Nov. 9, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
26:20
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| You know, after what we've seen in the last year, that new rail is really, really significantly needed. | ||
| As much as Rumble is needed as a video platform, I actually believe that the actual rail, the cloud, the infrastructure, the service is really, really needed for the entire Internet. | ||
| The free and open Internet is under attack, and we need to provide the rail as a common carrier, as close to a common carrier as possible for everyone else out there, all the other businesses, All the other churches, everything, universities, it kind of spreads into every sector out there, and we really want to provide that infrastructure. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the CEO of Rumble, Chris Pavlosky. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, thanks for having me. | ||
| Really excited to be on today. | ||
| All right, I guess we have to do like the disclaimers or whatever you want to call it right up front. | ||
| Yes, everybody knows that Rumble and Locals have merged. | ||
| There was an acquisition. | ||
| So this is not going to be an attack-ya kind of interview. | ||
| But the reason we wanted to do this was to clarify some of the reasons that we're doing this partnership in the first place. | ||
| So I'm just putting that part Out there. | ||
| Before I do anything else, can you just tell me a little bit about how and why you created Rumble? | ||
| Because this is not something that just magically appeared out of nowhere a year ago. | ||
| You've been working on this thing for a long time. | ||
| No, I have for sure. | ||
| So I've, I've actually been in this space for two decades now. | ||
| I started, uh, it was like 2001. | ||
| So yeah, exactly two decades. | ||
| And I remember it was about 2005. | ||
| I had one of my friends send me an ICQ message or an MSN messenger message. | ||
| And they're like, Hey, check this site out. | ||
| And it was YouTube. | ||
| And at the time my friend owned like the top 50 website on the internet, uh, in video. | ||
| And he's like, these guys are going to crush me. | ||
| They're they're well funded. | ||
| I got nothing. | ||
| I won't be able to keep up with the funding and they're going to win. | ||
| And, you know, fast forward two years. | ||
| YouTube sucks up all the oxygen in the room. | ||
| Google buys them. | ||
| Google puts them into the search engine and they end up being the de facto video platform on the Internet post 2007, 2008. | ||
| And kind of monopolize the entire, not kind of, they monopolize the entire video sphere online. | ||
| So it puts all of us out of business that own any video sites or small sites where, you know, no longer existing. | ||
| And then it wasn't until about 2010 where I started seeing a shift change, a real change in the way YouTube was doing things. | ||
| They introduced multi-channel networks, they introduced You know, a lot of preferencing on big corporations and icons. | ||
| So it took me till about 2013 where I said, you know, it's time to get back into this space. | ||
| It really seems to me that the incumbent platform, YouTube at the time, is starting to really deprioritize the small creator and really prioritize those multi-channel networks, big influencers, Large brands, large corporations, and our aunts and our uncles and our friends and family no longer really had any kind of space or real estate on these platforms anymore. | ||
| So we started Rumble in 2013 to really bring back that fairness and really help that small creator get access to those tools, get access to the monetization, get access to everything that those MCNs were giving creators access to. | ||
| And we built a pretty good business in 2013, and it was a good business all the way up until 2020, and then it became a really good business in 2000. | ||
| I would say starting in 2018 in Ford, it became a really, really good business. | ||
| I would say starting in 2018 in Ford, it became a really, really good business. | ||
| By 2020, everything hits the fan. | ||
| It was like 11 o'clock at night in the middle of the summer, and I remember a congressman signing up to our site. | ||
| And I was like, holy shit, why is a congressman signing up to Rumble? | ||
| This being a Canadian video platform, that was a pretty big deal. | ||
| And I remember going to my colleague and saying, hey, is this real? | ||
| Is this a real sign up? | ||
| And we looked at it, and we think it was real. | ||
| It seemed like it was real. | ||
| And a week later, I'm on the phone with this congressman, and he asks me a simple, simple question. | ||
| If I put my content on Rumble, will I be able to find it in search if I search my name? | ||
