Kook's Weely - Marsch 29 - The Non-Linear Path to a Trillion: AST SpaceMobile and the SpaceMob Strategy

[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. Good evening.
[00:00:28] Speaker C: Perfect timing because I literally just hit my Claude limit, so they're finally cutting me off as I've been messing around with my new separate Mac setup, uh, trying to use OpenCLaw and all this other stuff. And, uh, pretty underwhelmed. I feel like I was sold a false bill of goods from Twitter, if you could believe it, of all things, in terms of what OpenCLaw can do. So I'm still kind of messing around to figure out what I use that for versus Dispatch, but Cowork is pretty amazing as well as Claude Code. And so trying to figure out ways to deploy all this technology for, if you could guess, wait for it, analyzing ASTs. And so I guess it's a good time to introduce my Spaces though, because Anthropic cut me off. So these jerks are charging me for the max plan. I feel like I I'm spending as much as I can with them and they still cut me off right as I'm nearing the end of my program. But all is well, everything happens for a reason. So last week was really pretty brutal. Wednesday we got the announcement, really just got like a fake announcement that SpaceX was going to file their S-1 last week, which they did not unless I missed it. And then these stocks just took off. And so I was pretty worried about it because when you see the whole space sector up 15 to 20%, you know that you're not special. It's just a big basket trade. And with that comes a ton of hot money. And then it's as if people don't read the news. Then people got really bearish on Thursday and Friday because of the Iran war, as if we didn't know that was happening. And people, they kind of fell over fell over themselves. And it's happening kind of at quarter end too, which is already a bit of a disaster. It's always the, you know, biblical mummy. I just watched The Mummy last night, you know, the awakening of that scary guy. When, you know, people start breaking out these CTA numbers, which of course are supposed to reverse in April, and stock then starts to trip all the technical levels, which freak people out. And then the short-term guys go, oh my God, it's about to touch some magical line. And then the negative momentum just carries the day. So of course it's usually darkest before dawn. I personally added exposure in the way that I've done previously. So I have my core position, which I really just don't touch. And then I do this strategy that I call Torques. And Panman has plagiarized me and he'll often say he's adding Torques. Sometimes I don't know if he knows what a Torque is. So I feel like this is another example of intellectual property theft. At the hands of Anpanman. And so I will have my day in court at some point. But when I say that I'm buying a TORK, what I am doing is I'm selling a put spread. So I have capped downside. I'm basically agreeing to buy stock from the high strike price down to the low strike price. I'm doing that for a net credit, which means I generate some proceeds in doing that. It's different from just selling a put in that I have capped downside. So if if something really bad happens, I own all my other common stock, so I'm eating it, but it really just allows me to cap effectively margin exposure. And so if the stock kind of gapped down massively, all of a sudden I'm not getting put a huge amount of shares that I can't pay for. And so then what I do is I use the proceeds from that put spread to buy an out-of-the-money call. I call this a torque. It's really torquing up my portfolio and then That's what I do. And so every once in a while, from time to time, these really hit. And so when this stock wants to go up, it really moves. And so the hard part is just generally getting on the right cycle with this thing. To me, ASTS is like bull riding. And so you're kind of on this thing while it's in the gate. I'm sure there's a lot of technical terms. I really don't know anything about bull riding, but I did watch Yellowstone. And so you're kind of on this wild animal as it's in the gate, and then someone opens the gate. You don't really know when that gate is going to open, but when it opens, holy crap, hang on for your life. And so that's when you want to have a TORQ because you're just going to have wild vol. You can generally predict when that wild vol will be to the upside. And so when the stock is totally bombed out, check Twitter. I mean, I'm here fighting some guy named Lucky Stewie on Sunday. Everyone's angry at each other. TA guys are harikari-ing themselves. Katzi turned into a dog and Panman went gluten-free. I mean, literally the bottom has fallen out here. This is usually reflected on the charts. And so you can kind of see all this sentiment lining up. This is where I've really tried to get better at lining up with my torques. Not to say it's perfect. Sometimes I just get totally drilled on them. But when you get it right, it can add some real meaningful exposure. And for me, it satisfies the itch of feeling like I need to do something. And so as much as I preach being patient, I'm the first to admit it's really hard just to be sitting there as a long-term holder. I mean, I feel like I'm sitting here with like a loaded weapon and you just want to like fire off some shots. It's super hard to keep it holstered. And that's usually where most investors get, you know, go wrong. Usually what that manifests itself as people selling when they're scared or at the bottom or getting way too long on margin or using short-term calls. So the way I kind of release this urge, because I also have a very hard time sitting still, is by using this torque structure. And if you haven't traded options before, don't do this. And so I started my career on a volatility desk, I've been trading equity-linked derivatives my entire life. I feel like I'm pretty well equipped to do it. If you don't have a background that makes you feel very comfortable and really understand how options work, then just consider this first 7 minutes of me talking as a generally interesting educational overview, but something that you should not do until you've become very proficient with these instruments as well. But this is a long way of saying that I'm actually pretty excited for what's about to happen. I personally think the market's going to flip. I've been wrong on this, but I think the market's going to flip in April. Like it's a new quarter. I would wonder if the market actually bottoms with a land invasion, which I personally think is happening because I can see the marine movements kind of where I live, and I don't think you deploy all those guys for fun. And so I have enough friends in the military, I'm kind of picking up pieces here and there just in terms of guys that are unavailable to go hang out with me. And so I just don't feel like all that stuff is happening for fun. And so we're probably going to get a land invasion. My suspicion is the market probably bottoms on that because that's the thing people are sort of hyperventilating over. And when it finally happens, they're going to be like, okay, we're done. Peace dividend. But the fundamentals ultimately are what drive stocks. And so I spent this weekend, doing the weekly obviously, but also just trying to also vent this energy by learning some new things. So I've been studying Merlin. I have a lot of questions about that, but I do feel like there's a big founder there, certainly with an authentic background. I need to really review sort of what that milestone progression is going to be because as best as I can tell, this thing could easily just go straight to $5 as it could to $50. If you're thinking about what the path dependency is, but it's always useful when the market totally sucks to start to just learn new things and study. And studying ASTS, I think, is generally a really profitable thing to do. And so the things I took note of this week were Vodafone Ireland. And so we have the Prime Minister of Ireland, Michael Martin. I didn't actually fact check this. I'm assuming this is who this was. Prime. Let me just check this so I don't ever do Prime Minister of Ireland. Yeah, so it's Michel. Michel, who knows? Um, as, as an Irish person, I should probably know this, but he's sitting there with a really cool Bluebird, and I'm kind of wondering where he got this badass model because I'd buy it too. So got some issues with Scott as usual, but we have some really cool, uh, content coming out of Vodafone. Around their testing with Ireland around St. Patty's Day, which is really exciting. And so they complete a first ever mobile video call. They take a video of the video call, picture of a photograph, if you will. And that's great. And so the bears will usually say, oh, there's no proof that this works. And then you're like, well, actually there's videos of them doing a video call. It's a video of the CEO of Vodafone Ireland, and then they have a picture of the Prime Minister of Ireland. Seems like they're not fabricating this. And then the bears will be like, well, yeah, but the satellite overheated. Well, I mean, they, what are they going to do? Have a 6 to 10 minute long video of the guy just being like, hey, can you hear me? Hey, still, still here? Oh, are you there?
