honestly like I didn't realize it but you go a little crazy even after like six or eight hours yeah but like four or five days I got trapped in a hotel during COVID in Austin Texas for like a month and a half where I just couldn't leave and my only contact was a door dash driver that sucks that must have been crazy that that was even worse I was on antidepressants at the time yeah sure yeah that was uh that sucks I gained a lot of weight I lost it right after oh okay sure you look good so when you're trying to think about like expanding to all 18 000 police departments yes how do you how do you kind of like get into that you know how many are you at right now uh 23 23 and the thing that really uh the thing that sucks about selling the government is that you have to sell to each local government and they all have their own things that they want in the contract and they all have their city attorney who's got a distinct legal theory about this and stuff like that that you have to deal with it's honestly the transactional costs are pretty high yeah how many back and forth sessions is this yeah i mean sometimes i oh yeah i mean back and forth emails you mean but like you know we're not we're not 10 meetings but it's going back and forth sometimes i just give them my lawyer's email and i'm just like hey you guys like hash it out it's gonna be faster like um it's kind of it's kind of a pain in the ass uh so that is one thing about it uh we have no market power right now eventually we'll probably have the market power and be like hey this is our standard contract right and you'll have to go to your city council for an exemption on this stupid thing that they want you to sign because we don't do it it's much easier once like 300 police departments already yeah yeah and it will never be like that when we you know when we still approach new york city or la like because those guys have obviously a ton of market power it'll be worth your time yeah so So is this one of those things like, I imagine even today, you're probably honestly better at writing a police report than most police officers, because if they have to spend like 45 minutes or two hours or whatever, writing this thing, like, how could they possibly remember every little detail?

31:35Yeah, so right now, we're definitely better. And officers will sometimes read the report and say, wait a second, did he say that? And then go look at the body cam. And it's because when you're an officer, like on a scene, you have like a dozen things in your mind. Like, being a cop is actually extremely complicated. it's like weirdly complicated it's also weird how many like state codes and things like that that officers can just spit off the top of their head like they have an encyclopedic knowledge usually of the law i've heard people who don't like the police say that cops don't know the law and usually it's because there's some specific arcane thing that they've you know got an officer on but for the most part cops know the law significantly more than anyone um so yeah when you're an officer in the field you are dealing usually first and foremost with uh site security yeah um you are investigating but you are also uh a security guard and these two people hate each other or whatever or this guy's a high flight risk or whatever and so you're dealing with that while asking questions and you know kind of watching your own six like you know then there's now there's some random people on the sidewalk where you know volunteer defense attorneys screaming things and stuff like that like it's being a it's there's a lot of things going on and so a lot of times officers are out in the field and they don't even register that somebody said something incriminating or something like that and we're very good at finding that yeah so we can help raise that up and and make that obvious to the officer um later on so uh yeah right now uh we definitely write i would say better uh i consider us right now to be 95th percentile report writers wow okay and so before even let's like walk it back to like before body cams how error prone was the process of you go do eight hours of mission or six hours being out in the field or whatever then you come back and you have to spend 12 hours is it 12 yeah a lot of places are 10 or 12 and is that like they're on the ground doing stuff for 12 hours and then they have to come back a lot of three hours at a time so it depends on the agency um a lot of agencies want them to write in between calls which okay is obviously uh takes a lot of draining well no it takes a lot of cops out of commission when the call board is at its at its highest you know like it you know four three o 'clock four o 'clock in the afternoon like that's when things really start cooking um a lot of the you know maybe homeless people you know wake up around noon and stuff like that and so like things start cooking around there uh the fact that officers will go to a 20 minute call and spend 40 minutes in their patrol car writing a report terrible terrible waste of time absolutely um so yeah that's that's like default status how accurate are reports uh before body cam nobody knows right like nobody knows um reports have become less important though because of body camera uh body camera it's now in court it's that's more valuable evidence like yeah oh absolutely it's obviously more valuable than human testimony and it's done incredible things for policing the body camera era is the best era of policing like absolutely because it you know in the uh the cursed language of blockchain it creates a trustless system right like you don't have to take anyone's word for it about what happened you could just watch the body cam which has exonerated so many police in so many situations situations that would have produced horrible riots probably and you watch the body cam and you're like oh never mind and do the police actually like wearing them yeah i mean for like yeah because it covers their ass interesting like if you if you were not a good cop right and you you got into policing for the wrong reasons uh once body cans came along you kind of like filtered out the profession so that's excellent right uh but on top of that um the fact that good cops can be proven to be good cops is excellent as well um it used to be that cities would get body cams because of some events or some local event that occurred right um now cities get body cams because insurance companies want them to get body cams like because it 99 of the time the cops in the right what is it going to take like five or ten years for you to fully roll out to most police stations yeah yeah okay so let's say like 10 years in the future what does this kind of look like is this going to free up i mean how many arrests per day or you know interventions does a cop do right now it varies super widely like i couldn't tell you really an average number uh off the top of my head but make them roughly like 1.5 times efficiency or more yeah like we can almost certainly increase yeah the average officer the average officer now becomes 1.5 officers in the future crazy yeah okay because agencies like sfpd like if you go just talk to a random sfpd officer and say hey i heard you guys spend 130 your time writing reports they'll they laugh they're like dude we spend way more than that actually oh yeah sfpd the paperwork requirements at sfpd are insanely onerous wait okay so is it is it like police department by police department each one has different requirements for like which reports to write yeah so it's not only like you have to capture all this stuff you individually every single police department that you integrate with you have to like customize each report that you're presenting no generally generally they all need a report right like but it's what they need to write a report on okay you know uh so at uh in sf the number of reportable events is every detainable interaction which is extreme it's so many reports which has how many per day you know oh probably an officer does at at least seven or eight times eight like 1800 people yeah oh yeah 1800 is like a lot of those are like command staff and stuff like that so like probably like 1400 crazy or no it's 1600 is actually like 10 000 reports a day yeah it's an insane number of reports a day um but yeah the this has two impacts so the first impact is definitely officers um are just tied up there's not on the street because they're busy writing but then the second impact is officers the marginal cost of stopping someone is really high and so if you see someone poking their head and looking into a closed store window right are you gonna go ask them what they're doing no that's a detainable conversation would you have to write up a report for even that interaction yeah oh my gosh you know i do a report on that so the report is actually stopping people from entering like yeah of course taking action wow yeah it's like say i got i get paper fucked every time i do anything that sucks.

