Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski on Resisting Government Censorship Pressure - Live from Milwaukee GOP Debate | SYSTEM UPDATE #135
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Undoubtedly, see, we are not in our normal studio.
We are instead in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, live, where we are outside of the arena, where tomorrow night the Republican presidential debate, the Trump-free Republican presidential debate will take place.
But I expect there to be a lot of Interesting clashes and a lot of interesting things to cover as well, and we hope to have for you a great lineup of interview with some of the candidates, some of the other people here who are worth talking to.
But for tonight, I have with me a very special guest.
He is the founder and CEO of Rumble, Chris Pavlovsky, who arranged for Rumble to have the exclusive online broadcasting rights for the Republican debate, something that wasn't at all obvious to happen, and yet he managed to make it happen, and we are here to talk to him about that.
about that and many other things relating to online censorship and the fight for online freedom.
Chris, it is great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Glenn, thanks for having me on.
Glad to be here with you in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Yeah.
First time.
First time for you in Milwaukee.
I think, as you said, first time as well for you to be on our show, if my memory serves.
That's right.
So we're excited about many of those things.
So let's start off with the fact that, obviously, Fox is hosting the debate.
It has the exclusive online rights for TV.
More and more people these days, though, don't consume TV, who are under the age of 83.
They instead are consuming political content online.
And if you want to watch the debate online, there's only one place you can do that, which is Rumble.
How is it that Rumble secured the exclusive rights instead of Facebook or Google or any of the other more recognizable platforms from the perspective of, say, the corporate world and big tech?
Yeah, so Fox obviously has the broadcast rights.
They have the rights to do it on their website as well.
But when it comes to social media platforms and platforms, we were the exclusive provider for that and we're doing it through the RNC channel on Rumble.
And it came about, I would say, It's been like earlier this year it was something that we wanted to bid on doing the whole thing and you know taking over the one entire debate maybe getting you there to question the candidates and then we kind of got to a point where it made more sense to just go after the streaming rights and not have it on any of the other platforms and that's where we ended up and that's where we are today and now we have the first and the second debate which is like
I think it's a historic moment for new tech, like any new technology platform, to be able to have something that is this important in the United States.
So it's a huge win for Rumble.
I think it's a huge win for new tech in general.
Yeah, I mean, I see it as definitely a watershed moment for independent media, for the ability to kind of liberate ourselves from the tyranny of big tech, but looking at it from the From the perspective of the Republican Party, which is dominated by a lot of big corporate donors, it's not really that obvious of a choice.
This is an incredibly important showcase for the Republican Party to get as many people as possible to watch their candidates headed into the general election, especially the first debate.
Why is it that you think they were willing to kind of roll the dice?
I mean, it was, you know, such an obviously safer choice to say we're going to have an exclusive deal with YouTube or with some massive show on YouTube or Facebook.
Why do you think they were willing to take this gamble and put their exclusive rights with Rumble?
Yes.
So it's I think like when you take a look at all the candidates, like whether it's President Trump or Governor DeSantis or even Vivek, like they all have profiles and they're all on Rumble and they're not very big advocates of big tech.
So like just.
Just looking at the candidates' perspective, they're not advocating big tech at all.
When it comes to the constituents, they're definitely not advocating big tech.
You have this massive constituency that is on Rumble and is promoting and wants to see it on new tech.
They don't want to see it on big tech.
So I think it was a moment.
Obviously, the RNC thought about it, and I think they made a really good decision in doing that.
They also had the same kind of feelings that the constituents and the candidates had when it comes to big tech.
So it's-- - Well, what are those feelings?
What do you perceive as the kind of animosity that Republican constituents have to big tech? - Well, a perfect example is like Congressman Devin Nunes, right?
He was one of the first people to join Rumble back in 2020.
This is prior to the 2020 elections.
And he comes on the platform in the late summer of 2020, and he calls me up.
You know, I'm a Canadian guy, and I'm thinking, why is the House Intel, ranking member of the House Intel Committee, calling me?
Like, I thought I was getting under, going under some kind of investigation.
Yeah, that's never a kind of call you want, ordinarily.
Yeah.
So I get this call from him and he's like, Hey, like if I bring my podcast to Rumble and I search for my name, am I going to be able to find it?
I'm like, yeah, of course.
How could you not?
And he's like, well, that's not happening on YouTube.
And he joins and within like two to three months, he has like two to 300,000 subscribers on Rumble.
Whereas on YouTube in four years, he only had like 10,000 subscribers.
So That was the first watershed moment.
That was the first major moment for Rumble that kind of opened the eyes to everybody else.
And then, obviously, Dan Bongino came and really sent it to a whole new level.
That's a perfect example of a Republican—imagine, you're a Republican that has probably nearly a million constituents in your district, and you can't reach your audience, but you can reach it better on Rumble than you could on YouTube.
That's a problem.
And I think everyone sees that as a problem, and these are how they come to these decisions.
So we're both talking about this as an important moment, a watershed moment in independent media, the ability to liberate ourselves from the oppression of big tech.