[00:09:48] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:09:48] Speaker C: Okay. That would be a lame video. It would actually be pretty funny if they did that just to put to rest. Some of the FUD. And so if they're listening, you know, maybe the next thing you do is just literally have a 10-minute video and have fun with it. But there's more proof. And what's also really cool here, and just shows the space mob is totally undefeated, is there was a brief, uh, camera angle where they showed the signal-to-noise ratio. As best I could tell, it was showing the gain from the beam in the relevant frequencies, and then the gain, or really the lack of In the adjacent channels. This is technical stuff. And so sometimes you kind of wonder, are they throwing this little snippet in because they know the space mob will catch it? And my God, the space mob is impressive. And so I kind of watched the video thinking like, oh, cool video. And then of course someone, you know, runs an analysis to clean out the noise and do full, full scientific reconciliation of this. And then Katzi quickly picks it up as well. I mean, this is just like— Weapons-grade research that we've got in the space mom. And it shows what is in the DD doc. It shows this, this really sort of tabletop plateau where in the frequencies where you want to be transmitting with a lot of gain, boom, gain. Right when you get to the side, you don't have this sort of Mount Kilimanjaro, like big sweeping shoulders, which then cause a lot of interference in the adjacent channels. It just drops off. And that's really important. And so the next thing I have here is exactly this issue of bean forming. And so @Tomster000 did a couple passes with AI to clean things up, and it's showing the signal-to-noise ratio. And then Katzi, of course, you know, someone called him on the bat phone, and it also just sort of confirmed in, um, elevated this post. It actually might have been from @bonsai03 is the person that found this, or who knows, but a couple of people picked up on this and all of their contributions are really valuable. And thank you for that. But it's just showing the, this is showing the decibel watts per square meter. I'm just looking at this now. closely, but it's a little hard. Um, but it's showing the power flux density, I believe, and it looks exactly what it should look like. So the beamforming is ultimately the service we're delivering. So all of this tech goes into this advanced beamforming technology we have. That's the product. And we're seeing that product demonstrated in the field. And that's good news. What we also had this week, uh, should be quickly confirmed just a couple minutes ago, is just the pace Blue Origin is prepping to operate at. I know there's an incredible amount of frustration at the slippage in the launch schedule. This is a little bit of a maturity test in my view, because obviously it's really easy to get short and temperamental with people. But when you look at the scale of these I mean, the whole idea that New Glenn, even if it were just like a fixed skyscraper, that would be pretty impressive. The fact that this skyscraper blasts into orbit and then lands itself is simply difficult for my small little brain to comprehend. And so what we have picked up on are some reasons why the New Glenn 3 launch is happening when it's happening. I won't go into details, but this is The 3rd launch, they've launched 2, there's still learning that goes into this rocket. And with learning, it's absorbed and the next ones are faster. And so then we also found out today, Blue Origin said that they announced the no earlier than date of April 10th, I believe. And so now they really have line of sight on when they're going to launch this bad boy. The typical price reaction. Okay, so the future is not, uh, the past is not indicative of future performance, as everyone knows, but it's super fun to try to apply these analogs because maybe it will happen. So that's also kind of how I'm thinking is now we have a date, market has a date, we're going to see this thing, uh, static fired or hot fired. I forget which stage they're in, but they're going to do some additional test. There's going to be a lot of media around this. It is super exciting. We're going to have Artemis. In 2 or 3 days. So another sort of incredible feat of engineering, admittedly not the low-cost solution going up. All eyes will be on space. We have a Falcon Heavy going up and then reasonably certain we should get the SpaceX S1. There's a lot of space excitement about that's about to happen. And historically, ASTS really finds its footing into launch. And maybe it'll be different this time. So you'd want to own the stock for other reasons, not just like a run-up into launch, because you could be disappointed by that. So if you're interested in the stock, you should really try to understand why people like me have owned it for 5 years and have a desire to own it for, you know, the future. And, um, I was hesitating because I'm like, I kind of hope it's— it goes up a lot before 5 years, because 5 years is a long time. That would be, you know, a decade in a stock. I mean, What's my life expectancy? But history says that these stocks trade really well into launch, and these stocks meaning basically all the space stocks. What I'm really hopeful for is, quote unquote, this time it's different, which I realize are just absolutely tragic words to ever say, much less say publicly on a recorded basis. But what I think is going to be different this time is that we'll have New Glenn 3. I hope it's successful. But then we really should be on the cusp of a batch 1 shipment in the end of April. And I would hope that the company is going to start to give us some media that shows some progress toward that. But then that's really opening the floodgates of the exciting constellation deployment that I know all of us are looking forward to. And it's also going to dovetail again with the lead up into the SpaceX IPO. And so that's why I think Q2 could really be gangbusters and why I've added Torx to my exposure. And I'm going to really lay off any temptation of doing covered calls because again, I think we're on this bull that's still behind the gate and they're about to let the bull out. And covered calls can wreck your brain when this stock starts going and it starts having successive green candles, like holy crap. I mean, I've been there. I've had my face absolutely ripped off selling covered calls. In my experience, this is probably not one of the best times to deploy that strategy. Sit on your hands if you can and let the bull out of the cage. We also had the company issue a bunch of executive awards.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Dilution.
