Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482

0:00 The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram,

0:06 a messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people.

0:11 Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech,

0:14 building tools that protect human

0:17 communication from surveillance and censorship.

0:20 For this, he has faced pressure from some

0:23 of the most powerful governments and organizations on earth.

0:26 In the face of this immense pressure,

0:28 he has always held his ground continuously fighting to protect user privacy

0:33 and the freedom of all of us humans to communicate with each other.

0:37 I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him and can definitively

0:41 say that he's one of the most principled and fearless humans I've ever met.

0:46 Plus, when I posted that I'm hanging out with Pavel, a lot of people,

0:51 fans of his, wrote to me asking if he does in fact

0:55 privately live the disciplined aesthetic life he's known for, no alcohol,

1:00 stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise,

1:03 including a crazy amount of daily pull-ups and pushups,

1:08 no phone except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on.

1:12 Yes, he's 100% that guy,

1:15 which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me.

1:19 I'm grateful for it, and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend.

1:24 This podcast conversation is in parts

1:27 philosophical about freedom, life, human nature,

1:29 and the nature of government bureaucracies,

1:33 and it is also in part super technical, because to me,

1:37 it's fascinating that Telegram has a relatively

1:39 small engineering team and yet is able

1:42 to basically out-innovate all of its competitors

1:45 with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features.

1:50 Just like the meme of "The Simpsons" did it first,

1:54 you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps,

1:59 in almost every case, Telegram did it first.

2:02 So we discuss it all,

2:04 from the Kafkaesque situation he's in the midst of in France,

2:07 to the rollercoaster of his life and career,

2:10 to his philosophy on technology, freedom, and the human condition.

2:15 And by the way, while this entire conversation is in English,

2:19 we'll make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in multiple languages,

2:24 including Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi.

2:29 On YouTube, you can switch between language

2:31 audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon,

2:34 then clicking Audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer.

2:41 Huge thank you once again to ElevenLabs for their help with translation

2:46 and dubbing and with the bigger mission

2:49 of breaking down barriers that language creates.

2:52 They are truly one of the most remarkable

2:54 companies I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

2:57 This is the "Lex Fridman Podcast." To support it,

3:00 please check out our sponsors in the description.

3:02 And now, dear friends, here's Pavel Durov.

3:07 You've been an advocate for freedom for many years,

3:09 writing that you should be ready to risk everything for freedom.

3:13 What were some influences and insights that helped

3:17 you arrive at this value of human freedom?

3:21 I get to experience the difference between a society

3:24 with freedom and a society without freedom pretty early in life.

3:27 I was four years old when my family

3:30 moved from the Soviet Union to northern Italy, and I could see that a society

3:36 without freedom cannot enjoy the abundance of opinions,

3:42 of ideas, of goods, and services.

3:46 Even for a four or five year old kid, it was obvious.

3:49 That you can't experience all the toys, the ice cream of sorts,

3:57 the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you could access in Italy.

4:00 And then I got to realize something even more important.

4:04 You don't get to contribute to this abundance without freedom.

4:09 And at this point, it was pretty obvious to me.

4:14 You also wrote, "Svoboda vazhne deneg." It translates to: "Freedom matters more

4:19 than money." How do you prevent these values for freedom corrupted by money,

4:26 by people with influence, by people with power?

4:30 Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed.

4:33 So you make sure that they don't stand in your way.

4:37 If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you,

4:42 and then make yourself be comfortable with it,

4:45 there's nothing more left to be afraid of.

4:48 So you stand your ground, and you remember that it's worth living

4:54 your life according to the principles that you

4:58 believe in, even though this life can end up being shorter than a longer life,

5:06 but lived in slavery.

5:08 Do you contemplate your mortality?

5:10 Do you think about your death?

5:12 Oh, yes.

5:13 Are you afraid of it?

5:14 In a way, you have to go against your instinct of self-preservation.

5:19 And it's not easy.

5:21 We are all biological beings hard-coded to be afraid of death.

5:26 Nobody wants to die.

5:28 But when you approach it rationally, you live and then you die.

5:32 There's no such thing as your death in your life.

5:36 You stop experiencing life once you die.

5:40 So you have to ask yourself this question,

5:42 "Is it worth living a life full of fear of death?" Or, it's much more enjoyable

5:49 to forget about this and live your life

5:53 in a way that makes you immune to this fear,

5:56 at the same time remembering that death exists so that every day would count.

6:03 Yeah.

6:04 Remembering that death exists makes you deeply

6:07 feel every moment that you do get.

6:11 That's why I love reminding myself that I can die any day.

6:15 In many ways you live a pretty stoic existence.

6:17 I got a chance to spend a couple of weeks with you.

6:21 In many ways, you seek to minimize the negative

6:24 effects of the outside world on your mind.

6:27 You've written, quote,

6:30 "If you want to reach your full potential and maintain clarity of mind,

6:34 stay away from addictive substances.

6:36 My success and health are the result

6:40 of 20 plus years of complete abstinence from alcohol,

6:43 tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal drugs.

6:47 Short-term pleasure isn't worth your future."

6:50 Let's talk about each one of these.

6:53 Alcohol.

6:53 What's been your philosophy behind that?

6:58 That one is quite easy.

6:59 When I was 11 years old, my biochemistry teacher,

7:02 he gave me this book he wrote, it was called The Illusion of Paradise.

7:08 In there, he would describe the biological and chemical processes

7:14 that happen in your body once you consume this or that substance.

7:21 It was mainly related to illegal drugs,

7:25 but alcohol was one of these addictive substances that he covered.

7:28 So it turns out that when you drink alcohol,

7:33 the thing that happens is that your brain cells become paralyzed.

7:39 They become literally zombies.

7:42 And then next day, some time after the party is over,

7:47 some of your brain cells die and never get to normal.

7:52 So think about this.

7:54 If your brain is this most valuable tool

7:56 you have in your journey to success and happiness,

8:00 why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure?

8:04 This sounds ridiculous.

8:06 In many ways, it's a poison we let in our body.

8:09 But by way of advice,

8:10 what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking?

8:13 You know, a lot of people use alcohol

8:16 to enable them to have a vibrant social life.

8:21 There's a lot of pressures from society, you know,

8:25 at a party to drink so they can socialize.

8:28 So, what advice would you give to them,

8:32 To people who imagine having a social life without alcohol?

8:37 Well, first of all, don't be afraid to be contrarian.

8:40 Set your own rules.

8:43 Secondly, if you feel you need to drink,

8:46 there must be some problem you're trying to conceal.

8:50 There's something that, some fear you're not ready to confront,

8:54 and you have to address this fear.

8:59 If there is a good-looking girl you're afraid to approach,

9:04 get rid of this fear, approach her, practice, do it again and again.

9:07 It's pretty banal...

9:08 but this advice works.

9:11 Fix the underlying problem,

9:12 which is usually at the very bottom is always going to be fear.

9:16 Work on that.

9:17 I don't know.

9:18 Very often, people are trying to escape something in their lives with alcohol.

9:21 What is it they're trying to escape?

9:24 What is this problem?

9:25 You have to get to the bottom of it.

9:28 Your mind is trying to tell you something valuable,

9:32 and instead of addressing it directly, you are flooding it in alcohol,

9:40 which is sort of a spiritual painkiller, but works only temporarily,

9:46 and then you have to pay the debt with interest.

9:51 So, what do you do?

9:52 I mean, you've been in a lot of gatherings, a lot of parties.

9:54 Is there some challenges to saying no?

9:58 For me, not at all.

10:00 I've been always ready to stand my ground

10:03 and say no when I feel something's not right.

10:07 And it's extraordinary how easily we humans

10:12 are affected by what we perceive as majority,

10:16 because nobody since ancient times, since millions of years ago,

10:21 wants to be left out by the tribe.

10:26 We are scared that we won't become accepted anymore,

10:33 which thousands or millions of years ago meant we're going to starve to death.

10:38 So, we have to consciously fight this inclination to be

10:48 agreeable with everything that the majority imposes on you,

10:52 because it's quite clear that many things that the majority...

10:56 in many activities the majority is engaging in are not bringing you any good.

11:03 So, that's another fear you have to face.

11:05 Going into a party and the fear of being the outcast at that party,

11:09 of being different than others at that party,

11:12 at that social gathering in the crowd of humans, be different.

11:16 That's a fear.

11:18 That's a fear, and it's quite irrational if you think about it.

11:21 It was something that made a lot of sense 20,000 years ago.

11:28 It makes zero sense today, because if you think about it,

11:31 if you do the same thing everybody else around you is doing,

11:36 you don't have any competitive advantage,

11:38 and you don't get to become outstanding at some point in your life.

11:45 Yeah, that's one of the things we talked about sort of by way of advice is,

11:50 if you want to be successful in life, you want to be different.

11:55 Definitely.

11:56 And perhaps, I think you said you want to achieve mastery at a niche,

12:00 so find a niche at which you can

12:03 pursue with all your effort and achieve mastery,

12:07 and the niche being different than anything that anybody else is doing.

12:11 Can you explain that a little bit more?

12:14 So, obviously, in order to contribute to the society you're in, to the economy

12:21 of the country you live in, you have to do something that is valuable.

12:26 But if you're doing something that everybody else is doing anyway,

12:31 what's the value of it?

12:34 Now, it sounds easier than it is done to do something that nobody else is doing,

12:39 because we humans are surrounded by all kinds of information

12:43 which makes us want to copy what we are perceiving.

12:47 At the same time, there are so many areas which you can explore

12:51 that have nothing to do with the information you receive on the daily basis.

12:56 So, it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have,

13:03 so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left

13:08 to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important,

13:16 so that you end up consuming the same information,

13:20 the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else.

13:23 But rather, you should be proactive.

13:27 You should deliberately try to set a goal an area that you want to explore,

13:34 and then actively search information that is relevant to this field,

13:40 so that one day, you can become the world's number one expert in this field.

13:48 And it's not quite...

13:50 it's not that difficult to do that.

13:53 You have to just remain consistent, because nobody else is trying to do that.

13:59 Everybody else is just reading the same

14:01 news and discussing the same news every day.

14:04 But this way, they don't get to have a competitive advantage.

14:09 Yeah.

14:09 The majority of the population become slaves to the AI recommender systems,

14:13 AI-driven recommender systems,

14:15 and so the content everybody's fed is the same thing,

14:18 and we all become the same.

14:20 On that point, one of the different things you do is you don't use a phone,

14:26 except occasionally to test Telegram features.

14:28 But I've been with you for two weeks.

14:30 I haven't seen you use a phone at all in the way that most people use a phone,

14:34 like, for their social media.

14:36 So, can you describe your philosophy behind that?

14:40 I don't think a phone is a necessary device.

14:43 I remember growing up, I didn't have a mobile phone.

14:48 When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone.

14:52 When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls.

14:57 I was always in airplane mode or mute.

15:02 I hated the idea of being disturbed.

15:06 My philosophy here is pretty simple.

15:11 I want to define what is important in my life.

15:19 I don't want other people or companies,

15:23 all kinds of organizations telling me what is

15:29 important today and what I should be thinking about.

15:35 Just set up your own agenda, and the phone gets in your way.

15:40 It provides distractions.

15:42 It guides what you should be looking at, what

15:45 you will be looking at, so you don't want that.

15:47 You want to quiet the mind.

15:49 You want to choose what kind of stuff you let inside your mind.

15:55 Yes, because this way I can contribute to the progress of society,

15:59 or at least I like to think this way, and this makes me happier.

16:03 How often do you find quiet time to just

16:05 think and focus deeply on work without any distractions?

16:08 You mentioned to me that you value quiet mornings.

16:13 Yes.

16:14 So the thing I'm trying to do,

16:15 I try to allocate as much time as possible for sleep.

16:20 Now, even if I allocate, say, 11 or 12 hours for sleep,

16:25 I won't sleep for 11 or 12 hours.

16:27 So what I end up doing is I end up lying in bed thinking,

16:33 and some people hate it.

16:35 They say, "Oh, you have to take a sleeping pill," but I never take pills.

16:39 I love these moments.

16:41 I get so many brilliant ideas,

16:44 or at least they seem brilliant to me at the moment,

16:48 while I'm lying in bed, either late in the evening or early in the morning.

16:54 That's my favorite time of the day.

16:56 Sometimes I wake up, I go take a shower, still without the phone.

17:02 Beautiful ideas can come to you while you're doing your morning exercise,

17:08 your morning routine, without a phone.

17:11 If you open your phone first thing in the morning,

17:15 what you end up being is a creature that is

17:19 told what to think about for the rest of the day.

17:23 Same is true in a way if you've

17:27 been consuming news from social media late at night.

17:32 But then how do you define what is important

17:35 and what you really want to become in life?

17:38 Now, I'm not saying you have to completely

17:41 stay away from all sources of information,

17:44 but take some time to think about what's really important

17:47 for you and what you want to change in this world.

17:51 So you definitely try to avoid digital devices

17:53 for as many hours as possible in the morning,

17:56 just to have the quiet thinking time?

17:58 Plus the crazy amounts of push-ups and squats.

18:02 I know it's kind of counterintuitive because I founded

18:07 one of the largest social networks in the world,

18:10 after which I founded the second-largest messaging app in the world,

18:13 and you're supposed to be really connected.

18:18 But the conclusion you reach very early is

18:21 that the more connected and accessible you are, the less productive you are.

18:28 And then how can you run this thing

18:31 if you're constantly bombarded by all kinds of information,

18:35 most of which is irrelevant to the success of what you're trying to build?

18:43 You know, the entire world can be fascinated by a fight,

18:48 a quarrel between the world's richest man and the world's most powerful man.

18:52 But for the vast majority of these people following this saga, it's irrelevant.

18:58 It won't change their lives.

19:01 And in any case, they can't affect it, so it's a bit pointless.

19:06 Of course, there are people who are engaged in activities that require them

19:13 to be up-to-date of everything that's going on, but 99% of people aren't.

19:20 Yeah.

19:20 The internet, social media presents to us drama in such

19:26 a way that we think it's the biggest thing in the world,

19:28 the most important thing in which the tides

19:31 of history will turn when in reality,

19:33 most things will not turn the tides of history.

19:36 And so, I guess our challenge is to figure out what is the timeless thing?

19:41 What is the thing that's happening today that's

19:43 still going to be true in 10, 20 years?

19:46 And from that, decide what you're going to do.

19:50 And that's very difficult on social media 'cause everybody's outraged.

