We Are All Lying: Blake Oliver on the Collapse of Accounting, and How to Fix It

She would track her time in this secret spreadsheet and if she started to go over on a client, she would move numbers from one to another. All your data is meaningless. You can't make decisions based on this data. And that's what we're doing as a profession. We shouldn't be so misaligned with honesty, which is insane. Right. Right. That's an ethical foundational principle of our profession is integrity, honesty, and we have built a system that teaches people

to be dishonest. People choose webinars that to attend based on their schedule, not what they need to learn. So, here you are sitting in this webinar that's for a topic that's completely irrelevant to your career. That's not learning. companies play games like they're buying they're buying each other's revenue from each other in reciprocal transactions, right? And then if they can justify a purpose for it, they can recognize it as topline revenue and increase their earnings. Hi everyone, I'm Devin Kums, your host. I'm a CPA MBA who's helped negotiate multi-billion dollar deals as

a financial adviser at top companies like Google and Deote. Today I'm super excited to introduce my friend Blake who is the founder of Earark and also the host of the number one accounting podcast in the world. We cover a lot of really interesting topics from his journey from music into accounting and then going into a traditional accounting firm into something really non-traditional like starting his own business and starting a podcast, making a successful podcast. and then some really interesting technical areas that are wrong with the accounting profession

and some ways that we can think about it including the value of truth and integrity to the profession. So I think it's going to be a really interesting episode to watch it even if you're not an accountant but if you are an accountant you'll get something special out of this one. So please watch, please subscribe. Really excited for it and let's dive straight into it. Mike for so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it and I think everyone's going to be really curious. How does an accountant and a CPA come from a public accounting background to starting a podcast and starting their

own CPE company and going into marketing? Like what's that all about? Deon, great to talk with you. It's been a journey. Um, how did it come to be? Well, so I started the accounting podcast about seven years ago now, and we're now the number one podcast for accountants in the world by downloads. uh it's indisputable. And I guess that came out of uh when I left public accounting, I I I had some time on my hands. I was working at a big

firm in West LA. I was commuting on the 405 every day and I was sitting in a cubicle. Well, actually, I had my own office as a manager, but I was in the glass box. I had a view of the view of the beach, Santa Monica Beach, but I never went there. And every day I would see the traffic building up on Santa Monica Boulevard. Uh and then I knew I was going to have to sit in that for an hour. So, you know, being in public accounting, right, it's very busy. I was uh I had a lot of free time on my hands

when I left. And I went to work for a tech company. And sort of in between is when I started that podcast. And uh it w it started small. We had like a hundred listeners for a year or two and it's just grown. It's exploded. and uh we started putting social videos out there on Tik Tok and Instagram and now we're getting millions of views uh on our on our clips. Was that your ambition when you when you started? Did you expect it to get that big or was it more like, hey, I'm going to try this out as a hobby or what was what was in your head when you started that? Uh no, it

was just a hobby. You know, podcasting was still relatively niche and it was called we didn't even call it the accounting podcast. It was called the cloud accounting podcast. It was super niche and the focus was on technology and how accountants are using it in small practices. So, zoom in from accounting to small accounting practices and then zoom in on the ones that are doing client accounting services and that's what we were talking about. So, it was really small audience, the kind

of audience that you go to a conference and there's maybe like a few hundred people, maybe a few thousand people at like a QuickBooks conference. That was the audience. Um, and I I started that with my co-host, David Liry, who worked at into it for 20 over 20 years, and I came from the public accounting side. Uh, I said I was, you know, I was at a large accounting firm. Before that, I had my own small cloud-based practice. So, we were one of the first zero partners in the US. I was the second bookkeeper to get certified on Zero on

the West Coast. And, uh, and that just like skyrocketed my business. They sent us tons of leads. We had, you know, hundreds of clients within five years. And we were doing it all on subscription basis. So, small business would pay us a few hundred bucks, maybe a few thousand bucks to do their books. We did the bookkeeping, the payroll, the bill pay. That was our bread and butter. Uh, and I was very fortunate where a CPA firm wanted to acquire our team, our processes. And so, I was able to sell that after like five years. So sold so

had that firm, sold it, went to work for a large firm and then uh burned out there after like a year because I realized I would never get anything done and that's when I went into tech. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of the short. Oh yeah. Well, that's a and that's a very unusual journey, right? And I know Zero for people who don't know is kind of like the competitor at least the way you can correct me if I'm wrong was like the competitor to QuickBooks. I remember them reaching out for partners actually around the same time and I I used to drive the 405 also. I used to be in LA, so funny. We have a lot of overlap there. And I Yeah, that'll just driving

the 405 is a full-time job, you know. That's a second time. Oh, man. And did you get to drive it when there were those fires on both sides? Like I drove to work one day and the the the hills were on fire. This was before the latest ones. Um it's kind of a precursor to that. Yeah, I know. I Yeah, that was almost like 10 year like seven or 10 years ago. I remember I remember that my wife worked at UCLA and we worked over on like Sherman Oaks. We lived in Sherman Oaks and my wife worked at UCLA and my clients were in Santa Monica and just that 405 grind and I remember the fire and just being stuck on the freeway

