Apr 18, 2024, 00:49

Telegram is one of the fastest growing and biggest social messaging apps, text apps, in the world, popular all around the world, including in the United States, but almost nothing or very little seems to be known about the company. It's headquartered in Dubai, where we are now. It is run and owned, and the software is designed, written, by Pavel Durov, who began it some years ago, who almost never does interviews. It turns out he's a very interesting person, extremely interesting person. We learned that the other day while talking to him, and he has agreed to sit down and tell us about himself and his company, and we thought it'd be definitely worth hearing. And with that, Pavel, thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. So I confess I've used Telegram. I didn't know anything about you or the company, and I was just kind of amazed by your story. And if you wouldn't mind just recreating it a little bit for our audience. Where are you from? How did you start this, and why? That'll be a long story. That's okay. I was born in 1984 in the Soviet Union, so it was a fun year to be born. And back then, I could witness the deficiencies of the centralized system we had in the Soviet Union. When I was four years old, my family moved to Italy, where I could compare what I saw in touring Italy with what I experienced in the Soviet Union. And I thought the capitalist system, the free market system, is definitely better, at least for me. I went to school in Italy. I became sort of a part of the European as a result. But then when the Soviet Union collapsed, we decided to move back to Russia. In Italy, though, me and my brother, we had a lot of fun time. He was shown live on Italian TV as a young prodigy kid who could solve cubic equations in real time, being just 10 years old, and that was considered to be impossible back then in Italy. I don't know what a cubic equation is, so, yeah, it sounds difficult. And when I first went to school in Italy, I didn't know how to speak Italian. I didn't know a single Italian word. And a lot of teachers said, like, this guy, well, this kid will not going to be successful in our school. By the end of the first year, I was second best. By the end of next year, I was the best student in our class. So it also showed me that, well, you could excel, you could compete. I liked that competitive environment. And then when we got back to Russia, it was a little bit chaotic. The only reason we got back is my father got an offer to run one of the departments in the St. Petersburg State University. He's one of the famous scholars and writers dealing with ancient Roman literature. And that experience was very different, and I still enjoyed it. Because in Russia, in the 90s, you had these experimental schools where you were taught everything. Like, we had six foreign languages. We had math, like, very specialized. Six foreign languages at once? Six foreign languages in parallel. You would have math similar that you would have in specialized math schools, and chemistry at the same level you would have at schools specialized in chemistry and biology. So that was really intense. My brother, he became a world champion in maths, in the International Olympics in maths and programming. Many times in a row, absolute best. Myself, I was just the best student at my school. Also did some victories in local competitions in several areas. But we both were very passionate about coding and designing stuff. And because we brought this IBM PC XT computer from Italy back in the early 90s, we were one of the few families in Russia who could actually teach ourselves how to program. And we started to do that. I was in the university, I was building websites for my fellow students. And as a result, I started a company that became what they called the Facebook of Russia. We don't like to name it that way, because we actually managed to do a lot of things before Facebook, and that defined how the social media industry developed in the years to come. The company's name was DK. I started it when I was 21 years old. I just graduated university. And it eventually became the largest social network, the most popular social network in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and a bunch of other post-Soviet countries. That was a significant effort on my side, because I, at a certain point, was the sole 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 support requests. Barely slept, but that was a fun time when I was 21, 22 years old. And then the company grew, like I said, to somewhere about 100 million active users, which was a lot back then. It was, I think, 2012 or 2011 when we faced our first issues in Russia. Because you see, I was still a big believer in these values of free market, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. So when the Russian opposition started to use DK to organize large protests in Russia, where like almost half a million people would go and protest on the main square or some of the main squares of the city, we were requested to ban these communities on DK by the government. And I refused. So the government asked you to shut down communications between their opponents. Well, DK is a social networking platform. So they have these large public communities that anybody can join, anybody can read what people are discussing or what the administrators are posting. They can comment, they can share. So it was a tool for these protesters to organize themselves. Back then, it