Kook's Weekly - May 3 - Uncorking the AST SpaceMobile Production Line

This is the AST Space Mode Repilecast. We just basically come from the seamless, regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. The opportunity that we have is very, very large. Good evening everyone. Thanks for joining. This time I can actually see people. is you enjoying it? And I'm just trying to fix my microphone. It's all off. So, shocking to see people still joining after all the people on the internet saying that "Anpanman, myself and Katzi are scammers, pumpers and retail predators." So, you know, with that as a preface, anything you read on the internet, assume it's true. And then, you know, let the people who are sharing their diligence, their opinions, their research, you know, fight for themselves. And so, I know it's kind of blows my mind at this point for someone who's been sharing all of their research, which I believe all of my stuff is cited. I get that I'm a little bit of a cartoon, certainly a little bit loose on my shit posts and things like that. But, I think a lot of you know me at that point. And you can see, you know, my research and the grind of really kind of undertaking for the past five years, you know, along with Katzi and Panman, you know, and then, you know, other people obviously like Tanner and Kevin and, you know, a lot of people on this phone. And so, always makes me wonder, why the vitriol toward this? You know, why, why do these bears in short sort of just do their thing, leave it alone? Like, why is there such, such catnip to this name? And it really reminds me a lot of how Tesla of all, there's just this hatred. And this desire to see this really deterministic entrepreneur fail in Elon Musk. And there's, there's just something about it. People really don't like these sort of visionary founders and I'm trying to think of an exception where that visionary founder actually really failed because they'll point to the Trevor's of the world. But there was never any substance to that. You never really had the bonafide validation of the bears will say, you know, Nikola had GM validating it. That was bullshit research. GM just didn't do any. And we, we know, and it's verifiable that the many, many partners, not just one of AST space mobile have done incredible amount of work. We don't have to take their word on it. We can see it all in the testing and the third party validation and things like that. So I find it remarkable and it really comes out in force when the stock is crappy last week was really hard. I certainly take a toll. Unlike a proper bumper. What I don't do is, you know, be like, by the dip, guys, it's going to be okay. I have real sense of galo humor. It's just the way I'm wired. I think it really drives the end pan man crazy. He's usually like, you're like dark humor is scary and people I'm like, bro, it's who I am. They're darkness in my heart. And you know, and pan man can be, you know, like happy baker, whatever that's his persona. It's actually like how he is as a person. He's very pleasant and nice individual. I'm a little bit more of a gloom doom galo. The world is falling. I like to embrace the darkness. And so when the when the stock is trading terribly, I don't fight it. Enter my soul and course through my body like a virus waiting for my immune response to trap that virus and kill it brutally. And totally. And so last week was one of those days where I just let my emotional gate open and let it come in. And it sucked. Last week sucked. You can see the burnout. You can see everyone fighting and crashing out. And usually that happens at times at the bottom. So this this decline has been somewhat vaccine, but kind of actually on schedule in my experience with a STS will have these awesome runs up to 130 high five, you know, I'm like, Tanner bro, why don't you like move in and we'll start a fraternity. And that's always the top and you know classic. That's what happened. And then you get the decline. And usually it's like, OK, this is going to be short because look at all these events. And that's when bottoms don't form because there's still hope. And then we have all the TA guys come all of a sudden, I'm like, please reform trader show me the way. And unfortunately, like all of his triangles, there's always a story. And he's always the first to admit these stories can change and he's looking for narratives that didn't take hold. He's not predicting the future and he never never is saying he has he's looking for probabilities around risk return. And then you can see how it shifts. And I find the TA so interesting because it really shows the collapse of the human spirit at various levels. And you know, when the weakest new people sort of fold and capitulate and really like where does a stock half to go. Or people who don't know it well and don't own it to step in. And one thing I've always found in my career that is, you know, then the spear that has sliced my heart is I generally know more about an investment than anyone else. And in this instance, anyone else is like with the exclusion of catsie and pan man Tanner Kevin, you know, there's like, OK, there's a couple people to know better that I do. But by a large, I probably know it more than anyone else. And so as a result, I have the most confidence. And guess what happens when you have most confidence, my discount rate is the lowest I willing to price it the highest because I hold it when it goes up. And then what happens when the stock goes down, guess who does not have buying capacity. Me, you know, we're not all and pan man who can like buy the dip with his royalty streams from selling like a sort of consumer goods all across Asia, you know, I don't have that sort of backstop in life. So I just eat it. And that's what happens generally in the market is the people who know it the best already own it. And so they don't provide any buying support. It has to reprice so that, you know, people who are generalists can go like, I get it. I don't have this knowledge. I don't really understand noncommunication use cases. And I really understand L band like, but I do generally understand this NAV framework. And so I can see a flow, I'm not me, but this hypothetical buyer this steps in. I can see how there's downside support at call it 50 bucks, you know, whatever. And that's where you then you start to have this support. And it's this tiered level of buyer graded by people who are the most bullish who know it the best and then the people who are the least bullish know it the least and use a different valuation regime at various points. That's who's going to set the price. And I've seen this throughout my career. This narrative works really well on stylized examples like oil and gas where you'll have things like. One P reserves versus three P reserves into using that as an analogy it actually makes a lot of sense. It's like, okay, what's the hard NAV here. That's where the conservative distress guy just steps in and goes, I own it here. And then the person that really knows the, you know, the geology, etc is like, well, I'm going to give these like three P reserves value because I actually really have a