John H. Roth is vice president and chief compliance officer for Nassau Asset Management, a multi-strategy investment management platform managing more than $19 billion. He holds a B.S. in finance from Harbert. While at Auburn, he was treasurer of the Student Government Association.
Roth has also practiced law and served as chief compliance officer at two other capital management firms. He recently earned a doctorate in leadership and innovation from New York University.
John H. Roth is vice president and chief compliance officer for Nassau Asset Management, a multi-strategy investment management platform managing more than $19 billion. He holds a B.S. in finance from Harbert. While at Auburn, he was treasurer of the Student Government Association.
Roth has also practiced law and served as chief compliance officer at two other capital management firms. He recently earned a doctorate in leadership and innovation from New York University.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Harbert College of Business Podcast.
Curry Dyess:
War Eagle. I'm Curry Dyess.
Sarah Gascon:
And I'm Dr. Sarah Gascon. Welcome to another episode of the Harbert College of Business podcast. Today’s guest is Dr. John Roth. Dr. Roth is a vice president and chief compliance officer for Nassau Asset Management, a multi-strategy investment management platform. He earned his B.S. in finance from Auburn University, his M.A. in banking and finance from the University of Alabama, his J.D. from Samford University, and his doctorate of education from NYU.
Currie:
Investment management aims to meet particular investment goals for the betterment of the client. Management involves a short or long term strategy for acquiring and disposing of holdings. There have been many shifts from the financial crisis of 2008 to the current status of Wall Street versus the little guy. Today we’ll talk about business ethics, organizational theory, and the psychology behind the decision making within the investment management discipline.
Sarah:
Dr. Roth, welcome! War Eagle.
Dr. John Roth:
Oh, thank you, War Eagle.
Sarah:
So this is a really interesting time for us right now. Over the last decade, ethics has come to the forefront of discussions in government and in business. How does the current financial climate compare to the previous climate of 2008?
Dr. John Roth:
Oh, man. It's one of these things where I've tried to be intentional about paying attention this time around. In 2008, I had my head buried. I remember sitting in an office in New York when the Bernie Madoff thing broke. It didn't really sink in, so I was really not aware in 2008, but this one's different. This one, you have the feeling that it's not a systemic problem of brokenness of the system. It's more of an outside event. Now it does create problems, of course, but it's one of those things that we see the end of the tunnel. I think it a lot do with the vaccination and that coming up, but it's not something that needs to be fixed from a financial systemic perspective, which seemed to be really more what it was in 2008.
For example, I don't anticipate that there's any sort of a groundswell. In times of tough market conditions where it's hard to squeak out the profit, some people may be willing to break the rules. That's a reality, and I think a lot of people in the compliance world, for certain, have to keep an eye on that. It's harder to make a profit right now, especially if you're a certain type of strategy that just does not lend itself to this type of environment. So you have to really pay attention and really check yourself from an ethics perspective I think.
Curry:
Speaking of your research, part of your research and your dissertation focused on creating the framework for acting ethically within the financial environment. Can you describe the necessary components to your framework and why they're important to understand?
Dr. John Roth:
Yeah, absolutely. So it's probably an old adage that Wall Street tends to be a little bit ahead of the rules. Meaning that Wall Street, the brains, and if people coming up with new products and new ways of doing things, are trying to take advantage of a dislocation or a disconnect. So sometimes there may be a rule that someone on Wall Street decides if we do this, it doesn't break the rule that we can squeeze a profit out. So the point of that, I think the way that the rules and regulations, and there are a lot of different ones, of course, but some of the main ones that apply to the financial world, they're not really rules based. They're principles based. Now you say, "Well, what does that mean?"
I can get it by example, and I think this will feed into this idea of ethics, but imagine you're driving down the road and you see a road sign. Right now we're used to seeing a speed limit, 25 miles per hour. You know that if you go faster than that, you can get a ticket. You may take the risk. You may not. In some areas of the Wall Street applied rules, especially in Investment Advisors Act, instead of a 25 miles per hour, it says travel at a safe speed. Now to determine what that is, you have to take into the circumstances, is it raining? Is it a straight road? Is there foot traffic? And you may decide that 25 miles per hour is the right speed. Someone else may decide it's 30, and someone else may decide at 75. So it's principles based.