with fire on both sides, you know. My first apartment in LA was Sherman Oaks. Oh, crazy. We lived in the same neighborhood. Where where at? Benefit Street. Okay. Benefit Street. We near Crave Cafe. Oh, man. I was a regular at Crave. I actually even worked at the spot. If you knew the spot over in Cino as a place I worked, one of the first jobs. So, yeah. No way. Yeah. Small world. I I I would go to Crave like every day and and work there with my laptop. We probably saw each other. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure we passed Crosspath. It's It's insane because I

was there a lot of the time pretty late just working on my laptop. It was a great place. Um but so how did what B It's It's interesting because you obviously have this huge capacity for work, it seems like. I mean, you picked up the zero, you started a podcast, but why did public accounting burn you out? What was what was so draining about it? And and I guess because you obviously like accounting, right? And so it's and Yeah, I love it. So I'm kind of curious from your perspective. Yeah. So I backed

into the traditional accounting career path, right? So I started I was a music major in college. I graduated with a degree in cello performance in 2007. And we all know, all the millennials remember what happened in 2007 is the world collapsed in a in a recession. And so uh I couldn't really find work. I was gigging in LA and the first thing that gets cut when there is a financial crisis in the film industry is the music because that's the thing that comes last in the production process. So it was

around the same time that composers were starting to use technology to replace musicians. Yep. Synthesizers were becoming really good. There were all these sound libraries coming out that could uh replicate the sound of string instruments. Logitech all that all that stuff. Yep. Yeah. the Berlin Philarmonic recorded a sound library and so you could just buy that for like 300 bucks or something and you could play it on your keyboard and most people if it's underscore if it's the music under the dialogue most people cannot tell. So all

of the work not for the A-listers but the work for the upandcomers the newbies like me was just gone. So it's funny uh we talk about automation and accounting and how it's going to destroy jobs and all that stuff and I say well hey I have an experience in this. I've I've have I've my my first career got automated in many ways. So I decided that there wasn't enough work where I wanted to stick around and try to make it into the A-list movies cuz there were only like I don't know maybe a couple dozen chists in the in the whole city that worked

regularly. Yeah. Um so I picked up bookkeeping like I I got a job as a bookkeeper. Uh I was good with numbers, right? Musicians are good with numbers, accountants are good with numbers and I love technology. I was always into sound recording in college. And so when I got into QuickBooks, I realized, wow, this is fun. Like, and I had an opportunity to optimize some ways that the business I was working in was doing accounting. And that got me hooked. So, that's how I

ended up starting my practice was I was a QuickBooks Pro Adviser and gradually grew a bookkeeping practice and then connected with Zero when they were new. And that was a big opportunity. Um, so when I sold that firm, I thought, I need to go learn how it's really done because I didn't I didn't know. I was just making it up as I went. So, I went to work for a big accounting firm as a manager in their client accounting services practice, in their

outsourced accounting practice. And basically within the first, honestly, at the employee orientation is when I subconsciously knew I wasn't going to last. But it took about six months for me to consciously realize that. Um, and then I I very I I probably would have stuck it out longer, but I got recruited by a tech company in LA called Flowcast to go be their first uh product marketer. So I was the CPA on the marketing team doing webinars. Oh, how did you like that? That's such a that's such a pivot, right? I mean, you're kind

of just jumping from music to bookkeeping to the public accounting and now you're in marketing, right? Did Well, you think about it, right? like I I trained to be on stage to perform as a musician for 10 years from when I was 10 and I started playing the cello up until 20some and it was more than that. And so for me to do a webinar was actually pretty easy because hey you've got all your speaker notes right there. You've got a presentation prepared. You know

when you play a cello concerto you can't bring sheet music with you. You got to memorize for a recital. You got to memorize like an hour of music. An hour and a half of music. So, I uh I had a really fun time learning how to do that. I didn't even know what a product marketer was when I joined that company. They taught me. Oh, wow. And it sounds like it sounds like you loved it. It sounds like it was right up your alley. Oh, yeah. It's fun. I mean, we they had a big email list, you know, uh like a 100,000 accountants. And so, they would

advertise a webinar and I would get to create all the content. It's educational, right? And I would teach accountants about tech and they would bring thousands of people to these events. So, I really enjoyed it. I loved That's when I realized I love teaching, educating. Um, and so that's what that's what I'm want to do, you know, for the rest of my career is is help teach CPAs, Cas, EAS, accountants, bookkeepers how they can use technology to make

their lives better. Accounting doesn't have to suck. It's actually really amazing. I came into it as a musician because I was poor and I was working too much. And accounting gave me money and flexibility and I could work as much as I wanted and have a great lifestyle. So when I went into a big firm and I saw people that were so unhappy and overworked and underpaid, I thought this is so messed up. It does not have to be this way. So it's so it's it's so crazy. I think you're the only person I've ever

