In this presentation, we will take a look at the objectives of our practice problem for a not-for-profit organization.  Here we are in our not-for-profit organization dashboard. Now the file I'm looking at already has the end product within it. We already have the data in it. Within the practice problem, we're going to start from scratch and we're going to enter this data into the system. Our goal here is to look at the end product, what our objective will be. Therefore, if you start this not-for-profit organization from scratch, it's not yet going to have any data in it. That's okay. Also, note that if you want to navigate around or practice the navigation around, you can then open zero's demo files. You can select the dropdown and you could go into the demo file so that when I look at reports in here for the not-for-profit organization, our objective, our goal, we can at least practice navigating and go to similar reports on your side even though the numbers will not be the same and just practice the navigation process. Then we will go back into this and we'll start from scratch and we will put this thing together from scratch. One of the best tools to practice navigating is actually looking at this on Excel or within Excel because if you see it in Excel, it's a two-dimensional space and you can kind of compare and contrast things. You can see things more clearly that are going to be connected together. Even if you don't fully understand Excel, you don't need to know Excel to work through this course. We are going to enter it into the system as well, but if you see it in Excel, we can see the actual journal entry and then we'll do that in a step-by-step process. We'll take one little transaction at a time. We'll actually look at the transaction within Excel and then we'll jump over here into zero and see what the challenges are within zero. The not-for-profit organization has some unique challenges as compared to a for-profit organization. Let's take a look at some of those. I'm going to be opening up our Excel worksheet, so I'm going to go to Excel. I'm going to open up this example file. You should have a copy of this Excel worksheet so you can analyze it. I know it's a little bit overwhelming, but again, don't worry about it too much because we're just going to take one transaction at a time and just use this as an example to lead us into what our objective will be along the way as we enter this into the zero software. Note that if you think about this, each transaction within Excel typically will have a journal entry, meaning two accounts will be affected. Again, we'll take a look at each transaction at a time and think about the two accounts that will be affected just to get an idea of what's going to be in place. Then we're going to jump into the zero software where we will typically not be using journal entries, but forms. Notice that's a step away from the actual what's going to happen. In other words, these two accounts are what's going to happen on the financial statements. The form is going to be affecting at least two accounts typically. We want to get an idea of what each form is going to be doing, what's it going to be doing to the financial statements. In Excel, we can take these transactions and basically post them to our chart of accounts and create basically a trial balance. This would be the typical kind of thing that would happen in financial accounting if you learn financial accounting. This would be like the back end of the zero database system. Then we would post all these transactions and then basically have a chart of accounts in terms of debits and credits, which I won't get into the debits and credits, but we would have our chart of accounts. Then we would take our chart of accounts and that's the building blocks that the system uses to make the financial statements the end result. What we're looking for, that end result, including something similar to a balance sheet, we'll call it a statement of financial position for a not-for-profit organization and then the something similar to an income statement or statement of activities. That's going to be the general process. Now, when we create these reports, note that we have a little bit of a distinction right here, a little bit of a problem because if we go into the not-for-profit organization, because there's not a profit motive, we have some needs above and beyond or that are different than a for-profit organization. Oftentimes, they rename things a little bit, I'm almost just to confuse us, it seems like, but we'll have different names that sometimes are going to be very similar to the other name, right? So that means like, for example, the balance sheet up top here, we could see that it's going to be called the statement of financial positions, basically a balance sheet. So that's one thing we'll have to deal with within the zero system, it's simply renaming and we can do that. That's not a problem. Then we have the standard balance sheet that's going to be pulling over this information from our trial balance. That'll be assets, liabilities, and then this bottom line is not equity, but net assets. So that's another thing. It's a little bit different than a for-profit organization. That's something we'll have to deal with within the zero system. And then within the equity section, we also note that we don't have just a normal equity account or retained earnings. We've got with donor restrictions and without the donor restrictions. So for a for-profit, just like for a for-profit, the not-for-profit here, this equity section or net assets means assets minus liabilities equals the total equity. So it's kind of like the book value of the company. So or the not-for-profit organization. Same for a not-for-profit organization. If it was a for-profit organization, we'd still have to break these out in some fashion. If it was a partnership, for example, we would have two capital accounts at least or more for the partners. If it was a corporation, we would have retained earnings in some capital contributions, common stock and whatnot. And then if it's a not-for-profit, we have to break out whether these net assets are restricted, meaning they have something that's targeted for them already or not. And that's going to be the challenge we have with our not-for-profit to break these out. Then we have the statement of activities, which is basically the income statement. And you could say this one is a little bit more challenging even, because what we need to do with this statement is we need to take our numbers that normally aren't like I would say more of a two-dimensional function one column over here and bring them into a two-column format. We've got the with donor restrictions and without donor restrictions. So we actually have to track items of our income statement in two columns. Now, if you think about how would you do that from just a journal entry standpoint, on a trial balance, we actually make two different accounts, contributions with restrictions, contributions, without restrictions. And then on the income statement or statement of activities, we can have one account, for example, contributions, which is then broken out by column with restrictions, without restrictions. So is there a tool within zero that we can use to do that easily? There is, that's going to be our class feature. So we're going to be able to kind of break that information out, and that's going to be one of our objectives that we will be doing. Another objective we have is we also want to be breaking out our expenses by function, what they're used for, such as programs, and such as admin and fundraising. And we also want to break out their nature, which is what we would normally think of as expenses. So up top here is a worksheet breaking out expenses by their expense categories, their nature, and then by function, which is going to be programs, management services, admin, whatever, and fundraising type of activities. So that's another thing that we need. We need to be able to break that out, because people that read these financial statements want to know how much of the expenses went to the actual programs, and how much of the expenses went to the admin, and that kind of information. That's important for a fundraising type of or not-for-profit organization. So that's another objective. We also have the objective here for not-for-profit that we need to provide this information to people that as to make decision-making as easy as possible, and often people that are on the boards of a not-for-profit may not be really familiar with financial statements or work with them a lot, possibly. And therefore, we want to make it digestible as well. So we also want to make a report where we could say, here's the statement of activities. We got the expenses broken out in one format here. If you want to see more detail on it, we can give you more detail on it. We also have the restricted items and unrestricted items, which these two items could also use more detail. We could expand. We could say, well, what kind of restrictions do you have? And that's going to be some of the objectives we're going to have in a not-for-profit, which is a little bit more challenging than a for-profit in some ways. So let's think about the tools that Xero has to help us with that. And I'll just take a look at the end reports that we make. It will be customizing these reports. You can look at the standard reports just to look at a report in the demo file as we go through here. If I go to the accounting dropdown, then I'm going to say that we have the normal balance sheet, the normal income statement. And then we're going to be creating basically an income statement worksheet and the restricted items worksheet, and so on and so forth. I'm going to go into the reports here. Now, these reports, these alterations of the reports, these altered reports that we will make, we're going to be making it from a standard balance sheet, standard income statement, and we're going to save them in this custom reports field. So you can follow along and just open the standard balance sheet and income statement and just visualize how we'd be basically making some adjustments. And then we'll go through that in a very systematic step-by-step process as we go through the course. So I'm going to go to the custom tab and this is the end result. These are the reports we will be making. We'll be making a worksheet reports that we can use to help check our numbers and then presentation reports, which will be what we will use to provide to the users of the financial. So for example, we have our statement of financial position. This will be similar to the balance sheet. So if you hit your dropdown in your demo company and go down to the balance sheet, you can make your comparison. I'm going to go over here and we're going to open this up. This will be one of the end result reports that we'll help to, we'll work on generating and making as we do the data input process. As we do the data input process, zero will basically be making this type of report. It'll be doing exactly what we looked like, what we saw on the financial, on our worksheet over here. It'll be basically making journal entries as we entered data forms like invoices and whatnot. It'll be actually recording journal entries. This would be like a check or an expense type of transaction. It'll then be generating these reports. So here's the statement of financial position. I'm going to hold down control and scroll up just a little bit. Bring us up to that one, two, five. When you're on the reports, I like to be at around one, two, five of the scrolling. But when you're on data input forms, you generally want to be back down to 100 so that zero doesn't do anything kind of funny. Sometimes things get messed up if you're zoomed in on something other than a report. So then I'm going to scroll down and we got, as you can see, our assets. Notice the name change. So we changed the name from the balance sheet. We just created this from a balance sheet and made a custom report from it. We've got our assets here and we've got our liabilities. And then down here, we still have this kind of issue with the equity. It's difficult to rename this because this is going to be an actual name within the zero system. So that one's going to be a little bit difficult for us to adjust. However, we still can, but we'll have to export it to Excel and make that final adjustment. But we also have this grouping down here. We've changed the retained earnings to basically net assets unrestricted. Net