So it's about doing the right thing. And the other reality of it is the information flows so fast, decisions are made so often and so quickly, that you can't always have someone watching over every decision every single person makes. You have to, on some level, either set up a paradigm where people are trustworthy, and you know they're going to make the "right decision," whatever that may be, or you have to clamp down and it becomes more of a police state. You're watching everything that everybody does. You're checking up on it. You end up having a mix of both, but the whole point of this is that in the financial world, breaking the rules can be extremely lucrative, right? And that's why people do it.
It's kind of like say, why do you rob banks? Well, because that's where the money is. So if you're in finance and you break rules, you can definitely, unless you get caught of course, people can make money, or you can do things that are in the gray area. It may not be breaking a rule. It just may not be ethically correct. And so the idea there is to just make sure that you have an organization that promotes ethics and people who are really pursuing an ethical kind of vision and who want to do the right thing. So long story short, the part of the research was to figure out how you actually accomplish that.
Sarah:
That's a nice segue into our next question. Wanted to get your thoughts on Robinhood and Ameritrade and them shutting down the buying and only allowing selling. What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. John Roth:
Wow, that's very topical. There's a lot of argument out there that that's market manipulation. And I think that's why the SEC has started certainly looking at it. Conceptually, it's interesting. I haven't read into enough of it to see how commentators are looking at it. Provided people are acting as a group, you do have that chance for market manipulation. The thing that worries me about it is that it's like musical chairs. Someone is going to get hurt when the music stops. Someone is also going to take advantage of that. So you may have a situation where people come into the market and short that position because the levels, if you look at the fundamentals of that stock versus this technical push to a never-ending high, it's going to come down at some point. So now people could buy options out of the money call or put options and say, "Well, I'm going to catch that on the downside. So when that thing crashes, I'm going to make money that way."
So that's one thing. I can't obviously speak to the SEC, but if I was a regulator and I'm focused on retail investors, I get worried that you could have people who are putting money into this that think, "Well, I just made 100% in three days," or whatever the numbers are. They're astounding, and they could lose that. So then they put in more into it than they probably should in hopes that it keeps going up, but it's going to turn at some point. I think it may already have, at least to some extent, but I think the main problem there is market manipulation. And I can't say that I have a lot of sympathy for the alleged "bad guys" out there, the hedge funds that everybody says are so bad. People take advantage of market movements.
This is just so hard to get your head around because it's just at best a technical move. It has nothing to do with the fundamentals of the company or the companies. I think they're big and more than one, but it will be interesting to see it play out. And I think this is another example of a situation where the regulators in the form of the SEC, maybe or certainly could not have envisioned this happening. So now they're in a reactive mode. So now they have put something in place to stop or prevent that from going forward. But then when they set up a rule like that and make sure it doesn't cast too wide of a net and stop what should be truly "legitimate" trade, whether it's short or long positions. So it'll be interesting to follow and see how it plays out.
Curry:
Obviously there are different perspectives on what Robinhood and Ameritrade have done. They're defending the hedge funds or they're protecting their users. There seems to be a pretty clear ethical dilemma. And how do you navigate that? What precedence does that set for the future?
Dr. John Roth:
I always worry about precedents, whether it's a legal precedent or it's just the way, even with inside an organization, how you deal with the situation when it comes up. Certainly when you think about how someone will act in an immediate instance versus maybe in the long run, think about their motivations. So if you understand how someone's motivated, what they're motivated to do, or maybe what they're disincentivized from doing, I may get a better feel for how they might react. I think where the problems come in is where you have these counter situations where it's just hard to know. It will be interesting again to see how this one plays out. But again, I do kind of worry about the retail person that could have gotten caught up in this somewhere.
Sarah:
So the other day we listened to an interview with Kevin O'Leary on CNBC, and he stated that four or five years ago, we had about 100 million Americans that set nothing aside for their retirement. Some businesses and family, they're finally coming out of that hole from 2008. And now, as we stated previously, we have platforms like Robinhood that not only teach young people how to invest, but also allow them an opportunity to invest with a little bit of money. Some experts said that this is bad for the market. Other say, "Let's do what's going to happen," as you stated. So what are your thoughts on that?
Dr. John Roth:
Hadn't thought too closely, but if you look at the Hertz situation, I think Hertz filed for bankruptcy, but people kept buying the stock and you look at it and go, "That makes no sense whatsoever." I don't think that we need to have necessarily rules to prevent people from harming themselves, certainly to an extent, but the markets are open. People can get into it. People should get into it to understand it. I don't really know how to protect individual investors who may be jumping into the wrong things, who may be investing in the wrong things, who may be catching the back end of some market movement and losing it. I know when I was at Auburn, my parents, when I turned 21, gave me a little bit of money, not much, but a little of money and said, "Hey, invest this."
