The Baseball Card Bubble Can Tell You A Surprising Amount About How Markets Work

new bubbles are being made every day. Yeah, exactly. I think we should seriously consider just doing until we've really run out of bubbles, and that will be never um. But today I'm I'm particularly excited because we're going to be talking about a bubble in which I was an active and enthusiastic participant. Okay, wait, I know you dabbled in trade tech stocks in the late ninety nineties, and that, of course was a huge bubble. Is it? It's not

tech stocks? So I guess, now that I think about it, I guess I have a personality that's sort of drawn to riding bubbles up and then all the way down. But no, it's not tech stocks. Do you want to take it. It's not beanie bubbles. Is it's beanie bubbles Beanie babies? That one I was not into. I'll give you a hint. I was a twelve year old boy

when I was into it in the early nineties. Um, I'm really I'm trying to figure out whether or not you would have been like trading I don't know, emerging market debt during the Asian financial crisis or something, but at least how trading Mexican bonds before they play out or anything like that. Today, we're gonna be talking about the baseball card bubble in the early nineties. Like many other twelve thirteen year old boys, I got super into baseball cards, both both the ones that were coming out

out and historical ones. And maybe if you weren't involved in it, you didn't remember this, but there was a massive surgeon interest for a few years. I think it sort of ended in like the mid to late nineties. People are paying all kinds of money for them, and

then it's sort of just disappeared and people stopped doing it. Joe, I have to say I was never into baseball cards, but I'm going to admit something to you really embarrassing right now, which is I used to be into magic the Gathering, and there was a lot of card collecting in that. I suspect that there's some similarities. And I think you'll find in our episode that there's a lot of really interesting finance lessons that this bubble has to

teach about other bubbles. Well, it sounds very cool. Who are we talking to today? We're going to be talking to Dave Jamison. He is the author of Mint Condition, How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, and he is a labor reporter at the Huffington Post. Let's bring him in. Dave, thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the Odd Lots Podcast. Hey guys, thanks a lot for having me. First of all, why did you write a book about the baseball card bubble? We'll get into what it was,

but I'm curious what drew you to this story. Were you a baseball card collector at the time? Well, Joe, like you, I am a man of a certain age. We can say, um, I like yourself, I don't know

what you were. You were born and I was born in nineteen seventy eight, and so I was twelve years old in nineteen ninety and I was there for the same baseball card frenzy that you were, And this was a personal obsession of mine, I would say, from age seven to about thirteen, and all my friends were crazy for it too, and then for whatever reason, around age

thirteen or fourteen, it it disappeared from my life. And my interest was rekindled when I was around getting close to thirty years old and my parents were selling the house I grew up in and my mom said, You've got to come get these baseball cards out of the closet because it's full of them, and so that sort of sent me down this rabbit hole of oh yeah, whatever happened to baseball cards? So your story is very similar to mine. I mean I didn't, you know, write

a book about it or have to get rekindled. But I was born in Ni so just two years after you. So all the years line up, if they We're gonna have to be very careful with this episode, not just trading personal stories about collecting cards, because we could probably do that for like an hour or two and it probably wouldn't be very interesting. Wait, okay, so I'm going

to come in here now. We're not going to do that, Tracy here's my excuse to come in as someone who knows very little about baseball cards or baseball for that matter. What is the point of the cards? Are they? How did they come into existence? How did you end up with a shoe box full of them? Well, the the long story, which I will keep short, it goes way back to the eighteen eighties when when baseball cards were created basically to market cigarettes um, and they were a

collectible like any others. And the whole idea was to uh collect a certain team, a certain set. You know, if you've got numbers one, three, four, and five, you want to find number two in that set. And the original idea was you you collect these cards. They look nice. You maybe display them at your house, or you pull them out when there's company, when company is over. But they were always collectibles for years and years, and boys, young boys in particular, I love these. There was a

lot of a lot of baseball card heydays. They were huge in the nineteen thirties, they were huge again in the nineteen fifties. Eventually, however, around the time Joe and I came along, this idea of of baseball cards being investments had come along and there's a lot of backstory there. But I think, as Joe had had had said earlier, there is a lot to this story that that that says a lot about bubbles in general and the way

they work. Tracy, I'm really glad you asked that question, like what our baseball cards, because that's probably I would have just like skipped over that question. But it is actually interesting this idea that they originally you know, they've been around for you know, like a hundred and fifty years.

