Episode 312 - Prof. John M. Griffin: Forensic Finance and the Power of Research

26:48Even though it was set up to be this anonymous decentralized financial system, now we have all the money entering and exit through these centralized exchanges. And it's been that way for quite some time, actually. These centralized exchanges, though, are still caught between a little bit of a catch-22 in the sense that their customers don't want everything monitored by the exchange. And yet there is also an element where they surely don't want to lose their life savings either. So I think they could do much more monitoring, but they probably view that as just a cost center to them. You got to imagine they're making money if they're offloading all these accounts off of their exchange and they're making fees off of all those transactions.

27:31So shutting down that could shut down a significant source of revenue. So they've got a cost center to apply these monitoring methods. And so you can imagine where they could save money by not employing rigorous monitoring and also make much more on the fees on the front or back side. That's wild. You mentioned you don't read the blog post, but how has the crypto community, to your knowledge, responded to this paper? In one of the articles that printed, Heather came out with a statement saying the paper was flawed. I mean, it was interesting. They came out with that statement. The paper had just been posted.

28:06I doubt more than a couple hours had gone by between when they made that statement or if they had time. Maybe they had time to read the abstract when they said that. But I wasn't too bothered by that because they said our previous paper was severely flawed and put a blog post up about it and stuff like that. And then subsequently, the major allegations of our paper have all been worn out, in fact, admitted by Tether themselves. The company has a history of just making up stuff. I tend to ignore critics like that. you got to realize the industry has a vested interest. A lot of these, even firms that engage in tracing, they have as their customers, their large customers are Binance and chain analysis.

28:45That's one advantage to being independent is that we can call a spade a spade. You definitely do that in your papers. You're not messing around. I want to move on actually to your tether paper. To set that up, can you talk about how commonly fraud and misinformation are associated with asset price bubbles? It's something I wasn't aware of, and it was never really taught to me in any of my courses throughout my undergrad or PhD program. But when I started looking at books, they were more practitioner-oriented. This is related to your podcast with James Choi, but I also think there's things that we can learn from the practitioner-oriented finance folks as well.

29:24And it seemed like historians had made a lot of connections between fraud and bubbles. Anytime there's an asset price bubble, there's just a hype, there's a euphoria around it, and it leads to an ability to make stuff up. And so there's been a history of, dated back to the South Sea bubble is a very famous one, the Mississippi bubble, the dot-com bubble. These bubbles always had a tinge, and in fact, perhaps even much larger than people anticipated, fraud component. There's two aspects of that. There's two major theories on it. And one theory is that, well, because of the excesses, because of the hype, it allows people to be taken advantage of.

30:09That's definitely an aspect of that that's true. It allows the fraudsters to come in and prey on that. But there's also a second aspect that was shown in the South Sea bubble and the Mississippi bubble, at least anecdotally, as well as Akilov and Romer point out in like three bubbles, including like the Texas commercial real estate bubble, that fraud itself helping to drive and even cause the bubble. The mechanism's different in all of these situations, but it could be the case that the fraud itself makes the bubble bigger. On that note, can you talk about what Tether is? Yeah, Tether is a purported stablecoin that trades relative to a dollar.

30:48So it's a quote novel concept in the crypto industry that while we could have stability, something like the dollar, then we could yet trade in crypto, have very low transaction fees. But Tether was a cryptocurrency that was developed to be a stablecoin, but developed in a very illiquid market, very opaque market, and associated with the Bitfinex exchange, iFinex, and some related companies. And so they started this stablecoin. And since then, it's grown and taken over as to be one of the largest stablecoins by a large margin. What's the difference between Tether being demand-driven or pulled and supply-driven?

31:30or pushed. This is related to my paper with Amin Shams, and he's my co-author that's helped me understand a lot of these things. And it was very interesting for me to understand this market. We kind of set this up like we would in an international finance concept. In international finance, there's this concept of pushed or pulled in terms of capital flows. So our capital flows pushed or pulled and or demand driven or supply driven. And so basically what we were looking at there is what was the main source of demand for Tether? Was it the fact that there was all these people, let's say they had Bitcoin or other crypto or even dollars, and they said, I want to buy, that's demand driven, they want to buy Tether with it.

