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

- The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over 1 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's 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 pushups, no phone except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on. Yes, he's 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 bureaucracies, and it is also in part super technical, because to me, it's 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, 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'll 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 ElevenLabs 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. - 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? - 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. That you can't experience all the toys, the ice cream of sorts, the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you could 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, "Svoboda vazhne deneg." It translates to: "Freedom matters more than money." How do you prevent these values for freedom 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 shorter than a longer life, but lived in slavery. - Do you contemplate your mortality? Do 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 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. - 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 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 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 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. 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. - In many ways, it's a poison we let in our body. But by way of advice, what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking? You know, a lot of people use alcohol to enable them to have a vibrant social life. There's a lot of pressures from society, you know, at a party to drink so they can socialize. So, what advice would you give to them, 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 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. - Fix the underlying problem, which is usually at the very bottom is always going to be fear. Work on that. - I don't know. 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 in 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's not right. And it's extraordinary how easily we humans are affected by what we perceive as majority, because nobody since ancient times, since millions of years ago, wants to be left out by the tribe. We are scared that we won't become accepted anymore, which thousands or millions of 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. - 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 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 around 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 different. - Definitely. - And perhaps, I think you said 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 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 the information you receive on the 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 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. The 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. 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 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 what is important in my life. I don't want other people or companies, all kinds of organizations telling me what is important today and what 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 mind. - 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 mornings. - 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 wake up, I go take a shower, still without the 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 and squats. - I know it's kind of 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 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 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 everything that's going on, but 99% of people aren't. - 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's outraged. The news of the day, whatever the quarrel is, that's the thing that 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 emotions. And that's how you get into trouble, because you can be forced to make conclusions that are not in your best interest. - I've seen you be, once again, quite stoic about your emotions. Do you ever get angry? Do 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? - 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 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 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 if 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. - Yeah, that's the thing that people really confuse. If you're stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don't wanna do anything, just do something. 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 example. There are many days when you don't want to start working out, but 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 come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write the program. 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 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 or six times a week, spending between one and 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 these push-ups in the morning most of the days. Squats are particularly boring. 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 this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline. You know, not your biceps 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 to Banya, and I think it's fair to say you're nuts in terms of how much you can handle, and I didn't even see the worst of it. Can you just speak to your crazy escapades in the Banya, what value you get from it, so both the heat and the cold? - I don't know if it's crazy. I think it's quite natural and normal by this time. But maybe I just got used to it. So Banya is this extreme kind of sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans. But it is done in a way that maximizes heat, and they also use all kinds 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 these 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 Banya and ice bath. - We swam the length of a large lake in France a couple times. Can you talk through why you value these multi-hour swims? - 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 shaking a little bit, but you feel great after. We cross a huge lake, and I cross many lakes, Geneva Lake, 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 are 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 patience 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 five and a half hours. Did you panic if you were gonna be able to find the shore or 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 do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you 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 were strong, you must be not very smart, and vice versa, which is complete lunacy. Very often, these two things go together. - 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 an engineer, as a technologist? - Oh, yes. When I can't train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping on me. Like... So even in situations where I'm constrained, I can't go to the gym, I just keep doing push-ups. I just keep doing squats. - Yeah. I mean, that's the cool thing about bodyweight exercise, you can just do it anywhere. You could just pop off 50 or 100 push-ups before a meeting. - 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 better. - Yeah. I gotta 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. So take me through your philosophy on the no sugar, no soda, just clean food. - Well, sugar is pretty easy, because it's addictive. The more you consume sugar, the more you want it, the hungrier you get. So if you want to stay efficient and healthy, why consume processed sugar? You'll just end up snacking all the time. Intermittent fasting, eating only within six hours or not eating for 18 hours every day also brings structure into your day and into your eating habits, so you don't crave sugar anymore. Because, you know, if you eat sugar and then you're unable to snack, you're just punishing yourself. I read a few books on longevity. I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is harmful. Now, I'm not militant about sugar. 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 isn't agreeing 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 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 guess it all boils down to just discipline. - Yes, and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you're experiencing. If you're 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 mute 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? 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 that are 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 are some red signals, some red lamps start to blink 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 good answer is quite obvious. So, why are we constantly doing this regardless? Well, 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." Once I became a grown-up, I said, "No, I don't think that the producers of pills 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 so that I could buy them forever. And then I also realized... No, I'm not saying that you should never take pills. There are obviously some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example, so I'm not suggesting we go back to the Middle Ages. But what I'm saying is we overuse pills. - Yeah, it's always good to 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, just 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 the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That's really important to realize. 