It's Not Rocket Science

An interview with mechanical engineer Laura Rose Plaxico about SpaceX, exploding batteries, making cheese in The Philippines, a Keurig for frozen yogurt, robot cars, and putting your pride aside. A theme of humility and learning throughout.

Show Notes

An interview with mechanical engineer Laura Rose Plaxico about SpaceX, exploding batteries, making cheese in The Philippines, a Keurig for frozen yogurt, robot cars, and putting your pride aside. A theme of humility and learning throughout.

What is It's Not Rocket Science?

A podcast exploring the life arcs of smart, creative, driven people who helped Elon Musk and SpaceX revolutionize the space industry. How did they get there? What was it like? What world are they creating now?

Jeff:

So when I named this podcast, I thought that my guests would probably get out of the space industry after they left SpaceX. Recently, that hasn't been the case. But today, I got to talk to someone for whom it's really not rocket science. It's robot cars or food science or cheese.

Jeff:

So to get started, why don't you just introduce yourself and, tell me your favorite food just to get us Yeah.

LR Plaxico:

So my name is Laura Rose Plaxico. My favorite food I actually had to think about this. Aged cheese, but there's like a theme of cheese probably throughout this interview. So I don't know that we'll just we'll stick with that.

Jeff:

Okay. I wondered if it was gonna be cheese because I knew cheese would eventually come up. We'll leave hanging hanging mid sentence and come back to it at a later date. I appreciate your like taking the time out to come and chat with me and catch up. It's been a long time.

Jeff:

Yeah. So, as usual, the, you know, the price of entry is a SpaceX stories. And what did you do at SpaceX?

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. So, I started at SpaceX doing electronics packaging. Started out some smaller avionics boxes. So for those who don't know what that means, I guess I should figure help them figure that out.

Jeff:

So Yeah.

LR Plaxico:

Circuit boards, they do electronics. They need to be protected from all kinds of environments, salty air, being in the vacuum of space, maybe going underwater for a second or ten. So electronics packaging, protecting circuit boards. I moved into secondary structures. So more structural design, how do you attach all of the avionics boxes to the rocket?

LR Plaxico:

Falls under mechanical integration, but for, you know, somebody like a mechanical engineering background like myself, that's secondary structures, for aerospace.

Jeff:

So you were a mechanical engineer by training?

LR Plaxico:

Yep. Yep. I got a bachelor's degree, in mechanical engineering.

Jeff:

Yep. And when you were a kid, is that what you always thought you'd be, a mechanical engineer and worked in aerospace, or was there some other vision?

LR Plaxico:

You know, I think I had the pretty standard, like, wanna be a ballerina. I wanna be a Ninja Turtle. I had that phase. And then, you know, nobody does a good job teaching kids what engineering does. Like, what does an engineer do?

LR Plaxico:

They just sit there with, like, a slide rule. I don't know. So I I think I gravitated towards math and science in school, and I thought physics was the thing. And I remember actually taking a tour of Carnegie Mellon where I ended up going to school and took a tour of their machine shop. Was like, oh, this.

LR Plaxico:

I want hands on. This is it. Is this is this a mechanical engineer? Yeah. I want that.

LR Plaxico:

Right. So it so it ended up that way.

Jeff:

To build things.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Jeff:

And how did you how did you end up getting up to getting to SpaceX? Was that the first stop in your professional career or was that?

LR Plaxico:

That was the, it was the second stop. So I, I got a job out of school at, one of the NASA centers at JPL in Pasadena. I was there for about two years, and it was it was a really good first job. Like, it kinda taught me some of the basics of, you know, how to work as a mechanical designer. You know, I had some embarrassment to myself, and I didn't know certain things.

LR Plaxico:

Like, I thought maybe I would have learned in school, but, like, what is the four forty in a four forty screw mean? Like, I don't I don't know. And thank God I lived in a time of Wikipedia and cubicle walls, so I could look these things up and not be terribly embarrassed. And here I am telling my embarrassing stories to the world, but

Jeff:

Long enough ago. Right?

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Somebody else will feel less bad about themselves if I tell the story. So yeah, I was at JPL. You know, it wasn't as involved of a design experience as I wanted.

