Podcast appearances and mentions of brian also

Avoiding simple mistakes with the IC-DISC can mean the difference between maximizing tax benefits and leaving money on the table. In this episode of The IC-DISC Show, I sit down with Brian Schwam, National Managing Director of International Tax Services at WTP Advisors, to talk about the most common IC-DISC misconceptions that trip up practitioners and the underutilized opportunities many businesses are missing. Brian walks through the critical timing rules that confuse even experienced CPAs, including the 60-day and 90-day payment requirements that many practitioners misapply. He explains how the reasonable estimate safe harbor actually works and why paying the minimum amount can accidentally cap your commission at twice that figure. We cover the ordering rules for distributions, the often-misunderstood $10 million threshold, and why the transactional calculation method isn't nearly as impossible as people think. Brian also clarifies that IC-DISC dividends are subject to the net investment income tax, despite what some practitioners might believe. The conversation shifts to creative structures most companies never consider. Brian explains how multiple DISCs can fund executive bonuses at qualified dividend rates instead of ordinary income rates, saving both employment taxes and up to 17% in federal tax for recipients. He describes evergreen dividend resolutions that eliminate the stress of year-end cash movements and shared-DISC structures that make the strategy economical for smaller exporters with under $3 million in sales. These approaches work for both flow-through entities and C corporations looking to avoid double taxation. After more than three decades in international tax, Brian brings clarity to a strategy that looks deceptively simple on paper but contains hidden complexity at every turn. This episode delivers practical guidance you can use immediately, whether you're a practitioner helping clients or a business owner evaluating your own structure.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Paying the minimum 50% under the 60-day rule accidentally caps your total IC-DISC commission at twice that amount, limiting flexibility. Companies with export sales over $10 million can still use an IC-DISC—the cap only limits income deferral, not eligibility. Multiple DISCs can fund executive bonuses at qualified dividend rates, saving up to 17% in federal tax versus ordinary income. The transactional calculation method isn't impossible—most companies in 2025 can pull the data needed to maximize their IC-DISC benefit. Evergreen dividend resolutions eliminate 60-day and 90-day payment stress by automatically distributing commission rights on December 31st each year. Shared DISC structures let exporters with under $3 million in sales split compliance costs while each partner keeps their full tax benefit.   Contact Details LinkedIn - Brian Schwam (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-schwam-b6026a3/) LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance Brian SchwamAbout Brian TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dave: Hi Brian Welcome to the podcast. Brian: Hi Dave. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Dave: Yeah, my pleasure. So quick intro, Brian is, what's your title with WTP? Brian: National Director of National Managing Director of International Tax Services, which encompasses export incentives as well as more general international tax consulting. Okay, Dave: And that's at WTP advisors? Brian: Correct. Dave: And you and WTP advisors are founding members of the IC-DISC Alliance along with my firm and myself. Brian: That is correct. Dave: And so are you brand new to this international tax business? Did you pick it up last year or something? Brian: That's funny. I don't think I look like I picked it up last year. I've been been full-time international tax since 1992IC, and prior to that I spent a few years as a generalist, which I think makes me a better international tax person, but it's been a few years, been around the block a few times. Dave: Well, I think it makes you better. I always introduce you as the IC-DISC guru. Now that Neil Block has retired, I think you can now take over the mantle of godfather of the IC-DISC, Brian: Right? Or the step godfather. I don't know if anyone can ever replace Neil. He had a lot of knowledge, has a lot of knowledge in this area and a lot of experience, and I'm just kind of flattered to be compared to him. Dave: Well, Neil was, I think my inaugural or second guest, and I think he's only been on the podcast once. So I think you're trumping Neil with this either your second or third visit. Brian: I think it's the third visit. And Neil's retired and joined the Good Life and I'm not, so that's probably why I've beaten them as far as number of appearances. Dave: There you go. Well, today I want to talk about IC-DISC. I want to talk about misconceptions and maybe underutilized opportunities. So the IC-DISC is straightforward as can be cut and dried. Anybody can prepare the return, anybody can do the calculation. Easy peasy. There's nothing to your toe on. Is that accurate? Brian: That's far from accurate. Okay. Strength. Yeah. A lot of practitioners think that is the case, but I've seen more than a handful of IC-DISC returns and IC-DISC calculations done by generalists that definitely have a flare for not knowing what they're doing or not understanding the rules. And for a six page tax return that looks very straightforward. You'd be surprised how many of them are completely incorrect. Dave: Yeah, it's kind of deceiving, right? Because even the instructions for the return are only a handful of pages, right? Like six or eight pages. Brian: And then there's a couple of lists of codes and things that make 'em a little longer. But yeah, there's not much to it. But I mean, initially there are some statutory and regulatory things that have to be done, have to be done the correct way, and the rules are very draconian. If you don't do it the correct way, there's really no way to remedy the fact that you set up, you just deal with the consequences of having a disqualified IC-DISC, which means you've lost your IC-DISC benefits prospectively and you set up a new one or you forego the benefits No in between, really? Dave: Yeah. Brian: So some of these misconceptions that I've run into could lead to a IC-DISC being disqualified. Dave: So what's the first one that comes to mind? Brian: The first one that comes to mind really for me in practice is how does the 60 day rule and the 90 day rule work, this has to do with when do I have to move money to the IC-DISC? And some people don't understand it and they do things that make it not a problem. Other people do things, they don't understand it and it becomes a problem. So the 60 day rule basically says you must fund a reasonable estimate of the IC-DISC commission to the IC-DISC within 60 days after the end of the IC-DISCs year. It sounds very straightforward, but some people ignore that rule and some think they have to pay it all before the end of the year, but they don't have a 60 day window after the end of the year to accrue that IC-DISC commission and pay a portion of it. The other thing I see people do with the 60 day rules, they don't have all the information. They estimate a number. They say, oh, let's say the commission's going to be a thousand dollars and they pay $500 to the IC-DISC by the end of the 60th day. Well, what have they just done? Well, the 60 day rule says, yeah, you have to pay a reasonable estimate in the regulation. There's a safe harbor that says a reasonable estimate is at least 50% of the final IC-DISC commission. So by moving the least amount of money possible, they then limit their potential IC-DISC commission to two times that number. So rather than saying, oh, I think my IC-DISC commission's going to be a thousand and I'll pay 800 so that I have flexibility to go up to 1,600, they pay 500 and it can never be more than a thousand because there's a lot of information that's going to come out after the end of the year that's going to affect taxable income. And they generally don't know those things within the first 60 days after year. Dave: And what about for, I think this is for accrual basis taxpayers or accrual basis related suppliers. What about if it's a cash basis related supplier? Brian: Well, if it's a cash basis related supplier, now we're outside the DIS rules, but we're in the tax accounting. And in order to get a deduction, the payment does need to be made before the end of the year. If the payment is made after the end of the year, within that 60 day window, you've now pushed the deduction to the subsequent year, which really most people wouldn't be happy with. They want the production in the year that the exports arise, not in the subsequent year. So the other rule having to do with the moving of the cash is the 90 day rule, which says that you have to pay the IC-DISC any remaining commission within 90 days after the commission has been finalized. Well, finalized really means when did I file my IC-DISC return? And so it's an original return. It can be filed as late as eight and a half months after the end of the year. So you really have 11 and a half months from the end of the year to pay the remaining amount. So if we assume calendar year, that's a September 15th filing and a December 15th funding deadline for the remaining commission. I see a lot of practitioners out there that think the 90 days ends on the filing of the IC-DISC return, not starts on the filing of the IC-DISC return. So then they rush to pay that money and then they think they have a problem if they haven't paid it by the time they file. So I mean, there's no harm in paying it early, but that's not how the rule works. And then if someone's determining and amending a IC-DISC return and they owe more funds to the IC-DISC, they have 90 days. So when they file that IC-DISC return, amended IC-DISC return to make that extra payment to the, now, the other misconception is, well, what happens if my 60 day payment was greater than the final commission? I overestimated. So then the 90 day rule says if the IC-DISC received too much under the 60 day rule, it has 90 days that same 90 day window to pay back the overage back to the related supporter. So most people don't understand those rules and they do things that either potentially cause a problem or they create a lot of self-induced anxiety. They think they have to do something sooner than they have to do it. Dave: And speaking of the due date, if somebody wants to file their IC-DISC return in September, do they have to file an extension like to do their corporate return by March 15th? Brian: Nope. That is no, eight and a half months is the due date. There's no extension for a IC-DISC return. That is just the due date. Dave: And then what about if somebody wants to electronically file the IC-DISC return? How does that work? It doesn't. Okay. Brian: And why is that? Dave: Can't you electronically file Brian: Everything? Unfortunately not the IC-DISC, the 1120 IC IC-DISC is still a return that requires a paper filing. And sometimes clients don't realize that and they forget to file. And the good news is there's only a hundred dollars penalty for a late filing. But the bad news is if you keep continually don't file the IRS could. They could terminate your IC-DISC election. But yeah, there's no electronic filing. And then there's, there's another form. You also can't electronically file that relates to the IC-DISC, that it's the form 84 0 4, which relates to an interest charge that a taxpayer who owns a IC-DISC may have to pay if income is deferred to the IC-DISC and not distributed out as a qualified dividend to that shareholder. There's a lot of misconception around that form. And the first misconception is sometimes they think the IC-DISC needs to file that form and pay the interest. That is not true. That is not true. And so many times I'm asked to file that and I'm like, I can't file it. I can't prepare it. I don't know the information that goes on. And it's based on the shareholder or the disk. And if the shareholder is S corporation or a partnership, it's not based on that entity, it's based on its shareholders or partners. And there could be multiple 84 oh fours filed. And then oftentimes there's a surprise like, oh, I have to pay interest. I didn't know I had to pay interest. Well, it is called an IC IC-DISC, and the IC stands for interest charge. So that should not come as a surprise, but it often does. Dave: Okay. Wow, Brian: Go ahead. Yeah, so we're still on moving cash around. So there's also timing of when the shareholder of a picks up dividend income. So a lot of people think that if they pay the IC-DISC within that 60 day window after the end of the year and pay the dividend in the same 60 day window, somehow the dividend is recorded as though it happened on December 31st, and there's no deferral of the income in the IC-DISC. That's just flat out wrong. A dividend is taxable when it's declared, and most likely it's not going to be declared as of the end of the year. Dave: So that's like a miss application of the age old matching principle in accounting? Brian: Yes. Yes, definitely. Or a misapplication of someone thinking they have a evergreen dividend resolution, which I won't get into at the moment, but it's something that is used to accelerate dividends so that they do match the deduction of a IC-DISC. And you can't just match it because you have to match it because there's some reason to match it or there's action that's taken that would cause it to be matched. Dave: And I've heard some professionals maintain that because they're basically accelerating the dividend income to the current year, thereby bypassing the inherent deferral. That's okay, because why did the IRS care if they got paid a year early? Do you think that's, what's your opinion of that? Brian: I think that's a nice practical approach to that issue. I use it myself. I don't think that the IRS would audit a taxpayer and say, oh, by the way, you picked up that dividend too early. I'm going to write you a refund check. Dave: Yeah. Brian: Plus interest, I don't think, Dave: Now what if there was an audit though, and you had an issue where the audit period it covered had a mismatch so that if there was a year that you say it was the 2022 tax year and the dividend income should have been recognized in 2023, but they recognized it in 2022, and then let's just say they did an audit from of 2023 in isolation, and then let's say in 2023, the client didn't use the IC-DISC or had a much smaller commission amount, could the IRS potentially say, we don't care about 2022. In 2023, you should have recognized the dividend income. Brian: They they certainly could. And then they'd say, well, 2022 is closed. We can't