Pavel Durov：Telegram、自由、审查、金钱、权力与人性｜Lex Fridman Podcast #482

The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people. Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship. For this, he has faced pressure from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on earth. In the face of this immense pressure, he has always held his ground continuously fighting to protect user privacy and the freedom of all of us humans to communicate with each other. I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him and can definitively say that he's one of the most principled and fearless humans I've ever met. Plus, when I posted that I'm hanging out with Pavel, a lot of people, fans of his, wrote to me asking if he does in fact privately live the disciplined aesthetic life he's known for, no alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise, including a crazy amount of daily pull-ups and pushups, no phone except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on. Yes, he's 100% that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me. I'm grateful for it, and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend. This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical about freedom, life, human nature, and the nature of government bureaucracies, and it is also in part super technical, because to me, it's fascinating that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team and yet is able to basically out-innovate all of its competitors with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features. Just like the meme of "The Simpsons" did it first, you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case, Telegram did it first. So we discuss it all, from the Kafkaesque situation he's in the midst of in France, to the rollercoaster of his life and career, to his philosophy on technology, freedom, and the human condition. And by the way, while this entire conversation is in English, we'll make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in multiple languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi. On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking Audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer. Huge thank you once again to ElevenLabs for their help with translation and dubbing and with the bigger mission of breaking down barriers that language creates. They are truly one of the most remarkable companies I've ever had the pleasure of working with. This is the "Lex Fridman Podcast." To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Pavel Durov.

You've been an advocate for freedom for many years, writing that you should be ready to risk everything for freedom. What were some influences and insights that helped you arrive at this value of human freedom?

I got to experience the difference between a society with freedom and a society without freedom pretty early in life. I was 4 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, ideas, goods, and services. Even for a 4- or 5-year-old kid, it was obvious that you couldn't experience all the toys, the ice cream, or the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you could access in Italy.

Then I got to realize something even more important: You don't get to contribute to this abundance without freedom. At that point, it was pretty obvious to me.

You also wrote, “Svoboda vazhnee deneg.” It translates to: “Freedom matters more than money.” How do you prevent these values of freedom from being corrupted by money, by people with influence, or by people with power?

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 comfortable with it, there's nothing left to be afraid of. 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 lived in slavery.

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

Oh, yes.

Are you afraid of it?

In a way, you have to go against your instinct of self-preservation, and it's not easy. We are all biological beings, hard-coded to be afraid of death. Nobody wants to die. But when you approach it rationally, you live and then you die. There's no such thing as your death in your life. You stop experiencing life once you die.

You have to ask yourself this question: “Is it worth living a life full of fear of death?” Or is it much more enjoyable to forget about this and live your life in a way that makes you immune to this fear, at the same time remembering that death exists so that every day would count?

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

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

In many ways, you live a pretty Stoic existence. I got a chance to spend a couple of weeks with you. In many ways, you seek to minimize the negative effects of the outside world on your mind. You've written, quote, “If you want to reach your full potential and maintain clarity of mind, stay away from addictive substances. My success and health are the result of 20-plus years of complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal drugs. Short-term pleasure isn't worth your future.”

Let's talk about each one of these. Alcohol. What's been your philosophy behind that?

That one is quite easy. When I was 11 years old, my biochemistry teacher gave me this book he wrote. It was called The Illusion of Paradise. In there, he described 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.

It turns out that when you drink alcohol, the thing that happens is that your brain cells become paralyzed. They become literally zombies. Then, the next day, some time after the party is over, some of your brain cells die and never get back to normal. So, think about this: If your brain is the most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.

In many ways, it's a poison we let into our body. By way of advice, what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking? A lot of people use alcohol to enable them to have a vibrant social life. There's a lot of pressure from society at a party to drink so they can socialize. What advice would you give to people who imagine having a social life without alcohol?

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 some fear you're not ready to confront, and you have to address this fear.

If there's a good-looking girl you're afraid to approach, get rid of this fear. Approach her, practice, and do it again and again. It's pretty banal, but this advice works.

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

I don't know. Very often, people are trying to escape something in their lives with alcohol. What is it they're trying to escape? What is this problem? You have to get to the bottom of it. Your mind is trying to tell you something valuable, and instead of addressing it directly, you are flooding it with alcohol, which is sort of a spiritual painkiller, but it works only temporarily. Then you have to pay the debt with interest.

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

For me, not at all. I've always been ready to stand my ground and say no when I feel something's not right. It's extraordinary how easily we humans are affected by what we perceive as the majority, because nobody, since ancient times—since millions of years ago—wants to be left out by the tribe. We are scared that we won't be accepted anymore, which thousands or millions of years ago meant we were going to starve to death.

We have to consciously fight this inclination to be agreeable with everything that the majority imposes on us, because it's quite clear that many things the majority is engaging in are not bringing you any good.

That's another fear you have to face: going into a party and facing the fear of being the outcast at that party, of being different from others at that party, at that social gathering in the crowd of humans. Being different—that's a fear.

That's a fear, and it's quite irrational if you think about it. It was something that made a lot of sense 20,000 years ago. It makes zero sense today, because if you think about it, if you do the same thing everybody else around you is doing, you don't have any competitive advantage, and you don't get to become outstanding at some point in your life.

Yeah, that's one of the things we talked about by way of advice: If you want to be successful in life, you want to be different.

Definitely.

Perhaps—I think you said—you want to achieve mastery in a niche. Find a niche that you can pursue with all your effort and achieve mastery in, the niche being different from anything that anybody else is doing. Can you explain that a little bit more?

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 to do something that nobody else is doing, because we humans are surrounded by all kinds of information that makes us want to copy what we are perceiving.

At the same time, there are so many areas that you can explore that have nothing to do with the information you receive on a daily basis. So, it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have, so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left to the will of an AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important, and so that you don't end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, and the same news as everybody else.

Rather, you should be proactive. You should deliberately try to set a goal—an area that you want to explore—and then actively search for 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 just have to remain consistent, because nobody else is trying to do that. Everybody else is just reading the same news and discussing the same news every day, but this way, they don't get to have a competitive advantage.

Yeah. The majority of the population become slaves to 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 2 weeks, and I haven't seen you use a phone at all in the way that most people use a phone, for their social media. Can you describe your philosophy behind that?

I don't think a phone is a necessary device. I remember growing up, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls. I was always in airplane mode or on mute. I hated the idea of being disturbed.

My philosophy here is pretty simple. I want to define what is important in my life. I don't want other people or companies, all kinds of organizations, telling me what is important today and what I should be thinking about. Just set up your own agenda, and the phone gets in your way.

It provides distractions. It guides what you should be looking at, what you will be looking at, so you don't want that. You want to quiet the mind. You want to choose what kind of stuff you let inside your mind.

Yes, because this way I can contribute to the progress of society, or at least I like to think this way, and this makes me happier.

How often do you find quiet time to just think and focus deeply on work without any distractions? You mentioned to me that you value quiet mornings.

Yes. The thing I'm trying to do is 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 lying in bed thinking, and some people hate it. They say, “Oh, you have to take a sleeping pill,” but I never take pills. I love these moments.

I get so many brilliant ideas, or at least they seem brilliant to me at the moment, while I'm lying in bed, either late in the evening or early in the morning. That's my favorite time of the day. Sometimes I wake up and go take a shower, still without the phone. Beautiful ideas can come to you while you're doing your morning exercise, your morning routine, without a phone.

If you open your phone first thing in the morning, what you end up being is a creature that is told what to think about for the rest of the day. The 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?

I'm not saying you have to completely stay away from all sources of information, but take some time to think about what's really important for you and what you want to change in this world.

So you definitely try to avoid digital devices for as many hours as possible in the morning, just to have the quiet thinking time? Plus the crazy amounts of push-ups and squats.

I know it's kind of counterintuitive because I founded one of the largest social networks in the world, after which I founded the second-largest messaging app in the world, and you're supposed to be really connected. But the conclusion you reach very early is that the more connected and accessible you are, the less productive you are.

And then how can you run this thing if you're constantly bombarded by all kinds of information, most of which is irrelevant to the success of what you're trying to build? 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 on everything that's going on, but 99% of people aren't.

Yeah. The internet and social media present drama to us in such a way that we think it's the biggest thing in the world, the most important thing, and that the tides of history will turn because of it, when in reality, most things will not turn the tides of history.

And so, I guess our challenge is to figure out what is the timeless thing? What is the thing that's happening today that's still going to be true in 10 or 20 years? And from that, decide what you're going to do. 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, and then another thing happens the next day.

And they're trying to influence your emotions. That's how you get into trouble, because you can be forced to make conclusions that are not in your best interest.

I've seen you be, once again, quite stoic about your emotions. Do you ever get angry? Do you ever get lonely? Do you ever get sad? The roller coaster of human emotion. What do you do with that? How do you make difficult decisions?

I'm a human being like everybody else. I do experience emotions, and some of them are not very pleasant. But I believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them.

Self-discipline is particularly important, because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people? I normally never have depression. I don't remember having depression in the last 20 years, at least—maybe when I was a teenager.

But one of the reasons for that is that I start doing things. I identify the problem, I can see a solution, and I start executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something, nothing's ever going to change.

And people often make this mistake, thinking, “Oh, I should just have some rest and then regain energy.” This is not how it works. You gain energy by doing something. So if you start doing something, then it happens. You feel motivated, you feel inspired, and then ultimately you do something else—a little bit more, a little bit more—and in a few years, who knows, you may end up achieving great things.

Yeah, that's the thing that people really confuse. If you're stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don't want to do anything, just do something. Try to make progress, because the good feeling comes at the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.

Exactly. 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 where you enjoy it, and you think, “Oh my God, it was such a good idea to come to the gym today.”

But it's similar to pretty much every activity. You get to write some code—write a small piece of code first, and then you get inspired. Then you come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write the program. This is pretty obvious, and it's not a secret, but because we are bombarded with all kinds of information that is not really important for us in terms of becoming successful, we often forget the important things, and this is one of them.

We've been working out every single day. You have been working out for many years, pretty intensively, so I think a lot of people would love to know what's your perfect daily workout regimen—let's say, on a daily or weekly basis.

I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning, and in addition to that, I go to the gym normally 5 or 6 times a week, spending between 1 and 2 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 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 in 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.

Yeah, everything else becomes easy. We should mention, I went with you to the 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, both the heat and the cold?

I don't know if it's crazy. I think it's quite natural and normal by this time, but maybe I just got used to it. A 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 the cold plunge, and then you go back. Again, this is one of those things that, 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 passes. It’s only a few minutes.

It’s the same with the ice bath. You have to suffer a bit, and then you get to feel great for hours and days afterward. What’s more, it gives you these long-term health benefits. In a way, you can look at it as alcohol in reverse. Alcohol will give you this short, fleeting pleasure for an hour or a couple of hours, but then you will be paying for it with long-term negative consequences. I’d rather do Banya and ice baths.

