Pavel Durov on Lex Fridman: Why He Stayed Free After France

1. 0:00 – 3:07

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over one billion people. Pavel 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 user 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 Pavel, 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 part philosophical about freedom, life, human nature, and, uh, nature of government bureaucracies, and it is also in part 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, Telegram did it first. So we discuss it all, from the Kafkaesque situation he's in the midst of in France to the rollercoaster of his life and career to his philosophy on technology, freedom, and the human condition. And by the way, while this entire conversation is in English, we make captions and voiceover 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 Eleven 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 Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Pavel Durov.

2. 3:07 – 6:15

   Philosophy of freedom

   1. LFLex Fridman3:07

      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 helped you arrive at this value of human freedom?

   2. PDPavel Durov3:21

      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 (music) 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.

   3. LFLex Fridman4:14

      You also wrote, "Svoboda vazhne deneg," 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?

   4. PDPavel Durov4:29

      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 shorter than a longer life, but lived in slavery.

   5. LFLex Fridman5:08

      Do you contemplate your mortality? You think about your death?

   6. PDPavel Durov5:12

      Oh, yes.

   7. LFLex Fridman5:13

      Are you afraid of it?

   8. PDPavel Durov5:14

      In a way, you have to go against your instinct of self-preservation. And it's not easy. We are all biological beings hard-coded 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?

   9. LFLex Fridman6:03

      Yeah, remembering that death exists makes you deeply feel.... every moment that you do get.

   10. PDPavel Durov6:11

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

3. 6:15 – 14:20

   No alcohol

   1. PDPavel Durov6:15

   2. LFLex Fridman6:15

      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 mind. 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?

   3. PDPavel Durov6:57

      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. In 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 these 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, some time 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.

   4. LFLex Fridman8:06

      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 alcohol to, uh, enable them to have a vibrant social life. There's a lot of pressures 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?

   5. PDPavel Durov8:37

      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 banal, but this advice works.

   6. LFLex Fridman9:11

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

   7. PDPavel Durov9:17

      And, uh, 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.

   8. LFLex Fridman9:51

      So, what do you do? I mean, you've been in a lot of gatherings, a lot of parties. Is there some challenges to saying no?

   9. PDPavel Durov9:58

      For me, not at all. I've been always ready to stand my ground and say no when I feel something's not right. And it's extraordinary how easily we humans are affected by what we perceive as majority, because nobody since ancient times, sin- 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, in many activities the majority is engaging in, are not bringing you any good.

   10. LFLex Fridman11:03

       So, that's another fear you have to face, going into a party and the fear of being the outcast at that party, of being different than others at that party, at that social gathering, uh, in the crowd of humans, be different. That's a fear.

   11. PDPavel Durov11:17

       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.

   12. LFLex Fridman11:28

       (laughs) .

   13. PDPavel Durov11:28

       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.

   14. LFLex Fridman11:45

       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 different.

   15. PDPavel Durov11:55

       Differently.

   16. LFLex Fridman11:56

       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?

   17. PDPavel Durov12:13

       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 anyway, 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 a daily basis. So it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have, so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left 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, uh, 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.

   18. LFLex Fridman14:08

       Yeah. Uh, majority of the population become slaves to the AI recommender systems, AI-driven recommender systems. And so the content everybody's fed is the same thing, and we all become the same.

4. 14:20 – 20:16

   No phone

   1. LFLex Fridman14:20

      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?

   2. PDPavel Durov14:40

      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, uh, in, uh, airplane mode or mute. I hated the idea of being disturbed. My philosophy here is pretty simple. I want to define what 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.

   3. LFLex Fridman15:40

      It provides distractions. It guides what you should be looking at, where 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 mind.

   4. PDPavel Durov15:55

      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.

   5. LFLex Fridman16:03

      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 mornings.

   6. PDPavel Durov16:13

      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, "Oh, you have to take a sleeping pill." But I never take pills. I love these 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.

   7. LFLex Fridman17:51

      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 (laughs) and squats.

   8. PDPavel Durov18:02

      I know it's, I know it's kind of count- 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.

   9. LFLex Fridman18:26

      Mm.

   10. PDPavel Durov18:28

       And then how can you run this thing if, if you are 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 engaged in activities that require them to be up-to-date of, of everything that's going on, but 99% of people aren't.

