#48 - Police Chases, Ride Alongs, Bureaucracy | Daniel Francis, CEO Abel Police

Summary

Daniel Francis, founder and CEO of Abel Police, discusses his journey building AI technology that converts police body camera footage into police reports. The interview covers Daniel’s unconventional path to founding a police tech company, including doing 32+ ride alongs with police departments, experiencing a 47-minute high-speed police chase, and spending months in China.

The conversation explores the challenges of selling to fragmented government organizations, the importance of CJIS compliance, why police conferences are essential for breaking into the market, and how body cameras have transformed policing. Daniel shares his philosophy of understanding problems deeply through direct experience rather than traditional user interviews, and discusses his personal story of being paralyzed at 15 and learning to walk again.

Highlights

”We hit 130 mph on the highway, 50 mph in the Oakland Hills”

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“I was in a police chase and we hit 130 mph on the highway. But even crazier than that is we hit 50 mph in the Oakland Hills. And if you’ve ever been in the Oakland Hills, that’s wild because those are very narrow, scary roads. It was 47 minutes. That was the best day of my life.” — Daniel Francis, 2:25

”The best type of cop is a former bartender”

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“Policing is a service job. People think it’s more like the military. My favorite prototype of a police officer: former bartender. Because policing is a service job. You have that right combination of service but also like you might be able to throw the guy out. And you can definitely talk shit, which is an important thing for a police officer to be able to do.” — Daniel Francis, 5:15

”I explained alcoholism to my Chinese friend - ‘I don’t think we have anything like that in China’”

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“I was explaining alcoholism and he’s like, ‘I don’t think we have anything like that in China. Like I never heard of that.’ I was like, what a nation of supermen. And then I figured out - everybody, every male in China is an alcoholic. That’s just standard.” — Daniel Francis, 9:50

”He sat there in silence and said, ‘That was bitching’”

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“I came in with a demo. I had taken my phone and held it to my chest and warned my friend for littering in this fake body cam video I made. I showed it to Captain Eric Smith at Richmond. The video ends and he just sits there in silence staring at the screen and he said, ‘That was bitching.’” — Daniel Francis, 13:10

”Axon made it normal and then did a really terrible job at it”

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“It was weird when I was doing it but then Axon says it, it’s normal. Axon made it normal and then Axon did a really terrible job at it. They just shove it through ChatGPT. It’s so lazy. That’s not how you do it. There’s so many layers. It’s very sophisticated.” — Daniel Francis, 16:55

”We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy”

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“Have 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.” — Daniel Francis, 1:58

Key Points

• Abel Police Product (12:36) - Takes body cam footage and uses AI to turn it into police reports, since police spend one-third of their time writing reports
• Police Chase Experience (1:58) - Was in a 47-minute police chase hitting 130 mph on highway and 50 mph in Oakland Hills
• Ride Alongs (3:58) - Completed 32 ride alongs to deeply understand police work; describes it as the best free activity you can do
• First Customer (12:36) - Richmond PD was first customer after Captain Eric Smith saw demo and said “That was bitching”
• CJIS Compliance (17:19) - Criminal Justice Information Security is like SOC 2 for policing; very niche but critical barrier to entry
• Police Conference Strategy (11:09) - Police conferences are the best way to break in because you can’t otherwise meet command staff
• 18,000 Police Agencies (22:30) - US has 18,000 fragmented police agencies, each using different software
• Body Cam Revolution (33:10) - Body cameras created “trustless system” that has exonerated many police and improved accountability
• Report Writing Cost (20:22) - SFPD has ~1,600 officers spending ~50k/officer/year on reports
• George Floyd Impact (54:43) - 2020 protests led to national police shortage, making overtime a “curse” instead of reward
• Marginal Officer Impact (1:09:43) - Studies show for every 100 officers on Abel’s platform, one life saved per year
• Being Paralyzed at 15 (1:17:19) - Contracted rare disease that paralyzed him from waist down; had to learn to walk again

Mentions

Companies

• Abel Police (0:19) - Daniel’s company converting body cam footage to police reports
• Axon (17:19) - $60B company that announced Draft One product, legitimized the market but “did a terrible job”
• Lexis Nexis (1:12:13) - Makes Cop Logic; refused to sign sanctuary city agreements
• Flock (54:43) - ALPR company, now solves 10% of US crimes
• Y Combinator (54:43) - Daniel went through YC
• OpenAI (17:19) - Referenced as not being CJIS compliant
• ChatGPT (17:19) - Axon criticized for just shoving transcripts through ChatGPT

Products & Technologies

• Body Cameras (17:19) - Central to Abel’s product; have revolutionized policing
• Draft One (17:19) - Axon’s competing product announced after Abel started
• Cop Logic (1:12:13) - Online crime reporting system by Lexis Nexis that “looks like it was made in 1997”
• CJIS (17:19) - Criminal Justice Information Security compliance standard
• ALPR (Automated License Plate Reader) (54:43) - Flock’s technology for detecting wanted vehicles
• Baijiu (7:50) - Chinese liquor Daniel describes as “offensively sweet”

People

• Captain Eric Smith (12:36) - Richmond PD captain who was first to believe in Abel
• Chief Bisa French (12:36) - Richmond PD chief who approved the pilot
• William Sansamoer (40:37) - CIO at SFPD
• Noah Smith (26:50) - Met him in Japan, introduced Daniel to friends there
• Ti Morse (0:19) - The interviewer/host

