Kook's Weekly - May 11 - The ASIC Alpha and the Falcon 9 Frontier

[00:00:07] 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.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Time for our weekly AA meeting and a lot of suspense. You know, it's always a question of whether to do this in advance of an earnings call because most of our questions and speculations will be quickly answered. But, you know, the superstitions. And so I'd like to just address one thing up front is just because there's a chance there's a lot of new people because of this little article that came out on Friday. And it's really important, I think, people understand what Space Mob is about. First and foremost, there's no leader of Space Mob. I don't know why they said that Kook is the leader of Space Mob. I think they just kind of glom onto whoever the most insane person is and think that that's probably the guy to target. But it's really not. And so Space Mob was just really the name of a chat group we started because a lot of us had a common interest in this stock. And then over the past 5 years, there's been an ebb and flow of who's really involved. It really pains a lot of us to know there's people who had been really involved in the stock that for one reason or another sold and moved on. We really valued their contributions. And so, you know, I know for me it really started with actually this guy named Spack Torrey, who was in the, I believe he was in the US Army as a signal intelligence Officer, and as you could imagine, this person had a lot of technical insight, and so really is sort of a catsy type character—a person whose life involved signal intelligence really understood RF engineering. And these are the type of people that I know Anpan and I really glommed onto, and so we as generalists know what we don't know, which is really everything. but we're really good at figuring out analogs and understanding what the market's going to think in the development of business models. But we need to color that with the subject matter expertise. And understanding ASTS pulls in so many different disciplines. And so what I remember most vividly is the pairing between Katsy, who has very good mechanical understanding, And then Steve Larison, who's a software engineer. And, you know, another thing I think that Anpanman and I did and do very well is we get people excited, I guess. You know, we like to keep, we help keep the conversation going. And then what he and I are pretty good at doing is making sure we're in the room to take really good notes. And so while Katzie and Steve Larison would be chatting endlessly, again, the mechanical engineer figuring out the unfurling mechanism, And then the software AI engineer, Steve Larison, was really ahead of his time in terms of understanding AI. Having these 2 guys really discuss at length what is fundamentally a software-defined solution that's brought about because of a mechanical solution on how you get these, you know, these big arrays into space. That's what allowed us to put so many of these things together. And then you'd have people like No Privacy Anymore, which is kind of a pun on the original ASTS ticker, which was NPA. He really went to town on the regulatory things in FirstNet. And when you have this collection of subject matter experts that are very narrow in some respects on certain elements, but when you combine it all together, you start to get this powerful mosaic that very few people, certainly on Wall Street, have the ability to themselves know all of this. And in my career on Wall Street, you never really had access To this broad sort of Skynet-type knowledge base. I mean, I see Skynet, it's like we're global. There's people all around the world that are contributing to the Space Mob research, and that's really unique. And I kind of look back and I just think, was this type of network existing when I was properly in the hedge fund world? You know, I always have been, you know, really trying to be the axe on whatever I'm involved in. And the axe really means like the guy you call. And so whatever I was focused on, I'd always want to make sure that everyone knew to call me. I wasn't the kook, but I was always kooky. And that's really powerful is to be the collector of information. And so Space Mob is really a collection of a ton of people who are all contributing. There's no membership per se into Space Mob. It's really, do you post interesting research and effectively become a little bit fanatical about the conclusions you're making, which means people get really excited about their ASTS investment. That's Space Mob. And it's really cool. You can come and go as you please. And many do, but that's what we're all about. And it's exciting to see that this is recognized by Bloomberg. They certainly took a little bit of a meme angle to it, but I understand that we shitpost all day and that, you know, from the outside certainly is what it looks like. And I think they didn't do us any injustice by referring to it like that because then they did go and say, look, these guys are doing crazy research. You know, they're— they are doing next-level work that hedge funds really can't replicate. We know what the hedge funds are doing. I was literally just sitting here reading more of these expert calls That's what they're doing. I can't say some of the things we've done because quite literally our sources and uses go to the logical extremes of what, you know, especially like 4 knuckleheads were willing to do when our stock was $2. And to say that we went to extremes is an understatement of trying to make sure we could answer a couple basic questions. And those initial questions were, does the goddamn thing work? And by proxy, there's lots of ways you can figure out if this satellite works. And we did, and we were very comfortable, in fact, that that is what was happening. And what we always predicted was that the conversation would shift. So initially it was, of course, will it work? Will it work? And experts were saying it will not work. There were short reports, people like Tim Farrar who would come up with 100 reasons why it wouldn't work. Well, now it's, it pretty evidently works. Then there is the regulatory battle. There are no rules to accommodate this, which was true. We pressed on anyway because the question around rules is a man-made question. The question of will it work is a physics question. That's a God question. Will it work based on the known properties of the universe that we believe apply to our world? And we got comfortable That, yeah, you could close what's called the link budget, which is basically, can you produce a signal strong enough to connect to an unmodified phone? That's a natural problem that either was possible or it was not possible. And we concluded it was possible and the company proved it was. Having the FCC allow you to use terrestrial spectrum from space, that's a manmade problem. That just requires the FCC saying you can do it. There were no rules for this because It had never been done. Why would you have rules for this? Why would you have had rules for Uber before Uber? There were no rules. Why would you have had an FAA before the Wright brothers figured out you could have powered flight? Guess what? They created rules. And the same thing happened here. Abel proved you could do what everyone thought was impossible, and then they wrote rules to govern it. And the rules, when you were the first person to do it with the support of AT&T, Verizon, and FirstNet, turn out to accommodate exactly what you're doing because you built the thing to comply with all the things that other stakeholders would care about, which really relates to interference. Do you muck up the signal of other people? And the answer was no. So we always knew that one of the final battles we would face Was what's the market? Well, actually, before that, the battle was will any of the MNOs actually sign up with you? So you could have a working satellite, you could get rules, but then it really requires the kindness of strangers, AT&T and Verizon, to hire you to do your service. Because if they didn't hire you, you were dead because it's far too expensive. It's frankly impractical for ASTS to exist on its own and sell its services directly to consumers. That requires an incredible expense related to what's called go-to-market. Many have tried and all have failed in doing a go-it-yourself go-to-market strategy. Iridium was the first company to really try to do this 30 years ago, built their constellation and built their own phone and said, look what we did, direct to satellite. And it's very expensive to go advertise and sell all those phones to consumers. It's difficult to have a strong enough value proposition as a standalone product. The only way in my view for this product to work, to get off the ground, is to be cross-sold through channel partnerships with the MNOs. And that's the mobile network operators for anyone that's new. And so then we got those deals. We got the definitive agreement with AT&T and then I'll never forget the wake-up call I got from Anpanman