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- [00:02]
Chris Pavlovski
Tetragrammaton. By 2008 and 2009, there was no game in town to compete on video. It's absolutely impossible to compete against Google and YouTube. It was so difficult. Even, you know, years and years later, I remember when I was going around saying, hey, I think there's an opportunity emerging where we can help the small guy, the small creator get distribution. I went to various VCs and pitched all of them and they nobody bit.
- [00:54]
Interviewer
YouTube was the 800 pound gorilla. And why would you start something to compete?
- [00:59]
Chris Pavlovski
Exactly. It was impossible in their eyes to compete against YouTube. So I started Rumble in 2013 entirely on the premise of trying to help these small creators like, you know, think the America's Funniest Home Videos type of creators get their distribution. So what I started to see from Once Google integrated YouTube into their search is that I started to notice that they started pivoting. And the way they were pivoting was that they were just like search. They always promised that search would be free and fair and basically they're not going to rig the search results to be biased in anything. They also said the same thing with YouTube. It's going to be just an open platform, it's going to fall under section 230 and we're not going to do any biases or algorithmic changes that are going to control what people see and hear. And I started noticing this in 2009 and 2010 where they started picking winners. And by 2013 it got to the point where it was very obvious to me that if you're a big brand, if you were part of a multi channel network, which is like, you know, an umbrella that would manage a bunch of influencers. If you were a big influencer, if you were somebody that they think they could monetize, you would get preference.
- [02:13]
Interviewer
So they would try to build stars.
- [02:15]
Chris Pavlovski
Would you say that wasn't their intention? I think their intention at the time was to figure out the best way to monetize. And if a big corporation was creating the content, they could feel a little more comfortable monetizing that content than someone that filmed something at their home.
- [02:35]
Interviewer
And a lot of material in the early days was just ripped out and put on. So there was a lot of illegal material.
- [02:41]
Chris Pavlovski
YouTube was built on the backs of stolen content, in my opinion. I believe that like they grew because they had an enormous amount of stolen content.
- [02:51]
Interviewer
I mean, now looking back, it's stolen content, but at the time it was just a resource to be able to see the things that you want to see that you can't access anywhere else.
- [03:01]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, it's like because all these large companies were, were not forward thinking enough to be able to match.
- [03:07]
Interviewer
People didn't digitize their library by then.
- [03:10]
Chris Pavlovski
Exactly.
- [03:11]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [03:11]
Chris Pavlovski
So what would end up happening is you'd put a Saturday Night Live clip, someone else will take that Saturday Night Live clip, build their audience and monetize that video. Monetize someone else's content.
- [03:20]
Interviewer
You'd film something you liked on TV and then uploaded that to your YouTube.
- [03:24]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, that was a lot of YouTube's early days for sure. And they had a lot of lawsuits because at Viacom, the music industry went after them. Like there was a lot coming at them. And when Google took on YouTube, I think they were very aware of the challenges that they were going to have with that. What ended up happening, I think because of all this copyright and because of all those challenges, they were really kind of looking for content they felt safer to monetize. That's kind of the opinion I had. But in the process of doing that, they left behind your friends, your families, your aunts and your uncles, their content. The small creator.
- [03:58]
Interviewer
The people that actually built YouTube.
- [04:01]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, exactly. The, you know, the Charlie bit my finger type of content, the America's Funniest Home Videos type of content, stuff like that. So that was the opportunity identified. And in 2013, the whole idea and the whole premise of starting Rumble was to like focus on this cohort of small creators that were basically being deprioritized in YouTube that weren't getting distribution. They weren't. There was rules in place where they couldn't even monetize anymore. You had to hit certain amount of hours. So. So we saw this opportunity to build Rumble to kind of help this creator in a way. The one that was being censored by YouTube. You could call it censorship, you could call it like deprioritized. You call it whatever you really want, but they were just not prioritized by YouTube anymore.
- [04:47]
Interviewer
Would you say it was like the independent option to the corporate giant?
- [04:51]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct. Yeah. Home based creators, small creators.
- [04:56]
Interviewer
How do you come up with the name?
- [04:58]
Chris Pavlovski
So the person who. That's actually one of the coolest stories out of high school. I started websites like passing around funny pictures, funny jokes.
- [05:09]
Interviewer
This is pre YouTube.
- [05:10]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, this is pre YouTube. This is like 2001, 2003. And I started a website doing that. And then I remember I actually get a message from one of my high school friends at, I consider him like a genius. And he was like, hey, check out this website. This is going to be like the number one video website on the planet. And I look at it and he at the time actually owned one of the largest video websites on the planet in 2000, I would say 4,5ish. And he's like, no, these guys are going to crush me because I can't afford the hosting bills. And they got money to do it. And it was YouTube. This is before YouTube became popular. I was like, okay. One of the businesses he had, it was a domain business where he owned, I think, like 20 to 30,000 domains.
- [05:55]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [05:56]
Chris Pavlovski
One of them was rumble.com. i woke up on my 30th birthday and he was like, chris, here's the code for the domain name. It's yours. Go build that video business. To beat YouTube, it's going to be worth a billion dollars one day. No joke. That was his exact words. Amazing what he did. It was a birthday gift at 30 from a friend in high school.
- [06:15]
Interviewer
Good gift.
- [06:17]
Chris Pavlovski
Best gift ever for me, one of the best I've ever received. It was quite the generous gift, for sure. It's a very valuable name even prior to Rumble. And he saw the potential of what it had and he gave it to me for my birthday and never forget that.
- [06:33]
Interviewer
Tell me about the world of video websites. Like, how many were there?
- [06:37]
Chris Pavlovski
There was like dozens. Like college humor. Vimeo was a little later. But like Break.com, which was BigBoys.com, there was a bunch of these ebombsworld.
- [06:47]
Interviewer
What would be on them? Like, how long would the videos be?
- [06:50]
Chris Pavlovski
They're usually viral clips, like a minute or two.
- [06:53]
Interviewer
Would the creators make them and then post them on their own website?
- [06:57]
Chris Pavlovski
You know what, it was more like the actual home viral clips, things that people would film at home and then they'd send them to the, you know, an email box so that these websites would post them and then they would go viral. But it was like a fragmented. Everybody could be their own creator within their own house and be able to. To submit content to these websites. And there was dozens of them. And then YouTube came along, and then Dailymotion and a bunch of these other ones came along.
- [07:23]
Interviewer
Those were all aggregators, correct?
- [07:25]
Chris Pavlovski
Yes. So first it was like editorially controlled by sites like Ebaum's World. And then eventually the idea of aggregating it and creating like one place where everybody can upload, where, like the DailyMotions and the YouTubes and the Live videos at the time, there was like a whole bunch of them and Medicafe and those started to blossom. Then Google buys YouTube and overnight crushes all these businesses at once.
- [07:51]
Interviewer
How difficult was that business to build? Infrastructure wise? What did you need to have a website that hosted videos?
- [07:57]
Chris Pavlovski
Then it was really expensive to host. So you needed financing, you needed money. You definitely needed a bunch of developers to develop it. But it was a game at that time where you couldn't really monetize it. You were going to be kind of upside down until the end. The industry figured it out. I think it took YouTube like a decade to figure out how to monetize. Now they're a $40 billion company. But it was a very expensive endeavor to like get into video, do the video processing, the encoding, the storage of it. And it's still expensive even today. It can get very, very expensive. The barrier to entry is like pretty high. You have to have the means and the money to be able to do it. And then the other part was getting the distribution. I look at this as like probably the more difficult part is getting people to actually come to the platform and use it. And you know, Google, what they did was basically every single thing you would search for in their search engine would now be a YouTube video. So then all these guys and myself included all our sites basically that were getting search traffic, no longer got search traffic. And it all got funneled into.
- [09:06]
Interviewer
So before YouTube, if you were searching for a certain kind of video, someone might end up going to Google and getting to your site.
- [09:14]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, or Ebaum's World or you know, dailymotion. It was like you'd look at the search engine and they'd fairly treat every single other website to divert their distribution to. At the time, search. Google search was like the main route for distribution.
- [09:30]
Interviewer
So if that group of creators is no longer finding voice at YouTube, it does sound like there'll be people who want to watch that stuff because they wanted to watch it on YouTube when that was the focus of YouTube.
- [09:43]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct. So they moved their platform more to this highly produced stuff. Big creators, big corporations. And we were kind of still focusing on the small creators, on the grassroots stuff. And we built a really good business doing that. It was a.
- [10:00]
Interviewer
What would you say the nature of the content was in general, what did it go from?
- [10:04]
Chris Pavlovski
And to, you know, I would say cute cats and dogs and cute family babies and just family based content. And then 2020 happened where everything changed overnight. In the middle, in the summer of 2020, it was, I got a call from at the time the ranking member of the House Intel Committee in Congress. I didn't know him, I didn't know anybody in politics. Rumble's politics were cats and dog videos at the very most.
- [10:33]
Interviewer
It was never started as a political thing.
- [10:35]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. And I'm a Canadian. It's like, you know, I started it just to help the small creator. And then I got a call in the summer of 2020 and he asked like a really simple question. He's like, chris, if I were to bring my content to Rumble and if I search for my name, will I be able to find it? And I'm like, yeah, of course.
- [10:54]
Interviewer
Right?
