Kook's Weekly - February 1 - Why AST SpaceMobile is Built for Superiority

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. We 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.
[00:00:25] Speaker C: Good night, everyone. Not good night, good evening. I guess good night's really the exit greeting, but I hope no one looked at the stock market. So this is a good time to get together to talk about fundamentals and the path of a company because this sort of macro headwind is something I'd frankly been sort of expecting. Took a lot of crap from Anpanman and Tut, who was saying, oh, this is the guy that has called every crash. Well, not really, but like February's kind of a crappy month in general because of the January effect hangover. And then the government shutdown wasn't something I had expected to carry on over the weekend. And I think everyone's waiting to see if Iran gets bombed and these sorts of things. So this is the natural sort of Macro overhang that when you're living through it can certainly seem scary and, oh my God, let me look at the charts and let me get too cute on all my stocks and maybe I'll sell and buy it back. These are the sorts of things that people do. And what I always find funny is take— so I'm old at this point, which is sad and not much I can do about it other than eat a lot of vegetables, but I lived through the great financial crisis where I was at a hedge fund, and I would always tell people in hindsight, you know, go pull up a chart of Netflix. And when you look at a chart, you quite literally cannot see where the great financial crisis was. It just doesn't even register on a stock chart. And then you imagine all of the people who absolutely panicked and thought it was the end of the world. And admittedly, at the time, I'm just looking at what type of drawdown that was from peak to trough. That was a 33% drawdown in the GFC. And certainly Netflix has had some other drawdowns, but it just kind of melts away. For anyone that's watched Blade Runner, it's like a Tear, or is it a raindrop in the ocean or a tear in the rain? It just goes away. And that's something I've really reflected on in my career is really trying to zoom out because even over the course of a couple weeks, if not months, lots of events that are really sort of markets in crisis type of things that you'll see on CNBC, they basically just Fade away and don't really even look like much. I just pulled up a chart of Microsoft just thinking, well, what did April 2025 look like? And yeah, sure, you know, it got pummeled, but now in hindsight, it just looks kind of like a little bit of drawdown. People would easily say, all right, bought the dip. And so I don't think we're gonna have anything like that coming up in February, but a little bit of a blow-off is certainly on my base case. And maybe we had it. The stock ASTS is already down $25 from its peak on Friday morning, which is astounding how volatile this thing is. But that just also kind of brings us to this cover shot of the weekly, which I stole from King Tut, which I find absolutely hysterical in every possible way. And so some guy was doing some, I think he literally called it a noodle chart and he was serious about it. And then Tut retweeted it, you know, really in the form of a Jackson Pollock. And that's kind of a lot of times with some of these charts, kind of mean to me, with the exception of Reformed Trader, whose charts I always take seriously and would never mock or make fun of publicly for fear of getting defriended by him. But when we look at the fundamentals, so we're going to have a little volatility if the pre-market is any indicator. So nothing you can do about that. But what you can do is look at what the company is doing to build its team and its capabilities. So stocks generally track cash flow, you know, haha. At valuations, you'd say, ooh, kook, there's no cash flow. Well, yeah, jackass, I know. But the whole point of the stock is we're predicting it. And so we're very focused on the technology, which Kevin Chen, you kind of debate with this guy about, of like, actually it's pretty important to understand the tech in this. And the analog that the short seller was saying is, well, you wouldn't want to ask a dentist about investing. And it's just like, what tired platitude do you care to share next? So understanding the technology here is in fact vital to understanding the investment opportunity because then one knows that you have a platform in cutting-edge technology for which there are multiplying use cases beyond the simple communication use cases that we initially, or at least I initially invested behind. And so understanding that is the key to understand where commercialization and revenue opportunities will come in the future. One thing follows the other. And so luckily, and I'm astounded by the talent on the Space Moppy channel, just even last week, I was just chatting with some of my DMs and asking, what do you do? And he had worked in ballistic missile testing thinking, okay. Seems like someone who's qualified to study some of the tech. And that's just one guy. And we know that there's so many other people like that that contribute to the Space Mob to help us understand and validate the technology. But the people that really help validate the technology are those who come and join the company. And so we had some big hires recently. So I first tweet in my Weekly is joining Mike, the joining of Mike Williams, who's going to be a director at AST for system integration, test, and operations for federal programs. Big deal. He had been with Raytheon for 28 years as the missile defense chief. Seems like a big deal. So how are you able to hire a guy like this? Well, it takes two to tango. This is a guy I know just because my family is also very senior at some of these prime defense contractors. They have pretty good lives, like big pensions, which are frankly guaranteed by the US government, lots of prestige, things like that. You only leave for something astounding. And so a family member of mine left for something astounding. He was able to end up going to be a CEO of a defense company, got LBO'd, and now is rich, which is cool. And so that was his reason to leave the prime. And so what is this guy's reason to leave the Prime, especially after 28 years? Well, probably a pretty compelling opportunity, probably