Kook's Weekly - August 18

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to AST Space Mobile Podcast. Thanks for joining. Sorry for the ad hoc timing. I'm on vacation, and so that gets in the way of some time zones. So I do have some sympathy for the East Coast people now that I realize that my normal time is so late. But then the other issue I had is the hotel I'm in doesn't have a business center, to my surprise. And so trying to find a place to do the podcast because, uh, I don't think my wife was thrilled about me doing this while my children are trying to sleep. So she had the genius idea for me just to go sit in my rental car, which is where I am right now. So I'm trying to figure out how to get my hotspot to work so that I can actually see the weekly. And it looks like I'm in business. So anyway, so everyone has the visual. I'm sitting in a Volvo in a cold parking lot right now. While my family is watching Amazon Prime. But that's my dedication to the mob, because you know what happens when you go against the mob? You die. And I know that. I know Corey will come after me. I know he'll catch me and I'll have to sleep with one eye the rest of my life. So there will be a weekly. So let's start off with what happened last week, just so that no one comes after me for violating mob rules. The first thing is we obviously had an earnings call and we won't rehash that because I know that there were the calls for calls. And Panman beat me to it because he's a competitive MFer and he gave a very serious call, which just let me then be the clown that I am, 'cause I knew he actually covered the real business. But I just wanna bring everyone's attention again to what I thought was the real standout of the call, which is really more visibility on the production and the launch schedule, or really, dare I say launch, haha, wouldn't that be a funny concept? The ready-to-ship schedule. Which is a smarter way of disclosing it in my view, because ready to ship is something that is really in the control of AST, whereas launching, as we find out, can have many chefs in the kitchen. And what we really care about, we obviously care about launching, but what we also, what we really care about as investors is AST's ability to control its destiny and ramp its operating execution. That's ultimately what matters because the launch will come. Some of these slots shift around and it's annoying, but ultimately we had to prove out the technology. We had to finance the company and we had to clear all the regulatory hurdles, which we're in the process of doing. You have to prove out a commercial model and commercial partnerships, and then you ultimately have to deliver and build this stuff at scale. Not build 1, not build 5, build 50 to 60 at a minimum. But obviously if you get to 50 or 60, you're going to build. A couple hundred. And so this schedule is very interesting because it shows where they are in terms of the microns completed. Let me just turn my car on real quick and open my windows because I'm realizing I'm running out of oxygen. I had a coop die. Give him his spaces. It'd be a noble end to a noble life, but now I've got the window open. So we've got the schedule for microns for phased arrays completed. It doesn't say satellites completed, you know, so the bears picked up on that, but it's really showing some of the big critical path items, which are the microns, and it's a good unit of measure. And it shows that we're already good through launch number 4. Now we think that launch 1 is ISRO, launch 2 I think is New Glenn, but could be SpaceX. And these things could actually then be flipped around as well, that we've been debating this all day. There's a working group we have and thinking about whether it's SpaceX, ISRO, or if we're on New Glenn 2, Because the Escapade cargo isn't ready, which means that they could have some room for us. But then launch 3 and launch number 4 are almost certainly Falcon 9s, which are going to take 3. And so that means they already have 8 units ready to go, 8 satellites ready to go, or visibility ready to go. And it sets up for a really interesting year because in my view, the first 2 launches are going to be kind of sloppy in terms of the timing, as we're all finding out. That other than just kind of space mob neurotics, which I'm a key offender in said crime, what ultimately really is going to matter for real investors is launch 3 and 4, because once we're showing that we're putting up 3+ birds at a clip, which really means that we're producing at that rate, then the risk in the market of us not hitting our business plan is going to go basically to zero. 'Cause if you're starting to get ready for 6 satellites getting ready to ship in November, then you know that the whole constellation will come together. The money's already there, things are good. So that first slide's very important and it really sets the tone for this being a very de-risked investment by year end. It's already a very de-risked investment, but really on that path to dramatic revenue ramp. So very exciting. For anyone that missed the other details of the earnings calls or the calls about earnings calls, I have those all linked out. A lot of great work was done. I won't recap it all because we already did our earnings call, earnings call call, that is. But now let's skip to what I'll call Reformed Trader's Maxim. So for those of you who don't know, Reformed Trader is a friend of mine in terms of internet pen pal, but he's a very good trader, which I'm not, and has reformed himself to actually become an AST investor. So it shows we can really change the stripes on any tiger. But it's interesting, it's like from his mentality, and one reason I really like to talk to him and read his stuff is he's coming at this from a very different perspective than I do. And to him, and I really think he's right, is that with the company for the first time really implying that they're done with the ATM, which I wouldn't have otherwise come to that conclusion, but they did not drop an ATM announcement on their earnings call. And they were very clear about feeling good about how much cash they had on the balance sheet, and then very clear that they expected the next money to be coming from government and commercial opportunities. That when you look at Reform's analysis, it shows just how the stock will kind of trade sloppy after ATM filings and then notes offerings and then rip. And we have this pattern, and we're right now at the trough of what is usually the post-offering pattern. which I think some people call this a bull flag, and we're right there. And so these TA guys are really glomming onto this chart dynamic we have. But when you overlay the fundamentals, as Reformed Trader did, you can see why these guys are really lining up for the kill to the upside, to be clear. And that's good to know. I'm obviously a long-term investor, but I do deeply care about the short term, and I'm very excited about what could be really our actual pre-launch rally as we're now toward the middle Coming to the end of August, and we know that we're