welcome back to another episode of passion to profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay today we are gonna be talking about when you're collecting knowledge becomes your business excited for this conversation we are going to be talking about pre war vintage a lot of cool items from an amazing collector who's been doing this for quite some time today i'm joined by dan mckee who has a store darby's vintage on ebay and has been doing this for a long time but without further ado dan welcome how are you i'm doing great thanks for having me today excited for the chat let's start with maybe where it all began i i've i did some research on you listened to some of your previous conversations some articles but i think it would be fun maybe to kick this off with talking about just collecting and how you got started and the involvement of your father and kind of what those experiences taught you to shape you into the collector and business owner that you are today okay great i'm i'm in as far back i i was seven years old and dad used to take me and maybe four of my buddies down there was a card show once a year down at at the holiday inn in pikesville maryland right near baltimore and once a year we'd save up our allowance and we'd go down there and he'd sit out in the lobby when he go in the show he'd he'd read his numismatic news because dad liked his coins he collected the original thirteen colonies and us young kids would run-in there and spend our allowance and that's when i i started collecting my t two zero six tobacco set when i was seven i bought my first card it was it was downy hands above head for like ten cents and i liked the cards because they were old and small and i thought that was really neat and we were busting packs at the time it was nineteen sixty nine my first big year busting packs but that that's how i got started you know a lot of us think about the cards that we bought when we were younger or maybe even a few years ago and then we end up moving them for whatever reason i guess like having the start of your collecting career be with that t two zero six set like do you look back on that now and think man i had a good taste for the stuff that people would want or was it just kind of like the i thought these cards look cool at the time and that was just that yeah it was just dumb luck i liked them for their size and how old they were i really really found out over the years that i really like old things i mean just driving around i like to look at old houses i just like old stuff so but yeah it was just dumb luck i didn't i didn't know what i was doing but so i i've read a story that there was a trade a story involving your father with a babe ruth card and a sitting bull card maybe share that share that story in anything any color or context that you wanna add to it sure dad had always told me because he popped those gaudi cards out of packs when he was young the indians and the baseball and he always told me the indians were much more popular he would trade a beirut to get a sitting bull and i i didn't believe him really but i listened to him and then one time i went to a auction up in york pa and it was a family owned collection that never let went anywhere and i'm looking at the cards and all of the indians were worn and beat to death and the baseball cards were in good shape and i'm like wow dad was right the kids loved the indians and didn't mess with the baseball so yep i stood corrected on that one but that he told me that story i never believed him at first until i saw that auction that's amazing much of your brand and kind of what you collect is around baseball and i know you're a big orioles guy and collector maybe like share some perspective on just like what collecting has done for your fandom around the orioles and just the overall history sure i like i said in sixty nine when i started really collecting baseball cards i would love the orioles because they were very good in sixty nine seventy and seventy one so that really attracted me to them and and then as i got older and i i've got attracted to the older worlds like turn of the century and and anything like pre nineteen seventy of the oreo oreo memorabilia and cards and yeah their their team was really good and that that's what got me in my my all time favorite player is frank robinson and he he played for them then so so when you think about just frank robinson as your favorite player and just collecting frank robinson maybe letting the audience into kind of how you think about collecting are you the type of collector that tries to chase every frank robinson card needing it from all the sets and make sure they're organized in your collection or are you just picking up like one or two cards like how do you think about collecting your favorite player like frank robinson technically i am a set collector for the card sets but for frank robinson and also walter johnson i collect so yeah i try to get everything i can of that player now i even got to spend some time with frank before he passed away and i showed him my binder from fifty years of putting together his cards and he said oh my daughter collects and there was one card he hadn't seen i said i said frank i have a rookie card from of you from fifty six he's like no you don't and he kept signing i said yeah i do he goes no you don't and he kept signing i go yeah i do and he stopped and