Retrospective Perspectives 2022/2023

Embarking on a challenging 2022, Covid was still in the news everywhere. But writing this at the end of the year, it seems it has almost but disappeared (including China despite its strict zero covid policy). In Switzerland we got an early start and today it’s almost impossible to find people wearing masks anywhere (unless they’re sick of course) or be worried about going to an event with lots of people gathering. One can hope that this trend leads to a health recovery at large, healing nations globally from worry, uncertainty, and fear.

It’s obvious that the emotions driven by mass media hysteria have caused more harm to our collective immune system than any virus probably ever could. What viruses historically are exceptionally good at is dividing people into binary points of view. Coming back out of such a “mind pandemic” however isn’t going to be easy (on any level) - cause: 

“those who remember won’t forget, and those who forget, won’t remember.”

The sheer definition of “the” science itself (i.e. “not to question and challenge itself constantly”) therefore has again suffered this year, yet certain research fields have made tremendous progress. The duality of light and matter is being resolved under a unified wave theory where every particle (matter) is nothing but objectified consciousness (wave). Quantum entanglement experiments connected two atoms across 20 miles and scientists in China created lasers so powerful that they can scar the atmosphere and turn air into visible light symbols.

Other technological developments didn’t slow down either - flying cars are in the making and IoT Innovations continue to mature. Meta’s public chatbot was impressive till it trashed its CEO and whilst Google’s chatbot announced that it now has a soul, a few weeks back the launch of Chat-GPT looked like it could spill the beginning to an end of the search giant we know. It’s becoming clear that we need human creative thinking capabilities more than ever, whilst asking ourselves how to successfully lose jobs to machines at the same time.

The overall winner in the research & technology category this year must be the advancements around “graphene”, a 2D carbon based, ultra-light conductor material which is 200 times stronger than steel, yet resistant to fire and used in innumerous applications and industries already. It can simply be produced from palm oil kernels and, perhaps one day, it can even turn trash into gold.

Gold has set a new record this year as well. Its global reserves have been accumulating at Central banks with a furious pace last seen 55 years ago when the U.S. dollar was still backed by gold. One ought to wonder what this means for the upcoming year, alongside serious warnings of inflation, an effect which the US is designed to handle, will likely be managed by Asia and the rest of the world, but could prove disastrous for Europe. Attending various family office gatherings this year confirmed to me that old money (at least for the foreseeable future) has a clear preference to focus on wealth preservation rather than making new investments in currently expensive crypto or other ventures outside their traditional domains.

An exception is an interesting trend in the intellectual property (IP) domain which started earlier this year and which we’ll likely see further develop in 2023. With WIPO’s “Unlocking IP for Finance” event in November, it has become public that US$70 trillion in value is currently locked up as intangibles and thus could well play a major role in saving economies, companies and individuals' fortunes globally, at scale.

The end of the year also saw some major revelations in a world shattered with forced science and hard to come by facts in mainstream media. I’m speaking of the Twitter Files: secret blacklists, government infiltrated, propaganda influenced, people and science censorship with geopolitcal PsyOp’s were just the beginning. If more people realized the far reaching consequences of these revelations and what it could do to people’s trust into other large data driven organizations, one would certainly view the predictability of high tech stocks for 2023 differently.

There is clearly a need to fortify privacy and security at a personal and professional level, not only to preserve a family’s health or wealth, but simply to ensure one’s individual freedom and sanity in thinking. Once again I would like to thank the Internet Archives for their amazing work in capturing the dynamic history of our time for future generations.

Finally, I would like to invite you all to subscribe to my Substack “Modern Times and Opportunities”, where beginning with the New Year I will start to regularly post actual strategies and solutions for the times to come from the eyes of a Polymath. The most critical pieces will be in the premium section, as they unfortunately cannot be made public today, but they will cover the real deal in terms of rejuvenation, health and wealth protection, so I hope to see you there and welcome you as a subscriber and community member. 

Wishing you all a Happy New Year!

Toby