On Phones and Freedom: An Interview with Erik Finman

The following is an interview between Digital Editor of The Review Lintaro Donovan (LD) and entrepreneur Erik Finman (EF), the self-described “Youngest Bitcoin Millionaire” who made headlines in 2021 with his Freedom Phone project. Billed as a “free speech and privacy first focused phone,” the project seeks to undercut the censorship and monopoly of Big Tech through its own operating system and App Store.

TDR: Describe the Freedom Phone project. 

EF: Absolutely. So when I saw Parler got banned from the app stores amongst other apps as well, I wanted to go and start something that fixed that problem. 

You can’t have true free speech if you don’t have control of your own stores. They say that if you don’t like Twitter’s rules, you should go create your own Twitter. And then we go and create our own Twitter and then they ban that. And then they say that if you don’t like it, you should go create your own phone and app store. So I did. That was the plan with the Freedom Phone. 

TDR: What are some other areas where conservatives could create their own platforms or institutions? 

EF: People should create a competitor to Amazon. I think that would be a great competitor, where customers could just buy basic items and not have to buy from Amazon, like toothbrushes or toothpaste or other things.

I think that’d be an incredible opportunity, and I think conservatives are more entrepreneurial, so you’ll probably have better products on there. 

There’s a million other ideas too, but that would be my next favorite one. 

TDR: What impacts do you see blockchain and crypto having on our politics?

EF: In regards to accurate voting, I think blockchain is an excellent tool for actually being able to track that your vote counted and that it was a real vote. Blockchain would be great for that.

I think blockchain presents an incredible opportunity for the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to integrate at a national level. You see a lot of countries all over the world doing a kind of digital currency, like China’s doing a digital Yuan.

It’s not that I like China, but you have other countries talking about creating a digital version of or maybe upgrading their fiat currency to be still kind of a nation-backed currency but ultimately blockchain-powered. You even get annoying lefties like Elizabeth Warren talking about that.

That makes me not like the idea now, even though I’m pro-crypto. But I think that it is a potentially good option for the US to do that plus blockchain voting 100%.

TDR: Given the Canadian government’s freezing of Freedom Convoy assets, do you think it’s incumbent on average Americans to move their wealth into cryptocurrency? 

EF: I think that’s an excellent idea. It’s great. Absolutely Canadians and Americans should move their money into something that they can control.

I would not even just say cryptocurrency, however. For example, if you put assets in Coinbase, they can freeze that.  Actually keeping your own coins on something like a USB stick or a Trezor 

Wallet [is better]. People understand USB stick better, but you can do that in a Trezor wallet or hardware wallet: you can control [your assets] and you can have [them] in your home. It’s as good as putting cash under your bed, but it’s a lot smaller and a lot more compact. 

I have many relatives in Canada, and my mom grew up in Canada. That’s home for me in many ways. I think that they [people of Canada] should punish these big banks by taking out their money. 

If they [the banks] say that they can freeze their [the people’s] money at any time. The people should just take it out and use cash only or ideally, their own crypto wallets. 

TDR: If you were in charge of the American conservative movement, what would you be doing right now to win? 

The left has taken control over the word “diversity.” I would say that the diverse population in this country are much more conservative.

California is probably more winnable. If you have a good candidate, then even South Dakota is. You look at Kristi Noem, she only won governor by a couple points. In California, if you combine the Republican voting base with the kind of middle-age, very Catholic, conservative Latino voting base, I think that you would win a landslide and by a bigger percentage basis than Kristi Noem won in South Dakota, which again was just a couple points. People think South Dakota is like this super safe red state, but you got that Blue Dog Democrat vibe there still. 

I think particularly the Latino outreach [is important]. My girlfriend is Latina, so I guess that I’m maybe a little bit biased there, but I think it’s such an incredible culture. I grew up in many places, and one of the places I spent a good amount of time in was Chile, in Santiago. I got to learn Spanish—and I’ve totally lost it all now—but I found that to be an amazing culture and that Latino culture and the kind of more conservative people of the United States actually have a lot of similarities and a lot to culturally exchange with each other. So I would say taking that word “diversity” away from these Democrats and incorporating into the Republican Party [is important]. That’s what I would recommend to the Republican Party.