The Best One Yet - 🤓 “TikTok killed/saved books ” — Barnes & Noble’s #BookTok. Tesla’s GigaSchnitzel. The 40-yd dash of finance.

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Shocker: Barnes & Noble is enjoying a surge of book sales… thanks to TikTok #BookTok. Elon’s just opened his latest gigafactory in Berlin — these huge gigafactories are Tesla’s true competitive advantage. And the SEC may require a brand new financial statement (but the best way for us to explain it is with quarterbacks and vertical leaps).$TSLAGot 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/viewformID: 2091802Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dude, what would be a funny essay title that you could add that to? And it just sounds like really stupid. The old man in the scene. Here we go. Three, two. This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily.

It is Wednesday, March 23rd. This pod is the best one yet. It's a TVOI. I love what we mixed up today. Great mix of stories. For our first story, Barnes & Noble is suddenly enjoying a book renaissance. Yeah, it's not a hair. Harry Potter prequel and it's not the 50 second shade of gray.

It's not 53 shades either. It's book talk. Book talk. For our second story, Hello, Berlin. Yeah, Snackers, the fourth ever gigafactory is revealing how big Tesla's lead is. It's a really big lead. A third and final story is about the SEC. It may require a fifth mandatory financial statement.

This one's about climate. Okay, so the best way to explain this is with a 40-yard dash. It felt like a 50-yard. Ash, what I did it. Someone did a little too much rounding over there. Tim Tebow knows what we're talking about. I know. Snackers, before we get that wonderful mix, that. Again, fantastic mixture.

Nick and I noticed a strange trend going down in Hollywood right now. Yeah, specifically a trend with movie titles. Hollywood is remaking movies. That's like clear. That's been happening for years. But according to the Wall Street Journal, it's not remaking the titles of those movies. We're looking at the rise of the lazy movie title. Okay, Jack, let's whip up some examples here.

the movie Scream came out in 1996. Courtney Cox, I remember it. But Scream is also coming out this year. Yeah, not Scream 7, not Scream 8, just scream. Again, not Scream the sequel, just scream. Same name as the first one. So it's a sequel, but it's the same name as the original. It's not a sequel, it's a sequel.

It's a Requel. And Snackers, here's where things get a little wild. Sometimes Hollywood just adds one word to the same title of the same movie. That one word is simply the word. word the. The. The is the word. All right. In 2016, we had Suicide Squad. Last year, we got the Suicide Squad. Other times, they don't add a the Th, they drop the Th. That's exactly what they do with the The The Jack. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out in 1974. But this year, there's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No Thah. And get this, in 2003, there was another version called

the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Okay, this one's complicated, but it's the same title, but they made chainsaw two words, not one word. They added a space into the word chainsaw and feel like that's a new title. And yet they kept the the the thus. So, Jack, how many chainsaws we got? Okay, we got the Texas chainsaw massacre. Okay. Texas chainsaw massacre. There we go. And the Texas

chainsaw massacre. So Jack, what's the takeaway for all of our buddies making requil movie titles? If you have writers block, just add the word the to whatever the last thing you wrote. Or if you want to get really creative, out of space. Or delete the the, the. Let's hit the three stories. Let's hit our three store. ease. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers. 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 FINRA slash SIPC. For our first story, Barnes & Noble book sales are, get this, they are soaring again because of TikTok. It's called book talk. It shows that what doesn't kill you can indeed make you stronger. First, Oprah's Book Club, then we went to Reese's Book Club, and then we went to.

Gwyneth now as a book club. I know. If you're a celebrity and your literate. Convo. Launch a book club, you might be a billionaire. I did notice that Reese's is the only book club that comes with its own branded Rose. Is that, are you sure about that? I bet you Gwyneth does too.

I bet you guidance does too. I think Gwyneth is coming with some other stuff, Jack. Snackers, Barnes & Noble was a publicly traded stock that Nick and I have been covering for years. It was a blast. Tick or symbol, BKS. Remember that? I know. It was awesome.

But after years of battling Amazon. It was awesome. It was awesome. My dad, every road trip, it was a rule. We had to stop at Barnes & Noble. And I would just, like, dominate the magazine section. My mom's going to love this story. Except for the magazine part.

