1549 - Father/Son: Jeremy Lee and his father Harvey, Part 2

Foreign. Welcome Dr. James Beckett. Sports Card Insights. Another Father's Day podcast with Jeremy Lee of Sports Cards Live and his father Harvey had a great time. Thanks. Sponsors Topps, Panini Upper Deck Heritage Auctions, Hugs and Scott Auctions, Mike Stadium Sports Cards, Burbank sports cards, compse.com and Beckett Media, Beckett Grading, Beckett Authentication. So here's the discussion. Your most famous purchase of The Shoeless Joe 14 Cracker Jack. In many people's eyes, you fantastically overpaid. And yet you were externally after the fact, validated by people coming up to you afterwards after you'd paid this world record price and saying, hey, if you want to move that, count me in. I'm good for it. You brought attention to a goat. Very glamorous card. That's beautiful and noteworthy and historic. So even you. But my point is that the three of us on the call here, our IQs total over 300. Good. A hundred is average. I'm just saying, to think we're so smart is a problem. And so as smart as you are, you weren't thinking, hey, this is a no brainer. The emotional thing kicked in, but you were later validated that other people caught the flow of it afterwards. Get out there ahead of it. I trust my own judgment and gut more than the sum of the community. I truly do. I trust my intuition. It's not always right, but I've been validated in my decisions over the years when I have spent large sums of money on cards. Like you said on the Joe Jackson. It's been over a year now and the amount of people that have said to me that, oh, now you look like a genius type of thing. It's nice to hear, but I just felt so passionate and I did my due diligence. Like I said, I trust myself when it comes to these things, but it's nice to hear it. But it's almost. I know, I felt it. I got lucky too though, Jim. Gotta face it, very lucky. A month later, Joe Jackson became eligible to enter the hall of Fame eventually. And I had no idea that was coming. One quick advice for you, Jeremy. When somebody calls you a genius, tell them to put it in writing. What would you say would be the biggest mistake beginners could make with regard to rare or valuable cards? How do you evaluate these things? My original claim to fame in the hobby was doing these comprehensive price guides that were actually good for a whole year and then they were good for a whole month and now they're not good for very long because it's really difficult to catch Lightning in a bottle. I want to put this in the context of Father's Day, and one of the reasons the hobby is so popular, so wonderful, is that there's a highly relational component available. When I was a kid, it was just my neighborhood, so I didn't know anybody else, but every neighborhood I moved to kayakids were collecting. But now everything internationally come to the National. A whole bunch of countries represented there. So the big mistake people are making when they get started is going alone, not doing any homework, not listening to some podcasts that don't instantaneously give you knowledge or wisdom or information, but it's a start. So being isolated, when I was a kid, I'd trade with the neighbor kid that lived one street over, whether he got the best of me or I got the best of him. You're just trading this year's cards for this year's cards. But now it's so much more sophisticated with all the shows. And so my advice is don't go it alone. Sophistication is something that I've seen in you, Jim and Jeremy. When I look at something, I say I like it or I don't like it, and then I move on. I go down the spectrum and say, to what degree do I like it? And I say to myself, what gradient is it? What vector is it going up or down? And then looking at it in context, as you said, with regard to a number of things, it's multivariable, multidimensional. And as we talked when we sat at that restaurant in Toronto, longitudinal thinking is very important. Would you agree with that? Jeremy epitomized that with this Shoeless Joe purchase. At the point when he had to pull the trigger, he couldn't know what was going to happen. And there were very wise people that said no and maybe a few that said yes. I think the people that were encouraging him were careful about that because he was setting a world record price. You can't know. You can talk to people, but sooner or later, you've got to pull the trigger. And when you pull the trigger, you might be right, you might be wrong. If you're wrong, you still got a great card. And I don't know if you have any remorse, Jeremy, for the consolidation efforts that you had to go through to reduce some great cards in your collection in order to have that one card that very few people will be able to own because it's truly rare, you know, lower grade, with stupendous eye appeal. Again, you're becoming the poster boy for eye appeal. Yeah. I have no remorse whatsoever for the consolidation process. I still have a great collection. I did have to give up over 330 cards, but I didn't have to dip into my best 20 or 25. The question we started with was, what mistakes can beginners make? We talk about this a lot on sports cards Live is that you have to make mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, I