What We Learned After 50 Episodes With the Best in the Hobby

When we launched this show we wanted to bring you inside the hobby. I feel like we've done that. Over the last 50 episodes I have sat down with some of the most influential voices in sports and the hobby and collectibles, creators, founders, disruptors straight up hobby legends. So today we're doing something special. Welcome to the Collector Nation podcast here on the Collector Nation Network. Whether you're chasing grails or calling bluffs, you take you inside the hobby. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Yo, what's up Collector Nation? Ryan Alford here and welcome to episode 50. That's a big milestone for us. We appreciate you for listening. Whenever, wherever, however, you have been, it means the world to us to watch. The numbers go up. It's not lost on us. So thank you. When we launched this show, we wanted to bring you inside the hobby. I feel like we've done that and the best is yet to come. The people, the plays, the business. Over the last 50 episodes, I have sat down with some of the most influential voices in sports and the hobby and collectibles, creators, founders, disruptors straight up hobby legends. So today we're doing something special. We're going to do the best of those first 50 episodes. So if you've been watching and listening great, you're going to get a summary of what's been happening and if you haven't, then you get the best of all of our great guests that have already been on the show. King of cards, Kyle Kravitz, Gary V, Josh Luber, Brandon Steiner, Mike Baker, just a few of the names. We had King of cards on. We talked all kinds about what he's doing in the hobby, what it's like being an influencer in the hobby. I'm going to call him that whether he wants it or not. And look, just the deals he's making, and how he's documenting it and how my boys and I are watching him on YouTube every week. What was the moment, Kyle, when you said, I'm going to turn the camera on. It's very hard at first. That's a whole other world you're entering. It makes you vulnerable. It all happened by mistake. I was not a content creator. We document what I do. We turn the camera on and that is what you see. I was going to local shows. I was going online and I was figuring out if I could do this legitimately, how do you market yourself? And that's when I realized that if I was going to have a chance to do something that so few are lucky enough to do, I had to do what they weren't doing. So I turned the camera on myself. The collecting versus business is a fine balance of those two things. And for you, I want to just kind of two-part question like how you balance those things for yourself. I mean, I don't know if you can and you want it. Is there anything not for sale in the King of Cards deck? Of course. Easily separated. I'm a collector first. Like I said, my business happened by, not by accident. It certainly wasn't the intention. I wanted to make that money using what I knew about cards to afford and keep the cards I wanted to keep. Kids are walking around. They're almost like the dealer. Everybody thinks they're the dealer because they're at all in business. In a way, are we raising a generation that's truly collecting or just trying to figure out how to turn 10 into 12 every time? The people that are in it just on business, they're missing out on the front of the collecting side. I think that every kid has a favorite player, has their favorite teams, and that'll always connect for them. What's the best card like your favorite in your collection? How is it that Johnny Manzo? It's one of them, but for me, I think the one that takes the cake. I have his gold PMG. The best looking card of his is his PMG, and so he has a precious metal gem. I have the gold, and it's jersey number two of 10 in a bag in 95. I lost that card once before. The card popped up on eBay, and I was like, I will do whatever it takes to have it, and I never put my max bid in, and I got busy for like an hour and a half as we all do. And the auction ended, and I sat there like this, and I thought about that card for months. Sure enough, months later, the card ends up on eBay again. I got listed for auction. I said whatever it takes, when I tell you my bid on this card, thank God, nobody else bid. I bid on this card so much higher than what I went for. It would scare some people. hobbyist, you sort of turn to mindset into a visible badge, the embodiment of what you're trying to do. You're being transparent in the deals. This is a business, but there's that collector and nostalgia, and I don't know, and there's a warmth to what you're trying to do. I wanted to start a brand that was going to represent a lot of what we're doing here in those exact sentiments, right? There's a lot of opportunity for businesses to make money. How many of them are collectors? How many of them actually care about something outside the bottom line? I feel like I can run that all the way up and crush it on the business side, but I can do it at the same time while having a positive impact on the community. I'm in care and for it, giving back to it. What deal, what dollar figure am I going to hit in a deal or the bank account that's going to make it worthwhile? I don't think it exists. For me, what makes it more than enough and wants has me wanting to keep going and building on it and enjoying it, but what stands out to me is the impact we're having, and it's wild to me on the way that this is. It's reaching people and changing lives. Then my man, Gary Vee, V friends, he's been talking about the hobby for a while if you follow his content. Talked about what he's done with V friends, where it's going, the legacy that he's building, and ultimately a really cool, positive product that we need out in the marketplace. You've had your figure pinged on this for a while. What led up to this? I've always thought about intellectual property. It's always been a fascinating industry creatively and business-wise, Disney, Marvel, Lucas. I wanted to have my own world. This has obviously been a whole different animal because tops is the iconic brand in the industry. This is just kind of year four