You Are Gonna Learn Today! Season 6 Ep 1

Hello, and welcome to 2026. This is season six, episode one of the Ball Card Show, The Sports Podcast. For The Sports Collector, I'm Jason Otero. I'm Gary LeMaster. And we back, baby. We are. We are back. It was a nice little three-week break just to get our bearings. 2025 was a grind, man. Yeah. Yeah, it was. We have 48 straight episodes. We did. Each one of us maybe took one or two solo episodes while the other was on vacation or had something going on. We did 49 or 50 shows. We did 40 plus whatnot streams. Maybe 50 by the time it was all said and done. It was a year, man. Yeah, and we had all this free time left over. So much free time. It has been wild. A year ago, we decided to turn cameras on so that people could see us, and decided to actually put our content out there and make it as available as possible. And so far, it's been a wild ride. That's a fact. I think we're somewhere over three million views in a year between our platforms, which is a number I never thought I would hear. Nope. And that's including socials and all that. So all of you that's going to get to pinch a number. We're counting clips, too. We're not saying anything. What we're saying is, that's a number we never would have dreamed of. And more importantly, just the relationships we developed in the last year. Now that people know who we are, what we've been doing. And even in the last few months, it has been crazy because there's a lot of people that have seen us every week at their shows that they work at that are other dealers. And they just now stumbled onto the content, even though we have a banner that says podcast on it, that we've had at every show. But seeing people, even the last show, last weekend at Xenia, somebody's like, oh, you guys. Yeah. Yeah. So so that's been really weird. But we want to do some fun stuff today. We got a big update for the show. Some of you guys are not going to believe is going to happen. I'm going to make fun of an idiot. Also, not the same person, a different conversation. But this is this is a person that gets special treatment. I let him know we're going to try to make him famous this week. I had an opportunity to fix it. They didn't. So here we go with that. And then we're going to look back on 2026 and give our biggest wins, losses, perspective, things that we're focusing on for the next year. And they're probably the biggest lessons we learned as guys that sell cards for a living. Yep. You want to jump into this big one right away or, you know what, I'm going to get out of turn here. OK. Why don't you give everybody like as a as a as a zero entry here into the pool? You're you were talking to me about some things that January has a tendency to bring out in the hobby. Oh, yeah. And I'd like for you to start there and then we'll go to Jeff Wilson after that. OK, that works. So this time of year, if you've been in the hobby for a long time, especially if you're active on social media platforms, you see a couple of things that stand out between Christmas and the end of January almost every year. The first one is a good one. And a lot of times those those of us who have been around for a long time respond to it the wrong way. We get a lot of new people coming into the hobby. They either got some money for Christmas or somebody bought them a blaster box because they know they're a sports fan and it made them go look for their old stuff that they had when they were a kid. And then they hop on eBay and they see people trying to sell Jose Uribe error cards for twenty five hundred dollars. Right. And then they immediately jump on to Facebook or Instagram and they start asking questions that we've all seen 10,000 times have been answered 10,000 times in our immediate reaction is how could somebody be this stupid to ask this question? It's hard to remember. We all started somewhere. Those questions don't bother me as much as they used to. Here's the one that gets me, though, more than anything else. A lot of times those same people or people who have just had enough start to make this statement and it really, really frustrates me. So this may be a recurring theme in the show, but I want to call this translating bad hobby takes. The one I want to talk about today is a post I saw three times in the span of two hours in three different places by three different people. And that was I'm so sick of this hobby anymore. It's just not for kids anymore. How are kids supposed to afford any of this? Let me translate what they're actually saying. I can't afford this hobby. That's what they're actually saying. What they're actually saying is I want empty boxes for 50 bucks. That's what they're saying. This hobby has never been- And I want the hits to be worth 10 grand. Yes, yes. I want to pay as little as possible so I can rip stuff and I want when I hit something to be worth lots and lots of money. Those two things don't go together. This hobby has never been just for kids. Sorry, it never has been. Growing up in the 80s and going to shows at malls, there were seven or eight grown men for every kid walking around. You will go look at pictures of shows from the 60s. It was just grownups with the occasional teenager thrown in. Kids can still absolutely enjoy this hobby. One of my favorite things is seeing videos of kids opening a box of Big League or a flagship pack and hitting their favorite player. Those of us that do this for a living go, oh, it's only a dollar card. That kid is ecstatic that they hit that Aaron Judge. He's their favorite player. Kids have a blast in this hobby. I would go so far as to say that there are more kids involved in this hobby right now than at any point in the history of this hobby. Every single show you go to, there's at least one kid for every two or three adults. At least. They're working hard. A lot of times they know more about this than a lot of you adults do. Miss me with the, this hobby isn't for kids anymore. This hobby isn't for people who don't have any money. That's a true statement, but that's not just kids. Yeah, sorry, there's my rant. That was a little bit of a rant. So here's what I would say to like, as you see all these people that are new to the hobby, this is the time when Facebook is more toxic than ever. Oh God. Yes. Hey, I'm getting back into the hobby. I opened a pack and hit this card. Now here's what we know. There are people who are putting that in there and they actually mean that and they're just excited and like, so for example, sports cards nonsense has a 400 and some thousand people in there. Arguably the most toxic comments I've ever seen in my life regarding the hobby. And there's some, there's some, there's some shady groups out there, but, um, people will be like, Hey, I hit this and they just get eviscerated and they're going to be done after one box because other people that are mad about the same thing you said or are so upside down cause they were believed that ripping wax was the model for some type of business or whatever. They're cooked. Um, so don't be a jerk to people new in the hobby. You know, you have an option to other than like ripping them. You could just like a photo or do nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Don't be a jerk in transparency. You're not good at this. I'm not. I'm better than I used to be. I used to be the guy who felt like he needed to say something to every stupid thing that he saw. It felt like it was my job to correct all the stupid in the world. It's grown a lot in the last five minutes, Gary, a lot in the last five minutes. I'm really proud of you. I'm not saying that I'm perfect at it, but I'm better than I used to be. I would agree. I would agree that you have improved, uh, people that don't like this, like us are going to have a heyday with that because they think that's all we do, which is not true. That's all right. Which is not true. We try to offer value. We're going to talk about that a little bit more, but let's jump into this Jeff Wilson story. You ready? Offering value. We got some exciting stuff. Obviously we've talked about this. Everyone's talked about it. Ad Nauseam, the Beckett acquisition by collectors. And then we have this crazy story where a letter is written from a congressman to the FTC and what's going to happen with that. Well, right when this deal was announced the day before or the day of Jeff Wilson announcing his onsite PSA submissions, remember same parent company, right? He's thrilled. He's excited. And Jeff does what he always does. He takes to socials to say how excited he is. I'm just going to read this so I don't mess it up. Gary, make sure that we got this up on screen. I really hope collectors makes Beckett great again. First off, anyway, the excitement of getting a new Beckett price guide in the mail was a highlight of my week as a 10 year old. I was absolutely obsessed with collecting as a kid and Beckett was the brand I most associated with that experience. I would love to see Beckett restored to its prominent decades past. I truly hope collectors does that. Now, there is not a word that was spoken in there that I would disagree with. And I think the old heads, the people that are always trolling Jeff, people like us that do that quite a bit, the words themselves in that paragraph, there's no problem with there's a problem though. And it's that we all have seen this movie before one year ago with a brand that had more growth and was heading in a different direction with SGC. And we've covered that a lot. They were turned into a parts car. As we know now, one month later from this Beckett announcement, PSA is back even further up. Turnaround times last I saw over 180 days, but nobody knows really what that means. So Jeff makes this post. Everybody loves to hate on Jeff. I'll give him credit in that. If tomorrow he decided that every post was going to be the most thoughtful post in the hobby, he's still going to get ripped, right? So this is not me. I understand that Gary. I understand. I'm just laying the groundwork here. Okay. Yep. So he makes that comment. I cannot wait to say something because I'm so frustrated that Gary and I had even talked about, you know, with monetization, like 2026, we want to partner with some brands, but the thought of partnering with Beckett that was starting to see a little bit of growth again was a big, like that was something we really wanted to do was go after that as a potential partner