Latest / AST SpaceMobile Podcast / Kook's Weekly - May 11 - The ASIC Alpha and the Falcon 9 Frontier

Transcript

Kook's Weekly - May 11 - The ASIC Alpha and the Falcon 9 Frontier · AST SpaceMobile Podcast

• 0:07
  This is the AST Space Mobile podcast.
• 0:11
  Where we just basically come your phone be seamless
• 0:14
  regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to
• 0:17
  know that it's connected by satellite, satellite.
• 0:22
  Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large
• 0:25
  for our. Weekly, a meeting and a lot of
• 0:31
  suspense. You know, it's always a question
• 0:32
  of whether to do this in advance of an earnings call because most
• 0:36
  of our questions and speculations will be quickly
• 0:40
  answered. But, you know, the
• 0:43
  superstitions. And so I'd like to just address
• 0:46
  one thing upfront is just because there's a chance there's
• 0:49
  a lot of new people because of this whole article that came out
• 0:53
  on Friday. And it's really important people
• 0:58
  understand what Space Mob is about.
• 1:00
  First and foremost. There's no leader of space Mob.
• 1:02
  I don't know why they said that Kook is the leader of space Mob.
• 1:07
  I think they just kind of glom onto whoever the most insane
• 1:10
  person is and think that that's probably the the guided target,
• 1:15
  but it's really not. And so space Mob was just really
• 1:17
  the name of a chat group we started because a lot of us had
• 1:20
  a common interest in this stock. And then over the past five
• 1:24
  years, there's been an ebb and flow of who's really involved.
• 1:28
  It really pains a lot of us to know there's people who had been
• 1:32
  really involved in the stock that for one reason or another
• 1:36
  sold and moved on. We really valued their
• 1:38
  contributions. And so, you know, I know for me,
• 1:40
  it really started with actually this this guy named Spack Tory,
• 1:45
  who was in the I believe he was in the US Army as a signal
• 1:49
  intelligence officer. And as you could imagine, this
• 1:53
  person had a lot of technical insight into really is sort of a
• 1:59
  cat seat type character, a person whose life involved
• 2:03
  signal intelligence, really understood RF engineering.
• 2:06
  And these are the type of people that I know Anne Pan and I
• 2:11
  really glommed onto. And so we as generalists know
• 2:15
  what we don't know, which is really everything.
• 2:17
  But we're really good at figuring out analogs and
• 2:19
  understanding what the market's going to think in the
• 2:21
  development of business models. But we need to color that with
• 2:25
  the subject matter expertise and understanding.
• 2:29
  ASTS pulls in so many different disciplines.
• 2:32
  And So what I remember most vividly is the pairing between
• 2:38
  Katzie, who has very good mechanical understanding, and
• 2:42
  then Steve Larrison, who's a software engineer.
• 2:45
  And you know, another thing I think that NPN man and I did and
• 2:49
  do very well is we get people excited, I guess, you know, we
• 2:54
  like to keep, we help keep the conversation going.
• 2:57
  And then what he and I are pretty good at doing is making
• 3:00
  sure we're in the room to take really good notes.
• 3:03
  And so while Katzie and Steve Larison would be chatting
• 3:05
  endlessly again, the mechanical engineer figuring out the
• 3:09
  unfurling mechanism and then the software AI engineer, Steve
• 3:13
  Larison was really ahead of his time in terms of understanding
• 3:15
  AI. Having these two guys really
• 3:19
  discuss at length what is fundamentally a software defined
• 3:23
  solution that's brought about because of a mechanical solution
• 3:26
  on how you get these, you know, these big arrays into space.
• 3:31
  That's what allowed us to put so many of these things together.
• 3:34
  And then you'd have people like no privacy anymore, which is
• 3:37
  kind of a pun on the original ASTS ticker, which was NPA.
• 3:41
  He really went to town on the regulatory things and Firstnet.
• 3:45
  And when you have this collection of subject, subject
• 3:48
  matter experts that are very narrow in some respects on
• 3:52
  certain elements, but when you combine it all together, you
• 3:56
  start to get this powerful mosaic that very few people
• 3:59
  certainly on Wall Street have the ability to themselves know
• 4:02
  all of this. And in my career on Wall Street,
• 4:04
  you never really had access to this broad sort of Skynet type
• 4:10
  knowledge base. And I see Skynet, it's like
• 4:12
  we're global, there's people all around the world that are
• 4:16
  contributing to the space mob research.
• 4:19
  And that's really unique. And I kind of look back and I
• 4:23
  just think was this type of network existing when I was
• 4:28
  properly in the hedge fund world?
• 4:29
  You know, I, I always have been, you know, really trying to be
• 4:33
  the axe on whatever I'm involved in.
• 4:35
  And they actually means like the guy you call.
• 4:37
  And so whatever I was focused on, I'd always want to make sure
• 4:41
  that everyone knew to call me. I wasn't the kook, but I was
• 4:46
  always kooky. And that's really powerful is to
• 4:51
  be the collector of information. And so Space Mob is really a
• 4:55
  collection of of a ton of people who are all contributing.
• 4:59
  There's no membership per SE into space mob.
• 5:01
  It's really do you post interesting research and, you
• 5:04
  know, effectively become a little bit fanatical about the
• 5:07
  conclusions you're making, which means, you know, people get
• 5:09
  really excited about their ASTS investment.
• 5:12
  That's that's space mob and it's really cool.
• 5:15
  You can come and go as you please and, and many do, but
• 5:20
  that's what we're all about. And it's exciting to see that
• 5:22
  this is recognized by Bloomberg. They certainly took a little bit
• 5:25
  of a meme angle to it, but I understand that we shit post all
• 5:29
  day and that, you know, from the outside certainly is what it
• 5:32
  looks like. And I think they didn't do us
• 5:35
  any injustice by referring to it like that because they did go
• 5:38
  and say, look, these guys are doing crazy research.
• 5:41
  You know, they're they are doing next level work that hedge funds
• 5:46
  really can't replicate. We know what the hedge funds are
• 5:49
  doing. I was literally just sitting
• 5:50
  here reading more of these expert calls.
• 5:52
  That's what they're doing. I can't say some of the things
• 5:55
  we've done because quite literally our sources and uses
• 5:58
  go to the logical extremes of what you know, especially like 4
• 6:02
  knuckleheads were willing to do when our stock was $2.00.
• 6:05
  And to say that we went to extremes is an understatement of
• 6:09
  trying to make sure we could answer a couple basic questions.
• 6:13
  And those initial questions were does the goddamn thing work?
• 6:18
  And by proxy, there's lots of ways you can figure out if this
• 6:21
  satellite works. And we did and we were very
• 6:25
  comfortable, in fact, that that is what was happening.
• 6:29
  And what we always predicted was that the conversation would
• 6:33
  shift. So initially it was, of course,
• 6:36
  will it work, will it work? And experts were saying it will
• 6:39
  not work. There were short reports, people
• 6:41
  like Tim Farrar who would come up with 100 reasons why it
• 6:44
  wouldn't work. Well, now it's been pretty
• 6:45
  evidently works. Then there is the regulatory
• 6:48
  battle. They'll there are no rules to
• 6:50
  accommodate this, which was true.
• 6:52
  We pressed on anyway because the question around rules is a man
• 6:56
  made question. The question of will it will
• 6:59
  work is a physics question. That's a Dodd question.
• 7:02
  Will it work based on the known properties of the universe that
• 7:06
  we believe apply to our world? And we got comfortable that
• 7:13
  yeah, you could close what's called the link budget, which is
• 7:15
  basically can you produce a signal strong enough to connect
• 7:18
  to an unmodified phone. That's a natural problem that
• 7:22
  either was possible or it was not possible and we concluded it
• 7:25
  was possible and the company proved it was.
• 7:28
  Having the FCC allow you to use terrestrial spectrum from space,
• 7:33
  that's a man made problem that just requires the FCC saying you
• 7:36
  can do it. There were no rules for this
• 7:39
  because it had never been done. Why would you have rules for
• 7:41
  this? Why would you have rules for
• 7:44
  Uber? Before Uber?
• 7:46
  There were no rules. Why would you have had an FAA
• 7:50
  before the Wright brothers figured out you could have
• 7:53
  powered flight? Guess what?
• 7:56
  They created rules. And the same thing happened
• 7:58
  here. A bell proved you could do what
• 8:01
  everyone thought was impossible, and then they wrote rules to
• 8:04
  govern it. And the rules, when you were the
• 8:07
  first person to do it, with the support of AT&T, Verizon, and
• 8:12
  Firstnet, turn out to accommodate exactly what you're
• 8:15
  doing because you built the thing to comply with all the
• 8:19
  things that other stakeholders would care about.
• 8:21
  Which really relates to interference.
• 8:26
  Do you muck up the signal of other people?
• 8:28
  And the answer was no. So we always knew that one of
• 8:32
  the final battles we would face was, what's the market?
• 8:37
  Well, actually before that, the battle was, well, I mean, any of
• 8:40
  the MN OS actually sign up with you.
• 8:42
  So you could have a working satellite, you could get rules.
• 8:45
  But then it really requires the kindness of strangers, AT&T and
• 8:49
  Verizon to hire you to do your service because if they didn't
• 8:53
  hire you, you were dead. Because it's far too expensive.
• 8:57
  It's it's frankly impractical for ASTS to exist on its own and
• 9:01
  sell its services directly to consumers.
• 9:03
  That requires an incredible expense related to what's called
• 9:07
  go to market. Many have tried and all have
• 9:11
  failed in doing a go it yourself, go to market strategy.
• 9:14
  Iridium was the first company to really try to do this 30 years
• 9:18
  ago, built their constellation and built their own phone and
• 9:21
  said look what we did direct to satellite and it's very
• 9:25
  expensive to go advertise and sell all those phones to
• 9:28
  consumers. It's difficult to have a strong
• 9:30
  enough value proposition as a standalone product.
• 9:32
  The only way in my view for this product to work to get off the
• 9:35
  ground is to be cross sold through channel partnerships
• 9:39
  with the MN OS and that's the mobile network operators for
• 9:44
  anyone that's new. And so then we got those deals,
• 9:47
  we got the definitive agreement with AT&T.
• 9:49
  And then he'll never forget the wake up call I got from AMPAN
• 9:54
  man when he went hey Kook, hey Kook.
• 9:55
  They got Verizon and the stock was up like 15% or something.
• 9:59
  I remember in my bathroom I just went, people do not understand
• 10:03
  this just means this company got a bona fide monopoly in the
• 10:07
  largest telecom market in the world being the US Stock was
• 10:10
  like $4.00 and you know, high $4.
