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

This is an industry that has something like less than one in... I don't even know what this is. It's like one in 50 sports fans, water sold the card last year. People look at it now and they're like, this is nuts. We haven't even scratched the surface. Welcome to the Collector Nation podcast here on the Collector Nation Network. Whether you're chasing trails or calling bluffs, you take you inside the hobby. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. What's up guys? Welcome to Collector Nation here on the Collector Nation Network. Hey, we're going, you know, I always say we're always inside the hobby, but I feel like we're getting close to the sun here. They're doing big things. I enjoy the commentary personally and digest a lot of the content. So it's always interesting talking to people that, you know, I get this all the time from the business side in my business show, but when I flip the rolls, it's always fascinating. You'll know them by this name. It's Teapot, Tyler Nethercott. What's up Teapot? Hey, man, what's up? Good to connect. Yeah, likewise. I do enjoy your content. I was watching a video from last year on my drive over this morning. You know, uh, listening more than watching driving. Here we go. I got kids there. We're listening to that. But uh, you were talking about, and we're needy protect like you guys are doing all kinds of things. And it's like you were talking about the how many different cards and variations were like, he was from last year or something. And I was just reminding me how complicated, you know, all this might be for someone that's not in it, but in how wonderful it is at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, it can be pretty overwhelming. I did a video. I think you're referencing the one I did on all the different, what we call prismatic effects. I think that's the term I coined. I don't know. Maybe other people refer to it as that. We will officially register the trademark here. Teapots. Prismatic effect. Yep. Prismatic effects. All the different patterns sort of that you see on cards. Not the colors. You know, not red, blue, gold, green, not that, not, you know, but like we're talking, you know, the straight up refractor versus what panini's called a prism or a hollow or all kinds of foils and different things into your waves and mojo's and all the different effects. And there's, you know, this video I made was almost an hour. And I went through and showed pictures of them, and then I sort of counted down my top 10 favorites. It is really interesting. It's fun. It's cool. It's also a lot. And the thing that just it drives me nuts and I'm not the only one is I don't know why the manufacturers as a rule generally do not print what the card is called on the back of the card. Makes no sense. They need to start doing it. Come on, Thompson. Let's go. I know. And no serial numbers and no identify, you know, there's no identification, regular identification. I think there's some purposefulness in that. I'm guessing there has to be a conspiracy theory. That's a rabbit hole. We'll go down. Yeah. I know. I know. We'll come back to that. And I have enough down the lot. Teapot sports card investor. What's for anybody that doesn't know anything most who would do it. I want to they can go watch your YouTube videos where you talk about like how you get back into it all that. Let's let's cover new ground. But at the same time, let's do set the table. I mean, sports card investor, your involvement. What's you guys are up to? Let's lay the land on the SCI part and then dig into some hobby specific stuff. Yeah. We've been growing like crazy. Everything has been growing. Jeff Wilson, our founder owner came to us in the January of 2025. And he said to all of us just before our company retreat that we did, we're going to we're going to 10X everything. We're going to 10X everything that we're doing. And how are we going to do that? And we spent three days offside on a retreat, doing lots of fun group stuff and bonding and building relationships. Yep. And we came up with a whole bunch of ideas about how each of us within our own respective departments domains, what we were doing, we're going to 10X everything. YouTube views and subscribers, market movers, subscriptions, everything. And I would say, you know, what are we 16 months, 17 months later? We're well on our way. And it is, it has been an absolute rocket ship. Cards HQ has, I would say, surpassed all expectations. It has gone really well. It's difficult to keep inventory on the shelves. Things just sell fast. The hobby is hot. It's alive. We're seeing record month over month, public, you know, online sales, volume numbers from the different websites, eBay and all the auction houses. And market movers has been growing. I think we've only had three days this year in 2026 where our market movers subscription total was down from the day prior. So it's just been seeing record breaking growth signups, which has been amazing. I've been working on the product for six years. It's essentially considerate for all intents and purposes, my baby, my app, I'm working on it for better bad. Yeah. Since day one. And it's, I still have a lot of gripes with it. I still have a lot of things I want to do. I say there's only two things I don't like about working in software development and technology. And one is just bugs and issues and, you know, infrastructure challenges and things. And the other one is we just can't, no matter what, we can't ever go fast enough. I'm an ideas guy. Ideation is my number one on strengths finder. And I drive my team nuts with all the different ideas I constantly have. And there's, it's impossible. We could have five times as many developers. And I still think I would outpace them with all the stuff I'd like for us to be able to be doing. So it's been really exciting. The content has been growing. Market Movers channel has already done like 70% of the number of views through less than five months that it did all year last year, which was a record year. So a lot of really exciting stuff. And honestly, it's really humbling. It's really humbling. It's been an incredible journey. I don't, sometimes I just step back and like, I don't know how I stumbled my way into getting into this position with Jeff at a time where he was literally just starting to grow a company with no anticipation that we would be where we are today. And it's been a really fun journey to be able to build something