Pavel Durov

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

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

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

Yes. So the thing I’m trying to do, I try to allocate as much time as possible for sleep. Now, even if I allocate say 11 or 12 hours for sleep, I won’t sleep for 11 or 12 hours. So what I end up doing is, I end up lying in bed thinking. And some people hate it. They say, “Well, you have to take a sleeping pill,” but I never take pills. I love these moments. I get so many brilliant ideas, or at least they seem brilliant to me at the moment, while I’m lying in bed, either late in the evening or early in the morning. That’s my favorite time of the day. Sometimes I wake up, I go take a shower, still without a phone.

Beautiful ideas can come to you while you’re doing your morning exercise, your morning routine without a phone. If you open your phone first thing in the morning, what you end up being is a creature that is told what to think about for the rest of the day. Same is true in a way if you’ve been consuming news from social media late at night. But then how do you define what is important and what you really want to become in life? Now, I’m not saying you have to completely stay away from all sources of information, but take some time to think about what’s really important for you and what you want to change in this world.

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

I know it’s 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 of everything that’s going on, but 99% of people aren’t.

Yeah, the internet, social media presents to us drama in such a way that we think it’s the biggest thing in the world, the most important thing in which the tides of history will turn. But in reality, most things will not turn the tides of history. And so I guess our challenge is to figure out what is the timeless thing? What is the thing that’s happening today that’s still going to be true in 10, 20 years? And from that, decide what you’re going to do. And that’s very difficult on social media because everybody’s outraged. The news of the day, whatever the quarrel is, that’s the thing that everyone thinks the world will end because of this thing, and then another thing happens the next day.

And they’re trying to influence your emotions.

Yeah.

And that’s how you get into trouble because you can be forced to make conclusions that are not in your best interest.

I’ve seen you be, once again, quite stoic about your emotions. You ever get angry? You ever get lonely? You ever get sad? The roller coaster of human emotion, and what do you do with that when you make difficult decisions?

I’m a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience emotions. Some of them are not very pleasant, but I believe that it’s the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them. Self-discipline is particularly important because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people? I normally never have depression. I don’t remember having depression in the last 20 years, at least. Maybe when I was a teenager. But one of the reasons for that is I start doing things.

I identify the problem, I can see a solution, and I start executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something, nothing’s ever going to change. And people often make this mistake thinking, “Oh, I should just have some rest and then regain energy.” This is not how it works. You gain energy by doing something, so you start doing something, then it happens, you feel motivated, you feel inspired. And then ultimately you do something else, a little bit more, a little bit more. And then a few years, who know? You may end up achieving great things.

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

Exactly. And going to the gym is a good example. There are many days when you don’t want to start working out, but you have to overcome this initial reluctance, and then you get to a point that you enjoy it and you think, “Oh my God, it was such a good idea to come to the gym today.” But it’s similar to pretty much every activity. You get to write some code, write a small piece of code first, and then you get inspired. Then you’ll come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write the paragraph. This is pretty obvious and it’s not a secret, but because we are bombarded with all kinds of information, that is not really important for us in terms of becoming successful, we often forget the important things, and this is one of them.

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, weekly basis?

I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning. And in addition to that, I go to the gym normally five, six times a week, spending between one and two hours every day.

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

Yes, this is how I start my day. I’m not sure they do a lot in terms of changing your body, but they’re definitely a good way to practice self-discipline because you don’t want to do these push-ups in the morning most of the days. Squats are particularly boring. They’re not that hard, they’re just boring, but you overcome it and then it’s much easier to start doing other things related to your work. For example, when I can, I also take an ice bath because it’s another exercise of self-discipline. I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline. Not your biceps or your pecs or anything else. Because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.

Everything else becomes easy. We should mention, I went with you to Banya, and I think it’s fair to say you’re nuts in terms of how much you can handle. And I didn’t even see the worst of it. Can you just speak to your crazy escapades in the Banya, what value you get from it? So both the heat and the cold.

I don’t know if it’s crazy. I think it’s quite natural and normal by this time, but maybe I just got used to it. So Banya is this extreme kind of sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans, but it is done in a way that maximizes heat and they also use all kind of herbs and branches, and it’s a much more holistic and natural experience. Then the necessary part of it is you get the cold plunge and then you go back. And again, this is one of those things that maybe in the moment it’s not always that pleasant, particularly if you go to extreme temperatures, you don’t feel great.

I don’t always feel great, but this feeling is passing. It’s only a few minutes. Same with the ice bath. You have to suffer a bit and then you get to feel great for hours and days after. What’s more, it gives you this long-term health benefits. In a way you can look at it as alcohol in reverse. Alcohol will give you this short, fleeting pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours, but then you will be paying for it with long-term negative consequences. I’d rather do Banya and ice bath.

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

Yeah. I love swimming for hours. The longest I swam was five and a half hours in Finland. It was quite cold. I got lost in the process, barely could find my way back. But the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after. You’re shaking a little bit, you feel great after. You cross a huge lake, and I cross many lakes, Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake. And every time you feel this achievement, which makes you happy, makes you feel strong, and then you’re more ready to do other challenges. And of course, when you know you’re going to start a journey that will last a few hours, you are reluctant to do it. But you swim for 10 minutes and then for 20 minutes and then for 30 minutes, and it teaches you this incredible patience that I think is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life.

And it’s pretty meditative, lake versus ocean.

Yes. And you don’t have to go too fast. You can be slow and enjoy the moment.

Until you get lost and it’s five and a half hours. Would you panic, if you’re going to be able to find the shore, find your way out?

Not really, I’m a reasonably stress-resilient person. I didn’t panic at that moment. And there were worse swims I had that were shorter, but involved accidents and you know about some of them. So that wasn’t the worst by far. But an important thing about swimming and physical activity in general is that it makes your mind clear and your thinking process is becoming more efficient. Because at the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our heart can push through blood to our brain though. How can you make this go faster or how do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you make your heart more efficient in doing that?

Physical activity is the only way I know of. So it’s not just staying healthy or trying to look good, it’s also being productive. It’s also being stress resilient. All of these qualities are necessary if you want to run a large company, if you want to start a company. I’m surprised when I started doing this more than 10 years ago, that more CEOs didn’t engage in sports. The situation changed in the last several years, which is great. Because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago, there was this stereotype that if you are strong, you must be not very smart and vice versa. Which is a complete lunacy. Very often these two things go together.

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

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

Yeah, I mean that’s the cool thing about body weight exercise. You could just do it anywhere. You could just pop off 50, 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, it’s a shitty day.

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

Yeah. I got to ask you about your diet too. No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda. Intermittent fasting, sometimes once a day only, sometimes a couple times a day. So take me through your philosophy on the no sugar, no soda, just clean food.

Well, sugar is pretty easy because it’s addictive. The more you consume sugar, the more you want it, the hungrier you get. So if you want to stay efficient and healthy, why consume processed sugar? You’ll just end up snacking all the time. Intermittent fasting. So eating only within six hours and not eating for 18 hours every day also brings structure into your day and into your eating habits. So you don’t crave sugar anymore because you know if you eat sugar and then you’re unable to snack, you’re just punishing yourself. I read a few books on longevity. I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is harmful.

No, I’m not militant about sugar. You can eat berries, fruit, if you feel your body needs it, but it’s not true to think it’s necessary to consume sweet things. Not for children, not for adults. Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20 years ago because I just felt heavy every time I had it. So I guess it’s individual. It’s my metabolism. My digestive system isn’t agreeing with this kind of food. So I normally eat seafood of all kinds and vegetables. This is the basic source of calories for me.

Yeah, and like all things, you said, “Short-term pleasure isn’t worth your future.” So a lot of things we all know, that alcohol is destructive to the body. Tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar, but society puts that on you, makes it very difficult to avoid. So I guess it all boils down to just discipline.

Yes, and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you’re experiencing. If you’re experiencing a headache, one solution would be to take a pill and then the headache disappears. What this pill would actually do, in most cases, it would mute the consequence, your feeling of pain. It’s a painkiller. It will not eliminate the root cause. So you have to ask yourself, ” What is it that’s causing this headache? Do I need to drink some water? Is the air quality here bad? Do I need to start getting more sleep? Is there something wrong with people around me? They’re stressing me out.” There must be some reason why you’re experiencing a headache. But if you take a pill, you’re not removing this reason, you’re actually making it worse because this harmful factor is still there. It’s like you’re-

Full factor is still there. It’s like you’re piloting a helicopter and there is some red signals and red lamp starts to blink and it starts producing bad, unpleasant noise. What would you do? You would try to figure out the cause and eliminate it. Maybe there is some mountain next to you and you have to avoid it, or you take a hammer and smash the signal. I think the answer is quite obvious. So, why are we constantly doing this regardless? Oh, because everybody else is doing it. Because there’s a whole industry trying to persuade you that this is the right thing to do. So, it’s incredibly important to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.

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

Yes. I’ve been staying away from all of that since I became an adult. When you’re a teenager, your mom would typically say, “We need to take this pill, otherwise the world collapses.” Once I became a grown-up, I said, “No, I don’t think that the producers of pill are incentivized in the right way. They’re not really interested in eliminating the root of the problem.” They would rather have me dependent on the pills they’re producing so that I could buy them forever. No, I’m not saying that you should never take pills. There are obviously some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example. So, I’m not suggesting we go back to the Middle Ages, but what I’m saying is we overuse pills.

Yeah, it’s always good to study and deeply understand the incentives under which the world operates so that you don’t get swept up into the forces that operate under these incentives. 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.

This is something I practice every day. I read some piece of news and I ask myself, “Who benefits from me reading this?” Then you can end up coming to this conclusion that maybe 95% of things we read in the news have been written and published because somebody wanted you to buy some product, support some political cause, fight some war, donate some money. Let’s do something that would benefit other people. This is not a problem to support causes that you truly believe in as long as it was your intentional choice and you’re not being manipulated into fighting other people’s wars.

And that takes us back to the original thing we started talking about, which is freedom. One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself. Be very proactive understanding what the biases, what the incentives are. So, you can think clearly, independently, and objectively.

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

I have to ask you, this is something that came up. You don’t watch porn. I don’t think I’ve heard you talk about this before. What’s the philosophy behind not watching porn? There’s a lot of people that talk about porn in general having a very negative effect on young men on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality and how they get into relationships and all that stuff. So, what’s your philosophy in not consuming porn?

I don’t watch porn because I just feel it’s a surrogate, a substitute for a real thing that is not necessary in my life. If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy, some inspiration to a fleeting moment of pleasure. It doesn’t make sense. In any case, as I said, it’s not the real thing. So, as long as you can access the real thing, you don’t need to watch porn. But then if you can’t access the real thing, you shouldn’t watch porn as well 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 a long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure. There’s a theme to the way you approach life.

I try to be strategic. I try to act under assumption that I’m not going to die in one hour from now and I’m going to stick around for a bit despite the fact that we are all mortal. So, why would I exchange the mid and long term for the short term? It doesn’t make any sense.

Quick pause, bathroom break.

Yeah, let’s take a break. Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics

All right. We took a break and now we’re back. I got to ask you about Telegram, the company. I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers that worked there. Telegram runs lean relative to other technology companies that achieve the scale that Telegram does. It has very few employees. So, how many people are on the core team? Let’s say the core engineering team.

The core engineering team is about 40 people. This includes back-end, front-end, designers, system administrators.

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

Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn’t translate 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, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they’re responsible for between each other. The other problem with having too many employees is that some of them won’t get enough work to do, and if they don’t get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence. They’re still there, they’re still getting the salary, but they don’t do anything.

If they don’t do anything, more often than not, they will start trying to find their purpose elsewhere, maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work, but by finding problems that don’t exist within the team. 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 will probably end up hiring thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. But if you rely on algorithms and the team is forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient, and interestingly, much more reliable as well.

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

Yes, humans are attack vectors, and if you have a distributed system that runs itself automatically, you have a chance at increasing the security of speed and speed of your service, this is what we did with Telegram, while also making it much more reliable. Because if some part of the network goes down, you can still switch to the other parts of it.

Yeah. One of the big ways you protect user privacy is that you store the data. The infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed across many legal jurisdictions with the decryption keys. So, it’s encrypted in cloud. The decryption keys are split and kept in different locations so that no single government or entity can access the data. Can you explain the strength of this approach?

The way we designed Telegram is we never wanted to have any humans, any employees have any access to private messaging data. That’s why since 2012 when we’ve been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it. If you hire an employee or any of the existing employee, it can’t break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users. 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 an encrypted cloud. So, an interesting engineering challenge was how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.