view. Well, they're the ones that will own the stock at the highest price. And it doesn't mean they're the dummy because if they're right, the stock might go up a ton. The distress guy never bought it because it never got to his clearing price for entry. And so there's no right or wrong answer here, but it's very useful to understand sort of the path dependency of where these levels come into play. And this past week we've really had a lot of despair. And again, like I said, and now I can see and pen man join. Well, and pen man was away. I was just to remind him, especially when he's on mute and can't respond. I was just saying how he's usually like, you know, cook your dark, sensey humor, you know, scarce people and things like that. And I just again, I just try to embrace it. Anyone, you know, everyone should know me at this point where when I'm posting like all caps like there is no floor. You can go six feet under and like pictures of like screaming cats. I'm usually laughing my ass off when I post those things right about, you know, right before I go jump in and surf and like leave everyone to ponder those posts. And don't freak out when you see that that's actually when I'm like the most bullish because I'm just screened with myself. And anyway, so let's get to the, let's get to the facts of the matter, which really is people should realize that I'm a total wing that nut job unstable person who channels all of his frustrations in life through researching one stock and one stock only. So know your sources, do your own work and you know, all these people are calling me a retail scammer again, I have no idea I'm not a retail scanner. So that's my also my comment is I am not a retail scammer. So I hope that allays everyone's fears. But next week, not this week, but the next coming week we have a STS earnings. This is going to be a very interesting call. So on one hand, they're going to have to talk about what we already know, which is the failure of bb7 to make orbit. And you know, past tense. So what everyone is focused on is batch shipment number one. And really what that means in terms of, you know, what I call three tell infinity. So yes, I have the meme all preps for people that go back to early 1990s rap three to infinity is my theme of what's about to happen. Once we have the next batch of three satellites, they will presumably have uncorked and. debottle neck the entire production line. And so it really is free till infinity. And I believe that on the earnings call, we're going to have, if not, shipment already, but very high visibility toward the next shipment, which might not be enough for some people. But I believe for a lot of us who are long-term investors is going to be quite enlightening. And then we could very easily have some developments around some military contracts and things like this. So it's going to be an important earnings call and really set the tone because it's going to define the timeliness of this investment into the back half of the year. And so if they can convince people that they've really uncorked the production bottlenecks, which I think I personally have a pretty good handle of. And it's one of those things where it can certainly seem darkest before dawn. Many people can confuse darkest before pitch black death end of the world. That's what is fun about markets is the same information can lead people to believe that the patient has in fact died. I think that this earnings call is going to be one of those awakenings and could set the fever for people realizing that this is a second half of 2026 gangbuster investment. And what it's going to really help to is any increased visibility the company can provide around monetization. Because now the bears are back out of like, oh, yeah, of course the tech works. Wait, what? And oh, yeah, I guess they'll be able to build on satellites even though they still like to reign on that parade. But now we're kind of back to, there's no market. And it's interesting to see the bear narrative change, which is fine. They're entitled to it. I could care less. But it is interesting to track. And so into this earnings call, let's review what are bakery correspondent reporting live from his high carb lifestyle shows that we have in terms of a set up. We have all time high short interest. We have acutely negative investor sentiment. So yours truly has certainly crashed out like angry, want to go break stuff. Having my kids tell me that I rage bait them, which I don't think my kids actually know what rage bait means. But that's what they said. They're like, daddy, you rage bait because the stock went down. Like, OK, wake up all probably should get more balanced life. But then we see the implied and realized volatility near their lows, about to have an explosion. And then we have the big upside catalyst to come. And then a lot of us, as you might not be surprised, are tracking very, very carefully all sorts of little tealies that make us believe, though a lot of things are going really right. So we have a really great set up, which is nice. The company has to deliver. And almost sort of like you need that invisible hand to come down from heaven and guide you toward the light. AT&T pops up and gives us a little bit of love on X, which is interesting. Because just the other day, we-- or actually, last week, we had that conversation about analyzing John Stanky's comments from the earnings call, where despite him saying, we have all these options. And we're going to partner with SpaceX and Amazon. What he really said is, we cannot let ASTS fail, because we depend massively on them. And we have no idea when these other services will actually be available. And so the forensic analysis of what Stanky said was incredibly positive. And anyone that was wondering about that, go back to last week's weekly where I've documented all this. And so sure enough, AT&T is out kind of pumping, letting us know that they still love us. And what I think is also useful is, remember, we're not in a political debate where there's little gacha moments. This is not fake life where you're trying to impress a CNN anchor about something ridiculous. This is real life where you're trying to either create value or die. And it's binary in the ultimate outcome of, like, you have done it or you have not done it. And the experts will like to measure all these goal posts on a relative, like what they said and what they did, but failing to recognize that the movement of a company toward domination is very hard to do. And so when you look at-- there's this guy-- I think he's some language I can't say-- but his username is @stafonpoo13. And he's from some country that uses Cyrillic-- you remember what you call that alphabet-- but non-real alphabet. And he goes, the problem is this company grew the valuation by setting unrealistic expectations, not by delivering what they guided for. Well, he's got this totally wrong when it comes to the primary act of making money. And so I view myself, again, as a shadow board member. I view myself as running my own family office, thinking like an industrialist, hidden from view, but trying to control the world through my