LR Plaxico:

So, hey, why do we do things this way? Well, this is just how we do them. I didn't feel like I was learning in the way that I wanted. Things moved slowly. Some of the decisions were made just because of heritage while we've always flown this thing on to space, and you can't fly something new unless it's already flown in space.

LR Plaxico:

Well, that's a weird catch 22. I don't

Jeff:

Exactly.

LR Plaxico:

That doesn't make sense. So I wanted something that took more risk and that just made a little more sense in how things were operated. This was in so I started there in 2007. And in 2009, you know, I had I had looked at SpaceX basically as I was graduating college. I was like, oh, that sounds really neat.

LR Plaxico:

And SpaceX wasn't that far away. I had a friend that went from JPL to SpaceX and said, oh, you gotta come check this out. I'll give you, I'll give them your resume. And he did that and I got a call and did the interview and it was, there we go.

Jeff:

Looping back a little bit to what you said about the learning the things that you didn't know that you thought you should know. When you got to SpaceX, was that a thing? Did you did you feel when you got to SpaceX? Like I I got there and I felt there were a lot of things I didn't know about what was going on in rockets even though I'd been working in satellites for twenty five years.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Absolutely. And I I think I just kinda ate the embarrassment. And occasionally, I'd get funny looks or like, what do you mean? What do you what do you mean?

LR Plaxico:

What do I mean?

Jeff:

Right. Exactly.

LR Plaxico:

Super uncomfortable, but that's, you know, I kinda, you know, I took a new job to grow and that was one of the parts of growing.

Jeff:

Yeah. I think that was one of the experiences that people had and it's how you adapted to that was what part of whether you fit in and were able to be successful there. Is could you accept that there was a lot going on very very fast and not everybody knew everything and you had to not just act like you knew everything.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's a lesson that served me well in my career.

LR Plaxico:

I was always a shy a shy kid, I think a shy student, shy about asking questions, and I I think I gave that up around the time I got to SpaceX, and it it's worked out for the rest of my career as well.

Jeff:

And when you were at SpaceX, like, you worked in the avionics group doing avionics structures. So it was kind of an integrated, vertically integrated group. Like did you interact with Elon at all when you when you went through your interview process or when you were at SpaceX? Or was it by then things were big enough that people were isolated?

LR Plaxico:

I think yeah. I think the kind of mechanical integration wasn't really a thing until I had been there a little while. I think Bulent was my boss at the time, and I saw him doing a lot of these kind of integration tasks, and I thought that it needed some design help as well. And I I talked to him about it like, hey. I see you doing a lot of this.

LR Plaxico:

Do you can I do this too? Do you need help? Can I do it with you? And it it kinda went from there. I'm not gonna say there was nobody doing that work, but it it wasn't a formalized thing at that point.

Jeff:

And did that put you in contact with with Elon at all when you worked SpaceX or were you, like, insulated at a different level?

LR Plaxico:

You know, I didn't interact with Elon too often at SpaceX. It was a little bit with Elon, little bit with Gwen, but I think I was I was pretty junior at the time. I have I have some funny stories, you know, to share, but it it wasn't usually direct contact with Elon. Right. I got my ass kicked in different ways, not not necessarily the Elon berating.

Jeff:

Oh, and is it ass kicking stories that you have to tell?

LR Plaxico:

The pithy anecdotes are not about ass kicking, I think that's a part of the theme. Right? Like, I went there knowing I didn't know and expecting to, like, just technically get my ass kicked. I did and it was great. And that's you know, I became a great engineer because of it.

Jeff:

That's funny and that's like in contrast because I went sort of mid career. I'd already been running a company and I I came expecting to like step in and run a thing. But you gotta be prepared to get your ass handed to you a few times in that environment.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff:

Yeah. So what it what were the stories that came to your mind about your time at SpaceX?

LR Plaxico:

So this one's not necessarily about Elon. This is a I was working on the the early dragon battery enclosures. Right? And these at the time were lithium polymer pouch cells.

Jeff:

Yep.

LR Plaxico:

And it was just these massive things. Right? They're like 90 pounds. You know, I'm using English units.