| And we're like, yeah, that seems pretty standard. | ||
| It should come up in our search if someone searches for you. | ||
| And he's like, well, that's not happening anywhere else on the internet. | ||
| It's not happening on YouTube. | ||
| So I'm going to bring it over to Rumble. | ||
| Within three months, Less than that, two months, he accumulates over 300,000 subscribers on Rumble. | ||
| And in the very same period, over five, actually a longer period, five years on being on YouTube, he only had 10,000 subscribers. | ||
| So you can kind of see how that happened. | ||
| And when that did happen, and everybody noticed, Everything hit the fan. | ||
| Everyone started hearing about Rumble. | ||
| People were like, growing faster on Rumble. | ||
| The message went out, this congressman was on TV telling everybody, go to Rumble. | ||
| I know who the answer is, but we should tell people who the congressman was. | ||
| It was Congressman Devin Nunes. | ||
| He was the very first person in the political sphere to come onto Rumble and realize this problem that was happening. | ||
| And when it did happen, he was out on TV, Letting everybody know that, hey, I'm growing faster on Rumble and I'm getting more views on Rumble than I am getting on YouTube. | ||
| And it wasn't long after that until everybody started following and jumping on a Rumble and it took us to We're in 2021 now, and in August, we saw the largest month we've ever seen on our platform, a tremendous amount of growth from where we were six months ago, seven, eight months ago. | ||
| The largest single growth in a single month was in August, and we haven't looked back since. | ||
| And it's been super exciting. | ||
| We did the merger, and I want to call it a merger. | ||
| It's not really an acquisition, and I think we should really explore that a little bit more. | ||
| But the merger with you and becoming partners with you and Asaf is the next major moment in this business. | ||
| And I'm super excited to be here with you and talk through this. | ||
| So before we get into that stuff, can you just... | ||
| Tell people a little bit about what you actually have built. | ||
| Like, when people think, oh, you're trying to compete with YouTube, or you're trying to compete with Amazon AWS, like, these sound like impossible feats, and you know as well as I, like, I went into enough boardrooms to tell people what we were doing with Locals, and they're just like, no, the big boys exist, like, accept it and move on. | ||
| Yeah, and this is really like looking under the hood and it's really important. | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| So one of the things we did is we did when we built Rumble, we built it the old fashioned way. | ||
| Like I said, I've been in this for two decades. | ||
| I've been working off bare metal and my own servers since the day I started in 2001 or two or whenever it was. | ||
| And I never really did it any other way. | ||
| All these fancy words, cloud and AWS and Amazon. | ||
| I never subscribed to that. | ||
| And when we started Rumble, we put in our own servers, we put in, used our own bare metal and we built out our own infrastructure from the ground up and we didn't look back and how we did that. | ||
| And, you know, it wasn't something that I thought was necessarily, uh, it wasn't like, Hey, we need to do this because we need to compete against them. | ||
| It was like, Hey, we need to do this because it's going to save us costs. | ||
| It's better. | ||
| It's just, you know, we own everything. | ||
| It's, uh, We don't want to give anybody access to that data. | ||
| We want to make sure that's all under our hood and not under someone else's hood. | ||
| And that's kind of why we did it. | ||
| And, you know, you come to 2020 and 2019, 2020 and 2021, it ends up being a real, real good decision. | ||
| But that's not to say that we didn't look into the future a little bit with it. | ||
| When we started Rumble, we saw Rumble as like two things. | ||
| And one was to compete aggressively against YouTube and the video platform as much as possible. | ||
| But if we successfully do that, it means that we'll now have the scale to go really compete against all these incumbent cloud services. | ||
| Remember, when you look at Google and Google Cloud, what do they have that makes their infrastructure so large? | ||
| YouTube. | ||
| When you look at Amazon, AWS, what do they have that makes their infrastructure really large? | ||
| It's Amazon.com and Twitch. | ||
| When you look at Microsoft Azure, you look at Xbox, you look at these things that really allow them to have real competitive advantage on the infrastructure side. | ||
