Why The Hobby Is NOT In A Bubble!!

In our massive country, there are card collectors throughout the land participating in the hobby. There's Mike of Junk Wax Hero and Greg of Midlife Cards. And while distance may separate them, here is where they come together to talk cards. Hey, buddy. It is the week of the National. This is our Zebra Bowl. It's time to beat our chests, put on our capes, and fly ourselves to Chicago. Is the national this week? I hadn't heard. I know, but we're not going to talk about the National. At least not. That's not the topic we're talking about today. Right. We've. We've out talked. We've outdone. We've. What's the word I'm looking for? We've talked, over talked. The National. Yu-Gi-Oh the national is a topic, but the national is certainly not the only thing happening. And. And there's a lot happening in the hobby, as always, and we. We want to. We want to talk about some offshoots of it. And I want to get into that, but I got to tell you a quick story. Yu-Gi-Oh I'm officially old now. As we're recording this. We're recording this actually on Sunday. Usually we record this the day before. It comes out the night before. It's very topical, very fresh. It is. And, Yu-Gi-Oh it is the night before. But this, this week, the night before is my birthday. Yu-Gi-Oh Happy birthday, buddy. Thank you. And so we'll be. I'll be hanging out with some family, so we're doing it a day early also, with some of the travel and packing and all that stuff. This makes the most sense. So, wait, did you turn 47? I am turning 47. Yu-Gi-Oh So I got almost six months on you. You know who I share a birthday with? I'll give you a hint. It's a famous athlete, and it is maybe the famous athlete that is the most disliked in the entire sports world. And I'll give you one more hint. Alex Rodriguez. Yep. That's hilarious. That was enough. I share a birthday with Alex Rodriguez. And in fact, you know what we need to do? We should do it right now because we're going to forget. Well, as soon as we're done, remind me. Today is Adam's birthday. So we've gota. We've got to text Adam Happy Birthday. No, no, no, you don't get to do it first. I remembered, so I get to do the first one. Hold on, I'm. I'm doing it on air because I gotta beat you, Adam. I created. I created a calendar alert for myself for this morning, and it never went off. So, Adam, you're on my calendar. In fact, you're on my calendar twice. Because I went in, added you to my calendar, and then saw you already there, and for some reason, I wasn't reminded. Sorry, Adam. I'm ashamed. So here's why I actually feel old. It's not because I had a birthday or have a birthday. It's because my daughter Lucy is a very exceptional soccer player, and she is in the middle of the start of the season, the start of practicing. And so getting back into shape is. Is a struggle because you got to go from, like, hanging out to. And not that she's hanging out. She's always active, but so I was like, hey, let's go to the park and let's do some sprints. And she's like, you want to go do sprints with me? I was like, Yu-Gi-Oh dude. Let's go do some sprints. Like, I've sprinted before, you know? So we set up some cones, and we. We set up some stuff, and we start kind of getting loose, and she's doing this whole routine of, like, stretching and all this stuff, and I, you know, I kind of do a little bit of this. And so we kind of start with just a jog, and then we do a jog, then a sprint, and then a jog, and then a more sprint, and then just a sprint, and bang. My hamstring went, oh, my God, I'm so old. Dude. You are. I'm so old. Yu-Gi-Oh I think Adam also is 47. I think all three of us are 47. And Jeremy is a little older than us. I think he's a little older. Yu-Gi-Oh but he. But he has younger kids. But Darren. Darren returned to collecting, is like six months older than me, so he must have a similar birthday time to you. Yu-Gi-Oh Anyways, okay, so the. The topic. The point of today is not how old we are and that we feel old, although we're about to feel really old walking around for a couple of days on concrete floors. The. The point of today is, you know, there's all this talk about us being in a bubble in the hobby, and, you know, I. Everybody, we're in a bubble. We're in a bubble. We're in a bubble. And what if we're not? Is it possible, Mike, that we're actually not in a bubble? Yu-Gi-Oh So I've been saying this just at a very high level for, I don't know, three plus months, maybe six months, where I'm not convinced that we're actually in a bubble. And that doesn't mean this is not financial advice. I'm not telling people go out and buy cards, they're going to keep going up. That doesn't mean that cards are, aren't going to go down again at some point. But a bubble bursts. The bubble of the COVID bubble burst. I almost had bursted the COVID Covid bubble from 2020 into 2021. That burst because it was based on people. There are so many different things that drove that bubble that aren't in existence now. And I think, I feel like where we are right now is