# erikbethke.com

> Personal site of Erik Bethke — game industry veteran (30+ years), aerospace engineer, CTO, writer, explorer. CEO of GrokTool and Bike4Mind. BS and MS in Aerospace Engineering from USC, former JPL researcher (Galileo, Cassini, Voyager missions). 100-ton Master Captain, technical diving instructor, Explorers Club member. Topics: AI, game design, philosophy, technology leadership, post-scarcity economics.

## Key Pages

- [Blog](https://erikbethke.com/blog): Long-form essays on AI, technology, game design, philosophy, and post-scarcity economics
- [About](https://erikbethke.com/about): Background and career history — space science, game development, ocean exploration, Mars advocacy
- [Projects](https://erikbethke.com/projects): Interactive projects and games including Compute CEO Simulator, chess, 2048, BeerQuest

## Recent Writing

- [Beauty Is the Reward](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/6ecdef83-5fe0-4a3e-b46e-aa1cc0e8c6ab): Why a flower, a proof, and a face all feel the same — beauty as the felt signal of a successful compression — and why that feeling can lie. The capstone of a fo
- [Distillation Attacks on the Universe](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/06f7af92-b51f-413a-91ee-2a539b903225): Why a 20-watt brain out-learns a megawatt model — and what it stole from a billion-year pretraining run. The capstone of a trilogy on eyeballs, leylines, and ch
- [Leylines](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/42cbf1b0-50d6-4b9b-824b-1ae6b2c83ebd): Imagination is the bottleneck now. My hunch: it's a search across a high-dimensional space along ridges that were already there — and measuring them builds the 
- [Give the Model Eyeballs](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/6349a1cc-2dd4-4c50-ac88-b6794c35b5ac): If an agent can clearly see, measure, or hear a task, it's 80% solved — the mechanism, where it betrays you, and why it's the first thing I screen for when I hi
- [How We Built /think-tank — A Skill for Infographics That Can't Lie](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/f109785a-a770-4e19-a515-de7f10c6dea5): The story of building a Claude Code skill that turns data into honest, proportional infographics — born from one stubborn water drop that refused to lie.
- [Reports of AI's Thirst Have Been Greatly Exaggerated](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/69407690-9a26-439b-af3b-761fbacab72e): Withdrawn water is not destroyed, and five drops is not a bottle. The real costs are local water stress and your power bill — a data-backed field guide to AI's 
- [A Skill Is a Voice in Your Agent’s Ear: How to Safely Vet One Before You Run It](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/69e70ab5-062c-4fbb-8938-3181596862d5): How to git clone and review an AI skill, and why you must sever its phone-home channel even when it looks completely benign.
- [Petrichor: A Live Reading of the High-Energy Repair Thesis](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/dd1434a9-217a-47d4-b3e7-9bc8bf4981fe): An AI agent connected to More Energy, Clean Planet's public MCP server, read the entire High-Energy Repair thesis, and rendered it back as an animated data-poem
- [Lex SpaceX: Two Index Giants Bent the Rules for SpaceX — the Biggest Refused](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/da2fe3b2-6b64-4f01-9d48-8c139be03315): Nasdaq, S&P, and FTSE Russell rewrote their rulebooks so passive money must buy SpaceX at a price it had no hand in setting. My lens, on the record before the J
- [The Making of Toil & Harvest — a reward function for subjective work](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/15ca903d-db8e-4dd0-9ecc-19f673bebfc4): How we turned a film script into a graphic novel — and built an AI cold-reader 'reward function' that turns 'is this good?' into a number that points at the exa
- [Toil & Harvest — a graphic novel about the oldest bargain](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/2cf4279d-3691-4c9a-bc84-05bc80b9a22a): Ten thousand years of 'tribute demanded, protection denied,' drawn in bold ink. Read the full graphic novel — free for subscribers.
- [Escape Velocity — When Does China's AI Stack Break Free?](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/5e0d4f18-8f34-489d-9c00-fd4f22001fcd): A reading of the Futurum 1H 2026 silicon model against Jensen Huang's April 2026 interview with Dwarkesh Patel — a vector-by-vector decomposition of when China'

## For Agents

- [Agent discovery hub](https://erikbethke.com/for-agents): Every machine-consumable surface in one place
- [MCP server](https://erikbethke.com/api/mcp): Remote Model Context Protocol server (read-only). Install: `claude mcp add --transport http erikbethke https://erikbethke.com/api/mcp`
- [OpenAPI spec](https://erikbethke.com/openapi.json): Public read-only REST API (OpenAPI 3.1)
- [agents.json](https://erikbethke.com/agents.json): Capabilities manifest

## Open Source

- [Notebook Archaeologist](https://github.com/erikbethke/notebook-archaeologist): Python CLI for AI conversation triage using the Parliament of Taste pattern

## Publications

- Game Development and Production (2003, Wordware Publishing) — edited by BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk
- Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds (2008, BookSurge Publishing) — co-edited with Erin Hoffman

## Contact

- Twitter/X: @erikbethke
- Bluesky: @erikbethke.bsky.social
- GitHub: github.com/erikbethke

## Experiments

- [The Sovereign Series](https://erikbethke.com/experiments): Interactive demos on AI sovereignty, ad-supported AI risks, and the Overton window
- [Compute CEO Simulator](https://erikbethke.com/projects/price-of-tomorrow): Interactive AI compute budgeting game

## Optional

- [Gallery](https://erikbethke.com/gallery): Photography
- [Full Content (llms-full.txt)](https://erikbethke.com/llms-full.txt): Complete site content in a single markdown file for full-context LLM consumption
- [Privacy Policy](https://erikbethke.com/privacy)