Places

• Richmond, California (12:36) - First police department to adopt Abel
• San Francisco (40:37) - Abel headquarters; SFPD mentioned as target
• China (7:50) - Daniel spent 3+ months there on a whim
• Japan (26:50) - Spent 2 months backpacking with 13L backpack
• Oakland Hills (1:58) - Location of high-speed chase at 50 mph on narrow roads

Surprising Quotes

“We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.” — 1:58

“That was bitching.” - Captain Eric Smith’s reaction to seeing the Abel demo — 12:36

“I explained alcoholism to my Chinese friend and he said ‘I don’t think we have anything like that in China.’ Then I figured out - everybody, every male in China is an alcoholic. That’s just standard.” — 7:50

“Being casual with someone is a form of intimacy… if you’ve never been alone, you have never been alone until you are alone in Japan.” — 26:50

“If we save officers half their time writing reports, then for every 100 officers on our platform, one person’s life is saved per year.” — 1:09:43

Transcript

0:00 How 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… I’m just kidding. Don’t do that.

0:16 This is Daniel Francis. He is the founder and CEO of Abel Police. Daniel, what do you say about the allegations? What allegations? Next question. Backpacks. Love them. What about them?

0:33 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 2 months in Japan with a 13 L backpack. But really to unlock the power of the backpack, of course, you need merino wool. Merino wool. Yeah, merino wool.

0:53 Because merino does not smell. It’s amazing. You can wear merino for weeks and it won’t smell. Have you done that? Of course. That’s disgusting. I’m doing it right now. That’s really gross.

1:07 It’s fine. Are you here to interview me about Merino? Kind of. It’s a good podcast. Yeah. Merino is an amazing fabric. It’s miraculous, really. And the only problem is it’s expensive. So people who get 30 views per episode on their podcast probably can’t afford it.

1:27 Probably not. Is that why you have a sheep? No, I have a sheep because there’s actually two reasons for the sheep. One, there’s like a meme in police culture that police are sheep dogs and 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 which pleases 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.

1:58 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. What about you is attracted to those types of situations? Have 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. But I guess I’d choose cooler things than a podcast.

2:25 Tell me about the most stressful situation outside of Abel. The most stressful situation that you’ve ever been in. I was in a police chase and we hit 130 mph on the highway. But even crazier than that is we hit 50 mph in the Oakland Hills. And if you’ve ever been in the Oakland Hills, that’s wild because those are very narrow, scary roads.

2:50 So 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. When you find yourself in that situation, what are you thinking? No. I was just pumped. I was having the best day. That was the best day of my life. I waited for that for so long. That was awesome.

3:15 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. 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.

3:35 Incredible. Amazing. Yeah. Turns out you can’t have a 9mm on you when you’re on parole. So that’s why he ran. Are guns even legal in California? Guns are 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.

3:58 How do you ask a cop, can I just get in the passenger side and drive around with you? You just go up to any cop you see in the street and just ask them. I’m just kidding. Don’t do that. 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 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.

4:30 And how long does that process take? Two days. Two days. Yeah. And then you’re in a 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.

4:55 What’s the best thing about it? Okay. First off, it’s free. All right. That’s great. Free ride. Yeah, free ride. Second off, policing is way different than people think. In what ways?

5:15 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, my favorite type of cop, like my favorite prototype of a police officer, former bartender. What? Yeah. Why does that make the best type of police officer? Because policing is a service job.

5:40 But if you’re a bartender, you have that right combination of like service but also like not, you might be able to throw the guy out. Yeah. Like and you can definitely talk shit right? Which is an important thing for a police officer to be able to do.

6:00 What’s the worst type of police officer? The worst type of police officer? Honestly lazy cops. Damn. Yeah, cops can be lazy. Yeah. How often? 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 let you get fired if you’re persistently lazy.

6:30 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. It was really bad. You shouldn’t laugh.

6:55 Yeah, the guy got hit by a train. It was like a ball of like flesh. Wow. Cuz the skin kind of ripped off and was like, you couldn’t 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 and I’m looking at that. I don’t know. It was really gross. That was bad.

7:20 And like after that experience, you could go home that night, what do you, are you a little bit shell shocked? I was in a great mood. No. Yeah. I’d seen dead bodies before. Honestly, the worst is when people have been dead for a few days. Like a lot of times that happens where it’s like, you know, I’ll do a welfare check. We haven’t heard from 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 sickly sweet smell.

7:50 Yeah. The fact that it’s kind of sweet makes it really gross. That is disgusting. Part of your mind is like yes. Yes. Cuz it’s sweet, you know? All right. What part of your mind? Enticing for a second. And you’re like, “Wait, so you go into some dead person’s home and you think nice?” Isn’t it weird? It’s kind of sweet.

8:15 To be clear, I thought that was weird a second ago. To be clear, it is weird. It’s a little nice smelling. That’s the messed up thing about it. All right. Based.

8:30 It reminds me actually the first time I got to China. I got there at like 1:00 a.m. and nothing was open, but I was like, I want to have a drink, you know? I’m so excited, and I was alone, so I was just like, “Okay.” I just went down to the convenience store and I just bought the nicest looking bottle they had. It was so ornate.

8:55 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 purchased and consumed cologne. Like it was so sweet. It was so disgusting. It’s this liquor that they drink in China that’s so offensively sweet. It’s like overpowering.

9:20 Why do they drink it? I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I got used to it after a while. You thought it tasted horrible and you did it again? That one I didn’t drink, but I ended up going to a friend’s family for Chinese New Year. And the dad and the uncles all drink like every single meal, like insane amounts.

