About this transcript: This is a full AI-generated transcript of Inside the Billion-Dollar Trading Card Boom and How it Happened — The Hobby — FULL DOCUMENTARY from Documentary+, published November 11, 2026. The transcript contains 14,112 words with timestamps and was generated using Whisper AI.
"I think it's a good thing. I think one of the problems today in the hobby is that kids today are just looking at it for investment value. I'd rather collect newer cards because they're excellent in potential for investment. I think all the old cards are great. I mean, they're worth a lot of money,..."
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I think it's a good thing.
[00:00:29] Speaker 2: I think one of the problems today in the hobby is that kids today are just looking at it for investment value.
[00:00:37] Speaker 3: I'd rather collect newer cards because they're excellent in potential for investment. I think all the old cards are great. I mean, they're worth a lot of money, and they do bring some spirit of baseball.
[00:00:50] Speaker 4: Well, some of the kids are getting, maybe they're too sophisticated to be collectors. Now they want to be investors, which is really the wrong approach to a nice hobby. A hobby is a hobby is a hobby. You know, it's like collecting rocks. What are you going to do, buy one and sell one the next day? You know, you collect them to admire them and look at them.
[00:01:13] Speaker 5: Well, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll. The same can't be said for the sports trading card industry.
[00:01:19] Speaker 6: Two LeBron James cards and a Yanis Antito Kumpo card each sold for more than a million dollars.
[00:01:26] Speaker 7: The trend is celebrities who play trading card games.
[00:01:37] Speaker 8: Charizard with four seconds left is booked to $73,000.
[00:01:42] Speaker 7: I know this is a lot of money, but this is what everybody has been wanting lately.
[00:01:46] Speaker 9: Final cost could exceed $10 million.
[00:01:49] Speaker 7: I'm at $340,000. Final call. Last chance. $360,000.
[00:02:01] Speaker 9: A record $6.6 million. $12.6 million. This makes it the most valuable sports card of all time.
[00:02:30] Speaker 10: All right, how's my shirt looking?
[00:02:31] Speaker 11: Good.
[00:02:32] Speaker 10: How's my hair?
[00:02:33] Speaker 12: Great.
[00:02:35] Speaker 10: Thank you. So I'm Paul Sullivan. For 13 years, I was the Wealth Matters columnist at the New York Times. In March of 2018, I decided to look at the trading card market. The resulting column was titled, Some Traders Study Stock Prices, Others Monitor the 52 Mantle. I ended up writing 608 columns in 13 years, you know, over a million words, you know, talked to some 5,000 people. But I remember this one because when it was something like trading cards, there's always a why now component. Like, why would I write about this now? And the reason I wrote about it is because PWCC was introducing this index. So an index that they had created with trading cards and was modeled on the S&P 500. At the time that I wrote this column, the PWCC index had beat the S&P 500 by almost two times as much. They had doubled the returns. And so that was striking. Whenever I'd write about these things like trading cards, they always fell into a category that I come back to again and again, and that was passion investments. You know, people always hope that they're going to buy something and it's going to, it's going to boom. But for you to do it in any sort of intelligent way, you have to know that you just love this thing. You just love this thing. And if it increases in value, great. And if it doesn't, well, you have this thing that you love.
[00:04:10] Speaker 8: Collectors have been buying up full stocks of baseball cards, basketball cards, and Pokemon cards, and then reselling them online.
[00:04:18] Speaker 13: COVID was something that, you know, nobody obviously expected to happen, right? And when it happened, there's a lot of chatter in our industry thinking the market's going to crash. And then come April, everyone started getting into their old collections.
[00:04:30] Speaker 14: Thanks to the surge of live stream sports card sales, the sports card trading market is projected to grow from $14 billion in 2019 to nearly $100 billion by the year 2027.
[00:04:43] Speaker 13: You know, the Jordan documentary was coming out, so there was hype on that. I've never seen another documentary do anything like what that did.
[00:04:49] Speaker 15: Before the boom, a Michael Jordan rookie was $35,000. The height of the boom, $800,000.
[00:04:57] Speaker 16: Wayne Gretzky's 1979 OPG rookie card. That one sold at auction for just under $1.4 million.
[00:05:04] Speaker 13: We had a Brady sell for $2.88 million, privately sold a LeBron for $5.2 million, Patrick Mahomes' card sell for $4.3 million.
[00:05:11] Speaker 15: If you ran in the right product at the right time,
[00:05:13] Speaker 17: you made money. In the last six months, trading cards, Yu-Gi-Oh! Pokemon and Magic, we've sold $8 million worth. $8 million in two auctions.
[00:05:25] Speaker 1: Josh Van Ard!
[00:05:27] Speaker 18: Record-breaking sales, including one today, the card sold for $5.9 million.
[00:05:32] Speaker 19: This industry just went absolutely crazy. We were selling two cards per second. We did $2 billion in sales in 2020, and $2 billion in sales halfway through 2021. Oh my God!
[00:05:43] Speaker 13: We went from 25 employees pre-COVID to now we're over 110.
[00:05:49] Speaker 6: Pre-pandemic, it was a struggle at that time. We worked on margins like 5%, 10% before. Now you can average like around $80,000 to $120,000 in shows.
[00:05:58] Speaker 16: Through the pandemic, the government's printed trillions of dollars to try and help the economy and stabilize the economy, but that's going to create inflation down the road. And one of the things that you hedge against inflation is by buying hard assets. A lot of the people that are doing the buying are in that, you know, demographic that grew up in the 80s going to all these shows, and they love sports cards. So all those confluence of events are coming together over the last 18 months to create this perfect storm that we're seeing.
[00:06:26] Speaker 10: About 15 months after writing that first column on baseball cards, I received an email from a reader who said, you know, I have a, I don't think you got the full story.
[00:06:37] Speaker 20: Five grown men were fighting over trading cards outside the Brookfield Target.
[00:06:42] Speaker 9: The fight, all starting at the Wauwatosa Target, over claims the man in all black let people cut the line to buy sports trading cards.
[00:06:50] Speaker 21: When a business gets hot, a hobby gets hot, there's always a seedy element that might be jumping in to take advantage of the situation.
[00:06:57] Speaker 20: There was even a man who pulled a gun on another customer just to get Pokemon cards.
[00:07:02] Speaker 22: Target trading card collectors turned Target into a sneaker campout war zone.
[00:07:07] Speaker 20: We've learned this shooting happened after a shoplifting incident inside of this Target involving Pokemon cards and a pizza. Target is reportedly taking trading cards off of their shelves.
[00:07:18] Speaker 23: Yeah, I'm sure that's all for your kids, right?
[00:07:20] Speaker 24: All right, don't get that camera off. So now you've got these retail flippers lining up at Target, going in, they're going to buy a $30 box,
[00:07:27] Speaker 12: immediately go to eBay, flip it for $100, $150. It's all about supply and demand. A scarcity that's driven up the price of a box of new cards like this one, above $400. There's a big majority of it they're doing for return on investment.
[00:07:42] Speaker 24: So it's almost like the golden ticket Willy Wonka theory. Then you've got people just scamming each other online.
[00:07:48] Speaker 25: There have been times even online within these last couple of years where people have purchased one of these vintage boxes and they've cracked it open and it's been fake cards.
[00:07:57] Speaker 26: It's fake. Logan Paul paid $3.5 million for Pokemon cards. They're fake. A fake resealed booster box. It's a resealed box.
[00:08:07] Speaker 13: Get the f*** out of here, bro.
[00:08:10] Speaker 8: That's not good.
[00:08:11] Speaker 25: A man from Georgia spent $58,000 of a COVID relief fund loan on a Pokemon card. People are insane.
[00:08:21] Speaker 15: These were two submissions that we had to us. Two Jordan rookies. But everything about this card is fake.
[00:08:28] Speaker 27: They got us, guys. About a five-minute smash and grab.
[00:08:32] Speaker 21: We have had scary situations, scary characters come through here, and we've actually had a recent situation or worse.
[00:08:40] Speaker ?: Yeah, you gotta cut that.
[00:08:42] Speaker 21: You gotta cut that? Okay, cut that second thing.
[00:08:44] Speaker 10: The markers for nostalgia have been distorted by adults. Full stop. And it's trickled down to kids. That says something really sad about where we are with these childhood hobbies that give, you know, texture to our early lives and give us stories to tell when we're adults.
[00:09:18] Speaker 24: All right, guys, welcome back in another new podcast, Sports Cards and Nonsense, brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. As always, I'm your host, Mike Giuseppe. As always, he is my wife's third favorite cousin.
[00:09:28] Speaker 28: And your favorite best friend? Fair. Jesse Gibson is my name. Thank you, sir.
[00:09:32] Speaker 24: There you go. Now that we've established bloodlines, what are we doing today by means of actual content? What's the story?
[00:09:38] Speaker 28: We gotta do Hobby 101. I think we just start by explaining the ecosystem.
[00:09:42] Speaker 24: Let's go right from the streamline. So where does this whole thing trickle down from?
[00:09:45] Speaker 28: Yeah, I want to know about manufacturers, distributors. Okay. Basically everything there is coming from top down.
