welcome back loyal listeners of the stacking slabs podcast to season four episode seven of the wnba card podcast my name is caitlin and i go by at cold lunch cards mostly on the instagram machine but you can find me on other places on the internet as well and today i'm joined by me myself and i this is my first time flying solo and i'm super excited this episode comes at the midpoint of season four of the wnba card podcast all of which has been brought to you by our amazing sponsor over at card ladder so i just wanna give them a quick shout out before we get into things today but i'm just so excited to continue to bring you guys even if it's just by myself collector driven and community focused content to wherever you're listening or watching me today i really appreciate you being here and i'm super excited to go on this journey of a solo podcast together so why don't we introduce today's topic today's topic comes after six episodes of season four all of which i had a partner in crime a different guest on to talk about different eras of the wnba and if you've been following along last week we left off in two thousand and eighteen which kind of is good timing for today's topic which is all about nostalgia everything before this may have felt kind of like a previous world a different era and everything from here on out will probably feel more like ultra modern or recent history and so that i'm really excited about the timing of this because it feels like a good time to look back and reflect and a word that we often talk about in the card hobby when we're reflecting is nostalgia and so the inspiration for this episode not only did it come from you know how we're sequencing the episodes of this season but i read a substack essay from an economic commentator and writer named kyla scanlon recently it was called buying futures renting the past now before we get into this episode i'd urge you all to read this piece it was really inspiring and i found it to be incredibly thought provoking when you apply it through the lens of the hobby so before we get into the hobby part of it all which i know is why you guys are here today if you could just indulge me i'll set some context as to why this piece really is important to understanding why we're talking about nostalgia today so like i said it's called buying futures renting the past now kyla's idea is that a lot of modern culture and her specific application is the economy so if you're into that whole thing go check it out but her idea is that a lot of modern culture is built around two competing impulses the first of which is speculating on the future and the second of which is revisiting the past now kyla talks about the whiplash that i felt and you guys all probably felt watching this year's super bowl ads and commercials that constant back and forth between crypto ai sports betting prediction markets you know that whole futuristic lens but at the same time being marketed with a nineteen nineties nostalgia to sell it in fact kyla asserts that more than one quarter of commercials shown during this year's super bowl were focused on ai services her theory is that when the present day feels uncertain or hard to participate in because of affordability pressures political and civil unrest among the normal day to day things that we have as human beings when that feels uncertain or hard to participate in people often respond by those two impulses they either bet on the future or they immerse themselves in nostalgia and kyla kyla has this idea that this is just two sides of the same exact coin she says quote they are exit strategies to get out of the present now reading kyla's essay where it's mostly focused economics and you know there's a lot of fancy graphs around gdp and all these things i immediately thought about our wild hobby because if you think about it in simple terms sports cards can often sit right at that intersection of the future and the past at the same exact time and these are gross overgeneralizations but just an example when a collector or an investor or a flipper or whatever you wanna call them today when they buy a rookie card they're effectively buying a future and when they buy a super old vintage card they're reconnecting or renting the past but with wnba cards which is the topic of this entire podcast that dynamic gets complicated a little bit because of three main things this is my my theory i think the league is still very young that's number one number two many collectors today that collect the wnba didn't grow up with the wnba or with wnba cards and number three the early days of the wnba aren't necessarily seen as this glory days of that we have to return to a better past in fact i think a lot of people understand that the league has grown and become not only better in terms of skill and competitiveness but in general the league has put out a better product today hopefully i think so than in the past but yet we still feel this deep pull towards nostalgia so anyways here we go my plan for today is to attempt to define nostalgia then i'm gonna try to apply that definition to wnba cards and explore why i think nostalgia applied to wnba cards is a little bit different than say their counterparts in the nba or other leagues and then i'm gonna round out the conversation by talking about why i think nostalgia matters in this context so let's get into it when we talk about nostalgia today in the present just generally not not in the card hobby but just generally we usually mean something pretty simple like a longing for the past it's that kind of warm feeling then you think about a moment a place a person or a period of time that was met that meant something to you personally and when i was preparing for this episode you know the first thing i typed in the google search bar was nostalgia enter and the first definition that came up there were two different ones the first one read a sad pleasure experienced in recalling what no longer exists a wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to or the return of some real or romanticized past period or some irrecoverable past condition or setting now that's how i think i would frame i think that's a pretty good definition they did get a good job of that but the second definition was a little bit more interesting to me it was quote the state of being homesick which i thought was just you know the origins here must be a little different so i looked it up that version that second version of the term nostalgia was first coined in the sixteen hundreds by a swiss