Are collectibles the next big investment boom?

Brian Sozzi · Executive Editor

Thu, February 12, 2026 at 10:00 PM GMT+9

Opening Bid Unfiltered is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The world of collectables — from toys to unopened card boxes — remains red hot. And when you want to know anything about collectables, there are only two places to head: one, the new collectables hub on Yahoo Sports. And the second is serial entrepreneur Josh Luber. Luber co-founded StockX with Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. StockX revolutionized the trading of luxury goods by applying stock market principles—transparent bid/ask pricing and anonymous transactions—to sneakers and collectibles. Luber has since gone on to found toy collectables outfit ghostwrite. Luber hopped on the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast mic with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to go deep inside the collectables growth market.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on our website for full episodes of Opening Bid Unfiltered.

Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid Unfiltered is produced by Langston Sessoms.

Video Transcript

0:00 spk_0

All right. Welcome to a new episode of the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast. I’m Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sazi, and I’m really jazzed up about this episode. I, most of you don’t know this. I’m a little bit of a, uh, a collectible fan. Uh, I try to collect what I can. I’m probably not collecting the right things. That’s why I’m bringing in my, uh, featured guest for this episode, Ghostwright founder and CEO Josh Luber, who also co-founded.StockX and Josh, um, this is one of my most prized collectibles now. This is the Starbucks barista. I’m just gonna show it to the camera like a dumb ass. I took it out of the box. Stupid, right? And you could tell me on this. I,

0:36 spk_1

you know, I don’t know how much long-term value Starbucks collectibles are gonna have. So, you know, I don’t wanna, you know, throw a third too much shade if, if they’re gonna go too far down that, that path. But I mean, it’s.Such a phenomenal like microcosm of like the entire world right now that like this is the one we put on the table and not like a baseball card or like a pair of shoes or something like that.

0:54 spk_0

So it’sgreat. It was either this or some from random funko out of my collection and then, you know, I gotta give, uh, you know, the, uh, the, I forgot it was one Lexis Ohanian. I talked to him a big collectibles guy I talked to him a couple of months ago.And I’m like, Lex, I just found all of my Batman trading cards that I pulled, I think in the late 80s. He’s like, yeah, dude, they’re worthless. I’m shocked. Like I can’t believe it. Why are these not worthanything?

1:17 spk_1

You know, we’re about the same age. Every single person, every single at least guy our generation goes through the exact same thing where they, they find all their cards in their closet. They call up somebody who’s in the know and they’re disappointed when they find out they’re all worthless. And, and I mean, like the answer is simple. The answer.is Econ 101. It’s just supply and demand at its most basic. And back then they just flooded the market with that stuff. No one had any idea, and we all go through it. I mean, like literally, we all go through it. There’s literally a line somewhere deep in a footnote of the white paper of like, yeah, if you’re 47, don’t know what you’re talking about, like this one’s for you. Like, you know, and that’s fine that we all go through it because that’s what it was like in the 80s and 90s where they didn’t understand about scarcity and supply and all that. Did you flip your cards?I, I, I’m back in cards more heavy now than, than I’ve ever been, you know, when I left Stock X, I actually went and I created Fanatics collectibles with Michael Rubin. So that company was bigger, faster, crazier by everything. And so I got to be like full scale back in it from, you know, from a kid in the 80s and then to come back in the hobby in 2018, 2019. It was just like, it’s been phenomenal. I mean, it’s like I buy and sell cards every single day.Right now and um and it’s just a blast to like be be back in that hobby. All right,

2:25 spk_0

so I thank you for briefly mentioning, uh, your career because I’m going to skip that because I want to get into some of the things. I, no, it’s not, it’s not fun at all. So the other thing, and I want to get into this white paper, 38,000, 30,000 word white paper you just dropped. I loved it. Um, another thing I found in my closet ahead of this.Remember Pogs. I have OJ Simpson metal Pogs, Star Pog that I used to use in school. Should I be holding on to thisstuff?

