#234 Jared Isaacman - Will China Trigger the Next Sputnik Moment for NASA?

25:12Jared Isaacman:So I came back full circle, merchant services. Nice. And, yeah, I mean, now we have, like, 6 ,500 employees. We process payments in six different continents. At the Home Depot, get up to 15 % off all installed carpet projects for a limited time. Featuring brands like LifeProof, LifeProof with PetProof technology, Home Decorators Collection, and Traffic Master. Take your pick of carpet built for real life and designed for real comfort. Plus, with installation starting as low as 49 cents per square foot and a free measure to get you started, we'll handle the hard parts for you. Offer valid July 16th, 2026 through August 2nd, 2026.

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25:56Jared Isaacman:Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new Fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Croc store today. How do you convince your parents to let you drop out of high school to start a company? What helps if you're not a good student right from the get-go. So they felt like I didn't have much to lose. You weren't a good student? No.

26:37Are you kidding me?

26:38Jared Isaacman:I hated school. I looked for any excuse to not be in school. I mean, if there was like a fire drill, that to me was a pass to just skip the rest of the day. It was like, you know, the teacher, where were you? It was like, ah, the fire alarm went off. I don't know. I got, you know, discombobulated. I was in the library. I see you. um so i was pretty i i was doing just enough not to like uh you know flunk out so my parents were losing patience with my you know academic progression anyway and um they the deal was like you you're taking care of yourself we're not supporting you and um you got to get your your high school diploma and you have to you have to promise us you'll go to college um so i was like deal and that's how it went right on i mean how fast did you start seeing success us pretty fast um we were uh which by the way i mean you know everybody you work really hard and what a better what a great time to start a company by the way when you're a teenager you have no other responsibilities in life no family no kids so you could truly burn yourself out uh just working so there was a lot of hard work but there was certainly luck throughout my career the ball bounces your way every now and then and um i mean we were profitable pretty fast um Um, yeah, I mean, it went pretty.

27:52How fast?

27:53Jared Isaacman:Like within probably two years we were, we were profitable. Wow. So 18, you're crushing it. Do you think your parents were surprised? Totally. I was surprised. I mean, no, I never, I, my expectations were pay rent and, uh, pizza and beer in the city in New York, uh, for weekends. Like that was, that was really where, you know, my, my goals were calibrated at. So the fact that we grew as much as we did, as fast as we did, I mean, we were the, geez, what was it? 2003, so maybe four years after starting the company, we were the sixth fastest growing company in America. Are you serious? We had four years in a row.

28:34Jared Isaacman:We were in the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in America. I mean, we were, you know, it's not that, by the way, that we were that good. It was just everybody else was so bad. All the big banks in the late 90s and early 2000s, all they cared about was pushing credit cards on people. They just wanted to get consumers to spend. And the belief was that businesses, no matter how painful the process is or was, would conform to how consumers wanted to spend. So they put all their energies, resources, and innovation into pushing credit cards on consumers, and the whole acceptance side was neglected.

29:12Jared Isaacman:So it wasn't hard for us to create a lot of operational efficiencies and good process, workflow. And as a result, we were just winning customers over left and right. And you saw that at age 16? It was just so bad the way everybody was doing things. Everybody was outsourcing everything. The banks just could care less about acceptance. I mean, the example I used to give all the time is if you were 18 and you wanted a credit card in 1999, you went on the internet and in 60 seconds, you got an instant approval of credit cards in the mail. But if you were a pizza shop in 1999 and you wanted to accept credit cards, the paperwork was like getting a commercial mortgage.

29:51Jared Isaacman:Like it was 60 pages, you know, copies of your passport, everything was like, like, what do we, why is this so painful and complicated? How did you know this at 16? Because I was selling it. I mean, this is what I was doing when I worked at that company, Merchant Services. Like I had exposure for six months of trying to sell the service. And I was like, it's pretty bad. It wasn't their fault. It was just the industry neglected it. And now fintech is, you know, it was really hot and, you know, companies like Square and Stripe and everything like have, you know, all, you know, broken barriers and innovated in their own rights.

30:23Jared Isaacman:But for the longest time, like it was just a boring bank industry that no one, you know, gave a crap about. I mean, I'm just, I'm just curious. I mean, Did your parents, I mean, did they see, they had to have seen the level of potential that you brought? I just think they thought I'd be less of a, like, again, an academic embarrassment if they put me on another track in life. But they were very supportive. Like, I would never, like, I would never permit this with my kids. Like, this is, the path I went down, you know, 99 times out of 100 ends bad. Like I should be pumping gas in New Jersey or something.

31:04Jared Isaacman:So like I'm all for like the well paved road through higher education to get to success. And that's certainly the road my kids will be on. So my parents were a little, they were out of their mind to ever let me go down this path. But I'm grateful they did. How did you get into Dracon? So I always wanted to be an astronaut. I mean, when I was five years old, this is how I got into an aviation career. When I was five, in kindergarten, I would check out books from the library, like the elementary school library with picture books of the space shuttle. And I remember telling my kindergarten teacher, someday I'm going to be an astronaut.

31:45Jared Isaacman:She said, she'll be watching in her rocking chair one day. When I did wind up becoming an astronaut, she had already passed away. So she didn't get to see it. But I was always enamored by space. And I built my first computer so I could play flight simulators. I became a pilot because I thought that's as good as it's going to get. I'm a realist, like not going to be struck by lightning and become an astronaut. I went to like the space camp for aviation. It's called the Aviation Challenge at Space Camp. And, you know, I was 20 years old, I guess, where four years after I started my company where I was waking up on my keyboard and I was just burning myself out because I was going, you know, 20 hours a day.

32:25Jared Isaacman:And I told my parents, I was like, I need a hobby. I'm going to start flying. and I started flying, and I knew I wanted to fly jets, so I built time as fast as I could. I was flying as much as I could everywhere, moved to jets, then got into ex-military aircraft, met a bunch of really awesome people in that world that, you know, some of the greatest military fighter pilots in the world that I got exposure to. Dale Snort Snodgrass, like naval aviation legend there's a cool picture of an f-14 passing in front of a aircraft carrier like uh in knife edge that was him uh you know jive kirby uh i was flying the f-4 phantom demo stroker gustafson slick baum just off the thunderbirds and basically we put together an air show team uh in 20 um in 2010 and 2011 and uh we had seven jets doing like a blue angels type routine I was flying right wing in the diamond.

33:26Jared Isaacman:And we just had all stars that I was able to learn from. But we were having the absolute time of our lives because that was the year of sequestration where the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds were stood down. So every show in the country was begging for us. And it was like this horrible rock star life where you're flying constantly, you're drinking late, you're eating terrible, everybody's gaining like 30 pounds. And we were like, this is going to end poorly for us if we don't kind of pivot to something a little more commercial. So we went around the world and bought up about 100 fighter jets and created this commercial adversary business where we were just professional bad guys for the Department of Defense.

34:02Jared Isaacman:And that's where Drockin came from. Man. I mean, how do you – where do you – where do you purchase a MiG-28 or any of these guys? I mean, where do you get them? That was part of the fun. You know, so we were flying air show fighters that are like basically trainers. and they're great for, you know, making noise in front of the crowd and doing loops and rolls, but they're not, you know, like they're not tactically relevant. They're not a credible threat. So you're not going to train the DOD against it. So we had to fly around the world, the different countries that had fleets of aircraft that still had life left on them, that were, you know, that were relevant, you know, that were threatening.

34:42Jared Isaacman:So they had a radar, You could put a training sidewinder on them. And that you had enough quantity of that you were a useful training aid. You know, one or two jets isn't going to make a difference, right? And that's hard. That's the whole secret sauce of the business was finding aircraft, you know, that were safe, credible, and sustainable. Because generally speaking, when a country is done with their jets, they've squeezed everything out of them because they know whatever comes next is going to cost like 10 times more, like an F-35 or something. So we went to New Zealand. We bought the entire New Zealand Combat Air Force.

35:17Jared Isaacman:They made a political decision to not have any offensive capability. So we bought their A4 Skyhawks, which were same jets used in Top Gun, but they were upgraded with F-16 radars. We bought Mirage jets from France, from Spain, from Jordan. We bought L-159 Alka's from the Czech Republic. We bought MiG-21s from Poland. And it was awesome. It gave me a whole other side. Because by that point, I already had 11, 12 years of business experience. So now I was getting into dealing with governments, which meant everything I learned in business, you just throw out. Because nothing makes sense in this world anymore.

35:57Jared Isaacman:Everybody's motivations are different. And when you're buying fighter jets from other countries, by the way, people can talk about our government is corrupt. Our government is not corrupt compared to any of these other countries that you're out there doing business with where, you know, it is – you got to jump through some hoops to be able to buy military hardware from there. But it was a – yeah, I mean, it was a great learning experience, put it that way. So what did it – I mean, can you talk a little bit about more what the company did, Draken? Yeah, sure. So we – our job was basically to be professional bad guys.

36:34Jared Isaacman:or the op-4, if you will, or aggressors. These are all kind of the terms that would be used. So the history behind this is the U.S. used to have organic aggressor capability, and they still do, but they used to have a lot more of it during the Cold War. And the reason was is they could use their own aircraft to do it, generally speaking. And in order to handicap, like say an F-16, so that it could simulate, I don't know, MiG-29, for example, you know, in the early 2000s or the 90s, maybe they wouldn't use Afterburner. Or maybe they would set their radar scope to like a 40-mile scope or something.

37:14Jared Isaacman:And everybody still got good training out of it. The pilot who was being the red air, the Russian or the Chinese or the Iranian or something, was still getting good training out of it. The problem that started to develop over the last 15 years or so when we created this business in 2011 is the fourth-gen platforms like F-15, F-16, F-18 were reaching the end of their service life, and the replacements were continued to keep slipping to the right, the F-35. So every hour remaining on that airplane became precious. You didn't want to waste it being the bad guy when you might need it for national security reasons.

37:51Jared Isaacman:Second, because they're old, they cost more. So it cost a lot more to use it as red air. And then third, our capabilities had developed to such an extent that in order to simulate being the bad guy, you had to turn off a lot of systems, so much so that it became negative training. And then when fifth gen came, so stealth fighters like the F-22 and F-35, it was even more negative training to take such an airplane that costs like 80, 90 ,000 an hour to operate and pretend to be a Russian MiG-29 or something. So all of this was the demand signal for kind of a dedicated force of red air where it was our jets.

38:30Jared Isaacman:So it didn't matter how much time we used against it. They were foreign aircraft, so they looked different, which is pretty important. And the pilots could focus just on being Russian, Chinese, Iranian fighter pilots instead of taking away from blue air training. And out of nowhere, it became this, you know, like multi-billion dollar industry. Wow. Wow. Wow. How many jets are there within the company? I mean, Drakken, you know, our peak had over 100 fighters. And we did air-to-ground training, too, for JTACs. We supported, you know, the Navy special operators at Fallon. We would drop, you know, like Mark 76 and training ordnance for JTAC controllers and such on the ground.

39:19Jared Isaacman:because, again, you didn't have to use an F-16 or an A-10 that you might need to use in other parts of the world when it was kind of more about who you're talking to and what's falling off the airplane than it was the actual airplane type. So we got to do a lot of really cool missions. No kidding. I spent a lot of time out at Fallon when I was in. I'm wondering if we worked together. Drakken still has that contract even today, um you know supporting um supporting the guys up at fallon for um yeah jtech training and such how do you think you uh i mean how do you hold up against some of these legendary fighter pilots you were talking about me personally yeah are you are you flying out there um we uh i we used to fly together all the time i would tell you that uh snort snodgrass was unbeatable um i mean i think you know, he was, he was just born at a different time.

40:13Jared Isaacman:I mean, he led all the Tomcats into Desert Storm. He, uh, he was unbeatable. He was the greatest like BFM, you know, that's here in a, in a phone booth, night fight, uh, night fight kind of guy. He, um, nobody could beat him. And he was an unbelievable mentor. Uh, he, uh, yeah, I, I think he taught me a lot about, um, I mean, just who I am, but also how I fly. And, uh, but you know, I mean, there's, i've certainly uh had some successes against uh you know some of our our less skilled uh fighter pilot friends but i'll bet so i mean you were you were up you i mean as the owner of the company i mean you were up there training our fighters yeah i mean not anywhere near as much as like the the dedicated line guys i mean who did we we hired people right out of the aggressor squadrons because they were very current on the tactics and the threat um but i did fly in it from From time to time, I was part of a big exercise at White Sands Missile Range.

41:11Jared Isaacman:We did a 16 turn 16, and we just got these new aircraft in from overseas, and I was the first one checked out in it. So I had to fly in it, which is awesome. Nice. That was cool. But I was in A-4s when we were fighting the first kind of F-35, the JOT, the Joint Operational Test Team at Edwards. Fone in some A-4s at Fallon, brought the first L-159s to Fallon. but nowhere near like the guys that were doing it full-time every day. So, I mean, being up there against, you know, our own, how do you feel? You feel pretty safe? So, I'll give you two sides to this. In the beginning, so when we first started the company, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, I felt really good.

41:59Jared Isaacman:So, F-35s were just coming online. And I remember we had four, we had a, it was supposed to be just a 4v4, which means we should just get killed. A4 is against four F-35s from the Joint Operational Test Team. And three of the F-35s ground aborted. So it became a 4v1. And we had used up the entire airspace. I mean, we had jets high, low on the deck, and from different angles. And this one F-35 just went around and made easy work of everyone, just dispatched everyone super quick. No kidding. And, um, but what, um, what I thought over time, and this kind of comes to my only real like political position that I really truly care about, which is just the competitiveness of the nation.

42:39Jared Isaacman:Um, I got concerned when, you know, we were coming up with ways that could really create problems for blue air that were, that if like, if I could afford it, if I could afford to do these things to our aircraft, then certainly the North Koreans could and the, the Iranians, but definitely the Chinese are going to be able to do it. And we started to be very dismissive of it as, you know, well, that's not going to be a problem because if it is, we'll do that. But those were things that, but there were a lot of other scenarios where we didn't apply that kind of thinking or logic to it. And every year that started to go by, the Chinese threat specifically was getting better and better and better.

43:21I mean, really over, you know, again,

43:24Jared Isaacman:a five-year period of time, you know, you're simulating a MiG-21 to a, you know, dramatically improved flanker. I almost like, I use kind of the SpaceX example sometimes on it, where when it comes to China, what we think we know is already so dated. You know, two years is a long time in that world. It's the same thing with like, you know, with SpaceX. You're like, well, four years ago, they just, they barely put astronauts in space. They've done over a dozen, you know, commercial space missions right now. You know, in just a short span of time, not to mention caught a skyscraper with chopsticks from a building.