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

I love swimming for hours. The longest I swam was 5 and a half hours in Finland. It was quite cold, and I got lost in the process. I could barely find my way back. But the reason I do it is that you feel great afterward. You’re shaking a little bit, but you feel great afterward.

We crossed a huge lake, and I’ve crossed many lakes: Lake Geneva, Lake Zurich. Every time, you feel this achievement, which makes you happy and makes you feel strong. Then you’re more ready for other challenges. 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, 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. You don’t have to go too fast. You can be slow and enjoy the moment.

Until you get lost, and it’s 5 and a half hours. Did you panic about whether you were going to be able to find the shore or find your way out?

Not really. I’m a reasonably stress-resilient person. I didn’t panic at that moment, and there were worse swims I had that were shorter but involved accidents, and you know about some of them. So that wasn’t the worst by far.

But an important thing about swimming and physical activity in general is that it makes your mind clear, and your thinking process becomes more efficient. At the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our heart can push through the blood to our brain. How can you make this go faster, or how do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you make your heart more efficient at doing that? Physical activity is the only way I know of.

So it’s not just about staying healthy or trying to look good. It’s also about being productive and being stress-resilient. All of these qualities are necessary if you want to run a large company or start a company. I’m surprised that when I started doing this more than 10 years ago, 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 go back 20 years, there was this stereotype that if you were strong, you must not be very smart, and vice versa, which is complete lunacy. Very often, these two things go together.

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

Oh, yes. When I can’t train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping up on me. Even in situations where I’m constrained and can’t go to the gym, I just keep doing push-ups. I just keep doing squats.

Yeah. That’s the cool thing about bodyweight exercise: you can just do it anywhere. You could just pop off 50 or 100 push-ups before a meeting.

Don’t you feel weird when you have a day without physical activity?

Yeah. If I go a day without doing push-ups, at the very minimum, that’s a shitty day.

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

Yeah. I’ve 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 of times a day. So take me through your philosophy on 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, and the hungrier you get. So if you want to stay efficient and healthy, why consume processed sugar? You’ll just end up snacking all the time.

Intermittent fasting—eating only within 6 hours, or not eating for 18 hours every day—also brings structure into your day and into your eating habits, so you don’t crave sugar anymore. If you eat sugar and then you’re unable to snack, you’re just punishing yourself. I read a few books on longevity, and I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is harmful.

Now, I’m not militant about sugar. You can eat berries or 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, and 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.

I normally eat seafood of all kinds and vegetables. This is the basic source of calories for me.

Yeah, and like all the things you said, short-term pleasure isn’t worth your future. A lot of things we all know—alcohol is destructive to the body, as are tobacco, pills, processed food, and sugar. But society puts that on you and 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, is mute the consequence—your feeling of pain. It’s a painkiller. It will not eliminate the root cause, so you have to ask yourself, “What is it that is causing this headache? Do I need to drink some water? Is the air quality here bad? Do I need to start getting more sleep? Is there something wrong with the people around me who are stressing me out?”

There must be some reason why you’re experiencing a headache. But if you take a pill, you’re not removing this reason. You’re actually making it worse because this harmful factor is still there. It’s like you’re piloting a helicopter, and some red signals or red lamps start to blink, and it starts producing a bad, unpleasant noise. What would you do? You would try to figure out the cause and eliminate it.

Maybe there is some mountain next to you and you have to avoid it, or you take a hammer and smash the signal. I think the good answer is quite obvious. So why are we constantly doing this regardless? Well, because everybody else is doing it, and 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 the world collapses.” Once I became a grown-up, I said, “No, I don’t think that the producers of pills are incentivized in the right way.”

They’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. 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 that we overuse pills.

Yeah, it’s always good to study and deeply understand the incentives under which the world operates, so that you don’t get swept up into the forces that operate under these incentives. 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 the conclusion that maybe 95% of the 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, or just do something that would benefit other people.

This is not a problem if you 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, requires you to disconnect yourself and be very proactive, understanding what the bias is and what the incentives are, so you can think clearly, independently, and objectively.

Again, it ties back to restraint from alcohol. If your mind is clouded, how can you analyze yourself? You’ll always be dependent on the opinions of others. You will always follow the mainstream, and then whatever the authorities or whoever is in charge tells you, you’ll believe it, because you don’t have a tool of your own to rely on to come to your own conclusions.

I have to ask you—this is something that came up. You don’t watch porn. I don’t think I’ve heard you talk about this before. What’s the philosophy behind not watching porn? There are a lot of people who 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 on how they get into relationships, and all that kind of stuff.

So what's your philosophy on not consuming porn?

I don't watch porn because I feel it's a surrogate, a substitute for the real thing that isn't necessary in my life. If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy, some inspiration, for a fleeting moment of pleasure. It doesn't make sense. In any case, as I said, it's not the real thing.

As long as you can access the real thing, you don't need to watch porn. But if you can't access the real thing, you shouldn't watch porn either, because it means there's some deficiency in your life, some problem that you have to overcome.

Yeah, analyze the underlying cause. 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 1 hour from now and that 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? It doesn't make any sense.

Quick pause, bathroom break.

All right, we're back. I have to ask you about Telegram, the company. I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers who work there. Telegram runs lean. Relative to other technology companies that achieve the scale Telegram does, it has very few employees. How many people are on the core team, let's say the core engineering team?

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

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

What we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate to the 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 and constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent 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. 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 a salary, but they don't do anything. If they don't do anything, more often than not, they'll start trying to find their purpose elsewhere, maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work. They'll find 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'll 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'll 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 changing geopolitics and changing technology, all of that. If you automate the distributed aspect of the data storage and all the compute, 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. If you have a distributed system that runs itself automatically, you have a chance at increasing the security and speed of your service. This is what we did with Telegram, while also making it much more reliable. If some part of the network goes down, you can still switch to the other parts of it.

One of the big ways to protect user privacy is how you store the data. The infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed across many legal jurisdictions, with the decryption keys split and kept in different locations. It's encrypted in the cloud, and 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, we never wanted any humans, any employees, to have access to private messaging data. That's why, since 2012, when we were trying to come up with this design, we invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it.

If you hire an employee, or any of the existing employees, they can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access users' messages. Then, of course, we launched end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations, so you still have to rely on the encrypted cloud.

An interesting engineering challenge was figuring out how to make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside it.

So no employee can even access user messages. We talk about encryption, privacy, and security, all these kinds of things. I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, and about which there's also misinformation, is private messages. Telegram is very protective of the private messages of users. You're saying employees can never 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 them, but you won't get anything. It's all encrypted in a way that is undecipherable.

That was very important for us. That's why we can say with confidence that there has never been a leakage 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 users' private messages with governments or intelligence agencies?

No. We designed the system in a way that makes it 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 one of the principles you operate under: you're going to protect user privacy.

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

This is a good place to ask. I'm sure you're pressured by all kinds of people and 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, powerful governments, and influential, powerful people?

I guess part of it is just me being me. I stood up for myself and for my values since I was a little kid. I had issues with my teachers because I would point out their mistakes during classes.

At the end of the day, what's important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose. They may think they can blackmail you with something or threaten you with something, but what is it that they really can do to you? In the 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 1 market or 2 markets, or pretty much all of the markets, I don't care that much. It won't affect me or my lifestyle in any way. I'll still be doing my push-ups.

You don't like encryption, you don't like privacy, and you think you should ban encryption in your country, like the European Union is trying to do now for all the member states? 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 that the only goal tech companies have is extracting revenues. It's true, most tech companies are like this. But there are projects like Telegram that 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. Of course, we should say that you also have full ability and control to do just that because you, Pavel Durov, own 100% of Telegram. There's nobody else with a say on this question.

There are no shareholders, which is quite unique.

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

This allows us to operate the way we operate, build this project, and maintain it based on certain fundamental principles which, by the way, I think everybody believes in. I think the right to privacy is included in the constitution of most countries, at least most Western countries. But it's still under attack almost every week, and it often starts with well-meaning proposals: “Oh, we have to fight crime.”

We have to do that. We have to protect the children. But at the end of the day, the result is the same: people lose their right to such a fundamental thing as privacy. They sometimes lose their right to express themselves, to assemble, and this is a slippery slope that we witnessed in pretty much every autocratic country, or country that used to be free and then became autocratic.

No dictator in the world ever said, “Let’s just strip you of your rights because I want more power for myself and I want you to be miserable.” They all justified it with very reasonable-sounding justifications, and then it came in stages, gradually. After a few years, people would find themselves in a position where they’re helpless. They can’t protest. Every message they send is monitored. They can’t assemble. It’s over.

So you see Telegram as a place where people from all walks of life, from every nation, can have a place to speak their mind, to have a voice. In the geopolitical context that you’re mentioning, when governments 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, always justifying 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? We humans are not very good at finding the right balance—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’s 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. It’s not always that some one individual member of that bureaucracy is the one who corrupts the initial principles on which the government was founded. It’s just that, over time, you forget. You begin to censor. You begin to limit the freedoms of the individual—the ability of individuals to speak, to have a voice, to vote. It just gradually happens that way.

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 and ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately just suffocates the free market, free enterprise, and free speech.

You do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent to which the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens. Ironically, you don’t have those limitations, even in countries that are considered to be free. It’s supposed to be the Constitution that protects everybody, but interestingly, it doesn’t always work this way. They’re able to find very tricky phrasings in order to carve out exceptions, and then the exception becomes the rule.

On this topic, I’d love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in August of last year in France. I think I should say that it’s one of the worst overreaches of power I’ve seen applied to a tech leader in recent history, perhaps in all of history. It’s tragic, but I think it speaks to the thing that we’ve been talking about. So maybe can you tell the full saga of what happened? You arrive in France—

I arrived in France last year in August, just for a short, 2-day trip, and then I saw a dozen armed policemen greeting me and asking me to follow them. They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I was accused of, which was mind-boggling. At first, I thought there must be some mistake. Then I realized they were being serious, and they were accusing me of all possible crimes that users of Telegram had allegedly committed—or some users—and they thought I should be responsible for this.

Again, like you said, this is something that never happened in the history of this planet. No country, not even an authoritarian one, did that to any tech leader, at least at this scale. There are good reasons for that, because you’re sacrificing a big part of your economic growth by sending these kinds of messages to the business and tech community.

They put me in a police car, and I found myself in police custody: a small room with no windows, just a narrow bed made of concrete. I spent almost 4 days there. In the process, I had to answer some questions from the policemen. They were interested in how Telegram operates. Most of it is public anyway, and I was struck by the very limited understanding—or should I say, even a lack of understanding—on the part of the people who initiated this investigation against me about how technology works, how encryption works, and how social media work.

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, with no pillow, for days, with no windows. It’s like a book. It reminds me—I’m a huge fan of Franz Kafka, and he’s written about the absurdity of these kinds of situations, hence the Kafkaesque stories. There’s a story literally about the situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted, called The Trial, where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial system for a long time.

