Bleeding Edge

Happy 2021 my friends.

This first day of the New Year — I trust you had a blast last night with bonfires, fireworks, and friendly gatherings full of libations, food & cheer that led you to close the meaningful season of the holidays, beginning with Thanksgiving, then the long and quiet Christmas, and now with the end of this current Calendar Year, that we all agree to term “Annus Horribilis” that shall never be repeated ever again.  

Indeed the past year of 2020 was a rather sobering travail full of trials and tribulations for all of us, in many ways. Yet, it was also a quiet time for introspection, reflection and serenity, and that is why I am going to take a stand about what I believe the year ahead will bring forth.

Why prognosticate?

Well — I often do that, because for nearly 30 years now that I have championed the causes of progress, innovation (tech, medical & political), equity, social justice, inclusion, human rights, and civil rights as well as “finance for all” — by promoting a modern civil rights agenda inclusive of all. And that besides the big things like access to Clean Air, Clean Water, Food and Health Care — it also means giving our people, a real access to development finance, and the tools of business development for women, minorities and for all entrepreneurial people across our globe. And we have done this many times and have served millions of people, via the “American Angels” network of early stage innovation investments, via Green Capital, via Advance life Science VC, and of course, through all of my work with “People’s Health International” saving countless lives by combating Tuberculosis, and working within the Life Science field of innovations for all mankind, all of my life, without fail.

And yet when I look back to see why I do this, I must admit that I do it because I enjoy it, & also because it is a great exercise in seeing the true trends by talking and serving the people and thus I always find it useful to think and speak about what we are facing and need to “cure” in the immediate future — and also how to visualize the looming, coming and arrived trends that will surely disrupt or stress our lives in ways that can be good, bad, or irrelevant… yet always consequential.

Naturally I do this not only because it helps me define my new path for the future, but because it defines the future for all of the World’s People, as well as it lights up the path for my colleagues and for all the people dependent on my wisdom and visionary leadership.

Have no fear — I am no prophetic swami or fakir of any kind, but just an intelligent person trained in the art of pattern recognition and leadership that demands hard executive decisions that affect people’s lives, because I have been blessed with many gifts and a Special Light that I need to share.

Same as in the past, I will get some of these predictions, prognostications and visualizations of the future, totally right on spot, yet I shall also get a few of them off the mark by a hairbreadth, and some of them awfully close to be considered as statistically erring, only because they fell beyond the target, by the date they arrive in our lives, or by the longevity by which they persist.

Yet generally You shall find comfort in my prescient positions because my epistemology of studying the future as a scientific endeavor — has always been proven right to a great degree.

Yet even if my total score of a 97% accuracy of predictions based on Human Intelligence is impressive — it is also important to remember that having a strongly worded point of view is very helpful when operating in a world that is full of fears, doubts & uncertainties.

And this is the way that You too can structure your plans for the future by thinking about it, because at the outset of each new year — all humanity sets out to better itself. And we do this by resolving to improve, by eradicating our unhealthy habits and by cultivating healthy ones.

Yet, while the most typical New Year’s resolutions tend to be about physical health, wealth and well-being — the most meaningful resolutions aim at a deeper kind of health through the refinement of our mental, spiritual, and emotional habits, which often dictate our physical ones.

This level of introspection of course requires a bit of contemplation away form Youtube, Netflix, Mobile phones and internet in general — and is best done when we take a walk on the woods or in the greens, the forest, the beach or the city parks, as your life allows and as you choose to be quietly lost in contemplation.

Yet, silent meditation, prayer and the art of sitting still works marvelously for perfection the Art of Contemplation that unites you with God & the Divine Spirit as well as with the Cosmos and the Universe in such a way that the lines between past, present & future are getting blurry and the elements of existence become unitary, so that the future is nothin but a reading of the trending patterns of events past present & future combined in a collage of functionality…

Contemplate my friends, contemplate. Contemplate, and thus in silence and stillness — the future will become visible to you too, because what are we “doing” when we do nothing but think?

Contemplate this: Where are we when we are surrounded by our fellow-men, and are habitually “together” with no one but ourselves?

And in my case, thinking while walking, makes me far more present to the reality and the future embedded within; so much so, that I have little doubt about what will transpire next.

