Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Oracle OpenWorld 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon and this is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. We go out to all the big industry events, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm happy to have two members of the IOUG, which is the independent Oracle user group, Troy Ligon, who is with American Express in his day job, and we've got Michelle Colby, who's with backcountry.com. Both of you, thank you for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you. All right, so Troy, I'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what you do and how you got involved with IOUG. I've been running a regional users group for about 15 years now, and so that got me started with the IOUG and recently stepped up to the board as well, and so been working with their alliances and their partners, such as Cisco, for the last six months or so. Yeah. All right, and Michelle, you know, what are you doing, what's your role with IOUG? With the IOUG, I'm the board of directors over regionals, and I got involved because I live in Utah. I've been leading the user group there for quite a while and wanted to take it more to a bigger stage where I can make more of a difference. All right, so great. The research company I work with is Wikibon. We talk about practitioners sharing with their peers. It's great when you can kind of get those good stories to talk to the other people that have similar kind of things you've done. I spent a lot of time in the virtualization community with everybody who knows kind of the V-mugs that they have. Can one of you give me, just kind of, what's the scope of the IOUG? How's it managed? Maybe, Michelle, you're on the board. What does the organization look like and what's the global scope of it? So Troy's also on the board, so I'll let him fill in if I miss anything. But the IOUG covers all the database, storage, topics. They cover business intelligence, which is what I really care about, big data. Am I missing anything? We run the gamut pretty much of all of the Oracle space and all of the glue that binds all of the apps together. So think tuning and best practices and those sorts of things. All of the Oracle shops have a reason to be involved with the IOUG. All right, great. You know, one of the things we've been talking about this week, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. Oh, absolutely. You know, Oracle came out talking big about cloud. Michelle, you mentioned big data. How often are you refreshing what you're doing? How, you know, what's the interaction with your user community as to what new topics they're working on? I got to imagine there's a lot of things keeping you all busy. Oh, it's crazy trying to keep up. And coming to events like this, it's like you're thrown at so many different concepts that I just want to go home and learn so much more. And I rely on the user group community to help me with that. There'll be a few things that I dig into on my own, but then I rely on the community to help me with all those pieces I'm missing. All right, absolutely. The networking opportunities you get at Open World or at IOUGs collaborate, any of the meetups and mashups and so forth, those are vital to the careers of the current crop of folks. You're never going to get that in an online, just a class, those sorts of things. It's these types of events where you can move your career forward and stay fresh. Our jobs are a constant learning opportunity for an entire career. Yeah, so one of the challenges, of course, you're an independent group. But you need to have a direct feed with Oracle and get updates from them.  How is their interaction between, does Oracle give funding towards that? How does all that work? Oracle is an excellent partner. They work with us year round to provide funding for some of our activities, but really more on a sponsorship type of basis. We're an independent organization as our name tells. Back years ago, that wasn't the case, but now it is, and so over the course of the year, we get access to their product management. We get advanced information on things that are coming down the pike so that we can start getting our members up to speed and geared up for the learning opportunities they're going to need to get in front of to stay current on whatever Larry has dreamed up for the next round, right?  There's so many companies here giving precious everything. Sometimes you got people that run a group and they go work for a vendor and then they got to go change and everything. Can you maybe speak to some of those dynamics? You know, what do you see kind of the customer in the ecosystem from the user group? Our user group relies on all those different parties. It's people who are in there using the tools in their everyday job. There's consultants that are seeing what many different companies are dealing with and then also our partnerships that we have with companies like Cisco who can help augment what we're maybe struggling with with different tools with their products.  Cisco's one of our greatest proponents. They work with us year round. They work with us at our collaborate event. This past year, they sponsored a pre-event learning opportunity for the folks. They sponsored the women in technology and Michelle's a large portion of. So, without sponsors like that, you couldn't run such an organization. There's a lot of moving parts, a lot of things that you have to do to run an organization like this and be able to bring the content. We do road shows and those sorts of things to bring the content to our community, keeping the website up, those sorts of things, driving the speakers to come in and present to the community. So all of that, you gotta have great partners and Cisco's one of those, yeah. And if I could chime in about women in technology, I think it's amazing to have a partner like Cisco helping us in supporting that cause and showing that there really is value in supporting the women in the community, giving them a platform to meet each other, network with each other, and give them that support to say, we know that you're doing amazing things and we want you to keep growing that community. That's great, so, you know, this is like homecoming for everybody that's involved in Oracle. I mean, almost 60,000 people a year.  