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In CAS practices, the fastest growing segment of accounting, outsourced accounting,
it's 50% or less.
Our CPAs.
My concern with that is that if they aren't CPAs, then they aren't regulated,
and they aren't held to the same professional standard.
And so if we want to maintain high quality as a profession, as an accounting profession,
we need a lot of the accountants out there to be CPAs.
And if it's only a small group, then we can't protect the public.
Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.
Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Blake Oliver.
And I'm David Leary.
How did you like your flight back from Chicago?
You finally went and got TSA free.
Yes, I finally got TSA free.
It was funny because I was a Michael Lee and I were going through TSA free together.
He forgot to take a water bottle of his bag.
Again, I got to basically be like you or my wife when they're waiting on me to come through
because they sent through the line a second time.
And so I got to stand on the other side of TSA free, just waiting pointlessly
for somebody else to come through security.
Well, the back story, the back story for our listeners you don't know is that I've had TSA
free for years. I love it.
And David refused to buy, to pay for TSA free for, I don't know how long it's been around decades now.
Since they went into it would pay for it and I just refused.
I refused to get it. It's not about the paying for it.
It's more of a stubbornness of we all should get that service.
Make a crappy line for them, everybody else, the suspected people.
Well, and now they have clear.
So you can pay $189 every year if you want to skip the line.
It reminds me of like Disney Fastpass.
We've gotten to that level of airport security.
But I'm glad you like it. I'm glad you are now a member of the club.
And you will not have to take your shoes off again.
So congrats.
We were in Chicago for the unique CPA conference.
The theme was bridging the gap.
I had a great time. It was a lot of fun seeing our friends.
And thank you to Randy Crabtree for putting that together
and bringing us out there so we could be part of the event.
I got to meet some listeners that I've never met before.
Melanie came up to me and said hi and told me an amazing story
about how she used AI.
It wasn't for accounting though.
It was to resolve a Medicare dispute.
She's dealing with health issues with a family member
and Medicare denied a claim.
And you know, you get that letter and you have to respond.
And it can be very difficult to know what to do.
How do you write that letter to respond so that you're going to get the case resolved?
Well, she dropped the letter into chat GPT
and said help me write a reply to this Medicare dispute.
And it worked. It gave her a great letter.
She sent it off and resolved the issue.
So it reminded me of how we used it to draft that
letter to the IRS for our penalty abatement, David.
I think it's a great use case.
Anytime you've got those issues.
So the AI on their end can scan it and decide what to do with it.
Well, the human's on their end, right?
We just defer everything to some AI bots and they solve all our problems.
You think Medicare is using AI, David?
Not yet.
I mean, probably for customer service or inbound stuff, maybe.
I don't know.
I wouldn't be surprised if the insurance companies start doing it.
The health insurance companies to process claims.
I also met Chad at the conference.
Chad's a CPA at Keeper.
And he told me a story about his 150-hour requirement.
How he got his extra 30 hours because he didn't do a master's.
His final class was beginner's walk slash jog.
Yes.
Beginners walk slash jog.
Not advanced walk slash jog beginners walk slash jog.
I'm trying to imagine how, hey, how did this even become a class?
Because like, if you're on campus, you're probably walking already.
I don't know.
I didn't this.
Yelena, welcome.
Yelena's here in the live stream.
Yelena says, I have had global entry for four years now and enrolling clear this year.
My credit card does cover the cost for both, so it's helpful.
Oh, I need to check and see if my credit card does that.
I might get it.
But back to the current story, this 150-hour requirement,
Chad then sent me in a follow-up email an actual picture of his transcript.
And it really is there.
Yeah, you're like, prove it.
Show me the receipts.
You really prove it.
Exactly.
So here it is on the screen for our YouTube viewers.
KPED 1145, beginning walking slash jogging one semester hour.
And he got an A in it.
And he told me that all they did in this class was walk around campus for 30 minutes.
There was no education, no instruction, no discussion.
They just walked around campus.
Yeah.
Maybe this is an important part of the 150.
Because that way, two years in, you can run from the accounting industry when you get burnt out.
Maybe this is the important thing.
Skill to have.
Right.
Well, he and Park in the comments, he said,
how can you run the numbers or walk through a balance sheet if you haven't taken beginner
walk slash running?
This is genius.
Oh, what have I to kick this off?
This is great.
Yeah.
Well, so I always tell the story about how it was my intro to philosophy class that rounded out my 150
credits.
And I credit that class with giving me the ability to question the nature of my reality.
And whether or not the 150 is even reasonable to ask of people.
And the ethics of requiring an extra 30 hours that are potentially meaningless.
So I posted this on LinkedIn.
And I asked all of my followers, all of our listeners to tell us their stories.
What class did they take to get the 150 that's even possibly more absurd than this one?
And the responses are fantastic.
Um, Wendy said, I took beginning and advanced bowling plus conditioning slash weight training
for women.
And that was because when when they went back, it was 20 years after the bachelor's.
So I had to go get the credits, even though it was years and years later.
Aaron said, I took whitewater kayaking.
Brad said, I have an equivalency of a minor in geology.
Thanks in part to lunar and planetary geology and Alabama dinosaurs.
Leslie from the Minnesota Society of CPA said, and yet we are getting pushed back for wanting
to augment the rules here in Minnesota.
Is it fishing?
Is it a fishing class?
That would be the best.
Casey from Dark Horse CPAs got a credit for a bowling class and a class on the Beatles.
Intro to piano.
James said, Intro to piano.
Now that resonated with me because I used my music credits to get a lot of my 150
because I was an undergraduate music major.
Danny or Danny said, Intro to gerontology, which is the study of old people,
history of music and art history.
That's a good degree.
Now it's probably a good one to have for our space.
Right.
It's good to understand the partners in particular.
Right?
Yeah.
She said, interesting classes, but totally irrelevant to being a CPA and tax professional.
Janet said, History of Rock and Roll at UNLV.
Vladimir said, Understanding Jazz.
What was supposed to be an easy A ended up being a tougher class than I expected,
but I actually enjoyed it.
Jazz is not easy.
Jazz theory is harder than classical theory, in my opinion.
And I'm a classical music major.
Scuba diving, Matthew took scuba diving, golf, and tennis for credit.
Deon took women's studies, Erica took canoeing, vegetable gardening,
national parks, and dinosaurs.
And Pav took a humor studies class.
Alice Rose makes sense too.