• 10:13
  I remember I just sat on my toilet where I do my best work.
• 10:16
  It was a, it's a heated toilet. It's a Toto.
• 10:18
  So in fairness, like I have a better work environment than
• 10:21
  most people. When you have a heated toilet
• 10:23
  seat, you really, I think have really better decision making
• 10:26
  abilities. And in that moment, I had
• 10:29
  already basically lost generational wealth on this
• 10:31
  stupid stock. That didn't stop me from
• 10:34
  deciding to lose more generational wealth.
• 10:36
  And so I bought a couple extra 100,000 shares just thinking the
• 10:39
  market is blind to this very few people.
• 10:42
  You have to kind of understand the perspective of other people.
• 10:44
  Most other people call it. Everyone else in the world,
• 10:47
  except for maybe 50 people had decided to live normal lives.
• 10:50
  There were fifty of us who had spent every waking moment of our
• 10:53
  life studying ASTS. So when something like the
• 10:57
  Verizon deal dropped, think about the number of people who
• 11:00
  are actually prepared in that moment to understand the
• 11:03
  magnitude of what otherwise was a completely exogenous shock to
• 11:09
  a stock. Very few people were in a
• 11:12
  position to pursue the noble art of price discovery in that
• 11:19
  moment. But now here we are.
• 11:22
  We're the final frontier is really execution.
• 11:25
  Can they build the satellites? And we'll get to that in a
• 11:27
  second. And then will anyone use them?
• 11:30
  That's the market demand. And we don't know the answer to
• 11:32
  that. So we're certainly speculating
• 11:34
  on that. But what we did learn this week
• 11:37
  is that we took a apparently a major step toward proving the
• 11:42
  company can execute. But of course, like most things,
• 11:45
  I'm always shocked where you can do a lot of work and think the
• 11:49
  market's going to, you know, discount out in the future, ends
• 11:53
  up always being sort of the Bunker Hill, you know, wait
• 11:56
  until you see the whites of their eyes.
• 11:57
  And so of course, the stock was getting absolutely properly
• 12:00
  demolished because Rakuten, which had been a Series B
• 12:04
  investor in the company, has a very large position in the
• 12:08
  company and was selling a portion of their stock.
• 12:10
  And of course, the entire world decided to front run this and
• 12:14
  shorts piled in because they basically had like a free look,
• 12:17
  you know, have a known seller that's filing A13D publishing
• 12:22
  each, you know, a couple days, you know, we sold the stock, you
• 12:25
  basically have a free look to short.
• 12:26
  And many did. And predictably, like every
• 12:29
  other time the shorts have piled in, they get their eyeballs
• 12:34
  ripped out immediately. And so the day Mickey I believe
• 12:37
  is Wednesday. Mickey, who's the CEO of Racket
• 12:40
  and filed that they'd cleaned up their ASTS selling program.
• 12:46
  The company announced that they are ready for their first batch
• 12:49
  shipment. This is a Canon moment for the
• 12:52
  company to be able to build a satellite in itself is
• 12:57
  incredible. These are really big satellites.
• 12:59
  They are bordering on the size of a proper Geo satellite.
• 13:03
  Typically if you get one of these built by Boeing, it's a
• 13:05
  one or two year build for something like this.
• 13:08
  We've popped out two of our next generation satellites since last
• 13:13
  October. So we had FM one which
• 13:14
  successfully launched on the Indian rocket, and then we had
• 13:17
  FM 2, which unlike a typical Amazon Prime delivery, was
• 13:24
  dropped off on the curb and landed in a puddle and was
• 13:27
  rendered useless. So very uncharacteristic.
• 13:30
  Just goes to show you invest in Amazon Prime, it's worth it.
• 13:34
  You get a little bit better service.
• 13:35
  And so FM 2 unfortunately met a fiery end.
• 13:39
  And as we talked about previously, though, nothing is
• 13:41
  lost when you are a pioneer. We learned a lot about that
• 13:44
  satellite. It worked.
• 13:46
  It was able to turn on and get into orbit.
• 13:48
  We did the flight integration with Blue Origin and we learned
• 13:53
  about deorbiting. So we got some valuable
• 13:54
  information on how we can actually crash these things,
• 13:57
  which is a very important regulatory issue.
• 14:00
  Nothing is lost when you have a positive attitude.
• 14:03
  But what we did not know as investors is the timeliness with
• 14:06
  which the company was going to be able to start to pump out its
• 14:09
  next next generation satellite, which are made out of composite,
• 14:11
  not metal. And that's important because it
• 14:13
  means that the salaries are much lighter, which means that we're
• 14:16
  not up against mass limitations in the same way for the
• 14:19
  available launch vehicles. And so the company announced
• 14:22
  that they're going to be launching their next three
• 14:24
  satellites on a Falcon 9, which is also important because when
• 14:28
  New Glen 3 failed, people assumed our entire launch
• 14:31
  program was Fubard. Everyone assumes in the absence
• 14:35
  of information that Elon Musk is mad ripped up our launch
• 14:39
  contracts or that we never had them to begin with, and that
• 14:42
  ASTS is going to have the world's most expensive
• 14:44
  paperweights. Or that we're going to be forced
• 14:46
  to put our satellites up on the top of mountains and pivot to
• 14:49
  just become a very expensive terrestrial tower company, which
• 14:52
  is kind of an inside joke. There was actually a short that
• 14:54
  previously thought the the disruptive technology was in
• 14:57
  fact to put satellites on tops of mountains.
• 15:01
  And I would just say that that also was a Canon moment in the
• 15:05
  culture of Space Mob. RIP Hamid.
• 15:08
  We will never forget you, but we'll always love you.
• 15:10
  And so the market is hyper focused on launch.
• 15:15
  So it should and was well received when the company said,
• 15:19
  hi, y'all, we have some launches on Falcon now.
• 15:23
  People in the Space Mob already knew that we know that the next
• 15:26
  launch was going to be a Falcon. And guess what?
• 15:27
  I also know that the next, next launch is going to be on Falcon.
• 15:30
  And guess what? I also know that I think the
• 15:31
  next next and next and next and next and next launches are all
• 15:36
  going to be Falcon Nines. How do I know that?
• 15:39
  Research and I can read 2 pretty valuable skills in life.
• 15:44
  And so that is great. Once the company can really ring
• 15:50
  the bell and show that we're popping out three plus a month,
• 15:53
  is that 6 months, six months? No, but I think we're going to
• 15:56
  end up having our Batch 2 launch in July.
• 15:58
  I think that is going to be the news that we get tomorrow.
• 16:02
  But this is the end of what I call Constipation, actually what
• 16:06
  I actually call constellation Constipation.
• 16:09
  This is a company that's been building a massive satellite
• 16:12
  production facility as it's been designing this next generation
• 16:16
  satellite. This is hard stuff.
• 16:19
  You're building the crane manufacturing plant.
• 16:22
  You're building the world's tallest skyscraper.
• 16:25
  Crazy. There's a lot going on.
• 16:28
  But what also means is that when you finally get it going, it all
• 16:32
  goes all at once. And that's where peak pessimism
• 16:35
  can be a very damaging thing for shorts.
• 16:38
  Because when you're wrong, you're actually wrong on a
• 16:41
  compounded basis, and there's really no escape.
• 16:46
  And so the company is at the end of the teething period for its
• 16:52
  production facility. They had to figure out how to
• 16:55
  make the new microns. Then they had to get the control
• 16:58
  sets, which are the basically the compute on the satellite,
• 17:01
  all ironed out. Then they had to get the
• 17:03
  composite rings all ironed out. Then they had to get the
• 17:06
  stacking engineering. We had experts in the industry
• 17:10
  who shall remain unnamed, but it is Tim Ferrar out there publicly
• 17:14
  saying that we were unable to launch on Falcons because they
• 17:17
  would not fit and we could not stack them and seen ASTS puts
• 17:22
  out a press release saying that they are launching 3 Bluebirds
• 17:26
  on a Falcon 9. You cannot make this up and so
• 17:30
  you have to take a step back too and just think, if you're a
• 17:34
  hedge fund guy, do you have the time to spend all of your time
• 17:40
  studying a pre revenue satellite company?
• 17:43
  No, you do not. It is one of 40 things you have
• 17:47
  to deal with. You might have fallen in love
• 17:49
  with ViaSat or Rocket Lab or like whatever, and then you're
• 17:54
  forced to have a short leg against the love of your life.
• 17:57
  If you own your Rocket Lab last week, you did great.
• 18:00
  Amen. But you might have had to have a
• 18:02
  short, and so you might have spent a lot of time thinking
• 18:05
  about Rocket Lab Time well spent.
• 18:08
  But then Ken Griffin said, how are you managing your factor
• 18:11
  risk? And you were like, I don't know,
• 18:12
  have a lazy a lazy short. I'm sure this thing that's going
• 18:15
  to be eaten alive by SpaceX. And the experts say that they
• 18:18
  can't even stack their satellites and New Glenn can't
• 18:21
  launch. So I'm going to short this
• 18:23
  thing. Fair.
• 18:24
  You know, whatever. It's a tough job.
• 18:26
  That's why I don't do it anymore.
• 18:27
  And so you have to appreciate the level of work that shorts
• 18:31
  really have the capacity to do. It's not saying they're stupid.
• 18:34
  They just don't have the resources that Space Mob has,
• 18:38
  which is a really crazy thing. These hedge funds that
• 18:40
  effectively have unlimited research budgets do not have the
• 18:43
  resources. Do you have a maybe know how
• 18:45
  many people we're working with in Space Mob now?
• 18:47
  But let's just call it like 150. You do not have a 150 person
• 18:52
  senior analyst team. When you think about the people
• 18:55
  working on Space Mob, a lot of these people are making
• 18:57
  $1,000,000 a year. They're senior VP engineers,
• 19:00
  they're lawyers. You just can't hire a team like
• 19:04
  this. But we have for free because
• 19:07
  we've mutualized the benefit of the research, which is a really
• 19:10
  powerful thing. So we do know what's going on.
• 19:15
  And this is what's going to be really fun is juxtaposing quite,
• 19:20
  you know, the quite obvious conclusion.
• 19:22
  Many people had to short the stock.
• 19:24
  I read those expert calls too. And I was calling Tanner when I
• 19:28
  I called him on Thursday because I was going through a mental
• 19:32
  breakdown. The cook bottom is not a joke.
• 19:35
  Owning ASTS is not easy. If it were easy, everyone would
• 19:39
  do it. You know, people kind of laugh
• 19:41
  like the kook bottom, Hardy har har.
