Lochhead, Yoon: What Accountants Do when AI Makes Accounting Free | The Distruptors

Transcript

Liz Farr

Welcome to The Disruptors. I’m your host, Liz Farr from CPA Trendlines. My guests today are the Category Pirates, aka Christopher Lochhead and Eddie Yoon, and they are here to talk about their new book, Creator, Capitalist. Welcome to the show. Eddie and Christopher,

Eddie Yoon

Thanks Liz, for having us on. This is going to be super fun.

Christopher Lochhead

It’s a privilege to be with you. Liz, it’s great to see you.

Liz Farr

Yeah, it’s going to be fun. Now, this episode is different from all my previous episodes, because, first of all, you’re not accountants, and you don’t work directly with too many accountants, but I am absolutely convinced that the ideas in this book and your work as Category Pirates are essential for accountants to start thinking about. And now we’re not going to be able to be able to cover everything in this book, because this is, this is a freaking tome. This is 670 pages, but I want accountants to get a taste of it. So, so if you are game, then I am too.

Christopher Lochhead

We also must thank you for wearing pink today in honor of our book cover. Well, it was wonderful and wonderful, or should I say Pretty in Pink.

Liz Farr

Thank you very much. Now, my listeners are mainly accountants and people in the accounting space, so they’re all knowledge workers, and up until now, knowledge workers have been the most valuable class of workers, but in this book, you assert that knowledge workers are in big trouble. Why is that?

Eddie Yoon

Well, I think in the age of AI, and I’m sure your audience is kind of, their minds are buzzing with this is that what we kind of have tried to name, the book that I think people kind of intuitively understand, is that knowledge is essentially free, right, and that the things that you work hard, your audience has worked hard to get the education, to pass the CPA, to get all other kind of credentials and specializations, and, you know, international tax, this or that, like all of that expertise really becomes a commodity at some level. Not to say that it’s not valuable and that it’s going to go away. The value will go away immediately, but what we talk about is the knowledge. If you think about knowledge worker, historical Liz, kind of level, one has been what we call memorize and regurgitate. And people have gotten pretty far on that, on that task, right? And so I came out of a consulting and I think accounting probably in the Big Four fashion, the same way of you have accountants that you know, you have all the credentials you do the work, but you specialize to get, you know, extra expertise and pricing power, and, you know, advance your career. And you could do great as humans, specializing in things that you could memorize and regurgitate on command that nobody else was doing. And that’s fantastic. But when AI can do that faster and more comprehensively than you, then that’s a real problem, because the level above regurgitate and memorize is something we call synthesize and curate. Some people can do that, right? So I look across different things. I can I can simplify, boil it down to what matters, and then I can tell you what’s really important for them with that. But then the knowledge kind of worker pyramid gets really hard, and it’s a rarefied air when you’re then called to make what synthesize and curate is. Those are obvious connections. Liz, yeah, okay, you know, you you’re in this lane. You know, we had an issue with our accountants on Category Pirates where, hey, Creator Capitalist is selling well, what are your sales in Ohio, in California? And I’m like, Why? Because the law is there for sales tax are very specific and different. I’m like, Oh, I did not know that, right? And so that’s an obvious connection. Of you guys sell books and you hit the thresholds. But the non obvious connections, that’s where really category design and creator capitalists really exist. And that part AI does not yet do well yet, right? But the truth of the matter is, most knowledge workers don’t also do that as well. They’re very happy in their lane, memorizing and regurgitating. And the folks who are kind of kind of, quote, fat and happy. There are not going to be happy campers when somebody equipped with AI says, I can do that better, faster and cheaper than any of you can. And so the race, what’s left is really that non obvious connection, which you know folks who are kind of traditionally in fields where you color in the lines. That’s a. Really hard thing to do.

Liz Farr

Yes, that’s very, very hard, very hard. And now, now you a word that you used, which most accountants do not know about, is category design. So can you give, give us like a 30,000 foot definition what this is, because I’m sure my audience has never heard of this.

Eddie Yoon

Well, I’ll go in the Christopher can jump in his he’s the Godfather, but of category design, but the way that we think

Christopher Lochhead

the Co-God Father, I’m one of the godparents. You’re another one. Just so, you know,

