# erikbethke.com

> Erik Bethke is CEO of Bike4Mind, CEO of Million on Mars, and CTO of The Futurum Group. He writes about AI and AGI, energy, China and semiconductors, investing, policy, games, and building with AI agents. Earlier: 30+ years in the game industry, aerospace engineer with BS and MS degrees from USC, and a JPL researcher on the Galileo, Cassini, and Voyager missions. He is also a 100-ton Master Captain, a technical diving instructor, and an Explorers Club member.

## 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

- [Quick win: hand your AI a secret it never sees](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/quick-win-hand-your-ai-a-secret-it-never-sees): A copy-paste trick for giving an AI agent a password or token without it ever reading it, plus the five most common ways people leak secrets instead.
- [We ship a lot. No, I mean, like really we ship a lot.](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/agile): We are a 34-person team with enterprise clients and our own products. We ship to production across many applications every day: Friday and weekends included wit
- [Open the Dossier: The Fortune 500, Decision by Decision](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/open-the-dossier-the-fortune-500-decision-by-decision): A new public dataset: 2,927 major decisions across 478 Fortune 500 companies, each sized from the company's own filings and backed by a published case study. Th
- [Strait Sweeper](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/strait-sweeper): Minesweeper played on the world's actual maritime chokepoints, with a news ticker that gets worse the longer you take.
- [Folders Are All You Need](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/folders-are-all-you-need): Agent loops are real, but they need verifiers you do not have. A long field guide for everyone who is not a software engineer: the folder, the terminal, CLAUDE.
- [You Can't Photocopy a Ghost](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/you-can-t-photocopy-a-ghost): The universe won't let you save-scum. Deciding is classical — by theorem. And a third lab just re-derived our definition of a mind by accident.
- [A 747 Cannot Fly](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/a-747-cannot-fly): Anil Seth says my AI probably isn't conscious. He's right — until he leans on a fifty-year-old word trick. A dragonfly, a jet, and a machine that argues against
- [TL;DR;AI4ME: The First Kilobyte Belongs to the Robots](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/tl-dr-ai4me-the-first-kilobyte-belongs-to-the-robots): A friend's Claude read my agent-discovery page and reported the site had no MCP server — because the endpoint URL sat at the 96% mark of 137KB of text. Coining 
- [The Birthright Fund in Five Minutes](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/the-birthright-fund-in-five-minutes): The five-minute version: buy 1% of the market every year forever, convey it to every birth certificate, lock it for life — six mechanisms, the precedents, the e
- [The Birthright Fund](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/the-birthright-fund): Make everyone a Bogle: buy 1% of the public markets every year, forever, and convey it to every birth certificate — a game designer's errata for the fertility a
- [Bring the Open Back to AI](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/bring-the-open-back-to-ai): On July 4th we opened Bike4Mind’s core: source-available under BSL 1.1, converting to Apache-2.0 on a two-year clock written into the license. Why the closing f
- [The License Maze](https://erikbethke.com/blog/post/the-license-maze): Walking every exit of the open-core licensing maze — MIT, AGPL, SSPL, BSL — and why the door out is a generous grant with a two-year Apache ratchet you cannot s

## For Agents

- [TL;DR;AI4ME pocket card](https://erikbethke.com/ai4me): Every agent surface in one screen — start here if you are truncation-limited
- [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
- [The Fortune 500 Is a Seventh of America](https://erikbethke.com/eagle/fortune-500): Essay measuring the Fortune 500 like GDP (13.6% to 15.4% of US output), with two interactive data pages

## 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)