T-Pott shares details of the CardsHQ & Market Movers expansion! | & Talk about PSA & CGC values!

Hey everybody, it is Mike. This is this week in Sports cards brought to you by Auctionwire. AI. I'm joined by Tyler Nethercott Teapot. How are you today? Very good. Doing great. Back busy. Had a week off where I was completely unplugged from the world and now I'm back into the chaos of all of it. So. Well, now I've got to know what does being unplugged mean? Did you go somewhere? I did. I was up close to you. Nah, not too close. I was in Connecticut. I went on a, on a retreat for a week which was. I gave my phone when I went and was a silent retreat. So I, I went into. It wasn't like a darkness retreat like Aaron Rogers, like into a hole. But this was through my affiliated with my church. Just get, get out of the noise of everything in the day to day grind and hustle bustle and it was, it was great. But it's good to be back too. Yeah. I've never done a, you know, no, no phone, no nothing sort of retreat and I feel like I would love it. I feel like getting away from the grind for a week, like truly getting away from it would be great. But I don't know, it's tough like you, I don't. People have different discipline levels for me. Like I definitely had to give it up to somebody and say I don't have it. I can't check it. There's nothing, you know, I just. But yeah, it's, it's you. You kind of wonder like what am I missing, you know, and what am I missing in the world? And then we had a funny moment because we do market movers live every month and we do trivia and there was like a big sale of an Aaron Judge card while I was away and I just didn't even know it happened. I completely missed it. So when we came back for trivia, it was like 79 of the people playing got it right. It was like 800,000 something and I had no idea I got it wrong. And they were like hit me like how could you not know that? I'm like I didn't have my phone. I don't know. You know, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But yeah, $838,000 Aaron Judge card. You also had the 5.11 million dollar WEMBY. I did see that. Yeah. That was. Yeah, yeah. I like if I'm going out with friends or doing a meal, I put the phone away. So no, we've always had a Rule in our house, no devices at the dinner table. We've been doing that for 15 years, ever since devices became more prevalent. But you know, that's, that's about my. When I go to bed, there's no phone. But man, I can't imagine doing multiple days or even a day. It's good for you. That's. I'm sure it's really good for the mind. Yep. Try it. If I ever see you at a show, I'll just take your phone. Was that this week or last week? That's a couple weeks ago. Okay. I've just been playing catch up since then. You know how that is, you know. Oh, yeah. I was in Newport, Rhode island last week for family vacation and got back this week and. Yeah, catch up. So a lot has happened this week. I want to start off with the announcement of Cards HQ and Market Movers expansion. They were very specific when Jeff announced this that not only would Cards HQ be expanding into other states, but there would be investment and expansion with Market Movers. Let's talk first of all about Cards hq. Well, for anybody listening, what is your role with Market Movers? My title's changing, so I've been operating as SVP of Product for the last few years. Well, it's grown. I. I went from Product Manager when I was hired to VP of Product, SVP of Product, and now I'm moving into a role as EVP of Technology for the company. So I'll be taking on responsibility for it for everything that we do, as well as just growing our overall technology offerings. Obviously we have Market Movers. We have our Sports Card Investor app, which is kind of a free lightweight like trending cards, very easy to use. And then we have a price guide in our website and we've obviously got e commerce related to Cards hq, a whole website there and a shopify and everything. And then we've got a lot of internal tooling. You know, card shops largely don't operate in a very sophisticated manner, so most of them don't have any kind of ERP that they're leveraging to track their inventory and do these things. So we have some really cool opportunities to take advantage of already existing assets like our data and, and help streamline their operations and make things smoother overall for how we manage Cards. So there's going to be a ton of really exciting new projects to undertake. We're already starting them to support what we're kind of calling our commerce business unit within technology and how we can just bring things to market, whether we keep them to ourselves as far as just in house, like systems or maybe as a result of it, some cool stuff that will be born out of it that may serve the broader hobby landscape. You never know. But so expanding everything in that regard. And then, you know, just historically, Jeff's always funded the. The stuff that we do. I mean, he's funded it, and obviously we have subscription revenue and affiliate revenue through our. Our technology, through our apps. I think the bigger piece of that, it's exciting is, you know, getting a cash injection at this time, which I think is really the right time with growth. We want to seize the growth and we want to grow. Everything that we're doing should afford us the ability to double our, you know, engineering team and just our overall resources and hopefully be able to really focus more attention on how we continue to grow the products and. And give collectors and hobbyists tools that they want to use. That's amazing. Congrats. Sounds like a promotion. SVP to evp. