welcome back to another episode of built for the hobby presented by my good friends at inferno red technology a very fun episode to get into today i'm joined by scott lock but i'm also joined by dan kaufman managing director at sports business journal and we talk about the intersection of collecting sports media fan engagement and the business side of sports dan's perspective is unique because he is a collector and a leader covering the sports industry his work has centered around sports media technology innovation and the future of fan engagement and we get into a lot of that and how it applies to us as collectors in this conversation if you wanna show your support for stacking slabs hit the follow button tell a damn friend run on over the patreon group shout out inferno red technology for making this conversation happen built for the hobby let's get into it alright we are back it has been a minute but we have another episode of built for the hobby here and a unique one we are bringing in a outside guest to chat about an interesting topic talking about sports talking about collectibles in the intersection and i'm joined by scott as always from inferno red technology obviously shout out inferno red for putting on built for the hobby but i'm also joined today by dan kaufman of sports business journal he's gonna be part of the conversation talking about kind of what he sees in his role in this intersection but without further ado scott welcome dan welcome for the first time how are you dan doing great thanks for having me brett excited for the conversation thank you for the opportunity this is gonna be fun maybe before we dive into the conversation i'd love for you to spend a second maybe giving some background info for the audience just on your role whether it's in sbj or just historically how you've been involved in sports yeah let's see i mean i grew up playing sports love sports played baseball through a little bit in my first year in college and then as most of us do we realize at some point that it's not gonna go anywhere beyond that moment and and so kyle put tried to put sports in the back of my mind in the rear view mirror and i went to law school and actually was interested in entertainment law it was where i thought i wanted to be because it was around the time of like grokster and napster and file sharing and music sharing and all that stuff i thought that was really fascinating and so i took courses and then took some steps in my career to try to get me into the entertainment world and there's definitely overlap with entertainment and sports but i just kind of fell into sports i was working at a big law firm and i was poking around on a job board and i saw that there was an opportunity in dc for a junior lawyer at a sports agency and i applied and miraculously got the job and that was my first job in sports and that job primarily at first was to be the second chair attorney for two collective bargaining negotiations on behalf of sports unions so the nba recreation union and the mlb umpires union so within two weeks of that job i was on trains up to new york to sit across a negotiation table with david stern and his team of lawyers and then rob manfred and his team of lawyers and i was just like this is crazy i can't believe i have this opportunity so that was how lucky i got to be in the sports world and i did that for a few years and then learned a little bit about the agency world player representation side not just representing unions but the literally the player representation side and had this crazy idea to go out and start my own agency because i had some connections to some decent players on the baseball side and i had a friend who was out doing his own thing and we connected and we had this crazy idea to start our own sports agency and it actually had some traction ended up getting investors and and our investors were based in dallas and i was in dc and it just really didn't make sense for me to continue staying in dc and traveling to dallas to get the work done and so eventually was able to negotiate an exit from from that sports agency and i was looking for my next opportunity after that and i saw i saw this company sport techie which which i thought was interesting and i subscribed to the newsletter and the founders emailed me and said hey you have an interesting background would you be interested in talking to us we we think we've got something here i said sure and so they hired me i was the first employee and we grew sport techy from just a newsletter with a bunch of subscriptions to an event business and a a healthy subscription revenue business and then ultimately we were acquired by sports business journal to fill their tech vertical because we had built this sports tech crossover intersect from a media perspective growing during the time this is twenty sixteen to twenty twenty and sports business journal realized that we could fill that void and help them and so we were acquired by sports business journal and we grew the tech vertical within sports business journal and now here i am now i work across all of our events at sports business journal we do fifteen plus events a year sports business journal has a sister company in london called leaders in sport and they do multiple events including leaders week london which is a major event internationally and so i'm involved across all those events i also oversee our weekly webinar show called sbj live and then i oversee our video and audio strategy at sports business journal so that's my career in a nutshell awesome background and i love hearing kind of the beginning of the intersection between sports and tech and it's interesting because scott and i have so many of these conversations we're constantly talking about the intersection of tech and sports collectibles and i think this is gonna be one big mashup where we cover everything but maybe scott i'll i'll kick it over to you just in terms of listening to dan's background i find it interesting just like that adjacent path of sports and tech and then what we've been talking about with sports collectibles and tech like do do you see kind of where we're going just in in the hobby and the industry in a similar path that dan described just on his career path well i don't think i don't know that we're starting all off as lawyers so like that's it so that may or may not be where the base is and and it's always fun hearing dan i've heard the the the lineage and legacy of of his career i think it's amazing what he's done i think his persona and his profile at spj is is much bigger than he's than he's giving credit for because he's you know he's got the