So what did I do? I went out and bought a penny stock, and it went to zero in about two months. So that was my particular lesson. It was a hard earned lesson, and I wish I had that $500 back, but I certainly encourage people to understand those markets and to not feel so afraid of them. But the question is, how do you do it in a way? I mean, it may be dangerous if you get into a single name stock or a single name security versus, say, an ETF or something like that, but I don't know how you protect individuals from it.
Curry:
Yeah. John really quick, do you mind if we just take a step back? Can you explain the difference between a short and a long-term position and what those mean and why you would you position in each?
Dr. John Roth:
Sure. Well, in terms of financing or investing, what you're trying to do is buy low and sell high. It's really that simple. So you buy a share of stock of IBM. It cost a dollar. You have to sell it at two, or somewhere north of a dollar. Shorting is just the opposite. So what you're doing is you're selling first and then you're buying later. So how do you do that? Well, it gets kind of complicated, but you borrow those shares, your broker does on your behalf, and you sell those first. Hopefully in that position, the price of stock goes down. So then you buy those shares back. So it's just doing it the inverse. The danger of a short position is that technically it's unlimited risk. When you buy something and you're betting the price goes up, if the price goes down, you can lose no more than your total investment.
So in that example, if you bought one share of IBM for $1, not that that's what it trades, the most you can lose on a "long position" is that $1. When you short it, you sold it at $1 and you're hoping to buy it back at zero. But if the price goes up to $20, $30, $50, and you haven't covered that short, meaning you haven't bought the shares and closed out your position, your risk is very, very high, and again, theoretically unlimited. So it's a different way of trading. Some people express those trades and options and things like that to where you don't have as much exposure, but I think you have to really know what you're doing when you get into that type of trading.
Sarah:
So the current climate right now, it seems that there are social media groups that are attacking the hedge funds that are trying to short the market. How do you feel about that, and do you think that there's ethical issues within, well, I know both groups, but specifically social media group?
Dr. John Roth:
Well, I'm not going to try to defend the hedge funds, but what I will say is you have to keep hedge funds in context, because, or not only because in large part because of the 2008 crisis, you have a lot of public pension plans, university endowments, big corporations that have invested in hedge funds. It's not all they invest in, but some of their portfolio maybe invested in hedge funds. So when we talk about attacking hedge funds, I think people have in mind a hedge fund manager who may get paid more than he or she should. But you're also talking about the value that other institutional investors are trying to grow by investing in that type of strategy. So when you think about kind of sticking it to a hedge fund, there are individual investors or institutions underneath that hedge fund who could lose money.
Now that being said, hedge funds are, I mean, loosely saying, I would say they're stacked with very smart people, very smart people who are paid a lot to try to find profit in ways that other people may not see. They take risks that other people may not be willing to take. So if as long as what's happening is not illegal, and I hate to say all is fair in love and war, but it's not the worst thing in the world. Look, again, for lack of a more scientific way of putting it, it's a little bit weird, but it's something that the hedge funds took on that risk. If they shorted that stock, remember that example, it's again, theoretically unlimited risk there. They took that risk. Now they may have been right fundamentally that GameStop, or whatever other company, was circling the drain.
And they may have been right from a fundamental perspective, but sometimes technicals can swing the wrong way. And now all of a sudden you're like, "Well, we're still right," but they have to sell or cover that short and stop the bleeding from their end. Now, the funny thing is when they do that, they're buying stock and it just sort of makes the situation worse. But again, this company or these companies have to, if they're not fundamentally worth what the stock value would indicate, the musical will stop at some point and those prices will come back down.
If you have one person who's doing this as more of a way to protest versus someone who's trying to make a quick dollar, guess that's their right to do. Again, I just worry about the people who thought, "Man, I can make a quick dollar. I can catch up. I'm desperate right now. I've lost money, and due to COVID, I'm also lost my job and [inaudible 00:16:01] I've got $5." It's like playing the lottery and maybe they can make some, but they may lose that. And I think that's where the problem can really manifest itself in the long run.
Curry:
Dr. Roth, you have obviously studied ethics extensively with your dissertation. Have you found anything that would suggest one group of people have a higher proclivity to breaking the rules than another group? And do you have any examples of what that may look like?