physician and at the time nostalgia was actually treated like a medical condition kind of a deriving of melancholy or depression and for example soldiers that were stationed far from home at the time were said to suffer from nostalgia when they became emotionally distressed when thinking about the places that they left behind to fight at war now over time that meaning has obviously softened nostalgia stopped being seen as an illness something that needed to be cured and started being understood as something more reflective something honestly in this day and age that could be used as a marketing mechanism it's now seen as a way to tie a feeling to a memory to an identity that we hold or to a time that we miss and today when we think about nostalgia more broadly we often experience it through cultural objects and so some examples of cultural objects are like music like vinyl records or movies or old photographs that we uncover in the attic or sports moments from back in the day and of course sports cards and all of these things are anchors or representations for our own memories you know a song can bring you back to a certain summer an old photograph you know of your grandma and grandpa the day that they got married can really bring you back to the family's roots and a card as we all know can instantly transport you or reconnect you to a player or a season or a moment in time to a specific run and in the sports cards hobby nostalgia is often one of those most powerful forces driving what collectors buy and chase and a lot of collectors you know when we think about it just not just the wnba but everywhere across the hobby when we think about nostalgia i think the most common time we talk about it is when we talk about collecting what we did as a kid you know we try to build sets that we didn't have the opportunity to finish as a kid we buy cards that maybe were chases and super expensive we didn't have the financial means to acquire them the hobby kind of becomes a way of reconnecting with those younger or earlier versions of ourself it's a time when maybe the hobby felt simpler or quieter but i think that this is really like where the conversation becomes more nuanced as we've talked about nostalgia from like a hobby perspective from a cultural perspective but the nostalgia dynamic becomes a little bit more complicated when we start applying that to wnba cards so i'm gonna try to walk you through my thoughts on why i think it feels different and maybe you guys could have different opinions on this but this is just kind of my theory so let's start with the obvious which is that the wnba launched in nineteen ninety seven obviously we learned on episode two with cindy that you know women's basketball was always a thing it's always been around but the wnba as we know it today was formed in the late nineties in nineteen ninety seven making it about twenty nine years old less than thirty years old which really puts it into perspective and to give you some more perspective when you compare that to other professional leagues it's extremely young the nba as we know it today was formed in nineteen forty nine making it seventy seven years old the nfl in nineteen twenty two making it a hundred and four and the mlb in nineteen o three making it a hundred and twenty three years old almost a century longer than the wnba has existed and i think that that you know youthfulness of the league has an interesting impact on nostalgia because in many sports card segments like those that i just listed nostalgia is rooted in that childhood memory collectors chase the cards from eras that they personally experienced but with the wnba this is just from my position a lot of collectors today didn't grow up watching the league in that same way that they maybe did with the mlb or the nba or all those other leagues now they didn't watch because of a myriad of reasons which could be a whole another topic for a more heated episode where i get into you know the lack of representation the dis the divestment the other forces that really lead to the stunt the growth of women's sports in general but we don't wanna get off topic here this that's another episode but for many of us my point is that not all of us but for many of us our relationship with the wnba developed later in life not when we were a kid or an adolescent and for me that's definitely true just to give you guys some context on like my personal relation to the wnba i grew up playing basketball not very well i played you know my entire life and was a you know starter on the jv team i think i maybe saw action in one or two varsity games but anyways we don't need to talk about my experience but you know basketball was a big deal to my identity growing up in women's sports i was a woman in sports and it was a big part of my childhood but when i think back on my earliest basketball memories or idols none of them were wnba players and to give you some context i'm twenty four so this isn't that long ago the wnba was already five years old by the time i was born to me the idols that i had as a kid were the local high school girls basketball team they were the players i could go to the gym and watch they were the players that taught me how to shoot at a basketball clinic and at the furthest degree of separation and the closest to professional basketball was maybe some of the stars that you'd see in march madness those were the players that felt close and visible when i was growing up the wnba existed of course but it wasn't necessarily the mecca or the center of my basketball world nor was the nba in the same way that it might be for you know a kid growing up today in this new era of wnba and yet now as a collector i do still feel a real sense of nostalgia for earlier eras of the wmga for players like lisa leslie rebecca lobo despite my personal grief with her as a commentator sue bird diana terrazzi the list goes on and on these are all players who i never saw their primes in real time so that raises an interesting question can you feel nostalgia for something you did not personally experience i think in wnba collecting and elsewhere i think the obvious answer is yes of course because sometimes nostalgia isn't just about memory sometimes it's about discovery and respect you learn about a history of a league you learn about the players who built it and through that process the past stars or the past memories or you know all these past things start to feel meaningful to you even if it wasn't originally yours anyways i i've gone on a tangent here but i