more sustainable than it was in five years ago, six years ago at this point. And again, not to say that it one-of-one go down because there could be a pullback, but a pullback is not a burst. It's not a, you know, this, this thing was fraudulent. This thing was whatever. I don't think we're in a bubble right now. And I don't think things are going to burst. I mean, I, I, I hear you and I don't even dis, I don't think, I disagree with that. I think there's a lot of points in there that are very worthy points. And, and I do think that we're in a better place. And one of the reasons we're in a better place is I think things are hypothetically at least, more stable because there's more people involved. Like when there's, you know, three houses in a community and one of them goes up for a crazy price. It's, it's, you know, the, the num. It's a, say it this way. A stock versus a mutual fund. A mutual fund is more stable because there's, it is spread across more things. And when there's more people in the hobby, I think what that does is it creates more stability in the market. But some of the things that have been happening are insanely happy. Like, like, you know, Jordan cards doubling in a short period of time. I mean, Darren bought a card at trade night, the Four Collectors trade night in Strongsville. He bought a Jordan card and it's like rippled since then. And that was in April. Yu-Gi-Oh like that, that, that doesn't seem, I mean, certainly not sustainable now. Will it have shot up and then level or will it have shot up and then pull back a little bit? Will it go back to below what it was? I don't know any of that, but it, I mean, I don't know. Tell me why you think that it's a pullback instead. Well, there will have a pullback there could be some miniature bubbles within this. I don't know what we're calling this a growth period. There might be a, there might be a Jordan bubble. I'm not saying that there isn't a mini bubble within like the iconic card boom. Could part of that be a bubble? And I know Leighton Sheldon's probably going to get pissed because I keep mentioning the card I bought from national last year, 2009 top Steph Curry PSA 8. I paid 800 for that. That is closing in on $3,000 in a year, just under a year. I bought it on August 2nd of last year and it's closing in on $3,000. Almost 4x what I paid for it. And so there's, there's a lot of questions about repacks and is could there be a point where this boom gets the industry regulated, which would cause I think a pretty large pullback where there would be have impacts to tops and Fanatics, would have impacts to repackers, would have impacts to a lot of the infrastructure for this current boom. But the infrastructure is what's driving it and the infrastructure is only getting stronger. And if you think about PSA and the whole grading industry is in such a boom period that PSA is growing rapidly. They're up to almost 3 million cards per month graded while not taking in very many new ones. But I see videos and I hear see things on social media every day where people are just holding on to cards, waiting for them to come back. And it's not like in 2021 where the, they, they fell way behind and then it was part of the massive burst of the bubble. I think that they have to be ready. They and CGC and SGC and BGS have to be ready for this bubble to continue. There's been a slowdown in submissions because there had to be, but it's just going to come roaring back in my opinion. I think the only thing that's going to crash this, and I say crash, would be a broader economic crash. And you're looking at, if there's a crash, you're looking at like a 30% reduction at like a, that's a big reduction. That's not a burst necessarily. That is a big pullback. But Even at a 30% reduction, the gains that we've seen in cards are still huge. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, I mean again, I, I all. Everything you're saying is logical. Everything that you're saying makes sense to me. But with something goes up as much as it's gone up, I just go but historically, whenever I've seen something do this, it, you know, let me, let me throw another wrinkle into this conversation. We're about to go to the national and we're about to see some of the highest priced stuff we've ever seen. And especially early in the week. See a lot of people say you got to be there the first day or two because otherwise it'll be Beckett over. Well, maybe, but, but I, I think that there's a very good chance that early in the week this stuff will be priced through the roof because they've got like 55 days to find one person that's willing to pay that price. So I think the prices are going to be high and I think if somebody's not selling, then they'll start coming off their price. But the first day or two they're going to probably hold closer to that high sticker price. But what's going to happen as, as this is released on Tuesday is today they're going to be setting up in there. Tomorrow morning they will all be set up, they'll all be ready to go and