The Best One Yet - 🤕 “Fail Fast and Make Things” — Tesla’s SuperChargers. Varsity Inc.’s payday. Twitter’s un-Zucking.

Episode Date: July 22, 2021

Tesla’s kept a profit puppy hidden from us the last few years… but now it’s giving it away to competitors? College athletes are about to profit off themselves, so we got off the bench to gameplan the new industry: Varsity, Inc. And Twitter and Snapchat both report earnings today, yet they’ve followed completely different paths (hint: one involves an “Un-Zucking”).$TSLA $SNAP $TWTRGot 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 Thursday. The new Friday, July 22nd. Stocks rebounded for a second day in a row. We're almost a record highs, Jack. I know you're thinking what today really is.

It's still National Ice Cream Month. It doesn't matter if it is an ice cream day. Get the whole month. Chunky monkey, hubba wab. If you can put hot fudge on it, you should consume it. Jack, this is the best one yet. For our first story, the last decade, Tesla has had a hidden profit puppy hiding right under our nose.

That's supercharger. Now, Tesla is giving them away for free to competitors. I'm Ron Burkundy. For our second story, college athletes can now profit off their name, image, and likeness. We're breaking down a new industry. Here's what we're calling it, Varsity Inc. For our third and final story, Twitter and Snapchat, both social media, both reporting today, both getting a special snacks preview. All right, Snackers, here's the highlight.

Our first ever unzucking new things. Snackers, before we hit those three wonderful stories. I love the mix today, Jack. Can I call these three stories Scrum Trellesson? You can. That should be a Ben & Jerry's flavor right there. Before we do, some record snackers are meant to be broken. Other records, you're surprised they're even keeping track of these days.

Turns out our buddies at the Guinness Book, they're keeping track of Eminem Cairns. Cairns, keyword there, M&M Cairns. A cairn is a Scottish stack of stones. Ipso facto and M&M's cairn is a sweet stack of chocolatey treats. Snackers, we're going to ask you a personal question. Can you stack four M&Ms right on top of each other? We'll give you, I don't know, five seconds to go get the M&Ms that are definitely somewhere near you. Can you even do three without them toppling over? Can you even do two? Honestly, this is harder than it looks. I almost broke a finger.

You might be driving right now. You might think it's easy. It's not. This is the Everest of Confection. If you can pull this off, you will shout from a mountaintop. The reason M&Ms have a very unique, unpredictable shape. Jack and I jumped in snack style. Jack, the form is technically an ellipsoid. Specifically, it's an oblate spheroid. Oh, and plus, there's variation within each M&M's family. Different factory, different tilt.

Different color, different sheen. Eminem's are like snowflakes. No two are exactly alike. Well, wild news, Snackers, turns out a British man didn't care about all those geometric challenges as we just mentioned that were breaking the loss of physics. He pushed ahead and started determinantly stacking M&Ms. And that man just said a new Guinness World Record. Not just four M&Ms.

He stacked five M&Ms right on top of each other. Captured the whole thing on camera and then threw it on Instagram because otherwise we wouldn't believe this guy. Check out the Guinness Books Insta handle. Snackers, send us a pick if you can do too. Jack, let's hit our three stories. Don't even dare. Try it with the Skittles.

Bonus if they're Skittles. It's not a sphere. It's a messed up circle. You're tuned in to snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. The snacks about to hear ain't food. It's 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. It's not a research report or investment advice. Not an offer or sale of a security. Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robahood Financial, LLC, member Fenra. For our first story, Tesla is going to open up its special charging stations to the competition.

