Kook's Weekly - September 2

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: 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.
[00:00:30] Speaker C: Okay, so it looks like this is the solution. Um, sorry about that, people. Um, it's all Tim Ferriss's fault. I don't know what to say. The guy clearly has hacked my computer in an effort to stop and silence the people. So I'll have a quick recap just so we have a clean Summary of all the AA meetings. I'll skip the first thing, which basically just focused on the fundamentals. Don't be a panic-in, grow a pair and quit whining. That's basically the conclusion of the first tweet. The second was, if you think you can go to the beach and relax on the Friday before Labor Day, then you're dead wrong and you're alive. And so a lot of us were eagerly deciding to not go to the beach and sit in front of our computers at various hours after the close on Friday thinking, what would Scott do? Scott would torture us all because he himself is working nonstop and wants to make us earn it. But this wasn't Scott's control. This was the FCC's control, who probably is even more eager to make us earn it because of how much we've sort of obsessed about each FCC docket over the past 5 years. And we got what we wanted for. So the punchline of this FCC filing is we get the next 20 launches approved. So we had filed for 243, I think. But we're not about to launch 243 satellites. If you remember, we've all been panicking over FM1. So let's quit panicking over FM1. Let's now panic over FM1 through FM20. How about that? So we get to launch the next 20 satellites, 2 of which are going to be at the lower orbit and then 18 at the higher orbit, which is great. Those satellites are going to have really good communication. Characteristics and will not deorbit as much and otherwise are very efficient. Notable that SpaceX cannot operate, or Starlink cannot operate at that higher altitude without its service really being a total POS. I believe if memory serves, they're trying to operate at around 300 kilometers and we're going to be operating at about 690 kilometers, which means our satellites won't turn into shrapnel very quickly. We will be able to keep our satellites up in the air, which means that less of our cash will be going to maintenance CapEx and more of it will be going toward expanding the constellation, investing in R&D, or potentially down the line distributions of some form or another to shareholders. But let's not get too far down that rabbit hole right now. And many people said that we would never get to this point. And so it's important to think back at the tortured journey of an FCC docket. I think I made a couple jokes, which I'll make a second time because everyone knows that that's super funny every time when an on-the-fly joke is then repeated and it's more pensive. And so in the docket, we had a bunch of hate mail from Starlink that was all just lawfare and total BS. And then we had about 2,456.7 protests letters from astronomers in a deeply coordinated action, just basically to spam the docket. Well, Brendan Carr obviously saw that and said, sorry guys, progress is coming. And so this was one approval for a man, but a very large approval for mankind. This is the beginning of the space mobile era. We will have the next 20 satellites bringing us to a total of 25 sort of big boy satellites plus 1 BW3. This will get us to cash flow breakeven or positivity to very good intermittent service levels, but on the tipping point of true continuous broad service. More importantly, we'll be past the point of no return. So very exciting. There's very little chance the FCC is going to stop us at these next 20. And then people might say, well, they didn't get the service link. Well, we'll get that. And so meanwhile, we can operate the service link under STAs, which we've been doing previously. But this gives us some more time to finalize the deals with AT&T and Verizon. We've filed the lease agreements based on my best understanding with AT&T and Verizon. There was some FUD over the weekend about Verizon, but the same FUDster that said Verizon had actually changed their mind on us a couple years ago. Not true. And so I would ignore the FUDsters. And this is just another stepping stone toward many things, one of which is a particularly interesting event, which will be the Verizon DA. All we can surmise there is that there are conditions precedent For that Verizon DA, so some condition needs to be met before they can sort of release the hounds. I don't know if it was this FCC approval, and it very well might have been, but we'll only know in hindsight. So the other thing that's interesting that's happening as a parallel track is the rapid development of Blue Origin. So Blue Origin is already. going down the line with Blue Origin New Glenn 3. New Glenn 2 should be coming up pretty soon. It's been hot-fired. It looks like it could be ready to go. What we don't know is if we're on it or not. And so that flight is supposed to take the ESCAPADE project or ESCAPADE thing to Mars. As