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I think one of the problems today in the hobby
is that kids today are just looking at it for investment value.
I'd rather collect newer cards
'cause they're excellent potential for investment.
I think all the old cards are great.
I mean, they're worth a lot of money
and they do bring some spirit of baseball.
Well, some of the kids are getting--
Maybe they're too sophisticated to be collectors.
Now they want to be investors,
which is really he wrong approach to a nice hobby.
A hobby is a hobby is a hobby.
You know, it's like collecting rocks.
What are you going to do,
buy one and sell one the next day?
You know, you collect them to admire them and look at them.
COVID 19 pandemic has taken its toll.
The same can't be said for the sports trading card industry.
Two LeBron James cards
and a Giannis Antetokounmpo card
each sold for more than $1,000,000.
$190,000, do I hear 200?
200 I have. How about 220? 220 I have. Let's go 240.
The trend is celebrities
who play trading card games.
There's over four seconds left, just broke the $73,000.
I know this is a lot of money,
but this is what everybody has been wanting lately.
The final cost could exceed $10 million.
I'm at $340,000.
Final call.
Last chance.
$360,000.
A record $6.6 million.
$12.6 million.
This makes it the most valuable sports card of all time.
-How's my shirt looking? -Good.
- How's my hair? - Great.
Thank you.
So I'm Paul Sullivan,
for 13 years I was the "Wealth Matters" columnist
at theNew York Times.
In March of 2018,
I decided to look at the trading card market.
The resulting column was titled,
"Some Traders Study Stock Prices.
Others monitor the '52 Mantle."
I end up writing 608 columns in 13 years.
You know, over a million words.
You know, talked to some 5000 people.
But I remember this one because,
when it was something like trading cards,
there's always a "why now?" component,
like, why would I write about this now?
And the reason I wrote about it is because
PWCC was introducing this index.
So an index that they had created with trading cards
and it was modeled on the S&P 500.
At the time that I wrote this column,
the PWCC Index had beat the S&P 500
by almost two times as much. They had double the returns.
And so that was striking.
Whenever I'd write about these things like trading cards,
they always fell into a category that I come back to again and again.
And that was passion investments.
You know, people always hope
that they're going to buy something
and it's going to, it's going to boom.
But for you to do it in any sort of intelligent way,
you have to know that you just love this thing.
You just love this thing.
And if it increases in value, great.
And if it doesn't, well,
you have this thing that you love.
Collectors have been buying up full stocks of baseball cards,
basketball cards and Pokemon cards
and then reselling them online.
COVID was something that, you know, nobody obviously expected to happen, right?
And when it happened, there's a lot of chatter in our industry
thinking the market's going to crash.
And then come April,
everyone started getting into their old collections.
Thanks to the surge of livestream sports card sales,
the sports card trading market is projected to grow from $14 billion in 2019
to nearly $100 billion by the year 2027.
You know, the Jordan documentary was coming out, so there was hype on that.
I've never seen another documentary do anything like what that did.
Before the boom, a Michael Jordan rookie was $35,000
the height of the boom, $800,000.
Wayne Gretzky's 1979 O-Pee-Chee rookie card
that one sold at auction for just under 1.4 million.
We had a Brady sell for 2.88 million,
privately sold a LeBron for 5.2 million.
Patrick Mahomes cards sell for 4.3 million.
If you were in on the right product at the right time, you made money.
In the last six months
trading cards,Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon andMagic,
we've sold $8 million worth.
$8 million in two auctions.
Record breaking sales, including one today, a card sold for $5.9 million.
This industry just went absolutely crazy.
We were selling two cards per second.
We did 2 billion in sales in 2020
and 2 billion in sales halfway through 2021.
We went from 25 employees pre-COVID, to now over 110.
Pre-pandemic, It was a struggle at that time.
We worked on margins like five, 10% before.
Now you can average like around 80 to 120000 at shows.
Through the pandemic, the governments printed trillions of dollars
to try and help the economy and stabilize the economy,
but that's going to create inflation down the road.
And one of the things that you hedge against inflation
is by buying hard assets.
A lot of the people that are doing the buying are in that,
you know, demographic that grew up in the '80s,
going to all these shows and they love sports cards.
So all those confluence of events
are coming together over the last 18 months
to create this perfect storm that we're seeing.
About 15 months after writing that first column on baseball cards,
I received an email from a reader
who said, you know, "I have a-- I don't think you got the full story."
Five grown men were fighting over trading cards
outside the Brookfield Target.
The fight all starting at the Wauwatosa Target
over claims the man in all black
let people cut the line to buy sports trading cards.
When a business gets hot, a hobby gets hot,
there's always a seedy element that might be jumping in
to take advantage of the situation.
There was even a man who pulled a gun on another customer
just to get Pokemon cards.
Target trading card collectors turned Target into a sneaker camp out war zone.
We've learned this shooting happened
after a shoplifting incident inside of this Target,
involving Pokemon cards and a pizza.
Target is reportedly taking trading cards off of their shelves.
So now you've got these retail flippers lining up at Target.
They're going in, they're gonna buy a $30 box.
Immediately go to eBay, flip it for 100, $150.
It's all about supply and demand.
A scarcity that's driven up the price of a box of new cards like this one, about $400.
There's a big majority of it, they're doing for return on investment.
This is almost like the golden ticket, Willy Wonka theory.
Then you've got people just scamming each other online.
There have been times, even online from these last couple of years
where people have purchased one of these vintage boxes
and they've cracked it open and it's been fake cards.
It's fake.
Logan Paul paid three and a half million dollars for Pokemon cards.
They're fake.
A fake resealed booster box... - It's a resealed box.
Get the out of here, bro.
That's not good.
A man from Georgia spent $58,000
of a COVID relief fund loan on a Pokemon card.
People are insane.
These were two submissions that we had to us.
Two Jordan rookies.
But everything about this card is fake.
They got us, guys.
About a five minute smash and grab.
We have had scary situations, scary characters
come through here
and we've actually had a recent situation where...
You got to cut that. Okay, cut that second thing.
The markets for nostalgia have been distorted by adults.
Full stop. And it's trickled down to kids.
That says something really sad about
where we are with these childhood hobbies
that give, you know, texture to to our early lives
and give us stories to tell when we're adults.
All right, guys, welcome back in.
Another a new podcast, Sports Cards Nonsense,
brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network.
As always, I'm your host, Mike Gioseffi.
As always, he is my wife's third favorite cousin...
And your favorite best friend? - MIKE: Fair.
Jesse Gibson is my name. Thank you, sir. - There you go.
Now that we've established bloodlines,
what are we doing today by means of actual content?
- What's the story? - We got to do Hobby 101.
I think we just start by explaining the ecosystem.
Let's go right from the streamline.
So where does this whole thing trickle down from?
Yeah, I want to know about manufacturers.
- Distributors. - Okay.
Basically everything there is coming from top down.
Short answer, starts with manufacturing.
Topps, Panini, they make the cards.
They send them out to distributors
who do just that, distribute the cards.
Then come into play the retailers,
local card shops and breakers, retail locations.
And then at the end of the day, right,
the most important part, the collectors.
From there you kind of have options on what to do with the cards.
You can grade them,
use different auction houses, secondary markets.
So there's definitely a streamline of things,
but at the end of the day, it then just comes down to the collector, right?
If there's nobody who has a love and a passion for these cards,
everything above that is useless.
So that's really where the true lifeblood of this hobby is.
Okay, so that's where we are now.
But can we maybe take it back a little bit?
How did this all begin?
Yeah. Get his name. - Yeah. I mean, I can...
I've got a little bit of wiggle room if we need it.
Wanna just lead him a little bit?
So these are some of the highlights
in our upcoming vintage platinum night sports auction.
This is a 1912 Plow's Candy Ty Cobb card.
This is an extremely rare set.
There's only a handful of examples known
and this is the highest graded example of a Ty Cobb.
This will sell for 200,000 plus in the auction.
Uh, this is a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie card.
This is an example of what the cards did look like
before '52 Topps came out and changed the game.
And this card will bring around $400,000 in the auction.
So I think the first trading card is known as a "Peck and Snyder",
and it was the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
So initially, you know, cards were packaged with tobacco products,
then it graduated to candy and gum.