when he went, hey, Cook, hey, Cook, they got Verizon and the stock was up like 15% or something. I remember in my bathroom, I just went, people do not understand. This just means this company got a bona fide monopoly in the largest telecom market in the world, being the US. Stock was like $4 and, you know, high $4. And I remember I just sat on my toilet where I do my best work. It was a, it's a heated toilet, it's a Toto. So in fairness, like I have a better work environment than most people. When you have a heated toilet seat, you really, I think, have really better decision-making abilities. And in that moment, I had already basically lost generational wealth on this stupid stock. That didn't stop me from deciding to lose more generational wealth. And so bought a couple extra 100,000 shares, just thinking the market is blind to this. Very few people— you have to kind of understand the perspective of other people. Most other people, call it everyone else in the world except for maybe 50 people, had decided to live normal lives. There were 50 of us who had spent every waking moment of our life studying ASTS. So when something like the Verizon deal dropped, think about the number of people who were actually prepared in that moment to understand the magnitude of what otherwise was a completely exogenous shock to a stock. Very few people were in a position to pursue the noble art Of price discovery in that moment. But now here we are where the final frontier is really execution. Can they build the satellites? And we'll get to that in a second. And then will anyone use them? That's the market demand, and we don't know the answer to that. So we're certainly speculating on that. But what we did learn this week is that we took apparently a major step toward proving the company can execute. But of course, like most things, I'm always shocked where you can do a lot of work and think the market's going to, you know, discount out in the future. Ends up always being sort of the Bunker Hill, you know, wait until you see the whites of their eyes. And so of course the stock was getting absolutely properly demolished because Rakuten, which had been a Series B investor in the company, has a very large position in the company and was selling a portion of their stock. And of course the entire world decided to front run this and shorts piled in because they basically had like a free look. You have a known seller that's filing a 13D, publishing each couple days, we sold the stock. You basically have a free look to short and many did. And predictably, like every other time the shorts have piled in, they get their eyeballs ripped out immediately. And so the day Mickey, I believe it was Wednesday, Mickey, who's the CEO of Rocket Lab, filed that they had cleaned up their ASTS selling program. The company announced that they are ready for their first batch shipment. This is a canon moment for the company. To be able to build a satellite in itself is incredible. These are really big satellites. They are bordering on the size of a proper GEO satellite. Typically, if you get one of these built by Boeing, it's a 1 or 2 year build for something like this. We've popped out 2 of our next generation satellites since last October. So we had FM1, which successfully launched on the Indian rocket, and then we had FM2, which unlike a typical Amazon Prime delivery, was dropped off on the curb and landed in a puddle and was rendered useless. So very uncharacteristic. Just goes to show you, invest in Amazon Prime. It's worth it. You get a little bit better service. And so FM2 unfortunately met a fiery end. And as we talked about previously, though, nothing is lost when you are a pioneer. We learned a lot about that satellite. It worked. It was able to turn on and get into orbit. We did the flight integration with Blue Origin and we learned about deorbiting. So we got some valuable information on how we can actually crash these things, which is a very important regulatory issue. Nothing is lost when you have a positive attitude, but what we did not know as investors is The timeliness with which the company was going to be able to start to pump out its next, next generation satellite, which are made out of composite, not metal. And that's important because it means that the satellites are much lighter, which means that we're not up against mass limitations in the same way for the available launch vehicles. And so the company announced that they're going to be launching their next 3 satellites on a Falcon 9, which is also important because when New Glenn 3 failed, people assumed our entire launch program was FUBAR'd. Everyone assumes in the absence of information that Elon Musk is mad, ripped up our launch contracts, or that we never had them to begin with, and that ASTS is going to have the world's most expensive paperweights, or that we're going to be forced to put our satellites up on the top of mountains and pivot to just become a very expensive terrestrial tower company, which is kind of an inside joke. There was actually a short that previously thought that the disruptive technology was in fact to put Satellites on tops of mountains. And I would just say that that also was a canon moment in the culture of Space Mob. RIP Hamid, we will never forget you, but we'll always love you. And so the market is hyper-focused on launch, so it should and was well received when the company said, hi y'all, we have some launches on Falcon. Now, people in the Space Mob already knew that. We know that the next launch was going to be a Falcon. And guess what I also know? That the next, next launch is going to be on Falcon. And guess what I also know? That I think the next, next, and next, and next, and next, and next launches are all going to be Falcon 9s. How do I know that? Research. And I can read. 2 pretty valuable skills in life. And so that is great. Once the company can really ring the bell and show that we're popping out 3+ a month, Is that six months? Six months? No, but I think we're going to end up having our batch two launch in July. I think that is going to be the news that we get tomorrow. But this is the end of what I call constipation. Actually, what I actually call constellation constipation. This is a company that's been building a massive satellite production facility as it's been designing its next generation satellite. This is hard stuff. You're building the crane manufacturing plant as you're building the world's tallest skyscraper. Crazy. There's a lot going on. But what also means is that when you finally get it going, it all goes all at once. And that's where peak pessimism can be a very damaging thing for shorts, because when you're wrong, you're actually wrong on a compounded basis. And there's really No escape. And so the company is at the end of the teething period for its production facility. They had to figure out how to make the new microns. Then they had to get the control sats, which are the, basically the compute on the satellite, all ironed out. Then they had to get the composite rings all ironed out. Then they had to get the stacking engineering. We had experts in the industry, Who shall remain unnamed, but it is Tim Ferrar out there publicly saying that we were unable to launch on Falcons because they would not fit and we could not stack them. And scene, ASTS puts out a press release saying that they are launching three Bluebirds on a Falcon Nine. You cannot make this up. And so you have to take a step back too and just think if you're a hedge fund guy. Do you have the time to spend all of your time studying a pre-revenue satellite company? No, you do not. It is one of 40 things you have to deal with. You might have fallen in love with Viasat or Rocket Lab or like whatever, and then you're forced to have a short leg against the love of your life. If you own your Rocket Lab last week, you did great. Amen. But you might have had to have a short. And so you might have spent a lot of time thinking about Rocket Lab. Time well spent. But then Ken Griffin said, how are you managing your factor risk? And you were like, I don't know, I had a lazy short. Uh, I'm short this thing that's going to be eaten alive by SpaceX, and the experts say that they can't even stack their satellites, and New Glenn can't launch, so I'm going to short this thing. Fair, you know, whatever. It's a tough job. That's why I don't do it anymore. And so you have to appreciate the level of work that shorts really have the capacity to do. It's not saying they're stupid. They just don't have the resources that Space Mob has, which is a really crazy thing. These hedge funds that effectively have unlimited research budgets do not have the resources to have a— I don't even know how many people we're working with in Space Mob now, but let's just call it like 150. You do not have a 150-person senior analyst team. When you think about the people working on Space Mob, a lot of these people are making million dollars a year. They're senior VP engineers, they're lawyers. You just can't hire a team like this, but we have for free because we've mutualized the benefit