9:50 I met this friend in China. This is a China story. Met this friend in China and I was explaining alcoholism and he’s like, “I know what that is.” No, no, no. He didn’t. Like I was explaining it and I was like, “Yeah, cuz some people in my family are alcoholics.” I’m like, “Yeah, they just drink too much. They drink way too much and it really damages their lives and their personal relationships and the family will get enraged and all these things.”

10:25 He was like, “I don’t think we have anything like that in China. Like I never heard of that.” It’s like how amazing. How amazing. Yeah. I was like, what a 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.

10:50 Like I regularly see them putting it in their coffee and stuff. Like it was like, I’m pretty sure that one of the top companies just makes one beverage and it’s like Moutai or something. Yeah. It’s the alcohol. That’s the kind of alcohol. It’s Baijiu, Moutai is the brand, but Baijiu is the kind of liquor. And apparently it’s just on every table and deals and all sorts. It’s just everywhere.

11:09 So, you talked about police conferences, and apparently those are the best way to break in. Why are police conferences the best way to spend your money? Because you can’t break in otherwise, right? Like they don’t know who you are. And literally when I started this I was going around East Bay with a little flyer that my girlfriend made and I was like here’s my little startup. Can you, do you want me to do your reports for you? I’ll do AI reports for you. And they’re like I don’t think that’s legal kid. Like get out of here.

11:45 And it really took like an act of God. It was miraculous that I got into my first agency. But other than that it’s like you need to actually go and like talk. Where are the cops? Like where’s command staff meet? They meet at state conferences. So, Cal Chiefs, California Chiefs of Police.

12:05 Who was the first person that just opened the door to the first police station for you? It was Richmond, California. It was actually, so I ended up talking to 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. So it’s basically like chief, assistant chief, captains, then lieutenant, sergeant, officer. So, he’s pretty high up in the chain.

12:36 But I talked to this like I came in and I had like my, I made a fake body camera video. By the way, you should probably explain what my company does. You can do that. Go for it. 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. Boom. It’s changing. We’ll put AI in the title so people know to click. AI is the future.

13:10 But yeah, so I came in with a demo. I had taken my phone and held it to my chest and warned my friend for littering in this fake body cam video I made. And then I built like a demo model stack that could interpret this and then start filling out a police report.

13:35 And I came in and I showed it to this captain, Eric Smith, at Richmond. And like the, 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.”

13:55 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 had just been rejected by like 10 agencies. I was like, “All right, I’ll think about it.” You know, you’re in the running. Immediately I was like, “Yes, I definitely will do it here.”

14:20 Richmond was great. And then he brought it to the chief, Bisa French, and she loved it and I was like, “Hell yeah.” Like immediately it was really amazing cuz at the time nobody, it was nobody thought that was legal. Like everyone was like, I don’t know what to do with that.

14:45 You’re not allowed to use AI to transcribe what’s happening to people? People think that’s legal or thought. Yeah, it seemed very, because an officer’s report is something he swears to. And so if officers are just getting these reports generated for them, it seems like to a lot of older cops especially like it was what command staff tend to be, right? It sounds really fishy, right?

15:15 When you get up on the stand as an officer and you have to testify and the defense asks you, “Did you write this report?” Right? And like well kind of. AI. Kind of.

15:35 But the thing is Richmond is not, Richmond was more recent than most in having transcription, having scribes that you would call in reports. So it used to be a long time ago cops would go find a pay phone and then call in a report and there would be like the records gals back at the headquarters and they’d do the write up.

16:00 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 JHL or whatever their initials are and then the cop would sign off on it, read it over and sign off. And so when Eric Smith saw this he was like yeah that’s 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.

16:35 And so yeah, and then a few months after I started, Axon announced they were doing Draft One and Axon is a really big company, publicly traded worth like $60 billion, and Axon said they’re going to do the same thing. Wow. Yeah.

16:55 And that kind of opened 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. But no, it was great. Axon made it normal and then Axon did a really terrible job at it. Just really, they announce this is the future and just…

17:19 And then literally it’s their crappy transcriptions which are fine for in custody interviews or in station interview room cold room interviews. 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 very difficult to get good transcriptions in that environment. Difficult for other people, not for us.

17:50 And so they have bad transcriptions and then they just shove it through ChatGPT. It’s so lazy. That’s not how you do it. Oh, no. There’s so many layers. It’s very sophisticated. 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 cuz I thought it would be easy. Turns out it’s very difficult, but we got it.

18:20 How did you get in touch with the first one? The first 10 that rejected you. How did you get them? Driving around handing out little flyers? Literally to cops. Yeah. Would go to the station and be like, “Do you have like a captain I can talk to?”

18:40 What was their response? Just no. They would look at it and they would be like, it’s so out of left field and I’m just some random guy, and basically what the deal is is I want all of your body cam videos, which is not something that’s public record. You see body cam video on YouTube and stuff, that stuff’s redacted. They put a huge effort into redacting it, right? It’s very costly to redact that.

19:10 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 going to happen.”

19:30 So when you got that first police station to sign on, that was like a huge win. Oh, that was life-changing, honestly. I mean, that’s what took it from a weird project to like, oh, okay, this is actually a thing and then that helped me raise money.

19:50 Was there ever a situation where you’re after the fifth rejection and you’ve gone and talked to five different police stations and they’re like this is definitely, we’re never going to adopt this, where you maybe thought they won’t actually adopt it?