So there's more.
There's many more comments.
This was a very popular post, so I will have the link in the show notes if you would like to add
your comment.
And I would love to know what you did.
Kevin in the live stream says, I was in one of the last paper slash pencil two-day marathon
exam groups.
I think I would have had to go back to school to complete 150 head I not passed.
Oh gosh, that would be terrible, right?
Imagine you were in that group that failed the CPA exam right before the switch over.
And then you had to go back and earn 30 semester hours because of that.
I'd be terrified.
Yeah, so that's my fun story.
What you got, David?
Just reflecting on the conference a little bit.
So I'll start with a fun story, then I'll just couple of observations.
So the fun story was because you weren't there this one night.
This conference was hand all done at one hotel.
So we didn't leave.
And everybody was staying at the same hotel, basically,
in Chicago with the lulls of hair.
And you know, just like every conference, people wind up in the hotel lobby restaurant bar.
And there's a lot of accounts in there.
A lot of people about a tenth of the conference are young and cool like Blake hanging around, you know?
Well, there was this one table, these three really old guys at 11.30 at night.
Full ties buttoned up still.
And the joke was we were kind of joking in the room.
Like, where's the table with the accountants?
It looked like old senior members of firms.
Well, I wound up going over there.
We chatted, we chatted them up and it turns out it was actually an engineer, a doctor and a surgeon.
But they were not accountants.
Not there for the conference.
It was not like, yeah, if you had a bet, if you did not know and you were going to place money,
you would place money on that table, not all the other tables that actually had accountants on it.
So that was kind of the funny story there.
But the observations I saw is outside people coming to the county industry.
So I met, like a bit of words, a PE guy, but down to use PE.
He's just a guy who bought an accounting firm, but no background in accounting.
And now he has a cast practice.
And that's somebody else who he was in the e-commerce space.
He knows Merrill Johnson, who we had in the podcast a few weeks back.
And saw like, oh, there's opportunity here to do accounting, but he was service for e-commerce
people. And he's kind of out of the e-commerce business and he started a cast practice for
e-commerce businesses. So meeting people at this small first time conference that really
were completely from outside of the space.
Outside people are coming in to do accounting work that you don't need a CPA for.
And I saw a survey that backs that up.
This is the latest cast survey that AICPA does, or it might be CPA.com.
We might have time to talk about it later, but the stat I saw was that about 50% of cast staff
and partners and anyone involved in a cast practice are CPAs.
It's only half.
And that fits with the firm owners.
I see half are CPAs, half are not.
People coming from outside.
This is a consequence of the talent shortage.
We don't have enough CPAs to fill this need.
This really fast growing segment.
And so other people are seeing the opportunity.
And they're coming in just like I did as a career changer.
And I did eventually go get my CPA, but it was a huge process.
And a lot of people aren't willing to do that.
Go back and get the 30 hours or get the specific classes they have to have.
It's a huge, it's a big deal to do that.
And it's a lot of red tape.
So interesting, interesting observation.
Private equity is coming in and it's not just at the big firm level.
It's at smaller firms too.
So you know what I did on the way back from the conference, David?
On my flight back.
GSA pre.
I went through TSA pre in like two minutes.
And then I opened up my laptop in the terminal.
And I started doing my Arizona ethics class because my renewal
was due at August 31st.
And I'd waited until the last day to take me to this class.
You really think goodness you went to that conference too.
I know.
I had to get my, well, and also I just moved to Arizona a few years ago.
And this is my first renewal since moving my license over to Arizona from California.
And so I wasn't really up on all the specific Arizona rules.
And one of the rules that I became aware of earlier this month when I started looking into it
was that 16 of your 80 CPE hours for your renewal period
have to be in person or live webinars.
And I've been earning all my CPE by doing this show and creating self-study courses
which don't count as live.
So I needed to be at that conference so that I could earn my remaining live CPEs.
Because apparently for some reason, self-study is not acceptable.
You've got to be in a classroom in order to really be a qualified educated accountant.
But now that you're in Arizona CPA, you could get involved in the committees
in about five years' amount.
Maybe self-study will be okay for Arizona.
I would love that.
Another quirk of the renewal process is that the renewal was due at 5 p.m.
on the last day of the month.
And it's by birth month.
I'm born in August.
So August 31st, 5 p.m.
But I didn't see that 5 p.m. part.
I thought it was midnight.
Because why wouldn't my kid do it as homework?
I just, you know, I made a assumption.
And luckily, my flight landed before 5 p.m.
and I submitted my renewal application at 4.57 p.m.
Amazing.
And we did it in timely.
But I was thinking, why is it due at 5 p.m.?
And then I realized it's because the rules are still based on
when people sent in paper forms and it is received,
when it is received in the office, is the timestamp.
So it has to make it to the Arizona.
But it closed the office door.
Board of Accountancy, before they closed the office doors at 5 p.m.
But they haven't changed that.
Even though now it's an online process.
So I did it.
I'm going to be a CPA for another two years at least.
I don't have to rebrand and go remove CPA off your name
in thousands of places we have it.
This is actually good for us.
I got one more thing to add about that, though,
because it was like a four-hour ethics course.
And we haven't yet got ethics up on earmark,
so I couldn't take it through earmark.
And it's an estate-specific thing.
We do have ethics up on earmark,
but we don't have Arizona State-specific ethics
and the ASEPA-specific ethics.
So I had to take a self-study course from another provider
and pay some money.
And when I got the course, it was just a big PDF file,
a giant PDF, and then a copy of the test,
they gave me a copy of the test along with the PDF.
And then the way I proved that I earned my PDFs.
Two PDFs.
And then the way I would earn my credit
was I would take a 20-question online test.
And I'd had to get, I had to get 75% or better.
So they gave me the test, they gave me the PDF.
It counts for four hours,
but you could just drop those 20 questions into an AI and say,
give me the correct answers.
Well, I didn't do it to start.
So first of all, the test was extremely poorly designed,
such that anyone with any test-taking skills could eliminate
at least two of the answers of the four multiple choice questions,
immediately, and most of the time, three of them.
So I just went through, I read the PDF,
and I went through and I took the test,
and then I dropped the entire test,
copy-pasted it into an AI.
And I said, give me the answers.
And I checked my answers versus its answers.
And we got the same answers.
And I submitted it.
Did you give the AI the study guide to,
or did you just give it the questions?
No, I just gave it the questions.
