Talking to Josh & Mike from Talk’n Pops about Funko and Collecting in general

Christian recently spoke to Josh and Mike for their Podcast that has been going forever, covering Funko Pops and some other subjects.  You will find this particular episode here.  You can also listen to it right here  –

Or if you rather read, here is the full transcript  –

Mike: How’s it going, everybody?

Josh: Hey, welcome to a very special episode of talking pops. I am your host Josh.

Mike: I’m your host Mike.

Josh: And we have a special guest with us this week.

Mike: Let me play the theme music.

Josh: Go for it.

[Music]

Josh: You know him best from hobbyDB. We have Mr. Christopher. Christian. See I screwed it up already. Christian Braun with us today.

Mike: How’s it going, Christian?

Christian: Hey, thanks guys. Hi, Josh, hi Mike. I’m good.

Mike: So we’ve got a couple of questions for you. We’re excited too. We don’t have cool people on.

Josh: No one ever says yes to getting on the show. So we’re hoping this starts a new trend.

Christian: You didn’t tell me that. Okay, let’s do this anyway.

Josh: So we had a couple of questions we wanted to type up. Well, Mike typed them up. I didn’t help at all.

Mike: You were there in spirit.

Josh: I was there in spirit, so we’re going to ask you a few questions. Maybe some personal things, you never know. We’ll pepper in what we want to in there to make the show fun and we’ll kind of, we’ll kind of pick your brain if that sounds good to you.

Christian: Yup.

Mike: All right. So we’ll start with the first obvious one. What made you want to start a hobbyDB.

Christian: All right, where do you want to start? You know, I was going to write a book about, I collected toy soldiers 40 years ago and I wanted to write a book about the company I collected, and there was no information available. I did want to share what I knew, but I never really quite got around to it. My brother in the meantime wrote about 15 books on model cars. And later when I came back to the idea, I was going to do a website and I realized that this day and age we are actually losing as much information as we’re winning. What I mean by that is people create amazing websites and you know, life moves on and then they close those websites and that’s happening a lot.

There are dozens of websites that I used to use that are just gone and when they’re gone, that’s really it. They’ve really gone. I mean, I can’t even go the internet wayback machine. Maybe you can see two pages and three images on it, but there used to be 400 pages and 5,000 images. So I made it my mission to change that. The other thing I didn’t really like is, you know, I love Wikipedia, it is a fantastic project, but Wikipedia has come up with this concept of that they only cover something if it’s notable. As a collector, I think everything’s notable! Because I want every single collectible to have a page, but Wikipedia isn’t allowing it. Wikipedia is for what I call the big stuff. The politicians and the wars. I wanted to build a website…

Josh: Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. It might be for politics, I used it to get through high school. That’s what Wikipedia was for me. But I get your point.

Christian: Yeah. I wanted to build a website that has every collectible ever made in the way that I wanted to see that. And you know, different people have different needs or different types of items need different information. So for example, for comics, you want to know who’s the inker, who’s the penciler, you know, what kind of cover variations are there. And a Pez collector wants to know what kind of foot a Pez dispenser has – thick foot or thin foot. So I want to build a database that covers each of these subjects the way that a particular tribe wants to see the information and that is going to be there forever. I call it the natural extension to Wikipedia. We start where they stop. So for example, we’ve got now 80,000 pins that are Hard Rock Cafe related. And my hope is that it’s always going to be there, you can always go there if Hard Rock Café pins are your thing. You can find them all on hobbyDB. We already have every Funko item, every Kidrobot item, every Sideshow item, every Hot Toy item and then eventually every item.

Josh: That’s awesome.

Mike: That’s an insane amount of pins. I don’t know if I could even comprehend what 80,000 of anything is other than maybe French fries or rice.

Christian: There are 200,000 Disney pins. We like to say hundred billion collectible,… eventually. I think that’s how many there are. There is just so much stuff out there.

Josh: Yeah. Too much stuff.

Mike: Because everybody collects something. Right? My mom used to collect.

Christian: Yeah. 15% of Americans collect something but then everybody else likes to have nice stuff as well or find something, you know, to know how much it’s worth. But yes, I think it’s going to be a great resource. There are a few websites that people would always go to. IMDb for movies. Wikipedia for whatever you want to find there, Kelley Blue Book for the value of cars. And my plan is that hobbyDB is the place where you go to if you want to know anything about any type of collectible.

