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March 18, 2024 - Fresh & Fit
01:40:45
Chris Pavlovski Meets FreshandFit
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Time Text
Thank you.
And we are live.
What's up, guys?
Welcome to Refreshed Podcast.
We are with the Rumble CEO, Chris Pavlovsky.
Let's get into it, baby!
Let's go!
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
Hold on one second, guys.
Guys, give us one in the chat.
Give us ones if this is good.
Or if you guys can hear double.
Oh, okay.
I know what it is.
Alright, I got it.
We good?
Alright, we got it.
Alright, sorry about that, guys, for the double audio.
Welcome to the Freshman Podcast, guys.
It should be good now.
Give us ones if we're good.
Give us twos if it's still here in double.
But I think at this point, you guys should be good.
Guys, welcome to the podcast, man.
We're here with Chris, CEO of Rumble for Money Monday, man.
We're really excited for this episode.
We've been waiting to get this to you guys for a while.
Last time, you were really, really sick.
So, obviously, we couldn't do the pot or whatever.
We're happy to have you now.
Quick announcements.
It's actually funny.
Top of the line, guys.
Rumble.com slash FreshFit.
As you guys know, that's where to find us.
If we ever get canceled or whatever it may be, that's the home base for us.
CastleClub.tv as well, man.
Check us out over there.
So, you know, if the Matrix attacks or whatever, you guys will know exactly where to find us, man.
The home of free speech.
Rumble.com slash FreshFit.
CastleClub.tv.
And we gotta say, man, without further ado, welcome to the podcast.
Chris Pawlowski from Rumble.
So happy to be here.
You know, like the last time you were mentioning, I don't know what happened.
I got smoked from who knows what.
I had like the flu and it just took me out for like a week.
So happy to finally be here.
Sorry I couldn't make it the last time.
No worries, man.
We're here now, so...
Let's go.
And special mention, when we were down and out, we were having rough times with different platforms, trying to figure things out.
Rumble came to our rescue.
So without Chris, this would not be possible, even the podcast itself.
Yeah, I wouldn't have Fresher Fit, really, if it wasn't for Rumble, man.
So shout out to Chris and Rumble's, you know, standby and creators.
And we'll definitely talk about that a little bit more.
But Chris, for the audience, man, can you introduce yourself to them real quick?
We know who you are, but they might not.
Can you please introduce yourself to them?
Yeah, you bet.
So I'm Chris Pawlowski.
I'm founder and CEO of Rumble.
That's me.
So how'd you get started in tech?
Obviously, you're wildly successful.
You've been able to build a great platform that's rivaling juggernauts in the field like YouTube and Twitch, etc.
How'd you get your start in tech?
Yeah, so I've been in this for over two decades.
I was building websites out of my parents' basement.
I started, I guess, in high school.
That was the age where I kind of really started dabbling in the internet.
And then it was like, it's actually a funny story because in 2004 or 2005, one of my good friends from high school, this is post high school now, sends me a link to a website.
And at this time I'm running like funny video websites.
And he was running like actually one of the largest video websites on the internet called Zippy Videos at the time.
And And he sends me a link and he's like, check these guys out.
They're going to dominate the space because Zippy, I can't afford the bandwidth costs anymore.
And the link was, and this is before they were big, like they weren't even, I think there was a ranker out there called Alexa.
And he was like a top 50 on Alexa, global websites.
And YouTube was like 15,000 at this time.
And the link he sent me was YouTube.
And I was like, shit.
Two years later, YouTube's getting acquired by Google, and they end up sucking up all the oxygen in the room as Google started integrating them into their search engine and mobile phones after that, and ended up kind of dominating – not kind of, but dominating – The video space, post-acquisition of when Google bought them.
You saw Dailymotion, Meta Cafe, you saw Live Video, Zippy Videos, they all basically, Break.com, they all kind of ceased to exist.
Was this like in the mid-2000s?
This is 2007 to 2010.
Everyone kind of went belly up in the video space and YouTube just took over the whole space.
Inside and out, they monopolized the whole thing and they became the only real viable online video platform.
Fast forward to 2010 now, you probably remember the maker studios, the full screens, all the people that are managing talent on YouTube, the multi-channel networks, MCNs is what they were called at the time.
Specifically, they ended up becoming this new ecosystem that was built on top of YouTube.
And then we started to notice, I started to notice at that time that there was a lot of deprioritizing of the small creator, your friends, family, aunts, and uncles.
And the multi-channel networks, the full screens and the makers and all the big influencers, the corporations, the brands were getting...
All this attention and they seem to be getting prioritized on YouTube.
So I thought there was like an opportunity starting to emerge around 2010, 2011 and by 2013 I decided that I'm gonna go all in on it and try to help the small creator.
So I launched Rumble at the end of 2013 on the premise of like bringing monetization and distribution in a fair way to all creators, regardless of their size.
It was really kind of focused on that small creator, friends, family, aunts, uncles, viral videos, funny dog videos, etc.
And we built a business at the end of 2013 on trying to help the small creator.
And then, you know, as time progresses, you get to 2020.
The 2020 election cycle kicks in, and something dramatic starts happening.
It was, I remember, like, very vividly, because it was in the summer of 2020 that I got a phone call From the ranking member of the U.S. House Intel Committee.
To put this in perspective, I'm a Canadian.
Getting a call from U.S. congressman that's on the House Intel Committee and the Gang of Eight member is like, holy shit, am I under investigation?
What is going on?
I was freaking out.
Of course.
I get a phone call from him and he asks a really simple question.
He's like, Chris, if I bring my podcast to Rumble and I search for my name, am I going to find it?
And I'm like, yeah.
Thinking that there's some censorship investigation going on in the house.
And I'm like, absolutely.
Yeah.
And he's like, okay, so we're going to bring it and we're going to see if that happens.
And I'm like, okay.
So, you know, talking to my engineers, making sure if you typed in Devin Nunes, it's going to come up.
Devin Nunes podcast.
But yeah, it worked.
And, you know, this is the craziest thing.
Because you have an elected member of Congress, a gang of eight member, the ranking member of the House Intel Committee that's been on YouTube for four years prior to me speaking to him, and he's got like road signs in his district Promoting his YouTube channel and his podcast on YouTube.
He comes to Rumble and within two to three months, he has like two to three hundred thousand subscribers on Rumble.
Whereas on YouTube, in the four years that he was there, he has ten thousand.
Wow.
How is that possible?
How is it that you can have ten thousand and you're like...
Promoting in your district for four years.
You've had your podcast on there, and you go to a different platform, and all of a sudden, you go to Rumble and get 200,000 to 300,000 subs overnight in two to three months.
That shouldn't happen.
Not to an elected member of Congress, but that did happen.
And that was kind of like the opening that we saw, is that there was a real opportunity here to kind of really...
With what these other platforms were doing, we can now step in.
It almost goes back to the same premise of starting Rumble in itself.
The prioritization that was happening to big creators was now happening to the deprioritization that was happening to small creators is now happening to massive creators on YouTube.
And they were deprioritizing them in some way, shape, or form.
Because I remember I would go there and I would search Devin Nunes podcast and you couldn't find it.
You go to Rumble, you find it.
And this was like, you know, this obviously led to like Dan Bongino coming onto the platform.
He was, and once he came on, everything changed.
He's huge.
He brought on, at that time, Diamond and Silk came on, Dinesh D'Souza came on.
It was like a We had a flood of craters after he came on.
The floodgates opened, and within a year, we had the 45th president of the United States on Rumble.
And that happened, I think, in mid-summer of 2021.
So, I would say by the mid-summer of 2021, we had a pretty good lock on the conservative world in terms of the political world on Rumble.
We had pretty much everyone that you can think of.
Obviously, some weren't there, but a lot of them were there.
And that sent us into this massive growth stage where we went from 1 million monthly active users to 30, 40 million monthly active users in a span of a year or two.
We took in our first outside capital.
We raised money from JD Vance's Naria Capital, Peter Thiel, and Colt Ventures, and even Vivek Ramaswamy was in that first round that we did.
Shout out to him.
Yeah, yeah.
My people don't know.
He was kind of one of the early investors in it.
Yeah.
And that was in mid-2021, May, I would say.
April, May-ish time period.
And then, you know, fast forward to 2022.
We end up going public in September of 2022 in a multi-billion dollar market cap valuation.
And that brings us to where we are today, here in the Fresh and Fit podcast studios.
Let's fucking go, baby.
I gotta ask you this, Chris, because I noticed this when Elon Musk did an interview, and he said one of the first things he noticed when he took over X... Was that there was a considerable amount of censorship on conservative creators versus liberal creators.
And that's just on X where you're texting things.
Would you say you saw that also on the video sharing side where you got guys like Don Bongino, congressmen, etc.
that might have conservative belief systems getting suppressed in big tech?
So, something was going on.
Something is going on.
I don't operate these other companies.
I can't speak to what they're doing.
