Anpanman - $ASTS $TE $BAER $SRTA: Midday Musings and Mic Check

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: Hey everyone, I'm back. I'm trying out this, uh, this new microphone. Give me a thumbs up if it sounds okay. Uh, I think some of the issues that X was having, um, I guess it was a day ago or 2 days ago, I think it's been fixed, but I'm not sure. I've had, I did do, um, a few Spaces and they seem to be okay. So, um, and then I actually have a Zoom meeting earlier today and I used this setup and people thought it was pretty good. So anyway, um, yeah, interesting day. I figured I'd, in order to test this out, I'd jump on and just talk about a few things. Um, and actually talk about a number of names, not just AST SpaceMobile, but a few others. Um, but first I'll start with AST. Um, I think I'm going down the rabbit hole of this whole AI data centers in space, and it's probably going to take quite some time for me to get to a point where I'm not a complete idiot about this stuff. But I will say the more that I dig into it, the more I think AST is well positioned to win some of this business going forward. And I know there are some concerns and my concerns too. I mean, I think concerns meaning you don't want the company to lose focus on the key target market, which is delivering broadband connectivity to devices on the commercial side and defense side. And of course, there's a bunch of non-communication applications for AST as well. But I think the important thing here is that the company doesn't really have to lose focus. I mean, There's kind of 2 dynamics here. One, the company has a huge war chest of patents and they can go out and license these patents to other companies and generate a significant amount of royalties. And for those who are familiar, royalties are 100% margin. I mean, you're just basically selling your IP and someone licenses it and they're able to deploy it in their whatever solution they're looking to use it for. So that's, that's a positive. Um, but then the other thing that I think people should realize is that once AST, if they get up to 10 to 12 satellites per month production cadence, and once they have the low band and mid band Bluebird constellations already up, and, you know, who knows how long that will take, maybe it's, you know, 2028 or so, um, that's going to be capacity That's built in, and then you can go direct that capacity elsewhere. I mean, you're probably going to have to continue to build some satellites for maintenance, and perhaps the government will want some additional satellites, but then you're going to be able to take on customers and build things for other people. And so this whole idea of data centers in space, one of the things that we learned, which is funny because it was a patent from 2021 and of course, as investors, like, some things don't come to, you don't realize them until much later. But, you know, when you listen to StarCloud or some of these companies that are focused on data centers in space, the biggest issue is heat dissipation. And, you know, various people have approaches to creating active or passive radiators. And AST already has that built in. The large phased arrays that AST has where, you know, on one side it's a solar array, on the other hand, or sorry, on the bottom you have the antenna elements. And then within, in the middle of, and sorry, there's someone vacuuming here, but in the middle of the, in the microns, you have the embedded processors, which are currently FPGAs, but then will be ASICs that the company's developed. But those processors, which focus on signal processing and beamforming, they generate a ton of heat. And so AST already has developed the architecture to dissipate that heat across the— and that's why they have these large arrays because it acts as a very large radiator. And so they're able to dissipate the heat. And so if you can imagine a situation where you take an AST space mobile satellite, Um, you take out the antenna elements for the phased array. Um, and so you obviously save a lot of weight there. Um, you then for the processors inside, you replace those with TPUs or GPUs or ASICs, whatever your, you know, your AI workload requires. I think you also need to upgrade the interconnects between the processors. Um, I used to be a hardware investment banker and so I was, Maybe I'm dating myself, but I was there at the beginning of when people were developing, there was a company called Mellanox that was developing InfiniBand, which provided high-speed interconnects for servers. And so, and that's basically the underlying technology that's used to interconnect processors and data centers. But, you know, you'd have to basically beef up the interconnects between processors. And I think You know, there is some, you'd have to give up some performance because when you get processors closer together and densify them, then you get performance gains. If you spread them out, which is what you would do with AST, perhaps you lose some of that performance. But at the same time, from a heat management perspective, that's much better. Because I think I was looking at StarCloud, like they're going to pack these things into a box and then they basically need to figure out how to get all heat out of that box. Whereas AST, it's like, it's elegant in a sense of the array is your radiator. And you have, you know, there's like, there's thermal management, there's like pipes and some other materials that basically give off the heat, but it's elegant. Like the structure where you have the solar on the top is also that large surface area through the entire, the sandwich is actually dissipating the heat for you. When I was looking at StarCloud, like they have all these, these like basically boxes in the center and then they have this massive, huge, I mean, it's like football fields of solar arrays. And so that's how they generate the power. And so there's, it's a very, in my opinion, it's a very inefficient design because, you know, you have to run that on a, I think it's a polar orbit that needs to be focused on the sun all the time. And I think for those who are familiar with debris, managing debris and collisions and