Guest: Mark Edge - Ian Freeman's Case & The Fight For Decentralized Freedom

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Welcome to the Free Thought Project Podcast, a hub for free-thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability. Here are your hosts, Jason Bassler and Matt Agorist. Hello again, freethinkers. Welcome back to the Free Thought Project podcast. My name is Jason Bassler and joining me is no one. I'm actually by myself today, guys, which will be quite fun.

Matt's on vacation and rightfully so. He's a hard worker and definitely deserves some downtime.

So and i have a feeling this is going to be a great conversation but before i get into the introduction of our guests i as always wanted to jump into a few announcements here guys so first and foremost i wanted to apologize that we missed our show last week we try to be consistent with our weekly episodes but i was in vegas i was at the bitcoin conference and apparently so was our guest today so i'm sure we'll be getting into more

about that shortly but i certainly enjoyed myself and i do feel reinvigorated, which is nice. And also guys, if you didn't hear our last episode two weeks ago with sound money activist Aaron Day and Mr. Quibs from Xano, definitely listen to that episode after this one. We did a deep dive into Xano, which is a privacy oriented crypto coin that offers many new innovative features that a lot of other privacy coins don't really have the capability of.

And if you're down the rabbit hole like we are and trying our best to opt out of the surveillance state and the fiat vacant cartel, that episode is definitely for you. And geez, there's a lot of momentum right now behind Xano guys. So make sure you take a listen to that one. I think it's really important. Also, in that same episode, I announced that I am personally working on an online Know Your Right seminar that will be launching in the next few weeks.

I'm just finishing up some of the back end website work, but very shortly, you'll be able to sign up for both an online class and an in-person class. And as you guys know, myself and the Freed Bob Project have been reporting on the police state and police accountability stories for well over a decade now. So that coupled with the fact that I've actually taught Know Your Right classes locally here in my area. Well, I'm super excited to be doing this and to be rolling it out to our followers.

So keep an eye on that at JasonBassler.com and I'll be debuting that very soon. And last but not least, Freethinkers, please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast on your podcast player of choice. And while you're there, please leave a quick review and rating. This is a massive help to us and signals to the algorithms that our podcast is popular and valuable, and it just takes a moment.

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Okay, guys, so let's go ahead and jump into the introduction for our guest today. Our guest today is Mark Edge. Mark is a longtime Libertarian radio host and co-founder of Free Talk Live, a show that's been calling out the state's lies long before it was popular and long before it was trendy. He's a Liberty veteran, a free stater up there in New Hampshire, and has spent decades challenging statism, promoting peace, and defending free speech over the airwaves.

So, Mark, welcome to the Freethought Project podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? Very well, Jason. Thank you for the invite. Absolutely, man. Well, yeah, as I mentioned, you know, we wanted to have you on last week, but that kind of got shifted to this week. And it's certainly great to have you on. I think of, you know, some of the first people I became familiar with when I got into all this back in 2011. And it was you. It was you and Ian Freeman and Freetalk Live.

And as you may or may not know, you know, the Free Thought Project has had a lot of overlap and found a lot of mutual benefit working with CopLock back in the day. And I think at one point, Pete and maybe even Ademo lived in the Free State Project. And your work and Free Talk Live would come up a lot back then. And so I know without a doubt that you're an OG in this space. And so is your co-host, the legendary Mr. Ian Freeman, who is unfortunately locked up behind bars right now.

And, you know, I'm sure we'll be getting into that and spend a significant amount of time on the show today talking about that.

But first, I thought maybe we could start on maybe a slightly more pleasant note. And maybe you could share your experience at the Bitcoin conference last week. I was hoping I'd bump into you, but this was by far the largest conference I've ever been to. I think they said somewhere around 30,000 people in attendance. But yeah, what were your thoughts about it? And especially as somebody who's watched Bitcoin grow from its infancy, like how did you feel about the whole event?

Well, I had a lot of feelings and thanks for asking. So let's start on how big it was, because I have never been to an event that felt like that. This number, and this number is somewhere between 30 and 45. five. I've heard, you know, different people state different numbers and who knows, because I know that they were, you know, encouraging lots of people to come in. They were giving bonus tickets and a lot of things. And I've never experienced anything like an event like this.