Josh: That’s awesome.

Mike: That’s sweet. I think you’re working on it right? You are getting pretty close. That’s cool. Yeah. That’s awesome.

Christian: Yeah. We are moving in the right direction. I mean, just some numbers. We got 750,000 users now. There are about 6,000 volunteers, kind of like Wikipedia, hobbyDB is run on volunteers. They’ve added about 520,000 pages. You know, and then they have collections. Our users now have about 34 million items in their collection. And they are worth just about $670 million. Then they have 8 million items in their Wishlist that they wanted to have that are about $590 million worth.

Josh: Yeah. That’s awesome. So in the spirit of talking about that and building the overall collection and you know, toys and everything that you, that hobbyDB is trying to collect, you know, Funko being one of the biggest things and the PPG aspect of it. Do you think that PPG has had an impact on the success / popularity of Funko and itself?

Christian: Well, we like to believe so. The one thing that I think has Funko stand out is the cheap entry price – you can buy if you go for $10.

Josh: Right, exactly.

Christian: It’s affordable. And then quite a few of them go up in value. And I think that has driven a lot of the success. Now that is very similar to say, Hot Wheels. Hot Wheels have cost 99 cents since they started in 1968. So anybody can afford that. And then every now there is a model that is a Treasure Hunt which you can buy and it’s worth $50 as soon as you leave the store. And that’s just great. So I think Funko did a very good job with that, you know, like producing really nice product and then you have that little bit of a lottery aspect which means this item might become really valuable.

Mike: Yeah. I think we’ve experienced that pretty; we’ve experienced that.

Josh: Pretty brutally.

Mike: And you know, the first thing when we started, because we’re not OG collectors, we’ve only been collecting six years. And the first thing anybody ever told us is like, just start, as soon as you start put your stuff on Pop Price Guide because then you don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to think about it. You could go, Oh, do I have this one? I’m not sure. Let me check a spreadsheet or look at pictures. Oh no, I have a list of everything that I own on this website. And its great cause it gives you everything you need to know.

Christian: Yeah. Thanks. That was part of the idea. There is always going to be a resource that tells you what you asked and gives you the info.

Mike: Especially in the age of smartphones, that’s a perfect mix. And that kind of leads, we’re going to jump forward to the questions because that was a really good transition. So what was the process of integrating Pop Price Guide into the Funko app or hobbyDB into the Funko app? Did they come to you? Did you guys approach them? Are you allowed to talk about it?

Christian: Yeah, they came to us and said we built this app and we really, really like what you do with pricing. It was also probably a little bit of, we don’t want to show our own pricing cause that’s possible a little bit dubious as a company.

Mike: Yeah. Everybody was upset. They are going, oh well they’re getting their pricing and then they’re going to say, Oh, these Snoakes worth $10 instead of the 99 cents, so that, that’s going to put a mad rush on Snoke. And then everybody was really relieved.

Christian: The funny thing is even if they would never do that, there’s always that potential perception. I think that was just drive over it. They wanted it, PPG is the price guide. They wanted that on there, so they didn’t have to worry about it. They don’t have to worry that people think there’s an ulterior motive because you know, they don’t have any control over the prices, they get the API from us (the automatic feed of prices) and that’s it. They don’t have any control over what they show or not show. So it’s really independent and they wanted to provide it as a service to the users.

Mike: That’s the way to do it. That was a smart move on everybody’s point or on everybody’s part and I’m sure that thrilled you guys to be able to get on the, you know, in on it like that.

Christian: Yeah, I mean absolutely. And they had a database. They’ve done that work. A lot of companies don’t do that. There are a few teasing issues. So for example, they don’t separate between sticker variations. Any Funko product comes with actually a number of stickers such as the European sticker, the Asian sticker…

Josh: Oh I didn’t even think about that.

Christian: Those are not really important. But what is important is say, a Comic-Con sticker. So those are really important and in their system, it’s the same item as the common. Because it really is the same Pop. But you know that sticker creates a lot of value to the item – basically, it says you had to be in New York to get it. At the moment their database has only one of the two entries and it’s not always clear which one. They pick one of our prices. So for some of the specials, it doesn’t quite work that well. You may look at the common but see the Comic-Con price or the other way around. So that’s something we have to iron out with them.

