Introduction
Russell Brand: Hello, thank you so much for having us at the Crypto Olympics. What an extraordinary honor it is to be at this celebration of autonomy and independence and freedom.
Joining me is Chris Pavlovski who I’d like to invite you to give a warm round of applause. Firstly, for his commitment to free speech, for his support of Bitcoin starting in Miami 2022, and for our ongoing campaign to bring about freedom of all varieties. Chris Pavlovski everyone!
Opposition Rumble Has Faced
Chris, we’re going to have a very relaxed conversation in the comfortable environment of these attendees, certain in the knowledge that something pivotal appears to be happening.
The fact that we’re appearing on the same stage as two presidential candidates, Edward Snowden, at the time that Julian Assange has been freed, it seems like something extraordinary is happening when it comes to decentralized modalities and a general appetite, whether it’s in the world of finance or media, to create the opportunity for legitimate connection that isn’t mediated by potentially corrupt institutions.
How do you feel Chris that we’re going to continue to navigate this space at Rumble and what sort of opposition have you faced so far? And, so that it’s a quite nice long question and gives me some time to relax and take in the atmosphere, did you ever imagine that you would find yourself in such an extraordinary situation where being a tech billionaire used to be fun, and about yachts and probably womanizing, and now it seems to be about campaigning and confronting corruption?
Chris Pavlovski: First off, so glad to be here at Bitcoin 2024 and to be here with you, Russell. Thank you for having me here. It’s surreal to put it very simply. I grew up in a little town outside Toronto. I’m a Canadian.
Russell: Don’t cheer that. It’s actually a protected characteristic.
Chris: We have a little bit of a problem when it comes to free speech in Canada, but hopefully we can change that in the coming years. It’s surreal. I grew up in a town, it’s called Brampton. It’s about 20-30 minutes outside of Toronto. I didn’t really know anybody in the political world.
I didn’t know anybody big in the business world. And then all of a sudden I get a phone call in the summer of 2020 by the US House ranking member of the US House Intelligence Committee – Congressman Devon Nunes.
As a Canadian, I’m like am I under investigation? What is going on over here? He had a simple question. He just asked me, “Chris, if I bring my content onto Rumble and I search for my name am I going to find it?” I was like absolutely! Meanwhile, I’m calling my developers making sure that it works. Yeah, that’s what happened and by mid 2021 we had the 45th president Donald J Trump end up joining our platform.
Then shortly thereafter we had, it was I think in January of 2022, that this conference itself was pulled from YouTube from streaming. They ended up coming to us immediately to get the stream up and running and we were there to get the stream up and running.
By September 2022, we ended up going public on the NASDAQ under ticker RUM with a multibillion dollar valuation and now we’re sitting here at Bitcoin 2024 talking to you guys. It’s been an absolutely surreal experience for me and everybody at Rumble.
The fights that we’ve been fighting, I like to look at us as though we’re the tip of the spear when it comes to freedom of expression. We were there in 2020-2021 when no one else was there. We were all alone on an island fighting against every corporate media company in the world trying to guilt us by association, putting us in buckets of what we are. We fought back.
Then governments came after us. We had the Chinese government turn us off. We even had the Russian government turn us off. We had to turn the lights out in France, in Brazil all because they were keen on censoring creators that didn’t violate our policies.
The fight has been immense. It’s been insane to put it simply but also surreal not coming from the world of politics or the world of business in any major way. Being here now and kind of being thrusted into it and fighting for the First Amendment and what I consider a human right.
People don’t realize that freedom of expression is actually a human right. It’s in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s Article 19. Every country around the world seems to violate that, not care about that, except the United States of America. After building this business, you really get to appreciate how awesome America is with the First Amendment and how the judicial system stands up for it. It’s been surreal.
Media monopolies
Russell: One of the undergirding principles of Bitcoin I’m learning a lot about today because I am something of an ingenue (this is quite new to me) is the significance of decentralization and that if you decentralize power, something beautiful happens almost automatically.