that I think is pretty special with him over the last six years. Yeah. Oh, I mean, I'll say this. If the algorithm is deterministic, I believe that's the right term. I was kind of struggling there in the middle mind if that was a word or not. I think it is deterministic of the success or the 10 exability of market movers and SCI. The algorithm is feeding me more teapots. So I think it's like in line with what the effort is because I really shows up. I see it. So it's yeah, I'm feeding it. I give the likes and the shares and all that stuff. I like what you guys are. And I use market movers. I use a lot of time. I mean, you got to, in this business, it's kind of everything. You got to use all these tools and stuff. It's funny because I come to the digital, I own a digital agency. I'm a marker first. And I might collect it growing up. I've got boys that got me back into it. Everybody, you know, similar story to a lot of people. But but I'm a tech and ad and create guy. Can you hear me now? It was my first ad campaign. How age myself? So I, you know, the creative thought process is, yeah, I think we're, you know, hey, we had this talk pre episode about dogs. I think we're on the same wavelength on some ways. Creative thinkers that, that no dogs are wonderful. We can't have them. But talk to me on the tech side. Let's focus, focus there. How do you keep up? Obviously, you just said it yourself, but it's such an interesting. You got so many million cards, you got so much stuff, you're tracking it. Talk to me about how that process unveils itself. And how many people actually touch that app? Yeah. We've got the number of monthly users for market movers is about 75,000. And then we've got a free app as well that does around 100,000 monthly active VISTA sports card investor app that's more lightweight. A lot of people don't know there is a, there is a free version of market movers too on the mobile side that doesn't require a login or anything just to get some basic pricing information. And then obviously we have different subscription tiers to build everything out when, when Jeff started this, Billy and it was like in December of 2019. So he started his YouTube podcast in that summer July of 2019. And then about five months later started just working on like wasn't even ever meant to be a big app for people to use. He just was like making these charts and graphs for videos. And I need a way to like do this in a more automated fashion and not have to dump data into a spreadsheet and then make charts. So it was born out of that basic need that people want to see trendline over time, not just 90 days worth of comps or whatever, but like actually look at stuff and how it grows and be able to do more like retro analysis of patterns. And that's where it grew from. We started dumping the cards into the database and showing you know which cards went up and down the most over different time frames and the evolution of it has been okay pricing is one big thing. That's definitely a need. And now you have you know several different apps, competitive apps to market movers all trying to sort of do the same thing to serve first that need. Speed is the name of the game. Data breadth and data depth are also the name of the game and just you need to get it fast. How do I get a comp fast and how do I count on and have confidence in this in this data. So a lot online marketplaces you know eBay is obviously the big dog. They do 97% plus of the volume of number of sales. And then when you start getting to the higher end you obviously have the other bigger auction houses. So we built around that for a number of years both on Web and mobile. There's an evolution happening now especially when you look at the impact that AI is having and how quickly people can vibe code and spin up apps and sort of do even their own little personal projects that I really don't believe that data and pricing is going to be the competitive advantage that it has been for us up until now. This is very much a case of like what goddess here won't get us there. That's not to say we can just disregard pricing but I do believe there are other needs in the in the hobby that don't exist today. More oriented around discovery and education and curation and that's what we're starting to really look into. We're going to keep pushing in that in that same stream of stuff that just keeps refining the existing features that we have. We launched raw image recognition on the mobile app about two months ago, six weeks ago that's been really popular and was high demand for a number of years. And we're just going to keep refining that user experience which is the other big piece. I think UI UX design of your app and how people interact with it and how it delights them and how they enjoy the experience is what's going to actually separate and differentiate apps as we go forward because you can claw design and claw code your way into whatever you want but it's going to be it's going to be limited. We have a really talented staff designer that we brought in last year and it's just been he's been a real game changer for us in terms of his thought process, his attention to detail thinking about edge cases and mapping out personas and so that's that's where we're headed now and our goal is it's ambitious some would call it naive or too idealistic but our goal really is to serve everyone in the hobby no matter how they interact with it. And I think there's a real clear road map and pathway to be able to do that. I like that discovery talking to teapot. He is with market movers. I can't even name all the brands who've got so many of them now. It's was market movers, smart sport card investors. What am I leaving out? I know there's other things. Yeah, market movers. We got sports card investor. We've got of course cards HQ. We've got Jeff's personal channel. I do another podcast called spitball and cards with the guys about baseball. There's, you know, there's a little personal project. So yeah, we're really quick. Yeah, really quick. What's the market movers and sports card investor sounds like the same thing to me in a lot in a lot of ways. So like really quickly there and then I want to come back. So many bookmarked this for both of us discovery curation really stuck out to me. So I want to come back to that but define the difference between S.E.I and market movers. S.E.I is the company that started. That's the YouTube channel that Jeff started in the summer of 2019. And that's really the parent brand that we grew. Market