The Best One Yet - 🤑 “Wait, there’s no Bitcoin emoji?” — PayPal’s brunch test. The Athletic’s Axios crush. Big Wind’s new world.

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

You can buy that latte with Bitcoin today after PayPal just did its mainstream crypto dance. Newspaper disruptors The Athletic and Axios have a crush on each other that may blossom into a media SPAC marriage (aka “The Great Re-Bundling”). And Big Wind is having its big moment so we whipped up the 3 big numbers from the Biden infrastructure plan.$BTC $PYPL $SQ $GE $VWDRY $BLK $NEEGot 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 Wednesday, end of the quarter, March 31, Jack. So if you see Zucking, say Zucking, right? Yeah, and we just saw Zucking. This was almost a stage 5 Zucking Jack. Snackers, Spotify is blatantly Zucking Clubhouse.

They just acquired a mini clubhouse competitor. A little clubhouse competitor. So don't be surprised when Spotify tosses in a live audio conversation feature into the Spotify app. And remember, even a pre-Zucking is still a Zucking. And remember, this is our best. one yet. Jack, what's the first story on this TBOY? 29 million merchants except PayPal. Boom. 29 million merchants except crypto.

PayPal just launched crypto payments today. For our second story, The Athletic and Axios are making the gossip column these days. Yeah, it could be the most interesting media spec marriage of the year. And for our third and final story, Big Wind, maybe about to get some big money. Yeah, we found three big numbers off President Biden's 2030 Wind Energy Proclamation. But Snackers, before we hit those three wonderful stories. Fantastic. On Monday, Volkswagen published a press release.

But here's the thing. It wasn't a press release. It was one of those press releases that had draft, written in huge letters at the top for everyone to see. But it was also only up there for like 10 minutes. But it's the internet, so 10 minutes is technically forever. Yes, I mean, internet VW mocked a little too much schnell on this thing. The press release was to announce a new name.

Volkswagen, not Volkswagon. Now, to be clear, Volkswagen is still Volkswagen. Yes, but Volkswagen USA is now Volkswagen USA. Nick, how do you get your brand to scream electric cars? Jack, I'm no marketing major, but I think you stick Volt in your name. That's how you do this. Nick and I were talking about this PR fiasco that was pretty hilarious. And we thought to ourselves, could this all just be like a botched April Fool's joke from Volkswagen? But then we triple check the calendars on this thing. April Fool's isn't until Thursday. So yesterday morning, Volkswagen said that this was a real press release. But then yesterday afternoon, CNBC reported it was actually a joke.

So it seems it was supposed to be an April Fool's joke, but just prematurely timed? Or was it perfectly timed? Right, because we're all talking about it now. Which means VW just out Elon, Elon. Did VW just out Elon Elon? Let's in 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. Snacks is digestible. Business news for you.

Robohood Financial, LLC, member Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, PayPal, just launched crypto checkouts. you can actually pay with Bitcoin this time. But does this new feature pass the brunch test, Nick? Full disclosure here, Snackers want to know what happened to Ben the Bitcoin Jack. He's doing a lot better than he used to be doing. He's living his best life. He's out of the house. His bed, though, is now occupied by Ethel the Ethereum.

He moved down to Miami, Florida, apparently. And he's living in a penthouse suite way better than your place, Nick. That's what he's doing. He doesn't even write me. He doesn't send anything. Nothing on the blockchain. Now, Snackers, the story here is that PayPal just launched a crypto checkout service. So that you can do more with crypto than just put it in your Twitter bio that you love Bitcoin.

Jack, it's like everyone who bought Bitcoin now has pink eye with the laser eyes. Everyone had pink eye. Now, we actually covered this story already when PayPal announced it back in October that they had a wait list to pay for things with crypto. Yeah, Jack, looking on the numbers here, Bitcoin had hit $13,000 back in October, which that was like its highest level in three years. That was a big deal. Now, now it's been cruising from 50 to $60,000 for like a month. I'm aware. Now, here's the situation with PayPal Snackers.

