We sit down with Lod, a Bitcoin startup focused on monetizing energy loads, from Bitcoin to AI and everything in between.
Welcome back to The Mining Pod! On today’s show we’re joined by Lod’s CEO Medi Naseri to discuss monetizing energy sources using software! While yes most people aren't thinking about energy past flipping on their laptops or charging their smart phones, energy systems are frankly pretty complex and deserve a little more love. That’s why we brought on one of the more interesting startups in the space, Lod, to discuss their business model, who they help and why energy hungry miners and AI compute should think about using a system like Lod!
Published twice weekly, "The Mining Pod" interviews the best builders and operators in the Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining landscape. Subscribe to get notifications when we publish interviews on Tuesday and a news show on Friday!
Donald Trump targeted trans issues during his presidential campaign. He promised to take aim at gender-affirming care early in his upcoming term in office, including restricting federal funds for trans medical support. That could have a major effect on such care within the Indian Health Service. In addition, at least half of all states now ban gender affirming care for minors. A pending U.S. Supreme Court decision will determine the future of such care in those states. We’ll gauge the direction for trans issues and find out how trans advocates are preparing both politically and personally for the next few years.
Alleged New York shooter charged in CEO killing. What's next for Syria? Malibu wildfire. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
Doulas support, educate and advocate for their pregnant patients. A new program at Stroger Hospital makes 10 doulas available to patients for free. Reset learns more with WBEZ’s Kristen Schorsch, Cook County commissioner Donna Miller and doula Vivian Moreno.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
Police arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He has been charged with second-degree murder. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will testify on Tuesday in his own corruption trial. The start of his defense comes amid Israel's ongoing war in Gaza. Jay-Z is the latest celebrity to be named in the web of allegations against Sean 'Diddy' Combs. The rapper has been accused of raping a teenage girl more than two decades ago.
Today's episode of Up First was edited by Andrea de Leon, James Hider, Otis Hart, HJ Mai and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Ben Abrams. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott and our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
For five years the prospect of a criminal prosecution has loomed over Binyamin Netanyahu. Today he becomes the first Israeli prime minister to testify as a defendant. A shocking fraction of master’s degrees confer no financial benefit—and may even leave degree-holders worse off (10:43). And our staff share their picks for the best books of 2024 (16:58).
Josh Levine lives in Brooklyn, NY. He started programming when he was 6 years old, when his Dad brought home an Apple 2. He realized that though there wasn't enough legos in the world to support his creativity, he could get enough RAM. Growing up, he had a deep relationship with chess, setting up his own chess program. In fact, he states that he learned everything he knows about programming - by programming chess. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He loves karaoke, and is a musician, with his music online under the name Heavy Pennies.
In 2011, Josh joined an amazing online game website, when they started supporting his favorite game variant. Ten years later, he researched this company and their technology to see how it worked. He applied for one of the jobs, got rejected, but then quickly got a call from the CEO, who liked his application.
For our annual Christmas episode, Danny and Tyler add Merle Haggard's hard-timin' working-class classic to the Ultimate Country Playlist. For all the joy it brings, December can still be a pretty rough month. Merle knows your pain, so give this tune a listen!
Democrats once seemed to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley. Perhaps you remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter and posted pictures of cabinets at the old office filled with “#StayWoke” T-shirts.
But just as the country is realigning itself along new ideological and political lines, so is the tech capital of the world. In 2024, many of the Valley’s biggest tech titans came out with their unabashed support for Donald Trump. There was, of course, Elon Musk. . . but also WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini; VCs such as Shaun Maguire, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and today’s Honestly guest, one of the world’s most influential investors and the man responsible for bringing the internet to the masses—Marc Andreessen.
Marc’s history with politics is a long one—but it was always with the Democrats. He supported Democrats including Bill Clinton in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But over the summer, he announced that he was going to endorse and donate to Trump. Public records show that Marc donated at least $4.5 million to pro-Trump super PACs. Why? Because he believed that the Biden administration had, as he tells us in this conversation, “seething contempt” for tech, and that this election was existential for AI, crypto, and start-ups in America.
Marc got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, which is said to have launched the internet boom. He then co-founded Netscape, which became the most popular web browser in the ’90s, and sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion.
He later became an angel investor and board member at Facebook. And in 2006, when everyone told Mark Zuckerberg to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion, Marc was the only voice saying: don’t. (Today, Facebook has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.)
He now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz, where they invest in small start-ups that they think have potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. And their track record is pretty spot-on: They invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft, and Oculus—to name a few of the unicorns. (And for full disclosure: Marc and his wife were small seed investors in The Free Press.)
Marc has built a reputation as someone who can recognize “the next big thing” in tech and, more broadly, in our lives. He has been called the “chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite,” a “cultural tastemaker,” and even “Silicon Valley’s resident philosopher-king.”
Today, Bari and Marc discuss his reasons for supporting Trump—and the vibe shift in Silicon Valley; why he thinks we’ve been living under soft authoritarianism over the last decade and why it’s finally cracking; why he’s so confident in Elon Musk and his band of counter-elites; how President Biden tried to kill tech and control AI; why he thinks AI censorship is “a million times more dangerous” than social media censorship; why technologists are the ones to restore American greatness; what Trump serves for dinner; why Marc has spent about half his time at Mar-a-Lago since November 5; and why he thinks it’s morning in America.
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