   11. LFLex Fridman19:19

       Yeah. The internet, social media presents to us drama in such a way that we think it's the biggest thing in the world, the most important thing in which the tides of history will turn when 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 'cause everybody is 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.

   12. PDPavel Durov20:04

       And they're trying to influence your emotions.

   13. LFLex Fridman20:07

       Yeah.

   14. PDPavel Durov20:08

       And that's how you get into trouble, because you can be forced to make conclusions that are not in your

5. 20:16 – 41:28

   Discipline

   1. PDPavel Durov20:16

      best interest.

   2. LFLex Fridman20:17

      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 rollercoaster of human emotion? And what do you do with that? What do you make difficult decisions?

   3. PDPavel Durov20:31

      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, uh, the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them. Self-discipline is particularly important because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people? I normally never have depression. I don't remember having depression in, 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're, uh, 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 knows, you may end up achieving great things.

   4. LFLex Fridman22:12

      Yeah, that's the thing that people really confuse. If, if you're stuck i- i- 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.

   5. PDPavel Durov22:33

      Exactly. And, and going to the gym is a good example. Uh, there, there are many days when you don't want to start working out but th- you have to overcome this initial reluctance and then you get to a point that you s- 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, uh, some code, write a small piece of code first and then you get ins- inspired, then you'll come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write the 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.

   6. LFLex Fridman23:32

      (laughs) 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.

   7. PDPavel Durov23:50

      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 week, spending between one and two hours every day.

   8. LFLex Fridman24:04

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

   9. PDPavel Durov24:07

      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 these push-ups in the morning most of the days. Squats are particularly boring. It's, they're not that hard, they're just boring.... 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 an ice 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. Uh, no, 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.

   10. LFLex Fridman25:07

       Yeah, everything else becomes easy. We should mention, uh, (laughs) I went with you, uh, to bania, and, um, I think it's fair to say you're nuts (laughs) 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, the, your crazy escapades in the bania, what value you get from it, so both the heat and the cold?

   11. PDPavel Durov25:31

       I, I, I don't know if it's crazy. I think it's quite natural and normal by this time.

   12. LFLex Fridman25:36

       Yeah.

   13. PDPavel Durov25:36

       But maybe I could just get used to it. So bania is this, uh, extreme kind of sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans.

   14. LFLex Fridman25:47

       Yeah.

   15. PDPavel Durov25:49

       But it is done in a way that maximizes heat, and they also use all kind of herbs and branches, and it's a much more holistic and natural experience. Then a necessary part of it is you get the cold plunge, and then you go back, and again, this is one of those things that maybe in the moment is not always that pleasant, particularly if you go to extreme temperatures. 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 bania and ice bath.

   16. LFLex Fridman27:09

       We, uh, swam the length of a large lake in France a couple times. Can you, um, talk through why you value these multi-hour swims?

   17. PDPavel Durov27:17

       I love swimming for hours. The longest I swam was five and a half hours in Finland. It was quite cold. I got lost in the process, barely could find my way back. But the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after. You're shaken a little bit, but you feel g- great after. When you cross a huge lake, and I crossed many lakes, Geneva Lake, uh, Zurich Lake, and every time you feel this achievement which makes you happy, makes you feel strong, and then you're more ready to other challenges. And of course, when you know you're go- 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. It teaches you this incredible patience that I think is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life.

   18. LFLex Fridman28:23

       And it's pretty meditative, lake versus ocean.

   19. PDPavel Durov28:27

       Yes. And you don't have to go too fast.

   20. LFLex Fridman28:31

       Yeah.

   21. PDPavel Durov28:31

       You can be slow and enjoy the moment.

   22. LFLex Fridman28:33

       Until you get lost, and it's five and a half hours. Did you panic, like, if you're gonna be able to find the shore or find your way out?

   23. PDPavel Durov28:39

       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 do, do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you l- make your heart more efficient in doing that? Physical activity is the only way I know of. So it's not just staying healthy or trying to look good. It's also being productive. It's also being stress-resilient, 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 lunacy.... very often, these two things go together.

   24. LFLex Fridman30:34

       So for you, working out is not just about staying healthy, it's actually valuable for the work that you do as a tech leader, as a engineer, as a technologist.

   25. PDPavel Durov30:43

       Oh, yes. When I can't train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping on me.

   26. LFLex Fridman30:55

       (laughs)

   27. PDPavel Durov30:56

       I...

   28. LFLex Fridman30:56

       Yeah.