You could see a person and then never see that person again. I was walking down the hall. I saw Brian Johnson from Don't Die. I'm like, Brian Johnson. He's like, hi, can you help me get to such and such? And I'm like, sure, it's that way. And then off he goes. Right. And then that was, you know, it, I had a half a dozen people. I was supposed to meet there to do sort of free E and now.org activism and, I never saw these people the entire time. Four days.

So, you know, the fact that you and I didn't see each other, not surprising at all. I ended up getting shuttled into the J.D. Vance speech. And I must say, it was a good speech. I thought that he did well at it. And I think he knew his audience. He didn't spend a lot of time pounding politics. He just, you know, pointed out that he's trying, they're trying to make the Republican Party the party of crypto.

Which I think has its is a two-sided sword but regardless it's better than no party both parties making bitcoin you know the this evil currency that is used by drug dealers and terrorists I you remember the old line also when it came to the event bitcoin was very very much central to this so there weren't a lot of altcoins and you got the impression that maxis were kind of running the show to some extent. Now, I'm not anti-Maxie.

I believe that we've got to reach across the aisle and bring both sides of a long dead conflict together because there's no particular point at this point talking about Bitcoin and how it could have been this way or that way and that kind of thing. I just would like to see everybody be together and that's going to take some things.

I guess we're big blockers. It's going to take the big blockers not being so angry and pugnacious, and it's going to take the maxis being, you know, stop dancing the victory dance, you know, and stop using terms like peer-to-peer when you're referring to lightning. Lightning's not good. I mean, I've seen this conflict between maxis and big blockers for years now, and I get where it comes from.

I participated in World War Geek like so many did, but I'd really rather just at this point have everybody have your coin and stop trashing everybody else's, I think, is the best way to do it. Sure. No, no, no. Well, you made some good points there, some humorous points. Yeah, I saw Lynn Albrecht at one point and I, you know, we're walking past each other and she didn't see me. I don't even think she really knows who I am, to be honest.

But I was thinking in my head, I'm going to see her again. I'm going to ask her to be on the podcast. She's just started her new organization. And sure enough, never saw her again. So your point's certainly valid there. I miss the J.D. Vance speech, but, you know, as much as I'm not a fan, not necessarily just because, you know, any type of political leaning, it's just, I don't know. I don't particularly, I'm not fond of politicians, but I think he is smart enough to know his audience.

I think he is intelligent enough to know how to frame his speech. And so it doesn't surprise me that he kind of stepped to the plate and had a strategy in mind there. And I did want to get into the Republican Party kind of making themselves into the Crypto Party at some point in this conversation, because I feel like that's a valid conversation to touch on as well.

But much like you you know i i felt like boy this this whole event i mean it was overwhelming i felt kind of like a noob even though i've been in this world for as long as i have and i'm not like super technical like in the weeds crypto guy i feel like i have a pretty good understanding of it but boy there was just so much there to offer and so many corners of of crypto that i've just never you know stepped foot in and so that part of it i felt like well i need to step up my game a little bit.

And so I plan on doing that in the near future. But the glossy facade that the conference had certainly was a far cry from its roots of, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto's original intention and vision for Bitcoin. But that didn't bother me too much. Like you were saying, we're here now, you know, I understand like as much as we want to go back to the kind of the peer-to-peer mentality, it's just certainly it's not going to happen.

And so I'm kind of right there with you. I think we do kind of need to find a way to bridge the divide. And I'm not necessarily against the Maxis. I do, as a principled libertarian, appreciate Satoshi's vision. And I think that was certainly important to hold on to. But because it has shifted so much, I don't think there's any chance of her putting the toothpaste back in the tube in that sense.

And the one thing that I did take from it was that there is just this overwhelming enthusiasm for permissionless money and this whole expanding world of crypto assets that seems to be blossoming right now. And that was intoxicating to me. That was the energy that I fed off of. And it kind of helped propel me when I got back home, back into my office, back on the computer to be reinvigorated in my own work, in my own quest here.

I love that part, too. And I think that's, to me, the most important part of it is that I've been to a couple of Bitcoin conventions recently, Bitcoin 2025. And before that, it was like token 2049 or something. It was in Singapore.

And what I saw was a whole new breed of crypto, even the Maxis, even the Bitcoiners, whatever they are, a whole new breed of them that, really are excited about the things that bitcoin talked about in the early days and so i think they're very trying very hard to create private transactions and to do a variety of things on their platform and i can do nothing but support that now you know i mean i can so what it's going to require for me is to sort of let some of the past go yeah right and

well you know we're we're certainly, you know, big supporters of private privacy coins and people like Roger Veer as well. And so, you know, just to know his story and what he's been through, and of course, his recent book, The Hijacking of Bitcoin, it kind of puts Bitcoin in a different light for me. So while everybody was there, you know, sitting next to me, watching the speakers and cheering and standing and.

