Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482

The following is a conversation

with Pavo Durov, founder and CEO

of Telegram, a messaging platform

actively used by over 1 billion people.

Pavo has spent his life

fighting for freedom of speech,

building tools that protect human communication

from surveillance and censorship.

For this, he has faced pressure

from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on Earth.

In the face of this immense pressure,

he has always held his ground,

continuously fighting to protect us of privacy

and the freedom of all of us humans

to communicate with each other.

I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him and can definitively

say that he is one of the most principled

and fearless humans I've ever met.

Plus, when I posted

that I'm hanging out with Pavle,

a lot of people,

fans of his, wrote to me asking if he does,

in fact, privately live the

disciplined, aesthetic life he's known for.

No alcohol, stoic mindset,

strict diet and exercise,

including a crazy amount of daily pull-ups and push-ups,

no phone except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on.

Yes, he is 100%

that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me.

I'm grateful for it and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend.

This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical

about freedom, life, human nature, and the

nature of government And it is also in parts super technical

because to me it is fascinating

that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team and yet is able to basically

out innovate all of its competitors

with an insane rate

of introducing new unique features.

Just like the meme of the Simpsons

did it first when you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps.

In almost every case did it first.

So, we discuss it all from the Kuffka-esque

situation he's in the midst of in France

to the roller coaster of his life and career

to his philosophy on

technology, freedom, and the human

And by the way, while this entire conversation

is in English, we make captions

and voice over audio tracks available

in multiple languages, including

Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi.

On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear

icon, then clicking audio track,

and then selecting the language you prefer.

Huge thank you once again to 11 Labs

for their help with

translation and dubbing and with the bigger mission of breaking down barriers that language creates.

They are truly one of the most remarkable

companies I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

This is the Lex Freedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Pavo Durov.

You've been an advocate for freedom for many years,

writing that you should be ready to risk everything for freedom.

What were some influences

and insights that help you arrive

at this value of human freedom?

I get to experience the difference between

a society with freedom and a society without freedom pretty early in life.

I was four years old when

my family moved from the Soviet Union to

northern Italy and I could see

that a society without freedom

cannot enjoy the abundance

of opinions of ideas

of goods and services.

Even for a four or five year old kid, it was obvious

like you can't experience

all the toys, the ice cream of sorts,

the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you can access in Italy.

And then I got to realize something even more important.

You don't get to contribute

to this abundance without freedom.

And at this point,

it was pretty obvious to me.

>> You also wrote translates to freedom matters more than money.

How do you prevent

these values for freedom?

Being corrupted by money,

by people with influence,

by people with power.

Well, the biggest enemies

of freedom are fear and greed.

So, you make sure that

they don't stand in your way.

If you imagine the worst thing that can

happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it,

there's nothing more left to be afraid of.

So you stand your ground

and you remember that

it's worth living your life according to

the principles that you believe in.

Even though this life can end up

being than a longer life but lived in slavery.

>> Do you contemplate your mortality?

You think about your death. >> Oh yes.

>> Are you afraid of it?

>> In a way you have to go against your instinct of self-preservation.

And it's not easy.

We are all biological

beings hardcoded to be afraid of death.

Nobody wants to die.

But when you approach it rationally,

you live and then you die.

There's no such thing as

your death in your life.

You stop experiencing life once you die.

So you have to ask yourself this question.

Is it worth living a life

full of fear of death?

Or it's much more enjoyable

to forget about this

and live your life

in a way that

makes you immune to this fear.

At the same time,

remembering that death exists

so that every day would count. >> Yeah.

Remembering that death exists

makes you deeply feel

every moment that you do get.

>> That's why I love reminding myself that I can die any day.

>> In many ways, uh, you live a pretty stoic existence.

I got a chance to spend

a couple of weeks with you.

In many ways, you seek to minimize

the negative effects of the outside world on your

You've uh written, quote, "If you want to reach your full potential and maintain

clarity of mind, stay away from addictive substances.

My success and health

are the result of 20 plus years of complete abstinence

from alcohol, tobacco, coffee,

pills, and illegal drugs.

Short-term pleasure isn't worth your future.

Let's talk about each one of these.

Alcohol, what's um been your philosophy behind that?

>> That one is quite easy.

When I was 11 years old,

my biochemistry teacher, he gave me this book he wrote.

It was called the illusion of paradise.

And there he would

describe the biological and chemical processes

that happen in your body

once you consume this or that substance.

It was mainly related

to illegal drugs, but alcohol was one of this addictive substances that he covered.

So it turns out that when you drink alcohol,

the thing that happens

is that your brain cells become paralyzed.

They become literally zombies.

And then next day,

sometime after the party is over,

some of your brain cells die

and never get to normal.

So think about this.

If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to

success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.

Yeah, in many ways it's a poison we let in our body.

But by way of advice, what what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking?

You know, a lot of people use

to uh enable them

to have a vibrant social life.

there's a lot of pressure from society,

you know, at a party

to drink so you can socialize.

So, what advice would you give to them,

uh, to people who

imagine having a social life without alcohol?

Well, first of all, don't be afraid to be contrarian.

Set your own rules.

Secondly, if you feel you need to drink,

there must be some problem you're trying to conceal.

there's something that some fear you're not

ready to uh confront

and you have to address this fear.

If there is a good-looking

girl you're afraid to approach,

get rid of this fear, approach her,

practice, do it again and again.

It's pretty benile, but this advice works.

>> Fix the underlying problem,

which is usually at the very bottom is always going to be fear. Work on that.

And very often people are trying to escape something in their lives with alcohol.

What is it they're trying to escape?

What is this problem?

You have to get to the bottom of it.

Your mind is trying to tell you something valuable.

