Ep 144: Jared Isaacman's Bold Vision for Moon Bases, Nuclear Power in Space, and Returning NASA to Greatness

8:38Jared Isaacman:I mean, that basement startup now, it's, you know, like$10 billion EV. And you stayed independent.

8:42Joe Lonsdale:They all had to sell to eBay. You got to stay and grow independently. That's pretty impressive. Yeah.

8:47Jared Isaacman:I mean, it's, it's cool. I'd say almost a hundred percent. Like, I mean, we have tons of share in stadiums and theme parks. So all the cool experiences, stadiums, restaurants, hotels, uh, it's kind of been our, our thing a little, uh, a bit and, uh, it's, it's growing into a huge, um, multinational company.

9:03Joe Lonsdale:So I'm a little, I'm a little bit jealous here. You definitely out-athlet me because I was an intern at PayPal when you were doing that. So cause we're about the same age. So I have some, I should have been doing it on my own, but that's, that's pretty impressive. Yeah.

9:11Jared Isaacman:I think you did. Everything turned out really fun for you. I learned a lot from those guys. It all, it all, it all worked out. yeah so you so you're a pilot you're having fun you crushed it with this other bit both these businesses why NASA right so uh look I since I was five years old since kindergarten I wanted to be an astronaut like a lot of kids um told my kindergarten teacher when I was holding a picture book of the space shuttle like I'm gonna grow up and do this someday she's like sure you are and um that's why I became a pilot I was like that's as good as it's gonna get close you can get um and uh but I set this uh I did this world record flight in 2008 was um it was adventure was also raised money for make a wish foundation really high uh went around the world as fast as you could that's why i remember that okay and uh and as a result i got an invitation to go to baikonur kazakhstan with kind of the folks from the early commercial um space industry a lot of the google guys were there um a lot of spacex at that time and uh you got to see a soyuz launch and they were talking about we're going to build a spaceship for humans i was like okay it's pretty early on this is before like falcon 9 and self-landing rockets you're like okay it's

10:13Joe Lonsdale:pretty risky stuff.

10:14Jared Isaacman:Yeah. I mean, I checked in from time to time and, uh, and never would have guessed, you know, late 2020, uh, even before NASA resumed operational human space flight missions, got the opportunity to lead the first mission to space. Couldn't believe it. You got to go up.

10:27Joe Lonsdale:Very famous.

10:27Jared Isaacman:Yeah. Uh, inspiration for his first mission, then Polarist on. Um, and that, that was incredible. I was thrilled to be a small part of a, you know, an amazing evolution in space and, and obviously now I've got even more honored to have a chance to do it at NASA. When you did the flight around the world, how long did it take? 61 hours, 58 minutes, I think. It was a while ago.

10:46Joe Lonsdale:That's pretty good. I always thought it would be really cool to be very publicly somewhere and then to secretly go really fast to a fighter jet and fly really fast and be very publicly somewhere else at much faster than the speed of sound. And it would be like this neat. As a kid, I thought that was a neat idea. I don't know, to surprise people.

11:01Jared Isaacman:Yeah, well, I mean, that's the promise of maybe point-to-point travel in space is every 90 minutes you're coming around the world.

11:08Joe Lonsdale:You can get all the way around. So, I mean, yeah, technically on Starship or even a Falcon 9, you could fly all around the world in 45 minutes or something like that.

11:16Jared Isaacman:Yeah. I mean, Falcon 9, probably not. I mean, you need Starship where you're upper stage, you're intending to recover. There's a lot to do before you get there, by the way. Like, I love the promise of point to point. I'm not sold on it happening anytime soon because, all right, now that you figured out how to go from point A to B in a rocket really fast. And it's like, now the rocket's there. What do you do with it? So, now you have to build infrastructure for that rocket so you can send it back. That's a lot.

11:38Joe Lonsdale:Unless you make it disposable, which kind of defeats the purpose of it all.