She wishes I was reading a book. It could have been a full cover to cover. But here's the thing, Snackers. After a years of battling Amazon, Barnes & Noble was bought the entire company by a hedge fund back in 2019. Took it private. Yeah, the price tag for that acquisition was less than a billion dollars because Barnes & Noble has slimmed down from a beefy textbook of a company to basically a little pamphlet. Here's the wild story, Snackers. Sales at Barnes & Noble and at 600 physical bookstores have shockingly popped.

My dad and your mom are going to be thrilled. ruled about this. They're so happy. In fact, get this, 2022 sales of Barnes & Noble are on track to beat 2019 sales. I love books now. It's just I was young and immature, so I went to magazines. By the way, Shoe Dog, great book just finished. The Art of Fielding. I just finished, really loved it. And here's the Key Insight Snackers. Specifically, it was paperback sales that have searched. Specifically, paperbacks that are trending on TikTok. Behold, a whole community of book readers called Book Talk on TikTok. This is when people post videos

raving about some book. Yeah. And you hashtag it with BookTalk. It's got 43 billion views on TikTok, people talking about books. Book Talk is like almost bigger than TikTok. But Snackers, here's what Jack and I found fascinating about this story. Book Talk on TikTok has gotten so big it is physically changing the entire book industry. Forever.

Yeah. Actually, that's a cliffhanger. We'll get to it later in the story. For example, the title, it ends with us. Yeah. A heartbreaking novel. Classic story. Just timeless. I don't know. I haven't read it. But it's written by Colleen Hoover. And it was selling about 20,000 copies per year according to the Financial Times.

Yeah, which is not a huge number until book talk got involved. Now it ends with us. It's selling 300,000 copies a year. Okay. This is five years after it got its initial bump from being published. Like five years later. It's an older book. And now it's finally become a New York Times bestseller five years after publishing. That's totally unusual. Other books that are like popping up on Book Talk, they're seeing 100x sales growth because they're on TikTok.

Clearly, TikTok is where booms and interest can happen for like any product. And Barnes & Noble's looking at the situation. They don't really know what to do right now, but they're happy. Barnes & Noble is so thrilled that youths are coming into the store. They're like, me, little me. That they're remodeling their entire store

to accommodate these booktokers. Yeah, next thing they've got to start up. You know, and they have like the stencil drawings of the older people? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the famous authors. They could do more of those. Do them with the bookstock stars. You'll walk in and you'll see the table right out front says, trending on TikTok, and it's all the books that you're seeing on book talk.

Jack, what does this look like? This is another instance of analog Andy striking back. Yeah, Snackers, all this book buying is yet another sign of a backlash against screens that we're all facing. Drop the Kindle, grab the Kite Runner paperback. It's a great book. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies enjoying books? over at Barnes & Noble. The internet didn't kill books. And now the internet's making them stronger.

Snackers, e-readers, Amazon, Facebook, all those threatened to kill physical book sales and destroyed book sales for a while. The prediction was that some readers would switch from physical books to e-books and the rest would switch to just scrolling Instagram instead. Well, it turns out that was kind of wrong. Books have survived. In fact, social media is literally powering book sales right now. Online scrolling is driving offline reading. Because what didn't kill books is now making books stronger. For our second story, Tesla just opened up its fourth ever Gigafactory. It took Tesla 19 years to get here.

Yeah. And that should scare Tesla's competitors. Okay. First of all, Gigafactory. Great word to say, great brand. Gigafactory is just what Elon calls his factories. It's like chassis is probably the most fun word to say in automobiles, but this is second. Giga is the unit of measurement for billions.

Yes. And not that we know that much Greek, but it does mean giant in Greek. We also know that gigafactories are part of the reason Elon has giga dollars. Yeah, exactly. Because the gigafactory, it is a really big factory. One of Tesla's gigafactory snackers can hold over 100 football fields inside. Yeah, that is, give or take, 10,000 40-yard dashes. That's a lot of 40-R dashes.

And now, Berlin, Germany. the city where I studied abroad. And Nick visited me in 2009. Berlin is getting the fourth gigafact. I was going to ask, how close is this to your old spot? It's outside the city. I think it's in the middle of a forest. I mean, it was a great weekend.