29 million merchants now accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin cash, and Litecoin from 377 million PayPal users. That is a big platform. 29 million on one side, 377 million on the other side. They're all going to accept crypto now. So, like, let's say you're a snacker, you're living in San Diego. You're going to treat yourself. You got the $12 turmeric mushroom latte, even wanting it all week.

Or let's say you're a snacker who lives in Kansas and you just want a dollar black coffee in one of those blue cups. Either way, if you're going to pay in Bitcoin, live large, get the oat milk. Now, what you're not going to see if you pay for something in Bitcoin on PayPal is that PayPal is actually going to convert your crypto to dollars right before the transaction ends so that the merchant receives the local currency. Exactly. And let's say you're buying this fancy latte over in France, then PayPal will convert from Bitcoin into US dollars and then into Europe.

This is all a little different than Tesla's recent announcement. They said they're going to accept Bitcoin to pay for their cars. and Tesla is just happy to accept Bitcoin. They're not going to convert it to dollar first. All right. So first thing, the first thing Jack and I thought of when we heard this story, does it pass the brunch test? The brunch test.

The ultimate fintech mainstreamification standard. Jack, can your French toast with three buddies use a new payment product and not interrupt the conversation flow? With this new feature, yes. You're using the same PayPal app. You're not facing any transaction fees if you're paying crypto. That's nice. And it'll feel just like it's your linked credit card that you're paying.

with. All right, so Jack, then you've got to kick things up a notch. Can you pay Julie $18 in Ethereum for the eggs Benedict via Venmo? No. No. You can't Venmo someone else with crypto with this new feature. And remember, Venmo's owned by PayPal. This is just for business transactions, not peer-to-peer. You can't pay peer-to-peer so it doesn't fully pass the brunch test. It's not a fully mainstream-fied payment option yet. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at PayPal? PayPal marks a new era for Bitcoin's brand. Jack, 2008 to 2015, where are we seeing Bitcoin's brand then? Bitcoin was for early adopters. Your random tech buddy who, like, built his own motherboard so he could mine the stuff.

Honestly, we still don't know you were building, Larry. 2015 to 2019, Jack, where are we seeing Bitcoin's brand then? That's when Bitcoin was volatility. It was defined by wild price swings and dinner table conversations from Uncle Bob. Jack, 2019 to 2021, where are you? are we seeing Bitcoin's brand then? Well, that's today. And it's seen today still generally as an exotic asset, an alternative to investing in cash or stocks. And that's because you got Tesla, Square, Fidelity, all those brands are all now associated with Bitcoin from the past year.

But now that PayPal has adopted Bitcoin, the brand of PayPal is rubbing off practicality onto Bitcoin's brand. Get this wild stat. Fifty-four percent of people are more willing to buy from a business when that business uses PayPal. The best thing for Bitcoin isn't a pay-with-Bit-Coin option, because that still screams exotic and volatile. It, like, yells it. The best thing we're thinking for Bitcoin's brand could simply be pay with PayPal. The practicality, it rubs right off. For our second story, Axios and the Athletics, S-P-A-C-I-N-G. This is the most interesting potential media merger marriage of the year. So good. Jack Rom-com. Who do you think is going to play Dan Premack?

I'm going to say McConaug, just so that he writes something nice about it. in his newsletter tomorrow. I was going to say Tom Hanks and the Da Vinci Code with the hair. Now, we're talking about Axios and the Athletic. Two media companies that took vaguely virtuous adjectives and turned them into their company names. First, you got Axios, a newsletter company that is obsessed with smart brevity.

Will it save a line? Let's cut that period if it will. Kendall, this must take 16 seconds of reading. You know, Ampersam is a shorter word than and, so it could make our newsletter shorter. I think they're going to be happy with that, Jack. And then he got The Athletic, which is for sports fans who look down on like those Instagram post power rankings we're all saying. You graduated from ESPN and you want to be able to cite statistics that nobody else knows.

The power ranking is the Olive Gardens wine shelf. I like that. The Athletic is the wine shelf that you mentioned on the pot the other day. Jack, it was the Brunello. You're right. Now, when it comes to this potential relationship between Axios and the Athletic, one is based in D.C. And one is based in San Francisco. So it would be a long-distance relationship.