Dr. John Roth:
No, that's a great question. That's one of the things I looked at. One of the places where I started was whether someone who's young might be more willing to break the rules or act unethically. The theory being that they want to swing harder, swing for the fences, in order to get ahead. Based upon the research that I did, that doesn't seem to be the case. And one easy way to explain that is someone who's younger in the industry, if you're in an organization or a regulated industry that has controls, you have to be really smart to break the rules and get away with it, or you have to be working with someone else. So at least from a perception point of view, it doesn't seem that it's younger people who are breaking the rules. Younger people may break the rules because they don't know the rule, but in terms of breaking a rule knowingly with intent to do so, perception-wise that doesn't happen as much.
Again, it just could be because a younger person in a sophisticated market doesn't really know how. The people that I saw and researched that would tend to break the rules, so not someone who's trying to get ahead, but maybe two types of people to explain. One is someone who used to be ahead, who used to do real well, maybe they fell back. They aren't doing as well now, and now they're trying to catch up to where they used to be. So that may be an older person who was only successful, maybe had a couple bad years, and now may be willing or more inclined to break the rules in order to catch up to where he or she used to be. The other type of person that we found are people who have a feeling of entitlement.
You may have someone who's been in the industry for awhile, hasn't gotten lucky. I don't believe in luck, but sometimes it seems on Wall Street, the people who do well, it's not necessarily because it's their own hard work, sometimes they're just in the right place at the right time. But someone who's been there for a while, hasn't done well, hasn't been comped a lot, may feel entitled. And so they may form an excuse to say, "Well, I'm owed this, so I'm willing to break that rule because I'm owed this. I'm willing to steal from my firm, for example, because they haven't paid me enough." There's a series of questions, excuses and ways to water down an ethical situation, but that would be one of those. So you may demonize your company or you may say, "Well, the company has plenty of money. They're not going to miss, oh whatever, $1000 I may figure out how to take."
The other people who tend to break rules can just simply be someone who's bullied into it, someone who is a kind of a mid-level person or a lower level person who feels pressure bullied by someone who's in charge, someone who's paying a bonus to do something they shouldn't do, like signed financials, or sign a wire or something like that. So it's almost like a person who falls into it in a way. But there's no clear person I think that is more prone to break the rules. Sometimes I think it's situational. I think it depends on what the situation the person happens to be in, but keep in mind, and also when we're talking about ethics, the person has to recognize a situation as being an ethical problem.
There's ethical intelligence, and someone may not even understand that what they're doing may be an ethical problem, right? And so you first have to recognize a situation as being ethical. Then you have to go through a series of thoughts. Well, how do I address it? Who do I consider? What are the pros and cons? What are the consequences? What are the right choices? It's a whole line of thought. And some people may quite frankly just may not have enough experience, or maybe they have to think about it enough, that they hit concerns and they can just easily ignore it and move on, and hit the send button on something, or trade or something like that. So it's a pretty complicated thing.
Unfortunately, I wish it was a lot less complicated, but this concept of doing the right thing is just not that easy. And I think that's why there's plenty of research to say that people tend to believe they will act more ethically than they actually do. We can always say, "Well, I would never do that," but then people end up doing it. These aren't bad people necessarily. It just depends on the circumstances.
Sarah:
Yeah. It seems like nobody's immune to that specifically.
Dr. John Roth:
I think that's right. It's easy to sit back in judgment on someone, or look at a Bernie Madoff, and that's a pretty extreme example, but you can look at someone and say, "I would never do that. I would never take that action," or "I would go and do the right thing." But when you truly get into that situation, or if you do, it's hard to stop and think, "All right. I really have to balance some things out," and desperation can certainly cause people to do some desperate things that in hindsight or foresight, you said, "I'd never do that." So it's tough, and I think as organizations, we have to take those things into consideration. As managers or officers of the company, you have to say, "What are the conditions that I'm putting my employees in," or "I'm hiring someone who even has a questionable past. Maybe they had a problem with their last firm hiring them, and I hope they'll do better this time."
So it's something that has to be thought of. I think that one of the main takeaways is there has to be an intentionality about it. I don't think you can just say, "Hey, we have a code of ethics and we say we're going to do the right thing." That's a slogan. It's intentional. It takes thought. It's taxing, in some cases. As a compliance officer, you're faced with questions a lot, where there are gray areas. You're not really sure what to do. You can argue this way or that way. You have to stop and really think about it and help someone work through it. Sometimes I've seen situations where there is no easy answer. You love to say, "Well, clearly take path A. Don't take path B." But sometimes it's not that clear. And again, you just have to be very intentional about it.
