Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:23:38 · Garrett Langley
[00:23:38] S0: Yeah. Well, so it's it's funny. People pick on the minority report, and there's one thing that minority report did really well and one that they did really poorly. On the right side, you think about it, it was decades of arrests with only one wrongful arrest. How nice for the happy of our current judicial system and policing system only had one wrongful arrest and multiple death threats. That that sounds great. I think what we all get uncomfortable with, which I agree with, is this idea of inhuman thing, a pretty cog in the face of the movie, making this pretty terminal decision. There's steps in crime. There's notification that something's happened. That might be a 911 call to... In a in minority report that's this pre cog saying, hey. Something happened. Then there's an investigation. And then there's the, you know, making the arrest, closing the case. I think that a human should always be involved in the firm. Hey. Should shouldn't we go investigate? Is this a real crime? I think software and AI can completely run the investigation. Like, there is nothing particularly human about saying, hey. I'm gonna go look at this camera. I'm gonna go pull this cell phone tower dump. I'm gonna go look at this person's background. All these things. But then a human should be at the end saying, okay, Alexa, do I think this is enough burden of evidence to make an arrest? And I think that's actually a very human thing because I think societally that is gonna continue to change. I think the burden will continue to go up in a very good way. Like, I think that the the advocates who are against kind of increased police technology are missing that with this increased policing technology, we can increase the burden of an arrest and actually decrease what is one of our societal kind of black eyes of wrongful arrests. Like, how often... Too often do you see someone who's been in jail for a decade for a crime they never committed?
00:25:37 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:25:37] S2: Because I'm really fascinated by this. What is the role of drones in the future of public safety? What's what's really clear to me is that cameras are gonna get incredibly inexpensive, and I'm sure at some point, like, really, like, you know, a dollar per camera type price. You can have cameras everywhere being recorded twenty four hours a day. And to your point, you can use AI to parse through those to pull the minute when actually the, you know, black SUV showed up. Let's talk about drones. How do you think about the world of drones? [00:26:08] S0: We've deployed drones in some of the cities we work with that have a higher crime rate. We can detect the gunshot with our audio devices and have a drone there within under a minute. Whereas today, you know, some of our cities, you know, might deploy drones, you know, every so often. Our most advanced cities, drones get on scene first 94% of the time. [00:26:32] S2: Wow.
00:26:32 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:26:32] S2: Wow. [00:26:32] S0: And the level of kind of... Yeah. The level of precision. I'll give you one other example, Alexa, which I think speaks to the positive impact. So one of the towns we work with, they have a major mall. The mall is a customer. It's locked. And a car comes into the mall. It's a felony warrant on this vehicle. This person is known to be armed and dangerous. It's like not good. Right? And this is the busiest part of this town. Normally, happens is SWAT gets called in, and there's blue lights, there's automatic weapons, there's, you know, heavily armed, you know, response. And that would've been on the 05:00 news, and that mall would have had kind of quite a bit of a challenge over the coming months. And more importantly, someone probably was gonna die. And it was gonna be the the individual with a warrant, an officer, or an innocent bystander. Instead, what happened was this customer's kind of got the full Flock technology set. They get the alert. A drone is dispatched. Now, they also, in our system, can see that this this individual has a distinguishable tattoo on the forearm. The drone from over almost a half mile away can zoom in, finds the individual with the tattoo, can also see the individual is not currently armed and take him down from behind. No one has any idea. It's like this level of precision, this level of safety has never been seen before. And I think that's just like one in the last few months of thousands of examples where drones can just really change the way law enforcement works.
00:28:09 · Alexa von Tobel, Garrett Langley
[00:28:09] S2: By this year, 2025, Flock has surpassed 300,000,000 of ARR and with nearly 70% year over year growth, which is... I always like to say here at Inspired, we like to look for companies that as they get bigger, they get better. And actually, their scale ramps and their scaffolding is strong enough so that as they get more precise, the product is really nailed what it does. That she can grow faster. And you're doing that. What's helping you scale that quickly? [00:28:42] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think the number one thing is the products of work. I was talking to a chief of police in a small, small town in Indiana, and he was like, you know, our our contracts, you know, put most of the risk on us, not our customer. And he was like, mister Langley, you must be incredibly confident that your products are gonna work. And I'm like, yeah. I've just... I've seen it time and time again. When a city fully embraces technology, fully embraces Flock, the results don't happen in months. They happen in hours. And this is a transformation of both the culture inside the police department, the impact in the city, and we just hold so dearly as a company that, like, everyone deserves the right to be safe. And today, that's not the case. And and the combination of technology and really good people and really good policy, we can build that future together.
00:28:42 · Garrett Langley, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:42] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think the number one thing is the products of work. I was talking to a chief of police in a small, small town in Indiana, and he was like, you know, our our contracts, you know, put most of the risk on us, not our customer. And he was like, mister Langley, you must be incredibly confident that your products are gonna work. And I'm like, yeah. I've just... I've seen it time and time again. When a city fully embraces technology, fully embraces Flock, the results don't happen in months. They happen in hours. And this is a transformation of both the culture inside the police department, the impact in the city, and we just hold so dearly as a company that, like, everyone deserves the right to be safe. And today, that's not the case. And and the combination of technology and really good people and really good policy, we can build that future together. [00:29:35] S2: One question I... I've been sort of dying to ask you. If you think about the future, the next decade, you are probably one of the people in this country and maybe even the world who has a lot of clarity on what could be possible. And clearly, you have a really wonderful value system, which is like, I agree. Everyone should be able to move through this world and feel physically safe. Like, that that feels like a pretty basic human right. What is one belief that you have about the future that people would consider bold or even controversial that you can see super clearly?
00:30:14 · Garrett Langley
[00:30:14] S0: This is maybe not too bold, but I think capitalism solves most of the problems we're talking about. When you when you look at some of the countries that I've studied and say, what went wrong? Right? Where did things fall apart? And you look at it, and when this bedrock of safety disappears, capitalism tends to fall with it. And when that starts to happen, then people's future prospects goes down, which actually increases crime, which start this downward spiral. And so something I feel so strongly about is that we have this new project called Thriving Cities Fund where we invest in local entrepreneurs. It's not a nonprofit. You know? This is not a donation. I just believe so much that the the solution to our crime problem in America is jobs, is economic mobility. It's this just core belief that if you worked very, very hard, you can you can achieve so much in this country. And I I hope we never lose that because it's allowed me to do what I've been able to do in my life, and I hope the same will be true for my kids.