And as Henry David Thoreau eloquently describes the process of “walking” in his easy to read essay about his walk in the woods, by proclaiming that “every walk is a sort of crusade,” Thoreau laments (150 years ago) our growing sameness, which has possessed us to cease undertaking “persevering, never-ending enterprises” so that even “our expeditions are nothing but tours,” and with his characteristically dramatic flair; he lays out the spiritual conditions required of the true walker:

“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man — then you are ready for a walk. … No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession… It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.” –Henry David Thoreau

Still for me the art of “sitting” in contemplative meditation is also a boon for my mental acuity of divining the future, but it is a far more elaborate exercise, because it requires a different set of skills than those found amongst the fidgety people of today, preoccupied with receiving and reading the latest pings on our devises. Yet some of us, have succeeded in mastering this lost art as well.

Certainly all of us are able to take a walk in the woods with no electronic devises on, but a simple pair of sturdy shoes, and an assistive stick.

And that’s how we read the tea leaves that foretell the future.

…

So let us start with the elephant in the room.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…

Life is long if you know how to use it.” –Seneca

Take the Covid Pandemic as an example that has bedeviled our lives and yet now that has come to its end — we will surely open up the whole world within the first half of 2021 — yet some dark pockets of its malign influence will remain and will bedevil the Global South for this year’s couple of quarters.

In our country — we will see the end of the Covid Pandemic in the United States early in this quarter, because we will work out the challenges we face as we vaccinate at least 40mm people a month amongst all states within the first quarter’s 3 months.

That is what will turn the tide of this pandemic disease away from the downhill spiral we have already faced, because when you add that 120mm vaccinated people to the 90mm people in the US that the CDC believes have already been infected and fully asymptomatic or recovered — we will have well over 200mm people in the US who already process a strong background immunity protection from the virus by the end of March.

Certainly, by the end of the first quarter in the US, anyone who wants to be vaccinated will have been able to do so. All of this will be aided by at least two additional approved vaccines in the US coming on line within the month of January, along with new and improved protocols, like emphasizing the first dose over the second one, and also having the one dose vaccinations — and we shall be well on our way towards full recovery of our Healthcare, personally and system wide…

The second half of 2021 will be marked by two major conflicting trends — where we shall see first, our people returning to offices, restaurants, bars, clubs, gyms, stadiums, concerts, parties, travel, theaters, and anywhere that they can be social with others. Ideally many people will fall in love again, and will share their antibodies and antigens in the strong embraces and even those instances where love entails the exchange of bodily fluids. And that is a good thing…

So, my advise to You is to go ahead and Love each other — even if you do that in the interest of Medical & Life Science and even for the Health & Longevity of our Species.

I personally cannot wait to do all of that again right about now as the New Year excites all passions and the Spring blossoms start arriving…

“There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out.” — Allan Watts

Yet — I digress.

I digress, because ironically, this mass socializing trend will not materially and/or permanently change many behaviors we adopted in the Covid Pandemic, since I believe that we will continue to want to work from home, exercise from home, shop from home, watch first run movies from home, order in, livestream, and all of the other new behaviors we learned to suffer through, or enjoy and soldier on during this sobering year that just ended and hopefully has taken both the Demons and its Angels with it towards its retreating habitat.

Where all of this shakes out will be the big reveal of 2021 and will impact many tech companies and many tech stocks. As I wrote yesterday, I think the trends that were accelerated in 2020 will not reverse in 2021, although the slope of the adoption curves will likely flatten a fair bit.

While we are out mass socializing, we will also be picking up the pieces of our world that was shattered by the pandemic. In the US, we have racial equity issues that are longstanding, real and demanding to be addressed. We also have an economy that is in tatters. And we have sectors of our economy like retail, commercial real estate, carbon based energy, and more that will never be the same. The restructuring of our economy and government and corporate balance sheets and income statements that have been blown wide open will take a decade or more to work out.

Sitting above all of this is our atmosphere that due to the greenhouse effect — is getting warmer by the day, and because of that — the looming climate crisis will be to this next half century, what the two world wars were to the previous one.

Indeed, this global crisis will require people, communities, countries and all global Intergovernmental Organizations & Institutions to focus on the Climate Defenses, to Re-allocate capital from other endeavors to the existential fight against a warming planet, and to begin that reallocation of capital, in order to address the mitigation and adaptation for all of our People, and for the Ecosystems, by shifting our investment attention towards trends, companies and technologies that can help the world address this penultimate challenge.

Of course this existential threat shall not be the only one, since now we have discovered this alien world of deadly viruses that will bedevil our existence for many years to come — but climate change has got to be addressed soonest, lest we all wake up and find ourselves drowning in a new era of Noah’s floods.

