The Most Valuable Thing You Take Home Isn’t a Card

Foreign. What is up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Stacking Slabs. This is your hobby content alternative. Hopefully you are doing well. I am feeling a lot of energy right now. This conversation is being recorded well in advance of its release date. I wanted to do a flagship episode while I was here in Rosemont, Illinois at the national, in my hotel room here at the Lowe's Hotel. What a fun time. I'm one day into it as I'm recording this and man, I have so much energy, so many great conversations. And I was getting ready to go to bed last night. I had some WNBA on. I was chilling and I just kept thinking about the conversations that I had in one day and how powerful those chats were. And I thought about it for a second and when I woke up this morning, I knew I wanted to do an episode on the power of hobby conversations. And so that's what we're going to do today. We're only one day into this show and I keep thinking about the same thing. It's not a card, it's not a sale, it's not a booth, it's not one of the items which I saw many awesome ones and showcases. It's the conversations. Before we get into today's conversation, I gotta shout out Inferno Red Technology, the engineering team behind some of the biggest names in sports and collectibles like DC Sports, 87, COMC collectors, Upper Deck and eBay. From Yu-Gi-Oh powered solutions for startups to full stack platforms for industry leaders, their team can tackle your toughest technology challenge. They build awesome software for the hobby, for leagues and fans, and for everyone in between. See what they can build for you@infernored.com so the first 24 hours of talking with collectors, dealers, business owners, content creators, listeners, friends and people I had never met before, there was a lot of conversations. It gives me a lot of energy and, you know, some of the conversations were about cards, some were about the market, some were about what people are buying and why. Some were about stacking. Slap. People told me what is connected with them. They told me what they want more of. They share parts of their collecting lives that would never fit inside an Instagram comment. There were also conversations that had nothing to do with a purchase. No deal, no content plan, no ask two people standing across from each other because the hobby gave them a reason to start talking. When I walked out of day one, I had a lot more energy than when I walked in, which is kind of wild. It was a travel day. Travel days are grueling. I was up early, still being A dad trekking up to Rosemont, Illinois, doing the whole rigmarole of checking in, the hotel, getting situated, all these things. Spending an entire day talking to people. I think this is worth examining. The national is exhausting. You're on your feet, you're moving through crowds. Your schedule changes every 10 minutes. You forget to eat, maybe you forget to go to the bathroom. You lose track of time. Yet I felt charged up. The cards played a role in that. They always will. We're. We're here for the cards. The conversations, I think, played a bigger role. So today I want to talk about the power of conversations in the hobby. Why does a good conversation stay with us? Why can one exchange change how we see a card, a person, and perhaps our own collection? Why do in person conversations affect the way we feel as collectors? And in a hobby and media system built around clips, swipes, alerts, fast reactions, what do we lose when we stop giving conversations time? I'm not here to attack short form content. I make it. It gets attention. It can introduce a collector to a card, a person, or an idea that matters. But attention and connection aren't the same thing. Short form content can start attention. Conversations turn that attention into context, trust, and belonging. That is the argument I want to make today. So let's start with information. Maybe the thing outside of relationships and trust I value the most in this space. Collectors talk about information all the time. We want pop report sales history, checklists. We want to know where a card came from, how often it surfaces, and who else cares about it. That information matters. It'll always matter. But some of the most useful information in the hobby does not sit in a database. It lives in people. It lives in the collector who has followed one player for 20 years. It lives in the dealer who has watched demand change across five national conventions. It lives in the person who knows why a card is hard to find, even though the serial number does not look scarce. It lives in the collector who made a bad purchase and understands the warning signs now. It lives in the person who sold to sin. It lives in the person who held too long. It lives in the collector who can explain why one version matters more than another version that looks the same to everyone else. A sales database can tell you what happened. A conversation can help you understand why it happened. That does not mean every explanation is right. People carry bias. They defend what they own. They repeat stories that were never checked. They confuse confidence with knowledge. Conversation is not a replacement for evidence. It gives you context, questions and ideas that you can test against evidence and I think that distinction matters. The right collector conversation does not tell you what to think. It helps you see what you are not thinking about. That happened to me throughout my first day at the National. Someone would make one comment about a card category, a piece of content or part of the business. That comment would lead to a question. The question would open up another part of the conversation, and then 10 minutes later, I was thinking about the hobby in a way I wasn't thinking about it before. That is a return on time and no purchase was required. There's another distinction I want to make. A conversation is not the same thing as networking. The national is full of people trying to meet people. That is part of the event. Business gets done. Partnerships begin here. Deals move forward. I'm building a media business, so I arrive with meetings, recordings, goals and people I want to see. There's nothing wrong with intention. The problem is when every