19:53 The news of the day, whatever the quarrel is,

19:56 that's the thing that everyone thinks the world will end because of this thing,

20:01 and then another thing happens the next day.

20:05 And they're trying to influence your emotions.

20:08 And that's how you get into trouble, because you can be forced to make

20:13 conclusions that are not in your best interest.

20:17 I've seen you be, once again, quite stoic about your emotions.

20:20 Do you ever get angry?

20:21 Do you ever get lonely?

20:24 You ever get sad?

20:25 The rollercoaster of human emotion.

20:27 And what do you do with that?

20:29 What do you make difficult decisions?

20:31 I'm a human being like everybody else.

20:33 I do get to experience emotions, and some of them are not very pleasant.

20:37 But I believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us-

20:44 ...to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them.

20:50 Self-discipline is particularly important, because without it,

20:54 how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity

21:02 or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people?

21:08 I normally never have depression.

21:10 I don't remember having depression in the last 20 years at least,

21:14 maybe when I was a teenager.

21:17 But one of the reasons for that is, I start doing things.

21:23 I identify the problem, I can see a solution,

21:28 and I start executing the strategy.

21:33 If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something,

21:40 nothing's ever going to change.

21:43 And people often make this mistake, thinking, "Oh,

21:46 I should just have some rest and then regain energy." This is not how it works.

21:53 You gain energy by doing something.

21:56 So if you start doing something, then it happens.

21:59 You feel motivated, you feel inspired,

22:02 and then ultimately you do something else, a little bit more,

22:07 a little bit more, and in a few years,

22:09 who knows, you may end up achieving great things.

22:12 Yeah, that's the thing that people really confuse.

22:14 If you're stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really,

22:20 really, really, really don't wanna do anything, just do something.

22:24 Try to make progress because the good feeling comes in the end of that.

22:28 The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.

22:33 Exactly.

22:34 And going to the gym is a good example.

22:37 There are many days when you don't want to start working out,

22:40 but you have to overcome this initial reluctance,

22:45 and then you get to a point that you enjoy it, and you think, "Oh my God,

22:51 it was such a good idea to come to the gym

22:53 today." But it's similar to pretty much every activity.

22:57 You get to write some code,

23:00 write a small piece of code first, and then you get inspired.

23:05 Then you come up with more ideas.

23:07 You need to write a novel or just write the program.

23:13 This is pretty obvious, and it's not a secret,

23:17 but because we are bombarded with all kinds of information

23:21 that is not really important for us in terms of becoming successful,

23:26 we often forget the important things, and this is one of them.

23:32 We've been working out every single day.

23:35 You have been working out for many years pretty intensively,

23:40 so I think a lot of people would

23:43 love to know what's your perfect daily workout regimen,

23:48 let's say on a daily, on a weekly basis?

23:51 I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning,

23:54 and in addition to that, I go to the gym normally five or six times a week,

24:00 spending between one and two hours every day.

24:04 So push-ups and squats are still a big part of your routine?

24:07 Yes, this is how I start my day.

24:09 I'm not sure they do a lot in terms of changing your body,

24:14 but they're definitely a good way to practice self-discipline,

24:20 because you don't want to do these push-ups in the morning most of the days.

24:24 Squats are particularly boring.

24:26 They're not that hard.

24:28 They're just boring.

24:29 But you overcome it, and then it's much easier to start doing

24:37 other things related to your work, for example.

24:41 When I can, I also take an ice

24:45 bath because it's another exercise of self-discipline.

24:47 I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle,

24:51 the muscle of self-discipline.

24:53 You know, not your biceps or your pecs or anything else,

25:00 because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.

25:07 Yeah, everything else becomes easy.

25:09 We should mention, I went with you to Banya,

25:12 and I think it's fair to say you're nuts in terms of how much you can handle,

25:20 and I didn't even see the worst of it.

25:22 Can you just speak to your crazy escapades in the Banya,

25:25 what value you get from it, so both the heat and the cold?

25:31 I don't know if it's crazy.

25:33 I think it's quite natural and normal by this time.

25:36 But maybe I just got used to it.

25:39 So Banya is this extreme kind of sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans.

25:49 But it is done in a way that maximizes heat,

25:54 and they also use all kinds of herbs and branches,

25:58 and it's a much more holistic and natural experience.

26:02 Then a necessary part of it is you get the cold plunge, and then you go back.

26:11 And again, this is one of those things

26:14 that maybe in the moment is not always that pleasant,

26:18 particularly if you go to extreme temperatures.

26:21 You don't feel great.

26:23 I don't always feel great, but this feeling is passing.

26:27 It's only a few minutes.

26:30 Same with the ice bath.

26:32 You have to suffer a bit,

26:36 and then you get to feel great for hours and days after.

26:42 What's more, it gives you these long-term health benefits.

26:45 In a way, you can look at it as alcohol in reverse.

26:51 Alcohol will give you this short,

26:53 fleeting pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours,

26:58 but then you will be paying for it with long-term negative consequences.

27:05 I'd rather do Banya and ice bath.

27:09 We swam the length of a large lake in France a couple times.

27:12 Can you talk through why you value these multi-hour swims?

27:17 I love swimming for hours.

27:20 The longest I swam was five and a half hours in Finland, it was quite cold.

27:26 I got lost in the process, barely could find my way back.

27:32 But the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after.

27:38 You're shaking a little bit, but you feel great after.

27:40 We cross a huge lake, and I cross many lakes, Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake.

27:46 And every time, you feel this achievement which makes you happy,

27:53 makes you feel strong, and then you're more ready to other challenges.

27:59 And of course, when you know you are going

28:03 to start a journey that will last a few hours, you're reluctant to do it.

28:09 But you swim for 10 minutes, and then for 20 minutes, and then for 30 minutes,

28:16 and it teaches you this incredible patience that I think

28:20 is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life.

28:24 And it's pretty meditative, lake versus ocean.

28:27 Yes.

28:28 And you don't have to go too fast.

28:31 You can be slow and enjoy the moment.

28:34 Until you get lost, and it's five and a half hours.

28:36 Did you panic if you were gonna be able to find the shore or find your way out?

28:40 Not really.

28:41 I'm a reasonably stress-resilient person.

28:43 I didn't panic at that moment,

28:46 and there were worse swims I had that were shorter,

28:49 but involved accidents, and you know about some of them.

28:53 So that wasn't the worst by far.

28:56 But an important thing about swimming and physical activity

29:00 in general is that it makes your mind clear,

29:05 and your thinking process is becoming more efficient.

29:10 Because at the end of the day,

29:13 the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar

29:18 and oxygen our heart can push through blood to our brain.

29:22 So how can you make this go faster,

29:24 or how do you make your lungs more efficient?

29:27 How do you make your heart more efficient in doing that?

29:33 Physical activity is the only way I know of.

29:37 So it's not just staying healthy or trying to look good.

29:45 It's also being productive.

29:49 It's also being stress-resilient.

29:53 All of these qualities are necessary if you want to run a large company,

29:59 if you want to start a company.

30:02 I'm surprised, when I started doing this more than 10 years ago,

30:09 that more CEOs didn't engage in sports.

30:14 The situation changed in the last several years, which is great.

30:17 Because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago,

30:20 there was this stereotype that if you were strong,

30:24 you must be not very smart, and vice versa, which is complete lunacy.

30:30 Very often, these two things go together.

30:34 So for you, working out is not just about staying healthy.

30:36 It's actually valuable for the work that you do as a tech leader,

30:40 as an engineer, as a technologist?

30:43 Oh, yes.

30:45 When I can't train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping on me.

30:54 Like...

30:57 So even in situations where I'm constrained,

30:58 I can't go to the gym, I just keep doing push-ups.

31:03 I just keep doing squats.

31:06 Yeah.

31:06 I mean, that's the cool thing about bodyweight exercise,

31:09 you can just do it anywhere.

31:12 You could just pop off 50 or 100 push-ups before a meeting.

31:16 Don't you feel weird when you have a day without physical activity?

31:21 Yeah.

31:21 If I go a day without doing push-ups, at the very minimum, that's a shitty day.

31:27 And if you can do pull-ups, it's even better.

31:30 Yeah.

31:30 I gotta ask you about your diet, too.

31:32 No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda,

31:36 intermittent fasting sometimes once a day only, sometimes a couple times a day.

31:40 So take me through your philosophy on the no sugar, no soda, just clean food.

31:48 Well, sugar is pretty easy, because it's addictive.

31:51 The more you consume sugar, the more you want it, the hungrier you get.

31:57 So if you want to stay efficient and healthy, why consume processed sugar?

32:03 You'll just end up snacking all the time.

32:08 Intermittent fasting,

32:09 eating only within six hours or not eating for 18 hours every

32:17 day also brings structure into your day and into your eating habits,

32:26 so you don't crave sugar anymore.

32:28 Because, you know, if you eat sugar and then you're unable to snack,

32:33 you're just punishing yourself.

32:35 I read a few books on longevity.

32:39 I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is harmful.

32:46 Now, I'm not militant about sugar.

32:50 You can eat berries, fruit, if you feel your body needs it.

32:56 But it's not true to think it's necessary to consume sweet things,

33:03 not for children, not for adults.

33:07 Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20 years ago,

33:10 because I just felt heavy every time I had it.

33:15 So I guess it's individual.

33:16 It's my metabolism, my digestive system isn't agreeing with this kind of food.

33:25 So I normally eat seafood of all kinds and vegetables.

33:31 This is the basic source of calories for me.

33:37 Yeah, and like all things you said, short-term pleasure isn't worth your future.

33:41 So, a lot of things we all know,

33:43 that alcohol is destructive to the body, tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar.

33:48 But society puts that on you, makes it very difficult to avoid.

33:53 So, I guess it all boils down to just discipline.

33:56 Yes, and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you're experiencing.

34:03 If you're experiencing a headache,

34:06 one solution would be to take a pill, and then the headache disappears.

34:13 What this pill would actually do, in most cases,

34:17 it would mute the consequence, your feeling of pain.

34:22 It's a painkiller.

34:25 It will not eliminate the root cause, so you have to ask yourself,

34:29 "What is it that is causing this headache?

34:32 Do I need to drink some water?

34:35 Is the air quality here bad?

34:38 Do I need to start getting more sleep?

34:41 Is there something wrong with people around me that are stressing

34:46 me out?" There must be some reason why you're experiencing a headache.

34:50 But if you take a pill, you're not removing this reason.

34:55 You're actually making it worse, because this harmful factor is still there.

35:02 It's like you're piloting a helicopter, and there are some red signals,

35:07 some red lamps start to blink and it starts producing bad, unpleasant noise.

35:13 What would you do?

35:15 You would try to figure out the cause and eliminate it.

35:19 Maybe there is some mountain next to you and you have to avoid it,

35:23 or you take a hammer and smash the signal.

35:28 I think the good answer is quite obvious.

35:30 So, why are we constantly doing this regardless?

35:33 Well, because everybody else is doing it,

35:35 because there's a whole industry trying to persuade

35:38 you that this is the right thing to do.

35:42 So it's incredibly important to analyze yourself

35:45 and try to get to the bottom of things.

35:49 So, you generally try to avoid all pills, all pharmaceutical products?

35:53 Yes.

35:53 I've been staying away from all of that since I became an adult.

35:59 When you're a teenager, your mom would typically say,

36:02 "We need to take this pill,

36:05 otherwise, you know, the world collapses." Once I became a grown-up, I said,

36:10 "No, I don't think that the producers of pills are incentivized in the right

36:17 way." They are not really interested in eliminating the root of the problem.

36:24 They would rather have me dependent on the pills

36:30 they're producing so that I could buy them forever.

36:33 And then I also realized...

36:35 No, I'm not saying that you should never take pills.

36:40 There are obviously some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics,

36:47 for example, so I'm not suggesting we go back to the Middle Ages.

36:55 But what I'm saying is we overuse pills.

36:59 Yeah, it's always good to study and deeply

37:01 understand the incentives under which the world

37:03 operates so that you don't get swept up

37:06 into the forces that operate under these incentives.

37:08 And big pharma is certainly one of them.

37:12 Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive to keep

37:15 the problem going versus solving the problem.

37:17 It's wise.

37:18 Well, this is something I practice every day.

37:22 I read some piece of news, and I ask myself,

37:27 "Who benefits from me reading this?" then you can

37:32 end up coming to this conclusion that maybe 95%

37:36 of things we read in the news have been written

37:40 and published because somebody wanted you to buy some product,

37:49 support some political cause, fight some war, donate some money,

37:54 just do something that would benefit other people.

37:58 And this is not a problem to support causes that you

38:03 truly believe in, as long as it was your intentional choice,

38:08 and you're not being manipulated into fighting other people's wars.

38:14 And that takes us back to the original

38:15 thing we started talking about, which is freedom.

38:17 One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought

38:20 is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you.

38:27 That's really important to realize.

38:30 The content you consume, especially on the internet,

38:34 when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind,

38:39 you have to disconnect yourself and be very proactive,

38:42 understanding what the bias is, what the incentives are,

38:45 so you can think clearly, independently, and objectively.

38:51 And again, it ties back with restraint from alcohol.

38:57 Because if your mind is clouded, how can you analyze yourself?

39:02 You'll always be dependent on opinions of others.

39:07 You will always follow the mainstream,

39:11 and w- then whatever the authorities or whoever in charge will tell you,

39:17 you'll believe it, because you don't have a tool

39:22 of your own to rely on to come to your own conclusions.

39:27 I have to ask you, this is something that came up.

39:30 You don't watch porn.

39:31 I don't think I've heard you talk about this before.

39:34 What's the philosophy behind not watching porn?

39:36 You know, there's a lot of people that talk about

39:39 porn in general having a very negative effect on young men,

39:44 on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality,

39:47 and how they get into relationships, and all that kind of stuff.

39:51 So what's your philosophy in not consuming porn?

39:55 I don't watch porn because I just feel it's a surrogate,

39:59 a substitute for the real thing that is not necessary in my life.

40:08 If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy,

40:16 some inspiration, to a fleeting moment of pleasure.

40:20 It doesn't make sense.

40:21 And i- in any case, as I said, it's not the real thing.

40:26 So as long as you can access the real thing, you don't need to watch porn.

40:32 But then, if you can't access the real thing, it's...

40:36 you shouldn't watch porn as well,

40:38 because it means there's some deficiency in your life,

40:42 some problem that you have to overcome.

40:46 Yeah, analyze the underlying cause.

40:49 And again, this goes back to the theme

40:52 of investing in a long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure.

40:58 There's a theme to the way you approach life.