wasn't about us, you know, siding with one side, with one part of the political fight or the other. It was us defending freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly, which we believed was the right thing. But that didn't go too well with the government. And they were not too happy about that, I would say. And in a few years from then, in 2013, we had a similar situation where, you know, you had these protests in Ukraine, where people again would use DK to organize themselves and go to the main square of the city and show their disagreement with the government. And we received a request slash demand from the Russian side saying, you have to give us the private data of the organizers of this protest. And our response was, wait, wait a minute, this is a different country. We won't betray our Ukrainian users because you asked us to do that. We decided to refuse and that didn't go too well with the Russian government as well. So at the end of that year, I had to make a difficult decision because I was offered basically a choice between two suboptimal options, one of which was I would start complying to whatever the leaders of the country told me to do, and the other one was I could sell my stake in the company, retire, resign as the CEO, and leave the country. I chose the latter. If I can just ask you to pause, it's a little strange because I have heard people say that Telegram is a part of the Russian government and you're describing the opposite. You're saying you had to leave the country because you wouldn't bow to their demands. Well, exactly like you're saying, people who have very limited knowledge of where Telegram came from, they would make these claims. They could be encouraged by our competitors who see it as an easy way to discredit us because Telegram is spreading like a forest fire, two and a half million users sign up every day and we're sort of a threat. So I'm not surprised there's this perception because our competitors, they've spent tens of billions on marketing and they're known for using PR firms to also engage in campaigns like that. How much do you spend on marketing? Zero. Zero dollars? In dollars? In dollars. We've never spent anything on acquiring users for marketing purposes. We never promoted Telegram on other social platforms in any way. This is very different from other apps. You could see them being promoted here or there. Telegram is different. All of our growth is purely organic. We got to almost 900 million users without having to spend anything on ads to promote Telegram. Amazing. I'm sorry to interrupt your interview. No worries. No, it's just interesting because I have heard people say that, but it sounds like the opposite of the truth. So you decided to sell the company, resign as CEO and leave your country. Yes, that's what I did. It was a bit painful because obviously my first company was my baby. I created my stuff. There was a lot of creativity, time and effort invested in that platform. But at the same time, I understood that I would rather be free. I wouldn't want to take orders from anyone and I left behind probably a comfortable life. But for me, it was never about becoming rich. For me, everything in my life was about becoming free. And to the extent it is possible, my mission in life was to allow other people to also become free in a sense. And using the platforms that we created or I created, my hope was that they could express their freedoms. This is the mission of Telegram and it was also, in part, the mission of my previous company VK. We wanted to pause this interview just for a minute to point something out. When the Russian government asked Pavel Durov to use his social media company to censor its political opponents, he refused. He said he would rather resign and leave the country where he was born than participate in something like that. Such was his commitment to free speech. Now, you've got to compare that, what he did, what Pavel Durov did, to what Mark Zuckerberg did or Prague Agarwal, the guy who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought it. Both of them have collaborated with governments to censor people and that's shameful. So we believe Pavel when he says that his app, Telegram, will be a bastion of free speech because it has been. And we believe him because he's shown how committed to that he is. So we've decided that we're going to launch, with pride, our own Telegram channel to give one more avenue to reach people with our content free from censorship. So if you're on Telegram, we ask that you would subscribe to our new channel by searching for our username listed below. We're honored to be doing this. We're going to get back to our conversation with Pavel Durov. So you start Telegram after you leave Russia, correct? Yeah, so the idea for Telegram came when we were still based in Russia. Because at some point we had this very stressful situation where armed policemen would come to my house, try to break in, because I refused to take down this position groups that I mentioned earlier. And I realized there is no secure means of communication. I realized I want to tell my brother what's going on to coordinate whatever we want to do. And every tool to communicate I could use was not really secure, not encrypted. It was not safe to use. So I thought it could be a good idea to actually come up with a decently encrypted messaging app. And my brother, being the genius that he is, he was able to create this encryption standard that we're