It didn't even have the study guide or the course materials.
So AI can pass an ethics exam too.
I learned that.
Wow.
Yeah, it's a big deal.
But it just made me realize how poor the ethics experience is,
because if you had no ethics, you could very easily take the exam
and be done with it, not have ever even read the materials.
I mean, that's been, I mean, there's been big firms.
This has been going on, right?
People cheating on the ethics exam, right?
Like this is not.
You're not the first person to think and try in that, Blake.
I know.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
It's thousands of times.
The thing that's sort of strained for me
is that we have this profession
that is supposed to be super ethical.
But we set up a system that allows you to succeed
by being really unethical.
So the system is unethical.
If you actually apply ethical thinking to the system
of how we do CPE and how we test people on ethics,
when you have a system that enables rampant cheating,
the system itself is broken and unethical.
Yeah.
It's unethical to maintain that system.
And yet that's what we have in accounting.
And we wonder why we have an ethics problem in accounting.
Maybe it's because the system is designed
to reward unethical behavior.
Yeah, it's where those unintended consequences,
but everything has them.
Yeah.
So.
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Welcome back to CPEA land.
You have, David, a fun video to play.
Yeah, I mean, not everything is bad news.
And I think this is a,
since we're on the fun theme and we've been laughing a lot,
let's keep it going.
So we have a video.
So this is Danielle Booker PhD CPEA.
Apparently, I don't know how long ago this was.
It looks like it was recent, sometime mid-August.
She was on the Wheel of Fortune.
That's amazing.
Okay, I've got the clip here.
This was on LinkedIn.
Yeah, you sent me this.
And I saw it also when Jennifer Wilson posted it up.
I think people tagged us in it.
They're like, you got to play this on the show.
So, we're okay.
So this is an accountant who was on Wheel of Fortune.
And you are an accounting professor?
Yes, I'm an accounting professor.
I teach accounting and auditing.
And I'm really trying to get students to know that accounting is fun.
And it's not just number crunching.
And it's the language of business.
You have a great opportunity by having a degree in accounting.
Is that a tough sell?
Okay, I'm trying to get it out there right now.
No, you can convince there.
And remember, everybody, accounting is fun.
All right, let's do another toss up.
Oh my god, I gotta clip that.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna clip that.
And remember, everybody, accounting is fun.
And we gotta put that at the beginning of every episode.
Remember, we're like,
and we have it accounting is fun.
So there's that article, which is really positive.
There was an article in a business journal magazine,
but it had Christina Spell,
who's now, she's took over as the Maryland Association CPA.
She's the new chair.
Sorry, before that, did we say the name of the professor
who was in this video, who was on Wheel of Fortune?
I did be free press play.
Okay, was it Danielle Booker?
Yes.
Okay, Danielle Booker PhD over at Loyola.
Sorry, continue.
I know, it's all right.
And so just to stay on this theme,
so the new chair of the Maryland Association CPA,
Christine Spell, she, you know, she's in this article,
and she talks about how the industry needs to start reaching out
to the next generation of potential accountants earlier
to change the narrative of accounting the profession.
And so that's, so with Pat Sagex saying something like that,
that's helping to change the narrative.
And really, she frames this up.
It's like, it used to be where colleges would try to create
the impression on young people of what accounting
should be or accountant should be.
And she's like, but that's not happening
because by the time kids are even at college,
they've already learned from Hollywood,
how boring and unfun accountants are.
Or like we had last week, they're learning
from their accounting teachers in high school
that accountants are miserable.
So she wants to smash that narrative.
And there's two other articles besides Wheel of Fortune this week.
So there was an article going concern, pick this up.
So I'm going to mess up this name.
Eugene Amo Doddzi, he is the world's fastest number
cruncher.
So he qualified to, so he is a 100 meter
at the World Athletics Championships.
He's 31 years old.
He basically learned that he was fast
by running to catch the bus.
And so lots of accountants, which is really crazy,
a lot of accountants have reached out to say,
congratulations, you're representing accountants very well.
But he has yet to get a new job offer, which is a
love issue.
And he's, he's, you know, he's, he's like,
we're not boring stiff squares at the office typing.
Like it's another positive article about accounts.
That's great.
Does it say what his, what his job is?
Like where does he work?
What does he do in accounting?
He's focused on his running.
He said British accountant.
That's what we know.
And he's 30 years old.
There's an interview, but there's too much ones
who don't play it.
It's really hard.
There's too much wind in the background.
He's actually at the track, getting an interview.
It's just, it's a little, it won't be good to play on the show.
Now it says he works for a subsidiary
of Berkeley Group St. George PLC.
They have been phenomenal, honestly.
I am always on top of my workload.
I never slip behind.
But if I need to jet off somewhere to,
in Europe to race at short notice,
they are very accommodating of it all.
I won't lie and say that it doesn't get tough at times.
And sometimes you do feel like you're stretched quite thin,
but my misses is incredible.
What a great guy.
And it's great that his firm gives him the time
to fly around and race.
See, that's a good story, David.
All right, now I gotta take a,
I got one more good food.
A good story.
I'll take us down after you take us up.
Okay, one more.
So this is actually in HBCU lifestyle
black college living.
So it's a non-accounting Mac, right?
And the type of the article said,
no cubicles here.
The shockingly sunkest life of digital nomad accountants.
And basically, it's an article,
it might be a paid article.
It's from a company called The Counting Plus.
So it's like, they might be like a cast coaching community
or sales coach type thing.
But it goes on to talk about the nomadic lifestyle
you can have because of cloud accounting,
how you can do beach accounting.
And it really talks up all the tools that are available
to have this magical lifestyle.
And it's just another example of like,
hey, we got, they're projecting a new image to people
that normally would not know about this space, right?
This is great.
Hopefully, I don't want you to bring us down.
This is a very good kicker.
Sorry, David, but I can't control the news.
And we can only control the narrative so much as a profession.
You can talk up accounting, you can talk up audit.
But if the job itself doesn't live up to expectations,
you're just gonna create a situation
where you're lying to people about the reality of it.
And I believe that one of the fundamental problems
we have is that two thirds of accounting grads
go into audit.
This is in the United States.
Two thirds of them go into audit.
And they are auditing mostly large public companies.
And the audit profession in many ways is broken.
People don't read audit opinions.
Audit has become commoditized.
It doesn't create value.
It doesn't detect fraud.
Investors don't rely on audits.