Yeah, it's really a community. We've got a group of folks that I see twice a year. We see them here and we see them at Collaborate and I've known them for, you know, in some cases, 30 years, right? And yet, we get to see each other twice a year and talk over the rest of the year, so a pretty good size group. We have a booth on the second floor and it's kind of like a meeting space that we all run into each other and we have that common ground to bump into each other at all times. As far as formal events, there's a lot going on this week and we're all busy trying to balance everything going on. Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I always love the dynamics of this is you have to be local, but you have to share with your peers and you have to get to know what's going on. How do you guys communicate?  I'm very active on Twitter and Twitter has this whole Oracle community that supports each other. One of the really cool things that I experienced this week is the Oracle Developer Choice Awards, which was allowing the community to recommend others in that network for these awards of being experts in contributing and the Twitter handle that was going out about that was really fun to watch. It's fun to see everyone communicating over that medium even though there's a lot of miles between us. Yeah. We have a great website as well that has both a member's area where they have opportunities to have forums and discussions with their peers as well as a free section of the site where anybody can get involved and see some of our content, that sort of thing as well. So, got a list server that's been going for a lot of years as well. That's an old-school way to communicate one of the earliest of the social media and so we have a pretty active group of folks on there as well. Yeah, I guess you're bringing up a great point. How do people get involved here? You got the list server, you got the website.  What's the new way that, how does everybody get in touch with the IOUG? She's the social butterfly, right? Our website's our best resource. That's where we have our select journals listed online. We have lots of different articles linked to our events and the presentations that people have done at events. So, the website's the best method. All right, well Troy and Michelle really appreciate you coming and sharing all the good stuff going on with the IOUG. Wish you the best of luck with the rest of the event and I hope everybody checks out the website and helps participate because community's a real important part of everything going on in today. Thank you very much. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


Welcome to the Adam Does Movies podcast. I'm Adam and today's topic, superhero fatigue. Have we finally hit it? Has it set in? The thing Scorsese, Spielberg, and so on were saying was going to hit long, long ago. All the way back when Dark Knight Rises came out, I was hearing this. But yet here we are in 2023 and these films keep coming out. They don't stop. The reason I'm talking about this today is because I asked people on my YouTube community tab at Adam Does Movies what they wanted the topic to be on. My wife suggested talk Christopher Nolan films. Oppenheimer's Out, It's Fantastic, If That's Your Cup of Tea. It's a three hour movie with a lot of talking and I understand some people are like, get to the point already. I found it incredibly fascinating through and through. I have a review up on the channel. If you haven't seen it, please check it out. It's worth your time. And so is the movie in my humble opinion. It's a fair point. I should talk about Christopher Nolan movies. But the thing is, I don't know if I can sustain it for 35, 40 minutes without really diving into the history of his stuff and how he approaches film. But there is a point to be made there. And the reason people keep going out to see Christopher Nolan films, unlike most other directors, is because he has name recognition. And that name is synonymous with quality. It's synonymous with big, bombastic films, even if the topic is as simple as a documentary biopic of sorts on a guy who invented the atomic bomb. He still finds a way to infuse brilliant sound design, to infuse amazing IMAX level visuals on the big screen and to get some of the best actors in the business to put in the work. Not a lot of directors in 2023 are emitting that same kind of response. They're not eliciting that same sort of reaction from the audience. Spielberg at one point was right there. David Fincher, I think, at one point was there. James Cameron obviously still is, but he comes out with a movie every 20 years now. And I think when I look at the superhero franchise, that's really how the fatigue has set in. Quantity over quality. When Iron Man came out in 2008, they took their time with it. They cast the right guy to play Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr., who also is an Oppenheimer. It was nice to see him again. Perfectly cast for the role, it's been stated many times over that without him, this whole thing would not have worked. And I agree. John Favre, as the director, certainly helped as well. He made sure that this vision lined up with what they were thinking for the MCU, which was going to be a somewhat grounded flick with some good witty dialogue, some hard hitting action, and just an overall adult look behind it. Of course, 2008 isn't the first time we had superhero movies.  Like, Superman, The Quest for Peace is just so terrible. And then there was Supergirl. We had Tankgirl. And then we would slowly make our way to the sophisticated kind of comic book movies we've come to expect now, with X-Men by Brian Singer, which came out in, I do have it up here, 2000. And a couple years before that we had Blade with Wesley Snipes. Awesome movie. And that was another one that really treated the material with some respect. It was a hard-to-are film about a vampire hunter who was a half-vampire himself. They made a couple of those movies. Blade Trinity is, again, one of the worst things ever. Just one of the many times superheroes will lose their way in the course of appeasing the box office, rushing the movies out before they're actually fully baked. And now here we are with the MCU. Spider-Man. And what year was that? 2002? 2001? 