Kind: captions
Language: en
The following is a conversation with
Pavo Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram,
a messaging platform actively used by
over 1 billion people. Pavo has spent
his life fighting for freedom of speech,
building tools that protect human
communication from surveillance and
censorship. For this, he has faced
pressure from some of the most powerful
governments and organizations on Earth.
In the face of this immense pressure, he
has always held his ground, continuously
fighting to protect us of privacy and
the freedom of all of us humans to
communicate with each other. I got the
chance to spend a few weeks with him and
can definitively say that he is one of
the most principled and fearless humans
I've ever met.
Plus, when I posted that I'm hanging out
with Pavle, a lot of people, fans of
his, wrote to me asking if he does, in
fact, privately live the disciplined,
aesthetic life he's known for. No
alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and
exercise, including a crazy amount of
daily pull-ups and push-ups, no phone
except to occasionally test Telegram
features, and so on. Yes, he is 100%
that guy, which made the experience of
hanging out with him really inspiring to
me. I'm grateful for it and I'm grateful
to now be able to call him a friend.
This podcast conversation is in parts
philosophical about freedom, life, human
nature, and the nature of government
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 did it first.
So, we discuss it all from the
Kuffka-esque situation he's in the midst
of in France to the roller coaster of
his life and career to his philosophy on
technology, freedom, and the human
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. On YouTube, you can switch
between language audio tracks by
clicking the settings gear icon, then
clicking audio track, and then selecting
the language you prefer.
Huge thank you once again to 11 Labs for
their help with translation and dubbing
and with the bigger mission of breaking
down barriers that language creates.
They are truly one of the most
remarkable companies I've ever had the
pleasure of working with. This is the
Lex Freedman podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the
description. And now, dear friends,
here's Pavo Durov.
You've been an advocate for freedom for
many years, writing that you should be
ready to risk everything for freedom.
What were some influences and insights
that help you arrive at this value of
human freedom? I get to experience the
difference between a society with
freedom and a society without freedom
pretty early in life. I was four years
old when my family moved from the Soviet
Union to northern Italy and I could see
that a society without freedom cannot
enjoy the abundance of opinions
of ideas of goods and services. Even for
a four or five year old kid, it was
obvious like you can't experience all
the toys, the ice cream of sorts, the
cartoons in the Soviet Union that you
can access in Italy. And then I got to
realize something even more important.
You don't get to contribute to this
abundance without freedom.
And at this point, it was pretty obvious
to me.
>> You also wrote
translates to freedom matters more than
money. How do you prevent these values
for freedom? Being corrupted by money,
by people with influence, by people with
power. Well, the biggest enemies of
freedom are fear and greed. So, you make
sure that they don't stand in your way.
If you imagine the worst thing that can
happen to you and then make yourself be
comfortable with it, there's nothing
more left to be afraid of. So you stand
your ground and you remember that it's
worth living your life according to
the principles that you believe in.
Even though this life can end up being
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 hardcoded to be afraid of death.
Nobody wants to die. But when you
approach it rationally,
you live and then you die. There's no
such thing as your death in your life.
You stop experiencing life once you die.
So you have to ask yourself this
question. Is it worth living a life full
of fear of death? Or it's much more
enjoyable to forget about this and live
your life in a way that makes you immune
to this fear. At the same time,
remembering that death exists so that
every day would count.
>> Yeah. Remembering that death exists
makes you deeply feel every moment that
you do get.
>> That's why I love reminding myself that
I can die any day.
>> In many ways, uh, you live a pretty
stoic existence. I got a chance to spend
a couple of weeks with you. In many
ways, you seek to minimize the negative
effects of the outside world on your
mind.
You've uh written, quote, "If you want
to reach your full potential and
maintain clarity of mind, stay away from
addictive substances. My success and
health are the result of 20 plus years
of complete abstinence from alcohol,
tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal
drugs. Short-term pleasure isn't worth
your future. Let's talk about each one
of these. Alcohol, what's um been your
philosophy behind that?