investments. Trying to be Iron Man, honestly, at my spare time. And so when I think about this, sure, I could get wrapped up in what guidance was in the fact that they annoyingly miss it, almost for sport at this point. But then I step back and go, what is it I am trying to achieve as Iron Man? I am trying to have ASTS win. And so initially, the experts said, the satellites would not work at all. They would get no contracts. The FCC would not approve them. They could not hire. No one would launch them. There is no spectrum. There is no government business. And a whole host of other things. And so then what have they done? The satellites work. They have almost all the M&Os. They have FCC writing the rules for them. They've recruited global talent. They have launched contracts galore. They own their own spectrum in the most valuable market in the world. They are part of Golden Dome. In addition to 10 other programs. And there's a lot of other things they've done. Like set up a European subsidiary. God knows how many other things they've done that have been taught about. And so again, expectations are relative. The market ultimately sets expectations based on the price of the stock. When the stock was $2, the market expectation was this company goes bankrupt. So they have exceeded the market's expectation at $2. The market's expectation at $20 was they might not go bankrupt and they might muddle along. Maybe there's some strategic value to this company. But we have no idea if they can actually deliver anything. The company has exceeded that expectation as well. And so for those of you, they're not professional investors. It's very easy to get influenced by others and to really be infected by this line of thinking of like, well, they missed their guidance. Tesla has missed their guidance. Lots of companies have missed their guidance. The question is that they missed their guidance because they were a mature industry leader and they're missing guidance like revenue because of competitive onslaught. That's a problem. And so when Cheg started to miss guidance because Cheg's UPT was invented, you have a problem. When Tesla missed guidance, because they were revolutionizing the entire concept of what transportation was by commercializing and building the first scale electric vehicles that people wanted to buy in the world, that's a different type of missing guidance. When SpaceX is unable to hit a launch target for starship, that's a different type of mess. That's an innovation mess versus pressure from competition mess. And so when I look at this, the wine and crying and moaning and groaning on ASTA missing guidance is not the same thing as blockbuster missing guidance because Netflix is destroying their entire foundation of bead is not the same. And people can do whatever they want, surely. But what I really want to make sure people at least think about is making sure you're contextualizing a disruptive guidance miss because of businesses about to suffer versus a guidance miss because a company is embarking on making the impossible possible. If the latter and they succeed, you're going to be OK, even if they miss some guidance. Because what it means is that everyone else that's going to try to copy them is really far behind. And they will probably also miss whatever timing. And we're already seeing that with Starling. Their service sucks. And who knows when it will not suck. And Kuiper is not all sorts of problems. And they're really far behind. So it's really important they contextualize this. And then the goal posts are being shifted by the fudsters all the time. And so what I wrote in the tweet is the world previously thought ASTS was fourth down in like a million yards, basically impossible. And it's just not the same when looking at the nature of what they're trying to achieve, the difficulty, and the immateriality of missing guidance versus getting it right, and solving the natural challenges you have of doing something no one's ever done before. So that's an important point. Then let's go check in with Katzi. And so there were some interesting developments around spectrum. I actually meant to look into this a little bit more. it chose to screw around on a six foot four surfboard instead, which was a little bit more. a way better use of my time. I can catch up on the spectrum stuff tomorrow. But the point is the company is using all sorts of techniques to massively increase the capacity of their spectrum. What you really need about this stuff is using different waveforms on the same spectrum. So those waveforms aren't going to interfere so you can kind of shoot wave A and shoot wave B on the same spectrum and achieve different things like radar versus communications. And so that obviously provides an incredible opportunity for monetization of the company. And these are all sort of the exciting things. And when Katzi brought these things up three years ago to say he was laughed out of the room as an understatement. And again, that's where people like Tim Farrar went truly batshit and would say some of the most vile things possible to Katzi, which is just again remarkable if you know the guy at all is just like a really nice guy. And to accuse this guy, some of the things that Tim Farrar accused Katzi of being is just simply spitting derogatory words at Mother Teresa. And then turns out Katzi is right. And the joke we have of Katzi is right about everything. The guy has caught up in right about everything. And it's not because he was guessing. He saw it in the documents and he put one in one together. And so the company, despite some other efforts to hide some of these things for competitive reasons, would give just enough little clues. And Katzi would bury himself in these FCC filings in ITU filings and is a very inquisitive guy with a bit deadly, a very technical background, but certainly a capacity to learn really unlike anyone else I personally know. And he used that to figure some things out. And he was very generous to share it all with us in low and behold, he's right. And so he was useful to go back and for, I know for Ann Pamm and I were always just sort of amazed because we were the eyes that had to kind of listen to this guy, you know, three or four years ago when Space Mob was like six people. And you know, we didn't want to go out and be dismissive of him. But at some level, we were like, are we really on this conference called this guy? And it's like, it sucks. It's two bucks, bro. Like, no, it gives a shit about your radar or her theory. We just like can't go bankrupt. And, you know, but we entertain him because we're nice guys too. Ann Pamm and I are both generally not, we're not gonna be like, yeah, we're wasting our time. And we're really glad we listened to him because it gave us incredible amount of confidence about all sorts of other things and made us sort of believers. But it is, you know, we're calling balls and strikes. And so now we're seeing a lot of these things come out into the open and it's remarkable. So now let's get to the AST proxy statement. And so look, people call us paid pumpers. I would just like to point out the company doesn't even pay its