Alright. I am ready for some football! Ready for some football! Go football! Ready for some Superbowl football! The Patriots aren't in the Superbowl. You can take that jerseyed on. Fine. That one too. Hello everybody hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. This is the show where we review every vintage GI Joe toy from 1982 to 1994. This week we're looking at a fan favorite, Bazooka. This character has a following, but he's also controversial. For fans of military style GI Joe, he has a very obvious problem. This is Super Bowl Sunday. Before you enjoy an evening of football, let's look at a GI Joe action figure that directly referenced a football player. Hasbro headquarters is located in Rhode Island, which is in New England. They just couldn't resist adding an homage to the New England Patriots. Grab your fudgies and join me in looking at GI Joe's lovable buffoon. HCC 788 presents Bazooka. This is Bazooka, GI Joe's missile specialist from 1985. This figure was first available in 1985 and was also available in 1986. It was discontinued for 1987. It was reissued as a mail away offer in 1989. There were three versions of Bazooka in the vintage line. Version two of Bazooka was in the Tiger Force subset in 1988. It used the same mold as version one, but with different colors. Version three of Bazooka was issued in 1993 as a battle core figure. It had an all new mold and was radically different from the first two versions. Collectors sometimes refer to this figure as Fisherman Bazooka. As the missile specialist, Bazooka replaces GI Joe's first Bazooka soldier, Zap, from 1982. Although their specialties are not related in the GI Joe animated series, Bazooka was friends with 1985 Alpine. Oddly, the same year Bazooka was released, GI Joe got a new infantry trooper, Footloose. Footloose included an anti-tank rocket launcher similar to Bazooka's. That may have made Bazooka redundant in 1985. A Bazooka is an infantry carried anti-tank rocket launcher. The traditional Bazooka has been replaced by more modern anti-tank weapons systems, but modern systems are sometimes still informally called Bazooka's. The Bazooka got its name from an instrument played by comedian Bob Burns. The soldiers that used the original recoilless rifle thought it looked like Bob Burns' Bazooka, so they gave it that nickname. Here's some footage of Bob playing the Bazooka. Unrelated to the Joe called Bazooka, there was a comic strip character called Bazooka Joe. Bazooka Joe comic strips were included with Bazooka bubblegum. I don't think this was what Hasbro had in mind when they were naming the character, but it is a coincidence. Cobra didn't get its own Bazooka soldier until 1989 with the heat viper, way behind GI Joe. Cobra did have a missile specialist who mainly worked for Destro back in 1984, Scrap Iron. Later GI Joe characters that had basically the same specialty included 1990 Salvo, the anti-armor specialist, and 1991 Super Sonic Fighters Zap. Really, most of the replacements for Bazooka were just later versions of Bazooka. Starting in 1991, some GI Joe figures started including spring-loaded missile launchers, so you could look at them as all having Bazooka's job. Let's take a look at Bazooka's accessories starting with his weapon, which the card contents refer to as an MAT missile launcher. It doesn't say what MAT stands for, but I assume it's something like missile anti-tank. It is in black plastic. It is a short tube with a pointed tip at the front end. It has a grip at the front and a strap. That strap will allow you to sling this over Bazooka's shoulder, but I find it convenient when he has the grip in his hand to use the strap like a buttstock. As for a real-world analog for this accessory, it bears a striking resemblance to the M72 Law light anti-tank weapon. It also has some similarities to the M136, but it has some differences from that one too. This accessory is very similar to the one that came with 1985 Footloose. It would be easy to mix these up. Footloose's rocket launcher is most likely an M72, and it is different from Bazooka's, and that suggests Bazooka's is a different model. The next accessory is the helmet. The helmet is in green plastic. It looks like a Pasquette helmet with a cloth covering and a band around it. It looks really good. It's very well sculpted, and it looks pretty good on Bazooka's head too. The final accessory is the backpack, which the card contents call a missile pack. It is in green. It's a different shade of green from the helmet. It has some well sculpted details. It has some pockets and some buckles and a canteen, and it has extra missiles for Bazooka's missile launcher. These missile tips can break off very easily, so be on the lookout for broken backpacks. One problem I have with this backpack is not so much with the backpack as with the figure. The figure does not have any sculpted on straps or load bearing equipment for this backpack, so exactly how does he carry it? Does he pin the backpack to his shirt? Let's take a look at the articulation on Bazooka. He had the articulation that was standard for GI Joe figures by 1985, so it could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow that allowed him to bend his arm at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep that allowed him to swivel his arm all the way around. This was an O-ring figure, meaning the figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could move his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpted design and color of Bazooka. This figure is wearing the football jersey of Steve Grogan. Grogan was the quarterback for the New England Patriots NFL football team from 1975 to 1990. He's something of a legend in New England. Hasbro headquarters is located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which is in New England, so it's natural that GI Joe would reference the Patriots. Grogan war number 14. Bazooka's red jersey is almost identical to the Patriots home jerseys at the time. The 1985 season was a successful one for the Patriots. They finished with an 11 and 5 record, then went on to win three road playoff games to make it to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl was played on January 26, 1986. Unfortunately, that's where the success ended. They were destroyed by the Chicago Bears in the Super Bowl 46-10. Apparently, there were no hard feelings because Hasbro created an action figure of one of the Chicago Bears that beat the Patriots in that Super Bowl, William the Refrigerator Perry. Looking at Bazooka's head, he has black hair and a black, thick, Tom Selleck mustache. GI Joe loved mustaches in the 80s, and they weren't little teenager mustaches either. They were thick, beautiful men's mustaches. On his chest, Bazooka has that red shirt with a number 14 on the chest in blue numbers with a white outline, and those numbers are actually sculpted on. They are slightly raised on the chest they're not just painted on. He has a blue collar. He does not have numbers on the back, so it's not an authentic looking football jersey. Unfortunately, the chest and the back are missing some kind of straps for the guy to carry his backpack. His arms feature short red sleeves with white and blue stripes around the sleeves. His lower arms are bare except for some green sweatbands around his wrists. These look like the kind of sweatbands that you would wear while exercising in the 80s. So are these army-issue sweatbands? His waist piece features a green belt that is nicely detailed with some pouches and a really nicely sculpted buckle, and that green is a different shade of green than his trousers. That's a nice subtle color difference. His legs feature olive drab trousers with pockets on the thighs. It looks like part of a really nice authentic military uniform, and then he has some gray boots. These lower legs were used on another 1985 figure, the 1985 keel haul. The top half of this figure is brightly colored and totally unsuitable for combat anywhere but the football field. The lower half of the figure has a nice realistic military look. Early concept drawings by Ron Rudat had Bazooka in more traditional combat fatigues. The decision was later made to give him Steve Grogan's jersey. Ron was and is a Patriots fan. Even though it means Bazooka is trying to wear a bright red shirt into the field, I'm not terribly offended that Ron represented his home team. Let's take a look at Bazooka's file card. There are a couple variations of this file card. One text variation and one color variation. The file cards issued with the 1986 releases of Bazooka had a gray background. It has his faction as GI Joe. It has a portrait of Bazooka There are no straps for the backpack even in the card art, so I guess that backpack is just held on by magnets. He is the missile specialist codenamed Bazooka, filenamed David L Katzenbogen. Hasbro wanted Bazooka's specialty to be Bazooka soldier, exactly like Zap. The file cards were written by Larry Hama, the writer of the comic book series. Larry protested that Bazookas were outdated and more modern anti-tank systems should be referenced instead. So the specialty became missile specialist, but the character still got stuck with the name Bazooka. Primary military specialty armor defeating missile systems, secondary military specialty tank driver. It actually describes his background as a tank driver here. Place of birth, hibbing Minnesota, and grade is E5. Given his birthplace, I'm surprised he's not a Vikings fan. This first paragraph says Bazooka was driving an Abrams tank in the third horde in parentheses third armor division. When he came to the realization that an illiterate farmer armed with a $200 disposable rocket launcher could knock out a million dollar tank with less than two weeks training. He put in for a transfer immediately. This reference to the third horde is almost correct. The third armor division is nicknamed the third herd. So he started out as a tank driver until he realized that all that armor wouldn't protect him from a relatively unsophisticated attack. He decided he would rather be the guy firing missiles at the tanks than the guy in the tank getting missiles fired at him. This whole paragraph is about his training and he has a lot of it. It says training advanced infantry school fort Benning, armor school fort Knox, qualified expert dragon anti-tank missile, Milan system, law rocket, recoilless rifle, law system and all Warsaw packed RPG systems. Subject is also EOD in parentheses explosive ordinance disposal qualified up to the tack op category. Here's where we have a text variation. The earliest releases of the file card do not say tack op category. They say tack nuke, meaning Bazooka is qualified to handle tactical nuclear weapons. But I guess somebody at Hasbro decided they did not want to have nukes on their file card. So they changed it to tack op, which I think might be kind of meaningless. This bottom paragraph has a short one sentence character profile. It says subject is a decisive fast thinker with all the instincts of a natural survivor. That's surprising because as he was portrayed in the GI Joe animated series, Bazooka was kind of dumb. Looking at how Bazooka was used in GI Joe media, he appeared many times in the animated series produced by sunbow. He and alpine were buddies with alpine being the smart one. Bazooka