32:16Or was it the fact the supply driven or pushed hypothesis was that Tether was printing crypto unbacked. And then by printing this unbacked crypto, it was using that to purchase other crypto like Bitcoin. So you can imagine in an unbacked cryptocurrency case, let's just take the most common one we know. The US dollar is different in the sense it's backed by the full faith and trust of the US government, not some people sitting on a remote island. When the US government decides that there's an emergency and they want to print$4 trillion, you guys deal a lot with investments. We all know what's going to happen.

32:54That$4 trillion pushes in the system and people have to do something with that money and they tend to buy things with it and it tends to float all boats up. They end up buying stocks. Now, in this case, this is in the crypto system. If you print up a bunch of unbacked crypto and then you buy other crypto with it, like Bitcoin, what do you think is going to happen? It's going to push up the price of Bitcoin. That's the push hypothesis. Why though would the Tether creators want to inflate the price of Bitcoin? In general, they have an incentive to get more of their currency out there, first of all, because you can imagine when they first were creating it, the value wasn't that great.

33:35But right now, if you're sitting on Tether and you can park that money in terms of another instrument earning four or 5 % return, every million dollars of tether is earning significant yield. There's a significant incentive for them to get more and more tether out there. It's an incentive for anybody that has a stable coin to increase the supply of their stable coin. But there's also an incentive for a lot of people in the crypto industry to push up the price of crypto in general because they're holding crypto. Most of the crypto industry is long crypto. And so the crypto industry, of course, wasn't too happy about our paper as one person emailed me.

34:15Don't you understand? Tether is a good thing. Because if you're long crypto, it's a great thing. It pushes up the price of everything. They understood. You touched on this earlier. I want to ask about it again, though. We talked about decentralization in crypto. And you mentioned the importance of Tether. Can you just talk about how decentralized or not the crypto space actually is? Yeah, I think it's actually a little bit of a misnomer, decentralized finance. Because first of all, all the centralized players are the biggest players in the space. And that's where most of the capital comes into the system, and that comes out of the system.

34:52And then of course, you have DeFi, decentralized finance, developing all these decentralized exchanges and so forth. But you might wonder, even decentralized exchanges usually don't just pop out of the ground, run by themselves. Someone has to write the code. There's costs associated with that. Those players that write the code have economic incentives. They're the ones that write the code. They know the ins and outs of the system. They know how to game the market if they want to game the market. Even these decentralized players are in fact centralized to some degree. There's Silicon Valley money all over the crypto industry into these DeFi projects as well.

35:34And so it's not really decentralized as near to the extent that it was envisioned to be at the start of all this. How do you test whether Tether is pushed or pulled? One thing is in terms of the timing of the market, we started with the premise that if Tether is being printed unbacked, we could look at the printing of the Tether and then we could look at what happens afterwards. Now, we looked at the printing of the Tether and just because they printed the Tether doesn't necessarily cause the market to go up. We looked for when the Tether actually left Bidfenix and what they were buying. And we found that they were moving to other exchanges and when the money moved to those other exchanges, that's when the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies went up.

36:24We narrowed in on the hours where a tether had been printed and kind of sitting there in the background. It's oftentimes maybe for a couple of days, but then suddenly that tether was being used to purchase Bitcoin. And during those hours, in fact, a small set of hours, less than 1 % of hours, we found that you could explain half of the rise of Bitcoin in the massive run-up of Bitcoin in 2017. How do you identify the causal relationship though? Is Tether increasing the price of Bitcoin or is the Tether supply responding to the price of Bitcoin? We had a massive amount of tests in the paper and it's been like five years since I've thought about all of this.

