Limitless: An AI Podcast

Josh:
I got a quick geography lesson for you. 90% of the Earth's surface has no reliable cell coverage.

Josh:
Oceans, mountains, deserts, jungle, the things that cover most of the planet, they're all dead zones.

Josh:
In fact, even places that aren't dead zones, like driving, we're in New York,

Josh:
driving through upstate New York, there is frequent times in which I just completely

Josh:
lose cell connection and am offline for better or for worse.

Josh:
But SpaceX has come along and decided that those days are over.

Josh:
The day of the dead zone is a day of the past.

Josh:
It's just we will never have dead zones again because last week they rebranded

Josh:
their satellite's phone service as Starlink Mobile and announced a second generation

Josh:
of these satellites that deliver 100 times the data capacity of what's already

Josh:
up there today with no dish, no special hardware.

Josh:
It works with your current iPhone at up to 150 megabits per second from space.

Josh:
That's enough to stream 4K Netflix video. That's enough to watch anything on

Josh:
YouTube, FaceTime with your friends. So this is a pretty compelling product

Josh:
that they're launching, which might come as a threat to a lot of the cellular

Josh:
providers that we use today, like Verizon, AT&T, and even T-Mobile.

Josh:
This is going to be a pretty big deal.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I've got to be honest. I started off as a hater towards Starlink because

Ejaaz:
I was kind of like, okay, cool. We get additional phone coverage.

Ejaaz:
Who cares? Like, I'm not going to be in the mountains like for 99% of the time during the year.

Ejaaz:
But I really saw the use of Starlink come to life during the LA wildfires.

Ejaaz:
This was a major catastrophe event where a lot of LA was on fire and a lot of

Ejaaz:
cellular the towers were down.

Ejaaz:
So you had like millions of people that had no access to data or basic phone

Ejaaz:
services that could call for loved ones or emergency services.

Ejaaz:
And Starlink just kind of dropped in and they beamed, I think,

Ejaaz:
150 emergency messages in the space of like 48 hours, which helped so many people

Ejaaz:
communicate and deal with the fires to around 4.4 million people.

Ejaaz:
So this is really necessary technology. And I guess like the way that they're

Ejaaz:
scanning this is like pretty cool now.

Josh:
Yeah. So let's talk about what Starlink is right now, because as it is, it currently exists.

Josh:
In fact, there's 10 million users of it right now. So SpaceX launched this direct-to-cell

Josh:
satellite service back in January of 2024, just two years ago.

Josh:
And the first ones went up pretty quietly, but within days, their engineers

Josh:
were actually demonstrating texts from unmodified phones.

Josh:
It was the first time that an unmodified cell phone could actually send texts,

Josh:
video calls, and then actually FaceTime and watch videos in real time.

Josh:
It was slow, but now there's 650 direct-to-cell satellites that are in orbit,

Josh:
which is a tiny fraction of their 10,000 total satellites that are in orbit.

Josh:
But it's still the world's largest provider of 4G coverage because it reaches

Josh:
10 million users, over 32 countries and six continents.

Josh:
No one has that reach that Starlink has. In the U.S., you've probably heard

Josh:
of this through T-Mobile. They have T-Satellite, which is their branded version.

Josh:
And that's the $10 a month add-on that allows you to access this today.

Josh:
So currently, it does SMS, picture messaging, location sharing.

Josh:
It works with WhatsApp, Google Maps, AccuWeather.

Josh:
And your phone automatically switches over to satellite service if you lose service.

Josh:
But it doesn't have the bandwidth that this new version is going to have.

Josh:
And that's the big difference maker is the bandwidth is really going to unlock

Josh:
a lot of new use cases for this.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. Speaking of because I was questioning why T-Mobile can't do the same thing.

Ejaaz:
And the truth is they just don't have the infrastructure or scale to be able

Ejaaz:
to upgrade the technology at all.

Ejaaz:
You mentioned that they have access to Starlink through that package.

Ejaaz:
They currently have 120 million users, but they only cover around 80% of the US.

Ejaaz:
Starlink covers literally the

Ejaaz:
rest of that already with the 650 satellites that you already mentioned.