don't know how much you're learning along the way. Mistakes are a great way to refine your approach as time goes on. Maybe that just comes down to the magnitude of the card they're purchasing. If you buy a $15 card that you should have paid $10 for, it's a very subtle error in judgment, let's say. Or maybe someone just got you for $5, but you are still going to learn something. I think it's going to help you stay the course. So I think making mistakes is an integral part of going from being a beginner in the hobby to being a more advanced or more mature collector. Making mistakes is part of the tuition along the education of being in the hobby. There is no formal education in this hobby. The education we gain in the hobby, especially for beginners, is literally like you said, Jim, it's from exposing yourself to other experienced hobbyists, people who have been around longer than you have and have made some of these mistakes and have curated their path through the hobby. To my father's question, I think making mistakes is necessary, but that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book Pops and Comps. It's not to help people eliminate mistakes, but to help people mitigate and reduce that tuition. They have to pay from what might be tens of thousands, even millions of dollars in mistakes to smaller financial errors that they might make along the way so they don't have to pay an Ivy League tuition to get a community college type of education. The whole idea of starting small is abhorrent to the new collector. It would start small. Want to start thinking I want to be a player. The whole problem with making mistakes, again, like you said, if it's a $15 mistake, that's different than a 1500. 15,000. 15, whatever. And so if you're worried about making mistakes or you're trying to make good decisions, We've had long discussions over the last year about kinds of market manipulation, and these newbies are the ones that can get caught up in that. So I have two things I would say to the new person to avoid being manipulated and avoid making a big mistake. And both words are, wait, wait, Wait, don't be so impulsive. Wait to buy the bigger cards after you figure out and the other is W e I g h t Wait. If you are buying cards by the pound instead of buy the slab, you're going to be less liable to making a big mistake. If you bring back a big box of cards, a collection, which is how probably you and I got started buying collections. You might make a few mistakes, but you're not going to make a big mistake. And so the weight, if you come back from spending a weekend at a show and you come back with one card now you could come back with the Joe Jackson, but that's after a lifetime of study in the hobby and going with a gut that was prepared to consummate that deal. So the weight of the purchases. If somebody's going with a lot of money and looking for a very short number of cards, they need to be an expert. They can easily get burned if they buy a bunch of cards. They're going to win some, lose some, but you can't go for the big grail right away. Again, you might hit it, but big mistakes can be made. Yeah, I like when you use the W A I T to me is very important for beginners because, yeah, because of the nature of the hobby right now, just the amount of people coming in, the connection between on court, field ice performance versus price and how quickly those things move. In 99% of the cases or so, I think you're going to be better off waiting for the young player to settle down. It's a very what have you done for me lately? Industry the hottest rookies command the most dollars, but a year later there's a new group of hottest rookies. And if people wait that year, in most cases they're going to be able to buy those cards for a lower price. But what they're sacrificing then is the experience of owning the cards while the player is going through the ups and downs. And a lot of collectors enjoy owning cards while a player is playing. They feel like they have a vested interest in that player's career and their ups and downs. And that can be very exciting psychologically from a dopamine perspective. But that's where you have to decide what do you want to do? Are you looking for that short term high risk reward or do you prefer the long term, the more blue chip approach to the hobby? And I think some of the collectors who enjoy this hobby the most find a balance between both. They do a little bit of both and then they use your w E I G H T weight and they decide how much of my overall hobby budget am I going to put into short term, more volatile holdings and pieces for my collection versus the long term. I used to go to the lcs, the local card shop back in the day and if I would spend say $1,000 on opening up wax products, not knowing what was going to come out but hoping for a hit, If I spent $1,000 on that, I would say to myself, now go spend another thousand dollars on a card that you know what it is that you feel has good long term value just to balance out my overall expenditures. It would make myself feel better about what I was spending because I knew that I had a more balanced, let's call it a portfolio. And not just a portfolio of holdings, but a portfolio of spending