Because we now have the Rumble wallet. We now have a way for creators to be tipped and paid online. To those of you at home, I'm trying to find out where the Rumble camera is. I think it's that middle one. Hello to the Rumble watchers at home. Please know you can tip Plan B. I don't know if they need the money, but you can tip Plan B right now with the Rumble wallet, which was released just this week. So, we have the CEO of Rumble taking the stage, which is the only video platform that stared down big tech and it won. He put Bitcoin on the company balance sheet and launched the wallet to prove it. Sharing the stage is a legend of independent media. He founded Locals. He hosts the Reuben Report. And he is the living proof that you do not need the legacy media. And now you don't necessarily need legacy banks to win. So ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together. Please make some noise for Chris Pavlovski and David Rubin.
Enjoy guys.
Thank you guys. It's great to be here. I do want to say quickly before we dive into all of the tech and the finances and Bitcoin and all that good stuff, this is actually my second time in El Salvador, in San Salvador. I was here about 12 years ago for a few weeks. My brother-in-law was doing some volunteer work here and I came down and I lived with him for about 3 weeks. And I have to tell you, and it will not come as any surprise to you who live here, the transformation of this country and this city is absolutely staggering. You should all be incredibly proud of yourselves and it's just miraculous. So, from an outsider, I hope you hear that because it really is incredible and it's directly connected to everything I think that we're going to talk about up here, Chris. So, it's nice to be in a place where things are working, right? We're often in the States now in places that things don't work, and here we're in a place that feels like it's forward, it's future forward, and perhaps there's a chance for freedom.
Being in El Salvador, this is I think maybe my fourth time, third or fourth time, but every time I come, it gets better and better. And it's almost like a, and it's not actually almost, it is becoming a model to what we want to see with a lot of different countries. What they've done here, the safety, the freedom aspect of it, which is my favorite part, the way they're pro-free speech, they're pro-Bitcoin, which is pro-freedom finance, is something that I think every country around the world needs to adopt. Every country should have a Bitcoin treasury strategy. I think that's really important. And every country should be pushing forward this type of legislation. And you know, Bukele, President Bukele here in El Salvador has really taken the lead and become really kind of the example for the world to look at of how successful a country can become when you just adopt all these freedom principles. And being here is always a treat. I will continue to come here and Rumble itself as a business will have a presence here and we hope many countries follow suit and what Bukele is doing but it's amazing to be here.
So tell us a little bit about where Rumble is at as a company right now. You know, I think when it first sort of appeared mainstream a few years ago, and you've been working on Rumble for many, many years at this point, but when it sort of first came on the mainstream idea set, it was basically thought of as a YouTube competitor. It's actually much more than that now. And there's a whole slate of things on the way.
Yeah, it's broadened. And I don't know if everybody knows but Dave, his company Locals with Assaf who's now the president of Rumble, they founded a company called locals.com which was our first acquisition. So that happened when, was that 2021?
About 5 years ago now. Yeah.
Yeah, just shortly after kind of Rumble started exploding in growth. But at the very start in 2013, Rumble was a video platform very similar to what you saw on YouTube. And then by 2021, we grew from like 1 to 30 million monthly active users. Then we acquired a company called locals.com which Dave founded, co-founded, and we became more than just a video platform and now had the subscription-based community platform which was Locals. And shortly thereafter we realized that not only could we just be a video platform and a subscription platform but we're going to have to actually own the rail that we sit on. Because if you don't own the rail that you sit on, things like what happened to Parler would happen to Rumble. When you're hosting voices of people that are saying things that the government doesn't want you to say or other people don't want to hear you say them, you're going to face a lot of scrutiny and then eventually you could get shut down like you saw Parler get shut down. So we ended up building an entire cloud independent from big tech and completely on our rail to host and be able to host people on our platform so that they could exercise a basic human right which we all know is freedom of expression. That's Article 19 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights which most of the world has forgotten about but it is a human right. It's also the First Amendment of the United States of America. It is a fundamental right and the most important thing for any democracy to have. So we built our entire rail so that people could speak freely and no one can tell you what you can or cannot say or what you can or cannot watch or hear.
