Welcome back to Building Tomorrow. I'm here with the entire regular crew this time, Matthew, Will, and Aaron.   And after a goodly snooze or food coma, you're going to have to think about the choices you're going to make on the Morrow. Morrow, for it is Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. Or perhaps you're waiting for Cyber Monday, so as to avoid being stamped...stamped. Stomped. Stomped. Tramp-old. Tramp-old. Tramp-old. Just keep going. Hordes of shoppers. Either way, you need to buy something for these special people in your life, as well as your cousin Todd, who is the worst, but you'll feel bad if he gets you a present again this year. and you got him nothing like last year when he, well, wherever I was. Yes, we're finding gifts. It is a staple of the tech media at this time of year to put out a hot tech gadgets for the nerds in your life list. It's fun. It's easy copy, lots of clicks, light reading. We're going to do something slightly different here on Building Tomorrow. Rather than giving you a literal list of gadgets, we're going to proffer our suggestions of the top technologies and innovations that if they become the hot new tech toy of the season and were adopted en masse, like, you know, at Tickle Me Elmo, but for tech toys, they would do the most to transform our lives for the better. We're going to stick to North American tech and innovation because if we didn't, well, as Aaron pointed out, we'd be air dropping smartphones over the developing world. It would just win handily, like no competition, smartphones for everyone. That's not very interesting for a competition. And we're also not going to do an exact gadget or company necessarily. We're thinking about the underlying tech. And we're going to vote for the winners. Guys, you can't vote for your own, vote for someone else's. We can even if we want to be real fancy, we can go like main and do ranked choice voting in the spirit of last month. So let's kick things off with will. What is your hot tech gadget? So I'm going to go with the Fitbit. And now a lot of you think of that as something you wear when you're going to run to track how far you've run or how high your heart rate went while you were doing it. But it has a much more universal, really health centric potential applications. So you wear a device that tracks your heart rate as well as other biosigns over time. And it allows you to create a fairly comprehensive picture of how your body's behaving throughout the day, day in and day out. And this can allow either you or your doctor, perhaps, to begin to identify certain patterns that could then also potentially be aggregated with other people's Fitbit data to see larger societal health patterns where people sleeping well. What do people do before they sleep well versus when they don't have a good night's sleep? And you can provide for the fairly cheap collection of very interesting health data through what is now kind of got to boost the other year as a running killer app. Now they've been trying to move into the smartwatch and mobile payments market. But long-term Fitbit itself as a goal sees the idea of building a service business related to digital health as kind of the long-term quest for the product as are others in that space and firms more on the health side interested in making use of this data. Are you worried about the privacy implications of this, though? By definition, this is very personal data. I am kind of ignoring that, ghosting over it for now. Obviously, another sort of running app that allowed people to compare their runs called Strava earlier this year became a little bit notorious for effectively outlining the perimeters of military bases around the world because as soldiers would jog the fence in the morning, they'd be comparing themselves to others who might have been posted there in the past. And all of this was being posted on the global Strava runs map. So you could see these little glowing lines around facilities say in Syria that officially didn't exist. Now, yes, there is obviously if you were to lose access or control over your individualized that is non-anonymized Fitbit data, someone could know how you're sleeping, when you're active, if you had sex that night, just by looking at your heart rate and other biosigns over time. So there is some concern there, but I think overall the benefits of being able to learn that about yourself which is difficult otherwise and also very expensive people are sent in for sleep studies or to go and wear a heart monitor over lunch for a week. And these not only take folks out of the rest of their lives, a lot of people don't want to do that, take the time to do that. So they just don't get the treatment they perhaps would otherwise. And it simplifies all of this collection. I would think in theory you can aggregate this, right? So you can strip out identifying personal information and being like you're then being compared against the faceless mass of data kind of like you do with 23andMe. Like yes, in theory 23andMe there's a risk of privacy breach if that information gets leaked about your genetic makeup, but they strip out your personal identifying information so that other people can be compared not against you as an individual but against the aggregated profile. So I imagine the same thing can be identified local trends that way as well. How much worse are people sleeping thanks to the new highway built next to their development? And you aren't then dealing just with individual anecdotes from people in that community, but you can really look at how long they were sleeping for, how long they were in REM cycles across numerous individuals within that space. And you have natural control groups as well. Yeah. So this is like a case of something that's underutilized right now. I mean like lots of people have Fitbits, but it's kind of like they're glorified step counters. Yes, the infrastructure that you would need for these sort of health facing or health-centric applications isn't there yet. It's coming, but obviously the wider Fitbit and similar devices are adopted now. The more of a market there will be for those sorts of uses of that data down the road. And if you buy all of your relatives a Fitbit for Christmas, then we can move incrementally towards that healthier world. Nice. All right. I like it. So our first entry here is the Fitbit, maybe not specifically, but a Fitbit-like device, a health tracker for improving consumer health. Our next entry is a little bit different. So it's not a literal device, it's software rather than device innovation. It's end-to-end encryption. Do I have that right, Feeny? No one wants to get software for Christmas. No one wants to be told that they're overweight and slow for Christmas. So, and unlike the previous nomination, this one actually takes privacy into account. So if I could airdrop devices or software to families in America, it would be services that allow for people to engage in end-to-end encrypted communication. There are services out there such as Proton Mail and Tutonota, which are email services that allow people to end-to-end encrypt their emails. There are messaging services like Signal and Wicca, WIRE that I know all four of us use here at Cato. And the great thing about this is easy to use, low cost, but with very high benefits, a lot of great benefits, namely protection against surveillance. The sad state of affairs is that emails don't enjoy as much protection as we would like, thanks to legislation and Supreme Court precedent. So in the name of privacy and increased security, I would wish that everyone around Thanksgiving tables and Christmas gatherings and everything in between sign up for a low cost or even free end-to-end encrypted service. That's my nomination. So you go into your grandma's email account, set her up with a VPN client or a tour or something, and here you go, grandma, here's your... Yeah, it depends how much you want to get into the weeds. You could do a whole lot of... You could really go a little crazy with services like this, but in fact, many listeners probably already use this technology and don't know it if they use WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, right. But I think it's worth people getting out there to see the other cool services that are out there. So that would be my holiday wish. That's pretty good. Anyone care to piggyback on back on top of that? So Wills has the effects. There's all these health effects in the aggregate, and if everyone's using this stuff. But for the consumer, for the person who gets the fit bit, aside from if it tells them that they're wildly out of shape and just makes them depressed, but you get... It's a neat little thing for the person to have. Is that the case with the end-to-end encrypted? So you're basically saying, grandma, I'm going to switch you from Gmail to Proton Mail, and there's no real benefit to you in terms of the day-to-day use. But it means that you're more secure. Does this make sense? What's the consumer hook that makes the consumer want to use this stuff outside of we in this room are all paranoid libertarians who don't want the government snooping? No, well, I don't think that privacy insecurity is something that only paranoid libertarians need or desire. It's true that it's not as easy to show off in a coffee shop that you have to probably open up your smartphone and show the app. And some people might think, isn't that just not that much different from Gmail?  