using up until this day with minor changes. So your brother wrote the encryption? Yes. Well, my brother is like two PhDs in maths, super smart, he's an expert in cryptography. He designed the basic principles of Telegram's encryption. I was more on the user interface side, the way how 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. We first went to Berlin. We tried to set up a company in Berlin. We then tried London, Singapore, San Francisco. You name it. We've been everywhere. Why didn't you stay in any of those places? Oh, because the bureaucratic hurdles were just too difficult to overcome. I was bringing the best in-class 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 of the European Union, because you should first run some newspaper ad in a local magazine or whatever, and then for six months, nobody responds from the engineers that are available inside the European Union in Germany, then you're allowed to hire outsiders. 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. No, but if you told them you were illiterate refugees, they would let you stay. So you go from Germany to Singapore to London to San Francisco. What happened in San Francisco? In San Francisco, we really thought that it would be the place for us to be in, because all the tech companies are there or around San Francisco. And there are two things that happened that made us think twice. One thing is pretty obvious. I was in San Francisco. I got attacked on the street after visiting, I think it was Jack Dorsey in Twitter, in the Twitter's office. And I was walking back at 8 p.m. to my hotel, and I got attacked in the street. This is the only country where I got attacked in the street. What happened? Just three big guys tried to grab my phone from my hands. I was tweeting about the fact that I just met the founder of Twitter. That seemed like a right idea for me back then to do. And I got attacked. I didn't want to let them have my phone. They probably didn't expect resistance. So I snatched my phone back. There was a short fight with the guys. There was a little bit of blood involved. But I managed to run away and decided I should probably stay. They probably don't mug a lot of Russians. They might have been surprised. But they were much taller than me, I must admit. And there were three of them. But I think I put up a good fight. Were you surprised that this happened in San Francisco? Completely. It was a shock to me. Because I traveled a lot. That was the first place I got attacked. And I thought, all right, maybe we shouldn't look at San Francisco. Maybe there are other places in America where... Where you don't get attacked? Yeah, exactly. But there's this second part, which was probably more alarming there in the US. We got too much attention from the FBI, the security agencies, wherever we came to the US. So to give you an example, last time I was in the US, I brought an engineer that is working for Telegram. And there was an attempt to secretly hire my engineer behind my back by cybersecurity officers or agents, whatever they are called. The US government should hire your engineer? That's my understanding. That's what he told me. To write code for them or to break into Telegram? They were curious to learn which open source libraries are integrated to the Telegram's app on the client side. And they were trying to persuade him to use certain open source tools that he would then integrate into the Telegram's code that, in my understanding, would serve as backdoors. Would allow the US government to spy on 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 that's a little surprising to hear. Maybe it's not surprising, it's offensive. You're confident that happened? Yes. There is no reason for my engineer to make up the stories. Also because I personally experienced similar pressure in the US. Whenever I would go to the US, I would have two FBI agents greeting me at the airport, asking questions. One time I was having my breakfast at 9 a.m. and the FBI showed up at my house that I was renting. And that was quite surprising. And I thought, you know, we're getting too much attention here. It's probably not the best environment to run... Why would the FBI... Had you committed a crime? No. They were interested to learn more about Telegram. They knew I left Russia. They knew what we were doing, but they wanted details. And my understanding is that they wanted to establish a relationship to, in a way, control Telegram better. I understand that they were doing their job. It's just that for us running a privacy-focused social media platform, that probably wasn't the best environment to be in. We want to be focused on what we do, not on government relations of that sort. Government relations. So then you came to UAE, to Dubai. Yes. Seven years ago, we moved here. We first wanted just to try it for half a year, see if it works out. And it turned out to be a great place. We never looked back. We never wanted to change the UAE for any other place after that. Why? Well, for a number of 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're paying them a good salary, the residence permits are granted automatically. It's very different. If you try to do that in Europe and some other countries, it's very different from them. Second, it's very tax-efficient. Third, the infrastructure is great. You get a lot for the minimum amount of taxes you're paying. The roads, the airports, the hotels, everything. I think you witnessed it yourself. Yes. But I think