Horacio sat down with Andrew Goldberg, co-host of the Lukas Tigers and Brons OH MY! Podcast. Andrew and his co-host, Cage, have created one of the top sports card podcasts in the United States. From interviews with industry leaders to hobby influencers, the podcast has become synonymous with content and community.
Discussion topics include:
- Starting a sports and sports card podcast
- The benefits of having a background in sales and marketing for a podcast
- Finding an identity after finishing an athletic career
- Taking time off from climbing the career ladder to get back to the fundamentals
- Working with Gary Vaynerchuk and getting over a firing
- The importance of having family support during times of failure
- Buying Zion Williamson Panini Base Prism as an entry back into sports cards
- The beginning of the Lukas Tigers and Brons Podcast
- Dynamics of the podcast between Andrew and Cage
- Maintaining and growing the podcast as a business
- Using sponsorship activations to interact with podcast supporters
- Transitioning from the HGA to SGC card grading sponsorships
- Kobe Bryant’s death and the impact it had
- Increasing positivity in the sports card hobby by operating from an abundance mentality
- Andrew’s personal podcast, “No Overnight Success”
You can listen to the podcast through Spotify or YouTube.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Welcome back to the Alts podcast. I’m your host Horacio Ruiz. We bring you industry leaders and creators to give their insights on the rapidly changing and exciting world of alternative assets. Opinion expressed on this podcast by the host and podcast guests are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Podcast hosts and guests may maintain positions in the offerings discussed in this podcast. Today’s guest is Andrew Goldberg. Co-host of the Lukas Tigers and Brons OH MY podcast. One of the top stream sports card podcasts in the country. Andrew and his co-host Cage started the podcast as a hobby in 2020. But with a plan to record an episode every day, their following has built up over time. Andrew opens up about his journey, his mentality, and living a life free of imposter syndrome. I hope you enjoy my chat with Andrew. All right. So, we’re so happy here today to have Andrew Goldberg. He’s the co-host for the Lukas Tigers and Brons OH MY podcast. One of the biggest trading cards podcasts in the country. Andrew, thank you for being here.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Thank you for having me. I’m really looking forward to it.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Andrew I’m a listener, a regular listener to the podcast. It’s almost become – and I’ve sent you a couple messages, it’s become a highlight of my day and here I am. I find myself months later running my own podcast. I’m just curious man, about your journey, right. I want to talk to you about your journey becoming the co-host with Cage, what you were doing before that. Also just diving deep into your experiences. The last two years, I imagine that your life has changed a bit, right? With this new kind career that you’ve thrown yourself into.
[Andrew Goldberg]
My life has changed a lot. I mean, everyone’s life has changed a lot since COVID. But I’ve been very, very blessed. Saying that, my story is just like every single other entrepreneur, so many false starts. So many failures. Having the intuition to try to do this thing on my own. Leaving wall street and all that stuff. And having family friends’ kind of scoff at you and say like what is he doing? He’s got no plan, and having to navigate that period of my life, which was like kind of my early to mid-twenties, to literally – man, just thinking back about it’s so funny how things work out. And I got to give a shout out to my family because they believed in me even when things weren’t going great, as most entrepreneurs on the other end of this, they know it’s not all glitz and glam when you get into it. It’s a lot of failure. It’s a lot of sleepless nights. It’s a lot of like, am I even doing the right thing? Like, am I crazy? But yeah, the last two years have been really, really awesome. And I feel very lucky to do what I get to do. I basically talk about sports, which I love. And I played sports my whole life. I talk about sports cards, which I collected my whole life, and I get to make money doing it. So, when I was 22, 23 and got into business for myself, I could have never imagined that I would be doing this for money and for a living, but I feel very fortunate to do it. And I don’t take that lightly, especially on the bad days because when you’re an entrepreneur you’re lonely, there’s no one really you could talk to about the problems. But I always now remind myself of how this is the life I chose. This is the path I chose and I’m really fortunate to get to do what I do.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. What you just said, you allude to a lot of that in the podcast. You talk a little bit about your past and where you came from. The way I view you and maybe I’m not viewing you the right way, and I mean this in the best way, right, like you’re fighting for the little guy, right? You say that all the time in the sports hobby, in the trading card industry, always looking out and calling out certain corporations or whatever that you feel maybe could do more. And there’s an honesty to that, right. And there’s a part of that, that your show wouldn’t be the same without that. And I just say that because what you talk about that journey is really important to you. Right. And I kind of want to delve into that background, how you started, you mentioned a lot of times – did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Yes and no. Like looking back, I love the Steve Job’ speech. I go back to that maybe once a year. It was just commencement speech at Stanford. And he’s like, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So, yeah, like kind of revisionist history. I will say I did always want to be an entrepreneur. Like even, I was a little kid, I would buy my old buddy’s cleats off of them when we played soccer. I would send them back to Nike and they would give me, what’s called manufacturer’s defect gift certificates, and I would sell them. So, like, even from those days, like looking back, I’m like, I was always entrepreneurial. But I also played soccer at a competitive level. So that from like maybe 15, 16 to 22, that was my life. I didn’t even think about entrepreneurship or anything else. And then I kind of was just like going to go the standard route of wall street. And then bay area and all that stuff. But like looking back. Yes. But there was definitely times where I had blinders on and I was just like, I’m going to go the standard way. And I don’t know what pulled me out of that. I just thought at any time I was in an office, I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I wasn’t myself. I couldn’t sustain. I couldn’t be there. It was resistance. Honestly. I say that all the time to my buddy here, it just didn’t feel right. Anytime I worked for someone else. I couldn’t be myself.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. I hear you. My first job out of graduate school was a sales job. And I was actually working in the sports industry. And I thought I had it made man. I was working for the New Orleans Hornets, right, selling season tickets. And, but every day, man, I just felt suffocated. And I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t explain it. So, I totally understand what you’re saying.
[Andrew Goldberg]
That’s a huge point that you brought up. And even the people out there that feel that they want to be entrepreneurs or do something for themselves. My job was in sales as well and different type of sales. But I think that was the best thing I could have done from 20 to 25 was to learn how to persuade, learn how to sell, right. Like how many code calls did you have to do when you were on the Hornets? And like how many people are scared of being on the phone. And all of that helps me now. So, like, if you kind of think about what is a podcast, right? It’s kind of like a sales pitch. It’s persuasive, it’s storytelling. It’s being able to captivate an audience, how speak with the right tone. So, I remember I watched so many sales trading videos and I’m sure you have too. So that’s actually one of the best things that’s ever happened to me, was to learn how to sell. Right. You don’t learn that in college. You only learn that on the job.
[Horacio Ruiz]
I do have to confirm that. The fear I had picking up that phone the first day of my job and just cold calling or what we call warm leads sometimes.
[Andrew Goldberg]
If you’re lucky.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. If you’re lucky was, was real man. And that was not my personality at all. I’m not one of those guys to just come in and try to persuade you to buy any product or anything like that. but the skills and really just kind of the understanding that I could overcome my own fear and actually become decent at it. by the end of it, by the time I left, I was there for six months. By the time I left, I thought I had earned a pretty decent commission. I was happy to kind of start something else, but it gave me a confidence.