2002 I have, yep. Spider-Man comes out, and that really kind of seals it, I think, for a lot of studios. Many people harp that Blade doesn't get the credit. Well, I don't think it deserves the credit. I don't think X-Men deserves the credit either. It's really Spider-Man that brought in the box office and opened the eyes of Marvel to say, oh shit, we should probably take our properties and start putting them on the big screen, because at that time, Marvel didn't own a lot of its film stuff. It was selling it off to Fox and Sony and different companies, because they were hemorrhaging money. And so Kevin Feige, however you say it, he took a big calculated risk and said, alright, we're going to start producing these in-house. And that's how we got Iron Man. That's how we got the Incredible Hulk, not to be confused with Eric Bona's Hulk, which I don't care for, but I like Eric Bona as Hulk. I thought he was the best of the business. Iron Man would really be a movement that would set all of this in motion.  This is the brilliance. This is the real genius of what Marvel did. They set out ahead of time to make this a cinematic universe at the beginning. But they didn't put it in your face. They just had these little end teasers where Nick Fury would come out, wink, tip the hat to the comic book audience. And before you know it, they have transitioned a whole new group of moviegoers into that space. Comic books start flying off the shelves. Video games are getting made. It is really becoming a movement.  There's always generations of different types of movie genres getting the spotlight. You had the Westerns. You had the action vehicles with Arnold and Stallone and, you know, Arnold and Schwarzenegger. It's the same person. Yeah. I'm on the fly doing this by myself.  But you get my point. This ebbs and flows. Films change. Ideas change. But now here we are in 2023. Oppenheimer and Barbie. Barbenheimer come out the same weekend. They both pull in massive audiences and big numbers. That wouldn't sound so impressive if it weren't for the fact that just a couple weeks earlier, the Flash bombed at the box office. And a few weeks before that, or months before that, Flash 2 bombed at the box office. And before that, Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantum Shitia didn't do very well at the box office. I don't want to say it bombed because I'm not actually sure where those numbers ended up going. But I know it underperformed for sure. And the same goes for the Little Mermaid. Definitely underperformed compared to what it costs to make and market. I'm sure it'll end up making money for Disney in the long run because of merchandising and, you know, all the other things they do to turn a buck. But the audience is finally starting to speak up. They're starting to wise up to the fact that we're sick of it.    The quality has gone so far down. And yes, there are still exceptions. There are still some great gems there. James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. I thought was fantastic. A great way to end that trilogy. But that's really, again, kind of like Christopher Nolan. You have a director who's very consistent. He has a style to his movies. He's got a tone. He's got themes he usually plays with and actors he usually uses. And some people will say, I don't like his stuff, and that's perfectly fine. But for everyone that doesn't, there's a whole lot of people that do, including the higher-ups at Warner, who put him in charge of the DCU going forward. So after Blue Beetle, that's absolutely gonna bomb. He looks pretty terrible. And after Aquaman 2, I wouldn't be surprised if that bombs as well. We're gonna get a fresh Superman movie. The question is, will anyone care when it comes out? My thoughts? Yes. I think people have gotten savvy enough now that they know what's going on with the DCU. A couple months back, a year back, I would have argued against myself and said, no. General moviegoers don't have any idea what's happening with the DCU. And there are still plenty of people, even my wife, if I told her, or if I asked her, hey, what's the flash part of? MCU or DCU, she probably wouldn't have any idea. It's all kind of the same nonsense to her. But the people that are paying attention are really paying attention. And they know that these next few movies that are coming out are just kind of pointless because the DCU is over. Now, I'm not in that camp personally. I take each movie at face value. I take it as a separate entity. And I really wish more people would. But we've been trained now by the studios to expect these large world-building properties. And so it's really the fault of the studios for putting that in our heads, for implanting that idea that, hey, it's not so much about this movie. It's about what it's leading to, what it's branching out to. And I think that's just, that's an unwise thing to do. So for me, the DCU still has some fun movies here and there. And I'm going to give them a shot.  And when it works, it's kind of like, okay, well, that was a fun time.  I don't sit back and stew over it or kind of like unpack what I saw like with Oppenheimer.  It's, you know, it's window dressing. It's a couple hours on a roller coaster. And then I go home and I wait for the next ride to come out because that's what most of these superhero movies are. They're just rides. And rides can be fun for sure. But after a while, you feel a little empty and you feel like you've been on this one a thousand times. So why would I bother wasting more money on it? And that's where I think a lot of these movies are starting to hurt. Is the audiences are saying, yeah, we've been here. The Marvels comes out. I saw the second trailer. I thought it looked terrible. And I'm not even against that. You know, I don't have any problem with Brie Larson or any of those females in there. I actually kind of was interested because it seemed like something a little different, a little campier, a little sillier for the whole family. Fair enough. But the trailer was just so mediocre across the board. Didn't have any laughs. The effects are, of course, humdrum at this point. Nothing has any weight to it at all. It all is shot in front of a green screen or a digital screen, whatever they're using now. So I just don't know what I'm connecting to with that film. And it's not fun and light and creative enough, such as the new Ninja Turtles movie coming out. And it doesn't have anything, you know, it doesn't seem like it has anything to say, like even the Barbie movie, which could have been a very paint by numbers picture that ended up being a lot more, you know, feminist, a lot more of a voice is being shared there. Of course, it was smashed over our heads to the point where my brain was bleeding on my ear. Still, at least it's doing something, right? At least it's trying to put out messages and trying to entertain you in a different way.  