Kook's Weekly - August 25

[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.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Good evening, everyone.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: Thanks for joining. Glad to be back at the regular time just so I can frustrate all the people on the East Coast. I feel your plight. And this time I'm happy to report I'm not in a rental car and I'm not running out of oxygen. In fact, I have the windows open. So things are, things are looking up. I'm looking forward to covering quite a few interesting topics this week, but let's first start with The first Space Mob telethon. And so, as most of you know, we, we learned some, I don't even know how to say it. Tragedy doesn't, doesn't do the word justice, but we learned some tragic news of what happened to a gentleman named Gavin McPherson, who's a young guy, 25 years old, has a young son, and he was enthusiastic about AST SpaceMobile and a, and a budding Space Mobber. And he had a—
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:20] Speaker C: a catastrophic accident, which hopefully he'll recover from. I really have no idea what the state of technology is, but I'm generally very optimistic that the outcomes you'd have today are very different than the outcomes you might have 10 years ago. And if you haven't seen the first tweet of the weekly, it's a link to a GoFundMe that was set up by his friend Dylan, who brought this to my, or to all of our attention. But I think he actually added And I noticed just through pure luck. And since, I believe it was Friday, the total money raised for Gavin has increased from about $5,000 or something like that to almost $44,000. And so it's pretty incredible what the Space Mob and the Rocket Lab guys, although one guy, I mean, they just can't resist. They said, well, you know, our weird sister community, AST Space Mobile. It's like, Guys, we are not the sister community, but that notwithstanding, I'll let that go. But it is interesting to see these investment clubs, if you will, that have taken form on the internet, really race to support people that have a shared interest. And it really is the mob, really not leaving anyone behind. And so if you haven't donated and it's in your heart to do so, I don't know Gavin. I look forward to one day meeting him, but it's a special thing to reach out and, and help someone just outta the goodness of your heart, knowing that they are obviously living their own personal hell. I can only imagine of just the rate of change they've had over the past couple days. But I'm sure it means a lot to know that people around the world are rooting for you and probably actually impacts his recovery path because there just has to be some study that says that when you have the world literally rooting for you, your body's probably gonna put up. just a little bit of a stronger fight than it might have otherwise. And so I really believe this is more about more than money. This is also just spiritual support. So if you have, if you haven't seen the GoFundMe, it's the first tweet on the weekly. And if you're intending or want to make a donation, I highly encourage you. I'm going to be checking it throughout this Spaces and just see if we can get that total up. So this is the first Space Mob telethon. And for a great purpose to help this young man and his family sort of make these rapid adjustments they're going after. So now let's get into business. We had finally, seems like forever, it's really been 2 weeks, but we had proof of life of FM1. And so FM1 is our first Block 2 satellite, the new form factor, very big, and it looks like it's going very well. Now the market, as we know with AST SpaceMobile, gets to be highly anxious in the vacuum. And when I say the vacuum, I literally mean the TVAC and the vacuum chamber as well as the news vacuum. And so for those of us who are burdened by the knowledge of people like Tanner Kirk-Ottaway, who are engineers and actually understand this stuff, then you realize, you know, the satellite is literally in a vacuum being tested. And we get these pictures and the company knows that we know what this means. And so To see the satellite update of will be ready to ship. Let me actually check the exact wording because I think they said is ready to ship. And yep, is ready to ship in August, which is different from the earlier language of will be ready to ship, is suggesting that it is done with all the environmental testing. Now, not to be a panicking, but let's say a satellite were to have gone into the environmental testing and failed. Well, no big deal, you just go fix it, but it can add weeks and things like that to the schedule. But you wanna make sure a satellite is thoroughly tested before launching it in the rigors of space. And so these satellites are cooked, frozen, and beaten up so that they can have a really high degree of confidence that they're going to work. The company, which knows its audience, to put it lightly, also gave us some tidbits by showing us some pictures of FM3.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: What?
[00:05:20] Speaker A: What?
