AI, Accounting and Family Office Wealth, with Chris Mays of Armanino

0:01 So, for those of us who aren't accountants, I don't think we appreciate, but we hear regularly from our accounting friend, CPA friends, well, you know, I'm on after April 15th, talk to me. Can't talk to me April 15th. My son-in-law is a CPA. I hear that from him and I understand the family implications. We plan our whole lives around that deadline. We're excited to have today have today a partner in team leader of the family office I guess division, department, section for one of the largest accounting firms in the world, Armanino. Chris Mays, Chris, thank you for joining us today. And for those who don't know, this is probably being published in a week or two, but we're literally talking on April 16th. This is what Chris looks like the day after April 15th. He's at work. He's alive. He's back.

0:47 [laughter] Not the same suntan you had your wife talked to you last time you were coming from skiing and going to the ocean or from the ocean going skiing. Not today. No. No. Yeah, no. I mean it is what it is. I mean, you know, deadlines are funny. I think everybody's been subject to it at one point in time. Like remember before you get to finals. Remember like after you get done with that last final and you're kind of in this weird state afterwards where it's like you're exactly sure like you were glad to be done. Hopefully you felt like you did it well. but you know, it was just

1:25 [snorts] a weird state for a couple of days until things kind of come back to normal. I'm in that state right now. And so yeah, it's going to it's it's going to take a few days and we're going to we'll get back to normal. We'll get some normalized sleep and then everything that got shifted right? So you come into a deadline, you got all this all the usual things inside of business, billing all of the HR flows, everything that's going on. Like all that stuff gets shifted because of the deadline. Right. Now that that's got to get picked up and you've got it. I've just I've I've noticed the older I get like my the half-life on my contacts is is just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So like you know, to pick up all of the context specific things around a client's situation and be able to make a good decision on behalf of that client here is you know, it's the systems are getting better. You know, like our CRMs have they're able to bring everything into you know, and you're able to see it. But by virtue of how you have to breath the depth of texture of information you know, it burns. You know, I know when I think of you and I'm sure that people think of you as being a you know, I'm not sure the exact term, executive team leader, you know, high up the ivory tower compared to the entry-level employee at a large company. And we imagine that between staff and technology that you sit in the ivory tower sipping espressos and pondering the big issues of the day. Yet I know that as you explained to me, you have you know, high-level clients who need service and they come at you from so many more angles that you really can only technology only goes so far without creating its own problems, right? That's right. That's right. Well and you know, so my clients like I have over 100 I think we're going to you want to be part of bunch of more billionaires there. And over 100 billionaires in the end of 2025, but I think we're probably about

3:27 110 now. roughly 7% of the top 400, three of the top 10 wealthiest people on the planet as clients and then about 400 of them. So probably closer to 500 centimillionaire families now too. we should have those counts well which we should have now. and we focus on very small niche of wealth. And there's not a billionaire there's not actually a centimillionaire on the planet that has any qualms with going past all of the layers in my business to talk to me or one of my partners if they have an issue, right? They are not shy. Sure. So yeah, so we get you know, like the problems that don't get solved some other place in the business and percolate up to my level or some of my other partners you know, they're they're the hardest problems to solve and then and most often there is no good solution. And so you know, the reality of it is though that technology means the AI agents that are coming into the business it's it's it's actually it's it's pretty incredible. I mean, you know, when like we used to add intelligence token processing capability one body at a time.

4:50 Now you can spin up a million or a billion instances of GPT 5.4 or quad sonnet 4.6, you know, in an instant and virtually costless. And you know, the like Armanino's ability to process tokens is there's a but it's much more time dependent, you know, like it like sonnet 4.6 can process a million tokens in sub one second. You know, where it takes it could take one of my team members about a month to process that many tokens. Now my team members can output and process they output much higher quality tokens for a subset of not all tokens actually the AIs do a better job at a certain subset of tokens, but you know, the humans are still own probably 20% of the tokens. Now that that's halving every call it seven months or so. But the you know, I don't I hear a lot of fud around professional services and how it's going to be taken over by AIs and I don't actually believe it. It's actually it's completely false narrative cuz there's not enough accounting in the world.