adjust that. So it's always better to not fall into that fact pattern, but it happens. Definitely happens. Dave: So it Brian: Sounds like the good news is there's not a lot of IC-DISC audits that go, Dave: Yeah. So you're saying it sounds like when in doubt, just follow the rules, it sounds like. Brian: Yeah. Dave: When Brian: In doubt follow the rules, don't make up your own rules, for Dave: Sure. Yeah. Well, and I think part of the problem is people may not be aware of the rules. Brian: They're not, and then they just fill in the blank. Their brain fills in the blank with what they think makes sense. Dave: Yeah, because a lot of be a lot of differences between the IC-DISC and say an S corp, right? Like the election to be treated as an S corp does not have the same deadline urgency as the election be treated as a IC-DISC. Is that correct? Brian: I'm not a hundred percent sure, but there might, yeah, I am a hundred percent sure. Because if you miss the deadline for the S selection, there's automatic relief available for the S selection to be made late. There is no automatic relief available for a IC-DISC election. Either you've met the requirement to file it within the first 60 days of the corporation its existence, or you haven't. Now, there are exceptions, and we have written some private letter ruling requests in the past to get be granted relief for missing that 90 day window, but that's an extensive Dave: Miss. Yeah, understood. And then some other, Brian: And you may not know for two years whether you're going to get the relief or Dave: Yeah, I know I've had CPAs tell me that they frequently will just include the form 25 53 S corp election with the filing of the initial S corp return. Brian: That's allowed. And that's allowed, Dave: Yeah. Obviously you can't do that with the IC-DISC return. Brian: No, no. So then on the topic dividends, there's also some misunderstanding or misconception of whether a dividend from a IC-DISC is subject to the net investment income tax, the 3.8%. Dave: Oh, yes. I've heard people take that position that it's not subject to. What are your thoughts? Brian: Well, my thoughts are that many years ago, like 11 years ago, the IRS came out and said, it's definitely subject to the commission IC-DISC paying a dividend. That dividend is definitely subject to the net investment income tax. So I personally don't get involved in individual returns, so I don't know what people are doing, but if I'm ever asked, that's what I'll tell somebody. And I say, you can take whatever position you're comfortable taking, but this is the position I know the IRS would take. Dave: Okay, that makes sense. What other pitfalls do you see or misconceptions Brian: People have? So when I see IC-DISC, there's a $10 million, let's call the $10 million deferral cap with regard to a IC-DISC. And what that means is any IC-DISC commission related to export sales made by the related supplier, which are greater than 10 million above that $10 million threshold, create what's called a deemed dividend. You're not allowed to defer any of that income in the IC-DISC. Well, in practice or in the real world, people think, oh, I can't have more than 10 million of export sales. If I go over 10 million, I can't use the disk. That's clearly not true. I have clients that have seen clients that have billions of dollars of export sales. They just have a very large deep dividend that goes along with the IC IC-DISC commission. There is no limitation on the amount of export sales, the limitations on how much of the income you can defer the IC-DISC if you have more than 10 million of export suit. Dave: Okay. Brian: I've also seen related to that issues where someone's exporting military property. So military property, half of the income is a deemed dividend automatic under the rules. And then I've seen where they then add, and let's say the sales were over 10 million, they've added, they made an additive, they took half of the commission on the military property, and they said, oh, my sales are more than 10 million. I have additional deemed dividend as well. That's not how it works. The way it works is you compute your deemed dividend on the sales in excess of 10 million, and then from that you subtract the deemed dividend related to the military property. And so the most your deemed dividend can be is related to that $10 million cap. Dave: Okay. Yeah, I was less familiar with the military aspect of it. I don't think any of my clients are exporting military property. Brian: That's just an example. I mean, there's other things that give rise to deemed dividends as well. For example, one way you can defer income in a IC-DISC is to loan the money back to the related supplier. Under a producer loan arrangement, there's very specific facts that support the ability to use a producer loan. But then each year, the interest that's earned on that producer loan is a deemed dividend. Dave: Oh, sure. Brian: Whether it's paid or not. So whether the interest is paid, and then when the dividend is actually paid, it's not taxable because we've got a lot of ordering rules in the IC-DISC about when things get paid out and how they get paid out, and I don't have all day, but that's another area where I think there's a lot of misunderstanding. Dave: Okay. Brian: Oh, well, so I can focus on one small part of that is the IC-DISC in year one has the income of a hundred. In first quarter of year two, they pay out the 100 to the IC-DISC and the DIS pays the dividend. And in year two, it earns $300, and that gets paid in year three. Well, I hear all the time, well, I don't have any income deferred to the DIS because I earned the a hundred dollars in year one, I paid it in year two, and I paid the dividend in year two, and then I had income for year two of $300 that I paid in year three. Well, it doesn't work that way. In the DIS world or in the tax world in general, current earnings are always considered to be distributed first. So that a hundred dollars that gets paid out in year two is really coming from the year two earnings. And the year one earnings are still sitting in the deferred, thus giving rise to the interest charge that someone thinks they're avoiding. Dave: Okay. Brian: So there's some misconception about how that works. Dave: So I have one I just thought of, and I've heard this is the one, the misconception I've probably heard the most. Under no circumstances can the IC-DISC commission create a loss at the related supplier level? No matter how you do the calculation, it's Brian: Impossible. That's a big misconception. Dave: Yeah, Brian: There's no rule. There is no rule like that. Okay. So the rule is actually applied at the level in which you're computing the IC-DISC commission. So if you have exports with a profit, but overall your company has a loss, you can still compute a IC-DISC commission on those export sales because they have profit. Now, you can't cause the profit on the export sales themselves to become a loss. So let's say your export sales are making 2% bottom line, but overall, your company loses 3% bottom line. Some people will think, I can't get a IC-DISC commission. I have a loss. That's not true. You can claim a IC-DISC commission, but it cannot be more than 2% of the export profit because then makes the profit on the export zero, but it can't go below zero. Dave: And that's if you're using what we would call the standard or simple calculation. Brian: That's the simple calculation. Now, if you're doing something more detailed and you're calculating a IC-DISC commission on a product or product line or a transaction, you apply that no loss rule at that level. So you can have a number of transactions that are profitable, you can have a number of transactions that are not profitable, and then different rules apply. There's really people think, oh, there's two methods to compute a IC-DISC commission. That's probably another big misconception. There's really 18 methods to compute a IC-DISC commission, and you can choose one that allows you to get a commission but doesn't create a loss, and in some cases does actually allow you to create a loss. Dave: And is that methodology difference? I can't think of the technical accounting term, like where if you change your inventory method, you have to notify the IRS or you make an accounting change. This isn't like that, right? You don't have to each year notify the IRS. We used the 4% method last year, we're using the 50% this year, or we're doing other methodology. Correct. Brian: So you technically notify them by checking various boxes on the IC-DISC return, but it's not like a change in the accounting method where you have to apply for a change and have it approved or have an automatic change. This is considered a change in facts. And however your facts bear out, you can claim whatever commission you're allowed to claim. Dave: Now, when you do that transactional calculation, another misconception I hear is that it's just impossible because there's all this data that the company doesn't have, and it's so complicated to do it that just nobody has the ability to do it. Nobody can do it. Nobody wants to do it. Talk to me about that. Is the data really impossible to get from the clients? There no client that can provide any data that can be used. Brian: There may be handful that can't, but by and large, most companies have the ability in 2025 to obtain that data. When the rules were written in 1972, I'd say it was probably flipped where only a handful could probably get that information. And the vast majority of companies would never be able to get that information. But somebody wrote the regs that way back in the early seventies, and with the idea that you could get transactional information and compute the dis commission transactionally as opposed to at a higher level where everything's grouped together or a simple calculation. But in 2025, it's very, I have a hard time determining conceiving of a company that can't get some information pulled together. And that's the other, there's a related misconception. Oh, I have to tie out every dollar of my cost of good sold before I can tell you I have cost of good sold data for a transaction. Well, that's just not true because in the real world, companies make journal entries adjusting the cost of good sold. They don't do it at a transactional level. There's other things that schedule M'S on a tax return that affect cost of good sold. And so no, you don't have to nub that out to the last dollar to say, I have transactional data. You have to be able to identify what you can and what you can't identify gets allocated or apportioned across all the transactions. And if you think about it, if you say, I can't get anything, you're really apportioning all of the costs over everything anyway. That's the ultimate in apportionment. There's not even any allocation. You're just saying, oh, every one of my transactions has the same margin as a result, which is really factually never the case. Dave: Well, and I just thought of another one, and this isn't maybe a misconception as much as it is a misinterpretation. I can't tell you how many IC-DISCs I see that the related supplier is a flow through entity, yet they have the individuals own the IC-DISC. Have you seen this before? Brian: I've seen it. And sometimes they think that's the way it had to be. Sometimes they hadn't really thought of. It depends how they're using it. But the real downside to that is the IC-DISC commission reduces the income of the flow through entity, thus reducing the basis they have in their shares of that flow through entity. And then the dividend gets paid to the individual and there's no basis increase the dividend income. And unless they contribute the funds back to the business, they're eroding away their basis stock, which ultimately will result in a higher gain if they ever sell their business. Dave: When the ownership of the IC-DISC matches the ownership of the related supplier. Can you think of a scenario where it is actually beneficial for the individual shareholders to the IC-DISC instead of the related supplier? Brian: Yes. There are situations depending on where this shareholder lives. So let's say the shareholder lives in, say the company is operating in a state with a state income tax, but the shareholder lives in a state that doesn't have a state income tax. It's possible to get that dividend to the shareholder tax free, where maybe if it went through the S corporation or the partnership, it would not be tax free. Dave: I see. And you're talking about tax free at the state level? Brian: Yes. Federally, I don't really see in a regular IC-DISC that's just been used to pay dividends to the owners of the supplier. I don't see, unless it's a C corporation, in that case, you don't want the IC-DISC owned by the C corp, but if it's a flow through entity, you generally get the same tax answer, whether it's owned directly by the flow through entity or directly by the shareholders. Dave: Okay. Oh, I just thought of another misconception. It's funny, when we started this column, I only had a handful of misconceptions. But the more we talk, the more we think of. So here's another one. Say you have a flow through as the related supplier yet for whatever reason, you want the IC-DISC to be owned by the individual shareholders. Well, I've been told several times that the ownership of the IC-DISC must match the ownership of the related supplier. There is no option to do otherwise. Is that accurate? Brian: That's a fairly strong statement. So the answer to that is no, it's not absolutely not required. Now, if the shareholders are related to one enough FAMILIALLY related, and there appears to be donative intent. So if mom and dad own a company and set up a IC-DISC and transfer it to the kids, there is some old IRS guidance out there that says, Hey, when a IC-DISC commission's paid to that IC-DISC, mom and dad are making a gift to kids. So that's a pattern you want to avoid, which is pretty easy to avoid, frankly. Dave: And you would avoid that by just setting up a new IC-DISC that the children would Brian: Set up initially and not get transferred by Dave: To the right and where the kids are making the capital contribution to Bible stock and Brian: Right. Exactly. But that's the one little gray area. Otherwise, there are some people out there that set up a IC-DISC to fund bonuses for executives. And we've kind of transitioned here away from misconceptions to underutilized opportunities because really that's an opportunity where you can use a IC-DISC to fund bonus payments to key executives and owners, or not owners, and it doesn't save the company any money, but it certainly saves the recipients a good amount of tax because if they get bonuses, they're paying tax, whatever their ordinary rate is, let's just say 37%, where plus there's payroll tax of 3.8%, whereas if it's funded through a