SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, usually when you think of a child's toy, you just picture it eventually getting destroyed.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's basically inevitable.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Right. A teddy bear missing an eye, uh a toy truck missing a wheel. And if we rewind just a few decades, baseball cards were absolutely no different.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

They were pure ephemera, just you know, printed on the cheapest cardboard available.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Exactly. You'd take a Mickey Mantle rookie card, stick it in your bicycle spokes with a clothespin, and just listen to it make that satisfying, rapid fire thwack thlack thhwacks sound as you've rode your bike down the street.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

And that was the point. They were specifically meant to be handled, traded in the schoolyard, shoved into the back pockets of denim jeans, and, well, ultimately thrown away by moms across the country during spring cleaning.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

But fast forward to today, and that exact same piece of cardboard that used to get chewed up in bicycle spokes is now locked inside a temperature-controlled bank vault.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Encased in a sonically welded plastic slab.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Yes. And it is treated with the exact same reverence and carries the exact same price tag as a blue ship stock. We've been pouring over this fascinating stack of market analyses, historical accounts, and financial data for you today. And our mission in this deep dive is to unpack this incredible transformation.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

It's um it really is a staggering financial evolution.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

It's crazy. We are looking at a space that has morphed from a disposable childhood pastime into an $11.52 billion alternative asset class.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Aaron Powell, which is just a massive number. And to understand how we actually got here, we're going to trace the history of this market through its distinct eras. We'll break down the wildly different microeconomies driving baseball, football, and basketball today, and uh examine the ongoing high-stakes battle between real scarcity and manufactured scarcity.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Aaron Powell Let's jump right into this because to really grasp how we arrived at billion-dollar valuations, you have to hear the story of a man named Cyberger.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Oh, this is one of my favorite stories in the hobby.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

It's wild. So it's the 1960s. Berger is an executive at Topps, which is, you know, the preeminent card company of the era. And he has a massive logistical problem.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

A literal warehouse problem.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

All right. He has a warehouse in Brooklyn crammed full of unsold cases of the 1952 high number baseball card series. And sitting inside those unsold boxes are thousands upon thousands of copies of the iconic 1952 Mickey Mantle card.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

A card that in today's market is considered the absolute holy grail of the post-war hobby. I mean, a pristine copy recently sold for over $12 million.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

12 million. But back in the 60s, it was quite literally garbage. The baseball season was over, kids had moved on to football, and Berger desperately needed the warehouse space for the next year's product line.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

So what does he do?

SPEAKER_00 2:47

He loads these cases onto a garbage barge, tugs them out into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey, and just unceremoniously dumps them into the water.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Thousands of pristine Mickey Mantle cards sinking to the bottom of the ocean to be eaten by fish.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

The irony there is that Berger, entirely by accident, was inventing the core economic engine of the vintage card market.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Accidental scarcity.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Exactly. Accidental scarcity. Vintage cards are only valuable today, specifically because they were never, ever meant to be valuable. They were played with, they were destroyed, they were, as you said, dumped in the ocean. Right. That unintentional destruction over decades created a natural, highly constrained supply that simply cannot be artificially replicated by a printing press today.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Aaron Powell But if they were just considered cheap toys for decades, how did the psychology flip? Like how do we go from throw the unsold inventory in the ocean to let's put this cardboard in a safety deposit box?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Aaron Powell Well, that paradigm shift really gained momentum in the late 1970s. You had a generation of baby boomers who are now adults, they had disposable income, they were entering their peak earning years, and um we were in a period of high inflation where people were actively looking for tangible assets.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Right. They wanted something physical to hold on to.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Exactly. But the true inflection point was the media stepping in to legitimize it. In 1977, Time magazine ran a massive article on the financial upside of baseball card collecting.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Time magazine.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yeah. And then two years later, in 1979, the Wall Street Journal published a major feature on the hobby. For the first time, you had mainstream serious financial publications explicitly telling adults to look at vintage baseball cards as an investment vehicle.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Comparing it to the stock market. Yes. That has to be a wild moment in history. You've got guys in tailored suits reading the Wall Street Journal on their morning commute, suddenly wondering uh what happened to their old shoebox full of Mickey mantles.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

It completely changed the perception.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