37:04So I may forget the major ones, but we ran through a litmus of tests, but a lot of it came down to the timing of it. In particular, it seemed like they were looking for periods where Bitcoin had fallen in price and then the price had moved up. The other thing about it is we found that most of the activity was behind one player. So one entity was responsible for all the things. So if it was this massive, hey, there's all these people moving into the space, the institutional players of the world, the pension funds of the world moving into the space, and that's what was driving it, then you wouldn't see all this concentration in the one player.

37:41In fact, we found it was the activity of the one player and the activity of the one player coming out of Bitfinex itself that was driving all the activity. Using Tether to buy Bitcoin on other exchanges and so forth wasn't driving any of this. So Tether is being created and it's moving out through one significant player and going into Bitcoin? Yeah, it was during that period. I believe that the mechanisms have likely changed. And in fact, I'm not an expert, but a reporter brought this to my attention. There was a lawsuit in Florida regarding Almeida and some text messages that came up as a result of that.

38:18And in those text messages, it does seem to suggest that Almeida was in fact printing Tether with a quote, line of credit. What is a line of credit? Line of credit is really unbacked. They were printing Tether and they're using it to buy Bitcoin. Did they understand what they're doing? I don't know. I hope my papers are for good, but sometimes I feel they can be used the wrong way. And in this case, the Almeida person chatted that Almeida could create USDT to outpace the value of Bitcoin. And they wrote in their text messages, okay, putting in a$100 million creation need to beat BTC to 25 ,000.

38:56These folks may not have been rocket scientists, but you don't have to be a genius to understand that if you print $100 million of Tether and you're using that to buy Bitcoin in a concentrated period, at least during that period in 2020, you could have an outsized effect on the price. Other people in the crypto industry have an incentive here. So it could be a collusive activity as well, more than one player. And this text message doesn't seem like just still one player, but perhaps a different one that wasn't responsible early on. Do you test whether Tether is backed by other financial assets?

39:27We do test backing for Tether in a variety of ways. I think one of the most intuitive ways we do is we say, well, what would happen if Tether was, say, being printed unbacked and bought into Bitcoin? And the Tether creators had created a bunch of Bitcoin. And then all of a sudden, you were going to get audited in your financials and you need to have cash in your bank. Tether was not audited very much, but there were some end-of-the-month dates where they were audited. And so we looked particularly at end-of-the-month dates after they had printed a bunch of Tether and whether there was a downward effect on the price of Bitcoin.

40:02What we found is that, in fact, the price of Bitcoin did crash. Even though our sample was small, the T-stats were extremely large, that the price of Bitcoin was crashing right up to those end-of-the-month points where they would have had to sell Bitcoin to buy dollars. And as kind of an out-of-sample test of it, we actually found that there was one period where they did it mid-month. It was the September 15th of the month. And in fact, in that September of the 15th month, you see a very strong pattern where Bitcoin crashed right up until the point they had to have the cash in the bank account.

40:35And then after that, the price of Bitcoin rebounded when they could move those money out. So there was a variety of other things we did, but we did find evidence that Tether was at least partially unbacked. That test is super interesting. So it was like, if they were fully backed, when they get audited, it's all good. No issue. If they're not fully backed, they need to sell Bitcoin before they get audited so they can put the cash in the bank account to say, no, look, we're good. And you found that it at least seems like that's what's happening, that they were selling the Bitcoin to fill the bank account.

41:07And I guess auditing was a fairly strong word. They weren't being audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers or anything to my knowledge. It was more of a mom and pop type auditing. And that type of auditing also had limits on what it said. It says it wasn't auditing other entities as well. So one could imagine the similar types of shenanigans that got FTX in trouble, borrowing money from FTX, moving it to Almeida, that those similar type things could have been going on there in that setting as well. It's unbacked, but you can make it official by calling it a line of credit. Crazy. You would know better than me probably, but I don't think Tether's ever been audited.

