Parasites Are Eating Your Hobbies Alive

[00:07] body filmer Logan Paul and Monsuno co-creator Jeremy Padawa made waves on anime Twitter when they announced that they had just co-purchased the quote they had just co-purchased the quote greatest mangas in the world, the second

[00:21] highest grade One Piece number one and the highest grade in existence of Dragon the highest grade in existence of Dragon Ball number ONE FOR A RECORD 550 $50,000 first appearance of Goku and Bulma, which isn't even true. Toriyama teased

[00:35] Goku at the end of Dr. Slump. Also, even if it was, it wouldn't be special first appearance of the main character of the manga. That's just how manga works. And it's noting Dragon Ball number one. It's Shonen Jump 1984 number

[00:48] 50. I'm falling into his trap again already. So immediately, anime Twitter jumped Paul's ass, pointing out all those errors in his tweet and then some. I myself chose to focus on mangas. >> It's like one of my Japanese animes.

[01:03] >> If you zoom in on the grading slabs, there's some really funny nonsense on there, too. Like, they just listed two random mangakas names out of the 14 or so who also had a chapter in each of those issues. It's just so obvious that

[01:16] Beckett copy pasted their template for grading American comics with zero regard for how it might make sense in the context of manga. Kind of like how it's stupid obvious that Paul could not give a single solitary PSA7 too much corn

[01:31] with. >> I'm literally getting Look at I'm getting I'm getting goosebumps thinking about what anime means to me. >> Luffy D monkey. Shout out Luffy. >> Monkey D Luffy.

[01:43] >> Monkey D Luffy. >> Even the cameraman can tell. But the thing about tricks is when the magician's up is that obvious, it's usually cuz he wants you looking at that instead of what's in his other hand. As

[01:58] fun as it feels to mock him for his obvious laring or watch one of his obvious laring or watch one of his fellow WWE superstars subject him to one of the most brutal ratios in Twitter history. You need to understand Logan

[02:11] Paul doesn't care if you think he's a real One Piece fan. Just like he doesn't care about the sanctity of human life or literally any of the thousands of his own fans who he's robbed blind with his multiple welldocumented crypto scams and

[02:28] rugps. The only thing he cares about is making money. And that is what makes him more of a threat to our hobby and community than any tourist who's ever subjected you to their bad opinions about anime boobs or whatever. The dude

[02:44] can't even come back to Japan as a tourist. And frankly, he'd be happy to see you call him one because any publicity is good publicity when you're running an ad campaign and because it stops you from recognizing that he's

[02:58] something much worse. An overseas landlord. someone without even a passing vacationer's interest in the culture he's invading whose sole goal is to make a quick buck by making life less pleasant and more expensive for all the

[03:13] locals. And we know that because this ain't his first investment round. On ain't his first investment round. On July 22nd, 2021, Logan Paul made waves across the internet when he announced his acquisition of the quote greatest

[03:27] collectible in the world, a PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card for a record 5.275 million. A staggering jump from the

[03:39] previous documented price of $3 to $400,000 for every PSA 91 that had been previously sold. except the one PSA 9 that he bought a month before for over a

[03:51] million bucks. This was the culmination of months spent streaming expensive high-profile Pokemon pack and box openings on the impulsive podcast channel. the event that cemented PSA as the go-to grading house for Pokemon

[04:07] cards and a watershed moment for the entire Pokemon TCG community in kind of the same way that a tsunami or a dam breaking is a watershed prices for rare

[04:19] cards and sealed product and new which had already been creeping up due to pandemic pressures exploded exponentially in a matter of months with chase cards of all types rapidly escaping the reach of all but the most

[04:33] affluent fans and the most shameless clowns. clowns. >> No, they just take it from my cart. >> Why? Get the hell out of here. >> Run. You've seen these creatures, no

[04:47] doubt, in Tik Toks, shorts, and cringe compilations, snatching new boxes and blisters off the shelf as fast as the Walmart associate can set them down before gleefully shoving their overflowing carts past the despondent