You know, really pouring their heart into the support that they're giving the speakers it's just hard for me to be completely on board just because it does feel like it has been co-opted in some ways but at the same time like again like stepping back to our roots here and how far it's come and just even if it's not necessarily a perfect crypto just to see how far it's really progressed and the enthusiasm behind it i think was really exciting so

my mom is in the dog showing world, the American Kennel Club. And a saying that she had long, long ago is that there's no such thing as a perfect dog, right? There was no dog that you could look at and he was, you know, the ears would sit the right way. The paws would point, you know, both forward, you know, they would have the perfect coat, the perfect lines and all those things. And I think that's true in the crypto world, too. Bitcoin's the Jupiter of cryptocurrencies. It's gigantic.

And none of them can compare to it in that way. And I guess, you know, I'm just going to have to accept the growing pains that it had to go through didn't grow the way that I wanted it to. But that, you know, we live in the world we live in and Bitcoin is the way that it is in this world. And hopefully it can get better over time. And it's certainly better than the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Lempira.

Yes. And any type of CBDC, although, you know, obviously there's speculation that this could be some type of surveillance technology in the future. So who knows? But it's surveillance technology now. I mean, you read Hijacking Bitcoin. You read, if you haven't read Tracers in the Dark, this is on the capture of the Dread Pirate Roberts and a variety of other, people in the crypto world and how they used cryptocurrency as a surveillance tool to find these people.

Sure. Right. Right. Yeah. I guess I meant more on like a wide scale, more of like a mass adoption by AI is here. Right. Well, yeah. And we're going to be maybe get into that as well. If we have some time with the whole Palantir news front that just kind of hit us within the last few days here. But, you know, you just did mention that the Dread Park Pirates Roberts.

And I wanted to ask you, you know, what your thoughts about Ross taking the stage was because, you know, this is the first event that Ross Ulbricht has actually spoken at since, you know, he was released from federal prison. He was locked up since 2013. And personally, as somebody who's been watching his case from the beginning, I feel like I've created dozens of memes to raise awareness about his case. I even wrote him letters in prison.

I mean, for me, it was particularly exhilarating to witness him walk out on the stage and hear the roar of the crowd. And I know we all have a lot of feelings about Trump, but I think one of the positive things that he's done and we have to give him credit for was freeing Ross. So did you see Ross speak? And if you did, like, what were your thoughts about his message and his significance of his return to the public stage?

I didn't get to see Ross speak, but, you know, several of my cohort were in the room and said that it was very exciting. You know, this is how I think about Trump, is that come 2028, we're going to have a president. And there's nothing I can do to make that not true. I can be upset about it, or I cannot be upset, or whatever the case may be. So for me, if I can get one thing out of a politician... They can have my vote. My vote is mathematically insignificant and unimportant.

And I'll tell my listeners, look, this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. If you agree with me, then feel free to vote the way that I'm voting. And if you don't agree with me, then feel free to share with me and call in and talk about what it is that you think. But this is what I'm going to do and why I'm going to do it. And so I voted for Donald Trump. And the reason was, is he went to the Libertarian National Convention.

So he reached out to us and said, oh, look, you autists are alive, which is more than any politician has ever done for us. And then he said that he would free Ross on, excuse me, he said he would, yeah, commute Ross Ulbricht's sentence on day one. And I think it was day two, but he gave him a full pardon. So I'm willing to call it a fair trade. And then And he said that he was going to, I don't know, make Bitcoin great again or something, you know, make the U.S.

And Bitcoin and, you know, make U.S. Bitcoin land or something. Right. And just the very fact that you're not arresting my friends like Ian Freeman and Ross Albrecht for the use of cryptocurrency. I like that. And then third thing he said is that he's going to avoid World War Three, which is to say, try to somehow tone down the conflict between the United States and Russia, the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. it. And these three things were sufficient for me to have.

