Anpanman - Food for Thought - Industry Dynamics

[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. Hello everyone.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Uh, if you guys can hear me, please give me a thumbs up. I want to make sure this is working before I start. And sorry for the background noise. I'm actually in my car, the window open, so I don't, um, I have some air in here. But, uh, yeah, okay, I see thumbs up. It's kind of weird because when you Do, when you host a Twitter Space and you speak, there's a delayed reaction. So there must be, I don't know, 4 or 5 second delay. And so when you're talking, uh, you don't see reactions until several seconds later. And then when you end a space, um, like you guys know, Cook does this similarly, uh, you have to wait. Once you say the, your ending part, then you have to wait for the space to, uh, to actually end because it's on delay. Before, we didn't know this. And so when you would end a space, it would, you would actually cut off yourself speaking and then people would be like, what were they trying to say? But yeah, but anyway, but thanks to everyone for joining kind of last minute. I figured I'd just toast a space and talk about some industry dynamics and we can talk about some of the news today and the stock price move and just the markets in general. But yeah, I did want to, as part of today, talk about some industry dynamics. I was fortunate enough to speak with an industry consultant whose not name rhymes with Dim Spacebar, but somebody else who's actually quite knowledgeable and was able to get a few interesting nuggets, which I'll go through, which I think is very helpful in terms of thinking about AST SpaceMobile, and the competitive landscape and kind of the market in general. But first, I'll start off with, there was some news today that the Verizon CEO was replaced by Paul Schuman, I think is his name. He's a former PayPal CEO. He's been on the Verizon board for quite some time. He also has had experience in the telecom industry. For the very surface-level reading that I did on him, he sounds like a pretty decent executive. I mean, he's not without controversy. I guess people have questioned his effectiveness, but he seems to be kind of a high-level thinker, big ideas guy. And so maybe it's someone that Verizon needs, especially as they think about their branding and marketing to the consumer. Because I think quite candidly, Verizon's probably viewed as a kind of a stodgy brand. I mean, a very reliable— I use Verizon, very reliable service, that is probably priced on the premium side, but then not really memorable in terms of brand awareness. I think T-Mobile and AT&T do a much better job. But it was interesting that the former CEO was replaced by this new CEO, Paul Struman, who is actually, he used to run PayPal. And one of the things that I did immediately, which I'm sure a lot of you did, This morning is just trying to figure out what his relationship is vis-à-vis Elon Musk. And it sounds like, you know, Elon was quite critical of his stewardship at PayPal. And so it seems, at least at the surface level, that there's no love lost between the two. If anything, it sounds like their relationship was somewhat strained. And then the other thing I would say is that Paul has been on the board of Verizon for quite some time. So he's well aware of the company's strategic initiatives and obviously the AST SpaceMobile relationship. So I don't have any concerns about whether that relationship is going to change. And who knows, maybe it'll get tighter. We'll see. But yeah, that was like the one piece of interesting news today. Outside of that, it was somewhat of a quiet day for AST SpaceMobile in terms of Actual news. But then of course the stock price hit a high today of, you know, we finally breached $70 and we didn't just breach $70, we then went well, you know, north of $74 and change and then, you know, closed at $72 and change, which is kind of crazy, right? Because I think if you were to ask, I was talking with some other people today, sorry for the noise. I'm going to close my Sunroof here.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: If you were to ask yourself a year ago, a year and a half ago in May when the stock was under $2, if your future self would tell you, hey, just hang in there. I know being under $2 and having this massive drawdown is brutal, but you're going to, the stock is going to be well north of $70 in a year and a half's time. You would've told your future self to screw off. Because, um, that seemed like an impossibility back then. But, you know, fast forward to today, we've had a tremendous amount of, um, you know, accomplishments that have transpired since then. We've obviously, you know, signed Verizon, locking up 2 of the top 3 carriers in the US. Um, and, uh, you know, obviously had a strategic investment from them. We've made, um, a tremendous amount of progress with the FCC towards getting commercial US commercial access. And then of course the administration changed where now we have a very supportive FCC. I mean, we had a supportive FCC before, but now we have a very aggressively supportive FCC that wants to compete with China and understands the strategic importance of what AST SpaceMobile is doing. And then, you know, you also have an administration that's focused on the defense use cases for space assets. And so that's another big positive. And then of course we've got You know, we have satellites that are orbiting the Earth. We have a large quantum of capital to get us to our initial constellation. And then we also have, we're on the cusp of launching commercial service through the multi-launch campaign, which is coming up in basically, you know, in the next month or two. So we've made a ton of progress. And so I think it's important to take a look back and just remember where we were and just see how much has changed and the milestones that the company has achieved. And now to finally be at this point where we're almost about to breach $75, it's just an amazing journey. Obviously, you know, there was a lot of pain in that journey, but for those who knew what they owned and were able to stomach the volatility and have that conviction, days like today are why you invest, right? But yeah, so here we are. I mean, I think it's probably important to say, because I know we're all thinking this, you know, how much of the stock price is pricing in fundamentals versus like frothiness from the overall market and speculation? And I think that's a fair question that everyone should ask themselves. It's important that When you have a large-sized position that is speculative and obviously the opportunity is massive. I know, and I'll talk about it a little more later, but Reformed Trader tweeted out a post just talking about the current market conditions and how he sees based off of his charts and technical analysis that we could actually, the ingredients are there, right? That the stock could even get to $500, which is the first time I've seen The 5-handle mentioned by somebody. And I'll be candid, like, I'm not a technical person. I would take what he's saying with a big grain of salt, but I also could see that happening if things do become very frothy and people are very excited. And they, you know, if the company starts announcing all these different catalysts that we see coming in the near term, and people start pulling, basically pulling forward expectations, then you could see something like that happen. I'm not saying it will, but I think the important thing, what I'm trying to say today is have a plan. So know what your goals are financially and know, you know, I've talked to a number of people and I also have, you know, I think about it myself, like what's the end number of shares that you want to own for the long term, right? And so If you have an outsized position today, congratulations and for holding. But then, you know, as you think about your plans for the, your financial plans and, you know, independence and all these different things, what number is important to you to set aside where you're going to be comfortable? And like I've said before, be able to ride the rest of it, right? Be able to ride the volatility. Because then once you do that from a mental perspective, Then you kind of don't care if there's drawdowns or there's volatility because you've set aside, you've basically taken part of your win and you've locked that in, and then the rest you can pretty much ride. And I think having a plan, whether, you know, oh, I'm going to sell a little bit at 75 and some at 100, and then, you know, beyond that, maybe I'll come up with a different plan, but I'll sell some portion that where I can pay off my mortgage, I can set aside all the money that I need. I mean, God, college is super expensive, right? So