interaction becomes an extraction. What can this person do for me? What information can I get? What introduction can they make? Can this conversation become content? Can this relationship become revenue? People can feel that, and I feel it very, very much. I'm probably on the higher end of obsessive compulsive when it means, when it gets into reading people and what they want from me during a conversation, I can tell within the first 10 seconds if there's going to be reciprocity or not. And I think this exchange becomes a task. You stop listening to understand and start listening for an opening. The conversation that gave me the most energy during the first day didn't feel like that. They. They had no forced outcome. We were present. There was no call to action at the end of it. We followed the subject where it went. Sometimes it was the value was a piece of information. Sometimes it was feedback. Sometimes it was learning what another person cares about. Sometimes it was laughing about part of the hobby that only another collector would understand. Nothing needed to happen next for that time to count. That's the important part. Because relationship driven does not mean strategically useful. It means relationship comes before the use. The strongest business relationships I have in this hobby often started with repeated conversation that had no proposal attached. We learned how each other thought. We saw whether words matched actions. We found areas where our interests lined up. Trust grew from the pattern. Then an opportunity made sense. The same principle applies between collectors. If you approach every person as a source of deals, access or information, you reduce relationship to a function. If you approach with curiosity, you leave a room. You leave room for the person to surprise you. That does not mean every conversation becomes a relationship. It means you do not decide the value of the conversation before it begins. The best exchange at a card show might help you buy a card. It might help you avoid one. It might lead to a friendship. It might last three minutes and never happen again. The outcome does not determine whether it mattered. There's a reason a place like the national can produce so many of these moments. You're not only talking with five people you know best. You're running into people you know a little. You are meeting friends of friends. You are talking with someone who listens to a podcast but never sent you a message. You are standing next to a collector who works in the category you've never studied. Sociologists. Mark Granovetter wrote about the strength of weak ties more than 50 years ago. His point was that people outside our closest circle often connect us to information and opportunities that do not exist inside our usual group. Our closest relationships matter. They know us. They support us. But close circles often share much of the same information. Weak ties reach into other circles. This is what happens at the National. You cross paths with people who operate in different parts of the hobby. Vintage modern, wrestling, football, basketball, set, collecting all the things. Collectors who have no business interests in the hobby at all. Every one of those people carry a different viewpoint. That does not mean you absorb every opinion. It means you gain access to a wider set of inputs. Psychologists Jillian Sandstorm and Elizabeth Dunn found that interactions with acquaintances can affect wellbeing too. In one of their studies, students reported more happiness and greater sense of belonging on days where they interacted with more classmates than usual. That is one reason the small conversations at this show count. Not every hobby relationship needs to become a close friend to have value. The two minute exchange in denial matters. The person who stops you after recording to say they like your stuff that matters. The collector who shows you one card and tells you why it matters can change the direction of your day. We tend to measure relationships by depth, and depth matters. Breadth matters too. A room full of people who share in your interest can remind you that your collecting life is part of something beyond your own collection. That brings me to the energy I felt after day one. Why did I feel more energized after spending an entire day talking? There are a few ways to understand it. Relateness definitely is a part of it. People need to feel connected to other people. And at the national, you do not need to explain why a piece of cardboard can carry meaning. You don't need to defend why you remember the exact card you pulled when you were 12. You don't need an an explanation about why you're seeking a specific copy of a card. The person across from you already understands the starting point, and that saves the effort. You can begin further into the conversation. You can get the story, the decision, the regret, or the question. And that feeling of being understood creates energy. And the second piece is what researchers call shared reality. Shared reality is the feeling that another person sees or understands something about the world in a way that connects with your own view. Researchers Maya Rossniak Milon and Tory Higgins describe conversation as one of the ways people make sense of the world together. That phrase fits the hobby collectors are always trying to make sense of things together. Why does this card matter? Why is this player ignored? Why did the market respond this way? When is it time to sell? These are not questions with one clean answer. We form our answers by studying, collecting, making mistakes, and talking with other people. Sometimes the value of the conversation is agreement. Someone put words around the feeling you have carried but never explained. You think, yes, that is it. Other times the value is disagreement. Someone sees the same card and reaches a different conclusion. Now you have to examine your own reasoning because outcomes are useful. Agreement can create connection. Disagreement can create clarity. The third reason for energy is group experience. Researchers use the term perceived emotional synchrony to describe what happens when people gather, focus on something together, and feel part of a shared experience. Studies of group gatherings have connected the