Telegram Creator on Elon Musk, Resisting FBI Attacks, and Getting Mugged in California

Telegram is one of the largest and fastest growing social messaging apps in the world, popular around the world, including in the United States, but it seems that almost nothing or very little is known about the company. It is based in Dubai, where we are now. run and owned, and the software is designed and written by Pavo dorov, who started it a few years ago, who almost never does interviews, turns out he's a very interesting person, an extremely interesting person, we found out that the other day , as I was talking to him, he agreed to sit down and tell us about him and his company and we thought it would definitely be worth a listen and with that Pao, thanks for joining us, thanks for inviting me, so um, I confess I used Telegram.

I didn't know anything about you. or the company and I were a little surprised by your story and if you wouldn't mind just recreating a little bit for our audience where you're from, how you started this and why, it'll be a long story okay, uh I was born in 1984 in the Union Soviet, so it was a fun year to be born and, back then, I got to witness, you know, the shortcomings of the centralized system that we had in the Soviet Union. When I was four years old, my family moved. to Italy, where I was able to compare what I saw on the Italian tour with what I experienced in the Soviet Union and I thought that the capitalist system, the free market system, is definitely better, at least for me, um and uh, I went to school in Italy, I became friendly.

As a result, part of Europe collapsed, but then when the Soviet Union collapsed, we decided to return to Russia. In Italy though my brother and I had a lot of fun. They showed him live on Italian television as a young prodigy who could solve cubic equations in real time, you know, he was 10 years old and that was considered impossible back then in Italy. I don't know what a cubic equation is, so yeah, it definitely sounds difficult and you know. When I first went to school, I didn't know how to speak Italian. I didn't know a single word in Italian and a lot of teachers said to this guy, "Well, this kid isn't going to be successful in our school at the end of the year." the first year was the second best at the end of the next year, I was the best student in our class, so it also showed me that you could excel, you could compete.

I like that in a competitive environment and then when we came back to Russia it was a little chaotic the only reason we came back is because my father got an offer to head one of the departments at St. Petersburg State University. He is one of the famous scholars and writers who deals with ancient Roman literature and that experience. It was very different and I still enjoyed it because in Russia in the '90s there were experimental schools where they taught you everything, like we had six foreign languages, we had very specialized mathematics, six foreign languages ​​at once, six foreign languages ​​in parallel.

He would have math similar to what he would have in math magnet schools and would like chemistry at the same level. It would have specialty schools for chemistry and biology, so that was really intense. My brother became world champion in mathematics in many international mathematics and programming olympiads. times in a row, absolutely best for me, I was simply the best student in my school and I also had some wins in local competitions in various areas, but we were both very passionate about coding and designing things, and we, because we brought this IBM PC . XT Computer from Italy in the early 90s, we were one of the few families in Russia who could teach us how to program on our own and we started doing it.

I was at the University. I was creating a website for my fellow students and. As a result, you know, I started a company that became what they call the Facebook of Russia. We don't like to call it that because we actually managed to do a lot of things before Facebook and that defined what the social media industry is like. developed in the following years, the company name was VK. I started it when I was 21 years old. I just graduated from university and it eventually became the largest social network, the most popular social network in Russia, Ukraine, B, Russia, Kazakhstan and many other publications.

Soviet countries, that was a significant effort on my part because at one point I was the only employee of the company. I would write the code myself. I would do the design myself. I would manage the servers myself. It was quite intense. I even responded to customer service requests, I barely got a slap in the face, but it was a fun time when I was 21, 22, and then the company grew, like I said, to about 100 million active users, which was a lot back then, I think 201. 12 or 2011 when we made our first issues in Russia because, you see, I still believed strongly in these values ​​of the free market, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, so when the Russian opposition started to using VK to organize large protests in Russia. where almost half a million people would go to protest in the main square or in some of the main squares of the city.