So no employee can even access user messages. So, that’s the thing. We talk about encryption, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, all these kinds of things. I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there’s also misinformation, is about private messages. So, Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users. So, you’re saying employees never can access the private messages. Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?

No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it’s all encrypted. You can extract all the hard drives and analyze it, but you won’t get anything. It’s all encrypted in the way that is undecipherable. That was very important for us. That’s why we can say with confidence, there hasn’t been ever a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram. Not in terms of private messages, not in terms of say contact lists.

Do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies?

No. We designed a system in a way that’s impossible. It’ll 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 is you go into protect user privacy.

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

I mean, this is a good place to ask. I’m sure you’re pressured by all kinds of people, all kinds of organizations to share private data. Where do you find the strength and the fearlessness to say no to everybody, including powerful intelligence agencies, including powerful governments, influential, powerful people?

I guess part of it is just me being me. I stood up for myself and for my values since I was a little kid. I always had issues with my teachers because I would point out their mistakes during classes. At the end of the day, what’s important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose. They can think they blackmail you with something, they can threaten you with something, but what is it they really can really do to you? Worst case, they can kill you, but that brings us back to the first part of our discussion. There’s no point living your life in fear.

As for Telegram, it’s incredibly successful, but if we lose one market or two markets or pretty much all of the markets, I don’t care that much. It won’t affect me, it won’t affect my lifestyle in any way. I’ll still be doing my pushups. So, you don’t like encryption, you don’t like privacy, you think you should ban encryption in your country, like the European Union is trying to do now for all the member states, well, go ahead and do that. We’ll just quit this market. We won’t operate there. It’s not that important. They all think that somehow we profit from their citizens, and the only goal tech companies have is extracting revenues. It’s true, most tech companies are like this, but there are projects like Telegram which are a bit different and I’m not sure they realize that.

So for you, the value of maintaining your integrity in relation to your principles is more important than anything else. Of course, we should say that you also have full ability and control to do just that because you, Pavel Durov, own 100% of Telegram. So, there’s no anybody with a say on this question.

There are no shareholders, which is quite unique.

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

And this allows us to operate the way we operate, to build this project and maintain it based on certain fundamental principles, which by the way, I think everybody believes in. I think the right to privacy is included in the constitution of most countries, at least most Western countries, but it’s still under attack almost every week. It often starts with well-meaning proposals. Oh, we have to fight crime, we have to do that, we have to protect the children. But at the end of the day, the result is the same. People lose their right to such fundamental thing as privacy. They sometimes lose their right to express themselves, to assemble.

This is a slippery slope that we witnessed in pretty much every autocratic country or country that used to be free and then became autocratic. No dictator in the world ever said, “Let’s just strip you away from your rights because I want more power to myself and I want you to be miserable.” They all justified it with very reasonable sounding justifications and then it came in stages gradually. After a few years, people would find themselves in a position when they’re helpless. They can’t protest. Every message they sent is monitored. They can’t assemble. It’s over.

So you see Telegram as a place that people from all walks of life, from every nation can have a place to speak their mind, have a voice in. In the geopolitical context, you’re mentioning that government when they become autocratic naturally is the way of the world. Human nature and the nature of governments, they become more censorious. They begin to censor and always justifying it in their minds perhaps assuming that they’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. Then where does it stop? We humans are not very good at finding the right balance, and in this case, the right balance between chaos and order, between freedom and structure. We tend to go to extremes.

I think you still consider yourself a libertarian. There is something about government that always over time naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy. In that machine of bureaucracy, it accumulates more and more power. It’s not always that one individual member of that bureaucracy is the one that corrupts the initial principles on which the government was founded, but just something over time, you forget. You begin to censor. You begin to limit the freedoms of the individual, the ability of the individuals to speak, to have a voice, to vote. It just gradually happens that way.

And the government is not some abstract notion. The government consists of people and these people have goals. They would naturally be inclined to increase the level of influence, to have more subordinates, to have more resources. That’s how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens. Ironically, you don’t have those limitations.

You’re supposed in all countries, which are considered to be free. It’s supposed to be the constitution that protects everybody, but interestingly, it doesn’t work always this way. They are able to find very tricky phrasings in order to carve out exceptions and then the exception becomes the rule. Arrest in France

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

I arrived in France last year in August just for a short two-day trip and then I see a dozen of armed policemen greeting me and asked me to follow them. They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I’m accused of, which was mind-boggling. At first, I thought there must be some mistake. Then I realized they’re being serious and they’re accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed or some users and they think I should be responsible for this, which again, like you said, it’s 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 are sacrificing a big part of your economic growth by sending these messages to the business and tech community. So, they put me in a police car and I found myself in police custody. Small room, no windows, just a narrow bed made of concrete. I spent almost four days there. In the process, I had to answer some questions of the policemen. They were interested in how Telegram operates. Most of it is public anyway, and I was struck by very limited understanding or should I say even lack of understanding on behalf of the people who initiated this investigation against me by how technology works, how encryption works, how social media work.

I mean, there’s something darkly poetic about a tech founder of a platform where a billion people are communicating with each other and you’re on concrete, no pillow for days, no windows. 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, that nobody fascinatingly in that story, neither the person arrested nor any individual member of the system itself fully understand 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 form. It breaks the spirit, the human spirit laden in all of us. That’s the negative side of bureaucracy.

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

Yeah, you have a nice page showing this is like details that most people don’t really think about, but Telegram is at the forefront of moderating CSAM and terrorist groups. There’s a nice page, telegram.org/moderation that shows just the incredible amount of groups and channels that are engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram. A lot of this work, like you said, because of the automation is done with machine learning, just the scale is insane.

This is stuff that most noobs like me who are just chatting it up on Telegram don’t think about, but there’s just an immense number of people essentially doing things that violate the law on there and you have to find them immediately and catch it. I guess all platforms have to deal with it. Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that content. What you’re saying is the French government had no idea. Do they even know what machine learning is?

It’s a concept that is challenging to explain to them, but I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this investigation. That’s my hope. In any case, you’re right. If you look at Telegram, we’ve been fighting harmful content that is publicly distributed on our platform since 10 years ago, actually since the time we launched public channels on Telegram. Since something like eight years ago, we had daily transparency reports on how many channels related to child abuse or terrorist propaganda we’ve taken down daily.

Every day we’ve taken maybe we’d take down hundreds of them, and if you include all kinds of content that we remove, all the accounts, groups, channels, posts, that would amount to millions of pieces of content every week, hundreds of thousands every day. Then somebody would read the newspaper, get enraged because they would read something about child porn. This is a subject that is very emotionally charged and start doing something not based on data and logical thinking and laws, but based on emotions driven from inaccurate input.

Yeah, I think we should make pretty clear that there’s no world, no reason that the French government should have arrested you, but here we are. That’s the situation you’re in. So, to be clear, you have to show up in front of a judge. All of this is beautifully absurd. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t extremely serious. You have to show up in front of a judge every certain amount of time. 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 still a prosecutor, but it’s called a judge. That makes it harder to appeal. So, if you are limited in say, countries where you can travel, then to appeal that restriction will take you a lot of time. The investigation itself should have never been started. It’s an absurd and harmful way of solving an issue such as complicated as regulating social media. It is just the wrong tool. So, we objected and appealed the investigation itself. We did last year, I believe.

We’re still not even given a hearing date for the appeal because the process is painfully slow, not just for me but for everybody, which made me realize the system may be broken in many levels. You have other entrepreneurs affected by the French justice system telling me horror stories about their experiences where businesses got paralyzed by very unnecessary actions of investigative judges that ended up being unjustified and biased. In the end, you can perhaps solve it when you reach a higher court and you’ll get justice, but you’ll lose a lot of time and energy in the process. So, this is the only thing that is, I hope, different and will be different in this case compared to the story you told from Kafka.

I mean, but it does as Kafka describes break a lot of people with time. So, we should say that you’re for a long time not allowed to travel out of France. Now you can travel to Dubai. We’re now in Dubai, got to meet many of the people that work at Telegram. Telegram is headquartered in Dubai, but you’re not allowed to travel anywhere else. When do you think you’re coming to Texas to hang out with me over there?

That’s a hard question to answer because it doesn’t depend on just my actions. I can just say this, I’m patient. I will not let this limitation on my freedom dictate my actions. I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like at least during these four days in police custody when you are just stuck, unable to communicate with people that are important to you, when you don’t even know what’s going on in the world in relation to you personally. So, I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future. I can’t say that I am pessimistic. I think we’ve been able to gradually remove most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August.

If the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a back door or want 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 are wearing a tie.

Yeah, this is a serious adult gentleman-like program. Yeah, but that is a concern.

… a gentleman-like program, yeah. But that is a concern that people have is when you have so much pressure from governments that, over time, they’ll wear you down and you’ll give in. And then, of course, other places use that as propaganda to try to attack you, you get attacked by basically every nation. So, it’s a difficult medium in which to operate. It’s difficult to be you fighting for freedom, fighting to preserve people’s privacy. But is there something you could say to reassure people that you’re not going to sacrifice any of the principles that you’ve just expressed if the French government just keeps wearing you down?

I think the French government is losing this battle, this battle is wrong. The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become. And I think I have proven that in the last several months when there were attempts to use my situation being stuck here in France by approaching me and asking me to do things in other countries, blocking certain channels, changing the way Telegram works. And not only I refused, I told the world about it and I’m going to keep telling the world about every instance, any government, in this case in particular, the French government, tries to force me to do anything. And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.

So, I wouldn’t do that. There are probably other people in the world that would consider that, I don’t care. Telegram disappears to something people don’t understand, including in this intelligence services or governments, I don’t care, I’ll be fine. If they put me into prison for 20 years which, let’s be clear, it’s not something that I think is realistic but let’s just think about it as a hypothetical situation. I would rather starve myself to death and die there, reboot the whole game than do something stupid. Romanian elections

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

So, when I got stuck in France unable to leave the country for a few months, I was offered to meet the head of state foreign intelligence services through a person I know quite well, he’s actually a well-known tech entrepreneur in France and he’s well-connected and he said, “This guy wants to meet you.” I said, “Okay, fine, let’s do that but I’m not promising anything.” I took the meeting and, in this meeting, I was asked to restrict what I see as restriction of freedom of speech in Romania. I don’t know if you followed the whole saga with the Romanian elections, they had a presidential elections last year, the results got canceled. Now, Romania, at that point when I had this meeting, was preparing for a new presidential elections, the conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was supportive of so they asked me whether I would be shutting down or ready to shut down channels on Telegram. Let’s support the conservative candidate or protest against the pro-European candidates so they called the guy they liked.

I said, “Look, if there is no violation of the rules of Telegram which are quite clear, you can’t call to violence. But if it’s a peaceful demonstration, if it’s a peaceful debate, we can’t do this, it would be political censorship. We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world, put it in Asia and Eastern Europe and Middle East, we’re not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe no matter who is 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 are very wrong. I would rather do the opposite every time,” and in a way that’s what I did. I had a small debate with him about the morality of this whole thing and then, at a certain point, just disclose the content of this entire conversation because I never signed an NDA. I don’t ever sign NDAs with any people like that, I want to be able to tell the world what’s going on.

And that’s quite shocking to me that you would have people in the French government trying to get advantage of this situation. Of course, if they had nothing to do with the start of this investigation itself and use it to reach their political or geopolitical goals, I consider it an attempt to humiliate myself personally and millions of Telegram users collectively. And it’s quite strange that the same agency asked us to do certain things in Moldova as well. So, even before that, I think it was October last year or September, I was arrested in Paris in late August and then again approached through an intermediary and asked, “Would you mind taking down some channels in Moldova because there is an election going on and we’re afraid there’re going to be some interference with these elections. Could you please connect with representatives of the government of Moldova and take care of it?” We said, “We’re happy to take a look at it and see if there is content there that is in violation of our rules.”

And they sent us a list of channels and bots, some of them were … So, it was a very short list and some of these channels and bots were in violation indeed of our rules and we took them down, only a few of them, the rest were okay. Then they said thank you and sent us another list of dozens of channels, many, many channels. We looked at these channels, we realized that there is no solid foundation to justify banning them and we refused to do that. But interestingly enough, the French intelligence services that were asking us to do this in Moldova, let me know through the contact that, after Telegram banned the few channels that were in violation of our rules in Moldova, they talked to my judge, the investigative judge in this investigation that has been started against me, and told the judge could things about me which I have found very confusing and, in a way, shocking because these two matters have nothing in common.

