Tyler “T-Pott” Nethercott: Why Grading Is More Inconsistent Than Collectors Want to Admit | Sports Card Investor

This is an industry that has something like less than one in. I don't even know what the statistic is. It's like one in 50 sports fans bought or sold a card last year. People look at it now and they're like, this is nuts. We haven't even scratched the surface. Welcome to the Collector Nation podcast here on the Collector Nation Network. Whether you're chasing grails or calling bluffs, we take you inside the hobby. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Foreign. What's up, guys? Welcome to Collector Nation here on the Collector Nation Network. Hey, we're going. You know, I like to say we're always inside the hobby, but I feel like we're getting close to the sun here. They're doing big things. I, I enjoy the commentary personally and digest a lot of the content. So it's always interesting talking to people that, you know, I, I get this all the time on my, from the business side, in my business show. But when I flip the roles, it's. It's always fascinating. You'll know him by this name. It's Teapot Tyler Nethercot. What's up, Teapot? Hey, man, what's up? Good to. Good to connect. Yeah, likewise. I, I do enjoy your content. I was watching a video from last year on my drive over this morning. You know, listening more than watching, driving. Here we go. I got kids disclaimer. More listening than that. But you were talking about. And we're knee deep in tech. Like you guys are doing all kinds of things and it's like you're talking about the. How many different cards and variations. I think it was from last year or something. And I was just reminding me how complicated, you know, all this might be for someone that's not in it, but. And how wonderful it is at the same time. Yeah, yeah, it can be pretty overwhelming. I did a video, I think you're referencing the one I did on all the different, what we call prismatic effects. I think that's the term I coined. I don't know, maybe other people refer to it as that. But we will officially register the trademark here. Teapots. Prismatic effect. Yep, prismatic effects. All the different patterns, sort of that you see on cards. Not the colors, you know, not red, blue, gold, green. Not that, not, you know, but like we're talking, you know, the straight up refractor versus what panini's called, a prism or a hollow or all kinds of foils and different things into your waves and mojos and all the different effects. And there's you know, this video I made was almost an hour and I went through and showed pictures of them and then I sort of counted down my top 10 favorites. It is really interesting. It's fun, it's cool. It's also a lot. And the thing that just drives me nuts, and I'm not the only one, is I don't know why the manufacturers, as a rule, generally do not print what the card is called on the back of the card. Makes no sense. They need to start doing it. Come on, tops, let's go. I know. And no serial numbers and no identify. You know, there's no identification, regular identification. I think there's some purposefulness in that. I'm guessing there has to be. Yeah. Conspiracy theory. That's a rabbit hole we'll go down. Yeah, I know. I, we'll come back to that one. I got enough down the lot. Teapot Sports card investor. What's for anybody that doesn't know, and I think most people do it, I want to, they can go watch your YouTube videos where you talk about like how you got back into it, all that. Let's, let's cover new ground but at the same time let's do set the table. I mean, sports card investor, your involvement, what you guys are up to. Let's lay the land on the SEI part and then dig into some hobby specific stuff. Yeah. Been growing like crazy. Everything has been growing. Jeff Wilson, our founder owner, came to us in the January of 2025 and he said to all of us just before our company retreat that we did, we're going to 10x everything, we're going to 10x everything that we're doing and how are we going to do that? And we spent three days off site on a retreat doing lots of fun group stuff and bonding and building relationships. Yep. And we came up with a whole bunch of ideas about how each of us within our own respective departments, domains, what we were doing. We're going to 10x everything, you know, YouTube views and subscribers, market movers, subscriptions, everything. And I would say, you know, what are we, 16 months, 17 months later, we're well on our way. And it is, it has been an absolute rocket ship. Cards, HQ has I would say, surpassed all expectations. It has gone really well. It's difficult to keep inventory on the shelves. Things just sell fast. The hobby is hot, it's alive. We're seeing record month over month public, you know, online sales volume numbers from the different websites, ebay and all the auction houses and market movers has been growing. I think We've only had three days this year in 2026 where our market mover subscription total was down from the day prior. So it's just been seeing record breaking growth signups which has been amazing. I've been working on the product for six years. It's. I essentially consider it for all intents and purposes, my baby, my app. I've been working on it for good or bad. Yes, since day one. And it's. I still have a lot of gripes with it. I still have a lot of things I want to do. I say there's only two things I don't like about working in software development and technology and one is just bugs and issues and, you know, infrastructure challenges and things. And the other one is we just can't, no matter what, we can't ever go fast enough. I'm an ideas guy. Ideation is my number one on strengths finder and I drive my team nuts with all the different ideas I constantly have. And there's. It's impossible we could have five times as many developers and I still think I would outpace them with all the stuff I'd like for us to be able to be doing. So it's been really exciting. The content has been growing. Market Movers Channel has already done like 70% of the number of views through less than five months that it did all year last year, which was a record year. So a lot of really exciting stuff. And honestly, it's really humbling. It's really humbling. It's been an incredible journey. I don't, Sometimes I just step back and I'm like, I don't know how I stumbled my way into getting into this position with Jeff at a time where he was literally just starting to grow a company with no anticipation that we would be where we are today. And it's been a really fun journey to be able to build something that I think is pretty special