THE BIG HIT SHOW

“Sparkly Cardboard”

Season Four, Episode Four - Pokémon  

Western Sound / Higher Ground Productions / Spotify         

Alex Pappademas: Hello Taylor, how're you doing?

Taylor Jones: I'm doing great, Alex. How are you?

Alex Pappademas: I'm not bad. I’m not bad.

Alex Pappademas: Taylor Jones is one of the producers of The Big Hit Show. One specific qualification he brought to this season of the show is that when he was growing up in Atlanta in the late 1990s he was a big Pokemon fan. He had the Game Boy game. He watched the cartoon. But it all started with the card game, known to Pokemon fans and acronym fans as Pokemon TCG. That’s short for Trading. Card. Game.

Taylor Jones: I just remembered Pokemon was a thing at school one day. And I was like, I got to get one. And so I asked my mom to take me to a card shop and we bought one holographic Snorlax card, which you can't do anything with just one card. But I remember it was like $20 or something. It was in the case. I remember… yeah, that's the beginning. I was in there deep.

Alex Pappademas: Taylor shared his love for Pokemon with his adopted older brother Skyler. When Skyler first moved in with Taylor’s family, he brought some prized possessions with him.

Taylor Jones: When he moved in I remember him showing me, or having this binder, which I hold here in my hands. It's this Braves binder, it's blue vinyl. And he opened it up and this is like eighth grade. He showed me all these holographic cards. And I was shocked.

Alex Pappademas: Skyler passed on being interviewed for this show. He’s a little shy. He’s also on the autism spectrum. Taylor says that may have played a role in his early fascination with Pokemon card collecting.

Taylor Jones: Because it is a bit considered and focused. It's not just random cards. A lot of these are the special, holographic versions of them.

Alex Pappademas: This is a pretty intense collection and it's very themed.

Taylor Jones: Yeah they've been sitting in our parents' basement for the last… maybe 15 years now.

Taylor Jones: My mom shipped them here to LA, and here they are.

Alex Pappademas: So we’ve got a sizable collection of Pokemon cards from a person who took good care of them. And a lot of them are holos– cards where the picture of the Pokemon on the card is a hologram. The rarity of holos fluctuates depending on what era of cards we’re talking about– these are first-generation, when you were likely to get one holo in every third pack of cards. And they’ve been sitting in a binder for 15 years. Don’t know if this is in your head yet, but Taylor and I are both thinking, gold mine.

Taylor Jones: Dude right here, Charizard holograph. I feel like any holographic Charizard's got to be a game changer, college fund kind of thing.

Alex Pappademas: The market for rare Pokemon cards has exploded in recent years. And to our untrained eyes, these cards look like they have real potential.

Taylor Jones: Eight year old or nine year old Skylar did a good job putting this together. I feel like I'm just basically holding a version of those Publishers Clearing House checks, where they come to your house and they give you a bunch of money. I feel like this is a ticking cash bomb.

Alex Pappademas: From Higher Ground, this is The Big Hit Show, I’m Alex Pappademas. Thanks to a swarm of new collectors and nostalgic fans getting involved with the hobby, Pokemon card valuations have skyrocketed over the past decade. But the collectors’ market is just one way in which people have created their own contexts for experiencing Pokemon. When something hits as big and sticks around as long as Pokemon did and has, success isn’t just measured in fistfuls of yen or dump trucks of dollars. It’s about the way Pokemon becomes a part of people’s lives. The connections they forge around it. The Pokemon Company makes Pokemon products, but it’s Pokemon fans who imbue those products with meaning. In this episode of the Big Hit Show, we’re going to tell you some stories about how people interact with the ever-growing Pokemon universe — which go way beyond the simple yearning to quote-unquote catch 'em all. We’re talking about the meaning of life…as a Pokemon fan. Chapter Four: Sparkly Cardboard.

Laura Dale: I used to sneak my game boy into school. I would quietly play it at lunch. I would do trades with friends, I got very, very obsessed. It didn't matter that I'd completed the story mode very soon after getting it, I just wanted to spend more time in that world.

Alex Pappademas:  Laura Dale is a writer, and a video game critic. Laura has written a book, called Uncomfortable Labels about life as a gay trans woman on the autism spectrum. She’s also written a lot about accessibility in video games— the ways in which game developers have, and have not, started to take the needs of disabled players into account. Laura has spent a LOT of time playing various Pokemon video games. How many hours at this point, would you say that you have logged playing various Pokemon games, if you had to estimate?

Laura Dale: Well, lifetime? That's a hard estimate to do.

Alex Pappademas: She’s not sure what her lifetime number is, but in the five years since Nintendo came out with the Nintendo Switch– a gaming console that happens to log how much time you spend playing each game–

Laura Dale: I've put about 6,000 hours in since the Switch came out.

Alex Pappademas: When I laugh, that is not a judgment, that is merely me being impressed and kind of amazed. I'm just blown away, that was a higher number than I was expecting.