But I can tell you what I observe in the anecdotes that I see.
But when you have someone like Congressman Devin Nunes go from 10,000 on YouTube to 200,000 to 300,000.
It's crazy.
It's insane.
There's a million on Rumble now, subscribers on Rumble.
That shouldn't happen.
You can call that censorship.
You can call that some type of shadow banning.
In these cases, they weren't actually banned.
They were censored in some way, shape, or form.
And that was happening.
And it wasn't...
It didn't seem to be coming from all sides of the aisle, but I will say that that's changed a lot in the recent years.
The censorship has now kind of gone into various different areas.
We've attracted people from both sides of the aisle now on Rumble.
I remember it was 2021, and Russell Brand shows up on Rumble, and he's not a conservative by any time.
At least in my understanding, he's not a conservative.
But he shows up randomly.
I didn't know until two weeks after he showed up in late 2021 that he showed up on Rumble.
We also attracted the former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard onto the platform in 2021.
We brought on Glenn Greenwald as well.
It really kind of expanded more than just conservatives.
Today, it's far more now.
Now we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
on the platform, also using our cloud as well.
We're really kind of in all areas with content in all areas now.
But yeah, to answer your question, something was going on and probably still is going on, if I had to guess, when it comes to censorship and political candidates, etc.
And I actually think something worse will happen this time around.
So in 2020 and 2021, we saw a litany of bannings happen due to COVID, etc.
J6, all that.
Yeah, all different types of reasons.
They found a reason to ban a lot of people.
I think the new type of censorship is going to be far more intelligent, and I'm already seeing a lot of signs of it.
Banning someone is super obvious.
You can see it, you can feel it, you know it's there, and you can fight against that.
People will scream, and that word will spread.
But when you're shadow banned in an intelligent way, where, let's say, AI gets involved, and, you know, your content's coming and showing up to your loyal users, but not showing up to the users outside of that loyal base, now that's getting intelligent.
And you don't know you're banned.
You don't know you're shadow banned.
I think that's the next iteration of censorship.
I think it's already starting to happen on platforms.
Just my two cents.
I think it's going to be an incredibly intelligent censorship operation in the next few years.
I think the banning, they learned a lesson because in a lot of ways it opened up opportunities for other companies.
Now you're seeing a whole economy emerge and now they're changing their rules.
YouTube's like, okay, we can talk about elections again.
So they're clearly...
They're adapting and I do think a lot of these platforms are going to be participating in some really intelligent style censorship that we can't see or very easily detect and it's going to be all done through AI and technology.
I would argue it's happening right now, wink wink.
Chris?
I think it is happening right now.
I'm seeing some evidence of that happening right now.
The censorship that I'm starting to see or hear about is very deceptive.
I think the year of 2024, I think deception is going to accelerate to a level that we The people that we might think are on our side are not really on our side.
I think deception is at a whole new level in the next couple years.
And that kind of dovetails into censorship.
I can see the fakeness.
I can sense it.
I can smell it.
It's there.
But it's just very hard for people to see.
I think the idea of the Trojan horse is very relevant in today's current climate.
But Chris, the word free speech is thrown around a lot, you know, from different platforms, different people.
What is your definition of free speech?
That's a good question.
So I particularly don't use the word free speech.
I'm from Canada.
I use the word freedom of expression, which is also in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19.
It's a human right.
That you have the ability to speak freely, free speech, freedom of expressions.
To me, it's the same thing.
Online, there are gates that you have to abide by.
Anyone that's claiming they're free speech absolutist online is not being authentic.
You cannot be, to the definition of what we understand a free speech absolutist is.
It bothers me when I hear people say, you know, I'm a free speech absolutist, and then the next thing you see is there's a compliance with the government or whatever, and it's just nonsense.
It's not real.
Right.
So it's hard to say that Rumble is like a free speech absolutist platform.
It's not, because there's guardrails that force us not to be.
And that comes into the whole technology ecosystem.
Rumble is the tip of spear, in my opinion, in terms of mass size that's pushing and tilting the system back into place to the way we understood the internet to be.
We're the tip of the spear.
I really believe that.
And we do things that other platforms don't, even when they claim that they're free speech.
And I'm not sitting here and claiming Rumble is a free speech absolutist platform.
It can't be because of the app stores.
The app stores are guardrails.
If we want to reach the mass market, you have to abide by the app stores.
Period.
So that's like one major guardrail.
The other guardrail for other companies, which we do not have, and it's very unique to us in this system, is the cloud.
Parler.
We all know Parler.
They got shut down after January 6th based on the premise that, you know, Yep.
Yep.
more than Parler, but they didn't get deplatformed like Parler did.
So they got treated very unfairly in that situation.
And the guardrail there was obviously the app stores were one problem, but the more important problem for them, the one that turned the lights out, the one that put them basically out of business from our perspective is Amazon, AWS, they shut off the lights.
They didn't know where to put the website.
They couldn't find a host.
They couldn't find a cloud provider.
This was like a major wake-up call for us at the time because at the time, Rumble was running on bare metal.
It wasn't using any of the incumbent cloud platforms, but it was running on bare metal.
And bare metal is great because you're leasing servers, and you're kind of building on top of it, but it's not good enough.
And I'll tell you guys a story that, you know, no one knows, and I'll tell it today.
All right.
I have an exclusive.
Yeah, a little exclusive here for the Refresh and Fit pod.
But, like...
We were on bare metal, and that was good at the time.
It was enough to sustain us through a period where no incumbent cloud platform can knock us out.
We're distributed with multiple companies, multiple server companies, and we were able to survive on that basis at that point in time.
It became really apparent for us that that wasn't good enough and that we needed to invest, we needed to get investment, and we needed to invest heavily in building our own cloud.
And not only did I see it as existential for Rumble, I know it's existential.
I'll give you this example that I'm never told.
Not only is it existential for Rumble to be on our own cloud, But I also felt there was a need for other companies like Parler or whatever it may be, whether it's a religious university that Amazon AWS doesn't agree with on a religious perspective,
or whether it's a business that doesn't have the same values as Amazon AWS. We decided to build a cloud that's not just for Rumble, the existential threat to Rumble, but for the greater public.
And we launched it last week, which is a huge milestone.
Rumble now doesn't have the guardrail of someone else telling us on an acceptable use policy at the host level.
No one's turning the lights off anymore on Rumble.
That's not happening.
And now every business out there can have trust in a provider that won't turn the lights off on them.
Based on some ideological or some opinion that someone might have or some thought or any type of expression they might have, we're going to be operating very differently than Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, GCP, and Microsoft Azure.
So that did happen.
But let me step back.
I think, I'm just trying to remember the date.
It might have been, it was, I think it was July 4th weekend, where we had...
This year?
It was, I think, 23.
It could have been 22, actually.
It might have been 22, or 23.
It's either 23 or 22, where...
When was the Russia war?
When did that start?
Oh, I think 21 it started.
So it's probably 22 then.
But I can't remember the time flies and dates get all mixed up in my mind.
I think it started February 2022.
Where we actually, behind the scenes, and we already had a lot of infrastructure by this period kind of built out, where Rumble had the available infrastructure in place, our own servers, the ones that we actually own and bought with our money.
And we were setting up a CDN, we were setting up the cloud, we were setting it all up.
And we get a notice from, at the time, it was IBM saying they're shutting us down.
Wow.
That happened on a July 4th weekend.
Did they even say why?
It was so brutal.
They couldn't cite a policy.
They didn't have a policy that we violated.
We didn't violate anything.
They were citing EU stuff, not American stuff.
And, you know, at that point in time, it was all hands on deck that weekend.
And it was like a miracle.
Like, all our...
All our engineers came on deck.
We moved everything as much as we possibly could over to the Rumble infrastructure.
And we survived without even the lights going off for a second because we just invested in the right place at the right time.
It was way faster than I thought it was going to have to happen.
But we did it, and it was like...
I remember I tweeted something on that weekend on July 4th.
It's July 4th.
We were literally...
We were...
We're defending and protecting freedom of expression more than anyone at that very moment and our whole team was working overnight that whole weekend on July 4th weekend and it's like a story that I hold very very dearly to myself and it's one that you know All the engineers that were behind that and getting that up, they're heroes.
They're, like, heroes for doing that.
And that happened behind the scenes.
And now we're at a place where, you know, it's many years past that now.
Now we have our own cloud.
We're, you know, uncancellable.
We were uncancellable at that moment, too.
Yeah.
Which was great.
But, like, it was, you know, we didn't want to go 100% on our hardware at that point in time.
It was like we were trying to do it nicely.
Yeah.
And I think that's something that people underestimate, Chris, about you, is that like all the work that goes behind the scenes, I mean, daily there's articles criticizing you, daily there's people saying terrible things about you, daily they're trying to shut you down, daily they're trying to tarnish your character, the business's company, sorry, the business's character, etc.
Like, you know, we always say, you know, freedom of speech isn't free, like that's literally like the quintessential example, like people are constantly trying to come at you guys.