[Andrew Goldberg]
It’s everything. Because you remember like the first days on the job, like the first calls and what they do, they make it even worse. Everyone’s sitting in the room listening to your first calls. Right. And you’re like, this is just making it so much worse. You just want to get off the phone. Right. You don’t want to sell. You’re like, how do I finish this conversation as quick as possible? So, like learning how to overcome that inner fear, believe in your product and get someone on the other end to say yes, huge man. It was huge. It changed my life. And it sounds like it changed yours too.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Absolutely. It really helped me out in my next thing. I mean, next thing I did I took a non-profit job, but even then, I found myself that I was selling just in a different way. And so, I took those skills there. Let’s talk about your kind of formative years, right. Your twenties. You’re kind of – it seems like there it – and its commonplace. Like you’re kind of finding where to go. But you’re picking up on different things. Right? You’re learning different things. Even maybe when things weren’t so easy, is that right?
[Andrew Goldberg]
A hundred percent man. Look, looking back, I couldn’t probably articulate it better. When my first identity of being a professional athlete died. So, I played college soccer at Drexel. It was D-1, it was a good level, but it wasn’t a professional level and my career ended. It was a career that was going to end regardless, but it ended a little bit soon and it wasn’t on my terms. I tore my ACL in a preseason game of my senior year. And it was like, all right, you’re kind of done now. Right. Like I wasn’t going to recover. I didn’t have the right mindset to recover in time for my red shirt year. And I didn’t feel like I could. And now my identity was shattered. And I was always going to be the soccer player. Right. And I had to pick myself up and rebuild, who is Andrew Goldberg? You know, is he a Wall Street Banker? Is he a Lawyer? Is he going to go back and get his MBA? What’s my path? It’s challenging because when you have like everything laid out for you and you’re like, okay, I know what the next step is. But when it all falls apart, you’re like, I don’t even know what the next right move is. And there was a lot of failure that came with that. Right. Because I’m also someone who wants to live life on my own terms, but I didn’t have any of the skills to do that. So, I had to read, I had to learn, I had to acquire skills sometimes through reading books and watching videos, but also sometimes just by failing, trying and failing, right. I moved to the bay area right after college. It just felt right. I got a job at BlackRock. I left that job in literally three months because it was hell. And I went to work in sales. And I worked for a company called Jumio where we did ID verification. Like Coinbase was one of our clients. For example, we helped them verify their customers. And I learned how to sell. I learned how to persuade. I understood how companies work. I under watched the start-up, because there was 10 of us when I started, and 50, 60 people, when I left. That was a good experience man. It taught me a lot. And then I was just like, now I got to do it on my own. And that’s when it got even harder, man. I joined my buddy from the soccer team. We started building mobile apps and websites and that was business on our own, right. Like we had to make money for ourselves to pay rent and it was a client service business. And if any of you guys out there have ever been in client services, you kind of know it’s one of the hardest businesses out there. Because you’re kind of working for the client. They’re never happy. They always think they’re paying you too much. And they very rarely pay on time. So here I am, this 25, 26-year-old kid, who’s trying to make it and just running into roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, and what I decided to do – and I actually endorse this more for people, was to take a step back and travel. So, I went to Bali for a year and just like, try to figure out what was I going to do next? And I worked on my habits like journaling, meditation, yoga, eating right exercising every day. Like just getting back to the fundamentals. And I came back, and I was really blessed. I was listening to Gary [Inaudible 00:11:03] in 2014, 15, 16, 17. And when I got back from Bali, I was like, I’m going to move to New York. Moved to New York, started playing basketball. There was this thing I found on Instagram. It was 6:00 AM hoops right there or 5:00 AM hoops. And there was just a bunch of buddies that got out together that played basketball 5:00 AM before work. And I was like, yo, you mind if I roam with you guys? And they said, it’s cool. And a lot of the guys worked for Gary. And one of the – maybe first 10 times I was there, Gary showed up. We were same size, I’m 5”10. I think he’s right around there. And we were guarding each other, and it was cool. Like just to kind of like meet your idol, meet someone that you really look up to that helped you a lot. Believe it or not like a month later he was launching his Empathy wine brand. And I made some money buying and flipping stuff. He said, if you buy my Empathy wine, I’ll give you a call. I bought, I think it was the Club Empathy, 800 bucks. I didn’t have a lot of money then. Right. I was just out of Bali. I didn’t have a job. I was flipping stuff. 5,000 in the bank, probably even less. I’m just exaggerating the flex now. Living in New York too. Right. And I bought the wine, hour goes by doesn’t call, two hours goes by doesn’t call, three hours, so It’s like midnight, he calls. And I’m like, “yo gee”, I was really excited and nervous. I mean, I was 27, 28 at this point. And he’s like, “yo, appreciate you buying the wine”. He’s said what are you going to do with the wine? I said, I actually don’t drink, but I’m going to give it out to my family and friends, like bring a bottle of wine to them at events. He’s like, all right, what can I do for you? And I gave him a sales pitch, right. If you kind of go back because I learned how to sell, I was able to sell him here. And I’ll say, Gary, big fan, learned a lot from you. I’ve always wanted to be in your ecosystem. And this is actually recorded on my podcast. If you guys want to ever go back and listen. And my podcast is called no overnight success. I said, I’ve always wanted to be in your ecosystem. And he said, well, what do you do? I said, I’m just a born and bred salesperson. And he said, that’s funny. We were just talking right before this call about how we need a sales guy for Empathy Wines. And right there got the job.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Just like that. Huh?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Yeah. So, I mean, you had your moment, you got your interview, right. The opportunity was buy a bottle of wine, and then you had your opportunity and you had like, I don’t know, a few minutes maybe to sell yourself?
[Andrew Goldberg]
At most. And you guys know Gary talks super-fast. So, like in those 1, 2, 3 hours after I bought the wine, I was like mapping out, what am I going to say? You know what I mean? Because I was like, this isn’t going to be an easy sales pitch. The guy talks lightning fast and he’s boom, boom, boom. Right. So…
[Horacio Ruiz]
…And you said he called you at midnight or something?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Midnight because you know how he does this, like he goes live when he has new projects. So, you started going live at like 8:30-9:00 PM. People that know me, they know I’m early to rise early to bed. So, I’m like 9:00 PM, I’m out like a light. And yeah, it was like 9:30, 10:30, 11:30. He still hasn’t call. I’m not going to go to sleep. You know what I mean? I’m not going to miss the call. Like this is my one shot in life. Right. I’m kind of going to mess up my whole life in parentheses, because not really a mess up, but like relative to the standards and expectations of an immigrant family. And he calls and I was just like, oh, and he said come by the office next week, we’ll get it done.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Awesome man. So, what was that like working for Gary? I mean how much more did you learn from there?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Learned everything that I do now from there. It’s one of those experiences that’s going to live in my mind for a long time. And remember that Steve Jobs speech I was just telling you about. So, wait for this. So, another lesson in that speech was, remember Steve Jobs got fired by the company he started.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yep.
