The Pomp Podcast - #536: Rahul Sidhu on Police and Technology

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

Rahul Sidhu is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SPIDR Tech. SPIDR Tech provides the world's first automated customer service software for public safety agencies around the world. In this conversation, we discuss the Taliban war wagon, racial profiling, police training, defunding the police, alternate resources, social resources, and the militirazation of the police.  ======================= Gemini is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies: https://www.gemini.com/ ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global full-time employees and contractors. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more about Remote and their new Remote for Startups program at http://www.remote.com.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Raul Sadu is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Spyder Tech. Spyder Tech provides the world's first automated customer service software for public safety agencies around the world. In this conversation, we discuss the Taliban war wagon, racial profiling, police training, defunding the police, alternative resources, social resources, and the militarization of the police. I really enjoyed this conversation with Raul, and I hope you do as well. But before we get into the episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Gemini. Gemini is

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financial applications worldwide circle.com go check it out last but not least is remote.com in 2021 every business is a global business but how do you pay your global team and comply with international labor laws. Remote handles payroll, benefits, taxes, and compliance to help companies of all sizes pay and manage full-time and contract workers all over the world. No matter where your team lives and works, Remote's global employment solutions keep your team, your finances, and your intellectual property secure. Remote never charges percentages or fees, just best-in-class global employment solutions for a low flat rate. The world's top global companies love Remote. GitLab, the world's largest all-remote organization, Trust Remote, to manage their global team,

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but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Raul here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. You got it, man. Good to see you, brother. Absolutely. Let's just jump right into it. This will be a fascinating conversation. You spent a long time as a police officer. There's all kinds of things between the company that you're building today and also a lot of police reform stuff that we're going to cover, but just give us kind of your background and how did you eventually become a cop? Yeah, man. So look, I spent the last 10 years or so in public safety overall.

On the public safety side, I started as an EMT, paramedic, went to University of Pittsburgh, worked out there as crew chief, you know, on the fire rescue side a little bit, and then mostly on the EMS side as a paramedic there. And then, you know, had a couple things, I'm sure we'll get into it, things that happened in my life that made me decide maybe I want to try being a police officer. And I came back to LA where I was born and raised, I became a cop out here and in 2013, left full time, I'm a reserve officer now, which is essentially, it's the same thing as you know, full time police officer, except you're paid way less. And you don't have to worry about the scheduling, you just kind of put in what you can, and started spider tech in 2015.

So that was the public safety side on the tech side. You know, I've been in it since I was a kid, man, I was had my built my first little video game at 14. And then had a little startup in digital currency before Bitcoin was the thing. Back when I was in high school, you know, doing like game currency and stuff like that. And that paid my way through college a little bit and worked on apps and public safety after that, and eventually merged my love for tech and public safety with SpiderTech. Awesome. I love to see it. So let's start a little bit with kind of the story. I know you've got this kind of pretty crazy story around racial profiling and before you became a police officer, and that really kind of drove a lot of the way that you see the world

today. So let me just kind of tell that story and then what were some of the takeaways from it? Yeah. So for those of you that are listening and not looking, I am a browner man. And so it's a little bit, it's a little different, uh, for me in that sense. And, and, uh, you know, I grew up, um, in LA, you know, dealing with racism here and there, especially after nine 11 and, and, you know, things were toned down, but when I was working as a, uh, as a paramedic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, um, there's one incident that occurred that, that, uh, you know, made the news. Um, I was again on duty, uh, as a crew chief of the other rig, basically heading to a 911 call up North where my area was, uh, driving an ambulance in uniform, et cetera,

had my EMT with me as well. She was also in uniform. Uh, we were driving up the, I think it was 47. I'm trying to remember the, uh, the exact highway, but, um, there was a, there's a vehicle, like a white SUV that wasn't a police car. It was unmarked at least. And it was driving up the shoulder to try and it got like, really looked like it was angry at us. And it drove up the shoulder of the highway to take a look into the cab and see who was driving, which was me at the time. And then it pulled up behind me. Um, and then all of a sudden I saw it turn on its red and blue lights. And so I pulled over again in the ambulance on the side of the highway thinking, okay, I don't know what this is all about. Uh, the guy that popped out, uh, you know,

kind of short stocky, white, older dude who, uh, wasn't wearing uniform, no gun, no badge kind of walks up to the car and flashes an ID that says police, but I can't read it because it's too fast and says Pittsburgh police. And he starts cursing at me. What the fuck are you doing? And are you even a real fucking paramedic and all kinds of stuff? And I'm like, yeah, this is a driving ambulance. You know, this is not an elaborate ruse. So he asked for my didn't steal the didn't steal the ambulance there, did you? Yeah, well, that's actually that.

So just wait for this part of the story because it can crack you up. The the guy, you know, I gave him my paramedic ID because he almost doesn't believe me. So he goes back and checks to see if I'm a paramedic. He takes my driver's license, check to see if I have any warrants. Again, I'm on duty as a paramedic driving to a call. and he comes back and kind of throws at me. He's like, I'm coming at you with a, for a warrant. You cut me off in traffic, some type of road ragey type, you know, complaint. Now I'm 22, I think at the time. So I'm, you know, like this is 10, nine, 10 years ago. I'm nervous. I'm going,

oh shit, I did something wrong. So I get on the radio and I tell the chief, Hey, look, I just got pulled over. I think I'm in trouble. And he tells me, Hey, come back to the station. So the district chief at the time, and he finds out the guy calls the district chief to complain about me district chief's like dude he's an ambulance he's he's being an ambulance right now what are you talking about um so you know i get there and the district chief says hey i just did some digging i found out the guy that pulled you over is the chief of police for pittsburgh school police and the guy has no jurisdiction at least in the state of pennsylvania uh to be pulling me over on the highway and on his personal car you know like it's an absurd thing to do so he calls

uh the city and complains and i find out like a couple weeks later that was the last straw for that guy they fired him they terminated him right off the bat uh i guess he's had plenty of like road rage incidents and the guy just wasn't cut for the job now a couple months ago he's suing the city to try and get his job back i have to testify my district chief has to testify uh my partner emt at the time has to testify so we you know i go to court i swear to god this guy i'm sitting in court this guy says when they asked him why they pulled me over i mean i'm i'm this is word for word he says he thought i was driving a taliban war wagon that's that's the terminology you use and he and i'm the only one who's laughing by the way like

