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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 Pavo dorov who began it some years ago who almost never does interviews it turns out he’s in 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 Pao thank you for joining us well thank you for having me so um I confess I 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 a little bit um for our audience where are you from how did you start this and why uh that will be a long story that’s okay uh I was was born in 1984 in the Soviet Union so it was a fun year to be born in and uh back then I could witness you know 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 tourin 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 um and uh I went to school in Italy I uh became sort of a part of the um European as a result but then when the Soviet Union collapsed we decided to move back to Russia uh in Italy though we me and my brother we had a lot of fun time uh he was shown live on Italian TV as a young Prodigy kid who could Sol cubic equations in uh real time uh being just you know 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 definitely and you know when I first went to school in it I didn’t know how to speak Italian I didn’t know a single Italian word and a lot of teachers said this guy well this kid will not going to be successful in our school by the end of the first year was second best by the end of the uh next year I was the best student in our class so it also showed me that well you could Excel you could compete I like that in 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 uh an offer to run one of the departments in the St Petersburg State University he’s one of the uh famous Scholars and writers uh uh dealing with ancient Roman literature and uh that experience was very different and uh I still enjoyed it because in Russia in the ’90s you had this experimental schools where uh 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 specialist math schools and like chemistry at the same level you would have schools specialized in chemistry and biology so that was really intense uh my brother he became world champion in maths in international olympiads in maths and programming many times in a row uh absolute best myself I was just the best student at my school also did uh some victories in local competitions in several areas but we both were very passionate about coding and uh designing stuff and uh we because we brought this IBM uh PC XT computer from Italy back in the early 90s we were one of the few families in Russia who could actually uh teach ourselves how to program and uh we started to do that I was uh in the University I was building website for my fellow students and uh 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 uh we actually managed to do a lot of things before Facebook and that defined how the social media uh industry developed in the years to come the company’s name was VK I started it with I was 21 years old I just graduated University and uh it eventually became the largest social network the most popular social network in Russia Ukraine B Russia Kazakhstan and a bunch of other post Soviet countries uh that was an 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 myself I would uh manage the servers myself it was quite intense I even responded to customer support requests uh barely slapped but that was a fun time when I was 21 22 years old um and then the company grew like I said to somewhere about 100 million active users which was a lot back then it’s uh was I think 201 uh 12 or 2011 when we fa this the our first issues in Russia because you see I was still a big believer in this 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 will would go and protest on the main square or some of the main squares of the city uh we were requ requested to ban these communities on BK by the government and uh I refused so the government asked you to shut down Communications between their opponents well BK is a social networking platform so they have this 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 with one side with one part of the uh political uh 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 with the government and uh they were not too happy about that I would say and uh in a few years from then in 20 13 we had a similar situation where uh you know you had this protests in Ukraine where people again would use VK to organize themselves and go to the main square of the city and uh show their disagreement with the government yes and we received a request SL demand from the Russian side saying you have to give us the private data of the organiz 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 uh 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 a choice between two suboptimal options uh one of which was uh I would start complying to whatever know the leaders of the country told me to do it the other one was I could um sell my stake in the company retire resign as the CEO and leave the country um I chose the letter uh that’s a it’s a if I can just ask you to pause it 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 that 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 is an easy way to discredit us because you know telegram is spreading like forest fire two and a half ion 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 so how do you how much do you spend on marketing zero zero dollars in dollars zero dollars we’ve never spent anything on acquiring users for marketing purposes we never promoted telegram uh you know on other social Platforms in any way uh this is very different from other apps you could see them being promoted here or there t is different all of our growth is purely organic and uh we got to almost 900 million users uh without uh having to spend anything on ads to promote teleg amazing I’m I’m sorry to interrupt your no it’s just it’s just interesting because I have 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 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 uh you know I understood that i’ would rather be free I would want to take orders from anyone and uh I left behind probably a comfortable life uh but for me it was never about you know becoming rich for me everything in my life was about becoming