   29. PDPavel Durov30:57

       So even in situations when I am constrained, I can't go to the gym, but I just keep doing push-ups-

   30. LFLex Fridman31:03

       (laughs)
6. 41:28 – 56:50

   Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics

   1. LFLex Fridman41:28

      and now we're back. I gotta 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?

   2. PDPavel Durov41:48

      The core engineering team is about 40 people. This includes backend, frontend designers, system administrators.

   3. LFLex Fridman42:02

      Can you speak to the philosophy behind, uh, running a company with so few employees?

   4. PDPavel Durov42:10

      Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate to quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's 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 a 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 manually 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 al- algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient, and interestingly, much more reliable as well.

   5. LFLex Fridman44:31

      And more resilient to the changing geopolitics, to the changing technology, all of that. 'Cause if you automate the distributed aspect of the data storage and all the compute, then that's going to be resilient to everything that the world throws at you. I suppose if you have people managing all of it, it becomes stale quickly.

   6. PDPavel Durov44:54

      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 Telegram, 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.

   7. LFLex Fridman45:25

      Yeah. One of the big, um, ways you protect user 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?

   8. PDPavel Durov45:55

      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 end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it's- has certain limitations, so you still have to rely on an encrypted cloud. So an interesting engineering challenge was how do you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside?

   9. LFLex Fridman46:58

      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 messages. 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?

   10. PDPavel Durov47:38

       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 encrypted. 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 undecipherable. That was very important for us. That's why we can say with confidence there hasn't been ever a leakage of data or any leak of data from Telegram, not in terms of private messages, not in terms of, say, contact lists.

   11. LFLex Fridman48:28

       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?

   12. PDPavel Durov48:39

       No. We designed our system in a way that it's impossible.... 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.

   13. LFLex Fridman48:56

       So, that's like one of the principles you operate under, is you're going to protect user privacy.

   14. PDPavel Durov49:03

       I think it's fundamental. Without the right to privacy, people can't feel fully free and protected.

   15. LFLex Fridman49:11

       I mean, this is a g- 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?

   16. PDPavel Durov49:33

       I guess part of it is just me being me. I stood up (laughs) 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 c-... 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 discussion. There's no point living your life in fear. 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?

   17. LFLex Fridman50:40

       (laughs)

   18. PDPavel Durov50:40

       So...

   19. LFLex Fridman50:41

       Yeah.

   20. PDPavel Durov50:41

       You-

   21. LFLex Fridman50:42

       Yeah.

   22. PDPavel Durov50:43

       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, s- 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.

   23. LFLex Fridman51:23

       So, for you, the value of maintaining your integrity, 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, Pavel Durov, own 100% of Telegram. So, there's no other, uh, anybody with a say on this question.

   24. PDPavel Durov51:47

       There are no shareholders, which is quite unique.

   25. LFLex Fridman51:51

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

   26. PDPavel Durov51:56

       And this allows us to operate the way we operate, 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 a 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 authotar- autocratic. 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.

   27. LFLex Fridman53:39

       So, you see Telegram as 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, it's the way of the world, human nature and the nature of governments, they become more censorious. They begin to censor, and always justifying it, in their minds perhaps assuming that they are doing good.

   28. PDPavel Durov54:08

       Perhaps some of them assume they are doing good, but interestingly, 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 order, between freedom and structure. We tend to go to extremes.

   29. LFLex Fridman54:44

       I think you still consider yourself a libertarian. There is something about government that always...... 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, but 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.

   30. PDPavel Durov55:29

       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 resources, and that's how you end up in an endless loop of, you know, ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing 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 the- 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 carve out exceptions, and then the exception becomes the rule.
7. 56:50 – 1:13:01

   Arrest in France

   1. LFLex Fridman56:51

      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, uh, it's- it's tragic, but I think it 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...

   2. PDPavel Durov57:24

      I arrived in France last year in August just for a short two-day trip, and then I see a dozen of armed policemen greeting me and asking me to follow them. They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I'm accused of, which was mind-boggling. At first, I thought there must be some mistake. Then I realized they were being serious, and they're accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed, or 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 sacrificing 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 in 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.

   3. LFLex Fridman59:57

      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 Franz 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, (laughs) and 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 sys- 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 forms. It breaks the spirit, the human spirit laden in all of us. That's the negative side of bureaucracy (laughs) .