IC-DISC, they pay tax at the qualified dividend rate plus the 3.8%. So it's a 17% rate differential on that type of income between the wages and the qualified dividend for the recipient. Dave: And I guess it would also save the employer portion of the employment taxes as well, right? Brian: Well, it saves the employee and the employer, but it's replaced by the Obamacare net investment income tax. So they're both 3.8%. Dave: But if you had a simple example where an employee had a base salary of a hundred thousand dollars and they had a $20,000 bonus that was paid through the IC-DISC, that would've been subject to Brian: Fica. I'm thinking about people that are making more than Dave: Understood, Brian: But you can save FICA tax as well, Dave: And the Brian: Employer and the Dave: Employee, and that's kind of what I was thinking of. And even when they get above that limit, there's still the 1.45% that I think has no cap. Brian: Right. But again, that's the employer portion. Then there's the employee portion together that's 3.80, Dave: Right, which is the, Brian: So you've got the Obamacare tax. Gotcha. Dave: Well, that reminds me of another misconception that you had alluded to, and that is that a related supplier can only have one IC-DISC affiliated with it. Is that true? Brian: That is not true. Related supplier could have a thousand IC-DISCs if it wanted to. Dave: In fact, that option you mentioned of the employee owned IC-DISC, I usually see that as that being an additional IC-DISC kind of in addition to the primary IC-DISC. Is that usually how you see it? Brian: I see that way as well. Yeah, for sure. Or I see IC-DISC A is going to fund bonuses for the C level executives, and then IC-DISC B is going to fund bonuses for middle management. And so middle management IC-DISC has a targeted amount, and the upper level IC-DISC may not have a targeted amount. It might just be unlimited. Dave: Now, the drawback is if you have multiple disk, the combined commission amount for all of them cannot exceed what it would've been if you had just one IC-DISC. Right. It's not a mechanism to create larger combined Brian: That definitely can't, doesn't work. Yeah, it definitely would. But yeah, you can definitely set up different structures to fund bonuses for different people, or if it's a C corporation, and we don't see a lot of C corporations with IC-DISCs. But if you're a closely held C corporation, you can have a shareholder owned IC-DISC, and if you're in the habit of paying dividends, you can pay commissions to a DIS instead of paying those dividends, Dave: Avoiding the double taxation in Brian: The corporate layer. Exactly. So that's an underutilized opportunity in my opinion, because there's got to be more closely held C corps out there than the amount that are using IC-DISCs. Dave: And I guess another one, we touched on this earlier, but the evergreen dividend resolution, what's this all about? Why is this an opportunity? What are the benefits of Brian: It? So the evergreen dividend resolution basically says the IC-DISC is going to distribute, its right to receive a commission each year on the last day of its year. So that accelerates the dividend into the same year as the commission expense. That alleviates the need to move money under the 60 day rule and 90 day rule. There's no reason to move the money if you're not trying to qualify a receivable. That's what those rules relate to, whether you're as receivable as qualified or not. So that's a benefit. It also can guard against the law change where the rate on the dividend income would go up in the subsequent year. You can avoid that. But a lot of practitioners treat their IC-DISC like they have an evergreen, but they don't actually have it. And that's a problem in my mind. But if you have it, it just makes everything a lot easier. You don't have to try to figure something out by the end of February. You figure it out once and you just treat it like it all happened at the end of the year. And I know that that works because I had a client years ago that was in tax court in the great state of Texas. The issue came up. I wrote up a brief for the client, and the tax court accepted the evergreen as a viable dividend resolution Dave: Because in a way, didn't the tax court almost defer that to the state rules? Brian: Well, they just fall under. So you can have a dividend, you can create a dividend under state corporate law just by writing a resolution, but you have to have the income to support the dividend, to have a dividend for tax purposes. So if you have the resolution that says, I'm declaring a dividend on December 31st every year, then based on facts, you either do have a dividend or you don't for tax purposes depending on how much income you have. So it just falls back on that probably one other underutilized Dave: Opportunity. Well, Brian, before you move, I just wanted to talk about the evergreen, I guess is the biggest drawback that the taxpayer would miss out on the deferral. Brian: That's one of the drawbacks. The other drawback has to do with the interplay between all of this and this 4 61 L limitation, which limits how much of a flow through loss a taxpayer can deduct in a year. So you could have a situation where the IC-DISC dividend on a transaction by transaction basis becomes so large, the commission becomes so large, it creates a loss and the flow through entity, the shareholder can only deduct a certain amount of that loss, but they would have to potentially pick up all the dividend income Dave: And then Brian: Deduct that loss at a later point in time. Now, personally, I'm still getting a permanent rate benefit out of it. So if I'm not going to sit on this loss for years and years, I think it's okay. But if I'm going to sit on that loss year after year after year and not utilize it, then I don't want to be picking up those dividends that I can't utilize the losses. So it just requires some additional coordination between the CPA and us and the client to determine exactly what the right commission should be. Dave: Okay. So you're about to, Brian: And that's another misconception. Dave: Yeah, go ahead. Brian: Yeah, like, oh, my commission has to either be whatever I compute or zero can't be anywhere in between. That's a misconception because I can target an amount, and as long as my IC-DISC commission agreement gives the related supplier the unilateral power to include or not include a IC-DISC export sale in the IC-DISC calculation, I can pick and choose whatever number I want that to be so that I don't have a 4 61 L problem, or I don't have the number be bigger than I can utilize. In other words. Dave: And that's because the IRS does not require you to capture every export sale. So that's basically limit the IC-DISC commission to a specific amount and back into which of the export sales you'll basically exclude from the calculation. Brian: Right? Right. Exactly. Exactly. But again, also we like to see that supported in the IC-DISC commission agreement. And then the last underutilized opportunity has to do with G there. Having a IC-DISC does have some cost. So if I don't have at these 3 million of export sales, it might be questionable whether I can really benefit economically benefit from a IC-DISC. When I look at the cost and the benefit, well, there are structures out there that we'll call a shared ING IC-DISC where partner like small exporter can invest in a partnership. That partnership owns a IC-DISC. Maybe there's five or six investors in the partnership. They're all unrelated. They all have, let's call it a million dollars of export sales. And on a standalone basis, there'd be too much cost for setting up the disk compliance to offset the tax benefits, but it'd be greater than the tax benefits. But if I can use a shared disk, then I only have to share a portion of the cost, the annual cost of the IC-DISC, but I still get my tax benefit. And really what happens with the other partners? So the partnership owns the IC-DISC. The IC-DISC earns that commission from the related supplier, then the IC-DISC pays all of its dividends to that partnership, and the partnership can then allocate the dividends back to the individual exporters based on their contribution. So it's a way for smaller companies to still get a tax benefit out of it. And I seen very few of these out there. So there's got to be thousands of companies that export that just don't export enough to have their own IC-DISC. Dave: Yeah, yeah. No, that's an interesting opportunity. And I agree based on my experience. I mean, I've talked to so many people in the past, or I did talk to so many people who exported $2 million or less, and I'd have to say to them, it's probably not worth the time and the cost because there's time on their end and then there's hard cost to have the work done. Brian: Yeah. I've had the same conversation countless times with companies as well. It's really something that both exporters and their CPAs should be aware of because the CPAs are in the best position to know that their clients are doing some level of export. Dave: And I just thought of another misconception, and that is that the virtually from the day after the IC-DISC rules were enacted, prognosticators started saying that the IC-DISC is going away. It's just going to be a short-lived thing. And even in the two decades I've been involved in IC-DISC work, I've heard this from so many tax practitioners, oh yeah, this thing's going away anyway, why bother? Brian: Yeah. Well, it really, for it to go away would fly right in the face of current policy in the administration. So I don't think it's going away anytime soon. Some of the benefits have been whittled away over time with some of the other provisions that are coming into play, but it's really not going to get repealed anytime soon. Certainly not in the next four years after that, who knows. But certainly it's good for the next four years. But it's funny, in 2003 with the Bush tax cuts, they brought in this concept of qualified dividend income, which really revitalized the use of the IC-DISC for a lot of pass through businesses. One of the big four firms said, oh, it's going to be a technical correction, and the qualified dividends are not going to include the dis dividends. Well, here it is 22 years later, I'm still waiting for that technical correction out of Congress, but I guarantee you that they've advised their clients to use the IC-DISC, even though they were out there saying, oh, no, no, no, no, no. This is an error. It's going to go away. Dave: Well, I had this conversation, I think it was in 2009. I think the preferential dividend rate was IC-DISCussed going away at the end of 2010. If I have my time horizon. And I remember it was late summer of I believe oh nine, talked to the potential client, they connected me to the CPA, and this was the international tax partner of a top 50 CPA firm. And she said to me, quote, I think you're being reckless even bringing this idea up to my client. I said, why is that? She said, are you not aware of house resolution such and such that hadn't been passed, but the resolution was going to ever go away? And she said, if this is passed, then this will not be usable beyond the 2010 tax share. And she said, we think it's reckless and not even sure why you'd want to bother with it if you can only at max use it for a year and four months. And I remembered saying, I appreciate that. You may not think it's worth it, but I wonder if the client, when he does the ROI calculations, if they might think it's worth it. Because even if they only used it for a year and a half, it still might be worth the cost to set it up, the compliance cost and the cost to shut it down. Brian: That whole analysis took place in 2007, 2010, 2012. I remember, I'm not proud of this, staying up late on New Year's night of 2013, so I could watch Congress vote because they let the qualified dividend rate lapse and then they had to reenact it the next day. And they did it on January 1st, and I sat in front of the TV watching. I was fairly invested in whether they were going to vote for it Dave: Or not. Yeah. Well, I think that's appropriate. You're a little bit like the soup Nazi from Seinfeld. He is got such passion for his customers. Brian: There you go. Yeah, I definitely am passionate about what I do because I love what I do. I couldn't imagine not doing it. Dave: Yeah, I find the same. Brian: And I love helping taxpayers legitimately reduce their tax burden. Dave: Well, and the clients that we help tend to be entrepreneurial type companies, they're not Fortune 500. And I've seen where this can legitimately make a difference in freeing up cash to buy more equipment, hire more people. It's quite a stimulus. Brian: Also not a misconception is Fortune 500 companies can't use a IC-DISC. It's really for private companies. Dave: Yeah. Brian: It's not something that you'll see a lot of or any private public companies utilize. Dave: Okay. Well boy, we've covered a lot. Anything left to cover? Any other misconceptions or opportunities you can think of? Brian: Nothing that I don't think we've IC-DISCussed. Dave: Okay. Well, I have one final kind of fun question. So with the benefit of hindsight, if you could go back in time and give advice to, say your 25-year-old self, what advice might you give to yourself? Brian: It's going to be completely non-tax related. Dave: That's okay. Brian: If you tear a ligament to your knee, get it repaired. I did that and I didn't get it repaired. And ultimately I got a new knee, which works just as well as the original with a lot more probably pain in the interim. Dave: Gotcha. Okay. Well that's good advice. So the takeaway, if you're 25 years old and you have a ligament tear, don't wait 30 years to get it fixed Brian: Or to not get it fixed at all and just get an artificial knee. Dave: Yeah. Understood. Well, Brian, thank you so much. This was really fun. I mean fun by a couple of IC-DISC nerds. I guess not everybody would consider this conversation fun, but I thought it was a lot of fun and I appreciate the expertise that you bring to this matter. Brian: I appreciate the opportunity to be here and chat with you about it. And maybe in the future there'll be some more topics we can talk about. Dave: Yep. I would enjoy that. We should make it an annual tradition. Brian: That sounds like a good idea. Dave: Alright. Hey, have a great day, Brian. Brian: You too, David. Dave: There we have it. Another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, go to ic IC-DISC show.com. That's IC dash D-C-S-H-O w.com. And we have additional information on the podcast archived episodes as well as a button to be a guest. So if you'd like to be a guest, go select that and fill out the information and we'd love to have you on the show. So it we'll be back next time with another episode of the IC-DISC Show. Special Guest: Brian Schwam.

