Kook's Weekly - March 1 - From Mañana to Hoy: The AST SpaceMobile Inflection Point

[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.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Okay, good evening everyone. Certainly an eventful week, weekend, as I guess is the way of 2026. But as much as the world changed this week, ASTS did not stay standing still either. And this week's events to me just magnify the importance of what ASTS is doing and This two or three years ago would have been a a catsy hypothetical. We would have been thinking about the way the world is evolving, and surmising is really the only appropriate word. Surmising how ASTS could fit into this future and the types of use cases, and what a what a difference a couple years make. And so while guys like Pollock at the company know. Always knew what the dual-use capabilities of the company are. We didn't for sure. And in fact, we were scoffed, scoffed at by experts saying that these were just pipe dreams. But here we are this week getting a very important SDA contract for tactical satellite communication. And this is on top of Golden Dome. And so before we really kind of dig into this week's fundamentals, I thought Anpanman's tweet about, it's really what's changed since 1998 was relevant. So needless to say, a lot of things have changed since 1998. If I recall, I think I was like trying to sneak and watch Beavis and Butt-Head, which my parents wouldn't let me. back then, and we had MTV, and I think I would wear acid wash jeans. And so, you know, you really can't extrapolate from the '90s and get to today without really adjusting quite a few assumptions. And so Anpanman just points out back then, 300 million subs for mobile phones, Today, 6 billion. You really only use phones for voice and SMS was a budding feature. The daily usage of a phone, 3 minutes. I remember almost effectively inventing code so that I could minimize my minutes used and do bare minimum communication, which for me was generally coordinating sort of how I was going to get picked up from school or, you know, If my mom was running super late, you know, be able to tell me. And so you're always against the clock because your plan only included, you know, 20 minutes a month or something crazy. And the reason why cell phones were expensive is you just really hadn't had the adoption curve yet. And so like most things with scale, you start to get lots of efficiencies in every possible way. Whether it's the device, the network, really everything. And so today, people are obviously on phones, and the average speed is no longer measured in kilobits per second, but in terms of megabits per second. And importantly, as it relates to what we're doing, launch costs are the big why now issue. And so, I have this documented in my DD doc, which is really sort of the why now. And this is how I would frame the question, which I'm really kind of amazed at how easy venture investing can be if you just ask yourself why now. And that's what I've seen some of the best venture investors ask because it's, you know, always have someone come in your office and you have this idea, that idea, but then you got to ask yourself, well, there's been quite a lot of years for humans. And so why now? What is the change factor that gives rise to someone being able to have this business? What is it? And here there's quite a few actual why nows. The necessary one is just simply the global adoption of mobile phones. So yeah, everyone understands that. But that doesn't really speak to why a ubiquitous satellite network would happen now. So the actual then why now for an ASTS is that launch costs have plummeted. And so thanks to SpaceX, you've had launch costs go from $28,000 per kilogram to $5,000 a kilogram. And we have that outlined in the DD doc about what it cost Iridium to put up that original Constellation and things like Teledesic. And so I just always reflect on this and just feel like we have so many secular trends, many of which are new or nascent, that are happening now and intersecting, which is why we would have a license to have a big company built. So nothing's for certain in this life, but You want to ask yourself, like, why, why do I have a right to win and have a trillion-dollar company? What is it that it's happening now that other people didn't see or couldn't have seen or couldn't have done preceding this time? So I liked Anpanman's tweet. It's a good way to start off. And then The theory is all fun and well, but ultimately, as everyone knows, we got to launch some stuff. And so New Glenn 3 looks like it's getting ready. And so the landing platforms are going out and practicing their recovery exercises. We've seen the fairing go into the mating facility, which is pretty crazy. You have the engine skirt driving across the freeway. And it's just wild. You imagine You just drive along the road and you see this thing trolleying on top of you.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Pretty cool.