Guest: Aaron Day - The Manufacturing of A Crime & Why We Need To #FreeRogerVer

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I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to ride. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians. Music. And the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being. God damn it. My life has value. You want answers? I think I'm entitled to you. I want the truth! You can't handle the truth!

Hello again free thinkers welcome back to the free thought project podcast my name is jason bassler and joining me is the free thought project editor-in-chief matt agorist well guys it's finally here the last episode of the year yes this will indeed be our last episode of 2024, and damn i must say we've had some great guests on the show this year. But yeah, Matt and myself will be taking our annual hiatus for about three weeks, and we'll be back again recording the second week of January.

And rest assured, Freethinkers, we already have even more amazing guests confirmed for the next year, including names such as author and Mises Institute contributor Dave Benner, the amazing researcher who earlier this year made some big waves examining the disappearance of Malaysia airline flight, MH370, Ashton Forbes, Taxationist Theft Dan Berman, Antiwar.com's own Dave DeCamp, and we even got the legendary Ken O'Keefe scheduled.

We also are tentatively in the talks with David Icke and OG truther G. Edward Griffin to get both of them on the show as well. So I'm definitely excited for the new year. And side note, guys, this will be the last episode before we make a few overdue changes to the podcast. So keep an eye out for that as well.

Now, I did also want to mention that we had a great two-part podcast with Jeremiah Harding published over the past two weeks where we did some deep dives into Trump's election win, his cabinet selections, and the Libertarian Party's role in all of it. So definitely check out those episodes, guys. But before we get into a few announcements, I did want to ask Mr. Matt Agrist how he's doing this week. And dude, we already have a great lineup of guests for the new year.

So, I mean, I'm excited. Yeah. Are you excited as I am about 2025? Hell yeah, dude. It looks awesome, man. We got, uh, thank you. I know you've been doing most of the scheduling here and, uh, you've been doing a great job, brother. And I'm glad to be back. I know I missed the last two podcasts, uh, crazy times we live in, man. But yeah, I'm excited about this one. Always plenty to talk about. And, uh, yes, sir. We're onwards and upwards.

And guys, I just did want to take a brief moment here to remind our listeners to please subscribe to this podcast, especially if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It just takes a quick second to rate and review this podcast. And I know this is something we say a lot, but we really do need your help with this. Of course, there are other ways to support us with donations and subscriptions, you know, both of which can be found at the top of our website, the freethoughtproject.com.

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All right, well, let's go ahead and introduce our guests this week. So our guest today joined us back on the show in early May of this year, where we talked in depth about the dangers of central bank digital currencies. And we also discussed our mutual friend, Roger Veer's case, because that was only a couple weeks after Roger was arrested in Spain.

Now, today's show will most likely be centered around Roger's case, because a lot has transpired since May, and we really need to create some awareness about the lawfare that the feds are using to target Roger right now. But I was also hoping to touch on some crypto topics today, if possible, and I'm going to, Nevertheless, our guest today is entrepreneur, writer, longtime crypto advocate, and fellow at the Brownstone Institute, Mr. Aaron Day.

Aaron, thanks for joining us again, and how are you doing today, amigo? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. Well, as I mentioned today, today's episode will largely be focused on Roger. Roger is such an integral part of crypto and Bitcoin, no matter really which way you slice it. He's a veteran. He's an OG in this space. And he was so evangelical about the new technology in the early years of crypto that he was given the nickname Bitcoin Jesus.

Roger has done so much more than that, though, including writing the powerful book, Hijacking Bitcoin. And as he just demonstrated on his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, he is philosophically consistent and he has, you know, principled views on liberty. Now I'm sure we'll be getting into our thoughts about the Tucker Carlson interview today, but I did want to start this the right way.

And I would assume, you know, most of our listeners know who Roger Veer is, but for our listeners who might not be familiar with his case and his name, you've been very vocal about all this. And I know you were recently on Dr. Drew's show talking about it. Can you provide a little context and overview as to why people should care about Roger's case? And maybe from there, we can get into some more of the nitty gritty aspects of all of it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in short, basically, Roger is being attacked very specifically because he is an effective advocate for liberty and voluntarism, pure and simple. That is what it boils down to. And when you learn about his history, Roger had a run-in with the law in the past around 2000 when he was, while he was running for political office as a libertarian, he was selling fireworks.

And he was literally the only person in the country arrested for selling these fireworks through the mail, even though companies like Cabela's and others were actually selling these through the mail as well. Excuse me. So So Roger actually spent 10 months in federal prison. He was psychologically tortured in prison.

And he decided coming out of that experience that he wasn't safe in the United States and that he wanted to leave. And so he'd actually been searching and was looking to expatriate for quite some time. He moved to Japan, I believe, in 2006, and then finally was able to expatriate to St. Kitts in 2014.

And so he was charged with tax fraud, mail fraud, all of these other things on taxes that go back to go back 10 years and in some cases go back to actually after he'd already expatriated and was no longer a U.S. citizen. This is a situation that was clearly political in nature. And in fact, I had interviewed him on my podcast about his book, Hijacking Bitcoin.

And it was just three weeks later that he was arrested in Spain and thrown into the same prison that John McAfee was in when he met his untimely death eight months after trying to fight extradition from Spain himself. And so this is a case that affects everyone. And it's not just a crypto versus non-crypto, because there are elements of this case that should alarm anyone, whether you're an individual or a small business or a multinational corporation in crypto or not in crypto.

They violated his attorney-client privilege as part of his process in dealing with the DOJ. The IRS raided his attorney's offices and they got a hold of his private communications and are trying to use his private communications against him, even though what we actually find are in those communications are evidence of Roger complying with the law.

Nevertheless, if you can't rely on attorney-client privilege, that means you essentially can't even really count on being able to work with counsel in general. So this is a broad constitutional violation that affects absolutely everyone. But beyond that, what we find is Roger actually paid his taxes. And if you go back to 2014, the IRS didn't have clear guidance on Bitcoin. Was it a currency? Was it an asset? They didn't know. They didn't have very clear rules of the road for that.