free yes 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 create or I created uh 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 BK we wanted to pause this interview just for a minute to point something out when the Russian government asked pav 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 then participate in something like that such was his commitment to free speech now you got to compare that what he did what pav durov did to what Mark Zuckerberg did or Prague agarwall 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 pavle when he says that his his app telegram will be a Bastion of free speech because it has been we believe him cuz 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 for by searching for a username listed below we’re honored uh to be doing this we’re going to get back to our conversation with Pablo durov so you start telegram after you leave Russia correct yeah so the idea for telegram came with when we were still based in Russia because at some point we had this uh very stressful situation where armed policemen would come to my house try to break in because I refused to take down this uh 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 the every tool to communicate I could use was not really secure not encrypted uh it was not safe to use them so I thought hm it could be a good idea to actually come up with a know a decently crypted messaging app uh 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 IDE your brother wrote the encryption yes well my brother like two phds in maths super smart he could you know he’s he’s an expert in cryptography uh he designed uh 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 he was responsible for it 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 we’ve been everywhere and uh why didn’t you stay in any of those places oh because the bureaucratic hurdles were just uh too difficult to overcome you know I was bringing the best inclass programmers in the world to these places and I was trying to hire them uh 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 the local uh magazine whatever and then for for six months nobody responds from engineers that are available inside the European Union and Germany then you’re allowed kind of 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 refu we were you know very successful people we could have gone anywhere I know but if you told them you were illiterate refugees they would let you stay yeah so you 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 to be in because all the tech companies are there or around San Francisco and uh there were two things that happened that uh made us uh think twice uh well one thing is pretty obvious uh I was in San Francisco I got attacked on the street after visiting uh I think it was Jack dorsy uh in Twitter in the Twitter’s office and uh I was walking back at 8:00 p.m. to my hotel and I got attacked in the street uh this is the only country where I got attacked in the streets what what happened just three big guys tried to grab my phone from my hands I was tweeting uh about the fact that I just met uh the founder of Twitter that seemed right like a right idea for me back then uh to do and uh I got attacked uh I didn’t want to let them have my phone um they probably didn’t expect uh resistance so I snatched my phone back there was a short fight with the guys there was a little bit blood involved but I managed to run away uh and decided I should probably they probably don’t mug a lot of Russians they might have been surprised well there were much taller than me I must admit and there are three of them but uh I think I put up a good fight were you surprised did this happened in San Francisco completely yeah it was it was a shock to me because I I traveled a lot that was the first uh place I I got attacked and I thought all right maybe we shouldn’t uh look at San Francisco maybe there are other places in America where where you don’t get attacked yeah exactly uh but you know there there’s this second part which was probably more alarming there in the US we got too much attention from the 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 cyber security off officers or agents whatever they are called the US government should to 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 you know on the client’s 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 back doors would allow the US government to spy on people who use telegram the US government or maybe any other government because a back door is a back door regardless of who is using it that’s right and and and you’re that’s a little surprising to hear maybe it’s not surprising it’s 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 uh having my breakfast like 9:00 a.m. and uh the FBI showed up my house that I was renting and uh that was quite surprising and I thought you know we’re getting too much attention here uh it’s probably not the best environment to run why would the had you committed a crime no they were interested to learn more about telegram they knew I you know left Russia they 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’m I I understand 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 and we want to be focused on what we do not on uh government relations of that sort the government relations um so then you came to UAE to Dubai yes seven years ago we uh 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 and we never wanted to change thee for any other place after that why well for a number of reasons first the ease of doing business here is uh 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 they granted automatically it’s very different if you try to do that in Europe in some other countries it’s very different from them second it’s very tax efficient uh third uh the infrastructure is great you get a lot for uh the minimum amount of taxes you’re paying the the the the roads the airports the hotels the 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 friend with everybody uh it’s not aligned geopolitically with any of the big superpowers and I think it’s uh 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 um have you had any pressure from the government here honestly any pressure from the government here um to reveal a back door