The Best One Yet - “Facebook thinks it’s a telephone line” — Nio’s 1,000% jump. Sleep Number’s anti-Casper pivot. Twitter/Facebook’s Section 230 moment.

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Shares of Nio (the Tesla of China) have subtly surged 1,000% since March because it’s made a lifestyle brand out of a glorified battery. Twitter and Facebook just faced their biggest ever test about whether they’re platforms or publishers. And Sleep Number stock popped because it’s doing everything with mattresses that Casper isn’t.$NIO $SNBR $TWTR $FBGot a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @TBOYJack @NickOfNewYorkWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:http://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9Learn 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 Friday, October 16th. Stocks fell for a third straight day yesterday. Brutal, it got COVID majorly spiking over in Europe and it's increasing in 38 U.S. states. The early takeaway here, wear a mask. Exactly, but not a Batman mask. Yeah, there's a big hole in the middle of Batman's mouth. Too much ventilation. No, you're going to go more Bain Mask. The only COVID-friendly T-Boy Halloween costume this year, the Bain Mask from Batman. We're calling it. The Bain Mask. So, Jack, this happens to be.

our best snacks daily yet. What are we got for our first story? The Tesla of China. Neo, it's so glad we're calling it that, by the way. It's living its best life. Yeah, it turns out Neo stock has searched 1,000% since March, because you don't just drive Neo. You live Neo. For our second story, Casper mattresses gets all the attention from your buddies moving into their new place. But Jack and I noticed sleep number? It's stock just popped for being the anti-Casper. For our third and final story, Twitter and Facebook just faced their biggest test yet on whether they're just platforms that aren't involved? Yeah.

Or publishers that are involved. Jack, feels like our first premature snack fact of the pod. What do we got? Facebook claims that they don't publish anything. However, Facebook users, they publish 100 billion pieces of content per day. Ipso facto carry the nine. That means 14 posts per day per human on planet Earth. That is insane.

But Snackers, before we jump into that wonderful mix of stories, maybe you're looking for, you know, some nice weekend reading right now. You want to brush up on some business 101 books? Maybe a little Tim Ferriss four-hour work week. Or how about the three-hour work week? Jack and I are better fans of the two-minute work day. I'd sign up for each of those. You want to round down in this situation.

Now, Nicolette DiMaggio actually has our back. She's from White Plains, New York, and has let us know about the earliest known book about stocks in the world. Yeah, she's a snacker who sent this in. Turns out it was published in 1688 in Amsterdam by Joseph DiLovaga, a stock trader himself. Mr. De La Vega is a Spanish Jew who led Spain during the Inquisition, ended up in Holland, and became an author. And he flourished from there because in the last 332 years, Snackers, this happens to be the best title of any finance book that Jack and I have ever come across.

Are you ready for this? Please. The first book about stocks ever was called Confusion of Confusion. We repeat, Confusion of Confusions. Apparently the confusions offset. But while Mr. De LaVega was crafting these 996 gloriously confusing pages, we noticed there were three wild rules about stock investing that he decided to throw out there. This isn't a be treat. Mr. De LaVega had a lot of time on his hands. His first rule, speculating on stocks is a form of witchcraft. Aggressive, not sure if that applies.

That one hasn't aged well yet. Second rule, except both your profits and your regrets. Honestly, you could live by that one. That's a minute. Put that on a tattoo or a t-shirt. It means learn from your mistakes. too, that's a good valuable lesson. Third rule, though,

earning a profit on the stock market is like a goblin treasure. The confusion of confusion. Some of the rules make sense. Others sound crazy. Yeah, others sound like their Econ 101 with Dumbledore. Now, Nicolette happens to be writing

a children's book about the stock market herself. It's called Stock Explorer. Follows the journey of Elle, a seven-year-old who learned about financial literacy with magical powers. A little more family-friendly than the witchcraft goblin treasures. Let's hit our three stories. You're tuned in the snacks daily.

to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. Snacks about the hair ain't food. It's air candy. They don't reflect the views of the Robberhood family. It's all informational just so. We're not recommending any securities. It's not a research report or investment advice. Not an offer or sale of a security.

Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robberhood Financial, LLC, member Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, sleep number stock, just searched 14, percent after its earnings report. The OG mattress company is actually NG, new gangster. We got a new gangster situation over here. By the way, Snackers, so Jack and I jumped in Snacks style to this. We're looking at Sleep Number CEO kicking off the earnings call and she begins it with her sleep number. She is embracing her business. Also, the sleep number. It's like a snap streak. It's one of those,

if you know, you know situations. By the way, Shelley's Sleep IQ score? It's an 88. And you want to be right in the 70 to 100 range, that's the meaty part of the sleep number curve. Not showing off, but not falling behind. And does 100 mean you're dead? You're so still, you broke the machine. This is a Minneapolis-based company Sleep Number, and it says it has 13 million energetic users slash sleepers of its mattresses. The shareholders are energetic, too, because sales over its sleep number just jumped 12% to

$500 million last quarter. Another double-digit sales jump, because you're working for bed. That's right. You're also probably tracking. tracking your food these days and you're probably tracking your fitness. Sleep number is focused on tracking your sleep. And the key behind this is a singular product they call the 360 smart bed. This thing's the rolls royst of mattresses. It's got temperature control on both sides of the bed. They call it microclimates because there's nothing more technical than throwing the word

micro into something. Get this. It'll check your nighttime heart rate and the nighttime heart rate of whoever's sleeping next to you. Oh, worried you're flipping around a little too much. Boom. This thing tracks your physical movements in the mattress. It sends your phone a notification if it thinks you had a nightmare. Jack, I feel like the engineer is over at sleep number applied to jobs at NASA. Didn't get the jobs at NASA. It's a safety school kind of thing. Now, this snackers, when Jack and I jumped in and noticed what products were selling, we realize this is just another example of like blurring the lines between health and tech that we keep talking about. The 360 bed looks like the Apple Watch of mattresses, but it's not as expensive as you'd think.

It starts at $1,000. Funny thing Jack and I also noticed, though, who else referenced sleep health as their passion earlier this year? Casper Mattresses. Exactly. And when Jack and I checked out the S-1 IPO paperwork to Casper mattress, they referred to sleep as the third pillar of the health and wellness trend. That's right.

You got nutrition. You got fitness. And you got sleep. But venture capital back, Casper, is actually behind 40-year-old sleep number when it comes to sleep tech these days. Yeah, that 360's impressive. And it's behind when it comes to its stock. price. Casper's down 42% this year, sleep number stock is up 35% this year. One had a wonderful dream,

one had a horrible nightmare. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at sleep number? Sleep number represents the power of the pivot. Snackers, Jack and I jumped in deeper. Sleep number is actually the product of a whole bunch of mattress mergers going all the way back to 1980. And that mega merger strategy looked really bad in 2010 when the stock price had fallen to under $1. But then, sleep number made a magnificent change. They completely embraced their quasi-techiness and decided to go full techie in 2018. Since 2018, Sleep Number has only offered these high-tech smart bets. 100% of mattresses have been the 360.

Honestly, you go to the website right now. Jack and I just looked, the 360 bed is the only bed you're seeing. This is like a dairy farm going full cashew cream overnight. To win in a world of Casper, Lisa, purple, avocado, and like 300 other knockoff mattress companies. It's exhausting. Sleep number must be Wi-Fi connected. That's their differentiate. And its stock has doubled since that commitment to 100% smart pets. It's had three straight years of double-digit growth thanks to that marvelous pivot. For our second story, Twitter and Facebook edited the editors this week. And election intensity is highlighting the collision course of

big tech and regulation. All right, Snackers, this all went down just a couple days ago on Wednesday. The New York Post published an article based on a computer hard drive that it received for from Donald Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani. And Rudy Giuliani claims that that hard drive used to belong to Joe Biden's son Hunter. So you're looking at this situation, and the New York Post headline was basically red meat for Trump supporters bound to go viral on social media kind of thing. But the sources were obviously politically motivated, and the story itself could be false. Yeah, and honestly, if this thing is true, it could come from info that was like illegally hacked

from someone else's hard drive. So all that caused Twitter and Facebook to take an unprecedented move. on Wednesday. They took a proactive action because they thought the article's news could be false. Keyword could. They have taken actions on posts that are verifiably false. Case and point, Jack, I'm thinking like when President Trump claimed that mail-in-balloting would lead to massive voter fraud. But on Wednesday, Twitter forbid people from tweeting things that included the link to the New York Post story. And then Facebook reduced visibility of any posts that included that New York Post story as part of it. Now, Facebook and Twitter didn't explain much publicly why they were doing this.

