← Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Ep 1183 | KinderCare Cover-Up: New Report Reveals Abuse, Corruption | Guest: Edwin Dorsey
00:57:09
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- [00:01]
Edwin Dorsey
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- [00:16]
Allie Stuckey
Kindercare operates over 1,000 daycare centers across 41 states. And it has been revealed that there is systemic abuse across these daycare centers and very little, if any, anything is being done about it. What's worse, our taxpayer dollars are actually funding this abuse. Today we've got investigative reporter Edwin Dorsey detailing his new and damning report about Kindercare. He will also be detailing his past reports about Care.com and Roblox. Both of these companies have had practices endangering children. Oh my goodness. The details of what he has discovered over the years, they're absolutely chilling. And we as parents need to know about it. Don't just listen to and watch the entirety of this episode. Share it with every parent, every grandparent, every caretaker that you know. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good ranchers. Go to good ranchers.com use code ally. It's good ranchers.com code ally. Edwin, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Could you tell us who you are and what you do?
- [01:35]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah, Allie, thanks for having me on. Relatable. I write a newsletter called the Bear Cave, which is a substack publication focused on exposing corporate misconduct. There's two real components to the newsletter. There's a free component where I kind of aggregate the news in finance in the short seller world. So I'll summarize activist short campaigns, highlights the specific suspicious resignations, and link to interesting articles and tweets. And then there's a paid tier of the newsletter where twice a month I do some like deep dive kind of investigative journalism, generally looking at a one to $10 billion public company that I think is misleading investors or harming customers. And that's what I do with the newsletter.
- [02:14]
Allie Stuckey
Okay. How did you get into this?
- [02:17]
Edwin Dorsey
So I've been passionate about stocks from a really young age. Like second grade, I was all about the stock market.
- [02:23]
Allie Stuckey
Wow.
- [02:24]
Edwin Dorsey
In college, I interned at various hedge funds and I thought that's route I was going to take and work for hedge funds and short sellers in particular. However, the fund I was interning for, which was a very large short seller fund that did a lot of investigative research, they were in the process of shutting down my senior year, so I needed to get a job. And I figured that if I started writing smart stuff online, people would want to hire me. So I started this newsletter mainly as a way to get a job. But it got really popular very fast in the pandemic, quickly became a full time income and it's been what I've been doing for the last five years. It's my only source of income, reader subscriptions. And you know, it's been pretty decent, so.
- [03:05]
Allie Stuckey
Wow. Yes. So I saw a headline about your research into Kindercare, and I'm a mom of young kids and we've got a lot of moms out there listening. I've never, you know, interacted with Kindercare. My kids, you know, didn't go to daycare. But I'm really interested in how a company like this functions and I was really disturbed by some of the things you found. So can you tell us first of all, what tipped you off into looking into Kindercare and then what did you find?
- [03:37]
Edwin Dorsey
So my newsletter has a pretty long history of looking at big public companies that have some issues with child safety. I wrote on care.com five or six years ago. Over the last few years, I've written a lot about roadblocks, pretty successfully highlighting safety issues before this mainstream media gets to it. Kindercare got on my radar for a somewhat odd reason. I was using ChatGPT Pro. I'm always looking for new companies and I asked it, can you look through all the recent IPOs of public companies and find ones with high levels of consumer complaints? And it gave me a list of 10. Kindercare was on that list. And when I went through the list of companies with high levels of consumer complaints, Kindercare stood out as the one that had a lot of issues and that, you know, it's kind of, you know, harming the public. So that's how they got on my radar. It wasn't from a person or any novel researchers. Literally just asking ChatGPT for companies with high levels of consumer complaints. One thing that I'm very good at is using foia, the Freedom of Information act, to get copies of complaints people are sending regulators. So one common thing I'll do in my research is I'll go to the FTC and see what complaints people are submitting to the FTC and go to local state attorney general offices and see what complaints people are submitting to state AGs. And when I did that for Kindercare, I kind of got a high level of complaints about this daycare company, which is the largest daycare company in the U.S. a few hundred thousand kids go to it, over 1500 locations. And the kind of one pattern that stood out to me about Kindercare is they seem to have like a lot of child safety issues and not the type of stuff you'd normally expect where, you know, maybe a kid, like fights with another kid or somebody has allergies. There was like, issues where kids were escaping from the Kindercare locations. Kids were getting locked in rooms, you know, with no supervisions. Kids were overdosing on drugs brought by the staff. There was just tons of these, you know, local news stories across the board of Kindercare, mistreating the kids they're watching. And, you know, that's kind of the crux of my article and why people should pay attention.
- [05:39]
Allie Stuckey
Okay, kids are overdosing on drugs. Can you tell us about that?
- [05:47]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah. So there was one case where a woman, you know, dropped her kid off at Kindercare. Six hours later she was told, you, you, you need to pick up your kid. He's, he's throwing up, he's feeling sick. And she took him home. And she knew right away something was wrong, like the motherly instinct. And so she went back to Kindercare and said, like, what happened? Like, my kid was fine this morning and, you know, not now. He's very, very sick and like, has all these bruises and it's like, clearly something's wrong. And Kindercare denied anything was wrong. And, you know, but the mother knew something was wrong so she took her kid to the hospital and the hospital did a drug test. And this kid, this like 2 year old, tested positive for cocaine. And the police got involved and firstly pointed the finger at her and they're like, you must be doing cocaine in your house and your kids overdosing on and out. So they searched the house and like drug tested her and nothing was wrong. And then they went to the daycare, the Kindercare daycare. And it turns out one of the staff members had brought cocaine to work in a bag. And the kid, you know, having gotten access to this worker's backpack and like ingested some of the cocaine. And that's why this kid tested positive for cocaine. And that sounds absurd. And this daycare had been cited for a lot of safety violations in the past. It was ultimately shut down. But this is the type of pattern of misconduct you'll see at Kindercare locations. There's about 70 in the state of Texas, there's hundreds nationwide. You know, it's kind of crazy what goes on when you don't have, like, good corporate controls to prevent this stuff. And the common theme I see in all these Kinder Care cases is the company is never transparent with the parents about what happened. In this case, it only came out because the mom, like, took four steps to figure out what happened. So that's like one of the more absurd cases that happened just a year ago.