- [10:54]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, that's. That's the way it should work. But we all knew what happened with the YouTube and the fixing, the.
- [10:59]
Interviewer
Nobody knows. I mean, maybe, you know, I didn't know.
- [11:02]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. So in 2006, like in 2007, that was when Google integrated YouTube and then cut us all off. So I guess from my perspective, it was something that I was very aware of, that things could be changed and manipulated in a way to benefit whatever. In this case, it was to benefit YouTube back in 2006. So when I got in the call and him asking whether he should bring his podcast over to Rumble, he brings it, and within two to three months, he gets two to 300,000 subscribers on rumble. This was like mind blowing to us. We never seen anything like this.
- [11:37]
Interviewer
And what would have been a big.
- [11:38]
Chris Pavlovski
Account before that on rumble, you know, 10,000, 5,000. He had like two to 300,000 within that time.
- [11:47]
Interviewer
How many creators were there on Rumble?
- [11:50]
Chris Pavlovski
We had a million. A roughly amount of million users over how many years? That was in business for about seven years and six to seven years. And he brings it to our, to our site. He gets 2 to 300,000 within two to three months. Whereas on YouTube, he's been on YouTube for four years and he only has 10,000, 11,000 by the time he had 2 to 300,000 on Rumble.
- [12:13]
Interviewer
That point in time, did you have any other competitors besides YouTube? Were there any other small up and coming video platforms?
- [12:22]
Chris Pavlovski
There's like, you had dailymotion, you had a few, but like I said, they all kind of got wiped out in 2007, 2008. No one really kind of stood around to try to compete in that market. We were kind of like the only one, really, that was still trying. And ultimately I've always wanted to compete against them because I felt like they, you know, they got unfairly boosted by Google in 2007, which I thought was, you know, against everything that they said that Google said they would do is what. And they did exactly that. So deep down I wanted to. I definitely wanted to compete against YouTube as a whole and do better. Whereas I felt, you know, they were, they were picking and choosing and not helping the small guy. And, you know, I felt like we could do it better than they were doing.
- [13:11]
Interviewer
I feel like there are so many companies that get started because of someone who felt like they weren't being treated right by the big guys. So I'm going to do it myself.
- [13:20]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah.
- [13:21]
Interviewer
And that's what this is.
- [13:23]
Chris Pavlovski
Exactly. That's like what really kind of drove the passion to do it. As a Canadian, every Canadian has, has a temperature for American politics. Maybe not as much as American, but quite a bit because we're, we're right there. And when you see what happened on Rumble, I remember I was like talking to one of my developers. I'm like, hey, is this real? Like, is this actually happening? He was going through the logs, he's looking at it, he's like, it's real. This is as real as it gets. And we're sitting there scratching our heads thinking, we didn't think it was this bad. The fact that the congressman in California, an elected official, only had 11,000 subs on YouTube with road science promoting YouTube for 4 years and he comes to rumble and gets 200,000 virtually overnight. So that was a real wake up. And from that moment, Rumble went from a million users watching content to about 30 million users within like six months. And yeah, that takes us to where we are today. So it went through this explosive growth around 2020, late 2020 and 2021. And it was basically because we just didn't do anything to throttle anybody. We are just keeping an open and fair platform without same terms and conditions that YouTube had a decade ago. It was no different, same rules, just not, you know, pushing something down and pushing something up. It was just allowing people to upload and bring their content within our terms of service onto the platform. And I remember in the summer of 2021, we see an account, it says Russell Brand on there and we're like, is this the real Russell Brand? And we reached out and it's the real Russell Brand. It was quite the moment when you see all this growth happen kind of over there.
- [15:13]
Interviewer
Would you say the majority of things that you can find on Rumble are also on YouTube?
- [15:20]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, I would say the majority for sure.
- [15:22]
Interviewer
But for some reason on YouTube, people don't watch them. And on Rumble, people do watch them.
- [15:28]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, it's on YouTube they're probably pushed down. And on Rumble, they're not pushed up or pushed down. They're just treated Fairly. If you search for it, you're going to find it. So, you know, Dan Bongino had a huge channel on YouTube when he came to Rumble in late 2020, he came to Rumble. He had 700,000 subscribers on YouTube, but for some reason accumulated over 3 million on Rumble.
- [15:49]
Interviewer
That's wild.
- [15:50]
Chris Pavlovski
And that kept happening. It happened to so many people, especially in politics. And I guess kind of over 2021 and 2022. We took in our first investment in 2021, April. And it was funny because I did pitch the investor. We pitched one of the investors that we pitched in 2014 that had no interest. But in 2021 that changed and then they invested. So that was pretty cool. But we took our first investment in 2021.
- [16:21]
Interviewer
What could you afford to do differently when you had an investment?
- [16:26]
Chris Pavlovski
Well, at that time, we had to build our own infrastructure because of what was happening due to politics, a lot of the platforms were shutting things down. Not a lot. Like, a lot of the hosting platforms wouldn't allow specific type of content. That was, you know, all political bias.
- [16:43]
Interviewer
So everything on the Internet is hosted by someone?
- [16:47]
Chris Pavlovski
Yes.
- [16:48]
Interviewer
And what are the options for hosting?
- [16:51]
Chris Pavlovski
The way I used to build things back in the day is I even rented space in a data center and put servers in there. And that was kind of the way everyone did it in the early days. I did that all the way up until 2020, probably. But eventually these cloud companies came into play and they kind of dominate the market. So you have like Amazon aws, you have Microsoft.
- [17:11]
Interviewer
When you started, that wasn't even an.
- [17:12]
Chris Pavlovski
Option back in the early 2000s. No, they didn't exist. You got Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Cloud. So you have these huge cloud companies. And was that a big part of.
- [17:24]
Interviewer
The expense, the hosting part of it?
- [17:26]
Chris Pavlovski
Yes.
- [17:26]
Interviewer
I see. So by these cloud companies existing, more people could start. It was a lower barrier of entry.
- [17:37]
Chris Pavlovski
No, I wouldn't go there. I would say it was more expensive to use a cloud provider than it was to rent a server. Yeah. So if you were to.
- [17:45]
Interviewer
Why would anyone do it then?
- [17:47]
Chris Pavlovski
Because they convinced everybody. It's easier to scale that way and they convinced everybody, which it is easier to scale if you get big. So I agree with that. But they.
- [17:56]
Interviewer
It's one less thing to do.
- [17:57]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, it's one less thing to manage. So they made it easier in the sense of like managing your hosting. But ultimately it's more expensive. If we were to, you know, in 2020, if we were to be on Amazon versus running on our bare metal, it would be far More expensive by a magnitude of probably 10x.
- [18:15]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [18:15]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, maybe 5x but like significant.
- [18:18]
Interviewer
That's odd because you'd think with the scale that they're doing it on, the service could be provided for much less.
- [18:25]
Chris Pavlovski
You'd think. So that's how they sold us that bill. It seems like that that's what it was supposed to be when, when the cloud first emerged. That's what everyone said. It's going to be so easy to scale, it's going to be a lot cheaper.
- [18:36]
Interviewer
But that didn't turn out to be the case.
- [18:38]
Chris Pavlovski
It's not the case. It wasn't the case for us now like we're different. We're like a startup. Right. So if you're a large company, maybe you're if to hire all these guys, this might cost more. But as a startup it was way easier to go rent a server, you know, put everything on the server using a software overlay like cPanel and be off to the races and creating your site. That would cost like a hundred dollars to do that. And then you have, depending on the storage you're going to use and the bandwidth you're going to do with video, then it gets really expensive. So it really depends. But I think ultimately for like a startup, it's a lot cheaper to go the route through bare metal than it is to use a cloud provider. Now the cloud provider makes it easier to start and that's what most startups do now. But I had the muscle memory to do it the other way so it.
- [19:25]
Interviewer
Was cheaper and luckily you were doing it long enough to know how to do it the other way. I think many people who've come since the cloud providers probably don't even know where to start.
- [19:35]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct. I think that's true.
- [19:37]
Interviewer
It's a lost start.
- [19:38]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. So yeah, what basically happened I guess in late, early 2021, late 2020, when Parler got shut down, Amazon decided to pull the plug on all their cloud and they weren't able to move to bare metal because they didn't have the know how or the resources to move to that large of a scale over to bare metal overnight. It took them like four months. So they were out of business basically at that moment when that happened.
- [20:05]
Interviewer
Only things that have ever been shut down been based on politics.
- [20:10]
Chris Pavlovski
No, no, you can you get shut down for illegal content and illegal. Like we have rumble cloud and we will shut down people for illegal activity and stuff like that. So that happens all the time. But never have I seen somebody get shut down based on politics and Based on, you know what? The excuses they used were, in my opinion, like, manufactured, because you could apply that same excuse to Facebook or the same excuse to YouTube. And in fact, those companies had far more of that activity than Parler did at the time. So it was a double standard at the time. They took away the fastest growing social network, which was Parler. So we, a couple months later, when we took that investment in like April of 21, and the number one priority at that time was to build our own infrastructure. So we took that money and started building our own Rails so that Rumble would never face that fate. We weren't using the cloud providers, so we already kind of were a lot safer. But we still were leasing equipment from IBM and other providers. We realized we needed to build our own cloud, have our own rail, and not be dependent on anybody out there. And that's what we did.