But otherwise, it works really well because we’ve taken their reference numbers, so it’s really one to one. The pricing is the same. It’s always the same on PPG and the Funko App as well as the hobbyDB site. They don’t take the actual underlying pricing points. So if you want to do research, you may have to go to PPG. If you want to see what transaction makes that price, let’s say you want to look at a Ned Stark (Headless), then maybe there are only six transactions. Well, you may want to check every single one of them as to get a view of what’s going on here.

Josh: Yeah, that makes sense.

Christian: And also, we’ve recently started adding a specialized group of Funko proto lovers and started working with them to add Funko prototypes. We’ve added the first few hundred, there will be about 15,000 I think when we are done. Funko always has two prototypes. A monochrome and a colored one.

Mike: We only have a couple.

Christian: Okay. So there is only a small number of each of those. And that area, I think where there’s a lot of shenanigans going on.

Mike: Oh, there’s a ton of shenanigans.

Christian: So I think that’s going to be great to have as a resource. Because if you have one of these finding out which one is actually genuine and what’s not genuine is hard. (A) there’s no date on them anywhere, and (B), they tend to be more pricey, beyond 300 dollars each. And that is a combination of high value, nobody knows anything about them plus they are pretty easy to fake. Scrapers…

Mike: Scrapers, Mind Styles.

Josh: What are those?

Mike: Mind Styles are…

Christian: Mind Styles are produced in a factory that Funko works with. Although they work with Funko they are unofficial, there is a lot of grey area here and I think having a database there is going to be really valuable.

Mike: I think too. A lot of people I think would be into that because the fake ones are getting better and better by the year. And I’m sure that’s an obstacle you guys have to try to overcome even with, oh man, what’s that one that I’ve seen faked a hundred times on eBay? Your Planet Arlia. Even non-high dollar ones.

Christian: Actually that is a production model. So there is a number of things such as sticker fakes. You can actually go to eBay or Etsy and buy some Comic-con stickers. So there’s that. Then there are, you know, coloration stuff  – holographic models, for example, get faked quite a bit. And then there are variant fakes. The more information we can make it available the better, particular I think for people that start in the hobby. I think that’s important. You don’t really want to pay a high price and get screwed as a first thing joining a new hobby because you don’t know. Part of our mission is to tell those guys, you know, here is the stuff you want to look out for.

I mean, in fact the guys we’ve worked with, Martin (Morales) and some others, have a database of every fake that they have seen coming out over the last few years and we are now talking to about how can we make that available.  It’s going to be valuable to share all of that knowledge and that is why we went the Wikipedia route.

Mike: So yeah, it’s rough out there with the fakes and the fakes of any caliber. I mean we’ve seen $25 pops faked.

Josh: Yeah. We have. And it’s really put a damper on us trying to get rid of and help people community. Because the trust is not there, and people are doing stuff like that.

Mike: Josh has been looking for a Red-Eyes Frieza for years. And you can’t trust any of them on eBay anymore.

Christian: Well you’d like to hear what we do on that.  When I set this up –  I should probably first say that I sold about 40 million dollar worth of items on eBay and  I wasn’t a fan. I really didn’t like it. And what I want to do is create a safe environment. So when you buy something on the PPG marketplace, or hobbyDB we keep the money in escrow. So if you buy from somebody who is the trusted seller then that is somebody we know. We would pay them when the put in tracking information, and then we are good for the money. So if something has gone wrong, we will pay the buyer back. If somebody comes to new to the database we call them “not yet trusted” as we just don’t know them. Well then, they only get paid after the buyer tells us that they are happy with the item they received. Or five days have passed after the item has arrived. So as a buyer, you are going to have five days to tell us “hey this is a fake”, “something’s wrong with this” or “the conditioning is not as required” and then you can reverse the transaction and we’ll pay you. And we did that.

We feel very strongly about never ever paying a scammer. And we’ve not done that. We’ve had many people coming in, you know for example there are many Chinese vendors they’ve got basically fake items that they get produced. They come in and they put them up and you know for $60 items, $10 plus free shipping! People jump on that, people buy these. And we’re like “Oh, that’s going to be fake. But don’t worry, we have the money.” We don’t ever pay out to these people. Then they leave. We don’t actually see many coming anymore because they know they’re not getting any money. Well, the game plan is originally you put these items up on eBay, you make 30-40 sales, you get the money for 15 of them, you make a run before eBay is closing the account down and you create a new account. Same thing over and over again. Creating an eBay accounts costs nothing so they’d create hundreds of accounts every year and defraud people. We want to make it our mission to never ever pay these guys anything.