of the research, which is a really powerful thing. So we do know what's going on, and this is what's going to be really fun, is juxtaposing Quite, you know, the quite obvious conclusion many people had to short this stock. I read those expert calls too, and I was calling Tanner when I, I called him on Thursday because I was going through a mental breakdown. Uh, the kook bottom is not a joke. Uh, owning ASTS is not easy. If it were easy, everyone would do it. You know, people kind of laugh like the kook bottom, hearty har har. Um, it's real. I, it's when you have, you know, basically 90% of your net worth in this stock and you've really channeled it for various reasons, you know, none of which are investment related. But my friend Steve Larison, who I respect a lot, died and his last wish was to own ASTS until the promised land. And so part of me is very emotional about like winning this for Steve. And another part is, you know, if everyone ever goes through kind of like a personal trauma, there's various ways to deal with it. Spencer Pratt is dealing with it by taking on the entire political machine of California, productive way to deal with his loss. I've decided to deal with my own personal loss through uncaged rage toward the shorts of AST SpaceMobile. To each his own. I don't believe in SSRIs. I believe in overly concentrated positions in satellite stocks, but I am focused is really the key point. And so we know a lot of these things are happening as a result of this focus. But when I was calling Tanner, you know, he was like trying to put his daughter to bed and he's like, oh God, I have 2 babies. I have my 5-year-old that needs to go to bed because she's like temperamental and overly exhausted. And then I have my kook who is overly exhausted and temperamental. And so he chose correctly. He's like, okay, I gotta deal with like the fire that's burning the hottest. And so he was like, okay. What is up, kook? I'm like, okay, Tanner, so here's the problem. Um, the stock is down and it's bothering me. And then we really had a great conversation about stuff. I said, look, I was listening to all of these expert calls just like objectively, as if I were just another guy, just, you know, trying to make a living, running a diversified factor-neutral book with, you know, 5% drawdown limits. Like just a normal guy, you know, like all of us. And I said, look, I listened to these calls and especially in light of kind of a crappy stock price, I was bummed out. You know, sometimes when you really think about AST SpaceMobile and all the real life challenges involved with this company, it's a lot. There's so many challenges to overcome for this company to be successful. And then you hear all these experts, many of whom don't have good information. For example, the guy saying that each one of our satellites was going to take 2 years to build at a cost of $1 billion. I mean, good God, I hope he's not right, but he's not right, seeing as we already built the first 5 Block 1s, each at a cost of $28 million. And those are going to be some super expensive satellites. I'm, I'm very— and those work. I'm really sure that our follow-on satellites are not going to be 50 times as expensive. So you have to tune out some of these experts, but you know, you hear about, you know, it's like, oh, there's, you know, one more thing we gotta We gotta deal with this, we gotta deal with that. And then there's competition and then we have to deal with getting global L-band and launch capacity is strained and it's enough to kind of take the buzz out of it. And it's fine because that's part of the mental process. But then you can realize if you're just a standard buy listening to these calls, and many people are going to see these TICUS calls pushed out and then that's got The market consensus. There's really not a lot of edge in these expert calls anymore, but you have to really listen to them because that's what's setting the price in the market. And so as the stock price sort of readjusted, is a light word for down 40% in the past recent 2 or 3 months, you could see sort of concern about all this being repriced in the stock. Which is actually great news if you own the stock today because it means that those worries and concerns are reflected in today's stock price. Sure, if you had a time machine, hit that $130 bid and live your life, or perfectly trade it and rebuy it all at $63. I'm not that person, but owning it at $130 in hindsight was not reflecting a lot of those concerns. Doesn't mean $130 is ultimately wrong, but the hyperventilation Of market participants in the past 2 months because of concerns over New Glenn, concerns over SpaceX, concern over delivery cadence. Stock price is down 40%. What's being priced in? 15 satellites through 2026? 20 satellites through 2026? Sure as shit ain't 60. Pretty sure it's not 45 being priced in. We've recalibrated lower. Were Falcon launches priced in? Does the market know how many Falcons were signed considering the company didn't press release it, considering they're all subject to confidentiality agreements? Don't know. I feel like they started to price in other outcomes, and that means that we are set to get sprung, and that's exciting. I believe the market is fundamentally making the mistake of because it was hard to get our satellite production facility going doesn't mean that once it is going, it doesn't hit the cadence that was originally advertised. Because it was hard means that others probably cannot do it. And just think about the time, timing head start we have over everyone else. Think about the learnings we've had as we've built a satellite production facility to make the world's largest satellites at scale. Things that are dramatically larger than what SpaceX will be making, but not yet making for its V3 satellite. Pretty crazy when you think about what that moat is. And so as people go, well, Tesla has this moat because of Gigafactories and, you know, people can't touch SpaceX because of its scale. That's what we have. That's why I am sitting there thinking we might have this trillion-dollar opportunity here. What is the space economy worth? I don't know. Is it worth a trillion dollars? I don't know. But that possibility is there because as we're quickly finding out, the applicability of, you know, what was kind of this weird buzzy Adam Jonas thing, the space economy, like we're finding out that space economy is actually happening now. Look at the Rocket Lab results. There's all sorts of things to do in the space economy. And the new things that are happening, which are exciting, are the AI data centers in space, the power generation in space, the non-communication use cases for RF signals in space. We have the most power on orbit. ASTS is the biggest. All of those opportunities for the space economy are applicable to us. What's it worth? I don't know. Ask the people 4 years ago trying to figure out what the NVIDIA opportunity was worth. They didn't know, but they understood the asymmetry of the upside, or some did. And what they also understood is when a good thing gets going, don't try to trade a price target. That's my lesson. So anyway, that's a really long preamble. So we have a beautiful mission patch that has been put out there, and I'm looking forward to this mission. I really hope that we're invited. As usual, I will be there so long as it doesn't coincide with any kind of unmissable kid stuff. And like I said earlier, we finally got the overhang of the Mickey Rakuten sales behind us. And that, you know, unfortunately does take a little bit of time. So when a company does a secondary offering, those shares, just because, you know, someone buys them on that day, doesn't mean those shares don't have velocity and recycle through the market. These are the same as if the company actually did a stock offering itself. And so those shares take a little bit of time to settle. Previously, that's been like 3 to 10 days when there's been like a convertible bond offering, and this was a little bit more of like a protracted ATM. And so wasn't totally surprising that we had some weakness on Thursday. It was super annoying, but that's why I kind of said like, if the stock retraces, you know, let's do a vote on whether or not Koot keeps his account, which I will honor that, by the way. So if people had voted for me to delete my account, I would happily do it because it's the will of the people, but I was voted in to stay. But this is going to— this typically would take a little bit of time. Right now we are either blessed or about to be cursed with the earnings report. So if this company does what I think it's going to do, then those shares are going to be gobbled up, and any sort of indigestion we would have had on the Racketton sale sort of bouncing around the market, um, will get gobbled up real fast. If the company lays an egg, well, it was nice knowing you, and Monday Aftermarket will suck, but we'll get to what we can expect pretty soon. And so the fuselage is coming. We did the reverse diligence. We understood that the key concern by the shorts was production cadence