>> That one is quite easy. When I was 11
years old, my biochemistry teacher, he
gave me this book he wrote. It was
called the illusion of paradise. And
there he would describe the biological
and chemical processes
that happen in your body once you
consume this or that substance. It was
mainly related to illegal drugs, but
alcohol was one of this addictive
substances that he covered.
So it turns out that when you drink
alcohol, the thing that happens is that
your brain cells become paralyzed.
They become literally zombies. And then
next day,
sometime after the party is over, some
of your brain cells die and never get to
normal. So think about this. If your
brain is this most valuable tool you
have in your journey to success and
happiness, why would you destroy this
tool for short-term pleasure? This
sounds ridiculous. Yeah, in many ways
it's a poison we let in our body. But by
way of advice, what what advice would
you give to people who consider not
drinking? You know, a lot of people use
alcohol
to uh enable them to have a vibrant
social life. there's a lot of pressure
from society, you know, at a party to
drink so you can socialize. So, what
advice would you give to them,
uh, to people who imagine having a
social life without alcohol? Well, first
of all, don't be afraid to be
contrarian. Set your own rules.
Secondly, if you feel you need to drink,
there must be some problem you're trying
to conceal. there's something that some
fear you're not ready to uh confront and
you have to address this fear.
If there is a good-looking girl you're
afraid to approach,
get rid of this fear, approach her,
practice, do it again and again. It's
pretty benile, but this advice works.
>> Fix the underlying problem, which is
usually at the very bottom is always
going to be fear. Work on that. And very
often people are trying to escape
something in their lives with alcohol.
What is it they're trying to escape?
What is this problem? You have to get to
the bottom of it. Your mind is trying to
tell you something valuable.
And instead of addressing it directly,
you are flooding it in alcohol
which is sort of a spiritual painkiller
but works only temporarily and then you
have to pay the debt with interest. So
what do you do? I mean you've been a lot
of gatherings, a lot of parties.
Is there some challenges to saying no?
>> For me, not at all. I've been always
ready to stand my ground and say no when
I feel something is not right. And it's
extraordinary how easily
we humans are affected by what we
perceive as majority because nobody
since ancient times since million years
ago wants to be left out by the tribe.
We are scared that
we won't become accepted anymore, which
thousands of millions years ago meant
we're going to starve to death.
So we have to consciously
fight this inclination
to be agreeable with everything that the
majority imposes on you because it's
quite clear that many things that the
majority many activities the majority is
engaging in
are not bringing you any good. So that's
another fear you have to face going to a
party and the fear of being the outcast
at that party of being different than
others at that party at that social
gathering in the crowd of humans be
different. That's a fear. That's a fear
and it's quite irrational if you think
about it. It was something that made a
lot of sense
20,000 years ago. It makes zero sense
today because if you think about it, if
you do the same thing everybody else
arounds you is doing, you don't have any
competitive advantage
and you don't get to become outstanding
at some point in your life. Yeah, that's
one of the things we talked about sort
of by way of advice is if you want to be
successful in life, you want to be
different
>> differently. And perhaps I think you
said uh you want to achieve mastery at a
niche. So find a niche at which you can
pursue with all your effort and achieve
mastery and the niche being different
than anything that anybody else is
doing. Can you explain that a little bit
more? So obviously in order to
contribute to the society
you're in, to the economy of the country
you live in, you have to do something
that is valuable. But if you're doing
something that everybody else is doing
anyway,
what's the value of it? Now it sounds
easier than it is done to do something
that nobody else is doing because we
humans are surrounded by all kinds of
information which makes us want to copy
what we are perceiving. At the same time
there are so many areas which you can
explore that have nothing to do with uh
the information you receive on 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. Uh majority of the population
become slaves to the AI recommener
systems, AIdriven recommener systems.