And also at that time in 2014, Mt. Gox, which was the largest crypto exchange at the time, had collapsed. And so were Roger to sell all of his Bitcoin based on the average daily volume, the price would have plummeted nearly to zero.

And so it's really interesting that they're going after him, after he already paid an exit tax, already complied with the law, hired accountants, hired lawyers, and then all of a sudden they decide 10 years later, oh, you didn't pay enough, but we're not going to tell you how much you owe us. We're going to let you sit and rot in Spain facing extradition.

And when you are extradited and you come to the United States, you're facing 109 years, which is essentially a life sentence for Roger for not paying some unspecified amount of tax. Yeah. I'm kicking myself. And I think Matt shares a sentiment as well. I think it was maybe two or three weeks, probably right around the same time you interviewed Roger. We were supposed to as well. And because at the time he was living in Korea, we had a time mix up.

And boy, now obviously he's not doing any interviews and he just did this one with Tucker Carlson, which I'm hoping to get into. And he also wanted to get into the attorney client privilege aspect of all this, but it's pretty clear that he's been in the sights of the feds for decades here. And this is... Pretty clear to, I think, most of us that it's targeted lawfare, and it is political in nature. And you kind of touched on this a little bit, but I really want to hone in on this.

Roger left the U.S. in 2014 and renounced his citizenship, which he explained in the Tucker Carlson show, was largely motivated by principle because of the actions and injustices carried out and created by the U.S. Government, which he could no longer be associated with. And then in April of this year, He was arrested while in Spain for a cryptocurrency conference for what the DOJ alleges was failing to report the Bitcoin sales from 2017, even though, you know, he was no longer a U.S.

Citizen and hired these top tax professionals. And, you know, he tried his best to really comply with the law. He was still arrested for what happened like seven years ago. And that's strange by itself. But, you know, many of us, as I was saying, don't really believe that's the true motivation behind his arrest. You know, he was also arrested 25 days after his powerful book on how the Bitcoin community was hijacked was released.

But, you know, honestly, Aaron, I think the more I learn about Roger, the more it seems like he's funded half, if not more, of the Liberty community. You know, he's given, given, given. He gave to the Assange case. He's donated millions to WikiLeaks. He's held fundraisers for Ross Albrecht. He's funded our close friend who we were just talking about prior to getting on here, Derek bros.

Some of the tours he had done, he donated to a former guest of the show, Cody Wilson's Def Cad, a Free Stay Project, Electronic Frontier Fund, the Brownstone Institute. I mean, so much. It's insane. Once you start to realize how much he's contributed to really helping out the Liberty community. So do you suspect there were other motivations besides his taxes as a book, but maybe even something deeper because he has done so much to propel Liberty? Yeah.

Well, I think it's clearly because he's done a lot to promote liberty, although a lot of people don't know I wasn't even fully aware. So one of the things about I've been talking about Roger publicly since May, and I've been traveling all over the country and recently outside of the country and everywhere I go, I learned something new about a new person that he supported. it. So most of the stuff that he's done has been under the radar.

So I don't know to the extent that the feds even know how broad Roger's support is. He has a website where he lists some of the things, but I mean, it's a tip of the iceberg that's on that list. He has helped so many people that have faced tyranny from the government. He's helped them out personally, in addition to funding organizations everywhere I go. I've literally met people all over the world in different situations.

I was in Mexico for Mineratopia, and I found out that, oh yeah, just a few miles away, he put up the money to help rebuild a roof for a senior citizen center. It's amazing, and it's actually breathtaking the extent to which he has supported not only liberty causes, but individuals that are in distress. I think though, and as you know, when we talked about this before, my issue is CBDCs.

I think the real issue, the fundamental issue is that Roger is probably the single most effective person at promoting technologies to fight CBDCs. And he has been ever since the very beginning. Look, he's controversial around some of this Bitcoin stuff and block size stuff. And all of that is irrelevant. Roger has invested in countless cryptocurrencies. His message from the very beginning was that we need peer-to-peer digital cash for the world that's separate from state.

Separate from central bank tyranny, so that we can promote economic freedom and basically cut off the purse strings for the military-industrial complex that is killing people and spreading war all over the world. He has been so consistent, whether it was the first talk I heard from him live in 2012 to the Tucker Carlson interview, he has not wavered one bit. And by the way, he's been the most effective. So he did earn the name, which he hates, Bitcoin Jesus.

But he introduced me to Bitcoin. He introduced the Free State Project to Bitcoin. And then he learned about it from Ian Freeman as well. And so this really spread like wildfire. And then when he realized that the Bitcoin vision had been subverted and that this whole shift from its digital cash that you're supposed to use outside of state control, and now it's digital gold and it's slow and expensive and it's surveilled and you don't even have it in your own possession.

You get it through BlackRock and they don't even, BlackRock doesn't even hold it. You're two levels removed. He decided to expose it. With this brilliant book, Hijacking Bitcoin. And then in addition to, because he'd been kind of quiet for a while. I mean, he certainly was, he never stopped doing things behind the scenes, but with hijacking Bitcoin, he was really starting to come back into the public sphere.

And so not only with that book, so it's not just exposing that Bitcoin had been hijacked. And it's important to know that Bitcoin was hijacked because Bitcoin early on could have been the answer to CBDCs. But now that people are pouring all of their money and attention into Bitcoin, they're putting something, their resources into something that now can't possibly be an alternative to CBDCs. Low expensive trackable digital gold is not a solution to digital currency as a medium of exchange.

And so he also started promoting other cryptocurrencies. And in particular one he introduced me to called Zano, Z-A-N-O, which is a privacy coin. Because what he said is, look, what do we know now? We know that Bitcoin can be tracked. Obviously, they tracked Ross Ulbricht's money, Ian Freeman, all of these other people. And actually, they're trying to track everybody. I mean, I don't even know to the extent. They're working already, the IRS using AI with Coinbase.

So basically, if you're pulling your Bitcoin off of an exchange, the IRS is going to have a record of this now. So they're building a whole map of people's financial transactions. And so Roger said, listen, if we want peer-to-peer digital cash for the world, it needs to be privacy by default.