Yeah, I like stickers on my laptop. And then they make sure to really work you over at security. I've been rather happy with how I've been treated by the federal government's airport security personnel. The accent makes you come off as trustworthy. I don't usually talk during this. But yes, I get what you're saying. It's not a new product in the way that a Fitbit is. You can't hold it in your hand or an orb of encryption. You can't do that. But I think the selling point is enough to get people interested. Of course, if you go to Grandma and say, hey, here's a free tutor note or a proton mail account. And they say, oh, why do I need that? I guess it's a good excuse to talk about the sad state of affairs when it comes to privacy in the United States. But yeah, it's not something you can flash around. That's for sure. Do you see any physical products designed to offer those sorts of services? Like either a router you can buy that attempts to encrypt everything that runs through it, or even, I don't know, I'm imagining some kind of 5G hotspot you can wear as a necklace that then your phone connects to that. Yeah, that's a good question. Did it make it sexier in a way? You could have an orb of encryption. It would also put you on a few more radars, I suppose, if there was... No one can look at my iPhone and see that I have certain apps or services. I'm pretty happy with that state of affairs, I have to say. I mean, to some extent, though, you mentioned the iPhone. That is exactly what you're describing. I mean, this is a device and this is the case for other... I mean, I think Android phones do this now too, that the whole device itself, everything on it is encrypted and doesn't decrypt until you enter in your passcode. And the default messaging service that it comes with, iMessage, which I think is one of... If you consider messaging services as social networks, it's one of the largest social networks in terms of daily traffic in the US. Well, I think an added benefit to at least my present proposal is that it prompts excuses for interesting conversations. I don't want to bash Google necessarily, right? So Google produces products that a lot of people like and are really good and easy to use. But I think if you actually introduced every adult in America to the kind of interesting companies and services that are out there, we would just live in a more interesting world with people actually having more urgent conversations about security and privacy. Here's maybe a selling point to get the security skeptical. The folks who aren't paranoid enough, like good rational folks like us, you can hook them on the idea of ISP switching, right? So you can say, hey, look, do you like the shows that you see on Netflix or on Amazon Prime or on any of these other services? Well, did you know that if you just use a VPN client or an ISP switching client, you can access a whole new world of content on other national Netflixes, other shows, you can watch football games for free, you can watch, right? So all of which is legal. It's not illegal to mask your ISP, basically what your computer identifies itself as. So not only are you giving them security, they're using a client that obscures who they are and what they're doing on the internet. You're also giving them access to new stuff, stuff that ordinary consumers like and want. So something I will add, not that I think I need to, because I think I'm probably getting more votes in Fitbit at this point, but we'll see. We should attach a survey. Good luck. We'll see. I find, and this is totally anecdotal, that there's this frustrating degree of reluctance to do anything about the state of surveillance. The Snowden revelations come out and everyone sort of rolls their eyes and they think, well, what am I supposed to do about that? I can't give up email and I'm not going to stop using the internet on my phone and I'm not going to stop going outside. So what should I do about this? And actually, I think not enough people know that there are really cheap, low cost, low barrier entry ways of protecting themselves, but very few, comparatively few people do it and I think that's a shame. Decoder ring costs about $3 and you can get pigeons for free anywhere. Right. Well, you're only allowed to have one nomination will. So you can put in coding rings and pigeons as well. Well, and to your point, I mean, it's actually gone pretty mainstream, the idea that you shouldn't just leave your laptop, camera unexposed. I mean, it's now become ordinary for folks to tape over it. Now manufacturers are building in little physical manual slides. So something that five years ago, people did respond to with, like, what's wrong with you, paranoia, paranoiacs, that you're worried about that. That stuff can become accepted and even expected and end to end encryption is one of those things that you can see. It's in the near future. People are just going to demand it as a matter of course. Hope so. Yeah. Well, there's a natural segue, I think, here between what Matthew's proposing with end to end encryption and Aaron, your idea. So pitch us your gift of the season. Sure. So this does pick up with the end to end encryption and expands upon it a fair amount, which is the decentralized web. And so my, the products that I pick is decentralized web browsers slash clients. So there's a number of them out there. There's the status.i.m is one, I think Coinbase has Coinbase Wallet, I believe it's called, that is another that used to be called Tashi was the product that I think they bought. But there's a handful of these things. And basically what they are is a crypto wallet, usually an Ethereum wallet that can hold Ethereum tokens of various kinds. A end to end encrypted messaging platform that's sometimes built on their open protocols that are kind of part of the associated with Ethereum that gets built on. And then an ability to connect to what are called decentralized web apps, which are basically like regular web pages. But the data, your data as you're browsing them, as you're using them, as you log into them is controlled by you. So you're not really, they're kind of spread out more than, and the way that they're run is different so that they're harder to shut down. There isn't a centralized server that someone could go and turn off all of Facebook because it's living across different things. So you get the effects that Matthew is talking about. I mean, you could not, it's not email, it's instant messaging, but you could certainly, you could build a decentralized email platform of a sort into this thing and have access to it. And these are usually mobile apps, but there's desktop versions as well. But you also are getting the crypto thing, so you can do things like, basically, so status has what amounts to Venmo, like a Venmo client, but you're sending each other Ethereum tokens or other kinds of tokens instead. And you can be browsing what looks like the regular web, but is in this kind of decentralized, more private, more robust setup that is less accessible to government snooping, government shutting down, and so on. Will rolled his eyes when I mentioned this. I was just going to ask whether Mastodon would, does that meet your high bar for decentralized services? It's an attempt to decentralize Twitter, so anyone can create their own Mastodon server and run a Mastodon instance, which is like, it's basically, it's basically like kind of email reskinned to be Twitter. So your servers would be like having an email server, but then they can, the servers can talk to each other. So you can, you know, your tweets on it get sent out to the other people who are following