Hobby Jobs: Passion is the Entry Fee with Chris McGill of Card Ladder

Foreign. What is going on? Welcome back to another episode of Hobby Jobs here on the Stacking Slabs Network. Has the dust settled for you yet from this year's National? That is the question. What a time. There are so many thoughts going off in my brain, and I'm going to try to document them here on the Stacking Slabs Network both from a collecting and business building perspective. In the coming weeks and when there's opportunity in the calendar, I am going to share conversations that I had at the National. I spent much of my time at the national watching the sports card industry work that might sound strange when you consider everything happening inside that building. You had collectors buying cards. You had dealers negotiating, companies launching products, friends connecting, having conversations, money moving across the room at a pace that was impossible to track. But I think underneath all of that activity were people working. I had conversations with a lot of people working, and it's an interesting mix. You have individuals there on their vacation, collecting, connecting with others, and you had a group of individuals that were there to build. The people who were building were answering questions, solving problems, helping their customers or prospective customers, checking data, building those relationships. That work became one of the themes I kept thinking about throughout the week. You know, we spend time talking about growth of the sports card industry. It's undeniable that if you attended the national, you saw that growth in real time. There were more people, more companies, more cards than I'd ever seen before. Record sales, signs of progress. But growth really creates something else. It creates responsibility. I think the more people who use your product, consume your content, trust your data or rely on your service, the more responsibility you carry. It doesn't matter how successful you are. Success doesn't move that pressure. It changes the type of pressure that you feel. That is where I want to begin this episode of Hobby Jobs. My guest is my friend Chris McGill, co founder of Card Ladder. You've heard Chris on the Stacking Slabs Network many times over the years. This conversation's a little bit different. We recorded it from the Card Ladder booth at the National. Instead of focusing on cards, I wanted to focus on the work with Chris. Card ladder has become part of the infrastructure of the hobby. Collectors use it to understand sales. Dealers use it during negotiations. Buyers pull out their phones before making offers. Collection values, market indexes and transaction data influence decisions involving real money. You can walk around a card show and see Card Ladder opened on phones across the entire room. From the outside, that looks like success. Chris sees something different. He sees responsibility. When he notices someone using Card Ladder, his first reaction is not necessarily pride. It's pressure. Is the data right? Is the product working? Can the customer find what they need? Is there an issue? Waiting for someone on the team to address that response tells us something about what it means to build a product. People trust. The goal is not to become known. The goal is to become dependable. Those aren't the same thing. Attention gets people to try your product. Dependability gives them a reason to build it into their own process. You know, once that happens, you are no longer working on an idea. You are maintaining a promise and people are making decisions based on the work that you produce. They expect the product to work. They expect the information to be accurate. They expect someone to listen when something goes wrong. That obligation is part of the job. It is also the part we tend to leave out when discussing careers and sports cards. Working in the hobby sounds like a blast. It is. I enjoy my time. I get to spend my days talking with collectors, recording podcasts, building media products and studying an industry I care about. I don't take it for granted. But loving cards doesn't complete the work. It does not answer the customer email, fix the product, prepare the interview, send the invoice. It does not build the system that keeps the business running when the market slows down. Passion gives you energy. It does not give you permission to avoid the parts of the job that are really hard. This is where Chris's story becomes useful for anyone trying to enter the sports card industry. Card Ladder was not built because three people wanted jobs near sports cards. It started because collectors needed a tool that did not exist in the form they wanted. Chris, Josh and Christina understood that need because they felt it themselves. They were not standing outside the hobby trying to identify an opportunity. They weren't inside the problem. That distinction matters. It is an e It is easy to say you want to work in sports cards. It is harder question is whether you care about a specific problem enough to keep working on it after that excitement wears off. Chris says that the Card Ladder team would still want the tool even if they were the only users. That is a strong foundation for a business. The product is connected to their own lives as collectors. Their customers needs aren't abstract. The team understands the use case because they live it. That does not mean instinct replaces customer feedback. Card Ladder spends a large part of the time talking with collectors and responding to questions. You saw that if you walked up to the booth at the National. That was part of the conversation. That really stuck with me. We think of Car Ladder as data and a technology company. Chris describes Much of the daily work as customer service. That is the work behind the product. It is not part featured in some big shiny launch announcement. You do not see it on a sales chart, but it is where trust gets built. A collector asks why a sale appears in the database. Someone needs to explain the process. A customer wants to understand how an index works. Someone needs to teach them. A person cannot access an account. Someone needs to help. Some requests are valid. Others are