#482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature

following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over one billion people.

Pavlo 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, ascetic life he's known for.

No alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise, including a crazy amount of daily pull-ups and push-ups, no phone except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on.

Yes, he is 100% that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me.

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

This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical about freedom, life, human nature, and and the nature of government bureaucracies.

And it is also in parts super technical, because to me, it is fascinating that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team and yet is able to basically out-innovate all of its competitors with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features.

Just like the meme of the Simpsons did it first, when you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case, Telegram did it first.

So we discuss it all, from the Kafka-esque situation he's in the midst of in France, to the roller coaster of his life and career, to his philosophy on technology, freedom, and the human condition.

And, by the way, while this entire conversation is in English, we make captions and voice over audio tracks available in multiple languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi.

If this is of interest to you, you will need to head over to the Lex Lex Friedman channel on YouTube, where you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer.

Here, we only provide the original English version.

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And now, dear friends, here's Paolo 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.

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.

How do you prevent these values for freedom being corrupted by money, by

people with influence, by people with power?

Well, the biggest enemies of freedom.

are fear and greed.

So you make sure that they don't stand in your way.

If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there's nothing more

left to be afraid of.

So you stand your ground and you remember that it's worth living your life according to

the principles that you believe in,

even though this life can end up being shorter

than a longer life, but lived in slavery.

Do you contemplate your mortality?

You think about your death?

Oh yes.

Are you afraid of it?

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

And it's not easy.

We are all biological beings 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 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.

And there he would describe the biological and chemical processes

that happen in your body once you consume this or that substance.

It was mainly related to illegal drugs, but alcohol was one of 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,

sometime after the party is over, some of your brain cells die and never get to normal.

So think about this.

If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool?

for short-term pleasure.

This sounds ridiculous.

Yeah, in many ways, it's a poison we'll we'll 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 you 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 are 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.

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

What is it they're trying to escape?

What is this problem?

You have to get to the bottom of it.

Your mind is trying to tell you something valuable, and instead of addressing it directly, you are flooding it in alcohol,

which is sort of a spiritual painkiller, but works only temporarily.

And then you have to pay the debt with interest.

So, what do you do?

I mean, you've been at a lot of gatherings, a lot of parties.

Is there some challenges to saying no?

For me, not at all.

I've been always ready to stand my ground and say no

when I feel something is not right.

And it's extraordinary how easily

we humans are affected by what we perceive as majority.

Because nobody since ancient times, since million years ago, wants to be left out by the tribe.

We are scared that

we won't become accepted anymore.

which

thousands of millions of years ago meant we're going to starve to to death.

So you 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 and 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

twenty thousand 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.

Differently.

And perhaps I think you said you want to achieve mastery at a niche.

So find the 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.

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

I was always in airplane mode or mute.

I hated the idea of being disturbed.

My philosophy here is pretty simple.

I want to define

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.

To set up your own agenda.

And the phone 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, well, 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.

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

just to have the quiet thinking time, plus the crazy amounts of push-ups.

I know it's kind of 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 on which the tides of history will turn.

But in reality, most things will not turn the tides of history.

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

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

And from that,

decide what you're going to do.

And that's very difficult on social media because 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.

Yeah.

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.

You ever get angry?

You ever get lonely?

You ever get sad?

The roller coaster of human emotion.

And what do you do with that?

When you make difficult decisions?

I'm a human being like everybody else.

I do get to experience emotions.

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 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 want to do anything, just do something.

Try, try to make progress because the good feeling comes in the end of that.

The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.

Exactly.

And going to the gym is a good 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'll come up with more ideas.

You need to write a novel, just write a paragraph.

This is pretty obvious, and it's not a secret.

But because we are bombarded with all kinds of information that is not really important for us in terms of becoming successful,

we often forget the important things.

And this is one of them.

We've been working out every single day.

You have been working out for many years

pretty intensively.

So I think a lot of people would love to

know what's your perfect daily workout regimen.

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

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

And in addition to that, I go to the gym normally five, six times a 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.

Not your biceps or your pecs or anything else.

Because if you get to train that one, everything else

just comes by itself.

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 could just get used 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 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 banya in ice bath.

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

Can you talk through why you value these multi-hour swims?

Yeah, I left 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, you feel great after.

You cross a huge lake, and I cross many lakes.

Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake.

And every time you feel this achievement, 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 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.

Yeah.

You can be slow and enjoy the moment.

Until you get lost in this five and a half hours.

Did you panic?

Like if you're going to be able to find find the shore, find your way out.

Not really.

I'm a

reasonably stress-resilient person.

I didn't panic at that moment.

And there were worse swims I had that were shorter but involved accidents, and you know about some of them.

So that wasn't the worst by far.

But an important thing about swimming and physical activity in general is that it

makes your mind clear

and your thinking process is becoming more efficient.

Because at the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our heart can push through blood to our brain.

So, how can you make this go faster?

Or how to do you make your lungs more efficient?

How do you make

your heart more efficient in doing that?

The physical activity is the only way I know of.

So, it's not just staying healthy

or

trying to look good.

It's also

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 the 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.

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.

Yeah.

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

I would just keep doing push-ups.

I just keep doing squats.

Yeah.

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

You can just do it anywhere.

You could just pop off 50, 100 push-ups before 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, it's a shitty day.

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

Yeah.

I got to ask you about your diet, too.

No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda, intermittent fasting, sometimes once a day only, sometimes a couple times a day.

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, so eating only within six hours and 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 I read a few books on longevity.

I think

something everybody agrees on is that sugar is

harmful.

No, I'm not militant about sugar.

Like you can eat berries, fruit, if you feel your body needs it.

But it's not true to think

it's necessary to consume sweet things.

Not for children, not for adults.

Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20 years ago because I just felt heavy every time I had it.

So I guess it's individual.

It's my metabolism, my digestive system

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 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 quality here bad?

Do I need to start getting more sleep?

Is there something wrong with people around me?

They're stressing me out.

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

But if you take a pill, you're not removing this reason.

You're actually making it worse.

Because this harmful factor is still there.

It's like you're piloting a helicopter and there is some red signals and red lamp starts to blink, and 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?

Oh, because everybody else is doing it, because there's a whole industry trying to persuade you that this is the right thing to do.

So it's incredibly important to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.

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

Yes, I've been staying away from all of that since I became an adult.

When you're a teenager, your mom would typically say, We need to take this pill, otherwise, you know, the world collapses.

Once I became a grown-up, I said, no, I don't think that the producers of pill are incentivized in the right way.

They're 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 uh study and deeply understand the incentives under which the world operates so that you don't get swept up into the forces that operate under these incentives.

And big pharma is certainly one of them.

Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive to keep the problem going versus solving the problem.

It's wise.

Well, this is something I practice every day.

I read some piece of news and I ask myself,

who benefits from me reading this?

Then you can end up coming to this conclusion that maybe 95% of things we read in 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, at least 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.

Be very proactive, understanding what the biases, what the incentives are, so you can think clearly, independently, and objectively.

And again, it ties back with

restraint from alcohol.

Because if your mind is clouded, how can you analyze yourself?

You will always be dependent on the opinions of others.

You will always follow the mainstream.

And then whatever the authorities or whoever in charge will tell you,

you believe it because you don't have a tool

of your own to rely on to come to your own conclusions.

I have to ask you, this 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 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 a 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.

Doesn't make sense.

And 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,

you shouldn't watch porn 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 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 got to ask you about Telegram, the company.

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

Telegram runs lean relative to other technology companies that achieve the scale that Telegram does.

It has very few employees.

So how many people are on the core team?

Let's say the core engineering team?

The core engineering team is about 40 people.

This includes

back end, front end,

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 coordinated 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,

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, 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 factors.

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 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.

Yeah, one of the big

ways you protect your privacy is that you store the data, the infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed across

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 no single government or 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, 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 into an encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations.

So, you still have to rely on an encrypted cloud.

So, an interesting engineering challenge was how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.

So, no employee can even access user messages.

So, that's the thing.

You know, we talk about encryption, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, all these kinds of things.

I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there's also misinformation, is about private 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?

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, 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 design a 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.

So that's like one of the principles you operate under?

Is you're going to protect user privacy?

I think it's fundamental.

Without the right to privacy, people can't feel fully free and protected.

I mean, this is a good 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 always had issues with my teachers because I would point out their mistakes during classes.

And at the end of the day, what's important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose.

Like they can think they they blackmail you with something, they can threaten you with something, but what is it

they really can can really 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.

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 lie 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 Odurov, own 100% of Telegram.

So there's no other

anybody with a say on this question.

There are no shareholders,

which is quite unique.

Very unique.

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

And this allows us to operate the way we 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 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 is a place that people from all walks of life, from every nation, can have a place

to speak their mind, to have a voice.

In the context, in the geopolitical context 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 justify it in their minds, perhaps assuming that they're doing good.

Perhaps some of them assume they're 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

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 all countries of which I consider to be free.

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

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

They are able to find

very tricky phrasings in order to cover out exceptions.

And then the exception becomes the rule.

On this topic,

I'd love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in August of last year in France.

I think I should say that it's one of the worst overreaches of power I've seen as applied to a tech leader in recent history, in all history.

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 of armed policemen

greeting me and ask me to follow them.

They read me a list of

something like 15 serious crimes that I'm accused of,

which was 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, 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

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 days, 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.

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 Kafka-esque stories.

There's a story literally about the situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted, called The Trial,

where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial system for a long time.

That nobody, fascinatingly, in that story,

neither the person arrested nor the system, 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, laden 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 these problems, including with Telegram.

And we did it dozens of times.

Yeah, you have a nice page showing.

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 slash 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 is 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 like an immense number of

people essentially

doing things that violate the law on there, and you have to find them immediately and catch it.

I guess all platforms have to deal with it.

And Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that kind of content.

And what you're saying is the French 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 taking down daily.

Every day we've taken

maybe

we would take down

hundreds of them.

And if it 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 pretty clear that there's no world, no reason that the French government should have arrested you.

But here we are.

That's the situation you're in.

So to be clear, you have to show up in front of a judge.

All of this is beautifully absurd.

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

You have to show up in front of a judge

every

certain amount of time.

And what is that experience like?

In France, they have this role of investigative judge.

And I 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 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 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 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 these four days in police custody,

when you're

just stuck,

unable to

communicate with people

that are important to you,

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

in relation to you personally.

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

I can't say that I'm pessimistic.

I think we've been able to gradually remove most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom

last August.

If the French government or the French intelligence agency

want to have a back door or a way 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 it because you're wearing a tie.

Yeah, it's 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 to try to attack you.

You get attacked by basically every s 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 a telegram works.

And not only did 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 it 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

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 Sag 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 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

got cancelled.

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

presidential elections.

The conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was supportive of.

So they asked me whether I would be shutting down, or ready to shut down,

channels on Telegram

supported the Conservative candidate

or protest against

the pro-European candidates, so they call 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 are not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe,

no matter who is asking us.

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

I said, if you think

that because I'm stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you're very wrong.

I would rather do the opposite every time.

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

I

had a small debate with him about the morality of this whole thing.

And then at a certain point, just disclose 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 advantage of this situation.

Of course, if

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 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 going to be some interference with these elections?

Could you please

connect with

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 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 than I initially thought.

Initially, I thought

some people are confused about how technology works.

And here

after this

case in Moldova,

I get much more suspicious.

So, by the time that the head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania

to help them

silencing conservative voices in Romania, Romania.

I was

already wary

of what can be going on next.

Yeah, so clearly this was a

systematic attempt to pressure you to censor political voices that 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 leads left.

But if you flip everything around and the government would be right-wing, you'd be fighting for

against censorship of left-wing voices.

And you have in the past, many times.

Exactly.

Ironically, we received the 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 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 you've for many, many years, including currently, have spoken very highly of France.

You love

French history, French culture.

culture.

I think this situation, this historic wrong that's been done, is

put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France.

There's no entrepreneur that sees that, aspires to be the next Baba 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 do you think needs to be fixed about the French government, the French system, and then zooming out?

Because you see 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 later stage of the Soviet Union.

So

you have this disbalance

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

realm in France in the last 10 years.

