I recently sat down with Adam Taggart on Wealthion to share what Jim Chanos calls “a golden age of fraud.”
What started as a discussion about corporate misconduct evolved into an eye-opening exploration of how easy money and weak oversight are creating perfect conditions for deception. From $1 billion drone companies spending just $200,000 on R&D to auto insurers trapping customers in predatory contracts, the scale of corporate fraud today is staggering. After years of investigating companies through The Bear Cave newsletter, I’ve learned that the most dangerous frauds aren’t always the most obvious ones – they’re the ones Wall Street celebrates while customers suffer in silence.
Table of Contents
What You’ll Learn:
- We’re living in a “golden age of fraud” driven by easy money and weak oversight, where good people do bad things and bad people do worse
- Regulators act like “financial archaeologists” – great at investigating after fraud happens but poor at prevention, though they’re starting to target individual executives
- The most dangerous corporate fraud isn’t always the most obvious – companies with great metrics can be secretly abusing customers (like Root Insurance’s predatory practices)
- FOIA requests are a powerful tool for investigating companies by accessing consumer complaints and internal documents through state regulators
- A major red flag is when companies make it impossible to cancel services or trap customers in recurring billing – it may boost short-term metrics but destroys long-term value
Video
Watch my interview on The Wealthion.
Or watch it here:
Transcript
Edwin Dorsey: We’re living in a golden age of fraud.
Adam Taggart: Welcome to Wealthion. I’m Wealthion founder Adam Taggart. A system is only as good as the people running it. And too often these days we’re finding out that folks in charge are not nearly as competent or as ethical as we’ve been told to believe. Take the scandal at FTX as just one recent example. Who watches the Watchmen? That’s an important question that’s been raised since Roman times. Who will monitor those in power and help us hold them to account? Well, one new voice doing just that is today’s guest expert, Edwin Dorsey, who tracks corporate misconduct and outright fraud over at his substack, the Bear Cave. And sadly, the number of bad actors these days is so large that he’s a very busy man. Man. Edwin, thanks so much for joining us today.
Edwin Dorsey: Adam, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Adam Taggart: Thanks. Well, it’s a real pleasure. I want to give credit to Doomberg, who reached out after my last interview with him and asked me if I knew of you and your work and said I definitely needed to get you on the program. Glad we could make it happen so quickly.
Edwin Dorsey: Absolutely. Doomberg is very awesome, and I loved your podcast with him.
Adam Taggart: Oh, you’re very kind. He’s a great, fantastic guest. Of course, we’re going to set the bar higher here today. All right, well, let me just start with a high level question. I like to start all these interviews at a very high level. Answer any way you like. But what’s your current assessment of the state of integrity incorporate America and the financial markets?
Edwin Dorsey: Adam, one of my favorite people, Jim Chanos, has the saying that we’re living in a golden age of fraud. And I kind of agree with him. There’s a lack of integrity at a lot of companies and, and some of the factors that are making this such a big problem, in my view, is there’s just a lot of easy flowing money. And when you’re in a period where there’s lots of venture checks being written for things and investors are throwing money at anything that’s growing, that kind of makes good people do bad things and bad people do worse things, lots of easy flowing money is not a good thing for integrity. When you have lots of retail participation in the markets, I think that can lead to companies or CEOs of publicly traded companies, you know, being a little misleading, trying to cheat around the edges to get their stock price up. When you have like a weak punishment dynamic with regulators where you can just do wrong over and over again. And the fines are kind of minimal. And usually they’re at the corporate level and not the individual level. That’s problematic. So we’re living in a golden age of fraud. And, you know, it’s very sad because it harms a lot of people. But it’s great for me because it means I have a lot to write about and a lot to research and a lot to talk about.
Adam Taggart: Well, look, we’re going to get into a bunch of sort of different ways in which corporate malfeasance is manifesting right now. I guess as you from your perch as a guy who’s sort of watching it all, are you becoming increasingly optimistic that we’re identifying this and we’re going to rein it in and our regulators are going to catch on to this stuff? Or perhaps is it the opposite, where you feel like the bad actors are getting away with more and more as time goes on?
Edwin Dorsey: You know, regulators are in some ways like financial archeologists, especially financial regulators like the sec, where they’re very good at going in and seeing what happened after the fact and telling you who was responsible for what and sending subpoenas and analyzing the laws. But they’re not great at proactively preventing bad things from happening. So that’s kind of one of the big problems we have. You know, one shift that I see happening with regulators that I think is a big positive for like improving the conduct of executives is we’re not going to, you know, no longer is it just that the company pays a fine. I think there’s been a big, big push to like, name and shame executives and get executives, you know, bad press and find them. Personally, I think that is kind of key for improving misconduct. Because if, you know, if trend is that regulators just issue small fines to corporations, every CEO is going to call the general counsel and say, hey, I’m thinking of doing this unethical thing. What do you think? And they’ll say, oh, it’s a gray area. This is the potential downside, a fine for the company, but this is how much we can make if we do it. But if that conversation is different and the CEO calls a general counsel and says, hey, I’m thinking of doing this unethical thing, you know, what are the upsides and downsides? And the general counsel is like, the downside is you could personally pay a big fine and you could get in a lot of trouble and you could be name and shame and you could get a director and officer bar for five years. I think that is much More effective even if the fines are smaller. And you know, seeing, seeing regulators take that more nuanced approach is good. Another factor we have going in our favor is now with the Internet being so open, you have a lot of people like me on substack, on Twitter, on YouTube, wherever, trying to highlight misconduct, almost forming this like quasi community of like investigators highlighting this misconduct before it occurs. One example could be Mark Cohodes being a really early whit whistleblower on FTX before anyone was paying attention to it.
Adam Taggart: That’s a great point. And I’m trying to remember the name of the guy. There was a guy who was emailing the SEC annually about Bernie Madoff. I mean this was largely sort of pre the new Internet generation you’re talking about here. But it sounds like we’ve now got more of those people kind of on the beat.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, absolutely. So that was Harry Markopoulos and.
Adam Taggart: That’s right, Markopolis.