Eddie Yoon

I mean, so Liz, when we think about business, right, in the way that I would frame it is that, you know, everything we value, we’ve been taught to value. And that’s a phrase that I’ve stolen from Christopher, right, and that the, I would say 95% of what we’ve learned about business is based on all kind of the military, right? You think about supply chain logistics, that’s from the military. Every book on strategy is from the military. I mean, the epitome, Michael Porter’s book is literally called Competitive Strategy. And when you think about the military, right? And you kind of point, in fact, with what’s going on in Iran, and, you know, the US like it’s a zero sum game. For somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. And that’s kind of the traditional thinking of business, right? What category design is? It rejects the premise that it’s a zero sum game, and that what? And that’s why we tend to, we call it the ultimate business strategy, because we can compete, you know, my accounting is better than your accounting. Or we can say, you know, what? How do we design and dominate a new category that doesn’t quite exist that actually makes the pie substantially bigger than it is today, right? And that in a world where, effectively, when you know you say category design, that is the art of saying the way that the world is is not the way that the world will be. And I’m going to frame name and claim an entirely new definition of what that looks like on the basis of, you know, what the product design is, what the company design is, and what the category design is, aka the magic triangle. So from an accounting standpoint, it’s, it’s actually quite interesting. I would say that the where you kind of get that interesting the accountants who will do well in category design are the folks who are like, hey, you know, the government has just changed the laws on what you can capitalize, from an R&D perspective to encourage business investment. Oh, okay, that’s new, and that’s different, right? And so how do we define what accounting looks like in that way where, and then, similarly, in a world where, you know, people are defining new categories today, right? The accounting treatment for some of those things don’t quite exist yet. And so I would say a category designer in an accounting frame is somebody who’s going to say, you know, I’m not looking to beat out my other competitors on how to do liquid natural gas accounting for something that’s kind of traditionally been there. But when Elon sends and builds a lunar base and is creating AI satellites in space, like, does anybody know what the tax treatment is like in outer space? I’m not really sure what that’s like, right? And so a category designer in your space will say, I’m going to be the pioneer in frame name and claim what that looks right,

Liz Farr

right, right? And I can think it’s just as you were talking, I could think of multiple examples in the accounting space. You know, there’s a firm called Tri-Merit that specializes in R and D credits, that’s all they do. And the other way that it’s relevant is that as AI takes over a lot of the basic compliance functions, the bookkeeping and the tax prep and maybe even audits. That means that to be valuable and to really even exist, they’ve got to move up into the advisory space, which is substantially different, substantially different,

Eddie Yoon

100%. Well, and especially I have a buddy of mine who used to be our neighbor, and he’s a tax specialist, and he was telling me about the deal he did for a private equity firm that really kind of cemented his career. And, you know, I to be honest, Liz, I understood like 40% of what he was talking about, but that’s just. To me. But like, what he essentially mapped out for his his client, which is private equity owned, was, I have identified a set of acquisitions that we’re going to make, non obvious. I mean something, they’re related in the category. They were in the, you know, oceanic area, so kind of not an obvious geography. And what he identified was they had, I’m going to get this totally wrong, certain amount of tax liens and treatments were in the acquisition of it. It allowed for an accounting windfall to occur. Like it was one of those, like it was a tax deal, the acquirer, the target, had some tax benefits for the parent company to acquire. And it totally changed the IRR and the payback for the PE deal. And, you know, the PE guys were over the moon excited about it. And it’s not to say that, like, that’s, you know, the only realm of, like, kind of category design within the accounting space. But I think the idea of, I mean, even, even you look at kind of the, what you might call it, the the zero energy credits and the automotive space, like, you know, Tesla doesn’t get to be where it is without the tax treatment of, like, Hey, if you’re a legacy car maker and you don’t have EVs, you’re going to be charged a pollution credit. And you got to, you know, you got to buy these from a company that is producing good stuff. So, you know, anytime there’s going to be regulatory capture, there’s going to be an accounting opportunity. And what we know, you know, we’ve seen this, right? Pirate Christopher, is that, I mean, what Andrew Yang is talking about right now in the threat of AI. He’s proposing some radical, radical stuff, right? Don’t tax the humans tax the tokens. Pretty radical idea, right? And so I Is there an accounting expert on that? I don’t know, but the first one who does, I think, will do very well.

Liz Farr

That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. And now your book Creator Capital, which I think you know this, is a book that is going to be the most important book that I read this year. This encourages people like me to elevate beyond knowledge workers to become creator capitalist. So what? What the heck do you mean by creator capitalist? Pirate Christopher, thank you.

