Hello and welcome to another episode of Miles to Go. I'm your host, Miles O'Brien. I'm a science reporter for PBS and as a result, I do cover a wide range of topics and speak to a lot of interesting people all over the scientific map, so to speak. I'd say the three big buckets are innovation, exploration, and human resilience. This episode touches on all those bases. I'm sharing a conversation I had in September of 2023 with Jared Isaacman. The National Business Aviation Association asked me to do a profile of him as they were giving him their Meritorious Service Award. I didn't know much about Isaacman at the time, but the more I learned, the more intrigued I became. He is a high school dropout and business prodigy who started a payment processing company in his parents' basement in New Jersey in 1999. Today, the company is called Shift4. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and keeps growing like a rocket ship. 200,000 merchants use it. Isaacman is worth about $1.8 billion, they say. Isaacman has a lifelong passion for aviation. He's an accomplished pilot who owns and flies a fleet of fighters, including a MiG-29. In 2011, he and some of his pilot friends started flying air shows in tight formations, Thunderbird style. They called themselves the Black Diamond Jet Team. The next year, the team formed a company called Draken International, one of the largest private fleets of fighter aircraft in the world. The company provides adversary training for the US military, professional bad guys. His passion for space came to public light in 2021 when he led the Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian space mission on a SpaceX Crew Dragon sitting on top of a Falcon 9. This past September, he led his second civilian flight on a Dragon-Falcon combination, this one called Polaris Dawn. It is supposed to be the first of a trilogy of missions. We'll get into that in our conversation. What we won't get into is the fact that he has been nominated to be NASA's 15th administrator. That happened on December 4th, more than a year after our conversation. What he will do with the space agency is, of course, a story yet to be told. What will happen to the Space Launch System, Artemis, the Boeing Starliner, and what about NASA's science portfolio and its crucial efforts to aim sensors at our planet to better understand the climate emergency? All of these things will come to light as Isaacman faces confirmation hearings. But our conversation does offer up some clues. So without further ado, here's Jared Isaacman, recorded at Shift4 headquarters in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on September 25th, 2023.
Are you one of those people that when you were young, grew up and always wanted to be a pilot and/or an astronaut?
Tell me a little bit about that.
So I can point to two movies here. So first one is Top Gun. I think that had an impact on a lot of pilots over the last few decades. And then as a kid, I also saw The Right Stuff as well as the movie Space Camp. So that's what planted the space seed. But I think becoming a pilot felt a little bit more on the realistic trajectory. That space was going to be just a dream.
Most people when they have pilot jones going on, they go get their ticket and they might make their way to the regional airlines, become an airline pilot, or they might go the military route. You didn't do either. You decided to do business first. Was that a conscious decision?
I guess it was just all priorities in life. As a kid, I loved aviation and space and spent a long time getting familiar with it, studying. I built my first couple computers just to play flight simulators. I went to the aviation version of space camp called Aviation Challenge. And then I guess the next priority in my life was getting away from high school. I hated it. I had all these older brothers and sisters that were out living their lives and I wanted to do the same. So left school at 16, started a company, keeping that going became the top priority. And then I think I was about 20 years old, maybe 19, I was just waking up in the basement on my keyboard and I just knew I needed something else in my life again. And I went right back to aviation and that's where it began.
So you really have a passion for aviation.
So tell me a little bit about Aviation Space Camp. I'm not extremely familiar with that. Is that actually in Huntsville alongside the other space camp?
It is. First it was just Space Camp and then they created Aviation Challenge, which is basically instead of as a camper going through this space training mission profile, you're doing it as a fighter pilot. So you're flying flight simulators, you're doing this like really stripped down, they're putting you in a centrifuge, even flew in a Cessna 172. It was an awesome, awesome experience. And it's since expanded. Now they have cyber camp, robotics camp. It's actually Space Camp itself has become, like in my opinion, like a national treasure because it's exposing kids to all these experiences you couldn't get anywhere else other than Huntsville, Alabama. It's pretty awesome.
Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty special organization. I've done some work with them in the past.
It did, that solidified those initial dreams and I think it just built on it. Honestly, when I was a kid before I went to Aviation Challenge, I was playing lots of flight simulators. That's why I built a computer, was to play like Falcon 3.0 and then the Janes flight simulators and such. That to me was just supporting the habit, if you will. But yeah, it actually, it was shortly thereafter that where I actually put it to the side for a bit because business life took over for some period.
And that business life supports the aviation habit now, doesn't it?
And you got a big habit. Tell us... wait a minute, I'm getting too far ahead of myself. This always happens to me when I start talking about aviation and space. I'm just too much of a nerd, I guess. Get excited. Before we get into his impressive aviation toy box, I do want you to hear about his experience with his first flight instructor, Phillip Sniggy Adorado. And he told an interesting story about you guys almost quickly became peers in the cockpit, really. It was an interesting scenario, an unusual instructor-student relationship, I'd say.
Oh yeah, Phil's awesome. And basically we went on this journey together. He was a young CFI looking to build time and obviously I was ready at this stage of my life to really lean into aviation. And it just made sense, come work for me so that we can find time at any time, because it might be in the middle of the night, who knows, where we can fly together. And it got him a lot of exposure, the things that he needed to advance his career: multi-engine, lots of instrument flying, jet aircraft, of course. And we learned together on this journey. It was pretty cool.
Yeah, he said that the initial ab initio flight with you was just a random luck of the draw moment. I said, boy, think how that has changed your life. That's one of those forks in the road.
Oh, for sure. And look, even to get where I'm in life, the ball has to bounce your way many times. And that random luck of the draw getting me an awesome flight instructor who was ready to go on this multi-decade journey with me worked out incredibly well. Could have wound up with somebody else that completely turned me off to aviation for all I know, right?
We've all flown with those instructors. So walk us through your progression of aviation a little bit and how you, obviously in your case, you were working so hard, it had to be wrapped up in your business, but just explain how aviation and your business progressed together.
Yeah, so I think when you find things in life that interest you and that you're reasonably decent at, you just gravitate towards it. And at least for me, you give it everything and then you're continuing to seek out even greater challenges associated with it. It's like the same story with business, right? I didn't start a company in my parents' basement thinking someday we'd be on the New York Stock Exchange. You figure something out, you like it, and then you keep searching for that next greatest challenge and you parlay your experiences into something bigger, right? And that's exactly how it's gone with aviation for me too. You start like anyone else in a single-engine propeller 172 type airplane and then you enjoy some of the more challenging aspects, you enjoy for example instrument flying and such, or progressing onto multi-engines. But for me, I knew very early I wanted to get into jet aircraft. And jet aircraft took me into ex-military aircraft, and that took me to air show flying, and then Draken. And you just, like in business, you keep parlaying your success and experiences into something bigger and eventually it took me to space.
How important was it for the success of your business to have an airplane at your disposal? And I assume that goes till today.
Yeah, at first it was, I would say, therapeutic as a leader, right? I needed to come into work every day and be energized about the things that we needed to conquer here at Shift4. And I got a lot of that from the time I was able to take away from the office flying. It was like a great reset and clarity. And it was a motivator too. Now of course, there's all the productivity reasons why you do it, to be able to accomplish so much more in a day because you can fly yourself to these various locations. We did a series of M&A in 2017 where I was able to fly to six cities in a day and get things done. The productivity side of it for sure. But I think aviation has shaped me as a leader. There's a lot of the best practices of aviation that I've been able to bring back to my day job. A lot of our Shift4 way is about the structure and discipline of briefing and debriefing, checklist and procedure, process. That helps us be better and execute better here at Shift4. And a lot of that came from the aviation world.
So that you've actually employed an aviation philosophy into business, or has it gone the other direction as well?
