Jared Isaacman: What went wrong at NASA | The All-In Interview

25:30You know, like I tell you, I love talking to all the senators and the senate was so fair to me and I know I would have had a lot of great votes, but you talk to some senators and like, you know, we have a local rocket club that supports these schools and NASA contributes it to every year and I want to make sure that continues. It's like, well, why can't you do a car wash for the rocket club? Like, this isn't huge dollars. Why can't the community raise those funds? And then you might say, well, what's wrong with a couple rocket clubs, you know, to inspire the kids all across the country. Well, one turns to ten turns to thousands and it becomes a distraction.

26:02Those are parts to delete. Those are resources that are draining away from what every senator should care about, which is how do we get to the moon, get to Mars and shock the world with world changing headlines. That's what people are waiting for from NASA. You know? 100%. I mean, man, what you're saying resonates with me so much. It's not just NASA. It's across the federal government. I've spent enough time now interacting with folks and meeting with folks and hearing similar stories It's just the chaos that that builds with scale with age with bureaucracy with competing interests that all have to be met and You end up diluting everything away.

26:39It's so frustrating to hear that. I think this does play into Why China is is really just moving at at lightning speed right now Now, they have this immense second mover advantage that is crushing across all technology. You know, when you had the Manhattan Project, we had the technical know how the will and the resources to get something done, and we set up facilities where we needed them. You know, Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore, you know, you know, you get, you put the facilities where you need them and the talent where you need them to execute on the mission, and everything builds up logically to it and you deliver a win.

27:19And we did the same thing with the space program in the 1960s. Well now all of those national labs and really, honestly, a lot of the facilities within NASA are doing lots of little things for existence. And some of them are relevant to the mission and some are not. And when you try and do something glorious now, you have to try and repurpose those resources that are super entrenched and they don't want to necessarily move. and then of course you have congress that's protecting their programs. China is literally doing what we are doing what we did you know in the 40s and 60s and saying we're gonna hey we're gonna go after fusion or we're gonna work on newt next generation fifth gen nuclear reactors we're gonna build six gen fighter jets and they put the facilities where they belong with the right people and resources there's no baggage and they have this incredible second mover advantage and they're able to get things done at lightning speeds because they don't have all that drag and we have a lot of drag and again it's not just NASA it's government -wide And do you think there's a way to fix it without Congress or is the only way to fix it without Congress?

28:24Meaning there needs to be no Congress if we have a shot of fixing this and there needs to be a different governing model. You know, look, I think the, I think this is why I absolutely support the president that you know despite all I mean I my single The largest political donation ever was to President Trump in this, you know, to support his inauguration. It's why I got charged up with, you know, with Elon assembling the Doge team is like, we do have to shrink the government. We do have to get rid of all these inefficiencies, these, the waste and the distractions from the mission, things that we don't need every taxpayer contributing to and actually concentrate those dollars, real dollars on the things that the taxpayers should be fighting for.

29:05And when you do that, you know what? like twenty billion or twenty five billion is actually a lot of money and that you know i know like it's it's a super -tough budget environment right now in people people hate change but i'm always surprised when like a million is not a million anymore in a billion is not a billion because you do an awful awful lot with that so if there was ever a time to get this done uh... it's now with president trump with when you have the house in the senate behind him and i'm not surprised that there is frustration from from people that were really passionate uh... and and are still passionate when uh...

29:37when And this much time goes by and we're not able to get those things done that we thought we'd be able to. So NASA's budget last year, $25 billion, break it down for us. How was that money being spent? What are the dimensions upon which you would kind of categorize that budget? And we'll talk about kind of what's going forward. Yeah, I mean, look, I think an incredibly large portion of it is with human spaceflight And specifically the Artemis program and SLS and it's a lot of billions going to a disposable rocket. It is billions that when I'm talking, I mean, I think it's like five or six hundred percent overrun to build the mobile launcher to for the next generation SLS.

