Interview│Mark Edge - Free Talk Live│ETHDam III - 2025

[Music] I'm Mark Edge. I'm the one of the founding hosts of Free Talk Live and today my message is please sign my petition to free my co-host Ian Freeman at freeanow.org. What made you go from radio host to freedom fighter? Well, I think that as a radio host, I probably was a freedom fighter for some period of time.

I initially just when I got on the air, it was just, you know, dreams of stardom and and uh, you know, wealth and making money as a talk show host and, you know, probably not it's bit better than digging ditches. But as time went by, people would call in with questions um questions about the uh sovereignty of indiv individuals and you know value backed currency and you know can the watchers be trusted and these kind of questions and I would think about these uh questions and I'd come to conclusions different than I had drawn up to that point that I was essentially in a you a large hall where anyone could ask me questions. Free Talk Live is the name of the program. And people could call in and about anything that they wanted to call in about. And so when they would ask me questions, I'd come to conclusions that seemed logical to me.

And the logical answers largely lie within libertarianism. Why do you think the FBI targeted Ian Freeman? Well, the FBI had targeted Ian Freeman for many years. Um, and they had been largely unsuccessful in doing so. Uh, they were trying to get him to sell weapons or sell drugs or a variety of things that he didn't do and didn't have any interest in doing.

Um, Ian was very successful in selling Bitcoin. He had 5,000 five-star reviews on local bitcoin.com. he was getting Bitcoin into the hands of people who were happy um with his service. So when the FBI saw that, inevitably there were some people who had been scammed among those folks.

They would tell lies to Ian and they'd answer, you know, he had questions. He'd be like, "Uh, have you ever heard of a romance scam? Have you ever met your boyfriend? Are you buying this Bitcoin as an investment?" You know, questions like that.

and they were coached by their handlers on how to answer. Now, I'm not saying this is some kind of government conspiracy. I'm saying, you know, the scam artist told their victims how to answer these questions. And in the same way that if you went to a bank and they asked you, you know, what do you what are you doing? Where'd you get this money?

You might answer, you know, um in the way that you've been told to answer. And they did. and um they wanted to make their scammers happy. I mean that's the whole premise of these ideas. So going after Ian Freeman is like arresting the gun store owner for the rob for the robberies that were committed in town using his guns.

What do you want every listener to do? Yeah, I would uh beg them please go to [Music] freenow.org freenow.org or sign the petition and we're going to, you know, present this petition to Trump or whomever will listen and hopefully we have thousands and thousands of signers uh in the near future. Uh this is I'm just getting started and um you know this is the first event I've been to trying to get people to sign and I'm hoping that we can u you know stack thousands of of signers here and I could you know asking you to share on social media whatever you can do to free Ianow.

org. I have one more question. Uh could you elaborate on millionaire libertarians? Millionaire libertarians. I do.

I want to see the world full of millionaire libertarians. Um, we used to have uh this this concept of the Bill Gates libertarian um back in when we started Free Talk Live 2002 um all the way up to 2010. What would what would the world be like if there was a libertarian like who was as rich as Bill Gates, a billionaire libertarian? And I think that cryptocurrency might get us there. Um there are people who believe very very thoroughly in human rights, in freedom, in privacy, and they're willing to put their money where their mouth is to build better systems.

And I am much more excited about this new world full of uh crypto libertarian millionaires than I was about the old one where it was a bunch of people trying to grow their own tomatoes to solve the problems of uh personal freedom. And you should grow your own tomatoes. They're delicious.