In 1915, you get the Cracker Jack set,
1933, you get the Goudey Gum Company
producing the historic Goudey set.
And then Topps really shifted the market in '52
and created the modern era of card collecting
using imagery of the players, statistics on the back,
created that larger size.
The Mickey Mantle story is one that--
It almost sounds like lore, right?
It almost sounds like people made this up.
"Oh, the most expensive card of all time was dumped in the ocean."
Yeah, so the tale goes that
Topps produced the second series of '52 Topps,
and they weren't able to get them distributed to stores in time.
And eventually at some point in the '50s,
they put them on a barge and went off the coast of New Jersey
and just dumped all the '52 Topps cases.
If there was one '52 Topps case left right now,
it would sell for over $10 million.
Yeah.
In 1965, Topps buys Bowman.
Really making them king.
Then you have Panini first entering the game in Italy with soccer cards.
'70s and '80s. Fleer and Topps are battling it out,
even had Fleer suing Topps, claiming they're a monopoly.
By the '80s even into the '90s,
everybody's interested, advertising everywhere.
Baseball cards are in every kid's hand at one point.
So in the '90s, you know, we had this mass production.
There was a ton of demand for it and they over-printed basically everything.
And so, you know, values went down on sports cards across the board.
So that was what's called the junk wax era.
The basic economic forces played out the way they're supposed to play,
except that nobody had any transparency into supply.
This is pre-Internet, right?
Everybody thought they were the only ones that had 12
you know, an upright Ken Griffey Jr. rookies,
but we all had 12 Griffey's.
So they tried to create more rarity
and so they started serial numbering cards.
That leaned into signing of cards,
and then jersey patch cards,
game used jersey cards.
It's not just a piece of cardboard now.
It's, "Wow, this is a piece of Jordan's jersey, his autograph." You know?
Now we could keep a piece of history.
2005 rolls around, Fleer declares bankruptcy.
So now we've got Topps, Upper Deck, Panini kind of all competing.
And then really the back half of that decade,
we see Panini start to get super aggressive, getting licensing,
which would obviously not allow other manufacturers to make cards.
Then, at that point, It is all Panini for everything except baseball.
And that's what Topps was left with.
Topps had baseball, Upper Deck had hockey,
Panini kind of everything else.
Then in 2021, that's really when everything starts to change, right?
Fanatics enters the game.
Here you've got a ten ton monster just coming in
that is already just the player when it comes to apparel,
now they're coming into the card game.
You know, decades ago, Fleer thought Topps maybe was a bit of a monopoly.
Well, now Fanatics comes in and acquires baseball,
basketball and football licensing exclusive,
which is just unheard of.
I mean, these really are going to be the people
who set the table for the card market going forward.
Okay, so Fanatics gets all this licensing.
What's going to go on with Panini?
What happens with Topps now?
Do they just go out of business?
Topps, for the first time in over 70 years,
will not produce officially licensed Major League Baseball cards.
Fanatics moving beyond commerce.
They're going to be the exclusive trading card producer
for football cards, baseball cards and basketball cards
I've already seen on YouTube a couple of places,
guys are saying, "All right, so what's the downside here? What could happen?"
I think their current approach
- will absolutely destroy the hobby. - I do too.
They're going to want to hit some home runs
very, very early on to gain collectors trust
as they navigate through being basically the monopoly in the trading card industry.
Honestly, at this point, I think there's room for some skepticism.
Like, are they going to come in and just make this big business and totally ruin everything?
A hobby we all have loved for years.
Or do they come in and it's,
"Hey, we're going to really make things a little bit more professional."
Josh Luber, the founder of StockX,
is going to be the person who is going to run this new company,
Sneakers going legal, an accessible investment opportunity,
a democratized stock market.
He's a collector, more so than even I am.
So that actually instilled in me
that this isn't just big corporate America coming in to rule the hobby.
This is like a dude who loves the hobby.
So I think he'll keep the restraints on some things.
My name is Josh Luber.
I am currently the co-founder and Chief Vision Officer for Fanatics Trading Cards,
which is a new business that I started with Fanatics and with Michael Rubin
to, uh, to make trading cards.
It is majority owned by Fanatics,
but also is owned by the leagues and players associations
that are equity partners in the business as well.
We raised $350 million, a $10 billion valuation,
which is pretty extraordinary,
considering we hadn't even started to change the business yet.
And now we get to go and build a business.
We take over the licenses when the current licenses expire.
So Topps has two more years on baseball
and Panini has four more years on basketball and football.
People have talked openly that maybe we would buy those companies.
If that were to happen, we would take over those licenses earlier.
If not, we'd be on the sidelines until those licenses kick in.
But the starting point is that we're now a physical trading card company
and we have the licensing for baseball, basketball and football.
But I'm sure we'll do a lot of other things as well.
But, like, how cool is that?
And it's got a sticker from whatever store.
it was, $49,99. It was crossed out and sold for $14 99.
There's two types of people, right?
These either people that are collectors and people who are not.
And particularly our generation,i t was around stuff, right?
I mean, we can talk all about,
like, the newer generation and digital and NFTs and the whole thing,
but like, we grew up in the heart of Nike basketball advertising.
And the fact that we get to come back and it cycles change,
but now that we're the ones that are creating culture,
our generation are now the ones that are creating culture,
so we get to bring this stuff back.
I started collecting cards back in late 1974
with my earliest memories of the ice cream man, basically.
That was your local hobby shop.
There's like these corner stores, bodega,
and they just have, like, loose packs there.
And I remember not eating lunch and then using my allowance to just open packs.
I still remember the second grade
and running into 7-Eleven with a friend
and he pointed at theGarbage Pail Kids
and he said, "Have you ever seen these before?"
And I said, "No." And so we grabbed a couple of packs
and open them up in the car and I was hooked.
There was a tiny little card shop
that opened right around the corner from my house.
You'd walk in, there was just packs everywhere.
The price of packs were crazy at the time, you know, packs of cards costing $2.
The card shop that I went to as a kid
was definitely your stereotypical 1990s card shop.
Things everywhere.
You know, an owner who kind of just had the shop as,
you know, a thing on the side really more for enjoyment than turning a profit.
That nostalgia when you get back into it, you remember that feeling.
you remember going into the card shops,
the smell of it, you remember all that.
And so, you know,
when I got back into the industry, it brought all that back.
Your hobby wouldn't exist in the state that it is without the stores,
Card stores are still the lifeblood.
I mean, you go from manufacturer to distributor to the card store,
Local card shop's a billboard for the industry,
and the more billboards for the industry,
the more people recognize, "This is still available to me."
And there's a sense of community.
- You ready? Okay. -All ready.
My name is Dani Sanchez, also known as SuperDuperDani on YouTube.
I am a full time Pokemon content creator
and I've been making videos for over ten years now.
Not bad.
Hey guys, I have nine packs
of legendary collection, which is--
Why do I sound so weird? Is that even me?
What happened in the last ten years?
I don't know. I blacked out.
I had gotten these cards from a comic shop in my hometown
and they happened to have a selection of vintage cards.
Three packs for $10.
Now, these boxes don't sell for less than, like, $30,000 for a whole box.
Oh, cool.
I don't have this card.
Back in the day, people weren't collecting cards like they are now.
Like the pristine, mint condition.
Like, not a single bit of edge wear.
Like, it did not matter back then that I had the cards on a table and just, like,
set them on the table to line them up.
Since the individual cards, some of them are worth hundreds of dollars,
like it's way higher stakes for them to be in gem mint condition.
-Oh, wow. -
- Oh, wow. Wow. -
Like that! Like that!
You're not supposed to slam the cards on the table like that.
It is bad vintage card opening etiquette, Dani.
Look at that. -
Little does she know that Charizard just sold for $15,000, gem mint.
That was a comment that was left one month ago
on this video that's ten years old.
What is Pokemon?
Okay. Okay.
Honestly, I don't know how to explain Pokemon,
because I assume that everybody's heard of it in some capacity.
Pokemon.
So Pokemon is... is a...
Are you ready to be the ultimate Pokemon master trainer?
Yes!
Random people in parks chasing things.
I don't know. Card games. Not for me, but really popular.
Pokemon was a game and I think Charizard
is the most desirable card.