Ejaaz:
So although Starlink is kind of behind right now, you mentioned it's just like

Ejaaz:
a fraction of the total like 10,000 satellites that they have in orbit right now.

Ejaaz:
I think they could catch up really frigging fast because they also have access

Ejaaz:
to the space shuttle as well.

Josh:
Yeah, and if you look at this chart, I mean, the growth is about as perfect

Josh:
of an exponential as it gets.

Josh:
They just crossed 10 million after crossing 8 million the month before.

Josh:
After crossing 7 million and starting at zero just six years ago.

Josh:
So Starlink adoption is up big time. And maybe we could talk about what actually

Josh:
makes this new mobile version 2 so much better.

Josh:
And one of the things that I'm going to share, I had Claude make this for me,

Josh:
so forgive me if it's a little messy, but this is the difference between these

Josh:
version 2 satellites and the version 1 satellites.

Josh:
What we're seeing here in this traditional geo orbit thing, these orange lines,

Josh:
this is what it used to look like.

Josh:
So it's basically like shining a giant spotlight down on Earth.

Josh:
And the spotlight has to serve a lot of customers at once. What we're seeing

Josh:
in this other part, which is the Starlink V2, it's in low Earth orbit.

Josh:
So you'll notice that the traditional geosynchronous orbit, 35,000 kilometers high.

Josh:
This new one is only 550 kilometers high. It's much lower. And it uses these

Josh:
thousands of spot beams.

Josh:
So instead of one giant flashlight, it's using spotlights to point at all of

Josh:
the users on the ground. And because it's so much lower, the latency is better.

Josh:
The bandwidth is better. It's much faster to connect these satellites.

Josh:
And the result is that it delivers a 20 times throughput on versus current models of starlink v1 so

Josh:
This is 16 times more beams per satellite. The face-oriented antennas are five

Josh:
times larger than the current ones, and it's 100 times the data density of version one.

Josh:
So it's this gigantic exponential improvement in terms of bandwidth and what

Josh:
people are actually going to be able to use this service for.

Ejaaz:
I do want to level set for everyone listening what that bandwidth means.

Ejaaz:
So it's coming in at around 150 megabits per second, which is really good internet.

Ejaaz:
Like no one is going to complain about that. But compared to like the average

Ejaaz:
in the US, which is, I think, around 220 megabytes to 250.

Ejaaz:
It's not lightning fast, but it's good enough. And the fact is,

Ejaaz:
like, billions of people all around the world will get access to this no matter

Ejaaz:
how remote they are, which is awesome.

Ejaaz:
The other thing I find friggin' awesome is they built their own custom silicon

Ejaaz:
chip for these satellites.

Ejaaz:
And the media company that I thought of is Apple. Apple's done that entire thing

Ejaaz:
for all of their cellular phones, and it's given them the ability to operate

Ejaaz:
or own the entire stack of that technology.

Ejaaz:
So Apple knows what its chips are capable of. So it knows what kind of products,

Ejaaz:
apps, or software they can run.

Ejaaz:
That's why they have the best phones, in my opinion, in the world.

Ejaaz:
Elon's doing the same thing that Apple did to phones, two satellites right now.

Ejaaz:
He owns the Starships, he owns the satellites, and now he'll own the hardware

Ejaaz:
that builds on or that is composed of those satellites as well. It's just really cool.

Josh:
And not only does he own the hardware, he owns the Spectrum.

Josh:
And we recorded an episode about this.

Josh:
Last year because it was this like quiet news event that kind of went under

Josh:
the radar but what they bought is a chunk of spectrum and that spectrum enables

Josh:
them to handle and essentially take the job of these cellular providers because

Josh:
the way this works is there's a global spectrum there's a global like bandwidth of spectrum.