they're going to start walking around, buying stuff from each other, bringing it back to their case and putting the retail price that they just bought it for, plus 20%. And that can't go on forever. And so one of the things that I'm curious about is how will the hobby adapt if dealers continue to buy from each other, from showcases and then mark it up and somebody's paying all this money and they've been saving up all year to go buy their 48, 49 leaf. Jackie. And there are a lot, there are going to be a lot of them in the room and they're going to be big price tags on them. People are going to say, Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh I'm overpaying, but it's going up so fast. You know, this, this price today will be a deal in six months. Is, is your thoughts on that? Yu-Gi-Oh I agree. And just to go back for one second, I do want to say back when Fanatics bought tops and they said they wanted to 10x the hobby, everybody laughed, everybody scoffed at them. It was the dumbest thing. It seems so silly, but you gotta kind of give them credit in some ways. I know people are throwing tomatoes at the screen, as you like to say, but they kind of have, they have created in a big way this boom where you have athletes and celebrities who are talking about cards and you're seeing it in mainstream news and it's all over the place, which is causing Part of the cause of this big boom, which I thought was the dumbest thing I'd ever think. You're going to 10x the hobby? Sure, buddy, but it's kind of happened. And Yu-Gi-Oh I think that at some point there will be a pullback where dealers are stuck with things that they overpaid for. Which is. Which always. It's just like buying stocks that you overpaid for. Just like the economy eventually retracts. Is that the word I'm looking for, that there's always a pullback in the economy? I'm not saying it's on the verge in either case, but at some point these things are inevitable. And dealers who are going to the National, I don't think it will happen at the national because people go to the national intending to spend money and you go there with cash and you say, I've got all this cash. I don't want to come home with all this cash, because then I don't know my wife's gonna expect me to spend it on her. But people will overspend at the National. And then inevitably there's a bit of a pullback, because there usually is after the national, as baseball season winds down and the NBA season starting and the NFL season starting, there's a bit of a pullback, usually. And then we'll start seeing content creators saying the hobby is crashing, the hobby's crashing. And then Christmas will approach and, and it'll go crazy again, and then tax season and etc. Etc. One of the things that I think is interesting is I, I, John Wade, bog fan, does this thing where he tracks the market and then I go on like every six months with them and we look at his charts together and we kind of talk about it and it's, it's fun. I, I like looking at those charts and stuff. And one of the things that happened last year is in like September, October, the market went way up. And John was like, this is really weird. Why is it going up in September, October? And my hypothesis was because a bunch of dealers just sold so much inventory that now they needed to buy. And the reason, where are they going to buy? If they. You, where are they going to buy? And so I think a lot of them are buying from auction houses now. I actually prefer a different route of doing. I mean, that brings up a whole thing is where are dealers sourcing their cards? And I will say that if you were looking to sell your cards, you, you have some options. But one of them is if you're looking to sell your Collection or part of your collection, your whole collection that you reach out to our buddy Chris Sewell at SewellsportsCards CIDCards.com Chris is a fair guy. He's going to treat you well. And his business has been booming like a lot of dealers. But the thing about Chris is he's the kind of person that's not going to take advantage of someone. He's going to treat them well, he's going to give them fair prices and then he's going to turn around and charge reasonable prices and fair prices. And you know, he, he did a video that posted on Saturday about the cost, the real cost of grading and, and the upsides and downsides and everything about grading, which I thought was interesting, which he has his YouTube content links on his webpage cidcards.com he's got links to some of his ebay inventory on his website as well. So if you're looking to sell, check out Chris Sewell. Again, collector, investor, dealer, not in that order. What am I forgetting about Chris Sewell that we could say here? The key word I always say is transparent and fair. Those are the keywords for Chris. Yu-Gi-Oh Chris is the best, obviously. So I want to go back to what you were saying before we started talking about Chris and it's something I've never really given a whole lot of thought to. But you make a really good point in a roundabout