with him over the last six years. Yeah. Oh. I mean, I'll say this. If the algorithm is deterministic, I believe that's the right term. I was kind of struggling there in the middle. Mind if that was a word or not. I think it is deterministic of the success or the 10x ability of market movers and SEI. The algorithm is feeding me more teapots. So I think it's like in line with what the effort is because I. Everything shows up, I see it. So it's. Yeah, I'm feeding it. I give the likes and the shares and all that stuff. I like what you Guys are doing, man. And I use market movers. I use a lot of. I mean, you got to. This business is kind of everything. You got to use all these tools and stuff. It's funny because I'm. I come from the digital. I own a digital agency. I mean, I'm Marker first and I'm at collected. Growing up, got boys that got me back into it. Everybody, you know, similar story to a lot of people, but. But I'm a tech and ad and creative guy. Can you hear me now? It was my first ad campaign. I'll age myself. So I, you know, the creative thought process is. I think, you know, hey, we had this talk pre episode about dogs. I think we're on the same wavelength on some ways. Creative thinkers that. No dogs are wonderful, but we can't have them. Um, but talk to me on the tech side. Let's f. Focus there. How do you keep up? Obviously you just said it yourself, but it's such an interesting. You got so many million cards. You got so much stuff. You're tracking it. Talk me to me about how that process un. Unveils itself and how many people actually touch that app. Yeah, we've got. The number of monthly users for Market movers is about 75,000. And then we've got a free app as well that does around 100,000 monthly active. That's the sports card investor app. That's more lightweight. A lot of people don't know there is a. There is a free version of Market Movers too on the mobile side that doesn't require a login or anything just to get some basic pricing information. And then obviously we. We have different subscription tiers to build everything out. When. When Jeff started this really, and it was like in December of 2019. So he started his. His YouTube podcast in that summer, July of 2019. And then about five months later started just working on like a. Wasn't even ever meant to be a big app for people to use. He just was like making these charts and graphs for videos. And I need a way to like, do this in a more automated fashion and not have to dump data into a spreadsheet and then make charts. So it was born out of that basic need that people want to see trend line over time. Not just 90 days worth of comps or whatever, but like actually look at stuff and how it grows and be able to do more like retro analysis of patterns. And that's where it grew from. We started dumping the cards into the database and showing, you know, which cards went up and down the most over different time frames. And the evolution of it has been okay. Pricing is one big thing that's definitely a need. And now you have several different apps, competitive apps to market movers all trying to sort of do the same thing to serve first that need. Speed is the name of the game. Data breadth and data depth are also the name of the game. And just you need to get it fast. How do I get a comp fast and how do I count on and have confidence in this data? So a lot of online marketplaces, you know, ebay is obviously the big dog. They do 97% plus of the volume of number of sales and then when you start getting into the higher end, you obviously have the other bigger auction houses. So we built around that for a number of years, both on web and mobile. There's an evolution happening now, especially when you look at the impact that AI is having and how quickly people can vibe code and spin up apps and sort of do even their own little personal projects that I really don't believe that data and pricing is going to be the competitive advantage that it has been for us up until now. This is very much a case of like, what got us here won't get us there. That's not to say we can just disregard pricing, but I do believe there are other needs in the hobby that don't exist today, more oriented around discovery and education and curation. And that's what we're starting to really look into. We're going to keep pushing in that, in that same stream of stuff that just keeps refining the existing features that we have. We launched Raw, you know, RAW image recognition on the mobile app about two months ago, six weeks ago. That's been really popular and was high demand for a number of years. And we're just going to keep refining that user experience, which is the other big piece, I think, UI UX design of your app and how people interact with it and how it delights them and how they enjoy the experience is what's going to actually separate and differentiate apps as we go forward. Because you can Claude design and Claude code your way into whatever you want, but it's going to be, it's going to be limited. We have a really talented staff designer that we brought in last year and it's just been, he's been a real game changer for us in terms of his thought process, his attention to detail, thinking about edge cases and mapping out Personas. And so that's, that's where we're headed now. And our goal is it's ambitious. Some would call it naive or too idealistic. But our goal really is to serve everyone in the hobby no matter how they interact with it. And I think there's a real clear roadmap and pathway to be able to do that. I like that. Discovery talking to Teapot. He is with Market Movers. I can't even name all the brands you've got so many of them now. Was Market Movers smart Sport Card Investors. What am I leaving out? I know there's other things. Yeah, Market Movers, we got Sports Card Investor, we've got of course Cards hq. We've got Jeff's personal channel. I do another podcast called Spitball and Cards with guys about baseball. Yeah, there's, you know, there's little personal projects. So yeah, we're, we're growing. Yeah. Really quick. What's the difference? Market Movers and Sports Card Investor sounds like the same thing to me in a lot of ways. So like really quickly there and then I want to come back. So man, if bookmark this for both of us, Discovery and curation really stuck out to me. So I'm going to come back to that. But define the difference between SEI and Market Movers. SEI is the company that started. That's the YouTube channel that Jeff started in the summer of 2019 and that's really the parent brand that we grew up. Market Movers. Market Movers is, was essentially a digital app, a digital