Why would anyone talk to an investigative judge that is trying to find out whether Telegram did a good enough job in removing illegal content in France, what does Moldova have to do with it? I got very suspicious at that moment. Remember, it happened after we blocked a few channels that violated our rules but before we refused to block a long list of other channels that were completely fine which is people expressing political views which I may not agree with but it’s their right to express them. Not extreme views, not views that call to violence. That was extremely alarming, that was a moment when I told myself that there may be more going on here that I initially thought. Initially I thought, yeah, some people are confused about how technology works and, after this case in Moldova, I got much more suspicious. So, by the time the head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania to help them silencing conservative voices in Romania, I was already wary of what can be going on next.

Yeah. So, clearly, this was a systematic attempt to pressure you to censor political voices that the French government doesn’t agree with. And we should say that you have fought for freedom of speech for left-wing groups and right-wing groups, it really doesn’t matter. So, it’s not you don’t have a political affiliation, political ideology that you fight for, you’re creating a platform that, as long as they don’t call for violence, allows people from all walks of life, from all ideologies to speak their mind, that’s the whole point. And it happens to be conservative voices in the Romania election that the French government wanted to censor because, currently, the French government leans left. But if you flip everything around and the government would be right wing, you’d be fighting against censorship of left-wing voices and you have in the past many times.

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

Yeah, these things become a slippery slope. So, you’ve, for many, many years, including currently, have spoken very highly of France, you love French history, French culture. I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this. There is no justification for this arrest, there’s a misapplication of the law, all kinds of pressures, all kinds of behavior that seems politically motivated, all that kind of stuff, all the excessive regulation and the bureaucracy, a nightmare for entrepreneurs that dream to create something impactful and positive for the world.

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

I think the European society must decide where they want their ever-increasing public sector to stop increasing, what they think should be the right size of government. Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country’s GDP, it’s maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union. So, you have this disbalance where you have many more people representing the state as opposed to people trying to bring the country’s economy forward by creating great products and great companies.

The start-up field and my field, social media field has been affected by it immensely. There was one great start-up in this realm in France in the last 10 years, it was this location-based social network, it was eventually sold to Snapchat. But before it was sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell, I told him, “Never sell. You have a great thing going. You have lots of users, you have organic traction in many countries and the first of this kind of success story in France.” But then he sold anyway in a couple of weeks.

And later I met him, he’s trying to do a new thing now, I met him and I asked him, I was trying to understand what went wrong and one of the things he told me about is that, while he was trying to run his company, competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris, and he did a great job by the way, but while he was trying to do that, he got also attacked by some silly investigation, again, involving the data protection issues which lasted forever and was gradually sucking blood of his team and his company, constant interrogations, disclosure requests.

And this is a young company, it significantly increases the level of stress and, at some point, I think the pressure was too much, he decided to, again, just sell it. Eventually it turned out that there was no issue, the investigation ended as far as I understand with no charges but, such investigations, they have a price, they have a cost.

And unless the society realizes the cost of projects, of companies, of start-ups that are never created or sold to the United States at the very early stage or other countries resulting in decreased economic growth, things won’t change. I think we just talked to a guy a few days ago who left France and started a business here in Dubai and one of the reasons he had to leave France is that the government started an investigation on his company and they frozen his bank accounts and this investigation that involved taxes lasted for many, many years, I believe he said eight years.

And at the end of this eight years, the government reached to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong, he’s good, it’s okay. In the meantime, his corporate bank accounts were frozen, his business died. The only reason why he was able to retain sanity is because he moved to Dubai and started a new company which is incredibly successful and now he’s enriching this city which we’re in right now with his great ideas and creativity.

And by the way, 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 and that fires what fuels great nations. Build, build, build, build new stuff, expand, all of that and regulation suffocates that.

You have to cherish this people.

Yeah.

But I guess the French public or some part of the French public was misled and I don’t know when, perhaps since the time of the French Revolution, to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies. They’re the evil rich people that are the cause of all problems as if only you could make the rich share their ill-gotten wealth with the rest of the population then every problem will be magically solved. In reality though, a lot of these people that are starting such companies with fire in their eyes are sacrificing their lives, their livelihood.

They’re working 20 hours a day, they’re experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill the vision and bring value and good to the society around them. They create jobs, they create great services, they create great goods, they make your country grow, they make your people proud, you have to cherish them. But what does the system do to them? It squeezes them out because perhaps there was somebody in the tax authority that decided to advance their career and perhaps was too ambitious and not too smart so, as a result, a company was destroyed.

And now the same entrepreneur, by the way, who we talked to is invited to come back to France. He’s been offered really good terms, he said they’re going to open this new venue on Champs-Élysées, we’re going to give you the best location, we’re going to fund part of it, tax breaks and he said, “Never. Just forget about this, it’s impossible. I’m not coming back to France.” He’s traumatized by the experience and he’s French, he was born there, he has a French passport. So, unless things like this change, France and the rest of Europe will keep struggling with economic growth, with budget deficits, with unemployment and all the other relevant social and economic metrics.

Yeah, it’s heartbreaking. Many of these nations, I appreciate the historic and the culture of value and I hope Europe and France flourish but this is not the components that are required for flourishing. Quick pause, I need a bathroom break. Intense education

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 super intensive education so I thought it’d be really interesting to look at some of the powerful aspects of that education from the languages to the math. Can you actually describe some of the rigorous aspects of it and what you gained from it?

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

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

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

Challenging authority?

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

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

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

But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life, every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis. What’s the point of life? What am I even doing here? At some point, I decided, since I have to go to school anyway, I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best student and get an A or what we called five in the Russian system on every single subject and that kept me busy for a while.

It was incredibly difficult because you didn’t have enough time. Even if you just studied all the time, not doing anything else, you didn’t have any time left to prepare all the homework, tasks and get ready for all the tests. So, I ended up using the breaks between classes but I get to the result I wanted to get to. I got the excellent mark in every subject and that kept me happy for a while.

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

Yeah. I still think math is essential. It’s something that shapes your brain, it teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn’t work. This is exactly the same skill you’ll need in programming and project management and start it when you start your own company. And it’s one of the few subjects to school which encourages you to develop your own thinking as opposed to rely on what other people have to say and just repeating their opinions. That is extremely valuable. And of course, once you’re good at math, you can apply it in physics, in engineering, in coding. And it’s not surprising that most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at matters in coding because, ultimately, it’s the same mental skill that you rely on.

But back then in the school, I realized something else as well, it’s that competition is really important, competition is key. This is what motivates a lot of teenagers when there is school and, if you remove competition out of the education system, you end up forcing kids to start competing elsewhere, for example, in video games. It’s a trend you see now in many countries, including in the West, when well-meaning authorities or parents say we don’t want our kids to be too stressed, we don’t want them to feel anxiety so let’s just get rid of all the public grading system, all these rankings of who won, who lost, we don’t want any of that.

And part of it is justified but, as a result, some kids lose interest. Yes, you eliminate the losers but you end up eliminating the winners as well. And then, if you are overprotective of the kids in that age, they grow up, graduate schools, the universities and they’re still not prepared for real life because real life is constant competition for jobs, for promotions, for customers and it’s more brutal.

What you have as a result is high suicide rates, high unemployment, all the things and negative trends you see now in many countries which thought eliminating competition from their education system was a good idea. They still persist, they still think competition is a bad thing, they try to eliminate competition from their economy as well to an extent saying we are 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, with South Korea, with Singapore, with Japan and other places where the education system was based on ruthless competition. So, this is a hard choice any civilization has to make. We support competition understanding that, eventually, it leads to progress in science and technology and abundance for society at large or we remove competition thinking that somehow we can shield the future generations from the stress that competition inevitably causes.

Yeah, 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 earlier or you do it later. And it’s true, that’s such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development, like you mentioned, pursuing mastery. There’s something in human nature that, especially for young people, if you can compete at a thing, you’re going to be really driven to get good at that thing. If you can direct that in the education system as China does, as many nations like you mentioned do, then you’re going to develop a lot of brilliant people.

… do, then you’re going to develop a lot of brilliant people, resilient people, people that are ready to create epic shit in the world.

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

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

Well, first of all, I must say I learned pretty much everything from my brother, everything I know, because when we were used to be kids, we slept in the same bedroom, like beds a few feet away from each other, and I kept bugging him with questions. I would ask him about dinosaurs and galaxies and black holes and Neanderthals, everything I could think of, and he was my Wikipedia back in the time when we didn’t have internet access. He’s a unique prodigy kid, probably one of a billion.

He started reading at the age of three, I think, and he pretty fast got so advanced in maths, that by the age of six, he could already read really sophisticated books on astronomy. Sometimes when he did it in public places, like buses or metro, my mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it. They would tell her, “Why are you mocking your own kid with this serious book? It’s obvious that the kid can’t understand everything there. It’s too complicated even we don’t understand anything there. There’s some formulas,” and he was already sucking in this knowledge. He just has this thirst for information.

So he was the source of all kind of great facts, useful things, inspiring things. He taught me pretty much everything I know. At the same time, he’s incredibly modest and kind, and this is something I think a lot of people that think they’re smart but not generally intelligent lack. More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they’re also kind and compassionate.

And he is that?

Definitely.

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

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

Yeah, I’ve gotten to know you more and more and there’s a deep integrity to you that I think is good to show to the world. There’s a lot of attack vectors on user privacy and I think the most important, the last wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company, so it’s important to some degree for you to be out there to showing your true self. Programming and video games

So we should say that also you didn’t mention, but you were a programmer from an early age. You started coding at 10. First things you built are a video game at 11, and then eventually 10 years later, 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? Is it PHP mostly? How did you figure out how to program websites, all of that?

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

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

So I started to build computer games. My brother would sometimes guide me. For example, I would create a turn-based strategy. Of course, two-dimensional. Back then three-dimensional was too much for me. But it wasn’t as slick in terms of the scrolling FPS, frames per second, parameter, and I asked my brother how to optimize it. He would guide me, and this kind of learning and training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger.

Then I started to create video games for my classmates when we played, for example, tic-tac-toe on an infinite field in my class during the breaks. And not tic-tac-toe the three in a row, this was about five in a row and in 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, champions of math olympiads, sons and daughters of professors at the university, and I decided, “No, I want to win every single time. I don’t want to lose even a single time. So how do I win? I need to practice more, but how do I practice more? I need an opponent stronger than myself.”

So I coded this game so that I would play against the computer and the computer would calculate, I think, four moves in advance to choose the optimal strategy. That wasn’t enough. Four moves in advance, I would still win over it. If I tried to calculate five or six, it was too slow, so asked my brother to help me out here. So he made this algorithm. Eventually, I trained myself to win every single time, even with the computer back then, we didn’t have modern CPUs, and I could still retain some self-confidence.

I would go back to school during breaks, play with my classmates, and soon people started to lose interest. None of my classmates wanted to play this game anymore. I killed the game because there’s… VK origins & engineering

So after that, when I got into the St. 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 digitalized version of all lectures, which was something very unique back then. Remember, it was 25 years ago. I would put together a website where I would publish all this materials, and pretty soon it became super popular. I opened a discussion forum there. In a few years, I expanded to the university with all of its other departments, and then to other universities. We ended up having tens of thousands of users just as a student’s portal. We had all kinds of social features there, friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs. All of it.

It was quite successful, and after I graduated the university, one of my ex-classmates from the school reached out to me after reading about my successes in a newspaper, the main business newspaper of St. Petersburg, and he asked me, “Are you trying to build a Russian Facebook?” I said, “I’m not sure. What’s Facebook?” So we met. Since he graduated an American university two years before that, he showed me Facebook. I thought, “Well, I can’t already have all of this technology, but it’s valuable to know which elements I should get rid of in order to scale this thing and have millions of users.”

This is also something people don’t appreciate that sometimes in order to move forward and have more success, you have to get rid of things, including technology. Getting rid of features is super important.

Simplify, both for scaling and for making it amenable to just growing the user base where people get it immediately.

Yes. Otherwise, it’s just too complicated for the new user. The existing users will be happy, they’ll be praising you, they will be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated, so it’s easy to lose track and get disoriented if you are only relying on the feedback of existing users.

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

So I started to build it from scratch. For that one, I thought, “I’m not going to use any third-party libraries, modules because I want to make it as efficient as possible.” I was obsessing over every line of code, but then how do you start something that large? 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 post-doc student in Germany at the time in the Max Planck university, and I asked him, “What should I start from?” And he told me, “Just build a module to authorize users, just to log in, not even to sign out, just to log in because you can pre-populate the database with credentials and emails and passwords. It doesn’t really matter. But once you see that you can type in your password and email and you are in and it tells you, ‘Hello,’ using your name, then you will have a clear understanding where to go from there.”