You got to ask, do you want more slices or do you want a bigger pie? Tesla has a hidden profit puppy we never even thought of. The Supercharger Network. The Supercharger Network. It's basically like electric vehicle infrastructure, just like a little bit sexier. The Supercharger Network is a club for people who cherish their time because only Tesla owners can charge their car at a supercharger network, and it's a fast charge. I'm not waiting hours. I want to charge my car in the same amount of time that I would gas up my car and get something

from the store, probably Twizzlers. Yeah, it's 200 miles of charge in 15 minutes. And there are 25,000 superchargers globally, which you can think of as like the gas pumps, the individual gas pumps. Right. And those 25,000 individual chargers are spread across 2,700 charging stations. So to sprinkle on just a little bit of context here, can we compare those 2,700 Tesla supercharger stations, Jack, to the 150,000 gas stations in the United States? Yes. Supercharger is the biggest EV charging network, but it's still really tiny compared to the number of gas stations out there. Which leads us to the wild news yesterday. Tesla is opening up that supercharger network to non-Tesla electric vehicles this year. year. Major Tesla announcement that Elon decided to announce via reply to some Rando's tweet. Desalik doesn't have a PR department. They have Elon's Twitter handle. That is the PR department.

This is huge news because according to the Department of Energy, there are 43,000 total electric vehicle chargers in the United States. And that includes Tesla's superchargers. So fact though, Tesla is sharing 25,000 global chargers. That's a huge deal. Nick, this could cure range anxiety. It could cure it. Doctor, we've got a disease. If you're thinking about getting a non-Tesla electric car, now you have access to 25,000 new chargers global.

Jack, you're trying to tell me this is the cowbell to range anxiety on the thytastrosol. Yes, you're going to stop staying up late at night worrying about getting stuck with an empty battery and no way to charge it. I mean, Jack, this is like if Toyota owns. Exxon and Mobile and Shell gas station. And then suddenly announced, these gas stations aren't just for Toyota's. We're going to let anyone gas up here. That's what Tesla just did.

Now, Snackers, you may be in a car right now, and we know what you're thinking, why is Tesla giving this gift to all of its competitors? Well, first of all, they're not giving away the electricity for free. So they could make even more money charging at the super stations to like non-Tesla cars. They could also start selling adapters for non-Tesla cars to, actually use these superchargers so non-Tesla cars would have Tesla gear. Right. Because you need like a dongle.

If you have a GMEV, you need a dongle to charge at a Tesla supercharge. But we think the reason is actually part of a bigger plan. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over Tesla? Tesla just made the pizza decision. More slices or bigger pie? Snackers, Tesla could keep doing what it's doing. Competing for customers with the same competitors, which is trying to grab more slices of the existing electric vehicle pie.

Or Tesla could lose some customers but accelerate total electric vehicle adoption. Same slice, but of an even bigger EV pie. So that's what we're thinking. These superchargers for all isn't just a marketing gift to like Audi and Nissan and Ford. Tesla is also giving its future self a gift. It's sacrificing a differentiator for its cars today, but accelerating growth of the whole electric vehicle market. for tomorrow. It's taken a smaller slice, but they're making the pie way bigger.

For our second story, we got ourselves a new industry, varsity ink, because college athletes are finally getting paid. Name, image, and likeness is how you make money out of college athletic fame. Jack, traveling back a month, go back to June, Supreme Court rules unanimously that the NCAA could not ban players from making money. So this is a personal finance story of its heart. Yeah, basically it puts money in the podcast. pockets of 18 to 22 year old kids who really need it. But the brands that engage these young gun college athletes, they could make some bank too. So it's a personal finance store and a stock market store. Yeah, it is. Now, wild news yesterday from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Love the way you

pronounced it, Jack. University of Alabama's quarterback already has deals worth a million dollars according to his coach Nick Sabin. In a month, he signed deals for a million dollars. And get this, he's never even started a game at quarterback in Alabama. Does it have a single syllabus for a single class, the guy's already worth a million bucks? So this is our first major data point on just how much money prominent college athletes can make. Hasn't even bought the number two pencils or the trap or keeper jack?

So we want to break down for you the different types of deals we think college athletes could make with big companies. First one is video games. That seems the clear one for us. For 20 years, EA sports, It's in the game. Published college football and college basketball video games. They stopped in 2013 because they got sued, basically.

