Is The Middle Getting Squeezed Out Of The Hobby? Season 6 Ep 26

This episode of the ball card show is brought to you by our friends at Pristine Auction, where items are guaranteed authentic for the entire time you own it. Not just at the win, not just while the cert holds. If you own it, Pristine stands behind it for a limited time. Take advantage of $20 off your first auction when you register with the code ballcard. Win the real thing. Pristine Auction Foreign. Hello and welcome to the ball card show, the sports podcast for the esports collector. I'm Jason Otero. I'm Gary Lemaster. This is season six, episode 26, Gary. We are plugging along. Busy year. Yeah. Busy schedule, Busy weekend in the middle of a gauntlet for us. And I don't know if you can see this, but the salt is filling in more than the pepper lately in my beard here. I've got some. Some racing stripes going on. I think it's the pace. Mine's been that way for a while now. You raised teenagers? I'm in the middle of it. I think that's what's going on right now. Coming fresh off of a really busy and honestly, a really fun weekend in our hometown, Columbus, Ohio. Columbus Card Fest. I mean, do you want to jump right into it? Yeah, I. It was so fun to have a show of this caliber in our backyard. Yeah. The team that put it on, you know, Brad at B Sports, Ryan at Car Collector 2. Their respective teams come together. This was a show that I think everybody was excited about and curious about to see how this was going to go. And when I tell you that it was knocked out of the park, I don't even know that I'm doing it justice. The attention to detail from the level of signage, it felt like this. I'm not exaggerating here. I think you'll agree. Oh boy. It felt. It had the same vibe as far as just the quality of. Of presentation as walking into the Rosemont center in Columb in Chicago for the national. Like, the signage was awesome. The space was great, the traffic flow was amazing. And it was a first time show. It was paid admission and it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 paid admissions for this show over two days. Yeah, I. As far as the national, it's hard for me to compare that with like anything. Like, sure, my brain and my eyes. But what I will say is the attention to detail was there. Yeah. The signage, the prep, the load in and load out. It was the smoothest experience we've had had as vendors at a show with over 500 tables. I think I would say that. Yep. And it had its own unique things about it. Facility was really nice. I, you know one of the things we thought was, you know, there's been attempts at shows at the convention center before. The last one was not what this was and so we were just really happy now as far as the busyness. The line wrapped out the building and was heading down high street. It was wild. It was cool. One of the things I liked about the area too is it's really right there on the edge of the short north which has a lot of cool restaurants and bars. And with it being summer, it was like open air. And as we're walking to grab a drink and a bite after the show, you're seeing all these vendors that you see all over the country, you know, set up there. So it was, it was kind of neat like that. Convenient. I was a little nervous about attendance just because there were a lot of things happening in the city that weekend. Yeah, com fest, I believe another festival, some sort was going oddities. Yeah, there was. There was a lot of things happening. There was a graduation happening as well. So to see the type of attendance that was there was. Was pretty fun. We, we had our best show as far as sell through volume. Oh yeah. Ever. Even if you would include both of us. You know, sep. If you added it when it was separated over the years. Hands down the. The highest performing show for us on sales and on buying. Oh yeah. So it was one of those ones where as the show's wrapping up, you're exhausted because you haven't had a minute to breathe. But you're also like, I really hope this happens again soon. Yeah, yeah. It just goes to show that facility is important but the level of actual promotion that happens. You know, we've said in the past that the shows that we enjoy the most are the ones where the promoters understand who their customer is the and what their job is to serve their customer. And these guys just, they understood the assignment. Their job was to get customers in the door and they did it. Yep, yep. It was a great show. We had a lot of fun pickups. But let's talk about one that people thought we passed on first. Oh God. Do a show and tell real quick. Gary once. Yeah, now this is going to break. Hey everybody. What's that doing? What's that doing in your hand? Didn't you guys say no? And, and weren't you super rude to the guy trying to sell it to you? Yeah, yeah. No. It was all in our showcase. It's been there for months. So Kyle with Cosmic Cards MD has been doing content for a while. It's primarily sketch based or spoof. Comedy. Satire. Yes, satire based off of a dealer and show and all this kind of stuff. So typically if a video like skit like thing and the card space pops off, you know, you're expecting like 20 to 100,000 views. That would be a big