[00:05:20] Speaker C: 3? Why is it past FM2? So we actually think FM2 is currently in the oven and being tested. So FM1, we think, is out of the oven and ready to go this week. FM2, we think, might be out of the oven or in the oven, and FM3 is getting put together. And so what's exciting about this is you can start to really tie out the timeline. And so as they get more experience and comfort with the design, these satellites should end up spending less time in The thermal vac. But even if it didn't, you can start to bridge up and go, okay, this assembly line is really humming. They're really trying to produce these microns to get ahead of this critical path item, and then they're gonna be catching up on control sats. And then the critical path item is really gonna just be baking each satellite, literally. And so think of this as a massive cupcake manufacturing facility that burst into the bachelor party cupcake of all time. You know, from this cupcake springs this massive phased array and everyone gets all hot and heavy with all these beams pointing out. And So for that cupcake to be ready though, it's gotta go in the oven. And so then you can start to go, well, this cadence is starting to get pretty interesting because they're gonna be able to pop these things in and out. And this is the path to getting 6 per month ready to launch and get to this 20. And then what we don't know is whether they're gonna have additional TVACs or not. We've been still trying to put that together and, you know, hint, hint, Scott, if you're listening, which I know you're not because you're busy. creating a $100 billion company. If Scott is listening, I'm going to file a 13D and bar him from listening because the guy should be getting some sleep. But we're going to be on the hunt to see if they have some extra TVACs, and also we'll be on the hunt for clues that as they get more conviction, and we're going to do some more external research on this, if that TVAC time can actually go down. So we've talked a lot about TVACs. Let's move on. So this tweet, you can see the market ripped the stock after this tweet because people really are not being irrational about this, actually. I saw some comments from people going, oh, they actually didn't tell us anything, or in fact, they actually, this is bad news. Of course, you know, there's some of these FUD accounts that said that, but if you try to have a pretty balanced view, what it means is that the execution risk is now lower than it was 2 or 3 weeks ago. Is ready to ship means past environmental testing, if we're correct, seeing FM3 popping down the line, tells you that the shakeout of this manufacturing facility is going the right way. Remember that the challenge of building a company like AST SpaceMobile is beyond my comprehension. I cannot believe I was so stupid to invest all my money in this company. I mean, it's just astounding now that I have a fuller appreciation of the risks, that I did what I did. And I was debating with a short, this guy at Pivotal Capital, who almost certainly is not on this call, but he was writing some skeptical stuff. And me being the better man, DM'd him just to ask him, you know, what's your short thesis? I want to know. And he's not as much of a jackass as he would have you believe. And so we had a pretty good debate. He even acknowledged sometimes he'd be prodding me just to just be annoying, but at least he owned up to it. But he even said after we were having this discussion, he went, oh my God, You truly are insane. And I went, yeah, I have to be. If I want to pull off this investment, I have to be verifiably insane because to have started this company like Abel, you have to be verifiably insane. You have to have off-the-chart risk preferences. You have to have an unbelievable amount of self-confidence and ability to run through walls and grit and fortitude and ability to replace the reality of the present world with your own vision of reality and make it happen. That's what it takes to build a company like this. And so that's a lot of words. So what do I really mean here? You had to not only have the idea, believe in it, but then complete a very complex R&D experiment in a job shop environment. You have to build a world-class spacecraft effectively in a shed that they took over at an airport. And then at the same time, you need to build a global-scale aerospace production facility. To then build more of that R&D experiment that you operationalize to bring down the costs by 80% while having a product roadmap. I mean, good God, it's a lot going on. This is what I mean. You have to be totally crazy, which is why we're all here. And so the next tweet I have is just this meat grinder, because what I saw over the past couple of weeks, well, I just don't even know what I saw, what I saw myself. I was on vacation last week.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:00] Speaker C: And people might go, well, oh my God, Kook, what do you do on vacation? Well, you could summarize it as me sitting in a chair with my phone watching every single tick of ASTS SpaceMobile. And as it gyrates 30 basis points, my entire mood of the day changes. And I'm hanging on Reformed Traders every single word going, oh my God, is it going to like hold the 13-minute moving average and do this reverse head and shoulder upside down CMB pattern? And I'm, then I step back and I'm like, Is this healthy? And I go, yeah, it is healthy because I really don't know what else to do with it. But you can just see that the struggle is real. What separates you from success is usually you. And for me, it's definitely me. I separate myself from success and I'm trying not to be the separating factor of success. I'm trying to be successful, but the struggle is real. And I just want to say that out loud because I know a lot of people here feel the same way I do. And I certainly, well, I know the only reason I have this investment size the way I do, and the only reason I didn't give up at the bottom is because of the people that I view as my investment partners at this point, it's through community. This is far more than that. I view myself in an informal general partnership with a lot of great thinkers who contributed incredible amount of research and due diligence from a lot of different disciplines to help me build conviction and understand their own conviction to give me a little clarity in the darkness. And so this tweet from Reformed Trader, who's an interesting character in and of himself because he's a TA guy by practice, but we've kind of like broken his will to be a trader and he's turned into an investor. But he'll point out, you know, we had like 8 consecutive red candles, which I've now come to realize is bad. Candles are bad. And he'll go to these charts and just show, well, look at these patterns we have, you know, in April of 20— doesn't have the year here. April of 2022, we had 8 consecutive candles and then the stock ripped and then 8 more candles, stock