Latest / AST SpaceMobile Podcast / Kook's Weekly - November 23

Transcript

Kook's Weekly - November 23 · AST SpaceMobile Podcast

0:06
This is the AST Space Mobile podcast and.
0:10
We just basically turn your phone be seamless regardless of
0:14
where you are. We don't want the user even to
0:16
know that it's connected by satellite.
0:21
Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
0:27
Can you be everyone surprised anyone's still awake?
0:30
I guess there's some W coasters and probably some people in
0:33
Asia, so we'll keep this fast and and short.
0:38
You know, the real summary is that I think this company AST
0:41
space mobile has great prospects and I own a lot of it.
0:44
So thanks for joining tonight. It's our in depth chart chat and
0:50
I'm glad everyone was here for that important message.
0:54
But in all seriousness, as this guy that was fudding around on
0:58
ESTs said to someone else that had ASTS and their profile, I
1:03
think he said, quote, this belongs in the domain of
1:06
pathology. And I'm thinking, dude, have you
1:09
checked out my profile yet? And so kind of on that note, I'm
1:14
thinking I have to do the spaces.
1:16
I'm also someone who's extremely superstitious.
1:19
So I do the push ups every night.
1:21
I'd rather die than not do the push ups.
1:23
They do the weekly. Every week I do the spaces.
1:27
I legit today went around shopping for Jets gear because I
1:32
asked the Internet what would break the curse and the Internet
1:35
said not, you know, don't, don't fast, don't delete your account
1:40
or whatever, just become a Jets fan.
1:42
So a laugh was had by all when I tried to explain to the guy in
1:46
the shop where I was looking for Jets gear and he's like, dude,
1:49
why? And I'm like, well, I lost a
1:52
bet. And he understood.
1:55
He understood that no one would actually want to go buy a Jets
1:58
hat. And so they had a good laugh.
2:01
But this week I was, you know, every week I, I start off and
2:04
think, will there be enough for a weekly?
2:08
And what, what will I do if, if there isn't, you know, I'll have
2:12
to ad Lib, maybe talk about gardening or something.
2:17
But this week was like all the other weeks, which I think we've
2:20
been doing this now for like 16 months or something.
2:24
It started in August of 2024 when I thought the cadence of
2:29
news was just so incredible that it made sense to just compile
2:32
what happened in the week and then it became the next week and
2:36
the next week and the next week. And so this week we had some
2:38
interesting stuff. First and foremost, BB6, also
2:43
known as FM one, also known as WTF, where is it got a launch
2:49
date of December 15th. It will be launching with ISRO,
2:54
ISRO for short. That launch vehicle has a near
2:59
perfect record. Hopefully this will be a
3:00
continuation of it. And importantly, what I'm
3:03
hopeful of is that this is the start of the next ascent of the
3:07
stock price. And now some of you might be
3:10
panicking and waiting for the pre market to open so you can
3:13
dump all of your shares because you might have thought, Oh my
3:15
God is kook optimistic. And this is where it's very
3:19
important to clarify that there are two wolves inside of me
3:23
right now. 1 is a very depressed wolf that's super sad and full
3:28
of melancholy, and that should make all of you feel better.
3:32
The other wolf is seeing the world for what it is and seeing
3:37
a world that has blown the stock to pieces, which really isn't a
3:41
whole lot to do with the stock itself in as much as it is the
3:46
what, what a smart smart folk would call factor risk.
3:50
And so the factors, as the pod shops would say, would focus on
3:56
non profitable tech, non profitable innovation.
3:59
We'll get to this in a second, but stocks with these
4:01
characteristics were just brutalized in October into
4:05
November when the pricing of Fed rate cuts, which then, you know,
4:12
joined the AI slam of Michael Bury deciding he wanted to be a
4:15
movie star again. All these things collided to
4:18
kill stocks with these characteristics.
4:20
But now it's all flipping. And so I'm sure a lot of you saw
4:23
that Powell is leading toward a rate cut in December.
4:27
Bitcoin is going up. I think a lot of this was
4:30
actually due to Japan imploding. They Japan didn't implode.
4:34
Japan's attempt to unimplode which which in turn causes
4:39
implosion into what Japan did is introduce a bunch of stimulus
4:43
that creates a bunch of borrowing demand.
4:46
Weekend the yen blew out JG BS Japanese government bonds and as
4:52
it turns out the world is just one big carry trade.
4:54
Now. I got actually reprimanded in my
4:56
firm for making a joke saying, you know, hey, it's all just one
5:00
big yen trade and you're like, no, it's not.
5:03
This is all innovation. Don't simplify.
5:05
I'm like, guys, come on that you got to have a little bit of
5:08
street smart in life. And the reality is crypto was
5:11
one, just one big carry trade on the yen for now and that had a
5:15
multiple Sigma event, which that has ramifications.
5:18
And so people got massively liquidated in their crypto
5:20
portfolio and that, you know, has knock on effects for other
5:25
things. But the confirmation of a launch
5:28
date for FM 1 is important to me.
5:32
Was it expected? Yeah, of course.
5:34
We, you know, we're all tracking the Antonov flight to India, so
5:38
we knew it would happen. But there's something special
5:40
about just announcing these things.
5:42
It really is the kick off of the constellation.
5:45
And what we now know, or what we always knew, is that we'll have
5:48
FM One launch. And now we're on the hunt for FM
5:52
2 to ship. But we don't know actually is if
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FM 2 will actually be batched with other satellites.
5:58
We, we really don't know. And so there's some optimism
6:02
that creeps in here. But what we think where the
6:05
company's told us is FM one goes, FM two goes and then we're
6:08
going to start to have these batches and the first launches
6:11
will be with Falcons and these are up on next Space Flight.