   4. PDPavel Durov1:01:05

      I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing, 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 it dozens of times.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:01:43

      Yeah, you have a nice page showing this is kinda like details that most people don't really think about. Uh, but Telegram was at the forefront of, um, moderating CSAM and terrorist groups. There's a nice page, telegram.org/moderation, that shows just the incredible amount of groups and channels that are, uh, engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are blocked, actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram. So... And a lot of this work, like you said, because the automation is done on 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 kinda content. And what you're saying is the French government had no idea (laughs) .

   6. PDPavel Durov1:02:51

      They-

   7. LFLex Fridman1:02:51

      Do they even know what machine learning is?

   8. PDPavel Durov1:02:53

      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 fighting 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'd taken 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.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:04:36

      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. Now 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?

   10. PDPavel Durov1:05:01

       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 trial. 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, um, way of solving an issue such com- 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, um, the French justice system telling me horror stories about their experiences... 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 court, 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, different, and will be different in this case, compared to the story you told from Kafka.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:07:31

       I mean, but it does, as Kafka 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 Dubai. 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?

   12. PDPavel Durov1:08:01

       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 freedom dictate my actions. I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like, at least during these four days in police custody when- when you are s- 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.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:09:23

       If, uh, the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a backdoor 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?

   14. PDPavel Durov1:09:43

       Nothing. My response would be very clear. But it won't be very polite, so I'm not sure it's-

   15. LFLex Fridman1:09:52

       (laughs) It's good to say here. Uh-

   16. PDPavel Durov1:09:55

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

   17. LFLex Fridman1:09:58

       Yeah. This is a serious adult gentleman-like 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, try to attack you. You get attacked by basically every s- 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?

   18. PDPavel Durov1:10:42

       I think the French government is losing this battle. This battle is wrong. The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:10:59

       Yeah.

   20. PDPavel Durov1:11:00

       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 that violates the rights of other people as well, you become broken inside. You become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level. So, I wouldn't do that. There are probably other people in the world that would consider that, but I don't care. Telegram 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 situation. I would rather starve myself to death and die there, reboot the whole game, than do something stupid.

8. 1:13:01 – 1:23:56

   Romanian elections

   1. LFLex Fridman1:13:01

      Let me ask you about an example of the thing you're talking about. Tell the saga of Telegram in the- in the Romanian election. So, amidst all this, you were still fighting to preserve the freedom of speech. What happened? And what were some of the decisions you had to make?

   2. PDPavel Durov1:13:16

      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, he's actually a 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, but I'm not promising anything." I took the meeting and then 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 were, got canceled. 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 candidate, or protest against the pro-European 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 censorship. We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world, including in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in mid- the Middle East. We're not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe, no matter who's asking us." And I was very clear to the guy who was 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 time." And in a way, this is what I did. I, um, um, had a small debate with him about the morality of this whole thing, and then at the certain point, just disclosed the content of this entire conversation, because I never signed an NDA. I don't ever sign NDAs with any people like that. I wanna 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 Moldova as well. So, even before that, I think it was October of 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 Moldova because there is an election going on, and we're afraid they're gonna be some interference with these elections. Could you please connect with the representatives of the government of Moldova and take care of it?" We said, "We're happy to take a look at it and see if 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 it 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 sent 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 refused to do that. But interestingly enough, the French intelligence services that were asking us to do this in Moldova let me know through their contact that after Telegram banned the few channels that were in violation of our rules in Moldova, they talked to my judge, the investigative judge in this investigation that has started, is g- 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 common. 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 Moldova 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 mo- may not agree with, but it's their right to express them. Not extreme views, not views that call to violence. That wasn't 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, you know, some people are confused about how technology works, and here b- uh, after this case in Moldova, 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.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:21:18

      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 your f- you have fought for freedom of speech for left-wing groups and right-wing groups, it really doesn't matter. So it's not, you don't have a, a political affiliation, political ideology that you fight for. You're creating a platform that, as long as they don't call for violence, uh, allows people from all walks of life, from all ideologies to speak their mind. That's the whole point. And it happens to be conservative voices in the remaining election that the French government wanted to censor because currently the French government leans left. But if you flip everything around and the government would be right wing, you'd be fighting for, um, against censorship of left-wing voices, and you have in the past many times.