ripped. You know, so these patterns repeat and it's incredible the power of whatever we did just have, 8 or 9 red candles. The psychological destruction of that is amazing. And that's what the problem with public markets is. They allow you to separate yourself from success. Whereas if you could just figure out how to think of this as a private investment, which is what I try to do, but I cannot do. You would just think about a bell on the factory floor building. You'd think about them seeing the things they're doing and not 8 red candles. You'd be thinking about the vision and the opportunity and the aggression. And that's why entrepreneurs tend to make all the money. But I just want to say for other people in our little support group that the meat grinder is real. I feel it. Everyone feels it. My psychological impact when the stock kind of closed positive one day by like 3 cents, You would think I just was elected president of the galaxy, and that just tells you that the emotional rollercoaster is just too much. So what's causing that emotional rollercoaster? We are all, I think, subject to a very odd psychological phenomenon of feeling that our destiny is all but inevitable, knowing that in 6 months from now, the world in which we will live in will be having rockets going up Every month or every other month, we'll be on a continuum of success. We will no longer be chained to binary drama. And what's funny in this saying of it's always darkest before dawn, I mean, talk about darkest before dawn. Dealing with this ISRO crap is truly unbelievable of like trying to decipher random Indian news articles that seem to change all the time that are being intersected by geopolitics, national projects, and things like this. It really can break people. At exactly the moment where they've actually reached the finish line. And it's kind of funny, stocks have a, well, it's not funny, it's actually really sad, but stocks have an amazing way to end up with their rightful owners. And usually it's the meat grinder that takes the shares away from people. And the ISRO meat grinder, I think, is like the final hurrah of the market trying to steal people's conviction. And I have a quote or a tweet from Katzi, which just highlights yet one more bizarre confusion where from the ISRO perspective, and God bless these people, but they're saying that, you know, the rocket that we thought we were going to be on might be given to a national project first, which is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but they mislabel their own satellites based on whether they launch them or not. And if the series of satellites they launch was on a separate launch partner like Ariane, they don't count it in their own nomenclature, which then throws people like Katzi and Tanner and Kevin off the scent because they're like, wait a second, this CMS-02 satellite was already launched on Ariane. And then you realize that their whole designation of how they label stuff is just not the same as what we do. And that's the beauty of diversity. We have different cultures that disclose things in different ways and We're not used to it, and that creates a lot of confusion. Then that confusion creates an increase in the discount rate. Increase in the discount rate means stock lower. And that's why the press release that we got on Friday was good because we have to take a step back. As much as people are gonna hate what I'm about to say, you have to splice the going-ons of AST SpaceMobile in terms of the things they can control and the things that they cannot control. The thing they cannot control is whether ISRO gives priority to an ISRO satellite, CMS-02 in this instance, and in their eyes does something that doesn't really matter, which is push our launch 3 months, which is in the grand scheme of things, not a really big deal. We can't control that. We're at the beginning of what is a fantastic launch program. I liken this, and this is probably too visual for everyone. I liken this to like just someone suffering. from severe constipation, which I don't, 'cause I eat oatmeal every morning and I walk a lot. I really try to avoid constipation because it sucks. And that's what we're experiencing now is just how unpleasant constipation is as it comes to launching. Right now we're constipated. We have been trying to get FM-1 done. We'll, we'll get into that in a second. Now we have, but then the timing of the launch vehicle isn't quite right. As we get regular and we're pumping out 3 to 6 satellites every month, all of a sudden timing starts to match. We finally dovetail in a really nice cadence with our multitude of launch providers and it all just happens. But this shakeout period, both on production and getting satellites shipped to the launch partners, I just think this is going to be not a messy 6 months. I think by 6 months it's actually, we're in the promised land, But the consternation that's caused in the next month or two is why the stock is in the 40s and not in the 70s or higher. And I just want people to really think about that. You could disagree with me, of course, many people do, but keeping perspective of the shakeout phase, and we'll just call it the launch constipation phase. And then what happens once you have like Ex-Lax running through the system and we have satellites flowing like water? It's a really big difference and it's coming. That's the important thing. It is coming. Launch will loosen up shortly. We overbooked launch. Getting to that point where we're in the belly of our own launch schedule is coming very shortly. Getting these first couple satellites are important to me for sure and performative, but most importantly is not the satellite itself, but showing that they shook out the operations and got the final designs done. And then on ISRO, I still believe that the Indian lemon is worth the squeeze. It's a smart move. And so let's look at this other tweet from Unusual Whales. You have India now is the largest smartphone market in the world. And so say what you will about the potential ARPU, those are smartphones. Smartphones are going to have a higher ARPU in general than not smartphones, and they're importing them. So India has surpassed the US to become the leading importer of smartphones globally. Well, we import smartphones. That means that maybe they're all a bunch of those crappy Xiaomi whatevers from China, but a lot of these are going to be Samsung devices and Apple devices. And so this goes to the idea that I don't know that the ARPU is going to be as low as I've modeled of, you know, cents, dollars, low dollars. Maybe it's higher. And to have planted our flag and have local content in India, local content being using ISRO, things like that. spreading the love to the markets you intend to work in, just like we're seeing in the US now. It's not very fun having a totally foreign supply chain in a market that all of a sudden is looking inward. That's why Trump is making everyone build factories