6:15
They got to be confirmed and we'll get some more resolution
6:19
in terms of when those rockets are really going to take off.
6:23
But we know it's all kind of happening and what I know I've
6:27
had a lot of experiences in industries that are hard.
6:30
Space is hard, but there's a lot of other hard industries is that
6:33
once you get past like a critical shakedown phase, it's
6:37
easy to confuse the shaking as the end of the world.
6:41
And people tend to have pretty short time horizons.
6:43
I know I do. And it's hard to not a long term
6:46
thinker, but it's very easy to just look out your window and
6:49
see the weather and confuse yourself as someone who lives in
6:52
Seattle. But you don't live in Seattle
6:55
unless you do. A lot of people don't then.
6:58
So when it rains, it's, it's a passing thing.
7:02
And the stock market to me has weather patterns much more akin
7:05
to Iceland than it does Seattle. But people confuse each state
7:09
each time. And so for a person walking
7:11
around Reykjavik, they will, you know, in the stock market's
7:15
parlance, will think they live in Seattle and then flip and
7:18
think they live in San Diego and they extend periods too long
7:25
without an ability to see future state.
7:27
And so the current state the market has seen for, you know,
7:32
to to its credit is some delays and uncertainty on on launch.
7:35
And that was sort of resolved, we thought in early October.
7:39
That's why the stock really gunned and then it started to
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come undone again in line with all this Fed crap.
7:45
And as it as we get this visibility and really show this
7:49
company is going to deliver on the execution.
7:51
That's the big unlock that I believe is going to drive it to
7:54
whatever price it wants to go. I have a lot of respect for
7:59
people who know this for a reformed trader, he he's the TA
8:03
guy that actually took the red pill and started to really think
8:09
about the fundamentals, but still has that lens in sort of
8:13
his. I kind of view him as the forget
8:15
it was the dog whisperer. There used to be the show about
8:17
a guy who could, you know, have this special empathy with dogs
8:20
and almost talk to them. This thing was like Caesar or
8:23
something Reformed traitor to me is like the dog whisperer where
8:27
he has this innate understanding of stocks, but they can zoom out
8:30
and really see what the market is kind of signalling.
8:32
And what he sees is, is a path and God, I hope he's right.
8:37
A path in the early 2026 to the $150.00 range.
8:42
And you know, we can all be skeptical of the Chartists.
8:45
I get it. But Reformed has been incredibly
8:48
accurate. And again, he's developed this
8:51
understanding of the company beyond just simply saying, you
8:53
know, XYZ chart pattern. And I think the path to that can
8:58
also be tracked to the fundamentals.
8:59
And so I personally am really excited.
9:01
Again, this is the second wolf talking.
9:03
The first wolf is still very depressed and upset and full of
9:05
melancholy. Again, I don't want to scare
9:07
people, but the second wolf is saying that FM one boom, then
9:13
we're going to get FM 2 and then we might get surprised with some
9:17
of these bat shipments coming out fast.
9:19
And I think that's what's going to catch the market off guard is
9:21
like they actually got it. And if they confirm what we'd
9:24
look for in sequencing is if in December, you know, call it week
9:30
after next is the starting point.
9:32
If we actually get updated PR that talks about reaching that 6
9:36
satellite per month production cadence, then I think it's game
9:39
on. And I think a lot of this could
9:41
also coincide with Golden Dome. Think about it, an extra DA, it
9:47
would be nice, but I don't know that that causes a crazy RE
9:51
rating of the stock. Verizon was the big one, but I
9:53
don't know if the market is going to be as hung up on the
9:57
incremental Bell Canada deal. STC case in point, despite how
10:02
massive that was, it really, really told me is ASTS can book
10:07
as much guaranteed revenue as they want, but people will just
10:10
want to make sure the satellites are up to realize it and that's
10:13
fair until that's where all eyes for me are on that.
10:18
So what does the company think? There was a interesting 13D that
10:22
came out in on Friday about something that again, Reformed
10:26
Trader actually detected in the market flows of a massive
10:30
options trade that looked like it was a rolling of the collar
10:34
that Abell had put on last year. So for those who forget, Abell
10:39
did what was called a prepaid forward contract, which is
10:42
really just a wealth management tool for someone to defer the
10:46
sale of stock, defer the sale of a stock at a current price and
10:52
get some cash. And so Abell pays himself $0.00
10:55
by the company. So his only source of income is
10:58
through the sale of stock, which he does not want to do as
11:01
evidenced by his behavior. So he did this prepaid forward
11:04
deal which had forget what the bands were, but I think it was a
11:09
$17.00 Florida $46 app. And I believe the stock price
11:14
was around $25 at the time. And so now he could have, you
11:20
know, frankly, he, most people have said he should have just
11:23
LED this structure roll off. And what would have happened is
11:25
he would have to deliver, I believe it was two and a half
11:28
million shares to the, to the dealers that sold him this deal.
11:32
And he would have constructively sold stock at 46 bucks, walked
11:35
away with a lot of money. And frankly, as a percent of his
11:39
real ownership, really not sold anything and, and got enough,
11:43
you know, walking around money to to be happy to buy a boat,
11:46
whatever. He didn't do that.
11:48
He actually went back to the casino and said Nope, doubling
11:51
down and so he rolled his position again.
11:54
Now the ceiling price is 80 bucks effectively and the floor
11:58
is 56. He did it for a credit, which
12:01
means he was able to extract some cash just because the way
12:03
the option prices work. But he effectively deferred the
12:08
sale of stock for another year, which has some tax benefits, but
12:11
importantly he's not going to sell stock now below $80.00.