| When you look at Rumble, and now that Rumble has become a formidable size, we now have That advantage to really offer a cloud service is really offer a new rail. | ||
| And, you know, after what we've seen in the last year, that new rail is really, really significantly needed. | ||
| As much as Rumble is needed as a video platform, I actually believe that the actual rail, the cloud, the infrastructure, the servers is really, really needed for the entire Internet. | ||
| The free and open Internet is under attack and we need to provide the rail As a common carrier, as close to a common carrier as possible for everyone else out there, all the other businesses, all the other, you know, churches, everything, universities. | ||
| It kind of spreads into every sector out there and we really want to provide that infrastructure. | ||
| So I'm sure many people are watching this going, so let me get this straight. | ||
| If Parler, let's say, had been on Rumble infrastructure, using Rumble infrastructure after January 6th, would Parler still be here right now? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Rumble's still around. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that's a testament to where we are and what we're doing. | ||
| Rumble is around and Rumble will be around. | ||
| And we're going to continue to build that rail and build that new economy for everyone. | ||
| Not just for Rumble.com and locals, but for everyone. | ||
| And let me get this straight, Chris. | ||
| Our policy is that people can basically say what they want and we're not going to decide who the winners or losers are? | ||
| And if maybe somebody broke the laws of the United States, they have a bigger problem than Chris and Dave? | ||
| Is that... Could we be doing something so radical like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I think the best way to look at it is that we've got to get to becoming as close to a common carrier as possible. | ||
| We're not a publisher. | ||
| We don't want to get in editorial control. | ||
| We want to tell people what they can or can't say. | ||
| If you're having an argument at the dinner table, why can't you have that argument when you're online? | ||
| If you're having a discussion or having an opinion, why can't that be online? | ||
| This is the free and open Internet. | ||
| It's as free as your dinner table. | ||
| There's no difference in my mind, and there shouldn't be. | ||
| And what we've seen happen in the last 10 years on the Internet is this Huge tilting to kind of shut everybody up, regardless of your political views. | ||
| They just want to shut down the conversation that we all have at our dinner tables. | ||
| And that's just, it boggles my mind because when you look back 10, 15 years ago and you look at these incumbent platforms, they were all preaching the free and open internet. | ||
| I even think I saw Twitter Twitter Verified or Twitter, I'm not sure, Twitter Policy say that they want a free and open internet in Nigeria. | ||
| And like, where is that in the rest of the world? | ||
| Like, they're still pretending they want a free and open internet, but it really is not. | ||
| And I think that, you know, us building the rails to that and really providing an open communication platform like Rumble are small pieces, but important pieces to making sure the internet stays free and stays open. | ||
| So I want to flash back to all the way in June of this past year, June, 2021. | ||
| Asaf, my partner in Locals, and I, we met you in Miami. | ||
| We had a couple of plans. | ||
| We thought, all right, we're going to present this guy with some partnership ideas. | ||
| You know, we can work together in some ways. | ||
| And I've said this a couple of times publicly, but literally before the water was even poured at the table, we had sat down for about 20 seconds. | ||
| You said, guys, I want to merge with you. | ||
| How do we make this thing happen? | ||
| So why were you interested in Locals, you know, created by this wacky YouTuber? | ||
| Well, that's a pretty easy one. | ||
| You build something that is really important. | ||
| And what you've built is you've allowed creators to basically build subscriptions in their own way. | ||
| Allowing creators to have autonomy and independence on a different stream of revenue. | ||
| Rumble's been primarily, since we started, it's been based off of advertising. | ||
| And advertising is, to be frank, it can be a weakness in this environment. | ||
| And we don't want to fall pressure to that type of weakness. | ||
| So by having locals and having a revenue stream that's protected by subscriptions and allowing creators to have that independence is something that I've admired. | ||