you. And so you can switch servers and different servers can have different rules about, you know, this is the kind of content we're going to moderate or we're going to allow or, you know, this is the advertiser we're going to show or not. Yeah, I mean, the difference with these D apps is that they have, they have the wallet address is part of it, that you have, you kind of have an identity that you can carry between them that's based on your, the keys in your wallet. And tied to payments somehow? It can be tied to payments because it's the same wallet address that is the wallet address for payments. But so there's, there's slightly technical, there's technical differences on the back end, but if from the consumer standpoint, these are similar sorts of things. And I picked this one, so in part because the, the conceit of this episode was if, if this was what was given to everyone, what would you, you know, like, so that you kind of are waving your magic wand and suddenly everyone in the US is using this thing. And right now these products, I fully confess kind of suck. Like there's, you know, as, as instant messengers, they're a little bit slow compared to other, to, to, you know, Facebook Messenger or whatever, they don't have as many features. The apps are a little bit feel more in development. A lot of them are still in beta status. And no one else is on them. It's hard to talk to your friends on these things when they're all still on Facebook. Sure. So, so, but all of those are issues that get overcome by, by the conceit, which is if everyone's using it, then all of your friends are on it. And just like with the web, the, the original web, you know, once lots and lots of people started using it, we started seeing really rapid development in the space. And so this is, so if I can make everyone in the US kind of start using this thing, it kick starts that development. But I think as far as the benefits of this, again, kind of picking up from Matthews is this allows us, if we did this, then kind of by default, all or most of us would be having the majority of our digital communications in an encrypted space. We would be doing it in a way, we would be interacting with the web in a way that where we own our data have control over our data and it's, again, less accessible to surveillance. And all of this would be plugged into an economic system that would allow us to have economic relationships with each other, whether that's paying your part of rent or, you know, paying at the restaurant or sending reimbursing your friend for something or buying products online that's happening in this privacy respecting decentralized fashion that's outside of the reach of governments. And so in kind of one little app, it allows us to take an extraordinary portion of our digitally mediated lives and just move it out of the political sphere, move it out of the state sphere and move it into a place that I think is much more liberty respecting. I wonder if the participation in all of this is a selling point. So I guess the conceit of the episode is we just assume everyone grabs it, but it reminds me a little bit of the Tor network, that the more people that participate in this, the better it becomes.  And some of the more exciting applications of the stuff I think Aaron is talking about are anti-censorship applications, which would be pretty cool, especially when you consider governments like the Chinese that are pretty keen on censorship. So this sort of decentralized nature of it, I think is a big selling point. You can tell people that they're actually taking part in a really integrate social good without having to, you know, have to quit their job or to donate a huge amount of money. They can invert you of being just part of the network that they're contributing. I mean, it's not an unalloyed good, I guess, given what we expect to go on, what happens in the... I don't know. The Tor comment, you know, there, you can use Tor and then you can help to cover for government spies.  But if you're skeptical as to how the US behaves around the world. Well, look, angels and demons are going to use every new piece of technology. And there are costs to our privacy and our security with all different kinds of technology. I'm certainly willing to put that in the cost column, but we shouldn't forget the huge number of benefits too. I would also say that, I mean, with the exception of Fitbit, these are tech that the demons are already using. Like, so we're not, you know, this isn't tech that we've kind of made up out of whole cloth. It's already out there. You can use Tor right now if you want to. You can run Protonmail if you want to. You can download the status client and run it on your phone right now if you want to. And so people who have a strong incentive to be using this stuff because they're up to no good are already using it. So simply asking lots and lots of more people to use it means that you're just, you're likely to be bringing in a whole bunch of people who aren't going to be using it for no good. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, this also reminds me of something else. I think we have the difference here between the concrete and my own example will be concrete as well, the Fitbit or the smart diapers I'll be talking about, and then encryption and a decentralized internet that which is more abstract. I mean, it's, and also it only works because of our conceit, because if it comes to small scale innovation, you need to give consumers a reason to buy. I mean, they're more likely to say, I want to buy this thing because in isolation, if I have it, my life is better versus I'm going to buy this hoping a million other people buy it and then we'll all benefit with scale, right? So the conceit of the episode is necessary for this to happen, but it makes you wonder with the original internet, right? So how do you go from only essentially government and researchers, you know, academic researchers and the government using the early stages of the internet to mass adoption? I mean, because we had the goat, we had the bridge that abstract divide at 1.20, 30 years ago, right? And, but then again, there was kind of a killer app in the sense of remember what you circulated, if you wanted to get your grandma surfing online, what did you that AOL disk? Yes, exactly. You deluge them with like free internet time, the little disks AOL online. I think that's the first time I've heard anyone say anything good about that decade. It's all going to be counterintuitive here, but there was something good about it, which was that it was an entry point for folks who weren't, they weren't, they were not, they're not thinking about, can I build this thing called the web 1.0 that will benefit all of society through rapid innovation and joining us together?  They advertise to that. I mean, looking at early internet advertising can be fascinating because they really are selling not just their service, but the idea of the internet as a product. The old, what was it, eTrade or there's a video of Bill Clinton when he's in it. It's right at the end of his second term lame duck and Hillary leaves him to go campaign and he's bumming around the White House and he has an intern teaching him how to use the internet and they're mimicking a popular internet commercial of the time. We can put that up in the show now. It's a fun one looking as to how this thing was sold. As long as the intern wasn't Monica Lewinsky. No, it was a dude. It was all fine. But I mean, again, there you have the illustration, right? Like, there has to be an entry point into this abstract thing. And so some of the things you're mentioning, Aaron, like the ability to have a crypto wallet that is easy to use, easy to exchange in a way that can't be tracked by whoever, by, you know, ad companies, by corporations, by the government, what you're spending money on online. That's an entry by people get why that might that could have value. So I think that's a key way of thinking about that. Well, why don't we return to something a bit more grounded? My killer product for this holiday season is something that I think all parents will appreciate or people have had kids in the past. You know, most kids that you know, you don't want to lump a coal in your stocking at Christmas. But all I want for Christmas is to avoid a lump of something else in my kids' diapers. How long did he spend writing that check? Almost 10 seconds. He pulled out, he's got it written down. I got it written down. It was that important to me that I get that out. But okay, so Aaron will get this as someone who has kids. I get this as someone who has a kid. Being a parent is both incredibly amazing and the worst at the same time. And the worst part about being a parent, at least for the first couple of years, is changing diapers, right? Oh, I thought it was the sleep deprivation. Well, it's like maybe a close... Changing diapers while sleep deprived is certainly a poor combination. Yeah, that's not a great combination either. When you're so sleep deprived, you drop the diaper that you just changed. And yeah, kids produce an astonishingly amount of incredibly disgusting substances. And that's what you're dealing with when you change diapers. And you know, when you change, then anyone who's changed a diaper knows, here's the process for you guys who don't have kids. You've been an hour or two since the last diaper change. You start getting suspicious. It's time for another.  