How do you deal with that, man?
You know what?
Because that's just one story.
But I wish you guys knew some of the other stuff that goes on by the scenes.
Obviously, we're not going to talk about it here.
People don't understand how much pressure Rumble gets on a daily basis.
You know what, though?
It's crazy.
I asked that question, why did Mark Zuckerberg fold on all the things that he's folded on?
I ask this question all the time.
And the answer to me is pretty simple.
It's pretty easy to be strong.
I just think there's a lot of weak people right now.
I'm defending a human right.
Period.
That should be pretty easy.
For me, it's pretty easy.
Why it's hard for everybody else, you know, that's a question we need to ask them.
I'm happy defending that human right.
It makes me proud.
But, you know, the sad part is how many weak people there are out there not doing that and folding to, like, any type of criticism that they have.
It just requires a little bit of strength, you know?
And that's what this company, Rumble, is built on.
On strength.
It's built on pushing back.
It's built on telling governments to, you know, pound sand.
Yeah.
I mean, look at the Russell Brand situation.
They sent you that letter, right?
I remember you posted on X how when Russell Brand got canceled or demonetized, they asked you, hey, is Russell Brand monetized on Rumble?
And they were trying to get him demonetized on Rumble as well.
And you basically told them to go pound sand, which is huge because other platforms always bend the knee to governments.
What's that like taking on governments?
Because the UK isn't the only government that's come after you guys.
I mean, obviously we've talked about France, Brazil, etc.
What's that like, man?
So the UK situation was absurd.
It was like...
Sent you that letter, I remember.
Yeah.
An MP, I believe, I don't remember exactly, sent us a letter to say, hey, like, demonetize Russell Brand, do this, blah, blah, blah.
Crazy.
And I'm like, what law?
Yeah.
What are we talking about here?
Like, just because you say so?
Yeah.
Like, how does that work?
And you know what the scary part is, though?
All the other platforms did it.
Yep.
Yep.
And I'm like, why?
It's a good question.
Scary times.
It's like, you saw the letter.
We put it out there publicly.
TikTok got it as well.
He never even got arrested, dude.
It was merely one accusation.
Like, nothing came out.
These are accusations from people we don't even know.
They didn't even name the names.
Anonymous accusations, I think they are.
Accusations!
Like, 20 years ago.
And that's not my business.
Our business is video.
It's streaming.
It's an online video platform.
It's VOD. That's our business.
That's my focus.
If I were going to sit here and judge every single character on what they do in their personal lives, if YouTube was going to do that, well, they got to start digging a lot more because there's a lot of people on their platform they're going to have issues with if they start digging.
Because anonymous accusations...
That's a pretty broad reason to try to de-platform someone from a video platform.
It's just ridiculous.
It's upsetting to see how there's no backbone at any other platform out there when it comes to this type of stuff.
Focus on your business.
If your business is video, it's video.
If your business is to pursue crimes that other people did, then that's your business.
But don't tell me that that's what we have to do now.
We're just a video platform.
And we have our terms of service, and if you abide by them, great.
That's all we're focused on.
But if someone does something that's illegal in society and does something wrong, that's society's judicial process to take care of that.
That's not Rumble's process.
That's not Rumble's obligation.
We're just a video platform.
Leave us alone.
We just want to operate a great video platform.
Now, Chris, there are creators that do cross the line sometimes.
A little bit too far, you would say, on some platforms.
How does Rumble handle that?
For example, they cross the line where it's like maybe...
Citing violence or something.
Violence or maybe even like corn, you know?
Yeah.
How does...
So, you know, obviously we have a terms of service.
We do not allow a lot of types of...
Like, we do not allow inciting and violence.
We do not allow pornography, etc.
So, you know, that you have to abide by.
You have to abide by our terms of service.
And like I said, there is no platform that I know of that's of mass scale that sits on their own cloud that has to adhere to their cloud.
But there are the guardrails of the app stores.
And everyone needs to be conscious of that and aware of that.
And until someone comes up with another phone to compete against that market, that's the guardrail we're going to have to be a part of.
If you want to have any sort of mass market appeal, you have to be in the app stores.
Plain and simple.
When it comes to that type of stuff, there's obviously very strict policies in place.
And also, one of the things we like to do differently, and we're trying to figure this out, one of the things that happens on YouTube that gets taken advantage of are DMCAs, for example.
Copyright.
That's part of the law.
You've got to take it down.
We've got to strike accounts if they violate copyrights.
You've got to ban accounts if they do it too often.
One of the things we like to do is, like, I don't like the idea of, like, a permanent ban unless it's, like, some fraudulent type of behavior like spamming and stuff like that.
But when it comes to, like, copyrights, you want to kind of reach out to the creator, give them the option.
Rather than strike them, but give them the option, give them the window to take it down.
It might have to be fast because, you know, there's liability there.
But, like...
Kind of work with the creator in a different way than the other platforms have to kind of help them get into policy and not violate, not ruin their whole businesses and livelihoods because they made a mistake they were not aware of.
Innocent mistakes happen all the time.
And there's a lot of mobbing happening where someone will just...
Doesn't like somebody and send a whole crowd to take that out.
We see that all the time.
We're like, guys, this is Rumble.
We're not going to fall for that shit.
But it still happens.
It's unbelievable how they assemble activists to try to take people out.
That works really well on these other platforms.
It doesn't work at Rumble, though.
That's good, though.
Yeah.
Because you're giving the creator a chance to say, you know what?
This is my platform, but you know what?
Regarding your actual content, fix it up real quick.
We'll make sure that you're good to go on the platform still.
Rather than saying, oh, you're out of here completely.
You're gone.
You're banned.
That's good.
Besides Russell Brand, you were also there.
Obviously, you were behind us when we got demonetized.
But when Andrew Tate got canceled everywhere, you were there as well.
Can you tell us how that came to be and how you guys built that relationship?
Because obviously, the Tate brothers are...
Huge on Rumble.
But how did that come into fruition?
Yeah, no, the Andrew Tate channel on Rumble, you know, post...
So Dan Bongino has definitely, you know, put us on the map.
He brought in, like, a massive amount of users onto the platform.
It really kind of...
That's where, you know, a lot of the magic happened.
When Andrew Tate came on, believe it or not, he was the second largest after Bongino that had influence in terms of, like, app downloads and subscribers.
I think he's almost at two million on Rumble already.
That August, the wave was enormous and, you know...
Same idea.
Like, all the platforms just turn someone off and we don't know why.
One by one.
All these accusations.
Starts by Instagram, then Facebook, then YouTube.
It's the same story with a lot of these creators.
And it's just like, you know, we're pursuing to get them onto the platform even prior to when that happened.
But, you know, it's just unbelievable how it all happened.
And, you know, the impact that he had on Rumble, I think, is enormous.
He was like, he had us, I think, number one in the App Store for quite some time at that point in time.
And that was when Rumble needed a lot of work.
I think a lot of people still remember us from that era, which is now two years ago almost.
A lot of people remember us from that era where we didn't have product teams, we were a small company, just raised money for the first time ever.
21, when Peter came in, that was the first time I raised money for this company.
In 2013, I went to everyone.
I actually went to one of Peter Thiel's venture capitalist firms and pitched them.
And everyone thought, you're crazy competing against YouTube.
What are you thinking?
And by 2021, that was our first investment from Peter, JD, Vivek, Colt, etc.
We didn't have the best UI. We didn't have the best software.
We had a lot of improvements to make.
I think we've made a ton of progress.
You guys have seen it.
You guys are going through the pains with us.
People don't understand something when it comes to Rumble.
We're not just building software on top of Amazon's technology, their cloud, or even their live streaming software.
We're actually building software that sits on top of our hardware, where we're plugging in the wires ourselves, and we've got to make all this stuff work.
There's so many things happening here, and that's why we're uncancellable, but like...
And that's the benefit of it, but we have so much more work to do because of what we stand for and what we do in this world that it's not as quick as some people like it to be.
But I think now the velocity with the teams we have in place is increased dramatically.
And I think we're at a point right now where we're ahead on features now than some other platforms.
We're ahead in certain areas.
We're behind in others, but I think we can be very ahead in a lot of different ways by the end of this year on the majority of aspects to the platform.
And people underestimate how hard it is to actually be independent.
It is not easy, guys, to stand up to these big companies that have a huge infrastructure, they have a head start, they have Google behind them, etc.
So for you guys to be able to build up your own infrastructure, you know, it's going to take some time.
And which, by the way, guys, we'll have a Q&A at the end here, so if you guys have any questions for Chris or whatever as far as Rumble goes, you know, on the future, etc.
Yeah, a Q&A. We will go ahead and answer those questions for you.
We got y'all.
But...
Sorry.
So you guys obviously are improving.
A couple of big developments recently.
I guess we could start with Barstool Sports and another thing.
So you guys recently got Barstool Sports on board.
How did that come about?