38:24Sorry, that's the police. No, no, but how many how many times? How many like things do you think? Let's say there's 1400 police officers or something? How many things should they be going taking action? But because it's just effort to write these reports, they just don't think a lot of things where officers will look at it and be like, because it's like a pain in the ass. It's a pain in the ass, but also takes them off of other things they could be doing. Right when they have to go write that report, a lot of them first off that technology technology uh SOPD's got it's really tough with the technology a lot of the MDTs the in-car computers are broken um like yeah it's why I don't know what goes on I years of budget shortfalls okay uh just years of neglect right um we uh we had a board of supervisors that was run by people who didn't like the police let's just say that and so it was uh it was hard to get technology funded and then there's like uh and i will i talked to william sansa mosher who's the cio at the sapd recently is just like the time it takes to get things done means that by the time you're getting things implemented the uh like warranty on all the hardware you're installing is running out and then it's like and then you have a policy against installing stuff that's not under warranty and so you have to start procurement how long how long is the warranty period it'll be like three years so it takes three years to implement yeah what yeah it's just bonkers it's just like yeah uh just weird rules i can't remember he had he had some great explanation you shouldn't you should interview williams had some motion it's a great explanation for this but um sfpd especially has a lot of like difficulty uh getting things implemented and that's just ends up there's a lot of things being broken and stuff like that um and so a lot of times they have to go back to the station to write okay that takes a that now it's transit time right now they're off the actual street um and when they get to the station maybe somebody they need more help there or whatever and so it's just like takes cops out of commission um how many hours is that like definitely over half over half their time is definitely going to report writing and the associated bullshit with report writing so you can double the cop force if you just get this right 1.5 but yeah which was the first police department that you wanted to target to like integrate sfpd yeah and so what happened with that like why is that a difficult one to integrate with um it's really hard for sfpd to make decisions and it's uh it's hard to know what happens inside of agencies but i was talking to the tech people there um and it was it was sluggish what i what I figured out as time went on is that you're almost certainly best off not talking to the tech people to start with.