44:00Jared Isaacman:Like, things happen quick. And we started to see that a lot, I think, in the last years I was at Drakken, which made me really, I mean, really concerned about their pace of progress while we were stagnating. Man, man. How did you move into SpaceX? I mean, you got two enormous companies, and now you want to go to SpaceX. How did that happen? Well, so in 2008, I did a world record flight, and it was just speed around the world. It was just a fun challenge. I wanted to do it, and did also to raise funds and awareness for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. And when I came back from that, I was invited to go to Baikonur, Kazakhstan, by Peter Diamandis, who's like a serial entrepreneur, but very forward-thinking, brilliant guy, like MIT, MD.

44:53Jared Isaacman:And he's like, do you want to come and see this commercial? It's a Soyuz launch from Baikonur, but it's going to have a commercial astronaut on it, Richard Garriott. And I was like, do I want to go to Russia, Kazakhstan to see a rocket launch? Yes, of course. And I wound up going with a lot of the early pioneers of the commercial space industry, including a lot of the SpaceX guys. And by the way, that is so cool. If you go to a rocket launch, a human rocket launch at NASA, at Kennedy Space Center. The closest you'll get is about three miles away. When you go to see the Russians send their astronauts up from Kazakhstan, you're like a par three away.

45:30Jared Isaacman:Are you serious? You're like 100 yards away. The night before the launch, you can touch the rocket, whereas we're surrounded with security at KSC, and you're basically in this trench. Now, maybe they've upgraded it since 2008, but all I was thinking at the time is, man, this thing goes even a little bit off course. It's game over for everybody. If you know a little bit of the history of the Soviet space program, that that's happened it's happened more than once but um anyway i met a bunch of the folks there and uh you know i i heard about this thing you know dragon the the dragon spacecraft i was like well i'm a pilot and if the time ever comes where you know the goal always was from the get-go to make life multi-planetary you know to open up space for the many instead of the few and um i said i'd be interested and I just kind of knocked on the door periodically and in 2020, you know, they answered and they said, yeah, we're ready.

46:25Jared Isaacman:And man, in just a matter of weeks, we went from nothing to the first commercial space mission being announced, Inspiration4. Man, that's incredible. You know, I thought that the Make-A-Wish Foundation was after this, so I would like to talk about that now. I mean, so you rode a jet, drove a jet, piloted a jet around the world. And how long did that take? 61 hours, 50 minutes. It was, honestly, it wasn't that hard. It's actually, it's not the piloting or the flying. We did it because it was the first all-glass jets where you were starting to fuse a lot of information together in the airplane. So you didn't need to do as much flight planning on the ground.

47:07Jared Isaacman:and since these record flights, it's like NASCAR, you know, whether you're stopped or you're driving, it all counts, like you're getting fuel. So it's all the logistics of can you, you know, get all that, you know, can you get all that done so you're not sitting on the ground for too long, fueled up and in the air and do your flight planning essentially in the air in order to beat the record. And I was like, for sure, with all this extra information, you can. But any like good adventure that I've been lucky enough to go on, you try and always, you know, couple it with a really, a really good, you know, philanthropic effort.

47:39Jared Isaacman:Try and, you know, try and pay back what you're fortunate enough to be able to participate in. And so Make-A-Wish has been a charity I've worked with for a long time. Once kind of the, you know, the space missions came around and the platform got a lot bigger and could raise a lot more money, I kind of pivoted to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And that's where we've, you know, mostly been focused on for the last few years. What draws you to that? So I know how lucky I've been in life. And I think it's pretty damn important to acknowledge that from time to time too. You get a lot of successful entrepreneurs that you make all your own luck.

48:14Jared Isaacman:It's like you make some of it, okay? I mean, you were born in this country. You were born healthy. There's a lot of families that no fault of their own just get dealt really shitty hands in life. No child should be faced with the possibility of never growing up to get a driver's license or go to college or something. So I think that's always kind of gravitated towards those causes that try and help people going through absolutely horrific times. And with Make-A-Wish, I mean, it just seems absolutely terrible that an organization like that needs to exist in the first place to give a child with like, you know, life-threatening illness, a last wish, right?

48:56Jared Isaacman:But if you're going to be in those circumstances, do, you know, do whatever you can to try and help. So that's kind of what paired me with Make-A-Wish for a really long time. You got exposure to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where when you understand their mission, which is that no child should die in the dawn of life, and if they're successful, you don't need to grant as many wishes. And I thought, you know, with Polaris, you know, was a big enough platform that you could raise enough money to kind of make a real dent at it. So that's kind of how it went down. Man, I love that about you.

49:26That's, I mean, when I read that, that was just, that's so cool. Is all the philanthropy that you do focused towards children?

49:35Jared Isaacman:Yeah, pretty much entirely. So, you know, you've got the not so, you know, happy side of it, which is what Make-A-Wish and St. Jude try and do, which, I mean, look, it's happy as they keep increasing the survival rate of childhood cancer. Those are good days. But then it's kind of like the other side, which is, you know, more of the, I don't know, I guess the inspirational side, like where I try and help out a lot. So Space Camp, I've donated an awful lot to that organization. I think it's a national treasure. I went there. You know, Senator Sheehy, you know him, Navy SEAL. He went to Space Camp seven times as a kid.

50:12Jared Isaacman:it is a place where you get experiences as a kid that you can't get in the classroom, that you can't get playing a video game. And it's all the things that we need to ensure the competitiveness of our nation. I mean, it started at Space Camp, it's Space Camp, it's Aviation Challenge, it's Robotics Camp, it's Cyber Camp. I mean, all the areas you want to expose kids to things that they wouldn't get anywhere else so that when they grow up, they can kind of contribute to the grand plan, if you will. So anyway, that's another area to try and put some resources towards. I love that. Where did you start the Make-A-Wish Foundation flight?

50:48Jared Isaacman:I started in Marstown, New Jersey, actually. Marstown, New Jersey. What was, I mean, where did you go around? Oh, it was, you went up through Canada. So these were in light jets, so you can't cross the Atlantic or the Pacific direct. So I went from Marstown, New Jersey, up to St. John's in Canada, from there to the Azores. Um, we had different routes each time, but basically from the Azores, usually either to Spain or, um, or to Sardinia from there, like Greece to the Middle East, like, uh, Cairo or Luxor, um, Oman, Pakistan, India, Maldives, Thailand, you know, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, all times had to go through Russia to get to Alaska.

51:33Jared Isaacman:It's pretty cool. It landed at a big, uh, like naval base they have out there, which is pretty wild. So. Right on, man. that sounds like a hell of a lot to do in three days i was a lot of i mean it was it was tons of fun um all the adventures are fun you know yeah yeah well let's get back to spacex so they call you up and say we're ready to do this i mean how does how does that feel i can't believe how fast it went honestly and uh and also their willingness to even take it on so at the time that inspiration 4 was created, which was October of 2020, they put two astronauts up, Bob and Doug, on Demo 2.

52:15Jared Isaacman:It was a demo flight. It wasn't even the return of operational capability to the United States after the shuttle was retired. That was NASA Crew-1. That came after. So, like, I mean, to have the confidence, which, by the way, in itself is another travesty that we went 10 years in this country with having zero capability to put astronauts into space. 10 years when the shuttle was retired in 2011, we had to send all our astronauts via Russia. So you think of all the things of SpaceX and Elon and, you know, the good and the bad, they returned operational capability in the United States for sending astronauts into the high ground of space.

52:54Jared Isaacman:It's like absolutely a travesty that we ever let ourselves be in that position in the first place. But yeah, I mean, I just think of like the confidence they must have had in October of 2020 to say, yeah, we're ready to do this and we're ready to do it with civilians. And they did and they signed up for it. And then NASA Crew-1 launched. Crew-1 came home. NASA Crew-2 launched. And before even NASA Crew-2 came home, Inspiration4 launched. So it was about kind of nine months from when we said we were going to do it to when we went to space. what was the train up like uh what's your like getting in there it was uh the training was awesome um i mean it was i've i've said my two missions to space the time i spent on the ground with the teams at spacex and also nasa too i mean they played a part in both missions just as good as as going to space i mean to be surrounded by the best and brightest that are focused on such an amazing mission you know we talked about saint jude's mission of no child should die in the dawn of life.

53:56Well, how about, you know, the world is a more interesting

53:59Jared Isaacman:place when you can journey among the stars. That's a, that's a hell of a vision, right? It's, it certainly calls to me. Um, but yeah, you spend a lot of time, uh, my first mission, you had to get all the academics. So everything about the vehicle, um, you know, the Falcon 9 launch, the ground systems, you just, it was death by PowerPoint for a really long time. And, uh, and then you get to the fun stuff of being in the simulator, the centrifuge, and And we went, you know, out into the mountains. You know, I brought my crew up Mount Rainier. And you're flying fighter jets. You know, you're doing all those kind of good things to get comfortable being uncomfortable and build mental toughness.

54:35Jared Isaacman:And in addition to, yeah, you know, a lot of time in the simulator. And then eventually you go. But it's a great journey. I mean, so what was the first mission about? First mission was just showing can be done. I mean, that was, it was kind of simple in that regard that, you know, up until that point in time, you had to be one of those lucky few that got struck by lightning to get, essentially, to be picked to be a NASA astronaut or a Russian cosmonaut and to show that you didn't have to be a perfect human specimen. I mean, you know, the crew we assembled, which was a really inspirational crew, and I didn't know any of them.

55:11Jared Isaacman:It all came together, you know, essentially with, you know, with luck, the stars aligned, where our medical officer was Haley Arsenault, childhood cancer survivor, 10 years old, has bone cancer. All she wants to do is live and grow up and be able to help other kids in the fight and work at St. Jude. So that's exactly what she did. She beat the odds. She grew up. She became a physician assistant at St. Jude. Never knew she was going to get a phone call one day that said, hey, you want to go to space? She was a great astronaut. Still the youngest American to go to space. First astronaut to have a prosthesis.

55:43Jared Isaacman:She has a prosthesis in her leg from her bone cancer. So anyway, she was totally awesome. The first black female pilot of a spacecraft, Dr. Sian Proctor, I mean, a story about perseverance. She did everything she could. Her father worked in Guam on a radio site talking to the Apollo 11 crew. So he was a contractor for NASA. She did everything she could to be a NASA astronaut. I mean, she's a PhD geoscientist.

56:15Jared Isaacman:She's a pilot. She's done analog astronauts where they lock in, like, shipping containers. She was runner-up in NASA selection process, just never gave up, ultimately got picked. And then Chris Zembroski, Air Force veteran, worked on ICBMs and wound up riding a rocket and was a space camp counselor. So it's just a really awesome crew. But the goal was just to show it could be done. You know, pick these people at random, get it right. don't screw up uh you screw up you set back this whole idea of commercial space for decades but you get it right and all the fun missions will follow um and we got it right we did a bunch of science we raised a quarter of a billion for saint jude and then now the fun missions have have come yeah yeah i mean well what's it like being up there for the first time uh I I I I I

57:30Jared Isaacman:I It's still like getting struck by lightning, by the way. Yeah, it is. It is. It is. But it is, I'll tell you just on like kind of the health side of it. Everybody feels different. So that's like, you know, you can talk about the amazing views and how that impacts you like we were talking before about the overview effect. But the simple reality is when you're, we didn't evolve to exist in microgravity. So everybody feels differently. And the bookends here are you feel like you're hanging upside down from your bed and it lasts for days, but otherwise pretty functional. That's your best case scenario, by the way.

57:44Jared Isaacman:That's your best case? Best case scenario. The other end of the spectrum is you get incredibly sick, like horrible motion sickness, and you're throwing up for a couple days. And that's the reality. 600 and some odd people, almost 700 have been to orbit. Just more than 50, greater than 50 % will get what's called space adaptation syndrome. And there'll be a mess for a couple of days until they get some shots and they feel better. And it has nothing to do with whether you get motion sickness on the earth. You can be like this amazing fighter pilot, fly upside down, loops and rolls and whatever. And you can be a wreck in space for a couple of days.

58:21Jared Isaacman:So yeah, everybody feels different in orbit, but it's worth it. How did you feel? I'm one of the lucky 50 % that does not get space adaptation syndrome. So for me, it was simply you're hanging upside down from your bed. All your fluid shifts up towards your head. Your cheeks puff out a little bit. You kind of have this little bit of a brain fog for a day or so because you're getting used to the increased intracranial pressure. But yeah, that's what it feels like. All right. Well, what about from a personal aspect? You feel... When you reach it. Well, you feel incredibly fortunate and lucky to be there because you can't get to space without gaining a great appreciation for the thousands of people that it takes to put you there and to bring you back safely and to know the history of the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands that came before you over the last 60 years to figure all this out for it to even be made possible.

59:17Jared Isaacman:so i don't know anyone who doesn't get up there floating around looking out the window and doesn't have this profound sense of gratitude for everybody that helped contribute to make it possible man that's but that's just like were you married at the time yeah i've been uh married since uh 2011 how did that i mean what's your wife say when you're like i'm gonna go to orbit i'm gonna go to space uh my wife and i have known each other for a long time so we were on the same bus in middle school together she was like the 12th employee at my company started dating in like 20 you know i mean 24 years ago i guess like when it was still cool to date in the office you know and uh um so she's been here for all the adventures uh amazingly supportive of it um she'd probably prefer i don't go back to space um but i was explaining like relative to flying air shows 18 inches apart from other aircraft like i think it's safer so i think that i think that argument held she bought off on that yeah so right on so you come back and then are you right back in the program so um we had set out all these goals uh for inspiration for we're going to put together an inspirational crew.

1:00:43Jared Isaacman:We are, we're going to do three days of science in space, and we are going to raise a bunch of money for St. Jude. And when we came back, we checked all the boxes, except we were a little short on, on the fundraising goal. Like we, like we didn't, we didn't set a$50 million goal, a hundred million. We said, we're going to raise, you know, over$200 million for St. Jude. And, and we were close, you know, and uh i uh i felt i you felt pretty pretty accomplished and as we were getting um we helicoptered from from the ship that picks up the the capsule in uh in the atlantic and we were going back for some medical tests and somebody on their phone we didn't have our phones was like hey elon just tweeted and said um you know congratulations inspiration for put me in for 50 million.

1:01:37Jared Isaacman:And, uh, it was like, there wasn't a, there wasn't a dry eye in like the vehicle. Like we were, uh, we were all pretty emotional cause we, we now far surpassed the goal. And I was like, well, this is it. Like we, we set the bar high. We got everything done. Like it's over now. And, um, and then, uh, a couple of weeks later, I got invited to go to Starbase, Texas. And I was, this is a right near Brownsville. And, um, and Elon was there and I got a tour of Starbase. And it was a religious experience. I'm telling you, like, I have to imagine that's like what it was like when people first set foot on the grounds of like Los Alamos.

1:02:14Jared Isaacman:I mean, not to, you know, using a Manhattan Project analogy here, but I mean, that's what, when you're talking about making life multi-planetary and going to Mars, it's a Manhattan Project. Like, and that was like, that's, that's where it was all beginning. You know, building this city out of, out of the dirt and like there's nothing around and they're building massive launch pads and factories for vehicles, interplanetary spaceships, wild stuff going to a planet other than our own for the first time. And I was just totally, totally hooked at that point. And basically the message was, is okay, we showed we could do it.