product, you know, to help, you know, track price cards and track your collection and so much more. So Market Mover sits underneath Sports Card Investor owned by Sports Card Investor. It's not a separate company, it's just a separate brand within the company. And so we started it as an app and then built it into a YouTube channel which I have basically run myself since day one. That's been going for about five years and that's really taken off and seen a lot of, a lot of success. And I think more importantly distinguishing the two is Jeff and I have both been really grateful to be able to almost be a little bit of a yin yang to each other. And if you were to sort of venn diagram our fans, you know, and see like where there's overlap, there's definitely a lot of overlap. But then Jeff has, I think a bigger pool of overall people who love, you know, what he does and high end deals and trade nights and things like that and where he really likes to, you know, get into the hobby, he also has a bigger pool of haters because he's got just bigger overall reach. So he's got more critics. I think I have a lot fewer critics and then fewer fans of only me. But we've been able to have a broad reach and serve a lot of different people. Back to that point about, like, however you want a hobby, that's our, that's one of our biggest goals. You know, there's, you hear the word sort of like inclusivity get thrown around and it has a lot of opinions on both sides of it. But like, really, we, we see this hobby as this makeup of all these people. We want to do financial things. You want to flip, you want to invest, you want to go into high end grails, you want to rip product, you want to, you know, chase the big hits, you want to just collect, you, you know, what do you want to do? All of that stuff makes up what we generally refer to as the hobby. Even though a lot of people have opinions about different aspects of that, a lot of strong opinions, that's kind of our approach. And so I think I serve a particular audience with, with how I like to do it. And Jeff serves a bigger, different part of the audience. Yeah, that, that's a good description. And look, I mean, everybody likes different flavors of ice cream. It's like so. And I mean, I don't, I don't even know Jeff. But I mean, I respect, but I respect anybody that gets in front of the camera because I've done it for 8, 10, 8 to 10 years now and in a different lane. But it's easy to be a critic when you're not in front of the camera all day. And you can pick on this or pick on that, you know, come on. But, but you know what? All I see is a smart guy willing to, to put that to the side because it pays to be known. Yeah. Somebody trademarked that name. You can say you're talking to them, say what they want about Jeff, but you can't, you can't deny that he's been successful. Yeah. You know, he's grown a company, he's employed, you know, hundreds of people now with, with all this growth. And Jeff's been the best person I've ever worked for, the easiest person that I've had, you know, in a good way. He's very level headed, very grounded, slow to anger, slow to get riled up. He's just like, hey, we're running into a challenge. How are we going to solve it? You know, we put our heads together, we tackle it. He doesn't. You know, I've heard horror stories about Sort of like, you know, serial entrepreneurs and how they come to work and can blow a gasket when things start looking like they're not going well. And that is not Jeff at all. And that's probably the thing I've been the most grateful for. He's been fair to me, he's been good to my family. He's been good to work for. And I think most people, where they, where they start to lean into the hater crowd is really based on what they saw from Jeff six years ago, seven years ago. And they haven't acknowledged the evolution that he's made as a person, as a leader, as a, as a person in the hobby. Yeah. As an influencer. Yeah. And. And then, you know, also they just only see the on camera version of Jeff. And so maybe they maybe just like people don't like Colin Cowherd or Stephen A or whatever, they kind of see this Persona and they're like, man, I hate this guy. And in reality, if you get to know him as a person, he's very much family first. Like, he loves his family and he makes time for them amidst all the chaos. And then he's just a, he's a businessman, you know, he's kind of a serial entrepreneur. So he's always thinking and there's different versions, you know, just like I think with most, with most of us. So you said it. You're like, I don't really know Jeff, but a lot of people don't. Then they get to meet him, they interact with him at the national or something. And they're like, oh man, that guy was like way nicer, way, way more authentic to interact with than what I see on Teapot. Jeff and Ryan are having a beer at the National. There you go. Come to our member happy hour. Market movers member happy hour. I'm a member. Paying, paying card carrier. Come on, you know, yeah, we'll get those details. But Teapot, appreciate that. That was good commentary, discovery and curation. You caught my ear. Because let me just tell you, like, I'm coming into this game fresh eyed, you know, worked with Apple, Samsung, Verizon, BMW. And the hobby is very different than when I left it when I was 13 years old and I've been back in it for almost two years now. But it's, I'm like, man, it's come a long way and it hasn't. So talk to me about what you mean by that evolution. Maybe with market movers or SEI in those, in those lanes. That's a really true statement. What you just said, which is it's come a long way and it hasn't. When, when you look at this industry, the technology in the space has advanced massively over the last seven years and yet is still lagging way behind many other industries. Any, whether it's other collectibles or anything, anything, it's still way behind. So all of us are trying to play catch up and figure out how to serve, you know, and grow apps and have that balance of speed and resilience and all this stuff. I would argue, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for years, but really over the last two years, there's one question I keep coming back to, and it's a question, one of the questions I get asked the most by people, which is what's good, what. What cards are good? And the answer to that question is both highly objective and subjective. And it depends on where you're coming at it from. It depends on what your. How you interact with the hobby. There's a collector journey that I mapped out a few years ago that I think is really resonated with a lot of people. A very, like, predictable journey for a lot of people, especially those who collected when they were children like I did, and then found their way back in at some point over the last like seven or eight years, maybe, maybe more recently. For a lot of people. Yeah. So you start out and typically you get bit by nostalgia. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. It gets you back in. You find your binders, you find your screw downs, you find your top loaders, you're like, oh my gosh, I remember when I traded for this penny Hardaway Noise Boys, and this card was so sick. When I was a kid, I traded half my collection just to get this card. And. And you're just, I mean, it is just a rush, a rush of dopamine. And you start, okay, what are these cards worth? And all of this stuff. See, if you map this out on a matrix, there's a visual. If you go left to right, you're looking at the number of cards you own. Left side being few cards, right side being a ton of cards. And if you go bottom to top, it's low value up to high value. So people start out in this kind of like a middle of the bottom, like right quadrant where they have some, some volume. Typically they have a few big binders full, maybe a few thousand cards, maybe more. Typically not much worth anything unless they didn't know it was worth a ton. Now some Jordan Grail or something. And so they, they get back in and they're like, man, I really want to like buy more cards. I want to like get more into this. So they start ripping packs, buying into breaks, whatever, and next thing they know, they look around, their desk is covered in cards, they've got boxes of this new stuff, and they're like, what the heck's going on here? They hit a point where they go, what is any of this stuff good? Is any of the stuff from my childhood good? That's where they typically go to a tool like Market Movers and they start trying to look it up and figure it out. That's that point where the curation typically happens. There's two pathways that are common. They just get fed up, overwhelmed, see how much they've put on their charge card or whatever, and they just exit stage left and liquidate on Facebook Marketplace or, or at a local card shop or something. Or they do sell, they do a sell off event, they, you know, give cards away, whatever, and they start to do research. And that point right there where the research is what I'm trying to move the needle on and move up in that journey through education, but also with our products so that people can finally discover what's good. So what we're working on with Market Movers is hydrating our database with the entire catalog of every card in existence. Our big competitive differentiation over the last six years has been what we've called our featured card database. It's at like 7.2 million cards. You can chart them, track them. We have another 11 million cards now that we have waiting in the background to bring into the full user experience so that users can discover those cards, so they can look at images of cards, so they can navigate and look up every Gary Payton card of all time and check off exactly which ones from their childhood binder they have. Easily, that's the foundational point where you get the whole catalog. You start layering and pricing to the most important cards and different, different tiers of confidence. But we want to start training models to help people discover what they like. And if you can find the intersection of what the broader populace thinks about cards and what they believe is good and map it to what you think is good, you can help carve out a really thoughtful collection. That's whether you're like, I don't care the values all the way up to, yes, I want to collect things, but I also want to know they're going to sell for more someday. So that's kind of the, the bigger picture. That's the Noble mission, I would say, for, like, the marching orders I've given my team for the vision for our products and how we want to move forward and beyond that, I have a ton of really fun ideas that I can't let anybody else go steal, so I'll stop there. No, that makes sense. And I mean, I think I'm gonna digest and sort of summarize a bit. The. And I see it, too, because, I mean, I've been kind of studying the. I've been doing some things, doing content and all that, but I'm in the background, you know, with my. With my background, watching, observing, learning. I opened a store, a flagship store. If there's another better store in South Carolina, I'm not aware of it. Let me just tell you that. 3,000 square feet, experiential. My train going by as I'm talking. I'm watching it out the windows. You can hear it probably, but. And I see these things. Teapot. I'm like, what? Okay. I. Nothing lies more than a comp. Number one. Like. And even the biggest companies. I'm like, what are you guys doing? Every company is not created equal. You've got scarcity, rarity. You've got so many variables that aren't considered. Yes. And it's. Yeah. Let's just say I'm not trying to compete with what you guys are doing, but I'm building something way bigger for just my own store, if nothing else. Because it's like, I don't know, man. We're using, like, data points and knowledge and all this. And you. This is before even AI. I mean, AIs come a long way in eight months. I was. But 10 months ago, I was going, what the hell is everybody doing? Yeah. I mean, it's like this nostalgic, you know, you got the. The dealers, the old guys that don't want any tech at all. And I get it. And it's. And you got kids that are watching content. And I'm like, I don't know. I. There's just so many data points that could be informing decisions on business, on content, on everything else. And so it's fascinating to hear you talk about that. There's. Yeah. People look at comps. I've done. I've done a number of videos in the past on comps and how comps. The last comp is not the value of the card. The oversimplified answer. If I were to ask you, I'm sure you would answer this. What's the value of a card? The value of a card is what someone's willing to pay for it. That's the value of a card. Comp does not tell you what somebody's willing to pay for a card. Even if it was yesterday, wholesale, like, like it's law. It's more of a case of it's the best thing we've got. It's the best we've got. And so that's why people lean into it and rely on it. Now a big segment of people who rely on last comp, which is most of us, if you're just trying to get to a price, I don't want this to sound condescending, but they don't let their thought process transcend beyond comp. They