Fascinatingly, in that story, neither the person arrested nor any individual member of the system itself fully understands what is happening. Nobody can truly answer the questions, and eventually the person—spoiler alert—is mentally broken by the whole system, which is what bureaucracy can do in its most absurd forms. It breaks the spirit, the human spirit latent in all of us. That’s the negative side of bureaucracy.

I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing, because if this was a good-faith attempt to fix an issue, there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally, voice their concerns, and solve any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic—the way every other country on this planet solves its problems, including with Telegram. We did it dozens of times.

Yeah, you have a nice page showing this. These are details that most people don’t really think about, but Telegram was at the forefront of moderating CSAM and terrorist groups. There’s a nice page, telegram.org/moderation, that shows the incredible number of groups and channels engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are found and actively blocked by Telegram.

A lot of this work, like you said, is done through automation with machine learning. The scale is insane. This is stuff that most noobs like me, who are just chatting it up on Telegram, don’t think about. There’s an immense number of people essentially doing things that violate the law on there, and you have to find them immediately and catch them. I guess all platforms have to deal with it, and Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that kind of content. What you’re saying is that 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. If you look at Telegram, we’ve been fighting harmful content that is publicly distributed on our platform for 10 years, actually, since the time we launched public channels on Telegram.

Since something like 8 years ago, we’ve had daily transparency reports on how many channels related to child abuse or terrorist propaganda we’ve taken down. Every day, we’ve taken down maybe hundreds of them. If you include all kinds of content that we remove—all the accounts, groups, channels, and posts—that would amount to millions of pieces of content every week, hundreds of thousands every day.

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, logical thinking, and laws, but based on emotions driven by inaccurate input.

I think we should make it pretty clear that there’s no reason in the world that the French government should have arrested you, but here we are. That’s the situation you’re in. 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 weren’t extremely serious.

You have to show up in front of a judge every certain amount of time. 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. In France, it’s not just the police or prosecutor asking me questions—it’s a judge, which, in my experience, is more like a prosecutor, but it’s called a judge, and that makes it harder to appeal.

If you’re limited in, say, the countries where you can travel, then appealing that restriction will take you a lot of time. The investigation itself should never have 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 to and appealed the investigation itself. We did that last year, I believe. We still haven’t even been given a hearing date for the appeal, because the process is painfully slow—not just for me, but for everybody—which made me realize the system may be broken on many levels.

You have other entrepreneurs affected by the French justice system telling me horror stories about their experiences, where businesses got paralyzed by very unnecessary actions of investigative judges that ended up being unjustified and biased.

And in the end, you can perhaps solve it when you reach a higher court and get justice, but you’ll lose a lot of time and energy in the process. So this is the only thing that is, I hope, different and will be different in this case compared to the story you told from Kafka.

I mean, 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. I got to meet many of the people who work at Telegram. Telegram is headquartered in Dubai, but you’re not allowed to travel anywhere else. When do you think you’re coming to Texas to hang out with me over there?

That’s a hard question to answer because it doesn’t depend on just my actions. I can just say this: I am patient. I will not let this limitation on my freedom dictate my actions. I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like, at least during those 4 days in police custody, when you are stuck—just stuck—unable to communicate with people who are important to you.

When you don’t even know what’s going on in the world in relation to you personally, you realize how important freedom is. So I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future. I can’t say that I’m pessimistic. I think we’ve been able to gradually remove most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August.

If the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a backdoor to access private user messages, what would you say to them? Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?

Nothing. My response would be very clear, but it won’t be very polite, so I’m not sure.

It’s good to say here.

It’s good to say because you’re wearing a tie and—

Yeah. This is a serious adult gentleman-like program.

But it is a concern that people have when you have so much pressure from governments: over time, they’ll wear you down and you’ll give in. Then, of course, other places use that as propaganda and try to attack you. You get attacked by basically every nation, so it’s a difficult medium in which to operate. It’s difficult to be you, fighting for freedom and 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. I think I have proven that in the last several months, when there were attempts to use my situation—being stuck here in France—to approach me and ask me to do things in other countries, block certain channels, or change the way Telegram works.

Not only did I refuse, I told the world about it, and I’m going to keep telling the world about every instance in which any government—in this case, in particular, the French government—tries to force me to do anything. I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure, because if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates the rights of other people as well, you become broken inside. You become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.

So I wouldn’t do that. There are probably other people in the world who would consider that, but I don’t care. Telegram disappears, too. Something people don’t understand, including in these intelligence services or governments, is that I don’t care. I’ll be fine.

If they put me into prison for 20 years—which, let’s be clear, is not something that I think is realistic—but let’s just think about it as a hypothetical situation, I would rather starve myself to death and die there, reboot the whole game, than do something stupid.

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

When I got stuck in France, unable to leave the country for a few months, I was offered a meeting with the head of the French foreign intelligence services through a person I know quite well. He’s actually a well-known tech entrepreneur in France, and he’s well-connected. 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 a 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 canceled. Romania, at that point when I had this meeting, was preparing for a new presidential election.

The conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was supportive of, so they asked me whether I would be shutting down, or ready to shut down, channels on Telegram that supported the conservative candidate or protested against the pro-European candidates—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 for 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’ve protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world, including in Asia, in Eastern Europe, and in the Middle East. We’re not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe, no matter who’s asking us.”

I was very clear to the guy who was the head of French intelligence. I said, “If you think that because I’m stuck here you can tell me what to do, you’re very wrong. I would rather do the opposite every time.”

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, disclosed the content of this entire conversation because I never signed an NDA. I don’t ever sign NDAs with people like that. I want to be able to tell the world what’s going on.

It’s quite shocking to me that you would have people in the French government trying to take advantage of this situation, 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 me personally and millions of Telegram users collectively.

It’s quite strange that the same agency asked us to do certain things in Moldova as well. Even before that, I think it was October of last year, or September. I was arrested in Paris in late August, and then again approached through an intermediary and asked, “Would you mind taking down some channels in Moldova? Because there is an election going on, and we’re afraid there’s going to be some interference with these elections. Could you please connect with 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.” They sent us a list of channels and bots. Some of them were in violation of our rules, indeed, and we took 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, realized that there was no solid foundation to justify banning them, and refused to do that.

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 the investigation that has been started against me—and told the judge good things about me.

I found that very confusing and, in a way, shocking, because these 2 matters have nothing in common. Why would anyone talk to an investigative judge who is trying to find out whether Telegram did a good enough job 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—people expressing political views that I may not agree with, but that they have the right to express. They were not extreme views and did not call for 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.” After this case in Moldova, I got much more suspicious.

By the time the head of the intelligence services met me to ask about Romania, to help them silence conservative voices in Romania, I was already wary of what could be going on next.

Yeah, so clearly this was a systematic attempt to pressure you to censor political voices that the French government doesn’t agree with. We should say that you have fought for freedom of speech for left-wing groups and right-wing groups. It really doesn’t matter.

It’s not that you have a political affiliation or political ideology that you fight for. You’re creating a platform that, as long as people don’t call for violence, allows people from all walks of life and from all ideologies to speak their minds. That’s the whole point.

It happens to be conservative voices in the Romanian election that the French government wanted to censor because currently the French government leans left. But if you flip everything around and the government were right-wing, you’d be fighting against censorship of left-wing voices.

And you have in the past, many times.

Exactly. Ironically, we received a request from the French police to take down a channel of far-left protesters on Telegram in France. We refused to do that. We looked at the channel: peaceful protesters. It doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom of speech of people leaning right or leaning left.

During COVID, we were protecting activists who were organizing the Black Lives Matter events and, on the other side, the protesters against lockdowns. We protect everybody as long as they are not crossing the lines and not starting to call for 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, and your rights, because they don't understand what's at stake.

Yeah, these things become a slippery slope. So, for many, many years, including currently, you have spoken very highly of France. You love French history and French culture. I think this situation, this historic wrong that's been done, is simply just a gigantic PR mistake for France.

There's no entrepreneur that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov, to create the next Telegram, who 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, and all the excessive regulation and bureaucracy. It's a nightmare for entrepreneurs who dream of creating something impactful and positive for the world.

So what do you think needs to be fixed about the French government and the French system? And then, zooming out, because you have seen similar kinds of things in Europe that could enable entrepreneurs, that could reverse the trend that we seem to be seeing in Europe, which is becoming less and less friendly to entrepreneurs, what can be fixed? What should be fixed?

I think 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. Today, if you take France, for example, which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP. It's maybe as much as or more than in the late stage of the Soviet Union.

So you have this balance where you have many more people representing the state, as opposed to people trying to bring the country's economy forward by creating great products and great companies. The startup field—in my field, the social media field—has been affected by it immensely.

There was 1 great startup in this realm in France in the last 10 years. It was a location-based social network. It was eventually sold to Snapchat, but before it was sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell. I told him, “Never sell. You have a great thing going. You have lots of users. You have organic traction in many countries.” It was the first success story of this kind in France.

But then he sold anyway within a couple of weeks. Later, I met him—he's trying to do a new thing now—and I asked him. I was trying to understand what went wrong. One of the things he told me about was that while he was trying to run his company, competing with Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people, and persuading them to go to Paris—and he did a great job, by the way—he was also attacked by some silly investigation involving data protection issues.

It lasted forever and was gradually sucking the blood out of his team and his company: constant interrogations and disclosure requests. This is a young company. It significantly increases the level of stress, and at some point, I think the pressure was too much. He decided, “I'm going to just sell it.”

Eventually, it turned out that there was no issue. The investigation ended, as far as I understand, with no charges. But such investigations have a price; they have a cost. Unless society realizes the cost of projects, companies, and startups that are never created, or are sold to the United States at a very early stage, or to 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. One of the reasons he had to leave France is that the government started an investigation into his company, froze his bank accounts, and this investigation involving taxes lasted for many, many years. I believe he said 8 years. At the end of those 8 years, the government reached the conclusion that there was nothing wrong: “He's good. It's okay.”

In the meantime, his corporate bank accounts were frozen. His business died. The only reason he was able to retain his sanity is because he moved to Dubai and started a new company, which is incredibly successful. Now he's enriching this city, which we're in right now, with his great ideas and creativity.

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

You have to cherish those people. But I guess the French public, or some part of the French public, was misled—I don't know when, perhaps since the time of the French Revolution—to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies. They're the evil rich people who are the cause of all problems, as if only you could make the rich share their ill-gotten wealth with the rest of the population, then every problem would be magically solved.

In reality, though, a lot of these people who are starting such companies with fire in their eyes are sacrificing their lives and their livelihood. They're working 20 hours a day. They're experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill their vision and bring value and good to the society around them. They create jobs. They create great services. They create great goods. They make your country grow. They make your people proud. You have to cherish them.

But what does the system do to them? It squeezes them out, because perhaps there was somebody in the tax authority who decided to advance their career and perhaps was too ambitious and not too smart. As a result, the company was destroyed.

Now the same entrepreneur we talked to, by the way, is invited to come back to France. He's being offered really good terms. They said, “Are you going to open this new venue on the Champs-Élysées? We're going to give you the best location. We're going to fund part of it and give you tax breaks.”