2:47 spk_1

I don’t know. You know, this is the other part of this is that there’s so many different, you know, little niches around collectibility and like, I never collected pogs. I don’t know what the market’s like for it. Like, maybe, right? Like, you know, that, that’s like a perfect, there’s, there’s so many, you know, parts like that.You know, I’ll tell you a really quick story. So when I was CEO of Stock X, we were at Nike. This is like year 2, and I was giving a talk and it was like 300 people in the room, and we were talking, explaining StockX and everything else, and we sort of get to Q&A and there’s this guy all the way in the back of the room. It’s a huge room, and he’s like really, really wants me to, to pick on him. And I finally choose this guy and he goes, I just want you to know, when you guys get to banjos.I’m your guy. And I was like, OK, right. And like that’s the thing it’s like that guy collects banjos and the whole thing, and I’m, I’m sure that the, so I don’t know, find the banjo pod guy and I’ll figure out how much it’s worth. But

3:36 spk_0

isthat how, how a lot of your time is spent? Like you have, you do something that like you could instantly relate with people like you and I, we’re sitting here already talking about collectibles and Batman cards.

3:44 spk_1

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s also just our generation, right? Like we’re, you know, but it’s like our generation is now the people.That are, are sitting here at the head of Yahoo and who are making companies and stuff like that. And so we get the ones that, you know, you just mentioned like

3:55 spk_0

we finallyhave money, Josh. We got to go buy the things we wanted. That is

3:59 spk_1

exactly what

3:59 spk_0

happened.

3:59 spk_1

The whole market like just reset because we could go out there and buy the Michael Jordan card we couldn’t afford when we were kids. So, yeah. All right.

4:07 spk_0

So the,the blind boxification of everything, awesome white paper. I read it from top to bottom. One thing that stood out to me.And this kind of plays into my, what are my thinking on these Batman cards. The price of Legend cards.Are not like they’re not going up, right? Well,that’s

4:25 spk_1

a, um, that general statement misses the sort of next letter down, which is like, it depends. It depends, are, you know, are there some legend cards that have been, uh, you know, rebuilt with scarcity and, and collectibility in mind or, or they’re just, you know, cards that have, have too much volume. But that’s OK. I mean, there, there’s a wide range that some cards are meant to, I don’t wanna say be worthless, but not to be worthless.Thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of dollars that anyone can go in and get a Larry Bird card or Michael or a Magic Johnson card.

4:52 spk_0

So Michael Jordan car is still going to be super valuableor it depends. Well,

4:56 spk_1

and it depends, you know, you can go find a Michael Jordan card for 1 buck, right? On the other hand, the most expensive car that ever sold was a Jordan card, you know, sold 6 months ago for almost $13 million. So, you know,

5:06 spk_0

for the, uh, for the collectible noob out there, what does it mean? What did you mean by you, this is the year of the blind box.

5:14 spk_1

Um, you know, I think at this point everyone is familiar with Lububu, or at least the word, uh, you know, I

5:20 spk_0

was so lateon Lububo. I was solate on it.

5:22 spk_1

I’ll tell my, I have a 13-year-old daughter and, uh, and I held off forever and I was like, Listen, you are not going to be the last one on a trend. Like there’s no way, you know, you, you’re the coolest dad and my wife, my wife was like, Come on, just like let her have the thing. I was like, All right, so, um, yeah, I mean, Lububu really showed, um, kind of the rest of, of the world.Um, the power of, of, of blind boxes, the power of, of gamified commerce, right? Because, and, and by the way, most of the stories about Lu Boboo focus on Rihanna or K-pop or TikTok or, you know, and, and that stuff’s all true too, but like at the core of it.The mechanic was, you didn’t know what color lububo you were going to get, and you didn’t know if you were going to get the black one, which was the secret, and it wasn’t that rare. It was 1 out of 72. So when you look at, you know, the, the rarity of trading cards, you know, the Jordan that sold for $13 million is a one on one card. That’s it, the only one.So it really opened up a lot of companies to see that, oh wow, like that’s a really simple mechanic and and we could incorporate that into our business in a lot of different ways. And I also say there is something about, you know, you and I sitting here talking aboutAs kids and, and everything we collected, it’s a largely male dominated thing, you know, for us as kids doing it. Lubobo opened this up to the other half of the world, right? And so now you have both half of the worlds that are into the gamification of it, and then you have all these companies like Starbucks and Lids and La Crosette and all these other companies.That are now trying to figure out, well, how do we do that? How do we get the hype of it, yeah, which is, you know, what, yeah, but that’s the thing. And now you have these other companies trying to figure out how do we get the hype and excitement and, and, and, you know, and, and, uh, and dollars that that Popmart flew in over that, that period of time.