6:21 Okay? For sure. Not enough bookkeeping and not enough accounting. Those are two things there's just not enough of. There's hundreds of not enough of. I mean, think about the plumber down the street. Right? I mean, the plumber down the street does not have GAAP audited financials in real time. Yet. Okay? Which limits their ability to attract debt and equity finance. They the plumber down the street maybe can get a line on their receivables, can maybe get a line on their inventory. But they're largely locked out of any other finance other than asset-backed finance. Now imagine every business on the planet has GAAP audited financials. In fact, has all the requirements to go public. Like the cost of going public on NASDAQ or NYSE is expensive. I mean, I've heard that the price is anywhere from 800,000 to a million to per year and like the run-up to you know, getting the S-1 filed for all the different steps you got to go through is probably closer to $3 million you know, imagine that's costless. Right? Any business could any scale could have the GAAP audited financials and all the requirements to go public. I think it massively changes

7:42 Yeah. the economic structure of the United States as well as the other 23 OECD capitalist economies. And which is by the way is the vast majority of GDP of all the world. So you know, I that's what I'm super excited about. Yeah. We're going to be able to expand our services in a way where we've historically never been able to do before. We've never been able to Right. We've always had a sub-optimization because of the practical limits of the you know, the plumber down the street didn't want to pay our cost to do all the bookkeeping and have the attic you know, the GAAP type of financials. And so you know, that that's been our limitation. Well, I think the technology as it gets 10 times more powerful every year at some point the cost comes down you know, the opposite of that. And so theoretically those things that can be automated you know, instead of $100,000 cost for accounting, theoretically at some point it's 10,000 and the next year theoretically it's 1,000. And so you're right, you're going to have a plumber who's going to get $100,000 of CPA support in a couple years. Now it won't be the advice and the detail and customization, but he'll have the data in his hand.

9:06 It will. Yeah, it will. again, I don't I don't fear I don't fear that. I actually look at it as a massive opportunity. you know, the cost going to zero approaching zero. It'll never get fully to zero, but it'll approach zero. It just it expands

9:29 [snorts] you know, a lot of the structure of our businesses and our economy is is based upon the unit cost of labor. And the reason businesses have organized in the way they have and the larger businesses have the economies of scale that they have is is largely or at least partially the unit cost of labor is is is going to halve. It creates a an interesting issue, right? Which you know, there's been returns to labor, there's been returns to capital in our in our economy. In fact, 40% of our tax revenues, 40 over 40% of our tax revenue in the United States come from individual income okay? It's only like 5% of corporate tax. Property taxes like 12%, consumer tax is like 19%, but imagine where there's the income, you know, that the income goes down or maybe it doesn't go down, but it doesn't scale in the same way that it has scaled historically, right? I mean, income taxes could become an obsolete construct. but you know, I like you know, the fact that you can have infinite and abundant intelligence is going to mean that the economy configures itself in a completely different way Yeah. than it has historically figured itself. But it's actually it's it's it's actually for the better and it's going to it may cause some short-term pain, but ultimately, I think we get to a higher level of collective benefit as a result of this transformation.