[Andrew Goldberg]
So, he said, sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. So, believe it or not, man, I got fired by Gary six months later. [laughter] So you want me to catch you up?
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
[Andrew Goldberg]
All right. So, this is back to the point though, like I’m a bad employee. I’ve gotten fired everywhere I’ve worked, and I it’s not because of performance, it’s because I think I undermine the master from reading that Robert Green book. If anyone out there has read it like 50 laws of power, something like that. I’m someone that’s a free spirit. Like I need my freedom. I need to come and go as I need. I’m going to work seven days a week. I came in on the weekends, every single weekend work, but this is a sales job, and you know sales. I like to be judged on my performance. Now if I’m in the office from 9:00-5:00 PM. Right. But he is a company of a thousand people where showing face is equally as important as the performance. And he talks about this, right. He talks about how cultures super important. And he needs people to be as a part of the team and you can’t have any – he talks about this on his content. Right. And keep in mind, he runs a creative agency where he has artist, designers, stuff like that. He doesn’t have a sales agency and – Horacio do you remember being in a sales organisation?
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah, of course.
[Andrew Goldberg]
It’s competitive. It’s like we talk a lot of shit. I don’t know if you could curse on it. We talk smack, we come after each other. It’s competitive. Right?
[Horacio Ruiz]
That’s part of it. The anxiety inducing sometimes where, man you’re fighting over a sale and that’s it because your pay check depends on it.
[Andrew Goldberg]
I like that. So that’s me. That’s my athlete in me. I love it. I enjoy it. I like competition. I don’t shy away from it. It’s the immigrant mentality. But if you’re part of a company with a thousand people, I was on team Gary V, and you’re kind of like this one nail that sticks out’s, what is it, the nail that sticks out gets hammered, gets hit.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah.
[Andrew Goldberg]
I was the nail that stuck out. I was the sales guy. I would do what I want on my own time. I would hit my numbers, but I would be cocky, arrogant, like yo – not like in a bad way, but I would banter and talk, talk that talk, and I just didn’t fit in. I didn’t fit in, and I never felt like I fit in. I felt like I had imposter syndrome. If you guys out there have ever had that. I just didn’t feel like I fit in. And even though I made I think a hundred thousand in sales in six months, it just never felt right. But what was cool towards the end of that? I always asked to do more for whatever reason, and it probably hurt me, but one of his employees left and that employee was the one that would manage his podcast. Like edit it, produce it, all that stuff. So, I said, yeah, I’ll do it. I mean, I’m doing sales, but maybe I could handle this. And I learned how to edit a podcast, upload it to anchor, timestamps, all that stuff that goes into running a podcast. So, I ran the GaryVee experience for like two, three months and I was terrible at it. I made so many mistakes, I didn’t know what I was doing. But now, fast forward whatever it was, and I’ll catch you up on the whole firing in a second, if you want, I learned all the skills of how to run the GaryVee podcast, how to make it compelling, how to have Instagram clips and all that stuff from that two-month experience. Because his team taught me so much. And dude, his team is amazing, man. They work a million miles a minute. There’s so much to do to keep up with Gary. But they’re so willing to help you because here I am a sales guy learning how to edit a podcast. People have to teach me Adobe, premier, and Canva and how to edit and all that stuff. And they helped me so much, man. Even when I made mistakes, they still had my back.
[Horacio Ruiz]
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So, it seems like you were thriving, and I know what you mean. I mean you referenced the imposter syndrome, you never felt quite like yourself there. But on the flip side you were learning a lot. You were being successful, and you dipped your toes into this podcast. Right. And you were learning new skills. So yeah. Do catch me up on the firing.
[Andrew Goldberg]
So, Gary didn’t fire me. His team fired me. And there was never a reason. I just think I never fit in. And they saw that too. And like, it’s kind of like the blessing that you’re given that tastes like vinegar, but it was actually honey type of thing. I made a lot of mistakes with editing the podcast. I left parts in that towards the end you were supposed to cut out, it was bad audio quality and I left it in, little things like that, I would just make tons of little micro mistakes. And I think I was too aggressive for the culture they had, which came off as brash. And I think that was the final straw. So, it was like this guy can’t do that job really well. And he is a little bit brash.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Gotcha. You know, it’s funny, do you feel like not just on the job, but did the firing help you? Was that ultimately – Like I know you talk about like how it’s a blessing in disguise. Do you feel like you learned something from that firing or did you feel like it validated you in some ways?
[Andrew Goldberg]
I learned so much. So, when is this coming out? Cool. So today it’s – I think it’s January 27. Yesterday was January 26th. And it was Kobe, Kobe is my first hero. Other than my family, not just my dad, my dad, my grandpa, my grandparents. But like Kobe was someone that I was like, dude, I love this guy. Well, this one thing Kobe said was he played in this summer league, and he was like 11 years old, and he didn’t score any points. And at the end of that, his parents put their arms around him and said we’re going to love you no matter if you score zero or 60. And I came home from getting fired that same day, I was really embarrassed. You know what I mean? Here’s your dream job. And then you got fired from it. And you have to go tell your family. And came home, I was so sad, I was crying. And my parents, my dad, my mum, my sister put their hands around me. And they’re just like, dude, we love you. It’s going to work out for you. And that was cool, right. Like here you are. You’ve been messing up for a long time and your parents and your family still loves you no matter what. And I think that gives you this opportunity to fly. Right? It gives you this opportunity, like, all right, man, you’re just out here trying to do your best, and your family’s got your back no matter what. And it brought our family so close together. And ironically man, the next thing that happened was COVID. Literally, I got fired right before COVID. And the next two years I’ve spent with my family. We moved to Mexico together kind of temporarily, but we’ve been here basically 80% of the last two years. I got to know my dad so much better. My relationship with my mum is way better. My relationship with my sister, my best friend. So that little moment showed me that I’m going to be okay because my family’s got me. And they love me.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Wow. What you’re saying right now is you’re speaking your truth, right?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Well, you know this, especially like immigrant families. Like as the oldest son. Yes, they love you, but you’re meant to perform. Right. You’re meant to be like, we brought you here so you could take care of us. You could set us up, and that’s never said. Right. But that’s the interpretation or that’s what sits with you. Right. Dude, we came from communism. You’re the oldest. You have a big burden on your shoulders. And to know that, yeah, you still got that burden, but we love you, even if you fail. That’s a big deal. I wish that for all parents to give to their kids.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. You talk about parents, and I’ll say this. Like I come from an immigrant family, also immigrated when I was three years old to the states. What I get from what you said is, because I work with kids as well, is the I importance of that father figure. Right. And my dad always made sure that no matter what you can always come back home. At 18, I left home for college, I was like, I’m out of here. I grew up in Miami, I’m out of here. But my dad, as sad as he probably was seeing me leave the house, he understood, but he always said if you feel for whatever reason that you need to come back home, you’re always welcome back here. And the importance of having that father and that reassurance man with everyone, right. For all kids that I see that grow up without a dad. And we’re kind of going on a tangent, but man I have to definitely validate what you’re saying there.