[05:01] faces of poor Pokemonless children who arrived 5 seconds too late for the feeding frenzy. They've been the laughingtock of the internet and a bane on the existence of every honest Pikachu enjoyer for the last half decade. And

[05:16] that is what Logan Paul is trying to bring to your local manga aisles and anime conventions. I mean, more of them than you already see at anime conventions and now at the booths that you actually want to visit. This much

[05:31] many of you already know. But what you might not know is that what Logan Paul did to Pokemon and what he's doing to manga now was no accident. It was a calculated, coordinated plan involving multiple highincome investors to

[05:46] manipulate the Pokemon collectibles market for personal gain. And the exact same guy who coordinated it with him then is behind this move into manga now.

[05:58] Before we get to him though, I owe my wife Yazzy a huge thanks for making this video possible by telling me everything I didn't know about the Pokemon TCG side of this story cuz she was there in the trenches cracking evolving skies,

[06:12] chilling rain, and vivid voltage as the whole hobby collapsed around her. And now she has a new hobby, oshiatsu. The art of outwardly celebrating one's favorite things, which is kind of like the opposite of slabbing. And recently,

[06:26] with a bit of help from our buddy Liam Rising Superstream, she got the chance Rising Superstream, she got the chance to partner with Rioware, Japan's premier producer of a bags to design her very own purse. I'm so proud of her. Now, a

[06:41] lot of these bags, as you can see, are made to display thinner merch, like can badges and cards, stuff like that. But Yazz is more into plushies, and the bags that she usually uses to take those out are kind of bulky. So, she set out to

[06:55] create something sleeker with a cute little heart motif and square pockets set a little deeper into the bag so she could bring her babies out in style. However, she also knows how important flexibility is to her fellow oshiatsu

[07:11] enjoyers. So, she came up with this honestly genius little clasp system that pulls the pocket up and flattens it out for anyone who wants a more conventional bag setup instead. Now, since it is her first time collabing with Ria Rare,

[07:25] their pre-order window is only going to be open for a short while from now until May 16th. So, if you want to get one of these beauties for yourself or a weeb you love, you better act fast at that link in the doobly-doo.

[07:39] >> Buy it for Frog Joe. >> Bye. Love you. Okay, now back to the guy. the man who taught Logan everything he knows about transactional collecting and convinced him to start streaming box

[07:52] openings in 2020. And the man with the connections that let him buy the PSA 10 illustrator from that anonymous collector in Dubai is the very same man who just went in with him on those slabbed up shownen jumps. Monsuno

[08:09] co-creator Jeremy Padaw. This is the first ever Weekly Shonen Jump from 1968. Weekly Shonen Jump allows the publisher to do is introduce a bunch of new

[08:22] brands, a bunch of new pieces of content. Naruto, One Piece, and Dragon Ball all started here. This is like the grand parent of them all. Potential million-doll publication down the road. >> There's more to Jeremy than just

[08:35] knockoff no one remembers for Nickelodeon, though. as the CBO of Jazwares and former CEO of Wicked Cool Toys. He's actually managed the global

[08:47] license for real Pokemon toys for nearly a decade at this point. And before that, he was handling Jack Pacific's line of Pokémon toys among many other brands. But before he did any of that, way back in the year 2000, Jeremy made out like a

[09:03] bandit in the dot boom as the culmination of a website building law school side hustle built on the innovation of spelling the first word of domains with two A's so they'd come up first in search engines. But what did

[09:18] those websites actually do, you ask? Why? They were secondary marketplaces for hot collectibles of the time like absolute furbies.com and absolutebeanbies.com.

[09:36] the only people making real money in a gold rush are the folks selling shovels. And Jeremy Padawa has been in the shovel business for 30 years, during which he's befriended quite a few of his fellow shovel merchants and gold mine owners

[09:51] who all like to take turns selling their biggest nuggets back and forth to each other for increasingly large prices. But while that can be a decent, even fun way to store money, it's far from the best way to make it with your collectibles.