assets restricted. So you can see we can do that well in zero. So that works fine. So that's going to be our statement of financial position. Looks a lot like a normal balance sheet. So not too much customization there. We're going to go to the right, right click. Now this is something I'm going to be doing a lot as we go. Really great tool for online features, nets that you can duplicate the tab. So to do that, you want to go up to the tab, I'm hovering over the tab, right click on that tab and then duplicate that tab. And that allows me to have two statements open. So now I have this statement on the right. I'm going to go back to the left and I'm going to open up another statement. So I'm going to go to the accounting dropdown. I'm going to go to the reports and then I'm going to go to the custom reports and take a look at our other statements. Now the other main statement, kind of like the income statement is the statement of activities. So let's take a look at that one. You could follow along in the demo file, go into the business, I'm sorry, accounting and go into the income statement. So we're going to go into the statement of activities and check out this one. Now this one's going to be, takes a little bit more alteration within the system. And like I said, the flexibility of zero to deal with that alteration and make a nicely formatted report without the need to export it to Excel and do more formatting is really better than comparable software. This is a high point for zero. So obviously we can rename it up top. If we then go back down, now we have the income statement. We just basically took the total income instead of having one column. We've now broken it out into the unrestricted and restricted. And so, and we did this with the use of basic classifications and the edit layout tool down below. So we'll work with that as we go, great tools. So there we have these two. This is going to be unrestricted and these are going to be restricted items for the income statement. We'll talk more about exactly what those mean as we go and when we would generate these reports what kind of things would generate us putting this information to restricted or unrestricted as well as the tool which is going to be the tracking feature. So then we have the expenses. Note the expenses here are by nature and that's kind of the default setting for zero. So this is going to be the normal type of expenses. We will then break them out by function by their category. So in other words, right here in unrestricted we can further break this out now. So you can imagine then talking to someone that's in a not-for-profit and we'd say, you know, here's the balance sheet or basically the balance sheet and here's the income statement, statement of activities and then this will give the general information. Then you can imagine the next question might be, well, how much of these expenses are going to be broken out per program? How much of them are going to the programs and how much of them are going to the general and admin? Because that's important for not-for-profit because we want to see if they're efficient working well putting the money to the actual programs. Well, then we would have to break out this report. We'd say, okay, let's break out this unrestricted report and give the detail on it. To do that, I'm going to make another report up top. I'm going to right click on the tab up top. I'm going to duplicate this report. We're going to go back to the tab to the left and then I'm going to hit the accounting drop down again.  I'm going to go into the custom reports again. Custom reports. And then I'm going to go to the restricted, I'm sorry, the expenses by nature and function. Now this is a report we actually generated from an income statement. So you can open up a standard income statement again or just keep looking at the standard income statement and think about how we're going to adjust this report to make the expenses by nature. So we're going to take a standard income statement and then break it out by class or by category. So we'll make these categories which will then categorize this information and these are going to be the program. So we can say, all right, here's the total program that went to the program and here's the admin and the fundraising and here's the total. Now we're going to do that with the use of the categories and we're going to be breaking them out with the help of these percentages. So we would have to come up with some percentages to help us to do this breakout. We'll talk about how to get to the percentages and once we have the percentages, how we can then use the categories to break out this information. But you can see this report then being constructed from basically an income statement would be a little bit overwhelming if we were to include it in our statement report over here. In other words, we could make this income statement report basically income statement, statement of activities report also include the subcategories of the unrestricted to have all those columns in here but that would be a little bit overwhelming. So notice it's nice to have the unrestricted here and then give them more data of the expense breakout report and something like this. So then if we go back to the first tab then you can imagine the next question which might be, well, what are these restricted items? What type of restrictions do we have and what are the rules for, you know, what are those restrictions? So then we can make that report. I'm going to go back to the first tab. I'm going to right click on it and duplicate that tab again and then let's go back on down to the reports. So I'm going to go to the accounting dropdown. This is going to be another variant. This next report I'm going to go to the reports, another variant of the income statement. So we're just taking the income statement. I'm going to go to customize reports and we're now going to customize it for this report which is going to be the restricted item detail report. So now we're going to go into the restricted item detail which will allow us to get more detail on this report. This all seems a little overwhelming possibly but just note it's fairly easy alterations to make these reports once we enter the data and the data input will be much the same for a for-profit organization will use similar forms for it. So then we can say, all right, here's, if we go back to this report, here's our restricted items and then the detail for that, here's the types of restrictions. Government, long-term project and the time restrictions, that adding up to the 234-656 which ties out going back to the income statement, the 234-656. So as we see it here, if you look at all the information that we kind of need to be given to someone or to be reporting on, it could be kind of, it could be overwhelming but also note that if we were, we could include all of that information on this report by having this column and then four other sub columns in it for the programs and the admin and then this one and the three other columns related to the types of restrictions there are which would really be overwhelming to anybody. So our goal then would be to break these down and to be able to say, okay, here's these two columns. If you want more detail on them, here's another report that gives them more detail on them. So the question now then is of course, when we go through the process, we're gonna be using forms to enter this data into the system. The system's gonna be generating basically a basic balance sheet and income statement. We'll take that balance sheet and income statement and then alter it to reports such as these with the use of the editing feature down here and also with the use of the categorization features that we'll have within zero. So that's gonna be some of our objectives. We'll start off by some navigation. We'll go into some navigation of the system. We'll talk about some of the forms that will be used to enter the data. We do have a long course on zero that's a for-profit organization that goes into the data input process in a bit more detail. So if you want just the normal data input process and spend more time on navigation of that type of thing, you might wanna look at the for-profit organization. It's gonna be similar in terms of the navigation. So but we will review that and then we'll dive right into the practice problem here and we'll just put in a month's worth of data for the not-for-profit organization to actually generate these reports. That's gonna be it for now, let's get out of here.


Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee Today is Sunday, May 21st 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes or Doubter 5 and as usual we have our co-host Wombat on the phone with us. Hello Wombat! Can't imagine either. Those are very good singers. Those are very high notes. I'm gonna mercy me. You got my respect. Good notes. I taught that pretty good. And our guests today are Boudreaux, say hello Boudreaux and J.W. Kennedy. Hello, J.W. I didn't leave anyone out. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought and humanism in the sciences. And conversely we also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville while you're just not, there are several atheist free thinking and rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville and we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show breaks. Also, did you know that there has been a streaming atheist call-in video show? Yes, TV show. Did you know that, Wombat? Yes. Yes. And I'm so glad that you love obscure Japanese anime because Hinitsu Flagu is a really brilliant game about an otome game where a girl gets transported into a video game where she's the villainous, she's the bad guy rival for the love character, but she's still herself. So she's actually a really nice person and she makes friends with all the beautiful boys and all the beautiful girls. I'll have to watch that. Everybody loves her. It's amazing. It sounds great. It's really really good. But it's not our show. Oh, okay, then we'll never mind. Oh, no, that's not the right one. It's called Free Thought Forum. We'll give you more information after the mid-show break about how you can watch it, maybe even become involved in it. If you'd like to interact with this show during this show, the broadcast when we do it on Sunday morning at 11 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, go to Facebook and search for digital free thought radio hour and use the messaging function to send us questions or comments or you can just email to askanatheistatnoxvilleatheist.org. What is our topic today? One minute. I thought something really incredible happened yesterday. It was supposed to happen on Wednesday, but there's no sweat. I'm not Russian, but we just launched a spaceship from the USA with people in it up to the space station from a private company that not only was able to launch the spaceship but also had the spaceship land back down on Earth, a little crater. In my opinion, Larry, just mute and unmute yourself. You come right back. But I'm saying, in my opinion, that is one of the most incredible things that I've ever seen. That's like a spectacular thing that makes me feel like in a lifetime that I'm experiencing right now, I might be in the generation of people who just came off the moon landing to International Space Station to first flight out to Mars. That actually might happen in my lifetime, and I feel really excited about that. When I was a kid, one of the things that, I mean, science fiction movies were always rockets going to like some other planet and they would land like that. They would land, point down, and I never thought that I would actually see that because it didn't make much sense anymore. But with modern technology and computers and having the computer figure out all the logistics as it's coming down, it makes sense now. And it's just amazing to actually see it come to fruition. I just want to get everyone's opinions on this incredible thing to happen. I wonder if we're desensitized to it or if we think of it as the incredible event that it could be. Kujo, you'll be the first up to that. What do you think about this, man? So one of the things I thought was cool, and this was actually during the Wednesday launch attempt. But hearing the astronauts talk about the technology in the cab, and then there were flashing images of the previous launches and then even in more recent launches and talking about, I mean, they've got touchscreens. Yeah. They used to have to do all of