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's a. It's a promotion. It's really exciting. It's been a. It's been a really surreal six years that I've been working here. And all started with an email to Jeff. And now you're an evp. Yeah. Discord message of all things. I was just, you know, he started it. Yeah. I don't believe in coincidences. So it's been a. It's been a. It's been a great opportunity and super thankful for it. Crazy. Nobody saw, like, where we were, where we are today and where we are hopefully going. Nobody thought that six years ago, when I started, I mean, Jeff literally built market movers, you know, with one moonlighting developer, and, and told him at the time, the guy said, how many cards do you think? What's the most cards you'll ever have in market Movers? And Jeff said, I don't know, like, maybe a thousand. And Today we have 7.3 million and. And that are searchable. And really we have a backbone of many, many, many more millions that we're working through some things with. So. Yeah, I mean, he just didn't. He just was kind of taking it, taking it where it went. So. Yeah, so Jeff said that they'll be announcing in the next month or two about where they're expanding, what other states they're expanding into. Yeah, you want to spoil that right now and tell us, right? I do not want to spoil it. I do not want to spoil it. I don't think that would go well for me. But, I mean, I Do want to spoil it, but I won't. But I'm excited about it. I'm excited about the fact that we're expanding and I'm excited about where our next location will be. And I think it's going to be in a spot where the, the community will gravitate and really be excited about having a presence of a store like what we offer. The current Cards hq, our flagship store in Atlanta, has become a destination for a lot of people. I, I walk out and talk to people. I try to, if I have any free time, I like to go out and obviously look at cards and just interact with other people in the aisles. And I mean, I see somebody every single week wearing some kind of a Detroit sports something and maybe half or a third of the time they're from, they're from Michigan and they're like, yeah, I just like wanted to come down and see this store. Like, it seemed really cool. This is awesome. You know, it's a big shop. And so we're excited about opening our second location later this year, hopefully toward the end of the year. Maybe November is the target and then subsequent locations in, in years to come. So do you see Cards HQ itself? And let's just ignore market movers for a minute. Do you see cards HQ's primary competitor then to be Card Vault by Tom Brady? No, in fact, I don't see them as competitors at all. I think they're, we're actually serving people in a different, much different capacity. Cards HQ is scale. So it's kind of like, I don't know what you'd compare it to. I don't want to like, compare it to like Walmart or grocery stores. It's not that, but it's, you know, I would almost compare it more like, what kind of this. Is this a bad one too? It's not like dicks either. I'm trying to think of like, we're big, we're 10,000 square foot or more like, you know, floor space. And we've got a whole offering of different stuff, you know, from the value boxes and TCG and everything. I think Card Vault by Tom Brady has, has been much more of a boutique, like nice, you know, you might expect to see it in Manhattan type of thing. You know, like it's, it's smaller. They're anchoring it to different stadiums and things and they've, they've just got a different brand. I think it's, I think their store is the kind that makes you see it like you're walking by like a Like a Gucci store or something. And you're like, oh, wow. Like, what is this? Like, cards, Tom Brady. Like, oh, there's a big vault. Like, what's going on? And they walk in and you see a card that has like $20,000 written on it. Like, we don't very often have cards that expensive in our store. We have stuff that's. We have stuff that's expensive. Sometimes we have cards that are 20k. But we just try to get a lot of inventory at all price points. Both sealed wax and cards in every type of category to. To help people however they want. We host a lot of events, trade nights twice a month and game competitions many nights a week. So it's more of like a community hub than just like a boutique spot. I think there's. This has just a different kind of mission and nature to what they're doing. In every post that there were this, where this was announced, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, people are