The most wanted card here. Is that true?
Does the most damage.
And it's able to kill any Pokemon in one hit,
Charizard is a dragon-like character in Pokemon.
I think it's a dragon.
Do you guys know?
Pokemon is the biggest entertainment franchise in the world.
Bigger than Marvel.
Pokemon is bigger than Marvel Universe.
If you realize how huge the scale is.
So I'm not competitive.
I'm also, like, not into sports anymore,
and it's really funny for me to see people, like, idolize
a human being who plays a sport so much that they would want a piece of memorabilia
with part of his jersey that he wore in a game on it.
That's crazy.
"LeBron James wore this jersey!" "Wow!"
You know what I mean?
In the card world, we make a very distinct distinction.
There's sports and there's non-sports.
I'm Bob Means, Director of Trading Cards at eBay.
And, you know, we see a world where
what happened in trading cards is going to happen in other collectibles.
We're already seeing it.
Even if you just step away from sports trading cards for a second,
you can see it happening, what we call non-sports trading cards.
So this is going to be Star Wars cards.
It's going to be Garbage Pail Kids.
Recently, and most interesting, is Marvel cards.
Marvel's red hot out there right now, right?
You've got all the shows streaming.
You've got all the movies coming out, massive blockbusters.
Well, we're seeing people go buy the cards.
Yeah,
It's a Madonna rookie, right?
It's at eight. I'm not sure if there's any higher than that.
But like, Madonna, right?
This is one of my all-time favorite cards
that I think is going to be a massive card,
which is Kim Kardashian.
So this is her rookie card.
The die-cut is numbered to 50.
I think I have like maybe 15 or 16 of these.
I was buying the non-die cut for like,
I don't know, a couple of hundred bucks two years ago,
and now it's a couple thousand.
But I got to tell you,
the first time that she, like, picks this up and looks on her Instagram,
and is like, "Oh how, how cool, like, my rookie autograph card."
This is one of my all time favorite cards.
I've been trying to corner the market on this card.
This is Muhammad Ali and the Beatles.
In 1964, this Dutch company made this card.
But there's only ten of this.
There's two versions. There's the vertical and the horizontal.
It's the Beatles and Muhammad Ali.
Like, it's as iconic as any people ever.
This is an Abraham Lincoln rookie card.
It's a pencil drawn set from 1887.
That's James Monroe.
That's John Tyler, probably a lesser-known president.
Yeah, they were called trade cards.
There's actually some that have like an advertisement in this area.
This is a marketing piece they used in the 1800s.
And some of them survived.
I think I have maybe one of the largest Jimi Hendrix collections in the world.
This whole box is all Hendrix.
So...
his is like-- And it's like, this, like, fabric card. This is a ten.
This is, I think, the only ten from the '72 set.
But it's Jimi Hendrix, right?
Like Jimi Hendrix as iconic as any athlete ever, right?
I mean, we're familiar with like, stuff like this, right?
But like, this is just, same era, like,
as important as, probably even more important
than, you know, these guys. Yeah.
So anyway, I think non-sport cards are a big deal
and are going to continue to be a big deal.
Sports Cards Nonsense listeners,
we have Mr. CVO himself of Fanatics, Josh Luber,
joining us at this moment.
Mr. Josh Luber is here.
Mike...
So Josh, obviously a topic we get a lot on the podcast and just in general,
I'm an investor, I'm a collector.
You know, the one can't survive while the other,
'cause the investors are ruining it or vice versa.
What are your thoughts?
Can these things kind of live together and coexist?
Does one have the right and the other doesn't?
Where do you stand on that issue?
This is a age old issue in every industry.
And I mean, when we started StockX in the sneaker industry,
we got all of this, right?
All the people said, "Oh, people are just here to flip shoes and make money."
And that's okay, right? There is a blurred line.
Very, very few people, I think, in trading cards are from one or the other.
You know, I consider myself more on the the collector side,
but hey, man, if I have an opportunity to flip something
and make a couple bucks on something that I think is a good deal,
or maybe I don't think it's going to go up more,
then I'm going to take that and I'm put that money back into buying something else
that I'd rather have and own as a collector.
So where is that line?
I mean, it's so blurred.
Yeah, I agree, because I don't know
anybody who is just one or the other at this point 100%.
And just a couple of truths around the matter,
like collectors benefit from investors
because now your collection is worth more and investors
obviously benefit from the collector side
because now I have somebody,
there's a demand, they're creating the hype.
So I do I think the further this thing grows
and as the industry continues to take to take off,
I think we just keep seeing those things coexist and kind of flourish together.
That's what I would expect and I think it continues to become even more blurred.
And and I think that that's a good thing to happen.
So we're at Bleecker Trading today,
and we're set up for a two day pop up event.
So we brought some cards here.
Sports cards, obviously my specialty,
some football, in this case Mahomes, Tom Brady.
and this case we have some nice basketball,
Giannis RPA, Kobe, Lagerman, and Luka one of one up here,
and more basketball and a mix of baseball.
Black Jaded Wolf, take one.
That was great.
I grew up in in the Philippines. My parents are doctor and nurse.
I remember during school time and obviously the time difference
like, 13 hours, the playoff is going on at like 8:00 here.
It's 8:00 in the morning in the Philippines.
So I have, like, my parents bought me this portable TV,
no volume, but, you know,
I'm, like, in between my books, I'm watching the playoff game, you know?
And then when I moved here,
I found sports cards.
Through time, kind of fades, it gets lighter and lighter.
We're into investing part of the hobby.
It's a very nocturnal job.
You know, I actually don't go to bed
till, like, probably 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.
I read who's hot and who's playing well, you know?
I have a photographic memory, so that kind of helps me.
Yes. So I said I wouldn't be doing this if I don't have that skill.
Basically, you have to know what sells.
You have to know what people want.
You have to know what sells.
And we have to fall in love with players.
You can't because that's who we're investing in.
We have to like who we're investing in.
And so-- But you also can't fall in love with the cards itself.
Yeah, I think that's the best advice
that I was given to me when I was getting into the hobby
was, "You can't do this and be a collector
"also, you know, full time."
So I kind of stopped collecting myself.
But I do love certain players and...
I'm more like, "Oh, I don't think this player has peaked yet."
Everybody's telling me to sell those bigger Lukas.
Those few cards alone could be like few million.
So it's like people, like, sold it and invest in real estate.
But, you know, to me, the sports market is like the hottest market.
I would rather invest on the market that I know
front and back, you know, and stable.
So right now, everybody's telling me to sell those cards,
but I'm just not ready yet.
But I am not a hoarder of those cards.
It's just more like, I just don't think it's time.
That's it.
We'll see.
You know, that is the only thing worse than not answering is when he doesn't answer and texts you.
Oh, brother, what are you doing?
- Going through my house. - You look great.
We have a film crew here.
They want to know in the words of the man, the myth, the legend,
Chris Vernon, why we're so great. Why?
Why do we have the best podcast ever and why you found us?
That's what they want to know. Simple questions.
I went through, like, what every parent did,
in terms of kids wanting to get on TikTok
and, you know, with the way stuff is now,
I guess with everybody's like algorithms,
When I would get on TikTok
sports card stuff started coming up on my preview.
- Yeah. - So in a way, you popped up there
and you were talking about cards
and it was some kind of negative, opinionated thing.
-Yeah, that sounds right. - And I was like,
"Yo! Who is this dude?"
And you know, I'm like...
"Why? Why, why don't they have some kind of huge audience?"
That's a really, really great question you asked.
- True story.
I reached out to Bill and I said...
- Oh. - ..."I don't know why
"people don't know about this guy."
I was like, "But he is wildly entertaining.
"There is a niche that...
"nobody is on."
Literally, cards are how I support my family.
And honestly, that's how even when I was super broke back in the day,
baseball cards, selling my card collection
is how I was able to buy my wife's engagement ring.
So it's more than a podcast, a hobby.
It's more than just collecting.
Like these things are an investment, yes,
but it's really become a major part of my life.
All right. So that is the bank box.
Most of these are kind of what I would call like assets.
I bought them with the intent of,
"Hey, they're going to get flipped at some point."
Mays rookie's probably 30 grand,
like ten or 12 for the LeBron at this point,
the Kobe's like ten,
another Willie Mays, probably 15,000.