[00:09:55] Speaker 24: Short answer starts with manufacturing. Tops, Panini, they make the cards. They send them out to distributors who do just that, distribute the cards. Then come into play the retailers. Local card shops, breakers, retail locations. And then at the end of the day, right, the most important part, the collectors. From there, you kind of have options on what to do with the cards. You can grade them, use different auction houses, secondary markets. So there's definitely a streamline of things, but at the end of the day, it then just comes down to the collector, right? If there's nobody who has a love and a passion for these cards, everything above that is useless. So that's really where the true lifeblood of this hobby is.
[00:10:39] Speaker 28: Okay, so that's where we are now, but can we maybe take it back a little bit? How did this all begin?
[00:10:49] Speaker 11: Yeah.
[00:10:50] Speaker 16: Yeah.
[00:10:50] Speaker 11: It is new.
[00:10:51] Speaker 16: I mean, I can, I've got a little bit of wiggle room if we need it.
[00:10:55] Speaker 1: Can I just lead him a little bit?
[00:10:56] Speaker 16: So these are some of the highlights in our upcoming vintage Platinum Night Sports Auction. This is a 1912 Plows Candy Ty Cobb card. This is an extremely rare set. There's only a handful of examples known, and this is the highest graded example of a Ty Cobb. This will sell for 200,000 plus in the auction. This is a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie card. This is an example of what the cards did look like before 52 Tops came out and changed the game. And this card will bring around $400,000 in the auction. So I think the first trading card is known as a Peckin-Snyder, and it was the Cincinnati Red Stockings. So initially, you know, cards were packaged with tobacco products. Then it graduated to candy and gum. In 1915, you get the Cracker Jack set. In 1933, you get the Gowdy Gum Company producing the historic Gowdy set. And then Tops really shifted the market in 52 and created the modern era of card collecting. Using imagery of the players, statistics on the back, created that larger size.
[00:12:13] Speaker 1: Mickey Mantle.
[00:12:16] Speaker 22: The Mickey Mantle story is one that it almost sounds like lore, right? It almost sounds like people made this up. Oh, the most expensive card of all time was dumped in the ocean.
[00:12:26] Speaker 16: Yeah, so the tale goes that Tops produced the second series of 52 Tops, and they weren't able to get them distributed to stores in time. And eventually, at some point in the 50s, they put him on a barge and went off the coast of New Jersey and just dumped all the 52 Tops cases. If there was one 52 Tops case left right now, it would sell for over $10 million. Yeah.
[00:12:54] Speaker 24: In 1965, Tops buys Bowman, really making them king. Then you have Panini first entering the game in Italy with soccer cards. 70s and 80s, Flair and Tops are battling it out. You even had Flair suing Tops, claiming they're a monopoly. By the 80s, even into the 90s, everybody's interested, advertising everywhere. Baseball cards are in every kid's hand at one point.
[00:13:16] Speaker 13: So in the 90s, you know, we had this mass production. There was a ton of demand for it, and they overprinted basically everything.
[00:13:23] Speaker 16: And so, you know, values went down on sports cards across the board. So that is what's called the junk wax era.
[00:13:30] Speaker 22: The basic economic forces played out the way they're supposed to play, except that nobody had any transparency into supply. This is pre-internet, right? Everybody thought they were the only ones that had 12 89 upper deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookies, but we all had 12 Griffey's.
[00:13:45] Speaker 13: So they tried to create more rarity, and so they started serial numbering cards. That leaned into signing of cards, and then jersey patch cards, game-use jersey cards.
[00:13:56] Speaker 6: It's not just a piece of cardboard now. It's, wow, this is a piece of Jordan's jersey, his autograph, you know? Now we could keep a piece of history.
[00:14:07] Speaker 24: 2005 rolls around, Flair declares bankruptcy. So now we've got Topps, Upper Deck, Panini, kind of all competing. And then really the back half of that decade, we see Panini start to get super aggressive, getting licensing, which would obviously not allow other manufacturers to make cards. And at that point, it is all Panini for everything except baseball. And that's what Topps was left with. Topps had baseball, Upper Deck had hockey, Panini kind of everything else. Then in 2021, that's really when everything starts to change, right? Fanatics enters the game. Here you've got a 10-ton monster just coming in that is already just the player when it comes to apparel. Now they're coming into the card game. You know, decades ago, Flair thought Topps maybe was a bit of a monopoly. Well, now Fanatics comes in and acquires baseball, basketball, and football licensing exclusive, which is just unheard of. I mean, these really are going to be the people who set the table for the card market going forward.
[00:14:58] Speaker 28: Okay, so Fanatics gets all this licensing. What's going to go on with Panini? But what happens with Topps now? Do they just go out of business?
[00:15:06] Speaker 26: Topps, for the first time in over 70 years, will not produce officially licensed Major League Baseball cards. Fanatics moving beyond commerce. They're going to be the exclusive trading card producer for football cards, baseball cards, and basketball cards.
[00:15:25] Speaker 28: I've already seen on YouTube a couple of places guys who are saying, all right, so what's the downside here? What could happen?
[00:15:32] Speaker 23: I think their current approach will absolutely destroy the hobby. I do too.
[00:15:37] Speaker 29: They're going to want to hit some home runs very, very early on to gain collector's trust as they navigate through being basically the monopoly in the trading card industry.
[00:15:47] Speaker 24: Honestly, at this point, I think there's room for some skepticism. Like, are they going to come in and just make this big business and totally ruin everything, the hobby we all have loved for years? Or do they come in and it's, hey, we're going to really make things a little bit more professional?
[00:16:00] Speaker 26: Josh Luber, the founder of StockX, is going to be the person who is going to run this new company. Sneakers are now a legal
[00:16:08] Speaker 22: and accessible investment opportunity, a democratized stock market.
[00:16:13] Speaker 24: He's a collector, more so than even I am. So that actually instilled in me that this isn't just big corporate America coming in to rule the hobby. This is like a dude who loves the hobby. So I think he'll keep the restraints on some things.
[00:16:28] Speaker 22: My name is Josh Luber. I am currently the co-founder and chief vision officer for Fanatics Trading Cards, which is a new business that I started with Fanatics and with Michael Rubin to make trading cards. It is majority owned by Fanatics. but also is owned by the leagues and players associations that are equity partners in the business as well. We raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation, which is pretty extraordinary considering we hadn't even started to change the business yet. And now we get to go and build a business. We take over the licenses when the current licenses expire. So Topps has two more years on baseball and Panini has four more years on basketball and football. People have talked openly that maybe we would buy those companies. If that were to happen, we would take over those licenses earlier. If not, we'd be on the sidelines until those licenses kick in. But the starting point is that we're now a physical trading card company and we have the licenses for baseball, basketball, football. But I'm sure we'll do a lot of other things as well. But like, how cool is that? It's got a sticker from whatever store. It was $49.99. It was crossed out and sold for $14.99. There's two types of people, right? There's either people that are collectors and people who are not. And particularly our generation, it was around stuff, right? I mean, we can talk all about like the newer generation and digital and NFTs and the whole thing. But like, we grew up in the heart of Nike basketball advertising. And the fact that we get to come back and the cycles change, but now that we're the ones that are creating culture, our generation are now the ones that are creating culture. So we get to bring this stuff back.
[00:18:04] Speaker 21: I started collecting cards back in late 1974 were my earliest memories of the ice cream man, basically. That was your local hobby shop.
[00:18:22] Speaker 6: There's like this corner stores, bodega, and they just have like loose packs there. And I remember not eating lunch and then using my allowance to just open packs.
[00:18:34] Speaker 16: I still remember the second grade and running into 7-Eleven with a friend and he pointed at the garbage pail kids and he said, have you ever seen these before? And I said, no. And so we grabbed a couple of packs and opened them up in the car and I was hooked.
[00:18:49] Speaker 22: There was a tiny little car shop that opened right around the corner from my house. You'd walk in, there was just packs everywhere. The price of packs were crazy at the time. You know, packs of cards costing $2.
[00:19:00] Speaker 30: The card shop that I went to as a kid was definitely your stereotypical 1990s card shop. Things everywhere. You know, an owner who kind of just had the shop as, you know, a thing on the side, really more for enjoyment than turning a profit.
[00:19:17] Speaker 13: That nostalgia, when you get back into it, you remember that feeling. You remember going into the card shop, the smell of it. You remember all that. And so, you know, when I got back into the industry, it brought all that back.
[00:19:30] Speaker 18: Your hobby wouldn't exist in the state that it is without the stores. Card stores are still the lifeblood. I mean, you go from manufacturer to distributor to the card store.
[00:19:42] Speaker 21: Local card shop's a billboard for the industry. And the more billboards for the industry, the more people recognize this is still available to me. And it's a sense of community.
[00:19:55] Speaker 1: You ready?
[00:20:08] Speaker 25: I'm ready. Okay. My name is Danny Sanchez, also known as SuperDuperDanny on YouTube. I am a full-time Pokemon content creator and I've been making videos for over 10 years. Not bad. Hey, guys. I have nine packs of Legendary Collection, which is- Why do I sound so weird? They have these cool sparkly cards. Is that even me? What happened in the last 10 years? I don't know. I blacked out. I had gotten these cards from a comic shop in my hometown and they happened to have a selection of vintage cards. Three packs for $10. Now, these boxes don't sell for less than like $30,000 for a whole box.