gonna have a ready-to-ship on FM1 pretty soon. And I think the market will be really relieved when that happens. And so when we look for external confirmation of these things, it's worth noting in this next tweet where I titled it AT&T confirms it's quick, AT&T confirms it's evolving quickly. Here's a quote. We'll be making announcements in the near future on timing and what those services look like. End quote. He shared, quote, it is going to evolve quickly in support of more and more services. Now AT&T is saying something that really mirrors what Abel said on the call. One is that the jump from continuous service from intermittent service is fast. That's interesting. But also just the timing of the intermittent service, which is coming. This also pairs nicely with the rumor I heard that AT&T is going to be launching a really big media blitz in the fall, which is really around the corner. Which would also tie into really the defining of Space Mobile as a differentiator into the Black Friday selling season when people are upgrading their phones. Like, what is that selling message that's gonna get people to go into a Best Buy, go to an AT&T store, go to an Apple Store to be excited about their phone, but also more importantly from AT&T's perspective, their carrier. And so it really does seem like things are lining up. Another form of confirmation we have is the deployment of the gateways. Just looking at the comments that I see, Corey posted some ridiculous picture of a guy outside of a Best Western. God help us. And so this rapid ordering of these QV ground gateways, as Scott has said over and over again, is really the leading indicator of where the puck is going to hit the net. So Ganner, as always, really incredible at being on top of details, found this really great, what was it, an order sell-side report, just quoting that AST had ordered $20 million worth of gateways. And then those get sold onward by ASTS to the MNOs for systems integration, which is a source of revenue bookings as of this quarter, which will soon be converted into revenue. realized on the P&L in the quarters to come. So this Q3 and Q4, but most importantly, it's just showing that people are really getting their act together to put the infrastructure in place for the service to go live. This is why I say, I say a lot of things. I try to be somewhat serious in the important things, but when I, when you guys see me tweeting in general, you should move on with your life. But when you see me tweeting, you dig a little bit deeper and you see me saying things are inevitable. That's really how I feel. This sense of inevitability of whatever Marvel thing that was, the, I don't know, when the guy snaps his finger and the whole world blows up, you know, it's inevitable. The AST inevitability, I think, is going to be a really important concept. And so wherever the stock is going, let's say $100 or something, I think we could be pleasantly surprised. There could be this big unlock, which is another concept I talked about, frankly, in what seemed like in vain, what was now years ago. But I would always say that there was going to be these valuation unlocks, and it was very hard along the way. And I took a lot of heat and public pillorying for always looking for unlocks that were evasive. But the unlocks that we're about to hit, I think, are definitive. And so FM1, FM2 out the door, Which, whatever, get those things outta here. They've caused me a lot of brain damage. But really getting toward the FM3 to FM8, which are the first kind of bulk shipments, that's when this is past the point of inevitability, 'cause I think we're already inevitable. And then these ground stations locked in, the first revenues, these are the things when the market I think is gonna blow past any sort of near-term detail mucking. just like what we do all day, as Kevin Mack says, you know, figuring out if there's been a punctuation change in an FCC filing, which is in fact exactly what we do. We're going to get run over by just a wall of money when the inevitability is accepted by the market. And I think there will be these lists when analysts like this Shaye Balleur guy will put out these lists of like, oh hey, here are the monopolies in the world. ASML, I think next year it's going to become a fait accompli that ASTS is one of those monopolies. And that's the title of my DD report that I put out. I don't wanna call it a report, my DD notes that I put out last year where I said, this is the next telecom monopoly. And I, I really believe it. And so then we have things that could be coming actually pretty soon. And so under the tweet that's titled Whoop, There It Is, which dates me, but it's a great song, you have Google and people have noted that ASTS is Google's single largest public shareholding, which I believe to be true. I didn't check it independently, but you have Katsy figuring out that the Google Pixel is gonna support the Ligado L bands. Now, is Is that a surprise? No, it shouldn't be because in the Legato docs themselves, there's a specific revenue share trigger based on Google incorporating Legato LBANs. We had this side letter in this partnership with Google and everyone scratched their heads. Well, why do they have to have a partnership with Google if this works with any device? Well, the answer is to make it really work with any device, but also make it a more flexible pronoun because ASTS's pronouns are low band, mid band, L band. It identifies in lots of different bands. It in fact identifies in some bands that phones don't yet recognize. That's how progressive ASTS is. And so with Google starting to integrate these other spectrum bands, it's going to differentiate Google's product, which is very important to Google, but it also lights up the value of our spectrum. Whoop, there it is. We're ready to go. Exciting stuff. Now, some of you might be asking, what about Apple? And I throw back the same question to you. What about Apple? I think it's inevitable. Now, is Apple going to become a shareholder in ASTS? I don't know. I really hope so. Oh my God, could you imagine the white flash at 3 in the morning that will be the Apple A-bomb to hit the shorts? I can only think of a moment so beautiful to see the final end of the shorts. But what almost definitively will happen is Apple will incorporate the L-band into their phones at the request of AT&T and Verizon. That I'm willing to bet a kidney on and really not feel like I'm taking a lot of kidney risk. So back to the concept of inevitability. The long-onlys are responding as we would expect them to respond. And so as @Melnick45, Bossman45, I don't know why the difference between the @s and the handle. I was so silly that I'm just @TheKookReport and then my handle is The Kook Report. Maybe I missed something. when I was creating my online identity. But Bossman45 is adopting some terminology that you might've heard from me before of the terminal share count might not be far off. And what he, which is of course the point where the dilution really goes to a very modest amount, really through shareholder