41:03 I try to be strategic.

41:04 I try to act under the assumption that I'm

41:07 not going to die in one hour from now, and I'm going to stick around for a bit,

41:13 despite the fact that we are all mortal.

41:15 So why would I exchange the mid and long-term for the short-term?

41:21 Doesn't make any sense.

41:23 Quick pause, bathroom break.

41:25 Yeah, let's take a break.

41:26 All right, we took a break, and now we're back.

41:29 I gotta ask you about Telegram, the company.

41:30 I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers that work there.

41:34 Telegram runs lean.

41:36 Relative to other technology companies

41:38 that achieve the scale that Telegram does, it has very few employees.

41:42 So how many people are on the core team, let's say the core engineering team?

41:49 The core engineering team is about 40 people.

41:53 This includes backend, frontend designers, system administrators.

42:03 Can you speak to the philosophy behind running a company with so few employees?

42:10 Well, what we realized really early is that quantity

42:14 of employees doesn't translate to quality of the product they produce.

42:18 In many cases, it's the opposite.

42:24 If you have too many people,

42:26 they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate,

42:28 and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating

42:34 the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other.

42:41 The other problem with having too many employees is

42:45 that some of them won't get enough work to do.

42:50 And if they don't get enough work to do,

42:53 they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence.

42:55 They're still there, they're still getting the salary,

42:58 but they don't do anything.

43:00 And if they don't do anything, more often than not,

43:04 they will start trying to find their purpose elsewhere,

43:10 maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work,

43:16 but by finding problems that don't exist within the team.

43:22 And that can disrupt the team and the mood inside it even further.

43:31 Also, when you intentionally don't allow some of your team

43:37 members to hire more people to help them,

43:42 they will be forced to automate things.

43:45 In our case, you know, we have tens of thousands of servers around the world,

43:56 almost 100,000, distributed across several continents and data centers.

44:01 If you try to manage this system manually without automation,

44:10 you will probably end up hiring thousands of people,

44:12 tens of thousands of people.

44:14 But if you rely on algorithms and the team is

44:18 forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it,

44:23 then it becomes much more scalable, and much more efficient,

44:27 and interestingly, much more reliable as well.

44:31 And more resilient to the changing geopolitics,

44:34 to the changing technology, all of that.

44:37 Because if you automate the distributed aspect

44:41 of the data storage and all the compute,

44:43 then that's going to be resilient to everything the world throws at you.

44:47 I suppose if you have people managing all of it, it becomes stale quickly.

44:54 Yes.

44:55 Humans are attack vectors.

44:57 And if you have a distributed system that runs itself automatically,

45:03 you have a a chance at increasing the security and speed of your service.

45:09 and speed of your service.

45:11 This is what we did with Telegram, while also making it much more reliable.

45:18 Because if some part of the network goes down,

45:21 can still switch to the other parts of it.

45:26 Yeah.

45:26 One of the big ways to protect user privacy is that you store the data.

45:31 The infrastructure side of Telegram

45:33 infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed

45:35 across many legal jurisdictions many

45:37 legal jurisdictions with the decryption keys.

45:39 So it's encrypted in the cloud, keys.

45:41 So it's encrypted in the cloud,

45:43 the decryption keys are split and kept in different locations so

45:46 that no single government or entity entity can access the data.

45:51 Can you explain the strength of this approach?

45:55 The way we designed Telegram is we never wanted to have any humans,

46:04 any employees have any access to private messaging data.

46:09 That's why since 2012, when we've been trying to come up with this design,

46:15 been trying to come up with this design,

46:17 we always invested a lot of effort invested a lot

46:20 of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it.

46:23 into making sure that nobody can mess with it.

46:25 Like if you hire an employee employee or any of the existing employee,

46:28 they can't break the system they can't break the system

46:31 in a way that would allow them to access messages of users.

46:34 access messages of users.

46:35 And then of course, we launched end-to-end encrypted

46:37 messaging end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected,

46:40 but it has certain limitations, but it has certain limitations,

46:43 so you still have to rely on encrypted cloud.

46:45 So an interesting encrypted cloud.

46:47 So an interesting engineering challenge was how do

46:51 you make sure that no point of failure can be created that no point of failure

46:55 can be created within your team or outside?

46:58 So no employee can even access user messages.

47:00 So that's the thing.

47:01 You know, we talk about encryption, thing.

47:02 You know, we talk about encryption, we talk about privacy,

47:04 we talk about security, all these kinds of things.

47:06 all these kinds of things.

47:07 I think the number one thing that people are concerned about,

47:09 about which there's also about which there's also misinformation,

47:12 is about private messages.

47:14 So Telegram is very, very protective private messages.

47:17 So Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users.

47:21 So you're saying saying employees never can access the private messages.

47:30 Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever

47:32 accessed private user messages in the past?

47:33 agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?

47:38 No, never.

47:39 Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone,

47:42 a single private message with anyone,

47:44 including governments and intelligence services.

47:46 including governments and intelligence services.

47:48 If you try to access any server in any

47:51 of the data center data center locations, it's all encrypted.

47:55 You can extract all the hard drives and analyze it, but you won't get anything.

48:01 It's all encrypted in a way that is undecipherable.

48:04 It's all encrypted in the way that is undecipherable.

48:08 That was very important for us.

48:11 That's why we can say with confidence there hasn't been ever a leakage of data,

48:19 any leak of data from Telegram.

48:23 Not in terms of private messages, not in terms of, say, contact lists.

48:28 Do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user

48:34 private messages where you might share user

48:36 private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies?

48:40 No.

48:40 We designed the system in a way that it's impossible.

48:43 impossible.

48:43 It would require us to change the system, and we won't do that because we made

48:46 a promise to our and we won't do that because

48:49 we made a promise to our We would rather

48:51 shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.

48:57 So that's one of the principles you operate under:

48:59 you're going to protect user privacy.

49:03 I think it's fundamental.

49:05 Without the right to privacy, people can't feel fully free and protected.

49:11 I mean, this is a good place to ask.

49:13 I'm sure you're pressured by all kinds of people,

49:16 all kinds of organizations to share private data.

49:20 Where do you find the strength and the fearlessness to say no to everybody,

49:28 including powerful intelligence agencies,

49:30 including powerful governments, influential powerful people?

49:34 I guess part of it is just me being me.

49:37 I stood up for myself and for my values since I was a little kid.

49:45 I had issues with my teachers because

49:48 I would point out their mistakes during classes.

49:51 And at the end of the day,

49:53 what's important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose.

49:57 They can think they blackmail you with something,

49:59 they can threaten you with something.

50:01 But what is it they really can do to you?

50:04 Worst case, they can kill you.

50:06 But that brings us back to the first part of our discussion.

50:10 But that brings us back to the first part of our discussion.

50:16 There's no point living your life in fear.

50:21 As for Telegram, it's incredibly successful.

50:24 But if we lose one market or two markets,

50:27 or pretty much all of the markets, I don't care that much.

50:32 It won't affect me, it won't affect my lifestyle in any way.

50:35 I will still be doing my push-ups, you know?

50:40 So...

50:43 You don't like encryption, you don't like privacy,

50:45 you think you should ban encryption in your country,

50:49 like the European Union is trying to do now for all the member states.

50:54 Well, go ahead and do that.

50:56 We'll just quit this market.

50:58 We won't operate there.

50:59 It's not that important.

51:00 They all think that somehow we profit from their citizens

51:05 and the only goal tech companies have is extracting revenues.

51:10 And it's true, most tech companies are like this.

51:15 But there are projects like Telegram which are a bit different.

51:18 And I'm not sure they realize that.

51:23 So for you, the value of maintaining your integrity

51:25 in relation to your principles is more important than anything else.

51:31 And of course, we should say that you also have

51:34 full ability and control to do just that because you,

51:38 Pavel Durov, own 100% of Telegram.

51:42 So there's nobody else with a say on this question.

51:48 There are no shareholders, which is quite unique.

51:51 Very unique.

51:52 I don't think there's anything even close to that in any major tech company.

51:56 And this allows us to operate the way we operate.

52:02 build this project and maintain it

52:06 based on certain fundamental principles which,

52:09 by the way, I think everybody believes in.

52:13 I think the right to privacy is included in the constitution of most countries,

52:18 at least most Western countries.

52:20 But it's still under attack almost every week,

52:24 and it often starts with well-meaning proposals: "Oh, we have to fight crime.

52:32 We have to do that.

52:33 We have to protect the children." But at the end of the day,

52:36 the result is the same.

52:38 People lose their right to such a fundamental thing as privacy.

52:42 They sometimes lose their right to express themselves, to assemble,

52:46 and this is a slippery slope that we

52:49 witnessed in pretty much every autocratic country,

52:52 or country that used to be free and then became autocratic.

52:55 No dictator in the world ever said,

52:59 "Let's just strip you away from your rights because I want more power to myself

53:07 and I want you to be miserable."

53:10 They all justified it with very reasonable-sounding justifications,

53:16 and then it came in stages, gradually.

53:21 And after a few years,

53:22 people would find themselves in a position when they're helpless.

53:27 They can't protest.

53:28 Every message they send is monitored.

53:34 They can't assemble.

53:37 It's over.

53:39 So you see Telegram as a place that people from all walks of life,

53:42 from every nation can have a place to speak their mind, to have a voice.

53:49 In the context, in the geopolitical context

53:52 that you're mentioning that governments when they become autocratic,

53:55 naturally it's the way of the world,

53:58 human nature and the nature of governments, they become more censorious.

54:02 They begin to censor, and always justifying it in their minds

54:06 perhaps assuming that they are doing good.

54:09 Perhaps some of them assume they are doing good, but interestingly,

54:13 it always results in the state accumulating

54:17 more power at the expense of the individual.

54:22 And then where does it stop?

54:25 You know, we humans are not very good at finding the right balance,

54:31 and in this case, the right balance between chaos and order,

54:36 between freedom and structure.

54:39 We tend to go to extremes.

54:44 I think you still consider yourself a libertarian.

54:46 There is something about government that always,

54:49 over time, naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy,

54:54 and in that machine of bureaucracy, it accumulates more and more power.

55:00 And it's not always that some one individual member of that bureaucracy is

55:08 the one that corrupts the initial

55:09 principles on which the government was founded,

55:11 but just something over time, you forget.

55:14 You begin to censor.

55:16 You begin to limit the freedoms of the individual,

55:21 the ability of the individuals to speak, to have a voice, to vote.

55:26 It just gradually happens that way.

55:29 And the government is not some abstract notion.

55:31 The government consists of people, and these people have goals.

55:37 They would naturally be inclined to increase their level of influence,

55:43 to have more subordinates, to have more resources,

55:48 and that's how you end up in an endless loop of, you know,

55:54 ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation,

55:58 which ultimately just suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech.

56:06 So, you do want to have very,

56:10 very strict limitations on the extent the government

56:15 can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.

56:19 Ironically, you don't have those limitations.

56:22 You're supposed to, in all countries which are considered to be free.

56:29 It's supposed to be the Constitution that protects everybody,

56:34 but interestingly, it doesn't always work this way.

56:37 They are able to find very tricky phrasings in order to carve out exceptions,

56:46 and then the exception becomes the rule.

56:49 On this topic, I'd love to talk to you about the recent

56:54 saga of you being arrested in August of last year in France.

56:57 I think I should say that it's one of the worst overreaches of power

57:04 I've seen as applied to a tech leader in recent history, in all history.

57:12 So it's tragic, but I think speaks to the thing that we've been talking about.

57:17 So maybe can you tell the full saga what happened?

57:22 You arrive in France...

57:24 I arrived in France last year in August just for a short two-day trip,

57:31 and then I see a dozen armed policemen greeting me and asking me to follow them.

57:39 They read me a list of something like 15

57:45 serious crimes that I'm accused of, which was mind-boggling.

57:54 At first, I thought there must be some mistake.

57:59 Then I realized they're being serious,

58:03 and they're accusing me of all possible crimes

58:05 that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed, or some users.

58:12 And they think I should be responsible for this, which again,

58:19 like you said, is something that never happened in the history of this planet.

58:23 No country, not even an authoritarian one,

58:29 did that to any tech leader, at least at this scale.

58:37 There are good reasons for that, because

58:40 you're sacrificing a big part of your economic

58:43 growth by sending these kinds of messages to the business and tech community.

58:50 So they put me in a police car, and I found myself in police custody.

59:01 A small room, no windows.

59:06 Just a narrow bed made of concrete.

59:12 I spent almost four days there.

59:17 In the process, I had to answer some questions of the policemen.

59:22 They were interested in how Telegram operates.

59:31 Most of it is public anyway,

59:34 and I was struck by very limited understanding, or should I say,

59:41 even a lack of understanding on behalf of the people

59:47 who initiated this investigation against me about how technology works,

59:53 how encryption works, how social media work.

59:57 I mean, there's something darkly poetic about a tech founder

1:00:00 of a platform where a billion people are communicating with each other,

1:00:04 and you're on concrete, no pillow, for days, no windows.

1:00:09 It's like a book.

1:00:10 I mean, it reminds me, I'm a huge fan of Franz Kafka,

1:00:13 and he's written about the absurdity of these kinds of situations,

1:00:16 hence the Kafkaesque stories.

1:00:18 There's a story literally about the situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted,

1:00:24 called "The Trial," where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody

1:00:28 can explain and is stuck in the judicial system for a long time.

1:00:33 Fascinatingly, in that story,

1:00:36 neither the person arrested nor any individual member

1:00:40 of the system itself fully understands what is happening.

1:00:44 Nobody can truly answer the questions, and eventually the person, spoiler alert,

1:00:50 is mentally broken by the whole system,

1:00:53 which is what bureaucracy can do in its most absurd forms.

1:00:57 It breaks the spirit, the human spirit latent in all of us.

1:01:02 That's the negative side of bureaucracy.

1:01:05 I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing,

1:01:11 because if this was a good faith attempt to fix an issue,

1:01:19 there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally,

1:01:26 voice their concerns,

1:01:27 and solve any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic,

1:01:34 the way every other country on this planet solves its problems,

1:01:40 including with Telegram, and we did it dozens of times.

1:01:43 Yeah, you have a nice page showing this.

1:01:45 This is kind of like details that most people don't really think about.

1:01:50 But Telegram was at the forefront of moderating CSAM and terrorist groups.

1:01:59 There's a nice page, telegram.org/moderation,

1:02:02 that shows just the incredible amount of groups and channels

1:02:06 that are engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM activity that are blocked,

1:02:12 actively blocked, found and blocked by Telegram.

