Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature About this episode Pavel Durov is the founder and CEO of Telegram.
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Transcript:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Pavel’s Telegram: https://t.me/durov
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SPONSORS:
To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts:
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(02:46) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(11:29) – Philosophy of freedom
(14:37) – No alcohol
(22:42) – No phone
(28:38) – Discipline
(49:50) – Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics
(1:05:12) – Arrest in France
(1:21:23) – Romanian elections
(1:32:18) – Power and corruption
(1:41:50) – Intense education
(1:53:51) – Nikolai Durov
(1:58:19) – Programming and video games
(2:02:33) – VK origins & engineering
(2:19:46) – Hiring a great team
(2:29:02) – Telegram engineering & design
(2:48:04) – Encryption
(2:53:01) – Open source
(2:57:48) – Edward Snowden
(3:00:20) – Intelligence agencies
(3:01:32) – Iran and Russia government pressure
(3:04:41) – Apple
(3:11:38) – Poisoning
(3:43:53) – Money
(3:52:45) – TON
(4:02:35) – Bitcoin
(4:05:34) – Two chairs dilemma
(4:12:14) – Children
(4:23:24) – Father
(4:27:55) – Quantum immortality
(4:34:27) – Kafka
PODCAST LINKS:
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– Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
Transcript 36,015 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people. Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship. For this, he has faced pressure from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on Earth. In the face of this immense pressure, he has always held his ground, continuously fighting to protect user privacy and the freedom of all of us humans to communicate with each other. I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him and can definitively say that he's one
0:42 Lex Fridman? of the most principled and fearless humans I've ever met. Plus, when I posted that I'm hanging out with Pavel, a lot of people, fans of his, wrote to me asking if he does, in fact, privately live the disciplined, ascetic life he's known for. No alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise, including a crazy amount of daily pull-ups and push-ups, no phone, except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on. Yes, he is 100% that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me. I'm grateful for it, and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend.
1:24 Lex Fridman? This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical about freedom, life, human nature, and the nature of government bureaucracies. And it is also in parts super technical, because to me, it is fascinating that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team and yet is able to basically out-innovate all of its competitors with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features. Just like the meme of The Simpsons did it first, when you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case, Telegram did it first. So we discuss it all, from the Kafkaesque situation he's in the midst of in France,
2:07 Lex Fridman? to the roller coaster of his life and career, to his philosophy on technology, freedom, and the human condition. And by the way, while this entire conversation is in English, we'll make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in multiple languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi. If this is of interest to you, you will need to head over to the Lex Fridman channel on YouTube, or you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the Settings gear icon, then clicking Audio Track, and then selecting the language you prefer. Here, we only provide the original English version.
2:46 Lex Fridman? And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Miro for team collaboration, MasterClass for learning, Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, Finn for customer service AI agents, Element for electrolytes, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact.
3:30 Lex Fridman? All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Miro. It's an online collaborative whiteboard platform. You know, like for brainstorming ideas together with your team, except on the interwebs. They have this space called the Innovation Workspace that blends AI and humans, human creativity, to develop ideas. So this is for multiple people, so it enables teams to brainstorm, prototype, and iterate fast on the ideas. I think a really big part of a successful team is being able to brainstorm. Each individual person in a self-motivated ways coming up with ideas,
4:14 Lex Fridman? but then those ideas are put into the same kind of system where they can be integrated, and the tension between those ideas can develop even better ideas. And so you go and go and go and constantly improve. So I think Miro is a really nice platform for that brainstorming process. Help your teams develop great ideas into results with Miro. Go to miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O dot com.
4:43 Lex Fridman? This episode is also brought to you by MasterClass and their new class called The Power Playbook, How to Win at Work. It's actually a masterclass by a super strong and popular professor from Stanford, Jeff Pfeffer. He has a lot of excellent lectures and books that study power and this masterclass is a sort of an applied study of power. It provides a playbook that breaks down the rules of power and teaches you ways how they can be applied in the workplace. It's like the Game of Thrones, but in the 21st century capitalist system. There you go. It's a basic communication, body language, all that kind of stuff, how to position yourself
5:28 Lex Fridman? so that you get a promotion, figuring out how to be influential. I started listening to this masterclass and it's excellent. I highly recommend. It's called The Power Playbook, How to Win at Work and it became available on August 21st. So you should be able to get it now and you can get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/lex. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Uplift Desk, the very desk I'm behind right now. And I have many, many more of them in this whole place. And I have several of them in the podcast room.
6:08 Lex Fridman? In fact, four. And in that very room that you can see on camera, those desks have brought me a lot of happiness, both in the standing desk position and in the sitting position. I mean, it's just really, really excellent product, really excellent company, brings a smile to my face every time I think about them. They have never disappointed in their customer service. In the large selection of products that they provide, there's like some ridiculously insane number of possible desk combinations you could choose from. The look, the size, all the different characteristics you can pick. I've been a fan for a long, long time, long before they were a sponsor. And when they became a sponsor, that's like a dream come true.
6:53 Lex Fridman? Please go support them so they continue being a sponsor. Cause it's really cool when a product over the top definitively has made me happy for many years and they also are a sponsor. Go to upliftdesk.com/lex and use golex to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, a 15 year warranty and an extra discount off your entire order. That's U P L I F T D E S K dot com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Finn, a world-class, popular, excellent performing AI agent for customer service.
7:34 Lex Fridman? 65% average resolution rate, trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders, including some AI companies, including Anthropic. By the way, Anthropic has been killing it recently. But anyway, the fact that they trust Finn shows that these guys are legit. Their Finn AI engine is continuously improving, which easily allows you to do the analyze, train, test and deploy loop continuously over and over and over and over while it improves and gets better and adjusts your particular context and a particular set of customers and everything is always getting smarter, hopefully leading to happier customers. It's built to handle complex multi-step queries like returns, exchanges, disputes, delivering
8:17 Lex Fridman? high-quality personalized answers. Anyway, go to fin.ai/lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin.ai/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that brings me a lot of joy. I drink it in the morning, I drink it in the afternoon, I drink it in the evening, sipping on it right now. I started doing a thing that makes my life significantly, in a small way, but it feels big, better when I go to hard training sessions that go for, you know, 90 minutes to two hours on the match jitsu. You know, round after round after round for a long time. I usually prefer not to have
9:02 Lex Fridman? much water, just so I can focus on the training. You know, every once in a while, go to the water fountain, that kind of stuff. But bringing a cold bottle of water with a packet of watermelon salt element in it. It's just that little break of sipping on this drink that I've come to associate with home. And it's a little bit cold in the Texas heat. I don't know. It's just such a cool feeling. It's a good feeling. It makes me feel happy. You get a free eight count sample pack for free with any purchase. If you try it at drink element.com slash Lex.
9:42 Lex Fridman? And finally, this episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I built 20 minutes at lexreman.com slash store and have a few shirts on there. They're constantly upgrading every aspect of Shopify. It's kind of incredible. Now, I heard that they've upgraded fulfillment. So everything you need to ship stuff, if you're selling stuff online, you got to ship it most of the time. And all that is now built into Shopify, where you know that you can sell stuff online with Shopify. But again, the thing I'm going to keep talking about, which makes it incredible is that Shopify is this super scalable
10:26 Lex Fridman? cloud infrastructure, originally in large part built on Ruby on Rails. And huge brands use Shopify plus for enterprise grade scale. I'm also reading here that Shopify can support headless commerce. So you can use Shopify just on the backend and then do your own front end completely using React view and next JS. What do you know? Sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at Shopify dot com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify dot com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Pavel Durov.
11:29 Lex Fridman? You've been an advocate for freedom for many years, writing that you should be ready to risk everything for freedom. What were some influences and insights that helped you arrive at this value of human freedom?
11:43 Speaker 01 I get to experience the difference between a society with freedom and a society without freedom pretty early in life. I was four years old when my family moved from the Soviet Union to northern Italy. And I could see that a society without freedom cannot enjoy the abundance of opinions, of ideas, of goods and services. Even for a four or five-year-old kid, it was obvious. Like, you can't experience all the toys, the ice cream sorts, the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you couldn't access in Italy. And then I got to realize something even more important.
12:25 Speaker 01 You don't get to contribute to this abundance without freedom.
12:32 Speaker 01 And at this point, it was pretty obvious to me.
12:36 Lex Fridman? You also wrote "Свобода важнее денег", translates to "Freedom matters more than money". How do you prevent these values for freedom being corrupted by money, by people with influence, by people with power?
12:51 Speaker 01 Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed. So you make sure that they don't stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of. So you stand your ground and you remember that it's worth living your life according to
13:19 Speaker 01 The principles that you believe in, even though this life can end up being shorter than a longer life, but lived in slavery.
13:30 Lex Fridman? Do you contemplate your mortality? Anything about your death?
13:33 Speaker 01 Oh, yes.
13:34 Lex Fridman? Are you afraid of it?
13:36 Speaker 01 In a way, you have to go against your instinct of self-preservation. And it's not easy. We are all biological beings, hard-coded to be afraid of death. Nobody wants to die. But when you approach it rationally, you live and then you die. There's no such thing as your death in your life. You stop experiencing life once you die. So you have to ask yourself this question. Is it worth living a life full of fear of death? Or it's much more enjoyable to forget about this? And live your life in a way that makes you immune to this fear?
14:19 Speaker 01 At the same time, remembering that death exists, so that every day would count.
14:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah, remembering that death exists makes you deeply feel every moment that you do get.
14:33 Speaker 01 That's why I love reminding myself that I can die any day.
14:37 Lex Fridman? In many ways, you live a pretty stoic existence. I got a chance to spend a couple of weeks with you. In many ways, you seek to minimize the negative effects of the outside world on your mind. You've written, quote, "If you want to reach your full potential and maintain clarity of mind, stay away from addictive substances. My success and health are the result of 20-plus years of complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal drugs. Short-term pleasure isn't worth your future." Let's talk about each one of these. Alcohol. What's been your philosophy behind that?
15:19 Speaker 01 That one is quite easy. When I was 11 years old, my biochemistry teacher, he gave me this book he wrote. It was called The Illusion of Paradise. And there, he would... Describe the biological and chemical processes that happen in your body once you consume this or that substance. It was mainly related to illegal drugs, but alcohol was one of these addictive substances that he covered.
15:52 Speaker 01 So it turns out that when you drink alcohol, the thing that happens is that your brain cells become paralyzed.
16:02 Speaker 01 They become literally zombies. And then next day,
16:08 Speaker 01 sometime after the party is over, some of your brain cells die and never get to normal. So think about this, if your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.
16:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah, in many ways, it's a poison we let in our body. But by way of advice, what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking? You know, a lot of people use alcohol to enable them to have a vibrant social life. There's a lot of pressures from society, you know, at a party, to drink so you can socialize. So what advice would you give to them? Uh, to people who imagine having a social life without alcohol?
16:59 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, don't be afraid to be contrarian. Set your own rules.
17:05 Speaker 01 Secondly, if you feel you need to drink, there must be some problem you're trying to conceal. There's something that, some fear you are not ready to confront. And you have to address this fear.
17:21 Speaker 01 If there is a good-looking girl you're afraid to approach,
17:26 Speaker 01 get rid of this fear, approach her, practice, do it again and again. It's pretty banal, but this advice works.
17:33 Lex Fridman? Fix the underlying problem, which is usually, at the very bottom, is always going to be fear. Work on that.
17:39 Speaker 01 And very often, people are trying to escape something in their lives with alcohol. What is it they're trying to escape? What is this problem? You have to get to the bottom of it. Your mind is trying to tell you something valuable. And instead of addressing it directly, you are flooding it in alcohol.
18:03 Speaker 01 Which is sort of a spiritual painkiller, but works only temporarily and then you have to pay the debt with interest.
18:13 Lex Fridman? So what do you do? I mean, you've been in a lot of gatherings, a lot of parties. Is there some challenges to saying no?
18:20 Speaker 01 For me, not at all. I've been always ready to stand my ground and say no when I feel something's not right. And it's extraordinary how easily we humans are affected by what we perceive as majority. Because nobody since ancient times, since million years ago, wants to be left out by the tribe.
18:47 Speaker 01 We are scared that
18:50 Speaker 01 we won't become accepted anymore, which thousands and millions of years ago meant we're going to starve to death. So we have to consciously
19:05 Speaker 01 fight this inclination to be agreeable with everything that the majority imposes on you. Because it's quite clear that many things that the majority, many activities the majority is engaging in
19:23 Speaker 01 are not bringing you any good.
19:25 Lex Fridman? So that's another fear you have to face, going into a party and the fear of being the outcast at that party, of being different than others at that party, at that social gathering, in the crowd of humans, be different. That's a fear.
19:39 Speaker 01 That's a fear. And it's quite irrational, if you think about it. It was something that made a lot of sense
19:48 Speaker 01 twenty thousand years ago. It makes zero sense today. Because if you think about it, if you do the same thing everybody else around you is doing, you don't have any competitive advantage. And you don't get to become outstanding at some point in your life.
20:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's one of the things we talked about. Sort of by way of advice, is if you want to be successful in life, you want to be different.
20:17 Speaker 01 Definitely.
20:18 Lex Fridman? And perhaps, I think you said you want to achieve mastery at a niche. So find the niche at which you can pursue with all your effort and achieve mastery. And the niche being different than anything that anybody else is doing. Can you explain that a little bit more?
20:35 Speaker 01 So obviously, in order to contribute to the society you're in, to the economy of the country you live in, you have to do something that is valuable. But if you're doing something that everybody else is doing anyway,
20:53 Speaker 01 what's the value of it?
20:56 Speaker 01 Now, it sounds easier than it is done to do something that nobody else is doing. Because we humans is surrounded by all kinds of information, which makes us want to copy what we are perceiving. At the same time, there are so many areas which you can explore that have nothing to do with the information you receive on a daily basis. So it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have.
21:25 Speaker 01 So that you wouldn't be somebody who is left
21:30 Speaker 01 to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important. So that you end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else. But rather, you should be proactive. You should deliberately try to set a goal, an area that you want to explore, and then actively search information that is relevant to this field. So that one day, you can become the world's number one expert in this field. And it's not quite, it's not that difficult to do that.
22:16 Speaker 01 You have to just remain consistent. Because nobody else is trying to do that. Everybody else is just reading the same news and discussing the same news every day. But this way, they don't get to have a competitive advantage.
22:30 Lex Fridman? Yeah, majority of the population becomes slaves to the AI recommender systems, AI-driven recommender systems. And so the content, everybody's fed is the same thing, and we all become the same. On that point, one of the different things you do is you don't use a phone, except occasionally to test Telegram features. But I've been with you for two weeks. I haven't seen you use a phone at all in the way that most people use a phone, like for their social media. So can you describe your philosophy behind that?
23:02 Speaker 01 I don't think a phone is a necessary device. I remember growing up, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls. I was always in airplane mode or mute. I hated the idea of being disturbed.
23:30 Speaker 01 My philosophy here is pretty simple. I want to define what is important in my life. I don't want other people or companies, all kinds of organizations telling me what is important today and what I should be thinking about. To set up your own agenda. And the phone gets in your way.
24:01 Lex Fridman? 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?
24:16 Speaker 01 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.
24:25 Lex Fridman? 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.
24:35 Speaker 01 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, eleven or twelve hours for sleep, I won't sleep for eleven or twelve hours. So what I end up doing is I end up lying in bed thinking. And some people hate it. They say, you have to take a sleeping pill, but I never take pills. I love 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.
25:16 Speaker 01 That's my favorite time of the day. Sometimes I go, I wake up, I go take a shower, still without a phone.
25:25 Speaker 01 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,
26:07 Speaker 01 but take some time to think about what's really important for you and what you want to change in this world.
26:13 Lex Fridman? 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 pushups.
26:23 Speaker 01 I know it's kind of kind counterintuitive because I founded one of the largest social networks in the world, after which I founded the second largest messaging app in the world. And you're supposed to be really connected. But the conclusion you reach very early is that the more connected and accessible you are, the less productive you are. And then how can you run this thing? If you're constantly barbed by all kinds of information, most of which is irrelevant to the success of what you're trying to build.
27:05 Speaker 01 You know, the entire world can be fascinated by a fight, a quarrel between the world's richest man and the world's most powerful man. But for the vast majority of these people following this saga, it's irrelevant. It won't change their lives. And in any case, they can't affect it. So it's a bit pointless. Of course, there are people who are engaged in activities that require them to be up to date of everything that's going on. But 99% of people aren't.
27:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah. The internet, social media presents to us drama in such a way that we think it's the biggest thing in the world, the most important thing on which the tides of history will turn. But in reality, most things will not turn the tides of history. And so I guess our challenge is to figure out what is the timeless thing? What is the thing that's happening today is 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's uh, everyone thinks the world will end because of this thing. And then another thing happens the next day.
28:26 Speaker 01 And they're trying to influence your emotions.
28:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
28:30 Speaker 01 And that's how you get into trouble, because you can be forced to make conclusions that are not in your best interest.
28:38 Lex Fridman? 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?
28:53 Speaker 01 I'm a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience emotions, and some of them are not very pleasant. But I believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us
29:06 Speaker 01 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.
29:49 Speaker 01 I can see a solution, and I start executing the strategy.
29:56 Speaker 01 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.
30:26 Speaker 01 And then ultimately you do something else, a little bit more, a little bit more. And in a few years, who knows, you may end up achieving great things.
30:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's the thing that people are confused. If if you're stuck in in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don't want to do anything, to do something. Try, 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.
30:55 Speaker 01 Exactly. And going to the gym is a good example. There are many days when you don't want to start working out. But they have, you have to overcome this initial reluctance. And then you get to a point that you enjoy it and you think, oh, my God, it was such a good idea to come to the gym today. But it's similar to pretty much every activity.
31:20 Speaker 01 You get to write some code. Write a small piece of code first and then you get inspired. Then you'll come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write a paragraph.
31:35 Speaker 01 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,
31:50 Speaker 01 we often forget the important things, and this is one of them.
31:54 Lex Fridman? We've been working out every single day. You have been working out for many years pretty intensively. So I think a lot of people would love to um know what's your perfect daily workout regimen?
32:10 Lex Fridman? Let's say on a daily, on a weekly basis.
32:12 Speaker 01 I do three hundred pushups and three hundred 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.
32:25 Lex Fridman? So pushups and squats are still a big part of your routine?
32:29 Speaker 01 Yes, this is how I start my day.
32:32 Speaker 01 I'm not sure they do a lot in terms of changing your body, but they're definitely a good way to
32:40 Speaker 01 practice self-discipline. Because you don't want to do this push-ups in the morning, most of the days. Squats are particularly boring. They're not that hard, they're just boring. But you overcome it. And then it's much easier to start doing other things
33:01 Speaker 01 related to your work, for example. When I can, I also take a nice bath. Because it's another exercise of self-discipline. I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline.
33:16 Speaker 01 You know, not your biceps or your pecs or anything else.
33:22 Speaker 01 Because if you get to train that one, everything else
33:27 Speaker 01 just comes by itself.
33:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah, everything else becomes easy. We should mention, I went with you to Banya. And I think it's fair to say you're nuts.
33:40 Lex Fridman? In terms of how much you can handle. And I didn't even see the worst of it. Can you just speak to the, your crazy escapades in the Banya, what value you get from it? So both the heat and the cold.
33:52 Speaker 01 I don't know if it's crazy. I think it's quite natural and normal by this time.
33:58 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
33:58 Speaker 01 But maybe I could just got used to it. So Banya is this extreme kind of sauna
34:07 Speaker 01 practiced by Eastern Europeans.
34:08 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
34:10 Speaker 01 But it is done in a way that maximizes heat. And they also use all kind of herbs and branches and it's a much more holistic and natural experience. Then a necessary part of it is you get the cold plunge.
34:32 Speaker 01 And then you go back. And again, this is one of these things that maybe in the moment is not always that pleasant, particularly if you go to extreme temperatures.
34:45 Speaker 01 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.
34:58 Speaker 01 And then you get to feel great for hours and days after.
35:04 Speaker 01 What's more, it gives you this long-term health benefits. In a way, you can look at it as alcohol in reverse. Alcohol will give you this short fleeting pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours. But then you will be paying for it with long-term negative consequences. I'd rather do Banya in ice bath.
35:30 Lex Fridman? We swam the length of a large lake in France a couple of times. Can you talk through why you value these multi-hour swims?
35:39 Speaker 01 I left swimming for hours. The longest I swam was five and a half hours in Finland. It was quite cold. I got lost in the process. Barely could find my way back. But
35:57 Speaker 01 the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after. You're shaking a little bit. You feel great after. You cross a huge lake, and I cross many lakes. Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake. And every time you feel this achievement, which makes you happy, makes you feel strong. And then you're more ready to other challenges.
36:22 Speaker 01 And of course, when you know you're going to start a journey that will last a few hours, you're reluctant to do it. But you swim for 10 minutes, and then for 20 minutes, and then for 30 minutes.
36:38 Speaker 01 And teaches you this incredible patience. That I think is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life.
36:45 Lex Fridman? And it's pretty meditative. Lake versus ocean.
36:49 Speaker 01 Yes, and you don't have to go too fast.
36:52 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
36:53 Speaker 01 You can be slow and enjoy the moment.
36:55 Lex Fridman? Until you get lost in this five and a half hours. Did you panic like if you're gonna be able to find the shore, find your way out?
37:01 Speaker 01 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.
37:32 Speaker 01 Because at the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our heart can push through blood to our brain. So how can you make this go faster? Or how do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you make your heart more efficient in doing that? Physical activity is the only way I know of. So it's not just staying healthy or trying to look good. It's also being productive. It's also being stress resilient.
38:16 Speaker 01 All of these qualities are necessary if you want to run a large company, if you want to start a company.
38:24 Speaker 01 I'm surprised when I started doing this more than 10 years ago, that more CEOs didn't engage in sports. The situation changed in the last several years, which is great. Because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago, there was this stereotype that if you're strong, you must be not very smart and vice versa. Which is a complete lunacy. Very often, these two things go together.
38:56 Lex Fridman? 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.
39:05 Speaker 01 Oh, yes. When I can't train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping on me.
39:17 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
39:19 Speaker 01 So even in situations when I'm constrained, I can't go to gym. I would just keep doing pushups. I keep, I just keep doing squats.
39:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah. I mean, that's the cool thing about body weight exercise. You could just do it anywhere.
39:35 Lex Fridman? You could just pop off fifty, a hundred pushups before a meeting.
39:38 Speaker 01 I don't, don't you feel weird when you have a day without physical activity?
39:43 Lex Fridman? Yeah. If I go a day without doing pushups at the very minimum, that's a shitty day.
39:49 Speaker 01 And if you can do pullups, it's even better.
39:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah. I gotta ask you about your diet, too. No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda. Intermittent fasting, sometimes once a day, only sometimes a couple of times a day. So take me to your philosophy on the no sugar, no, no soda, just clean food.
40:09 Speaker 01 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,
40:23 Speaker 01 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 eighteen 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.
40:59 Speaker 01 I read a few books on longevity. I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is harmful. No, I'm not militant about sugar. Like, you can eat berries, fruit, if you feel your body needs it. But it's not true to think it's necessary to consume sweet things. Not for children, not for adults. Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20 years ago because I just felt heavy every time I had it. So I guess it's individual.
41:38 Speaker 01 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.
41:58 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and like all things, you said, short-term pleasure isn't worth your future. So a lot of things we all know, that alcohol is destructive to the body, tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar. But society puts that on you, makes it very difficult to avoid. So I guess it all boils down to discipline.
42:18 Speaker 01 Yes, and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you're experiencing. If you're experiencing a headache, one solution would be to take a pill, and then the headache disappears. What this pill would actually do in most cases, it would mute the consequence, your feeling of pain. It's a painkiller. It will not eliminate the root cause. So you have to ask yourself, what is it that is causing this headache? Do I need to drink some water? Is the air quality here bad? Do I need to start getting more sleep?
43:04 Speaker 01 Is there something wrong with people around me? They're stressing me out. There must be some reason why you're experiencing a headache. But if you take a pill, you're not removing this reason. You're actually making it worse. Because this harmful factor is still there. It's like you're piloting a helicopter. And there is some red signals, some 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?
43:50 Speaker 01 I think the good answer is quite obvious. So why are we constantly doing this regardless? Oh, because everybody else is doing it? Because there's a whole industry trying to persuade you that this is the right thing to do? So it's incredibly important to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.
44:10 Lex Fridman? So you generally try to avoid all pills? All pharmaceutical products?
44:15 Speaker 01 Yes, I've been staying away from all of that since I became an adult. When you're a teenager, your mom would typically say, we need to take this pill, otherwise, you know, the world collapses.
44:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
44:30 Speaker 01 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. Um, so that I could buy them forever. And then I also realized, no, I'm not saying that you should never take pills. There are obviously some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example.
45:12 Speaker 01 So I'm not suggesting we go back to the Middle Ages. But what I'm saying is we overuse pills.
45:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's always good to study and deeply understand the incentives under which the world operates. So that you don't get swept up into the forces that operate under these incentives. And Big Pharma is certainly one of them. Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive to keep the problem going versus solving the problem. It's wise.
45:40 Speaker 01 Oh, this is something I practice every day. I read some piece of news and I ask myself,
45:49 Speaker 01 who benefits from me reading this? Then you can end up coming to this conclusion that maybe ninety-five percent 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, at least do something that would benefit other people. And this is not a problem to support causes that you truly believe in,
46:27 Speaker 01 as long as it was your intentional choice and you're not being manipulated into fighting other people's wars.
46:36 Lex Fridman? And that takes us back to the original thing we started talking about, which is freedom. One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That's really important to realize. The content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind, you have to disconnect yourself. Be very proactive, understanding what the biases, what the incentives are. So you can think clearly, independently and objectively. And again, it ties back with.
47:16 Speaker 01 Restraint from alcohol. Because if your mind is clouded, how can you analyze yourself? You'll always be dependent on opinions of others. You will always follow the mainstream. And then whatever the authorities or whoever in charge will tell you, you'll believe it because you don't have a tool of your own to rely on to come to your own conclusions.
47:49 Lex Fridman? I have to ask you, this is something that came up. You don't watch porn. I don't think I've heard you talk about this before. What's the philosophy behind not watching porn? You know, there's a lot of people that talk about porn in general having a very negative effect on young men, on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality and how they get into relationships and all that kind of stuff. So what's your philosophy in not consuming porn?
48:17 Speaker 01 I don't watch porn because I just feel it's a surrogate, a substitute for a real thing that
48:27 Speaker 01 is not necessary in my life. If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy, some inspiration to a fleeting moment of pleasure. It doesn't make sense. And in any case, as I said, it's not the real thing. So as long as you can access the real thing, you don't need to watch porn. But then if you can't access the real thing, it's you shouldn't watch porn as well because it means there is some deficiency in your life, some problem that you have to overcome.
49:07 Lex Fridman? Yeah, analyze the underlying cause.
49:12 Lex Fridman? And again, this goes back to the theme of investing in a long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure. There's a theme to the way you approach life.
49:24 Speaker 01 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? Doesn't make any sense.
49:45 Lex Fridman? Quick pause, bathroom break.
49:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's take a break.
49:48 Lex Fridman? All right, we took a break and now we're back. I gotta ask you about Telegram, the company. I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers that work there. Telegram runs lean relative to other technology companies that achieve the scale that Telegram does. It has very few employees. So how many people are on the core team? Let's say the core engineering team.
50:10 Speaker 01 The core engineering team is about 40 people. This includes backend, frontend, designers, system administrators.
50:24 Lex Fridman? Can you speak to the philosophy behind running a company with so few employees?
50:32 Speaker 01 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.
50:46 Speaker 01 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.
51:03 Speaker 01 The other problem with having too many employees is that
51:09 Speaker 01 some of them won't get enough work to do. And if they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence. They're still there, they're still getting the salary, but they don't do anything. And if they don't do anything, more often than not, they will start trying to
51:30 Speaker 01 find their purpose elsewhere. Maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work,
51:39 Speaker 01 but by finding problems that don't exist within the team and that can disrupt the team and
51:49 Speaker 01 the mood inside it even further.
51:54 Speaker 01 Also, when you intentionally don't allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them, they will be forced to automate things. In our case, you know, we have tens of thousands of servers around the world, almost a hundred thousand, distributed across several continents and data centers. If you try to manage this system
52:28 Speaker 01 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.
52:53 Lex Fridman? 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.
53:16 Speaker 01 Yes, humans are attack vectors.
53:20 Speaker 01 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,
53:36 Speaker 01 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.
53:47 Lex Fridman? 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 the cloud. The decryption keys are split and kept in different locations so that no single government or entity can access the data. Can you explain the strength of this approach?
54:17 Speaker 01 The way we designed Telegram is
54:22 Speaker 01 we never wanted to have any humans, any employees have any access to private messaging data.
54:33 Speaker 01 That's why since 2012, when we've been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it. Like if you hire an employee or any of the existing employee, he can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users. And then, of course, we launched an encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations. So you still have to rely on encrypted cloud. So an interesting engineering challenge was
55:14 Speaker 01 how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.
55:20 Lex Fridman? So no employee can even access user messages. So that's the thing, you know, we're talking about encryption. We're talking about privacy. We're talking 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.
55:37 Lex Fridman? So Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users. So you're saying employees never can access the private messages.
55:52 Lex Fridman? Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?
56:00 Speaker 01 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 indecipherable.
56:30 Speaker 01 That was very important for us. That's why we can say with confidence there hasn't been ever
56:41 Speaker 01 a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram, not in terms of private messages, not in terms of, say, contact lists.
56:50 Lex Fridman? Uh, do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies?
57:01 Speaker 01 No. We designed a system in a way that's impossible. It would require us to change the system and we won't do that because we made a promise to our users. We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.
57:18 Lex Fridman? So that's like one of the principles you operate under is you're going to protect user privacy.
57:25 Speaker 01 I think it's fundamental. Without the right to privacy, people can't feel fully free and protected.
57:33 Lex Fridman? I mean, this is a good, good place to, to ask. I'm sure you're pressured by all kinds of people, all kinds of organizations to share private data. What, uh, where do you find the strength and the fearlessness to say no to everybody, including powerful intelligence agencies, including powerful governments, influential, powerful people?
57:55 Speaker 01 I guess part of it is just me being me. I stood up.
58:03 Speaker 01 For myself and for my values since I was a little kid.
58:07 Speaker 01 I was had issues with my teachers because I would point out their mistakes during classes. And at the end of the day, what's important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose. Like, they can think they blackmail you with something, they can threaten you with something, but what is it they really can can really do to you? Like, worst case, they can kill you. But that brings us back to the first part of our discussion.
58:38 Speaker 01 There is no point living your life in fear.
58:43 Speaker 01 As for Telegram, it's incredibly successful. But if we lose one market or two markets, or pretty much all of the markets, I don't care that much. It won't affect me, it won't affect my lifestyle in any way. I will still be doing my pushups, you know?
59:02 Speaker 01 So you you don't like encryption, you don't like privacy, you think you should ban encryption in your country? Like the European Union is trying to do now for all the member states? Well, go ahead and do that. We'll just quit this market. We want to operate there. It's not that important. They all think that somehow we profit from their citizens. And the only goal tech companies have is extracting revenues. And it's true, most tech companies are like this. But there are projects like Telegram, which are a bit different.
59:42 Speaker 01 And I'm not sure they realize that.
59:45 Lex Fridman? So for you, the value of maintaining your integrity in relation to your principles is more important than than anything else. And of course, we should say that you also have full ability and control to do just that because you, Pavel Durov, own one hundred percent of Telegram. So there's no other, anybody with a say on this question?
1:00:09 Speaker 01 There are no shareholders, which is quite unique.
1:00:13 Lex Fridman? Very unique. I don't think there's anything even close to that in any major tech company.
1:00:18 Speaker 01 And this allows us to operate the way we operate.
1:00:22 Speaker 01 To build this project and maintain it based on certain fundamental principles, which, by the way, I think everybody believes in. I think the right to privacy is included in the constitution of most countries, at least most Western countries. But it's still under attack almost every week. And it often starts with well-meaning proposals. Oh, we have to fight crime. We have to do that. We have to protect the children. But at the end of the day, the result is the same. People lose their right to such fundamental thing as privacy.
1:01:04 Speaker 01 They sometimes lose their right to express themselves, to assemble. And this is a slippery slope that we witnessed in pretty much every autocratic country. Or country that used to be free and then became autocratic. No dictator in the world ever said, "Let's just strip you away from your rights because I want more power to myself and I want you to be miserable." They all justified it with very reasonable sounding justifications. And then it came in stages gradually. And after a few years, people would find themselves in a position when they're helpless. They can't protest.
1:01:50 Speaker 01 Every message they sent is monitored.
