Kook's Weekly - September 29

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Okay, everyone. Sorry for the late start. We gotta figure out how to negotiate NFL schedule, especially for people on the East Coast. But I guess we're not gonna have overtime every time. Well, that was a pretty amazing game. So let's get into it. I think we're here for the AST Space Mobile Spaces, but I'm so tired. Honestly, it's like we're talking about open door. Totally fried. I just got off a flight from. New York, and now I'm back away from New York. But we had a big week last week. We started off with a really exciting court hearing where the Legato deal was confirmed. And now people are going to say, well, was it actually confirmed? And no, it was not. But the judge agreed to confirm it. And then that order, confirmation order, Actually came through today. Tanner posted it, and I saw while I was in the air. And so what does this mean? So the Legato deal, I think, is a seminal transaction for this company, and it's part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Legato couldn't pay its commitments as they came due. Legato owes Inmarsat money in order to use. the L-band spectrum in the U.S. It had a big payment coming up. It wasn't able to meet it. It filed for bankruptcy. As part of the bankruptcy, AST SpaceMobile is stepping into Ligado's obligations and it is advancing $520 million, which will be paid onward to Inmarsat. And then on a running basis, there'll be $80 million a year of lease payments for AST SpaceMobile to enjoy the benefit of 45 megahertz of mid-band spectrum, which is some juicy stuff. So in a bankruptcy, there's always the potential for fights. In this instance, it was actually a pretty smooth bankruptcy as far as things go. They basically had 100% of the stakeholders vote yes for the plan. In August, there was a little bit of drama. Inmarsat tried to write in a non-compete into the deal, which would Have meant that AST would have been prohibited from pursuing S-band spectrum outside of North America. There's no way AST SpaceMobile would have done that. They would, they would not have limited the scope of their system to the U.S. with respect to those spectrum bands, and Inmarsat had every reason to try to write this in. Uh, the court testimony was actually very revealing and there's what's called an adversary proceeding docket as part of the Legato docket. So basically think of that as like a side fight or like a side quest as part of the main quest. And that little side quest was actually very revealing because what was put into all the briefing documents was quite a lot of information that we hadn't necessarily seen before. But it's always very interesting to me to hear competitors talk about AST SpaceMobile in an honest way. And so in court where you're fighting for your life, Inmarsat is gonna be very honest and AST SpaceMobile is going to be very honest. And hearing the 2 legal teams fight really revealed what I think a lot of us already knew is that AST SpaceMobile is the disruptive juggernaut. that like a boulder barreling down on Indiana Jones is looking to smush and destroy all legacy players. And that is certainly how Inmarsat came across in these court hearings as a legacy player, just desperately trying to hold on, but seeing the boulder of AST SpaceMobile bearing down on it. So the good news is the bankruptcy did get confirmed. The judge agreed just to write in The contract, exactly the language that the parties had agreed to. I tweeted on this topic a couple of weeks ago and really just said, you know what, guys, this doesn't seem like a dispute we have to settle right now. Are you launching an international non-geostationary satellite system today? And the answer is no. Well, when AST goes and does that, let them fight it out later. And that was a good decision by the court. We talked about that. So anyway, we got confirmation. And so from here, what does that mean? It means the plan is done done. The only things left for the plan to go what's called effective is going to be the receipt of the FCC approval. So Legato and AST, and actually Inmarsat is compelled to positively support the application. These parties are going to submit a Application to the FCC for ASTS to use this L-band spectrum. Now I would imagine this gets filed fairly shortly. They've had all the time in the world to be preparing this application, and I'm sure that we have quite a few people on the space mob that are going to be looking around for this filing, and I'm quite excited to see it. That filing is going to go in front of Brendan Carr. I'm sure it will have a comment period and a counter. Comment period, and the timing of such approval is really anyone's guess. What's good is that we don't need it tomorrow because we're building our low-bound satellites initially, and the mid-band satellites will be built later. This goes a little bit contrary to what we thought about in terms of the the tail, the payload, the PLM payload launch, whatever it's called. That is appended to FM1, FM2, and the subsequent FMs. When I thought about it more today, I go back to maybe the PLM really just being extra solar power. Maybe there's some other payload on there, but I don't think it's L-band. That's kind of my current thinking, but it's really kind of not a big deal in terms of that. I just wanted to talk out loud. So then we have people like Kevin Mack, Say kind of out of the blue, you know, it's like the meme where it's like, no one, silence. Kevin Mack. Well, actually, you know, this last stock surge was just froth and everything's efficient. And so just go kill yourself because it's not worth it. And I'm being a little bit severe on Kevin Mack. I