Episodes

Dan Ferris:                 Hello and welcome to the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm Dan Ferris. I'm the editor of Extreme Value and The Ferris Report, Both published by Stansbury Research.

Corey Mclaughlin:     And I am Corey McLaughlin, editor of the Stansbury Daily Digest. Today we talked with Edwin Dorsey, editor of the Bear Cave Newsletter.

Dan Ferris:                 Edwin is a very bright young guy. He digs deep and has a unique skill set that I'm really excited for you to learn about. So let's do that. Let's talk with Edwin Dorsey. Let's do it right now. Edwin, welcome to the show. Really glad you could be here.

Edwin Dorsey:            Dan, Corey, thanks so much for having me on the Stansberry Investor Hour. It's an honor to be here.

Dan Ferris:                 You know something? Both – I think Corey and I – for both of us in this case – I think we were both surprised at how young you are, because your content is amazing. Well, like –

Corey Mclaughlin:     I would agree. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 I guess – yeah, let's start there. Let's ask, how did you come to be the guy who writes this wonderful Substack called the Bear Cave, which is loaded with pretty deep short-side research? How did you come to do this?

Edwin Dorsey:            Thank you so much, Dan. And I've been passionate about stocks from really young age. Like 2nd grade I was obsessed with the stock market. Now, the transition to the short side happened a little bit around my freshman year of college where just by coincidence I got introduced to two of the big players in the short world. One guy, early mentor, was named Mark Cohodes, who used to run a short-only fund and now as more of an independent skeptic and short seller.

And my other early mentor was Jim Carruthers who ran a billion-dollar short only fund called Sophos. And I interned for him on and off all four years of college. I also did a little bit of short activism myself in college writing critically about a publicly traded babysitting platform called care com. So I saw what it was like to publish critically on companies. And then what led to the newsletter – and the reason I'm not working at a hedge fund doing short work and instead get to write a newsletter – is, my senior year of college I would have likely gone to intern for this – gone to work for this hedge fund called Sophos.

But they were in the process of shutting down. So I was a senior. I'm like, "I need to get a job. I want a hedge fund to hire me. And I thought, "Just start this newsletter, put out short-based research and I'll get hired." But the newsletter got very, very popular, especially with the pandemic and it's more or less been my only job for the last four years... is doing this deep investigative analysis on public companies.

Dan Ferris:                 With the exception of 2022, it's been a tough many years for short sellers. I mean, tougher even than for like value investors I would say [laughs]. It's been rough. Right?

Edwin Dorsey:            I think that was tough to be a short seller. I think Jim Chanos over his career on average broke even or something. So it's never easy to be a short seller. I've been lucky a little bit with the pandemic where if there's a lot of investor participation that sometimes leads to easy pickings when there's a lot of SPACs, There's a lot of easy targets to go after. I like to say whenever there's a lot of change it's easy to find ideas that are potentially going to fall a lot. So now we got AI that's a major theme that I'm looking at. So there are still opportunities. It may be a little tough but there's still opportunities.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. Before we get into individual picks, since short selling is this very different thing that I'm willing to bet the overwhelming majority of our listeners do not do it... so I would like you, if you could – let's give them a little bit of an education and –  like how do you identify these things? What are the – one of the smartest-sounding things I ever heard short selling-wise – I forget the guy's name.

It was at a grants conference and he said, "Well, you can have this niggling list of problems," or you can have what he called a bullet-to-the-brain situation. And I thought, "Oh, that sounds really good. Look for the bullet to the brain and short the hell out of those." Because the niggling problems are manageable. Right? So can you tell me –

Edwin Dorsey:            So I wanted to start off with a little disclosure first. Which is, I personally actually don't short or bet against the companies I write about in my newsletter. I only make money from reader subscriptions. So I'm not shorting, buying puts or trading around the articles I write. Which is different than what you'd find in most of these activist short sellers who are publishing on companies.

Just mechanically short selling is one of the ways investors can bet against companies. You do it by borrowing shares from someone, selling it, buying it back at a future date ideally at a future date, and profiting the difference. And the risk is stocks can go up to infinity and you can use an infinite amount when you short. Now, I think most listeners here get short selling. So how do you find the companies that are going to go down? How do you identify them? My sweet spot tends to be, I look for $1 to $10 billion publicly traded companies in the tech or consumer sector.

And what I'm really good at is focusing on a company's relationship with these customers. So a lot of investors like to do detailed financial analysis, listen to management, talk to experts. And there's nothing wrong with that. That tends not to be my approach. I am obsessed with the company's relationship with its customers. So I look at consumer complaints. I often go to state attorney generals' offices and send foyer request or public record requests to state regulators to get consumer complaints people are filing against businesses.

So that's one of the big ways I tried to investigate companies, with the idea of being oftentimes you'll see these qualitative issues pop up before it's reflected in the numbers. And while Wall Street is good at pricing and numbers and things that are qualitative, but they're less good with these qualitative issues. If its numbers, quantitative, Wall Street gets it. If it's qualitative, I can meet early before it's priced into the stock. A lot of what I do is just also common sense based. One guy, Mark Cohodes, has the saying, "You want to wait until the jaguar is out of the tree."

So you don't want to be early to something. But if you're late, oftentimes that's perfect. It's OK if the stock is already down 20%, 30% and missed earnings once, because that trend is going to continue if it's a meaningful trend. So in terms of unifying them specifically, though, I do a lot of things, I'm addicted to Twitter. I look a lot at executive resignations. I look at a lot of other ideas people write on. I'm pretty agnostic where I get the ideas. But my sweet spot, $1 to $10 billion public tech or consumer companies.

Dan Ferris:                 All right.

Corey Mclaughlin:     That's great. Yeah. I want to go back to one of the early one that you said, care.com. Right? So that I think – what did you see in that – was that you were in college?

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah, in college.

Corey Mclaughlin:     In school? So that was kind of the one that got you started? What did you see there and what attracted you to actually start writing about these companies? Just generally. To me it sounds like – it's like journalism. But I don't know if that was an interest of yours or not or it was just more the stock side of it.

Edwin Dorsey:            Corey, I was more into the stock stuff but overall now I've drifted a little bit into journalism. I like to say what I do is somewhat of a mix between financial analysis and journalism. It's not normal journalism. I don't really have sources and asking for comments. But it's also not really financial analysis because it's not too much numbers-driven. I'm always spending a minute or two on the balance sheet and the income statement. So care.com is a perfect example of what I'd like to do.