- [21:25]
Interviewer
To be clear, you didn't have any political agenda at all.
- [21:30]
Chris Pavlovski
Just being open, just being fair, allowing people to speak freely about politics, speak freely about their. At that time, Covid was a big thing. Just be able to say what you could say at a dinner table. We didn't allow legal, any illegal activity or any of that.
- [21:47]
Interviewer
So the only thing that would dictate what did or didn't make it onto Rumble would be legality. If it was illegal, you would shut it down. If it was legal, it was open.
- [21:56]
Chris Pavlovski
I would say it wasn't free. It's not free speech absolutist. We're a little bit like, I would say if free speech absolutism is over here, we're like, you know, quite a bit away from that because, like, you know, calling for violence and how you call for violence, any type of violence calling is inappropriate and not allowed on Rumble. So we don't allow spam, we don't allow pornography.
- [22:19]
Interviewer
Doxing, for example.
- [22:20]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, doxxing. So there's a lot of things that might. Like adult material is not illegal. We don't allow that on Rumble. So I wouldn't call us like free speech absolutists.
- [22:30]
Interviewer
How did you decide we won't have adult stuff even if it's legal?
- [22:35]
Chris Pavlovski
So it wasn't a thoughtful decision at the time when it happened. It was when we started rumble in 2013. What happened is that Rumble didn't move its goalposts after we established its terms. What YouTube did, what Twitter at the time did, what Facebook did is they moved the goalposts every year. They moved it in one direction or the other. They kept changing their terms of service. If you know, you weren't allowed to talk about an election, you weren't allowed to talk about masks, you weren't allowed to talk about. COVID Rumble didn't make all these policy changes and start changing them based on public pressure and media pressure. We just stuck to exactly what we came up with in 2013, provided a very consistent terms of service and never moved. We haven't moved the goalposts for. Not for the media and not for a government that's asked us to. And we've, you know, come under a lot of scrutiny because of that. But ultimately it's become like a very important thing for me and for our company. It's in our DNA to like not make the mistakes these other tech platforms have made and to be very consistent to our user base and very fair to our user base.
- [23:49]
Interviewer
What do you think it was about you or your upbringing that allowed you to have that strength?
- [23:56]
Chris Pavlovski
That's a good question. Never thought about that. But my parents for sure.
- [24:00]
Interviewer
Tell me about them.
- [24:02]
Chris Pavlovski
My parents, my grandparents, they're very. I don't know how to explain it, but they're just very good people. Like, never do something wrong, never. When you know you're doing something right, just stick to it. Don't let anybody influence you. Would that be honorable? Absolutely. Yeah. My dad, honor is the perfect word for him. Stick to what's right all the time and never fall to peer pressure. Never allow someone to push you into do something that you don't think is right. You know, that that's kind of gone down. Our entire company in the last five years we've had, let me tell you, the amount of media that's come after us, the amount of twisted stories that have come after us, and a lot of it malicious, you know, a lot of it probably just based on not knowing who we are and just making assumptions. But yeah, we've, we've gone through quite a bit. Like we've had governments turn us on. Well, we, we've turned off in France, in Brazil. France was a. Was an interesting one.
- [25:07]
Interviewer
Was France the first government interaction you had?
- [25:11]
Chris Pavlovski
I can't remember if it was Brazil or France. Actually, the first one, I think that banned Rumble was China and I think that happened in 2020.
- [25:18]
Interviewer
Rumble is global other than places that have banned you.
- [25:21]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct. So I, I don't know what came first, if it was France or Brazil, but both of them are super interesting. But the French one was. They sent us a letter basically saying they're going to turn us off at the telco level unless we Remove content that didn't violate our terms of service.
- [25:39]
Interviewer
Not illegal.
- [25:40]
Chris Pavlovski
Not illegal. It was just in their views. It was during the Ukraine and Russia war, and they didn't want any kind of, I guess, Russian opinion on Rumble. And they told us to remove channels that were pro Russian on Rumble. And it didn't violate any of our terms of service. You know, we're an American U.S. company and didn't violate any U.S. laws. And we said no. And they said, well, if you don't, you're going to be violating sanctions. So then we took the step to just turn off Rumble on our side and challenge them on how do you do that?
- [26:14]
Interviewer
How can you turn off a country?
- [26:15]
Chris Pavlovski
There's just technology that allows us to turn it off. So we challenge them in court. And it's actually this. The. What makes it really interesting is that the media came after us saying that we're pro Russian companies sticking up for Russia. It wasn't a year later where the Russians came to us and wanted us to remove some, I guess, anti Russian content. And we took the same principles with the Russians.
- [26:42]
Interviewer
Yeah, we're not playing any sides.
- [26:44]
Chris Pavlovski
It's not a side. It's just these are our terms of service. We're not going to censor somebody based on political beliefs. Like, you can't live in a proper democratic society or a good society if you can't express your opinions.
- [26:57]
Interviewer
Yeah. So you're not a political actor at all. You're just.
- [26:59]
Chris Pavlovski
At all.
- [27:00]
Interviewer
You're out of it.
- [27:01]
Chris Pavlovski
And then the Russians turn Rumble off at the IP level. So now rumble's not accessible in Russia. Meanwhile, YouTube is so clearly. Well, I think YouTube might be off now, but at the time, YouTube was not. So at the time, maybe they were complying with the Russians. We weren't. So France turns us off because of Russia. Russia turns us off because of, you know, their reasons, which I find really ironic. And only a month ago, we actually prevailed in court in France, and we're back on in France now without changing anything. Without changing anything. We just beat them in the court, which to me was surprising.
- [27:35]
Interviewer
In the French court.
- [27:36]
Chris Pavlovski
In the French court. Yeah. We challenged them in France and the judge said that the person that sent us that letter, which was like a minister over there, didn't have the authority to do it, and it's invalid. So we're back on in France and it's one small win, but it. It was a bigger win than that. It was like a real moral win.
- [27:54]
Interviewer
Because, yeah, it's the principle you're fighting based on a principle. And the principle won.
- [27:58]
Chris Pavlovski
I didn't think that we would win. I thought the judges would just side with them. And to see that they sided on our side was, like. Was really cool. It was like we did something awesome.
- [28:08]
Interviewer
It gives you a feeling of possibility, of hope, correct?
- [28:12]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, absolutely. And those are the type of wins that mean a lot to me. Like, doing something like that costs a lot of money. It's, you know, we lost a lot of money. It was an ideological principled approach, not based on business. If it was business, it would be immediately, let's shut this down and keep the market.
- [28:30]
Interviewer
But in the long term, the principle is going to have a real benefit for your company. In the short term, it may have been a financial mistake, but in the long term, you have credibility for doing the right thing.
- [28:47]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. And I think that's kind of been why Rumble has done so well over the years, is that we've been so steadfast.
- [28:55]
Interviewer
Tell me the Brazil story.
- [28:57]
Chris Pavlovski
So the Brazil story actually was not even politics. It was a crater that the Supreme Court justice didn't like. They called him the Joe Rogan of Brazil. It was a creator named Monarch, and we got an order to remove the crater from Rumble, and we don't even know why. He didn't do anything illegal. This is, like, far beyond anything we've seen. And then we got orders to remove political people as well. In Brazil, we did the same thing. We're not going to comply with this. This doesn't violate US Laws. This is like, either it's political censorship with these creators or it's. We don't even know what the reason is for this crater. So we won't comply. If there's content that violates our policies, please point us to it. So, same procedure. Challenge them in court and turn it off. So shut down Brazil. And then this year, in February, we get a notice saying, you can now release this creator. You can be on your platform. Which was interesting. So we did. Four days later, we get a notice. Then we turn on Brazil. We go live in the entire country, thinking is a big win. And then the Supreme Court justice sends us a letter to censor this. Same one for different creators. Now, I guess they found other stuff on the Rumble they didn't like. Very political. And then we said no again. And this time, we didn't shut down Brazil, and they ended up shutting us off at the ISP level. And we ended up litigating against them for various different reasons. But we did that in the United States court. And because we Started litigating them because they sent an order saying, we need to do this and we need to pay this fine. And we're like, this is Invalid. We're a U.S. company. And we went to the U.S. court and we got the result we wanted out of the US Court. We didn't have to comply with this order. And he ended up shutting us down completely and then naming me specifically as I'm trying to destabilize Brazil for doing absolutely nothing except challenge them in court. According to the Supreme Court in Brazil, you're not even allowed to challenge them in the Florida court. So it's been a really odd one. And then I think recently there were sanctions imposed on that Supreme Court justice in Brazil by the United States for the censorship and stuff that he's done to Rumble and X. That one's been a little bit more. A lot bigger of a story just because he's did it to X as well. He did it to Rumble asking for all this censorship, and Rumble did not comply. I believe X did comply, though. So it was a little bit different of X didn't comply for a month, and then they ended up paying the fines and complying, whereas we didn't at all. And now we're shut off and continue to be shut off.
- [31:52]
Interviewer
And do you think that's something that eventually will work itself out?
- [31:57]
Chris Pavlovski
I think so.
- [31:58]
Interviewer
But usually over time, the truth wants to come out.