and really launch availability. People were losing their mind over launch availability. And if you ask an expert, they're going to just state things like, yes, ASTS is in competition with SpaceX. Abel might not like Elon very much, which I don't know to be true, but I've heard this and that can be true. A contractual requirement to launch on SpaceX is not to go have a baby with Elon Musk, which Elon Musk would probably like to change that contractual term. I'm sure he would prefer to extract more concessions from his would-be clients. But guess what? The FTC has something to say about that. The Department of War has something to say about that. The NROL has something to say about that. SpaceX cannot exert monopolistic powers in this market without having a real problem. They just launched the ViaSat satellites. They just launched the Amazon Kuiper satellites, which are directly competitive to the core of Starlink, which is the broadband market. But it's only ASTS SpaceMobile that will be discriminated against by SpaceX according to the bears, only us. SpaceX literally launches every single thing in the world, including us. Yet we're the only people who's going to be like, nope, not launching them because they compete with me on D2C, which isn't even really part of my business at all. And it was really just me trying to mess with people and do this fake T-Mobile deal, which is worth $100 million, by the way. On a 1-year deal, and yet he'll launch everyone else. So anyway, we did our work. We understood that they were going to launch on SpaceX, and lo and behold, they are. Space Mob for the win on everything. And so it got me thinking more. I already kind of know that they have a bunch of SpaceX launches, but I was thinking, you know, what, what is it that they could have in their financials that could just prove this point? Well, in their 10-K, they have the future commitments. And if you don't have their balance sheet from U2, but they have prepayments as well. And so when you sign a launch contract, one is you pay an initial deposit. That's a, what is that? That is a debit to your prepaid expenses. and it's a credit to cash, cash out the door, and you have a, you know, yay, I get my place in line. And then you have something that's not on the balance sheet, which is, which is a minimum commitment. And so ASTS has minimum commitments related to future launches as of 12/31/2025, you know, so mind you, many, many months ago, which they could have increased, related that are, uh, $250 million to $325 million. And so what do we know? We know that they got Extremely favorable terms with Blue Origin. My understanding is no money down. They're basically options. Blue Origin doesn't have a certified vehicle yet. They will get there, I'm sure. And they need the, they need the cargoes. They're happy to have it. They understand they got to put up or shut up. Not a whole lot of leverage in that system right now. SpaceX, on the other hand, is the preferred partner. It is an incredible launch system. There's really nothing negative you can say about the Falcon 9 program. It's frankly astonishing that this was, this is the reality we live in. So guess what? They can do whatever they want in terms of reasonable commercial terms that are not going to incite the scrutiny of the FTC. And so when you sign up launches with SpaceX, you're paying a deposit and you're paying minimum commitments. And so that if you change your mind or if you cancel, if you're late, they're going to get some money for that. I'm assuming a 60% cancellation fee, which means you gross up, call that midpoint of $300 million of minimum commitments. You gross that up for the percent cancellation fee because that's the minimum. And then you divide that by the full sticker price of $74 million per launch. And then that gets you A pretty good estimate of how many Falcon 9s are launched, because we can again reasonably assume that we do not have any additional launches committed with ISRO. That's India, and I do not believe we have any minimum committed launches with other people. Hold on, hold on, hold on. My son is just hold on. Hey, hold on, hold on. I'm on call. I'm on call. I'll come up on the way, okay? This is the problem with technology. My son just walkie-talkied me on my watch. Talk about bombing my my spaces. Oh, my daughter too. We're sitting waiting for a coffee today, and I was like, "Hey, check this out." And so I played that Bloomberg article, and she's like, "I'm boring." And then the lady's like, "Kook! Who's kook?" And then Sana goes. It's this California-based private investor. And my daughter's eyeballs like popped out. She gave me this look with this like evil smile and she's like, that's— is that you? I was like, yes, but you must keep it a secret. And so my daughter at some level is still shocked people listen to me. She would be with Tim Ferriss and be like, do not listen to this guy. So just know who you're listening to. But anyway, back to the business before my son started talking to my watch and just imagine him knowing him. He'd like walkie-talkie me and be like, Dad, is your Social Security number the following? And dox me to the entire world. You never know how it's going to happen and it's always going to be when I least expect it. And my son doxing me by like reading my passport. Randomly would not surprise me. But anyway, back to business. So I think we have all these Falcon 9 launches. The proof is in the 10-K. That's why I'm so confident. And I think the market is gonna maybe get a little bit more insight into that on Monday. And I think that's going to go a long way toward flipping the bear thesis because I don't think anyone really thinks that this company is going to hit 45 satellites before the year. I think that they will probably maintain that guidance with some language that gives them some room, like target 45. It's important for Abel to keep cracking the whip, and they might well have 45 satellites ready to launch. But I really don't think it matters how many they actually launch because the inevitability— you always have to think, what is this going to look like in 6 months from now? So what today was a disappointment, if you knew they weren't going to have 45 in the air, um, by Christmas, it— at Christmas, if they have 25 in the air and all of a sudden your relevant period to value a security is over the next 12 months, you're going to be feeling really good about the inevitability of this company. And that's the thing that's kept a lot of us actually ahead of the curve on this is, you know, myself, every— everyone has really been wrong on the timing on this company for 4 years. Look at us now, we're a $75 stock. Why is that? The market is forward-looking, so don't get too hung up on a goalpost and you know martyr yourself on a false metric. The stock market is dynamic, and the stock market is forward-looking. You need to be fluid. This is Tai Chi. This is not whatever the opposite of Tai Chi would be. This is not a rigid science; it is a flexible one when valuing securities, and that's what a lot of the experts. Don't understand because they have precisely zero security analysis skills and they have precisely zero investing experience. And that experience on how to be resilient and adapt is, in, in my humble opinion, what separates the winners from the losers. The other thing we got on Friday was ASICs. So A little background. AST SpaceMobile knows who loves them, and they've been very good to Space Mob. And they also know we're maniacal at analyzing whatever information they put out. This is not to say they have selective disclosure. They just understand that with a given level of disclosure, there are different audiences. There is one audience that has done an insane amount of work. And is looking for very specific things. And what they blur in the pictures and what they do not blur is an active decision they make and a decision that helps inform what we know. Of all of the things to not blur in their video was the Micron testing device that was labeled ASIC. What is the ASIC? The ASIC is the next generation chip, which is 10 times as powerful as the FGPA chip, which we're currently launching. ASICs take a lot of time to make, and they are very important because the critical path of our technology is power. FGPA consume a lot of power.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Fine.