   4. PDPavel Durov1:22:13

      Exactly. Ironically, we received a request from the French police to take down a channel of far-left protestors on Telegram in France. We refused to do that. We looked at the channel, peaceful protestors. Doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom of speech of people leaning right or leaning ref- left. During COVID, we were protecting activists that were organizing the Black Lives Matter events, and the other side di- did protests against lockdowns. We pro- we protect everybody as long as they are not crossing the lines and not starting to call to violence or incite damage to public property. It's a fundamental right to assemble. It's interesting that people who haven't had this experience of living in countries that don't have freedoms don't always realize how dangerous it is to gradually com- compromise your values, your principles, your freedoms, your rights, because they, they don't understand what's at stake.

9. 1:23:56 – 1:33:29

   Power and corruption

   1. PDPavel Durov1:23:56

   2. LFLex Fridman1:23:56

      Yeah, these things, uh, become a slippery slope. So you've, uh, for many, many years, including currently, have spoken very highly of France. You love French history, French culture. I think this situation, this historic wrong that's been done is, uh, i- uh, put simply is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There's no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this. There is no justification for this arrest, there's a misapplication of the law, all kinds of pressures, all kinds of behavior that seems politically motivated, all that kind of stuff, all the excessive regulation and the bureaucracy. A nightmare for entrepreneurs that dream to create something impactful and positive for the world. So what, what do you think needs to be fixed about the French government, the French system? And then zooming out, because you have, see similar kinds of things in Europe that, uh, could enable entrepreneurs, that could reverse the trend that we seem to be seeing in Europe that become, is becoming less and less friendly to, uh, entrepreneurs. What can be fixed? What should be fixed?

   3. PDPavel Durov1:25:20

      I think the European society must decide...... where they want the ever-increasing public sector to stop increasing, what they think should be the right size of government. Because today, if you take France for example, which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP. It's maybe as much or more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union. So, you have this, this balance, where you have many more people representing the state as opposed to people trying to bring the country's economy forward by creating great products and great companies. The startup field, and my field, social media field, has been affected by it immensely. There was one great startup in this, uh, realm in France in the last 10 years. It was a location-based social network. It was eventually sold to Snapchat, but before it was s- not sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell. I told him, "Never sell. You have a great thing going. You have lots of users. You have organic traction in many countries." And it's the first of the ki- of this kind success story in France. But then he sold anyway in a couple weeks, and later I met him. He's trying to do a new thing now. I met him and I asked him, like I... I was trying to understand what went wrong. And one of the things he told me about is that while he was trying to run his company, you know, competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris, and he did a great job by the way, but while he was trying to do that, he got also attacked by a... some silly investigation, again, involving d- data pro- protection issues, which lasted forever and was gradually sucking blood off his team and his company, constant interrogations, disclosure requests. And, uh, this is a young company.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:28:15

      Mm-hmm.

   5. PDPavel Durov1:28:17

      It significantly increases the level of stress, and at some point, I think the pressure was too much. He decided to, "I'm gonna just sell it." Eventually, it turned out that there was no issue. The investigation ended, as far as I understand, with no charges. But such investigations, they have a price. They have a cost. And unless the society realizes the cost of projects, of companies, of startups that are never created, or are sold to the United States at the very early stage, or other countries, resulting in decreased economic growth, things won't change. I, I think we... 'cause I talked to a guy a few days ago who left France and started a business here in Dubai, and one of the reasons he had to leave France is that the government started an investigation on his company and they frozen his bank accounts, and this investigation that involved taxes lasted for many, many years. I believe he said eight years. And at the end of these eight years, the government reached to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong. "He's good. It's okay." In the meantime, his corporate bank accounts were frozen. His business died. The only reason why he was able to retain sanity is because he moved to Dubai and started a new company, which is incredibly successful, and now he's enriching this city, which we're in right now, with his great ideas and creativity.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:30:17

      And by the way, uh, you know, having interacted with him, there's like a fire in his eyes, the human spirit that fuels entrepreneurship. Whatever that is, he doesn't have to do. He's made a lot of money. He probably doesn't have to do anything, but he still wants to create, and that fire is what fuels great nations. Build, build, build, build new stuff, expand, all of that, and regulation suffocates that.

   7. PDPavel Durov1:30:40

      You have to cherish those people.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:30:41

      Yeah.