deal. Well, we posted this one and the whole angle when we were talking ahead of time is like, what if we did one where the person trying to sell the card to you just won't take no for an answer. Right. And we weren't expecting it to pop off like it did. I think we're closing in on 2 million views. But here's the thing that happens. Card content, people, this is a small space. So at some point, if a video pops that heavy, it's getting out into the non sports card space. It's getting out everywhere. And the comments, my wild goodness were wild. People really thought they were Sherlock Holmes. Like, this is fake. I think, guys, this is. Or the ones where it's like, I don't care if it is fake. You still should have bought that card that we own. Yeah, there were a few. Now I will say this. The level of true toxicity wasn't as bad as it could have been. I think my favorite comment out of all of them was they didn't want the card because it wasn't deep fried with a side of ranch. That might have been my favorite comment. There was a good one referring to me. They referred to me as the second hamburger. What's a good one? That was a good one. That was pretty good. That was pretty good. But I mean, it's okay for people to joke and have fun. I know, know, I know. What we like to do is take it very serious all the time. You know, that's the, that's the important thing when you're watching sports car content. It better be serious. But thank God for people like Kyle Cosmic that did fun stuff like this. Well, what was fun to me and wild to me was the number of people who actually are in our space who thought it was a real, real thing. Well, in fairness, you and I have passed on many cards. That's. I don't think I've ever said here's your card and leave. I don't think that's ever had to happen. Well, because we've never had somebody keep trying five times after we said, thanks for stopping by. I think I'll pass. And. And I didn't catch it till like, I don't know, the fifth Time that it came across my feed the very end as he's walking away, you went, tell your friends. I was trying to make it obvious shoot. But yeah. So those of you, you know, we may never have a chance to buy again because of that. Yeah. Oh, well, if you guys did not enjoy that clip, don't ever watch Saturday Night Live. Right. Or any comedy genre where they're portraying something that's not really happening. Because it could be a rough ride. Rough ride for you. For a lot of it. But anyway, that was a lot of fun. Kurt Angle's still available. It is a three dollar raw card in a pop one SGC 10. I bought it way too long ago in a lot of cards. And it is not worth 250. $200 in the first three seconds. Which, which I thought especially those of you that are nerds that like the wrestling stuff that were in the chat. If you had a general understanding of the card market in the WWE space, which we don't, but we had enough to know that that was the most exaggerated possible card to be worth 250 bucks. But that's fine. That's fine. It's okay. Sometimes people have a hard time in that space figuring out what's real and what's fake anyway. So that's all right. Let's keep it moving. Let's keep it moving. Sorry. The good news is, is we did buy some really cool stuff. Yes, we did. We did have one of my favorite buys that lasted about one hour. What was it, Gary? Oh, the BGS8 star Jordan. Yeah. Yeah, we. That was fun. We're stepping out and buying some bigger stuff. I mean, you guys have. Have consumed our content for years. Know that our sweet spot is the 50 to 250 stuff with the occasional 5, $600 card, maybe a thousand dollar card sitting in the showcase. And we this weekend bought several four figure cards and almost every single one of them sold through. Yeah. Within a few hours. The star Jordan was fun. It's one of those ones. You buy it, you get it. We paid full on the last sale. Like we paid the full last sale of the card. And some of you immediately are saying, yeah, no, duh, Jordan's up. Yeah, that's fine. But you're still paying 100% of the last sale. It wasn't that long ago. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. Not talking like a year. We're talking what, a few weeks? A month. Yeah, a month. Yeah. At the most. So we. And it lasted and we marked it up from there to where we thought it was. And somebody came along and said, can you do a little better than that? I said, well, what do you think? They gave me a number. I said, yep, we'll take that. That's fine. Let's keep it moving. But I wanted to show you a few of our favorite things that we bought. I originally told Jason I had four, but I grabbed a fifth one because I didn't want to forget about it. It's my favorite card that we bought this week all the way around 2007. Exquisite upper deck. Exquisite Calvin Johnson, Ted Ginn. It's actually again, baby on the back. It's Dwayne Bowen, Robert Meacham. On card player. Worn patches numbered to 10. There's one sale of this card like 10 or 11 years ago, just a ridiculous card. And we first saw it at Midwest Monster a few months ago. The guy who bought it brought it over to me and I said, listen, if you ever, never sell that, give us first shot. And he walked up at Columbus this weekend. He