for an alternative solution degrading, right? But you have a legacy brand. So I'm bummed out a little bit selfishly, but I also, as a collector, wanted Beckett to emerge as a competitor. I wanted to see that happen. So all I did was comment on this, Beckett is going to get the SGC treatment button. And I put a little arrow and it got a bunch of likes and I was like, I bet Jeff sees that maybe not. Jeff comments. Jeff knows we're alive. Jeff knows we exist. Sometime around this too, he referenced Uncle Terry and said, Uncle Terry only buys his cards at Cards HQ, which honestly, that's a pretty good clap back. But no, he doesn't. Also. All right. So I post that in. Jeff goes on. I sure hope that or I sure hope that doesn't happen. Collectors buy SGC because they were a threat to PSA. This is different. I don't think Beckett was that threat to PSA. So hopefully they'll blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just replied, willing to put a wager on it? Like an unfiltered interview if this happens to Beckett over the next six months. So here's how this is going to work. If Jeff replies to me, what I'm saying is if Beckett goes down like SGC with their submissions, we're right. If Beckett goes up, you're right. But six months from now, let's put a bet on this and see what happens. So here's what happened. Here's the wager. I just threw it out into the ether to see what happened, expecting to be ignored. And I said, hey, if Beckett is up in six months, we will wear cards HQ merch on the podcast. If Beckett is down like we're expecting them to do, then you will come on the ball card show and do an unfiltered interview. And I mean, we're going to ask questions. He messages me, he's game. So let me pull up because I got to do receipts in case Jeff changes his mind here. No backing out, Jeff. No backing out now. You have receipts. I said, what do you think? I think it'll be fun. He said, I'm game. Jim rate shows Beckett greatest 74,000 cards in November, sports and non-sports. How about we measure that? He said, if I win, I'll come on your show and claim my victory while we're wearing the gear. So he wants his face on there too, which is going to be hard for us if that happens. But that's the deal. And then he says, if you win, you can ask me whatever no holds barred. That's where we want to invite some of you as listeners to submit questions to ask Jeff. And we will absolutely honor that. Also props, Jeff, you know that we have not been anything less than probably the kindest word would be critical of the way you do things sometimes. And to be willing to step into that arena without the level of control that a lot of times you have when you're doing interviews, props, man, I'll give you props for that. I would agree. I wasn't expecting him to be interested in this. I thought he would say no way or honestly just ignore us. But the only thing we counter back with was we prefer to stick with sports for a couple of reasons. That's our world that we live in and we want an accurate number of what's happening with a sports card market. And there's so much demand in the non-sport TCG and all that, that I think anybody willing to grade a slab with 180 day wait time is going to get some submission. So I think that sports one gives us a better picture. He said, sure, that's fine. The only caveat is if the FTC investigation shuts it down, obviously the deal's off. So Jeff, we're tracking that. We're going to watch that number. I think he was shooting for April. So in April, we're going to see how many sports cards were submitted and boy, I hope we get an interview. We'll see you in April one way or the other, Jeff. We're going to find out. We're going to find out one way or another. So I was kind of excited about that. I know that there are a lot of people that have asked us to cover stories about Jeff, to thank you for saying this or saying that about it. And then not just the tinfoil hat negative people, just people that have an honest take. So I would love to see that dialogue. If there are things that Jeff feels like people just don't understand, then he needs to do interviews with people like us and not from his studio with other big names. Like who are people that are set up at shows and dealers and LCS owners and boots on the ground that you can have an honest dialogue with? Boots on the ground is the important part. One of the things that I think his 2025 showed us is that those people out there like us who are in the grind of this, doing it for a living and not with a six-figure bankroll that we can just churn 10% on every week. People who are out there really in the grind of this, they feel a really big. disconnect between the influencers and the way they portray this business and the way it actually is. So if someone like Jeff wants to try to clarify why some of that exists and maybe some misunderstandings, we want to give him the opportunity to do that. Or just that big divide between, you know he has to feel that. You go to a show and you're in the same space as everybody else in that room, but it's like the majority are huddled up on the other side of the room. I think that there's dialogue that can happen. I'm hopeful for it. I don't think we're going to save the hobby. I don't think Jeff's going to be like, oh, thank goodness the ball card show. Thank goodness Gary and Jason. But I think it would be a fantastic interview. I think we're able to be blunt in a way that's still, well, that's another topic. There is a boundary between good content that is holding people accountable and just being ultra negative with no end in sight and for no reason. Yeah, and one of the things that we really try hard to do, and hopefully you guys have noticed this, but we conscientiously make the effort. We will go after takes. We will go after actions. We try really hard not to be personal. I don't know Jeff personally. Other than our boy, Eric Michael, Jeff has probably taken more personal stuff from us than anybody. I'd say probably been more aggressive towards him. And I will say for me, Eric Michael is probably the exception to that. I get a little personal there, not going to lie. We don't know Eric. Eric, you're welcome to join us for an interview too, so we'll have that story to break about your program. Boy, that would be something. Cutting edge. Cutting edge. While we're being so positive, I would like to highlight somebody that I would consider a hobby moron. Is that okay? Oh, yes, please. This is a fun one. Let me preface what you're getting ready to say here. We were literally getting ready to start our whatnot stream. We're finalizing our card order. We're getting everything ready to go. And Jason's phone dings and he goes, what is this? And this is what happened. Michael Majewski on TikTok, former partner and Transparent Breaks, he made a point of telling me that he is no longer affiliated with them as of one day after I shot the message. So to be clear, he is not affiliated with Transparent Breaks. But at the time of the message, he was. Let's back up a little bit. We get a lot of messages where people think we're idiots and that's okay. I'm comfortable with that. When you're opinionated and loud and you're not the mainstream of the type of content you see where it's cases of stuff being open, look how many case hits I got at the show. Here's a $15,000 purchase. We're just kind of guys that are selling singles, right? We're a little different. And so because of that, we draw out a lot of opinions. And a lot of times there's trolls that were just like, well, anybody with any type of an audience, even a smaller audience to respond and give them a little bit of marketing. And that's fair game. Every once in a while, somebody says something so dumb that I have to talk about it. And so this is the situation that we're in. The way that this happened made no sense. And then for this Michael to double down on this, I just thought it was crazy. Now he made it very clear he wanted to do a call or an interview. And I made it very clear, well, that's not going to happen, but we're going to do our part to make you well known because there may be people that feel exactly like you. And this may be your banner to carry your content out in 2026 and just get a bite of that pie. You know what I mean? All right. So here's what he said. First off, he sent us messages in May, just now seeing you guys, hope you guys talk us up as a repacker. That was his first message in May. No response. And he talked about how they're changing the lying ass hobby. We're honest. We never, camera never leaves the product. We only restock when a case hit is hit. Our name is public in the next couple of days. We don't manipulate like 99% of the repackers out there. Reminder, that was in May. They're out of business. So then last week, Gary posted a preview video of stuff he's running on whatnot. And if you haven't seen that, like our whatnot stuff, we are unapologetic. We run affordable, collectible stuff with a heavy emphasis on nineties and two thousands. When it comes to stuff bigger than that, we have showcases that were set up every week somewhere in the country, in the Midwest, usually, right? So it's always in the Midwest where I talk about, but we're always set up. But one of the things we'll do as a preview, like, Hey, tonight on whatnot, I'm running this Bobby hole auto and here's a Marcus can be atomic refractor. And it's a lot of like, we try to emphasize stuff. It's a little bit unique and inserts and all that. So Gary's just doing a preview video of the cards that he's going to run at $1. No sudden death. We don't do that. And we don't scream. We don't scream. So this is a 22nd auction with seven second extensions on it. And we rarely talk about what a card's worth. Nope. If we've been running lighter stuff all night and there's like a hundred or $200 card, then we'll say, Hey, this is where this is. The only other thing we'll do from time to time is if a card has that value and we've been getting crushed and we just can tell that bids are going to be under, we will say, Hey, I'm going to start this card at about 30 to 40% of the value. We started at a number that's so obvious on the margin that there's nothing to think about. Right. So that's the video is him showing, Hey, here's the stuff we're going to run. Here's the comment. And I quote, no hell way. Great grammar. Dot, dot, dot, fantastic way. Talk up cards. Nobody wants