Yeah. I mean, that’s true.

That’s one of the best advice I’ve ever got in my life. It worked perfectly, by the way. I started to build it and before I knew it, I would have there on the website photo albums, private messages, this guest book. We used to call it “thee wall” back on VK and I guess in the early days of Facebook. We’d end up building something even more sophisticated than Facebook at the time with more features.

I had a girlfriend at the time. I asked her, “We need to somehow come up with a database of all Russian schools and universities and the departments and subdivisions.” She did a great job trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing emails to universities saying, “Which departments do you have exactly at this point? We need to know,” or reaching out to the Department of Education, but in Russia and then in Ukraine, and then eventually in Belarus and in Kazakhstan and other countries where VK ended up to be the largest and most popular social network.

So we did a few things that were quite unique at the time, and for the first almost a year, I was the single employee of the company. I was the backend engineer, the front-end engineer, the designer. I was the customer support officer. I was the marketing guy as well, coming up with all the wordings and the announcements, coming up with competitions to promote VK, which worked quite well. That was an incredible experience that gave me knowledge of every aspect of a social networking platform.

Also understanding of how much a single person can do.

Exactly. It’s one of the reasons why I’d like to think I’m an efficient project manager and product manager inside Telegram because I will not take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members. If somebody gives me, “Oh, I need three weeks to do that,” I always reply, “Well, I built the first version of VK in just two weeks. Why would you need three weeks? It seems like something you could make real in just three days. Three weeks? What are you going to do the rest of the three weeks apart from this three days?”

And the team knows me, and that’s why we are able today, 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 from PHP and MySQL, Debian Linux, but very soon I realized, “I need 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 through a call. I would use an old-school phone to call him with wires. I said, “What do I do? How do I install this thing called NGINX? I’m not a Linux guy.” If he felt particularly kind that day and not too busy, he would show me the way to do it or set it up himself, but for the most part, I had to rely on just myself.

Having him there though helped when we started to grow fast and started to scale it, because at first, you realize, “One server is not enough. I need to buy another one. Then another one and another one.” The database should be in a different server. Then you have to split the database into tables. Then you have to come up with a way to chart the tables using some criteria that would make sense that wouldn’t break your user experience.

When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen of servers surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of the scaling aspect, it became impossible. I remember asking him to come back, “You need to help me with this thing. It’s starting to be really big.” What was worse is that since we became popular, somebody started to do DDoS attacks on us, as it always happens. And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK, and interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day, the DDoS attacks intensified, so we had to come up with a way to fight it. I remembered having many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.

So that was your introduction to all kinds of bad actors, DDoS, business. Then later you’d find out there’s such a thing called politics, and then later, geopolitics. But this is the initial stages, that it’s not just about creating cool stuff, it’s having to deal with, as you now have to deal with with Telegram, is seas of bad actors trying to test the limits of the system, trying to break the system.

Unfortunately. If we didn’t have bad actors and pressure, it would be the best job ever. You just get to create.

Yeah, yeah. And so the help from your brother, like you mentioned NGINX and charting the tables, some of this scaling issue is algorithmic nature. It’s almost like theoretical computer science. So it’s not just about buying more computers, it’s figuring out how to algorithmically make everything work extremely fast, so some of it’s mathematics. Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.

Yeah. So at that stage, I could do the basic stuff. I could understand how I implement scalability into the code base, how I chart my tables in the database, where I include Memcached instead of direct requests to the database. That was quite easy because it was still PHP back in the day.

When my brother got back from Germany somewhere around 2008, I asked him, “Can we make it even more efficient? Can we make it super fast and at the same time so that we would require even fewer servers to maintain the load?” And he said, “Yes, but PHP is not enough. I’ll have to rewrite big part of your data engines in C and C++.” I said, “Okay, let’s do that.”

He invited a friend of his to help him, another absolute champion in world’s programming contest, twice in a row, and they 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, more low-level.

So they rewrote it in C, C++?

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

Nice.

I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley and I met Mark Zuckerberg the first time and some of the other core team members of early Facebook. Remember, Facebook was just four or five years old. And everybody kept asking me, “How come even here in Silicon Valley, VK loads faster than Facebook? Everything seems to appear instantly on your website. What’s the secret sauce?” That was one of the things that made them very curious

And that was always important to you, to have very low latency to make sure the thing loads because that’s one of the things Telegram is really known for. Even on crappy connections and all that kind of stuff, it just works extremely fast. Everything is fast.

As one of the core technological ideas, we prioritize speed. We think that people can notice the difference, even if it’s just 50 million millisecond difference. The difference is subconscious. It also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive, but also more efficient when it comes to the infrastructure, the expenses. Because if your code executes faster, it means you need fewer computational resources to run it.

So there is no way you can lose in making things faster, and that’s why we have always been very careful when hiring people. I would only hire a person if I’m ultimately certain is the best option because if you hire somebody who is maybe a little bit distracted, unexperienced, you may end up with inefficiencies in your code base that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses. And think about the responsibility, like if we jump to today from the VK days, Telegram is used by over a billion people. They open it dozens of times every day. Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say, half-a-second delay. Multiply by dozens of times by a billion. It’s centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason other than just being sloppy. Hiring a great team

That is so important to understand and so wise that it’s actually, if you’re just a little bit careless as a developer, you can introduce inefficiencies that are going to be very difficult to track down because you don’t know that it can be faster. The code doesn’t scream at you saying, “This could be much faster.” So you have to actually, as a craftsman, be very careful when you’re writing a code and always thinking, “Can this be done much more efficiently?” And it can be tiny things because they all propagate throughout the code, and so there’s a real cost in having a careless developer anywhere in the company because they can introduce that inefficiency and all the other developers won’t know. They’ll just assume it kind of has to be that way.

So there’s a real responsibility for every single individual developer that’s building any component of an app like Telegram to just always ask, “Okay, can this be done more efficiently? Can this be done more simply?” And that’s one of the most beautiful aspects, the art forms of programming, right?

Oh, yes, because when you manage to discover a way to simplify things, make them more efficient, you feel incredibly happy and proud and accomplished.

And to your point, I can recall a few instances in my career where firing an engineer actually resulted to an increase in productivity. Say you have two Android engineers building their app and then 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 one,” but then you notice that one of them is really weird, falling behind the schedule, complaining some of the time, doesn’t assume responsibility. And you ask, “So what if I just fire this person?” And you fire this person. In a few weeks, you realize you actually don’t need any new, never needed the third engineer. The problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems than he solved.

That is so counterintuitive because 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 now.

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, which is like the folks you’re talking about. Introduced into a team, they can somehow slow everybody down. They demotivate everybody. And it’s very counterintuitive that you basically, part of the work of creating a great team is removing the B players. It’s not just hiring more, generally speaking. It’s finding the “A players” and removing the people that are slowing things down.

Oh, yes, because the other thing that people don’t realize is how demotivating working with a B player is. Everybody can tell if the other person, the other engineer they’re working with is really competent. And it’s very visible if the person is not comfortable. They’re asking the wrong questions, they keep lagging behind. And at a certain point, if you’re an A player, you get this dissatisfaction, this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential, accomplish what you’re really meant to accomplish because of this person working next to you or pretending to work next to you.

And by the way, in some cases, it’s not because the person is lazy. In some cases it’s just the mental, the intellectual ability is not there. It’s not about experience. Most often it’s about natural ability and persistence. In 90% of cases, it’s just the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time. Not everybody has this ability. So for people who do have this ability, it’s an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they’re responsible for.

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

Well, it’s in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress. If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition? A coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company as an engineer or just wants to get some prize money or validation can demonstrate their skills, and then we just select the best. Or if we are not certain because there’s not enough data to hire somebody, we just repeat the contest with another task, get more data, get more winners, then repeat again.

And at some point, you realize, “Oh, actually this guy has competed in 10 of our contests since he was 16 years old or 14 years old. Now he’s 20 or 21. He won in eight of these competitions. He seems to be really good in JavaScript on Android, Java, and also C++. Why not hire this person?” There’s some consistency there.

And a lot of these people, they have never worked in a big company before, which is priceless because in a big company, people tend to shift responsibility. They have this shared responsibility wherein nobody fully understands who can take credit for a project, who can take blame for a project. Inside Telegram, it’s pretty clear, and these competitions are the closest experience to what people will have when working at Telegram.

So for example, we want to implement certain very tricky animation and redesign to the profile page of the Telegram’s Android version. And the Android app, it’s an open-source app. Anybody can take its code and play with it. So as a result, we would not just select the best person and hire this person, we would also select the best solution to the problem because we would not suggest the contestants to solve trivial problems. It’s something that’s valuable. It saves a lot of time for us in terms of development.

And because I always had this large social media platforms, which I could use to promote these competitions, somehow both VK and Telegram were very popular among engineers and designers, other tech people, I had no issue to promote this contest and find the right people ever. And what can be better than, for an employee of your company, somebody who has been a user of it? This person has no prior experience of using Telegram.

This person has no prior experience of 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 salary for nothing, is used to shift responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings and have very limited understanding of what Telegram stands for? It’s just crazy if you think about it. Telegram engineering & design

Because of that, you’re extremely selective and slow in hiring. People really have to earn their spot and then as a result, I got a chance to sit in one of the team meetings where people discuss the different features that are being developed, the different ideas, some of which are at the very cutting edge and so you get to see behind the scenes how it’s possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation. You generate the idea, you 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 for many, as compared to WhatsApp and Signal, you’ve led the way on many other features. Many of the features we take for granted now, many of which we know and love, like the auto-delete timer. That was seven years ahead of any other messenger. Message editing, replies. These are all obvious things I’ve even forgotten for some of them that they were never part. I think auto-delete timer is a really brilliant idea.

We implemented in 2013 in the Secret Chats. Funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it, WhatsApp seven years after and then Signal and some other of these apps, they initially even copied the exact timestamps. For example, if we had one, three and five seconds, they would also have one, three and five seconds. They tried not to change it because they were not sure what was the magic sauce behind the feature. Ironically, it happens with many of these things. For example, when we design how you reply to a message and you have a small snippet showing that you’re replying to this message and now you’re typing your response, then there is a small snippet into the message itself that if you tap on it highlights the original message you’re replying to. Seems pretty obvious, but there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time and we got this vertical line on the left and all these other small things that are completely arbitrary, you can do it in a different way, but somehow the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution. Now whenever you go to WhatsApp, Instagram direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal, it doesn’t matter, you would see exactly the same or pretty much similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk and innovate. If something works, why not just copy it?

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 that from a design perspective makes it very clear that this part was written before and thing under it is your reply. The distinction between the different formatting, the text. Listen, I know how much typography is an art form. There’s a lot of interacting, graphic artistic elements inside Telegram that all have to play together extremely well. Like you pointed out to me, this thing that just blew my mind, which is the background gradient of Telegram, shifts. It changes and it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles and then there’s graphic elements on top of the gradient that all interplay together. All of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing clarity. Everything’s just intuitive. That’s very difficult to create. That is art. On top of that, super fast.

That’s the hardest part. To make it look so that designers love it is one thing. The real challenge is make it look the way the designers love it and make it work on the weakest device as possible. Oldest, cheapest, smartphones you can imagine. If you take the moving gradient on the background of every Telegram chat, this is something most people don’t notice, but they can feel it.

They notice it subconsciously or something like that. There is a pleasant feeling. There’s a feeling, there’s a pleasant feeling when you’re reading a chat and that’s where the design contributes to that. I think a gradient really does. I really love that about Telegram, the gradient. Not the technical thing you described, but the feeling of it and then the technical aspect of creating that feeling is incredible. I could probably come up with all kinds of algorithms of rendering that gradient that’s going to be super inefficient and so doing that efficiently is like…

Or efficient, but not too beautiful because even doing something so trivial as a gradient can result in noticeable lines in the gradient that a person can instantly say, oh no, it’s not the right thing. You can have to introduce certain randomness there and then you have the gradient, but it’s not enough. It’s too plain. You want to have certain pattern as an overlay, but it should be simple enough not to distract you from the content, but it has to be entertaining enough to create a good feeling about the whole app. Another question, what kind of objects you want to include in this pattern and how this pattern would work? Will it be based on pixels or would it be vector-based and would it be vector-based so they will be infinitely scalable and high quality? I think for the default pattern and the default background, which is based on four colors, it’s not a gradient based on two colors, it’s four colors and they’re constantly shifting. I probably look through several thousand variations of that because 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 four colors for that. You can change it.