He probably could have got it with any one of those things, but it's sufficient to get my vote to for Donald Trump. So fine. I mean, if somebody wants to say I'm, you know, some way perpetuated the system, I'd like to see the mathematical backing for that, because I think that Trump lost New Hampshire and my vote was therefore meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

No, I mean, it makes sense. And we've been talking on this podcast, you know, ever since, well, at least a year before Trump was actually elected, that there is nuance to this conversation. As philosophical anarchists, you know, it is hard to really lend our support in any direction towards the state. But there is an argument to be made, logically, that, yeah, this was the lesser of two evils.

I think, you know, obviously the Free Thought Project, we more have been just trying to point out that the two-party system is the problem and participating in it in general is the problem. And obviously, like you just said, Mark, that's not going to change overnight, right? So in the meantime. I think that there's lots of problems, right? The two-party system certainly isn't great, and it tries to perpetuate itself. But if there were three or four parties, the people that got power would still

be corrupt, and they would still be corrupted. did. So we know from, you know, there's plenty of science out there that has looked at this and that not only does power track the corrupt, but it also corrupts the people that are within it. It takes a very special person to, like Ron Paul comes to mind, to be able to work within that system and be the way you are consistently day after day after day.

And really the problem is the power and it coalesces to itself it tries to it attracts more and more i was using the jupiter analogy with bitcoin but it powers like gravity it it just attracts more things and more things until you got a problem sure and and we certainly have a problem i guess that's all relative too at the same time but yeah and again you know just to reaffirm here and maybe we don't really get into the weeds on this too often in the podcast.

But, you know, we, I don't want to speak for Matt or Don, but I think generally at the Free Thought Project, we support the multi-prong approach. I don't think there's any one linear path towards liberty, you know, and I think we all need to be stepping up and moving forward in different ways to start spinning the wheels of liberty. And I think one of those ways is politics. So, you know, I'm certainly not trying to poo-poo that idea.

I think personally here, you know, we're more of like trying to win the hearts and minds. Obviously, there's that route, the multi-pronged. There's obviously the That's Don's route. Winning the hearts and minds, that's really the thing. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that, yeah, I voted for Trump, but I don't support everything he does. And I don't think that anybody who votes for somebody supports everything that anybody does.

And voting isn't perpetuating the system. It isn't violence against your neighbor. It's just a reality of modern life. Well, yeah. And just to finish my point there, I mean, it's just more of like the Larkin Rose approach of like, you know, a, authority is all an illusion. As soon as we're able to evolve past this idea of political authority is probably when we'll start to see a little more of a free and peaceful world.

But for now, we're still here in clown world. So we're doing what we can to navigate that.

And speaking of which, I mentioned Ian Freeman there, and it's kind of one of the topics that I really wanted to sink our teeth into today, because obviously this is somebody near and dear to you. This is a story that's close to your heart. It's close to mine as well, because, boy, everybody seemed to be screaming from the rooftops about Free Ross. Even Roger Veer has some pretty good momentum behind his campaign.

But it doesn't seem like many people are speaking about Ian's case, and it bothers me. And I feel like there should be more conversation about that. So some quick background. The official story basically goes that Ian Freeman was sentenced to eight years in federal prison in October, 2023 for operating an unlicensed Bitcoin exchange that facilitated laundering of over 10 million in proceeds from quote romance scams. And you might have to give us some context on that.

And apparently other internet frauds, he was convicted on charges, including conspiracy to commit money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and tax evasion. So again, that's just the official narrative, but I did want to give you a moment to kind of dispel the lies there and give our audience some background on this case and maybe your perspective on where things stand with Ian right now.

Yeah, I think the best way, the best analogy for what happened with Ian's case is that the federal prosecutor was able to convince a jury that, here's the analogy part, that a gun store owner was responsible for the liquor store robbery because he sold the gun. And so, Ian, well, first off, I think the best place to start is that we decided many years ago, probably around 2011, you mentioned that as the start of the Free Thought Project.

And we've read untold dozens, maybe hundreds of free thought articles on free tough life that we that our show was more akin to a church show or a religious show than it was to a political show. So, you know, as a libertarian, it's very difficult. Well, the Republicans and the Democrats have a very simple solution on the radio as to how to solve all our problems. That's vote for Republicans and vote for Democrats.

And they do their whole thing day in and day out. The other team is dumb and bad and whatever. And you should vote for our team. And they managed to do it year in, year out. And somehow it stays fresh. You got me. Whereas our shtick was really, hey, look, there's a moral philosophy here. And if you adhere to this moral philosophy, your life will be better. But on top of that, everybody else's life will be better too.