if you have kids, I'm going to set aside money for their college and never touch that. I'm going to put that into like, you know, the S&P or something safer, then do that, right? And of course, make sure that you set aside money for taxes because I think as some people have learned, when you're upside down, when you've generated a ton of capital gains, especially short-term gains, if you're trading some things too, make sure you set aside that money because if you, what a big mistake people make is that they put, they reinvest everything, right? And then you have a big drawdown near tax time and all of a sudden you can't pay your bills. So anyway, the responsible side of me, just putting that out there that it's important to have a plan, especially when you've done extremely well. And, you know, as part of that plan also, I highly recommend thinking about charity and making donations, but to keep the positive juju going, I think that's important too. And it'll make you feel better as well as a person who's come into great fortune and being blessed. But yeah, I think there's always going to be this weighing of whether or not this company in particular is doing well based off fundamentals, which I think You know, I mentioned before, and I put this on a, I guess my pinned tweet where I discussed, you know, the previous launch campaign resulted in the stock going up. Let me just take a look here. I think it was like from $13 to a high of $39, but then kind of settling at $26. And I just like did a very simple fitting, right? Like, oh, if we, at the time of the tweet, $49, if it goes up 61% or eventually settles up 61%, On a successful launch, then that would get us to, what was it, $79? But then of course there's going to be volatility in between where previously we had hit a high of $39, which was from $13, that's like up 200%. And so, you know, do people in terms of markets, whether it's, you know, the algos and excitement and, you know, do you overshoot $79? Yeah, it's certainly possible. And then what does that mean after the successful launch? Like, you know, here we're talking about, I see Ryan or Connor in the crowd. We're talking about like multiple launches. It's not just like, you know, one launch and then you're gonna have to wait several months, quarters for the next one. It's gonna be one after the other and it's gonna be continuous until commercial service is actually the, you know, the switch is flicked on and then all of a sudden you've got this cash flow printing machine. which is going to be pretty, I think it's going to be pretty awesome to behold, to be quite honest. But yeah, I think making sure that you have a plan. And so, you know, whether you have shares in your retirement account so you can actually trade those a bit more or in a taxable account, you know, thinking about short-term capital gains and long-term capital gains. This is all stuff that I think you need to make sure you have a plan before the stock price gets to certain levels or if it falls, you know, and then maybe because you have capital, you're able to add back. But anyway, that's my public service message for the day. I think it's important to mention that because obviously there's a lot of sectors, you know, the market where it's frothy and it's interesting. I think when you look at, there's an index, Goldman Sachs VIP versus the most short names. where they take the most popular hedge fund longs. And so that's like the long part of the index. And then there's, they take the most heavily shorted names, which is the denominator of that index. And you've actually seen that index underperform significantly in, and now we're actually, we're, I think we're reaching back to levels of last year. But you know, if you look at like small caps, like IWM performance, It's now just catching up with where large caps have been, which is primarily, obviously the primary driver of S&P has been Mag 7. So I think from an honest perspective, I think the market is frothy and so we've gotta be careful. And so just keep that in mind as you invest and trade and think about positioning and your AST SpaceMobile position, which is the one that I'm talking about primarily here. But just be mindful of, again, what your goals are. You know, try not to be that person that moves the goalposts. It's like, well, gosh, I would do this if the stock ever got to 50, and all of a sudden we're at 75 and you're still moving the goalposts. Just be honest with yourself. And I know it's painful, like when stocks continue to go up after you've sold some, but you know, that I think also when you have a drawdown, you feel good that you did something and you're in a great mental place where you can just, keep writing in. So anyway, but that will be enough for my PSA. I know there's been some people out there who have accused me or Kook of like pumping stuff and it's like, no, I've actually held this stock for 5 years and my core position I've never touched. And yeah, I've, like I've said before, I've been bullish about it even during the darkest times. And so My tune hasn't changed and we're at 75. I still think there's a tremendous amount of upside. And so one of the questions that we always talk about is, is the market actually just re-rating and giving the company credit for its progress? Like people are now, Kuk and I were talking about how institutions are now asking like, oh, what is this? What is this company? What are they doing? And of course the first question is like, oh, they're competing against SpaceX. So how are they going to survive? But then as they peel back the layers of the onion, I think people are starting to get the story. And so once you have real institutional buying, you know, that's when you see a real rerate in stocks. And so the question is how much is being discounted today versus, you know, the level of risk. And, you know, obviously the company's pre-revenue, but hey, look, this coming quarter is going to be the first quarter of true revenue from Gateway sales. And then obviously we've got our military contracts as well that have kicked in. And so now we should start seeing a true progression of revenue generation for the company. And so it's a pretty exciting time. But as I said before, I did want to talk about industry dynamics and there, I did speak with this really great consultant today who's done their own independent work. And I just wanted to share some of the views or some of the notes that I took, which I'll go through in no particular order, but these are data points that I thought was pretty interesting. Actually, if folks can hold on with me for 10 seconds, I'm going to do something. I'll put myself on mute.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: You can hear me.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: I apologize. I'm actually waiting My son has soccer and I'm waiting in the car and then there's like this whole weird interaction that happens with your AirPods. And then, you know, I have my laptop open and my phone and so it doesn't know what to connect to. And then also the phone tries to connect to the car for hands-free. So I apologize. But okay, well, I need to start over in the consultant call. Sorry everyone. Yeah, no, so I had a call with this consultant, this person, background is in the wireless industry. They've been working in the area for decades. And I want to share a few things that we discussed, but I also want to be cognizant of not giving away their service, which is how they earn a living. So I just wanted to share a few different nuggets, but it was very helpful in the sense that You know, they come at it from the MNO perspective, having been in the industry for a really long time, which quite a few of the things that they share with me line up quite nicely with how we think about AST SpaceMobile. But then there were some additional insights, which I thought was very helpful. So let's see here. So yeah, I, the way that this consultant thinks about the industry is that, and for wireless in general, is that you should focus on what the cost per gigabyte delivered is, right? And so they talked about how in 3G, you know, the cost per gigabyte was about $10. And then once we moved to 4G, it was $1. And then when you moved to 5G, that went all the way down to 27 cents. And so similar to Moore's Law, with the increase in bandwidth and spectral efficiency over time, the cost per gigabyte, went down. And so when looking at this industry, it's really no different in that, you know, if you were to rent a movie, this was kind of the example they used to deliver a movie is about 5 gigabytes of data. And so that costs about, say, you know, 80 cents a gigabyte, or if the movie costs $4 to rent, that's about maybe 80 cents a gigabyte to stream. And so If you're doing that over fiber, that's great