here, or trying to. We're effectively quote unquote building a factory in India by using ISRO. It's a really smart political move, and we should appreciate it as such for helping really pave the way to what's going to be a fantastic market. Now let's get to FM1. So we've really spent a lot of time thinking about FM1. When I say we, it's the broader Space Mob. It's not me. And we have a theory that FM1 wasn't delayed. It was delayed. Let's just, let's just call it kook out. I'm being totally full of hopium. The definition of delay is not arrive when originally planned. I get it. But the reason for a delay can have many textured nuances. And so One such texture nuance that would be interesting to know is whether FM1 was delayed because of material design additions, not redesign, but design additions because of new information that could expand the opportunity for ASTS Space Mobile. And so this is when we have kind of the Knight Rider music of dun-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and Cassie rolls in with like some automated crazy FCC scanning. Pontiac, something awesome like that. And so this awesome FCC scanning Pontiac that Katsi rolls in on discovered, we think, that this PLM payload, payload module that was added, this stingray tail that we talk about, that it might not just be about solar. And so the more this has been studied, the less sense it makes for it to only be solar. And we, we've discovered some things in the bill of materials, if you will, for lack of a better word, that show that some L-band antenna are put on there, things like this. I was going over this This week more with some of the guys to confirm my own understanding of this. And so what bears saw, SATs delayed, bad. SATs are heavier, SATs cost more, bad, short it. What they might find out is SATs are delayed because we integrated L-band connectivity for the DOD, specifically for Golden Dome. The SATs are heavier because they rushed it out and wanted flight heritage with aluminum casing or steel. I can't remember what the metallurgy is of the encapsulation, but then, you know, sped that out because the composite wasn't ready. And lo and behold, we have a Golden Dome ready satellite with hosted L-band payload and the bears go. Oh, that's a really bad thing to discover. If your short thesis is FM-1 is delayed and it's like, psych, golden dome, that's pretty bad. Or psych, we're pulling forward an entire shell of satellites for 3 or 4 years. That's a good reason. And so when we tie out the timeline, and I certainly had this aha moment this week of going, wait a second, when did they file that critical design review? Well, it happened to be in February. When did delays start to pick up? It was right in the belly of the DIU contract, Halo DA, and Legato bankruptcy, a lot of things start to line up. We ask why, what else would we do? And so we've asked why, and we have a very strong theory as to why, and it's exciting. But more importantly, now it's moot because what was a delay is now today. It's almost like a funny little aphorism, aphorism for us to have fun with, but It is ready, and that's really the takeaway. But the why is where it gets fascinating. I'll tell another story later on if I remember about a very interesting— let me just see, am I— yeah, I'll get to it. Um, very interesting travel back home today. Everything happens for a reason. I'll put it like that. But I have more and more theories around why FM1 is really using this L-band. It's all adding up to me. I know that Katsi's convinced of it. It's very exciting to think about. So just When you start to get down in the dumps about delays, remember the meat grinder, A, but B, think about why. And maybe there's a really incredible reason as to why they're actually accelerating value generation by what looks like a delay. So for some more perspective, this account Jagaloon6 that I've highlighted, I take notice of Jagaloon. It's all a blur to me now, but maybe a year or two ago, he was putting out some incredible research on Navy applications. Well, it turns out he was right. We know he's right because of the forbidden video. And so some of us who have been really deep in the weeds know that ASTS has long since thought of itself as a government dual-use company. So at the inception of the company, we speculated on that for a while. Now we know it's not an issue of speculation anymore. We know. And so Jag Aloon, I have a lot of respect for him because he picked up on that way before we knew. For sure. So I just want to highlight what he said because he kind of zooms out. And, you know, for a guy who's been on the money over the years, first of all, that's the first point is here's someone who's had vision and ability to have some independent research skills to think for themselves and demonstrated that over a couple years. So that's why it's important to take someone like this when they put out a, like a long essay and say, well, maybe we should take a look at what they're saying now. He again is pointing to this meat grinder effect of what we're living through right now. The terrible, terrible decline from $60 to $48 now, which we'll all have t-shirts made shortly if we survive the $12 decline of ASTS SpaceMobile in the month of August when everything goes down. He points out to Google news coming up. I think we're getting some more hints about how Google's going to be introducing this to consumers. He points out to the inevitable Apple partnership. So this is something that I also believe in very strongly. It was in the Legato financing documents. it's specifically written into the contract of how the Ligado profit share or the ASTS changes upon integration of L-band into iPhones, which makes all the sense in the world that this will happen. He points out Golden Dome news. We'll talk about this more. He also points out definitive agreements with major MNOs. I'm specifically really waiting for Verizon to come through, but we've had some pretty credible sources suggesting that we might have some big deals coming through in the Middle East. That would be exciting. That could also come with some money, which we don't need, but that will always be good. He points out the delivery of FM1. Well, he was right on that seemingly with the update we got on Friday. He points out to the initiation of the launch campaigns. Well, that's the whole constellation constipation concept. Don't worry, ASTS has a plan for lots of fiber intake. The fiber has been ingested, the result of the constellation constipation relief. will be coming shortly. And then he points out to some IoT partnerships. So I just reflect on this Jagaloon post if you have some time. It just, it's good to remember what the bigger picture is, which is usually really the defining characteristic of someone who makes a lot of money in a stock and someone who gets lost in the short term is being able to zoom out and think. So speaking of thinking, I just rewatched The Sum of All Fears the other