Yeah, it was a big pickup for us.
So we got the whole Barstool portfolio on Rumble.
It's a partnership that extends not just on content, but also cloud and also an advertising relationship as well.
So it was a great pickup for us.
The thing I like the most about the Barstool deal is Dave is now an equity holder of Rumble.
He didn't come for the purpose of only taking cash.
He wanted mostly equity, and he took mostly equity.
And that's exciting to me, to have a partner that really wants to get behind this business and help it a lot.
I just did a pizza review with him a couple weeks ago.
He came to the offices.
Great guy.
Excited to be working with those guys.
So it's great because that really kind of helps us build that Rumble Sports portfolio.
We have...
We have the UFC in Canada, so you can actually do pay-per-view in Canada for the UFC on Rumble.
And we have the Power Slap, which you guys have been to the event.
That's growing like crazy.
You guys...
Who came?
I know you came to the last one, right?
You didn't come, right?
Were you there?
I missed it.
I literally just missed it.
Did you see the lineup that came out there?
You guys had Travis Scott there.
That's huge.
Everyone there.
Everybody was there.
It was insane.
This sport...
The trajectory of this sport, I think someone just wrote an article about it a week ago, but the trajectory, the demand, the amount of people that want to be there, and the way we're building this sport via influencers, I think is...
That was genius.
I think it's something very special.
And Rumble's got the exclusive distribution rights to that, which is a big deal for us.
We also have Street League Skateboarding.
We have the exclusive rights to all of that.
You wouldn't picture Rumble as being the place for skateboarding, but it is.
We also have Nitro Rallycross Racing.
We got Barenichael Fighting Championships on Rumble.
We have a lot of stuff.
And then we added Barstool to, you know, we're really kind of pushing that sports category in a way that, you know, in the last year, that has become, like, the main category of investment for Rumble.
And it's helped us broaden our audience and change the perspective of the platform.
What about WWE? That's a great question.
I've had conversations about this internally and externally as well.
All that type of stuff we eventually want to make moves for.
We want everything on Rumble.
We're very agnostic, so whether it's any sport out there or any type of entertainment or in any category, we want to make a move for, and we're all for it.
The WWE, I think, would be a good match for the current audience that we have, so it's a good idea, and who knows what happens in the future, but...
You know, we're gonna pursue all different types of content all the time.
I can say this with all authority and I want to say grace.
When I was at the Power Slap event, yo, the anticipation waiting for that slap to happen to somebody is incredible.
So quiet, man.
Yeah, on your seat, like, is it gonna get knocked out?
It's so crazy, bro.
I saw the Power Slap at Dana White.
Really good.
So you guys got Barstool.
Obviously, the app is improving.
The whole experience that you guys launched, Rumble Studio as well, the cloud.
There's also some new developments recently that came out literally less than a week ago with TikTok.
Can you tell us what's going on with that?
Give the people kind of an overview of what's going on with TikTok and how Rumble is adapting to it.
Yeah, so I'll step back in terms of like...
We got the clips too if you want me to play that first.
Sure.
You want to play that first?
Bill's being passed, right?
Yeah, yeah.
We can show it real fast and then I guess you can comment on it.
Is this from Fox News if I'm not mistaken, right?
All right.
We're going to share a screen with y'all real fast because this is some big stuff right here.
There are many U.S. platforms to tap, and believe me, the conversation's going on every morning since this bill got momentum in the House.
From 7 a.m.
to 10 o'clock, I'm on the phone.
Think about this.
Where do you serve it from?
Well, we've got something like a rumble here domestically that serves up podcast videos in a higher definition in longer form.
They could serve up TikTok.
We could move a lot of it onto there.
There's all kinds of players you've got to put together.
I'm going to be in that mix, Stuart.
I love this deal.
It's hairy, it's scary, but it's got huge value.
And then there's another one, right?
Yeah, there you go.
Last week we were filled with a conversation about TikTok and what should happen.
The House passed it in quite a bipartisan fashion.
This now goes over to the Senate.
And then over the weekend we hear this, that there are rumored bite dance buyers that are putting themselves together.
We have Steve Mnuchin, might be familiar to everyone, former Treasury Secretary under President Trump.
We have Kevin O'Leary, of course you know him.
Bobby Kotick, he's a former Activision CEO. And then someone I don't know, Chris Pavlovsky of Rumble.
So, There is a potential buyer.
Would that be a good solution for everybody so that it's sold off and everybody gets to keep using the app?
I think it would be a good solution.
Right now TikTok to me is a national security threat.
Why?
Because it's under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
That's the threat component of it when we have 170 million Americans whose information is that under that same control.
So they can use it to spy on us.
You know how people get I'm very mad when we hear of a spy balloon going overhead.
Or, you know, from us in the West where you see that China is buying farmland, ranchland near military installations.
This is much, much worse in terms of what they're trying to do.
I met with the CEO of TikTok last week.
He was in Washington.
And I said, look, the problem is not TikTok itself.
It's the problem of the ownership.
And if we can find a group like we have here, I think it would make the solution better.
Continue with TikTok, but not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
We'll see how that goes.
Boom.
Wow.
Alright.
Yeah, man, if you could comment on that a little bit.
That's big news.
W Rumble.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we put a letter out there that we expressed interest in TikTok.
The way I see it right now, you know, this has to go through multiple iterations.
The House just passed the bill and then the Senate has to pass it.
And then we're, you know, I think Biden said that he would sign it if the Senate passes it.
Yeah.
And then that would obligate them to divest.
You think this is something we could see in 2024?
Like, would this have to come into play with whoever the president is at the end?
I think we're going to know more in the next 30 to 60 days.
I think this is going to be very fast, and we're going to know a lot in the next couple months here.
It really just depends on the Senate, I think, and what happens in the Senate.
But, like, when you take a look at it, and the letter really kind of talks about us being the technology partner, but when you look at this potential acquisition of TikTok and how this has to happen, we expressed interest of wanting to be part of a consortium and being the tech partner on it on the cloud side.
And Kevin is right on in one aspect, Kevin O'Leary, that you saw in the clip there, but...
Meta is not going to be able to do anything here because of antitrust concerns.
Google, same reason.
They're not going to be able to step in either because of antitrust concerns.
So when you're looking out there, who is a video company that, one, Could help in some capacity.
Rumble is long form.
TikTok's short form.
So that's like high res down to low res.
And it's only the United States.
It's not global.
So how many other video companies out there that have that capability to understand how to run video both on video at all?
There really isn't any that I can think of off the top of my head.
And how many people, the big other problem that Any consortium is going to have or any buyer is going to have is the algorithm.
Because I don't believe the way the law is set up in China that ByteDance will be able to sell the algorithm due to their IP restrictions in China.
So someone has to build the algorithm for video and understand video in order to step in with TikTok.
And like, that's what company does that.
Obviously, YouTube does it.
Obviously, Mata does it.
But like, really, all the companies out there that do that are going to have antitrust concerns.
So like- Even Twitch, right?
You would say?
Amazon.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Twitch is part of Amazon.
And they don't, they're not, they're more just live streaming.
They're not like in that kind of space yet.
Pre-recorded short form content.
Yep.
In algorithm, algo-based stuff.
So one of the things we're working on in Rumble behind the scenes, because it's been a big problem, is our search and our recommendation algorithm.
And we've hired data scientists to be working on this for quite some time now.
So our recommendation algorithms and our data scientists are obviously working on this.
So what other company out there is actually working on algorithms for video?
Question for you.
I think it's like, when you look at it, it's just...
It rumbles, obviously, they got the cloud.
We are obviously working on algorithms.
I think Kevin said it best.
I got a question.
If you guys were to acquire TikTok, would you guys acquire it intact the way it is?
Or would you guys have to change the name?
Would you guys have to change a substantial amount of data behind it?
How much would you guys have to change when you acquire it?
Or could you guys keep it fairly similar to what it is now?
First, we don't know what that would look like and how the divestment from ByteDance would look like and what that would entail and all the details of it.
Second, we want to be part of a consortium, so not just us, obviously, but This is a very expensive transaction.
And we want to be the tech partner in that.
So those are a lot of questions that would be better answered at a later date, depending on how everything flows.
It really depends what the bills look like, what actually ends up happening.
Right now, it's a little bit of a jump ball in the sense that we don't know what the Senate's going to do yet.
Speculation.
We have to wait and see what the Senate does.
And, you know, my opinion on that is that it's changed.
I would say like I was maybe like a month ago thinking no way it could ever pass.
But, you know, I think like things are changing a little bit.
It could pass.
It's definitely changing after the how how the House passed it.
It's definitely changing.
I don't know what will happen.
I got one more.
If you guys acquired it, would you guys be able to implement a similar free speech slash free expression model to that TikTok?
At this point, we don't know.
We don't know what anything will look like.
We don't know what the consortium would look like.
There's a lot of unknowns at this point in time.
Almost like when Elon got Twitter, he unbanned a bunch of people.
