HYH Interview: Edwin Dorsey

Welcome back everyone.

We’re kicking things off with the first interview I’ve done in a minute. Last week, I hopped on a Google Meets call with Edwin Dorsey, the Founder of The Bear Cave.

The Bear Cave is an investing Substack with over 50,000 readers which focuses on calling out corporate misconduct and is often used by equity investors looking for short ideas. You can back into it, but the latest calculation is that Edwin makes roughly 500k a year as a 25 year old who built a niche finance following. Edwin has a large following over on Twitter and is also known for his Twitter Spaces debates. (And no, I’m never calling Twitter “X”). Edwin has launched some notable pieces, titling every piece “Problems at ____” and has never been shy about taking some unpopular opinions, such as recently arguing a negative case for Hershey.

Edwin wouldn’t let me jokingly name the newsletter title “Problems at The Bear Cave” - but I appreciated the dialogue with Edwin and respect the entrepreneurial drive and success he’s demonstrated. He’s also done a solid job calling out companies with unethical practices that played fast and loose that ultimately saw their equities go down by more 90% or more. He also told me he loves respectful debate - which brings me to this next topic:

Something happened shortly after our call on Monday 8/21, and I’d be a bad writer if I don’t call this out. After our conversation, Edwin hosted a Twitter Spaces with Short Seller Marc Cohodes that sparked a lot of interest among Twitter. Mainly because the behavior of Cohodes shocked a lot of FinTwit and was full of expletives.

If it wasn’t for the Chamath “I’m in the arena” bit last week, this would’ve been one of the more talked about events on Twitter last week.

I’ll leave it for everyone interested in listening to give it a go, just so we don’t go too far off track in this newsletter. The more fiery portions are from the first 4 to 10 minutes in, and then the last minute of the Space.

The video below includes the notable part from the last minute of the Space. It’s very colorful and entertaining, but also from my lens, it’s unfortunate to hear this, given Edwin was just telling me the night before how lucky he felt meeting Cohodes early on and how amazing it was to have him as a mentor while he was in college.

I asked Edwin for his comment on the matter, in which he replied: "I still love Marc and wish him the best. There is no genius without a touch of madness."

Now that the Twitter Spaces has been addressed, here is our conversation. We talked about Edwin’s start, his successful report on Care.com, and I got granular on his Hershey vs. Feastables pitch. Personally, I still don’t agree with the Hershey note, but appreciate Edwin thoughtfully laying out his case and pounding the table on his thesis. Note, none of the below constitutes financial advice.

High Yield Harry and Edwin Dorsey

High Yield Harry: Appreciate you hopping on a call here.

Edwin Dorsey: Absolutely, Harry. I'm excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me on your newsletter.

High Yield Harry: Yeah, of course, man. So I’d love to hear more about the origin story. Why you started The Bear Cave and ultimately what you try to achieve day in and day out?

Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, absolutely. So Harry I’ve been following stocks since the 2nd grade and was obsessed with the stock market in high school. I started managing a little bit of money for family members and started blogging on Seeking Alpha anonymously. That was my first time starting to write about stocks and doing real research. Then in freshman year of college, I got two really fortunate introductions. First, I met with Marc Cohodes who is this big prolific short seller and he became a really early mentor, and Jim Carruthers who ran a billion-dollar short-only fund called Sophos. So freshman year of college, two of my early mentors were just amazing short sellers. I interned for Sophos on and off for all four years of college and they were excellent. I learned a ton and I met a ton of people in the industry.

However, when I was graduating in 2020, they (Sophos) were in the process of shutting down - so I needed to find a job. It was the end of February 2020, my senior year of college and the pandemic happened. I graduated early, I had a little bit of time at home to work on this newsletter and it became really popular, really fast. Long story short in September of 2020, I started charging for. It hit about $100k in annual recurring revenue within two months, so it just became my job. Day in and day out, the Newsletter is focused on exposing corporate misconduct, so I highlight a lot of new activist short campaigns, questionable resignations, interesting tweets and kind of the gold standard of what I would hope to achieve is if I can write on something and then it has a real tangible impact in the world. For example, if I write on something and then the mainstream media starts to report on the issues I highlight and that causes a company to change its practices. That happened with Care.com when I was in college, and that's something I'm proud of and that's something I hope to repeat more and more with my own investigations. It would be nice to spark changes around the edges and encourage people to be citizen journalists. Teaching people a little about how I go about researching companies so they can take my techniques and apply them to how they research companies is another goal of mine.