Ultimately, though, as the person who founded Rumble, as the person who now runs it and it's had a meteoric rise, it's now a publicly traded company on the public markets.
What do you see as the kind of one or two defining differences between, say, Rumble on the one hand and Google's YouTube on the other?
We're fair.
We don't discriminate content.
You can search and you'll have the same ability to find content that any other creator has.
The deck isn't being stacked against you.
You're getting access to tools.
You're getting access to monetization tools, distribution tools that you normally wouldn't get on these incumbent platforms if you're a small creator.
Generally speaking, we're just fair.
And these other platforms are not fair in how they treat their creators and how they treat the audience.
They're stacking the deck.
They're picking and choosing.
You could call it censorship.
You could call it preferencing.
You could call it whatever you want.
The bottom line is they're just not being fair with their audiences and their creators.
And I think, ultimately, we're going to prevail because we're just going to be fair.
So I've been around the internet for a long time in the sense that my journalistic career was founded on the internet.
My audience was cultivated on the internet.
I never went and worked for a large media corporation in order to build my journalism career.
I only did that much later on once my career was established.
And even then I always had kind of one foot in and one foot out in terms of independent media.
So it never surprises me to see Miss being Deliberately disseminated, especially about new entities that are kind of threats to establishment power.
And obviously there's no shortage of kind of lies and deceit mythologies about Rumble.
And I know that firsthand because before I decided to not even bring my show to Rumble, the one that I have now nightly, but even these periodic videos that I was doing for a year or so before, I spent a lot of time looking into Rumble's history to understand what it was I was about to join.
And the history of Rumble, the actual history of Rumble, could not be any more different than the perception that people have of it.
So as the person who actually founded Rumble, not in 2020 and in 2021 when large amounts of people became aware of it, but back in 2013 when you were kind of In obscurity, building it slowly.
Talk a little bit about what it was that impelled you to do that and what the idea behind Rumble was and essentially what was the idea that gave birth to this company that has now become so big?
Yeah, looking in hindsight, it kind of all makes sense a lot more what we started to do and what we were actually looking at back in 2013 when we started.
But the whole premise of Rumble was that, you know, Google purchased YouTube in 2006.
And post-2006, YouTube became like the de facto platform for video and sucked up basically all the oxygen in the room and everyone went there.
By 2010, 2009, they started introducing programs with multi-channel networks.
There's these companies called Fullscreen and Maker that basically aggregated content and managed content on the platform.
And by 2013, I started to really sense that an opportunity was emerging.
And that opportunity was that these incumbent platforms, in particular YouTube, were starting to prioritize Corporations, big brands, multi-channel networks, and they were deprioritizing our friends and family.
So Rumble emerged on the premise of simply helping our aunts, uncles, and friends monetize and distribute their video.
Post 2013, YouTube starts putting in restrictions for watch hours in order to monetize, you know, minimum amount of subscribers, all these different barriers in order to monetize your video, which then would probably affect your distribution.
And basically, they left the small creator, they left them.
They built their platform on them and they decided to leave them for whatever reason.
And by small creators, what do you mean by that?
Your friends, family, you'd upload a family video like Charlie Bit My Finger back in 2007, 2008.
That got a billion views.
The platform was built in a large degree off user-generated content and then obviously they had this huge copyright issues that they also were building their platform on, but that's a whole different story.
The small crater was just totally left behind.
They were forgotten about.
And we saw that as an opportunity to go help the small crater, give them exactly what the big craters are going to get on the monetization and distribution side.
And we felt that that was the opportunity.
We didn't think that it would go so broad that they would start censoring political candidates and taking it to very large influencers.
Because back then in 2013, maybe there was a case here and there you could point to, but in general, there was no widespread perception, no widespread grievance that YouTube was engaged in political censorship.
That wasn't part of the thing you thought you were addressing, was it?
Yeah, they were engaged in small creator censorship, in a sense.
Yes.
Like it was more commercial than ideological.
Yes.
It was very commercial.
It was for the purpose of monetizing.
And I believe it was probably for the purpose of generating more revenue.
And they felt like, because we don't know what every single indicator is uploading, we got to be careful what brands and advertisers to put with the videos.
So we'll let the corporations do that.
let them create networks to do that, and then we'll monetize with them better and surface their content more rather than the small guy.
And that was essentially the opportunity that we saw.
And then it emerged to become something that's so much larger than just the small creator.
So you pretty much can't read an article now in the corporate media about Rumble that A, isn't derogatory, but B, and that makes sense as you become a competitor of corporate media establishment platforms, ones they perceive they can't control, and whoever they can't control, they ones they perceive they can't control, and whoever they can't control, they will villainize and demonize in But also, you can't read an article that...
Doesn't describe Rumble as some sort of right-wing site, as a MAGA site, and I think you can trace it to a couple of events.
One is the fact that people like Devin Nunes were the first to really start migrating as a response or a reaction to YouTube's political censorship, that here you have a sitting congressman routinely being suppressed in all sorts of ways.
