Latest / Sports Card Clubhouse / Did PSA give away a customer's $25,000 submission?? | Gamestop buying eBay buyer benefits?

Transcript

Did PSA give away a customer's $25,000 submission?? | Gamestop buying eBay buyer benefits? · Sports Card Clubhouse

• 0:01
  Hey everybody, it is Mike and this we are back.
• 0:04
  This is Teapot. Teapot, how are you today?
• 0:06
  So Good Friday. Really good.
• 0:08
  Yeah, And this will post on Saturday, Saturday morning.
• 0:11
  This is this week in sports cards, which I did very
• 0:15
  successfully for quite a few months end of last year into
• 0:18
  this year. Got super busy, super busy, got
• 0:21
  stressed about trying to find somebody to host with every
• 0:24
  week. And I had this vision of hosting
• 0:26
  with somebody different every week depending on what happened
• 0:28
  in the hobby. And then I thought, why don't I
• 0:32
  just rotate every other week? So I'm only doing this every
• 0:35
  other week now instead of every week, which helps me.
• 0:38
  And I've got Teapot helping me once a month or every four weeks
• 0:42
  and Chris Sewell, the other rotation every four weeks as
• 0:45
  well, which makes this much easier for me, much more
• 0:48
  palatable. So I'm excited to have you
• 0:50
  Teapot. Thanks for joining me today.
• 0:53
  It it wasn't really that crazy of a week in the hobby until
• 0:57
  about 1/2 hour ago when Boston card hunter Nick posted
• 1:03
  something that he thinks is going to shake the hobby.
• 1:06
  I'm going to give a really quick rundown of what this is and then
• 1:10
  get your perspective on it 'cause I know you watched it
• 1:11
  too. He says that somebody sent
• 1:14
  $25,000 worth of cards to PSAPSA, lost them initially, but
• 1:19
  then the police got involved and they discovered the PSA donated
• 1:24
  them at a giveaway event, apparently accidentally you
• 1:27
  would imagine. And those cards ended up being
• 1:31
  five of them ended up getting sold to an LCS and two went up
• 1:35
  on eBay and may or may not still be on eBay.
• 1:38
  Maybe, maybe they've been pulled down because of all this.
• 1:42
  What are What's your take on this?
• 1:45
  Man, every time I hear operational failure, like that's
• 1:48
  what it, that's what it always screams to me.
• 1:50
  I think some other people, a lot other people maybe go
• 1:52
  immediately to like conspiracy or just theft or like, you know,
• 1:56
  nefarious acts or malice or something like that.
• 1:59
  I just hear operational failure. Mistakes happen with companies.
• 2:03
  The idea even to me that, you know, PSA would be like, well,
• 2:07
  let's steal $25,000 worth of cards intentionally at some kind
• 2:11
  of a systemic level. It's the same response and the
• 2:13
  same mindset I have to so many other things, including things
• 2:16
  that have happened to me like with the Grant Hill credentials
• 2:18
  where it's like something failed operationally.
• 2:21
  This is a company that scaled the generate numbers just came
• 2:23
  out and they did over, you know, PS as what was it like 2.7
• 2:27
  million cards in the month of April that they graded up 50%
• 2:31
  from a year ago? I think maybe it was I.
• 2:33
  Thought it was 2.2 but maybe? 2.2 yeah, yeah, the total was
• 2:38
  around like 3 with CGC and the other companies.
• 2:40
  So yeah, you're probably right. But it, but you're, they're
• 2:44
  experiencing as is the hobby in general, rapid, rapid growth.
• 2:48
  And I had somebody recently on a market movers AMA asked me like,
• 2:52
  why do you think PSA doesn't just hire more people and like
• 2:56
  go faster and charge us less? And I'm like, it's not that
• 2:58
  easy. I guarantee if they wanted to do
• 3:00
  that, they could. That's a whole separate
• 3:02
  conversation from what we're talking about right now.
• 3:05
  But it is to me an evidence of operational failure that
• 3:09
  something obviously happened along the lines where not just
• 3:11
  one card, but ostensibly a group of cards, I don't know what the
• 3:14
  total number was, got put in the wrong bucket in the wrong room,
• 3:18
  put into somebody's into the wrong hands.
• 3:21
  This isn't in a case where an internal PSA employee in
• 3:25
  handling or receiving or something stole them and then
• 3:28
  went and sold them in the same town on eBay.
• 3:31
  This is it. There was like apparently some
• 3:33
  some Providence to show that these things, like you said,
• 3:35
  wound up in a charity situation where they were bid on or
• 3:38
  purchased for a good 'cause I hope.