11:41Jared Isaacman:So we got a long way to go flying like, you know, near hypersonic vehicles over land, landing them. There's things to solve. Like first step, let's, you know, get back to the moon. We could probably get to Mars. I would almost guarantee you we will get humans to Mars and back before like point to point rocket travel is a big thing here on Earth. That makes sense. That makes sense. And we're probably going a lot more to the moon first, I guess. Yes.

12:02Joe Lonsdale:Which makes a lot of sense. So you're now in charge of NASA. and so in its heyday, NASA was like the gold standard for competent government, world-leading research and development. And I don't want to just blame the guys in NASA, because here's what I want to ask you, because I don't want to get into your goals, but I want to understand. So for me, it's like World War II, we're a total war, everyone, everyone's helping the government. I mean, most people help the government anyway, like it's a national pride. And not only do we have all that cultural pride, but also innovation was really expensive back then, right?

12:32Joe Lonsdale:So if you wanted to build a computer, if you wanted to do something really cutting edge, it couldn't be you starting shift four in your mom's basement. You just couldn't do that back then. You'd have to go and be part of an institution. So it feels like all the talent naturally came to NASA in a way that nowadays, it's just a lot harder recruiting challenge. It's a lot harder culture challenge. So it's not a surprise to me that things are maybe not working as well as they should there. This is a hard thing you're trying to do now coming in and trying to make it live up to what it used to live up to.

12:58Joe Lonsdale:How do you look at this?

13:00Jared Isaacman:Yeah, I think everything you said is right. There's, you know, amazing history of unbelievable history of doing the near impossible. It was a different time back then, right? We had great competition. It was, you know, it was a national priority to beat the Soviets to the moon, bring them back safely. We were able to recruit the absolute best and brightest that had no other like competing interest at the time could solely focus on a single objective. We built our centers around the country to do specific things. You build engines, you test engines, you launch rockets, It's you train astronauts and control mission control.

13:31Jared Isaacman:Over time, you win. You have no competitor. People start to gravitate in lots of different directions. Everybody loves NASA, but not everybody agrees on what the priority should be. So you have a lot of external factors coming in trying to shape the direction of the agency. At the same time, you have big consolidation amongst the defense players, right? Same thing that's probably to some degree almost plagues DOW is like over consolidation really harms competition. Well, NASA is the definition of fully consolidated. until Elon came along. There was nothing else. Right, right. But I mean, you know, you take like, you know, our current launch vehicle, which was conceived at a time where you didn't have commercial space doing self-landing rockets.

14:07Jared Isaacman:It's got five prime contractors, hundreds of subcontractors supported by a workforce at NASA where we've probably over 50 ,000 between civil servants and contractors. 75 % are contractors using different tools and systems. Everybody wants to do the right thing. It's just, there's a lot of things that get in the way of it. And we got to fix it. And it doesn't happen overnight. It's lots of, you know, change a fraction of degree every single day until you're in a new direction. But we got to.

14:31Joe Lonsdale:So stepping back, like, what is your mission at NASA? You love space. You love being an astronaut. But why are you there? What are you trying to do?

14:37Jared Isaacman:Well, I mean, personally, this is, again, it's I live the American dream. I have a debt to repay the nation. But I'm grateful to have an opportunity right now under President Trump during this administration to start course correcting, right, to get us back. And we have no choice. We have no choice. I mean, hindsight against the Soviets, we have like unlimited schedule margin. We won and no one's been back since our Apollo series of moon landings. Right now, our competitor, we got a year of margin at best. They've said before 2030, we've said before the end of President Trump's term, that's late 2028, we got a year in between here.

15:11Jared Isaacman:This is at best. So we got to get moving. And sometimes having that kind of competition is a forcing function you need for change. So what are we going to do? We're going to return to the moon before end of President Trump's term. We're going to build a moon base so we can stay. we're going to invest in the next giant leap capabilities. We're not going to slow down. We're going to build nuclear power and propulsion. What industry can't do, because they got other things to worry about. We should be doing the nuclear mission. There's no other use case for it right now other than NASA.