some astute DDers have figured out, it's actually not really an optimal launch window for that. And so it might actually be in their benefit to swap Escapade out. We don't know what they're going to do. We also don't know if we can go rideshare with Escapade because there were some emerging theories that we would be on New Glenn too, which would certainly make for a very dramatic second launch. And we just don't know. But it is really good to see the capacity of New Glenn speeding up. Having that rocket hit the market is going to add a Ton of capacity and we want it. There's a lot of space mob stuff that wants to go up in the air. The other capacity that looks still honestly pretty far away to me, but is looking better than it was, is Starship. So Starship had a test flight this week as well. Dramatic as always, the camera angles they have are Really almost out of a sci-fi video. And they were able to get a cargo to a suborbital altitude. I believe it was like 170 kilometers. They were able to use the PEZ dispenser, which is interesting. And then they were able to get the rocket back to Earth, whereupon it dramatically exploded. So I don't really know the definition of success, but To be able to get real weight up to a suborbital destination, release it, and basically get stuff back to Earth is certainly a step in the right direction versus the prior launches that had really everything explode all over the place. And so I think you gotta just take progress where we can get it. And it's funny when you think about Starlink, I was actually kind of Dreading people being idiots of going, oh no, Starlink was, Starship was successful. We should sell ASTS. When I remind myself that previously the FUD would be, oh, the space mob's entire model depends on Starlink or Starship being available. It's like, what is it going to be, guys? That our entire model depends on Starship? being in existence to drive down launch costs. Well, that was never true. Explicitly from the beginning, ASTS has designed and budgeted its satellites for existing launch vehicles. And to the extent prices come down, that is just found value. Then let's talk about what happens if Starship is successful vis-à-vis the, vis-à-vis the V3 satellites. So the V3 satellite has an enormous amount of capacity. And it's going to be great for Starlink. And having never seen true Starlink financials, it's unclear how much that's needed because we don't really know. When you look at the churn, when you look at the cost of the terminals, when you look at the overall CapEx, you know that you have a lot of revenue growth at Starlink. What you don't really know is how attractive those cash flows are. I'm inclined to believe that they're pretty good. In which case then V3 would make it all better. But we don't really know if Starlink was in a way a business that required an inflection. I don't know that. The bear case would be that the V3 is going to allow them to have a viable D2C product. And I just don't think that that is really a relevant point. Because I don't think Starlink has the business model to pull it off, even if they have the tech. So that's why I personally think that Starship being successful is simply a net positive because it's majorly disruptive to launch. We are short launch, make no mistake. We want Rocket Lab to be successful with their rockets. We want New Glenn to be successful. We want SpaceX to be successful because that is going to commoditize the launch market, and we have a lot of weight over many years that we need to put in orbit. So the more capacity, the better. Once we're up there, to kind of extend on the FCC approval, I just want to explore an interesting tweet by Katzi, which we've had some clues about for quite some time about the impact of FirstNet On getting commercial service links. So this is interesting as, as to whether Katzi's right about not necessarily a backdoor, but a deliberate approval strategy where FirstNet, which is federal spectrum that's coordinated with the FCC by the ITU, we've already filed all of our work for the FCC for the FirstNet spectrum. So we know that that's on the docket. They've included it in all of the SES rules. It does give you one continuous swath of spectrum around the country, and by law, AT&T can use any free FirstNet capacity commercially. That was always the bet. And so Katzi has a theory That full commercial approval can drop at any time, and so the comment period ended August fifth. SpaceX has been spamming it as usual, but this would be interesting—not really necessary to own the stock, but it is necessary to ultimately get commercial approval for the service links, to be clear. But this first net angle could really come out of left field and give us. a service-linked surprise faster than perhaps some of us are expecting. But again, I think it's a moot point because what the market really wants to see is the production of Block 2 on a timely basis with then emerging visibility into the launch vehicles they're going to be using, successful launch of those satellites where they are