1:01:55 Speaker 01 They can't assemble.
1:01:59 Speaker 01 It's over.
1:02:00 Lex Fridman? So you see Telegram as a place that people from all walks of life, from every nation, can have a place to speak their mind, to have a voice. In the context, in the geopolitical context, you're mentioning that governments, when they become autocratic naturally, it's the way of the world, human nature and the nature of governments, they become more censorious. They begin to censor and always justifying it in their minds, perhaps assuming that they're doing good.
1:02:30 Speaker 01 Perhaps some of them assume they are doing good. But interestingly,
1:02:37 Speaker 01 it always results in the state accumulating more power at the expense of the individual.
1:02:46 Speaker 01 And then where does it stop?
1:02:49 Speaker 01 You know, we humans are not very good at finding the right balance. And in this case, the right balance between chaos and order,
1:02:59 Speaker 01 between freedom and structure.
1:03:02 Speaker 01 We tend to go to extremes.
1:03:05 Lex Fridman? I think you still consider yourself a libertarian.
1:03:09 Lex Fridman? There is something about government that always, over time, naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy. And in that machine of bureaucracy, it accumulates more and more power. And it's not always that some one individual member of that bureaucracy is the one that corrupts the initial principles on which the government was founded. But just something over time, you forget. You begin to censor.
1:03:39 Lex Fridman? 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.
1:03:51 Speaker 01 And the government is not some abstract notion. The government consists of people. And these people have goals. They would naturally be inclined to increase their level of influence, to have more subordinates, to have more resources. And that's how you end up in an endless loop of
1:04:16 Speaker 01 ever increasing taxes, ever increasing regulation,
1:04:21 Speaker 01 which ultimately just suffocates free market, free enterprise and free speech. So you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens. Ironically, you don't have those limitations. You're supposed in all countries of which are considered to be free.
1:04:51 Speaker 01 It's supposed to be the constitution that protects everybody.
1:04:56 Speaker 01 But interestingly, it doesn't work always this way. They are able to find very tricky phrasings in order to cover out exceptions. And then the exception becomes the rule.
1:05:11 Lex Fridman? On this topic, I'd love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in August of last year in France. I think I should say that it's one of the worst overreaches of power I've seen as applied to a tech leader in recent history, in all history. So it's tragic, but I think speaks to the thing that we've been talking about. So maybe can you tell the full saga, what happened? You arrive in France.
1:05:46 Speaker 01 I arrived in France last year in August, just for a short two day trip.
1:05:53 Speaker 01 And then I see a dozen of armed policemen greeting me and ask me to follow them.
1:06:03 Speaker 01 They read me a list of something like fifteen serious crimes that I'm accused of,
1:06:14 Speaker 01 which was mind boggling.
1:06:17 Speaker 01 At first I thought there must be some mistake.
1:06:22 Speaker 01 Then I realized they're being serious. And they're accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed with some users.
1:06:35 Speaker 01 And they think I should be responsible for this.
1:06:40 Speaker 01 Which again, like you said, it's nothing, it's something that never happened in the history of this planet. No country, not even an authoritarian one.
1:06:53 Speaker 01 Did that to any tech leader, at least at this scale. There are good reasons for that, because you're sacrificing a big part of your economic growth by sending these kind of messages to the business and tech community.
1:07:12 Speaker 01 So they put me in a police car and I found myself in police custody.
1:07:23 Speaker 01 A small room, no windows.
1:07:29 Speaker 01 Just a narrow bed made of concrete. I spent four days, almost four days there. In the process, I had to answer some questions of the policemen. They were interested in how Telegram operates.
1:07:53 Speaker 01 Most of it is public anyway, and I was struck by very limited understanding, or should I say even lack of understanding, on behalf of the people who initiated this investigation against me about how technology works, how encryption works, how social media work.
1:08:19 Lex Fridman? I mean, there's something darkly poetic about a tech founder of a platform where a billion people are communicating with each other and you're on concrete, no pillow, for days, no windows. It's like a, I mean, it reminds me, I'm a huge fan of Franz Kafka and he's written about the absurdity of these kinds of situations, hence the Kafkaesque stories. There's a story literally about the situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted, called "The Trial". Where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial system for a long time, that nobody, fascinatingly in that story, neither the person arrested nor
1:09:01 Lex Fridman? the 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 forms. It breaks the spirit, the human spirit laden in all of us. That's the negative side of bureaucracy.
1:09:27 Speaker 01 I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing. Because if this was a good faith attempt to fix an issue, there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally, voice their concerns and solve any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic, the way every other country on this planet solves these problems, including with Telegram, and we did it dozens of times.
1:10:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you have a nice page showing, this is kind of 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 blocked, actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram. So, and a lot of this work, like you said, because of the automation is done with machine learning. Just the scale is insane. This is stuff that most like noobs like me who are just chatting it up on Telegram
1:10:47 Lex Fridman? don't think about, but there's just like an immense number of.
1:10:53 Lex Fridman? People essentially doing things that violate the law on there and you have to find them immediately and catch it. I guess all platforms have to deal with it and Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that kind of content. And what you're saying is the French government had no idea.
1:11:13 Lex Fridman? Do they even know what machine learning is?
1:11:15 Speaker 01 It's a concept that is challenging to explain to them, but I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this investigation. That's my hope. In any case, you're right. I mean, if you look at Telegram, we've been fighting harmful content that is publicly distributed on our platform since 10 years ago. Actually, since the time we launched public channels on Telegram. And since something like eight years ago, we had daily transparency reports
1:11:53 Speaker 01 on how many channels related to child abuse or terrorist propaganda we've taken down daily. Every day we've taken, maybe
1:12:07 Speaker 01 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. And then somebody would read the newspaper, get enraged because they would read something about child porn, and this is a subject that is very emotionally charged, and start doing
1:12:44 Speaker 01 something not based on data.
1:12:48 Speaker 01 And logical thinking and laws, but based on emotions driven from inaccurate input.
1:12:57 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I think we should make pretty clear that there's no world, no reason that the French government should have arrested you. But here we are, that's the situation you're in. So to be clear, you have to show up in front of a judge. All of this is beautifully absurd. It would be hilarious if it wasn't extremely serious. You have to show up in front of a judge every certain amount of time. And what is that experience like?
1:13:23 Speaker 01 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.
1:13:36 Speaker 01 And in France, it's not just the police or prosecutor asking me questions, it's a judge.
1:13:43 Speaker 01 Which in my experience is more like still a prosecutor, but it's called a judge. And that makes it harder to appeal. So if you're limited in, say, countries where you can travel, then to appeal that restriction will take you a lot of time. The investigation itself should have never been started. It's an absurd and harmful
1:14:13 Speaker 01 way of solving an issue such as complicated as regulating social media. It's just the wrong tool.
1:14:26 Speaker 01 So we
1:14:29 Speaker 01 objected and appealed the investigation itself. We did last year, I believe.
1:14:36 Speaker 01 We are still not even given
1:14:39 Speaker 01 a hearing date for the appeal.
1:14:43 Speaker 01 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.
1:15:09 Speaker 01 Where businesses got paralyzed
1:15:15 Speaker 01 by very unnecessary actions of investigative judges that ended up being unjustified and biased. And in the end, you can perhaps solve it when you reach a higher court
1:15:33 Speaker 01 and you'll get justice. But you lose a lot of time and energy in the process. So this is the only thing that is, I hope, different and will be different in this case compared to the story you told from Kafka.
1:15:52 Lex Fridman? I mean, but it does, as Kafka describes, break a lot of people with time. So when do you hope? We should say that you were for a long time not allowed to travel out of France. Now you can travel to Dubai. We're now in Dubai. Got to meet many of the people that work at Telegram. Telegram is headquartered in Dubai, but you're not allowed to travel anywhere else. When do you think you're coming to Texas?
1:16:21 Lex Fridman? To hang out with me over there?
1:16:23 Speaker 01 That's a hard question to answer because it doesn't depend on just my actions.
1:16:30 Speaker 01 I can just say this. I am patient.
1:16:36 Speaker 01 I will not let this limitation on my
1:16:43 Speaker 01 freedom dictate my actions.
1:16:50 Speaker 01 I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand
1:16:58 Speaker 01 what the absence of freedom feels like, at least during these four days in police custody, when you're
1:17:09 Speaker 01 just stuck, unable to...
1:17:14 Speaker 01 Communicate with people that are important to you.
1:17:20 Speaker 01 When you don't even know what's going on in the world.
1:17:24 Speaker 01 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.
1:17:45 Lex Fridman? If the French government or the French intelligence agency. Want to have a backdoor or a way to access private user messages. Uh, what would you say to them?
1:17:59 Lex Fridman? Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?
1:18:04 Speaker 01 Nothing.
1:18:07 Speaker 01 My response would be very clear.
1:18:12 Speaker 01 But it won't be very polite, so I'm not sure.
1:18:15 Lex Fridman? It's good to say here.
1:18:17 Speaker 01 He's good to say because you're wearing a tie and.
1:18:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah, this is a serious adult gentleman like program. Yeah, but that is a concern that people have is when you have so much pressure from governments. That over time they'll wear you down and you'll give in. And then, of course, other places. Use that as propaganda, try to attack you. You get attacked by basically every, every nation. So um, 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?
1:19:04 Speaker 01 I think the French government is losing this battle. This battle is wrong. The more pressure.
1:19:13 Speaker 01 I get.
1:19:15 Speaker 01 The more. Resilient and defiant I become.
1:19:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:19:22 Speaker 01 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.
1:19:41 Speaker 01 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 do anything. And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure. Because if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates the rights of other people as well, you become broken inside.
1:20:24 Speaker 01 You become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level. So I wouldn't do that. There are probably other people in the world that would consider that. But I don't care. Telegram disappears to something people don't understand, including in these intelligence services or governments. I don't care. I'll be fine. If they put me into prison for 20 years, which, let's be clear, it's not something that I think is realistic.
1:21:04 Speaker 01 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.
1:21:23 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you about an example of the thing you're talking about. Tell the saga of Telegram and 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?
1:21:38 Speaker 01 So when I got stuck in France, unable to leave the country for a few months.
1:21:46 Speaker 01 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."
1:22:08 Speaker 01 I took the meeting, and in this meeting,
1:22:13 Speaker 01 I was asked to restrict what I see as restriction of freedom of speech in Romania.
1:22:24 Speaker 01 I don't know if you followed the whole saga with the Romanian elections. They had a presidential elections last year. The results got cancelled. Now Romania, at that point, when I had this meeting, was preparing for a new presidential elections. The Conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was supportive of. So they asked me whether I would be shutting down or ready to shut down channels on Telegram that supported the Conservative candidate
1:23:03 Speaker 01 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,
1:23:26 Speaker 01 we can't do this. It would be political censorship."
1:23:31 Speaker 01 We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world, including in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East. We're not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe,
1:23:45 Speaker 01 no matter who is asking us. And I was very clear to the guy, who was the head of French intelligence. I said, "If you think that because I'm stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you're very wrong.
1:24:01 Speaker 01 I would rather do the opposite every time."
1:24:06 Speaker 01 And in a way, that's what I did. I, um...
1:24:13 Speaker 01 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.
1:24:34 Speaker 01 And that's quite shocking to me. That you would have people in the French government
1:24:44 Speaker 01 trying to get advantage of this situation. Of course, if, you know, they had nothing to do with the story of this investigation itself.
1:24:57 Speaker 01 And use it to reach their political or geopolitical goals.
1:25:06 Speaker 01 I consider it an attempt to humiliate myself personally and
1:25:13 Speaker 01 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.
1:25:34 Speaker 01 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 are going to be some interference with these elections.
1:25:52 Speaker 01 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
1:26:21 Speaker 01 in violation indeed of our rules, and we took them down, only a few of them.
1:26:28 Speaker 01 The rest were okay.
1:26:31 Speaker 01 Then they said, "Thank you," and sent us another list of dozens of channels, many, many channels.
1:26:38 Speaker 01 We looked at these channels, we realized that there is no solid foundation
1:26:44 Speaker 01 to justify banning them.
1:26:47 Speaker 01 And we refused to do that.
1:26:50 Speaker 01 But interestingly enough,
1:26:53 Speaker 01 the
1:26:55 Speaker 01 French intelligence services that
1:27:00 Speaker 01 were asking us
1:27:03 Speaker 01 to
1:27:05 Speaker 01 do this in Moldova,
1:27:09 Speaker 01 let me know
1:27:12 Speaker 01 through their contact that
1:27:16 Speaker 01 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,
1:27:34 Speaker 01 and told the judge good things about me, which I found very confusing
1:27:42 Speaker 01 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?
1:28:08 Speaker 01 What does Moldova have to do with it?
1:28:12 Speaker 01 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.
1:28:38 Speaker 01 Not extreme views, not views that call to violence.
1:28:45 Speaker 01 That wasn't extremely alarming. That was a moment when I told myself that there may be more going on here than I initially thought. Initially, I thought, yeah, some people are confused about how technology works. And here, after this case in Moldova, I got much more suspicious. So by the time that head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania, to help them silencing conservative voices in Romania,
1:29:30 Speaker 01 I was already wary of what can be going on next.
1:29:40 Lex Fridman? 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 remaining election that the French government wanted to censor because currently the French government leans left.
1:30:25 Lex Fridman? But if you flip everything around and the government will be right-wing, you'd be fighting for against censorship of left-wing voices. And you have in the past many times.
1:30:35 Speaker 01 Exactly. Ironically, we received the request from the French police to take down a channel of far-left protesters on Telegram in France. We refused to do that. We looked at the channel, peaceful protesters.
1:30:55 Speaker 01 It doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom of speech of people leaning right or leaning left. During Covid, we were protecting activists that were organizing the Black Lives Matter events. And the other side, the protesters against lockdowns. We protect everybody as long as they are not crossing the lines and not starting to
1:31:34 Speaker 01 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.
1:32:17 Lex Fridman? 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 Pablo 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
1:33:02 Lex Fridman? politically motivated, all that kind of stuff, all the excessive regulation and the bureaucracy. A nightmare for entrepreneurs, a 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.
1:33:37 Lex Fridman? What can be fixed? What should be fixed?
1:33:42 Speaker 01 I think the European society must decide
1:33:48 Speaker 01 where
1:33:50 Speaker 01 they want the ever increasing
1:33:54 Speaker 01 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
1:34:12 Speaker 01 public expenses are fifty eight percent of the country's GDP. It's
1:34:20 Speaker 01 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 startup field and my field, social media field, has been affected by it immensely. There was one great startup in this realm in France in the last ten years.
1:35:05 Speaker 01 It was a location-based social network. It was eventually sold to Snapchat, but before it was sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell. I told him, never sell. You have a great thing going. You have lots of users, you have organic traction in many countries. And the first of this kind of success story in France.
1:35:31 Speaker 01 But then he sold anyway in a couple of weeks. And later I met him, he's trying to do a new thing now. I met him and I asked him, I was trying to understand what went wrong. And one of the things he told me about is that while he was trying to run his company, you know, competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris.
1:36:04 Speaker 01 And he did a great job, by the way, but while he was trying to do that, he got also attacked by
1:36:12 Speaker 01 some silly investigation again involving the data protection issues,
1:36:21 Speaker 01 which lasted forever and was gradually sucking blood of his team and his company. Constant interrogations, disclosure requests. And you know, this is a young company.
1:36:39 Speaker 01 It significantly increases the level of stress. And at some point, I think the pressure was too much. He decided to, I'm gonna just sell it.
1:36:52 Speaker 01 Eventually it turned out that
1:36:56 Speaker 01 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
1:37:09 Speaker 01 the society realizes the cost of projects, of companies, of startups that are never created or are sold to the United States at the very early stage or other countries.
1:37:24 Speaker 01 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 these eight years, the government reached to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong. He's good. It's okay.
1:38:08 Speaker 01 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.
1:38:37 Lex Fridman? And by the way, you know, having interacted with him, there's like a fire in his eyes, the human spirit that fuels entrepreneurship, whatever that is, he doesn't have to do. He's made a lot of money. Probably doesn't have to do anything, but he still wants to create. And that fire is what fuels great nations. Build, build, build, build new stuff, expand, all of that, and regulation suffocates that.
1:39:02 Speaker 01 You have to cherish these people.
1:39:03 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:39:04 Speaker 01 But I guess the French public or some part of the French public was misled. And I don't know when, maybe perhaps since the time of the French Revolution, to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies, the evil rich people, that are the cause of all problems, as if only you could make the rich share their ill-gotten wealth.