No way. Really?

Yes, you can do it and you want to rely on certain deeply hard-coded biological properties of the human mind. 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 and what kind of objects 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 are done typing a message and you just then tap send and 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. Sometimes it’ll be containing media or link preview or other stuff that will change the message bubble. You go through countless different scenarios and make sure every one of them works great, even if this message contains 4,000 characters. Then you look at all the platforms, iOS, Android and all the old devices, all kinds of outdated operating systems and the hardware and you cross the two because you can have this really bad old phone, but using the newest operating system version, so what do you do? What kind of bugs 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. It can consume a lot of space on your screen and then it’ll trigger using 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… If you’re really used to Telegram, if you’ve been a regular user for at least a few weeks, going back to any other messaging app feels like a serious downgrade.

Yeah, I mean there’s 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 this Thanos snap effect, right? The message is broken into tens of thousands particles, which go away like dust in the wind. It looks great, but it was so hard to make.

Probably one of my favorite GUI graphical things. It’s just art. It’s pure art. It’s incredible. It’s good to hear that it has been really fought over and thought through. It’s extremely well done.

No, you can’t pull it off if you’re not going deep in this. Then you don’t want to distract people from their communication with all this additional animation. You want them to be invisible in a way.

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

Yes. In order to do that, you have to overcome even more challenges. For example, you mentioned this deletion effect, message evaporates. If you do the animation, if you show the animation first and then the message that is preceding the deleted message that is going after the just deleted message move closer to each other, then it doesn’t feel right. It feels too long, too imposing. What you want to do is you want the message disappear while the messages around it go closer to each other to fill the resulting gap. Then you imagine what it involves. Redrawing the entire screen. On top of this very complicated animation, you have to think about things like which kind of messages were there before it after. It just adds to complexity.

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

Once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense sense of pride because nobody is doing this. Nobody really cares. In a way maybe they’re right not to care. Maybe nobody notices this, but there is something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected because I understand that every day, tens of millions of people around the world are deleting messages. What kind of experience they get? Is this an experience that maybe even subconsciously inspires them and makes their hearts sing even a little bit? Fills them with joy? Lightens up their mood, even a little bit by 0.001%? Is it something that is just basic and I think if we can bring some value in people’s lives, even through this subtle details, we have to definitely invest our time in it.

Some joy. Not just sort of value like productivity, but joy. I think Steve Jobs, Jony Ive talked about this, they would put so much love and effort in the design of everything, including things that weren’t visible in the initial pc, personal computers because they believe that you somehow through osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing and you’re absolutely right. 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. I feel that effort and I think a billion users feel that.

People like when other people care.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what it is. Of course there’s the more sexy things like all the emojis and the stickers, the gifts, many of those are just, they’re a little like art pieces.

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

Three years and eight months ahead.

… ahead of WhatsApp, yes. The stickers that WhatsApp ended up launching three years and eight months after were not the first version was not really good because they just did regular GIFs or WebM videos, which were not based on vector graphics. What we did is vector animations. Each of these stickers is only several kilobytes, sometimes maybe maximum 20, 30 kilobytes in size, but it says 180 frames. We were able to run them at 60 frames per second on all devices. It’s also very challenging. It was a challenging thing to do. We had so much headache trying to make it work. Nobody even tried to do anything like this before us because it’s crazily difficult. As a result, you have these fluid animations. You have this really nice user experience. Somebody sends you a sticker, you don’t have to wait for it to load because it’s so lightweight and it starts moving instantly.

Then of course, it’s not just engineering. You have to find designers that 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 was not easy to assemble a team of artists/engineers I would say, that are able to do something like this. This is a unique form of art and this allowed us to do a revolution in stickers and then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add into messages, custom animated emoji. I don’t think anybody did that. I think Telegram is still the only one allowing users to do that because you can include 100 of animated emoji in a message and they will be animated and it’ll be moving and your device won’t crash. It’s probably unnecessary and crazy, but we think somewhere in this intersection of art and engineering, true quality is created.

Then of course, more recently we expanded into what we call Telegram Gifts, which are essentially blockchain-based collectibles that you can demonstrate on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance, but you can also use them to congratulate your friends and close ones with their birthdays and other holidays and that was received extremely well.

Yeah, they can hold value, they can increase in value, you could trade them in that aspect, but to me still, vector graphics and it’s not just simple graphics, it’s incredibly intricate graphics. The vector makes it very efficient, but it also allows you to create, maybe incentivizes the artist, enables them, incentivizes them, to create super detailed intricate elements. Then 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. Now it’s like this little… Usually GIFs from back in the day and still in meme form, are low resolution and so usually people don’t put details and intricate art into it, but here with vector graphics it’s like a million things going on. It allows you to play with different animations. Like you showed me this thing where you send and you hold for a while on the send button and so you can share with the person you send a message to this animation that you’ve encoded. There’s a bunch of stuff going on when they read the message.

Yes, we have a lot of features like that when we use this art to allow people to express themselves and most people don’t even know about these features.

I didn’t know about it. That was cool. That was cool.

The other application of the same technology is reactions on Telegram because we made it a goal to make sure that people feel joy when they just send you a like. Something so trivial as just adding a like to a message should be an action that you want to perform again and again and again.

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

At 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’re 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, so all our apps have been available on GitHub since 2013 and then we added end-to-end encryption in our Secret Chats, which WhatsApp copied a few years after. One year and three months ahead they just started to test it. They rolled this out I think 2016, which is three years after us and the only reason I think the rest of the industry had to do it is because we set the standard.

It was incredibly important back in the day and at the same time we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption. Within that design, that 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 with maintaining bots that have lots of incoming messages. Multiple device support becomes tricky. People will end up losing some of the documents they share. We also saw a lot of issues and we ended up having this sort of hybrid experience where depending on your use case and your requirements, you can choose the level of encryption that we want to have.

That’s why you chose to go opt-in for end-to-end encryption. The trade off there that you are describing is between for people who really care about specific messages, extreme privacy on those messages and usability, like being able to sync across multiple devices, having groups that are 200,000 people. All of those features, quality of life features, there’s a trade-off between those and end-to-end encryption. You lean towards letting users enable end-to-end encryption for cases when they want to be super secure.

Yes. 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, any message from them, which is not necessarily something you need when you are trying to get some work done and you are 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, we 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 tried to get work done, it was just not adapted for it. At the same time, if you were really paranoid, you think, I don’t want to be screenshotted, I don’t want to have any leaks, I don’t even trust Telegram, I only trust code. Secret Chats are the best option. I believe is the most secure means of communication today. Open source

We should say that there’s a lot of other aspects to this that are important. For example, Telegram is the only app that has open source reproducible builds for both Android and iOS. Why is this important?

You need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims, really encrypts data in a way that it is described on its website. For that you need to make your apps open source for any researchers to have a look at it. Telegram has been open source since 2013. Apps like WhatsApp have never been open source, so you don’t really know what they’re doing and how exactly they encrypt your messages. What’s important here though is to understand whether the version of the app that you download from the app store corresponds exactly to the source code that you can view on GitHub. 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 the iOS that the source code of Telegram on GitHub and the app you are actually using is the same app. I think it’s incredibly important, not just to gain people’s trust, but just to stay transparent and open about it. When I make this claim that Telegram’s Secret Chats are the most secure way of communicating, I really mean it because I haven’t seen any fact contradicting this claim, at least among the popular messaging app. You say WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage. None of them have reproducible builds on both iOS and Android. None of them had at least at the same level put so much effort into making sure that the algorithms that you use in order to encrypt data are not algorithms that have been handed to you by some agency in order to create a honey pot, at least from what I know about our competitors. I don’t think they went through the same process.

We should say that the entirety of the software stack in Telegram is done from scratch internally to 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 is that very often open source tools, modules, libraries, that they used by everybody, ended up having certain flaws and security issues that make software vulnerable. It’s also a way to make sure you are doing things the most efficient way possible, but it’s extremely difficult to do that. You really have to have exceptional talent in your team to achieve this level of thoroughness, to go to a low level of coding that allows you to recreate from scratch database engines, web servers, entire programming languages because the programming language we use on the back end to develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.

Removing, minimizing the reliance on open source libraries is extremely difficult as most companies, they rely on open source libraries.

Well, I wouldn’t say we are completely independent from that. We use Linux on the back end. There’s no way of avoiding it for us at the moment, but for the most part we are much more self-reliant than most other apps.

You mentioned Edward Snowden. A long time ago you wanted to work together with him, perhaps to share expertise, to understand the full realm of what it takes to achieve cybersecurity. What do you make of his case? What lessons do you learn from what he has uncovered and maybe even broadly, what impact has his work had on the world, do you think?

Well, the main lesson is not everything is what it seems. You would discover and this is something that I found quite shocking at the time, that a lot of people who you thought were security and cryptography experts ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other, promoting flawed encryption standards. You wouldn’t end up discovering that your government that was supposed to be limited in how it can surveil its people, actually doesn’t consider itself that limited. That was very valuable for the world to understand.

I guess it also can be a lesson demonstrated that we humans don’t get the balance right. 9/11 created a situation when 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 the situation when the cure is worse than the disease. I think it was incredibly brave to do what Edward did. I didn’t get to work with him. Whoever see him in person, we keep in touch, we sometimes communicate, but we’re not close. I still, I think what he did is laudable. I hope someday we meet. Intelligence agencies

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

I think they should be equally afraid of or equally not afraid of, in a way. It’s not that intelligence services 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. You’re in general fearless in the face of the pressure.

That would be a very bold statement, but I proved to be quite stress resilient and it’s not that you don’t have fear. You can have fear, but you overcome this fear. I don’t think there is anything at this point that can happen to change the way I am. Iran and Russia government pressure

You went through a lot from 2011 to 2014, government pressure that you refused to give into, that 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 use 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 their own messaging app. They had several teams competing for the title of the nationally reigning messaging app. All these apps failed. People still preferred Telegram. Interestingly, Iran banned Telegram, but WhatsApp wasn’t banned.

WhatsApp wasn’t banned. Or at least they unbanned WhatsApp soon after. At the same time starting in mid-2017 or late-2017, Russia demanded that Telegram hands them the encryption keys. They thought these things exist, something that would allow them to read messages of every person on Telegram or at least every person on Telegram in Russia. And we told them, it’s impossible. If you have to ban us, ban us. And this is what they ended up doing in spring 2018. And that was quite fun because they were trying to block our IP addresses, but we were prepared for that and we came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones every time the sensor blocks our existing addresses. And then it was completely automated. We had millions of IP addresses. We would be burning through them. We set up this movement called Digital Resistance when system administrators and engineers all around the world, both inside and outside Russia could set up their own proxy servers and their own IP addresses for Telegram to rely on in order to bypass censorship.

We ended up spending I think, millions of dollars on that. And as a result, the sensor got crazy there. They would ban IP addresses and large subnets of IP addresses and huge subnets, which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country’s infrastructure started to go down. People were trying to pay for groceries in the supermarkets and nothing would work because the Russian sensor blocked too many IP addresses and some of the subnets were used to host other unrelated services. Even some Russian social networks and media got affected. Banks. So they had to start being more selective in how they combat our anti-censorship tools.

The biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple. Apple didn’t allow us to update Telegram in the app store saying for at least four weeks that we have to come to an agreement with Russia first who 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. 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’s over. We helped organize certain protests in defense of Telegram and privacy and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow. There was hilarious people flying paper airplanes.

I saw that.

And at some point I decided I have to make a statement. I have to say that Apple sided with the censor. That we are trying to do the right thing here, but without Apple we can’t do much because people can’t download your app anymore. I published it in my channel and then New York Times picked it up with the picture of the protesters flying paper airplanes. Apple was criticized in that story and I thought, well, Apple should probably come back to the right side of history here. And I waited for one day and two days. In the meantime, since we’ve been unable to update Telegram for more than a month, it started to fall apart because the new version of iOS came out and it made the old versions of Telegram obsolete. Some features that used to work stop working and users all over the world start to suffer. People that had nothing to do with Russia from other parts of the world experienced issues with Telegram. So it was really serious and I said to my team, you know what if by 6:00 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 that want to protest all the people that want to talk in Russia and removes their ability to have a voice in the most popular messaging app in that part of the world.