They're originally marketed, uh, you know, relating to tobacco. When I was a kid, the most famous card was I and I still remember the Honus Wagner T two O six card, uh that I think was specifically like you bought it and you got it in a pack of tobacco. And I remember the early six in the world, and I think Wayne Gretzky owned one. Uh. Tell us about this card, Dave, because I assume you know all the

same lare about it. Yeah, the the the T TOO six Honess Wagner is is like generally the most valuable car it ever and that's because in part because Wagner was was a great player for Pittsburgh and a Hall of Famer, but also because the card itself had this really unique back story, there was only a limited number of them of them printed. Um, there's different theories as

to why there was. You know, people think there was this dispute, you know that that Wagner didn't want to be on a tobacco card to market tobacco, so he pulled the rights anyway, for whatever reason, there's this mystery as to why there are not so many of them and if became this really hallowed card, and those old cards are really important to understanding the bubble that would come in the nine eighties and nineties. We fast forward

to the nineteen seventies. Baseball cards have been around a really long time, but it's not really un till then that anybody starts thinking of them as something that could be worth money. They've always been collectibles up until now. But there's a group of kind of forward looking guys at that time who start realizing that there's a market develop uping around these old neat cards like the Honus

Wagner card. And these guys, uh, they start traveling the country trying to buy up collections of baseball cards from people, and they will hit the road, and they'll put an ad in the local paper and say, Hey, my name's Joe. I'm gonna be in in Pittsburgh next Tuesday at the Holiday Inn. If you've got baseball cards, come out, I'll give you some money for him. And people came out. They they pulled out whatever it was in their attic and they sold it to these guys for for pretty

much a song. But that's when a certain group of collectors starts thinking about these things as money and a market starts forming. And it's not long after that that we start we see a price guide, Uh, come out.

This is a guy named James Beckett, a statistician who was also a big collector, decided that there should be some sword of price guide to help people guide sales and trades, and so all of a sudden we have this this price guard guy that serves almost like a stock tick or telling people what what their cards are worth. And this is these are the sort of things we see, kind of priming the pump for the boom that's going

to come in the nineties. Okay, I have questions about the price guide, but before we go there, I mean, I know you both have an affinity for these cards. But as an objective observer, I'm really curious how a single collectible piece of cardboard can be assigned of value because, like something like a card, surely you can counterfeit it, right, Like, surely you can make infinite numbers of copies of it. How did it become a collectible? Well, you know, counterfeiting

isn't all that easy. And when it comes to these old, uh, these old vintage cards, you could assign a market value to it because there weren't a whole lot of them. Actually, you know, the whole idea of baseball cards was they were supposed to be ephemera. They were not supposed to be here forever. So people back in the thirties and forties, of fifties and sixties, you threw them out, and if you didn't, your mom eventually through amount when you outgrew

these things. And so cards were not really meant to stick around for decades and decades, and so people got rid of them. And so those old cards, like the Honus Wagner card, they were genuinely scarce, and um, you know, it was always hard to say how many there were out there, of course, and some would always kind of appear out of addicts. But you knew that those old cards were rare cards and because of their scarcity, they could actually be valuable. Now that is very different from

the cards that we're being produced in modern times. Okay, And this was was a big problem and a big feeder of the bubble was was sort of the mentality that people had going into this hobby. People were we're buying and collecting cards in the nineteen eighties that were being produced at that time, but they were applying kind of this vintage mindset to it. People were collecting, you know, a Don Manning Lee Rookie card in four and thinking

of it kind of in the Honus Wagner terms. And so you had these baseball card manufacturers that were essentially printing money, you know, they were they were rolling these cards out, and nobody really thought about how there was no way to know how much was being produced and whether this stuff would ever be scarce, And in fact, it was like printing money, and the card makers were

printing obscene numbers of them. So before we started the recording, I was tarring to Tracy and I said, the two things that I think are going to be very relevant from this episode to understanding bubbles are a the role that price guides had in priming the pump, and be the explosion of supply that happened in the eighties and nineties. To magic demand, which is of course something that we see in other bubbles. Uh, supply always ends up swamping the bubble. So you've already hit on both of them.