Sarah:
I think that's a discussion that Curry and I have often is everybody thinks that they're their own hero in their story, right? Nobody ever takes the perspective [crosstalk 00:23:02].
Dr. John Roth:
Well, I'm the exception to that, right?
Sarah:
Yeah. What happens if you're actually the villain in your story?
Dr. John Roth:
Yeah, that happens. Yeah. No, I mean, again, it goes back to this idea of recognizing something as an ethical situation. I do believe in the investment management world, the sentiment overall is that people, I'm going to say this intentionally weirdly, people do not seek to do the wrong thing. That doesn't mean someone necessarily wants to do the right thing, whatever the right thing is. People don't intentionally seek to do the wrong thing, but it clearly happens. And one of the things I strongly believe in, especially in the financial world, investment advisory, investment management, there are a lot rules and the rules change. And some of the rules make no sense, and you have to try to put them in context and learn them. But my job that I see is to help people understand what those rules are. What are the rules of the game we're dealing with?
What can you do and what can you not do? Where are the gray areas? Where are the lines? I need to help you see around corners and maybe help you see where the line between okay and not okay is. Profit sometimes can be found in gray areas. A lot of the time profit can be found in confusion. Profit can be found right near the edge of what's right and wrong. My job is to help people understand where that is. And when people understand where that is and you respect it and don't cross that line, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't mean you want to walk tight on that line because you never know when you might falsely step over it or accidentally step over it. But people need to understand the rules, understand the regulations that apply to them.
And that's part of what I see my job as doing, help you understand. And then in light of those rules, as I said, help you look around corners. If you do this, what could happen next? Are we going to ease into an area where we may have a problem down the line? So you're trying to think one, two, three steps ahead, as well as going back to the other comment, thinking about precedent. You don't want to set the wrong precedent. And then you find yourself in this slippery slope where you're just kind of inching down towards the line you can't stop. So again, it's being very intentional. It's talking things through. It's making sure you realize what a situation is, or maybe what it isn't in a certain circumstance.
Curry:
Speaking of helping people understand, a lot of times the average American feels as if the rule makers are the ones that are not necessarily acting ethically. Is that true, or do you have any examples such as like the Piggly Wiggly short way back in the day? Was that the '20s?
Dr. John Roth:
I don't even know that one, but I love Piggly Wiggly. We don't have those up here in the north.
Curry:
Yeah. So...
Dr. John Roth:
No, to your question though, I think, well, certainly there is I think a sentiment, whether it's in investing or a government or a lot of organizations, that people who make the rules are the ones who know the rules and break the rules and they control what's happening. That's a tough one. That's a, I think, a big question. Look, there's something called the Stock Act. This is not necessarily on point, but the Stock Act, apparently there were people in Congress who, as congressional members of either whether it's Senate or the House, or even their staff, might see a role or a new regulation coming up. And knowing that is going to happen, they were able to go trade stock and take advantage of the impact of that rule. So let's say that there's a rule that not everybody knows about where the EPA is going to just shut off all coal burning facilities across the country, and no more burning coal to produce energy.
If you knew that was coming, you might short out on power because I think they produce a lot of electricity with coal. Now, previously that wasn't actually illegal. It's unethical, I would think. I mean, you're taking advantage of your role as an officer, or not officer, but an elected official, and you're able to profit off of that. So that's one example when the Stock Act came out. It sounded perfectly reasonable. Of course, one of the problems on our side was figuring out, well, how do you restrict trading and securities based on political intelligence that may cover an entire industry? But I haven't seen a lot coming out in the news about enforcement of that. And actually I'm not even sure what the current status of the Stock Act is, but that is one example where you think that just makes sense.
Curry:
Yeah. So I think I read something about Nancy Pelosi's husband investing pretty heavily in the electric car industry in December, and then Biden comes out just a few weeks later and says he's going to replace all of the law enforcement vehicles with electric vehicles. I mean, does that not raise red flags?
Dr. John Roth:
It depends on the timing. I think if he did it after the election, I don't know exactly what he based that on. Certainly if it was based on information that wasn't public, if he knew it through his wife or some other way, but I guess thinking backwards on this, and this is a little bit tricky too. Sometimes when you look at successful trades, you look back and say there's had to have been something wrong. How did the person know to do that? People don't tend to look back at bad trades and say the person knew something because presumably they wouldn't be a bad trade. But I think you would have to look at the timing of it. If it was in December after the election, one could argue that maybe, or looking on Biden's platform and say, "Well, he was interested in electric vehicles." Maybe taking a leap to say that, "Well, he may push all the police cars to be electric." It certainly doesn't sound great. And yes, maybe there's a smoking gun, or maybe it's smart investing. I don't know. It's an interesting one though, for sure.
