Weekly Journal: The Future According to Elon
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Insights from a long conversation with Elon Musk about work, consciousness, family, money, AI and how the future might unfold.
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 156 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge. New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
- Ryan
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drive the market’s volatility. Sentiment reveals itself across various channels—from social media activity to Google search trends—and when analysed alongside market data, these signals provide meaningful insight into the prevailing investment climate. The Fear & Greed Index aggregates these inputs, assigning weighted value to each, and distils them into a single, unified score.
🗞️ Metaverse news from this week
Netflix is buying Warner Bros
Entertainment moves closer and closer to a digital first and immersive experience.
FT: Whoever controls digital wallets will control the future
The FT argues that the true battleground for the next phase of the internet is not crypto regulation, but control of the digital wallet. These wallets already manage identity, payments and access. As more activity shifts on-chain, the wallet becomes the primary gateway to the digital economy.
Crypto wallets remove intermediaries and plug users directly into decentralised networks, which gives their designers enormous influence over who participates in financial and social systems. This power only grows as metaverse environments mature, because wallets govern ownership of virtual assets, identity, permissions and cross-world mobility.
Global models diverge sharply. China’s state-linked wallet centralises oversight. Europe pushes citizen rights and interoperability. The United States has yet to choose a framework, leaving space for Big Tech and blockchain ecosystems to define the rules.
The takeaway is clear. In the metaverse and the broader AI-driven digital economy, the wallet layer will decide who controls identity, participation and value. The FT warns that policymakers must act now to protect openness and digital freedom before a single private or state platform becomes the default gatekeeper.
📖 Read of the week
This was a really interesting read, I’m always interested in how culture evolves/adapts/manifests with new technology:
🎥 Watch of the week
A long conversation with Elon Musk about work, consciousness, family, money, AI and how the future might unfold.
AI Spotlight 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: Elon’s Most Important Interview in Years
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions.
If the video above is too long, here is a good summary 👇🏻
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from keynotes about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Public speaking is one of many services I offer.