So let's really dive into those. Let's start with the role of the Beckett You might even say the Beckett magazine was the Bloomberg terminal of prices? What did it do it? How did it? So? I remember, I would look and I would, you know, say, oh, I have this card from like a Ken Griffey Junior rookie card or something, or maybe there's eighty nine, I don't remember. And then every month I would look and see how much the price had moved up and up a nickel

of a quarter of fifty cents, down a bit. How were those prices collected by the magazine on a monthly basis, How reliable were they? And then be what did how did the existence of that price guide, the fact that I could look it up end up changing collector behavior? So the methodology, Uh, you may not be surprised to learn was actually pretty murky. I'm not hard to know exactly how they came up with the figures. Originally it was based on surveys with deals and collectors who are

kind of in the know. And you know, in Backett's defense, you know, early on, I think a lot of people thought of this as a public service. Right right now, and you know, in this day and age, it's very easy for me to know what my Donmattingly rookie card is actually worse. I can put it on eBay and in seven days i'm gonna have a pretty good handle on what the actual market value is. Back then, you know, it wasn't so easy to know. You know, I think a lot of collectors felt isolated, and so the price

guide kind of like gave you a benchmark to go by. Um. But where the price Guide was really dangerous was, in my opinion, just generally popularizing this idea of baseball cards as investments. Right I can say, you know, as a nine year old, you know, we we were carrying the Beckett price Guide around in school in our back past, and you know, that was how we made our trades. And it's kind of crazy to think of children as

doing that. But you know, we we were that the price Guy had helped make even children think of these cards as commodities um, which of course is always kind of you know, in retrospect, was a pretty clear sign of dangerous ahead. Okay, so you have the Price Guide, you have this narrative that's starting to filter out that

baseball cards make sense as an investment. Talk to us about the I guess the sort of cottage industry that sprang up around it, because I'm assuming, as with most bubbles, you did get a whole ecosystem kind of building and feeding up on this baseball card phenomenon. Yeah. Absolutely so. For for many many years, for decades, uh, there was only one company making, really making baseball cards, and that was Tops, the most famous brand. They essentially had had

a monopoly on this for decades. They had an agreement with the Baseball Players Union in Major League Baseball, and they were structured in a way that basically shut out any any competitors. It wasn't until around that that they finally lost their antitrust case on that, which opened the door for other cardmakers to come in, and they certainly

flooded in at that point. It. It wasn't long before a whole bunch of these card man new card manufacturers jumped into the fray, and a lot of different groups had kind of um their own interests in seeing more product kind of flood into the market. You know, one was the Baseball Players Union and also Major League Baseball. You know, they had these licensing deals with the card companies. If you inc more deals, you're gonna get more money. The league is gonna get more money, and the player

is going to get more money. So they had their own reason to want to see more cards printed. And you know dealers had their own part in it too. The more the more stuff they could sell to people, the better. And of course, you know, the demand for this stuff was surging. So you would think that with all these companies piling in and all of many many more cards being printed, that you know, people would would start to to see that that something was off here.

But the demand just searched so much you had new collectors pouring in, you know, in the nineties, it was I would say, highly unusual if if a nine year old boy wasn't collecting baseball cards. So, you know, obviously we want to talk about how the uh, you know the bubble crash, because that's important. But before we get to the crash, what, let's just talk about the crazy

stuff that happened. What to you when you go back and look at that period when it was unusual for a nine year old boy not to be collecting cards and all these new entrants came into the market and people started treating cards his money. What are some really fun stories of just like pure over the top extravagance that in retrospect we can look back on to say, like, jeez, this was obviously a bubble waiting to crash. I would point to a few things, you know, one would be

the the infamous Billy Ripken. Yes, uh, error card, Joe, are you familiar with that? I? I am indeed familiar with that card? Can you can you explain it? Please? How much of a family podcast is this? Well it is a family podcast. But but basically there was so Cal Ripkins younger brother, who never really amounted too much there was that they called him error cards. Do you

want to explain what an error card is? Dave? Yeah, So an Eric card is basically when a card was printed and there's a mistake on it somewhere and the manufacturer didn't catch it in time, so the card gets out. You know, usually this is like, you know, the stats are wrong, or the guys wearing you know, an old uniform or something like that. But in Billy Ripkin's case,

it was a lot worse. Yeah, they had a he had like a lot of typical pose was a picture of a baseball player holding a bat on their shoulder, like just sort of holding it up, and he had a foul phrase that's not safe for saying on the air. Uh, certainly not safe for nine year old boys to read, written on the bottom of his bat. And you know, so as soon as they caught that mistake, they obviously pulled that. But of course everybody wanted the uh the few that route there. Yeah, so this was a huge

embarrassment for the company that printed it. Flear and they really bungled kind of the response. They didn't know what to do. They they tried blotting out the expletive and reprinting it, and then they scribbled it out and others um and it turned out there ended up being like six different versions of this of this error card, and it kind of only only served to feed the frenzy more.