[Andrew Goldberg]
I think this is the most valuable stuff. You know what I mean? Like cards and all that stuff and success financially in business only comes when you have that support and security. Where I think it doesn’t only come with that, but I think it’s like gasoline on the fire. If you could add that to your life, if you have that foundation and you have that security, that’s a huge thing. Dude, no matter what you could always come home, I think you could do so much from that place.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. You mentioned that day you got fired and then COVID kind of just caught everyone off guard in a lot of ways.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Yeah. I actually caught COVID then. So, I got fired early November 2019, caught COVID in December. It was terrible. By the way, I didn’t know it was COVID I just thought it was the flu. You know what I mean? This was before COVID hit. And then I started taking real estate classes, but then I was like, yo, I remember – I don’t remember why I had this idea. Zion was injured. [Inaudible 00:23:19] was playing, but I remember watching Zion and Duke and I was like, I bought a Zion card, and I was like, this is going to make me a millionaire. And I brought it home to my dad and I was like, you see this? I’m going to start trading cards again. And he is like you’re an idiot. Why don’t you just do one thing? Like you just started taking real estate classes. Now you want to trade cards. Where I was like, no, I need your car. I’m going to the Westchester Valley Ford show in a week. I bought all of these Zion prisms, right. For 40 bucks off Mercari. Maybe I think I had 10 base and I bought a silver because I was like, yeah, let me try this silver. And I drove up, Philly Westchester show in New York city, and I submitted them to PSA to get graded. And then that was like my entry back into the hobby. 2020 January.
[Horacio Ruiz]
What made you do that? Were you already kind of hanging out on Instagram and kind of checking out card collections?
[Andrew Goldberg]
It was bubbling, but I don’t know the exact reason it was bubbling. Like when I got that job with Gary, the first day on the job, I brought him a Sam Darnold and a Joe Namath card as a token of my appreciation. So, I bought those off eBay or Craig’s, I can’t remember exactly. And brought them as gifts. But I wasn’t collecting cards and I wasn’t thinking of it as a way to make money. Then I don’t know. I think intuition, like looking back, I don’t know what it was. It was just like, yo, why don’t you get back to flipping? That’s what you did your whole life.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. And, and like you said, you started noticing that it was bubbling, right? The prices started creeping up a little bit.
[Andrew Goldberg]
I started putting money in my pocket in the next three months I made, nothing crazy, but like 10K. Because this was PSA was grading on time. So, I submitted them at the – why I went to the show was I learned that if you go to the show and hand them in, in person, you might get your grades back faster. Because they’re logged faster. So, it’s like January 10th, I got my cards back like early March on a, what was I think it was a 20-day sub. And I was like, whoa, like here’s 10 cards. They all got PSA10’s. They all got PSA10’s. So, this is like a 500 investment. I turned into $6,000-$7,000. And it just, it gave me confidence.
[Horacio Ruiz]
You know, it’s funny because my little side story, I was talking a couple collectors, you know, I collect mostly on the vintage side though. And then, but they were telling me about how they were getting anything. They were getting all these base cards and sending them to PSA, and the returns were insane. I was like, these guys are crazy. I was like, no way. Because I wasn’t into that game. And looking back on it, man, I missed on an opportunity there, but I was like, there’s no way that these base cards are going to suddenly – 20, 30X just because they’re PSA10. And little did I know that I was completely wrong, like completely wrong.
[Andrew Goldberg]
I got fortunate. Two things happened. I bought the right card, and the player came back and did well. I don’t know if people remember, they look at Zion now. His four first four games back, he was a monster. I think in his first game versus the spurs, he hit four threes. So not only did I buy the card at the right time, the raw card went from 50 to 200 in that time. And the PSA10 became $600-$700-$800. So, I got fortunate, but I do a lot of research. Like I did watch a lot of college basketball. I did realise that Zion’s injury was a meniscus tear, not an ACL tear. He would come back. They were just holding him out to be cautious. I thought he was going to take the league by storm. So, I was right on that thesis.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I just remember it happened overnight for me. One night I was at the mall one week and I was buying some packs from a vendor there, local vendor and he was selling the packs for about 10, 15 bucks. I forgot. And maybe I hadn’t seen him in a month. I come back a month later and he’s selling these packs now for like 40, 50 bucks a pop. And I’m like, what happened? I mean, I was like, no way, dude. He’s like, oh yeah, it was bubbling. But then when that thing really took off, it took off. I want to talk about how you got into creating Lukas Tigers and Brons, how did you meet up with Cage? The Genesis for that, the creation of the podcast.
[Andrew Goldberg]
So COVID hit March 2020. During this time – so Gary created, Lou really created it, but it was kind of Gary and Lou. Lou Geneux from Card Talk, great guy, great team. They created this like Instagram group when all the card stuff was bubbling, not what it is now. Like it was just in its infancy. So, he created this Instagram group with 30 collectors, and I was working for Gary at the time, and I asked Lou, can I be in it too. He put me in it. So, it was called the OG sports card family. Shout out to all you guys, if any of you listen, love that group. Rips is in it, Sasha [Inaudible 00:27:54] in it, slab stocks in it. It was like all of these guys before you know.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah, these are big players right now.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Yeah. But like we were just like talking cards, like cards were nothing at that point. And then you started seeing the card boom. And everyone was at home. We didn’t know what was happening with COVID right. It was like six weeks, we’re going to lock down, all that stuff. So, people were starting to create podcasts. And I was like, yo, let’s create a podcast to someone in the group. Card Talk started theirs. And Cage was like, yo, let’s do it. And I was like, I sent him a zoom link and the next day we recorded our pilot. And then after that we recorded episode one. And the next day we recorded episode two, ironically recorded episode one on my dad’s birthday is kind of when we started. And then we just started doing it every single day. And it was like, it was just, I don’t want to call meeting your soulmate, but there was nothing inorganic about it, it just clicked. Like from this first time we talked, I’m a Philadelphian, he’s the new Yorker. There’s never really a shortage of what we could say. We love to banter. And I think we complimented each other. You know what I mean? Like in boxing they say styles make fights. I think in podcasting, it’s kind of the same thing. And we just had a style that complimented each other. And then we got fortunate in two ways. We decided to do it every single day. And at first that felt ambitious. But it’s the same as exercise or anything, like doing something every day, all you need to worry about is that day. You know what I mean? You don’t have to look a million years in advance. So, we just said, let’s just do this every day. And the second thing was, this was right before the boom of August 2020. When you got the NBA back in the Bumble, you had the Luca Doncic three-point winner against the Clippers. His cards went crazy. There was that boom. Bol Bol cards were going nuts. So, we had so much to talk about and we were doing the content every single day and we just hit our stride.