[10:06] For guys like this, the real grail isn't any of the rare or one-of-a-kind collectibles that they hoard and trade around to store their wealth. It's a very specific scenario, a chance for them and all their buddies to get in on

[10:20] the ground floor of a mass market gold rush for more common collectibles like Beanie Babies or comic books where they can buy up stock before the plebs even come down with gold fever and make out like bandits. All because they predicted

[10:36] or better yet created the craze. And that is exactly what Jeremy Padawa had been trying to do with Pokemon for years before he met Logan Paul.

[10:48] >> What's going to make this set into a million-doll set 10 years from now is not the fact that the Charizard card, which I'll show you, is 50 grand. It's which I'll show you, is 50 grand. It's the fact that the Pikachu is $400. That

[11:00] was Jeremy talking to sports card collector Buster Share way back in 2019, trying to convince him that Red Cheeks Pikachu was the Pokemon equivalent of an OG Michael Jordan card. And he actually does make some pretty salient points in

[11:16] the interview, as you would expect from the manager of the Global Pokemon toy license since 2018, and a guy who had been working with the Pokemon market before that. He had some very unique and powerful insights into the buying habits

[11:30] of fans that let him see a market primed to explode. But to actually press the detonator, he needed help. He needed Logan Paul >> Logan and I have been friends. We became friends around co a little earlier

[11:45] actually. And uh dude, he reached out to me and he was like, "Jeremy, I want to understand why, you first have to understand the incredible economic magic trick known as speculation. If you

[12:00] understand the basic principle of supply and demand, then you know there are two ways to raise the price of a thing. Either suppress the available supply, which is generally pretty difficult and expensive, or use cheap and easy

[12:13] advertising to convince more people they want the thing. Of course, that generally depends on what the thing can actually do for them. But one thing that basically anything can do under the right conditions is be sold for more

[12:27] money than you paid for it. Those conditions naturally require demand for the thing to increase after you've bought it, which seems like kind of an advertising catch 22. But here's where that gets interesting. The mere idea

[12:40] that there could be more demand for a thing later can create demand for it now. If you can convince, say, a rich and famous YouTuber to tell all of his followers, "I'm buying this thing for lots of money cuz I think it'll make me

[12:55] even more money later." If even a fraction of those followers believe him, it magically makes the thing worth more money now. And the fact that it's already worth so much more now naturally indicates that it's going to be worth

[13:10] even more later, which in turn means, of course, that it's worth even more now. And a thing worth that much now has got to be worth tubs of money later. And hey, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT? IT'S WORTH BUCKETS NOW. This amazing trick works

[13:27] out great for everyone, except of course anyone who actually wants to own the thing for its intended purpose, like having manga to read or games to play or a house to live in. But who cares about them? You won't even be able to see

[13:40] those losers from where we're going on the moon, baby. Unless of course literally anything happens to make the thing worth less money now, which per

[13:53] the mechanics I just described is not good. Like say for instance, the makers of Beanie Babies or comic books notice a bunch of people buying up special editions and first issues at ridiculous prices. So they start making more of

[14:09] those things to collect some of that bag and end up flooding the market with them to avoid that sort of thing. and make it all the way to the moon. You need a way to manipulate not just the demand side of the market, but the supply, a way to

[14:24] manufacture scarcity, or better yet, the perception of scarcity since, again, buying up enough stock to actually limit supplies is very expensive, whereas advertising and packaging are dirt cheap. If you can use those tools to

[14:40] denote a segment of the supply as being special in some way and convince enough suckers that that specialness makes it more valuable, then you can sell them something as worthless as a JPEG of a monkey for millions of dollars. But how

[14:56] to do that when the JPEG is printed on card stock? That's the question. And the card stock? That's the question. And the answer is slabs. Trading card grading emerged as a practice and very fun phrase to say as an offshoot of the coin