experience with stronger social identification, positive emotion, and well being. I'm not claiming that walking through the nationals the same as every kind of gathering studied in a psychology lab, the framework still helps explain the feeling. Thousands of people arrive with the intention focused on the hobby. People point, they react, they tell stories, they recognize cards, they introduce friends, they celebrate a pickup with someone they just met for a few days. Collecting is not something you do alone at a desk or on a phone. It becomes something you experience with other people in the same place. That is where some of the energy comes from. It is not only excitement over inventory, it is the feeling of participation. Now when you deal with the other side of this Most of the hobby conversations do not happen at the national Most of the content reaches us through a screen. The screen is not the problem. Stacking slabs would not exist at its current scale without digital media. Collectors have formed relationships through podcasts, Instagram, YouTube, group chats, online communities. Goes on and on and on. I've met people this week because they first heard a conversation online. The online exchange led to an in person one that's a one-of-one The problem begins when we mistake exposure for understanding. You watch 50 clips and still leave with no context. You can see a hundred cards and remember none of them. You can collect opinions all day without examining one of them. You can feel active while doing nothing beyond moving your thumb. Researchers Katie Tam and Michael Islitz studied what they called digital switching across seven experiments with 1,223 participants. People believe switching between videos would reduce boredom. It did the opposite. Switching increased boredom and reduced satisfaction, attention and meaning. The point is not that every short video is bad. The point is that constant switching can keep us from staying with an idea long enough for it to mean something. That is a problem in the hobby because many of the questions that matter require context. Why does a collector care about a card? You need the story. Why did someone change their collecting direction? You need to understand what came before it. Why did a dealer make a decision that looks wrong from the outside? You need to understand the conditions around the decision. Why did a sale reset a category? You need more than the final price. A clip gives you the answer. A conversation can show you how someone reached it. That process is where much of the value sits. There is research that supports the value of dialogue as the learning format. In studies comparing tutorial dialogue videos with lecture style videos covering the same concepts, college students learn more from the dialogue format. Researchers pointed to features that monologues often lack. Questions, feedback, wrong answers, corrections. Moments when one person has to adjust to the understanding of another. That is what a good podcast conversation can do. My guess does not arrive as a quote machine. They arrive with a way of thinking. My job is to ask enough questions to reveal it. Why? What happened next? When did you change your mind? What did you miss? Long form conversations give your idea enough time to be challenged. It lets a guest qualify a statement. It lets uncertainty remain in the answer. It lets the listener hear a person think. That matters. In a hobby where certainty gets more attention than honesty, I want to be fair about short form content. The research on social media and wellbeing is mixed. I think context matters. I think age matters. The type of online space matters. That should stop us from making a lazy claim that scrolling is bad and conversation is good. Life isn't that clean. A 30 second clip can teach you something. A short post can lead a collector to another. A photo can make your search for a card that you never knew existed. A group chat can provide support in a moment. You need it. Short form content has a role. Its best role is not to replace the conversation. It is to create a reason for the conversation to begin. That is how I Think about the stacking slabs content system. The clip earns attention. The episode provides context. The conversation builds trust. The next conversation builds the relationship. The mistake is building the entire hobby media diet out of the first step. If every piece of content asks for five seconds of attention, we train ourselves to leap before the meaning arrives. We become good at recognizing. We become worse at understanding. We know which cards are hot. We do not know why they matter. You know the opinion. You do not know the experience behind it. You know the sale. We don't know the collector. That is enough for me. It's not enough for stacking slab. Let's bring it back to collecting. What can an in person conversation do in your mindset? First, slow down. Urgency the hobby. The online hobby presents every card as if it's a decision. The decision needs to happen now. The listing is ending. The break is starting. The release is live. The comp is changed. Then you talk with someone who has collected the same player for 15 years. They let you know how many times a card has appeared. They tell you about the copy they passed off. The time horizon changes. You remember that a collection is built across years, not refreshes. The conversation can improve your questions. Collectors often arrive with buying questions. Surprise, right? Should I get this card? Do you think it will go up? A good conversation can move you towards better questions. Why do you want this card? What role does it play in my collection? Would I still want it if no one saw a pickup post? Those questions protect you from the purchase that creates activity, but add no meaning. Next, conversations can give you conviction. Conviction does not come from hearing people agree with you. It comes from understanding your own reasoning after it, it's become tested. You show a card to someone. They ask why that version? You explain the set, the image, the history, all the context behind the card. By the end of the answer, you understand your own choice better. The conversation helped you hear the thinking. Conversations can change your direction. This is one of the