Edwin Dorsey: Kind of in response to that, the SEC created a really good program like the whistleblower office, where now instead of just, you know, doing it out of your kind heart to share information with the sec, if you’re an executive at a company and there’s serious misconduct, they’re cheating on their taxes, they’re lying on their financial statements, something like that, and you go to the SEC and say, hey, like I want to be a whistleblower. You can get 15 to 30% of like any like award or any recovery the SEC levies from the situation. So people are earning like tens of millions of dollars being SEC whistleblowers and reporting misconduct. And I think that’s one of the biggest things in the finance world that’s probably short of behavior, having big financial incentives for executives at public companies to blow the whistle on misconduct. Because other than that, being a whistleblower like kind of is terrible. If you look at the history of whistleblowers, a lot of them get addicted to drug. They’re just buried in bureaucracy, they commit suicide. You’ve got all the power in the world going against very, very tough to be a whistleblower. And I think regulators over time, at least in the US have got more sophisticated about that. Accepting anonymous whistleblowers, paying whistleblowers who provide credible information, making it easier to be whistleblowers. Another positive trend. But there’s still a lot of bad stuff in the world.
Adam Taggart: All right, and we’re going to talk about that in just a sec. But it does sound like at least some good things are happening. We’re incenting people to come forward and report misconduct when they see it, protecting them, maybe in a way they weren’t being protected before, too. And it sounds like there’s. The pendulum is swinging towards more, you know, we’re going to go after individual bad actors and not just the corporate structure itself, to kind of put the fear of the executives that they could be on the chopping block. And that I think, really it’s pretty stark in contrast to going through the last big crisis we had in this country, the 2008 crisis, where there was so much banking malfeasance and really nobody went to jail. And I, back then was interviewing guys like William Black who was involved during the hearings during the SNL crisis. And I can’t remember the exact numbers, but there was. There was some, you know, I don’t know, 20,000, you know, cases brought against people. And I think something like, I don’t know, a couple thousand went to jail. Right. Where virtually nobody went to jail in a much larger crisis in 2008. So hopefully, again, we’re seeing at least some optimism going into this topic, which I’m sure is going to make people’s blood boil as we get into some of the specifics of some of the stuff you’re watching right now. So let’s now move into the world of the current bad actors. There are a couple different categories that you sort of put this malfeasance in. I know one of them is just companies that harm customers and then maybe end up failing and then harming investors and just the economy in general. So let’s talk about that first category first. Unless there’s a framework you want to introduce before we just start going one by one.
Edwin Dorsey: Adam, that’s a perfect question. And I spend a ton of time looking at individual publicly traded companies to try to assess their relationship with their customers. Because if you delight customers, if you make customers happy, you might not be a great investment, but you’re probably not going to be a terrible investment. On the other hand, there’s a lot of companies, and this is the type. Type of stuff I spend a lot of time looking at in the barricade is companies that are having good financial results. They might be, you know, be having great customer retention, their profitability is increasing, whatever, but they’re just, you know, abusing their own customer base. And it might be helpful to give a few examples.
Adam Taggart: Please do. Let’s name some names.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, absolutely. One of the big companies I wrote about was an auto insurance company called Root Insurance that went public in October 2020. They are a Car insurance company. And what they did is they say, hey, download our app. We track your location 247 and based on getting the data from your phone 24 7, we can determine whether or not you’re a good or bad driver. Because we see the speeds at which you drive, the areas you drive, the times at which you drive. We in theory could even figure out like your braking speed just based on your ph owns GPS data. And that’s their kind of sales pitch. We are going to be the world’s most tech savvy, smart auto insurance company.
Adam Taggart: We’re the big data of auto insurance. Yep, got it.
Edwin Dorsey: Big data. We’re going to use big data to get great auto insurance and only underwrite good drivers. And investors were eating it off. All their metrics are up and to the right. And you know, I’m, I got interested because I saw one consumer complaint about them. And then I go to state regulators and send FOIA requests for consumer complaints that consumers had filed with Root insurance. And it was remarkable. Just like hundreds and hundreds of pages of consumers saying, hey, I signed up at this great price. But they, in the pandemic, when no one’s driving, I got no accidents. They just keep increasing my like renewals 50% every year, you know, for the last five years. And they make it really difficult to cancel. So Roots underwriting greatness isn’t actually that they’re a great underwriter. It’s that they lure customers in with cheap auto insurance and then just abusively renew them. Even during the pandemic, when no one was driving. Every other auto company in the pandemic was like lowering rates for customers. And Root just is making the rates go up, up, up, up. And in tandem with that, making it really difficult to cancel. And like to give you an example, you know, I, you know, some of the documents I got from FOIA was a lawyer who represented Spanish speaking clients and he wrote the Georgia insurance commissioner saying, hey, I have like 10 Spanish speaking clients. They all have roof insurance, have no idea to cancel. And they keep getting gouged for their auto insurance. And you know, it’s just so frustrating seeing conduct like that, you know, seeing the harm they’re doing to consumers, seeing how they’re abusing their customer base. And then Wall street on the other hand, is saying, oh, look, they’re so sophisticated. You know, the underwriting is so good because their profitability is going up. Look at these geniuses. And long story short, you know, people do end up figuring it out how to cancel. Regulators do eventually probe the company. And since it’s I in October 2020, I think the stock’s down 98, 99%. And you see that a lot where cusp companies are doing things that help their like short term financial metrics, short term retention, short term profitability, but jeopardize the long run of the long term prospects of the business. But because Wall street is so numbers oriented and model oriented, I don’t think people are as good at getting that like consumer complaints, consumer like sense, at least right away. You know, another example, hey, I’m sorry.
Adam Taggart: Hey, I’m sorry real quick, just before we go to your second example, which I want to get to you, you talked about filing FOIA requests. First, I just want to explain what FOIA is, right? It’s a Freedom of Information act request. Just explain really briefly for people exactly what’s involved in making one of those requests. And is this one of your sort of primary vehicles for really digging beneath the covers of what’s happening with the companies that you investigate?
Edwin Dorsey: ADAM Absolutely. And one of the beauties of being the US Citizen is the US Government has an obligation under the Freedom of Information act to share, you know, public records with us. So any US Citizen can go to the state regulator or federal regulator and demand public records. And part of public records are internal emails that aren’t, you know, going to be used in like an immediate dispute. Part of the public record are consumer complaints people file with their insurance commissioner or state attorney general. And now the laws vary a little by state. So not all states will give these records to you at all or give them to you quickly or give them to you without cost. But because I’ve done this so much, I know which states are more responsive and which states aren’t. But basically any US Citizen can go to their government agency. Most agencies have a FOIA officer and you can give them a specific request for records and within a certain period, like 30 days or 90 days, they need to get back to you. And it’s sometimes a little bit of a dance where they might charge you, they might say we need more time to figure it out. If they don’t want to give you the records, they’ll usually, you know, invent an excuse not to give them to you. This type of tool is used by journalists a lot to hold the government accountable. And this is absolutely one of the key things I do with my newsletter because I focus a lot on companies relationship with their customers. So you can read online, you can get a sense of some consumer like complaints online. But that’s not like a hard Document, you don’t know if a competitor is writing that, you don’t know, like, what’s the truth. But going to a state regulator, getting consumer complaints, you can often see a company’s response. You know, that is to me, the gold standard in understanding a company’s relationship with its customers. And if there’s any abusive business practices or unfair and deceptive business practices going on, and you know, 80% of the time there’s probably nothing there. 10% of the time you might see more mild stuff, but every once in awhile you find really, really egregious stuff that I just know is going to have a big impact on the future of the business. And, you know, that Wall street just isn’t picking up on, at least in that moment, if that makes sense.