[00:37:56] Speaker B: But if you're power constrained, that limits how much bandwidth you can process. which limits your number of beams and all this other stuff. ASICs are dramatically more power efficient, which means everything else is awesome. And so what we know, if you've been following this carefully, is in the 10-K, they also had some disclosure. They said, we have reached a validation maturity milestone, which allows production and provision of flight candidate ASIC units for assembly into the Electron board. So they were already telling us that they were ready. Now they're showing us that these things are going into testing, which means they might be ready to go into integration. So if you'd been listening to the expert calls this week, you would have been hearing former employees who had left the company admittedly a while ago, but they would say, you know, this might be 6 months to a year off. And again, I'd say no big deal because we still have an incredible lead and the market will understand we will get this eventually, but it would be nice to get it done sooner. And so you could again see where hedge funds and shorts would be going, oh wow, they're going to miss the ASIC. You know, that's really where these guys have this crazy technical lead over everyone. You know, again, like, is this a good funding source? You know, that's all they're really looking for is relative performance. Like, is this short going to be relatively, you know, an underperformer or not? They're not necessarily shorting with an intent to kill. And so you could see where all of a sudden all these experts are kind of giving you reasons where you're like, it's going to be pushed off a little bit. I'm safe. I've got a free look to short this thing over the summer. I got Rakuten selling, you know, blah, blah, blah. But then the company coming out on the Friday before earnings with an unblurred picture of a Micron testing facility that says ASIC. I mean, they're telling us and they're telling specifically us, they are telling Space Mob, in my humble view, guys, we're almost there. Hang on. Because I do believe the company truly— I would say love is a strong word, but really respects what the Space Mob has done. I can only imagine, and sometimes I visualize laughing, I'm like, I wonder what Scott thinks about this post. I wonder what Scott thinks about this. You know, he, he doesn't know who I am, of course. Well, he actually does, but you know, I'm sure he's just sitting there being like, oh God, how did this become my life where I have Space mob 24 hours a day going wild on the internet. But then I take a step back and I go, he must also think, how in the world do I have this autonomous research publication unit that at all hours of the day disseminates well-intentioned research about my company to reduce my cost of capital that has more readership in viewership than any sell-side report could possibly have. How is it that I have effectively won on the CAC model for educating people about my company? Because I think at some level he probably has a little bit of heartburn over us, probably very specifically me. Um, but then at another level realizes like, holy crap, not only was I the badass that invented the super wholesale model for efficient go-to-market of my technology, But somehow I also have this super wholesale model of information dissemination about my company to help drive awareness and sponsorship. And, and when I say reduce the cost of capital, that's a very important thing. This is not to say people pumping my stock. I, I really truthfully do not view myself as a stock pumper. I have no idea what that really means when a company has a $25 billion market cap and trades You know, whatever it is, $300 million a day. This ain't a microcap, but reducing the cost of capital is important. And so again, that's not pumping, but as there's more certainty, as more knowledge about your company is disseminated, as more people understand versus guess, people should and do pay a higher price for that security because there's less uncertainty. As people pay a higher price because of that reduced uncertainty, the company has more access to capital. And they used it. And so as people kind of mock Scott for, you know, Scott, Scott Delusky, I look at these offerings and go, this is, this is accretive to me. These actions helped my family get more wealthy because this company was able to raise capital at attractive prices to fund our accretive growth projects, which is our constellation, which I intend to be a beneficiary of. And so while I was diluted, We had to let some new partners into the company, and we let them in at prices that were higher than they otherwise would have been, which means that I get to keep a higher percentage of the economics than I otherwise would have. I'm thrilled that we could raise capital at good prices, and I'm also thrilled that we have capital. So I'm really glad we're going to have, you know, roundabout $4 billion of cash. That's a competitive weapon in a competitive industry. But then you also, because you look at what Wall Street would have been believing. Kevin Chen did this incredible timeline of all of the things Tim Farrar did wrong. And so just going back to March, Tim Farrar, who's the world-renowned satellite expert, said ASTS has discovered it doesn't know how to stack its satellites on a Falcon 9, so it's going to have to wait for New Glenn. And so when our launch failed, the market assumed our entire program was cooked. And then in April, it's just one month ago, Tim said, LOL, now remove all the F9 launches since they've been postponed for a year. One month later, ASTS announces Bluebird satellites are going up on a Falcon 9. And what Tim doesn't know is that there's going to be more Falcon 9s after that. So eat shit, Tim Farrar. And this reality is going to be colliding with Wall Street because again, if you're just a hedge fund bro, have you spent the past 5 years creating websites to document everything that Tim Ferriss has been wrong on forever in his entire life? No, you've done other things with your life, such as be happy and productive. Space Mob has singularly created its own Wikipedia to document everything Tim Ferriss has been wrong about. And so when he says something, we have more context about this guy and don't take it at face value. But if you're a hedge fund guy, kind of new to satellites, you're getting up to speed because of the SpaceX IPO, you know, and you call a broker or someone and go, hey, I need to talk to an expert about space. And I had these questions about this satellite company. Who should I call? Shockingly, there's not a lot of experts for an industry that previously didn't really exist. And it's really Tim Ferriss. So you call this guy and you assume you should take him at face value. Well, you should not, but You can kind of understand the genesis of why people have these misunderstandings, or you really can easily understand. And so this is how the shorts, in my belief, are going to be trapped. And it just goes to understanding your enemy. And we do understand our enemy. We do understand the shorts. We do understand the quote unquote experts. And then it helps you understand why people can take opposing positions In your investment, and so if you own ASTS Space Mobile and you look at this insane 60 million shares short, you should have a view about why these people are betting against you. To short a stock is difficult. They have done some work. You should understand their perspective of why they are short because shorting is very scary, and you don't do it lightly, or you should not. And so I spend a lot of time thinking like, what are these guys thinking? And I could be wrong, but I have a very strong understanding of what they are consuming in terms of information and research and how they're drawing their conclusions. But again, the bird droppings from our bluebirds are things that I believe only the space mob has really developed the focus to Understand. Lemme just quickly look at the score of this Las Vegas Ducks game. Come on, flash the score, flash the score. I've got this over my right-hand shoulder and I was gonna try to wrap up the Spaces so I could watch the rest of this hockey game, but I feel like I'm not gonna be able to do that. What's the score? Oh yeah. Okay. Ducks up by 1. All right. So Tanner goes through this in painstaking detail. So he sees that Bluebird 16 is in final assembly. That's good. That means that we're really cranking because next up is Bluebird 8 through 10. And so this means we've got, you know, some extra little birds in our proverbial clip. And he sees 9 integration stations and teams. That's good scaling. We did some before and after pictures of what this facility looked like. And before, it's kind of scary. It literally looks like an empty room with some tables on it. Now this thing is built out, new equipment, new scale. And so they have 500,000 square feet now, which is a 4x increase in 5 years. This is nutso. And so Tanner points out that the new dedicated Micron facilities is up and running. There's 70,000 square feet just for making microns. And then he again does a comparison of what it used to look like. You can see the build out of this. You know, let's call it the Gigafactory. And this goes back to the thing, this company is creating real enterprise value. Our value is not in the simple satellites, it's in the capacity to build satellites. Because again, I don't think that this ends with dead spots in communications. I think AST SpaceMobile is going to be a generational company to seize the opportunity of the space economy, which is going to include on-orbit power, AI generation. I'm sure a lot of other things I haven't thought thought about, but we'll try to learn. He sees an improvement