because basically fiber's really cheap. I mean, it doesn't really cost you anything, but on 5G, the video, the business case for delivering video still works. And so what was interesting is that based off of their analysis, what they were saying is that it, when you take into account the cost to deliver that service, which includes the CapEx required to build satellite and go launch it into space, and then you know, operate the satellite, and then eventually, obviously, it has to be, you know, deorbited. The cost for SpaceX, they calculated, was around $4 a gigabyte. However, you know, now that SpaceX acquired EchoStar spectrum, they thought that range was maybe perhaps now going to be around $2 to $3 a gigabyte. And then based off of their math, when looking at AST, They estimated that the cost per gigabyte for us, for AST to be able to deliver a gigabyte of data was around, because of the large phased array and spectral efficiency, but taking into account all the costs, meaning, for example, the fact that AST has to pay full retail price for launch, their calculation was around $1.50 to $2 per gigabyte. So even with SpaceX and their financial heft and might and being able to launch things at cost, the fact that they have to launch so many satellites, they orbit the Earth much closer than we do. Their arrays are smaller in terms of capacity per satellite. Obviously, they have more satellites, but then the capacity is not as much as AST SpaceMobile. You know, we're, we still have a pretty good cost advantage of $1.50 to $2, which is great. And so to me, that was pretty eye-opening. I know people have done their own analyses of how much it costs per gigabyte, but this is the first time that I had heard from, you know, a well-respected industry consultant, you know, what that cost is. And so to me, that was pretty eye-opening because I think You know, for SpaceX to deliver this service at $4 a gig, and then, you know, with the new EchoStar purchase, that gets them down to $2 to $3. I mean, we're still significantly lower than them, and that's just delivering data. Obviously, the quality of service is going to be very different, which I'll talk a bit more about in a little while. But yeah, that's, to me, that stood out quite a bit because I think when you look at the The models, if the company is pricing a gigabyte of data, let's say if there's like a day pass or something and the MNO is charging $15 or $20 for a day pass where they just put it as part of a premium plan or you pay monthly for it. And obviously you're not going to use it all the time, right? Because you're going to be— this is like for dead zones or in areas where there's no service, then you're you know, you'll use it at that time, but the pricing is really attractive in terms of the actual cost. And so the premium that you're able to command, if it's a day pass, you know, if it's $20 for a gig or whatever, and then you get throttled, that's quite impressive. And so it was actually, for me, it was very, again, very eye-opening to see those numbers on paper and to actually see, you know, the fact that we had this big cost advantage, even though you know, everyone talks about SpaceX and their scale and all these advantages of having launch. It's not really that apparent how much of an advantage they have. Let's see. And I think the other point that was brought up is that with the addition of MSS spectrum, it's not just about dead zones. The way that MNOs are thinking about it and how they're evaluating these new direct-to-device players is whether or not a satellite guy is bringing spectrum to the table. And so for Starlink, you know, obviously they've bought 40 megahertz of spectrum from EchoStar, and so can offer that at least in the US to obviously T-Mobile. But then they're going to go out and try to get S-band spectrum rights around the world, similar to what we're doing. But for us to be able to deliver, for example, 45 megahertz of spectrum in the US and Canada to Bell Canada, AT&T, Verizon. It's not just about dead zones, but it's also about giving additional capacity even in dense areas. So if it's like in a football stadium or if you can imagine areas where the terrestrial network is, the capacity is being utilized and it's getting, you know, the network is getting hit pretty hard, being able to then offload some capacity to AST SpaceMobile as this super wholesaler on MSS spectrum is going to be very helpful and a key differentiator. And I think some people have made this point before, which makes sense, that in order to compete in this market, the table stakes are much higher, right? Where you have to bring some level of your own spectrum and capacity in order to win MNOs' businesses, right? Or business. And so That cost, you know, Starlink just paid $19 billion. We've paid, you know, some amount of money upfront and of course ongoing economics that have been split with Legato. You know, these spectrum assets are finite. And so for another player to enter the market, they'll need something similar in order to entice MNOs to play with them, basically. Let's see it. Let me just look at these notes here. But yeah, what was emphasized here is that, you know, AST's low-cost approach, the key is the technology, which is the huge arrays and the spectral efficiency. And so I think, let me just go through my notes here. One of the key things that was mentioned is that AST's spectral efficiency to date that's been demonstrated is about 3 bits per hertz. 3, sorry, 3 megabits per hertz, whereas I think Starlink is probably around 2 megabits per hertz. But then that's not even taking into account the difference between low-band and mid-band spectrum. And so one of the key aspects of differentiation and the way, and we talk about first principles and how the service was developed, is that Abel from the outset wanted this service to work just like cellular, and it was gonna obviously utilize cellular spectrum. for that to happen, which is 600 to 900 megahertz, low-band spectrum, but he wanted this service to work indoors. And so if you think about a roof or a wall, which has all these different materials, part of what AST architected is that they made the arrays large enough and powerful enough to have a link budget that would compensate for any signal loss. And so when you look at conditions, for example, inside of a house, there's a signal-to-noise ratio that you have to overcome. And that's a direct relationship of how much data that you can pass per megahertz of spectrum. And so AST, you know, when you think about the signal that's passing through the roof, you probably, you know, you lose, call it 60 to 70% of the signal in order to get through the roof. And then So if you're at 3 megabits per hertz efficiency, you probably lose more than half of that, but you're still able to provide a pretty good signal and data transfer. And so for AST, that's important because obviously for wireless customers, having service that actually works and having a good quality service is important. That's why you might choose Verizon or AT&T over T-Mobile in a specific neighborhood because maybe they have better coverage. But imagine Satellite service where if you are in a cabin or you're, I don't know, in the Hamptons and you want to use the phone and you're kind of in an area that's covered, or more importantly, I think the killer use case for a phone that has satellite connectivity is being in your car, right? Because I think the statistic is that we spend about 80% of our time indoors, but then for that 20% we're outdoors, about half of that is in your car. And so having a satellite service that actually works through the roof of your car or your house is important. And so with AST, you get 3 megabits per hertz, and then that probably gets kind of half of the signal is going to be good enough where you're still going to have some level of data capacity delivered to your phone. Whereas Starlink at 2, it's going to be indoors, it'll be probably less than 1 megabit per hertz in terms of efficiency. And so, and of course, you know, as we, as most of you guys know, Starlink is primarily, their service today is architected to only work on 1.9 gigahertz. And then eventually that's going to, you know, also be architected to work on the spectrum that they've purchased from EchoStar, which is also mid-band spectrum, 2 gigahertz. Whereas AST, the first constellation is focused on low-band spectrum, which is great for propagation and coverage, which is 600 to 900 megahertz. And then you will then have the next constellation, which will be focused on L and S-band, which is, you know, the way the company defines that range would be 1.5 gigahertz all the way up to, I think we've seen as high as 2.6 gigahertz. And so with AST, you're going to have this this beautiful cake, these layers