Adam Taggart: All right, that sounds super fascinating. Thanks for explaining that key tool in your sleuthing here. I interrupted you. You were about to go to another company.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah. So just to give kind of another example of like, how this can work, there was a publicly traded company called the Joint, and they were a franchisor of chiropractic clinics. So you could go to any one of their franchisees throughout the US and pay for like a chiropractic adjustment. If your back was hurday, and in theory you’d pay like $20 for an adjustment, but they were pushing this type of plan where you’d spend $80 a month to get like unlimited or five adjustments a month and like get on there just like renewal cycle. And they started to grow. They were expanding their franchise base rapidly. You know, all the metrics were looking good. Wall street was taking them to like 40 times revenue. It was insane because everybody’s like, look, they’ve hit an inflection point. This business is doing great. We think they have a long Runway for growth. And you know, when I filed FOIA requests for consumer complaints, very similar pattern to root insurance, where people are like, I didn’t even know I was signing up for this monthly plan. I’m being billed and I can’t cancel. The thing that the joint did that was really abusive is in order to cancel, especially in the pandemic, there wasn’t a phone number you could call. There wasn’t a way to cancel online. You need to drive in person to your chiropractic clinic and fill out a two page form. And people are like, I’ve done this and I still can’t cancel. And just at a high level here, I’m saying, wait a minute. It looks like the company’s like, Franchise base is one probably unhealthy. Even if the financial metrics look good, if they’re doing this type of stuff, this isn’t sustainable. Once the pandemic subsides, people will be able to cancel and people will be pissed and their brand will be tarnished. State regulators had started investigating them. They had a lot of issues. They also, in my view, were kind of concealing some of the problems at the franchise level by having, you know, executives associated with the company loan money to troubling franchisees. And that was just like mildly disclosed in SEC filings. But by going to state agencies and getting more data on that, you saw like, hey, they’re like learning, you know, substantive amounts to franchisees and they’re not like clearly disclosing this. This could be a sign of problem. So I kind of at a high level sum that up. I also showed that about the chairman of their audit committee had like previously served on a bunch of boards for like failed penny St, which to me was a big red flag. And I kind of wrote about all these problems. And long story short, in like the 16 months since then, the stock’s down 80%, a lot of their franchises have begun to close or sell off and the kind of Wall street story imploded. And just to hammer this home, it’s like, you know, you can do things as a business that help your financial results. Making it impossible to cancel a subscription helps your retention and helps your financial results. So every investor thinks your value is increasing, but it’s actually dramatically decreasing because you’re tarnishing your entire future for a short term benefit.
Adam Taggart: Right. It’s a short term gain that creates long term pain. Yeah. And what didn’t help in the situation is leading up to the pandemic and then actually for a good while after, with all the stimulus funds flooding into the markets as well, you know, all boats rose. And so really what became the metric is who’s rising the fastest. And that’s where I should put my money in. Right. So these guys got rewarded for things that juiced short term results. Right. When the FOMO was really going to your point, you know, these are the companies that are going to fail the fastest once all that support’s removed because they’re doing things like abusing their customers or burning their long term goodwill for a short term gain. So, you know, we had an environment that was really conducive to practices like this. Is it over for good? We don’t know. But certainly a lot of what was propelling all that has been removed. As we’ve had the Fed withdraw liquidity, start hiking rates, tightening its balance sheet, we’re not seeing much more stimulus coming from the fiscal side of things from Congress anymore. And clearly that’s manifested in the markets. Right. We had the major indices down 20 to 30% last year. And that’s just the, the on average of the indices, there’s a lot of individual companies like some of the ones you’re listing here, down an awful lot more. All right, so you talked about this first class of custom companies that kind of get ahead in the short term by abusing their customer base. You have another one here that’s just companies that lack any real underlying economic substance or kind of actively go out of their way to mislead investors and by misleading. I’m sure lying is included under that umbrella as well. So can you, what can you tell us about these companies?
Edwin Dorsey: Absolutely, again, it’s easier for me to go with examples here. And oftentimes companies that, as I say, lack economic substance. What you really have is just like a shell of a company, you know, pretending to have something substantive and lying to retail investors to generate a lot of hype. An example of that would be Ageagle Aerial Systems, which was at one point like a billion dollar company. And they described themselves saying that we’re a pioneerin advanced commercial drone technologies. That’s what they said. They had all these investor presentations being like, we’re building drones that can deliver packages, we’re delivering, we’re making drones that can, you know, look at marijuana fields to determine whether or not marijuana crop is growing. Well, just all this bizarre stuff. And then literally within an hour of just reading the SEC filings and just trying to understand what substantively is going, you’re like, wait, they have one employee in research and development. In the last five years they spent a total of like $200,000 in research and development. Like comical numbers for a billion dollar company. Like what the heck? You know, you look at the investor base involved and there was like a Liechtenstein based hedge fund called Alpha Capital Ansell that has been involved in like 90, you know, or dozens of other like pump and dump operations and fined by the sec. And it’s like, how is this possibly a billion dol dollar company? Just seems so obvious. Like one photo that we can show is that if you look at the company’s drones on their YouTube page, it’s literally, it’s literally a remote controlled airplane with the GoPro attached. That’s what they said is their like revolution in, you know, Aviation drone technology. And this company reached a billion dollar market cap, you know, and it wasn’t even heavily shorted. And, you know, how does that happen? You know, it happens because the company goes out of their way to try to mislead investors. One of the things they did is they had the chairman’s daughter create like a locked YouTube video that had the Amazon logo next to the Ageagle Aerial Technologies logo to make it seem like a partnership was coming. And then all these stock promoters started saying, hey, guess what? We did some research. We found this locked YouTube video where the chairman’s daughter is hinting at an Amazon partnership. And you’re getting all these gullible investors to think, oh, I found the next big, let me invest, get the stock up. But it’s terrible because the company actually has nothing and it ended up falling 99%, you know, or another example is Embark Trucking. This company, real quick, I want to.