met in accounting that has such a like so much overlap with my own life because I had a recording studio when I was 18. Similar around 2007. and I lost it during the recession. I fell into accounting because I like the numbers and I like the tech. And then I'm always shocked by when I go to certain companies. I I always find that people accountants don't like doing the training. They don't like they don't like being in front of people. But that's where I thrive. I do like thousand person plus trainings at Google um all of the time for executives and it's it's so much easier than live

performances for two hours to your point. It's so much less stressful. U but then to your wait I got to ask you though. So I because I see the guitar. Is that a guitar behind you or is that a bass? I can't tell. Yep. Guitar. Nice. What kind of guitar is that? That's an ovation. It's a There's a whole story behind that because um when I was homeless, I actually had a pawn one of my favorite guitars like 15 years ago after I lost the studio and then my wife bought me a replica of it like three years ago kind of commen uh to commenserate like, hey, you know, you you can still enjoy your life and get

back into music. I'm not nearly as good as I used to be, but I still like to play. So yeah, I definitely can't play as fast uh as I used to. Yeah. But you know, the nice thing about the cello is that people just want to hear you play like beautifully lyrically, so you can get away with not with with losing the the speed. Well, that that's why you have the acoustic, not the electric, you know, like just a few chords and like a few notable songs and people are having a good time. But if you have your electric, people want you to start ripping and Yeah. I don't mean to derail this this podcast, but I I just got to ask like

what uh what kind of music did you do in your recording studio? Oh, I did a a variety of like I did a acoustic I liked like a lot of acoustic rock and then um and then like kind of folky stuff, but then I liked a lot of like heavy stuff like punk rock rock itself like overall rock genre, hard rock. I still have some albums I'll share with you some of them if you're ever interested. It'd be um it was a lot of fun. I mean, you don't meet a lot of there there are a good number of musicians in accounting, but you know, there's it's a it's a small group. So, yeah, I've met a few, too. I know I

know a guy I could introduce you who actually helped film the uh was in the studios filming the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. So, that guy is really So, I met there's a few of us. There's a few of us and he's really cool. He works at Google. Yeah, he works at Google with me. And so, that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Really cool. But I I I think it's really interesting to your point that like I I found centering all around that when you're like teaching and you like numbers. Accounting can be really really fun and you can really do it in interesting ways and help solve unique business problems, but you got to kind of break out of that mold of the general

public accounting of like let's just grind 60 hours, let's grind 100 hours and find maximum ways to build. And so how did you kind of break that mold and now it seems like your main focus is earmark. Is that correct? and what what's that like what's that looking like in this new stage for you? Well, I'll start with that first question because I think that's really important. Um, and it's something that I learned as a musician when I went to Northwestern University as a chist. Actually, I I went there as a like a general studies student and I played the cello and I was very serious about it in

high school. I was like the principal of my youth orchestra. I was um and then I was in the San Francisco youth symphony. Um, I I lived in Sacramento, so I would drive every weekend to go to San Francisco, and we got to play in Davies Hall. Our conductor of the youth orchestra was the assistant conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. It was like being in a like a a professional orchestra. It was that good. It drew from all over the Bay Area. Um, and I was definitely not principal at that in that orchestra. I was like barely got in. And so, uh, you went to Northwestern. I wasn't sure what I

wanted to do. And I got um I went to like a master class for the cello studio and I just saw how incredible these chists were and I said I don't want to do anything else. I just want to learn how to play like that. And so I asked if I could get lessons. Hans the cello teacher Hans Jensen he blew me off. He didn't want to teach me like and at the now now now I realize how ridiculous it was that me just like a student who didn't even audition for the music school wanted to get lessons from this legendary

professor and uh so he he said go take lessons with this guy over here you know one of the uh other professors you know adjunct and uh audition for me when we do auditions for next year and so I did that and I auditioned for him and I don't think I would have gotten in like normal through the normal process but I was already there and I think he just like intrigued. Here's this kid who like thinks he can do this. So, I was the worst chist when I joined that studio. Wow. Um out of like 20 chist, right? Or

something like that. And uh the thing that he taught me that is like the most valuable thing anyone has ever taught me in my whole life is it's how to focus and how to work. How to practice and this works for work too but how to focus and practice in a focused way. how to practice in a focused way where you are not sitting in that practice room for 12 hours a day and

where you can become a world-class musician in 4 to 6 hours and cuz when I started there like I thought all right I want to catch up I got to catch up to these other freshman chess I'm a sophomore like I'm way behind I'm like years behind I'm just going to go into this practice room and grind just be in there all day long and I did that to start and I was not making any progress. I was not getting better. I was just hurting myself. I was physically hurting myself. Yeah. You'll really get injured playing that long.