• 19:44
  It's real. I it's when you have, you know,
• 19:47
  basically 90% of your net worth in this stock and you've really
• 19:50
  channelled it for various reasons, you know, none of which
• 19:54
  are investment related. But my friend Steve Larrison,
• 19:57
  who I respect a lot, died and his last wish was to own ASTS
• 20:02
  until the Promised Land. And so part of me is very
• 20:05
  emotional about like winning this for Steve.
• 20:08
  And another part is, you know, if everyone ever goes through
• 20:11
  kind of like a personal trauma, there's various ways to deal
• 20:13
  with it. Spencer Pratt is dealing with it
• 20:14
  by taking on the entire political machine of California,
• 20:19
  you know, productive way to deal with his loss.
• 20:21
  I've decided to deal with, you know, my own personal loss
• 20:26
  through uncaged rage toward the shorts of AST Space Mobile.
• 20:31
  To each his own. You know, I don't believe in SSR
• 20:33
  is I believe in overly concentrated positions and
• 20:36
  satellite stocks. But I am focused is really the
• 20:41
  key point. And so we know a lot of these
• 20:43
  things are happening as a result of this focus.
• 20:45
  But when I was calling Tanner, you know, he was like trying to
• 20:48
  put his daughter to bed and he's like, oh God, I have two babies.
• 20:52
  I have my 5 year old and he's go to bed because she's like
• 20:55
  temperamental and overly exhausted.
• 20:57
  And then I have my kook who is overly exhausted and
• 21:00
  temperamental. And so he chose correctly.
• 21:02
  He's like, OK, I had to deal with like the fire that's
• 21:03
  burning hottest. And so he was like, OK, what is
• 21:07
  up kook? I'm like, OK, Tanner.
• 21:09
  So here's the problem. The sock is down and it's
• 21:13
  bothering me. And then we really had a great
• 21:16
  conversation about stuff. I said, look, I was listening to
• 21:18
  all of these expert calls just like objectively, as if I were
• 21:22
  just another guy, just, you know, trying to make a living
• 21:26
  running a diversified, diversified factor neutral book
• 21:30
  with, you know, 5% drawdown limits, like just a normal guy,
• 21:33
  you know, like all of us. And I said, look, I listened to
• 21:35
  these calls and especially in light of kind of a crappy stock
• 21:39
  price, I was bummed out. You know, sometimes when you
• 21:42
  really think about AST space Mobile and all the, the real
• 21:44
  life challenges involved with this company, it it's a lot
• 21:50
  there. There's so many challenges to
• 21:52
  overcome for this company to be successful.
• 21:55
  And then you hear all these experts, many of whom don't have
• 21:57
  good information. For example, the guy saying that
• 21:59
  each one of our satellites was going to take two years to build
• 22:02
  at a cost of $1 billion. I mean, good God, I hope he's
• 22:08
  not right, but he's not right. Seeing as we already built the
• 22:11
  first five block ones, each at a cost of $28 million.
• 22:15
  And those are going to be some super expensive satellites.
• 22:17
  I'm I'm very in those work. I'm really sure that our follow
• 22:20
  on satellites are not going to be 50 times as expensive.
• 22:24
  So you have to tune out some of these experts, but you know, you
• 22:28
  hear about, you know, it's like, oh, there's, you know, one more
• 22:30
  thing we got to we got to deal with this, we got to deal with
• 22:32
  that. And you know, then there's
• 22:34
  competition and then we have to deal with getting global L band
• 22:38
  And, you know, launch capacity is strained and you know, it's
• 22:41
  enough to kind of take the take the buzz out of it and it's fine
• 22:46
  because that's part of the mental process.
• 22:48
  But then you can realize if you're just a standard by
• 22:51
  listening to these calls and many people are going to see
• 22:54
  these Teegas calls pushed out and then that's got the market
• 22:58
  consensus. There's really not a lot of edge
• 23:00
  in these expert calls anymore, but you have to really listen to
• 23:04
  them because that's what's setting the price in the market.
• 23:07
  And so as the stock price sort of, you know, readjusted is a
• 23:11
  light word for down, you know, 40% in the past, you know,
• 23:14
  recent two or three months, you can see sort of concern about
• 23:19
  all this being repriced in the stock, which is actually great
• 23:23
  news if you own the stock today, because it means that those
• 23:26
  worries and concerns are reflected in today's stock
• 23:28
  price. Sure, if you had a time machine
• 23:30
  hit that $130.00 bid and, and live your life or perfectly
• 23:34
  trade it and rebuy it all at 63, I'm not that person.
• 23:38
  But owning it 130 in hindsight was not reflecting a lot of
• 23:42
  those concerns. Doesn't mean 130 is ultimately
• 23:45
  wrong, but the hyperventilation of market participants in the
• 23:50
  past two months because of concerns over New Glen, concerns
• 23:53
  over SpaceX, concern over delivery cadence.
• 23:56
  Stock price is down 40%. What's being priced in?
• 23:59
  15 satellites through 20/26/20 satellites through 2026.
• 24:05
  Sure shit ain't 60. Pretty sure it's not 45 being
• 24:09
  priced in. We've recalibrated lower.
• 24:13
  Were Falcon launches priced in? Does the market know how many
• 24:16
  Falcons were signed, considering the company didn't press release
• 24:19
  it, considering they're all subject to confidentiality
• 24:21
  agreements? Don't know.
• 24:25
  I feel like they started to price in other outcomes and that
• 24:28
  means that we are set to get sprung and that's exciting.
• 24:35
  I believe the market is fundamentally making the mistake
• 24:38
  of because it was hard to get our satellite production
• 24:42
  facility going doesn't mean that once it is going it doesn't hit
• 24:47
  the cadence that was originally advertised.
• 24:51
  Because it was hard means that others probably cannot do it.
• 24:54
  And just think about the time, timing, head start we have over
• 24:57
  everyone else. Think about the learnings we've
• 25:00
  had as we built a satellite production facility to make the
• 25:04
  world's largest satellites at scale, things that are
• 25:08
  dramatically larger than what SpaceX will be making, but not
• 25:12
  yet making for its V3 satellite. Pretty crazy when you think
• 25:17
  about what that mode is. And so as people go, well, Tesla
• 25:21
  has this mode because of gigafactories and you know,
• 25:24
  people can't touch SpaceX because of its scale.
• 25:26
  That's what we have. That's why I'm sitting there
• 25:30
  thinking we we might have this trillion dollar opportunity
• 25:34
  here. What is the space economy worth?
• 25:37
  I don't know. Is it worth a trillion dollars?
• 25:40
  I don't know. But that possibility is there
• 25:44
  because as we're quickly finding out, the applicability of, you
• 25:47
  know, what was kind of this weird buzzy Adam Jonas thing,
• 25:50
  the space economy, like we're finding out that space economy
• 25:53
  is, is actually happening. Now look at the Rocket Lab
• 25:56
  results. There's all sorts of things to
• 25:59
  do in the space economy. And the new things that are
• 26:01
  happening, which are exciting are the AI data centers in
• 26:04
  space, the power generation in space, the non communication use
• 26:09
  cases for RF signals in space. We have the most power on orbit,
• 26:15
  ASTS is the biggest. All of those opportunities for
• 26:19
  the space economy are applicable to us.
• 26:23
  What's it worth? I don't know.
• 26:25
  Ask the people four years ago trying to figure out what the
• 26:27
  NVIDIA opportunity was worth. They didn't know that they
• 26:31
  understood the asymmetry of the upside, or some did.
• 26:34
  And they also understood is when a good thing gets going, don't
• 26:37
  try to trade a price target. That's my lesson.
• 26:41
  So anyway, that's a really long preamble.
• 26:43
  So we have a beautiful mission patch that has been put out
• 26:46
  there and I'm looking forward to this mission.
• 26:49
  I really hope that we're invited.
• 26:50
  As usual, I will be there so long as it doesn't coincide with
• 26:53
  any kind of unmissable kid stuff.
• 26:56
  And like I said earlier, we finally got the overhang of the
• 26:58
  Mickey Rakuten sales behind us. And that, you know,
• 27:03
  unfortunately does take a little bit of time.
• 27:05
  So when a company does a secondary offering those shares,
• 27:09
  just because, you know, someone buys them on that day doesn't
• 27:12
  mean those shares don't have velocity and recycle through the
• 27:14
  market. These are the same as if the
• 27:16
  company actually did a stock offering itself.
• 27:19
  And so those shares take a little bit of time to settle.
• 27:22
  Previously, that's been like 3 to 10 days when there's been
• 27:25
  like a convertible bond offering.
• 27:26
  And, and this was a little bit more of like a protracted ATM.
• 27:31
  And so wasn't totally surprising that we had some weakness on on
• 27:36
  Thursday was super annoying. But that's why I kind of said
• 27:41
  like if if the stock retraces, you know, let's let's do a vote
• 27:44
  on whether or not keeps his account, which I will honor
• 27:46
  that, by the way. So if people had voted for me to
• 27:48
  delete my account, I would happily do it because it's the
• 27:51
  will of the people. But I was voted in to stay.
• 27:54
  But this is going to this typically would take a little
• 27:56
  bit of time. Right now we are either blessed
• 27:58
  or about to be cursed with the earnings report.
• 28:00
  So if this company does what I think it's going to do, then
• 28:03
  those shares are going to be gobbled up and any sort of
• 28:05
  indigestion we would have had on the rackets and sales sort of
• 28:08
  bouncing around the market, we'll get gobbled up real fast
• 28:12
  if the company lays an egg. Well, it was nice knowing you
• 28:15
  and Monday aftermarket will suck, but we'll get to what we
• 28:19
  can expect pretty soon. And so the fusillade is coming.
• 28:24
  We did the reverse diligence. We understood that the key
• 28:29
  concern by the Shorts was production cadence and really
• 28:32
  launch availability. People were losing their mind
• 28:35
  over launch availability. And if you ask an expert,
• 28:38
  they're going to just state things like, yes, ASTS is in
• 28:41
  competition with SpaceX. A Bell might not like Elon very
• 28:45
  much, which I don't know to be true, but I've heard this, and
• 28:50
  that can be true. A contractual requirement to
• 28:54
  launch on SpaceX is not to go have a baby with Elon Musk,
• 29:00
  which Elon Musk would probably like to change that, change that
• 29:03
  contractual term. I'm sure he would prefer to
• 29:07
  extract more concessions from his would be clients.
• 29:11
  But guess what? The FTC has something to say
• 29:14
  about that. The Department of War has
• 29:17
  something to say about that. The NROL has something to say
• 29:21
  about that. SpaceX cannot exert monopolistic
• 29:26
  powers in this market without having a real problem.