1:39:34 Speaker 01 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 they're working twenty hours a day, they're experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill their vision and bring value and good to the society around them. They create jobs, they create great services, they create great goods, they make your country grow, they make your people proud. You have to cherish them.
1:40:13 Speaker 01 But what does the system do to them? It squeezes them out. Because perhaps there was somebody in the tax
1:40:27 Speaker 01 authority that decided to advance their career and perhaps, you know, was too ambitious and not too smart. So as a result, the company was destroyed.
1:40:39 Speaker 01 And now the same entrepreneur, by the way, who we talked to, is invited to come back to France. He's been offered really good terms. He said, you're gonna open this new venue on Champs-Élysées, we're gonna give you the best location, we're gonna fund part of it.
1:40:56 Speaker 01 Tax breaks, and he said, never, just forget about this. It's impossible. I'm not coming back to France. He's traumatized by the experience, and he's French. He was born there. He has a French passport. So unless things like this change, France will and the rest of Europe will keep struggling with economic growth, with budget deficits, with unemployment, and all the other relevant social and economic metrics.
1:41:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's heartbreaking. Me, as many of these nations, I appreciate the historical and the cultural value, and I hope Europe and France flourish, but this is not the components that are required for flourishing.
1:41:44 Lex Fridman? Quick pause, I need a bathroom break. All right, we had some tea. We're back. Let's go back a bunch of years to the beginning. You mentioned you went to school with 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?
1:42:10 Speaker 01 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
1:42:30 Speaker 01 squeeze as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager,
1:42:38 Speaker 01 making a focus on maths and foreign languages,
1:42:44 Speaker 01 then there'll 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.
1:43:24 Speaker 01 The difference of this class as opposed to other classes in the same school, which was part of the St. Petersburg State University and called academic gymnasium, was that unlike other classes, which were specialized in some single subject like physics or maths or history, this one tried to get
1:43:48 Speaker 01 the best from all of the specialized classes and bring it to one curriculum.
1:43:56 Speaker 01 Since it was an experimental class, it wasn't possible to become a straight A student, to be excellent in all the subjects. It was considered crazy to even try.
1:44:10 Lex Fridman? 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.
1:44:21 Speaker 01 Yes, see what happens. This was an experiment.
1:44:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:44:24 Speaker 01 And it was in the middle of the nineties. Remember when Russia, particularly its educational system, wasn't regulated as much as it is today. It was
1:44:37 Speaker 01 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.
1:44:54 Speaker 01 First of all, why I got into the schools? Because I kept being kicked out from other schools.
1:45:00 Lex Fridman? Challenging authority?
1:45:01 Speaker 01 I was good at all subjects, but not behavior. You know, we had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union and early nineties.
1:45:12 Speaker 01 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.
1:45:21 Lex Fridman? By the way, that's not such a bad thing, right? Like, if you were looking back, there's some value to that, right? For young people to, maybe respectfully, but challenge the authority, the wisdom of old, right?
1:45:36 Speaker 01 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.
1:46:08 Speaker 01 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.
1:46:20 Speaker 01 But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life. You know, every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis. What's the point of life? What am I even doing here? At some point, I decided, since I have to go to school anyway,
1:46:41 Speaker 01 I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best students and get an A or what we called five in the Russian system
1:46:53 Speaker 01 on every single subject. And that kept me busy for a while.
1:47:01 Speaker 01 It was incredibly difficult because you didn't have enough time.
1:47:10 Speaker 01 Even if you just studied all the time,
1:47:13 Speaker 01 not doing anything else, you didn't have any time left to prepare all the homework tasks and get ready for 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.
1:47:41 Lex Fridman? What did you understand about an effective education system from studying for a language at the same time, doing such a diversity? Like, if you were to design an education system from scratch for young people, especially in the 21st century, what would that look like? You posted about the value of mathematics as a foundation for everything.
1:48:01 Speaker 01 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, try again if it doesn't work. And it's exactly the same skill you need in programming and project management and started when you start your own company.
1:48:35 Speaker 01 And it's one of the few subjects at school which encourages you to...
1:48:43 Speaker 01 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.
1:49:06 Speaker 01 And it's not surprising that most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at math and coding. Because ultimately, it's the same mental
1:49:23 Speaker 01 skill that you rely on.
1:49:27 Speaker 01 But back then in the school, I realized something else as well. It's that
1:49:35 Speaker 01 competition is really important. Competition is key. This is what motivates a lot of teenagers when they're in school.
1:49:48 Speaker 01 And if you remove competition out of the education system, you end up
1:49:55 Speaker 01 forcing kids to start competing elsewhere. For example, in video games.
1:50:02 Speaker 01 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.
1:50:14 Speaker 01 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."
1:50:28 Speaker 01 And part of it is justified, but as a result,
1:50:33 Speaker 01 some kids lose interest.
1:50:37 Speaker 01 Yes, you eliminate the losers, but you end up eliminating the winners as well.
1:50:44 Speaker 01 And then if you're overprotective
1:50:48 Speaker 01 of the kids in that age, they grow up, graduate schools, universities, and they are still not prepared for real life, because real life is constant competition for jobs, for promotions,
1:51:05 Speaker 01 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.
1:51:27 Speaker 01 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're gonna make sure the losers
1:51:42 Speaker 01 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
1:51:58 Speaker 01 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.
1:52:20 Speaker 01 We support competition, understanding that eventually it leads to progress in science and technology and abundance for the society at large. Or we remove competition, thinking that somehow we can shield the future generations from the stress. That competition inevitably causes.
1:52:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, it's grounded in a good instinct of compassion. You don't want people who are who suck at a thing to feel pain. But it seems like struggle is a part of life. Either you do it early or you do it later. And it's true, that's such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development. Like you mentioned, pursuing mastery. There's something in human nature that, especially for 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 as many nations like you mentioned do, then you're going to develop a lot of brilliant people, resilient people, people that are ready to create epic shit in the world.
1:53:30 Speaker 01 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.
1:53:52 Lex Fridman? 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?
1:54:24 Speaker 01 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.
1:54:35 Speaker 01 We slept in the same bedroom, like beds few feet away from each other. And um I kept bugging him with questions. I'd ask him about dinosaurs and galaxies and black holes and Neanderthals.
1:54:55 Speaker 01 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?
1:55:39 Speaker 01 It's obvious the kid can't understand everything there. It's too complicated. Even we don't understand anything there, there's some formulas.
1:55:49 Speaker 01 And he was already sucking in this knowledge. He's just has this thirst for information.
1:56:01 Speaker 01 So he was the source of all kind of great facts, useful things, inspiring things.
1:56:12 Speaker 01 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 genuinely intelligent lack.
1:56:33 Speaker 01 More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they're also kind and compassionate.
1:56:40 Lex Fridman? And he is that.
1:56:42 Speaker 01 Definitely.
1:56:43 Lex Fridman? You actually have been staying out of the public eye for the most part. You've done very few interviews. You're pretty low key, but your brother is on another level. He's been staying out of the public eye. What's behind that?
1:56:56 Speaker 01 Part of it is his natural modesty. He doesn't need to do it.
1:57:04 Speaker 01 He doesn't feel this urge to show off, brag about stuff.
1:57:11 Speaker 01 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
1:57:27 Speaker 01 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,
1:57:40 Speaker 01 which can result in
1:57:43 Speaker 01 strange situations, some of which we discussed earlier.
1:57:51 Speaker 01 For example, this French investigation.
1:57:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I've gotten to know you more and more and there's a 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. So we should say that also, you didn't mention, but you're a programmer. From an early age, you started coding at 10. First things you built 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?
1:58:40 Lex Fridman? What was the VK stack? Was it PHP mostly? How did you figure out how to program websites? All of that.
1:58:49 Speaker 01 I wasn't 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.
1:59:09 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:59:11 Speaker 01 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.
1:59:55 Speaker 01 So I started to build computer games.
1:59:59 Speaker 01 My brother would sometimes guide me. For example, I would create a turn-based strategy.
2:00:07 Speaker 01 Of course, two-dimensional, backline, three-dimensional was too much for me. But it wasn't as sleek in terms of the scrolling FPS, frames per second
2:00:24 Speaker 01 parameter. And I asked my brother how to optimize it. He would guide me and this kind of
2:00:33 Speaker 01 learning and
2:00:36 Speaker 01 training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger. Then I started to create video games for my classmates. When we played, for example, tic-tac-toe on an infinite field in my class during the breaks. You know, not tic-tac-toe, the three in a row. This was about five in a row and an infinite field. This is a much more interesting game. And it gets quite complicated if you keep playing it. My classmates used to love it. And some of my classmates were really smart, you know, champions of math olympians, sons and daughters of professors at the university. And I decided, no, I want to win every single time.
2:01:22 Speaker 01 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.
2:01:36 Speaker 01 And the computer would calculate, I think, four moves in advance
2:01:42 Speaker 01 to choose the optimal strategy.
2:01:46 Speaker 01 That wasn't enough. Four moves in advance, I would still win over it. If I tried to calculate five or six, it was too slow. So I asked my brother to help me out here. So he make this algorithm. Eventually, I
2:02:03 Speaker 01 trained myself to win every single time, even with the computer back then. We didn't have, uh, modern CPUs. And, um, I could still retain some self-confidence. Would go back to school during breaks, play with my classmates. And soon, people started to lose interest. None of my classmates wanted to play this game anymore. I killed the game.
2:02:30 Speaker 01 Yeah. So after that, when I got into the CNPyridurk State University,
2:02:41 Speaker 01 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.
2:02:53 Speaker 01 I organized the creation of digital
2:02:58 Speaker 01 answers to all exams and digitalized version of all lectures, which was something very unique back then. Remember, it was twenty-five years ago.
2:03:11 Speaker 01 I would put together a website
2:03:15 Speaker 01 where I would, uh, publish all these materials. And pretty soon it became super popular. I opened a discussion forum there. In a few years, I expanded to the university uh, with all of its other departments and then to other universities. We ended up having
2:03:38 Speaker 01 Tens of thousands of users, just as a students 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 success as a newspaper, the main business newspaper in Pittsburgh. And he asked me, are you trying to build a Russian Facebook? I said, I'm not sure. What's Facebook? So we met.
2:04:23 Speaker 01 Since he graduated an American university two years before that, he showed me Facebook. I thought, well, I can already have all 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, have more success, you have to get rid of things, including technology. Getting rid of features is super important.
2:05:01 Lex Fridman? Simplify, both for scaling and for making it amenable to just grow in the user base where people get it immediately.
2:05:11 Speaker 01 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.
2:05:31 Speaker 01 And get disoriented. If you're 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.
2:06:11 Speaker 01 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.
2:06:28 Speaker 01 But then, how do you start something that large? Like, I didn't have any prior experience of creating a project of that scale, which would involve everything.
2:06:41 Speaker 01 Before, I would reuse some existing solutions. Here, I wanted to build from scratch, so I called my brother. He was a postdoc student in Germany at that time, in the Max Planck University. And I asked him, "What should I start from?"
2:07:03 Speaker 01 And he told me, "Just build a module to authorize users." Just not just to log in, you know? Yeah. Not even to sign up, just to log in.
2:07:19 Speaker 01 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're in and it tells you hello using your name, then you will...
2:07:40 Speaker 01 Have a clear understanding where to go from there.
2:07:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, that's true.
2:07:46 Speaker 01 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 guestbook we used to call the 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.
2:08:30 Speaker 01 She did a great job trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing emails to universities saying, which departments you have exactly at this point? We'd, we need to know or reaching out to the Department of Education, both in Russia and then in Ukraine and then eventually in Belarus and in Kazakhstan and other countries where VK ended up to be the largest and most popular social network. So we did a few things that were
2:09:04 Speaker 01 quite unique at the time. And for the first
2:09:09 Speaker 01 almost a year, I was the single employee of the company. I was the backend engineer, the frontend engineer, the designer. I was the customer support officer. I was the marketing guy as well.
2:09:29 Speaker 01 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
2:09:44 Speaker 01 gave me knowledge of every aspect of a social networking platform.
2:09:51 Lex Fridman? Also understanding of how much a single person can do.
2:09:54 Speaker 01 Exactly. It's one of the reasons why I'd like to think I'm an efficient project manager.
2:10:03 Speaker 01 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 BK in just two weeks. Why would you need three weeks?
2:10:28 Speaker 01 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 you know, 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.
2:10:58 Speaker 01 I think outcompeting everybody else in this industry in terms of what you can do within a short timeframe. So yes, that experience was invaluable.
2:11:14 Speaker 01 As for this tech, I started from PHP and MySQL, Debian Linux.
2:11:22 Speaker 01 But very soon I realized I need to optimize this. I started using mem cached, Apache servers were not enough anymore. We had to set up Engine X and my brother was still living in Germany. So he couldn't help me much for the first year of building BK. Sometimes I would manage to get through to him through a call. I would use an old school phone to call him with wires. I said, what do I do? How do I install this thing called Engine X? I'm not a Linux guy.
2:11:59 Speaker 01 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.
2:12:14 Speaker 01 Having him there though helped.
2:12:18 Speaker 01 When we started to grow fast and started to scale it.
2:12:23 Speaker 01 Because at first. You realize one server is not enough. I need to buy another one.
2:12:31 Speaker 01 Then another one and another one. The database should be in a different server. Then you have to split the database into tables. Then you have to come up with a way to shard the tables. Using some criteria that would make sense that wouldn't break your user experience. When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen of servers. Surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of. The scaling aspect of it became impossible. I remember asking him to come back. He says, you need to help me with this thing. It's starting to be really big.
2:13:13 Speaker 01 What was worse is that. Since we became popular. Somebody started to do DDoS attacks on us. As it always happens.
2:13:23 Lex Fridman? Right.
2:13:25 Speaker 01 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.
2:13:40 Speaker 01 So we had to come up with a way to. Fight it. I remember having.
2:13:48 Speaker 01 Many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.
2:13:52 Lex Fridman? 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.
2:14:09 Lex Fridman? That it's not just about creating cool stuff. It's ha- 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.
2:14:24 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, if we didn't have bad actors and pressure, it would be the best job ever. You just get to create.
2:14:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah. And so, uh, the help from your brother, like you mentioned, NGINX and sharding the tables. Some of the scaling issue is algorithmic in nature. It's almost like theoretical computer science. It's not just about like buying more computers. It's figuring out how to algorithmically make everything work extremely fast. So some of it is mathematics. Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.
2:15:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, so at that stage I could do the basic stuff. I could understand how I implement scalability into the code base, how I short my tables in the database, where I included mem cached 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?
2:15:49 Speaker 01 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
2:16:11 Speaker 01 a friend of his to help him, another absolute champion in world's programming contest
2:16:21 Speaker 01 twice in a row. And they they put together the first customized data engine, which was far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcache, because it was, first of all, more specialized, more low level.
2:16:41 Lex Fridman? So they rewrote in C, C++?
2:16:43 Speaker 01 A large chunk of it, like, 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.
2:17:02 Speaker 01 At some point, we realized there are very few websites online that load faster than VK.
2:17:10 Lex Fridman? Nice.
2:17:11 Speaker 01 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 and everybody kept asking me, how come even here in Silicon Valley, VK loads faster than Facebook? Everything seems to
2:17:38 Speaker 01 appear instantly on your website. What's the secret sauce? That was one of the things that made me very curious.
2:17:46 Lex Fridman? 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.
2:17:59 Speaker 01 It's one of the core technological ideas. We prioritize speed. We think that people can notice the difference, even if it's just like 50 million millisecond difference. The difference is subconscious. It also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive.
2:18:23 Speaker 01 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.
2:18:48 Speaker 01 I would only hire a person if I'm ultimately certain it's the best option. If you hire somebody who is maybe a little bit distracted, inexperienced, 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,
2:19:18 Speaker 01 Telegram is used by over a billion people. They open it dozens of times every day. Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say half a second delay, multiplied by dozens of times by a billion. It's centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason
2:19:44 Speaker 01 other than just being sloppy.
2:19:46 Lex Fridman? 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. Like the code doesn't scream at you saying this could be much faster. So you have to actually, as a craftsman, be very careful when you're writing 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. If they can introduce that inefficiency and all the other developers won't know,
2:20:30 Lex Fridman? they'll just assume it kind of has to be that way. And so. There's a real responsibility for every single individual developer that's building any component of an app like Telegram, to just always ask, okay, can this be done more efficiently? Can this be done more simply? And that's like one of the most beautiful aspects, the art forms of programming, right?