41:42They've done attestations, but I don't know if they've ever had a proper audit. I haven't followed them recently, but at least a couple of years ago, they hadn't had a proper audit. How did Ted respond to your paper on this? Like I said, I try to not listen too carefully to all the people with naysayers and vested interests. If there's serious people that raise serious concerns and don't have a strong vested interest, I'm happy to listen to them and their content. But they made some very disparaging statements. I found one of them on their website. They put, all Tether tokens are fully backed by reserves and are issued pursuant to market demand and not for the purpose of controlling the price of crypto assets.

42:24It is reckless and utterly false to assert that Tether tokens are issued in order to enable illicit activity. Tether token issues have quadrupled since December 2017, which was part of my point. They made that very strong statement. But in fact, when their lawyer was under oath in the NYAG case, it's my understanding that they had to essentially admit that they were unbacked. And as part of the settlement with the CFTC and the New York Attorney's Journal's office, the CFTC found, and I'm going to quote, that from at least June 1st, 2016, and to February 25th, 2019, that's over the period of our study, how they're misrepresented to customers and the market that Tether maintains sufficient US dollar reserves to back every USDT in circulation.

43:14And that, in fact, Tether reserves were not fully backed the majority of the time. It first used to amaze me that when industry players would come after me and they would say things very convincingly and no, no, no, this is the way it is. And I would listen to them earnestly. But over time, I've learned that even major companies can just flat out lie and make things up and say just disparaging things. So it's one of the aspects about forensic finance we talk about in our paper that you got to develop a little bit of a thick skin and to kind of ignore people that make things up. They also engaged in some other behind the scenes things that I don't know what to necessarily talk about, but they were very duplicitous in the way that they acted.

44:00It takes a level of bravery, really, for you to publish stuff like that. I'd be nervous personally. I'm a Texan, so I don't know. A little bit of that's carried forward. Over time, I've learned it's just part of the job, but it is discouraging when some of these organizations, they do spend money and take lawyers and try to make stuff up. Luckily, the University of Texas, this happens several times in the University of Texas and stood behind me. So one lady at the tower standing behind me, I met one lady in the tower once and she said, yeah, we understand what these people are trying to do. We're going to tell them don't mess with Texas.

44:35Very cool. That NYAG case, that's like a different version of an out of sample test of your findings. I guess in forensic finance, you get court cases as out of sample tests instead of just new data. Yeah. Unfortunately, the court cases take such a long time to unwind that most people have forgotten about it by then. A lot of times people, industry firms will say I'm wrong on this or that. But as one editor told the paper that told some group that was disparaging us at an academic journal, he said, you know, you're welcome to write a rebuttal paper. And of course, I've never had any of our results overturned by a rebuttal.

45:11Everything we've written is correct, down to the T. And so it's discouraging, though, that because these firms speak so strongly when they make statements, people tend to listen to them. You asked earlier about the pig butchering stuff. A lot of the people that are saying things have vested interests in the industry. We vetted our paper with lots of academic audiences. We're very careful in our assumptions and so forth, and we're comfortable with what we're saying. So we're going to say what we want to say, and we're not going to worry about trying to please everybody. That crypto stuff, amazing, fascinating.

45:44I do want to move on to the work you've done on the Paycheck Protection Program, which was one of the ways that the US government distributed cash to businesses, I think, during COVID. Can you talk about how prevalent fraud was in the PPP in the US? This is work I've done with Sam Kruger, as well as Prateek Mahajan. We actually have three papers on it now. But the first paper was just measuring the magnitude of fraud. We develop a lot of, we call it like open source forensics. We take many databases and Prateek did an amazing job here. of taking many different databases, crossing those databases, checking for indicators of things that would potentially be fraudulent.

46:25Not all the claims are going to be fraudulent. We have some estimates where we can pinpoint things at the loan level, and there's other estimates where we can pinpoint not necessarily every loan, but we can pinpoint at the county or zip code level that this fraction of the loans are fraudulent. So when we do that second method, The number that we come up with, the larger number, is around$117 billion of an$800 billion program. That number does seem large. And again, we have a lot of people push back on that, depending on which side of Congress you're on and which administration you want to blame it on the other administration.