There is something almost inherent in monopolies that leads to corruption. It seems that what’s happening with Rumble and in particular Rumble’s evident David and Goliath struggle against YouTube, Alphabet. Their evident and obvious attempts to censor, control, and possibly participate in surveillance, certainly facilitate some extraordinary operations.
Their odd relationship with a group called The Trusted News Initiative that seemed to be interested in further centralizing and controlling the flow of information has some obvious correlation with the monopolization that happens in the financial industry.
It seems to me what I’ve been learning is that when you decentralize and make transparent the very business of transaction. Authenticity and integrity almost automatically appear. In fact they are a requirement. What I suppose I find pretty encouraging about that, Chris, is the suggestion that because like an event like this there’s people that are right heroes.
Edward Snowden – what an incredible hero, what an amazing sacrifice he made for America on behalf of his ethics. Bobby Kennedy – another heroic individual. Tomorrow the extraordinary spectacle of Donald Trump just fresh from his resurrection, just one earlobe down. Not the first man to nearly be annihilated by the dreadful phenomenon of slopey roofs. A threat to all of us anywhere there could be a slopey roof around us now.
It’s very easy to fall into the adulation of individuals that seem heroic or perhaps alternatively condemn them, loathe them, despair of them, but what it seems to me is available in blockchain technology is the regulatory principles that occur when individuals are empowered.
And indeed Rumble has comparable principles because a commitment to free speech does not favor or bias towards a particular type of free speech. It encourages all of our free speech and has a kind of I would say acceptance that universally through discourse we will arrive at conclusions that are positive if we’re not prohibited, inhibited, censored, controlled by institutions that claim that they care while actually practicing control.
It seems to me that there is something quite beautiful in learning that individuals when trusted will reach the right conclusions. That is antithetical to an era of elitism that we appear to be living through. What is the central principle of censorship? “We are a moral authority. We know more than you. We are smarter than you.”
And similarly too when Rumble first came out what did they first say? It’s disgusting; it’s filthy. What did they say about Bitcoin? “It’ll all be used to trade drugs and pornography.” And I bet some people have done that, Chris. But, ultimately when people are allowed to live deregulated and free, what emerges is something closer to our higher nature and our higher principles rather than our lower.
Chris: You sum that up perfectly. What’s happening right now is that you have all these entities that are controlling and now they’re fighting for control. They’re losing their control. They’re losing control to companies like Rumble, Truth, and X.
They’re starting to actually fear that their narratives are going to change. Because for once there’s not someone with an agenda telling Russell, “Hey Russell, you have to say this.” Has that ever happened with us? Never.
Russell: No, only the voices in my mind.
Authenticity
Chris: Now what you’re having is that you’re having true authenticity start to come out and true opinions start to come out. Things that we would have at our dinner tables that apparently we couldn’t say online, and we still can’t say online on the incumbent platforms.
YouTube for example for the last, say, 8 years, has just been moving the goalpost and moving the goalpost creating, new terms, sometimes on a monthly basis, sometimes on a weekly basis something is changing constantly on YouTube to try to say that you need to say something specifically or not say something at all.
They’re trying to control speech in many different ways. When Rumble came along in 2020, late 2020, where we actually had prominent figures start joining our platform like Dan Bogino, Congressman Devin Nunes, we started to break that fold and that’s what created a shift. Everybody picked a side. This is exactly what happened: everyone actually picked a side.
Rumble just stayed in the middle. Our policies didn’t change in any meaningful way in the last 10 years. They’ve been relatively similar. But, everyone else did. They left us all in the middle and what happened is they all picked a side and then the middle started coming towards us.
Why? Authenticity. People get to hear what you’re really thinking and they know that you’re not saying or doing something that has some kind of agenda or corporate agenda behind it. When you watch people like Russell on Rumble you’re getting to hear what he actually thinks and not someone else that’s telling him what to think. That’s what’s created the opportunity for Rumble in such a large way.