i don't think anyone else had the courage to laugh at this absurd moment in court um because i'm just like i can't believe this guy said this then he explains that the fbi taught him how to racially profile uh and then like the quotes in the news uh articles if you google it you know he was saying that um he the fbi told him that that terrorists are driving around the country uh in uh cloned ambulances that could be car bombs. And so he was trying to protect the city of Pittsburgh for me, basically, uh, maybe blowing something up. And, um, it was crazy, man. It was absolutely crazy. After that, I remember like civil rights groups, et cetera, they're kind of approached me, Hey, this is a slam dunk lawsuit with the city. That wasn't what I wanted to do. I'm not trying

to take money away from the school board or the city or, or, you know, my legacy is I'm, you know, it's just not what I want to do, but it made me feel terrible, man. It sucked. And it taught me at the time, like I had, I didn't have a good, you know, perspective, or at least I didn't feel good about cops. That was one of a couple of things that had happened, right? Just had this kind of narrow opinion on cops. And I had all these opinions on how they should be doing their job. And I remember, um, one of my, uh, one of my district chiefs actually told me, Hey, do you, maybe you want to try being a cop instead of a firefighter? Some other things are paramedic. There's some other things that had happened. And, uh, so I decided, fuck it. I'll put my money in

my mouth is. And I came to LA and I became a cop. And I immediately found out like 90% of the things that I thought were, you know, how it should happen, et cetera, was, wasn't true. I was wrong about the vast majority, but the idea that there are bad cops out there, there's racism, you know, out there within the world of policing. That's still true. That's something that I did find to be true, whether it's more far and few in between, or whether it's, you know, more targeted specific areas it's a whole different thing but it was an interesting experience for me so i gotta ask uh as somebody who was in the military i've never heard the uh terminology taliban war wagon uh what exactly is that great question dude i still don't know but i can tell you it's not a fucking

ambulance that i can hear you know this is an absurd phrase yeah no it was it was pretty creative. And I don't know where he came up with it. But like, it's got the alliteration at the end, it rolls off the tongue. It's a good buzzword. He tried to be a little bit more proper and call it a cloned vehicle that disguised as an ambulance. But it was already too late. You know, the vernacular stuck in my head. Yeah, that is absurd. All right. So you go, what were the most surprising things when you became a cop that you were just like, Whoa, that's not what I was expecting? Or I actually thought it was like 180 degree difference than the way things are done? Yeah, good question, man. Look, I think that I did already know about the reality of violence,

you know, like that, that is a concept that a vast majority of people, especially in the United States do not know, they just don't understand it, they have a tremendous amount of privilege, they don't know what it feels like to be stuck in a violent circumstance, where it's essentially things end up turning somewhat primal, and you have to either defend yourself or defend somebody else. And you have to make decisions that you never thought you'd have to make like that, aspect of the job, I understood enough having encountered a lot of the, you know, the essentially outcomes of that violence as a paramedic. And I also understood that the field is a very dynamic situation. You can't train for every possible circumstance. You can't, you certainly have to

just trust the people you've got. You have to be able to install some discretion, put policies in place, but there's never going to be a perfect scenario. There's never going to be perfect legislation or policy around that. That much I knew. And of course, you spent time in the army, right? So those two things I'm sure are also things that you've learned. What I didn't quite understand, um, I guess not having been in this situation at the time was what it's like to be responsible for it. Like if you're in a scenario where, you know, you pull up on a traffic stop and it's just a regular traffic stop, why cops are thinking like why they do the little things they do, why they might approach the car with their gun out, why they might stay behind the

second window. Um, you know, why they might, why it's so important to see somebody's hands, um, how quickly it, this is something I learned, how quickly you can go from somebody's hands that you can see them to you getting shot in the face. I mean, that's like one, one and a half seconds, the reaction times there until you train for those circumstances. It's pretty crazy. Um, I didn't quite understand, uh, at the time how the use of force continuum worked, you know, that like, I'll give you a more recent example, like the idea of a cop choking somebody to me was like, that's crazy. Until I started doing jujitsu and learning, you know, policing and understanding the difference between a cop choking somebody into carotid restraint, you know, things

like that, just didn't, I didn't know. I also didn't understand how the law applies to things and, and, you know, the difference in reactivity and proactivity in terms of like, going out there and stopping folks versus, you know, we're showing up to a 911 call and how that changes the circumstances. There's plenty of it I could dive into, but just a lot that I didn't understand. And the laws behind what's the difference between murder and manslaughter. Everyone just used the word murder and everyone thinks everybody should go to jail and how that process works is different too. Yeah. I always tell a story to people where I was in the military, go to Iraq, I come back pretty comfortable with weapons. Other people carrying weapons, generally that doesn't freak

me out and feel like I can do what I need to do if I've put in a situation where it's necessary. But when I came back, I was probably back six months, 12 months, whatever it was. And I was driving in a pickup truck that I had. And it had tinted windows, but it was dark out as well. So kind of hard to see into the vehicle. And I was driving on a highway and I had my younger brother at the time with me, I think that he was probably 14 or 15 years old. And they see the passenger seat, I'm in the driver's seat. And so as I'm driving on the highway, get cop pulls behind me turns on the sirens, I pull over to the side of the road. And you know, again, it's dark out. So you basically see the sirens, you can see the headlines, which can't really see kind of, you

know, who's approaching or whatever. And so I rolled down the driver's side window. And, you know, in generally well, enough educated to, you know, put my hands on the steering wheel, like don't make any sudden movements shut the car off like all the like super super basic stuff that uh you know most people shouldn't know uh at this point and all of a sudden it just pounding on the back passenger window and so i'm like what the hell right so all of a sudden i start to roll down the passenger side driver window and the cops got his flashlight out his gun drawn and he's screaming at us and what i realized very quickly is that he's screaming at my brother because my brother doesn't have his hands up, you know, on the dash or whatever. And so, uh, very quickly, I, you know,