Josh:
Customers or companies own so verizon owns some t-mobile owns

Josh:
some starlink bought a chunk of this and it's limited by the fcc

Josh:
you can only own a specific bandwidth because that's how you

Josh:
connect to these cell phones with spacex buying

Josh:
it they bought what is it 50 megahertz of exclusive s-band spectrum

Josh:
um for 17 billion dollars the deal closed for

Josh:
this was not a small acquisition by any means but what it does

Josh:
is it enables them to act as a standalone carrier

Josh:
and i think this is a really important point because forever they've

Josh:
been they've had to partner with t-mobile they've had to partner with international

Josh:
suppliers to distribute this and with

Josh:
this new bandwidth that they have they can actually create their own cellular provider

Josh:
service and i'm not sure who's not going to want to subscribe to a

Josh:
starlink mobile plan if it is as fast as everything else

Josh:
with no dead zones it just seems like they have such an advantage over everyone else

Josh:
so in summary spacex mobile v2 has some

Josh:
pretty awesome things going on let's just recap this quickly so it's

Josh:
available on 40 plus apps and 100 plus devices this service

Josh:
will offer video calls streaming emails it's available in

Josh:
32 countries covering 1.7 billion people the

Josh:
next generation of starlink mobile satellites version 2 delivers full cell

Josh:
coverage to places never thought possible via the highest performing

Josh:
satellite to mobile network ever built is their quote basically anywhere in

Josh:
the world there's not gonna be a single dead zone with this new network uh the

Josh:
v2 starlink mobile satellites also use the custom designed silicon just like

Josh:
apple did and these satellites will support thousands of beams using phased

Josh:
array antennas versus the traditional,

Josh:
which is a kind of spotlight that is low bandwidth.

Josh:
And then version two enables full 5G cellular connectivity compared to the current

Josh:
terrestrial services, which are only available on the ground. And that's lame.

Josh:
That does not include space exploration. That does not include beaming satellite lasers down.

Ejaaz:
You know, it's hilarious that you're talking about satellites and beaming lasers

Ejaaz:
to Earth, but that's not even the craziest part of this entire technology that's enabling this.

Ejaaz:
We've got an entire new spaceship that's coming out, right? Like,

Ejaaz:
how does this help us achieve what Starlink's trying to do with V2 here?

Josh:
Yeah, so in order to launch these new satellites into orbit,

Josh:
you need a much larger rocket ship.

Josh:
I mean, each one of these Starlink satellites will weigh 2,000 kilograms,

Josh:
and they're spanning 33 feet long.

Josh:
And Starship is going to put 50 of these into orbit at once.

Josh:
So currently, the way that you get these satellites into space is putting them

Josh:
on a Falcon rocket. There's Falcon 9, there's Falcon Heavy.

Josh:
There's only a limited amount of cabin space in there. that unfortunately doesn't

Josh:
fit these new gigantic satellites that are required in order to enable this

Josh:
Starlink V2 service. So Starship is necessary.

Josh:
The problem is that Starship is not working quite yet.

Josh:
The Starship program has been in the works for many years.

Josh:
They've been doing many test flights with varying degrees of success and failure,

Josh:
but it's still not ready.

Josh:
So what they're guiding towards now is 2027 next year for the actual launch and distribution.

Josh:
You got to wait a whole year for this Mobile 2. Not for the current version.

Josh:
So the current version works with existing cell phones, existing hardware.

Josh:
Because there's also something separate that needs to happen,

Josh:
which is a new chip architecture for the cell phones that we use.

Josh:
So in order to get 5G beamed down from these new Starlink V2 satellites,

Josh:
Qualcomm actually is making a chip that works direct to cell.

Josh:
So it's rumored to be included in the next iPhone 18.

Josh:
It's rumored to be included in the new Samsung Galaxy phones.

Josh:
All of the new phones coming out at the end of this year, next year,

Josh:
they're going to be equipped with the hardware to enable this.

Josh:
So there's the convergence of SpaceX Starship actually working,

Josh:
and then the cell providers getting on board with this new network architecture

Josh:
so that your cell phone can work without any additional chips inside of it,

Josh:
without any additional hardware or satellite dishes or anything.

Josh:
It'll just work the same way that Verizon or AT&T does.

Ejaaz:
Going back to the math, you said that each new Starship would be able to launch

Ejaaz:
50 satellites. Is that correct?

Josh:
Yes, about 50 of these.

Ejaaz:
About 50. Okay, so then I think the idea is you need around 1,200,

Ejaaz:
this is from Starlink themselves, 1,200 satellites of these new satellites up

Ejaaz:
there for us to be able to have global continuous coverage.