6:58 spk_0

WhyI want, before we get more into this white paper, what makes these things take off at the end of the day, in its most simplest simplest form, this is a damn cup that is made out of glass. I look at Labobo, it’sI mean, it’s a, it’s a thing. Like what, how, how do these become instant collectibles or how do they capture the zeitgeist out of nowhere?

7:16 spk_1

Yeah, I mean, look, it, it really is just supply and demand, and, um, the demand half of the equation works when you hit that intersection of culture and commerce, right, where, where you have, I mean, look, Starbucks.What percentage of the population know Starbucks? I don’t know. All. So you just, you have a world where like Lubooboo, you had this intersection of Rihanna and K-pop and all this other stuff, and again, culture and commerce and those things supply, but it is just supply and demand at its most basic level. And so just even forgetting how rare something is, if there’s more demand for something than there is supply, right, that product is going to sell for more. And so that’s the, like I said, this is Econ 101 at its most basic. Are

7:55 spk_0

are today’s la boo boos going to beThis generation’s versions of my Batman cars like 20 years from now, totally worthless.

8:03 spk_1

No, I love Booboo is, is already a Beanie Babies, like they’ve already gone through the full cycle that took Beanie Babies 67 years to go through. Um, that’s because of, you know, the internet and everything, you know, why our economy moves faster than it did in the 90s. Um, but, but that’s because Popmark didn’t intend.And didn’t manage Lubobu to be a collectible like trading cards or, you know, and so, um, they were happy to just make as many as they would make and people would buy them. And the fact that they resold for more, that is a function of the secondary market, which Pop Mart’s not trying to do that. They’re just trying to sell as many products as they can, which is in the 80s, they were just trying to sell as many packs of Batman cards as they can.

8:41 spk_0

Um, why is the card market booming?

8:45 spk_1

You know, in 2018, 2019, trading card market started to come back. Um, a lot of people looked at um the pandemic and the Last Dance documentary as a sort of moment where trading cards didn’t come back, and then the whole world went crazy in 202021, right? And uh trading cards went crazy in 20201 just just like everything else, and then it came down just like everything else. Um, but the core collector part of trading cards are still there, and, um, trading cards have fundamentally built in.True supply and demand, true scarcity, um, and so as faux financial assets, right, they still have that, that, um, you know, inherent, um, disconnect between supply and demand. Lububos, they just kept making them, as many as they would make.Um, and so, you know, this also, I think there’s something about, you know, sports and, uh, you know, the, the evolving nature of sports and content and, and everything we know about sort of how content is going to change with AI. I mean, there’s like, there’s so many like different parts of this, but like at the core of it is when more money comes in, they want the the products that are most rare, that are, that are most, you know, uh, valuable, and so it’s the top of the market that is going nuts. I mean, we’ve hadSix of the most expensive card sales in all time in the last 6 months, you know, all these cards that are over $5 million. So, and that’s only going to continue because you just have this like natural scarcity that exists.

10:06 spk_0

If I think back 15 years ago and I bought 100 shares of Nvidia, I probably wouldn’t be here having this conversation with you. Like, I would be, I’d just be chilling, to be honest with you. Like, what is that, I guess, card or cards today that are emerging that could be the next big thing.