As a sophomore in college I had a friend who was a babysitter on this platform called care.com. And the whole idea of the company, billion-dollar public company, was parents would use the platform to find babysitters and babysitters, typically teenagers, could advertise their services to parents. And my friend said, "I don't think the site is safe. It seems a little off. Look into it." So the first thing I do is just look for local media stories. Because oftentimes before there's a national scandal there will be local scandals.

And I see there's a lot of complaints in the local news we had about care.com babysitters hurting kids they were hired to babysit. And then I go to Paster, which is a government website to see lawsuits against companies. I see a lot of parents are suing the companies for approving babysitters who maybe had prior arrests and weren't qualified to be babysitting the kids. And I decide, "This is a critical issue for the company. They claim to be vetting the babysitters on the platform. I want to test it out for myself to see how good their vetting process is."

So I tried to sign up on care.com as Harvey Weinstein, who was in the news at the time. I used the photo of Harvey Weinstein [laughs]. I make up an e-mail address, make up an address, make it everything. I consent to their background check and they said, "We'll get back to you in 48 hours whether or not you're approved." And I think, "There's no way they'll approve me as a babysitter on care.com as Harvey Weinstein."

48 hours later I'm approved. Harvey Weinstein, the profile photo. I start applying for babysitter jobs and CPR-certified – they just weren't doing the background checks they claimed to be doing. And you could have looked at all the numbers and met with the CEO and all this, but you just need to test it out and they approved me. And I did one as Donald Trump and Daffy Duck. It's like, "It's clear they're not running the background checks to even charge parents –

Dan Ferris:                 Daffy Duck?

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah. They're just – they're not doing it. They claim to be doing it, they charged parents for it, but they're not actually doing it. And as a result these are funny examples. But do you want someone with a DUI watching your kids with a drug arrest, with like, a sex offender watching your kids? Do you want somebody who's lying about their identity watching your kids? It was essential to the company.

And long story short, the Wall Street Journal a year later wrote on these issues and the CEO, general counsel, all resigned. The stock got cut in half and it was ultimately acquired by IAC at a big discount who fixed the safety issues and brought the new management in. And this is kind of – really exemplifies my style of focusing on these qualitative issues around consumer protection and consumer issues that maybe aren't priced in the stock and the market might be completely unaware of but could really be impactful for investors.

Dan Ferris:                 I love that. I love the qualitative before quantitative. I love that. Because you're right. If it's in the numbers, the entire world knows it. Years ago it occurred to me, like – I was getting into financial statement analysis. And one day I was like, "This stuff is all history. It's already – if it's a fact – if it's a fact, it's already happened and everybody already knows it."

Corey Mclaughlin:     Well, yeah. And plus, in today's world, in journalism world as well, it's been – the whole industry has been gutted. Right? So if you even get started, have a kernel of an idea and are able to pursue it, you could end up doing things like you did with care.com and you're doing now. Like, that's one of the things that our modern media world and why newsletters have become so popular, is just –

Dan Ferris:                 What you're doing – that's right. Corey is exactly right. What you are doing –

Corey Mclaughlin:     I know, because I started in journalism full-time.

Dan Ferris:                 That's right. He knows. And what you are doing is – you're seizing low-hanging fruit.

Edwin Dorsey:            I think there's some individual – exactly. I'm seizing low-hanging fruit. And if the media was doing their job and if investors were good at this type of research, I wouldn't have much of a job. And I think the media – there's a lot of groupthink. And they'll write on nothing and then they're all right on the same topic together. There's not enough original research like this, and it leaves a big opening.

And I think one trend we're seeing is this disintermediation of media where people don't care about the big brand, whether it's the New York Times or CNN or even the Fox News. You care more about the individual person, the Tucker Carlson and the Joe Rogan. The Edward – whatever. You want the individual relationship with the person who, we're seeing people live the big brands and start a sub stack to go direct reader or podcast director reader or Tucker Carlson interviewing people on apps direct to the audience. So I don't know what this means for the public media companies but, yeah, there's definitely a lot of change here.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 And thank God for it. It's wonderful. You know? There's more competition than every thanks to the Internet. It's one of the – it's one of the very best things that's happened. There's more competition for us as a business too, but that's OK. So all right. We're all thrilled about what you're doing. Yay. And I like your approach. The qualitative stuff first. I started reading a little bit about your – there were two write-ups that interested me.

One of them is Roblox, and it's kind of a similar issue, isn't it, to care.com? And another one was Hershey, which is kind of a popular stock around Stansberry. But the Roblox thing – like, I read the beginning of it and I was like – it's like a human trafficking thing practically. It's like – when I read that – when I clicked on the Roblox write-up I did not expect to see this. If we're going to talk about journalism this is like – Edwin Dorsey journalist. It's incredible. Do you want to talk about it a little bit?

Edwin Dorsey:            Absolutely. So for maybe listeners who aren't aware, Roblox is a very, very popular platform for kids, young kids, like 6 to 14 to play online. They have tens of millions of users. They're a huge public company. They haven't done well since their direct listing years ago, but still $30 billion market cap. They aren't that profitable but they have a little bit of cash flow. And it's this unique kind of metaverse online world where users can create their own game.

So it's not just a video game. It's a video game where people can create their own mini games within the game. And kids are addicted to it. And the way the company makes money is, they sell this online currency called Robux where 100 Robux is about $1 or something. So a robot is about a penny. And kids pay to buy these Robux so they can buy virtual T-shirts or boosts in the game. And kids are addicted. They love it.

And even though it's not profitable, investors are really optimistic for the future of this company. And it did really well in the pandemic when everyone was online. There's a few issues with it. The biggest one to me is around safety. Anytime you have kids in a game, especially if there's open chat functionality like there is in Roblox – and what makes it so fun is, there's a risk that predators use it to meet kids. And what we've found, just by doing some research, is Roblox in my view, the No. 1 way sex offenders meet children in the United States – it's terrible. It's terrible.

There's stories of 40-year-old sex offenders getting on there talking to a 12-year-old who they ultimately kidnap. And this has happened dozens of times across the United States. And I think part of it is, parents are just unaware of the risks. Parents don't know there can be a 40-year-old on Roblox talking to my 12-year-old. And it's really easy for older people to impersonate younger users. Roblox doesn't do a lot around content moderation like they claim.