way, which is that dealers, there are so many dealers now and there are so many high end dealers that maybe there aren't enough people selling to dealers. And dealers now feel like they need to go and buy from other dealers, they need to buy from auction houses, they need to buy from ebay in order to have enough inventory to quench the sate, the hunger of us collectors. And that's a really interesting thought that, you know, I know that dealers are buying from dealers, but it hadn't occurred to me that they had to because demand is so high and yet people are selling at a much lower rate relative to demand. So something that, you know, one of the podcasts I really like listening to is Garrett of Ballpark Memories. Him and his dad obviously are doing their business of, of being dealers. And on their last podcast and I mentioned this, actually, I guess it hasn't come out yet, I was like, don't you listen to my podcast? But we switched weeks, so I recorded already with David Chase. So on Saturday on the Sports Card Clubhouse, there's going to be an episode of Sports of Midlife Card Chase with me and David Chase and we talk about this. And. And one of the things that is really interesting in that conversation that him and his dad, that Garrett and his dad had was that they are having dealers buy Jordan rookies and Jordan cards at full comp from their case. Full comp. Because the Jordan market is going up so fast. At one point in that episode, Garrett said, I would make more money right now if I just sat on the couch for a month and waited a month to sell my cards. Instead of selling my cards today, reinvesting to buy more inventory and then trying to sell those cards, he goes, because they're going up so fast, I'm selling them. And then a week later, I'm buying the cards back at more than I sold it for a week ago because of how fast Jordan. And he cited some specific players. He said, Jordan, Satchel Page, Jackie Robinson, and the Brady rookies, he said, are just going up so fast, you literally. They can't keep them in stock. You and I talked about this last week. That's what you're thinking of, I think. Is that what I'm thinking of? Yu-Gi-Oh So. So with that said, buying at full comp today from another dealer. See, but. But this is. This is actually an interesting point when. When you go and you buy at an auction house, you know, we're both partnered with CIA auctions. You know, I think that they do a great job. When I go and I bid on something on CIA auctions a good amount of the time, when I don't one-of-one a card, I see that card go up on ebay from a dealer. A week later, they are buying at auction houses. You know, there. One of my favorite dealers in the hobby is Tim Payne. Tim Payne is not setting up at the national this year, and that's a whole different story. I. I texted back and forth with him for 45 minutes the other day. He was one of my favorite dealers at the National. Not setting up. I bought my 41 play ball, Ted Williams, from him at the National a couple years ago. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yu-Gi-Oh but he's. He's got great stuff. He's got fair prices. And there were several times where I was at Strongsville, and I'm looking at his case at a card that I like, and I'm looking up comps and I go, that card sold in October, that sold at an rea auction. That's the exact same card. I think that Tim bought this after the national, and now he's got it in his case at whatever the market is at that point. He buys quality stuff and he holds it until the big shows come up. We're bidding against dealers. So in, in, in a roundabout way, what you're doing when you're bidding at an auction is you're bidding at tomorrow's prices minus the dealer markup because the dealers are buying. They're sourcing so much of their inventory there. Yu-Gi-Oh So what's happening? And I know we've talked about this so many times, but every time we talk about it, we cover more and more ground of it. And I feel like I, my, my thinking on this evolves and I learn a lot from it every time we talk about it. And what happens is you and I will scrape our YouTube pennies together and we'll, Yu-Gi-Oh we'll get a, There'll be a 400 doll auction and we will be like, okay, well I think I can do this. I think I can afford this. I'm really excited. I'm gonna put in a snipe bid for $407. And this is, this is gonna get it. This is a 300 card. I'm gonna get it at 407. But somebody outbids us at 408 and shocks us, pays way over comps like we were willing to, but who knows how high they were willing to go and then come to find out it's a well heeled dealer. $400 is nothing to them. And then they reprice it at 679 the next day. And this is, it's, it's frustrating because now I want that carton. Do I want to pay, let's say 575? They're going to come down on it a little bit. They're going to take the profit. Do I want to pay 5 7? I was just stretching to go to 407. Like I felt like I could get that in the high threes. Now do I go to 600 on it? That's ugly. That sucks. But, but here's the thing. So, so