day. Great movie. And so I think there's some parallels with the Sum of All Fears. If people remember, a bad guy stuck an A-bomb into a cigarette vending machine during a football game. Well, I think Apple's gonna sneak in an equivalently large shock to the bears by incorporating ASTS-based mobile. There's a nice tweet by our dear friend Katsy that goes into some incredible technical details that I would've never picked up on. by myself, but is pointing out that these integrations with AST SpaceMobile and L-band and things like that really need to happen. The move beyond Globalstar needs to happen. He points out that they've already shown a willingness to diversify because they integrated Starlink, which is of course not very good, but they did it anyway to satisfy one of their 3 major US sales channels, which is T-Mobile. And so The idea that Apple is gonna wanna add yet more premium connectivity with ASTS-based mobile makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, Google's fired the starting gun for the race by incorporating it into the Pixel 10. And I believe we know that, so I don't wanna say that if that's not totally for sure, but I think there's very strong speculation that that's happened. And then we also have the Google Pixel Watch has integrated connectivity with the Google, the Legato L-band. So this is happening and it shouldn't really, I don't think it should be a big news event 'cause it just seems so obvious to me, but I think it will matter a lot when all is said and done. If we do get a formal unveiling by Apple of this integration, I think to the bears that will come as a shock and certainly seem to run counter to what a lot of the paid experts are saying. The other thing that I think is going to come as a shock is the implications of Satco. So Satco being the JV that we have with Vodafone. I know there's actually some of you on the phone that are pretty bullish on Vodafone, which I can't disagree with you. I only have so much money. I'm no Anpanman, let's put it that way. But he always seems to be buying these dips. I just kind of sit here. But Vodafone stock's done well, and I was reading in Barron's this week that AT&T has performed like an AI stock. I'm just pulling this up on Bloomberg. Dude, yeah, AT&T's crushed. $14 stock to $30 stock, doing great. So SATCO could be very important because it's a way to pull in all these other MNOs into our network and really solidify a very strong market share position that you would generally use the adjective that starts with an M to describe. And SATCO is now officially formed. And so Peter Lindmark actually works down the street from it, and so we got eyes Eyes on SATCO, and that's something we want to keep an eye on. It just shows the power of this business model that Scott has brought to life, this super wholesale model where we're able to leverage these very powerful channel partners. And here's an instance of the channel partnership going on steroids because we're not just getting the benefit of Vodafone's reach. Vodafone is then extending its ability to form collaboration with all the other MNOs to leverage leverage ground infrastructure to get us yet more customers on which of course we get revenue share. That's very exciting. And so it's always worth revisiting why is it that AST Space Bubble is different? This debate I was having with this, and I don't think he used himself short, but this DM exchange I had with this account, it was the typical dialogue you'd expect with someone who's negative or skeptical on ASTS-based mobile. It's, well, they don't have a market share lead because they actually don't have a product yet. Yeah, thanks, jerk. I'm aware. Well, how do you think about T-Mobile? Well, I think T-Mobile made a huge mistake, so next question. Well, don't you think Starlink is going to innovate? Yeah, probably, but they made a foundational error with their system. It's not integrated. The G node B is in the air. It's a separate network that is tied into the core, but not integrated into the core itself. And what's interesting is this article that Kevin Chen found, as always, Kevin is always finding these incredible papers for us to read. There's this description by, I believe it is T-Mobile itself, and they say that voice is going to have to be over IP VoIP instead of VOIP. LTE, some implications there around whether 911 services can work. But then they talk about the kind of incredible effort this took. It took hundreds of thousands of people, hours, and the efforts of some of the world's brightest engineering minds to solve this giant technological puzzle. They don't use a standards-based system. And so it is this bespoke integration on a per-carrier basis. It sounds like hell. And this is a really good reason for MNOs to not partner with them. When you could otherwise go to a standards-based system that was built to integrate directly with the carrier's core where they have control over everything. It's a big difference. And then interestingly, this article says that mobile data will land at a Starlink gateway as non-prioritized IP traffic, which lacks traditional cellular controls like throttling. In this way, a Starlink mobile data service would act more like a mobile hotspot than integrated mobile broadband. Just one more example of these are not the same. The space mob can appear to be crazy and we are, and kind of in our own echo chamber. But I think the right read on that ultimately will be that the reason we are like that is because we identified that we are in a race against ourselves, as Scott actually said, that these 2 companies are not actually head-to-head competing. Swarm IoT has hijacked to be some vaporware system that they were able to bolt together at an incredible amount of effort for an atrocious level of service is not the same thing that had a billion dollars of capital spent in R&D over almost a decade in partnership with the world's MNOs to do exactly a specific thing. No wonder they arrived at different places. And that's an important point that I think is too nuanced for bears to understand. And I actually appreciate that. That's not a knock against the bears. You really have to be dialed in to start to pick up on these nuances. And normal people just simply are not going to have the time. It's like when people are debating Joby and Archer and QuantumScape and all these other stocks, which maybe they'll all do great, but I'm just not deep in them. So I really just don't know the difference between Joby and Archer. I really rely on Tut. I don't have a position in either of those, but I know Tut's done the work, but he's also a nut job. And so yeah, he's probably spent 3 years analyzing eVTOLs up the wazoo and I haven't. And so he's going to definitely know some nuances about those that I don't. The better man recognizes that he doesn't understand. That would be me in that instance. The bears on ASTS SpaceMobile, I don't think have the humility to understand that there are