2:20:54 Speaker 01 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 the app and then just they just can't make it. They are not keeping up with the pace of the feature release schedule. And you think I probably have to hire a third one.
2:21:40 Speaker 01 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. And a few weeks, you realize you actually don't need, and you never needed the third engineer. The problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems than he solved. That is so counterintuitive because, you know, in developing tech projects, we tend to think that you just throw more people into something
2:22:23 Speaker 01 and then things get solved miraculously by themselves just because more people means more retention from them. Now.
2:22:34 Lex Fridman? That's again extremely powerful. You know, Steve Jobs talked about A players and B players. And there's something that happens when you have B players, which is kind of like the folks you're talking about, introduced into a team, they can somehow slow everybody down. They demotivate everybody. It's very counterintuitive. They basically is part of the work of creating a great team. Is removing the B players. It's not just hiring more, in generally speaking. It's finding the A players, quote unquote, and removing the people that are slowing things down.
2:23:09 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, because the other thing that people don't realize is how demotivating working with the B player is. Everybody can tell if the other person, the other engineer they're working with is really competent. And if it's very visible, if the person is not comfortable, they're asking the wrong questions. They keep lagging behind. And at a certain point, if you're an A player,
2:23:40 Speaker 01 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. Some cases, it's just, you know, their mental, their intellectual ability is not there. It's not about experience. Most often, it's about natural ability and persistence.
2:24:19 Speaker 01 In ninety percent 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
2:24:35 Speaker 01 to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they're responsible for.
2:24:47 Lex Fridman? What's, uh, on this small tangent, what's your hiring process? So you've, uh, shown, you've talked about how you use competitions often, coding competitions, to hire, to find great engineers. Well, what's your thinking behind that?
2:25:02 Speaker 01 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?
2:25:22 Speaker 01 A coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company as an engineer, or just wants to get some prize money or validation,
2:25:31 Speaker 01 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.
2:26:05 Speaker 01 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 is some consistency there.
2:26:25 Speaker 01 And a lot of these people, they have never worked in a big company before, which is priceless, because in a big company,
2:26:36 Speaker 01 people tend to shift responsibility. They have this shared responsibility wherein nobody fully understands
2:26:47 Speaker 01 who can take credit for a project, who can take blame for a project.
2:26:52 Speaker 01 Inside Telegram, it's pretty clear. And these competitions are
2:27:00 Speaker 01 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 our the profile page of
2:27:17 Speaker 01 The Telegram is 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 these large social media platforms, which I could use to promote these competitions.
2:27:55 Lex Fridman? Right.
2:27:55 Speaker 01 Somehow both VK and Telegram were very popular among engineers and designers, other tech people. I had no issue to find, to promote this contest and find the right people ever. And what can be better than for an employee of your company, of somebody who has been a user of it? If this person has no prior experience of using Telegram, their understanding would be very limited. Why would I even try to hire somebody from LinkedIn who worked at Google and other companies?
2:28:39 Speaker 01 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.
2:29:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but because of that, you're extremely selective and slow in hiring. So like, people really have to earn their spot. And as a result, I got a chance to sit in in one of the team meetings, where people discuss the different features that are being developed, the different ideas, some of which are the very cutting edge. And so you get to see behind the scenes how it's possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation. So you generate the idea, you implement the prototype, and then you eventually, it becomes an actual feature in the product. And so that's why you have this kind of half hilarious.
2:29:40 Lex Fridman? 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 like obvious things. You I've even forgotten for some of them that they even were never part. I mean, I think auto delete timer is a really brilliant idea.
2:30:16 Speaker 01 We implemented it in 2013 in the secret chats. It's funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it, like WhatsApp, seven years after, and then Signal and some other of these apps, they initially even copied the exact timestamps. So for example, if we had like one, three and five seconds, they would also have one, three and five seconds.
2:30:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:30:41 Speaker 01 They tried not to change it because they were not sure what was the magic sauce behind the feature. And ironically, it happens with many of these things. For example, when we designed how you reply to a message and you have a small snippet showing that you're replying to this message. And now you're typing your response. Then there is a small snippet in the message itself that if you tap on it, highlights the original message you're replying to. Seems pretty obvious, but there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time. And we got this vertical line on the left and all these other small things that are completely arbitrary, right? You can do it in a different way.
2:31:26 Speaker 01 But somehow the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution. So 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?
2:31:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but we should say that it's done extremely well. The vertical line and the highlighting. I mean, all of these are tiny little strokes of genius. By highlighting the text in a certain way that from a design perspective, makes it very clear that this part was written before. And the thing under it is your reply. The distinction between the different formatting of the text. I mean, there's a. Listen, I know how much typography is an art form. There's a lot of interacting graphic artistic elements inside Telegram that all have to play together extremely well. Like you pointed out to me, this is the thing that just blew my mind, which is the background gradient of Telegram shifts.
2:32:39 Lex Fridman? It changes and it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles. And then there's like graphic elements on top of the gradient that are all interplay together. So all of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing clarity. Everything's just intuitive. That's very difficult to create. That is art and on top of that, super fast.
2:33:02 Speaker 01 That's the hardest part. Like to make it make it look so that designers love it is one thing. The real challenge is make it look the way the designers love it and make it work on the weakest devices possible. All the cheapest smartphones you can imagine. So 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.
2:33:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah, they they they notice this subconsciously or something like that. There is a pleasant feeling. There's a there is a there's a feeling, there's a pleasant feeling when you're reading a chat. And that's where the 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.
2:34:08 Speaker 01 Or efficient, but not too beautiful, because even doing something so trivial as a gradient can result in noticeable lines in the gradient. The person can instantly say, oh, no, it's not the right thing. So 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. And another question, what kind of objects you want to include in this pattern and how this pattern would work? Will it be
2:34:54 Speaker 01 based on pixels? Or would it be vector based? And you want it to be vector based, so they will be infinitely scalable and high quality. And then I think for the default pattern and the default background, which is based on four colors. It's not a gradient based on two colors, it's four colors. And they're constantly shifting. I probably look through several thousand variations of that.
2:35:23 Speaker 01 Because it's just such an important decision to make. It's the default back. Of course, you can change it. Actually, you can set up your own four colors for that. You can change it.
2:35:31 Lex Fridman? No way, really?
2:35:32 Speaker 01 Yes, you can do it. And you want to rely on certain deeply hardcorely biological properties of the human mind, right? So which color do you want to use? Is it going to be blue? Is it going to be yellow? Is it going to be green? Because each color has a different meaning in our brain. And what kind of objects you want to put there? Something from our childhood, something from nature, or something that can create a different kind of mood. And this is just one detail of the app. So there are many details. When you send a message, you are done typing a message and you then tap send. And then the message gradually appears in the chat. How does it happen?
2:36:18 Speaker 01 So you want the input field.
2:36:22 Speaker 01 To slowly morph into the actual message.
2:36:25 Lex Fridman? To the message, yeah.
2:36:26 Speaker 01 And you want this to be done regardless of the contents of the message. Because sometimes the width would be different, sometimes it would be containing media or a link preview or other stuff that will change the message bubble.
2:36:42 Speaker 01 So you go through countless different scenarios and make sure every one of them works great, even if this message contains 4,000 characters.
2:36:57 Speaker 01 And then you look at all the platforms, iOS, Android and all the old devices of all kinds of outdated operating systems and the hardware. And you cross the tool because you can have this really bad old phone, but using the newest operating system versions of what you do, what kind of bugs you get there.
2:37:26 Speaker 01 And then, of course, since Telegram works on tablets as well, and our iOS version works on an iPad, which I love a lot, you have to understand that everything can be really big, so it can consume a lot of space on your screen. And then it will trigger using more computational resources to render it. So there are a lot of nuances to it. But as long as you obsess over every small detail, at least every detail that really counts, you can get to a user experience. If you're really used to Telegram, if you've been a regular user for at least a few weeks, going back to any other messaging app feels like...
2:38:13 Speaker 01 A serious downgrade.
2:38:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, there's so many really magical moments. Like, for example, the way a message evaporates when you delete it. That is a really pleasant experience.
2:38:27 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, and boy, was it hard to make, particularly on Android. And this is this Thanos snap effect, right? So the message is broken into tens of thousands of particles, which go away like dust in the wind. It looks great, but it was so hard to make.
2:38:49 Lex Fridman? Probably one of my, one of my favorite gooey graphical things. It's just art. It's, it's pure art. It's, it's incredible. So it's good to hear that it's been really fought over and thought through. It's extremely well done.
2:39:07 Speaker 01 No, you can't pull it off if, if, if you're not going deep in this. And then you don't want to distract people from their communication with all this additional animations. So you want them to be invisible in a way.
2:39:28 Lex Fridman? They create the feeling, but they don't create distraction.
2:39:31 Speaker 01 Yes, and in order to do that, you have to overcome even more challenges. For example, you mentioned this deletion effect, message evaporates. If you do the animation, if you show the animation first, and then the message that is preceding the deleted message, that is going after the just deleted message, move closer to each other, then it doesn't feel right. It feels too long, too imposing. So what you want to do is you want the message disappear while the messages around it go closer to each other, to fill the resulting gap.
2:40:15 Speaker 01 And then you imagine what it involves. Redrawing the entire screen. So on top of this very complicated animation, you have to think about things like which kind of messages were there before, after. That just adds to complexity.
2:40:35 Lex Fridman? And once again, on all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems, all kinds of tablets, phones, desktop, all of that.
2:40:43 Speaker 01 But you know, once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense sense of pride. Because nobody is doing this. Nobody really cares. In a way, maybe they're right not to care. Maybe nobody notices this. But there is something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected, because I understand that every day, tens of millions of people around the world deleting messages.
2:41:12 Speaker 01 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?
2:41:28 Speaker 01 Fills them with joy, lightens up their mood even a little bit by zero point zero zero one percent?
2:41:37 Speaker 01 Or is it something that is just basic? And I think if we can
2:41:44 Speaker 01 bring some value in people's lives, even through these subtle details, we have to definitely invest our time in it.
2:41:54 Lex Fridman? And some joy, not just sort of value, like productivity, but joy. I think Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive talked about this. They will put so much love and effort in the design of everything, including things that weren't visible in the initial PC, personal computers, because they believe that you somehow, through osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing. And you're absolutely right. I mean, it's not about deleting messages. Like, I feel a little inkling of joy when I see that evaporation animation. It's just nice.
2:42:34 Lex Fridman? I'm happier because of it. And like, so I feel that effort. And I think, you know, billion users feel that.
2:42:42 Speaker 01 People like when other people care.
2:42:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And of course, there's the more sexy things like all the emojis and the stickers, the gifs. Many of those are just, they're little like art pieces.
2:43:01 Speaker 01 That's again, an intersection of art and technology. Because you look at the stickers which Telgum launched way before most of these other apps.
2:43:10 Lex Fridman? Three years and eight months ahead.
2:43:12 Speaker 01 Ahead of WhatsApp, yes. But the stickers that WhatsApp ended up launching three years and eight months after. And we're not, the first version was not, 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 twenty, thirty kilobytes in size. But it says one hundred eighty frames. We were able to run them at sixty frames per second on all devices. And it's also very challenging, was a challenging thing to do.
2:43:57 Speaker 01 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. But as a result, you have this fluid animations. You have this really nice user experience. Somebody sends you a sticker, you don't have to wait for it to load because it's so lightweight. And it starts moving instantly. And then, of course, it's not just engineering. You have to find designers that are able to create these stickers using vector graphics, which means they're based on curves described by formulas, not just created as photographs with pixels. Where do you find these people?
2:44:40 Speaker 01 Again, we did competitions. But it was not easy to assemble a team of artists, slash artists, artists slash engineers, I would say, that are able to do something like this. This is a unique form of art.
2:44:59 Speaker 01 And this allowed us to do a revolution in stickers. Then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add into messages. Custom animated emoji. I don't think anybody did that. I think Telegram is still the only one allowing users to do that because you can include a hundred of animated emoji in a message. And they will be animated and they will be moving. And your device won't crash. It's probably unnecessary and crazy, but we think somewhere in this intersection of art and engineering, true quality is created. And then, of course, more recently, we expanded into what we call Telegram gifts, which are
2:45:43 Speaker 01 essentially blockchain-based collectibles that you can demonstrate on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance, but you can also use them to congratulate your friends and close the one with their birthdays and other holidays. And that was received extremely well.
2:46:03 Lex Fridman? Yeah, they can hold value, they can increase in value, you could trade them for that in that aspect, but to me still the
2:46:10 Lex Fridman? the the vector graphics, and it's not just simple graphics, it's incredibly intricate graphics. So the vector makes it very efficient, but it also allows you to create, maybe incentivizes the artist, enables them, incentivizes them to create super detailed, intricate elements. And then the final result, like you would think it wouldn't matter, but the final result has like a lot of stuff going on. And it's, and it allows you to scale on arbitrary devices and now it's like this little, you know, like usually gifts from like back in the day and still in meme form are low resolution.
2:46:53 Lex Fridman? And so that descents, usually people don't put details and intricate art into it. But here with vector graphics, it's like, like a million things going on. And it allows you to play with different animations. Like you showed me this thing where you send and you hold for a while on the send button. And so you can share with the person you send a message to this animation that you've encoded. Like, there's a bunch of stuff going on when they read the message.
2:47:20 Speaker 01 As 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.
2:47:31 Lex Fridman? I didn't know about it. That's cool. That's cool.
2:47:34 Speaker 01 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 is just adding a like to a message should be an action that you want to perform again and again and again.
2:48:04 Lex Fridman? So another feature is, uh, on the more serious side, end-to-end encryption. So you led the industry in that. It was launched one year and three months ahead. Can you speak to why you decided to add end-to-end encryption? How you developed the encryption algorithm in the beginning? What was your thinking behind that?
2:48:24 Speaker 01 So at 2013, when we were launching Telegram, we were aware of the serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear. And 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. And we understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust. So that's why we made Telegram open source.
2:49:07 Speaker 01 So all our apps have been open, available on GitHub since 2013. And then we added end-to-end encryption in our secret chats, which
2:49:20 Speaker 01 WhatsApp copied a few years after. One year and three months ahead, they just started to test it. They rolled it out, I think, 2016, which is
2:49:32 Speaker 01 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.
2:49:45 Speaker 01 It was incredibly important back in the day. And at the same time, we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption. So within that
2:49:55 Speaker 01 design, that architecture, you can't support
2:50:02 Speaker 01 very large chat communities with consistent, persistent chat histories. You can't support huge one-to-many channels. You'd have issues with maintaining
2:50:16 Speaker 01 bots that have lots of incoming messages.
2:50:21 Speaker 01 Multiple-device support becomes tricky. People will end up losing some of the documents they share. So we also saw a lot of issues. And we ended up having this sort of hybrid
2:50:38 Speaker 01 experience where depending on your use case and your requirements, you can choose the level of encryption that you want to have.
2:50:49 Lex Fridman? So that's why you chose to go opt-in for end-to-end encryption? So the trade-off there that you're describing is between for people who really care about specific messages, extreme privacy on those messages,
2:51:03 Lex Fridman? and usability, like being able to sync across multiple devices, having groups that are 200,000 people. So all of those. Features that quality of life features. There's a trade off between those and end to end encryption. So you lean towards letting users sort of enable end to end encryption for cases when they want to be super secure.
2:51:26 Speaker 01 Yes, and secret chats are not just end to end encrypted. You know, there are certain limitations that are both their feature and the bug. For example, you can't screenshot them. You can't forward any document, any message from them, which is not necessarily something you need when you're trying to get some work done and you're just communicating with your team on a project. So it became very clear to us that there are different needs here. And if you try to combine both in one type of chat, you will end up losing a lot of utility.
2:52:08 Speaker 01 You know, we are telegram, we don't use any collaboration tool for teamwork. We use telegram to build telegram. So we felt instantly when we were trying to switch to, say, secret chats, to share large documents and try to get work done. It was just not adapted for it. At the same time, if you were really paranoid, you think, you know, I don't want to be screenshotted. I don't want to have any leaks. I don't even trust telegram. I only trust code. Secret chats are the best option.
2:52:52 Speaker 01 I believe it is the most secure means of communication today.
2:52:57 Lex Fridman? And we should say that there's a lot of other aspects to this that are important. For example, Telegram is the only app that has open source reproducible bills for both Android and iOS. Why is this important?
2:53:11 Speaker 01 So you need reproducible bills 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.
2:53:27 Speaker 01 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.
