Business Finds: Hormozi’s Skool Investment, $700M Water & VC Hacks

Sam Parr

It's insane. I think it's insane and brilliant. That's a good point.

Shaan Puri

Nobody knows about this account, by the way. This account only has 750 followers, so I kind of maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here. Alright, what's up? It's time for the first ever **Friday Quickie**! This is a little idea Sam and I had where we share basically the little things that we saw this week. These could be the best articles, the best tweets, or the best little videos that we came across. Normally, this is stuff we just share in our group chat, but we wanted to try it out on the podcast. We're showing it to each other. I don't know what he's going to say, and he doesn't know what I'm going to say. We each have three items, so we're going to do a list of six things. Let's run through it. Sam, you want to go first?

Sam Parr

Wanna go first? Oh, jinx!

Shaan Puri

I'll do... I'll do when I have a quick one. So, this is a genius deal flow hack. You ever heard about how hedge fund traders will move their servers to be as close as possible to the pipe? Or they'll use a certain kind of wire so that the trades get executed faster? I used to hear all these things about how in traditional finance, people would go to crazy lengths just to get that little edge, that little extra edge. I always felt a little sad that us, you know, the soft boys of Silicon Valley, we don't really do that. We're all nice, paying it forward, we're just blogging everything that we know. There's no real secrecy, the real ruthless secrecy about things... until I saw this. So, our buddy Sully tweeted this out: there is a company that started to help VCs improve their deal flow. He was like, basically every VC knows deal flow matters. Normally, the way you do it is by hosting dinners or conferences, or you go on podcasts, or you make a Patagonia vest that you give away... shit like that. But they're like, the problem is you don't know what deals you're not hearing about. So, what if there was a way where you could know about the deals you're not hearing about? What they did was, some company basically puts a photographer in front of the offices of Sequoia, Andreessen, and all these top funds.

Sam Parr

Is this real or an idea?

Shaan Puri

I think this is real. So, when people are leaving the office, they're like, "Hey, do you want a picture in front of the Sequoia thing? I'll send it to you." They take a picture because it's a great moment for the entrepreneur. "Oh, this is when we pitch Sequoia." And they're like, "Great! What's the name of your company?" And they're like, "Awesome!" They basically sell that list to all the other funds. It's like, "Hey, did you know these guys are out raising? They were talking to Sequoia." And he's like, "I heard about this and I thought it was amazing. Genius deal flow hack." He's like, "The VC who told me about it was like, 'We don't pay for this, but I know it exists and others do.'" I think that's brilliant. What do you think?

Sam Parr

I think it's **brilliant**. I think it's **insane**. I think it's **insane** and **brilliant**.

Shaan Puri

There’s another version of this that I follow. There’s a Twitter account called something like "Stealth" and it’s anytime somebody who had been working on something new or stealth... blah blah blah, anytime they change that to the name of a project, it immediately tweets out, “This person just announced they’re doing this thing.” So you could reach out to them and be like, “Hey, yeah, that’s really cool! I like what you’re doing.”

Sam Parr

What's the name of that handle?

Shaan Puri

Alright, so that account is called **StealthCospy**. If you go to **@StealthCospy**, it's a real-time notification of any time people leave a company. It also tracks LinkedIn activity. For example, if you leave a company that they consider a high trajectory, like a fast-growth startup, it indicates that "this person's leaving to do something new." You could see it. So, like, for example, the last tweet was: *"Julia is now building in stealth mode. She's the ex-Data Science Director from GitHub, and she lives in Boston. Here's her LinkedIn. She just announced or she just posted that she's working on something new that's in stealth."*

Sam Parr

This is awesome.

Shaan Puri

Or it'll be like Noah comes out of stealth. He's got a platform for no-code SDK tooling for enterprise LLM applications. Here's the link, here's his LinkedIn.

Sam Parr

This is awesome! Alright, that's a good find.

Shaan Puri

This account only has 750 followers, so I kind of maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here.