And so he started promoting this. And so three days, I believe, before he was arrested in Spain, he was speaking at a conference in the UAE and his closing statement was about the importance of privacy coins and privacy tokens.

So I think it's because he's an effective threat to cbdc's that all of this is happening wow that's a good point and it really is a threat to it because he's the only one that seems to be in that space with such a big voice that does keep advocating for the actual use of what crypto was designed for by satoshi right and instead like everybody else is just buying bitcoin and talking shit like how awesome that they're making this money on this digital gold but yet it's

inefficient and it's unsuitable as money and the government and financial institutions fucking love that right it's it's it's wild to watch that that play out like the bitcoin was hijacked i don't if you just look at the history of what happened and how the blocks got smaller became more and more unusable i mean this this happened we can prove that that happened we could look at it and we don't even have to get into like the the the reddit groups and and the

you know the propaganda that went out we could just see that this actually happened and now we have the end result of it, right? Like there's no fighting the Federal Reserve or the US dollar with Bitcoin because it's useless as what it was designed for, right? And we have people like Max Kaiser, right? He's a Bitcoin maximalist, right? And this happened when Roger was arrested the first time. I remember Max praised it and was talking shit like, oh, yeah, I hope he rots in jail.

And then this time he was like, I hope he rots in hell or some shit, right?

I saw it on my Twitter feed recently. i mean clearly this is like not just in poor taste but i mean it's it's personal and it's like praising the state and wishing ill on people that are doing good you guys just named a whole fucking slew of charitable contributions that veer's been given to for for years right and what i'm wondering like i mean obviously kaiser's a maximalist a bitcoin maximalist and does run counter to what roger claims you know about bitcoin being hijacked

But I'm wondering for you, Aaron, like, do you think that or why do you think that Max has taken such like this aggressive stance? Do you think it's like a class of ideologies? Or do you think there's like more behind this, this personal vendetta he appears to have against Roger? I mean, Max seems unstable in general. I mean, if you look at his comments, I mean, he'll say things like Bitcoin was here before Jesus. I mean, look, some of the stuff that he says is just is just wacky.

Oh, yeah. You should look at the stream of posts. Of course, I do want to point out because one of the things Roger talks about is propaganda and censorship and people try to make fun of him for that. I wrote a really short review saying, hey, you should read Hijacking Bitcoin right before I interviewed him. And then he retweeted it. I have been blocked by every Bitcoin core developer. I've been blocked by Max Keiser. I've been blocked by Michael Saylor.

Every single one of these people just for recommending that people read the book. They literally have a GitHub with a list of people to ban. It still goes on today, the censorship. They're not banning just Roger. They will ban anyone else that talks about Roger in a positive light. It is a systematic process that they have to stop this information from getting out there.

So I don't know if there's any personal blood. I think I remember seeing at some point a video of Roger and Max interviewing each other or having a conversation online. So I'm not aware of any particular bad blood, but Kaiser's comments are absolutely disgusting. And here's the thing. The irony of this is if Roger loses this case, the biggest harm will actually come to Bitcoin maxis and people that were in this early because the precedent's now been set.

And by the way, Roger did hire smart lawyers and accountants. Do we think all of these Bitcoin – I'll tell you right now, I know there are Bitcoin maxis that probably didn't file for any of this stuff. And they're probably sitting there saying, oops, we now realize this is on a transparent ledger, right? So they should be rooting for Roger the most, because if Roger loses, they're absolutely all next.

And then the funny thing is on this Tucker Carlson interview, one of the things that he unveiled was, that people hadn't been talking about before, is this new technology called Confidential Layer that allows people with Bitcoin to bridge their Bitcoin into Zeno so that you can actually make your Bitcoin private.

So even with all of this controversy and with all this crap that's going on and all of the attacks that Roger has faced, he goes on to Tucker Carlson and offers a technological solution to help make Bitcoin better money and to help make Bitcoin private. it.

So I think Bitcoin maxis should line up. And in my opinion, you know, look, I know some people and I've had in-depth personal conversations with a lot of people that, and this is a common theme, the block wars happened and then they didn't really think about it anymore.

And they just held onto their Bitcoin and they really haven't engaged. And now they're like, now they're starting to look at this. They're looking at Michael Saylor saying, well, we don't want to compete with the dollar or the Euro or Visa or MasterCard. We want to comply with KYC. And now Michael Saylor is saying you must be some kind of anarchist criminal if you want to self-custody or crypto.

So there are people that had actually just bought the narrative after the block size war, put their money on a hardware wallet or in cold storage, and they're now actually starting to question this. And I've had a lot of in-depth conversation with those people. So I think there's even within the universe of Bitcoin maxis, there are people that are Bitcoin maxis coming out of 2017 that haven't seen the new narrative and haven't been following it very closely.

So to me, I think maybe there's an opportunity to rally Bitcoin maxi support around Roger with the exception of Max Keiser and Michael Saylor, who should be called out because they are bad actors within Bitcoin. You know, I woke up this morning and to my surprise, to my delight, I was actually blocked by Max Kaiser as well, which, you know, I don't have a Twitter following the same size of yours or a lot of people on Twitter. I'm relatively small.

So I don't know. I feel like that was a badge of honor, I guess, to a certain extent. I used to have so much respect for him too, man. It's so strange how he's just taking a hard right turn or left turn.

I don't know, however you want to say it. And the fact that they're just siding with the US government on this, I mean, inadvertently, I guess, but it's still strange, you know, and I don't know, I know somebody on our tweet this morning, mentioned that, you know, it doesn't seem like it matters to them that they're siding with the US government, they're just more concerned about pumping their bags. And I think that's an accurate assessment.

But I also wanted to get into the Tucker interview a little bit, because the reason we connected again for this podcast is what, you know, you reached out to me to put on my radar that Roger was going on to Tucker Carlson's show and to speak about his case. And I guess it's the only interview he's going to do under the advisement of his lawyers, understandably. But I thought it was a solid interview by Roger. He was articulate.