You know, I should note that I only met Chris five or six years ago. It was at a dinner where before the water was served, literally we sat down. We had only met for 30 seconds and I remember the waiter came over. He was pouring the water and Chris said, "We're going to acquire you guys. We're going to work together." And you basically laid out the roadmap that leads us to today, which is the partnership with Tether, the Rumble wallet. Is your goal ultimately to have a completely separate ecosystem or do you think there's a way that the mainstream ecosystem still kind of exists? Do you think they're just going to completely go in their separate ways? Do you think they ultimately crash into each other? Does it matter in a sense?
And you know this is why when Tether took a stake in Rumble it was so great from my stance because the vision that Paolo has is the exact same vision that I had and it's the exact same vision that was laid out when we announced that we're going public in 2021 and we put our investor deck out there. All those pillars of business that you kind of see us have built were ones that we said we were going to build many years ago. And where we see it going is that we really believe we're going to live in a universe here where freedom technology is going to surpass and overtake the technologies of centralization, the technologies of bias and censorship, and the technologies that want to basically profit entirely off of everybody. We think the world is moving to a place and Rumble is a perfect example. We have a multi-billion dollar market cap because of our video platform that upheld free speech in a time where COVID was around and the presidential elections in the United States happened and where censorship was rampant far beyond anybody would have predicted in the United States. So you kind of saw Rumble take a big chunk of the market over those years entirely premised on the idea of freedom. And we think that's going to continue to accelerate. It's going to accelerate not just in the cloud world, but it's going to accelerate into AI. It's going to accelerate into everything you do on your phones. Everybody is going to really start to value privacy, decentralization, the ability to speak freely. And that's what we're building. We're building something for the future that we think in 10 years from now is going to be really, really valued by the majority of the population of the entire world. And we're starting to see that in the last 5 years really starting to emerge. The era of big tech companies controlling everything we do, controlling what we can and cannot see or hear, having everything centralized around them where they own all of our data and monetize all of our data. I think that time is going to change and it's going to change into an era where freedom technology is going to be highly sought after and highly wanted. And I think that's, we're already starting to see the early innings of that right now.
Can you talk a little bit about the hits that you and the company have taken to stand up for free speech in a time when it's been difficult? I remember about five or six years ago, I had Peter Thiel in my studio in my house the day that Alex Jones was kicked off of YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and everything the exact same day. And I said to Peter off camera, I said to him, you know, is this big tech all coordinating to silence somebody? And his answer was interesting as everything he says is interesting. He said, "I don't think so. I think they're all cowards and they just wait for the first mover and once the first mover does something they all just jump in on it." You and Rumble have been on the complete opposite side of that and that has in some sense cost us. I mean we've had to fight with various countries and all sorts of things. So can you talk a bit about that?
Yeah, it's been a war and it's continuous. Free speech isn't free. It takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of hustle, and it takes a lot of balls. You got to deal with a lot that you typically wouldn't believe you'd have to deal with. We've been shut off by China, Russia, Brazil, France. And here's a little bit of good news, though. Although we've been attacked by all these countries, most recently one of the first countries that shut us off was France. And the story is super ironic. They didn't like specific speech that was happening on Rumble that was related to Russia. It was political speech. It didn't violate our terms of service. Didn't violate anything. They didn't like Russia Today on Rumble. And Rumble said, "Too bad. We're not going to fold to what France wants us to do. We're an American company. We're going to stand up for American values and this doesn't violate our terms of service and you can go pound sand." Then shortly, the media comes after us. Every single media went after us. Like every single one, Politico, you name it. They write a story that we're defending the Russians and blah blah blah. And six months later, the Russians come to us and they say, "You need to take this down." And we tell them the same thing. Go pound sand. Russia turns us off. And the media's silent. Now that Russia cancels us, it's not a big deal.
At the end of this day, we challenged France in the courts and we ended up prevailing. We ended up prevailing about a month ago. So we're now back in France. It took a few years, but we ended up winning in the courts of France. And the courts declared that the order sent to us was not valid and we did not need to follow that order. So now we're live back in France. Still off in Russia, still off in China, and still off in Brazil. But it's kind of amazing that we won. And it kind of gave me a lot of hope that if we keep fighting and we keep fighting for the right values there is places where we can make a real move for the better. Hopefully the same thing happens in Brazil. I'm optimistic that we'll be back live in Brazil in time. I ultimately think this world will err on the side of freedom always and that's always the right side of history. So yeah, all the big tech owners are complete cowards for sure because it's not really hard. It's hard, but it's not that hard to pick the right side of history. And the right side of history in this case is always free speech.