[15:09] grading industry in the early 90s amid a rash of Ken Griffy Jr. rookie card counterfeiting. Hence why the first grading company was called professional sports authenticators or PSA. Over the decade, with the rise of sites like

[15:24] eBay, PSA's forensic services became increasingly essential to sports card and TCG collectors, who in turn became increasingly obsessed with the idea of owning certified, perfectly centered and printed copies of their favorite and

[15:40] rarest cards. Though ultimately it would be PSA's competitor, Becket Media, whose black label came to be seen as the true gold standard of perfection among those

[15:52] hardcore enthusiasts. That's the power of packaging. This was naturally true for Pokémon cards, too, where among the hardest core of collectors, top graded cards commanded top dollar. Though that was only ever really true for the rarest

[16:07] and most desirable chase cards from each set, the holo foils and full arts. I mean, it cost 20 bucks a pop, plus shipping and handling both ways just to get a card graded. Way more if you wanted to skip the line and get the

[16:21] highest end photo analysis done. No one was going to shell that out for a random was going to shell that out for a random 30 cent EX card. That would be stupid. But what if they did, though? What if you could convince the world at large

[16:34] that every random piece of poke pack filler could be turned into gold? If only the mighty card alchemists proclaimed and preserved its perfection in the magic plastic. When Logan Paul

[16:48] made headlines with his PSA 10 illustrator, PSA became a household name overnight, irrevocably associated in the mind of the average Joe with the very idea that Pokemon cards could be worth big money at all. And to those Joe's,

[17:05] the PSAs with the biggest numbers are naturally worth the biggest money across the board, regardless of their actual play or collecting value to anyone who's really in the hobby. I mean, sure, there might be several million V-Max Morpecos

[17:20] out there, but only 737 of those are PSA 10s. 75 bucks, please, Mr. eBay sir. Or if you get a PSA 9

[17:32] Mr. eBay sir. Or if you get a PSA 9 back, you could maybe maybe get $24.99 for it, which you'll note isn't even your grading and shipping costs back, let alone the actual price of the card. Funny how the collecting bros who

[17:47] encourage all the Walmart scalpers to go grade all their cards and video games and comics and everything else never mention that part. or the part where you could get back a super common grade that's worth less than the raw you sent

[18:03] in, which mathematically has to be what happens most of the time because if the cards that are worth thousands of dollars weren't exceedingly rare, they wouldn't be worth thousands of dollars. And per the mechanics of

[18:18] speculation, the possibility that any raw card could be gets baked into their pricing in the same way that sealed product that could have the big chase product that could have the big chase cards is almost always more expensive

[18:32] than what you actually find inside when you crack it. I digress, though. Just as Walmarts and Targets across the nation were finding themselves infested with scalpers, grading companies suddenly had a new, much larger and less informed

[18:47] base of customers of their own, clogging up their order cues to the point that grading weights once counted in days or weeks were now measured in months. Which in turn forced the more serious collectors with more serious collectors

[19:00] items to pony up hundreds of dollars for the express line service. And despite the fact that those serious collectors still saw Beckett as the gold standard, it was PSA that ended up with the bulk of that business in no small part thanks

[19:16] to Paul and Pal's constantly mentioning them in podcasts and interviews. Now, full disclosure, in all of the digging I've done, I can't find any evidence that PSA paid Logan or Jeremy for any of that publicity. So, it is entirely

[19:30] possible it was all a happy accident for them. the happiest accident of their entire careers. But there are a lot of ways you could compensate someone without actually creating a paid promotion that would need to be

[19:44] disclosed, like free or discounted expedited grading or even, you know, just fudging some numbers here and there. Many folks online have opined that in photos Paul's illustrator looks a little off center and nicked up for a

[20:00] 10. I mean, there are only 40 of those cards in the entire world in any condition. So, it would be a huge statistical anomaly if even one of them actually was perfect. Certainly not impossible. And of course, there's no

[20:15] way to check without seeing the card in person, which definitely is impossible, but you know, something to think about. as is the fact that the controversies and scandals section of PSA's Wikipedia page is four times as long as their