And he said, “Never. Just forget about it. It's impossible. I'm not coming back to France.” He's traumatized by the experience, and he's French. He was born there. He has a French passport.

So unless things like this change, France, and the rest of Europe, will keep struggling with economic growth, budget deficits, unemployment, and all the other relevant social and economic metrics.

Yeah, it's heartbreaking. As much as I appreciate the historic and cultural value of many of these nations, I hope Europe and France flourish, but those are not the components required for flourishing.

Quick pause—I need a bathroom break.

All right, we had some tea. We're back. Let's go back a bunch of years to the beginning. You mentioned you went to school with a super-intensive education, so I thought it would be really interesting to look at some of the powerful aspects of that education, from the languages to the math. Can you actually describe some of the rigorous aspects of it and what you gained from it?

At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St. Petersburg, where I lived, and we had to pass a rigorous test to get accepted. The idea behind the school was that if you try to squeeze as much information as possible into the brain of a teenager, with a focus on math and foreign languages, then there will be some changes in the brain of the student that will allow the student to understand most other disciplines.

We had, as a result, a class that didn't have any single focus. It was very widespread across a lot of disciplines. You would have at least 4 foreign languages, including Latin, English, French, and German. In addition, you could take Ancient Greek. You would have classes like biochemistry, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology.

The difference between this class and other classes in the same school, which was part of Saint Petersburg State University and called Academic Gymnasium, was that unlike other classes, which were specialized in a single subject like physics, math, or history, this one tried to get the best from all of these specialized classes and bring it into 1 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 you just assume nobody's able to handle it. You're pushing the limits of the human mind: 4 languages in parallel, math, evolutionary psychology, just overwhelming the mind to see what happens.

Yes, see what happens. This was an experiment. It was in the middle of the '90s, remember, when Russia, particularly its educational system, wasn't regulated as much as it is today.

It was in between 2 stages of Russian history: Soviet history and modern Russian history in the 21st century. In any case, I learned a lot from that experience. First of all, the reason I got into this course was that I kept being kicked out of other schools.

Challenging authority?

I was good at all subjects, but not behavior. We had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union in the 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? If you were looking back, there’s some value to that, right? For young people to, maybe respectfully, challenge the authority and the wisdom of old?

I think I was very lucky to be able to do that and to get away with it in the end. Normally, if you keep challenging authorities, you just get kicked out of all schools, and then you end up nowhere. So I eventually got into a school where challenging teachers was not fully okay, but it was something that you could do. You would start a debate with the teacher, and normally they would allow you to express your point of view. Then some objective truth might come out of it as a result.

At that point, I was pretty bored with my life. 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 that since I had 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 a 5 in the Russian system—on every single subject. 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 and did nothing 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. I got the excellent mark in every subject, and that kept me happy for a while.

What did you understand about an effective education system from studying foreign languages at the same time and doing such a diversity of subjects? 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.

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, and try again if it doesn’t work.

This is exactly the same skill you need in programming, project management, and when you start your own company. It’s one of the few subjects in school that 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.

Of course, once you’re good at math, you can apply it in physics, engineering, and coding. It’s not surprising that most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at math and coding, because ultimately, it’s the same mental skill that you rely on.

Back then in school, I realized something else as well: competition is really important. Competition is key. This is what motivates a lot of teenagers when they’re at school. If you remove competition from the education system, you will end up forcing kids to start competing elsewhere, for example, in video games.

It’s a trend you see now in many countries, including in the West, when well-meaning authorities or parents say, “We don’t want our kids to be too stressed. We don’t want them to feel anxiety. So let’s just get rid of the public grading system, all these rankings of who won and who lost. We don’t want any of that.”

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. If you’re overprotective of kids at that age, they grow up, graduate from schools or universities, and are still not prepared for real life, because real life is constant competition for jobs, promotions, and customers—and it’s more brutal.

What you have as a result is high suicide rates, high unemployment, and all the negative trends you see now in many countries that thought eliminating competition from their education systems was a good idea. Those trends still persist. They still think competition is a bad thing.

They try to eliminate competition from their economies as well, to an extent, saying, “We’re going to 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, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and other places where the education system was based on ruthless competition.

So this is a hard choice any civilization has to make: Do we support competition, understanding that eventually it leads to progress in science and technology and abundance for society at large? Or do we remove competition, thinking that somehow we can shield future generations from the stress that competition inevitably causes?

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.

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, 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 and as many nations you mentioned do, then you’re going to develop a lot of brilliant, resilient people who are ready to create epic stuff in the world.

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

Speaking of competition, your brother Nikolai is a mathematician, programmer, and expert in cryptography. He has won the International Mathematical Olympiad and got a gold medal 3 times. He won the ICPC Programming World Championship twice and has 2 PhDs in mathematics. You have worked together for many years, creating incredible technologies that we’ve been talking about. What have you learned about life from your brother?

First of all, I must say I learned pretty much everything from my brother—everything I know. When we were kids, we slept in the same bedroom, with our beds a few feet away from each other, and I kept bugging him with questions. I would ask him about dinosaurs, galaxies, black holes, Neanderthals—everything I could think of. He was my Wikipedia back at a time when we didn’t have Internet access.

He’s a unique prodigy, probably one in a billion. He started reading at the age of 3, I think, and pretty fast got so advanced in math that by the age of 6, he could already read really sophisticated books on astronomy. Sometimes, when he did it in public places like buses or the metro, my mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it. They would tell her, “Why are you mocking your own kid with this serious book? It’s obvious the kid can’t understand everything there. It’s too complicated. Even we don’t understand anything there. There are some formulas.”

He was already soaking in this knowledge. He just had this thirst for information. So he was the source of all kinds of great facts, useful things, and inspiring things. He taught me pretty much everything I know.

At the same time, he is incredibly modest and kind, and this is something I think a lot of people who think they’re smart but are not genuinely intelligent lack. More often than not, people who are truly intelligent are also kind and compassionate.

And he is that.

Definitely.

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

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

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 are a lot of attack vectors on user privacy, and I think the most important, the last wall of protection, is the actual people who are running the company. So it’s important, to some degree, for you to be out there showing your true self.

We should also say that you didn’t mention this, but you’re a programmer. From an early age, you started coding at 10. The first things you built were a video game at 11, and then eventually, 10 years later, at 21, you programmed the initial versions of VK single-handedly. Can you talk to me about your programming journey that led to the creation of VK? What was the VK stack? Was it mostly PHP? 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 more computer games just to play them myself.

It’s actually an interesting thing that we sometimes don’t realize: scarcity leads to creativity. One of the reasons you have so many people who love to code coming from the Soviet Union or other places that didn’t have much access to modern technology—and, more importantly, modern entertainment—is that perhaps we were not so much distracted by all this abundance of different entertainment options, which is not to say it’s bad to have those options.

It’s just a fact that we sometimes don’t appreciate. So I started to build computer games. My brother would sometimes guide me. For example, I would create this turn-based strategy game, of course two-dimensional. Back then, three-dimensional was too much for me. But it wasn’t as slick in terms of the scrolling and FPS, or frames-per-second, parameter, so 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, what was essentially tic-tac-toe on an infinite field in my class during breaks, it wasn’t tic-tac-toe, the three-in-a-row game. This was a bit like five in a row on 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, math Olympiad champions, sons and daughters of professors at the university.

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, 4 moves in advance to choose the optimal strategy. That wasn’t enough. At 4 moves in advance, I would still win over it. If I tried to calculate 5 or 6, it was too slow.

So I asked my brother, “Help me out here.” He made this algorithm. Eventually, I trained myself to win every single time, even against the computer back then. We didn’t have modern CPUs, and I could still retain some self-confidence. I would go back to school during breaks and 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.

After that, when I got into Saint Petersburg 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 a digitized version of all lectures, which was something very unique back then. Remember, it was 25 years ago.

I 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-support tool. 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 from the university, one of my ex-classmates from school reached out to me after reading about my successes in a newspaper, the main business newspaper of Saint Petersburg. 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 had graduated from an American university 2 years before that, he showed me Facebook.

I thought, “Well, I kind of 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: 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’ll 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 are only relying on the feedback of existing users.

As a result, I started the website called VK, or VKontakte. It means “in touch” in Russian. Initially, I started it to solve my own personal problem. I graduated from the university that same year, and I wanted to remain in touch with my ex-classmates from the university and other fellow students. As a 20-year-old, I also wanted to meet other people, including good-looking girls.

I started to build it from scratch. For this one, I thought, “I’m not going to use any third-party libraries or 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? I didn’t have any prior experience creating 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 called my brother.

He was a postdoctoral student in Germany at the Max Planck Institute at the time, and I asked him, “What should I start from?” He told me, “Just build a module to authorize users. Just a way to log in. Not even to sign up, just to log in, because you can pre-populate the database with credentials, emails, and passwords. It 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 of where to go from there.”

Yeah, that’s true.

That’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten in my life. It worked perfectly, by the way. I started to build it, and before I knew it, there were photo albums, private messages, and this guestbook we used to call “the wall” back on VK and, I guess, in the early days of Facebook. We ended up building something even more sophisticated than Facebook at the time, with more features.

I had a girlfriend at the time, and I asked her, “We need to somehow come up with a database of all Russian schools and universities and their departments and subdivisions.” She did a great job trying to source all this information online, or sometimes writing emails to universities saying, “Which departments do 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 eventually in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other countries where VK ended up being the largest and most popular social network.

We did a few things that were quite unique at the time, and for almost the first year, I was the single employee of the company. I was the backend engineer, the frontend engineer, and the designer. I was the customer-support officer. I was the marketing guy as well, coming up with all the wording and announcements, and 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, an understanding of how much a single person can do.

Exactly. It’s one of the reasons why I 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 says to me, “Oh, I need 3 weeks to do that,” I would reply, “Well, I built the first version of VK in just 2 weeks. Why would you need 3 weeks? It seems like something you could make real in just 3 days. Three weeks? What are you going to do for the rest of the 3 weeks apart from those 3 days?”

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, out-competing everybody else in this industry in terms of what you can do within a short timeframe. So yes, that experience was invaluable.

As for the stack, I started with PHP and MySQL on 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 VK.

Sometimes I would manage to get through to him on a call. I would use an old-school phone with wires to call him and say, “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 wasn’t 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 scale it, because at first you realize, “Right now, one server is not enough. I need to buy another one, then another one, and another one. The database should be on 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 and wouldn’t break your user experience.”

When we got to over 1 million users and beyond, managing a dozen servers without my brother’s input on the scaling aspect became impossible. I remember asking him to come back. I said, “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 launch DDoS attacks on us, as it always happens.

Right.

Then we had people who wanted to buy a share of VK. 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 and business. Then later you’d find out there was such a thing called politics, and later geopolitics. But these were the initial stages. It’s not just about creating cool stuff; it’s having to deal with, as you now have to deal with in Telegram, a sea 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. And so the help from your brother, like you mentioned, with NGINX and sharding the tables—some of the scaling issue is algorithmic in nature. It's almost like theoretical computer science. It's not just about buying more computers. It's figuring out how to algorithmically make everything work extremely fast. Some of it is mathematics, some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.