1:02:52Jared Isaacman:Now let's actually build the damn thing. And he's like, what are we going to need? We're going to need to go farther into space than we've gone in a while because it's harder. The farther you go out there, the harder it is to come home, and the more hazards there are. There's debris that are, I mean, there's a billion bullets flying around in orbit right now. And even a one millimeter piece of aluminum at orbital velocities will shred a spaceship. No kidding. 100%. We put the space station at 400 kilometers approximately for a reason, because the debris that's out there will burn up in the atmosphere very quickly.

1:03:23Jared Isaacman:As a result, though, we have to keep boosting the space station. But you go farther out there, especially in the 1 ,000-kilometer regimes, you've got micrometeoids and orbital debris, paint chips that fall off old satellites, or worse, satellites that were blown up in ASAT tests will create this, like, just debris field. And it's flying around at 8 kilometers a second. So you have debris. You have more radiation, which avionics don't like. Human bodies don't necessarily like it either. and then in order to come home, you have to put that much more energy to go farther out, which means you have to take that energy to come back.

1:03:58Jared Isaacman:So he's like, we got to go farther out there if we're going to go to the moon and Mars. We're going to need spacesuits. He's like, NASA has been using the same spacesuits for 40 years. They literally cost billions of dollars. I mean, it's hundreds of millions a year and just upkeep on those suits every year. And they leak. You know, there's a situation on the space station where, you know, you had an astronaut where their helmet was filling with water from their liquid cooling suit. I mean, like totally scary stuff. stuff. So he's like, we're going to need to build suits for thousands of people and no one's done it in decades.

1:04:24Jared Isaacman:So we got to do that. And we're going to need to test new forms of communication because, you know, our various, you know, legacy infrastructure of ground stations and teacher satellites are 40 years old. And I was like, I'm totally in on this. And kid Poteet who interviewed, he was too. He was the mission director on inspiration for, and obviously flew up with me on the last one. Like we were totally sold on the idea of a developmental program. And yeah, so I guess about a month or so after I came back from inspiration for, we created Polaris program and we were back at it. I'm not giving up.

1:04:57I am selling the building.

1:05:00Jared Isaacman:The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. No, stop. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX's The Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for.

1:05:47From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook. Man. So what's it, I mean, how has it been in orbit?

1:05:58Jared Isaacman:It's awesome. I mean, like I said, once you get past the hanging upside down from your bed feeling for a little bit, it's, yeah, it's amazing, man. You know, everything happens, like, quickly, but, like, time melts away. you um you're just always busy doing things your schedule is planned out to the second and you want to make every bit of that time count like you know how lucky you are to be there and if there is an experiment that could help with cancer treatment or you know the human body's ability to endure microgravity for long periods of time like you want to play your part in learning that and um and you do and it's kind of amazing how much time you have to get stuff done because it's not like you have to go far for anything like people were telling me oh yeah you know when you brush your teeth it's gonna take five times longer than it is here on earth it was like i went to i literally floated a foot grabbed the toothpaste it was done and then i floated a foot and i picked up an experiment like things just you're just sailing through things super fast you know right on i mean what is it you keep bringing up you brought it up a couple times at breakfast too uh you know cancer treatments in space and what we might find i mean why do we think the cure for cancer is in space?

1:07:10Are we onto something there?

1:07:12Jared Isaacman:I don't know if we think it, I think it's more we hope, right? And it doesn't, we hope that there is something that we will find in space, in the unique environment of microgravity, or say on the lunar surface with lunar regolith, that unlocks an economy that creates a justification for us to be there. because right now we are there mostly for national prestige. We have an international space station. We have American astronauts there. I think if you ask anyone at NASA, like what is the single greatest accomplishment we've gotten from the international space station, they won't say cancer treating pharmaceutical drugs, even though we've done lots of experiments.

1:07:53Jared Isaacman:They'd say we kept astronauts alive continuously. We've had a continuous heartbeat on the international space station for nearly a quarter of a century. It's a hell of an accomplishment, but you need that orbital economy to pay for everything we want to see in space someday. It can't be perpetual taxpayer funding. So whether it's cancer-treating drugs, you can use microgravity to create crystal formulations of pharmaceutical compounds to increase the density of the treatment, which might increase the effectiveness. People talk about 3D printing organs in microgravity, but none of these things have truly come to fruition yet.

1:08:30People talk about 3D printing organs? Yeah.

1:08:33Jared Isaacman:What? I mean, microgravity. What can we do there that we can't do as easily here on Earth? But there's lots of experiments, but nothing that has cracked the code yet on it. But if we don't figure it out, then it's perpetual taxpayer funding. And frankly, space, since the beginning of the space program, has always faced the debate of how can we invest so much money here? NASA's budget,$25 billion a year, whether it's$25 billion or$20 billion, which it may wind up tracking towards. How can you justify that when people are starving here and people are homeless and health care is bad? We are always going to be faced with that debate, and it's a good debate to have until we kind of crack the code and figure out how to extract more value from being in space than we put into it.

1:09:19And when you figure that out, whatever it may be, that's when you're in your Star Wars future, man.

1:09:24Jared Isaacman:And that's when you got multiple space stations and people on the moon and Mars because you're mining helium-3 or printing organs. Everybody's got a spare kidney in their fridge. You know, it's like we got to figure that out at some point or else we're just going to be on the taxpayer, you know, pipe for a long time. Could you just help me understand? I know nothing about this. Microgravity. I mean, why are we experimenting with cancer drugs and 3D printing of organs in space? What is it about space that is motivating people to do this type of research up there? Yeah, I mean, you know, kind of the lack of gravity, which is not even the really right way to say it, because you've got a lot of gravity.

1:10:06Jared Isaacman:Gravity is keeping you pretty much where you are, right, when you're in orbit. Just allows you to do things without the influence of something, you know, being held on the table like that. Now, this is what the big, brilliant minds are working on. I can tell you 100 % they have done crystal formulations of cancer-treating drugs in space, which kind of increases the density of the treatment in a way that hopefully increases the effectiveness of it. I don't know if it's conclusive or not yet. How far have they come with 3D printing in space? Not organs, but they are doing various biotech experiments in space.

1:10:47Jared Isaacman:but nothing's nothing's come to fruition yet after a quarter century that's kind of the problem we need to fix that and accelerate it pretty quick uh you know also breakfast uh talking about the for all mankind on apple tv nasa if you watch that show is like the most influential agency in the u.s government everybody comes to them because they bring in revenue you know uh it's not just all about tax revenue and it's from mining helium 3 on the moon um that doesn't mean And just because there's an Apple TV show on it, that's a credible path. We do believe you can get more power out of, you know, through a fusion reaction with helium-3, you can get more power out than you put into it.

1:11:28Jared Isaacman:But the point is, you need something like that. You need some orbital economy in order to build that future. And that show does a pretty good example of it. Well, I mean, it seems like, you know, this year I've talked to a lot of innovators. and um a lot of these guys i mean we talked to astroforge mining yeah asteroids talk to teeps steve quast who uh has a company called space built with the assemble satellites and stuff like that in space he was talking about helium-3 on the moon and he said that china was mining that we talked to um bajibot who is um building solar solar power uh power plants up there in hopes to beam solar energy back to earth from space talk to a lot of people about this stuff i mean it seems like as far as the you know civilian type population the the innovators i mean they're gung-ho on this and you know what else i'm seeing is I'm seeing all these younger innovator types who they're all jumping on the mission to Mars train.

1:12:43We're going to need power. We're going to need food. We're going to need all these things. And they all seem to be, I mean, Elon has just inspired so many people with this mission. And it's cool to see the younger generation start building businesses to help accomplish that. It's fascinating.

1:13:05Jared Isaacman:We need a thousand more companies like SpaceX across the whole like aerospace, defense apparatus, every major technology endeavor across any important domain should, you know, should have its SpaceX-like equivalent, at least a couple of them in there. I think it's what we need to ensure, you know, America's leadership and free world. Let's talk about the spacewalk. Sure. What was that for? So we tested out the first new spacesuit that was made in 40 years. And SpaceX and their team of really brilliant engineers built it in about two and a half years. And it's pretty important because people have been working a really long time to build replacement NASA suits and it hasn't happened yet.

1:13:51Jared Isaacman:Now, it was like, I would say, I mean, look, it was a lot closer to a min-viable product than it was something you'd walk on the moon or Mars with. But I can tell you, I recently just got an update on it, and they've already gone two generations beyond it, which will be cool to see them test at some point in the future. Just like I mentioned before, you can't go to space without feeling gratitude for everybody who helped you get there. And when I was in that suit outside the Dragon vehicle, I was thinking about all the people that worked really hard to make it and test it to keep me safe. I mean, there is nothing between me and death other than a visor.

1:14:23Jared Isaacman:and uh and you know and i had no doubt that what they built was going to perform well and that someday some evolution of it would be used on the moon or mars and that's what's going to happen but i guess maybe just say like it's a lot different than looking out the window you know i i really i was like it's going to be a you know it's going to be a visual thing and it's a it's an everything thing you um i mean you got all these sensations coming together you know you're cold i mean we We were really cold. You're using two-thirds of your oxygen supply is being used to cool you. And I think SpaceX erred on really cold because a lot of the old air-cooled suits from the 60s, all those astronauts overheated and they were sweating in their eyes.

1:15:04Jared Isaacman:They could barely get back in the Gemini capsule. Well, we were plenty chill. You know, you got all these pressure, you know, changes and sensations because we were operating at 5.2 psi. You've got exertion because you're working against a suit at 5.2 psi. You're hearing the airflow, and then you're getting the visual stimulus, and it's all coming together at once, and it's pretty wild. What are you walking on? So, I was on the top of the spaceship. So, they built this mobility aid. They called it the Skywalker. And it's basically, they removed the docking mechanism from the Dragon and replaced it with this, it's just a metal structure to hold onto.

1:15:42Jared Isaacman:You need mobility aids because if you're not holding onto it, you're screwed. and yeah we were just going through a series of tests with the suit to figure out its mobility and dexterity because it's uh yeah it's not easy to move into it when you're pressurized how long are you out there uh the whole operation from when we vented the entire vehicle the vacuum to repress was about two hours and change but i was outside for about eight minutes eight minutes are you tethered yeah yeah you're you're you're definitely tethered you don't want to just float and not hold on anything like we did that we you know people are like well in the 1960s they were floating around i was like well we learned not to do that in the 1960s you can't fix something you can't repair something you can't build something if you're just floating in space you need to the goal is to figure out how to maintain points of contact and get things done where you overheat and you don't accomplish anything so um but yeah we were pretty limited because we had no airlock and we needed to use consumables to keep us alive outside the vehicle and consumables to repress the spaceship.

1:16:52Jared Isaacman:And you had to maintain some fault tolerance for something to go wrong. We basically had a limited amount of time you could be outside. I mean, the hatch is getting ready to open. I mean, you have to be – I know you jump out of planes. You're a pilot. You fly crazy airplanes. I mean, but this is different. It's different. not a whole lot of people have been floating around out in space or or or left the craft let alone there hasn't been a lot of people that have even been to space yeah and so i mean what's going through your head when the hatch is getting ready to open uh don't screw up um so you know i was totally before about that that great fighter pod who's really um he's one of my best friends he actually died in a crash uh about four years ago but dale snort snodgrass and a lot of the attitude I have in life and everything has been being mentored by him.

1:17:45And it was, yeah,

1:17:47Jared Isaacman:I was just thinking when I was on the launch pad, I was thinking, whatever it is, you just got to hack it. And that was a mindset from him. And then when I was getting ready to open the hatch was just don't F this up, man. Like, it's just like, you don't want to screw up. You don't want to let everybody down who got to help you get to this moment. But I do have a funny story about that hatch so um when we start our journey training for polaris dawn we were doing a lot of we would be suspended from these offload harnesses that would um replicate microgravity and we were doing hatch drills because pretty much the most important thing was was closing the hatch you can't close the hatch can't repress the vehicle you probably won't survive re-entry because you run out of air or you burn up and um so we're doing all these hatch drills was all manual and then you know spacex in you know with other you know big bright minds were like we just can't get this wrong so let's build a let's build a hatch motor take the human out of loop they're really big on trying to minimize what the dependency on a human being i get it uh they're engineers in that but humans we do like to have some control and um so they built this uh this automated hatch motor probably took like six to nine months to do it and then a couple weeks before we launched in the mission, they're like, hey, we've been running some numbers and we don't think it's going to work.

1:19:07Jared Isaacman:We think there's going to be enough residual pressure coming out of your suit, venting from your suit across the surface area of the hatch that it's going to overpower the hatch motor. So you may need to do it manually. I was like, man, we spent so much time building on this thing for that to happen. Well, when I was there and I got to go to open the hatch so i open the hatch and they're like okay unseat it let's get the last of the residual pressure out i do it and they're like okay let go and i do it and it's a goes right back to flush with it and uh i'm just looking at it and then like it was like a two or three second delay and they were like your go for manual hatch opening which uh which was cool because you got to actually partake in and and do the human thing and and open the hatch and next thing you You're just staring out into the black void.

1:19:58Is that what you saw? Just a black void?

1:20:01Jared Isaacman:At first, until I climbed out, and then I was facing Earth. But I only had a couple minutes before we were in the eclipse, and most of the motion tests we were doing in the suit was facing away from Earth. So you're just looking out into just this dark, blast sky. you know sky and it definitely was a what i was feeling was like a very unsettling like almost it's a threatening environment like we don't know what's out there but it's all very hazardous to us humans and proceed with caution kind of like the explorers in the 1400s like i may sail off the end of the earth because it's flat or there might be a monster there waiting to eat me but i'm still going anyway and that was kind of the feeling i had looking out into the darkness of space damn would you remember what continent you were looking at when you walked out sure uh i was just coming over antarctica actually i was in uh the very south atlantic um i know because it was the highest radiation point of the orbit that i was out in uh we were at 750 kilometers almost like double the height of the space station during the during the spacewalk and the poles are a higher radiation environment so my actually my heart rate sensor burnt out from rad hits um but yeah i remember looking at as we came over it was just a portion of antarctica going into the um the south atlantic man does time feel different did it feel like a short eight minutes a long eight minutes or just eight minutes time just melts away in space no matter what inside or outside it was just just time just disappears um you're just always busy doing something you're never you're never wasting a second and as such like it just all kind of melts away what was it like coming back in back inside the spacecraft yeah uh you know it was disappointing i would have loved to have stayed out there more but um i had another crew member um you know uh sarah uh gillis um and she was uh she she was due to go out so i didn't want to eat into any of her time and unfortunately she was out the entire time we were in eclipse so she didn't get really any view of earth at all um but uh but yeah it was uh wish we could we both wish we could have stayed out there so much so much longer so the eclipse i mean it was it was just dark in the earth so you couldn't see anything right because of where we were coming over uh off of antarctica in the South Atlantic.