in terms of how we're actually packing the satellites, efficiency, a way to flip and lower the ring onto the array versus the old way of doing it. Pretty exciting stuff. What's great about people like Tanner, again, going to the merits of Space Mob, is Tanner is a petroleum engineer. These guys are going to have a different perspective than, you know, someone like myself. And I can think I can speak very safely for Anpin Man. I'm a finance guy. But so I wouldn't see these things in the same way. I just don't have that lived experience. Tanner is an engineer. He's dealing with these processes. He's dealing with safety cases and lost time incidences in the oilfield operations. A lot of these concepts carry over to any sort of industrial manufacturing. These are the types of insights that help other people in the space mob really have a holistic picture of what's happening. Because to understand AST SpaceMobile is to look past the R&D experiment that was Bluebird 3. Yay, we got it to work. So what? You need to be able to scale it. And that's where having a lot of these other people with, whether it's engineering experience, satellite experience is always great. It helps us understand these, these other other issues. And so these bird droppings that Abel put out, I think, are on purpose. And these guys, I think, are priming the pump to come out for what is a big earnings call. And so I think on Monday, Scott is not going to talk about Patch 1. He pushed that out. Why did they push out what should be the groundbreaking announcement one week before earnings? I think that was the prime of the pump. So that they can surprise us with more upside. And I think that that's going to be more clarity around batch 2 shipment. It did create a nice tourniquet for the bleeding of the Racketson sale and potentially set a real bear trap because then bears went, oh, they flushed out the good news. Now I got a free look on earnings. What a blessing. You know, these stupid retail guys popped the stock on Wednesday and now I get to short the living hell out of it because that was their news. Or was it? And so the market is now expecting that we have one launch in June and that that might have been flush of the bull case. What if that wasn't it? The shorts pressed. We'll find out in less than 24 hours who is right. I know a lot of us are thinking that we're due for some big government contracts. There's a lot of little things that have added up. Um, that support our belief for this. Let's check in with Only Six Inches. It's a humble group, Space Mob. If a guy says only six inches, you have to say thank you for the transparency. And I, I trust everything this guy says now because you know why not only seven inches? He could have, he could have been, he could have, he could have embellished. I wouldn't have checked it. And so he put out this expert call. Dun dun dun. And in the expert calls though, you know, sometimes you get factual information, not just opinions. And so we have a guy from Amazon saying, I do know ASTS is starting to look at some government contracts too. I think it would be good for them because literally other than Starlink, all the other players are making money on government. Government contracts are the only revenue stream right now. They're well positioned again with their spectrum and the size of their antenna. That lines up with much better for government applications than higher bands. There's an Amazon guy saying that we're really well qualified for government contracts. I personally think that we're still going to get some mega deal for Golden Dome. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. You know, I'm not a paid consultant, but the pump is prime for, for things like that. And then, and Panman, you know, love them or hate them. you know, came out with some interesting dynamics on really this spread in this weird, you know, what should be an arbitrary relationship between Rocket Lab and ASTS. And the Rocket Lab bros like can never forgive me because we've, you know, previously I've been skeptical of Rocket Lab, you know, not my war to fight, whatever. But until the end of time, they just despise me. But when you look at this Rocket Lab ASTS spread, ASTS generally has been outperforming Rocket Lab. And then there's this catch-up trade. It's sort of this ping pong. Both companies have owner-operators. Both companies have file accounts, um, 10 out of 10 CEOs. They're true founders doing the impossible. Peter Beck is unbelievable. And no, I wouldn't ever bet against a guy like that. And, you know, lately though, just if you take this spread for what it is, ASTS is at the cheapest it's ever been versus Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab has done great, but the pump is primed. And I think a lot of people have this spread shade on is really kind of the conclusion. And then we have to look, it just the slingshot of sentiment. And so you really have to know what other people are feeling. And this is again why the kook bottom seems to work. Is I don't fight my own sentiment. I've learned to embrace that there's no real benefit in life of like pretending to be strong. When I'm pissed off, I let everyone know. When the stock price goes down and sort of grinds me down, I get despondent, super upset, start rage posting on the internet. I'm in a bad mood, walk into the ocean with my clothes on, like you name it. I don't fight it, I embrace it. And that's when people trade off of that because they see that I'm crashing out and then they start making fun of me and I'm like, fuck this stock. And they're like, yep, buy order. And so, you know, last week I'm posting memes of me punching a Bloomberg screen, I'm deleting my account, I'm selling a sacrificial share. Those are all authentic feelings of mine. None of that is embellished. That is how I felt. I'm sitting in my car driving to work, punching my steering wheel, swearing my head off. That's me at $63. And so you take a look though and think about shifting narrative. Last year when the stock went to $60, couldn't believe it. I was the smartest person in the universe. I was free. Everything was amazing. And when the stock then corrected from $60 and went into the $30s, you know, kook bottom for sure. But now, you know, here we are. what appears to have been the correction was last year's kind of capitulation blowoff to the top. Just goes to show you the market is designed to make you go insane. But when you look more broadly at the overall sentiment, ignoring my little microcosm of insanity, last year or 2 years ago, everyone was saying satellite phones would not work. And then today, Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential Communication Companies Sorry, 10 most influential media and communication companies of 2026 includes us. The bears were screaming the whole time. And then, yeah, Dave, he's literally one of my favorite people. I don't know this guy, uh, personally at this point. I just really like following his stuff. He's just— he just cuts the right way with me. Um, but he went, you know, compared to last year, the tech is proven. We secured extremely valuable spectrum with Legato. We've partnered with the vast majority of the world's mobile carriers and Google. We have defense and space-based data centers are now a new use case. Competitors like Amazon and SpaceX have admitted that they're 2 years behind plus plus. Competitors have worse spectrum and have a harder path to getting anything going. We have full approval of FCC approval. The satellite design was finalized. We've scaled a massive new manufacturing plant and we have nearly $4 billion of cash. None of these things were true a year ago. And so it's always kind of my reminder to check myself, you know, get a grip, Kook. Easier said than done. But the sentiment lives in a local environment. The sentiment does not look back over a horizontal analysis of 1 or 2 years. And that's where people like Reformed Trader do us such a justice, is by really framing the sentiment in, you know, the collective, you know, psychohistogram of the market and its charts, and really just kind of understanding the ebbs and the flows, which I find to be pretty useful. And a lot of people get sort of crazy about how the company isn't communicating very well. And so you see this really on Reddit, you know, some dope is saying that, you know, the first thing I learned in business school, like, dude, that's your first mistake is you had to go to business school. And so, you know, whatever he learned from a professor in business school who's never actually run or owned or founded a business was that the best business practice is to under-promise and over-deliver. Actually not true. If you are a radical renegade of funk, That's redefining an industry. The best business practice is to be batshit crazy and inspire your team to do the impossible. And even if you're delayed, it's way the hell better than impossible. And that's what Abel does. That's what Elon Musk does. You have to rally a team. What are you going to say? Go, guys, you know, team, let's have our all-hands