11:22 You know, I think what I'm trying to tell my colleagues in my industry is it's going to displace you if you let it. And if you embrace it's going to leverage you up and make you more viable. And so, it is a concern for people who are lazy and don't want to do the work. But the flip side, like I'm doing twice the business I did a year ago. I'm not working as many hours. I'm not working because I you know, I have a listing with eight offers on it, but it's all being automated now and put to a spreadsheet for me to analyze rather than me each offer, who's the real situation, where what office is he with, who's the lender? It's all on a spreadsheet that I can just click on now. Automated for me and it just saves me so much time and better presentation to my customer so he can make a more informed decision. it's just amazing how it if we if we embrace this. Now, I talked to you previously, I know you mentioned that you were involved with the Open Cloud program. Which is now that's like there's the cutting edge, then there's the bleeding edge, then there's like the outer ring of the bleeding edge, and then there's next universe over. So, you're playing with that level. I think is that more just a hobby or is that for you to see where the industry's headed? I think there's real practical applications. I have what I call Tax Cloud and it's it's based upon an Open Cloud on a Mac Mini and I use it for I use it for any client work yet. The security concerns are very real. Yeah.

12:42 But built a number of different things that I think are very useful inside of the tax workflows that and you know, the way that the current set of tools, you know, Open Cloud working through the Cloud Code Codex, Open AI, you know, ChatGPT the you know, they're large organizations, they weren't really able to unshackle their agentic offerings even UI Path, you know, as well as some of the other RPA types of applications that have incorporated AI. They weren't they for whatever reason, they didn't completely unshackle the [snorts] the AI's ability to operate a browser or you know, make payments, do all these types of things that you would normally do. And Open Cloud made that open where you can kind of do anything you wanted and use cases are pretty incredible. The use cases are you know, I had it registered it renewed registration on one of my automobiles. I sent it to Open Cloud [snorts] and I was like so blown away that it could figure all of that out, that it could just take the PDF that I'd scanned, you know, I got the mailed notice from the California DMV and I just uploaded it and I kind of went on a lark. I gave my Tax Cloud and said, "Hey, can you renew the registration on this truck?" And boom, yeah, no problem.

14:37 I just need payment I need I need your credit card or routing number and account number. I didn't give it my credit [laughter] card number. I've heard the horror stories about credit card. I mean, it wasn't able to get you know, get the payment made. So, I mean, that that's a simple use case, but that that's typical of a lot of the workflows inside of tax or other administrative regulatory like burdensome types of jobs and you know, automating all that away cuz no human wants to do it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to take the 10 15 minutes it takes to figure that out click through some UI I haven't seen in a year and you know, try to figure out how to make the payment. It's never it's never easy. It's always kind of clunky. And I'm going to tell you that Tax Cloud or Open Cloud had no problem with it whatsoever. It was very easy for Open Cloud to do. I think that, you know, you said you don't work as much. I actually work more now because I have so many agents. They're like they're they're so fast. They're not like an employee like where I'm waiting on the employee. The agents, you know, they respond immediately. In fact, I had this thing I had this thing where I had a client who needed these 30 different brokerage statements from UBS, Goldman Sachs, bunch of other brokerages. And it's actually a prospect. I needed to figure out how many transactions were in there, like how like what's it going to take for us to determine summary journal entries on all these, get the investment holdings inside the book.

16:16 And I gave it to Cloud Code. I said, "Hey, you know, figure this out for me." And it not only did it you know, disaggregate all the statements and build a spreadsheet with all of the transaction lines. Without me asking, it built a checksum to go look at the statement, find out what the balance should have been across all of these different transactions. And it wrote Python code basically for each statement type figure that out and run that checksum. Now, you know, a checksum's a very typical accounting process, but I did not ask it to do that. At your its own volition, it figured that out. So, like take that, multiply that by 10,000 agents that might be working for you. You know,

17:10 [music] Oops. all of it through the next step in the workflow. And the challenge is is that these agents are so fast, they're all waiting on like I wake up in the morning, sometimes I have 30 or 40 different approvals to make. Yes, approve. Wow. You know, no, don't move forward on that cuz I don't want to do this, you know. But I don't think it's going to reduce the amount of labor we have. I think it's actually going to accelerate the amount of labor. And I think you're going to be more in a review and approve type of role at least here in the near term. as a result of all of this new technology. Well, for me, I used to do my ministry work after 5:00. You know, I try to talk to customers as much as I can 9:00 to 5:00 and be available to do that and then I would kind of schedule an hour or two of work afterwards. And now I can do the administrative work while I'm on the phone, while I'm on hold, while I'm in between calls, and it all gets done before the day is done. And at 5:00, I play with the grandkids. So, I'm in a little different situation than some, but now there are some limits. I know that you're using Open Cloud, which is very technical, very powerful. I'm using Gemini for my business. So, I have the business class Gemini, not the enterprise, but business class. And I pay for ChatGPT, pay for Grok.