Alex Pappademas: 6,000 hours is 500 12-hour days by the way. Math. But Laura’s not just playing these games. She’s doing something very specific.

Laura Dale: I've gotten very into something called shiny hunting in the Pokemon series.

Alex Pappademas: Shiny hunters are into collecting these rare Pokemon known as “shiny” Pokemon. Color variants. Like a Pikachu who’s sort of a burnt orange instead of yellow. 

Laura Dale: And it doesn't do anything different. It's no better in combat. It's no more useful. It's just a randomly occurring, oh, that Machop’s green rather than gray.

Alex Pappademas: Shiny Pokemon started showing up in the first Pokemon games created specifically for the Game Boy Color in 1999. There are a lot of theories as to why they were introduced but nobody really knows. ​​It was just a quirk of the game that became a feature in later installments, if you happened to be looking for it.

Laura Dale: Every time you encounter a Pokemon in the Pokemon games from the second generation onwards, you've got a one in 4,096 chance in the modern games, it used to be half that, that chance used to be one in 8,000 something, a chance of a Pokemon showing up with a color variant design and a sparkling animation.

Alex Pappademas: Over time, Laura has figured out how to sort of beat the odds taking advantage of the mechanics of different Pokemon games to increase her chances of catching something shiny within the games.

Laura Dale: ‘Let's Go Pikachu’ for example, if you encounter the same species of Pokemon 32 times in a row without accidentally encountering a different species of Pokemon, you can get your odds of a shiny down to about one in 300. It's been this way of extending my time in this world and going, yeah, it's easy for me to find this Pokemon. I know, it's just over there in that patch of grass. But if I want a shiny one, I'm going to have to work for it in a way that feels really satisfying to me.

Alex Pappademas: Pokemon is one of those things that becomes a part of people’s lives, sometimes in intense and all-consuming ways. But there are all kinds of different ways to be obsessed with Pokemon. For everyone who’s on a mission like Laura’s— collecting shiny variants with no real monetary value, for pure recreation, just because it’s satisfying and soothing— there are countless other people trading and selling physical Pokemon cards as an actual real-world commodity.

Dani Sanchez: I have a Growlithe mug right here, look at it, it’s got Growlithe on it, it’s got Growlithe’s butt on it <laughs>.

Alex Pappademas: This is Dani Sanchez. They are a content creator and Pokemon card collector from Los Angeles, California. Dani first started collecting Pokemon cards as a kid, in elementary school. And like a lot of kids who get really into something, they eventually grew out of it. And gave it up.

Dani Sanchez: I think I sold most of our Pokemon cards in a garage sale or something, which is so sad. But then when I was in late middle school, early high school, I walked into a comic shop and I saw that they had Pokemon cards in there. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I haven't collected these. I haven't even opened a pack of these in years." I randomly bought a pack and then I was immediately hooked.

Alex Pappademas: If you, like Dani, are someone who collected your share of Pokemon cards back in whatever historical era constitutes “the day” for you, you might be thinking, They still make those? And in fact, they do. According to the Pokemon Company, during the 2021-2022 fiscal year, they sold NINE BILLION of them. Pokemon’s made over 100 billion dollars in the last twenty-five or so years, and the card game makes up the third-biggest piece of that absurdly large pie, after video games and merchandise. As of 2019, they’d sold $10.8 billion dollars worth of cards. And those numbers don’t even take into account the vast and complicated and often contentious secondary market that’s grown up around Pokemon cards— a high-stakes world of live-streamed auctions, online influencing and occasionally brazen criminality. On their YouTube channel SuperDuperDani, Dani posts a lot of box break videos. Where they acquire a sealed box of Pokemon cards, often vintage, from some bygone era like the year 2000, and crack that puppy open in front of the entire Internet.

Dani Sanchez: You'll take that sealed box and you'll individually sell the packs to people, to the viewers, and you'll open them live. So everybody gets to see the pulls and the one person who bought the pack gets those cards inside the pack.

Alex Pappademas: For spectators it’s kind of like watching somebody open Door Number 2 on Let’s Make a Deal. Maybe there’s a pair of goats back there, or maybe there’s the Pokemon card equivalent of a new car.

Dani Sanchez: I've had the opportunity to open some very, very rare trading cards. Boxes and packs that are worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So when you're opening those, it is extremely nerve-wracking, because if somebody paid like $10,000 for this one pack of cards, you don't want to mess it up. You don't want anything to happen to that card. If you get excited, you don't want to be jumping around. Like I remember one time I was on stage doing one and I was literally shaking a little bit. I was like, "Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh." Because they could get a card in their pack that's worth like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you don't want to be the one responsible for messing that up. And it's funny because it's all over cardboard, literally over sparkly cardboard.

Alex Pappademas: But you never know when you’re going to stumble on some specific piece of sparkly cardboard that makes all that box-breaking worthwhile. Or several pieces.  

Dani Sanchez: Okay. I had a crazy fluke happen with one of my box breaks, legit like a once-in-a-lifetime error that happened to this booster box.