[00:20:54] Speaker 6: Oh, cool. I don't have this card.
[00:20:56] Speaker 25: Back in the day, people weren't collecting cards like they are now, like the pristine mint condition, like not a single bit of edgeware. Like, it did not matter back then that I had the cards on a table and just like set them on the table to line them up. Since the individual cards, some of them are worth hundreds of dollars, like it's way higher stakes for them to be in gem mint condition. Oh.
[00:21:20] Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.
[00:21:24] Speaker 25: Like that. Like that. You're not supposed to slam the cards on the table like that. It is bad vintage card opening etiquette, Dani.
[00:21:33] Speaker 1: Look at that.
[00:21:36] Speaker 25: Little does she know that Charizard just sold for $15,000 gem mint? That was a comment that was left one month ago on this video that's 10 years old. What is Pokemon? Okay. Okay. Honestly, I don't know how to explain Pokemon because I assume that everybody's heard of it in some capacity. Pokemon.
[00:21:59] Speaker 6: So Pokemon is a...
[00:22:01] Speaker 21: Are you ready
[00:22:03] Speaker 24: to be the ultimate Pokemon master trainer?
[00:22:07] Speaker 31: Yes.
[00:22:08] Speaker 24: Random people in parks chasing things. I don't know. Card game, not for me, but really popular.
[00:22:13] Speaker 16: Pokemon was a game and I think Charizard is the most desirable card. The most wanted card here. Is that true?
[00:22:20] Speaker 3: It does the most damage and it's able to kill any Pokemon in one hit.
[00:22:25] Speaker 6: Charizard is a dragon-like character in Pokemon. I think it's a dragon. Do you guys know?
[00:22:34] Speaker 17: Pokemon is the biggest entertainment franchise in the world. Bigger than Marvel. Pokemon is bigger than Marvel Universe if you realize how huge the scale is.
[00:22:43] Speaker 25: So I'm not competitive. I'm also, like, not into sports anymore and it's really funny for me to see people, like, idolize a human being who plays a sport so much that they would want a piece of memorabilia with part of his jersey that he wore in a game on it. That's crazy. Like, LeBron James wore this jersey. Wow. You know what I mean?
[00:23:13] Speaker 17: In the card world, we make a very distinct distinction. There's sports and there's non-sports.
[00:23:25] Speaker 19: I'm Bob Means, director of trading cards at eBay. You know, we see a world where what happened in trading cards is going to happen in other collectibles. We're already seeing it. Even if you just step away from sports trading cards for a second, you can see it happening in what we call non-sports trading cards. So this is going to be Star Wars cards. This is going to be Garbage Pail Kids. Recently, the most interesting is Marvel cards. Marvel's red hot out there right now, right? You've got all the shows streaming, you've got all the movies coming out, massive blockbusters. Well, we're seeing people go buy the cards.
[00:24:17] Speaker 22: There. It's a Madonna rookie, right? Piece of eight. I'm not sure if there's any higher than that, but like, it's Madonna, right? It's one of my all-time favorite cards that I think is going to be a massive card, which is Kim Kardashian. So this is your rookie card. The die cut is numbered to 50. I think I have like maybe 15 or 16 of these. I was buying the non-die cut for like, I don't know, a couple hundred bucks two years ago. Now it's a couple thousand, but I got to tell you, the first time that she like picks this up and looks on her Instagram, I was like, oh, how cool, like my rookie autograph card. This is one of my all-time favorite cards I've been trying to corner the market on. This card, this is Muhammad Ali and the Beatles. In 1964, this Dutch company made this card, but here's the only a ten of this. There's two versions. There's the vertical and the horizontal. It's the Beatles and Muhammad Ali. Like, it's as iconic as any people ever. This is an Abraham Lincoln rookie card. It's a pencil-drawn set from 1887. That's James Monroe. That's John Tyler, probably lesser-known presidents. Yeah, they were called trade cards. There's actually some that have like an advertisement in this area. This was a marketing piece they used in the 1800s, and some of them survived. I think I have maybe one of the largest Jimi Hendrix collections in the world. This whole box is all Hendrix. So, this is like, and it's like this like fabric card. This is a ten. This is, I think, the only ten from the 72 set, but it's Jimi Hendrix, right? Like, Jimi Hendrix is as iconic as any athlete ever, right? I mean, we're familiar with like stuff like this, right? But like, this is just same era, like as important as, probably more important than these guys. So, anyway, I think non-sport cards are a big deal and are going to continue to be a big deal.
[00:26:21] Speaker 28: Sports cards nonsense listeners, we have Mr. CVO himself of Fanatics, Josh Luber, joining us at this moment. Mr. Josh Luber is here. Mike?
[00:26:34] Speaker 24: So, Josh, obviously a topic we get a lot on the podcast and just in general, I'm an investor, I'm a collector, you know, the one can't survive while the other because the investors are ruining it or vice versa. What are your thoughts? Can these things kind of live together and coexist? Does one have the right and the other doesn't? Where do you stand on that issue?
[00:26:50] Speaker 22: This is an age-old issue in every industry and every, I mean, when we started StockX and the sneaker industry, we got all of this, right? All the people that said, oh, people are just here to flip shoes and make money. That's okay, right? There is a blurred line. Very, very few people, I think, in trading cards are firmly one or the other. You know, I consider myself more on the collector side, but hey, man, if I have an opportunity to flip something and make a couple bucks on something that I think is a good deal or maybe I don't think it's going to go up more, then I'm going to take that. I'm going to put that money back into buying something else that I'd rather have and own, you know, as a collector. So where is that line? I mean, it's so blurred.
[00:27:30] Speaker 24: Yeah, I agree because I don't know anybody who is just one or the other at this point, 100% and just a couple truths around the matter. Like, collectors benefit from investors because now your collection is worth more and investors obviously benefit from the collector side because now I have somebody, there's a demand, they're creating the hype. So I do. I think the further this thing grows and as the industry continues to take off, I think we just keep seeing those things coexist and kind of flourish together.
[00:27:55] Speaker 22: That's what I would expect and I think it continues to become even more blurred and I think that's a good thing to happen.
[00:28:09] Speaker 6: So we're at a bleaker trading today and we're set up for a two-day pop-up event. So we brought some cards here, sports cards, obviously my specialty, some football in this case, Mahomes, Tom Brady, and this case, we have some nice basketball, Giannis, RPA, Kobe, Logoman, and Luca, one of one up here and more basketball and a mix of baseball. Black Jitter will take one. I grew up in the Philippines. My parents are a doctor and nurse. I remember during school time and obviously the time difference, like 13 hours, the playoff is going on at like 8 o'clock here. It's 8 o'clock in the morning in the Philippines. So I have like, my parents bought me this portable TV, no volume, but you know, I'm like in between my books, I'm watching the playoff game, you know? And then when I moved here, I found sports cards. Through time kind of fades, it gets lighter and lighter. We're into investing part of the hobby. It's a very nocturnal job, you know? I actually don't go to bed till like probably 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning. I read who's hot and who's playing well, you know. I have a photographic memory, so that kind of helps me. Yes. So I said, I wouldn't be doing this if I don't have that skill.
[00:29:30] Speaker 1: It's like,
[00:29:31] Speaker 32: basically you have to know what sells. You have to know what people want, you have to know what sells, and we have to fall in love with players. You can't, because that's who we're investing in. We have to like who we're investing in. And so, but you also can't fall in love with the cards itself.
[00:29:53] Speaker 6: Yeah, I think that's the best advice that I was giving to me when I was getting into the hobby was you can't do this and be a collector also, you know, full time. So I kind of stopped collecting myself, but I do love certain players and I'm more like, oh, I don't think this player has peaked yet. Everybody's telling me to sell those bigger Lukas. Those few cards alone could be like a few millions. So it's like people like sell that and invest in real estate, but you know, to me, the sports card market is like the hottest market. I would rather invest on the market that I know front and back, you know, and stable. So right now, everybody's telling me to sell those cards, but I'm just not ready yet. But I am not a hoarder of those cards. It's just more like I just don't think it's time. That's it.
[00:30:46] Speaker 28: Let me see.
[00:30:47] Speaker 24: You know, the only thing worse than not answering is when he doesn't answer and he texts you? Oh, brother. What are you doing? Oh,
[00:30:55] Speaker 31: you look great.
[00:30:58] Speaker 24: We have a film crew here. They want to know in the words of the man, the myth, the legend, Chris Vernon, why we're so great. Why do we have the best podcast ever and why you found us? That's what they want to know. Simple questions.
[00:31:08] Speaker 31: I went through
[00:31:09] Speaker ?: I went through
[00:31:09] Speaker 31: like what every parent did in terms of kids getting wanting to get on TikTok and, you know, with the way stuff is now, I guess with everybody's like algorithms, when I would get on TikTok, sports card stuff started coming up on my feed.
[00:31:25] Speaker ?: So anyway, you popped up there and you were talking about cards and it was some kind of mega opinionated thing.