Is it though just a little urine that can be ignored safely for an hour or two? Or is it, did they drop some poo and you have to change it or else it's going to just create a massive mess? You have to check. So you start with the sniff test. You just stick your nose there and take a good old whiff. And that's the first diagnosis test.  You try to check in the back of the diaper to see if you see something, right? Like it is unpleasant. This is a deeply unpleasant thing, but you have to do it or else your kid will get rashes. Your kid will create messes. It's just part of parenting. So my killer innovation for this holiday season, it's actually from a new outfit called the verily, which is actually under the Google alphabet umbrella company. It's their life sciences division, but they patented a smart diaper that will be able to distinguish between urine and poop. It will measure conductivity, impedance, temperature in the fibers of the diaper itself to detect the presence of liquids and solids. So all the diapers would come with that sensing fiber built in. And then you'd have like a detachable relay that would send the information to an app on your smartphone.  What have they done? Do I need to change them now? And like the amount of mess and frustration, unpleasant sniffing that you would have to do as a parent would go down dramatically if you just knew that information. It sounds like a small thing compared to a new web or like better health outcomes for you with your Fitbit or avoiding government surveillance. But when it comes to like the lived experience of millions of parents in this country, having that kind of information makes your life quantifiably better on a day-to-day basis. I think you've given a great pitch, but at this point, only five people are still listening. I like it. Anytime you can be... I'm just going to claim the win, right? Yeah, every time you just eat lots of turkey. I feel slightly gone. I'm glad I age a while before this.  Anytime you can be pro tech and pro natalism, that seems good to me. Now, how does this... I hear Google involved in this. What kind of data do they get from this? Is there a cop interaction? When you open up the diaper to change it. Well, yeah, but are we getting like literally cradle to grave data collection now where they use that to predict future behaviors about you?  What does that say about impulse control and on? Well, in a less dystopian vision of that would be like, hey, we know how many diapers you've changed. We know you're running out of diapers. It's time for your automatic subscription to diapers on the Amazon to ship you a package. You could also imagine a use case where you say, like, as that tech gets more advanced, it's not just detecting what did they do. It's detecting information about, well, does your kid have... Like a stool sample right there. Yeah, it's essentially doing stool sampling, giving information that goes to their doctor, to your pediatrician who can monitor it. Like, oh, no, they've had, you know, they might have diarrhea and it's time for you to bring them in for dehydration to check. Like, this could actually improve health outcomes for kids as well. And it's not just kids. I was thinking to, you know, who else wears lots of diapers? It's the elderly folks in nursing homes and hospices who, especially if they're senile, can't do this for themselves. And there's a real dignitary benefit, I think, as well to this knowledge being provided by the diaper rather than an elder care provider having to look down the back of a 75-year-old man's drawers. Like, that there's a dignitary harm in that. No one's really comfortable with it, and it's unpleasant. And to receive it in the form of more sanitized data, I think, could make the experience more pleasant. Well, and to their, in that use case, there's a sense that... So, one of the big... There's lots of really bad health outcomes that apply to the elderly. So, like, if it's a baby, if you don't change your diapers soon enough, they get a diaper rash, which is unpleasant. They're uncomfortable. They scream and holler, and it makes your life miserable. And so, it's good if you can mitigate that. But with the elderly, if you don't change them often enough, they get bed sores. They, like, urinary tract infections. It kills them.  Like, the number of times that elderly, senile elderly folks in nursing homes die because they just weren't changed often enough is higher than you think. So, this is tech that could save lives as well and provide better quality of life, too. So, that's my pitch. It's, I guess, in the Fitbit kind of category of a more literal device. You're definitely going to win now, because everyone doesn't want to be anti-old people and babies. So, you're definitely going to win. Mine is still the best thing to receive in a box under the tree. We have instructions to download something or diapers. It's the thought that counts. And you can make small Fitbits for babies. So, we'll can get in on that. Yeah, maybe we should just put the Fitbit in the diaper. It is the relay. There you go. Yeah. I'll take it. All right. So, off air, we have written down our selections, but we're going to go around and announce them live. So, Erin, let's start off with you. I got to give my vote seeing as I can't vote for myself, which mine is obviously the best. Any of yours were better than mine. That's why I would have chosen as mine. But I'm going to start with Matthew. Just because in the my, you know, ranking of values, the ticket to the state and then surveillance stuff. Just software eating everyone else's Christmas gifts. You're buying them a gift certificate to something. So, I'm going to pick my first vote. It goes to Matthew's and then encrypted communications. My second vote goes to Paul's diapers, just simply because I went through three children of my own. And this sounds like it would have made things marginally easier. Yeah. Is it me now? Yes. All right. Because I cannot vote for myself, but I also want to stick it to the state. My first vote goes to Erin's Web 2.0. I'm not a parent, but I may be in the future. And in the future, I want that to be as little mess as possible. And I also don't want to come across as anti-old people or babies. So, my second vote goes to Paul. All right. Well, first vote to Paul with the smart diapers. I hate. Natalism wins, man, in this election and more generally. I should have found a way of working puppies in there too. We just need kids, not people getting dogs as kids. And I think secondly, I'll go for Erin's de-apps. It feels like it kind of includes a lot of Matthew's proposal as well, but it's more expansive. And yeah. Okay. All right. And I have Web 2.0, Erin's, for my first vote and then second for Fitbit. Oh, fine. You got on the board. Will's on the board. And I think our big, it's all going to come down the test, I suspect here. So this is our producer test. You have heard her voice maybe a time or two, but weigh-in tests. Give us the all-important fifth vote. Okay. Well, we're tied with Web 2.0 and diapers. So my first vote is going to go to encryption. Thank you. And my second vote are a tiebreaker, though I'm not sure how this is going to promote the general welfare and building a better future tomorrow. I'm going to go with diapers. All right. Buy a hair. I think diapers has it kind of, though diapers only had one first place vote and three second place votes and Web 2.0 had two first place votes and one second. I think that gives it to me. On great choice, it might. Yeah. If you give like two points for every first point, every first vote, and then only one point for a second vote. Yeah, it does go to Erin then with five points versus four for diapers. This is the kind of procedure we should have thought through before recording. You know what else we should probably mention in full disclosure because now I'm bitter. Erin is Tessa's boss and I just want to make sure the listeners know this. It's a dirty pool here.  Well, that was good. Well, thank you all for listening to Building Tomorrow and now you have some ideas for what to put under the tree and probably it's not going to be any of these things. And until next week, be well and happy Thanksgiving. Building Tomorrow is produced by Test Terrible. If you enjoy our show, please rate, review and subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn about Building Tomorrow or to discover other great podcasts, visit us on the web at libertarianism.org.