Yes. Magically 15 minutes to the time I was planning to remove Telegram from the Russian app store in order to proceed globally, Apple reached out to us and said, “It’s okay. Your update is approved.” And we managed to keep playing this hide and seek game with the sensor bypassing censorship through digital resistance. In Iran, it was a little bit different because we realized it would’ve been too expensive to try to come up with all these IP addresses, and in addition, it was not clear whether we wouldn’t be in violation of the sanctions regime. So we did something else. We created an economic incentive for people who would set up proxy servers for Telegram. Any person, say an Iranian engineer could come up with a proxy server, distribute its address among users in Iran, and whoever connected through the proxy of this person would be able to see a pinned chat, an ad placed there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy. And this is how you can monetize your proxy. So it created this market which resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem. And as a result, we kept millions or maybe 10s of millions of Iranian users. Up until this day I think Telegram is still banned in Iran today, but we probably have something like 50 million people relying on Telegram from that country.

So that people find a way around.

People find a way around.

That’s ingenious. That’s really great to hear. I have to ask you about this. After having spent many days with you, I learned of something that you’ve never talked about at the time, have not talked about to this day, that there was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018. I think to me, it showed this seriousness of this fight to uphold the freedom of speech for everyone, for all people of earth that you’re doing. I have to say it would mean a lot to me if you tell 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 fall ill. I believe I have perfect health. I very rarely have headaches or bad cough. I don’t take pills because I don’t have to take pills. And that was the only instant in my life when I think I was dying.

I came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented. I had this weird neighbor and he left something for me there around the door. And one hour after when I was already in my bed … So I was living alone. I felt very bad. I felt pain all over my body. I tried to get up and go to the bathroom, but while I was going there, I felt that functions of my body started to switch off. First the eyesight and hearing, then I had difficulty breathing. Everything accompanied by very acute pain. Heart, stomach, all blood vessels. It’s a difficult thing to explain, but one thing I was certain about is, yeah, this is it.

You thought you were going to die.

Yeah. This is it. Because I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see anything. Was very painful. I think it’s over. I thought, well, I had a good life. I managed to accomplish a few things. And then I collapsed on the floor, but I don’t remember it because the pain covered everything. I found myself on the floor the next day. 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 never happened to me. I couldn’t walk for two weeks after. I stayed at my place and I decided not to tell most of my team about it because again, I didn’t want them to worry. But it was tough. That was tough.

Did that make you afraid of the road you are walking, meaning all the governments, all the intelligence agencies, all the people like we mentioned? It’s like you’re playing a video game. You started with VK where you’re just trying to build a thing that scales and all of a sudden you find out there’s DDoS attacking the security, the integrity of the infrastructure, and then you realize there’s politics and then you realize there’s geopolitics and all of these forces are interested in controlling channels of communication, and you’re just a curious guy who created a platform for everybody on the earth to talk, and all of a sudden you realize there’s a lot of people attacking you. How did that change your view? Did that make you more scared of the world?

Interestingly, not at all. If anything, I felt even more free after that. It wasn’t the first time I thought I was going to die. I had an experience when I assumed something bad is going to happen to me a few years before that also in relation to my work. But after you survive something like this, you feel like you’re living on bonus time. So in a way, you died a long time ago, and every new day you get is a gift.

Is a bonus.

Yes.

And the first time you’re referring to would that have to do with the complexity that was happening with the pressure from the government on VK? The increasing pressure and you had to figure out what to do, and you understood that you’re losing control of VK that moment.

The first of these instances was in December 2011. December 2011 you had this huge protest on the streets of Moscow. They didn’t trust in the integrity of the election results to the state Duma in Russia. I remember 2011, I still lived in Russia running VK. There was no Telegram. So the government demanded that we take down the opposition groups of Navalny from VK that had hundreds of thousands of members and that were used to organize this protest. And I very publicly refused to do that. I just decided it’s not the right thing to do. People have the right to assemble. And I mocked the Prosecutor who handed me that demand. They put out a scan of it. And next to it a photo of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue out. And I said … This is my official response to the prosecutor’s request to ban the opposition groups. That was very funny at the moment. But then I had armed policemen trying to get into my apartment, and I thought about many things at that moment. I asked myself, did I make the right choice? And I came to the conclusion that I made the right choice and I asked myself, what would be the next thing that would logically follow from this? And I realized they’re probably going to put me in prison, so what am I going to do about it? I asked myself.

And I told myself, I’m going to starve myself to death. It’s something that probably many men have. They’re ready to die for other people or certain principles they strongly believe in. I’m not alone here. I guess Edward Snowden was ready to die as well, or some other people like Assange. Also, at that moment, I realized there’s no way to communicate securely. I need to tell my brother what’s going on. They’re probably going after him. How do I tell him without betraying him? Because in 2011, remember WhatsApp was already there. I think they launched in 2009, but it had zero encryption. All messages were plain text in transit, meaning that even your system administrator, let alone your carrier had access to your messages it was only after Telegram started this push for encryption that this other apps suddenly remembered that privacy wasn’t their DNA as WhatsApp founders famously stated, but it must have been a dormant gene in 2011.

Yeah. Yeah.

In 2011, there was no way to send a message in secure way. And I also told myself, if I’m going to survive this, I’m definitely launching a secure messaging app. Somehow it ended up not being too bad. I was summoned to the Prosecutor, answered some silly questions, fewer questions that I had to answer more recently in the French investigation case. But it was the beginning of the end. It was clear that there’s no way I’m going to be allowed to run VK the way I wanted it to run. That was the moment I packed my backpack and just started to wait. I moved to hotel and realized any day I can leave the country, I kept running VK. I started to design Telegram and assembling the team. But I knew my days in Russia were numbered.

First I really have to say for myself from I think millions, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe the entirety of Earth, thank you for putting your life on the line in those cases, I think freedom of speech is fundamental to the flourishing of humanity. And it depends on people 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 and the fact that you would spend many hours with me, thank you for powering through. We got this. It’s already late at night.

Thanks for doing this.

Okay. So there is increasing indication I think from things I’ve seen online that Russia is considering banning Telegram. First of all, do you think this might happen and what effect do you think this might have on humanity and in general what do you think about this?

It can definitely happen. As you said, there are certain indications. There have been certain attempts to partially ban it. Telegram is no longer accessible in parts of Russia such as Dagestan and will be incredibly sad if Russia restores its attempts to ban Telegram because currently it’s been used by its population for all kinds of purposes, not just personal communication or economic business activities, but also it’s the only platform which allows the Russian people to access independent sources of information. If you think about media outlets such as BBC or any other non-Russian of source of information, they’re only accessible in Russia through Telegram in the form of Telegram channels. Their websites banned. Some other social media sites banned. And as you said, there are indications that Russia is planning to migrate users from existing messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to their own homegrown tool, which would of course be fully transparent to the government and wouldn’t allow voices independent from the government to express themselves.

It’s certainly an alarming trend. We see these attempts in countries that are not famous for protecting freedom of speech, but also increasingly in countries that have been known to protect freedoms. And this creates this vicious circle because in a way, European countries trying to fight freedom of speech under pretexts that sound legitimate, such as combating misinformation or election interference, they create precedents and they legitimize restrictions to freedom of speech, which then in turn be used by authoritarian regimes and they would say in places like China or Iran that they’re not doing anything different. It’s the norm now to restrict voices that don’t go in line with the narrative.

That’s sad because one of the things that makes our life interesting is this abundance of different viewpoints of different people that we get to experience. You limit the freedom of people, you inevitably decelerate economic growth, level of happiness, the way people can contribute to the society, the way people can express themselves. I personally think it would be a huge mistake to ban a tool like Telegram in any country, particularly a large country such as Russia, because the Russian people are incredibly talented and resilient people. They’re among the first to start utilizing some of these recent innovations that Telegram implements. They’re the 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’s attacks on you all over the place. There’s misinformation. I’ve read a bunch of things that are, I think in a systematic way, lying about you, lying about telegram from all angles. Why do you get attacked so much by everybody?

For protecting freedom of speech. It’s not a way to make a lot of friends. Because you would inevitably find yourself in a situation where you would be protecting the freedom of the opposition to the current government in any country to express themselves. And then the initial reaction and a very basic instinctive reaction of any government would be to say our position shouldn’t be trusted and allowed to express themselves because they’re actually are agents of some foreign rival, a geopolitical force that wants to destroy our country. This is something that every authoritarian regime in history used. You take Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, Maoist China, they always use the same trick that 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 their citizens forget about their freedoms. And now increasingly you see similar attempts in free countries.

The initial instinct from say, President Macron’s team, when they’re confronted with some footage. For example, the footage of his wife slapping him would be to say it’s all fake Russian imagery. Something that is inaccurate. Something that is misinformation or interference. And then when they are confronted with more information, they have to refine the narrative. So when you find yourself in a situation that you’re running this platform like Telegram, and then you protect the freedom to express of ideas that don’t go in line with the mainstream narrative, you often find yourself in this crossfire when the forces in power will say that you must be working with some foreign government that they don’t like. Inevitably they would say that, oh, if you’re protecting this voices, it’s not right. They love you when you are protecting the freedom of speech in a country that is far from them or better yet in a country that is their geopolitical rival. They praise you for that. But then they have this 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 free press.”

And then you will find yourself in this weird spot. The Ukrainians say you work for the Russians. The Russians say you work for the Ukrainians. And all this schizophrenia is something that we had to deal with for some time because it’s a very easy way to attack you. At some point you don’t understand where it is coming from. Is it our competitors? We must give credit to our competitors if it’s their invention to launch these kind of rumors because at a certain point they must have realized they can’t compete technologically on the product side, so they must do something like this. Or it’s just governments launching these rumors, trying to discredit the platform, trying to scare their citizens away from it because they understand that their power and grip of their own country is in danger as long as they allow a pro-freedom platform to operate.

And through all of this, we should say over and over, that you are simply preserving the freedom of speech for all people of earth no matter what they believe, as long as they don’t call for violence, and as long as they’re not doing some of the criminal activity that we discussed, including terrorist organizing. But other than that, it doesn’t matter what they believe. Left-wing or right-wing, you’re just preserving their freedom of speech. Do you think people of Ukraine, people of Russia and people of Iran, people of all over the world understand that despite the propaganda against you?

I think people are smart. Every time I meet somebody from one of these countries you mentioned in real life or people recognize me in the street, say here in Dubai, they come over, they seem incredibly grateful and understanding. The propaganda in each of these countries would tell them a number of things, but they learned to discount it. That’s why they’re so happy that Telegram exists is because the way they can understand the world around them is to receive conflicting, mutually exclusive viewpoints from sources that hate each other and try to understand what really is true. Because there’s no such thing as an unbiased source of information. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, I instantly realized Telegram is going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides. And I didn’t want Telegram to be used as a tool for war and publicly. I suggested maybe we should just suspend the activity of all politics-related channels in both countries for the time of the war. Maybe we shouldn’t have channels in these two countries.

And then interestingly, people from both countries revolted against this. They told me … Both people in Ukraine and in Russia that I don’t get to babysit them and decide for them what sources of information that they have to be granted access to. They are grown-ups that can make these decisions for themselves. They understand that there is a lot of propaganda. They learn to see through this propaganda. They learn to be able to tell truth from lie. And in this time of war, it was particularly available for them to receive as much information as possible because their relatives, their friends who are getting affected and are still getting affected, they want to understand what’s going on. At that point, when I realized people are smart, people get it, people can see through it. If you ask most people in any of these countries, do you agree that access to Telegram should be restricted for whatever reason, they would say no.

They hunger to have a voice.

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

I have to ask in the question of leadership in the 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. That Elon runs several companies at once, while you only run one. And Elon can lean more on the emotional side while you deliberate and think deeply before acting. Can you expand on this? Also there’s an interesting point that you made that everybody’s weakness is also a strength.

Same point that he made that everybody’s weakness is also a strength. 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 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 and recklessness in other situations. Depending on 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’re invincible.

And even if you take a person as complicated as Elon, I believe that certain traits that Elon demonstrates that people criticize about him are also the sources of his strength. For example, his emotionality is derived from the fact that he cares about issues deeply, and he’s 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?

And if starting a war on X, debating certain issues or becoming personal with other CEOs, criticizing them, if these activities help Elon to innovate and start new projects, he should be doing more of it. There’s nothing wrong in being non-agreeable. Actually, it’s one of the main traits of a successful entrepreneur, not agreeing with things. And every time somebody like Elon, but there’s no somebody like Elon, it’s just Elon, I think, at least from the entrepreneurs I know and I personally interacted with, he’s unique in the sense that he keeps launching new things, running them in parallel, and he doesn’t seem to be stretched too thin. Well, some people think he is, but he manages to still demonstrate success in all or most of his endeavors. So again, you can criticize Elon for being emotional, but would he be the same person without this? I doubt that.