The government asked us to ban these communities in BK and I refused, so the government asked them to close. down Communications between your opponents, well BK is a social media platform so they have large public communities that anyone can join, anyone can read what people are discussing or what admins post, they can comment and share , so it was a tool for these protesters. to organize back then it wasn't about us, you know, siding with one side of one side of the political struggle or the other, it was us defending freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, which we believed which was the right thing to do. but that didn't go very well with the government and they weren't very happy with it, I would say, and a few years later, in 2013, we had a similar situation where, you know, we had these protests in Ukraine. where people would again use VK to organize and go to the main square of the city and show their disagreement with the government, yes, and we received a request from SL from the Russian side saying that you have to give us the private data of the organization. of this protest and our response was wait, wait a minute, this is a different country, we will not betray our Ukrainian users because you asked us to do that, we decided to refuse and that did not go very well with the Russian government either.

So at the end of that year I had to make a difficult decision because I was basically offered a choice between two suboptimal options, one of which was that I would start complying with whatever the country's leaders told me to do and the other. one was that I could sell my stake in the company, retire, resign as CEO and leave the country, I chose the lyrics, uh, that's it, if I could ask you to stop it, it's a little strange because I've heard people say that. Telegram is part of the Russian government and you are describing the opposite: you are saying that you had to leave the country because you did not give in to their demands.

Well, you are saying exactly the same thing people who have very limited knowledge of where. Telegram came from where they would make these claims. They could be encouraged by our competitors, who see it as an easy way to discredit us because you know Telegram is spreading like wildfire. Two and a half ion users sign up every day and we are like a threat, so I'm not surprised this perception exists because our competitors spend tens of billions on marketing and are known for using PR firms to participate in campaigns like that, so how do you spend on zero zero marketing? dollars in dollars zero dollars we have never spent anything on acquiring users for marketing purposes we never promote Telegram uh you know on other social platforms in no way uh this is very different from other applications, you can see them promoted here or there different, all our growth is purely organic and we reached almost 900 million users without having to spend anything on ads to promote Teleg.

Is incredible. Sorry, sorry to interrupt you, no, it's just interesting because I've heard. people say that, um, but it sounds like the opposite of the truth, so you decided to sell the company, resign as CEO and leave your country. Yeah, that's what I did, it was a little painful because obviously my first company was my baby. I created my stuff there. A lot of creativity, time and effort went into that platform, but at the same time, you know, I understood that I would rather be free, I would want to take orders from anyone, and I probably left behind a comfortable life, but for myself.

For me, it was never about

getting

rich, everything in my life was about being free, yes, and to the extent possible, my mission in life was to allow other people to also become free in a sense and use the platforms that we created or I created uh My hope was that they could express their freedoms. This is the mission of Telegram and was also partly the mission of my previous company BK. We wanted to pause this interview just for a minute to point something out when the Russian government asked. Pav Durov will use his social media company to censor his political opponents.

He said no. He said that he would rather resign and leave the country where he was born than participate in something like that. Such was his commitment to freedom of expression. Now you have to compare that with what Pav Durov did with what Mark Zuckerberg or Praga Agarwall did, the guy who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought it, both have collaborated with governments to censor people and that is shameful, so we believe pavle when he says that his

telegram

app will be a bastion of freedom of expression because we believe him because he has shown how committed he is to that, so we have decided to proudly launch our own

telegram

channel to provide another avenue to reach people with our content. censorship free, so if you are on Telegram we ask you to subscribe to our new channel by searching for a username below, we are honored to do this, we will return to our conversation with Pablo Durov.

So you start Telegram after leaving Russia, right, yeah, so the idea of ​​Telegram came about when we were still in Russia because at some point we had this very stressful situation where armed police came to my house and tried to break in because I refused. to put an end to these opposition groups that I mentioned earlier and I realized that there is no safe means of communication. I realized that I want to tell my brother what is happening to coordinate what we want to do and all the communication tools that he could use were not there. really secure, not encrypted, they weren't safe to use, so I thought it might be a good idea to come up with a decently encrypted messaging app, and my brother, being the genius that he is, was able to create this. encryption standard that we are using to this day with minor changes, uh, but the IDE, your brother wrote the encryption, yeah, well, my brother, like two math PhDs, super smart, might know he's an expert in cryptography, uh, he designed the basic one. principles of Telegram encryption.