just want to stay at that level of simplicity and go, this is it. And I, I'm. This is how I did. Is the comp. Here's comp comp. I need room, whatever that. That kind of crowd is like boom, boom, boom. There's a much bigger picture. The value of a card is this intersection of the quality of the card, the attributes. What makes a card great? That's back to that question. I said, what's good? What makes a card great? The player, the set, the eye appeal, the image chosen, these different attributes. The condition of the card obviously has a big factor, but I, I've been thinking about this condition. Agnostic. Just give me the raw card and let me tell you how much quality there's on card versus sticker auto versus no auto relic quality. All this different stuff, rookie year. These things all coalesce together to tell you what the quality of a card is. And then in order for it to have value, it not only needs quality, but it also needs exposure, awareness. People need to know that the card exists. They need to understand the lineage or the, the pedigree and all of these things. So those are just two factors. Social graph of the card as what I'd call a social graph. That's what I call it. That's why there is a lot of value to these auction houses for high end that will put your card on, you know, some marquee in New York City, like, or make promotional videos or go on CNBC and talk about it like Ken golden does. Like, makes a big impact. You're spreading awareness about, about the fact that this thing exists. Here's why it's important. It's why people pay Adam Gray, the Real 27 guy on Instagram and others to make reels because you're trying to educate and create awareness. The piece that is very often fleeting Even fake when it comes to value of a card is hype and fomo. Those things are just driven by rapidly happening transactions, by inertia. And those are. Those are the charts you see in market movers that just go way up and then come way back down fast because, you know, people get a little too excited and frenzied. So there's like sustainable value and then there's comp. Comps matter. If you're trying to make money, they do matter. Everybody's using them. But I think there's a much more mature and sophisticated way to think about it. I think as a hobby, that's what I'm hoping we can get to over the next five to ten years. Teapot. There's a smart guy that I worked with indirectly, but pretty damn close to the sun. His name was Steve Jobs and launching the first iPhone on Verizon wireless network. This is in my age, myself, 2007. And he said something in a meeting that I think's been, like, translated 100 different ways. There's signals and there's noise. One of them we pay attention to and one of them we don't. Yeah, that's the key. There's a lot of noise, but is it a true signal? And, you know, the hype cycles can be something that's. Yeah. You know, in the short term, hey, if you're a flipper, it matters, really matters where you are. And that's where I was. I. I'm fascinated and thrilled that someone's thinking about user journeys and all that. Now you're talking about language. You know, like, that's. That's what's been sort of missing a little bit. It's not. Everything's created equal. Like, all these journeys are a little different. So I love that you guys are going down that path. Teapot I. You know, we've got. You're gonna have to promise me a part two, because I didn't realize. I thought sometimes I get on like wins of 40 minutes, but maybe, like, maybe. Maybe it's a national. I'm gonna be doing shows in that. You'll probably be so busy you can't do it. You don't have to commit to it now, but we'll talk about it. We can. We can look into it. Usually my schedule is booked for about 18 hours a day at the National. Yeah, exactly. We'll see how it goes. But it'd be together and in person, so. Or you just look. Yeah, I'm not up the road. We could do this on the boat. Baby, you Know wherever you want. I'm about to start doing episodes with guests on the houseboat, you know, breaks on the boat. All right, I want to get to a couple topics while we got 10 minutes here. Roughly. It's interesting to me a couple things that have, that have happened and, and I, let me say this, I'll say the disclaimer. I got no problem like no skin in the game. No problem with either one of these companies. I actually like the people at both of them. But it is fascinating with PSA and Tops. Yeah. In no other industry can you buy up all your competitors. You just said just no big deal, nothing going on here. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. And yet it's happening. It's happened. Grading is a phenomenon of phenomena. The hobby has many phenomenon. Grading is, is one of them. What says you about what's gone down the last couple years with grading? I think no one denies the value of it. You know, stamping the, the grade, it's important it seals the condition, so to speak. Unless you crack it. Just saying. And so give me the. Lay the land on grading and PSA and buying all your competitors. I have a lot of opinions about grading, the, the short version and I've made a lot of videos on this. The biggest overarching problem that I have with grading is the price premium placed on quality as the number one defining value contributor to a cart. And you can't deny that the comps the market shows it. What the hobby has collectively decided is that the condition of the card matters significantly more than the quality of the card itself. So it's the magic trick. It's the great magic trick. It's the great infinite money glitch. If you can find a card that is in great condition, gem, mint condition and you send it into PSA, you will multiply your money by a minimum of 2x if not many times, significantly more. And what that says is people care more about the acrylic holder and the label and the subjective, very subjective and very proven inconsistent opinion of third party so called experts about the condition of that card. And they're willing to pay more for that opinion than they are to trust their own eye test, trust their own assessment of the card and appreciate the intrinsic qualities of the card itself. The artistic expression, the industry, the technology, the, the, the player, the moment, all of these other things. Like we were discussing its condition overall. And so that really bothers me. I did the experiment on the Market Movers channel. Some, some of your viewers may have seen it. I call it the the cracks heard round the world. Two different videos that took me a year and a half to complete where I cracked the same cards out and sent them to every