grants or share grants to employees and things like that, as opposed to massive capital raises. That's the concept of the terminal share count. My bogey for those playing at home has been 400 million shares. We're at like 383 on my count for fully diluted right now. So, you know, that's almost a billion dollars of extra capital that could come in through the equity before you'd hit my terminal share count assumption. But he's making the point that the setup is incredible because right as we're really close to the terminal share count, which is really the end of the, you know, quote unquote dilution boogeyman, and you have Wall Street continuing to really gobble up the shares. The setup is great. And when I just look at this holders list too, I see that Vanguard has taken the proper stake, but I'm seeing guys like Fidelity that have like another 10% of the company to go. So as we prove out the operating execution, I really don't think long-onlys are going to care about the price because you really have to, and this is something I hope to get better at in my life, is you really just have to identify the big secular trends and then you have to figure out who the market share winners are going to be. And then you need to put some blackout goggles on so that you don't confuse anything and just buy. That's how the Ron Barons make money. That's how the entrepreneurs make money. And that's why I think as the inevitability becomes more recognized that this is the next, well, this is the global telecom monopoly, I think that you're going to have that long-only share count, which is already really going in the right direction, is going to go higher. In a big way, and that's going to reduce volatility of the shares, create higher floors, and really just soak up the float. So it's very exciting. So when we want to put the exciting thing in context, we have Redrum showing us a really incredible graphic of just what's happening here. And so what does a Block 2 satellite look like on an NBA court? It looks like the refs would be really upset Because you would definitely be stopping play of the game. These are big, they take up the whole court. And so this is one of the key innovations of this company is flying by far the largest commercial phased array satellites ever built. That allows for a lot of interesting technological innovations, such as a lot of antennae, which creates a lot of waves and waveforms, which themselves create very directed and powerful beams, which create magic. And so the next slide is why size matters. And just again, the simple answer is more waves, more powerful waves, and those waves create directed beams. It's all about resonance and on-resonance to do what you want with the beam. And that's where we have this nice tweet by Inneralia51. We're just showing again the scale difference between what ASTS is doing and what Starlink is doing. And then importantly, it works. So I don't know why all these bears from the outside think that they're able to armchair quarterback something this complex without information. It always is kind of laughable to me. And Pan Man and I would always joke where we'd see some tweet from consultants and then we're like, oh, I bet Abel's sitting there in his office and he is like, oh, damn it, I didn't think about that. The satellite goes into the sun and then on the dark side of the earth, so it's going to get hot and then cold. Oh, if only I had thought about that. It's like, guys, when you have 400 PhDs, they, they like read the chapter around heat dissipation. It's not like Abel's sitting there and he's like, oh man, if only I had hired Tim Ferrar, my satellite wouldn't have broken up in orbit. Oh, it didn't break up in orbit despite Tim thinking that. Why? Because it works. And so then this next thing, which I always found to be just the height of being an idiot. Is this attempt to kill ASTS on a math equation around how many satellites are required for continuous coverage. It's like, all right, well, if it's not 60, maybe it's 70. Who cares? Like, the economics are so awesome, it just doesn't really matter. Then as it turns out, you know, some of these guys that don't have an axe to grind will run these simulations and figure it out, take back feedback. Aha, that's called the— when you're doing it from the outside with bad information, It's really hard to get it perfectly right. And then when people actually give you the information and you redo it, you can actually get to the right answer. But this guy, Carlos Placido, is an independent consultant, which is very different from an expert consultant. And so an independent consultant seems to actually take into account facts and make good efforts to communicate in an honest way to people. This is a very, very strange concept to me. I don't know how this person possibly has a job. But he posted his analysis on LinkedIn and did a million samples of something and made a map. And the map basically says that the constellation will have coverage and maybe on some of the 10-degree look angles, it will be a little spotty, but I don't know. That's a little different to me of, you know, maybe there's an issue with a 10-degree look angle and maybe it's spotty. That's a little different than 3 years ago when people were Damn it. That nothing would work. And it just goes to show you, when you see the evolution of, and I'm not saying anything about this guy Carlos, he actually seems to be a totally honest broker. But when you, when you look at people on the outside who have literally not achieved anything in terms of a technical breakthrough or innovation in their own right, trying to throw dirt at the doers of the world who have filed documents with regulatory bodies, with banks, with investors, that say what they're going to do. In my experience, having been through a couple of these rodeos in the past, you give the tie to the company. And so I've been through this exercise before with offshore and a lot of tank testing and fluid dynamic. I'm trying to think of the right physics term because again, I was clueless as always in these things, but I had to predict a lot of things in the past. And when you listen to the consultants, they'd find 1,000 ways till Sunday quoting all sorts of analogs of why something wouldn't work. But when you go to the primary science, the primary scientists that are actually having hands-on data with something, I've found that they're usually right. You gotta use your own brain cuz sometimes the thing will fail. And if you read the disclosure correctly, the disclosure said that it really might fail. But when the disclosure says it's gonna work and you test that through a lot of independent ways, my experience, it's probably gonna work. And that's kind of an interesting observation here is that the coverage analysis After they adjusted it and used the right numbers, they conclude that it's going to be fine. Great, we can move on. And so from all this, and this is kind of a recap, but a good— I kind of believe in the art of inculcation. It's like beat people over the head with a mop until basic things