guess i'll i'll i'll go into our next topic that i lined out which is why i think nostalgia matters in card collecting in wnba card collecting i think it plays a huge factor in our hobby i think it influences what collectors want and chase it influences what's deemed iconic it's you know what makes us impulsively buy or sell something but i think that nostalgia in collecting can happen in two kind of distinct separate ways so the first of which is what i'm calling individual nostalgia this is the kind that i think most people in our hobby are referring to when they say nostalgia it's you know tied directly to their personal memory it's the cards you had as a kid it's the players you watched growing up it's the teams that define your early childhood sports experience that built your fandom those cards feel special because they connect you to your own story your personal story but the second the different kind of nostalgia that i kinda wanna talk about a little bit more that comes up in collecting is what i called collective nostalgia now if you walk with me for a second i think that collective nostalgia happens when a community like us like wnba card podcast listeners builds a shared appreciation for the past even if not everyone in that group or that community lived through it over time the community stories about legendary players or historic moments or even dynasties like for me when i think even about like you know the lynx dynasty i feel nostalgic about that they become a part of the culture of the wnba hobby and the objects the cards themselves the things that bring us all together become symbols of that shared history and what makes wnba collecting especially interesting is that we're still in that early phase of building that collective nostalgia it's not something of the past it's something that we're actively engaging in and in a lot of other sports you know the iconic cards are already defined everyone knows what the grails are you know you have to have an eighty six fleer jordan to have you know the greatest nba cards of all time you have to have a fifty two man if you're having the greatest mlb collection of all time the significance of those cards or sets have been reinforced over decades the wnba we're not even three decades in much of that is still being decided decided and as collectors we're actively participating in determining which cards matter or which ones are deemed iconic which players define eras which rookie cards become the one that people talk about in twenty thirty forty a hundred years from now the community around wnba cards as we all know is still relatively small relatively but it's incredibly passionate and because of that there's this shared awareness i think that we're not just collecting the past we're helping define it now another interesting dynamic is that nostalgia often grows when people feel a little disconnected from the present moment in kyla scanlon's essay that we started talking about at the top of this podcast she talked about how the nineteen nineties represent really the last time that you know housing was affordable and we weren't tied to a screen all day and that's why ai in the future is marketed with that backdrop is because it feels like something that we miss and in the hobby i think collectors can feel disconnected from the present moment for a lot of reasons sometimes it's cultural sometimes it's emotional sometimes it's simply economical and over the past few years i think we've all seen prices explode as the glee grows in popularity and as the segment in cards becomes more mainstream you know and when that happens i think that collectors have to look elsewhere and i think a natural place for them to look is backward they start examining you know earlier players earlier sets earlier moments not necessarily because they experience them firsthand but because those areas feel accessible again both financially and historically and i think that's kind of a point where nostalgia starts to expand and grow because nostalgia isn't always about your personal memories about what you collected as a kid sometimes nostalgia is about respect for greatness and for history and for a past that built what you're collecting today so even if you didn't watch a player in real time their cards and their legacy can still create that sense of connection which is all that cards are you know the vehicle for and that card becomes a physical reminder of that history and in that way i think cards can act as a bridge across generations they allow collectors to honor players or even collectors that came before them so nostalgia in the wnba card market isn't always about escaping from the past i don't think that's what it is i think it's sometimes about discovering and honoring the past from a community standpoint and sometimes it's about making sure that the players and the moments and the runs and the things that built this league continue to be remembered even by collectors who weren't there to see them the first time around and i think that's completely okay so i guess we'll round the corner on today's episode which will be a a bit shorter than usual because it's just me but i'll i'll leave you with this nostalgia is often described as longing for something that used to be but in the hobby i think nostalgia is actually something we actively create and have to grow and like we talked about today with the wnba we're still relatively early in the phase of that process the league is still young the card market is still young and the stories that collectors attach to these cards are still being told like what we're talking about this season with different guests joining each episode so i'll leave you with this these are the closing thoughts from kyla scanlon's buying futures renting the past essay as we partake ways today i wanna leave you with this quote if speculation is an attempt to buy a future and nostalgia is an attempt to rent the past the present is likely some clean relationship between effort and outcome and we certainly know how to occupy the past and how to get lost in the future but what is our present spoiler alert alert folks in our hobby world in our crazy hobby world our present is our pc and the community that chooses to celebrate it alright that's all i've got on nostalgia today i hope you'll join me next week we'll have plenty more guests as we continue down season four but i hope you guys enjoyed my first solo pod i really appreciate you being here and hopefully we've got a wnba to look forward here soon alright bye guys