yell at him to get his hands up and I'll start yelling at the cop. I'm like, yo, my little brother's in here, like chill the fuck out. Right. And, uh, it's one of those situations where, you know, the cop is, you know, he eventually puts the gun down and explains, Hey, look, you know, sorry about kind of starling you guys, but, uh, recently there'd been a shooting cop had pulled over somebody on the street. Uh, they turned around, they shot at the cop, something that actually hit the cop, but all the cops were just on edge in general, because that was kind of a reminder, like be extra careful. Uh, and so it being at night with tinted windows, whatever, like, you know, it makes sense in hindsight, but sure as hell didn't make

sense when he's got his gun drawn is, you know, flashlight basically in our eyes and he's yelling and screaming. And so it's one of those situations where, uh, you forget that like basically two strangers are meeting on the side of the road. Uh, neither one of them has context about the other person, what they're thinking, uh, what they've been through that day. Are they tired? Are they not tired? Like there's so much complexity that goes into it. And if that happens millions of times a year tens of millions hundreds of millions of times a year of course things are going to go wrong right like yeah like statistically yeah it's just you can't stop them all and so what i think ends up happening and what i want to talk about next is kind of like the police training

it seems like the police training if done correctly just drastically reduces the probability that things go wrong it won't completely eliminate it but it at least takes it from hey maybe there's a three percent likelihood to can we get it to you know tenth of a point of likelihood that don't think that's going to happen. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it's a good point, man, because you know, when, when we talk about what can be improved with police training, I think we have to talk about like how they're trained today. Right. I went through a sheriff's academy in California. That's known as one of like the more intense, you know, stress academies that still exist today. And, you know, it was, it was fantastic training. Look, the thing, the thing

about being a cop is it's a dangerous job. I mean, I like people float statistics about how other jobs are generally more dangerous, but you're more likely to get killed by somebody, like literally murdered in this job. And the thing about training is that from a safety standpoint, what they try to train cops is to know what to look for and to trust their intuition and to not take chances. And in the case that you're describing to me, I don't know what the rest of the context is, you know, but you know, pulling up behind the rear passenger door, what they call the C pillar there ensures that like, they have an advantage over you. If you're going to try and, you know, pull a gun, he approached from the passenger side instead of the driver's side, which is another

tactic to try and surprise people in case there's something they're laying weight in the ambush. And it's a night, you know, if it's a night, you know, they're pointing lights at your, your rear view mirror in your, your, your side mirror so that you can't see them approach and they're avoiding silhouettes. So they're doing all of this and it might sound like over the top, but there are so many cops that get shot on standard routine traffic stops where you have to go through the process of basically treating everything a certain way. And then in your head, like understanding it in your head that this is the way it works, but creating body language for the other people that essentially deescalates them and makes them feel comfortable. So if I walk up

to a car, I don't know who it is, like the way that it works. And I'm sure you felt like this in the military, you have to kind of think, okay, this person might be the nicest person in the world. I'm going to act like I'm the nicest person in the world. In my head, I'm going to have a plan to eliminate them as a threat at every moment. Every second I'm sitting there thinking, where are their hands going? And this is just the nature of the job. Now, the training isn't, we should remove that from the job because that is a necessary element. The nature of violence, the nature of field, you have to be cautious. You have to be thinking about these things. there are ways to, I believe, improve these outcomes, not just based off of the training

that like in these individual situations, but the types of situations that were, you know, officers are constantly putting themselves in, in the first place, right? One thing that I think is kind of interesting is the defund movement, as they've talked about it, you know, I agree with some of it, I don't agree with with all of it. One of the things I agree with is the idea that the police are being asked to be the solution for problems that they shouldn't be asked to be a solution for. Homelessness, addiction, mental health, these are things that require other specialties that have been kind of thrusted upon the police over the last several decades that shouldn't be thrusted upon the police. And because of it, they're now putting themselves in

a lot of situations in which sometimes these dangerous outcomes exist. Now, the difference between what is being proposed potentially by some activists and the practical version of that, some activists feel like you don't send the cops to these calls. You don't send the cops to like let's say a standard mental health checkup call, for example. And I'll give you an example. This video was just released like two days ago. And it was just a regular routine welfare check in Ohio. And I'm still trying to understand the details of everything. But as I understand it, it was just a call for a person who might be potentially suicidal. I don't think he threatened anybody necessarily, but he was suicidal. The officers walked up to the front door,

one officer kind of, and she's smart. She kind of canted herself from the door. So she's not standing right in front of the door. She put herself in a position of advantage, something you're trained to do no matter what. And the guy, she's like, Oh, Hey, the guy's coming to the front door just to get ready to have a conversation. The guy opens the door, pulls out a gun. This all happens in about half a second, tries to shoot her in the head. She is, you know, she's got training. She rapidly drops to her like, you know, crouching position to avoid the rounds, takes out her handgun, starts exchanging gunfire. If I was, if she's not there, or if there was no officer and it was a routine mental health call, whoever showed up there would

have gotten shot. The guy didn't even look. The guy just kind of opened the door and pointed the gun at whoever that was the nearest person. I've personally responded to calls and you see this happen all the time where you respond, let's say to a bus and someone's kind of making someone uncomfortable because they keep talking to themselves and that's it. Benign mental health call. And by the time you show up, that person stabbed three people with a screwdriver and you go, okay, it's all evolving by the time you get there. So the idea of replacing cops versus supplementing them with mental health resources that are actually in charge of the scene, unless it turns violent, unless it turns criminal makes perfect sense, but you can't remove

the fight, the funding for the cops themselves because they still have to respond. So there's a lot to it. It feels like also like there's an argument between like, Hey, don't send a police officer, send like, let's say a mental health expert, right? Okay. That's one kind of extreme of it. The other extreme is send the police as they are today. right? And I think that the in-between in there is actually, well, what happens if we send police officers who have mental health expert training, or if we send a police officer plus somebody who has mental health training, right? There doesn't have to be such a black and white world. There's actually some nuance and kind of centrist view here of how can we provide the best care for