you're as bad as he says the names of two people that don't like to wear shirts and don't have hair and sell cards in the same geographical area. They love to say my dad's going to sue. So I'm not going to say their names and give them any, but I think I just spelled it out real clear for everybody. Uh, or said you're as bad as them and you try to make thousands off of humans. That is who we try to make our money from. I've not yet run into a Slenderman willing to pay and we can't, that they can't get back. They can't get it back. What can't they get back? The card they bought, the money they bought. Are you saying that that we're somehow, okay, so anyway, keep your dork content coming though. Manipulation at its finest block me or banter. I choose option C Michael, I choose option C, which is to systematically break down how stupid this take was. I'll make you famous. Do with it what you do with it, what you will. Now since then I reached out, I gave him plenty of opportunity to respond. Um, he said what he does for a living. He does something really honorable. I think that's great. Um, thank you for doing that. Um, but he really can't explain why he had such a rough take. Well, he, here's why he had the rough take, Jason. He wanted some attention. Yeah, sure. He, he, he thought we were going to like bring him on as a guest and let him try to debate with us and actually make him famous. Yeah, that's what he was hoping for. Well, I don't know that we have the capacity to make anyone famous period now. That's fair. But you know what? I leverage our audience. Yes. For that. You know what I mean? So, um, so then he asked for a call or something. I was like, no, we're not going to do that. Um, but here's the thing I want to understand. The accusation was market manipulation. And now those of you that are regulars think this is a stupid waste of time for us to even talk about it. And that's probably true. But I just want to be very, very, very clear. You could come after us for anything you want. Uh, those two guys are fat and ugly. Yes. Uh, those guys are old and out of touch. Absolutely. Those guys don't carry really big cards in their showcase. Nope. A $5,000 card would be a really big card for us. That's not, that's not the type of stuff we carry. What else? They're a little bit obnoxious. They're a little bit in the drama. They could be negative at times. All of that. But the one thing you're never going to get away with without us defending ourselves is calling us manipulators in this space, right? We've dedicated the value we bring to be honest. If there is nothing else we are, if we fail in our business, we will be honest on the way down. You are not going to lie. So you want to call us out for being manipulators in some way. Explain to me this, you moron. How in the world is a $1 start auction for 20 seconds with a seven second extension on 10 to $30 cards hurting a soul? What could possibly be misleading about that? Well here's, here's where that divide happens and this is what, one of the things that is unbelievably broken in this hobby right now. This guy's take is based in a world that is all about if somebody buys anything from us, they must be wanting to resell it. That's where that take is coming from. It's not a world. This dude can't comprehend. Oh yeah. He can't even comprehend. He can't comprehend that somebody bought a 1998 pinnacle gold team, Chris Carter, which is a card you see never. It's not worth more than 20 bucks, but he can't fathom that somebody bought that because they're a Chris Carter collector or they like rare 90 stuff and they're going to put it up on their wall or in their binder and just look at it from time to time. Or that it's worth 15 bucks. Yeah. Because they enjoy it. Like that's something that that person cannot fathom. If it's not transactional, they can't fathom it. Like that's where that take comes from. One of the things was the way that they would buy people's, they were willing to do buybacks right away was a part of the former business that they had that's now dissolved. Like your bitterness because this model doesn't work and many people are closing down shop over it is not our problem. Nope. We're willing to work harder. That's just it. And we're willing to think about who's buying things and is it sustainable? So guess what? You're going to see us every Sunday at four 30. Feel free to pop in and watch the manipulation at work, Michael. There'll be a whole lot of, Hey, here's this cool refractor from 2002 starting at a buck. And then we shoot the crap for 20 seconds and we do that over and over. What are we manipulating here, bud? I just feel like sometimes when people are dumb enough, we should make them famous. Yeah. If we did that more, that would be a good thing. So Michael, congrats. You're the first ran of the year. All presses, good press. Remember that next card business is going to be boy, I would sure, sure suck for you to have the same scrutiny you just offered us for everybody that listens in. So I'm sure we'll get some pushback from him, but he'll also deep down inside be happy. Somebody said his name. So all right, let's move on. Let's move on. Do you have anything else on that? No, I think we nailed it. Don't be a dummy. If you're going to have a take, use your brain to think it through before you say it. A really valuable lesson in life in general, pick carefully the personality types that you choose to go after because Jason and I usually aren't the ones. Now if we're wrong, we will 100% own it. But if we're not wrong and you want to play that game, okay. Yeah, we're loud and we call people out all the time, so we should expect the same treatment. But this was just like, I've never, like we're not running a mystery repack. There's no like transparency is, Hey, I'm going to talk long. Like we talk so long, I'm the shorter one and you probably have 40 seconds to comp. Yeah. Jason gets annoyed with me because I will give you the full Wikipedia definition of what a card is before I run it. We've run 30 cards and they're worth 10 to 20 bucks each. So yeah, I can't, I can't do that, but, but just, you know, just be real confident. Um, and what was that opening line again? No hell way. Yeah. No hell way. I don't even know exactly what that means. I'd be, if you try to get an English, we'll, we'll try to read that'd be a nice t-shirt. No hell way. All right. 2025 was a grind and a lot of lessons. Let's let's talk about it. Let's talk about it a little bit. All right, you start. Let's start. Well, we wanted to talk a little bit about a few things, I guess. First and foremost, like Jason said earlier, one of the things that we really leaned into heavy in 2025 was a conscious decision to try to bring actionable value to you guys, especially if you're a dealer or somebody trying to at least fund the hobby by buying and selling and not just rant and rave about things, but actually give you functional content for free. All we ask in return is clicking that like and subscribe button. We wanted to talk about some lessons that we learned in 2025, because again, we've both been doing this for a little while. I've been doing it longer than Jason, but 2025 was the first year we were both completely full time, no other source of income from anywhere. Jason did that a little bit before I did, but for both of us, this was the first year that that was the case. So a few things that we learned we want to talk about and they're not going to apply to everybody. If you're at a different stage in your journey in this business, it might be different for you, but you don't want to go back and forth on these or you don't want me to hit all three of mine. Then I'll follow up. Okay. Yeah. We'll go back and forth. So I think the first lesson that I learned as 2025 got into the heat of the year and as it started to wind down is this one. Show selection matters if you're a dealer. When you first start doing this and you first start setting up at shows, you don't really understand or know the difference between a 20 table show and a 300 table show. It's just a show and you don't understand the difference between a show where a promoter is working their tail off to get people in the door and a show where a promoter just rents a room and throws some tables up and collects your cash when you walk in the door and that's all they feel their responsibility is. So for me, going into 2026, it isn't the size of the show that matters. What matters is the effort and the time that that promoter is putting into making sure people come through the door. Yeah, it can be a 30 table show. And if 500 people show up, that's probably going to be a really good show. It can be a 300 table show. And if only 1000 people show up, it's gonna suck. But being selective about who we choose to partner with as a brand, because that's how we look at it. When we're coming to a show, we're paying you to be a promoter. And in our minds, we're we're bringing our brand there, we're bringing our content there, we're bringing our showcases there, we're bringing cash to buy, we're bringing cash to buy cards, who we choose to partner with, and the way that they choose to do business is going to be very important to us. As we move forward in this journey, as a brand together. And that's not throwing shade at small shows. That's not acting like we're too big or too good or something else at all. We will happily do a 30 table show that 500 people show up to. And we will happily not do a 300 table show that 1000 people show up to. It's all about that relationship with the promoter being mutually beneficial for everyone. Is that a fair way to say that? I think that's a really good point. And the way that you learn that lesson is, if you start having, you know, let's say that Q1 and Q2 were really solid, and then in Q3, you notice, man, show sales, blah, blah, blah, look back at your shows. Is there a theme? Is there a promoter? Is there a traffic issue? One thing I try to look at was, is there steady traffic, period, not even like, even if it is lighter attendance, but it's steady, people were hanging out at the table and walking down, you see people coming in, like, I can work with that. But when there's a sentiment of the promoters that I know there's not a lot of people in here, I wish you guys would have promoted this more. That's the fastest way for me to realize, I'm not going to do your job. I'm not saying it's an easy