It was his 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 it's the first of this kind success story in France.

but then he sold anyway in a couple of 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 the data protection issues,

which

lasted forever.

and was gradually sucking blood of his team and his company, constant

interrogations,

disclosure requests.

And you know, 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 to, 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 this 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.

And by the way,

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.

You have to cherish these people.

Yeah.

But I guess the French public, or some part of the French public, was misled,

and I don't know when, maybe 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.

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, you know, 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 been offered really good terms.

He said, You're going to open this new venue on Champs-Élysées.

We're going to give you the best location.

We're going to 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.

Yeah, it's heartbreaking.

Me as 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 bath and 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 gain from it?

At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St.

Petersburg, where I lived, and you 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 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 or evolutionary psychology.

The difference of this class, as opposed to other classes in the same school, which was part of the St.

Petersburg State University and called Academic Gymnasium, was that unlike other classes which were specialized in some single subject, like physics or maths or history, this one tried to get

the best from all of the 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 it's assumed 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.

It was an experiment.

Yeah.

And it was in the middle of the 90s.

Remember when

Russia, particularly its 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 soviets 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 that school 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 and 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 old 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 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 it's exactly the same skill you need in programming

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 relying 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 apply it

in physics, in engineering, in coding.

And it's not surprising that

most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at maths 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 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 are overprotective

of

the kids in that age, they grow up,

graduate schools, the 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 system was a good idea.

They still persist, they still think competition 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 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 the 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 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 going to be really driven to get good at that thing.

If you can direct that in the education system, as China does,

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.

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 were 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 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 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 told 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 are smart but not generally intelligent lack.

More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they're also kind and compassionate.

And he is that.

Definitely.

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?

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 like Telegram very much are willing to fill with an accurate information and they're willing to spread the 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 and to showing your true self.

So, we should say that also you didn't mention, but you were a programmer from an early age.

You started coding at 10.

First things you built are 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?

It was a 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 yeah

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 brother would sometimes guide me.

For example, I would create a

turn-based strategy.

Of course, two-dimensional, by client three-dimensional, is too much for me.

But

it wasn't as

sleek in terms of the scrolling FPS frames per second

parameter.

And I 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, not tic-tac-toe, the three in a row.

This is

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 Olympiads, 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 to help me out here.

So he made this algorithm.

Eventually, 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.

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.

So after that,

when I got into the St.

Peter State University,

it was quite boring just to study because it was too easy.

So I thought, what can I do there?

I created a website for the students of my faculty first.

I organized the creation of digital

answers to all exams

and digitalized version of all lectures, which was something very unique back then.

Remember, it was 25 years ago.

I would put together a website

where I would

publish all these materials and pretty soon it became super popular.

I opened a discussion forum there.

In a few years I expanded

to the university

with all of its other departments and then to other universities.

We ended up having

tens of thousands of users just as a student's portal.

We had all kinds of social features there, friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs, all of it.

It was quite successful.

And after I graduated the university,

one of my ex-classmates from the school reached out to me after reading about my successes in a newspaper, the main business newspaper of St.

Petersburg.

And he asked me, are you trying to build a Russian Facebook?

I said, I'm not sure.

What's Facebook?

So we met.

Since he graduated an American university two years before that, he showed me Facebook.

I thought, well,

I can already have all of this technology, but it's valuable to know

which elements I should get rid of in order to scale this thing

and have millions of users.

This is also something people don't appreciate that

sometimes in order to move forward and have more success you have to get rid of things including technology getting rid of features is super important.

Simplify both for scaling and for making it

amenable to

just growing the user base where people get it immediately.

Yes.

Otherwise, it's just too complicated for the new user.

The existing users will be happy, they'll be praising you, they will be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated.

So it's easy to

lose track

and get disoriented

if you're only relying on the feedback of existing users.

So as a result, I started the website called Vcontaktje or VK.

It means in touch in Russian.

Initially, to solve my own personal problem, I graduated.

the university that same year and I wanted to be in touch, remain in touch with my ex-classmates from the university and and the other fellow students

and of course as a 20 year old i wanted to meet other people including good-looking girls so i started to build it from scratch for that one i thought i'm not going to use any third-party libraries modules

because I want to make it as efficient as possible.

I was obsessing over every line of code.

But then how do you start something that large like I didn't have any prior experience of quitting a project of that scale which would involve everything

before I would reuse some existing solutions here I wanted to build from scratch so I I called my brother he

was a postdoc student in

Germany at the time in the Max Planck University and I asked him

what should I start from?

And he told me,

just build

a module to authorize users.

Just to log in, you know, not even to sign up, just to log in.

Because you can pre-populate the database with credentials and emails and passwords.

Doesn't really matter.

But once you see that, you can type in your password and email, and you're in, and it tells you hello using your name,

then you will

have a clear understanding where to go from there.

Yeah, I mean, that's true.

That's one of the best advice I've ever got in my life.

It worked perfectly, by the way.

I started to build it, and before I knew it, I would have

there on the website photo albums, private messages, this guest book we used to call the wall back on IK and I guess in the early days of Facebook

would end up building something even more sophisticated than Facebook at the time with more features.

I had a girlfriend at the time.

I asked her, we need to somehow come up with a

database of all Russian schools and universities and the departments and subdivisions.

She did a great job trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing emails to universities saying, which departments you have exactly at this point.

We need to know, or reaching out to the Department of Education,

both in Russia and then in Ukraine and then eventually in Belarus and in Kazakhstan and other countries where VK ended up to be the largest and most popular social network.

So we did a few things that were

quite unique at the time.

And for the first

almost a year, I was the single employee of the company.

I was the back-end engineer, the front-end engineer, the designer.

I was

the customer support officer.

I was the marketing guy as well,

coming up with all the wordings and the announcements,

coming up with competitions to promote VK, which worked quite well.

That was an incredible experience that

gave me knowledge of every aspect of a

social networking platform.

Also understanding of how much a single person can do.

Exactly.

It's one of the reasons why I'd like to think I'm an efficient project manager

and product manager inside Telegram because

I will

not

take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members.

If somebody

gives me, oh, I need three weeks to do that, I would reply, well, I built the first version of VK in just two weeks.

Why would you need three weeks?

It seems like something you could

make real in just three days.

Three weeks, what are you going to do the rest of the three weeks, apart from the three days?

And you know, the team knows me, and that's why we are able today at Telegram to move at a very good pace of innovation.

Every month we're pushing

several meaningful features.

I think outcompeting everybody else in this industry in terms of what you can do within a short time frame.

So, yes, that experience was

invaluable.

As for the stack, I started from PHP and MySQL, Debian Linux.

But very soon, I realized I needed to optimize this.

I started using memcached.

Apache servers were not enough anymore.

We had to set up Nginx.

And my brother was still living in Germany, so he couldn't help me much for the first year of building BK.

Sometimes I would manage to get through to him through a call.

I would use an old school phone to call him with wires.

I said, what do I do?

How do I install this thing called Nginx?

I'm not a Linux guy.

If he felt particularly kind that day and not too busy, he would show me the way to do it or set it up himself.

But for

the most part, I had to rely on just myself.

Having him there, though, helped

when we started to grow fast and started to scale it.

Because at first

you realize

one server is not enough.

I need to buy another one.

Then another one and another one.

The database should be

in a different server.

Then you have to split the database into tables.

Then you have to come up with a way to shard the tables using some criteria that would make sense, that wouldn't break your user experience.

When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen of servers, surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of the scaling aspect of it became impossible.

I remember asking him to come back.

He says, you need to help me with this thing.

It's starting to be really big.

What was worse is that since we became popular, somebody started to do DWS attacks on us, as it always happens.

Right.

And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of Vikay.

And interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day, the DDoS attacks intensified.

So we had to come up with a way to

fight it.

I remember having

many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.

So that was your introduction to all kinds of bad actors.

DDoS,

business.

Then later you'd find out there's such a thing called politics.

And then later geopolitics.

But this is the initial stages.

That it's not just about creating cool stuff.

It's having to deal with, as you now have to deal with the Telegram, is seas of bad actors trying to test the limits of the system, trying to break the system.

Unfortunately, if we didn't have bad actors and pressure,

it would be the best job ever.

You just get to create.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so

the help from your brother, like you mentioned, Nginx and sharding the tables, some of the scaling issue is algorithmic in nature.

It's almost like theoretical computer science.

So it's not just about like buying more computers.

It's figuring out

how to algorithmically

make everything work extremely fast.

So some of it is mathematics.

Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.

Yeah, so at that stage I could do the basic stuff.

I could

understand how I implement

scalability into the code base, how I short my tables

in the database, where I include

memcached instead of direct

requests to the database.

That was quite easy because it was still PHP back in the day.

When my brother got back

from Germany somewhere around 2008,

I asked him, can we make it even more efficient?

Can we make it super fast?

And at the same time, so that we would require even

fewer servers to maintain the load.

And he said, yes, but

PHP is not enough.

I'll have to rewrite

a big part of

your

data engines in C and C ⁇ .

I said, okay, let's do that.

He invited

a friend of his to help him, another absolute champion in

world's programming contest,

twice in a row.

And they

They put together the first customized data engine, which is far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and memcached because it

was,

first of all, more specialized, more low-level.

So they rewrote in C C ⁇ ?

A large chunk of it.

Like, for example, the search, the ad engine, because VK had a targeted ads.

They built that.

It was very efficient what they did.

Eventually the private messaging part,

the public messages part.

At some point, we realized there are very few websites online that load faster than VK.

Nice.

I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley and I met Mark Zuckerberg the first time and some of the other

core team members of of early Facebook.

Remember, Facebook was just four or five years old.

And everybody kept asking me, how come even here in Silicon Valley, VK loads faster than Facebook?

Everything seems to

appear instantly on your website.

What's the secret sauce?

That was one of the things that made them very curious.

And that was always important to you, to have very low latency, to make sure the thing loads.

Because that's one of the things Telegram is really known for.

Even non-crappy connections and all that kind of stuff, it just works extremely fast.

Everything is fast.

It's one of the core technological ideas,

we prioritize speed.

We think that people can notice the difference, even if it's just like 50 million millisecond difference.

The difference is subconscious.

It also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive,

but also more efficient when it comes to the infrastructure, the expenses.

Because if your code executes faster, it means you need fewer

computational resources to run it.

So there is no way you can lose in making things faster.

And that's why we have always been very careful when hiring people.

I would only hire a person if I'm ultimately certain it's the best option.

If you hire somebody who is

maybe a little bit distracted, unexperienced, you may end up with inefficiencies in your code base that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses.

And think about the responsibility.

Like

if we jump to today from the VK days,

Telegram is used by over a billion people.

They open it dozens of times every day.

Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say half a second delay, multiplied by dozens of times by a billion.

It gets

centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason

other than just being sloppy.

That is so important to understand and so wise that it's actually, if you're just a little bit careless as a developer, you can introduce inefficiencies that are going to be very difficult to track down because you don't don't know that it can be faster.

Like the code doesn't scream at you saying this could be much faster.

So you have to actually, as a craftsman, be very careful when you're writing the color and always thinking, can this be done much more efficiently?

And it can be tiny things because they all propagate throughout the code.

And so there's a real cost in having a careless developer anywhere.

in the company.

They can introduce that inefficiency and all the other developers won't know.

They'll just assume it kind of has to be that way.

And so

there's a real responsibility for every single individual developer that's building any component of an app like Telegram to just always ask, okay, can this be done more efficiently?

Can this be done more simply?

And that's like one of the most beautiful aspects, the art forms of programming.

Right?

Oh, yes, because when you manage to discover a way to simplify things, make them more efficient,

you feel incredibly happy and proud and accomplished.

And to your point, I can recall a few instances in my career when

firing an engineer actually resulted to an increase in productivity.

Say you have two Android engineers building the app and then

just

they just can't make it.

They are not keeping up with the pace

of the feature release schedule.

And

you think, I probably have to hire a third one.

But then you notice that one of them

is really weird,

falling behind the schedule, complaining some of the time, doesn't assume responsibility.

And you ask yourself, what if I just fire this person?

And you fire this person.

And in a few weeks, you realize you actually don't need any, and you never needed the third engineer.

The problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems than he solved.

That is so counterintuitive because,

you know, in developing

tech projects, we tend to think that you just throw more people into something and then

things get solved miraculously by themselves, just because more people means

more attention from them.