He was passionate, educational, and obviously philosophically consistent. At one point, though, Tucker asked him, kind of alluding if his money conflicted with his principle. He said, it sounds like your ideological commitment is overriding your financial interests, which I commend Tucker for saying, because it's clear Roger does care more about maximizing freedom than his pocketbook.

But I kind of want to just get your broad overall thoughts on the interview with Tucker. And have you seen as a result of the interview, does it seem like more people are taking interest in the case now? Absolutely. More people are taking interest in the case. And again, as libertarians or anarchists or ANCAPs, whatever we are on this, I'm sure we're all not Trump fans. But in this particular instance, Trump is the guy to convince.

And I'm actually pretty optimistic that that's going to happen because I know between this interview and the Charlie Kirk interview, this is getting the right kind of attention. I do believe this is going to get in front of Trump or if it hasn't already. And I think that Roger has a really good shot at being pardoned on day one along with Ross. And so it has been very effective. But, you know, one thing I like to put into perspective, like imagine what it's got to be like to be Roger.

You've already spent time in federal prison. You've already been psychologically tortured. You were arrested, completely surprised, thrown into prison where your friend died. You don't speak the language. And now you've been there for seven months. And I mean, knowing that, you know, McAfee fought at every level and he lost his final appeal eight months in. So basically Roger could be like in 30 days, Roger could be extradited.

Right. I mean, this just based on historical precedent, I don't have any, any keen insight on what's going on other than what he said on, on Tucker. And yet he still had, you want to talk about principled, and I'm sure lawyers are like, yeah, he knows everything that he says is going to be used against him as an extradiciary statement. And he still went on and gave a 40-minute interview where he stuck to the same principles that he was saying when I heard him in 2012.

I thought it was amazing. He did mention during that interview that he could wake up at any point and there's no process of alerting them or telling them when that day might come. I can only imagine how stressful that could only be living under that kind of situation. And I know you also alluded to earlier in this conversation that his attorney's door was kicked in.

And that to me is a huge red flag here because not only are they really kind of tiptoeing around the tax law here and kind of arbitrarily applying it to where they feel like it, I guess it could be used to condemn Roger. But this is also kind of a president in itself. And Roger did speak about the treatment that his attorney faced.

When the feds actually literally kicked in his door, the door to his attorney and apparently his accountant's office, which sounds like something that would happen more in like a country like Russia. And I know you've mentioned that Roger's case represents an unprecedented attack on the attorney client privilege. Could you maybe explain how this privilege is being challenged in this situation and drill down on that a little bit?

And how does this case really set a precedent that could affect the general public's ability to seek legal advice without fear of prosecution? Because, I mean, as far as I know, this is kind of a first. Well, reliance on counsel is kind of this sacred right that we have. I mean, it is kind of built into the judicial system.

And so the idea that you cannot speak to your own counsel in private without those communications being intercepted by the government, I think about it, it obviously puts you at a disadvantage. Roger doesn't get the ability to look at the discovery or any of the internal dialogue or the communications back and forth amongst the DOJ and the FBI. So how are you going to win a case when the other side violates your constitutional

rights and can use your information against you? It's complete information asymmetry. They can use your information. You don't get any of their information, and it completely violates your rights. So this impacts anybody, any case, any time. So now you can't even speak to your lawyer. You can't seek real advice or honest guidance because you have to worry about those very communications being intercepted by the people that are trying to throw you in a cage.

This is a profoundly, devastatingly bad precedent if it's set. And so now I know Roger, I guess, had been fighting this for a while and he'd appealed it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, I guess, at the time decided not to pick it up. They didn't reject it, but they didn't they didn't take on the case. And so I don't know how all of that factors in. And I think that may be part of the legal process.

I don't know what the strategy is with the lawyers, but everybody should be aware of that aspect of it. Because it doesn't matter whether, again, you're in crypto or out of crypto, or whether you are wealthy or not wealthy. This is a fundamental right to counsel and right to privacy of your communications with your counsel, which once that goes away, I mean, our courts become even more absurd than they actually are, or than they already are. Which is actually pretty bad, as it is.

Yeah, we certainly know how bad our courts are, even they're going after former presidents. Listen, I said it on Ian Freeman. My wife and I said it on Ian Freeman's sentencing hearing. And that case was, this is part of why I took such interest immediately in Roger's case when he was arrested. I mean, I've been talking about CBDCs and under Biden's executive order 14067, he authorized the government to basically terrorize people in the crypto industry.

So this was not just the IRS. It was also the FBI, the Treasury, the CFTC, even the Defense Department. I mean, it literally was a whole of government approach to cracking down on crypto. And Ian's case was absurd. I mean, they basically, the amount of money and the amount of time that they spent cracking down on Ian was absurd. and sending in plants and then omitting information and kind of actually fabricating information in that case.

And so after sitting through that, I realized that it was politically motivated. I had also interviewed a guy slightly after named Steven Nirov. He was my interview after I'd interviewed Roger. Are you guys familiar with Steven? No.

This is a wild story. Steven Nerioff is actually, he's a lawyer and an inventor, and he actually created the legal structure for the ICO, initial coin offering. He created the legal structure for the security token offering. He was the lead lawyer for the formation of Ethereum. In fact, Vitalik was staying at his house, I guess, as I understand it.

The foundation that they formed was in Switzerland. And so Vitalik was actually staying at Nereov's apartment so that he didn't have an address in the United States because that would have some impacts and everything else. Anyway, long story short, Nereov provides some legal guidance as to how Ethereum should do their fundraise. And he was offered what now would be well over a billion dollars worth of Ethereum.

He was offered, I think, half of ConsenSys, which is a related company involved in doing Ethereum-related development. And because he saw that they weren't kind of following the legal guidance that he was providing, and because he saw, at least from his perspective, some potential collusion between Ethereum and the head of the SEC at the time, and this gets into the whole.

You know, how is Ethereum not a security, but XRP is, and all this other stuff, he decides to walk away from this Ethereum project. So fast forward months later, and 12 FBI agents raid his home, put handcuffs on, throw him in a van and show him a list, a couple page list of names. And they said to him, unless you get us information that leads to convictions, on multiple of these people, you will never see your kids again.