For example. On Roblox you can't type out your phone number. So it's tough for a kid to give their phone number for a predator. But you can spell it out. So you can't type the numbers 212 but if I spell out my numbers 212 – you can't give out – you can't use the word "Snapchat" but you can use "snappy" or the ghost emoji. So it's kind of comically inept content moderation that's fueling all of these issues.

There's another – there's a lot of things unique to the Roblox platform that doesn't exist on Meta, Instagram, Snapchat or elsewhere. One is that the kids on Roblox are really young, which heightens the safety risk. And another thing in Roblox is, to sign up you don't even need an e-mail or phone number because a lot of the kids are so young they don't even have that.

And that actually poses a big safety risk because it means you can't actually ban users. Normally if somebody makes an account they have an e-mail and phone number so you blacklist those things. But with Roblox the predators, the sex offenders using it, can't be blacklisted because they just use a username and password.

So they just make a new one. There's tons of ways in which Roblox is – even though they market themselves to parents as the safest platform on the Internet, it's actually one of the riskiest. And why this matters to investors now is, it's starting to get mainstream press attention. I've been talking about it for two years. It's the company I've criticized the most in the barricade.

And I think now is the time it's about to get into national scandal. Bloomberg wrote a big piece on it this summer. Hindenburg Research, which has a big following, echoed many of these claims in a report last month. I've heard more from reporters about this company in the last month than I have in the prior three years before this. People are really starting to care.

And if parents see about all these safety risks on Roblox and that they can pose real world risks to the kids not just seeing an inappropriate image but like predators trying to meet with their kids through this platform – I think that it's going to be a huge issue for the company. And then the second issue, kind of unrelated to safety, is just in general I feel like the company has been trying to cut corners to boost its numbers and revenue. For example. They do a lot around allowing gambling on the platform So you can –

Dan Ferris:                 Kids and gambling. That's great [laughs].

Edwin Dorsey:            It's crazy but I see this complaints from –

Corey Mclaughlin:     No phone number or e-mail address.

Edwin Dorsey:            Kids get their parents credit cards hooked up and they spend $5,000. And normally parents have, like, transaction alerts. If it's doing something over $100. But Roblox, they are all in $5 or $10 increments, so they have 1,000 transactions at $10 each and parents get their statement and they're like, "What?" And the company doesn't refund them.

Or you can buy these boxes where you buy spins to win a special item and you can pay more for more – it's crazy. You can buy these items and trade and then go up and down in value. You can literally gamble kind of off platform with these online currency Robux and you can play games like dice and blackjack – and there's this whole kind of underground market connected to this currency they have created where kids, like teenagers, young kids, are just – it's terrible. It's crazy the lack of moderation and control that this company has over its user base and currency.

And I think it's deliberate to try to boost the numbers that they're not shutting this down. And I've even talked to executives and employees who left the company a year or two ago. And almost all of them say the company is aware of these issues, they don't want to fix it because it either costs money to moderate better, it'll hurt their growth to require more steps to sign up and – and they don't want to shut down these dark underground things because it will hurt the numbers.

And almost every former Roblox employee I talked to usually departed over a year is like, "I sold my stock." Some have even told me they're shorting the company. So the people closest to it know there's issues. You can see a lot of media reporting around it, and as it becomes more in the mainstream I think it really hurts the stock. I think Roblox is a fantastic short here.

Dan Ferris:                 And remarkably, of course during the sort of postpandemic 2021 ascension of everything, it soared up to – I'm just grabbing a Yahoo chart. Right? So the numbers might not be precise. But just call it $126 bucks. And then, now since like – call it May of 2022 – it's sort of been sideways between, I don't know, $30 to $40-ish. Which is remarkable to me because you're saying the mainstream is finding out about this thing and it's still just kind of going sideways. This is like – it hasn't been creamed yet. It's $27 market cap [crosstalk].

Corey Mclaughlin:     It's $3 a share? Yeah.

Edwin Dorsey:            This is like a 20-year-old company. It had the best time ever with the pandemic. There's 10s of millions of users. It's a cheap scale and it still can't post like gap profitability. That's an issue. The other thing is, this could be a fad. You look at the history of kids games and kids' tastes and preferences change over time. You know? Now, no game is popular among seven-year-olds for 20 years. So even in the best of times it can't get real profitability. So even if you don't care about the safety issues and cutting corners, what if it's just a fad and kind of goes away? I think there's tons of issues here. And at a $20 billion market cap not tons of upside.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Has the company – have people at the company – still at the company said anything about the safety claims, publicly?

Edwin Dorsey:            They say false and misleading, out of context. Some say there is bad content on the platform but it's tough to find. "We're industry-leading." But privately I think everyone knows Roblox is one of the least safe platforms that has a lot of these issues.

Dan Ferris:                 You know, Edwin, you remind me of – Whitney Tilson did a pretty good analysis of Lumber Liquidators. You remember that? They were basically poisoning their customers, right? [Laughs] So the treated wood was poisoned. So it's like some short sellers I think, "Oh, you make a good case against this company." And some people I'm like, "I would be terrified" – I was terrified only Lumber Liquidators. I'm terrified at the thought of owning Roblox. Because it sounds like you know, care.com 2.0 or something. It's just like a disaster.

Edwin Dorsey:            And you had Whitney on your podcast I think this past July. And he told this story. I listened to the first half of it not where he was short Netflix, and in response the Netflix CEO came out with the nicest blog post ever. It wasn't accusatory. He wasn't mean and kind of explained the long case. And that convinced him. So seeing a CEO have such humility and politeness and respect towards a short seller convinced him to ultimately go long and the stock is up 100x or something like that since then.

Roblox by comparison has literally sued one of the Youtubers who was criticizing them over safety. It's the exact opposite. And when you see this hostility and refusal to even engage in these types of conversations – if Whitney says the Netflix CEO was polite and had great result, then you're kind of seeing the opposite here with Roblox.

Dan Ferris:                 Exactly. If someone's committing libel, OK. If they're slandering or whatever those are legal issues. Right? I get it. However. As a company that is trying – survive and prosper and grow and all that, it seems like you would go out of your way to establish the legitimacy of what you're doing and the safety and all the rest of it. You wouldn't make a big show out of going after the YouTuber.

All right. Wow. So I'm just – thing is like $42. Like I said, the chart looks sideways for two years here. Between $30 and $40. And it won't surprise me at all if one day we look up and it's cut in half. And the other one that's sort of interested me – oh, I'm sorry, Corey. You were going to chime in there?

