Rick Smith

What Officer Antonio Richardson did on the Dames Point Bridge is the job at its highest form. 40 minutes. An outstretched hand and a prayer. And a man walked back from the edge. No tech in the world replaces this. We just want to provide the right tech to give officers the time, info, and backup to be there when it matters. Grateful for @JSOPIO. If you're struggling, please reach out. Dial 988

Dispatcher. Officer. Paramedic. Nurse. All heroes in the same chain. But in that last link, 2 nurses are assaulted every hour in the US. That’s a public safety crisis hiding in plain sight. They deserve better, and we haven’t forgotten them. It’s National Nurses Week, thank you for the vital role you play.

Largest-ever national study on classroom phone bans is out. Headline finding: disappointing. Test scores essentially flat. Suspensions up 16% in year one. The kind of result that makes people want to quit. But read the rest:  → Phone use in class dropped from 61% to 13%  → Discipline issues back to baseline by year three → Student well-being recovered and turned positive by year two  → 74% of American adults support these bans. Teachers say it works. Kids, even those complaining, say it works. Every parent raising teenagers knows it works. The lead Stanford researcher's read: don't mistake messy early data for failure. Most things worth doing don't pay off in year one. Ask any founder. Ask any mom or dad. Stay the course. nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…

A driver crashed off the road in Fairfax County last week. Down a ravine, no witnesses, hidden from view. The driver's phone auto-notified dispatch. A Skydio drone launched and found the vehicle from the air. Officers were guided directly to the driver. Same DFR program, different call: 911 reports a man with a bow and arrow. Drone arrives in 57 seconds. It's a man in crisis with a stick. Officers de-escalate before anyone gets hurt. Tech finds the problem. Humans solve it. That's why we build. fcpdnews.org/2026/04/22/dro…

This is just such a great example of how markets just outperform well intended regulations just about every time. Texas blowing past California in clean energy because the market forces are less constrained by regulation.

Five-year survival rate for stage 4 pancreatic cancer: 2%. Most people don't feel a thing until it's built that deadly head start. Mayo Clinic just published an AI that catches it on routine scans up to three years before diagnosis — on scans radiologists looked at and cleared as normal. Nearly ten years ago, my friend Matt Bencke was 45, running a company he built to teach machines how to see. Thought he tweaked his back lifting a chair on vacation. Stage 4 diagnosis within weeks. Gone three months later, leaving a wife, two young daughters and a life full of plans. From his hospital bed, Matt wrote an essay for Wired about the day everything changed. It's worth your time. Matt spent his career teaching machines to see. Now AI sees what the best human eyes couldn't. That's the world he was building toward. This won't bring him back. But somewhere down the line, this technology will catch what we keep missing. And someone will get more time. Someone's kids get more years with their dad. Someone's back pain turns out to be just a back pain, because the scan already caught what was hiding. I still think about Matt. Today, with a renewed hope.

Left Yale on a Thiel Fellowship. Started by building a school safety app. Ended up modernizing 911 from the inside out. Michael Chime is exactly the kind of visionary founder Axon wants to partner with. New Boldly Go is out — and yes, Mike Wagers gets to keep his email address. youtu.be/bN_49KrF5uA?si…

Sat down with @Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia at the 2026 Arizona Leadership Summit for a fireside chat. Turns out the company that revolutionized car buying into something people actually enjoy and a company building AI and technology to protect people have far more in common than you'd think. Great conversation.

I tell companies and individuals this constantly: lean in, iterate, don't wait for perfect. Watching robots in Beijing beat the human half-marathon world record by seven minutes, after finishing in 2.5 hours just last year, I'm reminded it applies to nations too. This progress is happening somewhere. Better to help shape it than watch from the sidelines. wired.com/story/a-humano…

@SeanMBraxton @PeterDiamandis I love my life every single day within narry a thought about my death 😁

What gives our life meaning without the finitude of mortality? What moves us to willfully act if there is no end? What makes love special and or so painful when absent if there is no end? We are trying to escape our own essence of being and meaning by running from the thing we are most uncertain of.

You're given a choice: (1) physical immortality or (2) digital immortality (uploading). Which do you choose?

Peter - I choose both. I’d like to extend my biology as long as possible, but upload in parallel in case I get in a car accident, etc. and so I can experience real life and digital heaven. And if people worry about us old guys taking up resources we need for my great great grandchildren, I’m happy to migrate to full digital and step aside. But still better to meet my great^100 grand kids in the happy Matrix!

This is the job. All of it, the big moments and the small ones. Proud to serve the people who serve everyone. 🐻 📷@NJSP

Excited to meet with @batuyumurtaci & our partners at TYTAN Technologies in Munich, where today I saw a demonstration of the first fully integrated air defense system using @Dedrone for detection & flight control, launching interceptor drones. Looking forward to working with TYTAN to create the aerial defense for the cities of Europe.

The U.S. has lost 24 drones worth $720 million in this conflict. To me, that's a measure of how much we value human life. We also sent $300 million in equipment to recover one of our pilots. That's not a coincidence. That's our value system. Every one of those drones represents a pilot who came home, a family that didn't get the worst phone call of their lives. When technology absorbs the risk, people don't have to. America's sonic weapon deployment in Venezuela is another example. The thing that broke their will, that doubled over Maduro’s security guards and had one swearing he'd never face American military force again, wasn't a bullet or a bomb. According to a widely circulated account shared by the White House press office, it was a non-lethal weapon. Overwhelming force and human restraint in the same package. That's a glimpse into the future of how the best military in the world fights. In Iran, the objective has been consistent: maximum pressure on a regime that brutalizes its own people, minimum footprint, minimum casualties. We can debate tactics. We shouldn't debate the intent, or who the good guys are. I've spent 30 years believing technology could make conflict less deadly. Not because I'm naive about the reality of war, but because I've seen what's possible when you combine overwhelming capability with precision. Faster resolution. Fewer casualties on all sides. And ideally a potential adversary who decides the fight just isn't worth having. That's the mission. The people executing it deserve a lot more credit than they get. 🇺🇸

@psaffo I assume you’re referring to Putin?

My mood, reflecting upon the precipice that the vain murderous folly of one deranged man has brought the World to...

I have to say, I’m so proud of our men and women who took enormous risk to bring one American back home. The fact we would sacrifice so much equipment and so many would put themselves in harm’s way to rescue one person speaks volumes about our values. I am especially proud to be an American today.

Lost two close college friends to cancer. One just recently. You know that helplessness — the moment medicine runs out of road. Then read yesterday: an electrical engineer used AI to design a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his dying dog. Two months, no medical degree, from scratch. Rosie's tumors shrank by up to 75%. She's back chasing rabbits. He calls it democratizing cancer treatment. That term hits deep when you've watched the system say there's nothing more we can do. Imagine what happens when breakthroughs like this can reach people just as easily. The world is moving fast. The question is whether the people deciding what's permissible will move as fast as the people doing the work. Go Rosie. 🐶🐇☀️

“Move fast or die” is a startup cliché. In Ukraine, it’s the literal truth. Spent time in Kyiv with government officials and tech leaders who are solving problems the rest of the world hasn’t faced yet. The conflict in the Persian Gulf shows us this threat landscape is coming everywhere. Ukraine is stress-testing the answers. Honored to be part of that work.