Sam Parr

This is a good find. There's also that phenomenon where people remove their employer from their Twitter handle or LinkedIn, and they'll say, "This person is now available." I like this. Alright, let me give you another one. I was reading Reddit the other day and I found this old post—it's over a year old. Do you remember Jake Cassan? Or Cassan? I don't actually know how to say his last name, but Jake started Movement Watches. They were one of the first direct-to-consumer brands to go big. They started this company where they sold watches and got popular on Instagram. I think he sold it for $100 million, then there was another $100 million earn-out, which I'm not sure if they hit or not. But the company was bootstrapped, so he made north of $50 million, I would imagine. I found this post, and I don't know why he did this, but I think it's great. He didn't really talk about it on social media, but I found this on a subreddit called "Find a Path," which is for those who have a hobby, passion, or a passing whim that they want to make a living out of but don't know how to get there. That's the description of the subreddit. In his post, he says, "I sold my company Movement a few years ago for a lot of money and thought all my problems would be solved. I made my life really cushy and comfortable, and I optimized to be as stress-free as possible." Then he goes on to say that he's new to this subreddit and is still trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He set up his life to be easy, and now it's been two years since he sold the company. He's 31, single, and he never has to work again, but he's never been lonelier or more depressed than ever. He basically talks about what he's trying to do in order to find his passion. I think what's interesting about these posts is that people never talk about this type of stuff publicly, where they put their name on it and truly say how they feel. That's fascinating. In the replies, you see people asking him different questions, and he goes through really detailed replies about what he's trying to do. He says, "I love video editing and making movies, so now I bought a camera, took a YouTube class, and I'm trying to learn how to take pictures and film videos." It's super fascinating to see behind the scenes of someone who's young. I think he was 29 when he sold, so 29 and worth tens of millions of dollars, yet he's pretty lonely and depressed. It's really fascinating to see someone break all this down. I thought this was a really, really fascinating Reddit post that I didn't see shared anywhere.

Shaan Puri

I love this! I thought it was awesome. I saw it because somebody on Twitter goes, "I wonder what the guys who crushed it in the early wave of e-commerce are doing now. I bet they're just killing it." This is something somebody tweeted, and then this other guy goes, "Actually, I just saw this post on Reddit." This was a year ago. He said, "I saw this post on Reddit from the founder movement saying exactly what he's been doing." Actually, you know, he's been kind of wandering and trying to figure it out. Then I read this thing, and I was like, "Dude, that's the magic of the internet!" Someone just tweeting a random question, and somebody else being like, "Oh, here's an obscure Reddit post that's filled with, you know, the answer to your question." Also, just that this guy... I almost felt bad I didn't bring this up on the pod because I was like, "It's kind of personal. Maybe he doesn't want this, like, you know, on blast." I mean, he posted it publicly on Reddit, so I guess it's fair game. But, you know, he's being very vulnerable. He's like, "You know, I'm lonelier than ever. I'm deeply depressed, and I'm trying to figure it out." But props to him for doing that and doing it with his name on it because he could have very easily just done the same thing and said, "I sold my company." He didn't have to say who he was. So, you know, respect to him for doing that. I really, really appreciated that.

Sam Parr

I think it's awesome. I believe this is a problem that not a lot of people go through, but it's really fun for those who are dreaming of making money or who want to sell their company. What happens on the other side? You know, I think someone described this as "the second mountain." You've climbed the first mountain, but you still need another mountain to climb. He talks about how people ask, "Why don't you start another company?" He responds that in the past, money and ego were huge motivators for him, but those motivators are gone now. So, whatever he does next, he needs to find fulfillment and help others in some way. I think it's really interesting. Alright, what do you got?

Shaan Puri

Alright, number 3. I'm going to do the Hormozi bump. Okay, so Alex Hormozi, friend of the pod, good dude, he bought a company recently called "School" from another guy who has been on the pod talking about it, the original founder, Sam Ovens. So that's like his new thing. He tweeted out, "This is the biggest bet I've ever made. I'm investing a bunch of money into this." Now he's wearing a School hat in every interview he goes on and in every video he creates. He's trying to promote School.

Sam Parr

It's an awesome product. School's really good.

Shaan Puri

I haven't... I've never used it. Have you actually used it?

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's a good product. That guy, Sam, is very savvy, and it's a very good product.

Shaan Puri

And so basically, it's like a community-building tool. People can create a paid community, and others can join it. It looks like it's heavily focused on affiliate marketing and drop shipping. When I browsed the top communities on the site, I thought it was a good investment. I was curious, how much of a bump do you think the school got in web traffic after Hermozzi did it? Obviously, he's doing it with the belief that, "Hey, I've just spent over two years building my audience—a huge audience of entrepreneurial people. I'm going to invest in this thing, and then I'm going to try to use my weight to drive traffic." This is very much the same strategy I've used, which is that you could buy something at a fair price, knowing that you have a growth lever to bring more traffic to the site. So, I'm curious, how much do you think it went up? I'll give you the four...