meeting. So we're probably going to be delayed, so I'm going to accept that and let's all just be extra complacent today and not have that fire in our belly because it probably won't work out anyway. And, you know, like take long lunches and hope you all have great vacations and just like put half effort into it. That's not what they do. You gotta rally the team. A funny quote Tanner had ironically about me in this Bloomberg article, which I guess is a compliment. He went, you know, basically kook is a nut job, but he is the straw that stirs the drink. It's an interesting comment. I never heard that before. Abel has to be the straw that stirs the drink, and the drink is like 500 milligrams of caffeine. You have to have a team that is killing themselves against impossible goals, and you will probably miss those goals. But you can't then communicate internally an aspirational goal, but then publicly be like, just kidding. And so you got to then look at the actual results, which again can be delays against previous promises, but still the accomplishment of things thought to be impossible. That's a beat. And so we have this other guy respond on Reddit, which Kevin, Kevin Chen pointed out, you know, the tech, they hit the tech, they did 120 megabits per second. That's amazing. They got the spectrum. They got Legato, which is like the, like we call it El Legato for a reason. It's like the city of gold. We got it. Many men have died trying to get Legato. Go call, go research Phil Falcone. Go research Cerberus. A lot of blood has been spilled trying to wrangle Legato. And we seemingly got it. We got regulatory approval. We got partnerships. We got DOD, Department of War. We actually hit revenue guidance. And so sure, the manufacturing guidance has slipped, but again, I think that that's a catch-up all at once. And so I like the fact that Abel is kind of like Teddy Roosevelt. He's not jawboning and talking about what he'll do. He's heads down. Trying to execute. Does it take a little bit longer? Yeah. Does that make me just want to pull my hair out sometimes where I'm just so exasperated? Yeah. Have I legitimately discussed with Anpanman whether I should apply for a job in the factory? Yes, I have. I don't know if I could, and it was kind of funny because then we went down this rabbit hole. I don't know if I could get a job. It'd be a very interesting resume. They'd be like, okay, sir, so Uh, you went to, you know, whatever school, and you worked on Wall Street your whole life, blah, blah, blah. How exactly are you qualified to know how to use a torque wrench? And I'd be like, you know what, you honestly, you got me. I have no idea, but I assume it would be really good for my fitness goals and endurance. So I will try really hard and I will be super focused. Because imagine also the funny thing of like a guy coming in, you know, hourly And then I own more stock than all of their executives except for one. I'm like, you want to talk about alignment on the factory floor? I will be goddamn driving people to greatness. I will be checking every bolt on that thing as if my life depends on it. I really do think that I should work on the factory floor because there is going to be no one that is going to generate more team spirit and cultural positivity than Cook on the manufacturing floor. And I think I would love it. And I think I would probably not last a month because it's a legit super hard job and these people Are very, very talented, and we're very lucky to have them. And they have to execute, and that's just the reality of it. And it's not easy. And I see comments like, oh, you know, they're hiring, you know, in Midland. It's hard. And these people, you know, look at their backgrounds. You know, they, you know, work in various, you know, non-Goldman Sachs prior careers. It's like, yeah, no shit. It's a manufacturing facility. You know, we've heard that. Blue Origin is hiring people literally from like the Waffle House to go build rockets. So you have to retrain people for these skills. Why would you belittle their aspirations and their resilience to learn a new skill? That is condescending as hell. And so we've seen these videos of the people that work at AST SpaceMobile. They're coming from all walks of life. A lot of them are coming off the oil field. So they're extremely skilled. at things that matter, like their hands. And they're used to working in environments that are severe and brutal outside in Midland, Texas, versus working indoor in a clean room. And so like, who, who do you think you are judging these people is really my view. And, and this is, you know, really the AST advantage is like, we're, we're tapping into this labor and it's hard, but we're not Having to deal with Hawthorne, for example, ask Elon Musk how that worked out. And so then the other thing that really came through this week is just people hyperventilating over New Glenn delay risk. This is what really just struck me is hedge funds legitimately thought that New Glenn not getting into orbit screwed the entire launch cadence. I can see that narrative. I get it. I disagree with it, but I can understand their perspective. And again, that goes to why it's important to know your enemy, know what the shorts are thinking, but really don't, Clinton, don't count New Glenn out. Never mind that I don't think it's a near-term problem for us. New Glenn is very important long-term to driving our costs very low, but it's not, it's not the end of the world. But the big beauty, as I call it, is going to be back on the dance floor shortly. There's 2 boosters in their facility. This rocket's kicking ass. And we actually found out exactly why the second stage failed. And I mean, there's no good reason for a failure, but if it was a fundamental design flaw, that's a little scary. You know, it means you have no flight heritage. You gotta go back and redo the whole thing. If it was because of a QA thing, that's better. And so if you don't know a lot about rocket manufacturing, what, when you're building a rocket, literally everything is filmed and Reviewed, so if there is a problem, you can go back and spot exactly what went wrong. Here, we've we've actually found out exactly what went wrong. I don't want to say it because because I don't, but I do know, and it's and it's really minor. It's something that will never happen again, and so I'm very optimistic that New Glenn will show us its incredibleness. But again, I don't think that ASTS is going to be launching on them anytime soon. I think that. FM-2 was sort of a trial balloon. It was a good opportunity to get on there and learn with Blue Origin. But then the bulk of our composite birds in the batches are going to be on Falcon until New Glenn has more flight heritage. And, you know, we could belabor that point until we're blue in the face. And then we also just kind of go back to you know, the revenue opportunity. Thought it was just kind of cool this week. I, I saw AllTrails, which, which I'm actually a subscriber to, integrating SpaceX. And so makes sense. People using the hiking app need to have connectivity to hike because you're hiking. And so is that a big revenue opportunity? Probably not. But again, it shows you the power of these platforms. There's all sorts of little problem statements existing out there that are going to build on these satellite connectivity platforms. And these are probably going to be higher ARPU customers. You're starting to get these tight affinity groups. And so for the off-roading community, for the hiking community, for the RV community, for the boating community, for the, you name it, birdwatching community, all sorts of things like that, which are just going to drive ARPU. And that's kind of neat to see all these vertical use cases popping up. The big broad horizontal use cases speak for themselves. But it is nice to have all these little spiky things. And so then going back to the space economy, we had a cool post by iPilot who is also an unbelievably large shareholder. But then he just did a quick synopsis of the Rocket Lab results and he made a good point. Wall Street is increasingly valuing these companies less like speculative SPACs and more like strategic infrastructure platforms. That are tied to defense, communications, AI infrastructure, sovereign resiliency, golden dome, space-based sensing and position navigation and tracking, and launch capacity shortage, which is doubly applicable to Rocket Lab. And it is neat. This promise of the space economy, which really meant nothing to us, is happening. And that's where I do believe the real investment dollars come when there starts to be bona fide businesses being built in space. It's no longer just government business or some, you know, like satellite TV and things like that, that there really is something. And so we also this week had some more comments out of Brendan Carr, who's the FCC chairman, and he has gone out of his way to applaud what's going on in the direct-to-cell industry. And most importantly, he's very focused on making sure there's a competitive market in that there's not just one monopoly. And