[20:30] company history. Of course, it could also simply be that Paul Padawa and all of their pals saw the PSA brand as being undervalued, bought up a lot of cheaper relative to Beckett PSA 10 cards, and then started talking up things like PSA

[20:46] 10 Charizards and complete PSA 10 base sets as the grails of Pokémon in order to inflate the value of their own collections. You know, as a little side benefit to Paul's main plan at the time of building hype for his then in

[21:01] development liquid marketplace scam. Carl Jolp made an excellent video about that a few months back, by the way, linked up in the corner, where he also showed a few other examples of how high-profile record setting collectible

[21:15] high-profile record setting collectible sales are almost always ads in disguise for something else. where the buyer intentionally overpays for an item in order to create hype around the idea that running your collection through

[21:28] whatever service they're trying to sell you can help make you rich. It's a real good way to sell shovels. Anyway, regardless of the reason, I doubt anyone at PSA was upset at the outcome of Paul and Padawa's promotion, which gave their

[21:42] business such a boost that by December 2025, their parent company, Collectors Holdings, was able to acquire Beckett outright, giving them control over 80%

[21:54] of the global card grading market. Antitrust laws, never heard of them. And with that move, they also gained control over 100% of the global manga grading market. Because exactly one year before collectors bought them out, Beckett

[22:10] announced that grading manga was a thing they were apparently going to be doing now, despite literally nobody in the manga collecting community asking for it. And naturally, nobody went for it either. Right now, there's this dude on

[22:23] the manga rarity subreddit, which is tiny and only exists because r/manga collectors ban speculation, flexing that he's got the only graded highQ number he's got the only graded highQ number one, not the only 9.6,

[22:38] one, not the only 9.6, the only one in the world. Just keep that in mind whenever you hear top grade in the world, population one. The distinction is meaningless unless you give it meaning. And there are two big

[22:52] problems that have stopped manga fans from giving manga grades any meaning at all over the last few years. Firstly, real manga collectors collect manga so they can read that manga. Rare manga is only valuable to us because it's out of

[23:09] print and thus harder to read. So, the idea of turning one of those treasures into a glorified doors stop is an affront to anyone who actually participates in the hobby. But the other bigger problem is the grades themselves

[23:25] are obviously complete With coins and cards, there are clear manufacturing standards that individual items can be graded against. Like, how centered is the print? How shiny is the metal? Are the ink layers all properly

[23:39] aligned? how much of the original stamp on the coin has eroded over time. But with a book, I mean, yeah, depending on the design, you might be able to judge how centered the cover is, but as soon as you look inside, the system falls

[23:55] apart. If you've ever flipped through a book before, you'll notice that the the numbers in the corner move all over the place with every single page. That's because every one of them is printed and cut separately. So, they will never be

[24:12] perfectly aligned when they're all bound together. It's mathematically impossible. Therefore, the only thing graders can really grade beyond obvious wear and tear or factory damage is the whiteness of those not quite aligned

[24:26] pages. And if you look at this Shonen Jump that I grabbed from my local Kini Jump that I grabbed from my local Kini last year, you'll notice none of the pages are white. The closest they get is off gray because they print this on

[24:41] the cheapest phone book recycled news print they can find to make printing at peak 6 million right now, like 2 million a week remotely viable. Anyone who calls

[24:55] a given Shonen Jump white is lying to your face. >> You have a weekly Shonen Jump Dragon Ball 92 here with look closely. Exceptional white pages, which I believe is one of the only Beckett exceptional

[25:08] white. >> Yeah. Of any of any of Yeah. Like like look look at look at the color of the pages. Of course, comic grading is still a thing

[25:21] in spite of similar objections in that space, but it's only really a thing with floppies there. So, thankfully, it doesn't have as negative an effect on comic readers as it could, cuz they can always just get the trade paperbacks

[25:35] instead. Those collected volumes you see in bookstores and whatnot tend to get larger, longerl lasting print runs than the floppies. So only an idiot would try to slab a trade, even a first printing, cuz everyone knows the real first print