these extra procedures and double checks and open up these books and look at things. And now it's all just like, click, click, click, click. It's awesome. You've got to wonder how far behind the American flight technology or the world. It's insane. It's so bad. A jet airliner and you've still got a billion buttons and levers and everything you've got to keep in mind. It's crazy with the heads up display or a gaming controller because I can fly a drone pretty well with this. We've all flown planes. Simulation. Yeah. And computers. Heck, why not just make a part of if anything, make it a keyboard and then just call it. Yeah. I'll be fine. I will say this, though. We have for the band I play and we've got a digital mixer. Basically, it's just a box where you plug things in. There are no knobs, dials, levers, anything and you can't control it all unless you have like an iPad or. Yeah, I've seen it. And that's fantastic. It works great. You can save things. You can, I mean, software update, you can get new options. But that mixer in your picture or, I mean, right behind you, daughter five physically right right behind you. Not over there virtually. But the difference, though, is if you have something go wrong and you're at a show and you need to fix something quickly, you know, your battery dies on the iPad or Wi-Fi connections bad, you just you can't change it. And I'm wondering how that translates to in space, you know, something goes funny and now you don't have a physical thing to turn, you know. So my two cents from that was and I saw a video where they actually made comments on like how they used to be all push knobs and none of that stuff's like hard analog. Like it's not like you turn a crank and like a string pulls something like a break. It's more of like talking to a relay and the relay decides what happens. But what's cool about the touchscreen display is even if the both astronauts pass out, mission control can fly that plane to where it needs to be because it's all it's it's close enough where it's like, we know how to fly this plane. We're good.   Yeah, yeah, that'd be so bad. Yeah. Please reboot. We'll take Martian AT support. But I'm Joey, I'm sorry, J.W. Kennedy, stage name. What do you got? What do you think about this? Well, I actually just recently watched a short documentary on Mars exploration of how they've been trying to do it for almost 30 years. And it keeps for political reasons. They don't they're not having been receiving the funding that they need. But in the documentary, I don't know if this is still the plan, but they're going to send up an unmanned spaceship. And it's going to land on Mars. And they're going to make sure it lands safely. And that's actually going to be their their their trip home. That's going they're going to switch. That's cool. I like that.  Really? Wow. Yeah. I got how he explained it. Did they have a timeline on that? No, when this document, this is an old older documentary from like five, five years ago or something like that, where they were still trying to work on getting the funding for it, it was still just talk. Okay. My big takeaway from this is I love the fact that it wasn't like a Christian project. It wasn't like a Muslim project. It wasn't like a white people or a black person or any particular groups project. We came together as a country and made this happen. And it took a lot of talent from a lot of different people. And it should be a demonstration that whether you're religious or not, you can work together to make an incredible thing happen. So there is progress possible. And it wasn't necessarily an action that was motivated by a religious belief. That's that's the other crux too. So like with with different minds coming together on the basis of what can we do scientifically and make this like this engineering pursuit happen in real world and and and be incredible and be like safe for everybody else to go in it as well. That is a pursuit that I think even if you were listening to this and you're like a staunch Christian, you'd be like, but yeah, maybe science is actually pretty useful. Maybe science is kind of cool. And maybe we should check this out. Maybe I should fund this a little bit more or shouldn't be bragging about how high school is a waste of time. We can't pray our way to Mars. Man, I just feel like physics students in class will be like, well, what's this useful force? Like, dude, did you just watch what happened on the news right now? You have to know this to do that. Like, do you want to do that? Do you want to be a part of that? This is where we're going right now. Like you are the next generation. And I just think it's good. I will go for it. No, I will say I was just saying it was exciting. Yeah, one thing that did irk me a little bit. The countdown was done by a person who at the end of the countdown said God speed, which didn't bother me at first because I had my Twitter radio going like God speed on a science thing. But then I was like, I looked it up and I'm like, I can I can that with like God bless you or it's like it's no particular endorsement of anything. It's like it's just an old saying it's a ship that's flying up in space. I'm like, whatever, that's cool. But we have to give credit to God for everything. He does everything that God and our moms, even though we think for ourselves, that's actually him doing it. So we have to give credit to him or he'll be very upset. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, though, I think good week as far as science goes and you don't really have like something as obviously monumental that everyone can just dial in at the same time. So, um, Boudreau, yeah, we're still going off. I don't even know if we're coming off, but like we're still in this, you know, COVID-19 situation, right? It's still hard to reach out and connect with other people. We have a lot of we have something that I'd like to throw out. Yeah, we J. W. Kennedy and I tried something yesterday that I thought would might be interesting to you. And that is a 10 minute you cannot stop talking session. So like, someone picks a topic, they have like a list of four topics. Someone sees it for the first time and they have to talk about those things and let them go wherever they go for 10 minutes. Here's the challenge. The person who's talking can't stop for 10 minutes. The person who's listening has to listen and work on that listening skills type of thing. Larry, what'd you say? Stream of consciousness type of thing. Exactly. It goes places, man. It goes places and it was intense. 10 minutes. J. W., you mind recapping? And then, Eric, I'd like to get your impression of this if this is something you'd like to try out too. Yeah. Well, I just said a couple of things that was the topic is something I'd been thinking about earlier this week. So I kind of got a chance to get it off of my chest. I hope I articulated it well. You did incredible. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, yeah, I already know that. I mean, it's been therapeutic for me and it's only been 24 hours. Yeah. So we had like a topic like masculinity, for example. You want to touch on that? Well, I just, the LGBT plus movement and the identity politics surrounded this. I didn't meet my biological father until I was 24. I didn't have a father figure until I was around 13. My mom left when I was eight. So, and I was never really, I tried out for contact sports, really wasn't my thing. And so theater was my thing and music was my thing and science and video games were my thing. And so in high school, I kind of went through a little bit of this crisis is just like, well, I'm not like other guys. And I don't like the things other guys like, I must not be like, like a real man, as they say. And then I kind of, in some reflection, then maybe even some, maybe I talked to my therapist about it, I'm not sure because I was seeing a therapist when I was a teenager. I just, I realized that masculinity is not an masculinity and femininity is not an exact science. It's they're both social constructs, they're both when it comes to, when it comes to their roles, when it comes to, okay, this is, you know, this is what you men usually like, or this is what men usually do. The spectrum. Men usually act. And I came to grips with this a long time before the LGBT movement and identity politics and the far left started presenting, what is it, 51 genders now? I'm just kind of confused by that. I haven't read the so-called sociological research that is claimed to support that. But it seems, it seems a bit much. It seems a bit unnecessary. Like, what the only thing that really I should, the only thing that really I concern myself with when I identify as what they say cisgender male is that I have the male parts and that's about it. I don't, I don't see any good reason to believe that I have to be interested in cars to be a man. I have to watch football on a regular basis to be a man. I have to, you know, fill in the blank to be a man. It's just, I, but I came to grips with that a long time ago. So anyway, that was, that's kind of the soapbox on that. Eric, how do you feel about that? Are you on the same page or would you add some nuance to that? No, and kind of what Chad was able to join today because he's, he's got a lot of, yeah, he's, he's, he's staying. He's flipping houses. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, he's, he's actually has a lot of kind of interest in this, in this topic and we've talked about it before. You know, I guess for me, it gets a little tricky when you start talking about participating in sports, but you know, particularly competitive and the Olympic level and things like that, you know, you have transgender entering the equation and someone identifying a certain way. I mean, how do you know that someone's not doing that just to win a medal or, you know, and that gets, and this is one of those things where it's, I don't think there's a simple answer to it. It's, it's tough. It's a new road.  And now, now that we have bathrooms that are gender neutral, now everybody's all sudden worried about perverts. It's like, well, they were there before. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm talking as a person who doesn't have kids, it's not so much the, the pervert in the bathroom aspect. It's just a very unhygienic pervert. It's like, that's the worst place you could do that in. Can't you just find a playground somewhere?  This thing about different genders playing in different sports just to get a medal like male identifying as a woman, just to be able to get into women's sports. Maybe we have to break that down into height and weight like we do boxing, you know, like a lightweight and middle weight and just let them go at it. If they're all the same stature and weight basically, they can't compete. Maybe we just need to take another look at it. Well, what they're talking about now is requiring if you went through puberty as a certain gender, you will have to compete as in that arena. And so, well, that's, I don't know if that's something that they've put in as a rule yet, but I heard a rumor that that's what they're talking about. It sounds like they're right when you consider it. Did they go through puberty as that particular gender? Sounds like an excuse. Yeah. I don't know what kind of label to put this on, but for me, it's always about consent. And if I have, for example, if I want to become a female woman's MMA star, right? If the lady knows what my history is and she's consenting to this and she knows she's going to beat me regardless of whatever my background is, we're consenting to this. But if I am very, very good post-surgery and I pass as a female and I have like, you know, biological advantages that I'm carrying with me and I don't tell my opponent that, I feel like that's a contrary to consent of the fight. Yeah. And I've seen both cases happen and what I would like to just be is a transparent issue so that everyone who's aware of it and consenting to it are fine to compete because I feel like anyone can compete as long as there's consent involved. Consentual. But if it's not consent or if there's like some stuff that's going on, it's like, who am I racing against? Why does this person have four quadriceps? This makes no sense. This person's half horse. That's not cool. I didn't sign up for that. It's like, well, they're trans species. Like, that's not, I don't know. I'm out. I'm out. I'm out. Like, if I consent to it, I'll race a horse. I will watch that on TV any day. There is an interesting idea that in the realm of non-combat of sports that it's a non-issue, whether you say like, hey, racing, bike racing, it's an exhibition game at the most. Like, this isn't really like a tournament. We just want to show we're inclusive. And I feel like even in those levels, when the participants aren't consenting to having, you know, someone who's who is transitioning or someone who's maybe from because we're hominids, the stronger gender coming or stronger sex coming on to like this into this arena, it feels like it's an unfair disadvantage for someone who's worked really hard to get outcompeted by someone who probably had a biological advantage. And that's, that's unfair. I feel like just make it consensual and I'm totally fine with it.  