And instead of addressing

it directly, you are flooding it in alcohol

which is sort of a spiritual

painkiller but works only temporarily

and then you have to pay the debt with interest.

So what do you do?

I mean you've been a lot of gatherings,

a lot of parties.

Is there some challenges to saying no?

>> For me, not at all.

I've been always ready to stand my ground and say

no when I feel

something is not right.

And it's extraordinary how easily

we humans are affected

by what we perceive as majority

because nobody since ancient times

since million years ago

wants to be left out by the tribe.

We are scared that

we won't become accepted anymore,

which thousands of millions years ago meant we're

going to starve to death.

So we have to consciously

fight this inclination to be agreeable

with everything that the majority

imposes on you because it's quite clear

that many things that the majority

many activities the majority

is engaging in are not bringing you any good.

So that's another fear you have to face going to a party and

the fear of being the outcast at that party of being different

than others at that party at that social gathering

in the crowd of humans be different. That's a fear.

That's a fear and it's quite irrational

if you think about it.

It was something that

made a lot of sense 20,000 years ago.

It makes zero sense today

because if you think about it, if you

do the same thing everybody else arounds you is doing, you don't have any

competitive advantage and you don't get to become outstanding

at some point in your life.

Yeah, that's one of the

things we talked about

sort of by way of advice

is if you want to be successful in life, you want to be >> differently.

And perhaps I think you said uh you want to achieve

mastery at a niche.

So find a niche at which you can pursue

with all your effort and achieve mastery

and the niche being different

than anything that anybody else is doing.

Can you explain that a little bit more?

So obviously in order to contribute to

the society you're in,

to the economy of the country you live in,

you have to do something that is valuable.

But if you're doing something that everybody else is doing

what's the value of it?

Now it sounds easier

than it is done

to do something that nobody else is doing

because we humans are surrounded by all kinds of information

which makes us want to copy

what we are perceiving.

At the same time there are so many areas which you can explore

that have nothing to do with uh the information you receive on the daily basis.

So it's extremely important

to curate the information sources that you

So that you wouldn't be somebody who is

to the will of

AI based algorithmic feed

telling you what's important

so that you end up consuming the same information,

the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else.

But rather you should be proactive.

You should deliberately try to set

a goal, an area that you want to explore

and then actively search information

that is relevant to this field

so that one day

you can become the world's

number one expert in this field.

And it's not quite it's not that difficult to do that.

You have to just remain consistent

because nobody else is trying to do that.

Everybody else is just reading the same news

and discussing the same news every day.

But this way they don't get to have a competitive advantage. >> Yeah.

Uh majority of the population become slaves to the AI recommener

systems, AIdriven recommener systems.

And so the content everybody's fed is the same thing and we all become the same.

On that point, one of the different things you do is you don't use

a phone except occasionally to test Telegram features.

But I've been with you for two weeks.

I haven't seen you use a phone

at all in the way that most people use a phone like for their social media.

So, can you describe your philosophy behind that?

I don't think a phone is a necessary device.

I remember growing up I didn't have a mobile phone.

When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone.

When I finally got it

to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls.

I was always in

airplane mode or mute.

I hated the idea of being disturbed.

My philosophy here is pretty simple.

I want to define

is important in my life.

I don't want other people

or companies, all kinds of organizations

telling me what is important today

um and what uh I should be thinking about.

Just set up your own agenda

and the phone gets in your way. It provides distractions.

It guides what you should be looking at, what you will be looking at.

So you don't want that.

You want to quiet the mind.

You want to choose

what kind of stuff you let inside your >> Yes.

Because this way I can contribute

to the progress of society.

Or at least I like to think this way.

And this makes me happier.

How often do you find quiet time to just think and focus deeply on

work without any distractions?

You mentioned to me that you value quiet Yes.

So the thing I'm trying to do, I try to allocate as much time

as possible for sleep.

Now even if I allocate

say 11 or 12 hours for sleep, I won't sleep for

11 or 12 hours.

So what I end up doing

is I end up

lying in bed thinking

and some people hate it.

They say you have to take a sleeping pill but I never take

I love this moments.

I get so many

brilliant ideas or at least they seem brilliant to me at the moment

while I'm lying in bed either

late in the evening or early in the morning.

That's my favorite time of the day.

Sometimes I go I wake up, I go take a shower,

still without a phone.

Beautiful ideas can come to you while you're

doing your morning exercise,

your morning routine without a phone.

If you open your phone first thing in the morning,

what you end up being

is a creature that is told

what to think about

for the rest of the day.

Same is true in a way if

you've been consuming news from social media late at night.

But then how do you define

what is important and what

you really want to become in life?

Now I'm not saying you have to completely

stay away from all sources of information

but take some time to think about what's really important for you and what

you want to change in this world.

So, you definitely try to avoid digital devices for as many hours as possible

in the morning just to have the quiet thinking time

plus the crazy amounts of push-ups.

>> I know it's kind of kind counterintuitive

because I founded one of the largest social

networks in the world after which I founded the second largest messaging app in the world.

And you're supposed to be really connected.

But the conclusion you reach very early is that

the more connected and accessible you are,

the less productive you are.

And then how can you run this thing

if if you're constantly bombarded

by all kinds of

information, most of which is irrelevant

to the success of what you're trying to build.

You know, the entire world can be

fascinated by a a fight, a quarrel between the world's

richest man and the world's most powerful man.

But for the vast majority of these people following

this saga, it's irrelevant.

It won't change their lives.

And in any case, they can't affect it.

So, it's a bit pointless.

Of course, there are people who are

engaging activities that require them to be up to date of of everything that's going on.

But 99% of people aren't. Yeah.