an opportunity where he's going to make a difference and sees the ability to rapidly inflect. And notably what we know he's not doing is he's not joining ASTS for the cash compensation. That's almost assuredly why he's not joining. And so then If you reflect on what ASTS is as a career path, it's an investment vehicle. People join ASTS presumably for the challenge to work on the cutting edge, but also for the equity grants because the bulk of their wealth historically, ask Scott, comes from the equity grants. And so people, if you're joining ASTS fundamentally, you are taking a big bet on the stock 'cause that's how you're getting paid. But to then attract these types of people, they have to believe in the upside opportunity and their ability to drive that upside through their own contributions. But then the company needs to have something for them to do that is real enough for them to come over. This is just one more confirmation that we have a burgeoning defense business. Well, we already know, is it from, what was it, 2 weeks ago now? tell the blur that we are in Golden Dome and we're attracting and building out the team that's giving us the credibility to deliver upon that, which is really exciting. And so one of the things that maybe one of my infamous tweets from many years ago was this series called #MeetTheTeam. And I had just gone through painstakingly and just profiled like really everyone on LinkedIn that worked at the company and just really showed like, here are the people behind this. When you own a de-SPAC at that point, that's pre-revenue, it's easy to lose your confidence in that and just go, oh my gosh, it might be a fake company, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's really easy to lose your nerve. And then you just have to ask yourself, you know, reflect on your own careers. Like, why did you join the firms you currently work at? You know, assuming a lot of people here have jobs. What did you see? What was it an intelligent choice? So if you're reflecting on your career and going, what a dumbass I am for working at my firm, well, that's something you should reflect on. And presumably the next time you won't do that. And so then you look at people who have joined ASTS and wonder, have they reflected on their own prior careers and realized they weren't on the winning path? Were they on the winning path and found yet a better rocket ship, no pun intended, to join. But going to a company is not always just driven by, I need a job and benefits, but it can really be someone taking the offensive tack on their career. And so you want to see if a pattern emerges around talent flow. This is something I certainly learned at this most recent juncture of my career where I've had to actually interact much more with all parts of an organization, not not just in the public investing seat where you just call the IR guy, but really understanding how an org works. And it's a very humbling experience for me, which I hadn't really appreciated just how tough this part is for VCs and private equity people of trying to make sure that you have the right talent coming into your company. Because a lot of times with public companies, you take it for granted, or if you have a company that's doing really well, well, you actually just take that for granted. And if it's going really poorly, you might not have really understood the pathology of your decline in terms of either a lack of talent or departure of talent. And so it's very important with a company like ASTS to validate your own assessment of the tech and the prospects and see that the people who have the relevant skill sets are actually transacting not in the stock directly by buying it, but with their career. And so YOLOing themselves. And that's a big signal for me, especially with ASTS and something I've been very focused on. So then we want to read the tea leaves to all this. And so we have Tough4R really went out as usual with some great content. I've linked it all out here. And here's just what the punchline is, is hiring radar experts like Walcott and Williams from Raytheon. Signals ASTS Space Mobile is bolstering its defense capabilities. Their expertise in phased arrays could adapt ASTS LEO satellites for radar apps like missile tracking and secure comms. ASTS secured a spot on the MDA SHiELD program, part of the Golden Dome for layered defense. This positions them for potential contracts in hypersonic missile threats, enhanced government revenue streams, and overall exciting potential. So what we're going toward is really understanding where does ASTS sit in the value chain for all of this? And the short answer is we don't really know, but we start to surmise things that it could do. So there's the tracking layer, which is sensing and understanding where missiles are going. There's the transport layer, which is moving that incredible amount of data across space to where it needs to be. And then there's the custody layer, which is, as the name suggests, basically taking custody of those assets you want to track. And so as a missile launcher, for example, is detected, Uh, following it and keeping track of it. And so what we had thought is that ASTS is actually pretty well situated for all of these layers. Now, will they get all 3 of these layers right away? Don't know, but can the technology be applied to that? And so what we think is on the tracking layer that has historically been thought to go to regular radar guys. But innovations in 5G technology are showing that the disturbance of a 5G field, almost think of like The Matrix where all of a sudden you sort of see like the ones and zeros bend. If you're shooting down that metaphorical ones and zeros into the atmosphere with an RF signal, as something is penetrating that airspace, that disrupts the RF signal. So that's a radar. That's how 5G technology can can be adapted for this use. We've always thought that ASTS would be used as a radar system, but even if it's not and someone else is providing the radar system, all of that data, the transport layer, needs to happen. And so ASTS can enable near-instantaneous global dissemination of this data and bypass the terrestrial delays. And this is going to enhance a real-time missile system and surveillance. Which is very important to the overall strategy of the US government. So this, I believe, is gonna