No, they didn't. And it caused a lot of outrage, and it caused its moves to totally backfire. Yeah, the wild, ironic thing about this whole situation is that more attention ended up coming to the New York Post article, not less. Because the reason of Facebook and Twitter, like preventing shares, was totally unclear. So Snackers, Jack and I are preparing for this podcast, and what we do is we put together a whole list of potential stories throughout the week. We noticed that there was a theme going on, particularly this week when it comes to politics and tech. Tech platforms became editors of the entire internet so far this month. Just a few days ago, Yelp started labeling businesses that have been accused of racist behavior. Just yesterday, YouTube banned a pro-Trump conspiracy group called QAnon because they're inciting violence online.

And to round out the whole big tech crew, Facebook also banned anti-vaccine ads and any post that deny the Holocaust. Now remember, after the 2016 election when Facebook was under a lot of pressure, Mark Zuckerberg famously said, Facebook should not be the decider of what is true and what is not true. But when Zuck's not busy Zuckin, turns out he's increasingly doing exactly that. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at the big tech content platforms? Facebook and Twitter are acting like newspapers, not just telephone lines. Snackers, key distinction you've got to keep in mind these days. Newspapers can be sued for publishing things that are false and may cause harm.

Yeah, you hear lawsuits like defamation, hurt it, slander, thrown out, or lifestyle. Bible. A bunch of them. But interestingly, internet platforms can't be sued for posts on their platforms that are false or cause harm. That's thanks to Section 230, a 1996 law that protects tech platforms from liability for the things posted on them. And basically what this 230 says is that Facebook and Twitter, they're just telephone lines. They can't control what people are saying across that thing. Think about it, Nick. If your crazy aunt says something insane on the phone, should AT&T be in trouble for it? No way. But this election season, Facebook and Twitter are taking control of what's going through their telephone lines lately.

That's why you've got the Supreme Court, Congress, and the president, the trifecta of our federal government, all scrutinizing that Section 230 liability shield. So Jack and I are looking at this and we're thinking, get ready for tech platforms to start getting treated like newspapers. Because they're editing information like newspapers do. For our third and final story, Neo Stock is up 1,000 percent, a thousand percent since March. The Tesla of China is betting that your car will become your entire lifestyle. Now, Neo is the leading electric car company of China, but you gotta sprinkle a little context on this thing, right, Jack? They're only making a tenth as many cars as Tesla does. They're based in Shanghai, but they're also listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the stock can be traded.

And just seven months ago, their stock exchange situation wasn't, look at you. Jack, it felt like they'd taken the red pill over there. Shares of Neo were down to three bucks. That's because they just lost $400 million in their previous. quarter, which was the end of 2019. Never good. And 2020 looked like the year they were going to run out of cash and go bankrupt. But then the folks over a neo does add to pop in a blue pill and the stock is up a thousand percent since March. It's up 30 percent in just the past week because it's getting analyst upgrades left and right on this big order backlog from Chinese nationals before the new year.

Kiyah! It also helps when a Chinese city gives you a billion dollars cash, no strings attached. What president she wants, she gets. Yeah. They didn't call this a bailout. No. But the city where it's headquartered, they give them a billion dollars of money, and that's from the government. Nothing helps deal with your cash issues like a billion dollars in free cash.

But we want to focus on one major innovation. That's really interesting going down at Neo. It's the battery swap. Sounds like a dating app, but it's the battery swaps. When it comes to electric vehicles, a big consumer hesitation is charging the battery. You know, you're going to be stuck off like I-95. for a half an hour, the Shake Shack's too far away to walk to, it's a whole pain and stressful situation. Nick and I don't think it's a big deal because it's only on long trips and you can take a half hour

break after three hours of driving. No big deal. But Neo decided to go full on Netflix over here and is whipping up something called the battery swap station. For $130 a month, you get a subscription to swap your battery whenever you want. Now right now they've only got 131 of these wild stations, but they swap out the battery in just three minutes instead of charging this thing for half an hour. Picture a jiffy loop. You drive up and there's a little hole. And beneath that hole, there's two guys working. And they're going to pull out your dead battery and replace it with a fully charged car battery from underneath the car. Boom, chassis for chassis. Three minutes, you're done. And Neo just passed their 500,000th battery swap since 2018.

