The Best One Yet - ♟️ “Hardcore Pawn” — Chess.com’s growth hack. Meta’s favorite word. Fanatics’ sports bet.

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

The number of Americans playing chess has shockingly doubled in just 6 months — and it’s all because of one website’s wild strategy. Meta surged 14% after its earnings because tech has a new favorite “word du jour.” And sports apparel giant Fanatics has 90M users, but it’s making a major pivot before its IPO: From t-shirts to sports bets.$META $GOOG $MSFTTake our weekly pop-biz pop-quiz at go.tboypod.com Want merch, a shoutout, or got TheBestFactYet? Go to: www.tboypod.comFollow The Best One Yet on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok: @tboypodAnd now watch us on YoutubeLearn 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. It's Friday, the real Friday. April 28th, and today's pod is the best one yet. It's a T-Boy. You know what day it is. It is Quiz Friday. Oh, it is Quiz Friday.

Yiddies, you can play our one-minute weekly Pop-Biz Pop Quiz. At T-Boypod.com, check it out. One-minute weekly, Pop-Biz, Pop Quiz. In the meantime, Jack, what's our first story for the show? The number of Americans playing chess has shockingly doubled in the past six months. Because Yeties, you're not playing chess. Test.com is playing you. For our second story, Metastock jumped 14% yesterday after its earnings report

showed that Zuck has a new favorite word. There's a new word du jour, and it is not the metaverse. And our third and final story, the sports apparel company Fanatics is making the biggest pivot in business. This is wild. They're going from sports shirts to sports bets, and soon sports TV. Allegedly. But yet is before we hit that wonderful.

Just the perfect mix to go into a weekend with it. I love what you drop there, man. We just got the spring report that we're always waiting for every spring. The highest paid internships in America. Bloomberg just tallied up who's paying the biggest bucks for temporary work this summer. And yet is you're going to want to sit down, stand up, and check your savings account again. These ain't no unpaid internships we're talking about. These are some extra pay internships. These are the guac internships.

They cost extra. Extra, extra. What do we got, Jack? Who is on the list? At JP Morgan Chase in New York City, they're paying $7,200 a month to summer interns. $7,200 bucks a month. And that is only number 19 on the highest paid interns list. Twitter's allegedly paying $7,300 for interns this summer. Okay, Elon, and that is number 17 on the highest paid interns list. Facebook is higher than both of them. Mark Zuckerberg is paying summer interns $8,200 per month. But here's the wild.

this part. That is not even the highest internship. The highest paid internship in America makes Zuck's pay look like a stipend. The highest paid internship in America? It's Stripe. It's Stripe with the highest paid internship. The B2B payment company Stripe is paying out $9,064 a month for this year's summer interns. All right, Jack, let's whip out the whiteboard. That is $56 an hour. That's $27,000 for the whole summer. That is $109,000 a month. A A year. Big Tech is laying off employees. They're pausing perks. They're not giving out free lattes or free laundry anymore. On the other hand, they're paying interns like the second coming of Jeff Bezos. At that price, you don't get copies for your boss. Your boss gets copies for you.

Oh, hey, Jerry, could you get the coffee? No. New Life goal? Become chief intern officer. That's what we said. But first, you got to become an intern. Spend three months interning and learning. And then you spend nine months on vacation. Then you intern again next summer, but with the more experience this time. And eventually get promoted to managing interns each summer as the chief intern. The final promotion become a full-time, part-time intern. I think today is intern takes their boss to lunch day. Jack, what's your dream job? Starting backup quarterback. Full-time, part-time intern. Jack, what's in our three stories? Fifteen years before this song, two boys from the northeast met in the dawn. They had an idea

It's the cost a cultural storm. It's the best one yet, but the best is a known. 50%. That's a fat tip. Tea boy city on your at list. If you know, you know, because we're ready to go. We can't wait no more. So just start the show.

Start the show. For our first story, chess, it surged during the pandemic. But now, here's the shocking thing. Chess is surging again. It's all because one chess startup devised a master plan to scale a 1400-year-old game. Yiddies, we know. did during the pandemic, you learned a new language. You learned to speak the language of chess. Thanks to pandemic boredom and one Netflix show, you probably played chess in 2020.

Yeah, like after Tiger King and after you watched the last dance, then Queens Gambit on Netflix, that was like, was that, that was peak pandemic movies, right, Jack? Peak Pandemic Shmovies. It was peak pandemic and it was about chess. So 62 million people watched that show, Queens Gamut, and had nothing to do. So they tried out chess. But here's the surprise, Yeti's. The pandemic. The pandemic is over. And yet chess is not over. In fact, chess playing in America has only accelerated as the pandemic has waned. Get this. Since November, visitors to chess.com have doubled to chess.com. Chess.com is a website where you can play people digitally in chess.

