The Best One Yet - “FantaZillowing” — Zillow’s dating app. Fluor’s nuclear (stock) option. Disney’s athleticism+.

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Zillow owns so much of the homebuying relationship, we think you should compare it to Match Group. Fluor knows nuclear plants are ridiculously expensive, so it’s whipping up a mini version that could help us fight climate change. And Disney’s already built ¾ of Netflix in just 15 months — But live sports is the ticket to beating Netflix. $Z $FLR $DISGot a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYorkSend us your Black History Month SnackFact here:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Hu00HOlQ-qb6S7Jx4CgnGOfzrA67_j_SLFqxvFKinEQ/editWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:https://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. Welcome back. It is Tuesday, still T-Boy Tuesday, February 16th. The best thing about a three-day weekend, Nick? I know you're thinking, Jack. Talk to me, talk to me. The four-day work week that falls. Why isn't this standard four-day work week every day is the new Friday? I would vote for whoever proposes that. Let's just make this happen. This also happens to be our best podcast we've ever done. For our first story, Zillow stock jumped 20% last week on Fantazillo Wing. It's not a real estate app. It's a relationship company. For our second story, Floor is one of the few companies still interested in nuclear power. Two and a half billion dollars of mini nuclear stocks. For our third and final story, investors do not care that Disney doesn't make profits anymore. No, they do care that Disney built three quarters of a Netflix in 15 months.

That's quite an accomplished. Was it 15 months, Jack, that kind of flew by. November of 2019 is when Disney Plus launched. But Snackas, before we jump into that wonderful, Mix of stories. It's great to be back. T-Boy Tuesday update, Jack and I found for you. Last week, we mentioned the latest item added to the hoarder's almanac from the pandemic. Brutal. Grape nuts cereal. Grape nuts cereal, 124-year-old cereal that contains neither grapes nor nuts. Grape nuts vanished from store shelves. There's no more grape nuts in Isle 6. Okay, here's the update. Good news. Seems like they found another grape nuts machine.

The shortage is going to end next month in March. But bad news. Yeah? We got a fresh new warning. coming from Kellogg's cereal company. Jack and I jumped into Kellogg's earnings report, snack style, and we found this. Turns out they are running low on frosted flakes. And frosted flakes are the 69-year-old cereal that is only composed of flakes that are fully frosted. And we all know, there's no finer fluid to absorb than milk with dissolved frosted flakes frosting. I believe that's what they call unicorn milk check. That is what unicorn milk is. In fact, Kellogg's has decided to cancel advertising for Frosted Flakes so as not to get people's hopes up and then disappoint them.

Tony's an endangered species. This guy can't even keep up with demand. No more marketing. Yeah, Tony the Tiger is disappointed. But while Wall Street is focused on Kellogg's revenue projections, it's EBITDA, it's net profit margin. Jack and I were looking at a box of sugar cereal because that actually told the whole Kellogg story. Tony the Tiger, let's hit our three stories. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. For 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.

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. Right. Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robohood Financial, LLC, member FINRA slash SIPC. For our first story, Zillow jumped 24% last week after its earnings, Jack.

But we need to stop thinking of it as just a real estate app. That's so true. Now, Zillow became, basically it's like a digital proxy for the entire real estate industry at this point. That's because Zillow owns the whole real estate value chain online. Yes, it does. From scrolling to searching, to drooling, to bidding, to buying homes, you can do it on a Zillow app. I mean, Jack, they own Trulia and we've all got like a Trulia tab. You've got a Trulia tab.

I always forget they own Trulia. You're looking at the West Village Brownstones or the Dutch Colonial Revivals. In the past 12 months, Nick, the stock has quadrupled as it's made $3.3 billion in revenue. Now, they still don't have a profit, but the number investors seem to be focusing on, $201 million. Jack, $201 million. That is the number of unique visitors to Zillow's websites and Zillow's apps in the last quarter. Basically, Zillow is almost the size of Snapchat. Now, Snackers, we could be at a housing market peak right now, and a housing market downturn would probably definitely hurt Zillow.

Interestingly, though, in their earnings report, Zillow's economists predicted that the number of home sales is going to grow 21% in 2021. So there is that. So they're not worried about it downturn. But this was the wildest week in Zillow's history. They hit a whole new level of cultural awareness, according to the CEO. Those are the words of CEO, Rich Barton. And I think he's referring to Saturday Night Live in which Zillow was the star subject of a hilarious skit last Saturday. You got Dan Levy from Schitts.

moaning over a guest house with the radiant heat and the built-ins. We call it Fantazillo. Yeah, he was scrolling a four-bedroom modern farmhouse with a jack and jail bathroom. Yeah, plus the huge pantry. You're fantasizing on Zillow. There has been a surge in home interest and real estate porn that has led to 10 billion Zillow website visits in the last corner. But here's the problem facing Zillow before you get too excited. Zillow only monetizes a single percentage of all those.

visitors, Fantazilers aren't buyers. Nick, how does Zillow solve that problem? Jack, feels like a takeaway. So what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Zillow? To best evaluate Zillow, the company, we should consider it a relationship company. Yeah, hear us out here. Zillow is really a lot like match. Match covers the whole spectrum of dating. They got Tinder, plenty of fish. They got an app for like every relationship stage. Zillow takes a similar approach to real estate. They own a different app that covers a different part of the home relationship value chain. All right, when it comes to dating a home, Jack, first impressions. Zillow owns Trulia, where you can see if the unaffordable ski chalet is a charmer or an alarmer.