And so the content everybody's fed is
the same thing and we all become the
same. On that point, one of the
different things you do is you don't use
a phone except occasionally to test
Telegram features. But I've been with
you for two weeks. I haven't seen you
use a phone at all in the way that most
people use a phone like for their social
media. So, can you describe your
philosophy behind that? I don't think a
phone is a necessary device.
I remember growing up I didn't have a
mobile phone.
When I was a student at the university,
I didn't have a mobile phone. When I
finally got it to use a mobile phone, I
never used phone calls.
I was always in airplane mode or mute. I
hated the idea of being disturbed.
My philosophy here is pretty simple.
I want to define
what
is important in my life. I don't want
other people or companies,
all kinds of organizations telling me
what is important today
um and what uh I should be thinking
about. Just set up your own agenda and
the phone gets in your way. 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 you have
to take a sleeping pill but I never take
pills.
I love this moments. I get so many
brilliant ideas or at least they seem
brilliant to me at the moment while I'm
lying in bed either late in the evening
or early in the morning. That's my
favorite time of the day. Sometimes I go
I wake up, I go take a shower,
still without a phone.
Beautiful ideas can come to you while
you're doing your morning exercise, your
morning routine without a phone. If you
open your phone first thing in the
morning, what you end up being is a
creature that is told what to think
about for the rest of the day.
Same is true in a way if
you've been consuming news from social
media late at night.
But then how do you define what is
important and what you really want to
become in life? Now I'm not saying you
have to completely
stay away from all sources of
information but take some time to think
about what's really important for you
and what you want to change in this
world. So, you definitely try to avoid
digital devices for as many hours as
possible in the morning
just to have the quiet thinking time
plus the crazy amounts of push-ups.
>> I know it's kind of kind
counterintuitive because
I founded one of the largest social
networks in the world after which I
founded the second largest messaging app
in the world. And you're supposed to be
really connected. But the conclusion you
reach very early is that the more
connected and accessible you are, the
less productive you are.
And then how can you run this thing if
if you're constantly bombarded by all
kinds of information, most of which is
irrelevant to the success
of what you're trying to build.
You know, the entire world can be
fascinated by a a fight, a quarrel
between the world's richest man and the
world's most powerful man. But for the
vast majority of these people following
this saga, it's irrelevant.
It won't change their lives. And in any
case, they can't affect it.
So, it's a bit pointless. Of course,
there are people who are engaging
activities that require them to be up to
date of of everything that's going on.
But 99% of people aren't. Yeah. The
internet, social media presents to us
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 cuz everybody's outraged.
The news of the day, whatever the
quarrel is, that's the thing that's uh
everyone thinks the world will end
because of this thing. And then another
thing happens the next day.
>> And they're trying to influence your
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 and some of them are
not very pleasant. But I believe that
it's the responsibility of every one of
us
to cope with this 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 know, you
may end up achieving great things. Yeah,
that's the thing that people really
confuse. If if you're stuck
in in a depressive cycle, even when you
really, really, really, really don't
want to do anything, just do something,
try try to make progress because the
good feeling comes in the end of that.
The whole point is to do first and then
feel, not feel and then do.
>> Exactly. And going to the gym is a good
example.
There are many days when you don't want
to start working out.
But they have you have to overcome this
initial reluctance
and then you get to a point that you
enjoy it and you think, "Oh my god, it
was such a good idea to come to the gym
today." But it's similar to pretty much
every activity.
You get to write some code.
Write a small piece of code first and
then you get inspired. then you'll come
up with more ideas.
You need to write a novel or just write
a paragraph.
This is pretty obvious and it's not a
secret. But because we are bombarded
with all kinds of information that is
not really important for us in terms of
becoming successful,
we often forget the important things.
And this is one of them.
>> We've been working out every single day.
you have been working out for many years
pretty intensively. So I think a lot of
people would love to um know what's your
perfect daily workout regimen.
Let's say on a daily on a weekly basis.
>> I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every
morning. And in addition to that, I go
to the gym normally five six times a
week
spending between one or two hours every
day. So, push-ups and squats are still a
big part of your routine.