And the incredible teams he’s motivated too. There’s an element of that which you’ve spoken about, the team at Telegram. Assembling a team of A players, as we’ve talked about, is a skill in itself. And that’s also a big part of the leaders that we’ve discussed, it’s like judged in part by the team you assemble.

Yes. And one of the necessary character features to enable that is to be ready to be unpleasant. You have to be ready to insult some people. If their work is inferior, you have to be ready to fire them without remorse. So in order to be an efficient and great entrepreneur and enrich the world of innovations, you have to do unpleasant things. Most people will shy away from it. And in a certain sense, entrepreneurs sacrifice their peace of mind in order to contribute to the world around them. And Elon is a great example of that.

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

One dirham is one third of that.

One-third of a dollar. And in 2024 was the first time Telegram was profitable. So one of the interesting questions here that we could talk for many hours about, but I’d love to get a high view picture. So you’ve left what I understand, what I think is a huge amount of money on the table by sticking to your principles. For example, not doing advertisement that’s based on user private data, which basically every social media company does. So the only advertisement that Telegram does is based on channels and groups, based on the topic, not the private data of the individuals. And the other thing is, which is also gangster and incredible, is you don’t do a news feed, which is the most addictive and engagement inducing aspect of social media, which feeds the very kind of addictive downside of the internet.

The distraction, the engagement, drama farming aspect that we’ve talked about in the very beginning that you tried to resist, that you think is damaging the human mind at scale. So anyway, that’s just speaking to the fact that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. So how the hell were you able to be profitable? What are the ways 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 exploiting personal data of users, something that most of our competitors do. Because money has never been the primary goal, at least not for me. When I sold the remaining share of my first company and I had to do it below market price because I didn’t leave Russia completely without any pressures, I reinvested the vast majority of everything in Telegram. Telegram is an operation that is losing money for me personally. I didn’t extract 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 when you’re profitable without sacrificing your values?

One of the ideas we explored was a subscription model, but only for certain additional features. We wanted to keep all the existing features free and just add more business-related tools or tools for advanced users that they would have to pay for, say 4 or $5 a month. It was quite unprecedented at the time. It wasn’t considered a viable option for messaging apps to do that. We launched the premium subscriptions for Telegram in 2022, and now we have over 15 million paid subscribers. This is some very significant recurring revenue. So we would receive more than half a billion dollars from premium subscriptions alone this year, and it’s growing fast. For that, we had to innovate a lot. We included over 50 different features into the premium package. And then how do you make an app that is already more powerful than any other messaging app on the market, even more useful so that people would be ready to pay for this extra? That wasn’t easy. That took a lot of effort.

And you’re constantly adding features.

We’re constantly adding features.

It’s actually fun to watch just the rate of adding, and some of them are subtle, like the updates to improvements, expansions of polls, for example.

Yeah. So you keep improving the existing features and adding new ones. And every time when you add a new feature, you don’t want to clutter the app. So in a way, they’re not in your way, they’re invisible. That’s not an easy thing to do. And most of the features maybe are not even known to the majority of our users, but when you need them, they’re there. So premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they’re context-based, not targeted. Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we’re not ready to engage in all this practices, exploiting personal data.

Just to be clear, targeted ads is what most social media companies, most tech companies that do any kinds of advertisement do. And that’s the kind of advertisement that uses personal data from users. Just to clarify. And when you said 80%, that’s a lot of money.

Of course, because we would never use, for example, your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata or your activity data to target ads. It’s sad that it became synonymous with the internet industry, this kind of exploitation. But we are happy with the fact that we managed to make Telegram profitable despite that. We are also experimenting a lot with blockchain-based technologies. We’re the first app to allow people to directly own their username or their digital identities using smart contracts and NFTs removing Telegram from the picture. So for example, Telegram cannot confiscate your username from you. It’s impossible. We do a lot of things related to the ecosystem of Telegram. We have a thriving mini app platform, millions of mini app developers launching their own bots and applications.

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

Yes. We enabled them to receive payments from the users through in-app purchase mechanism provided by Apple and Google, which I think was the first attempt of this kind, to allow that both on iOS and Android on a big platform so that third-party developers of mini apps, which are basically websites so deeply integrated into Telegram that you can’t tell whether they’re standalone or they’re part of the overall experience. And 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’re not 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. TON

Plus there’s a bot API. And I mean you have to tell me about the TON blockchain and the crypto ecosystem available through Telegram. So what is TON aka The Open Network blockchain?

TON is a blockchain technology that we initially developed in 2018 and 2019, and we started to develop it because we needed a blockchain platform to be integrated deeply into Telegram because we believe in blockchain. We think it’s one of the technologies that enable freedom. But at the time, if you look at Bitcoin, if you look at Ethereum, they were not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users would create. They would just become congested. And I asked my brother, “Can we create a blockchain platform that would be inherently scalable so that no matter how many users or transactions there are, it would split into smaller pieces?” which we call ShardChains and would still process all transactions. And he thought for a few days and said, “Yes, it’s possible, but it’s not easy.” And we started building it.

We ended up succeeding in developing that technology, but we couldn’t release it because the SEC, the Securities and Exchanges Commission in the United States was unhappy with the way the fundraise for TON was conducted. So we had to abandon the project and the open source community took over. Luckily because we constantly conducted those contests for third-party developers, there was a thriving community around TON, which now stood for The Open Network as opposed to its prior name, Telegram Open Network. And so this project got eventually launched without our direct involvement. And it’s thriving now because everything we do, like I said, this blockchain based tokenized user names, 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. For example, if you want to buy ads on Telegram, you should use TON. All the new things we launch, for example, let’s say gifts that we mentioned earlier, which you can define as a reinvented socially relevant NFT integrated into a billion user ecosystem, but at the same time available on chain, transferable, which you can own directly also based on TON. Incredibly fast growing space. We only launched them half a year ago, and now as a result of this Telegram gifts, TON has become I think the largest or the second largest blockchain in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.

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

Yeah, I’m a big fan of Snoop, and that’s why when they reach out, suggests to do something together, say, “Let’s launch the Snoop related gifts.” And it was really fun. We managed to sell 12 million worth of gifts within 30 minutes.

30 minutes. Well, there you go. I even got a few. But yeah.

After this we have many requests from many really high profile influencers that in a way are lining up.

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

And each of these gifts is scalable because it’s vector based. It references certain points in Snoop’s creative biography, and each of them has countless different versions. We had to create over 50 distinctive versions of each. And then each individual piece is unique because it also has unique background, unique icon and the background. It’s something that we reinvented because we didn’t like the old school NFTs. First of all, they were not relevant socially because okay, you have an NFT, where do you demonstrate it? At Telegram, a telegram gift is there next to your name. It’s part of your digital identity on Telegram. And then you can create collections of gifts and show it off on your profile page.

But also, 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. So what we did with Snoop’s gifts I think represents an example of beautiful, aesthetically pleasing and at the same time very accurate in terms of references to this specific artist’s biography mixture between art and technology, which I think is quite rare. I’m quite proud of it. I think it’s a new trend, a new phenomenon. It’s only half a year old, so let’s see where it goes. We’re going to select our next influencer or artist to be part of it.

Hey listen, I’m really proud. I got a Snoop gift next to my name, and I figured out that you can add even more by pinning them. It’s like a cool little art icon.

We didn’t expect it, by the way. We just had a lot of fun launching these things. And then we realized that one of the first collections we sold each piece at something like $5. And then the minimum price of any items in this collections currently is something like $10,000. And it keeps going up. So I was quite surprised with the reception. I realized when you are trying to monetize social media platform in a way that is consistent with your values, you are forced to find ways that benefit your users, not exploit them. People love these gifts. People love the fact that they can congratulate a person close to them with something valuable and at the same time something beautiful. Also, some people make a business out of it, which is funny. They resell these gifts. We recently met a guy who earned several million dollars just from buying and selling gifts.

It’s a real market.

It’s a real market. It’s just something that he did in a few months. And last year when we launched many new features for the mini apps on Telegram and the payments options for them and the other monetization options, the same guy earned $12 million from mini apps. And I know several people saying, “Totally, I earned $10 million.” “I earned $3 million in just a matter of months single-handedly.” Sometimes they would have a team of two, three people. So whenever I hear stories from people who were able to build businesses on top of Telegram, this makes me incredibly proud.

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

I was a big believer in Bitcoins since more or less the start of it. I got to buy my first few thousands of Bitcoin in 2013, and I didn’t care much. I think I bought at the local maximum, it’s something like $700 per Bitcoin and I just threw a couple of millions there. A lot of people after Bitcoin later next year, went down somewhere close to 300, 200. Started to express their sympathy to me. So, “Poor Pavel. You made this horrible mistake investing in this new thing, but don’t feel bad about it. We still have some respect for you.” And my response to them were, “I don’t care. I’m not going to sell it. I believe in this thing. I think this is the way money should work. Nobody can confiscate your Bitcoin from you. Nobody can censor you for political reasons.”

This is the ultimate means of exchange. And again, I’m now talking about Bitcoin, but it relates to cryptocurrencies in general. So I have been able to fund my lifestyle, so to say, from my Bitcoin investment. Some people think if I’m able to rent nice locations or fly private, it’s because I somehow extract money from Telegram. Like I said, Telegram is a money losing operation for me personally. Bitcoin is something that allowed me to stay afloat. And I believe it will come to a point when Bitcoin is worth $1 million. Just look at the trends. The governments keep printing money like no tomorrow. Nobody’s printing Bitcoin. There is a predictable inflation and then it stops at a certain point. Bitcoin is here to stay. All the fiat currencies, remains to be seen. Two chairs dilemma

Let me ask you a deeply philosophical serious question. In your first Telco interview, you had two interesting chairs in the background. I think they reference a now legendary meme. The choice is Пики точёные или хуи дрочёные (Russian: “Sharpened pikes or jerked-off cocks.”) What is the philosophical wisdom in the dilemma that these two chairs present? Have you had to face the dilemma yourself personally?

Not this exact dilemma. I think this is a riddle that people have to face in Russian prisons. And metaphorically, it’s describing all the situations where you’re presented a choice between two suboptimal options. When you’re running a big business or when you’re running a large country, it is similar. You sometimes face this dilemma, what are you going to do, this very horrible thing or this also very horrible thing? So I think the right answer to this riddle is not to do any of these things. Reframe the question, design a solution that turns a disadvantage into an advantage and then use it to cope with the other side of the problem. So do you know the answer to that riddle?

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

This is one of the ways to answer this question. If you got to a tricky situation that probably earlier you made a certain mistake-

You fucked up already.

Should have been avoided. But the other quite creative answer to this question is that you take the sharp objects from one of the chairs, or the spikes and then they use them to cut off the objects from the other chair. And you know what objects I’m talking about?

That’s a very engineering solution. I’m glad somebody came up with that.

I believe this is the right answer. We’re often being manipulated by politicians, by corporate leaders to make a choice from two suboptimal options. And then when we are forced to make this choice and we make this choice, it’s almost as if it’s something that we have to assume responsibility for. I don’t think we should be buying into that.

Okay. And this theme of absurdity and ridiculousness, there’s an object here that appeared in… Not many people seem to have noticed this. People should go watch your excellent conversation in the Oslo Freedom Forum. Behind you, I’m no archeologist, 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? Because the wishbone brings you luck. And I should also point out that just like with Telegram, with the art, there’s tiny little walruses. And thanks to you, I had to also find out that a lot of mammals have a bone inside their penis. And the evolutionary advantage, I guess, of having a bone is quite obvious. It actually raises the question of why humans don’t have a actual bone inside their penis. A lot of questions there.

That’s a very interesting subject. The reason I have this is because the tribe that is almost gone and extinct in Siberia and Mongolia called Evenki, passed me this gift from them. Normally they would craft something like this only for their most respected leaders. It is supposed to be a token of their appreciation for bravery, courage, leadership. Ironically, it also translates in a very specific way into the Russian language. In Russian, walrus’s penis means something a bit funny, which is often used to describe nothing. So for example, if you’re being requested by say certain government or a certain business partner to provide something 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 then they would.

Through osmosis figure out the deep message. It is an indirect rebellion. By the way, in the former Soviet Union, there was, and a lot of places throughout history, some of the rebellion had to take this kind of symbolic, metaphoric form through poetry, through children’s stories. It’s the beauty of the human language and art that we’re able to do that, say F-U, to whatever forces that try to overpower us. We say F-U through poetry, through art, and sometimes through a rather large walrus penis bone carried by what appears to be either a happy sumo wrestler or a cat of some sort.