And the financial statements that are being audited
have become less and less useful over time.
And you may not see this discussion happening
in public in the United States,
but it's really happening in Australia
where there have been some major, major scandals recently
to the point where ABC news in Australia did a 15-minute
investigative story called a decline in the big forest
auditing quality stokes fears
of an N-ron style corporate collapse.
But in this day and age of 12 second videos,
15s, they invest a lot of time in this.
Yeah, I can't remember the last time
I saw a 15-minute segment on NBC News or anything like that.
So I just wanted to place some of this video.
And David, I'm gonna use you as a barometer.
Just interrupt when you get bored
because I assume that's when our listeners will get bored.
And then we can link to the rest of it in the show notes.
We won't play all 15 minutes.
It's a beautiful boat and a beautiful bed.
These tranquil waters are a sanctuary
from the cut and thrust of corporate life.
I love going out in my little boat.
When you're in a bad place,
you dwell on those bad things that got you there.
So going out on the water takes that away a bit.
Tony Watson's career as a tax lawyer fell apart
when he accused a construction giant
of incorrectly claiming hundreds of millions of dollars
in tax deductions.
I told them that they were stealing from our children.
They were stealing from tax dollars.
It cost him his job as a senior partner
at a top-tier law firm.
I didn't see incapable of being shut up voluntarily
so they had to do it for me.
Now he wants to expose the roles of auditing giant KPMG
and consultancy group PWC in the scheme.
Do you think KPMG should have picked something up?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
We know how influential the big four accounting firms
are in the public sector.
I really do see these consultants as an infestation.
They are going from senior levels in consultant firms
and then into senior executive positions in government.
They made at least $10 billion in government contracts
over the past decade.
The big four are enormously powerful.
They're tentacles spread across.
The whole of big business globally and locally
and that power is unchecked,
untransparent, invisible.
The operations of these giants in the private sector
have received a little public scrutiny.
They're making huge profits
from auditing the same companies they're consulting.
It's risky business.
When they tell the truth,
proper decision-making can be undertaken
about where to make investments.
When they urge the truth,
when they don't take their job seriously,
we all stand to lose really significantly.
The impact on our retirement of poor decision-making
is very, very real.
That's probably good. I think that's a good point to start.
A staggering 9.
Yeah, because it touches on a couple of things.
There's blatant fraud,
blatant mining fraud.
It touches on the dance where,
hey, I work for big four,
now I'm working for the government,
and I'm back at big four.
Maybe I'm in the PCUB,
and then the whole third part
where they just...
They're consulting...
They're consulting and the audits
in the same firm,
which creates an inherent conflict of interest
that you cannot address
with these ethics trainings.
You mean the 20-page PDF does not help?
Yeah, sure that.
So, if the national leadership
in accounting wants to improve
the image of accounting,
you've got to address these issues.
Because in Australia, in particular,
it's reached mainstream news,
mainstream consciousness,
and the public has lost their trust.
And here in the United States,
I would say it hasn't reached that level yet,
but all it takes is another end run.
And the way we're trending,
I don't know if we have actually
solved the problems that led to end run.
When you look at PCAOB deficiency rates,
it's very worrying that 40% of audits
are deficient according to the PCAOB.
And I know we've talked to,
Jerry McGinnis,
partner at KPMG,
former office managing partner,
who he told us,
so he thinks the PCAOB to paraphrase.
They're being a little too tough.
But, I mean, that's a really bad number.
So, we've reached out to the PCAOB
to try to understand
what those deficiencies mean.
Does it really mean that these audits are super shaky?
What is exactly as the situation of audit
in the United States?
Do you think investors,
or should we be worried?
But to get back to the whole talent crisis discussion,
you can't improve the image of accounting
when the foundation is cracked.
I'm mixing metaphors there.
But I think you understand what I mean.
Yeah, and I mean,
you think about the whole fun.
And we had a big discussion about this at the conference
and the whole, you know, the working conditions.
Oh, yeah, working conditions.
There's a lot of ironic cracks, right?
ESG looks silly.
How can the accounting bodies be pushing for ESG
when they can't get the firms
to treat employees properly?
That's a governance, right?
An environmental that fits in that umbrella.
Yeah, toxic workplaces fit under ESG
in the governance side of the,
into the social side of things.
It's part of it.
That's why Tesla has gotten hammered
by some of these ESG funds
because of how they treat workers.
So, yeah, you've got,
you've got the firms auditing about ESG
and they themselves
would probably do pretty poorly on ESG
given how much they make people travel
for one thing,
with all the environmental problems of travel
and then the social problems of people overworking
and dying at their desks
and getting divorced
and having no social lives
and being physically used from the paper
and being stressed out
and having high blood pressure
and partners dying within five years of retiring.
The partners are overworked more than the staff even.
They're prisoners of the system themselves.
They may be making a lot of money
but they're stuck
in a lot of ways too.
Golden handcuffs.
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So I had some articles that tied to this a little bit,
because they bring this up,
this dance, the back and forth,
because this kid on a lot of headlines this week,
and I saw it, the IRS agents
are getting paid by private accounting firms
and people go back and forth,
and there's a study that came out,
and this was issued by the
Treasury Inspector General for Tactical Institution,
TIGTA, TIGTA.
And this new report came out,
496 IRS employees were identified
with connections to large accounting firms
or corporations.
Of these 241 had ties to accounting firms
and 255 corporations.
And again, this is that,
and guess who's involved in this?
Article in the realist is Elizabeth Warren.
And again, it's this,
there's the potential for
wrongdoing, but there's actually
no wrongdoing that they're calling out.
So I have to ask you something,
are these currently employed IRS agents?
It looks like this is current numbers,
from what I could tell from the article.
Okay, so these are people working at the IRS
who have ties back to corporations
or audits.
Or current itch,
because I mean it probably is hard to do,
so maybe it's 2021 or 22,
but it's current itch.
And the IRS said they responded with plans
to strengthen its ethics training
and review the case of the management systems.
And this is fine.
But coincidentally,
a week and a half ago, I had an article that
we never really made the show.
So a couple weeks back,
Elizabeth Warren,
and Katie Porter,
Democrat from California, right?
They sent letters to the executives of Intuit,
H&R Block, and American Collation
for Taxpayers Right,
and the Free File Alliance,
demanding a lot of information
because, and basically,
they're trying to tack the lobbying
spend, right?