1:22:33Jared Isaacman:So if you're over Europe, you know, or parts of Asia or North America at night, you can see all the city lights and everything, and it's gorgeous. But where we were in the orbit, there just wasn't much in the way of, you know, city life. Man.

1:22:52What did Scott say when you came back?

1:22:56Jared Isaacman:Oh, man. What was the first thing kids said? I don't know. I remember once we fully repressurized and I opened my, we all opened our visors. I was like, whatever that smell is, that's what space smells like. And honestly, it just smelled like fresh nitrogen and oxygen.

1:23:14Jared Isaacman:But other than that, we probably all remarked about how freaking cold we were. I mean, we were shivering. We all had these core body temperature pills and we were all cold. Yeah. but you know incidentally obviously kid and i were on that mission together but our two crew mates sarah and anna um they're the women who've been farthest away from earth ever um pretty pretty awesome and they're brilliant engineers um really great people so when you come home did you do you guys have a debrief with elon and the crew that made it possible uh elon wasn't in the debriefs um he was in he was incredibly engaged in all of the major milestone meetings that lead up to a launch so you have um you have a launch readiness review and flight readiness review and it's like a full scrub of everything including all the risks uh all the open risk issues that could potentially play a part um he was super involved in that and he showed up to the launch too.

1:24:22Jared Isaacman:We didn't see him because we were already strapped into the vehicle. But the debriefs are usually with the engineering teams that own various components. So you'll do kind of a general crew ops debrief and then you'll go almost system by system, which is awesome. Like it's a fun thing to be involved in and kind of share what you learn from it back to the people who are going to try and make it better and more reliable. But yeah, Elon wasn't in the debriefs, But he was definitely in all the big decision-making points leading up to launch. What kind of questions, I mean, were they asking you? Other than the systems and stuff that none of us are going to understand, I mean, there has to be a ton of questions about what was it like.

1:25:01Jared Isaacman:You know, they don't generally ask things like they – it is usually more technical or operational related. The first thing, which is immediately after you come back, is anything that poses a safety of flight risk to the next crew up or those that are up there on the space station that have to come home. So they'll go very specific into things that they need to know immediately. So like my first mission, Inspiration 4, the toilet broke. And it was not something we did to it. There was a line under the floorboards that like disconnected. And you had really no indication. Bottom line is like urine was just getting sprayed into the bottom half of the vehicle.

1:25:48Jared Isaacman:It's down, you know, kind of, it's not like you'd see like, you know, like pee floating around. It was trapped underneath the vehicle in a bad spot. And it was mixing with this chemical that accelerated the corrosion on the, you know, on the, like the pressure vessel of the vehicle. and uh and in three days that combination of urine and that chemical actually started corroding portions of our spaceship oh wow so they needed to figure that out immediately because uh nasa crew 2 was on the space station they used that toilet and that vehicle's up there for six to nine months and it's like if the same thing happened to them we could have a serious problem with the integrity of that spaceship and the same thing did happen to them and there was a lot of corrosion.

1:26:39Jared Isaacman:And SpaceX had to immediately go to work and do a bunch of testing to make sure that that hull of that vehicle was capable of surviving the conditions of reentry. So that becomes like kind of day one priority or something with like the parachutes or an avionics issue. Like they want to get to the things immediately that affect human life. And then some of the nice to have stuff that you don't need to figure out right away, that's like two weeks later, four weeks later and it's kind of more technical. Gotcha. Did you, I mean, did you, have you spoken with Elon since you got back? Yeah. I mean, um, what kind of questions did he have?

1:27:15Jared Isaacman:You know, he didn't, um, I mean, I, you know, I was nominated for the NASA gig, um, like two months after I got back from the mission. And it was, uh, shortly thereafter when I was at Mar-a-Lago where I saw him for the first time and we were more talking about things like some of the things he was trying to tackle with Doge where he thought that there was inefficiency or bureaucracy that was impeding agency progress within the government. It was conversations like that. We honestly didn't even, people assume we talked about Mars at all costs, forget the moon, everything else, or conversations like that.

1:27:57Jared Isaacman:We never really did. It was just more about, you know, kind of government inefficiencies. I don't think we ever talked about Polaris, none. Wow. I mean, he always moves on to trying to solve the world's biggest problems. Yeah. And he's trying to solve a lot of them across his companies. But at that time, he was trying to solve the national debt with an interest payment that exceeds the Department of Defense budget. That was his priority. So we really weren't talking about Polaris. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to, you know getting to mars and everything that spacex is doing it seems like everything is geared towards that i mean what is it going to take to get there yeah well i would say first like they they're very good at setting uh very challenging goals at spacex um but when they achieve them the capability has utility beyond that so um you know they need you know they want laser link communications between spaceships, but you know, that also creates a giant mesh network across their constellation of Starlinks, which allows them to sell more consumer broadband and solve airplane and ship and vehicle internet connectivity, not to mention people living in, you know, sparsely populated areas, which contributes revenue, which further funds space development.

1:29:15Jared Isaacman:So my point is like, they kill a lot of birds with one stone. So yes, there is certainly an organizational objective of making life multi-planetary and our best first stop on that journey is Mars. But when you have a fully reusable vehicle that tops off and refills propellant in low Earth orbit, you can send it anywhere. You can send it to the Moon if you want. You can send it past Mars. It doesn't necessarily even have to have people on it. You could use it to send cargo for point-to-point DoD applications. You could put giant telescopes in them and send them to every corner of our solar system and have them be like these prefab, you know, discovery probes because you basically have factories building these prefab spaceships.

1:29:56Jared Isaacman:So the point is, even though it's like kind of a Mars focus, what they will get from this breakthrough of fully and rapid reusable vehicles has like broad utility. But man, Mars is a hell of a goal. It is a Manhattan project. And there is a lot of things they're going to have to get right. And a lot of things the government is going to have to do. It can't all be on SpaceX's shoulders. And for that matter, all those other entrepreneurs you were talking about, they're all trying to contribute to that effort. Lots of problems that need to be solved in order to make that dream a reality. I mean, what year are we looking at here?

1:30:29Is there a timeframe? I mean, I would say that within 10 years, we'll have astronauts on Mars. I mean, I don't want to ever be out of sync with some of Elon's timetables, but I think he's even

1:30:44Jared Isaacman:recalibrated to, you know, probably 2030s are a lot more realistic than, but we're going to see some cool stuff along the way. Like, do I think in 2026, he's going to send some starships with some Optimus robots on them and maybe some will crash into Mars, maybe some will land? Totally. And that's going to look pretty awesome when you see a robot walking around on Mars, even if it happens in 28. So it's not like we'll be without some entertainment over the next, you know, 10 years until this happens. I mean, what are some of the biggest obstacles? I mean, We've got power and or fuel. We've got food.

1:31:18We've got oxygen. I mean, you just brought up all the debris that's going on. I've never even thought of that. Are there going to be refueling points? Are we going to stop on the moon? What are the big problems that we need to solve before he does that move?

1:31:36Jared Isaacman:I think there's two problems that we're going to have in order to make that dream a reality. there's a lot of them i mean look they're gonna the re-entry of of starship onto the mars atmosphere propulsive landing all that but let's just assume they solve all those things how do you come home so that's the biggest issue i i think of is like you will be able to get astronauts there a lot sooner than you would be able to bring them home safely and there's no one-way missions in this work if someone wants to sign up for a one-way mission to mars auto excluded from the list see ya like you were absolutely the wrong mindset to go on a on an endeavor like that so you have to have pretty high confidence that you can get people back right now if spacex were to do this entirely on their own they're going to need to mine propellant um manufacture propellant on the surface of mars and they need a lot of power to do that uh so you need either a uh a nuclear reactor on a starship to create surface power, or you're going to need like endless football fields of solar cells, which I don't love that idea because I don't know what, I mean, you're going to have a million Optimus robots maintaining it and cleaning off all the dust and everything.

1:32:51Jared Isaacman:Not to mention, the farther you are away from the sun, the less utility there is in solar power. So I think it's going to be nuclear. And you're going to need to make propellant to top off your starship to launch back home. And if you see starships launch here on Earth, they have this whole stage zero, which is the whole tower with, you know, a thousand people working on it under an atmosphere in 1G. And it still doesn't go always great. So, you know, pulling off that operation to refuel and come home is going to be hard. I think the government can help with that by kind of working on what no one else is capable or willing to do that's hard, the near impossible, which is start building nuclear electric propulsion, nuclear spaceships.

1:33:33Jared Isaacman:I think it's absolutely the right mini Manhattan project for NASA. Get America underway under nuclear power in space. If you can do that, you take a lot of pressure off of the in-situ resource manufacturing. And then number two is going to be the human. People are going to have a hard time. So nobody likes talking about this because it takes away the hero image of the astronaut, but you've had plenty of astronauts freak out in space. They've tried to kill their whole crew before. like um there is a there was a lock put on the space shuttle door uh for that reason because somebody tried to open the hatch more than once and take everybody out there's a lock on the dragon space capsule for that reason uh that was a carryover from that time period um it's happened to uh to russian cosmonauts it's happened to american astronauts and and this is during a time when most of the american astronauts were the best of the best coming out of the the military so it is a unique environment and that stressor has caused people to to crack so that's the psychology of it now when you're in low earth orbit you can be in the water in 90 minutes so you're 90 minutes from being on a helicopter ride to a cheeseburger and people have cracked in space when you're on the moon you're two and a half days from coming home and and when you're on Mars, you could be anywhere from six to nine months to well over a year before you can come home.

1:35:02Jared Isaacman:And think about it from, again, you get into the psychology of it. When you're in low Earth orbit, you look out your window, you see big Earth. When you're on the moon, it's still the blue marble. When you're on Mars, it's a blue speck in the sky. So we're going to have the, you know, psychological issues to deal with when you send humans to that environment. And then you're going to have physiological issues, which is we didn't evolve to be in sub 1G. So astronauts spend six to nine months on the space station, they come back to Earth, they're a wreck for two weeks. Right? So basically, that's the equivalent time of going to Mars.

1:35:38Jared Isaacman:So when they get to, you know, you know, reduce gravity environment, and they step off the spaceship, are they going to throw up in their helmet? What if we have to do surgery? Nobody's done surgery in space. I mean, it's only a matter of time when you're on multi-year missions that someone's going to have a ruptured appendix maybe or something else that goes on. So like all the things that make us who we are, um, are going to be highly problematic on journeys of two years plus, um, in space. And we got to figure that out. Um, you know, at some point if that doesn't mean you have to have it for the first four people, but if you're talking about sending thousands of people, uh, into space, there's a lot where, you know, into, uh, onto an outpost on Mars, there's a lot from the psychology and physiological side of being a human being that we have to figure out.

1:36:23Man, it's just something I can't even fathom. I mean, sending thousands of people to another planet when we haven't even sent anybody back to the moon in how long has it been? 60-something years? Yeah. I was 17. I mean, what is the— 53 years. What do you think the plan is? I mean, okay, we got 1 ,000 volunteers. We're going to Mars. I mean, what does that look like?

1:36:46Jared Isaacman:well first i mean again i think you got to have some of the most highly screened individuals possible and um because we haven't learned anything about this yet like i i'm the analog astronaut environments where they put people in like shipping containers and these bubbles like look you do learn some things from it but you open the door you're on earth you know if somebody's having a heart attack you open the door like they're gonna you know it's um you always know in your mind that underneath you is your home planet. So it's going to be that psychological stressor, not to mention all the physiological issues.

1:37:26Jared Isaacman:You're going to have to pick some highly screened individuals that are capable of going on that mission. You have to know for sure that you have a way to bring them home. There are no one-way missions on those first ones. You get that right, and then you can start building up that outpost. Look, in terms of the technical skills to go whether it's the moon or Mars, the incremental velocity, whether you're going to the moon or Mars, is negligible. So if you can build a spaceship and top it off in low Earth orbit with tons of propellant, you can send it to the moon or Mars. The only difference now at this point is habitability, landing, and how you come home.

1:38:01Jared Isaacman:And Starship should be able to work fine for both, considering both are designed for habitability landing. But coming back from the moon is a hell of a lot easier than coming back from Mars. I mean, have you thought about that? Have you thought about what civilization looks like on Mars? It's going to be horrible. Let's say, I mean, if 2030-ish seems to be the goal, what does it look like in 2050, 2060? Not much better. I mean, it's going to be horrible for a while. That's why there's a spectrum here of making life multi-planetary. Elon has correctly identified probably the most important goal for Mars is to make it self-sustaining.

1:38:45Jared Isaacman:So if someday something terrible were to happen on Earth and the resupply ships stopped coming, that our species could continue on. Totally. You know, from my perspective, like Mars doesn't have to become Earth. It never will become anything like Earth, not in any foreseeable future. It is more of an outpost in my mind. It is more akin to a research station in Antarctica than anything else. Like we need to get there and show that we can get there and that we can, you know, maintain an outpost and, you know, generate power and propellant and learn things. with the idea that we are going to continue on, that it is one stop on a much longer, grander journey because that is not going to be a good home.

1:39:33Jared Isaacman:And we also have never faced anything like this in our history here on Earth. You know, the age of exploration, you get on a ship, you go from Europe to the New World. Trees are trees, water is water, fish are fish, deer are deer. You work really hard, you chop down enough trees, you build a bigger house. you figure out you're trapping fur and you're selling enough of it like you're wealthy or whatnot you could spend your entire life on Mars you're going to be in a bubble you're not going to go outside and chop down more trees and build a nicer bubble life there is not going to be pretty but we have to go there and we have to have that stepping stone if we want to go even farther and we must because even Mars is again it's our next door neighbor it's nothing compared to the trillions of galaxies out there that we are inevitably destined to explore.

1:40:24How do you think NASA, I mean, you had mentioned earlier that SpaceX shouldn't be the one to have to head all of this up. Where does someone like NASA fall into play?

1:40:33Jared Isaacman:Yeah, so it's a fantastic question because of late, you know, there's been this kind of like, do we even need NASA anymore? Of course we need NASA. Like NASA, a government agency, why are we all chipping in as taxpayers into an agency like NASA? because you need NASA to do what no one else is capable of doing, like what no organization, nonprofit, or company is capable of doing. And that's what they did for a really long time. And parts of it today, they still do. Like the whole planetary sciences side, heliophysics, they're doing things that no one else will do unless we as taxpayers fund it, and we should because we should want to know about the solar system around us.

1:41:16Jared Isaacman:We're highly dependent on our star. We should know as much as we can about that. Star can get angry at times, create solar storms. It's problematic for our way of life on here. We should study these things. But then there's another side of NASA, and it's about 40 % of the budget, that does a lot of things that SpaceX and companies eventually like Blue Origin and Rocket Labs and Stoke will be capable of doing. And that's a problem. It's a problem when NASA's in the business of building rockets, and so is Blue Origin, and so is SpaceX. Because if you're doing what other people are doing, you know, what's the draw?