citizens without also putting them in danger or putting other people in danger, right? To your point about the guy who walks through the front door and just starts shooting. Like, yes, we don't want to put the person who's at the home in danger, but we sure as hell don't want to put a mental health expert in danger either. Right. Yeah. And I think that compromise, honestly, that practical compromise is key. You know, this all takes money. Here's the issue. It feels like defunding the police came out as a kind of a punitive strategy that kind of backed into a more logical approach. but uh the the concept of just taking a money away from the police department doesn't solve anything because i'll tell you this we were touching on training earlier there is a lot

of training we could be putting officers through whether it's mental health whether it's uh you know advanced tactics in terms of de-escalation whether it's more understanding of the law and how it applies for fourth amendment purposes i mean there's so much more you could do people are constantly complaining that um that cops don't get enough training for example i mean that's something that I think even cops would agree with to a certain extent. And it's also state by state. So that's different. But if the average cop is getting paid less than $50,000 a year, and they're not being trained enough, and you're also complaining, which is a valid reason, you can say that, hey, the quality of cops that we're hiring aren't high enough. You don't solve that problem

by reducing the resources even more and reducing the funding for the training and for the better cops and all the things that we want to do. Similarly, the compromise that you're describing where the cops are better trained on mental health, how to handle those scenarios. And we're also sending mental health professionals or homeless liaisons or addiction specialists to these calls with the cops, even saying that the cops are secondary and those specialists are primary and they only get involved if they have to. And they can even stay out of view. I mean, you can do all of those things. It just takes more money. But if you're stuck on the idea that the cops need to be defunded and you're explaining it backwards, then no solution gets

found. I mean, it doesn't solve anything. So when we talk about police reform in general, what are the things that you think make sense? What are the practical solutions versus the things that are just absolutely asinine and completely impractical? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first one we've already touched on a bit, which is alternate resources and social response. I think that's one of the best things to come out of the last several months in terms of conversations around police reform. I think it's something that, that police departments have long since embraced the idea of and have implemented for years. I know Seattle PD, one of the agencies that we work with experimented not only with actually having mental health responders respond

in the field several years ago, but also by ensuring that those mental health responders were actually putting valuable mental health data for, for people who are constantly in contact with the police. What I mean by that is like, what are their triggers? What are their hooks? Like what are the things that they, what calms them down? What are their deescalatory techniques? What are the things that upset them? And they put that information into the police system. So when an officer is responding to that call and they have to get there before, you know, the mental health responders get there, they're able to use that to deescalate the scenarios that they see fit. I mean, this has been going on for years. So progress in that front requires obviously

more momentum, which is, which is a good outcome of the last several months, but also requires more funding, not just on the technology side, but obviously on the human resource side. I think, you know, more practically speaking, you can have this all operate out of the fire department. The concept of creating a tertiary agency that is not police or fire and just does this, it could work. It's just going to take a lot longer. It's going to be more expensive. In the meantime, if your concern is that you don't want to lump these folks in with the police department themselves, and you want them to make them trained as fire department employees, because health is mental health. And I think that makes perfect sense. That's a stopgap. It's

faster. So taking that approach, number one, I think is going to solve for a large variety of issues. The rest of it comes down to legislation policies and training, most of which, again, are going to require additional funding. I think I'm all for, personally, increasing the amount of training officers have to go through in the beginning and increasing continuous training requirements. Right now, the states have totally different, they have the ability to have totally different requirements. And what the state of California does might be far, far along the training spectrum and much more in depth, many more hours than maybe a different state in the United States. So that causes some discrepancies, but funding is usually the issue for all of those

things. And with funding, you can also go out and find better cops. Because I think when I say better cops, I mean, higher quality candidates to actually apply for the jobs. I'm not saying that the cops out there today aren't doing the best with what they've got. But I constantly hear people say, well, doctors, you know, have to go through all this training, or lawyers have to go through all this training. And, you know, what, you know, if you, if you want to become a cop today, you got to be kind of crazy to do it. That's just the way it feels. Because it's not just that the salary is low. But it's the most hated profession potentially, right in the United States, you know, immediately people are going to hate you just for, for the fact that that's

your job. It's extremely dangerous. And one of the things that I think is so important in policing from police officers is to have empathy. I think empathy, and I don't just mean that emotionally, you know, in the context of everyday use for that word. I mean, empathy also teaches you how to be a good SWAT cop, how to know where you think the bad guy's going to pop out and teach you how to be a good detective. Where do you think you need to look for clues? But in the context of what I'm describing, empathy can make you a better cop. It can help you deescalate scenarios. It can help you use discretion in a way that essentially ends up being the best needs of the community. Now, the problem is that people who have that high level of emotional intelligence,

they're very empathetic. They're naturally built to absorb the emotions of others. And this job, policing, takes that out of you. You're constantly dealing with tragedy every day. You're dealing with angry people. You're dealing with sad people, victims. You're dealing with people who hate you. You're fighting. It's an incredibly emotionally draining job on a day-to-day basis. And if you're empathetic, not only is that part going to hurt, the part that's going to hurt is like the fact that your family and friends might turn against you. You know, if the, some type of news thing comes up and that's brutal to them too. And, and the lack of any type of support or just the idea that the country hates you is going to drain it out of you. So what we have here,

all the empathetic cops, they, they just, they leave, they go, okay, I can't do this job anymore. We're dealing with a massive amount of attrition, and we're losing a lot of the cops that have that. They're empathetic, but also have other options. They don't have to be cops. They've got degrees. They can go do something else. Maybe they want to go back to law school. They want to go get into sales.

They want to dive into Bitcoin, bro. They can do whatever it is they want to do. They have options. The ones that stay either love the job like I do. I don't get paid a tremendous amount of money for this, or they just might not have options. And that is not exactly progress. That's we're going backwards. Does it play into, you know, look, haven't been in the military, lots and lots of guys end up going to being prison guards, police officers, kind of all sorts of, I'll just call it kind of law enforcement or defense related industries and occupations. How much of the training that we gave to our soldiers over the last 20 years as we've been at war in the Middle East trickles back into not only the mindset, but also the skill set and kind of posturing of those who end up in law enforcement positions.