of a journey of building this intellectual property that I'm very excited about. We live in this digital world, but physical cards are still booming. Six, seven years ago, eight years ago, people were like, Gary, why do you still write books? You're so Mr. Digital, and my answer always was because people read them. Life is gray. Everything is the middle. Of course, physical cards and comic books, and I'll do toys, because the world is physical, but the world is also digital, and the world continues to become more digital, not less digital. I think V friends is probably going to end up being the biggest business I ever built. I think the characters represent the things I most care about in the world. And so, patient panda will take the baton in helping people learn that patient matters. I've done a lot as a human and put myself on the map, but I'm not going to reach all eight billion people. Meanwhile, a V friends cartoon that talks about tenacity and hustle and kindness can be dubbed in Italian and be running on Netflix idling in five years, and I'll be accomplishing the same ambition. I was born and raised in a manner that has a lot of compassion. I feel feelings. I do care about my fellow man. I do not want to win at the expense of someone else. I want to be better than the businesses I'm competing with, but I don't want bad for them. And then there's a billion other people, billions of other people that are in businesses that nothing to do with mine. And I cheer for all of them. I do not understand envy and jealousy. You shitting on someone else and saying they're not as good as you think they are does not make you better. And until people figure that out, we will continue to have a lot of people who spend all their energy and being instead of building. What's your feelings on the overall hobby? I think the consumer right now is more educated than ever. I think that they're being more thoughtful. I say a lot that people will not buy Jackson Dart rookies the way they bought Mac Jones rookies. And I use that analogy as not that I think Jackson's better at worse than Mac. It's that people are starting to be more strategic and thoughtful. And I think that's really good for the hobby. The hobby is probably in the best place it's been in a very, very long time because there's so much content, podcasts, social media, breaking platforms, all this stuff really is helping. I mean, I'm living to live vicariously with my kids and teach them business and everything else. So it's got a lot of, I don't know, there's sort of the stigma that goes with it, but I think the positive outweigh the negatives and I think you can teach your kids. And the negatives are controllable. This is just good parenting. The positives and social media outweigh the negatives. Yet the whole world is decided to spend 100% of its time worrying about the negatives. The negatives in a hobby is you allow your kids to treat it like gambling and all they really care about is opening up expensive packs, hoping for a miracle lottery ticket. If someone was disciplined and educated and put in the work, the amount of money people can make by going a dollar boxes that shows and stores. Buying cards for dollar and selling them for $4.99, $6.99, $9.99 on eBay. If you really knew your shit, the fact that you'd take $100 and turn that into $20,000. In a year, I'm only buying $1 cards and flipping them for five to 10 a piece, which is all day long with these dollar boxes that shows and stores. You teach your sons that, your daughters that, that is a skill set that they'll take with their whole lives around arbitrage, market dynamics, marketing, putting in the work ethic on tedious behaviors and things to get to a goal. So, you know, you're in control. I've always wanted to do something like this. Now I'm doing it. Never, ever, ever give up on your dreams and execute on them. And so whether this leads to you being a collector of e-friends and the value of that or if this leads to you creating some version of your own e-friends in a different form factor, in a different dream that you've had. I hope one of those two things happens. I've had all these accomplishments. I've done all these things, but, you know, I'm invigorated by being in a new chapter and doing new stuff and I just really hope it motivates people to realize you can change your script at any point in the movie. Josh Luber, of course, came on StockX. I got my new StockX actually arrived today, my new Jordans. But Josh's previous company that he founded, yeah, now doing Ghostrite, where he's talking about all the latest collectibles, his content's great. We talked about his son collecting, my son collecting, tons of fun. I can't keep up. You're touching everything that I like. How did you do it? Hey, I just get to make businesses around things that I like and that's it, right? I just happen to be the right age for the right history of the products that we grew up collecting. We didn't know that this career path existed when we were, you know, we grew up before the internet. We grew up before all of this. And it's fun now that to look at it, you know, we both have young children. We both have young boys and, you know, and watching now what his view of this isn't here, but like he just loves Pokemon cards more than anything else, right? And so now we get to be there to sort of guide them and talk about the business side of it. Like that, by the way, that is like the most fun part of all of this for me is like we had a conversation literally last night because he has Pokemon cards that he wants to get graded. And I told him that he has to fund it. StockX, the real business is not sneakers. It's the bid-ask model. It's the pricing model. It's the marketplace part of it. And it was just fortuitous to me that maybe the only other person, the whole world, trying to do the exact same thing at the exact same time, happens to be one of the most successful business people in the world. Talk about that bid-ask and anything you want to expound upon on that last point I made. At the most basic level, anyone who's ever used eBay understands eBay is what's called a listing-based marketplace, meaning that anyone