Jeff:

They're, you

LR Plaxico:

know, like, three feet by one one foot by, I don't know, nine inches or something, massive things. And, you know, lots of iteration, feeling pretty good. I remember something emailing Matt Sewell, like, hey. We're not the long pole. Celebrate that.

LR Plaxico:

And he's like, whatever. Like, don't don't say that. Don't jinx us. And, like, within a day, he's like, have you heard the news? Like, what do you mean?

LR Plaxico:

I think he calls me because we all had phones at our desk at that time. It's like, hey. Come out to the parking lot. Fuck? What?

LR Plaxico:

Okay. I go out to the parking lot. I will never forget the smell of an exploded lithium polymer battery that had exploded in the chamber. The chamber is totally destroyed. Just carnage everywhere.

LR Plaxico:

So going from, hey, we're not the long pole to your shit exploded in test in a building overnight. Like, good luck figuring that out.

Jeff:

I have a vivid memory that's the first time it's come up, but it's like that was a day that we were like, oh, these cells really aren't as benign as what we made them out to be and when they catch fire, don't even know how to put them out.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

LR Plaxico:

So another follow-up was my oh, I think this is my daughter joining us.

Jeff:

My father.

LR Plaxico:

Excuse me.

Jeff:

Give me one second.

LR Plaxico:

I gotta go give you to daddy. Okay?

Jeff:

Good morning.

LR Plaxico:

Hi. Yeah. Gotta go get your daddy. Will, I need you to to take this girl out the I'm sorry about that.

Jeff:

That No. That's alright. Now, I expect to hear rebellion. The door is locked. I expect to hear, like, the hammering on the door in

Jeff:

the Yeah.

LR Plaxico:

I don't think this door has a lock. So we're, we've been traveling for a few weeks. This is I'm at my parents house. I'm walking remote from here.

Jeff:

Yeah.

LR Plaxico:

And, this is my office slash the baby changing room slash the, you know, spare room. Anyway, so

Jeff:

I remember when I interviewed Dolly, it was during COVID and we were on a on a Zoom call and it was chaos at her house on the morning that we that we talked.

LR Plaxico:

That was good editing. I listened to that one. I wouldn't have known that. So, well done.

Jeff:

It was crazy. Cycling back, that battery pack caught fire in the chamber. Got rolled out to the parking lot because we didn't know how to put the fire out and it was a lot of learning in one day. And for me, that was the constant experience of SpaceX avionics. It's like every morning, you'd wake up and like which quarter is the issue coming from?

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Right. I'm I'm sure from your position, you saw just everything all the time. You know, was in my little my own little corner but you saw all of the corners.

Jeff:

Exactly. There's all that's I've always figured that's the definition of project management is that you never get a day's rest because there's always something on your project that's catching fire and something Yeah. That's going well and something that's finished.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Jeff:

So, you have to believe it and not not like you said, not jinx it by saying how good everything's going.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Right. Exactly. Never again.

Jeff:

And did your experience of SpaceX match with other people's about how the, you know, those kind of failures allowed us to move on and move more quickly or move on and and take the lessons and absorb them quickly?

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. I think so. I mean, one of the things I loved about that was it it wasn't I'm not gonna say it was par for the course, but it the the sentiment around something like that, like, most people knew that that had happened, but nobody's like, oh my god. We're totally screwed. Everything is wrong.

LR Plaxico:

We're never gonna be successful. It's just like, it failed. That was that was a bad one. It was kinda kinda cool, kinda bad, but let's keep moving. You know, somebody else is gonna have something like that.

LR Plaxico:

The only way forward is through this.

Jeff:

Exactly. Yep. Pick up the pieces and get back into test as quick as you can.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Jeff:

I feel from that actually that it's interesting to look back on that because those lithium polymers, you know, this was at the same time when there was a little bit of Tesla going on in our building. And in time, Tesla became giant manufacturer of lithium batteries. Mhmm. Yeah. So the lessons get incorporated across the businesses pretty successfully.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Seems to have worked out well for everybody involved.