Mike: That’s the good way to do it. Then you’re just cutting them off and they just leave on their own. Like you said, that’s the best way to get rid of someone.

Christian: They don’t come back. Time costs them a little bit. If they never get paid, they just don’t come back. We think it works for us in the medium term. In the short term, it is painful cause we pay your money back. But we like the fact that we’ve had many, many buyers who bought something and then see this is fake and we are like “Do not worry we got your money”.

Josh: That’s awesome. That’s great. So in the spirit of making people’s days and or ruining their weeks you know, you’re pretty high up there on the chain, the corporate chain, we should say. How many emails do you get any emails? Do you get a lot of different, like weird slash upset slash funny shout outs, comments, emails, complaints, anything that you want to that stands out that you want to share that we can make fun of, that we could talk about? Anything that’s really rocked your world in the last few years.

Christian: Yeah. We get loads and loads of emails. Most emails fall into two camps. They really love what we do and want to say thank you. Or they really hate an aspect of the site or an experience. We also get funny emails. So we have model trains and get, mostly from India asking for a train timetable. Or you know, how to get from Mumbai to another city in India. We have model planes and we’ve got the other day a complaint where somebody complained about the food on an American Airlines flight. We got a guy who shared with us how much mileage this Hot Wheels car has done. You get some funny stuff coming here.

Josh: Yeah, I would assume.

Mike: We like to get our bad reviews and design t-shirts around them. So like, it’s like one star. These guys aren’t great.

Josh: Tee shirt, tee shirts like tattooed on my arm and things like that. Cause I don’t hold grudges.

Christian: Then the other thing I’d like to add as you talked about corporate stuff.  Fortunately, everyone in the team, there’s 16 of us and we all collect something. We love what we do, and we’ve now got 600 volunteers helping with the hobbyDB project at PPG, hobbyDB, The Toy Peddler and other websites.

Josh: That’s awesome.

Christian:  And then we’ve also, so we’ve always said “By Collector For Collectors” and we think that’s kind of important. We’re now taking this a step further; we are saying “By Collector For Collectors OWNED by Collectors”. We are currently doing a crowdfunding on WeFunder so people can now own a part of PPG. And if you ask me, I’d like to have every user owning at least one share. I want it to be something that’s totally shared with the community. So that takes us a step further where people don’t really complain anymore because they own it. They come in saying, “Hey, you know, this didn’t go through well, how can we make this better?” That’s kind of where we want to get to, where people come in and say, “I own this site, I use this site. And I want to help as much as possible”.

Josh: Yeah. And that’s great. And that’s a great way to run the organization, right. You’re always going to be able to get better. You have people invested, volunteer or not and that’s great. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Mike: I did buy a little bit.

Josh: You bought a little bit?

Mike: Don’t get too psyched. It was barely more than a share, but I did buy some.

Josh: Nice, contributing.

Christian: Nice. Thanks.

Josh: Thank you. Thank you. So obviously you know, we talk pops right where we got involved in this interview and everything else that we do because around Pops, so hopefully you as a Collector for Collectors, you collect some pops, right?

Christian: I have a large collection of all kinds of stuff.  I find that collecting has become a little bit too easy because you can go to hobbyDB and at this point of time you can buy about 52% of every product that Funko has ever made. And there’s actually a little bit higher than that because if you subtract socks and T-shirts that people really don’t buy that much then it’s probably 75%. I personally think that people should have a theme. That could be every single Funko Pop, although that’s going to be a bit hard to do. I like space toys from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Mike: Oh, nice.

Christian: And lucky for me I still have some room for it.  I like Buck Rogers, Dan Dare and creatures from those fandoms. I also like the spaceship from that period. So I collect stuff from that period or modernly made of that period.

Josh: That’s awesome. You know, like you said, everybody collects something, right? So it doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you’re having a blast with it.

Mike: That’s right. That’s right. Hobby!

Christian: I think you want to find something that you like. And that’s the beauty of today. You know, when I grew up, you kind of had to collect what was locally available ’cause it’s no fun if you can’t buy anything and you also need to collect something that kind of fits your budget. For example, I’d like to collect 1950s to 1960s tinplate robots from Japan, but you know every one of them sets you back $20,000. I don’t have that kind of money so I could buy one only every 10 years which would not be much fun.