Corey Mclaughlin:     I was just saying, yeah. This is one of those things where it seems like one day it will – I don't know what. What do you think the share price will be out in a year, Edwin?

Edwin Dorsey:            I think it's tough to say in a year. I've heard from former employees that they think this is worth $5 to $10 billion, and it's a $25 billion company now. So, 70% downside. That feels about right to me. Again it's tough for me because I'm not used to typical financial analysis so it's tough to get a perfect read on it. But I would say this is something that has more than 50% to fall in my view.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah. Makes sense.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. OK. Now, the one that really shocked me, like I said, was Hershey. Because this is – it's one of the all-time great brands, isn't it? It's been a long around a long, long time. The Hershey legacy is one of like philanthropy and other such things, and the legacy of the brand is that it just won't go away and everybody wants it [laughs]. You seem to have a very different view. And I will note this. I can't help reading this, like, right off of your blog. Just like – you published problems at Hershey in July of 2023. It was the most mocked article in the Bear Cave's history. The blowback was swift. "How do I short Bear Cave," one person wrote. And, you know, "You're not a serious person. Brainwashed, complete garbage. I like who takes the majority of the time, but this one isn't it." Etc., etc., etc." Where are you – let's see. This is dated March 2024, so this is fairly recent. You're still there on her sheep. You still have problems – and the main problem is the Feastables or...?

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah. In fact, I'm a single-issue person when it comes to Hershey's. Typically in a short thesis you've got five different things. For me it's really simple. I've got one issue with Hershey's. And it's not with the company itself. It's with the new competitor called Feastables. And I think this audience actually is – and most investors aren't familiar with Feastables and the person behind it, Mr. Beast.

So I'm going to give a little bit of an introduction here. Mr. Beast is this 26-year-old – same like me, my age – YouTuber who's unbelievably popular. His real name is Jim McGowan. His channel is Mr. Beast. He puts out a video roughly every two weeks that gets hundreds of millions of views. I'm talking he has a Super Bowl-sized audience every two weeks. If you have an 8-, 10-, 12-year-old in your life they'll know about Mr. Beast and his content.

And his first real physical product was launching a chocolate brand called Feastables that directly competes with Hershey's. And it might sound silly to say, "How can a 100-year-old company like Hershey's $30-billion market cap, huge distribution even be hurt by a Feastables?" And a lot of the times when I say, "There's this new upstart competitor that might take share," people will dismiss it right off the bat. I have a few reasons that I think Feastables could compose a real competitive risk over time to Hershey's.

First, you're already seeing it a little bit in the numbers. Hershey's does about $10 billion in North American chocolate sales. Almost all their sales are in the U.S., and there are two dominant brands with Hershey's, are the Hershey's bars and the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. They have a few others, like Almond Joy and Twizzler. But those are the two dominant ones. And they sell a lot in Walmart, Target, and a lot of stories throughout the U.S. Feastables. And it's roughly 2.5 years since launch... I estimate is doing about $500 million a year in chocolate sales.

So that's a huge ramp really, really fast. Because they have this huge grasp over the younger demographic. So even though it's 5% of sales today and it might be creating a little bit of a new market, over time if this continues to grow – if Feastables is a $2 or $3 billion brand in a year or two, what if it takes a billion dollars of sales from Hershey's? That would hurt the stock tremendously. And Hershey's isn't a volume grower. The way Hershey's has continued to grow sails is by hiking price 5% to 7% every year. And there's only so much you can do with that.

So that's a real problem as Feastables starts to grow. And if you watch Mr. Beast's content, it doesn't just promote Feastables. He literally has videos with 100 million-plus views, mainly targeted towards kids where he has contestants taste the Hershey's bar and Feastables and they say, "Hershey's is trash." He has a room that just said, "Hershey sucks," in a video with 100 million views. He has contestants take the Hershey's bar and throw it in trash cans.

So he's actively going to tens of millions of kids in the United States – the future demographic of Hershey's – and teaching that – people love this guy. Kids love Mr. Beast. And he's teaching them, "Hershey's is terrible. You don't want to eat it." And I think over time that's going to have a big effect on Hershey's. This isn't something that happens in a day, a month or a quarter. But over time that might have a big effect. A lot of investors believe when you have this upstart brand is just going to be acquired if it gets big enough.

First, it's already a little too big to acquire. Mr. Beast and his manager said they would turn down a billion-dollar acquisition offer. Part of the reason they're doing it is because Mr. Beast has Crohn's disease and he wanted a better-for-you, healthier chocolate compared to Hershey's. So I really don't see an acquisition in the mix. A lot of investors say, "Well, even if you get a lot of online sales it's tough to get distribution. Hershey's is already in 10,000-plus U.S. locations. It's in every Walmart, every Target. You can go right now at the moment and oftentimes they're sold out."

Oftentimes they're right in the chocolate section next to Hershey's so there's a direct comparison. One to one. It's already getting a lot of distribution. It's already getting a lot in sales. So we'll see how this pans out. And this isn't to say Hershey is going to miss a quarter and fall by 50% or Hershey's isn't a good business. It's just oftentimes investors – sometimes it has the biggest moat. But things change, tastes and preferences can change over time. I don't think Hershey's connects with the younger generation as much.

So I have a feeling over the next two, three, five years, You know, if Feastables takes off this is just going to hit investors completely sideways. "What is Feastables? Who is this YouTuber? What?" And you're going to see 10% sales decline and then it will really get priced into the stock and be an issue. So this isn't fraud Or it's a bad company or the chocolate even tastes bad. It's just there's this new competitor I think that's quite good at executing well that isn't on the markets radar that could take share over time.

Dan Ferris:                 I see. So this – your emphasis, as you said, is on the relationship with the customer and Feastables is disrupting Hershey's relationship with its customer. It's not that Hershey is doing anything. They're not like the Roblox or care.com of chocolate or anything like that [laughs]. It's just they still do what they do and it's fine. But I'll tell you. It shocked me when you told me. This guy is, like, bashing Hershey's again and again.

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah.

Corey Mclaughlin:     I hope Mr. Beast isn't throwing Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at the wall. I haven't seen that but I still eat those planning.

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah.

Corey Mclaughlin:     I was just going to say, the point – the point about not being considered in the market is a great one. From even generationally that's not priced in. It's just one of those things I think that your point about the moat being breached at some point is a really good one. I think that's another great thing about what you're doing, pointing that out to people.