Sam Parr

Yeah, what was the before?

Shaan Puri

Before, let's say web traffic was, about 3 months ago, if I was, let's say, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... 5 months ago, it was at about 8,000,000 monthly visitors. What do you think it is now?

Sam Parr

I would guess 10 or 12. Alright everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. This one's easy because I'm going to show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company. When I say "I," I mean not my team; I mean I'm the one who actually made it. I've got this company called Hampton. You can check it out at **joinhampton.com**. It's a community for founders, and one of the ways that we've grown is by creating these surveys. We ask our members certain questions that a lot of people are afraid to ask. So, things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these interesting questions. Then, we'll put it in a survey. I went and made a landing page, so you can check it out at **joinhampton.com/wealth**. You can actually see the landing page that I made. The hard part with Hampton is that we are appealing to a sort of higher-end customer, sort of like a Louis Vuitton or a Ferrari. So, I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates—that's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand. It's very easy. They have this drag-and-drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not technical, and I'm the one who actually made it. Once it's made, I then shared it on social media. We had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information. I can then see over the next handful of weeks how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. This is where the revenue came from: it came from Twitter, it came from LinkedIn, whatever it came from. I can actually go and look at it and say, "Oh, well that worked, that didn't work. Do more of that, do less of that." If you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it! You could check it out; go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. Alright, now back to MFM.

Shaan Puri

Okay, so it went from 8,000,000 to, in January, it looks like it spiked at almost 17,000,000, according to SimilarWeb, which is not exactly accurate but directionally correct. So, almost double the traffic for that month. Now, a lot of it is people just coming and checking it out because of the announcement. It's not necessarily the most sustainable thing, but let's now look...

Sam Parr

So, it goes mostly through February.

Shaan Puri

So, what's the February numbers looking like?

Sam Parr

But check this out. So, Circle Dot, Circle Dot. I think they're called Circle Dot Co or Circle Dot. They're a community platform that's a competitor to School. They've raised, I think, tens of millions of dollars. School has more than doubled their traffic; they had doubled their traffic before they even took the money. Right? That's insane! Sam actually told me, and he posted it on their About page, that he has invested $10,000,000 of his own money, which I think was a large percentage of his money, into making School a reality.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's interesting what these are. So, I just sorted by paid. You can see it's the **Digital Growth Community**, which is basically internet marketing. Number two is Mark's manifestation thing. You pay $49 a month and you'll join his group. It's got 284 members. Then there's the **Digital Wealth Academy**. It's a lot of the like-minded men who want to live the Adonis lifestyle, right? It's a lot of Andrew Tate-type stuff, which I find interesting. But it's cool because, you know, I think you've done a bunch of paid communities on Facebook and now Slack and other places. You didn't use this for Hampton, right?

Sam Parr

No, because when we started, I didn't know enough about it and I didn't think it would be any good. But then I met Sam, the guy who started it, and we were already on Slack. I was like, "Oh, you actually are really smart. I should've... I kind of regret not using it." I have nothing to do with this company, but I thought it was awesome. They have a bunch of non-business-related stuff. There's content on style and clothing, and then there's one on meditation. So, there's a variety of non-business topics, it just doesn't...

Shaan Puri

Get anything aspirational you would want, right? So, whatever you want—whether it's a better body, better style, or better finances—whatever it is, that's how you get there. I think it's a great move. Also, just in general, the business model of taking a kind of crappy but high-volume business model, which is, let's say, media, and using it to buy assets in the best business model, SaaS, is what he did, right? He converted his YouTube fame, which doesn't pay very well, into owning a SaaS asset, which is one of the best business models out there. So, good move by Alex on that one, and congrats to all involved on the big spike.

Sam Parr

I hung out with Sam Ovens once. My wife and I were at a restaurant with him, or some type of bar or something, and we were just talking. Sam Ovens is a wonderful person, but he's almost a little awkward. He's really awkward in the sense that he's comfortable with silence. It got to the part of the conversation and...

Shaan Puri

You're like, "Turns out I'm awkward."