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: And so it's happening and we have to have, if my facts are straight, we have to have a static fire test first. And then hopefully everything goes well. If Artemis is any gauge, sometimes you find some things and that's good because you'd rather have a Rocket that is tested than not, but you gotta do the static fire and then we'll have our launch. And that could be anytime, I think, in the next 2 weeks. The question is whether the company's gonna send out invites for this launch. It's a little bit of a riskier ordeal because the timing can slip day here, day there, versus SpaceX is sort of giving someone an invitation for the bullet train. You know, you know exactly when it's gonna happen. So we'll see. What they choose to do, but in any respect, things must be going pretty well because ASTS this week put out a deal with the SDA Satellite Development Agency for a thirty million dollar contract as a prime contractor, and it's very exciting. It's a contract to test and demonstrate the capabilities, but one has to think that. Some things are going well with FM1 for these deals to start to percolate, and it's not necessarily the case. I don't know for sure that that's true, but you start to add up the timing, and FM1 unfurled is communicating. FM2 is sealed in the fairing. Government is really interested. The interesting part about this deal is it was a total of $50 million for the budget, and ASTS took $30 million of the $50 million that was available to 18 other companies. And so I know how I process that information. I start to go, we swept it. 18 other players and we took 60%. Of the available budget for this test, we must have something special. That's the inescapable conclusion that I had, and it's just very exciting. And this is again not part of Golden Dome. This is for tactical satellite communications for the government, which is very important. And I'm sure I speak for a lot of people on this call, but it seems like a lifetime ago where we had the State of the Union address, which. I actually didn't, uh, didn't listen to, but I mean, the number of times I was brought to tears thinking about, uh, the Chief Warrant Officer Eric Slover. By the way, I had no idea what CW5 meant. So the internet going crazy on this about like, oh, we saw Bigfoot. And I'm like, what the hell is it? Chief Warrant Officer and number 5. And then I obviously, like every other dude coming off their history of Rome and, um, peptide research, it's like immediately we all have to go and figure out the titling system in the US Army. And everyone's now just totally man-crushing on this idea that there's like a Chief Warrant Officer 5, which certainly made me feel like a complete failure in life when I see what this guy did. It's, thank God there's people that ate their Wheaties when they were kids and turned into servicemen and heroes like that. But I just couldn't help but think all week, and even as we speak now, you take people like that and his lovely wife doing what he does for our country. And could you imagine if you had a communication failure, you know, as you just got shot to pieces in your helicopter and still figure out a way to deposit the team? And then what we're seeing going on in Iran right now, needless to say, there's been a lot of people that have been tracking where those Bluebirds were. I don't want to speculate, but Just goes without saying that they were over Iran, and there seemed to be a lot of fancy things happening that allowed the U.S. to know quite a few things that apparently the Iranians didn't think Israel and the U.S. knew. But I get just so motivated when I realize that our work, sharing due diligence with with everyone on this company, which which has a purpose of reducing the cost of capital, it's super fun. But if you actually were to say. you know, what's the functional output of all this work? It's reduction of cost of capital. And so people like Katsy, Ant-Man, Tanner, Kevin, the whole lot, people doing research and sharing that research, that's reducing uncertainty. And so that drives down discount rate, that allows funding, that allows companies like ASTS to exist. And I am really proud that this company does exist, and I believe in large part because of this community, and that I, I really hope it can impact people's lives. For example, saving soldiers from harm's way wherever possible. And this is an important goal of the military as well.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Duh.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: And so when we look at the numbers associated with these contracts, they're astonishing. And so there's a table by @SpaceGrammys that sums up just sort of what other companies have received and ASTS, which is blank so far in here, but these are big numbers, billion dollars at a clip, which brings us to another interesting thing I was talking about with with someone in my DMs is just how the stock market is increasingly comfortable with very high concentration of US government revenues. And now I think that US government revenues are going to be a very small minority of ASTS's revenues, but they're sure pretty important for Palantir. They're definitely really important for Starlink and SpaceX. And we're going to get the benefit of that. People's eyes are going to be really opened, if not peeled back, because of Wall Street's insistence on looking at the SpaceX deal. People are going to realize the magnitude of these government revenue streams for both communication use cases and non-communication use cases for these next generation LEO satellite constellations. I think it's going to be a really Big deal, and I believe that ASTS, along with SpaceX, is absolutely front and center in the type of way that an Andoril, at least in perception. I actually don't know Andoril's true commercial success versus how much I hope they're successful because Palmer Lucky seems cool. But certainly in terms of the glossy, shiny new thing, ASTS is right in the vanguard of this. And I think the market's going to eat it up because the demand from the government and the military and all the allies is going to be damn near infinite, in my belief. And again, we just see, I'm sure