But then also, it seems like there's a lot of equipment, you know, I saw last year, at one point, the one that just kind of was like, wait a second, this looks like something that I had seen in Iraq, was I think it was in Minnesota, potentially, there was a video and they basically had like an MRAP, right? Yeah. An MRAP. Yeah. A mine resistant armored vehicle going down the street of a, of a neighborhood and everyone was decked out and kind of riot slash SWAT gear. And they were shooting, you know, smoke grenades basically at, at people who were on their porch and I don't know all the details. And so, you know, let's just give the police officers the benefit of the doubt that there was more to the story than what we saw in the video. Let's also give the benefit of the doubt to the people on the porch and say like, Hey, they probably were pretty shocked that they smoke grenade shot at them, right? And so kind of everyone ends up in a situation that they didn't

expect. But the scene of these mine resistant armored vehicles rolling down the neighborhood streets of the United States, I think just kind of blew people's minds. And so how do you see kind of the wars and the military training and the equipment and all that stuff, kind of bleeding into the police force? And do you think that has any impact on any of this? Yeah, I mean, it certainly does. But, you know, what we have to break it down for a second, because the concept of, you know, the militarization of police, you break it down from equipment, you know, what they what they have available to them, to, you know, tactics and training and how they're able to handle things, and then policy, and how they use the equipment and the training itself. So when it comes to

equipment, you basically have to, you want to have what you need to do the job in your worst case scenario. If something were to happen within the United States, whether it's a terrorist attack or whatever else is happening domestically, the military isn't showing up rapidly deploying within 15 minutes to come to us with tanks and MRAPs and all the stuff that they need to handle that. Unfortunately, that's going to be a local law enforcement issue. If something happens in the city of LA, LAPD is going to have to respond. The residents of the city of LA, for example, are going to need to know that if someone puts a bomb on the street, that someone like cops are going to be able to show up in a couple of minutes and start handling that. And police cars are not

bulletproof. The, the crown Victorians that we use, the Ford Explorers, they're not bulletproof. We don't have that kind of money and bulletproof vehicles are just, they're, they're cumbersome. They're not fast enough. You know this, right? Like they're, it's just, it's a gas mileage nightmare. They sound cool. So the equipment, you know, the, the, the United States had a program with the US military during the drawdown that allowed them, I'm sorry, the law enforcement agencies that allowed them to either get some of this equipment for free or at a massive discount

so they could adequately prepare themselves for some of these worst case scenarios. People use the word tanks. You and I know these aren't tanks. These aren't M1A, yeah, like these aren't Abrams tanks rolling around with massive guns and cannons on them. All these quote unquote tanks are armored vehicles that are defensively geared up.

They're designed so that if they have to go into a scenario where people are shooting at them, they're bulletproof enough to be able to handle that active shooter scenarios, or if they have to drive to, you know, uh, through the purpose of like, let's say EOD explosive ordnance disposal, they have to have a vehicle that can approach a bomb. And if that bomb explodes, everybody inside that vehicle stays alive, which is what the MRAPs are designed for in the purpose, you know, mine resistant or ambush protected vehicles. That's what it's designed for. Um, so the idea of having armored vehicles, you're probably not going to be able to convince my mom that I'm

is supposed to go into a place where everyone's shooting or something exploding without the idea of an armored vehicle. What ends up, what ends up, I think it's a threshold is how they're utilized and like where it goes over the top. Like what I think ends up being kind of dumb, but this is my personal opinion is when you've got like local law enforcement agencies and their SWAT teams are like in, in straight up Marpat or, or like, you know, like multicam camouflage, because that's just like, that's a, I want to feel cool type moment. And separating the, I want to feel cool to, I actually need these tools for my job, I think is an easy win to solve for some of the optics of these vehicles and this gear and equipment traveling around. The other thing I

hear constantly about is cops don't need assault rifles or anything like that. It's again, that's unfortunately in, in today's violent world, it's, it's not the case. Uh, if you want a cop to be able to engage in, in, you know, accurately shoot somebody, which you absolutely do, you know, within a range of beyond 10, 10 meters, you're going to want a rifle in their hands and not a handgun. There was a shooting that just happened, for example, and I think it was Phoenix, Arizona, just about a month and a half, two months ago, this footage was released where a guy grabbed a baby. He took a baby from his girlfriend and she called out and he started running into traffic. He pulled out a gun. She called out one and said, please help save my baby. He started shooting at

a bunch of random cars at the intersection. The cops showed up in 60 seconds. It's a patrol officer, the officer takes out his rifle, um, you know, positions himself in the, like, you know, right out of the car and, and is aiming at this guy's head and waits until the, you know, they're trying to deescalate, Hey, drop the gun, drop the gun. But then the guy points the gun at the baby's head. And the, the officer takes one shot, hits him in the head, drops him, runs up, grabs the baby. And you can see in this video, it's incredible. He goes from taking a shot, grabbing the baby, sitting down and becoming a dad, like, Hey buddy, how you doing? And that's, that's like them, you know, that's something that you need officers to be able to do too. So we need them

to have the equipment for the inevitably, you know, worst possible outcome training. Like I was saying is like what you're describing when they're shooting smoke grenades, when they're doing all this stuff, that is a case by case basis. In some cases, you know, like after in hindsight, I look back and go, okay, that's kind of an interesting decision they made. I don't know if I would have done the same thing, or I will, you know, in this area itself, you just have to operate with, with what you've got. It's hard for me to armchair quarterback that stuff because I don't know what's going on in their heads. And all we see is 15 second videos. Um, what I'll say is if they utilize this equipment in a way that is outside of policy or ends up being unreasonable

in hindsight, then those agencies have, they they're ultimately responsible for doing that in the first place that ends up being a policy and training element. One of the things that, um, I think, uh, people really underestimate is, uh, there's policies and then there's the execution of policies and, um, uh, and that works both for good or bad. Right. So I'll, uh, I don't want to say which department this was with, but, uh, I came back from, uh, from Iraq. Uh, I did a ride along for a couple, I think it was like a week or something, uh, with a local police department. And, uh, I rode with the same guy, I think it was like two or three days in a row. And, uh, one of the first days, he basically said to me, you know, Hey, look, uh, basically we're going to do