The internet, social media

presents to us in such a way that we think it's the biggest thing

in the world, the most important thing on which the tides of history will turn.

But in reality, most things will not

turn the tides of history.

And so I guess our challenge is to figure out what is the timeless thing.

What is the thing that's happening today that's still going to be true in 10, 20 years?

And from that decide what you're going to do.

And that's very difficult on social media cuz everybody's outraged.

The news of the day, whatever the quarrel is,

that's the thing that's

uh everyone thinks the world will end because of this thing.

And then another thing happens the next day.

>> And they're trying to

influence your >> And that's how you get into trouble

because you can be forced

to make that are not in your best interest.

I've seen you be once again

quite stoic about your emotions.

You ever get angry?

You ever get lonely?

You ever get sad?

The roller coaster of human emotion.

And what do you do with that?

When you make difficult decisions.

I'm a human being like everybody else.

I do get to experience emotions

and some of them are not very pleasant.

But I believe that

it's the responsibility of every one of

to cope with this emotions

and to learn to work through them.

Self-discipline is particularly important because without it,

how can you overcome

seemingly endless loop of

negativity or that ultimately leads to depression for some people?

I normally never have depression.

I don't remember having depression

in the last 20 years at least,

maybe when I was a teenager.

But one of the reasons for that is

I start doing things.

I identify the problem.

I can see a solution

and I start executing the strategy.

If you are stuck in this

loop of being worried about something,

nothing's ever going to change.

And people often make this mistake

thinking, "Oh, I should just

have some rest and then regain energy."

This is not how it works.

You gain energy by doing something.

So you start doing something, then it happens.

You feel motivated, you feel inspired,

and then ultimately you do something else, a little bit more, a little bit more.

And in a few years, who know, you may end up achieving great things.

Yeah, that's the thing that people really confuse.

If if you're stuck

in in a depressive

cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don't want to do anything,

just do something, try try to make progress

because the good feeling comes in the end of that.

The whole point is to do first and then feel,

not feel and then do. >> Exactly.

And going to the gym is a good

There are many days when you don't want to start working out.

But they have you have to overcome

this initial reluctance and then

you get to a point that you

enjoy it and you think, "Oh my god, it was such a good idea

to come to the gym today."

But it's similar to pretty much every activity.

You get to write some code.

Write a small piece of code first

and then you get inspired.

then you'll come up with more ideas.

You need to write a novel

or just write a paragraph.

This is pretty obvious

and it's not a secret.

But because we are bombarded

with all kinds of information

that is not really important for

us in terms of becoming successful,

we often forget the important things.

And this is one of them.

>> We've been working out every single day.

you have been working out for many years pretty intensively.

So I think a lot of people would love to um

know what's your perfect daily workout regimen.

Let's say on a daily on a weekly basis.

>> I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning.

And in addition to that, I go to the gym

normally five six times a

spending between one or two hours every day.

So, push-ups and squats are still a big part of your routine.

>> Yes, this is how I start my day.

I'm not sure they do a lot in terms of

changing your body, but

they're definitely a good way to

practice self-discipline because you don't want to do this push-ups in the morning most of the days.

Squats are particularly boring.

They're not that hard.

They're just But you overcome it

and then it's much easier to

start doing other things

related to your work.

For example, when I can, I also take a nice bath

because it's another exercise of self-discipline.

I think the main muscle you can exercise is is this muscle, the muscle

of self-discipline, you know, not not your biceps

or or or your pecs or anything else.

Because if you get to

train that one, everything else

just comes by itself. >> Yeah.

Everything else becomes easy.

We should mention I went with you

uh to BA and

um I think it's fair to say you're

in terms of how much you can handle.

Um and I didn't even see the worst of it.

Can you can you just speak to the the

your crazy escapes in the Bay?

What value you get from it?

So both the heat and the cold,

>> I I don't know if it's crazy.

I think it's quite

natural and normal by this

>> But maybe I could just got used to it.

>> So ba is this

uh extreme kind of

sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans.

But it is done

in a way that maximizes

heat and they also use all kind of herbs and branches

it's a much more holistic and natural

Then a necessary part of it is

you get the cold plunge

and then you go back.

And again, this is one of the things that

maybe in the moment

is not always that pleasant,

particularly if you go to extreme

You don't feel great.

I don't always feel great.

But this feeling is passing.

It's only a few minutes.

Same with the ice bath.

you have to suffer a bit

and then you get to feel great

for hours and days after.

What's more, it gives you this long-term health benefits.

In a way, you can

look at it as alcohol in reverse.

Alcohol will give you this short

fleeting pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours,

but then you will be paying

for it with long-term negative consequences.

I'd rather do banana in icebath.

>> We uh swam the length of a large lake in France a couple times.

Can you u talk through why you value these multi-our

>> I left swimming for hours.

The longest I swam was

5 and 1/2 hours in Finland. Was quite cold.

I got lost in the process.

Barely could find my way back.

the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after

you're shaking a little bit.

You feel great after

you cross a huge lake and I cross many lakes.

Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake,

and every time you feel this

achievement, makes you happy,

makes you feel strong,

and then you're more ready to other

And of course, when you know you're going you're going to

start a journey that will last a few hours,

you're reluctant to do it.

But you swim for 10 minutes and then for 20 minutes and then for

30 minutes and it teaches you this incredible

that I think is necessary

if you want to achieve anything in life

and it's pretty meditative lake versus ocean. >> Yes.

And you don't have to go too fast.

>> You can be slow and enjoy the moment

>> until you get lost and it's 5 and 1/2 hours.

Did you panic like if you're going to be able to find the shore,

find your way out? Not really.

I'm a reasonably stress resilient person.

I didn't panic at that moment.