No,

that's again extremely powerful.

You know, Steve Jobs talked about A players and B players, and there's something that happens when you have B players,

which is kind of like the folks you're talking about, introduced into a team.

They can somehow slow everybody down.

They demotivate everybody.

And it's very counterintuitive.

You basically,

part of the work of creating a great team is removing the B players.

It's not just hiring more, generally speaking.

It's finding the A players, quote unquote, and removing the people that are slowing things down.

Oh, yes.

Because the other thing that people don't realize is how demotivating working with the B player is.

Everybody can tell if the other person, the other engineer they're working with, is really competent.

And if it's very visible, if the person is not comfortable, they're asking their own questions,

they keep lagging behind.

And at a certain point,

if you're an A-player,

you get this dissatisfaction, this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential, accomplish what you're really meant to accomplish,

because of this person

working next to you or pretending to work next to you.

And by the way, in some cases it's not because the person is lazy.

In some cases it's just,

you know, the mental, their intellectual ability is not there.

It's not about experience.

Most often it's about

natural ability and persistence.

In 90%

of cases, it's just the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time.

Not everybody has this ability.

So for people who do have this ability, it's an insult

to work alongside someone

who is distracted and cannot go deep

in the projects that they're responsible for.

What's on this small tangent, what's your hiring process?

So you've

shown, you've talked about how you use competitions often, coding competitions, to hire, to find great engineers.

What's your thinking behind that?

Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy.

I think competition leads to progress.

If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people

for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?

a coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company as an engineer or just wants to get some prize money or validation

can demonstrate their skills.

And then we just select the best.

Or if we are not certain

because there's not enough data

to hire somebody, we just repeat the contest with another task,

get more data, get more winners, then repeat it again.

And

at some point, you realize, oh, actually, this guy has competed in 10 of our contests since he was 16 years old or 14 years old.

Now he's 20 or 21.

He won in eight of these competitions.

He seems to be really good in JavaScript and Android, Java,

and also C.

Why not hire this person?

There is some consistency there.

And a lot of these people, they have never worked in a big company before,

which is priceless because, in a big company,

people tend to shift responsibility.

They have this shared responsibility wherein

nobody

fully understands

who can take credit for a project, who can take blame for a project.

Inside Telegram, it's pretty clear,

and

these competitions are

the closest experience to

what people will have when working at Telegram.

So for example, we want to implement certain very tricky animation and redesign to

the profile page of

the Telegram as Android version.

And the Android app, it's an open source app.

Anybody can take its code and play with it.

So as a result, we would not just select the best person and hire this person, we would also select the best solution to the problem because we would not suggest the contestants to solve trivial problems.

It's something that's valuable, it saves a lot of time for us in terms of development.

And because I always had this large social media platforms which I could use to promote these competitions,

somehow both VK and Telegram were very popular among engineers and designers, other tech people.

I had no issue to find, to promote these content and find the right people ever.

And

what can be better than

for an employee of your company, of somebody who has been a user of it?

If this person has no prior experience, of using Telegram, their understanding would be very limited.

Why would I even even try to hire somebody from LinkedIn who

worked at Google and other companies

is used to receiving salary for nothing,

is used to shift responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings

and have

very limited understanding of what Telegram stands for.

It's just crazy if you think about it.

Yeah, and but because of that, you're extremely selective and slow in hiring.

So, like,

people really have to earn their spot.

And as a result, I got a chance to sit in one of the team meetings where people discuss the different features that are being developed, the different ideas, some of which are at the very cutting edge.

And so, you get to see behind the scenes how it's possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation.

So, you generate the idea, you implement the prototype, and then you eventually

it becomes an actual feature in the product.

And so, that's why you have this kind of half-hilarious,

half-incredible fact that for many,

as compared to WhatsApp and Signal, you've led the way on many of the features.

Many of the features we take for granted now,

many of which we know and love,

like the auto-delete timer

that was seven years ahead of any other messenger.

Message editing,

replies.

These are all like obvious things.

I've even forgotten for some of them that they even were never part.

I mean, I think auto delete timer is a really brilliant idea.

We implemented it in 2013 in the secret chats.

It's the funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it, like WhatsApp seven years after,

and then Signal and some other of these apps,

they initially even copied the exact timestamps.

So for example, if we had like one, three, and five seconds, they would also have one, three, and five seconds.

Yeah.

They tried not to change it because they were not sure what was the magic source behind the feature.

And ironically, it happens with many of these things.

For example, when we design how you reply to a message and you have a small snippet showing that you're replying to this message, and now you're typing your response.

Then there is a small snippet in the message itself that, if you tap on it, highlights the original message you're replying to.

Seems pretty obvious, but there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time, and we got this vertical line on the left, and all these other small things that are completely arbitrary, right?

You can do it in a different way.

But somehow, the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution so now whenever you go to whatsapp instagram direct facebook messenger is signal it doesn't matter you would see exactly the same or pretty much similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk and

innovate if something works

why not just copy it yeah but we should say that it's done extremely well the vertical line and the highlighting i mean all of these are tiny little little strokes of genius.

I highlighting the text in a certain way that, from a design perspective, makes it very clear that this part was written before, and the thing under it is your reply.

The distinction between the different formatting of the text.

I mean, there's a

listen, I know how much typography is an art form.

There's a lot of interacting graphic,

artistic elements inside Telegram that all have to play together extremely well.

Like you pointed out to me, this thing that just blew my mind, which is the background gradient of Telegram shifts.

It changes.

And it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles.

And then there's like

graphic elements on top of the gradient that all interplay together.

So all of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing clarity.

Everything's just intuitive.

That's very difficult to create.

That is art.

And on top of that, super fast.

That's the hardest part.

To make it look so that designers love it is one thing.

The real challenge is make it look the way the designers love it and make it work on the weakest devices possible, oldest, cheapest smartphones you can imagine.

If you take the moving gradient on the background of every Telegram chat, this is something most people don't notice, but they can feel it.

Yeah, yeah,

they notice it subconsciously or something like that.

There is a pleasant feeling.

There's a feeling.

There's a pleasant feeling when you're reading a chat.

And that's where

the design contributes to that.

I think a gradient really does.

I really love that about Telegram, the gradient.

Not the technical thing you described, but the feeling of it.

And then the technical aspect of creating that feeling is incredible.

i could probably come up with all kinds of algorithms of rendering that gradient that's going to be super inefficient and so doing that efficiently is like or efficient but not too beautiful because even

doing something so trivial as a gradient can result in noticeable lines in the gradient that person can instantly say oh no it's not the right thing so you can have to introduce certain randomness there and then you have the gradient but it's not enough.

It's too plaint.

You want to have certain pattern as an overlay, but it should be simple enough not to distract you from the content, but it has to be entertaining enough to create a good feeling about the whole app.

And another question, what kind of

objects you want to include in this pattern?

And how this pattern would work?

Will it be

based on pixels

or would it be vector based?

And would it be vector vector-based?

So they will be infinitely scalable and high-quality.

And then I think for the default pattern and the default background, which is based on four colors, it's not a gradient based on two colors, it's four colors, and they're constantly shifting.

I

probably look

through several thousand variations of that.

Because it is such an important decision to make.

It's the default background.

Of course, you can change it.

Actually, you can set up your own four colors for that you can change it no way really yes you can do it and you want to rely on certain deeply hard-coded biological properties of the human mind right so which color do you want to use

is it going to be blue is it going to be yellow is it going to be green because each color has a different meaning in our brain

And what kind of objects we want to put there?

Something from

our childhood, something from nature or something that can create a different kind of mood and this is just one detail of the app so there are many details when you send a message you are done typing a message and you then tap send and then the message gradually appears in the chat how does it happen so you want the input field

to slowly morph into the actual message.

To the message, yeah.

And you want this to be done regardless of the contents of the message, because sometimes the width would be different, sometimes it will be containing media or a link preview or other stuff that will change the message bubble.

So you go through countless different

scenarios and make sure every one of them works great, even if this message contains 4,000 characters.

And then

you look at all the platforms, iOS, Android, and all the old devices,

all kinds of outdated

operating systems

and the hardware, and you cross the tool because you can have this really bad old phone, but using the newest operating system version.

So what do you do?

What kind of bugs do you get there?

And then of course, Instead works on

tablets as well, and our iOS version works on an iPad, which I love a lot, you have to understand that everything can be really big, so it can consume a lot of space on your screen.

And then it will trigger using more computational resources to render it.

So there are a lot of nuances to it.

But as long as you obsess over every small detail, at least every detail that really counts,

You can get to a user experience if you're really used to Telegram, if you've been a regular user for at least a few weeks.

Going back to any other messaging app feels like

a serious downgrade.

Yeah, I mean, there are so many really magical moments.

Like, for example,

the way a message evaporates when you delete it.

That is a really pleasant experience.

Oh, yeah.

And boy,

was it hard to make particularly on android this is this tanos snap effect right so the message is broken into tens of thousands particles which go away like dust in the wind it looks great but it was so hard to make probably one of my one of my favorite gooey graphical

things.

It's just art.

It's pure art.

It's

incredible.

So it's good to hear that it's been really fought over and thought through.

It's extremely well done.

No, you can't pull it off if you're not

going deep in this.

And then you don't want to distract people from

their

communication with all this additional animation.

So you want them to be invisible in a way.

They create the feeling, but they don't create distraction.

Yes.

And in order to do that,

you have to overcome even more challenges.

For example, you mentioned this deletion effect.

Message evaporates.

If you do the animation, if you show the animation first, and then the message that is preceding the deleted message that is going after the just deleted message move closer to each other, then it doesn't feel right.

It feels too long, too imposing.

So, what you want to do is you want the message to disappear while the messages around it go closer to each other to fill the resulting gap.

And then you imagine what it involves.

Redrawing the entire screen.

So, on top of this very complicated animation,

you have to think about things like which kind of messages were

there before, after

that just adds to complexity.

And once again, on all kinds of devices, on all kinds of operating systems, all kinds of tablets, phones, desktop, all of that.

But you know, once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense sense of pride.

Because nobody is doing this.

Nobody really cares.

In a way, maybe they're right not to care.

Maybe nobody notices this.

but there is something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected, because I understand that every day

tens of millions of people around the world deleting messages.

What kind of experience they get?

Is this an experience that maybe even subconsciously inspires them

and makes their heart sing even a little bit,

fills them with joy, lightens up their mood even a little bit by 0.001%.

Or is it something that is just basic?

And I think if we can

bring some value in people's lives,

even through these subtle details,

we have to definitely invest our time in it.

And some joy, not just sort of value, like productivity, but joy.

I think Steve Jobs, Johnny I have talked about this.

They will put so much love and effort in the design of everything, including things that weren't visible in the initial PC personal computers, because they believe that you somehow, through osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing.

And you're absolutely right.

I mean, it's not about deleting messages.

Like,

I feel a little inkling of joy when I see that evaporation animation.

It's just nice.

I'm happier because of it.

And like, so I feel that effort.

And I think, you know, billion users

feel that.

People like when other people care.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's exactly what it is.

And of course, there's the more sexy things like all the emojis and the stickers, the gifts, many of those are just, they're little like

art pieces.

That's again an intersection of art and technology because if you look at the stickers which Telegram launched way before most of these other apps, three years and eight months ahead ahead of WhatsApp, yes.

But the stickers that WhatsApp ended up launching three years and eight months after were not the first version was not really good because they just did regular GIFs or web M videos

which were not based on vector graphics.

What we did is vector animations.

Each of these stickers is only several kilobytes, sometimes maybe maximum 20-30 kilobytes in size, but it says 180 frames.

We were able to run them at 60 frames per second on all devices.

And it's also very challenging.

It was a challenging thing to do.

We had so much headache trying to to make it work.

Nobody even tried to do anything like this before us because it's crazily difficult.

But as a result, you have these fluid animations.

You have this really nice user experience.

Somebody sends you a sticker, you don't have to wait for it to load because it's so lightweight.

And it starts moving instantly.

And then, of course, it's not just engineering.

You have to find designers that are able to create these stickers using vector graphics, which means they're based on curves described by formulas, not just created as photographs with pixels.

Where do you find these people?