Christopher Lochhead

A creator capitalist is somebody who creates net new value for a living at the highest level? That’s what it is. So. Liz, if you go back to some of your comments at the beginning of our discussion about knowledge workers and how accountants and auditors and CFOs and tax planners and you know all of the sub categories under the mega category called accountant, they’re knowledge workers. And what’s happened because of AI, is the biggest change in work since Peter Drucker coined the phrase knowledge worker, right? Drucker created the category of knowledge worker almost 70 years ago now, to distinguish those of us who work with our muscles and those of us who work with our minds. If you look at what the definition of a knowledge worker, if you look at what that is, and if you look at why your parents wanted you to become an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor, those were the big three, right? Those are the most laudatory knowledge workers. They’re at top, top of the mountain of knowledge worker. And if you look at the definition of a knowledge worker, it’s roughly this, somebody who acquires highly valuable knowledge and gets paid to apply that knowledge to affect some kind of an outcome, to produce some kind of a result. And that’s what accountants do, that’s what lawyers do, that’s what doctors do, and that’s what the vast majority of executives do, and white collar knowledge workers do in November of 2022 that began to change and Eddie touched on it. November 2022 is when ChatGPT launched, and what that really has meant over time is the value of existing knowledge because of AI gets closer to free every day. So if your entire living is predicated on knowing things other people don’t know, and being able to apply that knowledge to affect a known outcome, a desirable result, and now knowledge is close to free. What do you do? Then last year, in 2025 something else happened that most people didn’t notice. Last year was the year of the AI agents, yes, and you can think. Of agents is essentially small automations, you know, or for those of us who’ve been around for a while, and agent is a macro on steroids in the AI age, well, with the introduction of agents, execution, or the ability to do things get shit done, is getting closer and closer to free every day. So we now live in a world in 2026 where knowledge is getting closer to free and execution is getting closer to free. And here’s the problem, the vast majority of us, Eddie and I included, grew up in a world where we were taught, knowledge is power. It’s on the halls of universities and colleges and high schools. And we grew up in a world where people said, oh, ideas are a dime of death, and it’s all about execution, you know? And when Larry Bossidy wrote the book Execution, that’s what everybody said. And so we grew up in a world where we heard these two primary things, knowledge is power, and ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s Can you execute? Well, now in 2026 thanks to AI and AI agents, knowledge is close to free, and execution is getting closer to free every day. Well, the AHA Liz is that roughly 70% of what knowledge workers do is apply existing knowledge inside an existing system to affected execution outcome that is now being replaced by AI at a very low cost. And so now, what the now? What is nobody gets displaced by technology ever in the history of humanity, what they get displaced by is where value lives and the marketplace moves so back in the day when there was no running water. People had to go and get the water. Well, the valuable people then were the big, strong people who could walk to wherever the water was and carry that water back to where the people were. That was really valuable. And then modern water systems appear. That’s not valuable anymore. We don’t need people to do that, right? So the value shifts because of the tech, right? So we don’t get replaced by the tech. The tech makes things, something that was valuable, less valuable. And so now the question is, okay, well, where did the value move? So here’s the big aha, about 70% of what accountants do all knowledge workers really is execute with existing knowledge, right? So now, what a creator capitalist is, is somebody who doesn’t do that, or doesn’t do very much of that, but primarily what they do, they spend 70% of their time creating net new things. And so the shift from knowledge worker to creator capitalist, we would posit, we’d ask people to consider, is the biggest shift in the definition of work in 70 years. That shift is moving from knowledge work to creator capitalist work. And a creator capitalist is somebody who uses AI to solve different and unique problems in unique and different ways to make a very big difference at scale. And so the shift in value goes to creation from execution, creating net new things versus deploying existing things, the value shifts to judgment, to taste, to the framing of problems. What’s worth working on. If knowledge and execution are free, then or close to free, then the people who are the most valuable are the ones who decide, what are the things we need to work on, what are the problems, what are the opportunities? Where are the breakthroughs? And how do we how do we create opportunity there and then go execute against the opportunity that we create in new categories and new categories of the way we live, work and play. And so here’s the AHA, the shift is going from applying existing knowledge to creating new categories and new value in the ways that we live, work and play. And the people who can make that shift from 70% knowledge execution to 70% creation are going to be the most valuable, most innovative and creative humans ever that have ever existed. That’s what a creator capitalist is right now. And so we’re living at a time Liz, where roughly 50% of Americans are afraid of AI, where we have some politicians saying we should stop doing AI, or we should freeze all development of AI. And are there certain things around AI? AI that we have to be very mindful of and concerned about, and does governance matter, and does transparency matter, and do we need some regulation? And do those, we absolutely do, and those are serious concerns. However, overall, we’ve done a shitty job, because AI is the greatest innovation in human history. AI holds the promise of unleashing a level of creativity, innovation and new categories of thinking in the way we live, work and play like no other thing in the history of humanity. And most people are worried about their jobs and worried about the downside, as opposed to asking themselves, what can I create now? What am I able to do now that I was no that I wasn’t able to do yesterday? And that’s where we are. And so Creator Capitalist is a new lens on your career. It’s a way of thinking about what value you really have. There’s a big part of the book on the value of your value understanding what’s called the Four capitals and how you leverage those four capitals. And I know this is going to sound corny to some, but to create the career of your dreams and AI is the breakthrough that many of us were waiting for to be able to do that, particularly at some scale,

Liz Farr

Exactly you know. And I saw an example of somebody using AI as an accountant just this morning on LinkedIn. This woman who runs a micro firm, she’s she’s a mom, working mom. She works 15 hours a week on her accounting firm. That’s because that’s all the time she has. And she posted that using Claude, she did in 20 minutes what it used to take her eight hours to do when she was a Corporate Controller. So you know that not only unlocks the advanced level of work she can do, but unlocks time that she can do other things