But they specifically asked this question,
and I noted it last week.
So they were demanding in all these letters.
And this is from the Intuit letter.
Since January 1st of 2021,
how many Intuit employees or external partners
have previously worked for the federal government
and tax policy or other positions in the IRS
or the Treasury Department,
the Federal Trade Commission, or elsewhere in the executive branch?
For each of these employees,
please provide the following.
And this is big demand list, right?
How much revenue will you lose
if we launch a free tax file thing?
And it's just, it's a typical
Elizabeth Warren letter of nothing, right?
Well, I made a note.
I literally made a note last.
I was like, she should have these numbers.
Like, how does she not have this?
And then two weeks later,
we can half later, they announced,
they have these numbers.
But now this makes me think,
if they really know these 500 people
have done all this,
and she's involved in the press release of this,
and employees doing it or not.
So either it's a nothing burger,
because I'm assuming, let's say,
Intuit had 50 employees working for the IRS,
former employees.
I think that would be the headline of this, right?
Unless she's a slow plan or a car or something.
So I feel like the letter she wrote two weeks ago,
to the executives,
is a big nothing burger.
It's just, it's full,
it's funny how like, sometimes it's a show,
an article like,
you recognize something in it,
but it doesn't come together until two weeks.
This is all tied together.
But again, it's the,
what let me read the quote here.
So this is from the TIGO report.
Well, not a direct correlation.
This can raise impartiality concerns.
So again, it's like,
but Elizabeth Warren says,
accounting giants are abusing the public trust
and taking advantage of the revolving door.
So I don't know.
Well, we'll see.
And this is an article that ties back,
like you say, the foundation, right?
How do we have good images like a real fortune
and then have articles like this?
Well, the term, the term for what you're describing
is regulatory capture.
And that's when private industry
makes its way into the regulators
and gets the regulations the way they want them.
And then you bring those people down.
It's been going on for the history of time.
We've talked about this with the PCB and everywhere.
And it's such a starter industry, right?
But it's happening in accounting.
And we know it's happening.
And that's why,
you know, you could make the conclusion
that the reason that accounting standards
have an advance is because
the big four have captured the SEC
and the PCI OB
and get them to do what they want.
And they don't want anything to change.
Because change costs them money.
They like it to stay exactly the way it is.
All right, let's get to tech.
Because we haven't talked about tech yet.
Some really cool advancements in AI,
examples of accountants using AI
to create entirely new services,
to automate services in their firms,
and even to automate advisory.
And I know everyone wants to do advisory.
We all want to become CFOs
and not be bookkeepers.
And the question always is,
how do you do that at scale?
How do you provide insights into financials
when there aren't a lot of people
who can do that kind of work?
Our friend, Ryan Lasanas,
did an incredible demo in a Loom video.
And I want to play this for you.
Again, it's a little long.
It's five, six minutes.
So I might skip around a bit to show you
what he's doing.
In essence, he has figured out how to use
AI to create
an analysis of a set of financial statements
for a client.
And then voice-cloning technology
to deliver a video
with a narrative
of going through the financials.
So this is like a second level,
because I've heard about some accountants that are like,
oh, I learned to scale a little bit better
because what I do is I just record a loom
and I just read through the financials
and just send them the loom and that's it.
He's like, leveled that up. He's like,
I'm going to be on the loom.
I'll just put my AI version of me on the loom.
Right. Right. Right.
And so right now it's just an AI voice.
Are very soon going to be available
off the shelf.
So you could generate loom videos
with AI potentially.
Now, I know. I actually hear Blake.
I'm actually not here.
And that's the next level is that's the,
that's the really scary future in which
you can have a live avatar
and when you join a zoom meeting
with a sales rep, you don't know if that sales rep
is real or not.
Maybe the chibaleth
will become popular again.
There'll be a, you'll have to test the avatar
with a special word that they can't say
unless they're human or something.
Anyway, I'm getting beyond myself.
Let's watch Ryan Lasanas' video.
And if you like this,
you'll like his newsletter,
search FutureFirm newsletter
and you can subscribe and get this kind of stuff in your inbox.
Thanks, Ryan, for the video.
So off completely, I'm just trying to demonstrate
what the process looks like.
There's definitely improvements we can make to it.
But let's say you have
a health checkup service that you provide,
health checkup services, something that I recommend.
You provide to your clients.
It's basically an analysis of your clients'
past results based on a certain period
and some suggestions on how they can improve in the future.
It's a very simple service that you can add
and it helps you be proactive
and it's a value add for your clients.
So let's say we're going to analyze
the previous three months, the previous quarter
and I'm pulling this up in zero.
You've got a P&L on the screen.
What I do is I would export this to
an Excel document.
I would then go into chat GPT.
And I would make sure that code interpreter is enabled.
You'd have to have GPT4, I believe,
for this to be enabled.
And then this is a very simple prompt
and honestly, we can make it a lot better than this.
But here I'm just saying you're an accountant
who advises clients on how to grow their business increase
or profits, attaches a profit or loss statement
for the last three months.
Please analyze this P&L.
Explain to your client the main risks and opportunities,
actionable specs that they can take
to improve their business and profits.
I think we can really drastically improve this.
But this is the simplest prompt that I very quickly came up with.
And here let's say, so chat GPT then analyze the file
and came up with some risks, opportunities.
And I'm not suggesting you copy and paste all this stuff.
But I'm just going to do it for example purposes.
I think we could use chat GPT to kind of expedite the analysis process
and then add our own flair to it.
Add our own, there might be some stuff
that chat GPT simply doesn't get right.
You'd have to know your client obviously well enough.
We don't want to just, we don't want a robot doing the analysis
for you 100% of the way.
But we want to use the robot to help speed things up.
So what Ryan is showing on the screen is chat GPT's response
to his prompt, which has some analysis.
Such as there's a significant drop in sales from July to August.
This could indicate an underlying issue
with product demand or market conditions.
And maybe identify some things that we might have missed.
So we would copy and paste this.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this
into my voice cloning service, 11 laps.
And again, I'm copying and pasting here
for example purposes.
For example, purposes only.
But I'm suggesting that we should take this
and make it a bit of our own.
Okay.
So here.
So he's he's copied and pasted into a text box
in 11 labs, which is the voice cloning technology service.
Here are the main risks and opportunities.
So now he's typing in.
He's cleaning up the transcript a little bit that is generated.
It's using his verbiage, right?