In this episode of Kontent Rocks, Brian McKeiver talks about his experience at Kontent Horizons 2022 in New York. Brian also recaps his own session and demos a very cool custom element for Kontent that uses AI to generate images based on text via the OpenAI API.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tht3zdjztgdh0fu/NCHS041%20-%20How%20to%20Regain%20Smell%20after%20COVID.pdf?dl=0 (Click here) to download the full transcription as a formatted PDF. Episode Summary: Welcome to The No Cap Health Show, a weekly podcast where Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler uses his decades of experience in medicine and ability as an expert researcher to provide a light- hearted approach and share health trends popular on TikTok. In this episode, Dr. Brian provides his Cap/No Cap analysis on today's topic: How to Regain Smell after COVID. How can COVID-19 impact your sense of smell? What do mint, orange, garlic and coffee have in common? What is smell training? Find out in today's episode! If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you leave the show a Rating & Review at https://ratethispodcast.com/NoCap (RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap). Key Takeaways: 01:16 – With the Olympics in full swing, Dr. Brian takes a moment to promote a film that he was a producer on, Holky: The Steven Holcomb Story and encourages listeners to stream it free on Indieflix 01:51 – Dr. Brian introduces today's topic, How to Regain Smell after COVID 03:35 – What happens when someone gets an infection like COVID 04:28 – Dr. Brian reflects on his own experience losing his sense of smell after having COVID 06:25 – Smell training, explained 09:09 – What is Parosmia? 09:47 – Dr. Brian provides the No Cap Recap of today's episode and encourages listeners to reach out and Rate and Review this podcast on https://ratethispodcast.com/NoCap (RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap). Tweetable Quotes: “In the nose there are these receptors at the end of what's called the olfactory nerve. IT's the nerve connecting to the brain where people smell. It's kinda the smell nerve if you will. And what can happen is the virus can damage the ends of those nerves and the cells in the nose.” (03:48) (Dr. Brian) “It was awesome, one of my favorite pizzas. So, I'm eating it and I'm saying to my kids and my wife, ‘This pizza doesn't really have much taste. I remember this pizza being really good.' And I'm eating some more and it kinda tasted like cardboard. This was really weird.” (04:51) (Dr. Brian) “There's certain substances that if people smell it for about twenty seconds for two to three times a day, over time it can stimulate those olfactory, or smell nerves, in the nose.” (06:40) (Dr. Brian) “Also, taking things that are decongestants if somebody isn't feeling well is important to help clear up any sort of inflammation that could be active at the time. That can help as well.” (08:48) (Dr. Brian) Links Mentioned: DM Dr. Brian your questions and we will respond back with answers - https://v.cameo.com/F5MH0Hglnmb (https://v.cameo.com/F5MH0Hglnmb) https://www.boxerwachler.com/ (Dr. Brian's Website) https://www.tiktok.com/@brianboxerwachlermd? (Dr. Brian's TikTok) https://www.instagram.com/drboxerwachler/ (Dr. Brian's Instagram) https://watch.indieflix.com/movie/z1jvXp2ah0MZ-holky-the-steven-holcomb-story (Link to the filmHolky: The Steven Holcomb Story) Please remember, Dr. Brian is a doctor, but he is not your doctor. He is here to provide general information, not medical advice, so you should always check with your doctor before relying on any information. Podcast Production & Marketing provided by FullCast Copyright. Advanced Vision Education, LLC See https://omnystudio.com/listener (omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

On today's episode of the ACCEL Podcast, Scott, Eric and Alex welcome Brian and Matt from the ACCEL Gaming Division. On Part-One of this Two-Part Series, Brain and Matt discuss Blockchain, Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games, NFTs and how their integration with blockchain technology is not only growing, but accelerating to new heights of adoption across multiple chains. For more information on ACCEL , please visit www.acceldefi.com or our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/AccelDefiFor educational resources related to ACCEL and Crypto in general, please visit ACCEL University on YouTube using the following link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJDNIqPTp9kjsMPmPo119Zg Episode Transcript:[Alex] Welcome to the ACCEL Podcast. Today we have very special guests for you, Matt and Brian. They head the gaming division here at ACCEL. [Alex] Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background in gaming, and how you found yourself developing P2E Games in the crypto space? [Brian] Thanks again. As you said, my name is Brian. I've been an avid gamer pretty much my entire life. I've just been working into project management and programming for a few years now, and basically I've just brought everything together when forming this division as it appealed to all of my skills that I've built over the years. And I've been working on building this division from the ground up. So I am very excited to have a couple of people in our team. And honestly, it's been pretty much a dream of mine. I've always wanted to be kind of a project manager programmer for a small indie company. That's kind of something that's always been a dream of mine. So the simple fact that now I finally get to do it is fantastic and I'm looking forward to the future. [Alex] Thank you very much for giving us a little bit of information on your background. Is game development something you went to school for, or were you self taught? [Brian] That's a great question. I was self taught. The only kind of experience I have is some coding classes when I went to University, but I never really used them for gaming. It was just got through the courses and at the time that wasn't something that I planned on using. But now that I'm here, I'm really glad that I decided to stick with it. Those late hours of going through code, it's finally going to pay off. [Alex] Wow, that's fascinating. Hey, Matt, can you also give us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with ACCEL? [Matt] Absolutely. I've been in eSports. I was an eSports pro in my 20s. I actually have been involved in gaming for about 18 years now. Always dream. Just like Brian, we've been friends for ten years. We've gone through a lot. We've discussed a lot of things that we want to do, and this is sort of like making all that happen. I personally come from an engineering background. I am pretty good with numbers and like I set up both developed games simply and I've worked on different games just through the variable aspect. And I've been very involved with technology for the last ten years. So when Brian told me about this opportunity, I thought it was a great time to come in, materialize all the things that we've discussed over the years, just bring them together and make this an amazing environment. [Alex] Thank you very much for giving us that information. [Scott] So I guess that kind of leads us into our next question. I think there's a lot of kind of confusion around gaming in the crypto sphere and kind of how everything ties together. There's a lot of different words thrown around that I think kind of confused people between these console games and these mobile games that you can play on your phone, ones where you can actually earn rewards, ones where you can't can you kind of just give us a little bit more insight on what exactly you guys are going to do in the gaming division, how that ties into crypto? [Brian] Yeah, absolutely. So mobile and console games, they all use a standard protocol, and basically there's going to be a way that we can be able to connect them to the blockchains. As of right now, that's the challenge. But I believe that what we can do is it's definitely coming along. It's faster than you think. Right. People have been playing games for virtual tokens for years, and really the only change now is that they be playing with a stake and earn real world assets. So, you know, you basically instead of farming your own Gill, gold, whatever the ingame currency is, basically. Now what you can do is not only can you throw money in there, but there are also ways to earn the money through various tasks, et cetera. And it's basically a great community effort because you're going to have people that are going to be let's say all I want to do is be a blacksmith. Right. Well, everybody's going to need a sword. So you're going to have those one on one interactions in transactions with people just like you and me. And we'll be able to use centralized token or coin or what have you. And we'll be able to do all kinds of trading. And I think Matt can actually elaborate a little more. [Matt] Absolutely. What basically is happening here is that before, if you went to any game, you'd earn that game's currency, right? You could earn gold, you could earn Gill, you could earn, like, little jewels and Candy Crush, et cetera. And all those things actually allow you to participate or buy items using that in game currency. But those items and those things are only limited to that game, and you could never translate it into something outside of the game. You could be the best player in the world in Candy Crush, but you're still going to get beat up at school if you're a nerd happened to be honestly, it was an experience. And the good thing about these games, the strong thing about these games is they can appeal to both the time and skill that you can put in. And that skill doesn't always have to be related directly to one task. Right. Like, for example, you have people with different careers in the world that do different things. And in the gaming, in the meta verse itself, you can tie all this together that people are going to be very good at. Some people are going to be very good at racing, some people are going to be very good at guessing a number off of a deck. And some people are going to go more into the creative side. You know, they are going to design characters, they're going to build certain items, they're going to build a lot of different things. So there's always going to be a discipline that appeals to anyone. And like, as with horse racing, where one person wins and everyone else loses, you actually have all these opportunities for different people to come together and use the things they are good at, use the things they want to do, and they all have the same possibility to earn something that they can just take back with them after. [Scott] Okay. So I guess my follow up kind of question to that then is these Play-to-Earn games have kind of been around a while. Why do you think you're seeing this trend kind of catching on now? What is kind of that ignition behind it? Do you think it's the blockchain interaction? Is that kind of that big selling point that's really bringing the play to earn games, too? We're seeing them really rise to the top right now. [Matt] Yeah. I think one of the key reasons is exactly what you mentioned. Because for everything that happened before, one of the big elements was that there was always, well, not really in games, but like, if you take it to real world, there's always going to be someone in the middle regulating transactions between players. So, for example, this is a very simple example. If anyone out there has played RuneScape, I'm sorry for you. But Besides that, if anyone out there has played RuneScape, you've gotten like scammed at least once. Like, some person comes in and they want to sell you something and you give them your gold because like, okay, I want the site, I may give you my goal and then the person just disconnects and disappears and you basically got stiffed. Truth be told, it's just a game currency. So it wasn't really that much of a hurt on you because you really feel bad when it happens. And Blockchain Technology just has had its peaks since 2019. If I'm not mistaken, it was first developed around 2009, but it's really seeing the strong adoption today. And the important part of Blockchain Technology is that it can do two things that usually didn't happen before. A it can regulate transactions between two parties without having like a physical third party having to exist. And the second one is that is a trust system so you don't actually have to go and trust the other player to make your transaction. Because it's going to be written in code, it's going to be hashed and there's no way you're getting out of that. No one can really stake a different item in transaction than they originally did. Scams are there like scams happen every day, but it's mostly like 99% of them are mostly due to a human factor. And that's why the fact that you can now actually have people playing against something that they don't need to trust, they know there's no way to go around it and they're going to get the returns of what they're putting in. It's not a scam, it's going to be like written code. The smart context is going to be there. It makes people a lot more confident to stake money or stake different sort of assets in these games. Kind of like when people in the 90s were afraid to put their credit card information anywhere because they all thought like they were going to get cloned and scanned. And now like you'll just go to a Russian site because you wanted to buy that PDF, that one book that you need to print for your son and just put your credit card info in weird Russian site with like not thinking about it twice. [Brian] Also, one thing I'd love to add is I believe now more than ever people actually want to feel like they're a part of something bigger, right? So let's say you've got your avatar, you're going in the Metaverse and you want to buy paranike, whether it's going to be for your avatar, like The Sims where you can dress your avatar, or maybe Nike will have a special NFT for X amount of sales. So either way you've got the people who, I just want to make my avatar look cool, I want to spend it on this, that or the other. And then you've got other people that are, I'm doing this for the money. As far as like, this is a really cool limited edition Nike NFT. I can only imagine we're going to be bringing in some big names very shortly. And one of the cool things is you don't necessarily have to be quote, unquote whale to own a piece of the pie, right? You could have in the Metaverse, you own a piece of land and then that land has the shoe store in there. So someone who comes in and say 1000 people purchase that land, anybody who gets sales from that Nike shoe is going to disperse equally. And so everyone's going to be able to not only say that they've got some connections with brand management, but also just sales get X amount of tokens or whatever. And then you use those for basically whatever you'd like. So it's just really cool. [Eric] So Brian and Matt, you guys have done a diamond explanation of giving us a little bit of your background, how you're now starting to tie into ACCEL. So for our subscribers and maybe a couple more of our more veterans in the ACCEL game–I'll put myself in that category–give me a little more insight if both of you could, or a little more understanding on exactly what P2E Games are, and with that being said, exactly how they are going to now tie into The Blockchain, and I know you started to get into how we pay for it. I know, Matt, you had alluded to your son or your daughter can tie in a credit card, but bring it back a little more to the basics, and just let me know about the P2E Games, how they tie into The Blockchain, and exactly how it's being monetized. [Matt] P2E or like Play to Earn is just basically any game that gives you a reward for playing it. You can even define like, if you loosely define it, you can even call P2E to those little machines in Japan where if you exercise, you do ten squats, you actually get a train ticket. And it's sort of the same principle that comes in there. And people relate this a lot to casinos for that reason, because you basically go in, stake your money, make some bets. Betting is one of the many forms that P2E has. And I think there's a hidden gem that NFCs will bring that still hasn't been tapped into and relates directly with fractal ownership. There's a lot of artists that have talked about this. It's basically sort of selling a part or selling a piece of, for example, the right to your music. Like, if you have a favorite artist, how cool would it be if you could own a small percentage of the rights to their music? [Brian] Right. And NFT's in general, all these tokens would actually make for a strong case in which people can bring their resources together. We can form a pool of 30,000 people, and we can all pool our ETH. And the good thing is no one has to trust anyone else and get that pulled resources and get that pulled money to let's say we're all a big fan of Nike. You want to buy a percentage of Nike and sort of be able to bring the Nike brand into the Metaverse or get some dividends out of the Nike shares and et cetera. That's a strong point of NFTs and I think it's going to be seen a lot more because people are starting to realize there are a lot more uses to this than they thought originally. [Scott] Yeah, I think that's one of the craziest things we're kind of seeing in the blockchain and crypto areas. A lot of people don't really want to jump on this innovation and it's one of the things we're really seeing is everything is tied together and in our next episode we're going to kind of touch on this, but we want to leave you guys on a little bit of a cliffhanger. But in the next episode we're going to kind of explain to you guys how this all ties back together. The Metaverse, the NFTs, the Play-to-Earn, the blockchain and how they're all in one. So we're looking forward to this next episode. Please join us again with Brian Matt. It's going to be awesome. Bye.-----------------------------------------The Information presented in this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The Information provided from or through this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.You understand that you are using any and all information from this podcast at your own risk.