of spectrum where the bottom layer is like the fattest and it gives you coverage and propagation signal. And then, you know, then the upper layer will give you capacity, which is the mid-band spectrum. Whereas, you know, for Starlink, they only have mid-band spectrum today and that will expand. It'll become slightly wider mid-band spectrum with the addition of EchoStar. But I think the way that the solutions are architected, if you can imagine, AST going to MNOs, being able to basically reuse their cellular spectrum and do that on a non-interference basis, I think is really important because for them, for the mobile operators, being able to leverage that cellular spectrum and give users a cellular-like experience is going to be really important and highly differentiated, which I'll talk a bit more about the differences between the two because I think As we, you know, some of, I guess some of you guys know Starlink, their network actually is a completely separate network. It's, imagine like if you've traveled to foreign countries and you want to utilize some of these eSIM services, you basically install an eSIM or actual physical SIM into your phone and you basically then join a separate network that's not your home network. And so while that's great, you can like, browse and use the services in that country. You basically don't have access to your phone number. If people send you texts, you don't get them. So a lot of native stuff that you have just basically goes away until you go back to your home network. Whereas Aced Space Mobile, the way this system is going to work is that it's actually integrated into the core of the MNO, the MNO's core. And so when you go from terrestrial to satellite, there will be a handoff where you— it should be seamless to you. Like, it's not going to say a totally separate network that it says AT&T Space Mobile on it. It's just going to say AT&T, and then it's going to say AT&T Satellite. But everything that you do on your— on the existing network, you can do— or sorry, on the terrestrial network, you can do on satellite network. And so it's going to be fully integrated. It's not going to be separate. I think, you know, we've talked about sovereignty and who has the customer's data. In the Starlink model, the MNO, basically the customer roams onto the Starlink network and, you know, the MNO says goodbye. Like they have you as a customer, they can track where you are. And, you know, I'm not sure how much information the MNO has to give to Starlink for that to happen. But if I was an MNO, I would be really scared about that because—
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Obviously they can track where the customer is and then lo and behold, if I was Starlink, I would start sending them text messages. Would you like to subscribe to Starlink dish service at your home? And all these different things, right? But when it comes to sovereignty, I think it's important because, and this is something that the consultant brought up and agreed with, for Starlink, when you roam onto their network, you're basically their customer. And the You know, once you're on their network, your information gets passed on their network. It also may land in the home country. It may also land in another country because you don't really have control over that. As we know, Starlink satellites, they have optical inter-satellite links. And, you know, once you're on their network, they decide and choose where your data goes and where it lands. Whereas for the AST SpaceMobile architecture, Because it's integrated into the MNO core, your data stays with the MNO and then it lands in that MNO's country. And so this is, you know, especially in this day and age, this is like a pretty big problem, especially in Europe and, you know, whether it's in US, Canada, you know, data security and sovereignty I think is important, especially as we saw, you know, in the war in Ukraine where some sometimes very powerful people can decide not to provide internet service to change the dynamics of a war. I think that's a much bigger issue, which the MNOs have to think really hard and deep about. And so I think that's where AST has an advantage where the MNO ultimately controls the customer, they own the customer. We're just plumbing that enables the satellite service, but we're leveraging their spectrum. We're also providing our own spectrum. but we're utilizing, you know, their backend infrastructure, their customer support, the marketing service, all that stuff. They determine all of it, right? They determine pricing with us as well. But in the case where if you're working with Starlink, you basically are kind of at the whim of Starlink. They take the customer when there's a dead zone or, you know, some of these areas, and then they figure out what to do with them. And then obviously you pay Starlink for some, Some economics in order for that to happen. So yeah, I think there's a big issue there, which this consultant agreed with, that when MNOs are contemplating using either of these 2 companies, those are some of the things that they've got to grapple with. Let's see here. It was confirmed that Starlink uses FPGAs for their satellites. So Which makes sense. You know, they're always tinkering with the features of their satellites, and because they have so many of them, you don't have to worry as much about power and processing. But, you know, this move towards ASICs, it's likely when discussing this, it was in their view that Starlink is probably a year into spinning up an ASIC for this next generation satellite that will probably already support EchoStar Spectrum. And so you're probably in the lifespan of, and there's probably, there's, you know, tech people who are listening to this who probably know better. It was in their view that it's probably a 2 to 3 year process to get an ASIC spun up and working. And so if they're a year into it, then maybe at the shortest end, they're a year away from getting an ASIC or perhaps 2 years away. But yeah, I mean, as we all know from AST's development period of our own internal ASIC, the AST-5000, that took several years and a lot of R&D dollars. But I'm sure because of SpaceX's financial heft and their engineering acumen, I'm sure they can probably do that in a pretty efficient way. But an important point, I think, where Just thinking about the competitive landscape, this stuff is not, you can't just like put a constellation up. You actually have to go develop like proprietary hardware and your own chips to make this stuff work properly. You know, 'cause in space using FPGA is really expensive. Number one, it's expensive, it's inefficient, it's not very fast and it consumes a ton of power. And so getting to the point where you can deploy an ASIC, is really important in terms of getting the level of the cost of the service down and making it also to such a point where you're delivering real broadband speeds to your end consumer. Let me see here. Go through some of these notes.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: So in terms of the company's manufacturing capacity, I guess the view there is that where they're based, which is Midland, Texas, you know, it's oil country where you've got a lot of highly skilled people who work with their hands, who have to build custom parts when they're doing like, you know, they're doing these oil explorations and, you know, the idea behind like CNC milling and working with carbon fiber and all this other stuff. Like, it actually is something that's kind of built into the fabric of the country there. And so from what this person was saying is that when they visited the company, they were in a taxi ride, sorry, an Uber ride. And the person who was driving mentioned that 4 of their family members currently worked at AST SpaceMobile. So it's almost like a family affair in Midland where I guess AST is kind of the company to work for. and everybody's trying to get a job there. But more importantly, there's a lot of highly skilled labor there and highly skilled labor that doesn't exist anywhere else in the country where people can fabricate parts. And so it was really, to me, it was really great to hear that, obviously, because the company is trying to be vertically integrated and manufacturing a lot of these things on our own, which we know whether that's working with CNC milling machines or even working with carbon fiber. I mean, I'm not an expert about doing, making parts out of carbon fiber, but I've seen companies where you have rolls of carbon fiber and you have to basically layer multiple and multiple layers of carbon fiber or composites, which the companies refer to, into certain shapes in order to develop something that's structurally sound, but also very lightweight and can take very wide swings in temperature. I think it was, I remember