more importantly is that it's a neutral place. It's a neutral country. It's a small country that wants to be friends with everybody. It's not aligned geopolitically with any of the big superpowers. And I think it's the best place for a neutral platform like ours to be in if we want to make sure we can defend our users' privacy and freedom of speech. So in the time that you've been here, there have been a number of wars and threats of war, precursors to war. Have you had any pressure from the government here, honestly, any pressure from the government here, to reveal a backdoor into Telegram or to ban anyone or to make any changes to your business? Zero. That's the best part. For all the seven years we've been here, there's been zero pressure coming from the EU towards Telegram. They've been very supportive, very helpful, and it's a big contrast from whatever we've experienced before. What about what you've experienced since you moved here in those seven years? Have you come under pressure from other governments under whose jurisdiction you don't fall, but to accommodate their demands? Well, of course. Well, Telegram is a large platform. We are popular in many, many countries, and we've been receiving a lot of requests, demands. Some of them were legitimate. Like if there was a group of people who was promoting violence, there was terrorist activity that was spreading violence in some parts of the world, publicly posting things that any decent human being would disallow or wouldn't want to be posted. We would help them. But in some other cases where we thought it would be crossing the line, it wouldn't be in line with our values of freedom of speech and protecting people's private correspondence, we would ignore those. Can you give us an example of a request that you thought crossed into censorship and spying, violating people's privacy? Well, there's a very funny story related to your home country. After the events of January the 6th, we received a letter from, I believe, a congressman of the Democratic side, and they requested that we would share all the data we had in relation to what they called this uprising. And we checked it with our lawyers, and they said, you better ignore it. But the letter seemed very serious, and the letter said, if you fail to comply with this request, you will be in violation with the U.S. Constitution or something. So they wanted data on people who voted for the other guy in the election? Well, they wanted the data of people who were demonstrating in Washington or wherever they were doing. You're probably right. I'm not an expert in U.S. politics. What's funny about it is two years, sorry, two weeks after that letter, we got another letter, a new letter, from the Republican side of the Congress. And there, we read that if we give out any data according to the previous request, we would be in violation of the U.S. Constitution. So we got two letters that said, whatever we do, we'd be violating the U.S. Constitution in a way. That was my understanding of these letters. From the same legislative body, both from the U.S. Congress? Yes. So how do you respond to that? Well, the same way we respond to most such requests, we decided to ignore them because it's such a complicated matter related to internal politics in the U.S. We don't want to take any... If you, I believe this strongly, if you ignore your problems, most of them do go away. That's very true. It is. No one says it, but it's true. That's amazing. Have you ever had demands that you can't ignore? Well, it depends. Unreasonable demands. So I would say the largest pressure towards Telegram is not coming from governments. It's coming from Apple and Google. So when it comes to freedom of speech, those two platforms, they could basically censor whatever you can read, access on your smartphone. So, I mean, do you run the risk of being thrown out of their stores? Exactly. That's what they make very clear, that if we fail to comply with their guidelines, so they call it, Telegram could be removed from the stores. Well, that would be not a small thing for you, right? Well, it won't be a small thing for us because, obviously, a big chunk of the world's population will lose access to a valuable tool that they're using every day. But, you know, it will not also be a small thing for them. I mean, there should... I believe there must be some compromise in such cases. But Apple and Google are not very compromising when it comes to the guidelines. If they believe some content is against their rules, they will see to it that all the apps that are distributed to their stores comply with these rules. Are any of those rules, or do you interpret any of those rules? Do you believe any of them to be political in nature? Some of them, but it's not the rules, it's the application of the rules. The rules themselves, they're pretty general, right? So there must be no violence, discrimination, publicly available child abuse materials. It's hard to disagree with that. Yes. But then when they start to apply those rules, sometimes we are not agreeing with their interpretation. And we try to get back to Apple or Google, wherever it is, and say, look, we think you got it wrong. We think actually this is the legitimate way of people expressing their opinions. And sometimes they do agree to their credit. Sometimes they disagree, and we still have to take some content down, at least in the version of Telegram that is distributed through their platforms. So there are a bunch of, a