>> Yes, this is how I start my day.
I'm not sure they do a lot in terms of
changing your body, but they're
definitely a good way to
practice self-discipline
because you don't want to do this
push-ups in the morning most of the
days. Squats are particularly boring.
They're not that hard. They're just
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 a nice bath
because it's another exercise of
self-discipline. I think the main muscle
you can exercise is is this muscle, the
muscle of self-discipline,
you know, not not your biceps or or or
your pecs or anything else.
Because if you get to train that one,
everything else
just comes by itself.
>> Yeah. Everything else becomes easy. We
should mention I went with you uh to BA
and um I think it's fair to say you're
nuts
in terms of how much you can handle. Um
and I didn't even see the worst of it.
Can you can you just speak to the the
your crazy escapes in the Bay? What
value you get from it? So both the heat
and the cold,
>> I I don't know if it's crazy. I think
it's quite natural and normal by this
time.
>> Yeah.
>> But maybe I could just got used to it.
>> So ba is this uh extreme kind of sauna
practiced by Eastern Europeans.
>> Yeah.
But it is done
in a way that maximizes heat and they
also use all kind of herbs and branches
and
it's a much more holistic and natural
experience.
Then a necessary part of it is you get
the cold plunge
and then you go back. And again, this is
one of the 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 banana in icebath.
>> We uh swam the length of a large lake in
France a couple times. Can you u talk
through why you value these multi-our
swims?
>> I left swimming for hours. The longest I
swam was 5 and 1/2 hours in Finland. Was
quite cold. I got lost in the process.
Barely could find my way back.
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 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 and it's 5 and 1/2
hours. Did you panic like if you're
going to be able to find the shore, find
your way out? Not really. I'm a
reasonably stress resilient person. I
didn't panic at that moment. And there
were worse swims I had that were shorter
but involved accidents and you know
about some of them. So that wasn't the
worst by far. But an important thing
about swimming and physical activity in
general is that it makes your mind clear
and your thinking process is becoming
more efficient.
Because at the end of the day, the
efficiency of our brain is limited by
how much sugar and oxygen our heart can
push through blood to our brain. So how
can you make this go faster or how to do
you make your lungs more efficient? How
do you make your heart more efficient in
doing that? The physical activity is the
only way I know of. So, it's not just
staying healthy
or trying to look good. It's also
being
productive. It's also being stress
resilient.
All of these qualities are necessary if
you want to run a large company, if you
want to start a company.
I'm surprised when I started doing this
more than 10 years ago that more CEOs
didn't engage in sports.
The situation changed in the last
several years, which is great because
back in the day, if you take 20 years
ago, there was this stereotype that if
you're strong, you must be not very
smart and vice versa, which is a
complete lumacy.
Very often these two things go together.
>> So for you working out it's not just
about staying healthy. It's actually
valuable for the work that you do as a
tech leader, as a engineer, as a
technologist.
>> Oh yes. When I can't train,
I can instantly feel
that stress is creeping on me.
>> Yeah. So even in situations where I'm
constrained, I can't go to the gym. I
would just keep doing push-ups. I keep I
just keep doing squats.
>> Yeah. I mean, that's the cool thing
about body weight exercises. You can
just do it anywhere.
You can just pop off 50, 100 push-ups
before a meeting.
>> I don't you feel weird when you have a
day without physical activity?
>> Yeah. If I go a day without doing
push-ups at the very minimum, that's a
shitty day.
>> And if you can do pull-ups, it's even
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. Uh, so take me through your
philosophy on the no sugar, no no soda,
just clean food.
>> Well, sugar is pretty easy because it's
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 say eating only
within six hours and not eating for 18
hours every day also
brings structure into your day and into
your eating um habits. So you don't
crave sugar anymore because you know if
you eat sugar and then you're unable to
snack,
you're just punishing yourself.