job. Promoting's work. It is. Promoting's your work. Show's being a dealer. But we also found that when you find somebody that excels in this, we're going to latch onto their brand. So I'll say Brad Beeman with B-Sports, he partners with Card Collector too, but Brad Beeman is, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the Midwest, and those shows that are 100 to 300, 500 tables, he is the best at promoting that, building relationships. And when I say relationships, I mean that. He's, come grab a bite with us. How things going? How's life? Right? And some of you, we hear that and you're going to be like, a promoter? Yeah. But as soon as he has a show, I'll check with Gary, hey, what does he call it? To reserve your spot again. The list went out, the email went out. I was like, did you already? He's like, I already got it. Every time. Every time. But I will commit to moving my schedule around his shows because every single time there is consistent traffic throughout the show. Now, I'm not saying that all of his shows have been my highest paying shows. I'm not saying that at all. But what I am saying is I never for once have to think for a second, is this show being promoted the right way? Have they thought about space? Have they thought about restrooms? Have they thought about concessions? Have they thought about all of that stuff? I know it's been thought about. And when I'm there, it's going to be promoted. There'll be a drone flying around to get people to come back the next time. Now, everybody can't do that. I understand that. But no, even on a smaller show, if I know somebody's grinding out hustling, I'm there. Well, and Brad is top. At least there's a few other promoters in the Midwest that fall into that category too. The guys over at Pittsburgh card shows, uh, Bryce and Mark work their tails off to make sure that people are at those shows. Uh, the JJ all stars guys that run the Midwest monster and the mini monsters, they do the same thing. If you are a promoter and you're listening to this and you're finding yourself getting frustrated hearing us talk, I would really encourage you to just take a deep breath and ask yourself, am I doing everything within my power to make sure that the dealers who are paying me money have success at my shows? And if the answer that you give is, well, I post the flyer on Facebook and that's the only answer you have. If it's the only thing. Yeah. If that's the only answer you have, then you should probably examine ways that you can improve your business. You should always, we should all, if whatever business you're in, whether you do this for a living, whether you're in your regular job, you should always be questioning, what can I do better? How can I serve my customer better? Whatever that looks like. And the guys we're talking about right here that do it right. They're constantly doing that. I know that Brad, Mark, Bryce, Greg, those guys are always saying, what can I do to get more people in the door so that the dealers that are paying me money will want to keep paying me money. Yeah. I think, uh, I want to put a point important caveat here because I think what is there are promoters that don't put the work in, but there's a lot more dealers that don't put the work in than there are promoters that don't put the work. No question about it. The reason for that is those promoters are on the hook financially for a building, for tables, for the labor, like all that stuff takes time and money. So they've got to put some effort in, but there's a lot of dealers that are going to, as soon as we started in on shows and promotion, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But your stuff's overpriced. It's not the right stuff. You haven't restickered anything in four months. You're unwilling to move off of your unrealistic pricing. I'm not saying reasonable pricing. I'm saying unrealistic pricing. And then you just want somebody to blame for your lack of effort. That's different. That's different. So we say this and we sound like we're projecting at everybody else. Here's how we learned that two ways. One, we would go to shows and repeatedly do poorly after putting tons of hours and pricing the cards out and make nowhere close. There's been a couple in the last year. I look back, I'm like, man, I'm not sure it was even worth it. It's a waste of a day. And on that to be a, you know, a chunk, maybe a quarter of your income for the month. Like you feel that the other thing that's happened is we go to the shows that are well promoted and we don't do well. What did that tell us? We learned that lesson this year. We thought ultra modern football was going to fly in the first six weeks of the season because it did that the last three years in a row and it didn't. And we were at the right shows and we have two options there. We thought about it like, was it the show? Because we were at a larger one. I don't think it was. We realized the market was responding differently. That wasn't us problem. There were people in the door. There was money walking through the aisles. We didn't have the right stuff at the right price. So I, we always have to look at ourself first, but then you have a choice of shows. Now there are smaller shows up and coming. There are promoters running smaller shows that like, I wish I could do every one of them because I love them so much and their passion for this and they do it right. And they're honorable people and they want everybody to win, but you have to be somewhat selective. So think through your own criteria in 2026, we're going to be thinking about it like this. It's not necessarily a big or large show, but we're going to need enough bigger shows, especially two and three day shows to carry some weight for the brand to get out there and for us to have some bigger revenue weekends. We also want to be local and we want to do some smaller shows as well, but the caveat is going to be, it has to be well promoted. So yes, show selection matters. Yep. What's your first one, Jason? The first one I want to talk about was eBay. 2026 was a wild or 25 was a wild ride in January or February. I posted that video, eBay standard envelope sucks. It was one of our bigger YouTube videos because so many people were dealing with the same issue. Uh, when I started going from setting up occasionally at shows and doing Facebook sales to like, I'm going all in on cards. Part of that was doing the high volume, low end with the Rico 8170 card dealer pro card dealer pro pay us my goodness. Uh, I now have a 50,000 cards in the store. Uh, it's become a very viable stream of income, but in 2025, I really had to come to terms with a couple of things. Number one, if you're selling low end cards, understand that if you were first to the market, there will be 500 more to that market within the next month or two. You don't have a lot of time to be aggressive with your pricing. Inventory can get stale really quickly. The principles with eBay don't change though. List every day, ship every day, list every day, ship every day. 90% of the time. If something slowed down, I had a vacation. I was out of town. I didn't list as much that week. I didn't ship everything that week. I went back and forth whether or not I'd even keep the eBay store and I was very close in Q3 of shutting it down or just say, Hey, whatever's in there is fine, but I don't need this anymore because it's such a headache. And then I made a shift for me that's made a huge difference. Um, I began thinking about it differently of like, if somebody is going to eBay and they're buying low end cards, why go to a shop? You can go to a show. It's probably cheaper. Why are they going to eBay? It's because they're looking for something collectible in that price point. So I shifted my inventory to things that I believe were more collectible, not just new. And is this card worth five? And can I get three out of it? Right? You can do that, but just understand that inventory is going to get stale. Those markets shift quickly. But if I upload 10,000 vintage baseball and football cards from the mid seventies through up to like 80, most people that are looking to build a set would love to know if I have five or 10 more of that set. Right? So I shifted my thinking there as much as I am frustrated with some things that eBay does. Um, and I still think with eBay standard envelope, them allowing multi crop quantity orders to be one order would solve so many of the metric issues that sellers have, where it'd be a one order strike. You still would have to resolve it. You still have to refund all the cards. They can still do item, not receive cases. But if you consolidate that 10 card order to being one order number, I think you'd have a lot more people stick around. But the reality is this, there's no better place still for that low end. I sell low end sometimes on whatnot, like once or twice a month, I'll do a low end show. It's still better on eBay. I don't care what anybody says. It's labor intensive. It's hard work. But if you want to make money on eBay, don't let anybody tell you you can't because of fees that is bull. I'm at 20,000 orders. My feedback is back to a hundred percent. I'm at 19,000 logged, but I know I've hit it. It's going to show up in the next few days, but I was able to work those metrics back to that. So eBay is still viable. I don't care what anybody says. If you're selling the higher end stuff or bigger stuff, and you think the fees are eating it up, that just means you haven't learned to buy right yet, or you're putting the wrong stuff on eBay. It's not for your 90% stuff. It's not for your 80% stuff unless it's a whale of a card eBay for you, Gary. Well, a question for you in relation to yours before I jump into my next one. Do you think that if you hadn't made that mindset shift that you would have shut the store down? I think I would have. Well, I'll tell you what my thought was. So I think I shared it with you, but my idea was if I don't do this anymore because I'm so frustrated with the back and forth of eBay. I had a month and a half in November where there was nothing in my metrics to indicate it, but my sales fell off 45% to 50%. What's strange about that is if you're selling bigger cards, that happens all the time, right? You sold a card for $4,000 last month, and this month you don't have a $4,000 card to sell. Well, that's going to obviously affect that. But with lower end, you usually see more of a 10% to 20% variance. It's more this than this. So I took a dive, and my thought was, here's what I'm going to do. You guys know I bag up all my SKUs. I'm going to do whatnot, lot auctions, one bag at a time, buy out my entire eBay store. I still might do that. You never know. I start at every auction at five bucks. Here's the 30 to 50 cards that are in here. Go nuts. That's what I would have done if I was going to shut it down, but I was considering it. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm never going to have leverage with eBay. They're going to have people that get different deals than I'm ever going to get. That's okay. They are still marketing cards I buy for $0.10 all over the world. They're getting eyeballs on it. So like it or not, it's still the best place for low end. There's other platforms emerging. Don't at me with Collex. Get out of here. Love you, Card Dealer Pro, Collex. That's the brand, actually. I probably just screwed us over there if they were listening. But that was my big eBay takeaway. I wanted to drop it. I stuck with it. We're over 50,000 cards now, hitting that 20,000 sales mark. I still believe eBay is probably the best option for low end movement. Yeah. My second one was this, and this was a hard lesson for me to learn. Don't count on a narrow buyer pool. If you are one of the easiest traps to fall into if you're a dealer, especially when you do this full time, and especially with the prevalence of the repack buying market, it is very easy to fall into the trap of having one person, one repacker, one entity that you count on so much that if one week they don't show up, you're in panic mode. It's even easier to fall into the trap of getting so used to that, that you start focusing your buying activity only on the things that you think they're going to want. And then if they don't show up, you're really screwed. Because not only did they not show up, but all you have is a showcase full of the stuff that they would have bought, but not necessarily everybody else wants. And now you're really screwed. It also puts you in a position where if their business changes in any way, all of a sudden your business is going to feel the brunt of that. Or if that relationship goes south or sour for some reason, you're going to feel the brunt of that. And going into 2026, one of my biggest goals is to diversify the channels and the people that I bulk sell to. I still want to make sure I've got the stuff for the collectors walking shows and for the random people that may be trying to flip something or whatever. But the people that I sell 20 to 100 cards at a time to, I need 20 of those people, not one or two. I would agree. I think that a lot of people are addressing that issue this year as they look back. I think the reason that that happened was we knew the market was hot. We had no idea how viable and how quickly that repack market would grow. If somebody has capital and they have interesting breakers, they're going to be able to scale that pretty quick. What began to happen was people like you and I were all of a sudden like, I don't know how to feel about repackers, but they sure have no problem dropping 10K at our table the first five minutes of a show. That's kind of cool. If it's their repack, they offer me stronger than most collectors are off of sticker because now the expectation is to give a 15 or 10% discount on everything. That's the irony. People want to beat you up on cost, but they never want to pay your sticker. That's another discussion. I watched a lot of people become frantic because they go from just getting started. I think some of these buyers, I know for a fact, they see people that are new to dealing. They see that they have decent inventory. They spend money on cards. They want to become their best friend. They want to be the first one at their table right away. I get it. That's smart business for them. What happens is they buy in like, well, I only moved 500 cards to everyone else, but I did three grand right away with this one repacker or this one buyer or this one collector. That's fine. Keep doing that. Do not end that relationship unnecessarily. However, diversification is so important. When we interviewed Keith Newhart and we talked about having a shop since 2010, that is a hard thing to do anymore. The length of time that he has been an LC owner is the very impressive statistic. In all the great stuff he's done there up in Delaware, that one's it, but he was committed immediately to diversifying. Those of you that maybe you're feeling this pinch of like, hey, I had one strong buyer and then whatnot changed the rules. Now my repacker doesn't have whatnot and he's getting really picky and he's hitting these price bands. Yeah, there's a squeeze going on. There's more margins. Two ways of viewing that. How can you tailor the experience for them? Or I need three or four more of these guys. I think if more dealers would do that, now here's what's going to happen. If it's repackers, they're going to get territorial. They do. They're going to have feelings about it. They don't want you selling to other repackers too, but the problem is they are not your boss. They are not your employer. They really don't have a say in that. This is your inventory and your business. You can choose to just have one buyer, but just know if that goes away, it affects a lot of things. I think it's better. If I had a perfect scenario, I would have a hundred people buy two or three cards at a show that they would show. Yeah, I would take that all day. It would all be you end user, but that's not realistic. If you want to get paid and you want to pay your bills with this, you're going to have to have some case heads in there like it or not. Yep. You're going to have to have stuff that repackers are interested in right now. That is the market we are in. You can have the other stuff that people call bricks or that you and I call unique because they are scarce things without comps. I think the point you made there was really important too. I don't work for you. It's not a disrespectful. No, not at all, but if I wanted to work for somebody in this business, I have no doubt whatsoever that I could make 10 phone calls and have a salary in a week. Yeah. Doing what I do for someone. We could go source for arena club. Let's just call it what it is. That's what I had. I had a conversation with a friend of ours who's a fellow dealer in this space who reached out to me a week ago asking for advice because he got an offer of a salary job in this industry and was trying to weigh whether he wanted to go work for somebody else. You and I made the decision that we don't want to work for anybody else, at least at this point. Now I would be lying if I said that if somebody came to me and said, Hey, uh, starting next week we're going to pay you into the six figures for a 40 hour work week doing nothing but card stuff. I might have a hard time not at least considering that. Um, but that's what it would take to at least get me to consider it. So when some of these buyers that you deal with on a regular basis treat you like you're their employee, it can get frustrating. Yeah. And I think it's important that there's not a scarcity mindset. Like I, that's what I would emphasize. Like the people that you're selling to are the one or two bigger buyers. Do they have a similar philosophy to this or are they going to drop you like a bad habit? Yes. The moment you say, actually I'd like another $100 this time because you're saying you're at 90% but I'm, I'm sticker in this here because it really is there. Right. Um, so yeah, I think don't count on a narrow buyer pool. I think that's a really smart one. Yep. My next one I have, this has probably been the most fulfilling part of my business journey in the last year is relationships matter. And I know that you're so much better at this than I am. I'm designed to be a very relational person. I think my, my wheelhouse, whether I like it or not, is you put me in a room full of strangers and say, go. And I'm able to really quickly and almost in a scary way, get a read on everyone in the room. And within an hour I'll know what they like, what they don't like, who I'd never care if I talked to and who I might want to do business with. Yep. But I was spending so much time on the labor of the job because I was again, 50,000 cards on eBay, setting up at shows every week what not every week, multiple times, uh, creating content, editing videos, posting. I mean, um, we're not exaggerating 55 to 70 hours a week is closer to 70 takes what it, I know I'm trying to downplay it, but if you say the big number, everybody's like, yeah, no way. But I know I took time off over the holidays and I probably still was about 30 hours of just shipping and listing and everything. It felt like a vacation, didn't it? It did. But the relationships matter and here's why. Um, we are in a very slimy space. It's unregulated, right? We've seen wherever there can be quick money and value, there's going to be scams and scandals and all this. It really matters that you know who you're working with. It matters that you know who you like and don't like. And the reason it's tough for a lot of people in the space that are doing it for a business to focus on those relationships is because we've been taught to be in a scarcity mindset with all of this stuff. There's not enough to go around that repack or spent money with you. So how do I know that they're going to spend money with me? Um, you know, this shop will never work with you on numbers. This one will. And I think that until you get to know some people, that's going to be the case. Nobody knows you just walk in demanding something, nothing's going to happen. But I've experienced how mutually beneficial it is with other collectors, other dealers, one table down. You know, we have people that walk up to us with case hits that they want 90% for. We're never going to pay that, but we will walk that business down to people that are happy to pay that percent and they love us for it. And I'm okay with it. It's a win and they send us the weird stuff. Like a perfect example of that. Uh, somebody that I've known for a while, but I've gotten to know better this year. And you guys, if you follow sports card content, you've seen them. Um, Brent Shannon at Shannon sports cards. Yeah. Um, he's always set up right across from us at Grove city. And when guys walk to our