Rumble CEO Chris Pavlowski discusses the platform's commitment to free speech, its global legal battles, and strategies to compete with Big Tech. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.
Morning Wire
Rumble vs. Big Tech: CEO Chris Pavlowski on Free Speech | Saturday Extra
(upbeat music) Rumble is one of the few social media platforms committed to protecting and promoting free speech, and it has big ambitions to be the competitor to YouTube. But like other conservative position platforms, it's facing many headwinds, including legal battles here and abroad. In this episode, we sit down with the CEO of Rumble to discuss the platforms feuds with several governments around the globe, and its plans to compete with the big tech BMS. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief, John Vickley, with Georgia Hal. It's Saturday, August 3rd, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. (upbeat music) The following interview was conducted during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. - Joining us now at the Morning Wire booth at the RNC is Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski. Thank you so much for joining us. Good to meet you. - Good to meet you as well. Thanks for having me. - So Rumble is a major competitor to YouTube. What are some of Rumble's latest moves toward staying competitive with them? - Yeah, so I would say the biggest move that we've made in the last two, three years is kind of building out our infrastructure. If we're gonna compete against big tech, we need to be able to have our own infrastructure, and we can't rely on anybody else out there. As we saw what they did to Parler, they did the platform Parler in 2021. We saw that as a major threat to everything that we do, and it's really, really important that we have our own infrastructure. Otherwise, these other platforms like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, they'll end up dictating the policies on our platform and pushing us to whatever agenda they wanna push us towards. So by having our own infrastructure makes us much more independent, allows us to stick to the policies that we've had for a very long time and not teeter away from that, or get pushed around or move the goalposts. As you've seen on the incumbent platforms over COVID and the elections, the goalposts continue to move. Like weekly at some points. - Yeah, the changing landscape all the time when you're talking about social media platforms about various policies. And then like you said, these providers that are behind the scenes, things get really tricky. You don't have to give me details, but obviously building an infrastructure for this kind of thing to compete with the biggest of the big tech YouTube takes a lot of investment. It takes a lot of technological know-how. How has that process gone for you? How many months are we talking about that you've been working on this? - So we're fortunate to get investment. Actually, our first round of outside of investment happened in 2021 around April. And the lead investor was Narya Capital by JD Vance, which is pretty cool. And from that point on, I remember having a meeting with JD and a few others. And one of the things that we all kind of realized that we needed to do is we needed to immediately build our own infrastructure. So that helped us, that investment was primarily for the purpose of starting to build our own infrastructure in 2021. By 2022, we ended up going public on the NASDAQ under ticker symbol all our U.M. and raised around $400 million. We were, I believe, the most successful SPAC of that year, if not super close to the most successful SPAC of the year. So we've been public now for a few years and we have a multi-billion dollar market cap on the NASDAQ and we're well financed right now. But like, the greatest part about that is that we've been very fortunate. Obviously, our stockholders, our shareholders are very passionate about what we do on the free speech side and really kind of pushing the sphere and not getting pushed around by governments. They really appreciate that. And I believe we're the only company that when a government comes to us and says, "Hey, ban this creator and it doesn't violate our policies," we'll actually tell them no. And if it means us leaving that country, we will leave. We've been banned in China. We've been banned in Russia. We've left France and we've left Brazil. We push back and fight governments all around the world when they abuse their authority when it comes to our basic human right of freedom and expression. Have you had any wins on the international level? You know, have you seen any of these countries backed out? We're challenging a few right now that we haven't left and I'm confident that wins will happen. Like, we've been challenging in courts in France. It's the French story is the most ironic of all because in 2022 or 2023, I'm not sure on the dates, we got a letter from one of their MPs or government representatives that we needed to remove RT and a bunch of Russian news sources. And they didn't violate our policies in terms of inciting violence or whatever it may be. It didn't violate any of our policies. And we said, "No." And then they said they'll turn us off at the telco level. And the most ironic thing is Russia comes along and bans rumble. Meanwhile, YouTube is operating a rumble because we won't comply with Russian demands to take down content. So we were being called like we're-- - How many levels of irony is that? - Yeah, exactly. So it's the most ironic thing 'cause we've been called like we're, you know, Russian puppets. Meanwhile, you know, it's YouTube that's complying and working with the Russian government. It isn't rumble when the Russian government asked us to remove creators that didn't violate our policies. We said no the same way and they just actually turned us off right away. So we're challenging the French in their ways of challenging in their court system. And I think we're pretty confident that we'll prevail in some of these nations because like people forget that freedom of expression is part of the United Nations universal declaration of human rights. It's Article 19. This is something that is like basic and it's the cornerstone to democracies around the world. And without it, you don't have like woman's rights movements. You don't have civil rights movements without freedom of expression. It's literally the main thing that allows these events in history to happen to make us a better society. So I think we'll prevail. History will be on the right side of history. It'll take some time. We have to fight and we have to push back and we have to be very resilient. We can't back down when the government tries to push us around. Meanwhile in the States, how is business here in the States? How do you feel like the response in terms of the American audience has been to rumble? So most of our users are in the United States. We've primarily focused on being an American company. We're not a Chinese company. We're not gonna comply with what China tells us to do. We're not gonna be a French company that can comply with what France tells us to do. We're operating based on U.S. law and we are passionate about being a U.S.-based company. So in the U.S. when it comes to freedom expression, even that is starting to get a little odd. You're seeing the Biden administration really push against that and using companies. You're seeing these advertising councils like Garm, I think Ben Shapiro did a great speech about that. You guys are very familiar with what we're fighting against. Same at rumble, we're on the same side, entirely on the same side here. And we even have states. We've challenged, Latisha James, the New York state, tried to put in a law that would force platforms like rumble that would violate our First Amendment, right? We challenged that in New York. We won, that's an example of where we have won. They've obviously appealed. And I'm confident we're gonna continue to win there. But they're trying to do it in very sketchy ways in the United States. They're trying to find ways to do it through corporate entities and the government's kind of pushing it. Yeah, as agents, they're not as overt as the other nations, but the best part is that we have a Supreme Court here that's, I believe, going to uphold the First Amendment and that's very important. Yeah, as disclosure, Daily Wire is currently involved in litigation exactly about this issue, this job-owning concept with the Biden administration has funded these entities that are ultimately censorship entities. Final question, JD Vance, announced as the Vice President picked for Trump. We saw some shares jumped for rumble for that. How's that choice affected? You guys must like this. He was one of the first investors to identify rumble as a platform that would grow and need an investment. And I've known JD now for a few years, more than a few years. And it's super exciting to see him become the Vice President of the United States. It's been a rapid rise and really cool to see that. Everybody at rumble is like super pumped about that. It was, you know, I didn't see that come in like a year ago or two years ago, but it was pretty awesome to see that happen. Well, we appreciate you guys being a platform for free speech and we'll hopefully talk soon. Love to meet me in person. You bet. Thanks so much. I thank you very much for having me. That was rumble CEO Chris Pavlovsky and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire. (upbeat music) (clicking)