Yeah, using using it actually say.
Yeah.
Now, if you improve the prompt and gave it your tone of voice,
if you were able to train it, then it could possibly
generate a script in the style.
It can be in account.
All right.
So I took 30 seconds to very quickly massage this text.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to generate my voice.
So I'll put this on pause while my voice generates
and we'll take a look in a moment.
Okay.
So now I have generated my voice for all this text
that chat GPT outputted, which ideally we are massaging.
And now what we can do is we can simply pull up
often and loss and we could have a loom video,
which ideally would be video off in this instance.
And then we can, all right, let's dive right into this profit
and loss statement you've provided.
We'll take a look at the numbers and find the main risks
and opportunities.
Then we'll map out actionable steps to steer your business
towards more growth in profits.
So that voice you're hearing in the background now,
that's the cloned voice.
Yeah.
Sounds pretty close.
Most people can't tell the difference.
Here are the main risks and opportunities.
Because Ryan has a natural tone that's a little robotic anyway.
Said that tone rhythm.
It works really well actually for him.
It works great.
This could indicate an underlying issue with product demand
or so I won't go through the whole thing here,
but you can see how at some point in time
we're going to be able to use a combination of chat GPT,
screen sharing and a voice clone with some involvement
obviously on your end to massage,
massage, whatever is being outputted from chat GPT,
to actually scale up how we provide advice
and how we communicate with our clients.
So obviously it's a lot of copy paste right now,
a lot of switching between apps,
but imagine if you automated this to some extent,
where financials get generated,
a script is generated, a human reviews the script
and approves it, the voice is generated
and added to a video of the profit and loss.
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's an opportunity for some either an app developer
or you could have all these companies that specialize
in building accountant or CPA websites.
This could be a service they sell.
We will take time.
We will clone you and connect all these pipes
so you can pump out, you know.
It totally could be built.
Somebody could build this.
This to me is way more valuable than a dashboard.
But so many has to prove that accountants even care
about getting this and their clients care about getting this
and they're going to do something with it.
And at the end of the day, that's going to really push.
Again, it's like dashboards and other stuff,
like things get created and do business owners
even want this at the end of the day.
Yeah.
Well, I think they want the email analysis.
They want a high level analysis that comes with the financial statements.
If you're just sending a PDF,
that PDF never gets opened because busy entrepreneurs
do not have time to read financial statements, 90% of them.
So in my network of accounting for owners,
the ones who are doing advisory, the number one thing they're doing
that sounds really smart to me,
is provide an executive summary in the email.
So in the email, here's five bullet points.
Here's what you need to know this month about your financials.
And if you want to dig in more, it's an email or text.
Yeah, it's like what we send out to each
what I send out for us with using fin daily.
Yeah.
It's just like six bullets.
Here's the bank balance, boom, boom, boom.
And that's it.
Everyday we get that.
Or but yeah, or even more,
could you do in a text to people?
Yeah.
Or a loom video with the tax return.
That's what a lot of firms are doing now.
So I give you the five, ten minute loom video
walking you through the return.
Here's what you need to know.
If you have any questions, make a comment
or schedule time with me.
So that's already happening
and this can automate it further, make it more scalable.
Because making those loom videos only the preparer
or the partner can do that.
Not the staff, but they could prep the video
or they could prep the script even.
Yeah.
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I got another video to play.
Here's another cool AI application that I saw.
This is called...
What is it even called?
I'm just going to start playing the video,
and we'll find out.
Let's see here.
This is called Tax Genie.
This is Tax Genie, considering a complex tax scenario and query,
carrying out deep legislation research
and producing what appears to be illogical and accurate conclusion.
And is this one of those GFTPs
where they've retrained it on lots of tactile relations or something?
I believe so.
And apologies.
The recording on the video is super boomy,
and it sounds like they're in a big glass conference room.
I can't do anything about that.
You don't have to make sure that you just scan your way through
what I'm doing, so just pause it and you can read.
I guess we have to pause and read.
So, okay, here's the scenario given to Tax Genie,
is on 1 July 2023,
James Family Trust will dispose of the units held
in Damon Enterprises Unit Trust.
Capital gains earned by James Family Trust
will be distributed to Edwards J Enterprises Party Limited.
There will be no ordinary income to distribute,
calculate the indirect small business participation percentage
held by Edward James.
The response is given the scenario and legislation
detailing direct small business participation percentage
and indirect small business participation percentage,
we need several steps to calculate them.
And then it goes through multiple steps
and calculates the answer for this.
And it gets it to the percentages.
So, I guess I won't play the video
because the audio is terrible,
but I think it's an interesting, you know,
specific application of AI
for tax planning purposes, right,
for what we do as accountants and tax professionals.
And this kind of specifically trained LLM
technology is going to become super common
because super valuable.
And I think we're going to see something like this.
I think next week we're attending
some Intuit Investor presentation
and they're going to face into it's going to debuse
some sort of AI thing next week.
We're going to see that via,
I guess it's kind of like a webinar.
We'll be attending and we'll see that with that.
It's a live.
I think the specific ones.
Yeah, notice that they don't call it a webinar.
It's like a digital event.
Yes, but it's basically a webinar.
Yeah.
So we talk about a new podcast
that we are helping to launch.
The first episode is out.
The unofficial QuickBooks Accountants podcast
with Hector Garcia and Alicia Katz Pollock
is now up.
And you can get it on your podcast players,
Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,
or every listen,
you can also go to unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast
dot transistor dot FM.
And listen, it's super awesome.
David, tell us more about this show.
I mean, if you're a QuickBooks ProAdvisor
and you want to stay in the loop of everything happening,
QuickBooks Intuit Accountants related,
you want to listen to this podcast
because even like on our own show,
you know, there's so much news
like Intuit has stuff coming out all the time.
I think I have five Intuit things in my key right now
and they're probably not going to make the show,
but they'll make this show for sure.
They're quick, very specific to QuickBooks
and what's affecting the QuickBooks ProAdvisor.
Small business owners could listen,
but it's really probably going to be
that ProAdvisor community.
Yeah.
So Hector and Alicia are going to do this every month.
Episodes will come out weekly by weekly
all the latest news on QuickBooks.
So yeah, if you use QuickBooks,
you need to subscribe to this podcast.
Hector is indeed the man, Dark Horse CPAs,
says that in the live chat.
I couldn't agree more.
No better expert on QuickBooks in the world.