[Horacio Ruiz]
You hit your stride. Yeah. Had you guys ever even spoken before you started recording the podcast?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Never.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Never. Right. You guys were just communicating through social media. Right. And then when you guys started off, I mean, you have talked about this before, were you doing this as a hobby? Like, hey, let’s just do a podcast. Or did you really, from the beginning, have something else in mind?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Hobby, hobby. I had a consulting job. I got this contract job with like a; it’s called a SaaS company. They were like, we saw you work for Gary, we need you to do some similar stuff. A little bit of sales, a little brand development for CEO. Would you want to come on? It was all remote. And I was like, yeah, sure. And they paid pretty well. So it was just a side gig of like – but it was funny, the same things that we do for team Gary, like the, how the sausage is made, like people don’t realise it’s a whole team of 30 people that record his content to put the long form video on YouTube, cut it into little chunks for Instagram TikTok, like the whole content model, which Gary gives her free on the internet is what I learned to do it with Gary. Then I got hired at this company to do it for the CEO, and I was doing it for the podcast. So, the timing of it was like, now you get the turn your practice into a craft. But we didn’t even get paid with the podcast for, I think 6-12 months. I never thought I would get paid for the podcast. Never. I was just fun.
[Horacio Ruiz]
There’s a couple of observations I made. And so, I went back, and I listened to your first episode. Your first idea, I think initially was, we’re not going to take up too much of your time. We’re going to take up 15 minutes of your time. We’re going to give you some [inaudible 00:31:49], and no nonsense, no nothing. Right.
[Andrew Goldberg]
We haven’t done a 15-minute episode since.
[Horacio Ruiz]
And, and thank goodness for that. But the second thing was you guys were so kind of polite to each other. Right. because you’re kind of feeling each other out a little bit still, right. It’s not like now where you guys are just going back and forth with each other. So, you guys were just, oh no, I interrupted you. I’m sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Whereas now it’s like, come on, man. I’m talking here [laughter].
[Andrew Goldberg]
1000%. you have to interrupt Cage though or else it’s a monologue.
[Horacio Ruiz]
It’s what makes the show man. Like, because there have been some occasions where one of you couldn’t make it for part of it or for all of it and the show, it really isn’t the same. And so, I think that’s the beauty of it. It reminds me of part of the interruption, but like cooler, I don’t know. Or just more relatable. Let me put it that way. Where part of the interruption was like Michael Wilbon, Tony, Kornheiser, and these are kind of these old crotchy guys going back and forth. And it was it’s entertaining. But you guys are talking about relevant stuff and obviously you guys are more in tune with what’s kind of happening with culture, pop culture NFTs and all that stuff.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Big praise to even be in the same sentence as those guys, regardless of personality. Like personality is what it is. You’re not going to be everyone’s flavour of the week, but even getting to that level, you start to respect the game more than the personality. Right. because you know what it takes to go and show up and be yourself every day, no matter what happens in your personal life. Right. because life still goes on.
[Horacio Ruiz]
A hundred percent. Once you see what the hustle’s like. Right. And what actually goes into it, no matter whether you disagree or don’t like the style, whatever you respect, like you said the game. At what point did you guys realise that you were onto something? Like you said, you guys didn’t get paid for 6-12 months. At what point were you guys like we’re getting a pretty decent following here and you’re building up your podcast, you’re showing up every day. I mean, you are literally building the podcast just by showing up every day. At what point did you guys realise you had hit a certain level?
[Andrew Goldberg]
The lessons I learned from soccer helped me so much now and the injury that I had, my career ending one was because I got too big of a head. I started kind of thinking that above it. And I believe that’s what led to the injury. So now I still don’t think we’ve accomplished anything, or we’ve made it. And I just want to remain in the space of, I’m a learner, I’m a beginner and I’m going to stay humble because I know how easy it is to get to start thinking that you’re bigger than you are. But I will say, in life, like you need evidence to believe, right. And when you’re starting something new, what’s really difficult is you see it in your imagination, but there’s no evidence, real life evidence, to prove that you have succeeded in that. So, you kind of almost like not have to fake it till you make it, but you have to go solely on belief. Star Stock approached us in December. January really was when it was, we started of the podcast, July. January of 2021 Star Stock approached us. And they said they want to sponsor the show. And that blew my mind, because what they said was, we want to sponsor the show. We want you guys to do kind of like a once-a-week episode talking about the things that are happening on Star Stock, the cards that are moving up and down, this is when star stock wanted to be a roll card platform. And that was cool, man, because that was like, whoa, maybe we got something here. That was real life evidence to the belief.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. I mean you have a sponsor.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Yeah. I’m getting paid to talk about sports. What?
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah, if I can say, and then, so you guys have had Star Stock and I know you’ve had a sponsorship with Dibbs, HGA. You guys have a Sunday episode with collectible. You’ve had a partnership with whatnot and you guys just started off with SGC. And I’m rattling that off just because, again, this isn’t so much a story to me about sports cards. It’s a story about building up a business and it’s almost like you guys did it. Not almost you guys did it organically.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Well, we promised our community and I stand by this. I said, we’re never going to charge you for content, right. I don’t like the pay for play model. Not a big fan of it. So, he said, we’re never going to charge you for content. So, we need to make money off sponsors. But you also don’t really want to be like a sponsor kind of whore. What we did, I’ll talk about HGA in a second, but with all of those sponsors, we’re never go use Whatnot or go use Star Stock or go use Dibbs. What we did with them was try to kind of make them interactive. So, with Whatnot, we do a Sunday morning NFL show type of thing. So, we go live every single Monday, 10:00 AM. We sell slabs at the very end, but we give our plays and predictions and prop bets for the week for that day. So, no one else is doing that. Right. Some people go live on Whatnot to sell slabs. We’re like, no, let’s do like a Sunday NFL countdown. But we talk about the games that we kind of like. Kind of like, look out for this player. Like this is a spread to take a look at. Talk about prop bets. And then we auction off slabs. So, we try to make our partnerships more interactive with collectible fractional. We never like used collectible. They send us data and we go through, like, this card is overpriced. This card is under-priced. Josh Allen just lost. But we think that his gold might see a bumped because of his performance and people expect what they expect for next season. So, we’ve always wanted to do partnerships in a unique way where we’re not shilling the company. We’re just talking about things that are going on, on the platform. And if people want to use it, they can.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. Definitely. One of the things that you guys did, and you took a little bit of heat for it, from the outside looking in anyway, you guys launched an NFT project. Right. You launch your tiger NFTs and as a listener, I thought it was great. And the reason I say that is because you guys have held true to your word about doing things for your community. Right. And you guys stand by it, and you practice it. But you got a bit of a blow back on that. Like almost like you guys should have – you guys are sports cards guys, why are you going to crypto? Why are you doing this NFT stuff? You guys took some heat from that, even though you guys really explained what the purpose was for it. And even though at one point – and I thought you were kind of, and I’m say this politely man, I was like, what does this dude doing? You were giving out your phone number on your podcast for anybody that had questions. I was like, holy moly, like this guy’s going to get a thousand phone calls [laughter] or text messages. But you were willing to do that to get people onboarded into opening up a meta mask wallet buying Ethe, and then transferring that over to your wallet. You were working so hard, and then I could tell that at some moments you got frustrated by the blowback that you got for going into crypto.