all evolve in terms of what the ultimate involvement of ASTS is. And if they win one thing at the exclusion of another, I don't think I would call it game over because I think this will all evolve over time. And that's just gonna be the product roadmap and the commercial pipeline that we have at this company. And I believe that as we begin to really put a couple balls in the end zone, people will start to extrapolate more growth, which is just really the total addressable market expansion, which is really important. So you can put the most incredible radar system up in the sky that you want, but you are not going to stop KATSE. And so KATSE is really basically like a radar jamming turbo missile. And this guy seems to spot everything. And so what he saw, which is just absolutely a remarkable example of due diligence that I wish I were capable of doing, but I am just merely the sergeant at arms here and just report on other people's great work. But Cathie saw something that was quite crazy. And so there was some new filings dumped, but when you go and tie out the docket, there's ghost filings. And so the FCC system is old. It seems like it was built on Netscape. And so it will show sort of how many records are tied to a docket, but if the record has been redacted and blank, you won't see it, but it will still account for it in terms of how many rows it's showing. And so what you could see, or what Katzy noticed, is that there were 6 ghost filings that came up. So things that show as row numbers with no links. So Katzi comes to the conclusion, which I think is plausible, um, is that there are some redacted filings and it shows something happened because these records were created one way or another. We just can't see them. And so then you can have your imagination race, but there's things happening behind the scenes. That are evidently certain privileges are required to see. Very neat stuff. And just another indicator of what's to come. The other indicators of what's to come are just the changing mentality of experts. So Only 6 Inches posted a Tika's call, I believe. I somehow missed this one myself. Um, but An EchoStar expert and says that ASTS is number one. Noted that Starlink is gonna try, but at some point they're gonna take the MNOs on directly as a provider. And so that's naturally channel conflict and something I think is gonna be a big problem for them. But the technology is already challenged on many fronts, and this expert was very impressed by the size of ASTS's satellites. Nothing we don't already know, but a big departure from the fuddiest maximalist people like Tim Ferriss, who continued to try to throw brown ink in the pool and calling it a turd. But that game is running out and you're seeing, first of all, the stock market. It's not retail, I don't think, buying this thing. I haven't bought a share in a long time. I can't. When you have a position like mine, I'm not Ampanman, this guy that just seems to have a counterfeit money machine that he somehow gets loaded onto E-Trade. Real people like myself don't have any money left. And so it's not me doing it. I have a lot of shares. I'm holding them, which I view as every day I hold, it's the equivalent of buying it. But I just have a hard time believing that Space Mob is sitting there vacuuming up 20 million shares per day. So someone is doing that. And I believe, first of all, that's price discovery. Other people are marketing it there. It's not me. And you're having industry experts really change the tune and getting smart on this. And so the invisible hand is racing ahead. And this goes to some of the, frankly, I don't wanna be too rude to the guy, but asinine comments from some of these short sellers where I was asking one guy, you know, what would it take to actually change your mind? And he responded very flippantly, EBIT, just being a complete smartass. And it's like, okay, sure. So when the company has positive EBIT, what's the stock price going to be? Right now the company loses a lot of money, has negative EBIT, earnings before interest and taxes, but the market is very clearly discounting, rightly or wrongly, that this company's going to inflect and have an enormous amount of cash flow. So once it has cash flow, Then you cover. I mean, there's always the chance that the stock derates for one reason or another. Frankly, I remember I didn't trade on this, but I remember when Tesla was starting to ramp their Model 3, I thought that cash flow would be the curse, almost sort of like revenues as discussed in the HBO show Silicon Valley, where he goes like, revenue? Oh my God, don't get revenue. Then they're gonna want more of it. Then they're going to want profits. Just don't get revenue, sell the dream. And I thought for a while Tesla would be like that because once they had revenue, I thought, well, God, people are going to realize it's a car company. Well, again, basic first principles. There's a really big world out there. I don't need to short Elon Musk. I mean, why would I play Russian roulette with 5 in the chamber? Like, not a good trade. So this was more of a hypothetical thought experiment. of what would happen when reality came. And okay, so Tesla turned out to be a really good investment from the point when Model 3 was coming out. So good luck to these people that wanna cover their short when this has EBIT. And they really should be listening to the people that know. And so AT&T was out with a year in review and they just talk about ASTS-based mobile being really cool. But, you know, we could say those are just paid pumpers. AT&T, why would we ever trust, you know, these guys that only invented the modern telephone system that we all rely upon? I don't know what they know. So what's better then is to actually have these paid pumpers put in front of Congress and give sworn testimony. That's what I want. And so we have them. Finally on the stand where we're going to reveal that AT&T thinks that ASTS is vaporware. I hope you guys all watch this interview because that's not what they said. The senator asked if AT&T sought proposals before selecting ASTS. Their response? We evaluated that solution and we selected the best solution for public safety that could basically provide the highest level of connectivity, capacity, resiliency, and performance.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Damn.