And the more people that we can get to adhere to this moral philosophy the better off we'll all be and that sounds like a religious show more than it sounds like political show so we decided to organize ourselves as a church as opposed to just you know another political radio program and, you know the central tenant of our our church is you know don't do violence against people don't initiate violence against people and, you know, that kind of thing.

So, honor your word, you know, everything that libertarianism is. And. When we found Bitcoin, pretty quickly, we were one of the founders of an organization called Bitcoin Not Bombs. And Bitcoin Not Bombs, you know, the tenet was is that with sound money, there will be less violence in the world.

That during World War II, largely considered a just war by people who like wars, that, you know, when the rulers of the United States wanted more money to perpetuate their war, they came out and they said, buy war bonds. Give us money. We'll give you more money back later. Please. That was their whole shtick. Whereas in the early aughts, when George Bush Jr. Says, when he was asked, what should we do to help with the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan and all that stuff? He said, go shopping.

Now, we know the Britonwood Accords is tucked in there between 1940 and 2000. But, you know, the average person may not exactly know why we went from buy war bonds to go shopping. And but what we can say is, is that the new American money allows any organization, but the American government to perpetrate war whenever it wants to. And that any organization that lacks accountability is liable to do, you know, less and less good as time goes by.

And fundamentally as bitcoin not bombs what our goal was is to return to sound money means a return to a more peaceful world and that's our hope so ian considered bitcoin to be one of the sacraments of our church and i agree with him i think bitcoin is a sacrament of our church and cryptocurrency generally anything any sound money is a sacrament of the shire free church So he began trying to get Bitcoin into the hands of as many people as possible.

He used existing tools like local Bitcoins to... They sell or whatever you want to call it, but get Bitcoin into people's hands, allow them to invest, allow them to hold it, do what they wanted with their money. And in doing so, obviously, some scammers came along in the same way that when Walmart throws open its doors and it sells, you know, gift cards and things like that.

It knows that some percentage of the people that buy those gift cards, and maybe that percentage is double digit, maybe a double digit number of the people that buy those gift cards are going, they're participating in a scam. They're likely the victim of a scam. Sure. But they sell them anyway. And Ian tried his very best. He would ask the little old ladies and whomever was calling, do you know who your boyfriend is? Do you know what cryptocurrency is?

Are you doing this as an investment? You know, have you ever met your boyfriend? You know, all kinds of questions. I know because I sat there and I listened to him do it more than once. And then one day in March of 2021, they kicked the door open of our studios. Well, when I say kicked the door open, they actually ran two tanks into the side of the studio. They're called Bearcat. And they, you know, sent in two SWAT teams and a drone. They shattered the window, sent in the drone to look around.

They came in and for no reason I can figure out, no reason that has to do with their job anyway, they just pulled the wires out of the back of our broadcast stack and took off the air for a week, violating the free speech rights of half a million Americans in the process. Anybody who could call in and talk about anything they want was a normal listener. And, you know, it was, it was really, really a frustrating time.

And I, as far as the, you know, saying that Ian participated in romance scams, I don't know how to say, you know, sure, he participated if Walmart participates. Well, yeah, that seems like some important context there. I mean, leave it to the state to take it out of context and vilify someone, you know, and especially, I guess you said 2021 there. So that was still, and, you know, when he was actually sentenced,

which was 2023, those were still the Biden years. I was still kind of when the Biden administration was hot and heavy on the war on crypto and yeah, just targeting, you know, innocent people like Ian. And boy, it's, it's done some untold damage, not only to free talk live, but, you know, just to the crypto community and to the Liberty community, because it's, it's kind of had a, a chilling effect. You know, I want to tell this story that, you know, rarely gets told,

and it's only I who will ever tell it, because Ian will never blow his own horn. But... We as libertarians like a little conspiracy theory, so here's one for you. In 2005, I think it was, Air America was being kicked off as the liberal alternative to conservative talk. And we were at a convention, and I think the convention was in Washington, D.C., and I'm pretty sure it was.

At lunch, you know how you have the normal rubber chicken convention lunch, but in order to eat this lunch, you must listen to the sponsor's message. The sponsor's message was a little-known talk show host, brand new on the stage, called Rachel Maddow. And she had brought on a B-level politician, the senior senator from Delaware. where. And, you know, the Joe Biden sat up there for about 40 minutes,

was interviewed and sort of gave his interview speech. I'm sure he's fed the questions ahead of time. And he sat up there and then he stood up on his last question as he's talking, raises his hand before the crowd, which is a bunch of Republican talk show hosts, ends his speech, prepares for the applause and is roundly booed. And Ian and I were sitting at the same table. We were closest to the door. We're like, oh yeah, we're going to get out of here.