driven by personal interest. A seller might want a sale removed because it hurts the perceived value of a card. That is when a company needs more than customer service, it needs a standard. Serving customers does not mean giving each person the answer they want. It means creating a clear process and applying it when the outcome is uncomfortable. That is how a trusted product protects its credibility. Trust is not built by saying yes to everyone. It is built by making decisions people understand. This matters across the sports card industry. If you run a marketplace, collectors need to understand your rules. If you grade cards, collectors need consistency. If you create content, your audience needs to know where you stand. If you report sales, people need the confidence in the data. If you sell cards, buyers need to trust the transaction. Every company in the industry is in the trust business. The product is how you get trust or how trust gets delivered. There's another layer to the conversation that matters for people who want a hobby job. The sports card industry is attracting professionals from other fields. I met people at the national with backgrounds in tech, finance, recruiting, marketing, legal, pros, operation, sales. They want to bring those skills into the hobby. That's great for the industry. Sports cards need people with experience from outside the category. But wanting to be near cards is not enough of a reason to change careers. Chris makes an important distinction near the end of our conversation. He would not take any job in the sports card industry because he loves collecting. The work itself still needs to fit. Building a data product connects how he thinks, what he studies and how he participates in the hobby. That is alignment. Your professional ability needs to meet a problem you care about solving. If you are a talented accountant, that does not mean you'll enjoy accounting more because the company sells sports cards. If you hate the daily work now, placing sports cards around it one-of-one fix the problem. The logo does not change the function of the job. Before trying to enter the industry, you can ask yourself three questions. What work am I equipped to do? What problem inside the sports card industry needs that ability? Do I care about solving it? To solving it to stay? When the work becomes repetitive, stressful or invisible, the overlap between those answers is where you should focus. There is no single path into the sports card industry. Chris went from the music business to law school and then helped build Card Ladder. None of those chapters were wasted. His entrepreneurial experience taught him to tolerate uncertainty. His legal education influenced how he evaluates rules, evidence, and process. His work as a collector helped him understand the problem. His content helped him build relationships before the company even existed. That combination became his advantage. The industry does not need you to erase your career history and start over. It needs you to apply to what you have learned to a problem that is worth solving. The same has been true for me. My years of working in marketing and corporate environments influence how I build stacking slabs, how I learned how businesses make decisions. I learned how partners partnerships operate. I learned how to communicate with customers. I learned the value of consistency, preparation and systems. When I entered sports cards full time, I did not leave that experience behind. I brought it with me. Your background is not a barrier for entering this industry. It is part of the value you offer. The question is whether you know how to apply it. Passion is really, really common in sports cards. Walk around the national and you meet thousands of people who care about the hobby. Passion is the entry fee. It's not the advantage. Your advantage comes from the skills you have developed, the standards you maintain, the problems you understand, and your willingness to keep serving people after they begin depending on you. And that is the work. Chris and I get into all of that. During the conversation, we talk about the energy inside the National. We discuss the growing confidence in the card market. We explore how Card Ladder became part of the way collectors transact. Chris shares what customer service looks like inside a data company. We also discuss his path from law school to building one of the most used products in the hobby. And as you listen, I want you to think beyond the story of card Ladder. Think about your own alignment. Do you want to work in sports cards because you love the category, or have you identified work in the industry that fits the way you're built? That's the difference. One gets you through the door, the other gives you a reason to stay. Here's my conversation with Chris McGill, co founder of Card Ladder, recorded live from the National. All right, we are back, and I've got the most prolific guest in stacking slabs history here with me, Mr. Chris McGill. Card ladder. Chris, we've talked about a lot of different topics over the years. We talk about topics every month with Card Ladder Confidential. There's a lot going on here. Stimulation, overload. I can't get up without saying hi to someone and having a conversation about something. So we're going to have a conversation here, but I want to talk about, like, the industry side focusing on working and building a business in this space. But before we do that, it's the National. How are you feeling right now? It's day two. How are you feeling? Well, it's great to be back. And we just need to keep forcing me on the audience because I will not relinquish that title. Who's the wrestler? Who would be the right analogy for. Just keeps coming back for the crown on pure volume. Pure volume stats. Yu-Gi-Oh I would say probably like a. I feel like a Bret Hart back in the day. He was the mark of consistency. Just heads down. Always contributing when he can. Love that. Okay, good. All right. The National. It's been a great, great show. You know, here's. Here's my big take so far from like 36 hours, I guess, of the show being open or not even. We're really more like a 24 hours. I don't know that there's. There's certainly