It's so boring. We already hit the crescendo with Endgame. We already saw Thanos. We already saw him get taken down. And afterwards, it's just been a series of multiversal nonsense. People love Spider-Man. They loved No Way Home. I didn't love that movie. I liked that movie. Fine enough. It's pulling teeth to get me to watch it again. I'm sorry. It really is. I watched it a second time at home with my family who hadn't seen it. They didn't have that same visceral reaction I did when the other Spider-Man showed up. And I think part of that emotion that it's playing off of isn't even necessarily that, oh man, Andrew Garfield's here from the amazing Spider-Man movies. They're so good. Most people universally think those movies kind of suck. It's just Andrew Garfield is a very likable actor. So just seeing him again as Spider-Man, it's more of a good for you. It's so nice to see him in a better movie where he's Spider-Man.  So seeing him show up, it's just pulling at the heartstrings, pulling at the emotions. But if you look at the substance of Spider-Man No Way Home, there's none.  Worth Tom Holland's character, Peter, is convincing Dr. Strange to make everyone forget about him so that his buddies can get into a good college.   Well actually, we know he could have because it turns out all he had to do was ask originally the Dean of the admissions. And she would have let him in. But yeah, it was just, it's just so silly and so dumb. And that's okay. Again, if you're just going for kids' movies, you could do worse, right? But I think, and this is where the MCU has a problem, it branded itself as a more adult experience. As I'm talking, I realized, oh my gosh, you know what? I was freaking out. I thought maybe I wasn't recording audio. I almost had a small heart attack. Let me continue. It branded itself originally as something for older people. And I don't mean adults. I mean, you know, early teens and up for Iron Man, it's got some grit there. It's got a little bit of heaviness to it, some swearing, some debauchery. And it kind of stayed that way for all of phase one with Captain America, with Thor, and those movies all didn't hit for me. Most of them actually, I thought, were just kind of, yeah, it was fine. It was all right. They were good starts, though. They were decent introductions, good enough, I would say. And it really hit its stride, of course, with the Avengers. And phase two, outside of Iron Man 3, which is, I'm sorry, is phase, I get my phases confused. Sorry about that. I'm not an expert in the MCU. Whatever phase is Iron Man 2, pretty rocky. That might have been phase one still. I do not like that film. Anyway, phase two and three, damn consistently good stuff come out there, outside of Thor 2. But we have the Winter Soldier in the mix at one point. We have Guardians of the Galaxy, volume one and two. We have Ant-Man and then Ant-Man and the Wasp, again, they're like the sea unit characters. But their movies should have been worse than they were. I wasn't expecting anything out of Ant-Man. And I was pleasantly surprised. And I think it's a lot to do with them still taking their time to find the right people for the job, get the right actors and the right roles. At some point, they decided after Endgame that their new mission was going to be, let's just kind of do more stunt casting with roles. Let's spend less time on scripts and more time on more obscure properties. Let's really push the female angle now so that we have a more equal playing field, men, women. Some of this stuff is perfectly fine. But when you announce it as the only goal or as the main focus, you're kind of disservicing the fans that were there before. And you're kind of disservicing your own properties at that point. And you're undercutting what you had previously done. Not only that, they make jokes at their own expense when you get She-Hulk in the mix.  Like, oh, yeah, Captain America, he's a propagandist, he's just a tool for the army. Well, yeah, that was kind of the point of that movie even. Like, he's in on it too. So it's kind of unfair to undercut the guy when that's the point. But I think you understand what I'm getting at. Marvel got too big for its britches. The MCU did. It got too bloated. And the final nail for me, because I do think this thing is pretty much dead, unless they can prove otherwise with the new Avengers films coming out, I have no interest, to be honest. I think they sunset all the good characters a little bit prematurely. And now we're left with kind of the sea cast. But when they started doing the Disney plus TV shows, that was it. I was out. I was able to keep up with the movies fine. But when you start throwing out eight to 10 episodes of Hawkeye, of Loki, of Secret Invasion, who's even watching Secret Invasion? I have zero interest in watching that show. And that's pretty telling because I like the MCU. I was on board for quite a long time. And if I'm off, I think there's a lot of people that are as well. And that's only like three or four of the men that is She-Hulk, which is another bizarre one because it's kind of Deadpool-esque. But I think it's also continuing some of the plot points and introducing characters that previously weren't in the mix. And it's canon. But yet it's not. I don't know. It's completely messed up. And I heard that the new Marvel's film is relying on people watching Secret Invasion to fill in some of the gaps, watching the Kamala Khan show. I don't even remember that was called Miss Marvel. It was so lame. I could only make it three episodes in with my family and we all checked out. Then you have Moon Knight also. There's so much. And most people can't keep up with it. And that's why we hit a point now where audiences are looking for something new. They're going out to Barbie. They're going out to Oppenheimer. And that's a great thing. It really is a great thing when we can kind of purge some of this bullshit out of the way. And again, reflecting back, Fox put out a lot of X-Men movies. There was other movie properties coming out pre-MCU that were pretty damn good. I really like a lot of the X-Men films. X-1 and X-2 being amongst some of my favorite comic book movies, more so X-2. X-Men 1, just a decent starter course. And then of course Days of Future Past. If you haven't seen Days of Future Past, Rogue Cut, do yourself a favor and find it and watch it. It's really good.  