2:53:52 Speaker 01 What's important here, though, is to understand whether the version of the app that you download from the App Store corresponds exactly to the source code that you can view on GitHub. And for that, you need reproducible builds.
2:54:12 Speaker 01 As you said, Telegram is the only popular messaging app that does that. We allow people to make sure, both on Android and the IRS, that the source code of Telegram on GitHub and the app you're actually using is the same app. I think it's incredibly important, not just to gain people's trust, but just to stay transparent and open about it. When I make this claim that Telegram's secret chats are the most secure
2:54:41 Speaker 01 way of communicating, I really mean it, because I haven't seen any fact contradicting this claim. At least among the popular messaging apps, you say WhatsApp,
2:54:55 Speaker 01 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
2:55:25 Speaker 01 by some agency
2:55:29 Speaker 01 in order to create a honeypot.
2:55:34 Speaker 01 At least, from what I know about our competitors,
2:55:40 Speaker 01 I don't think they went through the same process.
2:55:44 Lex Fridman? So we should say that the entirety of the software stack in Telegram is done from scratch internally to Telegram. So we're talking about not just the encryption, but everything running on the servers. So the servers are built out, the hardware and the software are all done internally, which is one of the ways you reduce the attack surface on the entire stack that handles the messages.
2:56:07 Speaker 01 It does make it more secure.
2:56:10 Speaker 01 Because if Snowden's relations taught us anything is that very often,
2:56:19 Speaker 01 open source tools, modules, libraries, that are used by everybody,
2:56:26 Speaker 01 ended up having certain flaws and security issues
2:56:31 Speaker 01 that make your software vulnerable. It's also a way to make sure you're doing things the most efficient way possible.
2:56:43 Speaker 01 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,
2:57:03 Speaker 01 web servers, entire programming languages.
2:57:09 Speaker 01 Because the programming language we use on the backend
2:57:15 Speaker 01 to develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.
2:57:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so removing, minimizing their reliance on open source libraries is extremely difficult. Because most, most companies, they rely on open source libraries.
2:57:31 Speaker 01 Well, I wouldn't say we completely independent from that. We use Linux on the backend. There's no way of avoiding it for us at the moment. But for the most part, we are much more self-reliant.
2:57:46 Speaker 01 Than most other apps.
2:57:48 Lex Fridman? You mentioned Edward Snowden. A long time ago, you wanted to work together with him. Perhaps to share expertise to understand the full realm of this of what it takes to achieve cybersecurity. What do you make of his case? What lessons do you learn from what he has uncovered? And maybe even broadly, what impact has his work had on the world, do you think?
2:58:15 Speaker 01 Well, the main lesson is not everything what it seems.
2:58:20 Speaker 01 And you would discover, and this is something that I found quite shocking at the time, that a lot of people
2:58:30 Speaker 01 who you thought were
2:58:34 Speaker 01 security and cryptography experts ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other, promoting flawed encryption standards.
2:58:47 Speaker 01 You wouldn't end up discovering that
2:58:53 Speaker 01 your government that was supposed to be limited in how it can surveil its people actually doesn't consider itself that limited. And that was very valuable for the world to understand.
2:59:12 Speaker 01 I guess it also can be a lesson demonstrating that we humans don't get their balance right. So nine eleven
2:59:22 Speaker 01 created
2:59:24 Speaker 01 a situation when the government had to respond.
2:59:29 Speaker 01 And it responded, but it overreacted. It ended up in deriding certain basic rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy. Because the government always wants to increase its powers. And the government always tries to do it at the expense of citizens. You have this situation when the cure is worse than the disease.
2:59:55 Speaker 01 I think it was incredibly brave to do what Edward did.
3:00:00 Speaker 01 I didn't get to work with him. Whoever see him in person, we keep in touch, we sometimes communicate.
3:00:12 Speaker 01 But we're not close. I still, I think what he did is laudable.
3:00:19 Speaker 01 I hope someday we meet.
3:00:20 Lex Fridman? You yourself have faced
3:00:25 Lex Fridman? the full force of various governments, intelligence agencies.
3:00:32 Lex Fridman? Is there any intelligence agency you're afraid of, any government you're afraid of?
3:00:37 Speaker 01 I think they're all equally, should be equally afraid of, or equally not afraid of, in a way. It's, it's not that this intelligence service can kill you and the other can't kill you.
3:00:48 Lex Fridman? They all can kill you?
3:00:49 Speaker 01 I guess they all can kill me, one way or the other.
3:00:53 Speaker 01 But it's a matter of whether I'm afraid of death.
3:00:55 Lex Fridman? This goes back to the beginning of our conversation, I think, multiple times. So you're in general fearless in the face of the pressure?
3:01:04 Speaker 01 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.
3:01:23 Speaker 01 I don't think there is anything at this point that can happen to change the way I am.
3:01:32 Lex Fridman? So you went through a lot in, from 2011 to 2014. Government pressure that you refused to give into, that led you to create Telegram and let go of VK. And then in 2018,
3:01:50 Lex Fridman? Russia and Iran decided to ban Telegram. That was another example of pressure. Can you take me through that saga in 2018?
3:02:00 Speaker 01 So in 2018 Telegram started to become popular. I think we had something like
3:02:07 Speaker 01 200 million users.
3:02:12 Speaker 01 And it increasingly became popular in places like Iran and Russia. And other countries where sometimes
3:02:22 Speaker 01 people
3:02:25 Speaker 01 have something to hide from the government.
3:02:30 Speaker 01 In Iran, people used Telegram to protest against the government. They had these huge channels that they would use to organize the protests.
3:02:45 Speaker 01 And eventually, the government couldn't keep up. They decided to ban Telegram.
3:02:52 Speaker 01 People would still keep using it, though, using VPNs. It didn't help. The government
3:03:03 Speaker 01 invested a lot in coming up with their own messaging app. They had several teams competing for the title of the National Iranian Messaging App. All these apps failed. People still preferred Telegram. Interestingly, Iran banned Telegram, but
3:03:23 Speaker 01 WhatsApp wasn't banned. Or at least, they unbanned WhatsApp soon after.
3:03:30 Speaker 01 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.
3:03:54 Speaker 01 And we told them, "It's impossible. If you have to ban us, ban us."
3:04:01 Speaker 01 And this is what they ended up doing
3:04:04 Speaker 01 in spring 2018. And that was quite fun, because
3:04:11 Speaker 01 they were trying to block our IP addresses, but we were prepared for that.
3:04:18 Speaker 01 And we came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones every time the censor 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 someone to rely on in order to bypass censorship.
3:05:03 Speaker 01 We ended up spending, I think, millions of dollars on that. And as a result,
3:05:11 Speaker 01 the censor got crazy there. They would ban IP addresses in the largest subnets of IP addresses and huge subnets, which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country's infrastructure started to go down. And people were trying to pay for groceries and supermarkets and nothing would work because the Russian censor blocked too many IP addresses. And some of the subnets were used to host
3:05:44 Speaker 01 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
3:06:00 Speaker 01 our anti-censorship tools.
3:06:03 Speaker 01 The biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple.
3:06:08 Speaker 01 Apple didn't allow us to update Telegram in the App Store, saying for at least four weeks that we have to come to an agreement with Russia first. We said, "It's not possible." They said, "We will allow you to push your update for Telegram worldwide, except for Russia."
3:06:35 Speaker 01 We didn't want to do that. Almost lost hope. You know, at some point, I said, "You know, maybe this is the only way. Maybe we should leave the Russian market. Stop allowing users from Russia to download the app from the App Store, which would mean it's over."
3:06:58 Speaker 01 We helped organize certain protests in defense of Telegram and privacy and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow. That 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.
3:07:19 Speaker 01 That we are trying to do the right thing here, but without Apple, we can't do much.
3:07:29 Speaker 01 Because people can't download your app anymore.
3:07:35 Speaker 01 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,
3:07:52 Speaker 01 Apple should probably come back to the right side of history here."
3:07:58 Speaker 01 And I waited for one day and two days.
3:08:02 Speaker 01 In the meantime, since we've been unable to update Telegram for more than a month,
3:08:08 Speaker 01 it started to...
3:08:12 Speaker 01 Fall apart because the new version of iOS came out and it made the old versions of Telegram obsolete. Some features that used to work stopped working and users all over the world started to suffer. People that had nothing to do with Russia from other parts of the world experienced issues with Telegram.
3:08:42 Speaker 01 So it was really serious and I said to my team, you know what? If by 6:00 PM today, I think it was a Friday,
3:08:51 Speaker 01 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?
3:09:06 Lex Fridman? Which by the way removes all the people that want to protest, all the people that want to talk in Russia, removes their ability to have a voice in the most popular messaging app in that part of the world.
3:09:17 Speaker 01 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 censor, bypassing censorship through digital resistance. In Iran, it was a little bit different because we realized
3:09:56 Speaker 01 it would have been too expensive to try to come up with all these IP addresses. And in addition, it was not clear whether we wouldn't be in violation of the sanctions regime.
3:10:12 Speaker 01 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.
3:10:54 Speaker 01 So it created this market,
3:11:01 Speaker 01 which resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem. And as a result, we kept millions or maybe tens of millions of Iranian users. Up until this day, I think Telegram is still banned in Iran today. But we probably have something like 50 million people relying on Telegram from that country.
3:11:30 Lex Fridman? So that people find a way around.
3:11:31 Speaker 01 People find a way around.
3:11:33 Lex Fridman? That's ingenious. That's really great to hear.
3:11:39 Lex Fridman? I have to ask you about this. After having spent many days with you, I learned of something that you've never talked about.
3:11:47 Lex Fridman? At the time, have not talked about to this day, that there was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018. I think to me, it showed the seriousness of this fight to uphold the freedom of speech for everyone, for all people of Earth that you're doing.
3:12:13 Lex Fridman? I have to say, it would mean a lot to me if you tell me this story.
3:12:17 Speaker 01 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.
3:12:31 Speaker 01 We were trying to raise funds for Dawn, 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 was exactly the best moment for me to start sharing anything related to my personal health.
3:12:58 Speaker 01 But that was something that is hard to forget.
3:13:05 Speaker 01 That, you know, I never fall ill. I have, I believe I have perfect health. I very rarely have headaches or bad cough. I don't take pills because I don't have to take pills. And that was the only instant in my life when, I think I was dying. I came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented. I had this weird neighbor and he left something for me there around the door.
3:13:42 Speaker 01 And one hour after, when I was already in my bed, so I was living alone, I felt very bad.
3:13:53 Speaker 01 I felt pain all over my body.
3:14:02 Speaker 01 I tried to get up and go to the bathroom.
3:14:09 Speaker 01 But while I was going there, I felt that functions of my body started to switch off. First the eyesight, then hearing.
3:14:21 Speaker 01 Then I had difficulty breathing. Everything accompanied by...
3:14:29 Speaker 01 Very acute pain.
3:14:33 Speaker 01 Heart, stomach,
3:14:36 Speaker 01 or blood vessels.
3:14:39 Speaker 01 It was, it's a difficult thing to explain.
3:14:43 Speaker 01 But one thing I was certain about is, yeah, this is it.
3:14:46 Lex Fridman? You thought you were gonna die?
3:14:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is it because I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see anything, it was very painful. I think it's over. I thought, well, I have had, had a good life, I managed to accomplish a few, accomplish a few things.
3:15:04 Speaker 01 And then I collapsed on the floor, but I don't remember it.
3:15:09 Speaker 01 Because the pain covered everything.
3:15:13 Speaker 01 I found myself on the floor the next day, it was already bright.
3:15:22 Speaker 01 And I couldn't stand up, I was super weak.
3:15:27 Speaker 01 I looked at my arms, my body.
3:15:33 Speaker 01 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.
3:15:45 Speaker 01 And I decided not to tell most of my team about it because, again, I don't want it, I didn't want them to worry. But it was tough. That was tough.
3:15:57 Lex Fridman? Did that make you
3:16:01 Lex Fridman? afraid
3:16:04 Lex Fridman? of the road you're walking?
3:16:08 Lex Fridman? Meaning all the governments, all the intelligence agencies, all the people, like we mentioned, it's like you're playing a video game. You started with VK where you're just trying to build a thing that scales and all of a sudden you find out there's DDoS attacks attacking the
3:16:28 Lex Fridman? 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.
3:16:44 Lex Fridman? And you're just
3:16:46 Lex Fridman? a curious guy who created a platform for everybody on the earth to talk. And all of a sudden you realize
3:16:54 Lex Fridman? there's a lot of people attacking you.
3:16:58 Lex Fridman? How did that change your view? Did that make you more scared of the world?
3:17:04 Speaker 01 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.
3:17:18 Speaker 01 I had
3:17:21 Speaker 01 an experience when I assumed
3:17:25 Speaker 01 something bad is going to happen to me a few years before that, also in relation to my work.
3:17:33 Speaker 01 But
3:17:36 Speaker 01 now, 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.
3:17:47 Speaker 01 And every new day you get is a gift.
3:17:51 Lex Fridman? As a bonus?
3:17:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:17:54 Lex Fridman? And the first time you're referring to is that, would that have to do with the complexity that was happening, with the pressure from the government on VK? And then you had to figure out the increasing pressure and you had to figure out what to do? And
3:18:10 Lex Fridman? you understood that you're losing control of VK at that moment?
3:18:14 Speaker 01 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. And remember, 2011, I still lived in Russia, running VK. There was no Telegram.
3:18:42 Speaker 01 So the government demanded that we take down the opposition groups of Navalny from VK that had
3:18:54 Speaker 01 hundreds of thousands of members and that were used to organize this protest.
3:19:03 Speaker 01 And I very publicly refused to do that.
3:19:07 Speaker 01 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
3:19:19 Speaker 01 demand. I put out a scan of it.
3:19:23 Speaker 01 And next to it,
3:19:26 Speaker 01 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 opposition groups. That was very funny at the moment. But then I had armed policemen trying to get into my apartment.
3:19:51 Speaker 01 And I thought about many things at that moment. I asked myself,
3:19:58 Speaker 01 did I make the right choice?
3:20:01 Speaker 01 And I came to the conclusion that I made the right choice. And I asked myself, what would be the next thing
3:20:10 Speaker 01 that would logically follow from this? And I realized
3:20:15 Speaker 01 they're probably going to put me in prison.
3:20:21 Speaker 01 So what am I going to do about it? I asked myself.
3:20:26 Speaker 01 And I told myself, I'm going to serve myself to self to death. It's 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.
3:20:51 Speaker 01 Also, at that moment, I realized there is no way to communicate securely. I need to tell my brother what's going on. They're probably going after him. How do I tell him?
3:21:01 Speaker 01 Without betraying him? Because in 2011,
3:21:09 Speaker 01 Remember, WhatsApp was already there. I think they launched it in 2009. But it had zero encryption. All messages were plain text in transit, meaning that even your system administrator, let alone your carrier, had access to your messages.
3:21:31 Speaker 01 It was only after Telegram started this push for encryption that this other apps suddenly remembered that privacy wasn't their DNA,
3:21:44 Speaker 01 as WhatsApp founders famously stated. But it must have been a dormant gene in 2011.
3:21:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah.
3:21:54 Speaker 01 In 2011, there was no way
3:21:58 Speaker 01 to send a message in a secure way. And I also told myself, if I'm going to survive this, I'm definitely launching a secure messaging app. Somehow, it ended up not being too bad. I was summoned to the prosecutor,
3:22:17 Speaker 01 answered some silly questions,
3:22:21 Speaker 01 fewer questions that I had to answer more recently in the French investigation case.
3:22:30 Speaker 01 But it was the beginning of the end. It was clear that
3:22:37 Speaker 01 there's no way I'm going to be allowed to run VK the way I wanted it to run.
3:22:44 Speaker 01 That was the moment I
3:22:48 Speaker 01 packed my backpack
3:22:51 Speaker 01 and just started to wait.
3:22:54 Speaker 01 Just... They moved to a hotel
3:22:59 Speaker 01 and realized any day I can leave the country. I kept running VK.
3:23:09 Speaker 01 I started to design Telegram and assembling the team.
3:23:17 Speaker 01 But I knew my days in Russia were numbered.
3:23:23 Lex Fridman? Well, first, I really have to say for myself, from, I think, millions, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe the entirety of Earth, thank you for putting your life on the line in those cases. I think freedom of speech is fundamental to the flourishing of humanity. So, um, 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.
3:23:53 Lex Fridman? 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.
3:24:07 Speaker 01 Thanks for doing this.
3:24:08 Lex Fridman? Okay, so, um,
3:24:13 Lex Fridman? 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?