executives. So they really don't have a paid pumper budget. They give us Excel size t-shirts, which don't fit me because I am a solid medium. So even the consideration in which they give their paid pumpers some swag like I can't even wear it. So I would, you know, put that in the proxy, you know, give Cooke, Excel t-shirt and you want a medium. And that's my bonus for 15,000 tweets. See, that's a bum deal. But it's better deal than a bell got because a bell got zero. And it's really useful to appreciate that again, we have an owner operator. He is, you finally got a stock award, which he's sure forced upon him. But then the other executives. And so Guy like Scott made $250,000 base. So sure, you know, better than working at McDonald's. But he's also senior managing director level at, you know, any global investment bank. Shanti Gupta, partner level guy at any big three accounting firm. In fact, that's what he was. Those guys make a couple million bucks a year. God only knows what Dr. Yao could make like what his value at market is. It's probably a lot. And so these guys really make all of their compensation in stock. They are bullish. And they're not just blowing out of all their stock when they get it. They're taking, you know, relatively modest prints to get some liquidity for their families to pay for stuff like schools, trips, probably healthcare because they're probably working their ass off and, you know, need to get their pernovo exams. And so it's good to see this proxy. And just remember, a bell is playing to win. And we have an owner operator. And for a lot of us, the fact that a bell wasn't really leaking anything to himself and was only earning economics in the exact same way we were, you know, probably in order of importance, a bell taking zero dollars in salary and being an owner operator. And then number two, Katzi existing. Those are probably the two most important things for my investment thesis. And so I recommend everyone to learn how to read a proxy because incentives drive outcomes. And Elon says that the most. And I truly believe it. Incentives drive outcomes. And so a bell's incentive is make the stock go up. So far, that has been generally the outcome. Worth noting. So now let's get to stuff like building, you know, metal and orbit, which I guess some of our learned people care about. Well, in order to get metal and orbit, you need people on earth. And AST investors pointed out that the AST space mobile recruitment drive continues. And so there's now more jobs outstanding on the website. Then there were previously. So there's over 200 company continues to grow. And we have to ask ourselves, you know, what are what are they delivering into? And we believe that that's a multiple shell company. The more I sit back and think about this, there's some analogs that are close to home for me. One of which is the rise of my personal hero can griffin. So some people might be taking a gas at how the person who is responsible for the short ladder attacks could somehow be my hero. Well, Ken Griffin is an S-Class badass. I don't know that I've ever met. And yes, I have met someone who is a more brilliant business tactician with an ability to hold and really exclude complacency from a business to innovate and see opportunity and adjust with markets like this guy. But the real genius behind Ken was figuring out how to build a business and infrastructure A very efficiently. Doesn't really apply to ASTS because what Ken did is basically build out world-class infrastructure through past through expense reporting the delps. And theory got the benefit of the returns but never really got the ownership of what ultimately led to things like Citadel securities as well as the entire high frequency trading business. So I know. But what Ken did is he woke up one day and boom, he basically has Goldman Sachs as a guy without having taken outside money. He's raised some bonds but it's actually just astounding that you look when you look at the rise of Citadel and how they did it. And so now he has weapons grade infrastructure around the world. Pretty cool. Well, it gets me so excited again as a shadow board member Iron Man secretive industrialist trying to control the world through my investments reality I just own the stock at a stupid beverage account. But you know, it's kind of fun to to say this stuff. What I think about is yeah cool, we have like all these satellites but what we also really have is this unbelievable infrastructure to build satellites. That's really neat. And what we've really seen in the world is this value of like wait for it, manufacturing, you know, pretty wild that for the whole, you know, big chunk of my life, everyone was like software eats the world software eats the world and people were really investing in electrons and then you know, you wake up one day and you realize like the stuff you actually really need in this world still requires atoms. And so it's physical plant. And you look at what's important in the world right now. It's you know, do you have a physical plant to go build a bunch of Tomahawk missiles? You know, do you have the shipyards go build a bunch of ships? Do you have the big battery manufacturers to build EVs to make human-owned robotics to build ships to have data centers? It's actually like the atoms that have mattered. And I still think that ASTS when people take a step back, they're going to go holy crap. This company has global infrastructure to be one of the largest satellite manufacturers by tonnage in the world. And what really hit me was last week when I was watching this video from SpaceX. This is 28 minute video Elon put out. It was so cool. And so I highly recommend people find this and watch it. It's about Starship because you just look at the physical plant that they've built. The rocket manufacturing facility, the test facilities, it's unbelievable. The physical infrastructure they've built, I know it can be replicated because Blue Origin has done it, but Blue Origin is like the top 10 richest guys in the universe decided this is the thing he was going to focus on. So yeah, the barriers are pretty high. We'll see if rocket lab can do it, but there's very few companies that can do this. So if you're building up the infrastructure to manufacture rockets, test them and really then do cool things with them, Pretty scarce good. There's some real barriers there. What ASTS is doing is this vertically integrated sort of Manhattan project for satellite manufacturing in a world that's now realized that the secular trend is space in satellites. And I go, again, from my little, would be Bruce Wayne mentality, like, that's cool. That's my little industrial empire. And I don't think that people really understand the ASTS thesis in that way. It's usually like, will the tech work and they're thinking about the little blue birds popping out of the nest, but the nest itself is an unbelievable source of competitive advantage. They've done two things. They've designed the cutting edge technology, but then they had to design and build the cutting edge physical plant to manufacture it all, two very hard things. And that goes back to the winding, monining, groaning