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, he's actually kind of normal, I guess. It got to the point in the conversation where there was some silence. I thought, "I'm going to sit in this for a minute. Let's just see what this feels like. Let's sit in the silence." So we sat, and we finished the conversation. After about 5 seconds, he goes, "I delivered my baby." You know, he's from New Zealand, and I was like, "What? What do you mean you delivered your baby?" He goes, "My hands." He tells a story about how his wife went into labor and the paramedics couldn't make it in time. He said, "I just delivered it on my own." And he just threw that out there, and I was like, "Oh."

Shaan Puri

Doug, I would join a paid community of him just sending me a voice note every morning of that.

Sam Parr

That was like the... I know what that was like. The silence breaker was when I delivered my baby. I just thought it was awesome. I was like, "You're the best person I've ever met." Alright, let me show you another one. There's this tweet I saw. Her name is Julia Chang. She just shared this woman on Instagram named Amanda Wolf. What she does is she gets people to share their finances, and then she is like a personal finance wizard or something like that. So she writes out all the... all... wizard? I don't know what they call these people.

Shaan Puri

She's some sort of magician.

Sam Parr

She's a witch. She's a personal finance witch. I don't know what you call these people, but it's normally like individuals who are making around $80,000 a year. Then she talks about how this looks normal and this doesn't work. She got this couple that's 39 and 37 years old, a husband and wife. One's an attorney and one's a CIO. Their net income, or their personal income, is $3,700,000. They live in Alpine, New Jersey, and their expenses each month are roughly $77,000. They break down what their expenses are, with the biggest one being the mortgage at $29,000 and utilities at $1,200. But then it gets to some wild stuff. So where does it say their...

Shaan Puri

$29,000 mortgage wasn't wild.

Sam Parr

That's wild! That's wild! But a $29,000 mortgage? I think that's what it costs to have a $4,000,000 house. I mean, I guess that makes sense. But their personal trainers are $4 a month, and she breaks down all these expenses. I thought it was really fascinating to see what these people are spending on and how you can make almost $4,000,000 a year and not really save a lot of money at all. It's pretty ridiculous how much these people spend. So, they are able to invest. They invest something like $1,000,000 a year, which is a ton of money. But then she kind of shows that off in a weird way where she's like, "Look, they only have $23,100 left over each month after they invest $1,000,000 each year." It's kind of ridiculous to see these expenses. Sorry, the mortgage for $29,000 is actually $5,200,000 at a 4.25% interest rate. But it's pretty crazy, right, to see these expenses of $80 a month?

Shaan Puri

And so, what does she do? I see it all written out with nice handwriting here. Does she just cross it out at the end and say, "No, start over, change this"? What is the punchline of this? What does she take? What's the takeaway?

Sam Parr

Well, her takeaway was just basically, "I don't think her takeaway is important." Like, crazy, right? Yeah, it was just like crazy. I mean, I don't think that the takeaway—her takeaway—is that interesting to me. But I do think that $4 a month for personal trainers is ridiculous. A nanny costs $10,000, their kid's school is $25,100, and kids' tutors and coaches are $3,000. My takeaway is, if they live in Alpine, New Jersey, I bet they work in Manhattan. Then, does that lifestyle out there, even if you are making close to $4,000,000 a year, really allow you to reach terminal velocity where you don't actually have to work anymore? So, in order to not work and spend $1,000,000 a year, you have to have something like $25,000,000 liquid. I think that would be the number—right around there. If you want to withdraw 3% of your money every year, sorry, a year. So, in order to actually save up that amount of money, even when you're earning almost $4,000,000 in the Manhattan area, it is really, really challenging if you live the life like these types of people. I thought that was wild.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think that's the key. If you want to spend $29,000 a month on your mortgage, if you want to spend $10 on your nanny, and another basically $8 on miscellaneous and personal trainers, $6,000 a month on shopping—right? Like, the shopping is separate for just fun, and dining out is $4 and $6. So, like, $14 a month on shopping, fun, and dining out. I don't know, if you're not having fun with the shopping and dining out, maybe don't spend another $4,000 on fun. Right? Like, you've got to consider that this is just excessive spending for that level of income, I think.

Sam Parr

I agree, but it's just interesting. I think a lot of people who earn that amount of money, by the way, spend that way.

Shaan Puri

I think the real takeaway from this is that whoever posted this is just good at social media. They're like, "How do I enrage everybody? Okay, let me post this." Because all this does is just engagement bait, right? Everyone in the comments is just like, "Oh man, what the fuck? I can't believe this! This is not real. These people are so out of touch." They get so angry about it.