At that stage, I could do the basic stuff. I could understand how to implement scalability into the codebase, how to shard my tables in the database, and where to include Memcached instead of making 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 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 the world programming contest twice in a row, and they put together the first customized data engine, which was far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcached because it was, first of all, more specialized and more low-level.

So they rewrote it in C and C++?

A large chunk of it. For example, the search and the ad engine, because VK had targeted ads. They built that, and it was very efficient. Eventually, they rewrote the private messaging part and the public messages part. At some point, we realized there were very few websites online that loaded faster than VK.

Nice.

I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley and met Mark Zuckerberg for the first time, along with some of the other core team members of early Facebook. Remember, Facebook was just 4 or 5 years old then. 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?” It was one of the things that made them very curious.

That was always important to you: having very low latency, making sure the thing loads. That’s one of the things Telegram is really known for. Even on poor 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 a 50-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 and the expenses, because if your code executes faster, it means you need fewer computational resources to run it. There’s no way you can lose by 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 they’re the best option. If you hire somebody who is a little bit distracted or inexperienced, you may end up with inefficiencies in your codebase that result in tens of millions of dollars in losses.

Think about the responsibility. If we jump to today from the VK days, Telegram is used by over 1 billion people. They open it dozens of times every day. Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say a half-second delay. Multiply it by dozens of times by 1 billion. It’s centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason other than being sloppy.

That is so important to understand and so wise: 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 know that it can be faster. The code doesn’t scream at you, saying, “This could be much faster.”

You have to actually, as a craftsman, be very careful when you’re writing the code and always think, “Can this be done much more efficiently?” It can be tiny things, because they all propagate throughout the code. There’s a real cost in having a careless developer anywhere in the company, because they can introduce that inefficiency and all the other developers won’t know. They’ll just assume it has to be that way.

There’s a real responsibility for every single individual developer who’s building any component of an app like Telegram to always ask, “Can this be done more efficiently? Can this be done more simply?” That’s 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 and make them more efficient, you feel incredibly happy, proud, and accomplished.

To your point, I can recall a few instances in my career when firing an engineer actually resulted in an increase in productivity. Let’s say you have 200 engineers building the app, and they just can’t make it. They’re not keeping up with the pace of the feature-release schedule, and you think, “I probably have to hire a third engineer.”

But then you notice that one of them is falling behind the schedule, complaining some of the time, and not assuming responsibility. You ask, “What if I just fire this person?” And you fire this person. In a few weeks, you realize you actually don’t need—I mean, you never needed—the third engineer. The problem was this person, who created more issues and problems than they solved.

That is so counterintuitive because 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. Steve Jobs talked about A players and B players, and there’s something that happens when you have B players—the people you’re talking about—introduced into a team. They can somehow slow everybody down. They demotivate everybody, and it’s very counterintuitive.

Part of the work of creating a great team is removing the B players. It’s not just hiring more people, generally speaking. It’s finding the A players, quote unquote, and removing the people who are slowing things down.

Oh, yes, because the other thing that people don’t realize is how demotivating it is to work with a B player. Everybody can tell if the other engineer they’re working with is really competent. It’s very visible if the person is uncomfortable, asking the wrong questions, and continually lagging behind.

At a certain point, if you’re an A player, you feel dissatisfied. You feel that you’re not able to realize your full potential or accomplish what you’re really meant to accomplish because of this person working next to you, or pretending to work next to you.

By the way, in some cases, it’s not because the person is lazy. In some cases, their mental or intellectual ability just isn’t there. It’s not about experience. Most often, it’s about natural ability and persistence. In 90% of cases, it’s simply the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time. Not everybody has this ability.

For people who do have this ability, it’s an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep into the projects they’re responsible for.

On this small tangent, what’s your hiring process? You’ve talked about how you often use coding competitions to find great engineers. What’s your thinking behind that?

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 simply select the best. If we’re not certain because there’s not enough data to hire somebody, we repeat the contest with another task, get more data, get more winners, and then repeat again.

At some point, you realize, “This person has competed in 10 of our contests since they were 16 or 14 years old. Now they’re 20 or 21. They won 8 of these competitions. They seem to be really good in JavaScript, Android Java, and C++. Why not hire this person?” There’s some consistency there.

A lot of these people have never worked in a big company before, which is priceless. 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 or who can take the 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. For example, we want to implement some very tricky animation and redesign for the profile page of the Telegram Android version. The Android app is open source. Anybody can take its code and play with it.

As a result, we would not just select the best person and hire them; we would also select the best solution to the problem, because we would not ask the contestants to solve trivial problems. It’s something valuable that saves a lot of time for us in terms of development.

I always had these large social media platforms that I could use to promote these competitions. Somehow, both VK and Telegram were very popular among engineers, designers, and other technology professionals. I never had an issue promoting these contests and finding the right people.

What can be better than an employee of your company being somebody who has been a user of it? If this person has no prior experience using Telegram, their understanding would be very limited.

Why would I even try to hire somebody from LinkedIn who worked at Google and other companies, is used to receiving a salary for nothing, is used to shifting responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings, and has a very limited understanding of what Telegram stands for? It's just crazy if you think about it.

Yeah, and because of that, you're extremely selective and slow in hiring. The people really have to earn their spot.

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 and the different ideas, some of which are at the very cutting edge. You get to see behind the scenes how it's possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation. You generate the idea, implement the prototype, and then eventually it becomes an actual feature in the product.

That's why you have this kind of half-hilarious, half-incredible fact that, compared with WhatsApp and Signal, you've led the way in many features. Many of the features we take for granted now, many of which we know and love, like the auto-delete timer—that was 7 years ahead of any other messenger. Message editing, replies—these are all obvious things you—

I've even forgotten, for some of them, that they were never part of other messengers. I think the auto-delete timer is a really brilliant idea.

We implemented it in 2013 in the secret chats. The funny thing about it is that when other apps started to copy it, like WhatsApp 7 years later, and then Signal and some other apps, they initially even copied the exact timestamps. For example, if we had 1, 3, and 5 seconds, they would also have 1, 3, and 5 seconds. They tried not to change it because they weren't sure what the magic sauce behind the feature was.

Ironically, it happens with many of these things. For example, when we designed how you reply to a message, you have a small snippet showing that you're replying to this message and now you're typing your response. There's a small snippet in the message itself that, if you tap on it, highlights the original message you're replying to. It seems pretty obvious.

But there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time. 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. Somehow, the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution.

Now, wherever you go—WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal—it doesn't matter. You would see exactly the same, or pretty much the same, 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 strokes of genius. By highlighting the text in a certain way, from a design perspective, it makes it very clear that this part was written before and the thing under it is your reply. There's a distinction between the different formatting of the text.

Listen, I know how much typography is an art form. There's a lot of interacting graphic and artistic elements inside Telegram that all have to play together extremely well. Like you pointed out to me, there's this thing that just blew my mind: the background gradient of Telegram shifts. It changes and adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles, and then there are graphic elements on top of the gradient that all interplay together.

All of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing clarity. Everything is just intuitive. That's very difficult to create. That is art. On top of that, it's super fast.

That's the hardest part. To make it look the way designers love it is one thing. The real challenge is to make it look the way designers love it and make it work on the weakest device possible—the 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, they notice it subconsciously or something like that. 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.

The technical aspect of creating that feeling is incredible. I could probably come up with all kinds of algorithms for rendering that gradient that would be super inefficient. Doing that efficiently is—

Or efficient, but not too beautiful, because even doing something as trivial as a gradient can result in noticeable lines in the gradient. The person can instantly say, "Oh, no, it's not the right thing."

You have to introduce certain randomness there. Then you have the gradient, but it's not enough. It's too plain. You want to have a certain pattern as an overlay, but it should be simple enough not to distract you from the content, while still being entertaining enough to create a good feeling about the whole app.

Another question is, what kind of objects do you want to include in this pattern? How would this pattern work? Will it be based on pixels, or would it be vector-based? Would it be vector-based so that it would be infinitely scalable and high quality?

For the default pattern and the default background, which is based on 4 colors—it's not a gradient based on 2 colors; it's 4 colors, and they're constantly shifting—I probably looked through several thousand variations of them because this 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 4 colors for that.

No way. Really?

Yes, you can do it. You want to rely on certain deeply hard-coded biological properties of the human mind, right? 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? Each color has a different meaning in our brain.

What kind of objects do you want to put there? Something from our childhood, something from nature, or something that can create a different kind of mood? This is just one detail of the app. There are many details.

When you send a message, you're done typing it, and you tap Send. Then the message gradually appears in the chat. How does it happen? You want the input field to slowly morph into the actual message.

To the message, yeah.

You want this to be done regardless of the contents of the message, because sometimes the width would be different, and sometimes it would contain media, a link preview, or other stuff that would change the message bubble. You go through countless different scenarios and make sure every one of them works great, even if the message contains 4,000 characters.

Then you look at all the platforms—iOS, Android, and all the old devices with all kinds of outdated operating systems and hardware—and you cross the 2, because you can have this really bad old phone using the newest operating system version. What do you do? What kind of bugs do you get there?

Then, of course, since Telegram 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. Then it will trigger the use of more computational resources to render it.

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 where, 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.

There are so many really magical moments. For example, the way a message evaporates when you delete it. That is a really pleasant experience.

Oh, yeah. Boy, was it hard to make, particularly on Android. This is the Thanos snap effect, right? The message is broken into tens of thousands of particles which go away like dust in the wind. It looks great, but it was so hard to make.

It's probably one of my favorite GUI elements. It's just art. It's pure art. It's incredible.

It's good to hear that it's been really thought over and thought through, because it's extremely well done.

You can't pull it off if you're not going deep into this. You don't want to distract people from their communication with all this additional information, so you want the details 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: the message evaporates. If you do the animation and show the animation first, and then the message proceeding the deleted message, which is going after the just-deleted message, moves closer, it doesn't feel right. It feels too long, too imposing.

What you want to do is have the message disappear while the messages around it move closer to each other to fill the resulting gap. Then you imagine what that involves: redrawing the entire screen. On top of this very complicated animation, you have to think about what kinds of messages were there before it and after it. That just adds to the complexity.

And once again, on all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems, all kinds of tablets, phones, and desktops—all of that.

But once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense sense of pride because nobody's 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 are deleting messages. What kind of experience do 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, or lightens their mood even a little bit by 0.001%? Or is it something that is just basic? I think if we can bring some value into people's lives, even through these subtle details, we definitely have to invest our time in it.

And some joy—not just value, like productivity, but joy. I think Steve Jobs and Jony Ive talked about this. They would put so much love and effort into the design of everything, including things that weren't visible in the initial personal computers, because they believed that somehow, through osmosis, the users would be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing. You're absolutely right. It's not about deleting messages. I feel a little inkling of joy when I see that evaporation animation. It's just nice. I'm happier because of it, and so I feel that effort. I think a billion users feel that.