everyone's reading the same stuff I am, but just more as we learn about how the Iranian epic fury operation came to pass, all of the electronic warfare which just renders the opposing air defense systems useless. Clearly, there's a lot of things we don't know, but also clearly there is near infinite demand for this. And to be on the cutting edge of what's possible is where you want to be. But let's also just remember how the experts were so wrong on this. And so as Nomad Bets points out, Whenever ASTS does something good, there's always a tweet by Tim Farrar that said that that thing would not have ever happened. And so Tim, not to outdo himself as truly one of the worst telecom predictors of all time, comes up again with pocket aces of cluelessness. Which is ironic since he calls us clueless, but he says, what excuses will the clueless cult come up with when they find out that Link's DOD contract is going to award Link orders of magnitude more money than ASTS's paltry $500,000 in government revenues? Well, Tim, I don't think we have to come up with any excuses, but you know, you might when your clients all wonder why they're bankrupt. For listening to your advice. But the reason why it's useful to go back and point out the FUD, never mind my absolute visceral disdain for Tim Ferriss that's etched into the core of my soul, for which I will never forgive him, nor will I ever cease to use my animosity toward him to drive me to do everything I do, really just for blood sport at this point. Because this is a mean-spirited individual, this Tim Ferriss. But it is important to see just how wrong these experts are so that tomorrow, whatever FUD the experts will spill, whatever sort of SpaceX-manipulated headline will hit, you can go back and realize we've seen this before. And it's an amazing journey that the space mob has had because It's, to me, it's really like Neo in The Matrix where all of a sudden Agent Tim unloads a clip and we just slow it down and then the bullets just drop to the floor and we just realize, mm-hmm, we've done our work. And by the way, now we have AI, so go to hell, asshole. Like we can actually fact check every, everything you do instantaneously. But Now you can see that the degree of panic and misinformation is going down and down. Even when we have these declines from $130 to $80, which really sucks, you are seeing some Reddit crash out, which I don't really follow. I don't really spend a lot of time on Reddit, but in general, you're really not seeing the doubt anymore. You're seeing the general frustration and people being upset about the stock going down, but you're no longer seeing the sort of boogeyman in the closet and people kind of wondering what monster's under their bed. And that's because there's been a lot of learning here. And for anyone that's newer to this, I would just really suggest, you know, the quote that I'm famous or infamous for, know what you own. And so read the PIMDD doc, immerse yourself so you can see in a way some of the prior controversies and then how these were navigated. And Not everything has been great. This company definitely does not wear a white dress in a Billy Idol song. They've had delays. Space is hard and we've lived it, but you have a great team. And that's where my confidence always comes back to, is we have a classic owner-operator that is very well equipped to guide the company through the difficulties of doing something that was thought to be impossible. And what a great segue for talking about what was thought to be impossible, but now shown to be possible. And so Anshul Bhatt, who is with Rakuten, said, I made a phone call and video call over WhatsApp. It worked flawlessly on my normal handset. Let's chat and exchange notes at Mobile World Congress. There's a lot to unpack. Cool. It works flawlessly. Videos, huh? They said it was impossible. And so we've seen the demos. We always get the third-party validation from these MNOs and not just one MNO and not some crappy MNO, the big ones. And the tech works. And that's the foundation point clearly for everything that follows. And We haven't even begun to see what's possible. And so what's cool, and Peter Lindmark always, I call him our European correspondent, you know, over to you, Peter, reporting live from Liechtenstein. I always imagine if he's not walking around with like a fine espresso at all times, then he's totally failed to live up to my stereotypes of everyone in Europe. But Peter, is on it. And so he found a cool quote from Jennifer Manor, Spectrum Mama at ASE SpaceMobile. And she says, and when I talk about that 5G LTE data rates, we've tested with even our smaller satellites and gotten speeds up to 120 megabits. That's a pretty nice speed on a small handset. Well, it's pretty nice speed on small satellites too. And now we have our really big satellites coming. So they were already doing the impossible on BW3 and then Block 1. And now the game goes nonlinear. So it's going to be really exciting to see what the test results are on FM1 and FM2. And then that's not all. Wait until we get the ASICs spun up. And so that tech roadmap, that first principles architecture. Is what it's all about. And so, one of our kind of newer Space Mob friends at For Future 100 Investor for the Future is a really great account worth following. And he found a really cool LinkedIn article from the editor of the Mobile Network, and this guy Keith Dyer was at a technical briefing from Vodafone, and the Technical team was, quote, very firm on the rightness of its technical choice. They want to provide broadband services to users. And they, this is