[00:20:52] Speaker C: What's great in this video is there's this dude sitting in the back with just like a badass Yellowstone cowboy hat. And so I don't know if they brought the muscle with them to the Senate just to fend off any T-Mobile people and, you know, skin that smoke wagon if they ran into any trouble, but that's the sworn testimony. They looked at the market. ASTS was the best. All you have to do is listen. Now, arriving at the solution of, at the conclusion of ASTS being the best hardly is the end of an investment thesis. A lot of other things have to be right for you to make money on this investment than just simply being the best solution. There has to be total addressable market. There has to be really good commercial strategy. There has to be execution in terms of developing or in terms of production, lots of things have to go right. And these are of course the holistic points that we've incorporated in the diligence. But the starting point really needs to be this identification of the technology. From that, everything else grows. So on those other attributes of the thesis, a big piece of the pushback in the market has continued to be the TAM. Even when the shorts concede that the technology works, this, that, and the other, they go, well, yeah, good luck to your Yosemite tourist who uses a service for 5 seconds to tweet a picture of a geyser. That's kind of the bear case at this point, which we had always imagined, the moved goalposts. And frankly, we should embrace it. It's really nice to have a good two-sided market. to have a really vocal bear side in the short community that has a view but then is ultimately wrong. That provides, you know, really good tension and I think is healthy. The important thing for anyone long the stock is to be right. And we've done our own work. I've certainly done my own work, but then sort of my spirit animal in another life, Sequoia Capital partner, Sean Maguire, probably a surfer, just looking at the guy, but he talks about SpaceX. So he's Elon's sort of dude at Sequoia, good place to be. And he says that Starlink's D2C opportunity is, quote, one of the biggest market opportunities ever. So I don't know if you guys know a lot about Sequoia. I happen to know a lot about Sequoia. No comment. So Sequoia has seen a lot of big market opportunities, to put it lightly. They have seen the biggest market opportunities. And so for a guy who is a partner at Sequoia, who draws on that institutional knowledge, saying that DTC is one of the biggest market opportunities ever, sure, someone could just dismiss that and say, well, these are the same people that brought you Paying for a banana on FTX, fine. But they've also brought you things like the entire modern world that we live in. So net-net, I'm going to say Sequoia is pretty good. And when they say something like that, they're probably— who cares if they're right or wrong, but it's informed and they wouldn't say it if they didn't have a viewpoint of it. And so then we look at the numbers. So there were some numbers that came out, I think it was on Friday. I was just sitting there, I got some numbers from a broker through my just kind of blast feed. But the revenues for SpaceX, $16 billion, of which $10 billion are for Starlink revenues, and it's growing like a weed. Pretty good place for investors to find burgeoning opportunity. That's a lot of revenue. Now, how do you tie to SpaceX being a $1.5 trillion company? Well, Elon helped answer that question over the weekend with his plan for a million satellites to go provide AI data centers in space. So he's just gonna pump, pump, pump. That is for sure what he's gonna do. He's gonna pump stories like crazy to back into valuations like that. And again, not my problem, but that's what's going on. The key thing is just to see that there's valid market demand for these products. And so Starlink doing $10 billion of revenue is really remarkable. And that's for a system which is admittedly pretty low friction. That's for fixed broadband. And so we just say, well, shouldn't mobile be bigger? I've always had in my head that current Starlink is the equivalent of Facebook on desktop. And ASTS is the equivalent of Facebook Mobile. Well, anyone that knows the history of Facebook knows that mobile was important and is really what drove the boat over there. And that's what I think we have is that component. And so I think that the market opportunity accordingly is going to be much, much bigger for AST SpaceMobile. And then you just have to look at the trend. I was just looking at Zero Hedge. And they just said all the themes in 2025 that were working are actually working again. And I hadn't known this. I don't have these numbers broken out this way. It's very cool what they did, but the space sector was the dominant return driver in 2025. And so far, exact same thing is happening in 2026. I never sort of deliberately invested in a space theme per se. I never sat back and was like, well, I'm going to allocate to space. I thought it was going to be a really good secular trend. I remember when Cathie at ARK was setting up her space fund in 2021, I thought, oh yeah, this makes sense. Like this is the next frontier. There's a lot of