He was more on the UI side, the way the app works, the features etc., he was responsible for the encryption side, so where did you go when you left Russia? We tried several places, first we went to Berlin. We tried setting up a company in Berlin, then we tried London, Singapore, San Francisco, you name it, we've been everywhere and why didn't you stay in any of those places? Oh, because the bureaucratic obstacles were too difficult to overcome. overcome, you know I was bringing the best programmers in the world to these places and I was trying to hire them from a local company and the response I got in places like Germany, for example, is that no, no, no, you can't hire people. from outside the European Union because first you have to publish some advertisement in the newspaper in the local magazine uh and then for six months no one answers from the engineers that are available within the European Union and Germany, then you can hire external people and I thought it was a crazy idea because why didn't you just say they were illiterate refugees?

Well, because we didn't consider ourselves refugees. We were very successful people. We could have gone anywhere. I know, but if you had told them you were illiterate. refugees, they would let you stay, yes, so you go from Germany to Singapore to London to San Francisco. What happened in San Francisco? Well, in San Francisco we really thought that would be the place for us because all the tech companies are there. or around San Francisco and two things happened that made us think twice, well, one thing is pretty obvious. I was in San Francisco. They attacked me on the street after visiting.

I think it was Jack Dorsy on Twitter. in the Twitter office and uh I was walking back at 8:00 p.m. to my hotel and they attacked me on the street uh this is the only country where they attacked me on the streets what happened just three big guys tried to take the phone out of my hands I was tweeting uh about the fact that I just met uh the founder from Twitter, thatIt seemed like a good idea at the time, uh, and uh, they attacked me, uh, I didn't want to let them have my phone, um, they probably didn't expect, uh, resistance, so I grabbed my phone from them.

There was a short fight with the guys, there was a bit of blood involved, but I managed to escape and decided that they probably wouldn't mug many Russians, maybe they would have been surprised, well, they were a lot taller than me. I have to admit there are three, but I think I put up a good fight. Were you completely surprised that this happened in San Francisco? Yes, it was a shock for me because I traveled a lot, that was the first place I got. I attacked and thought okay, maybe shouldn't you look at San Francisco? Maybe there are other places in the United States where they don't attack you, yes, exactly, but you know there is a second part that was probably more alarming there, in the United States, where we received too much attention from the US the FBI , security agencies wherever we came to the US, so to give you an example, the last time I was in the US, I brought an engineer who works for Telegram and there was an attempt to secretly hire to my engineer behind my back for cybersecurity. officers or agents whatever they are called, the US government should hire their engineer, as I understand it, that's what he told me: write code for them or get on Telegram.

They were curious to know what open source libraries are built into the Telegram app. They knew this from the client and were trying to persuade him to use certain open source tools that he would then integrate into Telegram's code and which, as I understand it, would serve as backdoors that would allow the US government to spy on the people who use Telegram. The US government or maybe any other government, because a backdoor is a backdoor, regardless of who is using it, that's right and it's a little surprising to hear, maybe it's not surprising, it's offensive, you're sure it happened, yes.

There is no reason for my engineer to make up the stories, also because I personally experienced similar pressure in the US. Every time I went to the US, two FBI agents would greet me at the airport and ask me questions once. time I was having breakfast around 9:00 a.m. and the FBI showed my house that I was renting and that was pretty surprising and I thought you know we're

getting

too much attention here. It's probably not the best environment to run in, why would you have committed? Not a crime, they were interested in learning more about Telegram, they knew that you know, they left Russia, they knew what we were doing, but they wanted details and my understanding is that they wanted to establish a relationship to better control Telegram.

I understand that they were doing their job, it's just that for us, running a privacy-focused social media platform, it probably wasn't the best environment to be in and we want to focus on what we don't do in government relations of that type, relations governmental. So you came to the UAE to Dubai, yes, seven years ago, we moved here. We first wanted to try it for half a year to see if it works and it turned out to be a great place that we never looked back and never wanted. change you to any other place after that, why?

