The Big Empty: Real World Relevance

Tom Fox, founder of the Compliance Podcast Network and the Texas Hill Country Podcast Network. Over the past fifteen years, he has been a General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer. He is now an Independent Consultant, assisting companies with anti-corruption, anti-bribery compliance, and international transaction issues. He specializes in bringing business solutions to compliance problems. Tom is the author of the award-winning FCPA Compliance and Ethics Blog and the international best-selling book “Lessons Learned on Compliance and Ethics.” His podcasts have won numerous w3, Davey, Communicator, and Webby awards for podcasting excellence.
He is the author of the seminal text The Compliance Handbook, now in its third edition published by LexisNexis. In addition to his blog and podcast, he is a columnist for Corporate Compliance Insights and a Contributing Editor to the FCPA Blog. He is a well-known and frequent speaker on compliance and ethics issues, social media use, and corporate leadership. Tom is both the Voice of Compliance and Compliance Evangelist.

Loren Steffy has been a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly since 2013. In 2020, he founded Stoney Creek Publishing Group, an independent publisher that focuses on Texas narratives. He is a managing director for 30 Point Strategies, where he heads the 30 Point Press publishing imprint. Steffy is the author of five nonfiction books. His first novel, The Big Empty, was published in May 2021. He is also the writer and producer of the six-episode narrative podcast Putin’s Oil Heist, and he and Fox co-hosted the award winning Trial of the Century podcast in 2021. Steffy is the former business columnist for the Houston Chronicle and previously was the Texas bureau chief and a senior writer for Bloomberg News. His award-winning writing has been published in newspapers and other publications worldwide. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas A&M University. If he’s not writing or reading, he’s probably working on cars or puttering around his property in Wimberley, where he lives with his wife, three dogs and an ungrateful cat.