[Andrew Goldberg]
[laughter] Life. Right. What’s the question there, because all of that is a hundred percent true. And I was getting frustrated. That’s personal development because I should know that I’m going to get blow back when you do anything ambitious.
[Horacio Ruiz]
The question was, as you were building your brand, right, Like, did you feel like at any point in time, you weren’t sure whether that was the right step to take? Right. And I guess that’s the first question. And the second question was, how do you deal with that negativity?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Well, I always remind myself that I didn’t do it to hurt anybody. Right. And I will make sure that I deliver on my promises. So, the one thing – sometimes blow back, it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good to have people talking bad about you. But it’s way different if you did something wrong and people talk something bad about you versus if you took a chance and even if things don’t work out, you’re a man of your word, right. And you’ll give back the money or you’ll overdeliver and all that stuff. So, I reminded myself that nothing that we did with the NFT project was to hurt or rug pole or steal people’s money. It was yo, we’re going to launch this NFT project because we believe in crypto and NFTs. Now, if you don’t want to invest in the NFT, nothing changes. You don’t need to have the NFT to listen to our episodes. You don’t need the NFT to be in our discords, or our Instagram chat or any of that stuff. You will always have access to us and asking questions. So, if you don’t want to buy it, nothing changes for you. And if you do want to buy it and support us, that means the world. We don’t know what we’re going to do exactly a hundred percent. Or we’re going to aim to over deliver. And since that release, did the partnership with Dibbs, which was one month partnership, because whatever reasons they had, we say, we don’t do short term. They’re like we only do one month. We said fine. Because one-month partnerships to me feel very transactional. Like they’re just trying to get our community on their platform and then done. We said fine, but here’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to take a penny of the money. We’re going to give that 5,000 back as a reward to people who mentored our tigers. And then the second thing we did is we reached a partnership with SGC, and we said, would you be able to give back to our community? We think businesses have done really well. And I think people in the hobby are struggling. And they said, we’ll do 50 free grading submissions every month. So, everyone who owns an NFT gets preference, and they get a portion of the 50 free grading submissions every month. And that’s for 12 months. So, since that we launched it five months ago. That 50 grading submissions a month is 1500 bucks every month that we pour back into our community, that doesn’t go in our pockets. And then Dibbs was – 5,000. We poured it back into the community. And that’s money. But we also are going to do a cigar night at national. We’re going to do all of these other things that we’re still trying to figure out how the NFT world and the utility world works. But we try to give back as much as we can.
Yeah. A hundred percent. And I think that’s why you have a loyal following or following that’s there for you guys and because of what you guys do, we’re coming up on the time. I have a couple more things. I know you mentioned about talking about HGA. Was that an important point in the podcast that you want? That the moment when you guys got that sponsorship?
[Andrew Goldberg]
That blow back was way harder than the NFT one, because I get the premise, like it’s always like this fine line, right. You want to support new businesses, but you also don’t want to lead your people to slaughter. Right. When we met with HGA, it was like early April. This was when they were starting out in maybe April, May of last year, 2021. We wanted to give the little guy chance. PSA was closed. BGS was closed. We were like, we want to support a business and see if we could help them grow. We didn’t push our people to HGA, but we had the – like a pre-roll post-roll, but that one got a lot of backlash. Why are you guys partnering with HGA? They’re not a credible grading company. And I actually hear the people. I think that they have a lot of valid points. So, navigating that, like making sure that we weren’t sell-outs, making sure that we weren’t causing our community to lose money versus, hey, we’re a business, we need to make money. This keeps the podcast free, all that stuff. Because that was our first kind of big partnerships. Collectible, all that was great. That came later. That was our first big partnership. Pre-roll post role on our show. So that was an interesting one to navigate. But again, we didn’t make any false promises. We didn’t tell people; you have to sub with HGA. We said, hey, this new company’s out there, PSA and BGS is closed. Try them out. Don’t send all your cards there. Don’t send them the most valuable cards but send in five cards. See if you like the experience, see how the resell is. See if you like them for your collection. And if not, don’t go again.
[Horacio Ruiz]
And for a moment there, I feel like a lot of these other card grading services were filling in the gaps, filling in the void that was left there by PSA. And HGA became a player for a while. They still are. But I know that there’s other things, that’s another, that’s in the topic.
[Andrew Goldberg]
We cut ties with them and took half the money we were getting paid with them to go with SGC because we felt that they were dropping the ball. So, like, it’s super awkward, right. Like as a new business owner, you learn this stuff, right. Your reputation’s everything. And even if you leave money on the table, short term, I believe that helps us long term, but still, that is money. So, we decided that it was better to leave that money off the table, short term, take a step back and not let her harm her reputation. Because there was a point in time where they were just dropping the ball and everything. The times that they were promising to send cards back wasn’t happening, they were grading cards that weren’t authentic as authentic, all that stuff were like, dude, we can’t be associated with that.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. And for you to come out and be honest about, that’s pretty remarkable. I will say that the SGC sponsorship has been met with a lot more positivity.
[Andrew Goldberg]
That’s a compliment to their business though. They’ve done things very well. They deserve to be met with applause, because at the end of the day, we just want our cards back in a timely manner, for the price that we pay them at an affordable rate. Like we don’t want all these like bells and whistles. We just want our cards back when you guys say you will send it back. Because we’re paying for that. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. You, a lot of times talk about the state of the sports card industry and there’s a lot going right. But you always kind of are like that – you say what about these people that have had their cards tied up for a year? Or that still don’t know where they are or they’ve they sent it to us. What do you call that? A sub, not a sub grader…
[Andrew Goldberg]
…Yeah. A Group [Subver?]
[Horacio Ruiz]
A group [Subver?], I’m sorry. And this guy didn’t pay them. So now their cards are stuck in limbo. Right? You mentioned that a lot.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Why that matters, sorry to cut you off, is that’s the money that gets reinvested back into the hobby. So, when your cards are sitting in a backlog somewhere, you’re not getting those cards back, you’re not selling them. You’re not taking the money that you made from them. And you’re reinvesting. And that’s what keeps this whole thing going, not million-dollar sales. Those are great, but it’s the little man who could take his cards, grade them, get them back, sell them on eBay and take that profit and reinvest it.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. Like you said, when that pipeline is cut or when somebody is affected that way, they can’t do that anymore. Right. It affects – it could potentially affect their livelihood or their spot in the hobby for a while.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Thousand percent.