1:02:15 And a lot of this work, like you said,

1:02:17 because of the automation that's done with machine learning,

1:02:20 just the scale is insane.

1:02:21 This is stuff that most noobs like me who

1:02:24 are just chatting it up on Telegram don't think about.

1:02:26 But there's just an immense number of people

1:02:31 essentially doing things that violate the law on there,

1:02:36 and you have to find them immediately and catch it.

1:02:38 I guess all platforms have to deal with it,

1:02:40 and Telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that kind of content.

1:02:45 And what you're saying is the French government had no idea.

1:02:51 Do they even know what machine learning is?

1:02:54 It's a concept that is challenging to explain to them,

1:02:57 but I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this investigation.

1:03:01 That's my hope.

1:03:03 In any case, you're right.

1:03:05 I mean, if you look at Telegram,

1:03:07 we've been fighting harmful content that is publicly

1:03:12 distributed on our platform since 10 years ago,

1:03:17 actually, since the time we launched public channels on Telegram.

1:03:22 And since something like eight years ago,

1:03:27 we had daily transparency reports on how many channels related

1:03:34 to child abuse or terrorist propaganda we've taken down daily.

1:03:41 Every day, we've taken like, maybe hundreds of them.

1:03:47 And if you include all kinds of content that we remove,

1:03:53 all the accounts, groups, channels,

1:03:56 posts, that would amount to millions of pieces of content every week,

1:04:02 hundreds of thousands every day.

1:04:05 And then somebody would read the newspaper,

1:04:08 get enraged because they would read something about child porn,

1:04:12 and this is a subject that is very emotionally charged,

1:04:19 and start doing something not based on data and logical thinking and laws,

1:04:30 but based on emotions driven from inaccurate input.

1:04:36 Yeah, I think we should make it pretty clear that there's no world,

1:04:39 no reason that the French government should have arrested you, but here we are.

1:04:42 That's the situation you're in.

1:04:43 So to be clear, you have to show up in front of a judge.

1:04:47 Now all of this is beautifully absurd.

1:04:49 It would be hilarious if it wasn't extremely serious.

1:04:51 You have to show up in front of a judge every certain amount of time.

1:04:58 And what is that experience like?

1:05:02 In France, they have this role of investigative judge.

1:05:04 I don't think you have it in many other places in the world.

1:05:08 It means I'm not on trial, I'm being investigated.

1:05:14 And in France, it's not just the police or prosecutor asking me questions,

1:05:18 it's a judge, which, in my experience,

1:05:22 is more like still a prosecutor, but it's called a judge,

1:05:28 and that makes it harder to appeal.

1:05:31 So if you're limited in, say, countries where you can travel,

1:05:36 then to appeal that restriction will take you a lot of time.

1:05:39 The investigation itself should have never been started.

1:05:45 It's an absurd and harmful way of solving

1:05:53 an issue as complicated as regulating social media.

1:06:00 It's just the wrong tool.

1:06:04 So we objected and appealed the investigation itself.

1:06:11 We did last year, I believe.

1:06:13 We're still not even given a hearing date for the appeal,

1:06:21 because the process is painfully slow, not just for me but for everybody,

1:06:29 which made me realize the system may be broken on many levels.

1:06:35 You have other entrepreneurs affected by the French

1:06:40 justice system telling me horror stories about their experiences,

1:06:48 where businesses got paralyzed by very unnecessary actions

1:06:54 of investigative judges that ended up being unjustified and biased.

1:07:01 And in the end, you can perhaps solve it

1:07:06 when you reach a higher court and you'll get justice,

1:07:12 but you'll lose a lot of time and energy in the process.

1:07:18 So this is the only thing that is, I hope, different,

1:07:23 and will be different in this case compared to the story you told from Kafka.

1:07:31 I mean, but it does, as Kafka describes, break a lot of people with time.

1:07:35 So when do you hope...

1:07:37 We should say that you were for a long time not allowed to travel out of France.

1:07:41 Now you can travel to Dubai.

1:07:45 We're now in Dubai.

1:07:46 Got to meet many of the people that work at Telegram.

1:07:51 Telegram is headquartered in Dubai.

1:07:52 But you're not allowed to travel anywhere else.

1:07:55 When do you think you're coming to Texas to hang out with me over there?

1:08:01 That's a hard question to answer because it doesn't depend on just my actions.

1:08:08 I can just say this: I am patient.

1:08:13 I will not let this limitation on my freedom dictate my actions.

1:08:25 I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced

1:08:34 firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like,

1:08:39 at least during those four days in police custody when you are stuck,

1:08:47 just stuck, unable to communicate with people that are important to you.

1:08:56 When you don't even know what's going

1:08:59 on in the world in relation to you personally.

1:09:04 So I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future.

1:09:08 I can't say that I'm pessimistic.

1:09:10 I think we've been able to gradually remove most

1:09:16 of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August.

1:09:23 If the French government or the French intelligence agency

1:09:27 want to have a backdoor to access private user messages,

1:09:34 what would you say to them?

1:09:36 Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?

1:09:43 Nothing.

1:09:44 My response would be very clear...

1:09:49 but it won't be very polite, so I'm not sure.

1:09:53 It's good to say here.

1:09:55 It's good to say because you're wearing a tie and-- Yeah.

1:09:58 This is a serious adult gentleman-like program.

1:10:01 But it is a concern that people have

1:10:04 is when you have so much pressure from governments,

1:10:07 that over time, they'll wear you down and you'll give in.

1:10:12 And then, of course, other places use that as propaganda, try to attack you.

1:10:17 You get attacked by basically every nation.

1:10:19 So it's a difficult medium in which to operate.

1:10:24 It's difficult to be you,

1:10:26 fighting for freedom, fighting to preserve people's privacy.

1:10:28 But is there something you could say to reassure people that you're

1:10:32 not going to sacrifice any of the principles that you've just expressed?

1:10:38 If the French government just keeps wearing you down?

1:10:42 I think the French government is losing this battle.

1:10:45 This battle is wrong.

1:10:48 The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become.

1:11:00 And I think I have proven that in the last several months,

1:11:03 when there were attempts to use my situation, being stuck here in France,

1:11:10 by approaching me and asking me to do things in other countries,

1:11:16 blocking certain channels, changing the way Telegram works.

1:11:21 And not only I refused, I told the world about it,

1:11:25 and I'm going to keep telling the world about every instance any government,

1:11:33 in this case, in particular, the French government,

1:11:38 tries to force me to do anything.

1:11:42 And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure,

1:11:48 because if you submit to this pressure and agree with something

1:11:53 that is fundamentally wrong and violates the rights of other people as well,

1:12:00 you become broken inside.

1:12:01 You become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.

1:12:10 So, I wouldn't do that.

1:12:12 There are probably other people in the world

1:12:13 that would consider that, but I don't care.

1:12:17 Telegram disappears, too.

1:12:19 Something people don't understand,

1:12:21 including in these intelligence services or governments.

1:12:26 I don't care.

1:12:28 I'll be fine.

1:12:30 If they put me into prison for 20 years, which,

1:12:37 let's be clear, it's not something that I think is realistic,

1:12:42 but let's just think about it as a hypothetical situation,

1:12:51 I would rather starve myself to death and die there,

1:12:55 reboot the whole game, than do something stupid.

1:13:01 Let me ask you about an example of the thing you're talking about.

1:13:04 Tell the saga of Telegram in the Romanian election.

1:13:07 So, amidst all this, you are still fighting to preserve the freedom of speech.

1:13:12 What happened, and what were some of the decisions you had to make?

1:13:16 So, when I got stuck in France, unable to leave the country for a few months,

1:13:24 I was offered to meet the head of state

1:13:28 foreign intelligence services through a person I know quite well.

1:13:33 He's actually a well-known tech entrepreneur in France, and he's well-connected,

1:13:38 and he said, "This guy wants to meet you." I said, "Okay, fine.

1:13:42 Let's do that, but I'm not promising anything." I took the meeting,

1:13:46 and in this meeting, I was asked to restrict what I see

1:13:54 as restriction of freedom of speech in Romania.

1:13:59 I don't know if you follow the whole saga with the Romanian elections.

1:14:06 They had presidential elections last year.

1:14:09 The results were- got canceled.

1:14:13 Now, Romania, at that point when I had this meeting,

1:14:16 was preparing for a new presidential election.

1:14:19 The conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was

1:14:26 supportive of, so they asked me whether I would be shutting down,

1:14:32 or ready to shut down,

1:14:35 channels on Telegram that supported the conservative candidate,

1:14:40 or protest against the pro-European candidates,

1:14:45 so they called the guy they liked.

1:14:49 I said, "Look, if there is no violation of the rules of Telegram,

1:14:53 which are quite clear, you can't call to violence.

1:14:57 But if it's a peaceful demonstration,

1:15:00 if it's a peaceful debate, we can't do this.

1:15:05 It would be political censorship.

1:15:07 We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world,

1:15:13 including in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East.

1:15:17 We're not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe,

1:15:22 no matter who's asking us." I was very clear

1:15:26 to the guy who was the head of French intelligence.

1:15:30 I said, "If you think that because I'm stuck here,

1:15:33 you can tell me what to do, you're very wrong.

1:15:38 I would rather do the opposite every time." And in a way, that's what I did.

1:15:48 I um...

1:15:49 had a small debate with him about the morality of this, this whole thing,

1:15:56 and then at a certain point,

1:15:58 just disclosed the content of this entire conversation,

1:16:01 because I never signed an NDA.

1:16:03 I don't ever sign NDAs with any people like that.

1:16:06 I want to be able to tell the world what's going on.

1:16:12 And that's quite shocking to me, that you would have people in the French

1:16:21 government trying to get an advantage of this situation.

1:16:26 Of course, if, you know,

1:16:28 they had nothing to do with the start of this investigation itself,

1:16:35 and use it to reach their political or geopolitical goals.

1:16:43 I consider it an attempt to humiliate

1:16:48 myself personally and millions of Telegram users collectively.

1:16:53 And it's quite strange that the same agency asked

1:16:56 us to do certain things in Moldova as well.

1:16:59 do certain things in Moldova as well.

1:17:01 So even before that, I think it was October of last year, or September.

1:17:06 I was arrested in Paris in late August,

1:17:12 and then again approached through an intermediary,

1:17:15 and asked, "Would you mind taking down some channels in Moldova?

1:17:19 Because there is an election going on, and we're

1:17:24 afraid there's going to be some interference with these elections.

1:17:30 Could you please connect with the representatives of the government

1:17:37 of Moldova and take care of it?" We said,

1:17:41 "We're happy to take a look at it and see

1:17:43 if there is content there that is in violation

1:17:47 of our rules." And they sent us a list rules."

1:17:49 And they sent us a list of channels and bots.

1:17:52 bots.

1:17:52 Some of them were...

1:17:53 So it was a very short list,

1:17:55 and some of these channels and bots were in violation indeed of our rules,

1:18:01 and we took them down, only a few of them.

1:18:06 The rest were okay.

1:18:07 Then they said, "Thank you," and sent us another list of dozens of channels,

1:18:14 many, many channels.

1:18:16 We looked at these channels,

1:18:17 we realized that there is no solid foundation to justify banning them,

1:18:24 and we refused to do that.

1:18:28 But interestingly enough, the French intelligence services that were asking us

1:18:39 to do this in Moldova let me know through

1:18:50 their contact that after Telegram banned the few channels

1:18:56 that were in violation of our rules in Moldova, they talked to my judge,

1:19:04 the investigative judge in this investigation that is started,

1:19:08 is has been started against me, and told the judge good things about me,

1:19:15 which I found very confusing, and in a way shocking,

1:19:21 because these two matters have nothing in common.

1:19:27 Why would anyone talk to an investigative judge that is trying to find

1:19:34 out whether Telegram did a good enough

1:19:39 job in removing illegal content in France?

1:19:45 What does Moldova have to do with it?

1:19:50 I got very suspicious at that moment.

1:19:53 Remember, it happened after we blocked a few channels that violated our rules,

1:20:00 but before we refused to block a long

1:20:03 list of other channels that were completely fine,

1:20:06 which is people expressing political views,

1:20:09 which I may not agree with, but it's their right to express them.

1:20:16 Not extreme views, not views that call to violence.

1:20:23 That was extremely alarming.

1:20:26 That was a moment when I told myself that there

1:20:33 may be more going on here that I initially thought.

1:20:38 Initially, I thought, "Yeah,

1:20:41 some people are confused about how technology works." And here,

1:20:48 after this case in Moldova, I got much more suspicious.

1:20:55 So by the time the head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania,

1:21:03 to help them silencing conservative voices in Romania,

1:21:08 I was already wary of what could be going on next.

1:21:18 Yeah, so clearly this was a systematic attempt to pressure you

1:21:23 to censor political voices that the French government doesn't agree with.

1:21:27 And we should say that you have fought

1:21:29 for freedom of speech for left-wing groups and right-wing groups,

1:21:34 it really doesn't matter.

1:21:36 So it's not, you don't have a political affiliation,

1:21:40 political ideology that you fight for.

1:21:42 You're creating a platform that, as long as they don't call for violence,

1:21:49 allows people from all walks of life, from all ideologies to speak their mind.

1:21:53 That's the whole point.

1:21:54 And it happens to be conservative voices in the Romanian

1:21:58 election that the French government wanted to censor,

1:22:00 because currently the French government leans left.

1:22:03 But if you flip everything around and the government would be right-wing,

1:22:07 you'd be fighting against censorship of left-wing voices.

1:22:10 And you have in the past, many times.

1:22:14 Exactly.

1:22:14 Ironically, we received a request from the French police to take

1:22:19 down a channel of far-left protesters on Telegram in France.

1:22:25 We refused to do that.

1:22:28 We looked at the channel, peaceful protesters.

1:22:33 It doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom

1:22:36 of speech of people leaning right or leaning left.

1:22:41 During COVID, we were protecting activists

1:22:47 that were organizing the Black Lives Matter events,

1:22:53 and the other side, the protesters against lockdowns.

1:23:00 We protect everybody as long as they are not crossing the lines

1:23:07 and not starting to call to violence or incite damage to public property.

1:23:18 It's a fundamental right to assemble.

1:23:23 It's interesting that people who haven't had

1:23:30 this experience of living in countries that don't

1:23:35 have freedoms don't always realize how dangerous

1:23:41 it is to gradually compromise your values,

1:23:49 your principles, your freedoms, your rights,

1:23:53 because they don't understand what's at stake.