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So he's bullish. He's doing backflips from what I
12:19
can tell to minimize his own dilution, which is telling it
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it's like you know, I'm I'm a bullish guy on this stock, but
12:29
if a lot of us over I'm have trimmed for one reason or
12:33
another. For me, I trimmed to take care
12:36
of some margin debt and that was at like 20 bucks.
12:38
Now was were those good sales? No, they weren't, but I had to
12:41
do what I had to do. And a bell just can't sell.
12:47
And so he he had the opportunity to to sell when the stock was
12:50
100 and things like that. He didn't.
12:53
And so that's what also goes back to and I don't want to
12:57
distract Kevin Chen. Kevin now Kevin Chen, God, God
12:59
forbid I'm going to pay hell for even saying that.
13:02
What a fraying slip. Kevin Mack, the professor at at
13:06
Stanford, he's a good dude. And I don't want to have anyone
13:10
have a view that anything but friends with this guy.
13:13
But he was just saying, hey, this this stock price at 100
13:16
bucks was an aberration. And just because all these
13:18
crappy companies were rallying and there's some truth to that.
13:22
But that was the price. And there's a lot of people that
13:25
know the stock really well, including myself, who were not
13:30
rushing to rumour position at that price and neither was
13:33
management. And why is that?
13:37
Because there's reasons why that stock can be at that price.
13:39
And so, yeah, the market was hot.
13:41
We got a taste of it. You know, as Corey said, you
13:45
know, instead of securing his financial freedom by selling
13:48
some shares at 100, he instead decided to take a screenshot.
13:51
And I think a lot of us did too. But I really view that as a
13:55
preview of what's to come. And that's interesting way I
13:59
think the market kind of told us like, here's a crumb, here's
14:02
what's, here's what's in store for you.
14:04
And I again, view it as very confirmatory that management
14:08
seems to view it that way too. So let's talk a little bit about
14:12
what happened with the market position.
14:15
So I have this next tweet that says, you know why they got to
14:17
hate? And it just shows this golden
14:19
index. And then there's a little
14:21
snippet from Bloomberg about a Deutsche Bank note.
14:26
And, you know, really just people were puking equities and
14:31
the short squeeze basket had ripped.
14:32
And then people just went and attacked it with a vengeance,
14:35
which is typical when you have a sudden change in Fed rate
14:39
expectations. And so people went from really
14:41
thinking there were going to be December rate cuts to them that
14:43
being off the table for a little bit.
14:45
And, you know, just 25 basis points.
14:48
That might not seem like a lot, but it's like the trip wire that
14:52
can cause a cascading function. And then you have the Japanese
14:55
government bond market go to hell, which is a big rate shock
14:59
across the world. And these things just cascade.
15:02
And then that tries fear because as it's going down, people
15:05
aren't going, oh, I wonder what the correlation is to Japanese
15:08
interest rates. No, people are going.
15:10
Someone must know something, you know, And I never even saw that
15:13
when the Antonov was flying back to the US, people were right
15:16
around going, Oh my God, there must be something wrong with FM
15:19
1. And they, they took a flight and
15:22
flew it back to Midland. And I thought that is the
15:25
bottom. And it actually seems like it
15:27
was. And so now what's interesting is
15:29
these factors are going back in our favor.
15:32
Just as I've been checking in the news today that obviously
15:35
stuff's up overnight, Bitcoins rallying, the Fed is saying that
15:39
they are going to cut. And now all these programmatic
15:45
investors, pension funds, things like that, they are underweight
15:50
equities for the first time in months.
15:52
And we've had this happen before.
15:53
And so when I was treating the COVID debacle in February, you
15:59
had the blow off bottom. And then what happened is you
16:02
had this reversal and flows in March when all of a sudden the
16:06
Ctas and all the pension funds just had the pile on equities
16:09
because they got underweight. And that type of buying
16:12
basically gave other people this sort of put where they went, OK,
16:15
finally I can be rational again and get back to business because
16:18
all these flows are at my back. And you know, then you have fed
16:22
rate cuts, which is a liquidity boost, you have the government
16:24
reopening. So money will be flowing again.
16:27
There's a lot of positive things that are set to happen to the
16:30
market in the next month for sure.
16:33
And I hope that's hope that's right for my sake.
16:37
And then when looking at the patterns of Asts we've posted,
16:41
you know, we a couple guys in a I've posted these patterns where
16:44
we'll have these run UPS into launch and then these brutal
16:48
declines of 40 to 50%. But what I found so interesting,
16:51
just going back to study what I already kind of knew is just how
16:55
violent these increases are. And so some of the TA guys, you
17:01
know, again, reformed trader and pointed out to me in the past
17:04
that Asts would have this weird sort of serial correlation where
17:08
it would have like 11 green candles in a row and just crazy.
17:11
And we've experienced this like in June of 2025, which we'd
17:15
called the Endless Rally. And it would just, obviously
17:19
these are amazing periods of time for us because every day
17:21
you make some money. But that's what happens here is
17:24
this thing just shifts into gear and it goes.
17:27
And my personal plan was, I don't know if I'll ever have the
17:32
discipline to do it. But once you have news like we
17:34
just had on Friday, which which fits the, the pattern of
17:39
certainty of execution, that's what we're really looking for
17:41
with this company. Once we have a certainty of
17:43
execution press release, even if the stock gaps up, which it
17:48
didn't on Friday, but it tried what what I had been thinking is
17:53
these are really the rallies you want to buy up 10% because then
17:57
the serial correlation is, is pretty crazy.