Eddie Yoon

100% I mean, we just had that this morning where we had a three hour Ask Me Anything session on our book, Creator Capitalist, and in a few hours this morning with Claude, I turned it into a 15-20, page summary and synthesis of what we talked about. And you know you think about that. One is that back in my consulting days, it would have taken a team about two weeks to do what I did in two hours. That’s one and now somebody can read a document in 15 minutes instead of listening to the whole three hour AMA. And you can do this at scale, right? And so I think the what you’re laying out is the ability to shrink time, which is incredibly valuable. And you know what, what this person is doing on Claude is outstanding. We would also say, you know, we’ve built out a Pirate Eddie bot and a Pirate Christopher bot on Delphi and because, you know, we have the, you know we all have the you call our accountants, can they? Can I bother you with dumb questions? And, you know, and so we have an agent that is built on all of the stuff that we’ve ever written, that people can have a conversation with us about that we don’t have to be involved in. So you save time, you create time with agents that we don’t have to be present. We can just do that. And that’s, you know, a six figure revenue stream that didn’t exist last year, that any accountant can, frankly, do, not only to generate incremental revenue, but Liz. This is the important part is you get a client hooked on an AI agent of you, they’re never leaving. They’re sticky, and they’re stuck because they’re like, Wow, I may not be able to get Liz, but I, like, AI, Liz, I’m going to just keep asking questions and right? And that, the the four capitals that Christopher talked about, you have, you know, financial capital, right? So the the LinkedIn accountant is basically saying you could have a whole firm without having headcount necessarily, like, that’s, that’s really interesting from a which allows you to build, you know, your it changes the margin structure of what an accountant tent or accounting firm can look like. You have reputation capital, right because, and that’s the outcomes that you deliver. And one of the things that you know, you talked about in our in our prep thing is, like, typically, accountants are like, hey, my goal is to get you, you know, in compliance, you know, and that check the box, that’s the outcome, versus a, let me speed up decision making, because I can get back to you so much quicker, so that we can do all this kind of stuff, right? So I, you know, the accountant goes from you check the box to I accelerate your business because I can help you think through and save time. There’s relationship capital we just talked about, you create an AI version of your accounting firm or you and that you get more clients. Frankly, you know, the way that you find an accountant word of mouth, right? And it’s right, and it’s hard to know, because there’s not like a Yelp for accountants, of like, oh, I, you know, want this for that. Or like, we for Christopher and I, you know, we had to look. We have our own individual accountants. We have to find one for Category Pirates. Like, actually, what I was doing beforehand was finishing up our K1s and figuring out, you know, Category Pirates, you know, taxes and all that kind of stuff and whatnot. But like, you know, the ability to say, I’m going to test drive accountant Liz by using her AI first. And if I like that, then I’m going to stick with that, right? So relationship capital is there. And then finally, intellectual capital. Like, you know, I imagine there are accountants that write books about their specialty, and probably more technical and whatnot. But the thing that I think I’ve been so intrigued by is, you know, we have pirates in our academy, Nick and Lydia, that are helping lawyers solve for AI and not be AI invisible, which would be relevant for accountants, too, but Right? The part that’s so fascinating to me is that for a lawyer to be effective, he or she needs to be great at the non legal, legal things that are related to a legal case, that aren’t about the law, but are about the everyday life and transformation and outcomes. And you know, my financial advisor, you know, at Merrill Lynch, when I talked to him, he goes, you know, talking about investing is a fraction of what I do. And I was like, how is that possible? He goes, Oh, I spend most of my time helping my clients. You know, with mortgages. I’m like, why? He’s like, Well, you know, people are, you know, do I buy a second house or a vacation house, and this and that and and it’s not just I get you a secure mortgage that’s cheap or whatever it’s. How do I help you stay out of the tall grass because you were stupid and you bought a vacation home that you didn’t need or didn’t use, or it’s going to create all this Hee Haw in your life and blah, blah, blah, and that I imagine the space of intellectual capital that is free reign for your audience is the non accounting. Accounting, yes, and it’s all the wisdom, the gray hair, the battle scars, the, I can’t tell you who, but boy, oh boy. You better not step on that land mine type of a thing, right? And so I think the four capitals becomes a really interesting space, because, I mean, you tell me if I’m wrong. Liz, my my understanding is that the pipeline of people who are going into accounting is not as robust as it once was, and needs to be higher, and that a creator capitalist accountant is teeny, right? Like we need more accountants. We need more accountants that are creator capitalists equipped with AI. And the ones that are building intellectual capital about non accounting, accounting are going to be the ones that thrive. And really, you know, change the game from, do you want to be an accountant? Well, that seems like a lot of detail orientation, and maybe really busy at certain peaks of the year, like no with AI, you smooth out the workload, and we’re talking about really interesting stuff. And you know, you what? The thing that Christopher said at the very outset of like a creator capitalist, is going from someone who’s 70% reactive to 70% proactive. Yes, are. There are few fields like accounting that are just more inherently reactive. I need to file my taxes. I need to do this. I need to go find somebody, an accountant, who says, Dude, I can help you stay out of jail. Can you bring me on? Or I can accelerate your business? That’s an entirely different category.