1:23:56 Yeah, these things become a slippery slope.

1:23:59 So for many, many years, including currently,

1:24:01 you have spoken very highly of France.

1:24:04 You love French history, French culture.

1:24:08 I think this situation, this historic wrong that's been done is

1:24:16 simply just a gigantic PR mistake for France.

1:24:22 There's no entrepreneur that aspires to be

1:24:25 the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram,

1:24:28 sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.

1:24:32 There is no justification for this arrest,

1:24:35 there's a misapplication of the law, all kinds of pressures,

1:24:38 all kinds of behavior that seems politically motivated,

1:24:41 all that kind of stuff, all the excessive regulation and bureaucracy.

1:24:45 A nightmare for entrepreneurs that dream to create

1:24:48 something impactful and positive for the world.

1:24:50 So what do you think needs to be

1:24:53 fixed about the French government, the French system?

1:24:55 And then zooming out, because you have seen similar kinds

1:24:58 of things in Europe that could enable entrepreneurs,

1:25:02 that could reverse the trend that we seem to be seeing

1:25:07 in Europe that is becoming less and less friendly to entrepreneurs.

1:25:15 What can be fixed?

1:25:17 What should be fixed?

1:25:21 I think the European society must decide where

1:25:27 they want the ever-increasing public sector to stop increasing,

1:25:34 what they think should be the right size of government.

1:25:40 Because today, if you take France, for example,

1:25:44 which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people,

1:25:49 but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP.

1:25:55 It's maybe as much or more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.

1:26:04 So you have this balance where you have

1:26:11 many more people representing the state as opposed

1:26:16 to people trying to bring the country's economy

1:26:21 forward by creating great products and great companies.

1:26:26 The startup field, in my field,

1:26:29 social media field, has been affected by it immensely.

1:26:34 There was one great startup in this realm in France in the last 10 years.

1:26:42 It was a location-based social network.

1:26:45 It was eventually sold to Snapchat, but before it was sold,

1:26:49 the founder asked me whether he should sell.

1:26:53 I told him, "Never sell.

1:26:55 You have a great thing going.

1:26:57 You have lots of users.

1:26:58 You have organic traction in many countries." And the first

1:27:03 of this kind of success story in France.

1:27:09 But then he sold anyway in a couple weeks.

1:27:12 And later, I met him, he's trying to do a new thing now.

1:27:15 I met him and I asked him, I was trying to understand what went wrong.

1:27:19 And one of the things he told me about

1:27:23 is that while he was trying to run his company,

1:27:28 you know, competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat,

1:27:32 having all this pressure from investors,

1:27:35 trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris,

1:27:42 and he did a great job, by the way.

1:27:44 But while he was trying to do

1:27:45 that, he got also attacked by some silly investigation,

1:27:53 again involving data protection issues, which lasted forever,

1:28:00 and was gradually sucking the blood of his team and his company,

1:28:08 constant interrogations, disclosure requests.

1:28:12 And this is a young company.

1:28:17 It significantly increases the level of stress,

1:28:20 and at some point, I think the pressure was too much.

1:28:25 He decided, "I'm going to just sell it." Eventually,

1:28:29 it turned out that there was no issue.

1:28:35 The investigation ended, as far as I understand, with no charges.

1:28:39 But such investigations, they have a price, they have a cost.

1:28:44 And unless the society realizes the cost of projects,

1:28:52 of companies, of startups that are never created,

1:28:56 or are sold to the United States at the very early stage,

1:28:59 or other countries, resulting in decreased economic growth, things won't change.

1:29:07 I think we just talked to a guy a few days

1:29:12 ago who left France and started a business here in Dubai,

1:29:16 and one of the reasons he had to leave France

1:29:20 is that the government started an investigation on his company,

1:29:26 and they froze his bank accounts,

1:29:28 and this investigation that involved taxes lasted for many, many years.

1:29:33 I believe he said eight years.

1:29:35 And at the end of these eight years,

1:29:38 the government reached the conclusion that there was nothing wrong.

1:29:43 "He's good.

1:29:44 It's okay." In the meantime, his corporate bank accounts were frozen.

1:29:51 His business died.

1:29:55 The only reason why he was able to retain sanity

1:30:02 is because he moved to Dubai and started a new company,

1:30:06 which is incredibly successful, and now he's enriching this city,

1:30:11 which we're in right now, with his great ideas and creativity.

1:30:17 And by the way, having interacted with him,

1:30:19 there's like a fire in his eyes, the human spirit that fuels entrepreneurship.

1:30:24 Whatever that is, he doesn't have to do.

1:30:26 He's made a lot of money.

1:30:27 He probably doesn't have to do anything, but he still wants to create.

1:30:31 And that fire's what fuels great nations.

1:30:34 Build, build, build, build new stuff, expand,

1:30:37 all of that, and regulation suffocates that.

1:30:40 You have to cherish those people.

1:30:42 But I guess the French public, or some part of the French public,

1:30:45 was misled, and I don't know when,

1:30:49 perhaps since the time of the French Revolution,

1:30:52 to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies.

1:30:56 They're the evil rich people that are the cause of all problems,

1:31:03 as if only you could make the rich share

1:31:09 their ill-gotten wealth with the rest of the population,

1:31:14 then every problem will be magically solved.

1:31:17 In reality though, a lot of these people,

1:31:19 that are starting such companies with fire in their eyes,

1:31:24 are sacrificing their lives, their livelihood.

1:31:27 They're working 20 hours a day.

1:31:29 They're experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill their vision

1:31:36 and bring value and good to the society around them.

1:31:40 They create jobs.

1:31:41 They create great services.

1:31:43 They create great goods.

1:31:44 They make your country grow.

1:31:46 They make your people proud.

1:31:48 You have to cherish them.

1:31:51 But what does the system do to them?

1:31:56 It squeezes them out, because, perhaps there was somebody in the tax

1:32:03 authority that decided to advance their career,

1:32:08 and perhaps, you know, was too ambitious and not too smart,

1:32:13 so as a result, the company was destroyed.

1:32:15 And now the same entrepreneur, by the way,

1:32:18 who we talked to, is invited to come back to France.

1:32:22 He's being offered really good terms.

1:32:24 He said, "Are you gonna open this new venue on the Champs-Élysées?

1:32:28 We're gonna give you the best location.

1:32:30 We're gonna fund part of it, tax breaks." And he said, "Never.

1:32:36 Just forget about it." "It's impossible.

1:32:39 I'm not coming back to France." He's

1:32:42 traumatized by the experience, and he's French.

1:32:44 He was born there.

1:32:46 He has a French passport.

1:32:48 So, unless things like this change, France will,

1:32:53 and the rest of Europe, will keep struggling with economic growth,

1:32:58 with budget deficits, with unemployment,

1:33:01 and all the other relevant social and economic metrics.

1:33:06 Yeah, it's heartbreaking.

1:33:07 As many of these nations, I appreciate the historic and the cultural value,

1:33:12 and I hope Europe and France flourish,

1:33:16 but these are not the components required for flourishing.

1:33:19 Quick pause, I need a bathroom break.

1:33:23 All right, we had some tea.

1:33:28 We're back.

1:33:30 Let's go back a bunch of years to the beginning.

1:33:32 You mentioned you went to school with a super intensive education.

1:33:36 So, I thought it'd be really interesting to look

1:33:38 at some of the powerful aspects of that education,

1:33:41 from the languages to the math.

1:33:43 Can you actually describe some of the rigorous

1:33:45 aspects of it and what you gained from it?

1:33:48 At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St.

1:33:55 Petersburg where I lived, and we had to pass a rigorous test to get accepted.

1:34:02 The idea behind the school was that if you try to squeeze

1:34:09 as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager,

1:34:16 making a focus on math and foreign languages,

1:34:20 then there will be some changes in the brain of the student

1:34:26 that will allow the student to understand most other disciplines.

1:34:32 But we had a class as a result that didn't have any single focus.

1:34:37 It was very widespread across a lot of disciplines.

1:34:42 You would have at least four foreign languages,

1:34:46 including Latin, English, French, German.

1:34:49 In addition, you can get Ancient Greek.

1:34:52 You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis,

1:34:58 evolutionary psychology.

1:34:59 The difference of this class as opposed to other classes in the same school,

1:35:06 which was part of the Saint

1:35:08 Petersburg State University and called Academic Gymnasium,

1:35:11 was that unlike other classes,

1:35:14 which were specialized in some single subject like physics or math or history,

1:35:22 this one tried to get the best from all

1:35:27 of these specialized classes and bring it into one curriculum.

1:35:32 Since it was an experimental class,

1:35:37 it wasn't possible to become a straight-A student,

1:35:41 to be excellent in all the subjects.

1:35:44 It was considered crazy to even try.

1:35:48 So just assume nobody's able to handle it,

1:35:50 you're just pushing the limits of the human mind.

1:35:52 Four languages in parallel, math, evolutionary psychology,

1:35:56 just overwhelming the mind and see what happens.

1:36:00 Yes, see what happens.

1:36:01 This was an experiment.

1:36:02 And it was in the middle of the '90s, remember, when Russia,

1:36:06 particularly its educational system, wasn't regulated as much as it is today.

1:36:12 It was in the middle between the two stages of the Russian history,

1:36:19 the Soviet's history and the modern Russian history of the 21st century.

1:36:26 In any case, I learned a lot from that experience.

1:36:31 First of all, why I got into this course

1:36:35 is because I kept being kicked out from other schools.

1:36:38 Challenging authority?

1:36:40 I was good at all subjects, but not behavior, you know.

1:36:42 We had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union, in early '90s.

1:36:48 Perhaps they even have it today, I'm not sure.

1:36:52 I was very bad at behavior.

1:36:55 Always challenging the teachers, always pointing out their mistakes.

1:36:59 By the way, that's not such a bad thing, right?

1:37:01 Like, if you were looking back, there's some value to that, right?

1:37:04 For young people to, maybe respectfully,

1:37:07 but challenge the authority, the wisdom of old, right?

1:37:14 I think I was very lucky to be able to do

1:37:19 that and to be able to get away with it in the end.

1:37:22 Because normally if you keep challenging authorities,

1:37:27 you just get kicked out of all schools, and then you end up nowhere.

1:37:31 So I eventually got into a school where challenging teachers was not fully okay,

1:37:39 but it was something that you could do

1:37:41 and then you would start a debate with the teacher,

1:37:45 and normally they would allow you to express your point of view,

1:37:50 and then some objective truth may come out of it as a result.

1:37:58 But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life, you know?

1:38:02 Every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis.

1:38:06 What's the point of life?

1:38:08 What am I even doing here?

1:38:12 At some point, I decided since I have to go to school anyway,

1:38:20 I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best

1:38:23 student and get an A, or what we called five in the Russian system,

1:38:31 on every single subject.

1:38:33 And that kept me busy for a while.

1:38:40 It was incredibly difficult because you didn't have enough time.

1:38:48 Even if you just studied all the time, not doing anything else,

1:38:53 you didn't have any time left to prepare all

1:38:56 the homework tasks and get ready for all the tests.

1:39:01 So I ended up using the breaks between classes,

1:39:05 but I got to the result I wanted to get to.

1:39:11 I got the excellent mark in every subject, and that kept me happy for a while.

1:39:19 What did you understand about an effective education

1:39:22 system from studying foreign languages at the same time, doing such a diversity?

1:39:26 Like, if you were to design an education system from scratch for young people,

1:39:31 especially in the 21st century, what would that look like?

1:39:34 You posted about the value of mathematics as a foundation for everything.

1:39:39 Yeah, I still think math is essential.

1:39:42 It's something that shapes your brain.

1:39:45 It teaches you to rely on your logical

1:39:49 thinking to split big problems into smaller parts,

1:39:53 put them in the right sequence,

1:39:56 solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn't work.

1:40:02 And this is exactly the same skill you need in programming,

1:40:08 in project management, and start it when you start your own company.

1:40:13 And it's one of the few subjects

1:40:16 in school which encourages you to develop your own

1:40:23 thinking as opposed to rely on what other

1:40:26 people have to say and just repeating their opinions.

1:40:31 That is extremely valuable.

1:40:33 And of course, once you're good at math,

1:40:36 you can apply it in physics, in engineering, in coding.

1:40:42 And it's not surprising there that most of the most successful tech

1:40:49 founders and CEOs are very good at math and coding because ultimately,

1:40:56 it's the same mental skill that you rely on.

1:41:04 But back then in the school,

1:41:08 I realized something else as well: it's that competition is really important.

1:41:15 Competition is key.

1:41:17 This is what motivates a lot of teenagers when they're at school.

1:41:25 And if you remove competition out of the education system,

1:41:30 you will end up forcing kids to start competing elsewhere,

1:41:36 for example, in video games.

1:41:40 It's a trend you see now in many countries, including in the West,

1:41:45 when well-meaning authorities or parents say,

1:41:47 "We don't want our kids to be too stressed.

1:41:51 We don't want them to feel anxiety.

1:41:53 So let's just get rid of all the public grading system,

1:41:59 all these rankings of who won, who lost.

1:42:02 We don't want any of that." And part of it is justified,

1:42:07 but as a result, some kids lose interest.

1:42:14 Yes, you eliminate the losers, but you end up eliminating the winners as well.

1:42:22 And then if you're overprotective of the kids in that age,

1:42:29 they grow up, graduate schools or universities,

1:42:33 and they are still not prepared for real

1:42:36 life because real life is constant competition for jobs,

1:42:40 for promotions, for customers, and it's more brutal.

1:42:46 What you have as a result is high suicide rates, high unemployment,

1:42:52 all the things and negative trends you see now in many countries which

1:42:58 thought eliminating competition from their education systems

1:43:02 was a good idea, they still persist.

1:43:06 They still think competition's a bad thing.

1:43:08 They try to eliminate competition from their economy

1:43:12 as well to an extent, saying, "We're gonna make sure the losers don't lose

1:43:21 and the winners don't get too much." But as a result,

1:43:28 they make their entire systems less competitive, their entire economies.

1:43:32 Some of them in Europe are now struggling

1:43:37 to keep up with China, with South Korea, with Singapore, with Japan,

1:43:43 and other places where the education system was based on ruthless competition.

1:43:50 So this is a hard choice any civilization has to make.

1:43:58 We support competition,

1:43:59 understanding that eventually it leads to progress in science

1:44:03 and technology and abundance for society at large.

1:44:09 Or we remove competition thinking that somehow we can shield

1:44:13 the future generations from the stress that competition inevitably causes.