[00:16:59] Speaker C: So this is my point about compensation. This company pays its executives in stock, not in cash. If you work at AST SpaceMobile, it is a compensation vehicle for you and one that's been very lucrative to be an executive at. And so Scott, for example, got 100,000 shares. Well, that's cool. That's real adult money. And so I would have to see, I actually don't remember if these are annual awards, it would Suspect not. Um, they also are subject to vesting. Um, but I'd have to— problem is it's testing my eyesight. These are so tiny, these filings. But, um, but it says they've reached milestones. And so Scott, his milestones can in fact sometimes not be totally the things we want, you know. Hey, congratulations on the ATM and blasting our balls off with a convertible bond. Here's your share incentive awards. That is a true statement for Scott some of the time. The exact same thing can also be true for Andrew Johnson. Like, thanks for castrating me financially because you issued a billion-dollar convert right when the stock was about to go to $150. That is a milestone that Andrew would be compensated for. So again, let's not read too much into his milestones. But Shanti, dear Shanti, his performance milestones start to get very interesting. So this is the COO. He's compensated on stuff getting built. So that's good. His milestones could easily have been FM1, FM2, could have been the critical design review of the Bluebirds, could be anything. It could be, um, advancement of the Batch 1. Um, and the same thing, same thing for Abel. So Abel got a Big Boy Award, 184,000 shares. His milestones are certainly not going to be limited to doing an ATO, for example. That's going to be much more toward, uh, technical progress, commercial progress, and regulatory progress. So they hit their milestones outlined by the board. That is good. Um, and it does seem like things could really be shaping up. And again, I know that there's just rock bottom sentiment It's really easy to get mad at people is what I've kind of realized in life. I don't know all the people on the internet as people might imagine. I do know some of the people on the internet. And so that's why some people, for example, when anyone attacks Katzi, um, I turn into John Wick and I'm willing to basically burn down the entire world in the defense of my dear friend. Uh, because I do know about this individual and he is a really talented person. And so anyone that sort of flings invective at Katzi is going to get, you know, a knock on their door from El Cook. But some other people, I don't know who they are. And so for all I know, they're 23 years old or they're 18, um, as easily as they could be 65 in retirement. And so it's hard for me to always reconcile the exasperation people have, but as someone who I draw on my own experiences, I don't have any private companies that have done what they said they were going to do. It's just kind of almost remarkable when you're on the inside and on a bunch of boards and see how the world really works with companies just dealing with being companies. It's very humbling to see what executives have to do and how hard it is to make progress. I'm involved with some companies that are doing things of a loosely similar vein as AST SpaceMobile in terms of the regulatory and technical challenges, kind of actually making big things. It is viciously difficult, and to get something done within a couple years of your estimate is somewhat of an incredible accomplishment. So when you have that viewpoint, it's not like you're covering for management, but you understand the fact— and I made this point the other day in a tweet— the very fact that ASTS stock is above zero is an incredible accomplishment. It means that the company exists. It was financed and it has made it this far. And so anything above zero when you're doing something other people thought to be impossible is pretty incredible. Now, I would say that that also could be setting the bar a little bit low, but the stock is $80. They're doing great. But I do appreciate the exasperation people have because I think there's this expectation if you put something out publicly, you're supposed to do it. And I also kind of agree. I don't really understand why the company persistently gets its own guidance wrong. I don't know why you wouldn't just build in some more flexibility. I think there's always some delicate issues of you have to guide in line with your regulatory filings and your regulatory filings are trying to put realistic pressure to get stuff done. You're also trying to signal to your team, which is the Elon way, which I do appreciate. The second you start to introduce complacency into your company, anywhere, it can become pervasive. And so certainly studied Ken Griffin and his rule of Citadel, and he lives in terror of any complacency entering that organization. And he's right, you can't get complacent. It doesn't mean you hit all of your promises. And so that's the tension this company has to navigate and certainly hasn't built track record of hitting guidance, quite the opposite. But at some point that will change. And it will, they did actually hit their revenue guidance actually in fairness to them. And so the one financial KPI that they've really given, they did hit. And so that, that's a big deal, but the technical stuff, I would just emphasize to people, you, of course they'd rather get stuff done faster. Of course you don't think Abel would want these all to be up. It's not like he sits around, he's like, I know I'm going to give guidance and then I'm going to miss it by 2 and a half months so I can vaporize everyone's monthly calls. That will be super funny. That is not what he's doing. They're missing it because they're doing this for the first time on these next generation satellites with composite, and they got to get it right. And you just don't know until you throw stuff into the TVAC of what's going to happen. If something needs to be fixed, you fix it. And, you know, their guidance is evidently not baking in the contingencies sufficiently of the things they have to get fixed. But I know as an owner of the company, I want that stuff to be fixed. I don't want to launch a deficient satellite and have something break up in orbit if it could have otherwise been prevented. Now we might have satellites break up in orbit at some point, but I feel very good that the company's doing everything possible to mitigate that and be responsible. with their technical risk-taking, which I certainly appreciate. So I know a lot of us think, you know, yeah, sure, we're exasperated, but you just have to put yourself in the shoes of management. And it's not like the guy owns 78 million shares. It's not like he's missing guidance for the fun of it. It's because this is hard stuff. And if it were easy, someone else would've done it and SpaceX would've done it. So now let's talk about SpaceX. So SpaceX is like a pet tiger. So if anyone has watched Tiger King, you would know that while tigers look like really amazing animals, albeit when you get close to one, you start to realize they probably smell because they are a big animal, but they are a beautiful animal. But having a pet tiger is dangerous because at the end of the day, it is a cat. And unlike catsy, cats can generally not be trusted. Because they are smarter than you and they don't really respect you because they know that they're sophisticated in every possible way. And so that means from time to time they will just kill you. And that's why you don't have a tiger as a pet. You should also not have SpaceX as a partner.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: Why?