- [32:02]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. And the problem there is a little bit different. We're talking to the Supreme Court justice. When you look at laws in the United. The way the United States justice system works, if we have a problem in the United States, we take it to court and it goes up the court, it can go all the way to the Supreme Court. If you disagree on appeal, on appeal, and you get to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court makes a decision, and that becomes the law of the land. What the Brazilian Supreme Court justice was, he was not waiting for anybody to take it to the courts. He just created his own order at the very top and said, rumble's not allowed to do this. That's, like, unheard of in law. We've never seen anything like that in America. Then. It's definitely not the process in Brazil.
- [32:42]
Interviewer
So now you're on everywhere in the world except China, Russia and Brazil.
- [32:47]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct. Yeah.
- [32:48]
Interviewer
It's a big world. That's great.
- [32:50]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. No, it's. The France win was. Was a big one. Big moral victory for us.
- [32:55]
Interviewer
When that happened, did it help growth in Europe in general when you came back in France?
- [33:01]
Chris Pavlovski
It's still early to say. This just happened like a month ago, so really? Yeah, it's in. A lot of people in France probably are not even aware that that order has been reversed and now we're there, so it's going to take some time to see that.
- [33:14]
Interviewer
Do you do any kind of advertising or promotion outside of Rumble itself?
- [33:20]
Chris Pavlovski
Absolutely. And we're going to do that a lot in 26. We're going to go very international for the very first time. We've been very like isolated to the United States just because we've been working hard at making the platform better and doing a lot of things better. We haven't had the time to kind of really crow Rumble internationally. But that is a huge focus for us.
- [33:48]
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- [36:01]
Interviewer
From 2020 to now, how much has Rumble grown?
- [36:04]
Chris Pavlovski
So we reported 47 million monthly active users in the last quarter that we reported. So that's up, you know, 47 times since 2020.
- [36:14]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [36:15]
Chris Pavlovski
It's been huge. Yeah, it's been, it's been massive.
- [36:19]
Interviewer
And would you say that the content is across the board now?
- [36:22]
Chris Pavlovski
More so it's getting there. We're Doing a real big effort to diversify the content in the last years and we've done a pretty good job on that. And I think like, you know, since the elections in 2024, the political content is. It's still extremely popular. You know, Rumble does really well on, on days of news events. But it's been a huge, huge move for us to try to be more than just politics and really touch onto different things. Like, I hope so, because the purpose.
- [36:52]
Interviewer
Of it was never political.
- [36:53]
Chris Pavlovski
Never.
- [36:54]
Interviewer
Yeah, no, it was just people making cool stuff.
- [36:57]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. And you know, we brought on like street league skateboarding. We have that now exclusively on Rumble. So we got some cool sporting stuff on, on Rumble.
- [37:06]
Interviewer
Seems like comedy would be a really good area.
- [37:09]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, I agree. I think comedy would be. That's a great category for Rumble. It's something that we're talking about internally, how to do that. A lot of these guys have built huge audiences on YouTube. So we have to find ways to entice them to bring their huge audiences onto Rumble. That's the barrier we have to overcome. And there's like a monetization barrier, so we have to deal with that.
- [37:30]
Interviewer
But how does monetization work on rumble versus YouTube or anywhere else?
- [37:36]
Chris Pavlovski
So YouTube's monetization is basically pre roll ads. So you, you turn on a video and you get like a 30 second commercial or 10 second commercial before the.
- [37:46]
Interviewer
Video sold by YouTube.
- [37:49]
Chris Pavlovski
Yes. So rumble does the exact same thing on that as well. The other way that they, they monetize is through you can tip a creator. So if you're doing like a live stream, you can tip. We have that same feature on Rumble.
- [38:05]
Interviewer
On Rumble, you have live streams as well as pre made videos.
- [38:09]
Chris Pavlovski
Yes, exactly. So you can do VOD or you can do live streaming. So on vod it's all programmatic advertising, which are those commercials. On live streaming, it's programmatic advertising and tipping. And you can also subscribe to a creator for exclusive content on rumble. With YouTube, you can do something similar. The one thing where we have a competitive advantage against YouTube, which is just, you know, it's being released imminently, it's out on Android, it's out on iOS right now as well, and it's in beta is the Rumble wallet. So you can, you can also tip creators in Bitcoin or Stablecoin as well.
- [38:43]
Interviewer
How did that come to be?
- [38:45]
Chris Pavlovski
We took in a really large investment from Tether. We closed the deal in February of 25 this year for $775 million. So they invested in Rumble and Obviously they're the world's largest stablecoin tether usdt and they're huge bitcoin people and so am I. We actually, you know, we hold bitcoin at Rumble and we held it even prior to me even knowing the Tether guys. So it's something we always wanted to do. Especially now that with the new administration being a lot more pro crypto and pro bitcoin, we felt like this was an opportunity for us to be a first mover and allowing creators to end users to tip creators with bitcoin. So we've been working on that all year and it's now in beta on iOS and Android. And I'm really looking forward to, you know, launching this big time in, in 26 because I.
- [39:35]
Interviewer
How is the experience of Rumble different on the website versus the app?
- [39:41]
Chris Pavlovski
All the same features on the web on the app primarily.
- [39:44]
Interviewer
Are you on Apple TV as well?
- [39:46]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. So you can watch the podcasts on Apple tv, Roku, Samsung, lg, Xbox.
- [39:54]
Interviewer
You know, what percentage is on the phone versus the LA versus streaming on television?
- [39:59]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, we do. So when you look at a phone, I guess like a lot of people will still use their phone in a browser that's pretty popular. A desktop is like, you know, it's a much smaller percentage. TV is like the growing medium right now. So a lot of people are taking these podcasts on Rumble and watching them on their TVs now that's becoming like a thing. And what we're noticing is a lot of people are taking their podcasts, they're converting them to a live show where they can interact with the audience and actually take questions from the audience through the chats. So you're seeing podcasts kind of transform into a live stream and you're seeing these live stream podcasts now being streamed on the big screen.
- [40:42]
Interviewer
On the live streams, if you go to the app, are all the live streams in one place? Can you see this is all happening now?
- [40:50]
Chris Pavlovski
Yes. Yeah. It's different than your typical TV listings where you have channels like channel numbers. Here you have organization by based on how many people are watching, how many people are chatting, et cetera. So it's similar. I actually see the world moving. We have cable tv, which is live, I see that moving to over the top Internet based tv and I really see like independent creators kind of. This is like 5 years, 10 years down the road kind of dominating the most of the consumption for big screen TVs. So like a show like this will, you know, can be live on someone's TV and someone can tune into it whenever you go live. And I think that's where the market's going to move.
- [41:40]
Interviewer
What's the advantage of live versus recorded?
- [41:43]
Chris Pavlovski
The ability to interact with your audience. And it's the same for tv. If you look at like, you know, CNN or Fox, they're live. The idea of being live is just the audience likes it better. But the real advantage here is that when it comes to live streaming, like on Rumble or YouTube or any of these other platforms, it's now become like a, a community where the person that subscribes to you can now like chat, pose questions. You can choose to acknowledge them or not. You can choose to interact with them. You now have a two way relationship with your audience in real time with your guests or whatever your show might be. So to me it's like the next iteration. It's almost like moving web 1.0 to web 2.0, which was these flat web pages of information to now social networks. It's like live stream. It's like consumption of video web 1.0 to consumption of video web 2.0, where you now have a two way interaction with audience and talent. And I think that brings talent and audience a lot closer and really builds incredible communities. And that's kind of where I see it all going. I see your typical ABC networks, your Fox networks, these big networks that are on television. I see platforms kind of being their own networks. Whether it's going to be Netflix, YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, they're all going to have like their own collection of content, their collection of streamers. And you're going to tune into each platform the way you kind of tune into like the CBS or ABC networks. That's kind of how I see it transforming in the next five to 10 years.
- [43:29]
Interviewer
How would you compare Rumble to Twitch?
- [43:32]
Chris Pavlovski
Twitch is entirely a live streaming platform where Rumble is more than just live streaming. Rumble's like YouTube. It has live streaming, it has VOD.
- [43:42]
Interviewer
What percentage of people are watching live stream versus watching VOD?
- [43:47]
Chris Pavlovski
The VOD is still the largest component.
- [43:49]
Interviewer
Of rumble and on YouTube as well, I imagine.
- [43:51]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, absolutely. The live streaming component. It's more like a forward thinking future type of where we think the market's.
- [43:59]
Interviewer
Going to go now. If you do a live stream afterwards, it becomes a VOD piece.
- [44:04]
Chris Pavlovski
Exactly.
- [44:05]
Interviewer
So you don't have to watch it when it's happening, you could still watch it after.
- [44:08]
Chris Pavlovski
Exactly. And that's why a lot of people like that. It's like, you know, you're, you're basically getting all the work done in the live stream for your, for your VOD at the same time. And it all automatically converts when it's done. And it's, you know, a lot of people watch it three, four days later.
- [44:23]
Interviewer
From the beginning, did you think of Rumble as a niche product or did you think of it as. It's going to be YouTube.
- [44:31]
Chris Pavlovski
It's going to be YouTube.
- [44:32]
Interviewer
That's amazing.