| I've always wanted to get towards we've built rumble rants We've built in tipping but then I said to myself like why would we compete against someone that has the same? | ||
| Philosophy as us that thinks the same way as us and we're up against the largest thing the largest companies on the planet We're up against a monopoly It makes no sense to be doing it to be doing it with less resources and being really small you can't fight like a Trillion-dollar entities with a couple million dollars like you're not gonna win. | ||
| It's just it's impossible You need to really kind of bring in all the minds bring in all the resources and really and really do it together and I felt like one of the things that seems to happen a lot is that Everyone wants to kind of build their own thing and kind of go at it their own way without really kind of doing it together collectively in a new unified way and I felt like you know, I We've been talking to Asaf for quite some time. | ||
| I felt like there was a real opportunity after meeting you guys in person and then doing it many other times following that meeting. | ||
| It just made more sense to unify and to do this as a collective resource and to put all our brains together and to do it together. | ||
| And that's what this is. | ||
| This isn't just me. | ||
| This isn't just you anymore. | ||
| It's all of us. | ||
| And it's all of us going to go up against the monopoly. | ||
| And that's going to take more than just us at the end of the day. | ||
| We're going to need more than just us. | ||
| But at this point, I think this was the perfect marriage. | ||
| It allows Rumble to be a lot more defensible. | ||
| We now have a subscription revenue stream. | ||
| And it allows us to be a lot more bold on the advertising front. | ||
| The things that we have planned, you know, we've discussed on the advertising stuff is really bold. | ||
| And I can't wait till we go to market with those strategies. | ||
| But now that we have locals and we're together, we can now do that. | ||
| And we can do things and we can innovate in the market the way we couldn't innovate before. | ||
| So, you know, I think for me it was a no-brainer. | ||
| to combine and work with the two, yourself and Asaf. | ||
| I think, you know, this is the perfect synergy. | ||
| And for us, you know, it gave us not only the infrastructure we needed, but resources, but I think you really hit it, which is that we all vibe, like we all know what the threat is. | ||
| We all want to fight it. | ||
| And, you know, you said collective a couple of times, and it's like, my audience freaks out at the word collective, but like, sometimes you've got to team with people to beat these things. | ||
| So let's just get into some of the specifics of the deal and how we're going to work together, because a lot of people in my Locals community and on YouTube and on Rumble were asking about some of the specifics. | ||
| So first off, Locals is going to continue to operate as is. | ||
| We just have better resources behind us. | ||
| But Asaf will continue to run it. | ||
| You're not looking to take over Locals. | ||
| Anything else you want to say on that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Our vision, and it was from day one, is that we'll use Rumble to funnel a massive audience to Locals for your creators. | ||
| Bring them more subscribers, integrate it into Rumble, allow the Rumble audience to really find Locals creators and subscribe to their pages. | ||
| A real true discovery for Locals. | ||
| What drives the bottom line for all the creators. | ||
| In addition to that, the other thing that we thought was really compelling was, and necessary, and absolutely necessary, is to get locals on the rumble rail, is to utilize that infrastructure so that you're protected and that you can continue to fulfill your promise of allowing freedom of expression and allowing people to have their own opinions and have their discussions the way they want to have without anybody impeding that. | ||
| My philosophy is that The way Locals is being run right now has been phenomenal. | ||
| There's no reason for anybody to step in front of that, and that's not what this is. | ||
| What this is, is that Locals is going to be running independently, Rumble is going to be running independently, and we're going to utilize those resources, bring in that distribution from Rumble, really help that Locals community, and really protect that Locals community on an infrastructure point of view. | ||
| Nothing else changes. | ||
| Why would anything else change? | ||
| That's not going to help anybody. | ||
| Can you talk about the data and content side of this also? | ||
| Because when I started this thing, it was purely because I needed a place that I would own my content, my video, my audio, etc. | ||