- [07:36]
Allie Stuckey
Yes. We have a video clip of Kimberly, the mother, expressing regret over sending her child to Kindercare. It's not for, like, at the time.
- [07:44]
Edwin Dorsey
He was 11 months old. He is so innocent. Like, if you knew the baby before, like, he was just so happy.
- [07:52]
Allie Stuckey
His daily routine has been messed up due to unfortunately what happened at Kindercare. He has a lot of developmental delays now.
- [08:02]
Edwin Dorsey
He's a might be special needs now. I wish I didn't send him to Kindercare that day.
- [08:08]
Allie Stuckey
I wish that day I wouldn't have. That day just changed everything. Ugh. Poor thing. I mean, you can just see the desperation. So that Kindercare, Oak Creek Kindercare, as you said, had prior safety violations that included staff being aggressive with, with infants, undocumented injuries, and access to power tools and toxic chemicals. Then there was a woman. In April of 2021, she posted a video of a toddler on the streets outside Milford, Connecticut, KinderCare. When she alerted the daycare staff, they had, quote, no idea that the child had been missing. The boy's father only learned of the incident. Video went viral online. So after that happened, Kindercare didn't even inform this dad. Oh, yeah, sorry. You know, your kid escaped.
- [08:57]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah, no, this is. So there's two incidences in my article where, you know, a kid literally just escapes the daycare, usually by opening a window and then rolling out. Somebody is like, you know, the kid gets far, like he's walking down busy streets. People are taking videos. Ultimately somebody like, will find the kid and no one knows, like, who this like 2 year old belongs to. So they'll bring it to like a nearby business or something. Something. And Kindercare, when this happens, they don't even notice the kids missing. They don't inform the parents. It's just like. And even though there's been two cases where this has gone viral on Facebook of someone taking a video of a Kindercare kid escaping, I'm really confident this is happening a lot more at Kindercare locations. There was one complaint I saw to the Ohio Attorney General that I got through FOIA where a parent was like, my kid escaped from a Kindercare and I had no idea until, you know, someone told me. So, you know, I know of at least three cases where kids are escaping from Kindercare. And this is, like, way more than any other chain. It seems like a pretty simple and basic issue for a daycare. You got to make sure the kids can't escape. And that's going on repeatedly at Kindercare. So, yeah, they definitely have some odd issues here. And it's always not being transparent with the family, parents. In every single case, the parents are like, I didn't know what happened. Kindercare didn't tell me, but I found out from someone else. So this definitely seems like a pattern here. And if you look just, you know, in any state, there's often databases where these daycares are ranked and evaluated. Kindercare is consistently worse than the average, which is the exact opposite of what you'd expect for, like, a big company that has all the resources to have, like, good internal controls.
- [10:34]
Allie Stuckey
Right, because you found that they are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies, and so they're not hurting for money in addition to having so many paying families that are sending their kids there. And yet they get complaint after complaint. You found that. And it's only after several complaints, or I guess the news starts reporting on something that happened at one of these local branches that they end up shutting down. Why is it that there is so much grace for these Kindercare centers that repeatedly are receiving these kinds of very serious complaints?
- [11:09]
Edwin Dorsey
Allie, that's a great question. And I don't know, but it definitely should change. And that's a great point about taxpayers paying for this. So Kindercare law largely caters to working families. They also have a program to watch the children of kids whose parents are in the military. So service members. And about 35% of their revenue comes from the US taxpayer, which is their largest source of revenue through the Child Care Development Block Grant, which was started in 1990 under George H.W. bush, with the idea being that early childhood education, having kids in, like, informative daycares, is so beneficial to early childhood education and the kids development that the government should be subsidizing it. And the reality is it's kind of like the opposite. Kids in Kindercare, in addition to all these safety issues and ingesting cocaine and roaming the streets, you know, it doesn't not seem like it's, like, beneficial for your development to have 20 kids in a room supervised by someone earning $12 an hour in a corporate environment that just doesn't care about these kids. So it's a complete, you know, abuse of taxpayer funds. The government has huge ability to flex on these centers and not just shut them down or withhold state subsidies for these centers. You know, I think there is kind of an element of regulatory capture that exists across corporate America where the big companies, you know, ultimately control the regulators. Because Kindercare is so large, they have the ability to push back harder than any other entity. So if, you know, a lot of daycares are just, you know, one offs owned by somebody or a nonprofit that gets shut down, they might not have the resources to fight back. But what you see in Kindercare is sometimes the get shut down, but then there's an appeal process and Kindercare will be really good at the appeal process and how the best lawyers and fight back. It's something you see on Reddit threads where Kindercare employees talk is they say they're very good at just roping everything together properly right before licensing and inspections and then things fall apart right after. So I think there's kind of a corporate strategy around like pulling things together just for inspections and then laxing all the standards after. There's a corporate strategy of fighting back aggressively on suspensions. And I think regulators also aren't doing their jobs. So I think those three factors is why this continues to exist. And it's kind of bizarre because it's not just a private company, it's a private company getting hundreds of millions a year in taxpayer subsidies to do.