15:36Joe Lonsdale:You said nuclear mission. This is not going to put nuclear power as well onto the moon?

15:39Jared Isaacman:It's nuclear power and propulsion in space, which includes moon, Mars, propulsion to and from locations. You talked about recruiting and retention and things. And it's like, well, we're not the only game in town. There is SpaceX, of Blue Origin and Rocket Lab. How do you attract the talent and retain it? It's you do what no one else is capable of doing, which is what NASA was created to do in the first place. Things like nuclear power and propulsion is how you attract that talent. And you do the near impossible again. You ignite an orbital economy and just more science and discovery. James Webb, Hubble, they're awesome.

16:08Jared Isaacman:Perseverance on Mars. We got Mars rovers. Do it more often. You can. It can be done. You know, when we talk about competition, and I do think that was really healthy,

16:16Joe Lonsdale:healthy to try to have to beat the Soviets. They were the first in space. We were the first on the moon, we eventually got way ahead. It's a little embarrassing that it's 60 years later and we're like, we're going to be the first. 60 years. Can we do something even way more impressive in the next few years after that? How are you thinking about this?

16:31Jared Isaacman:Yeah, sure. And the president, President Trump's already there. He said, get back to the moon and build a moon base so you can stay. Realize the scientific, economic, national security potential. He's told me multiple times, we're not going back for the rocks and flags. We are doing this to build a moon base. And the president is absolutely spot on. That is so much harder. I mean, when we're in low earth orbit on space station, if you had a real emergency within hours, you could be in the water. You may not want to be in the middle of the Pacific. That might not help the problem, but you could do it.

16:58Joe Lonsdale:Right.

16:58Jared Isaacman:Versus a couple of days to the moon where look at the moon. I mean, it gets, it gets pelted all the time.

17:03Joe Lonsdale:That's the scary thing to be at the moon base is there's stuff, there's craters everywhere. Yeah. Yeah.

17:07Jared Isaacman:Something caused those craters, right?

17:08Joe Lonsdale:I mean, what do you do? I work on, I work on drone defense. We're not going to be able to hit a crater with a blast of microwave

17:13Jared Isaacman:of energy like like what like this seems scary you're totally spot on right and that's why the president is right that this is the logical challenge because you don't have an atmosphere you don't have a magnetosphere so you've got solar radiation and debris that's going to hit

17:24Joe Lonsdale:you all the time does debris hit the moon how often are there other meteor meteors uh all the

17:28Jared Isaacman:time i mean like once a day yeah i mean we're not talking like megaton class hits like those do

17:33Joe Lonsdale:happen there's like little things is every day every day and and and so if there's a spot on the moon it's probably like every like several years on average or every like several decades on average, it might be like something that would hit. I guess probably not for every, every self-deprecation or centuries probably for per single spot. Right. Yeah.

17:46Jared Isaacman:I mean, in terms of like the, we do like probabilistic risk assessments, like debris is more of a problem for us right now, uh, getting to the moon in portions of low and medium earth orbit, where we have debris from ASAT tests that have created a lot of debris. That's, those are bullets flying around everywhere. We're not as bad yet on the moon, but if we're going to be there for a while, we're going to need to improve the surface. So we're landing habitats and then we cover it with regula right and you need it for radiation you need it for and you

18:11Joe Lonsdale:design it there's something does get hit the rest of it hopefully i mean it's safe that kind of yeah

18:15Jared Isaacman:you're again what's hitting you the the big crater stuff is not uh of course not like a giant yeah but the little thing could hit it little thing could puncture a suit right or or pierce a

18:24Joe Lonsdale:pressure vessel so you gotta protect it what what's i mean obviously some of this is probably classified but what is like most strategic about the moon like for me uh you talk to elon he wants to do a mass driver and mine things and build, send up things to orbit from data centers. Like, like, like what else do you want? Do you want to get ice to like do something? Like, what do you want to be doing? We want ice.