table with case hits, we're usually pretty close to the front of the door. It's like CC two and then one other person and then us. And then Brent's right there. Um, I just send them over there and Brent sends us the weird stuff, the kind of bricky stuff that isn't his forte, but he knows we like. Yep. And like you said, those relationships matter. I know somebody now that if I wanted to sell a value box, I could flag them down. They would come take it. I know somebody else that if I was looking for a certain type of card, I, I know buyers and people that buy from us now, like, uh, uh, so coolly on our, on our whatnot, shout out to him. Like he's super involved in that, but he's a massive Marino collector. Incredible Instagram, by the way, if you love Marina stuff. But if I was ever looking for some, I would reach out. And it's not, it's not about, um, it's not just about a monetary exchange, but I think it matters that there is actually some sense of community in the space. I work here. You work there. We're coworkers like it or not. And I would prefer to enjoy the time I spend at shows. So I find myself now by focusing on this, enjoying shows, more slow shows feel like a S a two hour delay school day to me. Like I, you know what I mean? Like you're just like, anything could happen today. Right? Like I don't have, they're going to wheel the TV into the VCR and I'll, I'll walk, I'll walk around and just chat it up and see how people are doing. But it's a job that one of the things I talked about was like, mentally, it's a strain. You're working really hard. It's very repetitive. Most of the time you're working alone. I think relationships really do matter. I think they do. I think it's important if you don't have any of those, just put some effort in, say hi next time to the person that's been friendly to you at every show, ask them their name, go look at their stuff, start a conversation. You never know where it will lead. And, and focus on developing those relationships that are two way street relationships. I think it's, I think it's easy to get caught up in a, in a business relationship in this space, especially with as many people as are out there that have a big following. Uh, even if it's just an IG following where they're just posting pictures of stuff, people know their names and you get a little, I don't want to say starstruck. That's not the right word, but you get a little bit of the, Oh, this person is somebody that would be great to do business with. And all of a sudden you realize that that relationship is all one way. They want to buy your stuff at 70%, but when you want to buy their stuff, it's gotta be 95% of the sticker. Um, focus on two way relationships as well. That's all my assignment. A really good point with that is there are some people that if you just both decide, Hey, we're playing the same game here, so it's probably not going to work. You may end up having a really good friend. And I had this happen to last year. There's a couple of people where we got to that point where I was like, I can't keep giving you that kind of a discount as I worked my numbers more as I would do my accounting afterwards. Like, Hey, I was a little bit aggressive there, you know, and, and I just can't. Um, most people that are reasonable will respect that. And if they don't, you don't need to do business cause they're going to screw you over at some point. It's been amazing. What's happened with some of those relationships where it's like, we're probably not buying and selling from each other, but now if they have something I like, because we're cool, I get a better deal if it's for the PC, right? Or if I have a really neat card, they'll market that card for me because if they have a buyer that likes it, they've provided value to their buyer just by telling them where to find the card. So those relationships are huge. And your LCS is not the enemy. Go find a shop. If you really care about that narrative, if you really, if you really give a crap about this hobby, find a local shop. If you're, there's a few close to you and hang out there whenever you buy cards, talk to the owner, get to know them. Um, Gary and I pop into and out of shops all the time, but there's no secret. I hang out at new heart cards in Delaware more than anywhere. And I used to just go in and make my purchase and thank you a good talking. And now I find myself sitting on a stool, hanging out for an hour, talking to other people that come in. So relationships matter. Uh, getting to know the people in the space that you're hanging out with, it really does matter. So that was a huge lesson for me. Last one for me before you get your last one. Um, something strange happened for me this year up until 2025, I would say that I was probably known outside of the podcast, just in the sports show world. At most shows, I was known as the guy, Hey, if you want baseball or Bowman, go see that big white banner over there. That's that's your guy. And I still have that stuff, but it's not 80% of my inventory anymore. Um, this year I diversified to where it's almost an equal split between baseball and football stuff. I've pulled back a little bit from the Bowman side of things, although I still am there to an extent, but it got more volatile than basketball did. Um, I've even expanded my basketball horizons this year to actually have some basketball, even though it's more nineties and 2000 stuff and not the ultra modern stuff. Um, expanding those horizons made a huge, huge difference in the bottom line for my business this year. The biggest change for me was I never had any interest in the vintage side of things at all. It just wasn't something that appealed to me. And the last quarter of 2025, I started buying more vintage stuff. And I found something really interesting. And you had been trying to tell me, and I had been watching it happen to you. And I was just like, yeah, that's just cause Jason knows how to talk to old people. That's true too. It is true. But I, I buy vintage and within two weeks, the vintage was gone. And if it was a mantle or a maze or an errand, it was usually gone within a few days. And so I'd go buy it again. And how much were they trying to beat up your price? Not much at all. Not much at all. As long as my price was realistic. Like you can't go out. Gordy made this comment when we interviewed, when you interviewed him earlier this year, like it's like a coloring book. If you're in between the lines of what a PSA for sales for, you can have the best looking for in the world. If you try to price it like a seven, you're never going to sell it. Right. But you can price it at the top of the four range. Right. As long as you're in those lines. Sure. It sells pretty quickly. So for 2026, I'm going to try to do even more. I kind of am setting a goal for myself by the end of the year. I kind of want about 25% of my overall inventory to be vintage. And beyond that, as you're doing this a little, a side note, you're enjoying it. Like you're building out the 1957 set. I'm going to do the 57. One of my favorites. A good friend of mine came up to me at Xenia, a guy I used to coach with, shout out Luke, guy I coached high school football with for several years, came up to me at Xenia and said, hey, I just got these back from grading and it was eight or nine of the stars from the 57 set. And he gave me a good price on them, I bought them from him. And I looked at my showcase and I realized, well, I already have the Hank, I already have the maze. Well, let's see here, maybe I should do this set, two cards, I might as well build out the 1957 set. Well, so what will happen is the next week I went to an LCS owned by a friend of mine who's been a friend of mine for 30 years and he had about 19 or 20 of the commons already graded PSA, fours, fives and sixes. And he gave them to me for one heck of a price. And then I have another friend of ours back to relationships, sold me the Ernie Banks and it really it's raw, but it's nice. It's clean. And then I picked up another 54 commons and semi stars for less than two bucks apiece this week. I'm a quarter of the way through this set. Like, I just want to point out that, like, let's look at how much Gary's grown. Six months ago, he was opening Spongebob, but now he's looking at real cards. We're still going to open Spongebob, but that 57 that's I think that's a set. That's a really good point. I think expanding your horizons pays off, right? Like, you know, looking at looking at a little bit different stuff, trying some different cards in there. So that's cool that the vintage has been popping up for you. Yeah, it's been fun. I don't buy it all the time, but when I can, I do. I'm learning lessons about what moves quickly and what doesn't. Now, a temptation with vintage is if there's a comp there, I'm going to get it. You need to be more concerned if you're unfamiliar with vintage. If there's a comp there, will it still sell is a good place to start. Right. Because I've been cooked on a few of the right sets and decent names in raw condition that until I'm willing to send them off for the one that everybody knows they are probably not going to sell it. So there there there's a there's a little bit of a painful learning curve. The beautiful thing about vintage is it can be really beat as long as you're willing to lower that price and if you'll move it. Yep. You can unpack that a little quicker than some of the newer stuff. So that's a really good point. The the final one when it comes to shows and the businesses, I had to learn the power of no. Now, obviously, on camera here, I'm very direct. But if you've ever seen me in person, I'm direct, but I'm very friendly. I'm not going to be unkind. If somebody throws that energy at me, you can get it right back. But for the most part, if it's between me or Gary and there's a tense situation, he would prefer and I would prefer that I'm probably the one responding. Right. A hundred percent of the time. So one of the things that was tough for me was because I was so committed to my metrics, if I bought something really right and I could hit the percentage I wanted and the price of the card was way up there where I may have like doubled up, I had a tendency of saying yes, because it was like, give me that money back. Let me rebuy. I already made my margin. And that works and works and works until you hit like a slower month. And they're like, what's going on? What