Are Sports Cards Investments? + A Heated Hobby Debate + Collectors Clash Over Money

Michael Jordan. Sports cards is a lifestyle Sports cards and we live now Jeremy Lee in the building and every guess that you ever needed Sports cards after hours Keep the hobby heated Updates, homie Talk like you never seen it Sports cards live and I could ever beat it Sports cards is a lifestyle Sports cards and we live now. Welcome to another episode of Sports Cards Live with your host, Jeremy Lee. Last thing that I want to say, I know that everyone, you know, the whole panel here, I think, is into MEM Cards, which, by the way, you guys spoke about for, like, four episodes without me knowing what MEM cards actually meant. But now I know that's memorabilia. I'm a little slow. Sorry. But it's interesting to me that this panel was very skeptical of vintage autographs and the way that they were, that are they real? Are they not real? Do we believe the grading companies? Do we not? I think it's a lot of trust that we put into these companies for MEM Cards, and. And, you know, this is just me being skeptical about, and this is not me trying to go against them in any way, but I just think that there is a version of this that. That I'm a little skeptical on. How real are these items? Because, like, you know, I remember that called shot Babe Ruth jersey that went up for auction. I feel like it went up for auction for, like, possibly one company. They couldn't. They didn't really believe the photo match. It went to another one. They're like, we believe it, and they ended up putting it out there. I mean, do we know that these jerseys are real? I don't know. Just another small part of it that I'm not trying to go against anyone's collection. But just another thought I've talked about. I've talked about it a lot. And I say for me, because I collect these things, it's a leap of faith that I've chosen to take to. And listen, just like anything, I. I have to think, not only do I. Do I accept that some might not be some of the pat. Some of the patch cards in my collection may not be what they're purported to be. I also believe that because we see it. We see it happen. Like, upper deck will often put the wrong patch in the card. The player never played for the team. So how do we know that? Every time I see a piece of a patch card in a card, that. That. That that patch came from a jersey worn by that player, not one of their teammates, you know, or some other player. So it is a. It is a leap of faith. That we, that I take as a collector. Comparing that to vintage autographs. I've mentioned that they may or may not be real. Sure. Same way I mentioned what I just did. I just don't collect them. I, they're not, I don't want them in my collection. They're not, they're not what I care about. So that you love them, anyone loves them, great. Like all the power to. You have nothing. Our buddy Tony, that's his, that's his lane. So many people collect these things now. I don't care. I, I, I only, it's not I don't care. I only care because you care. I'm happy for you as a collector just does not. Interesting. Interesting to me. But how I deal with my lane. What I do love to collect is. Yeah, I take a leap of faith and I accept that they're probably not all what they're purported to be on the back of the cards. And just like, just like with graded cards, just like I'm sure I have trimmed cards in my collection and, and maybe the odd counterfeit. I mean I once did take advantage of the PSA guarantee because I had a fake card in a real PSA slab and they paid me out. That's why you always hear me saying I love, I love up charges. They're the best thing ever, those up charges. I bought the card for 1500. PSA gave me six grand for it and it was fake. Come on, tell me the PSA upcharges funding that aren't the best thing out there. I love PSAF charges. I've never paid it, but I love them. So, so there. That, that's how I reconcile everything you just said in very fair comments across the board, especially those of defending our good buddy Joshua Adams to the death. And I mean, you know what though, it's also fun content to to go at each other a little bit here and there. So I'm going to continue to do that with my good buddy Josh. But, but only in certain cases. Only in certain cases. No good stuff, David. How about. Did we hear. I think we've heard from everybody. I wanna, I wanna, I want to talk about the debt situation for a moment. I remember, you know, thinking to myself, I forget when this was 20, 18, 19, when I was buying a lot of cards because I thought that, you know, number one, I was newly dipping my toes into some certain to some new lanes and I was loving them. And I also felt pretty bullish about the hobby and future values. And I do care about future values in My cards. And I remember thinking about, man, I wish I had more money to spend. And I thought, I thought to myself, you know, and I, I didn't, I never considered it. But the possibility of, you know, I've got, I've, I've got lines of credit I could borrow against my house. I could probably put money on my credit card. I've never done that for cards. I've never ever gone into debt for cards. But boy, oh boy did I wish that I would have four years later when a ten, when ten, when a hundred dollars turned into a thousand dollars in sports card value. I wish that I was like, man, I should have bought all. I shouldn't have only bought those 20 Jordan cards. I should have bought 200 Jordan cards and sold my retirement fund to do it, you know. Now I didn't and I never would do it in the future. But some people might feel stronger