So I guess for us, we'd be grateful to get unbanned on TikTok as well.
They'll be like, hey, Chris!
You guys are banned on TikTok?
Yeah, dude.
We got banned on TikTok back before TikTok was cool like that.
We got banned in 2020 when it was just starting to take off in the beginning of the pandemic.
So it's like, now we blow up on TikTok because people repost our stuff.
But as far as us having official accounts on TikTok, We haven't had official accounts since December 2020.
Clear as day.
We were just getting into the content game, trying to push ourselves to be marketed on different platforms.
I remember the day we got canceled.
We and you were at the barbershop.
Remember that?
We're walking by Blackbird recording TikTok videos.
The title was, I remember it clear as day.
Punishing women for bad behavior.
Walking by where?
Blackbird.
It's like a local lounge down the street.
Yeah, I was filming TikToks, and one of my videos went viral, like, you gotta punish bad behavior from women when they flake on dates.
That went viral, and that video led to us blown up, but it also led to us, like, getting banned off TikTok.
We had, like, three million views on the first day, and we got banned for it.
Yeah, like a week later, the accounts were all gone.
And they broadcast it on The Real.
But now, we still, because now when people meet me or whatever, they'll say, yo, I love your content, whatever.
They always say, oh, I found you on TikTok.
So people are still reposting our stuff.
We don't have an official account on there.
So, bro, I hope y'all acquire it, man.
I think it'd be better for the creators anyway.
Like, I know a lot of people are scared, like, no, no, no, don't get rid of TikTok.
But I think you guys having it would be a lot better than whoever controls it now.
Who would be, like, who is more qualified on the operator and the tech side?
I really want to ask that question because, like, I sincerely believe that Rumble, like, I can't think of anybody outside of Rumble.
It'll be easy work for you guys.
You guys are able to host hours of video.
You can't have Google step in.
You can't have Meta step in.
Like, they all have antitrust concerns.
What about kick?
Oh shit, actually that's perfectly into the next question.
Chris, what's your thoughts on alternative platforms besides Rumble that are kind of fighting the fight against YouTube and Twitch, etc.
You know, Kick, Bitch Shoot.
I'm trying to think of the other.
There's a few others I can't think of right now.
Odyssey, etc.
What's your thoughts on all these other alternative platforms?
It's a great thing.
And as a creator, it's the best thing.
It creates...
Competition is so good for creators.
And in the live streaming space, Kik is doing a great job acquiring talent, creating a market for talent, and that helps creators.
Like...
One of the things I don't get is you see YouTubers and they'll knock platforms and they'll trash platforms that aren't YouTube or Twitch.
And you're like, I'm sitting there and I'm like, that's gotta be the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Because like...
Their economy gets better if we succeed.
Their economics get better if we succeed.
Having Kik and Rumble and Bitchute and Odyssey is an amazing thing for the economics of creators.
Overall.
You want that to happen as a creator.
So from a creator perspective...
It's a great thing.
One is BitChute.
They started using the Rumble Advertising Center.
So now they're starting to monetize.
So we're helping them monetize.
Rumble has four amazing assets.
And this is the way I look at the business.
The prime asset, like the one that we're all familiar with, is the video platform that competes against YouTube.
The second asset is the Rumble Advertising Center.
I refer to that as Rack.
And, you know, companies like BitChute and many others are now using Rack to monetize their sites.
And it's not just for Rumble, but it's for other people.
So if anybody wants to step in and bring ads onto their site, Rack is going to do that for them.
We're competing directly against Google AdSense and Google AdExchange and Google Ads.
And that's Rack, another amazing asset.
In perspective, Google bought DoubleClick, their ad server, for billions of dollars.
We built this in the last year and a half.
We didn't spend billions of dollars doing that.
So I see that as an incredible asset that this business has.
The third one is we got cloud.
Cloud.
Rumble has a cloud.
That's huge.
That's incredible.
We can now compete directly with Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure.
I see that as an opportunity.
All these companies that want to be closer to free speech and want to move into that direction, why aren't they using our cloud?
That's a...
Great place to be.
So I see them all as potential customers hopefully one day.
I see our assets kind of like a lot of our assets can work for them.
And then the fourth asset that we have is a studio, which is completely different and completely new.
It's not something that Google has.
I think this is kind of going to be one of our weapons in really competing in this whole ecosystem.
It's giving the ability for all creators, big or small, to run ads, you know, write directly in their live streams through using Rumble Studio and multi-streaming to all platforms.
And that is also a great tool for every single one of the platforms.
So for us, I see the whole market as an opportunity, and I don't see any single one as a negative.
I see it as a positive, especially a positive for the creator community.
Yeah.
And that's great.
We have lots of opportunity with all these companies, and I want to tap into that.
Yeah.
That's dope.
No, it's good.
So, yeah, I could read some of these chats, because I know you guys probably have some questions and stuff like that.
So, yeah, man, get your questions in now, guys, with Rumble.
Rumble ran it in.
What do we got here?
Oh, Laura Loomer.
Shout out to her.
She goes, Chris, thank you for all you do for free speech.
Why do you think the media always simps for Elon Musk instead of giving you more credit?
That's a damn good question.
And who is behind the Media Matters hit pieces against you?
Yeah, well, Elon Musk is Elon Musk.
He's one of the richest men in the world, so obviously...
I mean, we could pull up that article real quick, real fast.
I mean...
People don't know, but, you know, you do it pretty well yourself.
says here, you know, 1.8 BIM, Bill, pretty damn good, man.
Hey, Chris, we're friends, right?
We're friends, right, bro?
Okay.
That's from Bloomberg, so...
Yeah, no, Elon's Elon.
He's, you know, he acquired Twitter, and he's made Twitter far better than what it was.
Nothing but praise for that.
I'd argue there's less censorship on Rumble than on X, though.
X is good, but I think you guys are more free speech.
X is not the tip of the spear when it comes to freedom of expression.
Rumble is the tip of the spear for freedom of expression.
We shut down countries when they tell us to turn off creators.
Every other platform, including X, shuts off the creator when countries ask them to turn off certain creators.
In terms of freedom of expression, we are the tip of the spear.
I firmly believe that.
Not even close.
Yeah, it's not very comparable in my mind.
But anybody that's pushing and tilting the system in our direction is a positive.
It's helpful to rumble.
And you and Elon know each other, right?
You guys are amicable.
Yeah, we talk.
We talk.
So it's a positive.
It's a net positive for the community.
It's a net positive for freedom of expression.
And that's a great thing.
I'm all for that.
And the second part of the question...
Yeah, let's pull that back up.
Regarding Media Matters.
Yeah.
And who is behind the Media Matters hit pieces against you?
Bro, yeah.
Media Matters always writes bullshit.
Yeah, I have some theories about this.
I think it's like a web of organizations that a lot of dark money...
I don't quite know that well.
I think Laura probably knows better than I do when it comes to that.
She's really tapped in on understanding that web.
For me, it's like unraveling that has been something we've been trying to do and trying to figure out because it's so ridiculous what they do.
They will sit on our pages and refresh a page on a video that they deem inappropriate and And try to find an ad and try to destroy the reputation when doing that.
Elon's suing them, isn't he?
Yeah, he's suing them for that exact reason.
And we have the same evidence with Media Matters when it comes to that, of them doing that.
They literally had an account on Rumble.
We know which one is theirs.
We saw how many times they refreshed the page.
Caught a red-handed.
Caught in 4K. It's so absurd.
The agenda is obviously to distort and hurt us.
It's upsetting to see that because I never thought...
Ten years ago, I was always suspicious of a lot of stuff, but I never thought it was this corrupt.
You can see it now.
My fear is that corruption is going to get a lot smarter, and a lot of people aren't seeing shit anymore.
I feel like in the last year, people think it's getting better, but really, I think people are getting tricked in a lot of ways.
This is election year, right?
What do you predict is going to happen with creators that are pushing certain ideas and ideologies?
Like I said, I think the censorship is going to get extremely intelligent.
More subtle than before.
You're not going to know what's happening.
I think this is going to be a whole different animal this year in terms of censorship.
And many people, unless you're really tapped in and really understand, you're not going to see it.
And you're not going to understand it.
And you're not going to know who the authentic person is and who's not.
I think there's going to be a lot of tricks.
I think there already are.
And, you know, unless you're really tapped in and you know, it's going to be very difficult to...
It's so difficult, I think the people that do know don't even know.
I think it's going to be that difficult.
But AI is like...
The interests.
AI is so interesting.
I've been really, really exploring and trying to understand it.
In so many ways, it's so scary.
What the capabilities are here and how fast it's moving.
That's a rabbit hole that can get pretty scary once you go down it.
We got here, who's up next?
Yo, big shout out to Chris, bro.
No other CEO of a platform is doing this with its creators other than Elon, but Rumble is on its way to be a massive 100.
Thanks for this platform.
Finally, a sane human being running a site.