• 3:41
  But then, you know, wound up downstream and now you've got
• 3:45
  the massive whoever's at that point bought or purchased these
• 3:48
  cards and what they may or made out of done with them.
• 3:51
  Yeah. And you say operational issue.
• 3:53
  And I agree with you. It feels like these happen a lot
• 3:57
  with PSA. And then I think to myself,
• 3:59
  well, is it just because it's the same percentage as the other
• 4:02
  companies and they're grading 3 to 4X the number of cards that
• 4:06
  CGC is grading? Or is it because as Nick said,
• 4:11
  Boston Sports car, Boston Card Hunter, they are moving too
• 4:16
  fast, they're growing too fast. They are gobbling up companies,
• 4:20
  which I think were his exact words.
• 4:23
  Is that the problem or is it that this is the same level of
• 4:28
  problems that any company in the space are having?
• 4:31
  I don't know if we really can know.
• 4:32
  At the end of the day, there's no like benchmarks.
• 4:34
  We're not able to compare the incident reports and the
• 4:37
  operational failures from some kind of an intelligence
• 4:40
  dashboard from other companies to know this isn't like days of
• 4:43
  without an OSHA incident or something.
• 4:44
  You know that they count out in warehouses.
• 4:46
  This is just I, I do tend to think that the the biggest
• 4:50
  companies, the incumbents are the ones that always have the
• 4:53
  biggest spotlight on them of people just ready, waiting and
• 4:56
  watching for something to go wrong.
• 4:58
  And then they want to, you know, shout it out onto the mountain
• 5:02
  tops. And that's not necessarily
• 5:03
  wrong. When something goes wrong,
• 5:04
  company has to own up to it. But if you think about this,
• 5:07
  like in other content, we'll think about my boss, there's
• 5:10
  always people looking for like everything he says or does
• 5:12
  that's wrong and they shout it out.
• 5:15
  They'll say, you know, for for like 2 1/2 years straight, every
• 5:19
  other comment on every video was Will Grier or Lonzo Ball or
• 5:22
  whatever. Like some of the, you know, his
• 5:24
  his early sleeper picks for players he was high on to break
• 5:27
  out from like the first couple of years that he started sports
• 5:30
  card investor and they wouldn't let it drop.
• 5:32
  But then nobody was out there going like, man, Jeff was was
• 5:35
  like really right about Luka Doncic or about, you know, Shake
• 5:38
  Gills Alexander about these other players.
• 5:40
  So you're the point being they're kind of like looking
• 5:42
  nobody's out there and it's not newsworthy and it's not exciting
• 5:45
  and it doesn't get clicks. If you go wow, we've got the
• 5:48
  data. PSA grated 2.2 million cards
• 5:51
  last month and they had a 99.99999% success rate
• 5:55
  operationally with getting cards back to people safely and with
• 5:59
  no damage and no issues. We hear the other side of it, I
• 6:01
  think. Yeah, I agree, but that doesn't
• 6:04
  get attention. What gets attention is videos of
• 6:07
  Jeff saying Ben Simmons is going to the moon or whatever.
• 6:11
  What gets attention is PSA giving away $25,000 worth of
• 6:15
  cards that were a customer's submission.
• 6:18
  And those are much more fun. They're people are always going
• 6:22
  to watch those over a video of me saying PSA graded 99.9% of
• 6:28
  their cards accurately last month.
• 6:30
  Nope, nobody's gonna care about that.
• 6:31
  That's a that's a footnote in a Sunday video that I would put at
• 6:35
  the 36 minute mark. Yeah, I occasionally will get
• 6:38
  served up in my Instagram feed, some channel that's got some
• 6:42
  like reel of post that says like good, like feel good stories
• 6:45
  that happened this week in the world.
• 6:47
  And you can scroll through and see that like a big batch of
• 6:49
  puppies was saved and all these things, you know, types of
• 6:51
  things. They never have anywhere near
• 6:53
  the number of likes and everything.
• 6:55
  And the counts are not following nearly as much as every other
• 6:58
  major news network or all, you know, media person who's out
• 7:02
  there just talking about what this person did wrong on which
• 7:05
  side of the political spectrum or whatever.
• 7:07
  If you, if you tune into the mainstream media, it's 99% about
• 7:11
  all the problems in the world and everything that this
• 7:13
  president or this person's doing wrong.
• 7:16
  Even within the sports media world.
• 7:18
  The, the, the ESPN Sports Center that you and I grew up with that
• 7:22
  used to actually show you highlights of games and then
• 7:25
  would even go so far as to do like film breakdown and tell you
• 7:28
  why Peyton Manning was better than Tom Brady.
• 7:31
  I had to take that shot back in like 2006 before Brady kind of
• 7:34
  solidified his, his spot as the, as the number one.
