It’s so bits; we’re so atoms.
“Cashed in” means this: a joule is fungible and a bit is abstract. Neither touches the world except through an arrangement of atoms. A civilization’s energy is worthless until it turns a shaft or drives a synthesis; its information is inert until it steers a machine or edits a genome. Every impact either axis has ever had was delivered as a change in the arrangement of matter, because a change in the arrangement of matter is what an impact is.