into tegram 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 there’s been zero pressure coming from the eue towards telegram they’ve been very supportive very helpful and it’s a big contrast from you know whatever we’ve experienced before um what about what you’ve experienced since 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 to accommodate their demands well of course well telegram is is a large platform we are popular in many many countries and uh we we’ve uh been uh receiving a lot of requests demands some of them were legit legitimate like if uh there was a group of people who was promoting violence there was some terrorist activity that was uh you know spreading violence in some parts of the world publicly uh posting uh 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 uh you know in line with our values of freedom of speech and and protecting people’s private correspondence we would ignore can can you give us an example of a request that you thought crossed into censorship and and spying violating people’s privacy well there’s a I would say a very funny story related to your home country um after the events of January the 6th uh we received a letter from I I believe uh Congressman of the democratic side um and uh they requested that we would share all the data we had in relation to what they called this you Uprising or um and we checked it with our lawyers and they said you better ignore it but the letter seemed very serious uh and the letter said you know if you’re fail to comply with this request you will be in violation with know the US Constitution or something uh so they wanted data on people who voted for the other guy in the election but they wanted the data of people yeah who were demonstrating in Washington or wherever they were doing uh they Pro you’re probably right they were I’m not an expert in the politics uh What uh what funny about that is two years exactly two 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 US Constitution so we got two letters that said whatever we do would be violating the US Constitution in a way that was my understanding of this letters uh 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 such requests we decided to ignore them because it’s such a complicated matter related to internal politics in the US we don’t want to take any if you I believe this strongly if you ignore your problems most of them do go away it’s very true it is very no it says it but it’s true um that’s amazing have you ever had demands that you can’t ignore well it it depends unreasonable demands so I would say the largest pressure towards telegram is not coming from governments uh it’s coming from Apple and Google huh so when it comes to freedom of speech those two platforms they could basically censor whatever is you can read access on your smartphones 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 the guidelines so they call it uh telr could be removed from the stores well that would be not a small thing for you right well it’s not W be a small thing for us because obviously a big chunk of the world population will lose access to available 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 I believe there there must be find some compromise in such cases but Apple and Google are not very compromising when it comes to the guidelin if they believe some content is against their rules they will see to it that all the apps that are distributed through their uh 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 public uh publicly available I don’t know child abuse materials it’s hard to disagree with that yes uh but then when they start to apply those rules sometimes we are not agreeing with with their interpretations and we try to uh you get back to Apple or Google whoever it is and say look we think you got it wrong we think actually this is 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 it distributed through that 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 is behind us I want to be optimistic um I think now we reached a point where uh politicians and societies know what to expect from social media platforms and where there uh you know the red lines are yes uh we also learned much more about the requirements coming from both them and Google slapple so and our users get better educated as well what what is allowed it was not allowed so I don’t necessarily believe that things are going to get worse it does seem like the red line for for governments is allowing organized opposition to their rule that’s what you saw in Russia with nval and 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 p pattern here telgram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong yes barus Kazakhstan even in Barcelona back in the day yes so it’s it’s it’s been a tool for Theos to a large extent but it doesn’t really matter whether it’s opposition or the ruling party that is using tou for us we apply the rules equally to all sides we don’t uh become prejudiced in this way it’s not that we are rooting for the opposition or We are rooting for the ruling party of it’s not that we don’t care but we think it’s important to uh 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 um in start contrast to say Facebook which has said in public you know we tip the scale in favor of this or that movement and 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 you don’t want to be geopolitically aligned you don’t want to select the winners in any of this uh political fights and that’s why you have to be in a neutral place but I think Facebook in particular has uh a lot of uh reasons apart from being based in the US for doing what they’re doing uh I I think every app and platform plays its own role and we believe that Humanity does need a neutral platform like telegram uh that would be respectful to people’s privacy and freedoms maybe the mo from a political perspective it seems like the most provocative thing telegram does is offer something called channels which seem sort of readymade 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 too many broadcast tool that allows people to uh 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 uh 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 yes or her channel so the point here is uh 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 