thing we just talked about a second ago. And when they miss expectations, well, yeah, no shit, dude, they're building the house. Right now, it's hard. And I don't think in the houses, actually, they're the wrong analog. They're with the right thing. I mean, they're literally building the factory while they tried to build the product. And these are two very, very hard things. It's not like Porsche retooling and being like, surprise, there's a 9/11 GT3 SC with a manual. We said we were never gonna have built a GT convertible, but now we have with a manual assholes to all bought Spider-RRSs. And yeah, sure, it can just retool and pop out a new $300,000 car. No problem, but building the factory in StuGart was very hard. So the 9/11, pretty cool pieces of intellectual property, but then the plant to build the 9/11s also pretty cool piece of technology. And ASCS has been both of those things. And so again, when you're missing guidance, you gotta ask yourself, well, is it because I'm doing two extremely hard things, which when complete, give me these unbelievable modes and unbelievable sources of value? Or the missing guidance because of some competitive pressure, like the blockbuster analog, again, they are not the same. And you need to develop some cognitive skills in life to realize when two things are massively different, that lead to massively different life outcomes for yourself. So that's my, the calculation of this point. So now let's get to the other things that are hard with satellite companies. So you gotta have metal and orbit, because you also have to have stuff on the ground. You have to have ground stations. So we had seen, we didn't actually really tweet this 'cause it seemed like the company hadn't really intended for this to be public, but now it's coming out. There had been something in the SES, which is a European satellite company in their annual report, talking about their deal with ASD space mobile. Well, SES was buying Link and their European satellite TV provider, like, what are they doing with ASD? That was really the question. And it came out in an expert call with SES about a partnership for ground stations, which has yet to be announced. But apparently it's a done deal. That's cool. And so we've actually now closed the loop on this. We've seen it in the public filings. We were really all kind of very confused about what it could mean. But then it came out in an expert call. And now it's in the public domain. I didn't do it, but, you know, talking to it. And so, you know, now we know what they're doing and here's what they're doing. SES is providing ASD space mobile with ground infrastructure, teleports, gateways, fiber, backwall, and the local regulatory landing rights needed to bring ASD satellite signal down to Earth and connect them into terrestrial networks. ASDS owns the satellites and commercial relationships with the M&O's. But those satellites are useless about someone to land the data. And you need the backwall. And so, in effect, SES appears to be selling a gateway as a service to ASDS itself, which will be passed through to the M&Os. And that just allows everything to go faster. So cool development, again, really kind of like a pixel shovels type of thing. Not something for anyone to, you know, wake up tomorrow and go, I need to, or wake, you know, like, I don't need to go like, buy stock in the overnight market because of that revelation. But if you're a long-term investor and you're seeing how the building blocks are being put together, that's another one. It's, you know, it's good to know. And so, not let's revisit the bare argument. Again, when people get really negative, the sort of fragility of human emotion never ceases to amaze me, because I get sort of frantic as well. Like, you get negative and then, honestly, it's just spirals. I've, I've again, found it very useful to, you know, work with the space mob because in isolation, it can be very lonely place. You know, the stock goes down and you don't really know why. You don't really have anyone to talk to. And then you assume you're wrong, something you're missing, get in a bad place, sell at the bottom. That's really kind of what happens to most people. Space mob is sort of a self-help group for better or for worse. And what it does help you though is contextualize, you know, a lot of information and bounce it off a lot of other people who can help frame it and, you know, make it feel better when you're losing unimaginable amounts of money, which is certainly me. But you can really see the bear argument, which is just simply, ASTS is not launching satellites fast enough. Okay, well, you know, this guy, Pat Cakes, I mean Kevin Chen was pretty funny, but you know, Reddit is really a cesspool of human weakness. And that's really a bear argument. You can see it in Vick right up, you see it everywhere. Everyone just sort of falls on the sword on launch, you know, and they spin it out of control and go, oh my God, there's not going to be any launch and you know, not launching fast enough, but they're really not thinking through, you know, we've talked about many times. So I'm trying to also watch this hockey game while I do this. There's a lot of multitasking, it's Zuckarilla, Hellia. I'm a hockey fan for the past one week, so I really don't even, didn't even know what a power play was until I googled it, but what a great sport for the playoffs. Definitely not lay my kids play hockey, but my only lesson from this is like, God, this is violent. I don't, I can't, like why can't they make this little more family friendly? But anyway, going back to business at hand, launch is a really easy bear thesis to dismiss, because if you're short the stock based on concern about launch, what happens when you wake up and they launch? It's like, whoops, see daisy. And so what happens if, you know, this week you wake up and realize, oh no, they have like four successive SpaceX launches in a row for three Bluebirds each. Does that blow up your thesis? What happens if that's true? What happens if the FAA grants an expedited launch approval for New Glenn and they nail it? What happens if ASTS actually has some undisclosed relationship with the NSSL, which is the government launch program, what if, what if, what if? If you have a bear thesis, you have to go through the permutations of how quickly that could flip on its head and what happens? Do you get your eyeballs ripped out on that? And it's, you know, a useful thing to think of. And meanwhile, the FCC is just gunning it in terms of making Leo happen. And so the FCC is paving the way for D to C. They want supercharged choices in the market. And what's really interesting is to see Brendan Carr talk about this. They see it as a big upgrade and competitive with fiber. And so yeah, this is somewhat related to SpaceX's core offerings and things like that. But it's just showing how quickly what was dismissed as a niche market is now being viewed as like one of the bonafide, you know, for horsemen, for consumer connectivity choice. And the FCC is really leaning into it. They're, you know, letting these guys use more power, they're letting spectrum be