High Yield Harry: We’d love to hear more about some of these earlier stories like Care.com and those other types of reports you had early on in your coverage.

Edwin Dorsey: Absolutely, the Care.com story is a great story and it kind of goes hand in hand with the origins of The Bear Cave. So right after my freshman year of college, I was home for the summer between freshman and sophomore year for a bit. And I had a friend, who was a babysitter on this babysitting platform called Care.com, which was a billion-dollar NYSE-listed publicly traded platform for parents to find babysitters and for babysitters to advertise services to parents. My friend said, Hey, you should check out this site, I don't think they're doing the background checks they claim to be doing, they don’t seem safe, they seem sketchy. I'm curious, so I decided to look into it and I saw a lot of local news reporting about Care.com babysitters who had criminal histories and were unwittingly hired by parents to babysit kids and then bad stuff happens. I saw on PACER, a government website for lawsuits, that Care.com has been sued multiple times for allegedly not running the background checks they claimed to be doing on babysitters.

I decided to look into it myself by trying to sign up on Care.com as Harvey Weinstein. So, I used a photo of Weinstein, made up a Social Security number and email address, and I thought no way in the world would they approve me. This is an obviously fake account. I think there's no way they approve this account, but then 2-3 days later, they approve it and it's like, “Hello Harvey, you passed our background check”. This was proof they weren't running the background checks they claimed to be doing.

So I wrote a story about it and tweeted it out to my few thousand Twitter followers at the time and it got attention, the company got upset, and they called my college to try to get me in trouble for violating their terms of service. Stanford then told me I needed to take the article down and I refused to and this started a war between me and this company where I continue to investigate them, I file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with every State Attorney General against the company, and then published thousands of pages of complaints I obtained on them. I cold emailed journalists to try to raise concerns about the safety issues on the platform and long story short, the Wall Street Journal a little over a year after I first started writing about them has a front page story highlighting Care.com babysitters who have criminal histories that killed eight kids after being hired through Care.com. That's when real change was sparked. The CEO, CFO, and General Counsel all resigned. I was mentioned briefly in the WSJ article. It gave me a lot of credibility on Twitter where I wasn't just a college kid, I was somebody who predicted this big thing and then had some people who then cared about my newsletter when I started it.

I think another thing that really helped make The Bear Cave popular were some big wins early on: I criticized Root Insurance, a car insurance company that went public in a multi-billion dollar IPO that Wall Street loved. However, they had hundreds of consumer complaints about how they were raising prices on people who signed up for car insurance and making it really tough to cancel. I was seeing in all these of these consumer complaints that they were screwing people over, generally poor minority people, and getting them hooked on this cheap car insurance, then they raised prices aggressively during the pandemic, when no other auto insurance company was and then made it really difficult to cancel. When this came out, it really shifted Wall Street's perception on the stock and it ended up falling 90% plus.

High Yield Harry: You mentioned that by the end of 2020, you had roughly $100k of ARR. How has that changed over time? How did you scale your following over the past couple years?

Edwin Dorsey: I started the newsletter in February 2020. It got to 3,000 people by September 2020, which is when I turned on the paid tier. I tweeted a lot about it. I cold emailed every single college investment club in the US to tell them about it. I personally DMed each one of my Twitter followers for three days, just looking at my screen, asking every single follower to sign up and my eyes hurt by the end of it. I did all that to gain the early momentum. Once I launched the paid tier, I started publishing deep-dive investigations on companies. That’s what drove me to 50,000 free subscribers and over a thousand paid subscribers for The Bear Cave. So it's very much a comfortable full-time income. I also launched a second newsletter called Sunday's Idea Brunch, where twice a month I'll interview an interesting off-the-beaten-path investor. This has almost 10,000 free subscribers and over 500 paid. Newsletters are beautiful businesses in that they scale wonderfully, if more people read or pay for my newsletter it's still the same amount of work for me. Twitter was a big boost early on - just getting tweets to go viral, doing threads, and podcast appearances were a big part. I accept every podcast I get invited to, no matter how big, no matter how small. Being friends with others helps in unpredictable ways.