And then right after that psychological shift, you add the gasoline, which was the rookie craze.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Well, Fernandomania.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Exactly. In 1981, Fernando Valenzuela takes the baseball world by storm, pitching shutouts as a rookie, and suddenly the entire country is obsessed with finding his rookie card. It completely rewired consumer behavior.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Because adults realized they didn't just have to hunt for old 1950s cards anymore.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Right. They could just hoard sealed modern products of these new players to fund their kids' college tuition.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

And the card manufacturers, companies like Topps, Donorus, and Fleer, they obviously saw this tidal wave of adult money flooding into a children's hobby.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

And they responded exactly how a profit-driven business would.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

They turned on the printing presses and let them run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This triggered what is now infamous in the hobby as the junk wax era, which stretched roughly from 1986 to 1993.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

We really need to quantify the sheer scale of the junk wax era for you because the numbers are almost incomprehensible.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

They really are. To give you a sense of the volume, it's estimated that in 1987 alone, Topps printed over two billion cards. Two billion. They were printing um at least two and a half million copies of every single individual player in their base set.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

That is just insane.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

And this speculative frenzy was being cheered on by a publication called Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. Every month, kids and adults would get this price guy in the mail, look up the little up arrows printed next to their players' names, and you know, feel like they were Wall Street day traders managing a lucrative portfolio.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

It's the perfect definition of a gold rush, but with a fatal flaw.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Everyone is sprinting to California with their pickaxes, pulling these shiny nuggets out of the ground and mentally calculating their riches. But the prospectors didn't realize that the gold they were mining was actively being mass-produced in a factory right over the hill.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

That is a perfect analogy.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

So if literally everyone and their mother was carefully hoarding these 1980s cards and pristine plastic binders, assuming they'd be worth millions, what finally caused the bubble to burst?

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Well, two forces collided. First, the 1994 Major League Baseball strike abruptly halted the sport. It alienated the fan base and completely killed the momentum of the hobby.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Just totally stopped it in its tracks.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Yeah. But the far more structural permanent killer was the advent of the internet. Once people could log on to early online forums and eventually eBay, the illusion of scarcity was shattered instantly.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Oh man, of course. You log on to eBay thinking you're gonna sell your incredibly rare 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card for an absolute fortune.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

And you see 10,000 other guys trying to sell the exact same card.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Exactly. The internet laid the supply-side imbalance bare for the whole world to see. Everyone realized simultaneously that these cards were breathtakingly common.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

The market completely collapsed. It was a catastrophic flight of capital, and those cards that people thought would pay for their retirements became effectively worthless.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

So if accidental scarcity is officially dead because every adult is now putting every single card immediately into a protective plastic sleeve, how does the industry even survive that?

SPEAKER_01 7:57

The crash of the junk wax era forced card companies into an existential corner. They had to invent a brand new concept to keep people buying. They had to create manufactured scarcity.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Manufactured scarcity. And that pivot defines the modern era of sports cards, which really kicks off in the late 90s, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Exactly. Manufacturers realized they couldn't just print three million copies of a base card anymore and expect people to care. So they started introducing insert cards with strictly limited print runs.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Like specifically numbered cards?

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Yes. Then came the introduction of serial numbered cards stamped with foil, cards featuring actual player autographs, and cards containing little square swatches of game-worn jerseys.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Which means opening a pack of cards today is a completely different psychological experience.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Totally different.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

You aren't just looking for your favorite player anymore. You are hunting for the refractor version of that player. Like a card with a special metallic coating that shines in the light.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

And the artificial scarcity is built right into the design. You have the standard silver card, but maybe you pull the red border version, and there are only five of those in existence.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Or the ultimate chase, the one of one, where the manufacturer literally only printed a single copy of that specific card for the entire globe.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

It's totally artificial, but it hacks human psychology brilliantly to drive demand.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

But manufactured scarcity on the printing side was only half the equation, wasn't it? To truly turn this into an asset class, the market needed a standardized, trusted way to define a card's physical condition.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Yes, and that necessity led to the absolute explosion of third-party grading services. Companies like PSA, which stands for Professional Sports Authenticator, and BGS, Beckett Grading Services. They basically became the ultimate objective gatekeepers of value.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Aaron Powell Take a second to explain the mechanics of this to us. How does a company actually grade a piece of cardboard?