is happening? You need every one of those points. You need those points back. And so one of the things I shifted in in July was I knew that it was going to I was going to take a little bit of a hit on my sales initially to say no a little bit more to hold my ground when I'm 10 or 15 dollars off. When those were the tough ones for me, because it was always like, dude, you can rebuy. You've already got the 20 or 30 percent you're expecting on this card. Just go unpark that money. Well, that's fine. But some of that stuff was really liquid. And 10 minutes later, I probably would have gotten a stronger percentage. So and 10 or 15 bucks on a 500 dollar card is a whole lot different than your 50 dollar card that somebody offers you 35 for. Right. Right. Right. Yep. So as I began comparing my inventory value after shows to the money that came in and what I would expect to buy at percentage wise for the next one, one of the shifts I made was I have to say no more often. And you know what I learned? By doing it respectfully and carefully, it didn't affect my sales. Nope, it didn't. Some people respected it and they're like, oh, so you want like 5 percent more on stuff? And they just started offering stronger. So you never know what will happen. Other people respected it more and it opened up a relationship there where they may not buy from me, but they respected my willingness to be like the price is the price I'm here. And it's a little bit of a I think everybody that takes this full time leap, especially in the show scene, has to go through this. Like you've already been through that point. I had to go through it last year. I had to learn that lesson. You got to say no more often and trust yourself. If you're putting the work and trust the numbers you saw, trust those comps, trust the market. And let's be let's be very honest about the active market. Not just the market. Let's be very honest about this part of it, too, because this is one of those lessons that's a lot easier to learn if you've got some cash cushion. Like if you've got five, six figures, well, six figures is strong, but if you've got five and into the five figures of a little bit of cash cushion, it's a little easier to say no. Sure. Then it is if you've got four hundred dollars in the bank and you're like, I got a light bill to pay this week or a mortgage to pay this week. If you're in that position, you shouldn't be doing this full time. Right. Right. But I know people who are trying to say, yeah, you shouldn't be saying no to yourself. Yeah. And and tell yourself, hey, for one more year, it's going to be 60 hours a week. I got my job and I'm putting 15 to 20 hours in and I'm doing one or two shows a month and I'm selling a few things online. You will not regret it. You know, Gary and I looked back at some disappointments we dealt with in our business in the last year and there's been a couple. You know, we don't talk about is we had a network deal that completely failed and flopped. Right when we started, there was a network that was based out of Ohio. They had all these shows in Cleveland. It was it was a big market. This and that was going to happen. And we just watched it kind of fizzle out and not really monetize. We've been through disappointment. We've been through setbacks. We really have. But what we learned this year was like every time something like that happened, it was like the best thing for our business. We had to force ourselves to learn something and adapt to it. I think what not was a great place for that. You want to dive into that just a tiny bit here? Yeah, well, I mean, what not lessons for us have been fast and furious and hard to swallow sometimes. Every time we think we have something figured out, we realize nope, did not have that figured out. One of the things that you guys heard us talk about and we thought we had we thought we had found the leprechauns gold and we talked it through the roof. And there's credence to it, but it's not all we thought it was. We thought we had figured out this cost average thing and it was the end all be all. And there's validity to it. If you're unbelievably picky about what you buy and if you run every single card that you buy. But I'll spell that out a little further. If we buy 150 cards and 100 of them are really good to run and 50 of them, you're like, yeah, well, there's some value there until those 50 cards move. You did not buy those 100 cards at that. Like, yes, it's just math that's parked. You're parking it. So whatever the cost per card, all 50 of those are zero does negative negative. And what we found was we would buy 500 cards at a show and we'd spend eleven hundred dollars. And we were like, man, we're in these for two dollars and 30 cents. We're in this for less than three bucks a piece after our costs and everything else. And then we would run. Three hundred of them and two hundred of them would go into a box and we'd say, well, we'll get to those eventually. And then we had seven four rows full of eventually that we realized were going to be impossible to actually turn into cash. So we had to learn a really hard lesson on that front. And we we finally broke down and we took the vast majority of that stuff and we took almost a full day on Black Friday and we grinded out a the longest what not stream we have ever run just to get some of that cash back. Don't care if it's a buck. Don't care if it's three dollars. Whatever it is, just get it back. We were we were running a hundred card lots that were selling for eight bucks. It was just like some people love that show. We got to turn this into cash. And that the lesson there was it only counts if you sell it. If you don't sell it, then it really wasn't your cost average. It's not how it works. A part of the lesson we learned, too, was the inventory like there has to be a diverse inventory there. So we went all in on late 90s, early 2000s unique inserts, which we still do that more heavily than most people do. And because people are our age, a lot of people are our age. There's some people younger. But for the most part, they're they're not early 20s hanging out in our shows. Right. So we ran that stuff. But at some point, it's not always easy to get the right kind. It's not always easy to get the right names. You can have a card with a three hundred dollar comp and run that on whatnot. And if it's not the right name, we've got like 20 or 30 bucks. It's happened. It happens. And whose fault is it? It's our dumb fault. Why in the world did you think that the 20 people in this show make up one of the people looking for this card in the world? You know, so we had to learn that lesson. I think it's affected our show buying as well. It's part of the diversifying. I know this. If I want to have a successful show, I bet especially if it's 90s, 2000s, there better be Jordan. There better be Kobe. There to be Shohei. There better be Jeter. Who else are we getting? Barry Sanders. Barry Sanders. The names matter. And if you ran 20 of their cards last week, guess what? Go buy them again. The same names. Listen to the market. You and I had some cards that we loved. Players we couldn't believe. Hall of Fame auto. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. What do people want to buy? So that was a really hard lesson for us and whatnot. We got cocky about it. Now, the beautiful thing, we can still say this. We have not lost money on a show yet. We've made money every time. We had one show this year where it was close and we spent a lot of time on it. So we've had to change that up. That was a big lesson for us on whatnot. One of the things that threw us off was when we first launched whatnot, Juicebox gave us that case to do a review on. So we had a case of PSA and SGC slabs to give away over like a six week, eight week period and our following grew to like 4,000 in that six weeks. And we're like, we're going to have 50,000 followers by the end of the year. No, you're not. We got 85. No, you're not. Unless you want to keep giving away thousands in slabs every time. So that was part of a lesson too. It's going to take time. Spend time with your audience. Build relationships with your buyers. Learn what they're looking for. Learn what you're looking for. We had a big Ted Ginn buyer. I would go get that. There's a Gingy Beards, a handle on our, that follows the pod and all this stuff. He loves CC Sabathia. Like I know a handful of names that I probably wouldn't normally grab out of a stack that my buyers like to see. And so you really have to, with whatnot, it's a moving target. I wish I could use the quote that I give you all the time when it comes to whatnot. We don't know S about F. I'll just leave it at that. There's a quote from Ozark and it's like, just when you think you completely understand that market, just buckle up because whatnot changes quickly. It's ever evolving. And if you're going to do a model where you're not yelling and just pushing sudden death, you really have to have the right stuff because a 20 second auction with no action can clear out a room in about five minutes. You start running stuff like that. It's also a really important lesson there. And you just alluded to it, but I want to just hit it a little bit harder. If you want to grow a whatnot stream, now I also want to clarify this, there are a few of the guys that are kind of yellers and screamers who don't do the, Hey, we're only halfway there chat. They don't lie about stuff. That's their way of entertaining. But if you are not going to be that type of a seller, then your growth is going to be slower. If you're not actively doing the monkey song and dance, people lose their span of attention. They flip to different rooms and we haven't learned to be okay with that level of growth and seeking the right customers for you and not just casting the widest net possible. That's a great point because if we went off of comments for the last month, we would have run nothing but Drake Maykase hits. We're not those people. And honestly, if I have a Drake Maykase hit, I'm probably putting it in my showcase. Yeah. Not running it on whatnet. Yeah. With 35 people in the room. You've seen me do that. I'll run Rookie Kings. I'll run some $100, $200 stuff max, but bigger than that, it's just not consistent with our market there. I have people that buy $500 cards from me on a regular basis. It shows, but in our whatnot, it's affordable and it's collectible. That's the