- [44:33]
Chris Pavlovski
Since day one, that was. No question about that. That was always the target. I didn't see the world go the way it was going to go in terms of seeing all the platforms give away the market. We're all in the middle. We all have the same terms of service. You name it. Snapchat, Twitter, XNow, YouTube, Facebook, they all have relatively similar terms of service. And then everybody started picking sides, like right away, and we just sat in the middle and all of a sudden, from a very crowded place in the middle, it became empty and the market just came to us. It wasn't because we went to that. We just stayed in the same spot. We didn't change anything. And now they're all kind of changing back. And like YouTube announced, I guess like a couple of months ago that they're. Now you can talk about elections again, you can talk about whatever you want. And they're going to move towards free speech and they're going to bring back. And Facebook did that a year ago and Elon did that with X like a couple of years ago. So it's all coming back to where we were, which is great. There was a moment in time where it was very lonely, it was just us.
- [45:40]
Interviewer
And it seems like that's a pendulum that might keep swinging.
- [45:43]
Chris Pavlovski
Absolutely.
- [45:44]
Interviewer
There's a great advantage to you staying in the center.
- [45:48]
Chris Pavlovski
And you know, it's going to be funny because, like, one day you're perceived as one type of politics, but the next day you could be perceived with the other type of politics. But really you just, you haven't moved. And I think you kind of see that over history. Like, depending on the decade, there's certain parties are more for free speech, pro free speech than other parties. So it changes. Free speech is not stagnant, that's for sure. It's.
- [46:12]
Interviewer
It's politically agnostic and anyone can say anything.
- [46:19]
Chris Pavlovski
To a certain extent.
- [46:20]
Interviewer
Yeah. To the legal extent, yeah.
- [46:22]
Chris Pavlovski
Within the bounds of our terms of service. But you're exactly right. It's politically agnostic. It's not to be one way or the other. We want to be a place where you can speak freely, where we're not Telling you what you can or cannot say or you can or cannot hear. We want you to be able to express yourself the way you've been able to express yourself at your dinner table.
- [46:43]
Interviewer
And it's user generated. Everyone has opinions. So it's not representing anything other than the creator.
- [46:51]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct.
- [46:52]
Interviewer
It doesn't stand for anything.
- [46:54]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, it's the. And you know, it's funny because the media would associate a specific creator out of the millions that will be on your platform, they'll associate that creator to represent the views of the platform. And that's just preposterous. Like, but that's what happened in the last five years. And, you know, I think that kind of getting thrusted into the world of politics and seeing how the media would play that game, that was probably like the biggest disheartening thing kind of gave me a little bit more skin because you see how evil that is. Like, what was the first time the.
- [47:27]
Interviewer
Media came after you?
- [47:29]
Chris Pavlovski
Oh, yeah. Okay. So this was in. This is a good one. So it was 2020. You're going to like this story. This is a good story. I don't think I've talked about this story publicly before. It was BuzzFeed in 2020, around the election, like a week before the 2020 elections. And it was in the middle of COVID and an editor from buzzfeed wanted to interview me. And I've had no experience with the media. This is like Rumble kind of growing in this direction. That was incredible. But, like, I had zero experience with media. Zero experience politics.
- [48:08]
Interviewer
Probably excited that buzzfeed.
- [48:10]
Chris Pavlovski
I was excited. I'm like, all right, we're going to get an interview. This is pretty cool.
- [48:13]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [48:15]
Chris Pavlovski
And it's in Toronto and it's in Covid, and he says, let's meet. And you know, we. We end up meeting in the Rumble offices, which at the time are closed because it's peak Covid. But, you know, we decided to meet. He wanted to meet in person and we met in person and he starts interviewing me. You know, started off great. It was a. It seemed like a good interview. And he starts asking me some questions and I. I feel like it's going in this awkward direction all of a sudden. So a little background before I get into it, because it's. It's very relevant. My parents were born in a country called Macedonia.
- [48:50]
Interviewer
Where is that?
- [48:51]
Chris Pavlovski
That's north of Greece, so.
- [48:53]
Interviewer
North of Greece?
- [48:54]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, Close to Turkey, between Serbia and Greece and like right beside between Bulgaria, Albania, Greece and Serbia and Kosovo. It's a little country. It was part of the former Yugoslavia. So that's where my parents were born. They immigrated to Canada. They're back in the 70s. I was born in Toronto.
- [49:16]
Interviewer
So your parents moved. Did they already speak English?
- [49:19]
Chris Pavlovski
Probably not. My mom moved first to Australia, and then from Australia, she came to Toronto. And my dad moved, you know, in his teenage years with his parents and straight to Toronto.
- [49:29]
Interviewer
Why did they decide to move at the time?
- [49:32]
Chris Pavlovski
They. Looking for a better life. It was communist Yugoslavia at the time, and their. Their parents felt like they could find a better life in. In Canada.
- [49:41]
Interviewer
Could they leave, or was it hard to leave?
- [49:44]
Chris Pavlovski
I don't think it was hard to leave. If you had. I'm not sure exactly how. How they managed that, but I don't think it was difficult. So they. They came. I come from immigrants, immigrant parents that came from Macedonia. So I'm in this interview with buzzfeed, and then he mentions to me, so I was the reporter about the fake news farms in Macedonia, and I was like, fake news farms in Macedonia? What.
- [50:11]
Interviewer
What.
- [50:11]
Chris Pavlovski
What does that have to do with me? And he's like, I couldn't help but notice that you have parents that are from Macedonia. And I'm like, I'm sitting there in shock. I'm like, what? Like, okay, there's lots of Macedonians.
- [50:24]
Interviewer
What is.
- [50:25]
Chris Pavlovski
What does this have to do with me? And he's like, well, they, you know, helped me. Helped fix the election in 2016 with Trump and Hillary Clinton or whatever. And he starts asking me these questions, and I'm sitting there, and I'm like, I had, like, a tear in my eye. Like, I couldn't believe this was happening. Like, if someone, like, comes from a nation where there was a terrorist attack, are you going to ask them if they're part. Like, this is so discriminatory. Why are you asking me this question? It was so shocking. I remember I had a tear. I had, like, tears in my eye. Like, in this interview, in complete shock of what was going on. I go, this is, like, absolutely inappropriate. This is completely discriminatory. Yes, my parents came from Macedonia. And no, I have nothing to do with anything that you're talking about, nor do I have any knowledge about what you're even talking about. I'm like, this is ridiculous that you're even asking me this. And he got really. I think he felt really bad when I. When I said that, as you should. And that was my first instance with the media. And I never felt like something so evil that you would discriminate against me from. Just from my parents. It almost made me, like, embarrassed to say, like, should I be embarrassed to say that my parents came from Macedonia? Is that where you're like, it was really, really gross. And that was my first instance with the media. And I can. I put bad taste in my mouth forever.
- [51:54]
Interviewer
Did the story talk about that at all?
- [51:56]
Chris Pavlovski
They touched on it very little. He's like, I must put it in. And I'm like, why does that have any relevance to this story whatsoever? So they didn't really talk about it much, but they added in a line or two that he's from Macedonia. And of course, they had to put Macedonia was a place where fake news, like it was. It was just so wrong. It was from there on. I never took an interview from what I thought would be a hostile, potentially hostile.
- [52:23]
Interviewer
But going in, you didn't think it was going to be hostile. There would be no reason to think there'd be any hostility.
- [52:27]
Chris Pavlovski
I'm a Canadian guy in Toronto. Like, why is this happening? They're just looking for dirt. You know, they're looking for that headline and they want to put that headline out there to get more clicks or something. But that was a real eye opener. It was really. It was really gross.
- [52:45]
Interviewer
Since then, how has Rumble been smeared?
- [52:48]
Chris Pavlovski
Well, the Russia stuff with France, you know, every single major news politico, everybody covered the Russia thing with France. And then when Russia banned Rumble. Yeah, they didn't cover it. That seems par for the course for the amazing. The media. I think that was like, one of my biggest learning experiences is just like seeing the corporate media and how agenda driven they are. And they're just. They're trying to get to the answer they want rather than trying to figure out what the reality really is. They have an agenda, they have an answer they want to get to, and they're going to do whatever it takes to get to that answer to feed an agenda. And it's not what the media should be. And that's exactly why, like, you know, podcasts like this and shows on Rumble are doing so well, because it's just independent thought with no agenda, no corporate agenda behind it, telling them what they should be asking and what they should be saying. And I think that's why this medium is growing so much and why it will continue to grow in the decades to come.
- [53:56]
Interviewer
Have you dealt with any censorship in the United States?
- [54:00]
Chris Pavlovski
We dealt with a few things. One in California, one in New York that we've challenged in the courts, and we've succeeded on both of them.
- [54:08]
Interviewer
What were they?
- [54:09]
Chris Pavlovski
So the one in New York was at the time Attorney General of New York. I think Letitia James wanted to create like this moderation thing where I don't know the exact details of it. I can't remember this is a couple years ago, but it was basically some type of. It was something that violated the First Amendment. And the one thing that's been amazing about America is like, the judges here in the judicial system values the First Amendment. And like, we've been prevailing on anything when it comes to the First Amendment here. So we don't have that type of issue. Like, I've never dealt with, like, outside of obviously, the companies in America that are. They've been censoring for the last five years.
- [54:49]
Interviewer
But you have been attacked.