Ed O'Bannon's like, that's me on the UCLA basketball team. Awkward. I know you're not saying it's me, but that's definitely me. You guys are making a bunch of money. I'm not making it anymore. Jack, did you listen to the daily podcast episode about this? I did. Yeah, me too.

It was good. I was thinking the same thing. All right, there we go. Now, in the Varsity Inc. era, post-Supreme court ruling, electronic arts is bringing those games back, and they're probably going to include the players' names in the game. Exactly. So it's cool for fans to see the names, cool for players to make some money off of all that. EA Sports is still working out the details, though.

It's also going to play out differently for, like, your star players doing one-off endorsement deals. Barstool Sports is itching to sign a T-shirt podcast deal with the next Johnny Mansell. Future Tim Tebow type is probably going to, like, jump into Chick-fil-A, do some Instagram live stuff with them. And then, like, your smaller time college athletes, they're going to like sign some local deals with some local businesses. I got one for you from back in the day. Here it is. I'm Jack Kramer. I'm a Middlebury backup quarterback.

And this No Neat-Sandwich, it's no backup. I'm Nick Bartell. I'm a brown lacrosse midfielder with like two minutes of playing time. You're going to love East Side Pockets Falafel. That's falafel with an F. I appreciate that you rounded up on the playing time, Jack. So what's the takeaway for our buddies in the new industry of varsity Inc? Paying college athletes is an extension of the creator economy.

Snackers, outside of like men's football and basketball programs, to be honest, college sports doesn't make that much money. But a decent sized following on social media, you could make some money on Instagram, on cameo, or you can even launch your own podcast. Even if you're a lacrosse player. Even if you're a quarterback backup for a string backup. And he can pass. So a possible outcome of all of this is just the straight up on-field attention grabbing,

a key part of varsity ink. get ready for players to start taking off their helmets after scoring a goal. Yeah. To make sure everyone in the audience knows who to follow on Twitter and Instagram. Jack, maybe they throw an Instagram handle on their college sports jersey. Because paying college athletes is at its core, the creative economy. For our third and final story, Twitter and Snapchat, both reporting earnings today after the market's closed and we got curious.

Perfect time for a preview and a comparison of Snapchat and Twitter. Jack, I feel like we don't do this often. So Snackers' expectations are going to be inappropriately high for this story. Oh, I was thinking they'd be loud. Because, like, we've never done a good job with this. Honestly, I'm really excited for the takeaway. I'm just going to say that. Snackers, Snapchat stock.

It's actually just called Snap, by the way. It's up 150% in the past year. Twitter stock over the same period, it's grown by only half of that. Ah, kind of hurts. Both are slowly growing users at like the same pace. They're both, give or take one-tenth of Facebook size. But Snapchat is growing revenue three times faster than Twitter is. So Snapchat is therefore squeezing more money out of its users than Twitter.

Both Snapchat and Twitter, they were given just one lemon in life. Basically, that's what do you got a picture? They each got one lemon. What are you going to do with it? One of them has managed to just get like one glass of water with like a dash of lemon juice. The other one managed to turn that lemon into like a big lemon meringue pie that feeds a family of 12, Jack. Twitter's got the dash of lemon juice. If you want dessert, you're going to go hang out with Snapchat.

So two completely different results from these social media companies recently, we noticed they're the results of two different strategies. Jack, we got ourselves a Bobby Frost situation here, don't we? Two paths. Two different paths. Two different lemons. Nick's always buttering me up with Vermont poetry references. The way to Jack's heart is a haiku written in Burlington.

You got them. That's all you got to say. I thought you were going to say the way to Jack's heart is the path less travel. That would have been poetry. But Snackers, Snapchat. Snapchat strategy, it's basically just to do one thing. Yeah, they're all in on augmenting the world that is around you. Yeah, lots of augmented reality lenses to razzle and dazzle your Snapchat.

They're doing like 3D stuff with advertisers too. The advertisers are loving that. But Twitter strategy is fascinatingly the exact opposite. They're not doing one thing. They're trying everything over at Twitter. Yeah, case in point. Twitter launched spaces this year. Which is live audio.