voice for radio and the face for tv so this guy's you know a former former collegiate athlete and he's you know he he hosts i've been to many of the svj events and and he just does an incredible job there and what i like about working with dan is he's he's got a genuine perspective on on the topics and so for the last i don't even know dan i've i have been i have been a massive advocate of collectibles and and the crossover between collectibles and sports and i think there's a lot of a lot of continuity there to talk about obviously because without sports there are no sports collectibles and more recently like you were saying like the path of where things are and do they correlate i think that technology is playing a bigger and bigger role we are we just i guess in my my own shout out we just recently put out a call for ideas for an event that's happening at the national called inside the inferno and that's you know that's where you know these concepts of ideas and technology and things now with ai being making software engineering and product development much easier we're gonna see a lot more flood into the market and a lot more flood flood into the hobby and not only just from a collectibles perspective but like you're gonna see fans creating their own fan experiences i think you're gonna see a lot of interesting things come out of this new era of entrepreneurship and so i feel like that's where the the crossover's beginning and and it's and where the technology launching pad is happening as we speak so i'm excited to see like we'll see what we're we have the call for submissions and we're getting a lot of great ideas seems to be a common a common vein in in many of them but they're they're still great ideas nonetheless so i'm excited awesome i am excited for that event i've been trying to tell everyone i know to if you got an idea pitch it this is a good opportunity but let's maybe start with cards that's what we like to talk about around here a lot of lot of the time and i think scott when you first mentioned dan to me you mentioned this awesome you know story he had with collecting with his dad dan you're here to maybe share that perspective so maybe tell us a little bit about collecting baseball cards with your dad and just like the impact that has had on you yeah i still have a hundred and thirty plus cal ripken cards i think so so grew up idolizing cal ripken in silver spring tone park maryland and man i i spent so much money buying baseball cards as a kid i i would be interested to know what that amount is but there was plenty of joy that it gave me so i i don't regret it and i definitely remember conversations with my dad and he supported it certainly i i don't ever remember him being critical of of the money that i would spend but i definitely remember having conversations with him about the cars that he wishes that he had still right like oh i had the mickey mantle and i had this that and the other and i put them in my the spokes of my bicycle and and just i like the noise that they would make so i definitely remember conversations with him about that and then later in life like certain i can't remember when i stopped collecting cars when it stopped becoming something i was really interested in probably like maybe fourteen fifteen years old or maybe a little bit before that but then my dad preserved everything and like had it in his in his attic attic and i remember in my twenties or so when they were cleaning stuff out that he kind of said like hey look do you want me to save all this stuff and i said yeah we definitely should and that was also a moment where i remember he showed me some cards that he had that were very old and i i presume of considerable value although we don't yet know the exact value but it was really nice of scott to be able to kinda tell me like hey look we should really think about these cards and find a way to see what the value is and these cards were i don't even know how to describe them scott you probably can describe them better but they date back to like the nineteen ten nineteen fifteen nineteen twenty time frame there's a babe ruth in there maybe that's the most prominent thing to say but my dad found them at like a house in takoma park that was doing like an estate sale essentially and he got them and then that was but that was like maybe thirty years ago and then he just held onto them and then brought them to my attention recently and then i approached scott because i knew he was in the space and that's like the the biggest piece of my collection right now that we're anxious to see what the value is i'm now i i feel like i'm involved in the story with hearing it from you and hearing it from and i'm definitely interested to see how it all shakes out and best of luck for the collection and we'll speak good high grades into existence hopefully thank you those things get preserved the right way but i i'm interested you know you've pursued this career path in sports and thinking back to collecting and playing sports as a kid did you like when was the moment when you realized that you had an opportunity to you know maybe not just be a lawyer as in people thinking about lawyers but you had an opportunity to actually work in sports as someone who played sports and someone who collected sports cards as a kid i never thought it would happen to be honest and i thought it was just too challenging to get there and like i said i i always loved sports and then went to law school and kind of had this dream of working in the entertainment field which also is daunting and difficult to do but i never thought i could i could get into sports and so it really was just a luck moment i think i mean i i it's it's it's it was in the back of my mind as it'd be it'd be great to do but when i saw this job posting that was like for a sports and entertainment lawyer i was like oh my gosh this is incredible and i applied and i and i got lucky i suppose there was certainly preparation and maybe i'm being too modest but it really was a lot of luck now what i would say to other lawyers or young folks out there who want to maybe get into sports is that it's very challenging to do but you have to bring the skill sets that are gonna be relevant for the industry i see plenty of people young kids it's not just lawyers who say to themselves oh i wanna work in sports because i like sports that's not gonna get you the job just not and you know in other industries that might be true right if you just love to you know you love to do computer programming although that's becoming more obsolete with ai now but if you love to do computer programming then you know get a