the Kessler syndrome, having a structure that large in space, which is basically this large target for little objects to go hit. And it depends on like where it's orbiting. I think StarCloud wants to be well above LEO because there's so much traffic in LEO. And maybe, and so you might mitigate some of the potential dangers there, but that's a lot of mass and you've got to get it above LEO. I mean, launching stuff to LEO is relatively inexpensive. You're trying to launch something to GEO, it's super expensive. And so there's a lot of cost considerations there, but My point is that with AST, you have an existing architecture that generates a tremendous amount of power. It's elegant because it unfolds. It can fit into a normal standard fairing. And then if you can imagine, you know, like I was saying before, you replace the existing FPGAs or ASICs with GPUs or TPUs, and then you upgrade the interconnects. You take out the antenna arrays because you're not, Those processors are not going to be focused on signal processing. They're going to actually focus on AI training and workloads. But you upgrade the interconnects and then all of a sudden you've got a data center in space. And then you keep the QV feeder bands. And so what StarCloud was saying is that they actually are not going to beam any information down to Earth. They're going to use optical interlinks to communicate with Either Starlink fixed wireless or Kuiper fixed wireless, and then they're going to send down signals, which that's going to come at a performance cost because you're basically relaying it through other people's network. But the reason why StarCloud is doing that partially is because they don't want to pay extra money for the— and the extra money, but also the technological integration you need to put communications back down to Earth and you'll need gateways and all those things. They don't want to do that. But then more importantly, you're going to need FCC approval for that. So you're going to need to access and go through this regulatory gauntlet of getting access to feeder link spectrum, whether that's Ka-band or QV feeder, you know, Ka-band or QV band spectrum. And you're going to have to be licensed for that. You're going to have to like go through this whole process of coordinating with other people too. And so. The more elegant solution for them, at least, is to just try to plug back into existing constellations, whereas AST is already going to have the infrastructure and it has the technology to just, once workload is sent up to, let's say, I don't know what we'd call these bluebirds.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: Maybe, yeah.
[00:10:08] Speaker C: We'll have to go with some name for these AI data center bluebirds, but Maybe we'll call it Data Birds. Okay, so once information is up to Data Birds and then they process it and they send it back down, they can do that directly because we'll have the antennas, the main antennas, which do the QV, the high throughput feeders, it will send that back down to Earth. And you could put gateways next to an Earth data center, which then would interact with the satellite and of course save the information.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:39] Speaker C: The other thing I was thinking about is for that satellite, you wouldn't, you wouldn't, originally I thought, oh, you got to probably put some NAND flash for storage, hardened NAND flash for storage and/or hard drives. But then I was thinking about it more, you probably are just going to use it as edge computing. Like you don't need onboard storage if all the information is going back down to Earth. And so that would mitigate the need and save you some space as well. Yeah. Or as Cassie pointed out, in some of these applications where it's the Department of War or SDA, Golden Dome, whatever, you might need AI processing out in space. And so maybe you do put some amount of storage on this data bird. And then, you know, when these other satellites that are in Golden Dome need AI processing and intelligence, they would go to these data birds and use them. to do those calculations and then get the information back. But the key thing here is that AST has pretty much developed all the building blocks for making this a reality. And, you know, it's something that, for example, Hennessy Fund, who are institutional investors, they've been longtime shareholders who I respect. When I was talking with one of the portfolio managers back during the Block One Bluebird launch, he was telling me, you know, we were talking about the future of the company, that there's a lot of applicability here beyond just communications. And we've seen that already with the non-communications applications that they've won from various government agencies. Obviously those are secret, so we don't really know what they are, but we can guess, you know, some of it's electronic warfare, some of it is PMT. You know, um, GPS backup and, and what have you, uh, radar. But then, you know, it was this gentleman's point that, um, AST, once that's— once the constellations are up, you basically have this massive power generating capacity out in space. You can do a lot of things with that, whether, you know, there were some people who were, which I don't think, at least today, doesn't make sense economically. You know, you generate power, then you use some type of frequencies to beam that power back down to Earth. That was like, that's what I was thinking of when he was talking to me, but I, it didn't occur to me that this whole notion of data centers actually makes sense because you need a big satellite out there that can generate power and dissipate heat. And that's exactly what AST does and what it has patents around. And so, yeah, you have the building blocks and for people who are like, well, I'm not sure I want to be running that business. Well, you don't have to run the business. You can either license the technology out or you can build satellites for other people. and have some service revenue in terms of maintaining the data interconnects. But then, you know, for all intents and purposes, maybe that satellite is owned by Google or, you