he looked up and he said conn's hot dogs i said yeah he goes let me see that i said i said here it is frank i brought it over for you to sign for me he goes my daughter doesn't have that how much i go come on frank and i said okay i'll you can have for what i paid because i had another one i was gonna run home i i said five hundred bucks he said give me that darn card i'll sign it so i had a lot of fun with him that was a few weeks before he died so i think i have the only one that signed because he hadn't seen it until then wow so does an experience like that that you go through with your favorite player does that just enhance kind of your overall mindset and mentality with his collect with the collection you've built like do you feel like all that work that you've done over the years to acquire those rare and scarce cards like the conn's hot dog card in that moment you have it and you feel validated for kind of all the money and time spent building it oh yes absolutely it was a great feeling yep i i enjoyed every minute of that and and the fact that he he was into it too and had never seen it really made made me feel good knew i had something special so we're all of us sell cards at some level right we are all collectors we like to acquire but like part of the reason or part of the our process is we realize okay maybe we love a card that's out there that we want more so we end up selling some cards to help fund it like what is your story with selling like when did selling become part of your overall collecting life and when did you begin treating it as a business yeah like in the nineteen seventies and into the early eighties the big deal was to have all the common sets like tops and bowman so dad would wheel and deal in the real old stuff that he knew and he loved the history of baseball and talking so we would sell some killer rare stuff just to put our tops and bowman sets together because that were construction he didn't have a lot of money so as you said we were forced to sell to keep collecting once we got to a certain level so i had to do what i've had to do too i i can't spend twenty five thousand dollars for a card and tell my wife i'm taking the money out of the bank i i have to sell to to get a little money built up to go buy it so you're exactly spot on with that that that's exactly why i started selling this is a top i was i was traveling with dad in the early eighties to to card shows and he was setting up to to sell to make money for us and that that's when i really started the selling do you do you go through that today even when a big card pops up that's you know thousands or tens of thousands of dollars are you still kind of using the same formula of saying okay i can justify this card by letting go of some of the existing inventory or existing part of your own collection is that something that you're still doing today oh absolutely but i i have a limit i i nineteen twenty one the tip top bread lefty grows the last one i need for my set i was offered one last year for forty two thousand i had the money and i turned it down let my friend down in kentucky finish his set and then another one came up recently in huggins and scott and i'm bidding on it and i had the money to buy it and i i just couldn't go that high i just it's crazy i i the most i've ever spent for a card is twenty five thousand dollars for a nineteen fifty four sk hot dogs jahozie herd there's only three now so i love this in getting into this side of things and you know i think limits are good like having showing some restraint going back on those that card that you need for the set like if if it were to pop back up today and you had the opportunity for it would you still have the same restraint and say like i have a limit to this or would you because you've gone through the experience of missing it a couple times would you maybe pony up a little more for it this time like what's your mindset yeah i agree i would go a little higher i i think i went to thirty thousand this time and and i just i don't know i just can't get it's a piece of cardboard i can't i have the money and just can't do it and i don't know yeah i'd probably go a little higher but yeah not much let's talk about running darby's today what it what it involves from kinda how you think about finding inventory for the store with getting orders out like let let us inside of your process to keep the business running okay well ninety percent of the stuff in my store are doubles extras so they're easy to part with and there's you know there's ten percent stuff if there's a set that i know i can't complete and i get a couple rare cards from it i'll put that in the store and part with some stuff that i'll never replace but yeah i usually get my a lot of my inventory comes from of the catalog auctions that get mailed out there's so many of them and your average person's working and can't look at all of them and that's i use my fifty seven years of collecting experience knowledge to buy rare hard to find stuff and and that's what how i get my inventory how important is that experience and that knowledge and applying it to kind of your process and to your your strategy i think you know the the more time we spend collecting cards the more time we spend learning the more curious we get and just it's that wealth of knowledge where we get refined and we're able to make kind of better buying decisions