The Best One Yet - 🌋 “B-day” — El Salvador’s Bitcoin Day. Callaway Golf’s comeback. Entergy’s buried treasure.

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Happy B-Day to El Salvador, which just made Bitcoin legal tender… so we’re looking at how it went down (spoiler: lava). Callaway Golf shockingly claims its sales are about to double, but the real reason is a White claw and a 7-iron. And just after Hurricane Ida crushed a record number of power polls, Entergy Corp is facing a Shakespearean question: To bury, or not to bury.$BTC $ELY $ETRGot a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYorkWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9Got a SnackFact for the pod? We got a form for that too:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe64VKtvMNDPGSncHDRF07W34cPMDO3N8Y4DpmNP_kweC58tw/viewformLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily. It is Wednesday, September 8. The Dow dropped 260 points yesterday. Today's Pothos is the best one, yeah. Honestly, this one's right. Yeah, this one's really good.

No correlation between the stock market and this podcast. We do the inverse. Jack, what's the first story today? Happy B-Day Snackers. B-Dick-Dick. Bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador yesterday. Here's what Jack and I are thinking. It's just one petri dish in the global crypto experiment. For our second story, Callaway Golf.

just said its golf sales are about to double in the third quarter. Excuse me, Jack, can you repeat that? They're doubling? They're doubling. They're doubling. Snackers, it's not because you're working from the 7th T-box, different thing. Just tap it in. Tap-tap, tap-tap-o-tap-o-tap.

Third story, what do we got? One week after Hurricane Ida ripped down Entergy's power lines in Louisiana, there's one question. One question, Snackers, here it is, Shakespearean, to bury the power or not to bury it. But Snackers, before we hit those three great stories. Wonderful. mix today, Jack. I actually, I really love this mix. It's the end of the summer. So we got a cure for your end of summer blues. Yeah, here's what you do, Snackers. You start planning your next thing, your next trip. Yeah. It helps your psyche get like excited again. Yeah, Jack and I got you covered here because

Snacker, Srinny Sank car over in Boston went on an Airbnb dive, found this Airbnb gem sent it our way. He was planning his next trip and he discovered you can rent out the last remaining brick and mortars blockbuster video store ever. That's right. The movie rental chain was killed by Netflix revived by Airbnb apparently. Turns out you can watch the last samurai at the last Blockbuster. Jack, this isn't just like a sleepover at Blockbuster. This is a time machine. That's right. A typical Airbnb offers clean towels of dishwasher and tiny bottles of shampoo for your stack. Jack, this one, it's got VHS tapes and a closet full of Doritos, Ranchos. That's right. You book the room on your phone, with a tapier phone like it's 2021.

But you're living like it's 1996. One sec, honey, can you get me the Blu-ray to sleepless in Seattle? Snackers, this blockbuster that still exists is in Bend, Oregon. And you can roam the aisles for hours with like whoever you're staying there with to finally pick a movie. Jack, two hours later, you can finally start, I know what you did last summer. Only two hours. Freddie Prince Jr. Classic.

Classic. So you can book out the whole blockbuster video store. Not because it's like part of the whole Blockbuster Airbnb package. Yeah, Blockbuster, it's actually still open. There's just never any customers. You can book out the whole store because there are no customers. Summer's over Snackers. It's time to plan your next trip.

Be kind. Rewind. Let's hit our three stories. Let's hear you. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something illegal out the way. The snacks about to hear rain food is air candy. They don't reflect the views of the robberhood family.

It's all informational just so. You know, we're not recommending any. securities. Nope. It's not a research report or investment advice. Not an offer or sale of a security. Right. Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robberhood Financial, LLC, member FINRA slash SIPC. For our first story, happy B-day Jack. Happy B-day, too. Yeah. El Salvador began accepting Bitcoin as a legal tender yesterday. There we go. It's one of the many crypto experiments that's happening across the globe. That's the way we're seeing it. Snackers, you heard. heard on this podcast first in June just a few months ago.

Remember it well, Jack. El Salvador announced that Bitcoin would be legal tender. I think we recorded that one together in New York in person. Remember that? Oh, yeah. We had the sweet green, the different sweet green orders, and I went on the menu. You went on the menu. Now, El Salvador doesn't have their own currency.

They just use the U.S. dollar, but now they will also accept Bitcoin. Interesting, although Al Salvador also has fewer people than New York City. Where we recorded this pod. And they announced this with like literally only three details at the time. All right. Rule number one, they announced in June, every business in the country must accept Bitcoin for the business that they do. A single Papusa, you can pay for that with a fraction of a Bitcoin. Rule number two, the government will accept Bitcoin to pay your taxes. And then, Jack, rule number three, kind of a little bonus cherry on top situation here.