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Sure. So you mail your card to their facility, and a professional grader looks at it under a jeweler's loop, a small magnifying glass.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

They're judging it on four strict criteria: the sharpness of the corners, the crispness of the edges, the centering of the image on the cardboard, and the physical surface, where they're looking for microscopic scratches or print lines.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Aaron Powell, so they're getting really granular with it.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

It's extremely granular. If it's flawless, it gets encased in a tamper-proof plastic slab and assigned a grade, typically on a scale of one to ten. A ten is a gem meant perfect card. Today, the data shows that 67% of serious collectors refuse to make significant transactions without that authenticated graded slab.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

And that's because the financial multiplier effect is absolutely insane.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Oh, it's massive.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

You pull a raw card out of a pack, and maybe the open market values it at 100 bucks. You pay a fee to send it to PSA and miraculously comes back a gem mint 10, and suddenly that exact same piece of cardboard is worth 500 or $1,000.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

The plastic slab multiplies the value by five to ten times.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

But this obsession with grading everything in sight has created a brand new bubble. Analysts and the sources are calling it the junk slab era.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Right, because we are essentially watching the behavioral mistakes of the junk wax era repeat themselves, just you know, wrapped in expensive plastic.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

I love the analogy we found for this. It's like demanding a rigorous, expensive certificate of authenticity for a mass-produced IKEA chair.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

That's exactly what it is.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Let me hit you with a staggering statistical comparison from the data. Think about Hank Aaron, one of the greatest, most legendary baseball players in human history. Across his entire two-decade playing career, there were only 7,831 unique cards made of him.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

That's his whole career.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

His whole career. Now look at a modern minor league prospect named Drew Jones. He hasn't even sniffed the major leagues yet. Drew Jones currently has 3,847 unique modern cards.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Which perfectly illustrates the ridiculous dilution of modern products. When you combine that sheer volume of manufactured variation with the psychological obsession with grading, you get a massive supply glut.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Everyone is grading everything.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Exactly. Collectors are flooding the grading companies with basic unrare cards, hoping for that 10 multiplier. Right now there are over 23,000 PSA 10 graded Charizard cards from modern Pokemon sets sitting in the market.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

23,000 perfect copies.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

And there are 18,000 PSA 10 Ricky cards of NBA players like Zion Williamson and Luka Donichich.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

It's a dot-com bubble environment. People are taking a card that is fundamentally worth $5, paying a $50 grading fee just to slap it into a plastic slab, and blindly hoping to sell it for $200 to the next guy.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

But if there are 18,000 completely perfect copies of a Zion Williamson rookie card, it is, by definition, not rare.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

And because those base cards are essentially becoming worthless again, the smart money in the market has fractured. You can no longer treat the trading card market as one giant monolith.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

The stakes are just too high now.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

Right. As the financial stakes have gotten higher, the way demand enters the market is completely different depending on the specific sport you are analyzing. The microeconomies of baseball, football, and basketball operate on entirely different timelines, driven by entirely different psychological triggers.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Okay, so if football's weakness is that it's largely an American obsession, the card market's solution to finding global liquidity was basketball. But actually, before we get to the NBA, let's start with baseball. Because baseball cards operate exactly like venture capital.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

They really do.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Due to the minor league system, a player gets drafted and might spend three, four years riding buses in the minors before ever making their major league debut. So bizarrely, the financial demand peaks years before the player is actually playing on national television.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

This phenomenon is driven by what the industry calls the first Bowman card. Within the baseball ecosystem, a player's first Bowman, which is issued while they are still just a teenager playing in front of 300 people in a minor league stadium, has become the definitive most valuable card to own.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

It completely eclipses their official rookie card.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

It does. It is an economy based entirely on anticipatory demand.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Wait, I have to stop you there. So the most valuable card isn't even from when they make the big leagues, it's from when they were basically an intern.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

How does that make any financial sense?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Because investors are paying for the potential of what the player could become, not the reality of what they are.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Look at what happened with Jacques Caglioni, a highly touted recent prospect in the data.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

While he was just a prospect playing in the minors, his graded first Bowman autograph card was trading for around $800, based purely on the dream that he might be the next Babe Ruth. Then comes the call-up. June 3rd, he makes his major league debut.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