new people. I don't know that there's some, like, insanely overwhelming amount of new people. It's a lot of the same people plus new people. But the attitudes and the optimism and the willingness to transact is. That's the thing that's spiking is that there's a confidence, there's a willingness to. An excitement, a motive to just do things all of a sudden. And you see that had been accumulating before the show. You can see that in the market data of prices escalating. But seeing it in person is unique. It's like, oh, this is the embodiment of the numbers on a screen. Like, you can feel that there's a palpable desire for people to make deals, buy things, sell things, make moves. It's just in the air. And like, if you're trying to buy something, it's very competitive right now. If you're selling something, great time to be a seller. So in 2021, everyone points back to and you still hear it today. It's like I saw this Gary Vee video where he was talking about cards, and I got interested in cards because I was home bored during COVID It was like the perfect stars aligning where you have hypebeast talking about cards. Everyone sees the video because everyone's on their devices more than ever. And everyone's like, I'm not doing anything but watching reruns. There's no sports on. So let me get into Sports cards. So people came in and then, you know, it's like Darwinism, like the survival of the fittest. Some died. Yu-Gi-Oh Some survived. Yu-Gi-Oh And. And some died, but came back to life. That's right. When that, when things started getting hot again. What, what do you make for in this moment? The you mentioned, like, there are new people, but maybe it's not overwhelming, but like you've got a lot of people that. With a new confidence and a. A willingness to spend more money than they ever have before. I'm one of them. Like, I'm. I'm spending more money than I've ever spent in my lifetime. And part of that is I build up the equity of my collection to afford me to do that. But Yu-Gi-Oh I don't know, I've just that you look at the sales all the time, like, what do you, like, what is the reason people are feeling this confidence in this moment? Yu-Gi-Oh Great question. Love the, the long term build up. Like, I think most collectors experience that at some point, like when you're in it for a year or two, you're like, man, how am I ever gonna. But you just keep your head down, you keep adding more cards, you keep rotating, improving, learning. And then by year four, year five, year six, you're like, oh, man, I have a real asset here in terms of a collection that has liquidity, like liquid value that I can use to turn into other cards. At some point, it becomes a really powerful tool. And I think that's empowering some people because there are some people who came back in the early 2000s who are at like the half decade mark, five or six years. They probably have some real equity built up too. But I really think the mechanism is this. It is the new people. The new people are well capitalized. The new people are aggressive. The new people feel like they're catching up. Like they have to play from behind and they want to really like, carve out an identity and a space for themselves and make a splash and do it now. And so that provides the pressure on the rest of us to also have to suddenly play by a much more aggressive set of rules if we want to continue on the paths that we're on. Or it forces us to get very creative and to say, you know, maybe I want to keep some of my collection. And that means I can't really maybe swim in as deep of waters as some of these new buyers can. So I have to pivot. I have to discover something else. So I think discovery is absolutely happening too. You know, I was Talking to Josh. I don't know if you and Josh talked a bit about this, but, like, Josh and I were walking the Fleer yesterday, the upstairs area, and Josh was like, I don't see as many downtowns and kabooms this year. The composition of the display cases has changed, and that's partially. I think the license transfer is playing a role in that. And the products that are producing very liquid cards, like repacks, like, make cards very liquid to buy and sell. Like, they're looking for stuff from the new license regime. So, like, dealers maybe don't have as much incentive to keep Downtown kabooms anymore. But also, I just think, like, tastes change and evolve and update and revise. And I thought that was a great observation. one-of-one the composition of these dealer display cases is different now. So, Yu-Gi-Oh I think. I think new buyers are creating new pressure that we all feel. And quite frankly, it seems like there was actually plenty of dry powder, there was plenty of cash on the sidelines that just didn't feel the pressure, the motive, or the need to rush back in and get spent on cards. And now that the pressure is being applied, that cash is coming back into the game. So you have built a company with your teammates that is integrated and ingrained in the hobby culture. I was telling Josh that I recently made a deal at any car exchange. And when I talked to Shane about the deal, he's like, do you look at card ladder values? And I'm like, of course I look at card ladder values. And so that was like, a starting point for us to be able to come to terms on a deal. You mentioned all the new buyers. Dude, I walk around, I just see people with their phones out and they're looking at card ladder, which is, I don't know, like a compliment to, like, the brand that you all have built. Like, with all of these new people entering with the recommendations from other people saying, like, oh, you got to use card ladder if you're going to try to, like, understand values and understand their collection. Like, I mean, I know this isn't like an overnight thing. Like, you've been at this for, you know, six, seven years. Like, what? Like, as someone who literally is consistently working on this business, every day for that time, no matter the holidays, no days off, like, how. How. How do you, like, do you, like, react to that? Do you recognize that? Is it just, like, part of the journey? Like, how do you respond to that? Yu-Gi-Oh it's a great honor, and it's a responsibility that we take