17:59
And I know in October I didn't really have that mental model to
18:05
find well for myself. And so when the stock was
18:08
ripping in the 50s, I, I had no appreciation that the typical
18:13
pattern would suggest follow through up into the 70s, if not
18:16
to 100, which is what happened. And I want to be sensitive that
18:19
that could happen now. And what does that mean for
18:24
people? You know, I don't give financial
18:25
advice, but what it means for me is, for one, be super careful
18:29
selling covered calls because the way in which the stock can
18:33
run up usually surprises to the upside.
18:38
And so that's the first thing to be super careful of shorting it
18:41
obviously danger and you know, potentially I bought a little
18:45
bit of some call exposure additional on Thursday once the
18:51
stock that was up for the second day in a row.
18:53
I thought, OK, been here done that.
18:56
And so anyway, just telling people what I've been doing and
18:59
it's this pattern of serial correlation, which is pretty
19:02
interesting to go back and and study.
19:05
It's easy to lose it in the emotional whip saw we go through
19:08
going back to Icelandic weather, you know, when the stock is
19:12
crappy. I think I live in Seattle and
19:15
I'm just like, can't even look at it.
19:17
I always delete an pin man's number and start throwing darts
19:21
at pictures of King Tut. And what I should be doing is
19:24
just waiting for that chart to bottom, have a couple updates
19:26
and realize that then we're going to have like 20 updates in
19:28
a row because the weather will change.
19:30
And then before you know it, you think you live in Honolulu or
19:34
something. So then back to fundamentals.
19:39
There's some good research out on the Tam.
19:41
So I have that blanked out and it just shows that the DTC
19:46
demand model suggests, you know these guys think $37 billion
19:49
market by 20-30, who knows that's finger in the air stuff.
19:54
But the key point is it's a really big market and that
19:57
ultimately will drive the multiple.
20:00
So when you have a winner take most market and that market is
20:03
big and growing, that's where stocks get to be worth hundreds
20:07
and hundreds of billions of dollars and.
20:10
You can see that, you know, this is a point we've talked about
20:13
quite a lot on the next tweet is really what the Tam is.
20:17
And so, you know, the elevator pitch, the five seconds of DD is
20:21
that ASTS is for dead spots and there are a lot of those.
20:25
But over the past years, we've come to realize you'll never
20:29
mind government, military, IoT, things like that.
20:32
We call it the Scotiabank thesis back when we used to like
20:35
Scotiabank, but now we can call it the we stole Scotiabank's
20:38
thesis and they're temporarily dead to me until they upgrade
20:41
the stock thesis. And that relates to the
20:44
displacement of terrestrial towers.
20:47
So where do we see yet more proof of this?
20:50
On a weekly basis, we have the ASTSFCC docket until in one of
20:56
the filings against them, the RWA, which is the Rural Rural
21:02
Wireless Association quote, finds the manner in which the
21:06
applicant seek to provide SES service will disproportionately
21:09
harm rural wireless carriers and their customers by causing
21:13
harmful interference. OK, that's that's BS, but then
21:16
the truth comes out. RWA is concerned that if these
21:19
waiver requests are granted, national wireless carriers will
21:23
cease allowing their respective customers to roam on rural
21:27
carrier networks once SES is established and will default to
21:32
SES service rather than terrestrial based services that
21:35
are readily available through roaming arrangements.
21:38
Wow, they could not have given us our own bull case served in a
21:46
more credible bacteria free silver platter than what they
21:51
wrote in the SEC docket. And that's what's always amazing
21:56
to me. You know, you're, you're parsing
21:59
through all the fun and things like that.
22:01
Then you see something written by your adversary where they
22:04
wave a white flag and say you cannot approve Asts because they
22:09
will put us out of business. That doesn't sound like the
22:14
service doesn't work. Sounds like it works a little
22:18
bit better than anticipated. And so then zooming out, of
22:21
course AT&T and Verizon don't want to pay roaming fees to all
22:24
these jokers. You know, it's kind of like
22:27
small town cop being able to issue a ticket to the city
22:30
slicker with New York plates. Now we all got fed plates with
22:35
diplomatic immunity. That's kind of what's happening
22:38
here. And so do I know the net impact
22:41
of how, how significant these roaming arrangements are?
22:45
I do not, but I think they're probably a lot bigger than I
22:47
anticipated. And it really speaks to how ASTS
22:51
is, is going to take market share from terrestrial service.
22:56
And that fact alone likely multiplies the Tam.
23:01
The let's let's say that our dead spot Tam is really the
23:04
starting point for what we believe the market to be.
23:07
This in ingress on the terrestrial market, my belief
23:14
multiplies our Tam many fold, if not base 10.
23:18
And that's the type of dramatic change of perception.
23:20
They could cause a stock to go to Infinity, kind of like
23:24
NVIDIA. Oh, the markets just gave me,
23:26
oh, the markets just Bitcoin ASICS or you know, not even
23:31
Bitcoin taking ASICS, it's crypto.
23:33
And then it's like, oh, actually our chips power replacement of
23:37
mankind, boom, $5 trillion market cap.
23:40
And so I think that as the technology evolves, software
23:45
defined allows it to evolve more quickly.
23:49
And we're going to see that ASTS takes a lot of share from
23:52
terrestrial and that's bad news for the tower guys.
23:55
That's going to change their growth curves, but it's really
23:57
good news for us. And so other things that came
24:01
out, you know, again, these dockets are great.
24:03
You have AT&T complaining about how they can't provide 911
24:12
service with their Starlink thing because it's a crappy
24:15
system that wasn't built for purpose.