18:35 I had to pay a simple thing that is I'm sure well below your pay grade in your company, but something regularly that happens, which is we had 12 months bank statements on a property that we're taking over, a property management company, and we would scan the statements and want to create a spreadsheet because we didn't have access to the bank online for whatever for some legal reason. And so, I said, "We should all do that. Scan the documents, no big deal." It was 54 pages, 540 line items of a spreadsheet that neither Gemini at the business grade nor ChatGPT at the paid level could do 500. It could do them all one month at a time. And I'm thinking, well, okay, but if you can do one month at a time, just do all 12 in order and then combine them together. It's only 500 rows. And what I realized was that mathematically, 500 rows, the categories and such, was more memory than it could allocate. And it wasn't agentic enough to figure out how to do it on its own or I didn't give it the right instruction to, right? That's the key. Well, I would So, Gemini's got a massive context limit, you know, so surprised that it wasn't able to do that. I'm going to tell you like send that over to me right now, I'll have it done with 40 in 45 minutes with Cloud Code in one in a single sentence file. Cloud Code will do

19:51 [laughter] it. No questions asked. Like it cuz like my [clears throat] 30 statements that that would that's the equivalent of double the work, right? Five hours for one of my analysts to do that work manually. And when I say manually they're still going to you know they still have an OCR read the PDF and put it into to Excel and you know then run through the transactions, but bot code did that you know very quickly. I mean it didn't do it in seconds, but it did it in minutes. And you know there was there's well over 500 transactions in there. And then you know what the best part is is that you could you can then ask it to build a P&L from the transactions or you could ask it to classify or there's a million different things you can do with that that data. Like we I mean what I do with those like with statements is I say hey build me a journal entry and I typically build a markdown file that has all of the different chart of accounts items. And it can 99 times out of a hundred it gets it right. It'll build the journal entry in Excel which I can just import into you know whatever you are you are using QuickBooks or Sage intact.

21:17 You name it. So it's not like your specific situation how long ago did you do that too? Cuz I the other thing I noticed is like things that didn't work six weeks ago

21:33 Correct. Correct. Like a week later it I've seen the same thing on I've been working on my CMA comparable market analysis which is a regular activity as a real estate agent and I'm analyzing offers. And every time I tweak it gets better and the analysis better and there's more details to it. So I can see the but the new versions of these software get stronger, faster, quicker, more complete. I see it weekly the improvement. It's It is stunning to watch. and to your point like what I'm dealing with is kind of what maybe that plumber he would look at this as I can't even deal with this, right? And the real and he wouldn't call you because he assumes well if they pay your employee at their hourly rate fully loaded is too expensive, but as the cost of technology comes down you guys are going to be able to just throw that into your system and end up with a spreadsheet and start billing the customer after like five minutes of Claude time. You're not going to you're not going to be starting with an employee doing 20 hours of work. You're going to start with an employee with a full data set in the first hour probably. Yeah. Yeah. Well yeah that that's it. I mean I like you know we'll be able to connect directly to their systems through their bank or whatever it is right and just be able to build the financials instantaneously and you know that that that's what right now my business we're so we've on boarded the one that I can announce is a cool is signing a deal with cool which is channel growth catalyst back startup is is well as others are in our cap table and they are an overlay on existing systems of record for tax.