seriously. Like, there's a lot of people depending on the data populating every day, every hour, and that it's accurate, that it's precisely captured that the site functions properly. So it's something that I feel stressed about all the time that we do it right. And that if I walk around the show and I see too many screens looking at Card Ladder, I start to get like anxious and like, want to just like get myself in front of a laptop and start fielding like requests about like, oh, you know, something's inaccurate here. Like, I just feel like I need to make sure that the product is perfect and up to standard and doing everything I can to play my small part in doing that. So it's stressful and, but it's, but it's a, it's a great responsibility, it's a great honor. It's cool to see. But, but Yu-Gi-Oh it's a very serious obligation. Like when I, when I see that, it's like, it's really cool. But the, but the, frankly the, the overwhelming sensation that I have is like stress. Like this is a, we really need to make sure this product is firing on all cylinders and functioning properly so that people can use it in their journey to transact and do what they want to do. So there's, when you're dealing, you're reporting on something that has interest for a lot of different people and is tied to a monetary outcome. And anytime you have something that is money related, it's gonna be very controversial if people are going to have their own ways of seeing things. And I'm sure, like I did, I don't imagine, I can't even imagine what the support queue looks like for Card Ladder and the volume of requests. Like, how do you wake up every day knowing that you're going to get this, like we're going to have this whole plate of support issues, requests and some of them will be like, oh shit, we got to fix this, we got to figure this out. Like, someone's locked out, we got to change this. But like other instances you could are you notice might have a little bit of self interest involved and like there's just a lot of different directions. Like customer success and support is such a big part of like growing the business. Like how do you wake up and think about that function of the business every day? That's a great question. Like we are obviously a software app and a technology company, but you'd be amazed at how much of our time is spent as a customer service company. It's the vast majority, I think, of all of our time, which is Nice. That's why it's cool. We have a booth so that. And we had to staff our booth with four additional people this year to help when people walk up and have questions, whether it's something as basic as like why can't I log into my account? Or it's something as sophisticated as like why didn't this card get put into this player's index? All ranges of questions that we were happy to take. But even on the day to day basis, even when we're not here, a big, big part of the daily job that we do is just replying to people and trying to help them get what they should reasonably expect to get out of the product. Now to your point, sometimes there are very self interested requests and then we have to be extremely careful to follow our procedures and best practices to make sure that for example, sometimes we'll get requests to remove a sale and we don't do that. Especially if it's a situation where it's because the card didn't line up with what they thought the market should be. And so in a situation like that we say, well, the source of truth is the marketplace. And if the marketplace is certifying that it was a paid transaction, then we're going to keep that sale. Now if it's an unpaid transaction and we have relationships with many of the marketplaces where they provide that information to us, then we remove it, then we remove that sale. But we need that proof. We need, we need to know that it didn't get paid. And so it's like we're a database. And sometimes people come to us when really the person that they have the question for is the marketplace that generated the sale. So we try to do our best to, to really strictly and transparently provide data that people want to see. And so that's one flavor of a customer request. But you get all Topps Indexes are sophisticated. Methodologically. We tried to keep ours as basic as possible, but they're difficult to understand how they work, especially if you don't have a familiarity with finance or finance related things. So plenty of times people will ask, hey, how does this index work and why are these cards in it? And what does this index mean, what is it supposed to represent? And then the more sophisticated question askers will be like, is it market cap weighted, is it price weighted, how does it work? So we take a lot of time to explain those things in depth. And the hope is that that's not just helping one customer understand, but it's an investment of time into if that customer understands it. And then they have friends who use Card Ladder, and those friends ask them the same question. Then they can share it with them. And then we have lots of FAQs and stuff, too. But it's. I found that it's always worth taking. Like, who wants to read an FAQ document? You know, it's like, if somebody takes the time to come up and say, how does this work? Like, I can take the time to explain how it works and why, but that's kind of like the sneaky, hidden part of how our business works is it's a lot of customer service and personal relationships, which you wouldn't. You might not think that. You might just think it's a software app. But we allocate strategically as a business decision. We allocate a ton of time to talking to the collectors and the dealers and the participants in this space. And as much. And as often as they want to talk to us, we'll interact with them. How have those requests changed over the years? Is it kind of the same steady flow of the same Topps of requests or feedback while. Or does it shift when the market is, like, where it's at right now, where people are literally, like, screaming right next to us and there's people everywhere excited to be here? Yu-Gi-Oh I would have to sort of like, think for a second here kind of, like, systematically about the patterns. Like, certainly the intensity