Yeah. It's Yeah. Very physically demanding. And and what he taught me is that like it it's really about how you practice, not about how much you practice. Now, the best musicians will still once they get good at practicing practice a lot, as much as they can. So, this is tricky, right? It doesn't It looks like they're just grinding away, but they're not, right? So he taught me how to practice and um basically the takeaway from that is that it's it's it's like in accounting we're doing it all wrong. We're focusing

on billing as many hours as possible but we would do so much more we would accomplish so much more and create so much more value if we focused on on how we are working the work that we are doing not the hours that we are putting in. I can especially with automation and AI now I can produce 10 times as much as any other accountant and I can do it in less time. So we we've got it all wrong in the profession. We have to move away

from this inputs hours mentality. Um and career success should not be defined by how many hours you sit at your desk every day. If we do that, we are going to destroy the profession because that's what's been happening for the past, you know, hundred years. You know, I I got to jump in there because I was actually thinking about this in the shower this morning, which is funny enough. And I I didn't plan it. I wasn't looking at your stuff and thinking of it, but it drives me crazy that I've known so many firms.

I've worked with tons I've worked with Deote, a bunch of smaller firms throughout my career and you'll have teams of 20 people going out to do an IPO or implementation and everyone knows the clients know you know that everyone on the team is booking 60 hours a week in order to launch the implementation. Everyone knows though there's only one person or two people on that team that are actually doing a bulk of the work. They're doing like prao distribution 90% of the work. You could cut most of that team but it's all optics. It's all like this is how much it costs to get it done

and we know the project's going to cost a couple of million so let's staff it to cost a couple of million and then you have a bunch of people just sitting there who don't like their lives or are glued to their desks and they're not learning anything and they're not adding any value and it it blows my mind. It doesn't make sense from an investing standpoint. It doesn't make sense from a career standpoint. I just don't it's it's madness but we keep doing it. We like I don't I was really don't know how we get out of that unless there's more education around like two two people into businesses, right? So yeah, I think the issue has been that it's profitable. It works. It

may not be optimal, but it makes a lot of money for the partners. And the partners grew up in that system. So they don't know any better. They don't know another way to do it. And they're in many ways prisoners of the system too because the firm is designed to incentivize and reward this kind of overwork. It's the metrics are all wrong. And that's what frustrated me about public accounting and why I couldn't handle it for more than six months or so is that everything was designed to

incentivize me to get more clients. Topline revenue. It was billable hours. It was not profit. Believe it or not, we're accountants. You would think that would be the most important number is your profit. But we didn't calculate that. We didn't know what that was. We had like realization but that was kind of a fake metric because everybody would fudge their numbers in order to hit it. Can I tell you a story please public accounting about? Yeah. Yeah, please. Please. So, one of the most talented

staff accountants that I worked with, a senior staff accountant who was in a different office from me. We were working on a project together. I was working on the tech side. She was working on the accounting side. And we got to know each other and she revealed something to me. very revealing uh which was her secret time sheet. And I found out that actually many people kept these. So this was a spreadsheet where she had all of her clients listed and she had the budget, the hours budget for

each client that she had either inferred from the billings or had been explicitly told. And then she would track her time in this secret spreadsheet. And if she started to go over on a client, she would move numbers from one to another. So when this happens, right, when you incentivize people to always hit their target, they will figure out how to hit their target if that's how you're going to bonus them and promote them. And so I realized all these

numbers that we were tracking when it came to actual hours versus budgeted hours were false. They were all based on a lie because if a enough people in the organization fudge the numbers which you know when you design a system like that I would expect probably more than half to be doing that maybe 80% uh there would be a few dieards but they won't last long right because they don't they want to be honest they leave they don't do well they don't get promoted that sort of thing when you have a system like that that incentivizes people to lie or to fudge it or to you know they

don't think of it that way necessarily uh then all your data is meaningless. You can't make decisions based on this data. And that's what we're doing as a profession. Um you go to a conference and you ask accountants, have any of you ever fudged a number on your time sheet? Have you ever put a number that was not the actual hours build on your time sheet? Every hand goes up. That happens all the time. So, you know, it's it's sort of like I mean it is madness. Yeah. We're all lying, right?

And we all know that lying like is the complete opposite of ethics, right? We should be aiming for the truth. But then to your point, it's so fascinating. I I when I try to get new clients now when I'm working on on the side and I'm like I am intentionally saying you should pay me a retainer and tell me the work you want me to do or a fixed fee and I'll be available for you to finish that work. That's going to work out best for everybody. Don't give me hours. don't get because then you're going to incentivize me to show up to a bunch of meetings that I'm gonna just listen to and have

like I'm I don't need to be a part of all that, right? You're not incentivizing the actual output. So, it just it drives me crazy. You're 100% correct. And oh my god, that was the worst, too. That was the best way to get hours. If you needed to pad your time sheet, join every meeting. And it's so easy because you can just go back to your calendar and you can fill in the time sheet from that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We would have these meetings with like 12 people on them. And I'm thinking, how much is this costing the company, right? And it goes further because then all those accountants then go into take those habits into tech like

me at Google. I can't tell you how often it is that you have these people who just set up a bunch of meetings for optics and be like, look how look how busy my calendar is. I have 30 hours of meetings a week and I have to do my regular job. It's like you should be rewarded on that. You should be rewarded on how few meetings you are and are able to do your job. Right. So tries to be but I know we're going on a tangent here. Productivity. Yeah. No, no. I mean this is really important because you're what you're saying is true is that we bring young accountants into public accounting students they graduate they go into public accounting it's like twothirds go into audit something like