On today's episode we have a very special guest, his name Brian Sanders, his the director and producer of the Documentary Food Lies and the host of the Peak Human podcast. We discuss many topics having to do with the food industry, health and wellness. Brian Also talks about his time in Africa filming for the documentary. Follow Brian Sanders on Instagram @food.lies Checkout his website and podcast https://www.foodlies.org/ https://www.peak-human.com/ Follow us on Instagram @LAZARONUTRITION @METABOLIC.MATT @RYAN.LAZARO209

Hey Guys This was such a fun chat. I invited one of my favorite couples on the show to talk about a little bit of everything. We talk about how Brian got into drag and we got a huge announcement from Clay Studio' www.claystudios.net but you gotta listen to find out. we also talk about the paranormal and I even give away a few ideas I have for upcoming guests. which I never do. Oh if you want to follow Brian or Curtis on youtube there links are https://m.youtube.com/user/zekeal17squirrel/videos  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEhL5OhIrjChMdbutBEskdg  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did recording it. New Sponsor for the show and if you use Promo code Guilmy you can save 10% on your entire purchase Offend Tee City at https://offend-tee-city.launchcart.store/shop love this shop and I am so happy to be picked as on of the first shows to have a promo code. New Sponsor for the show Shirt Casters https://shirt-casters.launchcart.store/shop Clothes for the podcaster in you. Great collection of funny t-shirts and you can also support you local podcasters on there as well. Remember to use the promo code Guilmy for 10% off. If you need and Graphic Design work done please check out Rob Carey at https://www.instagram.com/rob.da.59 and tell him Guilmy sent yah. Merch Merch Merch Merch Merch Merch Merch Merch Merch Now that I got you attention check out the Guilmy Talks Merch click the link below! https://guilmy-talks.launchcart.store Talk to you later Justin Guilmette aka Guilmy RATE - REVIEW - SUBSCRIBE - SHARE Follow Guilmy Talks on Social Media Twitter https://twitter.com/Guilmy Instagram https://www.instagram.com/guilmytalks/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GuilmyTalks Now go check out this weeks sponsors www.batsinthebelfryart.com Sound effects & Music provided by www.freesounds.org Have a great day thanks for listening. Talk to you next week. Also check out the Ontario Indy Wrestling Podcast Network   The Johners Wrestling Network https://wrestlingwithjohners.com/ Straight Talk Wrestling http://www.straighttalkwrestling.podbean.com/ Shwa Wars https://anchor.fm/shwawarspodcast Scumbags of Wrestling https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/scumbags-of-wrestling-podcast/id1375723507 Knights of the Squared Circle https://www.facebook.com/KnightsOfTheSquaredCircle/ It's Time to Fight  https://www.facebook.com/timetofightwrestling/ Alliance Pro Wrestling Network https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/alliance-pro-wrestling-network/id1469155830?uo=4 Shooting up North https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsUZkOP3bJW5XJPr7KaWQjw Diary of a Wrestling Fan https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8yNWVlMmY2Yy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== MLW Rewind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26cNq4N16Ic Dyl-Mania https://anchor.fm/dylan-graydon1 Good Brother Morning https://whatchatalkinboot.com

EPISODE 34. In this episode of The Magpie Circle  have a special guest for you all not only is he a former player with over 130 appearances but he also ran Notts' Academy for many years producing some of best players to ever come through Notts' Academy, Brian Bates!Brian ran Notts' Centre of Excellence for many years producing some stella names, some of who never even made an appearance for Notts County. These names include Wes Morgan who was released as you'll hear for having a big back side, Jermaine Pennant who was sold to Arsenal, David McGoldrick & Leon Best who was both sold to Southampton & Simon Francis who was also released as a young kid. All of these players went on to play in The Premier League (one even won a Premier League title) & Brian Discusses how they got away among other talents in Notts' youth ranks!Brian Also made over 130 appearances for Notts in throughout the 1960's playing with the likes of Les Bradd & Brian Stubbs! 

Segment of Latest Underdog Prediction Podcast Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/3-dog-thursday/donations

In this episode of the Hard Water Fishing Show Jeff and Jason ask the question, when the ice is ready are you?  How to get prepared for the upcoming ice fishing season.  We have a guest on Brian from the Red Door resort.  He talks about getting the Red Door resort ready for ice season.  Also shares a great legend about rustic ice fishing on the Gunflint Trail. Brian Also shares a definition of legend during the interview. "A legend is historical but unauthenticated" This seems very fitting.  

On episode 2 of the Opinions On Sports Podcast , Brian touches base with the not so great USA basketball vs Turkey he also touches base on the 53 point beating of Japan. Brian Also calls in to his friend J Love to play the NFL Prediction game . Brian and J Love predict the MVP, ROY, DIVISION  WINNERS and Super Bowl PICKS !  AND MUCH MUCH MORE !  --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/brian-harvey3/support

On this episode of The Wanger Show, the boys are back to discuss a buuuuuuunch of fun stuff. They recap the 2018 or 2019 whatever it may be Golden Globes. How they felt the hosts were, their thoughts on the overall night. Cobbster finally saw Into the Spider-Verse, Cody played catch up with several 2018 movies and gives his take on them, Brian ALSO watched several movies and gave his take on them AND FINALLY, the two discuss the latest BONKERS of a movie that is Bird Box. Cobbster and Cody also go in-depth with the Black Mirror hit video game/movie experiment Bandersnatch!

Special Guests: Brian Douglas and Bex Warner of GitHub. In this episode, the panelists talk about automating GitHub with Probot. The origins of Probot are discussed, as well as making GitHub apps with the GitHub API, automating workflows with Probot, must-have Probots for every repo, and GitHub's V4 GraphQL API. References: Microstates README Probot github.com/integrations/slack github.com/marketplace/pull-reminders platform.github.community/c/integrations probot.github.io/apps/unfurl-links/ probot.github.io/docs/deployment/ probot.github.io/docs/extensions/#scheduler probot.github.io/community This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. TRANSCRIPT: ROBERT: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 105 of The Frontside Podcast. I'm Robert DeLuca, the director of open source here at the Frontside and I'll be your episode host. Today, we're going to be discussing automating GitHub with Probot with Brian Douglas and Bex Warner. I'm really excited about this topic. The idea of automating GitHub workflows with bots is amazing. This is something that I've been wishing the GitHub have the platform support for since I even started using GitHub for open source. Just being able to have a bot to take care of certain things like somebody doesn't leave enough of a PR description and they open up a PR, you can have a bot that just responds to it and saying, "Can you provide more information?" It's pretty awesome. With me as co-host today is Charles Lowell, who is also a developer here at the Frontside. Hey, Charles. CHARLES: Hey, Robert. ROBERT: Before we get into the discussion, I like to make a tiny little announcement. We've been building a composable and an immutable state container called Microstates. I'm sure Charles can talk about this more at length, then we will in the next podcast episode -- 106, but I would like to make a small announcement that Taras who is an awesome developer here just wrapped up a month's worth of work, creating a new ReadMe to describe the vision of Microstates and what you can do with them and everything about Microstates. If you're interested in that, I highly recommend checking out the ReadMe. I'll drop a link in the show notes for you that are interested. CHARLES: If I can add, it really is [inaudible] because it isn't like any other state management solution out there. ROBERT: No, absolutely not. I've been building something with it in React Native over the weekend of the 4th of July and it's amazing. But enough about that, you'll hear about that next episode. For this episode, I want to talk about Probot with Brian and Bex. Hi are you two doing? BRIAN: I'm well. BEX: I'm good. Thanks for having us. ROBERT: No, thank you for joining. This is really exciting. Like I said in the intro, I've been really excited about this project. I do a good amount of open source, I would say and this has been really helpful in all of our repos. We have, I think like 78 open source repos on the Frontside. We have Microstates, like we just talked about and Big Test and all of those repos use some combination of Probots that people have built and it's really nice, especially with the new Checks API that has just come out. You can integrate Probot into that, right? BEX: Yes. I, actually am currently working on shifting one of our bots from using the commits Statuses API to the Checks API. ROBERT: That's awesome. Before we go too deep into it because I want to come back to that because that sounds really cool and what the integration of that is like and what changes because I'm not even really that familiar with it. I just know it was released. I kind of want to go from the beginning here. Where did Probot come from and can we get a little bit of a history for everybody that might not know what Probot is? BEX: Sure. Probot originally started out as this simple idea to make GitHub scriptable. The original idea was you have a single file in your repository that would be like a JavaScript file and it would essentially spell out how the bot would act on your repository and the goal was to make GitHub apps accessible to people because if you ever look through our GitHub apps documentation, I think it can be a little tough to get started. There's, honestly, a lot of nonsense that you have to go through in order to get set up. For one thing, the way our GitHub app authentication works is it requires a JSON web token followed by using that JSON web token to request an installation access token and that process would be really tough for new people to get started. ROBERT: Yeah, it sounds like it. BEX: Yeah, so Probot was created to abstract all of that away and handle all of that authentication automatically and simply leave you with the payload that you get from listening on web token events and in authenticated GitHub client to make authenticated API requests while authenticating as an app. ROBERT: Cool, so that's where it started like a flat JavaScript file in the root but today, you use like EMO files and a .GitHub folder. How do that kind of progress? BEX: Originally, their use case was much simpler and it quickly became clear that a single JavaScript file in the GitHub repo was not scriptable enough and not easy enough to understand. The goal was to make like an API that could make that JavaScript file really, really easy to customize for every API of GitHub and it quickly became clear that that was not really a feasible thing to do. as time went on, it turned into this way to build Node JS applications and essentially, what the configuration files you're referring to are the way in which we make it customizable because right now, there's no way to be officially supported GitHub apps channels to pass secrets because it means you're a [inaudible] and the owners of GitHub apps, so that was just a way to kind of stop that problem. ROBERT: Gotcha, okay. BEX: The actual code for GitHub apps still lives in a Node JS module basically and the configuration file just specifies how that module runs. ROBERT: Right, so they're deployed like Heroku instances, if you want, like anywhere you can host a node app. BEX: Yup. Heroku, Now, yeah. ROBERT: Interesting. BRIAN: As a reason to that, some explorations of doing serverless deployments for Probot, I think there's a couple of issues of them. I'm not sure if anybody's shipped anything like the way they at but it's pretty much it's possible to. BEX: Just a week ago, we even released a new version in which we update our core from Node JS to TypeScript and now that things are typed, we have big plans for serverless. ROBERT: Nice. That's awesome, so then you'll be able to deploy to a Lambda and off to [inaudible]. BEX: Exactly. CHARLES: Can I actually interject here, as kind of a person who doesn't really know the relationship between GitHub apps and the GitHub marketplace and what exactly a Probot is before we hear the origin story. I would love to hear a very high level view of how this ecosystem fits together. BRIAN: I think a lot of people are pretty familiar with interacting with the GitHub API and OAuth integrations. I think I've just spent a lot of time at different companies previously to GitHub, just like making calls, either to cURL or through Node JS or more recently, [inaudible]. GitHub apps itself are a way to take all the things that you had to do to make an integration to GitHub much easier. It has a lot of cool things like OAuth, scopings, so you no longer have ask for all your repos ask access whenever someone logs in with GitHub and the connection between like, "Now have gone from OAuth to Now to GitHub apps," there was a lot of, as Bex mentioned earlier, ceremony that happens to getting set up with GitHub apps and integrations that Probot is like this tool to speed up the process of getting to the point where you just want to script some automation or some sort of workflow and it gives you all that bullet play for you. I don't know if that was a good high level for you Charles. CHARLES: Yeah. I've kind of witnessed this second hand with Robert installing a bunch of things here, so let's use an example, like you did some sort of automation on our repos, Robert, where when someone files a ticket, there's this workflow that automatically adds a triage label, so that we know that this thing hasn't even been dealt with, so we really need to address that issue. It doesn't need to be as a high priority. It doesn't need to be closed as a duplicate of something. One of the different aspects that you described there, how do they fit in terms of serving this workflow onto the end user? Or was that a good