No, it adds a decent amount and it also really changes how the ending plays out. Plus, Rogue was always one of the main characters in the movie franchise. The first film followed her specifically. So it was incredibly shitty that Fox decided to hide her behind a paywall. Because if you recall, and some of you might not know, but when Days of Future Past hit theaters, Rogue was on the poster. She had her own solo poster. But then it was announced before the movie came out that her scenes were all cut and they would come out on a Rogue-specific version of the DVD and Blu-ray as a total cash grab move. So I liked the original movie a lot and then when that version came out, it was even better. 100% better. So yeah, definitely check out Rogue Cut. But my point is I really liked a lot of these movies. You have Hellboy 1 and 2, another solid superhero set, and then they never finished the trilogy or Reboot, which was terrible, with the dude from Stranger Things. Forget his name right now. Hopper, whatever the actor's name is. You have really bad ones as well. Daredevil, Spawn, Electra. Some people, I joke about this a lot. They say, there's a director's cut of Daredevil that's way better. You should watch it, Adam. And then I just look at him and I say, does it still have the scene where they fight on Teeter Totters? And when they just look down, I say, yeah, we're done here. We're absolutely done here. On the DC side, I don't know. They're animated movies, I guess, are just fantastic. I've never actually watched them. I don't have the time or the real, real, I guess, care. What I have watched for animated, though, superhero-wise, is Invincible. I freaking love that show. Is that DC or MC? I don't even know if it's either. It might be its own thing. The Amazon Prime show, Invincible, they just showed the teaser for the new season. They're taking forever on this thing. And I was told that it's eight episodes and they're splitting it in half, so we're only getting four when the season comes out. And then we're going to have to wait months and months again for the rest of season two.  And that makes me sad. The Boys was another superhero show I was watching, also on Amazon Prime. I think that that show's kind of lost its way, but the first couple seasons are fantastic. And I'm sure they're going to up the odds and up the craziness in the new season again. Maybe they can kind of pull me back in. But this last season, it didn't really do it. So there is plenty of good superhero material, both old and new. We don't have to rely solely on the MCU or the DCU. There was stuff before these universes existed. That's plenty good. I named a few. There's more. I'm trying to think what comes to mind. Obviously, Logan is top of the line for me. I absolutely adore Logan. I think it was a great send-off to the character. And of course, he's coming back now in some form, which, you know, whatever. It is what it is, I guess. I'll just take it for what they provide. Obviously, the Deadpool movies are great. Dark Knight, one through three. That trilogy is fantastic. But we bring it back to Christopher Nolan again to round things out. I like Dark Knight Rises, too. I know a lot of people harp on it, but I think Dark Knight Rises is a solid ending. It's definitely the dumbest of the three. It's got some pretty silly stuff going on. Kind of some shenanigans about how Batman just kind of apparates in and out of locations. Overall, though, a solid ending to a really stellar trilogy. That's Christopher Nolan in a nutshell, though. The guy knows how to build up a property and really stick the landing. If you look at a film like Inception and Dunkirk and Interstellar, he really likes to play with time in his films and kind of tees the ending ahead of time. I think all three of those movies tees the ending ahead of time. Maybe not Dunkirk, but the other two really open up, like, Pandora's Box. And as the film progresses, he starts to show you exactly what's happening here. Like, oh, that's why that happened when that happened. And just a little bit more Christopher Nolan praise and appreciation. Absolutely check out The Prestige if you haven't. I think that's one of his best movies still. Criminally underrated. Or underappreciated, I should say. I don't hear a lot of people talk about that one. Hugh Jackman's in the mix. You got Christian Bale. So you got Batman versus Wolverine. And it's definitely worth your time. And to see where that movie goes from a character standpoint, it's pretty damn ingenious. Okay, thank you guys for watching. This is the episode. I talked about the kind of the rise and fall of the superhero properties. I don't see them, you know, I guess to kind of put a pin in it. As far as the MCU goes, I don't see them recovering anytime soon. I think Marvel's is probably not going to do great. And I'm terrible at predictions. So take that for what you will. I'm really bad at predictions. The Marvel's is probably going to be a box office smash hit. I don't think it is though. And same with Blue Beetle and same with Aquaman 2. I think all three of these movies are kind of kind of suffer. But the real telling thing, the thing we can point to and say, yep, it's official. Fatigue has set in. Superhero movies need to sunset a little bit. They need to calm down. We need to get away from the universe and focus on the solo aspect and just make a good damn movie again. When James Gunn's Superman comes out, if that thing does not succeed, it's going to be a lot of trouble for people, especially James Gunn. But James Gunn's one of those guys like Nolan where I think he does bring people to the theaters for his type of storytelling. And that's going to be a telling story on its own. All right. There you have it. Let me know your thoughts if you're on YouTube in the comments. What do you think of this? Do you think the fatigue really is real now? All these years later? Or is it just another blog post of a guy yelling at the screen and people can either listen or not? It's possible as well. Who knows? It's all speculation. Let me know. Please subscribe to the channel, like the video, and if you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, follow there or do what you ever have to do to keep up with all the new videos. I post them every single Monday, 9 a.m. on those platforms, and then I do a watch along, typically around 11 on YouTube. I hope to see you there. All right, take care.