He wanted to have a place where he could speak freely.
But also I remember when You started recruiting people like myself to do deals where there'd be periodic videos contributed.
I went along with people like Tulsi Gabbard and a couple of others.
There was a Washington Post article deliberately designed to create the perception that Rumble was a right-wing site, even though the people leaving were myself, who was a longtime left-wing, someone associated with left-wing causes.
Tulsi Gabbard, who was a Democratic congresswoman who resigned from the DNC to endorse Bernie Sanders, doesn't matter.
So when you began Rumble, was there some ideological component to its mission?
And is there an ideological component to its mission now in the sense of left versus right or Democrat versus Republican?
Our politics when we started were cats and dogs.
You can go look back on Wayback Machine.
That's all there was on Rumble.
That's as far as our politics went.
In terms of like, Really, what we believed in was just treating everybody fairly, and then that permeated into the 2020s and 2021, and we just never moved the goalposts.
You're very right.
We're constantly under attack by the media.
We're constantly under attack by Everyone that doesn't like to hear independent voices wants to silence voices.
We're essentially the only platform that has really fought back in the COVID era, really allowed people to speak out against what they believe happened in the election.
You can't find places like that.
Rumble was the place where people could voice their concerns and voice anything That they felt that they could voice at their dinner table.
We got to a point where the conversation me and you can have at a dinner table is not even allowed to happen online anymore.
That's completely wrong.
Our ideology was just treating people fairly and allowing people to have discussions and not moving those goalposts.
Definitely permeated in later years to being really sticking strong on the idea of following through on expression as much as possible.
It definitely changed a little bit.
As I saw what was happening, I can't even imagine a congressman couldn't reach his constituents.
In an election year, prior to the months before an election.
That's more concerning to me as an individual than anything else.
I feel like one of the greatest achievements was that we allow people to have voices when other places weren't allowing them to have it.
Yeah, I mean, for me, one of the kind of red lines that was crossed where, you know, for me, the concern reached a whole new level was the decision first by Twitter to completely prohibit any discussion of the reporting from the Hunter Biden laptop from the New York Post, the nation's the concern reached a whole new level was the decision first by Twitter to completely prohibit any discussion of the reporting
It doesn't get enough attention, I think, but Facebook's suppression of that story was more insidious and more subtle, but actually more effective where they decided they were going to algorithmically suppress the story.
That was an example where obviously conservatives felt like they were being targeted.
Another example that for me was kind of a Rubicron crossing moment was when Rand Paul held a Senate hearing in the United States Senate where he invited leading epidemiologists to talk about the potential benefits of ivermectin and some of the current clinical studies being conducted into it.
He, as has happened so many times before, published Or broadcast the committee hearing where those witnesses were brought before the Senate to speak to the American people and YouTube, namely Google, just pulled it off the air.
Yeah, that's how he ended up on Rumble as well.
Yeah, and he ended up on Rumble that way.
So those are examples where conservatives are being censored.
So my question is, the perception arose as a result with these people migrating to Rumble, well this is a refuge for conservatives, for conservative dissidents who are being censored.
Do you see it that way, or have there been examples of left-wing voices or non-conservative voices, independent voices also being restricted, even if they're not even political, cultural voices, restricted in arbitrary ways or unfair ways who are also migrating to rumble to escape that?
Are they as welcome from your perspective as conservative voices?
At first, I don't really see it as a left and a right, just a personal perception and a personal opinion on that.
I see it as people that are talking truth to power are being censored all the time.
There are people that affiliate with the left and people that affiliate with the right.
Anybody that goes against certain narratives that they don't like, regardless of what Political affiliation they may have has a high probability of being censored on the other platforms.
We have perceived leftists on Rumble.
We have perceived people on the right.
And actual leftists as well, not just perceived right.
Yeah, for sure.
Communists.
We have actual communists on Rumble.
There's some channels there that I've seen.
When it comes to how I look at Rumble, We try to be as neutral as possible and not try to lean any particular direction.
At least that's my philosophy as running the company.
We don't want to put the finger on the scale in any in any way.
That's exactly why we've succeeded is because we haven't.
And it's very important that we don't.
But yeah, I We're open to everyone.
I welcome everybody on the platform.
Left, right, up, down, forward, back.
Everyone's welcome on Rumble.
Dynamics I've noticed for a long time, being a free speech advocate, and I am happy to be called an activist for that cause as well, not just a journalist, but a lawyer, is that lots of people love to wave the banner of free speech.
Who wants to be called the censor?
Who wants to admit they're a censor?
People love to claim that they're fighting the battle for free speech, and yet The test really comes when the rubber meets the road, when there actually starts to become a price to be paid for whether or not you're actually willing to offer free speech.
And there was a recent controversy where a lot of people were critical of Twitter right before the Turkish election for having complied with court orders to remove specific candidates, specific dissidents.
You had a similar case prior to that where the government of France, not a small country, To put it mildly.