Jeff:

Yeah. Exactly. Did you have anything else that popped into your mind about it about the SpaceX experience? I don't remember how long you were there but

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. I was there for four years. I think another I had another good story. This was down in Texas. I spent a lot of late nights in Texas and Florida, and this story, I think, is another kind of essence of SpaceX, where I might have screwed something up and it actually worked out fine.

LR Plaxico:

So this was when we had first put and I I'm blanking on the word. The the collar around the top of the second stage. You know? I don't remember what you called it. The the turtleneck or something.

Jeff:

The inner stage.

LR Plaxico:

The interstage. Yeah. Well, not not the not

Jeff:

the That was one of the things I didn't know what it was when I came to SpaceX is what's an interstage?

LR Plaxico:

Yes. The the thing. So the the Avionics Tower, that sits on the top of the second stage, we used to be able to pick it up, turn it 90 degrees, and just kiss it on the top of the lock's cover. And because we had this little turtleneck on it, you couldn't do that. You couldn't just dangle it over and bolt it in.

LR Plaxico:

You had to have some kind of, like, installation beam to kind of guide it into place, and you had to have somebody's head up in there to make sure that it was going in the right place. So the lift was always a little bit stressful. Right? You're turning over 400 pounds of expensive electronics on its side and then flying it through the air slowly, but still. Now we added this additional step where you have to have this attachment beam, and you you transfer the weight of the the what you've turned it on over to this beam.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. And so I designed this beam. You know, I'd done a lot of design on the the the tower itself, but designing this this ground support equipment and this beam. And, you know, doing the analysis, making sure it'll it'll carry the weight of of the tower, but also counterbalance it appropriately. So it's not just like, you know, canted off at some weird angle.

LR Plaxico:

You really gotta put it on straight. Done the analysis structurally, but also looking at the counterbalance and all this, and I added some, like, gym weights just for margin. Right? Because I didn't know it, you know, it'd be off a little bit. And I started we did the lift.

LR Plaxico:

We picked up the beam, and we put some weights on it for margin because I I thought I we needed some weights, and the thing was just totally angle, like, not at all straight. And we're just like, oh, shit. It's midnight. This is in Texas. Like, oh, fuck.

LR Plaxico:

We just turned the like, what are we doing? We hadn't turned the we hadn't turned the tower over yet, luckily, because that would have been even more stressful, but we put more weights on it. We put more weights on it. Like, some dude is, like, literally hanging on it and mid air dangling off the back just because, like, we're all loopy and, like, oh, fuck. We're fucked.

LR Plaxico:

Deep breath. We're all tired. We're all loopy. Take all the weights off of it. Balances perfectly.

LR Plaxico:

LRE just over designed it a little bit, it worked out fine, but pressure's on, don't lose your cool. And everybody there was in the same boat. Again, nobody was getting angry. Nobody was yelling. It was just like, we're gonna figure it out.

LR Plaxico:

And we did. And it was fine.

Jeff:

I think that that insight, that detail that people didn't get angry that much It's like we all knew we were going as fast as we could and there was a degree of sympathy for the person who's, was in the spotlight at any particular moment.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

LR Plaxico:

And and I can think of plenty of times hearing hearing about that for other people. Hey. This person really screwed up. I should give her a call. She probably feels terrible, but that means she's trying really hard.

LR Plaxico:

I think that was Puolent talking about Katrina. Right? Yeah. Just it was it was general attitude, it was great.

Jeff:

Yeah. And it's an attitude that allowed us to like take take risks and take responsibility and know that somebody That people by and large would have your back and not be trying to push you off the off the cliff.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Jeff:

And how did you end up moving on from SpaceX?

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. I was I've been there about four years. Some of the, you know, things had changed. Some of the the work I was doing, felt like was getting I wasn't sure how it was gonna go, if there was gonna be a lot of new stuff.

Jeff:

Mhmm.

LR Plaxico:

But also, I met a boy. I really liked the boy, and he was gonna move. He turned out to be my husband, so, like Okay. I think I I made a good choice. But but, I mean, I think the work itself, like, I was tired.