Now, they both were found. in 2016. So they have age compatibility. And they both make about $60 million a year in revenues. Okay. So splitting the ramp won't be awkward. Yeah. These are also both high quality news outlets. They're not clickbaders. And according to the Wall Street Journal, they may merge and then form a SPAC together to go public with a publicly traded stock, raise money, moving in, and merge their operations. Now, opposites do attract, though, and there are enough complementary skills in this relationship to arouse a dating app. Okay, first, Axios is. is totally free. All their newsletters, you can sign up for for free. That's why 85% of their

revenues are the ads jammed into those newsletters. But the athletic isn't free. They got an $8 a month subscription. There are barely any ads. It's like the opposite. We're thinking Axios needs the athletics expertise to build a more reliable subscription business model. But wait a second. This isn't like a one-way relationship. The athletic needs some content spice in its life because it only does sports. The athletic needs Axios's news diversity. because Axios does media news, business news, politics, sports, China, even a random Minnesota newsletter. Now, if these companies do merge, the reports are that they would welcome other lean digital media groups into their company as well. Boom, each would bring its own editorial team to the relationship.

But then everyone can share resources like the one accounting department, the one ad sales team, and the one HR department. And if they do spec, we have got the ticker picked out for you. We looked it up. Yeah, we did. Get this. News is available. N-E-W-S. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Axios and the Athletic? The news industry is a pendulum. It swung from bundled to unbundled and now back to rebundled. Snackers, this goes all the way back to Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press in 1440.

That was the first mass distribution of media. Thanks to that wonderful invention, writers in the 15th century could finally reach some readers, but it was still hard to scale as an individual writer. Yeah, so then over the centuries, newspapers evolved, and that bundled writers together into one single product. As newspapers started grabbing up more writers and wider varieties of content, they could reach more people. But then the internet unbundled all of those newspapers

and readers started getting niche topics in different places. Blogs, newsletters, substack. You could choose your own mix of sports, business, politics, but not everything that used to come with one newspaper. Now, here's the kicker. All those unbundled digital news sources, they now have to bundle together in order to survive and thrive. Axios in the athletic merging would show how the news industry has gone from bundling to unbundling, but now back to re-bundling.

The great re-bundling. For our third and final story, Joe Biden's entire government is talking the wind energy. 30 gigawatts by 2030. That's the new goal. And guess what? It's all offshore. Okay, Jack, I'm going to whip up some names for you here. interior department, energy department, commerce department,

transportation department. It's like a captain planet of the government bureaus. Joe Biden got the whole gang together in the Oval Office for a joint statement on Monday about wind. So Jack and I went through the joint statement. Here's the thing. There are three big numbers you got to know. The first is 30 gigawatts. That is the goal that the Biden administration set for offshore wind energy in the United States by 2030.

And Jackson, no one knows what a watt even is. Can you sprinkle some contact on this for us? Yes. Today, America has less than 1% of that capacity, Nick. Yep. It's off the coast of Block Island and off the coast of Virginia. Okay, so second number here, 10 million. That is the number of homes that could be powered by just the wind if we fulfill this goal. All right, so we're talking like 50% more wind energy than even like the most bullish of estimates. Okay, the third number of this White House announcement, 77,000 jobs. As in the Biden administration is pitching this green energy as the job creator. Yes. Now, the wind turbines, the offshore energy we're talking about,

they're going to be 15 miles offshore from the beach. But the econ impact, we're going to see that in the steel mills, in the factories, in the ports, in the shipyards. Very onshore. Very terrestrial. Very insure. Like from sea to shining sea. It's like exclusively insure. But not outside the sea. You know what I mean? No, it's going to be inside. It's going to be inside. Now, this story, Snackers, it's also about two bodies of water with like constant gus and gales. This was a delightful detail in the story. It was. To make all this happen, the Interior Department is going to start selling and leasing federal

ocean development rights. Jack, grew up on the east side of Manhattan. Never heard of the New York bite. Didn't know it was a thing. That was a sandwich shop. B-I-G-H-T, not B-I-T-E. It's apparently a vast area of shallow ocean between Long Island and New Jersey. That's just perfect for offshore wind.