So that's actually my only Michael Jordan auto,
Jordan, LeBron, whatever.
Second greatest player of all time
Larry Bird one, obviously. Kevin Garnett too.
And there's no hometown bias. I'm just telling you facts.
That's probably like 25K.
And there's kind of like the pecking order, like,
"Hey, I need X amount of dollars. Cool."
What's getting sold?
This is like, sell the house, sell the dogs.
Well, one of the dogs
and then start selling the stack of cards because I'd prefer to keep the Brady stuff, so...
I mean, best guess. probably in the 300 to 400,000 range, all in.
With the inflated value in cards,
it kind of brings a whole different energy
to card collecting that wasn't there before.
So while I love collecting these cards
and like opening these cards,
there's now like collectors
like myself are having a really hard time finding cards
and finding them for an affordable price,
because there's this whole
other community that's now taking money
as like a way more serious part of this
than just like, collecting these for fun.
So we are going to the Frank & Son card show.
I am bringing a chunk of my bulk cards.
Like, 2 to 3000 bulk Pokemon cards,
and I'm going to attempt to trade them
for some sealed cards
or for some other cards that I don't have in my collection.
What I'm hoping
to get in exchange for them is either
some Fusion Strike cards,
like a Fusion Strike booster box,
which is the newest set, it just came out yesterday,
or some Pokemon Celebrations.
And those boxes have been so hard to find.
Those are ones that are all nearly always sold out
at Target and Walmart and Best Buy and anywhere you're trying to find them,
Let's go make a deal.
What's going on, everybody?
We are here at the Frank & Son card show.
This is in Los Angeles, California.
I have nearly 3000 common and uncommon Pokemon cards
and this is a very, very heavy box of cards.
Today, the mission is to trade in this gigantic box of both Pokemon cards.
I really want to make this trade and honestly, these cards are a little heavy,
so I would be happy to get them off my hands.
So I'm thinking that whatever booth
is wanting to buy these or trade for them will have Fusion Strike.
So I think that's probably going to be my go to.
I don't know what's going on with the Celebrations Ultra-Premium,
That's like $120 box. They have it for 350,
So I have, I think it's a couple of thousand.
I didn't get a chance to, like, count it out.
But do you guys do trades for, like,
Fusion Strike or some Celebration?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. We can work with you.
You can put that towards anything you want.
Yeah, pretty much anything at the booth.
Packs, singles, boxes...
So the Pokemon Center exclusive Fusion Strike Elite Trainers...
That one? Yeah, those ones are going for, uh, $80.
- So they're retail 50, right? - $50, yeah.
Would you be willing to make a deal
to exchange it for that box?
Yeah, I mean, I could do that for that, if you want?
- If you want. - Okay, cool. All right.
Yeah, I'll take that.
Whoo!
I just keep-- It keeps contact with you.
- Like, "What are you doing?" - You're-- Don't touch the mic, bro.
I would have sworn it was this way.
It's going-- We're going down this way.
He's in the new strip mall at the end.
Now, how long has he been open?
Chris has been open like six months, I think. Nine months.
Does he sell celebrity cards?
- Do you think there's any? - I don't know.
But if there's Pop Century we're ripping in.
Oh, absolutely. I'll get the box.
- Unbroken bonds. - Okay.
Yeah. This is such a new world to me that...
Yeah. So this is actually Jesse's first time in the shop.
- Being here is like-- - Is it overwhelming?
I realize why I don't come here
because I'm, like, going through like, your boxes over here,
of all the graded stuff, I'm like,
"I want this, I want this, I want this."
I mean, I would spend a fortune here, honestly.
That's the point. That's what we're looking for.
So we carry all sports.
We got football, basketball, baseball.
That's going to be your big three.
We also have hockey, soccer.
They're blowing up both of those.
WNBA has its own brand.
Golf, NASCAR, UFC is blowing up, Formula One.
Not only do we serve cards,
it comes in memorabilia form.
You can open up helmets, jerseys, basketballs,
all sorts of stuff.
Like, for-- So super high-end,
this is stuff we talked about on the pod this week.
- It came out today. -Okay.
Panini One and One basketball.
-Okay. - 1500 a box, it has two cards...
It could have something like really big in it, though.
- Like worth thousands. - Oh yeah.
Looks a little mellow downtown...
There are gonna be cards in there that are five digits, easily.
- I just don't love-- - There's such a part of me that wants that.
For 1500 dollars?
What have you got? What if I pulled the LaMelo out?
- 30,000? - See? I like the spine.
-Yeah. -Oh, my God. Could you imagine opening that?
Because... Oh, man.
Mavericks. Luka Doncic.
Okay, we want something big though.
Please, please, please, please, please, please.
Oh, my gosh.
They heard us! They heard us!
So ripping is just opening packs.
That's what we get addicted to, you know?
It's just a rush of getting going to the next pack
and then chasing the the best card, you know,
that you could pull in that product.
When I started getting back into cards,
I bought probably 20 different boxes,
different sports, different price points just to see.
And I printed off the sell sheets and I tried to sit there
and actually open up the packs
with the sell sheets to try to understand what was going on.
And even with that, I was completely lost.
This is one of the reasons
why it's hard for people to jump back into the market
who were cut their cards as a kid in the '80s and '90s.
And you show up now and you say, "Wait,
"there were three trading card sets when I left. There were five.
"Hold on, there's 50 of each sport? I..."
But a lot of people are now coming in
and they're trying to understand the market quickly.
I found what a lot of people have been doing
is they go and just watch breaks.
Just Simmons, Swift, Miller...
A Farfetch'd and then an eyeball right there.
Shiny Star V, Hidden Fates...
C-3PO. Chewie!
We got an Otto on the back.
Oh, no, that's Porter, never mind.
Amar Stoudemire, Kent Bazemore, Ersan Ilyasov...
Greg Newsome. Jalen Duren.
Whoo! One Mac Jones! One of One Mac Jones! Let's go!
Let's go! Let's go!
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.
100,000 plus!
Oh, my gosh.
They can very quickly understand certain product
and see what comes out of it by just watching you know, repetition,
Breaking, in its simplest terms,
as the breaker, I get boxes and cases of cards
go in front of the camera, live stream, live chat, sound,
sell 'em to individual people,
rip it open for the community to see it.
And then I ship the cards to the owners.
68. There you go.
So we spread the love. That goes to...
Now, in addition to Breakers,
and this is what's sort of what's amazing about it,
is you also have content providers.
What's fun about it, is like everybody's opening boxes,
and they're all, like, ripping packs and seeing what they get.
So it's sort of like you have the excitement
where people are like, "Oh my gosh, I got this."
And you have the other guy going, "Darn, I wanted that box."
And that I think now becomes sort of like a content
that people are doing when they're opening boxes and seeing what they could get.
- Ready? - Go.
Okay, starting with one.
Okay, first card,
Trae Young base.
-Non-auto. -Non-auto.
And Isaiah Stewart.
This is a rough box.
-It's probably, like, $300. -It's $300 out of the 15 you know,
but it's okay, it's part of the hobby
and, you know, so... Mm-hmm.
- Oh, man. Elleby. - Who is this one? Elleby.
It's a blue panel, which is rare,
but it's Elleby. Probably, like, 30 bucks.
- How much was the whole box? - 1500.
- That's 1500? - Thank you for reminding me the price.
- That's gonna be hard to follow. - Whoo!
It is going to be hard to follow.
Okay. Last box.
Here we go.
Downtown LaMelo Ball!
That's the best chase for the Downtown.
Oh, my God. I'm getting goosebumps.
So I'm kind of shaking a little.
The first thing in my head is "Grade it."
See if it's gradable.
So without grading this card, it's probably 20,000.
But if you luckily gem it, PSA ten,
it could be like, a 30, $40,000 card.
But it's also a card that I don't mind holding for a little bit
during the playoff or even a few years.
You know, how he pans out.
Grading has changed everything.
It's all a matter of condition now.
You may pull a card out of this box.
It's brand new, but it's off-center.
Maybe it has a slight imperfection printing-wise,
and it gets a PSA nine.
For first edition Charizard, a PSA nine is maybe $50,000.
If you hit a ten, it's $300,000.