- [13:39]
Allie Stuckey
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- [15:33]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah, no, it's very, very, very low. Working in early childhood education is very, very low paid field partly because there's not a lot of like credentials required for it. Now it might vary by state, but yeah, these are very low paying jobs. They have extremely high turnover. And you know, one of the bigger issues here is Kindercare, you know, is now publicly traded and for the last 10 years have been owned by like a Swiss private equity firm. And if you look at just kind of the private equity playbook, you know, anytime they get in health care or childhood education is you need to increase profits and you can't necessarily raise the prices of watching these kids, partly because the subsidies are capped at a certain rate, partly because it's just like a standardized thing and you can't, you know, be priced above market. So your profits come from cutting costs. And the way you cut costs is you lower the wages people are paid and you reduce the numbers of workers. So Kindercare has largely grown through acquisitions. They acquire an existing facility and when they do, they lay people off and they typically lower the pay. So Kindercare is not a leader in compensation and as a result you have the higher turnover. So there was one study by the Women's Law center that found these private equity backed daycares tend to have the highest levels of turnover, way higher than independently owned ones or nonprofit ones, which is problematic because if you got a new person coming in every six months, you're not going to be able to build relationships with them. How do you know if you can trust them? So that's kind of one issue with Kindercare. And yeah, I think that's a kind of a big factor that contributes to the low quality of care as people are getting is these people are paid low. They're paid lower than anyone else in the industry. And there's significant turnover.
- [17:18]
Allie Stuckey
Yeah, they are, I guess people who at times are just desperate for work, maybe they don't have credentials. And since you don't have to have credentials to work in a place like Kindercare, they get this job and they have no interest in children. They don't even have the temperament, some of these people, for children. And so you get the people who should at least be working with children, working with children who obviously can't defend themselves are in very vulnerable situations. And it sounds like Kindercare realizes that this is a problem, but they have all of the mechanics in place to protect themselves as much as possible.
- [17:55]
Edwin Dorsey
Exactly. And you know you're going to get everybody who's been fired or couldn't get jobs at the better daycares. There might be like some low levels of licensing and training required, but I read a lot of the forums where these former employees talk and you know, they talk about not being prepared. And one kind of common thing with Kindercare is there's a lot of rules around staffing. You need to have a certain number of staff members per kids and you can't like be out of ratio. And Kindercare is constantly out of ratio. And now the government isn't going to really know unless there's like inspection exams that Kindercare might like send an extra employee or two there for the inspection exam. So because Kindercare is constantly out of ratio, it's like tough to hire people in any environment. Then you get desperate for anybody, which is how you have people bringing cocaine to a day care or two year old's going to overdose and then the mom's going to be blamed and like, you know, right. It's a total mess, it's a total disgrace. And then a lot of the people, you know, one common theme I found just looking into a lot of companies and doing this a lot, getting consumer complaints, is it's always the working class people who are getting taken advantage of the most and who are least equipped to defend themselves. So, you know, if you did this with, you know, upper class families who have access to lawyers and maybe more of an educational pedigree, this would get shut down so fast. They go to reporters, they hire lawyers, they'd sue. You know, back to your clip with the woman, Ms. Hobson, whose son overdosed. I don't think she mentioned hiring a lawyer, I don't think she even mentioned suing them. And she said the like happiest day she'd experienced was the day the Kindercare was shut. Down. So when you're taking like advantage of working class people who have, you know, just less wherewithal to defend themselves and then it's like especially abusive. So just across the board, you know, when I look at companies that are hurting children, it's almost always working class families who just have a ton on their plate. They can't devote as much time to this. They don't have as much money to, you know, devote to this. And the most infuriating thing is this is literally being paid for by taxpayers. And even though there's a lot of local media reporting on it, there's been no mainstream media reporting on it. And I know one big theme with relatable is the failures of the mainstream media. And I would point to this as another one. This is very relevant. It's national, it's happening nationwide, involves taxpayer funds. And we haven't seen a single national paper write about this, even though it's been going on for a while.
- [20:19]
Allie Stuckey
Okay, so some of the scenarios that you described. October 2021, an infant died after being sick all day out of Kindercare. And you know, they denied that there was any negligence. But then the same daycare in Ohio faced two formal complaints around child injuries. As of April 16, that kindercare in Ohio is still operational. In February 2022, a kindercare in southern Florida locked a 2 year old inside alone because the mom was 15 minutes late. The mom had to call the police to open the door to get her two year old who was standing on a chair screaming for help. Two years old. That's a baby. In August of 2022, police officers arrested a Florida Kindercare teacher for child abuse after, quote, yelling at the child victim and repeatedly punching the child with an open and closed fist to the back inside of the head. Oh my gosh. April 2023, two parents in Texas sued a sewed. Okay, so requires that was a typo so to recording device into their 20 month old toddler's jacket. The recorded audio captured a Kind employee threatening the children, saying, I'm going to beat both of y'all. That's what I'm going to do. I'm about to throw some bitch swings at some of y'all right now. Get up and move. Sit down. There's a baby that whimpers. Sit your ass down. Come sit down. Touch it and you die. Just get away from me because I will end up in jail. That was a teacher at a talking to babies, talking to toddlers at a Kindercare in Texas. And not all of these facilities have been closed even after these things have become public, right?