elements that they have not yet absorbed that are in fact apples and oranges types of differences. So it's an interesting thing to think about, and it's also just important to know when you don't know what you own and can get kind of thrown for a loop. And it's very difficult to develop this level of subject matter expertise to see through all the noise and truly understand the engineering architecture of a company like AST SpaceMobile, which I'm not going to advertise that I truly understand it, but I think I know a lot more than most. Another component that really goes into this, which always should be mentioned, especially for people that are newer. to this company is you gotta have the leadership. And that's where a lot of us over the years, especially in the darkest days, always took a lot of faith in the fact that the CEO and founder of Bell Avalon does not pay himself anything. He doesn't give himself a bonus. He doesn't give himself stock awards. He's doing exactly what Jeff Bezos did, which this really nice interview, which I've seen before, but it always is great to see again, Nomad Bets posted this interview by Jeff Bezos where he explains why he never took additional equity. He said, well, I have enough, like I'm incentivized, I'm aligned, so I'm going to work hard, nose down. I'm going to build. I'm aligned. He didn't take a position of taking, which is very important in a leader. A great leader in this instance is going to eat last, not scrape economics from other people, but take their return through their equity. That's what Jeff Bezos did, and that's what we're seeing with Abel Avalon. And there are a lot of us, I wouldn't even say the quiet minority, we're the vocal minority. We really take stock in that behavior, and that's really helped us have conviction in what's happening here because we don't have an antagonistic CEO who's using us for exit liquidity or frankly diluting us. I know a lot of retail people have a fundamental misunderstanding of the pejorative use of the word dilution. And sure, we've experienced dilution to finance the growth of our company. That if you don't understand that, you're in the wrong stock. But it's another thing if Abel were actually taking huge re-ups in the stock, especially when the stock was $2. He could have re-upped himself and given himself a lot of ownership, and there's not a damn thing we'd really be able to do about it. And in fact, at the time, we probably would've supported it because we'd be like, oh, we need him to like really have all this upside and, you know, extra stuff. So he, you know, keeps his head in the game when the stock is $2, but he never did it. He always showed perfect alignment and respect, and that's something that tells you a lot about him as a leader and him as a person. Very valuable. This week we also had William Blair put out some sell-side research. I didn't really focus on this. I don't think there was anything really new in it. What's more important to me is seeing the buy side put up real money. And we're seeing more of these letters where Anpanman put out, I guess, Above Average Odds found this article from Greenhaven Road Capital, this concentrated hedge fund. Seeing more of these people identify this stock and talk about it is nice that people are coming to the same conclusions we have, but doing it with conviction. And I think if I have any predictive luck, I think we're going to be seeing more of that. into the fall and winter kind of idea dinner season in New York where more people are going to be bringing attention to this to the other buy-side firms. You know, these are people that live by the sword, die by the sword. They have to be right. It's not sort of putting out a report and saying, I see SpaceMobile is the best company ever, so we're going to rate it market perform with a target price 50 cents lower than the last price. None of that stuff. And now let's get to something that could really drive the upside, Golden Dome. So things are starting to happen. L3Harris, we think, is a partner of AST SpaceMobile. There's certainly been clues discovered by Katzi over the past that suggest this is true, is apparently the heat signature layer. And so as, as I was clarifying my own knowledge this week, when a, when a missile is shot up, hopefully never at us, there's obviously a heat signature, but then you also need to see the missile as it, as it's traveling. And so there's going to be multiple layers. Of the tracking and identification and the targeting of missiles. And so L3 apparently is already good to go. And a special person, well, just call them this, you know who you are, pointed out to me, this special person seems to be very aware of how Washington, DC works, and pointed out the parallels to Senator Banks giving a lot of public support for L3Harris. And how that seems to have materialized to L3 being part of Golden Dome and that same support that AST SpaceMobile is getting from Ted Cruz and our belief that that support will in fact materialize for us. So interestingly, I was a victim of state-owned airline crew strikes yesterday and spent my entire day at an airport only for my flight not to go. And one might think, well, that seems like terrible luck. But you know, with a positive attitude, you say, this must be God's will. Of all the things God has to worry about, God said, let's cancel Cook's flight so that he can take a connecting flight the next day. And you might go, why? Well, it's a funny story. Let me tell you why. It just goes to show you that everything ties back to AST SpaceMobile if you dedicate a sufficient amount of your mindshare to this stock. So as I'm getting on a plane, And my wife, like an absolute terrorist negotiator, figures out how to move us from 4 separate middle aisle seats in all different rows with young children, which is not ideal, to figuring out how to get 3 seats in a row plus 1. So she somehow figures it out only for her to be right behind me with this older gentleman. And she's talking to him, of course, because she's extroverted. And he goes, yeah, I work at Lockheed Martin. And so I think, oh wow, kook. Okay. Be, Be smart. Use this moment. What would Kevin Chen do? Kevin Chen would go, oh, you look at, you work at Lockheed? Do you know AST SpaceMobile? And are they getting golden dome? And he went, well, I actually don't work in that division of satellites at Lockheed Martin. I'm doing mostly the communications. And I thought that was my, that was my, my learnings of how to engage with people à la Kevin Chen. And you might think, well, Cook, maybe you should not skip the foreplay next time. You know what? It worked because you can't make this up. The woman next to the guy chimes in and goes, I work for Trump. Can't make it up. And then she said, very intimate with the Space Force. Oh yeah? Tell me more. And then I thought, okay, Kook, you know, you have like a second at bat, second chance. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do?