They manufactured an extortion case against him and then showed him a list of people. The people on that list included Roger Veer, Patrick Byrne, Bruce Fenton, Naomi Brockwell. It's basically the Venn diagram of people in the crypto space and people in the liberty space.

So this was 2019. And what we have is the DOJ and the FBI manufacturing an extortion case and threatening to throw a guy in prison for the rest of his life unless he gives up information on people that are in the liberty crypto space. So when we talk about the fact that we're on lists, I mean, we like to joke about this in the liberty community. Literally, the DOJ has been manufacturing evidence against our people, our people ideologically, since at least 2019.

Now, Neriyev ended up not doing this. He didn't comply. They ended up dropping the case against him. And then he hired Alan Dershowitz. And I believe he is suing the government for prosecutorial misconduct to the tune of like $7.8 billion. But I was blown away to find that out. And so I guess where I got on this track is that I knew from Ian's case that it was political. And then when Roger's thing, I'm like, yeah, I actually feared for Roger's life

when he was originally thrown in prison. I'm like, they're going to kill him. Right. Based on the McAfee thing. Right. And then what happened was he got out on bail. And then what I thought was, you know what? So I was looking around at what was going on in other cases like this, because there are other people that have had tax related issues. And so how have those been resolved? So FTX, multi-billion dollar fraud, multi-billion dollar tax liability, they settle it for pennies on the dollar.

Michael Saylor, massive tax penalty, a whole bunch of issues going back a number of years settles his tax liability. So I just assume this is typical run-of-the-mill IRS extortion. They're going to try to threaten him, intimidate him, and they're just trying to negotiate a price. And so I was thinking at that point, once he was out on bail, you know what, he'll negotiate this, and this probably isn't a DEFCON 1 situation.

Well, one month goes by, two months goes by, three months go by, and then it becomes very clear that it's political and it's punitive because they have not offered him any ability to pay. They have not even said what the discrepancy is or entered into any negotiations to settle his tax liability. This is purely politically motivated and it is transparently politically motivated. That's fucking chilling, man. That's that they're going through these links. I recently listened to an interview

with Mike Benz. He's this former State Department head of cybersecurity or something like that. I might have butchered that, but he went into the detail about how they're doing this legally and they're getting other countries involved and how they're going after enemies of the state, which they see as enemies of state. And they've made they've crafted laws that.

You know people that speak like this that talk about freedom and and and building parallel economies or or or that are advocates of crypto outside of bitcoin you know that they're they're threats to the state they're they're like literal terrorists according to these people and what you just said that example you just gave is i mean that sounds exactly they're like they're using it for that right they're just they're going after their political enemies man it it's fucking scary.

I don't even know a solution to this. If they just keep doing like this, they keep acting like this. They keep slowly squeezing people out, like putting Roger in prison. Where is he right now, by the way? Is he still in Spain? Yeah, he's in Mallorca. He's on an island. He can't leave. He has to check in every other day.

And again, he's sitting there. And at any point in time, he could either get noticed that he won and they're not extraditing him, or they could throw him in prison without any any advanced knowledge that that is how he lives every day when he wakes up motherfucker dude yeah that i mean it doesn't seem like there's a way to fight that you know like there's i don't see i mean unless everybody wakes up and we fucking have another january

6th or something right like they just keep taking out their political enemies and any any populist movement they're claiming that trump that's what mike benz did he rubbed me the wrong directions claiming that Trump was this, you know, this bastion of a populist movement and the people behind Trump, no doubt were, you know, it was a populist movement, but I don't see Trump being the.

You know, the, the antithesis to the state that they, that all these people claim he is, but that's, that's what they seem like they're doing. They're just going after the political enemies. And it seems unstoppable.

I don't, I will tell you my, my, so my opinion on this is, so i'm a big exit and build guy and i'm not gonna i think i probably talked about my background a little bit i'm not going to spend a lot of time on that other than just say i had a business destroyed and then i spent five and a half years in 280 million dollars in my own law fair so at this point i'm kind of like we we have to go all in to stop this and you know i tried political activism for a while and i realized that isn't it and

so i definitely adopted the exit build strategy however we can't exit and build, while our top people are in cages. So from my perspective, this is why I've taken such a complete interest in this. So we need to do everything that we can to help get Roger pardoned. But then there's another aspect to this, because you said chilling effect. And that's exactly what they want, right? They didn't want people to read hijacking Bitcoin. And they also don't want people to use Zeno.

They don't want people to use Monero. They don't want people using privacy coins. So you know what we need to do? We need to shove the bat up their ass. And we need to use this as a rallying cry to get mass adoption for privacy coins. And we need to get as many people as possible reading Hijacking Bitcoin. And the one thing that I love about what happened with the Tucker Carlson interview. Hijacking Bitcoin is now the number one book on Amazon for cryptocurrency.

It has overtaken the Bitcoin standard. So we can't have any fear about this. There's no point in having fear. Fear is useless, but we need to be all in because there is no doubt at this point in time after. Again, Ian's thing, talking to Neri off, observing and following and engaging in Roger's situation. There is no doubt it's political. And yes, I mean, is Trump going to fix it? Trump can get our people out of jail. He can get Ross out of jail.

He uniquely can get Ross and Roger out of jail. But the real solutions here are what Roger was always talking about, which is we need money separated from state and we need to start building alternative parallel systems. And we need to do that very aggressively. And we need to get more organized. This seems like a good time to mention, we've been talking about Ian Freeman here, guys. He doesn't have quite the amount of support that Roger does or even Ross. Check out his story at freeiannow.org.

And then also, please just take a second, even if you have to pause this podcast, go to your web browser, type in freerogernow.org and sign the petition, guys. So important. But Aaron, you made a great point there that the feds aren't willing to compromise. They're not willing to create some type of deal. So Roger could just pay off this fine. I think that speaks volumes, right?

That's huge. And it really kind of highlights the double standards that the government creates with these winners and losers and this arbitrary selection process. It's kind of at a whim, I guess, but maybe it isn't. Maybe it is more politically oriented as far as just trying to target dissidents like Roger.