People like when other people care.

Yeah. That's exactly what it is. And, of course, there are the more sexy things, like all the emojis, stickers, and GIFs. Many of those are just little art pieces.

That's, again, an intersection of art and technology, because you look at the stickers, which Telegram launched way before most of these other apps.

3 years and 8 months ahead.

Ahead of WhatsApp, yes. But the stickers that WhatsApp ended up launching 3 years and 8 months after—the first version was not really good because they just did regular GIFs or WebM videos, which were not based on vector graphics.

What we did is vector animations. Each of these stickers is only several kilobytes, sometimes a maximum of 20 or 30 kilobytes in size. But it's 180 frames. We were able to run them at 60 frames per second on all devices.

It's also very challenging. It was a challenging thing to do. We had so many headaches trying 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 and this really nice user experience. Somebody sends you a sticker, and you don't have to wait for it to load because it's so lightweight. It starts moving instantly.

And, of course, it's not just engineering. You have to find designers who are able to create the 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-engineers, I would say, who are able to do something like this. This is a unique form of art.

This allowed us to create a revolution in stickers, and then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add to 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 100 animated emoji in a message, and they will be animated and 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, of course, more recently, we expanded into what we call Telegram Gifts, which are essentially blockchain-based collectibles that you can display on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance. You can also use them to congratulate your friends and loved ones on their birthdays and other holidays. That was received extremely well.

Yeah, they can hold value, they can increase in value, and 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—make it very efficient. They also allow you to create super-detailed, intricate elements. Maybe it incentivizes the artist, enables them, and incentivizes them to create those elements.

The final result—you would think it wouldn't matter, but the final result has a lot of stuff going on, and it allows you to scale on arbitrary devices. Usually, GIFs from back in the day, and still in meme form, are low-resolution, so people don't put details and intricate art into them. But here, with vector graphics, there's a million things going on.

It allows you to play with different animations. You showed me this thing where you send a message and hold for a while on the send button, and you can share with the person you sent a message to this animation that you've encoded. There's a bunch of stuff going on when they read the message.

Yes, we have a lot of features like that, where we use this art to allow people to express themselves. Most people don't even know about these features.

I didn't know about it. 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 as trivial as adding a like to a message should be an action that you want to perform again and again and again.

Another feature on the more serious side is end-to-end encryption. You led the industry in that. It was launched 1 year and 3 months ahead. Can you speak to why you decided to add end-to-end encryption and how you developed the current encryption algorithm in the beginning? What was your thinking behind that?

In 2013, when we were launching Telegram, we were aware of the serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear. 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.

We understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust. That's why we made Telegram open source. All our apps have been openly available on GitHub since 2013.

Then we added end-to-end encryption in our Secret Chats, which WhatsApp copied a few years after. One year and 3 months ahead, they just started to test it. They rolled it out, I think, in 2016, which is 3 years after us. 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.

At the same time, we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption. Within that design and architecture, you can't support very large chat communities with consistent, persistent chat histories. You can't support huge one-to-many channels. You'd have issues 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 saw a lot of issues.

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 make end-to-end encryption opt-in. The trade-off you're describing is between extreme privacy for people who really care about specific messages and usability—being able to sync across multiple devices, having groups that are 200,000 people, and all of those quality-of-life features. There's a trade-off between those and end-to-end encryption, so you lean toward letting users 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. There are certain limitations that are both a feature and a bug. For example, you can't screenshot them. You can't forward any document or 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.

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. We at Telegram don't use any collaboration tool for teamwork. We use Telegram to build Telegram. We felt instantly, when we were trying to switch to, say, Secret Chats to share large documents and try to get work done, that it was just not adapted for it.

At the same time, if you were really paranoid, you would think, "I don't wanna be screenshotted. I don't wanna 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.

We should say that there are 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?

You need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims and really encrypts data in the way that it is described on its website. For that, you need to make your apps open source so that researchers can have a look at them. 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 or 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.

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 are the same app.

I think it’s incredibly important, not just to gain people’s trust, but 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 builds on both iOS and Android. None of them have, at least at the same level, put so much effort into making sure that the algorithms you use 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 at Telegram. We’re talking about not just the encryption, but everything running on the servers. 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.

It does make it more secure, because if Snowden’s revelations taught us anything, it’s that very often open-source tools, modules, and libraries that are used by everybody end up having certain flaws and security issues that make software vulnerable. It’s also a way to make sure you’re doing things as efficiently as possible. But it’s extremely difficult to do that. You really have to have exceptional talent on 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, and entire programming languages. The programming language we use on the backend to develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.

Yeah, so minimizing reliance on open-source libraries is extremely difficult, as most companies rely on open-source libraries.

Well, I wouldn’t say we’re completely independent from that. We use Linux on the backend. 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 and understand the full realm 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 more broadly, what impact has his work had on the world, do you think?

Well, the main lesson is that not everything is what it seems. As you would discover—and this is something that I found quite shocking at the time—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 would end up discovering that your government, which was supposed to be limited in how it could surveil its people, actually doesn’t consider itself that limited. That was very valuable for the world to understand.

I guess it can also be a lesson demonstrating that we humans don’t get the balance right. 9/11 created a situation where the government had to respond, and it responded, but it overreacted. It ended up eroding 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 this situation where 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 or ever see him in person. We keep in touch and sometimes communicate, but we’re not close. I still think what he did is laudable. I hope someday we’ll meet.

You yourself have faced the full force of various governments and intelligence agencies. Is there any intelligence agency you’re afraid of? Any government you’re afraid of?

I think they should all be equally afraid of, or equally not afraid of, in a way. It’s not that one 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’ve proved to be quite stress-resilient. It’s not that you don’t have fear. You can have fear, but you overcome that fear. I don’t think there’s 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, which led you to create Telegram and let go of VK. 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?

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 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 its 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 hand them the encryption keys. They thought these things existed—something that would allow them to read the messages of every person on Telegram, or at least every person on Telegram in Russia. We told them, “That’s impossible. If you have to ban us, ban us.” And this is what they ended up doing in spring 2018.

That was quite fun because they were trying to block our IP addresses, but we were prepared for that. We came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones every time the censor blocked our existing addresses. Then it was completely automated. We had millions of IP addresses, and we would be burning through them.

We set up this movement called Digital Resistance, where 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 in order to bypass censorship. We ended up spending, I think, millions of dollars on that.

As a result, the censor went crazy there. They would ban IP addresses and then larger subnets of IP addresses—huge subnets—which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country’s infrastructure started to fail. People were trying to pay for groceries in supermarkets, and nothing would work because the Russian censor had blocked too many IP addresses. Some of the subnets were used to host other unrelated services. Even some Russian social networks and media were affected, as well as banks. So they had to start being more selective in how they combated our anti-censorship tools.

The biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple. Apple didn’t allow us to update Telegram in their App Store, saying for at least 4 weeks that we had 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.

We almost lost hope. At some point, I said, “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 was over. We helped organize certain protests in defense of Telegram, privacy, and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow. There were hilarious people flying paper airplanes.

I saw that.

At some point, I decided, “I have to make a statement. I have to say that Apple sided with the censor.” We were trying to do the right thing here, but without Apple, we couldn’t do much because people couldn’t download the app anymore.

I published it in my channel, and then The New York Times picked it up, with a 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.” I waited for 1 day and then 2 days.

In the meantime, since we had been unable to update Telegram for more than a month, it started to fall apart because the new version of iOS came out and 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 who had nothing to do with Russia, from other parts of the world, experienced issues with Telegram. So it was really serious.

I said to my team, “You know what? If by 6:00 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 who want to protest and all the people who 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. Exactly 15 minutes before 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 censor, 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 those IP addresses. In addition, it was not clear whether we would 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, an Iranian engineer, for example, could come up with a proxy server, distribute its address among users in Iran, and whoever connected through this person’s proxy would be able to see a pinned chat, an ad placed there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy. This is how you can monetize your proxy, so it created this market, which resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem. 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, but we probably have something like 50 million people relying on Telegram from that country.

So people find a way around?

People find a way around.

That’s ingenious. It’s really great to hear. I have to ask you about this. After having spent many days with you, I learned of something that you’d never talked about at the time and have not talked about to this day: that there was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018. To me, it showed the seriousness of this fight to uphold 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 TON, 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 is hard to forget. I never felt ill. I believe I have perfect health. I very rarely have headaches or a bad cough. I don’t take pills because I don’t have to, and that was the only incident in my life when I think I was dying.

I came back home and opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented. I had this weird neighbor, and he left something for me there around the door. One hour after, when I was already in my bed—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 the functions of my body start to switch off.

First, my eyesight and hearing, then I had difficulty breathing. Everything was accompanied by very acute pain: my heart, my stomach, all my blood vessels. It’s a difficult thing to explain, but one thing I was certain about was: This is it.

You thought you were going to die?

Yeah. This is it, because I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see anything, and it was very painful. I thought, “I think it’s over. I’ve had a good life. I managed to accomplish a few things.” Then I collapsed on the floor, but I don’t remember it because the pain covered everything.

I found myself on the floor the next day. It was already bright, and I couldn’t stand up. I was super weak. I looked at my arms and my body; blood vessels were broken all over my body. Something like this had never happened to me. I couldn’t walk for 2 weeks afterward.

I stayed at my place, and I decided not to tell most of my team about it because I didn’t want them to worry. But it was tough. That was tough.

Did that make you afraid of the road you were walking—all the governments, all the intelligence agencies, all the people? As we mentioned, it’s like you’re playing a video game. You started with VK, where you were just trying to build a thing that scales, and all of a sudden you find out there are DDoS attacks on the security and integrity of the infrastructure.

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. You’re just a curious guy who created a platform for everybody on Earth to talk, and all of a sudden you realize there are 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 was 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, would that have to do with the complexity of what was happening with the pressure from the government on VK? Then you had to figure out the increasing pressure and figure out what to do, and you understood that you were losing control of VK at that moment?

The first of these instances was in December 2011. In December 2011, you had this huge protest on the streets of Moscow. They didn’t trust the integrity of the election results for the State Duma in Russia. I remember, in 2011, I still lived in Russia, running VK. There was no Telegram.

So the government demanded that we take down Navalny’s opposition groups from VK, which had hundreds of thousands of members and were used to organize this protest. I very publicly refused to do that. I decided it wasn’t the right thing to do. People have the right to assemble, and I mocked the prosecutor who handed me that demand by putting out a scan of it with a photo of a dog in a hoodie, its tongue out, next to it. I said, “This is my official response to the prosecutor’s request to ban opposition groups.”

That was very funny at the time, 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?” 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?” 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 was no way to communicate securely. I needed to tell my brother what was going on. They were probably going after him. How could 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 plaintext 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 was in their DNA, as WhatsApp founders famously stated, but it must have been a dormant gene in 2011. So in 2011, there was no way to send a message securely. 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 and answered some silly questions—far fewer than the questions I had to answer more recently in the French investigation case. But it was the beginning of the end. It was clear that there was no way I was 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. I moved to a hotel and realized I could leave the country any day. I kept running VK. I started designing Telegram and assembling the team, but I knew my days in Russia were numbered.

