Show Notes
An extended reflection on Bitcoin mining as the linkage between digital money and the physical energy that anchors it. The episode translates mining into a first-principles frame — always-on marginal buyer, permissionless participation, waste heat as byproduct — and uses that frame to surface a wider tension: why the abundance latent in cheap energy tends to get captured inside a debt-based system, and what changes once the coordination layer is honest. The register is one of appreciation for the elegance of the design rather than a call to action.
More from Age of Abundance
A weekly return episode that threads a firsthand account of frontier AI work into a longer meditation on the gap between right-and-wrong and legal-and-illegal. The frame it sets up: as intelligence becomes abundant and the fiat control system tightens, the question of who decides what is criminal – and whose rules are being played by – becomes inseparable from the question of what money is. Lands in a wisdom-tradition register about honest money, reputation, and the slow conversion of understanding into action.
A wide-ranging conversation with Bram about what shifts when you stop being a subject of fiat money and start acting inside a global, verifiable, decentralized network. The episode weaves between AI as an information-synthesis layer, open source as an unstoppable gift economy, and Bitcoin as the one object eight billion people can agree on – landing on why awakening to the money is as much a spiritual turn as an economic one.
Episode 100 is a retrospective and inflection point. Rather than introduce a new frame, the host walks back through five months of daily episodes to show what durable ideas were seeded, which conversations mattered, and why the body of work holds together as a single arc. The episode closes by announcing a shift from daily to weekly cadence, with the backlog itself positioned as a standing resource for anyone arriving later.
A conversation with Scott Dedels, author of The Age of Time, that reframes Bitcoin as a timekeeping technology before it is a monetary one. The episode traces how mechanical clocks reshaped civilization long before debt-based money arrived, and asks what inhabiting time might look like once Bitcoin reintroduces an intergenerational horizon. It lands in a register of cathedral-building — slow, patient, and surprisingly hopeful about what the next century makes possible.
Ricky maps out ten capacities he believes will matter in a world where AI handles the tasks and Bitcoin anchors the value — a reframing of personal development for the end of the fiat-career playbook. The episode is less a syllabus than a mirror: an invitation to examine where you're still optimizing for yesterday's incentives, and what you'd actually cultivate if the old scoreboard stopped counting.