41:07You should start with the command staff because to the tech guys, they might have, you know, inspiration and stuff like that for it, but it's a project still, you know, command staff just wants it done, you know? And so you go talk to command staff. And so, yeah, SFPD was, I had several meetings with SFPD and then they ghosted me. and then yeah why i don't know i was gonna give it to him for free you're gonna give him for free yeah of course that they let me build it there but the thing is it's like okay uh i was once told by the ceo of another police tech company that's much larger than ours uh he said that the places that need you most are the last to get you they need you the most because their city council hates police and they're the last to get you because their city council hates police like flock flock just blew right through the bible belt right all through the south places a lot of places that had really low crime rates immediately bought flock because the police would be like hey look like and and for those who don't know like flock is a uh alpr system it's a automated license plate reader system and so they put uh cameras at major intersections pointed where license plates go and then detect license plates as they go through read them and match them against master lists for like people with warrants or like you know wanted people um flock is now i think the number i heard was 10 of crimes that get investigated and get solved in the u.s flock are now solved with flock just an incredibly profound crime fighting tool but it just blew through like like this like all these like rich areas that had low crime and it's because every time the police come to city council was a convincing sounding like police tool the city council is like of course we love you guys right uh whereas in big cities policing is extremely political you know it's very complicated and so they are usually on the back end they're the last to get it so the smartest strategy is to go to like the least bureaucratic most adoption ready police departments and then kind of scale from there for the like 23 that you're operating in currently what's been the strategy for getting them to sign on um we i mean it's kind of straightforward we show them a demo we explain the software uh it's good to find places that are understaffed which a lot of police agencies so the big thing that makes this possible that would have been difficult 10 years ago even if the technology question was solved uh was that 10 years ago, overtime was like a reward for cops.

43:46And now overtime is like a curse. And it's because of 2020. It's because of George Floyd. After 2020, policing became much less popular as a profession. And therefore, there's national shortages of police across the board. And now agencies fight each other for cops that might lateral, it's called. You go from agency to agency. There is a war on for laterals. A lot of agencies, ironically, are lowering their standards for who can become a cop. Oh, so the George Floyd incident actually resulted in less quality cops. Yeah. I mean, it's obviously there's like a lot of great cops that are hired, but there's a lot of places where they're like, yeah, we're taking on people with, you know, things in their record that we wouldn't have taken on 10 years ago.

44:31Because it used to be 10 years ago, there's a line out the door to be a cop. It's a great job. You know, you can have a high school diploma, earn, you know, 150 ,000 a year. Like there's not a lot of things you could do that. And now it's like, there's a war on just to get anyone in the door. And so there's, yeah, there's a lot of agencies are allowing things that they haven't before. This to me is a nightmare. That's the worst. That's what's going to generate more problems in the future. Like really what we need to do is leverage the cops that we have to do more right if you have good cops now then make them more powerful give them an extra arm right so they can do more things um so yeah but yeah 10 years ago this would have been a difficult a difficult chore i think unions would have been tougher and now the rank and file of police unions are suffering from having to do mandatory overtimes so are you going to try and kind of go through the like flock playbook of going down you know through the bible belt initially uh to kind of get a whole bunch of case studies of we've actually done this and it's great yeah so i mean uh right now we go where where uh things are softest um the south is the least soft for policing they've got uh what i but i mean that what i mean by that is that a lot of agencies are shorthanded and those cops didn't just like evaporate a lot of them went down south because the political environment's much easier for policing interesting and so a lot of them like a lot of uh we won't have the exact same story as flock for that reason is because we talked to a lot of those agencies and they like it right it's cool but they want to be an early adopter we we first shipped in march of this year right so to be an early adopter for a technology you really have to feel the pain point yeah and otherwise they're like ah we'll wait to see what happens so for your specific case it's not only that like yes the the most difficult ones to sell to are the ones where it's you know the worst yeah but also probably the only ones that will adopt initially yeah it's well it's kind of a split thing where it's like really it's like uh small in midtown cities midside cities that have um like reason reasonable staffing issues right which are uh you know they tend to be in blue states right now um those are people that are picking us up so it is actually like where the city councils just don't fucking like their police departments it's not they don't like them it's just that there is tension and a lot of times if something happens, like a lot of, for a lot of cops, the question is, if something happens, is my mayor going to back me up?

47:18Is my DA going to back me up? Are they immediately going to go out to the front of the parade or the riot and like sell me out? Which is a difficult question, you know, when the body cam hasn't come out yet, you know, when things haven't come out and you could be in the right and your DA immediately wants to file charges against you as an officer. That's a terrifying situation. So have there been like cases where police officers have been basically under the scrutiny of the public eye, completely sold out by everyone above them, only to be like later exonerated, but they already had to experience all that pain.