[25:51] is the floppy. On that note, now feels like a good time to point out that like a good time to point out that Japanese style trade paperbacks or tonko bonds are literally the only format that 99% of manga have ever been available in

[26:06] on the English market. And that's the Beckett is trying to convince comic speculators to slab up by using a Japanese word that they don't know what it means. But why would they do such a thing? The manga equivalent of floppies

[26:22] zashi like shownen jump pretty much only exists in Japanese outside a very brief stint in the 2000s where viz tried to make English jump and shojo beat a thing. And while those are less common than Tonko Bonds and do have some

[26:38] nostalgia value for millennials like me as translated reprints, they're still never going to have the true first appearance providence of an action comics number one or Amazing Fantasy 15. There are some collectors of Ki Zashi or

[26:53] first chapters in the west, but it's always been a niche interest for us because we can't read them. We don't really have any nostalgic attachment to really have any nostalgic attachment to this format. The print quality sucks and

[27:06] they just take up a lot of shelf space. So, there was basically no way that Beckett could ever sustain an English-facing business by only grading these. They needed to convince people to start slabbing tanks just to stay

[27:20] afloat. And not just the few genuinely special first print tonkab bonds like Gold Text One Piece. All of them. Manga fans just weren't biting, though, and any scalpers who might raid their local bookstores on Beckett's behalf were

[27:35] already busy shoving 8-year-olds into shelves at Walmart. But if Logan Paul could make hundreds of graded V-Max Morcos happen by publicly overpaying for some cardboard, then maybe he can make graded Tonco bonds happen by publicly

[27:51] overpaying for a book. If you watch the announcement video, they're not even subtle about what they're doing. It's videos like these that are going to make copies. >> By the way, if you if you have a better

[28:03] copy, will you at least call us first? >> Get a sub. We'll buy it. Come on. >> Though, do take note because it'll help you understand other scams in the future of how they cloak the blatant sales pitch for grading in an even more

[28:18] blatant pitch of, "Hey, hit us up. We're buying." They know their target audience potential speculator is going to see that and think, "Aha, you tried to get me, Mr. Paul, but I'm smart enough to hodddle the manga so I can make even

[28:34] more money later." Never realizing that what they're really being sold is the idea that an unreadable book in a useless plastic box is magically worth more than the book alone. Logan and Jeremy aren't alone, though. There are

[28:51] dozens of card and crypto bro sicko fans talking up manga investments in their replies and quotes laring as longtime otaku who still have their one piece from 25 years ago and are maybe going to get it graded and attacking anyone who

[29:06] dares to question the wisdom of their investing gurus. They've got dudes on Reddit hyping each other up about their Tonkco bond gets and all the generate and conversations indistinguishable from any NFT pre-sale

[29:22] and dudes who already have generational wealth selling slabs back and forth to each other at many times their market value just to create the illusion of value just to create the illusion of demand. This is called wash trading. And

[29:35] in traditional commodities markets, it's actually illegal. But in a neat little legal loophole, individual collectibles don't count as commodities, so you can just do whatever you want with those. And just as they did and do with Pokémon

[29:49] cards, they've been doing it with manga for the last year or so. Just take a look at this totally legit auction reported by Swaggle House in early April of by an astounding coincidence, the exact same two Zashi that Logan Paul was

[30:06] planning to buy just 16 days later with a graded Dragon Ball going for 45 grand and One Piece for 42.5. Now, just looking at how close those

[30:18] prices are, anyone who knows anything about these books can immediately tell something's up here. The 42-year-old Dragon Ball Kizashi is substantially rarer than the 29-year-old One Piece one, for which both the current and

[30:31] previous sales prices shown here are ridiculously inflated. The last recorded heritage auction sales for One Piece from before Becket Bros started pumping from before Becket Bros started pumping the prices was in 2023 for a much less