job in computer programming if you love to cook then get a job as a as a chef but if you just love playing sports you can't just say to yourself that's why i wanna work in sports so that's maybe one one thing that i learned in my lifetime you have to actually position yourself to add value and there's plenty of ways to add value in sports it could be that you have tons of knowledge about tax or you have tons of knowledge about finance or you have tons of knowledge about the legal elements of it or you have you're just a great salesperson and and you wanna go out there and and sell season ticket passes so i was lucky to fall into sports and then once i was in it though i made sure that i could stay in it and work my butt off to to get to where i was able to get to today i mean think what you're saying is like i think is that sports is a business so yeah where you mean when somebody loves the fact that they played sports i mean that's the athlete side of the correct the equation that they're they're considering and not the business of sports and like what you just described like are all functional areas of a very large business or even small depending on you know you know which league or team or or group that you join so you know it's it's probably more think about what you've loved to do as a as a career and then the industry that you wanna work in is sports because you know that dream of being a major league baseball player is limited to you know just several hundred people in the planet right you know and smaller if you go into different you know leagues and and so on yeah that's well said so i wanna take us to the point in that intersection between sports business and the hobby think and scott in talking with you you're you have an interesting position because you are working with executives at the league level dan i'm sure you have conversations probably every day or almost every other hour with some executive in the sports industry and i think as the hobby becomes more mainstream as fanatics continues to promote the hobby it becomes a more part of kind of in stadium experiences we're seeing ads we've never seen we're just seeing sports cards show up in new places i think there's a lot of curiosity from collectors and maybe one of the questions i wanna dig into first is just like inside the mind of the sports executives like when sports executives today in twenty twenty six think about sports cards dan like what comes to mind like what sort of things have you heard yeah fanatics comes to mind immediately i mean they're dominating the market that that is the biggest brand in the collectible space from licensed merchandise to collectibles to even bedding and and and they wanna make a big play into data all around that to to really understand the fan so fanatics is the first thing that comes to mind the other stuff that comes to mind is stuff that that scott and i have talked about before and and i have to credit scott for for talking to me about it and really bringing it to my to my mind is is like you know the the breaks right the pack breaks the the the the moments of opening a pack of cards that are not just shared by my friend and me when i was a kid but are now shared by millions of people on youtube because i'm live streaming this what is it a break what do you call this a breaking dan let's give you the the one the the the one zero one on breaking yes so go so live they have live breaks we have we have reps so you have a mix of both of those things yeah you're right yeah we have i've spent way too much money on breaks but had a chance to you know had a chance to sorry i think i if i pause for a second had a chance to to get some good things from that yeah but it's a it's it's a good part of the i mean look at the size of of whatnot that's their livelihood so yeah i guess like there's this common conversation around fans and collectors and a lot of the narrative is we're trying to from big entities like fanatics is we're trying to convert fans into collectors i'm i'm curious just mhmm what does the sports industry understand well about collectors right now like what what sorts of things are you hearing dan i i think it's probably important to like maybe segment the sports industry a little bit like fanatics is huge part of the industry and it's a element of the business that the nba and mlb and european football all operate within they all understand the importance of having a relationship with fanatics and and monetizing their intellectual property through fanatics and the license but then there's a whole lot of other stuff that goes into the sports industry that a team representative has to do on a daily basis if they're in ticketing or if they're in marketing or if they're in on the on the performance side right if they're a coach or a trainer etcetera so it's hard i think to say like just what the sports industry is thinking about when it comes to collectibles i think though that there's a recognition that collectibles from the fifties when my dad was collecting initially or when he just i wouldn't even call it collecting at that stage was like they just had cards because they wanted the gum that was included within the pack of cards so for the progression from there to when i was a kid to when it was like okay we're collecting these cards because we really like the cards and there's value here i'm getting beckett baseball card monthly every month because i wanna know how much these cards are going up in value and then i might have thought at that point that that was gonna be it but like the progression is still going we now see everything that fanatics has done we now see the opportunities i think that we have through technology to make collecting an even bigger deal than it ever was even if that's just a youtube stream being at the ability to show a break like that so i just think that it's gonna continue to grow if you would ask me like twenty years ago if i'd be talking about collectibles still in the sports industry i might have said i don't think so i i think it kind of is it right here and it's not gonna get any bigger but it seems to be growing even more we were talking before this just about some of the opportunities that exist and we're seeing it now with debut patches from you know players like paul skeens selling for an ungodly amount of money but it's just this idea of taking the moment of a key athlete taking a patch off their jersey and embedding it into a card and putting it in a pack which is something i think collectors have desired for a long time and i think about the collaboration between sports and collectibles and that's a great example