[00:31:32] Speaker 28: Yeah.
[00:31:33] Speaker 31: And I was like, yo, who is this dude? And I'm like, and why don't, why don't they have some kind of huge audience?
[00:31:43] Speaker 28: That's a really, really great question you asked.
[00:31:46] Speaker 31: True story. I reached out to Bill and I said, I don't know why people don't know about this guy. I was like, but he is wildly entertaining and this is a niche that nobody is on.
[00:32:12] Speaker 24: Literally cards are how I support my family and honestly, that's how even when I was super broke back in the day. Baseball cards, selling my card collection is how I was able to buy my wife's engagement ring. So it's more than a podcast, a hobby, it's more than just collecting. Like these things are an investment, yes, but it's really become a major part of my life. All right, so that is the bank box. Most of these are kind of what I would call like assets. I bought them with the intent of, hey, they're going to get flipped at some point. May's rookie's probably 30 grand, like 10 or 12 for the LeBron at this point. The Kobe's like 10. Another Willie Mays, probably 15,000. So that's actually my only Michael Jordan auto. Jordan, LeBron, whatever. Second greatest player of all time, Larry Bird one, obviously. Kevin Garnett two. There's no hometown bias, I'm just telling you facts. That's probably like 25K. Then there's kind of like the pecking order, like hey, I need X amount of dollars. Cool, what's it getting sold? This is like sell the house, sell the dogs. Well, one of the dogs and then start selling the stack of cards because I'd prefer to keep the Brady stuff, so. I mean, best guess, probably in the 300,000 to 400,000 range. All in.
[00:33:34] Speaker 25: With the inflated value in cards, it kind of brings a whole different energy to card collecting that wasn't there before. So while I love collecting these cards and like opening these cards, there's now like collectors like myself are having a really hard time finding cards and finding them for an affordable price because there's this whole other community that's now taking money as like a way more serious part of this than just like collecting these for fun. So we are going to the Frankenstein card show. I'm bringing a chunk of my bulk cards, like 2,000 to 3,000 bulk Pokemon cards. And I'm going to attempt to trade them for some sealed cards or for some other cards that I don't have in my collection. What I'm hoping to get in exchange for them is either some Fusion Strike cards, like a Fusion Strike booster box, which is the newest edit that just came out yesterday, or some Pokemon celebrations. And those boxes have been so hard to find. Those are ones that are always, nearly always sold out at Target and Walmart and Best Buy and anywhere you're trying to find them. Let's go make a deal. What's going on, everybody? We are here at the Frank and Son card show. This is in Los Angeles, California. I have nearly 3,000 common and uncommon Pokemon cards, and this is a very, very heavy box of cards. Today, the mission is to trade in this gigantic box of bulk Pokemon cards. I really want to make this trade, and honestly, these cards are a little heavy, so I would be happy to get them off my hands. So I'm thinking that whatever booth is wanting to buy these or trade for them will have Fusion Strike, so I think that's probably going to be my go-to. I don't know what's going on with the Celebrations Ultra Premiums. That's like a $120 box. They have it for $350. So I have, I think it's a couple thousand. I didn't get a chance to, like, count it out, but do you guys do trades for, like, Fusion Strike or some Celebrations? Yeah, absolutely.
[00:35:53] Speaker 33: Yeah, yeah, we can work with you. Sweet. And you can put that towards anything you want. Yeah, pretty much anything at the booth, packs, singles, boxes.
[00:36:02] Speaker 25: Do you, so the Pokemon Center exclusive Fusion Strike Elite trainers? That one, yeah, those ones
[00:36:09] Speaker 33: are going for, uh, $80.
[00:36:12] Speaker 25: So they're retail $50, right? $50, yeah. Would you be willing to make a deal to exchange it for that booth?
[00:36:20] Speaker 33: Yeah, I mean, I could do that for that if you want.
[00:36:23] Speaker 25: Cool. All right, yeah, I'll take that. Woo!
[00:36:33] Speaker 24: I just, he keeps contact with you. I'm like, what are you doing?
[00:36:36] Speaker 28: You're not, you're, don't touch the mic, bro. I would have sworn it was this way. Are, it's going all, we're going down this way? He's in the new strip mall at the end. Now, how long has he been open? Chris has been open, like, six months, I think? Nine months? Does he sell celebrity cards?
[00:36:52] Speaker 24: Do you think there's any? I don't know, but if this pops entry, we're ripping them.
[00:36:55] Speaker 28: Oh, absolutely. I'll get the bucks. And broken bones. Okay. Yeah, this is, like, such a new world to me that. Yeah, so this is actually Jesse's first time in the shop. Being here is, like... Is it overwhelming? I realize why I don't come here, because I'm, like, going through, like, your boxes over here of all the graded stuff. I'm like, I want this. I want this. I want this. I mean, I would spend a fortune here, honestly. I mean... That's the point. That's what we're looking for.
[00:37:22] Speaker 27: So we carry all sports. We got football, basketball, baseball. That's going to be your big three. We also have hockey, soccer. They're blowing up, both of those. WNBA has its own brand. Golf, NASCAR, UFC's blowing up, Formula One. Not only do we serve cards, it comes in memorabilia form. You can open up helmets, jerseys, basketballs, all sorts of stuff.
[00:37:46] Speaker 24: Like, for so super high-end, this is stuff we talked about on the pod this week. It came out today. Okay. Panini one-in-one basketball. Okay. $1,500 a box. It has two cards.
[00:37:54] Speaker 28: It could have something, like, really big in it, though, like, worth thousands, right?
[00:37:57] Speaker 24: Oh, yeah, like the LaMelo downtown. Like, select basketball. There's going to be cards in there
[00:38:00] Speaker 28: that are five figures each other.
[00:38:01] Speaker 24: There's such a part of me that wants that.
[00:38:03] Speaker ?: I just don't love...
[00:38:03] Speaker 24: The $1,500?
[00:38:05] Speaker 28: What have you got? What if I pulled the LaMelo out right now? Yeah, what if you pull a... What if you pull a $30? Come on! See? I like the spot. Oh, my God. Could you imagine opening that?
[00:38:15] Speaker ?: Man.
[00:38:16] Speaker 21: Because... Oh, man.
[00:38:20] Speaker 31: Mavericks! Luka Doncic!
[00:38:23] Speaker 34: Okay. We want something big, though. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please. Oh, my gosh!
[00:38:28] Speaker 6: They heard us! They heard us! So, ripping is just opening wax. That's what we get addicted to, you know? It's just a rush of getting... Going into the next pack and then chasing the best card, you know, that you could pull in that product.
[00:38:44] Speaker 22: When I first started getting back into cards, I bought probably 20 different boxes, different sports, different price points, just to see. And I printed off the sell sheets and I tried to sit there and actually open up the packs with the sell sheets to try to understand what was going on. And even with that, I was completely lost. This is one of the reasons why it's hard for people to jump back into the market who were collecting cards as a kid in the 80s and 90s. And you show up now and you say, wait, there were three trading card sets when I left. There were five. Hold on. There's 50 of each sport, right? But a lot of people are now coming in and they're trying to understand the market quickly. I found what a lot of people have been doing is they go and just watch breaks.
[00:39:27] Speaker 25: Justin Simmons, Swift, Miller. A Farfetch. And then an eyeball right there.
[00:39:33] Speaker 29: Shiny Star V, Hidden Fates. C-3PO.
[00:39:36] Speaker 25: Joey! We got an Otto on the back. Oh no, that's Kid Reporter. Never mind.
[00:39:41] Speaker 35: Mari Stoudemire. Kent Bazemore. Erjana Eliasova.
[00:39:46] Speaker 6: Greg Newsome. Jalen Dart.
[00:39:48] Speaker 1: One of one Matt Jones! One of one Matt Jones! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Oh my gosh!
[00:39:56] Speaker ?: Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!
[00:40:00] Speaker 1: Oh my gosh!
[00:40:01] Speaker ?: Oh my gosh!
[00:40:02] Speaker 1: 100,000 plus! Oh my gosh!
[00:40:09] Speaker 22: They can very quickly understand certain product and see what comes out of it by just watching, you know, repetition.
[00:40:16] Speaker 24: Breaking in its simplest terms, as the breaker, I get boxes and cases of cards, go in front of the camera, live stream, live chat, sell them to individual people, rip it open for the community to see it, and then I ship the cards to the owners. 68, there you go. So we spread the love. That goes to me.
[00:40:30] Speaker 34: But now, in addition to breakers, and this is sort of what's amazing about it, is you also have content providers. And what's fun about it is like, everybody's opening boxes and they're all like ripping packs and seeing what they get. So it's sort of like you have the excitement where people are like, oh my gosh, I got this. And you have the other guy going, darn, I wanted that box. And that, I think, now becomes sort of like a content that people are doing when they're opening boxes and seeing what they could get. Ready? Okay, we're starting with one.
[00:41:03] Speaker 6: Okay, first card. Trey Young Bass. Okay. Non-oro. And Isaiah Stewart. So this is a rough box.
[00:41:16] Speaker 22: It's probably like $300.