   9. PDPavel Durov1:30:42

      But I guess the French public, or some part of the French public, was misled, and I don't know when, may- perhaps since the time of the French Revolution, to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies. They're the evil rich people that are the cause of all problems, as if only you could make the rich share their ill-gotten wealth with the rest of the population, then every problem will be magically solved. In reality though, a lot of these people that are starting such companies with fire in their eyes are sacrificing their lives, their livelihood. They're, they're working 20 hours a day. They're experiencing immense stress.... in order to fulfill their vision and bring value and good to the society around them. They create jobs. They create great services. They create great goods. They make your country grow. They make your people proud. You have to cherish them. What does the system do to them? It squeezes them out because, uh, per- perhaps there was somebody in the tax authority that decided to advance their career and perhaps, you know, was too ambitious and not too smart. So as a result, the company was destroyed, and now the same entrepreneur, by the way, w- who we talked to is invited to co- come back to France. He's being offered really good terms. He said they're gonna open this new venue on Champs-Élysées. "We're going to give you the best location. We're gonna fund part of it. Tax breaks." And he said, "Never. Just forget about this. It's impossible. I'm not coming back to France." He's traumatized by the experience, and he's French. He was born there. He has a French passport. So unless things like this change, France will, and the rest of Europe, will keep struggling with economic growth, with budget deficits, with unemployment, and all the other relevant social and economic metrics.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:33:06

       Yeah, it's heartbreaking. Me, as, uh, many of these nations, I appreciate the historic and the cultural value, and I hope Europe and France flourish. But this is not the components that are required for flourishing. Quick pause. I need a bathroom break. All right, we had some tea. We're back.

10. 1:33:29 – 1:45:29

    Intense education

    1. LFLex Fridman1:33:30

       Let's go back, uh, a bunch of years to the beginning. You mentioned you went to school with a super intensive education. So, I thought it'd be really interesting to look at some of the powerful aspects of that education, from the languages to the math. Can you actually describe some of the rigorous aspects of it and what you gained from it?

    2. PDPavel Durov1:33:48

       At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in Saint Petersburg where I lived, and you had to pass a rigorous test to get accepted. The idea behind this school was that if you try to squeeze as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager, making a focus on maths and foreign languages, then there will be some changes in the brain of the student that will allow the student to understand most other disciplines. But we had a class as a result that didn't have any single focus. It was very widespread across a lot of disciplines. You would have four foreign languages at least, including Latin, English, French, German. In addition, you can get ancient Greek. You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology. The difference of this class as opposed to other classes in the same school, which was part of the Saint Petersburg State University and called Academic Gymnasium, was that unlike other classes which were specialized in some s- single subject, like physics or maths or history, this one tried to get the best from all of these specialized classes and bring it into one curriculum. Since it was an experimental class, it wasn't possible to become a straight A student, to be excellent in all the subject. Abs- it was, like, considered crazy to even try.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:35:48

       So just assume nobody's able to handle it. You're just pushing the limits of the human mind. Four languages in parallel, math, evolutionary psychology, just overwhelming the mind and see what happens.

    4. PDPavel Durov1:35:59

       Yes. See what h- it was an experiment.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:36:02

       Yeah.

    6. PDPavel Durov1:36:02

       And it was in the middle of the '90s. Remember, when Russia, uh, particularly the, its educational system wasn't regulated as much as it is today. It was in the middle between the two stages of the Russian history, the Soviet's history and the modern Russian history of the 21st century. In any case, I learned a lot from that experience. First of all, why I got into this school is because I kept being kicked out from other schools.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:36:38

       Challenging authority?

    8. PDPavel Durov1:36:39

       I was good at all subjects, but not behavior, you know. We had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union in, in early '90s. Perhaps they even have it today, I'm not sure. I was very bad at behavior. Always challenging the teachers, always pointing out their mistakes.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:36:59

       By the way, that's not such a bad thing, right? Like, if you were looking back, there's some value to that, right? For young people to, maybe respectfully, but challenge the authority, the wisdom of old, right?

    10. PDPavel Durov1:37:14

        I think I was very lucky to be able to do that and to be able to get away with it in the end. Because normally if you keep challenging authorities, you just get kicked out of all schools and then you end up nowhere. So I eventually got into a school where...Challenging teachers was not fully okay, but it was something that you could do, and then you would start a debate with the teacher, and normally they would allow you to express your point of view and then some objective truth may come out of it as a result. But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life, you know? Every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis. What's the point of life? What am I even doing here? At some point, I decided since I have to go to school anyway, I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best student and get a- an A or what we called five in the Russian system on every single subject. And that kept me busy for a while. It was incredibly difficult because you didn't have enough time. Even if you just studied all the time, not doing anything else, you didn't have any time left to prepare all the homework tasks and get ready for all the tests. So I ended up using the breaks between classes but I got to the result I wanted to get to. I got the excellent mark in every subject, and that kept- kept me happy for a while.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:39:19

        What did you understand about an effective education system from studying four languages at the same time, doing such a diversity? Like, if you were to design an education system from scratch for young people, especially in the 21st century, what would that look like? You posted about the value of mathematics as a foundation for everything.