I read a few books on longevity. I think
something everybody agrees on is that
sugar is uh harmful.
No, I'm not militant about sugar. Like
you can eat berries, fruit if you feel
your body needs it,
but it's not true to think
it's necessary to consume sweet things.
Not for children, not for adults.
Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20
years ago because I just felt heavy
every time I had it. So, I guess it's
individual. It's my metabolism. My
digestive system
isn't
uh agreeing with with with this kind of
food. So, I normally eat seafood of all
kinds and vegetables. This is
the basic source of calories for me.
>> Yeah. And like all things uh you said
short-term pleasure isn't worth your
future. So a lot of things we all know
that alcohol is destructive to the body.
Tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar,
but society puts that on you. Makes it
very difficult to avoid. So I I guess it
all boils down to just discipline.
>> Yes. and trying to identify
the real cause of an issue you're
experiencing.
If you experiencing a headache, one
solution would be to take a pill and
then the headache disappears.
What this pill would actually do in most
cases, it would
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.
Uh do I need to drink some water?
Is the air quality here bad? Do I need
to start getting more sleep? Is there
something wrong with people around me?
They're stressing me out. There must be
some reason why you're experiencing a
headache. But if you take a pill, you're
not removing this reason. you're
actually making it worse
because this harmful factor is still
there. It's like you're piloting a
helicopter and there is some red signals
and red lamp starts to blink and and it
starts producing bad unpleasant noise.
What would you do? You would try to
figure out the cause and eliminate it.
Maybe there is some mountain next to you
and you have to avoid it or you take a
hammer and smash the signal.
I think the answer is quite obvious. So
why are we constantly doing this
regardless? Oh, because everybody else
is doing it because there's a whole
industry trying to persuade you that
this is the right thing to do.
So, it's incredibly important to analyze
yourself and try to get to the bottom of
things. So, you generally try to avoid
all pills, all pharmaceutical products.
Yes, I've been staying away from all of
that since I became an adult. When
you're a teenager, your mom would
typically say, "We need to take this
pill, otherwise you know, the world
collapses." Um, yeah. Yeah,
>> once I became a grown-up, I said, "No, I
don't think that the producers of pill
are incentivized in the right way. They
are not really interested in eliminating
the root of the problem. They would
rather have me dependent
on the pills they're producing
um so that I could buy them forever."
And then I also realized, no, I'm not
saying that you should never take pills.
There obviously is some diseases
that you can only fight with
antibiotics, for example.
So I'm not suggesting we go back to the
middle ages.
Uh but what I'm saying is we overuse
pills. Yeah, it's always good to uh
study and deeply understand the
incentives under which the world
operates so that you don't get swept up
into the forces that operate under these
incentives and big pharma is certainly
one of them. Pharmaceutical companies
have a huge incentive to keep the
problem going versus solving the
problem. It's wise. Well, this is
something I practice every day. I read
some piece of news and I ask myself
who benefits from me reading this. Then
you can end up coming to this conclusion
that maybe 95% of things we read in the
news have been written and published
because somebody wanted you to
buy some product,
support some political cause, fight some
war, donate some money. Let's do
something that would benefit other
people. And this is not a problem to
support causes that you truly believe in
as long as it was your intentional
choice and you're not being manipulated
into fighting other people's wars. And
that takes us back to the original thing
we started talking about which is
freedom. One of the ways to achieve
freedom of thought is to remove your
mind from
uh the influences, the forces that
manipulate you. That's really important
to realize. the the content you consume,
especially on the internet, when a large
percentage of it is designed to
manipulate your mind, you have to
disconnect yourself and be very
proactive understanding what the biases,
what the incentives are so you can think
clearly, independently and objectively.
And again, it ties back with uh
restraint from alcohol.
Yeah. Because if your mind is clouded,
how can you analyze yourself? You'll
always be def dependent on opinions of
others.
You will always follow the mainstream.