grading company and then back again to every grading company and they were all different every time. I sent a Ken Griffey 1989 star rookie BGS 95 through this journey and it went as low as a PSA 6 and all the way to two different companies saying it was trimmed, another company saying it was too large up to nines and everything in between. It was so inconsistent. And yet with our dollars we vote to say we not only believe in these opinions and the condition of this card, we think it is the most important, single most important thing about these cards. And that for me is a big problem. I think it's completely irrational. I don't understand it. I don't know how it came to be that way. I understand condition is a factor in all collectibles and things over time, but the most important aspect for me of grading needs to be authenticity and authentication to give you confidence that your card is what they say it is and not a counterfeit in a world of a lot of counterfeits. And I just went through a horror story situation with that where I bought a essential credentials Grant Hill card in a Beckett 5 graded holder and was alerted by some people online that it was a backdoored copy out of bankruptcy that had been fake stamped and graded by Beckett. I sent it to psa, they graded it and then two weeks later they deactivated it and said oops, our bad. We got additional info, it's not authentic. And I got the email back today confirming that it is in fact been ruled questionable authenticity and so not eligible for holdering or being reactivated. And it's a big, it's a big industry. I think it's necessary. I am not anti grading. I'm not, I'm not integrating. I tell people that all the time before and after. I should have said at the beginning I'm not anti grading. I think it's really important. I just don't agree with the current paradigm and I think there's a lot more that these companies need to be doing to make sure they get it right from an authenticity perspective as well as the, the condition assessment. Well, buying all your competitors doesn't help what you described. It's, you know, there is a lot there for sure. When you look at it and you're like, well, we're basically boiled down to two. The broader industry of the hobby as we say, is Very much looking like an oligarchy at best. You know, in many places, Tops, they got all the licenses. I don't know what p. I don't. I, I wish they just bought Panini. That way I come back in, I fall in love with kabooms and downtowns like everybody else. And then you're going to take the license. Can we just buy them already? Could they not make that deal happen? Like, yeah. And I, I like Reuben. Like he's, he's a beast of a businessman. Like, I mean he's kind of like, yeah, we all have different flavors, but man, I'm kind of an edgy guy. I like, I like cold hearted beast of a businessman, Ruby. You know, like I'm, I'm down, I'm here for it. But same time, I just want my damn, you know, my cars with the licenses on it. Why couldn't they make that deal happen? And, but it does now owning a shop, you know, and I mean we're gonna, I turned the doors on and don't even have allocation. We'll do a million dollars the first year teapot. Like it's like, it's problem. It's a challenge. Problems is the wrong word. I mean, what says you about that situation? You know, I obviously don't have a lot of access or visibility into how Tops is making these decisions or what, you know, their overall strategy is how they're pushing in these different directions. To the point about Reuben, you know, I think what, what the best thing I could say is don't hate the player, hate the game. Exactly. He's winning the game. It's still possible. They buy Panini. They just, they just won the FIFA licenses for World cup and It'll start in 2031, I think. So it's going to be a minute. Yeah. That was literally. Well, yeah, so they've got. I'm not saying that's as equal, by the way. I'm just saying. But it's more popular than it ever has been. Yeah. And I mean you're looking at it and you're like, what does, what does Panini have left other than they're just like product IPs. They don't have any licenses. And now there's things going to court to stop Leaf and Panini and others from being able to even create products where they have multiple independently signed agreements without the jerseys. They're starting lawsuits around that stuff. So this is, it's getting very messy. There's a lot of big boy type art of war, art of the deal type Maneuverings happening for sure. And you have that anywhere where there's a lot of, A lot of, you know, a lot of, A lot of ego, a lot of brand ambition and other things, a lot of empire building. And so they may still buy Panini because Panini will have essentially nothing left. They're gutted. And I think that's all going to come down to whether or not Panini's leadership would rather just die or like take something on the way out. You know, that's a decision they're gonna have to make. I think Topps was very smart to take the deal four years ago or whatever it was when it was originally, when they were originally acquired. Again, whether people like it or not, I think you're sort of acknowledging the present, present reality. But to the allocation piece, it's so tough. We. Everybody looks around and the basic consumer looks at this and goes, overproduction over production, overproduction. But then they also say price is too high. Price is too high. Price is too high. Well, there's also say, I want the cards to be worth a lot. Worth a lot. Worth a lot. There's a thing called supply and demand. Everybody wants to somehow have kabooms be, you know, or let's say like all aces, which I really, you know, really like. I've got my, my scuba all aces here that I just got in the mail. These are sick cards. And they're like, I want all aces to be super hard to hit, but I want one in my box. I better get one in my box. Better not see breakers getting those in their boxes. And I didn't get one in my box, but I want it to be worth a billion dollars so I can retire, but also to be super rare. And I want the box to still be 200. None of these things stack up together to make any sense. They just don't. And so it's, it's kind of the classic scenario of certain amount of righteous frustration and anger and indignation, but it's not channeled a lot of times with like a more thoughtful consideration for it. And you have this company that's empire building. And if I'm looking at, if I'm putting myself, my, you know, myself in their seats, I'm saying, would I rather manage a smaller number, number of close, tight knit, fully bought