18:42Jared Isaacman:I mean, really like I am, I hope we can crack the code on a lunar economy where I mean, and we need an orbital economy too. Like how do we get more value out than we put in outside of really launch observation communications? We have no examples yet. We need it. Maybe it is mining a helium three. I don't know. But we need, we need something on the moon, but I'll tell you the immediate priority is we want the ice. That's how we can do in situ

19:03Joe Lonsdale:you make an ice joke given the news lately.

19:07Jared Isaacman:If we're going to go to Mars someday, right? Like again, within our lifetime, you know, we'll be able to, within years, we'll be able to send humans to Mars. It's bringing them back. It's a hard problem.

19:19Joe Lonsdale:You need the fuel from the ice to bring them back. So, if the ice, basically you pull out the hydrogen and you make some kind of fuel.

19:24Jared Isaacman:Yeah. I mean, well, for sure, hydrogen and oxygen is applicable for us in the moon, but more importantly, you're, you're stress testing. You're, you're, you're actually like right now when we launch a rocket, it's under one, it's in an atmosphere under one G and it still takes thousands of people. Right. So, uh, you know, actually doing resource, uh, mining, refining, manufacturing on the moon is, is a hell of a proving ground before you have to do it nine months away, uh, on Mars. Now, Elon's got a strategy too, just cover them with robots that can do a lot of stuff, which is also pretty cool to think about, but we, we got to learn a lot on the moon before we go to Mars.

19:56Joe Lonsdale:And for now, for now, it's just sending people there to do the mining people there to practice doing all the work well we're gonna use robots for sure it's

20:01Jared Isaacman:just you're you're gonna want people there too if you're on a if you're on the moon like doing work

20:06Joe Lonsdale:for the government uh do you get like do you get like a place to like play sports where you could jump really high and stuff like is this the thing we've already done golf on the moon you know i

20:13Jared Isaacman:actually didn't know yeah it's alan shepherd he he took the golf club yeah i mean he's got to have the record for the longest drive i would guarantee he's got the record for the longest drive that actually didn't realize that that's pretty fun hopefully you hit it straight gotta be it'd be

20:26Joe Lonsdale:i always mine's always curved to the right it's a tough game i i hear you i'm i'm dangerous on a golf course i have no place being there oh yeah yeah no it's not good let's talk about artemis a little bit more so this is this thing's delayed yes you're annoyed it's delayed as as are as you should be uh we spent like a hundred billion dollars which is probably not ideal it doesn't seem like there's accountability that there should be like we i don't know if you're allowed to fire people or something or maybe help you inspire some of them and fire some of them like what What do we do here?

20:54Jared Isaacman:Yeah, we have to start making some good decisions. And that begins now. Yes, I mean, look, leadership, accountability. We had a situation with the Boeing Starliner vehicle. I had a press conference a week or so ago. We released the whole report short of some proprietary redactions. I didn't blame Boeing. I blamed leadership failures and poor decision-making at NASA to make sure our culture is going the right direction. So that started already. You go to Artemis right now. We have to zoom out to some extent because there is responsibility that other parties have in this. There's a lot of external stakeholders that like to tell NASA how we should do certain things, right?

21:30Jared Isaacman:We are NASA. We do have some of the smartest people in the world. We did send astronauts to the moon and we brought them back safely at a time period where we knew very little about an environment. We got to have a voice in this. Right now, we are being asked to do lots of things. There's lots of side quests going on right now. Everybody's got a pet project on this. How about let's get back to the moon? We haven't done it in a half century. This is really costly. It's very risky. Let's concentrate resources on the objectives the president has established in the national space policy. Right now, this is going to blow your mind, okay?