now that new comp is higher, they're trying to charge their, their margin on top of that. Right. And, but, but isn't, isn't what that is? Isn't that overpaying and then overcharging and then somebody missed out, so then they're overpaying which creates the new comp. Isn't that the, a big part, not the only reason, but a big part of why the prices are rising so fast is there's the fomo. You did miss out. Now you have another opportunity. You overpay. The dealer made their profit and Then the prices are going crazy. That's not, that's not, how is that not a bubble? How is that what's happening, what we're describing right there? Not a bubble. It goes back to the infrastructure that I mentioned. The infrastructure is in place for people to do that very, very easily now. And just ignoring that, Yu-Gi-Oh is bidding on cards. Bots are bidding on cards. You have the infrastructure. And I, I, I laugh at vaults. We all laugh at vaults, because who needs vaults? Well, these dealers do because they can buy a card on ebay from a vault and then immediately flip it for 25% more than they paid for it and never touch the card. It's just from their vault, it goes into this vault. They can buy it in a, some auction house and it just goes into a vault. It's, it's magical to me. I don't understand it. I'm not explaining it well because I don't understand it. But the, these vaults and the PSA offers program and everything that's out there that makes it easy for people. You can now buy a card on ebay. You can add PSA grading to it. And PSA is grading those ebay cards faster than they're grading other cards. Yep. They're only, they're $50 per card. If you're buying on eBay, it's 49.99 to add PSA grading to goes to PSA. PSA grades it much faster than they're grading other cards. I assume there's some sort of service level agreement with ebay, just like there is with the authenticity guarantee program with psa. And then PSA grades it, they put it in their vault, and then one of their partners can buy it back. Or you can sell it via the PSA program PSA eBay account and never touch that card, not once buy it on ebay. It gets sent automatically to PSA and then PSA grades it and sells it for you. It's the infrastructure makes things fly, makes things move much faster, much easier for everybody. And more and more people are getting into it. See, there was a time where people bought cards to hold the card, look at the card, kill the card, and now it's a commodity. Now it's like a barrel of oil or a, you know, a bushel of wheat or whatever. You know, it's, it has changed. But see, I've used the vault and I've used the vault. Not necessarily because I want to buy it and then turn it, but because I, I get out of my 8.25% sales tax. And on a $500 card, 8.25% sales tax is another pretty cool car that I could buy. 42 bucks if I put it in the vault and I leave it there for a minute, then I, I miss out on that and I keep more of my money and then I wait to ship it to me or, you know, or maybe if I, I, I have a lot of friends that are heavy in collecting. A lot of friends that most of their collection, most of it is in the vault and then they'll go, hey, you know, like there's a deal, they want to sell a card to a fellow collector and they go, hey, Yu-Gi-Oh I can get it, but it's going to be like, you know, a month because I got to order it from the vault and it takes a while to get here. Like, I like having my cards in hand. So. But there's also the safety thing when you're talking about the amount of money, like at this last Fanatics Premier auction, I mean there were some, there were, there were modern cards going for like hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wouldn't want that in My House. I don't want to hold, I want to hold the card, but I don't, it doesn't feel safe to have that much value of something in My House. If I owned a Monet, I wouldn't hang it on the wall. I would be scared that someone was going to come and take it. I'm going to venture into something that I don't know enough about to speak intelligently and people are going to comment. You don't know enough about anything to speak intelligently. I get it. But several years back, Collectible was a company that was doing fractional sales of cards and people would mail their big cards to collectible and people would sell off portions of the card to people and get some, some money. I don't know, I don't know how it all works, but those people thought that their cards were fine and now collectible is, or somebody is selling those off on behalf of collectible. And the people who owned them or believed that they owned them based on the terms at collectible are left holding the bag. They don't get anything from it, apparently. And so I, I worry. But then you say, okay, I'm going to put it in a, in a safe deposit box at a bank. Well, that something could happen with that too. Something could happen with your cart literally anywhere. And you just have to assess what's the safest. And it's probably like a, I don't know, a massive vault with one