about a sports card than they do about real estate or about, you know, their, their stock holdings, their equity holdings in their. I forget what you call them down there. They're up here. That's RRSP, your, your 1140 or what's it called, your 1K, your 401Ks. Yeah, like a lot of people would rap and listen, I haven't put money into my, invest into my RRSPs in years because I'd rather put my money into sports cards. I think I can do better long term value wise in sports cards than I can in traditional equities. I've been, you know, in the last 30 years, I've proven myself to be true. I'm a very good sports card investor. You know, luckily I also collect and I'm willing to hold these long term. So those invest. I don't sell. I rarely sell too early. I've done that of course and I have gotten out of cards. But so that's my thought. I think on, on the debt side of things. I'm not, certainly not. I've no, hey, I can't tell you not to not. I, I can't say right now that you should take, take my advice, like do as I say, not as I do because I don't do it either. So I'm certainly not telling anybody to do that. But I understand if you feel that strongly about something that you might be willing to do it. And again, like was said, I think on, on our show on the Hangover, it's only ten grand. I know it's a lot of money, but it's only ten grand. Really. It's not, it's he's very comfortable. It's not going to ruin his marriage. It's probably not going to put him out on the street where he's going to lose his house either. So, yeah, now I also saw his name is not Stan. I do know his real name. Actually, the people on this panel know his real name because I showed them the email earlier. So he, but he's a real person. Like I saw Skeppy said something like it looked like there might be a hint of AI in his email. I mean, Skeppy, you should, you know, in six to 12 months you're gonna have to say about every email ever. I mean, you know, it's just like, you know, it was funny. David Chase and I were joking around on text message the other day when he, he, I showed him my list of, of cards that I wanted to pick up at the, at the national and he wrote back, well, I think these should be on your list. So I sent him an email. I sent him a big long text back that I, that I, I had Chat GPT write for me. I told Chat GPT, here's what I want to do. I'm. It's meant to be funny. And David Chase writes back, you are effing hilarious. Thank God for Chat GPT. I screenshot my Chat GPT prompt and sent it to him so you could see what the prompt was. Because while Chat GPT is being used all over the place now, it's the prompt that's important more than the output. Right. The prompt and the series of prompts are going to produce hopefully what you are trying to articulate that you may not be able to do as well yourself. I think that. So to skept your comment, who cares? Like, like, are you the Chat GPT police? Are you the I, I like it's out there, it's happening. And you know, if you're disclosing it, like, even if you're not in a case like an email, who cares if it's helping you get your thought across a little bit more accurate to your, to your thoughts? You may not have as and you're not someone by the name of Chris Hoge who can just pull a dictionary out of his behind anytime he needs it so. Because that's what, that's what Chris Hoge does. And I will defend Chris Hoge in his dictionary laden behind to my death. David, were you gonna say something there? Yeah. I have a question for you about debt. Just kind of. Let's live in an alternate reality for a second and you believe so passionately when you bought your Joe Jackson for the belief not just that it was the right card, the right look, but also as an investment. Right. I mean, a very similar outlook to this person. But the difference is that you had cards as capital to be able to use, to be able to get up that money. Let's just go into an alternate reality for a second and assume that you didn't have those cards and that you didn't have money in the bank. Would you, if you were in this situation right now with no money in the bank but you had a line of credit, do you, could you see yourself going into debt to get a card like that? No. Okay. Never. I would never. I would never. I don't have the risk appetite for that. I am risk averse. I just had my annual call with my financial advisor, planner, manager and you know, he asked me one of the questions he asked me and I forget exactly. But it's like, would you rather be able to make like. If you had a million bucks to invest, would you rather be able to make like the, the hot. The, the, the good scenario, the good outcome is you make 250, but the bad outcome was you lose 150. I forget the exact numbers. Or would you like to make 100 and the worst cases lose 50? I took the latter. I forget the exact numbers. But that was the scenario. Basically I'm like, no, give me the ladder. I don't want to risk that bigger law. I am not, I'm risk averse when it comes to those things. So no, I would never go into debt to do that now. I mean, I've even now this didn't work out for me. But I once did the opposite of what our buddy Stan did. I did the opposite. I've talked often about having two big sort of consolidation moments or collection disposition moments. One was for the Joe Jackson. The other one was to buy my house. It was literally to buy my house. And when I bought the house I'm in right now, I had a mortgage on my old house, whatever it was. I'm not going to say how much it was, but I had a mortgage that was substantial. And when I bought the new house, I was unable to, to port