Pigs get fat; Hogs get slaughtered.
The sad thing about it all is that I believe WATA could have been successful WITHOUT all of this shady nonsense. They had the support of the community, a good product and service. The information on variants and print releases was beneficial to the community, informing the uninformed. The business strategy was sound and they accurately identified inefficiencies in the graded videogame market. There was very little competition other than VGA.
But they got greedy. They did not want incremental growth. They wanted to get really rich really fast. And that is when a pig becomes a hog. None of this was necessary. Pat gets at this point toward the end of the podcast, albeit from the angle of natural growth of graded game prices.