responding, complaining about private equity, which is a very common sentiment among Americans where private equity is not a popular thing. And of course, there's a couple of private equity companies in there. And Simon466, are you familiar with Simon? I love Simon. He's the. He's the secret smartest guy in the hobby that nobody pays attention to. Yes. I met him at the national last year. He's extremely smart. Yeah. And he tied cards HQ to fanatics in some way. And I'm not. I don't quite follow, but talk to me a little bit about the, the private equity. And I know you're not the. The guy. You're not. Certainly not Jeff. But how. How does that tied in here? Yeah, let me clarify too. I should have said not enough people pay attention to. I pay attention. And a lot of. He gets views, you know, but he deserves more. Yeah, I, I mean, I'll be honest, I kind of have like a recoil just when I generically hear private equity too. You know, there's a really, really, really funny guy on Instagram, PE guy. Have you seen this guy? I haven't. Oh, my gosh. I will send you. Everybody go look it up. He's like my favorite content creator right now. And I'm not gonna. You gotta just look it up. But he puts this, like, face, you know, modification AI thing on. And just like, he's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna go down to the club. We got, you know, we just, just bulldozed this whole house we just built up. We just bought a whole island. You know, he just he's so, like, locked in on this. Patrick Bateman, American. Yeah, it's kind of this, like, Persona of, like, a certain type of PE guy, you know, like, it's not all of them. And the ones we're working with, I've gotten to meet a ton of them. Super personable, super down to earth guys. They, they've got. Some of them have, like, really, like, cards. So we just had some really great conversations about cards and, and spent some time in the store, and I think they're really excited about what we're doing. It was a really good fit. You know, when you look at taking outside investment, there's a lot of different ways you can go about it. And so Jeff did a lot of his due diligence in that regard and thought, you know, explore different options. How do I want to do this? And ultimately we found a really strong partner in Shamrock and N1 and these guys that are coming in. This is different than, like, the YouTube videos that people are getting served up about how private equity has ruined high school sports like hockey and, you know, basketball and baseball and things like, this isn't. This isn't the same type of PE that is interested in doing roll up of dental groups and eyeglass. You know, I like optometrists and things like that, where they're just like, let's just juice all of this out of it. Yeah, they're financially motivated. It's a, It's. That's not a secret. You know, they're coming in, they're investing capital, they expect to see an roi and. But throughout this whole process already and definitely going forward, they are operating really as business partners. They're. They're helping us with their network. They have a lot of experience in media and sports. And so it's more than just a. A cash injection with like, a monthly readout of, like, expectation that we're just continuously, like, profitable. Profitable. It's very. I think it's very partner driven and that I was a little skeptical initially and then, like, after spending time with them and talking about what, you know, their hopes are and how they approach things, I think Jeff made a really, really good decision in partnering with this particular group. You know, the bigger picture is people look at it and they're like, they already get mad at the name sports card investor and this, like, financial idea. And they say that Jeff's a grifter and, you know, whatever. It's like, not sure a lot of people know what that word means when they're using it, but yeah, it's there's a. We're running a for profit business, so certainly we want to grow it, but I mean, there's a very different side of Jeff. When we opened Cards hq, this is a moment that I will never forget. I guess it's not related to private equity, but hopefully it. There's a human element to this. I always tell JET people they don't know Jeff. They only know the Jeff they've seen on the screen if they haven't met him and then they form their opinion. Just like I've formed an opinion of Colin Cowherd and Stephen A and all of these talking heads and I don't know them as people, but I maybe I don't like their Persona. Right. Jeff's a very different person when you get to know him. And, and I've worked for him for six years. And when we opened Cards hq, they gave him the microphone. It was a big grand opening and everybody was there. And Jeff basically told the story of like, how he even wound up in that position. And the only reason he was standing there that night and why we're doing what we're doing today is that his mom bought his son Reeves some packs of cards when reeves was like 8 years old. It was like 2018 and Reeves brought them and he's like, hey, look what grandma got me. And then Jeff