of the biggest companies in the industry. But who knows in transporting the cards, which we'll talk about soon. But I have a, I'll give you a real life example of something that I'm literally processing through as we record this. I have a Blackbeard card. Now my Blackbeard card is in an SGC5. It's like a $6,500 card, thousand dollar card. I but more than that, it's not about that. It's a six thousand dollar card which is like one of, if not the biggest card in my whole collection. The, the bigger problem is there's only like 30 of them and there's only like five or 10 that are this nice. It's like something I don't, I can't, nothing can happen to this. So on the, the SGC slabs, I like sgc but their slabs are brittle, dude. They like crack really easily. And there's a little crack kind of at, at like where it got cut. There's a little, there's a little shatter mark and it kind of bugs me. And it doesn't bug me so much that it bugs me. But if someday down the road somebody might be Beckett by it if I were to move it, which I'm not anticipating, do it. But this is just how I think. I think 20 years down the road, not today. And I'm like I should take it with me because I don't want to mail it to SGC and then have SGC re slab it and hope that they don't lose it, hope that they don't break it in that and then mail it back. So I'm like I probably should take it to the national, give them the 20 bucks or whatever it is to re slab the card and then have them put it in some box behind that wall and then hopefully it doesn't get lost. And then they re slab it and then they mail it back. Like if they said to me for $200, Greg, we will re slab it and hand it back to you in an hour, I would hand them the $200 but I don't want that card flying around the country. And that's just a five or six thousand dollar card. That's not some of these, you know, like Hannes Wagner cards and stuff. That whole part of it freaks me out too. I don't know. Yu-Gi-Oh And you know the $6,500, if you were in the market for that card today, would you, would you pay 6,500 for it? If you didn't already have it? Absolutely. Yu-Gi-Oh Okay. I don't remember what you paid for it, but for some reason, like 2400 sticks in my brain. Okay, so here's what happened. I bought a PSA2 for about, it was a year and a half ago. $420 for a PSA2? Yu-Gi-Oh That, that card has gone up so much that the PSA2, I think, is about now a $3,500 card. Okay. Strongsville, I have a collector friend. Not a collector friend, a friend. And he is on the, he is a PSA set registry guy. And he has three blackbeards. He had two SGC 5s and an SGC 4, but he didn't have one in a PSA holder, so he wanted one in a PSA holder for his registry. So I said, here's what we'll do. I will. Because, you know, you never know if you send something for a crossover whether it'll get a grade or, you know, is it trimmed? Like, who knows? Even if it's not, you don't know what's going to happen. So I traded him my PSA2 plus several cards, plus a few thousand dollars for his SGC5. And so what do I have into it? I mean, I, I, I have the $420, which resulted in a little over $3,000 in trade value. Plus I, I probably have $2,500 into the card at this point for the five. But I think because of maybe, maybe $2,000 in cash trade value of what I paid for those things for that. And I think it's, I think it's, I think it's a $6,500 card right as we stand right now. And I would pay $6,500 if I didn't have it. I would pay more than $6,500 if I didn't have it. So your PSA 2, 9X in a year, a year and a half. And that's what I'm encountering with these iconic cars. I just finished off my iconic card list, top 10 yesterday, Saturday. And I'm encountering a similar thing, not quite to that extent where it's 9x, but like the Fleer Jordan. I want that card. It's now going for $5,000. It's more than doubled in like, I don't know, six months, 12 months, Babe Ruth playing days. Gowdy cards. A 33 Gowdy. Way, way high. Jackie Robinson's outrageous prices. And it's, it's frustrating. It's It's. It's nice for the cards I already have, but I wish we could have waited until I owned all these cards. Let me have these cards. So, like, The Wilt Chamberlain Fleer is still very, very high on my list, and I want it very badly. And that one is approaching unapproachable. Oh, Yu-Gi-Oh The. The. The. The leaf, Jackie, is now unapproachable. Unapproachable. The. The gouty roots are unapproachable. Like, there's. And so then you start to scramble and you start to go, oh, I got to get the ones that I can. And it's like, well, it. At some point, you just have to let some stuff go. You just. You can't chase everything and freak out and panic. You just have to go, that one's not going to happen. Instead, I'm going to focus on the things that are within my attainability. And that is so difficult. And I think that's part of what's happening with the market, too, is people are panicking, saying, if I don't buy it now, I'll never get it. So I'm just going to buy that one. I'm going to liquidate this stuff. And then there