and the aggressiveness of the requests were lower in 2023 and 2024. Maybe not a different flavor of question, but the intensity and the anxiousness and, like, the rush to get an answer is stronger today. And I do feel bad for people who kind of don't really understand. Like, we do try to get back as quickly as we can, but there's a. There's often a large queue of inquiries that are waiting to get replied to. So it's just. It's not really so much a change in the nature of the questions. It's a change in the volume and the intense. They just. There's more right now, and people want the. People really want the answers quickly right now, too. And that kind of fits the room. Right? Like, there's an energy, a frenetic energy right now. There's a push right now for people who are. Who don't work in sports cards, but are collectors who are interested in working in sports cards. And part of the reason why I'm having these series of conversations is to give those individuals some sort of guiding light on, like, these are what these people are doing and how they did it, like, it's well documented that you were in law school, you're preparing to be a lawyer, and you instead started a company called Card Bladder. Not a very conventional path, but that's okay. Like, you ended up building with your team one of the most popular products that our industry has. Like, maybe talk a little bit about, like, that shift and that experience, like, what pulled you away from, like, what you thought you were going to be doing, and that is some sort of legal work into building this business that everyone uses in the hobby. Yu-Gi-Oh no, I have a pattern of evading real adulthood responsibilities that started even when I was in high school. I graduated high school, and I kind of had this plan that I was gonna go to college. And then, like, I was like, no, I want to pursue a career in the music business. Sorry. You know, so. But my family kind of felt that was coming one-of-one so drop me off in Atlanta and I'm just gonna see what I can do for myself. And, like, I remember one of my buddies, dads was like, you know, if you don't go to college right away, you're probably never gonna go. Like, you really should think about it. Very responsible advice. But I just. I. Very infrequently can I be reasoned with when my mind is set on something. And then I did that again after the. So, like, I did do the music thing, and then I did go back to college and I did go to law school. And then as we were at the end of law school, once again, it was like, Yu-Gi-Oh I'm staring down the barrel of having to be a real adult. This. This is. I'm not ready for childhood to end quite yet. Bear in mind, I'm like, how old am I at this time? I'm in, like, my mid-30s. 30s. So, you know, quietly in the background for a while, Josh and I had been discussing building something, and we both had content podcasts. His coming before mine. He had The Cardboard Chronicles YouTube series interviewing collectors. And then Christine and I came out with the House of Jordans podcast a little bit later. I think his came out in 2017 maybe. And ours came out. I know when ours came out. Ours came out in December of 2018. And so we were making content. We were making networks of collectors and audience members. Not really for any purpose, just because it was fun and a way to continue enjoying the hobby when you can't. You know, nobody can buy cards and sell cards every day. Like, how do you. How else do you fill the time? How else do you continue to enjoy the hobby and content is an amazing way to do that. And so we started making contents, became friends, bonded over the content. In fact, you can go back on YouTube and see when I first appeared on Cardboard Chronicles, I think it's like, 2019 maybe or something. And I brought a piece of paper that I wrote down price information on, and we talked about the market and stuff. And so there was always the concepts of a plan. There are always concepts of a plan, and we always would talk about it. And we're both very entrepreneurial. It was just a synergy of. Of that spirit. And then the catalyst was the COVID 19. And so what happened was he had to start working from home. I was in the final semester of law school. All my classes went to pass fail and became online. And that gave a few extra hours a day. And we just were like, let's try this. And like, there was a lot of uncertainty. It was like, you Goldin They were delaying all the bar exams, which I was supposed to sit for, and I definitely didn't want to study for. And so it was just. It was like, Yu-Gi-Oh there's this moment where you can do anything you want. And like, the kind of, like, the world is frozen right now. And so we cranked out a very, very basic version of Card Ladder. So. So the. I love the story. I want to focus in on the, like, very realistic element of, like, we got to make money so we can continue to do this and live our lives. So you're coming off of this law school experience where you're just, like, hunting, like, taking the next step and instead placing all your chimps in this idea that isn't probably fully baked out, but it's frozen in this moment of time. How did you think about the financial viability of what you were doing and, like, actually turning into something that you could make money off of to. To. To pay your rent, to buy cards, to buy your groceries, do the things. Well, Josh and Christina were much more serious adults than I was. Josh had a great job, Christina had a great job. And I had never had a real job, arguably still never have. So I had a long, long set of experience of, like, like, my. I worked in the music industry for a while, and here's how that works. Like, if you are receiving, like, royalty payments, you know, for. For publishing and stuff, like, maybe you'll get those once a year or once every six months. And then otherwise you're, you know, if, like, I was a producer, so I would license or sell the rights to my music, that'd be very sporadic. Like, one month I might sell a bunch of, you know, license a bunch of music, and then I might not have any opportunities for months. So I was very acclimated to basically not having money, being in a very unorthodox setup from like