[00:41:18] Speaker 6: It's $300 out of the $15, you know. But it's okay. It's part of the hobby. And then, you know. So, right here. Oh, man. Who is this?
[00:41:32] Speaker 1: Elleby.
[00:41:32] Speaker 6: Elleby. It's a blue parallel, which is rare, but it's Elleby. Probably like $30. How much was the little box? $1,500. So that's $1,500. Are you keep reminding me the price? It's hard to follow. It is going to be hard to follow. Okay, last box. Here we go.
[00:41:52] Speaker ?: Woo!
[00:41:55] Speaker 36: Downtown La Mela Ball!
[00:42:00] Speaker 6: That's the best chase for the downtown. Oh, my God. I'm getting goosebumps. So I'm kind of shaking a little. First thing in my head is graded. See if it's gradable. So without grading, this card's probably $20,000, but if you luckily gem it, PSA 10, it could be like a $30,000, $40,000 card. But it's also a card that I don't mind holding for a little bit during the playoff or even a few years, you know, how he pans out. Everyone from here
[00:42:26] Speaker ?: is the clear. Woo!
[00:42:35] Speaker 17: Grading has changed everything. It's all a matter of condition now. You may pull a card out of this box. It's brand new, but it's off-center. Maybe it has a slight imperfection printing-wise, and it gets a PSA 9. For first edition Charizard, a PSA 9 is maybe $50,000. If you hit a 10, it's $300,000.
[00:43:00] Speaker 30: My name is Peter Steinberg. I am the CEO of SGC Grading. So a grading company are basically the individuals who are telling you what you're buying, what you're selling, what you hope to own. So when you see a grade, you can assume that that card is authentic, first off. It's original, so it has not been altered since it was manufactured. And basically, from there, we grade it on its condition on a 1 to 10 scale, 10 being the best.
[00:43:41] Speaker 35: So the first thing I always tell people, look at the card. Centering, obviously, first thing people see. Then you look at the front and back of the card, and you zero in on the corners. And after that, you can have a card that looks like a 7, but the card has four eyeballs to it. You'll see it on, like, the Jackie Robinson. It'll be way out of focus, and it really brings the card grade down. You've got to look at all those aspects, and it all comes to a cumulative grade then.
[00:44:10] Speaker 16: Value is determined essentially by scarcity, condition, and desirability, what someone's willing to pay for it. Whose card is it? Is it a Hall of Famer? Is it one of the greats? You know, something can be a one-of-one, but if nobody wants it, it doesn't really have much value.
[00:44:28] Speaker 25: So these are some of my graded PSA cards. All of these, I did pull myself from Booster Packs. This is a Mint 9 Lugia first edition from Neo Genesis, the rarest card in the Neo Genesis set. Honestly, when I sent this off, I thought it was going to get a 10, and that would have been fantastic because a PSA 10 of this card, a Gem Mint version of this sold for over $100,000 last year. I feel like I was robbed because I'm looking at this card, and I cannot distinguish what would have given it a 9. that's a life-changing amount of money just for one single grade number difference. In the end, this was graded by an individual. Somebody could have been having a bad day. You never know.
[00:45:20] Speaker 28: Wait for the cameras.
[00:45:23] Speaker 24: So, like, for example, the Alec Bomb's a solid card. What does it sell for versus what's it worth? So it looks like it's selling for, like, $20 to $30. So for $20 to $30, if you grade it, say you get a 10, it's a one-and-a-half-time, maybe two-time multiplier. Okay. To me, that's right on the edge of probably not grading because if it doesn't come back at 10, you're grading money.
[00:45:41] Speaker 27: I feel like if that card 10s, it'll sell for about $60. Yeah. And so, therefore, you're putting a lot of money into grading it just to make an extra $5.
[00:45:49] Speaker 24: But he's a rookie, so I would also say and he's a good rookie, so hold it.
[00:45:52] Speaker 27: Hold on to it.
[00:45:53] Speaker 24: If he plays better next year and all of a sudden it's selling for $50 raw and SGC's 10 would probably get $100, cool, then it's worth it. All right. A little bit more expensive. This is $300 a box. Oh, honey.
[00:46:08] Speaker 28: There's a lot of cards in this, though.
[00:46:10] Speaker 24: So that is my big hit of the day right there. Last card, because Jesse was holding it. Anthony Edwards, Base Prison.
[00:46:16] Speaker 28: It's a $30 card, ungraded, but what do you think if they've got a PSA 10?
[00:46:20] Speaker 24: So that's what I'm going to look up now. I'm going to guess it's $400. I think I'm going to grade that and take a shot.
[00:46:26] Speaker 27: I would SGC it.
[00:46:27] Speaker 24: Deal. If one or two of these actually grade out, like I hope they will, yeah, then maybe we've got 60%, 70% of our money back. And again, we did. We came down here, we goofed around, we spent the afternoon and I'm going to end up losing $100. Not the worst way to spend time. That's what I mean, not the worst way to spend time. And if one of those guys goes off in the meantime, you're going to end up breaking even pretty quick. Your left, my right. Give me that pack right there. That's the one. This is the sweaty pack
[00:46:52] Speaker 28: he's been holding. But they're celebrating.
[00:46:56] Speaker 22: This is a 2018 Prism Hobby Box, which I'm totally addicted to, particularly until the Black Luca is pulled. Someone else needs to pull the Black Luca so I can stop opening up boxes. I've got to imagine if anyone can find it, it's got to be probably $4 million. And it's probably in a box somewhere. In the last case, I pulled this, which is a Luca Purple Ice to $149. That was a huge hit. I've had six cases for like $4,000 apiece. This has a chance to 10. There's one corner that they're great and pretty tough these days. So we'll see when I finally send that in. Each one of these boxes has whatever that is, 50 slabs. And then all of those and all of that. Those are all slabs. That was a ridiculous deal that I bought. That's all Peyton Manning. I just feel like Peyton Manning was so undervalued. It was like $200,000 for basically all Peyton Mannings. Like, yeah, it's like $2,000 Peyton Mannings. And I later learned that the person bidding against me was Peyton Manning. And I'm like, I was like, bro, I would have given you half the cards if you didn't have to pay this much money for it. You know, we could have like split it. Let me see if I didn't miss it. Nope. Bad luck. Not one Trey or Luca.
[00:48:20] Speaker 37: There it is, ladies and gentlemen. The news that Fanatics is acquiring Topps has come true. I predicted it was going to happen and I am so excited.
[00:48:37] Speaker 26: Fanatics is buying Topps trading card business for $500 million.
[00:48:43] Speaker 23: Fanatics buys Topps for $500 million. I am stoked. I'm with you.
[00:48:49] Speaker 8: I feel like that is what the hobby needed. In a remarkable way, you managed to get this license and now you're buying Topps. We're always thinking about how can we reinvent a business that's going to be better for all the constituencies involved.
[00:49:03] Speaker 22: You can't change the whole industry and economies, but you can at least try to manage the supply and demand of the products that you create. And that is an important part of not only the through line looking back, but now what we get to do moving forward and doing that.
[00:49:19] Speaker 28: All right, Josh, I got to know something. You know I love the non-sports side of this card hobby. What's the deal? Is there any truth to rumors that are floating around out there that Fanatics may be coming out with some kind of non-sports card company?
[00:49:34] Speaker 22: You know, I mean, rumors are rumors for a reason.
[00:49:37] Speaker 28: That's a yes. Hang on. Hang on. What do we say in here? Is that a yes? Just go ahead and say it. You heard it here first, folks. Yes, it is happening.
[00:49:46] Speaker 22: You guys should feel free to put whatever words in my mouth make sense, right? I mean, that's what, you know, that's what good journalists do. So, but I will say that I am also a huge fan of non-sport cards and believe that very much as a collector. And so, I don't know. Maybe those things will converge. That's a yes. All right, breaking news. Next question. There's nothing else you could ask there. Yeah, okay.
[00:50:08] Speaker 24: We got what we needed there. I will say, so Josh, bringing it back to reality, aside from Jesse's fantasy land, you know, obviously you guys are acquiring all the licenses, deals are being announced. Fanatics is going to be the kingmaker. You guys are going to do everything. But, you know, and rightly so. There's a ton of criticism, skepticism, probably skepticism is more the word. How do you guys deal with the thought of, well, you know, we're going to produce more, we're going to produce less, distribution may change, whatever. Like, how does that balance work on the Fanatics side of things?
[00:50:34] Speaker 22: Look, you know, Topps made baseball cards since 1952. And from the moment that we even started thinking about this business, that was always at the forefront was that Topps would continue making baseball cards. And in the conversations with Major League Baseball and Major League Baseball Players Association and everybody related to it, everybody was in full agreement there. How we move forward, what sub-brands are created, how we work with other sports, you know, all of that as TBD as we, you know, figure out the right way to grow the hobby. You know, there's a lot, just like baseball's about tradition, there's a lot of, in the trading car world, it's about tradition. And, you know, we're not going to, we're not going to mess with that. We do have to figure out how to grow the hobby, but those two things can coexist.