know, Microsoft. I think for SpaceX, they probably are going to do something similar. And so is Amazon, and they'll just be fully integrated into their stacks. You know, Amazon has their own applications and AI, and of course we all know SpaceX is vertically integrated and they'll be using That for Grok and they'll probably sell this capability to defense customers, but it's not out of the question. It actually makes a ton of sense that AST should just leverage the technology that they have and the capacity they have. Now, obviously, in terms of timing, they've got to focus on getting their constellations up. But if I was AST, I would and maybe they're already doing this. And they, my guess is they probably already have had discussions with Microsoft and Google, who, you know, is an investor, but I would dedicate some crack team of employees and call it skunkworks and just have them focusing on developing this other business because it's huge.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:42] Speaker C: And I think I, Kuk and I talked about this before. My initial reaction when I heard about data centers in space, when I saw, I mean, the key thing for me was like, I saw the StarCloud video and I saw that thing floating in space and I just laughed at it. I was like, that doesn't make any sense. That's crazy. But then Kuk and I talked about it yesterday. And the funny thing is like, oftentimes in life, when people, or when you come across ideas that are crazy and you laugh them off, you often end up being wrong about those. And we talked about the case of, for me it was Bitcoin, like back in 2011. I remember when I was at this hedge fund and the IT guy was talking about mining Bitcoins and he was doing it on his PC on this, like this server at work. And I asked him about it and then I just laughed at it and I was like, oh yeah, that sounds like a fraud and it's not going to go anywhere. And then of course, like I was really wrong. And then fast forward to I think it was like 2016, 2000, no, 2017 is when I started buying Bitcoin at $11,000. And then, you know, my story around Bitcoin is like I bought some, I bought initially at $18,000, bought some at $11,000 and bought all the way down to like $3,500. And then, and then it was like totally dejected. But then a few years later I held it and I sold most of it at $65,000 and then the rest at $55,000. And then, you know, I haven't touched it since, but The point of that is that oftentimes when people come to you, and by the way, like this is the same reaction for AST SpaceMobile too. Like if you were to go pitch people on the street about it, and obviously it's different because Starlink has helped educate you, but if you talked about AST SpaceMobile 3 or 4 years ago, people would just laugh at you and be like, that's ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. Like it's not going to work. How's that possible? Existing cell phone. And then is it really a market? Like who would pay for that? But of course now it's very different. And so I think this data center in space is actually, it's a tangible application. And if you think about where AI compute is going and the needed resources for it, it doesn't make sense to keep those on Earth. It makes more, it makes, as launch becomes much cheaper, it would make more economic and financial sense to go put this stuff up in space. And from an environmental perspective, The amount of power required, cooling, all that stuff on Earth, you're going to really run into serious resource constraints. And so I think putting it in space makes a lot of sense, but obviously my personal concern is that all this stuff needs to be environmentally sound when you deorbit it. And I think the way that some people are talking about these opportunities is that maybe if you have a reusable secondary stage for Some of these launch vehicles, maybe they can bring some of this stuff back and do it in such a way where not everything has to get burned up into the atmosphere. Because then that introduces like another environmental problem. But anyway, I think, yeah, I think the fundamental building blocks are there for AST SpaceMobile. We're talking to all the tech companies and then we've got MNOs as well who, you know, all these AT&T, Verizon, they all have enterprise customers. They also run data centers. And so yeah, I think the phone for AST is going to start ringing off the hook in the coming months as people start to look around and see, okay, who can actually, who has the technology, who can actually build this stuff and who has like experience. And that also includes like these hyperscaler companies, whether it's IREN, CoreWeave, NBIS. I mean, all those companies, yeah, they're, They've got a lock on Earth and they're doing their thing, but if they're smart, they're going to start pivoting into trying to figure out who on the space side can help them get into space. And so I think we're early, like they're on the cusp of this new theme and we just happen to be, I mean, we're lucky. We just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Like there's, I think, AEC SpaceMobile, Rocket Lab, some of these other companies are probably going to be well positioned. But the other thing I would say is that, yeah, I mean, for the company, there's going to be this, they're going to have to manage this where obviously you don't want to talk about this type of stuff until you actually get a regular cadence of production for what you're doing at the core, which is getting the first 2 constellations up. But I'm going to guess like over time you're going to have sell-side research analysts and retail, you know, it's definitely going to be a question I'm asking management, you know, how is this new market opportunity applicable to you? And I think that as we all know in space, there aren't many applications that actually generate money. I mean, the key one is communications. That's big. And, you know, people talk about Earth observation, but it's not really of scale and Oftentimes people are looking for an application in space that actually generates money. And launch, of course, is another, but this one feels pretty tangible and