Absolutely, man.
Wait a minute, Chris, are you the first billionaire on the show?
I just thought about it.
Are you the first billionaire on the show?
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, because I don't know if Grant Cardone and them count because they control real estate that they allegedly is worth that much, but as far as being liquided, yeah?
I think you're the first one, bro.
I don't even know if these articles are real.
Yeah.
Smart man.
Free speech, man.
He's humble.
You gotta be careful when you're reading mainstream media.
He's humble.
I like it.
Corporate media is not the place I get my information from.
Kimpop says, Chris is the new David and Big Tech is the new Goliath.
We'll be praying for you.
Wumble.
Yeah, shout out to you, bro.
All right.
What else do we got here?
Nolan Billy.
Chris, I love what you're doing with Rumble.
I love for what it stands for.
But when are you going to fix?
Locals Chat, WFNF, WB Balls, Chris Pavlosky.
And yeah, shout out to Dave Rubin, actually, by the way, when we talk about Locals.
I'll learn to find it later.
So they're asking about that.
What's the issue with Locals Chat?
He's going to clarify it in another chat.
Oh, he's going to clarify in another chat.
Okay, great, great.
I would love to know.
To clarify Locals, Live Chat doesn't refresh on Android app and on PC. I have to close the entire app on phone and back out on PC. I order to get the newest comments on Live Chat and the constant buffering that happens during a live.
I will escalate that immediately.
Bam.
There you go, my friend.
Just like that.
So shout out to you, Noam.
Guys, get your questions in now because you've got the man in the house.
So anything that you guys think would improve the user experience or whatever, Chris is really open to constructive criticism.
I mean, at the end of the day, man, we're here to take over.
So I told you guys before, Rumble is here to stay.
And to be frank, I don't know any other CEO that's going to sit here taking comments to improve his platform.
So this is a big W for you guys as well and Chris.
Seriously.
It shows the commitment to improve and really create the best alternative platform.
And you guys have given us, you know, previous critiques as well, and Chris fixed them right away.
Yeah.
I remember.
True.
Yeah.
He goes, also, I want to know why after a live ends on Locals, we're unable to view it.
So, for instance, on Crowder Live, shortly after it ends, we're unable to view it for a few hours afterwards.
WFNFW Big Balls, Chris Pavlosky.
Okay, so that is a processing limitation.
So, you know, we're not using the...
It would be the easiest to go out there and just use Amazon's Twitch live streaming product or live streaming products out there or use Agora's live streaming product that does all this for them.
You know, Agora was worth billions of dollars.
Actually, this is actually funny.
When we used Agora once, and we put it on, because Locals was using Agora, not Rumble, but Locals was using Agora, and we brought Crowder onto Rumble, and then Crowder did Locals, he crashed Agora.
A multi-billion dollar company that's focused on live streaming product crashed Agora.
Meanwhile, it's running on Rumble.
No, these are just simply limitations that we have because we're building this stuff from scratch and doing all the transcoding and encoding and there's just a delay from the end of the stream to the processing of that VOD. I think Rumble's getting better at that,
and I wouldn't be surprised to see all this kind of humming in a really comparative way to the Amazon live streaming products within the next couple of months.
We're actually aiming to have better, right now, our latency with YouTube is pretty even if the stream setups are done properly.
The quality is actually better on Rumble.
If you put it to the max quality on Rumble, guys, and put it side by side with YouTube, the quality on Rumble is actually better.
Yeah, I definitely hear that a lot.
But the latency for Twitch is far better right now.
They're the best at latency.
The Amazon live streaming product, which is Twitch.
Because it's designed for it, I guess.
But we're aiming to be better than them in the next few months.
The beauty about Rumble is that we're building it all.
Ourselves, so we can actually be better than them and try to achieve to be better than them.
It might take longer, but it's yours.
It takes longer, but it's ours, and it will be a competitive advantage when we get there.
We will get there.
We are going to get there because I care.
I want to win, and I want to be better.
Kick runs on those servers, but Rumble doesn't.
That's big.
Kick runs on those Amazon servers, don't they?
I have not.
That's what I've heard.
I've never looked myself, but I hear that they're on.
Everyone's on.
Most people are on Amazon.
Parler was on Amazon.
It's where everyone goes.
That's the easiest solution for people, and hopefully we can change that by getting everybody onto RumbleCloud.
I'll tell you this, man.
I'm buying Rumble stock.
Yeah, I already have.
I'm not even...
Bro, you guys...
I already have RUM, guys.
Invest now, because I'm telling you, this is going to be the future, man.
As they continue to restrict speech, especially with an election year, and it's been going up, too.
It's been going up.
It's been surging the past few months.
So, hey, RUM, if you guys want to know it.
WRumbleWChris, I love Rumble, but could you guys please stop autoplay on embedded videos or at least give us the option to turn it off?
You have that option on desktop now.
That was just released recently.
So on desktop, you can turn that off.
I'll have to check if that option is in the app.
The apps are a little further behind than the mobile web or desktop version, but it is now there on web for sure.
So it's in the video player, inside the video player on the bottom part.
Yeah, 1920 by 1080.
Yeah, guys, you can watch it.
Like, open up two tabs and watch this on Rumble and on YouTube and go 1920 on the Rumble side and see how much clearer it is than the YouTube.
Because he goes, see, not all Canadians live in igloos and repeatedly say A. Some of them can become tech CEOs.
He does say A. Yeah, I say A. Sometimes.
That's part of my vocabulary, for sure.
Chris, when are you gonna allow us to gift channel subscriptions and rumble live chat?
That's coming.
I would say in the next like 90 days we hopefully will have gifting of subs.
Nice.
So like similar to what Twitch has.
Keem Chillin, buy Rumble stock.
Hey, man.
I'm not telling you what to do, but that's what I'm doing.
This is not financial advice.
Yeah, it's not financial advice, but I definitely bought a good amount.
Mario PL. And it shot up like crazy after you guys acquired Barstool Sports.
Yeah.
And it's just going to continue.
Like, you guys have so many big creators over there.
You guys got us.
You got the Tates.
You guys got Steven Crowder.
You guys got Don Bongino.
You guys got Sneeko.
You guys got Kai Sinat and Speed.
Academics.
Do you have any other creators that we don't know about?
Do you guys miss Donald Trump?
Donald Trump, of course.
There you go.
There you go.
Donald Trump's over there.
Everyone forgets that he's on Rumble.
Yeah, because you mentioned it earlier.
But yeah, Donald Trump's on Rumble.
You know what I mean?
So it's like...
Anybody else?
Dan Bongino?
Dan Bongino is doing...
He did it this morning.
Like 120,000 live viewers every weekday morning.
Yeah.
Between 11 and 12.
Crowder's close to 100,000.
You know, there's so many creators on Rumble.
I guess, like, they all are in different areas and different topics, but...
Yeah.
Nelk recently came over.
Yeah, they're uploading their podcasts on Rumble as well.
They recently came over.
I saw a rant about BlackRock and Vanguard.
Oh yeah, it's right here.
Oh, okay.
With investors like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, will there be a censorship like on other platforms?
So search Steven Crowder in BlackRock and you can see the letter that they sent Rumble and you can see what Rumble did.
And I think that will answer your question.
Once again, man.
Jocasta goes, Hey Chris, thank you for fighting for free speech.
With all the streamers in the game right now, who would you say is your top three streamers under the age of 30 right now and why?
Interesting question.
Well, that's tough because I don't know who's under 30 or not.
How old are you guys?
Am I allowed to ask?
34.
I'm 31.
Alright, so you're under 30.
Not in the under 30 category.
So under 30, the top streamers?
Ryska maybe?
Sneeko?
Sneeko?
Yep.
Top three.
When they stream?
Yeah.
Kai and Speed?
Kai and Speed definitely do 50,000 plus live when they go live.
Kai and Speed.
And then I would say Sneeko is one of the big ones.
That's three.
How old is he?
Like 25?
So then Sneeko.
Yeah, that's it.
That's three.
Kai, Speed, and Sneeko.
Na'ili, can you make Rumble downloadable from TVs?
Downloadable from TVs?
Can you watch it on TVs?
Absolutely.
We have apps on Roku.
We have apps on Samsung, Apple TV. What am I forgetting?
Fire TV, Android TV, LG TV. So you can watch these shows on your big screens.
You can set up your accounts and have all your channels show there.
You can replace your basic cable subscriptions with Rumble.
We'd love that, obviously.
Watch the Fresh and Fit pod, right?
It's coming soon, guys.
It's really important, though, that you guys all download the app and sub to the Fresh and Fit pod because that's the way that you as creators grow.
We're actually finding that when you sub only on web, they don't get hit with notifications when you go live.
So when you sub on app and you download the app and you sub to your channel, that's how you get the notifications.
So just make sure that's set.
But yeah, we're on all the TVs, most of them anyways.
You can download the Rumble app there and watch us up there.