movers was essentially a digital app, a digital product, you know, to help, you know, track your price cards and track your collection and so much more. So market movers sits underneath sports card investor owned by sports card investor. I mean, it's not a separate company. It's just a separate brand within the company. And so we started it as an app and then built it into a YouTube channel which I have basically run myself since day one. That's been going for about five years and that's really taken off and seen a lot of a lot of success. And I think more importantly distinguishing the two is Jeff and I have both been really grateful to be able to almost be a little bit of a yinging to each other. And if you were to sort of then diagram our fans, you know, see like where there's overlap. There's definitely a lot of overlap. But then Jeff has I think a bigger pool of overall people who love, you know, what he does and the high end deals and trade nights and things like that and the where he really likes to to, you know, get into the hobby. He also has a bigger pool of haters because he's got just bigger overall reach. So he's got more critics. I think I have a lot fewer critics and then fewer fans of only me. But we've been able to have a broad reach and serve a lot of different people back to that point about like however you want a hobby. That's our that's one of our biggest goals. You know, there's you hear the word sort of like inclusivity get thrown around and it has a lot of opinions on both sides of it. But like really we we see this hobby as this makeup of all these people we want to do financial things. You want to flip. You want to invest. You want to go into high end grails. You want to rip product. You want to, you know, chase the big hits. You want to just collect. You know, what do you want to do? All of that stuff makes up what we generally refer to as the hobby. Even though a lot of people have opinions about different aspects of that, a lot of strong opinions. That's kind of our approach. And so I think I serve a particular audience with with how I like to do it. And Jeff serves a bigger different part of the audience. Yeah. That that's a good description and look. I mean, everybody likes different flavors of ice cream. It's like so. And I mean, I don't I don't even know Jeff. But I mean, I respect, but I respect anybody that gets in front of the camera because I've done it for eight, eight to 10 years now. Yeah. And in a different lane. But it's easy to be critic when you're not in front of the camera all day. And you can pick on this or pick on that. You know, come on. But but you know what? Oh, I see a smart guy willing to to put that to the side because it pays to be known. Somebody tried to make that name. You can say what they want about Jeff, but you can't you can't deny that he's been successful. Yeah. He's grown a company. He's employed, you know, hundreds of people now with with all this growth. And Jeff spend the best person I've ever worked for the easiest person that I've had, you know, in a good way. He's very level headed, very grounded, slow to anger, slow to get riled up. He's just like, hey, we're running into a challenge. How are we going to solve it? You know, we put our heads together. We tackle it. He doesn't, you know, I've heard horror stories about sort of like, you know, serial entrepreneurs and how they come to work and can blow a gasket when things start looking like they're not going well. And that is not Jeff at all. And that's probably the thing I've been the most grateful for. He's been fair to me. He's been good to my family. He's been good to work for. And I think most people where they where they start to lean into the Hader crowd is really based on what they saw from Jeff six years ago, seven years ago. And they haven't acknowledged the evolution that he's made as a person, as a leader, as a person in the hobby, as an influencer. And then, you know, also, they just only see the on camera version of Jeff. And so maybe they maybe just like people don't like Colin Cowherd or Steven A or whatever, they kind of see this persona. And they're like, man, I hate this guy. And in reality, if you get to know him as a person, he's very much family first. He loves his family. And he makes time for them and it's all the chaos. And then he's just a, he's a businessman. You know, he's kind of a serial entrepreneur. So he's always thinking. And there's different versions, you know, just like I think with most of us. So you said it, you're like, I don't really know, Jeff, but a lot of people don't then they get to meet him. They interact with him at the national or something. And they're like, oh, man, that guy was like way nicer, way, way more authentic to interact with than what I see on. T pod Jeff and Ryan are having a beer at the national. There you go. Come on. Remember happy hour. Mark and we were just remember happy hour. I'm a member of paying paying card carrier. Come on. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get those details. But T pod appreciate that. That was good commentary. Um, discovery and curation. You caught my ear because let me just tell you like, I'm coming into this game. Fresh, I'd, you know, worked with Apple Samsung Verizon, uh, BMW. And the hobby is very different than when I left it when I was 13 years old. And I've been back in it for almost two years now. But it's, I'm like, man, it's come a long way and it hasn't. So talk to me about what you mean by that evolution, maybe with market movers or SEI in those in those lanes. That's a really true statement, what you just said, which is it's come a long way and it hasn't. When, when you look at this industry, the technology in the space has advanced massively over the last seven years. And yet it's still lagging way behind many other industries, you know, any, whether it's other collectibles or anything, anything, it's still way behind. So all of us are trying to play catch up and figure out how to serve, you know, and grow apps and hit that balance of speed and resilience and all this stuff. Um, I would argue and I've, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for years, but really over the last two years, there's one question I keep coming back to and it's a question, one of the questions I get asked the most by people, which is what's good? What, what cards are good? And the answer to that question is both highly objective and subjective and it depends on where you're coming at it from. It depends on