Tangents with Rod Roudi

By Tangents Media

Meet the builders shaping AI, energy, and Bitcoin. Each week, Rod Roudi connects four conversations about what’s changing, what actually works, and who controls the technology we depend on. Nothing gr... more

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FAQs about Tangents with Rod Roudi:

How many episodes does Tangents with Rod Roudi have?

The podcast currently has 6 episodes available.

Tangents with Rod Roudi episodes:

September 22, 2026 Power, Privacy & The Promise of AI + Micropayments | Tangents
What does it take to build the infrastructure behind Bitcoin and freedom tech? Rod sits down with Steve Barbour, Jeff Gardner, and Ryan Gentry for three conversations about energy, private communication, and the businesses building through Bitcoin’s cycles.

Steve explains why Upstream remains focused on off-grid power and oil and gas while major Bitcoin miners chase AI infrastructure.

Jeff walks through White Noise, private messaging built on Nostr, and what it takes to make encrypted communication work across apps—for humans and AI agents.

Ryan discusses bringing Bitcoin businesses to public markets and why AI’s growing presence online could create a new opening for Lightning micropayments.

Plus: the case for coal, entrepreneurial perseverance, preparations for Imagine IF, and a Texas–Tennessee football tangent that puts the “real UT” up for debate.

Receive Tangents Daily directly to your inbox: tangentsdaily.substack.com
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50min
September 16, 2026 Open Money, Open Source AI & Bitcoin’s Next Chapter | Tangents
What happens when Bitcoin, open-source AI, and energy meet the people building them? Rod welcomes four guests exploring how these ideas become useful in everyday life.

Haley Berkoe recaps the Open Source AI Summit and the shared values connecting Bitcoin and private AI. Parker Lewis explains how Zaprite is making peer-to-peer Bitcoin payments easier with the wallets people already use. Frank Corva explores Venezuela’s stranded hydroelectric energy and the possibilities for rebuilding. Keith Gardner shares how Branta helps users know who they’re paying before sending Bitcoin.

Plus, preparations for Imagine IF and why hands-on communities matter.
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56min
September 09, 2026 It’s All About the Energy, The Next Phase of Bitcoin Adoption, Self-Custody by Design, and What Happened With Liquid?
It’s All About the Energy with Nacho Pauls (@NachoPauls), The Next Phase of Bitcoin Adoption with Trey Sellers (@ts_hodl), Self-Custody by Design with Ben Carman (@benthecarman), and What Happened With Liquid? with Lisa Neigut (@niftynei). Join Rod (@bitkite) for this week’s Tangents as we dig into mining, payments, open-source tools, and the protocol work that keeps Bitcoin usable and permissionless.
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1h 1min
September 03, 2026 Always Be Clanking, Owning Your Inference, Reverse Engineering an Industry, and Month End Close. Tangents Ep. 004 (9/2/2026)
Own Your Stack — four builders on keys, intelligence, mining, and money
Everything in bitcoin is a spectrum of ownership. Your keys, your intelligence, your money, your tools. On this episode of Tangents, Rod runs that thread through four conversations, with Jack dialing in from Seoul at 3am, and lands on the same idea every time: know what you own, and know the trade you make when you don't.
Clark Moody built the dashboard half of bitcoin checks every morning. He tells the origin story, born in the 2017 block size war when he was hitting five or six sites to read one number on each, then rebuilt by hand in Rust after it buckled on halving day. Buried deep in the page is a Lightning capacity trend that has him convinced institutions are quietly deploying. Old-school building, before the AI tooling existed.
Austin Kelsay makes the case for owning your intelligence. Local AI models went from a toy people chuckled at a year ago to tools that do real work, coding, even cyber defense, on hardware you own. His playbook: use the frontier models to set up your local stack, then move your private workloads home. Intelligence has custody tiers, the same way bitcoin does. Plus a first look at Finite Computer, the company he's co-founding.
Tyler Stevens explains why nobody actually knows how bitcoin mining works, and how the 256 Foundation reverse-engineered the whole stack anyway. Stratum was never documented, the firmware is closed, the chips come from overseas, so the team built a tool to decode the protocol one message at a time. The four open-source projects, the crown-jewel Mujina firmware, and how to join the dev calls.
Joe Wood kills the last excuse not to spend your bitcoin. Spend from a wallet that tracks your cost basis, get one clean report at year end, done. Then a real founder conversation: growing his bitcoin accounting firm to fourteen people, and a clear-eyed take on what AI erases and what it makes valuable.
The connective tissue across all four: custody is a spectrum, and it applies to your coins, your compute, and your payments alike. Pick your tier on purpose.
Every guest is headed to Imagine IF, October 5 and 6 in Nashville, at the convergence of bitcoin, AI, and energy. Request an invitation at imagineifnashville.com.
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53min
August 26, 2026 Big Deals, Clearing the Air, Financial Freedom Report, and Hacking for Freedom on Tangents Ep. 003 (8/26/2026)
Big Deals with Erik Hersman (@whiteafrican), Clear the Air with Zack Cohen (@zackcohen_), Financial Freedom Report with Zac Guignard (@zacguignard), and Hacking for Freedom with Alex Lewin (@ALewin). Join Rod (@bitkite) for Tangents Ep. 003!
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1h 3min
August 19, 2026 TANGENTS Ep.002 (8/17/2026)
Nothing great happens in a straight line. Episode two of Tangents brings four rapid-fire conversations across energy, AI, and Bitcoin: Brad Cuddy on Governor Abbott's data center guardrails and reimagining the Texas grid, Marks (Maple AI) on why not all AI "privacy" is created equal, Keith on five years of SeedSigner and the lessons of the Cold Card hack, and Schnitzel on the 256 Foundation's red team pointing AI at Bitcoin mining firmware — with a surprising verdict on stock firmware.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Welcome + the rundown — episode two, four guests, and a soundboard that's earning its keep