Old Joe, sprier than he was last year, runs to the door and begins to hold it open and shake the people's hands as they go out. And of course, I give my hand to be shook and Ian's behind me. He's about 29 at this point and he sees an opportunity. He hates politicians, hates the system, hates all of that stuff. He sticks his hand way out and Joe goes in for a double two handed shake.

He's excited that somebody wants to shake his hand and then he pulls back the last instant and runs it through his hair in the old hairy hand, the psych from the 80s movies. And everybody jeers and guffaws behind us. And, you know, I kind of wonder whether this is the reason that Ian Freeman went to prison. Oh, man. Well, that was a great story. And yeah, thanks for taking us back in the time machine there. And boy, you know, if Biden maybe had more faculties to him in the past couple

of years, I would suggest that might be a plausible theory. But I mean, who really knows, right? Who knows? Maybe it was another part of the, you could add to the theory that some aid held a grudge and the aid was there and along some longtime aid and decided to do that too. I don't know.

I tend to not entirely agree with the narrative that Biden is somehow or was somehow, you know, not in control. I saw him debate Trump. That wasn't an AI bot, I don't think. And he could at the very least at times turn it on. He did seem to wander off in the woods and tripped on the stairs quite often. But at some point or another, he seemed to have his faculties about him. And it did seem really odd that within a few days into his administration, he's going after Ian.

Right. Yeah, most definitely. Well, let's talk about how, how has this really impacted free talk live? I mean, both in terms of like the show's content and morale of the team and listeners, like, you know, how is it, how has it impacted your show? I'd say Free Talk Live has basically been gutted. It's on life support at this point. Free Talk Live is, you know, barely in existence. Bonnie, Ian's wife, is doing her best to keep things going, but it's on two days a week.

And you know the i think that the magic of free talk live you know and not to be vain or anything was kind of ian and i arguing about the minor minutiae of libertarianism and you know with, with ian in prison and me like keen smells like jail you know not not in keen anymore couldn't really see uh the goal of keeping it all going it just you know didn't wasn't terribly inspiring to me the idea of you know them saying well that edgington guy hasn't learned his lesson let's

go after him too we talk about basically on life support okay gotcha well that's that's frustrating and you know we could certainly relate and empathize you know the free thought project is.

Well maybe not quite on life support anymore but we've been there you know in 2018 we were deplatformed by both facebook and twitter at the same time and boy that was a big loss yeah somewhere around six million fans that we lost all together i think that's part of the game at this point is just they'll knock us down. We just got to get back up and keep going. Although it sounds like you might have a different strategy here instead of painting a target on your back.

Instead, you know, but I did, I know we did talk a second ago or maybe a few minutes ago now about the war on crypto and Trump's, I guess, shift. And I was wondering in your view, like, what does Ian's case reveal about the current state of cryptocurrency regulation? And do you actually have any hope that Trump will end this war on crypto and make the U.S. A more hospitable place for expanding crypto's innovation. And largely, it's, you know, I guess in the bigger picture, its footprint.

Yeah. From what I can tell, if Trump hasn't ended the war on crypto, he has, you know, dramatically decreased the amount of violence during the action. So I think that by and large, I would say that the war on crypto has ended. The thing is, is that I would, you The administration to do is now bring home the prisoners of war. You know, there are Ian Freeman, Roger Veer, you know, the, the guys from tornado cash, the samurai wallet guys, and a variety of people out there that are still

a Roman something. And I can't remember his last name. There's a variety of people that are looking for some help. And then I would go even a step farther and say, everybody who's been convicted of a crypto crime. Should it be looked at for a pardon? Because being a convicted felon doesn't make your life easier by definition. And I think that many of these people, the most that they were doing was simply selling crypto online, and that shouldn't be illegal.

Right. And, you know, again, we got to ask ourselves where the victim is. Who's the victim? And, you know, oftentimes with these state targeting, there is no victim, right? So I guess in Ian's case, they kind of drummed up some. And as you're using that analogy, you know, I guess it's convoluted, but maybe, maybe there's some victim that thinks that they were wronged by Ian somehow, but nevertheless. That victim.