was portrayed as a dim bulb. He may not have been too smart, but he had a few memorable moments. He and alpine met quick kick in pyramid of darkness part four. Quick kick was shirtless and shoeless in a snowstorm. Bazooka really wanted some fudgies. I could explain what that means, but it's more fun to make you guess. Another memorable episode featuring Bazooka was titled Bazooka saw a sea serpent. Even though this channel doesn't cover post vintage animated appearances, I think it's fair to point out that Bazooka was killed off in the mini series GI Joe Resolute in 2009. He wasn't used as much in the comic book series published by Marvel Comics, but he had a few appearances. He first appeared in issue number 44 along with other new Joes. After his initial appearance, though, Bazooka didn't have much to do in the comic book. He was mainly in the background. Like if there was a crowd of Joes on a page, he would be in there somewhere. Looking at Bazooka overall, I have mixed feelings about this figure. GI Joe needed a new anti-tank specialist. He has appropriate equipment. The figure looks great. The sculpting is very well done. The lower half of the figure looks like it belongs to a realistic military guy. The jersey is a problem. As a kid, I didn't like it. It annoyed me when GI Joe gave me action figures that were only half ready for combat. As an adult and as a patriot fan, I appreciate the jersey a bit more. It still isn't appropriate for his job, but I appreciate the history and the personal touch from the creator, who is also a patriot's fan. Even though I don't mind the jersey as much now, he still doesn't have a way to carry that backpack. No straps. I am assuming he safety pins the backpack to the back of the jersey. Another problem with Bazooka is he seemed kind of redundant. Footloose was released the same year and he had similar equipment, and Footloose was 100% ready for combat. That was a great figure. Considering everything about the figure on balance, it is a good figure, and I'm happy to have the old goofball in my collection. That was my review of Bazooka. I hope you enjoyed it. Now, please enjoy the Super Bowl. My prediction for this year's game? Pain. No, no, no, no. That was Rocky vs. Clubber Lane. No, my prediction for this year's Super Bowl is 49ers win 24-17. I'm not making any bets on that. Last time I bet on one of these, I had to sing the Philadelphia Eagles fight song. I never win these, so just enjoy the game. Thank you for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, I'm making more like it. So please give this video a thumbs up on YouTube, subscribe to the YouTube channel, hit the notification bell so you don't miss any future videos, and share this video with your friends. That's what helps this channel grow. You can find me on social media, on Facebook and Twitter, and I have a website, hcc788.com. If you want to know if I've already reviewed a vintage GI Joe item, that's a good place to check. Special thanks to all my supporters on Patreon, including the names you see on the screen now. Support on Patreon helps keep this show going. So if you like this show and you'd like to support this show in that way, please consider checking out Patreon. You can get some special rewards, including early access to reviews, and you can find out how to decode the secret messages you see in these videos. Thank you for joining me on this adventure of collecting vintage GI Joe toys. I'll see you next time, and until then, remember, only GI Joe is GI Joe.


Okay, welcome back to the deal room where I'm joined by Steven and just before the show I was like Steven, what have we got today? And there was rumbles of leverage, layers of leverage, the potential brewing of a big problem in global financial markets. And I was like, okay, yeah, I'm interested now. What are we discussing here? Yeah, give me a flavor. What have we got? Yeah, well, we've had some good news over the last few weeks and I didn't want us to have too many positive episodes in a row. I think the last few we've been talking about successful IPOs and first day pops and, you know, people getting very excited that the IPO market has opened again. Interest rates have remained stable in the UK and the US and maybe everything's going to be okay. But we are going to talk today firstly about private equity. We're going to build the story of private equity and their use of leverage across the value chain of private equity. This is a big story already, but it's going to get bigger and it's really, really important. And then we're going to talk about the Federal Trade Commission and how they're trying to block a lot of deals, including the Microsoft and Activision deal, but are not having a great deal of success. Amazon is the next big company in the FTC's crosshairs and we're going to discuss their chances of success with that as well. Sounds great. So look, let's kick it off then. So can you remind me what is the typical model? I think the start at the foundation level. What is the typical model of private equity? Yeah, so private equity is a fascinating asset class and just, you know, to take a very, very quick step back, private equity, as we've discussed on the pod before, it covers quite a lot of different investment strategies. It is any equity investment in a private company. And you put out a post a few days ago about the spectrum of risk return from a private equity perspective all the way from the least risky, your kind of traditional, maybe your traditional low levered buyout fund, all the way to your most risky, which is you venture very speculative early stage businesses. But often when we talk about private equity, we talk about buyout funds. So this is a fund that is dedicated, a fund raised by a private equity firm from institutional investors and pension funds to buyout entire companies with the intention of improving them, turning them around and then selling them for a lot more and making the return on the investment. So the way that leverage is used and leverage is not a bad thing. Let's be honest, you know, when used appropriately, it is, it is the kind of the secret source that powers the majority of this industry and the majority of investing will stop. So the way that a private equity fund works is there's a total amount of equity, let's say a billion dollars.  I could just use equity to buy these companies, but I wouldn't be able to buy many companies, right? So, you know, if I'm looking at, you know, two, five hundred million dollar targets to buy, that would just be two companies in the fund. Not great. What I could do instead is I could use a combination of my own equity in the fund, plus raising financing, raising debt at the target company level, i.e., putting debt into the company that you require in order to be able to spread my equity in order for my equity to go further. It's a little bit like taking a mortgage out on a house. You buy a company, you buy a house with percentage of equity and then a percentage of debt. And this is absolutely traditional, right? You know, I might buy my five hundred million dollar company with two hundred million dollars of equity and three hundred million dollars of debt. And if everything goes well in good times, you know, the private equity fund gets to work. They make the company more valuable. They sell that five hundred million dollar company for a lot more, you know, they repay the debts.   And everything goes well. You know, those are the good times. And it's been good times in the private equity industry for the last 13 or 14 years. But I guess that the search in anything to do with finances, you have that consistency and you're like, yeah, but can we can we get more? And I'm thinking like, I always have this vision of Jenga blocks when it comes to the kind of idea of the subprime crisis and how they were like starting to think like, okay, so I used the analogy of the housing market. It's like housing market. Yep. Everyone typically aspires to own and buy a home. So it's high volume. But then you're like, okay, how can I pump some steroids into this situation? But yeah, let's talk about nav financing because that's something which gets associated with this conversation a lot. But I'm conscious of not everyone will know what nav financing is and why it's important. Yeah, so, you know, going back to the traditional business model of private equity, as we said in the good times, the asset that is bought gets sold for a profit and you return money to your limited partners. Those are the institutional investors that invest in your fund and that is incredibly important because this, you know, private equity is a very unlike public markets. It's a very illiquid asset. As an investor in a private equity fund, I might have a tie up of four to five years, but after that period of time, I'm going to want to see some money returning, right? In normal times that money returns because you sell the company or the company that you own within the private equity fund, your IPOs or something like that. But unfortunately, over the last 18 months, these have not been good times. And now the problem for private equity funds is that since interest rates started rising, exits at attractive valuations have become fewer and far between. So we all know that interest rates affect everything, right? But at the core, they affect the cost of capital, which in turn depresses asset prices. So if interest rates are high, investors need to be compensated with a much higher rate of return to invest in to invest in risky assets, which actually lowers asset prices. So what's happened over the last 18 months is when a private equity fund has looked to exit one of its companies, maybe that company that it bought for $500 million instead of, well, I mean, it could try and sell, but the danger with selling is that it might not sell for as much because valuations have dropped and exit opportunities have been lower. So if I'm in a situation where I'm a fund that likes to report positive return on investment and I'm suddenly looking at selling a $500 million asset for $300 million, that doesn't seem particularly attractive. So what these companies are doing, what these private equity firms are doing is kind of saying, look, I know that my institutional investors want to get their money back, but I also am hoping that in a couple of years, the markets will return, IPO market will open back up, valuations will bounce back. If only I could find something to bridge this gap. If only I could find something to bridge the gap between, all right, I'm going to have to sell this thing at a massive haircut and, you know, maybe in two or three years time, I could get all my money back. In comes net asset value financing, the kind of bridge So net asset, so, so now financing is what I would call the second layer of the private equity leverage cake. The first layer is debt at a company level, traditional, vanilla, normal, fine. Now a lot of private equity firms have been taking out this now financing, which is basically borrowing money at the fund level secured against the equity within the fund in order to pay the limited partners who are starting to want to get their money back, having had a significant tie in period. So it's that bridge financing at a fund level to help release some equity because they can't exit a lot of