| And I needed a place where if I got booted off everything else, I could actually still communicate with my audience. | ||
| That's exactly how we built Locals. | ||
| But I saw some people, they're saying, oh, now, now Rumble is going to have all of that data. | ||
| You won't have it as the creator. | ||
| But I don't want to give you too much of a leading question here. | ||
| That's actually not the case. | ||
| You know, it's funny because I was actually talking about this like a year ago, and I've been having this conversation for months since that first time that I explored this. | ||
| I've always wanted every creator on Rumble to own their data. | ||
| I think that's imperative. I think I wrote an article a long time ago about that. | ||
| And that was one of the key ways to kind of really kind of get back into this market is | ||
| really making sure that the creators are independent and own that data. | ||
| For us to like have that data on Rumble, that's not that's not the mission here. | ||
| The mission is to make sure the creators stay independent. | ||
| The mission is to protect the creator economy more than ever and protect their | ||
| opinions and protect what they want to do. | ||
| It would be it would make no sense to be doing the complete opposite of | ||
| why why these businesses are succeeding today. Like we are here to like change the creator economy. | ||
| Give them more autonomy, give them more independence. | ||
| I really think this is the next wave of Web 3.0. | ||
| Call it whatever you want, but it's truly the next wave, and I think Locals is on the forefront of that, and Rumble needs to catch up and do more of that. | ||
| And that's what Locals allows us to do, is now we can accelerate on that. | ||
| Imagine having all your subscribers on Rumble being portable. | ||
| That should be possible. | ||
| That's what we should stand for. | ||
| That's what the creator economy deserves. | ||
| That's their audience. | ||
| For us to be able to take that away from them is not right. | ||
| And that's what Locals is doing, and they've changed that. | ||
| If anything, Locals is going to get Rumble to do the same thing that Locals is doing, not the vice versa. | ||
| And to be clear, that's complete 180 the reverse of what happens on Twitter, YouTube, elsewhere. | ||
| Like I have no way of contacting my 1.7 or whatever it is million YouTube subscribers because they own the access to those people. | ||
| I don't have direct communication with them. | ||
| One of the things that I saw pop up a couple of times when we announced this was people were concerned that Rumble is a Canadian company. | ||
| You are a scary Canadian with that draconian government you have over there. | ||
| Do we have any plans on that front? | ||
| So, we did announce that we're opening up a U.S. | ||
| headquarters in Longboat Key in Sarasota County down in Florida. | ||
| So, we'll be neighbors to Locals. | ||
| I know Locals is in Miami and we'll be on the other side of the coast. | ||
| But yeah, we're definitely planting a large presence in the United States and we're super excited about that. | ||
| The business climate in Florida is amazing. | ||
| The county's been amazing. | ||
| And one of the things I like about it is that, you know, Rumble gets a lot of support from small towns in the United States, and big cities, but small towns, a lot of it. | ||
| And going into a small town is super exciting to me. | ||
| I think supporting a community like that and really bringing Rumble to a community like that rather than picking a large city is super exciting. | ||
| I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| I understand everybody's concerns about being in Canada. | ||
| Those are concerns. | ||
| We don't know where that's going to go here in Canada yet. | ||
| The laws haven't been passed yet. | ||
| But it's definitely a concern. | ||
| I think a lot of companies are expressing that concern. | ||
| And at this point right now, we'll have our U.S. | ||
| headquarters in Sarasota, and I don't think there's anything for anybody to worry about at this point. | ||
| Is there anything else on the tech side that we should let people know that maybe I haven't let them know, or Bongino hasn't let them know, or that you just want people to know about what it is that we're building? | ||
| So there's, you know, the Rumble cloud is something that we're going to put a lot of focus on. | ||
| Obviously, our first priority right now is to make sure that we get locals onto this cloud. | ||
| We've brought on a lot of customers on the cloud side. | ||
| And it's funny because we're not even really proactively selling it. | ||