Sam Parr

Dude, I know so many people who live like this. By the way, I know a lot of people who make multimillions and they spend almost all of it. I know a lot of people who earn $1,000,000 a year and they still live almost paycheck to paycheck. It sounds crazy, but I know people who do that.

Shaan Puri

Having dumb friends... you know, you are the average of them.

Sam Parr

Those five people you're spending.

Shaan Puri

Time with those five idiots that are somehow burning $4,000,000 a year.

Sam Parr

Dude, it's insane, man. $4,000,000! If you live on the East Coast, man, it's insane. You spend a lot. Alright, you do one, and then I have one more.

Shaan Puri

Alright, my last one is a quick one. Did you see this Liquid Death marketing campaign that they did? No? Oh, okay. Genius! So, the Super Bowl was a couple of weeks ago, and they were like, "Hey, how do we want to do an ad? We want to hijack this marketing moment, but we don't want to buy a $6,000,000 Super Bowl ad." So, they went on eBay and called it "the biggest ad ever." They said, "We have a national run of 500,000 Liquid Death cases, and it's the size of this box. You can have this ad space. It costs you $6,000,000 to get in front of 110,000,000 people on the Super Bowl, but 200,000,000 people are going to walk through the doors of these retailers and see our Liquid Death thing." Pretty big leap of faith, by the way, that all of those people who attend a grocery store will look at this ad, but whatever. They auctioned it off, and Coinbase ended up buying this thing for half a million dollars. So, they got the first "pump" of PR in the marketing community because marketers were like, "Oh, so smart!" Then, the second "pump" was that Coinbase actually pays them $500,000 to buy the ad space. So, they got $500,000 off this thing that was just excess inventory for them anyway. Then, the third "pump" was the news that somebody actually bought it, and they got three hits out of this thing. Very smart marketing by Liquid Death.

Sam Parr

Dude, the guy who started Liquid Death came on our podcast, I think, two years ago. They were getting going, but they were still big; they weren't this big. If I remember correctly, his background was that he worked at an agency. My takeaway from the podcast was basically that when you're selling water, the product's not that important. It's just water, and I don't think it tastes particularly different than any other water. But he was just like, "I'm really good at advertising, and I'm gonna do all of these funny things in order to get eyeballs." I would not have predicted that that would have worked, but it has. He's completely crushed it. His name's Micah; I don't know his last name, actually. I just remember him.

Shaan Puri

How do you pronounce it?

Sam Parr

But if you can go back and listen to that part, it's really good. He was really fascinating.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that was a few years ago, and they were a lot smaller than now. They're like prepping for an IPO or something like that. It's pretty crazy. I don't know how healthy the business is, but it definitely went way further than I ever thought it would. Probably way further than you ever thought it would too. Because the bet was, "We're just gonna be incredible at marketing." That was the entire bet. It was, "Yeah, it's water, and then we're gonna be absolutely incredible, world-class at marketing, and that'll be the thing." And they pulled it off. Props to them.

Sam Parr

Alright, here's the last one. I found this article; it was from House of Fresh. So, if you Google "House of Fresh" and then "David and Goliath," you'll see this article. But I'm going to tell you why I was interested in this. So, do you ever use review sites to decide which product you want to buy?

Shaan Puri

Not anymore, but I did for a long time.