over time and we don't spend our money on something that's gonna go down in value but we we we can pick and choose our spots and this is a topic that maybe i'd like to break open a little bit with you because i don't think it's talked about enough but like how much do you lean on your experience and also like do you find yourself still with a desire to learn and are you still learning today oh absolutely i'm always learning and i i that's most of my buying is with my experience i'll have people come up and say teach me ebay you're doing so well and i'm like it's not ebay it's what i know about the parts ebay is just a a tool to use to move them but yeah i i definitely learn and i make mistakes anybody that tells you they win all the time is lying because i lose too but i take some chances you gotta take some chances you know i'll buy something that i think is gonna be good and i might lose a little bit of money but after a while i'll realize that and i'll let it go i'll take the loss and then make the let that money work for me again on the next purchase old cardboard credited you with finding the newspaper advertisement that established the origins of the nineteen twenty one tip top bread oreos cards what maybe tell the story there what led you to that evidence yeah i've i've found the ad i can't remember where i only got a photocopy of it now but i i remember find finding the ad years ago and we we weren't really sure how they were issued until this came out it was white's tip top bread and they were over on the west side of baltimore and i even went to where the building was but it's no longer there hope hoping i'd find a storage unit full of these cards but it didn't work yeah this is the set i only need the lefty grove in wow that's amazing is there a specific purchase that you can call out over the years where you saw something in a card that probably hundreds of other people who looked at the card missed but it was something based on your knowledge and insights where you said like i have to have this and this is why is there a specific example that jumps out yeah the it's actually not a card it's a wrapper that jumps out at me it it popped on ebay years ago and it was a nineteen thirty two us caramel wrapper now the us caramel did baseball and they did the president's so the wrapper looked very much like the president's wrapper with only a real minor modification but it had a baseball card with it so it was some mom and pop antique shop that found it and put it up and i said man it's i and i didn't notice the modification right away so i i jumped on it and i i i left a ginormous ceiling bid i think fifteen thousand or something i had my wife and dad hanging over my shoulder and i won it for six hundred bucks alright i got it yeah i put i put an article in a old cardboard about about that wrapper how you can tell the difference out and why we've missed it over the years no one had seen a us caramel baseball wrapper but i bet they have we just thought it was the president's wrapper so it's like instead of american heroes it's us heroes it's really a small change all the graphics are the same it's pretty cool but i but i got kinda lucky on that but the baseball card that was with it is what clued me in that that may have been the baseball wrapper it's like detective work here we talked we we've talked about rappers we talked about advertisements and regional issues since we've been on here what what do you think those pieces that maybe aren't car related what do you think they teach us about helping to understand the cards themselves oh i i love the the wrapping and the advertising it really tells you about how the the stuff of the cards were issued and what maybe why they were issued and and the advertising how they tried to catch the public's eye and i love that part every one of my sets has an original wrapper in it from where the cards were issued heck my george c miller nineteen thirty three set the wrapper cost me more than any of the cards but i spent sixty five hundred on that wrapper it sells yeah the the the packaging is very important you know i see all these videos in my feed of people buying rolex watches and it's like you've got the watch which is one thing which in this example is kinda like the card but then it's like the papers in the box that go along with it that's what it reminds me of to be a lot of that's meant to be thrown away if you think about it like the wrappers for the cards that's why they're so hard to find you open i didn't save any of mine from nineteen sixty nine i had to buy that wrapper later and i had a million of them in my hand that's amazing let's talk about ebay your ebay account dates back to november of nineteen ninety nine maybe talk about just like your experience selling on ebay why you use ebay yeah if just anything you wanna share there well actually april twentieth of ninety eight my buying account started and i sold with that in the beginning r three thirty seven man but the the darby's account that that i started i mean i i ebay is great because a lot of these sets i have now i would have never completed what ebay has done was allowed mom and pop's antique shop off the beaten path to show me what they have laying in their store so without ebay a ton of these rare sets i have like nineteen thirty three uncle jack's and and a lot of the regional sets i wouldn't have complete without