| We've made some statements that we have it and we've had a lot of incoming and we've onboarded a lot of different clients, some very large ones as well. | ||
| So there's going to be a lot of stuff on the cloud front. | ||
| We're going to be launching that Rumble cloud in the near future. | ||
| But in terms of locals in Rumble, there's going to be a lot of tech integration there as well, not just on the cloud side, but on the front side. | ||
| Um, being able to access the locals content through rumble, being able to discover it, having your accounts to be able to connect, not on a data perspective. | ||
| So we're not taking the data, but on a perspective of like being able to say, Hey, you have a locals account and advertise that locals account on your rumble page. | ||
| So you can go there and convert and maybe even convert them straight from the rumble page into the locals community. | ||
| So there's a lot of work on that front. | ||
| We also have our new app coming out. | ||
| That'll be out in Q1 of 2022, hopefully sooner, but let's say Q1 2022, which is going to have a completely new interface. | ||
| I know that's been a huge complaint and I agree, you know, when you're a bootstrap company and you never raised money since like five, six months ago, You know, you kind of, you don't really have the cash resources to go out there and build that fancy user interface. | ||
| You kind of focus on the core infrastructure, which we have done. | ||
| But now that we were a little more capitalized, we can, we can build that interface that everyone's looking for. | ||
| And we have been, and we're working on that, you know, every single day. | ||
| So we do all that, we fix the internet, and then what? | ||
| We just hang out on a boat? | ||
| What do we do after that? | ||
| I don't know about that, but we've got a lot of work to do in terms of fixing the internet right now. | ||
| Right now that free and open internet is under attack and I think it's going to take many years before we We fixed that, but definitely that's the only thing that I have on my agenda right now is making sure that we fight back on that. | ||
| Well, Chris, I just wanna say, you know, it is also, I've mentioned it on the show, you know, we did an all stock deal here, which we didn't have to do. | ||
| We had cash offers and Asaf and I believed. | ||
| Not only in the idea that you've presented here, but you and the team has just been like, this was all kind of a no-brainer, even though it can get tricky with lawyers and everything else, it all kind of fit. | ||
| And I think people are now seeing a hope for that parallel internet or social media 3.0 or whatever you wanna call it. | ||
| So I know you have work to do that perhaps is more important than talking to me. | ||
| Any final thoughts? | ||
| No, the work is to make sure that the community understands what this is and understands that we're here for them and we're going to fight for them and we're listening to them. | ||
| And I think that's really important that they know that we're listening. | ||
| I try to go through as much as I possibly can in terms of comments and what they say. | ||
| One of the things I noticed is that they say that you sold, you sold, but really, It wasn't a sale. | ||
| It's really just combining forces right now. | ||
| This is a merge. | ||
| This is a merger. | ||
| And I think, you know, we're stronger because of it. | ||
| And we're listening to all the feedback that's coming in. | ||
| And that's what I love about you guys. | ||
| And I think that's really important is to always really have our ear to the ground. | ||
| And understanding what our community is saying, because we have to deliver them what they want. | ||
| And if we don't, we don't deserve to be in business. | ||
| All right, here's what we're going to do. | ||
| I'm going to put you on the spot. | ||
| This was not pre-planned. | ||
| But when we post this video, I am going to ask you to respond to questions in my local community. | ||
| People can ask whatever they want. | ||
| And let's get you in there actually responding to people. | ||
| This is sort of the complete reverse of what Zuckerberg would do or Jack from Twitter or the rest of these guys, but let's get you in the community. | ||
| And if people have questions, they can go to rubenreport.locals.com and ask you questions directly right from the video itself. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I look forward to that. | ||
| I will do that and I will try to do that forever. | ||
| All right, Chris, I got nothing better to do than save the world. | ||
| I look forward to continuing the adventure with you. | ||
| Sounds good. |
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