• 7:37
  All those things were really exciting back then.
• 7:40
  And now you tune into ESPN and they might show you like 3
• 7:43
  highlights and then they want to talk about just you got Kendrick
• 7:46
  Perkins and Stephen a like running their mouths about
• 7:48
  everything that doesn't make any sense.
• 7:50
  Apparently it's working for them.
• 7:51
  So there's what you just described is a very proven,
• 7:54
  tried and true recipe for success.
• 7:57
  Yeah, I've been watching SportsCenter every morning for
• 8:00
  the last five years or so, and the 6:00 AM SportsCenter or even
• 8:05
  the 5:00 AM SportsCenter are mostly highlights.
• 8:08
  It's unwatchable when they bring out Perk to talk or most of the
• 8:12
  talking heads. I can't, I just can't watch
• 8:14
  those at all. But the problem is they used to
• 8:18
  show SportsCenter a lot. Now it's just a lot of talking
• 8:21
  heads. And you know, not just Sports
• 8:23
  Center, but throughout the day, the 24 hour ESPN cycle is just a
• 8:27
  lot of talking heads blathering on about the big negative things
• 8:32
  that are happening around in sports.
• 8:34
  And I'll do 95% positive videos, but those 5%, that one out of
• 8:40
  every 20 ish, maybe one out of every 10 is a negative.
• 8:44
  It's a something went wrong. Those are my videos that get
• 8:46
  attention and you know, I mostly I don't do a lot of them because
• 8:51
  it's kind of overdone. Everybody's doing wow, look at
• 8:54
  this, the thing that PSA did look at this thing that fanatics
• 8:58
  did. And so I just kind of shoved
• 9:00
  them into my Sunday video. But man, those do numbers and
• 9:03
  that's why Boston sports hunter, Well, excuse me, Boston sports
• 9:08
  card hunter. Boston Card Hunter does so well
• 9:12
  as he focuses on those things that are very attention getting.
• 9:20
  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's just no denying that it sells.
• 9:23
  I even if I go to the Market Movers YouTube channel, like the
• 9:26
  number one video is the the PSA experiment that I did, you know,
• 9:29
  the two different ones. And then the other ones are
• 9:31
  like, did I make money opening retail sports cards?
• 9:34
  And then, you know, I don't do as much like outright click bait
• 9:39
  hobby drama type stuff on the Market Movers channel, but it is
• 9:41
  kind of that stuff that is very controversial that gets the most
• 9:45
  views. And then some of the videos that
• 9:47
  I'm the most proud of that I felt were most authentic to me,
• 9:50
  that I thought were, you know, valuable information are
• 9:55
  typically below average. You know, on YouTube, you get
• 9:58
  your, you go to your YouTube studio, you get your top ten
• 10:00
  last videos and it'll show you your most recent one where it
• 10:03
  ranks. And I'll do a video that I'm
• 10:05
  like, man, I'm so proud of this video.
• 10:07
  And it's like 9 of 10, you know, and you're just like, oh gosh,
• 10:10
  this is really not like people really don't care.
• 10:13
  And that that's a talk. That's a talk that's a topic
• 10:16
  amongst a lot of people who I know watch this channel and, and
• 10:20
  they have their own like YouTube channels and they talk about
• 10:24
  like real collector type stuff. And they get really into topic
• 10:28
  sets, you know, different cards, their experience.
• 10:31
  And and they have to kind of be content with somewhere between a
• 10:34
  couple 100 to a couple 1000 views.
• 10:36
  If they want to go talk out and like bash on Fanatics or Tops or
• 10:39
  PSA or Jeff or somebody else, they'll probably be their top
• 10:42
  viewed videos. Yep, exactly.
• 10:46
  So this Week in Sports Cards is now sponsored by Auction Wire.
• 10:49
  Auction Wire. If I were one of these people
• 10:51
  who lost their cards in this PSA thing, I would make sure.
• 10:55
  I know, obviously I'd be working with the police, but I would do
• 10:58
  a search in Auction Wire. Auction Wire searches dozens,
• 11:01
  soon to be hundreds maybe of auction houses around the hobby.
• 11:05
  And you can just search for a certain card and it will show
• 11:08
  you whatever auction house is sending those.
• 11:09
  And then you can create alerts for it.
• 11:11
  And if your card got lost in the mail or something, very easy to
• 11:15
  do. Or if you're just looking for a
• 11:16
  rare card, I found one through auction Wire just recently that
• 11:19
  I'm bidding on. Not going to tell you what it is
• 11:21
  because I don't want you to go bid on it too.