actually really like him and Value Is Counsel, but he is an easy target because he's a professor. And so he said that the Legado bump, quote unquote, was largely noise driven and that the market's efficient. What else did he say? Something else that just made my blood boil, basically to the effect of everything's priced in. So I don't agree with this and I think there's nuances to it. And so Kevin is saying that the market is aware of Legato and it's priced in. And so the confirmation hearing result should not have driven the stock price. What I disagree with on the first instance is that with AST SpaceMobile specifically, as Tut would say, it lives in a glass house like we've never seen before. And frankly, there was some uncertainty. And so thinking about in August with the Inmarsat battle, I really studied that hard. I spent the entire plane ride. I go back and forth to East Coast a lot. I spent the entire plane ride restudying that docket painfully. And I thought both sides had reasonable arguments on that. And if the judge had decided in favor of Inmarsat, boy, I don't know what AST would have done. It's very valuable spectrum, but this is all to say that until that gavel strikes, I think that there was going to be a risk element in the market's understanding of the Legado deal, and now you have a confirmed plan. So no matter what the odds were in the market, they were not going to be 100%, even though in my view they should have been in the high 90%. And so the confirmation or the— see, we didn't even get the confirmation where that's going to hit next week. The statement that you would get a confirmation order, when you think about it, that wasn't press released. That was, you know, a couple of us on the Space Mom dialing into the court hearing and tweeting it. I don't think that was widely disseminated. And so then you think about the distressed world, surely things like Reorg Research, I'm assuming that's still around, would have been blasting that around to the street that there was a successful confirmation hearing. But there's not even that many claimants of Legato. It's so tightly held. you know, among like 5 funds that I don't even know who would've been listening, let alone doing the work to really understand it. But even if you take Kevin Mack's most extreme view, he'd say, well, it's priced in. And you'd say, well, sure, even if you say the market is efficient, the market prices things in in gradients. And so I think Kevin Mack was kind of silly because if you take my view that the spectrum is worth at least $20 billion, Then in theory, if the deal had not been consummated, ASTS should have jumped to zero. Well, obviously that's not true. And the corollary is that just because the gavel struck, should the stock go up from, you know, whatever the undisturbed price is by an extra $50? Well, also no, because it's not, first of all, a totally fungible asset. Just because they won the deal doesn't mean that tomorrow they can flip Flip it around and sell it to someone else for $20 billion. That's actually the point. There was probably only one buyer of this asset because there's only one company with the technology to monetize it. So in that respect, then you start to go down this joint path dependency element where the value of Legato can only really be accrued to one party, and that's Space Mobile. And that one party still has a lot of if statements to flip as well. We need to get the satellites in the air. We need to. do all sorts of things to then monetize the spectrum. But this goes to my more simplistic view. So is Legato priced in the stock?
[00:10:52] Speaker A: No.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: There's a lot of unlocks remaining that will ultimately unlock what I believe is going to be far in excess of $50 per share. But the market, in my view, I vehemently disagree that the market has priced this in. Now, are there remaining risks and discount factors that would result In people being able to take 2 sides of this argument? Absolutely. But if you take sort of a path-dependent view of this will be successful, then the upside of this asset is not reflected in the stock. And so we could split hairs a little bit. You could say, well, Kook, you're really saying that the market is efficient because it's discounting things for appropriate risks. Yeah. I'm also taking the view that I know more than other people. And that my view of the risk is different from the markets. And as that resolves itself, I will get a return far in excess of the risk-adjusted return, blah, blah, blah. Who cares? This is why I'm not a professor. This is why I run a prop book that violates every single semblance of risk control because I'm thinking like a founder and just basically going balls along this thing and doing the work, but also praying. And this is what's fun about doing what I do is you wouldn't be able to invest like that if you worked at a hedge fund. You'd have to be thinking about all these little things like, oh, is FMO going to ship next week? You know, what's my, you know, forget what the Citadel terminology, the monetizable volatility, the, as someone that knows their risk models pretty well, I'm blanking on it because it's just not how I'm going to think in this instance. But it's a fascinating topic about is the market efficient and can you see the evolution of a company versus the static picture of a company? And I think that's where I've really grown as an investor from the age of 22 when I was kind of an idiot, a smart idiot, then to today where I think I'm a dumb smart guy. And I think there's a really big difference of kind of embracing being dumb, but but that itself is a way of being really smart, is I'm taking