My name is Peter Steinberg, I am the CEO of SGC grading.
So a grading company are basically the individuals who are telling you
what you're buying, what you're selling, what you hope to own.
So when you see a grade,
you can assume that that card is authentic, first off.
Its original. So it has not been altered since it was manufactured.
And basically from there we grade it on its condition
on a 1 to 10 scale, ten being the best.
So the first thing I always tell people,
look at the card centering, obviously.
First thing people see.
Then you look at the front and back of the card
and you zero in on the corners.
Then after that you can have a card
that looks like a seven,
but the card has four eyeballs to it
and you'll see it on like the Jackie Robinson.
It'll be way out of focus
and it really brings the card grade down.
You got to look at all those aspects
and it all comes to a cumulative grade then.
Value is determined essentially by scarcity, condition and desirability.
What someone's willing to pay for it, whose card is it?
Is it a Hall of Famer? Is it one of the greats?
You know, something can be a one of one,
but if nobody wants it, it doesn't really have much value.
So these are some of my graded PSA cards.
All of these, I did pull myself from booster packs.
This is a mint nine
Lugia first edition from Neo Genesis,
the rarest card in the Neo Genesis set.
Honestly, when I sent this off,
I thought it was going to get a ten
and that would have been fantastic
because a PSA ten of this card, a gem mint version of it,
sold for over $100,000 last year.
I feel like I was robbed, 'cause I'm looking at this card
and I cannot distinguish what would have given it a nine.
That's a life-changing amount of money
just for one single grade number difference.
In the end,
this was graded by an individual.
Somebody could have been having a bad day. You never know.
Wai-wait, no. Wait for the cameras.
So like, for example, the Alec Bond's a solid card.
What does it sell for first? What's it worth?
So it looks like it's selling for like 20 to 30 bucks.
So for 20 to $30, if you grade it,
say you get a ten, it's a one and a half time, maybe two time multiplier.
Okay.
To me, that's right on the edge of probably not grading,
because if it doesn't come back a ten, you're grading money's wasted.
I feel like if that card tens it'll sell for about $60.
So therefore, you're putting a lot of money into grading it
just to make an extra five bucks.
But he's a rookie, so I would also say he's a good rookie.
- So hold it. - Hold on to it.
If he plays better next year and all of a sudden it's selling for 50 bucks raw.
Okay. And SGC ten would probably get 100.
- Cool. Then it's worth it. - All right.
A little bit more expensive.
This is 300 a box.
Oh, honey!
There's a lot of cards in this, though.
So that is my big hit of the day right there.
Last card, because Jesse was holding it,
Anthony Edwards base Prizm.
It's a $30 card ungraded.
But what do you think if you got a PSA ten?
So that's what I'm gonna look up now.
I'm gonna guess it's 400 bucks.
I think I'm going to grade that and take a shot.
- I would actually seal it. - Deal.
if one or two of these actually grade out like I hope they will...
Yeah. Then maybe we've got 60%, 70% of our money back.
And again, we did... We came down here, we goofed around,
we spent the afternoon.
I'm going to end up losing 100 bucks.
- Yeah, but-- - Not the worst way to spend--
That's what I mean, not the worst way to spend time.
And if one of those guys goes off in the meantime.
- Yeah. - You're going to end up breaking even pretty quick.
Your left. My right. Give me that pack. Right.
- That's the one. - That's the sweaty pack he's been holding.
But there's cellophane...
This is a 2018 Prizm hobby box,
which I'm totally addicted to,
particularly until the black Luka is pulled.
Someone else needs to pull the black Luka so I can stop opening up boxes.
Got to imagine if anyone can find it.
It's got to be probably $4 million
and it's probably in a box somewhere.
In the last case, I pulled this...
Which is Luka purple ice to 149.
That was a huge hit.
I've had six cases for, like, 4000 apiece.
This has a chance to ten.
There's one corner that they're grading pretty tough these days.
So we'll see when I finally send that in.
Each one of these boxes has whatever that is, 50 slabs
and then all of those and all of that,
those are all slabs.
That was a ridiculous deal that I bought.
That's all Peyton Manning.
I just feel like Peyton Manning was so undervalued.
It was like 200 grand for, basically,
all, Pay... Like, yeah, it's like 2000 Peyton Mannings.
Uh, and I later learned
that the person bidding against me
was Peyton Manning.
And I'm like, I said, "Bro, I would have given you half the cards,
"so we didn't have to pay this much money for it."
You know, we could have, like, split it,
Let me see if I-- Let me search.
Um...
Nope.
Bad luck. Not one Trae or Luka.
There it is, ladies and gentlemen,
the news that Fanatics is acquiring Topps has come true.
I predicted it was going to happen and I am so excited
Fanatics is buying Topps trading card business for $500 million.
Fanatics buys Topps for $500 million.
-I am stoked. -I'm with you.
I feel like that is what the hobby needed.
In a remarkable way,
y-you managed to get this license and now you're buying Topps.
We're always thinking about how can we reinvent a business
that's going to be better for all the constituencies involved.
You can't change the whole industry and the economies,
but you can at least try to manage the supply
and demand of the products that you create.
And that is an important part of not only the through line looking back,
but now what we get to do moving forward and doing that.
All right, Josh, I got to know something.
You know I love the non-sports side of this card hobby.
What's the deal?
Is there any truth to rumors that are floating around out there
that Fanatics may be coming out
with some kind of non-sports card company?
You know, I mean, rumors are rumors for a reason.
That's a yes.
Hang on.
What are we saying here? Is that a yes?
Just go ahead and say you heard it here first, folks.
Yes, it is happening.
You guys should feel free to put whatever words in my mouth make sense, right?
I mean, that's what you know, that's what good journalists do, so...
But I will say that I am also huge fan of non-sport cards
and believe that very much as a collector.
And so, I don't know, maybe those things will converge.
That's a yes. Breaking news. Next question.
Yes. Yeah, Yeah, okay.
We got what we needed there, I will say--
So, Josh, bringing it back to reality,
aside from Jesse's fantasyland,
you know, obviously you guys are acquiring
all the licenses, deals are being announced,
Fanatics is going to be the kingmaker.
You guys are going to do everything.
But you know, and rightly so,
there's a ton of criticism, skepticism.
Probably, skepticism is more of the word.
How do you guys deal with the though of, "Well, you know,
"we're going to produce more, we're going to produce less,
distribution may change." Whatever.
Like how does that balance work on the Fanatic side of things?
Look, you know, Topps has made baseball cards since 1952.
And from the moment that we even started thinking about this business
that was always at the forefront
was that Topps would continue making baseball cards.
And in the conversations with Major League Baseball
and Baseball Players Association and everybody related to it,
everybody was was in full agreement there.
Uh, how we move forward,
what sub-brands are created, how we work with other sports,
you know, all of that is TBD
as we figure out the right way to grow the hobby.
You know, there's a lot just like baseball is about tradition,
there's a lot in the trading card world that's about tradition,
and, you know, we're not going to...
We're not going to mess with that.
We do have to figure out how to grow the hobby.
But those two things can coexist.
And you know that I went there.
I saw you, like with Steve Aoki.
I was like, "Wait, is this actually..."
Like, "He's... What?"
Yeah, there's a good community, right?
We're opening Pokemon cards at a charity event, okay,
on a stage, on this livestream... - Mm.
Check out this video. Okay. Here it is.
Here we go.
- What is a Char? - Are you impressed?
She's like, "What is a Char?" -
- What is Charizard? - Charizard.
They opened, I think, like $500,000,
up to $1,000,000 in Pokemon boxes.
And that was the rarest card all day that was pulled.
I was there with Steve Aoki and King Pokemon.
Okay. Who is King Pokemon?
You had me at "Steve Aoki."
I have probably the world's number one Pokemon collection inside this case,
Gary is a bigger-than-life individual.
He was one of the first people who started collecting Pokemon.
You know, he's just a beloved fixture in the hobby.
I mean, you go to conventions with Gary
and people line up to get his autograph hundreds deep,
and he's just kind of the ambassador
of goodwill for Pokemon in our country.
Hi, how are you doing in school?
How you doing in school?
The better you do in school, the more collectible cards you get.
That's why I got a pile of Pokemon cards like this.