But in order to know when your favorite streamers or your favorite content is going live, you need to sub to them on your mobile app.
What else do we got here?
Question for Chris.
What type of cyber attack is Rumble experiencing?
A lot of people are complaining.
Maybe you can clear some of it up so people can understand what's going on.
Thanks, Rick.
Okay, this is a great question because we are...
Sometime in December, we have had incredibly large attacks happening on Rumble, ones we have never seen before.
I think they refer to them as HTTP Layer 7 attacks.
Very complicated to stop.
We have, you know...
We have DOS providers helping.
We have our own stuff helping.
But these attacks have been absolutely enormous and been very, very difficult for us to stem.
It created a lot of downtime for us and a lot of negativity around the platform just being down because of these attacks.
I think now we're in a really solid state.
We've really learned to defend against these attacks.
We got some great partners that are helping us with that now.
This has been something that's been really annoying to deal with behind the scenes.
Hence why you guys are working to get your own infrastructure.
Yeah, and like, you know, we've made some massive progress on this in the last three, four months, and now I think we're on a very solid basis right now.
Like, you probably saw everyone went down like a week ago, two weeks ago.
Yeah, a little bit of lag, yeah.
Rubble was up, Meta went down, YouTube went down, X went down, everyone went down with that major situation that happened.
Instagram went down for like a day or two.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Rumble was up the whole time.
So was Truth Social, who's also being hosted on Rumble's Cloud as well.
Bam.
What else?
What else do we got here?
Okay, Stay Dangerous, Chris, Big Tech, Rumble for Life.
Alright, shout out to you, Woozie Badass.
Good evening, FNF and Chris.
Shout out to Free Speech and shout out to Tate Sneak on FNF. They are the reason I'm using this app.
Shout out to you, bro.
Shout out to you, bro.
What else?
Emmanuel Angel.
Oh, hello, Chris.
Can you add a feature like YouTube where you can have premium and pay monthly to have no ads on all videos and replace?
Thank you for standing up for freedom of speech and expression.
Good question.
We have that already, so you can go into your dashboard on desktop and purchase a pro package to do that.
We're going to make this way easier, and you're going to be able to do it within app, and this is going to happen in the next 30 to 60 days.
But that feature is already there.
It's just that it's very hidden.
But you just got to go on your desktop computer, purchase the package, and it's $10 a month, I think.
If you watch it on your mobile app, will that translate over where they won't see ads on their mobile app, on their account?
It should.
And we're actually building this all into the mobile apps, and we're going to make this a big deal.
It's called Rumble Pro Pack.
It's, I think, starter package it's called, but it's under pro packages.
I believe that's what it's called in the dashboard when you go to my account.
I've seen it when I log in.
Yeah.
It's down to your account on desktop, guys.
It's definitely there.
Al Voice goes, we want live chat replay.
Okay, this is actually, okay.
Yeah, coming.
Yeah, I know you guys ask about that a lot.
We'll do that.
And the app crashes often when I have the screen minimized, and I always have to restart it.
Also, paying a few bucks to be able to skip ads would be nice, which we just answered that for you.
And then, Lunasa's Ra, when do you think live chat replay will be implemented?
Probably in the next 90 days or so?
Yeah, I'd give it a quarter.
All these things are all in the pipeline right now, so we're really working on it.
Awesome.
Yo, I just think you guys don't understand.
You're here talking to Chris.
In person.
Yeah.
About the app itself.
That's wild.
That's huge, bro.
That's wild.
Imagine the YouTube CEO doing this.
Never.
Never.
They don't give a fuck.
They don't care.
They don't give a shit.
Twitch, they don't fucking care.
Tell me Rumble, bro.
Yeah, man.
Totally.
I mean, I don't even think Kick will do this.
Nah.
So that shows you guys a commitment to creating the best platform, man.
Chris, you're an amazing question.
Is RumbleCloud usable for things like gaming servers with Game Studios, MSM Media, and ESG Consulting Groups attacking gamers?
I'm thinking of starting a new studio.
Yeah, I think we made a...
I think Palworld or something had said they were going to go to business because their costs were too high, and I made a public tweet saying we could help them.
I think the gaming community using RumbleCloud would be amazing.
We're all for that.
It's almost like Pokemon, right?
I've played it before.
It's pretty good.
I beat the game.
That's our other Chris.
Yeah.
Not so rich.
Hey man, he's loaded, man.
She's the bum version, quite literally.
Yeah.
Richard Fitt, let's go.
This is too hilarious.
Okay, well...
Sorry about that, Chris.
What were you saying?
So, yeah, rumble.cloud, you can go there.
You can check out the packages we have in terms of the VMs and see if it would work for your needs.
But we'd love to tap into that industry.
I think that'll...
If we could get the gaming industry on RumbleCloud, that's going to be huge.
I actually think the cloud...
There's two things.
I'm going to be the top gamer for Rumble, man.
We'll bring toxic gaming back.
In order to tilt the market back and win, we need to...
We need to kick the advertising ecosystem's ass.
We need to kick the cloud ecosystem's ass.
We gotta win in those two categories because cloud is the heart of big tech.
That we are taking the fight directly in their house right now by having cloud.
Their profit center, that's where they make a ton of money and they get to dictate a lot of things that happen on the internet.
The free flow of information starts at the cloud because everyone can hop on a browser and find a site and get their information.
But if it's all hosted on the cloud, they can prevent that free flow of information.
So having a new highway in that side of the world, having the rumble cloud is huge.
It's huge.
A massive asset that can really push back.
And obviously the advertising ecosystem is massive and I think we can do some serious damage on that side of the business as well.
Gaming combined to all other forms of entertainment is number one.
It beats movies, TV, sports.
It beats everything combined, gaming.
It's a huge industry, guys.
What else we got here?
YouTubeBot, 50 bucks.
Okay, shout out to you, bro.
Aortiz goes, Chris, can you address why 70% of your market cap is owned by insiders and of the 30% that actually out to the public, 5% is owned by Vanguard and 1.2% by both BlackRock and Straight Street, respectively?
I'm not sure those percentages are correct.
I've seen some stuff online that is not correct.
And I don't know whether those percentages are correct.
But yes, one thing that is correct is that the majority of ownership is insiders.
I have 85% voting control in Rumble, so roughly 85% voting control at Rumble.
And I am the single largest stockholder in Rumble.
And then, you know, one of my good friends that I've known for a very long time is the second largest stockholder.
And then the third largest is another good friend of mine.
And then even Dan Bongino is a very large stockholder of Rumble.
Nice.
But the public, the shares, like the insiders have like a huge portion in the majority of the shares.
And we're all like super passionate individuals in what we're doing and really believe in the mission.
Like myself, obviously Dan, everyone.
I mean, the proof's in the pudding.
How many countries have come after you and said, yo...
You need to cancel this person.
You guys said go pound sand.
Or, you know, how many hit pieces does Media Matters make?
You know, trying to say that you guys incite X, Y, Z. Like, you guys are really committed to the mission, right?
It's like you guys are standing up to freaking governments.
Oh, we do.
Multiple.
France, Brazil, UK. We shut those countries off because they asked us to shut off a creator.
Name another large platform that has ever walked away from a country based on the principles, based on a human right.
I don't know.
Because I get a lot of questions from you guys from France saying, yo, why isn't Rumble in France?
No, you know why.
Now you guys know why.
They basically wanted someone, in Brazil too, they wanted someone canceled.
Rumble said, no, we're not going to do it.
And they basically turned the country off, guys.
We stuck up for a crater than complying with the government.
Imagine that.
It's like, I can't believe we're in it.
It's sad that we're there.
And it sucks that we're the only one that does that.
It would be so great if Elon would come in and do the same thing.
It would be so great if Mata did the same thing.
I would love that kind of support.
And that would really tilt the system back.
You create a wall of platforms to fight back against this ridiculous censorship that's happening around the world.
It really opens your eyes of how amazing America really is.
Because we don't have this luxury.
In a lot of countries of the world that we do here.
That First Amendment is so incredible.
A lot of people will have it in their Bill of Rights, like Canada and all these other places, but if you don't have a judicial system and you can't uphold that constitution, that's a problem.
In America, it's really fortunate that we have a country that really upholds this human right.
And guys, we're going to go 50 and up here because, you know, obviously Chris is a busy man.
He's got money to make and, you know, creators to save and promoting free speech.
Hardyway says, is there any way that you can implement different price levels for memberships on locals similar to Patreon?
Remember, FNF used to have different membership levels when they were on Patreon.
Okay, so for locals, that's what they're asking.
That's a good question.
I don't know the answer to that.
I think you could, but I'm not going to say for certain because I don't know specifically if you can do that or not.
Okay.
What else?
Okay, can you make Rumble available for consoles, PlayStation, Xbox, for example?
Xbox is coming.
Okay.
Magico goes, Chris, love the platform growth and offerings in Cloud Studio video ads.
Would TikTok short form come into play?