real and it could balloon into something big. And it's something that, it's like the analogy of NVIDIA where people originally used NVIDIA processors for games, but then that was applicable to doing AI workloads and and machine learning and all that. And so the company exploded. I mean, it created a processor for one thing, but then it became applicable for other applications. And I think that's what we're kind of sitting on here with AST SpaceMobile. And so it's something that I'm trying to get smarter around and I know Kook and others and Katzi, but yeah, I think it's something to watch. And as interest picks up, it's important to note that there's not If you think about all the players who are servicing space, there aren't many companies, and this includes Starlink too and Amazon. There aren't many companies that are building, because Amazon isn't, Starlink isn't, Planet Labs, I know they're putting up 2 demonstrator CubeSats for Google to figure out if some of the hardware is actually going to work in space. But there are very few companies that can actually put together a 2 to 3 ton satellite and go launch it into space that has a tremendous power generating capacity that can dissipate heat, that can communicate with Earth, right? Because like Starlink, their satellites are pretty small. And Kuiper as well, like those satellites are small. So If you just think about the future and think about what the company has assembled here, I think we're really well positioned and we're early. Like, I don't think sell-side's really thinking about this, the research analysts, nor is the general market. But I guess today's December 5th. You know, we talked about it earlier in the week, but, you know, let's plant the flag. I think this great theme and this narrative is going to shift in the coming months and we're going to be a big beneficiary. But anyway, I was going to talk about some of these other names too. And so, because I've taken, you know, I've had, in addition to AST SpaceMobile, I've had smaller speculative positions in a few of these other names. And so I just briefly wanted to talk about some news as I test my microphone setup, which seems like it's working. But yeah, the first one is T1 Energy. You know, this is a company that used to be Freyr. For all those that remember, Freyr was this European-based player that was going to build batteries, like a huge battery factory. And then basically, I think the economics just didn't work out. And so the company pivoted. There was a company called Trina Solar who, you know, right, Trina Solar is one of the top You know, a Chinese-based top producer of solar modules and cells, and they were building this huge factory in Dallas that could produce up to five gigawatts of annual you know you know solar modules. And right as Trump was getting elected, they saw the writing on the wall that the regulatory regime was going to change, and that you know Chinese-owned factory wasn't going to be no bueno, right? And so so Freyr's management or the new management because all the old management left, the new management actually put together this sweetheart deal where they acquired this new, brand new spanking new module factory in Dallas that could produce 5 gigawatts of modules a year for sweetheart price. And Trina is still a modest shareholder. I think they have, they sold some down. I think they're down to 10%, but there were some like technology agreements and transition agreements, but for all intents and purposes, like This U.S. company, what used to be Freyr, is now T1 Energy. They bought this Dallas plant. They're also building another plant in Austin, and they're trying to get vertically integrated because the key thing for this company is that even though people over the last few years, or yeah, given the Trump administration and the shift away from green energy, you know, solar has been hated, but it's the most efficient cost-efficient and effective power generating source. But what's interesting is that this whole AI demand for power has changed the outlook for this and other renewable sectors. I think nowadays people, the right way to think about energy is that all energy is going to be needed, right? Whether it's renewable, fossil fuels, nuclear, whatever it is, right? Because there's going to be such a huge demand that you're going to need to tap all these sources. And so I think For example, T1 Energy, the CEO recently met with J.D. Vance. I think a key talking point to the administration is that here you've got a vertically integrated player, American owned and staffed and is expanding, basically creating like an American champion for solar. You're going to need all this stuff in order to meet the energy needs for the future, especially if the US is going to become a leader in AI. To power all these data centers. And so T1 has a pretty, let's see here, let me just talk a bit about financials. I mean, so the company's in growth mode right now. It actually has real financials. They, for fiscal year 2025, they're going to do about $814 million of revenue. And this is from 2024, basically at zero. And so they ramped up production this year. They're going to have $27 million of EBITDA. And so it's a real company, right? And the biggest knock for the company, or it's not a knock, it's just a fact of life, is that they're going to have to raise a pretty significant amount of capital in order to finish hitting full capacity at their Dallas factory and then ramping up their Austin factory. But this is a company that's going to generate according to the Street, by 2028, almost $2 billion of revenue and $425 million of EBITDA. And so what's great is, you know, as a retail individual investor, the story is interesting because you had like Frayer, which had probably a broken shareholder base, and, you know, obviously that venture failed, and then this company pivoted and acquired this manufacturing, this brand new solar plant, and they laid out plans to expand that to become vertically integrated, building additional capacity in Austin and trying to source domestic cells and leveraging energy credits. But you have this story where it's a pivot, right? And so you're going