these companies. So is there actually being casualties at this point in the sense of, you know, highlighting these risks, but then we saw with SVB happened. I mean, interest rates were lower than what they are at the moment. And, you know, that unfolded pretty quickly at the time. So how are they or has there been? I'm just not aware of it real struggles with rates being where they have been or where they are at the moment. Yeah. So this there hasn't been any major casualties. There hasn't been a kind of canary in the coal mine incidents yet. And this might well be because we are picking that canary down the road by using this now financing. So, you know, there are serious structural problems in the private equity industry. And this is represented by the fact that we're using this extremely expensive form of debt to try and keep investors happy, keep limited partners happy whilst acknowledging that a lot of the investments that I've made at a fund level are going pretty far south. So this net asset value financing financing at the fund level feels like a bit of a Band-Aid and just to throw a couple of stats out there. The interest rates, the interest rates on some of these net asset value financing loans, fund level loans, the interest rates can be anything from low teens to 19 percent, right? So these funds are willing to pay 19 percent interest on a loan that they take out in order to pay their limited partners in order to pay their institutional investors in the vague hope that the asset prices of the companies that they're trying to exit are going to recover. So whenever you see double digits and high teens in terms of interest rates, the higher the interest rate, the higher the risk for the lender, you're starting to smell something a little bit fishy and this is certainly pretty fishy. I think just given the large demographic of the people who listen to our show being in study at the moment, the one worrying thing I'd say looking long term is that if I was coming into the industry now and I'm seeing what you're describing, it's become normalized and actually this way of business and surviving through, let's say it all goes to plan valuations come back, the economy picks up natural kind of cycle. They've kind of got out of it by this utilizing this strategy and then that's that same mentality that you could say that calls previous instances in traditional markets in a sense of like the financial crisis and so forth where you kind of the worst thing you can do is kind of create these. I mean, you can never bet against human ingenuity, right, in terms of finding ways to find solutions to problems. But the problem is if you do that in a highly leveraged situation and you get away with it, what do you do the next time? Of course you do the same again and people coming into industry are thinking, well, this is normal. So then where do we go? We keep raising the bar each time. Yeah, and this is a huge story over the last generation within the financial industry. The way that cycles have traditionally worked is that you have to feel some pain at the bottom of the cycle in order to eventually recover in a less inflationary environment. And the problem with private equity and the problem with a lot of asset classes is in 2008. When they're overlevered and undervalued or valuations are tanked, they're bailed out by the government, by quantitative easing. Same bubble was happening in 2020, bailed out through the COVID massive, massive, quantitative easing and telecom to payments and interest rates and things like that. So if you're being a cynic about this, the industry might just be using now financing to buy time until the next catastrophe. And again, what is happening? You're transferring risk or you're transferring debt from private into public. That happened in 2008, happened in 2020. And these private equity masters of the universe are not getting any poorer all the way through this. They're still collecting their 2% management fee. Let's remember this. It's $11 trillion industry. So maybe they're just waiting until another bailout or another kind of global event. So you've mentioned so far that there's been two tiers to this cake. So where do we go from here? There is a third tier. There is a third tier. Tasty tier. It's getting more spicy as we go up the cake, it feels. Yeah. It's feeling more and more like a wedding cake. Now, so the third tier. So these are called Manco loans or management company loans. And if you, you know, if you read the literature on private equity or if you read the news, there's been a lot spoken about now financing over the last year or so and the concerns about piling an extra layer of debt on a leverage buyout investment model. You know, it's really quite concerning. But the third tier. The third tier is when the actual top company, the management company borrows at a top company level. So if you think about the way that a private equity fund works is you've got the private equity firm at the top. Let's call it Carlisle.  You know, European buyout fund one. And then that fund will own a lot of companies. Now we've seen debt at the company level. We're seeing debt at the fund level. And now we're seeing significant amounts of debt at the management company level. So this is basically borrowing money at the top company level based on the fees and the profits that are filtered up through the funds to the top company. And they're borrowing money at the top company level in order to do things in order to do things like raise enough money to start a new fund. So think about that for a second. Think about the kind of web of leverage that's going on here in order to start a new fund. The private equity firm, it's also called the general partner needs to put down like a base amount of money. Right. They need skin in the game and they're borrowing money at the mango level to put skin in the game for new funds. But they're also borrowing this money and it's secured against the success of the funds below it and therefore the success of the companies below that. So think about this three layer of leverage that's all actually relying on the success of the base investment sitting right at the bottom right at the foundation level of this cake. So I guess the big question then is we now know as you've very eloquently described the cake. So what could be a gimme a scenario whereby the cake just gets absolutely destroyed? Like what would what would be a hypothetical that could then make all of this just tumble down because it feels like it's one layer built on the next and what would that look like in a real life scenario? Yeah, I think it I think it's so like with any tower or whatever analogy you want to use the foundations are the thing that's going to bring the rest of the rest of the tower down and in this instance, it is the performance of the underlying assets. So, you know, there are so as we've said before private equity is a very illiquid asset, but there is a secondary market. It's super illiquid and it's very slow and stodgy and price discovery is not nearly the same as in public markets, but there is a secondary market and we are seeing, you know, if a private equity firm wants to try and sell some of their some or a limited partner wants to sell some of their fund commitment on a secondary market, we're seeing haircuts of 40 to 50 percent in terms of what they thought it was worth relative to what they can sell it for. So you think about the performance of the underlying assets if companies, let's say there's a major worldwide wide recession, right? And the companies that underpin these funds start performing extremely badly. Now, if they perform extremely badly, they may not be able to service the debt that they've got at a company level, which might mean either some form of bankruptcy or at least a renegotiation where finance is going to cost a lot more and therefore there's going to be less profits that are going to be generated up to the fund level. If there's less profit generated up to the fund level or at least lower asset values at the fund level, then the fund doesn't have the money to service the net asset value financing. Doesn't have enough money to service that debt and there might even be margin calls of the asset value of the security drops due to the poorly performing companies and then all the way at the top, if the funds are struggling to service their debt and they're not returning any returning any capital up to the management company, then the management company won't be able to service the debt that they've taken out in order to underpin new funds and the whole thing comes tumbling down. So the canary in the coal mine might well be a mid tier, mid to large tier private equity firm collapsing. We haven't seen it yet and it's unlikely to be one of the big four or five that we talk about a lot, but we might well get to see there's a lot of rumblings about consolidation in the industry and they're only being 10 to 15 big players left over the next five or 10 years. That's because of this, right? Because the business model is pretty shaky at the moment. And again, I'll say the stat again, it's 11 trillion dollars of assets under management and the investors are pension funds, institutional investors, insurance funds. You know, so this is big stuff that we really you know, it's not a kind of esoteric alternative area of the market anymore. It's properly mainstream. Okay. Well, I'll rest easy this evening. No, it'd be really interesting because I remember when they all kind of unfolded in 2008, I think by visibility of these being all quite public companies that we were monitoring at the time, it was quite easy to see the dominoes kind of falling. What's interesting here is this little bit, little bit more cloak and dagger behind closed doors. So it'd be really fascinating if that were to materialize about the speed and how it would unfold because you remember where SVB, it was like one day and it was just like and that behavior because it's just reflected in market price right there. And then it was just an absolute kind of bank run on regional banks. And then all of a sudden, you know, it kind of ran away with itself. And then within about interestingly within a week, it was kind of over. Yeah. And I would say I would say that this the dynamics are definitely different from public markets where there's contagion or or banks where there is this kind of this, this, this run the run on the bank and the fundamental business model of a deposit base. The other thing that I'd say that might, you know, this might be death by a thousand cuts is that a lot of the lenders to these funds are private equity firms themselves. So Carlisle and Aries, you know, a lot of these big private equity firms have private credit arms basically replacing the role of a banker in terms of taking on riskier loans and Carlisle and Aries are the two biggest nav finances. So they are, they have no incentive for the whole thing to go south very quickly. There'll be a lot of restructuring of debt. There'll be a lot of, you know, wrangling and negotiation before the House of Cards comes too big to fail, Stephen. Let's not worry about this issue here. Yeah, you will rest easy. All right. Well, look, let's let's move on and let's talk a little bit about the FTC and and I guess in the context of, you know, the regulatory environment, why is this important? What type of precedent does it set and why students should be aware of this type of thing and how it will benefit them would be a good place to start.  