Sarah:
So Dr. John Roth, you... you've been involved in a lot of different things. Education is a big component for you. What do you recommend? What advice would you give our listeners, especially the undergraduate students right now that are listening, and what the future holds for them?
Dr. John Roth:
Well, I saw a stat, and I should have looked it up before this, but when we think about jobs and was it 20 years, a certain high percentage of jobs that will exist in 20 years do not exist today. And if you're looking at the job market right now, you think, "What am I supposed to do with that? How do I even pick what major to pursue?" Maybe the industry doesn't exist. And if you go back 100 years, that speed of change and evolution didn't happen that fast, so that's tough. And I'm glad I'm not in that position right now. But I think my main thing that I tell people, and it's easy for me to say because I'm not in your position because I know when I was graduating college, I was worried. What am I going to do?
What's my career going to look like? I have all these goals and I'm starting at the very lowest of lows as a new graduate. I have this degree, don't know what to do with it. Be open. Let's say that you major in supply chain and I think it sounds like a great program and a great industry to be in, but maybe you end up liking something else. Just don't corner yourself, whether it's because there's an opportunity or because you don't like what your major shows you. You want to be an accountant. You majored in accounting. Maybe you got your Mac. You get into it and you hate audit. You hate accounting. You want to change. That's okay. Be open to change. The one thing I think I can guarantee you is the world will change. And if you have a really stuck mindset of what you're going to do, and it doesn't matter what the world around you's doing, you're going to stick to this heading that you have to be whatever this X, Y and Z thing is.
You're probably going to be disappointed. That was a hard lesson for me to learn because throughout my career, I thought, "Okay, I know exactly what I want to do. I figured it out. And I'm going to focus my energies on doing this thing." At one point in my life, I was, I guess, arguably a tax attorney. I didn't dislike it, but my life sort of took different turns, and I ended up doing something else and that's fine. But again, you know the world's going to change, so be open to change. Now that being said, I still think it's critical to stick with who you are. Know who you are as a person, so you can move into a different industry. You can move into a different role. You can move in a different vocation, but find who you are as a person and stick with it.
That's not always easy. If you're an Auburn grad and you grew up in the state and you want to go to Wall Street, that's not easy. And you're going to see and be around a lot of things that are very foreign, and people who may not have the same values as you do. At the end of the day, those values are what you have, and value those. And it sounds kind of cliche, but stick to your guns. Hold on to your values. I actually have a person who I was mentoring a few years ago, and really smart guy. He grew up in New Orleans, went to Wall Street straight out of college. And I just heard from him actually literally a couple of days ago. He dropped his job on Wall Street. He moved back to New Orleans.
He said he's burned out, and I can kind of see that happening as he sort of fell into but sort of was absorbed by the New York lifestyle of going out and doing all this stuff. I'm not saying that he compromised his values, but I just say stick with that. At the end of the day, you may find a job you don't like. You might be good at it, whatever, but if you have your values intact, that's always important.
Curry:
That's really, really great advice. Dr. Roth, thank you so much for your time. You are an encyclopedia of knowledge, and yeah, it's true.
Sarah:
It is.
Curry:
It's true.
Dr. John Roth:
I just make it all up as I go actually.
Curry:
That's what we do. You're an encyclopedia of knowledge and a Renaissance man of sorts. The Harbert College of Business couldn't be more honored to have shared this platform with you, and shared this time with you. I got one last question. How can our listeners, how can they follow up with you? How can they keep up with what you're doing? How can they contact you?
Sarah:
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to hear from people, especially in the northeast. I don't have a lot of Auburn grads up here, so I'm always happy to speak. I think the best way is my personal email address. I am one of probably two people in the world that still has a Hotmail address. So it's JohnHRoth@hotmail.com. I think I'm keeping the platform alive. So it's yeah, J-O-H-N-H-R-O-T-H @hotmail.com. Yeah, I'd be happy to talk with anybody, probably chew your ear off about whatever, but happy to talk.
Curry:
Awesome.
Sarah:
It's been great. Thank you for joining us today. War Eagle.
Dr. John Roth:
War Eagle.
Curry Dyess:
War Eagle.
Narrator:
Harbert. Inspiring business.