And there were worse

swims I had that were shorter but

involved accidents and you know about some of them.

So that wasn't the worst by far.

But an important thing about swimming

and physical activity in general

is that it makes your mind clear

and your thinking process

is becoming more efficient.

Because at the end of the day, the efficiency

of our brain is limited by

how much sugar and oxygen

our heart can push through blood to our brain.

So how can you make this go faster

or how to do you make your lungs more efficient?

How do you make

your heart more efficient in doing that?

The physical activity is the only way I know of.

So, it's not just

staying healthy or trying to look good. It's also productive.

It's also being stress

All of these qualities

are necessary if you want to run a large company, if you want to start a company.

I'm surprised when I started

doing this more than 10 years ago

that more CEOs didn't engage in sports.

The situation changed in the last several years, which is great

because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago, there was this

stereotype that if you're strong,

you must be not very smart and vice versa,

which is a complete lumacy.

Very often these two things go together.

>> So for you working out it's not just about staying healthy.

It's actually valuable for the work that you do

as a tech leader, as a engineer,

as a >> Oh yes.

When I can't train,

I can instantly feel

that stress is creeping on me. >> Yeah.

So even in situations where I'm constrained, I can't go to the gym.

I would just keep doing push-ups.

I keep I just keep doing squats. >> Yeah.

I mean, that's the cool thing about body weight exercises.

You can just do it anywhere.

You can just pop off 50, 100 push-ups before a meeting.

>> I don't you feel weird

when you have a day without physical activity? >> Yeah.

If I go a day without doing

push-ups at the very minimum,

that's a shitty day.

>> And if you can do pull-ups, it's even >> Yeah.

I got to ask you about your diet, too.

No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda,

intermittent fasting, sometimes once a day only.

Sometimes a couple times a day.

Uh, so take me through your philosophy on the no sugar, no

no soda, just clean food.

>> Well, sugar is pretty easy

because it's The more you consume sugar, the more you want it.

The hungrier you get.

>> So if you want to stay efficient and

why consume processed sugar?

You'll just end up snacking all the time. intermittent fasting.

So say eating only within

six hours and not eating

for 18 hours every day

also brings structure into your day

and into your eating um habits.

So you don't crave sugar anymore

because you know if you eat sugar and then

you're unable to you're just punishing yourself.

I read a few books on longevity.

I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is uh harmful.

No, I'm not militant about sugar.

Like you can eat

berries, fruit if you feel your body needs it,

but it's not true to think

it's necessary to consume sweet things.

Not for children, not for adults.

Red meat, I stopped eating it

about 20 years ago because I just felt heavy

every time I had it.

So, I guess it's individual. It's my metabolism.

My digestive system uh agreeing with with with

this kind of food.

So, I normally eat seafood

of all kinds and vegetables.

This is the basic source of calories for me. >> Yeah.

And like all things

uh you said short-term

pleasure isn't worth your future.

So a lot of things we all know that alcohol is destructive to the body.

Tobacco, pills, processed food,

sugar, but society puts that on you.

Makes it very difficult to avoid.

So I I guess it all boils down to just discipline. >> Yes.

and trying to identify

the real cause of an issue you're

If you experiencing a headache,

one solution would be to

take a pill and then the headache disappears.

What this pill would actually do in most cases,

it would the consequence,

your feeling of pain. It's a painkiller.

it will not eliminate the root cause.

So you have to ask yourself

what is it that is causing this headache.

Uh do I need to drink some water?

Is the air quality here bad?

Do I need to start getting more sleep?

Is there something wrong with people around me?

They're stressing me out.

There must be some reason why you're experiencing a headache.

But if you take a pill,

you're not removing this reason.

you're actually making it worse

because this harmful factor is still there.

It's like you're piloting

a helicopter and there is some

red signals and red lamp starts to blink and

and it starts producing bad unpleasant noise.

What would you do?

You would try to figure out the cause and eliminate it.

Maybe there is some

mountain next to you and you have to avoid it

or you take a hammer and smash the signal.

I think the answer is quite obvious.

So why are we constantly doing this regardless?

Oh, because everybody else is doing it

because there's a whole industry

trying to persuade you that this is the right thing to do.

So, it's incredibly important

to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.

So, you generally try to avoid all pills, all pharmaceutical products.

Yes, I've been staying away from all of that

since I became an adult.

When you're a teenager,

your mom would typically say, "We need to take this pill, otherwise

you know, the world collapses." Um, yeah.

Yeah, >> once I became a grown-up,

I said, "No, I

don't think that the producers of pill

are incentivized in the right way.

They are not really

interested in eliminating the root of the problem.

They would rather have me

dependent on the pills they're producing

um so that I could buy them forever."

And then I also realized, no, I'm not saying that you should never take pills.

There obviously is some

diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example.

So I'm not suggesting we go back to the middle ages.

Uh but what I'm saying is we overuse pills.

Yeah, it's always good to uh study and deeply understand the incentives under which

the world operates so that you don't get swept up into the forces that

operate under these incentives

and big pharma is certainly one of them.

Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive

to keep the problem going versus solving the problem. It's wise.

Well, this is something

I practice every day.

I read some piece of news

and I ask myself

who benefits from me reading this.

Then you can end up coming to this conclusion

that maybe 95% of

things we read in the news

have been written and published

because somebody wanted you to

buy some product, support some political cause,

fight some war, donate some money.

Let's do something that would benefit other people.

And this is not

a problem to support causes that you truly believe in

as long as it was your

intentional choice and you're not being manipulated

into fighting other people's wars.

And that takes us back to the original thing we started talking about which is freedom.

One of the ways to achieve

freedom of thought is to remove

your mind from uh the influences,

the forces that manipulate you.