24:19
And AST Space Mobile by contrast has successfully demonstrated VO
24:26
voice over Lt. calls with various partners.
24:29
So that's what happens when you design something from a first
24:33
principles basis versus adapt something and try to Gerry rig
24:38
it. And that's the difference
24:39
between ASTS and Starlink, which is going to continue to matter
24:43
more and more as people understand it.
24:46
And so let's talk a little bit more about the Tam and different
24:51
ways to think about it. Catsy was reading of of course,
24:56
Catsy doesn't sit down and go, you know, read Ulysses or
24:59
anything like that. He sits down and reads FCC
25:02
documents about C band spectrum auctions.
25:06
God bless his heart. And so in a thread he wrote, I
25:09
was trying to figure out, OK, so now why do I have to care about
25:12
this document? You know, there must be some
25:13
Nuggets in there. And what is interesting is 1
25:18
Kathy take away is, you know, as the spectrum is brought to
25:21
market, which is great for the overall market, it adds
25:24
capacity. It's it's really important for
25:26
America. But one thing that is never been
25:30
lost on me like Legato, for example, is if you get the
25:33
spectrum approval, if you're a normal guy, then how do you fund
25:37
the build out? And where we saw this very in a
25:40
very pronounced way was with dish and Echo Star where Charlie
25:44
Ergen just he bought the spectrum, but he he couldn't
25:48
build it out. It was just too expensive.
25:50
Nevermind. Then you got to go get customers
25:51
for it. And so a full build out of this
25:54
new spectrum that's going to be released by the FCC would
25:57
require on cats these numbers 20 to 40,000 tower sites, which
26:01
would cost between 25 and 40 billion dollars of cap X with op
26:06
X alone of 1 to $2 billion. By contrast, you can light that
26:10
spectrum up with an AST block of satellites, which will cost
26:15
about a billion dollars and immediately cover the entire US
26:19
that have for the most part avoided op X and things like
26:22
that and get it and get it in service faster.
26:27
And So what what I sort of think about the stepwise jump in
26:31
innovation. To me, the world that other
26:34
people are living in is a guy with a spade and a donkey trying
26:39
to plow the Great Plains. And we invented the combine.
26:49
We are the International Harvester of Spectrum with an
26:52
automated way to make grass and wheat and everything else grow.
26:58
And other people are in this very manual process that's
27:01
unbelievably capital intensive. And that's what I really think
27:05
is when you zoom out, sort of incredible changes in
27:09
technology, like the automated loom, for example, which Buffett
27:12
wrote about the advent of the car or the airplane,
27:17
Guggenheim's press, just things that took a stepwise change in
27:22
terms of how you approach a problem.
27:25
That's what I think we might come to be viewed as because
27:30
what most people don't realize when you pull your cell phone
27:32
out, it's just a radio talking to a tower.
27:36
And I, I just don't think most people really understand the
27:39
back end infrastructure that's required.
27:41
Maybe subconsciously they do because they're aware of these
27:43
towers that are ugly and they don't want them in the
27:45
neighborhood. But I really don't think people
27:47
truly understand the cost in the back end.
27:49
And that's where my thesis the whole time had really relied on
27:54
the M and OS viewing ASTS as their AWS.
27:58
And so in a world that was effectively on Prem just to jump
28:02
to another analogue, all of a sudden the cloud exists and you
28:05
go, Oh yeah, why do I need to manage my own capacity, have all
28:10
my own facilities, deal with disk, blah, blah, blah.
28:13
Why don't I put it in the cloud And someone else is having this
28:15
massive economy of scale to manage all this capacity.
28:18
So I want to use what I need. I don't have to deal with all
28:20
the OpEx, things like that. And that's what I think it is.
28:24
And so that's my both thesis on these M and OS for example is in
28:28
the extreme AT&T, Verizon, the Vodafone's of the world can
28:31
shift so much of their cap X to this much more capital efficient
28:34
model and focus on what is truly valuable and scarce for them,
28:38
which is spectrum and the ownership of the customer.
28:42
Those are the two things in my view that really matter.
28:45
The other stuff is commoditized balance sheet risk which we want
28:50
to get rid of. So anyway, Catsy's tweet gives
28:54
some really good numbers contextualize again the enormity
28:58
of what we used to call the Scotiabank thesis around CapEx
29:02
avoidance and think you're going to hear more about this later.
29:08
So the other thing that's super duper, duper cool about Asts is
29:13
again to quote the great Catsy spectrum will find its way to
29:20
the most efficient system or something like that.
29:22
This quote is going to go down with some of the great Marcus
29:26
Aurelius quotes. I think when history reflects on
29:29
this, because spectrum is the most valuable finite resource
29:35
that I'm aware of. It powers our current society,
29:39
and finding ways to use it more efficiently is very important.
29:44
And as we're finding, it's crucial to national security,
29:46
for one, what also powers the economy.
29:49
Just imagine your life without RF signals.
29:54
No Wi-Fi, no cell phone, no radio, no GPS.
29:59
I'm sure I'm missing 500 other things that relate to RF
30:03
signals. It's a very important thing.
30:06
And so to get these rights is also valuable as evidenced by
30:10
Starlink paying $23 billion for 50 megahertz of US capacity.
30:15
AT&T recently printing a massive number for spectrum, Verizon,
30:20
same thing they meanwhile, we have Asts getting somewhat the
30:23
same amount of spectrum for peanuts.
30:27
And why is that spectrum that previously was unusable by other
30:31
people for lack of technology can only have one buyer, the
30:36
person who has the technology and ASTS has it.