<Archival: Dani Sanchez YouTube> Dani Sanchez: Hey guys! We’re here live at Collect-A-Con. I’m here hanging out at the WhatNot booth. Today, we’re going on an adventure. I’m going to try a find a vintage booster box of Pokemon cards.

Dani Sanchez: I bought it at a convention. It was legit. We checked it out.

<Archival: Dani Sanchez YouTube> Dani Sanchez: We’ll go ahead and get started then! First pack here we go. Okay. <gasps> Our first holographic! So that was . . . wow!

Dani Sanchez: The first few we were suspicious because I was like, "Okay, maybe it's top heavy." Maybe all of the hits are in the top and that's going to be weird.

<Archival: Dani Sanchez YouTube> Dani Sanchez: And . . . oh my gosh! Two hits, two packs in a row!

Dani Sanchez: And we opened some packs from the bottom and those had holos in them. And so as we continue to go through the box, I was like, "There's no way every single pack in here's a holo." And it was. I just about lost my mind.

<Archival: Dani Sanchez YouTube> Dani Sanchez: Are you kidding me dude?! What!

Dani Sanchez: Traditionally you'll get around 12 holographics in a box of Pokemon cards. There's 36 packs in there. You'll normally get about 12 holos. I got a booster box that had 36 out of 36 holographics in it, which has absolutely never been seen before. I could not find any documentation that this had ever happened. Ever. We were trying to figure out how this could have possibly happened. And we were all stumped. It was just especially because it was sealed for 20 years. It was sealed for almost 20 years. And it was a full box of hits.

Alex Pappademas: Pokemon as a whole keeps getting bigger and generating more revenue but the Pokemon card world is its own weird offshoot, and lately it’s been growing very quickly. The market for trading cards in general has gotten a lot bigger in the last few years. There are a few key contributing factors. Investors are looking for new kinds of assets to put their money into. Prominent online influencers are pulling off splashy deals and crowing about it on social media and thereby hyping trading-card prices to new heights. And then there’s COVID, which temporarily put an end to sports and most other forms of communal activity and forced fans to find different ways to be into things. eBay, which is now the leading indicator of the trading-card market, reported that trading card sales overall were up 142% in 2020. But more importantly, in that same period, sales of Pokemon cards on the platform went up by almost 600%. One year later, eBay reported a 536% rise in the gross merchandise value of Pokemon cards changing hands on the site— that makes it the fastest-growing non-sports card category on eBay. The most expensive Pokemon card ever sold at auction— a rare Pikachu card originally given away as a prize in a drawing contest put on by a Japanese magazine— went for $900,000 earlier this year, toppling the previous record of $375,000 for the same card. Dani says the amount of money now at stake has made Pokemon card collecting a different experience.  

Dani Sanchez: Now it seems it's a little bit more focused on the money part of collecting. So there's a lot more people in the community now. It was initially kind of like a little village that's now a big flourishing city, I guess, is a good way to describe it.

Alex Pappademas: Let’s put this in concrete terms. About ten years ago, when Dani was just starting their channel, they sold a booster box— that’s a box with 36 packs of Pokemon cards, in this case from the original Pokemon card set— for $360 bucks.

Dani Sanchez: And at the peak of the Pokemon craze, that box probably went for $25,000. Like it's just a huge, huge difference that I did not anticipate at all. So a lot of those cards that I just thought were interesting just because they were old are now so valuable that they're unobtainable to any average person.

Alex Pappademas: The intensified demand for cards has priced out everyday people, and even collectors like Dani.

Dani Sanchez: As somebody who collects solely for the purpose of actually collecting, it has been a little difficult since this big boom and the big surge in the price of a lot of this stuff. Everybody has kind of assigned these values to this stuff that did not have that monetary value before. And anybody who's just starting now is going to have a really, really hard time trying to collect these really cool cards that are a little more old school or a little more scarce.

Alex Pappademas: After the break, we will meet the man who is almost literally holding all the cards. The owner of one of the ultimate Pokemon card collections in the known universe. In Las Vegas, Nevada, a place where just one card can change your life, there lives a man whose awe-inspiring and seemingly unparallelled collection of Pokemon cards has changed his. He hangs out with celebrity DJs and YouTube stars. Justin Bieber has his phone number. And we managed to secure a meeting with him. And then I got Covid. So our producer, Taylor Jones, who you met at the beginning of this episode, went to Vegas to check out his collection in person. And I joined them via Zoom.

Taylor Jones: We're in Vegas, pulling up on Game Day Sports Cards.

Gary Haase: Hi Taylor, how you doing? Good to see you.

Taylor Jones: Good to see you too.

Gary Haase: All right, welcome.

Alex Pappademas: Gary Haase is a 68-year-old retired casino manager.

Alex Pappademas: But in the world of Pokemon collectors, he’s simply known as the King.  

Gary Haase: I've been known for 20, almost 25 years, as "King Pokémon."

Alex Pappademas: Yeah. Yeah, you're an international Pokémon celebrity.