Again, we did competitions, but it was not easy to assemble a team of artists, slash artists, artists slash engineers, I would say.

that are able to do something like this.

This is a unique form of art.

And this allowed us to do a revolution in stickers,

then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add into messages, custom animated emoji.

I don't think anybody did that.

I think Telegram is still the only one allowing users to do that because you can include a hundred of animated emoji in a message and they will be animated and they will be moving.

and your device won't crash.

It's probably unnecessary and crazy, but we think somewhere in this intersection of art and engineering, true quality is created.

And then, of course, more recently, we expanded into what we call Telegram gifts, which are essentially blockchain-based collectibles that you can demonstrate on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance, but you can also use them to congratulate your friends and close the one with

their birthdays and other holidays.

And that was received extremely well.

Yeah, they can hold value.

They can increase in value.

You could trade them for that, in that aspect.

But to me, still,

the

vector graphics, and it's not just simple graphics, it's incredibly intricate graphics.

So the vector makes it very efficient, but it also allows you to create...

maybe incentivizes the artist

enables them incentivizes them to create super detailed, intricate elements.

And then the final result, like you would think it wouldn't matter, but the final result has like a lot of stuff going on.

And it allows you to scale on arbitrary devices.

And now it's like this little,

you know, like usually GIFs from like back in the day and still in meme form are low resolution.

And so that desensitive, usually people don't put details and intricate art into it.

But here with vector graphics, it's like a million things going on.

And it allows you to play with different animations.

Like you showed me this thing where you send and you hold for a while on the send button.

And so you can share with the person you send a message to this animation that you've encoded.

Like there's a bunch of stuff going on when they read the message.

Yes, we have a lot of features like that when we use this art to allow people to express themselves.

And most people don't even know about these features.

I didn't know about it.

That's cool.

That was cool.

The other application of the same technology is reactions on Telegram.

Because we made it a goal

to

make sure that

people

feel joy when they just send you a like.

Something so trivial as just adding a like to a message should be an action that you

want to perform again and again and again.

So, another feature is on the more serious size, end-to-end encryption.

So, you led the industry in that.

It was launched one year and three months ahead.

Can you speak to why you decided to add end-to-end encryption, how you developed the encryption algorithm in the beginning?

What was your thinking behind that?

So, at

twenty thirteen, when we were launching Telegram, Telegram,

we were aware of the

serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear.

And we thought, yes, we are designing this product in a way that is already extremely secure, but we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages.

And we understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust.

So that's why we made Telgram open source.

So all our apps have been

open available on GitHub since 2013.

And then we added end-to-end encryption in our secret chats,

which

WhatsApp copied a few years after, one year and three months ahead, they just started to test it.

They rolled it out, I think, 2016, which is

three years after us.

And the only reason I think the rest of the industry had to do it is because

we set the standard.

It was incredibly important back in the day.

And at the same time, we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption.

So, within that

design,

that architecture, you can't support

very large chat communities with consistent persistent chat histories.

You can't support

huge one or many channels.

You'd have issues with maintaining

bots that have lots of incoming messages.

Multiple device support becomes tricky.

People will end up losing some of the documents they share.

So we also see soil of issues.

And we ended up having this sort of

hybrid

experience where, depending on your use case and your requirements, you can choose the level of

encryption that you want to have.

So, that's why you chose to go opt-in for end-to-end encryption.

So, the trade-off there that you're describing is between

for people who really care about specific messages,

extreme privacy on those messages

and usability, like being able to sync across multiple devices, having groups that are 200,000 people.

So all of those features that

quality of life features, there's a trade-off between those and end-to-end encryption.

So you lean towards letting users sort of enable end-to-end encryption for cases when they want to be super secure.

Yes, and secret chats are not just end-to-end encrypted.

You know, there are certain limitations that are both their feature and the bug.

For example, you can't screenshot them.

You can't forward

any

document, any message from them,

which is not necessarily something you need when you're

trying to get some work done and you're just communicating with your team on a project.

So

it became very clear to us that there are different

needs here.

And if you try to combine both in one type of chat, you will end up losing a lot of utility.

You know, we are at Telegram, we don't use any

collaboration tool for teamwork.

We use Telegram to build Telegram.

So we felt instantly when we were trying to switch to, say, secret chats to

share large documents and try to get work done.

It was just not

adapted for it.

At the same time, if you're really paranoid, you think, you know, I don't want to be screenshotted.

I don't want to have any

leaks.

I don't even trust Telegram.

I only trust code.

Secret chats are the best option.

I believe it is the most secure means of communication today.

And we should say that there's a lot of other aspects to this that are important.

For example, Telegram is the only app that has open source reproducible builds for both Android and iOS.

Why is this important?

So, you need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims, really encrypts data

in a way that it is described on its website.

For that, you need to make your apps

open source for any researchers to have a look at it.

So Telegram has been open source since 2013.

Apps like WhatsApp have never been open source, so you don't really know what they're doing and how exactly they encrypt your messages.

What's important here, though, is to understand whether the version of the app that you download from the App Store

corresponds exactly to the source code that you can view on GitHub.

And for that, you need reproducible builds.

As you said, Telegram is the only popular messaging app that does that.

We allow people to make sure, both on Android and iOS,

that the source code of Telegram on GitHub and the app you're actually using is the same app.

I think it's incredibly important, not just to gain people's trust, but just to stay transparent and open about it.

When I make this claim that Telegram's secret chats are the most secure

way of communicating, I really mean it because I haven't seen

any fact contradicting this claim.

At least among the popular messaging apps, you say WhatsApp,

Signal, iMessage.

None of them have reproducible reproducible builds on both iOS and Android.

None of them had, at least at the same level, put so much effort

into making sure

that the

algorithms that you use in order to encrypt data

are not algorithms that have been handed to you

by some agency

in order to create a honeypot.

At least

from what I know about our competitors,

I don't think they went through the same process.

So we should say that the entirety of the software stack in Telegram is done from scratch internally to Telegram.

So we're talking about not just the encryption, but everything running on the servers.

So the servers are built out, the hardware and the software are all done internally, which is one of the ways you reduce the attack surface on the entire stack that handles the messages.

Aaron Ross Powell, it does make it more secure.

Because

if Snowden's relations taught us anything, it's that very often

open source tools, modules, libraries that are used by everybody

ended up having certain flaws and security issues

that make your software vulnerable.

It's also a way

to make sure you're doing things the most efficient way possible.

But it's extremely difficult to do that.

You really have to have exceptional talent in your team to achieve this level of thoroughness, to go to a low level of coding that allows you to recreate from scratch database engines,

web servers, entire programming languages,

because the programming language we use on the back end

to develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.

Yeah, so removing, minimizing the reliance on open source libraries is extremely difficult.

Because

most companies, they rely on open source libraries.

Well, I wouldn't say we completely independent from that.

We use Linux on the back end.

There's no way of avoiding it for us at the moment.

But for the most part,

we are much more self-reliant

than most other apps.

You mentioned Edward Snowden.

A long time ago, you wanted to work together with him, perhaps to share expertise to understand

the full realm of this,

of what it takes to achieve cybersecurity.

What do you make of his case?

What lessons do you learn from what he has uncovered?

And

maybe even broadly, what impact has his work had on the world, do you think?

Well, the main lesson is not everything what it seems.

And you would

discover, and this is

something I found quite shocking at the time, that a lot of people

who you thought were

security and cryptography experts ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other,

promoting flawed encryption standards.

You wouldn't end up discovering that

your government that was supposed to be limited in how it can surveil its people

actually doesn't consider itself that limited.

And that was very

valuable for the world to understand.

I guess it also

can be a lesson demonstrating that we humans don't get the balance right.

So 9-11

created

a situation when the government had to respond

and it responded, but it overreacted.

It ended up in deroding certain basic rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy, because the government always wants to increase its powers and the government always tries to do it at the expense of citizens.

You have the situation when the cure is worse than the disease.

I think it was incredibly brave to do what Edward did.

I didn't get to work with him.

Whoever see him in person, we

keep in touch.

We sometimes communicate.

But we are not close.

I still think what he did is laudable.

I hope someday we meet.

You yourself have faced

the full force of various governments, intelligence agencies.

Is there any intelligence agency you're afraid of?

Any government you're afraid of?

I think they're all equally, should be equally afraid of, or equally not afraid of, in a way.

It's not that this intelligence service can kill you and the other can't kill you.

They all can kill you?

I guess they all can kill me, one way or the other.

But it's a matter of whether I'm afraid of death.

This goes back to the beginning of our conversation, I think, multiple times.

So you're in general fearless in the face of the pressure.

That would be a very bold statement, but I proved to be quite stress-resilient.

And it's not that you don't have fear.

You can have fear,

but you overcome this fear.

I don't think there is anything

at this point that can happen

to change the way I am.

So you went through a lot from 2011 to 2014, government pressure that you refused to give in to, that led you to create Telegram and let go of VK.

And then in 2018,

Russia and Iran decided to ban Telegram.

That was another example of pressure.

Can you take me through that saga in 2018?

So in 2018, Telegram started to become popular.

I think we had something like

200 million users.

And it increasingly became popular in places like Iran and Russia

and other countries where sometimes

people

have something to hide from the government.

In Iran, people used Telegram to protest against the government.

They had these huge channels that would they would use to organize

the protests.

And eventually the government couldn't keep up.

They decided to ban Telegram.

People would still keep using it though, using VPNs.

It didn't help.

The government

invested a lot in coming up with their own messaging app.

They had several teams competing for the title of the National Iranian Messaging App.

All these apps failed.

People still preferred Telegram.

Interestingly, Iran banned Telegram, but

WhatsApp wasn't banned.

Or at least they unbanned WhatsApp soon after.

At the same time,

starting in mid-2017 or late 2017, Russia demanded that Telegram hands them

the encryption keys.

They thought these things exist, something that would allow them to read messages of every person on Telegram, or at least every person on Telegram in Russia.

And we told them

it's impossible.

If you have to ban us, ban us.

and this is what they ended up doing

in spring 2018

and that was quite fun because

they were trying to block our ip addresses but we were prepared for that

and we came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones every time the sensor blocks our

existing addresses.

And then it was completely automated.

We had

millions of IP addresses.

We would be burning through them.

We set up this movement called digital resistance when system administrators and engineers all around the world, both inside and outside Russia, could set up their own proxy servers

and their own IP addresses for Telegram to rely on on in order to bypass censorship.

We ended up spending millions of dollars on that.

And as a result,

the sensor got crazy there.

There were banned IP addresses and larger subnets of IP addresses and

huge subnets, which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country's infrastructure started to go down.

Like people were trying to pay for groceries in the supermarkets, and

nothing would work

because the Russian censor blocked too many IP addresses.

And some of the subnets were used to host

other unrelated services.

Even some Russian social networks and media got affected.

Banks.

So they had to

start being more selective in how they combat

our anti-censorship tools.

The biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple.

Apple didn't allow us to

update Telegram in the App Store, saying

for at least four weeks that we have to come to an agreement with Russia first.

We said it's not possible.

They said we will allow you to push your update for Telegram worldwide, except for Russia.

We didn't want to do that.

I almost lost hope.

At some point, I said, you know, maybe

this is the only way.

Maybe we should leave the Russian market.

Stop

allowing users from Russia to download the app from the App Store, which would mean it's over.

We helped to organize certain protests in defense of Telegram and privacy and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow.

There was hilarious people flying paper airplanes.

I saw that.

And at some point I decided I have to make a statement.

I have to say that Apple sided with the sensor.

That we are trying to do the right thing here, but

without Apple, we can't do much.

Because people can't download your app anymore

i published it in my channel

and then new york times picked it up with the picture of the protesters flying paper airplanes apple was criticized in that story and i thought well

apple should probably

come back to the right side of history here

and i waited for one day and two two days.

In the meantime, since we've been unable to update Telegram for more than a month,

it started to

fall apart because

the new version of iOS came out

and it made

the old versions of Telegram obsolete.

Some features that used to work stopped working and users all over the world started to suffer.

People that had nothing to do with Russia from other parts of the world

experienced issues with Telegram.

So it was really serious and I said to my team, you know what, if

by 6 p.m.

today, I think it was a Friday,

nothing changes and Apple doesn't allow us to

push the version of Telegram through,

let's just forget about the Russian market.