and this is only going to continue scott is like are we just getting started with this collaboration between sports and collectibles like there's gotta be more opportunities like how do you see this like how are you thinking about the this the this partnership between the these two worlds colliding over the next you know three to five years yeah i mean i don't i don't see them i i don't know that i would use the word colliding i mean i think that they they have been in lockstep and have been symbiotic as long as as you know dan just described from you know the early you know nineteen hundreds and before up until the modern day cards because again one doesn't exist well collectibles definitely doesn't exist with sports but sports exists without collectibles so i think that you know as we continue to see the hobby grow and the the you know it's not all about the value of the cards like the schemes and things like that you know it's about my you know my son works in a hobby shop in virginia and it's seeing like the the parents come in with the kids and like it's the first time they get a chance to like buy a player that they know right they're they're in their minds like my son was asked this recently on a on a different podcast christopher on sports cards live should go listen to him he sounds like an amazing amazing adult and he's twenty years old and he's an expert in the space sorry brad i gotta put it in there as a dad i write as we get to father's day weekend it's insane i was like literally cannot believe how good he was doing he did on that podcast but he's he answered this question of like when he sees like the connection between like kids and their dads and then when a kid a young collector or just a fan of the game comes in and finds the a card of their favorite player they're not like you know especially at the earlier ages they don't care about the price they don't care about any of that stuff they're not flipping it you know as they get older they kinda come in and start to have that like oh my god i can make some money but when they're young they're like you know oh my god that's you know that's lebron or like that's steph or that's messi and like they they they get these cards and they're just like it's the most important thing that they have walking out of the store and you can see you know usually the parents are like can't believe i paid that much for that card but like because to be your point then you're like your dad asking you how much you paid i'm like oh i'm curious to know like if if you did that same thing today yeah you would be different but i i you know i think you know companies like fanatics i'd be remiss to to not shout out upper deck and what they're doing with edigital and tech on their side for hockey and and you know e cards which p everyone said was like oh this isn't gonna last but it's like absolutely one of their their biggest pieces of ip so i think as time goes by we'll see like that that that fan engagement aspect of sports like dan was saying you can't just you can't just say it's this you know single industry of things like i think that sports leagues and teams know their customer incredibly well and what they're seeing is the impact that like that engagement opportunity with collectibles has and they're starting to invest a lot more into that that's why i mean why does michael rubin have this you know opportunity with topps and fanatics not just because he bought topps it's because they're they're creating an engagement experience and a model that resonates with an industry that's been around for like seventy seventy five years which is the connection to the sport to the player but you're not buying a card because like you know a major league team has an incredible accounting system right like they're buying because like the product that's on the field the players that they connect to you know the time when they go to the arena and like if and now it's like you go and it might be like you know baseball card day and they get a pack of cards and like now they're you know and they're bringing it all together over the last several years you know and then when those debut patches like that's a that's a treasure hunt like that's a chase and like so now by the way side note it's shocking to me how valuable like the patch is but like game used jerseys like sold on like sotheby's and and these other places where they have these the the the deals go for like a fraction of what a card in a pass goes for like it still blows my mind like i i'm like that's incredible but yeah that's what i think i think that's good perspective and dan i don't know if you've seen the numbers but i we've been tracking just the numbers on the industries aside according to cardladder and month over month the online sales totals in volume and in dollars continues to go up in may of this year so last month there were six hundred and eighty million dollars in online sales of sports cards across all the platforms tracked by cardladder which is insane and i i look at a number like this and it's continuing to go up month after month i continue to see these insane sales and i'm watching the industry forming and the infrastructure is still forming as the sales volume is going up i mean i've talked with scott a lot about just like the opportunity infernored has just with tech like there there's tech needed in this space and it's it's exciting and it's very much a part of the conversation which it wasn't three years ago even and i'm curious just like we're talking sports in the business side of sports i'm i'm curious just like we as collectors turn to other industries for inspiration whether it's the tech space whether it's the sports industry just to try to get some understanding of like where we might be headed i guess like on the sports business side like what are some like key themes or key trends right now that the executives are thinking about on the sports business side that we as collectors might try to understand as things progress and those themes might end up in the collectible space like what are you hearing just on a a day to day basis like where is the focus right now yeah i don't i don't know how we tie this to collectibles but i'll leave that to you guys but i can tell you what you know the biggest things that we hear are there's a heavy emphasis on premium experiences at venues so bringing in the premium fan to a venue and giving them an experience that they will never forget but at the same time recognizing that you still have to offer an experience for the the the fan that cannot afford that or does not want to pay for that i think there's still a lot