QuickBooks Online 2023. Financial reports generated from bank feed transactions. Get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Here we are in our bank feed practice file. We started up in a prior presentation using the 30 day free trial. We also have open the free QuickBooks Online sample company. You can open the two at the same time by using the incognito window or another browser to open up the sample company. You can open incognito if using Google Chrome by selecting the three dots in the browser incognito window typing into the search engine QuickBooks Online Test Drive. We're using the sample company to compare the accounting view the one the bank feeds practice file is in and the business view the one the sample company is in. You can toggle between the two by going to the cog up top and switch the view down below. We're going to duplicate some tabs to put reports in by right clicking the tab up top and duplicating it and then do it again right click and then duplicate and then back to the tab to the middle open up the financial statements and the reports on the left one of them being the big balance sheet the famous BS balance sheet and then note that in the business view the reports are located in the business overview by the way and then the reports on the left hand side that's where they're at. Let's go to the tab to the right open up the other famous and recognized report everybody's favorite the income statement or profit and loss it has multiple names because it's so famous and people you know generate nick names and stuff when they get famous like reports do that too. So we're going to change the range up top we're going to go from 010122 tab 123122 tab run it to refresh it and then let's tab to the left and then close up the hamburger scroll up top and then change the range going from 010122 tab 123122 tab running it to refresh it that's the setup process we do every time and prior presentations we have been constructing our financial statements primarily from the use of the bank feeds. So if I go to the tab to the left just to note where the bank feeds are they're in the banking tab on the left banking up top so we imported this information by the way in the business view the bank feeds are in the bookkeeping and then the transactions and then the bank transactions. So we imported the data from the bank feeds for multiple financial institutions checking accounts and Visa and PayPal you can do that with that as well and then we used the bank feed limbo to add the necessary information which includes the account as well as the vendor and customer oftentimes to pull the information from bank feed limbo into the promised land of the financial statements either creating or double checking what has been created in the financial statements with the financial transactions. So now we want to go to the end result what has been constructed on the financial statements and basically see if we can deconstruct see what has been happened and drill back down to get a better understanding of what has been constructed and when you you can use the bank feeds to basically create your financial statements and when you're going to have to use the bank feeds to double check your financial statements. So we took a look at this in the past with the use of a flow chart remember that if you're on a cash-based system you can kind of break out that thought process as to whether you're on a cash-based system for the expenses side of things cash outflows and the income side of things cash inflows at the end of the process. A lot of small businesses might be on a cash-based system one that they can depend on in essence the bank feeds to record transactions on the outflow side of things but maybe in an industry that they still need to do something a little bit different on the inflow because they have to deal with a cash register situation or they have to invoice meaning they have to do an accrual kind of thing on the revenue side of things. So that means that the bank feeds will act a little bit differently as either something you're using just to construct your books from in the simplest case which would be great if you're in an industry where you can do that or they'll be a little bit more complex as we've discussed if you have to do an accrual kind of component or a full service accounting system. So now let's kind of think about what has been constructed remember that the major two financial statements are the balance sheet and the income statement. So oftentimes when I'm entering the transactions I'll have these two things open for the year that I'm currently working on or you just might do it for the year to date that you're working on you also might use the trial balance as we've discussed from time to time in the past let's open it up by right clicking the tab up top duplicating it then we're going to go to the reports on the left hand side I usually open the trial balance by simply typing in up top trial balance if you use it a lot you can save it by putting a little star next to it so that you have it in your favorite reports it's in the accounting or for your accounting account group down below and this basically let's do a range change<PHONE_NUMBER>22 running it this is basically the balance sheet on top of the income statement and it's much more streamlined and therefore easier to kind of drill down on sometimes easier to have one report open rather than two reports as you're doing the data input and you want to kind of double check your your numbers and drill down on what has happened all right let's go to the first half now I'm going to switch this up a little bit so that we can see a month by month side by side report these are some of the things that you can do with the major reports balance sheet income statement you could have a summary balance sheet and you could make the balance sheet comparative balance sheets to a prior month have multiple months in it you could have prior quarters or multiple quarters in it and you could do comparative balance sheet reports so if you're doing your own reports or if you're a bookkeeper making reports for others then you have to think about how do I want to present these reports you almost have like an infinite number of reports just from the financial statements once you start comparing month the month year to year period to period and then do multiple months or multiple periods and then comparing to the prior year and doing difference analysis we'll talk about that in a little bit more in a second but for now let's change the range I'm going to go from because the data that I put in here I think was from 080122 to 103122 and then I'd like to see it on a month by month breakout so I'm going to say month by month and then run it so that gives us my side by side for the three months of data input because this is a balance sheet this is as of a point in time note that if I do the same thing on the income statement because it's a timing report if I take this from oh let's take it from 080122 to 103122 and break it out on a month by month run it that gives us the three months and the total for those three months because the income statement is a performance report showing how we did over time and the balance sheet basically is just showing us where we stand as of the end of each month the last day of each month so let's just go into each of these accounts now and kind of drill down on them a bit to see how they have been constructed as we've been doing the data input now clearly the most complex account is the cash account so if I go into the cash account we're going to have the most detail in the types of transactions in the cash account we've got deposits we've got expenses we've got transfers because