super basic stuff, but if there's a bank robbery or whatever, uh, I'm basically gonna pull over the side of the road, you're going to get out. And, uh, I'm going to roll to whatever the call is, if it's, you know, deemed in any way, you know, actually dangerous in terms of, uh, the original call. And so I was, and that's kind of an interesting, uh, approach. Why would you do that? He's basically explained that in the past, they hadn't done that. And next thing you know, they got to ride along, you know, and there's a shootout or whatever. And yeah. And I don't think anything ever happened, but just like the policy got revised of like, Hey, maybe we shouldn't be bringing the ride along folks that are unarmed, uh, to these dangerous situations. And so, um,

you know, we're, we're going through it. And, uh, towards the end of the second day, there's a, um, a call and he, uh, it's basically, you know, somebody wants, uh, somebody to go, uh, the police to come by and check on a, a home. And so I don't remember all of the details exactly, but, uh, there's two key parts to the, uh, the story that I remember. So when we pull up, it's basically one of these like town home type situations, it's an end unit. Uh, and he's like you know stay here uh he gets out he's got his uh his pistol in his hand he walks up to the front door knocks on the door nobody comes walks around checks the windows doesn't see anything goes to the back door realizes that the uh the back door actually is uh open and so uh if i

remember correctly it was like a check on the home because maybe it was me at work who like their alarm had gone off or something right okay so the back back door is open so hey you know put two and two together maybe somebody broke in the home so he basically walks back around the house comes to me and he says, uh, he used the radio. He calls and says, you know, Hey, I'm going to go check this out. And he looks at me dead in the eye and he goes, uh, you know how to use one of these. And he points to the shotgun that's kind of in the, uh, in the rack right behind them. And I said, uh, well, I've used one before. And he says, great. If I'm not back in five minutes, press that red button and a release and make sure that you come get me. And I'm looking at,

and I'm looking at this guy and I'm like, I definitely know that's not part of the policy because we were talking about how you could drop me off on the side of the road, right? Like whatever. but what stuck out to me in that story was this was a human right and he basically was like look you know i gotta go do my job here but there's nobody here no backup no whatever so fast forward basically he goes in the home and uh and within you know 30 seconds 45 seconds whatever uh there are a bunch of cops pull up and kind of the backup shows up and so i get out of the car what will the cops all say all they know is that there's been a call that somebody broke into a home and they see a guy with no uniform on immediately the cops like who are you uh well hold on you know i just

came in the car. And so what you start to realize is every single part of the iteration of a story like that happens every single day over and over and over again. And there's complexity when there's like a ride along and it's not an officer or whatever, but you can very quickly see everyone who's kind of armchair quarterbacking some of this stuff. Like what would you do in this situation? Right. And do you go in the home? Do you not go in the home? Do you wait for backup? Do you not wait for backup? Like, do you go in with your gun drawn? Do you go with your gun holster? Do you use your flashlight? Do you not, you know, all these different components. And it's just, it's an impossible situation, I think, to get right every single time. But I also think that there's things

that we can do from a technology standpoint. So tell us a little bit about Spider and kind of what you guys are building and kind of what the impact of this technology and other technology that kind of police officers are using, what that can do for policing, and really just for them fulfilling their job to protect and serve citizens. Yeah, so look, SpiderTech is, the whole goal here is to try and help law enforcement agencies become customer service oriented organizations. I mean, that's like the big thing we're trying to do. The way that we've kind of approached this, I mean, there's a few things that we fundamentally believe. Number one, if you were to ask a police chief 10 years ago, hey, what is that key

performance metric that will prevent you from getting fired as long as it goes well? They would have told you, oh, it's crime rates, crime rates going up, crime rates going down. That's how I'm usually measured. If you were to ask them today, they're going to tell you that that performance metric is public perception. Crime rates can inform public perception, but ultimately it's the way that the public perceives how you and your agency are doing that is the most important thing, which is reasonable to me. I understand that. Now, the other thing is when I was hired as a police officer, my chief had told me, listen, what we have here is a bank of goodwill or bank of trust with the community. Every time one of our employees or officers goes out there and has

a positive interaction with a community member, they're making a deposit into that bank account. And we need as many people to make as many deposits as possible because ultimately, someone's going to fuck something up just statistically. And we have to hope we have enough in that bank account to cash that check. That's what we're trying to protect against. Now, I kind of combined those two things. And at the company, we sat there and we thought about it. We thought, okay, listen, we believe fundamentally that interactions between employees of the police department and the community members are essentially ground zero for all improvements and declines in public perception. Everything after that is a game of telephone. You can't

really control for it, what the media is going to say, what social media is going to say. What you want to focus on is optimizing and understanding those interactions that your employees or officers are having with community members, finding those areas for improvement and focusing on improving that specifically. And by doing that, you will ultimately increase or improve the public perception of your agency. But even to do that, you have to start measuring it. So that's part of what we do. Now, our approach to how to solve this problem,

we kind of looked at how the e-commerce companies were able to build trust for people to actually put credit card information on the internet. I mean, you and I are old enough to remember when that first came out, like people didn't just jump into the internet and go, yeah, take whatever you want. One of the things they had to start doing

is like companies like Amazon, they would have to start, when you bought something, they'd have to send you an email that said, hey, here's your order confirmation. Here's your confirmation number. And just by doing that, that immediately made people feel like, okay, that makes sense. I trust this now that something's happening. But they're also setting expectations. If Amazon tells you your item is likely to be delivered on Wednesday, you're probably not going to call on Tuesday to ask where your item is.