47:54Yeah. Already had to move their family out of state for a week and stuff like that. Like, yeah. Crazy. It's a crazy job. Like there's no other job that where that can happen. so you're literally in san francisco this is like where you're headquartered and i know that the policing situation here has gotten a little bit better over the past like 12 months but it's still not great it's still not awesome it's a difficult environment yeah what was like other than the whole like startup scene is this is this the optimal place to build this company like for finding the type of people that want to join and kind of make police yeah definitely i mean right now because the the political energy here has changed okay like prop e in the last election i think passed by 70 that was a a law that gave a bunch of new technology to the cops oh so they could be like drone as first responder and all kinds of stuff like that um yeah when i saw prop e passed by 70 in san francisco i was like oh like vibes are back we're back baby like we're back um it's definitely a place that like it's to me it's easy I don't so if if someone is uh ideologically aligned with doing things like this they might go work for a defense tech startup right like it's the same kind of guy right like the same kind of people and um i i think that's easy when you live in a place that's like a small place that doesn't have problems like it's easy to worry about taiwan i don't care about taiwan i really don't i don't really care that much about ukraine honestly i hope they win the wars like i hope taiwan stays an independent democracy but like you're larping like that's not your problem like you know what your problem is is that your girlfriend can't walk to whole foods at night in an imaginary world where you have a girlfriend uh you know you cannot walk at night without feeling secure right in american cities that's crazy that's crazy this is the best country in the world and you can't walk at night on the streets that's nuts like anything any violent crime rate that's above what Tokyo's is is unacceptable to me what is Tokyo's uh I have no idea way less you and your facts I got facts baby bro you got the best facts but it's true I mean like uh people talk about like right now like violent crime is down in San Francisco like first off I'm always very doubtful like they'll give like up to like the weak numbers yeah I'm like bro like a lot of reports haven't even posted yet like of course like yesterday's like doesn't look like there was a lot of crime reports aren't even written yet like of course um wait so they're posting like basically fake stuff oh yeah a lot of a lot of cities do this um and i think it's yeah it's it's it's and they don't like update them to say actually oh no they do update them but it's like like we revised our numbers three quarters ago right no one cares about that right well three quarters ago we were all so excited with how low the crime rate was so is this one of those things where like someone comes into power and they just say like all right let's make sure that the numbers look like yeah a very very common thing a very common thing is to um is to down charge like if we have a felony we actually charge as a misdemeanor we have fewer felonies now isn't that amazing we just drop charges dropping charges is the best way to make crime go down are like mayors and stuff able to do that da's can crazy yeah so how much corruption is this like is there in the police force and general governments and stuff not that much i'm surprised we're just misreporting shall we say yeah i think there's just like uh just just convenient reporting practices convenient reporting practice yeah well it almost feels like one of those things where when the new guy comes in he can artificially lower or she can artificially lower the new cases and then just like say actually let's redact or not redact but basically update the old cases so suddenly it goes from the old numbers get way bigger and then the new numbers are way down and really it's just not changed well that's what happens when you three months later revise or three quarters later revise or a year later revise then suddenly the denominator here is totally different and that changes the crime rate relatively speaking compared to last year so does this also make it kind of difficult for like updating and like integrating new technology and stuff and like updating practices if you're just like fucking with the numbers all the time i mean it's good to not that's like a very um that's a very noisy signal right is like the crime rate right like i don't really trust that that much but what's the highest signal thing oh well for us the highest signal thing is the amount of time that officers spend writing reports okay which in some agencies is measured right they have to go like a certain status on their dispatch system when they're writing, right?

52:52We just did a pilot with Belmont, which is now going to contract, where they did a study and they reduced their report writing time by 40%. And I think that is way under exaggerated. I had some problems with the methodology, but I'm like, okay, overall, I get it, right? If we can cut time in half, that's amazing, right? That's so good. That's the signal that really makes sense to me. you got to measure the most specific and lowest lowest closest to the metal thing you can uh but the crime rate like and it's so noisy there's so many things going on there yeah and like you said like new guy comes in and revises the past numbers and here we are so when you were first starting this uh i know that like elon is very good at figuring out which kind of like kpi to go after and uh i imagine that this is one of those things where it's like a murky water where you're not exactly sure what exactly the right KPI to go after is initially, because you actually have to get the data right.

53:51And so if you can't get the data, then obviously it's not a good KPI, right? How did you what was the first thing that you were kind of like initially thinking was the right thing to go after? And then how has that shifted over time? I mean, definitely, like, immediately, I thought, obviously, I want to drive down report writing time, right? Time spent writing reports. uh oftentimes uh it's not well measured within agencies um and i didn't have it's also kind of hard to know like is there incentive to not accurately report how much time they're spending writing reports no okay so this is just like some arbitrary thing that just happens yeah it's just like a lot of dispatch systems don't have a code for like 10-8 like writing reports or whatever right um or a lot of guys will just go on like you know like something else like standby or something instead of specifically putting up the writing reports and so yeah i'm actually not like a terribly data-driven person i really uh i'm really a qualitative person that's why i do so many ride-alongs it's because i just want to watch people use it yeah um it's kind of funny because like in um in y combinator i'm with a y combinator and y combinator has this uh they kind of give you advice on how to interview customers and talk to people and like try and figure out like interview your users and i was just never very good at it i mean i just not um i just learned things by osmosis but i learned them really deeply i can really put myself you know what you remind me of you are the rick rubin of police thank you that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me you're just sitting there and you're like i know what i like i know what i don't like and i'm very decisive about it i am and i just watched them use it i and it just took and it took that's why i went on so many write-alongs is because i was like i have no idea what it's like to be a police officer right i have no clue so i just keep on going on write-alongs seeing them use the software seeing them write reports uh figuring out what really sucks about it you know um early on we had a decision that we wanted to not only do so there's two parts of a police report there's a face sheet it's called, which is like, you know, suspect one, we have to fill out all this information for suspect one, you know, victim one, you have to fill out this information, right?