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 bias is, what the incentives are, so you can think clearly, independently, and objectively. - And again, it ties back with restraint from alcohol. Because if your mind is clouded, how can you analyze yourself? You'll always be dependent on opinions of others. You will always follow the mainstream, and w- then whatever the authorities or whoever in charge will tell you, you'll 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 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 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 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 the real thing that is not necessary in my life. If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy, some inspiration, to a fleeting moment of pleasure. It doesn't make sense. And i- in any case, as I said, it's not the real thing. So as long as you can access the real thing, you don't need to watch porn. 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. And again, this goes back to the theme of investing in a long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure. There's a theme to the way you approach life. - I try to be strategic. I try to act under the assumption that I'm not going to die in one 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 long-term 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 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? - The core engineering team is about 40 people. This includes backend, frontend designers, system administrators. - Can you speak to the philosophy behind running a company with so few employees? - 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 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 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 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. Because 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 a chance at increasing the security and speed of your service. and speed of your service. This is what we did with Telegram, while also making it much more reliable. Because if some part of the network goes down, can still switch to the other parts of it. - Yeah. One of the big ways is that you store the data. The infrastructure side of Telegram infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed across many legal jurisdictions many legal jurisdictions with the decryption keys. So it's encrypted in the cloud, keys. So it's encrypted in the cloud, the decryption keys are split and kept in different locations so that no single government or entity entity can 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, been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it. into making sure that nobody can mess with it. Like if you hire an employee employee or any of the existing employee, they can't break the system they can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users. access messages of users. And then of course, we launched end-to-end encrypted messaging end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations, but it has certain limitations, so you still have to rely on encrypted cloud. So an interesting encrypted cloud. So an interesting engineering challenge was how do you make sure that no point of failure can be created 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, thing. You know, we talk about encryption, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, all these kinds of things. all these kinds of things. I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there's also 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 saying employees never can access the private messages. Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past? agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past? - No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center 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 a way that is undecipherable. 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, any leak of data from Telegram. Not in terms of private messages, not in terms of, say, contact lists. - Do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies? - No. We designed the system in a way that it's impossible. impossible. It would require us to change the system, and we won't do that because we made a promise to our and we won't do that because we made a promise to our We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that. - So that's one of the principles you operate under: 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 place to ask. I'm sure you're pressured by all kinds of people, all kinds of organizations to share private data. 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 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. They can think they blackmail you with something, they can threaten you with something. But what is it they really can do to you? Worst case, they can kill you. But that brings us back to the first part of our discussion. 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? So... 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 integrity in relation to your principles is more important 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 nobody else 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 operate. 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 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. - 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 that 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. - 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. - 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 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 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 to, in all countries which are considered to be free. It's supposed to be the Constitution that protects everybody, but interestingly, it doesn't always work this way. They are able to find very tricky phrasings in order to carve 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. So it's tragic, but I think speaks to the thing that we've been talking about. So 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 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're 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, is 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 kinds of messages to the business and tech community. So they 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 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 a 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 Franz Kafka, and he's written about the absurdity of these kinds of situations, hence the Kafkaesque 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. Fascinatingly, in that story, neither the person arrested nor any individual member of the system itself fully understands what is happening. 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 latent in all of us. That's the negative side of bureaucracy. - 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. - Yeah, you have a nice page showing this. This is kind of like details that most people don't really think about. But Telegram was at the forefront of 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 engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are blocked, actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram. And a lot of this work, like you said, because of the automation that's done with machine learning, just the scale is insane. This is stuff that most noobs like me who are just chatting it up on Telegram don't think about. But there's just 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 government had no idea. - Do they even know what machine learning is? - 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 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've taken down daily. Every day, we've taken like, maybe 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 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 it 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? - 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 an absurd and harmful way of solving an issue as complicated as regulating social media. It's just the wrong tool. So we objected and appealed the investigation itself. We did last year, I believe. We're 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 on many levels. You have other entrepreneurs affected by 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. - 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 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 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 those four days in police custody when you are stuck, 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 the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a backdoor to access private user messages, what would you say to them? Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages? - Nothing. My response would be very clear... but it won't be very polite, so I'm not sure. - It's good to say here. - It's good to say because you're wearing a tie and- - Yeah. This is a serious adult gentleman-like program. But it 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 nation. So 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 defiant I become. 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 this case, in particular, the French government, tries to force me to 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 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, too. Something people don't understand, including in these 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. - Let me ask you about an example of the thing you're talking about. Tell the saga of Telegram 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 a well-known 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 follow the whole saga with the Romanian elections. They had 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 election. 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 it's a peaceful demonstration, if it's a peaceful debate, we can't do this. It would be political censorship. We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world, including in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East. We're not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe, no matter who's asking us." 