And it's really difficult to get in front of a jury and lambast a little old lady for being stupid. Right. But, you know, one of one of these little old ladies was a money manager. She literally had millions of dollars under her control of other people's money. And somehow she thought that her new boyfriend, whom she'd never met, needed Bitcoin to pay for a drilling part that he broke on a platform in the middle of the Atlantic.

And you know like anybody who falls for a for a trick that says the the irs needs you to go to walmart and buy gift cards i i you know like i that it just frustrates me there's no pass for this there's no pass for lying about your relationship and why you're making a transaction and then trying to hold the person who sold you the stuff responsible you know i'm glad that they were these little old ladies were made whole, but I'm really frustrated that they got their money from my friend.

And more importantly, he had to go to prison in the process. You know, their scammers are, you know, running amok in Nigeria or North Korea or wherever they are doing whatever they're doing. And an American is paying the price. An American who never harmed these people is paying the price. Exactly, man. And all the meanwhile, the government gets to kind of claim Ian as a prize as if they are doing something to combat the crypto scammers.

And I think that's what makes it even more frustrating, as you as you noted there. But, you know, it did take nearly a decade and Netflix specials and petitions and documentaries and celebrities and influencers all talking about Ross's case to really get enough awareness for it to eventually get on Trump's radar. I guess Angela McArdle and the Libertarian Party also deserve some credit, too. But what do you think will take to get the same amount of support for Ian?

And how do you think the Free State Project and Libertarian community can support Ian and others that are kind of facing some of these other types of legal crypto challenges? It's a really difficult question to answer. So it's kind of like libertarianism. The first thing I'm trying to do is drum up awareness. So please, if you have not yet done it, go to freeiannow.org. I put together this petition and maybe it was ill-advised, but I did.

And now I need to have thousands and thousands of names on it. So please go to freeiannow.org and sign the petition in order that if somebody looks, you know, so one of these politicians, Trump looks up the petition, they don't just say that, oh, there's only a handful of people that signed this. So, you know, here we are. But Ian's going to be out. before too long.

Really what it comes down to is we're looking for a sentence commutation from Trump so that Ian can be out while his appeal is going through. Right now, the First Circuit has his appeal. I went there the first week of February, saw the arguments. I watched the judges, by the way, none of whom ever had a career as a prosecutor.

I watched the three judges And they even asked about the IRS agent's statement within the trial, which was that, that they didn't know how much Ian owed, nor if he had a tax burden at all. And this is a really important point because four of the seven charges that Ian is sitting in prison on were tax evasion. And to have tax evasion, you must have a tax burden. Now, the jury doesn't care about that. They don't have to, right? The jury just says guilty or innocent.

It doesn't, if the judge allows it to go through, and he never should have, it should have been at that moment, objection, your honor, and that should have been, you know, handled. But ultimately, Ian was convicted of it, but he's convicted without an essential part. And the circuit court should overthrow this, but they haven't done anything yet. Remember, in this country, at least, it's better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man sits in prison.

And the idea that they haven't ruled on an appellate bond within a few weeks is really kind of surprising. So I don't know what they're doing up there at the First Circuit, and I don't know what their actual goals are, but I have a supposition. My supposition is that we've got three lawyers, educated lawyers in Boston.

So that says to me, Democrats, who now believe that cryptocurrency is a Republican money and they don't want to rule in the favor of the defendant, even though the law says they should. That's just, again, me extrapolating from the information that I've got. So I don't know how to put pressure on these judges to do the right thing. The only routes I see are sign in a petition and get Trump to pardon Ian.

Got it. Boy, that would sure be discouraging if it is some type of partisan bias that's going on there and this team sport politics has really hit a fever pitch man and it seems like we're more polarized now than maybe ever and it kind of doesn't surprise me that they're not really trying to move the ball forward with ian's case too i remember roger when we were talking about roger veer's case it was kind of similar thing it's like they're trying to hold roger claiming

he owes back taxes from 2017 that he didn't pay on some bitcoin and it's like well okay, let them make it right. If that's the case, give them a number. I know Roger's good for it. Last I heard, he's a Bitcoin billionaire. Give them the number, let them pay it off, and let them move forward. And I think they did the same thing, kind of a get out of jail free card for Michael Saylor at one point, the Bitcoin maxi dude. And so it seems like they are playing favorites to a certain extent.