Let's keep going because the rest of the world is more important.

It's sad, but what can we do?

Which, by the way, removes all the people that want to protest, all the people that want to talk in Russia.

It removes their ability to have a voice in the most popular messaging app in that part of the world.

Yes.

Magically, 15 minutes to the time I was planning to remove Telegram from the Russian app store in order to proceed globally,

Apple reached out to us

and said, it's okay.

Your update is approved.

And we managed to

keep

playing

this hide-and-seek game with the sensor, bypassing censorship through digital resistance.

In Iran, it was a little bit different because we realized it would have been too expensive to try to

come up with all these IP addresses

and in addition it was

not clear whether we wouldn't be in violation of the sanctions regime

so we did something else we created an economic incentive

for

people who would set up proxy servers for telegram

any

person

say an Iranian engineer could come up with a proxy server, distribute its address

among users in Iran, and whoever connected through the proxy of this person would be able to see a pinned chat, an ad

placed there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy.

And this is how you can monetize your proxy.

So it created this

market,

which

resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem

and as a result we kept millions or maybe tens of millions of Iranian users

up until this day I think telegram is still banned in Iran

today

but we probably have

something like 50 million people relying on telegram from that country So the people find a way around.

People find a way around.

That's ingenious.

That's really great to hear.

I have to ask you about this.

After having spent many days with you, I learned it's something that you've never talked about

at the time, have not talked about to this day,

that there was an assassination attempt on you.

using what appears to be poisoning in 2018.

I think to me it showed the seriousness of this fight to uphold the freedom of speech for everyone,

for all people of earth that you're doing.

I have to say, it would mean a lot to me if you told me this story.

Well, this is something I never talked about publicly because I didn't want people to freak out.

Particularly at the time, it was

spring 2018.

we were trying to raise funds for Tawn, a blockchain project, working with all kinds of

VCs and investors.

In the meantime, we had a couple of countries trying to ban Telegram,

so it wasn't exactly the best moment for me to start sharing anything related to my personal health.

But

that was something that

it's hard to forget.

That, you know, I never fall ill.

I have, I believe I have perfect health.

I very rarely have headaches

or bad cough.

I don't take pills because I don't have to take pills.

And that was the only instant in my life when I think

I was dying.

I came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented, had this weird neighbor, and he left something for me there on

the door.

And one hour after, when I was already in my bed,

so I was living alone,

I felt very bad.

I felt

pain all over my body.

I tried to get up and

go to the bathroom,

but while I was going there,

I felt that functions of my body started to switch off.

First, the

eyesight, then hearing,

then I had difficulty breathing,

everything accompanied by

very acute pain,

heart, stomach,

or blood vessels.

It's a difficult thing to explain.

But one thing I was certain about is, yeah, this is it.

You thought you were going to die?

Yeah, this is it because I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't see anything.

It was very painful.

I think it's over.

I thought, well, I have

had a good life.

I managed to

accomplish a few things.

And then I collapsed on the floor, but I don't remember it

because the pain covered everything.

I found myself

on the floor next day.

It was already bright.

And I couldn't stand up.

I was super weak.

I looked at my

arms,

with my body

blood vessels were broken all over my body.

Something like this never happened to me.

I couldn't walk for two weeks after.

I stayed at my place

and I decided not to tell most of my team about it because, again, I don't want it, I didn't want them to worry.

But it was tough.

That was tough.

Did that make you

afraid

of the road you're walking?

Meaning all the governments, all the intelligence agencies, all the people.

Like we mentioned, it's like you're playing a video game.

You started with VK where you're just trying to build a thing that scales, and all of a sudden you find out there's DDoS attacks attacking the

the security, the integrity of the infrastructure.

And then you realize there's politics, and then you realize there's geopolitics.

And all of these forces are interested in

controlling channels of communication.

And you're just

a curious guy who created a platform for everybody on the earth to talk.

And all of a sudden, you realize

there's a lot of people attacking you.

How did that change your view?

Did that make you more scared of the world?

Interestingly, not at all.

If anything, I felt even more free after that.

It wasn't the first time I thought I was going to die.

I had

an experience when I assumed

something bad is going to happen to me a few years before that,

also in relation to my work.

But

after you survive something like this, you feel like you're living on bonus time.

So, in a way, you died a long time ago.

And every

new day you get is a gift.

As a bonus.

Yes.

And the first time you're referring to, is that would that have to do with

the complexity that was happening with the pressure from the government on VK?

And then you had to figure out

the increasing pressure, and you had to figure out what to do.

And

you understood that you're losing control of VK at that moment?

The first of these instances was in December 2011.

December 2011, you had this huge protest on the streets of Moscow.

They

didn't trust in the integrity of the election results to the state Duma in Russia.

I remember 2011, I still lived in Russia

running VK.

There was no Telegram.

So the government demanded that we take down

the opposition groups of Navalny from VK

that

had

hundreds of thousands of members

and that were

used to organize this protest

and i very publicly refused to do that

i just

you know decided it's not the right thing to do people have the right to assemble and i mocked the prosecutor who handed me that

demand i put out a scan of it

and next to it

a photo of a dog in a hoodie with it its tongue out

And I said, this is my official response to the prosecutor's request to ban opposition groups.

That was very funny at the moment.

But then I had armed policemen trying to get into my

apartment.

And I thought about many things at that moment.

I asked myself,

did I make the right choice?

And I came to the conclusion that I made the right choice.

And I asked myself, what would be the next thing

that would logically follow from this?

And I realized

they're probably going to

put me in prison.

So what am I going to do about it?

I asked myself.

And I told myself, I'm going to starve myself

to death.

It's something that probably many men have.

They're ready to die for other people or certain principles they strongly believe in.

I'm not alone here.

I guess Edward Snowden was ready to die as well.

Or some other people like Assange.

Also, at that moment, I realized there is no way to communicate securely.

I need to tell my brother what's going on.

They're probably going after him.

How do I tell him

without betraying him?

Because in 2011,

remember, WhatsApp was already there.

I think they launched it in 2009,

but

it had zero encryption.

All messages were plain text in transit, meaning that even your system administrator, let alone your carrier, had access to your messages.

It was only after Telegram started this push for encryption that these other apps suddenly remembered that privacy wasn't their DNA,

as WhatsApp founders famously stated.

But it must have been a dormant gene in 2011.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In 2011, there was no way

to send a message in a secure way.

And I also told myself: if I'm going to survive this, I'm definitely launching a secure messaging app.

Somehow, it ended up not being too bad.

I was summoned to the prosecutor,

answered some silly questions,

fewer questions that I had to answer

more recently in the French investigation case.

but it was the beginning of the end it was clear that

there's no way I'm going to be allowed to run VK the way I wanted it to run

that was the moment I

packed my backpack

and just started to wait

just

they moved to hotel

and realized realized any day I can leave the country.

I kept

running VK.

I started to design Telegram

and assembling the team.

But I knew my days in Russia were numbered.

Well, first, I really have to say for myself, from,

I think,

millions, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe the entirety of earth, thank you for putting your life on the line in those cases.

I think freedom of speech is fundamental to the flourishing of humanity.

So

and it depends on people

willing to put everything on the line for their principles.

So thank you.

Quick pause.

I need a bath and break.

All right, we're back.

And once again, we had a super long day.

And the fact that you would spend many hours with me.

Thank you for powering through.

We got this.

It's already late at night.

Thanks for doing this.

Okay.

So

there is increasing indication, I think, from things I've seen online that Russia is considering banning telegram.

First of all, do you think this might happen?

And what effect do you think this might have on humanity?

And in general, what do you think about this?

It can definitely happen.

As you said, there are certain indications.

There have been certain test attempts to partially ban it.

Telegram is no longer accessible in parts of Russia, such as Dagestan.

And it would be incredibly sad if

Russia restarts its attempts to ban Telegram, because currently

it's been used by its population

for all kinds of purposes, not just personal communication or economic business activities,

but also it's

the only platform which allows the Russian people to access independent sources of information.

If you think about

media outlets such as BBC or any other

non-Russian source of information,

They're only accessible in Russia through Telegram in the form of Telegram channels.

Their websites are banned.

Some other social media sites are banned.

And as you said,

there are indications that Russia is

planning to migrate

users from existing messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram

to their own homegrown tool,

which would, of course, be fully transparent to the government and wouldn't allow voices independent from the government to express themselves.

It's certainly an alarming trend.

We see these attempts in countries that are not famous for

protecting freedom of speech, but also increasingly in countries that

have been known to protect freedoms.

And this creates this

vicious circle.

Because in a way,

European countries trying to fight freedom of speech

under

pretexts that sound legitimate, such as combating misinformation or election interference, they create precedents and they legitimize

restrictions to freedom of speech, which then in turn be used

by authoritarian regimes.

And they would say, in places like China or Iran,

that

they're not doing anything different.

It's the norm now

to restrict voices

that

don't go in line with the mainstream narrative.

That's sad because one of the things that makes our life interesting is this abundance

of different

viewpoints, of different people

that we get to experience.

You limit the freedom of people.

You inevitably decelerate economic growth, level of happiness, the way people can contribute to the society, the way people can express themselves.

I personally think it would be a huge mistake

to ban a tool like Telegram

in any country, particularly a large country such as Russia, because the Russian people are incredibly talented and resilient people.

They are among the first

to start utilizing some of these recent innovations that Telegram implements.

They are the early adopters.

I say them,

also the Americans, perhaps other people from Eastern Europe, like Ukrainians and Southeast Asians, they're among the first people to start using any new edition that we launch.

They're incredibly hungry for innovation.

So all that said, there's

as part of the propaganda and in general, there's attacks on you all over the place there's misinformation

I've read a bunch of things that are

I think in a systematic way

lying about you lying about telegram

from all angles why do you get attacked so much by everybody

we're protecting freedom of speech

is not a way to make it all friends

yeah

because you would inevitably find yourself in a situation where

you would be protecting the freedom of the opposition to the current government in any country

to express themselves.

And then

the initial reaction, and a very

basic, instinctive reaction of any

government would be to say, oh, our opposition

shouldn't be trusted and allowed to express themselves because they

actually are agents of some foreign

rival, a geopolitical force that wants to destroy our country.

This is something that

every authoritarian regime in history used.

You take

Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany,

Maoist China, they'd

always use the same trick.

They'd say, we need to limit your freedom of speech because

these people who are masquerading as opposition are actually

the agents of this other country that wants to take over.

That's why, dear citizens, forget about your freedoms.

And now increasingly you see similar attempts in

free countries.

The initial instinct from, say, President Macron's team when they're confronted with some footage.

For example, the footage of his wife slapping him

would be to say it's all fake

Russian

imagery, something that is

inaccurate, something that is misinformation or interference.

And then when they are confronted with more information, they have to refine the narrative.

So when

you find yourself in a situation that you're running this platform,

like Telegram, and then you protect the freedom to express

of

ideas that don't go in line with the mainstream narrative,

you

often find yourself

in this crossfire

when the forces in power will say that

you must be working with some foreign government that they don't like.

Inevitably they would say that, oh, if you're protecting these voices, it's not right.

They love you when you're protecting the freedom of speech in a country that is far from them or better yet, in a country that is their geopolitical rival.

They praise you for that.

But then

they have this this bipolar attitude

when you do the same in their own country.

And they say, no, no, no, no, no.

We love you for protecting freedom of speech, but not here, not in my backyard.

We don't need it here.

We are all right.

We have free press.

And then you will find yourself in this weird spot that

Ukrainians say you work for the Russians, the Russians say you work for the Ukrainians.

And all this schizophrenia is something that we had to deal with for some time

because it's a very easy way to attack you.

At some point, you don't understand where it is coming from.

Is it our competitors?

And we must give credit to our competitors if it's their invention to launch this kind of rumors, because

at a certain point, they must have realized they can't compete

technologically

on the product side so they must do something like this or it's just governments launching these rumors trying to discredit the platform trying to scare their citizens away from it because they understand that their

power and grip on their own country is in danger as long as they allow a pro-freedom platform to operate.

And through all of this, we should say over and over that you are simply preserving the freedom of speech for all people of Earth, no matter what they believe,

as long as they don't call for violence, and as long as they're not doing some of the criminal activity that we discussed, including terrorist organizing.