a business point of view and understanding that, like, dude, I, you know, I'll. I'll do whatever it takes. I'll make it work. I'll. I'll. However long it takes. Like, we need to make sure that, that we give it a real shot and that we properly, you know, we need to be able to admit if it's. If it doesn't work, but we'll. I have a. I think all of us have a. I have a. Have a much stronger tolerance for like, breaking through barriers, like sticking with something and consistently doing it day after day that we all got from different avenues of our life. But I. My unorthodox background, like, I think made it not a shock to my system to just be like, Yu-Gi-Oh no, it's okay. So maybe I'm not gonna make any money for months. Like, I've done this many times. I've lived this life many times. So I've observed this about you, which I appreciate because I have a little bit of it in me where it's like, you get to this point where it's like a one track mind. You get focused in on something and you obsess over it. And so I don't know, like, do you think that has been an advantage for you in building a business with your teammates from nothing to something? Like, dude, I don't think people realize. I know this because we're friends and we interact and you talk about it here and there. But, like, I don't think people realize, like, the amount of hours that you put into building your business and the hours that you put into building your business. Do you think that like one track mind and then being consistent, do you think that's been kind of like a superpower for you and card ladder to take, continue to take the next step? It's a really good question. It's more of a superpower in more vanilla traditional industries. I think, like, to your point, in our industry, you have it. In Spates, I have it, Josh has it, Christina has it. Look around this room. A lot of people have it. There's like, this is. And when you're in like a passion field industry with people who are like, the profile of somebody who gets into this industry is usually somebody who's conscientious, who's open minded, who's adventurous, who's passionate, who's able to focus and explore and learn things that other people maybe haven't explored and learned already. Our group already selects for that. Like, you need to be a self starter, you need to be passionate, you need to be, you know, willing to step out, stick your neck out a little bit, do something that maybe has never been done before, not quite the way you're doing it. I think those are very, very valuable asset personality traits to have maybe in other industries in this industry. I think there's already a lot of it. I think there's a lot of people like that already. So I don't know if it's a differentiator. I do agree that you have it. Josh and Christina have it, I have it. My brother, our chief content officer, he has it as much as anybody I've ever known. Like the singular focus, you look at the art content creators like yourself, Adam, Jeremy, the ones who, and several other great ones who have gone full time. There is a focus, a drive, a specialization, a mastery that only comes from a very specific, specific combination of personality traits. I, I find that I'm attracted to the people who, I who look and feel like that have a similar mindset to me and what I'm doing. And it's always like I'm attracted to the consistency, the body of work. So many things come and go in this space, from people to collectors to content to companies. They, they come and go. And it typically happens when the market goes up. And then when the market, it's like, try building what you're building when the market sucks. Try to get excited in front of a microphone when the market sucks. But I don't know, like, I find that part of this space very, very interesting because I think I might, like, I might disagree with you a little bit that like, I think it might be like you all called out consistent examples and I agree with all those. But like, I find it like fewer and far between that of builders that are that way. And my mindset is. And I want to get your perspective on your mindset. My mindset is, dude, I get to wake up every morning and I get to like, take my kids to school and then I get to go back to my desk and I get to work on cards and talking about cards all day. And Yu-Gi-Oh there's like some business development and Yu-Gi-Oh there's some like operations and finance and systems building and like the corporate stuff that I'm trying to do on my own. But like, dude, I get it. I get to literally Talk about cards with people who talk about cards. So, like, I have this, like, I've been in the corporate structure and I don't want to go back. I want to protect what I'm doing at all costs. So I don't know, I just want to get like your reaction because I feel like, although you just said like, I've never really had a real job, I feel like you, the way you approach your work, it's like you wouldn't be up at 3 o' clock in the morning checking sales if you weren't trying to protect what you were doing at all costs. Yu-Gi-Oh no, we are violently passionate and about, not just about the product, although that's obviously true, and not just about the hobby, although that's obviously true. But we're also just as a function of the personality of all three of us. I promise you, if Josh wakes up to take a leak at three in the morning or four in the morning and he glances at his phone and there's a customer request in our customer service portal and he looks at it, he will reply to it before he goes back to bed. And it's because of passion and because of skills and everything, but it's also just how he is. He is just something funny about Josh. More than anybody I've ever known in my life. He. Okay, so you know what a procrastinator is? A procrastinator. I have that to some extent. Every normal human being procrastinates once in a while or often. He is the anti procrastinator. He, his like Achilles heel or his pet peeve or whatever is like he can't see stand when there's an outstanding task to be done. He like just, he, he, if he, if we were talking homework, like, he will be doing it on the bus before he even gets home after the day and it's done. And he has that just. I've