Hello and welcome to this session in which we'll discuss the concept of dividend received deduction, known as D or D. What is the big idea of dividend received deduction? It's to avoid the multiple taxation of dividend. What does that mean exactly? Well, let's assume we have a company A.  What's going to happen to that net income? Hello and welcome to this session in which we will discuss the dividend received deduction. What is the dividend received deduction? It's a deduction given by the IRS to receivers of dividend. Why? For what purpose? Well, to avoid the multiple taxation of dividend. What does that mean exactly? Well, let's take a look with a simple example to illustrate the concept of multiple taxation of dividend. Let's assume we have company A, company A generate revenue and incur expenses. As a result, they have a net income, more revenues than expenses. What do companies do when they have net income first? They close this account to retained earnings and eventually they might pay out dividend. So that's fine. Now, sometime what they do is they pay out dividend to other corporation that owns company A. So we might have company B and since company B is an owner in company A, company B will be receiving dividend that is previously taxed in company A. So company B would receive this dividend and they would include this dividend with their revenue. Again, we're dealing with a C corporation, then they reduce their expenses, then they will get to net income. Then what do they do with that net income? They put it in retained earnings first, then they might pay out dividend. Then company B might be owned or some of their shares by company C. Well, if they pay dividend, this dividend goes to the revenue of company C. Company C will incur expenses, they will have net income, that net income would sit in retained earnings, it will pay out dividend. So I hope you're starting to see the point that it's the same dividend that company A generated that paid out to company B was taxed first for company A because company A paid their taxes first, then that same dividend was transferred to company B. Company B paid taxes on it, then paid some of it to company C and company C paid taxes on it. So notice the same income would just transfer from company A to company B to company C and it's being taxed multiple times. So if a corporation owns a stock and another corporation will receive a dividend, a portion of that dividend may be deducted from income.  A phantom, phantom means like a deduction that don't exist, it's called dividend to receive a deduction. So we're gonna give you a deduction if you own stocks in another company. Well, how much the deduction is going to be? Well, depending on your level of ownership. So if you own less than 20% of a company, you will get a dividend received deduction of 50%. If you own between 20 to less than 80 will give you 65. Once you own more than 80% of a company and they pay you dividend, you will get a full 100% dividend to receive the deduction. So if you received $100 in dividend, you have a dividend to receive deduction of $100 assuming you own more than 80% of company A. Why? Because company A already paid taxes on that income. Why would I as an owner pay taxes on income that I technically own because I own 80% of the company? So that's the big idea. Now the dividend to receive deduction is limited to a percentage of taxable income. There's always a limitation and that percentage is the same as the deduction percentage means the same as the ownership deduction percentage. So what is the limitation of the DRD? Let's talk a little bit more about the limitation. Before we proceed any further, I have a public announcement about my company farhatlectures.com. Farhat accounting lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead, start your free trial today. The dividend to receive deduction is limited to the lesser of a percentage of dividend to receive deduction and that percentage, depending on what percentage it is, it could be 50% if you own 20% or less. It could be 65 if you own 20 to 80 and obviously it will be 100% if you own more than 80% or 50 or 60% not 50 or 65% of the taxable income corresponding to the percentage. What does that mean exactly? It means we're going to have to compute taxable income and take 50% of taxable income. We're going to see how we compute taxable income, take 50% of the dividend to receive, compare those two to each other. Now when we compute this amount of taxable income and dividend to receive deduction, we have to ignore those limitations if the DRD creates an NOL, too many acronyms. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to first compute the dividend times a percentage and we're going to get a number. We're going to take the taxable income times the same percentage, whatever that percentage is, either 50, 60 or if it's 100%, 100%, get a number. Now once we get to the DRD number, the first number, we're going to take the DRD and deduct it from taxable income. If the DRD minus taxable income gives us an NOL, that's it, we'll go with the DRD, we'll go with the 50% of the dividend. If not, we have to take the lesser of 1 and 2. Don't worry, we're going to work an example. So if an NOL exists, then the NOL rules take priority over the limitation, which is the percentage times the dividend. And bear in mind, any unused DRD is lost. You can use it or lose it. Basically, this is how it works. And for the purpose of the taxable income, because remember, we're going to have to take a percentage times the taxable income, we're going to ignore any NOL deduction. So this taxable income is computed before net operating loss deduction, if we have an NOL deduction, any domestic production activity deduction, we don't take this deduction into account. Obviously, we would ignore the DRD deduction because we are doing this computation to arrive to our DRD and any capital loss carry back for the current tax year. Now let's first look at the steps involved in computing the DRD, then we'll work an example. Step one, you'll take the dividend that you receive times a percentage. What's that percentage? It could be 50, it could be 65, or it could be 100%. If that's the case, forget it, you put the dividend, then you take it out. Then step two, multiply taxable income by the deduction percentage, same in one. So if you multiply it by 50%, you multiply taxable income by 50%. Now, oftentimes taxable income will be given to you. If not, you have to make sure taxable income is computed without regard to those four items. Then what you do next, here's what