I was watching this documentary on the SR-71, how back in the '60s and '70s, they developed this plane that can travel at over Mach 3. And they used, I think it was aluminum. And it would actually expand and contract. based off the temperatures. And they were saying if you had the ability to utilize composite materials back then, they could have made the plane much better and they wouldn't have had all these issues. Which I think the reason why I bring that up is that in space, obviously, you know, these materials are subject to wide swings in temperature and they get beaten up by radiation and all this other stuff. And so, but yeah, this person was saying that based off of, you know, what they had seen, the company has pretty much everything there and all these skilled workers who are doing their best to turn out to eventually what we all hoped is going to be 6 satellites per month of production. But let me see here. I'm just going through my notes here. One additional point, or there's a few points here. I guess from the MNO's perspective, what they really care about, these are some of the factors that this person outlined. One, does the satellite company bring new spectrum to the party that adds capacity? And this person's perspective is that no one in the press, at least up until more recently, was really focused on this point. But, um, you know, after AST announced the Legato deal in January, people kind of, you know, scratched our heads and shrugged it off. But then of course when Starlink bought EchoStar Spectrum, you know, it was like, oh my God, they can like provide their own, you know, service, which, um, you know, their own mobile service and they're going to compete with MNOs, which I think, um, you know, perhaps that's like taking it a bit too far, but, but obviously who knows, right? Elon's got various ambitions and we all try to speculate where he wants to go. But I think it is an important aspect where for MNOs who are looking at these different services, is the satellite provider bringing spectrum to bear that's going to help with congestion on the network and provide a truly differentiated service? And is that service, of course, going to be broadband? That's a very important differentiation, which this person was saying. Obviously, can the satellite extend the coverage of the terrestrial network and can the MNO use their logo or does it have to be branded as somebody else's service but powered by, or their service but powered by Starlink, for example, which, you know, that's what T-Mobile is doing today. I think you've seen T-Mobile dial down the amount of Starlink propaganda they put in their messaging. Now they call it T-Satellite and there's a little bit of powered by Starlink, but I remember initially, of course, with a lot of fanfare, it was like Starlink service with T-Mobile. And so I think maybe T-Mobile has learned quite a bit that perhaps they shouldn't be pushing the Starlink angle so much. But as we know, for AST, it's going to be white label. It's going to be AT&T or it's going to be Verizon. And for probably the general, I mean, the normal person, they're not going to know that the technology is actually enabled by AST SpaceMobile. And for me, that's fine, right? As long as we get more MNOs adopting the service and getting more subscribers, that's great. We can amortize the network over more carriers and we can generate more revenue and cash flow. You can call it whatever you want, as long as the company is earning an economic return on the constellation. Let's see here. Another important thing for MNOs is that they want to be able to guarantee service, right? And so the, and this was actually a really important point. You know, what they were saying is if you can imagine this future that everyone's trying to paint around AI and drones and autonomous vehicles, the first thing that regulators are going to do, so let's say like Domino's is, they're going to try to create an army of drones to deliver pizzas to your house. Well, the first thing they're going to say is, okay, well, if you want to deliver a pizza by a drone, how can you guarantee that that drone is going to be connected at all times? Because if it goes through a dead spot, what happens to the drone? Like maybe it has AI and it can kind of fly through the dead spot, but regulators aren't going to go for a service that is in and out of connectivity. Because regulators will want to know that there's a human kind of monitoring this stuff and has a kill switch and can override things. Because obviously if you're flying drones overpopulated areas, then, you know, who knows, like in that area, the drone, you know, it has issues and then heaven forbid it falls and, you know, lands on Granny Withrow or maybe injures some children. You can't have that. Or the drone gets close to a house and then it loses connectivity and then, You know, there's a child and dog there and they get injured. But, you know, the same analogy applies to autonomous trucking, which everyone thinks is going to be this huge revolution. Are regulators going to approve a service where trucks go in and out of coverage? And so the company has no ability to see what the truck is seeing because it goes through this valley and there's no terrestrial coverage. And so, oh, okay, yeah, we'll let this service, you know, this you know, multi-ton truck just drive on its own with AI, but not be connected to a network where a human operator can't see what's going on. Like that's, that's, that's like, that's dead on arrival, DOA, right? So I think what this person was saying is that for MNOs, they want, they want to know that they have 100% coverage and are able, like from a consumer perspective, but also enterprise perspective, like business customers, can you provide a service that provides 100% guaranteed coverage, 100% uptime? And in today's world with terrestrial networks, you can't do that. And where we're going in terms of IoT and connected devices, satellite's gonna play a huge role in that. And I think that's where maybe the market, maybe up until now, didn't really understand this opportunity. Like you had short sellers and skeptics say, well, it's just a niche service and no one's gonna Aside from dead spots, like no one's going to care. No, actually people care. Like those dead spots, if you're going to fly assets like drones or have autonomous vehicles on these like rural highways, right? Or any highways. I mean, you can drive to, I remember when I lived in California, I mean, there were just different parts of 101 or 280 in the valley where, or in Silicon Valley where you don't have coverage or you go through Menlo Park and you don't have coverage. Like, That's like a non-starter for autonomous vehicles and drones and all these other things that people want to do. So being able to, one, offer 100% coverage, but then a quality of service is going to be important. And then, you know, this was the point that the person made, which I thought was really important. Like, yeah, maybe for your low, you know, if it's a college student or a consumer that doesn't use the service very much, you know, they're probably going to look for budget plans and not really worry about, you know, if they fall in and out of coverage, they're fine. But For someone like me who, where I need to have access to data because I'm trading or investing or people who are in like professions where they need to be connected all the time, I think most people would pay double their current plan in order to have 100% certainty like this, your phone's going to work on the beach. It's going to work when you're working remotely in some cabin in Montana, it's going to work. Or when you're on a plane, it's going to work. Or when you're in your car and everything's tethered to your phone in the car, like it's gonna work. Or if you are Pizza Hut, or sorry, not Pizza Hut, that's not— but if you're Domino's and you have these drones flying all over the city in order to get people comfortable, you know, or it's Amazon with drones or the little, you know, these little autonomous vehicles that are delivering packages, you're gonna have to guarantee 100% coverage and connectivity. to those things. Otherwise, regulators are, whether it's local government regulators or the FAA or you name it, like NH, I forget, NHSTA or whatever, they're going to want assurance that these vehicles that don't have people in them are always connected, right? And so that's going to be a big killer app, which I think people underestimate. But the ability to have broadband data, to any 3GPP device, which is not just your mobile phone, but it's any laptop, a robot or whatever it is, but it has a cellular modem that has these frequency bands built in, that's going to be a killer app. And if you think about 3 billion subscribers today of