what you or how you interact with the hobby. There's a collector journey that I mapped out a few years ago that I think is really resonated with a lot of people, a very like predictable journey for a lot of people, especially those who collected when they were children, like I did, and then found their way back in at some point over the last like seven or eight years, maybe maybe more recently for a lot of people. Yeah. So you start out and typically you get bit by nostalgia, nostalgia is a powerful drug, it gets you back in, you find your binders, you find your screw downs, you find your top loaders, you're like, oh my gosh, I remember when I treated for this Penny Hardaway noise boys and this card was so stick when I was a kid, I treated half my collection just to get this card and then you're just, I mean, it is just a rush, a rush of dopamine. And you start, okay, what are these cards worth and all of this stuff? See, if you map this out on a matrix, there's a visual. If you go left to right, you're looking at the number of cards you own, left side being few cards, right side being ton of cards. And if you go bottom to top, it's low value up to high value. So people start out in this kind of like a middle of the bottom, like right quadrant where they have some, some volume, typically they have a few big binders full, maybe a few thousand cards, maybe more, typically not much worth anything unless they didn't know it was worth a ton now, some Jordan Grail or something. And so they, they get back in and they're like, man, I really want to like buy more cards. I want to like get more into this. So they start ripping packs, buying into breaks, whatever. And next thing they know, they look around, their desk is covered in cards. They've got boxes of this new stuff and they're like, what the heck is going on here? They hit a point where they go, what, is any of this stuff good? Is any of this stuff from my childhood good? That's where they typically go to a tool like market movers and they start trying to look it up and figure it out. That's that point where the curation typically happens. There's two pathways that are common. They just get fed up overwhelmed, see how much they've put on their charge card or whatever. And they just exit stage left and liquidate on Facebook, Marketplace or at a local card shop or something. Or they do sell, they do a sell off event, they, you know, give cards away whatever. And they start to do research. And that point right there where the research is what I'm trying to move the needle on and move up in that journey through education, but also with our products so that people can finally discover what's good. So what we're working on with market movers is hydrating our database with the entire catalog of every card in existence. Our big competitive differentiation over the last six years has been what we've called our featured card database. It's at like 7.2 million cards. You can chart them, track them. We have another 11 million cards now that we have waiting in the background to bring into the full user experience so that users can discover those cards so they can look at images of cards so they can navigate and look up every Gary Peyton card of all time and check off exactly which ones from their childhood binder they have easily. That's the foundational point where you get the whole catalog. You start layering and pricing to the most important cards and different, different tiers of confidence. But we want to start training models to help people discover what they like. And if you can find the intersection of what the broader populace thinks about cards and what they believe is good. And map it to what you think is good. You can help carve out a really thoughtful collection that's whether you're like I don't care the values all the way up to yes I want to collect things but I also want to know they're going to sell for more someday. So that's kind of the bigger picture. That's the noble mission I would say for like the marching orders I've given my team for the vision for our products and how we want to move forward. And beyond that I have a ton of really fun ideas that I can't let anybody else go steal so I'll stop there. That makes sense. And I mean I think I'm going to digest and sort of summarize a bit the and I see it too because I mean I've been kind of studying the I've been doing some things doing content all that but I'm in the background yeah with my with my background watching observing learning I open the store the flagship store if there's another better store in South Carolina I'm not aware of it let me just tell you that 3000 square feet experiential my train going by as I'm talking I'm watching it out the windows you can hear it probably but and I see these things tea pot I'm like what okay I know that lies more than a comp number one like and even the biggest companies I'm like what are you guys doing every campaign is not created equal you've got scarcity rarity you've got so many variables that aren't considered yes and it's yeah let's just say I'm not trying to compete with which you guys are doing but I'm building something way bigger for just my own store if nothing else because it's like I don't know man it's we're using like data points and knowledge and all this and you it's before even AI I mean AI's come a long way and eight months but 10 months ago I was going what the hell is everybody doing yeah and I mean it's it's like this nostalgic you know you got the dealers the old guys that don't want any tech at all and I get it and it's and then you got kids that are watching content and I'm like I don't know I there's just so many data points that could be informing decisions on business on content on everything else and so it's fast in here you talk about that there's you know yeah people look at comps I've done I've done a number of videos in the past on comps and how comps the last comp is not the value of the card the the over simplified answer if I would ask you I'm sure you would answer this what's the value of a card the value of a card is what someone's willing to pay for it that's the value of a card comp does not tell you what somebody's willing to pay for a card even if it was yesterday a whole sale like like it's law it's more of a case of it's the best thing we've got it's the best we've got and so that's why people lean into it and rely on it now a big segment of people who rely on last comp which is most of us if you're just trying to get to a price I don't want