• 29:29
  They just launched the VIA SET satellites.
• 29:32
  They just launched the Amazon Kuiper satellites which are
• 29:35
  directly competitive to the core of Starlink, which is the
• 29:39
  broadband market. But it's only a STS space mobile
• 29:43
  that will be discriminated against by SpaceX according to
• 29:45
  the Bears. Only us.
• 29:47
  SpaceX literally launches every single thing in the world,
• 29:50
  including us. Yeah, we're the only people
• 29:52
  who's going to be like, Nope, not launching them because they
• 29:54
  compete with me on DDC, which isn't even really part of my
• 29:56
  business at all. And was really just me trying to
• 29:59
  mess with people and do this fake T-Mobile deal, which is
• 30:02
  worth $100 million by the way, on a one year deal.
• 30:06
  And yet he'll launch everyone else.
• 30:09
  So anyway, we did our work. We understood that they were
• 30:12
  going to launch on SpaceX and lo and behold, they are space mob
• 30:17
  for the win on everything. And so it got me thinking more.
• 30:21
  I already kind of know that they have a bunch of SpaceX
• 30:23
  launchers, but I was thinking, you know what, what is it that
• 30:26
  they could have in their financials?
• 30:28
  They could just prove this point.
• 30:30
  Well, in their 10K, they have the feature contenders.
• 30:34
  They actually don't have a balance sheet in front of you
• 30:37
  too, but they have prepayments as well.
• 30:40
  And so when you sign a launch contract, one is you pay a
• 30:46
  initial deposit. That's a what is that?
• 30:51
  That is a debit to your prepaid expenses and it's a credit to
• 30:57
  cash, cash out the door. And you have a, you know, yay, I
• 31:00
  get my place in line. And then you have something
• 31:02
  that's not on the balance sheet, which is, which is a minimum
• 31:04
  commitment. And so ASTS has minimum
• 31:07
  commitments related to future launches as of 12/31/2020 five,
• 31:12
  you know, so mind you, many, many months ago, which they
• 31:14
  could have increased related that are 250 million to
• 31:19
  $325,000,000. And So what do we know?
• 31:21
  We know that they got extremely favorable terms with Blue
• 31:25
  Origin. My understanding is no money
• 31:27
  down. They're basically options.
• 31:28
  Blue Origin doesn't have a certified vehicle yet.
• 31:33
  They will get there, I'm sure. And they need the they need the
• 31:36
  cargoes. They're happy to have it.
• 31:37
  They understand they got to put up or shut up.
• 31:40
  Not a whole lot of leverage in that system right now.
• 31:44
  SpaceX, on the other hand, is the preferred partner.
• 31:49
  It is an incredible launch system.
• 31:52
  There's really nothing negative you can say about the Falcon 9
• 31:54
  program. It's frankly astonishing that
• 31:57
  this was, this is the reality we live in.
• 32:00
  So guess what? They can do whatever they want
• 32:03
  in terms of reasonable commercial terms that are not
• 32:06
  going to incite the scrutiny of the FTC.
• 32:08
  And so when you sign up launches with SpaceX, you're paying a
• 32:11
  deposit and you're paying minimum commitments.
• 32:16
  And so that if you change your mind or if you cancel, if you're
• 32:19
  late, they're going to get some money for that.
• 32:21
  I'm assuming a 60% cancellation fee, which means you gross up
• 32:24
  called that midpoint of $300 million of minimum commitments.
• 32:27
  You gross that up for the percent cancellation fee because
• 32:31
  that's the minimum. And then you divide that by the
• 32:34
  full sticker price of $74 million per launch.
• 32:36
  And then that gets you a pretty good estimate of how many Falcon
• 32:43
  Nines are launched because we can again reasonably assume that
• 32:46
  we do not have any additional launches committed with ISRO.
• 32:49
  That's India. And I do not believe we have any
• 32:52
  minimum committed launches with other people.
• 32:56
  Hold on, hold on, hold on. My son is just hold on.
• 33:02
  Hey, hold on, hold on. I'm on a call.
• 33:04
  I'm on a call. I'll come up a little bit, OK,
• 33:06
  Except this is the problem with technology.
• 33:10
  And my son just walkie talk with me on my watch, talk about
• 33:16
  bombing my my spaces. And then my daughter, too were
• 33:20
  sitting waiting for a coffee today.
• 33:22
  And I was like, hey, check this out.
• 33:24
  And so I played that Bloomberg article and she's like, I'm
• 33:26
  boring. And then the lady's like kook
• 33:29
  who's kook? And then Sonia goes this
• 33:33
  california-based private investor in my daughter's
• 33:36
  eyeballs like popped out. She gave me this look with this
• 33:39
  like evil smile. And she's like, that's is that
• 33:43
  you? I was like, yes, but you must
• 33:47
  keep it a secret. And so my daughter at some level
• 33:50
  is still shocked people listen to me.
• 33:53
  She would be with Tim Farrar and be like, do not listen to this
• 33:58
  guy. So just know know who you're
• 34:03
  listening to. But anyway back to the business
• 34:05
  before my son started talking to my my watch and just imagine him
• 34:10
  knowing him. He'd like walkie-talkie me and
• 34:12
  be like dad is your Social Security number.
• 34:15
  The following and docks me to the entire world.
• 34:18
  You never know how it's going to happen and it's always going to
• 34:20
  be when I least expect it. And my son doxing me by like
• 34:24
  reading my passport randomly would not surprise me.
• 34:28
  But anyway, back to business. So I think we have all these
• 34:30
  Falcon 9 launches. The proof is in the 10K.
• 34:32
  That's why I'm so confident. And I think the market is going
• 34:35
  to maybe get a little bit more insight into that on Monday.
• 34:38
  And I think that's going to go a long way towards flipping the
• 34:41
  bearer thesis because I don't think anyone really thinks that
• 34:45
  this company is going to hit 45 satellites before the year.
• 34:48
  I think that they will probably maintain that guidance with some
• 34:52
  language that gives them some room like Target 45.
• 34:55
  It's important for a bell to keep cracking the whip and they
• 34:58
  might well have 45 satellites ready to launch, but I really
• 35:02
  don't think it matters how many they actually launch because the
• 35:05
  inevitability, you always have to think what is this going to
• 35:08
  look like in six months from now?
• 35:10
  So what today was a disappointment if you knew they
• 35:13
  weren't going to have 40-5 in the air by Christmas at
• 35:18
  Christmas, if they have 25 in the air and all of a sudden
• 35:21
  you're relevant period to value a security is over the next 12
• 35:27
  months, you're going to be feeling really good about the
• 35:29
  inevitability of this company. And that's the thing that's kept
• 35:32
  a lot of us actually ahead of the curve on this is you know
• 35:38
  myself, every everyone has really been wrong on the timing
• 35:41
  on this company for four years. Look at us now we're $75 stock.
• 35:46
  Why is that? The market is forward-looking.
• 35:49
  So don't get too hung up on a goal post and you know, martyr
• 35:53
  yourself on a false metric. The stock market is dynamic and
• 35:58
  the stock market is forward-looking.
• 36:00
  You need to be fluid. This is Tai Chi This is not
• 36:05
  whatever the opposite of Tai Chi would be.
• 36:07
  This is not a rigid science. It is a flexible one when
• 36:10
  valuing securities. And that's what a lot of the
• 36:12
  experts don't understand, because they have precisely 0
• 36:16
  security analysis skills and they have precisely 0 investing
• 36:22
  experience. And that experience on how to be
• 36:26
  resilient and adapt is in, in my humble opinion, what separates
• 36:30
  the winners from the losers. The other thing we got on Friday
• 36:35
  was ASICS. So a little background.
• 36:41
  ASC Space Mobile knows who loves them and they've been very good
• 36:44
  to Space Mob and they also know we're maniacal in analyzing
• 36:48
  whatever information they put out.
• 36:51
  This is not to say they have selective disclosure, they just
• 36:54
  understand that with a given level of disclosure there are
• 36:59
  different audiences. There are is 1 audience that is
• 37:02
  done an insane amount of work and is looking for very specific
• 37:07
  things and what they blur in the pictures and what they do not
• 37:11
  blur. Is it active decision they make
• 37:16
  and a decision that helps inform what we know?
• 37:21
  Of all of the things to not blur in their video was the Micron
• 37:27
  testing device that was labeled ASIC.
• 37:31
  What is the ASIC? The ASIC is the next generation
• 37:34
  chip, which is 10 times as powerful as the FGPA chip which
• 37:38
  we're currently launching. ASICS take a lot of time to
• 37:42
  make, and they are very important because the critical
• 37:46
  path of our technology is power. FUPAS consume a lot of power,
• 37:54
  fine, but with your power constrained, that limits how
• 37:57
  much bandwidth you can process, which limits your number of
• 38:00
  beams and all this other stuff. ASICS are dramatically more
• 38:04
  power efficient, which means everything else is awesome.
• 38:08
  And So what we know if you've been following this carefully is
• 38:12
  in the 10K they also had some disclosure, he said We have
• 38:14
  reached a validation maturity milestone which allows
• 38:16
  production and provision of flight candidate ASIC units for
• 38:19
  assembly into the electronic board.
• 38:22
  So they were already telling us that they were ready.
• 38:25
  Now they're showing us that these things are going into
• 38:28
  testing, which means they might be ready to go into integration.
• 38:32
  So if you've been listening to the expert calls this week, you
• 38:34
  would have been hearing former employees who had left the
• 38:36
  company, admittedly a while ago, but they would say, I know this
• 38:42
  might be 6 months to a year off. And again, I'd say no big deal
• 38:46
  because we still have an incredible lead and the market
• 38:48
  will understand we will get this eventually, but it would be nice
• 38:51
  to get it done sooner. And so you can again, see where
• 38:54
  hedge funds and shorts would be going.
• 38:55
  Oh wow, they're going to miss the ASIC.
• 38:56
  You know, that's really where these guys have this crazy
• 38:59
  technical lead over everyone. You know, again, like is this a
• 39:02
  good, is this a good funding source?
• 39:04
  You know, that's all they're really looking for is relative
• 39:06
  performance. Like is this short going to be
• 39:08
  relatively, you know, an underperformer or not?
• 39:12
  They're not necessarily shorting with an intent to kill.
• 39:15
  And so you can see where all of a sudden all these experts are
• 39:17
  kind of giving you reasons where you're like, it's going to be
• 39:19
  pushed off a little bit. I'm safe.
• 39:20
  I've got a free look to short this thing.