the 50 MNOs that we're working with, multiply that, right? Like how many IoT devices and you know, AirTags or whatever, any type of assets that any tracking devices that you put in assets that, you know, a company with a trucking fleet or, you know, if they're like even delivery bicycles, right? Like everything's going to be connected. And so you're going to want to have, you know, I talk about how, and this person agreed with me, I was like, this, the whole idea where short sellers would say, well, no one's going to pay $10 a month for 100% guaranteed connectivity. And it's like, are you outta your mind? Of course they are. You know, like if you have kids, you know, my kids have Apple Watches and if my wife found out that I wasn't paying an additional $20 for satellite service to those watches to make sure that I know exactly where they are at any point in time, if they ever get lost, like I can pinpoint, I know exactly where they are. But yeah. Oh, dad, dad didn't want to pay $20. And so, you know, your kid's lost. whether it's maybe an amusement park where quite candidly, there's this coverage, the service there sucks. And so having additional MSS spectrum covering that amusement park, you'll get better coverage and then you'll be able to find your kid. Or if you go on a camping trip and they get lost, anybody who has kids or loved ones knows like you would pay any price for peace of mind. I mean, it's like the SUV analogy that I like using, which is people pay a massive premium to own A sports utility vehicle because it looks cool and maybe you'll take it off-road or go into like a pretty heavy snowstorm 1 or 2 days out of the year, maybe. But people pay for that peace of mind. Like they want a vehicle that can do anything, right? And so similar to your cell phone, you're going to want a cell phone or a device that's connected all the time, especially when it's to your mother who probably shouldn't be driving anymore, but she, gosh damn it, she's going to continue to drive. And so you wanna make sure that she's gonna have full connectivity and you can reach her no matter where she is, right? Or your kids, like I said, if they're away on camp, at summer camp, like you wanna make sure that, you know, if they get lost or something that you'll be able to track them. But I think having that peace of mind, I think for most people they would pay that. And it, look, it doesn't, and by the way, like this doesn't have to be a solution that's adopted by everybody. Like, If there's a 10, 20% adoption in a subscriber base of 3 billion, not include, this is just like human subscribers. We're not talking about like connected devices, drones, any of that stuff. And we're not even talking about military stuff too. That's like a whole nother conversation, which probably takes like another hour. But yeah, like people are going to pay for that. And for business users, enterprise users, they're going to pay double or more. For their phone to work. And if you're a salesperson and you actually have to go around and see people, like, or if you're, you know, a retail trader, like some of the people on this Twitter Space, and you decide to go somewhere, and obviously let's say like you have calls expiring and, or puts, you know, options expiring, but your family's on vacation. I mean, we've all been there, right? Like you're on a ski vacation, And your wife is like, why are you so distracted? Why do you keep looking at your phone? And you're like constantly trying to connect to a nonexistent network because you have to make trades because the stock is down, some stock is down 20% or it's up 20%. You need to do something. You would pay any price at that moment in time to be connected. And so I think that's what people lose sight of. They try to think of very simple, or they're dismissive of what This service brings, whereas I think this person was saying like, this is kind of the next big leg up for the telecom industry, right? Because now we are at $1 trillion of revenues and the consumer has been pretty much maxed out in terms of what you can charge them versus like the services that are being delivered to that consumer. Whereas this is the holy grail now, it's going to be, oh, we can give you 100% guaranteed coverage no matter where you are. Right. And at the high end, people are going to pay for that. For business users, they're going to pay for that. Not everybody below is going to pay. And quite candidly, like for those people, those are going to be some of the highest yielding users where someone's not going to want to subscribe to monthly service, but for those single days where they actually need it, they're going to pay $20, $30 to get access. I mean, it's just like in the alternative of no service, When you're on an airplane flight, I pay $30 for what is basically very intermittent shitty service that maybe is low band at best, but I pay for it because I need some type of connectivity, even it's just to see the quotes changing on my Bloomberg on my phone when I'm on a flight. I need to know what's going on. So anyway, But yeah, so I think the point of having quality of service that's always on, and also to this person's point, having a seamless experience where the network is converged, where satellite and terrestrial networks actually can do handoffs pretty seamlessly, which I think AST SpaceMobile is working very hard to do, which is not an easy task. But I think when you're integrated into the network operator's core and the, you know, the eNodeB or the brains are actually down on Earth and it's connecting and interacting with the network, that should be easier to do. But, you know, obviously that's going to take some time in order to make that a reality that's seamless. And then finally, I think As I mentioned before, sovereignty is going to be important. The data, where the processing happens, it needs to happen within the country. And that's a big high, or that's a big requirement for MNOs. And ultimately, do they have control over that? Are they operating the network or in partnership or parts of it? Or is someone, is it a completely separate service basically? And are they going to trust that? So let's see here. I think those are most of the points, which I think over the coming days I'll try to write a bit more about some of this stuff. But yeah, I just wanted to share some of these thoughts, which I think were enlightening. And as I said before, I think the market is starting to get their arms around this. And as Reformed Trader said before, If you want to invest in modular nuclear reactors, there's like a whole group of companies, or if you want to invest in AI, there's a whole group of companies, or quantum. And of course, there's a whatever level of speculation, and are some things real, some things not? But when it comes to direct-to-device broadband connectivity from space, there's only 2 companies right now. There's SpaceX, which is Starlink, And for the people that are interested in doing that at a, what is it? I mean, combined enterprise value of SpaceX and Starlink at $450 billion, you've got to go through an SPV and pay 2 and 20 or more in terms of fees. That's one way to invest. Or there's AT&T SpaceMobile, and it's this public company that happens to have the best technology today. It also is working with 50 mobile network operators. I think Starlink is now at, they moved up from 8 to 9, or sorry, from 9 to 10 mobile operators because now they can include Boost Mobile, as one of our MNOs. And I think they've got just under 300 million subscribers as potential customers, whereas AST is now at 3 billion. But yeah, you've got this company that you can invest in today. The question is, in terms of discounting, how much of the company is getting credit today in the current stock price? Which I would say for people looking at the stock price when it was at $2, but not understanding what state the company was in back then versus where it is today, I think it's probably a hard mental— it's probably a big hump to get over. But I think, you know, on today's call, we just talked about the consumer side and how it relates to MNOs, but then we haven't even discussed the government side of the business or the defense applications as well, which is a whole nother call. But yeah, I just wanted to share some of those thoughts and of course give people a sanity check too of kind of where we are and just to make sure that you have a plan. As the markets continue to trade up into what I think is pretty high expectations for all these different growth areas, which we've seen these kind of cycles in the past where you have a ton of excitement and obviously there's real dollars behind it. Like companies spending a tremendous amount of money on AI CapEx, and of course that's driving up the need for energy, which then is driving demand