KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEW, PART FIVE

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V27 2024 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 27, Number 45, November 10, 2024, Article 16

Greg Bennick's latest interview for the Newman Numismatic Portal is with Young Numismatist Kellen Hoard. Here's the fifth and final part, where Kellen discusses his perspective on the hobby's direction as a younger numismatist. -Garrett

GREG BENNICK: That's great. I'm excited for this. This is fantastic. So, okay. So, thinking about the badass coin threw me off just for a second because I love it so much. I was just going to ask: being a younger collector, younger researcher, younger writer, how do you feel about the hobby and where it's going in general? I'm not looking for It's bad. It's good. I am looking for, what are your feelings about it?

KELLEN HOARD: I think it's more hopeful than it's been in a long time in that, the constant conversation since I was at the first entry point collecting is, Where are all the young people? We are screwed. I don't hear that very much anymore, and about five years ago, I stopped being concerned about it. Because increasingly what you see is that there are a lot of young people involved in numismatics. I mean a lot and not just YNs, but 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds and so on. There's a few reasons why. One is that the internet has really done great things for coins.

The Instagram people. There are countless transactions on Instagram and Facebook every single day totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is real business happening online. So, it's harder to see visually, but there's real activity. There's also real activity outside the United States and that's harder for collectors at local shows to see. Collectors in Japan or in Europe. They're not in Hong Kong, they're not seeing that at their local show, so it's you know kind of hard to judge where the young people are there.

But also what we see, is that there's a lot of young vest pocket dealers who are very excited about the hobby, who are very engaged, who are making a lot of money. That is an incentive to draw people into the hobby. There's a lot of money in it to be made, and they're not just dealers. They're collectors. They really enjoy the hobby. I was just at the ANA show. There were a lot of young people on the floor. I mean what you just saw, and that's why I think you hear less of that conversation. A lot of programs have kind of popped up at larger, more institutional, coin companies, to harvest the talent. Witter Coin University was one of them that popped up. Stacks Bowers' Professional Numismatist Program. PNG Next Gen, Heritage has internships, PCGS internships, ANA summer seminar with the YN program there. I mean there are a lot of opportunities for young people popping up, to be basically picked up and brought into these, now billion-dollar, corporations that are happening. It is hard to stop the momentum of that. And I think young people just get sucked in automatically.

I think there are collectors and dealers and all this kind of stuff. So I'm not worried about it. I think there may be some transition with increasing craziness online. And I hope that we are able to preserve the social element of the hobby into that. Social element is key, I think, to preserving it as a hobby and not just as an investment practice. But yeah, I think it's hopeful.

KELLEN HOARD: What do you think, Greg? I want to know your take on this. I've been talking too much. What is your take on the hobby here in the next, five to 10 years?

GREG BENNICK: You rule. And you haven't been talking too much. You've been talking the perfect amount. I loved every word of this. I agree with this. Okay. I've been collecting since I was 10. And back then, we heard all the time, the story that you told. You know, you get into it, you get out of it, you get into it. And that there's not enough young people. I absolutely agree. That's not true anymore. There's more and more and more young people involved. And there's going to be more and more and more young people. I think a key is for us to all stay positive about that. Instead of saying sadly, Oh, there's not going to be and there's not enough young people. There won't be any young people. Let's stay positive about it.

Let's stay positive about the fact that there's going to be more people. And then invite more people in and be thinking creatively about ways to bring people in with the storytelling element, the online element, the social element. People ultimately are insecure creatures looking for something to do, and something to latch on to, something to feel like they matter in, and something of meaning that they want to be a part of. Let's invite that because it's possible for a young collector, a young person, to get involved in the hobby and find or discover something that hasn't been discovered before or learn something and have a perspective on something that hasn't been written about before.

Sure, there's tons of books - I collect numismatic literature too. There's literally a room over here filled with books. We'll get together sometime and talk literature. The point though is, is that not everything's been written. There's tons of opportunity. You just got done talking about how one person can create opportunity for others in a social or political context. That's certainly true in numismatics. My gosh, we see it all the time in whatever sub-facet we're interested in, whether that's error coins or counterstamps.

I interviewed Bill Groom for this series. Bill Groom is a collector of counterstamps not many people know about. Bill Groom calls counterstamps, the last great frontier of numismatics because he sees it as this entirely unwritten-about, undeveloped area of numismatics other than Brunk's work, Rulau, and his own writing and what not. There's so much potential for it. I think that people are hungry for it - to be part of something meaningful like that. I think there's a lot of potential for more and more young people. I'm excited about it. As I go to shows all around the country, I'm having a great time seeing that. I'm glad to hear that reflected.