[30:45] insane 2,000 bucks. And even that is well above the market average. Looking at eBay listings from this year, a near mint copy in Britain sold for about 800

[30:57] bucks on March 11th. And on April 17th, this one went for $1,600. And before Wrestlemania, you'd find these things going for even lower prices these things going for even lower prices on Marary and Yahoo auctions in Japan

[31:11] all the time. But ironically, it's the slabs that really lay the lie bare here. slabs that really lay the lie bare here. a Dragon Ball 6.5 and a One Piece 5.5 going for 40 grand. Any remotely credulous reporter would immediately

[31:27] question that. But we don't got one of those. We got Swaggle House and friends whose other friends really want them to sell you some Becket slabs. >> But of course, this all started with uh you know when friend of the channel

[31:39] speculation of manga. What if manga becomes the biggest collecting vertical company >> with Jeremy and his content on that table there. He's got like a hundred Beckett slabed mangas, right? Cuz he's

[31:53] for Becket branding. >> Guys, let's take a quick moment to talk Heritage Auction. >> Was that the legendary double shill >> Jeremy is obviously investing in the the top end of things. That's why the prices

[32:07] are enormous. So maybe it really is just scratching the surface, you know? Maybe this idea of buy your slabbed mangas now is still very early. >> And once you're aware of that agenda, you start to see it everywhere in these

[32:19] collector's posts. They're all taking legitimately rare and pricey manga or one-of-a-kind items like scripts, then surrounding them with common Tonkco bonds to create the appearance of value by association. The ones who can afford

[32:33] it are intentionally, grossly overpaying for top grades out of the few dozen first print tanks that have ever been graded. All to trick you into thinking

[32:45] that One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Narut Volume 1, some of the most printed books in the history of books, will magically become rare treasures if only they're

[32:57] encased in the magic plastic. You know, I I wonder who posted that photo. OH, HEY, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT? BECKET COLLECTIBLES. And of course, Jeremy's right there in the quotes expressing a high level of conviction for this

[33:11] high level of conviction for this extraordinary and overlooked category. Conviction that's supposed to mean something coming from the man who predicted Pokémon. An angle that you can find Jeremy playing up elsewhere on his

[33:24] own Twitter. But in that same video, he made another prediction that immediately powers. >> And once you get beyond Pokemon, go a couple more years to Yu-Gi-Oh in 2002. I I have the PSA 10 blue eyes white dragon

[33:40] card. The the grail of Yu-Gi-Oh. >> Anyone who knows anything about Yu-Gi-Oh and the Yu-Gi-Oh community can tell you that's nonsense. With a very small handful of exceptions, the only value a Yu-Gi-Oh card will ever have is its

[33:56] ability to win games. Rarity is only a factor for staples, either because you can flex on a while playing out your entire very shiny deck in one turn, or because maybe Konami is keeping

[34:09] a new power card rarity lock to make more money selling more boosters. If one more money selling more boosters. If one card gets banned, a $1,500 deck can drop to $40 literally overnight. It's a speculator's worst nightmare. When Logan

[34:24] Paul announced he was getting into Yu-Gi-Oh last month, no doubt on Jeremy's advice, the entire community laughed him out of the room, and we can too. We do unfortunately just have to accept that the richest larpers in the

[34:38] room are going to buy up the rarest, most one-of-a-kind anime related items in any growing fandom. Stuff like that floats to and past the top eventually. But we don't have to accept their laring premise that a several hundred,000 of a

[34:53] kind Zashi like One Piece Chapter 1 is one of a kind just cuz no other plastic box has the same arbitrary number on it. We don't have to acknowledge that this specific Dragon Ball jump that they grossly overpaid for is the Dragon Ball

[35:10] grossly overpaid for is the Dragon Ball jump because it's not. It only becomes the Dragon Ball if enough idiots buy into their scheme to submit their own copies for grading, which would put it at the top of a pile of hundreds rather

[35:24] than currently dozens. And make no mistake, Paul's copy will stay on top of that pile. Beckett has no reason to grade any submission higher, no matter how many they get, because the whole system is arbitrary and subjective, and

[35:40] they can give any undamaged manga any number they want. They deliberately set the target at a 9.2 to make you think, "Wow, there's a whole eight points above that. I could totally get lucky if I send mine in." But you won't get lucky.