Well, for several reasons, first, the ease of doing business here is so high, for example, you can hire people from anywhere in the world as long as you pay them a good salary. Residence permits are granted automatically. It's very different if you try to do that in Europe, in other countries, it's very different from them. Secondly, it is very tax efficient. Third, the infrastructure is excellent. You get a lot for the minimum amount of taxes. you are paying for the roads, the airports, the hotels, everything. I think you've witnessed it yourself, yes, but I think the most important thing is that it's a neutral place, it's a neutral country, it's a small country that wants to be friends with everyone, uh, it's. is not geopolitically aligned with any of the major superpowers and I think it is the best place for a neutral platform like ours if we want to ensure that we can defend the privacy and freedom of expression of our users, so that in the time there is been here there have been a series of wars and threats of war precursors to war, have you had any pressure from the government here?

Honestly, some government pressure here to reveal a backdoor in Tegram or ban someone or make some changes. to their zero business, that is the best part of the seven years we have been here, there has been no pressure from the EU towards Telegram, they have been very supportive, very helpful and it is a great contrast to what we have experienced. Before, um, what about what you've experienced since you moved here in those seven years? Have you been under pressure from other governments under whose jurisdiction you are not, but to satisfy their demands? Well, of course, Telegram is a big platform.

We are popular in many countries and we have been receiving many requests, some of them were legitimate, like if there is a group of people who promote violence, there is some terrorist activity that is you. I know that violence is spread in some parts of the world publicly, by publishing things that any decent human being would not allow or want to publish, we would help them, but in other cases where we thought it would be crossing the line, we would not do it. It would be inconsistent with our values ​​of freedom of expression and protection of the private correspondence of people we would ignore.

Can you give us an example of a request that you thought turned into censorship and spying that violated people's privacy? Well, I would. tell a very funny story related to your country of origin um after the events of January 6th uh we received a letter from I believe uh congressman on the Democratic side um and uh they requested that we share all the data that we had in relation to what To this they called it Uprising or um and we verified it with our lawyers and they said it was better to ignore it, but the letter seemed very serious and the letter said that if you do not comply with this request, you will be in violation.

They know the US Constitution or something, so they wanted data on the people who voted for the other in the election, but they wanted the data on the people, yes, who were demonstrating in Washington or wherever they were doing, uh, they're Pro, you're probably right. I'm not an expert in politics uh What uh how funny that is that two years exactly two I'm sorry, two weeks after that letter we received another letter, a new letter from the Republican side of Congress and there we read that if we release any information according to the previous request we would be violating the US Constitution, so we received two letters that said that anything we did would be violating the US Constitution in a way that, as I understood, these letters from the same legislative body, both from the US Congress, yes, so how do you respond to that?

Well, the same way we respond to most requests of this type, we choose to ignore them because it is a very complicated matter related to domestic politics in the US. We do not want to accept any if you I strongly believe this if you ignore your problems most of them disappear it's very true it's very it doesn't say it but it's true um that's surprising have you ever had demands that you can't ignore? Well, it depends on unreasonable demands, so I would do it. They say the biggest pressure towards Telegram isn't coming from governments, it's coming from Apple and Google, so when it comes to freedom of speech, those two platforms could basically censor any reading access on your smartphones, so I mean, what? they run the risk of being kicked out of their stores exactly that's what they make very clear that if we don't comply with the guidelines, that's what they call it, uh telr could be removed from the stores, well that would be no small feat for you, well, it's not.

It would be a small thing for us because obviously a large portion of the world's population will lose access to the tools available to them that they use every day, but you know it won't be a small thing for them either. I mean, I think there should be something like that. Some compromise must be found in such cases, but Apple and Google are not very compromising when it comes to guidelines, if they believe that some content goes against their rules, they will ensure that all applications that are distributed through their stores comply with these. Are the rules any of those rules or do you interpret any of those rules?

Do you think any of them are political in nature? Some of them, but they are not the rules, it is the application of the rules. The rules themselves are quite general. there should be no violence, no discrimination, public, uh, publicly available, I don't know, child abuse materials, it's hard to not agree with that, yeah, but then when they start enforcing those rules, sometimes we don't agree with their interpretations and we try to understand it. Let's go back to Apple or Google, whoever it is and say look, we think you're wrong, we think this is actually a legitimate way for people to express their opinions and sometimes they agree to their credit, sometimes they don't. okay and we still have to remove some of the content. at least in the version of Telegram that distributed through those platforms, so there are a number of conflicts going on around the world right now and that may accelerate, so you would expect that the number of lawsuits and the intensity of those demands increase.