Gary Haase: It's amazing. It is amazing. <laughs>

Alex Pappademas: Gary became the face of the secondary market for Pokemon cards back in 2017, when he appeared on the reality TV show “Pawn Stars” and offered to sell shop owner Rick Harrison some rare Charizard cards for half a million dollars.

<Archival: Pawn Stars>

Gary Haase: I have probably the world’s #1 Pokemon collection inside this case.

Rick Harrison: Little figures?

Gary Haase: Cards, and they’re all Charizards…

Pawn Stars Host: Chum?

Chumlee: Yeah?

Rick Harrison: This guy’s got “Poke-man” cards.

Chumlee: Rick, it’s not “Poke-man.” It’s “Poke-mon.”

Alex Pappademas: Harrison declined to make an offer on Gary’s cards. Which was good for Gary, because in today’s booming Pokemon-card market, those Charizards have appreciated and are now said to be worth millions, plural. When he met Taylor at the card shop, Gary brought along a few gems from his vast collection.

Gary Haase: These two, this is a Shadowless 9.5 Charizard. Value-wise, maybe a $100,000, something like that. And this is kind of a special one. This is a first edition base Charizard, gem mint, BGS 9.5 gem mint. And this is one of the cards I brought on my episode of Pawn Stars.

Taylor Jones: What are these three cards going for these days?

Gary Haase: Okay, these three, the PSA 9, first edition based Charizard, Blastoise, Venusaur. You know, maybe in the $60,000 to $80,000.

Taylor Jones: Wow.

Gary Haase: You know, something like that.

Alex Pappademas: When I spoke to Gary I asked him the million-dollar question– how much his collection of Pokemon cards is worth.

Gary Haase: It's safe to say it's well over $10 million.

Alex Pappademas: So I guess it’s more of a ten-million dollar question.

Gary Haase: But I don't have any idea how much over that it would be. I really don't. Not only do prices fluctuate, and have they gone up so much recently. I don't keep spreadsheets or anything like that on them, so I really don't know. That takes more work than time I have left on this planet to figure out.

Alex Pappademas: It is good to be the King, but for Gary, the monetary value of these things is sort of beside the point.

Gary Haase: I was never much of a seller. I just love to collect and I am a bit of a hoarder and in this case that turned out to be a huge benefit that I was.

Alex Pappademas: For Gary, it all started with a Coke machine. It was around 1959. He was five years old. Coca-Cola started putting football players’ faces on bottle caps. Back then the machines had built-in openers so you could pop your bottle, and a little container that would collect the caps. Gary didn’t even know why, but he knew he had to have all those football player caps.

Gary Haase: I was a completionist. I wanted to complete the sets. And so my dad taught me to connect a magnet to the end of a stick, and then put it down the little container in the soda machines, and then pull up the bottle caps. And so, I would go to every gas station I could reach, and get those bottle caps out.

Alex Pappademas: After that he got into cards. It was a golden age of trading cards. They made them for TV shows like The Munsters and The Addams Family. Gary collected them all. And Gary just kept collecting. And then in the late ‘90s, he heard about an episode of a Japanese cartoon show with strobe effects that had caused a mass seizure incident among Japanese children.

Gary Haase: That hit the international news. That was the first I heard about Pokémon, was from that. After that we just kept hearing Pokémon this and Pokémon that and I just thought this would be a cool thing to bring over to the states. Put up a little investment and see how it would work out.

Alex Pappademas: Gary started selling Pokemon cards in America before they were officially available here.

Gary Haase: You know, we brought cards, the Japanese promos, from Japan. We had them professionally graded. And then we sold them on what at the time was like the Home Shopping Network on TV.

<Archival: Home Shopping Network> HSN Host: Hi I’m Betty Lee, welcome back to ‘Shop at Home’. Also welcome back to the only place on the globe to get the most collectible thing on the globe, and that is Pokemon cards.

Alex Pappademas: But in 1998, the contract to make and distribute a US version of the Pokemon card game went to the American company Wizards of the Coast, who’d just had a huge hit earlier in the decade with the card game known as Magic: The Gathering. And that was the end of the line for importers like Gary.

Gary Haase: They cut out all the people outside of their own company because they realized there was such a big hit and there was a lot of money to be made. And from that point on, I turned into a collector sharing the experience with my sons.

Alex Pappademas: The first Pokemon cards produced in the US came out in January 1999. Within six weeks, Wizards of the Coast had sold about 400,000 packs. By the end of 1999, they’d sold more than a million packs. In those days Pokemon cards were scarce all over, but they were slightly easier to find on the West Coast. Gary was fighting cancer at the time, so he wasn’t working. And his sons loved Pokemon. So they started going on road trips, hitting up card shops everywhere from Vegas to the Pacific Northwest. And that was how Gary started his new life as a Pokemon card collector. Today, Gary is undoubtedly one of the world’s preeminent individual experts on Pokemon card values. And since the big appraisal houses that evaluate trading cards can take a really long time to assess a collection, we figured we’d short-circuit the process a little bit and get a ballpark valuation of Taylor’s cards from the King himself.