That's really important to realize.

the the content you consume,

especially on the internet,

when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind, you have

to disconnect yourself and be very proactive

understanding what the biases,

what the incentives are

so you can think clearly, independently and objectively.

And again, it ties back with

uh restraint from alcohol. Yeah.

Because if your mind is clouded,

how can you analyze yourself?

You'll always be def dependent

on opinions of You will always follow the mainstream.

And with then whatever the authorities

or whoever in charge

will tell you, you believe it

because you don't have a tool

of your own to rely on

to come to your own conclusions.

I have to ask you this.

This is something that came up.

You don't watch porn.

I don't think I've heard you talk about this before.

What's the philosophy behind not watching porn?

You know, there's a lot of people that talk about

uh porn in general having a very negative effect on young men

on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality,

and how they uh get into relationships and all that kind of stuff.

So, what's your philosophy in not consuming porn?

I don't watch porn because I just

feel it's a surrogate, a substitute

for a real thing

that is not necessary in my life.

If it just forces

you to exchange some

some inspiration to a fleeting moment of pleasure. Doesn't make sense.

And in any case,

as I said, it's not the real thing.

So, as long as you

can u access the real thing,

you don't need to watch

But then if you can't access the real thing, it's

you shouldn't watch porn

as well because it means there's

some deficiency in your life,

some problem that you have to overcome. >> Yeah.

Analyze the underlying cause.

Uh and again this goes back to the theme of investing in uh long-term

flourishing versus uh short-term pleasure.

There's this there's a theme to the way you approach life.

I try to be strategic.

I try to act under assumption that I'm not going

to die in 1 hour from now

and I'm going to stick around for a bit

despite the fact that we are all mortal.

So, why would I

exchange the mid and longterm

for the short term?

Doesn't make any sense. Quick pause. Bathroom break.

Yeah, let's take a break.

All right, we took a

break and now we're back.

I got to ask you about Telegram, the company.

I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers that work there. Telegram runs lean.

Relative to other technology

companies that achieve the scale that Telegram does, it has very few employees.

So how many people are on the core team?

Let's say the core engineering team.

>> The core engineering team is

about 40 This includes

back end, front end, system administrators.

>> Can you speak to the philosophy behind

uh running a company

with so few employees?

Well, what we realized

really early is quantity of employees doesn't translate to quality of the product they produce.

In many cases is the opposite.

If you have too many people, they have to coordinate

their efforts, constantly communicate,

and 90% of their time will be spent on

coordinating the small pieces

of work they're responsible for between each other.

The other problem with having too many employees is that

some of them won't get enough work to do.

And if they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate

everybody else by their mere existence. They're still there.

They're still getting the salary,

but they don't do anything.

And if they don't do anything, more often than not, they will start

trying to find their purpose elsewhere.

Maybe inside your team,

but not by doing productive

work, but by finding problems

that don't exist within the team.

And that can disrupt

the team and the mood inside it even further.

Also, when you intentionally

don't allow some of your team members

to hire more people to help them,

they will be forced to automate things.

In our case, you know, we

have tens of thousands of servers

around the world, almost 100,000

distributed across several continents and data centers.

If you try to

manage this system without automation,

you will probably end up hiring

thousands of people, tens of thousands of people.

But if you rely on algorithms

and the team is forced to

put together algorithms in order to manage it,

then it becomes much more scalable

and much more efficient

and interestingly much more reliable as well

>> and more resilient to the changing geopolitics,

to the changing technology, all of that.

Cuz if you automate

the distributed aspect of the data storage

and all the compute,

then that's going to be resilient to everything the world throws at you.

I suppose if you have people managing

all of it, it becomes stale quickly.

Yes, humans are attack vectors

and if you have a distributed

system that runs itself

automatically, you have a chance

at increasing the security of speed and speed of your service.

This is what we've did with

while also making it

much more reliable because if some part of the network

goes down, you can

still switch to the other parts of it. >> Yeah.

One of the big

um ways you protect your privacy

is that you store the data.

The infrastructure side of Telegram

is distributed across um

many legal jurisdictions with the decryption keys.

So it's encrypted in the cloud.

The decryption keys are split and kept in different locations

so that uh no single government or entity can uh

uh access the data.

Can you explain the strength of this approach?

The way we designed Telegram

is we never wanted to have any humans,

any employees have any access

to private messaging data.

That's why since 2012

when we've been trying to come up with this design,

we always invested a lot of effort

into making sure that nobody

can mess with it.

Like if you hire an employee

or any of the existing employee,

they can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users.

And then of course we launched

and an encrypted messaging that

is even more protected

but it's has certain limitations.

So you still have to rely on encrypted cloud.

So an interesting engineering

challenge was how you make sure that

no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.

>> So no employee can even access user messages.

So that's the thing you know we talk about encryption, we talk about privacy,

we talk about security, all these kinds of things.

I think the number one thing that people

are concerned about about which there's also misinformation

is about private So

Telegram is very very protective

of the private messages of users.

So you're saying employees

never can access the private messages.

Have any governments or intelligence

agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past? No. Never.

Telegram has never shared a single private message

with anyone including governments and intelligence services.

If you try to access

any server in any of the data center locations,

it's all You can extract all the hard drives

and analyze it, but you won't get anything.

It's all encrypted in the way that is

That was very important for us.

That's why we can say with confidence

there hasn't been a leakage

of data any leak of data from telegram

not in terms of private messages

not in terms of say contact lists.

Uh do you see in the future

a possible scenario where

uh you might share

uh user private messages

with governments or with intelligence agencies?

No, we design a system in a way that's

It would require us to change the system

and we won't do that because we made a promise to our users.