They launched their Twitter tip jar. For the creator economy. And they launched Twitter blue. Paid Twitter. And here's the other funny thing, Jack, and I noticed about Twitter. They're not just launching things. They're doing the opposite of their opposite, too. They're unlaunching things.

Remember Fleets, which was Twitter's copycat of Instagram stories, which was Instagram stories copycat of Snapchat? It's when they like zucked stories, ipso facto zucked Snapchat. Right. It's the profile picture with like a circle, which indicates to the, user that there's an ephemeral message waiting? Well, guess what, Snackers? Twitter just unsucked itself. Yeah, they killed fleets. Now, Wall Street is much more bullish that Snapchat can keep growing and keep on making more money. And that's why Snapchat is worth roughly double of what Twitter is.

So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over Twitter? Instead of move fast and break things, fail fast and make things. Snackers, we've all heard Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook strategy of move fast and then break things. Twitter's alternative is fail fast and make things. And we're giving them some credit for that. Yeah. Twitter's got a history of making a bunch of things and then killing those things quickly so that they can learn from them. Remember Twitter moments? It was around back in 2015. Honestly, I totally don't. We weren't into Twitter back. No, we weren't back. But the product failed. Yeah. Twitter killed it. Good for that. Yeah. But then they improved upon the concept

by replacing it with an explore tab. Exactly. So fleets recently failed. And now, guess that's Well, Twitter is putting on top of the app to fill the void of fleets. They're filling the void of fleets with spaces. Yes. The live conversation feature that's getting much more traction than fleets did. So Twitter's not the most profitable or the fastest growing of the social media apps. Twitter's 5 foot nothing, 100 nothing. But it's got a crazily engaged audience because they fell fast and make things.

Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us? Because Thursday's a new Friday. Tesla is welcoming any electric car. into club supercharger sometime later this year. It's shrinking its slice potentially but making the pie bigger. For our second story, Varsity Inc. is what we're calling college athletes getting paid. And it's an extension of the creator economy.

Twitter and Snapchat both report earnings today. Yeah, Twitter fails fast and it makes things. And we kind of like that. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one, good timing from Taylor Malone from lovely Cambridge, Massachusetts. Where they do biomedical stuff. Yeah, exactly. Taylor points out that Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, they were actually not the first billionaires to enter space. The man who invented Microsoft Excel was the first billionaire in space.

That man is Charles Simone, the Hungarian-born software engineer who did it twice in 2007 and 2009. Yeah, it turns out he got a seat somehow on a Russian rocket that was headed to the International Space Station. I think he like hitchhiked, literally. But he also paid $60 million. You know, Jack, in Soviet Russia, rocket blasts you. Snackers, you look fantastic today. Jack, I can't wait to do this with you tomorrow. Let's do it again tomorrow.

Me too, dude. Me too. I'll write you up home. Back up quarterback. And before we go, happy birthday to Eric in Boyle Heights, California, a.k.a. free premium trial. Happy birthday to Joey in London, England. And Minaj in Newark, California.

And Selena the singer in Norwalk, California. And Flex Thompson in V-684, aka American Samoa. Nick, happy half birthday. Yeah, it's my half birthday. Thank you very much, Jack. That's not gone in there. Congrats, dude. You've made another half year.

There we go. We're going to round up your age, by the way. And my playing time. Congrats to Ben Gordon and Catherine DeSalle for getting engaged in Chicago. And Kyle Collins, about to become a dad over in Thousand Oaks. Huge life move for Zhao and Mike, who had identical twins, Aurora and Athena in Colorado. And congratulations to Steph in Bergen County, New Jersey. on her one-year snack anniversary.

Anybody else celebrating something today? Make sure you make it a T-Boy. Celebrate the wins. This is Jack. I own stock of Volkswagen. 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 Robinhood 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. Nick's always buttering me up with Vermont poetry references. The way to Jack's part, the way to Jack's part. The way to Jack's heart.