Adam Taggart: Real quick, I want to go to Embark Trucking. But what you’re talking about there. You know, this is something that’s clearly happened at many times throughout history, but one relatively recent, very high profile example of that kind of deception is Theranos. And I, I used to live down in Palo Alto and actually know some of the people that were impacted by that are affected by it. And I remember in that story they had then Vice President Biden coming to the Theranos headquarters to tour the lab, and they basically created an entirely new, separate, fake lab to walk him through. So, you know, he comes through it and says, oh, I’ve just seen some amazing things. You know, this is the future of medicine. It was all completely fake. It was a potential lab that they, they created for this guy. So, I mean, this, you know, in retrospect, we hear these things and we can’t believe people went to this, you know, huge extreme to deceive. But as you’re saying here, you know, it kind of goes on. I don’t want to say on a daily basis, but I mean, it’s something that just keeps going on.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah. And you know, Theranos is a, was a private company. So I think if Theranos was a public company, it would have faced a lot more scrutiny and probably a lot of these issues would have become a lot sooner. Especially because there’s people with financial incentives who can make money by shorting the stock and doing the research to uncover all the nonsense going on there. So it tends to be, at least in my view, with these private companies, whether it be an FTX or Theranos, a lot of this crazy, egregious stuff can be going on and no one’s really looking into it other than maybe a local investigative journalist, because there’s no financial incentive to expose it. Right.
Adam Taggart: And the hurt is only going to be amongst generally a small number of private, Depocketed investors that, that are funding these private startups. The other thing, though is there’s less incentive to do it in a private company in the sense that you can’t pump the price of a private company overnight and then get out real fast. Right. The way that you can with this public company, especially these sort of smaller penny stocks or meme stocks or whatnot. Correct.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, absolutely. Because, like, you know, Elizabeth Holmes, I don’t think she sold the share. There are no stock. So she did this all and she didn’t like, you know, make any money from it, you know, and I’m not super familiar there, but it’s just like. Yeah. So it sometimes is an ego thing or you get addicted to the press coverage. I think oftentimes people are doing nonsense or committing fraud. Not just motivated by the money.
Adam Taggart: I mean, I think that’s true. But to your point about the chairman’s daughter faking people out, what not, I mean, my guess is I don’t know that specific company, but I imagine you’re kind of a shady executive. There’s a big temptation to do that if you’re trying to raise, you know, a new round or you’re, you’re, you’ve got some executive, you know, stock option bonuses coming up. You want to hit those targets, right?
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, like, you know, some of the things you. So that is a really excessive example of the chairman’s daughter making nonsense YouTube videos. That is very, very egregious. But there’s less egregious stuff you can do to get your stock up, like issuing a lot of press release, changing your tone on conference calls and your language a little stuff like that. And yeah, you know, sometimes I’ll see companies that, you know, try to pump up their stock. Then you keep issuing more and more stock to get cash, which is valuable. And then you’ll have a public company that really has no substance, that has a lot of cash. And how do you get that cash to executives? How do you really cash out? You’ll see these unethical companies pump a stock, issue a lot of shares to get cash from new investors. The company has cash, and what the company will do is they’ll start acquiring all these random related party businesses. They’ll acquire the CEO’s other company they’ll acquire furniture from the CEO’s wife, they’ll acquire a board member’s company for $100million. They’ll do all these shenanigans. And there’s real publicly traded companies, 1 to $5 billion market caps doing these like nonsense related party transactions just to get shareholders cash out of the business and into the hands of management and board members. And it’s disgusting, it’s terrible and it happens all the time. And I guess it’s kind of good it happens because it means I can write about it and people pay attention, but it’s disgusting. And like that’s what sometimes frustrates me with the state of corporate America in journalism is people people like to criticize. People aren’t good at differentiating the egregiousness of misconduct because there’s misconduct everywhere, there’s bad behavior everywhere. But there, there’s something like deeply, deeply, completely wrong with using shareholders cash on frivolous acquisition, these acquisitions to enrich board members and your wife and whatever and essentially launder money out. That’s a lot different than you know, being too aggressive on a conference call and like you know, just maybe being a little incompetent. But it doesn’t seem like the financial media is like good at like or investors are good at differentiating the level of egregiousness and kind of going back to what we talked to earlier, a lot of places make it difficult to cancel things, but you need to the big thing that where you can have value is how egregious is it? Is it, you know, just a little difficult to cancel and people are complaining online or is it basically impossible and people are like you Companies are billing a consumer against their will because that the most egregious stuff will always be addressed in the long run. You can’t build a multi billion dollar business if 90% of your customer base is pissed off at you and trying to cancel.
Adam Taggart: Yeah, that’s a great point about sort of degree of abuse here. You know, we kind of lump it all into misconduct, but not all misconduct is created equal like you’re saying. And you know, you’re talking about how egregious this can be and how it really can frustrate you. And that’s the whole point. I meant when I said earlier that a lot of what you’re about to talk about in this conversation is going to make people’s blood boil. I’m just curious back to what we talked about at the very beginning. Are we beginning to see more of Those people that are doing kind of the crazy shenanigans that you were talking about, the deliberate pumping of the stock and buying all these other, other stupid companies just to get cash flow or investor capital into the business so the execs can extract it. Are we beginning to see more of those people start to get held personally accountable for this stuff?
Edwin Dorsey: You know I think it’s too early to tell. I think the worst stuff.
Adam Taggart: Sorry, let me ask it a different way so you can answer. Has the status quo up until now been. Those guys were largely getting away with it?
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah. And SPAC deals were a big proponent of this nonsense, where you’d have companies that just are just nonsense. Like, you know, there’s no way it’s worth $2 billion. Merging at a $2 billion valuation, taking a lot of retail money, having this entire ecosystem to sucker retail investors into investing in nonsense deals, and then seeing all that evaporate. That game has completely changed where, you know, eventually people wisen up and say, hey, your four last SPAC deals fell 80%. Maybe I don’t want to invest in your fifth year. So seeing that deflate, I think has led to a lot of the, like, big nonsense kind of go away. Did I answer your question?
Adam Taggart: Yeah, yeah, you did. You did. Okay, well, look, I had interrupted you when you were about to go into Embark as another example of one of these, you know, sort of highly misleading companies.
