Jared Isaacman

Thanks for having me.

Honored to be here, but honestly, looking around the room, don't feel very worthy, but it's great to be here and chatting with you.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

It's a real pleasure to meet you, by the way.

You too.

You're an American hero.

Well, I would tell you right from the get-go, I'm 100% in the camp.

We absolutely went to the moon.

And what a travesty that we haven't been back.

And I can tell you how we got there.

We had a great Cold War rivalry, our ideology versus theirs, and 4.5% of the federal budget and the will of the nation is what happened.

And once we got there and we went a handful of times and collected enough moon rocks, that was an expense that was no longer palatable.

I will say for 35 years, as taxpayers, we spent over $100 billion to return to the moon.

35 years later, we haven't been able to do it.

That's obviously a big problem that we need to fix.

There's probably a lot of underlying reasons associated with it.

It's interesting.

Some of it goes to even the competitiveness that we have with the competitive nature of our country, our great geopolitical competitor in China that now has incredible second mover advantage on us.

What I mean by that is take the Manhattan Project.