You got 20 million homes right there onshore, ready to drink up all the clean juice. The administration also plans to finally approve. ocean wind. Yep. A commercial scale wind farm proposal that's just been waiting in line to get developed off the coast of Atlantic City. Yeah, so that'd be like the third big wind farm after the nearly completed farms that are off Martha's Vineyard and Rhode Island.

Oh, also Pacific Ocean, getting no wind love here. What's going on? I think it's like a bite situation. This whole story is just the Acela corridor. Here's the thing with the Pacific Ocean. Things will kill you in the Pacific Ocean chat. You always say that. And the beaches get very deep, very quickly.

So, like, you'd have to have like a thousand foot tall wind turbine. And I know how cold you get at the beach, Jack. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over in big wind? Government priorities are corporate opportunities. The White House estimates that $12 billion a year of investments is going to be needed to reach this huge 2030 goal. And guess what? A bunch of publicly traded companies want in on this government-blest wind cookie jar. All right, Jack, first you got the financing.

They want in. The government's dishing out $3 billion of guaranteed loans. and that could attract financing from publicly traded companies like BlackRock. You're going to need the utilities to actually run these farms. Next era. The biggest public utility in the country. They love to brag about being the world's leader in solar and wind. Well, why don't they get in on this?

Yep. And then you're going to need the equipment providers. You need equipment. America's General Electric. Yes. Germany's Siemens. Classic. Denmark's Vesta's.

Never heard of it. They're all building wind turbines for these. So the White House's nine-year wind energy goal. It's really a bunch of nine-year growth opportunities. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us over there? PayPal is going to allow its 377 million users to start paying in crypto. Nudge Bitcoin's brand into the mainstream with the brunch test. Axios and the Athletic are thinking about merging and then spacking.

News industry, its pendulum swings from the bundling to the unbundling and then back to the rebundling. For a third and final story, Joe Biden decided that offshore wind is a major priority for the next nine years. And a government priority, that's a corporate opportunity. And New York has a bite. It has a bite. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one tweeted in by Stephen Liu from a lovely down the street, San Francisco. Sure your question. How do you get cash when you're chilling at the South Pole?

Apparently two words. Wells and Fargo. Yeah, Wells Fargo owns two ATMs at the Antarctica McMurdo Station. Lovely. A science research center. Yeah, the workers and the scientists, they depend on that ATM for the cash to spend on, like, food and water. and we assume life-saving rations. Yeah, they're called rations.

I learned about that on the Oregon Trail. But because of the extreme weather, it's impossible for cash to be flown in regularly. So all the cash is just recycled at the McMurdo Station finance office. It's not impossible. I mean, you could ship cash in. Is it too much to ask? Best part? No ATMPs.

No ATMPs. Snackers, you look fantastic today. Odds are you're going to see another human at some point, and you should ask them, hey, HY, HYSD. Have you had your snacks? Daily. Bring a plus one to tomorrow's pot. We're giving you a plus one. See you tomorrow. If you know, you know. And before we go, happy birthday to Anna Serf, a legendary Middlebury Panther. Oh yeah. Happy birthday to Patrick Fisher from Dorset, England. And to Amanda in Bloomington, Indiana. And to Mama Nash. Yeah. The Mama Nash in Buffalo, New York. And to Ashley in Akron, Ohio.

That's Rubber City right there. And to Ali Lohman in Kansas City, Missouri? I'm not sure, actually. And E.D. Agnohotri in Chicago. And Chris Hoffman in Chicago. And Cole Marine in Rockaway, New Jersey. And Katie in New Jersey. And Cataria in San Diego. And Erica Schwartz in Rochester, New York. And happy birthday, Alex Porto in Long Island City. And we are sending our very, very best to Megan Loist, a legendary venture capitalist in New York City who loves Gen Z. Yes. And just got in a car accident. We hope he get better soon. Megan, we're thinking of you. This is Jack. Nick owns stock of Square. And he owns a three.

We both own stock of Spotify and I own stock of Volkswagen. The Robin Hood Snacks podcast you just heard reflects the opinions of only the host who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, 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.