[00:51:28] Speaker 25: I saw you, like, with Steve Aoki. I was like,
[00:51:53] Speaker 9: wait, is this actually, I was like, he's,
[00:51:57] Speaker 25: what? Yeah, there's a glitch in the matrix. We are opening Pokemon cards at a charity event, okay, on a stage, on this live stream. Check out this video. Okay. Energy!
[00:52:10] Speaker 1: Here we go. Another energy!
[00:52:12] Speaker 25: What do you think? Are you impressed?
[00:52:18] Speaker 6: She has, like, a white Charizard. Okay, so I know that's Charizard.
[00:52:22] Speaker 25: Yeah. Charizard. Charizard. They opened, I think, like, $500,000, up to $1 million in Pokemon boxes. Oh, wow. And that was the rarest card all day that was pulled. I was there with Steve Aoki and King Pokemon. Okay, who's King Pokemon?
[00:52:40] Speaker 1: Because you had me at Steve Aoki.
[00:52:43] Speaker ?: Come on.
[00:52:43] Speaker 38: I have probably the world's number one Pokemon collection inside this case.
[00:52:49] Speaker 17: Gary is a bigger-than-life individual. He was one of the first people who started collecting Pokemon. You know, he's just a beloved fixture in the hobby. I mean, you go to conventions with Gary and people line up to get his autograph hundreds deep and he's just kind of the ambassador of goodwill for Pokemon in our country.
[00:53:09] Speaker 39: Hi. How you doing in school? How you doing in school? The better you do in school, the more collectible cards you get. That's why I got a pile of Pokemon cards like this.
[00:53:25] Speaker 38: Yeah, well, my name is Gary Hayes. In the Pokemon community, I'm known as King Pokemon. I can't tell you how many times people have told me that that Pawn Stars episode got them back into the hobby. Well, we're here on Las Vegas Boulevard near downtown Las Vegas at the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop. This is where they film the Pawn Stars episodes. So how much do you want for these things? I'm looking for right in the area of $500,000. The amount those exact same cards, that same collection would be worth today is about $15 million. But anyway, no deal was, no offer was made and no deal was made.
[00:54:15] Speaker 25: When I moved, I had packed up a bunch of boxes that I had left with my parents. And in there, I honestly, I don't remember what I stowed away in there, but there's a lot of boxes that I just left behind because I didn't have the space for them. That reminds me, I do need to call my parents because I am actually really interested to see what's in those boxes. The prices of these trading cards are fluctuating so severely that I don't know if I am able to properly quantify for you a value that my whole collection would be worth. It's estimated anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 worth of Pokemon stuff in my collection. So right here we have... I think for me it's kind of like I can appreciate that I now happen to have something that's worth a lot of money. Like obviously that's cool. It was a complete accident, but that's not why I started collecting. That's not why I'm still collecting. So I think it's important that you have that group of core collectors and if the market were to crash it would be because the price of those cards is so high that people who are genuinely interested in it as a hobby can no longer afford it.
[00:55:32] Speaker 22: This happens in every market which is that when people are buying and it's hot is when more people want to get in. So I wonder is where's the next wave of people that's coming in and we have to be a part of that. Like we have to market the whole industry now as we're creating baseball, basketball, football cards and I do think we're starting to see the next generation of card shops really cater to the next generation of collectors and kids. I was just out in L.A. and I had a chance to go visit Burbank and what they built there is phenomenal.
[00:56:06] Speaker 21: Hey, cutie pie. I'm in the middle of filming. I got a documentary crew in here right now talking to the card father. So can we talk later, honey? My daughter. She takes priority. Okay, my name's Rob Veris. I go by the card father. We're at Burbank Sports Cards. Basically, I've been doing this longer than anyone else. It's a very young population coming into the category right now. So I'm kind of an OG, kind of the card father, I guess and just try to spit wisdom whenever I can. Let's just say you walk in and you're like, I really like Russell Westbrook. You grab a box, they're going to start at a dollar. It's basically a walk-in database. Check this out. Now you're seeing the heartbeat of Burbank Sports Cards. What you're going to see here is 42 million cards. The whole building is also on eBay. You'll come over here and again, you'll see showcases. These are all Kobe Bryant cards. This right here is Kobe Bryant's best rookie card basically back in 96. That was the card they were chasing. It was a very limited release. Topps Chrome was only available at Walmart. Hobby shops didn't have this product. There was only four cards in a pack. They were expensive from the get-go. The odds of hitting Kobe were slim. To find it in that kind of shape where a kid opened the pack and cared for the card is crazy. And this right here is one of those grail cards for so many in the hobby. one of the things that we worried about as a category that we might age out like stamps aged out. Maybe this generation is the last generation. Maybe we can't compete against YouTube and video games and things where kids put their time. But the industry has done a hell of a job of getting that generation back and the generation before that back. We actually had a kids' night last night. Our first one had over 100 kids here. It was chaos. It was way bigger than I anticipated. And the passion these kids had was crazy. These kids are on YouTube opening up cards. There's card shows where people descend on these shows and they're not 40 and 50 year old white guys. Again, it's much younger. It's much more diverse. It's totally cool. It's like sneaker culture. Card culture is the same thing.
[00:58:28] Speaker 1: We came to the card show so we can get some expensive cards.
[00:58:34] Speaker 17: How much were you joking? I'll do a thousand for that. like I was saying that's a number one eye.
[00:59:02] Speaker 16: Actually, those Air Jordans are probably going to sell for over a million dollars. Yeah, of course. They're the only photo matched Air Jordan ones like photo matched during a game. Game worn with a tiny autograph. But yeah, the photo matching is what really sets them over the edge. There's people that view collecting as, you know, it should just be pure collecting, not about the money, but enjoying collecting the items and owning them. But, you know, there's definitely a monetary aspect. You know, we're seeing a lot of that now as investors are getting involved in the market and they're seeing these as a new asset class. So they're, you know, more along the lines of, oh, I'm buying this as an investment. I'm buying, you know, a Mickey Mantle rookie instead of a piece of art that I would have typically purchased.
[00:59:43] Speaker 9: A rare 1909 Honus Wagner card officially sold at auction last night. The winning bid, a record $6.6 million.
[00:59:52] Speaker 16: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, Honus Wagner cards are going for more than some of the vacation homes we're offering in our real estate division. And people are certainly seeing the value and the investment potential in this industry.
[01:00:04] Speaker 8: A mint condition, 1952 Mickey Mantle sold, forget this, $12.6 million yesterday.
[01:00:12] Speaker 16: Now that grading's been going on since almost 30 years, from 1992 to current, most of the high-end stuff has been graded, authenticated, and slabbed. So you can go back and look at the population reports and look at that data and determine, okay, there's only 12 Roberto Clemente rookies that are grade, you know, 8.5 or better. Or there's only nine Mickey Mantle cards that are mint or gem mint in the whole world. And so when people start looking at those population reports from an investment standpoint, that's when they start saying, these are severely undervalued. There's only 10 of these in the world and he's one of the greatest players ever. I should, you know, put my money here. And that's what we've been seeing the last five or six years.
[01:01:13] Speaker 18: What is the rough value of these cards sitting on this table? Oh, just this table right here? Yeah.
[01:01:19] Speaker 15: Oh, you have over 10 million just in this table. Yeah, so here's my Jordan hoard card, and I control the market on these. Here's 15 of them. One, two, three. This is the Rock's rookie. This is his best card. This is fluctuate anywhere between $50,000 and $75,000. Number four. Number five, a nice one. 1968 Tops 3D. Here's the Queen Mother, Mac Daddy. I paid $3.25 million for that card. Numbers 14 and 15. Okay. Hi, my name's Rick Probstein. I'm the CEO of Probstee123. We are the largest auction house on eBay. There are tons and tons of new people. They are serious investors, and they're full in on it. You know, so I live in an Orthodox Jewish community not far from here, and I would go to the synagogue, and people would be, for the first time, like, oh, I heard about that Tom Brady sale for $2 million. I heard about the Luka Doncic sale for $4 million. And these are people that, you know, are affluent people that are in the Wall Street world that have, you know, an investment portfolio with hedge funds, and they were now coming to me saying, what should I buy in sports cards?
[01:02:48] Speaker 13: I'm Jesse Craig. I'm the Director of Business Development here at PWCC, and you are at the PWCC headquarters. PWCC is the largest auction house in the world for trading cards. Additionally, we have the only custom vault built for trading cards in the world. We're just under a billion dollars in assets, and we have almost 400,000 graded trading cards in our vault, so it's like, it's the Fort Knox for trading cards. So, our logistics team sends out between 500 and 1,000 packages a day. We have a lot of auctions that close, we have fixed price listings, we have vault fulfillments, so there's a lot of pieces that move around here. Cameras over every station, you can see cameras up in the sky, you know, the whole eye in the sky. So we've got, you know, about 70 cameras in the building, and if a card moves, we know where it goes. This is our imaging stations right here. We have manual, individual imaging stations, they're all custom built with lighting, and then we have, what nobody else in the world has, is we have two custom built robots that do the majority of our bulk imaging. So what we have are turrets that you stick cards down, they rotate, these suction cups pick up a card, these grippers will come over and grab it, take it over, flip it to a camera back there, rotate it again, take it down, and then those grippers grab it and set it back down in the turret. So it takes about seven seconds to shoot a card, whereas manually, it takes much longer because you can actually, it's like set it and forget it, right? We've always had the vision of trading cards being a legitimate, tangible asset, and we're the first company in the world to actually lend specifically on trading cards as collateral. I mean, that's the theory behind what's behind us in the vault is this ability to have liquidity in a market that is really an emerging, tangible asset class. We've just got a premier submission request for a 2012 Pokemon World Championship promo card and a PSA 9, which is roughly 200K. That'll be a fun premier card.