• 11:23
  But yeah, use my code hero. We'll have a new code for you
• 11:27
  soon for second month free, first month's already free
• 11:31
  auction wire dot AI. So next topic I want to talk
• 11:35
  about teapot is the eBay attempt, maybe alleged attempt
• 11:41
  to purchase from boy I can't even think of their name
• 11:46
  GameStop, man, I'm fried, I'm fried it's Friday afternoon, I'm
• 11:49
  fried Friday. And I know you guys on spitball
• 11:52
  and talked about it, but is this legitimate attempt to purchase
• 11:56
  eBay or is this just a a troll attempt?
• 11:59
  What is it? My area of expertise is
• 12:02
  definitely not in mergers, acquisitions and hostile
• 12:05
  takeovers. I don't, I don't know anything.
• 12:08
  I mean, I don't, it's not that I don't know anything.
• 12:09
  I know, I know a decent amount, but it's not my area of
• 12:11
  expertise to come on here and say like there's absolutely no
• 12:14
  way or there is a way. I've seen actually some pretty
• 12:17
  compelling cases for both. And if you saw the, I think it
• 12:20
  was CNBC interview that Ryan Cohen, who is the CEO and
• 12:24
  chairman of GameStop did where he was just kept sort of
• 12:28
  grumpily repeating the, the the information's on our website.
• 12:31
  It's half half stock, half cash. He wouldn't give them an ounce
• 12:36
  of information about how this was going to happen.
• 12:39
  There's been drama since then. Apparently he's been kicked off
• 12:41
  over banned from eBay on his account like.
• 12:44
  Allegedly. Allegedly, who knows, Like
• 12:46
  there's a lot of troll job stuff kind of going on, it seems like,
• 12:48
  but I I think about it more like if it were to happen, what are
• 12:54
  the implications of it? Like what does that actually
• 12:57
  mean? Is this a big deal?
• 12:58
  Is it a nothing burger? Is it like, you know, what is
• 13:00
  it? And my opinion is that this
• 13:04
  would not be what, for example, collectors has claimed is
• 13:08
  largely the case with SGC and Beckett, even though you could
• 13:10
  argue this as well. I'll just leave them as they are
• 13:14
  and let them run their business. That's not what the the interest
• 13:18
  is here. I don't imagine from GameStop, I
• 13:19
  think they would be looking at this as an opportunity to first
• 13:23
  more effectively broadly increase their e-commerce
• 13:26
  holistically across the board. I think they would potentially
• 13:29
  take walk in consignments from people if you want to bring your
• 13:33
  cards into your local GameStop and have them sold through
• 13:36
  auction, through live selling on eBay, maybe even some fixed
• 13:40
  price vaulting type thing depending on what ultimately
• 13:44
  happens with their broader relationship with PSA, which
• 13:47
  I'll get to in a second. Plus, they're not just doing
• 13:51
  sports and trading cards. They're doing, you know, video
• 13:53
  games and other things. Maybe they move more into the
• 13:55
  broader collectible space with, you know, graded Funko Pops or
• 13:58
  video games or whatever things that are out there, comics.
• 14:03
  Another thing I thought about was mail is a really big risk.
• 14:06
  You know, we, we, you put your cards in the mail and you hope
• 14:10
  that they make it to the destination without being sliced
• 14:12
  open or, you know, taken somewhere else where they
• 14:14
  shouldn't have gone and showing up on eBay or at charity.
• 14:18
  So if you could, you know, bring your cards into GameStop and not
• 14:21
  have to worry about if they assumed all liability and you
• 14:24
  had a declared value like you do when you and if you drop off at
• 14:27
  APSA submission center at at Burbank or Cards HQ or somewhere
• 14:30
  else, that could be a big benefit as opposed to like if
• 14:35
  you sent them through the mail to one of the other big eBay
• 14:38
  consignment companies. And then there was some
• 14:41
  verbiage, I think on Gamestop's website about how they, you
• 14:44
  know, wanted to kind of expand their media reach.
• 14:47
  So that would be interesting to see what they do.
• 14:49
  Does that just mean they're going to be spinning up little
• 14:51
  live selling cabanas in their GameStop locations like we have
• 14:54
  at Cards HQ or is it something different?
• 14:57
  But I think they're seeing that as like this sort of live
• 15:01
  selling QVC style thing is very popular.
• 15:04
  Regardless of what your opinion is on it.
• 15:06
  It's it is very popular and a lot of people seem to really
• 15:09
  enjoy it. It's a little bit of the wild,
• 15:11
  Wild West with with card prices when it comes to that.
• 15:16
  But then, you know, the big thing is they're just they just
• 15:18
  be buying a lot of technology, a lot of infrastructure and the
• 15:22
  largest sports and trading card customer database in the world.