was like, oh my gosh. Like, I used to love cards and my first job was at a card shop. And this like, the nostalgia just nailed him just like it did me in 2019, just like it did so many of us. And Jeff is a tech guy and everybody remembers his old intro if they know him long enough. Of like, by day I invest in tech companies and by night I invest in sports cards. And he is an investor. He's an investor and an entre. Serial entrepreneur. So he started his YouTube channel and he did it. And his mom tragically passed away. She got, she had a brain tumor and, and, and went pretty fast. And like Jeff that night at the card shop, like, really choked up. Like, really choked up. Like, it was like, I mean, there was a human element of it and, and hopefully he doesn't mind me sharing that, but it was like everybody who was there was like, oh my gosh, this guy is like, he's human. Like all of us, he's real. And he started something on a whim with a channel, just like having fun in that space of like, I'm learning. And he was saying that early. I'm learning. We're learning together, we're doing this. And at some point along the lines, you know, a certain group of people became really resentful of that, of, of, of the financial piece of the focus on the money. And they, and I get it, you know, we're collect. A lot of us are collectors at our core. But you know, we've moved into here today and Jeff and I have had some big conversations about like, where is this all going? And he's in it for the long haul. He loves this hobby, he loves what he's doing. Reeves loves it. I know he, who knows, who knows what he's going to do with his life. But it wouldn't surprise me if 10 years from now he's embedded into the business and you know, trying to help continue to grow what we're doing. And for, for people who see it that way is like, I don't, I don't know, maybe they really love their small like you know, 2,000 or less square foot like LCS. And all of us love those too. And maybe that's what maybe concerns them is like corporate takeovers happening. But we've built an incredible community at this shop in Cards HQ in Atlanta and I'm really confident we're going to be able to do that in the additional locations that are yet to come too. That's cool. So talk a little bit about the market movers expansion or is it too early to understand what your plans are for that? Well, what I can tell you is just like any startup, it's grown over time with its growing pains. Like I mentioned, you know, that Jeff didn't anticipate the database being the size that it is today and that this was just a small bootstrapped little like MVP caliber app that Jeff put together so that he could automate the charts and graphs he was putting in his videos early on. And then he got some people to sign up for it. It took off faster than he thought. We have had a, we've run with a pretty lean team over the years and we've grown our two halves of the company with Sports Card investor being like our YouTube and media and brand alongside our technology. And we've sort of had to manage and balance that, you know, that financial growth over time. It's always, I don't say always, but once Jeff saw like, oh, we've got something here and we're growing something in these two spaces, he set his sights on the long term. He did not set his sights on like one year. Let's make the most money that we can. It was always like, let's be sustainable. Let's, you know, go after this. You know, he's had, he had suitors over the years for companies that wanted to buy Market Movers that wanted to just kind of scoop up and take over everything we were doing. And he just was always like, I want to do this, I want to commit to this long term. So what this means now is you get a cash injection and we're trying to scale every single thing that we're doing. So Market Movers was explicitly mentioned in the press release. But we're, we're focused on opening our second store later this year. That's a huge, huge piece. The retail and e commerce growth is a big part of the plan. Um, and Market Movers overall as a product like pales in comparison with what it, you know, financially offers compared to scaling those businesses. But it's still a really integral part and it's more about our overall mission to like help educate people and entertain and delight them and give them tools that they need. More than that is like the financial engine now as we're scaling and growing everything that we're doing. So I've hired, we've, we've had a few recent like senior level technologists join the team. We hired a really talented staff designer last year and now we've been hiring a few additional positions. We need to hire at least one, if not two data engineers. So we're finally getting an opportunity to segment where people work. Whereas historically like all of us, whether on the engineering team or the product team have kind of had to do everything. We get a chance to, to split that up more and hopefully that'll help accelerate our velocity. We'll get to push, you know, customer facing features out on a more regular cadence, consistent cadence as opposed to