that right the other third go into tax very few go anywhere else after school they go into public accounting and we train them we condition them to think this is normal and this is the way they should be working and you do that for a few years and you create a cult-like behavior you create an ingrained behavior that is really really hard to shake and so that's why even in industry where billable hours are irrelevant you still have people who think that way and it really holds back accounting and finance teams. Yeah. Yeah. And it I catch myself even telling teammates

like, "Well, I'll when I educated teammates around my career," I'm like, "Well, my personal view is that we shouldn't be doing this and this this, but for you to succeed in this job, you need to not agree with my personal view and you probably need to show up to meetings and do this optics and build these hours cuz that's how you're going to be incentivized here." And that doesn't feel great. We shouldn't be so misaligned with honesty, which is insane, right? Yeah. Right. That's an ethical foundational principle of our profession is integrity, honesty, and we

have built a system that teaches people to be dishonest. Yeah, it's it's completely insane. And I think I'm glad we're at least talking about it. I'm glad I wasn't I was having these thoughts in the shower. I'm like, how would I ever change this? And it's so funny that we're talking about it now. Um, I think the only way you can change it is through education and talking about it, which is what I like I would love for you to talk more about how you started earmark and I a little background on myself is I teach at community college. I teach at Aloney College because I've always thought like that's the next generation. We need to

get ahead of them and accounting got helped me get out of homelessness. It's such a great profession, but there's so many ugly parts of it. How can we make it better? You go by teaching the next generation. And then I started building out this podcast to find more more professionals who are aligning their ambition with actual values and character. And so like you making you're doing something similar with earmark which is really cool and you've done it for the next last couple years. So I'd love to learn more. Yeah. Well, the practical way it started was we started getting more and more

listeners to the podcast. And after like four years, I started getting people CPAs coming up to me at conferences saying, "Hey Blake, I learned so much from your show. I ought to get CPE for it." And it was like a joke and but then it people kept telling that joke. It's like a dad joke, right? And I appreciated it. And I thought, wait a minute, there's something to this. What if how could we do this? Could we offer continuing professional education for accountants for listening to this show? And CPAs have to earn 40 hours a year.

It's a lot. It's a week of your working life every year. And the way they do it currently is pretty awful if you ask me. It's go to in-person seminars and sit there in a conference room for a whole day, multiple days. Some people do it all in like one week. I'm like, how do you cram all the learning you need to do into one week every year? like I could not do that. I have ADHD. Traditional education does not work for me. So, uh that was not an option when I got my CPA. And the other option is like

webinars which is slightly better. But what happens is that people choose webinars that to attend based on their schedule, not what they need to learn. So here you are sitting in this webinar that's for a topic that's completely irrelevant to your career. That's not learning. Yeah, you're checking the box for compliance, but are you really improving your professional competency? Probably not. So, that was the idea with earmark. And so, I hired a guy on Upwork and I started building out

the designs for it. And then he convinced me to let him code the first version of the app. And after like eight months, we released it and it lets you earn CPE for listening to a podcast. So, you can listen to an episode of the accounting podcast. You can listen to an episode of my earmark podcast. We've got Oh my fraud. We've got tax bites. We've got federal tax updates. We've got Jackie Meyer show, which I can't remember the title of right now. I mean, we got like dozens and dozens of shows now. Hopefully soon. Your show. Yeah, I

would love to be on it. Yep. Right. Right. And and so, uh, it it lets you earn the CP on demand. Like you can listen to the episode, you can stop, start it whenever you want. When you're done, you take a quick quiz and you get your CPE. And it sounds simple, but like figuring out how to do that under the rules for CPA, that's so hard was well, it was kind of a fun challenge, right? It was like a CPA type challenge where I had to read the 66 page standards issued by the National Association of State

Boards of Accountancy. It's clear as mud. Clear as mud, right? And I didn't have AI at the time to help me uh help help me figure this out. So then I I read them all. I wrote down like what are the what's the minimum that we need to do to satisfy the on demand requirement and can we do this with audio and yes the answer is yes. So then we built the app to satisfy those requirements and handle the compliance. Uh and it works. So that was the genesis you know that's why we started earmark.

It's been going now for like three years. We've issued 120,000 maybe 130,000 CPE credits at this point. We've got, you know, tens of thousands of users on the app and the goal is just to help every accountant with a CPE requirement learn about it and give it to them as an option. And for me, going back to this discussion about talking about this stuff, the problems in the profession, right? That's what I do a lot on my show

is I expose the issues in the profession. Um, we talk about the challenges, we talk about what needs to be done to improve it, the culture, the work life balance, the hours, the pay. This is stuff that you would never hear about or rarely hear about in a state society meeting or at an AICPA meeting because those societies like they they just they don't talk about that kind of

stuff. And so a lot of people though are concerned about it. And and the the feedback has been incredible. There are so many accountants who felt like they were thinking the same way, but all the messaging has been top down for all these years. And why is that? Well, I think the simple answer is that the CPA dues are often not paid by the individual CPAs. They're paid by the firms. And the large firms are very,

very large. The big four, for instance, pay for their AICPA dues for all the CPAs who work for them. That's what hundreds of thousands of CPAs. Yeah. Could be. Yeah. Tens of thousands at least, right? I mean, like what? So, Deote is like 140 I don't remember what it is, but it's like it's a lot of people. Yeah. So, there's a lot of CPAs working there, right? And so, you know, they pay the money to like organizations like the AICPA.