56:04And location, you have to fill out all this background information for the location. It's all the structured data. And then there's a narrative. Well, I was two months into the company when Axon said they were going to do draft one, they were going to do their report writing. And they said during the announcement, they said, we're taking transcripts and we're turning them into narratives. I was like, oh, that's nothing. that's so easy that's like such a i was doing structured data like we're doing the face sheets as well because i'd watch officers write reports and half the time they're spending it's clicking around all these like 500 fields for each person right adding data skipping a bunch of them just skipping a ton of data right because it's like what am i going to do sit here for like 10 hours filling this crap out and no one's ever going to read it probably so the amount of data that was missed and the amount of time spent filling out structured data was instantly like oh dude we could do way better than this right like I could definitely improve this and so I was like right off the bat right I was like I definitely want to do that couldn't have measured that I don't think like it wasn't like something that like you just had a qualitative understanding of a police officer's job and just watch them sit and click you know what's funny is the the whole like why see like go talk to your users or go interview users or whatever the real goal behind that is to understand their problem yeah and the real key is like you actually figured out the goal is not to go interview someone and ask the right, you know, these certain set of questions is just like go experience whatever they're experiencing.

57:28Right. I understand the problem. Yeah, some fundamental level. And like you can way better. Like I imagine that Axon wasn't doing ride alongs. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what they do. I don't know what huge companies do. I know the CEO doesn't, right? Yeah. Like someone who can actually affect things, right? I know what it's like to be a product manager at a place called Axon. Like it probably sucks, right? And I doubt that anyone has agency enough to just go to a police department and say, hey, can I do a ride along? Right. um it's uh it's definitely important i feel like and it's it's my job to do right along yeah like that's i used to write code like and that was like the hardest time of my life was during y combinator when i was uh all day i would write code and then at night and like in the afternoon i would go catch the swing shift at richmond and do right along still late at night and sometimes officers get held over that means the shift ends and they get told they have to stay on for like three more hours for they hate that yeah of course and i would i would hold over with officers just to see what it's like right to be out in the field for like 15 hours like something bonkers like that um that was like that was the most difficult time was like doing that because then i'd yeah you weren't getting enough sleep and yeah i wasn't getting enough sleep i was doing a ton of caffeine i imagine that with these people you do the first ride along because you asked but i imagine you do the 10th ride along because they actually like having you in the car with them probably are they getting lonely out there on lunches no it is kind of weird a ride along is crazy that you can do a ride along because it's like it's like hey uh your boss tells you like hey this guy's gonna sit in your tiny office with you for you don't get a choice eight hours no oh wow i mean like i i knew the cops right and we had good rapport and stuff like that it's really the valuable thing about it the repeated process like first like right along with a guy it'd be like yeah this is how we do things at richmond you know and then like the you know fourth or fifth one he'd be like you would not believe what my fucking sergeant just told me listen to this right it's like that kind of stuff he's just venting to you yeah which is exactly where you figure out what the pain points are right like you can figure out what's wrong in an agency by doing that right um i knew i knew way more about what was going on on the ground and like the in that agency then probably captain smith did wow because i was there with them like several times a week during that period so this this thing that went from like very difficult to understand the police problems and all this stuff kind of flipped on its head very quickly to you are experiencing them multiple times for hours at a time with the people that are actually and actually use your technology yeah and so i imagine like for those people were they just super psyched to not need to spend all their time writing reports the cops hate writing reports yeah like there's a zero officers zero people become police because they like writing they want to do the chases never once happened yeah yeah never once in history not a lot of english majors the english major to police officer pipeline probably the english majors go to college well a lot of cops go to college uh but uh yeah a lot of them are uh there's probably actually a decent amount of english majors i think about it that became cops but they don't do it because they love writing so is there any way that you can kind of like integrate into a police's stack or like a police officer stack without actually going through all the necessary things like just a chat gbt integration or you know whatever to enable them to more quickly fill out the reports even if it's not technically with the police department oh no i mean you can't do that you i mean you could basically be like you know i guess like a a chat gpt right but it's uh you will you're missing like 80 of the value then like uh the big thing is getting the body cam footage um going through that uh and obviously the admin staff is involved there.