Website visits for people scrolling homes on Zillow up 21% last quarter. Jack, how about the first date with a home? Zillow also owns a home touring company that it just paid $500 million to acquire where you can book a house visit, like with a broker online. It's all about the ambiance and the chemistry of the first physical moment. But Jack, how about the wedding, two homes, a home and a buyer coming together? And it can pass. Zillow also buys and sells entire homes. The whole thing is called I buying, and they have an online marketplace for them. For the first time ever, they actually made money flipping homes $22,000 per home last quarter. Looking at Zillow and comparing it to Match Group

helps us better understand their value proposition. Converting home scrollers into actual home buyers. For our second story, Disney's earnings show what should do for live sports what it's done for movies. Let the customer decide. Let them decide. Disney, though, announced on Friday, it's squeaked out. Jack, what do you say?

A little profit. It's a little profit. An adorable $17 million profit, which is 99% lower than what it made one year ago pre-COVID. Yeah, kind of an obvious. reason here, movie theaters, Disney World, still pretty much closed. The pandemic pulled no off. Yeah. Frozen Disney's profit puppies. And yet, this is wild. Disney's stock is 27% higher than it was before the pandemic. We're calling it clear the reason, but this is like the only reason we could decide on. Yeah, basically Disney's built out a three-headed streaming Ursula with 146 million

subscribers. Disney's streaming networks are now three-quarters as big as Netflix, and it's, of course, by Disney Plus. Let that sink in. We're talking 94 million human beings are paying subscribers of Disney Plus. And 50 million more to ESPN Plus and Hulu. So Jack and I were looking at this earnings. We're like, oh, this is impressive. This is wild. But the CEO wants more. Sit down, stand up, and sit down. CEO Bob Chapec, predicted in December, get this, that they would have 260 million subscribers by 2024. That's like a whole continent. Beggs the question. How can Disney nearly double its already gigantic subscriber base? Yeah, world's got up to 146 million subscribers today by simply putting its best movies and shows and shmovies on streaming.

You know what it hasn't put on streaming yet? Talk to me, Jack. Live sports. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Disney? And Bob. Disney could be part of the solution to rescuing sports in America. Funny things, Snackers. Zellennials, Gen Z plus millennials, hate the $100 a month cable and the terrible.

customer service that comes with it. By the way, is that a first person, Jack? Are we, I think we're technically. Let's definitely first person this thing because I hate the $10 broadcast fee. Check. The $10 equipment rental fee. I hear you. The $10 fee fee fee. Yeah. And yet, despite all that cable or a streaming equivalent of cable is the only way that you can watch an NFL or NBA game. We think one of the reasons that sports is dying, quote unquote, is because young people don't have cable in general, and therefore they can't watch live sports. But here's what we're thinking. Disney could change that. It owns ESPN. It owns ABC, two of the powerhouses of live sports. Disney also owns ESPN Plus, but so far it has refused to put the premier live sports NBA and the NFL on ESPN Plus.

Bob, here's the deal. Disney should let customers decide how to watch live NBA and live NFL games. If you still have a cable package and are paying $100 a month, great. Watch the game. on ESPN, the cable channel. But if you're not, you can stream live sports on ESPN Plus with something simple, like a $10 ad on to your subscription. Now, cable companies would be furious if ESPN and Disney cut out the cable company, just like movie theaters are furious that they've been cut out. But customers would love it. Snackers, if Disney makes sports streaming easy, young people might actually watch live sports again. Yeah, and then maybe we'd stop watching the NFL games from like some pirated rando website with a weird URL. Is that for?

First person, Mick? Is that first person? For our third and final story, Floor is trying to revive the whole nuclear power industry with baby nuclear. We're talking about the mini-nuclear option to the grave global warming threat to the world. Yeah, a little trivia.

Let's start this one with trivia, Jack. The two biggest carbon-free electricity sources, by far, what are they? And you can't say wind or solar. You make the answer so much easier. Hydro and nuclear are the two biggest carbon-free electricity sources. We should have asked this before the story. That's what we should have done.

But here's the thing. Neither of those clean power sources are growing. They're flat. They're doing nothing. Hydro-electric plants require rivers, and you dam the river, and then you use the flow of the river to turn a turbine and create electricity. Yeah, simple issue here, most rivers have already been dammed. Like, that's, it's happened.