All right, let's jump in further the numbers, Jack. Daily active users at chess.com more than doubled from 5 million to 11 million in just six months. 11 million people play every day on that website, and a record 32 million games happened in one day just last month. That's more games of chess than Union Square in New York. And this isn't your uncle Todd we're talking about here hanging out on his Windows 93. The biggest growth in chess online is from Gen Z teens. Turns out the website's number one demographic is people under the age of 24 playing in school. So you're not stuck at home anymore. Queens Gambit is like gone. No one's talking about that.

Why is there a second surge in chess in America today? Well, Yeties, here is the answer. You're not playing chess, no, chess.com is playing you. We are all pawns in this startup's corporate strategy, and here's why. Here's why. Chess.com engineered three growth hacks to maintain the growth of chess post-pandemic, and it's working. First is they touched the third rail. After 1,400 years, they changed the rule.

of chess a little bit for this new age of the short attention span. They didn't just introduce faster games. They introduced like super speed games. They added a timer so that you can't take forever deciding, oh, am I going to move my bishop that way to the left or that way to the right? What am I going to do with my rook? Let me consult my handy-dandy book and read for five minutes. At the beginning of the game, you decide, am I going to play a 30-minute game, a five-minute

game, or even a one-minute game you can play? Okay, growth hack number two. They added influencers to chess to reach new users. They paid Mr. Beast to play a live stream chess tournament on chess.com. Can we sprinkle on more context here on Mr. Beast, man? Mr. Beast is the biggest YouTuber of all time. He's got a 150 million followers who all got to see him playing chess. That's evangelism right there.

They got to see him move a king's rook to a bishop's knight 12. I'd love to play you in chess. It sounds like you're not any good. I did a little bit of rounding on that one, Jack. And the third growth hack at Chess.com, they created characters for more engagement. When you go to Chess.com and click play a game, you can play against another person who's somewhere on the web. Or you can play against a robot. But instead of just making this a robot, they turned the robot into like a Disney-style character.

Kind of an annoying character, actually. The number one villain of this game is named Mittens. It's a kitten. You can play chess again. Yeah, we're telling you, you can play chess against. against an evil kitten named middens. And guess what? 40 million games have been played against middens.

Add it all up. And like we said, we're all just part of chess.com's master plan. Like we said, chess.com, they're playing us. This is some hardcore pawn. So grandmaster, Jack. What's the takeaway for our buddies playing chess over at chess.com? Chess pulled off one of the hardest moves in business. They turned a fad into a trend.

Now, yeties, you would think that chess, would be going in the opposite direction right now. Like, it should be falling after the pandemic. Zoom, Peloton, even board games. Usage of those things has fallen back to their pre-pandemic levels. But chess is the rare exception. The pandemic turns out was just the beginning of the chess search. Chess.com took a 1400-year-old game and modernized it for the digital age.

And then, thanks to its three growth hacks, digital chess games surged again to an all-time high. Chess.com pulled off one of the hardest. things to do in business. They turned a fad into a trend. For our second story, Mark Zuckerberg's meta-stock has nearly tripled in just the last five months, not too shabby. Zuck's latest quarter tells you everything you need to know about big tech. We're going to jump in T-boy style to this story. Can we talk about the little reality about tech? Four of the top five big tech companies are driven. They make their living. They put bread on the table thanks to advertising. I love how you said it, Jack. The internet,

Yetis, it is free to access, but the internet's gatekeepers, they make you look at ads to be there. They make you click X on that advertising box that jumps up at you. For example, Google, its ad revenue did slip last quarter, but Google still is the number one advertising company in the whole world. Let's spin over to Microsoft. Ad sales jumped by 10% at Microsoft, thanks to their AI-enhanced fancy schmancy, sprinkled-dinkle, Bing search engine. And Jack, what did Amazon just tell us?

yesterday about its ad sales? Amazon's ad sales look best of all of them because it jumped by 21% as you see more ads for that mattress, mattress, mattress. But meta, meta, let's talk for a second about meta. Meta's ad sales got their swagger back. Yes, they did. Zuck has got his mojo. And that's why meta stock surged by 12% yesterday. It hit the highest point in over a year. It was all thanks to ads on Facebook, Instagram, and anything else Zuckerberg touches. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg's net worth has nearly tripled since November, thanks to the near tripling of Metastock. Okay, in fact, Mark Zuckerberg just said he would stop firing people.