So it kind of doesn't surprise me that maybe some more of these ideological people like Roger, like Ian, who have, you know. I don't disregard for the state, you know, don't necessarily want to play ball or participate. Some level of contempt, I would go so far as to say. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that's safe to say. But yeah. So unfortunately, it does feel like they are being intentionally railroaded here.

And it's maybe more of kind of the Ross Ulbrich treatment, trying to make an example out of them to kind of dissuade other people from going the same route. And man, it just really is discouraging.

But we are getting close to the end of the podcast now and you know we've talked about you know some some heavy topics here but usually at the end of our podcast we try to talk about something positive something hopeful.

Or uplifting and you know again some of this could feel a little bleak what gives you hope right now mark like what's your white pill what what's the thing that keeps you fighting for freedom even in the face of all this increasingly dystopian infrastructure that's being built around us. When I am on Twitter and I see everybody advocating, at least everybody I know, advocating for Massey and Rand Paul and Doge and these kind of things, just, you know, I get it.

These people may not be the most principled people around, but some higher level of accountability for the liars, thieves, and killers that call themselves our rulers, I am legitimately hopeful. Now, I never imagined that somehow the creation of Free Talk Live and 20 years of libertarian broadcast was just going to bring the state down around our ears.

But I was hoping that in some manner or another, you know, we could grab the chain from the bow, the boat of the gigantic boat of the state and just ease it in the direction of human freedom. Now, I don't know whether we got a one degree turn or whether we got a 10 degree turn or whatever it might be, but I'm glad to have been a small part in this process. Well, I think that deserves an amen. And I'm glad that you've been a part of it too, Mark.

You've certainly inspired us at the Free Thought Project and my work. And I think that's what it takes, man. I think all of us just collectively, even though I know that's kind of a naughty word within libertarianism, but collectively putting our efforts forth and whatever skill set we have and whatever specialty we have, whatever passions we have to just, you know, shine a light on the darkness of the state and uplift the principles of liberty.

And also, I think it's important to note that, look, they wouldn't be censoring us so much. They wouldn't be going out of their way to censor us if we weren't threatening their trillion-dollar machine, right, if we weren't actually speaking these truths that empower other people. And I think there's, yeah, a lot to appreciate right now.

It does feel like libertarianism, at least the philosophy and the principles, while maybe not necessarily completely understood, it does seem culturally like we are moving more in the direction of freedom and people are starting to get the boot on their neck isn't necessarily a good thing. So, Mark, this has all been a real pleasure. And as somebody who has been doing this for as long as you have and amplifying liberty and all of it, you know, it really has been a pleasure of talking to you.

I do appreciate your time and the fact that you stayed in this fight for as long as you have, you know, it's certainly messy and inconvenient. And as you were saying, it's probably even maybe a little dangerous at times, but I do appreciate you sharing your insight, the stories and your time with us today.

Hey, Freethinkers, this is Matt Agarist, and I'm going to take a quick pause to remind you of something really important. First off, apologies for the interruption. But if you're still here, that means you're resonating with what we're doing. And we need your help to keep it alive. Independent platforms like ours don't survive on corporate sponsorships or mainstream media funding. We survive because of you.

If you're finding value in these unfiltered conversations and real solutions, the best way to support us is by liking, subscribing, and sharing this podcast with your friends and fellow freethinkers. It's a small act, but it's a powerful one. It helps us break through the censorship and algorithms designed to silence voices like ours. This isn't just about supporting a podcast. It's about standing for freedom, exposing corruption, and building a movement that inspires real change.

And if you want to go beyond liking and sharing, we'd love for you to become a member of the Free Thought Project. Just head over to thefreethoughtproject.com and click on the TFTP membership link at the top of the page. As a member, you'll be directly supporting our mission and helping us to stay independent. Your support is what keeps this platform alive and fighting. So thank you for being part of this journey, for sharing these ideas, and for standing with us.

Before we wrap, please let people know where they can follow your work, Tune in to your show or anything else that you want to plug. Yeah, they can follow me on Twitter or Facebook, whatever's good for you. X, if you want to call it that. My name is Mark Edge and my show is Free Talk Live or FTL. If you put those things in, you search for them, you'll find me. And please give me a follow. I'll likely follow you back if you're interesting to me.

But really, I would encourage people, please go to freeiannow.org, freerogernow.org. And now that we've ended the war on crypto, let's bring home the POWs. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you for listening to the Free Thought Podcast. Music.