disruption because of Falcon 9, things like that. And that was, you know, 4 years too early in terms of people waking up. What really blew the door off of this theme is Trump and the redirection of the Department of War. So the Department of War was out again last week blasting out a tweet saying space superiority. This is where they are focused. We're in the right spot and the banks are waking up too. And so it's pretty cool that Goldman came out with their GS Moon Index. So, you know, some people might say, well, there's the top because I think when they came out with the BRIC Index, I'd have to go back and figure out when they actually blew up the world with their little indices. But I generally think there's a lot of juice from initial identification of a trend like this to the ultimate kind of termination of it, especially when it's long lead time. And, you know, the BRIC trend had its own problems because governments kind of went crazy, but it is exciting that there's more and more attention. They're obviously gearing up for the SpaceX IPO. It's in everyone's interest to have a very vibrant, active, liquid, big space sector as people start to trade and industry pods, if you will, start to cover the space and have dedicated guys with it. And the attention to this issue just is not going away. Each country is increasingly focused on this. And so Elena Niera, who's our MIT lady, very smart, Shared something in Japan that came out where Japan calls for a national LEO infrastructure development project to break away from dependence on overseas constellations and secure essential communication services. Sounds a lot like what Europe is trying to do with IRIS². The question is, can they do it by themselves, or are they gonna end up using a different structure like SATCO for Japan? The jury is out on what Europe will ultimately do. But the fact of the matter is, Europe is likely going to be staring at SACO up and operating well before IRIS is operational, if it ever is. And Japan certainly has some of the capabilities to do this by themselves, but Japan is a very small country. And so they might also question the economics of an entire constellation which serves just such a small segment. Sliver. Would it not make more sense to have the governance and legal structure that Satco set up in Europe also done in Japan where they have that dedicated capacity? We will find out, but it is something where you could see a very big opportunity for ASTS SpaceMobile. And we have a German ITU filing. Katsi was quick on the follow here. German ITU filing of our Arctic shell for SATCOM. Again, Arctic shells are very important for military use. And so that's kind of a giveaway of who the intended user is gonna be for any system. So as a well-situated competitor to provide all of this for these governments, ASTS is also on the spectrum hunt. And so while they continue to hunt and frankly hunt down companies like Inmarsat, like last week, Inmarsat got basically a red card from a judge. Different story. But in Europe, there is another race for this sort of beautiful 2 GHz MSS spectrum. And Floodsturts had said we wouldn't have access to it, nor would we even apply to it. I think the exact quote, and I'll read it into the record for posterity, Tim Farrar says, LOL, which means laughing out loud, out loud. The clueless cult don't understand. Orange explicitly avoided the word broadband because they don't believe ASTS's claims. But more importantly, ASTS and Vodafone didn't even bother to submit comments. Why should they take Why should the EU take Safco seriously? LOL, what a douchebag. And so yeah, Tim, take a report, dude. Um, they did comment and it's out there, and Dr. Mike has been all over this. He was actually just sharing some more things with me just now that I retweeted. And so they are commenting and they're putting out some frankly astounding figures that with multi-in multi-out MIMO, not to be confused with a meme, MIMO is when you have multiple satellites kind of hitting a coverage area at the same time. They might be able to achieve 6 bits per hertz, which is the way you measure spectral efficiency, which is covered in the DD doc. And I have some sensitivities for various levels. I forget exactly what I used, probably 3, maybe with an upside case of 4. I might've used my base case at 2.5, can't remember, but 6 is just burning. And so what that means is just more data. And so the satellites I've always thought of as a system with a critical path item, which is the processing of spectrum. So 10 gigahertz is the limit for a next generation bird. So if you get more bits per hertz, that's just more data. For the constrained processing capacity of the satellite. Processing capacity is constrained by the chip, but really by the power. And so if you're able to transmit more data for a given fixed power supply, that just means your economics are better. More data, more money. And so some of this stuff is coming out in these filings, which is just very exciting. But in any respect, ASTS and Vodafone submitted a confidential response to the EU. So they're definitely going for this spectrum. I know that for sure. Certain.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Why?