• 15:25
  So that's you see why they'd want to do it.
• 15:29
  Whether or not they're able to execute it, I don't know.
• 15:31
  The the follow up question to that is you sort of have this
• 15:34
  triangulation between GameStop and PSA where PSA and Nat Turner
• 15:39
  are invested into GameStop and then PS as got the relationship
• 15:42
  with the Vault and broadly, more broadly with eBay.
• 15:46
  Do they then make a play to acquire collectors and just
• 15:48
  become the, I would say the biggest secondary market engine
• 15:54
  where fanatics is the biggest primary market engine and you
• 15:57
  truly have, I guess a duopoly overall?
• 16:00
  I don't know. Yeah, actually, let's just tie
• 16:03
  these two conversations together.
• 16:05
  That Ryan Cohen conversation on CNBC got a ton of attention.
• 16:10
  It was a negative attention because people were shocked at
• 16:14
  the way he behaved on that and the way he answered that.
• 16:16
  And but he had apparently, I haven't watched it, but a lot of
• 16:21
  people have said that he had a follow up interview elsewhere
• 16:25
  that was much, much better. But far, far fewer people
• 16:28
  watched that because again, the same thing, it's less
• 16:31
  interesting. Yeah, you would much rather and
• 16:34
  not you, but most people would much rather watch somebody fall
• 16:38
  on their face then see them just walk straight and and do normal
• 16:43
  things. It's true, I've seen that
• 16:47
  interview clipped up the the -1 the bad, the weird one that's
• 16:52
  been half of my Instagram feed for the last couple days.
• 16:54
  It's I can't I can't seem to escape it.
• 16:56
  That next between the two are just clips of him like way too
• 17:00
  close to the camera going half stock, half cash.
• 17:02
  What's the question? Yeah, so.
• 17:05
  Well, my understanding is he owned, he took over Chewy, which
• 17:10
  is now a very, very successful animal food company, I think and
• 17:16
  and maybe some other things too. But when he took them over, they
• 17:19
  were not good at all and he completely turned them around.
• 17:23
  So he obviously has some strong business acumen.
• 17:27
  I would be very interested. I don't use eBay as a seller,
• 17:31
  but I buy on eBay way too much. Too much more than I'd want to
• 17:35
  admit. I've never used GameStop, not
• 17:39
  since, I don't know, my kids were little. 15 years probably
• 17:43
  since I've been in the GameStop. The one in my town just closed
• 17:45
  over the winter I think. So it wouldn't have a ton of
• 17:50
  effect on me unless there was something buying related on
• 17:53
  eBay. But that's the type of thing
• 17:54
  since I'm not really paying any eBay fees, although they're
• 17:58
  baked into the price of things I'm buying that the types of
• 18:02
  things that buyers would feel would be more experience related
• 18:07
  and not necessarily cost related.
• 18:10
  So you talked about some seller things.
• 18:12
  Are there any things that we can think of that would impact
• 18:15
  buyers, any sort of integrations?
• 18:18
  Like we know that Nat Turner is on the board of GameStop, I
• 18:22
  think, and he has a relationship with eBay.
• 18:24
  Obviously, it feels like they've done a lot of integrations with
• 18:28
  eBay. Is there anything else that you
• 18:30
  can think of that might make sense for them for an
• 18:32
  integration between the three of them?
• 18:36
  I mean, any any data integration would be valuable to them, but
• 18:40
  could be leveraged to make a better user experience or just
• 18:44
  provide data more holistically to users.
• 18:47
  I think the big thing though, to me that that comes to mind is
• 18:50
  the like the overall distribution network and what
• 18:52
  that would look like if you buy a card on eBay, you know, is
• 18:55
  there a way to just have it almost like Amazon drop shipped
• 18:59
  to another GameStop location where you're not, you're not
• 19:04
  taking the risk with USPS or whatever.
• 19:06
  The mail carrier is like they, they own responsibility and
• 19:09
  liability until it goes to the GameStop that's 4 miles from
• 19:12
  your house and you go pick it up in person.
• 19:14
  It's almost like your personal PO Box.
• 19:16
  They've got, I forget the number of locations, GameStop locations
• 19:20
  in the United States. I don't know if you've seen
• 19:21
  that. We could Google it fast, but I
• 19:24
  mean, they're pretty ubiquitous. There's, we just had two of them
• 19:27
  this this past four years within about four miles of my house.
• 19:31
  One of them actually did close, but there's still another one
• 19:33
  and it's super easy to get over there.
• 19:35
  So I think that would be a potentially a big benefit that
• 19:41
  they would just take that sort of end to end process.