There's a problem. There's a problem there. Let's say that you're in the Olympics and you don't really get to pick who the other country is going to submit for the competition. And you don't consent. Well, all of a sudden you're booted from the competition. You have no choice, no chance at all of getting that prize. Yeah. I think people have protested though before. Like, that's not the first time people have said, well, I'm just not going to Olympics then get somebody else. And then the rest of the team is like, we're not going either. We've, we've had countries, entire countries just say, we're not competing in this sport because Germans are Nazis. We don't, we're not going. Or Russians are, are steroiding. Exactly. Yeah. Or, but I think it's just, I think if we look in history, and I'm, I'm not sure how analogous this is, but I can say like, there used to be a time where black people couldn't play baseball with white people. And so black people said, we're really good at baseball. We're going to just make our own league. It's going to be called the league, the Negro league. And that was like a really, really cool sport because it was the same rules, but people were a lot faster.  Let's make this work out. And then, and next thing you know, sports got a lot better as a result. But I'm saying like, it's like no supporting the Negro league. There's no funding like for that. That was like grassroots as you can get. And it's a really interesting history behind that too. It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be hard to demonstrate the talent of like individuals who are transitioning and saying like, Hey, these are, this is a unique aspect of the sport. Maybe I can find other people who are like on the same level. And if not, I don't know, but I just feel like you should just work harder to get the consent rather than sneak it in. Because I feel like that's going to harm you in the long run, even if you benefit in the short term. Well, we all kind of stepped on your topic there. Do you have anything you'd like to flesh out on that for me? No, and I guess for me, it would be interesting to comment on the format that you guys did. So the 10 minute kind of stream consciousness talk, that sounds really cool to you. So you don't, you don't tell people the topic ahead of time. No, so, but we do give them for random four topics to go off of. And then from there, they are free to pick any of the initial ones and then branch off to wherever they need to go from there. And then after that, we just do a quick review session in the meanwhile, I'm just recording like some of the best quotes that I've heard. And it's insane, the places you go. And there's also a follow up where it's like, okay, you talk about these two things when you're on your stream of conscious, let's go back to these topics and go from there. And we got to some really intense territory, like it was, I was not anticipating it for it to get as emotional as we got to, but it's a cool thing when you just have to keep talking and you don't put that filter on. And then eventually it's just, this is what it is. And for even for the listener, it's a bit exhausting to just say, man, there's a lot of stuff to pull through this, man. Yeah, it was intense, dude. So is there any kind of a rebuttal or any kind of a comment back from the listener? I don't know. I don't know the format so well. I don't want it to be a place where it's like, here's my counter argument to this. It's more of like, these are the positive things I'm pulling out. Gotcha. Okay. So this is yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jw, what do you think? What do you think? Should it be more of a rebuttal? It'd be my good, maybe it's good to get some feedback. You just introduced me to this. So I'm not, I'd say clarification questions. It depends on, I don't know. I think that'd be something to just think about in time. Yeah. There is something called what's productive.  Yeah. I just don't think we can have both at the same time. Exactly. And I'm trying not to make it be either because SE, I don't know how good SE is over video chat. And I also don't know if I have the patience to listen to someone vent, but it's more of like, or preach. Exactly. Because you don't know who you're talking to sometimes. And I don't have patience for that. But it's more of like a interesting, where is this going to go? And how, how, and I know I don't have control over it. So I'm not even going to try to have control over it. I just want to see if I can see the branches of thoughts and can, and, and from point to point to point, can I see like the trajectory of the conversation as a listener? Because a lot of the time when you're talking to someone, you're hanging on the words that they're saying, but you also need to see where they're going, if it's in a positive direction or a negative direction, as far as the conversation is going. And I felt like it's just a really good talent to be able to understand momentum in a conversation and, and like vector, like, where's this directing? Where are we going? Where we will be like two minutes from now? Do we end up there? Or we somewhere completely different? It's just good. It's just nice to have my finger on that. There is a lot of cool things going on. But man, I think we're already at the half of the show. I'm not, yeah, we're 27 minutes in. How about this? Before we take a break, one more thing. I am, I'm kind of sad by the, the passivity that I'm sensing from you guys. We just launched a spaceship with people in it, into space. And you're guys like, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, we've done that before. That's happened. Was it in your lifetime? Well, we tried to launch people in the space once in a lifetime, but that's true. That's true. Yeah. International space stations have people in it for you. Yeah. So I think the more things happen. This sounds like the first time a spaceship has actually come down and landed itself. Yeah, from a private company. Like Amazon did that or something. Yeah. Like if Walgreens launched a spaceship, it would be like, whoa, it could happen. Disney's planning on building a hotel that's going to orbit the Earth. Right. There's always been a question of what do you do with a lot of money? And I feel like Elon Musk is doing the best, coolest things with money. Like the Virgin Mobile guy, he's like on a water ski with models. It's like, sure, but hip artists that are losing their money and going bankrupt do that same thing too. Do something cool. Elon Musk is like, I could build an Iron Man suit or I can make a spaceship and make electric cars and like do all that. Do all of it. He's like, I'm going to do all of it. And I'm like, that's great. So we're waiting on the Iron Man suit. Anyway, that's it. Okay. So we'll take a break for a station identification and maybe a song. This is WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll see you in just a minute. 103.9 FM Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Simply the best. Hey, you ready to continue? Let's do it. Welcome back. I'm Dutter 5 and this is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, May 31st, 2020. Welcome back to the second half of the show. Let's talk about the Freethought groups that you can join right here in Knoxville. First, there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville, founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. We have about 1,020 members now. You can join us online at KnoxvilleAtheist.org or you can simply Google Knoxville Atheist and you'll find us. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and search for an Atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. That's right. Another large Freethinking group in Knoxville are the Rationalists of East Tennessee. That's R-E-T. Just go to Rationalist.org to find out about their events and all about them. Earlier in the show, we said we'd talk about Knoxville Atheist call-in-TV show, what was called Freethinkers United Coalition. It's a kind of a coalition of the different Freethinking groups in Knoxville and they're doing it on YouTube now. Go to YouTube and type in Freethinkers United Coalition of Knoxville. And remember, you can find archives of their shows on YouTube where a fan has been posting them. If you're interested in getting involved in the TV or this radio show, just go to an Ask Meetup or R-E-T meeting or email us. Send a request to AskAnAtheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org if you want to. And you may be our next co-host or guest. With us on the show are Wombat and Guest Joy, J.W. Kennedy, sorry, Boudreau, and we miss you, Dred Pirate Higgs, maybe next time. Yeah, you too, Chad. Where do you want to come back on the topic? Hey, I like to start with my favorite section of the whole show. Do you guys see where it is? You guys find it? Yeah, yeah. You found it? I can't find my love. Where is the love? Where is the love? The love, the love. Where is the love? Today's question comes from Satan Clause from Reddit. He's been posting on rslastreatepistemology. He has a question for us. He says, hey, I was, how would you respond to someone who uses locations as justification for their belief? Here's the full question. I was wondering a lot about street epistemology and I don't have a way to question whether locations are reliable or not. For example, if a Christian were to say that they believe that Moses really received the Ten Commandments from God because Mount Sinai exists, what is a good way to respond to that? That or five, I'll throw this out. Real locations have been used in fictional works for centuries. Millenia. What? Yes, I mean, how long has England been around? Does that mean that Merlin and King Arthur were real and magic and dragons and all that is real? Troy's been around for thousands of years. Does that mean that Achilles really was invulnerable? Stories grow up about real places as well as mythical places. There's no credence to be had in that direction. Wow. Wow. Very, very straightforward. That's right, that's me. Boudreau, what do you think? And then maybe on the angle of trying to actually convince someone who thinks that this is a good argument, what would you say to them? Say, someone says, hey, well, you know this. Jerusalem does exist, therefore. Well, I think probably the way I would look at it is one of the best ways to craft a lie or a con or something like that would be to try to cling to as much truth as you can. So if you're going to whip up a story to try to explain why your wife got pregnant or try to explain why it rains or something like that, I mean, peppering as much truth as you can to make it more believable. So, of course, you're going to pick real places and real things. Or why can't it just be that things that were put in a book for fiction kind of became something? You know, people picked up on the name and we have names of cities and streets surely named after fictional places, right? I mean, I can't. Yeah, yeah. Right off hand. Harry Potter's train station is actually in London. There's actually a placard for it. Yeah. So, I don't know, seems kind of silly. Though I've heard that argument thrown at me before. So it's not like, okay, yeah, it's not uncommon. Oh my gosh, I've heard it in the laboratory. All right, JW Kennedy, go for it in the lab. When you're studying history, you've got to have some sort of, you know, discernment. You've got to be able to distinguish from what's a story from a historical event. And religious people are fine with every other religion and every other mythology and every other story thinking that is extraordinary and clearly just a story being considered fiction. But when it comes to, when we come to their texts and we use the same methods and we discern, hey, this kind of