Citizens will not have to pay any capital gains taxes if they own Bitcoin and their Bitcoin goes to the moon. Well, yesterday, Bitt Salvador went live and we got a whole bunch more details and how they're pulling this thing off. All right. First, the central bank wanted to make a PR splash and lead by example. So they bought $21 million of Bitcoin, the central bank did. I mean, El Salvador, it's a Tuesday. Treat yourself.

There you go. And then they set up a bunch of Bitcoin ATMs all across the country to get the populace excited. And then to like really get things going with like Bitcoin in El Salvador, they launched a brand new wallet app for Bitcoin. It's called Chiva, which is slang in Spanish down in El Salvador for cool. Very nice. And with this app, typical El Salvadorians can conduct business in Bitcoin. Yeah, every single Salvadorian got $30 worth of Bitcoin. We got like an Oprah situation here in the app, right? Right there waiting for you. All right. So you're wondering, how did everything go on day number one? Was it good, Jack? Was it bad? What kind of a Tuesday was it? A little bit of both. First, the PR was

definitely good. El Salvador became a rock star among crypto enthusiasts. That's all you got, Jack. That's all you got. Yeah, actually, we jumped in snack style. It actually turns out that El Salvador got a record number of social media mentions for the country in just the past year. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the good, but then there was some bad yesterday. Yeah. Then the app, they tried to roll out to the entire country, glitched hard, and people couldn't download it. The servers were down. The president had to announce on Twitter that the servers were down. Yeah, sometimes El Salvador, you got to try it.

You got to unplug it and then plug it back in again. Okay, then there was some fun elements here, like President Buckele. Yeah. He said he wants to use El Salvador's natural resources to power Bitcoin mining. What natural resources next? Jack, I'm looking, it kind of looks like a volcano. It looks like a volcano. He wants to use the geothermal energy from El Salvador's volcanoes.

True story. To power Bitcoin mining with renewable liquid hot magma energy. Okay, so ipso facto, more lava, more coin. But the 40-year-old president is also kind of authoritarian. He is, he did fire the Constitutional Supreme Court in that country and probably sees this whole Bitcoin thing as a convenient distraction. Okay, so fun stuff with the lava, less fun stuff with the authoritarian stuff. All right, let's go to the finances. This is like on paper the reason they're doing this.

A whopping 25% of El Salvador's GDP is remittances. It's El Salvadorans living abroad, sending money back home. And there's big fees for those. With Bitcoin, those fees could be avoided. Okay, so that's a positive with Bitcoin. But then they kind of had a negative financial thing with Bitcoin. The International Monetary Fund downgraded El Salvador's credit rating on this news because they're worried that the whole country is invested in Bitcoin, which is a volatile cryptocurrency. So B-Day, Bitcoin Day, was a lot of fun for a lot of people. But not fun for some people. Because Bitcoin's price fell 10%. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in El Salvador with Bitcoin?

Different country, different crypto experiment. Snackers, we're going to go full on Carmen San Diego on this thing. Every country right now, it seems, is running a different cryptocurrency or digital currency experiment. Jack, let's whip out the whiteboard. We've been keeping track of this. India, India is on one end of the Bitcoin experiment spectrum. That country is considering banning cryptocurrency nationally. Okay, so let's go to the other.

of the Bitcoin spectrum, Jack. What about the Bahamas? The Bahamas is launching their own adorable cryptocurrency called the Sand Dollar, which is just for this adorable island nation. Waiter, I'll take two. China, much bigger than the Bahamas, is in the middle of these two. Yeah, they're in the middle. In China, they've banned mining of cryptocurrencies, but they've launched their own digital coin. The central party would prefer you use the digital yuan than the Bitcoin that they can't control. And then, of course, Jack, you've got Facebook, which is like kind of of its own country, which is zucking all of this. Yes. Mark Zuckerberg is aggressively lobby in Congress right now for their own digital currency,

which they've renamed Novi. So Snackers, the way Jack and I see this, the world has become a lab of crypto experimenting in petri dishes. TBD on the lab results. For our second story, throw on your slamming salmon sweater, Callaway Golf, just down 4%. Because it said its sales are going to double this year. That's weird. Doubling sales is huge.

Yeah. But for Callaway, it is not natural. Also, we cannot make this up. Jack, the honors? No, they're yours, man. You found this. Okay. I mean, honestly, the CEO of a golf company, Callaway Golf, his name is Chip.