said, I told you I would give you first shot. I said, what do you want for it? He gave me the number. I didn't even argue. I said, we'll take it. So that one I wanted to show you, this is another one. That was an awesome pickup for us. A little bit of a history lesson. A lot of people have no idea what this is. This is 2008 upper deck all star vinyls in 2008 upper deck. And that's the Kobe. We have the LeBron as well. And it already sold. In 2008 upper deck decided that they wanted to compete with. At the time, the McFarland figures had just come out the. The upgraded starting lineups. And so they made these and they were. If you notice, this is a very like what we would consider a kaboom or a manga style. These were the inspiration artwork for the first kabooms. And these were packaged with those vinyl figurines. They're 10 inch vinyl figurines. And so these are pretty rare cards. The cards a lot of times got thrown away. Nobody thought anything about them. And recently these things have gone absolutely wild. A PSA 7 of this Kobe just sold for 3, $700. Yeah. Now condition wise. Yeah, this is where they came. Most of them are. Most of them are torched. Yep. And you could see on this one, bad bottom corners, very light surface crease on one of the corners. But again, just a super rare Kobe card that you just don't see very often. Want to say there's probably 12 or 15 sales of the card ever. We picked up a really cool LeBron rookie to 499. Another one where we paid strong against the last comp on it because it's been a while and there's nothing else really available out there on it. Jason's favorite pickup of the weekend, I think. Oh, yeah. 56 Clemente. Turn that thing. Let people see the centering on that bad boy. Yeah, no, it is. It's very nice. A very nice presenting five and then an ultra modern one because he's an Ohio boy. Colt Emerson, True blue Bowman, first PSA10 auto. And that's just a small sample of the stuff that we bought this weekend. I've got piles and piles of stuff that I need to make price tags for that have been comped out sitting here on my desk to my right. Since we don't have a show this weekend, I'm not freaking out about getting them done. So it feels nice to say that out loud and to have been able to purchase enough to where we don't have to scramble all week this week. Yeah, that doesn't happen often for us. Usually we are. We are chasing our tail to. To have enough to sell. So it's weird. We're probably gonna keep buying through the next couple weeks, but we get to be a little more picky. Yes. Which is a nice, nice thing. Next show we have is in two weeks. The weekend after the 4th, we will be in Ohio. Ohio staple show. It's a good size three buildings, tons of tables. More tables in time. Be sure to head out to that one. You'll see us there the week after that in Cincinnati again at Eastgate. So we, we have a couple local ones coming up. End of the month, obviously, we'll be up at the national. We're going to be there all week. Only time we won't be there is Friday. We're going to go to Wrigley and. And catch the. Is it Yankees, Cubs? I can't. I think it's Yankees, Cubs, Yankees, Cubs. Catch that game at Wrigley. So that'll be fun. Looking forward to that, too. All right, let's. Let's shift gears here. Let's head up to Delaware, Ohio, Keith Newhart at Newhart Cards for this week's episode of Shop Talk. Hi, this is Keith at Newhart Cards, and this is Shop Talk. Gonna continue our little miniseries about the national. Last week we talked about, you know, on a. On a bigger, broader scale, like, hey, no matter what your situation, no matter what your budget, come to the national. You'll see things you've never seen before. This week we're going to talk a little bit about maybe our strategies, how they're maybe different from other shops, other dealers, and maybe surprise you on a couple of things. So this year we're proud that every single card, 100% of the cards that we're taking to the national were bought within these four walls. We've always said, you know, we like to reward our customers, our clients who, who decide to come in here and buy from us and sell to us by repaying them and making them liquid in cards. So 100% of the cards that we're taking to the national this year were purchased inside this shop. So we're always proud to say that, you know, again, just giving back to the community, I guess you could say next of all, which this usually blows most people's minds, but I think this is our 10th or 11th national. We've never bought a card at the National. It's not what we do. Ours is a 100% selling show. So just to kind of give you an idea, Sometimes there are 30 or 40 people at our booth, you know, trying to look up cards and trying to make deals and bulk deals and such. We don't have the time nor do we have the manpower honestly to have one person dedicated to making purchases at a show that large. So we are 100% in selling mode when we go kind of last and certainly not least kind of the, the family atmosphere as well. It's, it's, it is the show of the year. We love it. We take our whole crew, we enjoy ourselves, we go out to dinner again. It is a, it is an event that cannot be missed again no matter what your budget