- [22:06]
Edwin Dorsey
Oh yeah, almost none of them have been closed down. You know, there's a local media reporting, there's some outrage. They fire the person if there is like media reporting and then they. It's so like comically absurd. There was one case in which, you know, that you didn't mention in which the Kindercare like there was like nap time, the kids were sleeping and the kid isn't doing anything. Like the girl is completely asleep, like a 2 year old. And one of the Kindercare employees is just like pouring water on her forehead to wake her up and she wakes up and falls back asleep and they're just like pouring water like sadistically on these kids while they're sleeping and they think it's funny. So the other Kindercare employee is literally like videotaping it and uploading it to Snapchat them, just like literally messing with the kids in their sleep. And this is what happens when you have no like controls. This is what happens when you don't care about kids. This is what happens when you have like a bunch of like immature 20 year olds like just watching kids messing around. This is what happens when there's like no account accountability and that facility isn't shut down and they're going to say it's a one off and they fire their people. But yeah, it's, it's absurd and it happens at a much higher rate at Kindercare versus any of these other facilities. And it's a big problem. And you know, I think, you know, I don't know all the rules around licensing, but it seems to be very friendly to these daycares. They have so many opportunities and to appeal and defend themselves. And one big problem is evidence. So you know, in any large corporation you generally see the corporate corporation trying to create a lot of documentation to protect themselves. With Kindercare, it's the opposite. Kindercare facilities rarely have cameras internally or externally. And you know the joke I've seen on forums is they don't want cameras because they don't want like to get sued because the cameras are going to show their employees doing stuff badly. So a lot of daycares, they want cameras so as things go wrong you can say no, look, this kid tripped or we're not negligent, right? But here Kindercare attends, potentially doesn't want cameras because they know they're going to be negligent and would contribute to lawsuits. And for a lot of parents, it's like they have an intuition something's wrong. They have an intuition to sew a recording device on their child, but they, they like, you know, absent that, how do you gather the evidence? It's like really tough to kind of prove abuse in these closed door facilities where you can't know what's going on, in which there's no video footage to back you up even if you went to the police police, you know, so, you know, you'll have a lot of stories where parents are like, my kids really didn't want to go there, but as a mom I just assumed that, you know, my kid didn't want to go to daycare and it's like that at every daycare, but she just loves being home. But then they realize there is some abuse going on and they're like, actually, you know, I wish I noticed this sooner. There is something really wrong about the Kindercare facilities. And one way you'd expect this to manifest, you'd expect a lot of online reviews and negative stories. And like any large corporation, Kindercare is trying to play games to smooth over their image and suppress the story. So one thing I found looking at a lot of online complaints, especially complaints to the ftc, is, you know, I see parents going to the FTC and saying, look, I had a bad experience with Kindercare. The reason I went to go to Kindercare is they had a ton of positive online reviews on Google. But I later learned that Kindercare would email all the parents repeatedly offering them $50 tuition discounts if they posted positive reviews. So part of the reason this happens is Kindercare, you know, I'm pretty sure against the law is offering discounts and subsidies to people just to post positive reviews to deceive more parents to coming into the Kindercare ecosystem.
- [25:40]
Allie Stuckey
Yeah, I just can't get over the fact that they are purposely targeting and manipulating, I'm guessing in many cases economically desperate people, a lot of single parents who they can't, they would love, maybe they'd love to stay home, but they can't stay home because they are the only income earner or just low income people who have, they can't afford a nanny, they can't afford the nicer daycare, maybe they don't have the option of staying home, I don't know. But it is taking advantage of poor or working class families and that is how they know they can get away with this kind of abuse. And because they don't want to cut into profits, they continually hire people that should not Be around children. And that is very disturbing to me. Next, sponsor Fellowship Home Loans. If you want to work with people that align with your values, if you don't want to have to worry if they secretly hate you because you're a Christian, especially when you're making a really big purchase like the purchase of a home, then you need to work with a mortgage company that actually aligns with your principles. That's Fellowship Home Loans. I know when I am looking for people to work with, when I am looking for, say I'm traveling and I need a makeup artist before a speaking engagement or even if I'm looking for someone to help decorate my house, a million different services that we use throughout our lives. I am getting so focused on my desire to work with people who are Christians, to work with people that share my values. And it seems like that would be even more important. When you are refinancing your home or you are making such a big decision like purchasing a home, you just want to make sure that the people you're working with are dealing honestly with you. They've, they've got integrity, that they are going to do a good job because they are working heartily for the Lord and not just for man's approval. And that is what you will get when you are working with Fellowship Home Loans. I have talked with Mike and Brian. They're the real deal. All of their employees are dedicated to glorifying God and serving you well. So check them out. Go to Fellowship Home Loans.com Fellowship HomeLoans.com Ali when you use my link, you'll get a $500 credit towards closing costs. That's Fellowship Home Loans.com Alli Nationwide Mortgage Bankers DBA Fellowship Home Loans/All housing lender NMLS number 819382 do you know anything about the CEO or the CEOs you know, of the past? Has this ever, has there ever been an effort that you know of to change the culture of what's going on here?