the cash is the lifeblood of the company that's why we need to do the reconciliation and obviously the bank feeds feed in directly to the cash transactions if all your information is coming from bank feeds then you would expect that you would just have deposits and expenses and transfers and possibly credit card transfer transactions in in your checking account as opposed to having like sales receipts up here or receive payments in here you can sort your cash transactions by customizing them and filtering the transactions generally usually by type so deposits checks expenses so on all right so that's clearly one of the main account that we've been focusing on with the bank feeds now the accounts receivable note we have something in here but you would only have accounts receivable if you had an accrual component so that's on the revenue side of things if you're constructing your books from the the checking account you're just going to construct with deposits you won't have accounts receivable if you're at a cash register then it's a little bit different but you still won't have accounts receivable only when you're invoicing for work that you did and you have to track the receivables to have them pay you will you have accounts receivable accounts receivable will go up with invoices and down let's go let's 10 3122 and down with payments up with invoices down with payments notice there's only basically two things you expect to be happening with the accounts receivable that's them there's also going to be a sub ledger report for accounts receivable tracking by by customer that you're going to have to deal with we'll take a look at those in a second those other reports inventory also an item that's basically an accrual component so remember if you have inventory you could try to stay in a cash based system meaning when you buy the inventory you just wait till it hits the bank and you record it as cost a good sold when when you have the the expense through the bank feeds and then you just record the revenue side when you sell the inventory but if you have any significant amount of inventory you're going to have to deviate from that put it on the books as an asset either use a periodic inventory system or a perpetual inventory system if you use the full inventory system a perpetual one then you can't really use the bank feeds you got to deviate from that as we discussed in the past because you're going to have to sell the inventory with an invoice or a sales receipt in order for it to track not only the dollar amount of inventory but the units of inventory in a sub ledger so then we have like investment accounts so we talked about some of the issues with recording an investment account which you could wait till they clear the bank fee to record an investment and like stocks and bonds record the interest and dividends but to record the capital gains and losses you might have to you might have to tie that out to the bank statements and do an adjusting entry periodically I won't go into that in a lot of detail here but we talked about that before and then we've got the equipment so remember with the equipment notice if I go into it and I change the range to 10 31 2 2 we don't have a lot of activity in the equipment such as we did in the cash account or would have in other accounts like accounts receivable if we use a accounts receivable all the time in a day to day transaction because we don't buy property plants and equipment all the time we just do it periodically so therefore the dollar amount is often significant large and it's something we need to track because we got to put it on the books as an asset even if we have a cash based system because the tax code is going to force us to do it meaning we're deviating from the cash based system to an accrual based system because we have to and we're going to want to give this information then to our tax preparer so that they can they can make the financial statements from it or make make a depreciation schedule from it using the tax software oftentimes that's how we'll set it up now accounts payable like accounts receivable is an accrual account so if you had a flowchart and you're just paying all of your expenses with electronic transfers or credit card payments then you're not going to have an accounts payable it's only when you start to enter the bills and then track them and pay them at a later point that you would have accounts payable usually larger businesses start to need the accounts payable because it becomes more important to pay the bills as late as possible as the dollar amounts go up and the number of transactions go up because of the time value of money becoming more significant with larger dollar amounts the credit cards like we looked at can be done with the bank feeds so with the credit cards you'll have similar information if you're using credit cards a lot as with the bank account but it should be more simplistic oftentimes for many companies because the expense forms will be similar to what you'd see in the checking account coming through the bank feeds but instead of decreasing a checking account or a cash account they are increasing a liability account and you don't really have to deal with the deposit side of things because the other side will typically be a payment a credit card payment out of the checking account paying off the the credit card account so there's only going to be those types of transactions a lot of expense transactions for the things that you're purchasing and then the payment of the credit card is what you would expect to see here tying this information out of course to the bank feeds and then the sales tax remember that the sales tax always throws a wrench into the system so if you want to use the sales tax within the quick book system then you're going to have to integrate the invoices and sales receipts because those are the things that calculate the sales tax otherwise if you want to make your sales recorded with a deposit form using the bank feeds you're going to have to manually calculate the sales tax in some way shape or form which we talked about in the past our loans can be we saw the loans going on the books which can be a little bit tricky we'll see the loans go on the books if cash is affected if we finance the equipment it could be a little bit tricky and then we have to deal with those amortization tables breaking out the interest and principle which messes up the bank feeds a bit and then down here we have the equity side of things this is the owner's kind of claim to the assets in the business because remember the accounting equation is assets equals liabilities and equity so if this is what the company has liabilities represent a third party that has claimed to those assets the bank oftentimes and equity represents the owner's claims to the assets now the equity though could be a little bit different depending on the type of of organization if it's a sole proprietor you would expect to see the account that you rule stuff into called owner's equity you might still call it retained earnings because that's that's the account that quick books often gives you but i changed it to owner's equity because that's the name you would expect to see oftentimes and then the opening balance equity you might have something in there but we should probably clean it out i won't do it here but it's not really professional to have something in owner's equity because it's kind of like a a plug account for quick books to to be in balance and the draws represents money that has been pulled out of of the business and an owner investment would be the owner putting money into the business now if this was a corporation same kind of idea except that the owner's equity would be called retained earnings the earnings that have been accumulated that have been retained that haven't been given back to the owners or drawn out by the owners not with the form of a draw but in that case in the form of dividends draws would be dividends and then you'd have the investment owner the owners investing in the company would be called the capital stock the issuance of the stock would be the investment so the stock that means that the value of the company has been basically cut down into fixed units of stocks as opposed to like a partnership which is a little bit more complex actually oftentimes than a corporation because then you have to track the owner's equity per partner each partner's claim which is not always equal claim as it is like in a corporation and therefore you have to track it in accordance with the