So yeah, what's the background Linda? Yeah, so so Linda Kahn is the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She's an American legal scholar and she is an incredibly important figure in the world of US and therefore Western business because she is setting her stall out as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission to take a much harder stance on antitrust and on competition law.  You know, the regulatory environment within which businesses can operate and flourish is is super, super complex and it is all about how do you ensure that?  And now previously in the US, you know, from about the 1980s from kind of Reagan onwards, the FTC has been incredibly weak and there has been very, very little desire for the FTC to ruffle big corporate feathers, right? And this has resulted since the early noughties in the growth of these absolutely mega companies, right, the big four or five that you talk about a lot on the Friday podcast. Now Linda Khan's come in really quite a strong character.  We'll talk about the pharmaceutical industry. We'll talk about Amazon as well.  So we've talked about Microsoft and Activision before, but I'm just conscious that not everyone listens to every episode we put out. So maybe a quick summary of the Microsoft Activision and the Amgen Horizon one, but then maybe we could focus a bit more on the Amazon one, given that that's the one in focus now and given that Amazon is such a well-known and large entity. Yeah. So Microsoft and Activision for anyone that studying M&A or wants to go into M&A, this is kind of the platinum deal that you probably need to know something about. And we do a lot of our simulations actually based on Microsoft and Activision and try to value division to see whether it's good value for money. So in January 2022, it's a long time ago. It's almost two years ago, January 2022, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the games manufacturer known for Call of Duty amongst others for $68.7 billion. They're a huge, huge, biggest transaction of the last couple of years by quite some way. And the way that these things go, it gets announced, and then you have to get regulatory approval. So they went through this very, very long and complex process getting regulatory approval in all sorts of markets around the world. It got allowed in Europe, in the EU, and then it got blocked by the UK Competition and Markets Authority, and then it got blocked by Linda Kahn and the FTC and the rationale was relatively flimsy. The rationale was, hey, we're a little bit worried about you blocking Activision titles on other consoles and on other games distributors like Ubisoft. And we're also worried about potential monopoly in online gaming, not a monopoly at the moment, but a potential monopoly. So they're kind of using antitrust to cast their crystal ball into the future. Lots of back and forth, Microsoft ended up taking the FTC blocking of this deal to court. The FTC are not, you know, they're not the courts, but they are an agency that can recommend and can get things past. The courts decided against FTC blocking the deal and said, hey, Linda, you've overstretched your mark here. You know, we don't see enough grounds from a core legal perspective to block this deal. So we're going to let the deal through. We're going to override you, Federal Trade Commission, the way the power works in these engagements. We're going to let the deal go through. Subsequently, the competition markets authority in the UK said, hey, look, Microsoft, you've given us a couple of concessions, you've made the deal slightly more maybe competitive. We're going to put the deal through as well. And it is looking, you know, on the 27th of September, 2023, it is looking more and more like this deal is actually going to go ahead. And what's quite interesting again, any student of M&A, the best thing to look at when thinking about the likelihood of deal success. Activision is a listed company, right? And the offer price from from Microsoft from Microsoft was $95 a share. So the closer the share price gets to $95 a share, the more likely or the view of the market, the more likely the deal is going to be consummated. So when the deal was blocked by the CMA back in the summer, division share price dropped to $74, $21 below the offer price. This morning when I looked it up, Activision was trading at $94. So almost the $95 suggesting that it's basically a done deal.  Why is Linda still there? Like in any other normal situation? And I know you're going to describe that there's an amgen horizon situation as well. At what point then? I guess my question is what it what is the political influence? You said there's like lobbyist things like that who obviously want business to to boom and they've got other interests that might be misaligned. So how does someone like Linda get appointed and how much does the political side of this come into her dealings? And then how can she? I mean, we're describing three here in total. We just discussed one. At what point is it? Well, you've got no teeth basically and therefore it's a redundant kind of position and someone else has to come in. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a lot going on here. I think it's it's definitely very political and there are people behind the scenes saying, look, Biden, if you get in again in 2024, you're going to have to you're going to have to sack Linda, right? You know, we're we're we're really really upset with her.  So so there is a lot of and I think that if the Republicans get in in 2024, she'll probably should probably be out the door. I think what's worth saying and it's good is best represented with the Amgen and Horizon case. This is one big pharmaceutical company buying another big pharmaceutical company for twenty eight billion dollars. The FTC blocked it based on the potential for anti-competitive cross-selling where, you know, a pharmacist in the U.S. could basically bundle an Amgen drug with a Horizon drug and say, look, you can get these two together and we'll give you a discount because it's all part of the same company. Again, very long story short, the FTC lost that in court again when the deal is going ahead. But to give Linda Kahn some credit during all of these processes, concessions have been made in terms of the structure of the deal to make it more competitive and to give more assurances to the market that there isn't going to be anti-competitive behavior. And she's also battling in a super conservative environment. She's coming from 30 years where everything just got through. So I think she's almost having to go too far the other way in order to slightly balance the books in order to get competition policy back onto a bit more of equitable footing and to avoid some of these kind of maybe what one would say abuses from the very, very largest companies in the U.S. today. And with Amazon then because what's the situation there? What's the actual crux of what she's suggesting with Amazon? Yeah, so this came this is a really, really new new story. So this came out very, very recently. So they so Amazon has just received a 172 page complaint from the Federal Trade Commission that is relatively holistic in its representation of Amazon's business model being anti-competitive. So often when these when these cases are brought and actually the Department of Justice bought one against Google last week against its search engine and against paying $10 billion to be the native search engine of Safari and things like that. This 172 page claim against Amazon is basically carrying apart the entire business model of Amazon's e-commerce platform. It's saying that it's anti-competitive in a number of different ways and its fundamental business model is anti-competitive, i.e. You know, and we've known this for quite some time. If you've got an e-commerce platform where you own the e-commerce platform and you own a lot of the basic products that you're selling on the e-commerce platform, there is an incentive to stop your competitors undercutting you. There's an incentive to stop your competitors in terms of product level being higher up on the search engine. So it actually seems and by the way Linda Khan wrote a big paper in this about Amazon in 2017. So it's kind of seen like this was going to happen. Khan has been kind of teeing this up and teeing Amazon up as the kind of the one that she wants to go after holistically as opposed to an ideal specific context. So and you know, I haven't read much into this. It's a very new story. I think I read the story five hours ago. And this seems to be a relatively robust case. It's pretty comprehensive. It tackles the fundamental business model and it's going to be a really interesting one. You know, Linda Khan having failed a few times on a couple of acquisitions. Maybe this is going to be the one that determines her legacy. But do not put it past the power of the Amazon lobbyists. You know, they've got so much money. So many lawyers to chuck around to say, by the way, you know, you've interpreted this wrong. We're a lovely company. We're adding value, consumers love us, etc. You know, I was just having a look at Amazon share price because as you rightly said before, looking at Activision, for example, looking at other companies as a marker of the outcome of these events as far as investors perception. But it's hard. It's hard to kind of obviously tell because, you know, I'm not tracking Amazon news flow and stock price day today, but they've been coming off anyway over the last two weeks. But certainly there's a lot of headline buzz around this latest one. They did fall. They did drop 4%, which underperformed the market yesterday, but they are also outlaying $4 billion on an AI start up at the same time, which is not a small amount of money either, which can go two ways actually from a stock price perspective in whether you buy into the hype of the future income that that could bring through that acquiring of that technology against actually the cost of the acquisition in itself. But yeah, no, look, super interesting as always. Don't forget as well, just as we're wrapping this up. What I might do, Stephen, I'm going to see if I can find and if not create a little three tiered cake to mark this episode of leverage in the private equity world. I'll see what I can come up with. Also, don't forget that if you weren't aware of it, there is now an M&A Finance Accelerator. We launched it last week and we had to close registrations within 48 hours because it's capped because Stephen runs it live with the rest of the team. It was capped at 500 people and yeah, amazing. So thank you everyone who signed up for that. But we're going to be dropping some new dates very soon. And actually, if you just jump on our LinkedIn profile account AmplifyMe if you just put your name on our last post and what we're going to do is we'll slide you a DM soon as that new date gets dropped and we'll give you 24 hour heads up before it then goes public so you can get in on that action. So yeah, don't forget to do that. Stephen, thank you for your insights as always and I'll catch everyone next week. Thank you.


