Tangents with Rod Roudi

What happens when freedom tech becomes part of everyday life? On this episode of Tangents, Rod catches up with four people putting it to work.Sahil Chaturvedi explores better Bitcoin design, his work at Ark Labs, and why AI agents need products they can actually navigate. Okin joins from Namibia to share Behind the Jersey, a winning AI Hack for Freedom project that helps fans investigate the money behind sports sponsorships. Anna Chekhovich explains how she uses AI to analyze her competitive shooting results as she works toward becoming a national champion. And Michael Tidwell reflects on building Atlanta’s Bitcoin community, why TABConf is coming to an end, and why self-sovereignty takes practice.Plus: a recap of AI Hack for Freedom and the countdown to Imagine If in Nashville.Nothing great happens in a straight line.

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 

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.

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.

Own Your Stack — four builders on keys, intelligence, mining, and moneyEverything 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.