1:44:22 Yeah, I mean, it's grounded in a good instinct of compassion.

1:44:25 You don't want people who are, who suck at a thing to feel pain,

1:44:29 but it seems like struggle is a part of life.

1:44:31 Either you do it early or you do it later.

1:44:34 And it's true, that's such a good point that competition

1:44:37 does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development,

1:44:42 like you mentioned, pursuing mastery.

1:44:46 There's something in human nature that, especially for young people,

1:44:49 if you can compete at a thing,

1:44:51 you're gonna be really driven to get good at that thing.

1:44:54 If you can direct that in the education system as China does,

1:44:57 as many, as many nations like you mentioned do,

1:45:00 then you're going to develop a lot of brilliant people, resilient people,

1:45:04 people that are ready to create epic stuff in the world.

1:45:08 I think there is a lot of evidence proving

1:45:10 that we are biologically wired to compete and establish

1:45:15 our understanding of what our qualities are and talents

1:45:21 are in relation to other people around us.

1:45:26 And this is one of the ways society self-regulates.

1:45:30 Speaking of competition, your brother, Nikolai,

1:45:34 he's a mathematician, programmer, expert in cryptography.

1:45:37 He has won the IMO, International Mathematics Olympiad.

1:45:42 He got gold medal three times,

1:45:45 ICPC Programming two times, has two PhDs in mathematics.

1:45:51 And you have worked together for many years,

1:45:54 creating incredible technologies that we've been talking about.

1:45:57 So what have you learned about just life from your brother?

1:46:02 Well, first of all, I must say I learned

1:46:05 pretty much everything from my brother, everything I know.

1:46:09 Because when we used to be kids, we slept in the same bedroom,

1:46:15 like beds a few feet away from each other.

1:46:19 and I kept bugging him with questions.

1:46:23 I would ask him about dinosaurs and galaxies and black holes and Neanderthals,

1:46:33 everything I could think of, and he was my Wikipedia

1:46:37 back in the time when we didn't have internet access.

1:46:40 He's a unique prodigy kid, probably one in a billion.

1:46:45 He started reading at the age of three, I think,

1:46:49 and he pretty fast got so advanced in math that by the age of six,

1:46:55 he could already read really sophisticated books on astronomy.

1:46:59 Sometimes when he did it in public places like buses or metro,

1:47:06 my mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it.

1:47:13 They would tell her, "Why are you mocking your own kid with this serious book?

1:47:17 It's obvious the kid can't understand everything there.

1:47:21 It's too complicated.

1:47:22 Even we don't understand anything there.

1:47:24 There are some formulas." And he was already sucking in this knowledge.

1:47:33 He just has this thirst for information.

1:47:37 So, he was the source of all kinds of great facts,

1:47:45 useful things, inspiring things.

1:47:50 He taught me pretty much everything I know.

1:47:52 At the same time, he is incredibly modest and kind,

1:47:57 and this is something I think a lot of people

1:48:05 that think they're smart but not genuinely intelligent, lack.

1:48:11 More often than not, people who are truly intelligent,

1:48:15 they're also kind and compassionate.

1:48:19 And he is that.

1:48:21 Definitely.

1:48:22 You actually have been staying out of the public eye for the most part.

1:48:25 You've done very few interviews.

1:48:26 You're pretty low-key.

1:48:27 But your brother is on another level.

1:48:30 He's been staying out of the public eye.

1:48:33 What's behind that?

1:48:34 Part of it is his natural modesty.

1:48:37 He doesn't need to do it.

1:48:42 He doesn't feel this urge to show off, brag about stuff.

1:48:49 I tried to avoid it as well, but at a certain point,

1:48:52 I realized that me being too private, too secretive,

1:48:57 becomes a liability because it creates this void,

1:49:01 this emptiness that people and organizations that don't like

1:49:08 Telegram very much are willing to fill with inaccurate information,

1:49:13 and they're willing to spread narratives about Telegram,

1:49:17 which can result in strange situations,

1:49:23 some of which we discussed earlier, for example, this French investigation.

1:49:32 Yeah.

1:49:33 I've gotten to know you more and more,

1:49:35 and there's a deep integrity to you that I think is good to show to the world.

1:49:40 There's a lot of attack vectors on user privacy, and I think the most important,

1:49:45 the last wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company.

1:49:51 So it's important to some degree for you to be out there,

1:49:53 showing your true self.

1:49:55 So we should say that also you didn't mention,

1:49:58 but you're a programmer From an early age, you started coding at 10.

1:50:03 First things you built were a video game at 11,

1:50:07 and then eventually 10 years later, at 21,

1:50:10 you programmed the initial versions of VK single-handedly.

1:50:12 Can you talk to me about your programming

1:50:16 journey that led to the creation of VK?

1:50:18 What was the VK stack?

1:50:19 Was it PHP mostly?

1:50:21 How did you figure out how to program websites, all of that?

1:50:27 I wasn't interested in programming websites at first.

1:50:29 I didn't even have access to the internet when I was 10 years old.

1:50:34 But I liked video games.

1:50:36 I didn't have enough of them, and the scarcity forced me to start building them,

1:50:44 more computer games just to play myself.

1:50:49 It's actually an interesting thing that we sometimes don't realize it,

1:50:54 but scarcity leads to creativity,

1:50:56 and one of the reasons you have so many people who love to code coming

1:51:03 from the Soviet Union or other places

1:51:07 which didn't have much access to modern technology,

1:51:11 and more importantly, modern entertainment, is that perhaps we were not so much

1:51:19 distracted by all this abundance of different entertainment options,

1:51:24 which is not to say it's bad to have those options.

1:51:28 It's just a fact that we sometimes don't appreciate.

1:51:33 So I started to build computer games.

1:51:37 My brother would sometimes guide me.

1:51:39 For example, I would create this turn-based strategy, of course two-dimensional.

1:51:45 Back then, three-dimensional was too much for me.

1:51:49 But it wasn't as slick in terms of the scrolling FPS,

1:51:57 frames per second, parameter, and asked my brother how to optimize it.

1:52:06 He would guide me, and this kind of learning

1:52:11 and training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger.

1:52:19 Then I started to create video games for my classmates.

1:52:24 When we played, for example,

1:52:27 tic-tac-toe on an infinite field in my class during the breaks,

1:52:31 you know, and not tic-tac-toe, the three in a row.

1:52:34 This was a bit five in a row, and an infinite field.

1:52:38 This is a much more interesting game,

1:52:41 and it gets quite complicated if you keep playing it.

1:52:44 My classmates used to love it, and some of my classmates were really smart,

1:52:49 you know, champions of math Olympians,

1:52:52 sons and daughters of professors at the university,

1:52:55 and I decided, "No, I want to win every single time." I

1:53:00 don't want to lose even a single time, so how do I win?

1:53:02 I need to practice more.

1:53:03 But how do I practice more?

1:53:05 I need an opponent stronger than myself.

1:53:07 So, I coded this game so that I would play against the computer,

1:53:13 and the computer would calculate, I think,

1:53:17 four moves in advance to choose the optimal strategy.

1:53:22 That wasn't enough, four moves in advance.

1:53:26 I would still win over it.

1:53:27 If I tried to calculate five or six, it was too slow.

1:53:31 So, I asked my brother, "Help me out here." So, he made this algorithm.

1:53:38 Eventually, I trained myself to win every single time,

1:53:44 even with the computer back then.

1:53:46 We didn't have modern CPUs and I could still retain some self-confidence.

1:53:54 I would go back to school during breaks,

1:53:57 play with my classmates, and soon people started to lose interest.

1:54:02 None of my classmates wanted to play this game anymore.

1:54:07 I killed the game.

1:54:09 There's no- So after that, when I got into St.

1:54:15 Petersburg State University,

1:54:18 it was quite boring just to study because it was too easy.

1:54:22 So, I thought, "What can I do there?" I

1:54:25 created a website for the students of my faculty first.

1:54:30 I organized the creation of digital answers to all

1:54:37 exams and a digitized version of all lectures,

1:54:41 which was something very unique back then.

1:54:45 Remember, it was 25 years ago.

1:54:49 I would put together a website where I would publish all these materials,

1:54:57 and pretty soon it became super popular.

1:55:01 I opened a discussion forum there.

1:55:03 In a few years, I expanded to the university with all of its other departments,

1:55:10 and then to other universities.

1:55:12 We ended up having tens of thousands of users just as a student support tool.

1:55:20 We had all kinds of social features there:

1:55:24 friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs, all of it.

1:55:29 It was quite successful, and after I graduated the university,

1:55:36 one of my ex-classmates from the school reached out

1:55:41 to me after reading about my successes in a newspaper,

1:55:45 the main business newspaper of St.

1:55:48 Petersburg, and he asked me,

1:55:49 "Are you trying to build a Russian Facebook?" I said, "I'm not sure.

1:55:56 What's Facebook?" So, we met.

1:55:59 He, since he graduated in American university

1:56:03 two years before that, he showed me Facebook.

1:56:06 I thought, "Well, I kind of already have all of this technology,

1:56:11 but it's valuable to know which elements I should get

1:56:16 rid of in order to scale this thing and have

1:56:22 millions of users." This is also something people don't appreciate

1:56:27 that sometimes in order to move forward and have more success,

1:56:32 you have to get rid of things, including technology.

1:56:37 Getting rid of features is super important.

1:56:40 Simplify, both for scaling and for making it amenable

1:56:45 to just growing the user base where people get it immediately.

1:56:51 Yes.

1:56:51 Otherwise, it's just too complicated for the new user.

1:56:54 The existing users will be happy.

1:56:56 They'll be praising you.

1:56:57 They'll be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated.

1:57:02 So, it's easy to lose track and get disoriented if

1:57:10 you are only relying on the feedback of existing users.

1:57:16 As a result, I started the website called Vkontakte, or VK.

1:57:23 It means "in touch" in Russian.

1:57:26 Initially to solve my own personal problem,

1:57:29 I graduated the university that same year and I wanted to be in touch,

1:57:34 remain in touch with my ex-classmates

1:57:35 from the university and other fellow students.

1:57:37 And of course, as a 20-year-old, other fellow students.

1:57:39 And of course, as a 20-year-old,

1:57:42 I wanted to meet other people, including good-looking girls.

1:57:46 So, I started to build it from scratch.

1:57:49 For that one I thought, "I'm not going to use any third-party libraries,

1:57:56 modules because I want to make it as efficient

1:58:00 as possible." I was obsessing over every line of code.

1:58:05 But then how do you start something that large?

1:58:08 Like, I didn't have any prior experience of creating a project of that scale,

1:58:15 which would involve everything.

1:58:18 Before, I would reuse some existing solutions.

1:58:24 Here, I wanted to build from scratch, so I called my brother.

1:58:29 He was a postdoc student in Germany at the time

1:58:34 in the Max Planck University, and I asked him,

1:58:38 "What should I start from?" And he told me,

1:58:43 "Just build a module to authorize users." Just not a way to log in, you know?

1:58:54 Not even to sign up, just to log in, because you can pre-populate

1:58:59 the database with credentials and emails and passwords.

1:59:02 It doesn't really matter, but once you see that you can type in your password

1:59:08 and email and you're in, and it tells you "hello" using your name.

1:59:14 Then you will have a clear understanding where to go from there.

1:59:22 Yeah, I mean, that's true.

1:59:25 That's one of the best advice I've ever got in my life.

1:59:28 It worked perfectly, by the way.

1:59:30 I started to build it and before I knew it,

1:59:34 there on that website, photo albums, private messages.

1:59:38 This guest book we used to call "the wall" back on VK and, I guess,

1:59:43 in the early days of Facebook,

1:59:47 we ended up building something even more sophisticated

1:59:50 than Facebook at the time, with more features.

1:59:53 I had a girlfriend at the time, I asked her, "We need to somehow come up

1:59:59 with a database of all Russian schools and universities and their departments

2:00:06 and subdivisions." She did a great job trying to source

2:00:11 all this information online or sometimes writing emails to universities saying,

2:00:15 "Which departments do you have exactly at this point?

2:00:19 We need to know," or reaching out to the Department of Education,

2:00:25 both in Russia and then in Ukraine,

2:00:27 and then eventually in Belarus, in Kazakhstan,

2:00:30 and other countries where VK ended up

2:00:34 to be the largest and most popular social network.

2:00:38 So we did a few things that were quite unique at the time,

2:00:44 and for the first almost a year, I was the single employee of the company.

2:00:52 I was the backend engineer, the frontend engineer, the designer.

2:00:58 I was the customer support officer.

2:01:03 I was the marketing guy as well,

2:01:07 coming up with all the wordings and the announcements,

2:01:12 coming up with competitions to promote VK, which worked quite well.

2:01:17 That was an incredible experience that gave me

2:01:23 knowledge of every aspect of a social networking platform.

2:01:30 Also, an understanding of how much a single person can do.

2:01:33 Exactly.

2:01:33 It's one of the reasons why I like to think

2:01:36 I'm an efficient project manager and product manager inside Telegram,

2:01:43 because I will not take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members.

2:01:54 If somebody gives me, "Oh, I need three weeks to do that." I would reply,

2:02:00 "Well, I built the first version of VK in just two weeks.

2:02:02 Why would you need three weeks?

2:02:04 It seems like something you could make real in just three days.

2:02:11 Three weeks?

2:02:12 What are you going to do the rest of the three

2:02:15 weeks apart from those three days?" And, you know,

2:02:19 the team knows me, and that's why we are able, today at Telegram,

2:02:24 to move at a very good pace of innovation every month.

2:02:30 We're pushing several meaningful features, I think,

2:02:35 out-competing everybody else in this industry in terms

2:02:40 of what you can do within a short timeframe.

2:02:46 So yes, that experience was invaluable.

2:02:50 As for the stack, I started from PHP and MySQL,

2:02:57 Debian Linux, but very soon I realized I needed to optimize this.

2:03:05 I started using Memcached.

2:03:08 Apache servers were not enough anymore.

2:03:11 We had to set up NGINX, and my brother was still living in Germany,

2:03:17 so he couldn't help me much for the first year of building VK.

2:03:21 Sometimes I would manage to get through to him through a call.

2:03:26 I would use an old-school phone to call him with wires and say, "What do I do?

2:03:32 How do I install this thing called NGINX?

2:03:33 I'm not a Linux guy." If he felt particularly kind that day and not too busy,

2:03:41 he would show me the way to do it or set it up himself,

2:03:45 but for the most part, I had to rely on just myself.