• 39:22
  Over the summer. I got Rakuten selling, you know,
• 39:25
  blah, blah, blah. Then the company coming out on
• 39:27
  the Friday before earnings with an unblurred picture of a Micron
• 39:31
  testing facility that says ASIC. I mean, they're telling us and
• 39:40
  they're telling specifically us they are telling space mob.
• 39:43
  In my humble view, guys, we're almost there.
• 39:48
  Hang on. Because I do believe the company
• 39:52
  truly, I would say love is a strong word, but really respects
• 39:58
  what the space mob is done. I can only imagine.
• 40:00
  And sometimes I visualize laughing.
• 40:01
  I'm like. I wonder what Scott thinks about
• 40:03
  this post. I wonder what Scott thinks about
• 40:05
  this. You know, he, he doesn't know
• 40:06
  who I am, of course, what he actually does.
• 40:08
  But you know, I'm sure he's just sitting there being like, oh
• 40:10
  God, how did this become my life where I have space mob 24 hours
• 40:18
  a day going wild on the Internet.
• 40:20
  But then I take a step back and I go, he must also think, how in
• 40:25
  the world do I have this autonomous research publication
• 40:29
  unit that at all hours of the day disseminates
• 40:34
  well-intentioned research about my company to reduce my cost of
• 40:38
  capital that has more readership and viewership than any sell
• 40:43
  side report could possibly have. How is it that I have
• 40:48
  effectively one on the CAC model for educating people about my
• 40:54
  company? Because I think at some level he
• 40:57
  probably has a little bit of heartburn over us, probably very
• 41:00
  specifically me. But then in another level
• 41:03
  realizes like, holy crap, not only was I the bad ass that
• 41:07
  invented the Super wholesale model for efficient go to market
• 41:10
  of my technology, but somehow I also have the Super wholesale
• 41:15
  model of information dissemination about my company
• 41:20
  to help Dr. awareness and sponsorship.
• 41:24
  And and when I say reduce the cost of capital, that's a very
• 41:26
  important thing. This is not to say people
• 41:28
  pumping my stock, I, I really truthfully do not view myself as
• 41:31
  a stock pumper. I have no idea what that really
• 41:33
  means when a company has a $25 billion market cap and trades,
• 41:37
  you know, whatever it is, $300 million a day.
• 41:40
  This, this ain't a micro cap, but reducing the cost of capital
• 41:44
  is important. And so again, that's not
• 41:46
  pumping. But as there's more certainty,
• 41:49
  as more knowledge about your company is disseminated, as more
• 41:51
  people understand versus guess, people should and do pay a
• 41:55
  higher price for that security because there's less
• 41:57
  uncertainty. As people pay a higher price
• 42:00
  because of that reduced uncertainty, the company has
• 42:02
  more access to capital and they used it.
• 42:04
  And so as people kind of mock Scott for, you know, Scott,
• 42:08
  Scott Dilewski, I look at these offerings and go, this is this
• 42:12
  is a creative to me. These actions helped my family
• 42:19
  get more wealthy because this company was able to raise
• 42:22
  capital at attractive prices to fund our accretive growth
• 42:26
  projects, which is our constellation, which I intend to
• 42:29
  be a beneficiary of. And so while I was deluded, we
• 42:32
  had to let some new partners into the company and we let them
• 42:35
  in at prices that were higher than they otherwise would have
• 42:37
  been, which means that I get to keep a higher percentage of the
• 42:40
  economics than I otherwise would have.
• 42:42
  I'm thrilled that we could raise capital at good prices, and I'm
• 42:45
  also thrilled that we have capital.
• 42:46
  So I'm really glad we're going to have, you know, round about
• 42:48
  $4 billion of cash. That's a competitive weapon in a
• 42:52
  competitive industry. But then you also, because you,
• 42:55
  you look at what Wall Street would have been believing Kevin
• 42:58
  Chen did this incredible timeline of all of the things
• 43:02
  Tim Farrar did wrong. And so just going back to March,
• 43:07
  Tim Farrar, who's the world renowned satellite expert, said
• 43:10
  ASTS has discovered it doesn't know how to stack its satellites
• 43:12
  on a Falcon 9. So it's going to have to wait
• 43:15
  for New Glenn. And so when our launch failed,
• 43:17
  the market assumed our entire program was cooked.
• 43:20
  And then in April, it's just one month ago, Tim said lol, now
• 43:25
  remove all the F9 launches since they've been postponed for a
• 43:28
  year. One month later, ASTS announced
• 43:31
  announces Bluebird satellites are going up on a Falcon 9.
• 43:35
  And what Tim doesn't know is there's going to be more Falcon
• 43:37
  Nines after that. So eat shit Tim Ferrar.
• 43:42
  And this reality is going to be colliding with Wall Street
• 43:45
  because again, if you're just a hedge fund, bro, have you spent
• 43:48
  the past five years creating websites to document everything
• 43:52
  that Tim Farrar has been wrong on forever in his entire life?
• 43:56
  No, you've done other things with your life, such as be happy
• 44:01
  and productive. Space Mob has singularly created
• 44:05
  its own Wikipedia to document everything Tim Farrar has been
• 44:09
  wrong about. And so when he says something,
• 44:12
  we have more context about this guy and don't take it at face
• 44:14
  value. But if you're a hedge fund guy,
• 44:16
  kind of new to satellites, you're getting up to speed
• 44:18
  because of the SpaceX IPO. You know, when you call a broker
• 44:22
  or someone and go, hey, I need to talk to an expert about
• 44:25
  space, and I had these questions about the satellite company, Who
• 44:27
  should I call? Shockingly, there's not a lot of
• 44:30
  experts for an industry that previously didn't really exist.
• 44:32
  And it's really Tim Ferrar. So you call this guy and you
• 44:35
  assume you should take him at face value.
• 44:38
  Well, you should not, but you can kind of understand the
• 44:44
  genesis of why people have these misunderstandings or you really
• 44:47
  can easily understand. And so this is how the shorts in
• 44:52
  my belief are going to be trapped.
• 44:55
  And it just goes to understanding your enemy.
• 44:58
  And we do understand our enemy. We do understand the shorts.
• 45:01
  We do understand the quote UN quote experts.
• 45:03
  And then it helps you understand why people can take opposing
• 45:06
  positions in your investment. And so if you own ASTS Space
• 45:10
  Mobile and you look at this insane 60 million shares short,
• 45:15
  you should have a view about why these people are betting against
• 45:20
  you. Too short a stock is difficult.
• 45:23
  They have done some work. You should understand their
• 45:27
  perspective of why they are short because shorting is very
• 45:31
  scary and you don't do it lightly or you should not.
• 45:34
  And so I spend a lot of time thinking and like, what are
• 45:36
  these guys thinking? And I could be wrong, but I have
• 45:39
  a very strong understanding of what they are consuming in terms
• 45:46
  of information and research and how they're drawing their
• 45:48
  conclusions. But again, the bird droppings
• 45:52
  from our Bluebirds are things that I believe only the space
• 45:55
  mob has really developed the focus to understand.
• 46:01
  Let me just quickly look at the score of this Las Vegas Ducks
• 46:04
  game. Come on, flash the score.
• 46:07
  Flash the score. I read this over my right hand
• 46:08
  shoulder and I was going to try to wrap up the spaces so I could
• 46:12
  watch versus this hockey game, but I feel like I'm not going to
• 46:15
  be able to do that. What's the score?
• 46:17
  Oh, yeah. OK, ducked up by 1.
• 46:20
  All right, so Tanner goes through this in painstaking
• 46:25
  detail. So he sees that Bluebird 16 is
• 46:29
  in final assembly. That's good.
• 46:31
  That means that we're really cranking because Next up is
• 46:34
  Bluebird 8 through 10. And so this means we've got, you
• 46:38
  know, some extra little birds in our proverbial clip.
• 46:43
  And he sees 9 integration stations and teams.
• 46:46
  That's good scaling. We had some before and after
• 46:49
  pictures of what this facility look like and before, it's kind
• 46:52
  of scary. It's literally looks like an
• 46:54
  empty room with some tables on it.
• 46:55
  Now this thing is built out, new equipment, new scale.
• 46:58
  And so they have 500,000 square feet now, which is a 4X increase
• 47:02
  in five years. This is not so.
• 47:06
  And so Tanner points out that the new dedicated Micron
• 47:09
  facilities is up and running. There's 70,000 square feet just
• 47:13
  for making microns. And then he again does a
• 47:16
  comparison of what it used to look like.
• 47:18
  You can see the build out of this, you know, let's call it
• 47:21
  the Gigafactory. Then this goes back to the
• 47:23
  thing. This company is creating real
• 47:25
  enterprise value. Our value is not in the simple
• 47:28
  satellites, it's in the capacity to build satellites because
• 47:32
  again, I don't think that this ends with dead spots and
• 47:35
  communications. I think AST Space Mobile is
• 47:37
  going to be a generational company to seize the opportunity
• 47:41
  of the space economy, which is going to include on orbit power,
• 47:44
  AI generation. I'm sure a lot of other things I
• 47:46
  haven't thought about, but we'll try to learn.
• 47:49
  He sees an improvement in terms of how we're actually packing
• 47:52
  the satellites, efficiency, a way to flip and lower the ring
• 47:57
  onto the array versus the old way of doing it.
• 48:01
  Pretty exciting stuff. What's great about people like
• 48:04
  Tanner, again, going to the merits of Space Mob, is Tanner
• 48:10
  is a petroleum engineer. These guys are going to have a
• 48:14
  different perspective than, you know, someone like myself.
• 48:18
  And I can think I can speak very safely for an pen man.
• 48:20
  I'm a finance guy, but so I wouldn't see these things in the
• 48:23
  same way. I just don't have that lived
• 48:25
  experience. Tanner is an engineer.
• 48:28
  He's dealing with these processes.
• 48:30
  He's dealing with safety cases and lost time incidences in in
• 48:34
  the oil field operations. A lot of these concepts carry
• 48:37
  over to any sort of industrial manufacturing.
• 48:40
  These are the types of insights that help other people in the
• 48:42
  space mob really have a holistic picture of what's happening.
• 48:45
  Because to understand AST Space Mobile is to look past the R&D
• 48:49
  experiment that was Bluebird 3. Yay, we got it to work.
• 48:53
  So what you need to be able to scale it and that's where having
• 48:56
  a lot of these other people with whether it's engineering
• 48:59
  experience, satellite experience is always great.
• 49:02
  It helps us understand these these other, other issues.
• 49:06
  And so these bird droppings that a bell put out, I think are on
• 49:10
  purpose. And these guys, I think are
• 49:12
  priming the pump to come out for what is a big earnings call.