And I mean I remember this was like the buzz on the playground back then was was was the Billy Ripken card and and it was just you know, you really enjoyed it as this illicit thing as a kid. But what's crazy is how valuable those gotten a very short time they were They were selling for well over

a hundred hours in many cases. Um, just because this was a card that had a bat that had an exploitive on it, you know that that was a sign of of kind of the weirdness going on that something like that could be could be fetching so much money. And you know, for me it was it was just kind of little thing things that that that you know, you should have seen that that could have told you

what was going on. You know, one being how how people were stockpiling cards and not opening them right This la kind of goes goes against the very idea of collecting. You're supposed to open the packs and like see if you got your favorite player and try to assemble your team.

People mself included, were just buying this stuff and like putting it in the closet as if it was like you know, going to accrew value forever and ever as this like unopened artifact, and you know, dealers were dealers told me like we were storing this stuff in our

our basement like it was cardboard gold. Dave, I wanted to ask you about this because of course, Okay, so people are collecting cards because they think they're going to grow in value, but you also have this tinge of gambling there, right, because you buy a pack of cards and you never know what's going to be inside of it, and one of the you know, you could in theory, hit the jackpot. It's a bit like buying a lottery ticket. So how much did that feed in to the craze? Wait,

I gotta tell a story here. Sorry, it's a real quick story, but it's exactly what this is about. It's perfect story. So my friends and I actually did this. We bought a box of unopened nineteen eighty nine Don Ross cards that's another one of these new um, these new ones that came into the market, and we're like, we're not going to open them. I don't know what we were thinking, but we that were like, well, let's just open one pack just to see if we got

the Ken Griffy Junior Rookie card. Because it's just we're just gonna open one pack and then we're gonna leave the other one sealed for like future or whatever. And so we did that, and not only did we get the Ken Griffy Junior Rookie card, we also got the Bobby Benia Rookie card in the same one. So it's totally exactly what you say, Tracy. It was totally that gambling thing, like, let's just do it one. It's like opening scratching off a lottery ticket and incidentally we won.

Incidently lost because we lost. I don't know where that card is now, but it's you nailed. The mentality of the gambling thing is totally what I was thinking. Isn't it great that you have these cards that started as tobacco advertisements and then slowly taught children how to gamble and make speculative investments. Absolutely, the stories from the eighties in the press are kind of amazing about you know, little kids hanging out outside smoke shops basically badgering people

for the cards and their cigarette packs. And I mean truly not joking it. It really served to introduce kids to tobacco. So, you know, there is this idea that that cards were always this kind of wholesome thing. I'm like always trying to poke holes in that that kind of nostalgia for these these things, because they've they've really you know, they've always been about money, whether it was the money for the collectors or money for for the

manufacturers who were rolling them out. I had no idea how dark of a turn this episode was going to take. Let's talk about the crash. So you know, you talked about the build up, the price guides, treating them as money, the gambling. What was the tipping point? When did it all? When? When was the peak, what year was the peak, and what sort of was the sign that it was sort

of coming to an end. I think the peak in sales when you actually look at numbers was probably around but most people and myself included, like to point to four as the year when things started really going down, and that was, of course the year that that there was a baseball strike. Um, you had a big labor dispute between the players and the owners that the season got sidelined, and so you had that coinciding with people.

You had people really disenchanted with the game because of because of the dispute that was going on coinciding with people also kind of starting to realize that this stuff is actually just cardboard and that maybe it was actually way overprinted. Um so people people are really star to

see that because it's it's it's inescapable. Then, I mean the volume of cards that they were printing and the sheer number of sets that were out there, it was it was really dizzy ng And and you know, one interesting part of this, you know when you get into into monopolies here, was when all these different cardmakers were

able to come come into the market. Uh and I'm I'm look, I'm all for for for the free market here, but it created a lot of confusion and you had kids like me, all of a sudden, there's like there's

a half dozen companies and there's thirty different sets. You kind of started to lose the common language of collecting, right because the whole the whole idea of collecting is that and trading is that we're we're kind of working with the same cards here, right Like if I'm trying to to to to collect the Yankees team that tops rolled out, my buddy down the street needs to be collecting the same set of cards, and so that that element got lost in their hobby just got really confusing