1:01:25And then they have a lot of requirements. And CIGIS is a funny data security, like data compliance spec, because it's kind of different depending on who you ask. And it's kind of different state to state, which is really convenient for us.

1:01:44But going through CIGIS, a lot of times you'll run into an IT person at an agency who's like, a seagist expert right they really they got a fascination with sieges which is inexplicable to me but they love it and so they really want to drill you right and so and they want to like make sure that you know yeah yeah they want to they want to grill you on the details of sieges and so we run into that um you got to be you got to know what you're doing which is good honestly we it's a profound trust um that people it's a body cam footage of people talking about the worst day of their lives, you know, so it's a profound trust.

1:02:22Is there kind of ways to sell into these departments that are a little bit more founder mode? Figuring out like, who makes the decisions? And how do you make them like you? Yeah, of course. I mean, being liked is the best thing you can do in sales. In my experience, if cops like you, then it's easier to sell to cops. And so and I happen to be someone that I'm just incredibly charming. And so it's very easy for me. It comes naturally, you know.

1:02:57But the foot in the door, you definitely have to meet them first. And if you go to your local police agency, it's like, you know, it's like the queen bee is in the center of the nest, you know, you won't get to her, you know, so you got to go where police chiefs and police captains go to socialize and that's usually police conferences interesting cal chiefs what was the most interesting story from a police conference there's never been anything interesting to happen in a police conference you're just going and it's boring no it's uh it's uh you know it's where police go and get drinks and uh usually they just have fun conversations and they like telling cop stories cops love telling stories and honestly it's they got good stories right like the the funny thing about policing i when i first started doing this i um i did the sfpd uh citizens academy where you go through it's like a six-week thing and you learn all kinds of stuff and then one of the weeks it was scenario training and the scenario training was like you're like given like a wooden gun and a baton and stuff like this and then there's a guy who's a cop but he's like he's like you know a criminal and you have to do the scenario with him and you have to decide how to deploy force and the way that you're like blood turns cold when someone gets in your face and is like fuck you like fuck you pig fuck you like eat shit like i'm gonna do it and it's like you're like suddenly it's like you realize all of a sudden like the worst thing that happens at your job is someone sends an email it's like per my last email like that's the biggest conflict you'll have at work if you're a white collar worker right especially in the top half of white collar workers right like it's like so our lives are so easy and then the day-to-day thing with the police is just getting abused yeah all the time right and it's you're really it's like it's like your adrenaline spikes and you're immediately in the state right um policing is uh yeah there's a lot of stories as a result of that where it's like that um and uh there's a lot of uh moments that go surprisingly violent um there's a lot of people that will try and reach for your gun there's a lot of just like crazy things that happen out there and um so i love i love police conferences because i love talking to cops they have great stories and do they just become very unfiltered after a beer or two of course amazing that'd be wonderful you mentioned in the tech crunch article that you're basically like initially got into this by like rescuing some lady from an abusive relationship and then like bringing her to a new place and then her boyfriend would just like come over yeah and bang on the door or something and it would take a cop's like 40 minutes to show up how many times how did this happen how many times did this happen that happened several times actually i think like why were you helping her uh she's a friend of mine from a long time ago and uh she ended up in the bay area and she didn't have anyone to help her um and basically she like reached out to me because she physically needed help getting out of this like living situation and she was like daniel's my guy yeah well she knew i was out here and she was like hey we haven't talked in years but can you help me now we're good friends as a result of this ongoing drama um but yeah going through that was really really eye-opening about what it's like it's really easy to criticize police right especially when you're someone whose worst conflict at work is a per my last email kind of message right like it's really easy to not know what it's like to be out there and i did you know there's a lot of scrutiny on police and that makes sense it's it's a it's a sacred duty right it's a sacred trust that we give police to handle the violence problem in society but you should really think about how terrifying it is when the police don't show up like that the lack of police is horrifying and every city that defunded the police immediately reverse course what you should really want is more funding for the police because you should want better policing you're not going to get a better product if you cut funding uh you can put strings on it right you can say we want a longer you know police academy you know we want whatever but the on net like what you really want is you want you definitely want police you definitely want police because it is so scary when they don't show up and there's a violent situation going on how do those how do the police actually feel since um some of the like bigger protests and stuff of the of the past few years um what's the general vibe you know there's fewer people going into police work but also like at the actual police departments or out in the field or whatever um how do those people feel uh the sentiment that i've heard several times is that we bring it on ourselves right like like obviously the way that minneapolis police department was running at the time was not good right like every every cop