actually a crazy quote. It was prepared to lose first mover advantage and wait for the tech to be right to achieve that. What a sentence, because basically the short thesis was always that ASTS, even if it had a first mover advantage, it wouldn't be long. And then as Starlink retrofitted all of their swarm satellites, well, all of a sudden the 5-second DDD guys said ASTS doesn't have a first mover advantage at all. Wow. What a change. And then ASTS has had delays and things like that. And so what's important is getting it right. And so it's like Apple. Apple didn't invent the mobile phone. They've been almost first to nothing, but when they enter, they get it right. And you can see what the result has been. And so ASTS tried to be the first mover and certainly is the first mover based on my definition of the market. In terms of providing true seamless next generation network connectivity from space, because that's actually what Starlink does, does not do. And so I still think that we are the first mover. There's just a murky little cloud of FUD coming from Starlink that got some, you know, jerry-rigged IoT system to work. But Vodafone talks about the size, but really about how it is a Transparent payload and bent pipe. And so keeping the base station in a ground station and just having the radio head antennas up in the satellite. And so that leads to a lot of things. It makes it comply with 3GPP standards. It protects for data sovereignty. It's backwards compatible, all sorts of fun stuff. And And it's a great article. And here, I'm just looking at some of these data points, but it's a good article to read and it's linked out. So I'll let anyone that wants to follow that later can do it. And then you just say, well, we have the right tech. We've seen enough of that to be reasonably confident of that. And then it goes back to the why now questions that I asked like a true Socrates at the time when we launched this space. And so another big why now that we didn't really have on our radar back when we made the investment, I say we, but like just kind of all the people that spent their life talking to me about this, AI. And so it became very clear to quite a few of us that AI is going to be a massive expander of opportunity for the need for connectivity. If you believe that everything is going to be AI enabled, then I don't know why it wouldn't. All that stuff needs to be connected. But importantly, and here's, here's the quote, Samsung expects smartphones to be the main vehicle for consumers to access AI. Of course, you know, as I sit here, I've got My Mac Mini sitting on my desk. I haven't yet booted it up, but I'm going to set up my OpenClaw. I've got my Perplexity computer. I've got like literally any AI tool that comes out. I just buy and pay for it so I can not be obsolete and not be accused of being old. Um, but, you know, in as much as I've now kind of gotten hooked on vibe coding, which is pretty fun, that's not how most people are going to interact with AI. It's going to be on their phone. And I think it's going to be also IoT driven. And so you are going to have this increased demand for connectivity, increased demand for data. And zooming out, ASTS obviously provides this additional network layer, but also, and increasingly, it provides this additional way to operationalize spectrum, which is needed. And so as ASTS does all this great stuff, uh, the petulant little child who must always get mommy's attention, SpaceX, uh, puts out some stuff. And so Zero Hedge Bros seemingly were just like pounding the stock in advance of putting out this tweet. And that's kind of what we're seeing in the market. And they come out with what their goals are for, uh, their product when they're utilizing their S-band. So, you know, great. They have a lot of work to do to get that, but they have the spectrum. They paid $20 billion for it. And the question is just what type of beamforming are they going to be able to achieve? And also importantly, how are they going to access the customers? And so the beamforming in the first instance is a problem. What we've seen is the MNOs specifically actually tested it. And then blocked it because it was interfering with their terrestrial spectrum. So that's a problem. But then the MNOs are also not suffering from end-stage brain damage, and they know that partnering with SpaceX is truly leading the wolf into the henhouse. So you do not have to be that smart to realize that SpaceX is not the ideal partner because they are not carrier neutral. They are in it for themselves, and so never mind that they don't have the tack. The carrier neutrality should drive the entire equation in my view, and thus far seems like it in fact really has, and that's just going to perpetuate in my view. And so we have Satellite Connect Europe announced. So the JV formerly known as Satco turns into Satellite Connect Europe. Exciting. I don't know how they could have thought of such a creative name. I'm sure they paid some marketing firm a lot of money to come up with that one, but they're at it and they're reminding the EU regulators every day that they're there. They're going after. The two gigahertz spectrum, they have kept announcing how many MNOs are signing LOIs and getting momentum. And again, Europe just can't sit there and watch the U.S. replace dictators in a day with all of our fancy stuff and not invest in these types of capabilities. It's Crazy to think that Europe is not going to figure out a way to do this, and the bazillion-dollar question is Iris two, Iris squared. So I believe that that is past the point of no return. But how this