able to take command and fly them. And then I think a reasonable person, of which all of us are, will realize that the FCC will approve the SCS commercial links, which is why they had the legislation in the first place. So that really shouldn't be a bridge too far. Speaking of people who are crossing that bridge, AT&T is ramping up for something. And so many of us started to see AT&T reach out to some of us asking for our contact details. And I haven't gotten a package yet. I've been excitedly checking my door every 10 minutes waiting to see what AT&T is gonna send us. My imagination runs wild. I have a theory that they're gonna give me some like waffle oven or something, or maybe a customized syrup. I don't know. And maybe we should start a poll on what we think the AT&T swag is going to be, but I hope it's awesome because if they're smart and they are, it will be awesome. And then we're all just going to explode it all over the internet and they're going to get a ton of free media exposure, but it shows you that something is coming. It also, when you think about it, is a direct extension as to why Verizon will be getting their act together to the extent that they're not. But the fact that Verizon has been on TV saying we have a deal with AST SpaceMobile, the fact that they filed the paperwork for the lease tells me that there's really no big deal and it's all just on its way. But when you think about it, there's just no way Verizon is going to hesitate on this. The idea that AT&T is going to be coming out in advertisements saying, Full guaranteed 100% coverage all of the time with a bunch of media that shows people really probably on the positive end of like being able to share those moments, to be able to send a picture to grandma and those sorts of things is probably how you want to lead. I don't think fear-based marketing is best, but I'll leave that to people like Tut who are marketers because the inverse is showing people in broken down cars or like stuck on a mountain and things like that. And delivering a very simple message of use AT&T and you will not die. Use AT&T. So if you're walking on a dark street and feel uncomfortable, you know, your phone will work. Guess which audience that message will resonate with? Women. It's not hard. Women really respond well to safety, as they should, because they're smart. And that's why women live longer than men. And so this is not a hard thing to sell to people because women will understand that 100% network coverage is better than playing cell phone roulette like I just did trying to do my Spaces. Now, some would say that this was a life-threatening event I just went through of not being able to do my Spaces because how would I go on? And I would've just, instead I'd be hitting Space Mobile to deliver this. Opro Pro via satellite. But there's just no way into the holiday season in a highly competitive cell phone market that Verizon is going to be known as the carrier that will kill you. That's just not a winning proposition. And both these guys are going to be eager to stick a shank in the back of T-Mobile, who idiotically partnered with Starlink to try to get some pixie dust, but they're being shut down by Deutsche Telekom, their main owner anyway. So let's see the AT&T ramp, but I think you can safely assume as AT&T is positioning to start marketing this, you can assume a lot of things are about to happen. One of which is Verizon VA, because there's just, again, there's no chance Verizon is going to let AT&T jump out ahead of them. That just flies in the face of logic. And it also implies AT&T sees what the company has already told us, which is that production is ramping up and we're going to have 20 satellites up in the air in the blink of an eye, which makes this real. So you can start to build expectations for consumers within the sort of horizon people expect things to be delivered. This is not AT&T's FSD of, oh, buy my product and full self-driving will occur In your grandchildren's, you know, cryogenically extended lifespan. This is going to be buy our phone, use us as your MNO, and you'll have space mobile within the next months. That's, I think, what they're lining up to do. So when we think about the deliverability of the service, we had yet another very exciting thing happened. Legato. And so Legato, for quick background, is AST's very elegant and well-structured deal to get 45 megahertz of what they call beachfront spectrum. So this is super high quality spectrum that's going to be great for high data throughput and voice and things like that. It's been held up forever in the regulatory morass of the FCC, fighting with the DOD, fighting with really everyone. And ASTS was able to effectively consummate alchemy by taking spectrum that was and is regulated currently and approved as multi-use satellite spectrum, but then being able to use it as terrestrial spectrum. No one else has been able to do that before. Previously, they've tried to use it under these ATC, which is like ancillary terrestrial control. I forget what ATC stands for, but it's