1:41:49Jared Isaacman:Why wouldn't you just go work at SpaceX and you get a bunch of stock that's gonna be worth money? Or go work at Blue Origin and get a bunch of stock that's gonna be worth even more? NASA needs to constantly be recalibrating to do the near impossible, what no one else is doing, and the things they figured out, they hand off to industry. Industry is gonna build rapidly reusable rockets that'll reduce the cost of space materially. Awesome. I hope SpaceX and Blue Origin Rocket Lab are competing like crazy because they're going to make their rockets awesome and lower cost. What should NASA be doing?

1:42:18Jared Isaacman:What they can't. Build nuclear spaceships. These companies are not going to play around with highly enriched uranium. They're never going to take the liability nor get the approvals to launch nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium in it. That's exactly what taxpayers should be funding NASA to do. And in doing so, it will help enable commercial industry to do what they want to do. So that's kind of the division of responsibilities, I think. And then, you know, what do you think the most important part of the journey to Mars is? Is it exploration? Is it a fallout shelter if Earth ceased to exist?

1:43:01I mean, in your mind, what is the most important part or all of the parts of why we should be going there?

1:43:09Jared Isaacman:Well, there's an optimist side and a pessimist side. The optimist side is like, who knows what we may find? What if we find that there was life there at some point in time or another? That'd be quite the development, wouldn't it? And actually, it's very helpful for funding all things space-related because, in my mind, And there's only two ways you have the future that we all dream of someday, one of which is an orbital economy that helps pay for it all. Or two, find proof that we're not alone. Because if you do, the demand for that knowledge will be insatiable, and it will fund lots of exploration and discovery missions.

1:43:44Jared Isaacman:So there's a possibility we might find proof of life. The capabilities we will develop in order to get to Mars will become a national asset. We could use it for transporting telescopes, for mining asteroids, for going to and from the moon and helium-3. Like all these capabilities, like I mentioned before, that will need to be pioneered in order to make that mission possible will be useful. You build nuclear spaceships. You could have solid-state lasers in space. You could have a whole new golden dome apparatus as a result of it. So there's lots of, like, good or useful things that can come from, you know, establishing an endeavor like that.

1:44:21Jared Isaacman:But the kind of, you know, more negative approach to it or hedge, if you will, is what if something really awful happens here on Earth? You know, there aren't any dinosaurs around anymore. So you pick it. I mean, eventually at some point or another, our star will kill us off. Or maybe it's a bioweapon or a chemical weapon or a nuclear war or some new virus that just appears out of nowhere and takes us out. I mean, we're an asteroid. But that's just a matter of time. So for all those reasons, it would seem to make sense that we should hedge our bets a little bit and start spreading out. Not to mention, I just think it's our destiny.

1:45:04Jared Isaacman:I think that there's way too much space out there and too much to learn for us to just sit here the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Let's take a quick break. Yeah. And then when we come back, we'll dive into some NASA stuff. Hear that? That's now Crispy and McCrispy Strips meeting creamy Caesar sauce. Sounds extra crispy. Caesar sauce at McDonald's for a limited time. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

1:45:40This episode is supported by FX's The Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties, and excess. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's The Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now.

1:46:13Jared Isaacman:How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? or smooth caramel maybe, or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

1:46:32All right, Jared, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into some NASA stuff, but I just have a slew of random questions I want to ask you. One being UFOs. What do you think? Are we alone?

1:46:47Jared Isaacman:I think if we're thinking about the entirety of the universe, there is almost certainly other life out there. I would bet heavily on that. I would bet heavily that there's intelligent life out there. Have they interacted with our planet? I would say the odds of that are incredibly low. You've got a couple things working against you. You can't really exceed the cosmic speed limit, which is the speed of light. So when you think about the trillions of galaxies and all the stars and all the planets out there, the odds they would have found us and somehow been able to travel to at a time when our civilization was alive.

1:47:26Jared Isaacman:You think of the industrial age that would give off clues of our existence just seem incredibly low. So if I had to bet on the UFOs, I'd probably put my Draken hat on again and say it's either our stuff or it's our adversaries that are checking in on us. it's amazing right like if the aliens are going to visit you could just you could just have those flying tic-tacs show up over new york city or somewhere else but they all seem to be around our naval bases and in las vegas area so i i think that probably leads me to believe it's it's something that's human created i mean you know it's just it's interesting we see all this disclosure stuff starting to hit the government a couple years ago you know they had the first congressional hearing on the UAP stuff and you've had a couple maybe one or one or two more I think since then but what I mean what do you think about that stuff is that a big distraction do you think a lot of people think that that is a distraction or or they screaming for disclosure you think there's actually something that they're hiding from us when it comes to aliens no I mean I look I don't want to be dismissive of people's beliefs or hopes or interests.

1:48:40Jared Isaacman:When I was nominated to lead NASA, I got a million emails from interested people all around the world, people in government, out of government, at NASA, not at NASA, with all sorts of ideas and theories that range from well thought out, good intended, to crazy. That's what space does to you. Like, how can you not when you look at it as, you know, you're out laying on a field looking up at the stars and how does it not make your mind just wander? So I think that fuels a little bit of it. The idea also, like, we do have lots of, like, classified programs and our adversaries have lots of technology too that they don't advertise to try and figure out what we're doing that we don't advertise.

1:49:21Jared Isaacman:So like my Occam's razor analysis on that is it's more likely in that camp than it is all the miracles that would need to happen for intelligent life out there, which I believe is like, I just have to believe it based on the size of the universe that these miracles that needed to happen to create life are not that unique. that surely would have happened again. But for it to exist, to build a spaceship, to travel at the speeds necessary to show up at this particular time in our history, super low probability. So you don't think that there have been beings out? I mean, we hear a lot about bending space and time and this whole whatever.

1:50:05That's about the extent of how I can articulate it.

1:50:09Jared Isaacman:Flying through black holes and wormholes and such like that. Yeah, you're not buying into any of that? Can we manipulate space and time? Look, I hope we can at some point because we're not going to – if we are – if our limits are sub-lightspeed, like materially sub-lightspeed, we're not going to get very far, right? So we're going to have to be putting humans in some sort of cryo sleep and, you know, they're going to wake up thousands of years later. So my point is, like, I want to believe that we will crack the code on some sort of exotic form of propulsion that will take us close to those kind of speeds simply because we won't be able to explore without it.

1:50:55Jared Isaacman:But, like, I, you know, I'm not betting on wormholes or anything anytime soon. But I'd love to see us moving in the direction of, you know, goodness, like, which would be nuclear propulsion and then, you know, kind of evolving from there. What kind of stuff? I mean, you've been interested in space for a long time since you were a little kid. And so, you know, I want to go on. What excites you about space? I mean, we hear stuff about, this is what I watch. I don't watch other interviews. I don't really watch much of anything. In fact, every night I pretty much fall asleep watching something about some documentary about the universe.

1:51:33And, you know, they're always talking about dark matter or dark energy. I mean, what do you, what is it?

1:51:39Jared Isaacman:It's all of that. It's everything we don't know. You think we can use it? I mean, that's like the, if the question is like, what is it that, you know, captivates you or interests you about it all is there is so much we haven't figured out or understand yet. And therefore it's intriguing. I mean, I remember, I think it was probably like fifth or sixth grade in geography class and how bummed out I was looking at a map. And it's like, man, we found all the damn islands. we crossed all the seas we climbed the mountains like what's left under the ocean yeah and then you go and you look up at the stars and you're like oh man there's a there's an awful lot left out there right so it's all of that it's all those things that we don't understand i mean you know the same way like think of us as like in a primitive way of like our our ability to understand the solar system the universe is like you know uh natives you know that we're carving a canoe out of a log.

1:52:37Jared Isaacman:Like, I mean, that's the equivalency of what we're at right now. So we have no idea what, you know, automobiles and trains and airplanes and supersonic travel is in our future because we are still hollowing out that log. So it's everything, everything we might stand to learn that could change, you know, and will change our understanding, you know, is out there. We just have to find it. I mean, it's fascinating stuff. I mean, you know, and that recent one, they were talking about how you know we thought that we thought that space was just empty and you know it's not in our what visual spectrum that to see that is it dark energy or dark matter i can't remember yeah i think it's dark energy but now they're saying that all that empty space is dark dark energy and that we there may be a way that we could potentially utilize it you know for an unlimited amount of energy.

1:53:30Yeah. I mean, there's, look, there's, there could be like

1:53:33Jared Isaacman:dark matter, antimatter as a form of propulsion that we could use to unlock massive amounts. Antimatter. What's that? I'm like, we are going down a path that is, is far from my area of expertise. Thankfully, there's a lot of, a lot of scientists and big brains that are out there thinking about these kinds of things. But I think where you're getting at is like when, when people try and understand the structure of our galaxy, there is clearly something else out there that's helping form the structure that we don't have our arms around yet. But that's like, again, that's what's so exciting about this journey.

1:54:08Jared Isaacman:Just kind of a quick story. One of my crew members from Polaristan was with Kid and I. She played the violin in space. She was raised, and she was a toddler, to be a classical violinist. And ultimately, she chose engineering and science, and she wound up being hired as the lead astronaut trainer for SpaceX. She trained me for my first mission to go to space, and then I picked her to be an astronaut on the Polaristan. And part of it was she was going to bring her violin up to demo this Starlink transmission where we basically created this flash mob orchestra around the world to raise money for St.

1:54:50Jared Isaacman:Jude. And she is playing this wooden instrument floating in space, and it's really cool. Anyway, I know it's a long story long, but she was since asked to come and perform at an observatory in California, top of a mountain. It's this 100-plus-year-old observatory. And I was like, I'm definitely coming to see it. And this observatory where she was playing, which may be the coolest venue next to seeing her play in space, was where Hubble discovered that there is more than just one galaxy in the universe, right? So not that long ago, we thought it was just our galaxy and that all these stars were part of it.

1:55:26Jared Isaacman:And then through his analysis and his research, he determined not only is there more than one, eventually there's trillions of them. And every one of those has who knows how many stars inside it and who knows how many planets inside it How many of those are potentially inhabitable regions, right? We haven't even scratched the surface. So, like, yes, you're picking on a couple areas that we think we might be starting to know something about. But there is so much that we don't. And that's the appeal. I mean, it's crazy. I mean, even just the vastness. And, you know, I had Avi Loeb on a couple years ago, I think, now.

1:56:00But, you know, we were talking about how everything is getting farther apart. Planets are getting farther apart. Galaxies are getting farther apart. I mean, why is that happening? I think that's all, you know, part of what underwrites the Big Bang, you know, is the eventual creation of the universe and that everything is moving away from it.

1:56:25Jared Isaacman:But that's, well, it's like that's where it ends because, like, we don't really know where it began either. What came before the Big Bang and what created it? And, you know, we have this expansion right now. is there a contraction again we don't know um that's a damn good point i never thought about that yeah it's um yeah i mean we certainly know that the the universe is expanding we've observed that and um but now is it expanding or is i mean that's what i want to know because if it's expanding then that means there's an edge to it right so what's on the other side of the edge yeah i i i mean this is certainly this is a hypothetical conversation but i mean the expansion of the universe is what helps you know underpin the the big bang theory but um i don't uh look i don't know where it goes um i don't know what created it what happened before it um or what happens next 14 billion years from that you know yeah yeah what about black holes What do you know about black holes?

1:57:39Jared Isaacman:Black holes is what happens when really big stars eventually die. And you basically have such an extreme amount of gravitational influence that not even light can escape from it. But then Stephen Hawking figured out some things do escape from it. What escapes from it? Hawking radiation, actually. It's named after him. So basically, whatever is consumed inside this black hole will slowly, over some extraordinary period of time, gradually radiate out of it, and the black hole will disappear like it was never there.

1:58:24Jared Isaacman:That's certainly the limit of my knowledge on it. I probably butchered that up pretty good. I just love thinking about this stuff. Yeah. You know, it's like I said, it's fascinating stuff. And this is, like I was saying, when I got nominated, my inbox just blew up from people all over the world that all had opinions and thoughts. And some were appreciated and some really were not. And you know what I was saying? I was like, there is no way the Secretary of Agriculture gets any emails like this. It's like, I mean, but that's what's so cool about it, right? Is like people do, no matter where you are in the world, at some point or another, you're lying back in a field and you're looking up at those stars and your mind wanders.

1:59:02Jared Isaacman:And that's such an awesome thing, right? Yeah, yeah. Do you think more about your companies or more about space?

1:59:14Jared Isaacman:Well, the company I started when I was 16 is what helped enable a lot of these things, a lot of these adventures I've been able to go on, my aviation career, my space career. But when I was nominated to lead NASA, you have to do a lot of separation from your business affairs. My president of that company became CEO. I'm a chairman of the board now. now, which means like one day a week, you know, a couple of weeks, a quarter, I'm really involved. But the rest of the time, you know, I can be focused on other interests, which this past summer has been the first time since I was a teenager that I had no real professional obligations.

1:59:58Jared Isaacman:It was kind of cool. And it felt really great to be able to, you know, still be young enough to have a whole new chapter, whether it was in government service or elsewhere. um so yeah i guess i'd say like i don't put it anywhere when i when it was my full-time job it had to consume the majority of my thoughts now it does not i mean did you i'm just i'm just curious business owner to business owner i mean how did i mean did that uh create a tremendous amount of anxiety to walk to walk away i couldn't imagine just being a part of it a couple times a year No, because the company is in a really excellent place, there couldn't have been a better time to get nominated to go into a whole new direction in life.

2:00:42Jared Isaacman:The business is killing it. We have an incredible leadership team, tons of firepower, lots of demand, good opportunity, good products. There was no better time to be able to walk away and feel like what I helped create long ago was going to remain an enduring business and a good trajectory. So no, it's not like if this was 10 years earlier, if any other time when the company still had an equal number of challenges and opportunities where you're like, I don't want to risk things going off course that could hurt people's jobs and livelihoods, but it's in a good place. Good. You know, before we move into NASA too, I'm just curious how you raise your kids.

2:01:26I mean, it sounds like you grew up in what sounds like a middle-class, everyday American home. I mean, you've obviously done very well for yourself, created a couple of empires. You've been to space. I mean, what are you hoping your kids do? How do you raise them?

2:01:44Jared Isaacman:I mean, you want them to be— It's a whole different world than what you grew up in. You want them to be happy, healthy, and good people. And I think I owe like 99 % of that to my wife. I think I can take credit for very little over how awesome my kids are. My wife is amazing.

2:02:07Jared Isaacman:But, yeah, I mean, you don't want to spoil them. You want them to be very appreciative for what they have in life and to look to others that aren't as lucky or as fortunate. I mean, they, you know, again, just got dealt a great hand in life and need to understand as early as they can that that is not how it exists for a lot of others. And now they carry some weight in life to try and make it better, to elevate other people's lives. So we try to make sure we teach them that. How do you teach them that? How do you instill those type of values in them? I mean, from my perspective, it's to show them.