Ejaaz:
So that's like what? That's like 24 launches?

Ejaaz:
So like that doesn't seem like much. Like we could probably pull this off in

Ejaaz:
like a year once these starships are actually mobile, right?

Josh:
Yeah, it seems like this will go fairly quick. They're gonna be able to launch

Josh:
50 of these Starlink satellites per flight.

Josh:
And yeah, once they deploy those 1200 satellites, they're good.

Josh:
So it sounds like they're targeting six months from the time they launched the

Josh:
first one to the time that the network will be complete, which is fairly short.

Josh:
So with this guidance, it's mid-2027. It's looking like there will be complete and total coverage.

Josh:
And the V2 Starlight Constellation caps at 15,000 satellites.

Josh:
So 1,200 will be sufficient.

Josh:
15,000 will be fully saturated. And that probably takes a few years to get to.

Josh:
But man, that ramp up is going to be quick. And it's going to be available to

Josh:
everyone pretty quickly.

Ejaaz:
Well, the other thing as well is I don't think there's any competitor to this,

Josh:
Right?

Ejaaz:
Isn't it just Elon versus Elon at this point? I was framing it in my head like

Ejaaz:
They need Starship for this to work, but also Starlink doesn't exist or no other

Ejaaz:
competitor exists unless you have Starship.

Ejaaz:
Like you need the vessel to get into space.

Ejaaz:
And the cheapest and most performant way to do that is Elon Musk's SpaceX company,

Ejaaz:
which now owns the AI company and all these other things.

Ejaaz:
So it really is just a monopoly that is about to emerge.

Ejaaz:
And Elon's at the forefront of all of it. That's that's pretty cool.

Josh:
Absolutely right. I mean, Blue Origin is trying. There are other satellite companies

Josh:
that are trying, but no one is going to be able to get what Starship can do.

Josh:
I mean, they're at least five years behind at most, maybe 10, 15.

Josh:
I mean, the space is really hard and even Starship doesn't work yet.

Josh:
So they have to break this like novel problem set just in order to get these satellites into space.

Josh:
And everyone else is so far behind. But what enables them to do this is this

Josh:
flywheel that they have, the revenue flywheel, where Starlink,

Josh:
the residential service that has been powering people's Wi-Fi across the country,

Josh:
that's generating a lot of revenue, too. I mean, they have 10 million users now.

Josh:
So that enables Starlink V2. Starlink V2 generates additional revenue.

Josh:
And then that creates this unbelievable

Josh:
market flywheel for SpaceX to continue to grow the market cap.

Ejaaz:
Oh, so they put the revenue from that into Starship.

Josh:
That's how it's funding the Starship program. Exactly. But it seems like they

Josh:
might need even more money than that because there are rumors on the street

Josh:
that they are going to IPO soon.

Josh:
And thanks to our friends over at Polymarket, we have the exact odds of when

Josh:
they're going to go public this year.

Josh:
It seems like it's a near certainty. there's an 88% chance that they go public

Josh:
before December 31st, 81% chance that it's by September 30th,

Josh:
and a 62% chance by June 30th.

Josh:
So it seems like the probable window is sometime middle to late of this year.

Josh:
I've heard rumors that it's coming sooner. People want to come sooner,

Josh:
but it seems like Polymarket disagrees. But it seems like we're getting a SpaceX IPO this year. How,

Josh:
There's another Polymarket for that, which shows that it's going to be almost

Josh:
guaranteed over a trillion bucks.

Josh:
Like $1 trillion plus is $92%. Yeah, so there's a 92% chance this goes over a trillion.

Josh:
It seems like it is going to be IPO-ing, I mean, well above a trillion,

Josh:
probably between 1.5 to 1.75 is what the rumors are saying.

Josh:
Polymarket confirms. Thank you again, Polymarket, so much for sponsoring this

Josh:
section of the episode. And I mean, again, SpaceX is just like this unbelievable

Josh:
company that is seemingly coming for everyone. And they're threatening a lot

Josh:
of companies along the way.

Josh:
These traditional cell providers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile,

Josh:
they have a serious problem on their hands.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, the T-Mobile thing is an interesting one because right now,

Ejaaz:
like my phone runs on T-Mobile.