Edwin Dorsey: So that is just a little similar to Theranos where you had a 26 year old CEO, you know, of an autonomous trucking company, they made software for autonomous trucking go public via SPAC at like a 4 billion multibillion dollar valuation. And you just read the prospectus, just read the SEC filings, and a bunch of things would pop out. They said they owned no patents, even though their competitors each owned hundreds of patents. And it’s like, wait a second, why do you own no patents if your competitors own hundreds of patents? And they’re like, we rely on trade secrets right away, I think they’re in us, like, this might be like nonsense. And then you’re like, well, who are these other executives? And they wouldn’t really advertise it. But the 26 year old CEO, all the other executives were like friends from his college class. And I’m like, well, this is a little odd. And usually if you’ve got a burgeoning startup, something growing really fast, new technology, you hire an adult in the room, you hire a professional who comes in to help give it legitimacy. And they hired a famous engineer from Tesla who Left after six months. And one of the big red flags consistently over time is if you see an executive join and then leave, leave like within a year or within 18 months. Because no one ever does that. No one ever goes moves to join a new company and then quits after18 months or less unless there’s something really bad going on. And if you see that with multiple things, you know, you know, there’s like something under the hood that didn’t make sense. And oftentimes what I see is companies that have issues try to like cover it up in the public eye. So what Embark did that, you know, was another red flag is if you looked on Glassdoor, the CEO had like 50 five star reviews, tons of positive things on Glassdoor about the company. But if you look at the date of all the reviews, like all the reviews were posted literally the day the SPAC merger was announced. So these aren’t like legitimate reviews for employees saying we love the CEO. This is the CEO’s HR office saying, everybody go leave a five star review on Glassdoor. We got a spacious deal. It’s just like, you know, so just a small amount of initiative and like digging into this, you find these really crazy situations of companies just trying to mislead investors, getting multibillion dollar valuations from it and then of course collapsing. And I think Embark is down over 99% since its SPAC merger less than two years ago. So, you know, it’s infuriating, it hurts investors who lose a lot of money, but it keeps happening. You know, the SPAC stuff has declined, but not good.
Adam Taggart: God, you’ve got so many topics wrapped up in there. Just the SPACs themselves as a highly speculative vehicle may go down as one of the dumber ideas of this decade, but the 26 year old CEO, I mean, does that really ever work out? Well, the young kid is put in charge of the multi billion rocket ship company. Those stories just always seem to prove out. More often than not it seems that, you know, it was a total, you know, cash burner and fly by night operation. But you also talked about this was in the autonomous trucking space. What’s the company? I can’t remember the guy’s name, but there was the CEO of Nikola, I think.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, Trevor Milton Nikola
Adam Taggart: Trevor Milton Nicola and I mean that company’s had a lot of troubles, but certainly one of the more famous things that he did that really blew back on the company was creating a promotional video showing their truck actually in operation before the street was expecting it to be. And Then it turned out basically, you can’t tell from the way it was shot, but they just basically put a truck on a hill in neutral and let it roll down the hill, right?
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah. So, Adam, the example you’re talking about, it was highlighted by Hindenburg research and this trucking company, hydrogen powered trucking company, Nikola or electric truck company. They wanted to show that their truck could drive when it couldn’t drive. So they found this special hill in Utahthat had a 3% downgrade and they just started pushing the truck and let it roll slowly down this hill so they could shoot a promotional video that made it seem like it was moving when it wasn’t actually moving, like under its own propulsion. It was just rolling down a very low incline hill. And you couldn’t. Cantell from the video. I’m going to use that, Adam, almost as a counter example here. I don’t think that’s as egregious as people make it out to be. Now, the media went wild because it’s funny, it’s hilarious. They’re rolling a truck down a hill. It’s like, oh my goodness, how bad that is that I’m going to say, I don’t think so. That is nowhere near as bad as this ageagle aerial or embark trucking stuff. Even though the media gave it a hundred times more press because that happened, happened when it was a private company. It wasn’t even a public company when this was occurring. This was like, you know, private venture capital rounds. And it’s like you, you’re just building hype among potential customer base. You’re not even misleading investors with it. That’s not part of an investor presentation. This is just when you’re a private company, you’re doing that. And you know, it’s actually like a common thing from the auto industry to like build models that can’t move under their own, like, propulsion, like just, just to see if you can manufacture it and stuff like that. My understanding from Auto Manuf is it’s a little bit like making a drug. We’re making the first few models is really difficult, but like subsequent models get a lot easier as you mass produce. It’s so like when you dig into that a little deeper. And Nicola had like thousands of employees, millions in research and development. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot, a lot of issues there. And Nate and Hindenburg did great job pointing it out and it was ridiculous. It got to like a $10 billion plus valuation. But there’s a difference between that. Where you’re kind of, you know, as a private company building a little hype and the media is just going after you like crazy. And yeah, you’re like lying a little versus having nothing. And I mean, like, you’re spending 40grand in R and D, you have half an employee working on your drone, and you reach a billion dollar valuation that way. The Nikola stuff, I think, can be a lot tougher to decipher as an outsider, which is why Hindenburg and a lot of these activist shorts will contact recent former employees and literally just like, act like an investigative journalist and talk to people. People where the stuff I’m more focused on, at least in my view, is like, this is peanuts. This is. This. I could do this in my sleep. It’s so egregious. And it’s almost all document based. You can learn everything I learned just by reading the company’s filings, being inquisitive, curious, applying scrutiny and filing FOIA requests and state regulators. So there’s levels to all this stuff. And I don’t. And I think there’s a lot of stuff that happens that’s so much more egregious than Nikola that just people don’t talk about and it’s frustrating.
Adam Taggart: Okay, got it. This goes back to the earlier discussion that, you know, there are degrees of egregiousness, and you’re basically saying that you hang out in the deepest part of the pool where all the real trash and garbage, you know, is collected. Yes, there’s a lot of junk in the pool itself, but you’re really trying to focus where the most people are getting hurt the most.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah. And the important thing is it needs to be something that the market doesn’t fully appreciate. I could go, I could say, hey, here’s a payday lender trading at 3 times earnings and half of book value. Here’s all the issues with it, but the market’s kind of saying, well, we understand that we’ve priced it in. So you bringing this to our attention, like, doesn’t do anything. Like, everybody understands acting this gaming way, where I can do a lot about add a lot of value, where I think I do my best work is if there’s a company that, you know, everybody seems to love that’s getting a great valuation from Wall street, but is secretly not understood by everybody. Eng and really, like, you know, egregious misconduct, in my view, that that’s where you can add a lot of value, at least with my newsletter.