2:03:53 Having him there, though, helped when we started to grow fast and scale it,

2:03:59 because at first you realize, "Right now, one server is not enough.

2:04:06 I need to buy another one, then another one and another one.

2:04:11 The database should be in a different server.

2:04:14 Then you have to split the database into tables.

2:04:17 Then you have to come up with a way

2:04:20 to shard the tables using some criteria that would make sense,

2:04:25 that wouldn't break your user experience.

2:04:27 When we got to over a million users and beyond,

2:04:32 a dozen servers surviving without the input from my brother in terms

2:04:37 of taking care of the scaling aspect of it, became impossible.

2:04:42 I remember asking him to come back.

2:04:45 I said, "You need to help me with this thing.

2:04:48 It's starting to be really big." What was worse is that since we became popular,

2:04:56 somebody started to do DDoS attacks on us, as it always happens.

2:05:02 Right.

2:05:03 And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK.

2:05:08 And interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day,

2:05:12 the DDoS attacks intensified.

2:05:14 So we had to come up with a way to fight it.

2:05:23 I remember having many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.

2:05:30 So that was your introduction to all kinds of bad actors, DDoS, business.

2:05:35 Then later you'd find out there's such a thing called politics,

2:05:41 and then later geopolitics.

2:05:43 But this is the initial stages.

2:05:46 That it's not just about creating cool stuff.

2:05:50 It's having to deal with, as you now have to deal with with Telegram,

2:05:55 is seas of bad actors trying to test the limits of the system,

2:06:00 trying to break the system.

2:06:02 Unfortunately, if we didn't have bad actors and pressure,

2:06:07 it would be the best job ever.

2:06:10 You just get to create.

2:06:12 Yeah.

2:06:13 Yeah.

2:06:13 And so the help from your brother, like you mentioned,

2:06:17 NGINX and sharding the tables,

2:06:19 some of the scaling issue is algorithmic in nature.

2:06:24 It's almost like theoretical computer science.

2:06:26 So it's not just about, like, buying more computers.

2:06:29 It's figuring out how to algorithmically make everything work extremely fast.

2:06:35 So some of it is mathematics.

2:06:39 Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.

2:06:44 Yeah, so at that stage I could do the basic stuff.

2:06:47 I could understand how I implement scalability into the codebase,

2:06:53 how I sharded my tables in the database,

2:06:59 where I include Memcached instead of direct requests to the database.

2:07:07 That was quite easy because it was still PHP back in the day.

2:07:13 When my brother got back from Germany somewhere around 2008,

2:07:22 I asked him, "Can we make it even more efficient?

2:07:24 Can we make it super fast, and at the same time so that we would require

2:07:29 even fewer servers to maintain the load?" And he said,

2:07:33 "Yes, but, you know, PHP is not enough.

2:07:36 I'll have to rewrite a big part of your data engines in C and C++.

2:07:44 I said, "Okay, let's do that." He invited a friend of his to help him,

2:07:53 another absolute champion in world's programming contest twice in a row,

2:08:00 and they they put together the first customized data engine,

2:08:07 which was far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcached,

2:08:13 because it was, first of all, more specialized, more low level.

2:08:19 So they rewrote it in C, C++?

2:08:22 A large chunk of it, like, for example,

2:08:24 the search, the ad engine, because VK had targeted ads.

2:08:28 They built that.

2:08:30 It was, it was very efficient what they did.

2:08:33 Eventually the private messaging part, the public messages part.

2:08:40 At some point, we realized there are very

2:08:44 few websites online that load faster than VK.

2:08:49 Nice.

2:08:50 I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley and I met Mark Zuckerberg

2:08:56 the first time and some of the other core team members of, of early Facebook.

2:09:02 Remember, Facebook was just four or five years old then.

2:09:07 And everybody kept asking me,

2:09:09 "How come even here in Silicon Valley, VK loads faster than Facebook?

2:09:13 Everything seems to appear instantly on your website.

2:09:18 What's the secret sauce?" It was one of the things that made them very curious.

2:09:25 And that was always important to you to have

2:09:27 very low latency to make sure the thing loads and...

2:09:29 because that's one of the things Telegram is really known for.

2:09:32 Even on crappy connections and all that kind of stuff,

2:09:34 it just works extremely fast.

2:09:36 Everything is fast.

2:09:38 It's one of the core technological ideas.

2:09:41 We prioritize speed.

2:09:43 We think that people can notice the difference even if it's just,

2:09:49 like, 50 millisecond difference.

2:09:51 The difference is subconscious.

2:09:53 It also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive,

2:10:00 but also more efficient when it comes to the infrastructure,

2:10:05 the expenses, because if your code executes faster,

2:10:09 it means you need fewer computational resources to run it.

2:10:15 So there is no way you can lose in making things faster,

2:10:19 and that's why we have always been very careful when hiring people.

2:10:24 I would only hire a person if I'm ultimately certain it's the best option.

2:10:31 Because if you hire somebody who

2:10:33 is maybe a little bit distracted, inexperienced,

2:10:38 you may end up with inefficiencies in your codebase

2:10:43 that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses.

2:10:47 And think about the responsibility.

2:10:49 If we jump to today from the VK days, Telegram is used by over a billion people.

2:10:58 They open it dozens of times every day.

2:11:04 Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say half a second delay.

2:11:09 Multiply it by dozens of times by a billion.

2:11:14 It's...

2:11:15 centuries, millennia lost for humanity without

2:11:19 any reason other than just being sloppy.

2:11:25 That is so important to understand and so wise,

2:11:28 that if you're just a little bit careless as a developer,

2:11:32 you can introduce inefficiencies that are going

2:11:34 to be very difficult to track down,

2:11:36 because you don't know that it can be faster.

2:11:39 The code doesn't scream at you, saying,

2:11:41 "This could be much faster." So you have to actually, as a craftsman,

2:11:45 be very careful when you're writing the code and always thinking,

2:11:49 "Can this be done much more efficiently?" And it can be tiny things,

2:11:53 because they all propagate throughout the code.

2:11:56 And so there's a real cost in having

2:11:59 a careless developer anywhere in the company.

2:12:03 Because they can introduce that inefficiency,

2:12:05 and all the other developers won't know.

2:12:07 They'll just assume it kind of has to be that way.

2:12:11 And so there's a real responsibility

2:12:14 for every single individual developer that's

2:12:16 building any component of an app like Telegram to just always ask,

2:12:22 you know, "Can this be done more efficiently?

2:12:24 Can this be done more simply?" And that's

2:12:28 like one of the most beautiful aspects, the art forms of programming, right?

2:12:33 Oh, yes, because when you manage to discover a way to simplify things,

2:12:40 make them more efficient, you feel incredibly happy.

2:12:45 ...and proud and accomplished.

2:12:46 And to your point, I can recall a few instances in my career

2:12:51 when firing an engineer actually resulted in an increase in productivity.

2:12:57 Let's say you have 200 engineers building the app, and then just...

2:13:05 they just can't make it.

2:13:07 They're not keeping up with the pace

2:13:09 of the feature release schedule, and you think,

2:13:15 "I probably have to hire a third one." But then

2:13:18 you notice that one of them is really weird, falling behind the schedule,

2:13:25 complaining some of the time, doesn't assume responsibility.

2:13:30 And you ask, "So what if I just fire this person?" And you fire this person.

2:13:33 In a few weeks, you realize you actually don't need,

2:13:37 I mean, you never needed the third engineer.

2:13:41 The problem was this guy who created

2:13:45 more issues and more problems than he solved.

2:13:49 That is so counterintuitive because, you know,

2:13:54 in developing tech projects we tend to think

2:13:58 that you just throw more people into something

2:14:01 and then things get solved miraculously by themselves

2:14:06 just because more people means more attention from them.

2:14:11 No.

2:14:12 That's, again, extremely powerful.

2:14:13 The you know, Steve Jobs talked about A players and B players,

2:14:17 and there's something that happens when you have B players,

2:14:20 which is kind of like the folks you're talking about, introduced into a team.

2:14:25 They can somehow slow everybody down.

2:14:27 They demotivate everybody.

2:14:28 And it's very counterintuitive.

2:14:31 They basically...

2:14:32 Part of the work of creating a great team is removing the B players.

2:14:38 It's not just hiring more in generally speaking.

2:14:42 It's finding the A players, quote unquote,

2:14:44 and removing the people that are slowing things down.

2:14:48 Oh, yes, because the other thing that people don't

2:14:50 realize is how demotivating working with a B player is.

2:14:55 Everybody can tell if the other person,

2:14:57 the other engineer they're working with is really competent.

2:15:02 And it's very visible if the person is not comfortable,

2:15:06 they're asking the wrong questions, they keep lagging behind.

2:15:11 And at a certain point if you're an A player, you get this dissatisfaction,

2:15:20 this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential,

2:15:26 accomplish what you're really meant to accomplish because of this person

2:15:32 working next to you or pretending to work next to you.

2:15:37 And, by the way, in some cases it's not because the person's lazy.

2:15:40 In some cases it's just, you know,

2:15:43 their mental, their intellectual ability is not there.

2:15:47 It's not about experience.

2:15:49 Most often it's about natural ability and persistence.

2:15:55 In 90% of cases, it's just the inability to focus

2:16:01 on one task for an extended period of time.

2:16:05 Not everybody has this ability.

2:16:09 So for people who do have this ability,

2:16:12 it's an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted

2:16:18 and cannot go deep in the projects that they're responsible for.

2:16:26 What's on this small tangent, what's your hiring process?

2:16:30 You've shown, you've talked about how you use competitions often,

2:16:34 coding competitions, to hire, to find great engineers.

2:16:37 What- what's your thinking behind that?

2:16:40 Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy.

2:16:43 I think competition leads to progress.

2:16:46 If you want to create an ideal process to- for selecting

2:16:51 the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind.

2:16:56 What can be better than a competition?

2:16:58 A coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company as an engineer,

2:17:04 or just wants to get some prize money or validation,

2:17:08 can demonstrate their skills, and then we just select the best.

2:17:14 Or if we are not certain because there's not enough data to hire somebody,

2:17:21 we just repeat the contest with another task, get more data, get more winners.

2:17:29 Then repeat again.

2:17:30 At some point, you realize, "Oh, actually,

2:17:33 this guy has competed in 10 of our contests

2:17:38 since he was 16 years old, or 14 year old.

2:17:43 Now he's 20 or 21.

2:17:45 He won in eight of these competitions.

2:17:47 He seems to be really good in JavaScript, in Android Java, and also C++.

2:17:55 Why not hire this person?

2:17:59 There's some consistency there.

2:18:02 And a lot of these people,

2:18:05 they have never worked in a big company before, which is priceless.

2:18:10 Because in a big company, people tend to shift responsibility.

2:18:16 They have this shared responsibility wherein nobody fully

2:18:22 understands who can take credit for a project, who can take blame for a project.

2:18:30 Inside Telegram, it's pretty clear,

2:18:34 and these competitions are the closest experience

2:18:40 to what people will have when working at Telegram.

2:18:46 So for example, we want to implement some very tricky animation

2:18:50 and redesign to our profile page of the Telegram Android version.

2:18:56 And the Android app, it's an open-source app.

2:19:00 Anybody can take its code and play with it.

2:19:04 So as a result, we would not just select the best person and hire this person,

2:19:10 we would also select the best solution to the problem,

2:19:13 because we would not suggest the contestants to solve trivial problems.

2:19:18 It's something that's valuable,

2:19:19 it saves a lot of time for us in terms of development.

2:19:24 And because I always had these large social media

2:19:28 platforms which I could use to promote these competitions...

2:19:33 ...somehow both VK and Telegram were very

2:19:38 popular among engineers and designers, other tech people.

2:19:45 I had no issue to promote this contest and find the right people, ever.

2:19:50 And what can be better than for an employee of your company,

2:19:56 somebody who has been a user of it?

2:19:59 If this person has no prior experience of using Telegram,

2:20:04 their understanding would be very limited.

2:20:06 Why would I even try to hire somebody

2:20:09 from LinkedIn who worked at Google and other companies,

2:20:15 is used to receiving a salary for nothing,

2:20:22 is used to shifting responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings,

2:20:28 and has very limited understanding of what Telegram stands for?

2:20:36 It's just crazy if you think about it.

2:20:39 Yeah, and then because of that, you're extremely selective and slow in hiring.

2:20:44 So the people really have to earn their spot.

2:20:48 And as a result, I got a chance to sit in one

2:20:51 of the team meetings where people discuss

2:20:54 the different features that are being developed,

2:20:56 the different ideas, some of which are at the very cutting edge.

2:20:59 So you get to see behind the scenes how it's

2:21:02 possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation.

2:21:05 So you generate the idea, you implement the prototype and then eventually

2:21:10 it becomes an actual feature in the product.

2:21:14 And so that's why you have this kind of half-hilarious,

2:21:18 half-incredible fact that for many as compared to WhatsApp and Signal,

2:21:24 you've led the way in many other features.

2:21:27 Many of the features we take for granted now,

2:21:30 many of which we know and love, like the auto-delete timer.

2:21:35 That was seven years ahead of any other messenger.

2:21:40 Message editing, replies, these are all obvious things you...

2:21:47 I've even forgotten for some of them that they were never part.

2:21:51 I mean, I think the auto-delete timer is a really brilliant idea.

2:21:54 We implemented it in 2013 in the secret chats.

2:21:57 The funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it,

2:22:02 like WhatsApp seven years after, and then Signal and some other apps,

2:22:09 they initially even copied the exact timestamps.

2:22:13 So for example, if we had like one, three,

2:22:15 and five seconds, they would also have one, three, and five seconds.

2:22:19 They tried not to change it because they were

2:22:21 not sure what was the magic sauce behind the feature.

2:22:25 And ironically, it happens with many of these things.

2:22:29 For example, when we design how you reply to a message,

2:22:33 and you have a small snippet showing that you're

2:22:37 replying to this message and now you're typing your response,

2:22:40 then there is a small snippet in the message itself that, well,

2:22:44 if you tap on it, highlights the original message you're replying to.

2:22:49 Seems pretty obvious.

2:22:50 But there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time,

2:22:55 and we got this vertical line on the left,

2:22:58 and all these other small things that are completely arbitrary, right?

2:23:01 You can do it in a different way.

2:23:03 But somehow, the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution,

2:23:08 so now wherever you go, WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal,

2:23:14 it doesn't matter, you would see exactly the same or pretty much

2:23:19 similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk and innovate.

2:23:26 If something works, why not just copy it?