30:41
And so what's really interesting is the extension of this thesis
30:46
where our pursuit of low cost spectrum does not end with
30:51
legato. So Doctor Mike has been
30:54
following the case pretty carefully.
30:56
And there's a tweet that I retweeted about Echostar and
31:02
some of these European Union 2 gigahertz of MSS reallocation
31:07
proceedings. And so all these incumbents are
31:09
going to lose their spectrum from that.
31:10
I understand it's getting re licensed and this is terrible
31:14
for them because it's, it's really like a litmus test of
31:17
like, So what did you do last summer?
31:20
You know, have you been pretty actually really is Elon Musk
31:23
saying, you know, tell me what you did last week and all these
31:25
companies are going to be like about that.
31:29
And you know, you saw the the video that STS put out today
31:34
showing some of these CE OS literally praying with tinted
31:37
hands and like all these behavioral cues of distress and
31:44
looking to calm themselves because they're horrified about
31:46
their future. But Echostar said that they only
31:50
need 5 megahertz to maintain their current service offering.
31:54
But they've had 15 by 15 megahertz channels for 15 years
31:59
and they've only used 1/3 of it. So what does this mean?
32:04
This means it my understanding and I'll have the experts in the
32:07
space mob correct me. But as these reallocations
32:10
occur, if someone is coming there saying we will use it,
32:14
they they're going to get it. And I am not aware that these
32:18
necessarily go up for auction in the same way the US does it.
32:22
And so there's a very good chance the SAT Co, which is the
32:25
joint venture between ASTS and Vodafone is actually going to be
32:29
the recipient of spectrum potentially not for free, but
32:35
with a service commitment to use it.
32:38
And this aggregation of spectrum on a global scale is again, what
32:45
I, and I don't mean to say this sensational at all, but this
32:48
vertically integration, not a satellite production itself,
32:51
which which is important, but this shift in what we understand
32:55
their strategy to be to actually grab all the spectrum itself.
32:59
This is a complete boomerang of value or boomerang's wrong word.
33:06
What I really thought is like as something goes around the Earth
33:09
and the slingshot pattern to get to the moon where you just get
33:13
more and more velocity to then really escape Earth.
33:18
That's what I see happening here of, you know, a company where I
33:21
originally thought we had 100 to $200 billion company opportunity
33:25
as they've come to understand how this company could aggregate
33:29
a massive holding of spectrum around the world.
33:33
Hence my joke that wasn't a joke of ASDS is the first spectrum
33:38
treasury holding company. That's when I started to realize
33:41
they might have a path to a trillion dollars of value.
33:45
And whether they hit that or not, there could be a believable
33:49
upside case to that, which is really what matters.
33:52
And so we're getting more and more details of that.
33:54
It's something I'm following very closely.
33:56
Really keen to see other people post on this topic and educate
33:59
us all. Obviously, if I see it and it's
34:01
interesting, I will put it in the weekly.
34:03
So keep, keep doing that. And to this point, again in the
34:07
FCC filings, we have SpaceX complaining, complaining,
34:12
complaining. And so now and so he's useful.
34:15
I don't thought I quoted this, but I think it's down later.
34:19
But you have the the now famous Catsy annotations.
34:23
If he takes the file in that just writes on top of it.
34:25
What they're really saying between the between the text and
34:29
here, what you have is SpaceX crying because they were
34:33
seemingly totally outmaneuvered in in Europe.
34:36
And so now that SpaceX is vocally clamoring ASTS is a EU
34:42
sovereign network, you can't possibly approve them.
34:46
Now these these foreigners, never mind that SpaceX is only
34:51
customer is a German owned telecom in the US, but they
34:56
start to attack ASTS over this new Sacco structure where
35:00
Vodafone has made it fully EU compliant and offering European
35:05
digital sovereignty. Now, do I think the FCC is going
35:07
to have, you know, an adversarial position to this?
35:12
Absolutely not. If anything, they're going to
35:14
respect it. They're going to understand it's
35:16
crucial to give data sovereignty in the areas where you're
35:20
operating. And the, I would think that ASTS
35:24
is going to have a very clear ability to operate in Europe and
35:29
comply with the wishes of Europe.
35:32
And I don't know how the FCC is going to get in the way of that.
35:35
But what it really shows is the ASTS seemingly just totally
35:38
outflank space, SpaceX and the EU.
35:41
And I think it started with technology.
35:44
SpaceX system spams CATS has done incredible work showing
35:47
what the beamforming differences are.
35:49
And I picked up when I was meeting with, I forgot where he
35:53
was an engineer at, but I've been at Radium and he was just
35:56
telling me this issue of this 100 kilometers and the borders.
35:58
And he just said, yeah, like SpaceX, you know, can basically
36:01
operate in the US because 100 kilometers from the Mexican and
36:07
Canadian border, you know, sucks for people in Buffalo, but
36:12
that's kind of it. In Europe, when you have these
36:15
100 kilometer buffer zones, you actually delete service in a
36:19
massive part of Europe. You you render your service
36:22
functionally inoperable. And so SpaceX was never really
36:27
well equipped to serve Europe. Nevermind.
36:30
Then innovate contractually to create what we all believe to be
36:36
what will come to be known as the Iris Squared constellation,
36:40
which was the state initiative to take OnStar Lake in Europe,
36:45
was effectively doomed at inception by the way they were
36:49
going to do it, leaving Europe holding the bag with no
36:53
substitute. Enter Vodafone with a perfect
36:56
solution to offer. And now we're starting to see
36:59
other competitors realize the masterstroke that ASTS seemingly
37:03
pulled off and try to, you know, bicker about it.
37:09
With great technology and success should come money.