can go list whatever they want. We create what's called a product-based marketplace, meaning that the product is the page and, as opposed to listing, and we create that catalog on StockX, and that creates the efficiency and the transparency around the dollars and the data. I left for the sole intention of trying to acquire the licenses for trading cards. You know, ideas are worthless, right? Execution is the only thing that matters, and I was fortunate to find the perfect person to partner with to go and do that. And then we were able to acquire all the licenses for baseball, basketball, football cards. As everyone knows at the end of 21, beginning of 22, acquire tops. Just having the leagues as equity partners in their own product, that should have been that way for decades. It's their product, it's their business, right? Talk to me about the name, goes right, goes tell stories. I'm a writer myself, so it immediately resonated with me. And then, you know, there's uniqueness, but also, I don't know, some mystery intrigue in the whole thing. Ghostrite is a blank canvas collectible, so this three printed ghost was the entire business plan in 22. And the ghost has no face, it has no gender. The ghost itself is not a character. This is a blank canvas. The physical form of the trading cards is the same every single time. The value is about who's on it, the condition, the scarcity, but it's a blank canvas product. What makes people want to collect? Is that just a, it's like, everybody's just a natural collector, you know? It's like, I don't know, it's like, I mean, I'm a dude. Hang out with guys. I got four boys, you know, like, but guys just like to collect shit, you know? I don't know what. Man, they do. Gary Vanichock is a a friend and investor and he thinks that collectors and are going to be sort of a new pillar of culture next to music, art, fashion, sport. That is a big statement. And I certainly think that there's some like real potential that it becomes that. I mean, you know, who do you collect? I collect a lot. Most of sort of my like primary goal on a day-to-day basis is I collect Black Prism, NBA Black Prism from 2013 to 2021. True Black, 101, basically any, any players. I just think that prism is the most important brand of the last, you know, 15 years and they're going away or at least NBA Prism is going away. And then Brandon Steiner, a true OG, one of the pioneers of the industry and Brandon got raw and real. We've had him on a couple of times. Just listen, lots of good insights about what's been done, what's coming and ultimately the lessons that we can learn. Anything I feel like we can educate people a little more or share views, visions. It helps the business grow. I'm all for it. I mean, I've secured over 40 million autographs, sold about 50 million hours of dirt, taken down many stadiums, including Yankee Stadium, Giant Stadium, Mass and Square Garden. I was in this game before I really became a game. Listen, I started Steiner's sports with $4,000 and I hope it's a good example for people to know that you don't need a lot to have a big dream and to get started. But I'm worried a little bit about the leadership as this business gets bigger and also the ability or the lack of ability to collaborate with some of the bigger companies and also making sure that the small collector has a big voice. You know, the guy who has a table at some cart show or some small little cart shop in a small town, they need to be respected and be taken care of. That's the heart and soul of the business. I think it's the challenge and also it's always a challenge when you grow is making a lot of money's easy. Staying who you are is hard. Being who you are, staying who you are and that's what I'm urging some of the larger companies to do and that is, you know, don't overproduce, don't say things that work more than they are, let the small guy make some money, let everybody make some money. And you know, I see the way grading prices are. It's very troublesome to me because the market's up and I see a lot of greed. I see a lot of overproduction with some of the card companies and I see tops way way over producing and confusing the market. But you know, my new company collect machines, we take people's collections on and it's so heartbreaking when people come in with 200 balls and I'm like, most of these balls are worth nothing. You brought a bunch of garbage because you got caught up in the hype. Buy or beware but buy or be educated. No, it's some of the stuff that you're getting, be aware of it. Deal with quality people that are really passing on quality opportunities for you to buy stuff that's good quality. Maybe it goes up a value, but you don't want to buy something that you've overpaid for or think it's worth a lot more than is. That's what's heartbreaking. What is it about collecting that brings people together and keeps them so interested? I think we treat people by collecting and remembering the moment and I think that really people really enjoy that. Remembering the moments that matter is kind of memorabilia's moments that matter and why not collect around them? That's big part of the growth of the business is this mystique of, can I make a lot of money? Yeah, so I get that. Put it in the other hand, like the best way to make a lot a lot of money is starting with love and passion and purpose about what it is you're doing. Not, how can I make a quick buck? And if you play the long game and you buy quality things and don't you want to end up with the music stuff without a chair? I don't have a problem with somebody buying something and they get most of their money back or make a little loose a little and then every now and then you find something to make a lot of money. But I think there's a lot of stuff being bought right now that you're not going to make any money and you can be losing substantial amount of money on your stuff and that really breaks my heart. Again, if there's going to be one, let's have all of the best companies and all the brands under one umbrella versus them just going away or be one person. You want to talk about them inopoly for production. They want to control who sells it. They