3:24:29 Speaker 01 It can definitely happen. As you said, there are certain indications. There have been certain test attempts to partially ban it. Telegram is no longer accessible in parts of Russia, such as Dagestan. And it 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
3:25:14 Speaker 01 to access independent sources of information. If you think about...
3:25:21 Speaker 01 Media outlets such as BBC or any other non-Russian source of information,
3:25:30 Speaker 01 they're only accessible in Russia through Telegram, in the form of Telegram channels. Their websites are banned. Some other social media sites are banned.
3:25:43 Speaker 01 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,
3:26:02 Speaker 01 which would of course be fully transparent to the government and wouldn't allow voices independent from the government to express themselves.
3:26:15 Speaker 01 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.
3:26:34 Speaker 01 And this creates this vicious circle. Because in a way, European countries trying to fight freedom of speech
3:26:48 Speaker 01 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
3:27:17 Speaker 01 that they're not doing anything different.
3:27:22 Speaker 01 It's a norm now to restrict voices that don't go in line with the mainstream narrative. That's sad, because one of the things that makes our life interesting is this abundance of different viewpoints, of different people that we get to experience.
3:27:50 Speaker 01 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
3:28:11 Speaker 01 in any country, particularly a large country such as Russia, because the Russian people are incredibly talented and resilient people.
3:28:21 Speaker 01 They are among the first to start utilizing some of these recent innovations that Telegram implements. They are the early adopters. I 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 edition that we launch.
3:28:50 Speaker 01 They're incredibly hungry for innovation.
3:28:54 Lex Fridman? So all that said, there's a... as part of the propaganda and in general, there's attacks on you all over the place. There's misinformation.
3:29:04 Lex Fridman? I've read a bunch of things that are, I think, in a systematic way, lying about you, lying about Telegram
3:29:13 Lex Fridman? from all angles. Why do you get attacked so much by everybody?
3:29:18 Speaker 01 We're protecting freedom of speech.
3:29:22 Speaker 01 It's not a way to make a lot of friends.
3:29:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:29:25 Speaker 01 Because you would inevitably find yourself in a situation where...
3:29:32 Speaker 01 You would be protecting the freedom of the opposition to the current government in any country
3:29:42 Speaker 01 to express themselves. And then
3:29:46 Speaker 01 the initial reaction and a very basic instinctive reaction of any government would be to say, oh, 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
3:30:22 Speaker 01 Stalinist Russia, or Nazi Germany, Maoist China, they'd 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
3:30:40 Speaker 01 the agents of this other country that wants to take over. That's why, dear citizens, forget about their freedoms.
3:30:49 Speaker 01 And now increasingly, you see similar attempts in free countries.
3:30:55 Speaker 01 The initial instinct from, say, President Macron's team when they're confronted with some footage,
3:31:03 Speaker 01 for example, the footage of his wife slapping him, would be to say it's all fake Russian
3:31:12 Speaker 01 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
3:31:32 Speaker 01 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.
3:31:49 Speaker 01 You often find yourself
3:31:54 Speaker 01 in this crossfire. When the forces in power will say that you must be working with some foreign government that they don't like. Inevitably, they would say that, oh, if you're protecting these voices, it's not right. They love you when you're protecting the freedom of speech in a country that is far from them. Or better yet, in a country that is their geopolitical rival. They praise you for that, but then
3:32:29 Speaker 01 they have this bipolar attitude.
3:32:33 Speaker 01 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.
3:32:49 Speaker 01 And then you find yourself in this weird spot. Ukrainians say you work for the Russians. The Russians say you work for the Ukrainians.
3:33:01 Speaker 01 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.
3:33:17 Speaker 01 Is it our competitors? We must give credit to our competitors if it's their invention to launch this kind of rumors, because...
3:33:28 Speaker 01 At a certain point, they must have realized they can't compete
3:33:33 Speaker 01 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.
3:34:01 Lex Fridman? And through all of this, we should say over and over that you are simply preserving the freedom of speech for all people of Earth, no matter what they believe. As long as they don't call for violence and as long as they're not doing some of the criminal activity that we discussed, including terrorist organizing. But other than that, it doesn't matter what they believe, left wing or right wing, you're just preserving their freedom of speech. You think people of Ukraine, people of Russia, and people of Iran, people of all over the world, understand that despite the propaganda against you?
3:34:36 Speaker 01 I think people are smart. Every time I meet somebody from one of these countries you mentioned, in real life, people recognize me in the street, sit here in Dubai. They come over. They seem incredibly grateful and understanding.
3:34:54 Speaker 01 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
3:35:12 Speaker 01 understand the world around them is to receive conflicting mutually exclusive viewpoints from sources that hate each other and try to understand what really is true. Because there is no such thing as an unbiased source of information.
3:35:35 Speaker 01 When the war
3:35:37 Speaker 01 in Ukraine started in 2022, I instantly realized Telegram is going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides.
3:35:52 Speaker 01 And I didn't want Telegram to be used as a tool for war. And I said, and I posted it publicly. I suggested, maybe we should just
3:36:03 Speaker 01 suspend the activity of all politics-related channels in both countries for the time of the war.
3:36:12 Speaker 01 Maybe we shouldn't have channels in these two countries.
3:36:17 Speaker 01 And then, interestingly, people from both countries
3:36:25 Speaker 01 revolted against this.
3:36:28 Speaker 01 They told me, both people in Ukraine and in Russia, that I don't get to babysit them and decide for them
3:36:39 Speaker 01 what sources of information that they have to be granted access to. They're grownups that can make these decisions for themselves.
3:36:52 Speaker 01 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 valuable for them to receive as much information as possible because their relatives, their friends
3:37:17 Speaker 01 were getting affected and are still getting affected.
3:37:21 Speaker 01 They want to understand what was going on.
3:37:24 Speaker 01 At that moment, I realized, people are smart. People get it.
3:37:29 Speaker 01 People can see through it. If you ask most people in any of these countries, do you agree that
3:37:36 Speaker 01 access to Telegram should be restricted for whatever reason, they would say no.
3:37:41 Lex Fridman? They hunger to have a voice.
3:37:43 Speaker 01 They need a voice and they need a place to share their opinion securely.
3:37:50 Lex Fridman? I have to ask you in the question of leadership. In the Le Point interview, the journalist said that you're often compared to Elon Musk.
3:38:01 Lex Fridman? 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 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?
3:38:41 Speaker 01 First of all, I don't think there is such a thing as a negative personal trait. In most cases, our bad traits and our good traits are the same trait, or at least have the same source. Of course, there are some extreme examples, but I'd say 99% of people, if you analyze their character, their bravery can be seen in recklessness in other situations. Depending on circumstances, you would see exactly the same personality trait, and it will be either a good thing or a bad thing.
3:39:24 Speaker 01 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.
3:40:03 Speaker 01 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 a life of a successful entrepreneur, the question of motivation starts to be the primary question.
3:40:48 Speaker 01 If we are talking about the richest person in the world and the most famous entrepreneur in the world, you have to wonder, how does he motivate himself?
3:41:02 Speaker 01 And if starting
3:41:07 Speaker 01 a war on X, debating certain issues,
3:41:13 Speaker 01 or becoming personal with other CEOs, criticizing them, if these activities help Elon to innovate
3:41:26 Speaker 01 and start new projects, he should be doing more of it. There's nothing wrong in being non-agreeable. Actually, it's one of the main traits of a successful entrepreneur, not agreeing with things. And every time somebody like Elon, but there is no somebody like Elon, there'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,
3:42:07 Speaker 01 and he doesn't seem to be stretched too thin. Well, some people think he is, but he manages to still demonstrate success.
3:42:22 Speaker 01 In all or most of his endeavors.
3:42:25 Speaker 01 So again, you can criticize Elon for being emotional, but would he be the same person without this? I doubt that.
3:42:34 Lex Fridman? And the incredible teams he's motivated to, there's an element of that, which you've spoken about, the team at Telegram, you know, assembling a team of A players, as we've talked about, is a skill in itself. And that's also a big part of the, uh, the leaders that we've discussed. It's like what, judged in part by the team you assemble.
3:43:01 Speaker 01 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.
3:43:23 Speaker 01 So in order to be an efficient, a great entrepreneur and enrich the world of innovations,
3:43:30 Speaker 01 you have to do unpleasant things. Most people will shy away from it. And
3:43:39 Speaker 01 in a certain sense, entrepreneurs sacrifice their peace of mind
3:43:44 Speaker 01 in order to
3:43:48 Speaker 01 contribute to the world around them. And Elon is a great example of that.
3:43:53 Lex Fridman? I have to ask you about the big picture Telegram.
3:43:58 Lex Fridman? We've already talked about the fact that you own a hundred percent of it. And there's a lot of, on the business side of it, the, the business structure of Telegram is fascinating. Um, you've invested hundred, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of your money. Uh, as far as I know, you take a salary of what, one dollar?
3:44:19 Speaker 01 One dear hum, it's one third of that.
3:44:23 Lex Fridman? One third of a dollar.
3:44:26 Lex Fridman? And in 2024 was the first time Telegram was profitable. So one of the interesting questions is here that we could talk for many hours about. But I'd love to get a high view picture. So you've 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 newsfeed,
3:45:11 Lex Fridman? 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?
3:45:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, we had to innovate a lot in order to reach a point where we are profitable
3:45:53 Speaker 01 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.
3:46:16 Speaker 01 When I sold the remaining share of my first company,
3:46:22 Speaker 01 I had to do it below market price because
3:46:27 Speaker 01 I didn't leave Russia completely without any pressures, you know.
3:46:33 Speaker 01 I reinvested the vast majority of everything in Telegram.
3:46:40 Speaker 01 Telegram is an operation that is losing money for me personally. I never, I didn't extract more from Telegram than I invested in it. I never sold a single share.
3:46:55 Speaker 01 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
3:47:20 Speaker 01 business-related tools or tools for advanced users that they would have to pay for, say, four or five dollars a month.
3:47:31 Speaker 01 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
3:47:45 Speaker 01 2022, and now we have over 15 million paid subscribers.
3:47:53 Speaker 01 This is some very significant recurring revenue.
3:48:00 Speaker 01 So we would receive more than half a billion dollars from premium subscriptions alone this year, and it's growing fast.
3:48:13 Speaker 01 For that, we had to innovate a lot. We included over 50 different features into the premium package.
3:48:22 Speaker 01 And then how do you make an app that is already more powerful than any other messaging app on the market?
3:48:32 Speaker 01 Even more useful so that people will be ready to pay for this extra. That wasn't easy. That took a lot of effort.
3:48:40 Lex Fridman? And you're constantly adding features.
3:48:42 Speaker 01 We constantly adding features.
3:48:43 Lex Fridman? It's actually fun to watch, just the rate of adding, and some of them are subtle, like the updates, the improvements, expansions of polls, for example.
3:48:54 Speaker 01 Yes, you keep improving the existing features and adding new ones. And every time when you add a new feature, you don't want to clutter the app. So in a way, they're not in your way, they're invisible.
3:49:08 Speaker 01 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 eighty percent of value
3:49:32 Speaker 01 on the table because we are not ready to engage in all these practices, exporting personal data.
3:49:37 Lex Fridman? 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 eighty percent, that's a lot of money.
3:49:56 Speaker 01 Of course, because we would never use, for example, your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata, your activity data to target ads. It's sad that it became synonymous with the internet industry,
3:50:17 Speaker 01 this kind of exploitation, but we are happy with the fact that we managed to make Telegram profitable despite that. We're also experimenting a lot with blockchain-based technologies. We're the first app to allow people to directly own their username 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.
3:50:54 Speaker 01 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.
3:51:10 Lex Fridman? So a lot of people are making millions of dollars on the Telegram platform.
3:51:14 Speaker 01 Yes, we enable them to receive
3:51:20 Speaker 01 payments from the users through
3:51:24 Speaker 01 in-app purchase mechanism provided by Apple and Google, which I think was the first attempt of this kind to allow that both on iOS and Android and on a big platform so that third-party developers of mini apps, which are basically websites, so deeply integrated into Telegram that you can't tell whether they're standalone or they're part of their overall experience.
3:51:54 Speaker 01 And by providing this payment option, we are able to extract a commission from these transactions, but it's a very low commission. Presently, it's 5%.
3:52:11 Speaker 01 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.
3:52:25 Speaker 01 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.
3:52:42 Lex Fridman? 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?
3:52:56 Speaker 01 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?
3:53:39 Speaker 01 So that no matter how many users or transactions there are, it would split into smaller pieces, which we call short chains, and would still process all transactions. And he thought for a few days and said, yes, it's possible, but it's not easy. And we started building it. We ended up succeeding in developing that technology, but we couldn't release it. Because the SEC, the Securities and Exchanges Commission in the United States, was unhappy with the way the fundraise for TON was conducted.
3:54:23 Speaker 01 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, is blockchain-based,
3:55:08 Speaker 01 tokenized, usernames, Telegram accounts are all based on TON and its smart contracts. It's the only way for third-party developers and creators.
3:55:24 Speaker 01 To withdraw the funds that they earn through our revenue sharing programs. For example, with channel owners, we do a fifty fifty 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.
3:55:47 Speaker 01 All the new things we launch, for example, let's say, gifts that we mentioned earlier, which you can define as a
3:55:58 Speaker 01 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,
3:56:31 Speaker 01 I think, the largest or the second largest blockchain
3:56:37 Speaker 01 in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.
3:56:41 Lex Fridman? So yeah, like you mentioned, it is a layer one technology as opposed to being built on top of Ethereum or Bitcoin. And it's able to achieve the scale and the speed of transactions that's needed for something like Telegram. And like you also mentioned, the gifts you recently launched,
3:57:01 Lex Fridman? uh, some Snoop Dogg gifts. Is there going to be some other celebrities in the pipeline?
3:57:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm a big fan of Snoop. And that's why when they reach out, suggest to do something together. So let's launch up Snoop related gifts. And it was really fun. We managed to sell twelve million worth of gifts within thirty minutes.
3:57:26 Lex Fridman? Thirty minutes. Well, there you go. I even got a few, but yeah.
3:57:30 Speaker 01 After this, we have many requests from many really high profile influencers that in a way are lining up.
3:57:40 Lex Fridman? 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. Cause like the Snoop. Uh, the Snoop gifts are all just like going back to our previous conversation. It's a beautiful piece of art. That like in encapsulate certain memes, certain aspects of Snoop that everybody knows. These cultural icons that he represents. That's cool. That's just, and the detail, the incredible detail of the art of the individual gifts is just incredible.
3:58:15 Speaker 01 And each of of these gifts is scalable because it's vector based. It references certain points in Snoop's
3:58:27 Speaker 01 creative biography and each of them has countless different versions. We had to create over fifty distinctive versions of each.
3:58:37 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:58:38 Speaker 01 And then each individual piece is unique because it also has a unique background, unique icon and the background. It's something that we reinvented because we didn't like the old school NFTs. First of all, they were not relevant socially because, okay, you have an NFT. Where do you demonstrate it? And 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 it also, the other thing that we wanted to reinvent is the aesthetic part of it. Most NFTs are just ugly.
3:59:23 Speaker 01 And they are not based on any sophisticated technology.
3:59:29 Speaker 01 So what we did with Snoop's gifts, I think represents an example of
3:59:40 Speaker 01 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 gonna select our next.
4:00:09 Speaker 01 Influencer or artist to be part of it.
4:00:13 Lex Fridman? 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.
4:00:23 Speaker 01 We didn't expect it, by the way. We just had a lot of fun launching these things. And then we realized that one of the first collections we issued, we sold each piece at something like five dollars.
4:00:41 Speaker 01 And then the minimum price of any items in these collections currently is something like ten thousand dollars.
4:00:50 Speaker 01 And it keeps going up. So I was quite surprised with the reception. I realized, you know, when you are trying to monetize social media platform in a way that is consistent with your values, you're forced to find ways that benefit your users, not exploit them. People love these gifts. People love the fact that they can congratulate 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
4:01:36 Speaker 01 just from buying and selling gifts.
4:01:38 Lex Fridman? It's a real market.
4:01:39 Speaker 01 It's a real market. It's just something that he did in a few months. And last year, when we launched many new features for the mini apps on Telegram and the payment options for them and the other monetization options, the same guy earned twelve million dollars.
4:02:02 Speaker 01 From mini apps. And I know several people, just anecdotally, I earned ten million dollars, I earned three million dollars. Just in a matter of months, single handedly. Sometimes they would have a team of two, three people. So whenever I hear stories from people who
4:02:22 Speaker 01 were able to build businesses on top of Telegram, this makes me incredibly proud.