2:02:47Jared Isaacman:you know, what the world really, you know, looks like. So, um, you know, I got to take him on an adventure into, um, into Africa, uh, a couple of weeks ago. And to me, it's like, look, there's going to be, there's going to be a part of this trip that you are going to like and enjoy. And you're going to see, you know, zebras and, uh, and giraffes and elephants. And then you're going to see a lot of people that, you know, this is where they were born and they do not have much in life and the things that you would take for granted, um, would be, you know, would be life changing for them. Like, uh, you know, and it's like you try and find opportunities to educate them in a, in that kind of a way as often as possible.

2:03:34Jared Isaacman:Um, yeah, I mean, I definitely want, and again, I'm very lucky because my kids are, they're awesome and they're very grounded. Um, and they do appreciate what they have in life. And they, I think they do are growing up, you know, with something instilled in them that they have an obligation now to help others. It doesn't just happen on its own. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move into NASA. So you were selected by Trump to head up NASA and lead that. And then a couple days before your confirmation, they pulled it. So let's start at the beginning. How did these conversations start? How did you wind up on the radar to head NASA?

2:04:18Jared Isaacman:Yeah, I mean, I certainly wasn't preparing for any sort of political career. If I had been, I probably, you know, I would have done some things differently to prepare for it. But no, I got a text message in late November. Well, first of all, let me just say as somebody who's been always very apolitical, And I generally felt like the system is kind of self-correcting that, you know, the forefathers did a pretty decent job putting enough checks and balances in place that things can't get too off the rails. I don't know. Maybe that was just easier to think that way, I guess. Because things can't get off the rails.

2:05:00Jared Isaacman:But anyway, that's just kind of how I live most of my life. I never had a reason to be actively involved in politics as a defense company. like, you know, our service was in demand regardless of who was in office. And, um, and my FinTech, you know, my day job was just, uh, just never really required any lobbying or whatnot. So, um, never really, you know, imagined it coming. Although I always felt like I, I owed this country a great debt, uh, for living the American dream. So I would look for any opportunity I could to repay it. Uh, so anyway, back to that, Late November, I got a text message from a retired four-star that I had known a little bit from my time at Drakken and said that, you know, your name is being kind of passed around for a couple positions in the administration.

2:05:50Jared Isaacman:And I was like, wow, that's awesome. I never really imagined, but yeah, I'd be honored to have a chance to serve. then I uh it's like I I had a um uh a missed call and then a text message I was actually running in New York and Central Park I just number I didn't that wasn't in my phone missed call it was like um uh would you be interested in serving in DJT's uh administration and I deleted it because I was like you know if it was not a scam someone that I like I it would be like just a little bit more legit than this. And then I got another text from the general who was like, they're trying to get a hold of you.

2:06:31Jared Isaacman:So the next thing was a call and a phone interview with Howard Lutnick, who's Secretary Lutnick now, a commerce secretary. And he was leading the president's transition. And so it had like an hour long call. And he asked me if I was interested in the NASA job. And I said, absolutely. And the next day I was in Mar-a-Lago with an interview with the president. and shook my hand at the end of the meeting and said, you got the job. What was it about you that they liked? I think that I was a political newcomer. So I know the name, I mean, they mentioned in the interview that some of the names that were being considered were kind of, you know, in the system for a long time and that we're looking to do things a little differently.

2:07:17Jared Isaacman:I mean, I did come in with somewhat of a plan to talk about what I thought were the, you know, important steps and a couple priorities that we needed to hone in on. And I guess those landed. Why do you think that your name was pulled? Why did they pull you right before the confirmation? Yeah, I mean, I... Seemed like a really good fit for the job. In fact, I've been reading a lot of your tweets and, I mean, everything seems on point, makes a lot of sense. I was a little frustrated, more than a little frustrated. Yeah, I don't think it had a whole lot to do with me. I think that there was a very widely covered falling out, you know, between some pretty important people.

2:08:02Jared Isaacman:and I became a good target, you know, to kind of as a parting shot, I think, in that whole divorce. I mean, I wouldn't even call it really, you know, speculation. I've, you know, heard enough from enough folks of, you know, how it all went down to understand. And I didn't take any of it personally, by the way. Like, I knew what I was getting into, eyes wide open. There were risks of falling out and divorce and, you know, where, you know, where my connections were, weren't coming from SpaceX and, and such. So like, I understood it all. I just, I just, I kind of falsely assumed that I would have an opportunity to kind of get in the job and have an opportunity to, you know, kind of make my contributions and stand on my own.

2:08:52But, you know, prior to the

2:08:54Jared Isaacman:confirmation, if there was going to be a big falling out, you know, I probably should have anticipated I might be one of the ones taken out in it. What a shame, man. What a shame. So let's go into NASA. I mean, what? And that's, by the way, the real shame. Like the world's greatest space agency doesn't have a confirmed leader right now. I mean, I think other than GSA, it's the only agency or cabinet kind of position that doesn't have a confirmed leader. Like the most accomplished space agency in the world, it doesn't have a you know, a confirmed leader at this point. Secretary Duffy is the acting.

2:09:30Jared Isaacman:I guess that's really the unfortunate part, right? I mean, space is the ultimate high ground. We have a competitor that's making incredible progress in that domain. So, for something that didn't have to do with really job qualifications and whatnot, was probably more personal with other folks, that's like really the disappointment. Personally, I don't take any of it personally. It's just an awful shame for the agency yeah you know i mean it seems like i mean we're we had alluded to it at the beginning but you know it is we're just we're it seems like we're at such a pivotal point with china and space exploration and now we have you know duffy who's department of transportation and nasa and so his time's getting split 50 50 and i mean it's it's frustrating to see that we don't we haven't identified the next guy and that you know essentially this is all happening because of a pissing match which sucks yeah i mean and you know secretary duffy has stepped in as the acting in the last couple months but i mean you're talking it's been seven months since the confirmed leader of nasa you know resigned during the inauguration a long time like a lot can happen over seven months and um so yeah i mean to me if somebody had said you know three weeks after hey we we don't like you or we don't like you know this connection to this organization or whatnot so we're shooting you in the head and we're going with somebody else i get it um you know my life is going to be fine i'll get back to to business you know get somebody else in there you know um like i just care about america winning in the high ground of space.

2:11:10Jared Isaacman:So that's really just the disappointing part is like, it leaves an important agency leaderless for a bit. So, I mean, what does NASA do? I mean, we hear all about SpaceX. How many rockets are they launching a year now? SpaceX? Yeah. Oh man, every two days, probably. Every 48 hours, they're probably launching a Falcon 9. And I mean, what's NASA doing? So NASA's huge and they're doing a lot of things. Some are really important, why the agency was created in the first place. And then they're doing a lot of little things that I would say were not necessarily why the agency was created and can be somewhat of a distraction.

2:11:53Jared Isaacman:There's 40 ,000 people between contractors and employees at NASA across 10 major centers. and um and in my mind you know the agency again should be doing the near impossible what no one else in the world no other organization or company is capable of doing like the true radical cutting edge things in space and in our atmosphere from a uh human exploration a science and a scientific discovery uh and trying to usher in the orbital economy like they should have two or three really big things that need to be solved in this incredibly important domain. And I'd say that their budget is split across like thousands of things that kind of make it hard to do any of those things.

2:12:38What are some of the big things that you think are important that they're doing?

2:12:42Jared Isaacman:That they are doing? Yeah, that they are. I mean, planetary science for sure. So look, all the things they're doing are directionally correct. How well are they doing it, right? Is Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope awesome? Absolutely. Are the rovers on Mars cool as hell? Absolutely. Why do we need to wait every 10 years to launch a new one? Like, why aren't we launching these things every year? Why don't we have 10 telescopes out there looking out at different galaxies? Why don't we have rovers on Venus and on Mars? Why do we have to wait X number of years for the helicopter to tour Titan, for example?

2:13:19Jared Isaacman:Like, so, like, planetary science is a great thing they're doing. It's approximately a third of the budget is science at NASA. Like, why aren't we doing a lot more with it? Like, can we get more mileage out of approximately$7 billion a year? I bet you can, right? And that's because for every, like, one or two kind of big flagship things, there's lots of little things that may not be as important. And the big flagship things, because they're defined as at least a billion-dollar program, become very expensive and take a long time because you can't get them wrong. And that's part of the problem. So, like, science is an important thing they should be working on.

2:13:59Jared Isaacman:You just should be getting a lot. The American people are eager for world-changing headlines. We should be delivering it all the time and not every 10 years. What are some of the things that you had mentioned? And you think that there are some smaller things that would be distractions? Oh, I mean, I think a lot of things are. Like, how about aeronautics? Like, the first A in NASA. As a pilot, I should be super charged up about what they're working on at NASA and aeronautics. And I'm not. And I don't think the people working at NASA and aeronautics are charged up about it. So, you know, you talk the 1960s, 70s, 80s, almost all of the most badass breakthroughs in aeronautics made their way through NASA at some, at least in the last like, you know, 50 years.

2:14:43Jared Isaacman:That's not what's been going on in the last 25 to 30 years. So the days of NASA with the forward swept wings and, you know, fly-by-wire technology and thrust vectoring, which wound up going into the F-22, it was all NASA's work. What are they doing on now? You know, they spend, I think, about$800 million dollars on a on a boomless supersonic airplane that hasn't flown yet those guys built one already and flew it multiple times and retired it and they're moving on to something else and i guarantee you they didn't spend 800 million dollars in x number of years on it um they they committed 400 million dollars to a uh to this honestly it's a very ugly looking uh you know modified Boeing airplane that they were going to use for high efficiency flight.

2:15:33Jared Isaacman:Boeing walked away from their commitment in it. They're working on drone technology that's like decades behind other agencies in the US and certainly behind China. So why are we working on it all? They fund fuel efficiency enhancements to like Pratt & Whitney Motors that have been around for decades to squeeze three or 4 % more fuel efficiency out of it when they should be doing that themselves for competitive reasons. Like what should NASA's aeronautics program be working on? Things that go super high, super fast, radical designs that if you figure out something pretty wild from it, has direct influence over DOD designs or commercial airliner designs.

2:16:12Jared Isaacman:They should be at the absolute tip of the spear on breaking ground on aeronautics. And honestly, like even bridging, you know, bridging the divide between in atmosphere and out of atmosphere type atmospheric wave riding technology but they're not they're working on a lot of boring stuff um i mean 800 billion 800 million for a supersonic jet that blake shoal's working on right now i mean where is the money going to lockheed they they'll make a cool video every six months of like doing an engine run or something um but that's the point they're done already they flew it they tested it they've moved on and you know nasa's hoping that they'll fly their quiet supersonic demonstrator soon and it's like part of it is a fear too like if you were to ask the you know it's like do people show up to work every day at nasa want to see america kick ass absolutely like there's no one there that wants to lose but like they also get entrenched in the system and it's like well if i recommend to cancel all these programs because honestly they don't really check the box anymore for what we should be doing at NASA, how do I know I get something else?

2:17:21Jared Isaacman:Like, isn't a bird in hand better? Shouldn't I take this and kind of still fight for this trustless, you know, efficient airliner or solar powered airplane? Because how do I know I won't get something else? And that's like, I mean, that's almost a leadership issue. Like you have a, there's a trust issue almost with the team where it's like, look, guys, if you're working on something that no longer fits the definition or the mission of NASA, I need you to tell me about it because I will stand behind you and make sure that you do get the resources to be working on what will move the needle, right?

2:17:53Jared Isaacman:But that doesn't exist. It's this fear. So you got to entrench yourself and perpetuate programs that shouldn't exist. You know, I mean, I think NASA's budget was a$25 billion and now they're moving it to$19 billion. I mean, is that part of your plan? Did you put that in place? No. So honestly, when you're a nominee, they don't tell you anything about the president's budget or any of those kind of plans because they want you to have deniability with the senators. I mean, if I knew that the president's budget was going to slash by 20%, they'd never let you out of committee. You'd never get a floor vote.

2:18:31They would hold you hostage intentionally until they got some,

2:18:36Jared Isaacman:the senators would until they got concessions. So I was as surprised as anyone. I mean, during my hearing, I basically said, look, I don't think budgets are going up, guys. So like, we don't have unlimited funding. We got to be smart and concentrate our resources on what moves the needle. But, you know, did I generally assume that we were going to try and shrink the government under President Trump and get back on more, you know, stronger fiscal footing? Sure. And I totally support it. I mean, you know, would I pick different things if I was like, you know, being surgical in the budget? Yeah. I mean, but generally I assumed across the board, we were all going to have to do more with less.

2:19:14Jared Isaacman:And do I think the US government is capable of doing more with less? Absolutely. No question. Would you have cut the budget? I would have been advocating for the same budget, like keep it flat, and I will do way more and get far better results with those dollars because I will know how to allocate them more effectively and efficiently than any government employee is going to be capable of it because I've literally had to do that for a quarter of a century. Like there's no doubt if you're a successful entrepreneur, you are far better at capital allocation than any government employee. You just had to have been because if you screw it up, you don't get more.

2:19:55Jared Isaacman:Generally, the government will keep funding things for a while. But I wouldn't have like, unless they told me like, hey, you have to cut it by 20%, then I would have said, great, let me pick what needs to go and I'll make sure that the 80 % that we retain will be focused on the things that will truly change the world. You know, you had a, or have a plan for where you would have taken NASA. And so I'd like to dive into that. What were some of the changes and stuff that you were planning on making when you took over? So what I, you know, I briefed the president on during my interview. And honestly, I've handed off the whole plan to Secretary Duffy.

2:20:36Jared Isaacman:I don't know if he'll use any of it at all, but I, you know, everything that's for the good of the country, I'm 100 % for and what work we did that was assembled by a lot of great people, by the way. A lot of people contributed to that plan. Yeah, I wanted to make sure it went into good hands. But step one is you got to reorganize the agency and rebuild the culture. I mean, that's just, you can't do the fun stuff until you reorganize and rebuild the culture. Like this is a total step one, we got to admit we have a problem here. 35 years and$100 billion have been spent trying to get us back to the moon.

2:21:13Jared Isaacman:And we haven't flown humans around the moon, which we did in Apollo 8, you know, 1968. We haven't even done that yet, let alone landing. So like, we got to admit that what we're doing right now is imperfect. And it's hard in a politically divided time. And like, you know, Elon's bad and all these things people say, it's like, it kind of in somehow balances out to like what we're doing must be right. No, like there can be lots of things wrong. And certainly there's a lot of things wrong at NASA and not unique to NASA. It's like government wide, but we got to reorganize, you know, there's 50 different safety departments inside NASA.