- [28:30]
Edwin Dorsey
I know there's been some turnover at the executive level. They've only been public for less than a year. They were bought by a Swiss private equity firm in 2015, Partners Group. And that's when, as far as I can tell, things started to go, you know, much worse. For a long time it's always been the cheapest, lowest paying daycare. But I think this private equity model of growing through acquisitions, cutting costs, especially over the last 10 years at Partners Group is where there's been an issue. I don't think it's limited to One CEO. I think it's like the culture of the organization. As far as I can tell, it's just about maintaining licensing. I don't think there's been any concerted effort to really improve the quality of care there because there's no financial incentive to do so. Now I want to kind of revisit the past point you made. Ali on this is preying on working class people, because that's absolutely true. They're often the lowest cost provider in any state. I think it's even deeper than that. So one thing I see in complaints is people will say, look, the director offered parents to pay cash directly to the director at, you know, maybe a slightly inflated rate, and then the director would pay electronically out of their own bank account for kids. So because Kindercare officially will only accept checks and electronic payments, but there's a lot of paying under the table and cash to the directors. And to me, whenever I see that, I think they're dealing with undocumented immigrants or people who don't have bank accounts and those kids are being watched in Kindercare. So I kind of suspect that it's probably the daycare of choice for undocumented immigrants who need to pay cash much kind of under the table to Kindercare directors. That's what you see from consumer complaints. You know, you see a lot of complaints about billings. So not only do they give low quality of care, they, they charge people after the kids have left. They charge early termination fees or continue. They bill you even if you don't have a kid in the system. They promise to refund you and they won't. You know, I saw one complaint in which it's like literally military service members and they have a special program dealing with military families and they get deployed and they need to like move their kids to like their new army base and Kindercare won't let them out of their daycare contract. I'm like, how can you, like, advertise yourself and promote yourself to military service members and then not let the kids out of contracts and be like, you need to move to a new military base. It's so absurd. It appeals to, you know, working class families where both parents are working the exact type of behavior you want in America, subsidize the government to harm the exact type of working class families you should be trying to help.
- [30:58]
Allie Stuckey
And there has been problems repeatedly. 2017, 2021, 2023, multiple 2023, 2024, also 2020, where kindercare teachers have been accused of producing child sex abuse Material and also just possessing child sex abuse material, but endangering the children that they're actually working with with because of what they're trying to create, the kind of content that they're trying to make.
- [31:27]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah, if you're like, you know, a bad person and want access to young kids, like, there's no better place than a Kindercare and, you know, if the internal controls are really bad, like this is the exact type of environment where it can go on for a long time and people look the other way. One thing you see constantly in Kindercare is they never want to write formal reports, they never want to notify parents, they never want to like, create an incident report. And this type of world where like, there's no documentation and no cameras and it's like the perfect breeding ground for, you know, sex offenders and demented people. So, you know, I don't know how severe it is compared to other daycares, but like, you know, it's just kind of obvious you don't want just. And it's always men. It's almost never the woman. It's always men. And it's like if you're a man who's taking a job at like a very low paying Kindercare with the history of abuses, it's like, I don't know.
- [32:18]
Allie Stuckey
All the red flags. The reddest of flags. The reddest of flags. On an earnings call last month, you reported that Kindercare CEO Paul Thompson told analysts that roughly 35% of the company's revenue comes from the Child Care and Development Block Grant. That's the federal program that sends money to states subsidized child care for working families. 35%. That's a lot.
- [32:42]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah, it's hundreds of millions of dollars and. Yeah, and there might be changes under the Trump administration to this. So it's been rumored DOGE is going to want to look at this program and cut costs. However, you also see the opposite in some of the things President Trump is saying where he wants to incentivize more babies being born and wants to give a credit if you have a kid and you know, if you really want to incentivize people, have more kids, maybe you, you try to subsidize child care more. The issue to me is like large bureaucracies, federal government, state government, it's like the kind of approach, it just subsidized child care and don't do enough to like, you know, discriminate among the child care providers. You should in theory be giving huge subsidies to the person that's giving, you know, great food to the kids, a great learning environment, letting the kids form friendships like that is good for long term development. And you should be giving practically no, no subsidies to private equity backed firms that are just trying to make the most amount of money possible. It drives me nuts that taxpayers fund this nonsense.
- [33:45]
Allie Stuckey
So I'm going to do everything possible to have Elon Musk watch or listen to this episode just so Doge can get to this one thing. Because I care so much about child safety and I just hate the thought that we are subsidizing with hundreds of millions of dollars there's this kind of child endangerment.
- [34:03]
Edwin Dorsey
Your taxpayer dollars are going to a woman who's bringing cocaine to a daycare and where a two year old's going to overdose on it. And it's so wrong. And so the way the federal grant works is I think money goes to the states and then the states can choose how to disperse it. And you know, some states have gotten a little smarter where they'll like rate, I think Ohio state rates the daycares, you know, bronze, silver and gold based on the quality of care being delivered. And if you're giving higher quality, quality care, then in theory you're going to get slightly higher subsidies from the government. And I think that's smart. And in those models, Kindercare gets a little less money, but you know, you need to aggressively tier it more. And this is just where like, it's like private equity so exploitative. They're going to be like perfect at like doing this playbook to figure out how to get the most amount of subsidies and just like, you know, you know, fit the check the box narrative that some inspector is going to use to like distribute subsidies. Subsidies, but they're not going to actually deliver great care. And then the independent practitioner who actually cares about kids but is less, you know, nuanced in the system, they're going to get less subsidies for developing better care. So yeah, I would love Elon and Doge to, you know, take an ax of this, you know, get a few hundred million dollars back from Kindercare and say like, you can't be abusing kids with taxpayer dollars. I, I think that is very, very, very needed. It would make me very, very happy.