Ejaaz:
They're the dominant provider in the US at least. But I feel like it's a ticking time bomb for them.

Ejaaz:
Like they have this exclusive partnership with SpaceX, right?

Ejaaz:
You pay an extra 10 bucks, you get access to the satellites,

Ejaaz:
but that's only for one year.

Ejaaz:
So I can imagine that other broadband providers or telecom providers like AT&T

Ejaaz:
and stuff are going to try and outbid them, but they're outbidding the guy that's

Ejaaz:
going to eventually replace them.

Ejaaz:
So like, I don't really understand how the economics of this work.

Ejaaz:
Are they just kind of buying an extra lifeline whilst they figure out their

Ejaaz:
own satellite deployment, but then they need to rebuild an entire space company

Ejaaz:
to be able to launch that on.

Ejaaz:
So I don't understand how AT&T

Ejaaz:
and all these other telecom providers survive. Am I missing something?

Josh:
Well, there's a lot of strain on these networks.

Josh:
Like there's a lot of people who demand a lot of data and starlink is not

Josh:
going to be able to subsidize all of that so there will still be

Josh:
the need for these ground-based coverages that work in particular for higher

Josh:
density areas that need a lot of bandwidth so you'll notice one of the newer

Josh:
things is 5g uwb ultra wideband and that is the super high power bandwidth that

Josh:
gives you up to like a gigabit per second of internet in fact it's so good it's

Josh:
replacing some of the wi-fi,

Josh:
setups that people have in their homes because it's very high powered their

Josh:
local cell towers That is a unique advantage to ground-based infrastructure.

Josh:
It has much lower latency. It has much greater bandwidth. But if you are not

Josh:
contingent on needing infrastructure,

Josh:
a terabit per second, and you value this additional coverage anywhere in the

Josh:
world, then Starlink is probably for you.

Josh:
And we've seen this with the dishes that they have with the Starlink residential

Josh:
plans. People take it on road trips, people take it camping.

Josh:
If you live on a farm somewhere, you don't have connection. It's better than

Josh:
most of the options that we have today, but it's just going to apply to the phone.

Josh:
So while it might not replace these cell companies entirely,

Josh:
it certainly will start to displace some of their customers if they don't partner

Josh:
with them like T-Mobile is doing.

Ejaaz:
Wait, Josh, I think I have a answer to my own question,

Josh:
Which is what do you got?

Ejaaz:
Well, like I was thinking about like Starlink having coverage for anywhere in the world, right?

Ejaaz:
Including really rural remote areas where there's not that many people.

Ejaaz:
So why would that be useful? Like who are the people and customers that are

Ejaaz:
going to be paying for that? And then I realized it's probably not going to be people.

Ejaaz:
It's going to be like autonomous vehicles or farming infrastructure or any device

Ejaaz:
that requires the internet that can extract or observe data and feed it back

Ejaaz:
into a system that might be AI, for example,

Ejaaz:
would be inherently useful for these satellites, for this internet connectivity.

Ejaaz:
Sorry, I just had like a mind blown experience whilst realizing this.

Ejaaz:
I was like, oh, it's not just for humans. It's for any and every detection or

Ejaaz:
device system that's out there. And you can place that remotely on the beacon

Ejaaz:
or the top of a mountain or somewhere completely icy and remote.

Ejaaz:
Like the world's your oyster there.

Josh:
This is a really important point for the Internet of Things.

Josh:
As we start to deploy a lot more hardware that's using AI models,

Josh:
that's using, you know, inference or reasoning models, there is going to be

Josh:
a benefit to having it online.

Josh:
And a lot of places in which these things happen are rural.

Josh:
They don't have a lot of infrastructure. and giving it that cellular connectivity,

Josh:
it's going to be a pretty big deal because traditionally in order to do this,

Josh:
you need a big satellite.

Josh:
Now it's compressed down to the size of a small little iPhone chip.

Josh:
I mean, you could put that on anything and that really enables a lot of the world.

Josh:
And when you think about the world broadly, three to 4 billion people on earth

Josh:
have no reliable internet connection.