10:22 spk_1

Well, you know, um, as you may know, um, Fanatics took over the trading card licenses, um, a couple of years ago, and, and I was part of that, but they just, um, they, they acquired the licenses a couple of years ago, but they just started using them. So, only a couple of months ago, they released their first fully licensed, uh, basketball set. Um, Topps scoring basketball. So this is the first time that Topps has made basketball cards, fully licensed basketball cards. In trading cards, you need two licenses, you need a license from the league, and then the players.And, um, and then they’ll also take over the NFL license at the end of the year. So what we’re gonna see by the time we get to the end of 26 is a kind of, um, uh, like steady-state trading card industry, where now the, the people that are in it, you have Fanatics that makes the majority of the cards, and you have PSA that does the grading, and then you have the marketplaces around it.You have an economy that has a ton of money, a ton of like very mature companies that understand, you know, how to grow and and what’s, but like, it is, it is like almost day zero from from the market as a whole. So it’ll be very like how many, what percentage of NBA fans collect basketball cards? I don’t know. It’s gotta be like less than a fraction of a point, right? And so now that the leagues and the teams are are partners in these companies, the same way.At sports betting, you, you’re gonna walk into an arena and you can be able to bet on games when you walk in. You’ll walk in the arena and be able to buy trading cards when you walk in at, at your seat. So, which is a short way of saying like the whole market is still very, very early. Specifically, you know, that’s a, it’s a, it’s a much tougher question to identify what part is gonna be for my next. I know what I’m trying to, like I know I’d be very careful not to do that, do that one offline, but it, but it is.You know, the whole industry is pretty nascent in terms of when you look at the other industries of the same size and how sophisticated and how old they are. I mean, we just started marketing a hobby for the first time ever this past year. The first time there’s ever been trading card marketing, you know, it was only in the past year. And so it’s, you know, it’s it’s a very interesting time to look back in a couple of years and see where we’re at. All right. Hang

12:18 spk_0

with us, Josh. We’re going to go off for a short break. We’ll be right back.All right, uh, welcome back to Opening Bid Unfiltered. I’m Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sazi having a fun chat here, uh, with, uh, Josh Luberg, Ghostwright, founder and CEO, StockX co-founder, and I got, before we even get back to the conversation, I gotta give a shout out to Yahoo Sports. They have a new collectibles vertical on their site. I mean, this thing’s awesome.Plug my own company for

12:48 spk_1

once. I, well, I like to think that, that I, I helped, uh, start that, uh, you know, I’ve been pushing the people behind the scenes that you guys should be covering

12:55 spk_0

Ryan Spoon. I mean, he’s a legend in collectibles in his own right. That’s right. Uh,

12:58 spk_1

you know, uh, I’ve, uh, I’ve known Ryan for a very long time and I’ve been trying to, to move the bare bricks out of his office and, and ghosts into his office. You should see his

13:06 spk_0

office. I have to take you back.Oh you’ve seen it. Oh yeah,

13:08 spk_1

I’ve seen it. And we’re, we’re, we’re slowly filling up more, more ghosts than there are the bears there. But yeah, I mean, you know, as collectibles become more and more, I don’t want to say of a real industry, but as a, as a larger and more robust industry, you guys should be covering them in the same way that you cover every other industry.

13:22 spk_0

So true.Uh, before I get into what you’re doing here at Ghost, right, so I went to StockX. I go in there from time to time.And for the first time I saw boxes of cereal on the website. I mean, and I’m like, I had to ask Josh about this. What food is now collectible?

13:34 spk_1

Well, you know, there’s a, I don’t know, there’s maybe about 6 dozen of those boxes. What happened was, um, a couple of years ago, some of the cereal companies started to ask some of the, the large, um, fashion designers to redesign some of the boxes, and I think the first one was.Cause, who’s a, you know, a famous artist, um, did one of the boxes, and then what happens is they design the box. It could sell out, but what happens is collectors say, oh, I’m going to hold that one aside and then you know someone else wants it. It’s just, you know, again, it’s just supply and demand, but, but those are those are collaborations with artists and designers and other people. I have one, I think it’s like an Ambush one. Ambush is a Japanese, uh, um, streetwear company.Uh, I have like an ambush. Um, I don’t know what it is.

14:19 spk_0

Where do you keep all these?What, Paul, what is your collectibles collection even look like? I

14:24 spk_1

really should, we should put that up as a thing. It’s, it’s like Ryan’s office except times whatever large number you want to put behind it. Yeah, yeah. Where do you keep all this stuff? Well, I moved to Austin, so, you know, when I used to live in New York, it was much different. I live in Austin now, so I can have, you know, multiple rooms for this stuff.