partnership agreement and that can get fairly complex so that's the general balance sheet on the income statement we saw that we have the income accounts which usually we would only I have a couple income accounts like service items and items for inventory in income because then we would have a sub ledger breaking out the information by customer if we wanted to or by things that we sell service items or inventory items however if we're constructing our books from the bank feeds we lose that added detail because we're not using the forms designed to provide it that being an invoice in the sales receipt but rather using a deposit form which doesn't have that capacity making it more likely that we just want to enter our income accounts by name like who paid us like the platforms that's why we ended up with amazon audible blah blah blah that who who gave us the money and then of course you've got your cost of goods sold which you would only have if you you had inventory that you're dealing with same inventory issues we talked about before you can have a a cash based system but you're probably going to need some other based system and a cruel based system and that means you got to do a periodic system or perpetual system and then all of the other expenses most of the expense accounts have been constructed as we made cash payments or credit card payments and so they're usually going to be constructed if you're building them with the bank feeds with expense type forms so and that's usually where you have the most accounts down here and you have the most kind of flexibility and the biggest necessity to kind of determine how you want to group your expense accounts do you want to have a lot of sub accounts do you want to have a whole bunch of accounts or have a very limited amount of accounts and so on and then you've got your other income down below so now let's look at some of the other reports i'm just going to kind of list them out quickly i'm going to duplicate this and just look at some of these other reports just to see how they kind of tie in so you got you might be overwhelmed you're going to look at all these reports and say well there's a bunch of reports down here so note the business overview reports you got an audit log i won't go into that in detail a balance sheet comparison is really just a balance sheet that they have then made into a comparison report balance sheet detail similar thing balance sheet summary is just another balance sheet but now they've limited they've only given you basically the the account categories instead of all the actual accounts within standard balance sheet business snapshot gives you like a snapshot view of it i won't go into that in detail and then the profit and loss percent of total income it's just another format of the income statement or profit and loss we can construct that if we want to profit and loss comparison another format of the standard profit and loss you could build that from a profit and loss report profit and loss detail and then the profit and loss year to date comparison just another comparative report profit and loss by class which we would only have if we had class tracking turned on we gave some examples of that profit and loss by customer just another format of the profit loss you can build it from a normal profit loss profit loss by month just another format of the normal profit loss you can build it from a profit loss profit loss by tag which would only be relevant if you were using the tag feature and then the normal profit loss and then profit profitability summary i won't go into that in detail quarterly profit and loss summary these are summary reports and the statement of cash flows that is another important report it's going to be and it's another financial statement report and it's it's you don't we don't normally open it with the the profit and loss or income statement and the balance sheet even though it's a major financial statement report because it's really being constructed from those other two financial statements and it becomes more and more relevant if you're not on a cash-based system which we kind of are because we constructed our books basically from the bank feeds because if you're on an accrual system then you also want to see the cash flows so the cash flow statement kind of helps to give the best of both worlds in an accrual kind of income statement and then the cash flows give you more of a cash flow kind of statement so it's an important report but i won't go into that in detail here who owes you these are all going to basically be giving you more detail generally on the balance sheet account of accounts receivable which you'll only have if you're tracking accounts receivable if you issue invoices so so if you're constructing your books from the bank feeds you won't need most of these so accounts receivable aging accounts receivable aging summaries let's just take a look at it this one gives you how outstanding the balances are and if i put this as of uh let's say 10 31 22 it also gives you this information by who owes you the money the point is that that 919 25 ties out to the 919 25 on the balance sheet so it's giving you more detail about a balance sheet report our collections report customer balance detail deals with the same accounts receivable customer balance summary same idea invoice list invoices are the things that make the accounts receivable balance similar report invoices and receivable payments similar thing open invoices open invoices you would think would give you the accounts receivable balance statement list terms list these are lists for uh or terms that you could put on an invoice like 30 day net 30 and so on uh unbilled charges these are charges that you had billable from an expense form or time a billable time that you can create an invoice from which you wouldn't be doing if you're constructing your books directly from the bank feeds typically and then we've got the sales and customers information we would expect this to be giving mainly more detail on the income item on the income statement so but it'll be less relevant oftentimes if we're constructing our books directly from the bank feeds so you got the customer contact links that's just a contact list deposit detail gives us more information kind of similar to the to the transaction detail if you just click on the deposit on the cash account on the balance sheet uh estimates and progress invoicing only there in certain industries that you're using like a job cost system for example so probably not there if you're building your books from the bank statement estimates by customers so these are estimate form reports which is again only there on industry specific things typically income by customer summary so this is like an income statement but it's by customer so you can build that from a normal income or this is income by customer so this is giving more detail about mainly the revenue line item but also I think the cost to get sold but it won't be there uh uh if you if you construct your books using the bank feeds instead of making the income recording with a sales receter invoice uh inventory detail so obviously these reports would be summarizing the inventory so if I open this up inventory valuation this gives you detail I'm going to make this as a 10 3122 this this will track the inventory items so this 250 if you were tracking on a perpetual inventory system would tie out to what's on the balance sheet it does not hear because we put some stuff into our books without uh an item we posted to inventory without an item but if you were doing a full perpetual inventory system this report would give you the units of inventory tying out supporting a line item on the balance sheet which you would only be doing if you had a bit more complex a system than constructing your books directly from the bank feeds payment method list physical inventory worksheet product and service list this is a list of the things you sell sales by customer summary so now this is going to give you more detail about your sales line or would so if I was to say this is going to go from 101 122 to 10 3122 you would think that this numbers should tie out to my sales for the year to date on the income statement which is right here it doesn't of course because we made our sales not with the sales receipts and uh and the invoices but we constructed our sales not using these but with a deposit form so even though we added the customers it can't populate it's not populating the customer summary because we didn't use the proper reports to do