all jives with Satellite Connect Europe is remaining to be seen. But you could rest assured that Vodafone is gonna be very active at creating a big opportunity for that JV. And one that, while I don't know the specifics of exactly how that's going to play out, I do believe in my head that the European JV is going to be something that's going to be producing billions of dollars of revenue one way or another. It's a massive market. It is a market that can only really be served by ASTS because of the bean forming. In my DD doc, I show just, you know, a little geography lesson for people that aren't as familiar with Europe. And when you start to draw 100-kilometer buffers around countries, you actually delete entire countries. And so the 100-kilometer buffer is what's needed for SpaceX to operate without impinging on adjacent spectrum. ASTS can do it. SpaceX cannot, which means that it cannot cover very large chunks of Europe because of this interference problem. So switching back to what Europe is watching in envy, but the US is, boy, I mean, the resolve for Golden Dome, although already high, could not be higher. And so what we're seeing right now with how the Aegis systems are working, where not a hit came into the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is just remarkable. These missile defense systems are the most important thing. It seems as simple as that. And so what the U.S. is showing and demonstrating is just how important these systems are. And I really can't imagine, as much as the threat seems like on a daily basis is is going down in terms of the numerosity of the threat. The, you know, there will be no Iran by the end of next week as we currently know it, but there's still a North Korea and, you know, and who else, you know? Um, and so we're in a great spot for this and the powers that be keep talking about the requirement for this unprecedented coordination. In the command structure, but also just how they're putting together this proliferated system of commercial technologies that can be dual-use capable for the military. And as Hegseth said, quote, I ultimately don't care what company name is on the side of the satellites, engines, or space case or space planes. The question is, can it scale? And can we scale it fast enough? And that's the challenge that I really believe ASTS is going to rise to. But the why now question, once again, cropping its head, couldn't be more obvious when thinking about what's happening with military technology. If you can stop the missiles, you have free rein. And that's exactly what we saw this weekend. And so the US government is funding this up. And so we have a tweet from Nuke to SPAC Track, and it's outlining the Pentagon's plans for 2026, $7.2 billion for space-based sensors. Let's go back to the thwarting of the Iranian missiles on the aircraft carrier group. So when I was reading the Wall Street Journal, is all of those ballistic missiles were detected in the launch phase. And so this is where they had an EWAC flying over the carrier group to help provide increased fidelity for detection. Well, great, it works. Imagine when they replace the EWAC With AST Space Mobile, which is going to happen. That's why they didn't order more of those plane radar systems as as good as they are. Once we have this in Leo, it's it's going to be more reliable, provide more coverage, and it's going to be better. So exciting stuff, and the government's excited, and we are really. at the intersection of so many great trends. And we're going to be hearing a lot about that this week, I think. And so now marks the 5th year where I have forecast that we are going to get some splashy announcements out of Mobile World Congress. And one of these times I will be right. And I think it's probably this time. In hindsight, every time I'm disappointed, which is often, that we didn't get a bunch of Flashy headlines in Barcelona. It's then clear to me that the time was premature because we weren't in the inflecting part of our constellation. It was still an R&D phase. If I were Scott, I wouldn't sign anything until it's really go time to operationalize the constellation, things like that. Because if you're right, which he seems to have been, as you demonstrate the system, And the world just evolves, the value and the perceived value of it would go up. And that was always their thesis. Well, my God, was that right? And so could you imagine what would have happened if we'd actually signed a bunch of DAs 2 years ago or even a year ago? We might've cheered it at the time, but imagine how the commercial terms must have shifted in our favor. Since then, it must just be staggering. Every company in the world clamoring because companies are made of people, and people are generally pretty predictable and not that smart because it's not that not that smart, but they're political. They're captive to to politics. And so if you're you know that guy at an MNO, how do you really make your case to go to your board or your CEO and sign a big deal? The thing hasn't worked yet. And they're like, well, don't we have time? You know, yeah, sure. The constellation is not launched until 2025, but it will be delayed. And here we are, 2026. There wasn't really a need to be aggressive. And when you think about the agency principal costs for all these people, it's quite high. And so what? So this year though, it is a little bit of poop or get off the pot. For these MNOs, because we're about to have a fusillade of satellites go up if if our guessing is right in terms of batch one, batch two, and and all of those that follow. And so we're going to have