20:10 No, it seemed inevitable because I figured what was going to happen is that police would start using ChatGPT in the field. And there’s something called CJIS and I knew CJIS was really important. CJIS is like SOC 2 for policing. It’s the criminal justice information security services. It’s the protection of criminal justice information CJI.

20:40 And ChatGPT is not CJIS. CJIS is a really, it’s like SOC 2 for policing. It’s very niche. OpenAI does not have a CJIS product. Becoming CJIS was a massive headache because I had to do it like we had to figure it out ourselves basically.

21:05 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 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 CJIS moat. OpenAI is not going to become CJIS. It’s just too niche.

21:35 But also isn’t OpenAI or most of the chats just public? So if you do actually start feeding it, is it different through the API? So they have the weights in AWS GovCloud which has weights for Anthropic. And then Azure Government Cloud has the OpenAI weights. And those are clean room CJIS environments. But it’s not really accessible to a consumer.

22:05 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? 1,600. So 1,600 times 50,000. That’s like not a small number. That’s a very large number.

22:30 Yeah. That’s like more than a billion dollars on reports. Yeah, it’s spending a lot of money on reports. Insane. Yeah. Isn’t policing like super fragmented? There’s just a bunch of random agencies. Extremely fragmented. There’s 18,000 police agencies in the US. 18,000? Yeah. Wow. It’s a lot.

22:55 Are they all using different software and stuff? Many of them are, which is really convenient for us. It’s not. It’s a pain in the ass. Yeah. Do you just like chewing glass? Yeah. I mean, well to me it’s like every hardship is an opportunity, right? So what do we have to be really good at? We have to be really good at API design and building around other people’s APIs, right? We have to be really good at having scalable systems engineering, right?

23:30 Like these are things that we are very strong at and it’s not like minor to do that well for AI because a lot of those playbooks aren’t written yet. And so having really GPU intensive workloads that we have to do in a scalable way. We figured a lot of that out.

23:55 When you’re thinking about some stunt or going on a cop car or whatever, how do you kind of go in your mind? Really, the biggest problem with life is that it’s boring. You ever seen that clip from the Sopranos when Christopher Moltisanti is talking and he’s just like the regular regularness of life, I can’t take it. Right. I feel the same way.

24:25 I feel like, and it’s funny because I come from a family of alcoholics, like in that show he’s an addict, right? And but I think that’s what makes people act like that is just the regularness of life is just so unbearable. And so yeah, I would love, I mean sometimes I get mad in here. I just drive out to Richmond and go on a ride along. I got to go do something, right? I can’t do another day of this. Can’t do another day of a 17 viewer podcast.

25:00 What’s been the craziest thing you’ve done outside of ride alongs? I 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 fares.

25:30 And there was a mistake fare 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 don’t know, bored and yeah going to China totally alone. I had broken up with a girlfriend few months before. I’ll do it. Yeah.

26:00 I was just kind of like man I’m so bored and so I just went to China and it was great. It was so much fun. I had a great time. What did you do? I just traveled around. Met a girl. Had a great time. I went to Shanghai, I went to Beijing, went and walked on the wall.

26:25 And then I had to come back and then I was like this honestly it sucks to be back and my boss was like, “Yeah, you’re 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 you went back to China for like three months.

26:50 So you get back to the US. How 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. Cuz I’m talking to this girl. I was like, I’d rather be in China. So, yeah. Went to China again.

27:10 You learn Chinese or any? Just didn’t even try. Didn’t even try. It’s really funny. The 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.

27:35 But I think obviously it was a little bit more national feeling. But back then they were so nice. They loved Americans and it would be you would just be like nihao. 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 US, we’re like, “Fuck off, idiot.” Like they were so nice about it.

28:00 Did you really just learn like Nihao and Xie Xie and that’s it? Yeah. Yeah. Those are my two words. And everything else was just Google Translate and they were always happy to accommodate.

28:20 China back then was extremely exciting. I remember I took an overnight high-speed train from Shanghai up to Beijing and it was so exciting. It was such a beautiful little sleeper cabin thing I got. And how much did it 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 totally fine, doable.

28:50 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 almost felt like crying, you know, cuz it was like, I don’t know, it’s something exciting about a country that’s just bursting at the seams of growth, you know? It’s like America in 1870 or 1880, right? Just radically expanding.

29:25 So yeah, I really liked my time in China. What were we talking about? China. Craziest thing you ever done. Definitely just randomly going to China. Yeah. Bouncing around.

29:45 You said you backpacked around Japan for two months. Yeah, that’s easy though. Why would you do that though? There’s no danger in Japan. It’s totally fine. Yeah, I that was honestly I’d sold my last company which was a fitness app and I had gotten 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.

30:15 They go to you for counsel. No, because I just not once did anyone ask. I sold my company and it was like fine. It’s not like I’m rich. It was just like whatever. And there’s a lot of people that exit like that. And it was, and then I was like immediately the next day I just woke up in my mid apartment in North Beach and I was just like, dude, why did I wake up? Like what am I doing?

30:45 Like and that’s when I got like postpartum depression after that. So after a while I was like let’s get out of here, go to Japan and yeah, just did. Boom. What was the most interesting thing about Japan?

31:05 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 was kind of interesting how not good of a time I had. What was the worst thing about Japan?

31:20 So the worst thing about Japan is if you have never been alone, you have never been alone until you are alone in Japan. It’s really, Lost in Translation had a really good vibe for this, but he had another English speaker in the hotel, right?

31:45 It’s like if you don’t know anyone, then the only people that can speak English are service people who are interacting with you and they are so profoundly polite and what I realized is that impoliteness and being casual with someone is a form of intimacy.