Gary Haase: Well, certainly this binder has been well loved. No question about that. It's all beat up and the outside is broken binders and Atlanta Braves, I guess that is on the cover. But you know, inside's the treasure, let's see.

Gary Haase: Okay. Well, he definitely got the Charizard from the base set. That's a very nice card, depending on condition.

Taylor Jones: Well, if there's anyone, I feel comfortable touching these cards, I feel like it's probably you.

Gary Haase: Yeah. I'll be nice. That's for sure. I'm going to take a look at that Charizard first, just to try to gauge condition.

Taylor Jones: Sure.

Gary Haase: Well this one's not in bad shape. There is some foiling around the outside. Little dent here…I say that, but that's actually nicer than what I normally see. People bring me sets, they were throwing them and... which gets closest to the wall or put them in their bicycle spokes or something to make a noise. That's how they normally look. These are actually in nice condition, considering they were a little kid's collection and he definitely took care of his cards.

Alex Pappademas: Finally Gary and Taylor got down to brass tacks.

Taylor Jones: So, so what are we looking at here? Crush my dreams or tell me I should be going to the Bellagio. What are you looking at?

Gary Haase: OK. If I had to put a number on this without actually seeing all the cards that are hiding in between cards, I would probably put in the area of maybe $300, something like that. Okay? I could be off a bit.

Taylor Jones: For the whole album?

Gary Haase: For the whole album. Yeah… If the cards inside were in perfect condition or like they came out of a pack, then you'd be looking at probably $4-5,000. So condition is everything. But that's true with just about all collectibles.

Taylor Jones: Well…Thank you for looking at that.

Greg Haase: Certainly.

Taylor Jones: Yeah. Alex, I don't know if you can register the sadness on my face.

Alex Pappademas: I can hear it in your voice man.

Alex Pappademas: Gary’s Pokemon collection is huge. It’s spread across three storage units whose locations he will not disclose. People know this about him. Famous people who are using the proceeds of that fame to invest in rare Pokemon cards. And sometimes those people come to Gary, hoping he has the card they can’t live without — and that he will agree to sell it to them.

Gary Haase: I do get quite a few names of people that I don't know, but they're extremely popular. People like Logic, who's apparently a rapper or something, and Justin Bieber. Him, I did know.

Alex Pappademas: Here’s Beebs in 2019, showing off his collection on Instagram Live.

<Archival: Justin Bieber  IG Live Video> Justin Bieber: Got this made the other day. Check it. All the Pokemons. First generation. Don’t come at me unless you got all the first generation Pokemon cards. All of em. Ok Justin, we get it. You have all of them.

Gary Haase: And then he started having representatives contact me every two, three weeks or something like that. And it just wasn't something that I wanted to… that I could easily deal with.

Alex Pappademas: Gary did end up selling one of his rare Charizard cards to the big-time EDM DJ Steve Aoki, who got super into collecting Pokemon cards during the pandemic when he couldn’t do shows. Aoki, who also lives in the Las Vegas area, was another person Gary had never heard of, but they really hit it off. They’re now, like, actual friends.

Gary Haase: Yeah. I've jumped off his balcony to a ball pit.

Alex Pappademas: On YouTube, Aoki has channels for his music, but also runs a channel called Aoki’s Cardhouse, where he does box-break videos similar to Dani’s and shows off rare finds. Aoki is reportedly the third-highest-paid DJ in the entire world. So he instantly became a big deal in the world of Pokemon-card collecting.  But around the same time, another challenger entered the celebrity-Pokemon-collector ring. Logan Paul, age 27, is a Youtube personality, occasional amateur boxer, and jack of no particular trade who has lately added wild Pokemon card speculation to the list of things he does as part of his clickbait existence. In 2020, Paul approached Gary, looking to acquire a first-edition Charizard of his own.

Gary Haase: I had never heard of him. But after he contacted me, and wanted to come over and get together, and that, of course I looked him up, to, I wanted to make sure he wasn't a Charles Manson, or anything like that. I looked him up, and I saw 20 million followers on his YouTube, and I thought, "Well, I guess that's safe."

Alex Pappademas: In a transaction that was, of course, captured on video and posted to YouTube, Paul offered Gary one hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash for just one of his seven PSA-10 graded Charizard cards. And Gary took the deal– albeit reluctantly.

Gary Haase: It really hurt. It really... I mean, I remember him sitting on my couch, and looking me right in the eye, and so honest, so sincere, and so respectful, all the things you wouldn't expect out of Logan, because I know he's a bit of a crazy guy, right, on his persona, I just suddenly felt, it was no, no, no, no, no, until it came to that moment where I felt that this was just simply the right thing to do.

Alex Pappademas: Gary knew what making this very public deal with a very public figure like Logan Paul, in front of Paul’s twenty million plus YouTube subscribers, could potentially do for the mainstream profile of Pokémon card collecting as a whole.

