Episode 7. The guest is John — Cincinnati Picker — and the title isn’t a tease. He has opinions. Opinions on the reseller-course people who are still out there charging $1,000 to teach you what eBay’s sold filter would teach you for free, opinions on the 2017-era YouTube bashing circle that he watched eat itself, and opinions on which 443K-subscriber reseller he doesn’t trust himself to interview for a full hour. We also covered the Reseller Rally in Cincinnati that John is co-running this year, a 50-pallet media buy he pulled off back when he had a warehouse, and a Crazy Dreamers hot-seat moment where Ryan got asked, on air, whether he’s even technically a reseller anymore.

The Reseller Rally pitch — and why the website doesn’t say what it is

[3:51] Hot Lunch Reselling left a comment on our last episode pointing out that the Reseller Rally website never actually explains what a Reseller Rally is, so I made John pitch it cold. His version: 99% of resellers are a one-person show, the job is isolating, and the Rally is two days where you stop being one person and become several hundred for a weekend. Pete started it in 2017 in Chicago. John’s now running it. The 2026 dates are set, Pete is confirmed, and Lonnie and Ryan have a hotel block booked.

[7:38] The reason this year’s Rally has a paid pre-event is funny in retrospect: in 2021, John booked a German restaurant for the pre-Rally hangout and the COVID-era seating rules had everyone in their assigned chair like a third-grade lunchroom. He stood up, said something, and the whole group got politely escorted out. A year later they took over the hotel bar instead and that got them banned too. Now the Rally rents a ballroom and prepays appetizers. Necessary infrastructure for a group of resellers who refuse to sit in their seats.

50 pallets, $100 a pallet, and Great Courses DVDs

[15:50] Back when John still had his Look What I Found warehouse and a five-person crew, he bought 150,000 pieces of media — DVDs, CDs, video games — for somewhere around $100 a pallet. Fifty pallets. Four months to work through it with a team. He framed it the way I think about every $5 jewelry box: “Yes, the price is right, but the money’s in the work.” Cheap inventory is only cheap if you have the labor to clear it.

The lasting souvenir of that buy is what he learned: Great Courses DVDs and CDs — the professor-on-camera adult-ed sets — still move on eBay if you pick the right titles. He scanned 500 of them at a garage sale last year for $150 and is over $1,000 deep on the listings. Half he listed individually, half he lotted up.

”Fast nickel over the slow dime”

[21:45] John’s current setup is 700 square feet — half office, half storage — and he runs it on the principle of fast nickel over the slow dime. He moves 90% on eBay, 1% on Facebook Marketplace, and 9% through a local online auction (the same business he sold to a guy named Andrew back in 2018, now run by a different friend on the High Bid platform). Bulk and weird stuff goes to the auction; the eBay-friendly stuff gets listed; nothing sits.

Tied to that: he does about five Whatnot shows a month selling baseball-card singles. Quit during the 2022 panini-flood and came back when the singles market settled. His take on Whatnot from the seller’s side — “I’d rather have a sustainable model where I’m selling to people outside of my own reach” — is exactly the case Josh from Hairy Tornado made on last week’s episode. Two resellers, very different scales, same conclusion about why Whatnot pulls buyers eBay never sees.

The $220 perfume-brick buy

[40:21] Last Friday Candice and I paid $220 at a garage sale for fourteen bricks of perfume samples — about 16 vials per brick — plus full bottles. Listed at $30 a brick on eBay; one discontinued scent at $20 per sample. John knows the category cold because he made a $5,000 buy a year ago that required a box truck. His tip on samples: skip eBay, take them to a local online auction. Buyers there don’t argue about whether a 0.05 ml vial is “full enough” the way the eBay perfume crowd does.

The bit that almost made it the whole post: John and I both, completely independently, started calling them “bricks” — like we’re moving narcotics. Reseller pidgin.

”Is Crazy Ryan even a reseller?”

[50:41] A real comment we get a lot. I put Ryan on the hot seat for it. His answer: still active on eBay, store is open, 20 sales in the last 90 days. John pointed out that’s basically a healthy part-time pace, then we both laughed at the YouTube-comment archetype that has decided what a reseller is supposed to look like and bashes anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. “There are a million different ways to do this thing.” Ryan, for the record, is a reseller. The Pitchfork Mob can stand down.

”Most YouTube resellers don’t talk about this”

[55:08] John’s second channel — the flipper channel — is where he writes the post you’re not getting from most reseller YouTubers. Most recent episode: his January listing goal was 200, he hit 124, and he made a whole video about why the slow month happened and what the comp data is doing. His framing: “reselling is not all unicorns and rainbows… most YouTube resellers want to make it to be like you’re just going to get rich all the time and they don’t show the warts.”

If you’ve ever watched a reseller channel and felt like the haul-to-sale ratio they imply is suspicious — yeah. John agrees. The flipper channel is at 4,000 subscribers and growing, and it’s where he posts the stuff the garage-sale audience doesn’t want to hear.

The malfeasants and the bashing circle

[1:00:25] This is the part the title is about. I asked John for the latest YouTube-reseller “malfeasants” he’d called out. He named the pattern, not the people: “if you give me $1,000 for this course, you’re going to make X amount of money.” Empty-promise course pushers. We pulled at the thread and got two old names — the Green Room (mostly defunct), Raiken (still around), Bonafide Hustler (whose RC-car content John actually likes) — and then the bigger one Ryan brought up: Rockstar Flipper just posted a video stepping back from reselling content, leading with positives, then turning negative on Nicole State. John hadn’t seen it. The energy when Ryan named it told me he had complicated feelings.

[1:04:34] “Back in the day, like 2017, 2018, it was just this revolving circle of four or five YouTubers. One would bash one and they’d bash the other and they’d bash them and over and over and over again. It’s stupid. So dumb.” That’s the cleanest summary I’ve heard of what the YouTube reseller community used to look like. John watched the whole cycle. He’s the grandfather of this corner of the platform — his words — and he’s earned the right to call it dumb.

The Mojo warehouse pick

[1:05:00] John offered to take Ryan and me picking when we get to Cincinnati for the Rally — his friend Mojo runs a 15-to-20,000-square-foot space curated for 80s/90s toys, vintage clothes, band tees, and “if you can think of it, the guy has it.” Bundle deals, no individual pricing, and Mojo lets you film. We’re flying in, so we’ll have to ship anything home, but I’m not turning it down.

”Ten minutes maybe”

[1:11:40] Closing bit. Ryan asked John if he’d ever talked to Hairy Tornado on the phone. “Ten minutes maybe.” Ryan tried to get him to commit to a podcast with Rockstar Flipper as the next guest. John didn’t say yes. “I can handle ten minutes of talking to anybody. But once you get out to an hour, that could go bad.” Honest answer. Most podcast bookings should be made on that math.

We’ve got two more guests booked in this run — same energy as this episode — so stick around for those. Subscribe to Cincinnati Picker, watch the flipper channel for the warts-and-all videos, and we’ll see y’all at the Rally.