[00:24:58] Speaker C: SpaceX is a tiger. They think they are smarter than you. They think they are dominant in every possible respect than you. And if they're your partner, it's only because for this exact moment in time, they need you. But the second they don't, they will slash your jugular with their claw and eat you. And so it is perhaps a little bit awkward for T-Mobile to see that its partner is bidding against them in the AWS-3 spectrum. And so Anpanman was retweeting this that Mike Dono found. And this just goes to the point that you don't partner with a company that is unpartnerable. SpaceX's first principle is not to be a carrier-neutral global infrastructure provider. Their first principle is to be vertically integrated, own the customer, and have zero dependencies whatsoever.
[00:25:53] Speaker A: Great.
[00:25:54] Speaker C: The difference with SpaceX is they can generally actually do that. He, he being Elon, has proven over and over the ability to completely disintermediate all prior existing value chains and own the full stack. Impressive, but something you should take note of if you're an MNO. And he does generate big ideas. So if you own SpaceX stock, good for you. Will he do a SpaceX phone? I don't know, but I bet he will. Will the SpaceX phone be competitive with, as an MNO service, competitive with AT&T and Verizon? I don't know, but I do know that it's going to make the AT&Ts of the world poop in their pants. And my guess is that it's not a good idea for Elon to do because MNOs are incredibly capital intensive businesses with very little net market growth. It just seems like a killing field. And so my personal bet is Elon's going to see that maybe he doesn't want to enter this capital-intensive, low-return killing field and instead do something that is more greenfield, like orbital AI and things like that, that have just crazy open white space in new markets where he has a real big competitive advantage. That makes more sense to me. The corollary to that is that maybe he takes an off-ramp in terms of D2C, but here he is bidding for more spectrum. So who knows what he's going to do? But if you're an MNO, you really don't want to partner with this guy and give him any advantages. You want to start making his life as hard as you can. Meanwhile, ASTS is also going after more spectrum, which is very exciting. And so at One More Smith here, another great account, Uh, points out that the, and this was actually new to me, there's, uh, Grain Management LLC has this nationwide block of 800 MHz spectrum. So I need to do more research on the background of Grain Management, but some other people have been hoping, I guess, that this 6x6 band of spectrum would find its way into ASTS. And so they're petitioning the FCC to really, again, free this up. And they mentioned DDD services. So I don't really think this should drive the stock price one way or another, but it is just another snippet that there's more spectrum shaking loose. And it's very possible that this spectrum is going to find its way to ASTS, which in my belief, which I started as a joke, just kind of Spitballing on a space is, but I really actually kind of mean it, is that ASTS is going to be a global spectrum holding company, and then it will potentially end up being one of the world's most valuable companies. And so Rocket Tank 123, another very technical, very good account, also noticed that ASTS submitted a filing requesting S-band allocations in Brazil. Just another Drop of facts that show this strategy taking hold, the company vertically integrating into the upstream asset, which is going to position it to have a totally different value proposition to its MNO partners, a lot more defensibility than being just the tech leader with bent pipe. When you actually bring the radio frequency rights with it, start to become a really big Deal. The Legato transaction is also trudging ahead. So again, that's another big piece of spectrum that you want. And it's always good to remember the difference in spectrum. And so ASTS is able to operate with low-band spectrum. Reason being, I'm always amazed at how simple the physics are. Low-band spectrum are big waves. Those antennae, those elements need to be spaced further apart. Because those other waves would otherwise collide with each other. And so almost think of like a silly string or something where, you know, you have some sine waves shooting out. If that's a big sine wave, you need silly string dispensers being further apart so that the silly string doesn't hit it, hit itself and sort of cross the beam and the world Ghostbusters style. And SpaceX, because they can't make this big array because they haven't figured out the unfurling, can only operate in the high band stuff. because those are like little bitty lasers and, you know, they don't wiggle a lot. It's more like straight lines. And so those elements can be closer together. The reason why you need low band is because it allows you to get premium coverage and work inside. And so here we have this cool post from Kevin Chen about a FirstNet, uh, user, and he was just Talking about how FirstNet saved his life because of the low-band, uh, what was it? Low-band coverage that his cell phone had allowed him to make a call when they were under fire. So getting shot at and they moved into an elevator for cover, but in the elevator, they didn't have their radios wouldn't work. And so they use their personal phones, which are operating on low-band and were able to make a call to get help. And so in the most challenging environments is when you need to have really, really the most flexible spectrum. The communications must happen. And that's where ASTS is, is going to thrive. And we'll have something a little bit more later about that in terms of 911 services. But then this week, we also got a DA with a Singaporean entity, the I forget what DST stands for, but it's the Defense Science and Technology Agency of Singapore. And so this is their FirstNet. So this shows that we have a commercial blueprint for these types of deals and we're starting to sign them. And so this MOU, I believe, had been announced last year, but now it finally printed and they really should have these around the world. And I believe We will. It just goes to show you that sometimes the initial DAs take a while because you have to figure out the commercial blueprint that can work for everyone. But once you have it for a specific market, then other markets are going to be similar and there's precedent. So that MNO or agency on the other side doesn't have to worry about sort of reinventing the wheel. There's a real template that someone else had signed off on and just allows things to go faster. And that's why the DA momentum should really pick up in the back half of this year, especially as we're launching satellites. I think DAs will start to become a mundane event that really people take for granted, and hopefully it's just happening when we otherwise have a lot of momentum in the stock, and just these constant DAs will just be like boosters for it. So then NPMN was out also with the New Zealand Network Operators Group with a presentation that points to the deficiencies of SpaceX. Here's a quote to remember. If you dial 911, which is their 911, and you're on Starlink, we believe the call will fail. Your mobile device will then try other carriers and eventually hit the AST Space mobile network and produce the emergency call.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Huh.