though so we lost that detail by constructing our books from the deposit forms which is okay but we lose some of the detail sales by product or service same thing this would give us the sales line item not by customer but by what we sold we don't have that detail that reports useless if we constructed our books from deposit forms instead of invoices and sales receipts because we don't have the items in it so let's just go down who owes you all of these reports have to do basically with the balance sheet account of accounts payable which once again would only be there if you're on an accrual based system entering bills tracking the accounts payable if you're constructing your books from the bank feeds it's not going to be there and then expenses and and vendors uh what you owe expenses and vendors this will have to do somewhat with the expenses on the income statement 1099s have to do with a report for 1099 report filing which you you do have to kind of deal with even as a small business oftentimes if you're dealing with contractors you can go through your list of vendors and uh check off which of them might be subject to 1099 reporting and you can then issue them a 1099 check detail expense by vendor summary open purchase orders we probably wouldn't have if constructing of course from the bank feeds purchased by class detail uh these would be more purchasing reports tracking inventory purchased by product transaction list sales tax you would only be using these if you turned on the sales tax if tracking the sales tax within the system you would have to be using invoices and sales receipts rather than constructing your books just from the bank feed deposit forms employee ease would only be there if you had the uh payroll turned on and for my accountant some of the main reports in here are the general ledger which which gives you all your transaction accounts by accounts similar to like drilling down on the accounts the journal gives you all of your transactions basically in journal entry format which is a great tool to practice with and then you've got your transaction detail by date report which is also a great report also just note that your trial balance is here too now i just want to do a quick thing with our profit and loss i just noticed with our with our with our balance sheet and profit and loss reports you've got this way that you can see the profit loss by month you can also see them side by side by quarter you can also do a comparative report so let's compare two periods for example if i wanted to go from from uh let's say from uh oh nine oh one two two two ten and then i'm gonna say i want to compare these two by taking the previous period percentage change dollar change so now i just got two periods that that i want to be comparing to and i'm going to change this back to total and run it okay so now i've got two months that i'm basically comparing to and so i have the difference between the two and the percentage change that's a common report uh that you would also uh be be running and you also the other common report that you might change this into uh you can do a previous year comparison but i'm going to take this off and then run it again and so there's a there's back to the normal you also might do a percentage uh a percentage of the column and so now this is taking a percentage everything given a percentage of total assets those are common reports on the income statement you can do the same thing let's just but let's just bring this back to the totals but if you did that percentage column thing then you're usually taking the percentage of income percentage of income and which is which is a little bit counterintuitive but now you're comparing everything to total income because that's like the goal of the income statement revenue generation so that's just a quick look at kind of like what we've constructed a little bit of look on how you can see those reports and and a look at you know how all the other reports kind of would fit into these major financial statement reports


All right, now, whether you are renting a tuxedo or suit, having one made or if you already have one in your closet that you plan to wear, in order to get a perfect fit, you're going to need to go to a tailor. The two most common questions I get are, how do I find a tailor and how do I know if that tailor is any good? I'll be answering both of those questions for you in this video as well as talking about what to expect, turnaround times and some things to consider when you are asking for specific alterations. Tip number one for finding a great tailor is to ask around. Word of mouth is the absolute best possible way to find a tailor. If you have a friend who dresses well and his clothing always fits perfectly, ask him who his tailor is. If you see someone on the street or in a store who looks like he's got his stuff together, doesn't matter whether he's a complete stranger or not, go up and ask him if he has a tailor that he recommends. In my experience, guys who are into style are always more than happy to share information like that. Tip number two, because this is the 21st century, do a Google search to find tailors in your area. That will quickly yield a lot of results and you'll also be able to see what kind of reviews they get. Now, once you find those three, four or five tailors who look promising, I do recommend reviewing tip number one and asking around a bit because in my opinion, when it comes to knowing the quality of a tailor's work, it is always best to have some kind of personal connection or personal recommendation from someone you trust rather than just cold calling someone you have no experience with. Now, aside from knowing whether a tailor is good at what he or she does, it is very important that that particular tailor is a good match for you. Just like any relationship, whether that's personal, business or romantic, a relationship with a tailor needs to be built on mutual trust and respect. Always keep in mind that any tailor is coming from a particular style background, so they may be very traditional and perhaps only used to older clients who are looking for a very traditional or classic style. So if you go to a tailor like that and they've never dealt with someone who's looking for something more modern, like a tapered leg or just a slight break, going in there and asking for that might really throw them for a loop and they might even tell you that you can't or shouldn't do that.  I've personally experienced that and it just sets up a weird dynamic to the relationship. That's not good for anyone. The tailor's gonna be frustrated, you're going to be frustrated, it's just a lose, lose situation. Along those lines, remember to be respectful and patient. Tell them what you like, listen to them if they wanna offer some advice and then if you feel like they're still not quite on the same style page as you, show them some examples of exactly what you're after so they can get a really clear visual picture of how you want to have your clothing tailored. If the tailor is good, regardless of their personal preferences, they will be able to do whatever you are asking. Let's talk about turnaround times. Now how long will it take a tailor to do your alterations depends on two things. One, the type of alteration and two, how busy they are. Simple alterations such as hemming pants, taking in or letting out the waist or shortening a sleeve, I would say you could reasonably expect to get back in no more than a week's time. If you're talking about something a bit more involved like tapering the pant leg, shortening a jacket or doing any type of work with the shoulders, that's going to take longer and not to mention be a lot more expensive. One final thing to remember is that tailoring is an art and not a science. It's not uncommon to have to do additional alterations, especially if you are getting a custom-made suit or tuxedo. So there you have it. Those are my tips on how to find a quality tailor and how to work with a tailor. Now one thing I didn't cover in this video was price because that's going to be very dependent on the particular tailor that you go to. Some rental companies will do free alterations. Most custom suit companies will also not charge for alterations, but that will vary from company to company. To give you a ballpark idea of what alterations can cost, however, I put together a list of some of the most common alterations and what you might expect to pay for them and that's down below this video. So that wraps it up. If you have any questions, let me know.