Josh: Oh my God.

Christian: I think today you can actually really unusual stuff. You can collect say Argentinian taxi models if you wanted to. Because you can do it, you can buy them online.  I think it’s about having to search for them and making yourself knowledgeable – that’s the fun part. And you really have to be knowledgeable otherwise you’re going to be taken advantage of.

Josh: Oh yeah. That’s a very good point. Especially with the Funko Protos. That’s funny. So something I’m very interested in and I wanted to kind of pick your brain with, the Pop Culture Hall of Fame. How did you, how did you get involved with that?

Christian: Well, the Pop Culture Hall of Fame was actually initially called the Toy Collector Hall of Fame. It was part of an event in Las Vegas called the Super Toy-Con. I went once, and I thought this is great but could be so much bigger. When that event struggled, I spoke to the guy that owned it and we bought it.  We changed it to the Pop Culture Hall of Fame and since then we’ve inducted some really cool people. For example Reis O’Brien, Funko’s Chief Designer as well as Funko . So every year we induct a bunch of brands, like this year Star Trek for example. And we also induct a number of people and one charity.

Josh: That’s awesome. Go ahead, sorry.

Christian: You can see all that at popculturehall.com.

Josh: Right, right. So you induct X amount of people, right. And X amount of fans and maybe an X amount of podcasts. Question Mark.

Christian: Ha ha.  We also run the Model Car Hall of Fame and is the first year we’ve done that. We call it Influencer. We’ve inducted a YouTube Channel. It’s a new thing. I think that’s something we should do for the Pop Culture Hall of Fame as well.

Mike: So you’re saying there’s a chance.

Josh: You are telling us there’s a chance. That’s all I wanted to hear.

Christian: Yeah. So this year we inducted for example, Star Trek, I mentioned that.  But also Sideshow Collectibles, Final Fantasy, the Joker and then the charity called Extra Life which…

Mike: Great cause we meant to do that this year.

Christian: Last year we did the Pops for Patients, which I think is great.

Josh: Oh that’s awesome too. Yeah, we donated them too. That’s awesome. They’re one of our plugs on our shows. That’s pretty cool.

Christian: Yeah so, we inducted those guys, the idea is to give them a little bit of exposure and then value what they’ve done. So you know, those guys are in the same class that, so this year, for example, we’ve inducted Haim Saban of Power Rangers. Robert Downey Jr, Reis O’Brien, the chief design officer of Funko.

Josh: Reis is an awesome guy.

Christian: Hayao Miyazaki, Christopher Lloyd…

Mike: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty neat.

Josh: So you collect, we all collect, you know, what would, if you had to pick something by Funko, what would something you’d want them to make? Is there some dream Funko item?

Christian: Yeah, I really wanted them to do Buck Rogers and I don’t know if you know Dan Dare, a 50s character, very, very cool from the UK with great aliens.

Mike: I think I’ve heard of them. Josh is way younger than me, but his wife’s older than me, so you’ve got to give him a little…

Josh: Yeah. Okay. All right. That’s fair.

Mike: I have a question for you. And it’s a weird one because it’s a local company to us…

Josh: So you might not have ever heard of it.

Christian: Let me just finish on that. With one idea I thought it would be good and we should shout in the direction of HQ in Seattle. Lego does this thing now where you go to the Lego site and you can show them a model you made and you can say, “Hey, Lego people, do you want this?” and then Lego users can say “I like that”.

Josh: Lego Ideas!

Christian: Yes!  And if you can get 10,000 votes Lego makes it. Obviously, they need the license and so forth, but I think that would be cool. And then you can go out and talk to everybody.  So I would say “They should really do buck Rogers” (and then you would know what the guy looks like. I read about you that that you have some dogs with funny names.  So you could say “Hey, you should do a model of these dogs”. And then when they get 10,000 votes your dogs get made, you know, maybe…

Josh: Well, we’re going to see two-pack of the best podcasters around!

Mike: We’re going to see Funko next in two weekends from now at Toy Fair. We’ll give them our idea, right?

Josh: Yeah. Our idea.

Mike: All three of us. So I think you know what question is coming, because it’s like I said, I think this is a good one.