But other than that, it doesn't matter what they believe, left-wing or right-wing, you're just preserving their freedom of speech.

You think people of Ukraine, people of Russia, and people of Iran, people of all over the world understand that, despite the propaganda against you?

I think people are smart.

Every time I meet somebody from one of these countries you mentioned, in real life, people recognize me in the street, see here in Dubai.

They come over,

they seem incredibly grateful and understanding.

The propaganda in each of these countries

would tell them a number of things, but they learned to discount it.

That's why they're so happy that telegram exists, is because

the way they can

understand

the world around them is to receive conflicting, mutually exclusive viewpoints from sources that hate each other

and try to understand

what really is true.

Because there is no such thing as an unbiased source of information.

When the war

in Ukraine started in 2022,

I instantly realized Telegram is going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides.

And I didn't want Telegram to be used as a tool for war.

And I said, and I posted it publicly, I suggested maybe we should just

suspend the activity of all politics related channels in both countries for the time of the war

maybe we shouldn't have channels in these two countries

and then interestingly people from both countries

revolted against this

they told me with people in Ukraine and in Russia that I don't get to babysit them and decide for them

what sources of information that

they have to be granted access to.

They are grown-ups that can

make these decisions for themselves.

They understand that there is a lot of propaganda.

They learn to see through this propaganda.

They learn to able to tell truth from lie.

And in this time of war, it was particularly valuable for them

to receive

as much information as possible because their relatives, their friends

were getting affected and are still getting affected.

They want to understand what was going on.

At that moment, I realized people are smart.

People get it.

People can see through it.

If you ask most people in any of these countries, do you agree that

access to Telegram should be restricted for whatever reason?

They would say no.

They hunger to have a voice.

They need a voice and they need a place to share their opinion securely.

I have to ask in the question of leadership.

In the La Pointe interview, the journalist said that you're often compared to Elon Musk.

And you highlighted some interesting nuances around that, that you're quite different, that

Elon runs several companies at once while you only run one.

And Elon can lean more on the emotional side while you deliberate and think deeply before acting.

Can you expand on this?

Also, there's an interesting point that you made that everybody's weakness is also a strength.

Everybody's strength is also a weakness.

There's a dual nature to all our our characteristics so

on the topic of elon

what have you learned from his style of leadership what do you respect about him

first of all

i don't think there is such thing as

a negative personal trait in most cases our

bad traits and our good traits are the same trait or at least have the same source.

Of course, there are some extreme examples, examples, but I'd say 99% of people, if you analyze their character, their bravery can be seen in recklessness in other situations.

Like depending on circumstances,

you would see exactly the same personality trait

and it will be either a good thing or a bad thing.

Because humanity is perfect as a whole.

And each of us is different for for a reason.

We have evolved to be different,

to complement each other's abilities, so that together we're invincible.

And even if you take

a person

as complicated as Elan,

I believe that certain traits that Elon demonstrates

that people criticize about him

are also the sources of his strength.

For example, his emotionality

is derived from the fact that he cares about issues deeply

and he is willing to start as many wars and as many fights as it takes to change the world in the direction that

he thinks is right.

He also seems to be able to extract motivation from all these wars and personal conflicts,

which is again not something to be underestimated.

At a certain point in the life of a successful entrepreneur, the question of motivation starts to be the primary question.

If we are talking about the

richest person in the world and the most famous entrepreneur in the world,

you have to wonder how does he motivate himself?

And if

starting

a war

on X, debating certain issues,

or becoming personal with other CEOs,

criticizing them, if these activities help Elon

to innovate

and start new projects,

he should be doing more of it.

There's nothing wrong in

being

non-agreeable.

Actually, it's one of the main traits of a successful entrepreneur,

not agreeing with things.

And every time somebody like Elon, but there is no somebody like Elon, it's just Elon.

I think,

at least from the entrepreneurs I know, and I personally interacted with, he's unique in the sense that that he keeps launching new things,

running them in parallel,

and he doesn't seem to be stretched too thin.

Well, some people think he is, but

he manages to still demonstrate

success

in all or most of his endeavors.

So, again, you can criticize Elon for being emotional, but would he be the same person

without this?

I doubt that.

And the incredible teams he's motivated too.

There's an element of that, which you've spoken about, the team at Telegram.

You know,

assembling a team of

A players, as we've talked about, is a skill in itself.

And that's also a big part of the

leaders that we've discussed.

It's like what judged in part by the team you assemble.

Yes, and one of the necessary character features to enable that is to be ready to be unpleasant.

You have to be ready to insult some people if their work

is inferior.

You have to be ready to fire them without remorse.

So in order to be an efficient, a great entrepreneur and enrich the world of innovations,

You have to do unpleasant things.

Most people will shy away from it.

And

in a certain sense, entrepreneurs sacrifice their peace of mind

in order to

contribute to the world around them.

And Elon is a great example of that.

I have to ask you about the big picture telegram.

We've already talked about the fact that you own own 100% of it.

And there's a lot of, on the business side of it, the business structure of Telegram is fascinating.

You've invested hundreds, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of your money.

As far as I know, you take a salary of what, $1?

One dirham.

It's one third of that.

One-third of a dollar.

And in 2024 was the first time Telegram was profitable.

So one of the interesting questions is here that we could talk for many hours about, but I'd love to get a high-view picture.

So

you've left what I understand,

what I think is a huge amount of money on the table by sticking to your principles.

For example, not doing advertisement that's based on user-private data, which basically every social media company does.

So the only advertisement that Telegram does is based on channels and groups, based on the topic, not the private data of the individuals.

And the other thing is, which is also gangster and incredible, is you don't do a news feed,

which is the most addictive and

engagement-inducing aspect of social media, which feeds the very kind of

addictive downside of the Internet.

The d distraction, the engagement, drama farming aspect that we've talked about in the very beginning that you tried to resist, that you think is damaging the human mind at scale.

So, anyway, that's just speaking to the fact that you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

So, how the hell were you able to be profitable?

What are the ways the telegram makes money?

Yeah, we had to innovate a lot in order to reach a point where we are profitable

without having to resort to

dubious business activities involving exploiting personal data of users,

something that most of our competitors do.

Because money has never been the primary goal, at least not for me.

When I sold

the remaining share of my first company,

I had to do it below market price because

I didn't leave Russia completely without any pressure, pressure, as you know.

I reinvested the vast majority of everything

in Telegram.

Telegram is an operation that is losing money for me personally.

I never I didn't extract more from Telegram than I invested in it.

I never s sold a single share.

But I also didn't want to sell Telegram, so how do you reach a point when you're profitable without sacrificing your values?

One of the ideas we explored was a subscription model, but only for certain additional features.

We wanted to keep all the existing features free and just add

more

business-related tools or tools for advanced users that they would have to pay for, say, four or five dollars a month.

It

was quite unprecedented at the time.

It wasn't considered a viable option for messaging apps to do that.

We launched the premium subscriptions for Telegram in

2022,

and now we have over 15 million paid subscribers.

This is

some

very significant recurring revenue.

we would

receive

more than half a billion dollars from premium subscriptions alone this year and it's growing fast.

For that we had to innovate a lot.

We included over 50 different features into the premium package

and then how do you make an app that is already more powerful than any other other messaging app on the market

even more useful so that people will be ready to pay for this extra that wasn't easy that took a lot of effort and you're constantly adding features we're constantly adding features it's actually fun to watch just the rate of adding and some of them are subtle like the updates the in improvements expansions of polls for example yes you keep improving the existing features and adding new ones and every time when you add a new feature, you don't want to clutter the app.

So, in a way, they are not in your way, they are invisible.

That's not an easy thing to do.

And most of the features maybe are not even known to

the majority of our users.

But when you need them, they're there.

So, premium is one source of our revenue.

We also have ads, but they're context-based,

not targeted.

Of course, we leave probably

80% of value

on the table because we are not ready to engage in all these practices, exporting personal data.

Just to be clear, targeted ads is what most social media companies, most tech companies that do any kinds of advertisement do.

And that's the kind of advertisement that uses

personal data from users.

Just to clarify.

And when you said 80%, that's a lot of money.

Of course, because we would never use, for example, your personal messaging data or your contacts data or your metadata or your activity data to target ads.

It's

sad that it became synonymous with the internet industry,

this kind of exploitation.

But we are happy with the fact that we managed to make Telegram profitable despite that.

We are also experimenting a lot with blockchain-based technologies.

We're the first app to allow people to directly own their username and their digital identities using smart contracts and NFTs.

Removing Telegram from the picture, so for example, Telegram cannot confiscate your username from you.

It's impossible.

We do a lot of things related to the ecosystem of Telegram.

We have a thriving mini-app platform, millions of mini-app developers launching their own bots and applications.

So a lot of people are making millions of dollars on the Telegram platform.

Yes.

We enabled them to

receive

payments from the users through

in-app purchase mechanism provided by Apple and Google, which I think was the first attempt of this kind

to allow that both on iOS and Android and on a big platform, so that third-party developers of mini apps, which are basically websites so deeply integrated into Telegram that you can't tell whether they're standalone or they're a part of their overall experience.

And by providing this payment option, we are able to extract

a commission

from these transactions.

But it's a very low commission presently, it's 5%.

So we're not greedy here.

We want people to

succeed in building these tools for our users.

We understand that

many apps bring us users.

The more users we have, the more successful and relevant Telgrim becomes.

We need third-party developers.

I think at this point, Telegram gives developers by far the most powerful tools to create.

Plus, there's a bot API.

And I mean, you have to tell me about the TON blockchain and the crypto ecosystem available through Telegram.

So, what is Ton,

aka the open network blockchain?

Ton is a blockchain technology that we initially developed in 2018 and 2019.

And we started to develop it because we needed a blockchain platform to be integrated deeply into Telegram.

Because we believe in blockchain.

We think it's one of the technologies that enabled freedom.

But at the time, if you look at Bitcoin, if you look at Ethereum,

they were not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users will create.

They would just become congested.

And I asked my brother, can we create a blockchain platform that would be inherently scalable so that no matter how many users or transactions there are, it would split into smaller pieces, which we call short chains, and would still process all transactions.

And he thought for a few days and said, yes, it's possible, but it's not easy.

And we started building it.

We ended up succeeding in developing that technology, but we couldn't release it

because

the SEC, the Securities and Exchanges Commission in the United States, was unhappy with the way

the fundraise for Dawn was conducted.

So we had to abandon the project and

the open source community took over.

Luckily,

because we constantly conducted those contests for third-party developers, there was a thriving community around TON,

which now stood for the open network, as opposed to its prior name, Telegram Open Network.

And so this project

got eventually launched

without our direct involvement.

And it's thriving now because everything we do, like I said, this blockchain-based,

tokenized usernames, Telegram accounts are all based on Don and its smart contracts.

It's the only way for third-party developers and creators

to withdraw the funds that they earn through our revenue sharing programs.

For example, with channel owners, we do a 50-50 split of ad revenues.

It's also the only way to transact on Telegram.

For example, if you want to buy ads on Telegram, you should use Tawn.

All the new things we launch, for example, let's say

gifts that we mentioned earlier,

which you can define as a

reinvented socially relevant NFT

integrated into a billion user ecosystem, but at the same time available on-chain, transferable, which you can own directly, also based on TON.

Incredibly fast-growing space.

We only launched them half a year ago.

And now as a result of this Telegram gifts, TON has become,

I think, the largest or the second largest blockchain

in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.

So yeah, like you mentioned, it is a layer one technology as opposed to being built on top of Ethereum or Bitcoin.

And it's able to achieve the scale and the speed of transactions that's needed for something like Telegram.

And like you also mentioned, the gifts.

You recently launched

some Snoop Dogg gifts.

Is there going to be some other celebrities in the pipeline?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Snoop.

And that's why when they reach out, suggest to do something together, say, let's launch some Snoop related gifts.

And it was really fun.

We managed to sell

twelve million worth of gifts within thirty minutes.

Thirty minutes.

Well, there you go.

I even got a few, but yeah.

After this, we have many requests from

many really high-profile influencers that, in a way, are lining up.