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, that's what I did. I um... had a small debate with him about the morality of this, this whole thing, and then at a 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 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 an 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. 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 there's going to 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 rules." And they sent us a list of channels and bots. 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 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 common. Why would anyone talk to an investigative judge that is trying to find out whether Telegram did a good enough job in 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 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, 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 conservative voices in Romania, I was already wary of what could be going on next. - Yeah, so clearly this was a systematic attempt to pressure you to censor political voices that the French government doesn't agree with. And we should say that 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 political affiliation, political ideology that you fight for. You're creating a platform that, as long as they don't call for violence, 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 Romanian 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 against censorship of left-wing voices. And you have in the past, many times. - Exactly. Ironically, we received a request from the French police to take down a channel of far-left protesters on Telegram in France. We refused to do that. We looked at the channel, peaceful protesters. It doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom of speech of people leaning right or leaning left. During COVID, we were protecting activists that were organizing the Black Lives Matter events, and the other side, the protesters against lockdowns. 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 compromise your values, your principles, your freedoms, your rights, because they don't understand what's at stake. - Yeah, these things become a slippery slope. So for many, many years, including currently, you have spoken very highly of France. You love French history, French culture. I think this situation, this historic wrong that's been done is simply just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There's no entrepreneur 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 bureaucracy. A nightmare for entrepreneurs that dream to create something impactful and positive for the world. So what do you think needs to be fixed about the French government, the French system? And then zooming out, because you have seen similar kinds of things in Europe that could enable entrepreneurs, that could reverse the trend that we seem to be seeing in Europe that is becoming less and less friendly to entrepreneurs. What can be fixed? What should be fixed? - 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 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, in my field, social media field, has been affected by it immensely. There was one great startup in this 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 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 the first of this kind of 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, 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 some silly investigation, again involving data protection issues, which lasted forever, and was gradually sucking the blood of his team and his company, constant interrogations, disclosure requests. And this is a young company. It significantly increases the level of stress, and at some point, I think the pressure was too much. He decided, "I'm going to 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 think we just 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 froze 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 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. - And by the way, 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's what fuels great nations. Build, build, build, build new stuff, expand, all of that, and regulation suffocates that. - You have to cherish those people. But I guess the French public, or some part of the French public, was misled, and I don't know when, 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 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. But what does the system do to them? It squeezes them out, because, 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, who we talked to, is invited to come back to France. He's being offered really good terms. He said, "Are you gonna open this new venue on the Champs-Élysées? We're gonna give you the best location. We're gonna fund part of it, tax breaks." And he said, "Never. Just forget about it." "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. - Yeah, it's heartbreaking. As many of these nations, I appreciate the historic and the cultural value, and I hope Europe and France flourish, but these are not the components required for flourishing. Quick pause, I need a bathroom break. All right, we had some tea. We're back. Let's go back 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? - At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St. Petersburg where I lived, and we had to pass a rigorous test to get accepted. The idea behind the school was that if you try to squeeze as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager, making a focus on math 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 at least four foreign languages, 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 single subject like physics or math 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 subjects. It was considered crazy to even try. - 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. - Yes, see what happens. This was an experiment. And it was in the middle of the '90s, remember, when Russia, particularly 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 course is because I kept being kicked out from other schools. - Challenging authority? - I was good at all subjects, but not behavior, you know. We had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union, 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. - 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? - 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 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 me happy for a while. - What did you understand about an effective education system from studying foreign 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. - 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 in 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 in 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 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's 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 the 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. - 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 skill development, like you mentioned, pursuing mastery. There's something in human nature that, especially 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, 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 stuff in the world. - 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. - Speaking of competition, 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 incredible technologies that we've been talking about. So what have you learned about just life from your brother? - Well, first of all, I must say I learned pretty much everything from my brother, everything I know. Because when we used to be kids, we slept in the same bedroom, like beds a few feet away from each other. and I kept bugging him with questions. I would 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 in a billion. He started reading at the age of three, I think, and he pretty fast got so advanced in math 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 kid can't understand everything there. It's too complicated. Even we don't understand anything there. There are some formulas." And he was already sucking in this knowledge. He just has this thirst for information. So, he was the source of all kinds of great facts, useful things, inspiring things. He taught me pretty much everything I know. At the same time, he is incredibly modest and kind, and this is something I think a lot of people that think they're smart but not genuinely intelligent, lack. More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they're also kind and compassionate. - And he is that. - 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 on another level. He's been staying out of the public eye. What's behind that? - 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 narratives about Telegram, which can result in strange situations, some of which we discussed earlier, for example, this French investigation. - Yeah. I've gotten to know you more and more, and there's a deep integrity 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, showing your true self. So we should say that also you didn't mention, but you're a programmer From an early age, you started coding at 10. First things you built were a video game at 11, and then eventually 10 years later, at 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? - 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. 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 this 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, frames per second, 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 on an infinite field in my class during the breaks, you know, and not tic-tac-toe, the three in a row. This was a bit five in a row, 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 want to win every single time." I don't want to 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 modern CPUs and I could still retain some self-confidence. I would go back…

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