We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.

>> So that's like one of the

principles you operate under is you're going to protect user privacy.

>> I think it's fundamental.

Without the right to privacy,

people can't feel fully free and protected.

>> I mean, this is a good good place to to ask.

I'm sure you're pressured by all kinds of people, all kinds of organizations

to share private data.

What uh where do you find the strength

and the fearlessness to say no to everybody,

including powerful intelligence agencies,

including powerful governments, influential, powerful people?

I guess part of it is

just me being me.

I stood up for myself and for my values since I was a little kid.

I was had issues with my teachers

because I would point out their mistakes during classes.

And at the end of the day,

what's important is to remind yourself

that you have nothing to lose.

Like they can think they they blackmail you with something.

They can threaten you with something, but what is it

they really can can really do to you?

Like worst case, they can kill you.

But that brings us back to the

first part of our

There's no point living your life in

As for Telegram, it's incredibly

successful, but if we lose

one market or two markets

or pretty much all of the markets,

I don't care that much.

It won't affect me.

It won't affect my lifestyle in any way.

I will still be doing my push-ups, you know.

>> you don't like encryption,

you don't like privacy,

you think you should ban encryption in your country

like the European Union is trying to do now

for all the member states.

Well, go ahead and do that.

We'll just quit this market.

We won't operate there.

It's not that important.

They all think that

somehow we profit from

their citizens and the only goal

tech companies have is extracting revenues. And it's true.

Most tech companies are like this.

But there are projects like Telegram

which are a bit different

and I'm not sure they realize that.

So for you the value of maintaining

your um in relation to your principles is more important than than anything else.

And of course we should say that you also have

full ability and control to do just that because you

Po Durov own 100% of Telegram.

So there's no other

anybody with a say on this question.

>> There are no shareholders

which is quite unique. >> Very unique.

I don't think there's anything even close to that in any major tech company.

>> And this allows us to operate the way we

to build this project

and maintain it based on certain

fundamental principles which by the way I think everybody believes in.

I think the right to privacy

is included in the constitution

of most countries, at least most western countries.

But it's still under attack

almost every week and it often

starts with well-meaning proposals.

Oh, we have to fight crime.

We have to do that.

We have to protect the children.

But at the end of the day,

the result is the same.

People lose their right to such fundamental thing as privacy.

They sometimes lose their right to express themselves, to assemble.

And this is a slippery slope that we witnessed in pretty much every

autocratic country or country that used to be free and then became author

No dictator in the world

ever said, "Let's just

strip you away from your rights

because I want more power to myself

and I want you to be miserable."

They all justified it

with very reasonable sounding

justifications and then it came

in stages gradually and

after a few years people would find themselves

in a position when they're helpless. They can't protest.

Every message they send is monitored. They can't assemble. It's over.

So you see telegram is a place that

people from all walks of life

from every nation can have a place

to speak their mind to have a voice

in the context in the geopolitical

context you're mentioning that

governments when they become autocratic

naturally is the way of the world human nature and the nature of governments

they become more sensorious

they begin to censor

and always justifying it

in their minds perhaps assuming that they're doing good.

Perhaps some of them assume they doing good,

but it always results

in the state accumulating

more power at the expense of the individual.

And then where does it stop?

You know, we humans are not very good at

finding the right balance

and in this case the right balance between

chaos and between freedom and structure.

We tend to go to extremes.

I think you still consider yourself a

There is something about government that

over time naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy

and in that machine of bureaucracy

it accumulates more and more power

and it's not always that some one individual

member of that bureaucracy

is the one that corrupts the initial principles on which the government was founded.

It's just something over time you forget.

You begin to censor,

you begin to limit

uh the the freedoms of the individual,

the ability of the individuals

to speak, to have a voice, to vote.

It just gradually happens that way.

And the government is not some abstract notion.

The government consists of people.

And these people have goals.

they would naturally be inclined

to increase their level of influence

to have more subordinates

to have more and that's how you end up in

an endless loop of

you everinccreasing taxes everinccreasing

regulation which ultimately just suffocates

free market, free enterprise and free speech.

So you do want to have

very very strict limitations

on the extent the government can increase

its powers at the expense of citizens.

Ironically, you don't have those limitations.

You're supposed in in all countries

of which are considered to be free.

It's supposed to be the constitution that protects everybody.

But interestingly, it doesn't work always this way.

They are able to find

very tricky phrasings in order to cover out exceptions

and then the exception becomes the rule.

On this topic, I'd love to talk to you about the recent saga of

you being arrested in August of last year in France.

I think I should say that

it's one of the worst

overreaches of power I've seen as applied to a tech leader

in recent history in all history.

Uh so it's it's tragic,

but I think speaks to the thing that we've been talking about.

So um maybe can you tell the full saga what happened?

You arrive in France.

I arrived in France last year in August

just for a short

two-day trip and then I see

a dozen of armed

greeting me and ask me to follow them.

They read me a list of

something like 15 serious crimes

that I'm accused of, which was mindboggling.

At first, I thought there must be some

Then I realized they're being serious

and they accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed.

with some users and they think

I should be responsible for this

which again like you said it's nothing it's something that never happened in the

history of this planet.

No country not even an

authoritarian one did that

to any tech leader

at least at this scale.

There are good reasons for that

because you're a big part of your economic growth

by sending these kind of messages

to the business and tech community.

So they uh put me in a police car

and I found myself in police custody.

A small room, no windows.

just a narrow bed made of concrete.

I spent four day almost four days there.

In the process, I had to

answer some questions of the policemen.

They were interested and how telegram operates.

Most of it is public anyway.

And I was struck

by very limited understanding

or should I say even lack of understanding

on behalf of the people who initiated

this investigation against me

about how technology works, how

encryption works, how social media work.