LR Plaxico:

I've been working really hard, and some of there were some choices that were made at the management level that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. So I think that the combination of those two things was like, well, I'm not super happy. I'm exhausted. My boyfriend is gonna leave LA. The only reason I would stay is this job, which I'm not thrilled about.

LR Plaxico:

So I left, but I didn't wanna just go move to he was gonna go to grad school in Wisconsin, which is where I'm from. But I was like, oh, I don't wanna just, like, go back home. I don't have anything to do there. So what's the weirdest thing I could possibly do? Oh, I could go help my brother start a cheese factory in The Philippines because that's where he was living, that was his weird thing that he was gonna do.

LR Plaxico:

So I I went off to go try that.

Jeff:

Oh, I thought the punchline was that the cheese was gonna be in Wisconsin because that would make sense.

LR Plaxico:

Oh, that's there's a longer story, longer arc to the story and it does end up there. But it's yeah. Why would you do something that's so reasonable like make cheese in Wisconsin when you could first try to do it in a foreign country that doesn't have cows? Okay. And I can explain that but Why was it?

Jeff:

Why was it in The Philippines to begin with?

LR Plaxico:

So let me just give a little I guess I should give a a background on my family makes cheese. We're from Wisconsin's Wisconsin. Bunch of New York Jews moved to Wisconsin to make cheese. Kinda weird. And my mom always likes to joke about that.

LR Plaxico:

My brother, couldn't get a job out of college, went to China, wanted to start a business there. That didn't work out. And then my my dad was looking for some expansion. Hey. You know, dairy food is getting big in Southeast Asia.

LR Plaxico:

The Philippines speak English. They also adhere to business contracts unlike China, at the time. Sorry if I'm offending somebody by saying this. You can get powdered milk from, New Zealand, Australia. It's a huge export.

LR Plaxico:

It's cheap cheaper to ship than liquid. Hey. Let's give it a shot. And there's ways you can you can do this to make it powdered milk into cheese.

Jeff:

Okay.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. I know a lot about cheese. I could really go deep on that. We'll save that for a different podcast. But, yeah, that was a it was an adventure, and my brother was like, hey.

LR Plaxico:

I need an engineer. You're smart. You figure random shit out that you don't know how to do. Like, yeah, that is what I do. And so I gave it a shot.

LR Plaxico:

And, you know, I think, technically, it could have worked. There were starting to be competitors in the dairy industry in Southeast Asia at the time, and my brother, you know, kind of looked at us like, I don't know that I wanna do this for the next ten years to make this really successful. So he he ducked out and was like, okay. That's fine. I did go back to Wisconsin then, because my my boyfriend was there.

LR Plaxico:

My family's cheese business is there. I was like, well, I'm an engineer. I'll go help my dad. I got bored to tears.

Jeff:

So cheese wasn't as exciting as rockets? Come on.

LR Plaxico:

Sadly not. It it is tastier. Frankly, it made me much more fun at dinner parties because everybody wants to talk about cheese. Rockets? Cool.

LR Plaxico:

Whatever. Nerd. So, you know, I was I was pretty cool when I worked for the family business, but I was really bored. So from there, I, being bored, two guys cold called me. We're like, hey.

LR Plaxico:

We have this idea for a startup. It's kinda like a Keurig for frozen yogurt, but we don't know anything about hardware or dairy, but we hear that you do. Do you wanna do this with us? You wanna be a cofounder? Was like, great.

LR Plaxico:

Sure. So I was cofounded a business, doing that.

Jeff:

Who knew that there was a niche for mechanical engineers in the dairy industry? I suppose it makes perfect sense once you stop and think about it, but

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Well, so I yeah. It's there's there's a lot of really cool and this is just me being a a geek, but there's a lot of really cool equipment designed for automating food production. And, you know, if you ever get a chance to go through a food factory, like, wow. There's some there's some really neat equipment out there.

LR Plaxico:

I think there's actually a TV show called maybe it's How It's Made or something that's about this. Like, I just nerd out on that stuff. So food industry is pretty cool, but the, like, niche cofounder, tiny startup hardware, dairy, let's go figure out problems and fail fast. I'm like, oh, wow. This is made just for me.