And with then whatever the authorities
or whoever in charge will tell you, you
believe it because you don't have a tool
of your own to rely on to come to your
own conclusions.
I have to ask you this. This is
something that came up. You don't watch
porn. I don't think I've heard you talk
about this before. What's the philosophy
behind not watching porn? You know,
there's a lot of people that talk about
uh porn in general having a very
negative effect on young men on their
view of the world, on their development
of their sexuality, and how they uh get
into relationships and all that kind of
stuff. So, what's your philosophy in not
consuming porn? I don't watch porn
because I just feel it's a surrogate, a
substitute for a real thing that
is not necessary in my life. If
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 u access
the real thing, you don't need to watch
porn.
But then if you can't access the real
thing, it's you shouldn't watch porn as
well because it means there's some
deficiency in your life, some problem
that you have to overcome.
>> Yeah. Analyze the underlying cause.
Uh and again this goes back to the theme
of investing in uh long-term flourishing
versus uh short-term pleasure.
There's this there's a theme to the way
you approach life. I try to be
strategic. I try to act under assumption
that I'm not going to die in 1 hour from
now and I'm going to stick around for a
bit despite the fact that we are all
mortal. So, why would I exchange the mid
and longterm for the short term? Doesn't
make any sense. Quick pause. Bathroom
break. Yeah, let's take a break. All
right, we took a break and now we're
back. I got to ask you about Telegram,
the company. I got to meet some of the
brilliant engineers that work there.
Telegram runs lean. Relative to other
technology companies that achieve the
scale that Telegram does, it has very
few employees. So how many people are on
the core team? Let's say the core
engineering team.
>> The core engineering team is about 40
people.
This includes
back end, front end,
designers,
system administrators.
>> Can you speak to the philosophy behind
uh 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 is the opposite.
If you have too many people, they have
to coordinate their efforts, constantly
communicate, and 90% of their time will
be spent on coordinating the small
pieces of work they're responsible for
between each other.
The other problem with having too many
employees is that
some of them won't get enough work to
do. And if they don't get enough work to
do, they demotivate everybody else by
their mere existence.
They're still there. They're still
getting the salary, but they don't do
anything. And if they don't do anything,
more often than not, they will start
trying to
find their purpose elsewhere.
Maybe inside your team, but not by doing
productive work,
but by finding problems that don't exist
within the team. And that can disrupt
the team and
the mood inside it even further.
Also, when you intentionally don't allow
some of your team members to hire more
people to help them,
they will be forced to automate things.
In our case,
you know, we have tens of thousands of
servers around the world, almost 100,000
distributed across several continents
and data centers. If you try to manage
this system
manually
without automation, you will probably
end up hiring thousands of people, tens
of thousands of people. But if you rely
on algorithms and the team is forced to
put together algorithms
in order to manage it, then it becomes
much more scalable and much more
efficient and interestingly much more
reliable as well
>> and more resilient to the changing
geopolitics, to the changing technology,
all of that. Cuz if you automate
the distributed aspect of the data
storage and all the compute, then that's
going to be resilient to everything the
world throws at you. I suppose if you
have people managing all of it, it
becomes stale quickly. Yes, humans are
attack vectors
and if you have a distributed system
that runs itself automatically,
you have a chance at increasing the
security of speed and speed of your
service. This is what we've did with
Tilgrim
while also making it much more reliable
because if some part of the network goes
down, you can still switch to the other
parts of it.
>> Yeah. One of the big um
ways you protect your privacy is that
you store the data. The infrastructure
side of Telegram is distributed across
um many legal jurisdictions with the
decryption keys. So it's encrypted in
the cloud. The decryption keys are split
and kept in different locations so that
uh no single government or entity can uh
uh access the data. Can you explain the
strength of this approach? The way we
designed Telegram is
we never wanted to have any humans, any
employees have any access to private
messaging data.