30:23So sorry, just tell us what SLS is for the audience. That's the space launch system, I think, or it's they also call it the Senate launch system, I think. And it's spread across a lot of dollars or spread across some key states. Well, just to give you an idea, so SLS is just repurposed Shuttle hardware. So and I don't blame anyone for putting us down this path because at the time you did not have Blue Origin or SpaceX or any of these other commercial companies doing the things they're doing today. But they were like, let's take the Shuttle program parts and put it into a program called of consolation, and let's take the consolation parts and put it in a program called SLS.

31:02And essentially again, it's the same shuttle motors. It's the same solid rocket boosters. You're basically taking the tank and putting a rion on top of it. A rion is 20 years old, by the way, it hasn't flown humans yet. And it's incredibly expensive and very disposable, but it creates a lot of jobs in certain states. And it's like, and look, there's enough hardware now to fly a couple of missions and make sure you be shining back to the moon. But you can't be stuck on this forever. This is literally the equivalency by the way of taking P51 Mustangs from World War II and using them in desert storm Because we got to keep the plants open and that obviously makes no no logical sense whatsoever for factories They're making this stuff that used to make landing ships in World War II that made Saturn rocket that pivoted to shuttle to SLS And now to believe that you can't make another pivot is kind of crazy and the right thing you should pivot towards honestly is nuclear I want to just talk about the Trump budget proposal for NASA.

31:55So this is the NASA budget over the history of NASA. And the proposed budget would basically create the lowest budget since 1961. So they're proposing to reduce the overall budget from 25 billion a year down to 19 billion a year. were you part of the conversation on building this budget and then I'll highlight some of the features of this budget here in a moment. But did you have conversations with the administration as this was being put together and some of these proposals were being considered? I mean, how deep have you gone in this? No, you know, when you're in nominee, you're actually kept in the dark on a lot of things.

32:37You do get briefed on everything that's going on with every center, you know, every major program. and things that senators could ask you about from a, from like a one -on -one perspective, but you're not given access to sensitive information. You almost need some deniability when you're talking to senators on that, or else your nominations could get held up really big time. So I wasn't aware, I honestly, I was voted out of committee, the Commerce Committee by Senator Cruz and 18 other, 19 senators in total. And the next day, the skinny budget came out. And if that skinny budget had come out, You know, again, a day or two earlier, I would I would never have made it out of committee because obviously as as I think is playing out right now, both sides of the aisle are not happy about the, you know, the budget.

33:22Okay, so in this budget, there's a proposal to cancel SLS and Orion, terminate numerous robotic science missions, including the Mars sample return mission, Probes to Venus and several future space telescopes. And it represents the White House's desire to end the development of a nuclear thermal rocket engine. I guess having scrutinized this budget, how do you react to what you see being proposed? And does it solve what you've identified as some of the challenges in NASA or are those more management challenges? Does budget create a constraining force here that fixes some of the issues with respect to focus and concentration of capital into the right projects from your point of view.

34:07Yeah, it's an excellent question. So first, look, the big budget reduction is a great forcing function for change. And I know there's a lot of people that probably don't want to hear that, but it is true. That doesn't mean I would have landed at 19 billion in this whole thing, but I fully support the present and with the goal of shrinking the budget and getting back to responsible footing and I do think billions can go a very long way so I will just start with that. Everything you just said directly is kind of in the right direction. We've already got paid for an FLS hardware that if you were to terminate for convenience now, you got enough to launch like two or three of them.

34:47It's enough to get you back to the moon, check that box, make sure that you don't have any economic or scientific or national security reasons to stay on the moon and put your energy much more towards commercial industry. Look, nuclear thermal for propulsion, I'm not a fan of. I like nuclear electric. Nuclear thermal to test it, your spewing radioactive debris here on Earth. It's not going to go over well to anyone. And it doesn't really solve your refueling problem. You still need to top it off with hydrogen in space if you want a reusable space plug. So I don't like that either. And it's subscale.