ebay so ebay ebay has been great for finding stuff and also for selling you gotta remember every buying their mother uses ebay so all these other avenues come up and people complain about the fees but you you get the most exposure there i'm telling you i i wanna learn maybe okay you you've got a individual page for buying you've got a page for selling when when dan walks in and is searching or looking at what is sold like what is your typical day look like i'm sure ebay is involved but maybe take me through kind of your your workflow of what you're doing on a daily basis alright i i start my morning and and yes i always look at the buying first because that's so much more fun than selling so yeah i i go through all my ebay searches and and any and i i check to see if any auctions are ending that day so i don't miss them and that takes a lot of time actually now ebay changed years ago they used to have the baseball cards broken down by like years pre forty and and it's a lot harder now to search i wish they'd have broke the coins up that are all dated and you can find them easier but they did it with the they put all the cards together and it's really changed things but and then i'll then i'll go in and i'll take care of orders after i do my fun part because the order packing orders is not fun i'm sorry but it's gotta be done and to keep the top rated power seller rating i gotta get the stuff out in twenty four hours so that's gotta be taken care of next and and that's pretty much my day yeah i spend a lot of time on ebay a lot are you are you as a seller are you a buy it now guy or are you an auction guy either or if it's something rare and and i haven't seen for a while or something i think i can make a little bit of money on i don't i don't care if it's buy it now or or or at auction i'll i do both all the time i don't even really take that into consideration of course to buy it now is you can grab right away yeah do do you have a preference one or the other or just when you are selling yourself do you have a preference one or the other when i'm selling i do almost all buy it nows for my stuff because you gotta remember the auction's limited to the viewing i'll have stuff sit in my store for a couple years before i sell it and then boom mhmm and the auction you're gonna run for what ten days i mean i i use the auction service to get rid of stuff that's piling up and actually my wife ebays for me too to help me get rid of stuff the only problem is she never gives me any money back and i it's funny i gotta buy this stuff you can't just sell it and keep it she goes oh yeah i can i love that how do you decide and this is the age old question for dealers like how do you decide what belongs in your collection and what belongs in your store if if i'm working on a set and it's something i need that goes in the collection and any doubles will go into the store and and like i said before if it's a set i'd know i can't finish and i'm not gonna work on that'll be something i don't have i'll put that in the store and share it with somebody that may be working on that set and and can't find that card i wanna hear about this fourteen card eighteen ninety four alpha photo engraving oriole set and just kind of what putting that together taught you and did you learn anything new like yeah anything you wanna share about that set specifically sure and first to get started i'm no genius that was another dumb luck nineteen ninety one a a consignor from virginia consigned at the sotheby's auctions fourteen cards opening bid was three thousand dollars my dad was at that auction and nobody bid and lou lipsett bought them behind the scenes sold them out all over the country and once i saw them after that my partner joe bosley who's passed away now he he had a couple of them and when i saw them i fell in love with them they were baltimore they were eight the eighteen ninety four team that has like i think seven hall of famers on it and they were one of a kind and i said oh my god i gotta have that so i spent the next ten years buying those cards up to put the set together got down to needing the last four and lou called me and said i know where they are and he goes i can get them for you for six thousand dollars i said sold he goes oh my god is it too late to ask you for ten i said yeah well you're ten six so don't do that so we left and he got me my my last four took me about ten years to to to put the set back together and then man i i that was my baby i loved it and i i'm one of one of the vintage chat boards net fifty four and a a a guy knew i was bringing them to the philly show to show another member and he and he approached me and he said you know i'm blah blah blah can i see your cards i said sure and and he said he looked at me he goes how much i'm like not for sale i'm walking away and he's following me with his wife and young young boy in tow i'll never forget it and he goes i throw a number at me dan i said not for sale no way they're i love them they're mine i keep walking i i had about twenty grand in them which was probably more than they were worth i just wanted them for myself and and then he keeps following me i'm getting getting a little annoyed but it's all all in good fun he says i had to throw a number at me i turned around i said half a million turned around started walking he goes we're close and i stopped and i went what because we're