47:01We're kind of equal opportunity offenders. We found that the fraud was rampant. It was there at the beginning, during the Trump administration, but it ramped up during the Biden administration, even after the program's been around for a year. And they had a chance to close some of these loopholes. It just increased. We think the$117 billion figure is an estimate. There's actually been some other estimates when they audit programs like unemployment insurance, for instance, on limited scale, where they find around 20 % of the loans are fraudulent. And some of the estimates coming out of the government are very close to ours, actually, and some of their audits.

47:37They took them a while afterwards. But some of their estimates have been very close to our numbers. So we would say that probably the$100 to$120 billion range is probably a good number to start with. And what role did fintech lenders play in the propagation of PPP fraud? That was a surprise to us that most of the fraud concentrated in the highest levels, at least, in these fintech lenders. And these lenders, you might ask, well, why is that? We've talked to many people in industry. It's not exactly in the paper. But if you talk to people at the traditional banks, they seem to use the vetting procedures that they'd always use for the SBA in terms of they have, hey, you give us your tax return and let's verify what the income could be and we'll put the loan in for that.

48:26Whereas these fintech lenders didn't have the rigorous history. According to our understanding, they did employ monitoring. They had monitoring services. They had everything set up. but they tended to either ignore that monitoring or insufficient monitoring. And you can imagine they had incentive to turn a blind eye to this because they were making so much in fees for each loan. If 35 % of your loans are fraudulent or 33 % we found on one lending is fraudulent, then that would be a lot of fees you'd leave at the table if you employed monitoring. Crazy. What did people's social connections have to do with their propensity to engage in PPP fraud?

49:08In a follow-up paper, we really asked the question of how did this fraud spread? Because one of the things that was interesting about it is we found it was hugely geographically concentrated in certain zip codes, certain areas. And so one of the hypotheses is that, well, maybe it spread door to door, you telling your neighbor and so forth about it. But actually, when we tested like Facebook connections and we tested those versus geographic connections, the Facebook social connections completely beat out in a horse race, all the physical connections. which kind of makes sense if you think about today's world you probably don't interact as much talking to your person that lives five doors down the street as if you do on social media or even text message with some friend of yours we found that these social media posts in one part of the paper we actually tracked we were able to download people that were on these social media networks, social media posts, and then we were looking at unique names of people that took out loans, and we could match them at the loan level.

50:17And we could see that, in fact, the people that were on these fraudulent posts were much more likely to take a fraudulent loan. We also found that there was a huge correlation between not just the PPP program, but geographically, there was a huge correlation between the unemployment insurance and the EIDL program, which was set up to also hand out COVID funds between the geographic fraud in all three of those programs. So those programs were all correlated in terms of the amount of fraud. It concentrated very heavily geographically, and those seem to be strongly related to the social connections.

50:56That is so crazy. So fraud is contagious or something? In the old days, there were some older academic papers, and they showed how some measures of fraud spread from year to year, and it spread geographically, and it grew slowly over time. Whereas most of this happened in less than a year, and our paper shows that the initial levels of fraud were very slow, and that it just ramped up throughout the program. And so it seems like word got out on social media, and we collected a lot of social media posts that were basically encouraging you to do fraud. And they were saying things like, well, everybody's doing it.

51:31You got to do it. Justifying it. There was actually some interesting ones where it got into more philosophical. The rich are taking money from you. It's your opportunity to take it back. What effect did PPP fraud have on real estate prices? As I mentioned earlier, we found this huge geographic concentration in not just at the county level, but even down to the zip code level. And so we wanted to see what effect that had, if any, on real estate prices. So we started by just looking at this detailed zip code level measure of fraud and looking at whether the zip codes that received the most fraud, did those have real estate prices that went up more?