AFTS and Vodafone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona again, the big industry confab, and I would. Not be surprised if we had a bunch of DAs and and a lot of great coverage in terms of testing updates and things like that. But MWC is one thing, but the big event that I've accepted as important is the SpaceX IPO. And so they surprisingly. are considering filing an IPO as early as next month. So I really thought this was going to be like a Q3, Q4 thing. Filing an IPO does not mean execute the IPO, so I could still be right on the actual timing of the pricing of the IPO, but they're looking for now a valuation in excess of $1.75 trillion. These are pretty big numbers. And so when we dig into that, We have a tweet by Akash Gupta and just spelling it out. You have $1.75 trillion, it's $15 billion of revenue. That's a spicy 116x revenue. And we're talking like Snowflake part 2, you know, crazy. I'd be remiss at saying that there was a lot of hype. At the Snowflake IPO, which turned out to be a miserable time to invest in that stock. But that's a long, longer debate. And so the numbers that are being put on this are just staggering. And he concludes correctly that the number that justifies that valuation is Starlink. And so two-thirds of the revenue come from the satellite business, and. It's exciting. And he goes, this is an orbital telecom monopoly bundled with a government contractor, $22 billion of federal contracts. Now it obviously has the AI angle to it, but when you kind of take a step back, ASTS should benefit from this. It's going to open people's eyes and realize the nature of the opportunity. With the Leo constellations. And it's going to be an exciting time. What, what will ultimately happen to the share price is anyone's guess, but this is going to be the event that's going to grip Wall Street. This is the big deal and it's happening, and just be ready for it. So the rest of the world is getting ready for it. And so As SpaceX readies itself for an IPO, a lot of people are going to own ASTS without even knowing it. And so on Friday, Morgan Stanley, the world index, added ASTS Space Mobile, and that just gives us some more liquidity. Ultimately, it just sops up shares, and so not going to have a price impact tomorrow because ARBs would have set that trade up. And by the end of the day, You had another you know two percent of the shares kind of locked up in an index, and that's just supply and demand. But now let's move. Where am I going over here? And let's go back a little bit to some of the industry commentary. And I thought this was kind of cool where Dr. Mike was was commenting on the American Tower quarterly call that Anpanman. Extracted. And interestingly, American Tower says 6G is likely to be designed with satellites being an integral part of an integrated network. So this is starting to be a departure from the initial thesis of dead zones and sort of this niche thing. It's increasingly talked about and thought about as an integral part of the overall telecom network. I had always believed that what is viewed initially as a supplement will get better and ultimately grab market share in sneaky ways and be much bigger. And so we've talked about this many times about how all of a sudden it's fast enough where you can start decommissioning some towers. All of a sudden you use the guard band and it's a way just to light up more spectrum and Boy, that means it's being used everywhere, not just on niche markets. All of these things as a tech platform gets more mature, is bigger, things like that, it snowballs in momentum. And that's the path to the very big outcome that some of us hope for in this stock is that type of snowballing dynamic that we've seen you know, in some examples that come off the top of my head with cloud compute, AI chips, things like that. And so I think we're front and center to an analog that could unfold or unfurl like that, if you will. But the other thing that's going to happen is the use cases are just going to keep going higher. And so Archer, which is, I believe, King Tut's favorite stock, I think he has a really high appreciation of this company, is partnering with Starlink. And so they were able to put out a Starlink tweet to pump their stock and talking about how Starlink will help them integrate high-speed connectivity to its air taxis. And that's going to be Starlink's entry into urban air mobility. It supports passenger internet and real-time flight communications. Cool. Okay. Well, for those who know King Tut, he abhors Archer. He is a Joby guy through and through. But as someone who doesn't have to insert myself in air taxi wars, I would just point out that this is just another use case. And so you're going to need connectivity on these things. You're going to want positive control. You're not going to be able to accept the possibility that you don't have data. And that's going to be true of many things. So air taxis being one, but then vehicles being another. And we've talked about that quite a few times. And then the IoT applications I think are going to go wild. And this is the intersection to the atomic economy. And so as the electron economy, like software gets beaten to dead, beaten to death with a club every day. The Atoms of the world are thus far the things that are holding up. And that's, you know, a very interesting part of where innovation is happening, both aided by AI, but certainly not in spite of it. And that's where I believe that the connectivity applications are going to surprise people to the upside, especially when we learn that drones, for example, require positive