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah. And Corey, I like your point about the generational divide. Because my view in general is that markets are good at pricing companies – and most of the market participants, investors, in the world, tend to be men and tend to be older. Because that's just where you have the most capital. So we're talking 40 to 80 I think is where a lot of the decisions in finance are being made.

And that kind of leaves blind spots when it comes to the youth demographic and women. So I think oftentimes that cater a lot to youth or women can be the most mispriced or mispriced obviously for a long period of time. You look at Lululemon or, in this case Hershey's Feastables. So that's where I – or Roblox or care.com. People just have these blind spots because of the demographic of who's investing in the market and who these companies cater to are often very different. So that's one place I think I can dive in fast, especially using social media which I tend to be good at navigating and find these disconnects.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. So between Care, Roblox and Hershey now there's a theme here. Right? There's a disconnect between what parents think and what's actually happening kids, in all three cases. You know? Parents are probably like, "Oh, Hershey's is great," meanwhile their kids are like, "Throw that piece of crap in the trash can." And the other two are more serious in that way.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 So do you got anything else before I, you know, sort of rifle through the Bear Cave Substack here [laughs]? Is there another write-up of yours that is in that same general vein, sort of a generational divide?

Edwin Dorsey:            There's not one necessarily generational divide, but could I share an idea on a different topic, Dan?

Dan Ferris:                 Absolutely. Let's move on. Yeah.

Edwin Dorsey:            So moving beyond kind of child-related issues, one company that I think is poised to not do well in the future is Planet Fitness. And I think everyone here is probably familiar with the general idea of Planet Fitness. Cheap, bare-bones gym. $10, $15 a month, a place you can go as kind of a beginner to workout. And $7 billion company, a few thousand locations, franchise throughout the United States. $7 billion market cap, near all-time highs, 40 times earnings. The market likes it.

And to me, Planet Fitness has one big headwind coming up that I don't think the market is pricing in. And the FDC recently passed a click-to-cancel rule. Which the big idea behind this rule that's going to affect a lot of companies is, you need to make it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up for your service. And people can dislike regulators – and I'm not trying to give a comment on the Biden-Harris Administration. But I think this rule in particular is a good rule. Because companies play so many games when it comes time to – everyone's experienced your calling and waiting, this and that – and with Planet Fitness I think they're the worst actor, worst industry.

And to get a sense of how tough it is to cancel a Planet Fitness subscription is, you can do it over the phone, online, in person, whatever. But the only way – you can't cancel Planet Fitness online, in app, over phone or by e-mail. You need to go in person to the location you signed up at. And if you can't do that you need to send a letter. So it's already really difficult to cancel Planet Fitness subscriptions. And what I found by going to regulators to view complaints is, a lot of people say, "I go in to cancel. They even tell me it's cancelled, but they continue billing me."

So there's this huge disconnect where it's really tough to cancel Planet Fitness and there's lots of people who try to cancel and think they do and continue to get billed. And normally what I see is, if companies play games around cancellation, they do tend to get a lot of credit-card disputes. If a customer can't cancel their recurring subscription they just dispute it on their credit-card statement.

And what Planet Fitness does to circumvent this that's really brutal and shows you how much of a bad actor they are is, they don't let you sign up with credit cards. They force you to blank your checking account or use a debit card because then there's no dispute mechanism, or the dispute mechanisms are a lot weaker. So this is a common thing you see among scamming companies, is they want to keep billing you against your consent or overcharge you. They don't want you using a credit card which is very consumer-friendly.

So this is insane. And it's the most complaint about company I see on regulators. I literally see letters to regulators where somebody says, "I went in, I sent them three letters and they just won't cancel it." You go on talk boards for credit unions or on the comments section of YouTube and oftentimes bank employees say, "One of the big reasons generally low-income consumers cancel and reopen bank accounts is just to get Planet Fitness to stop billing them."

Because there's nothing you can do. They just keep taking the $10 a month out of your account. So they're the worst actor in the worst industry, gyms. I think people are genuinely unaware of how bad and predatory the Planet Fitness policies are. And once this rule gets into effect in about six months, I think it's going to really hurt the company. I joke, "Is Planet Fitness a gym company or is it an illegal billing operation with gyms on the side?" I think this is the company that's – the market is unaware of this issue but it's really going to affect them over the next year.

Dan Ferris:                 That does sound horrendous. I'm a libertarian type of person, so I wouldn't get the government involved. I would just – this is not going to work out well over the long term to treat people like that. But I agree. When that rule goes in, people are going to be clicking the hell out of there in a big way. And you would think that this would be in the stock. You're telling me it's not – this development is not in the stock?

Edwin Dorsey:            Well, it's near all-time highs. I was reading about them in 2023 and this is like the exact type of worst thing that could happen to the issue – you know, for the company. And I think you're right. Forget about government intervention or meddling in this issue. There's word of mouth.

Once somebody is mistreated by Planet Fitness they're not going to go back in the future. And they're going to tell their friends, "I think their brand among with a lot of their demographic is severely jeopardized." You see people just on Twitter, it's like the number one thing that goes viral, especially among lower income demographics, which is Planet Fitness primary audience, is just, "I have so much trouble canceling it."

People know they don't want to sign up again. It's a very over-saturated brand. Oftentimes in cities there's Planet Fitness's literally 2 miles away from each other and it's franchised. So the company has an incentive to have more units even if the franchisees don't. So there's a lot of issues here that, again, the market is kind of missing.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Treating franchisees bad. That's another whole layer of problem that – you can't keep it a secret. So there's two huge problems that you cannot keep secret. And this thing, as you have pointed out – it looks like, you know, the very tippy top might have been $95 in 2021 and it's like $79, $80 now still.

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah. Exactly

Dan Ferris:                 It's not like $40 or $30 or $20. It's $80.

Edwin Dorsey:            Exactly. Exactly.

Dan Ferris:                 And it's been going up, you know, over the past – what? I want to say since – you know, about a year or so. It's just like – OK. That's interesting to me. That's an interesting short idea. Maybe I'll steal that one from you [laughs].

Edwin Dorsey:            Steal away.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Planet Fitness. All right.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah. This is reminding me of something I remember learning early on. Like, the best of short research is really – yes. You'd like to make money in the trades but, like, exposing the consumer safety issues – that's one of the values that short sellers bring to the market, and we're clearly hearing that from you.