Any roadmap to go into tweet or forum space like Reddit or True Social?
Interesting.
No.
Not at all.
I think we have the four categories.
I can add a fifth category in what we're kind of exploring, but it kind of really dovetails into studio.
So, cloud, Video platform, advertising ecosystem, and then studio, which is going to bring in ads.
And one of the things we're doing is we're trying to bring in our own products.
So like, for example, if brands don't want to touch you, run Rumble Coffee, right?
Stuff like that.
So we want to make sure...
It's actually pretty good.
I actually really like this coffee.
I bought a coffee maker just for it.
We had some in Romania with the Tates.
It was great.
It's legit.
It's actually legit.
It's high-quality stuff.
I love it.
But what we want to do is we want to have...
Like, a set of different products so that creators can generate revenue.
Because there's a lot of creators that advertisers don't want to touch at all, and that creates an issue.
And it's gotten so stupid, the reasons why, that, like, if you want to promote Rumble Coffee, it'll be as an option in the Rumble studio to generate revenue.
So we want to have a product line.
We don't just want coffee.
We're looking at exploring in, like, various different products.
So you can call that, like, a fifth...
A fifth pillar.
That's so important though.
But that's really just supporting the Rumble Advertising Center and the studio.
So it kind of fits into one of those.
I think for a creator, if you're not able to get sponsors from other brands, then guess what Rumble says?
Here's some products you can use in your platform to help us generate money, which is pretty good.
Yeah.
I mean, what other platform is going to do that, guys?
How about whiskey?
This guy.
Rum?
How about rum?
Yeah, rum.
That's what Chris wants.
It's possible.
That's rumbo card!
Fat Olive, as he goes, Chris, thank you for giving us a partner program, only investing channel on rumbo that looks at fundamentals.
Question, when do you see rum to be net income positive and cash flow positive?
So these are like forward-looking statements for a public company.
I can't get into answering any forward-looking type stuff when it comes to financials or rumble.
That's for the CFO. Luzupan goes, Am I tripping or is there no way to download long-form content to the device in an app similar way to YouTube, Whole, FNF, Team and Chris?
So download your videos on...
I think you download videos on Rumble?
Yeah, it's not...
I think I know what he's asking.
We're going to be building in that function where you can actually download it to your device.
So that's coming.
Okay, because I've seen the download thing.
Yeah, in your accounts you have it, I believe.
Okay.
For your own stuff, yeah.
Okay.
PunchTV says, What is the future of the gaming community on Rumble?
Good question, bro.
Hey, like I said, we want to be in all categories of content.
We don't want to be one specific thing.
We don't want to be just politics.
We don't want to be just sports.
We want to kind of have all the communities on Rumble.
I think it just comes down to building an amazing product and getting a better product out there, and that's what we're going to do.
Like I said, latency is a big thing that we need to...
Need to fix.
And our goal is to be better than any other platform out there when it comes to latency.
And I will drive and I won't stop and I won't quit until we are better than everyone out there.
So I think as we continue to build a better product here and sub-gifting and all the other stuff, rating.
Rating is in testing right now with some creators.
We'll have that better product and hopefully we'll have a much better product here in the next year or two.
Yeah, and I game on Rumble, guys.
It's a Rumble exclusive for obvious reasons, because I'm very competitive.
But yeah, if you guys want to see me game on Overwatch, I'm over there on Rumble.
That's a nice way to say it, but I don't ask for you, bro.
Yeah, Crickle goes, Hey, Chris, my question is, there have been any thoughts on developing using an additional streaming protocol alongside RMTP? Something like Mixer's FTL protocol, which gave an option for sub-second latency.
I wasn't aware of that, but that is something I will talk to my tech teams with respect to.
I have no idea what he said, but it looks like you know.
We got here.
Just checked out RumbleCloud.
Solid pricing, but no GPU compute.
How many V100s do you have on order, and when can I start running my Gen.AI app on RumbleCloud?
Interesting questions.
Yeah, tech questions.
I don't even know what they're saying.
Interesting.
Go back.
That's a graphics card question.
Yeah, so GPUs is in very high demand, specifically the H100s.
I can't talk about any forward-looking stuff, but what I will say is that we're very aware of the AI community and the needs on the cloud side, and that is something that we are having a lot of conversations about in where and how much to invest, and hopefully there'll be some more information on that, but I don't want to say much more than that at this point in time.
No problem.
And we got 14,000 of y'all, man.
I like the video, guys.
Katie Maria says, Hey, Chris, can you tell me why Europa, the last battle, has disappeared from Rumble?
I'm not familiar with what this is, but if videos are getting taken down...
Might be copyright.
Could be copyright, it could be an app store, takedown request, it could be various different things.
Like I said, there's many different reasons why the content can be taken down on Rumble, but we try to be as...
We try to push the system as much as possible that we possibly can, but we're constricted by guardrails of the app stores.
Yeah.
Let's see, because that's a documentary, guys, so it might be copyrighted.
What else do we got here?
We have one more.
One more?
That's going to be in soon.
It's coming shortly.
Someone clarifying one of their questions?
So, Chris, I guess just for me, the last question I have for you.
Future Rumble, where's it going, and what's the future for creators on Rumble?
So, at this point in time, I am the most, what's the word, excited with what we have.
We have, it has taken, it's actually been really fast, but for me it's been really slow.
In perspective, we built an ad marketplace in the last year and a half when Google spent billions of dollars buying Double Kick and Double Click and many other things.
We have the four assets that we can finally go to market and start selling now and start improving.
The Rumble video product will only get better.
The Rumble Advertising Center is an incredible asset for publishers, for Rumble, for advertisers, going directly after AdSense and AdExchange.
We have the cloud going directly at the heart of big tech.
And then we have the studio.
All these products now, we're finally at the stage where they're all kind of out there.
The studio still needs to add the ads part.
Once that's done, I can now, you know, hit the market with four incredible products, build an incredible business.
It's like a mini Google in a way, you know, not search, or we don't have search, but...
And we can hit the market and really push forward.
Like...
I've never been more excited about these four assets that we have.
I think they're incredible assets.
It's an incredible achievement what we've done in the last couple of years alone since we raised money.
And I've never been more excited, I think, for creators.
The fact that they're going to have advertising options.
They're going to have things like Rumble Coffee to advertise.
You guys are already doing it.
That is what's going to build sustainability for creators.
All these things are coming together and we're going to be able to create a creator ecosystem that's going to be sustainable for the long term.
And most importantly, my goal is to create...
I want to create the best way for creators to make and generate revenue.
I want to be the best place on the planet for helping creators make money.
And you guys do better than YouTube.
If a creator comes over to Rumble, they don't got to wait to get monetized.
They get monetized.
Yeah, we have some advantages.
Obviously, YouTube's got other advantages.
They get a lot of brand ads.
We don't.
The goal is, though, with Rumble Advertising Center and then Rumble Studio bringing in live reads, which no one else does, by the way, that's patent pending, that technology to, in real time, get an advertisement notification while you're live streaming.
So imagine we're live right now, and your Rumble dashboard in the Rumble Studio right now pops up and says, hey, for $100, read this read on Rumble Coffee.
You read it, $100 goes into your account.
That's what this is going to do.
This is patent pending right now.
This is a whole new mousetrap for generating revenue for creators that no one else has out there.
And I think that's going to be a really big competitive advantage in the live streaming market.
The other great part is it doesn't really depend on Rumble.
You can stream on YouTube, you can stream on any platform, and Rumble will now participate in the revenue generation on all platforms.
So it's not limited to just the audience on Rumble.
It's unlimited to the whole spectrum of all platforms.
Wow.
No, that's great stuff, man.
As you guys can see, a lot of big things coming for Rumble.
Did that thing come in, guys?
Yeah, okay, man.
Okay, last one here, guys.
Boozy Badass says, Chris, bring in Brand Dangerous Perfume and Cologne.
We want to work with Fresh and Fitted.
Okay.
Never heard of it, but okay.
Guys, this was a great episode, man.
I don't think anyone else would, you know, have the courage to come and listen to constructive criticism.
Like, that show is a dedication of making the platform the best it can be.
I told you guys, the last Bachelor of Free Speech, man.
Chris, thanks for coming on the pod, bro.
I'll give you the last word.
No, thank you.
You guys are a powerful force on Rumble.
I would say one of the larger shows.
You guys pull in some incredible numbers.
We're so happy to have you guys.
I love seeing these Rumble trophies on the table here.
What you guys have done in helping Rumble has been phenomenal.
I just want to say a big thank you to you and your community out there.
Having the patience they've had with a lot of stuff that we needed to improve on over the years.
So I can't thank you guys enough.
You guys and your community is what makes us better.
And I can't thank you guys enough.
Thank you so much, man.
Shout out to Chris.
He's the CEO of RumbleMan.
Shout out to RumbleMan.
Guys, we'll be back with some lovely ladies in a little bit, man, because the show doesn't end.
Love y'all.
Peace.
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