High Yield Harry: I’m very zoned in as a credit investor on red flags, downside risk, on really scrutinizing something, and having more pessimistic views than an equity investor, especially from a long side. You’re a big proponent of making information requests, curious from your lens as a more pessimistic equity investor how you think about red flags?

Edwin Dorsey: Two big buckets are Companies that mislead investors and Companies that harm customers. Any attempts to mislead investors no matter how small get a lot of scrutiny from me. For example, there was a SPAC deal for Embark trucks (which fell 90%+). In their investor presentation they said their 25-year-old CEO built the first-ever self-driving car in Canada. I thought, “Well that’s an interesting claim”, and when I looked into it, the CEO built a golf cart. It’s kinda true, but not really. When you see that, that really peaks my interest, “What else are you lying about”?

Another thing is harming customers – one of the first things I’ll do is look at consumer reviews and cancellations. Once you read through these, you figure out what’s substantive and reasonable. Once in a while, it’s clear the customer is antagonized, the company seems to be screwing people over. That will lead me to start filing FOIA requests to figure out how egregious the problems are.

Other things are high executive turnover where you can form a narrative, such as if their chief accounting officer leaves and someone resigns from the audit committee. Or if a lot of operating execs leave after 1-2 years and remove their past experience from LinkedIn. I spend time on bad boards & seeing what other boards they served on. If almost none of the board has public company experience that’s a red flag, or if they do and they’re associated with penny stock companies. Unique disclosures are the last big thing I look at – “There are no accidents in SEC filings” is largely true. Most disclosures are boilerplate used by dozens to hundreds of companies. If I see one specific disclosure then that’s interesting. For example, “Why are you the only company that uses this language for revenue recognition?” – that’s kind of odd.

High Yield Harry: Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. That was geared to my next question, that it seems like you’re looking at a lot of companies that make it hard for the consumer to cancel, or take advantage of people. Inherently you can’t do that forever, unless you’re the U.S. Healthcare system. It seems like that’s a good way to go about finding companies to report on.

Edwin Dorsey: The irony there is it makes the numbers look better. If you can make it tough to cancel and aggressively raise prices over the short term then the numbers look better. But it degrades the value of the business long term, and it makes the short term better. You can find these disparities where it’s clear it’s not sustainable and it will bite them in the butt eventually. Especially with a recent IPO or SPAC, this can be a great setup.

High Yield Harry: Got it. Switching gears a bit, your business relies on a paid premium model, which is obviously doing very well. But you get a lot of pushback on Twitter from the fact that you don’t short any of these names. The argument I keep seeing is “If you don’t short it are these pieces going to be less actionable short ideas for the street?”. Giving you the window to lay out your response on why you run it this way and if you would ever change.

Edwin Dorsey: It’s funny, I spoke at a conference with a bunch of high school teachers and told them about what I did, and every single one said “I think it’s great you don’t take positions and give honest opinions” which is funny cause Wall Street says the opposite. They say “You don’t eat what you’re cooking” and “You don’t have real validity” – it’s a little bit of a catch-22. If you don’t take positions people will say “If you believe what you’ve said you’d take a position”, and if you take a position “You don’t believe in what you write, you’re saying it so it benefits your position”. There’s no way to win.

I chose my model cause I’m good at the early innings of research, I’m very document-based, I file FOIA requests, I read lawsuits and SEC filings, and express my opinions. I’m not spending months or years on something like other activist short-sellers, I don’t want to hire private investigators, and I don’t have hundreds of thousands or millions to spend on a research model. It’s just a different model where my model is good at the early stages of research and expressing my opinion on the documentation. I don’t care about moving stocks, my goal isn’t to move stocks, this model is being an independent citizen journalist which fits my talents. If I wanted to make more money, I probably could try to do the activist short model, but that’s not what I’m great at, my skillset is a little different than the activist short sellers out there. But nothing wrong with what they do, I’m just more comfortable with my model. What you say stands for itself, if you say nonsense you’ll lose readers over time, so you need to be correct.