Josh: It’s a stupid question.

Mike: It’s not a stupid question. There’s a local company to us called Pittsburgh Plate Glass. They make glass and paint, but their websites, www.ppg.com are you mad that you can’t get that website?

Josh: You’re an idiot.

Christian: Yeah, of course. We were trying to buy the company.

Josh: Oh, there you go.

Mike: That’s what you got to do. Just buy the company. Take the website.

Christian: The site actually was what was called Pop Price Guide, but people start calling it PPG and it kind of stuck.

Josh: Yeah. It stuck all the time. That’s what I call it.

Christian: Something kind of happened. PPG.

Mike: It rolls off the top.

Josh: It’s these millennials, man. They will get you every time.

Mike: You take the Es out everything and just add an R.

Christian: I should probably take the moment to thank John Hamm. John actually was the guy who created Pop Price Guide, and he was doing it on his own. He was writing the code and as he was building it out we started talking.  He liked the vision of what we were doing. And there were some technical issues and he did not have all the skills needed to keep it going.  Then there were some problems with it going down all the time. We helped to keep it up and then we bought it.  He then worked with us for a year or two. I just want to make sure I mentioned his name.

There was him and then there were untold volunteers helped over the time managing pricing. We’ve probably had two hundred volunteers years over the years working on PPG and we still have a number of them. There are always new ones coming through. People were coming in and out. Sometimes they come back up after a time when they didn’t have time. Overall the volunteers have really done an amazing job. It wouldn’t have been possible without them.

Mike: Yeah, I did it for about six months.

Josh: Oh, that’s right. That’s right.

Mike: And it is interesting, it’s pretty intense sometimes when you look at how many you need to do and you’re like, Oh, geez.

Christian: Oh, I should say we improved the tools a lot. It’s much more matching and so and so forth. I think it’s actually now much more fun than it was.

Mike: Well, it wasn’t too bad when I did it, but sometimes you’d look at it and you’d be like, where did they even get this name from?

Josh: Yeah. That’s cool.

Mike: So is that the same process you do for all the sites? Where the volunteers go in and they take a look and they verify, make sure there’s no damage and then approve it.

Christian: Yes. You need a certain amount of, expertise to do it. There’s help and there are tools available.  As I said, we want to cover every collectible ever made. And with a team of 16 and all of us having at least one interest we cannot do it all.  We need volunteers.  Re volunteers, we have different people with different expertise, handling certain sections of the sides. And that includes everything from making sure that entries are correct and complete, to maybe adding images for the new things to helping with pricing.

Mike: It’s reassuring to know that there’s an actual set of eyes that look at it and not, you know, just some mechanical…

Christian: Yeah. It cannot happen automatically. You haven’t seen it because the tools have changed. So when you’re a volunteer and you look at say, a price from eBay and you compare it against something from the database, we now have everything color-coded. We tell you, “this is this within the range”. So this is the $30 item, and the guide says $31 for this item that makes it so much more a likely fit. Also, if you ever make a mistake, it’s not a big deal because the $30 on a $31 price guide entry, that’s okay. If it’s a $500 item and you want to apply a $10 price point to it, which happened in the past, that’s much harder now. It warns you, “Hey, you know, that doesn’t look like it’s the right fit!”. If you tried to do this automatically, say with a bot, then you end up, you know, all the special Comicon stickers end up on the common listings.

Mike: Right. And we can attest to a Funko pop collectors loving the con stickers because we are the same way.

Josh: I am all about that sticker.

Christian: Did you guys think that, do you care if an item has an Asia Pacific sticker?

Mike: I kind of, when it has liked an Asian specific sticker or a special edition sticker, like when I was over in Australia, I walked into a game stop over there and there were Target exclusives and Walmart exclusives, but they all just have the special edition sticker on there. And it took a lot for me to not buy some, just so that I had all the stickers. So like I understand fundamentally they’re the exact same thing, but Oh, you know, you really, you should have three because there’s three stickers.

Christian: Actually I think there are four as there’s a European sticker too.

Josh: Oh, see, there you go.

Mike: Son of a gun, you got me again. Speaking to Comicon’s and such, I’m sure being in the collecting field, you probably go to a ton of those. Right?