basically hang towers and use this MSS spectrum literally on the ground as terrestrial spectrum. And that created interference issues. And then the DOD stepped up because the DOD is using this spectrum for defense purposes. And it was causing problems. We don't know exactly the problems with the DOD, but presumably either related to Well, it must have related to interference. That's really the simple answer is the best answer. So we had this incredible deal where we're paying $520 million upfront, plus roughly $80 million a year as a lease payment to control 45 megahertz of spectrum in North America. Now, this would normally be worth billions. AT&T did a deal this week, which we'll talk about, to get EchoStar's spectrum, which I believe it was 50 megahertz of spectrum, although I don't have that number off the top of my head. And they paid $23 billion for that spectrum. We're paying a song because we are the only people that can use it in this way. Very valuable angle. Well, Inmarsat ultimately owns the spectrum. They had agreed to lease it to Legato to coordinate it and basically allow that spectrum to be useful. And then Legato hit the wall. And so then now we're stepping in to lease that spectrum from Legato with monies then remitted ultimately to Inmarsat. So think of a sublease effectively. So now Inmarsat is a cranky bunch. And so along the way of the bankruptcy, there's a couple issues, one of which is Inmarsat wanted their money right away. So this $520 million they wanted upfront, fine. They figured out a way to do it. And then they threw in sort of an obvious surprise saying, well, not only that, but we actually want to effectively write in a non-compete clause into this lease. So we want to, not basically, but we do want to prohibit AST from operating in the L-band on a global basis. We want a contractual non-compete. Well, this gets really interesting really quickly. So for starters, ASTS said no. He said it's unreasonable for a global constellation to agree to a non-compete Because that goes exactly to what I've said many, many weeks in a row, forever, about the value of a global, high economies of scale, multi-client system. You would not start to hive off geographies. That is literally being pretty dumb. The reason you're going to make a lot of money as a monopoly type company is because of this exact economies of scale. And multi-client business model, so you wouldn't write it out. So we went through all the documents; they didn't give the ultimate court—it's called the coordination agreement. Some of this is all well, a lot of it's all redacted. But in the adversary proceeding, which is just a fancy way of saying a side fight, so there's a main fight, and then kind of think of like outside the bar in a back alley, there's like an extra little fight. So in this docket for the extra little fight. there was a lot of interesting stuff that showed the red lines and a lot more context about this dispute. What it shows very clearly is the ambitions of ASTF SpaceMobile. So a big thing, kind of on a sidetrack, so we're going from a side fight to a sidetrack. The sidetrack is I'm always looking to make sure that there's a big vision by a management team. If I'm going to have a position like this, I want to make sure that whether I'm around for this thing to be X dollars per share, conserve, let's say, $1 billion per share. I, while I might not ride it out for that, I wanna make sure that that conveyor belt of value is there so that someone else will be as excited to buy this stock from me at $500 as I'm as excited to buy it today at $50. You don't really wanna ever, I don't think you wanna invest ever knowing that there's a bag holder. You wanna make sure that there's a big opportunity. You want to understand the true thinking of management. how strategic they are, how big they're thinking. So this docket was revealing because Inmarsat even said ASTS is a very ambitious company. They see it from a mile away that ASTS SpaceMobile is coming for their spectrum. We have some proof points of this just from a couple of weeks ago where we did this very small $60 million deal to buy ITU coordination rights. That's showing the hand of AST SpaceMobile. They're doing little things and big things. The little things set up for big things down the line where you can start to actually just start taking or applying or using spectrum if someone's not using it fully, which Inmarsat would not be using it fully as they operate these narrowband systems for ships. We can waltz in there and have third in priority as as is the case for us with that ITU right, and then start to use it. Inmarsat sees this from a mile away and they very clearly see the threat we pose to their business. And so they were trying to stop it. So the judge did a reasonable thing. A good judge should really do the minimum, in my view. And that, you know, I think is a political divide where people will usually accuse activist judges of legislating from the bench and maybe ruling In a way that is reflective of how they think the world ought to be, where