- [35:26]
Allie Stuckey
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- [36:59]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah. So care.com played a huge deal in my like professional development. I was a college student when I started talking about it and this is what I would say made me a little famous or like gave me credibility where people cared what I had to say. That hedge funds wanted to pay for. My newsletter to see who had criticized the Care.com incident in college is really what you know, I would say put me on the map in some ways. So care.com, it's a huge babysitting platform for parents to find babysitters and babysitters to advertise their services to parents. And a huge thing for any babysitting platform is safety. You got to make sure the people are who they say they are. You got to make sure they're not sex offenders. You got to run some background check on them. And care.com claim to be a very safe place to look for babysitters and they claim to be running background checks. But I had a friend, and this is my, I think sophomore year of college who was a babysitter on the platform and said, look, you should look into Them I get the sense that something is wrong. So I decided to try to test becoming a babysitter on care.com and the way I tested their process is by trying to sign up as Harvey Weinstein, who was in the news a lot at the time. So I use a photo of Harvey Weinstein. I use the email Harvey the babysitter@gmail, gmail.com I made up a Social Security number. I documented all this process. I just made everything up as Harvey Weinstein. And I consented to their background check on care.com to be a licensed babysitter on there. And they said they'd run the background check and get back to me in 48 hours. And to my amazement, I was approved. Hello, Harvey. I got a verification badge. And as Harvey Weinstein as a student in college I was like applying to babysitting jobs on care.com they said I was CPR certified. It was clear they're not running the background checks they claim to do. I made a different account as Daffy Duck and got approved. It's like they're telling parents are running background checks, they're charging people for background checks, and then they're not running the background checks. And there had been like some like local news reporting around lawsuits where parents alleged defective background checks. But here I had like concrete evidence that they weren't doing that. So I wrote one article as a college student and that went a little viral. And then the company like, they called my college to get me in trouble. They like sent some legal letter to my parents house and that made me dig in more. So then I went to every state attorney general to get consumer complaints, people that filed on care.com and I saw tons of safety issues. And I kind of like noticed this pattern. First things will appear in, you know, complaints to state AGs. Then there will be local media reporting and then ultimately there will be a national story. So I became obsessed with care.com I go to every state ag every for consumer complaints. I even go to some like, you know, police departments and I ask for all 911 calls that had care.com mentioned in the transcript because I want to see like how extensive all these abuses are. And you know, there's a lot of people with criminal histories who are approved to babysit. On care.com there's a lot of people who had their kids taken away from them who then go become babysitters. On care.com there's people who've been banned from running daycares who are, you know, listing their services on Care do. There's people with DUIs and battery charges advertising themselves on care.com and all unbeknownst to parents. And ultimately there were eight kids who, you know, were given to care.com babysitters with criminal histories where the parents didn't know. And the kids ended up dying. They're abused or beaten up, they're drowned in a pool. And I get obsessed with this. I cold emailed like a hundred reporters and then Gregory Zuckerman at the Wall Street Journal got involved. We talked for a while and nine months later he had a front page story about care.com babysitters not passing background checks with criminal histories and killing, like several children just because this company wasn't doing their job. And then that put me on the map. That's why people kind of cared about my newsletter, even though I was really young. The stock collapsed. The CEO, CFO and general counsel all resigned and they got new management. And from what I can tell, the safety issues have kind of been fixed. Fixed. It's not that extreme now, but that was another company that had a lot of issues. And, you know, it kind of made me obsessed with this idea that literally just anybody, if you see a lot of local news reporting in different states and cities of these issues, it's just going to be a while before the national media catches up. And even though it, like, matters a lot, there's a lot of group thinking media, they're kind of slow to like finding these issues out themselves. But you can really try to make a difference if you identify it early.
- [41:16]
Allie Stuckey
Absolutely. Now, when it comes to Kindercare, I know that you mentioned there's been no mainstream reporting of this and it's a really big deal. It's getting our tax dollars. It's a huge company. We've got military families involved in this. Do you think it's one of those things where it's like, okay, they're just slow and they will catch up to your reporting eventually? Or do you think there's something else underneath that? Do you think there's a reason they're not reporting on Kindercare?
- [41:41]
Edwin Dorsey
Well, I don't think it's like corruption and sinister and the media wants to see kids abused. I did, you know, actually one bigger reporter reached out to me, like, you know, after this. But they were so slow and they had so many stories and, you know, I think they're like, it's infuriating looking at the media. There's going to be like 50 stories about some like, minor Trump thing and there's going to be 100 stories like trying to take down Elon Musk and then the thing that can actually make a big societal difference, you know, highlighting these abuses, getting Congress involved, changing the tax incentives, zero media reporting. And I just think there's a lot of group think in media and I know one big theme with relatable is independent thinking. And there's just, there's very little that in I think mainstream media, these stories are also difficult. It's easy to write a headline about Trump and Elon and some small thing and then get a lot of clicks. Clicks. It's a lot, lot, lot more work to do this type of research and spend six months on it and talk to former employees and get corporate records and really demonstrate the abuses. So this is the type of thing that's a lot of work, not a lot of clicks. It may, you know, drive some subscriptions that people very much value independent journalism. But it's like for whatever reason, I think the media has a tougher time putting it together. The media is very like, like tips based. And if one parent just says, oh, I've had a bad experience at this, I don't know if it'll click to them that it's, it's actually systemic because it's tough for an outsider to really say like is this systemic or is it a one off when it is systemic for Kindercare? So yeah, I, I would love to see more mainstream media write about kinder care. But for now I'm happy to go on your podcast Ali and talk about it.