21:59Jared Isaacman:Artemis 1 was an uncrewed demonstration, right? It flew three and a half years ago. The next one, Artemis 2, should fly in a couple weeks. That's great. There is no world where a launch cadence in this business of a rocket with 8.8 million pounds of thrust should be launching every three and a half years. People retire. You lose muscle memory. Should it surprise anyone that we're working really hard and we still see the same hydrogen leaks or helium problems that we had on Artemis 1? No. You know what the next mission after Artemis 2 comes back? It's Artemis 3. We're supposed to land on the moon three years from now.

22:31Jared Isaacman:Yeah, it's not going to work. So what are we doing? We're fixing this. We just made this announcement. We are increasing thanks to President Trump's national space policy and the one big beautiful bill funding. We are going to get in a cadence of launching every 10 months. We are going to add a new mission. Artemis 3 is supposed to land on the moon in 2028, not doing that anymore. We're going to launch Artemis 3 in 2027. We're going to rendezvous with the landers in low earth orbit. We're going to test our systems out, test our suits out and set up for two opportunities in 28 to meet the president's objective to land.

23:03Jared Isaacman:I don't know who came up with these ideas years ago of launching every three years. You go back to the space race across Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, do you know what our average launch cadence was between missions? It was between three and four months. That makes sense. Yeah, it sure does make sense.

23:17Joe Lonsdale:I mean, what's e-launch average separation with new things?

23:21Jared Isaacman:Yeah, no, he's been averaging probably about four months on his like really world, you know, world changing. On the new stuff. Yeah, rocket. So we got to get into a fair launch cadence. We got to do things in an evolutionary way. We're because we're sometimes being asked by a lot of stakeholders to do 20 different things to make, you know, lots of people happy. we wind up designing these dream states thinking they're going to happen like this instead of doing things with cadence in an evolutionary way and get back to winning the way we did in the 1960s. That's what President Trump wants.

23:47Joe Lonsdale:I love it. And is there new talent you're going to bring in? The other is not there. Like, well, what's missing? And how do you get top talent? Obviously, you're there. And obviously, as a basically a volunteer relative to everything else, how do you get other people to come be there and do that?

23:59Jared Isaacman:You know, the nice thing is we don't we don't have a shortage on our funnel. I mean, Manasseh has got such a great brand. People want to grow, you know, come work here. The hard part is how do you get them to stay? because they come, they learn, they get experience. And then for sure, they go to industry that's doing very similar things with rapidly appreciating equity. I mean, Jeff Dezo has a lot of money to pay people. Yeah, a lot of, you know, you've got to make sure we're working on what no one else is capable of doing. That's why NASA exists in the first place. Nuclear power propulsion, the president put in his national space policy, do what they can't do.

24:25Jared Isaacman:And you're going to bring in talent and they're going to want to stay because there's nowhere else to go to do it. I also give credit to our OPM director who established this new tech force initiative right now of doing exchange programs with industry because there's a lot of people like me who want to serve their country. They want to come in for a period of time, make a difference and vice versa. We can send people from NASA to those companies. He's putting together a hell of a lineup of companies, you know, all the, all the best ones to do exchange programs with. That's how we'll mature a lot of our talent.

24:53Jared Isaacman:Yeah. We have Scott Cooper on the show as well.

24:55Joe Lonsdale:He's, he's really great. And he's actually one of my cousin actually works for him and they're also redoing it to let you hold people accountable too, which I think matters a little bit. So you got both sides. You got to sticks, right? Yes, sir. Let's talk the future of the space economy, just to teach our listeners a little bit how to think about this. A lot of people are seeing, I think we mostly think of the guys launching. I happen to be invested in like satellite bus companies doing really well. There's some cool things there. Like what, how's this economy evolving? What are the new possibilities in space?