it’s a very familiar form for a lot of people and since we launched launch channels 8 years ago I believe uh a few other apps popular apps followed in our footsteps and copied that feature as well not nearly as advanced was we have but it shows that it’s a really uh high quality and demanded feature that the world needs I think it’s and you don’t have to answer any of these questions if you don’t want if it’s too personal but um you’re the owner you you own it and it’s very unusual in fact I’ve never seen it um 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 till was 100% owned by myself which is like I said quite uh unusual I’ve never heard of that before the the reason I tried to you know stay away from Ben Capital money at least the early stages of our development is because we wanted to be independent we knew that our mission and our goals not necessarily consistent with the goals of uh funds that could be investing into us and also for me it was never about money right so I have a few hundred million dollars in my bank account or in Bitcoin since 10 years ago and uh I don’t do anything anything with it I don’t own any like real estate Jets or Yachts I don’t think those uh this lifestyle is for me I like to focus on what we are doing uh with Tel you don’t own anything like big assets You Don’t Own no big assets an island in Hawaii or no no no no land no real estate nothing why well because for me my number 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 don’t 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 telegram so I know that if I buy a house I I buy a jet something like that I would be spending time on trying to make it nice and 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 probably bunch of my friends will see interesting and you didn’t take cuz I I just want I just have to say it a third time 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 tgram did takes outside money we issued bonds 3 years ago so we rais debt uh and that was uh and and before that we had a cryptocurrency project that also raised some funds so there were instances where we raised outside uh funding but uh when it comes to company’s 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 my myself as the sole owner director and product manager for this uh extensive period of time and the company’s development allowed us to move faster and be how could you be the only product manager are you still the only product manager in the company exactly I still come up with all most of the features uh I still work directly with every engineer every designer who is implementing these features um you know 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 and because the way we are engineer no 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 engine Engineers it’s actually contest.com we have the separate uh 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 like 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 could join our team which is just about 30 Engineers so it’s it’s really compact the team super efficient it’s like a a Navy sealed team and uh uh this is how we operate we don’t need HR department to find uh super talented Engineers why doesn’t everyone do this 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 what 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 and 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 uh Independence anyway I asked this question to the predecessors of el Jack dorsy Jack and um um and the his predecessor as well and uh what you say dick cost I his name and uh this Jack he told me that uh if I told him look you can run this company with 20 people you don’t need so many people here 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 got to keep all this uh 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 what but to to his to his credit El has to take Twitter private before he could do all theorization 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 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 a 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 uh 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 like efficiency standpoint I would argue and I think a lot of people would agree with me that we a a public company is suboptimal however there are other advantages of of uh getting listed and of course that is relevant when you want to acquire other companies cash right 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 not presently definitely I am enjoying running my company in The Way It Is Well who knows what the future holds but uh as of now I think we are doing a great job with uh with telegram 900 million users will probably cross a billion uh 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 the 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 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 things that’s why whenever you have a person who who started to use Telegram and they’re there for a while and they start to discover all the features all their uh you know the speed the security the pro everything that we have uh they don’t want 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 uh 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 you know very high quality copy that they make of our features so people love quality that’s why they move they also love the independent 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 um were all over the company I mean they were 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 to governments does that make you paranoid that you’ll be penetrated I mean I 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 we I wouldn’t say we are paranoid but I think it makes sense to stay prudent and uh you know not being uh 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 uh confidence that you know those places are uh consistent with what we do in our values I don’t go to any of the big geopolitical powers of the countries like China or Russia or the US so uh you don’t go to the US I try not to I can go but you know it’s uh 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 by Def 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 you know doesn’t take any side but you’re probably right there’s some role we have to play well not taking