number of conflicts going on around the world right now, and that may accelerate. So would you expect that the number of demands and the intensity of those demands, the persistence of those demands would increase as the wars become more intense? Let's see. I'm really hopeful that the past is behind us. I want to be optimistic. I think now we reached a point where politicians and societies know what to expect from social media platforms and where their red lines are. Yes. We also learned much more about the requirements coming from both them and Google slash Apple. So, and our users get better educated as well at what is allowed and what's not allowed. So I don't necessarily believe that things are going to get worse. It does seem like the red line for governments is allowing organized opposition to their rule. That's what you saw in Russia with Navalny and the Ukraine crisis in 2014. That's what you saw from that Democratic member of Congress after January 6th, 2020. Definitely, there's a pattern here. Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day. Yes. So it's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent, but it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that is using Telegram. For us, we apply the rules equally to all sides. We don't become prejudiced in this way. It's not that we are rooting for the opposition or we're rooting for the ruling party. It's not that we don't care, but we think it's important to have this platform that is neutral to all voices because we believe that the competition of different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone. That's in stark contrast to, say, Facebook, which has said in public, you know, we tip the scale in favor of this or that movement in this or that country. All far from the West and far from Western media attention. But they've said that. What do you think of that? Tech companies choosing governments. Well, I think that's one of the reasons why we ended up here in the UAE out of all places. Right. So you don't want to be geopolitically aligned. You don't want to select the 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 apart from being based in the US for doing what they're doing. I think every app and platform plays its own role. And we believe that humanity does need a neutral platform like Telegram that would be respectful to people's privacy and freedoms. Maybe from a political perspective, it seems like the most provocative thing Telegram does is offer something called channels, which seem sort of ready-made for organizing groups of people. Can you explain to viewers who aren't familiar with what a Telegram channel is? Yes. So Telegram channel is a one-to-many broadcast tool that allows people to quickly disseminate any message to millions of people. So there's a channel, people subscribe to it. It's a one-way communication, meaning a channel can be used by, say, a president or a head of state, and everybody else will not be able to send a message to the president, but the president will be able to send a message to all of the people who subscribe to his channel or her channel. So the point here is channels are so easy to use, and they're so deeply integrated in the messaging user interface that they became extremely popular. So you receive it like a text. Exactly. So it's a very familiar form for a lot of people, and since we launched channels eight years ago, I believe a few other apps, popular apps, followed in our footsteps and copied that feature as well. Not nearly as advanced as what we have, but it shows that it's a really high-quality and demanded feature that the world needs. I think it's interesting, and you don't have to answer any of these questions if you don't want to, if it's too personal, but you're the owner, you own it, and it's very unusual, in fact, I've never seen it, to have a large business like this owned by one person. Why didn't you take, and you could have cashed in on private equity money along the way, but you didn't. Why didn't you? Well, that's true. As of now, Tilgrim was 100% owned by myself, which is, like I said, quite unusual. I've never heard of that before. The reason I tried to stay away from venture capital money, at least at the early stages of our development, is because we wanted to be independent. We knew that our mission and our goals were not necessarily consistent with the goals of funds that could be invested into us. Also, for me, it was never about money, so I have a few hundred million dollars in my bank account or in Bitcoin since 10 years ago, and I don't do anything with it. I don't own any real estate, jets, or yachts. I don't think this lifestyle is for me. I like to focus on what we are doing with Tilgrim. You don't own anything? Like, big assets? You don't own an island in Hawaii? 