a bet that there's going to be a lot of evolution to this company versus what you see today. I think that Legado is a great example of that. You have a company that's clearly being aggressive on spectrum holding strategies. What will they buy tomorrow? I don't know. Will they buy something tomorrow? Yeah. So there's some value in this company as a platform company. Famous last words. When people start talking about platform companies, I go right back to Ackman talking about Valiant Pharmaceutical. That was like a, you know, when people start talking about AST SpaceMobile as the global spectrum consolidating platform and every person on Wall Street loves this thing and the stock is $750, maybe it's time to move on. But I think we have a long way till that mentality comes. But you can see the footprints of what Is to come. So, for example, the ITU rights—those closed this week as well. The trap is set. So, when taking into context the dispute in Legato case of Inmarsat versus Legato versus AST Space Mobile about whether or not AST is prohibited from pursuing S-band rights outside of the U.S., and ASTS is adamant that they are not prohibited because again, why in the world would they sign that? This ITU prioritization rights show their hand. What is, what do they get from the ITU rights? They don't get spectrum, but they get a priority stance with the UN to not have to coordinate with people, but in fact, have other people coordinate with them. And what's so scary for Inmarsat, and this is actually laid bare in the bankruptcies. Inmarsat has a lot of spectrum, but it's used for narrowband applications. And so think like ships. A lot of ships will have a narrowband satellite system to do basic stuff. I know a lot of ship owners, ironically, and so I've talked to them about this and are very unhappy with these Inmarsat systems. They would actually really like to have AST SpaceMobile because a big part of keeping a happy crew is having them have access to their phones so they can talk to their kids. Not surprisingly. And so Inmarsat knows that they're not utilizing their spectrum. And so AST SpaceMobile can come in and with their priority rights show that maybe they're not going to have the same priority as Inmarsat, but they're also not going to interfere with Inmarsat. And so they'll be able to coordinate around Inmarsat and therefore get access to spectrum and monetize it. This is where the AST Space Mobile Spectrum Holding Company strategy starts to take form in the years to come. And this could be worth, to quote the great Abel, this could be worth a price no one can afford, which is to say it could be worth a lot. And I get really excited about it. This is a little bit more distant. And so this is sort of the Abel becoming, you know, an individual who can be worth $100 billion type story. this is too far out for me to worry about, but I do like the fact that this upside is now existing for us because you always want to have someone that's quote unquote next in the trade. Let's say for some reason my wife hijacks my account and forces liquidation of my stock at some point. Well, it's very important that someone buying the stock from her at $300 believes that it's worth $600. The story cannot end at $300, otherwise it will never get there. the strategy they're undertaking right now starts to unlock a type of upside that is uncapped and far beyond the upside we could have imagined 4 years ago, or at least that I imagined 4 years ago. And then we have another tweet by, I think this was Socrates. It was an interesting tweet because it really struck home for me because I also think this is what's going to happen. And so he tweeted just kind of out of the blue, ASTS and Amazon Kuiper are teaming up. AST brings L-band plus carrier integrations. Kuiper brings Ka-band broadband and AWS Edge, and Blue Origin provides the launch. Okay, well, this didn't happen, but, uh, which is an important thing to clarify up front. It's like people that are having a positive heart attack are thinking, wait, what? Amazon just teamed up with AST SpaceMobile? Not yet. But when you think about it, it, it really is a brilliant combination and would answer the question of, quote, congratulations on what? So AST SpaceMobile lacks the go-to-market channels for fixed broadband. That would be tough. They could do it through AT&T and Verizon, which would make sense because it would be sort of in the triple play bucket. But Amazon is going to have a great go-to-market for its products with its, obviously it's a great D2C distributor and they're going to have Kuiper. And so they're going to be able to put a lot of pressure on Starlink, but also they need to get somewhere fast because Starlink already exists. And so you can start to see potential tieups. Now, if I overthink it, I could start to say, well, that starts to be maybe in conflict with The MNO relationships, because I'm not sure if AT&T wants to see AST partner with Kuiper, because does that start to impinge on fiber? I don't know. But at the end of the day, you can really see a lot of reasons why Abel and Jeff Bezos have a lot to talk about. Blue Origin specifically needs a lot of cargoes to underwrite its rockets, and that's the most obvious combination. that I could see, because you can start to very quickly synthetically recreate SpaceX, and that's a valuable thing. So just always have that out there when you're thinking about, you know, what sort of strategic tieups could occur. Are they interesting? Is there latent value in your investment that could be unlocked and be very obvious in hindsight? You want to be long those things that are strategically valuable. And it's, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see