High Yield Harry: Okay, so it seems clear you’re very early term, research-oriented. I think a lot of us on Twitter have Investment Banking or Bulge Bracket backgrounds, would you ever model out some of your names or is that not really what you’re there for? You’re trying to be more of a reporter as opposed to modeling it out right?

Edwin Dorsey: Ya modeling would not fit with what The Bear Cave is doing. There’s a lot of people great at modeling EPS and playing quarters, but that’s not my skill set. That’s another common question “Why don’t you model, Why don’t you provide earnings estimates” but that’s not what I’m great at – I’m great at this early stage research, shifting through thousands of companies and finding the few dozen that have some serious issues underappreciated by the market and doing the research to confirm that’s true and showing the evidence. That’s what I’m great at and I don’t have a desire to model, I’m not going to be talented at modeling, I’ve got this unique skill set finding $1B-$10B companies that are misleading investors and harming customers. I’ll continue to make those writeups better. If you want modeling pick a different service.

High Yield Harry: Okay, I appreciate the response. Some of the reports I’ve really enjoyed the most from you are looking at these $1B, $2B companies (where they were valued in late 2020/2021) and seeing these companies go down 90% or so. I think these are fascinating to go after, especially looking back at how frothy ’21 was. It seems like with some of these larger, more capitalized companies some of these reports are making less of a dent, like Airbnb, TD Bank, and Hershey, how do you think about writing reports on larger companies vs. some of these smaller ones?

Edwin Dorsey: Absolutely, it’s really fun to find those $1B-$2B companies where you bring a lot of information to the table and change the market’s perception, but that was a lot easier in 2020/2021, it’s a little tougher now, but I still look at it a lot. Readers prefer larger companies, because it’s more actionable for more people, you might not move the stock, it’s tough to move the stock of a $50B company but that’s not my goal. It takes more time to research bigger companies, so that’s why I didn’t start initially. I can do a $500mm company in my sleep, with my eyes closed, in a few hours. It’s a lot easier to look at larger companies. I’m looking at a bunch of $1-$5B companies with some serious issues, it's just over time I want to get into bigger market cap names.

High Yield Harry: Okay, got it. Going off of that, how do you feel about the fact that some of your pieces now are immediately popping up as Bloomberg alerts, or Walter Bloomberg might blurb it out. It’s kind of a “great power, with great responsibility” thing where you’ve amassed this audience and you need to put in the work to have your research taken seriously given it’s having real market consequences. So how do you approach the pros and cons, given it’s obviously important?

Edwin Dorsey: Absolutely, it’s humbling to see how far I’ve come from a college student no one wants to talk to vs. thousands of people seeing something instantly and trading it. It makes you a lot more nervous, I read everything 5 to 6 times. It’s a constant reminder to me to be understated and let the evidence speak for itself. My headlines are always “problems at xyz company” and it’s intentional. I know I could write a flashy headline that could move a stock more, but it’s part of maintaining credibility and letting the evidence speak for itself. It’s exciting, it’s humbling, it’s a little scary – I always remind myself “don’t get any of your facts wrong”.

High Yield Harry: Yeah, so let’s go into some individual names. Hershey is a good one to start with – FinTwit had a lot of comments on this one – part of the argument on your end is that Feastables can take a bite out of Hershey’s lunch. On my end, I view Hershey as a pretty gigantic operator with scale. This is a business with over 10 Bil in Sales, decent FCF, almost 20k employees – I think with Mr. Beast there’s been some issues as of late, especially with him backing out of his burger deal. I think it’s fair what people are asking, why would Feastables be any different – if he had to back out of his burger deal cause of quality control and had issues with his ghost kitchen partner, couldn’t something like that happen in a market where there’s a lot of volatility and variability with the input costs you put into a chocolate product. Now that it’s been a bit since the Hershey report, how do you view the set-up there?