saw that and they're like oh shit right now obviously you're paying the tax for what someone else did right like that sucks that's the thing about policing police look monolithic to most people like there's just police in every city right they're all totally different unrelated to each other right like oftentimes never talk to each other so it's like they're all very different and every cop is different right um but the thing that i've heard again and again is like yeah like we we earned that one right like policing was not doing that like it was like there was clearly cops where there was a slack in the attention paid to police like what police were doing uh that's uh that put us in this situation well the strangest thing to me is when something goes really bad and someone does something that they shouldn't have done who pays for it and sometimes there's like these multi-million dollar settlements and it's not just like coming out of nowhere it's a city exactly but it's just your money basically going to some city's money doing something bad and literally like it's like sometimes like uh we've one agency we were talking to and they were like sorry like settlement just came through like we can't spend any money now because it's like so it like forces them to be less good at doing what they're meant to yeah yeah i mean it's like because like city council's like dude we gotta pay like three million dollars for this where's that gonna come from like it's gotta take a chunk out of that out of the police budget sorry guys but like that's the reality of it yeah and i mean that's the reality of being any entity that needs to make its ends meet is that you know you gotta you gotta pay your bills and when you do something wrong you gotta own up to that and pay that and cities pay for that all the time all the time they pay for it so what are you thinking over the next like few months to a year what are your main focuses uh expanding definitely we've got um there's been a lot of studies about the impact of the marginal officer on homicide rates and other crime rates the impact of the marginal officer on homicide rates if it shakes out the way it shakes out is that if we um if we save officers half their time writing reports which i think we're definitely at now um then for every hundred officers on our platform one person's life is saved per year that's just because officers are on the street more and they're getting guns off the street uh they're being present in violent communities things like that so um oh is it one of those things where there's like some convexity where you you double the police force time on the field but suddenly the crime rate goes down by like 80 or 90 percent yeah amazing it's it's a it's it it is a highly leveraged thing when you can when you can put more police just out just out and about um so expanding is definitely our focus um and then there are some other things there are some other things to build the thing is there's a there's a high cost of i mean we haven't really we're not enough of a machine to calculate a cac right but it's there is a cost of acquisition clearly for police agencies that's rather high just because going through this process is is pretty difficult and so once you get them though and they really like your stuff and it's like well they're never going to tear you out well yeah that's one uh extremely low churn industry that's uh what makes it an attractive investment but also um you are really incentivized to build more build more products right because if they like your stuff they'll buy your other stuff right and they already like you so it's like uh so we're expanding into a few more things um um that are currently underserved by incumbent players the incumbent players in this industry mostly are not that good it's uh it's been a industry that has been for ideological reasons uh ignored by like most really talented um technologists over the past 10 to 15 years and so a lot of the software that police are using you would look at be like this is appalling like it's like really old it's really yeah and so how do you think about like deciding to focus on just grinding and building out the one thing and like figuring out how to get a consistent sales process and scaling customers and all that stuff versus like you have 23 police departments and you could build other products that you're selling into those police departments at the same time like what's the better use of time and how do you think about that yeah so we don't we're not google we don't change things just for the fun of it like you know it's like once we get something that was saving a ton of time then we're like okay like we've got one of our engineers who's like really the expert in that right and just kind of spearheads that development and continues on like adding features and stuff like that but it's like okay once we really got like a strong beach head on a product then it's like well you know several agencies have asked us for this thing so i'll i'll talk about a product that's coming is um the product we've been talking about is able writer uh takes body cam footage turns it into police reports um there is a common product that is used throughout the industry that everyone agrees really sucks called cop logic it's made by a company called lexus nexus and what cop logic does is uh it it's a way of taking in reports from the general public online and you go if you go to like uh sfpd oakland pd to go to their website it'll say file a report and these are for minor crimes where people uh want to get a report number usually for their insurance company or whatever but they don't want to wait for a copy comment stuff like that okay uh well lexus nexus it turns out now has contracts i think we think with ice they would not sign richmond's the city of richmond's um sanctuary city agreement which says that you will not do business with immigration and customs enforcement they refused to sign it so richmond the city had to cancel their contract with lexus nexus um and as a result they came to us and they're like hey can you do something about this and we're like yeah definitely we definitely do a way better version because you look at cop logic it looks like it was like made in 1997 last updated 1999 it looks like garbage looks like garbage on mobile and like it breaks easily