this to sound condescending but they don't let their thought process transcend beyond comp they just want to stay at that level of simplicity and go this is it and I just how I do is the comp here's comp comp comp I need room whatever that that kind of crowd is like boom boom boom there's a much bigger picture the value of a card is this intersection of the quality of the card the attributes what makes a card great that's back to that question I said what what's good what makes a card great the player the set the I appeal the image chosen these different attributes the condition of the card obviously has a big factor but I I've been thinking about this condition agnostic just give me the raw card and let me tell you how how how much quality there's on card versus sticker auto versus no auto relic quality all this different stuff rookie year these things all coalesce together to tell you what the quality of a card is and then in order for it to have value it not only needs quality but it also needs exposure awareness people need to know that the card exists they need to understand the lineage or the pedigree and all of these things social social graph of the card as what I call it that's why there is a lot of value to these auction houses for high end that will put your card on you know some marquee in New York City like or make promotional videos or go on CNBC and talk about it like Ken Golden does like makes a big impact you're spreading awareness about about the fact that this thing exists here's why it's important it's why people pay Adam Gray the real 27 guy and Instagram and others to make reels because you're trying to educate and create awareness the piece that is very often fleeting even fake when it comes to value of a card is hype and fomo those things are just driven by rapidly happening transactions by inertia and those are those are the charts you see in market movers that just go way up and then come way back down fast because you know people get a little too excited and frenzied so there's like sustainable value and then there's comp comps matter if you're trying to make money they do matter everybody's using them but I think there's a much more mature and sophisticated way to think about it and I think as a hobby that's what I'm hoping we can get to over the next five to 10 years T-POT there's a smart guy that I worked with indirectly but pretty damn close to the sun his name was Steve Jobs and launching the first iPhone on Verizon Wireless Network this is in my age myself 2007 and he said something in a meeting that I think's been like translated a hundred of her ways there's signals and there's noise one of them we pay attention on to and one of them we don't yeah that's the key there's a lot of noise but is it a true signal I mean the hype cycles can be something that's you know in the short term hey if you're flipper it matters really matters where you are and that's where I'm fascinated and thrilled that someone's thinking about user journeys and all that and now you're talking my language you know like that's that's what's been sort of missing a little bit it's not everything's created equal like all these journeys are a little different so I love that you guys are going down that path T-POT you know we've got you're gonna have to promise me a part two that I didn't rely I thought with sometimes I get on like when's the 40 minutes but maybe like maybe maybe at the national I'm going to be doing shows in that you're probably so busy you can't do it you don't have to commit to a novel we'll talk about it we can we can look into it usually my schedule is booked for about 18 hours a day at the national yeah it's the how it goes but it'll be together it in person so are you just look I'm like up the road we can do this on the boat baby you know wherever you want I'm about to start doing episodes with guests on the houseboat you know breaks on the boat all right I want to get to a couple topics while we got 10 minutes here roughly it's interesting to me a couple things that have that have happened and and I let me say this I'll say this disclaimer I got no problem like no skin in the game no problem with either one of these companies actually like the people at both of them but it is fascinating with PSA and tops yep uh in no other industry can you buy up all your competitors get it just uh no big deal nothing going on here uh pay no attention to the man behind the curtain uh and yet it's happening it's happening uh grading is a phenomenon the hobby has many phenomenon grading is is one of them what says you about what's gone down the last couple of years with grading I think no one denies the value of it you know stamping the the grade it's important it seals the condition so to speak as you crack it uh just saying um and so give me the lay the land on grading and PSA and buying all your competitors uh I have a lot of opinions about grading the the short version and I've made a lot of videos on this the biggest overarching problem that I have with grading is the price premium placed on quality as the number one defining value contributor to a card and you can't deny that the the comms the market shows it what what the hobby has collectively decided is that the condition of the card matters significantly more than the quality of the card itself so it's the magic trick it's the great magic trick is the great infinite money glitch if you can find a card that is in great condition gemment condition and you send it into PSA you will multiply your money by a minimum of two X if not many times significantly more and what that says is people care more about the acrylic holder and the label and the subjective very subjective and very proven inconsistent opinion of third party so-called experts about the condition of that card and they're willing to pay more for that opinion than they are to trust their own i-test trust their own assessment of the card and appreciate the intrinsic qualities of the card itself the artistic expression the industry the technology the the the player the moment all of these other things like we were discussing its condition overall and so that really bothers me i did the experiment on the market movers channel some some of your viewers may have seen it i call it the the cracks heard round the world two different videos that took me a year and a half to complete where i cracked the same cards out and sent them to every grading company and then back again to every grading company and they were all different