• 19:44
  And then I don't know, maybe we get to the point where it's
• 19:45
  actually, you know, drone delivered to your to your front
• 19:49
  door just like the Walmart deliveries and stuff are now,
• 19:52
  so. 1600 Gamestops in the United States as of January.
• 19:56
  They closed some right around that time.
• 19:58
  I don't know if that's before or after.
• 20:01
  I don't think they closed a significant number, certainly
• 20:04
  not 25% of them, I'm guessing, but 1600 it it would be easy for
• 20:10
  me to find a GameStop location too.
• 20:11
  It's one of those things where it's not quite like Subway,
• 20:13
  where they're on every corner, but.
• 20:16
  Yeah, it's, it's a really interesting point there that you
• 20:19
  make that if you, if they owned eBay, being able to walk into a
• 20:25
  a GameStop and just bring your cards in and say maybe there'll
• 20:30
  be some sort of even further integration of they see your
• 20:35
  sales somehow too. And you just drop them off and
• 20:39
  say here they are. And then they package them for
• 20:41
  you and they ship them too. Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, I just
• 20:44
  think there's a lot of friction overall in that space that they
• 20:46
  would look at and say here's how we can, here's how we can help
• 20:49
  you do this. I don't know, maybe there's
• 20:51
  software where GameStop, you know, builds out through eBay
• 20:54
  where you integrate your personal, like you said, eBay
• 20:57
  seller profile. I think that's what you're kind
• 20:59
  of getting at is I sold these cards and hold them here like a
• 21:03
  mini Com C hub or something. Don't forget too that eBay owns
• 21:07
  TCG Player and has it like it's some kind of at least
• 21:10
  partnership with Com C, who we've heard rumors isn't maybe
• 21:14
  isn't doing too well. So they might be part of that
• 21:16
  overall umbrella of like vaulting and housing of lower
• 21:19
  dollar cards, who knows. That's an interesting point too
• 21:22
  that I hadn't considered is that eBay owns a chunk of Com C and
• 21:26
  from what Neo has said, they have the ability to have an
• 21:29
  option to fully purchase Com CI think later this year if they
• 21:34
  want to. I don't know how Neo knows that,
• 21:36
  but he talked about it in a video a few months ago.
• 21:38
  I think I want to say it's November of this year.
• 21:41
  They have to decide whether they want to purchase the entire COM
• 21:44
  C platform. So yeah, interesting,
• 21:48
  interesting point. Yeah, Yeah.
• 21:51
  I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot happening now in this space
• 21:53
  of I, I have to be very realistic as we, you know, as we
• 21:56
  build market movers that the landscape is evolving for hobby
• 22:01
  apps beyond just pricing and comping and checking things and,
• 22:07
  you know, tracking your collection into a lot more
• 22:10
  desirability. The, the, the ability to quickly
• 22:12
  price cards is becoming more and more ubiquitous.
• 22:15
  I think there are getting served up AI apps every day for
• 22:19
  different pieces, different chunks of what people need from
• 22:22
  the hobby and to do things. And so that space is rapidly
• 22:25
  evolving and I think they'll be able to do that more
• 22:29
  confidently, like, as like traffic would walk into
• 22:32
  Gamestops too. When the announcement happened,
• 22:34
  like what was it 2 years ago that they were going to start
• 22:36
  buying cards from people and also operating as APSA grading
• 22:40
  submission drop off? You know, there were all kinds
• 22:42
  of videos of people walking in with their stack of Pokémon
• 22:45
  slabs and being like, you know, I have this VMAX Charizard
• 22:48
  that's worth $380. It's APSA 10.
• 22:50
  And they told me they could give me 63 bucks for it.
• 22:52
  You know, it's tough. There's, there's, you know,
• 22:55
  pieces to that, but it's, it's getting easier and easier for
• 22:59
  companies, the playing fields being levelled.
• 23:01
  And I think, I think a lot of it is just spend time and sort of
• 23:06
  things to catch up and companies are catching up.
• 23:10
  Data is becoming more available to different platforms.
• 23:13
  So I imagine, like I said, I think, I think data would be at
• 23:16
  the heart of everything they're trying to do and then would be
• 23:19
  coupled into retail operations and a distribution network.
• 23:23
  Five years ago, hobby permanence felt a little tenuous.
• 23:25
  It felt like, it felt like things could fall apart at any
• 23:30
  time. And now today in 2026, it feels
• 23:33
  like hobby permanence is closer. Like obviously they're going to
• 23:37
  be ups and downs, but it doesn't feel like things are going to
• 23:40
  fall apart because the infrastructure is much, much
• 23:43
  stronger and more vast than it ever was even two or three years
• 23:48
  ago. And you know, we, we look at
• 23:50
  those things like walking into a GameStop and when that came out,
• 23:53
  everybody's like, this is the stupidest idea.