- [54:51]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. So when it comes to the corporate America. Remember how I was telling you how we were building our infrastructure so on July 4th? I remember it because it was July 4th.
- [55:01]
Interviewer
Yeah. Independence Day.
- [55:02]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, it was. I think it was the day before Independence Day that we got a notice from one of our providers that they were going to shut everything down on July 3rd, that they're going to shut everything down in 24 hours because they didn't want to host anything to do with Rumble. And our team, which has been building the infrastructure behind the scenes at lightning speeds, were forced to move everything early onto the infrastructure and they did within 24 hours notice.
- [55:32]
Interviewer
So you didn't miss a beat.
- [55:33]
Chris Pavlovski
We didn't miss a beat. And I remember being like, wow, like, that's awesome. On Independence Day, we achieved one of the. Would have been a catastrophic problem where Rumble would be shut down across the world.
- [55:47]
Interviewer
Did they tell you why they wanted to shut you down?
- [55:50]
Chris Pavlovski
It was. I think it was related to this Russia war. They want specific content to be off.
- [55:57]
Interviewer
So now are you totally independent in that way?
- [56:00]
Chris Pavlovski
Oh, yeah. When Facebook goes down or Amazon goes down, we're humming we're alive.
- [56:07]
Interviewer
Congratulations.
- [56:08]
Chris Pavlovski
It's the coolest thing when you see that we're running completely on our own rail and completely independent from any type of, I guess, competition and no corporate interference. Yeah. And that's really. That was the big fear, was the corporate interference and where the corp. Those guys get their marching orders to do what they do. We didn't violate any of their policies. Not even their own policies were violated. But they make a decision up at top saying, these guys gotta go.
- [56:38]
Interviewer
That's wild.
- [56:40]
Chris Pavlovski
Yep.
- [56:53]
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- [58:21]
Interviewer
For people who have not built their own infrastructure, is there a way that they can find safe haven?
- [58:30]
Chris Pavlovski
Depending on the year, that's probably the best way to answer that. I think it depends on the year, it depends on the political environment. But ultimately, if you become really, really large and there's a government out there that doesn't like what you're saying on it about their government, you're not going to survive. It's that simple. We've gotten censorship orders from New Zealand, Australia, India, Brazil, France, China, Russia, and we even had one in the uk. They wanted us, the UK parliamentary member, or I can't remember exactly who, sent us the letter, but they wanted us to take down Russell Brand, not for the content that he posted on Rumble because they didn't like who he was, had nothing to do with the content on Rumble, but they wanted us to remove.
- [59:26]
Interviewer
Well, they tell you it has nothing to do with the content. It's impossible to know.
- [59:31]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct. Yeah, they were, they were just. And we, we stood against them and we went public with the letter and we said, no way, you're going to have to shut us down first before.
- [59:43]
Interviewer
You'Re on in the uk.
- [59:44]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, we're still on in the uk. Yeah, they didn't follow through and it was just a threat. And a lot of them are like, the New Zealand one was a threat, the Australian one was a threat, the UK one was clearly a threat that they didn't follow through on. But it just shows that, like, we're that close to them taking away what I regard as the most basic human right, the ability to speak freely, the ability to give your opinion. If you can't give your opinion and you can't speak freely, what society do you live in that is like the most fundamental human right. Everyone talks about human rights. This is the, one of the most Fundamental.
- [60:27]
Interviewer
Basic.
- [60:27]
Chris Pavlovski
Basic. Absolutely basic. It's something that people have fought for for, you know, thousands of years. No matter where you are, you want to have a voice. And when you take away someone's voice and you take away everyone's voice, you know, that's what creates really big problems in the world.
- [60:44]
Interviewer
Where on the planet is Rumble most popular?
- [60:47]
Chris Pavlovski
United States of America.
- [60:49]
Interviewer
And after that, I would say Canada.
- [60:52]
Chris Pavlovski
And the UK would be the next two.
- [60:55]
Interviewer
And are there any places where you see big potential growth?
- [61:00]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. So our focus in 26 is going to be international. We see a lot of potential in South America, a lot of potential in India. We think India is a very large market and it's one that we want to pursue because there is a little bit of English overlap there. So it'll be, it'll be a little bit easier for us. And then we just launched like Spanish language Rumble in the last month. So as we get more global, you know, that'll take away that political perception as well.
- [61:26]
Interviewer
So when you go international in each country, you can be in the language of that country using AI.
- [61:33]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. So I think we're doing it a little differently when we're entering these countries now, but as AI gets smarter and gets better, we're going to have a ton of options. We just acquired a company in Europe and Germany. We announced this about a month ago, that has the largest GPU estate, one of the largest GPU estates in Europe. GPUs are the hardware behind AI. So basically an AI infrastructure company is what we acquired in Europe. So this is a big, big initiative internally for us. This will attach to our cloud business that we've built, this AI infrastructure company.
- [62:11]
Interviewer
Tell me about the cloud business.
- [62:13]
Chris Pavlovski
So we built that Rumble cloud business because it was existential for Rumble to survive, as we spoke about on that July 4th day.
- [62:24]
Interviewer
But you've opened it up beyond just your use.
- [62:27]
Chris Pavlovski
Correct. Now it's open to the public as of last year. And we are now hosting more than just Rumble. We're hosting. The Miami Dolphins were hosting the.
- [62:37]
Interviewer
Competing with the. The other big cloud services.
- [62:42]
Chris Pavlovski
Exactly. Our goal is not only to compete with them, compete with Google on. On video, but to compete with them on. On cloud as well. And the reason why we got into the cloud business is obviously it was because it's existential. But the other reason why is that when you own a very large video property, like Google owns YouTube or like Amazon owns Twitch, you have a lot of capacity of storage, a lot of capacity for bandwidth, a lot of capacity for processing power for example, rumble represented 17% of the US streaming market according to stream charts on the 2024 election night presidential elections. That's huge.
- [63:26]
Sponsor/Advertisement Voice
Huge.
- [63:26]
Chris Pavlovski
YouTube was like 60, 70%. Twitch was like 10, rumble was like 17, 18% that night. And we're not 17, 18% of the US streaming market every day. That was just on election night. So you have all this excess capacity that's not being used every other day. And if we hosted, if we got to 17% on election night, we'd probably have a little bit more.
- [63:46]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [63:46]
Chris Pavlovski
And so we have all this extra capacity that we're not using and so does Google and so does Twitch and that enables us to go into the cloud market with tons of capacity and be able to sell that with really high margin. So not only was it existential for Rumble to have it and defend itself, but it's also, we can be very competitive with the Googles and the Amazons because of the excess capacity that we have because of Rumble as Rumble being the main tenant.
- [64:15]
Interviewer
And price wise, can you compete with them?
- [64:16]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, because, you know, we have this capacity whether we're using it or not. So essentially the margin is, you know, huge. That's why we got into the business. And then more recently, about a month ago, we. So we have processing power, we have compute, we have storage, we have kubernetes. What we just brought, what we're bringing in with this acquisition in Europe is AI GPU as a service. Data centers. They own a lot of data centers, they have a lot of power, they have really good assets. So we're bringing in a very large asset base, one of the largest GPU estates in Europe. So that also helps us go international because we've been very, very here in America mostly. But that takes us the next step and also fortifies us as well as a company. So pretty excited about that. And to go to your AI point, that AI resource now that we'll have is going to be critical in making Rumble better, making our ads better for our advertisers, and really kind of taking Rumble to the next level as well, both internationally with languages, tools to help creators monetize better, help them do things easier, etc.
- [65:28]
Interviewer
So YouTube sells ads that are pre roll and now you guys also sell ads?
- [65:36]
Chris Pavlovski
Yes.
- [65:37]
Interviewer
How does that work?
- [65:38]
Chris Pavlovski
So the way I like to look at Rumble is that we have a bunch of pillars of business. We have the video business, we have the advertising business. So pillar one, video. Pillar two advertising. So the Rumble advertising center is where advertisers can go in, purchase ads with their favorite creators purchase ads across the platform and they can purchase ads even outside of the Rumble ecosystem. So it's a whole exchange where you can buy ads and spend money. We have another pillar which is the payments.
- [66:08]
Interviewer
How big of a staff do you have on the advertising side?
- [66:12]
Chris Pavlovski
We've just under 300 for the whole company and I think the advertising side is probably close to 50. The other pillar that we have is payments, which is that the wallet that we're launching, that's in beta that I spoke about. And then the fourth pillar would be cloud and then our fifth pillar is the data centers with this acquisition that we're making. So those are the five pillars of business that we're focused on. The whole vision is to basically create a Freedom first technology infrastructure across all these pillars where everything is built around the ethos of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to transact, freedom of reach, freedom to build on a cloud that's not going to interfere based on anything that you do. We believe that everything that we do online in the next 10 to 20 years, everything you do on your phone should be built in a way that you own as the creator owns it, as the user should own it. The user should have privacy around it. They should have the ability to do what they want with it and it should be decentralized. So the whole ecosystem that we're building is going to be based on the principles of everything around Freedom first. And eventually we're going to have a freedom first AI. We think your AI should also be your AI, not controlled by a corporate entity. The only place we play in is will be your infrastructure, will be your resource. If you need more compute power, if you need more hardware, we'll play in as the resource for that. So we're really, really. I'm really bullish on the idea that everything will go towards the ability for people to own their own software, have their privacy and be able to say whatever they want to say with their own applications.