35:17It's a fact. It's a program that sits in a lab forever. Like what you need a nuclear electric, I'm passionate on the subject, is you need us to get back to the good old days. like we went from the atomic bomb in 1945 to laying the keel on the Nautilus in 1951. Five, six years, we didn't keep it in the lab forever, we said, you know what? We're going to do big bold things. And that's what we need to be doing in space when it comes to nuclear. Look, a lot of the science programs, I'm huge fans of Mars sample return. The best thing you do is when the astronauts get there to bring the samples home.

35:48Why would we spend billions to center robotic mission? We can put that into commercial industry and accelerate their timeline. So I'm not, I wasn't a fan of a pure robotic mission on that one. And you know, a lot of the big science programs, I want to see James Webb's and Hubble telescope programs launching annually, if not more. Flagship programs, definitely, our billion dollar spends. And if you spend a billion, then you got to get it right. And that means lots of requirements. And we can't take unnecessary risk. And a billion becomes a three billion program that's never on time. Like we should be challenging the best and brightest.

36:20Give me $10, 100 million missions a year. Let's try that and let's accept the three fail and get, you know, I was gonna introduce like time to science as a KPI. Like, why don't, why do we accept things taking 10 years when they could be year? Even the Decadal process of prioritizing scientific missions over a 10 year span is kind of insane. 100%, 100%. And I think a lot of people hear budget cuts And I hear this on the NIH side as well now, that the administration and budget cutting is going to take lives, you're going to lose lives, we're going to lose science. This is an anti -science agenda.

36:58But if you can get more efficient with how you deploy capital and how you manage the deployment of that capital and the utilization of that capital, you actually accelerate science. You accelerate outcomes and you improve the condition and the prosperity for humanity for America, and it's completely a misdirected statement when people say that a budget cut is an anti -science movement. It's about finding the right places that you get more outcomes and redeploy in a smarter, more efficient way. It drives me nuts. I just see it all over right now. That's just, I mean, it's just politics. I do think over funding leads to complacency, leads to bureaucracy, which actually leads to a slowdown in discovery, a slowdown in invention, a slowdown in progress.

37:42Anyway, I'm sorry for my rant. I agree. Look, as I mean, as entrepreneurs, we know like some of our probably best decision -making is always when we were running low on cash. So, you know, it kind of drives efficiency and it is a necessity, mother of all invention there. Yeah. Well, I think that's just a product of some of our, and I'm not familiar with any VNIH or, and I'm not pretending to go deep on that at all, just I do think this is kind of a product of the politics of our time. It's a very divided country. You know, people have to take an opposing view and go to extremes. People will die over this, but the government in his terrible capital allocators, come on, we should all know that.

38:15And, you know, we should, as taxpayers, we should be contributing to the things that no one else is willing to do, where there is no good business use case or economic model. You know, it is in, you know, if competition is working, they can solve a lot of problems and we should put our energy to what they won't solve. And look, I think Cratsios, by the way, in science, he's a great leader. I've spoken a bunch of times. You know, he's not a quagga, he doesn't think wild things like that. He wants, you know, the golden age of science and discovery. Good science. I'm very good science. Yeah, absolutely.

38:44Well, let's talk about Artemis. I think this is a big piece that the American public doesn't fully grok that we have this effort. And maybe you can just lay out for us the case for Artemis. Lay out for us the case for Mars. Tell us about the relationship between the two and the timelines. Sure. And why are we doing? Let's just say I am in the return to the moon camp. That doesn't mean like You know, and I know that you know Elon is very focused on on Mars And he has a lot of great reasons why including just the survival of our species I mean long -term it is the right move. I remember During my hearing one senator was really grilling me a lot of like what really what's the difference between you know moon and Mars and You know isn't moons is stepping stone.

39:31I'm like well once a planet, you know and you know It has an atmosphere. If you looked at the moon, it doesn't look pretty. It's getting beat up all the time and has no protection from solar radiation. Reality is like you should go to the moon because for 35 years we said we were going to. I think that's very important. It's very late in the game to say, well, we did it in the 60s and early 70s. That would have been the fine position to state the entire time that we've done it and we're moving on. But we didn't. For 35 years, we said we're going back and we spent over a hundred billion of taxpayer dollars saying we were going to do it.