my old mortgage to my new one. I was, my mortgage was at 1.94. I had 3 1/2 years left on it. I was not able to port that over to my new house when I bought this house. And then. And my new mortgage would have been like five and a half or six percent. This was well this was like, you know, the end of 2023 when I was negotiating it. I was. And, and I didn't know that before I bought the new house. My mortgage broker told me I could and he was wrong. And the, the guy didn't like. All he did was say sorry. Like I was so pissed. You better know you're a mortgage broker, David, right. You got to know your mortgage laws where. So I was so pissed at this guy, but what could I do, right? I, I signed the papers. It was. So what did I do? Instead of paying that interest on my house, I sold cards and paid off my mortgage. Completely paid it off using cards. So now, so because had I not done that, it would have, it would have literally cost me interest on my home to keep my cards sold. Cards paid off the house. Now in hindsight didn't work out so well for me. The cards I sold have gone up substantially from that and would have more than paid for that interest. I could sell them now and have, and I would have had to sold. Have to have sold fewer cards to pay off the same house. Right. So. But that shows two things. Number one, cards are often cards, some, not all cards, but some cards are better than investment. Some of them are the best investments we've ever seen, we've ever had the chance to invest in besides maybe like Bitcoin or Nvidia, you know, except for the, the unicorn opportunities out there. But at the same time I wasn't willing, not only was I not willing to borrow against my house to buy cards, I sold cards to pay off my house. I did the opposite of that. So if that tells you anything about where I, how I live my life, David, and my risk, my level of risk aversion. What, what? I don't know. What do you think? Like that's all I got. I think that that sounds great and that I was just wondering that because you kind of pushed back a little bit at a certain point and about it's okay for him to go into debt. But I understand now kind of what you're saying is it's a kind of debt that is short term that he's going to get out of within a year, which is very different than long term debt also. Which I understand. Right. That's a big part of that. Yeah. Jim here says, Did Jeremy just say he's living in a house of cards? What's funny is when I, when I moved in here and I met my neighbor right over there and we're like getting to know each other, I, I tell Them, I, I go, yeah, I go, this is, this is the, this is the house that Michael Jordan built is what I told him. That's awesome. Yeah. And it's, and it's somewhat true, but Jordan cards have skyrocketed since I sold those and you know, I can't go back and change and luckily I kept some and I, I still have a collection I'm very happy with and so I'm good. And I, I live in my house and my house is completely, I'm, I've been, I'm mortgage free. Like it's a, it's a wonderful, you know, in my early 50s and, but that said, I could be renting a house and I could have all my Jordan cards still and I'd probably be wealthier at the end of the day in that situation. But there's something about, you know, where I'm very comfortable where I am right now too, so. Thoughts, Comments, anything else? Chris? Josh? Anything? Or on another topic as well, we can, we can change it up as well if you guys want to. Yeah, I just want to echo a lot of what David said and what you said, Jeremy, especially when dealing in this world of cards. And it's, it's been, there's a lot of different eras of cards. You know, one of the topics I brought tonight, which obviously I don't think we'll get to, but maybe I'll foreshadow it for a different time, is that what is it? What does long term actually mean in the hobby? Yeah, I think we say that and we, you know, long term, it's 20 years or something. I don't think so. I think like, if you sort of like look at the cyclical nature of our market, whether it's been the post covet era or the pre, it's like, it's like every like three to four years, there's sort of an ebb and a flow, there's a peak and a trough. I think long term, the hobby really means like three or four years empirically, not philosophically, not aspirationally, but measurably. I think we see people come and go, we see markets cycle every three to four years. And so I just bring that up because I actually find the disconnect sort of between the on the ground reality of how long our cycles last and how aspirational we are about coffin cards and so on. I think that ties back into the financial discussion just a little bit too because, you know, it's, it's like, man, like within a window of three to Four years, you can see a card you own double, and then you can see that same card you own be worth less than what you paid for it. All that stuff can happen within that same cycle, and then it can never recover again. Or it can go parabolic or it can land somewhere in between. It's. It's just this. This market is. Is. Is far more volatile and dynamic. And it's just. It's really. It makes me uneasy to think that I would ever want to advise or ever take on myself a position where, like, you know, I'm. I'm putting my. I'm taking a financial risk for the sake of collecting cards. I just think that that's, That's. That's just. I, I don't. I don't really know a way to make an argument, a prudent argument for it. But aren't we doing that just by spending money on cards? Like if I, you know, instead of spending two grand on the. What