of questions around the collection of data on fans and how we use that data to improve the fan experience whether that's in the venue or on an app or watching in a connected television environment where we know who the fan is who is watching wouldn't be the lit the traditional linear environment but maybe through a smart tv and then speaking of television and and consumption i think there's a lot of discussion about the next generation of fans gen z gen alpha and how they consume sports content that is probably one of the bigger things that we talk we hear people talking about all the time the decline maybe in watching on a linear television the standard television and the increase in consuming content through social media and becoming a fan through a feed i was on a panel just recently where we literally said that line right fandom starts a feed and it was in reference to z and gen alpha fans or potential fans that that's the way that young people now are discovering sports content and within that there's also the question of am i becoming a fan of the athlete first and then the team or the team first and then the athlete or does it matter and i think that that question right now to me is more important than it was thirty forty years ago yes you could become a fan of a team because of the athlete but i felt like it was very fandom was very much driven by your parents and the army we're in so i was in maryland so i was an orioles fan my dad actually was a yankees fan but we were going to so many orioles games that he became an orioles fan because we were all right there i don't know that that same locality has as much of a draw it still has a draw but it's different given the ability to see so much other stuff with this device right here that might attract my attention that's interesting and scott definitely wanna help you maybe help us bridge the gap and i i zeroed in on like the premium experiences and creating experiences in stadium and on this collectible side there's a conversation about premium experiences there's a conversation about engagement there's conversation about you know creating moments and i know teams are spending millions of dollars investing in these fan experiences in stadium or outside of stadium scott like based on what you know on fan engagement and being a part of these conversations like where where do sports cards fit into all of this well it's interesting like when dion was talking about that i think one point you made at the end of like the the locality doesn't matter i think like the fans in new york city might argue that that's not the case fair enough i mean there's knicks fans everywhere but like if you're not from new york like it's almost like it doesn't matter but so i i i feel like geographic association to teams is still pretty strong people tied to their roots and to the where their home is but you're not wrong think i mean i have two teenage boys or i guess one's not teenager anymore but but that's how they consume content i mean that's how if they miss a game but we'll sit down and we'll watch a lot of basketball full games and it it's crazy because when christopher and i watch basketball games you know we're watching the game he's on his phone like like half the time but you would think like oh he's not paying attention no like he's like he's swiping through cards first so he's like looking at like should i invest in a player that he's watching like he's like looking at like what their cards their rookies are worth he's pulling up highlights of something that just happened and it's it's on instagram he's seen the comments of like a dunk that just happened or a play that just happened and that's how fast the the data and the the media moves across these different platforms i know i overheard at an spj event this year of like whether or not you know like ar digital experience that would replace live sports experiences and like i think you know it it it definitely won't replace it but it can augment it for sure and create a better experience and as far as the premium experiences goes like if collectibles are already doing this right i mean like some of the cards that were that topps dropped into their products this year about where you can win a meet and greet or you have a fan engagement experience and you have you know they put like ten different you know redemptions in for these premium experiences that's one way i think in in the hobby itself is trying to connect to a premium experience in the hobby shops with like vip breaking areas and like high end almost like a premium suite style experience in a hobby shop because when you to be honest with you you get into this like price point where you know some of these boxes are like ten fifteen thousand dollars each and the people who break those boxes in a hobby shop like want that level of experience so it's gonna be different than the people who are buying you know the four dollar pack of pokemon cards there are four dollar packs of pokemon cards anymore in a hobby shop but like so that's that's starting to like carry over and where you see like you know what is a premium experience at a venue and what is it like in the hobby shop and then lastly i think in my opinion there's a huge opportunity there's a there's a lot of conversation around like the mixed use around arenas and especially in nfl and football because they have to share the the the revenue for inside stadiums and so they're buying and they're investing in the properties around it and so there's there i feel like they're they're right now they're focused on connecting like the fan who's not inside the venue with like through apps and things like that but there's other ways to do that through collectibles and memorabilia and fan engagements outside of the arena that tie those things together so they feel like they get a piece of the game i i would love to see like what that turns into i haven't heard very many people talk about that so if you're listening out there stadium builders and leagues like that's that's one of one of my ideas can i ask a follow-up question of sky so you're the description of your son watching a game on television with you but looking through his phone for the cards that might be relevant to the player that he just saw make an amazing play and deciding whether to buy that card invest in that card because he believes that that athlete is gonna perform because of what he just saw that and and again i'm paraphrasing that i might have gotten that wrong but like that is very interesting to me i'm wondering if you feel like that's a typical experience for a teenage boy right now or if given your