You can view the reactions in the Tweet below:

Edwin Dorsey: I would highlight that Hershey is down 10% to 15% since I wrote on them. I thought it was such a bizarre, insane reaction on Twitter. It’s one of my favorite ideas, one of my favorite Bear Cave writeups, and I 100% stand by it. I think Hershey an interesting short idea. Part of my frustration with the FinTwit reaction, there were a lot of people criticizing it, I think most of the people criticizing it have not read the paywalled portion. A lot of their questions and issues were addressed in the paywalled portion. It’s mind-boggling to me. The high-level thesis is the core of Hershey’s business is $8B in North American confectionary sales, mostly chocolate with the Hershey bar and Reese’s peanut butter cups. Those are the flagship brands and are primarily sold in retail outlets. Go to any Walmart or Target, they dominate the candy aisle. It’s a great and steady business that will grow in line with the US population and is priced to perfection at 30x earnings. Hershey was a business I would never bet against 2-3 years ago, it’s something you’d be pretty confident would be bigger 5-10 years from now. This is until I started following Feastables.

One of the frustrations here is Mr. Beast is this huge YouTuber – but everyone (every critic) will say “Look I found this article and sales were only tens of millions of dollars” – that article was 3 months after launching – it got in every Walmart by the end of 2022 and now it’s in every Target, they said they’ll go from 4,000 retail stores to 40,000 retail stores by the end of the year. My broad-based estimate of how Feastables sales will do is $500mm this year in part due to what they said on podcast episodes, where they hope to do $100mm or $200mm in October alone, so you can get to that ballpark of $500mm in sales pretty easily. If you have a Feastables chocolate bar now next to Hershey’s in every Walmart and Target of course it’s gonna have an effect. Even if half of Feastables sales is coming from a new market, and half is coming from existing people (from Hershey) that’s still a $200mm impact on Hershey’s sales this year. That’s material to their business, that might be 2% of revenue, but that’s half of revenue or volume growth and a 2% impact on revenue will have a disproportionate impact on profitability. More importantly, it’s going to become a bigger issue in the future. So much of the candy market is kids or parents buying candy and buying candy on Halloween, and now for parents it’s almost a no-brainer to buy a Feastables. It’s completely off Wall Street’s radar and I think it can have a material effect starting this year and a bigger effect in the future.

This Beast Burger stuff is a completely separate thing – Feastables is 100% owned by Mr. Beast and his management company, it’s been a rockstar success from the start and is taking off. Every podcast he’d talk about Feastables and talk about the problems of the Burger. I was aware of the Beast Burger issue, it wasn’t a surprise to me. Mr. Beast has even said his big regret with Beast Burger is he let it be outsourced to this third party who was running these ghost kitchens and then quality control got messed up, and now he’s suing to get out of it. Feastables is a completely separate thing where he owns 100% of it and they made clear he wants to build this into a huge enduring business. He’s 100% focused on Feastables and building a multi-billion dollar brand. This burger stuff is just noise. It’s so frustrating, cause to me it’s so obvious, this burger stuff means nothing, and these articles about how little sales they had in the first 3 months when it was online only mean nothing. The big question is how much in sales will Feastables have this year, are they creating a new market, or are they taking share from Hershey and how big will it get in the future.

Wall Street is great at pattern recognition – when they see Feastables their view is: A creator creates a business, they can get some online sales but it’s tough to get distribution, and even if they get distribution it’s going to be a long slog to get it over a few years, and even if they get it and maintain it and it’s not a fad, what always happens is the big brand buys it out for $500mm-$1B. So Wall Street thinks “I’ve seen this 100 times before, this time is not gonna be any different. Edwin doesn’t know what’s doing, this is a stupid writeup. Worst case this is a $1B acquisition for Hershey.” What I’m really steadfast in is there’s something different about Mr. Beast – he’s not a creator, he’s the dominant creator getting hundreds of millions of views within weeks on every one of his videos, and he’s becoming more and more powerful month by month. I think he’s going to be one of the most influential people in our generation. I think Feastables is going to be a huge success, they’ve made clear they’re not willing to sell even at a multi billion dollar buyout and I think Wall Street doesn’t understand the power of Mr. Beast and how rapidly Feastables is growing and how much real distribution they’re getting after less than two years.