even. Here, here. This card I got in the mail, and I love it. It wasn't two grand. It was less than that. But I picked up my 49 Bowman Mugel. I love this card. I think I paid twelve hundred bucks for something like that. I could have put that into the stock market. I put. It. Could have put that into my 401k, which is. We call RRSP up here. But I didn't. Instead, I, I took the risk of putting it into a baseball card because I collect cards, and I love cards way more than I love traditional. Traditional investments bore the you know what out of me. I am not. They have. There. There's nothing fun about traditional investments. I look at my statements once a month, I update my books, and I mark to market once a month, and that's it. And I don't think about them at all. They sit there. I don't care. I just hope that they're there when I, When I need them. I don't enjoy traditional investments. I love sports cards. So I take money I could otherwise invest and I put them into sports cards. Is that risk? Is that kind of a risk? No. Josh, you seem to want to jump in. Go ahead. It's not supposed to be fun. It's an investment. You put it. You, you, you save your money so you have it when you get older. Not supposed to be fun. The hobby is supposed to be fun, so it's called a hobby. And I, I don't think cards are an investment. They never should. They should not be an investment. If you're buying cards saying, I Need this money later on. I think you're making a huge mistake. I buy a card, I stop looking at the price after I buy it because I don't care. Because if it goes up, I don't care. Because I'm not going to sell it. If it goes down, big deal. So it went down. I'm not going to sell it anyway. Now if I have it. Yeah, I mean, I worry about it, but not, you know. Yeah. Foul Ball agrees. He says this is a hobby, not an investment. So I'm just going to push back on both of you there. And I'm going to say you, do you like you. When you say it should not be an investment. That's fair. But don't. But. And this is not. Don't tell me, Joshua Adams, how to live my life. Don't tell me I shouldn't invest in sports cars. Same to Foul Ball. Don't tell me it's not a hot. Don't tell me it's not an investment. This is, it's not an investment to you, Josh, and to you. Foul bond. To many other people. It's not to you guys. You don't look at it as an investment. That's fine. You don't have to. I am more than able, willing and allowed to look at it as an investment. I, it's a, it's my hobby. I collect these things, but they are, I also consider them to be investments because otherwise I wouldn't spend a thousand bucks on a card. I would only buy cheap cards that I wouldn't care about their values. I care about the values of my cards. Why? Because I put investment type money into them. I could put it, I could put a thousand bucks a month into my RSP or whatever other investment account, or I can put a thousand bucks a month into my card budget. One or the other. Doesn't matter what else I'm putting into my investments. No, if I, If I put 10 grand a month into my investments and $1,000 a month into, into my sports cards, why couldn't I put 11 into my investments? Like, like if, if, if, if it's if, if sports cards are universally not investments, which just isn't true. And I, and I, I know that because, because they've been investments for me. When I, I paid off my house and I mean, my tax return was a disaster that year. Like, I paid more tax that year than ever before because I paid off my house with sports cards that I bought years earlier that I earned a 500% return on. How is that now? In hindsight, was that. Was that not an investment? Did I not invest capital into an asset, sell it for more than I paid, pay the taxes on it, and move on with my life? How was that not an investment for me? Doesn't have to be for you, Josh, or you fallible or anybody. I don't really care how you look at your cards, whether you look at them as purely hobby, where if. If you spend. If you spend a $10,000 on a card or a quarter million dollars on a card and it goes to zero and you don't care, that's fine. You don't. You don't need the money. I do need the money. I do want the money. I like money. Money is how I can take care of my family now and in the future. So again, like, I asked the question, and this is a legitimate question, did I not make an investment into an asset and sell it? Like, were they not assets if I was able to make a very nice investment return on them, like, Josh, what do you think? Was that not an investment? Maybe it wasn't. I. I just don't understand how it wouldn't be fallible. Says, I'll never understand. You're right. Fallow ball. I will never understand your way of thinking. I won't. We. We approach. We approach this hobby, this, this whole way of. We. We approach sports cards completely differently. I will never understand. But foul ball, you will never understand my way of doing things. You just won't. And that's okay. I don't care that we don't under. That we don't understand each other's approach to the hobby. I just care that we're both in the hobby. And I'm glad to know you and I have. Every time we see each other, I see foul ball a few times, once a year, whatever. It's all good. I don't. I don't care that you don't look at them as investments. You don't have to. But for me, they have actually functioned as the best investment I've ever made. So, Josh, what do you think? Like, was that not an investment for me? I. I guess it is for you. I just. I just. I've never looked at cars that way. I've looked at my. For fun, and I buy something and then I. I want to