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 things, first, it will tie you down to a physical location. In my view, it's my personal view. I have nothing against people who are buying real estate, but in my personal view, it would be like this for me. And the second reason is I like to stay focused on what we do at Tilgrim. So I know that if I buy a house, I buy a jet, something like that, I would be spending time on trying to make it nice. Yeah. This will require a lot of time and effort. Would you go with leather seats or velvet seats? Exactly. And you're not even going to choose. Yes. For me, I would rather make decisions that would influence how a billion people communicate, rather than choosing the color of seats in the house that only I and my relatives or probably a bunch of my friends will see. Interesting. And you didn't take, because I just want to just have to say the third time, I haven't seen this before. You obviously were famous as a young man, as a company builder and entrepreneur. And so you could have really taken a lot of money and you didn't because you didn't want to be controlled? I just didn't see any reason to do that. You know, I had enough money to get by. Well, to be completely fair, Tilgrim did take outside money. We issued bonds three years ago. So we raised debt. And that was, before that, we had a cryptocurrency project that also raised some funds. So there were instances where we raised outside funding. But when it comes to company equity... Yeah, you 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 that having myself as the sole owner, director and product manager for this extensive period of time in the company's development allowed us to move faster and be more efficient. How could you be the only product manager? Are you still the only product manager in the company? Exactly. I still come up with most of the features. I still work directly with every engineer, every designer who is implementing these features. I'm running this company because I enjoy it. I'm the only product manager because I think this is the way I can contribute. How big is your HR department? Zero. Well, you could say it's me. Because the way we hire engineers... No, you need a big HR department, you don't think? You don't suffer without one? We, in a way, decentralized that. We started a platform where we host contests for engineers. It's actually contest.com. We have this separate platform for that. And we select the best of the best engineers as a result of the competitions that we organize. We hold them every month or two months. So after a series of these competitions, we select the best of the best of the best. And they then maybe can join our team, which is just about 30 engineers. It's a really compact team, super efficient. It's like a Navy SEAL team. And this is how we operate. We don't need HR department to find super talented engineers. Why doesn't everyone do this? I mean, I look at some of these tech companies or Elon Musk famously when he showed up at Twitter. I mean, there were people doing things that he didn't even know they were doing. And they didn't know what they were doing. They were like, there was a world peace department and a foosball department. Why doesn't everybody run their business like you? Well, it's an interesting question. I think it all boils down to the question of independence. I asked this question to the predecessors of Elon. Jack Dorsey. Jack and his predecessor as well. And... What did you say? Dick Costler, I think was his name. And this Jack, he told me that if... I told him, look, we can run this company with 20 people. You don't need so many people. And the response was, I agree with you. But if we start firing so many people, it will make the Wall Street scared. They will think something's very wrong with the company. And we don't want to do that. And that's why we keep all these employees around. So to keep the stock price high, he had to run it inefficiently. I mean, that's what you're saying. If I understood him correctly, that's what... But to his credit, Elon has to take Twitter private before he could do all the... I mean, there's something sort of profound in what you're saying. I mean, the whole point of a publicly traded company, or one of the points, so the public can participate in the ownership of the company, but also so outsiders can assess the operations of the company. And so there's transparencies. We know how the company is run because it's owned by the public. And so it would be, by definition, more efficient, you would think. But you're saying that it's wildly less efficient that you wind up with the foosball department when it's publicly traded. But when it's privately held, you don't. I mean, that's kind of the opposite of what you would think, right? Well, I guess most tech founders would actually agree that running a public company is less efficient than running a private company, because you have to be accountable to much more people. There's a lot of redundancy, bureaucracy involved. So from a purely efficiency standpoint, I would argue, and I think a lot of people would agree with me, that running a public company is suboptimal. However, there are other advantages of getting listed. And of course, that is relevant when you want to acquire other companies. Or cash. Yes, you can have access to cheap capital. You know, there's a lot of things you can do. But you don't want to do any of those things. Well, not presently, definitely. I am 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. We'll probably cross a billion monthly active users within a year from now. I think we're doing great. Why would we lose this momentum right now? Can I just go back to something you said at the outset? You don't have an HR department. You only have 30 engineers working for you. You run the products. You own the company. Such a tight organization. But how do you get new users if you spend zero money for acquisitions? If you're not advertising, if you're not paying to bring people in, how do you do that? How do you get to a billion for free? Because people love our product. What we realized pretty early on is that people are smart. People