37:14
We have Ted Cruz talking more about the BEAD program.
37:17
So BEAD is the Broadband Equity and Access Directive, can't
37:22
remember exactly what it stands for.
37:24
Massive, I think it was like $42 billion program.
37:28
And here we still have all this money and there's been a real
37:32
focus on getting it actually spent efficiently.
37:35
And Ted Cruz is out talking about it.
37:37
Put that link out there. Ted Cruz has visited the AST
37:41
space mobile facility. I certainly get pointers from
37:44
people who seem to know what they're doing to keep focused on
37:48
BEAD, which I take as a hint this might be applicable to us.
37:51
So we're seeing a little bit of news in that front next.
37:57
We have expectations of a Bell DA coming.
38:02
And so we have some FCC extensions that cats see very
38:05
politely pointed out to us. And we we know they've had
38:09
successful testing. We have Bell Canada talking
38:13
about their earnings releases. And so seems like it's time to
38:16
ring the bell. I think we'll have a nice Dai
38:19
don't know if it's going to have the same type of prepayments
38:21
that STC has because they're already an investor.
38:24
And I also don't know how much the market will care about it to
38:26
nice to have. But again, I think that showing
38:30
this the cadence of really FM 2 through FM 10 is what's going to
38:36
really drive the the stock price.
38:40
But having more DA's pile up certainly is not bad.
38:45
Then we have UK testing, we have an STA for Mexican testing, we
38:51
have Ireland. You can see this company is busy
38:55
and they are pumping with the FCC, which brings us to a
38:58
obvious side note. We could have SCSCS approval for
39:03
the front haul, which is where the final FCC approval that I
39:08
think would solidify the regulatory permissiveness of the
39:12
company. That could happen I think at any
39:15
time and hopefully before your end.
39:17
And that would be a pretty big deal, certainly discounted in
39:20
the price because ASTS is being valued as a company that will
39:23
exist and a failure to get FCC approval would certainly not be
39:28
good. And so I think the market has
39:32
come to realize this company has manifest destiny at this point.
39:36
But it will still be nice to get these FCC approvals.
39:38
Could you know, be, you know, yet another thing that gets long
39:42
only is to realize that this is where the boat is going.
39:45
And then we also had to use a really kind of a surprising
39:51
update and updates on Blue Origin.
39:55
So Blue Origin announced a product road map.
39:59
To my surprise, they are doing these massive upgrades and going
40:04
to have this, what they call the 9 by 4, which is a meaningfully
40:09
bigger new Glen Rocket than we knew of.
40:14
And the fact that they were already able to land the booster
40:17
on the second try is just astonishing.
40:21
And the size of this next rocket starts to look a lot like
40:25
Starship. The difference is that Starship
40:28
does not work and New Glen does. And so good thing we have a
40:35
diverse set of launch and have Falcons and things like that.
40:39
But what's interesting as we dig a little bit deeper, we have at
40:43
at Alex from Babylon kind of doing a little bit more analysis
40:48
on this new configuration for New Glen.
40:52
And this is interesting you just really highlights that really
40:57
very, very few large customers actually require this type of
41:02
capacity. And so then why build it?
41:06
And so first point is that Jeff Bezos wants to have the biggest
41:12
rocket, too. So yeah, it could just be a
41:14
rocket measuring contest between Elon and Jeff.
41:17
Makes sense. But you got to actually have
41:18
something to do. And so for interplanetary
41:21
missions, it's useful. But then interestingly enough,
41:26
Newland points out that this rocket is designed for three
41:29
customers, for Amazon, for their Leo initiative, Kiper, for NASA,
41:35
whether it's your interplanetary stuff and then for this little
41:39
company called AST Space Mobile. And so what's cool about this
41:43
because it basically means the AST Space Mobile got what we're
41:47
going to call a semi private configuration purpose built for
41:53
its own needs. And then we start to realize
41:56
that this is able to potentially help us launch a lot more
41:59
satellites than we had previously thought.
42:03
And Katzie pointed out that the fairing in the new new Glen, I
42:10
guess we call it Newer Glen, is basically exactly the dimensions
42:15
required to fit Block 2 satellites side by side.
42:20
Probably not a coincidence. The other thing, which is neat
42:24
is something we'll get to in a second because I did not space
42:32
my tweets in logical order, but I did list all the other clients
42:37
that New Glen has for us, the vehicle, just so we could turn
42:39
to see who who's going to be using it and therefore who
42:44
really it was meant to benefit. New Glen 2, by the way, was
42:51
returned to the refurbishment center.
42:54
Rocket looks in good shape. I can't even imagine how hard it
42:56
is to refurbish a booster and then, you know, study a contrast
43:02
and actually, you know what? Maybe I missed a tweet.
43:04
Oh, no, I didn't, sorry. So after talking about this
43:09
Duglen update, the key take away is Blue Origin in the press
43:14
release. Let me go to it as this really
43:17
cool thing of both our 9 by 4 and our current variant, the
43:21
seven by two, which again refers to the number of engines on the
43:25
booster. And then the second stage, we'll
43:29
serve the market concurrently, giving customers more launch
43:31
options for their missions. And this is where it gets
43:34
important, including mega constellations, lunar and deep
43:38
space exploration and national security imperatives such as
43:42
Golden Dome. And so a lot of us go what you
43:48
know, then we, we just start to think, well, this is this rocket
43:53
is designed for Golden Dome support.
43:56
And then the three customers they list for this rocket
44:01
include AST Space Mobile. And we start to just wonder,
44:07
congratulations on what? And that would be exciting.
44:10
And I know I am the worst offender in terms of people who
44:15
are prematurely excited about the possibility of Golden Dome.