But if they don't tell you anything, you're more likely to call on Tuesday. All of this isn't just destroying the trust between you as a customer and Amazon. It's ultimately costing Amazon, it would cost them a tremendous amount of money. If they had to pick up the phone every single time someone was calling about their items, they didn't automate this entire customer service process. Now, similarly, these e-commerce companies are also sending out surveys. How do you feel about this product? How do you feel about this service? And they're doing that to identify where the areas for improvement are, the liabilities. They're also doing that to positively promote good performers in that sense, right? And so we took this type of automated customer service

platform and we applied it starting with policing. And the way it works is if you live in one of our 50 plus cities across the United States and Canada. You call 911. The moment you hang up, you'll get a text message that says, hey, here's your 911 call number. Here's what to expect. You'll get updates. Hey, you know, when the officer's on their way over there regarding if there's a delay or something like that, you'll have the opportunity if you want to actually just cancel the call and fill out a report, you know, report right there on your phone. So you don't have to inconvenience yourself if you want. And then when an officer comes and takes a report and they leave. They'll submit something into their system that essentially allows for you to now get

an email or text saying, hey, here's your case number. Here's what to expect. Here's how a detective will be assigned. Here's what you need to send your insurance company. Here's your victim advocate, whoever it is that you need. And then throughout the process, a detective has been assigned, a case has been closed, an arrest has been made. And now we're starting to work with district attorneys to do the same thing for the court systems as well, to be able to provide that Amazon-style customer service. Now, during this whole process, we're sending out these mobile friendly surveys to measure the interactions. Hey, how did the officer treat you when they spoke with you? How was your experience with the dispatcher? How was your experience with

the detective? And they're doing that not just, again, to identify where areas for improvement are, but I think this is the most important piece. They're doing that to change officer culture. What I mean by that is positive reinforcement goes a long way. Some of it's carrot, some of stick. In order to improve officer culture, you have to help reward the modern officer for being a modern officer. Right now, from a data standpoint, all these agencies are collecting enforcement data. I can tell you in most agencies how many citations someone wrote, how many arrests they made, how many stops they made, traffic stops, et cetera, et cetera. That's going to be the only performance data I might be able to gather about this officer. Once you throw in something like

an NPS score or something along the lines of how many positive survey responses they've gotten, and you start rewarding them and patting them on the back for that metric, they can start pulling away from trying to show you that they're a good cop by making stops and writing sites and proactive enforcement action. And they can start focusing on just being a good person when they're interacting with people because they can get rewarded for that. And that's what we're seeing within the dozens of agencies that we're live in, that we've transformed the cultures there. We've almost gamified going out there and just providing good community policing. And that helps change the culture. Yeah. And it feels like what you're really doing is you're taking the best of

the non-law enforcement world, right? The technology world. And you're basically saying, let's incorporate this. Let's actually use the feedback. Let's use the information, the data to get better. What do you see as the biggest changes that people actually make inside of these police departments or these organizations once you give them that data? Yeah, that's a great question. Look, I mean, they utilize the data in a variety of ways. You have the day-to-day operational use cases where if a good survey response comes in, I'm going to forward it directly to the officer and give them an attaboy, attagirl. If it's a negative survey response, I'm going to investigate it. That's the day-to-day ability to constantly every day optimize your

organization and not let anything slip through the cracks. We tell chiefs that's the I was blind and now I can see moment that we give them. But the other side of this is how they're able to use data in larger sets, whether it's, you know, in monthly meetings or yearly, or when they go to city council and they try to allocate funding. I'll give you an example here. What we ended up having with one of our customers, they were talking about a growing homelessness issue in their city. And the city council was saying that this is mostly anecdotal and they couldn't really, you know, quantify it. Typically in city council, you've got like, in these meetings, you have like a couple dozen of your loudest residents will come in and they're either

activists or, or they're not activists, they're just residents. And they're your frequent flyers in these community meetings. And those are the ones that typically, you know, bend the ear of the city council people the most, which is fine. That's how democracy works. But what we're doing is now empowering everybody else to be able to participate in that conversation to a certain extent. So when this, this particular chief who is trying to explain to council, look, we have an issue with enforcement, you know, thefts are going up, vandalism is going up, all these things are going up with increasing homelessness population. And they're saying, sorry, but we don't see it. One day, he shows up with this large data set saying, here's, you know, thousands of survey

responses from your city council, district city councilwoman from your district city councilman, and going through this whole process. And then weeks later, walking away with a six figure, you know, addition to the budget. So he has the resources to be able to tackle that particular issue, including with special mental health responders and homeless liaisons specifically to be able to solve for that. So using this data to basically give these cities an understanding of what's actually happening so it's no longer anecdotal, not just based on where the crime is, but how people are feeling. Because neighborhoods, some neighborhoods might feel like they're underpoliced and some neighborhoods might feel like they're overpoliced. You can't

put a one size fits all there. But if you're asking these neighborhoods, what do you think the problems are? What do you want from us? You can actually start making actionable decisions and allocating resources appropriately. So that's just one of the examples. Yeah, I think that's a great example. Before we get into the rapid fire questions to wrap up, you guys asked me one question to end it. Where can we send people if they want to learn more about spider if they want to find you on the internet? Yeah, so find me you can find me on Twitter. I'm trying to I'm trying to blow up like pomp here on Twitter. So I'm just out there making content dude uh you can find me just tweet bitcoin just tweet bitcoin that's what i gotta do i gotta

tweet bitcoin i gotta start like talking about clubhouse i gotta move to miami i gotta do all that stuff and i'll have a hundred thousand followers by thursday um yeah no look it's my my twitter handle rahul but it's spelled creatively r-a-h-o-o-l and s-i-d-o-o or who and uh find us spider tech you know follow spider tech s-p-i-d-r no e because we're cool tech people tech, T E C H spider tech.com. Uh, happy to connect with anybody and, uh, talk more about this. I'm super passionate about it. Spider tech. So no E in the spider, but a E in the tech, you gotta, you know, if you're a real tech company, you would just remove all the E's. Yeah. You know what? We're not that crazy, dude. Cause if you just look at it, it just sounds like

gibberish. Can't get away with it. The spider was acronym when we started, it was a research project for me. You know how police and military love their acronyms. So it was specialized police intelligence and data resource. And the idea was how it was a project, how do we help leverage data to do more than just catch bad guys. And then learn this lesson. If you're a founder, and you're trying to start a company, and you're thinking really early on, maybe it's time to rebrand, pull the trigger. Because when you're several years in, it's more expensive, more difficult to rebrand. Don't do it to yourself. I could not agree more. I got three questions for you, then you get one for me. First one, what is the most important book you've ever read?