Of those demands would increase as wars become more intense, let's see. I very much hope that the past will be behind us. I want to be optimistic. I think we have now reached a point where politicians and societies know what to expect from social media. platforms and where, you know, the red lines are yeah, we also learned a lot more about the requirements coming from both them and Google slapple, so our users are also better educated about what's allowed, wasn't allowed, so that I don't do it. I necessarily think things are going to get worse, it seems like the red line for governments is to allow organized opposition to their government, that's what you saw in Russia with nval and the Ukraine crisis in 2014, that's what you saw from that Democratic member of Congress after January 6, 2020 there is definitely a pattern here Telgram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, yes, Barus, Kazakhstan, even in Barc

elon

a in the past, yes, so it has been a tool for Theos to a large extent, but that's not the case.

It really matters whether it is the opposition or the ruling party that is using you for us, we apply the rules equally to all sides, we are not biased in this way, it is not that we are supporting the opposition or we are supporting the ruling party. It's not that we don't care, but we think it's important to have this platform that is neutral for all voices because we believe that the competition of different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone. Let's say Facebook, which has said in public that you know that we tip the balance in favor of this or that movement and this or that country, all far from the West and far from the attention of the Western media, but they have said: what do you think of those technology companies? electing governments well, I think that's one of the reasons we ended up here in the UAE, of all places, so you don't want to be geopolitically aligned, you don't want to pick winners in any of these political fights . and that's why you have to be in a neutral place, but I think Facebook in particular has a lot of reasons, other than being based in the US, for doing what they're doing.

I believe that each application and platform plays its own role and We believe that humanity needs a neutral platform like Telegram, which is respectful of people's privacy and freedoms, perhaps from a political perspective, it seems that the most provocative thing that Telegram does is to offer something called channels that look ready to organize groups. of people, can you explain to viewers who are not familiar with them what a Telegram channel is? Yes, so the Telegram channel is an over-streaming tool that allows people to quickly spread any message to millions of people, so there is a channel that people subscribe to.

It is a one-way communication, which means that one channel can be used by, say, a president or a head of state and everyone else will not be able to send a message to the president, but the president will be able to send a message to everyone. people who subscribe to your channel yes or your channel, so the point here is that channels are so easy to use and so deeply integrated into the messaging UI that they became extremely popular, so you get it like a text message, that's exactly what it is. It is a very familiar way for many people and since we launched launch channels 8 years ago, I think some other popular applications followed our footsteps and copied that feature, not as advanced as the one we have, but it shows that it is a highly requested feature and high quality that the world needs, I thinkIt is and you don't have to answer any of these questions if you don't want to, if it's too personal, but you own it, you own it and it's actually very unusual, I've never seen it before.

Having a business as big as this owned by one person. Why didn't you take it? You could have collected private equity money along the way, but you didn't. Why did not you do it? Well, that's true from now until it was 100% owned by me, which is, like I said, pretty unusual. I had never heard of that before, the reason I tried to, you know, stay away from Ben Capital's money at least in the early stages of our development is because we wanted to be independent, we knew that our mission and our goals were not They were necessarily consistent with the objectives of the funds that might invest in us, and furthermore, for me it was never about money, so I have a few hundred million dollars. in my bank account or in Bitcoin for 10 years and I don't do anything with it.

I don't own real estate like jets or yachts. I don't think those, this lifestyle is for me. I like to concentrate. about what we're doing, with Tel, you don't own anything like big assets. You don't own any big assets, an island in Hawaii or not, no, no, no land, no real estate, nothing, why, well, because for me my number one priority in life is my freedom and once you start buying thingsFirst of all, it will tie you to a physical location. In my opinion, it is my personal opinion. I have nothing against people who buy real estate, but in my personal opinion it would be like that for me and the second reason is that I like it.