example, even? BRIAN: One of the cool thing about GitHub apps and what Probot does for you is that normally, if you want to add a label to an issue, either you Charles or Robert, would have to be admin or maintainer on the team for the Frontside and you could add labels. But somebody who opens up an issue, doesn't have that ability to have write access to your content, which is adding a label. What a GitHub app does, it actually takes a spot as if you would have another user on your platform, instead of creating a dummy account or a dummy user. Probot is basically building a bot for you to then, give you the ability to add that issue. That's sort of workflow that normally would have to happen through an actual real human could not happen through a bot without taking up a spot of like, "I guess, I probably shouldn't speak so ignorant about our platform and what we actually pay for nowadays for GitHub," but I know we used to have like a limited amount of seats for organization, like that seat no longer has now taken up and now, it could be just be used a bot can do something that normally us would take. ROBERT: Right. You no longer have to create a user to do these things. BRIAN: Correct. BEX: [inaudible] within GitHub. It's sort of built in a way that apps can take a lot of power in your repositories. CHARLES: So then, what is the relationship between Probot and an app? BEX: Probot is essentially the framework for building an app. You can definitely make the equivalent of any Probot app outside of Probot. It abstracts away all of, basically, the horrible parts and leave the easy part. CHARLES: Now, I think I'm ready to participate in this discussion. ROBERT: That was perfect, though. That's a great intro because I actually didn't have a total grasp or understanding of the relationship between GitHub apps and Probots. That's really good. BEX: Yeah. Additionally, going back a second. You mentioned the marketplace before. One thing to note that is that there actually are several Probot apps on the marketplace right now. The marketplace is essentially the home for any larger, usually third-party companies that have made apps and Probot is essentially supporting some of those. ROBERT: Interesting, so then my question would then be, do you know anybody selling their Probots. Does the marketplace charge? I'm going to assume it does. BEX: Yes. ROBERT: Okay. Is there anybody charging for their Probot? BEX: Yes. There is a quite a few, in-fact, charging for it. Recently, a pretty popular example is the GitHub Slack integration, which is if you open new issues, you can have them appear in your Slack channel. That whole application was recently rewritten by GitHub. It was previously owned by Slack and that was built on top of Probot. CHARLES: And I actually remember, we upgraded to that version. It's actually way, way, way better. BEX: I'm glad you feel that way. CHARLES: I didn't know the story behind there. I was like, "Oh, I just got a lot of... Awesome," you know? Although I don't know what's the costing. BEX: Yeah, I think that integration is actually free, so that wasn't the best example. I think it's for open source projects, at the very least. BRIAN: Brandon, one of the maintainers for the Slack integration and work at GitHub, also did a really cool talk at the SlackDev Conference a couple of weeks ago, so if you're interested what were the behind the scenes. That integration is all open source as well, so if you have request or you have features that you would like to add to the Slack integration, you can pop into the repo that hopefully will show up on the show notes because I'm not sure if it's like GitHub/Slack, but I guess we'll find that out in the show notes later on. BEX: It's Integration/Slack. BRIAN: But for an example of a paid app of a non-third party, we're not talking like Travis or Circle or another one with the big names but rather, a solo dev created. It's Pull Reminders, which is on the marketplace as of today and essentially, this gives you reminders of your pull quest, so you can actually ping inside the comments and tell Pull Reminders to say, "Tell me about the pull request like next week because it's Friday and I don't have time to look at this." ROBERT: That's awesome. I've also seen the one that's kind of related, that is like you can set your out of office at GitHub, which is actually kind of a neat concept. BEX: Was that the one where we are already changing that profile photos to have the overlay or the one where is just auto-replying to messages because I've seen a couple of -- ROBERT: I think, it's just auto-replies. BEX: Okay. CHARLES: So, it can change like your profile pictures and really, not just related to repo and history related activities but everything? BEX: Anything that you can access via the GitHub API, you can almost access via GitHub apps. There's a list of end points that I specifically enable for GitHub apps because there's something such as delete a repository that there's basically, a very few circumstances under which you want to give that permission to an app. Also, to things very specific like your profile or your personal page. About a year ago, there was an official internal audit of all of the API endpoints because there are lots of inconsistencies over what was and what wasn't enabled for GitHub apps, so they went there and kind of decided, what endpoints should be enabled and what endpoints actually get enabled. Now, that list is much longer than it was a year ago. Now, it's much more comprehensive. ROBERT: That's awesome and is this for the Rest API and the GraphQL API? BEX: Yes. Probot does support both. The Rest API is the one that specifically had all of these endpoints audited. The GraphQL, since it's a bit newer, we sort of built those and more. ROBERT: Cool. I really like working with the GraphQL API with GitHub. It makes it easier than trying to do a bunch of Rest calls. BRIAN: Yeah, there's a community form, it's like a discourse form that the API team actually manages and sort of pipes in there. Again, going back to like, if there's not something in the Slack integration that you would like to have, the form, that community is actually in there, if there's something not in the GraphQL API, that you would like to see. No promises on shipping it within an x amount of time but if enough people are requesting it obviously, there's going to be some resources [inaudible] at. ROBERT: What do you mean? We're doing open source. It has to be done yesterday. BRIAN: Yeah, exactly. And that form is at Platform.GitHub.Community, just a URL to get there. ROBERT: Awesome, that will be helpful to look through and get some recommendations in there. One of my favorite things I was going to say about the new integration for Slack and GitHub is the fact that I can highlight line numbers, paste that linked in and then it just expands it and the chat in Slack. That is so nice and I use it all the time. BEX: Yeah, I love that they built that feature. Actually, the original feature that was built on GitHub to allow those line expansions in the first place, like on GitHub itself, was actually built last summer by some folks who were also a part of my intern class at GitHub last year. ROBERT: Hey, intern power. That's awesome. BEX: Yeah. ROBERT: Everyone there is doing amazing work. I'm also following along with somebody that is also an intern and it's building a weekly digest program. BEX: Oh, yeah. That's actually a Google Summer of Code student. ROBERT: Oh, interesting. BEX: So, being sponsored through Google Summer of Code by Probot as an open source support. ROBERT: Is there anything more to unpack there? That sounds really interesting. BEX: Essentially, we submitted an application for Google Summer of Code because we thought it'd be a cool way to get more people, more students, a mentorship opportunity for the maintainers, basically and we were honestly overwhelmed. We got like almost 100 applications and it ended up being a huge of a deal but we're -- ROBERT: That's a great problem. BEX: Yeah, definitely a good problem but we were really happy. We, initially wanted to accept more students but Google limited us to only two students, so we have two Google Summer of Code students working on projects and one team of women from Rails Girls Summer of Code working on Probot. ROBERT: That would be awesome. What do they working on? BEX: I'm not sure yet. They actually just started a couple of days ago but the other Google Summer of Code student is working on a background checks API to eventually do sentiment analysis of comment history of someone new to your repository. ROBERT: That's interesting. That sounds like there will be some machine learning in there. I might just throwing out buzzwords? BEX: Most likely, I think they're just using some sentiment analysis API, like the perspective API. I don't think they're actually doing that themselves. ROBERT: Okay. CHARLES: Actually, I have a couple questions. Back on the subject of Probot. How does this square with the classic mode of integration because there was a lot out there? I think the first one that I remember that stuck in my mind was like Travis and I don't know if there had to be like a special relationship between the Travis developers and the GitHub developers, that's like, they was able to make that integration happen so many years ago. I don't know how that happened. I just remember it popped up and I was like, "Woah. This is incredible," and we see kind of the integrations gets more and more rich. For someone who's got, like you mentioned a couple of the big names, is the idea that eventually those would be able to be completely supported is GitHub apps or is it they're always going to be kind of a separate track for kind of the really deep integrations? BRIAN: I wasn't around when Travis first integrated with Lyft GitHub and I think that's a really cool integration and I know they have a very nice sized team that's able to do that. I think if we zoom back out like Probot, the way to get started with Probot is that we have the CLI command, which is to create Probot app. I believe it was intentionally copied off of create React app and the cool thing about create React app and create Probot app is that they abstract all the ceremony and boilerplate to get started really quickly. It was like, what developers or smaller teams can get started with integrating with GitHub apps. I highly doubt that Travis is going to rewrite their entire application with something like create Probot app but they're definitely going to be moving towards the new API calls, which would have been like GitHub apps. Part of the Checks API that we had launched at the end of May, Travis had blog post on how their integration with the Checks API works. They're making, though they have a lot of what Legacy endpoints and a lot of Legacy integrations in the way they integrate with GitHub, they are actively moving towards a GitHub app. I don't know if I could actually comment on their status of where they are today, to be honest but actively, we want all new apps and new integrations to follow the model of being a GitHub app, so that way, out of the box, you have access to all the newer features. You have all the access to all the newer GraphQL endpoints, if you want to use GraphQL and that way, we can serve one market, as opposed to everybody who had a GitHub integration from five or six years ago, that was all piecemeal together and sort of duct tape, like we run move away from duct tape everything together. CHARLES: I see. BEX: I definitely agree that I don't think Travis is going to switch to using Probot anytime soon and I don't think most of the large companies will be doing that but I do think, there will be shift towards GitHub apps in general. For those companies that don't already have the buildings of the GitHub app started, I think that Probot could be, in time to free some of them. BRIAN: In addition to that too, Travis and Circle and all the CI integrations, they're doing a really good job. I think the cool thing about GitHub apps is what you take away all that ceremony of getting your checks to work, now we can start opening up the door of like what's the next sort of CICD thing like? There's another term or another, I guess category of applications that can now be built to improve GitHub. CHARLES: The most amazing thing about having a great platform is the apps that you don't foresee, like it just come completely out of left field and you're like, "Woah. I can't believe that's actually a possibility now." When you have started to see some of those, some Probot or GitHub apps, you're like, "Man, I didn't see that coming. That's awesome." BEX: A hundred percent. I think it's the most exciting part of Probot because I think GitHub as a platform, we all know GitHub is the largest developer platform in the world and I think the idea that developers can build on top of this platform is the most exciting idea right now. I have honestly already seen apps that really excites me. The other day, I saw this app that was definitely not near completion but it was essentially updating and issue a comment box over and over and taking response through like checking a box and then listening on that common edit, in order to specify your coffee order. ROBERT: Woah. BEX: I was like, "Do you want an ice coffee or regular? Do you want milk or sugar and cream?" and it was going one at a time. It didn't actually order you your coffee at the end but it was super exciting to watch that. You're just editing the comment. I had never seen that before. ROBERT: That's pretty slick and that's taking the API pretty far. I'm sure there were some parsing in there and each Webhook response are like, "Was this box edited or not." That interesting. CHARLES: Yeah. Actually, now that we're having this discussion is kind of like changing my mind a little bit. Robert and I were actually talking yesterday about trying to standardize on our release management and our plan was basically to have some software that was going to run inside of our CI provider and have kind of a shared library, just a little ntm package that was shared by all of our repos but I'm thinking now, man, we should really explore doing this as a GitHub app. ROBERT: Yes, please. I've had three ideas that I really want to build out as a Probot. I'm just going to list them off and then we can build them all together and take equity and you know. I'm kidding. But the two that really excite me, that I kind of want to do is one concept that we work on this open source project for our clients and if somebody from the outside that doesn't have commit bits to be able to