never met a person who has even close to that ability to just knock things out, knock things out, knock things out, knock things out. And it's a great balance to sort of my disposition where I'm like, I want to stay in the background. I want to perfect, I want to refine, I want to build, I want to like, oh, I'm not quite sure if it's ready yet. And he's the total opposite. He's like, do it, do it, do it. Let's just do it. Let's just put it out there, let's just keep going. I think part of that he learned from the software industry, but a Huge part of it is his personality. And the same thing with you. You have a special. And this is for all of us in the hobby. One of our superpowers is that we all have other backgrounds. I brought entrepreneurial experience in the music industry, running my own production company. I brought legal background and an interest in academic and intellectual topics and an interest in economics. You bring a background in corporate structure, a rich background in culture, a rich background in collectibles. Prior to cards, you bring the. Your thing, which I always noticed when you put this on podcast. Consistency. You love consistency. You are the paragon of consistency. You're still making a football card podcast came out today. I don't even know how that came out because I've seen you here for the last two days. How did you even put that out? It's like you prepare, you're well in advance, you schedule things well in advance. You have everything set up. Like the superpowered superpowers that sort of differentiate. Each of us is like, we have these other backgrounds that, like, help us bring a special framework to how we approach, whether it's the industry side or the collecting side. That I think those. Those are, like, really interesting quirks that people have. And then, you know, if you have. If you're, like, really strong with it, like, you know, that. That's. That's the key, too. It's like, like you. You said, like, imagine talking to a microphone during a down market. And it's a great example, right? Because, like, where does the fire come from? You know, where do you. Where do you get the fire and the energy from? And. And so you have to. You have to dig deep and you have to find it, you know, or, like, try building a. A software company or a. A content and entertainment company. Like, you really, you. There are. You will. Very quickly, much quicker than you think you'll come up on those days where it's like, is this working? Is this. Am I. What am I doing? There was a time where everybody was getting emails from card ladder about how much money we were losing in our collection every day. Yu-Gi-Oh And there is like, it's like, it is funny, like, when the market is down. Like, we love doing the crossover every week, you know, like. Because, like, there is, like, something to the zag of it all. Like, when the market is down, it's like, oh, like so now, like, the zag right now is like, oh, everybody's exuberant, everybody's flying high. So, like, let's temper this. But when everybody's flying low and the energy's low. Then it's like, oh, this is. That opens up an interesting space to fill with ideas and content that doesn't exist. Like right now, right now, everybody's a genius. Everybody's right. Everybody is hitting home runs. And to be fair, that's true. Like one of the miracles of this hobby is that, and one of the things that makes it so difficult for other hobbies to compete with it is like once you get into cards and if you really do like the beauty of them and the cultural significance of them and you like the connection to sports or entertainment or whatever your field is, when you have that whole like network sort of appears clear in your mind. And then many times you can get your money back out of the car that you purchased. Or even if you're in an environment like right now, you're making hand over fist gains on things that you purchase. How does another hobby compete with that? How do, how do you go back to like mountain biking or something, which like, is great for you and like the health benefits and everything? Like, I'm, I'm not trying to make it like an Absolute comparison. I'm just saying, like, it's tough to, to, to see, to get to, to be pushed away from this hobby if you're, if you, if it's working out for you, it can, it just, it compounds the enjoyment factor. Compounds. There's a financial component that compounds. There's a network, a culture, a friendship, community building. It's just unlike anything else. It's tough. It's, it's a, it's very such, it's such a virtuous circle that this hobby experience creates that once you get into it, it's, it's tough to, to imagine leaving it. How do you think about the fact that your hobby is, also leads over to your profession? They're what? They're, they're one and the same. Like for me, the only time I'm not thinking about cards, building something for cards, buying cards myself, bidding on cards. The only time the, the, the only, the only time I'm not doing that is when I'm with my family, like picking up my kids and, and then once the kids are in bed and once dinner's over with and everyone's quiet, I'm, dude, I got my laptop, I'm planning out the next day, I'm looking up auctions that are ending and it's like, I take a step back and there's sports on TV or wrestling on tv, but it's nonsense. It never gets boring to me. It's what I want to be doing. So how do you think about those two worlds, the hobby and the job being one and the same? Essentially same exact way. There's always a question of is there a risk of burnouts if you're working in the space that you also have a passion for and you do for fun. And I think the thing that powers us through every day is that even if we weren't professionally offering a product or a service, just like even if you weren't professionally providing content, you would still turn on the microphone and do it one-of-one and you would still get the utility out of it. I think you're a person who thinks through your content and thinks through, like, as much as you're providing content that you've already prepared, you're also learning as you make that content too. And so it's enhancing your collecting, it's enhancing