23:25 And you know we have a state of the art tax act all of the best tools I'm going to tell you that adding a cool to that is a fundamental game changer and it just a First we took returns we filed in 2023 with our existing tax act and ran those through about 70 returns with

23:53 [snorts] with a cool and the simple to moderately complex returns we knocked out on average about 40% of the labor. And you know a lot of that labor is stuff that people don't want to do. It's it's just kind of real persnickety detail analysis check it. Machines have no problem doing this work. They actually love it. They're make a lot less errors. you know hallucinations have they were a lot of fun last year. They're virtually non-existent now. You have agents attacking agents. You have agents who have different specific objectives. You know some of those objectives could be searching for errors, searching for hallucinations and eliminating them. So you know the these AI overlays that don't touch the systems of record I think are going to be like the things that you're going to see the next three to five years. That's that's where there's going to be the most acceleration. And there's a number on the bookkeeping there's of course Basis, Truewind a number of those AI overlays that are they're largely selling through accounting firms right now but these systems are all taking massive bites out of the Yeah.

25:21 The stuff that we've never been able to get rules based systems to handle and you know it's it's it's definitely improving our business. It's improving our ability to get financial documents to the client quickly. It's improving the accuracy of those financials, but I do see a world eventually where every business every person on the planet could have GAAP audited financials.

25:45 I agree. And There's no reason why not, right? There's no reason why you just wouldn't have something set up properly everything is scanned in the system and gets categorized properly automated. I mean it's I mean you say it and it does sound like you're talking about the invention of fire, but it's really not that complicated.

26:01 No. It's not that complicated. And by the way the cost of tax cost of tax compliance is going to go to zero too. And the ability for the tax collector to get rid of all the sub optimizations like you know sub optimizations like composite returns, right? That you agree to pay the highest rate in any state so that you can avoid filing in the state cuz the cost of having a professional file in the state is more than the tax you owe or the collective amount is more than the tax you owe. There's a ton like the fact that you can't deduct 212 expenses for production of income 986. Like Congress was like oh we got to reduce the administrative burden for the citizens of the United States. So they had this administrative burden reduction act. I don't remember this name of it. Anyways the 2% AGI floor was a part of that and so you know people can't deduct the cost of their lawyers or their investment advisors or accountants. Where businesses can. If you're in a trade or business you can deduct those amounts All of those off sub optimizations of the tax code can now go away. We don't need Everybody in the tax team knows what good tax policy is. It's broaden the base lower the rates, right? Don't let the tax tail wag the economic dog. Okay?

27:25 Well you said that I think the thing the most just plain thing I'm you know as I kind of go towards the end of my career is that so much energy of great CPAs, wealth advisors, tax attorneys so much energy is on avoiding taxes and not helping the business be more productive, right? I mean you take all that brainpower to okay you made this money we have to lower your taxes cuz of all the complications. If it was simpler you would you would be hired to help them make more money and use your accounting and knowledge and information to help them see where these opportunities are, where the costs are, where the mistakes are. That's the that's the potential that would be unlocked I think if what you say is going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you have infinite abundant relatively costless expertise. I have a thing. And so you're you know the thing like the By the way this is democratized. So I have a bunch of clients that come to me after having run their returns through ChatGPT with all these suggestions. And you know I'm going to tell you that that's I actually really like it because I know it frustrates a lot of my colleagues cuz it's like why are they second-guessing? And I'm like they're not they're not second-guessing. They're they're helping me to think through all of the different perspectives that one might take around their returns and they're educating themselves. Yes. So an educated client is always better than a client that's oblivious to what's what's going on. And 100%. You know working I actually love it. I have this one hedge fund manager in New York and every I told him that we use Blue J internally. So he got his own subscription to Blue J. Blue J's a tax optimize platform for you know tax research. And so he's always bringing me these Blue J around his specific issues, you know?