14:37 spk_0

Nice.All right, so take us through Ghostwrite, uh, what it is and what you’re working on,so.

14:42 spk_1

Um, I left Fanatics Collectibles in the summer of 22 after we acquired Topps, brought a management team, and, you know, it’s three years from four years almost from now, and, um, I left for the very specific purpose of, can we create the mechanism of trading cards but use a different form factor. And so Ghostwriter is a collectible toy brand, but, um, it’s, you know, it’s funny, we should, we should, you wanna open one? I do.

15:08 spk_0

All of this is.Right up my alley. I, I try, I don’t portray it on TV, but like this is who I am at mycore.

15:13 spk_1

OK, so here, each one. So this, um, is the WNBA set, which is actually, uh, live right now on our set, but this is a blind box. There’s multiple different forms of ghost, right?And I should really have one, to show before we open it, but, um, this is like a box of trading cards where this is with the WNBA set. So we’re gonna look for different, uh, players in here. Uh, Paige Becker’s, uh, rookie ghost is a big one or, or Asia Wilson, Sabrina.Um, all the top players, but what we really want are the rare variants. And so there’s a gold version that has a gold crown that’s numbered to 10. There’s a chrome crown that’s numbered to 5. There’s a fire. I don’t know. No, I, I, I, that would be a, a, a really big problem if I did. But, uh, but the, from a value standpoint, you know, when we did the Major League Baseball set last year, the Shoe Otani Fire Crown, the one of one, so the most rare of the best player, sold on the secondary market for $44,000. It’s a 2-inch.Piece of plastic. But this is the whole thing. What’s a trading card? Trading cards a little 2-inch piece of cardboard, right? plastic. And so it’s the exact same idea is we take all the mechanics of trading cards and use a different form factor. Unfortunately, we have licenses with the NBA and Major League Baseball and WWE and, and UFC. Um, so let’s, let’s open our box

16:25 spk_0

and can I open it? Like I’mafraid. I don’t want you to like taxme or something.

16:27 spk_1

No, no, that, that one’s yours. This, this one’s mine. So.

16:30 spk_0

Right way to, oh, you just rip it open.

16:31 spk_1

There’s a little pull tab on the top. So we, again, we, what we really want are rare variants, but it would also be good collectible

16:37 spk_0

one like the gold one.

16:38 spk_1

Yeah, so you’ll see if there’s a shiny crown. Um, there’s, um, it’s very much like trading cards where there’s a, there’s a number of 50, a number to 25, a number to 10, a 5, and a 10,

16:47 spk_0

I love that there’s no more wrapping in here.

16:49 spk_1

And then there’s a little gold. So

16:51 spk_0

this is big. This is cool. This is so on my alley. My friends, longtime friends know this is right up my alley.Let’s see. Now I just got to open it.

17:00 spk_1

So there’s a little, yeah, there’s a, there’s like a on the side

17:04 spk_0

yeah.ah, where’s the team come in here and help me open this.

17:08 spk_1

Yeah, there’s a should be like a little notch on, see, this is like

17:11 spk_0

real time, guys. That’s what we’re doing. Oh, here we go right in front of my face. I had it backwards. Ah,

17:15 spk_1

so, all right, so that’s, so this is a good, so there’s no gold crown, there’s no shiny crown. So that means this is a base. This is like a standard ghost.Um, nice

17:24 spk_0

weight. These are cool as hell, man.

17:26 spk_1

There’s a lot of work that went into figuring out like what should the shape be because the, the shape is the brand. Have you’ve seen the larger ones in, in Ryan’s office?