Gary Haase: Cause people were thinking, well, if Logan Paul is spending millions of dollars on this stuff, and he has Squirtle tattoos on his legs, and things like that, well, this is pretty cool, right? If it's cool for Logan, it's cool for me.

Alex Pappademas: Influencers do influence people, after all. And Paul’s transaction with Gary did seem to have some real impact. Suddenly people who’d never thought about pictures of pocket-sized monsters as an investment category were intrigued. And Gary was deluged with messages from people looking to find out if their cards were worth money.

Gary Haase: I mean, it just blew up the interest, which is what my purpose was, it was the whole reason I did it, because I didn't want to, and I didn't have to, but I knew it would help Pokémon, you know that's what I cared about.

Alex Pappademas: But according to Dani Sanchez, the rise of the demicelebrity Pokémon card enthusiast has been a mixed blessing for people who’ve been in the game for a while.

Dani Sanchez: People like Logan Paul, who was not necessarily in the Pokemon community and then kind of jumped in and made a huge impact while making these videos on these extremely rare, high end products… those kinds of people I think are influencing others to join the community, to maybe behave in a certain way within the community.

Alex Pappademas: And let’s face it. If you were making a PG-13 comedy set in the wild world of Pokemon card collectors, Logan Paul is like the guy you’d cast as the profligate goofball who’s in it for the attention and the cash. When Paul made his debut on the WWE’s Wrestlemania this spring, in addition to being dressed in black and yellow leather like an X-Force villain from the ‘90s, he was wearing what he said was a 5 million dollar Pikachu card on a diamond-encrusted chain around his neck. Paul later announced that he had made this card into a non-fungible-token, or NFT, because of course he did. And if any of this makes you long to see Mr. Paul take an L— well, I don’t want to spoil it but you may want to visit his YouTube channel and check out a video entitled I Lost $3,500,000 on Fake Pokemon Cards. That happened, although he reportedly got the money back. But fake online auction listings are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Pokemon-card related crime. Since the moment the cards hit the scene and became a sensation, people have been trying to steal them. Recall the second-season episode of The Sopranos, from way back in the year 2000, where Chris Moltisanti tips off Big Pussy about his plan to take down a truckload of quote Pokeyman cards. 

<Archival: FOX 9 KMSP> Newscaster: A punch in the gut for Punch Out Gaming in Forest Lake. The small business broken into with thieves making off with thousands in Pokemon merchandise. That’s our top story tonight.

Alex Pappademas: Earlier this year, a man broke through the back wall of a card and game shop in Minnesota and helped himself to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of Pokemon cards. But if you’re not looking to put the time into pulling an Ocean’s 11 on the Android’s Dungeon, there’s always forgery. Dani Sanchez again.

Dani Sanchez: There's been issues, especially with those high end boxes, because if you're spending $10,000 or $20,000 on a box, that's worth a scammer's time to try to replicate a fake.

Alex Pappademas: Last year, customs officials at an airport in Shanghai seized almost eight tons of fake Pokemon cards bound for the Netherlands and presumably, distribution across Europe. In a world where everyday people are willing to drop five figures on what could be a disappointing or even worthless box of Pokemon cards, you might expect to find a longtime collector like Gary Haase running the table in a kingly manner. Wheeling and dealing. Buying and selling from his vast holdings.  But apart from very occasionally accepting an unrefusable offer from the likes of Logan Paul or Steve Aoki, Gary is mostly content to just own the cards he owns. He’s kind of attached to them.

Gary Haase: I am an awful seller. I'm not interested in the day-to-day value. I've sold like two cards in the last two years. And I sold them to people that I thought could help the hobby. And so, for me, the value is going to mean more after I'm gone to my family. And when I look at my collections, I don't see dollar signs at all. What I see is just the love of the hobbies. That's all that matters these days. That and our autism charities, you know that's it. So I mean if I sold these for $10 million, that $10 million would do what? Would go in the bank, or it would go into investments that I'll never live long enough to enjoy.

Alex Pappademas: At the end of the day the cards are just cards. They have only the value we assign to them. Pokemon as a whole is like that. It’s just a silly monster-hunting game but individual fans have invested it with meaning. And from that perspective, Gary’s cards aren’t valuable; they’re priceless.

Taylor Jones: What's your daughter's name?

Gary Haase: Akara.

Taylor Jones: Akara. Nice.

Gary Haase: Akara-

Taylor Jones: It's beautiful.

Gary Haase: Hi.

Taylor Jones: Hey-

Akara: Hi.

Alex Pappademas: Gary’s daughter Akara is seven years old. And she’s autistic. Gary’s wife, Thuan, is a special-ed teacher who works a lot with kids on the spectrum.

Gary Haase: You know that's really our big passion outside of our hobbies is what we can do for autism.

Alex Pappademas: Gary’s used his platform as King Pokemon as well as his relationships with celebrity Poke-pals Logan Paul and Steve Aoki to raise money and awareness around autism.