are the other cards that are flooding the market right now. The Alkalines and the Harmon Killer Brews are a really good deal because those cards are flat. Those cards are flat. And. And maybe that's the way to go. I mean, that is a beautiful reprint. It's a counterfeit. It's a counterfeit. Yu-Gi-Oh So I'm just holding up for listeners. I'm holding up a counterfeit Fleer Jordan that a viewer mailed to me. And. And my friend Oliver also gave me one, I think. No, it wasn't Oliver I bought. I gave one to him. I bought a lot of Jordans four, five years ago on ebay. And the seller included this in it and wrote a note saying, included a counterfeit Jordan just because. So I actually have two counterfeit Jordans. Why? I don't know. Is it. Do you think it's bad to have those circulating? I mean, absolutely, Yu-Gi-Oh Don't you feel like you should do, like, write on the back of it or something that says fake or something just to protect someone in the future? I have a note to my wife. If anything ever happens to me, I have a. There's a file with everything she needs to know. And one of the things she needs to know is that the 286 FLIR Jordans are counterfeit. And it's in that file. I'm not doing anything with it. But like, there's a dealer at the local Portland card show, Portland, Maine card show, who sells these counterfeit Jordans, and he puts a price tag of $200 on them. And then so I said to him, hey, this is a counterfeit. And he said, right, that's why I put a C on the letter on a sticker on the back, so people would know it's a counterfeit. And I was like, that doesn't tell anybody it's a counterfeit. Nobody would know that. The C means counterfeit. You're pricing, you're pricing it not at a real car, but somebody, some mother or father could come up and say, oh, Yu-Gi-Oh this is a cool Jordan card. I'm going to buy this for my kid and pay you $200 for it. Would you let them do that? And he's like, well, no, no, I wouldn't let them do that. But then why do you have a price to $200? Well, you know, in case somebody wants to fill their Fleer set with a low grade counterfeit. And I said, well, who would do that, though? And it's clear that he would, he would sell somebody the Jordan Fleer counterfeit for 200 bucks, which to me is really scummy. I think it is unethical to sell a counterfeit card even if you announce that it's counterfeit, because you don't know what that person is going to do with it and who they're going to try to screw with it. So to me, I, I would, I mean, I'm not telling you what you should do, but I would probably throw that card in the garbage or cut it up because I don't want it to get in the hands of somebody down the road. It's just like preventing a future issue. I mean, and with the prices we're talking about and, and you know, we were talking a second ago about how the Jordan has gone up so much. You know, that's a junk wax card. Like there are thousands and thousands and thousands. But I also know that the demand is so high that even though the supply is so high that even cards in huge quantities could have huge value if the demand is bigger than the supply, which is the case with that card. I would like to have a Jordan, but there's no way on earth I'm gonna pay anywhere near the price that that card is going for right now. If there was a massive correction and I could get a Jordan and a five for, I don't know, 2,000 bucks. I'd probably do that. But, I mean, the price of that is so high, I just. I. I don't even. I don't have any interest at that price. I do. I definitely do. There are. There are a lot of cards out there that there's zero demand for that have very low pop. 1, 2 carton. 2 examples of the card in the population and nobody cares about except for, you know, one or two people who are after them. And so those cards, it's not. It's not just about population. It's about demand. And with the Jordan, like you said, there's massive amounts of demand for it, including for me. I want one. I'm not driving up the price because I'm not buying one. But I would love to. If the price were to come back down where it was a year ago, I'd be. I'd be buying. All right. I just had to grab a couple of cards. I've shown these before. Here is. I'm gonna hold up a beautiful, sweet cap. Flamingo. Yu-Gi-Oh And this. I mean, this is gorgeous card. Okay. Yu-Gi-Oh And I bought it for, like, $3. And you know how many are on the pop report? Not that many. You know how many are on Earth? Not that many. Not a lot of people want a Flamingo card. But I was thrilled to pick it up for three bucks. Rare, Not a lot of value, but you could flip that to the right person for, like, 20 or $30, too. Could I? I think. I don't know. Here is a Between the Ax Little Cigars card. I saw that, and I'm like, I have to have it. Well, I don't know who that guy is, but look at that image. Not a lot of these on the pop report. And it's a beautiful example. Nobody wants, like, that, Greg, if I could, I would. You know, not a lot of people can do that these days. But Yu-Gi-Oh you're right. I mean, there