The big question mark which is fair, isn’t whether Feastables will get hundreds of millions, or even billions of sales. The bigger question is whether this creates an entirely new market of demand, or steals share from Hershey. Sometimes people have a tough time understanding change, I know I’m going on here a bit, but Warren Buffett’s whole thing at Berkshire 10-20 years ago was “I can’t predict the next big technology thing, but I know a lot of people will be chewing more gum in the future and I can predict chewing gum sales in grocery stores will continue to go up.” People like to quote that now, but that was actually very wrong. Chewing gum sales at grocery stores have gone down. The reason they’ve gone down is because people are on their phones at the checkout aisle, they’re not looking to buy gum as the last second purchase. It’s the perfect example of how things can change in ways you don’t expect or in ways that haven’t been modeled out before. I think you see that with Hershey, beyond pressure with Feastables you have this general health trend in the U.S. and this big trend with weight loss drugs that can suppress the appetite for Hershey’s. I think there’s this big change where a lot of these CPG companies are really just advertising companies, but now advertising has changed for the little guy where you can see a brand like Celsius or Prime take share quickly, which means there can be more copycats like that in the future. I think Hershey could be in real real trouble, I think Feastables will take share, and I think a lot of these traditional CPG companies will get in some trouble in the future.

High Yield Harry: I appreciate the rundown, don’t worry about ranting a bit, it’s all good. A couple of follow-ups on that, just out of curiosity, for the reader we want to compare the size of Hershey and Feastables a bit. You gave some run-rate revenue numbers, obviously October is a pretty big month for confectionary brands. I know off-hand Hershey is a business that does roughly $500-$600mm in capex a year, I think they’re elevating it this year to invest in some co-packing facilities, just curious if you had on hand anything on margin for Feastables, anything bottom-line oriented or also on anything on the employee side, even if it’s contracted workers, whether they own facilities, or if they’re taking up co-packing space to build out Feastables and get it to allegedly 40,000 stores.

Edwin Dorsey: So those are all very great questions, I don’t know is kind of the honest answer because it’s a private company. For me, the best way to track Feastables is to listen to every podcast with Jimmy Donaldson (Mr. Beast) and his manager and listen to their commentary change over time. Those are all fair questions that I want to answer over time. To me, they’re unanswerable right now. They have said that the margins are very strong and it’s very profitable and they want to grow rapidly. They keep saying they get overwhelmed with the growth – it’s not a demand problem, it’s very much a supply problem where it sells out everywhere it goes. I do think they said they’ve had issues figuring out the supply chain, which will be worked out over time, but they’re killing it. You could compare Hershey’s R&D to Feastable’s R&D, I don’t know a ton on the marketing side. Hershey will spend way more on marketing than Mr. Beast ever will, but I think Mr. Beast mentioning it in a video with 200mm views where he has Pete Davidson trying out his Feastables and Pete says it’s great, Hershey couldn’t pay $500mm for that type of remembrance among this generation of kids. I think a lot of times people like to compare numbers that companies spend on capex or R&D or marketing when it’s really not apples to apples. It’s not a money constraint thing, it’s about how effective you are with using your resources.

High Yield Harry: It certainly makes sense given the platform he has he can get marketing spend at pennies on the dollar compared to everyone else. I’ll let you get the last word before we move on but I think, not to go too far off topic, a big thing I have on the red flag side as a credit investor is when you look at private companies and private individuals and they make statements to the public, normally you see things that aren’t necessarily true. You see this with a lot of pre-IPO companies where they say “we are profitable” but then they’re profitable on a highly adjusted EBITDA basis or even private credit, private equity where you don’t have true mark-to-market and have the ability to really hide how things are going at the portco level. Not to use an extreme example, but you look at SBF and they had a $32B valuation and everything looked super rosy and it certainly was not. Obviously, that is not a comparable, but using that as an example. Obviously, things are a little rosier on the private side when you don’t have to give information and can be a little vague to the public side. So I just wanted to call that out as one of my credit red flags, but I’ll let you get the last word on Hershey and Feastables before we move on. (To be clear I’m asking if we can take Mr. Beast at his word).