That's why since
2012 when we've been trying to come up
with this design, we always invested a
lot of effort into making sure that
nobody can mess with it. Like if you
hire an employee or any of the existing
employee, they can't break the system in
a way that would allow them to access
messages of users. And then of course we
launched and an encrypted messaging that
is even more protected but it's has
certain limitations. So you still have
to rely on encrypted cloud. So an
interesting engineering challenge was
how you make sure that no point of
failure can be created within your team
or outside.
>> So no employee can even access user
messages. So that's the thing you know
we talk about encryption, we talk about
privacy, we talk about security, all
these kinds of things. I think the
number one thing that people are
concerned about about which there's also
misinformation is about private
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. Uh do you see in the future a
possible scenario where uh you might
share uh user private messages with
governments or with intelligence
agencies? No,
we design a system in a way that's
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 good place to to
ask. I'm sure you're pressured by all
kinds of people, all kinds of
organizations to share
private data. What uh where do you find
the strength
and the fearlessness to say no to
everybody, including powerful
intelligence agencies, including
powerful governments, influential,
powerful people? I guess part of it is
just me being me. I stood up
for myself and for my values since I was
a little kid.
I was had issues with my teachers
because I would point out their mistakes
during classes. And at the end of the
day, what's important is to remind
yourself that you have nothing to lose.
Like they can think they they blackmail
you with something. They can threaten
you with something, but what is it they
really can can really do to you? Like
worst case, they can kill you. But that
brings us back to the first part of our
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
>> yeah,
>> you
>> you don't like encryption, you don't
like privacy, you think you should ban
encryption in your country like the
European Union is trying to do now for
all the member states. Well, go ahead
and do that. We'll just quit this
market. We won't operate there. It's not
that important. They all think that
somehow we profit from their citizens
and the only goal tech companies have is
extracting revenues. And it's true. Most
tech companies are like this.
But there are projects like Telegram
which are a bit different
and I'm not sure they realize that. So
for you the value of maintaining your
integrity
um in relation to your principles is
more important than than anything else.
And of course we should say that you
also have full ability and control to do
just that because you Po Durov own 100%
of Telegram. So there's no other
anybody with a say on this question.
>> There are no shareholders
which is quite unique.
>> Very unique. I don't think there's
anything even close to that in any major
tech company.
>> And this allows us to operate the way we
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 author
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 you're mentioning that
governments when they become autocratic
naturally is the way of the world human
nature and the nature of governments
they become more sensorious they begin
to censor and always justifying it in
their minds perhaps assuming that
they're doing good. Perhaps some of them
assume they doing good, but
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. It's just
something over time you forget. You
begin to censor,
you begin to limit uh the the freedoms
of the individual, the ability of the
individuals to speak, to have a voice,
to vote. It just gradually happens that
way. And the government is not some
abstract notion. The government consists
of people.
And these people have goals.
they would naturally be inclined to
increase their level of influence to
have more subordinates to have more
resources
and that's how you end up in an endless
loop of
you everinccreasing taxes
everinccreasing regulation
which ultimately just suffocates free
market, free enterprise and free speech.
So you do want to have very very strict
limitations on the extent the government
can increase its powers at the expense
of citizens. Ironically, you don't have
those limitations. You're supposed in in
all countries of which are considered to
be free.
It's supposed to be the constitution
that protects everybody.
But interestingly, it doesn't work
always this way. They are able to find
very tricky phrasings in order to cover
out exceptions
and then the exception becomes the rule.
On this topic,
I'd love to talk to you about the recent
saga of you being arrested in August of
last year in France. I think I should
say that it's one of the worst
overreaches of power I've seen as
applied to a tech leader in recent
history in all history.
Uh so it's it's tragic, but I think
speaks to the thing that we've been
talking about. So um maybe can you tell
the full saga what happened? You arrive
in France. I arrived in France last year
in August just for a short two-day trip
and then I see a dozen of armed
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 mindboggling.
At first, I thought there must be some
mistake.