want to control who gets it. They want to control where you sell it. They want everything on their side. These card stores are hardworking. They're the ones that have built this business all these years. That's my point. They're not just jumping in right now. They've been there for years and they're like, sorry, what do you want our audience to remember or know? First of all, you use the collectibles for joy and happiness. The money is good, but collectibles is supposed to be about joy, happiness, fun, remembering the moments, sharing moments, experiences with family and friends and make sure that's a big part of your portfolio. And lastly, Mike Baker, my good friend, the original OG grader from PSA. He was the head grader at PSA now doing Mike Baker authentication. Mike's a great guy. I love the technology and things that he's bringing into the grading process and the transparency. So I love what Mike's doing. He's going to be a regular on the show. In 2020, I think that's when you started. Was that always the path in your mind when you hit it out? Did you think you were going to start your own thing? Yeah. Well, no, to be honest, you know, the project kind of was born in the early 2000s and thought, hey, what don't we do like a Mike Baker line? It got shelved. It got taken off the shelf so to speak in the late late teens. I thought we were actually going to start in 19. We had some delays and then we started in August of 2020 and then COVID hit. And it was like, oh my gosh, you know, like you can't go to card shows. If it wasn't for the Dallas card show, you know, a lot of the industry would have been in probably a different space, but being able to kind of continue the momentum and still go into more shows and try to, you know, tell everybody that this is what we're doing. This we're providing because everyone already had their card graded. So like, why do you need to go and send it off or get a sticker on it to, you know, blah, blah, blah. And at time after time, you get this and sure enough, you would try to articulate why just certain cards are better than their counterparts in the same grade. So what we've done is basically platform those special cards and bring attention to them and celebrate them. And with that, the premiums have grown and everyone now after five years is getting to the point where when you get a silver or gold or a black, you know what you're getting. How would you compare your grading versus the other guys out there and just talk a little bit about that product? I think the differentiator with what we're doing is we're adding greater notes or what we call a heat map. So when a card gets graded, I highlight the areas of concern. You get the card back. You can go look at the report card basically and it'll be highlighted up or right. You can put the little magnifying lens over that area and kind of identify what kind of kept the card from going into a higher grade. And that's what I love about what you do. Like you said, doing the whole heat map, you get to understand, you get educated on what the flaws were, what drove the grading. If you don't become the market leader in the next 10 years, I'll be surprised. I mean, I'm just saying I know that sounds probably impossible to you. But what you're doing though, the transparency that you're having, why hasn't that been done and am I just crazy to think that should be the standard? Well, it's cost and efficiency, especially at a PSA level would be interesting. I mean, it can be done. They do offer it for a fee. And I understand why you have to charge for that because it slows the process down and at that level, it's a machine and anything that goes into that process is going to add time. I'm doing it in part of kind of the ethos of why we did it was to ensure it the transparency because it's appreciated. Number one, to it'll save more time with customer service, answering those questions, rather have it beyond doing more business than talking about business has already been done. So if we can narrow that gap, make you more educated about how things are graded, what's going on, that's going to make you more educated, buyer going to spend more money, probably do a little bit more business with us in the day. What cards are we grading, man? I want to be specific for everybody listening is you guys flip on more of the, you know, you know, retail or send in stuff or it gets more access to start growing, doing new old all sports Pokemon. What are we grading? Tell me what makes a good grader. You know, patience and temperance, not thinking that you know everything because there's always somebody out there that knows probably a little bit more than you. You got to love your job too because it's monotonous. Most people, their eyes are getting tired, the fatigue, you know, it's mental fatigue too because you're not everything's a 10. So that was easy. You can just be a button pusher and, you know, who cares. But when you're running the gamut from vintage to modern shiny cards, all that stuff and trying to adhere to a standard and, you know, the calculations are big, you know, which is why I see how AI can definitely be a thing coming in the not traditional future. I know for some it's already here. I haven't seen anything yet that can pick off alterations and, you know, it be consistent. Ultimately AI is topped by humans. So as good as the AI is, it has to come from the human component to make that AI what it is. These aren't just interviews. These are blueprints and lessons that show how fast this industry is moving. I'm pumped to be in it, pumped to bring to life collector station, which is launching over the next week. And of course, right here on collector nation, let's celebrate 50 episodes. The best is yet to come. We'll have all the links in the show notes. And of course on the website thecollectoration.com. We're bringing you the best, the brightest, the coolest, the innovative of collectibles and trading cards here on the network. We appreciate you. We'll see you next time on the 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 collectornation.com and follow Ryan on Instagram at RyanAlford. Now get out there and collect yours.