Liz Farr

Oh, yeah, yeah. And there are a lot of accountants who are recognizing that, and who are recognizing that what they really bring value with is helping business owners reach their goals, improve their businesses. It’s it’s not the reactive rear window perspective, but it’s looking out the windshield, looking at what is coming and what’s even around the corner. And that is what technology and AI are giving accountants the bandwidth to do.

Eddie Yoon

yeah, it. It’s really remarkable. I think, to your point, the the accountants of the next 20 years who embrace AI, who are creator capitalists, will look nothing like the accountants in the last 20 years.

Christopher Lochhead

Nothing, oh no, nothing. Because their job won’t be primarily. Knowledge based right knowing the new reg change in how certain assets get depreciated, from a tax perspective, will not be valuable the way that it is today. What will be valuable will be judgment. What will be valuable will be helping people frame things. What will be valuable? Will be helping people create things right? Those things will be valuable. Judgment, where to apply focus, where to apply attention, how to frame a problem, how to think about a problem. And therefore, once you, once you, you know the famous Einstein quote, If he was given an hour to focus on a problem. I forget exactly the quote, but essentially what he said is, you know, I’d spend 55 minutes focusing on the problem and five minutes focusing on the solution, right? All these things are part of the in category design. We call it a from to from the old way to the new way. What’s going on right in front of our eyes right now is the status quo of what it is to be a knowledge worker is melting in front of our faces, and why it’s not on the cover of The Wall Street Journal all day, every day, we’ll never know, because the biggest it’s the biggest change in what work is in all of our lifetimes by definition, Right? And so the accountant of the future has a a co founder of their career, called AI. And I want to go back and underscore something that Eddie was talking about at a high level. There’s really two big use cases, and there’s overlap between them, of the kind of usage of AI that we’re talking about here. So the first one is, if you think about your use of Claude or chatGPT or Grok or whatever your favorite AI is, business people now are creating custom versions of those. And how they’re doing it, of course, is they’re a ingesting a whole bunch of intellectual capital, content data, into an LLM, a large language model, and populating it, and what’s called training the LLM on the data, right? So imagine I’m an accountant. I take everything that I’ve ever learned and I dump it into an LLM. I take the entire tax code and dump it into an LLM, or whatever areas of focus and expertise that I have. So I create an AI, a large language model that is the sum total of everything that I know and that is known in my field, in my category of work. And then we train the AI on the data. In addition, of course, the AI gets smarter every time we use it, right? That’s why the AI we use today will be the dumbest AI we use going forward, because the AI we use tomorrow will be smarter, because 100 million people banged on the AI today, and will benefit from what the AI learned today tomorrow. So when you do that, you create for your own use inside your own firm, even if it’s just you as an accountant or if you’re the CEO of Deloitte, what you’ve created is a knowledge base of everything that can be accessed by anybody at all times, incredibly powerful, and it gets smarter and smarter and smarter with every single prompt now. So that’s if you will. That’s more of an internal use case. Eddie talked about the bot, the agent, and we use a product called Delphi. And what Delphi allows you to do is a very similar thing, dump in everything you know and create a digital robot of yourself. That’s that’s the name Pirate Eddie bot, and Pirate Christopher bot. By the way, the Pirate Eddie bot is way better looking and smarter than the Pirate Christopher bot. the pirate, Christopher the pirate. Christopher bot’ll swear at you. And if you ask it to get drunk with you, it will anyway. And so the second piece of this, and he mentioned, he mentioned Lydia, who’s building this out. Imagine a bot of yourself, an agent of yourself as an accountant, that all of your clients can go and use so they get the benefit of everything you know, plus plus, plus, and you don’t have to talk to them. And just like if you wake up at 3am and you’re concerned about something, or maybe you just can’t get to sleep, and you’re curious about something, you can fire up Grok and spend three hours with Grok on the thing that’s keeping you up at night, or chatGPT or whatever, because it’s always there. Well, the Pirate Eddie bot is always there. The pirate Liz bot, if Liz is the accountant and I’m the client. Is always there. And so this idea of a building AIs that represent the sum total of our expertise, means everybody who works with us can access that, and we can access the same of their expertise, right? Used to be said that with knowledge workers, the assets walk out the door every day because they’re in every they’re in everybody’s head. Well, now they’re in the LLM, right, and they’re there, therefore everybody’s knowledge, everybody’s experience, is monetizable by everybody else in the firm. And then by having client facing AIs like the Pirate Eddie bot, we can now deliver a level of service to clients that is mind boggling, because we don’t have to be there, and we’re at the point in our world because, of course, we’re creator capitalists too, where people consume our books and our courses and they do our podcasts and all these sorts of things, and then they go and they jam with the Pirate Eddie bot, and they get to 90% of the result that they want. And then they show up in our Category Design Academy, and for the last 10% they jam on that idea with Eddie and I and Bri and then they get their answer. And so this is a small example of a radical new work design called Becoming a creator capitalist.