every time i sent a Ken Griffey 1989 star rookie bgs 95 through this journey and it went as low as a psa 6 and all the way to two different companies saying it was trimmed another company saying it was too large up to 9s and everything in between it was so inconsistent and yet with our dollars we vote to say we not only believe in these opinions and the condition of this card we think it is the most important single most important thing about these cards and that for me is a big problem i think it's completely irrational i don't understand it i don't know how it came to be that way i understand condition is a factor uh in all collectibles and things over time but the most important aspect for me of grading needs to be authenticity and authentication to give you confidence that your card is what they say it is and not a counterfeit in the world of a lot of counterfeits and i just went through a horror stories situation with that where i bought a essential credentials grant hill card in a Beckett 5 graded holder and was alerted by some people online that it was a backdoored copy out of bankruptcy that had been fake stamped and graded by Beckett i sent it to psa they graded it and then two weeks later they deactivated it and said oops our bad we got additional info it's not authentic and i got the email back today confirming that it is in fact been ruled questionable authenticity and so not eligible for holdering or being reactivated and it's a big it's a big industry i think it's necessary i am not anti-grading i'm not i'm not anti-grading i tell people that all the time before and after i should have said at the beginning i'm not anti-grading i think it's really important i just don't agree with the current paradigm and i think there's a lot more that these companies need to be doing to make sure they get it right from an authenticity perspective as well as the the condition assessment well buying all your competitors doesn't help what you described it's uh you know there there is a lot there for sure when you look at it and you're like well we're basically boiled down to two the broader industry of the hobby as we say is uh very much looking like an oligarchy at best you know in many places tops they got all the licenses i don't know what pain i don't i always say to just bought panini that way i could i come back in i fall in love with kabooms and downtowns like everybody else and then you're going to take the license can we just buy them by already because they don't make that deal happen like yeah and i like roobin like he's he's a beast of a businessman like having he's got like yeah we all have different flavors but man i'm coming to edgy guy i like i like cold hearted beast of a businessman roob you know like i'm that i'm here for it but same time i just want my damn you know my cards with the licenses on it why couldn't they make that deal happen and but it does now in a shop you know and i mean we're gonna turn the doors on and don't even have allocation we'll do a million dollars a first year teapot like it's like it's problem it's a challenge problems yeah is a wrong word i mean what says you about that situation you know i obviously don't have a lot of access or visibility into how tops is making these decisions or what that you know their overall strategy is how they're pushing in these different directions to to the point about roobin you know i think what what the best thing i could say is don't hate the player hate the game yeah exactly who's winning the game and it's still possible they buy pinini they just they just won the FIFA licenses for world cup and it'll start in 2031 i think so it's going to be a minute yeah that was that was litter well yet so they've got i'm not saying that's it's equal but i'm just like it's more popular than ever has been yeah and so that i mean you're looking at it and you're like what does what does pinini have left yeah for nothing other than they're just like product i piece they don't have any licenses and now there's things going to court to stop leaf and pinini and others from being able to even create products where they have multiple independently signed agreements without the jerseys they're starting lawsuits around that stuff so this is it's getting very messy there's a lot of big boy type art of war art of the deal type maneuverings happening for sure and you have that anywhere where there's a lot of a lot of um you know a lot of a lot of ego a lot of brand ambition and other things a lot of empire building and so they may still buy pinini because pinini will have essentially nothing left they're gutted and i think that's all going to come down to whether or not pinini's leadership would rather just die or like take something on the way out you know that's a decision they're going to have to make i think tops was very smart to take the deal four years ago or whatever it was when it was originally when they were originally acquired um again whether people like it or not i think you're you're sort of acknowledging the present present reality um to the allocation piece it's so tough we everybody looks around in the basic consumer looks at this and goes over production over production over production but then they also say prices too high prices too high prices too high well there's also say i want the cards to be worth a lot worth a lot worth a lot because the thing called supply and demand they everybody wants to somehow have kabooms be you know or or let's say like all aces which i really you know really like i've got my my uh scuba all aces here that i just got in the mail these are sick cards and they're like i want all aces to be super hard to hit but i won't in my box i've got one in my box but i don't see breakers getting those in their boxes and i didn't get one in my box but i wanted to be worth a billion dollars so i can retire but also to be super rare and i want the boxes to be two hundred dollars none of these things stack up together to make any sense they just don't and so it's it's kind of the classic scenario of certain amount of righteous frustration and anger and indignation but it's not channeled a lot of times with like a more thoughtful consideration for it and you have this company that's empire building and if i'm looking at if i'm putting myself my you know myself in their seats i'm saying would i rather manage a smaller number of close tight knit fully bought in and committed relationships with shop owners and other businesses to to to have a significant