like to use good things. And they don't like to use inferior. That's why whenever you have a person who started to use Telegram, and they're there for a while, and they start to discover all the features, the speed, the security, the problems, everything that we have, they don't want to go back. And they start inviting their friends, recommending them, you should really check this app out because it's so much better than everything else. Also, because people realize that whatever messaging apps they're using right now, they're like five, six years behind. They're copying what we did six years ago. And that's not a very high quality copy that they make about features. So people love quality. That's why they move. They also love the independence. They also love the privacy. They love the freedom. There are a lot of reasons why somebody would switch to Telegram from other apps. So one of the things we learned when Elon Musk bought Twitter is that the Intel agencies, not just US, but a bunch of 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 the direct messages. You can just imagine, well, you know, because you run one. But the wealth of data flowing through would be of great interest to governments. Does that make you paranoid that you'll be penetrated? I mean, I assume governments would like to know what's going on sort of privately on Telegram. Well, there's definitely a lot of responsibility that we have on our shoulders. And I wouldn't say we are paranoid, but I think it makes sense to stay prudent and not being too accessible, not traveling to weird places. You don't travel to weird places? I hope not. Like, I travel to places where I have confidence that those places are consistent with what we do and our values. I don't go to any of the big geopolitical powers of the countries like China or Russia or even the US. So you 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, if you run something like this, you're a player in world politics. I mean, 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 that is impartial and doesn't take any side. But you're probably right that there's some role we have to play. Well, not taking a side is the one thing you're not allowed to do, right? I mean, aren't you required to take a side in the modern world? I think that's a big problem, because I think that kind of attitude can result in our world becoming 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 to each other in terms of getting to know the positions of the other people, even though they're drastically different from our own positions. And that's how we get to some compromise and move forward. If we're strictly divided and everybody is required to take a side, I think we can't take a side because we are this platform that people should use to collaborate and to find common ground and hopefully to move forward. If we lose that, we can end up in a much more dangerous place. How often do you intersect with the National Security Agency, NSA? And I asked that as someone whose texts were read by them, so I know that they're very active in this world. What's your experience, Ben? Well, I think the NSA is not an agency that works with you directly, right? You're so diplomatic. I love it. The NSA is not an agency that works with you directly. No, that is true. That is true. So my knowledge of my interactions with the NSA is very limited. Yes. I could read something in the newspapers about, you know, my phone being penetrated with pegasus or something like that. No idea whether it's true or not, but this is the only source of information I can have about me personally being of interest to any of the secret agencies. But you've got to think, even though you haven't done an interview in seven years-ish, you know, it's widely known by people who are interested in who you are and your role in this. I mean, you've got to think you're under crazy amounts of surveillance, wouldn't you think? That's probably true. You know, it would sound funny, but I assume by default that the devices I use, I compromise. Because you will still use an iPhone or an Android phone. Now, after experiencing what I experienced in the U.S., I have very limited faith in platforms developed in the U.S. from a security standpoint. Yes, privacy standpoint. Exactly. In a lot of countries, ours, America included, spying is described as, quote, security. You're looking at it from the other perspective. You're assuming that security is privacy and my right not to be spied upon. But big governments describe spying upon you as security. Thank you for this correction. So last question, do you, since you've done this since you were in college and you've been at the center of it, where do you see it going? And by this, I mean the free exchange, the private exchange of information between sovereign individuals, human beings, non-slaves. When I was a child, that was possible. It's increasingly difficult. Are we moving toward a world where there just is 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 extent of privacy. When you say privacy will remain, do you mean that we have absolute privacy now? I don't think that we do. And I think the world is becoming less amenable. Governments becoming less tolerant of privacy. And that's clearly the trend because they have more technological power. But will they win? I guess, will there ever be a way to preserve privacy? You know, is there a place for it? I believe in that. I'm an optimist. I think some new secure hardware