like, oh, we gotta shift and spend six months working on the back end and refactoring code and you know, upgrading our database size and all of the stuff that you have to do that nobody, if you don't work in the space, you don't know, it's, it's a really, I'm really excited about it. So hopefully we get to do that, get some more enthusiastic people and who are excited about our mission and what we're trying to do. And the rest is just the team trying to keep up with not being overwhelmed by the unlimited sea of ideas that I have as I live and breathe this hobby every single day. Nice quick break for a message from our sponsor. This week in sports cards is sponsored by Auction wire, which is AuctionWire. AI is an amazing Amazing platform that allows you to search across dozens and dozens of auction sites looking for any card. You can, you can add it, have saved searches, have alerts. I use it a lot for vintage cards and, and low pop cards. You can search, have it search across any graded card platform too. Use code SCC for Sports Card Clubhouse. SCC is your code on auctionwire AI for two months. Free teapot. Thank you for that overview of Market Movers. Anything else you want to add on the Market Movers kind of expansion? I know it's very early in the process. Yeah, I mean, no, we've got plenty of ideas. I think what's really interesting is you look at, if you go back to when we launched In February of 2020, that was a different time. We were really the first market, first tool to market kind of like this and, and, and others came along and what's good is there's, I think there's plenty of meat on the bone. There's just a lot of people in this hobby like trying to interact with it in different ways. But now if you're on Instagram and you have card content as your primary thing on Instagram, if it's anything like me, every, every day I'm scrolling, there's some new vibe coded AI collection, pricing, image scanning, some kind of tool that somebody's put out there promising, you know, predictive whatever to be the best thing and you use them and you're like, it's okay or yeah, that's kind of cool. But like this doesn't do everything we need. We really want Market Movers to be for the 99% and to be serving people however they want a hobby. And it's an ambitious goal. It's, it's, it's against the grain with what people say you should do with the product. They're like, no focus on a, on a certain group. But we think we can do it foundationally. We've got data, we've got a really good core set of features. I think what's going to distinguish where people gravitate to over the next three to five years is going to be really thoughtful user experience. How do you navigate, how do you do that intuitively? And frankly, just being blunt, that's one area where I think Market Movers has really sucked over the years. And it's, and that's on me. And we, we. But we've got a good designer now who's putting a lot of thought and care into that. I think that's going to separate a lot. And then just what Else what other cool, unique things are out there that people don't, that don't exist today that people don't know they need or want and being able to experiment with that and get some of those things out hopefully fast. And that's what really charges me up. It's, it's, you know, you start a product and you got to focus on the most important things and then you reach a point of maturity where it's painful and you got to fix all the crap you didn't account for and then you get to take another step. And now I feel like we're at this third step where we've got a lot of the core functionality that people want. We, we need to execute that better and then just push out new stuff. So I'm, I'm very, I'm very excited. It's my baby. I use it every single day. And I, I, I wish we could just go faster. That's my main. Yeah, every development team wishes they could. You'd mentioned the other, you know, there, there are a glut of, I don't even want to call them competitors. There are a glut of apps out there. I know because I get a lot of emails from the, the owners of these products, the people who started them saying, hey, I'd love to sponsor a video where you talk about my product and I will go and I'll try out their product. And I've literally dozens of these and my response is always, this is a good start. I'm not going to do a video on this. This is, it's way too early. You're not ready for prime time. There's so much that needs to be done before you, I mean, you can put it out as a beta where some of these are. Yeah, but they've got like one feature and it's a cool feature, but it's just not enough to, for people to pay however much money they're expecting. Yeah. Yep. I, that, I feel that. Yep. As the market movers guy with the PSA shut down. I know they're not shut down entirely, but, and the slowdown industry wide. CGC has slowed down. TAG is largely shut down. SGC has slowed down. Do you see any shift in the market in terms of values for any sort of slab company, any grading company? So do you see PSA values coming down? Do you see nines going up? Is there anything like that that you can