[00:32:53] Speaker C: Because I studied at length the adversary proceeding of AST SpaceMobile against Inmarsat, where they talk about it. I've listened to all the hearings. Where they talk about it. So I know for sure this is what they're doing, and it's exciting because the company can then assemble a global spectrum portfolio, which in the words of Abel, is worth more than anyone can pay. And that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to become a vehicle for global spectrum aggregation by way of operationalizing it in a novel way that no one else could. Pretty ingenious. We'll see how it develops. To operate in these countries involves not only access to spectrum, but you also have to play nice and deal with governments that can be very protectionist. Not all countries are as open as the US, if the US is even considered open at this point, which isn't even really meant to be a political comment. It just seems like it's hard to operate in the US, even though it's probably One of the better markets to operate in. India is not generally known to be an easy market to operate in. I think I would probably rather do eye surgery on myself with a screwdriver than try to navigate the bureaucracy of India. So my entire life has been having deep, deep humility for anyone that can do business in India. I've had investments in companies that do oil stuff there, I've had the privilege of having 100% loss losses in the one private deal I did in India. Never to do that again. But Starlink is having the same problem of they just got rejected from their constellation in India. And it's because India hasn't yet completed its regulations for the D2C frequencies. And so at Rocket Tank 123, who's, who's very good, very technical, While he allows that the same might apply for ASTS until the regulatory pathways are done, one would just have to take a step back and where Modi, who has something to say about what goes on in India, and ISRO are our partners, where we have Vodafone as well, one would think that notwithstanding the difficulty sometimes of getting permissions in India, one would think when the Prime Minister is tweeting about your company, when you have done extremely high-profile business to elevate this, the global stature and the global reputation of ISRO, which is deserved, that is a badass rocket these guys have, and they launched it perfectly. When you lift up others, As they literally lift up you. That's the basis of a good partnership. Starlink, by contrast, don't do shit in India. They're not launching there. They're not spreading, you know, any butter around for local content. They're not lifting up people and participants in India. I don't know that they have any M&O deal. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But a country like India is going to look at that and go like, I don't know, why would I bend over backwards for these guys when one can only imagine that really big local companies like Reliance and things like that who have existing telecom investments are going to whisper in some ears and say, hey, Starlink bad. Why? Because they're just going to disintermediate local companies and hurt people's business. And so it's going to be really hard. To get open season in these countries when you're hurting the local oligarchs. Those guys, you know, I'm not trying to say anything other than common sense. Like those guys have sway, just like we have lobbyists. You know, I don't know the internal workings of India, but I could just only believe that they have lobbyists too. And they're just going to make life a little bit more difficult for Starlink. And it'll be very interesting to see how that changes for ASTS, but I have very high expectations that ASTS is going to have a different experience for getting the permissions in India because they've taken the time to actually treat their partners in that country respectfully and create business opportunities for new partners in that country that again lifts up the entire industry as they literally lift us into orbit. I think it's going to end up being viewed as a very smart thing that ASTS did to incorporate ISRO as a launch partner. So that's, that's my take on it. And just going back to ASTS doing smart things, they, they spread the wealth. They're creating opportunity around themselves. And so the Midland mayor is just waxing poetic about the full ball of wax, frankly. She goes, we're Really excited to have ASTS in the community. She says they're the cowbell of Midland. That must be a Texas thing, and notes the local spaceport is now a strategic site for national security and defense. Smart, creating a lot of opportunity. I kind of like now watching this video. This mayor has an infrared sauna in her room, so you know smart and healthy. What's not to like? And she's pumping ASTS Space Mobile. It's like the. The perfect lady, and so we are spreading goodwill everywhere, and as a result, we're getting what we want. And so there are a bunch of FCC filings, and it just shows that all the right people are in the room. You have ASTS's partners, not the CEO level. You don't want that. You don't want John Stanky having to show up to an FCC meeting right now. You want some AT&T lawyers that are. finalizing some documents. And so these are happening. We could really expect a US market grant, I think, any day. In the context of the glacier that can be FCC approvals, any day could mean February or March, but that will be a seminal achievement of the company that, you know, I know Anpanman's talked about a lot and I think I've talked a lot about, but it will happen. And then the other thing that's very important is Legado, or as we now call it, El Legado, the land of gold. And so the Legado FCC filing has been accepted for public notice. And so this is moving ahead. We have Inmarsat, uh, from time to time being quite annoying, but the legal system is, uh, showing its integrity and keeping this case on track and making all the parties perform. This is an important future source of value for the company, so we'd really wanna make sure this goes smoothly. Around the world, we're also seeing the evolution of regulations. And so Ofcom, which is in the UK, has officially cleared the regulatory path for direct-to-device satellites. This is another domino falling our way, and that's what's going to happen around the world. Everyone's going to follow the FCC and their lead. But then what's really neat too, as ASTS gets more and more, really, like its sea legs in a way, as they are obviously having a lot of success with their production, One might say, well, why haven't they shipped batch 1 and batch 2? And we think that's just some congestion at the launch sites because of Artemis and then Crew Dragon, which makes sense to me. But they're starting to really now make some smart moves. And so Jennifer Manor, who's really our queen of spectrum at ASTS, has really been a godsend from what I can tell for the strategic posturing around spectrum. So while a lot of us might simply think that the value of this company is in The satellites, I again think that the