most important book i've ever read oh good question i'm looking at my bookcase you know what it's hard it's hard to say most important what i'm not going to pull it up but uh one book that i just read recently that i think everyone should read because it really uh kind of adds a new perspective to humanity is sapience have you read that one sapience is good it could be a little bit of a dry read but i would power through it because it kind of explains the history of of of you know humankind in a way that allows you to adapt that perspective for a lot of things that we're dealing with today. I appreciated that one. That was one of the more recent ones, but the rest of these books, man, I got Hacking Darwin up here,

our final invention, Life 3.0, just AI type stuff. And the rest of it's on investing because I'm trying to get like you, dude. So I just read your letter and I read books. I love it. Second one is more personal sleep schedule. I used to sleep five or six hours. Now I'm like eight or nine. And this one comes from our friends who already ate sleep. They've got a thermoregulated bed. Super hot, super cold. I sleep on an ice cube basically and sleep like a little baby. My wife tells me that I'm a much more enjoyable person now that I sleep eight or nine hours and get good sleep. What's your sleep schedule? And how has that changed over the years? Yeah, man, that's a great question. And I've heard so much about eight sleep and so many good

things about it. I really should give it a try. I will say number one, whether you think of eight sleep or something else, invest in your bed. Like I'm a big proponent of you sleep, you know, one third of your life, or maybe a little less, if you know, depending on how you sleep, is in bed, spend money on getting something that fits for you, people really, really underestimate that. And with with the, you know, the creation of eight sleep, and, you know, like this kind of smart sleeping concept, really optimizing is important. For me, it's important, you know, I try to get at least six hours, seven and a half is a good full night's rest. For me, personally, it's that's an equal amount of sleep cycles. I try to hack it up a little bit. I mean,

I don't take naps as much as I used to, I try to avoid taking naps and just try to, you know, focus all of my sleep, uh, when I can and I'll, I'll sleep in on the weekends. At least I'll try and sleep in once. And I sleep in for me as a little over eight hours, you know, and, but then a little, when I get a little bit beyond that, I start feeling bad about myself, dude. You know, like the guy that no, come on, come on, dude. No, I just, cause I just, I don't want to go in like 10 hours. I feel like I could have spent that two hours doing something else, but I will say the minimum is an absolute requirement. And I've heard guys like Elon, you know, like all these people that you'd expect don't have the time to sleep. They're

prioritizing their sleep. So why can't we? Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You got to get eight sleep, man. I'm telling you, I am a convo. I know, dude. I know. I was just telling one of my friends about it too. I was telling her that she needs to go grab one. Third question, aliens, are you a believer or non-believer? Wow, good question. Yeah, I've heard you ask this question before. Look, I am a believer in the mathematical problem that is aliens probably exist. That's as far as i'm willing to go um and i like my mind is open i try to like kind of react in terms of probabilities and the the fact that the universe is so vast and we know so very little about it it comes off it would come off to me as really arrogant to say that they don't someone say that

aliens probably don't exist like it's the likelihood is much higher than they do the form of those aliens, I would say is like up for debate. Um, there's a lot to be said about civilizations that have been extinct, uh, or civilizations that are much earlier than us is bacteria on Mars. Alien life is, you know, or are we, are we really talking about like half cyborg human beings that are so like multiple sons away? I mean, I could see both of them happening. I don't think we're going to see them in our lifetime and I'm not as like caught up in the UFO side of it. It's all fair. What question you got for me to, uh, to finish up? Well, dude, let's see. Let's see. Your favorite seed investment in the last 365 days. I don't

know if you went into eight sleep. So I'm gonna take that off because you already put them in there. What is your favorite one? Favorite seed? I can't pick a favorite. Okay, you know what? No, let me let me rephrase. Let me let me cut you off. What is a seed investment that you regret the most in the last two years that you didn't make? Oh, that I didn't make? Yeah, you didn't. I'll do one even better than that. It's not a seed investment. It's actually an LP investment. So I'm a very, very small investor in a friend of mine's fund. I don't want to say who it is, but he'll know if he hears this. And he was thinking about starting a fund and he's very, very well connected, very well known in the kind of tech world. And I was like, you should

absolutely do this. Like no brainer. I'll be the first person to say yes to you. Uh, we were at dinner with, uh, with his girlfriend at the time and, uh, and, uh, my wife and we were like, yes, we're in, like, we absolutely will invest in you. You should definitely go do this. Like we believe in you. And so that pushed them and he ended up starting the fund. And then, um, he kind of went and gathered a bunch of checks. And, uh, when it came time for us to invest, it was basically at end. And we were like, ah, we'll throw a check in. And we throw a pretty small check into this thing. And then he went out and he had an epic fund. I mean, he literally put money into one company that ended up going from nothing to $2 billion in like 18 months. He was in the seed

series A, you know, like multiples return, probably one of the best performing funds of that vintage. And he just did company after company after company. And my regret is not that I invested. My regret is that I believed in my friend so much to convince him to go do this. I believed so much that I told him sight unseen of a deck, a strategy, anything like I'm in. And then when he was like, all right, put your check in. Like it was more of like, Oh, I'm supporting my friend. It wasn't me looking at it from like, Oh, I should really invest a lot of money in this. And so it's just a reminder that like, when you believe in something, then like really believe in it. Right. It's like, Oh, kind of like anything worth doing

is worth overdoing. I think that we lose sight of that and investing a lot. And so that's probably like the biggest regret that I have? That's actually, that's a really good answer. I, I have, you know, spent so much time kind of working with companies and thinking about investing from a founder standpoint that, um, you know, now I'm like kind of at a stage where I'm, I'm looking and thinking like, Hey, if I wrote an LP check, potentially, even if it's a really small one for me, who, you know, where would I put the money? And I've been meeting so many like amazingly talented investors who were previously founders with multiple exits. I'm going to plug him real quick. Matt Brazina is one of those guys that I've been spending some time with in the last

couple of months. And just talking to him about investing, other guys like Alex Rubalcava and Sean Amarati, these folks have really opened my eyes to what it takes to be a good investor. I've spent so much time thinking about what it takes to be a good founder and CEO and where I would put money there that I'm learning about that. And making that jump, I'm sure, is just as nerve wracking as it is elsewhere and going like this is a business opportunity versus this a friend i mean that's that's a scary thing if you believe believe yeah go all in all right bro listen thank you so much for doing this i really really enjoyed this i think that uh you sit in a very interesting spot both in the technology world and obviously the law enforcement

side so thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to uh share all your insights with us and we definitely want to do this again in the future you gotta pop i'll see you in miami