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Published · transcript-backed

Speaker unverified: belief

6 Apr 2021 Acquired Special: "Why Now" for Digital Health (with Levels founder Josh Clemente)

“I think that old aerospace had kind of been resting on its laurels, in a sense, but also combined with the failures of the shuttle program was—in the political nature of the entire program—worried about losing what they had.”

— Speaker unverified

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
6 Apr 2021
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…I'm sure you've thought about this a lot, but why does that work? SpaceX has worked, and it's been because of 1000 or 10,000 decisions like these. Was the industry just too conservative before? Or is there something different about SpaceX that makes it possible for them where it wasn't possible for people before? Definitely. I mean, I think that this kind of goes to psychology generally. There's like this scarcity syndrome that if you have something, you fear losing it, and if you don't yet have something, there's nothing to lose. SpaceX was in a, we have nothing to lose mentality for the entirety of its kind of early days. It's basically we're either going to run out of money, not get this contract, and cease to exist; or we're going to slice this thing off with scissors and try. That's kind of the approach, we were always one launch failure away from losing the company, until probably 2014. Once Falcon 9 1.1 flew, we got a ton of orders on the books and things started to smooth out a little bit. But up until then, it was Elon—every single opportunity he got—was telling people, look, you personally have to succeed. If you don't, 2000 people are going to lose their jobs, including you. I mean, he would not mince words. I think that old aerospace had kind of been resting on its laurels, in a sense, but also combined with the failures of the shuttle program was—in the political nature of the entire program—worried about losing what they had. Any failure was career-ending for a politician, and any failure was potentially career-ending for the engineer. Failure is not an option in old space, and it was always an option for SpaceX. That proliferates the culture all the way through to live streaming explosions of Starship. No other does that because it's like airing your dirty laundry. Yeah, that's such a good point. Man, we could talk about this forever but I got to hear about how Levels came to be. I'm wearing a continuous glucose monitor on my arm, it has a patch with your logo over it. Catch me up from you were a SpaceX engineer to you decided to have David and I sitting across the internet from you wearing this. How did it come to be?…

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