Yeah, well, my name is Gary Haase.
In the Pokemon community, I'm known as King Pokemon.
I can't tell you how many times
people have told me that that Pawn Starsepisode got them back into the hobby.
Well, we're here on Las Vegas Boulevard
near downtown Las Vegas, at the Gold & Silver Pawnshop.
This is where they film the Pawn Starsepisodes.
So how much do you want for these things?
I'm looking for right in the area of $500,000.
The amount those exact same cards,
that same collection would be worth today
is about $15 million.
But anyway, no deal was-- No offer was made and no deal was made.
When I moved, I had packed up a bunch of boxes
that I had left with my parents,
and in there, I honestly, I don't remember
what I stowed away in there,
but there is a lot of boxes that I just left behind
because I didn't have the space for them.
That reminds me, I do need to call my parents,
'cause I am actually really interested to see what's in those boxes.
The prices of these trading cards are fluctuating so severely
that I don't know if I am able to, like, properly quantify for you a value
that my whole collection would be worth.
It's estimated anywhere from 100,000
to $300,000 worth of Pokemon stuff in my collection.
So right here we have...
I think for me it's kind of like...
I can appreciate that I now happen to have something
that's worth a lot of money.
Like, obviously that's cool.
It was a complete accident,
but that's not why I started collecting
and it's not why I'm still collecting.
So I think it's important that you have that group of core collectors
and if the market were to crash,
it would be because the price of those cards is so high
that people who are genuinely interested in it as a hobby
can no longer afford it.
This happens in in every market, which is that
when people are buying and it's hot is when more people want to get in.
So I wonder is where is the next wave of people that's coming in?
And we have to be a part of that.
Like, we have to market the whole industry now,
as we're creating baseball, basketball, football cards
And I do think we're starting to see the next generation of card shops
really cater to the next generation of collectors and kids.
I was just out in L.A., I had a chance to go visit Burbank,
and what they built there is is phenomenal.
Hey, cutie pie, I'm in the middle of filming.
I got a documentary crew in here right now talking to the Cardfather.
So can we talk later, honey?
My daughter. She takes priority.
Okay. My name's Rob Veras.
I go by the Cardfather.
We're at Burbank Sportscards.
Basically, I've been doing this longer than anyone else.
It's a very young population
coming into the category right now,
So I'm kind of an O.G.
Kind of the Cardfather, I guess.
And just try to spit wisdom whenever I can.
Let's just say you walk in and you're like, "I really like Russell Westbrook."
You grab a box, they're going to start at a dollar.
It's basically a walk-in database.
Check this out.
Now you're seeing the heartbeat of Burbank Sportscards.
What you're going to see here is 42 million cards.
The whole building is also on eBay.
You'll come over here and again, you'll see showcases.
These are all Kobe Bryant cards.
This right here is Kobe Bryant's best rookie card, basically.
Back in '96, that was the card they were chasing.
It was a very limited release.
Topps Chrome was only available at Walmart.
Hobby Shops didn't have this product.
There was only four cards in a pack.
They were expensive from the get go.
The odds of hitting Kobe were slim.
To find it in that kind of shape
where a kid opened the pack and cared for the card is crazy.
And this right here
is one of those grail cards for so many in the hobby.
One of the things that we worried about as a category
that we might age out, like stamps aged out.
Maybe this generation is the last generation.
Maybe we can't compete against YouTube and video games
and things where kids put their time.
But the industry has done a hell of a job
of getting that generation back
and the generation before that back.
We actually had a kids night last night.
Our first one. Had over 100 kids here.
It was chaos. It was way bigger than I anticipated.
And the passion these kids had was crazy.
These kids are on YouTube opening up cards.
There's card shows where people descend on these shows
and they're not 40 and 50 year old white guys.
Again, it's much younger. It's much more diverse.
It's totally cool. It's like sneaker culture.
Card culture is the same thing.
Came to the card show so we can get some Simpsons cards.
- How much for your Jokic? - Uh, I'll do 1000 for that.
And, you know, like I say, that's 199.
Actually, those Air Jordans are probably going to sell for over $1,000,000.
-Yeah, of course. - They are the only photo matched
Air Jordan Ones like photo matched during a game.
Game worn with a tiny autograph.
But yeah, the photo matching is what really sets them over the edge.
There's people that view collecting, as you know,
it should just be pure collecting, not about the money
but enjoying collecting the items and owning them.
But, you know, there's definitely a monetary aspect.
You know, we're seeing a lot of that now
as investors are getting involved in the market
and they're seeing these as a new asset class.
So they're, you know, more along the lines of,
"Oh, I'm buying this as a, as an investment.
I'm buying a, you know, a Mickey Mantle rookie
instead of a piece of art that I would have typically purchased."
A rare 1909 Honus Wagner card
officially sold at auction last night.
The winning bid a record $6.6 million.
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, you know, Honus Wagner cards
are going for more than some of the vacation homes
we're offering in our real estate division.
And people are certainly seeing the value
and the investment potential in this industry.
A mint condition 1952 Mickey Mantle sold for,
get this, $12.6 million yesterday.
Now, that grading has been going on
since almost 30 years
from 1992 to current,
most of the high end stuff has been graded,
authenticated and slabbed.
So you can go back and look at the population reports
and look at that data and determine,
"Okay, there's only 12 Roberto Clemente rookies
"that are grade, you know, 8.5 or better."
"Or there's only nine Mickey Mantle cards
"that are mint or gem mint in the whole world."
And so when people start looking at those population reports
from an investment standpoint,
that's when they start saying these are severely undervalued.
There's only ten of these in the world
and he's one of the greatest players ever.
I should, you know, put my money here.
And that's what we've been seeing the last five or six years.
What is the rough value of these cards sitting on this table,
Oh, just this table right here? - Yeah.
You have over 10 million just on this table.
Yeah, so here's my Jordan hoard
and I control the market on these.
Here's 15 of them. One,
two,
three.
This is the Rock's rookie.
This is his best card.
This is fluctuated anywhere between 50 and $75,000.
Number four, Number five. A nice one.
1968, tops three D
Here is the Queen Mother, Mac Daddy.
I paid 3.25 million for that card.
Numbers 14 and 15.
Okay.
My name is Rick Probstein.
I'm the CEO of Probstein123.
We are the largest auction house on eBay.
There are tons and tons of new people.
They are serious investors, and they're full in on it.
So I live in an Orthodox Jewish community not far from here,
and I go to the synagogue
and people would be for the first time, they're like,
"Oh, I heard about that Tom Brady sale for 2 million.
"I heard about the Luka Doncic sale for 4 million."
And these are people that, you know, are affluent people
that are in the Wall Street world
that that have, you know,
an investment portfolio with hedge funds.
And they were now coming to me saying,
"What should I buy in sports cards?"
I'm Jesse Craig. I'm the director of business development here at PWCC,
and you're at the PWCC headquarters.
PWCC is the largest auction house in the world for trading cards.
Additionally, we have the only custom vault built for trading cards in the world.
We're just under $1,000,000,000 in assets
and we have almost 400,000 graded trading cards in our vault.
So it's like, it's the Fort Knox for trading cards.
So our logistics team
sends out between 500 and 1,000 packages a day.
We have a lot of auctions that close.
We have fixed price listings, we have vault fulfillments.
So there's a lot of pieces that move around here.
Cameras over every station, you can see cameras up in the sky.
You know, the whole "eye in the sky."
So we've got, you know, about 70 cameras in the building.
And if a card moves, we know where it goes.
This is our imaging stations right here.
We have manual individual imaging stations.
They're all custom built with lighting.
And then we have what nobody else in the world has,
is we have two custom-built robots
that do the majority of our bulk imaging.
So what we have are turrets that you stick cards down,
they rotate, these suction cups pick up a card,
these grippers will come over and grab it, take it over,
flip it to a camera back there,
rotate it again, take it down,
and then those grippers grab it and set it back down in the turret.
So it takes about seven seconds to shoot a card,
whereas manually
it takes much longer because you can actually--
It's like set it and forget it, right?
We've always had the vision
of trading cards being a legitimate, tangible asset,
and we're the first company in the world to actually lend specifically
on trading cards as collateral.