What's good Josh you brought Ross back in again with another video So we're gonna check out this clip Roman Reigns embracing his heel like persona right before a class of champions Which is this? Sunday, so I'm probably gonna be checking that out just to see how they you know Kind of set up the match and how they go through the match But I'm interested to see clearly a lot of people already has over a million views So this is clearly the direction that WWE should keep going into because people are interested in Roman being an asshole, but before we begin to this video I want to give a quick shout out to this dope artist. She goes by ravey I don't know if you can see it, but she's a very dope artist She made this as well, you know, and I'm a Leo So, you know, I love me anything lying related and she has a lot of different dope pieces man And I think you guys should definitely check her out I wouldn't be putting anything on this channel unless it's something that I support and I think you guys would love it Also, she also She paints and she'll deliver it to you guys like she'll ship it out to you guys So you guys should definitely check it out man.  Definitely hit her up I must also put the link to her Instagram down below and you know, it's at the bottom screen So basically go check her out to you know, tell her that your boy Ross sent you, you know, I'm saying But let's get into it man. Shout out to you ravey. She's cool people man. Cool people. I Would give you this title if I could That's how it always start You wouldn't even know what to do with it This is I like this. You don't understand the accountability This is great the responsibility of being on top You don't understand the weight and the pressure From being the face of the WWE. How could you that is not your fault?  So our family depends on me Our family relies on me being the tribal chief. That's who I am in this life. This is so good Wait, what's this Roman years ago? This is fantastic. It ain't you. Oh This is so good, bro. It won't ever be you because it'll always Always be me You can't beat this This is he'll Roman. He's coming off like someone that cares But he really doesn't it's all about him. Why Vince? Why couldn't why couldn't we get this character a few years ago? This is perfect when crowds are actually there. This is great This is great. You can't beat this man. I love seeing characters actually be like Developed in a way where it's believable. It comes off like, you know what Roman's like. Yeah, I am the guy and You're cool.  I Wish there was a live crowd here for this Should have been a live crowd for this type of odd man What if you're wrong? Why can't I be the one to provide for the family ous? Why can't I Provide for my wife and my kids your nephews This is good. I've been battling this my whole life.  Main event mr. WrestleMania, you know what they say when they see me use Which one are you? who This is true. This is good. I Like is I like this Give me more after Sunday when they ask me who am I they gonna know they gonna say I know you ous You the one that beat Roman Reigns at class of champion for the universal Championship Will be me This is good Jey Uso is good Ready for Sunday and the biggest moment of his career the biggest moment of his life Fantastic of a lifetime I'm rocking with it was to put the family on his shoulders for once Jey Uso wants to know what he's truly made of And two nights for Jey Uso to realize his dream Well for Roman Reigns to know my god Reigns with a Superman punch Yes Yes There we go. Yes I don't just feed my kids for this title. I don't just be your kids with this title I feed With this title To have this title and you want to take it for me. This is great.  I don't I'm sold This is one of the few matches. I am looking forward to a classic champion Of course, I'm looking forward to Randy Orton versus Drew McIntyre But yeah, I'm sold of course, you know, Roman's gonna win, but I think I think I think they're gonna put on a I think Jey Uso is gonna put up a fight more than Roman isn't expecting and I think it's gonna piss off Roman And I think he's gonna try to really hurt Jay, but this was great. Oh that oh my gosh This is the Roman we need. I'm rocking with it Let me know comment down below if you guys are actually looking forward to this match. I am I I'm definitely looking forward to this. I think this is The storytelling alone is is fantastic Basically family members going at it and one basically trying to say hey man You cool, but I need to be the one to hold this championship and the other one saying yo I've never had the chance to even fight for the title. It's my time. You know I'm saying and I love it, bro I'm looking forward to it man. It's definitely got me hyped and I can see why it has over a million views because Right now Roman is he's doing this thing man. He's doing this thing and I'm enjoying this character But I appreciate all the love and support road to 30k. I appreciate y'all kicking it with me Now see y'all on the next video. Peace


Whereas, for the that Riemann surface for log, but I did not get time therefore, you get a home assignment. So, all you need to do is to make stack them together and then make a branch cut to the center together. So, that you get perfectly aligned branch cut and then stick them together. One more home assignment which something which I sort of hand not sort of completely hand waved last time and none of you caught me there. So, let us refresh your memory. What I said last time was that you take a and I think I started from here take a point z naught here which is at this point and write the power series of log around z naught. So, look at the disk around z naught and then I said that this disk actually intersects goes beyond or goes above the real axis and that and then I also said that once it the moment goes above the real axis this power series coincides with the log 1 z definition and I did not prove it I just said it does and none of you pointed out also. So, as a punishment for that you get this home assignment which is to take a point look at the disk take a point z naught oh sorry z 1 what will that be and or let us make it simple the two main negative signs here. So, it is just flipping this you approach from here this is at pi minus epsilon and this is at as you traverse further down it is at pi plus epsilon and let log z around z naught b of course, you know what it is it is i pi minus epsilon and we saw this last time all of this k greater than equal to 1 minus 1 to the k minus 1 divide by k z minus z naught to the k. Now, this disk hits z 1 as well and then what I want to say that look at the disk disk around z 1 on that disk this power series will coincide with the power series around z 1 and the way to prove it would be to show that this is equal to i pi plus epsilon plus k greater than equal to 1 minus 1 to the k minus 1 over k that is the power series around z 1. So, it need to show that these two are equal of course, this is equality holds for certain z also only which are reasonably close to both z naught and z 1 for assuming all of this. So, this clearly establishes the fact that the power series around z naught coincides with the power series around z 1 and therefore, which and that is certainly not the power series given by the log 0 z at z 1 because for log 0 z at z 1 will be a will have a minus epsilon plus pi here. So, now let us continue we will discuss a little bit more on this. So, this Riemann surface that you get for log z it is again a mental construct to allow us to nicely visualize mapping log set right. You can instead of looking at infinitely many log function this allow us to look at a single log function sending this Riemann surface to the complex plane. Now, one could argue that this is as you know arbitrary as that cutting of infinitely many log functions you could start at any point make any branch cut at any angle and then you get different set of infinite classes. But in very in one very interesting way the Riemann surface associated with log z is not arbitrary it is a it is really extremely useful. Besides allowing you to imagine the mapping log z in a nice fashion it is actually useful in a very more or I say much more concrete sense. So, let us see that what is now this I am going to invoke Cauchy's theorem what is this this is integral around not less equal to 1 this integral around unit circle of 1 by z what is Cauchy's theorem tell us 2 pi i right because Cauchy's theorem in general says f z over z the integral around a disk where f is analytic is 2 pi i times a f our likely z minus z naught is f z naught. So, this is z minus 0 that is f 0 I can view this integral in another way 1 by z is differentiation of log z and we establish that it holds over all complex so 1 by z dz equals d log z it is d log z by dz times dz and d log z by dz is 1 by z. So, integral of d log z is what log z and then there are this is circle of course now circle there are no limits. So, one can see, but there is a bit of an issue about here because about how do you exactly define this business of limits as one thing. Secondly, log z is not properly defined over this entire circle anyway again thinking of log z over complex plane and here let us say thinking about the differential another differential the log 0 z by the way differential of any variant of log function log 1 z log 2 z log 3 z log 0 z the differential is always 1 by z because of the difference between any of these variants is only in the constant part and that gets wiped out by differentiating. So, this differential is not defined at the branch cut. So, there is one line of in case of order is a negative real line is not defined. So, you cannot really integrate over this both of this problem can be resolved in the following way we can say we can integrate from z equals e to the i minus pi plus epsilon to e to the i pi minus epsilon now in this sort of this is starting point this is ending point and in this region this is very well defined and this also gives me a starting point and definition point. Now, by Cauchy if the well actually you do not you would need Cauchy, but there is a fact use the analyticity of log z function to say that this integral is this log of this minus log of this which is 2 pi i minus 2 i epsilon and as epsilon goes to 0 this becomes and that matches perfectly with this Cauchy's formula. So, we could do this round about way of integrating and get the same value, but that is not the end of story what about or let us say in general c by z let us say t by z t z what about this this is clearly by Cauchy is 2 pi i t. So, I just write 2 pi i t is this, but if I write it in the same fashion this is equal to d log z to the power t is simple to verify is differentiate z power t you get t by z here fine and now if you try to do the same thing we will fail why here the z moves around this unit circle in the counter clockwise, but we are taking log of not z but z power t. So, as z moves around a circle counter clockwise what happened to z to the d z to the t will move to t