Gary Haase: All three of us do charity work for autism. And anytime those events come up, they're always, boom, right there to help me with our fundraisers.

Alex Pappademas: This stuff is obviously very personal for Gary, but as he points out, autism advocacy as a cause has some natural affinities with the gamer/collector culture surrounding Pokemon.

Gary Haase: If gamers and collectors have nothing else in common, it's extreme focus. It's extreme focus and interest and not easily distracted and can spend hours and hours and hours on their video, doing their video games, or on their collections or surfing eBay, looking for cards they need. And so it kinda comes natural and something maybe you know, maybe a lot of our listeners here don't know, the person who created Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri, has autism and is an autistic man. And he created Pokémon. I love saying that without autism, there would be no Pokémon.

Alex Pappademas: That story, about Taijiri being in some way on the autism spectrum, has been around for years. It gets repeated because it seems to explain so much about the culture and mechanics of Pokemon– and why autistic people tend to find the Pokemon games so appealing. Here’s writer and games critic Laura Dale, who identifies as autistic, talking about the specific allure of Pokemon.

Laura Dale: You are just quietly going off into the world to go sort your little collection of things that you are going to be the best at. And you're going to know more about, than anyone else in the world. And you don't need anyone else's help. There is something about that, that I think strikes a chord with a lot of autistic people who just want to get on with obsessively cataloging information about the things they love, without the rest of the world really bothering them on that journey.

Alex Pappademas: If you’ve listened to this show, you know a bit about Tajiri by now. As a kid, he was so obsessed with collecting and cataloging insects that other children supposedly called him Dr. Bug. Later, as urban sprawl encroached on the undeveloped areas where he’d once gone bug hunting, he recreated that experience in a video game about catching so-called Pocket Monsters. A game that had a battle component, but was really about completism, and accumulating knowledge, and the freedom to explore a space that still had clearly-defined boundaries and rules. For Pokemon fans on the spectrum, the idea that Tajiri himself was autistic adds a layer of resonance to the games and their various offshoots. It positions Tajiri as an autistic person who’s succeeded not in spite of that but because of it– someone who took a neurodivergent point of view and built a game around it that became a franchise that continues to captivate the world. But more importantly and more simply, people like to feel seen. And one of the most life-sustaining things we get from anybody’s creative work is the sense that there’s a person behind it who understands us, even if we’ve never met them.

Kate Ringland: If you think about video games, there's lots of video games where the point, if you will, of the game is to win it, to get to the end and you know beat the final boss or win the race.

Alex Pappademas: Kate Ringland is an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz who’s done a lot of research on the way people with disabilities interact with technology, and specifically the intersection of neurodivergence and gaming. She says Pokemon is a great example of a type of game that a lot of neurodivergent people find rewarding.

Kate Ringland: I think with a lot of these kind of more open ended games and things like Pokémon, I mean you can win in the more traditional sense, but there are accomplishments and there's ways to feel successful in the game that don't strike that same kind of like, "Oh, I've beaten the final boss and now I'm done and I can walk away." This is more of an ongoing, "Oh, I need to complete this collection." Or, "Oh, I need to finish filling in this map." These still give you that sense of success. The world is not built for neurodivergent folks in the same way that it's built for neurotypical folks. And having a place where you can feel that success, whatever that means to you. I think that's the most important thing.

Alex Pappademas: So here’s the thing.

Alex Pappademas: Although Pokemon seems in so many ways like something an autistic person might have come up with, there’s actually no real evidence to support the claim that Tajiri is in any way on the autism spectrum. He’s never talked about it. The story about Tajiri supposedly being autistic seems to have originated in a 2009 English-language biography written for young readers— the kind of book you might do a book report on in the fourth grade. The author of that book later admitted that her only source on the autism thing was a Satoshi Tajiri page on Myspace that she later realized was probably fake. Tajiri is not active on any social media in any public-facing way. He is an extremely private guy. We should probably note here that Nintendo and the Pokemon Company declined to participate in this podcast and did not make Tajiri available for an interview. But there is an official denial on record. One autism advocacy page that featured Tajiri as an example of a successful person with autism received an email from someone identifying themselves as a press officer from Tajiri’s game-development company, Game Freak. It said quote, “Tajiri has not Autism and Asperger syndrome,” and continued by requesting the page in question be taken down. Laura Dale knows all this, but also says she understands why people want to believe the story about Tajiri, even if it’s been debunked.

Laura Dale: There's something really comforting in the thought that your autistic special interest was made by someone with the same obsessive level interest as you. And that there is something connecting you to the creator of this thing you love. I understand where that appeal comes from, regardless of the fact that it feels very strange to label someone with a disability that they've never publicly said they have, particularly with someone who is such a notoriously private person. It is a game about going on a big grand adventure that largely doesn't involve other people but when it is time for you to connect with other people, there are mechanics in place to go. You have utility to offer someone else to start a conversation, which I think is a common theme for a lot of autistic people. That the way that the games manage making these full, these perfect collections just does something good for the brain. My journey with the Pokemon series began basically as soon as the games came out in the UK. I was maybe six years old.