The hype peaks.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

The hype hits an absolute fever pitch, and that card spikes to over $1,200.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

But then reality sets in.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Exactly. After a few weeks in the majors, he's playing decently, but he isn't instantly breaking home run records. He's just a normal rookie adjusting to big league pitching.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Narrative fatigue takes over, the fantasy dissolves into reality, and that same card rapidly plummets to $500. Wow. The investors who made money were the ones who treated him like a tech startup. They sold the hype right before the IPO debut, offloading the actual performance risk onto casual fans.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Imagine putting a chunk of your 401k into a human being only to watch half your investment vanish because he went zero for four at the plate on a random Tuesday in July. So if baseball is a slow burn venture capital play, how does football operate?

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Football is violently narrative driven. It operates on a hypercondensed timeline of weekly volatility, tightly tethered to Sunday performances, and the incredibly narrow window of a Super Bowl run.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

And it's basically just focused on one position.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Overwhelmingly focused on exactly one position.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

The quarterback. If you are an offensive lineman, nobody cares about your rookie card. But if you are a quarterback, your market value swings wildly every single Sunday based on touchdown passes and interceptions.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Take Sam Darnold. He was an injured backup quarterback, completely written off by the league, and his rare rookie card cratered to barely over $100. Right. But then he gets a shot with a new team, he leads a deep playoff run to the Super Bowl, and his market surges massively overnight. The demand enters in violent, event-based spikes.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Which brings us to the king of global liquidity. Basketball. Basketball cards account for roughly 32% of total demand in the sports card market, which is by far the largest share of any sport.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Why basketball over the NFL, though? I mean, the NFL dominates American television ratings.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

It comes down to global star power and cultural crossover. The NBA has brilliantly marketed its individual superstars internationally in a way that the NFL and MLB simply haven't. That makes sense. There are massive, highly capitalized card markets in China, Europe, and Australia that primarily focus on basketball because they actually know who these players are. Furthermore, the basketball card market shares a massive demographic overlap with sneakerhead culture.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Yeah, that same hype-driven drop culture mentality perfectly translates to pulling rare cards.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

So when a player hits the global stage, the liquidity is insane. Look at Shai Gilgis Alexander. During a recent NBA finals run, the global spotlight was so intense and the international money poured in so fast that his most premium cards peaked at over $33,000. It's wild. But I have to push back here. I really do. You're talking about a guy's value dropping by 50% because of a minor league slump, or a piece of cardboard spiking $10,000 because a quarterback threw a game-winning pass. How is this an investment? Honestly, how is this not just sports betting with cardboard?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

You've hit the nail on the head, and that is the exact question institutional investors are asking right now.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Really?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Because of that massive real-world volatility where you are tying your financial asset to a 22-year-old's ligaments and off-field decision making, we are seeing a massive rotation of capital taking place. Smart money is fleeing the modern card market and rotating heavily into safer, more stable assets, namely vintage cards.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Vintage versus modern. This is the great divide in the hobby right now. You have modern cards, which act like incredibly risky tech stocks, and then you have vintage cards like a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner or a 1914 Cracker Jack Joe Jackson, which are viewed by the hobby as treasury bonds. Exactly. In fact, while modern cards have seen massive price corrections and crashes recently, the pre-war vintage index actually rose 25%.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

And the reason for that stability is simple. A vintage player's statistics and historical legacy are permanently fixed. Babe Ruth is not going to suddenly go on a slump next season.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Right. His narrative is etched in stone.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

Furthermore, vintage cards possess true unmanufactured scarcity. Topps isn't printing anymore 1952 Mickey Mantles.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

And on the flip side of that safety, you have what the market calls the ACL factor. This is the dark side of modern investing. A vintage card is safe, but a modern card can go to absolute zero overnight.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

It really can.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Look at the Andrew Luck effect. He was a generational quarterback talent who just suddenly retires in his prime due to physical exhaustion, instantly wiping out millions of dollars of speculative card value across the hobby. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Or to the Wander Franco scandal, where off-field legal issues effectively vaporize his entire market in a single week.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Aaron Powell There's a dealer quoted in the data who puts it incredibly bluntly. They said dead players don't get DUIs or lower their batting averages.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