more conservative judges rule really to preserve freedom and rights and otherwise let things get decided later so that you're just reserving judgment. And I, I kind of like the, the latter approach better. See how the cards shake out. And so the judge said, let's get these birds up in the air. Let's get North America L-band lit up. If you guys have a fight on international things later, then you sue each other later, but you're not in a fight right now. You're not tripping over each other on international spectrum right now. So let's not settle it. And it's not in my purview to settle it. So they agreed to cut and paste the mediation language That they had done, which is binding mediation language. They had agreed to put that language in the final documentation, which is going to be the basis of getting this plan confirmed, which should hopefully happen this month. And then rest assured, when ASTS SpaceMobile down the line moves to operate in the L-band internationally, Inmarsat will sue them and we'll just figure it out later. But when you think about it, At that point in time, the value that will have been created will cause this lawsuit to just be an issue of how much more value will we be creating in addition to the, you know, X incredible outcome that we already created. So very exciting to see this Ladao bankruptcy move forward. I do think the confirmation of this bankruptcy is going to be a very important event. for the market, especially as people are looking at what we'll get to next, which is this AT&T spectrum deal. And you can see EchoStar really revalue. We'll get to that in a sec. You can see ViaSat revalue. Probably should have bought that stock, honestly. I mean, these spectrum assets, specifically these MSS spectrum assets, I think are likely to be revalued because the value at use is going higher. because of ASTS-based mobile. It begs the question of, do you buy the NAV-based play of a revaluation of spectrum, or do you buy the actual company that can drive the value of spectrum? And I think the latter is smarter. It just goes to the saying CATSI has is spectrum will find its way to the most efficient system. And as we saw with With what happened to EchoStar, squatting on spectrum is a dangerous game. Regulators aren't particularly humored by it, and there's lots of mechanisms to force that spectrum into your hands if you can actually use it. So I'd want to be aligned with the companies that can use and monetize the spectrum, not squat on it. Personal view. Sure, there could be a vibrant debate. So next, let's get to spectrum. We had AT&T do a blockbuster deal. They bought again, $23 billion of spectrum. It was in the low band, 600 megahertz swath, and then they bought some mid-band spectrum. So the low band stuff is particularly interesting. When I was talking to friends who are experts on this stuff, they made the point that low band is what is the most scarce spectrum, and what it also helps is really the uplink. And so to have spectrum that can penetrate in buildings and provide a lot more capacity to uplink as the use for really spectrum just continues to climb. The mid-band is interesting too. It adds capacity for high data broadband, but there is just more mid-band that the government is going to be freeing up in subsequent auctions. So it's inherently not quite as scarce, still very valuable. This spectrum just gives AT&T More stuff to utilize with Space Mobile. And importantly, now that AT&T's about to do a $23 billion cash deal to close sometime in 2026, they're going to be under pressure to light it up. And so lighting it up requires new towers or modifications to existing towers, which takes time and costs money. And so a quick way to fill in the dead spots for this spectrum, so it might not be a dead spot per se where there's no coverage, but dead spot for this spectrum could and likely will be utilizing AST SpaceMobile, which really highlights the incredible value of this beyond quote unquote dead spots in a simplistic way of thinking about it, but also just the tower vacuum and also the CapEx reinvestment cycles these MNOs pursue. And I think could be a real early taste for MNOs of maybe we don't need the tower at all. Maybe in a lot of these areas, We're just going to use AST SpaceMobile to light up the spectrum and use it versus go through the CapEx event of hanging up a new tower. Interesting food for thought. And this, let me see if there's, there's a lot of tweets I included for this so people could study it for themselves. And I think for me, it will be an evolving, evolving learning process to get the full Takeaways from this. I actually bought AT&T stock last week too, because what you want— the parallel I saw with AT&T is just them doing what IBM did, which is like just actually focus and quit being stupid. And so AT&T is focusing and not being stupid, and spectrum is a valuable asset. And so, you know, I made the joke of these companies being spectrum treasury companies. Well, AT&T's, you know, just did the meme and I like that thesis. They're being smart, they're