[00:33:26] Speaker C: Well, I don't know why you'd use Starlink then. And so this uptime is really what's going to matter. And I was also learning, so as I was learning this weekend more about Merlin, again, I'm really early in this and I just want to be clear, as far as I'm concerned, it could easily go to $5 in the next couple of weeks as it could to pump to $20 or something. So just TBD. I think it's super interesting thesis, but one I need to learn about. But I was just learning more about AV. Aviation redundancy, which clearly there's a lot of it. And a big issue they have is as their AI brain is trying to natural language process all the air traffic control transmissions. And so as an air traffic controller is talking to them on VHF frequencies and, you know, all sorts of accents and speech patterns and things like that, the problem Merlin has is it can't rely on an internet connection. And so they have to solve a problem where it still has to be able to do all of its compute without access to the internet and have it all on board. And it just goes to the problem of, as we have more AI in the world, the connectivity is going to need to happen where connectivity is the least assured and where the reliability must be as close to 100% as possible, or you're going to have to undertake incredibly complex engineering tasks to Solve for that. And I was learning about, uh, Swarmer as well, just stuff I listen to when I'm at the gym. Same issue of, you know, how do you have all these drones work in GPS-denied environments and without access to connectivity? And this is just where these use cases, whether it's 911 calls, um, AI everywhere, things, whether the military or not operating in challenging environments. That's where these market figures, in my view, could really explode. I don't think I'm just being hopelessly optimistic. I think it's really just showing each day we're getting closer to that vision, and I'm really excited to see what the commercial impact of that is going to be. And that to me means that partners don't really have a choice. And so we get to the emerging decisions that are happening with Iris Squared, which is the sovereign European constellation, and we have UTSAT explain at Mobile World Congress that it did not have the financial means to create a constellation with the capacity to do D2D. And so, as expected, the Europeans are realizing that this is really difficult. Their local industry players are these kind of tired TV satellite companies, and. And are being asked to do something that the, some of the most, you know, best capitalized US tech companies in the world have a 10-year head start on. And so their fallback plan is going to have to be to partner, I think, with ASTS or Starlink. And we've already kind of beaten to death The fact that Starlink is not an ideal partner, and so we're seeing more things kind of drop out in these European filings. And we know if you've done the diligence, you know that ASTS has been very forward with data sovereignty and things that Europeans should and do care about. So there is increasingly high hopes that we're going to get some big announcements. around things like IRIS-2. And by all accounts, the Vodafone JV, now known as Satellite Connect Europe, is firing on all cylinders. And I know we have Peter Lindmark really tracking that really as carefully as anyone. He's European, has a good pulse of like where to look, first of all. And then is very generous in sharing it and everything I've been reading from him and then putting together with all the other great contributors. Is really helping me form a really great mosaic of what ought to happen. And sadly, what ought to happen isn't always what will happen, but what does happen usually is what ought to happen. So that is my pedantic speech using fancy specific words for the night. Let's get back to basics. SCS. And so the FCC docket for supplemental coverage from space, which is the market access award, which is forever in the making, are now having some of these finer points with some late-stage meetings. We just had the ITU filings for the 543 satellites. I might have forgotten the exact number. But there's starting to be some activity on the back end, which is starting to smell like we're about to get the FCC drops. And that should be, well, as a guy who's kind of predicted this for a year, I want to be careful, but that really should be in the next couple of weeks in my best guess. But again, I am an anonymous account on the internet that is accused of being a paid boiler room pumper from Bangladesh. So My estimate of this happening in the next couple weeks, one should caveat that perhaps I am wrong, but perhaps I'm right. We just don't know, and that's why the stock has 100% implied volatility. But it is good now that we look at these ITU filings, which is conveniently the next tweet I had, is this 543. Satellite filing for the ITU looks like a big land grab to slot in a couple more shells. There's all sorts of inclinations being included, including our equatorial satellites, and this is some pretty exciting stuff. And so Tanner Kirk-Ottaway, who evidently doesn't have a Netflix subscription— I mean, this guy just seems to spend literally all of his time looking for ASTS stuff. So this is really one of these incredible case studies of price elasticity. And so Netflix increased the prices, Tanner can't afford it. Tanner does more work on ASTS so that he can make some money in the stock. And, you know, thank you for ripping our faces off, Netflix, with a price increase, because that's what causes Tanner to search itu.int filings. I mean, God, I wonder if like 12-year-old Tanner, like, had a vision of himself. It's like, I know when I'm older, I'm going to be sitting around reading ITU filings and understanding which orbital shell satellite will be in. And you know what? We love you for it. And so this is exciting stuff. And Katzi's of the belief that this is the type of stuff that is coordinated with the FCC before a formal Filing to the FCC. And I have no reason to believe that's wrong. It just shows you the scale this company is preparing to operate at. It's much bigger than what they originally said. And this all just revolves around ultimate data capacity and coverage and use cases. And if you take the foundational belief, so if you kind of, you know, wonder how kook's brain works, it goes down to unit economics. Before I get excited about anything, a single thing must just be good. And so the unit, the widget that this company produces is a satellite. On my math, which you could drive a truck through the variance of whether it's right or wrong, leads me to believe each satellite is enormously profitable thing. And so I measure this at a bottoms-up way of how much data it produces. I put a price on that data relative to its CapEx. Yada, yada, yada. And I have these satellites being enormously profitable. If you could be a partner in one satellite, you would put all of your money in that because you'd be getting like a 1-year payback or something like that. And so again, I, I could be massively wrong because we don't really know all these numbers, but the