Edwin Dorsey:            Exactly. It's almost doing the job that the media should be doing.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Right. And I just –

Edwin Dorsey:            I joke [crosstalk] – yeah?

Dan Ferris:                 No, go ahead.

Edwin Dorsey:            There's a joke I heard that a short seller said, "I only have my job because people aren't doing theirs." And I think that's completely true. When the government doesn't do its job, when the media doesn't do its job and when the market is missing stuff – which I think happens a lot, and especially more in today's world – then short sellers have a lot of opportunity.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Like I said, it's low-hanging fruit. You're doing a great job. I noticed a couple things here, just with your Substack. One of them is, you have an entire tab devoted to Roblox abuse. So I didn't catch that before. It's amazing. And you were talking about AI losers. You've got a whole tab of those, too. So what's – and this Planet Fitness, I notice your write-up it says January 2023. What's your most recent thing here on Substack? What is your most recent write-up that you –

Dan Ferris:                 Most recent, this is Roblox, Which we already discussed. And then the other thing that I've talked about a lot this year that you just referenced is AI losers. So, I know you had past guests – I think Marc Chaikin was one of them. Because he talked about AI winners and all the potential. And there's going to be a lot of winners. I, of course, want to focus on the losers.

And there's a bunch of different categories. One that's already played out is education. Chegg was to me the most obvious short. Now it's down 99%. Still has about $200 million market cap. But you're not going to pay a service for homework help when ChatGPT can do it for you. Now, what I'm looking at a lot are call center stocks. Outsourced call centers and basic business process outsourcers. And my guess is, the listeners here are really familiar with the stock market but these are kind of like a subset of stocks that a lot of people don't talk about.

So the whole idea between outsourced call centers and these business process outsourcers is, generally they employ a lot of people in countries like Ecuador, India, the Philippines, to either do call center work or to do kind of basic labor for something like $10 a day. And the idea is that so much cheaper than us labor. Even if the quality isn't perfect it's more than enough to, like, offset for the cost benefit.

And some companies that do this are Teleperformance, a $6-billion company in France. There's TaskUs, a billion-dollar company based in the U.S. There's Concentrix with a $2.5 billion market cap. Telus International. There's a bunch of these call centers, 10 to $20 billion in total market cap. And I think these companies are just doomed. You know? Call centers – the amount of humans working there are already going down and going to continue to go down over time as AI can automate a lot of this work.

First they're going to automate the work that humans would normally do on a call, like call transcription. Note taking, transfers and stuff like that. Ultimately, I think in the future we are going to have a human service for where it matters. But this outsourced work – and when it's outsourced it means the companies don't care about it – that's going to be replaced by AI. You look at Y Combinator, and there's tons of these startups that are just AI phone companies, call agent companies that are getting really, really good.

All these call center agents I think are going to be out of a job the next one to five years. And there's just not a huge way this company can pivot. A lot of what these business process outsourcers do is content moderation. So they watch a TikTok or YouTube video or tweet and try to determine whether or not it's not within the guidelines of the platform. That could be outsourced.

A lot of it is, you go on Uber Eats and you get a delivery and it's not good and you take a photo take a photo to get a refund. That's going to be done with AI soon. This is very, very basic work. And you look at the case studies, it's comical how simple it is. One company said they got a multimillion-dollar contract to just transcribe a bank's calls between its customers and the bank to look for performance issues. This is exactly what AI can do.

So this subset of companies, business process outsourcers, outsourced call centers, Teleperformance would be probably the best one. Which is based in France and $6 billion market cap. Concentrix is a similar one in the U.S. These are great, companies to bet against because this is just a huge headwind that I think is going to hurt the industry big.

And the final thing I'll point out is, sometimes people like to get fancy with the thesis and say, "Bet against young CEOs who are talented." I like to bet against old CEOs who I don't think can pivot as well. And teleperformance is literally by its 71-year-old founder and CEO, Julian who works out of Miami Beach.

So Teleperformance, a French company, half a million employees around the country led by a 70-year-old chilling in Miami Beach – that's the company I want to bet against. I don't want to bet against, like, the Duolingo with the 40-year-old wicked smart tech CEO. I want to bet against this company that's being disrupted with older management, Having fun in Miami. Those are the ones that are not going to do well. So that's probably the biggest AI loser theme.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. Biggest AI loser is call centers.

Edwin Dorsey:            And if I can continue on this maybe just slightly more, there's a lot of downstream kind of effects here. Because this is really relevant for investors. You know, Within the call centers then there's call center software companies like Five9 – again, multibillion-dollar company that I think is going to be a hurt because they do per-seat pricing.

So as the number of call center employees go down, the software for call centers kind of get – Verint is another billion-dollar company that does call center-like transcription and analysis, so it makes software that when you call in a call center it helps tell the call center employee whether the tone is angry or friendly or like recommend prompts an upsells.

But that's going to be irrelevant in the world of, AI customer service. So there's a lot of these kind of downstream effects. And then I see a lot of investors talk a lot about AI. And you've done a great job at Stansberry highlighting the winners. But when it comes to losers, I don't see – like, on Twitter people just get too complicated. They want to say Duolingo or Adobe. I don't want to look at those. I think like textbook companies. The future of education, are we going to really use textbooks?

I haven't seen a single person talk about H&R Block. They do relatively basic tax filings. They have a huge physical footprint, A huge human footprint. In the future with AI are the regular average Joe Americans may be going to have an AI agent help them with their taxes? I could totally see that happening. It's going to take out so much cost.

And for complicated things you might want a human expert. For average Americans, like, you already use TurboTax. Why can't an AI agent just help you with your taxes and completely destroy the H&R Block model? There's so many of these companies that I don't see even talked about that I think have huge AI risks. It's just not immediate. This is going to be, like, a two- to three-year thing.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah. That's great. We just had – at our conference in Las Vegas, our Stansberry Research conference – a guy who used to work at OpenAI, Zach Kass. And he was talking about the opportunity in AI agents over exactly that timeline. Five years, 10 years. And yes, they will be there. And this is great, because you're explaining the opposite end of it, of what AI can replace and which is clearly not priced in the market for these companies yet I don't think. Right?

Edwin Dorsey:            I completely agree. The call centers are starting to get hurt, but still a long way to go if you think there's obsolescence. And the H&R Blocks in the world. Like, everyone's chilling. Nobody's even talking about it yet. Because it's a little – like, it's not immediate but it's going to happen.