looks like fiction. Sorry. I don't know what to do. Sorry. Yeah. I met someone who was really, really bragging that they went over to Kadesh and I was just like, I don't know where Kadesh even is on the map. I didn't say that out loud. I was just wondering like, where's Kadesh? And why does it sound familiar? I'm like, what? So I asked the girl like, and this is in the laboratory where like handling micro plates and stuff. And it's just like, so where's Kadesh? It's like, it's Middle East. You never heard of Kadesh? I was like, no, like what, what's special about it? I would love to know. And she looked at me very, very angrily. And she said, it's where the Bible happened. And I was like, in a switch of my head, just went like, I care to, I don't care anymore. I was just like, oh, okay. I don't know what the sound was, but it was sort of like, all right. Just did the rest of the work. I think I walked out of the room later on, but I never felt such a hard flip. Just like, oh, so I don't have to care about what you think anymore. Great, wonderful. That saved me a lot of time. To add to what everyone else is saying, I would say strictly from a histological point of view, and this may not necessarily be the response, but it'll be, if I read in a book that Mount Sinai existed and it was like the Bible, that wouldn't even be good enough proof that Mount Sinai existed. There's much better proof to determine if things exist than reading in a 2000 year old book. I can look it up in a map. I can go on Google Maps. I can see people that came from there. I can see cultures. I can look it up on Wikipedia. I could visit there myself. All of these would be better standards of evidence. And as long as some mundane claim, like New York exists, I'm sure there are cities that are named after New York. New York probably isn't the only city called New York in America. There's a lot of cities that have Yorkshire in them and are new versions of English towns that came over, but these are very mundane claims and I can still find a better standard of evidence to support those claims. But when you use these low standards of evidence to support really, really grand oise claims, like Moses existed and he was a guy who could split the seas with a stick and cause food to fall out of the sky and move like, I forgot how many slaves he moved out of Egypt, but it was more than 12. Let's just say it's more than 12. Definitely more than 12. All of these things would need a higher standard of evidence because they're much more extraordinary claims. Oh, go for it. Well, what you were saying a little while ago about your lady friend and the flip, the little switch flipping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody's mentioned him yet, but oh, now I can't remember his name. It was in my mind just a minute ago. His name's Sam Harris. Sam Harris, exactly. Don't worry, I forget him all the time. Yeah, he says, and the way he puts it is, when they do things like that, when they say things like that, they pay a price for bringing the magical world into the regular world. Like if you could be talking to your friend and then all of a sudden he starts off on this rant that he saw Elvis yesterday, well, he pays a price in the conversation and his standing in the conversation as it were. And she certainly did. You no longer cared for her opinion or what her opinion was. And when she talks to other people who believe the exact same thing she does, she doesn't realize that she's cashing checks with the same check back and forth. So she's not making a profit. It's only when she talks to someone who's completely out of her bubble that it's like, hey, where'd my money go? I thought I gave them $5. It's like, where'd it go? It's gone because I don't know that anymore. J.W. brought up a thing a little while ago about historians or maybe we should. We're talking about how we don't ascribe to history things like magic and things. It's called the concept of continuity in history. Historians, when they look at the past and they see stories like Jesus then rose from the dead, they say, well, people don't rise from the dead now. We don't see that happening. This is not something that we credit now. Why would we credit it then? It's a continuity of history that historians have to ascribe to to be taken seriously, basically, in their own field. J.W. Yeah, we drew. Can I jump back to the previous point you guys were making our cash and checks? So I thought about this a lot lately. And I think maybe we brought this up, maybe not here, but one of our offline talks. And when you meet someone for the first time and you find out they're religious, do you feel like you have a almost want to say a prejudice because you're kind of prejudging against that person? Yeah, I do. And then on the flip side, when you meet someone you find out they're an atheist, do you kind of have the opposite reaction? Like, how do I hug you? I feel that they're operating in the real world.  J.W. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. Everybody has some little area that they have a pet area for that they need to justify. I once, I flew to Sweden to do work there for a year. And when I was getting my residency card, I was in line. And I remember meeting people who had an American flag on their shoulder and maybe American, like, sparse, bangled shoes. And I'm like, hey, you speak English from America. I was like, no, no, no, sorry. It's just a fashion statement for them to wear the badge and the shoes. And I'm like, oh, geez, that's right, like different country, they just wear it. So I lived in a really small town. Very few people spoke English. And whenever I did meet someone who did, I met a Canadian. And I was like, oh my God, America. It's just like, I'm Canadian. It's like, it's the same thing. Come on. North America. Come on. Let's hang out. It's good. It's just like, no, let me know. I was like, come on. We got to be friends. So that's how I feel like when I meet another atheist. It's just like, I've been in this country for so long. I just want to reach out. Yeah. I totally get that. I definitely have that, that. Don't you? I do. And it's something I like to kind of keep in check because the thing about it, if I'd have met J.W. before his deconversion, I would hate to... Well, no, but I mean, he was a person. No. Yeah. But think about how I'd miss out on knowing you as a person. So I guess I also think too that not everybody has put this much thought into it as we have. I mean, I put a lot of thought, I think about religion more than most of my religious friends, I'm sure. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's so many people that just kind of, they're default, they're default religion. They're default religious. They're just, that's what they've always known. Yeah. It's the easiest path. And honestly, I bet if you really probed them, they'd... Oh, yeah, I'm actually not. I guess I'm not that religious. Butcher, I'll tell you straight out. The benefit of being religious is that you don't have to think about religion. Yes. Yeah. Gives you a gold-plated reason to stop thinking, I think. Yeah, and that's... That is a great... You have to think about it as a benefit. That's a pretty good benefit. As far as, hey, man. And sleeping late on Sunday and a 10% raise in pay. There's definitely benefits on the other side too.  Well, you get a 10% raise, but I'd not believe it. No tithing. Yeah, no tithing. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess... You're going to read the fine print. In their defense, some of them have been psychologically abused to the point that... There's a lot of benefits to leading religion behind. Sure, sure, sure. Ambul, I'm just saying that some of them may have been psychologically abused to the point where they may not... This is... I don't have evidence right now to quote or cite, but there might be people who are incapable of leaving because of the amount of abuse that they've come through. And so it's even a surface that it's just them not being a critical thinker, but sometimes there might be more at play there. It's amazing what you can do when you never get someone the idea to cope with death until like they're in their 30s, and they just never had the experience to just look at it honestly. And now all of a sudden it's just like, what? God, sorry, Boudre, what were you saying? No, no, I was going to say in the Muslim world, there's even a bigger penalty to not being religious. You know, I mean, there would be fear. I mean, I mentioned there are a lot of people that would otherwise be atheists, but they just, they're too scared. I've met former Muslim atheists in our lab before, and I won't call them out. But they told me, like, you're an atheist? Like, yeah, because at that point I was like, I was just getting used to the idea of just saying it out loud. And you would be surprised how many people are like, oh, yeah, me too. I'm like, whoa, I had no idea. But I met a guy who thought was Muslim, turned out former Muslim just does the bowing just to make sure his family's good and he doesn't bring any stigma to anyone. And then eventually he got a job back in his home country.  He's like, yeah, it's going to suck. But I got a family. I was just like, yeah, all right, keep at it. Keep at it, so. Yeah, your survival and your family's survival and well-being is primary. Yeah, yeah. That's not hard. Do you participate in the one, there's one day a year that's kind of advertised as a come out as an atheist, to someone that doesn't know, to someone you know that doesn't know you're an atheist, to tell them?  I didn't know there was a specific. I didn't know there was a day. Yeah, it's something that I should do more as well. But again, because sometimes with work and other things, it just, it's getting less and less of an issue for me. But I still worry a little bit about it. I've been outed in the neighborhood and I think some people judge us differently because of it. But I do. Yeah, every year I make an attempt to tell someone and even try to pick someone kind of risky. Someone. Ooh, look at you. You know, yeah. Well, hey, President Trump. And a lot of people are surprised when they, at least with the experiences that they've had with me, that I've been a nice person. Yeah.  That's exactly what I was told. Then they say, if there's a person there, that's their argument. They're just like, look, how could you just, dude, you got the love of Jesus just all over you, man. I'm just so confused, man. Yeah, I really wouldn't go on with doing. I love science and I just care about people. That's just what I do. Cheers. Yeah, I have. I found that my YouTube channel has been actually a really good vehicle for me to express like the atheism in a really good way. Because I wouldn't even tell him I'm an atheist. I just say, hey, I do these really interesting hobbies where I talk to random strangers for like five minutes. And I'm like, what? I want to check that out. And then through the process of watching the videos, they're like, oh, I get where he's coming from. Because like I'm very open with where I'm at. And it's good to see someone use what they would use as arguments before they even use them on me. Because then they were like, oh, okay. Oh, well then. All right. Well, that's cool. I like this. This is nice. Like it's just a really good way to introduce that. I know more people, more and more people at my work, the work, the job that I have right now, know of my YouTube channel and know of my position non-religiously, I guess. And they love the gossips. I'm totally fine with it. There is one Christian at my job, though. And or not, I don't mean by one. I mean, like there's one good friend that I have who's definitely Christian, who probably doesn't know, but I am slowly putting the layers on. And every single time I ask him questions about his religion, it's always, yeah, I'm definitely a Christian. And then you ask like two questions like, yeah, but it's not like I'm really a Christian or I can overly like read the Bible or anything like that. It's like, okay, it may not even be worth having these kinds of talks with you. We're almost, I want to bring up something. This is a really good tangent. In two hours, four hours, I actually have a debate with a Christian. And on the topic of meaning an atheist and being really happy or meaning a Christian and feeling a little apprehension, but like overall getting over it, have you ever, this guy that I'm having a debate with is a person who I had a conversation with at Nanocon, where Larry and I went up to National and met people and I did some tabling there. He had a really good conversation with me. And I had a good conversation with him, but I assumed that he was an atheist. We actually talked about math and like the idea of like the value of science and all that stuff. And his definition for atheism is exactly on point. He said, hey, I do a show too. Can you please come on in? I'm like, totally fine. What do you want to talk about? He's like, does a God exist? And I'm like, which God? Because I'm not going to give you, I'm not going to give anyone the credit that there's a capital G God or atheism. It's not bad. Like there's so many different God claims. All right. That's usually what I say when I'm on Facebook and says talking about God exists. I usually just throw that out. They just get some response. But I'm curious who this Christian is that you're going to be debating. So you may not remember him, but his name is Pedro. He's from Ask and Wonder. Are you familiar with him? Ever heard of him? Okay. I'll be happy to share that video when we do it. But the idea is I was very sure that this guy was free thinking. Turned out he's Christian. I asked him and he was like, no, I'm a follower of Christ. And I want to talk about God. I'm like, listen, there are billions of people that you can talk to Christ about, in fact.  