Yeah, for sure. Taking a lot from aviation and even space, honestly. You get to spend several years inside an incredible organization like SpaceX, you're going to try and take as much of that secret formula and bring it back here. But our chief operating officer is a pilot, that's where I met him. I recognized a lot of the things that made him a really great pilot long ago would do incredibly well here in operations. So actually throughout the organization, you'll find a lot of pilots, you'll find a lot of ex-SpaceXers that have come into the organization. So I'd say brought a lot more aerospace into Shift4 than bringing Shift4 into aerospace.
The discipline of aviation works well in a business model, for sure.
I think one of the things about when you get in the aviation world is you meet, it self-selects an amazingly good group of people, wouldn't you agree on that?
I do, I agree, yeah. Flying in air shows in 2011, essentially that air show team, we were doing formation aerobatics, became, all of us became the co-founders of a business together, which was Draken International, which was a whole new idea to basically outsource turnkey fighter jets as professional adversaries or professional bad guys for the military. Those same people that I'm very close with today are supporting our work on the Polaris program with SpaceX. So no question, you know, met incredible individuals throughout my aviation career and they've found their way into Shift4 or other endeavors that we've worked on.
So when you're flying in tight formation like that, a matter of inches away from somebody else's wingtip, and you're flying with former Thunderbird pilots, most of the people in that formation would have learned all that in the military. You came in a completely different way. Did you find they were a little skeptical at first?
I'm sure they were. I'm sure Stroker and Slick would say that the first, you know, the kind of early days before we really started flying together, there was probably some healthy skepticism, not just about me but also Doug Demko, who is the other civilian background pilot on the team. I don't think it took long after flying together that they had the right confidence in us. We were lucky because actually long before we were doing formation aerobatics, we were flying with extraordinary aviators like Dale 'Snort' Snodgrass, one of the best. We had flown with him for a couple years before the air show teams, and Jerry 'Jive' Kirby, another great example. We had some awesome mentors long before we decided to bring seven aircraft in close proximity to each other. And hopefully the rest of the team saw that pretty early on and that's why we had a great air show career together.
Did you ever have any moments where you felt like, I don't belong here?
For sure. In the early days when we were training, actually up here in Pennsylvania near Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and then down in St. Augustine, call it our training season, you knew you were flying with the best of the best for sure. And I was very quick in some of the first debriefs, 'Hey guys, I'm just happy to be here. Kick me out at any time and I'm going to enjoy watching you guys fly.' Always wanted to give them an out if they felt that we weren't able to make the cut. Fortunately, they never had to take that out.
So I suspect if they felt you could make the cut, you would have heard one way or another. Those guys don't mess around. And your handle is 'Rook' because that was... that's my name. Never explained your call sign, right? It's not for rookie, is it?
All right, tell me about the transition to space flight. Was that always part of your trajectory plan? Or was there a moment where you're like, wait a minute, I could buy myself a seat or a capsule and go into orbit? How did this all transpire?
No, again, like, balls got to bounce your way so many times, stars have to align to have that, I don't know, one in a billion opportunity to be able to lead the first civilian mission to orbit. So there's no way that you could ever say that there was like a plan for that to happen. It was in 2008, 2009 that Doug Demko and myself, we did some around-the-world record flights. And we did it because of the challenge and also to raise funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. And we came back from that, I got an invitation from a lot of folks that were essentially the founders of the commercial space industry to go to Baikonur in Kazakhstan and see the Soyuz launch. This was the end of 2008. So of course, I'm going, who's going to pass up an opportunity like that? And when I was there, I came away, not only was it extraordinary to see a launch in Kazakhstan, they let you see it, you're like a par three away from the rocket, it's pretty awesome. I came away from that trip saying, you know what, maybe it's possible. And I had some conversations with SpaceX then. There's like a document in the archives of the first opportunity to pilot Dragon was discussed in '08 for an expected launch date in 2011. So it turned out to be a little bit more down the road. But I had honestly forgot about it for so long. I was just cheering SpaceX on from the sidelines. And then in October of 2020, before even NASA's Crew-1 launched, conversations began that ultimately led to Inspiration4. And I couldn't have predicted that a month before those conversations that it would happen.