interest in collectibles your son yeah are interested in collectibles how many other kids are doing that well i think do i think it's a typical probably not typical but i do think if like if kids between the ages of probably like fifteen and i'll say twenty five as a that's not a child but like yeah half my age right and if they're in the hobby and if they buy sports cards like they're doing that right they are absolutely doing that and it's funny because like we were just watching world cup and and christopher's sitting there and he's like same thing he's flipping through and he's i think we should like buy our first like really high end mbappe card and i'm like we don't buy high end mbappe cards during the world cup wait and and that's like that's the trap right i'm like i'm not suggesting that like when you know we see in the in the during a regular season let's say the nba and somebody has a breakout game the interesting thing about sports and collectibles and especially cards the value of these cards are associated to the performance of the player very heavily right so you have like you have like the retired leg legends level like the the like blah blah blah it's not retired yet but say jordan and you know shaq and magic and like those those folks and then you have the the historical figures like ruth and maze and and mantle and those are like kinda like the bookends to everything that's kind of happened or will be happening in the middle and so at the edge of that is what we'll call modern or ultra modern and that's like active players real players and like that set of of cards and and memorabilia and everything related is heavily influenced by what have you done for me lately active play and so like the you know the the old saying in in our the hobby is you know like pikachu never tears an acl right so like that that value kinda like ebbs and flows with the market of like what people wanna collect but in sports collectibles like a breakout game i mean look at i have a horrible story to tell you we owned probably some of jaylen bronson's like best cards on the planet we had multiple psa ten gold prism rookies we had one of ones we had like we we were we actually put an offer of two hundred dollars on the nebula that's the one of one prism card for jalen i mean we had dozens and dozens of his rookies because when he came out like was not like who he is today like he wasn't the best player in knicks history right so like but once that he took off we started to like sell those cards at a little bit of a of a gain and like if we had known now what we or knew then what we know now obviously like we we gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars in in potential value but it was all driven by performance and i think you know there's a lot of platforms out there that track like brett just mentioned like ladder and and other tools that try to track the value of the cards but you know the there's it's interesting to see like know that there's concepts and ideas and maybe even products that are like kind of breaking through where they try to associate those things in real time so when you're sitting there and you're watching a game you make it you can make a decision you know should i collect this person depending on your where you fall on the hobby spectrum shout outs to the hobby spectrum but if you're a flipper like you might say you might be able to see like if and you and you know basketball because you're a fan you can start to see like well based on the performance of this player he's having a great game he's out you know they all you know the nba data stats are crazy right like it's tuesday and it's seven pm and in the history of the nba no one has scored twenty seven point three points at the age of twelve like you know it's like these like random nba and nfl stats when you tie those things together like you can start to make decisions and i think honestly like this is what they talk about these are what the kit what these people are talking about in forms on instagram heavily heavily heavily on instagram and tiktok and you know if you're just stuck to ebay like kind of filtering for listings then you're missing the entire conversation that's happening in this kind of this like subreddit for lack of better term because this is where the decisions are made and frankly brett like you also cut out like the value of the market that doesn't even count the private sales where the you know the hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars worth of cards get sold so i mean it's there's a lot of room for growth so sorry for the long winded people literally like if people are watching a game and they see a basketball player tears acl like that affects our like tanks tanks like when tatum went down last year his market just like vomited and like it isn't because like tatum all of a sudden was a bad player right it's just like he's off the court he's no longer producing like the you know the celtics chances like everything that gets associated to tatum just like starts to fall and then and it's not always just in in injury you have players who are just injury prone who are still like like think like zion as an example like the hype on zion was so high and heavy when he him and jaw came out in the same year and like their cards and you've i can't even put in perspective how many of their psa silvers prism rookies there are there's tens of thousands and they were selling for like two three grand each yeah and then just like they they fall through the floor once the first injuries happen in or they have off like you know jaw has some off court you know and those things affect the performance so it's heavily driven by performance unless you're a you know a like messi's hat trick the other day like messi was already expensive and the hat trick just like cements another legacy moment and it just keeps just getting you know rich and he's about to become the all time world cup leading gold scorer right so i don't know unless he doesn't score another goal for the rest of the what are the odds on that yeah i i doubt that i in listening to all of that and scott tell the story of his son being on the phone buying cards while sports are happening i would say for the younger generation that is the typical way they participate in the hobby and that's growing as more people enter through the promotion of fanatics and getting sports cards and placements that it's never they've never seen before i think there's there's one other way there's sorry to interrupt there's one other way too which is which is shows like like these card shows are packed like in the smallest venues