25:19Jared Isaacman:Yeah. So what we've known for 60 years is largely still the case today, which is there is demand across a lot of customers that you can build a business case around for launch observation in communications. And we need it to be more than that. So yes, it's great that we're doing standard bus architectures. We got the healthiest, most competitive launch industry in the history of America's space program, the world space program. And yeah, communication is going to another level where you're unlocking it from a true consumer perspective.

25:47Joe Lonsdale:The Starlink direct-to-phone stuff is so cool. It's so cool.

25:50Jared Isaacman:We need something else because you got a lot of money that's going in, a lot of private capital, which is awesome because we didn't have that in the 60s when NASA's budget was four and a quarter or whatever percent of discretionary budget. We've got a lot of wealthy people and a lot of private capital going to help us, but we need to figure out, I don't know if it's pharmaceutical compounds for cancer-treating drugs, if it's biotech, do we all get a couple spare kidneys or something in the fridge? Or is it helium-3 on the moon? Whatever it is, we need to crack up.

26:16Joe Lonsdale:What about tourism? I mean, tourism could be a bigger thing, couldn't it?

26:18Jared Isaacman:It could be. I'm not there yet. Now, when launch costs come down materially, Starship works. Yeah, you got a shot.

26:26Joe Lonsdale:I mean, it seems like that'd be a pretty big industry. I think it'd be fun to go. I'm kind of jealous you guys have been up, you know.

26:31Jared Isaacman:Look, from my perspective, one of our overarching goals, like we got a couple of things. We got to inspire people to join our great adventure at NASA, but, you know, we need to get more people living and working in space. Like that's how we become a spacefaring civilization. As it stands right now, you're having a lot of people ride a controlled explosion to 17 ,500 miles an hour. A hundred percent of people feel different in space. You're either on the spectrum of like, well five days was not great it was like one of the worst hangovers my life or you're throwing up and it's it's not great for a while like so the you know i i think you look back the russians have been selling seats on soyuz for a long time you're scaring me a little bit now because like when i

27:07Joe Lonsdale:was trying to learn to be a pilot and you have to practice stalling like my stomach it's like it's the dinner so you're a little scared it's another level of not feeling great we got do we have like things you could take or something there are shots and such but believe me for five days

27:20Jared Isaacman:He's not going to be grateful. All right, I'll try not to be a wimp. But look, we're going to get there. This is something we all want. I don't know if the demand is, you know, it's never, we're not going to be close to an airplane ride in terms of safety for a long time. So what we need is the economic reason for people to need to work and live in space.

27:36Joe Lonsdale:And that's going to drive more innovation, greater safety margins, lower costs. And nuclear power in space, you mentioned, like, obviously, it sounds very dangerous to launch something with nuclear. You got to be really, really sure it's going to work. Like, is this something only the government could do, I guess, because no one is allowed to do it? Wouldn't it be safer just to use Elon's stuff because his stuff's so much more tested? Or how do you think about that? Sure.

27:55Jared Isaacman:I mean, but look, there's limitations too. So right now with chemical propulsion, you're basically at that one particular moment in time. You're imparting a lot of Delta V on a vehicle and you're sending it somewhere. And that's the end of it. Now, what if you want things to come back and forth? Think like a train. You're going to need lots of mass. You're in nuclear power. What happens when you get to the surface of Mars? Yeah, you could set up a lot of football fields worth of solar panels, and then robots will go and dust them off at times. But nuclear reactor is pretty good. I mean, you know, power density there is pretty strong.

28:25Jared Isaacman:What if you want to explore in the outer solar system where, you know, the fusion reactor of our sun is not as effective the farther out you get, you need nuclear power? So this is the right thing to do. It's directionally correct. And it's not just like, is it dangerous? Nuclear power is so much safer now. It's really just the opportunity cost. If I was on the board of any nuclear power startup right now, I'd be like, this is malpractice for you to put even a minute of time in space when we've got unlimited terrestrial demand.