is. Please try to come to Chicago. It's a five hour drive from Ohio. Peace and love here at the ball card show. When we decided to partner with Pristine Auction, it's because it felt like such a no brainer. Pristine has gone out of their way to make sure that the entire collector experience is as transparent and, and seamless and authentic as possible. They offer fast paced live selling auctions where every sale sets a recorded comp. They offer 10 minute auctions where 10 lots go up and you can bid on them for 10 minutes. And they offer traditional daily and weekly auctions as well, if that is more your speed. Most importantly, every item you purchase from Pristine, they stand behind and guarantee to be authentic for the entire time that you purchase. Own the item for a limited time. When you register at Pristine and sign up with the code ball card. You'll get $20 off your first auction win as well as three months of gold status as a consigner Win the real thing. Pristine auction. Thanks, Keith. Make sure you guys hit Keith up at the National. Look for new heart cards. We'll be doing some fun stuff with them as well. We'll be there all week at the national. Except Friday afternoon we got plans. Yeah, we're gonna be at Wrigley for the the Cubs Yanks. That'll be a good one. But never been to Wrigley. It'll be fun. It'll be good. It'll be good. All right. This topic that we are gonna jump into, I think it's very interesting. I think it's front of mind for a lot of people. But I want to give credit. Ballpark. Alex does a lot of content on IG is where we see him primarily. But he did a. A meme where he was talking about a graphic where he was talking about the middle being squeezed out of the hobby. With everything that's changed in the space from Hobby Wax to this question of are people even trading with their friends anymore? Are the collectors in the middle feeling kind of pushed out? And I know that you had a little back and forth with him on your perspective, but I, I just like you. I think Alex puts really thought provoking stuff out there and this is a really good conversation. I know there'll be different opinions on this and so we encourage you if you want to push back on this, hit us up in the comments. I'm sure Gary would love to debate with anybody that would like to, but we want to hear what you're feeling as well. But Gary, I thought maybe just as a launching off point with everything that we're seeing happen in the space is people that set up every single weekend. We travel nationally, more regionally. Right. Midwest, down south, big six hour radius all the way around. What are we seeing in the hobby and who's being impacted by it? Is the middle really being squeezed out? What do you think? I. I don't think so. I think there's one thing in the space that everybody I think agrees with. I think that even if you got the CEOs and owners of the largest breaking companies on the Internet in a room with a lie detector strapped to them, they would agree that the price of wax has gotten excessive. I think that from hobby to retail, it's just more expensive than it used to be. It's never been a cheap hobby. I think that's an important thing to say. That's I'm a. I'm push. I'm going to play devil's advocate all through. You can. But why do you say that? Because I think. And the mental hurdle for me is I don't remember somebody saying that that box of cards cost them a car payment in 1992. I don't remember that. I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm not saying there weren't cheap enough cars out there for that. How many $250 car payments are there right now? Zero. Exactly. How many 250 hobby boxes are there right now? 10 or 12. Yeah, if you can get them. Well, if you can get. But that's not the manufacturer's fault. That's just demand in the hobby. The manufacturers are. That would be a whole nother conversation. Well, manufacturers are not. What's the activating property? Hold on, hold on. Timeout. What's the average hobby box gonna cost? Somebody around 300 bucks. The average hobby box is around 300 bucks. Now what I'm talking about, I feel like that's you. I'm not talking about. I'm not talking about Jumbos 300 across the board. I'm not talking about flawless. I'm talking about your average middle of the road hobby product from maybe tops Chrome 200. Yeah. Topps Chrome baseball is a $270 hobby box. It's going to be 3, 20 ish on the secondary market. Jumbos are going to be 5 to 600 bucks. Topps Chrome Football got wild. But at release it was a. What was it? An EQL 400 for like 10 minutes. Yeah, but, but again, so when we talk about affordability, every. This is true across the board in all things in life. Like we look backwards and we forget all the things that we conveniently are easy to forget. A box of 1989 upper deck was $36. For a sealed box, there were 36 packs. They were a buck a piece. In 1987, you could buy a box of tops for 18 bucks. Donruss was about 20. Flir was about 20. But also, you know, a loaf of bread was 30 cents. Right. Like so. One of the things that happens in hobbies in general, and when I say this has never been a cheap hobby, I'm talking about in comparison to other hobbies. In 1992, was it cheaper to collect