2:21:51Jared Isaacman:Doesn't mean safety isn't important, but if you have 50 different offices that all have the ability to say no, that's not a good thing necessarily. Like safety should build up logically. So one, you know, one department has all the necessary information to make the right call. And honestly, we got to recalibrate that risk framework because like, you're not going to explore the worlds beyond ours without taking some risks. Um, this kind of trying to drive risk to zero is why telescopes that are supposed to cost a billion become$15 billion. Why, you know, missions that are supposed to take people back to the moon are taking 35 years and a hundred billion.

2:22:25Jared Isaacman:Um, Um, so, and we need cultures around ownership. We need accountability. Uh, we need, you know, freaking more doers and less management. Uh, everybody inside, uh, the agency has a deputy or a vice who has a chief of staff, who has a deputy chief of staff. I mean, departments with six people in it have a chief and a deputy chief. It's just, you know, it's, it's creating a hierarchy that serves the hierarchy instead of just like, look, we, we need certainly need management leadership, but we need to empower the best and brightest to get the damn mission done. So anyway, the step one is all reorganize, rebuild the culture, and then you move on to the priorities.

2:23:06Jared Isaacman:America leads in the high ground of space. Unlock the orbital economy and accelerate the rate of world-changing discoveries. Those are the three things that NASA should be thinking about every single day. How would you have done those? So in terms of America leading in the high ground of space, with the investments that already been made with sls return to the moon um do it as quickly as possible and determine why we need to be here is there any economic scientific or national security value of being here if yes then you rely on commercial industry spacex blue origin rocket lab to get you to and from the moon at a frequency far greater than every couple of years which is what the nasa four and a half billion dollar per launch disposable rocket cost so you use sls to get back to the moon determine why you need to be there with any frequency and then from there you rely on commercial industry so it's actually affordable and repeatable and not in every couple years event and then you pivot those resources so it's about a third of nasa's budget like call it seven billion a year away from competing with industry on building giant rockets and start building nuclear spaceships because no one else is going to do it unless you care unless it's the russians or chinese And China for sure is going to do it.

2:24:21Jared Isaacman:So build nuclear electric spaceships. It's all dual-use stuff. So for as much as it's good for peaceful space, believe me, it has defense implications for it as well. And it's very important for getting to Mars. So that's all generally in your high ground of space. The step two, which is unlock the orbital economy, which is the space station has only so much life left in it. Use every bit of it to figure out what will actually generate more value than what we put into it in space. So, you know, go have a huge outreach effort to companies like Astroforge and Varda in the pharmaceutical space. Everybody who's trying to figure out what can happen in space that generates value so that we don't have endless perpetual, you know, perpetual dependency on taxpayers.

2:25:08Jared Isaacman:Because without it, you won't have these commercial space stations. I mean, there's like four companies right now that are building space stations. I don't even know if there should be one because you have like one customer it's like the nasa plus isa the european space agency so i don't know what how those companies will survive if you don't figure out an orbital economy so that's two and then three you know a third of nasa's budget is going into science we need hubbles like every year james webbs every year rovers every year um we can't be waiting five, 10 years for the next great discovery asset.

2:25:43Jared Isaacman:So anyway. I mean, so I'd like to dive into these a little bit more. So I mean, when it comes to the moon and sending people or machines out there or whatever your plan was, I mean, how would you determine whether we need to be there or it's time to move on? Well, I think the cost of being there is something we got to get our arms around. Right now, the way we get to the moon is a four and a half billion dollar disposable rocket called sls reusing 60 year old uh space shuttle hardware made by thousands of people and it's it is a huge jobs program across alabama mississippi uh and louisiana these are the sls states some people joke that it's sls stands for the senate launch system um all right great we spent 35 years and hundred billion let's use what we got get back to the moon but that is not a way to get there frequently that is a way to get there every three years she's like really insane and not only that it introduces a whole other part called gateway which is a lunar gateway that we need to it makes things even more expensive the reason we need to do that is because our partners on SLS that are building the European service module doesn't have the performance to do what we need it to do so we need to create a new space station over the moon none of this is affordable.

2:26:59Jared Isaacman:You know what I mean? But anyway, we leverage what we have to get back to the moon and then figure out, do we need to stay? Is it helium-3? I mean, there's more of it on the moon. It's not a lot of it, but there's more of it on the moon than on Earth. Is that going to be the key to, I don't know, any sort of quantum computing or fusion power source? If so, you're going to need to stay. Well, the good news is you can't get back to the moon without either Blue Blue Origin, SpaceX are both because they're both building the landers. And in order to get the landers to the moon, it means they're reusable big rockets, so Starship and New Glenn work.

2:27:33Jared Isaacman:And if that works, now you have a way to get to and from the moon affordably, repeatedly, without having to spend$4.5 billion per launch. So now you've determined why you need to be there, and now you have an affordable path to go back and forth. So now you pivot the money that you were investing in that$4.5 billion per launch vehicle to nuclear spaceships, and that has applications for moon, Mars, low earth orbit, and it's just a natural evolutionary step for the agency. So you would have just, for lack of a better term, you would have just slashed all the rocket programs that NASA's doing and offloaded that onto SpaceX, Blue Origin, and then had NASA specifically concentrating on nuclear starships.

2:28:21Jared Isaacman:For the third of the budget that is SLS, I would have used what we already have and will have over the next two years to get to the moon a couple of times, certainly get back before China, because I do think that failing to do so would be one hell of a dent in American exceptionalism. I mean, we knew nothing in the 60s and got to the moon. We paid a lot to do it. More and a half percent of our budget for a while did it. But China knew nothing about going into space at that point in time. I mean, and now for them to get back after we've said for 35 years we're going to do it is going to be a major blow.

2:29:00Jared Isaacman:And I think the ramifications are like there will be congressional hearings. It will expose a lot of things that we don't do right. So we can't let that happen. So let's get it right and use the hardware that we have. And that hardware strategy has inherently a dependency on both Blue Origin and SpaceX. You can't get to the moon without one or both of them now. So when you do get to the moon, as expensive as it was, you now have one or two viable paths to get back there at far lower cost. So when that comes, you then pivot investing in this legacy technology into the next generation that no one else will do except our adversaries if we don't do them.

2:29:41Jared Isaacman:And yes, I believe that's nuclear electric propulsion. And I also don't understand why it's so controversial. The plants in like in Michoud and Louisiana that are building SLS and Marshall space flights, these guys built landing crafts in World War II. They built the Saturn V rocket. They built the space shuttle. They built SLS. Why wouldn't we be pivoting on to the next great thing? I mean, this is literally the same. This is like, it doesn't matter what happened at Pearl Harbor. I'm not taking any chances. Keep building battleships. Forget these aircraft carriers. Like, why wouldn't we evolve our thinking when we learn new things?

2:30:18Jared Isaacman:And we've learned a lot of new things over the last 50 years. Yeah, I think a lot of people have the exact same questions. And then as far as telescopes and satellites and stuff that we're sending out for exploration, I mean, can you get a little more specific? Where would you be sending these? Would you have sent them all in different directions? You know, I think like, uh, there are a couple things broken with the science process for one of which the prioritization of scientific missions is done every 10 years. It's called the decadal survey. Um, I just don't, I mean, presumably we would learn new things in that time period that might change or shape our thinking.

2:30:56Jared Isaacman:So like, I just don't think that needs to be, I mean, it is a total sacred cow thing. Like the decadal is what drives the prioritization. All right, why don't we make it in every three-year survey or something? And then the other thing I would say is you just need to go in and there is a lot of inefficiency and bloat and outsourcing that takes place across the scientific spectrum. There's multiple mission controls. There's just lots of inefficiencies, which means we get really exciting missions less frequently. It starts probably with flagship missions definitionally being over a billion dollars.

2:31:33Jared Isaacman:And if you're going to spend a billion dollars, then you have to get it right, which means you have to take a long time and you have to de-risk it a lot. Instead, I would be trying to shift that philosophy towards launch 10$100 million missions every year and it's okay if three fail. Let's just increase the rate of discovery here. We don't need to do a single billion dollar mission that inevitably becomes a$5 billion dollar mission because of all of the fear associated with getting the billion dollar mission correct. What would you like to see explored specifically? I mean, I think generally though, like where, where we're going is all, is all correct.

2:32:09Jared Isaacman:Like I, I'm, I'm, I'm nowhere near like the, an expert, um, on the scientific prioritization of our exploration missions to say that, you know, sending this here or there is wrong. Like everything that the, you know, the science mission directorate has briefed is good. Like, yeah, I want to know all those things too. I just want to help them know those things faster and for lower costs. Would you have sent anything closer to the sun? Can we? Yeah. I mean, you just had the Parker solar probe kind of kissed a portion of the sun. That was an awesome breakthrough. I don't know about that. Yeah, it actually, I believe, I mean, it's one of the highest velocity man-made objects ever.

2:32:50Jared Isaacman:And it was only this, it was just over like Christmas timeframe. It actually recorded the sounds of the sun and transmitted it back. It's pretty wild. But it definitely, it's closest approach we've ever had to the sun. Again, it's called the Parker Solar Probe. and it was actually one of the reasons I was challenging this 10-year decadal survey process is what if you learn something amazing from that? Wouldn't you want to just like immediately fire up, if you could, a half a billion dollars to build something else and send it right back to the sun? Why would you want to wait 10 years for scientists to process that information potentially and determine, yeah, it's a medium priority, it's high, like don't we want to listen to the data constantly and make good informed decisions from it.

2:33:37Jared Isaacman:But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even pretend to be anywhere near as much of an expert to weigh in on the prioritization of scientific missions. I just want to help them all do it better. Who would you have put around you? So, you know, I had a number of like really great people that were contributing to kind of the planning of what would have taken place if I was confirmed at NASA. And they're good folks from all over. Certainly some SpaceX-ers, because honestly, they're very accomplished. They are brilliant people. And they want to repay back. I mean, you spend 10 years at SpaceX, you did really well financially.

2:34:20Jared Isaacman:I mean, that stock has gone up a lot. They're not trying to get rich. They want to apply their knowledge back to an agency that in inspired them. There were folks from Relativity, Blue Origin. I was bringing in people from Wall Street, from the finance world. These are specialists that go in and help big organizations that lose their way at times. See, that's the thing. The best companies in the world, Google, Apple, Meta, they're constantly changing. They don't make a plan 60 years ago and stick to it. They're listening to the world around them and information and course correcting. A couple of years ago, Meta was like$80 a share and everybody thought Zuckerberg lost his mind with the VR goggles and all that.

2:35:05Jared Isaacman:He woke up one day and he said, you know what, I may have overdid it and pivoted, put more into AI, scaled back some of his funding here on that, and the stock's probably 10x that in the last couple of years as a result. He got some of it wrong. I, I, you know, Google bought, uh, was Motorola at one point in time building phones and they were like, oh, we got this one wrong. And they sold it at a loss. Microsoft bought a Skype, um, you know, vastly overpaid for it. And, um, and, uh, and eventually they shut it down, right? Like they're just, the point being is like, you don't always get it all right.

2:35:39Jared Isaacman:So if you don't reorganize and like do a true bottoms up build of looking at where's all the dollars going, where are all the experts putting their time and energy and what are we getting in return? Like, what are the KPIs? What should we care about at NASA? How about time to science? Why wait five years to learn something if we can learn it in a year and at lower cost? And, like, you bring in, you know, experts who do that at large organizations that have lost their way. And it's like, you know what? I want a team of 14 of them, two at every one of the centers, and get them out there and do the analysis we would do if a Google lost their way or a Meta lost their way and give me the information so we can course correct a little bit.

2:36:14Jared Isaacman:So yeah, it wasn't just like, you know, space exorcists, people from various, you know, backgrounds that could help, you know, refocus the agency on the true needle movers. You know, we've been talking a lot about helium-3 has come up a couple of different times and talked about it at breakfast. You brought it up a couple of times in here. You know, I mentioned Steve Quast who said that he thought that China was mining helium-3 off the dark side of the moon. I mean, when did helium three actually show up on everybody's radar? Uh, yeah, I mean, I, you know, I don't know the, the full history behind it, like how far it goes back and when we thought it might be a key to fusion power, but I'll tell you, uh, there's a lot of really smart people that are champions of it.

2:37:03Jared Isaacman:Um, Harrison Schmidt walked on the moon, first geologist first true scientist to walk on the moon um you know he's in his 80s and sharp as hell and you know he's he's still studying lunar rocks and you ask him and he he's like i think i think helium 3 is going to unlock a lot of potential here on earth um and there's certainly more of it on the moon than there is on uh than there is here on earth uh i don't think i do believe also again and i'm not pretending to be a you know physicist on this i do believe we have demonstrated that we can get more power than we put into a very brief fusion reaction using helium three as a fuel source um so anyway that that's like what we know it's the cooling process correct i'm i'm i'm definitely not taking an inch farther than i have already other than um we need an orbital economy and helium three is probably one of the better ideas on what it could be and that would be more or less a lunar economy.

2:38:02Jared Isaacman:All that said, I don't think, not to contradict Stephen, I don't think China's mining anything. China has certainly had some successful missions to the moon. And honestly, if we don't course correct, they will beat us back to the moon. But I don't think we've got, they haven't set up industrial operations yet on it. That doesn't mean we should try and do everything we can Again, make sure that we don't fall behind in that, but we still have time. What are some of our adversaries doing in space? I mean, the high ground has mattered, you know, from the beginning of human history, you know, from, you know, there's tactical and strategic advantages of it, and they are well aware of it.

2:38:46Jared Isaacman:So they're building out their constellation of communication satellites, Earth observation satellites. They are leaning heavy into hypersonic weapons. I mean, you know, when something is in space, in orbit, it's very predictable. It's like literally a railroad track. Like once it's in orbit, you know exactly where it's going to be, which makes it pretty easy to, you know, intercept a lot of the satellites that are up there. China's been working on like hypersonic wave riding technology. You can put something in orbit, bring it back into the atmosphere where you've, you get, you know where some you know air resistance some uh aerodynamics come back in turn go right back up in and you've changed the inclination that object is in space like that's that changes the game on certain things and they they they're doing that right now they have been doing it like they are they're they are not messing around in space i think from like a hypersonic weapons you know capability i i would think a lot of people are not happy with the progress they've made so they're or not, you know, they've gone through this phase of like buying or stealing and reverse engineering and copying things.

2:39:57Jared Isaacman:And then they started to reverse engineer and improve upon it. Like they're flankers. You know, they call Russia up and say like, we need to buy two fighter jets and like reverse engineer it. And the next thing you know, you know, you got like a J-15, it looks just like a flanker, but they made it better. Right. But then they just started to learn from all that and build brand new things you know they're j20 they're j35 they're showing off six gen this is obviously all like uh aircraft related but they did they're doing the same things in space it's not just like they're copy and paste stuff anymore and reverse engineering they are building a lot of good capabilities out in the high ground um yeah i mean when was when was last time we fought a war where we didn't have either air supremacy or own, you know, the domain of space with a, with a peer.