- [43:22]
Allie Stuckey
This is a good substitute. Me too. Okay. Another story that involves kids is, is Roblox. And we've talked a little bit about Roblox and just the capabilities that it has, the vulnerabilities that it has. We've talked about how predators use Roblox, but you found a lot of disturbing stuff that's going on.
- [43:39]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah. So Roblox is I think, the absolute worst. Let me put it this way. Roblox is the best way for sex offenders and abusers to meet kids just across the board. Like you can literally look at interviews like, you know, pedophile and stuff. They say they like meeting kids through Roblox. And now the reason Roblox is so dangerous, it's a game where young kids play online six to 14 is, is that, you know, there's a few things. One, there's a lot of open messaging. You can easily message people back and forth. It's easy to like fake being young. So anybody can go on Roblox you can be 40, you can say you're 12, you make a little avatar, you can make three different avatars and then you can start talking to kids and manipulating them. It's easy to get their contact info and move off platform. Parents kind of assume it's safe even though it's not. And then just over and over and over and over again you see like a registered sex offender, they go on Roblox, they typically make a few accounts, they pretend to be multiple different people, but it's all the same person. And they start talking to like a 7 year old or something, convince them that they're, they're frying and convince them to like, you know, get out of the house and like go down the block and then like essentially kidnap them and like drive like 500 miles across state lines. And you know, I think I've seen like two dozen incidences like this. And you know, again, everyone kind of writes it off as a one off, but it's like systemic within Roblox. And there's a, there's a few other issues that make it really bad on Roblox because the kids are so young. To sign up to make a Roblox account, all you need to do is give a username and password. You often don't need an email and you're not required to give a phone number. And just, just that distinction versus most of social media is actually a huge issue because there's no limit to the number of usernames and passwords you can make. You can make a Roblox account get caught inappropriately messaging kids get banned. Make a second Roblox account. Make a third Roblox account. Make 100th Roblox account. There's nothing Roblox can really do to shut you down versus if you require a phone number at sign up, there's only so many phone numbers you can have. You, you can only get banned so many times before it becomes a nuisance to keep obtaining new phone numbers. So that's like one very simple thing that makes Roblox so much more dangerous than other platforms. Yeah, I think parents really underestimate the dangers of Roblox. I, I think the Kindercare stuff is slightly worse. People know like kids online you need to be like wary of things. But yeah, Roblox is a ton of these issues of like just young kids, kids, you know, being manipulated by these like older adults and like being kidnapped.
- [46:19]
Allie Stuckey
Last sponsor is Net Suite, NAT Suite. It's also for all of you small business owners out there, you need One source of truth. You want to make sure that you've got all of your numbers, all of your KPIs in one place to make sure that you are achieving your goals. And Net Suite by Oracle is the number one cloud ERP that over 38,000 businesses are using to future proof their business. With one unified business management suite, you've got that one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. You've got real time insights and forecasting, so you're looking into the future with actionable data. If you are a business owner, you know how important all of this is. If you go to next net suite, that's net s U-I-T e.com Alli, you can download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's netsuite.com Alli how is it mentioning the or hosting the school shooting games? I don't really know like what Roblox even is as a game. I've never seen the app before. So how is that working?
- [47:32]
Edwin Dorsey
So Roblox is unlike many games where there's a lot of user generated content, so users can create games that other people play. And there's this long tail like hundreds of thousands or millions of games on Roblox. And Roblox has historically claimed they care a ton about content moderation. Every item, every game is going to be reviewed by a human before it's uploaded, but that's clearly not the case. And like what I found just like looking into it a little bit and like kind of going down the road at rabbit holes and stuff is there's a lot of games that are totally inappropriate. There's like Holocaust reenactment games. There's literally like school shooting games where you can play as a school shooter and like a replica of a school and like see how many kids you can kill like you know, within roadblocks. It's, it's super, super, super messed up. And it's just a sign that they're not doing moderation. What happens is the games go viral. You know, kids are being immature and bad and like playing the games. And then once it gets a lot of traction, Roblox will ultimately shut it down. But then someone will just make another account and re upload it. And it's like absurd that this platform, like if you want to play like school shooting games, the way it's like most accessible is on the platform for like really young kids. And it's not just like, you know, hypothetical like real school shooters have like mentioned their like you know, love of Roblox and playing on Roblox. So you know I, I, you know it's a very sensitive topic and I, I'm not the most informed on it but it's kind of absurd that you have a game playing play thousands of times on Roblox being re uploaded constantly where like you can you know, role play as a school shooter.
- [49:09]
Allie Stuckey
It's like that is, yeah.
- [49:10]
Edwin Dorsey
And nothing happens to the company.
- [49:12]
Allie Stuckey
Right. And can access that. So you've got a six year old boy who can access that. They can access all kinds of pornographic material. They can be talking to a predator who might pose as, you know, another seven year old boy but is really an adult. And as you said there's really no safety mechanism in place to make sure you are who you say you are, that you're the age that you say you are. There was this 87 page whistleblower document that was shared with you from employees saying yeah, the company knows that these issues exist.