foundational building block of the way my brain works is that the unit economics are good. So if that's true, you want open-ended runway to have as many units as you can. And so for someone like me, seeing a path from 93 units or whatever the original thing was to then the full constellation ask of 248 gets exciting. But then to see 543 is really exciting because that's really just saying we have many, many, many, many years of constellation buildout. So basically incremental, awesome unit economics building. This is good. This is how stocks compound. And it also ties to all the qualitative things Scott has said over the years, ties to what we've learned about Golden Dome and the military programs. It ties to the mid-band. As a mosaic, it all fits together. And that's what's really exciting. Do I know specifically what's going to happen? No, I don't. But I've, I've been able for my own thinking to create a mosaic of this general blob of good things that I have developed my own conviction in. And so that's how I approach it. There's many different ways in which people think and invest, and I don't purport to be right or the only person, but that's how I think about it. What's good to support this idea of unit economics is to understand why our units are going to be desirable to MNOs. So what was also neat is there is this video by Two Degrees. So again, the New Zealanders, And it's this nice video and NPM was generous enough to create a summary of this video and just talks about the first principles. So ASTS works with 3GPP standards and you can use ordinary phones. That's good. The architecture. And so the MNO owns the network, which is very important. It has control over the ground stations and the eNodeBs and flexibility over control and it works. So listen to that video. It's important to keep your own understanding. But then you also are having some of the MNOs and the regulators slap back at bad architecture. And so this is sort of doubling one's conviction. So you have some MNOs talking affirmatively as to why ASTS is good, but then you have other regulators showing us exactly why SpaceX is not good. And so Namibia is out there to just make some noise. And so the chairperson of the board of the Communications Regulatory Authority announced the reasons why they rejected Starlink's application for spectrum and operating licenses. And he said the applicant met only 3 of the 6 criteria, noting that failure to meet even one requirement is sufficient grounds for rejection. And they said that the lack of Namibian ownership in the American company contributed to this decision. Okay, whatever. Um, but they said Starlink failed to meet national security criteria, and I believe that that relates to the architecture, the regenerative architecture, where Namibia would have no idea where the data is going and have no control over it. They have no wiretapping authority, things like that. These are the reasons why sovereigns are not going to like, uh, SpaceX. And we've Been talking about this for now years. Our own understanding of it has just been cemented early on where it began as guesses, and now it's been solidified with proof points. And that's really then the closing of uncertainty, which is why the stock goes up, because things are less uncertain. And, um, now let's talk about some of the other opportunities. And so Military. I was kind of surprised this other guy who I didn't really follow, but this Space Connect guy who's all like taken up in arms because ASTS is a military company. I guess this guy doesn't understand the price of freedom, but I do. And so I'm really proud that AST SpaceMobile has military applications. I want the good guys to have better weapons. I think that we're the good guys. I know there can be different views on that, but I don't. subscribe to the alternative view. But what we're learning from the Iranian conflict is that Iran, uh, they're not dumb. And so it's been global headlines that they took out this early warning EWAC, which, you know, there's no more of these things in the US, very valuable military infrastructure. And they just totally drilled it on a Saudi Arabian airbase, which is, which is bad. And they've also been taking out ground-based radar systems. And so the U.S. embassy got whacked, and so they're blinding us wherever they can. They realize that if you take out the radar, you take out a bunch of capabilities. So tragic that Iran is successful in these attacks, but also eye-opening in what could possibly be the countermove from such an obvious vulnerability. I believe the U.S. is pretty far ahead. and has identified that these LEO constellations provide a very different approach toward EWACS and ground-based radar. I believe that AST SpaceMobile is just simply an Aegis system in the sky. And so we have continued movement of Golden Dome, which is going to be relying on a lot of these technologies for the tracking and custody of And so we have continued movement in Golden Dome. The price went up because they added capacity and they've added air moving target indicator sensors so they can track projectiles in different ways and a space-based communications architecture that will connect it all. So to a man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail. I obviously believe that ASTS is suitable for all of these things. I don't, I doubt they will get all of these things, but I think they'll get some of these things. And it, these awards, we went from Golden Dome being sort of the talk of the town. I think people kind of forgot about this, but it's a big project, $175, $185 billion that I think is going to drive a lot of excitement as we get into the coming months. And it's not just about Golden Dome. It's about Really, all of the capabilities. And so we have a quote from Michael Pollack, who's the EVP of Government Operations, where his closing remarks at the SAT show were, quote, "The war in Ukraine and the war in Iran have made us more important than ever." That seems like an obvious statement if one's been following, like I have, both of these conflicts. And if you know. if you so-called monitor the situation, you see that electronic warfare is really how all of this happens now. And that's a big opportunity for ASC SpaceMobile to support all of the allies. And that's where I think Europe comes into play too, because Europe is going through a big rearmament cycle as well. And I just think things like IRIS are going to be very difficult to do by themselves. And so going back to other applications, Arne, again, a really talented industry executive. So again, part of the space mob that's able to pull in a lot of pretty crazy firsthand experience was out there. What was he doing? So transforming, I think this is just simply the number of IoT devices. Oh yeah, he was responding to this really funny thing about And so, you know, the D2C market is really the direct-to-cow market. There was this thing shown about how people were spending $5 to $8 a month. I think that was in Kiwi dollars, so exchange rate it. But talking about how they would put solar-powered smart collars on cows to track them. So smart to do. You want to make