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:39:43] Speaker C: What would Kevin Chen do? Destroy the space bubble. She went, yeah, are they going to get gold or dope? And she just smiled at me and I thought, this is why I'm glad I missed my flight. And so smiling is not betraying what's actually going to happen. She probably was just thinking, who is this absolute Looney Tune asking me all of these questions in rapid fire while turning around in his seat on an airplane as everyone's trying to board the flight? And she probably just really didn't really know what to make of this exact moment. As I told her, I said, well, you know, actually right now I'm reading the Inmarsat Adversary proceeding to really figure out the L-band. So what do you think about L-band? Does the DOD really like this? What do you think? What do you think? And she's, you know, again, just looking at me like, am I in outer space? Is this real life? And it was real life. That is really what random people on the street want to know. You know, if you run into someone that works for the Trump administration, be prepared. They want to know about the takings lawsuit. They want to know about Legato. They want to know about that tale on FM1. That's what people want to know. So it's very exciting. So I got her card. I'm going to follow up with her and see, frankly, honestly, I'm actually kind of interested to see if I can join the Space Force. I think it's a pretty cool mission. And as I learn more, this really is the next big thing to me. There was another paper that Kevin Chen put out. I think I retweeted it. Oh, it's the next tweet actually. Kevin Chen put out this paper of, what was it? It was from some seminar. And the title of my tweet is Changing Times in the Military. And I really suggest you read it. It, you know, even for people that spend all day thinking about ASTS, space mobile, this is mind-blowing type stuff. When you hear the military talk about it, this is the future of national security, full stop. And I was talking to this lady today. She said the Space Force is the most important arm of the military right now in Trump's eyes. They, they see this as the thing. And then you got to ask yourself, well, in MARSAT, as you read these, adversary proceedings, which I have, Inmarsat already gave the L-band to the DOD. Inmarsat already gets tons of money from the DOD. It's a little bit dodgy what they're doing. Like Legato lawsuit asks like, what did you know and when? And we'll find out maybe, but then you go, well, hold on. ASTS SpaceMobile seemed to have gotten the easy pass on all this with these NTIA coordination, seemingly with the DOD, a lot of interesting little things, but then when we look at it, These military leaders are saying one of the most important, important lessons I learned was that access to spectrum is not just a commercial telecommunications issue. It is a national security issue. It is foundational to modern warfare and our ability to project power, superiority, and resilience in a rapidly changing world. Sit down, Palantir. That's what it sounds like to me. ASD SpaceMobile, as Kasey has said many, many times, is the most efficient system for using spectrum in these novel ways. We're seeing the spectrum flow through them. I think that this is the start of a megatrend that very few people understand. I feel like my own learnings on this are rapidly expanding every day, and I literally spend almost every waking minute of my life thinking about this one stock, whether that's healthy or not. We've debated that at length, but I do. And I just still liken this to many of the early trends, like when all these people were talking about ChatGPT-1 and GPT-2 and things like that. And I remember seeing this stuff on Twitter and I was like, what is this? I never really put one and one together, but the signs were there. And then the world, it sort of exploded onto the world stage, obviously in that infamous November, the world changed and never looked back. I don't think we're going to have something that dramatic, but I think that the magnitude of the change in terms of how spectrum is being used for national security as well as for commercial telecommunications. I think that's there. And that's a key tenet of the bull versus the bear debate. When I was talking to this guy, he, you know, I said, well, look, the bull thesis is that the TAM is big. The bear thesis is that the TAM is not big. We'll figure it out. I think that's it. And there's evidence to suggest that the TAM is really big, which takes us to, where does it take us to? So the next tweet I have is, this is also how I introduced myself. Oh, so it does take us to, American Tower. And so people that are the mainstay of terrestrial spectrum, of course, the tower guys. It is interesting that the CTO of American Tower introduces himself as the CTO of American Tower and an ASTK SpaceMobile board member. It's almost like he's trying to hitch his star to the car because he knows his horse-drawn carriage might be more limited in the rate of growth at which it will experience or the relevancy. into the future. And so there's an interesting quote he has, but you can see people are increasingly raising their hand and saying, I'm an AST SpaceMobile person, and I think that we're going to be the equivalent of Yahoo's Alibaba. And so some of these companies that were smart enough to see around the corner, while their own businesses might stagnate, which is the Yahoo component, at the end of the day, 99% of Yahoo's value was driven by its stake in Alibaba, the growth asset. I think AST SpaceMobile is the Alibaba, and there's going to be a lot of companies that created a lot of value for themselves, the Rakutans, the AT&Ts, the Vodaphones, the Verizons, the American Towers, et cetera, that find themselves in that lovely position to have made a lot of money on a passive investment that maybe at a time, it's hard to imagine, but maybe at some point in time starts to rival the value of their existing business. So back to Legato quickly. The bankruptcy's been held up by this dispute on a mediation between Inmarsat and Legato. This dispute relates to whether or not ASTS is bound by the exact agreement that determines the cooperation between Legato and Inmarsat. Importantly, there's a concept of contract assignment, which in bankruptcy you can't partially assign something. It is all or none. Inmarsat is taking the position that this is an assignment of the spectrum deal, which means ASTS has to take the full enchilada, which in Inmarsat's view means that there's exclusivity so that Inmarsat has L-band everywhere else in the world and ASTS SpaceMobile enjoys exclusivity in North America. The dispute is whether or not ASTS SpaceMobile is actually taking a full assignment of that contract. or just subleasing it, is it bound by the restrictions of Ligado or not? Inmarsat obviously wants to sideline ASTS SpaceMobile's future growth outside the world for the most simple reason is just if they do, the value of their global L-band goes up when ASTS must just go buy that from them. And ASTS's view is why in the world would we bind ourselves to such a restriction For what is naturally a global constellation. And in this docket, there's all sorts of interesting stuff that was never really meant to be made public. But the red line of the mediation agreement is available and you can just see how things were changing. And I don't, I don't know how this will resolve itself. It's, it's going before a judge. I can see it both ways. As I was reading the briefings from Inmarsat, I went, oh, he has some good points. And when I was reading the briefings from AST, I went, oh, those are better points. ChatGPT doesn't know either. So we're really at a loss here. But what it does tell me most importantly is that Abel and Scott are thinking huge. What we have seen so far, never mind that we're in the early innings of this company, so we'd imagine that what we've seen so far is actually just a small ripple of what is going to be a tsunami, but you can see these guys positioning for a global conquest to really become a spectrum treasury company. Kind of my joke that I made ad hoc a couple weeks ago. The more I thought about it, I went, oh my God, that's actually really what they're going to do. You can see that that's how they're thinking when you really study these documents. Now, how does that relate to what's in front of us immediately with Legato? I don't really know, because if the judge just binds ASTS to the stricter interpretation, then We in fact have exactly the thing we bargained for, which is L-band in the US.