your hobby as you do it. This is the same thing with a card layer product. Like, we would be building this and using it. Even if we were the only. It was just the three of us who were using it, we would still have the exact same need and the exact same strict requirements for the data that we would want to be able to access for the collection management, tracking and all the suite of features that we provide, we would still want those for ourselves even if we were the only three people using it. So it's like the business side of it is amazing and it's great that people want to use it, but we would still be. We would just be moonlighting doing it, but we would still need the tools and the feature set and everything that it provides. That's how it always stays a passion. It's designed ultimately to service the needs of the collector. But how we divine and interpret what those needs are starts from our own needs as collectors. And then other collectors give us great ideas too, obviously, but that's where it starts to close it out. There's a trend of people wanting to apply their professional skills to this industry, which I think is great because I think that these new. The ideas from the outside are going to be responsible for growth in the inside here. I think that's seeing this in motion and it's becoming a theme and something I'm monitoring. So there's people listening who fall into this camp and maybe they're looking for a job. Dude, I got a DM from a very, very, very successful professional recently and rich, rich career history, and they told me they want to work for a company in this space and apply that. I was like, this is great. So I guess like for you, what sort of advice would you share for anyone out there who's like listening, who's like or continues to listen to this content and has a desire to work in this space? Yu-Gi-Oh there are two night and day, different worlds. In my opinion. I would not want to work in this industry if it wasn't because the area of work I'm doing in this industry lines up perfectly, perfectly with what I'm passionate about. So for example, if I did go into law and if I had gone down that path, I wouldn't want to be a hobby lawyer. That we actually have an amazing hobby. Lord Paul Lesco is brilliant. I Goldin do what he does and I wouldn't want to do what he does and I'm glad that he exists. If I were to go into law, I wouldn't choose sports card related law. My path of law was going to be litigation. I was going to be a litigator. So like if I'm not, if I, if I'm, if my, that's, that's, that's the starting point is like if I want to, if I'm going to work in this hobby, the way that it makes sense is that it's because the work that I'm doing is a direct overlap with my passion. Whether it's building a tool or it's creating content for the collectors. That doesn't mean like I'm just going to love every minute of it. That's not even true. It's, that's not even remotely true. It can be extremely stressful, it can be incredibly challenging, it can be incredibly difficult. But the big picture is there. So that's my personal perspective or bias on that is that if you're doing what you love, it's tough to imagine something more fun than working in this industry because we love it, because we love collecting, because we love the community we love, we love the products and the content that we're building that enhance our experience. But if it were like would I like to, you know, do a more ordinary job in the context of this industry, I probably wouldn't do that. Like the law example. I would do law in a different field most likely and I would still enjoy the hobby purely as something that's in my non professional hours. Always good insight and advice from our man Chris. A little different flavor this time. Appreciate it. Can't wait to. You can find us on Card Letter Confidential. Next we'll be talking more about cards but anything in closing national, we're here right now, what's on your mind? I'm the Bret Hart of stacking Slabs content and I'm keeping that belt. I see a couple guys trying to creep up on me. Just know I'll be back. And I would love somebody out there in the audience or maybe an Yu-Gi-Oh should tabulate what is the number of appearances? I'd love to know. I'm sure I can find that for you. We've had a lot of conversations. Maybe at some point we'll turn that into some sort of artifact. I'm sure somebody. Maybe it'll just be us reading it. But I'm sure it'll be fun to listen to or read about the conversations with we've had over the years. Plenty come to my mind. The unveiling of your Jokic flag. We talked about what happened when the boom wasn't happening. It didn't ever happen. There's been. It's been a whole journey. We've been doing this for quite some time. Amazing. I remember that episode. I was in a hotel room in Arizona when I talked to you on that episode, the Jokic Black one. I remember the Prizm Black Finite episode. Learning about this. So many. All right, until next time, Chris. Appreciate the time, man. Yep. I always value my conversations with Chris. It's really fun to dig into these topics, topics that we have not necessarily explored together. There's a lot we can learn from listening to individuals like Chris McGill, someone with a ton of passion, but someone with a lot of outside experience in different areas that you might not think would translate into. Into sports cards or building a business in sports cards or building a undeniable product that nearly every individual in this hobby relies on. There's a lot of really cool stories that come from talking to people building businesses in this space. That's why we're building hobby jobs. I have a ton of passion for this stream on the Stacking Slabs Network and we're going to continue to bring it. I appreciate all your support. I appreciate all your interest in hobby jobs. If you are a business building something cool in the sports card industry and you think hobby jobs can help get at me, I'm easy to find. You can email me at stackingslabs gmail.com we're going to continue to put out these conversations from the national in the coming weeks. Hope you enjoy them. Happy building. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.