• 23:54
  It's never going to work, but it has added to that strength of
• 23:58
  infrastructure, strength of hobby permanence to make you
• 24:01
  think maybe this bubble isn't as much of A bubble as people think
• 24:06
  it is. Yeah, I don't think there can be
• 24:10
  a pricing bubble. There's not a popularity bubble
• 24:13
  in my opinion. I do not.
• 24:15
  I think, I think already year over year, there are tons of
• 24:19
  people just getting absolutely smoked financially on things
• 24:22
  that they overpay for early. And my hope is that they're
• 24:25
  learning some of those lessons and over time it will curb out
• 24:28
  some of the zeal and enthusiasm that we've seen in in wax prices
• 24:32
  and other stuff and just these insane record-breaking sales for
• 24:36
  players who haven't even debuted in leagues.
• 24:37
  And, and it's I, I talk about that a lot on the market movers
• 24:41
  channel and try to kind of set realistic expectations.
• 24:45
  Obviously people are getting burned like it's every single
• 24:49
  day they're they're overpaying. It hasn't slowed things down
• 24:53
  like that's on a micro level and an individual user or you know,
• 24:56
  hobbyist level, but the broader machine is just and there's so
• 25:01
  many people. I cited some numbers recently on
• 25:04
  a video that I did where I don't remember the exact figures, but
• 25:08
  if you look at what you know, Fanatics was putting out in
• 25:12
  terms of like the overall, I don't know what was it like $8
• 25:16
  billion or something like for primary markets their their
• 25:20
  recent like collectibles valuation.
• 25:22
  Do you remember this at all? Did you see these numbers?
• 25:24
  Yeah. I don't remember what it is
• 25:26
  though, but you know it. Was like 8 billion or something
• 25:28
  it what you know and and I was surprised I thought it would be
• 25:31
  a bigger number. But then if you go back to what
• 25:34
  tops valuation like you annual was like a couple of years ago
• 25:37
  be when they before they were acquired, it was like it was
• 25:40
  like 2 billion or something. You know, they're growing,
• 25:42
  they're growing, they're growing.
• 25:44
  But if you look at bigger markets, like the sneaker market
• 25:48
  in 2024 was $150 billion and the sports betting market was $250
• 25:53
  billion. So there's just the number of
• 25:58
  people who collect cards today or do something in the hobby
• 26:00
  with cards relative to the number of sports fans is so
• 26:05
  small. It's I don't know what the it's
• 26:08
  like. I think it's fewer than one in
• 26:09
  100. Like if you just scale up how
• 26:11
  many people watch even just like American football in this
• 26:13
  country. So while we all look at it and
• 26:17
  we go, you know, Oh my gosh, there's, you know, there were
• 26:20
  111,000,000 cards produced in 202526 Bowman basketball
• 26:26
  according to Slab Squatch on X. You know, that sounds like a ton
• 26:30
  of cards printed, but like there's like, you know, 120
• 26:35
  million or, you know, million people watching NFL football
• 26:38
  every year. So you're like, I don't know,
• 26:41
  maybe it's not that much. All these numbers are becoming
• 26:43
  like very relative as things have scaled really, really
• 26:46
  rapidly across the hobby landscape.
• 26:49
  Month over month, record-breaking sales numbers on
• 26:51
  public sites, you know, just new users, content channels growing
• 26:57
  rapidly. It's a boom.
• 26:59
  And I don't think it's, I don't think that part of it's a
• 27:01
  bubble. I think it's becoming very like
• 27:03
  institutionalized and stabilized in a lot of ways.
• 27:06
  Yeah, I agree. I'm in a CGC bulk submitter
• 27:09
  group that I've never submitted to before, but somebody
• 27:11
  recommended it to me. The owner of that group
• 27:14
  apparently it's quite big and I guess he's close with somebody
• 27:17
  high up at CGC because he posted yesterday saying I just came
• 27:21
  back from CGC. They have a 2 million card
• 27:25
  backlog. They are ramping up hiring and
• 27:29
  will have capacity to do 900,000 very, very soon.
• 27:32
  They're doing I think six 56150 ish thousand a month right now.
• 27:36
  And so they're, they're going up to, they're going up by almost
• 27:40
  50% and with a 2 million card backlog, they've obviously
• 27:45
  decided this is not temporary and we can't sustain whatever it
• 27:49
  is 60 business day turn around times and compete with PSA
• 27:52
  because PSA obviously their turn around times are long.