It is a morbid way to look at it, but um it's an economically sound principle. Investors want stability without performance risk. And that exact desire has led to perhaps the most fascinating anomaly in the entire trading card market. And it isn't a sport at all.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

It's Pokemon.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Yes. The Pokemon phenomenon. You wouldn't normally think a cartoon Pikachu belongs in a serious financial discussion alongside Mickey Mantle and Tom Brady, but Pokemon is currently operating as the ultimate blue chip trading card asset.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

If you look at the underlying fundamentals, it actually makes perfect sense. Pokemon combines massive global brand power. It is literally the highest-grossing media franchise in human history with absolute zero performance risk. Why? Because Charizard can't tear an ACL.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Exactly. A first edition holographic Charizard is never going to get caught in a scandal, it's never going to demand a trade to a small market team, and it's never going to suffer a career-ending injury.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

It's completely immune to real-world chaos.

SPEAKER_00 20:42

Because it relies purely on global cultural nostalgia rather than a weekly sports narrative, Pokemon Blue Chip cards have delivered a staggering 3,821% return since 2004. It behaves exactly like a vintage sports card, but it appeals to a much younger demographic.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

But whether you are investing in a 1952 mantle, a modern Luka Doncic, or a vintage Charizard, this entire market is experiencing the severe growing pains of becoming an $11.5 billion industry.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

The money is just so big now.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

It is. The stakes are so high now that structural financial risks are threatening the very foundation of the hobby.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

It's the dark side of big money entering an unregulated space. The data indicates that roughly 15% of cards circulating in the secondary market might be fraudulent or physically altered.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Like trimmed edges or recolored borders.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

Yeah. That is a terrifying statistic if you are dropping 10 grand on a piece of cardboard. And we are seeing massive multimillion dollar lawsuits tearing. Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

This is where insiders or auction houses artificially inflate the prices of million dollar cards. You basically have two guys in a room bidding against each other on their own asset to create a fake sky high public sales record. Just pump

SPEAKER_00 22:00

The price up.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Exactly. Then they use that fake data point to justify selling a similar card to an unsuspecting buyer for an exorbitant price. It distorts the entire concept of fair market value.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

It highlights the core tension of the current era. The hobby desperately wants to be treated like a legitimate regulated financial market by Wall Street, but it is still grappling with the shadows of its completely unregulated Wild West past.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

It's a tough transition.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

So what does this all mean for you? We've gone on quite a journey today. We started with Cyburger dumping thousands of Mickey Mantle cards into the Atlantic Ocean because they were literally worthless inventory. Right. We watched the market catch fire with adults in the 80s, only to collapse under the weight of two billion mass-produced cards in the junk wax era. And we've arrived at today a completely financialized, data-driven, heavily graded billion-dollar asset class where collectors are tracking population reports like hedge fund managers.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

It is a market permanently defined by the constant friction between childhood nostalgia and return on investment. The pure joy of a hobby colliding with the cold, unforgiving mechanics of supply and demand.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

Before we wrap up, I want you to think about where all of this is actually heading. We've spent this entire deep dive talking about the physical condition of cardboard, analyzing corners with a magnifying glass, putting paper into sonically welded plastic slabs.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Yeah, everything is so focused on the physical object.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

But right now, 46% of Gen Z collectors say they prefer digital collectibles. We are seeing massive real money growth in blockchain authenticated digital assets like NBA Topshot.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Which introduces a fascinating existential threat to the current system. Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

If a digital card is secured by the blockchain, meaning it physically cannot be bent, it cannot have its corners dinged, and it cannot be counterfeited by a scammer, will the next generation eventually abandon physical cardboard entirely?

SPEAKER_01 23:55

That is the big question.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

And if they do, will this entire billion dollar physical grading industry, companies like PSA and BGS, whose entire business model relies on assessing the physical flaws of paper, just become completely obsolete?

SPEAKER_01 24:08

That's entirely possible.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Someday, will we look back at these expensive plastic slabs the exact same way we look back at those kids sticking baseball cards into their bicycle spokes? It's something to think about next time you find an old shoe box in your attic. Thanks for diving deep with us today and we'll catch you on the next one.