Russell: Yes. I thought of so many things while you were talking then and not because I wasn’t listening. Because I was. That’s just common good manners. Here are some of the reflections that I would like to offer you Chris and everybody present when dealing with an organization like Google/YouTube.
Technological Feudalism
I recognized that my voice was significantly amplified by that platform initially before the blessed day where I got the opportunity to begin to work with Rumble. You recognize how tyranny and power may guide us towards dystopia.
Let me illustrate that further. We’re being encouraged to imagine that the dystopias of the future might resemble the despotism of the 20th century and that we might fail to militaristic 20th century style demagoguery. We’re being taught to fear fascism and of course fascism is something that ought be feared.
Because indeed Bitcoin and Rumble, the technologies that we’re talking about, are about primarily individual freedom. When it comes to the tyranny that I fear mostly, the phrase I heard that resonates is technological feudalism. When you consider the mounting bureaucracies and the incredible power that’s being accrued by groups like Alphabet/Google because we are talking about monopoly/centralized power.
I would like to reflect on how it feels to deal with these organizations directly. If you find yourself in a spat or a contratant with YouTube you will find that the discourse is very unusual and anodyne. We have had to censor your content. You will have to appeal to the community guidelines. A team member will get back to you. It’s very friendly. It’s very banal. It’s very sterile.
You get the sense that you’re communicating with some peculiar odd and inaccessible insidious mist. When we think about tyranny in the future, we should not think about 20th century modalities of dictatorship. We should think of great writers like George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Franz Kafka who indicated that dictatorships in the future might be rather anodyne and friendly and here to protect you and keep you safe.
Some of you may have noticed that in the last five years in order to protect your freedom, in order to protect your safety, in order to protect your health, certain measures were strongly recommended. Certain conversations were forbidden.
Indeed just think of the people that have been on the stage over the short period of time that we’ve been at this conference. Bobby Kennedy – strongly censored. Edward Snowden – exiled. Julian Assange (while absent) was imprisoned and incarcerated with trial. All for what? To protect you, to protect you from information that might harm you or to protect you from microbes or viruses that might harm you.
God help us. God protect us from these people that want to save us and protect us in their rationalism and materialism. They have sought right down to the microscopic level to replace God and to replace the authority of God with rationalism and materialism to make rationalism the highest authority. Having made themselves the highest authority their edicts go uncontested.
There was a moment in September last year where I myself was at the very middle of a tundra, a dark maelstrom of incredible power, the kind of power that can only occur when big tech platforms, big media, and government align. The government in my country directly asked platforms to demonetize me, a sitting government minister.
This is an extraordinary overreach of government. Among the people and platforms that were bold enough to say hold on, we have principles around justice, around hearings, around innocent until proven guilty was Chris Pavlovski at Rumble. And of course Elon Musk at X, who I know evokes complex feelings like many tech billionaires.
They’re all fucking crazy these guys. They’re all a bit weird. They are not like normal people. I’ve got to know tech billionaires now. They sort of look at their phone too much. They leave meals in the middle of a meal. They’ll just get up and go. Essentially, they’re monetizing autism.
Never mind mining Bitcoin. Start mining the neurons of these lunatics that are coming up with this stuff is what I would say. But nevertheless what we’re finding in these unusual minds is the kind of bravery that comes from not centralizing power but from decentralizing it. Because the simple truth is no one should be mediating your connection to God or your connection to money or your connection to free speech because no one knows better than you although there are high principles to which we could have recourse.
Rumble creating their own infrastructure
Chris: It’s even more insidious. Monopolizations are happening in every aspect of tech. For example, you guys probably all remember the moment that Parlor got deplatformed entirely by Amazon AWS. That happened for a complaint that was actually happening more so on the other platforms than it was happening on Parlor itself.