• 27:55
  To compete with them, you have to have faster turn around
• 27:57
  times, right? Is that the that's the best way
• 27:59
  that in customer service? Yeah, I definitely think those
• 28:02
  are the two best like you have to compete on price and customer
• 28:05
  service and and build brand credibility.
• 28:12
  Overall, I think the more of your cards you can get in
• 28:16
  circulation. Maybe this sounds like a bit
• 28:20
  myopic, but like when, when we do you know, when we run like
• 28:23
  the top five cards going up on an SCI every week it we're
• 28:27
  almost always selecting APSA graded version of a card because
• 28:31
  there's there's volume. You can actually track something
• 28:33
  day over day, week over week. Mostly there are grading
• 28:36
  companies. You can't CGC, you can on TCG.
• 28:40
  We don't typically do TCG on there, but you know, you, you
• 28:44
  just there's no volume on SGC, even on Beckett and certainly
• 28:48
  not on CGC for sports. And so it's, it's kind of always
• 28:51
  PSA. And if you don't have price
• 28:53
  confidence baked in because there wasn't a sale yesterday
• 28:56
  and the day before or the week before, or at least something
• 28:58
  very recent on these cards, the comp driven landscape that we
• 29:02
  live in, just it doesn't work for the vast majority of these
• 29:06
  of these cards. Putting aside the high end
• 29:08
  market and stuff that's actually interesting and rare and more
• 29:11
  niche, the liquid commodity market of the hobby, which is
• 29:15
  sort of the the big machine that's humming right now.
• 29:18
  I think that's a big reason why it's almost like this self
• 29:20
  fulfilling flywheel of PSA to, you know, the production.
• 29:23
  And so if CGC can breakthrough that and they can, you know, do
• 29:27
  more cards, they were up. I'm looking at sports in April
• 29:32
  year over year and they're only up on sports cards 2%, whereas
• 29:35
  their overall grading numbers are up 102% year over year.
• 29:38
  So. Heavy on TCG, Yeah.
• 29:42
  So for me, I'm a big rookie Hall of Fame autograph collector.
• 29:46
  And if I ever see, and I almost never do, but if I ever see,
• 29:51
  let's just go with a Kirby Puckett rookie autograph, for
• 29:54
  instance, 'cause that's a good one.
• 29:56
  If there were a CGC and APSA slab, the Kirby Puckett rookie
• 30:02
  autograph at auction, I would absolutely go after the CGC one
• 30:07
  because I know it's gonna end 20 to 30% less.
• 30:10
  But most people, most sellers are not selling CGC slabs via
• 30:14
  auction because they can't get close to what they're getting
• 30:17
  from PSA. And they think, well, I'm gonna
• 30:19
  list this, buy it now at PSA prices, and then they just never
• 30:23
  sell. And it's frustrating for me
• 30:26
  'cause I'm not gonna pay you PSA prices for a CGC card, even
• 30:31
  though I prefer CGC, which seems stupid to me.
• 30:33
  Just saying it out loud, but that's the way it is.
• 30:37
  Yeah, I don't, I don't know how they shift the, the broader
• 30:39
  price confidence and breakthrough on the secondary
• 30:41
  market value piece. I I don't know.
• 30:43
  I don't know if it has to be some like I've speculated on it
• 30:47
  before and thought it would have to be some kind of like a
• 30:49
  massive scandal that would be like PS as own undoing coupled
• 30:55
  with just like crippling operational inefficiency.
• 30:58
  Where if like if PSA, for example, had to for some reason
• 31:01
  shut down for another year like they did during COVID and CGC
• 31:05
  because they're in Florida and was open, like could keep
• 31:07
  humming like SGC did back then too.
• 31:11
  That's one way that you could sort of like take market share
• 31:13
  overall and build hopefully customer loyalty.
• 31:15
  But there's got to be some kind of like a master's thesis in
• 31:20
  like the rise and fall of companies.
• 31:22
  And this isn't like a Blockbuster or Kodak thing.
• 31:25
  That's not what's going on here. I think.
• 31:27
  I think there have to be some other big, big thing that would.
• 31:29
  Happen. Yeah, agreed.
• 31:32
  Well, Teapot, we've covered it all.
• 31:34
  Anything else you want to say before we wrap up?
• 31:37
  Nope, thanks for having me on. It's good.
• 31:40
  There's always stuff going on in the in the hobby.
• 31:42
  This might have been a look you said.
• 31:43
  A little bit of a slower week but still no shortage of news
• 31:46
  and stuff to discuss. So look forward to talking again
• 31:48
  the next time. Yeah.
• 31:50
  Thanks for joining. We'll see you again in four
• 31:51
  weeks. Thanks everybody for watching.