- [68:01]
Interviewer
I remember a few years ago in Canada, there was the issue with the Canadian truckers. Do you remember the story?
- [68:06]
Chris Pavlovski
Oh yeah. Very well. Very well.
- [68:08]
Interviewer
And they were smeared, they were removed from social media, they were debanked people who donated to them. The money was stolen. Do you see a world where Rumble fixes that problem?
- [68:22]
Chris Pavlovski
That's what we're trying to fix. When you really look at the tech stack that we're building, the goal is to make sure that your money is untouchable. We're launching a non custodial wallet. We can't even Touch it. The Rumble wallet. We can't even take the money out of it. It's not even technically feasible for us to do it. So it's a non custodial wallet. You have a platform where we're allowing you to speak completely freely without telling you what you can or cannot say or can or cannot hear. That is exactly what I think most of the world is striving for. They're striving for that independence, that resilience, that. That privacy, that freedom. Freedom is something that we've all pursued for thousands of years. Every generation, like wars have happened based on fighting for freedom. Like, that's something that is engraved in us as humans. We want that freedom. And I think that right now, all the companies that are out there, all the big corporate technology companies are, they control the application layer. They are biased. They don't want you to own your own AI. They want to monetize every part of you. You're now the product for them. We want to flip that on its head. I want to be the resource for you if you need it, and I want to give the application layer for you where you can control it and you can have your own privacy. I think there's a market for that. I know there's a market for that. That's why Rumble exists. Today. Rumble has 47 million monthly active users, most of which are here in America. And we haven't even touched the surface internationally yet. And when you put that in perspective, like 30 to 40 million in US and Canada. For US X has, the last time they reported was 67 million in the US. YouTube's 200 million in the US. So it's, it's a big number.
- [70:15]
Interviewer
It's a big number.
- [70:16]
Chris Pavlovski
It's a. It's not a small number. We don't have 2 billion worldwide, but we haven't tried yet. So as we try next year, you know, that's. There's a lot of headroom for us to grow there.
- [70:26]
Interviewer
But even now, YouTube is less than 10 times as big.
- [70:30]
Chris Pavlovski
There are 2 billion internationally. 2.2 or something in the US. In the US less than 10 times. Yes.
- [70:35]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [70:36]
Chris Pavlovski
In the US so, you know, it's.
- [70:38]
Interviewer
Possible that's within striking distance.
- [70:40]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, absolutely. It's. We're close. And on election night, we're, you know, not far at all, actually. Yeah, we're the only competition on election night. So the appetite for what we're building is there. And I think that it doesn't just exist for video, it exists for all your applications.
- [70:58]
Interviewer
If you could Walk me through the trucker situation. What was taken from those people? And how would in this new Rumble ecosystem protect those people?
- [71:09]
Chris Pavlovski
So, number one, the truckers, they were voicing their opinion by protesting physically online during nonviolent protests. No, they were playing hockey on the streets there and honking their horn. That was absolutely nonviolent. It was. It was like a party, if anything. And it was all over Canada, but most particularly in the capital, Ottawa. But the parties were in. Were in Toronto. They were everywhere. You walk the streets, you'd see it. And they just were voicing their opinion around. Around Covid at the time, and they didn't want forced vaccines. And the problem here is. And this is why Rumble fixes all this, is that, number one, you couldn't even voice these. These opinions or even show what's happening on the streets. These peaceful protests on YouTube, they were getting banned because I'm sure the Canadian government was putting pressure on YouTube to remove content. And Rumble was the opposite. Rumble was like, you know, this doesn't violate our terms of service to play hockey on the streets of Toronto.
- [72:12]
Interviewer
And if someone wants to make a video arguing the opposite side, that would be there, too.
- [72:17]
Chris Pavlovski
Absolutely. Let the best argument win.
- [72:20]
Interviewer
You're not on any side.
- [72:22]
Chris Pavlovski
No, exactly. No side whatsoever. So you could broadcast these protests on rumble, whereas on YouTube, you might not be allowed to say that the COVID shot. I don't want to have it. One, you give the ability for freedom of speech to all those truckers. That's one thing that we do better than our competition at the time. But the truckers were fighting for other things too. They were getting their banks shut down. So Rumble Wallet would defend that. If you had your money in Rumble Wallet, government of Canada can't shut that down. That's untouchable. It's on the blockchain. It's decentralized. So Rumble Wallet would fix that as well. So you give them freedom of speech, you give them freedom of finance. Those are the two pillars that you would really be able to fix with Rumble in that situation. But ultimately, I think if a company like Rumble becomes very big that's based on this principles, then governments have harder time opposing that as well. I also think, like, if more companies did what we did, governments wouldn't be able to do what they did to the truckers. And that's like, kind of the sad part is that all these companies folded. Every single one of them folded. They all took orders from the government, regardless of their principles, whether they agreed with them or disagreed with them. They just took the orders and they censored and they shut everybody down. They shut down the bank accounts out of fear.
- [73:42]
Interviewer
It's scary to go up against the government.
- [73:45]
Chris Pavlovski
It is. But we had, we did. We did it in France, we did in Brazil.
- [73:49]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [73:50]
Chris Pavlovski
I'm not as big as Mark Zuckerberg or any of these other guys, not even a fraction of them. But I still told them to go pound sand. Just based on a principle. Yeah, it was pretty easy. Like it was the right thing to do. I'm surprised they all folded. It's shocking to me how weak everyone was.
- [74:13]
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- [75:43]
Interviewer
How much of the Internet is free and fair now?
- [75:48]
Chris Pavlovski
Not much. And it's going to get worse. It's going to get way worse with AI.
- [75:54]
Interviewer
Wasn't that the whole idea of the Internet originally?
- [75:57]
Chris Pavlovski
That's a free and open Internet is the whole premise of it. It's the whole point. With AI, it's going to go completely opposite.
- [76:05]
Interviewer
How do you see that playing out?
- [76:07]
Chris Pavlovski
So one form of censorship was to just shut people off and know that they were shut off. That's what happened in 2020, in 2021. 2022 was so easy to see. Everybody knew it. With AI, you're not going to know it. They don't need to shut you off anymore. They don't need to suspend your account or take your account away. They need to make it look like the people that are looking to see if you're still there. It shows up and the people that were never looking for you never see it. And I believe that's already started. I believe that AI will take Censorship to a level we have never seen. And it'll be almost impossible to figure it out.
- [76:51]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [76:52]
Chris Pavlovski
And that's like the scary part, because you'll start believing narratives that might not be popular, but AI will make it appear popular. That gets into a really scary territory. I think that we're going to have to be very aware, very cognizant, that this is. Could be a very big possibility.
- [77:11]
Interviewer
Undermines the whole promise of AI. The whole basis of AI is that it can look at all the information that exists and make decisions even better than humans. That's the idea.
- [77:26]
Chris Pavlovski
Yep.
- [77:27]
Interviewer
So if the humans in any way put the thumb on the scale of AI in any way, it totally negates the whole benefit of it.
- [77:36]
Chris Pavlovski
Absolutely. And the worst part is, is that we've already seen humans put the thumbs on their scale. It's just human nature. They all do imagine they know they can do it without you knowing they're doing it. I just don't see a world in which they don't do that. They're going to do that. I think they'll all do it. And I think that creates the opportunity for us.
- [77:58]
Interviewer
Are you building your AI from the ground up?
- [78:01]
Chris Pavlovski
So we first, you need the resources and the hardware to be able to do that. That's why we did this acquisition. And then our big investors, which are the stablecoin tether, are building something like this right now. We're partnered up with them to do that as well. And the whole idea is going to be basically for us to deliver an AI that you own, that you control and you control its outcomes, where we don't really have the say on that. And I think that's where this is going to go. And this is. That's where we're going to take it, because you can't trust us to control your AI.
- [78:42]
Interviewer
So it won't be built on top of any existing AI system.
- [78:48]
Chris Pavlovski
So the way that in which Tether is looking at it's called qvac. And the overarching idea is that it'll be a model that's built on you, not built on the preferences of us. So I want to say we're early days for AI, but I think we're definitely early days in mapping this out and doing it the right way. But this is something that I think will be a very big opportunity for Rumble, because I don't imagine any AI not being biased. I don't care who does it, if it's being controlled, if the model is being built, that model is not open source. And you can't see or someone can't investigate what it's. What it's doing, then I don't think you can trust it.
- [79:29]
Interviewer
And the one you're building will be open source.
- [79:31]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, the one. Whatever we do, it will be done in a way where everyone can see it. And you'll be building it on your own device, and it'll be held on your own device, and it'll be independent and differently than the one I have on mine. And that's kind of the principle of where we want to take it. And no one's doing that yet. And we want to be the first ones to do that.
- [79:53]
Interviewer
Tell me about the decision to go public.