If any snacker knows of, like, a vast, grand river. River? Yeah. That's like eligible for hydro? Let us know. It's also some environmental consequences, but then you get nuclear. Nuclear is the other option. And in America, the last nuclear plant was built in the 1980s. Yeah, this is before us. And they take way too long to build. They cost too much, and they require like a whole bunch of oversight. One of the most regulated things in the world is a nuclear power plant. So Jack and I were preparing for this Tuesday's pod, and we noticed a company in the news called Floor. It is engineering and industrial. They're trying to fix that situation. It's a publicly traded two and a half billion dollar company. Nick, it's spelled

F-L-U-O-R. Sounds like a direct-to-consumer baking company based in Williams Burr. It is. It's actually based in Texas, though. Floor worked on, get this. They worked on the Manhattan Project. They did rebuilding in post-war Iraq. Okay. And they did rebuilding in New Orleans after Katrina. I get the point, Nick. They're not a baking company. No, they're not. But the news this week we notice, they're the only company to clear the first step toward approval of a brand new nuclear plant. That was for a company called New Scale, which floor owns a majority of. It's based out of Oregon. They got the green light from the nuclear regulatory commission to make a small modular reactor. That's what they're called. But here's the thing. A key reason nuclear plants are so expensive,

they got to be built on site. They're huge. But these miniature nuclear plants that we're talking about, they can be manufactured in a factory and then shipped to like wherever where they're going to produce electricity. Much more scalable, much more cost efficient. And according to the Wall Street Journal, they could power a Mars colony someday. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at floor? We may need a nuclear option to neutralize climate change. So the other bummer news, Jack and I noticed last week, all the efforts taken so far to combat climate change, not nearly enough. The University of Washington researchers just said that countries must do 80% more more on average than what they've committed to in the Paris Climate Accord.

All right now, nuclear plants, they were built in like the 60s, the 70s, 80s. They were retiring of old age these days, including one in my home state of Vermont. But many nukes, they could be the clean power energy source for when it's not sunny and it's not windy. Now, it could be part of the solution. Also, though, not an easy solution. No. Floor is working on building the first American miniature nuclear plant in Utah,

but they hope to be done by the end of the day. decade if they're lucky. So you got like floor, General Electric, Hitachi, they're all making investments in mini-nuclear, but these are pretty risky investments. Yeah, and several groups are opposed, like Greenpeace, they have moral and safety objectives to anything with nuclear in its name. For climate change, may as well throw some baby nukes at it too. Jack, and you'll whip up the takeaway for us to start the four-day week. Zillow has got an app for every stage of the house buying relationship. One for Fantazilloing, one for first visit, one for buying, the commitment. Sure the commitment. For our second story, Disney streaming apps have 146 million paying subscribers. And we're thinking

adding live sports, that gets you 100 million more. For our third and final story, Floor is a small, modular nuclear reactor business building the first one in Utah right now. It's risky. It's costly, but it could be part of the climate change solution. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one sent in by Sherrod Dixon in lovely Charlotte, North Carolina. John Merrick was an entrepreneur born in 1859 in Clinton, North Carolina. He was a barber who partnered up to open his first of several barbershops in Durham, North Carolina. To meet the needs of their community, Merrick and his partners opened a drugstore, textile mill, and newspaper. They also opened Mechanics and Farmers Bank and North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, both of which are still around today.

This collection of black-owned businesses was the first Black Wall Street in America. Great to hear about another Black Wall Street with a living legacy today. In Durham, North Carolina. And Snackers, we're taking snack facts for Black History Month through a Google form in the notes of this episode if you want to submit your own. Happy T-Boy Tuesday. We'll see you tomorrow. And before we go, happy birthday to Matt Oman in Pineville, North Carolina. And happy birthday to John Coplechack in Springboro, Ohio. Casey Panful Parsley in Tyler, Texas, and Josh Adams in Houston, Texas, and Leslie Goldman in Mawaw, New Jersey.

Tim Wagner, happy birthday in Chicago, Illinois, and Alexandra Leake in Santa Monica. Selby Jenkins in Denver, Colorado. Megan Wilde in Tallahassee. Kelly Chang in beautiful Pasadena, California. And Alex Crow in Eureka. Happy birthday, Andrew Fortis in Los Angeles. And Kevin Fox in Huntington, Long Island. And Austin Hart in Williamsburg, Virginia.

And Zach Coburn, congrats on the series. down in St. Louis. Sounds like we got an accredited investor down. Yeah, both of us too. It's rough. Now, Nelson Garcia, congrats on becoming a dad down in Virginia. Nelson, I'm going to be a dad in a couple months. Maybe we should like, pin each other. Corrin Kathleen, Simmerville. It's their anniversary in Delray Beach, Florida. Congratulations to Travis and Christina Miller for having a baby in Utica, Ohio. And Ryan Glenn on the new job in Hoboken. Congratulations to Gorov and Adeline, who just got hitched in the D.C. Maryland, Virginia, area. and Diana Lee buying her first apartment in Sydney, Australia.

Happy Tibetan New Year to Tensan Lama and Jackson Heights, Queens. And James Smith, happy Valentine's Day from your wife, Meg, married for seven years in Indianapolis. Somebody just tweeted there should be Mescalentimes Day? Yes. To celebrate, you know, that wonderful liquor. We're adding it to the list. This is Jack. I own stock of Netflix.

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.