It was completely unjustified to do that and I think that was like crossing a red line in society when you have an oligopoly on the cloud business. You got Microsoft; you got Amazon; you got GCP Google. And then at that moment Amazon decides to take out Parlor, which was horrible.
That was a big wakeup moment for us because we realize Rumble won’t survive unless we have our own infrastructure. On the infrastructure level now Rumble can’t just be a company that says hey we’re going to uphold free speech and protect everyone’s rights to have their voice. We now have to build our own infrastructure.
So what did we do? We built our own infrastructure. We launched the Rumble Cloud earlier this year which is now available not only to Rumble but the entire public. And that’s based on the same principles that Rumble has free speech.
But it gets even worse. Not only is the infrastructure a problem, we solved the infrastructure, now the next thing we need to go solve is the advertising world. The advertising world, the way they working, and the way they’re colluding together to make sure that they only bring the advertising dollars to specific creators that have certain viewpoints is a major problem and we just saw in the release.
I’m sure you’ve seen this, Russell, is the Global Alliance of Responsible Media as they call it. They put it in nice names to make it sound really good, as you just mentioned That’s the way they do it. You can see the emails that the Judiciary Committee released with respect to that and Ben Shapiro was talking about this as well when he was at Congress.
It’s appalling what you see. You see that they’re actually constructing a boycott of putting advertisements on X and other platforms like Rumble, to make sure that voices that they don’t agree with are not getting monetized. Trying to strangle them at the monetization point. This is just one example.
Multiple examples both on the infrastructure and on the advertising side of what we’re up against. We have ad cartels. We have infrastructure. We got governments. We got States. We’re fighting multiple things at multiple different points but you know one of the good things is we’re not alone anymore. There are other companies starting to step up. You have Truth; you have X, and things are starting to move. So, question for you, do you think things are getting better?
Optimism with Open platforms and protocols
Russell: Yes, actually. I’m feeling almost overwhelmed with optimism in this actual moment now because I know that we are streaming this on Rumble. There will be people watching this on Rumble now and a considerable audience also watching elsewhere.
And I’m reminded of the significant and oft repeated maxim attributed usually to Andrew Breitbart that politics is downstream of culture. Well culture is evidently and obviously downstream of technology. We have the technology for immediate proliferation and dissemination of not only information but clearly a transactional technology also.
What I find deeply heartening about this is the opportunity and obvious establishment already because you have a lot of early adapters and adopters, “I knew about Bitcoin for ages. I know all the subtle ones you’ve not even heard of. I know all sorts of cryptocurrencies. I’ve just made one up right now.”
You lot know about this stuff already. One thing that institutions fear more than anything I believe is not the direct and martial attacks which John Lennon greatly and famously said they know how to deal with. But people moving away from their institutions, setting up parallel economies, parallel media. Of course my deep concern is that we remain in the thrall of commodity commerce and material when this could be so much more.
When this is a genuine opportunity for us to access something deeply ethereal and mystical. Our own personal connection to the ultimate reality, a personal and private connection to God, a resource that we might utilize so that we are no longer in the thrall of prohibition and inhibition and systems of absolute control that might use the kind of patriarchal auspices of your health and safety.
They might use any measures. My interest is this most of all: that this is not just a digital form of the gold rush but this is a set of systems through which we may bypass our atrophying, corrupt, hypocritical systems of government, big tech, media, the loss of moral authority that they are experiencing is deserved.
We know that lawfare can be used, that the judiciary can be used as a weapon, that media can’t be relied on, that the regulatory bodies that control big pharma are funded by the corporations that they’re supposed to be regulating. You have known for some time that these institutions are not worthy of your trust and now you are beginning to have the means to bypass them.
And if they cannot be bypassed electorally for the corruption is so immersive or the options so limited, now there is the genuine chance for your individual freedom of expression to exist both in terms of media and communication, through platforms like Rumble and others, but also through the through the advance that you are at the very forefront of when it comes to transaction digitally.