So, from my perspective as a fan, it's just interesting to see what kind of art you create for any kind of celebrities, athletes, musicians, because

the Snoop gifts are all just like going back to our previous conversation, just beautiful pieces of art

that

encapsulate certain memes,

certain aspects of Snoop that everybody knows, these cultural icons that he represents.

It's cool.

It's just

and the detail, the incredible detail of the art of the individual gifts, is just incredible.

And each of these gifts is scalable because it's vector-based.

It references certain points in Snoop's

creative biography.

And each of them has countless different versions.

We had to create over 50 distinctive versions of each.

And then each individual piece is unique because it also has a unique background, unique icon, and the background.

It's something that we reinvented because we didn't like the old school NFTs.

First of all, they were

not relevant socially because, okay, you have an NFT,

where do you demonstrate it?

A Telegram or Telegram gift is there next to your name.

It's part of your digital identity on Telegram.

And then you can create collections of gifts and show it off on your profile page.

But it also, the other thing that we wanted to reinvent is the aesthetic part of it.

Most NFTs are just ugly.

And they are not based on any sophisticated technology.

So, what what we did with Snoob's gifts, I think

represents an example of

beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, and at the same time

very accurate in terms of references to this specific artist's biography mixture.

between art and technology, which I think is quite rare.

I'm quite proud of it.

I think it's a new trend, a new phenomenon.

It's only half a year old.

So let's see where it goes.

We're going to select our next

influencer or artist to be part of it.

Hey, listen, I'm really proud.

I got a Snoop gift next to my name.

And I figured out that you can add even more by pinning them.

It's like a cool little art icon.

We didn't expect it, by the way.

We just had a lot of fun launching these things.

And then we realized that one of the first collections we issued, we sold each piece at something like

$5.

And then

the minimum price of any items in these collections currently is something like $10,000.

And it keeps going up.

I was quite surprised with the reception.

I realized

when you are trying to monetize social media platforms in a way that is consistent with your values, you're forced to find

ways that benefit your users, not exploit them.

People love these gifts.

People love the fact that they can congratulate a person close to them with something valuable and at the same time, something beautiful.

Also, some people make a business out of it, which is funny.

They resell these gifts.

We recently met a guy who earned several million dollars

just from buying and selling gifts.

It's a real market.

It's a real market.

It's just something that he did in a few months.

And last year, when we launched

many new features for the mini apps on Telegram and

the payment options for them and the other monitor options, the same guy earned $12 million dollars

from mini apps.

And I know several people just anecdotally,

I earned ten million dollars, earned three million dollars just a matter of months, single-handedly.

Sometimes they would have a team of two, three people.

So whenever I hear stories from people who

were able to build businesses on top of Telegram, this makes me incredibly proud.

Yeah, mini apps include games, they include

like tools, services of any kind.

It's an app within the ecosystem of Telegram.

Let me ask you about crypto in general.

So you've you've been an early supporter of cryptocurrencies,

Bitcoin.

You've bought in into Bitcoin early on.

You kept buying.

Maybe you could speak to the reasoning why you kept buying Bitcoin.

Do you think Bitcoin will go to a million dollars?

Do you think it'll keep increasing?

And Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies

i was a big believer in bitcoins since more or less the start of it

i got to buy my first few thousand of bitcoin in 2013 and i didn't care much i think i bought at the local maximum it's something like seven hundred dollars per bitcoin and i just threw a couple of millions there

and a lot of people after bitcoin later next year went down,

somewhere close to 300, 200,

started to express

their

sympathy to me.

They say, oh, you're a poor fellow.

You made this horrible mistake investing in this new thing, but

don't feel bad about it.

We still have some respect for you.

And my response to them were, I don't care.

I'm not going to sell it.

I believe in this thing.

I think this is the way money should work.

Nobody can confiscate your Bitcoin from you.

Nobody can censor you

for political reasons.

This is the

ultimate

means of exchange.

And again, I'm now talking about Bitcoin, but it relates to cryptocurrencies in general.

So I have been able to fund my

lifestyle, so to say, from my Bitcoin investment.

Some people think if I'm able to rent nice locations or

fly private, it's because I somehow extract money from Telegram.

But like I said, Telegram is a money-losing operation for me personally.

Bitcoin is something that allowed me to

stay afloat.

And I believe it will come to a point when Bitcoin is worth $1 million.

Just look at the trends.

The governments keep printing money like no tomorrow.

Nobody is printing Bitcoin.

There is...

a predictable inflation and then it stops at a certain point.

Bitcoin is here to stay.

All the fiat currencies remain to be seen.

Let me ask you a deeply philosophical, serious question.

In your first Tucker interview, you had two interesting chairs in the background.

I think they reference a now legendary meme.

The choice is Pikitachone, ili huidracion.

What is the philosophical wisdom in the dilemma that these two chairs present?

Have you had to face the dilemma yourself, personally?

Not this exact dilemma.

I think this is

a riddle that people have to face in Russian prisons.

And metaphorically,

it's describing all the situations where you're presented a choice between two suboptimal options.

When you're running a big business or when you're running a large country, it is similar.

You sometimes face face this dilemma.

What are you going to do?

This very horrible thing or this also very horrible thing?

So I think the right answer to this riddle is

not to do any of these things.

Reframe the question.

Design a solution that turns

a disadvantage into an advantage

and then

use it

to cope with the other side of the problem.

So do you know the answer to that riddle?

No, somebody on the internet said

which is

basically

try to avoid the situations where such dilemmas present themselves or there is no right answer.

This is one of the ways to answer this question.

If you got to a tricky situation that probably earlier you made a certain mistake, you fucked up already.

It should have been avoided.

But the other quite creative answer to this question is that

you

take the sharp objects from one of the chairs or the spikes

and then they use them to cut off the objects from the other chair.

And you know what objects I'm talking about.

That's a very engineering solution.

I'm glad somebody came up with that.

I believe this is the right answer.

We are often being manipulated

by politicians, by corporate leaders,

to make a choice from two suboptimal options.

And then, when we are forced to make this choice, and we make this choice, it's almost as if it's something that we have to assume responsibility for.

I don't think we should be buying into that.

Okay, on this theme of absurdity and ridiculousness, let me.

There's an object here that

appeared in the

not many people seem to have noticed this.

People should go watch your excellent conversation in the Oslo Freedom Forum behind you.

I'm no archaeologist, but I believe this is a

how how should I put it a

walrus penis bone

and it was behind you.

You told me that you

that you brought it with you to France and back to Dubai.

I assume it brings you luck of some sort.

What's what's the what what why did you bring it with you everywhere?

Is it kind of like um you know, in America they have a wishbone?

Is it just a large wishbone?

Because a wishbone brings you luck.

And I should also point out that, just like with Telegram, with the art, there's tiny little walruses.

And thanks to you, I had to also find out that a lot of mammals have a bone inside their penis.

And the evolutionary advantage, I guess, of having a bone is quite obvious.

It actually raises the question of why humans don't have an actual bone inside their penis.

A lot of questions there.

That's a very interesting subject.

The reason I have this is because the

tribe that is uh

almost gone extinct in Siberia and Mongolia, called the Venki, passed me this gift from them.

Normally they would craft something like this only for their most respected leaders.

It is supposed to be a token of their appreciation for bravery, courage, leadership.

Ironically, it also translates

in a very specific way into the Russian language.

In Russian, walruses penis means something

a bit funny, which is often used to describe nothing.

So for example, if you're being requested by, say, certain government

or a certain business partner

to provide something you that you're not willing to provide,

you can just politely

have this

penis bone in the background while you're doing the video call

and hope that they would

through osmosis figure out the deep message.

It is an indirect

rebellion.

By the way, in the form of Soviet Union, there was,

and in a lot of places throughout history, some of the rebellion had to take this kind of symbolic metaphoric form through poetry, through children's stories.

It's

the beauty of human language and art that we're able to do that.

Say FU to whatever forces that try to overpower us.

We say FU through poetry, through art, and sometimes through a rather large walrus penis bone.

carried by what appears to be either a happy sumo wrestler or a cat of some sort.

They asked a lot of questions about this

walrus's penis bone

in the airport,

both here in the UAE and in France.

They are always very interested in this thing.

There seems to be some confusion over how many kids you have.

It's often said to be over 100.

Can you explain

how many kids you have?

The truthful answer to this question is I don't really know how many biological kids I have exactly,

because at a certain point in my life, about 15 years ago, I decided

that

it was a good idea to be a sperm donor.

Initially, a friend of mine asked me to help

because they were trying to have a baby with his wife, and

they experienced certain health issues that prevented them to do it the natural way.

And he asked me,

he told me we don't want to just rely on some random anonymous genetic material.

We want somebody we know and respect to be the biological father of our kid.

And I said,

you got to be kidding me.

It sounds ridiculous.

What are you even talking about?

But then I realized

it's actually a serious issue.

and they were not the only couples struggling with that.

So, eventually, I got persuaded into doing more of it.

I can't say I'm incredibly proud of that, but I think it was the right thing to do, particularly at the time when I thought, okay, I probably don't have much time

on this planet left.

Things are getting trickier and trickier.

So, if I can help some couples have babies, let's do it.

And then, more recently, when I was working on my will,

I realized that

I shouldn't make a distinction between the kids conceived naturally

and the kids who are just my biological kids that I never seen.

As long as

they can establish their

shared DNA with me,

someday, maybe in 30 years from now,

they have to be

entitled for a share of my estate after I'm gone.

And that made a lot of noise in the news for some reason.

People get very excited by this kind of news.

I got a lot of messages from people claiming they're my kids.

I got a lot of requests from people asking me to adopt them.

The memes were priceless, but understanding that

no, it's not a thing that most people do.

I don't see anything wrong with it.

If anything, I think more people should

be donating sperm.

So, yeah, we should say, like, the hundred plus kids is from that, and you also have naturally conceived kids.

And it was a pretty bold decision to,

from a financial perspective, to treat them all equally.

And also quite interesting was that

you

kind of

said that they don't receive any money for the first few decades of their life.

Can you describe that thinking?

Yeah, I think overabundance

paralyzes motivation and willpower.

It's extremely harmful, particularly for young boys, to grow up in an environment where they can be proud not of their own achievements, but of

their father's achievements, of their father's wealth.

This

removes

the incentive to

work

on

developing their own skills,

removes the incentive to study, to work.

So I thought if if they're gonna

have this

money,

it should be something that they would

only get

when they're already adult.

It's still risky.

But one of the reasons I decided it makes more sense to divide this

huge wealth that

I'm likely to leave behind

among

a hundred or more than a hundred people is that it won't be too much

for

every single

descendant.

But at the same time,

some people did the calculation.

It's still

many, many millions of dollars for each child.

So I'm not sure it

helps too much.

On the topic of abundance, offline, we had a lot of fascinating philosophical discussions, one of which was about the mouse paradise experiment, also known as Universe 25.

It's an experiment from the 1960s and early 70s conducted by ethologist John B.

Calhoun.

And we can talk about this one for hours also, I'm sure.

But it was an experiment with a few hundreds of individual mice compartments.

And they provided them with unlimited food, water, nesting, no predators, stable temperatures, and frequent cleaning.

Basically, the definition of a buttons as far as mice go.

And the interesting aspect of this experiment is that at first the population doubled, it grew very quickly, but then it leveled off

and certain really negative social things started happening.

Like mothers neglected to kill their young, violent attacks and hypersexual activity became widespread.

Some quote-unquote beautiful ones, largely inactive, well-groomed mice, withdrew, refusing to mate or interact.

So all of these kind of societal qualities that we see as negative for the functioning of a society started to emerge because of the abundance.

And finally, the collapse.

The reproduction rates crashed.

Social dysfunction spread to the next generation, and eventually just went extinct.

It didn't just plummet to a low level.

It plummeted steadily to zero, despite the fact that there was ongoing resource abundance.

As

this description states, the last mouse died surrounded by untouched food and water.

So, I mean, there's deep wisdom to that about abundance.

It seems you've mentioned this in different contexts throughout this conversation is it seems like scarcity, it seems like constraints,

it seems like non-abundance is essential for human flourishing, which is a counterintuitive notion.

It's true for mice and I think it's probably true for humans too.

We have evolved to overcome scarcity.

Almost by definition, there has never been such thing as

infinite amount of food

or entertainment in our lives before

now.