to have turnover in shareholders, research analysts as well. And so it's kind of a tweener. It's not for And it's this new company, but it's a new story and obviously new management team, people want to see execution. And so you're kind of at this point where the company trades at some significant discount because people want to see what they're going to do and if they can execute. And then on top of that, they do have to raise a pretty large quantum of capital over time in order to expend CapEx in order to ramp these plants up. And so It's similar to AST in a sense of being back in, I don't know, 2023, 2024, where you've got this significant amount of capital you have to raise and you have to execute and you've got to get market credibility to go do that. On the flip side, for T1 Energy, they actually are generating revenues now and EBITDA. And so that's good, but they've got to quickly quickly get to a level of vertical integration where these tax credits that they get for manufacturing solar panels, you know, you get domestic tax credits in order to preserve those. They really have to quickly get to a certain level of vertical integrate, you know, domestic content basically in order to continue to generate those. But yeah, it's an interesting story. I've written about it. There's a few other people that have written about it as well. The news out today, I just wanted to cover, 'cause, you know, on the one hand there was a little bit of bad news and then there's some really good news and I'll cover the bad news first. So the bad news is that the company issued this 8-K and there is a, there was a disclosure that they received a subpoena from the Department of Justice.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:29] Speaker C: Department of Justice and the SEC. And so this is related to what appears to be some personal trading on behalf of an executive, this executive, and I think they were a board member. So I think it's one individual. They traded stock, they basically sold stock in the second half of 2023. And apparently, you know, this person got permission according to the company's insider trading policies, but then, you know, it was approved. But then I guess the DOJ and SEC are seeing something that looks questionable and have this inquiry into the company. And so this is, you know, this is a bit of a cloud over the company. Um, but it's not, in my opinion, I don't think it's that material. Um, the, so let's talk about like what a bad DOJ, SEC subpoena or civil demand or criminal demand would look like. Um, that could hurt a company if, if you were to get one of these things and it was related to sales practices or revenue recognition or something like that. That would be really, really bad, right? Because then that's actually an implication on the companies, on the company itself. There's also questioning its financials, will they have to restate and all that stuff. But this is actually related to what I, it seems like from what I could read, you know, someone perhaps not following company procedure or maybe their company procedure wasn't, you know, kosher to the point of meeting, you know, I guess avoiding any legal questions from the DOJ or SEC. And so this is an inquiry into this particular person's sale of stock. You know, did they, my guess is like, did they have material information? You know, it, this, I believe they had to sell stock 'cause it was collateral against a personal loan. And my guess is that personal loan was called and they had to sell the stock in order to meet that loan. And may, I'm just, you know, I'm speculating, but maybe there was some material information that was happening at that time, but this person had Maybe they weren't aware of that information, or maybe they were, but the facts and circumstances may have looked like this person was selling to get ahead of something bad when it looks like maybe they were selling because they had no choice because they had to meet the obligations of this personal loan. So anyway, but I think it's important to understand that it's not related to the company's financials or operations. It's really just an individual's Personal trading, and so then when you when you look at that, you have to ask yourself: Well, is it because they is it is it going to target someone who's important? Like the last thing you want is a key man or key person to be targeted in an investigation, and then you know maybe they're critical to the company and they have to resign, and that's not good. But it looks like this trading happened in the second half of 2023. I'll just note that most of Freyr's management and board exited the company when the company pivoted to T1 Energy and did their transaction, or sorry, yeah, became T1 Energy when they acquired the solar manufacturing assets. Then that was back in December of 2024. So a lot of people are new. And so if I just go through T1 Energy's management and board tenures, you know, the CEO of of T1 Energy, Dan— Daniel Borsello, he joined in November of 2024. The CFO, June 2024. The CTO, January 2024. The chief operating officer, August 2025. I mean, if you look at the entire executive team, and I'm looking at Bloomberg, there's like, there's 11 individuals. The earliest that anyone joined was January 2024, and then everyone joined after. And so this investigation does not include any of those executives. And so I'm guessing that the person who is in question has left the firm or left the company like long ago, right? And so then I flip over to T1 Energy's board. And you kind of have the same thing. However, there's 3 individuals who would fit the potential targeted range. One is Jessica Strine, but she joined in November of 2023. And so as a pretty green board member, I'm guessing that she probably didn't have a personal loan against stock because that just, you know, you get like a small grant initially when you join the board. It's probably not material enough to take a personal loan against it. So she's probably not that person. And then you have Daniel, Dr. Daniel Steingart and Peter Matry. Steingart joined the board in January of 2023. And so he could be a potential individual of interest, or