52:14And we found a very strong effect. Now, we all know that there's a variety of other things going on at the same time in in terms of people moving, stay at home, and so forth. So we collected data on all the other papers in the literature, and we ran horse races. And a lot of those other measures are useful in explaining home prices as well. But we found that the zip code level fraud measures were one of the strongest in a variety of horse races in terms of explaining when home prices went up. So you might say, what's the mechanism here? We pinned it down again with loan level. people that receive fraudulent loans were much more likely to go out and spend that money on a vehicle or on a house.

52:58Now, you might imagine like, well, wait, wait a second. Imagine two people, one of them got$100 ,000 loan for their business. They use that to pay payroll because their business was shut down. So they didn't really receive a windfall$100 ,000. But the other person just committed rampant fraud and they got$100 ,000. And probably that second person was not as wealthy as the first person either. They received$100 ,000. Previously, they had maybe $10 ,000 sitting in the bank or nothing. And now they got$100 ,000 windfall. What do they do with that money? We find that down with name matching and in a couple of different samples that they were much more likely over twice as likely to buy a house as the individual that received the loan a legitimately non-fraudulent law.

53:44Is there recourse? You can track these people. You've done it in your paper. Is the government going to do the same thing? I would hope that the government is doing more to look at this. And I know that they are investigating. We've seen some people, the extreme examples, be put into jail. So I think it's a matter of if someone committed fraud with a large amount, they're taking interest in those cases and they are prosecuting those cases. Congress did extend the statute of limitations for 10 years, which is good. But my read of the situation from talking to a variety of people is that perhaps law enforcement is just simply overwhelmed by the magnitude.

54:18Think of this over$100 billion of fraud. Is it economic for them to go out and prove these small cases and prosecute people that took$10 ,000? Maybe they've got to start somewhere in a threshold. Maybe they're working their way down the list. I think it could be done more efficiently. I think it could be done in large scale. there was no reason you had to forgive all these loans. Our paper came out and we said that a lot of these loans were fraudulent. And what did the SBA do afterwards? They just forgave a large fraction of loans. They could have just flagged those loans. They could have created measures similar to ours, flagged loans and said, we're not going to forgive these loans until we do further due diligence on them.

54:58But instead they forgave most of the loans. So now it makes it harder to claw back the money. So the people making those social media posts saying that this is your chance to take money from the rich ended up being right. Even if they were morally wrong, maybe they ended up being right. Yeah, I think some subset of them are being put in jail. The people that did extreme things on social media, I think they're prosecuting them. I think law enforcement is doing good work there on that front. So I don't want to belittle that because I do think they're trying hard. I think in general that US should allocate more resources to fighting fraud.

55:31You have a huge program that doled out all this money. Why didn't they set aside large amounts of it, a fraction of it, even just 5 % of it, and use it efficiently in terms of going about prosecuting this? I think it would have more than paid for itself in terms of the funds that they recoup. Based on your research on how PPP went, what do you think the implications are for how a major financial relief effort like that should be executed? I'm not a policymaker. I think most of those things are made by people with political connections in just a very few schools or even just no academics making those decisions.

56:09I do think our paper shows that this notion that you shouldn't put many guards on the program on the front end and just clean up on the back end, that that is wrong. And that was specifically the way the program was set up to get the money out the door quickly. But was the world going to fall apart if people didn't get their check? It got their check another 30 days later. In fact, most of the fraud happened in the later stages of the program. So they had ample time, more than enough time to set up some safeguards. Why weren't tax returns required? The old SBA program had the companies, they were responsible for a fraction of the loans if the loans defaulted.

56:53So they had skin in the game. They had an incentive. And they still should have had skin in the game. There's no reason why they shouldn't have had skin in the game. Maybe the loans would have taken slightly longer. But the fraud was not all about what happened in April 2020. That's not where most of the fraud happened. Most of the fraud happened in 2021 and later 2020. So I think these programs should think carefully about fraud on the front end, fraud prevention, set aside more money for law enforcement to go after these things, more rigorous monitoring systems, have third party. I do think one thing the SBA program did right or they did right with this was putting the data in the public realm.