Christian: Yeah. I’ll try as much as I can. I go to lots of them. we cover all kinds of stuff, which I love.  So I go to pin swapmeets, I have just been to Designer Con in Pasadena. New York is coming up. Denver Comic Con is coming up. So, yeah, I love to go.

Mike: Yeah. The Comic-Con put the kibosh on other people. SDCC put the kibosh on people using Comicon, didn’t they?

Christian: Yeah. Yeah. Everybody had to change their name.

Mike: Some of them. I think Emerald City is still Emerald City Comic Con.

Josh: I think you are right.

Mike: Sticking it to them.

Josh: Cool. Well, go ahead.

Mike: So we have one question that we like to ask everybody that’s on the show. Do you eat cereal? Like breakfast cereal?

Christian: Yup.

Mike: When you’re done eating the actual cereal part.

Christian: That was the question?

Mike: No, that leads up. When you’re done eating the actual cereal and there’s milk left in the bowl, do you drink the milk, or do you dump it out?

Christian: Who would dump it out? You drink it.

Josh: That’s right. You drink it.

Mike: It’s been like 50 / 50.

Josh: My side. It’s not been 50 / 50 you’ve gotten like two weird people to say yes.

Mike: Ming Chen dumps it out and Sully dumps it out.

Josh: Whatever. Hey Christian, I appreciate you being on my side.

Christian: Well I miss the period when I was raised, there were always the toys and you had to get the bottom of the package. I kind of missed that. Maybe we’ll have to talk to Funko doing Mini Mini Pops and put them in there. That’d be cool.

Mike: They have cereals.

Josh: They kind of do that with the cereal. You have to be careful.

Christian: Not like that. But you got to buy that and there’s not much, not on my normal, you know Corn Flakes.

Mike: Oh, I see what you’re saying.

Josh: I want tare, tare, 10 of the top’s mailman with $2.95 on a stamp.

Mike: Like Dr. Pepper.

Josh: That’s right. So Christian, is there anything else you want to talk about or plug before we kick you off of here?

Christian: I’m just hoping that we can get more people involved in the project. You know, we’d love everybody to join and just take care of the part of the catalog that they like. It doesn’t really matter what that is.  We talked about Hot Wheels and Hot Toys, Kidrobot and Funko.  Whatever you like, we would love to have you on board!

In fact, we just launched something called Adopt A Superhero on  www.adoptasuperhero.com. We want everybody to adopt either a superhero or supervillain and be responsible for that character and kind of “protect” those guys’ heritage. There hace been thousands and thousands of these guys. Yeah and then some like Iron Man never die, but there are so many out there quite quirky ones that came out in the past and have never been heard off again.

Josh: Yeah. That’s great.

Mike: Sounds great. You go ahead.

Josh: I was going to say, make sure you check out hobbyDB if you haven’t already. Christian runs that and which is in part with PPG or is part of the hobbyDB. No, I’m not, I can’t talk. We’re checking out the invest in hobbyDB as well.

Mike: www.wefunder.com/hobbydb. I mean honestly, you use the website for free for how long, you know, own part of it!

Josh: Yeah, exactly. So we recommend you checking that out. The Adopt-a- Superhero, we’re going to look into that one too. You know, this is all great stuff, Christian. We’re so happy to have you on the show. Honestly, we’re so happy for everything you guys have done for us. Because PPG has been our bread and butter from the beginning. And you know, hobby DB is amazing as well. It’s incredible how much data you have. There’s got to be one heck of an Excel file somewhere. So that’s amazing, and we really just appreciate everything you do.

Christian: Thanks. And if anybody wants to ask a question, so there’s a green button on both PPG and hobbyDB to shoot me an email. And I’ll come back to you.

Josh: That’s great. Well Christian, thank you so much for having us. Or you have or us having you.

Mike: Well thanks for joining us.

Josh: Thanks for joining us. That’s right. Sorry, I’m new at this. No, we really appreciate it. And we wanted to say thanks again.

Christian: You are welcome. I have to think about the two of you now every time I eat breakfast.

Mike: Perfect. That’s how we like it. But we can’t thank you enough for coming on. I’m sure you’ve answered so many questions that collectors have wondered and haven’t been able to ask. So we will end the show here unless you got one last, you know, couple of last things to say,

Christian: Greeting from Boulder, Colorado, and thanks for having me. I’m always happy to come back.

Mike: We appreciate it. Thank you.

Josh: Thank you.

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