Adam Taggart: Got it. Yeah. You’re breaking the news. You are the young boy finally Saying the emperor has no clothes and just changing the entire perception of something overnight. Got it. This is a question I was going to ask you at the end, but I’ll ask it now and then we’ll keep going through your categories of companies. But you mentioned John Chanos earlier in one of your answers. And for those that don’t know, Jim Chanos, sorry, Jim Chanos, he runsKynikos and is one of the most well known and most respected short sellers around. And I’ve got to imagine, you know, that he would think a service like yours that you offer through Bear Cave is a great opportunity for finding targets for shorting.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, absolutely. Jim I’ve met a few times. I think he’s a wonderful human. He’s a subscriber to the Bear Cave, which is kind of awesome.
Adam Taggart: Congratulations. That’s very cool.
Edwin Dorsey: The main people who read the Bear Cave are people who are interested in short selling, law firms looking to sue companies and people who actively short.
Adam Taggart: Okay. Yeah, so yeah, so I mean, on this channel we’ve talked a lot about the opportunities in shorting. We’ve also really told people, you know, most people shorting’s tough. I mean, it’s tougher than just being long, especially in the markets that we have had for the most better part of the past 10 years because kind of everything went up, even the junk, as you’ve said, a lot. So we do encourage that people generally work, if they’re going to short work with a financial advisor to kind of help hold their hand and help them make sure they’re not putting too much at risk in case the trade goes against them. But there is lots of opportunity in short for the right person who’s done their homework. And what’s great about you, Evan, is that you’re doing a lot of the homework for people, which is great. So, all right, let’s get to your third category here. Oh yeah, sorry.
Edwin Dorsey: Go ahead, can you back on the point you just made about the difference.
Adam Taggart: Absolutely.
Edwin Dorsey: You, you mentioned Jim Chanos earlier. Jim Chanos, gold standard of a short seller, like kind of world renowned for being a great short seller, I think is fun. Chanos and company or Kinnikos. Like if you look over the very long period of time, I believe he’s about broken even on his short shorts. So the guy who’s best in the world at short selling or one of the best in the world has with his short book about broken even or maybe made a 1 or 2% return on the shorts over time. So, you know, if you’re like, if you’re a genius at this, you’re, it’s tough to make money. And the reason he’s still adding value if he does this is the market on Average goes up 9, 10 a year over the very long run. So if you’re just short the market, you’re probably losing 9 or 10% a year. So if you’re short and break even, you’re actually doing quite well because you could get levered long and reduce that risk. But just on his short portfolio, short only, I’m pretty sure Chanos is more or less broken even or made a 1 or 2% return over a very long period of time. So it’s very tough if you’re at least running a portfolio and sticking with the larger apps to make money shorting over the long run.
Adam Taggart: I really appreciate that additional intelligence. Yeah, and you’re just helping reinforce the perspective here, which is there is opportunity there, but you got to go in wise wide open because it’s not an easy place to make your money. You got to be really good on the timing. Right. You can have a great thesis that might even get proven right over time, but if it doesn’t happen in the time in which you’re exposed, it’s that classic the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Are you?
Edwin Dorsey: Precisely.
Adam Taggart: All right, well look, so one sector you’ve been looking at closely, obviously because of recent events like ftx, is the crypto space. So there’s been a big collapse in crypto banking which maybe you could explain a little bit and connect to how that is enmeshed with the regular US banking system in ways that probably a lot of people don’t understand.
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, absolutely. So when FTX collapsed, me being me, I naturally wanted to see are there any publicly traded companies that are going to be affected by this or what are going to be the follow on effects. And right away it was like, people think the crypto ecosystem is just some offshore things with kids gambling around with play money. There’s no way it affects me or my U.S. bank or my hometown bank. And, that was reinforced by Janet Yellen on November 30 who said in a press conference, quote, the good piece of an explosion like we saw is that it hasn’t spilled over to the banking sector. Banking regulators have been very careful about crypto. That’s what Janet yellen said on November 30. And it turns out that it’s kind of not true. Or atleast my view on it is that the US banking Sector or a specific sliver of small banks have a lot of exposure to the crypto ecosystem that isn’t immediately obvious to people. And this exposure comes in five different ways at a high level. Number one is deposits. There’s a lot of banks, not necessarily big ones like bank of America and JP Morgan, but smaller ones like Silvergate and Signature bank and Metropolitan bank. These like one to $10 billion banks that literally and Community Bancorp that got tens of billions of dollars of deposits from crypto related companies like stablecoin, like Circle, like exchanges like FTX and other other places in the crypto industry. Because all these players needed places to deposit their money at banks, most of the big banks didn’t want anything to do with them. So there’s a sliver of small banks that said, hey, we can get this huge base of deposits from crypto companies and we don’t even need to pay interest on them because these clients are kind of desperate for banking relationships. And we can earn a lot of money taking the tens of billions in deposits, getting them for free and then loaning the deposits out at much higher rates like banks do. And you know, that alone is kind of problematic because you saw with Silvergate bank where all their deposits were with crypto companies, their deposit base has like gone down rapidly. And when your deposit base goes down rapidly, you need to sell off your securities down rapidly. So you need to like sell your mortgages that you own, you need to sell your municipal bonds, whatever, and you’re selling them at worse and worse prices as it gets illiquid. So banks like Silvergate took a big hit hit on their like crypto deposit base. And I think you could see other banks like Signature and Community Bancorp get hurt as their deposit base rapidly diminishes from crypto companies. Another example is transfers and transactions where two specific US banks, Signature bank and Silvergate bank, processed over a trillion dollars of like transactions for these crypto companies of people getting on the platform with US Dollars dollars getting onto the platforms or getting off these crypto platforms, you know, back into US Dollars. And the bank intermediaries that did that are kind of responsible for know your customer compliance and anti money laundering compliance. And at a high level it looks like they’ve completely failed there where you process literally trillions of dollars of transactions for getting money onto and off of crypto companies. And you know, some investigative journalists have made like a accounts as bora on some of these like crypto firms. And I’ve been able to get bank accounts like as like this Frivolous character or you know, you know, so there’s been some early litigation showing that, you know, I think Silvergate bank processed $400 million of crypto transactions onto and off of platforms for like a cartel money laundering. And that’s something I published about, you know, so, so if you transfer trillions of dollars in payment payments, you know, you’re responsible for, know your customer compliance, anti money laundering risk compliance, the fines there can be incredibly steep. If you don’t fulfill your legal obligations to file Suspicious activity report and not support that type of conduct. And I think the banks there fail, they’re going to have a lot of risk. A third category of how the US banking system is intertwined with the crypto ecosystem is loans where some smaller banks like Provident Bancorp, which is the 10th oldest bank in the country, was loaning money. They just decided to pivot into this crypto space and start loaning money to like bitcoin miners and you know, digital asset platform companies. And those loans as you can imagine have performed horribly. The bank is taking huge write downs. The CEO just departed and now you have the 10th oldest bank in the country potentially going under or suffering because they decided that they’re going to pivot into the crypto space that it’s like so embarrassing. But another example, and then two final ones that are a lot smaller on how the crypto space is intertwined with the banking space is we saw some banks or some crypto platforms like FTX invest in like really small, like local community banks. Like I think it was Moonstone Bank, FTX took a stake in this one branch bank in Idaho or Nexobank took a one took a small stake in Summit national which is another one branch bank in the US and it’s not completely clear to me why they did that or with the exposure is going to be for the banking system. But that’s kind of a big question mark. And then the fifth is FDIC insurance where a lot of crypto companies and the crypto banking platforms would say, hey look, we’re FDIC insured, your deposits are FDIC insured. Even though that might not always be true in certain cases. And if one bank under FDIC insurance fails, like a silver gator signature, that is going to have like ripple effects where either the government might need to come in to backstop the FDIC or FDIC is going to raise, raise the insurance rates they charge other banks which is going to then trickle down to all of the other consumers. So the important point here is you think oh, it’s a bunch of kids in Miami playing around with NFTs and nonsense offshore. But it’s actually like. No, the crypto banking ecosystem. The crypto ecosystem found its way to the US banking ecosystem over these last three years, you know, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in deposits, trillions of dollars of US dollar transactions. And there’s going to be, like, significant, you know, fines, I think, for some of these banks. And the cost might be borne either by the taxpayer or all bank depositors.