But it is strange to me that out of all the media coverage that Roger did get from being arrested in Spain, nobody really mentioned that his attorney's door was kicked in, or at least none of the articles I saw on mainstream media that, I mean, maybe they did and somewhere in small print at the bottom of the article or something, you know, but like, that wasn't the focal point.

And that seems like it should be the focal point. That is something absolutely serious. So I mean, from the outside looking in for people who aren't maybe as familiar with these things as we are, the normies, if you will, like, how do you think this case will impact the perception of cryptocurrencies among the general public. Do you think this is going to be something that does really encourage people to get involved? Or do you think this is just kind of noise in the background?

Or how do you think this is going to land? I think it depends on how successful we are at getting the word out. But there is a big movement. There are a lot of people involved in this Free Roger Now campaign. So you've seen a couple of my interviews, but people like Robert Barnes, the constitutional lawyer, he's done some big interviews. He's been on Alex Jones, Viva Fry. He was on with me with Dr. Drew, Tom Woods. There are other interviews slated.

This process is just kicking off. And so I think that this is, and obviously the key interview was Roger's interview with Tucker Carlson. So I think if this story can get out there as it looks like it is, and I think once people can understand it, then I think that's going to spark outrage. The biggest issue that we have is the internal fighting with Bitcoin Maxis.

I mean, I will say it does seem like one of the things, at least on X, that's happened And as a result of this Twitter Tucker interview, it's kind of rekindled the Bitcoin block size war debate, which is not the right point that people should be focusing on, right? I mean, that's a big distraction. Bitcoin maxis should be understanding that they're the ones that are in the crosshairs next. So that's a distraction.

But at the same time, I think the more people find out about it, and you're seeing people. Elon Musk even responded to the Tucker. He did his exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. So I think this is going to have a very positive effect. But then here's the other problem. So yes, they're going after crypto, but most people are in Bitcoin.

Most people don't know that they're basically putting all their money in a PSYOP that is basically designed to suck all of their money away from alternatives to CBDCs. So, you know, how how nested does this conversation need to be? And that's that's probably the bigger challenge, because people really need to understand that the threat here is that we still need peer to peer digital cash. And so, you know, Bitcoin isn't the answer.

Well, if Elon's on board and he's paying attention, I mean, if there's any one person that could really get the normies to pay attention to things, it's certainly Elon. So let's hope that is the case. And yeah, it's great to hear that there is kind of a campaign mounting up. And I think it was like November 19th, there was a big push on that specific day where everybody was posting about Roger as well. And I was kind of hoping that wasn't going to be the peak. And it sure sounds like it's not.

It sounds like things are continually moving in that direction. But I did want to ask you here, just shifting away slightly, Aaron, like, you know, after Trump won the presidency, we did start to see a dramatic shift in the crypto space.

Even though nothing had really technically changed, the prospects of the end on the war of crypto and the possibility of some stability in the crypto ecosystem were enough to take Bitcoin from around 77,000 to nearly 100,000, which it's sitting at right now in just a month. And it's not just Bitcoin either. Ripple, Ethereum, many other coins have also seen some big gains in a short amount of time.

I know we all have mixed feelings about Trump being elected and some legitimate concerns of his policies regarding rights and financial stability, especially regarding his advocacy of tariffs. But I want to ask you, are you optimistic about where the cryptosphere and Bitcoin is headed in general, kind of regardless of the whole hijacking of Bitcoin by the intel agencies and big money interests and all that?

I mean, obviously, Bitcoin is just one element of crypto, but like zooming out, do you believe that Trump's influence will be a net positive for crypto? Trump's influence will buy us time. I actually hate bull markets because if you look at what's happened the last couple of bull markets, what ends up happening? Influencers push coins like Hawk and you have these tokens or hot dog or memes or NFTs and people make a bunch of money in fiat. The market crashes.

Meanwhile, the technocrats are building tokenized systems to digitally tokenize all of our assets, not just money, our homes, our stocks, our bonds and everything else. And they get closer to rolling out a complete dystopian control grid. So it's a good news, bad news situation. Trump clearly buys us more time because we don't have people like Gary Gensler.

But if we use it for stupid things, if we use it for meme coins, things that have no utility, understanding that the technocrats have already developed and are just enhancing surveillance tech using crypto. Then it's a complete waste of time. This is my biggest concern about all of this. Now, separately, I mean, as I, you know, I hope at some point, what really needs to happen is Trump needs to talk to Roger about crypto, because I don't think Trump's, the advice that he's getting is great.

One of the reasons Bitcoin is going up in price is because of the Bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that's a villain arc out of an Ayn Rand novel. If Nancy Pelosi went on TV and said, hey, listen, guys, good news, the American taxpayer is going to spend a trillion dollars buying my stock portfolio, and they're going to lock it up for 20 years, people would be irate.

This is exactly what's going on with the strategic reserve. So let's keep in mind, the strategic reserve has as its basis 200,000 Bitcoin that were stolen, which were accumulated through civil asset forfeiture, which is theft. Now, on top of that, they're going to use taxpayer money to continue to buy more. That's part of what the price appreciation is. And so that is not good news at all. That doesn't help.

That doesn't help the underlying anything regarding finding solutions for peer-to-peer digital cash, and it doesn't do anything to fight CBDCs. If anything, it enables and makes it much easier for those things to happen in the future. The other thing people need to look out for is this worship of Cynthia Loomis, who's this Wyoming U.S. Senator who puts up all these crypto bills and who wrote the Strategic Reserve Bill.

Read the bills that she's written. She has written, she's put up a bill twice with Gillibrand from New York. Her bills give more control to banks. She's anti-privacy. The last bill that she wrote bans algorithmic stablecoins, and it's basically setting it up so that stablecoins will only be able to be issued by the largest regulated financial institutions in the United States.

So it's an attack on DeFi. It is an attack on Tether, which I don't like Tether, but Tether should be able to exist in the marketplace. And so, again, we have a breather here, but if we don't do anything with this extra time, and certainly if we rely on the legislation that's going to be drafted, that's going to be crony legislation that won't do anything to protect privacy or provide alternatives from central bank digital tyranny.