times the speed of z. So, when z will complete one circle z to power t will complete t circles and now we are taking log of that function which is actually the completing t circles. So, now there is really we cannot really do any limit because it is there is no to end point as such here which we can take a limit and get around this. So, we cannot sensibly discuss this integral over the standard view that log is infinitely there are infinitely many log maps one each from a complex plane with a branch cut to a complex plane. So, if you adopt that view we cannot really do this integration. However, if you adopt the Riemann surface view then t circles are fine because every time you complete a circle you move up. So, you are spiraling t times up and as you spiral the definition of log changes right you jump to the next log function. So, as you do t times you will make t jumps and here. So, this is same as integral z power t starting from and now we do not need to start from here just to make life simple we can start at one start from here and do t circles. And as you do one circle where does z power t goes e to the 2 pi i and you do it twice twice t times reach here. Now of course, this is all same there is no difference between these two values, but when we talk of taking log of this and because as every time we circle around we change the value of log function itself. The first log function we start with this the log 0 which is. So, log 0 of 1 is 0 log 1 of 1 is 2 pi i log 2 of 1 is 4 pi i. So, as you do a t time circle. So, log this would therefore be 2 pi this is log t of 1 minus log 0 of 1 which is 2 pi and that is perfectly matching with the Cauchy integral. So, this allows us to view the integral in this different fashion and still make complete sense out of it. Of course, in this simple case because we can apply Cauchy's theorem directly here we get the value of integral without any problems. But when there are more complex functions sitting here instead of z to power t let us say there is some f z sitting here. Then integrating so if you do this and you come here you get f prime z over f z d z and integrating that over a circle may not be very easy. On the other hand if you take this view and you look at d log f z then all we need to do is that as z varies we need to count or see how many times does f z wind up or wind down and that will give us a the value of the integral without worrying too much about see all we need to do is to count how many times does it wound up. I do not need to worry about exactly what path does it follow while winding up because by Cauchy's formula all paths will lead to the same integral because it is an analytic function. So, just need to see that as z moves around a close contour and again this need not be a circle it could be any close contour as z moves around this close contour how does f z move and how many you know levels does it go up. The moment we calculate the levels we got the integral. So, it provides a very convenient way of integrating function integrals of this kind f prime z over f z d z and when we look at zeta function this will occur very regularly. So, we need to understand this value yes this function. So, typically what we will have is that the function will be f z here.  So, that is a kind of integral we will see. So, here say the z moves around the boundary of r this is z is on complex plane it just moves around the boundary of the complex plane.  But, instead of viewing f z as lying on the complex plane we think of this as on the Riemann surface because there is a log sitting after this.  How many times does f z wind up around 0 and that number. So, it is convenient to view f z as lying on the Riemann surface because winding means going up in a circle fashion right. And that number is the value of this integral that numbers times 2 pi i of course. So, it is still a mental construct you can still view as f z being on the complex plane. You can still do this integral by as Orko pointed out by taking the limits cutting out pieces where log is not defined. But, it is far more convenient to think of this lying on the Riemann surface. So, all you need to do is to study this map z to f z to evaluate this integral. And as you see there as z moves in a circle how does f z move around 0 not clear. You can also think of if you do not want to think of Riemann surface you can just think of f f mapping complex numbers to complex number. And in the complex plane itself you see how f z bounce around 0 it will on does it bounce 1 time does it bounce twice does it bounce 3 times like z to the t winds t times around 0 as z moves once around fine. So, that is perfectly fine view and you can calculate the immediately conclude the value of this integral. But, to justify this to be the value of the integral we have to say that f z is actually lying on this Riemann surface. Because, then we can say that log of f z is completely defined over this curve. So, the Riemann surface provides a way of justifying the value of the integral. So, now we have I will study the analytic functions we have also that the power series expansion of analytic functions. And we know now that every analytic function around every point expands as a power series inside a disk. So, analytic function can be defined in a strange domain. But, they will be sort of if this is the domain of analytic function then around any point there will be disks over which a power series represents the analytic function. And the size of this disk can be inferred easily you start at the point at the center and just blow up the circle as much as you can until you hit bound one of the boundaries of the domain. And that is the size of the disk on which this is well defined on this on which this uniformly converges this power series and is equal to and in this way fashion you can keep on defining in this console. So, one thing that is clear is if it is a finite domain no it is not clear that you will have that is not necessary that you will only have a finitely many disks here it depends on the boundary the boundaries messy then you may end up having infinitely many disks required to capture all of this. Now, this is nice, but this is still little little unsatisfactory and the reason is that first is that this power series expansion what it says is that outside the power the disk everything diverges on every point outside the disk it is a it is a certainly not absolutely convergent. So, it is generally diverges absolutely. So, it does not quite allow us to study properly I should say the singularities of an analytic function well analytic function by definition cannot be singular in its domain. But there are certain points which are outside the domain on which the analytic function is singular. Now, behavior of analytic function around those points is not that properly expressed by the power series expansion. Let us take an example is let us take just this function the simplest possible such function 1 by z it has just one singularity at z equals 0. And if you so is domain is the entire complex plane except this point there is this puncture made at z equals 0 and that is a domain on which it is analytic. Now, if I try to write this same function as a power series around this point z equals 0 well what I can do is I can write write put a circle here which converges everywhere inside this power series expansion. But which touches z equals 0 this is not defined then I have to cover the other regions I have to define another circle then another circle another circle. So, I have to define this multiple circles each capturing part of the behavior of the function around the singularity. So, there are times when this is good enough, but there are times when one would like a you know simple or one single representation of the behavior around the power around the singularity. And for example, for this function this representation itself completely defines the function around the singularity and anywhere else, but of course, this is not power series. So, that is the problem, but this also says the solution there instead of just taking to power series if we relax our requirement a bit and allow inverse polynomials also to occur in the power in not the power series by in the more general series. Then at least certainly for this function we can just write the entire function as a single such series. And that give rise to the notion of Lorentz series. So, this is the last concept before we dive into zeta function. So, this Lorentz series and its discussion for singularities will complete the basics of complex analysis. So, Lorentz series is defined as this is Lorentz series is an infinite sum of this form. The only difference with power series is that we allow negative powers of z also to occur. So, infinitely many negative powers, infinitely many positive powers. This this is clearly a Lorentz series. Now, as with power series we have to understand where is this analytic this clearly this is more general than power series. So, every powers every analytic function we can write as Lorentz series around a certain region, certain region where it is analytic. So, that is that is clear. So, we need to understand exactly where is a Lorentz series convergent. So, let us start with this as a Lorentz series and let us split it into two parts. This part is a power series and this part is a pure negative power series. And let us give it certain names this is a f minus z plus for f plus z we know precisely where this is convergent. There is a disc associated with this where this is convergent. What about f minus z? So, f let me just write it. f z is convergent inside and whenever I write convergent I mean uniformly convergent because that is the only notion of convergence for power series that we will be interested inside say some disc z equals alpha. Oh by the way I have again eaten up the more general form here it could be it should be z minus z naught to the k. So, you are expanding the series around z naught. So, let us assume that that is 0 here. So, this we know what about this? Well we do not know its negative powers of z but it is purely negative powers. So, if we flip z and replace this is 1 minus z we get a power series. So, we know precisely where this is convergent is convergent or let us instead of z let us write it as 1 over w this is convergent inside some disc w equals beta. So, this implies just taking z to be 1 over w this is convergent outside the disc mod z equals 1 over beta w is 1 by z. So, just replace 1 by z here the by mod w we replace by 1 over mod z and then you get z equals 1 over beta and inside gets flipped to outside. You can see this clearly by we is writing this replacing equal to by less than equal to and that is it we know precisely the convergence of these two parts. So, therefore, f z is convergent in this annulus annulus is this name for the disc with the smaller disc taken out from inside. Yes it is possible and then it is nowhere convergent then it is really not a very nice definition. So, it will make sense only when 1 over beta is less than alpha only then there is some region of convergence for the Lorentz series. Coming back to this example what is the annulus of convergence for this 0 to infinity. So, it is basically convergent everywhere except this single point 0. So, that is punctured out and that is becomes an annulus. Now, it is outside this annulus is this convergent can it be convergent anyway no why well if you look at outside this annulus go beyond alpha going beyond alpha this part is convergent that is not a problem. So, this is some finite value take any point z which is with modulus bigger than alpha this is absolutely convergent some finite value, but this diverges. So, some diverges similarly inside below 1 minus less than 1 more beta this diverges this converges. So, some again diverges. So, again exactly like power series it is convergent precisely inside the annulus.  