And he's got millions and millions of YouTube views
on his QuickBooks videos.
And it's very clearly branded unofficial QuickBooks.
Unlike this next story I'm going to talk about Blake.
What's the next story you're going to talk about, David?
So I think anybody who's ran a Facebook group,
a LinkedIn group,
if anybody posts to Twitter or LinkedIn,
you ever put the word QuickBooks
and you start getting these spam posts and the replies.
And it's like,
actually I can share my screen.
I'll show you the kind of how these feel.
A little bit.
Let's share the screen.
This is why I stopped using a lot of these groups.
Share a screen, window, share a screen.
That's my Twitter.
And you get these posts that are like QuickBooks payroll,
P-A-Y-R-O-L.
And it's called QuickBooks Payroll Support, right?
This Twitter handle.
And they have these ads.
These really janky kind of half-ass ads.
It's got the phone number.
It says QuickBooks Payroll Support Phone.
They show up over and over again.
They get posted all over.
At the funny thing, I had a hard time finding comps.
I'd spend a decade blocking these all over social.
Every time I get posted by one of these things.
But even in my own feed,
because I searched for the word QuickBooks
when I prepared for the show.
And I had to block this one phone number
because it just keeps popping up everywhere over and over again.
So basically what happened now, finally.
Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, hold on.
What are these posts?
Why is somebody spamming QuickBooks and support
all over the internet?
Because it's a scam.
It's a scam.
Oh.
So it's a scam.
They pretend.
How does it work?
The way the scam works is they...
It's just like those Microsoft scams.
You have a problem on your Windows computer.
Give me your credit card.
I hope you fix it.
Everybody's seen these scams floating around the internet.
But these are very specific to QuickBooks and small business.
So the Department of Justice just arrested somebody
yesterday in connection to this.
He's scammed more than 7,000 victims in the US market
for a total of $13 million.
So people are looking for the QuickBooks support number
and they find his scam post
and they call that number and they get scammed out of money?
Yes.
And then some of it may be...
It's overcharging them for support.
And so he operates his companies.
Some of them is Fed software services, Fed software services,
PN bookkeeping services, Fed's consulting,
QuickBooks tech assist, QuickBooks US,
QuickBooks accounting, QuickBooks support team.
These are the companies who he presents himself
as being some official QuickBooks support thing.
And I don't think he's the only company doing it.
I think there's so many of these happening.
But they've arrested him and they're going to get him a wire fraud
and essentially 20 years in prison
or twice the gross profit caused by the offenses.
But they basically trick people who don't know,
small business owners and elderly,
to pay a lot of extra money for tech support.
They probably don't even fix the problem.
And they pretend they're QuickBooks or Intuit.
This has been happening for a decade,
these stupid posts on social media over and over again.
I've always wondered what that was.
And now you have taught me, David.
Thank you.
And in that...
We should all be celebrating.
Like, these should go away.
That Department of Justice is like cramp cramp cramp.
I should actually go unmute everybody
and see if it actually stops
or if a different company pops up to do all this.
Wacomall, right? Probably.
I have some listener mail.
Two messages before we go.
Perfect.
Anything else, David?
Okay.
So this is from Sean.
Sean said,
Hi, Blake.
I'm a big fan of the growing family of podcasts.
Thank you for all you've done to elevate
and modernize the profession.
On the accounting podcast,
the topic of the accounting shortage regularly comes up.
I wonder, though,
is it a shortage or a resource allocation problem?
I ask because my specialty is small
and mid-sized nonprofits.
I've gotten to see a lot of situations where CPAs
end up doing a lot of bookkeeper and other duties
that do not require specialized skills.
That leaves me wondering if the future of accounting
is just one where we see CPAs use surgically,
basically just in situations
where they need their specialized training.
Does that make sense?
Does that align with your experience?
Best, Sean.
David, I'll let you go first.
Does that make sense?
And does that align with your experience?
Well, I think,
if I'm kind of getting the vibe
what he's talking about.
So here's the new world,
like P's coming in.
We talked about this before.
People are buying cast practices.
But some function of that business
is going to need an accountant.
And maybe accounts are just like mercenaries.
There's free agents.
Like, hey, I need a CPA.
And I'm just going to bring in a CPA
for this one little thing I need in my practice.
And then that CPA is going to be a mercenary.
So there's just like free agents or mercenaries
that just come in and like do this one thing
or this one piece of the bigger picture.
They don't actually run a business.
There's mercenaries.
Maybe that's the vibe I'm getting in my,
it went through my head.
Yeah, I mean, we definitely have seen that.
Fewer CPAs needed for specific jobs.
I, I mean, we just talked about it in the show.
In cast practices,
the fastest growing segment of accounting,
outsourced accounting,
it's 50% or less,
our CPAs.
And my concern with that is that
if they aren't CPAs,
then they aren't regulated
and they aren't held to the same professional standard.
And so if we want to maintain high quality
as a profession, as an accounting profession,
we need a lot of the accountants out there to be CPAs.
And if it's only a small group,
then we can't protect the public.
So we need to make it more accessible.
We need to take away the red tapes
and more people want to be CPAs
and want to be held to those high standards.
That's, that's my main concern.
And, and, and that counters the argument
that, oh, it's good when we don't have a lot of CPAs
because our wages go up.
Well, no, I don't think they do
because as we have fewer CPAs,
the value of the CPA will decline
because it will become less omnipresent in the mind of the public.
They'll stop thinking,
I need a CPA for this.
And they'll start saying,
maybe I don't need a CPA for this.
And when they start doing that for lots of stuff,
that's when we are in trouble as a license.
Do you think, in the same way,
I think when it comes to regulation,
right, needing to be licensed.
And I think the big story is like,
why do you, when people that want to have a hairbreeding business,
they have to get licensed just to breed hair, right?
And do you think that might be the way
to get more people to become CPAs?
You can't practice cash practices now,
unless you have a CPA license.
Do you think there's people in the profession
possibly pushing for that legislation
that from that direction to,
instead of it just being signing on audits,
it's more things.
It would be, I think it would be better,
if it were, it's certainly better for CPAs,
if like you needed a CPA to do more things
and I don't understand why the leaders in our profession
aren't advocating for that.
That seems like it should be one of the top things they advocate for.
Some states are better about it than others,
at least in terms of using the term accountant in Texas.
You can't say you're an accountant,
practicing to the public,
unless you're also a CPA or working in a CPA firm.