17:33 spk_0

The Undertaker,Ryan, yeah,

17:35 spk_1

like, you know, it can be a WNBA player, it can be Undertaker. It could be a basketball, you know, we did one last week that was, it was a, a pencil, um, but so if you look on the bottom of the foot, it’ll tell you how many exist.And, um, so the bottom of the photo tell you, so there’s, um, there’s, it was when it was manufactured and then. 800 means that one’s out of 800. So there’s 800 base and then if it was a gold crown, I would say 10 numbered just like trading cards. And so, um, I got Nafisa Collier, who’s probably the, I don’t know, maybe the second best player in the league right now.Um, and that’s works. So this is our 4th set. We’ve done WNBA, NBA, Major League Baseball, 2nd version of WNBA, but NBA comes out next week during All-Star, then Major League Baseball, then WWE, and like this, like, again, I can’t, can’t stress enough. This is just a box of trading cards and it works the exact same way. And so the secondary market for the rare ones, you know, theThe Caitlin Clark Gold number to 10 sells for $4000 on eBay,

18:32 spk_0

you know,I, I, I just want to take you. So Brian now, I just opened this. I took it out of the box. I have not felt that.Unboxing experience. So, I really think since I opened cars, it’s one thing to get an iPhone. You see the, you know what you’re getting. There was just something to this experience. I gotta think on a little bit more that I have not experienced since maybe I got that OJ slammer for my pogs like back in the day. It was, but like, so I got this. I mean, do people trade these?

18:55 spk_1

Yeah, this is the same thing, and this is what I said. This is like how this is why that feeling that, by the way, the whole white paper is about experience. It’s not about products, right? This is.This is not like the gambling industry exists. This is how all of this, you know, I mean, the, the short version of, of like, you know, 140 pages is that you have the normalization of gambling becoming more and more common to the point where now with prediction markets, right, where prediction markets, you can now basically bet on anything andIt’s made gamified commerce that much more normalized to the point where, you know, you can basically bet on any product, right? Any blind box, you can create that, that, uh, experience, and that’s what Lububo did is it made it so the most simple version is, what am I going to get? What’s coming out of here, and that that level of excitement. When you take it to another level, and now you have true collectibility in here whereIf you get, you know, the, the goal, by the way, there’s a $15,000 bounty on the Page Becker’s one of one, right? So you may be in this, it may be in this box. Yeah, we, we, I truly have no idea, right? Actually, here, let’s do one other thing. So this is the NBA box from, uh, our last set. So, um, what we really want out of here again is a, is a rare variant, butThere’s a Wemby in here, uh, Steph, there’s also, by the way, we have a famous fan. We, we just trade, we just steal from trading cards. So in the WNBA set, the famous fan is Lena Waithe, and the NBA set, the famous fan is Eminem. So there’s an Eminem wearing a Pistons jersey that you could get as well.

20:26 spk_0

So I, you know, you’re my new friend. Uh, I’ve determined that, and I want to share this with you. I, I actually also went recently went digging for.My 80s McDonald’s toys. Now, there’s a ton of these things on eBay. I get it, and I’m not expecting to get rich off of them, but there was something about these toys. I still have them. I have like 75 of them at my house.

20:43 spk_1

Well, you know, the McDonald’s Pokemon stuff has been nuts, and they’re about to release a new one. Really?

20:49 spk_0

Oh, no gold, no gold crown.But Jason Tatum, Jason Tatum, that’s a win.

20:55 spk_1

Oh, Steph Curry, Steph Curry,

20:58 spk_0

like wait, that’s mine. I do wanna trade it. I do wanna trade it.

21:02 spk_1

Only, only because I have many Steph Currys already. But, uh, but,

21:05 spk_0

yeah, yeah, and there’s very few moments in the past 20 years of my life that I was, I’ve been able to actually be human. This is one of them and has morphed into something really cool. And

21:13 spk_1

plus I got a little color match going on with the, the piece of. This is,

21:17 spk_0

this is awesome. So let me, I have, uh, some rapid fire ones for you, um.The best way to invest in a collectible.

21:25 spk_1

Um,The simplest way to invest in a collectible is uh unopened Pokemon boxes. Um.That’s the simplest way.

21:37 spk_0

Your holy grail collectible and why.