do a set. I bought the set. I bought the most expensive car because I needed it for the set. That's done. Good job. I'm collecting other cards. I want this card. I bought it. Awesome. I just. I just. I have investments for like, you know, like savings and retirement, all that stuff, and other types of investments. That's, that's separate. I don't mess with those. But cards are for fun and. No, no, sorry for you there. For fun. Yes. Right. Yeah, exactly. For me. Exactly. For me, they're for fun. And I don't really, I really, I've never once bought a card and said, I hope this goes up. I bought because I want it and I like it. And yeah, you're in a very fortunate position where you can spend the kind of money you spend on cards and that can be purely discretionary, straight to the income statement and not worry about it. You don't need the money that you could get for them. That's a great place to be. David, what are you thinking? Yeah, and Josh, I love your way of collecting and I totally respect it, even though it's very different than the way I collect too, which is okay. But I just want to ask your opinion on something. You do care a little bit about the price of cards because you gave up your 48 leaf set. You gave up your 33 Gowdy set. Are you telling me you didn't care what those were worth when you ended up selling those to buy your big boy cards? Or like, you know, like what, what is, what's your mindset there? You did care about the financial aspects as you rearrange your collection? Well, when you say care, I, I didn't buy those cards when I bought them and said, I hope these go up X amount in whatever years. I bought them because I wanted, I wanted to do the set and I took 20 years to do each set. I got them and then I had to, I, I sold them to buy another car. So. Travis? Yes, I, I've sold cars before to buy another card and because all those Leafs I can buy, I can buy again. I just need time and money, so. But weren't you happy they appreciated to the dollar amount that they did so you could make a move like that? I mean, yeah, it was fine. Yeah, being happy that they appreciate is one thing. Buying them, hoping they will is two different things. We're talking about two different things here. I'm. Yeah, I bought them because I wanted the cars because I, I love that sets, my favorite set of all time. And I wanted the set that was out of the story. And is there an end game for you where, when you're a hundred years old, do you want to die with these cards or would you eventually think about selling any of them as you get older? David, I have no idea what I'm doing next week. So I do not plan any of this stuff far in advance. You, you give me way too much credit for thinking I have any sort of plan on any of this stuff. I just kind of do what I want to do and then if it works out, it works out. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Yeah. And I love your answers. I'm just pushing back for fun. You know that. That's exactly. Yeah. Lots of comments on this. We'll, we'll go through a few of them here. Let's start Old E105 says Josh is a long time respected member of the Net54 message boards. Midlife Greg says, Plus Josh is 100, a titan of the industry and a visionary. Couldn't agree more. Mike Petty says it might work out for him, but putting it on a home equity line of credit is just idiotic. Skeppy here says we did that one already. Foul ball says I look for rubber bands in cases I walk right by those toxic graded cards at shows another difference in approach in collecting that I have with foul ball that we don't, you know, you know what I was gonna say, we don't need to understand each other, but I think we do. I think we actually do. We just don't approach it the same way. Situational says past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Could not agree more with that. However, I will say that when you, when you have a track record and when you have been almost nothing but successful in whatever it is that you are an expert in, and I can kind of consider myself to be a loose expert in sports card investing, let's say for the purpose of this discussion, I am very confident. I'm very confident in my ability to put myself in the best. In the position to have the best possible future performance. So I agree with the comment Situational says here. But that goes for anything and everything in the world. So, you know, I, I think that sports cards are probably one of the safer places to park capital as investment. At least if you have, if you're me, because in my head I've only done very well with it. So it kind of for me it makes sense. Skeppy says it's actually the other way around. Every single card someone acquires is an investment. Collecting is invest is investing. Whether you care or not. That's a pretty strong statement. I think. I think what he's really getting at there is you're putting your money into something. You are trading, you are trading currency for a tangible Product you can hold and I want to say asset, but I know a lot of people don't look at them. You don't care a lot of like, listen, you can decide when you buy a card. If you decide. We all have personal financial statements that are, that, that exist even though you might not keep them, but we all have them. If you could take every cent and dollar that you've ever spent or brought in and, and, and do traditional type like GAAP accounting for it, you would have, you would produce financials like debits and credits. You would have financial statements, you'd have a balance sheet and you would have an income statement or a P L people call it. You'd. You