• 49:17
  And so I think on Monday, Scott is not going to talk about batch
• 49:22
  1. You push that out, Why did they
• 49:24
  push out what should be the groundbreaking announcement one
• 49:29
  week before earnings? I think that was the prime of
• 49:31
  the pump so that they can surprise us with more upside.
• 49:34
  And I think that that's going to be more clarity around batch 2
• 49:37
  shipment. It did create a nice tourniquet
• 49:40
  for the bleeding of the rackets in sale and potentially several
• 49:44
  bear trot because then bears went oh, they well, they they
• 49:47
  flushed out the good news. Now I got a free look on
• 49:49
  earnings. What a blessing.
• 49:50
  You know, the these stupid retail guys pop the stock on
• 49:53
  Wednesday and now I get to short the living hell out of it
• 49:56
  because that was their news or was it?
• 50:00
  And so the market is now expecting that we have one
• 50:04
  launch in June and that might have been flush of the bowl
• 50:08
  case. What if that wasn't it?
• 50:11
  The shorts pressed where? We'll find out in less than 24
• 50:17
  hours who is right. I know a lot of us are thinking
• 50:20
  that we're due for some big government contracts.
• 50:23
  There's a lot of little things that have added up that support
• 50:27
  our belief for this. Let's check in with only 6
• 50:29
  inches. It's a humble group space mob.
• 50:33
  If a guy says only 6 inches, you have to say thank you for the
• 50:38
  transparency. And I, I trust everything this
• 50:41
  guy says no, because you know why not only 7 inches.
• 50:43
  He could have, he could have, he could have, could have
• 50:46
  embellished. I wouldn't have checked it.
• 50:48
  And so he put out this expert call, Dun, Dun, Dun.
• 50:52
  And in the expert calls, though, you know, sometimes you get
• 50:55
  factual information, not just opinions.
• 50:57
  And so we have a guy from Amazon saying, I do know ASTS is
• 51:01
  starting to look at some government contracts too.
• 51:03
  I think it would be good for them because literally other
• 51:05
  than Starlink, all the other players are making money on
• 51:11
  government. Government contracts are the
• 51:13
  only revenue stream right now. They're well positioned again
• 51:16
  with their spectrum, the size of their antenna that lines up with
• 51:19
  much better for government applications than higher bands.
• 51:24
  There's an Amazon guy saying that we're really well qualified
• 51:26
  for government contracts. I personally think that we're
• 51:29
  still going to get some mega deal for Golden Dome.
• 51:34
  Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, You know, I'm not a paid
• 51:37
  consultant, but the pump is prime for for things like that.
• 51:40
  And then Ampan man, you know, love him or hate him, you know,
• 51:44
  came out with some interesting dynamics on really this spread
• 51:48
  in this weird, you know, what should be an arbitrary
• 51:51
  relationship between Rocket Lab and ASTS and the Rocket Lab Bros
• 51:54
  like can never forgive me because we've, you know,
• 51:56
  previously I've been skeptical of Rocket Lab, you know, not my
• 51:59
  word of fight, whatever, but until the end of time, they just
• 52:03
  despise me. But when you look at this Rocket
• 52:05
  Lab Asts spread, ASTS generally has been outperforming Rocket
• 52:11
  Lab. And then there's this catch up
• 52:13
  trade. It's sort of this ping pong.
• 52:15
  Both companies have owner operators.
• 52:16
  Both companies have bile accounts. 10 out of 10 CEOs.
• 52:22
  They're true founders doing the impossible.
• 52:24
  Peter Back is unbelievable. And no, I wouldn't ever bet
• 52:32
  against a guy like that. And you know, lately, though,
• 52:35
  just if you take this spread for what it is, ASTS is at the
• 52:38
  cheapest it's ever been versus Rocket Lab Rocket Lab has done
• 52:44
  great, but the pump is primed. And I think a lot of people have
• 52:47
  this spread shade on is really kind of the conclusion.
• 52:51
  And then we have to look it just the slingshot of sentiment.
• 52:54
  And so you really have to know what other people are feeling.
• 52:59
  And this is again, why the kook bottom seems to work is I don't
• 53:05
  fight my own sentiment. I've learned to embrace that
• 53:09
  there's no real benefit in life of like pretending to be strong.
• 53:14
  When I'm pissed off, I let everyone know when the stock
• 53:17
  price goes down and sort of grinds me down, I get
• 53:20
  despondent, super upset, start rage posting on the Internet.
• 53:26
  I'm in a bad mood, walk into the ocean and my clothes on, like
• 53:29
  you name it. I don't fight it, I embrace it.
• 53:32
  And that's when people trade off of that because they see that
• 53:34
  I'm crashing out and then they start making fun of me and I'm
• 53:37
  like, fuck this stock. And they're like, Yep, buy
• 53:40
  order. And so, you know, last week I'm
• 53:42
  posting memes of me punching a Bloomberg screen.
• 53:44
  I'm deleting my account. I'm selling it a sacrificial
• 53:47
  share. Those are all authentic feelings
• 53:50
  of mine. None of that is embellished.
• 53:52
  That is how I felt. I'm sitting in my car driving to
• 53:54
  work, punching my steering wheel, swearing my head off that
• 53:58
  that's me at $63. And so you take a look, though,
• 54:03
  and think about shifting narrative.
• 54:05
  Last year when the stock went to 60, couldn't believe it.
• 54:09
  I was the smartest person in the universe.
• 54:11
  I was free, everything was amazing.
• 54:15
  And when the stock then corrected from 60 and went into
• 54:17
  the 30s, you know, Cook Bottom for sure.
• 54:21
  But now you know, here we are. What appears to have been the
• 54:23
  correction was last year's kind of capitulation blow off to the
• 54:27
  top. Just goes to show you the market
• 54:30
  is designed to make you go insane.
• 54:32
  But when you look at more broadly at the overall
• 54:34
  sentiment, ignoring my little microcosm of insanity, last year
• 54:38
  or two years ago, everyone was saying satellite phones would
• 54:41
  not work. And then today, Time magazine's
• 54:44
  100 most influential communication companies.
• 54:49
  Sorry, 10 most influential media and communication companies of
• 54:52
  2026 includes us. The bears were screaming the
• 54:57
  whole time. And then, yeah, Dave, he's one
• 54:59
  of the one of my favorite people.
• 55:00
  I, I don't know this guy personally at this point.
• 55:02
  I just really like following his stuff.
• 55:04
  He's just, he just, he just cuts the right way with me.
• 55:11
  But he went, you know, compared to last year, the tech has
• 55:13
  proven we secured extremely valuable spectrum with Legato.
• 55:17
  We've partnered with the vast majority of the world's mobile
• 55:20
  carriers in Google. We have defence and space based
• 55:23
  data centers are now a new use case.
• 55:26
  Competitors like Amazon and SpaceX have admitted that
• 55:28
  they're two years behind plus. Plus competitors have worse
• 55:32
  spectrum and have a harder path to getting anything going.
• 55:35
  We have full approval of FCC approval.
• 55:37
  The satellite design was finalized, we've scaled a
• 55:40
  massive new manufacturing plant, and we have nearly $4 billion of
• 55:44
  cash. None of these things were true a
• 55:46
  year ago. And so it's always kind of my
• 55:49
  reminder to to check myself, you know, Get a grip, Kook.
• 55:53
  Easier said than done, but the sentiment lives in a local
• 55:59
  environment. The sentiment does not look back
• 56:02
  over a horizontal analysis of one or two years.
• 56:07
  And that's where people like reform trader do such a justice
• 56:10
  is by really framing the sentiment in, you know, the
• 56:15
  collective, you know, psycho histogram of the market in his
• 56:20
  charts and really just kind of understanding the ebbs and the
• 56:23
  flows, which I find to be pretty useful.
• 56:26
  And a lot of people get sort of crazy about how the company
• 56:31
  isn't communicating very well. And so you see this really on
• 56:34
  Reddit, you know, some some dope is saying that, you know, the
• 56:40
  first thing I learned in Business School, like, dude,
• 56:42
  that's your first mistake is you had to go to Business School.
• 56:45
  And so you know, whatever he learned from a professor in
• 56:47
  Business School who's never actually run or owned or found
• 56:50
  any business was that the best business practice is the under
• 56:53
  promise and over deliver. Actually not true.
• 56:56
  If you are a radical renegade of funk that's redefining an
• 57:00
  industry, the best business practice is to be batshit crazy
• 57:05
  and inspire your team to do the impossible.
• 57:08
  And even if you're delayed, it's way the hell better than
• 57:11
  impossible. And that's what a bell does.
• 57:15
  That's what Elon Musk does. You have to rally A-Team.
• 57:18
  What are you going to say? Go, guys.
• 57:20
  You know, team, let's have our all hands meeting.
• 57:22
  So we're probably going to be delayed.
• 57:24
  So I'm going to accept that. And let's all just be extra
• 57:27
  complacent today and not have that fire in our belly because
• 57:31
  it probably work. Won't work out anyway and you
• 57:34
  know, like take long lunches and hope you all have great
• 57:38
  vacations and just like put half effort into it.
• 57:44
  That's not what they do. You got to rally the team.
• 57:48
  The funny quote Tanner had ironically about me and this
• 57:51
  Bloomberg article, which I guess is a compliment.
• 57:54
  He went, you know, basically Kook is a nut job, but he is the
• 57:58
  straw that stirs the drink. It's your interesting comment.
• 58:02
  I never heard that before. A bell has to be the straw that
• 58:06
  stirs the drink, and the drink is like 500 milligrams of
• 58:10
  caffeine. You have to have a team that is
• 58:13
  killing themselves against impossible goals.
• 58:16
  And you will probably miss those goals.
• 58:18
  But you can't then communicate internally an aspirational goal,
• 58:22
  but then publicly be like, just kidding.
• 58:25
  And so you got to then look at the actual results, which again,
• 58:29
  can be delays against previous promises, but still the
• 58:32
  accomplishment of things thought to be impossible.
• 58:36
  That's a beat. And so we have this other guy
• 58:39
  respond on Reddit, which Kevin, Kevin Chen point out.
• 58:42
  You know, the tech, they hit the tech, they did 120 megabits per
• 58:46
  second. That's amazing.
• 58:48
  They got the spectrum, they got legato, which is like the like
• 58:53
  we call it El El Legato for a reason.
• 58:55
  It's like the the city of Gold. We got it.
• 58:58
  Many men have died trying to get legato.
• 59:02
  Go call, go research Phil Falcone, Go research Cerberus.