And what is an AICPA president going to do? Who are they going to listen to? Follow the money. Yep. So, the the firms which have this messed up culture and, you know, structure that creates overwork and underpaid, you know, situations for accountants, right? They're the ones basically who have the voice in these organizations. And so that's why these organizations don't talk about this stuff. Um, but guess what? Thanks to social media and thanks to podcasting and uh alternative media, we can get the

word out. We can start discussions about this stuff. And that's what most accountants care about, right? Because most accountants are not firm owners and most accountants are not controllers and CFOs. They're the staff who are doing the work. They're on the front lines. they're the ones suffering. And if we want to make this profession better, we need to be talking about this stuff because we need to figure out how to make the profession a better place to work. And so that's my mission is by by making earmark available, we can

get that word out. And it's not just me anymore, right? It's it's so many other podcast hosts and uh creating awesome content. And there's technical on on there, too, right? and we're creating all sorts of new kind of like technical content that's more relevant for accountants. So, you know, driving accounting standards forward, that's another thing that I'm really passionate about. That's a wonky thing. I think that accounting standards like GAP is completely outdated and it needs to be rewritten and you're not going to hear anyone at the top talking about that,

you know. Yeah. And I I would love to talk I I have many many opinions on that. I think what and I'm looking forward to contributing technically to some of it like with my expertise from doing Revreck at Google and other companies. I'm so excited. Yeah, I'm really pumped to do it. But to your point, I think what I'm hearing from it is like you're actually coming in and speaking the truth like and that's something I've always liked about accounting is I think that's the goal is that like finance can like someone used to say it to me, one of the first CPAs I worked with who uh I I won't wasn't the

most competent person I ever worked with but he was a nice guy. He um he said the reason he became a CPA is because he wanted no one to BS the numbers to him. Like and that's kind of the goal is like anyone can fudge the numbers. Anyone in finance if you've worked in any business you can make any forecast show anything you want by playing with the assumptions. And the goal of accounting is well let's try to ground it in consistency and accuracy and con like make sure we can compare the information and get the truth behind it. And it's so interesting like truth is so fundamental. It's a science. It's meant

to be a science. There's supposed to be a truth behind it for us to have bridged into this falseness and these lies and like interpretations of GAP that are inconsistent and the SEC is not keeping up and the fazb is not keeping up and it's great like what you're doing with earmark needs to be done for the profession to keep its integrity. You need you need clear honest communication for us to have like to have that. It reminds me of a professor who he said the reason he likes accounting is because reputation was so important and

it's like you have a blank piece of paper and like if you're a CPA it's completely clean and as soon as you do something wrong in public you crumple it up and no matter how much you flatten it it's still going to it's going to be show the marks. But it's so many people are crumpling the profession publicly and and everyone knows it. Like everyone it's no one's surprised, but we're all pretending like it isn't happening, right? Yeah. It's this elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge at the top in the official leadership positions because it's uncomfortable,

right? And it it's a threat to to to the system. Um, and the regulators are totally like oblivious to what's going on in my opinion, just based on what they've done. Um, accounting is the science of business. That's what it should be in my opinion. Right. And so, you're right. We've we've gotten away from that. It's it's all loose. It's all estimates. It's all gray areas. It's like let's let's

make it look good. Um, and that that's not our true value to the economy, right? The the reason people trust CPAs is because they believe that we serve the public. We have an obligation to the public, not just the companies that we work for. So, if we want to really serve the public, we need to solve the accounting talent pipeline. We need to get more CPAs out there to help small businesses and medium businesses that can't afford to hire a CPA right now.

So, we need more CPAs. There aren't enough of us to do the work. That's a problem. Are about to retire, right? Like, we're going to lose a ton. Yeah, we're losing so many. PE firms are going to go wreck and buy them all and remove the licenses from them. So, that's a whole Oh, that's a that's a fun that's a fun topic for, you know, like the whole PE thing could be good, could be bad. Um, you know, it's it's Sorry to cut you off. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no, it's fine. I just I lost my train of thought. There's so much to

talk about when it comes to that, you know, like um I would actually love I don't know where you want to go with this, but I I love to talk about the problems of GAP and accounting standards with uh people who actually understand it even better than I do, which I'm sure you do, uh given your, you know, role at in Google Cloud and all that. Um but like, you know, when I when I look at this just as an outsider who never had to do any like real gap financials, I was always working with small businesses that that didn't have to do that level. Um, it just seems to me like it actually

relates to this whole tariffs conversation that we're having right now where the focus of accounting standards and tariffs is on tangible assets. But since the 70s, our economy has inverted from tangible to intangible assets. as you are well aware at Google cloud which is all about data intangible assets there's nothing physical at Google and yet it's one of the most valuable companies in the world right