for these next generation nuclear technologies. Who knows who's going to be the winner? But then, you know, looking at, hey, some of these solar companies are going to benefit, or even traditional coal and gas, like that's going to benefit too. But, you know, I think looking at the market and what it's doing and also recognizing that there's probably some level of like exuberance in AST SpaceMobile stock price, but then also balancing that against the fact that, you know, I tweeted that meme of the football player dropping the football or basically celebrating and dropping the football right before the end zone. We're kind of at that point where we're going to be launching satellites into space and it becomes much more, you know, the constellation's going to be built out and service is going to start to be rolled out here and we're going to be generating revenues and we're going to be getting, you know, we've talked about like the Verizon Definitive Agreement, Bell Canada Definitive Agreement, you know, Golden Dome Award or other defense awards. All this stuff starts becoming much more tangible. And so as Kuk mentioned before, for institutions, it becomes something that is unavoidable that they're going to have to get smart around and whether they decide to invest, you know, who knows, right? But I think when I was talking to this consultant, the point that I made, which is my favorite, is that there's this unique opportunity to own what is going to be the largest wireless carrier in the world. And we're not obviously competing with AT&T and Verizon and Vodafone, but we will have, you pick the number, I don't know, 400 or 500 million subscribers. Maybe we'll be the first company to be at 1 billion wireless subscribers just through our relationships. And obviously those subscribers are not going to be on the service all the time, but we are going to have those customers and they will be paying, which is great. And I think it was Tut who mentioned Netflix where, if you can imagine Netflix's model where they charge, I don't know, $10, $15 per subscriber and You know, they leveraged the internet, they leveraged the fact that people have devices. It's kind of a similar story, right? So is the adoption curve and the economic model going to be similar? I would argue it's going to, you know, our service is going to be more rapidly adopted and the financial, you know, obviously the, our EBITDA margins relative to, you know, our high fixed costs initially from putting out the satellites, but then the ability to generate free cash flow after that is going to be tremendous and it's going to be, you know, a Harvard Business case study for people to study for many years to come. But anyway, I know I'm just rambling and repeating stuff that I've said before, but I'm going to take a quick look at some of the comments and see if there's any questions here. Every time I listen to you lately, you keep telling me to sell. Haven't sold a bean since '06. Hoping to hold till $400 plus. $75 is already an overwhelming amount of money though. That's a fair point. I, you know, when I say, and I'm sorry you feel that way, that you feel like I'm telling you to sell, I think it depends on your situation, right? Like if you have a 5% position that's grown into a 10% position in AEC SpaceMobile, then you're more than welcome to like keep holding it, right? Like hold it until the cows come in and we get to $1,000 a share. I think that's like a great strategy. But if you have that similar position and you've got like your credit card's maxed out and you have a mortgage, and by selling 2% of your position, you can like completely pay down your mortgage and be free of debt, then your circumstance is different, right? And I think you owe it to yourself to think through that analysis to make a decision for financial independence, right? And I think also, you know, it's fun to like be in these times of when the stock price is doing well, but also go back to when the stock price drew down to $36 and how were you feeling then? And did you have any regret? And were there things that you wish you had done when the stock was at, what was it, $60 when it peaked at $60? And so now that we're at $74, you know, does it make sense to do those things you were contemplating? I'm not telling people to sell, but I think it's important to have a plan and to stick with that plan, right? And so if you have 80% of your net worth in this stock, then God bless. And if that's because it went— and it also depends on like what your cost basis is, right? Like if you bought a ton at $2 and then all of a sudden the stock has gone to $74 and it's become 80% of your net wealth, you are probably okay with riding the volatility to a degree because your cost basis was so low and you're basically riding on house money. But I think what I've told people in the past is if you've made multiples of your net worth in this stock, why not just like sell enough to cover, to crystallize what your previous net worth was? And of course taxes, and then the rest you can just ride. But yeah, it's all situation specific and I'm just like a voice of, just a, not a voice of reason, but I guess a friend just saying like, Do what works for you and have a plan and just make sure you're prepared, right? Because I think, you know, Reformed Trader was talking about potential for, I mean, all the ingredients of the market and, you know, the rate backdrop and all the things that are going on. Like he could see a path to 500, which, you know, God bless, that would be amazing if we get to 500. But if we do, I will tell you one thing, like it will not be a straight line to 500. Like there's, it's going to be a rocky road. Like you might get to a point where, I mean, I'm just making this up, but like let's say the stock goes to 200 and then you have a drawdown all the way to 90 and then all of a sudden it goes to 300. Are you able to ride that volatility?
[01:04:09] Speaker B: Right.
[01:04:10] Speaker A: And it's not just volatility of being down money, but it's also like having foregone profits, right? Because sometimes that's pretty brutal to go through that mentally. So anyway, yeah, I'm not telling people to sell it, but just be mindful, right? Let's see. There's a lot of comments about, of course, me having technical issues. I'm sorry about that. Let's see. Question for you regarding let it ride. What if you've already smashed expectations? How do you shift from letting it ride and into capital preservation? Well, I mean, there's option strategies you can do to preserve capital. You could like buy some protection or, you know, heaven forbid, sell calls, which I think is always, I mean, from my perspective is a bad idea. But the best solution is to just sell some of your position and then that's like the easiest way to capital preservation and then you can ride the rest, right? Anyway, but yeah, sorry, being a broken record here, but people are asking about this stuff. Yeah, it looks like a lot of people— what percent of shares short do you think are technical, meaning delta type of hedges versus straight bearish trades? As in people think the stock will crash? Well, I think a lot of short sellers. Okay, so There's kind of, there are convertible bondholders who are at this point fully hedged. So I forget what the exact number is, like it's probably, don't quote me on this, I will probably be wrong, but there's probably, I don't know, 10 million shares related to the converts that where bondholders are short. And quite candidly, like the hedge funds who are convertible ARBs, they probably closed some of those positions. positions. And so they might have covered those shorts and sold the bonds. And the people who own the converts might actually be fundamental guys who want, who like the company and want to have exposure to the fundamental story, but then want to express it through the convert, which is basically equity now. And then you also get a coupon, a very small coupon, but a coupon nonetheless, and some downside protection if the stock were to completely crater. But yeah, the rest of it is short sellers. So I think we've talked about how I'm not really sure what the short thesis is at this point. Quite candidly, it's probably really irresponsible to be short the stock just given where we are in terms of development of the service and we're about to launch commercial service. Previously, the bears were like, you know, the tech doesn't work. There's no funding. What were the other things? Oh, they can't scale production. But all those things are, you know, the funding's there, the technology works. You know, M&Os, if the technology didn't work, you'd have M&Os kind of backing away from the company, but you have more investment from M&Os and M&Os are, you know, you had the CEO of Vodafone, at the factory