it could be this Peter Matry guy who joined in July of 2021. However, let me just look at their backgrounds. I don't think, yeah, I don't think either were An executive of Frayer at the time. Although actually, I take that back. So maybe, ah, so maybe it is Peter Vetry because he is it. He's a sitting board member now, and he used to be the CEO of Frayer. Actually, you know what? Never mind. He he left Frayer as CEO on July. 2021. I think that's right. But anyway, um, I guess the most important point is like, it— this person who's being investigated is not a person of consequence because, um, it doesn't— it's not an existing executive and it's not a majority of the board. It could be one of these 2 individuals, but it doesn't seem to be the case because I think the individual in question was a board member and an executive, which probably, if I had to guess, and I haven't really looked closely into this, but it's probably the former CEO because CEOs typically have their position as CEO and then oftentimes they also take a dual role chair of the board. And so if it's somebody who was on the board and the executive, it's probably CEO or it could be, again, I got to dig into this, but maybe it's the CFO because sometimes you have the CFO on the board or But, um, or maybe a founder. Um, but anyway, I think the most important point is like, I think this investigation, um, depending on where it's going to go, I'm not sure the company will face any penalties. The person could, whoever it is, but, you know, innocent till proven guilty. So we'll see. But at least there's not a key man risk here that somebody, that somebody could currently in the executive ranks could get could get the boot. So that's important. But yeah, I just wanted to cover that. Let's see, I'm going to shift now to this company Bridger. Bridger is an interesting name. It's one that I had a speculative position on last year, just given this huge increase in wildfires. And it's a forgotten SPAC, just like some of these others too. And so The key thing is like, you know, I didn't know it was a politically charged name until I was invested. And then of course I found out later there was like some short sellers and other people who had pressured the company, primarily of Democratic background, because the former CEO, Tim Sheehy, he actually left and ran for Senate and won. And so as part of his campaign to run for US Senate, There was a big smear campaign about the company Bridger and various dealings that he had with the company. And I think the city of Bozeman or the state of Montana. But fast forward to today, the company, it is, for those that don't know, their primary asset or most visible asset are these Super Scooper planes that pick up water and dump them on fires. They also have air attack aircraft that manage fire situations and communicate with ground crews. And so they have a whole host of different air assets. And then they also have this application that first responders and firefighters have in order to coordinate how to, as some of you guys know, especially on the West Coast, for some of these fast-moving fires, you need to coordinate with firefighters of where to put fire firewalls up and avoid getting surrounded by fires, which unfortunately, you know, a number of firefighters die every year by getting subsumed by these things, which is bad. But yeah, the company was a forgotten SPAC. You know, I started buying some of these warrants like long ago as speculation when we had these huge California wildfires last year. And that actually, this whole You know, wildfire season, there's not really a season anymore. It's actually year round. But the interesting thing about the company is that they've got these legislative tailwinds. So after the wildfires around LA happened, there's been a refocus on deploying federal dollars and state dollars to build out infrastructure to fight these fires. And a big part of that is these air assets, right? And so I don't want to like ramble on about this company too much, but The key thing is that the company's highly leveraged. It's a $100 million market cap. Let me look here. And they've got about $600 million of debt and $50 million of cash. So the enterprise value is like $650 million. But what I find interesting about the company is that it's growing, it's profitable. They just added 2 additional Super Scooper planes, which you can't, you can't buy these things because there's basically like no availability in production. And so they bought these 2 Super Scoopers out of Spain that can generate $8 million of EBITDA each. And they're potentially bringing those back to the US or they might keep them out in Europe. But anyway, the company went through a number of refinancing transactions. They also did a sale leaseback of their headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. And so financially they're well positioned because before they were kind of under the gun with some of I think the previous debt that they had outstanding, they were under a bit of pressure to basically pay that off and refinance it, but they did a recent refinancing. They also did the CLA SPAC, which allowed them to buy these 2 Super Scooper planes, which were being renovated or that were being refurbished. And so the company's well positioned. It's a name that's been forgotten. Like there's no, there's basically like no institutional sponsorship. There's one research analyst that covers it. However, as I mentioned before, you've got these legislative tailwinds in the US which are going to be very positive for the company. And then on top of that, the news that came out yesterday is that the chairman of the board bought 300,000 shares and paid $540,000 for them. And so for me, the chair, after all these transactions had happened, obviously you don't want to do it ahead of them and have material information and basically get accused of insider trading. But after everything was all said and done, this gentleman bought a bunch of stock because he sees positive prospects for the company. And so yeah, it's just, it's a big, I think, vote of confidence. And there's another guy who follows the name and does a lot of research