2:40:45Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you talk about, you know, kind of unlocking economy, what do you, what do you call it? A space, like an orbital economy. I mean, what all does that entail? We, we brought up a couple of them earlier, but I'd just like to see what am I missing here?

2:41:03Jared Isaacman:Well, so like what's a, what's an example of it working? And honestly, it's the only, yeah, Starlink, a hundred percent. That's only example I can really point to where more value is being created than what's being put into something that requires space. Outside of that, like where you have real consumers paying for a fee and Starlink's making, or SpaceX is making money off it and taking those dollars around and investing in cool stuff in space, right? Without it, all these other commercial companies that everybody's excited about, and a lot of them are alumni from, you know, SpaceX or Blue Origin or whatnot and they're getting VC funding and they're excited about something, who is going to pay them for those companies to exist, to perpetuate?

2:41:47Jared Isaacman:And it's either NASA or the DoD and there's more companies and the budget is the same or smaller. That's not a formula for success. So if we want to see space really grow and all these commercial space companies that have created an economy here on Earth but may not be sustainable, we need to figure out how we can unlock value from that unique environment of microgravity and we don't have good answers for you i mean there's there's just i mean we have i'll just rattle a couple off and i want to see if you know of any that i'm missing because one selfishly i'd love to interview him because i don't i think i'm always fascinated with anything in space but i mean we've got space we've got starlink you know communications we have spacex we have steve kwaas company space build who wants to assemble satellites uh in space and other equipment we have astro forge who wants to mine metals off of asteroids we have um shit what's the other one we have uh bodgie bots you know company where he wants to beam in solar energy to to to receivers you know and distribute that i mean and then we have you know what we talked about earlier just regular everyday like space tourism i mean that's we're on the precipice of that what am i missing i want them all to succeed but the simple reality is other than what spacex is doing with starlink and their launch vehicles i don't think any of them are profitable and actually i would think for most of the names that you've rattled off?

2:43:26Jared Isaacman:I don't think any, I think almost none of them have any revenue. I mean, look, Boeing is, you know, their Boeing space systems, every quarter loses billions of dollars. And that's like an established legacy player with real government contracts. I don't know if anyone else, Blue Origin isn't profitable. Rocket Lab isn't profitable. They're all negative earnings. You know, the point is, is there's all these commercial companies that are all endeavoring to do something in space. And none of them have cracked the code on anything that generates value other than Starlink. It's not like me saying like, winner take all Starlink, not even close.

2:44:00Jared Isaacman:I wanted all the work. And hopefully, as the cost to be in space comes down with Starship and New Glenn and, you know, Rocket Lab is working on a big, you know, neuron, their big vehicle and Stoke is working. I hope it all works out. But I'm just saying, other than Starlink, the space economy is unchanged for 60 years. It's launched observation and communication and almost entirely paid for by world governments. That's not good. I mean, don't you think, I mean, don't they have to, I mean, when I talk to these guys, it seems like a lot of the problem is the red tape. And, and, you know, I mean, I can't remember a lot of these guys are launching, you know, within the next couple of years, I think, uh, 2027, 2026, I mean, we're going to see like the first landing on an asteroid.

2:44:50And I could be off by a couple of years, but it all sounded relatively soon. You know, Bonjibat Solar, you know, him being solar, and he's a couple of years out from a test of that, according to him. I mean, is that why they, I mean, how could they be profitable? It's going to take a lot of innovation and getting through red tape to actually get up there.

2:45:15Jared Isaacman:I think, I mean, look, you've got SpaceX, Rocket Lab, ULA, Blue Origin soon. You got Firefly. There's plenty of launch providers. You can launch something in space. Shockingly, there's almost no red tape. It's actually one of the problems. Interesting. Is that, like, don't get me wrong. We want to start talking nuclear. There's red tape. Yeah. You want to launch nuclear reactors, there's red tape. But in terms of just general commercial space, they all basically get a free pass to do what they want. It's called the learning period. And basically, Congress actually got this right of giving commercial industry time to figure out what the economy is.

2:45:56Jared Isaacman:Look, you have to get an FAA launch license to launch a rocket. There is no one who inspects the integrity of the rocket. No one signs that off. So, You want to talk about no regulation? So if that rocket gets up into orbit and then blows up and showers low Earth orbit with debris that takes out other satellites and whatnot, there's no one who inspected that or signed off on it. At some point, there will be. So in a lot of areas, commercial industry, to figure this all out, has a lot of latitude. I think, look, what's holding it back is that the revenue model is highly dependent on either DOD or NASA, and there's only so much money to go around.

2:46:34Jared Isaacman:I think I said before, there's four different companies trying to build space stations. There are two in existence, the Chinese and the International Space Station, and neither one of them make money. Why are there four companies trying to build space stations? I hope that we need four companies to build space stations someday. I'd like nothing more than to see lots of space stations up there. There's no economy for it. There's no one that needs to have lots of people in lab coats up there figuring cancer drugs out. I hope there is at some point in time or another. So look, I think the part of the problem is that there isn't a revenue model that actually underwrites a lot of these businesses.

2:47:10Jared Isaacman:Do I believe at some point it's inevitable we will mine asteroids? Totally. It's like one of the sure things that will happen. And as the cost comes down to launch things out to mine asteroids, it will become more and more of a reality. I can believe in that. Will it be less expensive to capture solar power in space and beam it back to Earth versus just covering large portions of the Nevada desert with solar panels. I think the latter is cheaper, but maybe it'll happen. But whatever it is, we got to figure out a way to drive revenue from space in excess of what goes into it. And it has to come from more than the government, or we're not going to have that future in space we all want.

2:47:48Do you have ideas on how we do that?

2:47:50Jared Isaacman:Nope. I mean, I was spending a lot of time. It was my number two priority if I was confirmed at NASA, I think it all starts with very inexpensive launch. So Starship, New Glenn, Stoke, Firefly, Rocket Lab, make it cheap to experiment in space. And the more we experiment, that's how you go from the 1980s car phone to the 13-year-olds with Meta and DoorDash and Uber on your phones that you never could have imagined 30 years ago. Have you invested in any of these companies personally? I was briefly invested in SpaceX, but divested as part of the NASA process. So I have no equity interest in any of them.

2:48:34Jared Isaacman:I wish them all incredibly well. You can't not love space and not want to see them all succeed. Is Russia a player? Not really anymore or as much. What about India? Emerging player. You know, they're just getting going. I mean, reality is anyone in the launch business, if you have to throw away your rocket, SpaceX can eat you alive. Like they can use the same rocket 25, 30 times and they're about to do it with a, with a Starship. New Glenn is going to get there. I'm sure Rocket Lab and Stoke will get there too, is it in Firefly? Like Russia is not a, I mean, I'd be, I mean, in like a, in a combat context, like they can brute force and throw a lot of stuff up there and create a lot of problems.

2:49:15Jared Isaacman:So I think that's more of a DOD consideration. but in terms of just like broad capabilities to wow us from peaceful space military space and whatever blurs the line between the two it's china china's the threat they will be the ones that will that will cause issues are they ahead of us no uh honestly thanks spacex i'm not trying to make it a spacex love story but they've been landing rockets on ships for 10 years now and no one else has done at once. So SpaceX gave us reusability because they saw opportunity to break the monopoly that was ULA. I mean, all of basically US launches was up until SpaceX was a monopoly, a government sanctioned monopoly, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed called United Launch Alliance.

2:50:01Jared Isaacman:And they charged like a half a billion a launch. And SpaceX was like, this seems like something I could disrupt, not to mention they have great vision. So we launch more orbital class rockets every year, largely thanks to reusability. The country that launches the second most without any of that tech is China. And they're not like too far behind. So they will be the next country to unlock reusability. They will make something that looks like a Falcon and a Starship inevitably. Is there anything that they're doing that we're not doing that you find innovative that you know about? Yes, and it's not just limited to space.

2:50:42Jared Isaacman:I think they are literally sitting back and saying, what are the absolute coolest world-changing projects across all technology domains? And assign somebody to it and resource it and make it happen. I mean, they went from literally like coal-fed locomotives 25 years ago. Now they have 25 ,000 miles of high-speed rail across the country. They're like, build a fusion research center. Build the largest telescope in the world. That sounds like a good idea. Build the biggest dams. Send some people to the moon. Put nuclear reactors in space because we're going to want that kind of power generation from a propulsion or laser perspective.

2:51:25Jared Isaacman:Build an aircraft carrier. They're literally going across the board. AI. Figure out how to do AI on the cheap. We don't have the big hyperscalers like we do in the US. Figure out a way to get comparable on it. Quantum computing. They take on all of the most interesting projects. They're not going to win at all of them. I'm not trying to say, US is going to lose, America is going to lose, China is going to win on everything. No, there are areas that we will have some advantages in, but they are taking on big, bold, world-changing projects like we used to do during the Manhattan Project and the space program.

2:52:00Jared Isaacman:And they're going to get wins. They're going to definitely, you know, they're going to get some wins.

2:52:11What should I be asking you that I'm not?

2:52:14Jared Isaacman:All your questions are really good. Let's take a quick break. Want more from the Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions. Our new SRS on-site specials and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show.

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2:53:28All right, Jared, we're back from the break. I wanted to talk about kind of the history of the space program, you know, from a global aspect. And, you know, you were talking at breakfast about how you kind of looked up to some of the cosmonauts. And so I'd like you to just go into that a little bit.

2:53:43Jared Isaacman:Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, all the astronauts, the cosmonauts of the space race, the engineers, the operators, the mission controllers, like, I mean, they started with zero. I mean, they really were breaking down the door on a whole new frontier. And, I mean, they knew nothing compared to what we know today, which is still not a lot. I mean, they didn't have, you know, supercomputers. They didn't have like, you know, our iPhones are more powerful than the, you know, the computers they had on Apollo spacecraft. So it's just, it's just, they were starting in, you know, they were just beginning this great adventure and they were taking, you know, a lot of risks.

2:54:21Jared Isaacman:But they were risks worth taking. They're just all pioneers and I admired that. So, I mean, just again, you know, the people in mission control, like the flight directors, like Gene Kranz, you know, I mean. You know, he had to write the rules for how we conduct operations in space and keep people safe. And then when things go wrong, to bring them home safely, like on Apollo 13. So, anyway, I admire them all. I think, you know, the Soviet cosmonauts, look, they took even grander risks. You know, we're talking over breakfast. I mean, Yuri Gagarin. So, the first two American astronauts that went into space, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, they were suborbital flights.

2:55:04Jared Isaacman:You know, like not too dissimilar to the Blue Origin flights now. Like what goes up must come down. They were in space for a matter of minutes. The first, you know, the first person to go into space ever, a Soviet cosmonaut, it was orbital. I mean, it was what goes up may stay up the whole damn time. You know, it may not come back. So Yuri Gagarin, I mean, he went right to orbit. It wasn't until our third astronaut mission when John Glenn went up that we sent someone into orbit. And then when he reentered, I mean, you know, you're just, you're a meteor, you know, crashing through the atmosphere, surrounded by a fireball.

2:55:42Jared Isaacman:And when he came through all that, he didn't land in a spacecraft. He ejected. That's crazy. He had to eject out of that thing. And it wasn't just him. It was a lot of other cosmonauts thereafter. And they didn't tell anyone that, you know, they were, they had to land under a parachute, under their own parachute. And the spacecraft just smashed into Earth. I mean, wild times, man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, can you talk about Sputnik? Sure. I mean, that was, I mean, they call it a Sputnik moment for a reason, right? You know, Eisenhower wasn't super big into space. You know, I think he was on the other side of a debate that still rages on now of couldn't that money be spent elsewhere?

2:56:31Jared Isaacman:um you know obviously funded certain things to give us our you know early ballistic missile programs and such um but i mean at some point or another and he by the way was i don't know if dismissive is the right word i mean i try and be reasonably studied on an early space history but at least publicly he was very much downplaying sputnik too it was a lot of others um you know that were concerned and said hey wait a second here you know if this was a if this was a soviet bomber that was flying over us right now, we'd all be pretty pissed off. But because it's a little bit higher than that, because we can't really see it, we should be okay with it.

2:57:08Jared Isaacman:And if they can put this, you know, tiny radio beacon of a satellite above us, what else can they put above us? Could they put a nuclear weapon above us? Like, it was a very unsettling moment because we knew we overlooked something and we were behind. And then when we tried to catch up, you know, the first satellites we tried to put up, well, first they were very small in comparison to what the Soviets put up. So that told us already that we were at a disadvantage from like a heavy lift capability. They could put something big in space. We were going to put something like the size of a grapefruit in space and it didn't work.

2:57:44Jared Isaacman:Our first attempts all blew up on the pad. It was not it was not pleasant so it was a wake-up call right and when we uh you know kind of you know rallied our resources and focused it on something extraordinary we did it um And yeah, I mean, sometimes I guess, you know, look, competition is a good thing. You just don't want to lose. And Sputnik set off a great space race. And in the end, we didn't lose. But the story doesn't end there. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think it's going to take another Sputnik moment to get our asses in gear here? you know when i was at draken and again our job was to to be the bad guy and i watched as years went by and what we were replicating or attempting to replicate in terms of the chinese threat was getting better and better and better and it was getting scary and we would sit around i mean this is like seven eight years ago long before i went to space you know and you're at the bar talking you're like this is going to be a problem right guys and it's like i remember saying it was probably a handful of beers deep in the conversation.

2:58:53Jared Isaacman:I was like, you know what? They're going to get back to the moon before us and it's going to be a wake up call and they're going to have congressional hearings. And we are going to, all these things that we allowed to happen, you know, the over consolidation in the defense industry that has killed innovation, that makes things cost way too much for the war fighters and come too little too late. Like, it's going to fix all of that. And I was, you know, I wouldn't, as an American, I don't want to see that happen. I care about the competitiveness in nation but i was like maybe that's what it's going to take until i got nominated to lead nasa and i was like hell no like we're not going to let that happen but i mean there's a chance it could and if it does um you know maybe it'll be the you know maybe it'll be the wake-up call we need i don't know maybe maybe uh draken's getting ready to move into red cell space uh space operations maybe maybe you'll be the guy that shows us hey here you go what are you going to do?

2:59:50Luckily, it's just me and I'm a friend. But, well, Jared, last question. If you were to get re-nominated to head NASA and be the administrator, would you take it?

3:00:02Jared Isaacman:In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat. I mean, like I have no, I didn't take any of it personally. There's no hard feelings. I care about the competitiveness of the nation. And I think there's a lot of great people that could lead NASA. but if i had the opportunity i would absolutely step up and want to contribute well maybe that'll happen i hope it does but well jared i love that about you man you're not taking anything personally and you know you have the attitude of i just want to win i don't really care who's in there and uh i think we need a lot more of that in this country so thank you for being who you are and and thank you for coming in today and and like i said it was an honor to interview hey the honor is mine.

3:00:46Jared Isaacman:Really, it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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