I mean, there's something darkly poetic about a tech founder

of a platform where a billion people are communicating

with each other and you're on concrete,

no pillow for days, no windows.

It's like a book.

I mean, it reminds me I'm a huge fan of France Kafka and he's

written about the absurdity

uh of these kinds of situations,

hence the Kafka-esque stories.

There's a story literally

about the situation that he wrote,

perhaps predicted called the trial

where a person is arrested

for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial

system for a long time

that nobody fascinatingly in that story

neither the person arrested

nor the any individual member of the system itself

fully understand what is happening.

uh nobody can truly answer the questions

and eventually the person

spoiler alert is mentally broken by the whole system which

is what bureaucracy can do

in its most absurd form is it breaks the spirit the human spirit

laden in all of us

that's the negative side of bureaucracy

I agree with you on the absurdity

of because if this was a

good faith attempt to fix an issue.

There were so many ways

to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally,

voice their concerns, and solve

any alleged problem in a way that is

conventional and diplomatic, the way

every other country on this planet

solves its problems, including with Telegram.

And we did its times. >> Yeah.

They have a nice page showing

this is kind of like details that most people don't really think about.

Uh but Telegram is at the forefront

of um CSAM and terrorist groups.

There's a nice page telegram.org/modderation

/modderation that shows just the incredible

amount of groups and channels that are

uh engaged in terrorist activity and cam

activity that are blocked

actively blocked found and blocked by telegram.

So and a lot of this work like you said because of the automation

is done with machine learning

just the scale is insane.

This is stuff that most like noobs like me who are just chatting it

up on Telegram don't think about.

But there's just like an immense

number of people essentially

doing things that violate the law

on there and you have to find them immediately and catch it.

I guess all platforms have to deal with it and Telegram was

doing a great job of

dealing with that kind of content.

And what you're saying is the French had no idea.

Do they even know what machine learning

>> It's a concept that is

challenging to explain to them, but

I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this investigation. That's my hope.

In any case, you're right.

I mean, if if you look at Telegram,

we've been harmful content

that is publicly distributed

on our platform since 10 years ago.

Actually since the time we launched

public channels on Telegram

and since something like eight years ago,

we had daily transparency

reports on how many

channels related to child abuse

or terrorist propaganda we taking down daily.

Every day we've taken like

maybe we would take down hundreds of them.

And if you include all kinds of content that we remove,

all the accounts, groups,

channels, posts, that would amount to

millions of pieces of content every week,

hundreds of thousands every day.

And then somebody would read the newspaper,

get enraged because they would uh read something about child porn.

And this is a

subject that is very emotionally charged.

and start doing something not based on

data and logical thinking

and laws but based on emotions

driven from inaccurate input.

>> Yeah, I think we should make pretty clear that there's no world, no reason

that the French government should have arrested you, but here we are.

That's the situation you're in.

So, to be clear,

you have to show up in front of a judge.

All of this is beautifully absurd.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't extremely serious.

You have to show up in front of a judge

every certain amount of time.

And what is that experience like?

In France, they have this role of investigative judge.

I don't think you have it in many other places in the world.

It means I'm not on I'm being investigated.

And in France, it's not just the police or prosecutor asking me questions.

It's a judge, which in my experience is more like

still a prosecutor, but it's called a judge.

And that makes it harder to appeal.

So if you're limited

in say countries where you can travel,

then to appeal that restriction

will take you a lot of time.

The investigation itself should have never been started.

It's uh an absurd

and harmful way of

solving an issue such comp

as complicated as uh regulating social media.

It's just the wrong tool.

So we objected and appealed the investigation itself.

We did last year I believe.

We are still not even given

a hearing date for the appeal

because the process is

painfully slow not just for me but for everybody

which made me realize

the system may be broken in many levels.

You have other entrepreneurs

affected by u the French dust system

telling me horror stories about their

where businesses got paralyzed

by very unnecessary actions of investigative

judges that ended up

being unjustified and biased.

And in the end you can

perhaps solve it when you reach

a higher and you'll get justice

but you'll lose a lot of time and energy in the process.

So this is the only thing that is I hope

and will be different in this case

compared to the story you told

from I mean, but it does, as Kofka

describes, break a lot of people with time.

So, when do you hope

we should say that

you were for a long time not allowed to travel out of France, now

you can travel to Dubai.

We're now in Got to meet

um many of the people that work at Telegram.

Telegram is headquartered in Dubai,

but you're not allowed to travel anywhere else.

When do you think you're coming to Texas

to hang out with me over there?

>> That's a hard question to answer because

it doesn't depend on just my actions.

I can just say this. I am patient.

I will not let

this limitation on my dictate my actions.

I will, if anything, double down

on defending freedoms because

I experienced what the absence of freedom

feels like at least during these four days

in police custody when

you're just stuck unable

to communicate with people

that are important to you

when you don't even know what's going on in the world

in relation to you personally.

So, I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future.

I can't say that I'm pessimistic.

I think we've been able to gradually

remove most of the restrictions

initially imposed on my freedom last August.

If uh the French government or the French intelligence

agency want to have a back door

or a way to access

private user messages, uh what would you say to them?

Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?

My response would be very clear,

but it won't be very polite.

So I'm not sure it's

>> it's good to say here.

>> It's good to say because you're wearing a tie and >> yeah

it's a serious adult gentlemanlike program. Yeah.

But that is a concern that people have is when you have so much

pressure from governments that over time they'll wear you down and you'll give in

and then of course

other places use that as propaganda to try to attack you.

You get attacked by basically every every nation.

So um it's a difficult

medium in which to operate.