Alex Pappademas: By then, Laura was already into video games, but Pokemon spoke to her on a different level.

Laura Dale: At the time, I really struggled with socialization as an autistic child who'd only just started school: I really lacked the communication skills I needed to connect with other people.

Alex Pappademas: But in the late 90s, when the whole world– or at least, all the kids in Laura’s world– started talking about Pokemon, she suddenly had a reason to join those conversations.

Laura Dale: As someone that didn't really know how to socialize, it was this really useful starting point. I could basically rely on anyone in my age bracket growing up, at the very least having a passing understanding of Pokemon.

Laura Dale: That paired with the fact that as someone who had a very obsessive-level interest from a young age in the series, I was able to be socially useful.

Alex Pappademas: Decades later, the mobile game Pokemon Go kickstarted an international resurgence of Pokemania, and Laura found herself once again navigating a challenging new set of social circumstances with help from Pokemon.

Laura Dale: A few years after Pokemon Go came out, I finally moved away from my hometown for the first time. I'd lived basically the first 25 years of my life in one town and never left. And moving to a completely new place, several hours away, I found that once again, Pokemon Go was really useful for making local connections it once again, gave me this excuse to do a shared activity with other people. And you had a shared interest and use that as a way to start talking to people. And it made moving somewhere new a lot less scary. It was a really nice connecting experience.

Alex Pappademas: And while Pokemon has changed Gary Haase’s life in any number of high-profile ways, the most important thing it’s done for him has nothing to do with YouTube or influencers or professionally-graded hologram cards. It’s become something he can share with his daughter, Akara.

Gary Haase: She loves Pokémon. She is verbal and especially verbal when it comes to naming Pokémon. She's not real sociable, but she's very sociable when it comes to her Pokémon or comes to her stuffed animals and that. She won't play with other kids, but she'll play with her own things like Pokémon plushes for hours on end. So it definitely plays a part in her development. And we try to use that as a springboard to other things and it works out well for us.

Alex Pappademas: After that disappointing card assessment in Las Vegas, Taylor caught a ride back to the airport with King Pokemon and Akara.  

Taylor Jones: Yeah. I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, but my brother, my adoptive brother who had these Pokemon cards, he has Asperger's.

Gary Haase: Oh, okay.

Taylor Jones: So-

Gary Haase: Yeah. That's ... I know a lot of people in the community don't like to say high functioning and that, but Asperger's I think would be considered like high functioning autism. And she doesn't have that. Also, they're not even using Asperger's anymore. These days, it's just one spectrum. You're somewhere on the spectrum. But they don't differentiate Asperger's anymore.

Taylor Jones: You be well, my friend.

Gary Haase: Sure will. It's been a real pleasure, Taylor.

Taylor Jones: Bye Akara.

Gary Haase: Okay.

Taylor Jones: Nice to meet you.

Gary Haase: (to Akara) Goodbye Taylor. Goodbye Taylor.

Akara: (Goodbye Taylor)

Gary Haase: There you go!

Taylor Jones: Thank you so much! Thank you!

Gary Haase: That's an honor to get one of those.

Taylor Jones: Oh my gosh. I feel honored. Thank you Akara. Bye Gary.

Gary Haase: Bye.

Taylor Jones: Bye-bye.

Alex Pappademas: Next time on The Big Hit Show– the Future of Pokemon. In which these cute little monsters will follow you everywhere….

Greg Miller: What's Pokemon going to be? Pokemon is going to be whatever the audience wants it to be, and whatever Pokemon thinks it should be. 

Alex Pappademas: …redefine what it means to “grow up”....

Kathleen Tia: I'm officially old, but I don't feel old. That's one of the things about this game is, it helps me feel younger.

Alex Pappademas: …and help you figure out how to sensibly invest your hard-earned money.

Thundercat: I do exactly what you would think I do when I get to Japan. I start drooling immediately. Every now and again, somebody has to... I almost have a handler when I get there, to try to like, "Please make sure that he doesn't try to... We're trying to preserve his life right now."

Alex Pappademas: From Higher Ground, this is The Big Hit Show. It’s written and hosted by me, Alex Pappademas, and produced by Western Sound. Colin McNulty is our showrunner. Producers are Taylor Jones and Sabrina Fang. Our production assistant is Stella Hartmann. Nicole McNulty and Savannah Wright are our fact checkers. Production help from Tyler Hill. Alex MacInnis is our composer, sound designer and mix engineer. Theme music and studio direction by Dan Leone. The Executive Producer is Ben Adair. Our Editor is Jamie York. Executive producers for Higher Ground are: Dan Fierman, Anna Holmes, Mukta Mohan, and Janae Marable. Jenna Levin is our editorial assistant. Executive producers for Spotify are: Daniel Ek, Dawn Ostroff, Julie McNamara and Corinne Gilliard. Special thanks to Joe Paulsen and Eric Spiegelman.