repurposed. Things like this, this is certainly helpful for SpaceX, but it's also very helpful for ASTS. Whatever is good for SpaceX generally means that we can, we could already do things well under the prior rules and we can do them better with new rules. And then you're going to have things like legato, for example, where spectrum that was stranded is going to be repurposed and, you know, effectively approved for this use. We believe that things like grain management will have their spectrum approved for this. Sirius XM might. And that's just more capacity that is available. And then that just is more demand for that metal and orbit. They can process and really make use of that spectrum. So it's very interesting. So then we get back into the whole competitive dynamic. There was this interesting study out of China of all places. So out of Shinghua University, they took a look at how Starlink actually worked. And the punchline is that it's kind of crappy and doesn't work very well. And there's lots of drop calls. And they specifically tested things like WhatsApp, which is interesting. And people don't really like it, but it's better than nothing. But it kind of contextualized, you know, why it is that the Starlink service isn't really having a lot of demand. That's because it's not very good. And so the mistake is investors go, aha, Starlink isn't having the demand. People don't really like it. So therefore, ASTS is doomed. Well, I don't know. You know, can you think of some services where the initial thing wasn't very good and say you didn't buy it? And then the killer app came out. and everyone used it. I feel like the personal computer is an example. The cell phone is an example. Everything is an example. And so that's really where the bears are glomming now 'cause they're getting what they think are their first aha moments that, okay, supposing you can get regulatory approval, supposing you can build a satellite, supposing they work, no one's gonna pay. Well, okay, you know, that is the debate and we'll find out about it. But one would point out that the Starling system really sucks and it's not very useful. And so as a result, you can see why consumers don't get really addicted to it 'cause it's high friction, doesn't work very consistently. And that's not how the American consumer, for example, works. It needs to be frictionless. People have really high expectations and they are demanding. And so that's why Abel had first principles to have a service that will be that killer out. Then meanwhile, SpaceX is having these posts about direct to cow, you know, which again, we've kinda made fun of before, but it's about this rancher using SpaceX connectivity for smart cattle collars, cattle collars that removes the need for cell towers or on ranch infrastructure. Well, now there's a problem statement you're probably having thought of. And this is a big Starlink thing. And so it just goes to Shelya, you know, how much demand there is we could really quickly see, you know, how many had a cattle are there? How many, and you know, probably Australia, had a cattle in the US. I'm gonna guess like a million, I could be off by a lot. Whoa, okay, a lot, 86 million. And so that's a lot of cows. Who knew, I guess the whole thing about like, you know, methane emissions from cowfarts is probably right. Not every cow is obviously gonna have a Starlink collar, but you just kinda can think about that. Well, that could end up probably, you know, having a lot of applications in terms of herd management and things like that, who knows? One of probably 4,000 use cases for this technology. And so as it rolls out, let's see what happens. I'm taking the bet the market's gonna be really big. And then the M&O's themselves, I believe, are gonna be the next part of the AI trade. And so Verizon, for example, came out in the Rheans call, said it's in deep talks with hyperscalers, cloud providers, and large enterprises, to use its fiber and 5G assets for AI infrastructure. They say a revenue opportunity, could be worth multi billions of dollars. The company said more details could come in three to six months. I've always thought of ASTS as an AI infrastructure play, because all of the compute in the world don't mean a thing. If you can't communicate to it, signals have to go back and forth to process information. And so sure, maybe some AI can be on the edge. I don't know, makes sense that there's gonna have to be connectivity. Makes sense you're gonna wanna have this always on. The demand for things that are then everywhere are gonna probably have more exposure to gaps in connectivity issues. And this is my bet that this will be right. And so goes to the IoT observations and really the AI infrastructure observations that I think could be quite meaningful. Meanwhile, Amazon is coming to the direct polar opposite of user demand. People are convicted to convenience. And so Andy Jassy, who is the president of Amazon, said, the last thing I'll say about it is, you know, your question about global sir, increasingly what we're finding with our customers and our surprising governments is that they don't like to have any periods where they don't have connectivity. It upsets whatever customer experience they're going through, even in metropolitan areas. We all hit certain parts of the highway or certain roads where you can't get connectivity or you're hiking your scheme. We see very large demand for consumers to have direct to device. That was really the impetus for our acquisition of global star. They have unusual and scarce global spectrum that's required to provide direct to device. So that's what Amazon's used. What do they know about anything, right? And then more broadly, just space is the secular trend. Government defense is oriented toward that. And it's just really the priority of US defense spending. So that's a good place to be in terms of where money is going to flow. And then the procurement methodology has also changed. So as we've talked about many, many times, they're going to be leveraging the commercial capacity for government use because it drives down costs. It makes the systems much more resilient and robust. And so that goes right to the fairway of ASTS going back to what I started originally around of how much value there is in the satellite production capacity we're building, because we are going to be able to make, I don't know the exact stat, but I looked it up to their day. But I think we'll have one of the top three satellite production capacity ratings of anything. And that's going to have value as new use cases and new needs emerge because our satellites are quite flexible. At the end of the day, ASTS has invented a way to create the most power in orbit. The first way they're monetizing that power is through RF signals. Other ways you can monetize that power is AI compute, actually beaming energy down. There's all sorts of things. But fundamentally the platform is around power generation and really the duty cycle of that power generation. That was the critical solve they did. Once you have that much power in orbit, hooking up elements to create telecommunication gear is the very obvious first