communication devices will be created in a similar way that now we have hardware wallets to store your cryptocurrency. Maybe we'll have secure communication devices to send messages or voice calls. It's possible. I do believe that the world develops in cycles. And if things seem to go in one direction today, it doesn't mean that tomorrow they will go the same direction. I also feel that at some point people will get tired of what they experienced today. And they will decide to move to some other direction. So I've seen it after COVID, for example. During COVID, you had a lot of restrictions. Also on social media platforms. Most social media platforms, you were not really allowed to express doubt in relation to lockdowns, vaccines, masks. And at some point, I could feel that the sentiment changed. People started to feel very, very tired and sometimes angry with the fact that they were not allowed to express their opinions. Particularly after the end of the pandemic, a lot of people started to be even more skeptical about the restrictions in their freedoms that they experienced during the pandemic. What was your position as a business owner during COVID? You must have come under pressure to censor opinions on lockdowns, vaccines, masking. How did you respond? So our position is pretty straightforward. We're a neutral platform. We were helping governments to spread their message about the lockdowns and masks and vaccines. We had dozens of governments who we really helped disseminate their information. But we also didn't want to restrict the voices that were critical of all these measures. We thought it made sense for these opposing views to collide and hopefully see some truth come out of those debates. And of course, we got criticized for that. But looking back, I think it was the right strategy. So you allowed people to voice doubts about the so-called science throughout the experience? Exactly. During the pandemic, we, I think, were one of the few or maybe the only major social media platform that didn't take down accounts that were skeptical in relation to some of its measures. So why are you not famous and treated as a hero in the United States? Shouldn't there be a parade in your honor? If you're the only social media platform not to take down what turned out to be true or to some extent true, certainly more true than the CDC guidance, why weren't you Times Man of the Year? Why isn't your face on the nickel? I'm not an expert in the US politics. But to be fair, you have now Twitter or X that seemingly becoming more pro-freedom of speech. And I think it is. It's a great development. And back to our earlier discussion about how all of this is developing in cycles, things are starting to change, it seems. So do you, I mean, but in some ways, Elon buying Twitter sort of ends your monopoly, but you still greet it cheerfully. You're still in favor of it. Definitely. We love the fact that Elon bought Twitter. We thought it was a great development for a number of reasons. First reason is just innovation. You could see X doing, trying a lot of things. Some of them will turn out to be mistakes. Some of them will work, but at least they're trying to innovate. That's something we didn't have outside of Telegram and a few other companies in this industry for the last 10 years. What you saw from the big players, they would rather copy the proven models, the features that apps like Telegram launched and just scale them on a larger audience. These features would be pale reflections of what we built, but this was the way those companies operate and still operate. What X is trying to do is in line with what we are building, innovation, trying different things, trying to give power to the creators, trying to get the ecosystem economy going. Those are all exciting things. I think we need more companies like that. I don't know if it's good for humanity that Elon is spending so much time on Twitter, making it better, but it's definitely good for the social media industry. When you see the guys who run these other companies, do you know them and do you ever talk about Freedom of Speech? I mean, if you're running, you don't have to answer, of course, if you don't want, but like if you're into Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, we met with Mark more than 10 years ago. I was still running BK and I told Mark and his colleagues about our app platform. We launched an app platform, I think it was 2009 at BK. They were very interested. It was an interesting meeting. They ended up trying to copy not what we did, but what I told them we did. It was funny. I remember him asking me whether we were planning to start something on a global basis, on the global level, like go for international expansion. I said no. I asked him whether he was going to try to capture more of my domestic market, where I was working on. He said no. We both ended up doing exactly that in two or three weeks. I'm thinking I shouldn't go into business with Mark Zuckerberg. No comment. Pavel Durov, thank you very much. It was a great conversation. I appreciate it. We're rooting for you. Thank you for having me. Of course. Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organization. Societies are defined by what they will not permit. What we're watching is the total inversion of virtue. Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. The internet is crowded with interesting things that don't really matter. 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