close i'm in the three to four range i'm like what and oh my god we negotiated for a a month and a half on email and the those cards were not for sale they're still not for sale today but they're gone so everything has a number on it so yeah he bought them from me with some money and trade and he brought a film crew down to the fill next philly show and his son and we filmed the exchange for some of the money in the trade i got some j equals k candy cards that were really rare in in the deal and then he wired the rest of the money in my wife's account i thought i'd never see her again hey honey it was great i'm in the islands thanks but that worked out great and and we're in our house now because of those cards so we we gotta buy a nice house and move our daughter into a better school district that's true wife let this be on record she begged me not to sell them she said you're gonna be miserable don't do it we're doing fine i said i have to it's crazy and then my dad said to me god bless dad he said he said son you know you're only a temporary custodian of those and i'm like what he says you're gonna be dead and gone somebody else is gonna own them i'm like man i never thought about that that was it gone i've i've bought four back by the the way okay i was gonna ask you know there are these cards in our collection that we spend all of this time energy money and resources to acquire and then sometimes if you've been doing this long enough you get an absurd offer like you received and you think through it and you have family and tell you like you gotta make it happen and then you start to see things a little differently and that's what it sounds like happened with you i'm i'm curious like you've mentioned the home you've mentioned putting your daughter in a better school district which are all like value adds to life certainly but i'd be remiss to ask you like do you miss not having the set still not really not anymore like i said i bought four back a very good friend of mine has most of all the other ones down in kentucky that i could have tomorrow if i wanted to pay for them again so they're still would like fit my fingers reach there might be one or two commons out out in the hobby i'd have to work to get but and i even had a new set of babies that helped me get get through it my my nineteen ten washington times cards that are all only ones known i got the ty cobb and the water johnson and no people they're not for sale but thanks anyways that's incredible you mentioned lou like how important like that relationship that you had and that access like how important are relationships for you and you building your business and being a collector like how much do you lean on those relationships to get access to cards that you never would have thought you would be able to get oh yeah the relationships are very important lou lou and my dad were very close and lou was always great to me and he was an icon in the hobby he wrote three books about the the old rare stuff and and yeah it was great be being my dad's son i got i got connections with all those contacts like you said and and it's still to this day you you you learn who who to trust and who not to trust and and who who to lean on and who not to lean on i have a lot a lot of good friends that well not a lot but i have a handful of good friends that know know a lot more than me and i i talk to them all the time that's awesome did you know you you're selling are you doing shows still yes i did a philly show i was doing chantilly i do the i've been doing a national for thirty something you almost forty years and i'm i do a couple of local shows here in maryland in november i i got invited to a a show at a synagogue down in pikesville so i'm looking forward to that that should be fun wow so through the shows through ebay like how do you think about the managing kind of those customer relationships the people who i'm sure there's people obviously they got your store saved and people you are seeing you you at shows and you're seeing the same faces like how do you think about like managing kind of those relationships with people so they keep coming back is it just like look at my stuff like i continue to have stuff you need like how do you nurture those relationships with customers yeah it's not it's not it's not just look at my stuff i you've learned if i know they're a collector and not a dealer to flip for money which i don't mind i mean i understand where they're coming from too but a collector will get a much much better deal and i i do have a lot of repeat customers on ebay outside of ebay and people will come to the house and i always try to take care of them if i if i can they'll write me on email and my regular customers i i give the absolute best deal i kinda i've even given cards of what i've paid for sometimes because they've been such good customers so yeah you you've have to work and then if you if i have a new customer come in and i can let the best is a young a a young kid that's looking at the old stuff if i see that and can tell he's collecting i had one come into the philly booth the last show and and yes we i take took care of him because we need the young blood in the hobby to keep the hobby going otherwise if you look at the stamps hobby it's almost dead because no young blood got interested in it so so every hobby no matter what it is needs young people to get interested