investing in the thing they're actually good at and it's a cheap stock. And so I thought this thing could, you know, revalue and with interest rates coming down, these dividend stocks that are 6 or 7% could do pretty well. So we'll see. I mean, it's a small position for me, but just thought I'd highlight that. Then people can laugh at me later when it's like Cook bought AT&T, lost money on his MNO stock. But there's a lot of cool details here that I included. I'm just skimming through them all. And then I included the conference call, which is the last link there, and I suggest people listen to that. It was pretty interesting. So Charlie, Charlie's angels now want to Be a D2D company. How cute is that? And so it looks like they want to get in on the party like they usually do. They see a good idea being done and then he goes, why no, why don't I just take maximum financial risk and do something subscale without a business plan and pray? Well, it didn't work out that great for Charlie on his spectrum squatting. He looks to have lived another day. But now the whole theory is, well, this guy's going to come dominate the D2D market as a latecomer using a commoditized prime contractor to put stuff in the air with zero customers and entering the market with the utter contempt and hatred of all possible partners. So therefore, of course he will win, right? And so The issue is this AWS 3 and 4 spectrum that he has, this S-band spectrum. Good for him. Spectrum is a good place to start, but he's got to build satellites. And so I was doing a little bit of work just studying the capabilities of MDA, which is the Canadian prime that he's using. MDA is a real company and they have a platform called Aurora. Which is their generic communication satellite platform that they are going to be using for Charlie's system. So all ironies aside, this is literally what's gone wrong for every satellite constellation ever, which is have an idea and then use a prime to go try to build it. So why is that problematic? Well, you don't have control. And so think about what's going to happen here. MDNA wants to leverage its R&D and its, you know, fixed investment in its Aurora platform. It doesn't want to be doing bespoke adaptations of this. For example, like putting on a payload module, the tail, we call it the Stingray, to adapt to perhaps adding L-band for DOD purposes for Golden Dome, things like that. Would be very difficult to do with a prime because they're not really set up, or they are set up for change orders, but the problem is then they'll just scalp you. The other issue is you just don't really have the same ownership with a third-party prime relying on your, or you relying on third-party prime versus having internal control. Nothing is better. When you outsource the key thing, which is your constellation, just kind of obvious. So this is what Charlie has done. He has the same fuse lit now of he has operationalized the spectrum. Otherwise, the FCC will take it. He's going to have this dog and pony show about it. I think the view is that he probably is going to try to sell the spectrum, but he's crazy. And so you really don't know. And maybe he pulls off a trick by getting Apple as a partner. And so that seems like there's certainly a non-zero chance that Apple might ditch or complement their Globalstar deal and pull in Charlie and use his spectrum. That, that could make sense. A little bit of a precarious move for Apple because it starts to look like they're maybe vertically integrating as an MNO. We'll see. But worth, worth watching. I think my general instinct is this spectrum existed. It was either going to go to the hands of SpaceX or stay with Charlie, maybe get sold to an MNO, but I think too hard. And so keeping it with Charlie is what I would imagine is a weaker competitor is probably the better outcome for AST SpaceMobile. But when I zoom out, even if SpaceX were to have bought it, so what? They still don't have the customers. They still have a lot of issues. Connectivity wasn't really what was holding them back. The spectrum wasn't really holding them back in my view. And what I also heard in the market, I don't know if this is true, is that Elon didn't even bid. And the reason why is because Trump wouldn't have let it go through. And that's interesting if Elon basically knows he can't really ask for advantages or approvals anymore. And I don't, again, I don't know if that's true. I was asking around to see if anyone else could confirm that. So if anyone has further information on that, just DM me. I'll obviously respect anyone's desire to remain anonymous. So, but those are the types of things I'm thinking about. Next we have T-Mobile. building expectations for their own service, but then I heard they also pulled the ads. So again, if anyone has clarification of what T-Mobile is doing, we'd love to know. But T-Mobile is building expectations for a service that's not good, only to be followed very quickly by AT&T. And so, you know, what are they doing here? It's going to be interesting to see. But meanwhile, it