way in which you monetize that power in orbit. Just like Iceland probably thought of all sorts of things of what to do with all their power and they realize that the highest value is the use way to export electricity when you have an island in the middle of the ocean is aluminum smelting. But their critical observation is we have cheap power and then they got into the aluminum business. So useful to also think about that. Golden dome is in motion. We continue to have some big awards coming out. According to General Mike Gullin, Golden dome is real. It is no longer theoretical. We are underway. We are shovel ready and we're building it right now. It is reality in motion. Let's get some contracts, bro. I can't think of anything that can change a sentiment more quickly than a couple big dog contracts for Golden Dome. And so they're saying it's on schedule, on budget, completed initial classified architecture design, awarded contracts, site analysis and visits are underway. All right, giddy up. I hope we get some big contracts out of there. I have some real expectations that we will. But, you know, cooks can be cooks. And the Department of War has been investing a lot of money. And so we saw some really cool things this week about, I believe it was $140 million for a Department of War contract as part of a radar system. We'll see if that goes to us. I hope it does. And then we have gotten approval for using spectrum over the ocean, which again has some pretty obvious use cases for the military. So we shall see. A lot of us have some pretty high expectations of some near-term military awards. Maybe we'll get something on the rings call. But that's really conjecture on my part, not something I would really position around. But then we also go back to the competitive landscape. A nice article was out, a SpaceX phone question mark. Not if AT&T gets its way. SpaceX won't be an MVNO if AT&T has anything to do with it according to AT&T John Stanky. Oh, shots fired. What? Like common sense has entered the room. And so yeah, no shit. Like AT&T is not going to say, hey Wolf, would you like to sleep next to our nice cozy warm sheep? Just don't eat them. They're not that dumb. And so the MNOs are very clearly on guard about SpaceX. They know that they are an enemy. Whether they kind of wonder whether a STS might one day, grow into something that is too big to control is a totally different issue. But a STS isn't openly pursuing warfare against the MNOs. Like they are being carrier neutral. SpaceX is clearly going to do a phone. They need to do this to justify a $2 trillion valuation. And the MNOs are, they control the terrestrial spectrum. Which creates a very interesting dynamic, because it just brings into the issue of SpaceX just doesn't have enough spectrum to do anything that ambitious. Amazon does not have enough spectrum to do anything ambitious. ASTS does. In partnership with the MNO. So it's actually a very nice check in balance, which I'm sure the MNOs also appreciate. And then Sam Altman in the room, okay. You know, hey buddy, how you doing? You know, weirdo. And you know, it turns out Sam is still weird. But open AI is reportedly building a phone designed to replace the iPhone. Well, I can't wait to see that. But it just goes to show you AI, connectivity, hardware devices. They're all going to rely on spectrum. No one has figured out a replacement of spectrum. Now, wouldn't that be a big idea? But I don't know how that would work. And I don't think it will work. And so, spectrum is the critical path item of humanity. And it's about to intersect with some really big companies that have really big ambitions and the STS isn't the middle of that. I think it's a pretty good place to be. So that's what I remember myself with when I'm crashing out and supersad and posting you know somber memes on X for no reason. Then I remind myself put on my Iron Man helmet in Big Boy pants in realize oh Rome wasn't built in a day, stocks are volatile and this company's building out massively strategic infrastructure that intersects with the world's largest and most dynamic growing markets. It's going to be okay. And you know then I focus on other problems like why did I gain two pounds this week? You know like this is what you got to do to stay sane. And then we have to ask ourselves well if I'm focused on like why am I not making progress on my six back and I realize like oh perhaps it's because I eat like three pounds of sugar coated nuts. Then I ask myself well what is SpaceX focused on? Well again incentives drive outcomes as per Elon Musk himself. So what is Elon's incentive? 200 million super voting shares. I actually don't know the cap table of SpaceX. I don't know what that equates to but I am sure it is a lot of money. And he gets that if SpaceX hits a 7.5 trillion dollar valuation and establishes a permanent Mars colony with at least one million people. So it sounds like that's a joint double trigger condition which means that he's going to be focused on deporting among people to Mars. Like it's kind of interesting when you think about like so how does he intend to do this? I don't think I am going to live on a Mars colony. And so is this like in collaboration with ICE or like who are the Martians going to be? Is a very interesting question. Is there a surfable point break on Mars? Would like to know. And so he's got to figure out how to convince a million people to go to Mars and then actually figure out how to get a million people to Mars while doing that in a creative way because I don't know the business model of Mars. Are these people paying him all their money and that's going to be considered like ARR? Who knows? And so the SpaceX incentives are beyond my comprehension. But then the other thing that's interesting is he gets into the additional 60 million shares if SpaceX again hits certain valuation goals and operates data centers in space to living 100 terawatts of compute. Well I don't really see anything here talking about D to C or a phone. So incentives drive outcomes. What is King Elon going to be having his team do? Sounds like it's going to be abducting people and hiding them on Mars while somehow getting paid to do it in a value a creative way. Count me as very curious to see how this plays out. Is his focus going to be on D to C? I think again it's going to be AI data centers. That's where the cursor acquisition comes into play. You can see he's basically like, damn it, I have a lot of compute. People asking GROC to change women's outfits is probably not a scalable business model. I need to do something else. So he bought cursor, smart front end, a lot of demand for compute, back ended into GROC. Okay, I'm starting to see something make sense here. Leverage my SpaceX infrastructure for AI data centers. Okay, that makes sense to me. The Mars thing, I don't know, I mean cool, hope you were, oh, I hope it works, but I don't know the business model. But where, you know, people can only do so many things. Like where is the focus going to come on the D to C segment? We'll find out. But incentives drive outcomes and we don't see that incentive actually being set. We actually don't even