um and all that generates more calls to the agency all that generates more calls for service that cops have to go out and do all that waste police time for like you know oh somebody broke into my car and i just need a report number from my insurance company or somebody stole my phone uh so we are now making able citizen and we're going to be launching in richmond uh looks like this week um and so that will take in reports uh the b1 of that is just taking reports uh through form but what we really want is a chat interface and we're building now is a chat interface for it so people can go on and just describe the crime because a lot of times when you ask people to summarize a crime they miss what we call uh the uh the necessary components of the crime right so you can have some like llm just spit out yo here's the questions that we need answered yeah and be like and if they describe it be like okay now did they actually break into your car right or was the car left unlocked because that's a different kind of crime right um when you say something was stolen was it stolen on your off of your person right because that's a very different a crime that if it was stolen like you left it somewhere right um getting the clarity uh is another thing that saves record departments time and it saves cops follow-up time um anything we can do basically to soften these difficulties that end up being officer time yeah because everything like shit runs downhill in these agencies and it just ends up being officers have to go out for everything and we only got so many bodies right now like we got a shortage uh so for spending cop time going down chasing down like you know what happened to that stolen cell phone uh it's not the best use of time so improving that is uh our next product awesome and it sounds like i think a lot of california agencies are going to end up having to cancel lexus nexus and cop logic because of the refusal to sign sanctuary city agreements is the fact that like no one really wants to work in this kind of industry from the software side what leads to like so much inefficient like it's kind of ironic because if there was more efficiency from a software and all this all these other things side suddenly cops would actually do a much better job there we way lower crime yeah in like all these cities so i imagine this is like one of the as far as quality of life improvements for just people in general it's like one of the highest leverage things that you could be doing for just humans absolutely it's incredible what a like from a technological perspective you know i won't underrate it but what a flick of the wrist it is compared to other things you could be doing right that would radically improve american cities and thus improve the united states of america that's awesome yeah that's so cool to be able to write code that makes your city cleaner right that makes crime go down that saves people's lives like that's amazing that's just it's just stuff you're writing in vs code that is producing that result that's sick let's do the final question that's the hardest thing you've overcome uh i guess when i was when i was 15 um i came down with a disease called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis and it paralyzed me from the waist down if you want a really literal answer i was paralyzed for weeks i couldn't walk and i had to learn to walk again afterwards and a lot of people die from it and a lot of people are permanently paralyzed by it um and so yeah i was 15 they couldn't figure out what it was i lived in a like mid-sized town in florida and so they had to put me in a helicopter and fly me up to jacksonville where they had like a diagnostician like a doctor house figure who like figured out what it was and put me on this cocktail steroids and stuff that like fixed it um how close were you to just being out well i i don't remember like i did get me drug the whole time which was awesome but it was it was definitely uh the most so what it does is your immune system attacks your nervous system and so i had lesions on my spinal cord and brain and the headaches were life-changing it was the most painful thing it was awful and so yeah going through that and then like having to learn to walk again i was like 15 how'd you even get it uh it it's a mystery how it happens so it happens when you are if you are sick and you don't like take it easy like you don't like rest and so i was sick and i just kept going out and i was like you know a degenerate little teenager so i was drinking with my friends and stuff and so your immune system was compromised and you were already compromised i just one night i just literally couldn't pee and i like in the morning i was like mom like something's wrong and she's like yes that's appalling wrong so we went to the emergency room and that's where how it all started and then after like 24 hours after that i couldn't walk and then they were like it's getting worse wouldn't move yeah could you feel your legs no you couldn't feel your legs that was the scariest thing is like being in bed and looking down and there's a doctor and he's like can you wiggle this toe and i couldn't move my toe right i was like oh shit did you think at that time like you would never be able to walk again yeah kind of yeah i was like this doesn't seem to be going my way right now yeah this is kind of getting away from me here this doesn't look good uh so yeah that was the hard and then and then i got my ability to walk back like i i was able to recover and then i was i learned to walk again and that took months and then um and it gave me like a really profound sense of like serenity really and that's when i became buddhist i became like really like yeah uh and i spent most of my years back then buddhist um because it everything that like zen buddhism and chan buddhism taught i was like yes 100 i get it right like uh so yeah for years i was really into buddhism because of that and then um and then i was also i got really into fitness which now i no longer care about but i was really the idea that i could use my body right because yeah i don't know i was younger i didn't really care but then you didn't have it yeah then you don't have it and you're told that you might not walk again and you're like, oh shit.

1:20:30So that was probably the hardest thing I went through.