But you weren't going to say no.
There's zero chance of that.
So tell me about you, this opportunity gets presented before you. And I think if you look at the history of, the pejorative would be space tourism, but we'll call it space participants, they've been pretty individual efforts. And you had the opportunity to go with your bros, your friends, right? Or whatever. And instead you bring it out to a bunch of people you didn't even know. What were you thinking at the time?
When I found out, because for all I knew the offer was going to be the 12th mission or the 15th mission. Seems fair that they'd want to get a few NASA missions under their belt first, right? And when I found out it was going to be the first and how quickly it was going to come to be, I just knew that was going to come with a lot of responsibility and that we had to get it right. That really comes down to just doing the right thing. It is going to take a lot more than what Elon and all of that SpaceX brain power and talent can do to put humans on Mars. It's more than just the hardware and the software. You have to have people that are willing to believe in it all, that it's okay that we should do this, that it's all right to make progress in space for tomorrow. And we won't ignore everything that's wrong here on Earth too along the way. And if you recognize that, how important that's going to be towards achieving this broader vision, then it should have been obvious right from the get-go that this isn't going to be a bunch of your friends that you're going to have to assemble a very inspiring crew that each have their own audience and maybe it has nothing to do with space flight at all. It's just people that have an amazing story, never giving up or hope in the bleakest of moments in life, or service and generosity like in the case of Chris Sembroski. You knew you were going to need a very inspiring crew and you knew that it had to serve a bigger purpose than the mission itself. And that's where St. Jude Children's Research Hospital came into it all. And these were going to be just vitally important if you believe that SpaceX's vision could become a reality, then this first mission had to be handled a very certain way. And that's what we tried to do.
Lay out for those who don't know or forgot how each seat represented some sort of ideal.
Yeah, the four mission pillars were hope, generosity, prosperity, and leadership. And for hope, from the get-go, we knew we were going to take a frontline healthcare professional from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which was the charity that we were going to work with on this vision. Because if you think about the kind of players involved, SpaceX has this incredible vision of making life multiplanetary because the world's a more interesting place when you can journey among the stars. St. Jude has a very powerful vision too, which is that no child should ever die in the dawn of life. So two really incredible visions that you get to support in this. So we knew that from the start and we wanted a healthcare professional from St. Jude. And St. Jude went through a selection process on their end and that's where Hayley Arceneaux came from. And not only her talents to actually contribute to the mission as a medical officer were flawless, she was a childhood cancer survivor. And as a result, if you're thinking about hope, she overcame those horrific circumstances early in life, lived her dream to become a St. Jude medical professional, became the youngest American to go into orbit, the first with a prosthesis. There's a lot of hope in that story right there. Dr. Sian Proctor, she represented prosperity. She's a person that never gave up in life. She literally did everything she could to be a NASA astronaut and she made it to the final selection round and came up short. She's a Civil Air Patrol major, she's a pilot, scuba instructor, PhD geoscientist. She literally tried to build the expertise in everything necessary to be a successful astronaut and came up this close and never gave up, right? And through her talents in poetry and arts, she got selected to represent the prosperity pillar. And then Chris Sembroski on generosity. Air Force veteran, worked on some of the biggest rockets in the military arsenal, was a space camp counselor. He made a donation to St. Jude, $50 donation type deal, knowing that yeah, we had a one in a million chance or something, but regardless, it was going to a good cause. And he actually wasn't selected, his friend was selected. And then furthering that spirit of generosity, chose to give his seat to Chris Sembroski. So just awesome stories, great individuals, and they did their job incredibly well on the mission.
So you took four of you, all strangers, right? Each of you with an interesting backstory on their own, right? And you managed to turn that successfully into a crew, into a family, which says a little bit about your leadership style. Was there something conscious you did to make that happen, or does that just come naturally to you?