- [49:46]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah. So I've been writing about roadblocks for the last three years. I'm like, I kind of get obsessed these companies and sometimes what happens is when you write on them a lot and start publishing publishing information is former employees will reach out to you and say actually it's really bad. And here's, here's more evidence. So there, there is these like kind of internal messages kind of like in a slack but like internal message boards where you know, Roblox employees say I wouldn't let my kids play these games. These games are not safe. They're so much worse than other places on the Internet. So I got a copy of that and it's like pretty like bad. It's like you could, they know it's bad. And the thing with Roblox is it would be so easy to improve the safety. It's not like this is a complicated issue. You require phone numbers at signups. Maybe you require people to verify IDs or in order to have the ability to chat with other people, you need to verify your ID first so anybody can play. But if you want the chat functionality which is really like the stepping stone for abuse, you need to verify your id. Doing those little steps of friction, you know, hurt the company. It's maybe a little less likely people will sign up. But it would totally transform sales safety because then you could permanently ban people. Then you could cross reference with the sex offenders list. You could, you make sure people like are an appropriate age. You don't have a 40 year old talking to an 8 year old, very, very like low hanging fruit to just transform the safety of the platform. It just comes with cost and you know, lower user growth. And so the easy transformation, they're just not going to do it. And I kind of hope there's more media reporting on it. The company will be shamed into doing it. The other thing they could do is just invest more in moderation. It should be that every game uploaded to Roblox is reviewed by a human. So you don't have like school shooting reenactment games. But that's just not the case right now. And I note over the years they kind of, they used to advertise, we look at every item, we look at every game and they've kind of softened the language around that because I can tell they're afraid of getting sued and they don't want like to have advertising as strong of a language. But they still present themselves in a very safe platform when they're not.
- [51:48]
Allie Stuckey
Yeah, Edwin, I'm just sitting here listening to you and wondering if you have ever received any threats over your reporting.
- [51:56]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah. So ironically, the worst one was probably care.com so I was the student at Stanford and they literally, somehow I think like some donors were on care.com board, they like got a hold of the dean and students and were complaining about me. And as like a sophomore, the dean of students calls me in and I'd never really been in trouble before. And they're like, you're violating our, you know, WI FI policy and you're impersonating other people and all like, you can't do this using Stanford WI fi. Will you take the article down? And it's like, that's the first time I got a taste of like how the world works. The backdoor shenanigans. I was like kind of floored that they weren't supporting me. And then, then care.com also sent a private investigator to my house where my, my dad, you know, calls me one day and he's like, yeah, some guy with like a body cam showed up to our house and was asking questions about you. You know, I, I typically have, I've done this a while, so I kind of know which guys are like the really bad actors who are going to like really go after you versus when you go after large corporations, the kind of standard thing is they might mess around, they might send you a cease and desist, they might sue you, but they're not going to like, like kill you. You know, where if you go after international companies, the standards There are a lot different where it's very less tolerant of criticism. But if you're going after large US listed companies and you're not saying anything incorrect and you're backing it up with information, and I'm not trading the stock, you know, I, I think I'm somewhat protected. You know, one issue is when the companies actually have issues, there's going to be discovery and litigation. So they sued me. They might end up exposing more about themselves. I think I have an advantage kind of being young and having a little bit of an Internet following where if I did get sued, it's going to be a lot of bad headlines for them and again, draw more attention to the issues. One thing I try to do to mitigate like legal risk is I really try to be understated. You see this trend in the media and you know, sometimes in finance where people want to be sensationalistic and, you know, just like fraud, scam, red letters, exclamation point, it's going to zero. I, I do none of that. I really try to let the evidence speak for itself and just kind of lay out the facts and let people draw their own conclusions. Doing that kind of protects me a little. But you still get nonsense from time to time. You know, I, I don't know if I would say death threats, but I get occasional emails being like dead Edwin walking and it's like, that's not, you know, pleasant to receive.
- [54:21]
Allie Stuckey
Right.
- [54:21]
Edwin Dorsey
You get, you get. I got an a cease or desist or two over the years, but I've never been sued. I, I'm not too worried because it's again, large US Companies where the most they're going to do, I think, is sue me. And I, I, I think as long as I'm saying stuff that's truthful and understated and have evidence, I don't think they're going to do that. And fortunately, the Bear Cave newsletter has been kind of successful where I, I could probably afford one lawsuit. Not that I'd want to spend a lot of money on it, but I, I could probably afford like one big fight.
- [54:49]
Allie Stuckey
Yeah. Okay. Well, just in case you have lawsuits coming your way, everyone needs to subscribe. So you could maybe afford two lawsuits if needed. Hopefully that will never be necessary, but everyone should subscribe to your sub stack anyway just because, I mean, you're the only one I know that's giving this kind of information. Maybe there are other independent journalists out there that are also doing it. But I appreciate you especially that you also focus on companies that are endangering children. That's relevant to people, no matter your political persuasion, but especially as parents out there. Like, we just really need to know what's going on. So thank you so much, Edwin. I really appreciate it.
- [55:27]
Edwin Dorsey
Yeah. And Ali, thanks so much for having me on your show. I think independent media like yours is so, so, so important. It's the way these stories can get told. So I think you deserve a lot of credit too for.
- [55:38]
Allie Stuckey
Well, thank you having me on, letting.
- [55:39]
Edwin Dorsey
Me share some of these issues. So thank you.
- [55:41]
Allie Stuckey
Thank you, Edwin. I appreciate it. Quick reminder to sign up for Share the Arrows. Get your tickets @sharethe arrows.com if you are a Christian woman, this is the conference for you. Hard hitting, solid theology, apologetics, training, encouragement and edification as moms as any woman in any stage of life. We'll even be talking about how to live biblically healthy lives. So go to share the arrows.com that's sharethe arrows.com October 11th, Dallas, Texas. That's where you can get your tickets. That's sharetheaeros.com.