32:10 Being casual with someone is a form of intimacy. Yeah. It’s like taking a break from the protocols of how proper people behave and being casual with someone is like you’re, they’re taking you into their confidence, you know? It’s like an intimacy.

32:35 I’ve never heard a phrase like that. I guess I would agree with that. I hadn’t put that together. That’s cuz 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.

33:00 So, does it feel just like you’re completely cut off? Yeah. Because no one’s being radically authentic and you’re surrounded by people. Yeah. And people who, I’ve talked to Japanese people who have lived in the US and two of them have told me they do not like Japan because they feel like people are very inauthentic there.

33:25 And they’re all just kind of robots. Yeah. They’re very polite. Well, they’re just like they have this presentation layer that’s super thick and you cannot get past it. And obviously if you are just a foreigner then it’s very difficult.

33:45 So eventually like 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 one of the guys likes to go to baseball games. Oh I love baseball. So we started going to some baseball games. I had some friends but like on a day-to-day I could go days without talking to someone.

34:20 That’s crazy. Yeah. It’s insane. You go a little bit insane when you just haven’t talked with any humans. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was nice to have time to read and stuff, but you go a little crazy even after like 6 or 8 hours. Yeah. But like four or five days.

34:45 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 DoorDash driver. That sucks. That must have been crazy. That was pretty worse. I was on anti-depressants at the time, so yeah, that was… That sucks. I gained a lot of weight. I lost it right after. Oh, okay. Sure. You look good.

35:15 So, when you’re trying to think about expanding to all 18,000 police departments. Yes. How do you kind of get into that? How many are you at right now? 23. 23.

35:35 And the thing that really, the thing that sucks about selling to 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.

36:00 How many back and forth sessions is this? Sometimes I, oh yeah. Back and forth emails, but like you know we’re going to have 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 hash it out. It’s gonna be faster. It’s kind of a pain in the ass.

36:25 So that is one thing about it. We have no market power right now. Eventually we’ll probably have market power and be like hey this is our standard contract 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.

36:50 But it’s much easier once 300 police departments are already working with you. Yeah. And it will never be like that when we approach New York City or LA because those guys obviously have a ton of market power. It’ll be worth your time. Yeah.

37:10 So, is this one of those things where 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 2 hours writing this thing, how could they possibly remember every little detail?

37:35 Yeah. 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 on a scene, you have a dozen things in your mind. Being a cop’s actually extremely complicated. It’s weirdly complicated.

38:00 It’s also weird how many state codes and things that officers can just spit off the top of their head. 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, but for the most part cops know the law significantly more than anyone.

38:30 So yeah, when you’re an officer in the field, you are dealing usually first and foremost with site security. You are investigating, but you are also a security guard and these two people hate each other or whatever or this guy’s a high-flight risk. And so you’re dealing with that while asking questions and watching your own six and then there’s random people on the sidewalk who are volunteer defense attorneys screaming things.

39:05 Being a cop, 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 so we can help raise that up and make that obvious to the officer later on.

39:30 So yeah right now we definitely write, I would say better. I consider us right now to be 95th percentile report writers. Wow. Okay.

39:45 And what, so before even let’s walk it back to before body cams, how error-prone was the process of you go do eight hours of missions or 6 hours being out in the field. Then you come back and you have to spend… 12 hours. Is it 12? Yeah. A lot of places are 10 or 12.

40:10 And is that like they’re on the ground doing stuff for 12 hours and then they have to come back three hours of time? So it depends on the agency. A lot of agencies want them to write in between calls which takes a lot of cops out of commission when the call board is at its highest. Like 3:00, 4:00 in the afternoon, that’s when things really start cooking.

40:37 A lot of the homeless people wake up around noon and stuff like that and things start cooking around there. 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.

41:00 So yeah, that’s default status. How accurate are reports? Before body cam, nobody knows, right? Reports have become less important though because of body camera. Body camera, it now in court it’s more valuable evidence. Oh absolutely. It’s obviously more valuable than human testimony and it’s done incredible things for policing.

41:30 The body camera era is the best era of policing. Absolutely because it, in the cursed language of blockchain, it creates a trustless system, right? 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 that would have produced horrible riots probably.

42:00 And you watch the body cam and you’re like, “Oh, never mind.” Do the police actually like wearing them? Yeah, I mean for like, yeah, because it covers their ass. Interesting. If you were not a good cop and you got into policing for the wrong reasons, once body cams came along, you kind of filtered out of the profession. So that’s excellent.

42:30 But on top of that, the fact that good cops can be proven to be good cops is excellent as well. It used to be that cities would get body cams because of some events or some local event that occurred. Now cities get body cams because insurance companies want them to get body cams. Because 99% of the time the cop’s in the right.

43:00 What is it going to take, like 5 or 10 years for you to fully roll out to most police stations? Yeah. Okay. So, let’s say 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 interventions does a cop do right now?

43:25 It varies super widely. I couldn’t tell you really an average number off the top of my head. But roughly like 1.5 times efficiency or more? Yeah. We can almost certainly increase the average officer now becomes 1.5 officers in the future. Crazy. Yeah.

43:50 Because agencies like SFPD, if you just talk to a random SFPD officer and say, “Hey, I heard you guys spend one-third of your time writing reports.” They laugh. They’re like, “Dude, we spend way more than that, actually.” Oh, yeah. SFPD the paperwork requirements are insanely onerous.