Adam Taggart: That is really super fascinating. This is what people talk about when they talk about contagion in the banking system. Historically, we’ve talked about it where, you know, some banks start failing, and then banks that were lending to those banks and doing business with them then get compromised and it starts sort of cascading towards the center. This is almost like a Covid type of infection contagion where just people weren’t expecting this. Right. It’s a pandemic that came out of nowhere. Right. Oh, we thought this crypto thing was just sort of offshore and people playing around, but all of a sudden it’s doing some real damage in here potentially, man. The part about the FDIC insurance I hadn’t even thought about. But that could just raise the cost of banking going forward, hurting both the banks themselves as well as taxpayers. If we’re funding all the backstop that’s going on, and we’d certainly pay in higher banking fees as well, just as consumers. That’s really interesting in terms of, like, you know, you turn on the light and you see that. You turn the light in the middle of the night. That’s where you see the cockroaches. Where the cockroaches are. Right. Like, where are we, do you think, in this story, in terms of finding out how bad the contagion in the infection is? Like, in terms of innings, is this still inning one? Are we halfway through the game or near the end, what you think?
Edwin Dorsey: I would say inning three. You know, inning one might have been in November when FTX was just collapsing. You know, it’s like Silvergate bank, the bank that’s kind of really involved in all of this. I think their stock’s down 90% over the last year or so, which is a sign at least the market for that specific bank has said we recognize there’s huge problems, so we can’t really be in any one anymore. But we’re still seeing these big banks that I don’t think it’s fully priced in like a signature or metropolitan Bank. You know, the big question is going to be like, how much in money laundering went on on these crypto platforms, and how big of a role did banks play? That is going to be like, you know, otherworldly fines, in my view. And we.
Adam Taggart: Because that’s where the big penalties come into play, right?
Edwin Dorsey: That’s where the big penalties come into play. And bank boards, unlike, you know, most boards, most boards have, like, director and officer insurance. My understanding is bank board members can be held personally responsible for some of the misconduct their banks go. Even if, like your directors and officers insurance, if you’re a bank board member, does not apply in certain scenarios, if it’s like, true negligence on the part of the boards. And that’s like, a unique thing to the banking sector. So we’re going to see some, like, I think, really crazy stuff come out over the next few months, and we’ve even seen regulators start to signal that where in November 30, I told you Janet Yellen was like, there’s no problem. Now, I think the treasury and the Office of Comptroller releasing a joint statement saying, actually, we think there’s a lot of problems, and we’re very concerned with certain players, which is kind of a signal saying, one, stop the nonsense. And two, we’re gonna. We’re gonna. We’re gonna, like, you know, throw the book at you if you were really doingegregious stuff. So inning three, inning four. But there’s a lot to play out, in my view.
Adam Taggart: All right. Wow. Oh. These are all reasons to keep reading the Bear Cave to find out how the story unfolds. Speaking of which, how do you. How do you find these companies? How do they get on your road radar?
Edwin Dorsey: Absolutely. So I’m like, very simple. I’m addicted to Twitter. Adam, I know you use Twitter a little. I’m a Twitter addict. I’m on there two, three hours a day. I follow thousands of people. I got different lists of smart people. I’m bookmarking, like, 50 tweets a day. It might not be healthy, but I think it’s a great way to find ideas. Oftentimes it’ll literally just be a tweet of somebody complaining about a business. I follow, like, nonprofits that do consumer advocacy. I follow, you know, other short sellers. I. Twitter is an amazing tool. I’m also, like, you know, I spend a lot of time on YouTube, so. And YouTube learns. I like watching videos of people complain about companies. So I get more and more videos of people complaining about companies.
Adam Taggart: That’s a Great way to use it.
Edwin Dorsey: And every big company is going to have some complaints. It’s always a question of, like, how Regis is the kind conduct. But Twitter, YouTube, I read a lot of SEC filings, SEC comment letters. And the one thing I do is. That’s kind of funny. I call border left. So anytime I see a recent IPO or SPAC deal collapse, like, fall 90% in a year or six months, it’s. I look at all the board members and I say, hey, you served on the board of this failed company. What other boards do you.
Adam Taggart: What other companies are you on?
Edwin Dorsey: Yeah, if you. If you. If you did one nonsense company, I bet your other companies are a little bit of nonsense, too. And you’d be amazed at how often it’s like, hey, this person serves on three boards. The first two were SPAC deals that fell 90%, and their third is, like, a $2 billion recent IPO. And I’m like, this is so good. And a skeptic might say, oh, why does that matter? Does the board even influence the value of the company? And I would say, maybe minimalist. But it’s a sign of, like, deeper issues. Because like attracts like.
Adam Taggart: Exactly. It’s a sign of an ethos or a culture. Yeah, it.
Edwin Dorsey: It precisely. It’s a sign of, like. So oftentimes, what I’m doing in this early stage of trying to find a company is just, like, identifying these common red flags. Another thing I do is every day, every week, at the end of every week, I look through the 300 or so, like, publicly disclosed recent resignations, and I, like, try to find the five or ten most egregious. For example, a CFO who leaves after just four months. Or, like, the head of hr. You’ve had three different head of HR in, like, the last four years. Stuff like that. That’s, like, a sign of, like, something being wrong at a company. I look at that every week. I highlight a few of the not able ones in my newsletter. And that can serve as, like, an impetus for me to be like, hey, you seem a little sus. Let me check you out. Yeah.Yeah.