Sam Parr

Me too. I did for a long time. I started diving deep on this and I was like, "Okay, so how does BuzzFeed, which is like a... I don't even know what their specialty is, know which air purifier is best?" I don't know if they can actually test all of this stuff. I started noticing that there are all these websites, like Men's Health and a whole bunch of others, reviewing products or posting "This is the 10 best items." I'm like, "I don't think that they actually review these things, but maybe I'll trust them." Well, I read this article and at this point, I'm not going to trust any of them. So, let me give you a little breakdown. This company that wrote this, House of Fresh, is a small company and all they do is review air purifiers. That's all they do. They're like a missionary in the mercenary game. Most of the people who review air purifiers are just like BuzzFeed. They just think, "Look, we can rank on Google, so we're just going to read a bunch of Amazon reviews, pick the one that looks best, and put that as the top of our list." Whereas these other guys, House of Fresh, actually buy the products. They're not given them, so they're not owed good coverage to any of the manufacturers. They test it out. They do this big article explaining how review sites work. The takeaway is basically that 16 companies—like Meredith, which owns a whole bunch of different magazines, Dotdash, which owns a whole bunch of stuff, and Penske Media, who we talked about in a podcast—they own all this stuff. These 16 media companies get 3 billion clicks per month and they basically dominate Google. It's really hard for any small company getting into the review space to rank high because these 16 companies control the whole thing. This article dove deep into how they're doing reviews. They basically hire a freelancer just to go out and do whatever, and then they post the article on their websites. But they each own like 50 different websites, so they'll post it across all the other websites. They don't actually show how they're doing the reviews. The takeaway is that what they're likely doing is just going to Amazon, reviewing what Amazon people have actually said, and aggregating those, curating them, and putting that into their article. It's not a great way to find out what's actually best because you're trusting someone else versus going out and doing the research. I read this article and my takeaway was two things: 1. I don't trust any website now that's doing reviews. 2. I only trust a few of them. There are a few. I used to trust Wirecutter, but now I'm nervous about trusting them because they're owned by The New York Times. So, they're owned by much larger companies, and I think they have different incentives. Besides that, there are very few companies out there that I trust for reviews. I go to Reddit, but that's even hard. I think there's actually an opportunity to create some type of trusted review website. I don't know how exactly you could do that and get big, but I'm pretty certain you could still do that while remaining small. There are a whole bunch of niche websites that used to talk about really interesting stuff. There was one for VPNs, there was one for mattress companies, and then the mattress company, like Casper, or the large VPN companies, they go and actually buy the review sites and they put their link up top.

Sam Parr

I'm skeptical of the entire industry, and this may be because I don't trust any reviews. I've already written lots of articles about how Amazon reviews—most of them, or a lot of them—are total bullshit. I used to have friends that would make products, and they'd be like, "Hey, I'm going to make this product free on Amazon. Will you buy it so it says that you're a proper customer and then just give me 5 stars?" It's all a circle jerk, and I don't trust any of the reviews online at this point. It makes me very skeptical.

Shaan Puri

100% agree. This is crazy; it's gotten completely out of hand. This is one of the major ways that news sites actually stay in business: they basically sell their SEO juice to the highest bidder. This applies to everything, like what you're talking about—air purifiers, mattresses, and more. It's all just SEO hacks. For example, if you want to find the best mattress and you Google "best mattress," you're not going to find the best mattress. You're going to find out which mattress company is the most aggressive at SEO. That's the only answer you get when you Google "best mattress." I'm totally with you; I wish there was a better solution to this. There are more products than ever, and you do want to find out if they're any good or which one to buy. The problem is that you can't really trust any of the current solutions. I actually think there’s probably something you could do with a combination of video and subscription. What I would suggest is saying, "Hey, we're calling out the BS that exists in this space. We're going to do a subscription product. You pay for this, and you're going to get access to super high-quality reviews." Only conscious consumers will do it, so you start small. But again, it's like The Athletic. You're going to get people to actually care enough to pay. Then you tell them, "Look, because you pay, you get no bias in the results. We are not going to take affiliate commissions anywhere." I think if you drew the line there, there would be a market for that. Maybe you could even let people share their subscription so that a bunch of people could chip in and say, "Cool, I want access too," and it's $100 for all of us in order to make the economics work.

Sam Parr

So, I think that's...

Shaan Puri

That's the solution. Somebody's gotta say, "I'm going to choose a different business model. I'm not going to get paid on my affiliate links." That's the person who would end up getting trusted because their incentive is not to just push affiliate products.

Sam Parr

You know how there's that infographic or image that shows how like 4 or 5 companies own about 80% of the food in the grocery store? Yes, that's what this article has. They have one of those infographics where it's basically 16 media companies: Hertz, Dotdash, Bustle, Ziff Davis, The Arena Group, Red Ventures, and a handful of others. It shows all of the companies and titles that they own. You scroll through this and you're like, "Those are all supposed to be the reputable ones," and I'm like, "I don't trust any of this anymore." So, it almost makes me a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to this stuff. It completely ruins my browsing experience because now I see this stuff and I'm like, "I can never go to those websites in order to get reviews." So, it kind of opened up my eyes. It's kind of interesting. You could see it: just Google "House of Fresh," "David versus Goliath." It's a very fascinating article that has kind of changed my opinion on review sites, and they do a huge breakdown. Alright, is that the pod for our... what are we calling it? Quickie Friday?

Shaan Puri

The Quickie

Sam Parr

The quickie. Alright, that's it. That's the pod.