sure you're monitoring your herd and you just go again. This thing I'm seeing is this massive collar. Not quite sure how it's working, but this is again one of the many, many use cases for IoT. Another thing that Arnie and I were talking about live this week was something we saw for, I believe it was the equivalent of OnStar. I don't know why I didn't link this out. I wonder how I missed this, but I do remember it. It was an article about arming cars with this type of capability for if there's a crash, basically to have OnStar on it. And they were saying that the average budgeted usage for the life of the vehicle was something like 5 megabytes. So basically nothing. And this goes to the capacity payment that I've been talking about with AST SpaceMobile. So, you know, likening it to insurance, you're paying premium and hopefully if you're lucky for your entire life and never having a claim. Most people do not want a claim. When you do have a claim, it's very high severity to you, but it's very low frequency. I've always believed ASTS is selling insurance, but in this instance, they're not short this crazy exposure of if your house burns down and you get tagged for a trillion dollars. If you have an accident in your car or something, there's a call on the data, but with an actuarial table, you'll be able to really smooth that out. But meanwhile, you're able to charge someone whatever it is, $5, $10 a month. You know, I think I'm paying, what am I paying? $10, $15 a month on my Toyota. BMW's trying to charge me something, but I told them I don't want their service. But car companies are getting increasingly smart about trying to add these subscription services, and it could easily just be the car company paying for this upfront to have this enabled service. And from their perspective, it's really not that much money anyway. On a feature they're selling up front, and then embedded is this data data package. But it's really not consuming any of the ASTS network; it just has a right of call against the network in the unlikely event it is needed. This is what allows ASTS to oversell its capacity manifold. And so, going back to my unit economic math, on my unit economic math, I'm not doing that at all. I'm assuming they only sell 30% of their data; the rest is just. unutilized. The reality is the company is going to be able to oversell its data, and that's what I believe makes my numbers quite likely dramatically low. And I hope that's right. And so I'm not putting out estimates like a sell-side analyst. I don't put out price targets. I'm putting out my own math that I use for myself. I just know what I have to believe at a minimum, knowing that I'm likely wrong and likely wrong massively. But I'm wrong with respect to the upside. And so I'm just trying to line myself up for asymmetry to the upside. And that's where, again, making sure you own your shares in the correct way so that you either don't have a rigid target price and sell right when a winner is winning or do something else silly. But that's kind of how I think about it. And so learning more about these IoT opportunities is really important because I think this is just simply a lot of cash flow that comes with minimal demands on the network, which allows you to then oversell the network. Because what you're really doing if you're ASTS is you're looking at people like me that will be using the network pretty consistently as I go in and out of coverage areas. So you're charging me a price and I use a certain amount of sort of known demand. Then you're going to have all sorts of other use cases, but then you're going to have these IoT use cases, Which are really using network capacity where people are not located or extremely infrequent uses that you can then really stack without worrying about exhausting your capacity. So that's how I would think about it, and that's where the network optimization comes into play. And you can see that the company has added incredible board experience in this respect and technical experience in terms of how to manage the network. I believe that a lot of that goes into these things that I'm saying. And so let's go back to midweek as we talked about the SpaceX IPO really got these stocks ripping. Lunar was up 20%, Fly was up 18%, blah, blah, blah. This was sort of the hot money thing that caused unfortunately like a terrible hangover Thursday and Friday. And I think that's caused us to really overshoot to the downside. And then we'll see what Monday brings. I haven't checked the market since I've been on the Spaces, but it really wouldn't surprise me at all if a ground invasion, if confirmed, which I personally would believe that's what's going to happen, whether I like it or not, it's just what I think is going to happen. I think that might be the capitulation move where all of a sudden the boogeyman comes out and then it's like, well, okay, US ground troops, On the ground is usually going to be a quick end to something. Because again, you got to be a, you have to be a very religious person, um, to stand your ground when a Marine expeditionary unit lands in front of you. I mean, your belief in God has to be absolute because otherwise the sane response is to like just run. And, and that's what I hope the Iranians do is just simply run for their life because you don't want to be on the receiving end of that spear. And that's what I think would cause the market to also bottom. So then the last thing, but I could be wrong, who knows? I'm just literally a kook sitting in my office, my wife texting me, asking me when I'm done with my cultivating. So, you know, you're not like getting advice from JP Morgan right here, to put it lightly. But you do, let's end on something equally credibility destroying, which is me talking about a tweet from Ben Jawanda, who might have a lot of credibility. I don't know. Um, but he walks through the case as to why this company could be a trillion-dollar company. I know this is what the bears always like to glom onto, saying that these paid pumpers are leading everyone to their own demise. And, um, again, you know, maybe I am, but I do so naively because I am on the same path to demise if that is true. But this person walks through the high-level math and it is good. I usually look back at the biggest stocks that I've missed and have always just kind of realized, you know, it's so easy to get so enraptured in the details, and it's so difficult to get to a point where your subject matter expertise on one hand is extremely high, but then on the other hand, your ability to do math on a napkin is also high. Because usually it's very difficult to, to marry these 2 things. Either you're incredibly in the weeds and you do a 300-page PowerPoint that industry consultants say is total garbage and trash. And then you really don't have the ability to zoom out and see the bigger picture, or you're a super high-level thinker and you just won't look at something like ASTS because it's very complex. And so distilling the complexity is a very hard thing to do. But sometimes if you just look at the simple math, like a Ron Baron would do, It allows you just to understand what am I playing