that will make them rich are understood. And so that's kind of my way of trying to help people. is beating you in the head with a mop, which in a way also beats myself in the head with a mop so I don't do stupid stuff like be short-term. But Redrum puts out a really cool tweet. I don't know how he does this while he's designing custom ASTS clothes all day, but very talented individual. But he goes through in this tweet with all the different moats with a very cool picture of, I forget what it is, it's some French island that in High Tide is an island, has a beautiful church. I think it's like St. Michelle or something. A fortress nonetheless with a big moat. So I hope you guys get that point. But he makes the point, we have a technical barrier to entry. It's hard to do this. Took 10 years, some of the world's brightest minds. We have a financial barrier to entry. This costs at least $1 billion to go replicate. We have a regulatory barrier. It's very difficult to get spectrum rights, to get MNOs to give you contiguous spectrum, to get the FCC to give you The right to launch, those are only going to go higher because someone coming down the line won't be able to make a public interest case. Why is it in the public interest for a speculative constellation with no MNOs to be put up in orbit? Riddle me that. We have a patent barrier. So all of these novel inventions that were created to do something for the first time, they lock the door behind them with patents. And so you have to navigate that tripwire. The switching costs are going to be enormous. I just go back to the simple thing of you're creating revenue for your MNO partners. You're not charging them anything. You're actually creating revenue for them. So to switch off, they have to get rid of revenue. Then they have to deal with all the testing, core integration, all this type of stuff. It frankly seems insurmountable to me for there to be a real switching opportunity here because it, by its very nature, is a natural monopoly. And so Switch to what is really the first question. And then if you want to switch to what, the how I think is going to be enormously complex. So the only other constellation that's going to be around is the Starlink constellation, but that's not the same thing. That's not integrating with a network core. The eNodeB is in the air. It's a separate network. It's a totally different architecture. It doesn't seem fungible to me. And then you have the distribution, which is really kind of the commercial moat. And so you really block out a lot of competitors because the end customer is controlled by the MNO and you're not going direct. That's a sucker's bet. Ask Iridium how that went. Some people have tried and their corpses are rotting right now. And then you have an economies of scale business. I think what he didn't put in here is the multi-client effect that I put in there in my lectures. But this is the type of thing that you're able to spread the costs of all these geographies over one constellation, which really makes it so that no MNO could or should ever do this themselves. And also it's gonna be very difficult for any other company to justify this because you're not gonna be able to have the big MNO network base on here to deliver the lowest unitized cost. And then he goes on and says, you know, the scarcity of supply, well, that's around the spectrum that they're locking up and this hunting license with the S-band ITU rights, which we'll get to in a second. And so it's just moat after moat after moat. This is the part whenever I kind of lose, I don't know what it is, like lose strength or just want to become a total wimp. I remind, which is often, I remind myself of all of these moats. And so in the darkest days of being an ASTS shareholder, the thing that really got me through it, other than frankly talking to Katsi and Panman and Steve Larson all the time, and now, you know, we've expanded that group of people, but I would just tell myself, I've never seen a business with this many barriers to entry before. If they can do it, the reward will be insane. At the time, it started to become a bigger if to me because I was getting beaten up by the share price. I think in hindsight, it actually was an enormously risky bet and it worked out. And I'm not confusing some elements of luck with skill. Very humble in that respect. But the barriers are enormous. And that was always my true north of if they can cross the Rubicon, Rome is ours. And that was always what really guided me. And I think that's in the future what's going to be able to take us to have people expecting that this could be a multiple hundreds of billions of dollar market cap company to the extent that it doesn't just become that quickly. And then we have other tailwinds that keep on hitting. And so this guy Donald Trump, well, he is not flying B-2 bombers over Putin, which I find to be It's totally hysterical. He is expected, or did, I can't remember if he did it, but the tweets were he was expected to sign an executive order elevating the Office of Space Commerce. And this is just showing you that we're really on the right trend. They're gonna, I don't know if they're gonna blow a bubble in space, but they're gonna try because this is something that the US government wants more of. And so what do you do when you want more of something? You make a massive, massive bubble. What did they want when they wanted Housing availability. They created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and they subsidized mortgage rates and they created the biggest supernova of finance the world had ever known. And I think they, you know, ended badly for banks, but they created a lot more houses. That, that they did. And they want more space and they really want more launch, which is great for us because we're short launch costs. And so everyone on this call, if you're an ASTO shareholder, everyone should be clapping for Blue Origin launches. Everyone should be clapping for SpaceX launches. Everyone should be launching for Rocket Lab launches and ISRO and everyone, anyone that can light a candle, we wish them happy birthday. It is good for us. But then they want to have this vibrant ecosystem. I think space is the next AI. I think it's inextricably linked to AI and the government has acknowledged it and its importance like they have AI. And I think that they will facilitate and accommodate capital like they have AI. Is it as big as AI? Uh, no, but it's really big. And I think it's a super trend and I think we're early onto it and I'm looking forward to riding it. You know who else is looking forward to riding it? J.R. Wilson. Let's meet the team. And so J.R. Wilson is an executive, or was an executive importantly, from AT&T. He was their head of towers business and now he works at AST SpaceMobile. And so one thing I've learned maybe in the past 5 years, really, because of the different, different seat I've sat in, that's what's kind of good about having a little bit of a diverse career is you put a lot of different perspectives together. And I think that's one of my