So, indeed I feel optimistic not because of any great individual leader, although we have seen great individual leaders at this conference, but because what Bitcoin epitomizes above all else: decentralization, transparency, open communication, and the possibility for new human relationships.
That is the deepest optimism of all that human beings aren’t corrupt and ugly, aren’t disgusting and deserving of shame, are beautiful and capable of again connecting with the sacred. If Bitcoin can do that, surely I believe in it, and surely I am optimistic Chris.
But the truth is we still got five minutes. So have you …?
Chris: I think the tide is so big right now. Like I said we were all alone on an island for a couple years during Covid from like 2020 to 2022 really. I think that tide is unstoppable. You have Bitcoin which is a freedom movement. You have companies like Rumble and X and Truth that are freedom movements. It’s kind of emerging everywhere.
You have infrastructure like Rumble Cloud, the parallel economy is really getting developed. And you have talent like real important talent that are speaking their minds and really kind of waking up to everything and telling the world what they think like yourself and many others. I think this tide is so big right now there’s nothing that’s going to stop it.
Ultimately the number one value that underlies everything here is freedom. It’s freedom of speech. It’s freedom; it’s transparency. When you take a look at it though, for the last 10 years we’ve had a monopoly control the video space. We’ve had an oligopoly controlling the infrastructure space.
The idea of having competition is a type of decentralization in its own right and that’s what we need to have. If there’s ways to take things like Rumble and get them even more transparent and more decentralized. I’m all for it as technology continues to evolve. In the finance world you now have Bitcoin which is really taking hold and has an incredible future. This tide – nothing’s going to stop it. We are going to win in this war for sure.
Wrapping Up
Russell: That is pretty positive. And in a way a further indication that these technologies are neutral. You know Bitcoin went through a phase where it was perjured and condemned and attacked. Rumble went through a phase where it’s perjured and condemned and attacked which clearly in the case of Bitcoin was an attempt to stymy and slow its progress while they set up central digital banking that they could control themselves.
What I feel like is that this is an opportunity for new forms of new connections to form.. We are here with a limited obligation because in a minute there’s going to have to be Secret Service coming in here making sure this is absolutely safe because if Donald Trump’s coming here and saying, look part of the Federal Reserve is going to be in Bitcoin, you motherfuckers are all going to be rich.
But, beyond material wealth we are seeking the Kingdom of Heaven surely aren’t we? And earlier today in the holy name of our father Jesus Christ, praise His name. I wanted to mention, I met Lyn Ulbricht earlier today who is the mother of Ross Ulbricht who you may be aware received double life sentences for some of his entrepreneurial activity on Silk Road.
We know that the centralized system likes to condemn and damn and control. We know that it likes to destroy outliers. I don’t absolutely know the entirety of Ross Ulbricht’s story. But, 40 years worth of sentencing does seem particularly draconian.
If you’re watching this now on Rumble, or indeed YouTube. If you’re watching on YouTube, click the link in the description and get on over to Rumble. If you’re watching it on Rumble we’ll post there is a petition for Ross’s Freedom that is being passed around.
What we must demand is that the corrupted institutions of government, the corrupted institutions of finance, the corrupted institutions of media, are all held accountable to the power of the people which we are beginning to see realized in this auditorium. Thank you so much for allowing us to speak today.
I mean thanks for the enthusiasm, beautiful people of Nashville, smashville, bachelorette party capital of the world, let’s get out on that stinking Honky Tonk Street, get messed up y’all.
Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Pavlovski of Rumble. Thank you very much for the incredible welcome. Thank you for your enthusiasm. Have a wonderful, wonderful, rest of your conference, and I hope you get rich, most of all spiritually. Amen.
Watch the original content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1A3jq-Vrbk
Also read: Bitcoin as a Tool for Freedom
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