44:15 Wait. Okay. So, is it police department by police department? Each one has different requirements for which reports to write? Yeah. So it’s not only that you have to capture all this stuff, you individually, every single police department that you integrate with, you have to customize each report?

44:40 No, generally they all need a report, but it’s what they need to write a report on. So at SF the number of reportable events is every detainable interaction, which is extreme. It’s so many reports. How many per day? An officer does at least seven or eight. Times like 1,800 people. Yeah. Oh, 1,800 is like a lot of those are command staff. So like probably 1,400.

45:15 Crazy. 10,000 reports a day. Yeah, it’s an insane number of reports a day. But yeah, this has two impacts. The first impact is definitely officers are just tied up. They’re not on the street cuz they’re busy writing.

45:40 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, are you going to 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.

46:05 Oh my gosh. You want to do a report on that? So the report is actually stopping people from taking action. Yeah, of course. Wow. It’s like say I got paper every time I do anything. That sucks. Sorry, that’s the police.

46:30 But how many times, let’s say there’s 1400 police officers or something, how many things should they be taking action on but because it’s just effort to write these reports they just don’t? A lot of things where officers will look at it and be like because it’s a pain in the ass.

46:55 It’s a pain in the ass but it also takes them off of other things they could be doing when they have to go write that report. A lot of them, first off the technology, SFPD’s got it’s really tough with the technology. A lot of the MDTs, the in-car computers, are broken. Yeah.

47:15 Why? I don’t know what goes on. Years of budget shortfalls. Okay. Just years of neglect, right? We had a board of supervisors that was run by people who didn’t like the police. Let’s just say that.

47:40 And so it was hard to get technology funded. And then there’s like, I talked to William Sansamoer who’s the CIO at SFPD recently. It’s just the time it takes to get things done means that by the time you’re getting things implemented, the warranty on all the hardware you’re installing is running out. And then you have a policy against installing stuff that’s not under warranty and so you have to start procurement.

48:10 How long is the warranty period? It’ll be like 3 years. So it takes three years to implement? Yeah. What? Yeah. It’s just bonkers. It’s just weird rules.

48:35 SFPD especially has a lot of difficulty getting things implemented and that ends up with a lot of things being broken. And so a lot of times they have to go back to the station to write. Okay, that takes transit time, right? And now they’re off the actual street.

49:00 And when they get to the station, maybe somebody they need more help there or whatever. And so it just takes cops out of commission. How many hours is that? Definitely over half their time is definitely going to report writing and the associated stuff with report writing.

49:25 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 integrate with? SFPD. Yeah. And so what happened with that? Why is that a difficult one?

49:50 It’s really hard for SFPD to make decisions and it’s hard to know what happens inside of agencies, but I was talking to the tech people there. And it was sluggish.

50:10 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. You should start with the command staff cuz to the tech guys, they might have inspiration and stuff, but it’s a project still. Command staff just wants it done. So you go talk to command staff.

50:35 And so yeah, SFPD, I had several meetings with SFPD and then they ghosted me and then yeah. Why? I don’t know. I was going to give it to them for free. You were going to give them for free? Yeah, of course that they let me build it there.

51:00 But the thing is, I was once told by the CEO of another police tech company that’s much larger than ours. 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.

51:25 Flock just blew right through the Bible belt. 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, and for those who don’t know, Flock is a ALPR system. It’s an automated license plate reader system.

51:50 And so they put 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 people with warrants or wanted people.

52:10 Flock is now, I think the number I heard was 10% of crimes that get investigated and get solved in the US are now solved with Flock. Just an incredibly profound crime fighting tool.

52:30 But it just blew through all these rich areas that had low crime and it was because every time the police come to city council with a convincing sounding police tool, the city council is like of course we love you guys. Whereas in big cities policing is extremely political and complicated and so they are usually on the back end, they are the last to get it.

53:00 So the smartest strategy is to go to the least bureaucratic most adoption-ready police departments and then scale from there? For the 23 that you’re operating in currently, what’s been the strategy for getting them to sign on?

53:25 We show them a demo. We explain the software. It’s good to find places that are understaffed, which a lot of police agencies are. So the big thing that makes this possible that would have been difficult 10 years ago even if the technology question was solved was that 10 years ago overtime was like a reward for cops and now overtime is like a curse.

53:55 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 laterals. It’s called you go from agency to agency. There is a war on for laterals.

54:25 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, there’s 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 things in their record that we wouldn’t have taken on 10 years ago.”

54:55 Cuz it used to be 10 years ago there’s a line out the door to be a cop. It’s a great job. You can have a high school diploma, earn 150,000 a year. There’s not a lot of things you could do that in. And now it’s like there’s a war on just to get anyone in the door.

55:20 And so there’s a lot of agencies 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. Yeah.

55:40 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.

56:00 So yeah, but 10 years ago, this would have been a difficult shore. I think unions would have been tougher and now the rank and file of police unions are suffering from having to do mandatory overtimes.

56:25 So, are you going to try and go through the Flock playbook of going through the Bible belt initially to get a whole bunch of case studies of we’ve actually done this and it’s great?

56:45 Yeah. So, right now we go where things are softest. The South is the least soft for policing. A lot of agencies are short-handed and those cops didn’t just evaporate. A lot of them went down south because the political environment’s much easier for policing.

57:10 Interesting. And so 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 don’t want to be an early adopter. We first shipped in March of this year. So to be an early adopter for a technology, you really have to feel the pain point. And otherwise, they’re like, “Ah, we’ll wait to see what happens.”