Difference between all those opportunities you have and that conversation you're going to have with your higher power is that I actually am listening. And as a result, I have, I'm not immortal. I have a limited amount of time. And there's better, if you want to have a conversation with God, you can have them with other people. But I would rather talk about like, how you came to a conclusion. Or how about this? I'm an atheist.  He said he was a former atheist. Why don't we talk about atheism? Because he, because it's not a worldview. I think we can agree on that. It's just an answer to one question. And there's like a lot of things that people apply on that label. I mean, we can talk about that. That'd be a really interesting conversation. So that's what I'm going to try to focus the conversation on. And I'm not here, unlike J.W.'s example from last night, to be preached at for 10 minutes at the time while I'm quiet. If we go off rails, I'd be like, Hey, this is what I want to talk about. This is the time that we have. Let's use it wisely. And yeah, that's my point. I got it, too. So it's good. Undoubtedly, there will be a cross somewhere in the background of his video feed. When you're talking about this. Yeah. Make sure you ask him, Hey, what is the lowercase T stand for? Do you ever feel this is the most tangible thing that when they ask you to pray for, when they ask to pray for you, I'll thank for you.  It's like, Oh, it's not a lowercase. He's like, Oh, what is it?  It's like, Wow, I'm going back. I don't, why would I like that? Why do you think I like that? It's like, we thought you liked this.  Yeah. And they see them everywhere. I never Christian around there. Isn't that a, that's a David Cross bit. I think that's a David Cross. Oh, is it? Oh, I love David Cross. Someone else may have. Yeah, that could be, but yeah. All these Christians wearing crosses on the crucifix on their necks. It's like, do you really think that a cross is the first thing Jesus wants to see when he comes back? Yeah, I feel like. If he was beheaded, would they be wearing a guillotine? Yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah. He was like kidnapped by al-Qaeda. You wouldn't want that little weird squiggle thing that they use or whatever. I don't know, a bio clava or whatever. It's like, we, if I, if I was in charge of the marketing department of Christianity, it would be like doves. Like that is an easy, just only doves are our thing. There are, everybody loves doves. You use them magic. That's great. Everyone, no one's looked at them and been angry. Or the fish thing, kind of sure. Yeah, why not? Yeah. But not the cross. That's like hardcore. Some, some metalhead got through and like was like someone's girl, someone's boyfriend or girlfriend and snuck it in. And especially the crucifix when they have his figure on the cross. Yeah. Yeah. Dredpire, we're talking about iconography. What would be the better iconography for Christianity? What's, what's your feedback? Well, I have marketing chief. Yeah. Loaf of bread. I don't know. Loaf of bread. Everybody loves bread. Piece of toast. Right. That's the bad. Jesus, that's your on it. Jesus. I feel like if we did toast, we start to start fractions in the society of bread where it's just like I'm a little evil. I'm a little nice. I'm a little whole week. Then you got the British bread. And you're just like, what are you trying to say? The white toast. Wheat bread matters. Wheat bread matters. All right. Goodness. Dred, we were talking a lot about the space flight in the first half of the show. Oh yeah. Launched from Florida. Did you, are you aware of it? And what do you think about the idea of us landing in Mars within our lifetimes? I, I am absolutely all over it. I just love it.   And it was amazing. I was just enthralled by it from that point on. And it's been a long standing hobby of mine, astrophysics and cosmology and all the rest of it. So yeah, I'm totally into it. Did you see the rocket finally land? Like how they do in like the Twilight Zone where it's just like this big long thing that just lands straight up? Yeah, it looks so science fiction-y, artificially, you know, fakies or stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. But it's amazing. It really is. It's the coolest launch ever, I think, in my opinion. Also, the cockpits all touch screens. I feel like the astronauts are pushing buttons, but the mission control is like, no, we're not letting you. They think they're flying the same one. They're just, they're just going like through apps. It's like, oh, I can play pigs versus zombies or whatever. Yeah, yeah. The control is like, okay, let's land this thing. Yeah, that's bad. I'd say thank you guys for, you know, risking your lives and, you know, putting yourselves out there and the commitments that everyone did to get that up there. Men and women, different, everybody different coming together to make this incredible thing happy. I'm so happy. All right. Nor the end of the show. We've got five minutes left. Let's do call out J.W. You got stuff coming up in the future. You got your central theist, terrible podcast name. Well, actually, bad news. Oh, no. Carl has kind of hit some things in his personal life where he's unable to continue moving forward on what the podcast we were going to do. So, I am left to speak to your beautiful mind and here I also, I also recorded with Faithless Flores this morning. Nice, cool. So, I've got, I've got opportunities.  And those, that's coming out for sure. Yeah. And I look forward to doing S.E. like you do. Nice. I look forward to having my music and comedy out, just some things, whenever they will, it may take a year or so. Take your time with it. It's no big deal. I would say this. Fanny is also available for you to do interviews. She just did an interview with Nathan and it was really, really good. I highly recommend it. Fanny loves interviewing people and she has a pizzazz that's immediately infectious. You would love the experience. And then also our videos for Speak Your Beautiful Mind are coming out as like the test demo of like the stream of consciousness, one person talking for 10 minutes, not stopping, and the other person forcing themselves to try to stay aware of like where the conversation is going throughout. It's a weird experience and it gets intense.  What's going on here? Our magic number, we're going to go shoot for five. We got two done. Nice. We did one with Fanny. Oh, nice. I will admit, I don't know that it'll be very kid-friendly. Is the territory with Fanny ever? Yeah, I don't know. All right. It went interesting way. It was cool. But we've got another one planned for, I think, Tuesday night where we're going to talk. Let me know if I can hop in in any of those. Yeah, I think, you know, we've got a cool format where Chad and I are kind of interviewing, so to speak. But we'll can handle Lurkers and that could be fine. Five minutes to two. Yeah, we're going to do civil rights, civil liberties, that kind of thing. So, and then hopefully talk about seatbelts, because we just never got to it last time. Yeah, well, you've been supporting our broadcaster so long. I'm happy to help you if you need me. Well, and I'd love for everyone to help share it. We'll get that one out. Yeah, I'll fill this out. Hey, Larry, if you have like a weird radio thing, I'd be happy to join in on that too. Maybe we'll meet up once a week and talk about it. Keep that in mind. If there's like a live Atheist TV show or something like that, I'd be like, oh, wow, explain that to me. Well, we'll keep you in mind. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Actually, the TV show, I have talked to you before about this, I think. And I told them they have permission to use our videos as content for the TV shows. So we may be seeing some of this on the show. You're saying we're going to be on TV, too? Yeah, well, not actually TV. Hey, that's good. That day has gone. Okay, fair enough. Radio's cooler than TV these days, anyway. Well, it's internet. Internet killed the TV star. There's radio killed the internet star. I forget. TV killed the radio star. All right, Dred. The video killed. Speaking of OBS that no one mentioned, Dred, you're playing around with OBS. What's going on there? Yeah, I was trying to get that all set up. I saw it. I'm teaching myself how to get it done. I had a two-minute clip there that Ty saw and says, did you actually mean to post that? But it was funny because I had a couple of people say, oh, great editing, man, let's be friends. Of course, it's all tongue-in-cheek. But I appreciated that. I appreciated that. There was a few pairs of eyes on it. But I think I've got it worked out. And if I hadn't been remiss this morning, I would have been on and set up to actually put this on. Oh, I totally thought that. Yeah, yes, yes. So how about if you guys are OK with it? I'd like to do that for next week. Absolutely. Yeah, OK, cool. Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, I'm sorry I didn't make it earlier. I was really keen on it. And then we had this. It wouldn't be Canada without apology for no reason, right? There you go. Well, we had this. We had a torrential rainstorm last night. And that's all your fault. We're actually in risk of flooding over here. So I'm just trying to keep our. Yeah, well, you know, I'm not personally, but I got to look up for my neighbors and help Sandbag if I have to. And yeah, absolutely. Good luck with that. Yeah, thanks. Shoot, you guys can find me on YouTube under Let's Chat. I'm also tweeting a lot more since that space planning thing happened. And I got to, like I said, I have the interview that I did with J.W. Kennedy. Well, maybe turn this into like a monthly thing. Well, we just like check back. I'd like to try some streaming consciousness thing too, because I know I got less from my mind. But also looking forward to two o'clock central time today, where I'll be talking with Pedro and trying to not be preached that for at least an hour and keep the conversation focused on like, hey, you're a former atheist. I'm an atheist. Let's talk about atheism. Like that's that's a cool thing that we can both agree to talk on. And I'll post that on my channel too. So look forward to that. Okay. Larry, what do you got? Well, as usual, if you want to find me or any of the stuff I've done, and just go to digitalfreethought.com or blogs of these radio shows. No, I dropped the speaker back there apparently. Or if you have any questions down a road, Goldberg machine or something. Yeah. If you have any questions for the show, send them to askanatheistatnoxfilatheist.org. If you'd like to find their podcasts, you can find them anywhere pretty much on iTunes, Stitcher, Luminary, podcast.com. Just do a search for digitalfreethoughtradiohour. Now on YouTube under Let's Chat and also under my channel. I'm posting there as well. So join us again next week at Wednesday 7 o'clock on WOZO Radio for another digitalfreethoughtradiohour. And as a reminder, everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Nice. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. Say bye everybody. Bye everybody. Bye everybody. See you later. Bye rational.