to the like to the national like they are filled with this generation of of kids like walking through and looking and buying i mean it's amazing i did be at card shows i i remember that you can't be in an old dingy low lit mall show that i think most of us probably were a part of as kids but i was curious dan just as as fan engagement is such a theme on the sports business side as you alluded to hearing the stories of kids on their phones spending a lot of money on cards while sports are going on that's a high level of engagement like do do people behind the scenes at leagues with teens do do they do they understand that that sort of engagement is going on because to me that sounds like this is like the ultimate fan engagement watching sports and spending money on collectibles yeah i i think without a doubt they do and i obviously i can't i can't speak for them but but my my instinct is that they absolutely do but maybe not as much as they will even a year from now or two years from now the story was really interesting scott i mean it it's a great it's a great symbol of the ability to have a fan interact with a sports team or an athlete on multiple devices at once to to monetize that fan's experience in the moment which is important for driving revenue for a sports team and if if collectibles is the way to do that then i mean you know the industry needs to lean into it even more heavily in particular because all the things i talked about where fandom starts in the feed were like you might go watch the highlights on x twitter later there's no direct monetization there like the the the teens and the leagues like that the fans going to twitter and that you're following them on twitter x excuse me but the direct monetization piece on tiktok for example is still in its infancy you know how is tiktok going to the chicago bulls and saying like we want you to do more stuff on tiktok and this is how we're gonna help you monetize those interactions on tiktok still being developed but the monetization of buying a card or buying a jersey while watching a game it's right now so it's a it's a good point they do topps has you know this product called topps now that they do to try and capture like momentous moments in in sports and so you know like they'll they'll create they'll create a mini product in almost in in real time of like you know when brunson's mvp or like the knicks win they'll have these kinda mini sets and they did that for like the the olympics and i don't know if you know this but there's there's this triple autograph but they can create the products without any of the actual autographs right they'll get the autographs later so they they create and that's where redemptions come into play and where you you get the redemption for the card and and what have you or they get it signed and then they send it out later if it's on card so one of like the famous ones that happened during the last olympics summer olympics was there was a a triple auto of steph lebron and kd that went that had a million dollar has a million dollar bounty actually don't know if it's still a million but like it's it was like in it was tied to the event was tied to the to the players and so when when topps now creates this subset they they put it out on social media they put it out and so they're kind of instantly generating a product to sell for a moment like of of of an athlete's performance or of a game or of a league or whatever i can tell you this is my opinion in the hobby i don't know how well received tops now is like as a general product i don't like my the the people that we are in our circle i think it's cool but they don't collect it you know they like maybe they'll go and they'll buy like you know ten dollars worth to see if they can hit a number card or something i don't i'm i've i can't speak to what topps' numbers are on those things i have no idea but i can tell like i definitely know like unless you have like a print like one of like a triple logo of something you know that that hard market is pretty soft so you know that's good for tops but like what about the to your point what about the cities the leagues the teams like what can they do and i guess it you know it comes to a question of rights and who owns the rights to be able to create these things and and frankly tops is in a position to like to generate something like that because that is their product i mean they can they can you know create print ship all the logistics associated with putting out a product and apparently instantly so yeah it's an interesting question about the team side i i know that topsnow is definitely a cash machine because everyone's tried to hit those high number parallels and printing on demand is do think they do you think they like i i don't know anything about the numbers so i i should be clarify that i'm not i'm not they're doing just fine they're doing just fine scott they're doing i guess on the secondary market it's an interesting i i mean well we you can trace it all the way through because you know how many they print right like yeah because the prints get printed so yeah it is definitely a it is a cash grab for sure and it's cool and interesting i just don't when we're talking about the hobby and like things that have value and persist over time and then are then end up actually getting traded or sold again on the secondary markets like just don't know how well that does like that's just my opinion my personal opinion totally and i wanna be mindful of time here but i definitely just maybe a couple more dan i'm just very curious because we we talk a lot about tech on here and how tech is impacting and changing the landscape of the hobby we've never really discussed tech from a a sports perspective is and i want the this audience which is an audience of collectors to maybe get some insight from you just regarding tech like what is what is a big theme just regarding tech and sports like this year like that's happening right now that's a focus just so we can kind of wrap our heads around how that might you know trickle down and translate into collectibles in the future yeah off the cuff here i mean don't think i can talk about technology this year without talking about artificial intelligence so i mean we'd have to talk about how that's impacting the sports industry and i think i wanna clarify when i say artificial intelligence like i'm really talking about like generative artificial intelligence or agentic artificial intelligence which is really where chatgpt and boothropic and others are going right now that is having an incredible impact across all of businesses including sports from the