40:07And for us not to be able to do it now and watch shine do it, like I said, it signals a far greater disease across our government and how our system operates. And I don't think we want that reckoning. So look, we paid for the hardware anyway. Let's go back, but let's parallel going to Mars. So that's what Artemis is really about. I mean, you can say Artemis is about Mars too, but that's like a hundred years down the line. And like I said, it's a giant disposable rocket program that repurposes Shuttle hardware. It's incredibly expensive. We signed up a lot of international partners to support it because we like collecting flags and it doesn't necessarily always mean that what they're contributing to is in the best interest of the program.

40:43Case in point, you know, we had, you know, Gateway, man, like this is going down a rabbit hole of a lot of things because of the shortcomings of the vehicle. But it's expensive, it's disposable. It is not the way to do affordable, repeatable, efficient exploration, whether it's to moon Mars or anywhere else. So let's get it done and then focus on the right way to go about doing this so that we're not seeing people walk on the moon every five years or something crazy, that it's happening all the time, which is what we get excited about. What is there to do on the moon? Why should we go back? What is the purpose?

41:15I think it's almost like, if you're going to go and commit yourself, take risks in a conflict, you want clear objectives. And in my mind, again, aside from the fact that the hardware is already essentially purchased, it's clear objectives, is there any economic, scientific, or national security reasons to be here? And I don't think we can say that conclusively right now that there are none. And China is going. And if they were to find something, even a small probability of 1%, let's just say hypothetically, it's helium 3, and they're going to usher in a new form of power. Think about how many conflicts that we've had over the last century over Sources of power over energy.

41:56Do we want to get that one wrong? And are we willing to take a 1 % chance and that could shift the balance of power here on earth? I don't think so and we said we were gonna do it for 35 years and we spent a hundred billion taxpayer money And like I said the hardware is there, but I think you do it you make those determinations is there scientific economic or national security reason to be here and if not, you move on. And if companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX and even Rocket Lab are successful with their vehicles, you're gonna have like the optionality to go to the moon. It's not the Delta V is a negligible difference between whether you're going to the moon or Mars.

42:27And we should colonize Mars. We should build a colony on Mars. I think we need to go there. And by going there, it is the first step on a far grander journey. You know, and you know, Elon is obviously very passionate about it, occupy Mars. Like, you know, it's not the perfect destination. There's nothing like, you know, it's unlike anything in Earth's history. You know, people say it's analogs to, you know, the explorers of the 1400s are putting people in like those shipping containers for six months and saying, we know how to live on Mars. It's bullshit. You know, you could work your whole life on Mars and you still live in a bubble.

43:03You know, so it's not like, it's not going to be an easy way of life, but it is a step in the right direction. Like, our destiny is out and along the stars. like we will inevitably learn something out there that's going to change our thinking and we're it's gonna It's gonna create a craving for that knowledge and we're gonna want to continue to go out and explore and learn even more Mars is the best step first step on that journey. So let's talk about Getting there and achieving some of the other missions that we might have as a country as a species and The relationship with private industry e -lon believes you can get payload into orbit for $10 per kilogram with the Starship platform, which is call it a roughly 100x reduction in cost.

43:50Yeah, maybe more. Maybe from some, depending on the point at which you're measuring, it may be a thousand x reduction in cost. And that unlocks the potential to do these things in an economically viable way, going to the moon, going to Mars. Why shouldn't NASA be more fully embracing of this private industry capability? Is it because it's Elon or is it because it reduces money going to defense contractors? What is the motivation against going all in on this company, SpaceX or companies like it, that have built these competencies that would have been unfathomable just a few decades ago, but are real here today.

44:35Oh, this is such a deep conversation. So look, I, one thing I'd say is like, obviously, I love SpaceX and they safely put me into space twice and two awesome missions brought me home and I'm cheering them on. I'm happy what SpaceX is doing. I'm thrilled about the investments, the blue origins doing, that rocket lab is doing, you know, firefly. So it's like, we have a great industry. So the broader question is just why isn't, why isn't Nestleany more into commercial? Well, it gets NASA's foresight that gave birth to the commercial crew program that enabled even me to go to space, so they are thinking in that direction, but there are politics in play.