Edwin Dorsey: Two quick things – I always say “Does it make sense”. There were a lot of things with SBF that didn’t make sense – “Who was this kid” “How was he able to do this” “Where are the funds being stored” “Why is everyone on his team kinda nobodies” – with Feastables there’s a lot of talented people with CPG experience on the team. This is a guy who can create a ton of demand. The story to me makes sense. The second thing is – fine, don’t trust all his statements, verify them. Go into any Walmart or Target, go to the candy section, and next to the Hershey bars you’re going to find the Feastables. It might not be getting a ton of shelf space, but almost everywhere I’ve gone, next to the Hershey bars are the Feastables. I’d encourage all your readers to just go to Walmart, Target, Kroger, 7-11, and Albertsons and see if Feastables is there and next to Hershey’s.

And think to yourself – could this cause a 2% decline in Hershey’s revenue? I think yes, and if that happens how big will it be next year when they get more retail space.

High Yield Harry: Okay, got it, appreciate it Edwin. Last question on my end, another individual name, your piece on $RICK (RCI Hospitality) got a lot of attention, a while ago at this point. You called this out, it’s been a big Twitter stock I guess, with a lot of people talking about it on there. You guys ultimately had a Twitter Spaces, with the CEO, the management team, and some of the bigger investors. Obviously, it was a very passionate conversation from both sides, so I wanted to hear you reflect a bit and hear if your views have changed and what you thought of the debate overall.

Edwin Dorsey: I love respectful debate. I love it when I write something and someone very knowledgeable about the business wants to come on and do a Q&A. The CEO of RCI Hospitality (they operate strip clubs and restaurants) came on. He was very smart, very articulate, and very respectful and I learned a lot and gained a lot of respect for him. I don’t think I wrote anything wrong in my article, I don’t think I would’ve written it again if I could go back because I kind of missed the forest in the trees. I spent a lot of time nitpicking small things where there was a bigger story I missed. It’s gone from 55 to 65 today, so it’s not like I horrifically missed up. If there’s one thing that’s a consistent flaw, I think sometimes I get too focused on things that don’t matter to the core story and miss the bigger picture and that might’ve been what happened with Rick’s a little.

High Yield Harry: What’s the future look like for The Bear Cave and for you Edwin? You wanted to start a career in the investment industry but then you scaled something on your own that makes more than a lot of people your age make. So I wanted to think about what’s next with The Bear Cave.

Edwin Dorsey: The key for me is to do a great job and everything will take care of itself. Great content consistently over time is the key to success. I don’t want to do anything that jeopardizes The Bear Cave and Ideas Brunch. I have tons of ideas for other newsletters, but the big thing I want to do is to get into YouTube. I want to start taking the content with mass market appeal like Hershey or Planet Fitness, Companies that are well known that I think have some issues, and start creating YouTube investigations around it. An example could be “Here’s how Planet Fitness is screwing over millions of Americans in 8 minutes or less” and then break it down, show the FOIA evidence, and show the cancellation complaints. If you make well-produced YouTube videos like that it can get millions of views. YouTube is an incredible distribution platform and it can serve as a great top of funnel for the newsletter, making it beyond just a Wall Street niche publication and making it into a well-known mass publication. With The Bear Cave, more time will go into investigations and I will maybe focus on bigger companies, keep killing it with Sunday’s Idea Brunch, move into YouTube eventually, and start doing some content there to see if it can widen the breadth of the audience.

High Yield Harry: Okay perfect, thanks a ton for the time Edwin, and best of luck.

That concludes this interview - it was the longest HYH newsletter piece done thus far, but covered a lot of ground with a notable FinTwit account. Thanks everyone for reading - a new credit oriented piece will be out two weeks from now.