where AST in a heartbeat can be sort of a like, oh, duh, that was obvious type thing. And I think it's strategic to the world's most valuable companies. There was a chat we were having earlier today about OpenAI should just buy AST or someone made a comment on Reddit or X. I can't remember. Yeah, they should. They need to build distributed AI around the world. Space mobile is the way to do it. Another interesting comment someone made now that I'm thinking about it is Amazon has wanted to deploy drones forever for delivery. It makes all the sense in the world. I remember a long time ago, this is a long time ago, 10 years ago, actually, one of my friends worked at Amazon and he said, well, what's your address? I gave it to him and he delivered something to me just immediately. And I asked him, I was like, how in the world did you do that? And he said, well, I just deployed our drone. And so he was working on this. This was over 10 years ago at this point in New York City. And, and was instantly able to deliver something. It was just a beta test, just showing it could work. But the issue with that is Amazon needs to have positive control of their drones at all times. And the existing cellular network doesn't allow for that. And so you could see the immense interest in having a broadband network like AST SpaceMobile for drone operations. I'm assuming this, this same is going to be true for humanoids and certainly all the autonomous applications people are thinking of. Every time I look at updates in the defense industry with what people are trying to do, it comes down to being able to have tracking and command and control of your assets. ASTS SpaceMobile is centered to that. So Long way to say it, that was a random speculative tweet by someone that had no bearing in reality, but it could be good. So then we also, let's do a quick regulatory check-in. Kevin's doing a really nice job of just giving us some updates from time to time, like little postings of, hey, remember this? And so we have the SES application, which is our service links. So that's actually the connection between the satellite and your phone, which is important. That was accepted. For review, um, or not accepted for review. That was accepted for filing on September 5th. The comments are due next week, October 6th, and then everything must be wrapped up by October 23rd. So this is something that is a very important filing and we're starting to get into the, you know, the meat, the meat of it in terms of the docket activity. And I'm hopeful. That this has timely approval this year. I think this could be certainly a big event for the MNOs. This provides the last link because we have the backhaul approved for the next 20 satellites. And then this will be the front haul and really be the culmination of frankly an unbelievable turn of events from the regulatory risk perspective. If you remember when ASTOS was born, the rules for its service did not exist. And many bearers who again, look at a static picture and not a dynamic picture of where things will go said, well, this will be dead on arrival. There are no rules to accommodate it. And then they literally wrote the rules for ASD Space Mobile. And now we're having our application against those rules, which is exciting. And I have every confidence that they'll be approved. So then let's move a little bit to just what's going on in the world. Russia is really an obnoxious military power, as it turns out. And what we have just in the news all of the time is just more and more space defense spending because of Russia. And so Germany is upping their spending to €35 billion. But also this week, the US deployed its AWACS, which are mobile radar airplanes. And that's really just to detect stuff from Russia. And so this really just underscores the use cases for non-communication applications. We heard Scott this week talk about this. He said that there are 10 government programs that he feels there's a very good fit, including communications and non-communications. And they're so excited about this that they're talking about their capacity of 6 satellites per month, not only being tied up through ongoing buildout for government work, far beyond what's going to be needed for the maintenance replenishment of their satellites, but in fact, laying the groundwork for the capacity to build 10 to 12 satellites per month to meet government need. Whoa. What is the size of our government business going to be? Inquiring minds would like to know. So, and then we have Golden Dome. I think it's happening. So Scott, in that same presentation, which was with B. Riley, just openly talks about Golden Dome and about how they're really well suited for it. And then meanwhile, we have AST. having job listings that look very specific for Golden Dome. And so when you run these job qualifications through ChatGPT, just to check, just say, what does this look like? I tried to, I ran it specifically, hey, is this a Golden Dome one? And then I ran it specifically for just like, what is this without leading it? Granted, I know that OpenAI has some memory, so it would know where I'm going with this, but But AI sees, sees this very clearly. And some other experts that kind of responded in the comments noted some of the clearances and things like that are not readily handed out by the U.S. government. So you're not hiring for these roles with people with these clearances unless you already have a stated need for them. So we know, and it really should be the least controversial thing I say on any Spaces, we know that ASV Space Mobile is very deep with the U.S. military. And we're just getting hit with more and more facts that show that that's accelerating and the general