stamps or collect baseball cards? I would think stamps, yeah. In the collecting world, cards have never been the cheapest thing. But what happens is we're in a society right now where in A bigger picture. Everything has gotten more expensive, especially necessities. Housing is drastically more expensive than it was 30 years ago. Food, clothing, all the things that we have to have to live. The prices have gotten insane. So when our disposable income shrinks, we look at our hobby as a place to escape the noise of everything else that's stressing us out. And our disposable income has shrunk and now it's expensive to buy these things too. And that's the one place we can take that anger out because we have to buy the other stuff. But we sure would love to, to have the stress relief of ripping a hobby box at a price that it was 10 years ago. And so I think that drives a lot of that. That being said, I do think that it's really important to understand that while any given piece of, of a segment in the hobby can be impacted, what, what I'm seeing, I think what you're seeing, I think what anybody who does what we do for a living is seeing is 10,000 people, over 10,000 people at Columbus Card Fest this weekend that all paid a minimum of 10 bucks a piece to come through the door. Some of them paid a hundred for super vip, for a two day pass. We, that's not dying to me. That's not people being squeezed out. Right. That's a booming thing. And, and again, it wasn't people coming to our table being like, hey, what five thousand dollar plus cards do you have? Right. I'll give you that. We, we're selling everything we have of any name that's worth having, that's not niche, under 250 bucks as fast as we can put it in the showcase. Yeah. As people are building PCs from their childhood. How many Jordans did we sell this weekend? Low end ones. How many? Probably just about every single one we have. Yeah. And every time one came into the showcase, people brought them up for us to buy, we put it in the showcase and it was gone in 10 minutes. Yeah. People walking around, young families with newborns to 90 year olds on a Rascal and they're all enjoying the hobby and in whatever way they choose to enjoy the hobby. I think that's a disconnect. I want to kind of interrupt you there. I think that's one thing that we got in trouble for, the touch grass. Remember? Everybody got worked up about that. What I was trying to say is like what we're seeing, the people we're seeing every week, it tells a different story about this hobby right now than a lot of What I'm reading on social media, it's like a very different experience. And it's not people that it doesn't feel to me. Now, again, you and I can't speak for the whole hobby either. There are 10,000 people in Columbus that or in the Columbus area that attended or traveled in or whatever. There are countless tens of thousands more that ripped a blaster somewhere that have no idea where the next card show is. Right? Yep. So I think there's a perspective there of, like, there's a lot of people that we can't just say, you must love singles. That's going to be our default, because that's what we enjoy the most. But I do understand the perspective of I want to be able to rip cards, and once a week if I want to spend money on this hobby. Like, there's a lot of hobbies where you can always go to the hobby shop and find stuff. Yep. Collectibles intersecting with hobbies makes that a little bit different. Yep. Liquidity and money entering the space makes that a little different. Yep. So I just think it's really important to understand that outside of a very few things, there are not a lot of hobbies that you can have that are in the collectible space or even in the non. If you build models, if that's your thing, you enjoy building models. They're not cheap either. Like, you want to build a. Tell you what, though, mid-90s, working on a model with the windows shut was a good time. I think that we all. Again, I want to reiterate this point, and I'll reiterate it over and over again for all the people in the back who are going to cherry pick the things we say and try to ignore the qualifiers that we give. Do I wish that I could do. I Wish it was 2016 again and I still had an account with GTS Direct because all they needed was my ein for the sign company that I own. They didn't care that I was an LCS and that I could buy a case of bowman jumbos for 700 bucks. Yeah, I would love that to be the case again. I would love that to be the case again. I used to rip a lot. A lot. Can't do that anymore. And I'm just glad. And I can't tell you what to do, but I'm glad that I was able to find enjoyment in other parts of this space because what I realized is that as fun as it was to rip, even then the ROI on wax wasn't great. Yeah, right. Even then The ROI on Wax wasn't great. It has gotten markedly worse. Yes, it's gotten markedly worse because the cost has gone higher. Right. And. And I'm not going to put all this on fanatics because I really think Panini was the pioneer of, of making your products terrible. Well, it was Raise the price, expand the checklist. Raise the price, expand the checklist. They like case hits. Well, let's just add more case hits. Well, what