I mean, that's the theory behind
what's behind us in the vault
is this ability to have liquidity
in a market that is really an emerging tangible asset class.
Just got a premiere submission request
for a 2012 Pokemon World Championship promo card in a PSA nine,
which is a roughly 200K.
That'll be a fun premiere card.
When a market becomes mature,
there's so much information out there
that you're able to compare apples to apples
and you're able to know that,
"Okay, this sold for $100 a year ago."
All these other fundamentals point it being worth now $120 or $80.
That's a market that's functioning properly.
When you have a collectible market,
it doesn't function like that, because passion gets involved,
scarcity gets involved, authenticity gets involved.
Nobody's-- nobody gets physical shares of stock anymore.
You don't have an authentic share of Apple
and have it up you know, in your in your office at home.
A baseball card that somebody is trying to flip,
they're hoping that they have more information
than the person that's going to buy it from them.
Just count it. Make sure. I think it's 850.
- Hey! How are you doing? - What's going on?
Creating content and making it relatable.
- Mike? Hi, how are you? Sharon. - Hi, I'm Jesse.
You don't have any celebrity cards, do you?
- I do. - Here we go.
I have a super-fractal Han Solo.
I'll tell you. You know who we should get on camera?
- Who? - Sharon.
This is just about, like, my most famous favorite person in the hobby.
Hey, so they're filming me, and I bought them over here.
I said, this is my favorite person in the hobby.
So I brought them over. I don't know if they can hear.
I started buying cards again in early 2019
and Luka had just finished his rookie season.
He was Rookie of the Year.
I don't know. I was like, "Look, I was like, maybe this is the guy."
And so for the next two to three shows I went to,
I bought every Luka Prizm I could find.
Hundreds of PSA tens at 70 bucks.
I bought every parallel I could find,
and I was at a card show in Virginia,
and I got to a dealer there
who a lot of people know as Black Jaded Wolf.
This is Sharon. She pretty much controls the hobby.
I met Josh Luber, like pre-pandemic,
so he wanted one of my cards.
I asked 20,000 for the Luka black gold Prizm, one of five.
I was like, "This is ridiculous."
"I mean, $15,000 and, like, PSA tens are 70 bucks."
And she goes, "Well, it's not for sale."
I was like, "Well, we have it in your case." She's like, "I know."
She's like, "I have it at $15,000 because no one's going to buy it."
We didn't agree on a price.
His advisor told him not to buy it.
And this is a guy who'd been in the industry for 20 years.
15000 dollars? What's it going to go to? 20,000. 25,000?
He was like, "I don't know. You got enough Lukas today, man."
And I said, "All right, fair enough. I'll let it go."
I could have bought for $15,000. - Which I encouraged you to buy.
I think you have a little bit of a different story.
But I did tell you to buy it.
Because obviously then what happened next was
Luka starts his sophomore season.
He goes nuts. All of a sudden, he's, you know, you know, god level
and looks like, you know, potential Hall of Famer
Doncic pulls up. Three pointer.
Bang! Bang! It's good!
What's the card today? Half million dollars? A million dollars?
A big person in the hobby did offer close to, like, 750,000 for the card.
But I told him if I ever want to move it, he'll get first shot.
And then I've tried to buy it from her like four times since then, so...
But I don't want to pay a million dollars for it. I want to pay 15,000 for it.
We'll see.
A couple of events that are coming up
that I'm actually really excited about.
One of them is an event called Collect-A-Con.
This time I'm going with an app called Whatnot.
I'm actually emceeing one of the stages there.
All right. What's going on everybody?
Welcome to Collect-A-Con.
We are here at the Whatnot stage
breaking a new Revelation first edition booster box.
We're going to be breaking that at 4:30 today, right here on the stage.
Trying to find it.
All day we've been looking for a box of Pokemon cards.
We have found the one that we are going to open.
I am so excited.
It's a Neo Revelation first edition booster box.
How much is this box?
This one went for a crazy price of $25,000.
25 grand for this one, this one box of cards? - For one Pokemon box.
This, this set in particular
has a couple of really rare Shining cards in it,
the Shining Magikarp, the Shining Gyarados.
Those two cards, especially in first edition,
would be incredibly valuable to get in a good grade.
I haven't opened in forever and I'm so excited.
Ahh!
Oh, I started using the magic touch.
All right, everybody,
this is the last box break of the day!
We got Superduper Dani.
We've got Sarah Natochenny here special guest,
the voice of Ash Ketchum,
here to open the first pack today.
I absolutely love coming to these conventions.
I get to see all of my friends.
A lot of my friends I've made through Pokemon
are from all over the world.
Lugia! Hey! We got a Lugia!
And everybody here is just absolutely
geeking out on Pokemon, which is my favorite thing.
I think a lot of us struggle with finding that
in our own little cities and whatever.
So, when we all can come together in one place
and just open packs and geek out,
it's the best feeling.
All right, all right, all right.
And... Yeah!
I remember pulling my first ever holographic card
from a pack when I was a little kid.
Honestly, what I'm doing right now,
for my younger self, is a dream.
Like, there's no-- If I was a little kid looking at my older self,
I'd be losing my mind.
A Goldin is this one. Now we have one more.
We got a... A Remoraid and...
No way!
Oh my gosh! You gotta be kidding me.
Out of the Neo Revelation box! What!
This is a secret-- A secret rare Shining Gyarados.
This is one of two secret rares in this set.
And as one of the most valuable cards in the whole set.
- I can't believe we pulled-- - We pulled the magic card and the Gyarados.
We pulled both of the Shining cards from this set.
The two secret rares.
That is very uncommon to get both of them out of the same box.
In my opinion. I don't know what's going on lately.
It's like, I'll go through patches
where I'll get absolute garbage out of these Pokemon packs
and then I'll go through patches where I just get every single one of the best cards.
It's a beautiful moment.
Oh, here they come.
This is it. I'm so excited.
Hi. Hello. Ohh!
How was the trip?
How's it going? Yeah, you met the dog.
How are you? Long time no see. - Good.
My little girl.
Oh, my goodness. Hello. Oh.
- Oh, come here. - He's like, "Who are the extra guests?"
Oh, hi.
So we brought a few things for you.
Thanks for storing these. I appreciate it.
Well, you're welcome.
And we have some other stuff here, too.
He just brought a couple of them.
So you can look through 'em.
From the side, I can already see some boxes
from like the late '90s, early 2000s,
and then some boxes that I opened.
at like the start of my YouTube career in 2010.
Some little plush toys.
This was hanging up in my little Poke cave.
We got a Pokemon VHS.
I have not seen one of these in, like, ten years.
We've got a Skies red booster box.
This is honestly probably one of the most expensive booster boxes.
Even the empty box is almost $500 right now, which is insane.
You'd be able to sell this on eBay.
- We almost sold it. - Yeah?
Yeah, It's almost like, "Don't sell any of my stuff."
This is a two player starter set from way back,
this is one of the original.
I think was a base set two, yeah.
Base set two starter deck from 2000.
This one I think I got from, you guys remember that comic shop
that was, like, downtown?
Yeah.
- Got this from that comic shop. - For almost nothing.
I had actually opened all of these Pokemon products
on my channel at one point or another,
so this is like a little tiny time capsule right here.
It's pretty cool that you knew what you wanted to do.
You guys are also, like, overwhelmingly supportive, of, like, anything I've done.
So I think having you guys is part of the reason
why I was able to even do that to begin with.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, we're just very proud of her.
I think she's just following her dreams and making it happen
and we're very proud, you know?
All right, you guys want to get some dinner?
Hey, that sounds good.
- All right. -You know of a place?
Yeah, I know a place.
You know a place?
Uh, let's see what they're worth.
Holy shit.
That's, uh... Yeah. Well, you can already see it.
You can already see it from this graph that it's...
It's, you know, trending down.
I mean, things don't go straight up forever.
I'm not an analyst. I don't feel comfortable saying,
you know, calling a top of anything
just the same as I'm never comfortable calling the bottom of anything.
But if it was my money,
would I get into this market right now?
And I love baseball cards.
Probably not.
Would I wait two years and see how things shake out?
Yeah, I would.
Are we headed for a crash?
No, you just you have to have a lot of people
that want to stop putting money into it
and don't want those cards anymore.