It's difficult to be you fighting for freedom, fighting to preserve people's privacy.

But is there something you could say to reassure

people that you're not going

to sacrifice any of the principles that you've just expressed?

If the French government just keeps wearing you down,

>> I think the French government is losing this battle.

This battle is wrong.

The more pressure I get,

the more resilient and defined I become. >> Yeah.

And I think I have proven that in the last several months

when there were attempts

to use my situation

being stuck here in France

by approaching me and asking me to do things

in other countries, blocking certain channels,

changing the way Telegram works.

And not only I refused,

I told the world about it.

And I'm going to keep telling the world

about every instance any government in in this case in particular the French government

tries to force me do anything.

And I would rather lose everything I have

than yield to this pressure.

Because if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally

wrong and the it violates

rights of other people as well,

you become broken inside.

You become a shell of your former self

on a deep biological

and spiritual So I wouldn't do that.

There are probably other people in the world that would

consider that, but I don't care.

Tilgrim disappears to something people don't understand,

including in this uh

intelligence services or governments. I don't care.

I'll be fine if they

put me into prison for 20 years,

which let's be clear, it's not something that I think is realistic,

but let's just think about it as a

hypothetical I would rather starve myself to death and die there.

Reboot the whole game

than do something stupid.

Let me ask you about an example of the thing you're talking about.

Tell the saga of Telegram in in the Romanian election.

So amidst all this,

you are still fighting

to preserve the freedom of speech.

What happened and what were some of the decisions you had to make?

So when I got stuck

in France, unable to leave

the country for a few months,

I was offered to meet the head of

state foreign intelligence services

through a person I know quite well.

He's actually well-known uh tech entrepreneur

in France and he's well connected.

And he said, "This guy wants to meet you."

I said, "Okay, fine.

Let's do that, but I'm not promising anything.

I took the meeting

and in this meeting

I was asked to

restrict what I see as restriction of freedom of speech in Romania.

I don't know if you followed the whole

saga with the Romanian elections.

They had a presidential elections last year.

The results got cancelled.

Now, Romania at that point when I had this meeting was preparing for a

new presidential elections, the conservative

candidate was not somebody who

the French government was supportive of.

So they asked me

whether I would be

shutting down or ready to shut down

channels on Telegram that supported the conservative

or protest against the pro-Uropean candidates.

So they called the guy they liked.

I said look if there is no violation

of the rules of telegram which are quite clear

you can't call to violence

but if if it's a peaceful demonstration

if it's a peaceful debate

we can't do this it's

would be political we protected

freedom of speech in many countries in the world

including in Asia in Eastern Europe and the Middle East

we're not going to start engaging in censorship

in Europe, no matter who is asking us.

I was very clear to the guy who is the head of French intelligence.

I said, "If you think

that because I'm stuck here,

you can tell me what to do, you're very wrong.

I would rather do the opposite

every And in a way, that's what I did.

I um had a small debate with him about the morality of the whole

thing and then at a certain point

just disclose the content of this entire conversation

because I never signed an ND.

I don't ever sign NDAs

with any people like that.

I want to be able to tell the world what's going on.

And that's quite shocking to me

that you would have

people in the French government

trying to get advantage of this situation.

Of course, if you know they had nothing to do with the

start of this investigation

itself and use it

to reach their political or geopolitical

goals, I consider it

an attempt to humiliate

myself personally and millions of Telegram users collectively.

And it's quite strange

that the same agency

asked us to do certain things in Muldova as well.

So even before that, I think it was October

last year or September,

I was arrested in Paris in late August

and then again approached through an intermediary

and asked, "Would you mind

taking down some channels in Muldova

because there's an election going on

and we're afraid they're going to be some

interference with this elections.

could you please connect with the

representatives of the government of Muldova

and take care of it?

We said we're happy to take a look at it and see

there is content there that

is in violation of our rules

and they sent us a list of channels and bots.

Some of them were

so was a very short list and some of these channels and bots were

in violation indeed of our rules and we took them down only a few of them.

The rest were okay.

Then they said thank you and send us another list of

dozens of channels, many many channels.

We looked at these channels.

We realized that there is no solid foundation

to justify banning them

and we refuse to do that.

But interestingly enough, French intelligence

services were asking us

do this in Muldova,

let me know through their contact

after Telegram banned, the few channels that were in violation

of our rules in

They talked to my judge,

the investigative judge in this investigation

that is started is has been started against me

and told the judge good things about me

which I found very confusing

and in a way shocking

because these two matters

have nothing in Why would

anyone talk to an investigative

judge that is trying to find out whether Telegram

did a good enough job

in uh removing illegal content in France?

What does Muldova have to do with it?

I got very suspicious at that moment.

Remember, it happened after we

blocked a few channels

that violated our rules,

but before we refused to block a long list of other channels

that were completely fine,

which is people expressing

political views, which I may not

agree with, but it's their right to express them.

Not extreme views, not

views that call to violence.

That was extremely alarming.

That was a moment when

I told myself that

there may be more

going on here that I initially thought.

Initially I thought yeah some people are confused

about how technology works

and here but after this

case in Muldova I got much more suspicious.

So by the time the

head of intelligence services

met me to ask about Romania

to help them silencing

silencing conservative voices in Romania,

I was already wary

of what can be going on next. Yeah.

So clearly this was a

systematic attempt to pressure you to censor

political voices that uh the French government doesn't agree with.

And we should say that you're

you have fought for freedom of

for leftwing groups and right-wing groups.

It really doesn't matter.

So it's not you don't have a

political affiliation, political ideology

that you fight for.

You're creating a platform

that as long as they don't call for

uh allows people from all walks of life, from all ideologies

to speak their mind.

That's the whole point.