28:52Joe Lonsdale:There's a lot. There's a lot of stuff to get done here first. So one of the favorite things about space and all this is like the sci-fi stuff. The stuff 100 years out. So I think when we were kids, we're reading this stuff from the 1950s, 60s, 70s. And it's just so cool. I always loved, I forget what it's called, where there's people living in the ring around the planet and you can spin it fast enough. There's like cities on the ring. Oh, sure, sure. Artificial gravity stuff. Artificial gravity stuff. but it's just like giant new places to live in space. And they're all free, actually. If you're a pro-freedom person like me, it's kind of fun for the US to have these new colonies, basically, that are places where maybe there's less regulation for things.

29:25Joe Lonsdale:What inspires you the most about crazy sci-fi futures? Are we going to do things on the moons of Saturn or Jupiter or something? What are some of the really cool things we could do like 50 years out?

29:35Jared Isaacman:Well, that's the thing. I consider this the greatest adventure in human history, and it's endless. And right now, we are on step one. This is not even fair to say that we're dipping our toe in the grandest ocean of all. Like, it's just begun. Is there a world as we continue to progress out further? Like, we start with the moon. The next logical stop is Mars because it does have an atmosphere. It's a real planet we can work on. Where do you go from there? Well, you know, the environment changes. You've got some pretty high radiation environments out there. Will we ever be in a position to, you know, really explore or occupy moons of, you know, Saturn or something?

30:10Jared Isaacman:I don't know. maybe i mean that's the nice part is who the hell knows in a couple hundred years or a few thousand years but we're what we're doing is we're pursuing the secrets of the universe and we don't know what we may find out there that could change everything it feels like with this stuff with ai it could be

30:24Joe Lonsdale:like a lot of wealth created for everyone and then all of a sudden you could have groups of us go to like a super giant asteroid and make it into like a like a like a luxury resort and spin it

30:32Jared Isaacman:and certainly mine it you know usually mine it which is fun too there's always like everyone's

30:36Joe Lonsdale:like there's a trillion or quadrillion dollars of gold i'm not quite sure you need a trillion

30:40Jared Isaacman:dollars a gold but it's yeah they don't think like the supply demand element to it is when you introduce like uh a crazy amount of supply everybody although if everybody's aesthetic

30:48Joe Lonsdale:was president trump's aesthetic then maybe there would be the demand right gold might yeah certainly

30:52Jared Isaacman:could have a lot of demand but you're going to introduce a heck of a lot of stuff i have to

30:55Joe Lonsdale:admit i do like what he did with the oval office not everyone agrees with me i think it's i think

30:58Jared Isaacman:it's classy yeah you have to say that though but i actually think it no i do i i agree so we started

31:04Joe Lonsdale:this podcast to push back against like cynicism and pessimism we're seeing a lot of our country I think sci-fi and making NASA work against one of the most optimistic areas you could talk about. With the big challenges ahead, what makes you the most optimistic about what we're seeing right now?

31:17Jared Isaacman:So what makes me optimistic? Well, first, I'm two months on the job yet. I haven't run into a single roadblock. Everybody wants to go out and achieve, change the world in the air and space. And you got a presidential national space policy that says, go do it. And across all government, this is your executive order. Don't let anything slow you down. And then you got the resources between one big, beautiful Bill and Congressional funding. So we can do this. We can get back to the moon. We can build a moon base. We can unlock an orbital economy. We can launch more missions of science and discovery.

31:46Jared Isaacman:This is all exciting. And when you do this, I mean, not only does this continue to ensure America's leadership in the high ground of space, it literally inspires the world. There are going to be more kids dressing up as astronauts on Halloween in the years ahead and ever. And they're going to grow up and want to contribute to this endeavor. And then like my kids, your kids, grandkids are going to take us even farther. This is such an awesome time.

32:05Joe Lonsdale:Well, I really hope you're able to inspire my kids who want to be astronauts again. Actually, that's a really cool goal. My kids do, so I wanted to. I love it. Thank you, Jared, for joining us. Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate it.