Stay focused on what we do on Telegram, so I know that if I buy a house, buy a plane or something, I would spend time trying to make it enjoyable and yes, this will take a lot of time and effort. leather seats or velvet seats exactly and you're not even going to choose yes for me. I'd rather make decisions that influence the way a billion people communicate rather than choosing the color of seats in the house that's just me and my family probably a bunch of my friends will find it interesting and you didn't make it because it's just I want to, I just have to say it for the third time.

I haven't seen this before, you were obviously famous when you were young as a business builder and entrepreneur, so you really could have done it. You took a lot of money and you didn't do it because you didn't want to be controlled. I just didn't see any reason to do it. You know, I had enough money to get by and be completely fair. Tgram took outside money. We issued bonds 3 years ago, so we raised debt, and that was it, and before that we had a cryptocurrency project that also raised some funds, so there were cases where we raised external funds, but when it comes to equity capital company, yes, you did.

We didn't give up ownership, we didn't give anyone ownership or voting control or anything like that because we also believe in efficiency. I think having me as the sole owner, director and product manager over this extended period of time and the development of the company allowed us to move faster and be how could you be the sole product manager? Are you still the only product manager in the company? Exactly I still create most of the functions. I continue to work directly with every engineer and every designer who is implementing these features. um, you know, I run this company because I enjoy it.

I am the only product manager because I believe this is the way I can contribute. How big is your human resources department? Well, you could say that's me and because the way we are engineers. no, no, you need a great human resources department, don't you think you won't suffer. Without one, we somehow decentralized and started a platform where we run contests for engine engineers. Actually, it's contest.com, we have a separate platform for that. and we select the best of the best engineers as a result of the competitions that we organize, we run them every month or two months, so after a series of these competitions we select the best of the best and then maybe they could join. our team which consists of only 30 engineers so it's really compact the team is super efficient it's like a Navy sealed team and that's how we operate we don't need the HR department to find super talented engineers Why doesn't everyone do it?

I look at this with some of these technology companies or with Elon Musk when he appeared on Twitter. I mean, there were people who did things that he didn't even know what they were doing and they didn't know what they were doing. there was a Department of World Peace and a Department of Foosball and why doesn't everyone run their business well like you? It's an interesting question. I think it all comes down to the question of Independence anyway. I asked this question to El Jack Dorsy's predecessors. Jack and um um and his predecessor too and uh what you say, dick cost his name and uh this Jack told me that if I told him look, you can run this company with 20 people, you don't need that many people. here and the answer was: I agree with you, but if we start laying off so many people, Wall Street will freak out and they will think that something is very wrong with the company and we don't want to do that and that's why we have to keep everyone. this, uh, employees, so to keep the stock price up he had to run it inefficiently.

I mean, that's what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, that's what, but to his credit, he has to make Twitter private before he can do that. all the theorizing out there, I mean, there's something profound in what you're saying, I mean the goal of a publicly traded company or one of the points for the public to be able to participate in the ownership of the company, but also for that outsiders can evaluate operations. of the company and that is why there are transparencies, we know how the company is managed because it is owned by the public and, therefore, it would be, by definition, more efficient, one might think, but you are saying that it is tremendously less efficient to end with a department table football when it's publicly traded, but when it's privately held, no, I mean, it's the complete opposite of what you would think, well, I guess most tech founders would agree that running a public company is less efficient than run a private company because you have to be accountable to a lot more people, there's a lot of redundancy bureaucracy involved, so from a purely efficiency standpoint, I would say, and I think a lot of people would agree with me, that being a Public company is not optimal, however, there are other advantages of being listed and of course that is relevant when you want to acquire cash from other companies, yes you can have access to cheap capital.

You know there are many things you can do, but you don't want to do any of those things well. No, no, right now I'm definitely enjoying running my company the way it is. Well, who knows what the future holds, but as of now I think we are doing a great job with Telegram. 900 million users will probably exceed 1 billion monthly assets. users within a year. I think we are doing very well, why would we lose this momentum right now? Can I go back to something you said at the beginning? You don't have a human resources department, you only have 30 engineers working for you. you run the products, you own the company, a very tight organization, but how do you get new users if you don't spend money on acquisitions?