envision? And I didn't prep you with this question because I wanted just to. Yeah, actually, just for any clarity, I Didn't prep T. PA with any questions, but I consider prepping him for this one to see if he could come up with any data. And then I said, no, I want to have him just off the cuff. A lot of this is going to depend on, I guess maybe how long they really are shut down, to what extent. It's five or six months they're saying now. Yeah, yeah. And I. Yeah. And we know there were 10 million when they made the announcement and then several more million cards came in as we anticipated. And I don't. The question isn't so much is this. I don't think PSA values are going to come down for whatever reason. I don't know how it's happened. This market has decided this, this collective hobby has decided that the grade is the most important single thing on a card. They just believe that. They, they, they believe it. I don't agree with it. I made a video about that last this past Monday that went out on the market movers channel. 10 lies. The hobby tells you 10 lies. Big hobbies telling you. That's right. Tops included. Yeah. And I just, I don't agree with it. I don't, I don't understand it. I don't understand this multiplier effect. I don't. On ultra modern cards, Pokemon in particular is insane. You could have a, you can have a $5 illustration rare that you can buy that sells a thousand copies a month online and it'll sell for $135 in PSA 10 condition. It doesn't make any sense. I don't know that the closure or temporary closure is going to impact those values. The bigger question is can the other grading companies that will certainly get now a glut of redirect of people sending to them in, in desperation, can they handle things operationally? How will they handle them? How will they respond when they are overwhelmed or, you know, make mistakes because they just get a new volume they're not accustomed to. If they can knock some of those things out of the park, they'll can. Maybe they win some, maybe some loyal customer share. And so the big question is like, will a CGC10 go up in value a little bit? Is there anything to that? But I don't think so. Like, some people were talking about that internally, like, well, maybe PSA nines will go up or maybe CGC will go. I don't, I don't know if this impacts any of that. It didn't impact things really that much when PSA was closed for like a year during COVID they just, they've just built ever since then. If anything, it makes it an even shorter supply. People are still going to be trying to jam those, you know, Topps Chrome base cards through at an 80 service level and hope they get a 10 on key rookies and things. So you're going to see that and it's going to be like I was looking at Dylan Harper's PSA 10 tops chrome refractor and it's like pop 82 or something right now is selling for over $1,000 for a refractor. And it's just because there's not a lot of them out yet. And he's hot, you know, and the spurs are hot. And so I don't know, I've, I've thought a lot about it. I, I haven't come to any like big eureka or strong opinion on it. I guess I'm just kind of in wait and see mode. What do you think? I'm, I'm with you. It's hard to see much changing in the market, even though just because it'll be impossible for CGC or TAG to scale up and take on like SGC gained a lot of customers and a lot of cards graded during the pandemic when PSA shut down and Pete was out in front and they, they were doing awesome and so SGC values went up and they're for vintage cards were pretty close to psa, but I don't see that happening with any other company right now because they're having just the same problems PSA is having. And over on Collector Investor podcast this week, they. I think it was Theo who said that a lot of people are probably just hanging on to their cards waiting for PSA to reopen and cards that they were planning on grading right now they're just gonna put them in a pile in a box until December when PSA reopens theoretically and send off to PSA still instead of sending them to CGC. And I love CGC. I'm using CGC JSA for like a 10 auto in person autographed cards per quarter roughly right now. Nothing serious, but I'm a big fan. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think, I think CGC is going to get another big glut of more Pokemon and tcg. That's kind of their specialty. I think Beckett is going to get a lot more sports cards sent their way. And that's, that's going to be the big question is, you know, how does Colin is his name. I think the new, you know, new head Honcho. I, I think he. They're gonna make a mistake. They're gonna make mistakes. I think the most important thing they could do is have him take a page out of Peter Steinberg's book from SGC days and just say, hey, like, sorry, guys. Like Maya Culpa, we messed this up. We're good. We're, we're, we're trying, we're scaling. We're so thankful for the submissions. You know, candid enthusiasm, whatever. Own it. Make it right with the people who are impacted, like, and just keep trying to scale and grow. That, That, I mean, I think is the number one thing