is. There. There are a lot of cards that are high pop with high demand, and there are a lot of cards with a really low pop and really low demand. But that's the beauty of the hobby. The hobby allows us to Yu-Gi-Oh the supply and the demand and the price that results from them and decide if it's something for them. And I decided that this Flamingo card was worth my $3, which is about half a gallon of gas in California. It's about three quarters of a gallon of gas here in Maine. Oh, well, that's good for you, man. I mean, we must, we must be having premium gas or something. That's got to be the reason. Yu-Gi-Oh your gas smells better. Well, do you know what a smog check is? I assume it's where they are checking how much the smog is accounting for in the sky. I don't know. I thought, see, I grew up with this. I. This last story and then we'll wrap this up. I thought this was just something they did everywhere. But when you have a card that's a car that's at a certain age, I don't know, it's like eight, eight years old and older. Every couple of years, to register your car, it has to go through basically a pollution test. And you take it to like an oil change shop. And what they do is they hook it up to a machine and they check the pollutant level of the car. And if the car has too many pollutants on it, you have to get it fixed to reduce the amount of pollutants before they'll let you register the car. And I, I went in the other day with my daughter's car. It's like, it's probably like a 10 year old car. And I paid my, my $80 for my smog check to be able to register the car. And I was just like, oh, you know, this is just part of having a car that's not new, you know. And then I was talking to Mookie and I was like, I went and got Lucy's car smogged. And she's. He's like, what's that? I told him, and I was like, you've never. You guys don't do smog checks. I don't even know what you're talking about. And I'm like, wait a second. Other people don't have to do this. This is just a California thing. He goes, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. We, in Maine, we have to have our car inspected every year before it can be registered for to make sure it's road ready. And the inspection only costs $15. You take it to, not to a gas station, but to like a service place, a garage. And the inspection itself only costs $15, which of course motivates a lot of garages to find things that are wrong with your car that they can then fix for you and charge you $1,500 or whatever before you can, because you can't. Your car's being held hostage. You can't register your car. No, sorry. You actually have to register your car first before you can have it inspected, I think. And then they, they inspect it and if it fails inspection, then they rip the sticker halfway off your inspection sticker, which is in the middle of your windshield. And if a police officer sees that your inspection sticker is ripped halfway off, car's got to come off the road. If I went to the doctor and the doctor said, we've got to remove your kidney, and I said, okay, if you got to take the kidney out, take the kidney on. This is going to be very expensive for you. But you're telling me I need to take the kidney out when I didn't really need to have the kidney removed. That seems like that would be wrong, wouldn't it? But when I go to a garage or I go to a auto place and they tell me, you know, if you don't get some more fluid put in your transmission, it's going to blow. But we'll do it for you for 350 bucks. Like that's legal. Even if I don't need new transmission fluid. Or maybe it's just kind of on the line. Like that doesn't seem cool to me. When there are areas of the world that I know nothing about and they tell me, you need this or the world is going to end, then I just do it. And it seems like there should be stuff in place to prevent that, does it? I mean, that doesn't seem like it's okay. The doctor's not going to remove my kidney if my kidney doesn't need removing. So why are they telling me I need transmission fluid when mine's actually fine? Wouldn't it be cool to be the reason that the world is ending though? Like, can you imagine standing around watching the world end with a bunch of strangers and being like, hey, I did this. That does not sound cool at all. That sounds, that sounds like beaver dream stuff. Oh boy. All right, well, guess what? In a couple of days, some real the shake your hand. I know you don't like hugs, but I'll hug you one-of-one just to make you uncomfortable. And it's a bro hug. Well, used to be a bro hug. Now it's not going to be a bro hug. Now it's going to be a real hug. I'll squeeze you tight, buddy. Okay? And we'll get to hang out. We'll look for some, some vintage pack wrappers, wax to that graded at some mysterious table somewhere inside. We don't know quite where though somewhere inside the national, we will, we will hunt for that wax wrapper. Sounds great. Looking forward to it. Greg. All right. See you very soon. We'll even probably eat a meal together. Sounds great.