scale of that. On a related note, FirstNet. So there's a thought, I don't want to dwell on this next comment, but there is a thought that the FirstNet budget closes on the 30th of September. So they have a Q3 annual filing. And one would think that they need to commit their budget. I don't know. I hope, but hope isn't a strategy. But meanwhile, we have Vodafone starting to offer services in a FirstNet style in Europe. And it's very exciting because the success that AST has had on a regulatory front with Band 14, which is the FirstNet spectrum, and then what we believe is going to be incredible uptake of FirstNet use of space mobile that should be replicated around the world. And so we've had some early success with Singapore, I believe. And then Vodafone is recreating the same thing in Europe, which is very exciting because it's just more baseload demand we're going to have against our network, which isn't always tying up usage, but should be getting very premium ARPUs and potentially capacity payments. So just Increased visibility on how we're going to monetize our network. And again, as Scott reminded us in his chat last week, this is a company that knows how to generate revenue. They are not science-only people. They're very commercial, and that's been pretty evident from the get-go and very important for us. We don't want an R&D experiment. We want technology that is readily monetizable. with a sales team that knows how to monetize. And it's nice to see them consistently reminding us of this. So let's quickly take a little walk down GPS lane. I was pointed in the direction of this company NextNav this week by Tanner, who noticed that the backer of NextNav, which was a SPAC, was also a backer of the company we bought Our IT prioritization rights, so call this an interesting coinkydink. And so NextNav has spectrum. I believe it's 10 by 10 megahertz. Might have been 10 by 15. And so they have this spectrum, and what they're trying to do is partner with MNOs and then use a sliver of that spectrum to provide backup PNT services. So again, PNT is GPS. So it's interesting to go through the NextNav presentation. This company's worth $2 billion and they're going through the case of what providing a GPS complement service is, and they believe it's a $15 billion market. Now, I don't, I don't know who the payer is of that. It's an interesting question and time will tell, but I think what we know is that the military is certainly a capacity payment payer of this. You could see a lot of federal agencies wanting to pay to have this service, FAA obviously being one, FirstNet arguably being another. And it's an interesting market. It should be very easy for us to enter. If people remember, AST SpaceMobile is actually very active in the PNT docket where the FCC is soliciting input and ideas on how to address This incredible vulnerability that the U.S. has, where we're reliant on the GPS system, which is vulnerable to jamming and spoofing these sorts of things, which we've seen in real time the consequence of because of Russia. And we ourselves weaponize this when launching attacks, for example, on Iran. We destroy their ability to track things. And so this is very much a. Dynamic part of the market, and ASTS is definitely in the middle of it. Not a hypothetical statement. There is a docket where they explain to the FCC how their technology can be used, and we've had some other people post some of the patents that they've filed, which show how they can create a jam-proof and spoof-proof system as well. So just putting that there, if people wanted to get a little bit smarter on the PNT opportunity. If nothing else, so that you're not surprised by it when, in my belief, not if, when it hits for ST SpaceMobile, the right response will be not, oh, I should go out and buy the stock today because of the PNT opportunity. If that's what's driving your incremental decision, then that is peculiar. But when they get a deal for it, the takeaway should be, wow, this TAM is really big. Something with an acronym that probably 1 out of 1,000 people at most actually understand is worth X hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And wow, if that application is worth so much and I haven't even heard of it, and that's only one of 10 things they're doing for the government alone, hmm, maybe these LEO 5G systems are pretty dynamic and pretty cool. That should be your takeaway. And one of those things where you go, well, if I'm right on this, I could have a Palantir-type multiple because the growth is so open-ended. That's the thing where you could avoid some pain for yourself as you start to get right on the thesis, but then dramatically underestimate how far and with what magnitude the market is willing to look at that opportunity in the future. Kind of store that little concept in the back of your mind for later. So then we have Commercial Service at some point being rolled out. And what's funny is listening to Scott talk, you just almost forget, oh yeah, we're going to actually have a solution to solve for dead spots. It's funny in a way how these government opportunities have surged to the forefront and are of such high magnitude that the commercial story is not the initial story. It's going to be, I think, somewhat stunning to people When they see the magnitude of these government programs come in. But Scott did confirm last week that there's 100 people at AT&T working on this project. There's 100 people at Vodafone working on this project, and there's 100 people at Verizon working on this project. So sometimes there can be some doubt. Did Verizon bail? There's FUDsters who come in all, all over the place. Not only is there an FCC application with the Verizon