just goes back to the importance of spectrum in the FCC. So next we have an article that just says, is Brendan Carr the most powerful man in, really in Washington? And I've certainly had my eyes open to the evolving power of he who controls the spectrum. Now, this article is also about how Brendan Carr can shut down all the news networks and things like that. So that is a big part of the article. But to a man with a hammer, the world looks like spectrum. And what we've seen as we've studied Golden Dome more is that our understanding, the collective, our understanding of how spectrum is going to be used for defense and national security issues is rapidly evolving and not static. And we're right there of exactly where the market is going. And we're the one company that is positioned to deliver on that, that has not yet pissed off the only man who can stop it, which is Donald Trump. And so we're in a great position of having not angered anyone by creating a third political party or compromising important legislation. We have remained quiet, predictable, reliable, apparently very accommodative to the needs of the DOD. And made a lot of friends for whom we are going to provide a great service, and that's a nice place to be. Another nice place to be is FirstNet. So we already talked about FirstNet, but just putting it back here again, there's an Urgent Comms article that just says that AT&T and Space Mobile recently received regulatory approval for the FirstNet testing. So it just goes to again this backdoor. That CATSE is thinking might apply to us for a broad commercial service link approval, which would be exciting. And then we also just have to take a step back. And I think this last tweet is kind of an interesting thing to think about where just the imaginations that are released with space. And you see these videos that SpaceX puts out and it seems like the world stops to watch this stuff. And it's just so cool. And I think this evolving recognition that the space industry, the space opportunity is more than a rich boys club sort of pastime is a theme that will certainly extend into 2026 and beyond. And I've just had a lot of humility about writing these themes because it's And I think I've said this before, but sometimes you can identify the tip of the spear, but then you just don't quite realize that the width and the length of the wood behind the spear is a freight train, not a straw. And so look at recent examples like AI, recent question marks like quantum, probably going to be a big trend, but don't know. Things like SaaS, you know, things like alternative energy. These things were big movements, like pigs being forced through pythons. And if something is easy to capture the imagination and then subsequently has incredible substance and incredible business models, there's really room for dramatic market cap responses. And that's what's going to be the most exciting thing to look at over the next year when we're really in the Q max phase of our commercial development. It's going to be really interesting to see if we don't have the Palantir effect, because I really think we might. So the last thing to end on is just a reminder that our friend Gavin had an incredible tragedy befall him and You know, it's easy to get a lot of an emotional response sort of right when you learn about it, but the journey Gavin is going through certainly doesn't end on a 1-week fundraiser. He has a long journey ahead of him and just want to call out, you know, his challenges that he has ahead of him. And I know he really appreciates all the support, but just, you know, I'll include this link a bit, just so anyone that hasn't or would like to make a contribution to some of the needs he has of getting an accessible home built and some of the transitions that he's going to have to make as he recovers from his injury, I'm sure he'd appreciate any support and just recognizing he has a long journey ahead and let's make sure we don't forget him. Sorry again about the technical difficulties. I hope next week is better, and I'm not quite sure what went wrong, but maybe the answer is that I do this off of my laptop from now on. That seems to be the conclusion. So thank you everyone for joining. I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day, and we will see what the next week brings. And I hope if Scott can channel my thinking through telepathy, he will put out PR tomorrow morning saying We got FCC approval and the future is bright. Something to that effect. Thanks everyone. I'll leave it running for a couple minutes so that those on replay aren't going crazy, and have a great night.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[00:42:10] Speaker B: We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology we can really affect billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from space. Every day smartphone. People will just basically turn 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 MNOs.
[00:42:49] Speaker A: Mmm, waffles.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: Mmm, waffles.