57:33Because if you look at what's happening, what numbers do we have from the government in terms of exactly how much frauds happen and so forth? The program's happened a while ago. There has been some audits, some numbers put forward. But our paper, I believe, is the most comprehensive in terms of understanding various aspects of it. And that's because I believe academics have the tools available to them to answer these questions. And so I think they did do something right by putting the data in the public realm. And I think more data should be put out there in the public realm and not left to government agencies who oftentimes are controlled by political parties or have people with political interests that are wanting them to release or not release paper.

58:14I've talked to many people in the government, academics that have worked with government data, and they've wanted to release some data, wanted to release some statistics, but they've been stifled. It's happened at the Fed. It's happened at the IRS. And so censoring is a real deal. Our paper, Forensic Finance, talks about this a lot. I mean, it's a huge deal in China. Pretty much everything's censored and things that you wouldn't think should be politically sensitive. People can't even write about those things. But it also happens for academics that are working at government agencies, SEC, the Fed, IRS, all of those agencies.

58:50People have told me that I had this interesting finding, but I couldn't move forward on it. somebody's worried it's going to offend somebody. You're independent. I think I read somewhere that you're one of the most cited academics in SEC rulemaking, something like that. I didn't set out to get cited in academic rulemaking, but I think they cite our papers because they say, well, this market is flawed and here's some evidence that it's flawed. I mean, here's some of the problems with it. And I think it's a first step. You need to understand what the problems in the market are before you come up with a policy solution.

59:23So what went wrong in the market previously, you have to really understand that. And I think a lot of policies are made without understanding what went wrong previously. Final question for you, John, to cap this incredible conversation. How do you define success in your life? When I was a young man, I didn't realize what I was doing, but I thought that success could be obtained by achievements, achieving more things, working harder, and making money. What I found was that when I started achieving some limited measures of success, I found that I either needed to double down on those things or do something differently because it wasn't working for me.

59:58And as I had a lot of dissatisfaction in those pursuits, and so over a period of time and reflection, that actually led me to become a Christian. And so when that happened, my purpose shifted to wanting to live for God and wanting to help fellow men. But as an academic, and I still felt called to continue as an academic, I had a struggle seeing what that connection was because honestly, some of my papers, even though it was helping my career and was getting published and maybe presented at some industry conferences, I didn't think that it had much practical value for society. And over a period of time, I seized on this verse in Ephesians and said, do not engage in the fruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

1:00:44And what was interesting to me about that is oftentimes people think of like, oh, don't do bad things yourself, you know, and we're often focused on that. That's good. But there's an element in which it also gives us license to look into the darker things and push those things out in the light and to fight against those things. And those are things aren't necessarily left just to law enforcement. And that actually played a little bit to my personality and my sexiness. I saw many things going on. And there's apparently a strong Canadian-Texan connection, so I hope you guys can relate. I saw many things going on in the financial markets that seemed potentially wrong, and not many people investigating those things.

1:01:25And so I began to look into those things, wanting to investigate them, push harder. And that's where my research developed. So at least in my professional career, I see success as an opportunity to fight and uncover those things that are potentially not right in finance. I also have to remind myself I live in a fallen world, a world where there's a lot of brokenness and a world where there's lots of fraud, waste, abuse. I have to temper my expectations on the results of that and just kind of live the results of that into God's hands. I have been much more energized in my career by seeing this connection between my faith and my work.

1:02:05There's other aspects to your question in terms of my personal life and so forth. That's what drives my academic work and mission to uncover fraud and aid the defrauded, hopefully. Man, that is a deep and incredible answer to that question. Thanks much. It's been a great podcast. Y 'all ask extremely insightful questions. Awesome. Well, this has been a great conversation, John. I think the audience is going to really appreciate it. We really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. We've got a great podcast and it was a pleasure to talk to both of you today. Thank you. Indeed.

1:02:37Thanks, John.