So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Neo? The winner of the electric car wars will be the one that's a lifestyle brand. Snackers, arguably the bigger innovation that Jack and I have noticed, Neo created a brand before it ever created a car. They invested millions of dollars into Neo hats and Neo swag before they sold their first car online. But what Jack and I found way more fascinating than like a Neo branded hat is this like Neo house concept they whipped up, Jack? These are like a showroom to show off their cars, but it's also a clubhouse for people who own Neos or who are on the wait list for a Neo. You got a library, a kitchen, like a daycare for the kids. Honestly, you're going to want to have a wedding ceremony here. This is like a Delta Lounge meets Disney World

meets restoration hardware with the side of TikTok influencer house. Singles night at the Neo house. Where'd you meet at the Neo house? Now Snaggers, you commit to an airline because of the perks and you commit to Peloton for the community. You commit to Neo because it'll become part of your identity. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us before the weekend over there? Sleep number mattress is having a bit of an awakening. Yeah, the stock is winning thanks to its smart mattress. Pivot. Power the pivot. For our second story, Facebook and Twitter are controlling their platforms like newspapers do. And now they got Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, uh, noticing the whole situation. For our third and final story, Neo is the

darling electric car company of China building a lifestyle brand. Not gas stations, not charging stations, battery swap stations. Now time for our snack factor the day. This one tweeted in by Mark Gaspar in lovely Chicago, Illinois, based on a previous snack fact from earlier this week. It's a bit of a checkdown on the great western Michigan city of Grand Rapids. Yeah, they call it Paris on the lake, I believe, Jack. Grand Rapids, it's actually not on the lake. It's close to the lake. Grand Rapids had been voted best beer city in the United States. But technically, Mark points out that Chicago is the biggest beer city in the entire country. That's right. Chicago has 167 breweries. Denver is second with 158 breweries. Seattle comes in third with 153.

Because Chicago does logistics and fermentation. And fermentation. Now, Snackers, before we go, quick correction to an earlier pod this week. We said that Epic Games was present at Apple's big iPhone event. It was actually Riot Games. That was who covered League of Legends. Also, Hans, the CEO of Verizon, he's not a German. He's a Swede.

No Freudian that shot in. Let's just call Tuesday's episode one batch of overcooked snacks. Yeah, it was the best one yet, but today's is much better. Today's was the best one yet. Today's is the best. Snackers, share your snacks with your buddies using H-Y-H-Y-S-D. Ask them, have you had your snacks daily? And Nick and I'll see you Monday.

Have a great weekend. And before we go, congrats to Snackers Cash to Ashman and Kaylee Snippet, who've listened to 365 snacks in a row, and it's their anniversary. Dang, that is tough to follow. Nick O'Connor, congrats for your leadership award over in Ireland. And Max von Pilnitz just sold his food tech startup over in Hong Kong. And Taylor and Stephen got married over Zoom in San Francisco, congratulations.

Meanwhile, Caitlin and Zach celebrating their eighth over in San Francisco, too. Happy fifth anniversary to Nelson and Camilla in Seattle, Washington. And Michael and Kelsey just got married in Chicago because Chicago does logistics and fermentation. Happy birthday to Lucie Fell in Honolulu, Hawaii. And happy birthday to Melissa Davis in Detroit, Michigan. And Taylor Bookstaff in Houston. And Andrew Withers in Baltimore. And Luis Reyes in Oklahoma, Florida.

And Rebecca Hemp in Wawodagh, Wisconsin. And Isaac Cleveland in Charlotte. Vermont. I thought you were going to say Charlotte, Nick. In the meantime, Eric Wang, celebrating down in Atlanta. And happy birthday to Jackie Robertson in Canton, Ohio. And Juan Alvarez in Compton, California. Finally, Jeremy Lembeck, who listens with the whole family in Plymouth, Minnesota. This is Jack, nickel and stock of Apple and shake shack. The Robin Hood Snacks podcast you just heard reflects the opinions of only the hosts who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, Inc, or any of its

subsidiaries or affiliates. The podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to serve as a recommendation to buy or sell any security and is not an offer or sale of a security. The podcast is also not a research report and is not intended to serve as the basis of any investment decision. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.