• 59:08
  A lot of blood has been spilled trying to wrangle legato and we
• 59:13
  seemingly got it. We got regulatory approval, we
• 59:16
  got partnerships, we got DODOD, Department of War, we actually
• 59:21
  hit revenue guidance. And so sure, the the
• 59:24
  manufacturing guidance has slipped, but again, I think that
• 59:27
  that's a catch up all at once. And so I like the fact that a
• 59:30
  bell is kind of like Teddy Roosevelt.
• 59:33
  He's not jawboning and talking about what he'll do.
• 59:37
  He's heads down trying to execute.
• 59:40
  Does it take a little bit longer?
• 59:42
  Yeah. Does that make me just want to
• 59:43
  pull my hair out sometimes where I'm just so exasperated?
• 59:46
  Yeah. Have I legitimately discussed
• 59:49
  with AMPAN man whether I should apply for a job in the factory?
• 59:56
  Yes, I have. I don't know if I could.
• 59:58
  Anyway, it's kind of funny because then we went down this
• 1:00:00
  rabbit hole. I don't know if I can get a job,
• 1:00:01
  maybe a very interesting resume. I'd be like, OK, Sir, so you
• 1:00:05
  went to, you know, whatever school and you worked on Wall
• 1:00:10
  Street your whole life, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:00:13
  How exactly are you qualified to know how to use a torque wrench?
• 1:00:16
  And I'd be like, you know what you honestly, you got me.
• 1:00:19
  I have no idea but. I assume it would be really good
• 1:00:23
  for my fitness goals and endurance.
• 1:00:25
  So I will try really hard and I will be super focused because
• 1:00:28
  imagine also The funny thing of like a guy coming in or, you
• 1:00:30
  know, hourly. And then I own more stock than
• 1:00:33
  all of their executives except for one.
• 1:00:36
  I'm like, you want to talk about alignment on the factory floor?
• 1:00:38
  I will be goddamn driving people to greatness.
• 1:00:42
  I will be checking every bolt on that thing as if my life depends
• 1:00:46
  on it. I really do think that I should
• 1:00:47
  work on the factory floor because there is going to be no
• 1:00:50
  one that is going to generate more team spirit and cultural
• 1:00:53
  positivity than Kook on the manufacturing floor.
• 1:00:56
  And I think I would love it. And I think I would probably not
• 1:00:58
  last a month because it's a legit super hard job.
• 1:01:00
  And these people are very, very talented and we're very lucky to
• 1:01:05
  have them. And they have to execute.
• 1:01:09
  And that's just the reality of it.
• 1:01:10
  And it's not easy. And I see comments like, oh, you
• 1:01:12
  know, they're hiring, you know, in Midland.
• 1:01:14
  It's hard. And these people, you know, look
• 1:01:16
  at their backgrounds, you know, they, you know, work in various,
• 1:01:19
  you know, non Goldman Sachs prior careers.
• 1:01:22
  It's like, yeah, no shit. It's a manufacturing facility.
• 1:01:26
  You know, we've heard that Blue Origin is hiring people
• 1:01:28
  literally from like, the Waffle House to go build rockets.
• 1:01:32
  You have to retrain people for these skills.
• 1:01:34
  Why would you belittle their aspirations and their resilience
• 1:01:40
  to learn a new skill? That is condescending as hell.
• 1:01:44
  And so we've seen these videos of the people that work at ACCS
• 1:01:48
  Mobile, they're coming from all walks of life.
• 1:01:49
  A lot of them are coming off the oil field.
• 1:01:51
  So they're extremely skilled at things that matter, like their
• 1:01:55
  hands, and they're used to working in environments that are
• 1:01:58
  severe and brutal outside in the Midland, TX versus working
• 1:02:02
  indoor in a clean room. And so like, who, who do you
• 1:02:08
  think you are judging these people is really my view.
• 1:02:10
  And and this is, you know, really the AST advantage is like
• 1:02:14
  we're we're tapping into this labor and it's hard, but we're
• 1:02:19
  not having to deal with Hawthorne, for example, asking
• 1:02:22
  Elon Musk how that worked out. And so then the other thing that
• 1:02:25
  really came through this week is just people hyperventilating
• 1:02:28
  over New Glenn delay risk. This is what really just struck
• 1:02:31
  me is hedge funds legitimately thought that New Glenn not
• 1:02:36
  getting into orbit screw the entire launch cadence.
• 1:02:41
  I I can see that narrative. I get it.
• 1:02:43
  I disagree with it, but I I can understand their perspective.
• 1:02:47
  And again, that goes to why it's important to know your enemy
• 1:02:49
  know what the shorts are thinking, but really don't
• 1:02:51
  Clinton don't count New Glenn out.
• 1:02:53
  Never mind that. I don't think it's a near term
• 1:02:55
  problem for us. New Glenn is very important long
• 1:02:59
  term to driving our costs very low.
• 1:03:02
  But it's not, it's not the end of the world.
• 1:03:06
  But the big beauty, as I call it, is going to be back on the
• 1:03:09
  dance floor shortly. There's two boosters in their
• 1:03:10
  facility. There's rockets kicking ass.
• 1:03:12
  And we actually found out exactly why the second stage
• 1:03:16
  failed. And I mean, there's no good
• 1:03:18
  reason for a failure. But if it was a fundamental
• 1:03:21
  design flaw, that's a little scary.
• 1:03:23
  You know, it means you have no flight heritage.
• 1:03:24
  You got to go back and redo the whole thing.
• 1:03:26
  If it was because of a QA thing, that's better.
• 1:03:31
  And so if you don't know a lot about rocket manufacturing, what
• 1:03:34
  when you're building a rocket, literally everything is filmed
• 1:03:37
  and reviewed. So if there is a problem, you
• 1:03:40
  can go back and spot exactly what went wrong.
• 1:03:43
  Here we've we've actually found out exactly what went wrong.
• 1:03:46
  I don't want to say it because because I don't, but I do know
• 1:03:51
  and it's, and it's really minor. It's something that will never
• 1:03:53
  happen again. And so I'm very optimistic that
• 1:03:56
  New Glenn will show us it's incredibleness.
• 1:04:02
  But again, I don't think that ASDS is going to be launching on
• 1:04:04
  them anytime soon. And I think that FM 2 was sort
• 1:04:06
  of a trial balloon is a good opportunity to get on there and
• 1:04:09
  learn with Blue Origin. But then the bulk of our
• 1:04:12
  composite birds in the batches are going to be on Falcon until
• 1:04:15
  New Glenn has more flight heritage.
• 1:04:20
  And you know, we could belabor that point until we're until
• 1:04:26
  we're blue in the face. And then we also just kind of go
• 1:04:30
  back to, you know, the revenue opportunity.
• 1:04:33
  Thought it was just kind of cool this week.
• 1:04:34
  I, I saw all trails, which which I'm not sure as subscriber to
• 1:04:39
  integrating SpaceX. And so makes sense.
• 1:04:43
  People using the hiking app need to have connectivity to hike
• 1:04:46
  because you're hiking. And so is that a big revenue
• 1:04:49
  opportunity? Probably not.
• 1:04:51
  But again, it shows you the power to these platforms.
• 1:04:53
  There's all sorts of little problem statements existing out
• 1:04:55
  there. They're going to build on these
• 1:04:58
  satellite connectivity platforms and these are probably going to
• 1:05:01
  be higher ARPU customers. You're starting to get these
• 1:05:03
  tight affinity groups. And so for the offering
• 1:05:06
  community, for the hiking community, for the RV community,
• 1:05:08
  for the boating community, for the, you name it, bird watching
• 1:05:11
  community, all sorts of things like that, which are just going
• 1:05:15
  to drive ARPU. And that's kind of neat to see
• 1:05:18
  all these vertical use cases popping up.
• 1:05:20
  The big broad horizontal use cases speak for themselves, but
• 1:05:23
  it is nice to have all these little spiky things.
• 1:05:27
  And so then going back to the space economy, we had a cool
• 1:05:31
  post by ipilot who is also unbelievably large shareholder,
• 1:05:38
  but then he just did a quick synopsis of the Rocket Lab
• 1:05:41
  results and he made a good point.
• 1:05:45
  Wall Street is increasingly valuing these companies less
• 1:05:47
  like speculative SPAC's and more like strategic infrastructure
• 1:05:50
  platforms that are tied to defense communications, AI
• 1:05:53
  infrastructure, sovereign resiliency, golden domes, space
• 1:05:56
  based sensing and position navigation and tracking and
• 1:05:59
  launch capacity shortage, which is, which is doubly applicable
• 1:06:02
  to Rocket Lab. And it is, it is neat this, this
• 1:06:05
  promise of the space economy, which really meant nothing to us
• 1:06:10
  is, is happening. And that's where I do believe
• 1:06:15
  the real investment dollars come when there starts to be bona
• 1:06:18
  fide businesses being built in space.
• 1:06:20
  It's no longer just government business or some, you know,
• 1:06:23
  satellite TV and things like that, that there really is
• 1:06:28
  something. And so we also this week had
• 1:06:31
  some more comments out of Brendan Carr, who's the FCC
• 1:06:34
  chairman. And he has gone out of his way
• 1:06:38
  to applaud what's going on in the direct to sell industry.
• 1:06:43
  And most importantly, he's very focused on making sure there's a
• 1:06:48
  competitive market in in that there's not just one monopoly.
• 1:06:52
  And most people will go, well, yeah.
• 1:06:53
  But in the SpaceX is a monopoly. And I just think what people are
• 1:06:59
  missing is that he was most focused on making sure there was
• 1:07:01
  a balance to ASD space, mobile and then in an analog that now
• 1:07:06
  sounds less anachronistic than it had.
• 1:07:10
  But you know, rewind 10 years ago, you had Intel desperate to
• 1:07:14
  keep AMD in business so that it wasn't, you know, effectively
• 1:07:17
  like antitrust. And then of course, AMD came
• 1:07:22
  back and slaughtered. But now Intel is re
• 1:07:25
  slaughtering. But I believe ASTS is the Intel
• 1:07:29
  of your and that SpaceX in its current form with its DDC
• 1:07:33
  business is what just provides some optics around some
• 1:07:36
  competition as well as Amazon. But when you unpack it and, you
• 1:07:39
  know, unpack it, I have the issue I come up against is
• 1:07:43
  SpaceX and Amazon just don't have the commercial access
• 1:07:46
  through the MN OS. I believe what they're
• 1:07:48
  ultimately going to do is use their spectrum for their own
• 1:07:51
  consumer devices, which may or may not be a phone in the
• 1:07:54
  traditional sense, but you don't have to be too creative to see
• 1:07:58
  how they can have some captive devices, Amazon in particular.