it's all information economy is what people call it right so like we have a president who's he and his advisers seem to be living in this world of the 60s50s and60s where the American economy was 80 90% driven by tangible assets by manufacturing by making things, right? And um and but in the 70s, starting in the 70s and accelerating in the 80s and 90s, the that inverted where now the the

crazy stat is this that 90% of the S&P 500 market value is driven by intangible assets. Oh wow. I didn't know that stat. I would believe I believe it though. I believe it. Yeah. And it used to be just 50 years ago, it used to be the other way. Well, okay. Um, oh, here's an interesting thing. Can I jump off that point real quick? Yeah, go for it. So, what's so fascinating is then you go into the revenue because a lot of the value of S&P 500 is driven off earnings quality, right? And like earnings and the valuation is based off of earnings or forward earnings and all those

intangible all those earnings are based off topline revenue and all that's based off of ASC 606, you know, the revenue recognition standard. And what you find is a lot of these large companies play games like they're buying they're buying each other's revenue from each other in reciprocal transactions, right? And then if they can justify a purpose for it, they can recognize it as topline revenue and and increase their earnings. So like let's say Salesforce wants to buy uh sell its software to uh uh QuickBooks or into it or what whoever

owns them. Mhm. if they can say like, "Oh yeah, there's a justified reason they're buying it." And then and by a reciprocal purchase of a QuickBooks product, they both could take the topline revenue on it. And there's some like contra revenue guidance around it of like, well, you have to make a business justification. It has to be at fair market value. There's a ton of judgment around it. And most people don't even know that guidance or are not going to be sophisticated, especially the auditors around it. And so then my question instantly like how much of that intangible revenue or like that what's

you're basing your data off of is actually even real like is that or is it just inflated competitive per competitive reciprocal purchases? Yeah. Because if we if you if you are let's say you're Salesforce and I'm into it and we want to both inflate our numbers. We want to both have more revenue. We could just like buy unnecessary seats or licenses or we could overpay each other. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Exactly. And then in theory, who's going to challenge the

price? Yeah. Exactly. If you have to have some really good auditors who are really technical to get into that detail, but it's because of the materiality of these companies too, it's really easy to inflate 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, $40 million here and there to and and just keep nickel and dimming that from each other. and you don't use them like if you under dig it. How are you going to audit the seat usage by an internal your internal company like how many people are actually using that software? No, no 22-year-old auditor at Deote is going to be doing that. Yeah, there's no way, right? That's the problem. That's the

problem with the audit model, right? You got these like totally inexperienced recent grads who have never worked in industry before auditing like really experienced people who know how to manipulate the system if they want to. Yeah. So, it's uh Yeah, you're right. It's total. That's f I did not know that that was possible. Yeah, that is I wonder how much revenue is inflated that way. Yeah, I would be confident a lot. The guidance is explicit against it. Like, oh yeah, you're supposed to gross it. You're

supposed to net it down if you don't have fair market value or don't have a business use for it. It's like a payment to a customer. But it's just so hard for auditors to catch that and to justify it and so easy for someone to come on the other side and just you know how it is on the documentation side is to say yeah we got we we got fair market value it's at list price we bought it at or sold it at list price and or a reasonable discount and yeah this is they have 100,000 people in the organization so of course they're going to use it but no one's auditing that underlying usage right like the application of the

principle isn't reflective of the intent of the principle which I think you were getting at to earlier of like the issues with the regulators catching up, right? And the intent with ASC 606 was to like prevent this manipulation from happening and so that you get hundreds and hundreds of pages of guidance and rules and regulations, but accountants are smart and they'll figure out how to get around it. So it just it just creates a

huge compliance burden now for the businesses that don't have the resources to hire somebody who can be their you know ASC 606 expert or a whole team that can do it especially in the intangible space like you said which is probably 90% of you know US's like US's revenue or market cap but then there's only probably hundreds of true 606 experts in that space right which is insane. Yep. Yeah. So like my feeling on this is it's we need to go back to first principles

when it comes to accounting. We we we have to focus on measuring and reporting metrics that are not easy to manipulate because you can't build a house on a foundation of sand. Yeah. Very true. Yep. We right we need a strong foundation and you know the all the movement actually in in GAP over the past few years has been toward more

estimates and like you said the problem with estimates is that uh you know the auditors don't have the expertise to challenge them. Yeah. So like all this fair market value stuff that we're working on like it's hurting it's hitting earnings. It's like the one number that Wall Street really cares about that accountants create. Do you know this is the only EPS is the only ratio that's actually defined in GAP? We have all these ratios. Oh, that's so insane. I didn't I actually didn't know that. That's I learned something new today. That's insane. Yeah, EPS is the

only one that's defined. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's that's what that's what I Yeah. think and um and that number is so easy is is easy to manipulate, right? And it and it's because GAP is still based on like the the manufacturing logistics uh industries that it started in. Right. Yeah. gap was defined starting in the 1880s 90s in the guilded age when