you do next. Before you proceed any further, you would say, okay, I'm going to take, I'm going to subtract whatever I got in step one from taxable income. Whatever I got in step one, subtract it from taxable income. If I get, as a result of deducting this amount, I got an NOL, not operating loss. That's it, I'm done. I will choose number one. If the DRD does not create or increase in already NOL, well, then I will choose between one and two. That's too many steps, right? What is this? Let's work a few examples illustrating this point. I'm going to move to the Excel sheet and show you several scenarios illustrating the simple concept that you need to know, powerful simple concept, and it's easy points on the CPA exam, enrolled agents exam, as well as your accounting course. So let's take a look at those three scenarios. We have Adam, Noah, and Farhat, three different corporations. The gross income for Adam is $520,000, expenses from operation $360,000. The company received $200,000 in dividend, and the payer is owned 20% by Adam. So Adam owns 20% of the company that paid Adam $200,000. And taxable income before the DRD is $360,000. So they're giving us taxable income before the DRD. How do we come up with the taxable income before the DRD? We took gross income, $520,000 minus the $360,000 plus the $200,000. So the taxable income before the DRD, before the deduction is $360,000. Because we have a gross income, let's let me show it to you another way. We have a gross income of $520,000. We have dividend from that company that we own $720,000. So total income is $700,000, $200,000, $720,000 in total. Then we have $360,000 in operating expenses. Therefore, our taxable income before the DRD is $360,000. What do we do next? Immediately, what we do before we proceed any further, this will make our life easier. If we'll take 50% of the dividend, we compute step one, it's $100,000. Then we say, okay, let's take taxable income before the DRD minus the DRD. So if we take taxable income before the DRD, $360,000 minus the potential DRD deduction, $100,000, it gives us $260,000. Did this create an NOL for us after we did the deduction? And the answer is no, we don't have an NOL. If we don't have an NOL, what's going to happen is we're going to choose between step one, which is 50% of the dividend, and step two, which is 50% of taxable income. 50% of taxable income is 360, which is 360 times 50%. Which one are we going to take now? The lesser of step one or step two. The lesser of step one and step two is $100,000. That's fine. Now, let's take a look at NOAA company. NOAA company, they have gross income of $340,000. They receive dividend of $200,000. They have total revenue under W20, $540,000. Then they're going to deduct $360,000 in operating expenses. They're going to come up with $180,000. So let me just double check the math. $540,000 minus $360,000, that's $180,000. That's good. So we arrived to taxable income before the R&D. We're going to take the dividend times the 50% percentage, because we own 20% of the company. That's $100,000. Before we proceed any further, we're going to take $180,000 minus $100,000. $180,000 minus $100,000 equal to 80%. Did it create an NOL? No. If that's the case, then we're going to go to step two. What's a step two? Step two, take 50% of taxable income. 50% of $180,000 is $90,000. Now, we compare $90,000 to $100,000, and the DRD is the lower of these two. The lower between $90,000 and $100,000 is $90,000. Therefore, our DRD is $90,000. Let's take a look at scenario three, Fahad, Fahad company. Gross income, $250,000. We have $200,000 of dividend. That's $450,000. Then we're going to have operating expenses of $360,000. That's going to give us taxable income before the R&D of $90,000. Then we're going to do what? We're going to go ahead, take the dividend, multiply it by 50%. We have $200,000 of dividend, multiply it by 50%. Now, if we take taxable income before the R&D minus the potential of the R&D will give us $10,000. It's going to put us into a net operating loss. Excellent. Once we are in a net operating loss, drop all the rules. You no longer have to go through step two. Basically, you will take 50% of the DRD, and we deduct $100,000. Notice I gave you three scenarios. One were no NOL, and step one, which is 50% of the R&D was lower than the taxable income. In scenario two, no NOL, and the 50% of taxable income was lower than the 50% of the dividend. In scenario three, we have an NOL scenario, well, easy percentage times the dividend. Now, for tax planning purposes, we have to understand that for tax planning, it's very important for companies to understand this deduction, because it could make a difference to their bottom line. Let me show you this scenario. Let's assume we have a company with a gross income of $205, expenses from operation of $250,000, and dividend received from domestic corporation $100,000. So $205,000 minus, sorry, plus $100,000 first. Let's include the dividend. That's total revenue of $305,000. Then we subtract the dividend, $250,000. We come up with $55,000. So this is taxable income before the R&D. Now, 50% of dividend is $50,000. I'm sorry, 50% of $100,000. We have $100,000 in dividend for the sake of illustration in this company. Therefore, $50,000. Now, if we take $55,000 minus $50,000, we'll give us $5,000. Is this an NOL? And the answer is no. If it's not an NOL, you have to go through step two and find the difference between the two. And let's go ahead for this purpose. Just find the difference between the two to show you what's going to happen if that's the case. So we'll take $55,000 now times 0.5, and that's going to give us for step two, $27,500. Now, we compare $50,000 to $27,500. And which one do we take? We'll take $27,500 as a DRD for this company. Let's stop for a moment here and think about the computation here. From a tax planning perspective, what can we do as a company? Here's what we can do as a company. We can do one of two things. We can either defer some revenue, somehow if we can defer some revenue. And since creating NOL is $5,000, if we can defer $5,000 and a dollar of revenues, we can defer. Notice I am what I'm doing is I am deducting from my revenue, my revenue right now, my gross income is 205, I am deferring $5,000 and a dollar. So somehow if I can defer this, okay, I'm going to create an NOL. Once I create an NOL, I can take the full $50,000. Or if I cannot defer $5,000, if I cannot defer $5,000 and a dollar of revenues, can I somehow