floor. And obviously that was partially to celebrate the completion of FM1 and then announcing, Bell Canada just announced their first video call. So obviously things are going pretty well. I mean, if the 5 Bluebirds that are up in space, if they weren't scaling or if the technology wasn't being proved out as we, over the last several months, MNOs would be seeing that data, because obviously we're working closely with them. We can't test these things without their infrastructure. Then you wouldn't see MNOs like AT&T sending out care packages to Space Mob or talking about the service and how it's going to be rolled out soon. So yeah, I mean, the proof is in the pudding there. I just don't know why shorts are involved. I mean, I think Maybe I've talked about this in my prior call where, you know, they might be looking for fluctuations like, oh, hey, they're— and, you know, to be candid, like somebody did make some money on the delay in launch where the stock went from. And of course, maybe if you knew, if you were like talking to EchoStar management and they're like, oh man, it sounds like they're pretty close to a spectrum deal and maybe it's Starlink. So I'm going to speculate. And you saw some of these people like short AST and then it went down. They made some money. But I don't think many of them covered and then it went up and ripped them in the face. And then you had like some of these brain-dead guys who are long EchoStar and they're like, hey, this is a perfect pair trade. I'll long EchoStar because it's a SpaceX proxy and they're going to benefit from working with SpaceX. And so who is SpaceX? Starlink's one of their key competitors, at least for a direct device. Oh, it's AST SpaceMobile. So I'm going to put that pair trade on. I'm going to short AST at 36 or 40. And now the stock's at like 74 and Echostar is basically flat. So they just got their asses handed to them. They had like a completely, I don't know, irrational trade on. But I don't know, people do stupid things, right? So anyway, but yeah, I'm not sure why shorts are around. I know Ryan O'Connor, Pranya Capital, and some of the other guys here, they could probably tell you because they kind of go toe to toe with some of these guys and And I think it seems like it's like smaller hedge funds where people who think like they have some variant perception and different edge. And so somehow, you know, there's going to be some precipitous decline in the company's stock, but it's bizarre because given everything the company has accomplished to date, I don't think you're playing for zero on the hedge fund side. Like maybe you're playing for a 5 to 10%, maybe 30% drawdown and some, you know, hey, what happens if like some satellites break up there and they don't deploy properly and then people get scared? I mean, you saw Firefly, what was it, down 20, 25% because their rocket engine exploded. But of course, like that was on top of the fact that the company in their first public quarter didn't hit guidance and, or sorry, didn't hit expectations and/or guidance. which is like a cardinal sin. You never do that as a public company in the first quarter. You can't, especially a regular way IPO, not a SPAC, but a regular way IPO where you basically are giving research analysts the numbers and you're telling them to, hey, these are appropriately sandbag numbers. And so, but you know, it's like an unsaid rule or not an unsaid rule. It's like everybody knows this in investment banking. You need to set expectations such that you can beat and raise at least for 4 quarters after being public. And so Firefly shit the bed the first quarter, and so the stock was down, broke IPO price, and then of course like a rocket engine exploded. And people have been concerned about Firefly because they're, as Rocket Lab investors know, which they make people acutely aware, Firefly's had a checkered history in terms of their rocket program. And so that stock went down a lot. And so yeah, I mean, AST, you could have a situation, heaven forbid, that maybe a satellite doesn't deploy or you know, things happen. But the great thing is that we've got a ton of satellites. A ton of satellites are being built and that are going to be launched. And so before, if BlueWalker 3 didn't work, that could have been like an existential extinction event. Or if the Block 1 Bluebirds, if like one didn't work, that could have been a problem. But now, you know, we're going to be launching, we have 13 launches that are going to put up I don't know, depending, 50, 60 satellites. If you have one go bad, that's okay. Like, that's totally recoverable and it's expected. Like, you're going to have some number of these things that may not work. I mean, in Starlink's case, a lot of the satellites don't work. They malfunction, they don't get to the proper level. They don't get, when they do their arrays, they don't get to the right orbit. But that's a different beast. Like they're building quantity over quality and they're okay with having a decent amount of defects, right? Because that's their business model. Whereas for us, and Abella's philosophy is like, you get it right the first time and every time. So, but yeah, it's, I think for anybody holding this stock, and I preach this constantly, like don't hold it at margin, don't go, don't get over your skis. It's highly volatile. I mean, on days like this it's great, but on down days, you know, if you're on margin, not good. So anyway, but yeah, that's about all I had today. My son's soccer practice is going to end soon, so I should probably end this space. But yeah, I think I covered most of the important points that I had in this conversation. There were a few other things that maybe I'll kind of share over time. But I would say that my conversation, I came away quite bullish. And it's interesting, I think even the people who know the industry well and understand the importance and have a good grip of what this technology brings in terms of transformation and disruption, I think they're just literally at the point of like scratching the surface. I don't think they fully comprehend what this means and what a sea change it's going to be that quite, you know, I think most people on the retail side understand. And so that's the opportunity, right? Like I think those consultants, the people who are in the industry, they, and the ones who are working with M&Os, they at least have a pretty decent understanding. But then compare that to retail investors, they're pretty far behind, but then they're at least ahead of most institutional investors who quite candidly, most have no clue. They don't really understand what this is, they might think it's like, oh, it's like Globalstar SOS text messaging or something like that. But I don't think they understand how it fits into what I described before, which is in a connected environment where you have Internet of Things devices, drones, autonomous vehicles, things like that, robots, you're going to have to have 100% connectivity. And even when the terrestrial network goes down, You need the satellite network backup because like, if you can imagine where we become, and then, you know, from my perspective, it's quite sad, but we become more dependent on these devices, whether it's, you know, robots, drones, or other things like for a terrestrial network to have an outage to go down, like that's just, that's, that can't happen. It just can't. Right. And so having whether as a primary network or a backup or an overlap network, having a satellite network, it's going to be absolutely critical. And I think we're all early in understanding that, and I think the market is far behind, but once they do, yeah, it's going to be pretty wild. If you think our time now is wild in terms of the market recognizing the value of this company and the opportunity, I think we're just scratching the surface. But anyway, I'll end it there. I've got to go get my kid and I'm going to, we'll be back at it tomorrow. Maybe I'll do, I'll do some additional spaces because yeah, this is fun. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this. I'm gonna let it run for a while, and then yeah, we'll catch up again. Thanks everyone for joining.
[01:16:00] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mobile Podcast.
[01:16:04] Speaker A: If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others.
[01:16:09] Speaker B: Post about it on social media.
[01:16:10] Speaker A: 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.
[01:16:23] Speaker B: We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology we can really affect billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular broadband connectivity 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 this into reality, always in partnership with the MNOs.
[01:16:57] Speaker A: Listen. Mmm, waffles.