Telegram Creator on Elon Musk, Resisting FBI Attacks, and Getting Mugged in California
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The social media app Telegram has over 900 million users around the world. Its founder Pavel Durov sat down with us at his offices in Dubai for a rare interview.
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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 Djarov, 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.
You would have math similar that you would have in specialist math schools and like chemistry at the same level you would have at schools specialized in chemistry and biology.
So that was really intense.
My brother, he became the world champion in maths, in the International Olympiads, 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, you know, I started a company that became what they call 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 VK.
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, Belarusia, 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, freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly.
So when the Russian opposition started to use VK 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 VK by the government.
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 siding with one part of the political fight or the other.
It was us defending the 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 had these protests in Ukraine where people again would use VK 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 these protests.
And our response was, wait, wait a minute, this is a different country.
We won't betray our Ukrainian users because you ask 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.
The other one was I could sell my stake in the company, retire, resign as the CEO, and leave the country.
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 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 spend tens of billions on marketing and they're known for using PR firms to also engage in campaigns like that.
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 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?
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 opposition 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 them.
So I thought, hmm, 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 uh but the idea your brother wrote the encryption yeah Yes.
Well, my brother had like two PhDs in maths, super smart.
He's an expert in cryptography.
He designed the basic principles of the Telegram's encryption.
I was more on the user interface side, the way how the app works, the features, etc.
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 and a local magazine or whatever.
And then for six months, nobody responds from the engineers that are available inside the European Union and Germany.
And I thought, all right, maybe we shouldn't look at San Francisco.
Maybe there are other places in America where you don't get attacked.
Yeah, exactly.
But there's this second part, which was probably more alarming there in the U.S.
We got too much attention from the FBI, the security agencies, wherever we came to the U.S.
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, wherever they are called.
They were curious to learn which open source libraries are integrated to the Telegram's app, you know, 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.
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, 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 are paying.
The roads, the airports, the hotels, everything.
I think you witnessed it yourself.
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?
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?
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 some 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.
Well, 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.
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 DS politics.
What was funny about that is two years, exactly, 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.
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.
Well, it won't be a small thing for us because obviously a big chunk of the world population will lose access to a valid tool that they're using every day.
But it will not also be a small thing for them.
I mean, there should, I believe there must be find some compromise in such cases.
But Apple and Google are not very compromising when it comes to their guidelines.
If they believe some content is against their rules, they will see to it that all the apps that are distributed through their stores comply with these rules.
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?
Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day.
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 are 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.
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 them 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.
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.
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 beyond.
i mean that's what you're saying if i understood him correctly that's what what but to to his to his credit elon has to take twitter private before he could do all the well i mean there's 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.
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 things.
That's why whenever you have a person who's starting to use Telegram and they're there for a while and they start to discover all the features, all their speed, the security, the properties, 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.
And 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 of our 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.
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, 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.
I could read something in the newspapers about, you know, my phone being penetrated with Pegasus or something like that.
I have 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, it's widely known by people who are interested 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?
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 do voice calls.
It's possible.
I do believe that the world develops in cycles.
And if things seem to go in one direction today, 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 experience today and they would 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.
On most social media platforms, you were not really allowed to express doubt in relation to lockdowns, vaccines, or 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.
During the pandemic, I think we're 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 these 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.
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 Axe is trying to do is in line what we are building, you know, innovation, trying different things, trying to give power to the creators, trying to get the ecosystem economy going.
Those are all exciting things.
And 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.