[00:47:50] Speaker B: Great.
[00:47:50] Speaker C: That's worth a lot. If this goes ASTS's way, did we get anything immediately? No, because we would then still have to go strike cooperation agreements and buy other spectrum from other people. And we're not limited to buying other spectrum from other people. It's just this L-band exclusivity issue. It would be nice if we won. It preserves some more optionality, seems to have some fewer barriers. It seems to knock back Inmarsat from having the ability to kind of knock on our door a little bit more. But it is to me showing the broader strategy that this company's going to pursue over the coming years, and it's a big-brained idea. The thing a lot of us are looking for is understanding the vision of the entrepreneur. Was Abel going for something that was going to be worth $2 to $5 billion? That's a lot of money. for an individual. Well, now, you know, this is of course worth almost $20 billion. So the question is, is this a person who's always had the vision? Whether they'll achieve it or not is a separate question, but did they have the vision on how to create a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars? If so, what is that vision and how will they achieve it? And this is something I've been really focused on for quite a long time because it is important to find entrepreneurs with big visions and deep understandings of how to put those visions into reality in the markets they operate in. And I've consistently seen that from this team and this Inmarsat adversary proceeding gives me that much more confidence in that as well. Other things I have confidence in are FirstNet. I know we're almost kind of up against an hour, I'd say, at time, but we're time unlimited. And so there was a board meeting for FirstNet. Great. The fatigue of when is FirstNet happening is real, but they have a budget. It's a big one. They're going to invest in satellites. It's literally in their press releases. So that's very exciting. And then you might go, well, Kuk, is there anything else to suggest that this FirstNet stuff is going to happen? Well, yeah, actually. And so we got an FCC filing that locks ASTS into FirstNet's Band 14 spectrum. They're going to be testing 45 phones, which is enough, they think, to be showing the scalability of some individual beams. It's all on the FCC doc. They show the interference studies. So FirstNet wouldn't be doing FCC filings with AST to get spectrum lit up if they weren't doing a deal with AST SpaceMobile. So this will end up being the least surprising deal you could imagine when it ultimately gets PR'd. And so it will happen. I don't know when. And then the other exciting things, which we've already kind of touched on, are the initial consumer applications. And so we're seeing some additional stuff pick up from Google with the Pixel Watch. And what else did we have from Google? I have 2 links here. So the Google Watch, and then yeah, people are just really glomming onto the watch having the satellite connectivity. So it's exciting. We're gonna have these initial consumer applications roll out, and it's important to realize that as you're really capacity constrained on your constellation in these early days, you really do want to introduce this service with IoT and things like that. Where intermittent connectivity is actually good enough as opposed to introducing a service that initially would look a lot more like what Starlink is experiencing of truly intermittent service that will probably just irritate consumers. And as Abel said, the transition from intermittent service to continuous is actually very fast. There's a tipping point which we'll probably reach sooner in 2026 than we anticipate. But the starting point is exciting. It's going to start to build momentum. So that's what we have for the weekly. I'll just remind people, if you're interested, I've included as the last link as well, the GoFundMe for our friend Gavin. And so if you like to donate, we've tried to make it easy for you to find a link and we'll hope to help his family during this difficult time. And we'll obviously, we're looking for updates from him as he embarks on his recovery. And I'm really optimistic that he's going to have a really surprisingly good outcome. from this because he seems like a fighter. Have a great night, everyone. I'll leave it running a little bit as always so that it doesn't cut people off later, and I'll see everyone next week.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST Space Rover 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.
[00:52:25] 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 to the 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.
[00:52:59] Speaker C: Listen.
[00:53:05] Speaker A: Mmm, waffles.
[00:53:06] Speaker C: Mmm, waffles.