push to master, it would be really cool if we had a Probot that after it had an approved on the PR, from the maintainer, that the person that open the PR could then tell a Probot say, "This is approved by somebody that manages this project. Can we merge?" and then the Probot would then actually merge. I don't know if that's possible. That's something that I definitely wanted to explore. Then the other one, which is less cool, would just be like if we have a couple branches on some of our projects that we want to continue and we're not ready to put it back into master but we want to continuously run the test suite against it, so the idea there would be to have a Probot that would watch for changes on master and rebase as needed and continue to run the test suite and see where you're at. Those are the two things that I'm really excited about to do with Probot but I just want to automate everything with GitHub now. CHARLES: Right. BEX: Yeah, definitely, that first idea was actually pretty viable. I'm curious to know like how you actually get those commit links -- is that what you called it? ROBERT: Commit bits are more like commit permissions, I guess. BEX: Oh, I see. ROBERT: An outside contributor. CHARLES: Yeah, we want to push responsibility to the person who is the maintainer who can approve it but actually, the way we do it at Frontside is the person who actually is making the change is responsible for merging it. Once you get approval, you still have to hit the go button and that's just going to make sure that you're taking responsibility for saying it's done but that doesn't work for open source because people coming off the internet are going to have the right to push but we would like to give it to them, maybe via an app, if there is a maintainer who's approved it. BEX: Yeah. That's definitely something you can do. I've seen quite a few apps that, essentially add outside collaborators to the repo. Are you familiar with the... I forgot what it is called, like the all contributor section, where you cite everyone in your repo and everything and who's worked on it. There was a GitHub app that would add someone automatically after they merge their first change. CHARLES: That's awesome. ROBERT: I may have seen that on React State Museum but I'm not sure. It's a repo that we've contributed to and it has all the contributors at the bottom. It seemingly just kind of popped up there. BRIAN: There's an app that, I would like to mention too that I'm pretty excited about, that it sounds trivial too and it's almost similar... Not similar but it's sort of related to what you were talking about, Rob, with your first app, which is the WIP bot, which is the work-in-progress bot. This is a pattern of whenever I open a PR and I might not ready for a merge but I want to share my code so I can get feedback earlier on, I'll type in WIP so that append to my title of my PR. What this engineer did was every time you do WIP, it's going to go into the GitHub API and actually block the PR for merging, which is a feature available to GitHub. It's nested in your settings but the cool thing about this it actually blocks the PR for merging, so you don't have to worry about getting your, sort of like show and tell code merging the master without being ready. ROBERT: That's one of the first bots that I installed on all of our repos and then you can correct me if I'm wrong, it didn't always have the ability to block the PR from being merged but with the new Checks API, is that something that was introduced? BEX: Not exactly. The way that blocking of merging works is if you set it as the required status, so you can install any sort of CI on your account and have it not being required and ignore it whenever you feel like it, so it's really up to you to make it required. Otherwise, it just isn't checked and that's true for anyone who uses the Statuses or the Checks API. ROBERT: Okay, so that's a Statuses API. Okay, sorry. BEX: Yes. ROBERT: Also, the cool thing about that that I noticed when that was rolled out was I was now able to pick and choose and use workflows on Circle CI and each workflow is broken out as a different status check. I am now required like linting and the build and the test have to pass for these browsers before it can merge, which is really cool to be able to pick and choose. BEX: Yeah. It's awesome. I know personally on some of my repos, I have a few checks that I just don't require because I know I have to make them pass. ROBERT: Yeah. Speaking specifically about the work-in-progress bot, do you know how that works? It's open source, so I am sure I can go look. I think we want to go make a PR. We had some back and forth about this, Charles. CHARLES: I actually just [inaudible] we disagree. ROBERT: Yes. Charles opened a PR and one of his first commits in the PR had work in progress and the title had work in progress and we have this this Probot on our website and it was a blog post. You know, you make a couple more commits and you're further down, you move the work in progress in the title but the PR were still blocked because the first commit on a PR have work in progress in it. I think if it's the most recent commit or if it's in your PR title with work in progress, it should block but otherwise, it should not and Charles feels differently. CHARLES: I have about six commits and the very first one have WIP in the title or in the commit message and it blocked the whole thing but I kind of felt like it actually made me go back and I had to squash it down to two commits because I actually feel that your commit history should tell the story of the development, not like it should an absolute one-to-one journal of what happens but what you are intending. I actually felt that it could help me out because there's six commits that we're kind of all over the place and just kind of slapdash together have made me kind of go back, rethink it and tell a coherent story. I think it did me a service but it was not obvious. I definitely agree with that but I was like, "Why? Why were you still blocking?" ROBERT: Do I really [inaudible] admin privileges? BEX: I would say, I am friends with the creator of the web app. His name is Gregory Mantis and he is actually got a huge work in progress PR shifting work in progress over to using the Checks API and one of the features that he's using with the Checks API is essentially this mark as now work in progress button that will add the special line, like feel free to merge or something like that into your original PR description at the bottom. If that is there, the work in progress app will no longer be blocking. It's essentially like a hard override and honestly, that's the power at the Checks API versus the Statuses API. That's really exciting. ROBERT: Because I have seen the work in progress bot to get into a weird state, where I did remove the work in progress from the title but it didn't quite update and I'm still blocked. It's okay for me because I have admin privileges but other people on the team maybe not and they might be blocked from something that's actually work in progress. It's a lot like that hard override will be probably pretty helpful. BEX: Yeah, definitely. I think sometimes, there's some confusion with that just because of the way what perks work on GitHub and the way our pages are rendered, that you may need to refresh the page before you actually see it take effect. ROBERT: Right, yeah. Overall though, I love that bot. I go weekly, probably to the Probot apps listing and just go shopping. BEX: Wow. I'm actually the person who approves all the Probot apps to the listings so that's pretty motivating there. ROBERT: It's really nice. I am not even joking when I say shopping, I go through and I open up a bunch of tabs, I read through them, "Oh, this could be useful," that kind of thing. BEX: The first app you mentioned, which was like the one that requests more info is actually one that I built, so that was kind of funny. I guess you got that from the Probot apps too. ROBERT: Yup. That one, we definitely use on a couple of our organizations and repos. It has yelled at me a couple of times because of a blank PR. BEX: It yells at me all the time. I think I get yelled at more than people who are actually doing it wrong. ROBERT: I'm a little embarrassed like, "I should do better. I need to set an example." BEX: Definitely. ROBERT: Cool. I'm curious what both of your favorite Probot app is. This ought to be interesting. BRIAN: The app that I'm really impressed with so far, that I actually only use on a junk project at the moment, is the weekly digest one and it's mainly because I built something for this in my previous role at the company but then we shift it, which is basically go through every single repo. I worked at a company called Netlify previously and we had way too many repos to maintain... Oh, sorry, to keep track of and I was moving further and further away from the backend at the time so I was unable to keep up to date with all that was changing. I built a Lambda to watch Webhooks and then give me a digest of what was shipped like issues and PRs closed. It was way over-engineered and I never actually shipped that to actually make it work. But then the weekly digesting came out maybe a couple of weeks ago and it blew me away because I was like, "This is exactly what I needed," and I was trying to make it overly complicated through like a Lambda and like a bunch of Webhooks and this person, with only a few weeks, has the scaffolding of what I needed. That's the one thing I'm pretty excited about. It was already mentioned earlier too, as well. BEX: I guess, I would say one of my favorite ones is the unfurl a link app. I think that one it so simple but so nice. I don't know. I think having that unfurl link preview is just beautiful. Essentially what it does is it listens on issue comment creation or pull request comment creation or issues your pull request or whatever and read through the text or whatever was that issue or pull request and looks for links and then, essentially unfurls them so you can get a really nice preview of what you're going to. I think that's really beautiful and just so simple. ROBERT: Yeah. I love that one too. I have that added to all of our repos. BEX: It's so much nicer. Why would you not unfurl your links when you could unfurl your links? ROBERT: Exactly. CHARLES: I actually have a question. I think it's been touched on, probably at least twice throughout the conversation. I want to actually create a Probot, how do I actually go about deploying it? What does that look like? What does it look like to deploy and maintain it? BEX: We have a page on our docs about deployment and essentially the TL;DR is you can deploy it on any normal cloud hosting service that you wanted to deploy it. There are a few things you need to specify. For example, GitHub gives you a private key that you need to create your JWT and that private key means to be passed into your hosting service however you do that and then, there's a few bits of information that need to be pass in. We have pretty intense docs about it. Honestly, I'm not a deployment person. I usually try to let other people do that and I have never had a problem going through our docs and just getting it working immediately. BRIAN: It's also mentioned that there are examples like Heroku and Now and a couple of other ones. If you have a service that you already like, it's possible it's already in the docs, like steps to how to get that deployed. BEX: Yup and any other services are more than welcome to be added to the docs. Pull request are welcome. ROBERT: Sweet. It sounds like we need to set up a hack date to create a Probot, Charles. CHARLES: Seriously, my mind is brewing. ROBERT: I guess it's not directly related to GraphQL but there's something that I've always wanted to build. For prior history to everybody [inaudible], then the podcast, Brian and I used to work at a company called IZEA and one of the things that we built and I worked on a lot was we would create a collect metrics on people's social accounts that they're connected and do that and graph it over time. This idea came from when I was building up that feature all the way back in 2013, I want to graph the change in GitHub stars. Is there an API available for me to see like weekly GitHub stars or is that something that I still have to manually store and track? BEX: There's definitely an API endpoint to get the amount of stars and I don't see why you couldn't just do that on weekly basis and compare but I don't think there's any track that change API. ROBERT: Gotcha, like a history of it. I could do this by just stealing and looking at what the weekly digest Probot is doing because there is a change in stars section in there. I was just curious if there was now an API that was available. BRIAN: Yeah, that's more unlikely. I'm going to say no without looking at all the reference documentation. I think as far as that database, it's something you'd probably have to collect on your own but it's also a good candidate for a GitHub app, where you build a service that you can actually track stars once you've installed it and then if you want to monetize it, you can actually pay for private repo or whatever stuff like that, if you wanted to. But it sounds like a great opportunity to see this in the GitHub/Probot listings. BEX: I actually just look this app really quick in our docs because I was curious but apparently, you can receive the star creation timestamps. That could be doable through timestamp usage. ROBERT: Oh, and then I just kind of loop through back and build your graph in there. BEX: Yeah. ROBERT: Interesting. All right. Well, [inaudible] I was going to do today. BEX: Yeah. But I think it's exciting to bot the weekly digest and then what you could extract from that into stargazing is that Probot scheduler, which is essentially this all Probot extension we made that triggers a Webhook on a scheduled time period because right now, the way GitHub apps works are so centered around Webhooks. It can be difficult to find a way to trigger an action on something outside of a Webhook, like on a schedule basis. ROBERT: Yeah, that would be really helpful. I can definitely see how that would be a problem, if it's very, very central to reacting to Webhooks and events that happen on the system. BEX: Exactly. ROBERT: You're just hoping that somebody comes through and creates an event at a specific time. CHARLES: Can I ask you a question about, it's definitely on topic of extending GitHub but currently, just a question about, where the line is between what you can and cannot extend? You mentioned, for example in