Edwin Dorsey:            It feels second order but it isn't really. It's quite obvious now that you point it out. Yeah. So Edwin, I want to get you on record. We're recording this and I want to get you on record for two things. First of all, I'm having a blast. I love hearing you talk about these things.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yes. Nice having a young buck on here, too.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Edwin Dorsey:            Thank you. I'm having a blast, too. You guys do great.

Dan Ferris:                 That's No. 1. No. 2, I am going to, as forcefully as possible, tell the powers that be that I would love to have you speak at our Vegas conference that Corey just mentioned next year. Probably next October.

Edwin Dorsey:            I would be honored. That is very humbling and I would be honored. So accepted before I even know the date.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Right. And third, let me piggyback off of Dan right now. And third, I want to get back a little bit more into your origin. Obviously, you know what you're talking about. That's pretty much clear. But I want to go back to your origin story about getting into stocks and just going after this – what you're doing a little bit more. So you said 2nd grade you got interested in stocks? And then, just get into a little bit more of how that led to the newsletter. Because I feel like, obviously you're a young guy, you know what you're doing. I feel like some other people can learn a couple of things by –

Dan Ferris:                 I would expect you to be managing money. I agree with Corey. I would expect you to be managing money right now.

Edwin Dorsey:            So Dan, it could be possible in the future. Frankly, like, a newsletter is a good steppingstone because it allows you to build an audience and build credibility and save a little bit of money, and I'm really lucky and grateful for every reader so far. So, it's possible in the future. And for now I want to do this, get great at it and build those relationships that can lead to it in the future.

So to the origin story, Corey, I was into it really young and a few lucky breaks. One is, my grandmother, put a little bit of money in an E*Trade account. Her money but I got the username and password and I could invest it for her. And when you're a kid getting to manage real money, it's like, "Oh my goodness." It's the coolest thing. And then my uncle gave me his retirement account and I got the username and password and I just invested it for them.

So I was more into investing. And I think – I did well overall. But I invested a little bit in Valiant. Which this is like high school. And I lost a lot of money in that. And I kind of – I was doing what a lot of investors do, Which is trying to look at the numbers. I'm like, "Well, it's 10% cash flow yield and this is what management projects." And I realized it was kind of based on a lie.

Like, I didn't really understand the underlying business. Valiant was just jacking up prices like crazy, and that's not sustainable. And there's patent cliffs, where when a drug goes off patent their earnings go down." And I kind of realized the numbers don't matter if the underlying business is kind of not sustainable and built the wrong way."

So that almost made me do the opposite where I did tons of stock screeners and numbers and quantitative to really try and just understand the core business. And what I found – in some cases, not all but in some cases the flaws are so egregious it doesn't matter what the numbers say because the flaws are going to bear out fruit over time. And working for this hedge fund Sophos, you know, I interacted with a lot of different hedge funds and intern for a few. But Sophos was a $1 billion short only.

And the way they did work and where I worked for them all four years at college, is, it was crazy the way they approached things. Where, you know – barely building a model. Maybe the analyst did that a little but it was, you know, calling the people, the former people who interacted with the company – just understanding it at a basic level. If there's a drug company, we called the doctors who prescribe the drugs. There's a lot you can do just by Googling for an hour or two just to get a really deep understanding of the basic issues that drive the business. That helped.

And then I launched the newsletter in February of 2020, which is my senior year. And listeners will note that's one month before the pandemic. And the pandemic was the best time ever to launch an e-mail newsletter because people were bored, people were online, and people were looking for stuff to read. So it got really big, really fast in the pandemic. Which again was a huge, lucky break. You know?

And I just started charging for it with this idea that "twice a month for the paid subscribers I'm going to release an idea that I think is a good potential short. That's worthy of more investigation." And I got I think pretty lucky with the early ones where there's a lot of these tech IPO's that investors loved but they didn't understand the underlying business was kind of built on lies or harming consumers. So that really helped. My experience from Sophos, seeing how they can use the Freedom of Information Act to interact with regulators and get consumer complaints.

Which is technically public info but it's not obvious info because it's not found, like, through a Google search. Having that skill set gave me an edge and I really encourage investors, if you want to you can literally send an e-mail to the FTC, their FOIA inbox and within a month get a spreadsheet of complaints against the business." And 9 times out of 10 it might not change your view, but 1 time out of 10 seeing the complaints and patterns there can really make an impact."

So the entire way I'm built top to bottom is so different than Wall Street. Which means I can't understand many of the things people do. I'm not good at estimating earnings and talking about valuation. But I have this unique skill set on consumer issues and I know my spots. And if I stick to this universe of companies that I can understand well, I think I'm able to come up with these differentiated insights. And it's a ton of fun. I did it four years in college, now four years with the newsletter And I'm the only one that's doing what I do. I'm self-employed. I got all the time in the world. I just obsess over these things. So I got this unique niche and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible and just do it as well as I can.

Dan Ferris:                 That's awesome.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah, that's awesome.

Dan Ferris:                 That's so good to hear. I'm curious about you as an investor and –

Edwin Dorsey:            Thank you [laughs].

Dan Ferris:                 I'm curious about you as an investor, because obviously like, you know, you mentioned Chanos – one of the all-time greats – his fund broke even over time. You're not shorting these things because, you know, you're just independently offering information to your subscribers. As an investor, certainly you must have some stocks or something somewhere. How do you pick those?

Edwin Dorsey:            Yeah. So I think my strength is finding companies to bet against. And I know that the market tends to go up over time. So I don't want to short too much. I think these people who are brilliant think shorting is the way to make money. It's not. It's good as a hedge, it's good as a way to get more long if you're long a short fund. It's not a good way for individuals to make money.

So, I'm kind of basic on the long side. You're not going to believe this but I own just two individual stocks. One is Apple and another is that's really microcap pizza franchise company. And I like to just do – I like profitable businesses. I prefer microcaps. I prefer – I like businesses that are honest. So it just needs to be doing something I find useful in the world. I don't want gimmicky. I don't want promotional management. It just needs to be honest management that I think is doing something fall, nonpromotional. You know?