it really was was in 2019, if you guys want to really rabbit hole this, the manufacturers and the distributors. And at the time, the biggest distributors were Peach and gts and they were Panini's biggest distributors. They saw what happened to the secondary market on 2019 basketball product because it was Zion and Ja and they saw hoops was an MSRP of $90 and those boxes were selling on the secondary market for 300 bucks. Prism was a $190 MSRP and they were selling on the secondary market for $1,000. And the manufacturer, Panini and the distributors went, wait a minute, we should be getting most of that money, not the end user. Right. And so they transferred all the risk for ROI to the end user and kept the rest for themselves and said, we're going to start offering direct through our website. Panini GTS said, we're going to only allocate a very small portion of what we get for the manufacturer and we're going to wait and see what the retail market on this stuff is and then you can buy from us at 90% of that. But that was the real change. Doesn't that make a stronger argument for what guys like Alex are saying that, like, hey, these things have changed. It has been fairly recent. I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that part of the argument when it comes to, to wax prices. For the third time, we all agree that, that we would love for them to be less expensive. Reality tells us that's not the case. It's not going to be the case. Yeah. So if you love this hobby, you love collecting cards. There are so many ways to do it. Like, trade nights at LCS's are thriving. Our, our friend Mario up at Mars Cards, they do trade nights and you see the, the content they create there. Hundreds of people in their, in their little shop up there on trade nights. Keith, Keith at Newhart, they do a trade night on Black Friday every week. You can't move. It's awesome in the shop. It's amazing. Like, you wade to the back room and just park. Like, that's all you can do, the, the community is, Is actually thriving. I think that we all get. So. And this isn't a. This isn't me saying touch grass. That's not what I'm trying to say. What I'm saying is, is if you get so locked in on one thing that you wish was different, it gets really easy to ignore all the really good things that are happening. Our space is growing. New people are coming in all the time. Do we cycle them out when they get burnout on breaking or they get toasted somewhere? Yes, but that's happened for years. Right, well. And hobbies have an attrition rate period. How many hobbies have you had over the years from paintball? We don't need to get into all that. But, but that's. That's true. So my point here would be that almost every section of the space, what we see every week is thriving. If you're, if you're super wealthy and you want to play on the high end of things and dome a case of Flawless or Dynasty, and that doesn't affect your life on the day to day, have fun. Have that. Thank you. Because. And then bring the singles and sell them to us. So in theory, down the road, a challenge would be that hobby becomes less and less attainable unless product is being ripped. At this point, that hasn't happened. And I have a hunch, I have a hunch the people that have made a bajillion dollars at fanatics, if they saw that happening, would say, sounds like we need to mark all this stuff down about 20% because I would rather sell the things that we print than to stockpile them. Yes. Like, I think that's how the market will respond to that as that's happening. But again, I think many times there's a tone of loss or investment or value is kind of a tricky word to use in that as well. But there's usually a story of somebody's like, yeah, I got into this and when I got into it, this happened. And so because of that, I feel like, don't they owe it to us to correct this for us? And there's a couple different angles. I think that there's probably definitely a lane for that conversation and it's important. But I also think, like, but what about the thriving scene that is the show scene right now, that every time people say, oh, it's cooling off. It doesn't, it doesn't. The number of shows happening, the volume. And there were like five massive shows nationally last weekend. Yeah. And they were all insanely. Well attended. Well, one thing that is promising to Gary and I. So we spent a lot of time in our content talking about selling to. To the repack scene and how there's a lot of different things you need to consider with that. That over the last two to three months we sell a lot more one to two card orders. Yeah. Yep. When it's mostly repack, it's 10 to 15 to 20 cards. They're trying to get value and bulk it out. It's not happening like that for us. On average. Like most of our sales are two to five cards. They're very similar to each other. Similar era, same player, something like that. People are buying closer to sticker if we price it reasonably right. Yeah. That's an indicator to me that people are buying it. I think the goat boom is not that we're seeing right now where the 90s and 2000s inserts are intersecting with goat players. Especially the basketball stuff is crazy right now. But even baseball we