That's the guy's name. Chipr. Instant classic. Instant. Now, like most golfers, Calloway is approaching Middle Ages. Yeah, it is. It is $5 million company turning 40 years old. Jack, I think we call this the.

pleaded khaki phase of life. That's where it's going. And they just gave us an update that they expect the third quarter, which ends in September, to be fantastic. They're so excited. They're like putting the test up on the fridge before mom even knows what the score was. Here's the historical context. In 2019, pre-pandemic, Callaway Golf made 430 million in sales in the third quarter. Okay. Then in 2020, a year later, they made a little bit more than that. They made 480 million in third quarter sales. In this year's third quarter, they expect 850 million in sales. I'm sorry, I have to sit down, stand up and sit back down again. Talk about a hole in one.

That is doubling of sales in one year, and it's kind of... We had to jump in snacks now to this. We assumed Callaway is cheated. I mean, what's got... Can we do a urine test in aisle six on these guys? Callaway hit the ball out of bounds, but quietly dropped the ball in the rough when Nolmes looked. I mean, Jack, you don't go from John Daly to Rory McElroy in one year. It just doesn't happen.

Well, we actually jumped in snacks down to figure this out. 11 months ago, Callaway acquired Top Golf for $2 billion. And we think that's related to this headline. Yeah, we do. It's the equipment maker, Callaway, buying an experience maker, Top Golf. And if you've never top golfed, you should know it's the Dave and Busters of the driving range. Have you been to Top Golf, by the way? I have not, but my wife's cousin's husband has and tells me all about it.

So you're making this up on the pot. I can't believe you're doing this. We're pulling this out. It's here set. It's full hearset. I haven't been either, but like it seems you don't, you know, you go to a golf course to make deals. You go to Top Golf to do dating. Okay.

At Top Golf, you're not schlepping a heavy golf bag on your shoulders for 18 holes, 7,000 yards. No, no, no. This is what you're doing. You're basically going to hit a driver with a white claw on your left hand because you're at an outdoor arcade. All right. So back to the third quarter. How is Callaway doubling revenue? Jack, it's doubling revenues because top golf.

That's how it's doubling revenues. Two stroke penalty. So what's the takeaway for our buddies over Callaway? Growth is a story. Yeah. Make sure you know who the hero is. Snackers, for the first time this year, Callaway Golf's revenues included top golf's revenues.

Last year's numbers didn't. Right. So when you see that revenues doubled, it's not that Calloway is just organically selling more clubs or more golf balls. It's not organic growth. This is acquired growth from sales of the new driving ranges of Top Golf. It just acquired. They bought Top Golf, which represents a full 35% of Calloway's revenues.

That's huge. That's why growth looks so explosive. And Wall Street knows this. And they know that that acquired growth wasn't free either. Wasn't cheap either, Jack. It cost $2 billion. And that is why Callaway Golf stock is actually down in the past three months, despite headlines showing like doubling of revenues and everyone in their cousin like Jack's

friend's nephew's cousin's sister golfing these days. Calloway's core business isn't the hero of this growth. No, no, no, no. Top golf is. And Calaway paid $2 billion for that hero. For our third and final story, Jack, you look like a man who slept last night with his feet up against the wall to relaxes like muscles. I hope a lot of snackers have tried that out.

I think it's a great method. I mean, I just would be curious to see some pictures. It's a great stretch and I think there's some sort of endorphins that are going on. Wall's not going to complain anytime soon. Snackers, third story. Nine days after Hurricane Ida walloped Louisiana, half a million customers still don't have power. It's a sad story. An energy must decide to bury or not to bury. Existential question.

But before we jump into that, Jack, we like, I don't think we rarely do this, but this story kind of starts off with a snack fact. Hurricane Ida destroyed 30,679 of those poles that carry power lines. But Snackers, here's the kicker of the snack fact. That number that Jack just said, that is more than Katrina, than Ike, than Delta, and Hurricane Zeta combined. We got all that data from Entergy, the publicly traded public power company that owns those 31,000 destroyed power poles. And Energy does polls. That's what they do. Well, they do electricity, which involves polls.

They got a lot of stuff going on. And now, Entergy needs to repair those 31,000 poles. Or, Jack, not repair those poles. Snackers, electric utilities in hurricane-prone areas like Louisiana are facing a big question in the era of climate change. All right, and here's the question. Should power lines be hanging from poles or should they be buried under the ground? The reason those 31,000 poles got destroyed?