have these. Whether you like it or not, you have these. Now when you spend money on sports cards, you have two choices when it comes to these, these abstract financial statements. You're, you have to make. You, you have to make a journal entry into your financial statements. That means you make debits and you make credits. When you spend money or incur debt, you are crediting an account, you have to have a debit. And debits can go to one of two places, an asset or an expense. So when you, when you deploy money, you spend money, your wallet or your bank account or your cat, whatever is being credited by the amount you're spending. And your debit can go to two places. Either the, an asset on your balance sheet which goes towards your net worth, or an expense on your, on your income statement which reduces your net worth because it's gone. Once it hits your hits that it's gone. So I choose when I buy sports cards to put them on my balance sheet. Josh Adams puts them on his income statement. That's a choice. You have the choice to do that. But to me, when I buy sports cards, they go on my balance sheet because I know that in the future, unless we go to martial law, I'm going to get money for them. Whether I get more money, exact money or less money, I'm going to get money for them. And it's not until that point that the original amount I spent moves out of that asset and onto my, onto my income statement as cost of goods sold. And if you're an accountant, you've ever taken an accounting course, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Again, two choices. And this is really the way that we can look at this difference in, in hobby approach, in mindset of the hobby. If you are someone who looks at who, who considers sports cards to have future value, call it an investment, but just simplify it, having future value. They go on your balance sheet, abstract or like me, actual or they go on your income statement as an expense and you never think about it again. However, when you sell that card down the road now, now all of a sudden, you're going to have to recapture that cost that you had or you're going to bring it all into income. So you're now going to have to pay taxes on the full amount that you collect. For me, I get to deduct the cost of goods sold because I never expensed it in the first instance at the time of purchase. So, David, you're following. I can tell. I'm sure you guys, you're both educated. I'm sure you guys are following. I don't know about everyone in the chat. Many of them are following. But again, it comes down to where are you putting the, the, where are you putting the debit? When you buy a card, are you putting your balance sheet or your income statement? And that's a question you can ask anybody. Where's. Where do you, what, what do you debit? I'll put that a shirt. What do you debit? Because that, the answer to that question tells you a lot about somebody's mindset and how they collect. I think that made sense. Does anybody have any issues with anything I said or, or feedback on it on the panel? Josh, please. Listening to you, two things I realized a why I'm a, One, why I'm, I was an English major and then two, I don't keep track of any of this stuff. I'm completely irresponsible. It turns out, like, I buy a card and I put it like I have it. I don't remember what I paid for it. That's going to hurt you at tax time. When you ultimately dispose. That is going. That is going to hurt you at tax time. But that's okay. That's okay. Talk about taxes on a live YouTube recorded video. But. Okay, I know you're saying no. All right, Anyone else? Chris, you have any thoughts? Yeah, I do. Jeremy. I, I admire, I know that almost that entire motivation behind that speech was because you can't sit with logical inconsistencies and because you are dead set on making sure the right answer given the context of the discussion was known. And I just love that. I admire that I have a little bit of that in myself where, like, I need to work through the logic of the situation earnestly and take everything at its face value and process it. And that's where my comment is going to build off of, which is that we just sort of like sketch your motive for why you just made that case. And it's because it's a logical case that resolves some tensions in the discussion. But anytime somebody chimes into a discussion, there's usually a motive, there's usually something pushing us to chime in, and especially when the things that we're chiming in on are, you know, sort of like commenting on how other people are doing things. And I think that one of the motives for sort of like preserving this as a hobby is that people just genuinely want to own cards and they are worried about sort of this domino effect where if a lot of market participants, or even just one or two that are bidding against me adopt a financial mindset, I find myself having to pay more and more for cards and having to engage in more and more difficult bidding wars over cards. Not because I'm going up against somebody who wants to own this card and collect it, but because I'm going up against somebody who wants to then sell it to me for even more next week. And so I think that there's like a real, a justified concern, not that there's anything illogical about the, the way that we can certainly flesh out a case for the financial upside of cards. But, but, but because that logic we can extrapolate from and then have in person experiences with battling people who are using that logic to actually increase the cost of our hobby, to make it more difficult for us to own as many of the cards