29:24 And so you know it's it's it's actually really helpful for my team and him to work through and candidly it has unlocked some things. Some things that we didn't know he had flexibility on his side to change and you know when that that dialogue, you know, these basically these agents going at each other around these specific issues. There was a game. Now, what you bring up is also very important, right? Which is it shouldn't all be tax focused, and I think largely it has been cuz that's where That's where the most business gains are coming from. If you can optimize for tax cuz you already got this income, you've already got these revenues, already got these costs, and you can optimize Right. you know, there's there's often a step function of value to the business owner. But, you know, imagine everybody on the planet. You talked about GAAP audit and finance and trading with the funder down the street. Now, also imagine if the funder down the street has in their ear the combination of the top decile of S&P 500 CFOs Right. Warren Buffett, Jack Bogle, Ray Dalio giving them advice about their business. you know, that's also coming, right?

30:45 Right. Right. And I just like think about all the bad decisions, all the bad financial decisions that are made across this country. Right. I mean, if you unlock that, we're talking about tens of points of GDP, right? Like if everybody makes better financial decisions, we're actually a much more formidable economic engine, the country itself. Right. And it'll create the wealth of everybody on in the country. And so, you know, again, I think that optimistic bent that I think that's part of the messaging, which is like, you know, infinite abundant intelligence, it's going to fundamentally change business in ways that we have just we can't anticipate right here, right now. Right. Right. You know, to now take it from the macro to the micro level, you know, I know a big part of your business is family offices, where you're also dealing with their personal finances, right? That It's one thing to worry about the business investments and the long-term things. and one of the things, you know, there's a lot of security discussion about AI at the enterprise level and beyond, the global level, right? These bad actors hacking and such. But, at the local level, the individual people still needs to have good security practices regarding their bank accounts, their checking accounts, their investment accounts, their information flow, what they use for email. Can you share a little bit kind of some of the advice or best practices or pitfalls to avoid of people just protecting their own personal financial information cuz the people you're dealing with are big targets. You know, I have clients as well, and just amazing how they have to harden the target because, you know, there's a lot of fraud looking after a lot of money. So, can you give me share a couple tips or problems to avoid?

32:32 Yeah, I mean, yeah, your free version of these models is not secure, right? Why wouldn't it be? Yeah, [laughter] so

32:44 [snorts] you know, they all have SLA privacy notices, and you have to follow them. The good thing is is you can point the tool at the privacy notices, and you can get very specific descriptions of what their privacy obligations are. And you know, like we don't expose any client data unless it's a hardened AI platform. so, you know, our kind of core go-to platform is we're we're we're on Azure predominantly, a little bit on AWS. The Azure has all of the different models inside of it, and they've all been hardened for business usage. They've all done the privacy and making sure that we meet all the our certifications. but, you know, AI helps in security in that it helps protect against social engineering. It helps you know, I read some articles in Well, Cloud is not really saying really think that releasing its latest model against mythos because it found security vulnerabilities in 20-year-old code, and you know, I think that's a good thing. I mean, I you know, [snorts] with their security there's still security vulnerabilities in you know, in code, and those are there is some clever hacker that could find those. And so, you know, allowing the AI tools to do their job and find those security vulnerabilities using that as assistants to help people especially elderly people that that maybe don't have as good executive functions

34:46 As somebody younger. you know, but these are all really helpful things that that the AI tools can help us with. It's not perfect yet, but you know, it's it's getting better every single day. I went to the real estate conference for the company that I'm affiliated with, and the founder is a billionaire, and he's giving a demonstration about AI and coding and such. He's he's a he was a coder. He was a tech guy who built this real estate company. And he