strong points. So clueless as I am on RF engineering and FCC filings and things like that, I have sort of a kaleidoscope when it comes to putting together a lot of different angles, I think. And I carefully watch talent flow. What I've noticed when building private companies is attracting talent is often the differentiator between life and death. And so when you see great talent coming into a company, it's telling you a lot of things. It's telling you that the existing team is highly capable and A, smart enough to attract talent, smart enough to know they need talent and have an opportunity sufficient to justify talent. And so we've seen a lot of talented people. This is where I really kicked off 4 years ago, just profiling people at the company for my own sanity of Are they voting with me? Are other people that know what they're doing who are going to deliver this company, are they actually there? And with J.R. Wilson, this is great. A guy who ran a tower business bailing to go to AST SpaceMobile. I mean, this is literally our thesis. And what makes it better is J.R. had been at Teledesic. And for those of you who don't know Teledesic, we actually went over this a couple weeks ago, but this was in the early days in the '90s when the dream of space telecom really took off. Teledesic was backed by Craig McCaw, Bill Gates, and it was really the who's who's company. They died for a lot of reasons. It was just premature. It was direct to handset. They outsourced their manufacturing to Boeing who scalped them. So he saw their dream and failure nodes 25 years ago, maybe 30 years ago at this point. And then he's now seen the right pitch and swing. Swinging at it. It's great. And he's had a long-spoken track record about talking about ASTS's technology. I know we've all watched some webcasts from him 1 or 2 years ago and learned a lot because he'd go on there alternating with Chris Sambar. It was really one of the key, from what I could tell, supporters of SpaceMobile at AT&T that really allowed us to get the support we needed. So very exciting to see more of these people jump ship. I know that Jennifer, our new FCC head coming from EchoStar, is incredible, and we're just starting to attract the best talent in the industry for each of these specific roles. And that's really more important to me than watching Morgan Stanley buy some more shares or watching, you know, whatever investor, name it, buy more shares. And a good investor can be very smart and certainly have a good track record, but it's very different to see industry leaders join the company and bet with their So the next thing that's equally important is watching MNOs hitch their star to this wagon. And so we also saw a meeting with Scott this week where I believe he was saying that they're pretty close to 2 DAs with MNOs. I got some various copies of notes floating around, so thanks for the people that were able to go. And so my personal bet is Verizon and Bell Canada, but And Panman, the rebel that he is, made a bolder prediction and said Saudi Telecom, Zain, or Mobility will sign DAs, all of whom have MOUs with SpaceMobile. And we'll find out, but now would be the time for these MNOs to jump. And perhaps the Saudis make sense just because of where they are in the world and maybe fit more nicely with the initial constellation. But it also fits why Andy Johnson on the earnings call said, we're good on money. We're going to be funding with government and commercial stuff. And you like to think that they're such ninjas that they actually were dramatic about how they canceled the ATM as a way to give the space mob yet another clue. Because I feel like they really, well, I know they really respect their investors and they also respect Reg FD. So they don't leak information from what I can tell, but they can drop nuances that we're You know, as professional semicolon analysts who study punctuation do pick up on, the facts really point out to the idea that we're going to have DAs pretty soon. And I think that's true. And I've always said it makes no sense to sign the DAs early until the constellation is right there. Signing a DA early is just paper PR value that will fade, and you might have traded forever commercial value for that. Little flash in the pan. And so if you're a short-term pumper, you do that. If you're running the company as if it's your own money, which is what Abel does, you don't do that. You do one thing, which is the right thing. And the right thing, if I were on the board, would be to Braveheart it and you hold the line, add some more face paint to look extra scary, but you hold, hold, hold, hold, hold until right when you're about to get the constellation going. And then you're going to get the highest price for your differentiated service. And so I think that's exactly what's going to happen. While we have DA Watch going on, we also have Golden Dome Watch. And so there continues to be a lot of interesting stuff. The Pentagon is very much under a gag order right now from what we can tell, but we continue to have really cool stuff percolate out. And so there's some more meetings in Huntsville, Alabama, where I believe the command and control center is being built by Lockheed. And You have Lockheed, by the way, copying our formatting, which suggests that we're working with them, which I do believe is true. And then you have some other cool notes coming out. And so this investor, For Future 100, or @ForFuture100, put out a tweet where we have Clinton Austin come back from this Missile Defense Agency Golden Dome Industry Day. This was in Huntsville. And the key takeaways from this is Speed is everything. They want to go fast, think, think big. They want to get this field golden dome up now. This is a humongo project, $151 billion over 10 years. They want traditional primes and non-traditional players. This is not business as usual. Companies like AST SpaceMobile are going to be invited to the dinner. They are trying to solve problems. With industry, which we know we're doing too. We're working with them and it's gonna be a multi-layered defense system. We're an important part of that layer. Every time I read more about Golden Dome, I continue just to see more and more overlap to what we are likely gonna be doing. At the same time, there was some news that's getting increasingly public, which we had found out about a while ago, but we just kept quiet 'cause it seemed like it was pretty sensitive to the company and we're not gonna cut off our nose to spite our faces, but There's more and more people kind of letting the cat out of the bag, letting the catseye out of the bag about the Homestead Air Force Base. And so Homestead Air Force Base is the next expansion area for the company. It's very exciting. It's on an Air Force base. It's in Florida. There's a lot of missile defense things going on there, and we're seemingly poised to get some really nice financial incentives to build out our presence there. And what is neat is that we could likely be getting CHIPS Act money for it. And it's also very clear if you read very carefully that the