[01:05:06] Speaker 10: When a market becomes mature, there's so much information out there that you're able to compare apples to apples and you're able to know that, okay, this sold for $100 a year ago. All these other fundamentals point to it being worth now $120 or $80. That's a market that's functioning properly. When you have a collectible market, it doesn't function like that because passion gets involved, scarcity gets involved, authenticity gets involved. Nobody gets physical shares of stock anymore. You don't have an authentic share of Apple and have it up, you know, in your office at home. A baseball card that somebody's trying to flip, they're hoping that they have more information than the person that's going to buy it from them.
[01:06:04] Speaker 6: just count it, make sure. I think it's 8.50.
[01:06:30] Speaker 36: Hey, what are you doing?
[01:06:33] Speaker 5: What's going on? The hobby is creating content, making it
[01:06:36] Speaker 28: relatable. Mike.
[01:06:38] Speaker 36: Mike, hi, how are you?
[01:06:38] Speaker 28: Sharon, I'm Jesse. You don't have any celebrity cards, do you?
[01:06:42] Speaker 36: I don't do a lot of them. Oh, here we go. I have a super fractured hand solo.
[01:06:48] Speaker 22: I'll tell you what, you know who we should get on camera? Who? Sharon. This is just about like my most favorite person in the hobby.
[01:06:55] Speaker ?: Oh, my God.
[01:06:57] Speaker 22: Hey, so they're filming me, and so I brought them over here. I said this is my favorite person in the hobby, so I brought them over. I don't know if they can hear you. I started buying cards again in early 2019, and Luca had just finished his rookie season. It was rookie of the year. I don't know. I was like, look, I was like, maybe, maybe this is the guy. And so for the next, like, two or three shows I went to, I bought every Luca prism I could find. Hundreds of PSA 10s at 70 bucks. I bought every parallel I could find, and I was at a card show in Virginia, and I got to a dealer there who a lot of people know as Black Jaded Wolf. This is Sharon. She pretty much controls the hobby.
[01:07:35] Speaker 6: I met Josh Luber, like, pre-pandemic, so he wanted one of my card. I asked $20,000 for the Luca Black Gold Prism 105.
[01:07:44] Speaker 22: I was like, this is ridiculous. I'm like, $15,000? I'm like, PSA 10s are 70 bucks. And she goes, well, it's not for sale. And I was like, well, you have it in your case. She's like, I know. She's like, I have it at $15,000 because no one's going to buy it.
[01:07:53] Speaker 6: We didn't agree on the price. His advisor told him not to buy it.
[01:07:58] Speaker 22: And this is a guy who had been in the industry for 20 years. $15,000, he goes, what's it going to go to $20,000, $25,000? He's like, I don't know. You got enough of Luca's today, man. And I said, all right, fair enough. I'll let it go.
[01:08:08] Speaker 33: I could have bought for $15,000. Which I encourage you to buy. You have a little bit different story, but I did tell you to buy it.
[01:08:17] Speaker 22: Because obviously then what happened next was Luca starts his sophomore season. He goes nuts. All of a sudden, he's, you know, guy level and looks like, you know, potential Hall of Famer.
[01:08:27] Speaker 38: Dodgers pulls up, three-pointer. Bang! Bang! It's good!
[01:08:31] Speaker 22: What's the card today? Half a million dollars? A million dollars?
[01:08:34] Speaker 6: A big person in the hobby did offer close to like $750,000 for the card. But I told him if I ever want to move it, he'll get first shot.
[01:08:43] Speaker 22: And then I tried to buy it from her like four times since then, so. But I don't want to pay a million dollars for it. I want to pay $15,000 for it.
[01:08:51] Speaker 6: We'll see.
[01:08:57] Speaker 25: A couple of events that are coming up that I'm actually really excited about. One of them is an event called Collect-a-Con. This time I'm going with an app called Whatnot. I'm actually emceeing one of the stages there. All right. What's going on, everybody? Welcome to Collect-a-Con. We are here at the Whatnot stage breaking a Heo Revelation first edition booster box. We are going to be cracking that at 4.30 today right here on the stage. Trying to find it. All day we've been looking for a box of Pokemon cards. We have found the one that we are going to open. I am so excited. It's a Neo Revelation first edition booster box. How much is this box?
[01:09:46] Speaker 26: This one went for a crazy price of $25,000.
[01:09:50] Speaker 25: $25,000. $25,000 for this one Pokemon box. This set in particular has a couple of really rare Shining cards in it. The Shining Magikarp, the Shining Gyarados. Those two cards, especially in first edition, would be incredibly valuable to get in a good grade. I haven't opened it in forever and I'm so excited. Oh, I saw you using the magic touch. All right, everybody. This is the last box break of the day. We got Super Duper Danny. We've got Saranata Chani here, special guest, the voice of Ash Ketchum here to open the first pack today. I absolutely love coming to these conventions. I get to see all of my friends. A lot of my friends that I've made through Pokemon are from all over the world. Lugia! Hey, we got a Lugia! And everybody here is just absolutely geeking out on Pokemon, which is my favorite thing. I think a lot of us struggle with finding that in our own little cities and whatever. So when we all can come together in one place and just open packs and geek out, it's the best feeling.
[01:11:04] Speaker 1: We got a palm old rod. Is there?
[01:11:09] Speaker 25: All right, all right, all right. And? Yes!
[01:11:13] Speaker 1: I remember pulling
[01:11:19] Speaker 25: my first ever holographic card from a pack when I was a little kid. Honestly, what I'm doing right now for my younger self is a dream. Like, there's no way. If I was a little kid looking at my older self, I would be losing my mind. A Goldeen. Is this a... No, we got one more. We got a... A Remoraid. And...
[01:11:42] Speaker ?: Oh!
[01:11:43] Speaker 1: No way! Oh, my gosh! You've got to be kidding me!
[01:11:53] Speaker 25: What... This is a secret rare. This is a secret rare Shining Gyarados. This is one of two secret rares in this set and is one of the most valuable cards in the whole set. I can't believe we pulled both... We pulled the Magikarp and the Gyarados. We pulled both of the Shining cards from this set, the two secret rares. That is... That's great. It's very uncommon to get both of them out of the same box. In my opinion. I don't know what's going on lately. It's like, I'll go through patches where I'll get absolute garbage out of these Pokemon packs, and then I'll go through patches where I just get every single one of the best cards. It's a beautiful moment. Oh, here they come. I'm so excited. Hi, hello! How was the trip? How's it going? Yeah, you got the top. Hey, how are you? Long time, no sleep. My little girl. Oh, my goodness, hello! You said we had extra guests. Oh, hi.
[01:13:03] Speaker 40: So we brought a few things for you.
[01:13:06] Speaker 25: Thanks for storing these. I appreciate it.
[01:13:08] Speaker 40: Well, you're welcome. And we have some other stuff here, too. We just brought a couple of them so you can look through them.
[01:13:16] Speaker 25: From the side, I can already see some boxes from, like, the late 90s early 2000s and then some boxes that I opened. I like the start of my YouTube career in, like, 2010. Some little plush toys. This was hanging up in my little Pokey cave. We've got a Pokemon VHS. I have not seen one of these in, like, 10 years. We've got a Sky Ridge booster box. This is honestly probably one of the most expensive booster boxes. Even the empty box is almost $500 right now, which is insane. I thought you were going to sell this on eBay.
[01:13:51] Speaker 40: We almost sold it.
[01:13:52] Speaker ?: Yeah.
[01:13:53] Speaker 25: Yeah, it's almost like, don't sell any of my stuff. This is a two-player starter set from way back. This is one of the original, I think it was a base set, too. Yeah, base set, two starter deck from 2000. This one, I think I got from, you guys remember that comic shop that was, like, down the street? Yeah.
[01:14:12] Speaker 18: Got this from that comic shop. Got it for almost nothing.
[01:14:15] Speaker 25: Yeah. I had actually opened all of these Pokemon products on my channel at one point or another. So this is, like, a little time capsule right here.
[01:14:25] Speaker 40: It's pretty cool that you knew what you wanted to do.
[01:14:28] Speaker 25: You guys are also, like, overwhelmingly supportive of, like, anything I've done, so. I think having you guys was part of the reason why I was able to even do that to begin with. Oh, cool.
[01:14:42] Speaker 40: Yeah, we're just very proud of her. I think she's just following her dreams and making it happen, and we're very proud. You know?
[01:14:55] Speaker 25: All right, you guys want to go get some dinner? Hey, that sounds good. All right. You know the place? Yep, I know a place.
[01:15:03] Speaker 40: You know a place. Yeah.