in collecting and this boy came in the booth and i could tell he wanted to collect and he got some real good deals on t two zero sixes what's your current assessment on just like the vintage space obviously in pre war we're seeing just record breaking sales all the time do do you feel like there is new energy from a younger crowd that's buying that stuff like what are you seeing in just like the sales in your store and when you're going to shows i think a lot of the new energy is investors and not really people interested in the cards a lot of the big money's coming in from the like they're bought the graded cards i'm not a big fan of grading but the graded cards they're buying the number on the label instead of the actual card i probably could have an empty label there and they'd still buy it back i'm kidding they don't seem to look at the card or appreciate it like i did when i they weren't grading back in the day but yeah every now and then you know there'll there'll be a a collector come in that's interested in the card wants to know the history and i'll explain stuff to them i i get a ton of questions on the forty seven bond red issue that a lot of the grading companies went great but it's really really pretty simple to understand so this is like a topic that i've seen pop up in a lot of different spaces on the pre war and vintage side but i love your perspective where you know we talked about grading you've you've you've been collecting you've been buying you've had access you've seen so many of these cards and you've owned so many of these cards over the years like i'm sure there are times when you see a card and you it has a specific grade that you look at and you're like man there's something wrong with it and i this isn't what i would this isn't the grade i would give it and then you maybe see a a card in another holder and it's got a lower grade but then when you're looking at it it's got good color good centering and all these things you're like man that card looks excellent to me like how do you how do you think about that just with all of your years and especially when you're trying to sell like maybe raw cards and like how does that all factor into your business yeah you you see a lot of that actually because grading is subjective and so many different people have looked are looking at the cards you don't know what you're gonna get and just to be until recently what i got a giant box in a basement full of broken empty slabs if i saw something like you just said i'll crack that sucker open either either resubmit it or sell it sell it raw and sometimes when you do that then you just go oh i now i see what i'm i missed it i mean nothing's perfect but you can't do that anymore because the grading fees have gone so high i have a extra nineteen fifty two tops mickey mantle right now and i don't see a thing wrong with it and it's in an authentic holder but i i can't pop it it's gonna cost me five grand to have it slabbed again when when it was sixty bucks i could've done it you know but not anymore oh that brings me i i brought out my page with my fifty two tops on there see my those look those look pretty nice to me for me my my set is gorgeous my mickey mantle was really nice and he was probably a six at one time but i handle him all the time i love holding my mickey mic he's probably a four now and by the time i die he'll be a two but that's okay oh man well so that said obviously is like the it's it's such a a entry point for a lot of people when they think of like that era of baseball they think of that mantle and they think of that set like you've been around collecting this stuff for a while like how would you tell the story of what that set was when you started collecting to kind of what it is now and specifically the mantle yeah that set has really held its its its esteem i mean even back in the seventies that was the the most popular set to get in in the common sets of tops and bone and everybody wanted it and naturally the mickey mantle was our last card we needed and dad didn't have the money to get one and an ad came up in the baltimore sun a guy in downtown only had one card and it was a mickey mantle eight hundred dollars and we just had enough money and he threw me in the nineteen seventy two ford pinto and we went downtown and i bought the card it it had a had a little wrinkle in it i'll i'll never forget it but it completed our set and we were we were so excited but yeah that that set is amazing the high numbers are great i mean it's that is probably the the best tops top set there is you know i'm i'm hearing these stories you're telling of kinda your your early years and your dad being involved like how important was like enabling like in supporting like having your dad there supporting what you're doing and then now it sounds like as you've evolved as a collector and a business owner like you've had friends that are there to support and enable like how important has that support system been for you and to keep the fire going and doing what you're doing today oh it's it's been everything i mean a dad didn't get started right away like i told you he'd sit in the lobby and read his coin book and one time i came out with my head down he said son what's the matter i i said i can't find his card to finish my sixty seven set and he goes who is it it was number six hundred brooks robinson which is a a hard to