LR Plaxico:

So that was a neat experience. Didn't work out. Me and the cofounders didn't really see eye to eye on some of this stuff. But I still have one of the machines in my garage. I make frozen yogurt sometimes.

Jeff:

That was gonna be my question. Did they make the Keurig for frozen yogurt? And I just didn't notice.

LR Plaxico:

So they made it. You can't buy it. I think the the business folded maybe six or twelve months after I left. The things we didn't agree about were, I think, around hardware hardware stability before, like, getting it out for demos, what the business model is. Is it a reusable versus a disposable?

LR Plaxico:

And there's some technical trade offs. If it's disposable, the quality is not as good, but it's cheaper and it is a better business model. So the engineer was like, make it better, make it more reliable, make it faster, make the frozen yogurt faster. And the the business guys were like, no, make it a better business mom. So whatever.

LR Plaxico:

Anyway, it's it was it was a thing. But

Jeff:

So two two stints in the food business then after after space.

LR Plaxico:

After space. Yeah. And then I ended up, going to the company I'm at now, Zoox, which is autonomous vehicles, which is much more like, you know, tech and space. It's it doesn't go to space, but it is similarly, if not more complex as far as, like, overall product product that you're launching. So it's it's been a a cool a cool ride.

Jeff:

Explain the Zoox for a second.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. So Zoox is autonomous vehicle. So you you I'm not sure if Waymo is in Denver. But it's

Jeff:

Waymo is coming to Denver. We Waymo ed in the Bay Area. So I I can imagine a Waymo. A Waymo is like pretty much like a car with a giant police light on the top of it.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Exactly. So what's neat about a Zoox is it's a custom vehicle. So, again, for somebody with my mechanical background, like, you're designing the vehicle, not just the software, not just the sensor and computer hardware, but it's the whole vehicle. So you get, like, a much more like, you get a full experience.

LR Plaxico:

It doesn't feel like you're in a car with no driver. It feels like you're in a Zoox. It's really meant for for riders, and I think that's the tagline. So it's a it's a really cool experience being in one. But, also, from a technical perspective, it's really neat to work on a fully integrated product within the company, right?

LR Plaxico:

So we have a huge software org, of course, but we also have what's equivalent to an avionics team, right, the sensor and computer hardware, the the brains, and then you have the vehicle team. And there's, you know, there's integration, of course, and, you know, there's manufacturing. There's, you know, ops. There's, you know, the fleet operations. That's a huge thing.

LR Plaxico:

Lots of logistics. So, yeah, it's a it's a full vertically integrated technical company. And I so I started there. It was, like, a hundred and hundred and sixty people. It was classic, like, bunch of dudes in a garage with a bunch of Toyotas.

LR Plaxico:

I came in and they had done somebody had designed, like, a computer box and you're buying electronics off the shelf and somebody had designed a box for it. I'm like, what the fuck is this? This looks like a tractor in the back of a Toyota. Like, what are you doing? I brought in one of my battery or, yeah, Dragon battery box designs.

LR Plaxico:

I was like, guys, we could do better. Let me help you.

Jeff:

Nice.

LR Plaxico:

So I I started designing doing doing electronics packaging, but it was just just in a very different and more involved way because it was such a small company, and nobody knew what they were doing, again, which I loved, again, and we all learned together. And since then, now it's grown immensely. We're a much more structured company, which has its pros and cons, but it's it's been a really cool thing to to see grow over time.

Jeff:

And are they getting ready to hit market with Zootz, or is it already on the market? I couldn't quite tell.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. So it's it's on the market. I think you pay like a dollar. Right? It's not it's not a we're not the for profit stage, but it's in San Francisco.

LR Plaxico:

It's in Las Vegas. We do have a few more cities that we're getting getting to market that we're not quite ready for. But over the next year or two, I think it's really gonna take off as far as number of vehicles and number of cities. We just started true production of these vehicles, so we're trying to make several thousand of them very very soon, and that that'll really help as well just to have more vehicles out in the world.

Jeff:

Well, we're waiting in our family till we can, like, buy a real autonomous vehicle, like buy a Waymo or buy a Zoox and have that take us from place to place. Yeah. So much better than driving.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My, my dad commutes, I think, 60 miles each way through rural Wisconsin. He's like, why can I get one?