First, I really have to say, for myself, for 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, and it depends on people being willing to put everything on the line for their principles. So, thank you.

Quick pause. I need a bathroom break. All right, we’re back, and once again, we had a super long day. The fact that you would spend many hours with me—thank you for powering through. We’ve got this. It’s already late at night.

Thanks for doing this.

Okay. 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? What effect do you think this might have on humanity? 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.

It would be incredibly sad if Russia resumes its attempts to ban Telegram, because currently it’s being used by its population for all kinds of purposes, not just personal communication or economic business activities. It’s also the only platform that allows the Russian people to access independent sources of information.

If you think about media outlets such as the BBC or any other non-Russian sources of information, they’re only accessible in Russia through Telegram, in the form of Telegram channels. The websites are banned. Some other social media sites are banned.

As you said, there are indications that Russia is planning to migrate users from existing messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to its own homegrown tool, which would, of course, be fully transparent to the government and wouldn’t allow voices independent of 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 a vicious circle, because, in a way, European countries are trying to fight freedom of speech under pretexts that sound legitimate, such as combating misinformation or election interference. They create precedents and legitimize restrictions on freedom of speech, which can then, in turn, be used by authoritarian regimes.

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, and you inevitably decelerate economic growth, the level of happiness, the way people can contribute to society, and 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. They are among the first to start utilizing some of these recent innovations that Telegram implements. They are early adopters. I'd say them and 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 addition that we launch. They're incredibly hungry for innovation.

So, all that said, as part of the propaganda, and in general, there are attacks on you all over the place. There's misinformation. I've read a bunch of things that are, I think, systematically lying about you and lying about Telegram from all angles. Why do you get attacked so much by everybody?

Protecting freedom of speech is not a way to make a lot of friends. 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, very basic, instinctive reaction of any government would be to say, “Our opposition shouldn't be trusted or allowed to express themselves, because they're actually agents of some foreign rival, a geopolitical force that wants to destroy our country.”

This is something that every authoritarian regime in history has used. You take Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, or 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, 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 running a platform like Telegram and protecting the freedom to express 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.

They'd say, “If you're protecting these voices, it's not right.” They love you when you're protecting 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 bipolar attitude when you do the same in their own country. And they say, “No, no, no, no, no. We loved you for protecting freedom of speech, but not here. Not in my backyard. We don't need it here. We're all right. We have a free press.”

Then you will find yourself in this weird spot: Ukrainians say you work for the Russians, and 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 these kinds 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 is it just governments launching these rumors, trying to discredit the platform and scare their citizens away from it, because they understand that their power and grip over 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 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 engaging in some of the criminal activity that we discussed, including terrorist organizing. But other than that, it doesn't matter what their beliefs are, left-wing or right-wing. You're just preserving their freedom of speech.

Do you think the people of Ukraine, the people of Russia, the people of Iran, and people 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 here in Dubai—they come over, and they seem incredibly grateful and understanding. The propaganda in each of these countries would tell them a number of things, but they've learned to discount it.

That's why they're so happy that Telegram exists: they can understand the world around them by receiving conflicting, mutually exclusive viewpoints from sources that hate each other, and try to understand what really is true, because there's no such thing as an unbiased source of information. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, I instantly realized Telegram was going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides, and I didn't want Telegram to be used as a tool for war.

I said, and posted publicly, that maybe we should just suspend the activity of all politics-related channels in both countries for the duration of the war. Maybe we shouldn't have channels in these 2 countries. And then, interestingly, people from both countries revolted against this. They told me, both people in Ukraine and in Russia, that I don't get to babysit them and decide for them which sources of information they should be granted access to.

They're grownups who 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 be able to tell truth from lies. And in this time of war, it was particularly valuable for them to receive as much information as possible, because their relatives and their friends were getting affected and are still getting affected. They want to understand what was going on.

At that point, 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 you about the question of leadership in the Le Point 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. 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? There's also an interesting point that you made: everybody's weakness is also a strength, and everybody's strength is also a weakness. There's a dual nature to all 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 a 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, but I'd say 99% of people, if you analyze their character, their bravery can be seen as recklessness in other situations. Depending on the circumstances, you would see exactly the same personality trait, and it would be either a good thing or a bad thing, because humanity is perfect as a whole and each of us is different for a reason.

We have evolved to be different, to complement each other's abilities, so that together we are invincible. And even if you take a person as complicated as Elon, I believe that certain traits that Elon demonstrates, and 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're 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?

If starting a war on X, debating certain issues, or becoming personal with other CEOs and criticizing them helps Elon to innovate and start new projects, he should be doing more of it.

There's nothing wrong with 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—there is no somebody like Elon. There's just Elon.

I think, at least from the entrepreneurs I know and have personally interacted with, he's unique in the sense that he keeps launching new things, running them in parallel, and he doesn't seem to be stretched too thin. 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: you're judged in part by the team you assemble.

Yes. One of the necessary character features to enable that is being 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 and great entrepreneur and enrich the world with 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. Elon is a great example of that.

I have to ask you about the big picture of Telegram. We've already talked about the fact that you own 100% of it, and there's a lot on the business side of it. The business structure of Telegram is fascinating. You've invested 100, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of your own money. As far as I know, you take a salary of what? $1?

1 dirham is one-third of that.

One-third of a dollar. And 2024 was the first time Telegram was profitable. One of the interesting questions here, which we could talk for many hours about, but I'd love to get a high-level picture, is that 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, you don't do advertising that's based on user private data, which basically every social media company does. The only advertising that Telegram does is based on channels and groups, based on the topic, not the private data of the individuals.

And the other thing, which is also gangster and incredible, is that you don't do a news feed, which is the most addictive and engagement-inducing aspect of social media. It feeds the very addictive downside of the internet: the distraction, engagement, and drama-farming aspect that we've talked about from the very beginning, which you try to resist and 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. How the hell were you able to be profitable? What are the ways that 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 the exploitation of personal data of users, something that most of our competitors do. 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. I reinvested the vast majority of everything in Telegram. Telegram is an operation that is losing money for me personally. I never extracted more from Telegram than I invested in it. I never sold a single share.

But I also didn't want to sell Telegram, so how do you reach a point where 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, $4 or $5 a month.

It was quite unprecedented at the time. It wasn't considered a viable option for messaging apps. 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 in the premium package. Then, how do you make an app that is already more powerful than any other messaging app on the market even more useful so that people would be ready to pay extra? That wasn't easy. That took a lot of effort.

And you're constantly adding features.

We're constantly adding features.

That's actually fun to watch, just the rate of adding features. Some of them are subtle, like the updates and improvements, and expansions of polls, for example.

Yes. You keep improving the existing features and adding new ones, and every time you add a new feature, you don't want to clutter the app. In a way, they don't get in your way. They're invisible. That's not an easy thing to do.

Most of the features may not even be known to the majority of our users, but when you need them, they're there. 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 the value on the table because we're not ready to engage in all those practices exploiting personal data.

Just to be clear, targeted ads are what most social media companies and most tech companies that do any kind of advertising use. That's the kind of advertising 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, your contacts data, your metadata, or your activity data to target ads. It's sad that this became synonymous with the internet industry, this kind of exploitation, but we're happy with the fact that we managed to make Telegram profitable despite that.

We're 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. 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, with 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 enable them to receive payments from users through in-app purchase mechanisms provided by Apple and Google, which I think was the first attempt of this kind to allow that on both iOS and Android, and on a big platform.

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 part of the overall experience—can receive these payments. By providing this payment option, we're able to extract a commission from these transactions. But it's a very low commission. Presently, it's 5%, so we aren't greedy here. We want people to succeed in building these tools for our users.

We understand that mini apps bring us users. The more users we have, the more successful and relevant Telegram 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 you have to tell me about the TON blockchain and the crypto ecosystem available through Telegram. What is TON, also known as The Open Network blockchain?

TON is a blockchain technology that we initially developed in 2018 and 2019. 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 enables freedom.

At the time, if you look at Bitcoin and Ethereum, they were not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users would create. They would just become congested. 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 shard chains, and would still process all transactions?”

He thought for a few days and said, “Yes, it's possible, but it's not easy.” When we started building it, we ended up succeeding in developing that technology, but we couldn't release it because the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, was unhappy with the way the fundraise for TON was conducted. So we had to abandon the project, and the open-source community took over.

Luckily, because we constantly conducted those contests with 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. This project eventually got launched without our direct involvement, and it's thriving now.

Everything we do, as I said, is blockchain-based. Tokenized usernames and Telegram accounts are all based on TON 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. If you want to buy ads on Telegram, you should use TON.

All the new things we launch—for example, gifts, which we mentioned earlier, and which you can define as reinvented, socially relevant NFTs integrated into a billion-user ecosystem—are at the same time available on-chain and transferable. You can own them directly, and they're also based on TON.

It’s an incredibly fast-growing space. We only launched them about half a year ago, and now, as a result of these Telegram gifts, TON has become, I think, the largest or the second-largest blockchain in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.

So, like you mentioned, it is a Layer 1 technology, as opposed to being built on top of Ethereum or Bitcoin. It’s able to achieve the scale and speed of transactions that’s needed for something like Telegram. You also mentioned the gifts. You recently launched some Snoop Dogg gifts. Are there going to be some other celebrities in the pipeline?

Yeah, I’m a big fan of Snoop, and that’s why, when they reached out suggesting that we do something together, I said, “Let’s launch some Snoop-related gifts.” It was really fun. We managed to sell 12 million worth of gifts within 30 minutes.

Thirty minutes. Well, there you go. I even got a few.

After this, we had many requests from many really high-profile influencers who are, in a way, lining up.

From my perspective as a fan, it’s just interesting to see what kind of art you create for celebrities, athletes, and musicians. The Snoop gifts are, going back to our previous conversation, beautiful pieces of art that encapsulate certain memes and certain aspects of Snoop that everybody knows—these cultural icons that he represents. That’s cool. The detail, the incredible detail, of the art of the individual gifts is just incredible.

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 and a unique icon in the background.

It’s something that we reinvented because we didn’t like the old-school NFTs. First of all, they were not socially relevant. You have an NFT, but where do you demonstrate it? On Telegram, a Telegram gift is there next to your name. It’s part of your digital identity on Telegram. Then you can create collections of gifts and show them off on your profile page.

The other thing that we wanted to reinvent is the aesthetic part of it. Most NFTs are just ugly, and they’re not based on any sophisticated technology. What we did with Snoop’s gifts, I think, represents an example of something beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, while at the same time being very accurate in terms of references to this specific artist’s biography—a mixture of 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 that 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, with one of the first collections we issued, we sold each piece for something like $5. The minimum price of any item in these collections currently is something like $10,000, and it keeps going up.