44:18
I really hope we win it. This is something that if we
44:21
don't, life goes on if we get it.
44:24
I think that's the type of propellant for the stock price
44:27
because of the validation that it would provide.
44:30
That coupled with some operational updates that are
44:33
favorable could really do unbelievable things to where the
44:37
stock is going. But more importantly to where
44:39
the stock will not be going, which will be down for
44:43
meaningful periods of time because it will at that point be
44:46
a too big to fail company. And Speaking of things that are
44:51
too big and fail, we had some updates on Starship.
44:55
And so again, if I'm being totally honest, Starship is
45:00
something we want to work, but like Saint Augustine has said,
45:06
not yet. And so this rocket is very big.
45:13
This rocket facilitates Starlink doing lots of things faster.
45:19
Now, they would still have all sorts of problems in my view, on
45:22
really competing with AST space mobile because of the MNO
45:24
relationships and things like that.
45:27
But you know, would you put your head in the mouth of a Tiger
45:30
even if you were really sure that the Tiger had lockjaw?
45:34
I would not. Why risk it?
45:37
And so I don't really want to see what happens when SpaceX can
45:40
launch trillion satellites at the same time.
45:43
So therefore having Spaceship delayed a little bit, while I'm
45:46
never really rooting against someone when you're calling
45:49
balls and strikes, having Starship delayed is good for ASD
45:54
space mobile. And we're looking at these
45:56
pictures over the weekend of of booster 18 blowing out like
46:01
someone tried to shotgun it. And so that's not good.
46:05
They can't land it. It's all over the place.
46:08
I don't think they've made true orbit yet.
46:10
And now you have these things blowing out like crazy.
46:14
Something is wrong. I'm not a rocket engineer, but
46:19
you can see some of the videos too.
46:20
They got they got this on the got it on the Ring camera, I
46:24
think. And this is not good.
46:28
So we have to ask ourselves, does Starship have a bigger
46:33
problem? If so, what does that mean for
46:36
SpaceX, especially as all these SpaceX investors, you know, are
46:40
a determined bunch? I'll say this.
46:43
They keep paying higher and higher prices, but there's got
46:47
to be a point where someone wakes up and goes, wait, hold
46:49
on. So New Glenn just launched a
46:53
Starship effectively competitor. We have all this other launch
46:58
capacity coming. And then Starlink is going to be
47:02
attacked on all ends from Kuiper for the fixed terrestrial.
47:07
And then we're going to have ASTS walk in with the DTC
47:10
opportunity. Someone at some point has to
47:14
acknowledge the reality that there is competitive pressures
47:16
building on SpaceX. This company cannot be perceived
47:19
to truly already live on a different planet.
47:23
Maybe I'm wrong, but the ramifications of that are
47:27
important because these companies, you know, someone
47:31
that says private markets for a living, this this stuff just
47:34
doesn't go well when you start doing down rounds.
47:37
That's just it's a total mess with how liquidation preferences
47:43
work and things like that. And I don't know SpaceX is
47:46
capital structure, but I just, I just do know these these are not
47:48
good things. And there has to be a point
47:51
where someone decides like, hey, maybe I'm not going to mark up
47:54
SpaceX to $1 trillion when I can synthetically kind of recreate
47:59
it for 50 to 60 billion by buying a batch of other
48:04
securities. So just something to think about
48:08
as reality seems to be setting in there.
48:12
And then meanwhile, we have SpaceX attacking us in our
48:15
docket. That's the next thing on the
48:16
weekly. And Catsy ripped into shreds as
48:20
usual through this thing called truthful analysis, which is a
48:26
crazy thing that expert consultants never thought to do.
48:29
But it's pretty fun to watch Catsy RIP these filings apart.
48:33
And to me, it just begs desperation.
48:35
And then you had T-Mobile do the same thing.
48:38
Should Catsy RIP them to shreds too?
48:40
But they just kind of try to stall us through law.
48:43
Fair. It won't work.
48:45
We'll get our approvals, I'm very certain of.
48:47
And if anything, it shows us that our approvals might
48:51
actually be forthcoming quickly. So a lot of interesting stuff
48:54
this week. Maybe maybe there will be no
48:58
news during the week of Thanksgiving.
49:00
But I'm thinking that we're going to have some exciting
49:03
developments if not formally announced by the company, but
49:07
through some research from the space mob because we're all on
49:09
the hunt for any signs of what the satellite production is or
49:13
any early signs that any of these things are being shipped.
49:16
So I know I'm going to be monitoring the situation very
49:20
carefully and thanks everyone for joining me.
49:23
Sorry it was so late. I'm on vacation and the time
49:27
zone certainly is pretty brutal for people on the East Coast.
49:29
So thanks for those who are able to join in.
49:32
Appreciate it. It's nice to connect to people
49:34
and I also want to make sure we keep every superstition possible
49:38
alive so that the stock will be strong and go up.
49:42
I'll talk to everyone soon. Have a great night.
49:44
Bye. Listening to the AST Space
49:48
Mobile podcast? If you enjoyed this episode and
49:51
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50:00
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50:03
Thanks again and I'll see you next time.
50:09
Or doing something very, very big.
50:11
And I think with this technology we can really affect billion
50:14
lives. AFT Space Mobile is the only
50:16
company that has proven technology to deliver cellular
50:20
broadband connectivity directly from space to the everyday
50:24
smartphone. People will just basically turn
50:26
their phone and be seamless, regardless of where you are.
50:30
We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by
50:32
satellite. Our role is to bring this into
50:36
reality, always in partnership with the MMO.