talked about last week, the. The ones that never got as much hobby love as they should. The. Frank Thomas is right. Like some of those guys, that stuff's flying. But our experience, which is all we can go off of, we are set up at Nashville, Columbus Card Fest, ship like everywhere we can go. It's a lot more people my age that are getting back into it and they were like, yeah, I used to do breaks. And then I just started buying Griffey. Yeah. Yeah. I used to rip a lot of boxes that got expensive. And I realized I'd rather just go looking for PMGs and buy one a month rather than rip three hobby boxes. People that have more money. Right. Yeah. Those stories are happening on a regular basis. So I don't know what to do. Like comparing my personal experience with also this deep frustration that for me I do feel like hobby Wax is out of touch. The other thing is, I do appreciate. It does appear that Fanatics is trying to juice the retail product more than it has been in the past. I know Platinum Anniversary is a great example. If you find that it's very popular, it's double where it was stickered right now in the secondary market at least. And it seems like it sold out. I heard something today about Target canceling orders. I don't know if they ran out. I don't know what's going on with that. It's fresh news. But it does seem that the retail stuff is getting more of bigger product hits. Well, and it was before Fanatics is. Is recognizing some of those frustrations too. Maybe not at the speed that people want them to. Maybe not doing things exactly how we would like them to be done. But for example, Topps Chrome Baseball released on EQL this week, it may even. And the cynical side of me says, well, the EQL drop must not have gone the way they hoped. But the positive side of me thinks maybe they're seeing some things because after that =EQL drop, they also sent out an email to every tops.com fanatics one email address that said, hey, your hobby box of Topps Chrome is reserved. No eql. You get one at the, at the introductory price because there isn't an MSRP with fanatics. Right. But everybody that wants one has until midnight on June 30th. You can go order one. Yeah. And you'll get it. So again, I think that, that there is some things addressing that. But the idea that any segment of the hobby right now is getting squeezed out and losing interest. My gut tells me that the, the, the people that are losing interest in leaving are the ones who are looking for. The only part of the hobby that they look forward to is the serotonin dump from a big hit from Rip and Wax. Right. It could be. And if that's the case, listen, let's, let's be very just real here. They're probably leaving the hobby anyway because the serotonin dumps don't come very fast if you're ripping wax. Well, that's where I, I'd argue for that person that enjoys that a repacks a way better lane for you if you find one where it's not, you know, there are some where they're just filling spots and you're getting one of the boxes. Yeah. That would be a route to go. Yeah. You know, where you're not going to miss on that. You can play even a higher volatility repack in some cases is going to serve you a little better than. Yeah. If that's a gamble dump you're looking for. I can't imagine draw to going a high risk on something in a space that I spend a little time thinking about when it could be the Zach Thomas Platinum Medallion. I can't fathom risking to not get anything. This is way more enjoyable for me. Sure. This is an Easter egg. JT found it for me. I couldn't wait to hand him money. He said, get your wallet out. And for some people, their Easter egg is that big hit when they're. And, and that's okay. And Gary and I have never been mad while getting a Big hit. Ripping. No, we love that too. Yeah, but I don't. I guess from, from the experience that we see every single week, literally every single week, even a show that we go to and we're like, that was a little slower than normal. It's still booming. Right? Like, we're not six deep, we're too deep. But from the, the high end of things where people are buying, you know, ripping cases of natural treasures and flawless and buying five, ten, twenty hundred thousand dollar cards to the people in the middle, which is what we see the most of. To even the people who like our budget collectors who live in dollar boxes that build sets, how many four row $1 boxes did we see this weekend? I mean, in every weekend it shows thousands of them. And people just digging and having the time of their life going treasure hunting. Like, JT sets up with us a lot. His tables are usually very close to us. And at least five times a day he looks at me and goes, hey, I'll be back, I gotta go digging. And I watch his cases for him and he goes digging. Every part of this space from what we see is growing and people are enjoying it. It doesn't mean that there aren't things that need to be improved because there are. There's no question that there are things that we would love to see change. If we had a magic wand, we would wave it and change them. But the idea to me that there's any section of the space right now that is being squeezed out is. Doesn't align with the reality of what