The preacher would tell my mama he'd make sure he'd bring that boy so he could sing when we go out again. So you're alto? Probably tenum. Tenum? Okay. Okay. What was your favorite song to sing? Come on now. He has sent me free, God has smiled on me. And see, he doesn't know me for rapping, so people really don't know me. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101. So you get after you, you know, being in this small town and whatnot, how did you introduce yourself to music? How did you step up to the point? My mama always had me in the choir. As a young kid, all sung in the choir.  And I'm a young, a kid watching this. How did that affect you seeing that music had that much power over somebody? At that particular time, I didn't like study how it's affecting. I'm just going through the motions. I'm a kid. I'm like a teenager. How old were you? Oh, a teenager. But I started singing in the church like at five, four. Okay. The preacher would tell my mama, make sure you bring that boy so he could sing when we go out to church. So you're alto? Probably tenum. Tenum. Okay. Okay. What was your favorite song to sing? Come on now. He has sent me free. God has smiled on me. And she knows me for rapping. Yeah. So people really don't know me. Yeah, but at the end of the day, man, listen, man, it's something about, you know, making a joy for noise to the Lord. Yeah, well, nice voice. Be honest with you. You know, that's why they were falling out, jumping around, catching a holy ghost. Oh, look, it goes deeper than that. One of my mama friends and called me on this slick and got me outside of church doing things. And I'm a kid. She married with three kids. Uh-uh. I'm sneaking out my mama's window. Yeah, it's going down. Because she picking me up. This the lady from the church. Yeah, it going down.  I was just about to say that same thing. She turned you out. She did. She picked me. She used to pick me up, take me down to the road and it got, she got off the hook with it. She would, we would be at the house. Like, she bring me to the other side of the house. She'll make everybody go over here and take me over. I'm like this woman. Wow.  No, no, we got to hear it all. When you think about it, this is every, and it ain't just happened to you. Consequently, to most people that's going to a lot of different buildings, doing different thing.   So this is something that, that was happening frequently in a lot of the churches. And I was a kid. So really what's that called? Yeah. She's a pedophile. So I'm a victim of it. It's out there. Wow. Now, yeah, you remind me of Antoine Fisher. You know, y'all go check that movie out.


Precipitation is the creation of a solid from a solution. When the reaction occurs in a liquid solution, the solid formed is called the precipitate. Mechanically that causes the solid to form is called the precipitate. Without sufficient force of gravity settling to bring the solid particles together, the precipitate remains in suspension. After sedimentation, especially when using a centrifuge to press it into a compact mass, the precipitate may be referred to as a pellet. Precipitation can be used as a medium. The precipitate free liquid remaining above the solid is called the supernate or supernatant. Powders derived from precipitation have also historically been known as flowers. When the solid appears in the form of cellulose fibers which have been through chemical processing, the process is often referred to as a regeneration. Sometimes the formation of a precipitate indicates the occurrence of a chemical reaction. If silver nitrate solution is poured into a solution of sodium chloride, the chemically reaction occurs forming a white precipitate of silver chloride. When potassium iodide solution reacts with lead II nitrate solution, the yellow precipitate of lead II iodide is formed. Precipitation may occur if the concentration of a compound exceeds its solubility such as when mixing solvents or changing their temperature. Precipitation may occur rapidly from a supersaturated solution. In solids, precipitation occurs if the concentration of one solid is above the solubility limit in the host solid, due to e.g. rapid quenching or ion implantation, and the temperature is high enough that diffusion can lead to segregation into precipitates. Precipitation in solids is routinely used to synthesize nanoclusters. An important stage of the precipitation process is the onset of nucleation. The creation of a hypothetical solid particle includes the formation of an interface, which requires some energy based on the relative surface energy of the solid and the solution. If this energy is not available, and no suitable nucleation surface is available, supersaturation occurs.


me sort of flow pool, if you will. And so with our proximity to St. John'sbury, Sean Tester and I are working together and our chief nursing officers are working together to explore a concept through a limited liability corporation of establishing a shared RN flow pool. And so out of that idea is generating other ideas such as shared flow pool for obstetric personnel and even considering it for onboarding new staff. So, for example, if a RN is onboarding on an OV with a low volumes and maternal child health, it's hard to train new staff and get the volumes. So we're exploring an opportunity where we could share the staff between the two facilities and flipping back and forth based on the volume of the organizations. So again, here is the financial forecast projection for actual, and the black is our budget that we're seeing that come back to Ryan. We have a $1.8 million line that we've had to draw on in the last year for cash flow purposes and that was related to our Athena transition. I'm happy to report that as of last week, we paid that down to $1.2 million. So we are seeing an increase in cash flow despite the small operating loss. And I think that's important to point out that it's going in the right direction and we anticipate continuing to pay that down. I have asked for a physician development plan working with an organization that will help us keep to work with our physicians and seek to understand what our population base can support across all specialties. So we'll have a survey with our physicians and then we're doing analytical work with a company called 3D and out of that we'll have a roadmap for the next three to five years of what specialties that we can support in our market. And I have asked St. John's Berry to also consider using that product because it could show that we could share resources between the two hospitals for the development of physicians. Our limited liability corporation already shares some staffing. We have a sleep lab and pulinary program at the hospital and North Country fronts and then lends the staff to the program that's down in St. John's Berry. So that's an example of things that we're trying to work and do at the end of the box. Also, keeping an eye on our campus development we have a facility master plan that will soon go underway where we seek to understand what infrastructure improvements will we need to make in the next three to five years and even 10 plus years because we have, we want to be mindful of the operating margin that we need to produce so that we can fund those through our capital programs and spending our capital wisely. And then the last thing we have also we're exploring federal grants for programs and maternal child help that would fund a program for four years that could result in as much as $3 million over four years to it's very competitive grant that would be a partnership with St. John's Berry and also Bradford, Vermont FQHC. So those are some things that we'll be working on as well. So with that, we kept our presentation very high level but we're here to answer your questions. We believe that we're on track that we would, we believe that we don't need to be rebased going into our next year. We see that we're coming back in line. So thank you. Thank you. And I hate to kick anybody when they're going through an IT changeover process but you update us on where you're really at on that and also let us know because as a regulatory body we can't make good decisions we don't have good data and we still don't even have your audit, we're 18. So maybe if you could just update us on your audit and your IT transition. Yeah. So you're talking about the FY18 actual final numbers being put into that for the COVID-19 team. We're hoping to get that completed next week. So 18 will be up to date. I believe February is, some through February correct is in there and we're about ready to close out on March's financials. So hopefully within a week or so we'll have that back on track and in line. As far as our conversions go no, we can convert it to EHR where we also convert it to our accounting system at the same time. And since that wasn't enough we actually just also implemented a new budget system two weeks ago. So we're jamming it all in and at the same time we've lost two senior accounting team members. I was going to puzzle that chain. Yeah. The one, no, the one may be a much. One of the team members actually she had a prior career in IT compliance and she kind of went back to the bank for that recently career. It's obviously you don't have a monthly closed schedule that you're tied to when you're in that kind of environment. So she kind of went more for an additional opportunity. The other one may have come back because of the additional pressures. It is what it is. That's where we are. So I'm hoping that next week or so we can have those numbers update. We want to get March closed or March financials closed out. And then the next priority right after that is to get Lori and her team the 18 members of today. So you had said that in your explanation on the bad debt, you talked about the change to Athena. Maybe you could just expand on that a little bit because I can see where if there's a delay in collections because of the change. But why would the change add to the bad debt? Well, part of what's happened, we have seen her add that climbing over the last couple of years. But one of the things that it's the last thing that we're looking at with our AR with Athena is the self paid piece of it. And because we switched systems, we actually had an outside vendor that helped us manage our self paid accounts. And we're doing call collections and putting people on payment plans, the access for them into Athena. There was a delay in getting that access so the AR is actually grown. We actually have Athena on site right now to do a revenue cycle evaluation with us to do a deeper dive and make sure, we're at a point now where we can actually look deeper into our revenue cycle and our AR management. And one of the big things is self paid. It's grown to roughly 20% of our current AR. So when that happens, self paid age is out and we're reserving those