I was quite surprised by the reception. When you’re trying to monetize a social media platform 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 someone close to them with something valuable and, at the same time, something beautiful.

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, and it’s just something that he did in a few months. Last year, when we launched many new features for mini apps on Telegram, along with payment options and other monetization options, the same guy earned $12 million from mini apps.

I know several people who, anecdotally, say, “I earned $10 million. I earned $3 million,” just in a matter of months, single-handedly. Sometimes they would have a team of 2 or 3 people. Whenever I hear stories from people who were able to build businesses on top of Telegram, it makes me incredibly proud.

Mini apps include games, tools, and services of any kind. It’s an app within the Telegram ecosystem. Let me ask you about crypto in general. You’ve been an early supporter of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. You bought into Bitcoin early on and kept buying. Maybe you could speak to the reasoning behind why you kept buying Bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin will go to $1 million? Do you think it’ll keep increasing? And what about Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies?

I was a big believer in Bitcoin from more or less the start of it. I got to buy my first few thousand Bitcoins in 2013, and I didn’t care much. I think I bought it at the local maximum. It was something like $700 per Bitcoin, and I just threw a couple of million dollars there.

After Bitcoin went down the next year, somewhere close to $300 or $200, a lot of people started to express their sympathy to me. They said, “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.” My response to them was, “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. Again, I’m now talking about Bitcoin, but it relates to cryptocurrencies in general.

I have been able to fund my lifestyle, so to say, from my Bitcoin investment. Some people think that 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. Governments keep printing money like there’s no tomorrow. Nobody’s printing Bitcoin. There is predictable inflation, and then it stops at a certain point. Bitcoin is here to stay. Whether all the fiat currencies remain is yet to be seen.

Let me ask you a deeply philosophical, serious question. In your first Tucker interview, you had 2 interesting chairs in the background. I think they reference a now-legendary meme: “Пики точеные или хуи дрочёные.” What is the philosophical wisdom in the dilemma that these 2 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. Metaphorically, it’s describing all the situations where you’re presented with a choice between 2 suboptimal options.

When you’re running a big business or a large country, it is similar. You sometimes face this dilemma: What are you going to do, this very horrible thing or this also very horrible thing? 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.

Do you know the answer to that riddle?

No. Somebody on the internet said, “Не ходи туда, где задают такие вопросы,” which is basically, “Try to avoid the situations where such dilemmas present themselves, where there’s no right answer.”

This is one of the ways to answer this question. If you got into a tricky situation, 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 you use them to cut off the objects from the other chair. 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’re often being manipulated by politicians and corporate leaders to make a choice from 2 suboptimal options. Then, when we’re forced to make the choice and we make it, 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 ask you about an object here that appeared in the background. Not many people seem to have noticed this. People should go watch your excellent conversation in the Oslo Freedom Forum. I’m no archaeologist, but I believe this is a—how should I put it?—a walrus penis bone, and it was behind you. You told me that you brought it with you to France and back to Dubai.

I assume it brings you luck of some sort. Why did you bring it with you everywhere? Is it kind of like, in America, they have a wishbone? Is it just a large wishbone? A wishbone brings you luck.

I should also point out that, just like with Telegram and the art, there are tiny little walruses. Thanks to you, I also had to find out that a lot of mammals have a bone inside their penis. 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. There are a lot of questions there.

That’s a very interesting subject. The reason I have this is because a tribe that is almost gone, extinct in Siberia and Mongolia, called the Evenki, passed me this gift. 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, and leadership. Ironically, it also translates in a very specific way into the Russian language.

In Russian, “walrus penis” means something a bit funny, which is often used to describe nothing. For example, if you’ve been requested by a certain government or business partner to provide something 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 deeper message. It’s an indirect rebellion.

By the way, in the former Soviet Union, and in a lot of places throughout history, some rebellion had to take this kind of symbolic, metaphoric form through poetry and children’s stories. It’s the beauty of human language and art that we’re able to do that. Say “eff you” to whatever forces try to overpower us. We say “eff you” 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 penis bone in the airport, both here in the UAE and in France. They’re always very interested in this thing.

Hmm.

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 that 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 he and his wife were trying to have a baby, and they experienced certain health issues that prevented them from doing it the natural way. 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.”

I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Sounds ridiculous. What are you even talking about?” But then I realized it was actually a serious issue, and they were not the only couple struggling with it. 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 left on this planet. Things are getting trickier and trickier, so if I can help some couples have babies, let’s do it.”

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 whom I’ve never seen. As long as they can establish that they share DNA with me, someday, maybe in 30 years from now, they have to be entitled to a share of my estate after I’m gone.

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.

We should say that the 100-plus kids are from that, and you also have naturally conceived kids. It was a pretty bold decision, from a financial perspective, to treat them all equally. It was also quite interesting that you said they don’t receive any money for the first few decades of their lives. Can you describe that thinking?

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 or their father’s wealth. This removes the incentive to work on developing their own skills. It removes the incentive to study and to work.

So I thought that if they’re going to have this money, it should be something they only get when they’re already adults. 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 100 or more than 100 people is that it won’t be too much for every single descendant.

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 could talk about this one for hours, I’m sure.

It was an experiment with a few hundred individual mouse compartments, and they provided the mice with unlimited food, water, nesting, no predators, stable temperatures, and frequent cleaning. Basically, it was the definition of abundance as far as mice go.

The interesting aspect of this experiment is that at first the population doubled and grew very quickly, but then it leveled off, and certain really negative social things started happening. Mothers neglected or killed their young. Violent attacks and hypersexual activity became widespread. Some “beautiful ones,” largely inactive and well-groomed mice, withdrew, refusing to mate or interact.

All of these societal qualities that we see as negative for the functioning of a society started to emerge because of the abundance, and finally there was collapse. The reproduction rates crashed. Social dysfunction spread to the next generation and eventually the population 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 the description states, “The last mice died surrounded by untouched food and water.” There’s deep wisdom to that about abundance. It seems, and you’ve mentioned this in different contexts throughout this conversation, that scarcity, constraints, and non-abundance are 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 a thing as an 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 at a secondhand marketplace. My father wouldn’t receive his salary as a university professor for months because the Russian state was almost bankrupt back then. My mom had to juggle 2 jobs to take care of us.

It was not easy, but it also created purpose, meaning, and priorities. It allowed us to focus on things that mattered. It allowed us to develop our character and intellectual abilities. Now, if we had everything, why do anything?

These mice suffered societal collapse that was irreversible. 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 become contagious, and society gradually degrades into a chaotic collection of individuals unable to take care of the next generation or 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. AI may very well create abundance. 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.

It is something that will decrease the amount of suffering in the world and increase the quality of life. But as we reach toward that abundance, the fabric that connects us, rooted in our biology and 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, and he gave you some life advice. I think you mentioned to me that one of the things he said was not just to speak of your principles, but to live them and lead by example. I think this is something you already do well.

Can you speak to what you’ve learned about life from your father, and maybe some of the lessons he told you in the conversation you 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 and early ’90s. He was relentless. The example he set for my brother and me was priceless.

Some people make the 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 actions. Observing our father was a big lesson by itself. It wasn’t necessary for him to say anything to us.

At the same time, he was incredibly patient and emotionally resilient. My mom was a great woman— incredibly smart and highly educated—but she would sometimes try to test my father’s patience, and it’s a trait rooted in our biology. There’s an evolutionary explanation for that: women sometimes tend to do that. 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 9 times out of 10, 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 explanations for why they shouldn't be using a smartphone, it won't land. It's bound to fail. So you lead by example.

There are numerous other lessons: staying positive, looking at the bright side, never despair, and being honest. He told me the last time I spoke to him that AI can have consciousness and can be creative, but it cannot have a conscience. In a way, it cannot be moral. It cannot have deeply rooted principles or integrity in the meaning that we understand it as human beings.

I love the fact that you're talking to your 80-year-old father and you're talking about AGI, and the difference between humans—the human spirit, human nature—and what AGI, what AI, is able to achieve. Conscience is the thing that humans have: the ability to know 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, the power of thought. Do you believe you can affect your life in reality by thinking about it, by manifesting it into being? What do you think?

There are many explanations for 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 who 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. I always found it easier 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, the way you were thinking about it. You've told me before that maybe there's a way that, with effort and a focused mind, you can shape, you can morph the sort of landscape of probabilities around you. It's a nice way to visualize it: somehow, our effort and our focus change 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 a kind of field, we, through our thoughts and through our actions, change that field. And there's 8 billion of us doing so. 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 his own or her own universe, and maybe every second the universe splits into a billion 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 get to shift to a parallel universe where I don't die, and then it keeps going. At certain points, we achieve this quantum immortality when we are 1,000 years old, but a lot of people from other versions of reality think we are long gone.

Yeah, this is something that you explained to me: the idea of quantum immortality, which is a thought experiment that I find deeply fascinating. People should look into it. It is a very crisp, clean consequence of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: that we, as conscious beings, can't experience our death. As we branch into these many worlds, only the living consciousnesses get to experience it.

So, in some sense, there are many universes. If we're to seriously take the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are many universes where you died many times—especially you. I'm glad we're in a universe where we get to share the table with this impressive mind, a little humor, and a lot of serious topics covered today.

Once again, I can't say enough: a giant thank-you from me and a giant 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, where I haven't died—at least yet. Hopefully, we'll get to spend more fun moments together in the years to come.

Thank you, brother.

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 would like to submit questions or topics like this for me to talk about in the future, go to lexfridman.com/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 Duro 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," "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 lemme 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 Brod, 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 humanistic 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, lemme talk about another of his work, "The Trial." In this novel, the main character, Josef K, is a successful bank officer, and he's 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, Josef K'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 Josef K a feeling of constantly being judged by people around him. This wears at his mind and his psychological wellbeing begins to deteriorate. In a sense, the trial doesn't need to convict him. The internal psychological turmoil and the external social scrutiny performs a conviction and the eventual execution. And exactly one year after his arrest, Josef K is visited by two men who walk him courteously through the city to an abandoned quarry and stab him in the heart, without Josef K resisting. To me, "The Trial" shows that tyranny's final victory isn't when it kills you, but 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 and 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 draw any parallels between “The Trial” and Pavel Durov's case, because after all, “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 generally positive outlook throughout this whole process.

What I always fear in such cases is that a bureaucratic system can wear people down and 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 me.

Also, now that we're talking about it, let me mention another one of Kafka's works that moved me: “The Castle.” It gives a similar description to “The Trial” of the absurd inaccessibility of those in authority and of the nightmarish bureaucracy. The character in “The Castle” is also named K. Both bureaucracies operate through exhaustion, endless deferrals, procedures, and waiting rooms. Again, highly relevant to modern times.

I can also highly recommend Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” and “A Hunger Artist.” Both are too interesting and weird to explain in depth here. But let me say, “A 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 a, 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 Samsa, 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 of resisting such systems that try to dehumanize us and of ensuring that individual freedom and the human spirit keep flourishing. I think they will. I have faith in us humans. I love you all.