57:45 So for your specific case, it’s not only that the most difficult ones to sell to are the ones where it’s the worst, but also probably the only ones that will adopt initially.

58:05 Yeah. It’s kind of a split thing where it’s really like small and mid-size cities that have reasonable staffing issues, which tend to be in blue states right now. Those are people that are picking us up.

58:30 So, it is actually where the city councils just don’t like their police departments. It’s not that they don’t like them, it’s just that there is tension. And a lot of times if something happens, for a lot of cops, the question is if something happens, is my mayor going to back me up? Is my DA going to back me up? Are they immediately going to go out to the front of the parade or the riot and sell me out?

59:00 Which is a difficult question when the body cam hasn’t come out yet, 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.

59:25 So, have there been cases where police officers have been basically under the scrutiny of the public eye, completely sold out by everyone above them only to be later exonerated? Where they already had to experience all that pain? Yeah. Already had to move their family out of state for a week and stuff like that.

59:55 Crazy. It’s a crazy job. There’s no other job where that can happen. So you’re literally in San Francisco. This is where you’re headquartered. And I know that the policing situation here has gotten a little bit better over the past 12 months, but it’s still not great. It’s still not awesome. It’s a difficult environment.

1:00:25 Other than the whole startup scene, is this the optimal place to build this company? For finding the type of people that want to join and make police a… Yeah, definitely. Because the political energy here has changed. Okay.

1:00:50 Like Prop E in the last election, I think, passed by 70%. That was a law that gave a bunch of new technology to the cops. Oh. So they could do drone as first responder and all kinds of stuff like that.

1:01:10 Yeah, when I saw Prop E passed by 70% in San Francisco, I was like, “Oh, vibes are back. We’re back, baby.” It’s definitely a place that if someone is ideologically aligned with doing things like this, they might go work for a defense tech startup, right? It’s the same kind of guy.

1:01:40 And I think that’s easy when you live in a place that’s a small place that doesn’t have problems. 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 war. I hope Taiwan stays an independent democracy, but like you’re LARPing.

1:02:10 That’s not your problem. 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. You cannot walk at night without feeling secure, right? In American cities, that’s crazy.

1:02:35 That’s crazy. This is the best country in the world and you can’t walk at night on the streets. That’s nuts. Any violent crime rate that’s above what Tokyo’s is is unacceptable to me. What is Tokyo’s? I have no idea. Way less. You and your facts. I got facts, baby. Bro, you got the best facts.

1:03:05 But it’s true. I mean, people talk about right now violent crime is down in San Francisco. First off, I’m always very doubtful. They’ll give up to the week numbers. Yeah. I’m like, bro, a lot of reports haven’t even posted yet. Of course, yesterday’s doesn’t look like there was a lot of crime. The reports aren’t even written yet. Of course.

1:03:35 Wait. So, they’re posting basically fake stuff? Oh, yeah. A lot of cities do this. And they don’t update them to say actually? Oh, no. They do update them, but it’s like we revise our numbers from three quarters ago. No one cares about that, right? Three quarters ago, we were all so excited with how low the crime rate was.

1:04:05 So, is this one of those things where someone comes into power and they just say let’s make sure that the numbers look good? A very common thing is to downcharge. 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.

1:04:35 Are mayors and stuff able to do that? DAs can. Crazy. Yeah.

1:04:50 How much corruption is there in the police force and general governments? Not that much. I’m surprised. Or just misreporting? Yeah, I think there’s just convenient reporting practices. Convenient reporting practice.

1:05:15 It almost feels like one of those things where when the new guy comes in, he can artificially lower the new cases and then just update the old cases. So suddenly the old numbers way bigger and then the new numbers are way down and really it’s just not changed.

1:05:40 Well that’s what happens when you 3 months later revise or 3 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.

1:06:05 So does this also make it kind of difficult for updating and integrating new technology if you’re just messing with the numbers all the time? I mean it’s good to not, that’s like a very noisy signal, right? The crime rate. I don’t really trust that that much.

1:06:30 What’s the highest signal thing? For us, the highest signal thing is the amount of time that officers spend writing reports. Which in some agencies is measured. They have to go a certain status on their dispatch system when they’re writing.

1:06:55 We 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 underexaggerated. I had some problems with the methodology, but overall I get it. If we could cut time in half, that’s amazing. That’s so good.

1:07:25 That’s a signal that really makes sense to me. You got to measure the most specific and lowest, closest to the metal thing you can. The crime rate, so noisy. There’s so many things going on there. And like you said, new guy comes in and revises the past numbers and here we are.

1:07:55 So, when you were first starting this, I imagine that this is one of those things where it’s 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?

1:08:20 I mean definitely immediately I thought obviously I want to drive down report writing time. Time spent writing reports. Oftentimes it’s not well measured within agencies.

1:08:45 Is there incentive to not accurately report how much time they’re spending writing reports? No. So this is just arbitrary? Yeah. A lot of dispatch systems don’t have a code for like 108 writing reports. Or a lot of guys will just go on standby or something instead of specifically putting that they’re writing reports.

1:09:15 And so yeah, I’m actually not a terribly data driven person. I really am a qualitative person. That’s why I do so many ride alongs is because I just want to watch people use it. Yeah.

1:09:43 There’s been a lot of studies about the impact of the marginal officer on homicide rates and other crime rates. It shakes out that if we save officers half their time writing reports, which I think we’re definitely at now, then for every 100 officers on our platform, one person’s life is saved per year.

1:10:15 That’s just because officers are out in the street more and they’re getting guns off the street. They’re being present in violent communities, things like that.