we see every week. Would you agree with that? I would say for the most part, yeah. The thing that does surprise me a little bit is I think you have the more casual collector that goes to a show once a month. And the only thing that I'm seeing where they're frustrated is when there's a new trend, just how quickly it pops. So to the person that's been collecting Jordan inserts, because they like to collect them primarily and not flip them, they're coming up to showcases and seeing, like, how in the world is that? How is that electrified? A 45 car, what in the world? Bucks three months ago. Yeah. And so for that I understand if they're like, oh, I never caught on to a fad, I just picked a goat and stuck with it. Sure. I think some of those people are feeling a little bit like this is silly. Right? Is it? Yeah. Go back to chasing a rookie class. Right. And again, if this year's rookie class pops off, I will fully anticipate the market to go chasing again. Yep. I think the goat market will plateau. And then the next time there's a rough rookie class, the goat market is always clockwork. It's like clockwork. So I do think that that collector. I could sympathize with some frustrations there of like, okay, is this card really going to be $45 in one year? It's 30 years old. Like, what are we doing here? And to that I say it might be a hundred. I don't know. I can't explain all of it either. I do know that repacks are not in a hurry for our ex to ex near mint Jordan inserts that are foil. And like that's. That's not a game. A lot of them are selling all of them and they're selling all raw. Yeah. Cards. So yeah, I. I would. I would be curious as we kind of wrap this up. So you acknowledge that on the wax and I know we talk about it a lot. You have your elevator pitch. One, can it be fixed? Hobby wax pricing being more attainable? Two, how would you do it? You got 20 seconds. Go. It can be fixed. The way you fix it is properly allocating to the LCS and getting rid of second wave pricing. That was 10 seconds. Do you want to say anything else? No. I mean, that's the fix. That. That's the fix. Okay. Go back to a true distribution model. All right. Okay. Before we wrap up, I've been excited to do this for a minute. JT sent us this. I've been wanting to get it plugged in. We're going to do it this week. Some of you been having a blast with this. JT Triple Crown 24. Go check him out. His content lately has been unbelievable. Breaking down transactions, experiences from a dealer. Some of the frustrations dealers are dealing with at a regular basis. Very honest, transparent stuff. But we have a new fresh segment of out of the box with jt. You know, it's a good value box find if I'm taking a picture of it in my car. I found this Freddy Peralta, one of one auto from Elite Extra Edition at a shop recently for only $15. What I love about Elite Extra Edition cards is that a lot of times they will precede a first Bowman card of a prospect. And I find that particularly true of guys who might be drafted in later rounds and guys who may be signed internationally just because the Bowman releases only have so many spaces for those guys. So you can get some really good players or guys who maybe get overlooked at first, but then end up having really good major league careers. Freddie Peralta, fantastic pitcher for the struggling New York Mets. But this is a 101 autograph here. Now, is this a crazy fine? No. I don't even expect to get $100 for this, but it's definitely worth more than the $15 I paid. So always pay attention with those Elite extra edition autos. Just because they're unlicensed doesn't mean that you can't find some cool stuff and get some good deals on some solid cards. All right, thanks, J.T. as always, like Jason said, make sure you give J.T. a follow. If you haven't yet, write down here, hit that little thumbs up, maybe hit the little subscribe button if you haven't yet, and hit the little bell. It'll tell you when we drop. Helps us out a ton. Hopefully it helps you to let you know when we bring stuff out. Also, make sure, like we said, at the front of the video and in the middle, if you haven't yet, go check out Pristine Auction. The link to sign up is there. They're going to give you 20 bucks for free on your first auction. Win all kinds of stuff over there. If cards aren't your thing and you just like us, maybe you buy some precious metal, maybe some artwork. They have all kinds of stuff available, so make sure you check out Pristine Auction as well. Jason, what else we got? Oh, ebay live. Next you'll start seeing that. You'll start seeing promotion for ebay live. We'll be selling stuff that's a little bit higher value, a little more end users. Some of the stuff from our showcases will make their way into the ebay live stuff. It'll be a slower vibe. So if you like hanging out with us on whatnot, but you wish everything would slow down a little bit, take your time. You'll see more of that on ebay live. That's coming up starting next week. We're not completely getting rid of whatnot either, so we're gonna have a lot going on as always, but we appreciate you all hanging out. This has been the ball card show, the sports podcast for the esports collector. Bye now. Peace.