for? And just to know that on the, if you're right, and also using a framework of the if and unless framework, which I have in the first couple of pages of my document of unless these bad things happen. So in other words, if inertia and rational behavior keeps going, what does something look like? If I slap a certain market share number that's achievable and I slap certain unit economics, blah, blah, blah, and you just kind of calculate sort of a high-level EPS. If that's a massively big number and you have a really good founder and a really good team, that's the way you see the nonlinearity in the world, and that's where you can make the monster numbers. And I have seen enough of this in my career, but I've never had the 100-bagger, and I want one. And I go back, I was again sort of in a pissing match today with this, uh, Lucky Stewart guy, and he was out there making these claims. I think my response to him—oh yeah, this was maybe not my finest moment—or my tweet was "Stewie, fuck off." Okay, I guess I could be a little bit more civil. But but he then maybe he's a nice guy. I don't know. But he just says that he's doing God's work because ASTS is astronomically overvalued. Well, that's I think a very discrete. statement. And where I get so, I don't even know, I get whipped up, but what I think about when I see things like that are the same statements by quote unquote experts when Google IPO'd. I remember I was doing the case study of Google versus Ask Jeeves. I was very young back then and not wise, but I was very smart and that's a dangerous thing. And so as someone who had a lot of positive feedback as to one's sort of academic intelligence, but not matching that with high-level distillation skills, because those are usually not present in a 23-year-old. I did not see the bigger picture of something like Google. And then that was reinforced by all these value investing guys that I was friends with and read. They would do these sort of like very condescending write-ups of, well, you can buy Freeport-McMoRan, Newport, you know, Pan American Silver, Conoco. You could buy all these things, and that's the same market cap as buying Google. Ergo, Google is astronomically overpriced, and what a bubble, blah blah blah. Like, they were wrong because they didn't see the bigger picture. And so the Muppet that was just buying Google because they went, this seems like it's going to be a monopoly and an aggregator of all content of all of humanity and be rent seeking and then have a platform to do the exact same thing in every other format. The person that understood that high level thing would have not gotten, would not have received a job at many firms other than like Tiger, which is frankly the only place they probably wanted to get a job, but they wouldn't have really gone far with the Park Avenue suit wearing value investor. They would have been laughed out of the room. And I have the same thing. Ironically, my in-laws are with me and I remember I was going over for dinner and talking to my brother-in-law's son who was like, I don't know, 28 at the time. I remember, you know, go to dinner and, you know, fancy hedge fund guy and he came up like, what did he like? And he was like, oh, I'm all in on Tesla. You know, they're going to change the world. He's, you know, young environmental guy and didn't understand the math, anything. He just saw like, this is the trend. My generation wants EVs. These are cool. You gotta believe. He was all in. And I remember kind of just smirking, being like, yeah, well, I mean, like, what about, what about their balance sheet? Like, do you have a view of the front-dated converts that I'm on a heavy delta on? You know, what do you think about those things? And they just saw the high level. And so I really tried to reorient my brain Um, I don't want to claim to be the next Antonio Linares. I am certainly not, but I've tried to retrain my brain to really allow this separate GPU, if you will, process just the high-level big picture so that I'm not blinded by the facts and the difficulties of, of reality. That's where the team comes in. And so the facts and the difficulties of reality are all too easy to find when you're looking at AST SpaceMobile. Just go ask Tim Ferriss. He'll tell you that. Um, but if you have a dynamic management team that can break through walls, then the question is, and I hate this phrase viscerally, but I'm doomed to repeat it. You ask yourself, is there a there there? Which is like the most West Coast thing a person can say. Is there a there there? But you know, it's a good, it's a good point. You know, I got to concede sometimes things you hate are right. And so you ask, is there a there there? Well, with ASTS, I have concluded that there is a there there, and that there can be somewhat loosely mapped by simple math like we have from our friend Ben Jowanda. And so that's what the type of analysis I really like to see, um, on, on really anything I'm looking at. And so, for example, as I sort of study Things like Merlin, you know, the basic thing is like, okay, what's the business model? Again, I don't, I don't know the answer on this thing yet. I don't want anyone to think I'm pumping a new stock. Um, but you know, I'm trying to learn new things. And so I try to understand, you know, what is the unit economics? What is the go-to-market? How does it scale? If, if it goes to plan, what does it look like? That's the type of thing, if you had really sat and thought about for businesses like NVIDIA, Google, Facebook, You know, all of the big great businesses, it's that bigger picture that made you get rich, not understanding next year's PE ratio. It's the nonlinearity. So anyway, kind of babbling on about stuff that's sufficiently ambiguous for anyone to actually challenge me on, so I'll stop. But I'm excited for next week. I hope we have a, not a run-up per se, that sounds short-term, but I do believe we're going to get a relief rally into the New Glenn 3 rocket. And then people are gonna have to ask themselves if they feel lucky on batch 1. And I think a lot of things are gonna be coming. Sentiment, I think, is absolutely in the toilet in the market. And for this stock in particular, I think we have this washout because of the SpaceX S-1 anticipation. I think that will come. And, you know, as I look here, S&P futures are back to almost flat. So that's what I have tonight. Everyone's been doing awesome DD. I hope the launch is actually delayed a little bit so that I can get back for my kids' spring break in time and then go to launch. So, you know, careful what you wish for, I guess. That's what I got. So thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. And I hope everyone has a wonderful day.
[01:04:13] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mover 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 Space Mobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[01:04:36] Speaker B: We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology we can really affect billion lives. AST Space Mobile 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.
[01:05:13] Speaker A: Listen.
[01:05:13] Speaker C: Mmm, waffles.