[01:15:08] Speaker 10: Let's see if it works. Holy shit. That's, uh, yeah. Well, you can already see it. You can already see it from this graph that it's, you know, trending down. I mean, things don't go straight up. Forever. I'm not an analyst. I don't feel, you know, comfortable saying, you know, calling a top of anything. Just as I never feel comfortable calling a bottom of anything. But if it was my money, would I get into this market right now, and I love baseball cards? Probably not. Would I wait two years and see how things shake out?
[01:15:59] Speaker 18: Yeah, I would. Are we headed for a crash?
[01:16:07] Speaker 22: Are we headed for a crash? No. You just, you have to have a lot of people that want to stop putting money into it and don't want those cards anymore. And I don't think that's the case. Sure, a lot of people have come into the market, but there are way more potential collectors out there than exist.
[01:16:23] Speaker 16: There's still a lot of growth to be had. Athletes are getting involved. Celebrities are getting involved. I think it's great. Anything that generates interest and can bring new people into the market.
[01:16:31] Speaker 5: Yeah, if I ever go broke,
[01:16:33] Speaker 17: I won't sell them.
[01:16:33] Speaker 16: It's my back down plan.
[01:16:34] Speaker 17: There's all types of celebrities you read about that collect trading cards because they grew up with them.
[01:16:40] Speaker 28: This is my birthday present from Wizards. I love you guys.
[01:16:44] Speaker 17: We collect things for one simple reason other than profit. Nostalgia. It's all about nostalgia. It's what it means to you.
[01:16:56] Speaker 30: The way I view it, it's art, history, business, and sports. So I tend to think that looking at the growth where we've been, where we've come, and where we're going, I truly think we're just at the tip of the iceberg here. So exciting times ahead for sure.
[01:17:16] Speaker 22: And then the last part of that, I guess to some extent falls on me and the people that I work with, which is that I think we're all hyper aware of the mistakes of the 80s and 90s of the card manufacturers with regard to supply and demand and production. And so I think the sort of two areas where you might see the potential for a crash are both pretty solid and have good fundamentals for the future, but no one can predict markets. No one can change markets, but I think it looks pretty good.
[01:17:50] Speaker 28: This just in, Sports Cards Nonsense listeners. We have big breaking news. Mr. Josh Luber is here. Mike? Josh, what is the breaking news?
[01:17:59] Speaker 24: Take it away, sir. The floor is yours.
[01:18:02] Speaker 22: We are pretty excited to launch Xerocool. Xerocool is our trading card brand for non-sports, for culture, for all the most important people, brands, IP companies in the world other than sports, so Xerocool is finally here.
[01:18:16] Speaker ?: It is what it is.
[01:18:17] Speaker 22: This is VFriends, the first ever release from Xerocool. In 10 years, when VFriends is as big as Disney and Pokemon combined and is the largest IP in the world, this will be a $1 million sealed box. How about that? I'm counting on that $1 million appreciation. I know you are. This is our next full set. It actually comes out in a couple weeks. It's from Jackass Forever, the new movie that came out about two months ago. I expect the clearing price to be in a couple hundred hours, but people can get lucky and get one of the rare boxes and hopefully that becomes collectible and is part of it as well. But new audiences, important part of it, and we get to see the blind Dutch auction for this will open in a couple weeks and roll tight. So Topps, Panini, Upper Deck, Ziracool are now your four trading card companies. Both of Jackass and VFriends sold for more on the secondary market than what the clearing price was. And so by that sort of, just sort of black and white data point, we can say it's absolutely a success, meaning there was more demand out there than what was originally put into the market. And that's what we want, right? We want people to care about the products, continue to care about the products, and their products do continue to sell for more than what they originally sold.
[01:19:33] Speaker 28: Man, I got to tell you, I'm very excited to see where Ziracool is going. I think this is a really cool first step, though. I want to see guys from the office. I want to see Seinfeld. I would love to see Parks and Rec. You know, like, all these celebrities, the guys my age seem to also love. I think an Oscar category would be awesome. Like, if you ever were nominated for an Oscar, there you go. I was just like, I was trying to think, where could you bring in people that aren't in the card hobby into it? Mike, we're doing a comment box for them. We'll make one. I'm going to go get a tissue box in the hotel room, and I'm just going to set it there. I'm going to say zero cool suggestions.
[01:20:08] Speaker 24: You don't have to ruin that relationship.
[01:20:09] Speaker 28: Well, we're going to think about it. We're definitely going to think about it.
[01:20:12] Speaker ?: That's burning.
[01:20:13] Speaker 28: Okay.
[01:20:15] Speaker 11: Please welcome to the stage the co-founder and chief vision officer of Fanatics Collectibles, Josh Luber, and founder of Omaha Productions, Peyton Manning.
[01:20:30] Speaker 26: Josh, you know, with Fanatics. How do you ensure that hobbyists have an easy and fun introduction
[01:20:35] Speaker 22: to the hobby? For sure, the goal is growth, period. You know, this industry has been around, I mean, literally since the 1800s, and the growth we've had in the last five, six years has been extraordinary. But it's still a really small number of people that actually collect cards, that actually, you know, move the money and the hobby. I mean, best guess is there's maybe two or three million people that have bought and sold a card, you know, in the past year. Our goal is to expand the hobby, and the number one way the starting of doing that is technology. The key is making it easy for people to buy and sell cards. That's what StockX was. It was access. It changed sneaker industry because it was about access, and that's a starting point is we need to make access for people to come in. Fantastic, guys. Well, thank you. With that, we're going to bring Bob Means and Brent to the stage. a present for Peyton before we do that. Please, go for it. Because I felt really bad, man, that I, I felt really bad that I bought your collection like from you. So I showed him the pictures backstage because there's 2,000 cards in the collection. I felt really bad about that. So I actually have a present for you. We have a box. It's a big box. It doesn't quite hold 2,000 cards. Your cards are massively undervalued, right? So I can't really give them to you. But we made 2,000 cards of me for you. In all seriousness, I brought 20 cards for your son. Oh, wow. Actually from the collection that we found 20 cool cards for your son. That's awesome. Thank you very much. That's great.
[01:22:05] Speaker 35: If you want any cards of me, you can have them. I do. I want that. I want that set. There's, there's 18, 18 other numbers.
[01:22:13] Speaker 22: When trading cards truly become integrated into culture, not only for sports cards and the things that we do, but for non-sport cards, for making trading cards of rappers and musicians and designers and artists and everything else, the whole industry will be 10x, 20x, 50x of what it is today, right? There's enough people out there who believe that. That's why, you know, Michael and the Fanatics team, you know, believed in me and the vision for it. And we have a hard job ahead of us, but God, it's fun. We get to make baseball cards. It's an extraordinary place to be. We'll see where the story goes from here. It's just the beginning.
[01:22:58] Speaker 32: I love the hobby. I love talking to people. To me, it's beyond cardboard. It's a, it's the story of you and your dad saw Cal Ripken and now you're the biggest Cal Ripken fan. It's, one of my students was a ball boy for the Yankees and now has, like, a dirty cheetah bat somewhere. Game use bat. World Series game use bat. I wanted to buy it. Ah, that was 15 years ago. He probably still has it.
[01:23:28] Speaker 6: We gave each other a retirement time, which is five years, and hopefully teach someone to handle my business and I'm kind of going to be semi-retired, you know, and probably enjoy life a little.
[01:23:44] Speaker 17: It's a deeply developed hundred-year-old hobby. It just takes you down this nostalgic path.
[01:23:53] Speaker 25: I cannot tell you how many fantastic friends I've made in this space and that I hope to maintain friendships with. Even if Pokemon isn't around in the future, the relationships that I've made through this will last a lifetime. The relationships that I've built, I think those are priceless.
[01:24:18] Speaker ?: It's hard.
[01:24:19] Speaker 15: Deep down, I'm a collector. I'm a collector who's an investor. But ultimately, I love the cardboard itself. You know, when I hold that 1914 Cracker Jack card with the caramel in the back, it makes me feel good. You know, it makes me feel like I did when I was a kid when I started collecting.
[01:24:38] Speaker 24: I just love the hobby. Like, that's what it comes down to for me. I invest, I collect, but then you come into a card shop like this, get a bunch of kids ripping packs. They don't care if it's a billion-dollar Charizard or a two-cent Mark McGuire card. It's just love of the hobby. At the baseline of almost everything in the hobby, that's really what it comes down to.
[01:24:58] Speaker 12: We're having a good time. That's a good one.
[01:25:02] Speaker 1: He's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one.
[01:25:05] Speaker ?: He's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one.
[01:25:10] Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one.
[01:25:25] Speaker 41: No one compares to you. You take my breath away. When I think of you, I smile. Please tell me you feel the same. I don't care about baseball cards. I don't care about new guitars. I don't care about brand new shoes. I don't care about anything but you. I don't care about anything, anything. I don't care about anything but you. I saw you at school. I don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything. I don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything. I don't care about anything but you don't care about you don't care about anything. I don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything. I don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything. I don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything. I don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything but you don't care about anything. I don't care about new guitars don't care about brand new guitars don't care about brand new shoes I don't care about anything I don't care about anything but you.
[01:28:36] Speaker ?: Thank you.