    12. PDPavel Durov1:39:39

        Yeah, I still think math is essential. It's something that shapes your brain. It teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn't work. And this is exactly the same skill you need in programming, in project management, and start it when you start your own company. And it's one of the few subjects at school which encourages you to develop your own thinking as opposed to rely on what other people have to say and just repeating their opinions. That is extremely valuable. And of course, once you're good at math, you can apply it in physics, in engineering, in coding. And it's not surprising there that most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at math and coding because ultimately it's the same mental skill that you rely on. But back then in the school, I realized something else as well. It's that competition is really important. Competition is key. This is what motivates a lot of teenagers when they're at school. And if you remove competition out of the education system, you will end up forcing kids to start competing elsewhere, for example, in video games. It's a trend you see now and many countries, including in the West, when well-meaning authorities or parents say, "We don't want our kids to be too stressed. We don't want them to feel anxiety, so let's just get rid of all the public grading system, all these rankings of who won, who lost. We don't want any of that." And part of it is justified, but as a result some kids lose interest. Yes, you eliminate the lunar- losers, but you end up eliminating the winners as well. And then if you're overprotective of the kids in that age, they grow up, graduate schools or universities, and they are still not prepared for real life because real life is constant competition for jobs, for promotions, for customers, and it's more brutal. What you have as a result is high suicide rates, high unemployment, all the things and negative trends you see now in many countries which thought eliminating competition from their education systems was a good idea. They still persist. They still think competition is a bad thing. They try to eliminate competition from their economy as well, to an extent, saying, "We're gonna make sure the losers don't lose and the winners don't get too much." But as a result, they make their entire systems less competitive, their entire economies. Some of them in Europe are now struggling.... to keep up with China, with South Korea, with Singapore, with Japan, and other places where education system was based on ruthless competition. So this is a hard choice any civilization has to make. We support competition understanding that eventually it leads to progress in science and technology, and abundance for society at large. Or we remove competition thinking that somehow we can shield the future generations from the stress that competition inevitably causes.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:44:22

        Yeah, I mean, it's grounded in a good instinct of compassion. You don't want people who are, who suck at a thing to feel pain. But it seems like struggle is a part of life. Either you do it early or you do it later. And it's true, that's such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of ski- skill development. Like you mentioned, pursuing mastery. There's something in human nature that, especially for, for young people, if you can compete at a thing, you're gonna be really driven to get good at that thing. If you can direct that in the education system, as China does, as many, uh, as many nations like you mentioned do, then you're going to develop a lot of brilliant people, resilient people, people that are ready to create epic shit in the world.

    14. PDPavel Durov1:45:08

        I think there is a lot of evidence proving that we are biologically wired to compete and establish our understanding of what our qualities are and talents are in relation to other people around us. And this is one of the ways society self-regulates.

11. 1:45:29 – 1:49:58

    Nikolai Durov

    1. PDPavel Durov1:45:30

    2. LFLex Fridman1:45:30

       Speaking of competition, uh, your brother, Nikolai. He's a mathematician programmer, expert in cryptography. He has won the IMO, International Mathematics Olympiad, he got gold medal three times, ICPC Programming two times, has two PhDs in mathematics. And you have worked together for many years creating, um, incredible technologies that we've been talking about. So, what have you learned about just life from your brother?