portion of my allocation and be able to guarantee that that allocation is being used up by these companies because they're breaking and they're doing other things or would i rather try to figure out how to manage this massive distribution network of all these different shops and everything the noble thing to do the thing you and i would like to see everybody do um and i mean this is yes i want to see like lcs's in like every city worth anything and getting some amount of supply to be able to satiate demand it doesn't surprise me that that's not the direction it looks like it's going in that's you know because i think it's just a more business logical path that they're that they seem to be kind of i think unable to to open to new direct accounts and then and then um but it could it could prove to be really myopic because i do believe the lcs is sort of the heartbeat of the hobby yeah i'm not worried about getting it i'm gonna get it because this store is what they want tech experience and all that yeah it just will take getting them here and we'll get them here i'm not i so it's less about my store i'm just speaking i know that's always the complaint and it's an interesting thing you know for all it's much the the consumers anything yeah it's it is an interesting i had this discussion said the last week on the show i'm like yeah you want to go to Walmart and the show the shelves to be stocked but those scalpers also keep your prices high so you know your cards worth more it's interesting it's an interesting uh dichotomy of variables that play into all this yeah there's stages of grief for a lot of people who used to really enjoy opening a lot of packs and they were able to do it you know five years ago six years ago they could open maybe their maybe their wax budget was five thousand dollars a year and that meant that they could open 20 20 hobby boxes yeah no a case of their favorite product tops chrome uh and now they they're looking at it and they're like this gets me like four boxes and the pack odds are worse than they ever were before i just got absolutely cooked on my twelve hundred dollar hobby football chrome box and got forty dollars worth of cards out of it and it's and it's it's it's it is literally stages of grief because for a lot of people i mean it's this is a hobby but it's like way deeper than that this is like yeah it's like the thing they do that keeps them going every day beyond whatever their nine to five might be or they're their situations in life and so um there's a lot of there's a lot of frustration and i i do understand it i don't i hardly rip anything anymore and i love opening packs and i love doing nothing like kids but it's it's very tough to justify yeah as we close out here teapot um is the industry stay hot is it teflon at this at this point i mean you know you and i are both vested in it's a we we hope so but like uh you know uh we got a social economy yeah i don't think it's as bad as they say i also think there's there is some negative things uh you know you've got AI taking it as a world we can't solve all that the slow to question but maybe just you know ground it in that that what where's the hobby going i look at this people ask me this question a lot and uh and it's a question we discuss internally a lot as we're trying to grow everything we're doing is you know what are what are our risks there's existential threats you know world war financial collapse us dollar collapse all this stuff there's a lot of stuff happening and you know sort of the global geopolitical sphere that's pretty dang concerning i i try to stay just enough on top of it to be aware of it but also to acknowledge you know go back to some serenity prayer i'd be like i can't control it i don't know i just got to pray and hope it hope it keeps going so then you pivot into the the the normal uh wave of things we've got you know hundred plus years of a pretty consistent pattern of ups and downs with the economy in the stock market and jobs and everything and so you sort of see uh a trajectory there and i think that's the thing you can that's really the only thing you can map against and right now this is an industry that has something like less than one in i don't even know what the statistics it's like one in 50 sports fans bought or sold a card last year they just were you know forecasting this fanatics was like forecasting their valuation on the primary market basically at eight billion dollars the sneaker industry did a hundred and fifty billion in 2024 and sports betting did two hundred and fifty billion more than the stock market so like in terms of total dollar moving around so so if people look at it now and they're like this is nuts and this is heated and every trade night we host as a pack store that the fire marshal has to come to and um clicker people in like it's the hottest club in town the nationals once again i'm sure going to set record attendance numbers this year over a hundred thousand people coming and going over the four or five days and um it's huge we haven't even scratched the surface like people pack out the big house in an arbor every Saturday during football season with 112,000 people that's just one college football team of fanatics like diehards so the more that starts to spread and and become popular and i think it's exponential it's not linear it's exponential and we're already seeing it that doesn't even touch on the global markets like europe aja australia these places are blowing up with popularity within the hobby they're starting to open shops david anab Adams is over in in the netherlands like psa's opening over there i don't believe we've even scratched the surface i do i think it is only going to get crazier from here and more and more ubiquitous and more popular and more considered cool and even financially savvy to be in the sports and trading card space um so i very bullish and optimistic i agree i'm putting my money where i'm out this too so i'll say this go do a trade night the national i was there last year and talk about the money this second hand trade like the secondary market the money that's not registered on the books this is this is way bigger than people realize hundreds of billions i think already like if you go i'm not so sure they're what and you know a certain country's gdp transacted just in secondary trades at the national last year i mean it's a lot yeah you know because i tried to estimate how much money is in the room it's i don't even know it's over a billion dollars worth of