In fact, in fact, he even may hire people later this year. That'd be nice, although he's putting us through some emotional swings over here. Now, Yeti's ad sales overall, they are soft right now because advertisers are bracing for a possible recession. But at Meta, at Microsoft, and at Amazon, ad sales are looking all right right now. Okay, so Yeties, Jack and I just told you how much the tech. industry depends on ads. And yet, we noticed something strange in the tech earnings this week. The CEOs weren't talking about ad sales during their earnings calls. No, in fact, the CEOs were talking about something that they make like no money on whatsoever. They were obsessed with

talking about artificial intelligence. Get this. Microsoft mentioned the word artificial intelligence 54 times on their earnings call. Facebook said AI 57 times on their earnings call. And Google said AI 65 times on their earnings call. I think Google is the most self-conscious about it. It feels like a zucking. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in the big tech industry? AI just replaced the metaverse in the tech hype cycle. Yeah, yet is remember when meta used to be called Facebook?

Yeah, that wasn't that long ago. Zuck changed the name to meta because he wanted to shift the world into his metaverse. It was a big deal. That was last year. And yet investors barely asked Zuck about the metaverse on the earth. earnings call this week. Instead, artificial intelligence has completely taken over the conversation. Zuck had to talk about AI 57 times this week. So Jack and I were looking back on our history of recording this podcast and we noticed four years ago, the tech word de jour was cloud computing.

Three years ago, the tech word de jour was cryptocurrencies. Two years ago, it was Web 3. And one year ago it was the Metaverse. Well, today, the tech word de jour, it's AI. The tech hype cycle. It's moved on from the Metaverse to artificial intelligence. For our third and final story before the weekend, Fanatics is trying to jump from, get this, selling T-shirts to selling sports bets. But can it solve the biggest problem with being a sports fan in America?

Can it solve how frustrating it is sometimes to be a sports fan? Funny thing about Fanatics, whether it's Yankees, jerseys or Red Sox caps. Or whether it's Rangers' jerseys or Devil's jerseys. Whether it's, Bulls or da Bears? It doesn't matter what the rivalry is.

Both those jerseys are going to be made and sold by Fanatics. That Jacksonville Jaguars jersey was produced by Fanatics, the $31 billion private sports apparel company. You may want to get to know Fanatics because Fanatics is the fifth most valuable private company in the United States. Fanatics started in the 90s. They were very early to online retail for fan merchandise. Yeah, Jack, when we jumped in T-Boy stop, what was that thing we need?

noticed about what they were offering? I went to the search bar and typed in Shohei Otani. 372 different pieces of merch showed up in the search results. But here's the thing, Angels fans. Fanatics wants to do something that even Shohei Otani can't do. And what is that? Fanatics wants to play every position in every single spot. Yeah, because get this, Fanatics began in the apparel industry. They sold t-shirts, jerseys, and caps online. And then Fanatics expanded to the collectibles industry. They do trading cards. They do on-field memorabilia. They do NFT. But now Fanatics is trying to jump industries in a way we've never seen before.

They're trying to go from a sports apparel brand to a sports betting brand. On Monday, Fanatics is launching a sports betting app in two separate states, Tennessee and Ohio. Again, we're talking about a company whose core business is selling dad hats with like a Rangers logo on it. You can wear a Fanatics jersey while using the Fanatics betting app. But yeties, here's something we should point out. We've told you before that if you want to see a company's ambitions, you look at their job board. You look at who they're hiring. Fanatics just hired the woman who handled Netflix's IPO.

Fanatics just hired the same person who ran Mehta's investor relations department for like the last eight years. And her job now is to prepare for fanatics going public. That was the insight here. It looks like Fanatics is preparing to IPO. And this new hire is going to write Fanatics S-1. So Fanatics has gone from a company that sells jerseys online to a company that sells trading cards to a company that has sports betting apps. So the question is like, what else can they do? A whole lot apparently.

The CEO made this incredibly ambitious statement to the Wall Street Journal yesterday. He said he wants to become the one place that a sports fan can do everything they want to do digitally. Everything they want to do digitally. Apparently Fanatics wants to enter even more. industries. He mentioned live sports streaming and ticketing as the next for FNAVs. Yeah, Jack, our business school professors, I'm pretty sure they said we should focus on like one or two things. I guess the one thing is sports, but everything for sports. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Fanatics? Pro Sports can finally become fan first. Look, Yetis, funny thing about

pro sports in America. It is an extremely customer, unfriendly business. Pro sports treats fans pretty badly, if you think about it. They have a long history of fan unfriendly and profit-first moves. They put pros before coes, classic sports industry. Exorbitant ticket fees. TV blackout so you can't watch the game you're excited about Friday night. Makes fans angrier than losing that game in double OT. But Fanatics thinks they can fix those two products, ticketing and TV streaming.