increase my operating expenses by $5,000 and a dollar? If I can do that, I also would create an NOL as a result of my computation. Therefore, I don't have to take the $27,500, I can take the $50,000. So notice what happened here. If you can plan properly and either move revenue or income down the road or accelerate some expenses enough to make you create an NOL, then you can take the 50% times the dividend. So I hope this helps in terms of computation. How do we perform the computation? I gave you different scenarios. Let's go back to the PowerPoint slides. What else do we have to know about the dividend received deduction? There's a 45 days holding period. What is that? What is that rule? To prevent tax loopholes related to short-term stock holding, a restriction was implemented stating that no dividend received deduction is permitted unless the corporation holds the stock for more than 45 days. So to be able to get this dividend received deduction, you have to buy the stock, hold it at least for 45 days in order to qualify for the dividend received deduction. Why? Because they don't want you to buy the stock, sell it, basically trading stocks and get the deduction. That's not the purpose of the deduction. This rule addresses a situation where the stock is purchased shortly before a dividend record date. So you get the dividend and what's the record date? So you have to own the stock on that date. You would buy a little before the dividend record date. So you will be on record. Then you sell it X dividend. What's X dividend? After you receive the dividend, you qualify for the dividend, you sell it. So you bought it only for the purpose of receiving the dividend. And sometime it could result in a capital loss equivalent to the dividend amount. So you could also, even though you might incur a loss, we don't care. You don't care. Why? Because you're going to get a dividend received deduction. And we're going to work an example with numbers. If dividend received deduction were allowed in such cases, the capital loss resulting from the stock sale would exceed the taxable portion of the corresponding dividend. So what happened is the loss would offset the dividend. So what did they try to do? You have to hold the stock for 45 days at least. Let's work an example and see what we are talking about here. October 2nd, Adam Corporation declares a dividend of $1 per share for shareholder recorded as of November 1st. So on October 2nd, they said we're going to pay dividend $1 per share. You have to own the stock November 1st. The dividend is scheduled to be paid in December 2nd. So let me just show you on a timeline. This is October 2nd. So this is where they declared it. So we're going to pay dividend. And they say in order to get the dividend, you have to own the stock November 1st. This is the record date. So you have to own the stock on that date. And we're going to pay you in December, December 2nd. So as long as you own the stock here, you're going to get the payment. Okay. So here's what happened. NOAA Corporation purchased 10,000 shares on October 29th. So notice October 29th is before December, November 1st. So what they did, they bought it before the record date. So on November 1st, they're on record as owners. Okay. Well, as a result, they're going to get the payment. So that's what they did. Subsequently, a few days later, November 7th, NOAA sells the 10,000 shares for $20,000. So they bought it for $30,000, sold it for $20,000, they incurred the loss of $10,000. Okay. Assuming no market price fluctuation except for the dividend component. Now we're assuming here because it's ex-dividend, the stock went down, but the stock could go down further, could go up, but we're going to assume that they incurred the loss for $10,000 and they created a short-term capital loss.  So that's one thing they have a long short-term capital loss. What can they do with the short-term capital loss? For corporation, it doesn't matter whether it's short-term or long-term, it's simply put a capital loss. If they have capital gains, they can offset some capital gains. Okay. Also on December 2nd, NOAA received $10,000 in dividend. Remember they were owner as of the record state. So they got here $10,000 of dividend. Okay. So notice every, if all said and done, they lost 10,000, they gained 10,000. Do you see this? So it's like, basically you would say, well, why would you do this? You're basically the net is zero. Well, not really. Now, if they received for the dividend received deduction, if they got the dividend received deduction, if they get the dividend received deduction, they're going to get a $5,000 deduction because they own, we're going to assume they own less than 20% of Adam company. Well, what's going to happen is they're going to receive an additional $5,000 in dividend received deduction. Well, that's good. So they received $5,000 in the deduction. That's basically what they did. So if the holding period restriction did not exist, NOAA corporation would be eligible for 10,000 capital loss, again, subject to capital loss limitation, assuming they can use it. However, the income would only be $5,000. Why? Because the dividend is 10, then they get a dividend received deduction of $5,000. So here's what's going to happen. A loss of $15,000, a dividend of $10,000, assuming they can and a dividend received deduction of $5,000. So notice all in all, they were able to get a $5,000 deduction, if this makes sense or not. So they lost on the game. This is a real loss. They lost, they bought it for 30, sold it for 20. This is a real dividend. And this is a deduction given by the government DRD. As a result of this DRD, they get a deduction for $5,000 for doing something like this. So what did the government says? Guess what? When it comes to dividend received deduction, you have to own the stock for 45 days because after 45 days, you know, market could change. I mean, you could still experience a loss, a phantom loss from the DRD, but at least give it 45 days. You just, so you're not doing it for the short term. So this is what you need to know for DRD. Now, am I gonna, should I work an example illustrating more DRD computation? I think I should work an example doing so. But what should you do now? Whether you are a CPA candidate, enrolled agent or an accounting student, go to Farhat Lectures, look at additional lectures, MCQs, true-false, and I'm gonna work more examples. Good luck, study hard, and of course, stay safe and stay motivated.