European investors started pouring money into America and they sent over Scottish accountants to report on what was actually happening in those railroads and in those factories steel factories. So archaic. Yep. Yeah. And and so like that's why the focus of GAP is so much on cost. Cost accounting is the foundation of of GAP. And it's because at the time uh that was how you measured the success of a business. It was all

about optimizing your manufacturing process to control costs. And so the like uh what do you call it? The like a margin per unit was a super important metric because you could look at two steel companies and you could see this company's steel costs less than this company's steel and they're able to sell it for a higher price and so you can see which business is better and that's why we focus so much on accumulating costs in in accounting. It's like all cost

based, right? But but so that but then think about what happens when you switch to an intangible economy where you still have costs but there the value of what you create is not rooted in the cost. So like the value of like in manufacturing you can extrapolate the price from the cost. Yeah. Yeah. There's quality differences too, but really in the end quality kind of comes together

like all the railroads. Yeah, you have to, you know, have they have to have a similar quality. So like basically you can you can compare this like so the the cost determines the price you can or the profit you can make. That's it. Cost determines profit. But in the intangible economy of like Google, the cost does not determine the profit. Yeah. Yeah. It's Yeah. And it's so fascinating. And then the underlying cost drivers, things like data centers or these long-term assets, they can change depreciation methods on like you see it very

regularly. Oh, EPS is a little short. Just did it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, oh, we're a little short on EPS this year. Let's extend the depreciation of our data centers like or or we're having a bad year. Let's go from uh seven to five years. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ex. It's absolutely crazy. But hey, I I want to I feel like we and I could talk probably for hours and I'm looking forward to being on your show and being supporting uh earmark, but I want to just hear like what's next on your docket for you. How can my listeners support you? How can I continue to support you? And I'm looking

forward to continuing the conversation after two ways. One is listen to the accounting podcast. Find that in your podcast player. Go to accounting.show in your web browser. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We're also on YouTube now. We live stream on YouTube which has been really fun. Sounds blast. That sounds And we have built a actually a bigger audience on YouTube now for our podcast than on our podcast feed. Uh that's really cool because you can interact with us. You can comment as we talk about the latest stories. And I don't know if I mentioned what our show

is about. It's a weekly news roundup for accountants. So whatever is in the news that is relevant to accounting and tax professionals, that's what we talk about. Awesome. So, the last few weeks it's been a lot of tariffs and Doge because Doge has been going into the IRS and doing some stuff, a lot of stuff. And the tariffs impact all of us uh in the economy, but especially accountants because, you know, we're working for these businesses that now have to deal with sudden cost increases. And so, I you know, we talk about that. We we're not afraid to get into political issues that relate to accounting. Um, in my

opinion, we should be talking about that stuff because especially when it comes to tax. It politics and and accounting merge together in tax. Yeah. So, we we aren't afraid to do that. I know a lot of like CPU providers are afraid to talk politics because they don't want to piss people off. Uh, but you know, I think you can do it and you can do it in a rational way and we can approach it in a numbersbased way, right? Objective, scientific. Let's talk through the numbers. Yeah. And sometimes the numbers

change my mind. And I I I don't I'm not a partisan person. Uh I, for instance, I I like what Doge is doing. I've been following that and I enjoy it. Um I think the tariffs are one of the worst ideas a president has ever had since McKinley did it, you know. So I can think both things. And what's great is that our audience appreciates that. Um and I get called I get called MAGA on LinkedIn and I get

called liberal snowflake on Twitter. So I think I'm doing something right. That means you're doing something right. That means you're exercising your freedom of speech and searching for the truth, right? Because there's no there's no hard line. What else can we do? What everyone should subscribe to earmark, right? I'm going to I'll subscribe and I'll put some stuff on it. Like that's like definitely something to do, right? And here's the the best part. You don't even have to pay a dime to use it. That's part of our public service. You can go to earmark.app app. You can download the app from the the earmark app from the app store and you can earn

one CPE for free per week. If you want to support us, it's just $150 a year to subscribe and that gets you unlimited CPE. It gets rid of the ads, some other perks, some more stuff we're going to build. Uh and and we've got, you know, thousands of subscribers now. It's amazing. So, it's making the work we do possible. Um, so that's that's really it. Get the earmark app and you know, also just like use your voice, speak

out about how we can improve this profession. Um it it is really the individual voices of accountants that made this latest change happen with CPA lensure that's going around the states where we're getting rid of that 150 hour rule and bringing it down to four years which I believe is essential to attracting students who don't want to be in school forever. Yeah. Um definitely you know the value of traditional education has declined in relevance or in you know not not maybe uh in like

total value but basically in relative value. Yeah definitely. Yeah. These days. So yeah, um that is how you can support me earmark app and listen to the accounting podcast. Well, I'll be doing that personally and then I'll also put the links below and I'm looking forward to working with you on getting webinars up and being on your show too. Blake, it's a pleasure. I really would if you're ever in the Bay Area, I'd love to take you out or when next time in LA area, I'll I'll give you a call, man. I've really enjoyed our conversation. That that would be awesome. Uh looking forward to it. Can't wait to have you on my show. Yeah, can't wait.