1:10:35 Is it one of those things where there’s convexity where you double the police force time on the field, but suddenly the crime rate goes down by 80 or 90%? Yeah. Amazing. It’s a highly leveraged thing when you can put more police just out and about.

1:11:00 So, expanding is definitely our focus. And then there are some other things. There are some other things to build. The thing is there’s a high cost of acquisition for police agencies that’s rather high just because going through this process is difficult.

1:11:30 And so once you get them though and they really like your stuff, they’re never going to tear you out. Well, yeah, that’s extremely low churn industry. That’s what makes it an attractive investment.

1:11:55 But also you are really incentivized to build more products, right? Cuz if they like your stuff, they’ll buy your other stuff. And they already like you. So we’re expanding into a few more things that are currently underserved by incumbent players.

1:12:20 The incumbent players in this industry mostly are not that good. It’s been an industry that has been for ideological reasons ignored by really talented technologists over the past 10 to 15 years. And so a lot of the software that police are using, you would look at and be like this is appalling. It’s really old.

1:12:50 I’ll talk about a product that’s coming. The product we’ve been talking about is Abel Writer. Takes body cam footage, turns it into police reports. There’s a common product that is used throughout the industry that everyone agrees really sucks called Cop Logic. It’s made by Lexis Nexis.

1:13:20 And what Cop Logic does is it’s a way of taking in reports from the general public online. If you go to SFPD, Oakland PD, go to their website, it’ll say file a report. And these are for minor crimes where people want to get a report number usually for their insurance company or whatever, but they don’t want to wait for a cop to come.

1:13:50 Well, Lexis Nexis now has contracts, we think, with ICE. They would not sign Richmond’s, the city of Richmond’s sanctuary city agreement, which says that you will not do business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They refused to sign it.

1:14:20 So, Richmond, the city had to cancel their contract with Lexis Nexis. 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 could definitely do a way better version because you look at Cop Logic, it looks like it was made in 1997, last updated 1999. It looks like garbage. Looks like garbage on mobile and it breaks easily.”

1:14:55 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 wastes police time for somebody broke into my car and I just need a report number for my insurance company or somebody stole my phone.

1:15:20 So we are now making Abel Citizen and we’re going to be launching in Richmond. Looks like this week. That will take in reports. The V1 of that is just taking in reports through a form. But what we really want is a chat interface so that people can go on and just describe the crime.

1:15:50 Because a lot of times when you ask people to summarize a crime, they miss what we call the necessary components of the crime. So, you can have some LLM just spit out, here’s the questions that we need answered.

1:16:15 And be like, did they actually break into your car or was the car left unlocked? Because that’s a different kind of crime. When you say something was stolen, was it stolen off of your person? Because that’s a very different crime than if you left it somewhere.

1:16:40 Getting that clarity is another thing that saves records departments time and it saves cops follow-up time. Anything we can do to soften these difficulties that end up being officer time. Everything 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.

1:17:10 Spending time going down chasing down what happened to that stolen cell phone, it’s not the best use of time. So improving that is our next product. Awesome. And it sounds like I think a lot of California agencies are going to end up having to cancel Lexis Nexis and Cop Logic because of the refusal to sign sanctuary city agreements.

1:17:40 Let’s do the final question. What’s the hardest thing you’ve overcome? I guess when I was 15, I came down with a disease called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis and it paralyzed me from the waist down.

1:18:05 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.

1:18:30 And so yeah, I was 15. They couldn’t figure out what it was. I lived in a mid-sized town in Florida. And so they had to put me in a helicopter and fly me up to Jacksonville where they had a diagnostician, like a Doctor House figure who figured out what it was and put me on this cocktail of steroids and stuff that fixed it.

1:19:00 How close were you to just being out? Well, I don’t remember, or they kept me drugged the whole time which was awesome. But it was definitely the most painful thing. 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.

1:19:35 And so yeah, going through that and then having to learn to walk again. I was 15. How did you even get it? It’s a mystery how it happens. It happens when you are sick and you don’t take it easy. Like you don’t rest.

1:20:00 And so I was sick and I just kept going out and I was a degenerate little teenager so I was drinking with my friends and stuff. So your immune system was compromised and…

1:20:20 One night I just literally couldn’t pee and 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 it all started. And then after 24 hours after that, I couldn’t walk. And then they were like, “It’s getting worse.” Wouldn’t move.

1:20:50 Could you feel your legs? No. You couldn’t feel your legs? Yeah. That was the scariest thing is 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. I was like, “Oh this is doesn’t seem to be going my way right now. This is kind of getting away from me here. This doesn’t look good.”

1:21:20 Did you think at that time you would never be able to walk again? Yeah, kind of. Yeah. I was like, “This doesn’t seem to be going my way.”

1:21:35 So yeah, that was hard. And then I got my ability to walk back. I was able to recover and then I learned to walk again and that took months. And it gave me a really profound sense of serenity really and that’s when I became Buddhist.

1:22:00 I spent most of my years back then Buddhist. Because everything that Zen Buddhism and Chan Buddhism taught, I was like, “Yes, 100% I get it.” So yeah, for years I was really into Buddhism because of that.

1:22:25 And then I got really into fitness, which now I no longer care about. But I was really into the idea that I could use my body. Cuz I don’t know, I was younger, I didn’t really care. But then you didn’t have it and you’re like, “Yeah, then you don’t have it.” And you get told that you might not walk again and you’re like, “Oh.” So that was probably the hardest thing.