most people will go, well, yeah, but SpaceX is a monopoly. And I just think what people are missing is that he was most focused on making sure there was a balanced ASD Space Mobile. And then in an analog that now sounds less anachronistic than it had, But rewind 10 years ago, you had Intel desperate to keep AMD in business so that it wasn't effectively like antitrust. And then of course AMD came back and slaughtered, but now Intel is re-slaughtering. But I believe ASTS is the Intel of yore and that SpaceX in its current form with its DDC business is what just provides some optics around some competition as well as Amazon. But when you unpack it and, you know, unpack it, I have the issue I come up against is SpaceX and Amazon just don't have the commercial access through the MNOs. I believe what they're ultimately going to do is use their spectrum for their own consumer devices, which may or may not be a phone in the traditional sense, but you don't have to be too creative to see how they can have some captive devices, Amazon in particular. And then we even see with SpaceX, you know, they got super long, all this AI processing, Grok. You know, can only, you know, sort of like make her wear a bikini so many times before that's not really an efficient use case of AI technology. And they're just wholesaling it to Claude right now. And so it's entirely possible that SpaceX does something with their spectrum. We'll see. But the big kahuna, I believe, is AST SpaceMobile. And, you know, we're first with broadband, you know, bona fide chops. And with that comes really the right of capture around spectrum, spectrum and orbital real estate. These companies that are pioneering right now are getting the good stuff early before the full value of it is recognized in the market. And I believe that value is only going up and you're seeing that in the market as MSS spectrum in particular is being rapidly revalued because of AST SpaceMobile. ViaSat is going up because of the waves we're making in terms of the commercial viability of MSS. It's an important observation. And so I also had added some other technical slides to this and was going to talk about more of the bar arguments. We've already gone over an hour. I'm exhausted. I also want to watch the rest of This hockey game. But we can talk about bear arguments another day, but a lot of it I kind of touched on really, which is so much of Wall Street right now is focused on uncertainty around launch and uncertainty on production cadence. And then you have some adjacent uncertainties around ASIC availability, but I think that's really just sort of what they thought was the cherry on top. And so tomorrow with the company having earnings, what we want to see is not 3, but 3 plus 3 plus 3. In other words, what I said with 3 till infinity, you know, again, people caught on to the analog or the reference to 93 to Infinity, which is a great song from the 1990s. For me, this is all about 3 till infinity. You get those first 3 composite birds out, bang, you've uncorped it. And the next 3 and the next 3 are going to come out in an increasing cadence. And that's when we have operations. That's when we move to the final boss of this thesis, which is really what is the ultimate revenue generating capacity of the company is. I don't know, but a girl can dream. And, you know, the question the shorts have to ask themselves is from what stock price are we answering that question? And that's something I always would tell AntPanMan. Is, you know, when people would worry about our execution abilities and things like that back when the stock was like $5, it's like, are they going to be able to drive that conversation from a stock price of $50, from a stock price of $75, from a stock price of $150? You know, these dingbats might have forgot to think about the order of operations. And so I think the company is going to come out swinging tomorrow. They're going to talk about their balance sheet. They're going to talk about their spectrum. They're going to talk about probably an increasing book of government business. They're going to talk about probably increasing opportunities in Europe, which our European correspondent Peter Lindberg is on top of. He better go check that office right now in Luxembourg. I'm assuming it's coffee time in Europe, so you know he's going to casually walk over, get an espresso, but he's watching. And then I believe the big thing is just going to be production cadence, and then. ASIC integration. And that's when people go, it's happening. And the other thing is, what is our lead against our competitors? I mean, you know, again, Space Mob is cool. You know, I put it out there and then lo and behold, I have a guy who is an ASIC engineer reach out and he's like, hey, Cook, you have any questions? I literally only do ASICs all day, every day. Let me take a look at this. I'll get back to you. It's like, yes, please. And so Do I have subject matter expertise in ASICs? No, I do not, but I have AI and now I have Leo who's an actual person. And so we're going to learn about that, but he's looking at it and helping to educate me exactly what the lead times are for these things. And what people don't seem to understand is, again, when Abel is doing his all hands meetings, you know, telling people just be complacent, it's cool, just chill out. Again, he's not saying that. He's also not saying, I'm glad we are done with innovating. You have completed the innovation. Now please no longer improve anything ever. We have achieved what we wanted to and now you can go home. No, he's lighting people on fire. Innovate, innovate, innovate. If you don't innovate, you will die. Literally what he's telling his team. They told me that's what he says. This is a founder. He's crazy. And so what people don't seem to— and crazy is good, and that's probably why they accept Kook in their world, because he's like, yeah, whatever, crazy likes crazy. And where are we gonna be in 5 years? So when people actually potentially catch up to us on the tech, which— are they gonna do it? They don't have the spectrum. Yeah. So maybe they can catch up to us on S-band type stuff. Maybe. Where are they going to do the low-band stuff? They can't get it. Even if they did, where are we going to be in 5 years? Better. We are learning at a faster rate than other people because we are doing now, we are doing better, we are doing more. We are first. We wrote the problems, we answer the problems, we create the problems, we know the solutions. We are ahead of everyone. We have access to more partners, therefore more learnings. We're in more deals. We're getting the best talent. We are first. We will be better. Our lead will expand. That's the lesson of life when investing is market share matters because it means you're ahead, which means you learn more, which means you innovate faster. And this is where the integration happens, the vertical integration. How in the world is Amazon going to learn jack shit when they've integrated it to a Canadian company, MDA, to Do it for them? How do you change something? How do you do an ASIC? These are the questions I was actually asking to my new friend. There's a reason why literally every single satellite company that's ever tried to outsource it with a third-party prime contractor has gone bankrupt. There is a reason why SpaceX does not do it this way. There is a reason why ASTS is vertically integrating, as painful as it might be. It's not only for control, but But they're going to expand their lead on innovation, and I can't even imagine the cool stuff we're going to be talking about 5 years from now. It's also hard for me to imagine still talking about this 5 years from now. It will be 10 years in on a single stock investment, unhealthily focused on this. I only pray that the stock is $2,000 so that the financial rewards will have justified this type of chaos. But, you know, so far so good, right? The thing kind of paid more than, you know, an honest day's work at Wendy's. So with that, I'm going to end it so I can watch the rest of this game. Although it looks like it's the Ducks for the win. I was kind of rooting for the Golden Knights, but I'll see everyone tomorrow. I unfortunately have a work meeting at the time of the earnings call, so I needed to work with my EA and figure out how I tell her I cannot make a pretty important meeting without telling her why I cannot Make a pretty important meeting. But otherwise, I might be listening to this on replay and I will do my Kook thread anyway, but I'm sure there'll be like 50 other people doing earnings calls threads as well. So look out for those. And I hope the company can deliver us into an exciting summer and kick off what is hopefully an endless summer rally. Thanks again for joining everyone. Talk soon. Keep publishing all this awesome research.
[01:16:14] 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, and I think with this technology we can really affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular mobile connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the NMOs. Listen. Mmm, waffles.