for kids just because there was there was frankly like so much crap out there and so um. You know. It was really in the early nineties when that hit a peak and it in it unfortunately for the hobby, really coincided with UH, with this labor dispute, and that's when we see, you know, a very precipitous drop off in sales after another interesting dimension here now that you bring it up in terms of the changing nature of cards from when it went to a monopoly to you know,

sort of the early nineties. If you go back and uh look at you know, those seventies and eighties cards, they're all just kind of on like a rough, fairly cheap cardboard. By the time like three the level of uh sort of like how much was being invested in the design of the car. They were all like super glossy. Some of them had like golden or like you know, leaf on them to sort of make them pretend like

you couldn't counter counterproof them. Like it was just they just became like these sort of like luxury cards in and of themselves. This sort of attempt to I guess sort of manufacture collectibility from day one, like they really just changed. Yeah. Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it. And you know that the company upper deck Is is kind of the best example of that. This was a company that that sprang up in the late eighties out of this idea of cards explicitly being being something you

you you collect as investments. They made these really fancy cards on on heavy cardboard stock, They had the holograms on them, they sprung for really good photographs, and they you know, doubled or quadruple the price of what you would normally expect to pay for a baseball card pack, and people ended up buying them anyway, and a lot of this, you know, and we see signs of it here is really, in my opinion, the huge mistake that that card makers you know, commit here is they really

start catering to two adults, right, you know. Tops at one point I found in one of their one of their ten k's around this time explicitly said like we are you know, we are making this stuff for adults

as well as children. That is really not how you want to be approaching this if you're in this for the long term, because those adults are not going to be around forever um, and so that that was I think a big, big mistake on their part was starting to cater to people who were older and had disposable income to throw on this one. Really the lifeblood over

the decades was always children, children, children. Wait, I have I have a sort of off the wall question if if the bubble started to burst or burst around, there was something else that was happening then, which was the rise of the Internet and the rise I guess of you know, transparency, And I think did eBay exist in I can't remember, but in theory you had a Yeah, you have an online platform where people could, for instance, talk about the pricing information of baseball cards. Do you

think that played into it at all? It may have I think a bigger problem, you know for the industry when you talk in terms of like evolving technology, it's

just at a time when they were losing kids. Um, you had the Internet rise, you had video games become that much more amazing, and so you had all this stuff really starting to compete for children's attention on a on a much greater level, and it became I think harder for you know, cardmakers to say to kids you know, in this in this day and age, in modern times, say hey, here's a pack of cardboard, you know, go go have fun with it, and that, you know, that

created problem that to this day they're they're still trying to dig their way out. Yeah, before we go, David, I was actually just gonna ask you exactly that you know, in terms of you know, a competing thing, video games, Nintendos and stuff really sort of probably helped crush my interest in cards because those you know, playing video games were way more fun. But I was just gonna ask you, um, what is the state of the market today. And there's

still who's still producing cards. It's still primarily Tops. Um they are, They're still around, and to a credit, they're they're trying to do some inventive stuff now, you know, they they are still printing cards and they have them tied to you know, an online app that functions a lot like Fantasy Baseball and so kids, you know, have this online element to it. You know, their sales on the baseball card front are are still you know, I would say a fraction of of what they were you know,

many many years ago, back during the boom. So you know, they still have a lot of work to do if they ever hope to get back to where they were. But you know, I think they are, you know, to their credit, trying to reach kids again in a way that that for a lot of years of card makers had kind of written off and we're increasingly only uh, you know, devoted to these these these older guys who had who had money to throw around. But of course,

you know, they're not gonna be around forever. And you know, I think one of the problems that's going to linger for a long time is that when you lose a generation of collectors with something like this, it becomes harder to to get people back and to get the children

of those of those collectors you lost. I mean, I was just talking with with our producer here, Zach, who was just a few years younger than me, and we were talking about what we were going to talk about here, and he said, oh, I didn't know that there was a baseball card bubble because he was seven seven years or so, eight years or so younger than me, and

so he had completely missed the fat. Of course, you knew about like beanie babies and pots and that sort of thing, But when you lose a generation of collectors. It was it. You know, for a long time, it was you know, fathers turned their sons onto baseball cards, older brothers turned their younger brothers on the baseball cards. So you know, when you have this big generation that missed out on it, I think you're you're trying to