• 1:08:03
  And then we even see with with SpaceX, you know, they got super
• 1:08:06
  long, all this AI processing grok, you know, can only, you
• 1:08:09
  know, sort of like make her wear a bikini so many times before.
• 1:08:13
  That's not really a efficient use case of AI technology.
• 1:08:16
  And they're just wholesaling it to Claude right now.
• 1:08:18
  And so it's entirely possible that SpaceX does something with
• 1:08:22
  their spectrum. We'll see.
• 1:08:24
  But the big kahuna, I believe is AST space mobile.
• 1:08:28
  And you know, we're, we're first with broadband, you know,
• 1:08:34
  bonafide shops. And with that comes really the
• 1:08:40
  right of capture around spectrum, spectrum and orbital
• 1:08:44
  real estate. These companies that are
• 1:08:46
  pioneering right now are getting the good stuff early before the
• 1:08:50
  full value of it is recognized in the market.
• 1:08:52
  And I believe that value is only going up and you're seeing that
• 1:08:55
  in the market as MSS spectrum in particular is being rapidly
• 1:08:59
  revalued because of AST space. Mobile ViaSat is going up
• 1:09:04
  because of the waves we're making in terms of the
• 1:09:08
  commercial viability of MSS. It's important observation.
• 1:09:15
  And so I also had added some other technical slides to this
• 1:09:20
  and was going to talk about more of the bear arguments.
• 1:09:21
  We've already gone over an hour. I'm exhausted.
• 1:09:25
  I also want to watch the rest of this hockey game, but we can
• 1:09:32
  talk about bear arguments another day.
• 1:09:35
  But a lot of it I kind of kind of touched on really, which is
• 1:09:41
  so much of Wall Street right now is focused on uncertainty around
• 1:09:48
  launch and uncertainty on production cadence.
• 1:09:52
  And then you have some adjacent uncertainties around ASIC
• 1:09:56
  availability. But I think that's really just
• 1:09:57
  sort of what they thought was the cherry on top.
• 1:10:00
  And so tomorrow with the company having earnings, what we want to
• 1:10:05
  see is not three, but 3 + 3 + 3. In other words, what I said with
• 1:10:12
  three till Infinity, you know again that people caught on to
• 1:10:15
  the analog or the the reference to 93 to Infinity, which is a
• 1:10:21
  great song from the 1990s. For me, this is all about 3 till
• 1:10:25
  Infinity. You get those first 3 composite
• 1:10:27
  birds out, bang, you uncorped it and the next three and the next
• 1:10:32
  three are going to come out in an increasing cadence.
• 1:10:35
  And that's when we have operations.
• 1:10:37
  That's when we move to the final boss of this thesis, which is
• 1:10:40
  really what is the ultimate revenue generating capacity of
• 1:10:44
  the company is. I don't know, but a girl can
• 1:10:46
  dream. And you know, the question the
• 1:10:50
  shorts have to ask themselves is from what stock price are we
• 1:10:53
  answering that question? And that's something I always
• 1:10:54
  would tell Anpan man is, you know, when people would worry
• 1:10:57
  about our execution abilities and things like that back when
• 1:11:00
  the stock was like 5 bucks, It's like, are are they going to be
• 1:11:04
  able to drive that conversation from a stock price of $50, from
• 1:11:09
  a stock price of $75.00, from a stock price of 150?
• 1:11:13
  You know, these dingbats might have forgot to think about the
• 1:11:17
  order of operations. And so I think the company is
• 1:11:20
  going to come out swinging tomorrow.
• 1:11:22
  They're going to talk about their balance sheet, They're
• 1:11:24
  going to talk about their spectrum.
• 1:11:25
  They're going to talk about probably an increasing book of
• 1:11:27
  government business. You're going to talk about
• 1:11:29
  probably increasing opportunities in Europe, which
• 1:11:32
  our European correspondent Peter Limburg is on top of.
• 1:11:36
  He better go check that office right now in Luxembourg,
• 1:11:40
  assuming it's coffee time in Europe.
• 1:11:41
  So you know, he's going to casually walk over, get an
• 1:11:43
  espresso, but he's watching. And then I believe the big thing
• 1:11:47
  is just going to be production cadence and then ASIC
• 1:11:49
  integration. And that's when people go, it's
• 1:11:53
  happening. And the other thing is, what is
• 1:11:57
  our lead against our competitors?
• 1:11:59
  I've been, you know, again, space Mob is cool.
• 1:12:01
  You know, I put it out there and then lo and behold, I have a guy
• 1:12:03
  who is an ASIC engineer, reach out and he's like, hey, kook,
• 1:12:07
  you have any questions? I literally only do ASICS all
• 1:12:10
  day, every day. Let me take a look at this.
• 1:12:11
  I'll get back to you. It's like, yes, please.
• 1:12:14
  And so do I have subject matter expertise in ASICS?
• 1:12:18
  No, I do not. But I have AI and now I have Leo
• 1:12:24
  who's an actual person. And so we're going to learn
• 1:12:26
  about that. But he's looking at it and
• 1:12:28
  helping to educate me exactly what the lead times are for
• 1:12:31
  these things. And what people don't seem to
• 1:12:34
  understand is, again, when Abella is doing his all hands
• 1:12:37
  meetings, you know, telling people just be complacent, it's
• 1:12:40
  cool, just chill out. Again, he's not saying that.
• 1:12:43
  He's also not saying I'm glad we are done with innovating.
• 1:12:47
  You have completed the innovation, now please no longer
• 1:12:50
  improve anything ever. We have achieved what we wanted
• 1:12:53
  to and now you can go home. No, he's lighting people on
• 1:13:00
  fire. Innovate, innovate, innovate.
• 1:13:04
  If you don't innovate, you will die.
• 1:13:06
  Literally what he's telling his team, they told me that's what
• 1:13:09
  he says. This is a founder, he's crazy
• 1:13:15
  and So what people don't seem to and I think crazy's good and
• 1:13:18
  that's probably why they accept Kook in their world because he's
• 1:13:20
  like whatever, crazy likes crazy and where are we going to be in
• 1:13:26
  five years? So when people actually
• 1:13:30
  potentially catch up to us on the tech, which are they going
• 1:13:32
  to do it? They don't have the spectrum, so
• 1:13:35
  maybe they can catch up to us on S band type stuff.
• 1:13:38
  Maybe where are they going to do the low band stuff?
• 1:13:40
  They can't get it. Even if they did.
• 1:13:42
  Where are we going to be in five years?
• 1:13:46
  Better. We are learning at a faster rate
• 1:13:50
  than other people because we are doing now.
• 1:13:52
  We are doing better. We are doing more.
• 1:13:55
  We are first. We wrote the problems, we
• 1:13:57
  answered the problems, we create the problems.
• 1:13:59
  We know the solutions. We are ahead of everyone.
• 1:14:01
  We have access to more partners, therefore more learnings.
• 1:14:05
  We're in more deals. We're getting the best talent.
• 1:14:08
  We are first. We will be better, our lead will
• 1:14:09
  expand. That's the lesson of life when
• 1:14:11
  investing is market share matters because it means you're
• 1:14:14
  ahead, which means you learn more, which means you innovate
• 1:14:16
  faster. And this is where the
• 1:14:17
  integration happens, the vertical integration.
• 1:14:19
  How in the world is Amazon going to learn Jack's shit when
• 1:14:23
  they've integrated it to a Canadian company, MDA, to do it
• 1:14:28
  for them? How do you change something?
• 1:14:31
  How do you do an ASIC? These are the questions I was
• 1:14:32
  actually asking to my new friend.
• 1:14:35
  There's a reason why literally every single satellite company
• 1:14:38
  that's ever tried to outsource it with a third party prime
• 1:14:41
  contractor has gone bankrupt. There is a reason why SpaceX
• 1:14:44
  does not do it this way. There's a reason why ASTS is
• 1:14:47
  vertically integrating. As painful as it might be, it's
• 1:14:51
  not only for control, but they're going to expand their
• 1:14:54
  lead on innovation and I can't even imagine the cool stuff
• 1:14:57
  we're going to be talking about five years from now.
• 1:14:59
  It's also hard for me to imagine still talking about this five
• 1:15:02
  years from now. It will be 10 years in on a
• 1:15:06
  single stock investment unhealthily focused on this.
• 1:15:11
  I only pray that the stock is $2000 so that the financial
• 1:15:17
  rewards will have justified this type of chaos.
• 1:15:21
  But, you know, so far so good, right?
• 1:15:23
  The thing kind of paid more than, you know, Honest Day's
• 1:15:26
  work at Wendy's. So with that I'm going to end it
• 1:15:29
  so I can watch the rest of this game.
• 1:15:30
  Although it looks like it's the ducks for the win.
• 1:15:32
  Was kind of kind of rooting for the Golden Knights but I'll I'll
• 1:15:36
  see everyone tomorrow. I unfortunately have a work
• 1:15:39
  meeting at the time of the earnings call, so I need to work
• 1:15:42
  with my EA and figure out how. I tell her I cannot make a
• 1:15:46
  pretty important meeting without telling her why I cannot make a
• 1:15:50
  pretty important meeting. But otherwise, I might be
• 1:15:52
  listening to this on replay and I will do my kook thread anyway.
• 1:15:56
  But I'm sure they'll be like 50 other people doing it, earnings
• 1:15:58
  calls threads as well. So look out for those.
• 1:16:01
  And I hope the company can deliver us into an exciting
• 1:16:05
  summer and kick off what is hopefully an endless summer
• 1:16:08
  rally. Thanks again for joining
• 1:16:09
  everyone. Talk soon.
• 1:16:11
  Keep publishing all this awesome research.
• 1:16:13
  Bye. Thanks for listening to the AST
• 1:16:23
  Space Mobile Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and
• 1:16:27
  you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with
• 1:16:30
  others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and
• 1:16:33
  review. To catch.
• 1:16:34
  All the latest news about AST Space Mobile, make sure to
• 1:16:38
  subscribe. Thanks again and I'll see you
• 1:16:40
  next time. We're doing something very, very
• 1:16:46
  big and I think with this technology we can really affect
• 1:16:49
  billion lives. ASP Space globally is the only
• 1:16:52
  company that have full technology to deliver several
• 1:16:56
  broadband connectivity directly from space to do everyday
• 1:17:00
  smartphone. People will just basically turn
• 1:17:02
  their phone. And.
• 1:17:04
  Be seamless, regardless of where you are.
• 1:17:06
  We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by
• 1:17:08
  satellite. Our role is to bring this into
• 1:17:12
  reality, always in partnership with the MMO.