And I don't think that's the case.
Sure, a lot of people have come into the market,
but there are way more potential collectors out there that exist.
There's still a lot of growth to be had.
Athletes are getting involved,
celebrities are getting involved.
I think it's great Anything that generates interest
and can bring new people into the market.
Yeah, if I ever go broke, I will sell them. It's my backup plan.
There's all types of celebrities you read about
that collect trading cards because they grew up with them.
This is my birthday present from Wizards. I love you guys.
We collect things for one simple reason
other than profit, nostalgia.
It's all about nostalgia.
It's what it means to you.
The way I view it. It's art, history, business and sports.
So I tend to think that
looking at the growth where we've been,
where we've come and where we're going,
I truly think we're just at the tip of the iceberg here.
So exciting times ahead, for sure.
And then the last part of that,
I guess, to some extent falls on me
and the people that I work with,
which is that I think we're all hyper-aware of the mistakes
of the '80s and '90s of the card manufacturers
with regard to supply and demand and production.
And so, I think that sort of two areas
where you might see the potential for a crash
are both pretty solid and have good...
good fundamentals for the future.
But no one can-- No one can predict markets.
No one c-can change markets.
But I think it looks pretty good. Yup.
This just in, Sports Cards Nonsense listeners,
We have big breaking news.
Mr. Josh Luber is here.
- Mike? -Josh, what is the breaking news?
Take it away, sir. The floor is yours.
We are pretty excited to launch zerocool.
zerocool is our trading hub brand
for non-sports, for culture.
We're all in for supporting people,
brands, IP companies in the world other than sports.
So zerocool is finally here.
This is VeeFriends, the first ever release from zerocool.
In ten years when VeeFriends is as big as Disney and Pokemon combined
and is the largest IP in the world,
this will be a $1 million sealed box.
- How about that? - I'm counting on that $1 million appreciation.
I know you are.
This is our next full set.
Actually comes out in a couple of weeks
It's from Jackass Forever,
the new movie that came out about two months ago.
I expect the clearing price to be in the couple of hundred dollars,
but people can get lucky and get one of the rare boxes
and hopefully that becomes collectible
and that's part of it as well.
But new audience is important part of it and we get to see.
The blind Dutch auction for this
will open in a couple of weeks and we roll tide.
So Topps, Panini, Upper Deck, zerocool
are now your four trading card companies.
Both the Jackass and VeeFriends
sold for more on the secondary market than what the clearing price was.
And so by that sort of, just sort of, black and white data point,
we could say it is absolutely a success,
meaning there was more demand out there
than what was originally put into the market.
And that's what we want, right?
We want people to care about the products,
continue to care about the products,
and our products do continue to sell
for more than what they originally sold.
Man, I got to tell you,
I'm very excited to see where zerocool is going.
I think this is a really cool first step, though.
I want to see the guys fromThe Office,
I want to see Seinfeld,
I would love to see Parks and Rec.
You know, like all these celebrities
that guys my age seem to also love.
I think an Oscar category would be awesome.
Like, if you ever were nominated for an Oscar, there you go.
I was just, like, I was trying to think,
where could you bring in people
that aren't in the card hobby into it?
Mike, we're doing a comment box for them.
We'll make one. I'm going to go get a tissue box from the hotel room
and I'm just going to set it there.
I'm going to say, "zerocool suggestions."
You don't have to ruin that relationship.
Well, we're going to think about it.
We're definitely going to think about it.
- I want to go see Luber. - Okay.
Please welcome to the stage
the co-founder and Chief Vision Officer of Fanatics Collectibles,
Josh Luber.
And founder of Omaha Productions, Peyton Manning.
Josh, you know, with Fanatics,
how do you ensure that hobbyists have an easy
and fun introduction to the hobby?
For sure, the goal is growth, period.
You know, this industry has been around, I mean,
literally, since the 1800s, and the growth we've had
in the last five, six years has been extraordinary.
But it's still a really small number
of people that actually collect cards,
that actually move the money in the hobby.
I mean, best guess is there's maybe two or 3 million people
that have bought and sold a card, you know, in the past year.
Our goal is, is to to expand the hobby.
And the number one way, the starting of doing that is technology.
The key is making it easy
for people to buy and sell cards.
That's what StockX was. It was access.
It changed the sneaker industry because it was about access.
And that's the starting point is we need to make access for people to come in.
Fantastic, guys. Thank you. With that, we're gonna bring
Bob Means and Bryan to the stage.
I actually have a present for Peyton
- before we do that, - Please. Go for it.
'Cause I felt really bad, man, that I...
I feel really bad that I bought your collection, like, from you.
so I showed in the pictures backstage,
because there's 2000 cards in the collection.
I felt really bad about that.
So I actually have a a present for you.
We have a box.
It's a big box.
It doesn't quite hold 2000 cards.
Your cards are massively undervalued, right?
So I can't really give 'em to you.
But we made 2000 cards of me for you.
In all seriousness, I brought 20 cards for your son.
Of, actually, from the collection,
that we found 20 cool cards for your son. - That's awesome.
- Thank you very much. - If you want any cards from me, you can have 'em.
I do. I want that-- I want that set.
There's 18 that are numbered, right...
When trading cards truly become integrated into culture,
not only for sports cards and things that we do, but for non-sport cards,
for making trading cards of rappers
and musicians and designers and artists and everything else,
the whole industry will be 10x, 20x, 50x
of what it is today, right?
There's enough people out there who believe that.
That's why, you know, Michael and the Fanatics team,
you know, believed in me and the vision for it.
And we have a hard job ahead of us, but...
God, it's fun. We get to make baseball cards, like,
it's an extraordinary place to be.
We'll see where the story goes from here.
It's just the beginning.
I love the hobby. I love talking to people.
To me, it's beyond cardboard.
It's the story of you and your dad saw Cal Ripken,
and now you're the biggest Cal Ripken fan.
It's "one of my students was a ballboy for the Yankees
"and now has, like, a Derek Jeter bat somewhere, game used bat."
World Series game as well.
I wanted to buy it.
That was 15 years ago. He probably still has it.
We gave each other a retirement time,
which is five years,
and hopefully teach someone to handle my business
and I'm kind of going to be semi-retired, you know,
- and probably enjoy life a little. - Mm-hmm
It's a deeply developed hundred-year-old hobby.
It just takes you down this nostalgic path.
I cannot tell you how many fantastic friends
I've made in this space and that I hope to maintain friendships with.
Even if Pokemon isn't around in the future,
the relationships that I've made through this will last a lifetime.
The relationships that I've built.
I think those are priceless.
Deep down, I'm a collector.
I'm a collector who's an investor.
But ultimately I love the cardboard itself.
You know, when I hold 1914 Cracker Jack card with the caramel on the back,
it makes me feel good, you know?
It makes me feel like I did when I was a kid, when I started collecting.
I just love the hobby.
Like, that's what it comes down to for me.
I invest, I collect.
But then you come into a card shop like this,
you get a bunch of kids ripping packs.
They don't care if it's $1,000,000,000 Charizard
or a 2 cent Mark Maguire card.
It's just a love of the hobby at the baseline
of almost everything in the hobby.
That's really what it comes down to.
♪ No one compares to you
♪ You take my breath away
♪ When I think of you I smile
♪ Please tell me You feel the same
♪ I don't care about Baseball cards
♪ I don't care about New guitars
♪ I don't care about Brand new shoes
♪ I don't care about anything
♪ But you
♪ I don't care about anything Anything
♪ I don't care about anything But you
♪ I saw you at school
♪ I thought I'd melt away
♪ Oh, the way You look like that
♪ I'm gonna talk To you one day
♪ I don't care about Baseball cards
♪ I don't care about New guitars
♪ I don't care about Brand new shoes
♪ I don't care about anything But you
♪ I don't care about anything Anything
♪ I don't care about anything
♪ It all means nothing
♪ Nothing
♪ Nothing, it all
♪ Means nothing
♪ Nothing, nothing
♪ You are a shining star
♪ You keep me up at night
♪ I think of you all day
♪ Please, oh please Treat me right
♪ I don't care about Baseball cards
♪ I don't care about New guitars
♪ I don't care about Brand new shoes
♪ I don't care about anything
♪ But you ♪