spectrum, But Verizon has 100 people working on it. The CEO in July said they have a deal. I bet my life they have a deal. And so that DA is coming. What ultimately is holding it up, I don't know. I suspected that there are some conditions precedent related to either the Block 2 satellites going up or the SCS approval, but that might not be true. They might literally just be slow. And we'll find out, but the commercial segment is going to be the second act of AST SpaceMobile. The government story will come from. We also had Cramer, thank God, say that our stock sucks. I was really worried for a moment. It looked like he actually said something positive about AST SpaceMobile. And I'm so superstitious that that actually would have gotten into my head. But then he came out promptly and started bashing it. So close call, guys. Close call. And then here's the tweet by Kevin about markets being efficient. I don't know if I have anything more to say on this topic other than, you know, he just says amateurs are making mistakes because we assume things aren't priced in. I don't know. I mean, if he were just a professor, I'd just chalk it up to him being a professor, but he actually runs a hedge fund. So I don't really know who you should check on this, but I do think that the market doesn't do a great job of understanding knock-on effects. You just ask yourself, how many people in the world spend this many hours of their life thinking about this one stock? Just, there's not that many people that do that. My friends that are big institutional portfolio managers, they have like 40 names. They know their names well, but this $20 billion company's not even that big. Like they don't really cover it and it's so volatile that they can't really size it. And so they kind of know it at most. They'll do a call and they'll call Verizon investor relations and be like, hey, so what do you think about this? They're like, oh yeah, we're working with them, but you know, it's backup because our network is amazing. Because if we said anything otherwise, you'd short Verizon stock on God forbid. And so I can guarantee you that the population of people that really understand SpaceMobile, it's like the Hennessy guys know it. And then you have some, you know, kind of the more hardcore, smaller fund managers like Ryan O'Connor. Those guys will know it. But then I don't know how deep that bench is behind that. You know, I knew it really well, but I don't set the price. I've been sitting on my stock position forever. And so I've just tucked those shares away. And I know a lot of people on this call kind of whip the stock around, but you're also not that big either. And so I don't know, I just don't think that people really understand, for example, Legato. I don't think people understand the IT rights. I don't think people understand Golden Dome in depth. I think at this point maybe there's an understanding that they might be involved with it, but we'll see. I don't think the market's efficient, but again, we'll see. So another thing the market's not going to get right is talent density. And so the most important thing I've seen as dispositive of good is when smart people go to companies. And so I was actually meeting with a friend a couple of days ago who is an operator, which means has a real job, works as a software engineer, and we were just talking about ideas. I was giving him some ideas of things I've seen of companies that maybe he should go work for because I think they're going up. And he made the point, what he looks for is talent density at companies, which is absolutely what you should look for. And it's funny, a lot of investors don't think like that because you're not in the company building business. You know, a lot of people are looking at TA and charts and things like that. And that's what makes a market. That's also what makes an inefficient market. But there this week, for whatever reason, the hiring of J.R. Wilson surfaced again. And this had happened a while ago, but it was making the rounds again. It's just worth bearing when you're starting to have some of the most senior executives at AT&T who are responsible for their tower business leaving AT&T to go to AST SpaceMobile. Ask yourself why. What are these people seeing where they're YOLOing their life? What are they seeing? I know what they're seeing, but it is good to see that they see that too. And good people want to usually work with good people. And so if you have an inflow of talented execs, that just begets more talented execs wanting to go. And I think Good investors understand that companies that can attract great talent become dynamic and create more future opportunity for profitable growth and product innovation, which are things that are not generally reflected in a stock price. Sometimes they can be reflected over time in a premium multiple because a pattern of doing amazing things as a result of really good earnings and cash flow and growth. But sometimes I don't know if people really unpack why the growth and profitability happens, and it's usually because of talent density. On a related talent density note, we have Jennifer. And so Jennifer was at a panel. She's our Spectrum lady. She had been EchoStar, Jennifer Manor, and she just wrote a book. I was looking for it on Amazon. Looks like you can only buy it off some UK website, but she is the guru on our spectrum strategy, which I think is going to be an incredible creator of value over the years that right now will be a hidden asset, but will ultimately be something people come to appreciate when they go, why is this company doing so well? Why are MNOs giving SpaceMobile such amazing profit shares and things like that? It will be because of