- [79:56]
Chris Pavlovski
So we went public in 2022. The one thing about Rumble is the people love Rumble. It's unbelievable how much recognition we get and how much love we get. The investment community and the corporate community do not like Rumble. Were disrupting everything for them, especially the corporate media, as we discussed. So outside of, like, a very few investors, the interest to invest in Rumble was not something that any major investor wanted to do. In fact, when we went and looked for a vehicle to go public, no one wanted to work with us. The only one that wanted to work with us was Howard Lutnick. That was the only guy who's now the Secretary of Commerce, and he helped us take us public and we went public. And the reason why we went public is we knew there was a real appetite with the people to do what we're doing, building something based on freedom of speech. So we took it public at a 2 billion valuation back in 2022. And it was the most successful SPAC at the time. In that year when SPACs were like, you know, not doing well at all, we had less than 0.1% redemptions or something like that. It was incredible. So it was super successful. And the even till now, like, the majority of the people that own Rumble are the retailer, the people, the people that use the platform. We don't have huge institutions coming in and buying huge chunks of. Of our stock and trying to influence our board. And we have the people that own us. And the people are like, fully aligned with the mission that we have. And it's very ideological in the sense for free speech and the human right of freedom of expression. And most people wouldn't go public. But for me, I think that was definitely the right choice at the right time.
- [81:57]
Interviewer
How has it been so far since that decision?
- [82:00]
Chris Pavlovski
It's been amazing. I. Everyone says, like, going public is tough, and maybe you don't want to go public. But, you know, it's kind of fun when you're, when you have the people behind you and the people that are the owners. It keeps you in check because, you know, you're always doing the right thing. And you have to do the right thing because the people that own your company and your shareholders want you to do the right thing. They're in it for, obviously they want to see a very successful company, but they're also in it because of our mission and what we do.
- [82:29]
Interviewer
And the mission is clear to everyone. The people who are investing in it invest in it because of what it is, not in spite of what it is.
- [82:37]
Chris Pavlovski
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's why the institutions may stay away from it.
- [82:41]
Interviewer
And maybe you want them to Possibly.
- [82:43]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah. I think times are changing now because freedom expression is a little cooler than it was three years ago. So, you know, you're. We're seeing a little bit more interest. It's not as taboo as it was. So times are changing a little bit for sure.
- [83:01]
Interviewer
Where does Vimeo fit into the ecosystem of YouTube? Rumble in the video wars.
- [83:09]
Chris Pavlovski
You know, there's actually a cool story behind that. Vimeo was started by the college humor guys. So remember I was talking about Ebaum's World and all those video sites way, way back.
- [83:19]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [83:19]
Chris Pavlovski
So it was started by like three guys. They started Vimeo after college Humor to compete against YouTube and they did very well. And then obviously that became not so well once YouTube started getting integrated into Google Search. And, you know, it became more difficult for. For everybody. But when I started Rumble, one of the shareholders was the founder of Vimeo, believe it or not. He's no longer in it, but he, he was part of Rumble. Josh Abramson was one of the very first shareholders of Rumble.
- [83:51]
Interviewer
And what's the status of Vimeo today?
- [83:54]
Chris Pavlovski
I think they just got purchased by. I can't remember the name. They just got purchased by somebody, I think an Italian company. But they're more like an enterprise product now. They're not in the same space that rumble or YouTube is in. They've completely pivoted to the enterprise world.
- [84:12]
Interviewer
Who are the biggest creators on Rumble today?
- [84:15]
Chris Pavlovski
The biggest creator on Rumble today is currently active is Steven Crowder. In terms of, like, the amount of live streams that he's doing, his live stream numbers are consistently the highest every day. The biggest creator on Rumble, though, by subscribers, but he's no longer on the platform today is Dan Bongino. He's the. The deputy director of the FBI. So he left his podcast to go become the deputy director of the FBI, which he just announced prior to coming here that he's, he's going to be finishing with the FBI in January.
- [84:51]
Interviewer
So he'll be back.
- [84:52]
Chris Pavlovski
I'm hoping he's back. He was actually the largest live streamer in America every single day in 2024.
- [85:02]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [85:03]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, he was across any platform. Across all platforms. We had the largest live streamer and perhaps in the world on most days as well. A lot of the days as well. But definitely in America, the largest live streamer doing like 160,000 people live, millions of views a day. One of the most influential conservative podcasters in the world in terms of views.
- [85:24]
Interviewer
Has anyone left Rumble?
- [85:26]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, for sure. And why would anybody leave contracts from other companies? Money. It's usually us fighting for talent and, you know, doing deals. For example, Joe Rogan, he's on Spotify. He's, he was never on Rumble, but that's an example of someone doing a huge contract to make sure he only stays on Spotify. So we, we do that too. We, we have contracts with like Tim Pool, who's huge. Steven Crowder.
- [85:52]
Interviewer
So Tim Pool's on Rumble, but he's not on YouTube.
- [85:55]
Chris Pavlovski
He's on YouTube as well, but he has an exclusive show on Rumble as well at noon. So we buy content from, from creators to, to be exclusive and bring their audiences over to the platform.
- [86:05]
Interviewer
Tell me about music on rumble.
- [86:07]
Chris Pavlovski
So in 23, 2023, where we actually got the most traction outside of the political sphere was with like hip hop commentators, hip hop artists. So one of the like the largest commentators out there, this guy named Academics, who I guess reports on the hip hop world, came to Rumble. So we saw, we saw like a really interesting overlap with free speech and hip hop. It became so popular on Rumble and the Academics is still on Rumble. Actually it's probably one of the more popular non political creators on Rumble that it became so popular that the Rolling Stone wrote an article how hip hop is turning right because they're going to Rumble. Right wing.
- [86:54]
Interviewer
It has nothing to do with it.
- [86:55]
Chris Pavlovski
It has nothing to do with politics. Exactly. But you can search this article is funniest headline. But basically guys like DJ Akademiks are huge influencers in the hip hop space, talking about all the hip hop artists and brought his show to Rumble and simply because he believed in free speech. And a lot of the hip hop artists believe in free speech. It's actually something that they are very, very, very keen on. And we saw tons of overlap and growth in that and that hip hop segment, that was one segment that was one of the most easiest for Rumble to grow outside of the political world was hip hop. And it had nothing to do with politics, just simply their desire for freedom of expression.
- [87:40]
Interviewer
Have there been any technological breakthroughs from the early days to now that have, like, changed everything or made it much easier? Or, for example, the size of video when you were starting, how much space it took up? Has that been solved? Is it still the same?
- [87:59]
Chris Pavlovski
No, it's almost. It's like little increment advances. I think we haven't had this really big breakthrough in technology since probably the Internet, I would say. I don't think we've seen that. I think we're coming up to one, though. I think we're going to see that in the next couple years. With AI, I think the big breakthrough. There's something that's going to come that's going to overtake AI, and it's going to be quantum computing.
- [88:30]
Interviewer
Tell me about that. I don't know what that is.
- [88:32]
Chris Pavlovski
I think quantum computing is going to change the game. It's going to take AI to the next level. So AI requires lots of power, lots of processing, but I think quantum computing is going to change the world forever. And I don't know how that's going to look post quantum computing, but I see that as the big next AI and quantum computing. And both AI and quantum computing combined is a real force multiplier.
- [89:01]
Interviewer
What's the projection on quantum computing? When does that become real?
- [89:06]
Chris Pavlovski
They say five to 10 years, some say 20, 30 years. It's really. I think everything's going to happen a lot faster than people think. I think AI is going to get really advanced in the next two years. I think quantum computing is here in the next five, I think, or less. I think we're going to see some real big advances very soon.
- [89:28]
Interviewer
What's different with quantum computing?
- [89:30]
Chris Pavlovski
Quantum computing is really scary and really cool at the same time, but it's just. Just processing things, like at a speed that is incredibly fast.
- [89:43]
Interviewer
How many times what we have now?
- [89:46]
Chris Pavlovski
I would say millions. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that, but I think it's like millions. I think it's like we're talking like a leap unseen, for example. I know the consequence of what it could do. It could break all our security for Bitcoin and security for banking. If we have quantum computing, it could crack the code in minutes for every password that everybody has, whereas now it would take us, you know, thousands of years so that's, we're talking like a massive, like thousands times increase in speed.
- [90:18]
Interviewer
In building things like wallets and a financial business. How do you take into account the possibility of that down the road?
- [90:27]
Chris Pavlovski
I think a lot of people are thinking about that right now because quantum computing would break it all. And, you know, I think that breaks down society if we don't have a solution to that. So I think everything's vulnerable to quantum computing. Your bank accounts, your, you know, crypto wallets, like everything. The question is, how far away is it and do we have enough time?
- [90:49]
Interviewer
If it breaks everything, would it be legal?
- [90:53]
Chris Pavlovski
Yeah, that's another question. Right, like, but then if someone can have it in their basement, whether that's possible or not, like, we don't know, we don't know what kind of resources it'll take. But you know, AI you can have in your basement. So we'll see. But there's a lot that's going to change in the next decade and we got to be aware of what's coming and we got to prepare for it. And I don't think we have quantum resistant bank accounts yet. And I think we're going to need to have that a little sooner than we might think. You know, it could do amazing things too. We're talking about it could cure probably cancer right away, like run this in an AI model to figure it out. And you should be able to cure all kinds of things. So there's a lot of benefits. There's going to be a lot of downside risk too. So we're going to have to but like it with anything. I think that's how it always is. But it'll be a very interesting world in the next decade.
- [91:56]
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- [92:08]
Interviewer
Tetragrammaton is a podcast.
- [92:11]
Chris Pavlovski
Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.
- [92:23]
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