work, Ben Devrin, who we talk about this name quite a bit. And so I think, you know, this is a tweener type of situation where there's no institutional support, no research, but the company's executing, you know, it's growing revenues. Let's see, like this year, the projections are $121 million of revenue, and that's up from $98 million in 2024, and 2026 will be $133 million. And then EBITDA of $37 million this year going to $49 million next year. And so yeah, the company's on this like steady execution. I've talked with management once and, you know, I think they're pretty solid. And by the way, I also talked with P1 Energy as well, which I'll get back to. But I think, yeah, I think this story, it's basically like, for anyone interested, it's a highly levered call option, right? Because the equity value is only $100 million out of enterprise value of $600 million. So any financial improvement and execution is going to accrue in a leveraged way to the equity. Because like when you have a big swing in enterprise value and the equity is such a big small part of that, then you could, that's when you like experience serious ups, right? And so, and then of course I own warrants, which The good thing about these things, and yeah, $11.50 strike, that seems like pretty crazy to be out there. But the great thing about these warrants is that the implied vol is not that high. So I think today they were trading at like 88% implied vol. The company doesn't have any options that trade on it, but then you can just look at historic vol, which, let me just look here. Most recent 60-day historic vol, I think was like at 65 and it's been going up. I think historic vol, if you look at previous years, was in the 80s, 90s, 100s. But yeah, I think if the company can execute and it starts getting more interest and awareness, you could see the stock really perform in 2026. And these warrants that I have, they actually expire on January 25th, 2028. So you have a lot of time on these. But yeah, I just wanted to point that one out. The other thing I was going to say is that I have been talking to Bridger and T1 Energy and AST SpaceMobile for that matter. I've broached the idea of doing a fireside chat similar to what I did with Strata Critical yesterday. And so I know T1 Energy, both Bridger have expressed interest. And so, you know, be on the lookout for those. I might be able to schedule those in the coming weeks. But then the other one is, of course, the big granddaddy, which is AST SpaceMobile. You know, I've talked about hosting Scott from time to time over the years, and I think he's always been a little iffy about it. But, you know, I've been promised at the right time we'll probably do it. And so I don't know if that's going to happen. You know, there's probably a logical time to do that. Like, Perhaps after getting, you know, 2 or 3 launches under their belt or 4, and then doing a space to discuss that, it could make sense. But yeah, I think that would be a really, you know, obviously a well-received space. But let's see here. I guess another thing, the last thing I'll close with, I did have this this space with Strata Critical yesterday, which I, for me, it was good because I learned quite a bit, but I did want to reemphasize like that, that name Bridger, T1 Energy, you know, once upon a time it was all like, these are all, and I guess I just can't help myself. I get attracted to these situations of these like small cap companies that are pretty much unknown and they kind of go through, I guess in the case of T1 Energy and Strata, they go through a transformatory event where, you know, which involves like a sweetheart deal for T1 Energy. It was buying Trina Solar's US domestic manufacturing assets because the Chinese had to offload that and they had no choice. And so they basically gave it to, not gave it, but they sold it to T1 Energy at a very sweetheart price. And then for StrataCritical, selling a money-losing passenger business to Joby, and getting a really good price for that and then flipping those proceeds to go buy Keystone Perfusion, which is generating a significant amount of revenue and EBITDA. It's profitable, it's growing like 50% year over year. They paid a really reasonable valuation multiple for it. But you have this like company that was originally Blade and, you know, people were investing in that on the promise of electrification, and bringing EV OTLs to consumer passengers. And so you had like this one shareholder base, but then of course they sold that business and there were a number of people who were disappointed in that. And then they bought Keystone Perfusion to focus on medical, critical medical logistics, which is basically organ transplant end to end. So getting organs from patients and then transporting that by ground and then by air if necessary, private jets, helicopters, and then getting it to the recipients who need it, which are, these are high-value procedures. But here in Strata Critical, you have a similar situation where it's kind of an orphan where the previous research analysts who were covering it for the electrification of flight story, EVOTLs, Basically those people have dropped coverage and then you basically need to go out and find new sell-side analysts to cover your company. And so that takes some period of time. And then on top of that, you've got the previous shareholders who were invested in it for one particular story, and then they find out like, oh, the story has shifted. And so it's going to take time for them to essentially churn out of that company. And so that's kind of the opportunity in a lot of these names where You have an orphan company that's going through change, and as long as they execute and continue to garner credibility with investors and meet with new institutions, like that's kind of the opportunity where as a retail investor, you can buy some of these names for a pretty decent valuation discount because on the one hand, it doesn't fit in. You're transitioning between shareholder bases, research analysts. It doesn't fit in. conveniently into what it was before, and you're basically starting all over. And so as a retail investor, you can buy some