best parts of a show like the National. You arrive looking for one thing. Then a collector shows you another path. You learn about a set. You hear a story. You see connection you had missed. You do not need to buy anything that day. The change happens down the road. The conversation planted that idea. Conversations can make the hobby feel human again. Cards move through systems listings, vaults, grading queues, auctions, shipping price charts. It is easy to forget that people sit on the other side of those systems. The person selling might be funding a business. The person might be rebuilding a collection they've lost. The person who might, who will not sell might have received the card from someone important to them. The person asking a basic question might be entering the hobby for the first time. Conversations restores the person behind the car. That does not mean you ignore the price. It means the price is not the only information in front of you. This is why long form conversation remains the foundation for stacking slabs. It is not the fastest content to make. It is not the easiest content to distribute. It asks more of me. It asks more of my guests. It asks more from you, the listener. You are giving us time. I never take that for granted. If you listen to one of my conversations, I want you to leave with something useful. An idea you can apply, a question you can ask, a collecting approach you can examine a person you can better understand. I do not want to fill time. I want to respect it. That is why feedback at the national means so much to me. Download numbers tell me someone. Press play. A completion number can tell me someone stayed. A clip view tells me someone. I earned someone's attention. But when a listener stands in front of you and explains what an episode changed for them, I receive information a dashboard can't provide. They tell me where the value reached them. They tell me where the question stayed with them. They tell me which conversation made the reconsider a purchase, appreciate a card, contact another collector, or return to part of the hobby they had ignored. The feedback improves the work. It also strengthens the relationship between the network and the people it serves. The stacking slabs is not built for an abstract audience. It is built for collectors with names, collections, histories, questions and limits. In person conversations make that impossible to forget. Conversations have power. Power needs judgment. The hobby also contains rumors, status updates, private incentives and group think. A conversation can help you see more. It can pull you towards someone else's agenda. So listen with curiosity, not surrender. Ask where the information came from. Separate firsthand experience from something repeated. Notice whether the person benefits from your belief. Compare that claim with public data. When public data exists, talk with people outside of one circle. Give more weight to the collector who can explain uncertainty than the person who performs certainty. The goal is not to collect the most opinions. The goal is to improve the quality of your thinking. Good conversation should make you more independent, not more dependent. That's the standard. You do not need to Whatnot the national to use any of this. You can change the quality of your hobby experience by changing the way you talk to people. Start with better questions. Ask better questions. Instead of asking what are you buying? Ask what changed the way you collect this year. I think questions are Everything. I'm a curious person. I built this business on the back of questions. Not only asking others questions, but asking myself the same question. Do not spend the entire time waiting for your turn to talk. Ask the next question based on what the person said that makes a great conversation. If they mention a mistake, ask them what it taught. If they mention the change of direction, ask what caused the change. The value is often one question past the final answer. Bring someone into the exchange to share the information without keeping a score. Make the introduction, send the checklist. Point someone towards the collector who knows the category. Follow up after the show. Relationships are built when the conversation continues. After there is no immediate transaction in front of either person. That is what makes the hobby stronger. Not only more connected, more informed, more patient, more trusting, more human. When I look back on this national, I know I'll remember cards. There will be cards I wanted. Cards I've never seen. Cards that change hands. The cards that change the way I think about my own collection. But after the first 24 hours, I'm convinced that the most valuable thing I will take home is not a card. It is what people shared with me. The feedback, the questions, the ideas, the relationships that move forward because we had time in the same place. It is the energy that comes from being around people who care about the same things. We live in a hobby that can turn every card into content, every sale into reaction, every opinion into clips, every quiet moment into another chance to scroll. That system isn't going away. I'm part of it. But I do not want to confuse more content with more connection. I do not want to confuse faster information with better understanding. I don't want to confuse attention with trust. The conversation still matters. The time still matters. Listening still matters. The questions after the show matter. The person across from you still matters. If you're at the national or another big show coming up, then make time for that. If you weren't at the show, call a collector you trust. Send a message to someone whose collection made you think. Ask a better question in a group chat. Listen to a full conversation. Give one idea more than 10 seconds. Your next step as a collector might not begin with a card. It might begin with someone asking you why you care about it and giving you enough time to answer. I love conversations. I've built my career on the back of conversations. I just think conversations are cool and we should think more about it. Appreciate you tuning in to Stack and Slab. If you enjoyed this show, make sure you tell a damn friend. Take care. Happy building Happy collecting. Talk to you soon.