perspective certainly of being able to streamline operations and get that things done faster and theoretically cheaper so that certainly is a buzzy topic across sports maybe it's within artificial intelligence as well there's some ai elements to it but i don't know if i if if if i'm describing it properly but the ability to take video and use the video use technology to scan the video for everything that's within the video and then deliver very quickly a synopsis of everything that went on in that video and then also in particular to think about how video technology might allow us to take large quantities of people within an environment like in a sports stadium and understand their behaviors and their motions and their movements and their eyeball location as well to even think about you know where are they paying attention to what's on the field are they paying attention to what's on the court are they paying attention to the sponsor activation where are they looking those types of things are interesting to me or anything else when it comes to sponsor valuation i think technology used to improve the ability to value a spend from a brand within sports is gonna become more and more important as more money is spent within sports but also those brands are demanding a better understanding of the return on their investment that's incredible i i'm dev i'm going to the fever game tonight and if caitlin clark is drilling threes i i don't even wanna see the video of me and what i look like at at this at this stadium scott before we get out of here is there anything you wanna you bring up just regarding all of these topics in this intersection like anything that you think is important to kinda close us out with i've never heard of ai before so i'm curious what that is not at all i think i think danny buried the lead i think that the at this spj tech awards this year the the thing that won the prize of like overall best in tech at the the awards was a device that allowed and helped people with vision challenges or or blind full blind vision experience a game through tactile essentially you know controllers with using your hands and the in a a custom device that did use ai to capture the the motions and movements on a game and essentially replay that so you could feel it and it and it's incredible like that was built by two college kids graduate students but still college nonetheless and i think like that's that there's the opportunity to to use technology to work with people who are or to take opportunities to create experiences for people who may be not able to experience it the same way as like you know somebody going to a game or seeing a live game so that was super exciting i think that's like a mission that should be invested in personally and so i hope you know that that's where technology kinda drives us it's so it's there's obviously like in the hobby it's just so much talk about like the value of things and like i just you know i and i'm part of that you know i definitely fall into the you know the collector and and more on the the the flip it side and you know you and i have talked about that and i get it but it's not always about that right like i'll i'll share very quickly just because i wanna put it out there in the world like we pulled out of signature football the one on one tom brady auto the product hit and what was crazy was as good as that is and that card is like a five figure card like it's crazy like you didn't text me about this scott what the hell god chris r immediately put it on instagram but like it's insane we were like we had offer we have offers of like forty fifty grand already like and it came out of a six hundred dollar bucks but what's and what's nuts that was cool but the way it happened is still like fundamentally the best part of the story because i had the pack in my hand morgan my younger son he's eighteen is like over my shoulder christopher is sitting across table he's opening you know we split the packs in half and he's like he's like oh i got this i got that and i'm like oh here's the here's an there's an auto in each pack and i slide over and morgan's like over my shoulder he's like dad it's a one zero one i'm like i didn't even hear him like i'm like oh okay and then he's like dad's a one zero one and i slide it back on the other way and i'm like oh it's this is like pinkish and i slide down and i see the brady and i know it's auto just from i was like oh i'm like oh my god oh my god and christopher's like what and he thought i was messing with him he's like i'm like oh my god and christopher's morgan's like it's a one zero one it's a one zero one i'm like one zero one tom brady otto and like we just started jumping like i jump out of my seat we're like literally hugging and jumping in the same spot my wife comes over who hates collectibles because they're everywhere in her house and she's like what what just happened and i'm like this is one with tom brady oh my god i'm like it's over and she's like what and i'm like one on one tom brady and like christopher is like immediately like oh my god what's that worth and like the whole like we literally have been talking about it as a family moment for like still days right he's just like do you remember that time we pulled the one zero one tom brady and like that was yes that just happened and so like christopher like in mornin and and and my wife laura like we just had this like family moment that was tied to all of this and the excitement of doing something like that like i mean i don't even i care about how much the card's worth but like i also can't put a price on like what that moment was like so you know it still comes back to ripping packs like that's what it is we book in this conversation with some family stories of collecting and we had a whole lot in the middle scott always appreciate our conversations dan it was great to meet you appreciate you sharing your perspective on what's happening on the sports business side i think this conversation will be very insightful to everyone out there listening and hopefully we can do it again sometime down the road thank you brett thanks brett appreciate it thanks dan awesome getting dan on the show that was a fun conversation and it is really good i think to get outside perspective especially perspective from individuals who are spending their full time covering sports to find that bridge between sports and sports card collecting and i think we did that in today's conversation shout out inferno red technology for making this conversation happen we will have more built for the hobby coming very soon appreciate all of you take care talk to you soon