Yeah, not at all, man. And we've been talking about like this political persecution by the state and, you know, by this lawlessness of the state going after their political enemies.

But that's what you've just mentioned, you know, that we're clearly not going to rely on politicians to solve this for us. But I was wondering if you know of any. Bills or any legislation that is actually coming out that we should keep an eye out for right now, like, you know, regarding CBDCs or kind of potential attacks on crypto or anything like that? So I wrote a long article since we, I was on last and because I've spent a lot of time on this.

Obviously, I do a lot of these interviews and one of the first questions people ask me is, well, what is a CBDC? And after thinking about it and studying it for a couple of years, I've realized we already have a CBDC.

So, and I've actually created kind of a CBDC tyranny index, but the The way money is created in this country is the federal government issues an IOU to the Federal Reserve, and then the Federal Reserve creates the money out of thin air, and it's actually in an Oracle database, which is by definition a central bank digital currency. So all of the stuff that people worry about with CBDCs, tracking, censorship, programmability, we already have that today.

People aren't aware of it. On the tracking front, I've identified 13 different federal government programs that surveil our financial transactions. I'm not going to go through all 13. I'll just give you a couple. The IRS is now working with banks using AI to analyze our financial transactions. The NSA is doing bulk data collection. Through the Patriot Act, they can come in without a warrant, seize our bank accounts, and then they can issue what's called a national security

letter where we can't talk to anybody about it, including a lawyer. This exists today. So it doesn't get, well, It sounds like it doesn't get much. It can get worse than that. But I mean, what's worse than the IRS, the NSA, and then them being able to arbitrarily seize your bank accounts and you can't even talk to a lawyer? That's pretty bad as far as programmability goes.

Anybody that has a health savings account or a flexible spending account, those are debit cards tied to a bank that you can only use to buy very specific health care items from specific retailers at specific times. It's programmable digital money. MasterCard had a pilot program for a Doconomy MasterCard in conjunction with the UN that tracks your carbon output and shuts off access to the card if you use too much carbon. That uses the existing system. So there is no new blockchain.

There's no technological upgrade to have a, quote, central bank digital currency. We have a central bank digital currency. There are just layers of tyranny that can be added upon it. And so I'm actually writing another book, which I haven't had a lot of time to get to. But my argument in that is that we already have a central bank digital currency. And then people will say, yeah, and we don't want a China-style social credit system.

It's awful. Look at what they have in China. We have a social credit system as well. It's called the 75,000-page, 16-million-word tax code. Literally, our tax code is a system of penalties and incentives. But you know what? We don't even know what the penalties and incentives are. We don't have an app. And if we don't follow the rules, they throw us in prison. There are 1.8 million Americans in prison. There are only 1.69 million Chinese in prison.

So my argument in this book is like, we're already, we're already living the situation that people fear in the future. And boy, can it get much worse. So when I look at the legislation, in particular that Loomis had drafted in the past, and I think about Trump saying, oh, well, we're going to provide clear guidance. I hate it when somebody says clear rules of the road.

I mean, that basically just means they're locking in, you know, crony interests and, you know, carving out who's going to get an advantage using the force of the state. That's what that immediate reaction is that I get. And so we need to be really worried about the next 100 days and the kind of, quote, clarity they're going to provide, because I've seen no indication and I have not seen a single bill except something that was called the anti-CBDC bill.

But the anti-CBDC bill basically just said that the Federal Reserve can't create CBDC without congressional approval. Well, that's a useless bill that was unnecessary because the Federal Reserve doesn't have the ability to create a CBDC without congressional approval. All of the stuff that I mentioned about surveillance, that stuff didn't come from the Federal Reserve. All of those laws were written by Congress. And so it's like Congress is sitting here saying the Federal Reserve is the bad guy.

And don't get me wrong, the Federal Reserve is a criminal cartel that is completely unnecessary that will, you know, commit genocide to get an extra 5% yield. So I'm not going to say anything good about the Federal Reserve, but all of the stuff that we don't like about our existing digital monetary system, those were laws passed by Congress.

Yeah, you know, well said, first of all, and it does feel like the mechanisms of the state are beginning to kind of capitulate because they realize people are pissed and they need to continue their illusion authority. So they toss us a few crumbs occasionally.

And I guess what that anti-CBDC bill was is basically that, you know, and, you know, to add to your sentiment there, there's already 134 countries that are, you know, piloting or have already implemented CBDCs, including major economies like Russia and Japan.

And also, you know, put a finer point on what you're saying, you know, the journalist Whitney Webb, who's also a previous podcast guest of the Free Thought Project, she's been really stressing on the fact that they're going to somehow manipulate some stable coins into what appears to be a CBDC. And that kind of aligns with what you were just saying, Aaron, about already having a central bank digital currency.

So there's a lot to be paying attention to right now. And I think that's exactly why you've had so much time and talking to a lot of these bigger figures, because you seem to really understand this and you've been really doing your homework. And speaking of which, I did want to talk about a possible solution here because we are getting close to the end of the podcast.

You know, Roger talked quite a bit about the importance of privacy when it comes to money and financial transactions on the Tucker Carlson interview. And one of the options he talked about was Monero, but one of the lesser known privacy coins he also spoke about was Xano. And I know you were just talking about that earlier in this conversation, and you've talked about it in the previous months as well.

Watching it on CoinMarketCap over the past week, you know, it's been kind of exciting because it's really starting to make some serious strides in price going up like, what, 30%, if not more. What can you tell us about this coin and why do you believe it's, you know, one of the most important cryptocurrencies we can currently invest in right now?

So the interesting thing about this is, so Roger, he mentioned it on my podcast, and then he reached out to me afterwards, because he saw a podcast that I did talking about how... In order to enable peer-to-peer digital cash, we need easier-to-use wallets, and we need easier-to-use point-of-sale systems. And so he said to me, look, you really should take a look at Zainab. He's been pretty dead on in the past, so I did. I took a look.