So that really increases the value of being a CPA firm
or being a CPA is that other,
your competitors can't call themselves accountants
unless they're also CPAs.
They can call themselves something else like consultants.
I'm worried that CPAs will become too niche
and then the value plummets.
The reason that it became so valuable over many, many years
is because almost every accountant became a CPA
and now that's less and less and less likely.
That's just my feeling.
And I think in New York,
after a decade push,
they overwhelmingly approved as the verbit share.
They're going to permit non-CPA ownership of CPA firms in New York.
Which is, it still requires 51%.
And that's the way it is in the other states
that allow non-CPAs to own CPA firms,
which I think is good.
But I think we got to keep it over that 51%.
For licensure, you know,
for CPA firm ownership,
we got to be the majority.
And ideally, it should be like, you know, two-thirds.
If two-thirds of accountants were CPAs,
that would really go a long way to protecting the public
because we can hold them to a higher standard
than non-licensed professionals.
And, you know, let's toss in the others there too.
Like, I don't want to leave out enrolled agents
and certify that as well.
It's not reaching out that you just renewed your CPA.
You've gotten ready.
Well, I just spent my, I just sent in my $275 ACH payment.
Actually, they let me use a credit card, that was nice,
to realize them.
So I got to get my value.
All right, here's a message from Glenn.
David.
I mean, David Glenn.
Hello, Blake and David.
I'm a regular listener
and actually shook David's hand at AICP and Gage
a couple months ago.
I hear the 150-hour brought up quite regularly
and wanted to share my thoughts.
I think we need to be more granular in terms
of what services are being provided
and what the minimum education requirement
should be for those services.
I think for CPAs who provide bookkeeping type services
like Blake did, the 150-hour requirement is too high.
You can learn all you need to learn an undergrad
and are perfectly qualified to do that type of work.
For CPAs to provide tax services,
I think the current requirements are actually too low.
As it stands now,
someone could get licensed as a CPA
and provide tax services using the CPA brand
while only taking a single tax class.
At the end of undergrad in a finance degree,
I pivoted into an accounting career
by getting a master's degree in tax.
Having that dedicated year of training
to get a solid foundation in tax has been invaluable to me.
I see way too many unqualified CPAs doing taxes
who just don't know many of the basics that they would know
had they been required to get a master's in tax
to use the CPA brand in their practice.
On the flip side,
I'm legally allowed to issue audit opinions
but I'm woefully unqualified to do so
since I lack any training in that area.
I did pass the audit section right on the number
with a 75.
I enjoy the show and keep up the good work.
And David Glenn brings up a great point.
Thanks for listening.
It is crazy that you can practice tax as a CPA
only taking one tax class.
It shows like the state of thing.
In this case,
I don't want to spin this off in the one 50R stuff
but the argument in the point of view
is like everything's working perfectly
and it's very obvious.
There's holes in all of this everywhere.
So it doesn't matter if South Carolina does a little bit
or Minnesota does a little bit.
It's very fractured already.
Yeah, but nobody admits that.
It's like an emperor has no clothes kind of situation
where everybody sees it
but nobody's willing to admit it
at the levels of the profession
where anything can actually get done.
It's just all us small firm owners sitting here
watching these clowns and suits and ties.
That's how it feels sometimes.
Like, what are they saying?
This doesn't match up with anything.
We all know it's broken.
I don't know.
So how do you...
Is it...
Just come out and say,
like, hey, we realize that...
Or, you know, I'm just going to tell you
that's like the CPA plus concept.
Like, it's CPA plus.
Like, there are extra letters you start sticking on.
There's a T because you've taken a year of tax.
Not just one class of tax.
Because I think that's the bigger issue of all this.
It's me as a consumer or a small business owner.
I see the CPA.
I assume you're good at accounting taxes.
Maybe on it.
In general, it's usually taxes.
Right, that's the funny part.
The public associates the CPA most with taxes.
And yet we don't have very much in the way of requirements
for CPAs to do taxes.
It's all about financial accounting.
A lot of it's financial accounting and audit.
There's one section of the CPA exam that's taxed.
So you've got to know that to practice.
But arguably, EAs have better tax experience and training
because of that exam than CPAs do.
It's more focused.
That's the argument I've heard EAs make.
And CPAs really don't like that.
I actually heard an argument from some of the EAs CPA
at this conference that said, but, you know,
EAs don't have to take a business class.
So I don't know.
EAs don't have to take any classes.
I don't know what the solution is.
But I know that the situation doesn't make sense.
Admitting where we're at is part of the step one.
Yes.
We had to admit when you have a problem to fix it.
We should let everybody get on to their holiday weekend.
Yes.
I hope you have a great Labor Day weekend, David.
Don't work too hard.
That's like the main point of the holiday.
So everybody listening should actually take time off.
That was one of my favorite sessions at the conference,
by the way, was I forget the speaker's name.
I feel bad about that.
But he was talking about how you, you know,
putting work before life.
You'll never have enough time for life.
Oh, and then NIO Carter Gray did a session on
how to actually take a vacation.
Which I thought was very valuable.
How to take a vacation and enjoy it.
As an accountant, it can be really challenging to do that.
And so she gave really good tips on how to actually take a vacation.
You know, Amy Vetter had her talk.
And it was funny because I don't go to go to conferences a lot.
I don't sit in the sessions very often.
So, yeah, I don't need CPE.
But usually I'm working the sales for and the sales for is gigantic.
And it takes days to talk to everybody you talk to.
And so I went to a lot of sessions.
So I saw John Garrett, which was nice.
And Amy Vetter.
And then I'm gonna name Vetter's session,
which is really a little bit folks that disconnecting and focusing on the human side of these things.
And I'm the only idiot in there.
Like an asshole working on my laptop.
You know, still.
Take a vacation.
Trying to get the QuickBooks podcast live.
It's the unofficial QuickBooks podcast.
All right.
Thanks everyone who joined us live.
Always fun to have you.
Subscribe on YouTube.
Get notified when we go live.
And you can email us the accounting podcast at earmark.me.
That's the accounting podcast at earmark.me.
Just head into the show notes to find out how you can reach out to us.
We love getting stories from our listeners.
That's where I got most of the stories for this episode.
Was our listeners sending me links to that video from Australia?
Thank you so much to our listener who sent that in.
And with that, let's go enjoy the weekend.
All right, everybody.
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