[Horacio Ruiz]
I want to go back. So, can we get into numbers as why – I just want to say, like, could you give me an idea of how big you guys have gotten? Like your data downloads and everything like that, just to kind of give people an idea of how many people are listening to you.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Sure. I don’t think it’s that big. Like we have 2000, 3000 listens a day on Spotify, Apple, maybe another 500 to a thousand on YouTube. So, let’s call it 3,000-4,000 daily. Okay. I get it. We do a daily show and it’s a little bit of a longer form too. So relative, but the impulsive show, those guys get millions of views. So, it’s always compared to what, right. Like I’ve never been a guy that likes to compare myself down. I always like to compare up. So, I think we’re just scratching the surface. That being said, Cage is really good at this because I’m a dreamer, he’s a numbers guy. So, he’s like, we just crossed 400,000 listens all time. That’s an impressive number. And he’s like, we should be proud of that. So sometimes it’s okay to look around and smell the roses, but I think we’re punie. I think we’re tiny. I think we have so much more room to grow and opportunity to add value to people.
[Horacio Ruiz]
I agree with both of you guys, that’s kind of a Testament to the work that you guys are doing. I want to take it back, man. And I say this with upmost respect. And I kind of want to get your insight because I was kind of shocked.
[Andrew Goldberg]
It’s okay. Push my buttons. It’s okay. I don’t mind that I’m used to it. It’s the immigrant family in us, right?
[Horacio Ruiz]
I guess. Yeah. That’s kind of how it was. We push each other’s buttons to see how maybe how tough we were. This might hurt a little bit. You described the role that Kobe played in your life. And I never liked Kobe as a player. I wasn’t a Kobe guy. Let me put it that way. I respected the game. I just wasn’t a Kobe guy. But I will say that I was shocked at how I felt when he passed away, even talking about it. You know, now I get a little kind of choked up. And I can’t describe it. I don’t know if it had something to do with his daughter being there too. I don’t know. But I was surprised at how it affected me. And I kind of want to talk to you about that. You were a Kobe fan, you looked up to him that way. What was it about Kobe? Obviously, he’s influenced you in your life. What are the lessons you’ve taken from him and how did you react to that loss?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Well, the loss was tough, man. Believe it or not. So, I bought a Jordan FLIR card off Mercari, and the day it arrived, I don’t know how it arrived, maybe the day before, it ended up being a fake Jordan card. Wow. And the day I got it; I didn’t know it was a fake. I was so pumped. I went to the grocery store and my buddy texted me, said, dude, Kobe died. And I remember stopping. I was like this isn’t fucking funny. That’s not a joke. And he’s like, no, like I’m being serious. And everything kind of went blank for a second. And I think it’s because, dude the guy live like a perfect life in the sense of like he had everything. And to go down with your daughter like that, you kind of question your own mortality. And you’re like, wow, this is, it’s not forever. And you start to kind of like, how am I living in this world? You question a few things and in a good way, for me Kobe – I’m always able to separate the competitor from the person. I don’t know why more people can’t do that. I think that is a skill like maybe because I’m a kind of a dickhead competitor. I talk so much when I play, I want to belittle you. I want you to feel terrible about yourself when I plat. And I thought he was kind of like that. But then when you’re off the court, it’s done, it’s done. What happens on the field, stays on the field was my motto for life. I never was upset with him or didn’t like him because of the way he treated his teammates. He just demanded a lot from them. And if you don’t agree with how he does it, that’s great. But you’ve never been in that position. You’ve never won anything. So, you don’t know what it takes to win. Okay. But then he was also an incredible father. Man. What made me really sad was his legacy was just beginning. He was going to be so much more than a basketball player. And that was really sad because he was doing like a tour, he did a lot of podcasts after he retired. and he wrote dear basketball, he opened Granity studios and they, with a Wizenard series. There’s a great, great, great podcast. When I was in Bali, I’d listen to it a lot’s called The Punies. I don’t know if you guys listen, but please go listen to it. It’s really cool. It’s like a Saturday morning children’s cartoon type of thing.
[Horacio Ruiz]
The Punies?
[Andrew Goldberg]
The Punies. Really good. So, he loved storytelling and you know what’s cool looking back, we’re in cards, a lot of us want to make money, right. Stocks, all that stuff. Kobe, if you go back, you’ll never hear him talk about money. And I think it’s because he’s a true artist. He loved art and storytelling and basketball was his first craft. But his second craft was storytelling and building. What I thought would be like kind of the next Walt Disney.
[Horacio Ruiz]
In terms of like developing a franchise?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Yeah. Storytelling and developing a franchise. Because in just three years he had deer basketball, like the short story. Then Punies. Guys, I’m telling you, if you go listen to Punies, especially with your kids, it teaches so many lessons about teamwork. I will never be able to recap it, but. And then he did the Wizenard series. Right. And the concept was, there was no real books for athletes. There’s no ways to teach the lessons to athletes. Right. And you go and you lead. And the things that he created in two, three years after retirement, you look at other people who’ve retired. You don’t even hear from them again. Or you know, someone retires, two years, they’re fat, they’re not doing anything. He literally, as soon as he retired, maybe took 30 days off and then he was back at it, back at creating. Right. And that’s really what it is. He’s a creator, he’s an artist. And I love that about him. And I really was excited to see what he could accomplish and just to see it kind of – And he was a great coach and a great dad too. I mean, what do we know? I’ve never met him. So how this is all at a distance.
[Horacio Ruiz]
But that’s what I mean, the way that he affected your influence so to say, you didn’t need to know him, right. You didn’t need to – Like, he influenced you and then that’s kind of his pull. Someone like that can influence you from a million miles away. That’s pretty stunning that someone could have that kind of power and influence and then they must, there must be something about them to do that.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Well, let’s go to the Bible. Right. And I don’t want to get super religious because I grew up Jewish, but the Bible is a series of stories.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah.
[Andrew Goldberg]
How do those influence us thousands of years later? The Bible’s really the first book or the first series of books, if you kind of think about it, how does that impact us man?
[Horacio Ruiz]
A hundred percent.
[Andrew Goldberg]
That’s art, right? Art stands to test of time.
[Horacio Ruiz]
On another question I want to ask you, how do you feel about the card space right now and the future of the card space? One of the wonderful things about the podcast that you guys have is there’s always this back and forth, right. There’s a tension and I mean a good tension where you’re debating where are we at. And where are we going. And I’m kind of curious to see how you feel overall right now about it.