    3. PDPavel Durov1:46:02

       Well, first of all, I must say I learned pretty much everything from my brother. Everything I know. Because when we were, used to be kids, we slept in the same bedroom, like beds few feet away from each other. And, um, I kept bugging him with questions. I'd ask him about dinosaurs and galaxies and black holes and Neanderthals. Everything I could think of. And he was my Wikipedia back in the time when we didn't have internet access. He's a unique prodigy kid, probably one of a billion. He started reading at the age of three, I think, and he pretty fast got so advanced in maths that by the age of six he could already read really sophisticated books on astronomy. Sometimes when he did it in public places like buses or metro, my mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it. They would tell her, "Why are you mocking your own kid with this serious book? It's obvious the, the kid can't understand everything there. It's too complicated. Even we don't understand anything there, there's some formulas." And he was already sucking in this knowledge. He's just, has this thirst for information. So, he was the source of all kind of great facts, useful things, inspiring things. He taught me pretty much everything I know. At the same time, he's incredibly modest and kind. And this is something I think a lot of people that think they're smart but not generally intelligent lack. More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they're also kind and compassionate.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:48:18

       And he's that.

    5. PDPavel Durov1:48:20

       Definitely.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:48:22

       You actually have been staying out of the public eye for the most part. You've done very few interviews. You're pretty low-key. But your brother is in another level. He's been staying out of the public eye. What's behind that?

    7. PDPavel Durov1:48:34

       Part of it is his natural modesty. He doesn't need to do it. He doesn't feel this urge to show off, brag about stuff. I tried to avoid it as well, but at a certain point I realized that me being too private, too secretive becomes a liability because it creates this void, this emptiness that people and organizations that don't like Telegram very much are willing to fill with inaccurate information and they're willing to spread the narratives about Telegram, which can result in strange situations, some of, uh, which we discussed earlier. For example, this French investigation.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:49:32

       Yeah. I've, I've gotten to know you more and more, and there's, um, a deep integrity, uh, to you that I think is good to show to the world. There's a lot of attack vectors on user privacy and I think the most important, the last...... wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company. So it's important to some degree for you to be out there, to showing your true self. Uh, so we should say that also you didn't mention, but

12. 1:49:58 – 1:54:11

    Programming and video games

    1. LFLex Fridman1:49:58

       you're a programmer from an early age. You co- started coding at 10. First things you built were a video game at 11 and then eventually 10 years later, 21, you programmed the initial versions of VK single-handedly. Can you talk to me about your programming journey that led to the creation of VK? What was the VK stack? Was it PHP mostly? How did you figure out how to program websites, all of that?

    2. PDPavel Durov1:50:27

       Yeah. I wasn't interested in programming websites at first. I didn't even have access to the internet when I was 10 years old. But I liked video games. I didn't have enough of them and the scarcity forced me to start building them, more computer games just to play myself.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:50:47

       Yeah.

    4. PDPavel Durov1:50:49

       It's actually an interesting thing that we sometimes don't realize it, but scarcity leads to creativity. And one of the reasons you have so many people who love to code coming from the Soviet Union or other places which didn't have much access to modern technology, and more importantly modern entertainment, is that perhaps we were not so much distracted by all this abundance of different entertainment options. Which is not to say it's bad to have those options. It's just a fact that we sometimes don't appreciate. So I started to build computer games. My brother would sometimes guide me. For example, I would create a turn-based strategy, of course two-dimensional. Back then three-dimensional was too much for me. But it wasn't as slick in terms of the scrolling FPS, f- frames per second, um, parameter, and asked my brother how to optimize it. He would guide me, and this kind of learning and training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger. Then I started to create video games for my classmates. When we played, for example, Tic-Tac-Toe in an infinite field in my class during the breaks, you know, and not Tic-Tac-Toe, the three in a row.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:52:34

       Yeah.

    6. PDPavel Durov1:52:34

       This is a little bit five in a row and an, and an infinite field. This is a much more interesting game and it gets quite complicated if you keep playing it. My classmates used to love it and some of my classmates were really smart, you know, champions of math Olympians, sons and daughters of professors at the university, and I decided, no, I wanna win every single time.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:53:00

       (laughs) Yeah.

    8. PDPavel Durov1:53:00

       I don't wanna lose even a single time. So how do I win? I need to practice more. But how do I practice more? I need an opponent stronger than myself. So I coded this game so that I would play against the computer and the computer would calculate, I think, four moves in advance to choose the optimal strategy. That wasn't enough. Four moves in advance, I would still win over it. If I tried to calculate five or six, it was too slow. So I asked my brother, "Help me out here." So he made this algorithm. Eventually I trained myself to win every single time, even with the computer back then. We didn't have, uh, modern CPUs and, um, I could still retain some self-confidence. Would go back to school during breaks, play with my classmates, and soon people started to lose interest. None of my classmates wanted to play this game anymore. I killed the game. Th- there's no-

Episode duration: 4:34:09