And here's why it might work. Because Fanatics is actually part owned by the sports leagues. MLB, the NFL, the NHL, and the players associations have all invested in fanatics. That is a rare alignment. It means that fanatic success would be the league success. So if fanatics can expand to all these new products, then sports could finally become fan first. Finally. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us for the real Friday? Chess surged during the pandemic and it's surging even more now.

Because chess.com turned a fad into a trend. Or our second story, meta, showed a rebound in ad sales last quarter, but everyone was talking artificial intelligence. Honestly, AI, it's replaced the metaverse in the tech hype cycle. And our third and final story is fanatics. They expand Monday into sports betting with sites on TV and ticketing next. Pro sports in America. It could finally become fan first.

Please. Please. Now, time for the best fact yet. This one sent in by Lloyd Broughtman from lovely center city Philadelphia. Yesterday, we talked about how cardboard is actually a leading indicator, a leading, leading, indicator for the economy. We talked about how the number of cardboard boxes actually predicts what will happen in the economy. You know what's another leading indicator?

Yes, Jack? Trash. Yeah, trash. Like garbage. Garbage is also kind of a leading leading indicator. Because the more money you spend on things, the more stuff that ends up in your garbage. So facto, the more garbage, the stronger the economy. Checking out your neighbor's garbage pail might be the most real-time indicator of the economy

that there is. In fact, there is an 82% correlation between your neighbor's garbage output and economic output. You're going to want to put some rubber gloves on if you want to be a real economist. It's not weird. It's just research. Yeties, you looked fantastic this week. And remember, if you want to be healthy this weekend, treat yourself to a job. gelato cleanse. Those Harvard scientists, they were shocked and, like, concerned by their findings.

And scoop full of cookies and cream, that's only going to make you feel better. Spoonful of sugar does make the medicine go down. Celebrate the wins with the hot fudge. Jack and I will see you Monday. Before we go, a shout out to Yeti, Mary Speedy, who's flying over to Scotland to catch Bruce Springsteen's European tour, not too shabby. And big shout out to Dominique Pileasy, who got promoted to Army. warrant officer and is starting flight school right now. Mike and Madison Cooney, congratulations on the seven-year anniversary over in Bridgeport, Connecticut. We are wishing all the best to Maddie V. and Lindy. We're getting married this weekend in

Colorado. Big shout out to the Michigan Ross MBA graduating class. Never forget the five forces of business. And a congratulations to legendary Yeti, Rachel Hauer, who just left her corporate job to dominate social media right now. She's actually, actually our new social media manager and she's absolutely crushing it. Check out her work at T-Boy Pod. It's amazing. And a happy birthday to Yeti Justin Wright, his golden birthday over in Salt Lake City. Happy birthday to Hashim Al-Awami from Saudi Arabia, but celebrating in Philadelphia at the Wharton School. And a happy birthday to Michael Memoring over in Trenton, Michigan.

Happy 13th birthday to Logan in Saginaw, Michigan. And Liam Martin's turning 18 down in Dallas. And happy birthday to Natalia Birabille Amussan in Dallas, Texas. And Cindy Mayo, happy birthday over in Los Angeles. Happy birthday to Maddie the Mid Kid Calwell in Boston. Just not so bad, Boston. And Ryan Duke just got a lower car insurance rate for his 25th birthday. Not too shabby.

Not too shabby. And happy 25th birthday to Emily Guess in San Francisco. And Jay Farrick, enjoy that birthday in the wine country of Petaluma. Happy birthday to Matt Herrera in Los Angeles, California. Legendary Yeti Matt Herrera and a happy birthday to Maddie Hibbs over in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Happy birthday to Hannah Talbinfield

in Seattle, Washington. And enjoy that birthday, Mr. Brett Onsey Onsbacker over en masse, a Piqualong Island even though you chose the wrong NHL team. Not too shabby. That's where my wife is from. There you go. And little, little call is turning two years old on a bouncy castle in Florida.

This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon and Netflix. and Nick and I both own stock of Peloton. Great. Oh, great job. Name of the show is hardcore pawn. I think it is, dude. I think it definitely is.