1:54 COMPUTE COWBOY: Brad Cuddy — Governor Abbott's data center guardrails (bring your own power, audits, transparency reports) and fixing the incentives before 400 gigawatts tried to come to Texas. The rate-base problem with how utilities make money. 300 GW of load vs. 100 GW residential = 200 GW of flexible load. 765 kV transmission upgrades and NIMBY pushback. Post-Uri reliability, grid-balancing batteries upstream of compute, and giving back to rural Texas — including desalinating brackish water with cheap wind and solar to provide clean drinking water to surrounding communities. Plus: Troya heads to CIGRE in Paris (Aug 23–28).

14:50 LOCAL LOCAL LOCAL (AI): Marks, Maple AI (ex-Apple) — keeping up with the AI firehose without chasing every release. AI proofreading and fitness coaching as everyday unlocks. Why he doesn't trust Dario's regulation push, and how to read Zuckerberg's 6,500-word "the future is for everyone" post given Meta's track record. Privacy tiers: proxy services that still ship your prompts to OpenAI/Anthropic vs. true end-to-end encryption with open-source code. The (unconfirmed) Stripe–OpenRouter deal: genius payments-style play or the next AOL–Time Warner? Venice AI's reported $100M run rate says people care about privacy.

26:50 CUSTODY CORNER: Keith, SeedSigner — five years of full-time open-source development. The Bitcoin Red Team: after AI likely found the Cold Card flaw, Rob Hamilton spun up a volunteer effort (now OpenSats-funded) slamming every open-source Bitcoin project with AI — SeedSigner got a disclosure on day one. Why American frontier models refuse security work while the red team runs on open-source models like Kimi. Bitcoin is just the first wave — closed-source companies everywhere get probed next. The Trezor mailing-list leak (~19,000 customers). SeedSigner's model: hide in the crowd of 10 million off-the-shelf boards, verify 100% of the software — "I'm not asking for any of your trust at all." And why the social trust layer still matters in a crisis.

43:30 RED TEAMS EVERYWHERE: Schnitzel, 256 Foundation — a red team for Bitcoin mining firmware, open AND closed source (reverse-engineering binaries on live S19s in the lab). Prove vulnerabilities with a working PoC, then follow responsible disclosure. Findings disclosed in LuxOS, Braiins, and Vnish — and the plot twist: stock firmware came out safest, because third-party dev-fee connections open a second channel for man-in-the-middle attacks. The agent ranked Mujina's open-source firmware #1. The bigger problem: ~80% of hashrate runs closed-source firmware from a single company. The 256 Foundation is fundraising — six million, three years.

56:50 Wrap-up — new segments coming (Delegate/Delete, supported by Athena), a Tangents community with Bitcoin Park, AI Freedom Lab, and Imagine If folks, http://notfinancialadvice.com supporter shoutouts — starting with Buck and the Nashville Fence & Deck crew — and Imagine If, October 5–6 at Bitcoin Park, Nashville.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Governor Abbott's Texas data center guardrails, ERCOT, Winter Storm Uri, CIGRE Paris

• Zuckerberg's "The Future is for Everyone," Stripe/OpenRouter reports, Venice AI, Maple AI, Open Source AI Summit (Presidio, early September)

• Bitcoin Red Team — Rob Hamilton, Portland.HODL & co., OpenSats, Kimi K3, Cold Card exploit

• SeedSigner, Trezor mailing-list leak, Michael Flaxman's multisig episode on Stephan Livera (2019)

• 256 Foundation — Mujina, BitAxe, Hydra Pool; LuxOS, Braiins, Vnish disclosures

• Imagine If — October 5–6 at Bitcoin Park, Nashville

Not financial advice.
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1h 7min

FAQs about Tangents with Rod Roudi:

How many episodes does Tangents with Rod Roudi have?

The podcast currently has 6 episodes available.