Adam Taggart: Yeah.Yeah. And I’m guessing that as you built a community around tracking companies like this, you get a lot of people out there kind of doing a lot of gum shoe detective work for you and saying, hey, I just noticed this bit of news about this company or just heard this customer complaint.
Edwin Dorsey: Adam, you’re so right. That’s the thing I forgot to mention. And that’s the beauty of, like, doing this for a while. People are willing to send you inbound tips. So I really function almost like a journalist looking for this stuff, proactively getting inbound tips from readers and then just like, you know, investigating for a while.
Adam Taggart: What is the best way for people to send you tips? I’m sure in this video they’re going to be a few people at least, Edwin, who have had a bad enough experience with a company that they’re motivated to let you know about it. What’s the best way for people to reach out to you like that?
Edwin Dorsey: If you know a public company that’s misleading investors or harming customers, you can email me edwin8585research.com or just DM me on Twittered edwindorcey@stockjabbers. So Edwin Dorsey, find me on Twitter or just like look up the bear cave and reply to any of the emails there. It should be easy to reach me.
Adam Taggart: All right, great. Well look, in beginning to kind of wrap things up here, this has been a fascinating discussion. Edwin, thanks so much. I’m going to have to thank Doomberg for making this connection here and getting you on. What are some common red flags that investors should look out for when thinking about investing in a public company that maybe they could check before hand just to say, okay, I want to reduce my odds of getting surprised that this company’s deal doing shady things behind the scenes.
Edwin Dorsey: The easiest thing is just to read SEC filings and read the risk factors and just see if you can understand a business. Read the investor presentation and see if it makes sense. For me, oftentimes I’m reading something, it’s just gibberish. I can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, that’s generally a big problem. I think something really easy to do is just look at all eight board members and Google them and see what other company boards they’ve served served on. And you know, I use a tool called the SEC Full text search tool, which is this public site by the SEC that lets you search all SEC filings inexistence. And what I do is I take each board member’s name and I put their name in the SEC full text search tool. And that means I can see every, every time that board member has been mentioned any SEC filing ever since 2001. And if you do that, then you can get like the most comprehensive in my view, like biography of a board member. You can see the other boards they served on, the ones they’ve resigned from. You can see times they’ve been shareholders or mentioned in other companies press releases. And if you see like board members of A big company who have been involved in a lot of failed companies or penny stocks or promotions or stuff like that, that is a huge, huge red flag sign to avoid. You can look for executive turnover. A high level of executive turnover is bad. And, you know, just read like consumer complaints. Something as simple as going to YouTube and typing in the company’s name plus complaints. Or. Or like, at least for consumer focused businesses. Wall street likes to be fancy and hire consultants and expert network calls and say they have a proprietary model. I think just like the bare bones. Like, you wouldn’t want to invest in a pizza company. Read the consumer reviews on the pizza. Taste the pizza. Like, look into the executives a bit. That’s how I prefer doing it. And I think just having a little bit of initiative to look into the board members, look into the executives, see their history. History. See who the auditor is. If it’s a big four, that’s a slight positive. See the consumer complaints. Just do a little bit of Googling. That goes a long way.
Adam Taggart: Yeah, it’s amazing. You know, Edwin, I’ve familiar, you know, past incarnations of my career working with management consulting companies. And, you know, I can see the massive, you know, decks that they would create. Create to replicate the type of work that you’re doing and the massive charges that would come along with it, massive fees that would come along with it for their clients. And they’d have 12 different people at the management consulting firm involved in the project. By your scrappiness, you’re basically getting a lot of the same value that they’re assessing out there. And in many ways, doing a level of gumshoe detective work that they don’t even stoop to doing. But it’s where you can really uncover the most of this stuff. So it’s really impressive what you’re doing there. Bear cave.
Edwin Dorsey: Well, thank you. Adam and I had a lot of time talking about it on here, and thanks for having me on. And no, it’s a lot of fun. Great.
Adam Taggart: Great. Well, so folks that want to follow you in your work, Edwin, where should they go? Presumably, they should start by going to the Bear cave. Right.
Edwin Dorsey: Adam, just Google the Bear Cave newsletter and it should be the first thing to come up. And you can check it out there, or you can just GoogleEdwin Dorsey Twitter, and my Twitter will pop up and I’ll tweet about stuff.
Adam Taggart: Okay, so. All right, great. And when we edit this, Edwin, we’ll put up the URL to the bear cave and to your Twitter handle and whatnot so people know exactly where to Go. This has been a super pleasure, Edwin. Thanks for coming on. And you’ve underscored in many ways. You know, a big part of this channel’s mission is to help people build wealth. And a big part of building wealth is to, you know, take prudent steps, to build momentum in the right direction. But it’s also to add a layer of risk management so that you’re less vulnerable to just general market setbacks, but also that you’re less vulnerable to outright misconduct or fraud or minimize your chance to get surprised by that stuff. So that’s one big reason why I’m such a big fan of your work and just want to underscore, for most people that have real lives, real jobs, it’s hard to do a lot of this detective work on your own, which is why you want to leverage experts like Ed and just a good professional financial advisor that does the right kind of due diligence when they make an investment in their portfolio to make sure that they’re only investing in companies that have a very high probability of being run with acceptable integrity. And look, if you’ve got a good professional financial advisor who’s serving as that kind of guide for you, great. Stick with them. They’re extremely valuable. If you don’t have one or you’d like a second opinion of one who does, does feel free to schedule a free consultation with the financial advisors that are endorsed by Wealthion. It’s totally free. It doesn’t cost you anything. There’s no commitment to work with them. It’s just a free public service they offer. Soto schedule one of those, if you’re interested, just go to wealthion.com fill out the short form there, and they’ll be right in touch. And if you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Edwin just a fraction as much as I have and would like to see him come back on the channel in the future, please do me a favor and support this channel by hitting the like button, then clicking on the red subscribe button below, as well as that little bell icon right next to it. Edwin, it really has been a pleasure. I hope we can have you back on this channel when you know you’ve got something that you think is important enough to let the general audience know about in terms of any misconduct that you might be seeing in the future.
Edwin Dorsey: Adam, Absolutely. This was a blast. I think you’re doing great work. Thanks for having me on.
Adam Taggart: All right, thanks so much, Edwin. Everybody else, thanks so much for watching.