Homestead Project is going to be serving both public and Department of Defense applications. And so we'll find out. It doesn't even matter actually what they actually do there. I don't know if it's going to be a dedicated Blackbird production facility or just serve the greater Throughput of the company. I don't know that that actually matters or if they will be different, but I think we are lining up to be getting some federal money from this, just like Trump is throwing CHIPS Act money at Intel. I wouldn't be surprised if we get some money because we are a chip company. And then there's continued confirmation of military ties. And so @RocketTank123, whose rocket tank is freaking full of liquid oxygen, this guy does not sleep. He's like another Kevin Chen. He noted that AST just posted a new job application for, quote, environmental test engineer, and it requires military standards. And so what is MIL-STD-810? Well, I don't know what a MIL-STD is. That sounds spicy. Too, too many tours overseas, young war man. But it's not an STD. It is United States military standard, and it is the test methods for assessing the durability and performance of military equipment under various environmental conditions. Basically, it's a requirement for working with the DOD. It may not come as much of a surprise to most paying attention, but ASTS may be just as much of a defense company as it is a commercial company. Thank you, Rocket Tank 123. And so It's pretty exciting. Now let's look a little bit more into the military. So we have Geist, who is a military official, in an interesting article that was shared with us. It's under the tweet Military Multi-Client, and they say, quote, the military business does not scale enough by itself to warrant a standalone constellation, Geist noted, quote, nor do I think the military wants to have its own standalone constellation. So if companies can provide them with the full capabilities that augment an existing network that fulfill their operational and usability needs, then that's a solution. Whoop, there it is again. It's like we got the whooping cough. We're like just everywhere the world wants us to be. It's a great solution for the military, and that's why I think there's going to be more and more government business coming our way and more and more acknowledgement of this. But that's not all. If you order now, you also get a PNT solution thrown in. What's a PNT? which is positioning, navigation, and tracking. And so the FCC has its own PNT initiative. There's a separate docket for this, and ASTS is front and center. It's very interesting. This actually was super interesting. They, in their filing, are combining the capabilities of their LEO constellation with the free Skyterra satellite that we picked up in the Legato deal. So like, all jokes aside, order now and you get like a free sponge included. We literally got a free satellite. And so like true ASTS SpaceMobile, trivia would be how many GEO satellites do we have? And all the young folk would be like, trick question, it's LEO. It's like, no, we have a GEO satellite, bro. We got it at a low cost of $530 million and some penny warrants. And so ASTS puts in an SEC filing, the tiny portion of PNT can provide critical information on its own. ASTS SpaceMobile has been designed to provide accurate time signals across the full coverage area, leveraging the 40 megahertz of L-band MSS spectrum that ASTS SpaceMobile will be using for its low Earth orbit space-based cellular broadband service, combined with access to this spectrum on the L-band MSS Skyterra geostationary orbit satellite, ASTS will be able to bring to users across the United States resilient, high-quality alternative PNT service, as well as providing precision timing for critical infrastructure. This is so cool. So first of all, we're seeing more and more cards flip around how this Legato spectrum will be used. While I have not been able to prove it, and I've asked people who said have been able to prove it, so I think they were just being tight-lipped around me. I think that the DOD already has an agreement with AST SpaceMobile around the Legato spectrum, or it's so blindingly obvious about what's happening that they just stepped aside. There's just no state of the world where the DOD, which stole the spectrum from Legato, was sitting there during a federal bankruptcy case and didn't have their pager go off. From the judge saying, sup, is this feasible? There's just no chance to me that someone would have missed that. And so now you're seeing the use cases of this L-band spectrum for the military being disclosed in the FCC docket before we actually closed the deal. But to show that we could be providing the backup GPS system, that's important. That is a critical piece of national security infrastructure, which is coming into the frame. With what we just saw happen in Israel and Iran, and obviously those Russians are creating problems all over the place. There was a plane crash the other day. I think it was in Azerbaijan because the Russians spoofed the plane's GPS and then wouldn't let it land. It's very, very important that we have a backup PNT system. And I think ASTS is very well positioned to do that. And now it's no longer conjecture on our part. We're, we're seeing it in the documents. They're telling us how they're going to do it. So speaking of the FCC, they keep chugging along with our application. So our constellation is called S3065, and there continues to be more filings, some compromises in terms of how the backhaul is going to work using some specific spectrum that won't piss off all the astronomers, which by the way, these astronomers need to turn off their telescopes anyway because they evidently are signaling to aliens that if you saw that Harvard professor, there's some large alien coming to Earth to destroy us. We really should rethink about broadcasting radio signals out into the galaxy without knowing exactly who's listening. So maybe Space Mobile will save the world by blinding them all with Block 2. But it looks like we reached a compromise so that they would continue to use their radio telescopes to invite aliens to destroy us. If it's like, why didn't you guys watch Independence Day? It's all laid out right there. But we're moving. So end of the world, which might happen anyway, we will have FCC approval before then. And there was another interference study that came out. And so the filing, I'll read you what ChatGPT said. The filing provides a defensible engineering basis that ASTS can coexist with terrestrial co-channel licensees and meet the SCS R&O, rule and order, OOBE, which is out of bound. What does it stand for? Emissions, something like that. Constraints—that's the neg 120 threshold—while still offering usable 4G, 5G service over large swaths of continental U.S. Residual risk is concentrated in operational execution, e.g., the timing of beams and power coordination and dynamic cell muting in tight borders. That's exactly what you'd want to hear. Like the best possible answer I can imagine hearing is there is no interference risk. And