In fact, to capture this function as power series in the entire complex plane you will need infinitely many power series because any power series start you know at any point in the complex plane and will only be able to take out a finite region from the complex plane. So, it is a more general and more powerful form of representation of an analytic function and it is a pretty straight forward to show that any Lorentz series inside the annulus of convergence is analytic essentially the same proof that we used for power series carries over do you remember the proof how did we show that any power series inside is this of convergence is analytic. So, what we did was we looked at truncation of power series just limit the sum to some finitely many. So, that is a polynomial polynomials are analytic we know and then when you take the limit because of uniform convergence the analyticity is preserved because that is by Morera's theorem then you use because every polynomial is analytic. So, the integral around any rectangular is 0 and then you take the limit of the these polynomials which is the power series and due to the uniform convergence we can swap the summation and integral and therefore we get. So, that is the proof for analyticity of power series and the same proof really goes through here. So, I will not prove that I will leave that due to the workout instead what I will prove is just like we showed for power series that around if you are given any analytic function and around any point inside the domain we can represent the analytic function as a power series on a disk. Similarly, given any analytic function and given an analyst then inside any point sorry given any analytic function on a domain given any point inside that domain we can represent the function as in Lorentz series inside an appropriate analyst and the proof is actually pretty much mimics the power series proof, but there is one nice twist to it that is why I want to show it to you. For example, look here this is a Lorentz series convergent on this domain this is an analytic function also on the domain inside that punctured complex plane this is a Lorentz series for the same function and it is around the point z equals 0 that point is not inside the domain is actually singularity. So, this Lorentz series expression this one is around a point which is not in the domain yet can be expressed as Lorentz series around that inside the domain it is already a disk. So, that is not that interesting anyway yeah then it is anyway Lorentz because it is a power series or it is a Lorentz series so it is not anything interesting. So, given any z naught let us say let us try to write a statement and we will try to prove it f z can be expressed. So, f is analytic on d take any point z naught f z can be written express a Lorentz series around z naught, but its analysis of convergence will be inside the domain that we cannot escape from. So, how do we prove this? So, suppose this is the domain and this is the point z naught which is actually outside. Of course, if I take z naught here then there is no analysis of convergence and this point less to no analysis of convergence which fully lies inside the domain. So, it forces me to pick a point which is covered by a boundary of the domain and then I can try to define analysis of convergence. So, how do we handle this? Well, let us pick an analysis which consists of two circles with centers at z naught lying completely inside the domain and let us say this is alpha and this is beta.


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What is your take on all the ICOs that happen almost every day? The ICO craze. I look at this space, and I think of it in terms of having to be comfortable with a tiny bit of cognitive dissonance, more specifically temporal dissonance. Meaning, let's take two ideas and see if we can squeeze them in our head at the same time. Idea number one. Initial coin offerings, tokenization of startups, products, and services will completely transform the world of crowdfunding. Then it will completely transform the world of venture capital and fundraising at every level, and it will bridge the gap from the smallest organic fundraise all the way to the unicorn level, initial public offerings on stock markets, and disrupt them too. Over the next 15 years, this is going to ripple out like a tsunami across the entire financial industry. It is unstoppable. It opens up a global pool of investment to a global pool of investors. It allows any startup to rapidly not only raise money, but use a single token for dividends, access control, product offering, notification, voting, participation, and all of the other functions you can jam into a token that are so much more than simply raising money. It is unstoppable, it is enormous, and it's going to shake the world.   They will return nothing. They will cause lawsuits. They will result in regulators pulling out their big hammers and hammering everything that looks like a nail futile. They will force jurisdictional arbitration. They will create panics in the market. They will create backlashes in the market. They will create government responses that are completely knee-jerk. They are going to damage the price, volume, volatility of every digital currency that is involved in them.  Nothing is going to go back to investors. 99.999%. The question is, can you hold those two ideas in your head simultaneously because they are both true?   Kyle Thompson from ESA, you let it to my question really well there, which is, I've not learned the voice in the room, but this is a question about rules.  Is there a fussy, is there a danger that through that the rules that emerge around them are, governments are going to be very reactionary and say, well, this was clearly a mistake, and now let's put very stringent rules in around it, and a lot of the rules that have been built up around investing, your initial price invested earlier, whether right or wrongly implemented, and whether they lead into a system of control, they're designed to protect the public. So, do you think that the crypto industry needs to start to adopt certain levels of self-regulation, and if so, what are the mechanisms that can actually be put in place to start to adopt the basic system of rules to protect people, as you said, inside or outside of the kind of financial system? Well, a couple of things. First of all, I think the assertion that these rules have been designed to protect consumers, perhaps designed, but whether they actually work and are effective in protecting consumers, rather than creating a built-in system of inequality between tiers of investors and leaving most outside, I would very much question that. The rules as they exist cannot possibly keep up with the volume, liquidity, and movement and innovation in this space, cannot possibly keep up. We talk about VCs being disrupted, we talk about banks being disrupted, and one of my favorite topics that seems to pass underneath everybody's view is the fact that regulators are being disrupted more than anything else. Regulators are rapidly being obsolete. They have the desire, they have the authority, they do not have the means, they do not have the control structure to actually achieve enforcement of any of these rules in any of these markets. And what will happen is they will announce, they will regulate, they will put rules in place, and those rules will be properly ignored, probably by the most powerful people in that country first, followed by everybody else, who knows how to set up a tour network, or VPN tunnel, an account on an exchange outside their country, or anything else. And it will all hinge on the fundamental principle that digital currencies that are uncensorable are uncensorable, and therefore you cannot stop people from participating in ICOs. The whole idea that investments should be vetted, in my opinion, is problematic, because it puts enormous power into those who do the vetting, and it also removes responsibility from investors to do the vetting themselves and creates a false sense of security. And so what do they vet?  I like using that word when it comes to finance. And they then tell you, this is AAA. These are the people protecting consumers. This is what they did. And there was zero consequence for the cartel of the three rating agencies that did that. There was zero change in the model. And guess what they're doing now? They're doing it again with credit default swaps and tranches of mortgage-backed securities that are piles of junk with a little garnish on the top. They're doing it again, and they will keep doing it again. These are the people protecting consumers. They do not protect consumers. Millions lost their homes as a result of that, and they weren't investors. They didn't consider their mortgage to be a security interest. Now, what's going to happen with ICOs? What do I hope to see? The education of investors. You do not bring in people to fight the wolves. You armor the sheep. And how do you armor the sheep with education? And how do you educate investors about making better choices? You let them make bad choices. Nothing will educate an investor faster than a bad choice that causes them to lose their money. Governments of the world should be doing massive education campaigns, giving people the financial tools they need, teaching these things in every school, as to how to analyze and research and determine which investments are suitable and which investments are junk. You cannot help people protect themselves against themselves. All you do when you try to do that is invest enormous power into yet another layer of elites who get to decide what is an investor, what is an accredited investor, and what is a good investment, and then they lie. I don't want to see self-regulation. I want to see education of investors. Unfortunately, the best way to do that is to give them a lot of money that they didn't expect to suddenly earn through massive appreciation of an asset that they weren't really expecting to appreciate just as fast, and then let them spend it on junk. Lesson has started. School is in session. A year from now, a lot of people will be a lot more careful about ICOs. Simple.