as we'd like to be able to acquire. And that is a source of great frustration for, especially for the purist. So I'm not, I'm not saying that contradicts anything you said. It doesn't. But I think that's a layer of understanding of where the frustration that gets vocalized against a logic of investments can enter this discussion. And it can make sense, even though it doesn't contradict any of the logic that you just laid out. You know, I think you're. I think you nailed it. I think you're exactly right that that is probably where the tension comes from. And you know what? The, the only rub, this isn't even a rebuttal. It's just building on the discussion because this is not what you said makes complete sense. And, and I love that there's that purity in the hobby. Then I think, then I go back to that logical part of my brain, Chris, that you identified at the beginning there. And I think about, where are we in the world right now? Where are we in the history of sports cards? And we're past the pure hobby. It's no longer just a pure hobby. You can make it a pure hobby if you want, but if you want to own certain cards and you're deploying significant money from your paycheck towards them, you got to think about getting out at some point. And if you don't, that's fine. I think you're irresponsible if you don't, but that's fine. You again, I don't even want to. Let me rephrase. I would think I was irresponsible if I did it that way, because I don't. I don't really care how you guys do it. I just want you to have. By you guys, I mean everybody else. Like, it's not my business how you guys think about it. I'm curious and I'm interested in it, and I don't always think that that would work for me, but some people I do, some people I don't. But I think about where is the hobby at right now? The hobby, it's an industry. It just, it just is. When cards come out of the pack and they're a million dollars, Come on. I mean, we're not just at a place where, you know, and not all of them are a million dollars, of course, but even to buy a pack or a box now, like, it's. You have to. At the same time as having these, these purist type feelings, you also have to be a real. Or you don't have to. I choose to be a realist. I choose to look at the way the landscape is and the way the world is in front of me right now. And, you know, I've always been somebody that, you know, like, I can't change the weather. I can't change the political party in power. I can't change what's going on in the macro economy. I can't change what's going on in the. The Strait of Hormuz. I can't change what's going on on the streets of Los Angeles. I can't change anything. Right? All I can do is worry about myself and make decisions that I think are best for me, that make me happy and are good for my family long term. That's all I can do. So with all that said, I do consider the reality of the situation and I adapt to that reality. I think a lot of people, like, there's a lot of, like, foul ball here says my hobby doesn't go on to any sheet. Well, it Does. You just, you just don't understand that foul ball. But it actually does go on a sheet. It's an, it's an abstract sheet. That's why I used the word abstract earlier. Every time you take money out of your pocket, you are making a journal entry into the financial statements of your life. They exist. Just like, just like the, Just like the universe is built on math. No, it isn't. I don't see numbers out there. Well, trust me, it's built on math. The, the math underlies everything by all. Like it's, it's, it's there, so you don't have to focus on it. You don't even have to care about it. But if you don't acknowledge it, that's where I have a disconnect with somebody else. And in that case, I don't want disconnects. So what do I, what do I want to do? How do I strive to live? Instead, I look at what we have in common and I try to build off of that. In relationships, we don't have to, we don't have to cheer on the same sports teams, even be the fans of the same sports, never mind politics, religion and sexual orientation and all those other things. We don't have to live the same way in any of those, in, in any of those areas, but we likely have something in common. And when it comes to relationships and interactions, even here with the, with people in the chat, hopefully we can find something that we have in common and build a relationship based on that. Or you can just, you know, put comments in the chat that I'm really going to be snickering at and shaking my head at in my own mind, but I don't want to insult anybody. Sometimes I do, but. So, yeah, I mean, listen, it's, that's the way I look at it. And, and the other thing is like, I'm just one person and, and I've got my way and, and everyone, you know, we got a great audience and a great community and great chat here and great panelists and all that. We don't, we don't. The, the goal is not to see. The goal is not to all be the same. The goal is to be. Is to have an understanding for each other and to just be. And, and just. That's it. Accept people for how they hobby. As long as you are not hurting anybody, as long as you're not ripping anybody off and being deceptive and all those things. If you're not committing fraud and doing all those things, you're more than welcome to be in this community regardless of whether or not we collect the same or live anyway any parts of our life same or different. Thanks for tuning in and being a part of the sports Cards live community. Don't forget to like, subscribe and most of all keep collecting more great content to come. Sports cars is a lifestyle.