Josh:
Like they just cannot access the internet. And in a world in which it's so connected

Josh:
and that has so much value, there is such a huge untapped market available for Starlink.

Josh:
And what we're seeing is they've, they frequently make it free in

Josh:
places of chaos or places that are

Josh:
having issues because they want to help out the people but i'm sure

Josh:
there will be subsidized plans for even lower income countries or

Josh:
areas where they can really bring the whole world online and

Josh:
it's this incredibly powerful technology that is here and it's growing exponentially

Josh:
and with this starlink or with the starship v3 launches it's going to start

Josh:
to be deployed in the real world and by this time next year there's a good chance

Josh:
that these v2 satellites are going to be very close to launching and by the

Josh:
end of next year, we'll have a full network of them.

Ejaaz:
It's hard to wrap my head around all of this being owned by one single company.

Ejaaz:
SpaceX owns the Starships. They own the satellites.

Ejaaz:
They own the AI. They own the distribution layer through the social media company.

Ejaaz:
And I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other companies embedded within that and projects within that.

Ejaaz:
This IPO is going well over one trillion, dude. I'm going to bet like 1.5 to 1.7 probably closes.

Josh:
That seems like a good bet.

Ejaaz:
If it launches mid-year, I'm guessing it's going to be over two trillion by

Ejaaz:
the end of the year. This might be bull market speaking, but that's my bet.

Josh:
So are you a buyer of SpaceX? Are you interested in joining the IPA?

Ejaaz:
But I can go further than that. I'll be a buyer and a holder.

Ejaaz:
Like, I don't care what the price does.

Ejaaz:
Like, this company is a once-in-a-lifetime generational company,

Ejaaz:
probably literally out of this world.

Ejaaz:
So I'm going to hold and bet on Elon for this one.

Josh:
Yeah, you and me both. I'm in it. This is going to be really exciting.

Josh:
I will be holding my SpaceX shares for an eternity.

Josh:
And I'm just, like, admiring from afar and from hopefully close up of all these

Josh:
amazing things they're doing,

Josh:
how they're changing the world and how it's just uniquely positioned in a

Josh:
way that no other company can do they've been building this for so long

Josh:
and they have such a far head start and they're just continuing to

Josh:
put their foot on the gas and crush it so that is the starlink update that is

Josh:
the cool new technology that is coming to a cell phone near you the days of

Josh:
dead zones are over and i cannot personally wait because i go hiking a lot i

Josh:
love being out in the middle of nowhere and i never have connection and some people value that but.

Ejaaz:
When you don't those instagrams

Josh:
When it's emergence is yes someone's got to post the pictures come on

Josh:
now um or perhaps you just want to like you know reach out to someone or find

Josh:
a map so you don't get lost or don't get hurt there's a lot of help yeah there's

Josh:
a lot of use cases across the board regardless of whether you want to be connected

Josh:
to the internet or not it is valuable having that option and that's what spacex

Josh:
enables and that's what starlink is going to do and it's just this unbelievably impressive project,

Josh:
From Elon and co. And yeah, it's just been awesome. So hope you enjoyed this

Josh:
episode. Any final thoughts before we leave?

Ejaaz:
No, it's been awesome. Thank you, folks, for listening. There are thousands,

Ejaaz:
literally thousands of new listeners to the show. So welcome.

Ejaaz:
We are finding you and seeing your comments across X, across YouTube,

Ejaaz:
and across all other publications that we have on newsletter as well.

Ejaaz:
You guys are extremely active and we appreciate it. If you enjoyed this episode, give us a thumbs up.

Ejaaz:
If you're not subscribed, please subscribe. It helps us massively. turn on

Ejaaz:
notifications if you're feeling particularly generous if you're listening to

Ejaaz:
this on a platform like Spotify or Apple

Ejaaz:
Music give us a thumbs up give us a rating it helps us out massively we just

Ejaaz:
had an awesome episode come out around uploading a human brain onto an AI chip

Ejaaz:
and getting it to play a computer game as well as uploading a fly brain go check

Ejaaz:
that out none of what I just said is unreal it is literally it happened go check it out

Ejaaz:
and yeah that's it we'll see you guys on the next one

Josh:
Awesome thanks for watching see ya.