control. And not to steal his thunder, but I was talking to another Space Marauder this week who has a telecom background, and he was explaining to me, you know, some of his experiences with IoT contracts. And I was floored at the size of some of these numbers in the past and the actual quirky use cases that people had been trying to get done as a result, you know, that resulted in these massive numbers. And so to not steal his thunder, I will say no more, but I'm really hoping that this individual writes up the observations we had in our conversation because it was eye-opening to me, both the numbers involved, the use cases involved, but then also why it didn't happen 10 years ago, for example. What was it commercially and technologically, but, but usually commercially that caused these ideas to die on the vine? And then here we go again. Why now? And there's a good answer for why now. And I'm going to let him tell it, but when he writes this, I will retweet it and I will verbalize it on whatever spaces. that is. But the IoT opportunity is something that I would not take your eye off of. And we have Battery Commodities sharing this really cool chart as well of just the total number of IoT-enabled devices, and it's just skyrocketing. And I think this is just going to multiply. I literally just AirTagged everything in my house. And air tag my wife and everything she owns because just losing stuff is no fun. And the other day, of course, she left her purse, you know, at the terminal when we got off an airplane. We only figured it out right when we were getting on the rental car van. And luckily I air tagged her because I'm smart. And so I could see that the purse was still at the terminal, never mind that TSA doesn't really like adrenalized people running back into the terminal. So that was a totally separate question, but being able to see where your stuff is and locate it is pretty valuable. And it's cool what Apple did is creating this mesh network, if I understand how it works correctly. But, you know, as I've kind of made up on the spot a while ago, having an ASTS AirTag that's satellite powered is going to be a game changer when everyone can sort of asset track all the things that matter to them and probably for a very, very low cost. And so when I just look at how many AirTags I have, I mean, I must have 15 to 20 things now tagged, all my luggage, all of my keys, put it on my remote. I mean, you want to talk about like quality of life improvement is Instead of wondering what my kids could have possibly done with a remote control and like why it is that they decided to move it to the other side of the house and bury it for reasons known only to them. When you put an AirTag on a remote control, you're just alive. And so when you think about all the things that should be connected, it's going to be everything. And that's where the IoT opportunity is really going to come in. And then we will end today just on this thesis review from Michael Sickand. I might not have said his last name correctly, but he's a crackhead. For those who know Kraken, the investment, he's not an actual crackhead. And so based on his cohesive and cogent logic, it seems like an individual who has in fact stayed off drugs. But he is a, he is into future technologies and he has boosted his conviction in ASTS, which is his decision alone. But if you are interested in understanding his decision, the last tweet I included, quote, nice thesis review, is his thesis. And it just goes through the enormity of the numbers and some good little reminders of know, why a lot of us own this stock. So that's what I have. I can't move my neck. I'm broken physically because I have brought it upon myself to try to catch up on 1,211 pushups that I had a deficit on because of my peptide disaster. And so now I've traded the deferred pushups because of one source of pain into another debilitating type of pain because evidently my body was not built to do, let's see, in the past 4 days I've done a lot of pushups, 750 pushups. So I don't know if I'm going to be able to close the deficit. I might do some more tonight, but that means that tomorrow we might be down. So I just want to let people know in advance, but I'll try to have cleaned up my pushup mess by Tuesday so that after earnings call we can go up. That will be my my goal for for everyone, and I'll keep you posted with my chart. Have a great night, everyone. Thanks for joining, and I'm I'm really excited for the Monday earnings call. Maybe I should actually talk about that. It's kind of an obvious thing to opine on. So earnings call, I think, is going to be a swinging event. I think that they are going to come out swinging because they have quite a lot of interesting things to talk about. They're going to be able to talk about. New Glenn, not New Glenn 3. They're going to talk about FM1 and initial testing results. They're going to be able to talk about the regulatory pathways that are unfolding. They are probably not going to talk a whole lot about Legato because that right now is just active bankruptcy case and working its way through the system. But they will be able to talk about how they filed the FCC stuff. They will then talk about New Glenn 3 launch, which, which will potentially have a little bit more visibility, but it'll be a little bit, you know, sliding around because of things outside of your control. But then I suspect that they're going to say that the Batch 1 is ready and, you know, the panikins are gonna go back to what happened in August where they said, you know, FM1 is ready to ship and then it ultimately didn't ship