If you don't advertise, if you don't pay to attract people, how do you do that? How can you get to a billion for free because people love our product? What we realized from the beginning is that people are smart, they like to use good things and they don't like to use inferior things, so whenever you have a person who started using Telegram and was there for a while and started to discover all the features, you know, the speed, the security, the professionals, everything we have, they don't want to go back and start inviting their friends who recommend them, they should really try this app because it's so much better than everything else and also because people realize that whatever messaging app they are using right now is five and six years behind.

They are copying what we did six years ago. does and you know, that's not a very high quality copy that they make of our features, so people love quality, that's why they move, they also love independent, they also love privacy, they love freedom, There are many reasons why someone would switch to telegram from other apps, so one of the things we learned when Elon Musk bought Twitter is that Intel agencies, not just us, but many other countries. The usual suspects were all over the company, I mean some of them were present working at the company they had access to direct messages, you can imagine, well you know, because you run one, but the sheer amount of data that flow would be of great interest to governments.

Does that make you paranoid that you will be penetrated? I mean, I guess. Governments would like to know what is happening privately on Telegram. We definitely have a lot of responsibility on our shoulders and I wouldn't say we're paranoid, but I think it makes sense to be cautious and, you know, not. be too accessible don't travel to strange places don't travel to strange places I hope it's not like I travel to places where I have confidence that you know those places are consistent with what we do in our values. I don't go to any of the big geopolitical powers of countries like China, Russia or the US, so don't go to the US.

I try not to, I can go, but you know it's too much attention, like I described before , yeah, because at some point point, if you run something like this, you're a player in world politics. I mean, definitely, whether you want to be or not, don't you think we definitely don't want to be a player? We want to be a neutral platform. impartial and you know he doesn't take sides, but you're probably right, there is a role we have to play well, not taking sides is the only thing you can't do well, I mean, aren't you obligated to take help?

In the modern world I think it's a big problem because I think that kind of attitude can make our world a more dangerous place because at the end of the day we all have to try to understand each other and try to get closer. each other in terms of knowing other people's positions, even those that are drastically different from ours, and that's how we come to some compromise and move forward if we are strictly divided and everyone is required to take a side and we can't take sides because we are this platform that people should use to collaborate and find common ground and hopefully move forward if we lose, we can end up in a much more dangerous place, how often do you cross paths? with the National Security Agency (NSA) and I asked him that as someone whose texts were read by them.

I know they are very active in this world. What has been your experience? Well, I think the NSA is not an agency that works with you directly. true, I'm not coming and C you are very diplomatic. I love it. The N is not an agency that works with you directly. No, that's true, that's true. So my knowledge of my interactions with the NSA is very limited. Yes, I could. I read something in the papers about my phone being penetrated with Pegasus or something. I have no idea if it's true or not, but this is the only source of information I can have that I personally am of interest to any of uh, you know. secret agencies, but you have to think that even if you haven't done an interview in seven years, you know that you are, it's widely known to people who are interested in who you are and your role in this.

I have to think you're under a lot of surveillance, don't you think that's probably true? You know, it would sound funny, but I assume that by default the devices that I use are compromised, yes, because you will still use an iPhone or an Android phone and, uh, now After experiencing what I experienced in the US, I have a very limited faith in platforms developed in the USA from a security point of view, yes, from a privacy point of view, exactly yes, because in many countries, the United States, spying included is described as security in quotes. You are looking at it from another perspective, you are assuming that security is privacy and my right not to be spied on, but big governments describe spying on you as security.

Thanks for this correction. So, last question, since you did it. this since you were in college and you've been at the center of it, where do you think it's going? And by this I mean the free exchange, the private exchange of information between sovereign individuals, non-slave human beings when I was a child, that was possible. Is it increasingly difficult for us to move towards a world where there is simply no private communication or do you think that privacy will remain despite, say, AI or just massive increases in computing power? Well, this depends on the degree of privacy.

When you say that privacy iswill keep, right? it means we have absolute privacy now I don't think we have it and I think the world is becoming less docile governments are becoming less tolerant of privacy it's clearly the trend because they have more technological power but they will win I guess there will ever be a way of preserving privacy, you know, is there a place for that? I think I'm an optimist. I think some new secure hardware, you know, communication devices will be created in a similar way to how we now have hardware wallets to store your cryptocurrencies.