45:11The nice thing is, is those winds are shifting. Throughout my whole confirmation process, you are educated heavily by some very smart political folks. They shurper you around every senator. And they were like, look, a year ago, two years ago, the idea of talking to senators that are in SLS states and convincing them we need to be looking a little bit more to the future with commercial and maybe pivoting to things like nuclear propulsion would be a non -starter. And I'll tell you, they were very reasonable. All of them were very reasonable that they know that this rocket built on 60 -year -old technology that's $4 .5 billion dollars a launch has an expiration date.

45:50So I do think that ship is turning. This isn't a speedboat. with the government, you know, it's turning like it's a giant shipping container, it turns a half a degree like a year. And that's not obviously fast enough for a lot of us. But I would say it's moving in that direction. And then NASA also has to repurpose its resources on things that a SpaceX or a Blue Origin won't do. They're not going to build a nuclear reactor and launch it. You're not going to get the indemnities for that. Even shipping highly enriched uranium is a nightmare. That is what the government should be doing. Like so, NASA should be doing what the commercial industries can, and that, by the way, takes so much stress off a company like SpaceX trying to get to Mars.

46:30Like if you can minimize the number of space -based refueling or the insitu resource manufacturing, look, even when a Starship gets to Mars, you're betting on like, you know, 100 consecutive miracles happening to mine for Pellent there and bring it back. NASA should be helping. The government should be helping with that because it creates a lot of other optionally. We can have nuclear battle stars in lower orbit. You know, it's part of Golden Dome. There's a lot of reasons why, you know, it's not all SpaceX, all commercial versus NASA. It's both totally. So just to compare last week, Space Epoch, a Chinese rocket company completed its first C recovery test.

47:09So much like we saw a few years ago, with SpaceX, they had a vertical launch and they landed back in the ocean about 125 second flight. The key question a lot of folks are now asking has China caught up. Is this a space race? Why does it matter? Because isn't space big enough for everyone? I mean, the space is the ultimate high ground and the high ground has mattered. You know, it's had tactical and strategic significance since like the beginning of human kind. It matters. I was grateful to have the opportunity to lead, you know, the peaceful exploration of space, but it's not all peaceful. Like, we can't be naive to the fact that it has been weaponized.

47:45And China leading in this domain makes a difference. There are things of scientific and economic and again national security value out there. And we can't, we have to lead, we can't fall behind. If we fall behind, we may never catch up. So, and I am concerned about that, China moving closer to reusability. They launched the second most orbital rockets every year without reusability. Thank goodness for space X or we definitely be already behind in that regard. So I am concerned about it. It honestly it is a race and like yeah, the domain is finally important. We can't fall behind So that gives them the high ground with respect to weapons systems with respect to observational platform sensors, etc Right.

48:30Yeah Okay, so so let's talk a little bit about your nomination You seem I would give you my vote. You should be the administrator of NASA. It would be amazing Thanks. You testified in front of the Senate Committee on April 9th. I think it was a 19 -9 vote to move you out of committee. Yes. Then there were reports going into this weekend that you were going to be voted on by the full Senate this week and the estimates where you were going to get 70 confirmation votes. That was some news report I had read. So it seems like you were going to fly right through and administer NASA. So then what happened?

49:03So I mean, I got a call Friday of last week that, you know, the president has decided to go into a different direction. It was a real bummer, and I know like a number of parties in government need to be notified of that, which, you know, I expected to kind of have just a peaceful week, and the next thing I knew on Saturday, you know, there was a lot of activity on the internet, but maybe That's just like my perspective because I follow space and such but it was certainly you know disappointing But you know the president needs to have you know his person that you know he counts on to fulfill the agenda and Yeah, I yeah the person that called you what was what did they tell you was the reason the president was withdrawing his nomination?