aged out amounts. So that number is growing, which hasn't even had it done our back in it. We re-engaged that outside vendor about a month ago. So we're starting to see those collections come in but since it is self paid, it's slow to work that down. Given some of the recent press about other institutions that have had security breaches, do you ever be concerned about the cloud based product? I always have concerns of security breaches because I'm also the compliance officer and IT security officer. But the cloud based product tends to be more secure because there's less avenues of access as opposed to an onsite network. So the cloud based is actually a little bit more secure as far as a breach from the outside into Athena. I think there's always going to be a concern of that. You see breaches all the time with everything all the way through what should be an extremely secure government entity that gets penetrated. So there's always a little bit of a in the back of my mind concern. Do they offer you any type of guarantees? I did not offer us guarantees but we do have in the contract dollars and cents for mitigation of breaches that were increased above and beyond in our financial contracts. Okay, I would add just a real quick question that anytime there's a breach in our state or anywhere else in the country of a hospital, IT is the first place that we're asking the questions of okay, what can we learn from that? It's an industry that continues to reinvent how they infiltrate. And so there was a breach I think that looked in the last month or two in our state and we were pleased to know that we had some mechanisms already in place that potentially guarded us from those but you just seek to learn across your fingers that your hospital isn't the first one to have that happen. My last question was on the travelers and locals. What percentage of the normal cost of an employee, how are you seeing your actual expenses for these travelers? I'd say it's about three times. Three times? Depending on the position. Yeah, yeah. Okay, other questions from the board? Marie? Just a couple questions. I like the breaches that you did and I think you could also do that for the net revenue because particularly where you're saying the bad debt was down a million seven fifteen but your total NPR was down a million seven so wondering whether free care was lower as well if I can look at the two of those together but if you had a bridge to show that that may show that as well. So did you see a change in free care? No, our free care has actually has been running really close to what our budget has been both last year and this year, fiscal year to date so that number's been pretty consistent. The bad debt's the one that's actually spiked. And then just your trend for operating margin with a loss of 1.9 and 17, 1.9 and 18 and then potentially trending negative with your new forecast, that's something that obviously we're worried about in the state and just when you talked about whether or not you'd be rebased, we're gonna make final decisions in a couple weeks but you probably don't necessarily hit the threshold because what we did for NPR was we said you'd get to be up 5% from where your actuals was trending but that said, the concern is that you are forecasting your top nine tied into your expenses and you guys do seem to be managing the expense control well but your NPR is dropping greater than what's going on so you end up losing money and so I just wanna talk about that trend because prior to that you were making money every year and I know at the total margin you are but you can't always rely on what's gonna happen. Yeah, so I'll start and you can tell me I'm wrong. So I think what we're seeing is the growth of the inflation rate overall and operating expense is more and more challenging so there's certain things like management contracts for equipment and supply expense from vendors where we have a little control of the inflations that have been passed on to us. I think one of the big things and it was on the chart that you saw that's impacting us is that low-come, those dollars and in fact, we've seen that I think in the last budget cycle when we were projecting our budget for FY19 we didn't anticipate this much low-income expense and so that's probably our deepest driver right now is that work for shortage. We do have some encouraging things that are developing. We have a cardiologist that we have just this week signed on that will give us back the coverage that we had before. We have one retired within this budget cycle and then we have a ED physician that we are in active agreements negotiating terms so those types of things are things that will help us to decrease that low-income expense but the work for shortage isn't going away and you've heard that topic from every, I know you've heard from every hospital. So my development now, LC looking at trying to do these things differently, that's what I look to see to elevate and control some of our operating expense at the same time. I want the North country to be in a position to invest in the health of the community step away from the hospital so we currently don't participate in Ry's remark and that's a program that I want us to invest dollars into that's going to take an investment that will I think rewards in the future but there's capital operating expense out late for that. We are one step in with one care meaning just Medicaid and Mountain Scouting is what their risk level is, what their risk count is so we have to, we're considering what that impact could be on us as well. So I'm going to give all of the other comments. Let's do it. I think listening to Mountain Scouting that almost seemed like a nearer image of what we're going through with the volumes where they had strong volumes in their last quarter, the first quarter now it's dip down or is where the reverse, very strange environment that we're in when we're really two and a half hours apart from each other, we have differences in our volumes. That's the only other comment that I have. I see our volumes coming back right now from where we were in the first quarter. Other questions from the board, Tom? My first question was the same as this Marine had sitting here trying to add up the pluses and minuses of the red and blue lines and organize them by expenses and revenues and I never got a right after three tries and tried to listen at the same time. And that bridge would be very helpful. I'm just, I'm not an expert at all by any means in additional payments but I was looking at your trend here in 2016 at 1.8 million, 2017 at 1.4 million, 2018 at 400,000 and then it looks like the projected for 2019 was up to like 880,000. What drives that from your perspective? The calculation over the years, there are three different buckets of dish funding it's all done through the equation now. One of the years, one of the buckets, one of the hospitals in one of the buckets fell out because they were in that bucket long had that money got distributed, changed when it became two buckets. Then in 2017, the legislature took $10 million out of our dish money hospital-wide and then in 2018 they took another almost $5 million out. So between those two things, changes in calculations and the reduction in actual dish dollars, you see that significant downward trend. And you still have buyer tax with the other side of that? Yeah, that's gone up. Yeah.  Right now it looks like the payer mix is pretty much on track. Our Medicare and Medicaid combined is about 65% of our payer mix with Blue Cross being 16 and then everything else falls under that. So those are the, our three major payers that make a good chunk of our revenue. The road trial one just in terms of bad debt, it seems just a common refrain hospitals are bad as far enough because of the high deductibles. And so when you mentioned high deductibles are you talking about the QHP population or other forms of private insurance? QHP? Oh, okay. Exchange, yeah. I think it's a combination of the two. We see the exchange has a high deductible but even the private insurers can only have some smaller, pretty significant businesses in our area that's small compared to statewide that are on a Blue Cross or a significant plan and they deductibles are in a $5,000 range. So that automatically falls to your self pay after an insurance base. Other questions to the board, Robin? Do you want to go ahead and stress? I just have a quick one. I'm just interested in the agreements that you're pursuing with St. John's very to share services and build a flow pool. And I was wondering if you had any estimate of the cost savings you might achieve in doing that or is it too early to tell? Yeah, it's too early. First of all, it's just to float the idea so both Sean and I met. And once I got his interest then this connecting our CNOs and making sure that they're on board with scoring that idea, we got that label combined. We, you know, one hospital's CNO is transitioning to Porter. So good that we're still gonna keep that up in the state. So Sean is still actually he started later than I did. So I'm not going to be anymore. But so we're both getting our feet on the ground and floating out ideas. So it's really high level right now. But out of that is surfacing others. Like, okay, well maybe float pool is too aggressive. Maybe there's something like the OB maternal child out that we can start. And then we have to check in with our malpractice carrier and then talk about those things. So as far as estimating the cost, we're not at that level yet. Okay, thank you. I might have a similar question. So I wanted to ask it first, but I wanted to say I applaud your creative thinking. I think that's exactly what we need right now in this area. So I appreciated hearing about some of the preliminary ideas that the two of you are working on together. I also am very interested in your physician development plan in terms of understanding the population needs and also what the population can support in terms of specialty in that area. We are working on the health resource allocation plan, which is kind of a statewide assessment of need resources and gaps. So we'll be very interested, I think, in hearing more about that in the future. So no questions. Just wanted to give you a heads up for the summer when we'll all at least come back to that question. I got a thousand questions. Okay, any other questions from the board? If not, comments or questions from the public? Seeing none, we wish to thank you. All right, thank you. Our fingers are crossed by the transition. IT is not an easy thing. Is there any old business to come before the board? Seeing none, is there any new business to come before the board? Seeing none, do I hear a motion to adjourn? So moved. It's been moved and seconded to adjourn. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye, any opposed? Thank you, everyone.