We seem as a species to lose our ability

to identify purpose in a world where you have everything

and everything loses its meaning.

Restrictions are important.

I think, though, that they should be coming from within.

It should be self-restriction rather than restriction

in order to create purpose and meaning in life.

In a way I was lucky in a very

counterintuitive way because

I grew up poor.

I didn't have money when I was a teenager.

I had the same jacket for years

which was bought on a second hand marketplace.

My father wouldn't receive

salary as a university professor for months because

the Russian state was almost bankrupt back then.

My mom had to

juggle two jobs

to take care of us.

It was not easy, but it also created purpose.

It created meaning.

It created priorities.

It allowed us to focus on things that mattered, allowed us to

develop our character and intellectual abilities.

Now, if we had everything,

why do anything?

This mice

suffered societal collapse

that was irreversible.

And this

is not an accident.

This kind of experiment has been repeated countless times.

At a certain point, social dysfunction and the erosion of social roles becomes contagious.

And the society gradually degrades into

a chaotic collection of individuals unable to take care of the next generation or even even to produce the next generation.

And it goes extinct.

It's fascinating because we're creating technologies and this is what AI is proposing to our future generations

as a problem to solve, which is AI may very well create abundance.

And so we will be like these mice potentially.

whether it's AI or other kinds of technologies that increase and give more and more to all of us.

And it is a thing that is good, decrease the amount of suffering in the world, increase the quality of life.

But as we reach towards that abundance,

the fabric that connects us, rooted in our biology that's developed by evolution,

might create a real challenge for us.

We should find the right balance between chaos and order,

between self-restriction and freedom for creativity.

Your father recently celebrated his 80th birthday.

You had a conversation with him.

He gave you some life advice.

I think you mentioned to me one of the things he said was not to just

speak of your principles, but to live them, to lead by example.

I think this is something you already do well.

Maybe can you speak to what you've learned about life from your father?

Maybe some of the lessons he told you on in the conversation you've had with him on his birthday?

I'm incredibly lucky to

have my father.

He's a person who wrote

countless books on ancient Rome and ancient Roman literature,

dozens of scientific papers.

And I always remember him working.

He would be busy

typing his books and articles on an old school typewriter back in the late 80s, early 90s.

He was relentless.

The example he said to myself and my brother was priceless.

Some people make this mistake of thinking that

you can instill the right principles

in the future generation or into your kids by saying things to them.

But kids are smart.

They discount words.

They look at the actions.

So observing our father

was

a big lesson by itself.

It wasn't necessary for him to say anything to us.

And then at the same time, he was incredibly patient.

emotionally resilient.

And you know, my mom,

great woman, incredibly smart, highly educated,

but

she would sometimes

try to test the patience of my father.

And it's a

straight-rooted in our biology.

It's an there's an evolutionary explanation for that.

women sometimes tend to do that

and he demonstrated incredible patience all the time

He told me recently,

you shouldn't give

the wrong example to the people around you, and in particular to your kids, because you can do the right thing nine times out of ten, but you make a mistake once, and they will instantly copy it.

If you're telling your kids not to use a smartphone, but you're using a smartphone all the time yourself,

and coming up with all kinds of sophisticated, brilliant brilliant explanations why they shouldn't be using a smartphone.

It won't land.

It's bound to fail.

So you lead by example.

And there are other

numerous lessons: staying positive, looking at the bright side, never despair, be honest.

And you know, he told me last time I spoke to him that AI can have consciousness, can be creative, creative, but it cannot have conscience in a way.

It cannot be moral.

It cannot have deeply rooted principles.

It cannot have integrity in the meaning that we understand it as human beings.

I love the fact that you're talking to your eight-year-old father.

You're talking about

AGI

and the difference between human, the human spirit, human nature, and what AGI, AI, is able to achieve.

And conscience is the thing that

humans have.

The ability to know the right from wrong.

This is the lesson that he gave me.

One of my goals in life is never to disappoint him.

Another thing we've talked about,

which I think is a fascinating topic,

is the power of the mind, power of thought.

Do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it, by manifesting it into being?

What do you think?

There are many explanations why it works.

One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident

does allow you to achieve

the things you want to achieve.

It's very hard to believe, though, that you can just manifest things into being without applying

effort in the direction that seems to be logical.

Maybe some people exist that can just sit on the bank of a river and materialize things by the power of their thought.

But

I'm not sure I'm one of these people

always found it more easy to believe that if you couple this optimism and faith

with

logical action,

then it is bound

to be successful.

Prolonged effort, hard work,

coupled with positive focus thinking about the thing.

Oh, yes, over many, many, many days.

It is possible to imagine our world as a high-dimensional universe where humans have the ability to navigate through it with the power of

belief,

which is coupled with

positive emotion

and logical thinking.

But we are getting into an esoteric realm.

We don't have any proof of that.

But we also know that we probably

at this point haven't discovered even 1%

about this universe.

I agree with you fully, and I like what you said in the way you were thinking about it.

You've told me before that maybe there's a way that with effort and with a focused mind you can shape, you can morph the sort of landscape of probabilities around you.

And it's a nice way to visualize it that somehow our effort and our focus

changes

the things that are likely and less likely.

And by focusing on it, we make the thing more and more likely.

At least as an estimate, as the kind of field that we, through our thoughts and our actions, change that field.

And then there's 8 billion of us doing so.

And together, there's this collective intelligence that creates the world we see around us,

like the

mice.

And like you said, us as a humanity together are perfect.

I like that you said that.

I admire your belief in the fact that we get to experience

this together, because it's not obvious.

Maybe each of us experiences its own or her own universe.

And maybe every second the universe splits into a billion of different universes.

And everything that can happen happens.

And there is a universe where

Say I died in 2013.

Maybe every time I die, I actually actually get to shift to a parallel universe when I don't die.

And then it keeps going.

And at certain points,

we achieve this quantum immortality when we're 1,000 years old.

But a lot of people from

other versions of reality

think

we are long gone.

Yeah, this is something you explained to me, the idea of quantum immortality, which is a thought experiment, which I find deeply fascinating.

People should look into it, which is a very crisp, clean consequence of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, that we as conscious beings can't experience our death.

We can only,

as we branch into these

many worlds, only the living consciousnesses get to experience it.

So in some sense, yeah, there's many universes.

If we're to seriously take the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there's many universes where you died many times, especially you.

And I'm glad we're in a universe where we get to share the table with this impressive bone, a little humor, and a lot of serious

topics covered today.

Once again, I can't say enough.

Ajay and thank you for me.

And Ajayan, thank you from hundreds of millions of people that follow your work

for

you fighting for the freedom of all of us to speak and creating a platform where we can do so.

And thank you so much for talking today, brother.

It's been an honor getting to know you and to be able to call you a friend.

Thank you for saying that.

I'm also incredibly grateful

to you and to the fact that I happen to be in this version of reality when I haven't died at least yet.

And hopefully,

we'll get to spend more fun moments in the years to come together.

Thank you, Mr.

Thank you for listening to this conversation with Pavel Durov.

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

And now, let me try to articulate some things I've been thinking about.

If you'd like to submit questions or topics like this for me to talk about in the future, go to lexfriedman.com/slash AMA.

I'd like to use this opportunity to talk about Franz Kafka, one of my favorite writers.

The reason he has been on my mind is that his work, The Trial and the Case of Pavel Durov in France, has,

let's say, eerie parallels, both metaphorically and literally.

Of course, The Trial is a work of fiction, but I think it is often useful to go to the surreal world of literature, even of the over-the-top dystopian variety, like 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Trial, The Castle, and Metamorphosis, even The Plague by Albert Camus, all to better understand our real world and the destructive paths we have the potential to go down together, which also hopefully helps us understand how to avoid doing so.

So let me zoom out and speak about Franz Kafka.

Who was he?

He was an insurance clerk who wrote at night.

He died young and almost completely unknown, and he asked for his manuscripts to be burned.

Luckily for us, his friend, Max Broad, refused to do so, giving us the work of what I consider to be one of 20th century's greatest writers.

In his work, Kafka wrote about the cold, machine-like reduction of humans to case files through the labyrinth of institutional power.

He wrote about an individual's feeling of guilt even when a crime has not been committed.

Or, more generally, he wrote about the feeling of anxiety that is part of the human condition in our modern, chaotic world.

His writing style was to use short, declarative sentences to describe the surreal and the absurd, and in so doing, effectively, I think, convey the feeling of an experience versus simply describing the experience.

For example, famously, his work The Metamorphosis opens with the following lines.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

He was lying in his hard, armor-plated back, and when he lifted his head a little, he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff, arched segments, on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position, and was about to slide off completely.

His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

Kafka, I think, effectively uses this image of being transformed into a giant bug stuck on his back to convey a feeling of helplessness and uselessness to his family, to his job, to society, the feeling of being a burden to everyone, dehumanized, alienated, and abandoned, the feeling of being only temporarily valued as long as he served some function for his job or for his family, and quickly discarded otherwise.

I will probably talk about this work in more depth at another time because it is so haunting, and I think it is such a profound description of the burden of existence in modern society for many people.

But here, let me talk about another of his work, the trial.

In this novel, the main character, Joseph Kay, is a successful bank officer, and he is arrested on his birthday for an unspecified crime by a kind of amorphous court whose authority is everywhere and nowhere.

He navigates a labyrinth-like legal system where everyone knows about his case, but no one can really explain it.

The so-called trial never actually occurs in any conventional sense.

Instead, Joseph Kaye's entire life becomes the proceedings leading up to the trial.

In a sense, the trial is the state of being accused itself, a permanent condition rather than a singular event.

Kafka's genius in this work was to show that modern institutions don't need to hold trials.

They just need to hold you in the permanent looming possibility of one.

Public attention to this case, both positive and negative, gives Joseph Kay a feeling of constantly being judged by people around him.

This wears at his mind, and his psychological well-being begins to deteriorate.

In a sense, the trial doesn't need to convict him.

The internal psychological turmoil and the external social scrutiny performs the conviction and the eventual execution.

When exactly one year after his arrest, Joseph Kay is visited by two men who walk him courteously through the city to an abandoned quarry and stab him in the heart without Joseph K resisting.

To me, the trial shows that tyranny's final victory isn't when it kills you, but when when you hold still for the knife, not because you're forced, but because you've been exhausted into submission.

Once again, it is a haunting story of the soullessness of bureaucracy in its suffocation of the human spirit.

I highly recommend this short book, and I'll probably talk about it even more in the future.

I don't think it's especially useful for me to speak to any parallels between the trial and Polodirov's case, because after all, the the trial is a work of fiction.

But on a positive note, let me report that as far as I saw, Pavel has maintained optimism and a general positive outlook throughout this whole process.

What I always fear in such cases is that a bureaucratic system can wear people down, exhaust them into surrendering.

I saw none of that with Pavel.

I don't think he knows how to give up or give in, no matter how much pressure he's under.

Again, this is truly inspiring to to me.

Also, now that we're talking about it, let me mention some other of Kafka's work that was moving to me.

The Castle has a similar description as the trial does of the absurd inaccessibility of those in authority, of the nightmarish bureaucracy.

The character in the castle is also named K.

Both bureaucracies operate through exhaustion, endless deferrals, procedures, waiting rooms.

Again, highly relevant to modern times.

I can also highly recommend Kafka's in the penal colony and Hunger Artist.

Both are too interesting and weird to explain in depth here.

But let me say the Hunger Artist is a story that I think is relevant to our modern day attention economy where so many people want to be famous.

It tells the story of, let's say, professional faster who performs starvation in a cage as entertainment, and he slowly loses his audience to newer spectacles, so much so that eventually, when he starves himself to death, nobody cares.

Kafka's work is heavy.

It serves as a warning for the nightmare that civilization can become.

And yet, I think it is also a source of optimism.

Because when we can recognize elements of our own world in Kafka's stories, when we can see elements of our institutions in the trial or in the castle, when we can see ourselves in Gregor Samza, we're not just diagnosing the disease, we're proving that we're still human, and wise enough to see it and name it.

Kafka gave us the goal, to resist against such systems that try to dehumanize us, and to ensure that individual freedom and the human spirit keep flourishing.

I think it will.

I have faith in us humans.

I love you all.