35:16 [laughter] he's giving this talk. He says, "Do you guys want to code live while we're here now?" And I'm like, "Well, of course." He pops up his laptop, and he opens up his email. I'm thinking, you know, and it's on the screen, right? Here's the Here's the Google Mail email for a billionaire. Like, there got to be criminals who pay a lot of money just to see a screenshot of that to figure out. And I'm thinking somebody hasn't told him you can't do that. Like, you're That worked 20 years ago when you were broke, but you can't be doing that today. And it was fun to watch, I have to say, but it was But, I feel like people they don't understand any Wi-Fi you're connecting to outside of your home or your business, you got to be careful. This is not There are people who are after you for this stuff. Yeah, I mean, if you have a VPN on a public Wi-Fi, you're largely safe because it's all encrypted. I mean, buyer beware. Like, you know, I think that a lot of the public Wi-Fi concerns, you know, most people do operate with VPNs now. So, I it isn't the same risk. You know, the security risk that I worry about, it's more social engineering than anything.

36:30 Mhm. cuz AI allows you to give a facsimile of a human that is could deceive. The voice, the picture, the it's pretty realistic these days. Pretty realistic. you know, and I think we have to we have to worry about quantum computing breaking all of the you know, all of our security process security techniques are based upon large prime factorization. And you know, Shor's theorem inside of a quantum computer with 100 cubits, like

37:10 [snorts] it'll do break a lot of those encryption schemes. And you got to remember that that's that's 100% of our IP infrastructure. Not just Bitcoin, it's it's all of email, it's WhatsApp, it's iMessage, it's you know, it's it's it's it's ubiquitous across the security landscape. And so, I mean, you know, there's there's lots to be fearful of. And there are some things that you makes a lot of sense to be cautious around. you know, I like but, I mean, you have to be thoughtful there. There's there's some risks that are worth taking, and there's others that are not. Yeah, it seems to me to try to limit your footprint, and then keep an eye on that limited footprint is also another, you know, good security practice. People have so many different credit cards. I always say to my wife, "It's just not worth it tracking for an extra 5% savings at Macy's. It's just not worth a credit card. Let's just use one for personal, one for business, watch all the transactions, watch it carefully, and guard it because it just seems I'm though I'm sure with AI you could track your expenses more carefully, but it's just

38:25 Lock down your credit. In case Lock it down. Yeah, lock down your credit cuz you know, that most of the fraud that we see is social engineering or some form of people open up loans on in behalf of a on behalf of somebody that they are not, and they take out money. you know, that that that's the vast majority of it. And most of it's avoidable, and most of it's pretty low tech. You know, that that's the worst part. Like, I don't you've been very fortunate, but I've never seen a really high-tech hack. most of it's super low tech. And so, Mhm. I wouldn't over rotate on You know, I think having good personal practices around passwords, you know, being very cognizant of you know, the ones that I always worry about are where you download some malicious software, which then gets a hacker visibility into your system. Right. And by virtue of that visibility, they're able to social engineer Right. the situation cuz they can see everything. They're communicating behind the scenes and those are probably the most dangerous types of situations.

39:54 Well, look, there's a lot to talk about. We had a pretty wide-ranging and obviously your practice is pretty wide-ranging for your customers, your family offices at that size. You've got global issues and personal private issues. I really appreciate your time. You've been a you know, I know I learn a lot whenever I talk to you. Chris Mays is a partner as well as I'm not sure the exact title, but you're the head of the family office

40:14 Family office, yeah. for Armanino, which is one of the nation's largest accounting firms and really gracious of your time. Thank you so much for sharing with us your perspectives. Look forward to continuing with you so much. For those if you're interested in getting more information from him, his contact information is down below and the webpage is armanino.com. You can search and find Chris Mays there and there is all That's what he looks like not on April 16th, by the way.

40:37 [laughter] Thank you so much. I know it's tough. Thank you so much for making time for us today. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. Great being here. And for the rest of you, this was the [The Estate Planning Podcast]. We get together every week with the estate planning attorneys and vendors to help us be more effective in helping our customers. Obviously, it was a real treat to have somebody who deals with so many ultra-high net worth per families to give us a perspective kind of at the global level. if I can help anyway, please reach out at Bill Gross Probate on social media. As always, make today your best day ever. Thanks so much.