Eddie Yoon

But the Pirate Christopher bot is more fun

Christopher Lochhead

Yeah, I love it. I love it now. Now I want to shift to another thing in that you talk about in your book, which is outcomes. Now, this is really relevant for accountants, because for decades, for way too long, they have done their pricing based on their input, based on the labor it takes. But what’s no one cares. No one cares. No one cares how many hours it took. No one cares. Eddie and I have employed accountants for decades. Okay, in May of this year, I turned 58, years old. I started my first company when I was 18. Math is not my strong suit, but that sounds like 40 years. I’ve worked with a lot of accountants. I’ve been an officer and a director of many public companies. I’ve worked with many CFOs. I’ve worked with many heads of audit committees on boards of public companies, all the way down to my personal tax accountant and everybody in between. And I could tell you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we pay for the outcomes. Can I tell you a quick story about this? Okay, so my accountant, my personal accountant, Greg Finley, he retired, for which I want to throttle him, but he’s the only reason I have any money, and so he helped me get to the outcome. I don’t know what I paid him every year. I never looked at his bill once. I just paid it. I don’t care, because what did he do? He protected me. What did he do? He helped me preserve what I worked so hard to make, and then when I was getting ripped off by Morgan Stanley, he helped put me in touch with my new investment guy at Oppenheimer, Dave. And guess what? Dave has beat the S&P 500 every single year since I’ve had Dave. And I met him through who Greg and when I needed a lawyer on something that I didn’t know. Who did I call Greg? And then here’s the story. Actually, I sort of got two. There’s a lot of great stories. One of them is me and a buddy of mine used to go surfing a lot in Fiji. So we had this genius idea one time, after surfing all day and drinking beer all night, we were going to set up a nonprofit in Fiji so that we could write off all of our surf expenses to Fiji, so we come up with this genius idea. We come back and I call Greg, and I tell him this genius idea. And he says to me, this is exactly what he said. You ready? Liz, so you want to go to jail, you stupid. And then he swore at me whole bunch. And he goes, Look, this is what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna make your money. You’re going to pay your taxes, you’re going to thank God you live in America, and you’re going to get on with your life. And I said, Okay, great, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And then at one point in my relationship, I own stock in private companies. And sometimes those companies go public, sometimes they get acquired. Sometimes I sell that stock while the company’s still private, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So in this one particular case, I had sold a major stock position in a private company prior to its IPO, and for whatever reason, it got the IRS very excited. And I. Got audited for the first and only time in my life. Guess what I had to do for the audit, Liz?

Liz Farr

um, you had to produce all your accounting records.

Christopher Lochhead

No,

Liz Farr

your bank statements.

Christopher Lochhead

Guess what I had to do? Guess what Christopher had to do?

Liz Farr

Oh, you had to do nothing.

Christopher Lochhead

F’N nothing. Matter of fact, this is all I did. He sent me a form on DocuSign, giving him power of attorney to represent me in this manner. I signed the form. About a month later, he called me and he said, we’re done. That was it. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what he did. He said they had some questions. He showed him the shit, and they went away the these are the kinds of outcomes that we want. And I can tell you categorically, I love Greg Finley. He’s an incredible man, and he took care of me. He gave a shit about me, and he applied his creativity and his expertise to help me keep and keep the money that I made and build it and grow it and keep me protected. And those outcomes are incredibly valuable. I would do anything for Greg and we get together now once a year and have a nice lunch and have a great time, and I love hearing about his family. But these are the outcomes. The question is, how do you produce? Greg Finley, like outcomes in an AI first world. And I think we think at least a proposal for the answer to that question is consider becoming a creator capitalist.

Liz Farr

Exactly it means taking what you know and putting it into some format so that it can be applied at scale. And it’s the at scale part that is so damn difficult, because every person is a little bit different, you know. But if you can figure out enough of the commonalities that you can leverage the commonalities so that you can get to the 90% that’s the same, then all you need to worry about is the 10%

Christopher Lochhead

that’s right.