They asked a lot of questions about this walrus’s penis bone in the airport, both here in the UAE and in France, they are always very interested in this thing.

There seems to be some confusion over how many kids you have. It’s often said to be over 100. Can you explain how many kids you have?

The truthful answer to this question is I don’t really know how many biological kids I have exactly. Because at a certain point in my life, about 15 years ago, I decided that it was a good idea to be a sperm donor. Initially, a friend of mine asked me to help because they were trying to have a baby with his wife, and they experienced certain health issues that prevented them to do the natural way. And he asked me, he told me, “We don’t want to just rely on some random anonymous genetic material. We want somebody we know and respect to be the biological father of our kid.” And I said, “You got to be kidding me. Sounds ridiculous. What are we even talking about?”

… I mean, sounds ridiculous. What are they even talking about? But then I realized it’s actually a serious issue, and they were not the only couple struggling with that. So eventually, I got persuaded into doing more of it. I can’t say I am incredibly proud of that, but I think it was the right thing to do, particularly at the time when I thought, “Okay, I probably don’t have much time on this planet left. Things are getting trickier and trickier. So if I can help some couples have babies, let’s do it.”

And then more recently, when I was working on my will, I realized that I shouldn’t make a distinction between the kids conceived naturally and the kids who are just my biological kids that I never seen. As long as they can establish their shared DNA with me someday, maybe in 30 years from now, they have to be entitled for a share of my estate after I’m gone. And that made a lot of noise in the news for some reason. People get very excited by this kind of news. I get a lot of messages from people claiming they’re my kids. I get a lot of requests from people asking me to adopt them. The memes were priceless. But understanding that it’s not a thing that most people do, I don’t see anything wrong with it. If anything, I think more people should be donating sperm.

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

Yeah, I think overabundance paralyzes motivation and willpower. It’s extremely harmful, particularly for young boys, to grow up in an environment where they can be proud, not of their own achievements, but of their father’s achievements or their father’s wealth. This removes the incentive to work on developing their own skills, removes the incentive to study, to work. So I thought if they’re going to have this money, it should be something that they would only get when they’re already adult. It’s still risky, but one of the reasons I decided it makes more sense to divide this huge wealth that I’m likely to leave behind among a hundred or more than a hundred people is that it won’t be too much for every single descendant. But at the same time, some people did the calculation, it’s still many, many millions of dollars for each child, so I’m not sure it helps too much.

On the topic of abundance, offline we had a lot of fascinating philosophical discussions. One of which was about the mouse paradise experiment, also known as Universe 25. It’s an experiment from the 1960s and early ’70s conducted by ethologist John B. Calhoun. We can talk about this one for hours also, I’m sure. But it was an experiment with a few hundreds of individual mice compartments, and they provided them with unlimited food, water nesting, no predators, stable temperatures, and frequent cleaning. Basically the definition of abundance as far as mice go.

The interesting aspect of this experiment is that at first the population doubled, it grew very quickly. But then it leveled off, and certain really negative social things started happening, like mothers neglected to kill their young, violent attacks, and hypersexual activity became widespread. Some “beautiful” ones, largely inactive, well-groomed mice withdrew, refusing to mate or interact. So all of these kind of societal qualities that we see as negative from the functioning of a society started to emerge because of the abundance. And finally, the collapse. The reproduction rates crashed, social dysfunction spread to the next generation, and eventually just went extinct. It didn’t just plummet to a low level, it plummeted steadily to zero despite the fact that those ongoing resource abundance. As this description states, the last mouse died surrounded by untouched food and water. I mean, there’s deep wisdom to that about abundance. You’ve mentioned this in different contexts throughout this conversation, is it seems like scarcity. It seems like constraints. It seems like non-abundance is essential for human flourishing, which is a counterintuitive notion. It’s true for mice, and I think it’s probably true for humans too.

We have evolved to overcome scarcity. Almost by definition, there has never been such thing as infinite amount of food or entertainment in our lives before now. We seem as a species to lose our ability to identify purpose in the 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 a restriction in order to create purpose and meaning in life. In a way, I was lucky in a very counterintuitive way because I grew up poor. I didn’t have money when I was a teenager. I had the same jacket for years, which was bought on a 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 two jobs to take care of us. It was not easy, but it also created purpose. It created meaning. It created priorities. It allowed us to focus on things that mattered, allowed us to develop our character and intellectual abilities.

Now, if we had everything, why do anything? These mice suffered societal collapse that was irreversible, and this is not an accident. This kind of experiment has been repeated countless times. At a certain point, social dysfunction and the erosion of social roles becomes contagious, and the society gradually degrades into a chaotic collection of individuals unable to take care of the next generation or even to produce the next generation, and it goes extinct.

It’s fascinating because we’re creating technologies and this is what AI is proposing to our future generations as a problem to solve, which is, AI may very well create abundance. So we will be like these mice potentially. Whether it’s AI or other kinds of technologies, they increasingly give more and more to all of us. And it is a thing that is good: decrease the amount of suffering in the world, increase the quality of life. But as we reach towards that abundance, the fabric that connects us, rooted in our biology that’s developed by evolution, it might create a real challenge for us.

We should find the right balance between chaos and order, between self-restriction and freedom for creativity.

Your father recently celebrated his 80th birthday. You had a conversation with him. He gave you some life advice. I think you mentioned to me one of the things he said was not to just speak of your principles, but to live them, to lead by example. I think this is something you already do well. Maybe can you speak to what you’ve learned about life from your father, maybe some of the lessons he told you in the conversation you’ve had with him on his birthday.

I’m incredibly lucky to have my father. He’s a person who wrote countless books on Ancient Rome and Ancient Roman literature, dozens of scientific papers, and I always remember him working. He would be busy typing his books and articles in an old-school typewriter back in the late ’80s, early ’90s. He was relentless. The example he said to myself and my brother was priceless. Some people make this mistake of thinking that you can instill the right principles in the future generation or into your kids by saying things to them, but kids are smart. They discount words, they look at the actions. So observing our father was a big lesson by itself. It wasn’t necessary for him to say anything to us. And then at the same time, he was incredibly patient, emotionally resilient.

My mom, great woman, incredibly smart, highly educated, but she would sometimes try to test the patience of my father. It’s a trait rooted in our biology. There’s an evolutionary explanation for that. Women sometimes tend to do that, and he demonstrated incredible patience all the time. He told me recently, “You shouldn’t give the wrong example to the people around you and in particular to your kids, because you can do the right thing nine times out of 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 why they shouldn’t be using a smartphone, it won’t land. It’s bound to fail. So you lead by example.”

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

I love the fact that you’re talking to your 80-year- old father, and you’re talking about AGI and the difference between human, the human spirit, human nature, and what AGI, AI is able to achieve. And conscience is the thing that humans have, the ability to know the right from wrong.

This is the lesson that he gave me. One of my goals in life is never to disappoint him. Quantum immortality

Another thing we’ve talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought. Do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it, by manifesting it into being? What do you think?

There are many explanations why it works. One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident does allow you to achieve the things you want to achieve. It’s very hard to believe though that you can just manifest things into being without applying effort in the direction that seems to be logical. Maybe some people exist that can just sit on the bank of a river and materialize things by the power of their thought. But I’m not sure I’m one of these people. I always found it more easy to believe that if you couple this optimism and faith with logical action, then it is bound to be successful.

Prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus, thinking about the thing.

Oh yes, over many, many, many days. It’s possible to imagine our world as a high dimensional universe where humans have the ability to navigate through it with the power of belief, which is coupled with positive emotion and logical thinking. But we are getting into an esoteric realm. We don’t have any proof of that. But we also know that we probably at this point haven’t discovered even 1% about this universe.

I agree with you fully, and I like what you said in the way you were thinking about it. You’ve told me before that maybe there’s a way that with effort and with the focused mind, you can shape, you can morph the landscape of probabilities around you. It’s a nice way to visualize it, that somehow our effort and our focus changes the things that are likely and less likely. And by focusing on it, we make the thing more and more likely, at least as an estimate, as the kind of field that we, through our thoughts and through our actions, change that field. And then there’s eight billion of us doing so, and together there’s this collective intelligence that creates the world we see around us like the mice. 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 of the universe splits into a billion of different universes, and everything that can happen happens. And there is a universe where, say, I died in 2013. Maybe every time I die, I actually get to shift to a parallel universe when I don’t die. And then it keeps going, and at certain points we achieve this quantum immortality when we’re 1,000 years old, but a lot of people from other versions of reality think we’re long gone.

Yeah. This is something you explained to me, the idea of quantum immortality, which is a thought experiment, which I find deeply fascinating, people should look into it, which is 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, yeah, there’s many universes. If we were to seriously take the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there’s many universes where you died many times, especially you, and I’m glad we’re in the universe where we get to share the table with this impressive bone, a little humor, and a lot of serious topics covered today. Once again, I can’t say enough. Again, thank you from me. Again, 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. 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 happened to be in this version of reality when I haven’t died, at least yet, and hopefully we’ll get to spend more fun moments in the years to come together.

Thank you, brother.

Thank you for listening to this conversation with Pavel Durov. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me try to articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you’d like to submit questions or topics like this for me to talk about in the future, go to 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 Durov in France has, let’s say, eerie parallels, both metaphorically and literally. Of course, The Trial is a work of fiction, but I think it is often useful to go to the surreal world of literature, even 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 understand our real world and the destructive paths we have the potential to go down together, which also hopefully helps us understand how to avoid doing so.

So let me zoom out and speak about Franz Kafka. Who was he? He was an insurance clerk who wrote at night. He died young and almost completely unknown, and he asked for his manuscripts to be burned. Luckily for us, his friend, Max 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 humans to case files through the labyrinth of institutional power. He wrote about an individual’s feeling of guilt even when a crime has not been committed, or more generally, he wrote about the feeling of anxiety that is part of the human condition in our modern, chaotic world.

His writing style was to use short, declarative sentences to describe the surreal and the absurd, and in so doing, effectively, I think, convey the feeling of an experience versus simply describing the experience. For example, famously, his work, The Metamorphosis, opens with the following lines, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying in his hard armor-plated back, and when he lifted his head a little, he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments, on top of which, the bed-quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.”

Kafka, I think, effectively uses this image of being transformed into a giant bug stuck on his back to convey a feeling of helplessness and uselessness to his family, to his job, to society. The feeling of being a burden to everyone, dehumanized, alienated, and abandoned. The feeling of being only temporarily valued as long as he served some function for his job or for his family, and quickly discarded otherwise. I will probably talk about this work in more depth at another time, because it is so haunting, and I think it is such a profound description of the burden of existence in modern society for many people.

But here, let me talk about another of his work, The Trial. In this novel, the main character, 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 geniusness 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 well-being begins to deteriorate. In a sense, the trial doesn’t need to convict him. The internal psychological turmoil and the external social scrutiny performs a conviction and the eventual execution. When exactly one year after his arrest, Josef K is visited by two men, walked him courteously through the city to an abandoned quarry, and stabbed him in the heart without Josef K resisting. To me, the trial shows that tyranny’s final victory isn’t when it kills you, or when you hold still for the knife, not because you’re forced, but because you’ve been exhausted into submission. Once again, it is a haunting story of the soullessness of bureaucracy in its suffocation of the human spirit. I highly recommend this short book, and I’ll probably talk about it even more in the future. I don’t think it’s especially useful for me to speak to any parallels between The Trial and 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 general positive outlook throughout this whole process. What I always fear in such cases is that a bureaucratic system can wear people down, exhaust them into surrendering. I saw none of that with Pavel. I don’t think he knows how to give up or give in, no matter how much pressure he’s under. Again, this is truly inspiring to me.

Also, now that we’re talking about it, let me mention some other of Kafka’s work that was moving to me. The Castle has similar description as The Trial does of the absurd inaccessibility of those in authority, of the nightmarish bureaucracy. The character in The Castle is also named K. Both bureaucracies operate through exhaustion, endless deferrals, procedures, waiting rooms. Again, highly relevant to modern times.

I can also highly recommend Kafka’s In The Penal Colony and Hunger Artist. Both are too interesting and weird to explain in depth here. But let me say, the Hunger Artist is a story that I think is relevant to our modern-day attention economy, where so many people want to be famous. It tells the story of 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: to resist against such systems that tried to dehumanize us and to ensure that individual freedom and the human spirit keep flourishing. I think it will. I have faith in us humans. I love you all. This entry was posted in transcripts on September 30, 2025 by

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Host of Lex Fridman Podcast. Research Scientist at MIT, working on human-AI interaction, robotics, and machine learning. View all posts by Lex Fridman →