see any incentives being set for start link at all. And interestingly, so then start link seems to be hitting a tam limit. They're cutting price. Well, it's not the end of the world, but it means you've exhausted the premium tier of users who will pay the current price. And so you expand your tam by dropping price. That's fine. The problem is when you have to drop your price for everyone, sort of like the reverse way in which a power grid works where the marginal unit of power that's dispatched sets the price for the entire curve. You know, Elon can discriminate by market and things like that and by plan. So you can try to get different people to pay different prices. That's fair game. But he's got to figure out a way to expand the market. At the same time, Zuck also wants to go to space. And so we have a article coming out and see what we have. Meta is also looking to power AI data centers with solar energy collected in space, taking a novel approach to meeting its insatiable demand for electricity. So we've got Elon with his key incentive being determined by AI data centers in space. We have Mark Zuckerberg now saying it. We have Google saying it and we have Amazon saying it and yet the bears are like this won't work. But the four or five most prominent companies with the wherewithal to actually understand this are all focused on it. Good to know because again, ASTS has an advantage with the most power on orbit. Makes the company very strategic, which again goes to then the infrastructure it's building to produce all of these satellites at scale. Yeah, I get it a little bit delayed. But once it's going, what a glorious moment that will be really neat. So now we have a couple of technical issues and we're almost up on the hour or two. It always kind of turns out to be an hour even though I would happily just go for whatever period of time is required. But we have the Russell rebalancing. So saw the usual suspects sharing this information and Payment and Cassie and they have something here. So Russell reconstitution provides an interesting technical event. And so I haven't done the math myself, but it looks like these AI is pretty good at this. So it looks like there might be 10 million shares of demand into the end of June. What's interesting about that is we've had that before. That happened last year and the stock was really ripping. But then Scott knew money and so Scott Delisky struck again. And frankly, like good for him. And that took all the wind out of the stock. But the stock was really pumping on the back of some good fundamentals, block one. And then you had this Russell rebalance that just kind of added some some gas to the fire. And that looks like it's set up to happen again. And so the stock is, you know, crushed on the 200 day moving average. Really terrible sentiment. We just had a failed satellite. So people, you know, bad fun, a mental event. Right is we're about to have a big technical rebalance. My belief we're going to get what we want on the batch shipments. It does seem like the stock is particularly coiled for something great. And unlike previous times, it does not look like a STS is in the market to go raise money on the back of any strength. They just did that other convert, never say never. But it sure looks like they really might be done with that, which then coincides to three tel infinity, which is, you know, my new little moniker for what we're about to have in terms of shipments. Could finally be the time where we sort of have sling shot it around orbit ready to go to the moon. And so that perfect confluence of events we've seen it before on what happens when we have these sort of traffic jams and his ampant man points out, we have almost 64 million share short all time high. The convert guys have been covering because they're on a lower delta. So you've had all time high shorting offsetting the mechanical covering by the convert guys. So a lot of people are piling in and it's going to be, you know, 12 new at the okay car out pretty soon. I'm always a little worried. I'm like, where are the shorts now? But historically the shorts really just pile on a negative momentum and they, you know, we kind of see what they're thinking because these expert calls when they just have these expert calls which are paying like 1200 bucks for and it's basically just like, so can they launch will they launch will SpaceX launch them? Why why would SpaceX launch them? There's no launch. Oh my god launch launch launch launch launch launch launch launch. And you you kind of realize that okay, they really don't have a good thesis here. It's just literally concerns about launch. And they convince their PM they go, you'll bro it. It's I'm like, work here. Elon has launchers and Elon has satellites. So Elon won't launch other people satellites because Elon has his own satellites, bra. And then Bezos he owns a book company and the book company is not launching satellites, bra. And so his launchers wait for it. His launchers are going to launch the book company's satellites, bra. So there's going to be no launchers in a state of satellite company only, bra. And he has launch contracts with launchers who have their own satellites, bra. And so they're not going to honor the contracts, bra and they're not going to have any launch. She shorted and they have. And we're about to find out if we're going to blast their balls off. And I hope that we do because at some level as I said earlier, I'm a wingnut and I get. Real psychic joy from watching shorts get their heads blown off So that I can make funny ex-posts about various losers wearing Patagonia vests having open to work profiles on LinkedIn that Is what I stand for Some shit posting with my boy Corey making fun of people wearing Patagonia vests with LinkedIn open to work profiles And so I hope to cover at 150 and we will all be able to say reform trader was right about everything with magical charts With unicorns and triangles and I think he's gonna be right And it's gonna be awesome. So with that I missed what appeared to be a pretty cool hockey game but I'll get over it and There's some stuff that came out over the weekend with some cool D.D. People were publishing And so I'll get to that and I'll update the D.D. doc too and I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and thank you very much for joining and just remember when I'm like Crazy postings scary stuff it like I'm actually just like laughing so just also don't Break out actually just ignore me. That's really the best thing is if it's not actually due diligence that I will always present that serious Literally ignore everything else I post and you will live a happy fruitful successful life. Have a great night. Bye Thanks for listening to the AST space merver podcast if you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast Please share it with others post about it on social media or leave a rating and review to catch all the latest news about AST space model make sure to subscribe thanks again and I'll see you next time Something very very Connecting with this technology we can really affect the glass a space mobile in the only company that have You