that Becca can do. The irony, of course, is they're owned by collectors. So, like, it's, it's kind of all good for the goose, good for the gander in that regard. But yeah, I think I had kind of a hot take on cards on the table, and I haven't read any of the comments to see it wasn't the main topic. So I don't know if anybody, you know, even caught it. Usually people only comment on the first topic we discuss. But I think if Beckett were going to make a strategic move, there's always been this like, discussion about changing their grading system. Like fundamentally making a 10 the gem mint. You know, I think that would be very dumb. I do not think they should do that. They have loyalists who like their current grading system and they understand the 9 5. What's the one competitive advantage that Beckett has? And maybe the only one right now, I mean subgrades is that is a competitive advantage. Yes, sub grades. But it's not enough to move the needle. What moves the needle? What, what gets people excited and what has sent. Caused people to send a lot of one piece cards and TCG and Pokemon and stuff to. To Beckett. Is the chase for a Beckett 10 pristine or a Black Label. Those outsell PSA 10s. So my suggestion was if I were at Beckett and I were Colin, I would be saying let's make it incrementally easier to get a 10, right? Not so hard. If you're submitting your cards, what's going to be the number one thing to make you go back to Beckett? You got a 10 and your 10 just outsold PSA. And I would. I'm not like, that's the thing that could set people off big time. I'm not advocating for any kind of like tomfoolery or like fraud. At the end of the day, every company controls their grading standards. So if you go to their website and you read what you need to have for a BGS 10 pristine, it's like, perfect according to eye appeal and virtually perfect under a microscope. Yeah. Make it, make it 5,248 centering instead of 50, 50. You know, make it just marginally that much. And if you start getting 5% more Beckett 10 pristines and, you know, 5% more black labels and you, you sort of toy, I think you could win a lot of. A lot of people over that way and just without actually changing your grading tiers necessarily. I, I agree with that. And as long as they're transparent about it. Yeah. They're not completely watering down the tens that are out there right now. Yeah, I agree. And of course, the, the 9.5s, a lot of people with 9.5s would probably get upset, but a little, little tweak. Yeah, I think would be good. It's going to impact net new cards the most, you know? Yeah, sure. People may try to, like, cross and send over, but like, we know this. Every grader looks at a card and they have to make that decision between a half grade of, like, those sub grades and it. If you just say, when in doubt, go this way. You know, like, when it's close. Yep. I don't know. It seems, I think every grader does that at PSA too, whether it's 10 or nine. And that's a big swing. That's a big swing. So, yeah, speaking of little tweaks on cards on the table on Wednesday. See, like how I did that segue, Cards on the table. And on my Clearing the Bases episode on Sunday, we both talked about the Panini AI situation. You had the response, but I, I read through. Who is it Ravers or something like that on Twitter. Yeah. Raver or Raven or some. Somebody. Yeah, yeah. Posted a bunch of AI written clearly. And you, you said, these are definitely written by AI. And I agree. Yeah. And I said it's very possible that they have an employee who's just using AI being lazy, and Panini has no idea about it. And then Panini came out afterwards and denied that there's AI being used. And you said. Same exact thing I said. We. I mean, I work for a company with thousands and thousands of employees, and there are people doing things that the. The company can't possibly know about, people using AI for things that company can't know about. And that's. It's got to be that, right? I think. So I was typing because I wanted to try to see if I could find, like, another ridiculous one. Just to just for kicks and giggles, I'm trying to remember the set. Hold on, you got to give me one sec, because I'm going to find one as an example, I'll just read it. Wasn't it 20, 25 prism or 26? It was signature series. So, like, let me, like, read this one that I just found on the fly. I don't know how you say this, I should know this, but I think it's Malawak. This guy. Yeah. For. For the Suns. Let me try to share my screen if you can. I don't know if you have to pop it up, but. So Malawak block shots like he's swatting dreams back into reality. Players rise for the rim. He rises higher, palm wide, and suddenly the ball's going the other way. Then he rumbles down the floor, catches the lob, and dunks so hard, you wonder if the hoop just resigned in the middle of the game. Like that. That's like, I gotta. I'm gonna go and, like, read every card from this set. I'm assuming they're just all that way. That somebody was just like, ah, shoot, it's Friday, it's 3 o'. Clock. I'm supposed to have these in. Here you go. Hey, hey, Chat GPT. What you