Liz Farr

That’s not

Christopher Lochhead

That’s right and right. Now, hundreds of people are working with the Pirate Eddie bot, and we’re here talking to you. So right now, I mean, this time shifting thing is real. Right now, the two of us are here hanging out with our friend Liz, and right now, countless people are interacting with our bots and with our AI, and they’re working on category design plans, and they’re working on marketing plans, and they’re testing whatever it is they’re doing, right? They’re they’re trying to figure out they’re different. They’re trying to figure out what their superpower is. They’re trying to figure out their positioning. They’re trying to whatever it is they’re trying to do, right? And so in a very real, no bullshit way. Liz, we are sitting here hanging out with you, and our AIs are helping countless people in a way that we couldn’t with a podcast, or we couldn’t with a book, or we couldn’t with a newsletter. And interestingly enough, if you combine all those things, people say it’s content, it’s not content, it’s intellectual capital. Yeah, and when, when we do what you just described, we can deploy and monetize our intellectual capital at scale and make a difference for look, two days ago, I’ll tell you this quick story. Two days ago, I met a 30 year old doctor, MD, who’s a med tech entrepreneur from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and he sent me a love note about a month or so ago on LinkedIn, and he said, Christopher, I have consumed all of your work. The people in my company are sick of me talking about category design and creator capitalist and all the stuff I’ve read, everything category pirates has ever put out. And I’m coming to a tech conference in Silicon Valley, and I would like to come and meet you and say thank you in person, because we just raised $2 million which in Brazil, is an extraordinary thing for a 30 year old entrepreneur to be able to do for a software AI software company. And he said, we never would have been able to do this without what you and Eddie have taught us. And so I had coffee with this young man two days ago, and it brought tears to my eyes. And so what’s my point, if you’re willing to consider becoming a creator capitalist, as we’ve described, the difference you can make when you connect your different and your intellectual capital around your different to making as big of a difference, for people is possible at scale, because the internet and AI is all about scale. Then one day, you’re going to be 58 years old, and you’re going to be having coffee with 30 year old doctor from San Paulo, Brazil, who’s showing you pictures of his six month old daughter and is grateful to you so much so that he pulls out a document and says, We want to give you guys stock in our company. That just happened. And so this is the amazing thing about becoming a creator capitalist and choosing to do your best to make a difference at scale, you are going to find yourself having coffee with a wonderful young man from Sao Paulo who is grateful for you because he says his life and the life of his 15 employees would not be what It is, and now they just broke 100,000 people on their app who are using their app to access more effective medical care in Brazil. And so he looks me in the eye and says, Your work is helping to produce medical outcomes for over 100,000 people in Brazil. And I want to thank you. This is possible for all of us who choose this path of creator capitalist.

Liz Farr

Well, that’s just amazing. Now, now, Eddie, you look like you want to say something, yeah, no,

Eddie Yoon

I wanted to build on that and just say Liz to your audience. If you’re you have your accountants who are excited about this. They want to be creator capitalists, and they’re not sure where to start. Just to think about what Christopher’s relationship was like with is like with his accountant, I would say there are three things, three outcomes, three categories of outcomes that your audience can focus on, and they’re going to be non obvious to them, right? Oh, you’re gonna say, Oh, you’re gonna focus on some expertise and not not about knowledge. Save time, save money, and reduce stress, time, money and emotion. Those are the three outcomes. That’s all that really matters everybody we assume that you know, most of your audience is competent at what they do. They do the job. They do it well, right? Most folks think, wow, if I’m going to compete on something, or how do I stand out or be different? Compete on money I’ll be cheaper. Don’t worry about your money. Worry about their clients money, right? How do I save you money by, you know, you know, preventing you from doing stupid things, or whatever else it might be. Right? If you listen to our we wrote a mini book called The Agentic CFO, where we talk about Jeff Klimkowski, who is the CFO at Dude Wipes. They built an agent Diesel Dan, and all it does is it looks up the POs they got from Walmart and Target and says, Did we submit the PO just yet? Right? Did we submit it in the right way at the right time? Because every company is a little bit, you know, picky about how it gets done. And a lot of companies, they they slow the cash flow just because they didn’t submit the invoice. And at a very local level for us, you know, for Category Pirates, we work with contractors, and I just kind of laugh, I get invoiced. I’m the, I’m not a CPA or an accountant, but I’m the conscripted CFO, just because for that. But like, you know, I get invoiced

Christopher Lochhead

he can do math, which is amazing. I can’t

Eddie Yoon

we get all these invoices from vendors we love to work with. And the invoice comes in and says, you know, here’s what, you know, I’m owed. Thank you for this. They’ve done the work. They’ve done great work. And it says, payable by 30, 45, days, 60 days out, and I’m just kind of like, you did the work. We love the work. I’ll pay you today. I don’t get the and, and they have to be like, I can do that. I’m like, Yes, you can do that, right? And that it in an accountant that focuses on, I can accelerate your cash flow by rejecting the premise of what has to be, what normally people think it has to be done. Or even, how do I build an invoice so that it’s, here’s another one, right? I learned this the hard way. Was when sending an invoice out to one of my first clients, when I went solo and I left the you can pay by bank or you can pay by credit card box checked, Ooh, boy, I and that that I had a very large invoice come in. I’m like, who took 3% Oh, Visa and MasterCard did. I never let that happen again, right? And so there’s little things that you can do to kind of just save people money, accelerate cash flow, that really matters. But the thing about reducing time, like what Christopher said he never, he signed the DocuSign. That’s it, and an accountant that said, I will save you time. You never have to think about this. That’s a differentiator. And the accountant that says, I save you time money, and I take your stress from here to there, you know, those outcomes are evergreen. They will never go out of fashion. And with AI, you can be a creative capitalist that specializes on that, and I guarantee you that an accountant who does that will have no shortage of clients and outcomes and pricing power