in and committed relationships with shop owners and other businesses to, to. To have a significant portion of my allocation and be able to guarantee that that allocation is being used up by these companies because they're breaking and they're Doing other things or would I rather try to figure out how to manage this massive distribution network of all these different shops and everything? The noble thing to do, the thing you and I would like to see everybody do. And I mean, this is. Yes, I want to see like LCS's and like every city worth anything and getting some amount of supply to be able to satiate demand. It doesn't surprise me that that's not the direction it looks like it's going to in that's, you know, because I think it's just a, A more business logical path that they're, that they seem to be kind of, I think, unable to. To open to new direct accounts and then, and then. But it could, it could prove to be really myopic because I, I do believe the LCS is sort of the heartbeat of the hobby. Yeah, I'm not worried about getting it. I'm going to get it because this store is what they want, tech experience and all that. It just will take getting them here and we'll get them here. I'm not. So it's less about my store. I just speaking. I know that's always the complaint. And it's an interesting thing, you know, for all as much the, the consumer as anything is. It's. It is an interesting thing. I had this discussion. I said last week on the show, Mike, yeah, you want to go to Walmart and the shelves to be stocked, but those scalpers also keep your prices high, so, you know, your card's worth more. It's interesting. It's an interesting dichotomy of variables that play into all this. Yeah, there's stages of grief for a lot of people who used to really enjoy opening a lot of packs. And they were able to do it, you know, five years ago, six years ago, they could open maybe their, maybe their wax budget was $5,000 a year and that meant that they could open 20. 20 hobby boxes. Yeah. You know, a case of their favorite product, Topps Chrome. And now they, they're looking at it and they're like, this gets me like four boxes and the pack odds are worse than they ever were before. I just got absolutely cooked on my 1200 hobby football chrome box and got $40 worth of cards out of it. And it's, and it's, it's. It is literally stages of grief. Because for a lot of people, I mean, it's. This is a hobby, but it's like way deeper than that. This is like. Yeah, it's like the thing they do that keeps them going Every day Beyond whatever their 9 to 5 might be or their other situations in life. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of frustration and I, I do understand it. I don't, I hardly rip anything anymore. And I love opening packs and I love doing it with my kids, but it's, it's very tough to justify. Yeah. As we close out here, Teapot, does the industry stay hot? Is it Teflon at this, at this point? I mean, you know, you and I are both vested in it, so we, we hope so. But like, you know, we got a so, so economy. Yeah. I don't think it's as bad as they say. I also think there's, there is some negative things. You know, you've got AI taking over the world. We can't solve all that. That's a loaded question, but maybe just grounded in that. Where is the hobby going? I look at this, people ask me this question a lot. And it's a question we discuss internally a lot as we're trying to grow everything we're doing. What are our risks? There's existential threats, world war, financial collapse, US dollar collapse, all this stuff. There's a lot of stuff happening in global geopolitical sphere that's pretty dang concerning. I, I try to stay just enough on top of it to be aware of it, but also to acknowledge, you know, go back to some serenity prayer and be like, I can't control it. I don't know, I just got to pray and hope it, hope it keeps going. So then you pivot into the, the, the normal wave of things. We've got, you know, 100 plus years of a pretty consistent pattern of ups and downs with the economy and the stock market and jobs and everything. And so you sort of see a trajectory there. And I think that's the thing you can, that's really the only thing you can map against. And right now this is an industry that has something like less than one in. I don't even know what the statistic is. It's like one in 50 sports fans bought or sold a card last year. They just were forecasting this. Fanatics was like forecasting their valuation on the primary market basically at $8 billion. The sneaker industry did 150 billion in 2024 and sports betting did 250 billion more than the stock market. So like in terms of total dollar moving around. So people look at it now and they're like, this is nuts. And this is heated. And every trade night we host is a pack Store that the fire marshal has to come to and clicker people in like it's the hottest club in town. The Nationals once again. I'm sure going to set record attendance numbers this year. Over a hundred thousand people coming and going over the four or five days and it's huge. We haven't even scratched the surface. Like people pack out the big house in Ann Arbor every Saturday during football season with 112,000 people. That's just one college football team of fanatics like Die Hards. So the more that starts to spread and become popular and I think it's exponential. It's not linear. It's exponential and we're already seeing it. That doesn't even touch on the global markets like Europe, Asia, Australia. These places are blowing up with popularity within the hobby. They're starting to open shops. David Adams is over in, in the Netherlands. Like PSA is opening over there. I don't believe we've even scratched the surface. I do. I think it is only going to get crazier from here and more and more ubiquitous and more popular and more considered cool and even financially savvy to be in the sports and trading card space. So I very bullish and optimistic. I agree. I'm putting my money where my mouth is too. So I'll say this. Go do a trade night at the National. I was there last year and talk about the money that's secondhand trade like the secondary market, the money that's not registered on the books. This is, this is way bigger than people realize. Hundreds of billions. I think already like if you got, I'm not so sure. There wasn't, you know, a certain country's GDP transacted just in secondary trades at the national last year. I mean it's a lot, you know, because that doesn't get estimate. I've tried to estimate how much money is in the room. It's. I don't even know. It's over a billion dollars worth of cards in, at