the rewrite of the WIP bot, being able to throw out a big button that says override this merge. Are there any plans to be able to actually extend the UI in novel ways? Everything there right now is happening with API calls, with I assume, UI elements that are related but the UI elements are static. If someone wants to put a novel piece of the UI, that button is going to require an extension of the GitHub UI by GitHub itself. Are there any plans to be able to, I know it's a dangerous waters, perhaps at a limited fashion at first but maybe more so, add different interactions and the actual application. BEX: I think this is actually the most exciting future of GitHub as a platform. In the past, GitHub APIs have only specifically supporting things that you can do through the command line or you can do through GitHub's UI itself. The Checks API introduced the very first non-integration specific UI element essentially and the merge button that I was referring to in WIP is exactly that. It's essentially this button that you can change the text of it to be whatever you want and you can listen on that action and then you can do as an integration or an app, anything that you want based on that. I think that's the most exciting direction for GitHub. Because if you look at Slack, Slack is a platform that has sort of really impressive integrations in that response. Your apps on Slack can really do all of these things, use custom UI elements, so I think the most exciting features for GitHub as a platform is all of this customization and giving the power to the apps. ROBERT: Yeah, that sounds an awesome way to be able to extend GitHub without having to try and throw the feature on to GitHub developers. BEX: Exactly. I feel that a lot of the struggle right now is that there aren't these nice ways of communicating via apps because I feel lot of the apps and bots end up just commenting on issues and pull requests and taking up a ton of screen real estate as a result and I just think that that's not the way that bot should ideally interact with the GitHub platform. They should have their own space to exist and that's the feature I'm most excited for. CHARLES: Yeah. I can think of having like progress bars for CI checks and your various appointments. It's too exciting. I'm glad. That's definitely the response I was hoping to hear. BEX: Yeah. We're excited for it too. ROBERT: Basically, you all have a massive community of a bunch of developers that would want to do this and are willing to get their hands dirty on it. Enabling that community is probably the root of all Probot is about. That's super awesome. BEX: Yup. CHARLES: That's a good place to end, because gosh, it's going to be so exciting to have the millions of developers on the planet, just like surgeon to the APIs that you're developing. BRIAN: One thing to add to that too, about the whole million developers, there's a number that's been thrown out from Stack Overflow and also, some other people who are saying like there's 50 million developers, there's 24 million developers. As far as GitHub, our public user number is 28 million, the cool thing about Probot and GitHub apps is that there's a good chance that all those people that are using GitHub today are not actually developers. They're like PMs or designers and what's really cool about this, like having interactions with that kind of platform in this way is that you can now enable all the non-developers to be able to interact with your GitHub repos and start bringing more designers and PMs onto to the GitHub platform to interact with the developers. ROBERT: That is an interesting point. That is awesome and something that I'm always looking for is a different ways to collaborate with non-developers on my team because... I don't know, developers tend to think everything is always centered around code but it's not. The shifting at work that are awesome, needs a lot of collaboration from non-devs and non-dev skills. That would be really interesting to see. I'm excited for that to play out. BRIAN: Yeah. There's a blog post that was published a month ago, I think about where the design team, design system teams rather, built the integration to Figma to update their icons effectively. I just posted that in the chat to look into but they also built this as a Probot app as well. ROBERT: That is awesome. BEX: Yeah, that one is super exciting. You would have the app comment, the diff between what the old icon versus what the new icon look like and it's just such a beautiful design change to be able to see that shift. ROBERT: Man, I'm happy that this is happening. The future seems super bright. Where can we direct people to get resources to contribute, to get involved and start really going at this? BEX: Basically, Probot.GitHub.io has all the Probot stuff, /app has all the listings for apps you can install today, /docs is where the docs are, if you want to get started and hopefully from there, we link up to the necessary things that you need to do. BRIAN: Also, what I mentioned too via Probot Slack channel, there's a Slack channel as well and they do a weekly call. I think, it's weekly or bi-weekly call to actually chat with the Probot community. If you have questions, you can actually bring your questions to the team. BEX: Yeah, we call it 'Office Hours' and it's once a week and it's under our community page, where we also have a link to our Slack. We have a link to another podcast we run and basically, how to get involved in the Probot community. ROBERT: Those are really helpful resources. I do remember seeing that Office Hours. It's on Thursdays, right? BEX: Yes. ROBERT: I was going to drop in for one and then, I actually forgot. Actually, it might be going on as we talk right now in this podcast. BEX: It starts in half an hour, I think. ROBERT: That's awesome. Cool. Well, thank you Brian and Bex for having a conversation about Probot. This is really awesome. Is there anything that you would like to plug for yourselves? How people can get in contact with you? BRIAN: Yeah, I am BdougieYO on Twitter. Everything you need to know about me is there and I am happy to say hello. I'm also helping with the GitHub developer program, which is sort of getting a soon-to-be announced rebranding. If you go to Develop.GitHub.com/Program and you want to have more conversation about the API and GitHub apps on the GitHub side, you can go there to sign up. BEX: And I am HiImBexo on Twitter. You can ping me in any Probot stuff. I'd be happy to look at any Probot code. I've been looking at it for a while now so I'm happy to do that. ROBERT: That's awesome. Thank you all for having a conversation with us. This was really fun. I'm so excited about everything you can do with Probot. This is a really fun project. I'm happy that this is happening and I will make a Probot in the future. CHARLES: I'm looking forward too. Robert has been excited for quite some time and he definitely talks a lot about it and now, I have some insight as to what -- ROBERT: It's happening, I'm telling you. Well. Thank you for being here and we are the Frontside. We build UI that you can stake your future on. We are specializing in JavaScript. We can build anything that you want throw at us. We do functional programming, React testing, Vue, anything in JavaScript, we specialize in. As always if you want to suggest anything for us to have on the podcast or talk about, you can reach out to us at Contact@Frontside.io and like I teased earlier in the podcast, next episode is going to be all about Microstates, the immutable and functional state container, composable model system that we've been building, it's controls as a brainchild for the past two years. That is next episode and I'm really excited about that. It's a really fun API and expressive to build models with. Thank you, Mandy for producing our podcast and we'll see you next episode.

This week the boys talk about the future of coinoperated and the things that got lined up. Brian Also forgot what was talked about and only remember that we do a panel for MegaCon!

Ever feel discontent with your ministry? Join our conversation with Brian Zhand as he unpacks his journey of why a pastor of a large and successful church would risk everything in a quest to find a richer, deep fuller Christianity. Brian’s story is a journey into faithfulness of Christianity’s great theological tradition. If Christianity is going to thrive into the coming generations we need to listen to the deep thinkers and practitioners of the Church like Brian Zhand. You can find Brian on Twitter @BrianZahnd (https://twitter.com/BrianZahnd)or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/BrianZahnd/timeline). Brian Also blogs at http://brianzahnd.com. Books by Brian Zhand: Water to Wine (http://goo.gl/oPZ29k) Beauty Will Save the World (http://goo.gl/qO1FyT) A Farewell to Mars (http://goo.gl/J6kwwO) Suggested Books from Podcast: The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Wilken (https://goo.gl/7erzAu) The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard (https://goo.gl/MIEOT5)

In which we briefly explore the history of Gothic Fiction. Again, I’d like to thank Amy Lukavics, Andrea Judy, Kira Butler, and Katie Locke for being my test audience. I adore you gals. I also need to add Brian LeTendre to the list of people I am indebted to. Thank you so much for your help. Brian ALSO makes podcasts and writes Lovecraftian things. Check out his work over here: http://www.seebrianwrite.com/   Intro/Outro music: “Ghost Story” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Xiaohua: Hello and welcome to RoundTable’s Word of the Week. Now today Brian and I are going to talk about something food-related.Brian: That’s right. We’re talking about all the different ways to describe how good your food tastes because in Chinese you often say it’s literally “good eat” or “good taste” or whatever. For a lot of people, they’ll check the dictionary and say, “Oh, it’s delicious.” That’s a very common phrase and it’s not incorrect but the most common one, you just say, “Oh wow, that was good” or “Man, that food tastes so good.” It’s just kind of like Chinese there and it is actually a little more common than saying delicious.Xiaohua: 我们中国人在说什么东西好吃的时候，基本就说”好吃”、”真好吃。”但是呢，其实在英语里面 “Delicious”这个词并不是我们想象中的那么常用，而用最简单的 “good,” “That’s good food,” or “That tastes so good,” 倒反而是一种更加常用的用法。Brian: Exactly. And then we also get “appetizing” there. For this, you don’t actually have to use that much after you’ve tasted the food. It’s more like you walk into a room, especially if you have appetizers, but even with dinner or whatever you see on the table especially, you get the sights, and you get the smells there, and you’re like, “Man, that food looks so appetizing. I just want to get a piece of that. Can I start eating now?” Xiaohua: “Appetizing” 直接的翻译是说 “开胃的” 、”促进食欲的”。但是这个词经常使用在当我们看到卖相很好的食物的时候说的，而不是在吃进食物之后表达它有多么好吃的时候说的。We don’t want to make the mistake of gobbling something up and then say “appetizing”.Brian: That would come often as a little weird, and then another one that I personally like quite a bit is “scrumptious”, “simply scrumptious.” I feel like maybe this you might have seen this in one of those Willy Wonka movies over there, but it’s a little bit funny ‘cause it’s kind of formal but if you use it in kind of a humorous or light-hearted situation, such as “Ah! Simply scrumptious! I must have some more of that.” or you’re kind of being mock-formal and that kind of thing. But it’s definitely a compliment to whoever’s made that food for you. Xiaohua: “Scrumptious” 虽然也是在书面场合用到的词，但是当你对朋友的厨艺赞赏到 “scrumptious” 的时候，他可是会非常高兴的啊。Brian: Yes, and of course, even besides these different words here, there’re a lot of different phrases we use in English where we use these different flavors to describe something that isn’t food. For example, “a sweet tooth.” Lots of people, especially Americans, have “a sweet tooth.” That means you really like foods that are sweet, and often have a lot of sugars. Xiaohua: That’s right. 下面来讲一下跟酸甜苦辣各种味道相关的一些英文中的习语。 “A sweet tooth,” 那就是非常喜欢吃甜食。Brian: Also, we’ve got another one – “short and sweet”, or often “keep it short and sweet”, that you want to keep it nice and not too long.Xiaohua: “Short and sweet” 其实就是简明扼要的意思。I wish all the speeches in these Chinese meetings can be short and sweet.Brian: Ah, that would be nice there, but meetings are sometimes important. Also, we’ve got “sweet talk.” A lot of people have probably been “sweet-talked” at some point. They want a favor and they come up and like, “Oh, I love your outfit there. That’s just so good, and you’re looking so good today. By the way, I have this little thing, and I think it would be really good for you.” If someone’s going like that, they’re sweet-talking you.Xiaohua: “Sweet talk’”是甜言蜜语， 而且不是平常所说的恭维大家。经常在 “sweet talk’”后面还有一些等着你要干的活，或者等着你要帮的忙。Brian: Exactly, exactly. Then, we have some other flavors here, of course, like “sour,” “sour grapes,” which I think in my personal experience, it’s been more like you say “Oh, don’t be a bag of sour grapes” or whatever. You’re just kind of criticizing things and being negative without much of a use or reason.Xiaohua: “Sour grapes.” “酸葡萄。”这个字好像中文和英文的意思差不多。就是说，自己得不到什么样的东西，但是你也别老去抱怨别人。Brian: And then even besides “sour,” of course we also have “bitter.” And “bitter” is actually an interesting thing because it’s an important flavor in Chinese cuisine, but in Western, and certainly in American cuisine, it almost never comes up. So it’s a cultural difference. But we have things like “to the bitter end,” “to the very end,” all the way through whether it’s good or bad.” And often if it is “bitter,” it’s grueling, it’s long, and it’s hard work. You just have to go through all the way with it to the very end. Xiaohua: “To the bitter end” 这个词是说坚持到最后，一直到最后的意思。Brian: Yes, and besides that, we also have “spicy,” which is again, also something that’s a little more common in Chinese food than in certainly American food there, but it does come up, and it does come up in language quite a lot too. For example, “to spice things up,” to make it more interesting, or we often have to go for “sexy” as a common popular word for that. So instead of keeping things boring, doing the same thing everyday, you change something, add a little spice, and then spice things up there. Xiaohua: “Spice things up”基本上就是说让生活变得更有意思一些，或者是让这个party变得更热辣一些。Brian: And lastly, we have “the spice of life” or “variety is the spice of life,” meaning that you don’t want to do the same thing everyday so you add variety, and that is the spice of life. Xiaohua: “Spice of life” 也有点像是生活的调味剂的意思。 And that wraps up this edition of RoundTable’s Word of the Week.