criteria. Content as we wrap up here, what are some lessons you think we learned? If anybody else is out there and they're thinking about doing card content, here's the first thing I would say and then I'll hand it over to Gary. The biggest regret that Gary and I have with our brand is that we did not put this on camera five years ago, that we didn't trust ourself. We knew how hard we were willing to work, but we didn't believe in ourself enough, if we're being honest. We were hopeful and not believing that we were going to build something. It wasn't until we put ourselves out there that we realized there's an audience of people craving authentic, authentic conversation around the hobby, where the interest is not self-gain only, where it is unapologetically a space for people that are dealers trying to make money with this, but man, I regret that we didn't start sooner. I regret that we didn't just ready, fire, aim with this. You know? Yeah. Well, and that's something that both of us not only regret, but the whole ready, fire, aim is so against how we're both wired. Yeah, that's true. We both want to know what the path looks like. slight before we step a foot onto it. Um, so I would agree with that. Um, I think the, the, a few of the lessons that I would take from content this year, uh, it took us longer than it should have to figure out what our voice was going to be in the hobby. And I think we both knew what it needed to be before we decided to lean into it. Sure. And again, I think most of these content lessons boil down to trust yourself and go, you know, who you are. Yeah. Um, and the minute that we leaned into that, we didn't, we saw the little bump right off the rip when we went to video, but what really, really saw us take that kind of exponential curve was when we said, we're the guys who are anti trying to sell knowledge were the guys who are anti gatekeeper, and we're going to just tell people exactly what this is like and offer to help in whatever way we can to be, help people be successful in this business. Uh, you may not agree with our thought processes. You may not agree with our takes, but you can't say that we're. Not trying to help people and that it's not rooted in experience. Like that's, that's, that's one of the unique takes is it's nothing to turn on a camera and give your take about hobby news. Sure. Do it. We want to hear everybody's got an opinion. That's never going to be boring, but the reality is it may not be substance. The biggest shift we made. So we had a viral video, the only truly viral video we had where we went after backyard breaks over that shipping issue they had, which was resolved for like a week later, but it was an issue and we had a decision to make, but I was feeling like I didn't just want to create content around the tinfoil. I didn't just want to create content around conspiracy and negativity. What it is. We didn't want to be sports card radio 2.0. We didn't want to be a constant stream of negative. Yeah. But some of the stuff they said, I really liked. So I don't want to, well, it's not a question of liking it. Do I think all of us human beings, we all eat up when, when somebody says the things that we think deep, dark things about when somebody is willing to say the negative things that we might be a little too afraid to say. And if you listen to us at all, you know, that we will say some of those things, but we didn't want every week to be an hour of just crapping on everything in the hobby and complaining about every person in the hobby, like that's not what we wanted. And that's the reason that I started turning on my phone when I was shipping items on eBay and just answering any questions people would have. And until tick-tock changed hands and ownership, I was able to do that. Now we get restricted. If we mentioned the word eBay, I can't. I were set up at a show this weekend, not even talking, just had the camera on the table so people could watch what it's like at a card show and we got restricted. Yeah. So that's made it tough, but we did that. And then the biggest shift we made was this thing called the value box where it was like, what can we give away? What can, you know, we're not saying that we have a massive shop. We're not saying that we are the biggest influence. We're not saying we buy these $10,000 cards, but you know what we are saying? Nobody's going to outwork us. There's no, there's nobody in this industry that's going to outwork us. I stand on that. I don't care. And the other people saying I do, they probably work just as hard as we do. But you're not going to outwork us and we're never going to lie to you. We're going to tell you exactly what we're experiencing. And we're going to try to offer you the best advice and knowledge that we have to help you in your business. But trying to be the exciting new content that wasn't us. We're a couple of blue collar guys that work really hard and we took the leap and we want to help other people know that this is an option too, and find a way to, uh, to be helpful in that. So like, if I can say there's anything we're going to double down on, it's how do we bring more value to the content? This morning, someone shared Thomas family cards on Tik TOK shared this long story about how a philosophy that we introduced in an episode is affecting his business with a stressful situation he was dealing with. And I got emotional. Yeah, it's awesome. I got emotional because nobody knows. I'm getting teary eyed saying this. Nobody except you knows just how much we've put into this and how much it matters to us that we are not full of shit. When we talk about this, it matters so much that it's rooted in our own failures and experiences and our wins, and that's what we're trying to give away. So if there's anything we're going to lean in on more this year, it's that we're going to bring more experts. When we don't know something, we're going to bring somebody in. If there's something in the repack space and we aren't the right voice for that. Sure. Fine. We're going to bring in the right voice. Shop owners, people that sell on whatnot, people that scream on whatnot. What are they doing? Why are they doing that? Right? There's a lot of people watching. We're going to hear a lot more voices on that. Our hope and our commitment with the content is that we just keep giving more and more value away. Yep. And any ideas you have for how we can be helpful. We want to hear from you. We want to know what those might be. Yep. So a lot of lessons in 2025. Um, I've never been in a situation. I can't recall my adult life being more excited for a year in my business than I am this year. Yep. I genuinely mean that. It's such a rewarding feeling to know that you built it to the point where you kind of have an idea of what you're doing and you want to grow on it. Yep. And you still remember the big thing for me is not only that part of it, but always remembering what you said earlier. We still don't know S about F sometimes and being willing to eat. You're never going to grow as a person or in your business, unless you're willing to say, Hey, I was wrong here. How do I fix it? How do we, how do we make it better? Yeah. Um, 2026 is going to be awesome. We're excited that you guys are here and on this journey with us. Um, we hope to hear more from you. Keep those comments coming in, hit that like button, hit the subscribe button. It really does help us. We, um, in full transparency, we are so close on both YouTube and Tik TOK to monetization, which would be a huge, huge step for us. It's just a goal. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's just a goal for us and, and it will help us to increase the quality of the content we bring you. Uh, it will help us to bring you more diversified content. We want to be able to hop on a plane. And even if we're not set up, fly to the Burbank show and show you guys what it's like out there. Same thing with Dallas. Yeah. Um, and those things happen when we hit those goals. So make sure you're hitting that like button, hit the subscribe button. It really does help us a ton. Uh, you'll see an uptick in the number of whatnot shows in 2026, three to four a week are likely. Um, the way that's going to work is every single Sunday, you'll have a show with both Gary and I on it. That's the ball card show. And then additionally, because Gary and I do this for a living, we'll have, he'll have a pop-up show. I'll have one. I also do low end lot stuff because I mess with that low end market a little bit too. That's called morning madness. It's madness in the morning. Maybe we'll come up with a different name. I was just sounding good at the time. We had no idea what to put in there, but we've got that going on. Um, shows coming up. We have Eastgate on the 18th. Yeah. The day after this drops 17th, it's 17. It's actually a two day show this week, this month. However, we'll only be there for the skate is yes. It's the 17th and the 18th this month, but we'll only be there on the 17th. Unless we get froggy and decide to stay in Cincinnati. Wow. Uh, anyway, um, secondly, uh, we will be, we have two shows at the end of the month. There is a really cool one. The Buckeye is a Buckeye card show. I want to say Ohio state card show. Okay. The Ohio state card show. Greeny sports cards is hosting that. It's at the Kasich center at the fairgrounds. Good size space. Really excited. We got three tables for that. Our buddy Keith from New York cards will be a sponsor. It'll be set up there as well. Following day. The very end of the February 1st or January 1st, February 1st, Superbowl Sunday, right? Uh, the eighth, the Superbowl. So we're good then. Uh, February 1st, Grove city card fest. And then we'll be back to Xenia East gate on it. So a lot coming up ship. Shawana is in March. We're going to be traveling more. If there's a show in your area, you think we should check out? Let us know. We'd love to talk with you about that, man. This is a lot of housekeeping. Is there anything else? No, I think that's it. We kicked off a 2026 with a almost 90 minute episode. So hopefully y'all are still awake and with us. Um, we will be right back to the grind. You will see us every week. At least one of us every week until, uh, the holidays again. Uh, next year. Good Lord willing, we'll be, uh, we'll be here. One thing left to do. This has been the ball card show. These sports podcasts for the sports collector. Bye now. Peace.