Yeah. 150 mile per hour hurricane force winds. Brutal. So like if your energy, here's how you're looking at this. You could fix those poles and then they'll probably come down in the next big hurricane. The unsexy alternative is you could bury the power lines underground instead. Exactly. So you like ditch the ladders, get some shovels instead. Because six feet underground, those wires are impervious to the hurricane's winds.

So long term, energy would save money by putting your power wires underground. But short term, doing that is five times more expensive than just fixing the Pauls and hanging on my case. Which leads to the Shakespearean sonnet of a question. To bury or not to bury. That is the question. And so, Jack, what is the takeaway?

Bering wires may make sense for society, but not for Entergy's profits. Yeah, Snackers, if Entergy is just like deciding on its own, it may just hang the wires and not bury them. Yeah, fix those 31. thousand polls because despite devastating the power grid, Hurricane Ida has not hurt energy stock price. Yeah. And if it just fixes the hanging wires like it has in the past, the profits for energy are probably going to be okay. But what about the discomfort, the pain and the lost productivity of millions of people not having power for a week? I mean, Jack, it's like brutally sad, but like,

unfortunately, that's not a factor in energy's profit decision. They're leaving that one up to the politicians. Exactly. Joe Biden visited New York and New Jersey. yesterday and used Hurricane Nida's damage to pitch his infrastructure bill. Exactly, because that includes over $100 billion for power and climate infrastructure initiatives specifically like burying vulnerable wires. Entergy's math says not to bury. But society's math says bury. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us over there?

B-Day down in Bid Salvador was mixed. Yeah, this is the grand era of global crypto experimentation. Callaway Golf's revenues will nearly double this third quarter. But it's an acquired growth from Top Golf, not an organic growth from Callaway. Entergy is still bringing power to the people of Louisiana and Mississippi. Nick and I are sending our thoughts to them. Yeah, we are. Entergy's math says not to bury.

Society's math says Barry. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. Hold on Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick. Can I hijack the snack fact? You can hijack this. I guess hijacking. I don't really have an option. I think we need to say, for a snack fact, that people used to have to rewind their videos before returning them.

Yeah. You finished watching some Freddie Prince Jr. flick. And then you had to sit there and watch your machine rewind it for like five or ten minutes. Jack, I'm handed over the controls of the airplane. Keep rolling. Let's go, baby. And if you didn't rewind it, okay. You'd get a fee from Blockbuster video.

Love this. Gen Z. Are you hearing this? Ed Gen Z. Pay attention. That was a thing. That was like a third of your day. You complained about having a few. to type in a passcode to open your iPhone.

The movie's an hour and a half. The rewinding's a half hour. The best part, Jack, watching the faces. There's also the tuning. Oh, yeah. If like, if there was the gray, you had to push the tuning button, which would fix it. Jack, the best snack fact yet. Thank you.

Snackers, you'll look fantastic today. And if you got a snack fact for us, we've got a link right here in the podcast description. And if you want a shout out at the end of the pod, we got a link in every episode's podcast description. Jack, can't wait. to do this tomorrow with you. And before we go, happy birthday to snacker Brenda Lim in Coda Kemening, Malaysia. And happy birthday to Tejohn Williams in Philadelphia, PA.

And Maggie Grout down in Boulder, Colorado. And Abby Ephraim and Ann Arbor, Go Blue. Mike, happy first week of grad school at Yale School of Drama. Break a leg. And happy first year anniversary to Elijah and Rebecca Smith in Santa Clarita, California. John and Kieran Laramie married in Manitoba moving to San Francisco. We'll see you around. to Bethany and Ryan, who just got hitched in Idaho. And Justin Sellers and Martha Killam just got married in Florence, Italy. Enjoy the Fiorentina B-Staca to celebrate the win. Anybody else celebrating something today, make it a T-Blink. Celebrate those wins.

This is Jack. I own stock of Airbnb and Netflix, and Nick also own stock of Airbnb. Robin Hood Snacks, newsletters, and podcasts reflect the opinions of only the authors who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and do not reflect the views of Robin Hood. Robinhood Markets Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. They are meant for informational purposes only and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, cryptocurrency, or investment strategy in any account. This is not an offer or sale of a security, not a research report, and is not intended to serve as the basis for any investment decision. Any third-party information provided therein does not reflect the views of Robbondon Markets, Inc., Robin Hood Financial LLC or any of their subsidiaries or affiliates. All investments involve risk, including loss of principle and past performance,

does not guarantee future results. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA SIPC.