satellites are really just the mode of spectrum aggregation for the company. The actual scarce asset we have is spectrum leases and spectrum we share with our partners again through leases. That's the ultimate value. And then it's a question of how you monetize it. That's the actual satellite. One without the other creates a different viewpoint. Spectrum without a way to monetize it leaves you with Dish. It was valuable, but it was only valuable because Starlink could monetize it. Charlie could not. Its actual value when monetized is probably many, many multiples of what Starlink paid for it if they can monetize it effectively. If you have satellites, but no one will share their spectrum with you, Then you have orbital debris, nothing more. And so ASTS is now seemingly really going on the offensive. They know they've got the biggest, baddest offensive lineman in the sky with our satellites. So now it's how can, how can they, we get as much spectrum as humanly possible? So this filing hit, uh, by ASTS. To get a 5 megahertz sliver in the 2 gigahertz spectrum in the US. So this is the spectrum they're also going after in Europe. But what Kasey picked up on is just something that is funny at every level. It's really a sliver of spectrum sitting right in between EchoStar's spectrum, which really is cutting through SpaceX's Spectrum. And so while they're gonna want to have one big continuous highway, if they have someone in the middle, it sort of degrades what they can do with their overall spectrum. Now, I don't know why EchoStar isn't applying for this. This is something maybe I should look into a little bit more, but ASCS is applying for it. And if anything else, they're gonna provide a fight. On something that maybe SpaceX ultimately gets, but it is a bargaining chip. And so if they get it, then maybe they trade it away for areas where SpaceX has the upper hand on its international spectrum. TBD. But you can see this battle is heating up. ASTS is not laying over in any respect. They're striking for the jugular like a winner. And that's how you want to see this company punch. as a winner because if I'm right, then this becomes quite literally something that's right up there with the Mag 7, which I think is possible. You want a company that's acting like Mark Zuckerberg, like a total killer. And that's what I think we're seeing. You are seeing, aside from spectrum warfare, actual warfare. And so the government is really focused. Next article we have is a Space News article and it's Golden Dome is forcing the Pentagon to confront missile defense economics. It's tough. It's expensive to do. This goes to the whole thing of, can Japan put up its own sovereign constellation? Can Europe? I don't know. I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense. These are natural economies of scale assets. They're natural monopolies. So you got to then figure out how to get people the capacity they need with the assurances around the sovereignty of that capacity. But in the same way, the government has and is quickly learning how to leverage these commercial systems. Just like we talked about last week where the MilNet system magically disappeared, that was supposed to be a dedicated system, it just poof, gone. And it seems like it ties perfectly to that business being shared with commercial systems like AST SpaceMobile. That's what we're going to be seeing across the board is these multi-use systems. And it really is about, I think, the government leveraging the companies that can put the most weight into orbit. And that's where our vertically integrated production capacity becomes so important. Our ability to put 6 satellites out the door, maybe 12 according to Scott, per month is, I wouldn't say unprecedented because SpaceX has also created sort of a scaled satellite production factory, but ASTS is going to be a very strategic asset in terms of its ability to mass produce incredible amount of power generation and RF signal generation in orbit. And that's what's going to drive down the costs for use cases for the government, which is going to be all important. And this message is definitely being heard by those generals. ASTS is sponsoring a black-tie dinner for senior Army leadership Including, very importantly, the Golden Dome director Mike Gutling. So they're in the room. It's exactly where you want them to be. And all their partners are also right where they want to be. So AT&T got domed as well. AT&T is, quote, pleased to announce it was awarded a contract for Missile Defense Agency SHiELD program. Well, now. Who are they doing that with? I would take note that the LinkedIn profile, which was sloppily done on AI, shows a generic satellite. They should have fine-tuned it to have an ASTS bird, which would have then made us all go crazy and like their post a lot more. But you have this guy Kyle Mullen, who's AT&T business development lead for the US Space Force, announcing that they were also awarded something for the SHiELD program. It'll be interesting to see how these different prime versus subcontractor roles pan out in terms of who does what, what the economics are. It's all sort of like a big bowl of spaghetti to me at this point, and we'll see how it progresses presumably over the next year. And the focus though on these big opportunities is becoming more clear. So Blue Origin nukes its New Shepard program to accelerate and really focus on New Glenn, which it should. And we're a key part in that. But it's great to see Blue Origin really scaling up for the big boy stuff as opposed to shooting Katy Perry into space, which one could argue is not important in the strategic national interest of this country. And so all things come to an end, but New Glenn is coming to a Opposite event. It's coming to a big bright beginning, and why? It's the TAM. We talk about TAM all the time, but the TAM is big, and we have Deutsche Bank out this week highlighted by SPAC Bobby. Deutsche Bank and other analysts are now starting to realize the TAM for AST Space Mobile is much larger than they ever imagined, and the Deutsche Bank even says, "Quote, it might actually make sense for ASTS to pivot away from the primary broadband opportunity or price it higher." if there's very strong demand, just because they might have too many other things to do. So markets are waking up. The shorts are not. The shorts still think that this is the Yosemite hiking application, but they're gonna get run over on that very quickly. And last week we think, frankly thought that we were gonna have a big announcement because More news around Starlink and Apple was rehashed out of nowhere from Mario Nawal. And so, you know, it started to really feel like something was happening. And certainly on Friday when I saw the stock kind of rip in the first 30 minutes, it honestly started to look like Volkswagen to me the way it was trading. It was just bid without offer. It just felt like someone knew something. And then I guess everyone forgot it all at the exact same time and the stock price crashed.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: But whatever.