that, that remains is totally controllable through operating execution. In other words, we're not spamming the US with these large side lobes, which Katzy has done kind of an incredible job educating us all on this. The interference that would be at risk is within our control because of our beamforming technology. That is a great answer. And that's why I think we're going to get approval pretty soon. So let's continue on spectrum. So I find it Always very interesting to see the difference between strategic thinkers and peasants. I fancy myself to one day be a strategic thinker, but I'm merely a spectator of those who have the actual title. And then you have Tim Farrar. So what's interesting is at every opportunity, people want to throw stones at AST SpaceMobile, but they often truly don't recognize the difference between chess and checkers. The company was very clear to people that this ITU Priority deal they got 2 weeks ago, that does not give them 60 megahertz of global spectrum. What it does is give them an unequal playing field to get it. It is merely just an initial move on what is going to be a multi-year chess game to aggregate as much attractive MSS spectrum around the globe as possible, which then they monetize as terrestrial spectrum, thereby having one of the world's most incredible— I don't think this is an understatement. This is one of the world's most incredible arbitrages. Of taking fallow MSS spectrum and lighting it up as terrestrial. This is just giving them one more advantage in doing that before the world can catch up. If you're a flexible strategic thinker, you'll see, well, you didn't actually learn anything about them securing additional spectrum with that announcement. That is true. What you saw is A, an intent, and B, a means. By which to effectuate that strategy over a multi-year period. That's what you want if you're a long-term thinker. If you're looking to find the next Jensen, the next Satya, the next Bezos, I wouldn't even put Buffett in there because he's not thinking. I don't think he's thinking like multiple steps ahead for a competitive checkmate. That's, I don't really think of Buffett that way, but Bezos, Satya, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, frankly, like these are the people that are playing true industrial chess to find ways to have checkmates in their industry. And I believe Abel will be put into that pedestal in the years to come. And this is just another telltale that this is not your father's satellite company. It is not that. This is a future MAGA constituent and they're playing a bigger game. So then we have Elena Neyra, who's a— look at her resume. Let's put it that way. She definitely did Kumon math when she was young and almost certainly ate oatmeal instead of Froot Loops. She's a very smart cookie. And so she points out in a tweet, which I agree with, that says MNOs have one and only one strategic asset, licensed spectrum. You might've heard something similar from me in the past because I made the point that we are AWS to the telecom industry. They should get out of the business of hanging towers and owning all this capital equipment. They'll never be able to get out of it totally, but they should seek to Diminish their CapEx toward this low-return commoditized part of the value chain and focus on the 2 things that really drive value: spectrum. And then the thing that Elena missed is a relationship with the consumer. And so the scarce thing is the spectrum. The hard-fought thing is the consumer. The 2 of those things make a valuable enterprise. Right now you have to load in all this crap in the middle. which dilutes the returns and makes MNOs not really great businesses. But the reason why the MNOs should love ASTS is because it is a spectrum expander. They're gonna bring additional spectrum to the party because they, and only they, can light up MSS spectrum as terrestrial, but then they allow the existing spectrum to be used much more efficiently. They fill in the black holes without having to put in new capital equipment. They can utilize wasted spectrum, guardband spectrum, In ways that are not previously possible. This is why ASTS is the dream of an MNO, which is why you have them all piling in. And then we have another tweet just as a reminder to focus on the spectrum by Only 6 Inches. And so, as I said just a second ago, ASTS SpaceMobile has created alchemy. I repeat, alchemy. Shaking my fist at the clouds. And so Only 6 Inches pulls out a Great quote from the earnings call, and it's when Abel said, quote, yes, I mean, you obviously 60 megahertz of global spectrum. If you, if it were purely terrestrial, it would be a number that nobody can afford. And it's so funny because he's right. You know, it's just, it's an asset that would be too big for anyone to pay for. We could do the math of how many megahertz pops that is, and it's a lot. But only 6 inches arrives at the same statement that I just made, that the thing ASTS's technology does is it De facto takes MSS spectrum and makes it terrestrial. And he says, most still don't get that they're turning water into wine. This was the critical observation, I think, back in January when we got the Legato deal to the tape. And that, I remember just telling Anpanman, I said, dude, this is alchemy. It's so elegant. They, they are turning MSS into terrestrial. And the whole thing that people had tried and failed at is They were trying to actually repurpose this MSS as terrestrial with ATC clearances, actually hang the towers on the ground. And that's where all the interference stuff happened and just a nightmare. And never mind the capital intensity that would've occurred had they been successful in this, but to actually utilize it with the capital efficiency of a satellite constellation is truly genius. And I think that this will be, this is a nuanced point for sure, but to have this in your back pocket, knowing the value creation engine, that will be released in the future when we have simple things like satellites being launched. It was a powerful observation that I highly recommend people sit on so that you think like an owner. And then, you know, I just have some other tweets here where we're getting the 13Fs come in. And so the Pod Monkeys arrived. So the Millennium guys bought shares. Good for them. If, you know, if the stock goes down 3%, they all get fired. But then we also have a DB report came out most of the same earnings recap we've given. UBS came out with a report. They're no longer restricted. They had their fireside chat with Scott. Scott was apparently wearing a Blue Origin shirt. And people are like, well, why do you guys think they're going to be launching early on Blue Origin? Well, I don't know. Scott's literally wearing a shirt. But why is it Scott wearing Redrum swag? I mean, we have like big questions here. Now that I think about it, I really want to see Scott wearing a Catsy shirt. Out of respect. I might write a 13D if I figure out how to do that and make that point. So then we also have CATSE, or we have Cantor, not CATSE. We have Cantor writing a