of these names that have good stories that are financially doing well, and there's catalysts ahead and you believe management can execute. And so that's kind of the opportunity. And so that's why, you know, for Strata, like I became interested in it. I mean, I owned it for Blade, For kind of the dual story there. But then once they sold the passenger business into this deal, it became a lot more interesting for me. So that's why, you know, I hosted Manish Bit and, you know, we talked about it. But anyway, maybe I'll end the space there. You know, I guess we've talked about quite a few different names here. Hopefully my mic sounded okay. Actually, let me just look at the comments here. Oh, new mic sounds awesome. That's great. What is, what's the deal with SMX? I don't even know what that is. And of course, Corey made a little, made a little meme of me speaking to a mic. Um, but yeah, that's, that's pretty much my, my TED Talk. I don't know if anyone had questions. Feel free to put them in the comments or, but yeah, I'm, I'm glad this, this mic is actually working. Um, 'cause it sounds good to me. I have these like, Headphones on so I can hear myself, which it's not necessarily a good thing. But yeah, maybe I'll talk about a little bit about the markets. I think, yeah, it is weird. We have like pretty big intraday swings because I think, you know, the economic numbers today actually looked really good. You had core PCE index coming in line and then consumer confidence was up and inflation short and long-term expectations are down. So going back to what I talked about earlier this week, I think we have a really solid environment for risk assets because you got the new Fed chair who's coming in, Bessent, who seems to be in full alignment with the Trump administration for cutting rates as long as obviously inflation stays subdued, which is, you know, his initial comments were that he sees inflation being subdued and at least the PCE numbers today indicate that and expectations as well. So in particular for, actually for all these names, but also for AST SpaceMobile, I think for companies that have hard catalysts that are coming up that are going to be positive for AST, that's, you know, we've, it's crazy. We've got The Bluebird Six launch out of India, ISRO LVM three rocket. Like that's going to happen about ten days. And for those that are they're going to be around, I think we might do a live broadcast with Cook and and maybe Katzi and some others. We might actually just do a live broadcast since we're not going to be in India, but we're going to be be sitting at our homes, you know, biting our nails to to watch and. of course be excited to watch that launch. But yeah, that's going to happen in just over a week's time. And then you've got the shipping of BB-7 and of course the shipping of the next 2 batches as well and launches shortly thereafter. So I think the setup for AST is going to be really positive. You've got all these great CALs that are coming up and then You know, we also have Scott speaking at the UBS conference on Monday. And so, you know, will we find out some information by then? We'll see. But yeah, I think intraday market volatility aside, I think December year-end is shaping up to be great. And of course, as we head into the new year, you know, everyone talks about the January effect. Oh, you know what, actually, I will point out that As we head into the end of the year, be on the lookout for bargains. You know, sometimes you'll, especially in some of these illiquid names, you'll see heavy selling related to tax loss harvesting into the end of the year. And so just as a reminder, like last year I was able to buy a bunch of Satisfye warrants for less than a penny, for a fraction of a penny. And then those warrants ended up parlaying into a trade where Satisfye was acquired a few months later, and those warrants ended up being worth 87 cents. And so it's always good to keep an eye out for some of these, whether it's warrants or stock in various names that might've been forgotten or someone's like sick of it and they want to harvest, maybe they've made a lot of money in other areas and they want to harvest losses. And so you will see some of this tax loss selling towards the end of December in certain names. And then of course, once you get into January, then you have this January effect where people, especially for hedge funds that are on a calendar year, you know, it's a new year, right? And so they're looking to deploy capital. And that's also true for retail investors too. So you sometimes or typically see a rally in January and some of those names that were Sold down for tax harvesting, you might see a bounce back is that after December 31st, there's no need to sell some of those names because you're not going to get obviously tax credit for them. And so that pressure abates and then some, you see some of these things rebound quite nicely. So anyway, yeah, it's just something to keep in mind, keep focused on because there will be some of these opportunities going into the end of the year. Oftentimes people ask me, it's like, what opportunities are you seeing? But there is this balance where it's like, well, I need to buy the opportunity before I tell people about it because I tell everyone about it, then I can't get into it. But yeah, if I do see something, I'll let people know. And yeah, that's actually on my to-do list. I probably need to start tracking some of these names that might come under pressure into the year end. But anyway, yeah, thanks for joining. It sounds like thankfully this microphone setup is working. It's, it's, it's working well. And, um, yeah, we'll catch up again soon. Um, but thanks everyone for coming on and we'll talk again.
[00:53:01] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again. and I'll see you next time.
[00:53:22] Speaker B: We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology we can really affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular mobile connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring into reality, always in partnership with the animals.
[00:53:59] Speaker A: Listen.
[00:54:07] Speaker C: Mmm, waffles.