49:52Just said the president had decided to go in a different direction. We all serve at the pleasure of the president Now, I mean, I started to get some more details and went on. I honestly also like, I don't really like play dumb on this. Like, I had a pretty good idea of, you know, that, you know, I don't think that the timing was much of a coincidence that, you know, there was other changes going on the same day. And, you know, it was kind of obviously a little bit of a disappointment. So are you referring to Elon? long? I just you know there was obviously there was more than more than one you know departure that was covered on that day and it became you know at least from what I've heard that it was there was a you know there was and I'm just you know I read the news same as everybody else but I you know I had obviously was in the in DC for the last six months getting ready that there were some people that had some access to Grindr guess.

50:55And I was a good visible target. I know the news talks a lot about democratic donations is the cause. That was not a new development. You just Google, they're all public. The New York Times published an article saying that President Trump knew about your democratic donations in the past when you received the nomination. So that was actually not news. according to the New York Times, that that was well understood and well covered. So kind of put the kabash on that explanation. So what are the access to grind, or the access to grind with Elon, or are there kind of two factions, whatever you can kind of provide some color on, I think it would be really helpful to understand, because there's a lot of speculation going on right now.

51:36And I would say some folks are really disappointed in some of the transitions that are taking place, and some folks are really trying to grok it and understand it. So anything you can do to help folks understand would be, you know, I think helpful. You know first I just I want to be overwhelming clear I know I have I don't fault the the president all I fully support him that you know the president night states You know the leader of the free world makes a thousand decisions a day with seconds of information He's got to get a lot more right than wrong So I don't I mean, you know, I don't blame You know an influential advisor coming in and saying look here's the facts And I think we should kill this guy and the president's got to make a call and move on I think that's exactly You know kind of how it went It was not the Senate at all.

52:17You don't get floor time. By the way, there's a hundred nominees that are waiting for floor time. The only way you get floor time is when a lot of senators call Senator Thun and say, this is our guy and we got to move him along. That's how you know it's like a high, you're going to get a high vote count. So the Senate was very fair, really nice. I enjoyed that experience. I think you got one person. and I don't know the history on what the trigger was or wasn't, but decided to make a move. And again, I don't fault the president for it at all, but look, in terms of donations, I've always been somewhat of a moderate.

52:56I actually like, I am like a right leaning. I do support the president's agenda. That's why I made as big of a donation as I did to his cause. Let me just ask for clarity. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say, like you when you feel like you're questionnaire for the senate committee which is public it asked you to list every donation before you go in front of a single senator before you do a hearing you do these prep sessions at the white house where people pretend to be senators and they prep you on the donation question so like that wasn't new news might have been new to the president at that you know might have refreshed his memory perhaps but uh I don't I don't think that was a cause I think the media's got it pretty accurate.

53:32So was this a shot at Elon by someone that is anti -Elon? I mean, you know, people can draw their own conclusions, but I think the direction that people are going is, or thinking on this seems to check out to me. And what is the root of that? Is it vested interest in spending that Elon is advocating gets cut? Is it diametrically opposed philosophical points of view on the role of government? What is the root anti -Elon sentiment that is kind of on the other side of the equation here? Do you think? I mean, I think that the people overwhelmingly voted for the president to go in and shrink the government and bring about change and get rid of fraud waste and abuse, of which I am a thousand percent behind the president.

54:18And I believe that that's what Elon and Doge was working towards. But people also hate change. Like we all know this. And people can be very protective of their empire. And when somebody comes in, Elon's got a playbook. And I think he knows how to get things done. And I think, you know, in a lot of respects that rub some people or, you know, what I think I was one of, you know, or had some access to grind, I don't know. And, you know, we're just waiting. I don't want to speculate on all this, but. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that you've said enough. And I guess you've seen the tweets from Elon today where he's not going to be a lot of was pretty negative about the house bill that is being labeled the big beautiful bill, making the case that it's actually going to drive up a government deficit to over $2 trillion to $1 .5 trillion a year.