The most controversial anti-aging intervention, well, not the most controversial. I guess the most controversial would be Youngblood. Are you really not familiar with parabiosis? The second most controversial, a distant second most controversial anti-aging intervention, NMN is back in the news in the fight against breast cancer. Unfortunately, NMN was recently banned by the FDA, a move that could make it almost as hard to get as a blood boy. Welcome to Lifespan News, I'm Emmett Short. Now, I mentioned NAD, which is important because it plays a role in regulating things like energy production and DNA repair, so, you know, aging. Basically, having more of it is generally a good thing. Its levels decline with age and supplementation through precursors like NMN and NNR has shown benefits, but NAD is a double-edged sort. It can also be used as fuel by some cancer cell types. It's like comedy these days. It's mostly getting converted to the best medicine, laughter, but it can also be a career killer. So we've got to learn how to use it wisely. You can learn more about the potential legal issues going on with NMN and the FDA. In this episode of Lifespan News, linked right here and in the description, researchers studied the effects of NAD on triple negative breast cancer, or TNBC, which is notoriously hard to treat, which is how I thought it got its name, like it's just so bad. It's like triple negative. Like there's nothing positive we could say about this cancer. I don't know why I thought that. What, like there are other cancers that have that are really good for you? No, that's not it at all. Apparently, cells of TNBC lack the three common receptors that are usually found on the surface of breast cancer cells. No receptors means drugs don't have anything to latch on to, so it's difficult to target the cells with treatments. But this study showed that continuous use of NMN significantly impeded tumor growth and metastasis in mice with similar results on cells taken from a human cancer patient. So the researchers first did a study in the laboratory in Vitro to see what would happen when they added NMN to the cells. And what they found was pretty interesting. They discovered NMN increased the levels of NAD in the cells really quickly. And here's the kicker. While NMN didn't affect the growth of the cancer cells, it did slow down their ability to spread and invade other cells. That's pretty important because spreading and invading is kind of cancer's shtick. So how does NMN do this? Well, they sequenced the RNA of the tumor and found that NMN activated certain genes that are involved in regulating the body's antioxidants. Specifically, one of the most important antioxidants, glutathione. But that's not all. Turns out, TNBC was associated with low CERT1 protein levels. So patients with higher levels of CERT1 had better survival rates. So they tested resveratrol, another controversial supplement that might affect CERT1, and found that it also decreased the spread of TNBC cells, but again, did not affect their growth. Same thing. So pioneers like Davidson-Clair have made some strong statements about resveratrol and others have pushed back. So this study does seem to support the idea that it activates CERT1, but for more on this controversy, check out this Lifespan news episode from Ryan O'Shea, linked right here and in the video description. Finally, the researchers looked at something called oxidative stress. Oxidative stress occurs when there are too many free radicals in the body rummaging around and it's been linked to a number of health problems, including cancer. They found that both NMN and CERT1 acted to decrease oxidative stress and that this might play a role in slowing the spread of cancer. What's more, this research also seems to be pointing towards CERT1 and NMN having an impact on a specific protein. That guy. So we're zeroing in, but this study does make it seem like raising NAD levels through NMN supplementation could be useful in treating this stubborn subtype of breast cancer. If you were excited by this and you want to learn more about NMN, check out Lifespan IO where there's an entire page dedicated to what you need to know. Make sure to subscribe and click the bell so you can stay up to date on aging research. I'm Emmett Short and we'll see you next time on Lifespan News.


Welcome learners. Today I will be discussing about natural and technological environment. This video lecture will be the part one of the video lecture. And these unit is included in the business environment course of your BBA program. And it is also used in MCOM program, PZDHRM and PZDSM program. So these unit is explained in two video lectures. After completion of each part of the video lecture, you need to self-check your progress. And at the end of the lecture, you need to participate in the discussion forum so that you can communicate with us about your level of understanding. So first part is divided. First part is about the natural and technological environment. And the second part is about the innovation. Let us first start with the natural and technological environment. It is said that at the core of any social system is the natural environment and the availability of technology. So it depends on the society how we protect the natural environment and how we use the technology so that the natural environment should not harm. In India, the citizens and NGOs have been pressing the government and fighting continuously against the different environmental issues such as indiscriminate mining, the use of harmful pesticides because of which the products were very much harmful for us. Then deforestation, as industrial development is growing, we need to like cut the forest land and use it for the social other industrial purposes then introduction of genetically modified foods and pollution of rivers and underground water which polluted the water level and because of which so many diseases were occurred among the human beings. So let us discuss the importance of protecting the natural environment. Nearly a quarter of the carbon dioxide that makes up about 80% of all greenhouse gases come from electric power plants. So in our society the amount of carbon dioxide is increasing day by day which is a very big threat for the society. Then another problem is transportation. So transportation is the second only to electricity generation as a contributor to global warming. Then due to millions of rural cooking fires, parts of South Asia suffer from very poor air quality. A person cooking over an open wood or kerosene fire inhales the equivalent of two packs of cigarette a day. So just imagine how the level of air is polluted because of such things and during the Diwali's you must have seen that so much because of the firecrackers and all all the environment becomes polluted. So these are very threatening things to our society and we need to think about the improvement of the natural environment. So let's discuss the emerging trends in natural environment. The first thing is shortage of raw material, especially water. So mankind is using these raw materials more and more as the population is growing faster and faster. But the raw material is not in infinite quantity. It has got some specific limitations. So as the requirement for things are growing more and more we are having shortage of natural raw materials. Then increase the cost of energy. Suppose for example oil is a finite and non-renewable energy. So depletion of this source has been a major concern although the sector has witnessed more supply in the recent past. Then increase pollution level. Pollution has been a global concern as industries were developing more and more the level of pollution from those industries were also rising. Then changing the role of government. All the governments in the world are not equally sensitive to the issues of environmental degradation. Just for example other government of Delhi they have initiated the CNG gas cylinders for the vehicles which they have made compulsory for the vehicles. So which is a very good initiative taken by the government. Now let us discuss about the technological environment. With the advent of internet and mobile phones we can see that the way the consumers choose to communicate is changing drastically. Because of the technology we can observe creative distractions. Televisions impacted newspaper. So as the technology is growing faster and faster we have seen many creative distractions. Just for the example, television is impacted the newspaper. As the people were getting news from the television they hardly looks at the newspaper. The managers should be aware of the technological changes taking place in the business environment also. Because of these fast moving technologies the business environment is also influenced by these things. Now let us discuss the emerging trends in technological environment. First is accelerating pace of change. More ideas for change and implementation of the same have been emerging phenomenon. Just think about the mobile phone. The mobile phone in 2000 were totally different from the mobile phone in 2020. So the changes were taking place at a very accelerating speed. Then comes the unlimited opportunities for innovation. Innovation is also taking place at very high speed. Because of increased expectations of people and customers the business organizations are finding huge opportunities for innovations. Then are varying budgets for research and development. The companies are spending more on research and development. The amount spent by companies on basic and applied research is also changing. So as the organizations as different companies were using more and more fund on research and development so new things are coming up at very faster rate. Then increased regulations of technological change. Unsafe products may create health hazards. So the government keeps watching on unsafe products and processes because of which the government is looking after all those productions and technological changes they have set up some regulations to monitor this. Then impact on globalization. Globalization has been greatly influenced by technology. Advent of containerization and global sourcing has facilitated production and transportation in bulk. So because of these technological changes it has also impacted heavily on globalization. So now let us check are your progress. So my first question is what are the natural environmental trends that the managers should be concerned with. We have already discussed in the video lecture. So I think you will be able to find out those points. Hope you have understood this video lecture. Thank you.