[Andrew Goldberg]
I like to learn from smarter people, who’ve been through cycles. Like Warren buffet is the best at what he does because he’s been through cycles. So, he’s seen this stuff and it doesn’t surprise him. He doesn’t panic. We’re in an interesting stage where it’s kind of like this middle ground where we don’t know what’s happening next and uncertainty’s never good for investing. Right. So, we don’t know what’s going to [Inaudible 00:52:10]. We don’t know what Fanatics is going to do. We don’t know up until a short period of time if PSA is going to reopen their company, right. Or when they’re going to reopen or if there will be affordable grading. So, there’s all of this uncertainty. I also think the hobby, if you look at the demo of the people who participate in it, are very male-dominant, very middle-aged male-dominant and that’s a very cynical class of people for whatever reason. So, they love to argue and be right and be mean to each other. And not everyone, but there are pockets of this. Where why would people want to join the hobby, if that’s the experience that they see. Versus if you go to the NFT world, you see a lot more positivity, there’s still, there are issues, but there’s a way more positivity. There’s more community. There’s way more of like the wagme, we’re all going to make it right. Whereas in the hobby, it’s more like if I make it, you have to lose. And I never understood that mindset because I think if I eat, you could eat too. It’s not this one pizza that everyone’s taking the pieces from and eventually we’re going to run out, it’s how do we make the pizza pie bigger so that we could all eat more, and more people could come in and eat. So, I think the hobby needs to – this is just my 2 cents. What do I know – needs to get to a place where they’re not operating from scarcity mindset? They’re operating from abundance in the sense that, how do we grow the pie? Not how do we take as much from the pie and leave someone else holding nothing. I don’t like that culture. It’s not going to help anyone grow. So, like, even the way we treat influencers like Gary, there was a video, a clip where he talked about how the card hobby pushed him out because anytime he posted a photo of his card, he was getting so much of like, hey, pump and dump, pump and dump. And he’s never sold a card. So, like, why do you do that? Why are we so against influencers? I know that they don’t – they aren’t necessarily always good, but they have a tremendous amount of benefit. Right. And you don’t have to go and buy the card, he took a picture of. He’s bringing people to the hobby. He’s introducing them to the space. The community he hangs with. if they want to deploy their money into this space, it’s going to help everybody.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Yeah. And there are a lot of people that give him credit a large part of the credit for reviving sports cards. That he kind of brought that back and by saying, hey, look, this is what I’m investing in. This is what I’m buying. And that kind of helped kickstart the hobby again. So, and I want to end on this Andrew, last question. I know you mentioned, and I wrote it down, so I made sure I got back to it. You have another podcast, right? You said it’s No Overnight Success?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Yeah. I haven’t done that a lot with it recently, so please don’t be mad at me, people.
[Horacio Ruiz]
What is that? And how does that tie into like, how you go about your business?
[Andrew Goldberg]
Well, funny enough, like I started that podcast when I was working for Gary. Right. Because I don’t know. I think there was always a calling for me that my, one of my heroes, it’s not so much like a Kobe hero that I described, someone I liked, someone I admired was Larry King. And I didn’t even get into this, but like I grew up behind a cafe and my dad owned a family business café. And I would meet so many people. Right. And I would talk to them, and I always had a knack. I was like, I think I like doing that. Like, I like that job, having a microphone, interviewing people, learning from smart people. So, No Overnight Success, I started when I was at Gary’s because first off, I think his team is really, really intelligent. And there was a lot of people passing through and a lot of people, I wanted to document that. I wanted to learn from those people because I think we often see like this whole, oh my God, look, he’s won. And you hang, like you could even, let’s use [Inaudible 00:55:48]. You’re like, now they’re winning, but what got them there? How did they get there? Because there’s no overnight successes, Daymond John, how did he get to be on shark tank? All of these amazing stories, we see the finished product, but we don’t see the steps that it takes to get there. I wanted to document those interviews, but also document my life as I am going to be a success. So, I had the moments in my life where I wasn’t successful in what I was feeling and all that stuff. And interviews and conversations with people. And one of the great ones I did was this guy named Max Brown. He used to be the USC football quarterback. Again, he was the number one prospect coming out of high school, going to USC, and his career didn’t go as planned. He didn’t make it to the NFL. His buddy Dan Arnold did. And hearing his story, how did he deal with all of these expectations, right. Number one prospect in the country as a quarterback. And now, you didn’t make the NFL, what does your family say? So that was one of the interviews I did. I just wanted to capture people’s story. In audio form. And when I did the first interview, I was like, dude, I could be good at this. I like it. I like interviewing. I like talking to people. I like asking questions. I think I have the natural talent for it, and it just clicked.
[Horacio Ruiz]
It is pretty awesome. When we have guests on the podcast, Andrew, when I’m talking to you, just listening to people’s stories, the stuff that they have to say, what they’ve been through, educating the listeners. It is pretty awesome, man. So, I can definitely relate to that. And what you guys are doing also, you guys are – your industry is sports cards, but you guys have a different way of going about it. And that’s why people are tuning in man. So, I’d like to just finish off by thanking you for your time, man. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it and, really, really happy you could make it on, man.
[Andrew Goldberg]
I could see why you guys have had success. You’re really good at this man. I’m not just saying that. And I appreciate you having me. It’s flattering. It’s cool to kind of tell your story as well. I don’t get a ton of opportunities to do that. So, like share your story, share your heart, share your trials, your tribulations, because maybe my story could help someone. And if anyone out there is listening and anything resonated, you could always message me. I am Andrew Goldberg on Instagram, or I am [email protected]. You could shoot me an email, answer all my DM’S, any questions about cards or anything like that? Even if I don’t know the question, we have all these Instagram groups, I could screenshot and send it to someone, they might know, or Cage might know better too. So, yeah, I just enjoy helping people. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, so I kind of want to help other people avoid those mistakes if possible and help them on their journey, make some connections, make some friends maybe. Would love you guys to follow the show. Lukas Tiger and Brons podcast. how we structure it, it’s like we kind of mirrored our thing with over CMBC fast money. So, we banter for half the episode and then every day we’ll give like kind of like watch list, look at this card or check out this card. Or have you heard about the story of this card. So, it’s kind of like that vibe. So, you you’ll always get some value and hopefully a little entertainment and laughter. And if you like me, my co-host is two X. The guy I am, I think he’d do great on your show. He’s actually become a mentor of mine too, which is – they don’t always come as they appear. So very, very lucky I met cage he’s a good dude. And I get to see behind the scenes. He’s an even better dad. He has two kids the way he interacts with them. Ian’s been on the show a few times, Leah, his daughter was the one that drew the tiger. So, we love our family and he’s a great guy. Really, really blessed.
[Horacio Ruiz]
The dynamic you guys have is incredible. And you can tell there’s a mutual respect between two guys. Even in the silliest part of the episodes. You guys caught lightning in a bottle there. And that’s good stuff. Andrew, thank you for being here. Andrew is the co-host of the Lukas Tigers and Brons OH MY podcast. One of the top sports card’s podcasts in the country right now. Thank you for being on man.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Thank You. We have Australian listeners too. We’re big in Australia.
[Horacio Ruiz]
You know what you’re going to get. You’re going to definitely get Australian listeners on the podcast. Our co-founder Stefan is from Australia and I’m sure he’s going to be repping out there.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Love It. Love Aussies.
[Horacio Ruiz]
Andrew, have a good night and thanks again.
[Andrew Goldberg]
Appreciate you.
[Horacio Ruiz]
After sitting down with Andrew, it’s no wonder how the Luka tigers and Brons podcast has developed a loyal following. I really appreciated Andrew’s honesty and willingness to not pull any punches. And I left our conversation and feeling better for it. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, let others know about it. I say this every time we find our guests so interesting and knowledgeable, and I know others will too. Or leave a review or hit the follow button. Until next time, take care.