the spectrum strategy that the company is pursuing. pursuing, which is bringing so much more to the table than we would've thought just a couple years ago. So we also have this last tweet, second to last, is just called Legato Overview, and it's just a nice little ChatGPT summary that Jonathan Cooper put out and gives some valuation estimates. I always spend the plane ride today just tightening up my Legato work, and I'll post that at some point this week. I was doing some just cleanup of the deal so people have it. Also the cleanup of the price we paid, just so I can allay some confusion when people are trying to compare SpaceX versus what ASTS paid for roughly similar spectrum. One could say that the AST SpaceMobile spectrum is better, but SpaceX got slightly more of it. And I think it's important to start to think through some of the math. And you could see what AST paid and the price involves a royalty. So it's a little bit of a codependent price. If successful, the price AST pays ultimately will be higher, but hey, you know, the upside wouldn't have been available. And then what I also thought about is just trying to put some numbers on what the capacity of Legato is worth. And so looking at the total data throughput, this is just the way I've tackled this problem in the past, rightly or wrongly. But I went through and looked at the spectral efficiency, the spectrum reuse utilization, how many satellites you're going to have deployed on it to get to the amount of data per year you'd be pumping through a logado spectrum, put a price on that data to get to some general revenue numbers, which are very hypothetical. But I'll put that out at some point. I might just check with Katzi to see if he sees anything I might want to adjust on that. But Legado is going to be a really big deal. And next week we should start the week off with a confirmation order that is signed from the judge. We also have New Glenn. It's getting up close and personal. And so some cool videos of New Glenn coming out. That rocket looks beautiful. They have a lot of upper stages complete. And I think we're going to be getting a launch in October of that. I do not believe ASTS SpaceMobile is on it. But on that note, there was a very interesting comment that Scott made at his B. Riley presentation. The analyst said, was really trying to lead him into saying that the launch on F— for FM1 would be sort of in November to January as per the ISRO comments we'd seen. Scott really did an interesting kind of forensic deflection where he didn't Really answer the question, but sort of gave a smiling answer of we might, or we will be happy with our result. Really listening to these comments a couple of times led me to believe the satellite might've already shipped. And so we will know that, or we will not know that. But I think the way Scott spoke about it, which was a very peculiar way. And that's what's great about hearing these fireside chats is people don't have the time to really think through their response. You start to get some involuntary limbic responses in terms of how people answer things. And the way he spoke was curious and almost like he knew something other people didn't, which, God, I hope he does. He's president of the company, but in that instance, it certainly seemed to indicate that this might be sooner than we think. So I'm cautious, cautiously optimistic, potentially waking up tomorrow for a PR that FM1 has flown the coop. He said something, I'll tell you exactly what he said. He said FM1 will quote officially ship or people will be relieved when it officially ships. And so I think that kind of allays a lot of the confusion of when they tweeted this out in August, it was ready to ship, but the definition of official is pretty obvious, you know, leaving the facility. And again, I really think he was giving people quite a tell on this call last week. And overall, the call was very positive in terms of another comment. like a normal company, they actually had to close out their books this quarter for revenue. I will be very excited if they actually start to put up GAAP revenue. They have the guidance out there, the run rate. He did say that they expected to be very quickly at a billion-dollar run rate into 2026 with a lot of that coming from government. But I think the market will react very positively if we actually see this company get out there with $75 to $150 million GAAP revenue run rate, and not just from the ground station, base station sales, but actually using Block 1. But we'll find out soon enough. So thanks for everyone for joining me. I think we'll just keep doing this. Well, I'll push the Spaces until the end of whatever football game is going on so that I can accommodate everyone, even though it means a little bit later. I think this result for me means I'm not surfing tomorrow. We're getting some, some hurricane effect down here. So the surf is huge, but after having been outta the water for a week and being super tired, probably the combination of being outta the water for a while, weak, tired, and then going in and getting pummeled by some hurricane waves is probably a recipe for drowning. So everything happens for a reason. I will end it here and thank you very much for joining and look forward to seeing some great research over the next week. So I have more things to talk about. Adios.
[00:44:13] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. 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 broadband connectivity directly from space to the Earth. Every day is my show. 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 MMOs.
[00:45:13] Speaker B: Listen. Mmm, waffles.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Mmm, waffles.