the national, just in the, in the main show hall. And yes you have. I mean you probably experienced this at trade night last year. Maybe the part that blows my mind is I get like this 11 year old kid who walks up to me with a zion case full of cards and he's got $60,000 worth of cards in a case like sagging over his eyebrow and he comes up, he's like you buying, you know, and you want throwing the card in your face and saying like whatever or I've got some of my cards out, I've got my, you know, 300, you know, whatever. Shay Gil just Alexander on the table and he's like, he's like, we take 140 for that. I'm like, no. And he's just like, whatever. And they like there, there's a, there's a subterranean culture of this like young crowd that are like, they're grinders. They, they're, they're grinders and they're not afraid to, to come at you hard and negotiate and like push into things and holy cow, do they make, they make, they make some money. That's, that's. Dude, I've talked about that, that hundred thousand dollar case thing with the 12 year old. You know, I'm like pulling my cards out and then you know, like Chevy Chase, you know, not realizing he didn't have enough money, like stuffing it back in the wallet going, I'm not gonna do it. Our cars. This kid's got a twenty thousand dollar, you know, Tom Brady. I'm like, what is going on here? There's more kids with $100,000 cases and like anyway, it's crazy. All right, rapid fire for me. Really quick. I'm. Four quick things. We'll get you out of here. Most underrated player all time or now you can choose. Oh my gosh, that's such a good question. I mean I could go across sports, but in basketball. In basketball, I would say the two most underrated or undervalued relative to their greatness, I would say are Tim Duncan and Shaquille o'. Neal. I just don't. Their cards do not go for. They don't match the, the greatness that they've had. I still think that most all time great NFL cards are massively undervalued. Barry Sanders has finally started to see a lot of price appreciation and respect over the last 18 months or so. I bought a Terrell Owens precious metal gems for three $800 at, at the Fanatics Fest last year. I sold it for like 5,500 I think on Fanatics a little later. That's still like less than a quarter of what Alonzo Morning goes for. So I don't understand some of that stuff. No. And then within the modern like modern landscape, there's so many players across different sports who I think are undervalued. I think Shay Gil just Alexander gets a lot of unwarranted hate. I could rant about why Shea is exactly what the NBA needs and why the foul baiting is a thing, but is also. That's not his fault. He's Using the system just like Donovan Mitchell just did against my pistons in game four to put that at 2:2. So I think SGA is a breath of fresh air, two way player, highly efficient scoring threat that doesn't live at the three point line and just jack up threes in transition. And I love his game. I don't love free throws over and over, but I think Shai still is. Is very. I think Shane Jokic both are really undervalued. Yeah. Hey, you got mine. I was gonna say Jokic favorite product right now. My favorite product has always been Top Stadium Club because I love photography. It's the most important attribute to me on a card is a really iconic, awesome dramatic photo. Whether it's a portrait or a dugout shot or an action shot, I love good photography. Topps looks like they're slowly trying to kill stadium club and took a lot of my favorite things out of it this year, which really frustrated me. Trying to skew reduce baby skew reduction. I, I really, I love Topps Dynasty. I think it's an awesome product. I love Tops Dynasty. So I, I'd go Stadium Club and Dynasty. One car you'd buy today and maybe just either you personally, you kind of name some of the hot ones. So maybe just like what's. What do you. What, what, what would be an immediate purchase if I put it in front of you right now? I would move a lot of pieces in my collection to obtain a 2021 Gold Kaboom Berry Sanders. He only has one set with gold kabooms and it's that set and I've missed a couple and then I haven't seen them since. And it's definitely kind of a people lock it up type of card in a lot of cases, I think. So that's the one for my PC. Detroit lion running back, correct. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oklahoma State all time rushing leader. I mean this is all in my air, baby. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Barry Switzer with the famous quote about how, you know, you guys don't want to, you don't want to face the freshman Barry Sanders. Don't make sure Thurman Thomas doesn't get injured, you know, because Barry's better than he is and found a Barry Switzer like heads up the flag football in Woodstock here where my kids. Oh my God. So that's kind of cool. But yeah, Barry Sanders would be that card. Specifically would be a card. I would, I would move a lot of stuff to get my hands on. And then if I were looking at one player right now who I'd be targeting if you're looking for like I think no guarantees but I feel very guaranteed price bump. It would be honest. He's about to get traded. It's going to happen in the next couple of months and when he does, it's probably going to be to a contender and his card market is probably going to go up 30 to 70%. Like just based on that trade announcement. Yeah. Gotta get it on. Not financial advice, but I did buy quite a bit of Giannis anticipating that teapot. You've been very generous going over the time. I appreciate that. We'll do part two. We'll at least say nod and hello at the national, maybe grab a beer, maybe, you know, film something, if not five minutes. But really appreciate. I love what you guys are doing. I love your, your takes. You're adding a lot of value to the industry. A lot of smarts, a lot of intelligence and couldn't be more appreciative for you coming on. Thanks, Ryan. Yeah, thanks for reaching out. It's been a blast. Hey, guys, you want to find us Collector Nation? The CollectorNation.com got lots of things brewing. So does market movers and SCI teapot. You know where to find those guys. We'll have links to all their stuff in the show notes. We appreciate them for coming on. There's room for everybody in this hobby. Hey, it's all growing fast. Wild crazy right here on Collector Nation. Thanks for tuning in to the show. Be sure to follow us on your go to podcast platform and catch the full video episode over on YouTube. Visit us@collectornation.com and follow Ryan on Instagram at Ryan Alford. Now get out there and collect yours.