21:41 spk_1

Well, um,I have a Shohe Otani card that is, most people would acknowledge as maybe his second best card ever. Uh, I think it’s his best card ever regardless. Um, I paid about $1,000,000 for it a couple of years ago and I’ve had multiple offers over $2 million and I’ve turned it down and I think that it’s.I think it, I think it might legitimately be the best trading card in the history of trading cards, and, and I just got super lucky that I happened to buy this one card at this one time.Uh, and Otani is Otani. Are you

22:16 spk_0

buried with this thing, or you, or are you just at some point you’re gonna just have to sell it?

22:19 spk_1

No, no, I, I mean, I have, I’m, I’m in it for $1,000,000. So, you know, I mean, I have a lot of other cards too, but that one, and like, and this is how it happens is like I’m not paying $2 million for a card, but if I get lucky and you know, you have a card that goes from $100,000 to $2 million like this is where the market’s at. Obviously, you know, by the way, I have other stories that have gone the other way. So, you know, don’t, don’t think

22:39 spk_0

it’s.

22:39 spk_1

Wins

22:40 spk_0

here.

22:40 spk_1

Not, not that easy, but yeah, that Otani card’s a monster. All

22:42 spk_0

right, next one, LeBron is probably nearing retirement soon. After he retires, what do you think the market looks like for his cards, sneakers, you name it, hats,memorabilia?

22:53 spk_1

Yeah, it doesn’t change at all. Um, and, and same thing is like, you know, uh, Wemby cards are just astronomically expensive because his whole career is basically already built into the price because we see of what he could be and LeBron.I mean, his whole career has, has been written. So it’s already baked in his price. He won’t, his cards won’t change when he retires. I will say to be a little bit morbid, when Kobe died, his autograph cards went up in value. Actually, everything went up in value, but particularly his autograph cards because now he can no longer sign. And so you have a little bit of that that happens when an athlete dies. But for the most part, most athletes, their cards, uh, their prices are already built in. I mean, you could argue that Cooper Flagg’s price is already built in. Um, I mean,Not to be what, I, I paid $80,000 for a Cooper Flag card last week. Uh, I think it’s a monster card, and I think it can have the same like trajectory as that Otani I just bought, but like that’s wild, right? Like he’s amazing, but he’s also played what, 40 games. So

23:46 spk_0

yeah, last one,What is the fascination with these Honus Wagners cards? Now, I, I ask you this because I have grown up seeing this one photo on a card, you know what I’m talking about, of Honus Wagner, and there’s just something about this. What makes this cardso valuable.

24:04 spk_1

This is like you can’t have a better story about story. I mean, this card, which is a, it’s a tobacco card from 1909, Honus Wagner was one of the first five people inducted into the Hall of Fame. He was, most people consider him to be the best player of baseball’s like first generation, butThe card was very rare, um, at the time, um, there weren’t a lot of, a lot of money made, and, um, and just over the years it’s developed this mythology. Uh, Wayne Gretzky bought uh a very at the time in 1991, he bought the most expensive Honus Wagner ever. Uh, it was like $450,000 in 1991. So you have this just mythology that has been building for a decade, excuse me, for aCentury. And, uh, and so, you know, how many exist, no one really knows. There’s only 37 that’ve been graded by PSA so maybe there’s like 50 or 60 that exist. But, um, yeah, I mean, if, if that, uh, Ken Kendrick, who’s the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks owns the one that Wayne Gretzky owned, which is the one that’s in, in best condition, if that car ever went to market.$50 million it’s probably.

25:05 spk_0

That’s awesome. Um, well, I could do this all day. I have to go. It was a real treat to meet you. This is a

25:10 spk_1

blast, man. Thanks for having me.

25:11 spk_0

I mean, where can I get those like big Ryan spoon-like ghostwrights? Is that the site?

25:14 spk_1

Absolutely, yeah, yeah, all on ghostwright.com. All right,

25:16 spk_0

I appreciate it. Good to see you, Josh.

25:17 spk_1

Thanks for having me. All right,

25:18 spk_0

that’s it for the latest episode of Opening Bit Unfiltered. This was my favorite episode I’ve done in like 6 months, and we’ve been cranking these things out, guys. Uh, continue to hit us with that love on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, iHeartMedia, and probably 30 other places I’m forgetting about right now. Thank you so much.

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