What If Energy Is the Real Currency?

00:00 — Opening

Hey, and welcome to Slow Builds.

This one is going to be a real pure ramble — some wild theories that go on in my head sometimes. So bear with me. This one's going to be a little odd. I'm trying to connect some thoughts that probably aren't really there, but I like playing those games to see what connects and where things turn up in the end.

This one's definitely not advice, it's not a prediction, and it's honestly probably not going to make a lot of sense. But I like talking through these things just to see what could come of it — and if there's any possibility of some truth behind it or a link to something realistic.

00:58 — Everything Comes Back to Energy

This one is about something I've been noticing.

The deeper I've been looking into the world — economics, technology, AI — everything in my mind comes back to the exact same thing.

It all breaks down to energy.

I'm going to go off on a tangent here for a second.

You're always told the one thing you can never get back is time. So we always looked at time as the most valuable thing.

But now — yes, obviously time is important. You only live a certain amount of time. But energy seems to be the underlying theme.

02:14 — The Digital World Still Runs on Electricity

Everything I look at, if you break it down far enough, almost everything relies on energy.

Driving a car. Eating. A house. Building a factory. Growing food.

It all comes back to energy being converted to something.

And even the digital world — which is abstract, kind of weightless — it's still all about ones and zeros. Which in the end is power on, power off. Data centers, servers, cooling systems, GPUs, electricity flowing through massive buildings full of machines.

Even AI, which feels almost magic in a way, is really just energy being used.

Electricity goes in and thinking comes out. That's basically what AI is.

03:21 — Tokens Are Just the Meter

I've been watching some videos and you see it in the corner — the limits, the tokens.

When you use a model, everything's measured in tokens. You ask a question, it has to digest your question. Then it has to find and research the answer, and generate the answer. All tokens.

And tokens cost money.

And what you're paying for in the end is compute power — which is electricity, which is energy.

The hardware doesn't produce the answer. Tokens are basically just the meter. Like the meter on your house for heat and light. It's a way of measuring how much thinking is required.

How complicated? How deep do you want it to go? Do you want it to plan, research, execute? Or just give you a quick answer?

It's just electricity. The tokens are just fuel.

04:45 — Tokens as Units of Digital Work

So if tokens aren't quite money, they're something closer to real energy.

Units of digital work. I like that phrase for it.

You burn tokens to create something. You burn them to create code, to research, to run automation, to play through random ideas. Agents running tasks in the background.

Tokens are fuel for intelligence.

AI pieced a lot of this together for me. I sit down with ChatGPT, turn on the transcribe, start spilling ideas. This is one idea I had and it turns into a script. That's me burning tokens to create the script, then sitting in front of a camera to put it on YouTube — which in the end is all energy.

Those tokens are becoming more valuable because they're unlocking more. It's like opening up a new encyclopedia. Giving you access to vast amounts of intelligence and knowledge and computing power.

06:47 — What Determines the Value of Tokens?

This is where my mind goes somewhere even stranger.

If tokens are like energy, then what determines their value?

Right now we just price them in dollars. But that feels like a layer on top of something much deeper. Under all of it the real cost is just energy. Electricity, computing, hardware.

Which brings me to Bitcoin.

I'm not here to convince anyone about Bitcoin. I'm not an economist, I'm not a strategic trader. But one idea about it has always stuck with me.

Bitcoin is created through energy. Mining requires energy. Computers perform massive amounts of work. So in a weird way, Bitcoin represents energy that was spent. And unlike money that can be printed endlessly, Bitcoin has a fixed supply.

That's why a lot of people call it digital gold — or even stored energy.

08:26 — The Chain in My Head

So this is where the thought experiment starts for me.

What if the future economy looks something like this?

Energy powers everything. Energy powers computing. Computing powers AI. AI produces intelligence and work. Tokens measure that compute. And Bitcoin — or something like it — becomes the base layer that stores value created from that energy.

The chain in my head looks like this:

Energy becomes compute. Compute becomes intelligence. Intelligence becomes economic value. And somewhere underneath all of it, energy is still the thing that makes it possible.

09:24 — AI Isn't Just Software — It's Infrastructure

This also makes me think differently about AI itself.

People talk about AI like it's just software. But it's not really just software. It's a massive infrastructure. Huge data centers, thousands of CPUs, gigawatts of electricity.

The AI boom isn't just a software boom. It's an energy boom.

And whoever controls the most efficient energy and compute might end up controlling the most intelligence.

Knowledge used to be something only humans produced. If you give AI a task, it goes through the analytical process to decipher it, find the patterns, unlock things we can't even see — not because it's smarter, but because it's more powerful. Which means it uses more energy.

10:51 — Where It Gets Weird

This is the part where people laugh at me.

When you start following ideas like this far enough, things get weird pretty quick. You start wondering about simulations. Digital worlds. Entire systems running on energy and computation.

And suddenly, movies like The Matrix don't feel as ridiculous as they once did.

I'm not saying we're living in a simulation. But it's interesting how quickly technology can turn science fiction into something that feels plausible.

Ten years ago, AI writing code would have sounded crazy. Now people do it every day. We're more or less reviewing code at this point — and sometimes we're letting AI review it for us.

Some of those old movies and books feel really close to now. That's where I started thinking: did someone already know this was happening? Maybe it's not time travel. Maybe it already existed. Maybe it's just a simulation.

No, I don't believe that. But it's fun to let your mind go to those places.

12:45 — Why I Keep Thinking About This

The reason I keep exploring ideas like this isn't because I think I've figured anything out. It's the opposite.

It reminds me how big and complicated the systems really are.

Economics, technology, energy, AI — it's all sort of become one thing. Different layers of the same reality.

Most of us are just participating in these systems without really understanding what we're doing. And sometimes you have to ask these odd questions to help see things from a different angle.

When your mind is allowed to wander, it brings you back to reality.

Maybe energy really is the base layer of everything. Maybe tokens become the fuel of digital intelligence. Maybe Bitcoin ends up acting like some kind of energy-backed store of value for all the energy that's spent.

Or maybe none of this happens at all. Maybe it's just one of those late night thought experiments that goes nowhere.

I do that a lot. Which is fun. I'm glad I have a place now to just spill out what I'm thinking.

14:48 — The Sun Thought

This one kind of came about because I had a thought about the sun.

If we use just solar energy alone, the whole earth would only use one trillionth of all the sun's energy. That's free energy. Free to grab. Free to use.

Whoever harnesses that has a huge advantage.

There's only one person I know really focused on that — from a space angle. Putting data centers in space, solar panels, satellites.

Anyway, that's where my mind goes and why I started thinking about this.

Thanks for watching. Love to know your thoughts.