Honestly, we actually only ate chocolate and pretzels. And versed. I think we saw the sunrise one morning. Which sounds really romantic. It wasn't that romantic. I actually had an early flight. Snackers. Now, this fourth gigavagher is such a big deal that the

Chancellor of Germany literally stopped by for the ribbon-cutting ceremony with Mr. Elon. As the first 30 Tesla's rolled off the assembly line, Elon Musk started dancing. Chancellor Olaf Schultz didn't dance. Yeah. Now, Snackers, the reason this fourth gigafactory is so important is because Europe is destroying the United States in electric vehicle adoption. Last year, Europe bought four times more electric cars than the United States. We repeat, Europe is doing four times as many electric car purchases than America.

So it's important that Tesla is in Europe. And it's especially important because Tesla is on a quest for global electric car domination. And when it comes to global electric car domination, that requires physical expansion. We see gigafactories as Tesla's outposts. This is literally like the game of risk that one of your siblings forced you to play like 20 years ago and you played risk. You move little pieces from country to country and continent to continent. Elon moves gigafactories. And it all started with the OG Tesla. factory in Fremont, California, on the other side of the bay from the OG headquarters in Palo Alto. Yeah, that's the most productive car plant in America, pumping out eight and a half

thousand cars every week in Fremont. And then came Tesla's first gigafactory over in Nevada. They do one thing. Batteries, battery packs. Perfect, because then they opened their second gigafactory in Shanghai, China in 2019. China, where they buy even more electric cars than Europe does. And finally, Austin, Texas is getting its very, own gigafactory, also the future site of Tesla's next headquarters. The cyber truck will be there. Taxes won't be there. So Berlin is Tesla's fourth car slash battery factory. The fifth one's coming soon to Austin, but it's not done. Yeah, to keep Austin wired. So Tesla's got three continents covered with these little pieces of the game of risk. Exactly like the game of risk. So Jack,

what's the takeaway for our buddies over Tesla? The battle over electric cars isn't about cars. It's about factories. Yeah, Snackers, there is one stat overall that highlights Tesla's wild electric vehicle lead. Two out of every three electric cars sold in America in the past two years. Two out of every three were Tesla's. But what drives that advantage for Tesla isn't the self-driving features and it isn't the Falcon Wing doors. It's these gigafactories. Yes. The global gaggle of gigafactories. Yeah, because most car companies began making electric cars like a few years ago, Tesla started two decades ago. Tesla is so far ahead that this one factory in Berlin produces more cars than VW did all of last year. Factories, they aren't just where the cars are made.

There where Tesla's lead is made. For our third and final story, the SEC already requires that all companies report four standard financial reports. For the first time in years. This is wild. Maybe seeing the birth of the fifth report, the climate report. First of all, Jack, LeBron versus Jordan. Manning versus brain. Okay, Gretzky versus Messia.

You can't have a sports argument without agreeing on one thing. Standardized metrics. Standardized metrics, Snackers. You need them to compare Tim Tebow to Division IIIbo. And we get those standardized metrics over at the NFL Combine. Yeah, let's focus on football over here, Snackers, because every athlete in the NFL Combine does the same 40-yard dash, the same vertical jump, and the same bench press to test their physical abilities.

And that way, scouts can compare two very. very different players who have very different shapes. Okay, Jack, I'm pulling up the stat sheet here. Let's say we got quarterback's Tim Tebow and quarterback D3bo, both of whom score a whole bunch of touchdowns. I think the touchdowns were a little easier for D3Bow. They were, they were. But the NFL Combine will reveal that D3Bow is a guy with seven inch hands. Good enough for Division III.

But Tim Tebow has nine inch hands. One player runs a 40-R dash in 5.5 seconds. Tim Tebow runs it in 4.4 seconds. Yeah. These standardized metrics, they are what let you see that Tim Tebow is the stronger, faster quarterback than D3bo. I'm sorry, D3bo. You're not going to make the NFL.