4:02:27 Lex Fridman? And mini apps include games, they include like tools, services of any kind. It's an app within the ecosystem of Telegram. Let me ask you about crypto in general. So you've, you've been an early supporter of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin. You've bought into Bitcoin early on, you kept buying. Maybe you could speak to the reasoning why you kept buying Bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin will go to a million dollars? Do you think it'll keep increasing? And Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies?
4:03:01 Speaker 01 I was a big believer in Bitcoins since more or less the start of it. I got to buy my first few thousand of Bitcoin in twenty thirteen. And I didn't care much. I think I bought at the local maximum, something like seven hundred dollars per Bitcoin. And I just threw a couple of millions there. And a lot of people after Bitcoin later next year went down. Some were close to three hundred, two hundred. Started to express their sympathy to me. They say, oh, you're a poor fellow.
4:03:43 Speaker 01 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.
4:03:58 Speaker 01 I believe in this thing. I think this is the way money should work.
4:04:06 Speaker 01 Nobody can confiscate your Bitcoin from you. Nobody can censor you for political reasons. This is the
4:04:18 Speaker 01 ultimate
4:04:21 Speaker 01 means of exchange. And again, I'm now talking about Bitcoin, but it relates to cryptocurrency 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
4:04:45 Speaker 01 fly private, it's because I somehow extract money from Telegram. But like I said, Telegram is a money-losing operation for me personally. Bitcoin is something that allowed me to
4:05:03 Speaker 01 stay afloat.
4:05:06 Speaker 01 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.
4:05:18 Speaker 01 Nobody's printing Bitcoin. There is
4:05:22 Speaker 01 a predictable inflation and then it stops at a certain point.
4:05:29 Speaker 01 Bitcoin is here to stay. All the fiat currencies remains to be seen.
4:05:34 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you a deeply philosophical, serious question. In your first Tucker interview, you had two interesting chairs in the background. I think they reference a now legendary meme. The choice is
4:05:52 Lex Fridman? What is the philosophical wisdom in the dilemma that these two chairs present? Have you had to face the dilemma yourself personally?
4:05:59 Speaker 01 Not this exact dilemma. I think this is a riddle that people have to face in Russian prisons.
4:06:10 Speaker 01 And metaphorically, it's describing all the situations where you 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?
4:06:33 Speaker 01 This very horrible thing or this also very horrible thing?
4:06:38 Speaker 01 So I think the right answer to this riddle is not to do any of these things.
4:06:46 Speaker 01 Reframe the question.
4:06:50 Speaker 01 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?
4:07:06 Lex Fridman? No, somebody on the internet said, "Не ходи туда, где задают такие вопросы", which is basically try to avoid the situations where such dilemmas present themselves, where there is no right answer.
4:07:24 Speaker 01 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.
4:07:33 Lex Fridman? You fucked up already.
4:07:34 Speaker 01 Should have been avoided. But the other quite creative answer to this question is that you
4:07:44 Speaker 01 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?
4:07:59 Lex Fridman? It's a very engineering solution. I'm glad somebody came up with that.
4:08:05 Speaker 01 I believe this is the right answer. We are often being manipulated
4:08:10 Speaker 01 by politicians, by corporate leaders.
4:08:15 Speaker 01 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.
4:08:30 Speaker 01 I don't think we should be buying into that.
4:08:34 Lex Fridman? Okay, on this theme of absurdity and ridiculousness, let me, there's an object here that appeared in a
4:08:44 Lex Fridman? not many people seem to have noticed this. People should go watch your excellent conversation in the Oslo Freedom Forum behind you. I'm no archaeologist, but I believe this is a, a, well, how should I put it? A walrus penis bone.
4:09:06 Lex Fridman? 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. What's, what's, what, why did you bring it with you everywhere? Is it kind of like, you know, in America, they have a wishbone? This is just a large wishbone? 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.
4:09:52 Lex Fridman? A lot of questions there.
4:09:53 Speaker 01 That's a very interesting subject. The reason I have this is because a tribe that is almost gone extinct in Siberia and Mongolia, called the Venky, 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.
4:10:27 Speaker 01 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, a certain government or a certain business partner
4:10:57 Speaker 01 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
4:11:11 Speaker 01 and hope that they would...
4:11:14 Lex Fridman? Through osmosis, figure out the deep message. It is an indirect rebellion.
4:11:22 Lex Fridman? By the way, in the form of Soviet Union, there was, and in a lot of places throughout history, some of the rebellion had to take this kind of symbolic, metaphoric form through poetry, through children's stories. It's the beauty of human language and art that we're able to do that. Say "F you" to whatever forces that try to overpower us. We say "F you" through poetry, through art, and sometimes through a rather large walrus penis bone,
4:11:54 Lex Fridman? carried by what appears to be either a happy sumo wrestler or a cat of some sort.
4:12:00 Speaker 01 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.
4:12:15 Lex Fridman? There seems to be some confusion over how many kids you have.
4:12:21 Lex Fridman? It's often said to be over 100. Can you explain how many kids you have?
4:12:27 Speaker 01 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...
4:12:44 Speaker 01 It was a good idea to be a sperm donor.
4:12:48 Speaker 01 Initially, a friend of mine asked me to help because they were trying to have a baby with his wife and
4:12:57 Speaker 01 they experienced certain health issues that prevented them to do it the natural way. And he asked me, he told me, "We don't want to just rely on some random anonymous genetic material. We want somebody we know and respect to be the biological father of our kid." And I said, "You gotta be kidding me. Sounds ridiculous. What are you even talking about?" But then I realized it's actually a serious issue. And they were not the only couples struggling with that. So eventually, I got persuaded into doing more of it. I can't say I'm incredibly proud of that, but I think it was the right thing to do.
4:13:41 Speaker 01 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
4:14:13 Speaker 01 and the kids who are just my biological kids that I've never seen. As long as they can establish their
4:14:24 Speaker 01 shared DNA with me
4:14:28 Speaker 01 someday, maybe in 30 years from now,
4:14:33 Speaker 01 they have to be
4:14:36 Speaker 01 Entitled for a share of my estate after I'm gone. And that made a lot of noise in the news for some reason. People get very excited by this kind of news. I got a lot of messages from people claiming they're my kids. I got a lot of requests from people asking me to adopt them. The memes were priceless, but understanding that, oh, it's not a thing that most people do. I don't see anything wrong with it. Anything I think more people should be donating sperm.
4:15:14 Lex Fridman? So we should say like the the hundred plus kids is from that. And you also have naturally conceived kids. And it was a pretty bold decision to, from a financial perspective, to treat them all equally.
4:15:31 Lex Fridman? And also quite interesting was that you uh kind of said that they don't receive any money for the first few decades of their life. Can you describe that thinking?
4:15:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think overabundance
4:15:50 Speaker 01 paralyzes motivation and willpower. It's extremely harmful, particularly for young boys, to grow up in an environment where they can be proud not of their own achievements, but of their father's achievements, of their father's wealth.
4:16:11 Speaker 01 This removes the incentive to
4:16:19 Speaker 01 work on developing their own skills,
4:16:25 Speaker 01 removes the incentive to study, to work.
4:16:29 Speaker 01 So I thought if they're gonna have this
4:16:34 Speaker 01 money,
4:16:37 Speaker 01 it should be something that they would only get when they're already adult.
4:16:45 Speaker 01 It's still risky. But one of the reasons I decided it makes more sense to divide this um.
4:16:55 Speaker 01 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 it's it's still many, many millions of dollars for each child. So I'm not sure it it helps too much.
4:17:33 Lex Fridman? Uh, 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, uh, conducted by ethologist John B. Calhoun. And, uh, 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.
4:18:17 Lex Fridman? And the interesting aspect of this experiment is that at first the population doubled, it grew very quickly, but then it leveled off. And certain really negative social things started happening, like mothers neglecting to kill their young, violent attacks and hypersexual activity became widespread. Some quote unquote beautiful ones, largely inactive, well groomed mice withdrew, refusing to mate or interact. So all of these kinds of societal qualities that we see as negative for the functioning of a society started to emerge because of the abundance. And, uh, finally, the collapse, the reproduction rates crashed, social dysfunction spread
4:19:00 Lex Fridman? to the next generation and eventually just went extinct. It didn't just plummet to a low level, it plummeted steadily to zero, despite the fact that there's ongoing resource abundance. As the description states, "The last mouse died surrounded by untouched food and water." So, I mean, there's deep wisdom to that about abundance. It seems, you've mentioned this in different contexts throughout this conversation is, it seems like scarcity, it seems like constraints, it seems like non-abundance is essential for human flourishing, which is a counterintuitive notion.
4:19:45 Lex Fridman? It's true for mice, and I think it's probably true for humans, too.
4:19:49 Speaker 01 We have evolved to overcome scarcity. Almost by definition, there has never been such thing as infinite amount of food or entertainment in our lives before now. We seem as a species to lose our ability to identify purpose in a world where you have everything and everything loses its meaning.
4:20:22 Speaker 01 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.
4:20:48 Speaker 01 I had the same jacket for years,
4:20:52 Speaker 01 which was bought on a secondhand marketplace.
4:20:57 Speaker 01 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
4:21:15 Speaker 01 to take care of us. It was not easy, but it also created purpose. It created meaning. It created priorities.
4:21:27 Speaker 01 It allowed us to focus on things that mattered. It allowed us to
4:21:34 Speaker 01 develop our character and intellectual abilities. Now, if we had everything...
4:21:44 Speaker 01 Why do anything?
4:21:47 Speaker 01 These mice
4:21:52 Speaker 01 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.
4:22:33 Speaker 01 And it goes extinct.
4:22:35 Lex Fridman? It's fascinating because we're creating technologies and this is what AI is proposing to our future generations as a problem to solve, which is AI may very well create abundance. And so we will be like these mice, potentially. Whether it's AI or other kinds of technologies that increase and give more and more to all of us. And it is a thing that is good. Decrease the amount of suffering in the world, increase the quality of life. But as we reach towards that abundance, the fabric that connects us, rooted in our biology that's developed by evolution, might create a real challenge for us.
4:23:16 Speaker 01 We should find the right balance between chaos and order, between self-restriction and freedom for creativity.
4:23:25 Lex Fridman? 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
4:23:39 Lex Fridman? 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?
4:23:54 Lex Fridman? Maybe some of the lessons he told you
4:23:57 Lex Fridman? in the conversation you've had with him on his birthday?
4:24:02 Speaker 01 I'm incredibly lucky to...
4:24:07 Speaker 01 Have my father, he is a person who wrote
4:24:14 Speaker 01 countless books on ancient Rome and ancient Roman literature,
4:24:20 Speaker 01 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.
4:24:39 Speaker 01 He was relentless. The example he said to myself and my brother was priceless.
4:24:48 Speaker 01 Some people make this mistake of thinking that you're gonna instill the right principles
4:24:58 Speaker 01 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
4:25:13 Speaker 01 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.
4:25:28 Speaker 01 And you know, my mom, a great woman, incredibly smart, highly educated. But she would sometimes try to test the patience of my father. And it's a
4:25:45 Speaker 01 trait rooted in our biology. It's, it's, 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.
4:26:27 Speaker 01 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. And there are other numerous lessons. Staying positive, looking at the bright side. Never despair. Be honest. And you know, he told me last time I spoke to him that AI can have consciousness, can be creative, but it cannot have conscience in a way it cannot be moral. It cannot have deeply rooted principles.
4:27:12 Speaker 01 Cannot have integrity in the meaning that we understand it as human beings.
4:27:19 Lex Fridman? I love the fact that you're talking to your eight year old father. You're talking about AGI and the difference between human, the human spirit, human nature, and what AGI, AI is able to achieve. And conscience is the thing that humans have, the, the, the ability to know the right from wrong.
4:27:45 Speaker 01 This is the lesson that he gave me. One of my goals in life is never to disappoint him.
4:27:55 Lex Fridman? Another thing we've talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought. Do, do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it? By manifesting it into being? What do you think?
4:28:17 Speaker 01 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.
4:28:52 Speaker 01 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.
4:29:26 Lex Fridman? Prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus thinking about the thing.
4:29:34 Speaker 01 Oh, yes. So over many, many, many days, it is possible to imagine our world as a high-dimensional universe, where humans have the ability to navigate through it with the power of belief, which is coupled with positive emotion and logical thinking. But we are getting into an esoteric realm. We don't have any proof of that. But we also know that we probably, at this point, haven't discovered even 1%
4:30:19 Speaker 01 about this universe.
4:30:22 Lex Fridman? I agree with you fully, and I like what you said in the way you were thinking about it. You've told me before that maybe there's a way that with effort and with a focused mind, you can shape, you can morph the sort of landscape of probabilities around you. It's a nice way to visualize it, that somehow our effort and our focus changes.
4:30:52 Lex Fridman? The things that are likely and less likely, and by focusing on it, we make those things 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. And like you said, us as a humanity together are perfect. I like that you said that.
4:31:27 Speaker 01 I admire your belief in the fact that we get to experience this together, because it's not obvious. Maybe each of us experiences his own or her own universe. And maybe every second, the universe splits into a billion 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
4:32:12 Speaker 01 when we're 1,000 years old. But a lot of people from other versions of reality think we are long gone.
4:32:26 Lex Fridman? 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. We can only...
4:32:48 Lex Fridman? As we branch into these many, many worlds, only the living consciousnesses get to experience it. So in some sense, yeah, there's many universes. If we're to seriously take the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there's many universes where you died many times, especially you. And I'm glad we're in a universe where we get to share the table with this impressive bone, a little humor and a lot of serious topics covered today. Once again, I can't say enough, a giant thank you from me and a giant thank you from hundreds of millions of people that follow your work
4:33:29 Lex Fridman? for you fighting for the freedom of all of us to speak and creating a platform where we can do so. And thank you so much for talking today, brother. It's been an honor getting to know you and to be able to call you a friend.
4:33:44 Speaker 01 Thank you for saying that. I'm also incredibly grateful to you and to the fact that I happen to be in this version of reality, when I haven't died, at least yet. And hopefully, we'll get to spend more fun moments in the years to come together.
4:34:05 Lex Fridman? Thank you, brother. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Pavel Durov. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me try to articulate some things I've been thinking about. If you'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,
4:34:47 Lex Fridman? but I think it is often useful to go to this surreal world of literature, even of the over-the-top dystopian variety, like 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis, even The Plague by Al Barakamu, all to better understand our real world and the destructive paths we have the potential to go down together, which also hopefully helps us understand how to avoid doing so.
4:35:17 Lex Fridman? 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
4:36:01 Lex Fridman? 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,
4:36:44 Lex Fridman? 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,
4:37:29 Lex Fridman? and quickly discarded otherwise. I will probably talk about this work in more depth at another time, because it is so haunting. And I think it is such a profound description of the burden of existence in modern society for many people. But here, let me talk about another of his work, The Trial. In this novel, the main character, Joseph Kay, is a successful bank officer. And he'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.
4:38:13 Lex Fridman? The so-called "trial" never actually occurs in any conventional sense. Instead, Joseph Kay's entire life becomes the proceedings leading up to the trial. In a sense, the trial is the state of being accused itself, a permanent condition rather than a singular event. Kafka's genius in this work was to show that modern institutions don't need to hold trials. They just need to hold you in the permanent looming possibility of one. Public attention to this case, both positive and negative, gives Joseph Kay a feeling of constantly being judged by people around him. This wears at his mind. And his psychological well-being begins to deteriorate.
4:38:57 Lex Fridman? In a sense, the trial doesn't need to convict him. The internal psychological turmoil and the external social scrutiny performs the conviction and the eventual execution. When exactly one year after his arrest, Joseph Kay is visited by two men who walk him courteously through the city to an abandoned quarry and stab him in the heart without Joseph Kay resisting. To me, the trial shows that tyranny's final victory isn't when it kills you, but when you hold still for the knife. Not because you're forced, but because you've been exhausted into submission.
4:39:38 Lex Fridman? 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 surrender. I saw none of that with Pavel. I don't think he knows how to give up or
4:40:23 Lex Fridman? 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
4:41:06 Lex Fridman? and weird to explain in depth here. But let me say The Hunger Artist is a story that I think is relevant to our modern day attention economy, where so many people want to be famous. It tells the story of, let's say, a 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.
4:41:36 Lex Fridman? 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 try to dehumanize us, and to ensure that individual freedom and the human spirit keep flourishing. I think it will. I have faith in us humans. I love you all.
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