Yes, maybe we have secure communication devices, you know, to send messages or make voice calls, it is possible. I think you know that the world develops in cycles and if things seem to be going in one direction today, it doesn't seem that way. I mean tomorrow they will go in the same direction. I also feel that at some point people will get tired of what they experience today and decide to, you know, move in another direction, so I saw it after Covid, for example, during Co. You had a lot of restrictions on social media platforms as well. , on most social media platforms, you weren't really allowed to express doubts regarding lockdowns, vaccines or masks and at some point I could feel the sentiment change, people started to feel very, very .

Tired and sometimes angry about the fact that they were not allowed to express their opinions, especially after the end of the pandemic, uh, P.E., many people began to be even more skeptical about the restrictions on their freedoms that they experienced during the pandemic. What was your position as a business owner? During Covid? He must have been under pressure to censor opinions about the lockdowns? Masked vaccines. How did you respond? So our position is quite simple. We are a neutral platform on which we were helping governments spread their message. The lockdowns, the masks and the accidents we had dozens of governments that we really helped, you know, simulate their information, but we also didn't want to restrict the voices that were criticizing all of these measures, that's how we thought.

It made sense that these opposing points of view would clash and Hopefully you'll see some truth come out of those debates, and of course we received criticism for that, but looking back, I think it was the right strategy, so you allowed people to express doubts about it. called science throughout the entire experience exactly during the pandemic, I think we were one of the few or maybe the only major social media platform that didn't remove accounts that were skeptical of some of these measures, so why that? You are not famous or treated like a hero in the United States, shouldn't there be a parade in your honor if you are the only social media platform that doesn't delete what turned out to be true or to some extent true? truer than CDC guidance I mean, why why weren't you Man of the Year why isn't your face on the nickel?

I'm not an expert on American politics, but to be fair, you now have Twitter or a Yes, apparently more and more in favor of free speech, uh and uh, I think that's a big step forward and going back to our earlier discussion about how This is all going on at Cycles, things are starting to change, it looks like you are too. I mean, but in some ways Elon's purchase of Twitter ends his Monopoly, but he still greets it with joy, he's still for it, definitely, we love the fact that Elan bought Twitter, we think which was a great development for several.

The first reason is just innovation. Ax could be seen doing a lot of things, some of them will turn out to be mistakes, some of them will work, but at least they are trying to innovate, that's something we didn't have outside of Telegram and some other companies in this industry for the last 10 years which You see the big players would prefer to copy the proven models the features that apps like Telegram launch and simply scale them to a larger audience. These features would be pale, pale. pale reflections of what we built, but this was the way those companies operate, they still operate, what x is trying to do is in line with what we are building, you know, innovation, trying different things, trying to give it power to

creator

s, trying to get the economy of the ecosystem going, those are all exciting things and I think we need more companies like the one I was.

I don't know if it's good for humanity that Y is spending so much time on Twitter to make it better, but it's definitely good for the social media industry when you look at the other guys, the guys that run these other companies, do you know them? Do you ever talk about freedom of speech? I mean, if you're running, you're running towards Mark, no, you don't have to answer, of course, if you don't want to, but if you're running towards Mark Zuckerberg, yes. We met Mark over 10 years ago. He was still running VK and I told them.

I told Mark and his colleagues about our application. platform we launched an application platform I think it was 2009 in VK they were very interested, it was an interesting meeting um they ended up trying to copy not what we did but what I told them we did uh it was funny um I remember he asked if we were planning to start something at the level Lael's global global level, like going for international expansion. I said no and asked him if he was going to try to capture more of my domestic market that I was working in and he said no and we both ended up doing exactly that in about two or three weeks so I'm thinking I shouldn't do business with Mark Zuckerberg uh, no comment, pav J, thank you very much, it's a great conversation, I appreciate it and we support you, thanks for having me, of course, freedom of expression is bigger than any person or organization, societies are defined by what that they won't allow, what we're seeing is the total reversal of virtue, hey, I'm Tucker Carlson, the internet is full of interesting things that don't really matter.

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