and a portfolio of experience. Okay, I'll give you a scenario. I'll make it Stanley Cup Finals or NBA Finals. It's game one of the Finals and we know what happened now. But I'm just saying it's game one and a better is thinking, it's listing this conversation. Are you saying I shouldn't bet on game one Because I don't know how these teams are going to come out, so I'm going to hold off betting. They don't do that. They bet on game one. Nobody says I'm not going to bet on game one. I'm going to bet on game two after I see what happens in game one. If it's trending, maybe somebody does that. But if you're a gambler, if you're a card collector, you want action and you want action. You don't want to wait. You really don't want to wait to get more information because it's still uncertain. Yeah, that comes down to personality, risk tolerance and what you're in the hobby for. All these different types of approaches fall somewhere on the hobby spectrum. It comes down to knowing yourself and then governing yourself as well so that you don't end up in a position where you are sacrificing other areas of your life. We see that all the time. You have an organization out there now called Collectors MD that is there to help collectors who are dealing with hobby addiction. The hobby has come that far. Where we need an organization just to be there to support people who are dealing with that so they don't lose their careers, their families, their financial situation, their homes even. Because like you said, Jim, the overall price, the tuition, the price of admission has gone up so much in the last five years that their behavior can have a significant impact on their life outside the hobby. We call this thing a hobby and it is a true hobby for many people. But it's more than just a hobby for a lot of people nowadays when we're deploying these amounts of money into cards, it's becomes more than just a hobby. Listen, the amount I paid for that Joe Jackson card, for me, that's an investment. It's also a collection piece. It's also part of the hobby. For some people it would be a drop in the bucket where if they lose that money, it's no big deal. So you really have to know where you're at in this thing because mistakes are aplenty and they are around every corner. There's a lot to know. I haven't heard you say it this way, but one way I would think about it is that Chris Sewell, collector, investor, dealer, in that order. Maybe the best path into this hobby is in the spectrum, starting at the lower numbers and working your way up. They want to come in as a hundred point tycoon or whatever it is, instead of a precisionist or somebody that's coming into it because they love the cards. It's not about the money and then you work your way up. For me, I've bounced around, but I'm a hybrid now. I'm wondering if your dad is a precisionist, but being in the lower numbers, Jeremy, it keeps you out of trouble, of losing too much money, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. As far as my father goes, I'm a precisionist on the hobby spectrum. I scored 38 when I first took the assessment. My father hasn't taken it. He's not really a collector at this point. He's more interested in the hobby than he ever has been before. That's fair. My father, he's been to the national seven or eight times, going back to 2009 or 10. His other son, my brother, is there often, so we go. It's been a bit of a family reunion for the three of us going on many years now. But he's not with me the whole time. And he'll come to the show, he'll say, son, I'll be there at 1 o', clock, 2:30. He texts me, where are you? I said, oh, I'm over by whatever booth. And I'll say, how long have you been. I've been here for two hours. I've been walking around talking to people. He does love it. He is interested in it. It brings me joy to know that he doesn't need me by his side all the time. He likes walking around, talking to people. He came back to me one time at the national, he said, I was talking to a gentleman, I think his name was. Was it Kit Young you were talking to? It was one of the real OGs. And I said, oh, that's an impressive person that you happen to run into. He's a stalwart of the hobby icon, an icon of the hobby and he didn't even know it when he was talking to him. But my father's a very calculated sort of person. He thinks things through. He doesn't jump to conclusions or decisions. He's very methodical in what he does. And I think it comes back to his professional training in medicine and the specific type of medicine he does can be very problematic for people. So I think it's just who he is. So if we had to put him on the hobby spectrum, I would put him right where I am. I think he would be a precisionist because he's a very precise person. What an honor to be on here with my father and you, Jim, in your traditional Father's Day episodes. I'm grateful and it was a joy to me to see you two conversing at the event I co hosted at the Toronto Expo and the other two dinners we had together. What a great experience for the young 15 year old Jeremy. I would just be delighted to know I was having this discussion today with both of you. Thank you for inviting us and for doing what you do and continuing to be a voice in the hobby.