Then I realized they're being serious
and they accusing me of all possible
crimes that the users of Telegram have
allegedly committed. with some users
and they think I should be responsible
for this
which again like you said it's nothing
it's something that never happened in
the history of this planet.
No country not even an
authoritarian one
did that to any tech leader
at least at this scale. There are good
reasons for that because you're
sacrificing
a big part of your economic growth by
sending these kind of messages to the
business and tech community.
So they
uh put me in a police car and I found
myself in police custody.
A small room, no windows.
just a narrow bed made of concrete.
I spent four day almost four days there.
In the process, I had to answer some
questions of the policemen.
They were interested and
how telegram operates.
Most of it is public anyway. And I was
struck by
very limited understanding or should I
say even lack of understanding
on behalf of
the people who initiated this
investigation against me about how
technology works, how encryption works,
how social media work. I mean, there's
something darkly poetic about a tech
founder of a platform where a billion
people are communicating with each other
and you're on concrete, no pillow for
days, no windows. It's like a book. I
mean, it reminds me I'm a huge fan of
France Kafka and he's written about the
absurdity uh of these kinds of
situations, hence the Kafka-esque
stories. There's a story literally about
the situation that he wrote, perhaps
predicted called the trial where a
person is arrested for no reason that
anybody can explain and is stuck in the
judicial system for a long time that
nobody fascinatingly in that story
neither the person arrested nor the any
individual member of the system itself
fully understand what is happening. uh
nobody can truly answer the questions
and eventually the person spoiler alert
is mentally broken by the whole system
which is what bureaucracy can do in its
most absurd form is it breaks the spirit
the human spirit laden in all of us
that's the negative side of bureaucracy
I agree with you on the absurdity of
this
thing
because if this was a good faith attempt
to fix an issue.
There were so many ways to reach out to
Telegram, to reach out to me personally,
voice their concerns,
and solve any alleged problem in a way
that is conventional and diplomatic, the
way every other country on this planet
solves its problems, including with
Telegram. And we did its times.
>> Yeah. They have a nice page showing this
is kind of like details that most people
don't really think about. Uh but
Telegram is at the forefront of um
moderating
CSAM and terrorist groups. There's a
nice page telegram.org/modderation
/modderation that shows just the
incredible amount of groups and channels
that are uh engaged in terrorist
activity and cam activity that are
blocked actively blocked found and
blocked by telegram. So and a lot of
this work like you said because of the
automation is done with machine learning
just the scale is insane. This is stuff
that most like noobs like me who are
just chatting it up on Telegram don't
think about. But there's just like an
immense number of
people essentially
doing things that violate the law on
there and you have to find them
immediately and catch it. I guess all
platforms have to deal with it and
Telegram was doing a great job of
dealing with that kind of content. And
what you're saying is the French
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 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 like maybe
we would take down
hundreds of them. And if you include all
kinds of content that we remove, all the
accounts, groups, channels, posts, that
would amount to millions of pieces of
content every week, hundreds of
thousands every day. And then somebody
would read the newspaper, get enraged
because they would uh read something
about child porn. And this is a subject
that is very emotionally charged.
and start doing
something not based on data
and logical thinking and laws
but based on emotions driven from
inaccurate input.
>> Yeah, I think we should make pretty
clear that there's no world, no reason
that the French government should have
arrested you, but here we are. That's
the situation you're in. So, to be
clear, you have to show up in front of a
judge. All of this is beautifully
absurd. It would be hilarious if it
wasn't extremely serious. You have to
show up in front of a judge
every certain amount of time. And what
is that experience like? In France, they
have this role of investigative judge. I
don't think you have it in many other
places in the world. It means I'm not on
trial.
I'm being investigated.
And in France, it's not just the police
or prosecutor asking me questions. It's
a judge,
which in my experience is more like
still a prosecutor, but it's called a
judge. And that makes it harder to
appeal. So if you're limited in say
countries where you can travel, then to
appeal that restriction will take you a
lot of time. The investigation itself
should have never been started. It's uh
an absurd and harmf