KELLEN HOARD: We'll get him into sample slabs too. That's the other frontier there. We'll get him into both.

GREG BENNICK: I agree with that because I remember when I bought David Schwager's book, the original sample slab book, I bought it because I'd never heard of sample slabs. I thought this was the most unusual thing that I'd encountered that summer or whatever it was. I bought it. I read through it. I'm like, This is fascinating. Are there really collectors of this stuff? That wasn't me being critical because remember that I collect weird, broken error coins. I was like, This is fascinating. We have seen an exponential rise in the number of people collecting sample slabs.

KELLEN HOARD: That book, which was published first in 2015, then second issue, 2016, is deeply outdated now because there's new ones being made all the time. There's a third edition coming out with a new author and its multiple volumes and it is still incomplete. They had to make a cutoff date because there were just constantly new ones being made. It's kind of a neat thing. I think you're right. People seek community in so many different ways. This is also a tie-together of both politics and coins in that we are a fundamentally social creature and we're going to seek community wherever we can find it. And what we see in America today are fewer and fewer opportunities to build that community. I think to our detriment. We are an isolationist culture in the first place. America is very individually driven. That's the mindset of a lot of people.

And we have nuclear families since the fifties and the sixties. We're very road-centric communities and not a lot of this kind of European model of plazas to bring people together and to have that social life. There's this whole concept of third places beyond your home and your work. Where's a third place where you can gather with your community, like a park? Are we investing in those, especially the ones that don't have paid barrier to entry?

So, what we see in America today, especially post-pandemic and during the pandemic, was this amplification and exacerbation of this individualistic thing where one in seven adult men today in America say they have no close friends. It's a huge number. Church attendance is declining. So, no matter your opinion on religion, that was a place of community for many people. Civil society is struggling. So, clubs and organizations. So where are people seeking community today? Often, I think it's online. And that can be both good and bad, depending on how we direct it. It can be good if, hey, you discover coins online, and suddenly you have this great new hobby, and maybe you end up coming to shows in person or seminars, and you end up finding this new community.

It can also be bad. It can lead to radicalism. It can lead to further feelings of hatred or anger, especially if you find the wrong Facebook group. And there's some dark holes you can go down. So how we as a society are tackling this, is I think relevant. How we as a hobby are tackling this, is I think, quite relevant to us recruiting new collectors and saying, hey, this is not just us collecting metal widgets, and not just us collecting metal widgets with a cool story, but it's sharing those stories, having those people together. One of the things I say that I love about this hobby is there's such a range of people, both some of the most intelligent people I've ever met, some of the kindest people I've ever met, some of the weirdest people I've ever met.

You have such a mix of people. And that is really a compelling part of the hobby to me, is that you actually have the opportunity to learn from people who know their area so well, and know other areas so well, and are just engaging people to hear from and learn from. If we as a hobby are able to drag people in from online into these in-person settings, whatever that looks like, I think that's going to be an opportunity for us to do our part in addressing isolation in America.

GREG BENNICK: I love it. Okay, this is immense. This is fantastic. This could probably be the first of a series of these. I love all of this. This might be a good place to just wrap up to give people a 45-minute nice chunk of information about you that they can digest.

KELLEN HOARD: Sure. That'd be great. We'll see what the reaction to this one is and how people end up feeling here. I'm not looking for any emails asking like, Oh, I'm so alone. Help me? Ideally. But we'll see. But if that's how you feel, email me and we'll sort something out.

GREG BENNICK: Exactly. If people are feeling alone and they don't have any friends, right, Kellen and Greg. We will be your friends. We'll talk about whatever you want to talk about.

KELLEN HOARD: You can join us next time and we'll have a long, granular discussion of something that only Greg and I care about.

GREG BENNICK: (Laughs) Okay. So, everybody, this has been yet another interview in the series for the Newman Numismatic Portal. I'm Greg Bennick with Kellen Hoard. And if you're interested in this interview, there's been a number of these interviews and there will be a number more. So, if you have ideas for people you'd like to have be interviewed, send me a message. That's how Kellen and I got together today. Somebody mentioned, You should talk to Kellen. I was like, Oh yeah! I should talk to Kellen. So, with that in mind if you have ideas, be in touch anytime. I'd love to hear from you. And Kellen, thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.