aside is the one thing you’re not allowed to do right right I mean aren’t you required to take aide in the modern world I think that’s a big problem because I think that kind of um 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 in terms of getting to know the positions of the other people even those they’re drastically different from our own positions and that’s how we get to some compromise and and move forward if we’re strictly divided and everybody is required to take a side and 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 I I know that they’re very active in this world um what’s your experience been well I think the NSA is not uh an agency that works with you directly right I don’t come and C you’re so diplomatic I love it the N is not an agency that works with you directly no that is true that is true 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 I 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 uh you know the secret agencies but you’ve got to think even though you haven’t done an interview in seven years is uh you know you’re it’s it’s widely known by people who are interested who you are in your role in this I mean you’ve got to think you’re under just 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 are compromised yes because you you you will still use an iPhone or an Android phone and uh now After experiencing what I experienced in the US I have very limited faith in platforms developed in the US from a security standpoint yes privacy standpoint exactly yeah because 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 um 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 nonslaved 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 uh 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 government’s becoming less tolerant of privacy it’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 can is there a place for it I believe in that I an optimist I think some new secure Hardware you know communication devices will be created uh in a similar way that now we have uh Hardware wallets to store your cryptocurrency yes maybe we’ll have secure communication devices you know to send messages or do voice calls it’s possible uh I do believe that you know the world develops in cycles and uh if things seem to go in one direction today doesn’t seem doesn’t mean that tomorrow they will go the same direction I also feel that at some point people will get tired of uh what they experienc today and they would decide to you know move to some other direction so it’s I I seen it after covid for example so during Co you had a lot of restrictions also on social media platforms you most social media platforms you were not really allowed to express doubt in relation to lockdowns or vaccines or masks and uh 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 uh the pandemic uh PE a lot of people start 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 uh during covid did you must have come under pressure to censor opinions on lockdowns vaccines masking what 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 accidents we had dozens of governments who we really helped uh you know de simulate 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 this opposing views to collide and hopefully you know see some truth come out of those debates and of course we got critic for that but uh looking back I think it was the right strategy so you allowed people to voice doubts about the so-called science throughout the 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 uh take down accounts that were skeptical uh in relation to some of these measures so why 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 in some to some extent true more certainly more true than the CDC guidance I mean why why why weren’t you times Man of the Year why isn’t your face on the nickel I’m not an expert in us politics but to to be fair you have now uh Twitter or a yeah that uh seemingly becoming more Pro freedom of speech uh and uh I think it is it’s it’s it’s 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 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 we love the fact that uh Elan bought Twitter we thought it was a great development for a number of reasons first reason is just Innovation you could see ax 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 launch and just scale them on a larger audience this features would be a pale will be pale pale reflections of what we built but this was the way those companies operate still operate what x is trying to do is uh in line what we’re building you know Innovation trying different things uh trying to give power to the creators uh trying to get the ecosystem economy going those are all exciting things and uh I think we need more companies like that I was I don’t know if it’s good for Humanity that um like Y is spending so much time on Twitter making it better but it’s definitely good for the social media industry when you see the other the guys who run these other companies like what do you do know them and do you ever talk about freedom of speech I mean if you’re running you’re running to Mark not you don’t have to answer of course if you don’t want but like if you’re running to Mark Zuckerberg yeah I we met with Mark more than 10 years ago I was still running VK and I told them I told Mark and his colleagues about our uh app platform we launched an app platform I think it was 2009 at 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 him asking whether we were planning to uh start something on a global uh basis on the global Lael level like go uh for international expansion I said no and I asked him whether he was going to try to capture more of my domestic Market where I was working on and he said no and we both ended up doing exactly that in like two or three weeks that was so I’m thinking I shouldn’t go into business with Mark Zuckerberg uh no comment pav J that thank you very much it a great conversation I appreciate and 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 on TCN we attempt to bring you interesting things that actually do matter and a lot of them interviews long form and short videos documentaries you can find all of it on tuckercarlson.com and we hope you will
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