cards in at the national just in the in the main show hall yes you have i mean you probably experienced this at trade night last year maybe the part that blows my mind is i get to like this 11 year old kid who walks up to me with a zion case full of cards and he's got $60,000 worth of cards in case he's like that's all about that he's got a really hair like sagging over his eyebrow and he comes up he's like you buy in you know and you want to throw in the card near face and say it like whatever or i've got some of my cards out i've got my you know $300 you know uh whatever shake you'll just say i'll exam her on the table and he's like he's like we take 140 for that i'm like no and he's just like whatever and they like there's a there's a subterranean culture of this like young crowd that are like their grinders they're their grinders and they're not afraid to to come at your heart and negotiate and like pushing the things and holy cow do they make they make they make some money uh that's that's dude i think i've talked about that that $100,000 case thing with the 12 year old uh you know i'm like pulling my cards out and then you know like chubby chase you know not realizing he didn't have enough money like stuffing it back in the wall at going uh i'm not gonna do it on our cards this kid's got a $20,000 you know Tom Brady i'm like what is going on here there's more kids with $100,000 cases like anyway it's crazy uh all right rapid fire for me really quick four quick things we'll get you out of here most underrated player all time or now you could choose oh my gosh that's such a good question um i mean i could go across sports but in basketball in basketball i would say the two most underrated or undervalued relative to their greatness i would say our tim Duncan and shkeel on eel i just don't their cards do not go for they don't match the the greatness that they've had um i still think that most all time great NFL cards are massively undervalued Barry Sanders has finally started to see a lot of price appreciation and respect over the last 18 months or so um about a Torelloans precious metal gems for $3,800 at at the fanatics fest last year i sold it for like $5,500 i think on fanatics a little later that's still like less than a quarter of what a Lonzo morning goes for so i don't understand some of that stuff no and then within the modern like modern landscape um there's so many players across different sports uh who i think are undervalued i think shkeel just Alexander gets a lot of unwarranted hate i could rant about why she is exactly what the NBA needs and why the follow baiting is a thing but is also that's not his fault he's using the system just like Donovan Mitchell just did against my pistons in game four to put that at 2-2 so i think sga is a breath of fresh air two-way player highly efficient scoring threat that doesn't live at the three-point line and just jack up threes in transition and i love his game uh i don't love free throws over and over but um i think shae still is is very i think shae and yogicch both are really undervalued yeah hey you got mine i was gonna say yogicch uh favorite product right now my favorite product is always been top stadium club because i love photography it's the most important attribute to me on a card isn't a really iconic awesome dramatic photo whether it's a portrait or a dugout shot or an action shot i love good photography uh tops looks like they're slowly trying to kill stadium club and took a lot of my favorite things out of it this year which really frustrated me um so i'm skewer reduce baby skewer reduction uh i really i love top's dynasty um i think it's an awesome product i love top's dynasty so i i'd go uh stadium club and dynasty one car you'd buy today and maybe just either you personally you kind of name some of the hot one so maybe just like what's what do you what what what would be an immediate purchase if i put it in front of you right now i would move a lot of pieces in my collection to obtain a 2021 gold kaboom berry sanders he only has one set with gold kabooms and it's that set and uh i've missed a couple and then i haven't seen them since and it's definitely kind of a people lock it up type of card and in a lot of cases i think so that's the one for my pc the toy car and running back correct yeah oh yeah Oklahoma state all time rushing later i mean this is all in my air baby yeah yeah yes uh yes berry switzer with the famous quote about how you know you guys don't want to you you don't want to face the freshman berry sanders don't make sure thurmond Thomas doesn't get injured you know uh because berry is better than he is and uh found a berry switzer like heads up the flag football and in woodstock here where my kids oh yeah um so that's kind of cool but yeah berry sanders would be that that card specifically would be a card i would i would move a lot of stuff to get my hands on uh and then if i were looking at one player right now who i'd be targeting if you're looking for like uh i think no guarantees but i feel very guaranteed price bump it would be honest he's about to get traded it's going to happen in the next couple of months and when he does it's probably going to be to a contender and his card market is probably going to go up 30 to 70 percent like just based on that trade announcement yeah i got to get it on it well financial advice but i did buy quite a bit of yannis anticipating that teapot you've been very generous going over the time i appreciate that we'll do part two well at least uh say nod and hello at the national maybe grab a beer maybe uh you know film something if not five minutes but uh really appreciate i love what you guys are doing i love your your takes you're adding a lot of value to the industry uh a lot of smarts a lot of intelligence and couldn't be more appreciative for you coming on thanks Ryan yeah thanks for reaching out it's been a blast hey guys you don't find us collector nation the collector nation dot com got lots of things brewing so does market movers and sc i teapot you know where to find those guys we have links all their stuff in the show notes we appreciate them we're coming on this room for everybody in this hobby hey it's all growing fast wild crazy right here on collector nation thanks for tuning into the show be sure to follow us on your go to podcast platform and catch the full video episode over on youtube visit us at collector nation dot com and follow Ryan on instagram at ryan allford now get out there and collect yours