Well, it's the exact same situation in finance, isn't it, Jack? To compare two very different companies, there's a shared metric that you can use to compare them, like earnings per share. Exactly. Like, let's take Microsoft and Crocs, for example, to totally different. companies. You cannot get more different companies, but they both report the same metrics every quarter. It's because of the SEC. The Securities and Exchange Commission. That's the government agency that decides what standard financial metrics every company must report. Well, just

this week, the SEC voted to require that all companies report climate metrics a new type of metric. This is a big deal. And it's because climate change, they think, presents risks to all companies in the United States. Yeah, this government agency is saying, hey, investors should know the risks, and now those risks could be climate risks. Debt, for example, that's an obvious risk to any company. Exactly. And when you check out a company's balance sheet, for example, a financial statement, you're going to see info on the debt. Well, Gary Gensler thinks that dependence on fossil fuel is a risk, too. And investors should be able to learn about that for every company. With a new financial report. Now, business lobbies are opposed to this. They're complaining they'll have to hire a

bunch of new accountants, and it'll be hard to calculate climate change metrics. And then some politicians are calling this overreach by the SEC. But this could take years before it becomes law. Actually, what's this next stage, Jack? There's a 60-day comment period. Whatever that means. Just started where people can send in letters. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for all of our buddies who are all companies?

The SEC already demands four standard reports. Climate change could be the fifth. Snackers, there are over 4,000 different publicly traded stocks in the U.S. United States. We don't know every stock happened. No, no, no, no, we don't. But we do know that all those companies have to publish the exact same four reports every quarter. The income statement, the balance sheet, the cash flow statement, and the shareholders equity report. Well, the SEC, they require that all four of those documents get published every single quarter. It's the rule for every publicly traded company. But climate, that could be the fifth report that every company must

provide. Which means we'd be witnessing the birth of a new financial report in our lifetimes. We're really excited about this. We never thought we'd see the day. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us over there? Barnes & Noble is enjoying a book buying renaissance thanks to TikTok. Yeah, the internet didn't kill books. It's now making books stronger. Tesla just opened their fourth factory. This one's in Berlin. Gigafactories. Not the car's gigafactories. That's why Tesla's leading. Our third and final story is about the SEC, which wants all companies to report, standardized climate metrics like greenhouse gas emissions. I don't want to get ahead of myself, Jack, but we could be getting the fifth standard financial

statement. My baby boy. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one sent in by the trademark office of Fred Heim over in Orange County, California. Hey, snackers. Did you know the fitness term spinning is actually a registered trademark? Often misused its proprietary eponym. The name spinning was coined in 1991 by a couple of cycling enthusiasts, hacking together

bikes in a garage in Santa Monica, California. Since then, the company Mad Dog Athletics has gone on to sell over a million bikes and certify a quarter million spinning instructors. Wow. The rare trademarked verb. Doesn't happen that much. I thought trademarks were only for now. Well, the lawyers love this because then you got a copyright spin, spinning, spinningist.

It's like a whole thing you got to do there. Imagine a trademarked adverb. I just went to SoulCyco the other day. And honestly, I don't even know if we can say that now. Well, you didn't spin there. That's for sure. Let's wrap this out. Snackers, you look fantastic today.

If you haven't yet, one way you can help us grow the pot, you can give us a review right here on Apple or Spotify. Spotify lets you review now, too. Let's roll with it, one through five, preferably a five. And Nick and I, we'll see you tomorrow. And before we go, happy birthday to Snacker John Elias down in Atlanta. And happy birthday to Michael Kane and his Doug Gizzy, both celebrating their birthdays in Denver.

And our job, enjoy the Los Angeles birthday. And happy 11th birthday to Austin Hale in Jacksonville, Florida. And Grace and Duke, enjoy the birthday in Chesapeake, Virginia. Happy birthday to Lawrence Sarmienta in West Lake Ohio. And Jared, enjoy the Boston birthday just outside of Boston. Happy birthday to Abby, who just moved back to the Upper West Side. And Jack, Jim Lord in New Jersey just published his first book. Don't wait, leave now.

I agree. Book talk? Maybe it's a book talk potential. And congrats to Fancy Nancy, who's graduated. down in Philadelphia. And Wy and Colvin, congrats on the new house, the new job and the new baby in Hotlanta. The trifecta. And congratulations to Alyssa and Philman Burr, who just got engaged in Chicago. Doing logistics. And to anyone else celebrating something today, making a T-buoy. Celebrate the wins. This is Jack. I own stock of Amazon, Crocs, and Volkswagen. And I own a

Volkswagen. 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 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 Robinood Markets Inc., Robinto Financial LLC, or any of their subsidiaries or affiliates. All investments

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