till October, and you know the reasons for that. Who knows who cares? But it's a little bit of a Bill Clinton deposition at times with this company in terms of the definition of ready to ship. You know what is the definition of ready to ship? And in my definition is a looser one of if the launch vehicle could accept your payload at the processing facility. could you ship? That's my definition. And if the launch vehicle is not ready, then you should not ship. In my view, as a non-technical armchair quarterback, I would keep my satellites in the facility and keep testing, testing, testing. That's clearly what this company does is they test until they can test no more. And so then I believe that we are really primed for some April launches. We will miss, I believe, the 5 launch guidance for Q1. I mean, it's only 30 days left. I just can't see how it's possible that they could do that many launch integrations in the first instance. And so I believe that it's possible that we have a launch. So we're going to have a launch in March with FM2. And then we'll have probably a launch in April and potentially 2. But then that's when it starts to really spin up. That's when all of a sudden the constellation constipation that I talk about should have really, really started to be working its way through by the time we get to the May and June timeframe. That's when this is going to start to be a very Easy and predictable launch cadence. And that's what I hope they talk about and let people know, sort of, guys, like, just hang on 3 more months, 3 more months. And then we'll be right in the middle of the cadence. I believe they're going to talk about Golden Dome and the government use cases. They have certainly won a lot of contracts. I think it'd be really useful for them to explain what is different when they're a prime contractor versus non-prime. What other partners are they working with? How do they fit with these other ecosystems? Seems like a complex web of relationships, but each probably has different revenue opportunities. I'd love to hear more about the Satellite Connect Europe strategy. They probably are not going to show all their hands as it relates to spectrum, but there's some good updates there. Their balance sheet goes without saying is very strong. And they'll be able to talk about being fully funded and people sort of lose their mind, I believe incorrectly, when a company says fully funded and then raises more money. Well, that is not the right thing to be mad at. And so the definition of fully funded, again, the Bill Clinton deposition is they define what they're fully funded for, but then if there's more opportunity and more growth, you're not infinitely fully funded. For every possible thing you might want to do. And so as things drop into their opportunity zone, then there's an opportunity to pursue those things. And so, for example, I believe that they're going to have a separate government shell for things like Golden Dome. There's a reason why satellites with the optical inter-satellite link are different and more complex than the commercial birds. It's not clear to me that you're going to have dual use on individual satellites as opposed to some dedicated shells that make your whole company dual use and the technology dual use, but not every individual satellite. And then you could ask yourself, well, are they going to actually have separate production facilities for some of these things? And I think they will. And never mind the dilution impact of some of these deals. are like 2% of the share count. It's basically nothing. And so then to have a company with billions of dollars of cash is absolutely the right thing to do if you're playing to win and you're playing to create a trillion-dollar company, which is what I believe Abel is doing. And so I think they should clarify and articulate some of those things. And then what else would I do if I'm Scott? What would I do? Ultimately, you got to give people the update on where we are with the production ramp because it, it's always a little bit mañana with these guys, but then they get it done. And soon, sooner rather than later, we're going to flip from mañana to hoy. And I believe that in the next, again, 3 months, we're going to be an H-O-Y company. Hoy, if you know Spanish, today. As opposed to a mañana compañía, and so that's an important point they should have because you'd also want to start to bookmark some types of expectations and to sort of bookmark that type of inflection and ramp up. If I'm right, sort of at the end of Q2, that dovetails perfectly with the SpaceX IPO, and so what a time to actually hit their numbers. That would be cool. And I hope they come out swinging. It's time to really own their success. They have built an incredible team. There's people like Tanner and Kevin posting the job openings on the daily. And you can see this is a company that is just trying to grow as fast as they can because of an opportunity, which is, I think, just exploding faster than they could have possibly imagined. So I'll end there. Thank you everyone for joining, and I'll see everyone tomorrow afternoon for the earnings call, which I am really excited to get an update on our company. Talk to everyone.
[00:54:59] Speaker A: Bye. 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. Connecting with this technology, we can really affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular global connectivity. Until we can directly communicate to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want you even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the NMOs. Mmm, waffles.