55:17It doesn't make deep enough cuts. There's a lot of pork in there, a lot of wasteful spending in there. And then the house speaker today responded to Elon saying, hey, we've still got a rescission bill coming. We've still got an appropriation bill coming where we're going to start to fix the budget, but clearly Elon is now getting vocal about his point of view on this. Have you spoken with him at all about what's going on and government spending and his kind of take on things as he's walked out of the office there? Well, you know, as you know, I kind of mentioned, I told the Senate too, like I've only spoken to Elon, you know, I don't know, a couple dozen times, most of which related to human spaceflight missions, but when I was talking to him towards the end of last year, it was all on government efficiency related programs.

56:00and I think you got a lot of people excited about Doge by making one simple point. The interest rate on the national debt exceeds the DOD budget. That's scary and it's getting worse and we can't spend our way out of this problem, which we've grown a habit to doing. And I know he's very passionate about it and he sacrificed a lot along with all the others so Doge to try and bring about some significant spending cuts and then to see a bill come in whatever 1200 pages or so that adds to the deficit I think was pretty disheartening. I suspect I'm not in this fight. I think trying to codify at handful of billions and cuts probably is a drop in the bucket.

56:51I can't imagine that's too exciting. Do you think he's going to get more vocal? I don't, I wouldn't presume to know what goes on through his mind. Like I said, I think he spends a lot of time trying to solve a lot of world's problems and a problem for this country and I think a lot of people agree with it is that the, you know, this national debt is just getting way out of hand. I mean, this has been my case for about four years that if we don't fix this, it eventually becomes an intractable debt spiral. and when that happens, all of the wrangling we're doing over budget, priorities, programs, interests, jobs are no longer possible.

57:32It's like you're trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. You don't get the choice of what programs to fund when there is no funding. And that's the unfortunate iceberg we're running into. Do you think Doge is dead? Any point of view on that? I mean, it was interesting, you know, obviously there was kind of the grand exit this past week and then I don't know, at least in my Twitter feed, I try and follow a lot of the cabinet secretaries. They were all coming out and saying, Doge is alive and well embedded inside the eight. I think it was more implying that we're gonna clean house. We're gonna take care of our own house as opposed to letting other people help us do it.

58:06Problem is we haven't been very successful at that historically. So I suspect going in the midterms, people don't wanna let the other side be pounding the table on Doge. So I don't know. I mean, I've been an outsider nominee, so I have no idea how to play out. But I think that some, I imagine some people in the government want to see it go quietly in the night. Is there a deep state? And does the deep state, like, is it too big to break? You know, I don't like know what I would classify a deep state or not. Like there are, there is an absolutely bloated bureaucracy that hates change. It gets very entrenched.

58:50That is happy to ride out political appointees like, you know what, you're gone in three, four years or dead before you even arrived. It's, we'll wait you out. So I think there's some of that. And then I think there's some of that in with actual, you know, politicians and political pointies that advocate like hell for the status quo. And some of it might be good intended because they're just afraid of what comes next and you know, why take a risk when you've got something right now that supposedly works. And I ask like, you know, what if that comes at the competitiveness of the nation and our economic security?

59:29What if we get it wrong because you weren't willing to take some risk and make changes? So I don't think the necessarily evil, by the way. I just think some people get very comfortable in the status quo. Are you going to go back to space?

59:46I don't know. This is like the first time in 26 years that I've been really kind of out of work. I'm sure I'm definitely going to go back and help shift for. I won't ever rob my CEO of his well -deserved title now. I'll probably be an exact chair or something. and I got to work, I got to have a mission. But I'll find something to contribute to. And man, I love flying and I love space. And I like the philanthropic efforts we've been doing with St. Jude. So I'll keep busy. I mean, anything. Well, look, you've been, if nothing, Jared, an inspiration to many, I appreciate your commitment to service, your commitment to charity, your commitment to discovery.

1:00:25And I want to thank you for the time today. It's been really great talking with you. Thank you. Well, thank you. I appreciate having the opportunity to chat.