got? You know, and I promise, boss, I just. I wrote these. You know, I have a master's in American poetry, so that's. And there's no way that some higher up read those and thought, yeah, this is good. I just think that they just kind of trust somebody and they got pushed through. Yeah, I can't. I can't imagine. And. And by the way, this guy who apparently, like, swats the block and runs for the dunk on the other end averaged a whopping 3 points this year. Per game. Per game, right? Almost. Yeah. Oh, shoot. Sorry. There's Auto playing a video on espn. He played. He started one game and played nine minutes in that game. And overall this season, I guess he had a total of 33 blocks. So the odds of him running end to end. Yeah, Nobody read this. I mean, if somebody read this, I. I've wondered for a long time if there aren't employees at Panini who are intentionally trolling us. Like, the things they. I know people get mad at tops and fanatics for a number of different things. They do. It's. It was different. I've been doing cards on the table for like, four years at least, with Jeff and, And. And company and it was like when Panini had the licenses every single week. There was something to Talk about where you're just like, you can't be serious. Like, really, like, whether it's the crisis, toilet paper, parallel or whatever thing they're throwing out there. It was like, come on, somebody's. Somebody. Somebody. This. This can't be real, you know? Right. Like, Right. Somebody. Yeah, Somebody approved this. Yeah. I was a little surprised that Jeff almost took the side of panini on this one, because we know how much Jeff dislikes or gets frustrated with panini. And the title in the thumbnail made me think, oh, he's gonna really go after panini here. But he didn't. Yeah, I think he was just. I think he just is, like, at this point, you know, don't, you know, beat a dead horse, so to speak, or kick a dog while it's down. Like, Panini's struggling, man. They got. They. They're. They're. They're on the struggle bus. They don't have much left. And. And so I think he just was like, this is hilarious. If anything, it is kind of funny. Like, if you're like, oh, my unlicensed cards have, like, ridiculous little, like, haikus on the back or something. Like, you know, I don't know, but it is. I think that is part of the problem, too, is that Panini is bare bones. I don't think they have a lot of employees left, and there's just not a lot of quality checks. Yeah, I've worked for companies like that in the past where they've a lot of layers are stripped down and are gone, and you just like, okay, it's my responsibility to write up the. The back of these cards. I'm gonna do it, and I submit them, and then they. They go. They go live. Yeah. Yeah. I think. I think that's definitely what happened. I literally laughed out loud when I was reading some of the backs of these cards. I just. But there were cards like that in the 90s, too. I'm sure if I pulled some of this stuff off the wall. I'm trying to look and see if I have a. Let's see if I have a 90s card. I'm just gonna pull this Grant Hill thunder and lightning and see. No, it's not. It's not anything too crazy, but, like, there are somewhere. The backs, they just are like, you know, they're just like, oh, Dino Raja, how you brought your game from Europe here to the United States. Like, they, like, talk to him. Like, they're, like, writing him a pep talk, love letter or something. It's just. It's hilarious. Dino Raja was one of my favorites. Yeah. Celtics. And to give you a little, you know, throw a little. A little Celtics player out there, Basketball hall of Famer Dino Raja. Did he make the Basketball hall of Fame? Yeah, he and he. And let's see, who else would it have been? Was it Sabonis bonuses in mostly because of his time in Europe? It was like, the first. It was like. Because these guys were, like, part of having come from Europe to the NBA as, like, they were, like, pioneers, you know? Yeah. And then who was the guy who ended up dying, like, in a car accident? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. I just watched a. I was just watching clips of him the other day. I always forget his name. Yeah. Oh, man. Why is his name escaping me? Somebody's yelling. I just literally watched videos two days ago. That's how my brain is right now. But he's. He's Serbian, and I have a Serbian co. Worker. Yeah. I always talk about these guys. Yeah. I learned how to pronounce all their names correctly. Petrovich. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of those guys. You're right. I didn't realize that about Dina Raja, though. Yeah, I think so. You know, Raja, I love that. That era of the Celtics, they were so terrible. Like Vin Baker. Yeah, man. Terrible, terrible. Speaker was a gamer. He was. But he was also an alcoholic, and that ruined his career. Yeah, yeah. He and Sean Kemp. Just loved Sean Kemp dunking. Anyway, Teapot, thanks for coming on again. We'll see you in four weeks. Sounds great. This week in Sports Cards with you, we'll have Chris Sewell on again in two weeks. All right, thanks, everybody, for watching.