LR Plaxico:

I'm like, we don't we're not great in snow yet. Sorry, dad. I guess Denver is probably similar, so we'll we'll let you know when it's ready.

Jeff:

Yeah. We'll see. We were supposed to get Waymo here in Denver. It just hasn't happened yet. And I'm sure if we get Waymo, then Zooks will follow.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a reason that Zooks and Waymo are in all the same cities. So

Jeff:

Yeah. Outside of the outside of the Zooks work and having a family, what's, you know, what's exciting? Exciting? Or is family the thing that's exciting outside outside of Zoox? I

LR Plaxico:

think a lot of it is family. You know, my my husband also works, so two working parents, two little kids. I think, you know, on the weekends we try to get outside as much as possible, you know, whether that's me and my husband go on a date hike or we take our kids out to the tide pools or whatever it is. So it's it's mostly family. Longer term, I'd like to get, you know, some time back to myself to to do some of my own pursuits, but right now, I don't think there's a lot of space for for that.

LR Plaxico:

Cooking, physical fitness, like the normal things. I think that's

Jeff:

about it. The things that you'd wanna do. Yeah. Exactly. So I have a series of like short questions that I ask people at the end just to try to make sure that each of the conversations has some common threads that might be interesting to the assembled listeners.

Jeff:

Sure. So I'll shoot shoot through the short questions. You could give me your answers short or long as you as you prefer. But the the first one is, like, what was your biggest takeaway from the SpaceX experience?

LR Plaxico:

I think it's some of the stuff we talked about earlier, just putting your pride aside and trying to learn in whatever way was going to be the most efficient. So if it's saying, I don't know, or if it's actually just failing and learning and picking yourself back up, I think that was a huge lesson. I think, you know, some of the technical skills, also just hard technical skills that you need to have to be an engineer or to be competent in your field, just making sure you really have those fundamentals so that you can build on them from there.

Jeff:

And that kind of answers the second question too about what you'd recommend for, say, a high school senior or a or a, you know, freshman in college who wants to get into this ecosystem of startups.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Getting getting those those fundamentals and and again, yeah, being being willing to put your pride aside and and learn.

Jeff:

I like that. I think it's important and difficult for all of us. I think we have to relearn that from time to time. Certainly, I do.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Absolutely. Same.

Jeff:

And lately, I've pivoted to this question about, do you think we can make the world a better place?

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. I I absolutely do. You know, some of it's, you know, smart people working on hard problems to make the world better. I see a lot of energy, you know, abundant energy around alternative energy. Right?

LR Plaxico:

I think that's a nice example. So so smart people working on the right things, but also I think much as I've been talking about putting your pride aside, I think reminding people to live with empathy is kind of the other side of that. And I think that that can be in the workplace. It can also just be in your day to day. Don't get mad at the lady who misspelled your name on your Starbucks.

LR Plaxico:

Right? She might not have slept that much last night. She might be having a tough time. And I think that's just generally how we live, just reminding ourselves to be kind to one another.

Jeff:

Wow. I'll take that. There's a perfect place, a perfect off ramp to the conversation to live with empathy and try to do that at the same time that you're living with confidence. I mean, that's a a real recipe. I think it would make the world a better place.

Jeff:

Yeah. I really appreciate

LR Plaxico:

make a sign, hold it up to remind everybody all the time but

Jeff:

I was at the Pride March yesterday in Denver and basically that's what all the signs say, more or Yeah.

LR Plaxico:

There we go.

Jeff:

You can phrase it in as many different ways as you want but that's the message.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Jeff:

I appreciate you taking a slot out this morning to to have this chat and to catch up. It's really great to catch up with you.

LR Plaxico:

Yeah. Same to you. Thanks for thanks for reaching out. This has been this has been fun.

Jeff:

I love the message that LR ended with. If you wanna improve yourself and the world, set aside your pride and show empathy. It's not rocket science. This episode was produced with assistance from Devin Schwartz, and you can find us at it'snotrocketscience.space.