And if I find that I'll just bet big on that. So, you know, Apple is one where I just think it'll do well over time. I think they have room to increase prices. It's a useful – I use a lot of their products. That's good. No fancy analysis there. And then, I do look at a lot of microcaps where we're just looking for management integrity, reasonable valuation, doing something useful in the world. I can talk about one if you'd like, but it's small so I don't know if that's allowed.

Dan Ferris:                 Sure. Yeah. You can talk about it all you want. Whether or not – as long as we tell people, "It's small, it's illiquid. Be careful," etc. We're not – I don't think we're limited from doing that. Put it this way. Is it under $100 million in market cap?

Edwin Dorsey:            It is [laughs].

Dan Ferris:                 OK. Is it under $50?

Edwin Dorsey:            It's about $50. It's about $50. But the company that I'm kind of interested in on the long side – and again, illiquid, speculative. I personally own it. But it's called Rave Restaurant Group. The ticker is RAVE. And they're fan franchisor of pizza restaurants called Pizza Inn that's popular in the southeastern United States. If you have a relative in Texas they probably know about it. And they were popular in the 1980s. They competed with Pizza Hut. And over time they fell off.

They went from 600 units down to about 100. And then in 2019 they got a new CEO who came from Domino's who did the turnaround at Domino's in 2008 to 2014. And now he has a chance to turn around this pizza chain. And I think he is going to do it. They kind of got hurt in the pandemic because it's buffet-style pizza, so, you know, all buffets were kind of hurt in the pandemic.

But now it's starting to grow. They've signed licenses to open new pizza chains. It's been profitable for four straight years. They're projecting to grow units like 50% over the next five years but who knows if the projections are true. It has a clean balance sheet. But this is kind of the opposite of what I look at. I look for companies that are screwing customers on the short side for Bear Cave, and here's a company where the customers love it, at least according to online reviews.

Management is not promotional. Management owns the stock. It's a profitable, simple business at a reasonable valuation, 15 times earnings X cash. So it's got a runway for growth. You know, so small, illiquid. The market is not looking at it but this is the type of just basic, honest thing that I want to invest in that has the potential to do well.

Dan Ferris:                 All right. With all our caveats. Small, illiquid, etc., etc., etc. Your own work. We're not making a recommendation. We're just talking to our guest [laughs]. All right. Let's see. We have been talking and talking. My goodness. This is a lot of fun. But we've come to the moment when I asked the final question. And the final question is the same for every guest no matter what the topic. If you have already said the answer, you know, feel free to repeat it. So the final question is simply, "If you could, Edwin, please leave our with listener with a single thought today, what would that be?"

Edwin Dorsey:            It's a great final question.

Dan Ferris:                 Thank you [laughs].

Edwin Dorsey:            The single idea – and we've touched on this a little bit – is, I believe there's a lot of things businesses can do to make the numbers better in the short term that hurt the long-term value. You can raise prices. You can make it more difficult to cancel. You can make it more difficult to get refunds. There's a lot of things – you can cut corners on content moderation.

All these things help the numbers in the short term so they make the stock more attractive in the short term while harming the long-term value. And seeing that disconnect when it occurs is where I and I think a lot of investors can profit. So the final idea is, businesses can easily do things that help the short-term numbers that hurt long-term value.

Dan Ferris:                 Excellent. Thank you for that. And thanks for being here, man. I am telling you – I enjoy all of our guests but I haven't had this much of a blast In a little while. Your mind is on fire. I really enjoyed it. I'm sure Corey did, too.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah, man. Thanks. It was great.

Edwin Dorsey:            Thank you, guys. It was an honor to be here.

Dan Ferris:                 A new crisis threatens the American economy and could soon bankrupt millions of citizens. If you own U.S. stocks, bonds or real estate you may not even have seen the problem yet. But the world's most well-connected investors sure do. Billionaires like Warren Buffett and George Soros are now selling off U.S. stocks. Find out why and how you can protect your portfolio by going to www.americandarkday.com.

The last time the U.S. economy looked like this, stocks didn't move for 16 years, and many investors lost 80% of their wealth. Before you buy or sell anything, review this latest warning about the U.S. stock market completely free at www.americandarkday.com. [Music plays and stops] Wow, huh? Wow. That guy's mind is on fire. I love it. I loved every minute of that. I'm sure you did too, right? Just incredible.

Corey Mclaughlin:     I did. As long as he wants to stay in this industry With what he's doing, he will go as far as he wants to do – go with it. Yeah, it was great. Just the value he's bringing to obviously having subscribers at such a young age, and you've read his stuff. I know you are really impressed right off the bat. I think a lot of other people are too. And yeah, you could hear why.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. You could accuse me of a bit of confirmation bias, because the idea that you find these qualitative things that other people aren't necessarily looking for, don't have the skill set to pursue, that's really valuable and it's something that – I haven't done it nearly as well as his but I've starting to think about it a lot. And, you know, he just gave me an education in that. And his Substack is an education in that, too. So I personally have a lot of use.

Corey Mclaughlin:     Yeah. His point about how he points out a lot of blind spots for a lot of people just given – what he looks at and his age and generationally the differences, there's a lot to be said for that. And he's just doing it. So it's great. I also loved his point about how he got started, what piqued his interest in this. And literally his family members giving him actual money to not play with but to actually manage.

Those are the things that – even if it's just a little bit of money with somebody – are invaluable to somebody, like, younger to just get that experience, and get comfortable with it. Because I know a lot of people aren't. And so, that's why I asked him about that because I think that's just like a lesson for a lot of people to get started early, and the more you do it the more you get comfortable with it like anything else.

Dan Ferris:                 Absolutely. Wow. I just – that was a lot of fun and but a lot of fun. And we are definitely going to invite him back. I can't wait to see it, like, six or so months from now, "What has he gotten into? What has he discovered?" It's exciting. All right. Well, that is another interview and that is another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour.

I hope you enjoyed it as much as we really, truly did. We do provide a transcript for every episode. Just go to www.investorhour.com, click on the episode you want, scroll all the way down, click on the word transcript and enjoy. If you liked this episode I know anybody else who might like it, tell them to check it out on our podcast app or at investorhour.com please. And also, do me a favor. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And while you're there, help us grow with a rate and review. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Our handle is @investorhour. On Twitter our handle is @investor_hour. Have a guest you want us to interview? Drop us a note at [email protected] or call our listener feedback line. 800-381-2357. Tell us what's on your mind and hear your voice on the show. For my co-host, Corey Mclaughlin, till next week. I'm Dan Ferris. Thanks for listening.

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