short print high number but i was a kid if it wasn't sitting out on the table i just walked by he went into the show for the first time that time and came out with like six of them because he went to every table and asked and then we were completed and then he was hooked helping me work and set together and i i gotta be honest with you with all of my collecting my most fun was doing those topps and bowman sets with my dad man was that fun and i remember our partner joe bosley back in the nineties when that stuff was getting expensive he said you wanna sell them sets now dan now's the time and he might have been right and i said joe i can't sell them i me and dad put them together they'll be the last to go even though they're probably my most common stuff that's incredible i'm sorry dad dad made it to ninety two and a half and he was still sharp as a tack my wife moved him in so we could take care of him and i would buy a rare oddball card off ebay i'll never i'd walk it into his room and hold it up and he'd still identify it and i miss him when he went i killed a lot of my collecting drive there was times that i had to have something and that i don't there's nothing i have to have anymore so i lost a little bit and and because he was the fire behind me but yes i got a lot of good friends and collecting friends and and they they keep it going when you think about your business when you think about your collecting today what what does success mean to you like what you're waking up in the morning you're getting on ebay looking for stuff you're processing orders like what keeps you going man if i get a chance to scratch something off my want list that is like a rush it's it's it's better better than a high it's crazy because it rarely happens and and it does happen once in a while and sometimes it's something small and cheap that that i just haven't seen in a while but if i get to scratch like a i'm working on a w five seventy two strip set i think i need like five more and i just scratched one off two days ago that i got for fifteen bucks off ebay but it's never popped up so that that that's that's what keeps me going at that's a lot of fun the the hunt is the fun no doubt what what do you as we're kinda rounding the corner on this conversation dan what what do you want like the next generation of collectors out there to understand about just like your mindset and just the work that you've done like what do you hope when you know this is kind of ending for you like what what do you hope happens on the other side or do you care like what what what's your mindset well sadly it's really all changed it's completely different from when i was collecting i mean i watch kids get packs of cards and rip rip them open the wrapper goes in the trash they're looking for that chase card they don't have it the cards go in the trash it's just man completely different than it was and i don't think it's ever gonna get back to where we actually loved the cards because of all the money that's gotten into it and and and the grading and everything i it it's it's more of an investment than it is a collectible now so that that's kinda sad to me but i mean if i had to start now today i couldn't collect it's too expensive i was lucky to get most of my stuff in the seventies and and early eighties so i understand that you know they they just can't collect the way i did but i don't think it'll ever get back to that but but i wish it would i think that was when it was at its best knowing what it took for you to get to where you are with your collection and business and then also pairing that with what you just said about the current state and just the pricing and just the entry points being challenging like what advice would you give to maybe the younger generation somebody out there listening who wants to do this wants to be in a position like you are you know fifty years from now like what is one piece of advice you'd get who doesn't wanna take the traditional path to getting a corporate job but wants to work in cards i the best advice i can give them is buy buy the old stuff i got a feeling this shiny stuff is gonna hit a wall one day and i'm not wishing any bad will on anybody but but buy the buy the old rare stuff and you're never gonna lose i don't think that stuff's ever gonna go down and if you wanna start out at at collecting because collecting is a bug you either have the bug or you don't i've had buddies that have sold their collections i'm getting out and then a week later i see them and their hands are full of stuff i mean you either have the bug or you don't so so pick a pick a small maybe a small insert set or something from the fifties or sixties and and put it together and and feel what it's like to actually collect something and and complete something and that feeling is a great feeling and it's hard to describe until you've done it dan i very much enjoyed this conversation learning about your collecting the stories your relationship with your dad and building a business we'll have to do this again down the road yeah please and one last thing where i got my name darby's darby chocolate company nineteen ten was a company in baltimore and they put baseball cards on their candy boxes that's water johnson only one known amazing bright on brand appreciate you showing me that take care alright have a good one thanks for having me i appreciate it have a fun