Liz Farr

Exactly, exactly now. Now, I know we could talk about this book and creator capitalism for accountants for hours, but I want to respect your time. So what else would you like accountants to know about this book? Besides what I’m going to say, which is go out and buy the damn book,

Christopher Lochhead

that would be great. But what we really want is more people to be creator capitalists. This is the biggest unlock in our careers. So there’s many things in the book we could talk about. The one thing that I would underscore as we wrap, and this is something that Eddie and I didn’t understand when we wrote it. As a matter of fact, it’s only become clear in the last three or so weeks since it came out. You know when you, when you we spent three years doing the research and writing this work. So very it’s a very serious piece of work that we did here, and when you put it out in the world, it goes from being yours to not yours anymore. It’s the world’s and this is, I think, the thing we’ve been most surprised about. There’s throughout the book, there’s a thread, and there’s some specific writing and work on this around the value of your value, and we had no idea how personal this would be for people. What we have learned is that most people report that they radically undervalue the value of their value. And so if you’re willing to do some work and look at your four capitals, relationships, reputation, intellectual and financial, consider the fact that those four things actually work together in a flywheel. Right? Your reputation brings more clients to you, which produces financial capital. You produce the results to achieve that reputation through your intellectual capital. When you do a good job for people, you produce results for people. You produce outcomes for people as a result of your intellectual capital and your ability to create value for them. Your reputation improves. And guess what? You fall in love with your clients. I’m in love with Greg Finley. I always will be right, even if he doesn’t love me anyway. So so here’s the thing that I would ask people, give yourself a little bit of time. Take inventory of your four capitals. Write down the relationships. Write down reputation is what people say about you when you’re not there. Ask people what they say about you when you’re not there. It’s the thing you are known for. Right? Look at your financial assets. Most people over rotate on looking at this. So here’s what we know, if you’re willing to do that work and spend some time inventorying your four capitals. And then in addition, you ask yourself, What’s my different? What is my different Superpower? Everybody has one, and most of us have more than one. And there’s lots of ways you can get there. We could explain. But if you get clear, or when you get clear on your different superpower, the thing that makes you unique, the thing that makes you stand out, the thing that makes you the most valuable, the thing that people come to you for when you get clear about your different superpower and connect that difference, or that different to making a difference in the world at scale, with AI, you will have the most magical career you can possibly have, and you’ll never going to want to stop working. One of things we talked about in the book is through the big retirement line, retirements bullshit. It’s ridiculous. Anyway. My point is this. What we have learned through working on Creator Capitalist is that almost everybody under values the value of your value, and when you do the work that I just described, and then the final piece is looking at the outcomes that you’ve helped produce, and when you inventory your outcomes, you will realize you produce way more outcomes than you realized. If you do that work, you will have a profound change in your understanding of the value of your value once you do that, and you sort of have the dials and knobs of becoming a Creator, capitalist in AI first world, you now have the power to design the most radically legendary career that you could possibly design for yourself. And that’s really what our dream and our hope for people Liz

Liz Farr

and Eddie. What do you have to add? You’re muted.

Eddie Yoon

There’s nothing to add when perfection just came. So I’m good to go with what he said,

Liz Farr

that’s perfect. Well, I think that that is probably the best place to wrap up our conversation. Now I want to thank you both so much this has been an incredible honor to have both of you to have two guests of your stature on the show, because a lot of my guests are, you know, solo accountants who run a little bookkeeping firm or An accounting firm that does things just a little differently than the legacy accountants. But having people of your stature is just an incredible treat, and I want to get people to think, set their targets higher, much higher. So, so if people want to learn more about your work and to connect with you. Where are the best places to go?

Eddie Yoon

CategoryPirates.com, is the simplest place or CreatorCapitalist.ai. Is the you can find the book there.

Christopher Lochhead

Everything’s off CategoryPirates.com, yeah,

Liz Farr

yeah, yeah. And I just want to thank you once again for being on the show. And you know, welcome, welcome to my world. I hope that
Christopher Lochhead

We love your world. Liz, we love accountants. We actually do fantastic.

Liz Farr

Well with that, I want to let both of you go and we and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day today.

Christopher Lochhead

Thanks. Liz, it’s an honor.
Eddie Yoon

It was great.

Christopher Lochhead

Thank you. Bye.