I read the white paper, downloaded a wallet, and I've actually fallen in love with the project. I've since met the whole team, met the developers, talked to these guys, and I've been working with them and collaborating with them on things. This is, let me tell you why this technology is so important. So CBDCs are tokenized money, okay? So it's basically creation of digital tokens that represent money.

But the same people that are building the CBDCs are also working on a common platform where they're going to tokenize all of our other assets. So our stocks and bonds and our mortgages, all of those assets are going to be tokenized in the same way as CBDCs, meaning they will be able to be centrally programmed. they will be able to be tracked and they will be able to be censored. What Xeno allows you to do is to create privacy tokens.

So it's the exact opposite of their situation. So Monero, which is the leading privacy coin. So imagine having Monero level privacy, but on assets that you tokenize. So now you're tokenizing and trading stocks with Monero level privacy or, and let me give you a couple of real world examples of how this is used. There's something that Roger announced for the first time called Confidential Layer.

And I think I mentioned this earlier. Confidential Layer allows you to bridge your Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum into Zeno. So you can basically take these transparent blockchains and now add privacy to them. And I think the fee for this is like 0.3% to make your transparent blockchains private. I'm working on something that I'm going to launch next year called Karma, K-A-U-R-M-A, which is a gold-backed privacy stablecoin.

So imagine you have gold in decentralized vaults in different countries around the world, and you have a privacy token that people can use, and they can actually redeem the token for physical gold, but it's separate from the state. So those are just a couple of examples. But to me, Zeno represents the best privacy platform in solution to combat this technocracy tyranny. And by the way, I'm not saying this is a maximalist because I want to be very clear.

We need multiple coins just in order to be able to handle the transaction capacity. And I'm all for market-based solutions. So I use Monero and I use Pirate Chain and I'll look at any privacy coin just to be very clear so that inevitably somebody will say, oh, well, you're a maxi for this and everything else. No, I'm broadly for the sector. But in terms of being able to tokenize things and to make other assets private. Zeno is incredible. And the founder...

Andre, the founding developer of this, actually worked on the development of CryptoNote, which is the technology behind Monero. So this guy is an absolute OG in terms of cryptography and privacy coins. And so I'm glad Roger recommended that I take a look at this. And I've been recommending to everybody else to look at it, download a wallet, and start using it. You can create a privacy token within the wallet for like, it's, I guess now it would be like $1.80.

It's like 0.1, actually $1.18. It's like 0.1 Zeno to create a token, a privacy token. You can create your own supply. You can name the token. There's no smart contract involved. And so it takes less than a minute. So you compare this to what it would take to tokenize something on Ethereum in terms of having a developer work on it, having the contract audited, and then the fees are expensive, and then it's on a transparent blockchain.

This is something you can do instantly from within a wallet without programming. So it is very powerful anti-tyranny technology. It's also deflationary as well, right? It is. Once you reach, I think, 200,000 transactions per day, it becomes deflationary. Okay.

All right, Freethinkers, this episode is nearing the end. We wanted to take this time to remind you, if you found value in this conversation, please consider hitting that like button and subscribing to the Free Thought Project podcast on your preferred platform of choice. It's an easy, no-cost way to support us and ensure you never miss an episode. Also, the Free Thought Project operates primarily on the generosity of our listeners.

If you believe in our mission and support our cause, please consider donating or subscribing by going to the membership tab at the top of our website. Your contributions ensure We are able to continue our important work, having these important conversations, and your donations help us do just that. Lastly, if you're part of an organization or own a business that aligns with our mission and values, we are currently inviting sponsorships for our podcast.

This is a fantastic opportunity to promote your product or make your brand visible to our engaged audience while supporting meaningful discourse. Thank you for your support, Freethinkers. And as always, thank you for listening. Wow, man, those are some badass solutions, dude.

And I guess we are we just hit the hour mark man so we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up here and I before we before we close I have one more question I just and first I want to take a moment to genuinely thank you dude for you know your dedication in this fight and for helping to amplify what what's happening to Roger man and apologize earlier for in the podcast I know I came off a little bleak you know I was saying your story was fucking chilling I'm not gonna lie dude especially given

the you know like the sheer brazenness of these state actors that and how they label those people like very veer as a threat you know and people who are genuinely advocating for peace and freedom and sound money like that's the opposite of a threat you know but the reality is you know as you stated earlier there is no room for fear in this fight you're absolutely right dude you know it's voices like yours that keep this movement alive man like the work you're doing those solutions that you

just proposed today or just a second ago like monero and xeno and the all these other decentralized systems this is this is the solution right we're the solution we we have to partake in these tangible tools that so we can push back just not in theory but in action right we have to build these parallel networks we have to practice agorism we have to embrace these systems to make the old ways obsolete i mean and show the new ways are the ones that can resist tyranny, right? Yeah.

But, you know, in the meantime, we have to rally together and focus on freeing Roger in the short term. Right. So, Aaron, with all that said, man, what is one thing that people could go do right now?

Something tangible that would have the most impact in fighting against these tyrants. And of course, we're going to send people to freerogernow.com. But, you know, after you answer that question, is there anything else you'd like to plug before we wrap up? So I'm going to say the three things are go to freerogernow.org, sign the open letter, and then send it to friends and DM them. Send it on Telegram signal because of these social media sites.

I mean, you also share it on social media, but understand external links are suppressed. But absolutely do that. But then the other two things are related to why they are going after Roger. So let's reverse this. Let's make a galvanizing effect. So buy hijacking Bitcoin and download a Zeno wallet. because if Roger wasn't sitting in his current situation, he would probably be out giving talks about privacy tokens and about Zeno and he would be out talking about his book.

So let's not let them have that chilling effect. Let's reverse it. Hell yeah, I love it, man. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Aaron. It's always a pleasure. And I can say that now since this is your second time on here. And again, man, we really appreciate what you're doing and raising this awareness. And the solutions that you're proposing and not just the talking, man. It's amazing and it's an inspiration, brother. Take care.

Thank you, Aaron. Thank you. Thank you guys for everything you do. Music.