report. And then we also have Rocketman strikes again, like a tank, 1, 2, 3. And there's this cool article. It was in Spanish, good test of my Duolingo, and it is a About a roundtable meeting in Colombia, including their agriculture, environmental sciences, finance, cartography, the British Embassy, Navy, blah blah blah, everyone. And they are just talking about all the use cases and applications of this technology with all these different verticals. And that's where I just go back to the TAM here is going to be wild. I really wouldn't be surprised if the TAM we ultimately underwrote about kind of consumers and dead spots. I don't think I'd be surprised if that ended up. being a minority of the revenue versus all of the other stuff. And that's going to be really exciting, is ASTS SpaceMobile as a platform where people with problems come to us with a solution that we enable versus having to be clairvoyant and think of all the problems in the world. I think that reverse inquiry of let builders build on your platform is going to be a really enormously powerful way of thinking. And then I hope that's how ASTS pursues it. But even when looking, At the opportunity for the consumer market, to me, it is pretty crazy that T-Mobile already has a 1.5% penetration rate on their Starlink product. It has just been so massively maligned in the market as a crappy service that to have 1.5% of people signing up for it at that price seems really positive to me in terms of what the baseline number is gonna be for AST SpaceMobile. So that's a good number to see because it's setting what I think is a very high floor. And then speaking of Starlink, this is also kind of funny. And so @ForFuture100 strikes again. And so there's this LinkedIn post by Jason Pressament, and he says Elon Musk's Starlink makes a desperate move in a brutal satellite internet war. They're reducing their hardware price by 50% and some reductions in monthly subscription pricing with a low-cost entry point, no service contract. How does this secure a customer or prevent churn to something, per incoming soon, that will likely include some very attractive promotions? And Abel liked the post, and I just kind of read this to be Starlink is about to get disrupted in a big way. I still have always maintained that, you know, never let good enough get in the way of anything. I think the right quote is never let perfection be the enemy of good enough or something like this. And, you know, even as I sit here, Doing the Spaces in the parking lot in a hotel while on vacation with the window open so I don't suffocate, but now suffering the wrath of mosquitoes. Do you need a Starlink terminal? I mean, we've seen all these videos of people bolting a Starlink terminal to their car. If you're getting 35 megabits per second, or the high end when they have multi-in, multi-out, you're getting 120 megabits per second, you're just gonna use your phone. There's gonna be so many other options that are gonna be so much less friction. That I do think that ASTS SpaceMobile is going to be eating into the fixed wireless business, the fixed satellite business, even if they're not actually targeting it. People are pretty creative. I think people will figure it out. It's going to be so much cheaper to do, and that's exciting because we know that Starlink is the most exciting telecom story, or was. There's a reason why it trades like that, and I think we get to come in hot and you're going to have all the MNOs who were not born yesterday knowing exactly how to cross-sell this exact same service offering. I mean, wait till these guys at AT&T taste blood and it's gonna be like a great white shark just ripping to shred Starlink in every possible way they can with all of their B2B units going, their enterprise salespeople. It's gonna be, I think it's gonna be wild as our constellation scales and we have the capacity to really sell through services like that, which will be a while 'cause you're gonna have to have a lot of satellites up before we're meeting our base service goals, which are going to be to have a continuous consumer service. But then once this thing is really densified, I think the opportunities are going to be pretty exciting. So then the last thing is that Redrum is making it a little easier for people to consume these podcasts. So thanks, Redrum. It takes a village. I don't really have the time to think like a normal influencer because I'm not. And so I love it when people figure out ways to make things easier and and just repost my stuff. So, and he's reposting my Spaces and Ant-Man's and probably Tut's and everyone else's. So that's great. Thanks for him for making our clothes and making our content. And then I posted some other news articles that came out. So CNBC, fine. But then interestingly, Barron's came out again, which is great. Barron's has a really nice reach of a different type of investor. I like to read Barron's most weekends. It's what I do just to kind of take tabs on a lot of different companies. And it just shows that the tent is broadening and just expect more and more of it over the next year. And we're finally noticed. I had actually emailed this guy, I forget his name, Alan Root, back years ago saying, you know, you should cover ASTS. I promise I'm a real person. And, you know, this is exciting. I've been reading your articles for years and years and years, and I promise you should read this. And, you know, of course, when you email someone from thecoopreport@gmail.com, your emails go straight to spam. to spam, but at least I tried. And it's just like when I emailed Ron Baron's son to my report, and I'm sure, you know, you get like the PDF from @thecookreport, and he's probably like, yeah, you know what? I'm not opening that PDF. That is definitely like a PLA hacking email. But it wasn't. It was actually my attempt to be helpful to someone that I don't know, but respect his dad. And, you know, he'll maybe one day hear this story and look at his deleted items and go, I was served some quality DD on a platter and I deleted it. And you know what? He's still a billionaire, so he won't care. But that's what I have for everyone. Hope we have an exciting week ahead. We've been spending a lot of time trying to, when I say we, just kind of a little working group, trying to figure out some of the launch specifics. And, you know, think that we're going to have, you know, a nice 3 to 4 week period is kind of our latest thinking. of some news developments on that front, but we're, we're really trying to dig as deep as we can. And when we find anything really great, I'm sure you'll see it posted on Twitter everywhere. So thanks for joining on the ad hoc. I'll be back at home next weekend, so we'll be back on the normal schedule. So sorry for just doing this with 5 minutes advance notice. You know, for unpaid content, you get what you pay for. I'll leave it running for a couple minutes so it doesn't cut off on replay. Hope everyone has a great night. Thanks for 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. Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.