Personally — I believe that many of our colleagues in the policy advocacy as well as in the policy delivery world and in the future investment community of venture capital & PE — will do the same because not only does the world need these types of investments, but they will also generate fantastic returns too.

Climate will be to this decade what cloud computing, A.I. and infrastructure built outs, were to the last one…

The twin terrors of the Covid Pandemic and the Climate Crisis will drive the great US migration of the 21st century as we are already experiencing and as we will see accelerate in 2021, because of what we really learned in the Covid Pandemic. We learned that attending the needs of a corporation, the lifestyle choices or a good job — no longer requires someone to live in a massively gentrified, low lying flood-prone city like Miami LA or NYC or even a beautiful city that is always smelling like smoke because all the contiguous forests are burning … like what happens in San Francisco, Portland or Los Angeles for most of the year, and thus we will see many people in the US choosing to up stakes and leaving those places and adopting to new homes in cities towns and counties that are less impacted by the planetary warming climate crisis.

We call this “adapting to the climate crisis” and I forecast that it will be a huge investable trend for many years to come.

I believe that governments will respond to all of these economic challenges by continuing to provide liquidity through surface money easing, without restraint or concern, and thereby taxing and regulating innovative new companies to protect old and dying companies.

This will lead investors to continue to allocate capital to new forms of money (digital, crypto, stable currencies) and new ways of creating and financing innovation through decentralized projects and organizations, that serve the unbanked like the DOT that I have created more than a decade ago and that it now has globalized the early stage investment landscape of American Angels and all of our young green shoots, startups and entrepreneurs.

And because we are already seeing that incredible growth happen in the finance sector, with breakout projects in decentralized finance in 2020 like our new project to offer help to all of the unbanked segments of our population — we invite you to once again come play in my sandlot because we are now building the next Big Thing in the world of the “Unbanked” bottom of the pyramid people.

And because, we shall surely see this approach to serve the “unbanked” accelerate in 2021 and expand into areas beyond the financial sector — I invite all of you who are interested to send me your resume herewith and to partner up with me to win this race against time and culture of division, hate & discord.

The idea of financing and executing innovation inside of a global decentralized autonomous organization is such a powerful idea and one whose time has come.

Join the Revolution that I lead forth and you shall enjoy the spoils of Victory alongside me.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

Indeed, all the trends that will define 2021 have been building and ramping up for many years and are finally coming of age, because all of the insecurities that have been revealed in the past year and beyond.

At least 2020 gave us the time to think things through, and in any case, 2021 will be a year of returning to normal, but it will be a new normal and not like anything that we have experienced before.

Therefore, adapting to change is our new mantra for 2021.

Happy New Year everyone.

PPS:

And as a way to keep ourselves honest to goodness Truth-tellers, we ought to delve deep into what Carl Sagan shared as his secret to upholding the rites of scientific reason, in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.

A few months before his death in 1996, in a book titled “The Demon-Haunted World — Science as a Candle in the Dark” and specifically in a chapter titled, “Art of Baloney Detection;” Carl Sagan reflects on the many types of deception, untruth, fakery and misdirection, to which we’re all susceptible since we receive this type of communication 24/7/365 from all directions in the Marketing & Advertising Age of constant bombardment and attention deficit disorder.

Starting from the politicians, to the high street charlatans & the Madison Avenue crowd of silly mavens coupled with the Technology Trolls (Tities) of Silicon valley, along with the San Francisco pantomimes of neural empathy degrees of separation and depression social networks, coupled with our telephone, internet and Facebook psychics, minority reports, prescient pre-cogs, religious zealots, prophets, and paid product endorsement scientists — all betraying their contempt for the intelligence of the populace at large, their customers, and American people in general, by introducing an insidious level of corruption of popular attitudes without a smidgeon of scientific objectivity.

But rather than preaching from the ivory tower of self-righteousness — Carl Sagan approaches the subject from the most vulnerable of places — having just lost both of his parents, he reflects on the all too human allure of promises of supernatural reunions in the afterlife, reminding us that falling for such fictions doesn’t make us stupid or bad people, but simply means that we need to equip ourselves with the right tools against them.

Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set, a “kit” of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods:

Carl Sagan argues, that the “Truth Kit” isn’t merely a tool of science, because it contains valuable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as aptly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation.

To that end, Carl Sagan shares nine of these “truth serum” tools:

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

So as I bid goodbye to the past year and welcome the new one — I must offer a polite goodbye to this troublesome child that unleashed more Demons than Angels in our life and that brought more curses rather than dreams to our world…

So as 2020 sails on to the sunset, we bid her well…