[35:57] Someone will eventually, probably someone who knows someone with a 9.3 or four to keep the floor low for a couple more years, but only when they need Paul and Padawa to make another record- setting purchase and rev up the hype

[36:12] cycle again. And while I'm calling shots, let me tell you where I think the current hype campaign is going. It is not a coincidence that one day after their kayfabe trash talk on WrestleMania, I show Speed was the first

[36:25] guy calling Logan Paul a tourist. And it's not a coincidence that Logan Paul took his promo picture for the One Piece Zashi in front of the Wrestlemania stage. All of this touristy tweeting, sarcastically taunting One Piece fans

[36:41] about how much love they've shown him as he shows off things he's bought that are supposed to make us jealous. every one of which has multiple blue check accounts replying with the same AI manufactured meme of monkey D speed

[36:56] decking Logan Charles. By the way, it's all heel work. He is intentionally using toxicity and tribalism in the anime community to build heat for a grudge

[37:08] match at probably SummerSlam 26, where Speed is going to kick his ass and take the graded One Piece from him, thus turning a relatively common thousandish dollar Zashi into a prize with a storyline and a symbol to anime fans

[37:24] everywhere of gatekeeping the tourists, which in turn will cement the idea in pop culture that manga in a slab is special and worth more than manga you

[37:36] can read. Which of course he's hoping will in turn make the other two One Piece Zashi that he bought, even the one with the scuffed, chewed-up corners, worth more than he ever paid for the one that Speed is going to take from him. A

[37:49] price I want to note that has never been disclosed in any of these tweets or videos where they're flexing the 550k they spent on Dragon Ball because it probably wasn't that much and it would make the scam really obvious if they

[38:05] told you what they paid. And what I think makes this branding strategy especially obvious is how Jeremy has also pivoted to rage bait. pathetically transparent Gen AI rage bait of him as the oldest manga fan ever after all of

[38:20] his attempts at positive publicity fell on their faces. Though, just to be clear, I'm not showing you any of these tweets to have you guys go yell at these guys. And I'm not just saying that to cover my ass like a drama tuber. I

[38:35] really mean it. When you quote Dunk on Paul and Padawa saying you're not a real fan, you don't deserve the One Piece chapter 1 or the Dragon Ball chapter 1 or the big toblone. No matter how brutally you ratio their asses, you're

[38:50] giving them exactly what they want. associating their names with the brand names of these anime and reinforcing the idea that these slabbed up collectibles that they overpaid for are something special that only a real anime fan would

[39:08] deserve. somehow more special and more valuable than any of the vast majority of identical shownen jump issues and Tonkco Bonds out there which nobody's bothered to submit to Beckett because

[39:22] bothered to submit to Beckett because again manga grading is obviously a scam. As long as they can get you talking about anything other than that fact Paul about anything other than that fact Paul Padawir Beckett and all of their bros

[39:35] win. But if you focus on the scam part of the story, if you explain why grading manga is to your friends and fellow fans, or just share this video so I can explain it for you, and if you make people at cons and online who do

[39:50] buy and sell graded especially tonkabonds, feel as stupid and unwelcome as they are, we might just be able to excise these parasites before they can fully sink their teeth in. By forming a united front, you guys can starve

[40:07] Beckett out of your hobby. And if they go, the speculators and scalpers will go go, the speculators and scalpers will go with them. Make Logan Paul apologized to Japan again. Hey, thanks so much for watching all of this. I know it was a

[40:20] long one, but the subject needed that level of depth. If you're new here, because you're here for Logan Paul hating, that's not my usual content. Usually I recommend cool anime and manga. So click one of those videos to

[40:34] manga. So click one of those videos to check that out. Thanks.