dig out of a bigger hole. Does that mean there's no chance that the market could ever recover, because I mean we are in the midst of a little bit of a nostalgia boom. And what's more nostalgic really than kids collecting cards that depict the players of America's national pastime. I mean, cards have been so zilient for a hundred and forty odd years that I think there's no reason they're they're not going to be around for a really long time. I also think it's important to kind of

clarify that there's really two markets here. There's there's the market of of new stuff being made that we're talking about right now, like companies like Tops are producing still each year that has been you know, a struggling business for you know, two decades now. But that the separate market, the earlier one we were talking about a vintage cards of the Honus Wagners and such. That market has been

a a bowl market for forty fifty years now. It is still going strong because that stuff is still very rare and because there's a lot of older guys, um millionaires who are willing to throw serious money after that stuff. So that market has remained exceptionally strong. And if you were if you were involved in that early and if you made some smart moves, you know that that could could very well have made you a rich person now.

But that is a very different market from this overglutted modern market of way overproduced cards that me and Joe came up in. Well, Dave, it was absolutely awesome to talk to you. I I swear, you know, maybe we should beat for Colbee sometime just so we could talk old baseball cards stories. But you know, you talked about trade stories. But I feel really dumb now because I did all the dumb things back then. I was just like everybody else thinking that I just feel really stupid

the problem. But I'm glad to I'm glad to find out that I am not alone. And uh, I really appreciate you coming on. I learned quite a bit. Look, man, I got an email like every three days from some guy around our age asking me what is cards are worth? And so I'm baking breaking bad news to people all the time. So you're you know, we're all on the same boat. So so there's that awesome stuff. Thanks Dave, Thanks guys. So, Tracy, I kind of wanna go on

eBay and start buying a bunch of baseball cries. Now, what happened to your old baseball cards? Do you remember? That's a really good question. Um, I know my dad has some storage, some boxes in storage somewhere from when I was a kid. So now I kind of got to figure out where those are and go get them. They might some of them might be somewhere, they might

be recoverable. Yeah, I mean, I think the amazing thing is we all kind of have stories from our childhood of similar things, whether it's baseball cards or um in my case, magic the gathering cards, or POGs or beanie babies. Again, it's just amazing how often this pattern of behavior is repeated throughout history. There's so many relevant lessons here for other things. So obviously we talked about the role of

price guides, and that's kind of clear. But although although it's interesting too, the idea we should do an episode just on pricing, because it's interesting that and how prices are derived, because you know, we got these magazines as kids and it would say, oh, your card is worth five dollars, but we never questioned how that price was arrived at, how how whether we could get that price

if we actually wanted to sell our cards. Like, there's all sorts of interesting stuff just with the collection of pricing. Also interesting this idea of like they're really being two baseball card markets. The current market that just sort of got overturned and overproduced and that collapsed, and then the true vintage market from when there was actual scarcity, and how that has been, as he said in a two

decade bowl markets sort of unfazed by the crash. And the other part, Yeah, it almost speaks to a truism of bubbles, I guess, which is that as people cotton on to the fact that this is going on, and as they start to participate in it, you get that boom and apply and then inevitably the bubble will eventually come crashing down, right, Yeah, I remember before our Bubble series,

it might have even been like a year ago. Remember we talked to that professor at Harvard about his paper on the five or six characteristics of all stock market bubbles and the premium, and that was one of the things that I really took away from that, the premium that stock investors pay for new issues, new I p o S versus legacy ones. And then of course, because investors pay that premium, then the I p O Market booms and the supply or you know, swamps demand and

that helps to kill it. But that's really sort of definitional. And I think, you know, if we look at even the bubbles that we've talked about in this series, Florida real estate being example, you know, suddenly people just buying the swamp land in the middle of nowhere. The market always finds a way to create the supply when there's adequate demand for it. Yeah. Hey, hey, Joe, what's the secret to uh, writing a bubble success fully? Is this gonna be right? Oh? Yeah, that's a good lot. Actually,

thank you, I've been saving that one. Speaking of timing. Yeah, all right, let's do it. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart and I'm Tracy Alloway. I'm on Twitter at Tracy Alloway, and you can follow Dave Jamison on Twitter at Jamison. And you can follow our producer Sarah Patterson on Twitter at Sarah patt With two teas. Thanks for listening.