[00:48:57] Speaker C: They probably just flipped over and read the William Blair report that lowballed everything. And so they are forecasting $685 million of revenue in 2030. So whatever, room to upgrade, but maybe that's the thing that made people spill their coffee when they looked at that. They should have flipped the page Back to Deutsche Bank. And so Deutsche Bank is expecting a realistic TAM of 1.75 billion users globally for AST SpaceMobile. That's why, again, I think this could be a Mag 7 type company. It's just enormous reach and scalability, only really that's been seen by some of the household names we all talk about. And some of the household names we never talked about are some of these recently declassified satellite programs, which I think are really fascinating just from a historical perspective, just to understand. But to then just understand the types of technology innovations that were occurring 40 years ago and where we are today and just how important these things were for the government. The last link I had is this article on the NRO Jumpseat spy satellite. And it's, it's cool. And, you know, these things I don't think ever really got the heroes' praise that they deserve. Many of these satellites are pretty directly responsible for ending the Cold War. If you ever really study and read, read some of the books, I've read a book on the satellite program called Keyhole, not to be confused with like Treadstone. But they're fascinating things that really went a long way toward messing with the Russians. They show the type of tech that was available and how it was leveraged. And then you just ask yourself, what type of tech do the governments have now? And I think we've started to see some really early pictures of that with some of the enhancements in electronic warfare that we've seen in some of the most recent skirmishes or whatever you want to call them. And it just shows again why the Department of War is tweeting space superiority. These things, you know, it's really kind of the other silent service, are crucial to the national security. And it's a rapidly evolving landscape for which we believe that ASTS is dead smack in the middle to compete very effectively with and against the largest US primes. So a lot of things really adding up here when you look at the talent flow, the Really everything. It's all really pointing in one direction, which is why it's important again to make sure you understand what your own investment thesis is and what your own game plan is. And so Anpanman always says, you know, have a game plan. I don't have one. My game plan was just simply buy as much stock as I could and then hold on for dear life and manage my own mental decay. from all this volatility. I don't know what Ampin's man plan is, but I feel like I'm just gonna kind of wing it. But make sure you have your own plan. And so if the stock, you know, has a rough week, I'm just looking at where the market is. Looks like things have kind of rallied a little bit since I started, but NASDAQ's down 1.25%. So high beta stocks are, you know, gonna get smacked around. But just remember to take stock of what your thesis is and look at some charts of things that you may have already invested in previously, or you missed and regret. And look at those charts over time. I'm going to zoom out at some of the volatility that people had to endure for greatness. And then look at how trivialized a lot of these little mini storms were, how easily forgotten they are. Even big things like the shutdown of the world during COVID Great Financial Crisis. Like, show me a chart where you can spot where we used to care about Greek collective action bonds. Show me that on a chart of a true secular winner. You're not going to find it. Show me when China devalued the yuan on a chart when everyone was panicking back then, but show me how that is relevant now to anything that was ultimately a secular winner. So that's why it's so important to me to really understand what you own, know what you own. tagline. And we put out the weekly every week, all the people that contribute to really share the DD, put it in a common spot, and then talk for an hour about it to synthesize it so that when there's drawdowns, you're making a non-emotional, an unemotional choice versus just getting run over by the market. That's kind of the goal, to help people make the right decisions for themselves. Hopefully the right decision is to own the stock, but I obviously Can't guarantee that. It's the decision I've made, but I'm braced for volatility. So it's at this point, it's nothing really new. And if you're newer to the stock, make sure you all are also braced for volatility. The implied vol on the stock is 100, and the reason why it is there is because that's actually where it realizes the vol, which means buckle up, buddy, buttercup. So I'm going to end here. Thanks for joining, and I'm looking forward to another Good week of some cool due diligence and discoveries. Have a great night.
[00:54:30] Speaker B: Numbers so too good to be true. Will it work? We don't have a clue. Lilio waits, we will be there soon. Swinging for the stars, the Earth and Moon. A whisper through the static hiss. We love the risk. Yeah, we Fortunes rise, the sea traverses. We hold the line through the fear and bliss. 'Cause we're the Model Space. We, we love the risk. Tears of joy. From our first call, reaching life, connecting all hills and seas where no towers stand, connecting voices in forgotten lands. Each day feels like a bluebird's kiss. A journey to Leo Abyss. We love the risk. We love the risk! Blue burst forth, connect the world. Vast shores rise, as ships unfurl. We hold the line through the fear and bliss. Cause we're the model space. We, we love the risk. Ride the spectrum, chase the beam, never foolish enough. Hold, hold Holy baptism. We love the risk. We, we, we love the risk. Bluebird soar, connect the world. Foxhounds rise, and see jumpers. We hold the line through the fear and bliss, 'cause we the mob of space. We, we love the race. Chase the feeling, never foolish enough. Hold, hold, hold it in that time. We love the risk. Where we love the risk.
[00:58:26] Speaker C: 3, 2, 1.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: We love I love the risk.
[00:58:29] 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. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. 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 goal is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the NMOs. Listen.
[00:59:41] Speaker B: Mmm, waffles.