2:23:31 Yeah, but we should say that it's done extremely well.

2:23:34 The vertical line and the highlighting, I mean,

2:23:36 all of these are tiny little strokes of genius by highlighting

2:23:40 the text in a certain way that, from a design perspective,

2:23:43 makes it very clear that this part was written

2:23:48 before and the thing under it is your reply.

2:23:50 The distinction between the different formatting of the text.

2:23:53 I mean, there's a...

2:23:54 listen, I know how much typography is an art form.

2:23:59 There's a lot of interacting graphic artistic elements inside

2:24:04 Telegram that all have to play together extremely well.

2:24:08 Like you pointed out to me, there's this thing that just blew my mind,

2:24:12 which is the background gradient of Telegram shifts.

2:24:17 It changes and it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles,

2:24:22 and then there's like graphic elements on top

2:24:26 of the gradient that all interplay together.

2:24:28 So all of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing clarity.

2:24:32 Everything is just intuitive.

2:24:35 That's very difficult to create.

2:24:37 That is art.

2:24:38 And on top of that, it's super fast.

2:24:40 That's the hardest part.

2:24:42 To make it look so that designers love it is one thing.

2:24:46 The real challenge is make it look the way the designers

2:24:50 love it and make it work on the weakest device as possible,

2:24:55 the oldest, cheapest smartphones you can imagine.

2:24:58 So if you take the moving gradient on the background of every Telegram chat,

2:25:05 this is something most people don't notice, but they can feel it.

2:25:12 Yeah, yeah.

2:25:12 They notice it subconsciously or something like that.

2:25:14 There is a pleasant feeling.

2:25:16 There's a feeling, there's a pleasant feeling when you're reading

2:25:21 a chat and that's where the design contributes to that.

2:25:25 I think a gradient really does.

2:25:27 I really love that about Telegram, the gradient.

2:25:30 Not the technical thing you described, but the feeling of it.

2:25:34 And then the technical aspect of creating that feeling is incredible.

2:25:37 I could probably come up with all kinds of algorithms

2:25:40 of rendering that gradient that's going to be super inefficient.

2:25:44 And so doing that efficiently is like...

2:25:47 Or efficient, but not too beautiful, because-- Right.

2:25:51 ...even doing something so trivial as a gradient

2:25:54 can result in noticeable lines in the gradient.

2:25:59 The person can instantly say, "Oh, no,

2:26:01 it's not the right thing." So you have to introduce

2:26:04 certain randomness there and then you have the gradient, but it's not enough.

2:26:08 It's too plain.

2:26:09 You want to have certain pattern as an overlay,

2:26:12 but it should be simple enough not to distract you from the content,

2:26:17 but it has to be entertaining enough

2:26:19 to create a good feeling about the whole app.

2:26:23 And another question, what kind of objects you want to include in this pattern?

2:26:28 And how would this pattern work?

2:26:30 Will it be based on pixels or would it be vector-based?

2:26:36 And would it be vector-based so they

2:26:39 will be infinitely scalable and high quality?

2:26:43 And then, I think for the default pattern and the default background,

2:26:46 which is based on four colors.

2:26:48 It's not a gradient based on two colors;

2:26:50 it's four colors, and they're constantly shifting.

2:26:54 I probably looked through several thousand variations of them

2:27:01 because this is such an important decision to make.

2:27:03 It's the default back.

2:27:03 Of course, you can change it.

2:27:05 Actually, you can set up your own four colors for that.

2:27:08 You can change it.

2:27:09 No way.

2:27:10 Really?

2:27:10 Yes.

2:27:11 You can do it.

2:27:12 And you want to rely on certain deeply

2:27:14 hard-coded biological properties of the human mind, right?

2:27:18 So which color do you want to use?

2:27:21 Is it gonna be blue?

2:27:23 Is it gonna be yellow?

2:27:24 Is it going to be green?

2:27:26 Because each color has a different meaning in our brain.

2:27:30 And what kind of objects you want to put there.

2:27:34 Something from our childhood, something from nature,

2:27:39 or something that can create a different kind of mood.

2:27:42 And this is just one detail of the app.

2:27:44 So there are many details.

2:27:46 When you send a message, you are done typing a message,

2:27:50 and you then tap send and then the message gradually appears in the chat.

2:27:54 How does it happen?

2:27:55 So you want the input field to slowly morph into the actual message.

2:28:03 To the message, yeah.

2:28:04 And, and you want this to be done regardless of the contents of the message,

2:28:09 because sometimes the width would be different,

2:28:11 sometimes it would be containing media or a link

2:28:14 preview or other stuff that will change the message bubble.

2:28:20 So you go through countless different scenarios

2:28:25 and make sure every one of them works great,

2:28:30 even if this message contains 4,000 characters.

2:28:34 And then you look at all the platforms: iOS, Android,

2:28:39 and all the old devices of all kinds of outdated

2:28:44 operating systems and the hardware and you cross the two

2:28:50 because you can have this really bad old phone but using

2:28:55 the newest operating system version, so what do you do?

2:29:00 What kind of bugs do you get there?

2:29:04 And then, of course, since Telegram works on tablets as well,

2:29:08 and our iOS version works on an iPad, which I love a lot.

2:29:13 You have to understand that everything can be really big,

2:29:17 so it can consume a lot of space on your screen.

2:29:22 and then it will trigger using more computational resources to render it.

2:29:28 So, there are a lot of nuances to it,

2:29:31 but as long as you obsess over every small detail,

2:29:34 at least every detail that really counts, you can get to a user experience.

2:29:39 If you're really used to Telegram,

2:29:41 if you've been a regular user for at least a few weeks,

2:29:45 going back to any other messaging app feels like a serious downgrade.

2:29:53 Yeah, I mean, there are so many really magical moments.

2:29:56 Like, for example, the way a message evaporates when you delete it.

2:30:02 That is a really pleasant experience.

2:30:06 Oh, yeah.

2:30:06 And boy, was it hard to make, particularly on Android?

2:30:12 This is this Thanos snap effect, right?

2:30:15 So, the message is broken into tens of thousands

2:30:19 of particles which go away like dust in the wind.

2:30:23 It looks great, but it was so hard to make.

2:30:28 probably one of my favorite GUI graphical things.

2:30:34 It's just art.

2:30:36 It's it's pure art.

2:30:38 It's incredible.

2:30:39 So, it's good to hear that it's been really thought over and thought through,

2:30:43 because it's extremely well done.

2:30:46 No, you can't pull it off if you're not going deep into this.

2:30:51 And then you don't want to distract people

2:30:54 from their communication with all this additional information,

2:31:01 so you want them to be invisible in a way.

2:31:06 They create the feeling, but they don't create distraction.

2:31:09 Yes, and in order to do that, you have to overcome even more challenges.

2:31:15 For example, you mentioned this deletion effect: message evaporates.

2:31:20 If you do the animation, if you show the animation first,

2:31:24 and then the message that is preceding the deleted message that is

2:31:28 going after the just deleted message moves closer to each other,

2:31:32 then it doesn't feel right.

2:31:35 It feels too long, too imposing.

2:31:38 So, what you want to do is you want the message to disappear while

2:31:45 the messages around it go closer to each other to fill the resulting gap.

2:31:53 And then you imagine what that involves, redrawing the entire screen.

2:31:58 So, on top of this very complicated animation,

2:32:04 you have to think about things like which

2:32:06 kind of messages were there before it, after.

2:32:11 That just adds to complexity.

2:32:14 And once again, on all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems,

2:32:17 all kinds of tablets, phones, desktop, all of that.

2:32:21 But, you know, once you accomplish it,

2:32:23 it gives you this immense sense of pride because nobody's doing this.

2:32:30 Nobody really cares.

2:32:31 In a way, maybe they're right not to care.

2:32:35 Maybe nobody notices this.

2:32:37 But there is something about it that feels wrong when

2:32:41 such things are neglected because I understand that every day,

2:32:43 tens of millions of people around the world are deleting messages.

2:32:50 What kind of experience do they get?

2:32:53 Is this an experience that maybe even subconsciously inspires

2:32:57 them and makes their heart sing even a little bit,

2:33:06 fills them with joy, lightens up their mood even a little bit by 0.001%?

2:33:15 Or is it something that is just basic?

2:33:18 And I think if we can bring some value into people's lives,

2:33:25 even through these subtle details, we have to definitely invest our time in it.

2:33:32 And some joy, not just sort of value, value like productivity, but joy.

2:33:36 I think Steve Jobs, Jony Ive talked about this.

2:33:39 They would put so much love and effort into the design of everything,

2:33:44 including things that weren't visible in the initial PCs, personal computers,

2:33:48 because they believe that somehow through osmosis,

2:33:51 the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing,

2:33:56 and you're absolutely right.

2:33:57 I mean, it's not about deleting messages.

2:34:01 I feel a little inkling of joy when I see that evaporation animation.

2:34:09 It's just nice.

2:34:12 I'm happier because of it, and so I feel that effort,

2:34:15 and I think, you know, a billion users feel that.

2:34:21 People like when other people care.

2:34:23 Yeah.

2:34:24 Yeah.

2:34:24 That's exactly what it is.

2:34:26 And of course, there are the more sexy things

2:34:29 like all the emojis and the stickers, the GIFs.

2:34:34 Many of those are just little art pieces.

2:34:40 That's, again, an intersection of art

2:34:41 and technology because you look at the stickers,

2:34:44 which Telegram launched way before most of these other apps.

2:34:48 Three years and eight months ahead.

2:34:50 Ahead of WhatsApp, yes.

2:34:52 But the stickers that WhatsApp ended up

2:34:54 launching three years and eight months after,

2:34:57 the first version was not really good because

2:35:01 they just did regular GIFs or WebM videos,

2:35:07 which were not based on vector graphics.

2:35:12 What we did is vector animations.

2:35:15 Each of these stickers is only several kilobytes,

2:35:19 sometimes maybe a maximum of 20, 30 kilobytes in size.

2:35:23 But it's 180 frames.

2:35:25 We were able to run them at 60 frames per second on all devices.

2:35:31 And it's also very challenging.

2:35:33 It was a challenging thing to do.

2:35:35 We had so much headache trying to make it work.

2:35:39 Nobody even tried to do anything like

2:35:41 this before us because it's crazily difficult.

2:35:44 But as a result, you have these fluid animations,

2:35:47 you have this really nice user experience.

2:35:50 Somebody sends you a sticker, you don't have to wait for it to load

2:35:54 because it's so lightweight and it starts moving instantly.

2:35:57 And then of course, it's not just engineering.

2:36:00 You have to find designers that are

2:36:04 able to create the stickers using vector graphics,

2:36:08 which means they're based on curves described by formulas,

2:36:12 not just created as photographs with pixels.

2:36:15 Where do you find these people?

2:36:18 Again, we did competitions but it was not easy to assemble a team of artists,

2:36:25 slash engineers, I would say, that are able to do something like engineers I

2:36:29 would say that are able to do something like this.

2:36:33 This is a unique form of art.

2:36:36 And this allowed us to do a revolution in stickers,

2:36:41 then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add into messages,

2:36:47 custom animated emoji.

2:36:48 I don't think anybody did that.

2:36:49 I think Telegram is still the only one allowing

2:36:52 users to do that because you can include a hundred

2:36:55 of animated emoji in a message and they will be

2:36:59 animated and they will be moving and your device won't crash.

2:37:04 It's probably unnecessary and crazy but we think

2:37:06 somewhere in this intersection of art and engineering true

2:37:11 quality is created and then of course more

2:37:15 recently we expanded into what we call Telegram GeMs.

2:37:20 which are essentially blockchain based collectibles that you can demonstrate

2:37:25 on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance but you

2:37:29 can also use them to congratulate your friends and close ones

2:37:34 with their birthdays and other holidays and that was received extremely well.

2:37:41 Yeah, they can hold value, they can increase in value,

2:37:43 you could trade them for that in that aspect, but to me, still the...

2:37:47 The vector graphics, and it's not just simple graphics,

2:37:53 it's incredibly intricate graphics so the vector makes it

2:37:57 very efficient but it also allows you to create,

2:38:01 maybe it incentivizes the artist, enables them,

2:38:06 incentivizes them to create super detailed intricate elements

2:38:11 and then the final result like you would think

2:38:13 it wouldn't matter but the final result has

2:38:15 like a lot of stuff going on and it's,

2:38:17 and it allows you to scale on arbitrary devices and not,

2:38:20 now it's like this little...

2:38:22 you know like usually GIFs from like back

2:38:26 in the day and still in meme form are low resolution

2:38:31 and so usually people don't put details and intricate

2:38:35 art into it but here with vector graphics it's like,

2:38:39 like a million things going on and it allows you to play

2:38:42 with different animations like you showed me this thing where you send and you

2:38:46 hold for a while on the send button and so you can share

2:38:51 with the person you sent a message to this animation that you've encoded.

2:38:55 Like there's a bunch of stuff going on when they read the message.

2:38:59 Yes, we have a lot of features like that when

2:39:02 we use this art to allow people to express themselves.

2:39:07 and most people don't even know about these features.

2:39:10 I didn't know about it.

2:39:11 That was cool.

2:39:11 That was cool.

2:39:12 The other application of the same technology

2:39:15 is reactions on Telegram because we made it

2:39:20 a goal to make sure that people feel joy when they just send you a like.

2:39:30 Something so trivial as just adding a like to a message should

2:39:36 be an action that you want to perform again and again and again.

2:39:43 So another feature is on the more serious side is end-to-end encryption.

2:39:46 So you led the industry in that.

2:39:49 It was launched one year and three months ahead.

2:39:53 Can you speak to why you decided to add end-to-end encryption,

2:39:57 how you developed the current encryption algorithm in the beginning?

2:40:00 What was your thinking behind that?

2:40:03 So in 2013 when we were launching Telegram, we were aware of the serious issue

2:40:14 with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear.

2:40:21 And we thought, yes,

2:40:22 we are designing this product in a way that is already extremely secure,

2:40:27 but we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages.

2:40:34 And we understood very clearly that a bunch of people

2:40:37 who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust.

2:40:42 So that's why we made Telegram open source.

2:40:44 So all our apps have been open available on GitHub since 2013.

2:40:52 And then we added end-to-end encryption in our secret chats,

2:40:58 which WhatsApp copied a few years after.

2:41:01 One year and three months ahead, they just started to test it.

2:41:04 They rolled it out I think 2016, which is three years after us,

2:41:11 and the only reason I think the rest of the industry

2:41:14 had to do it is because we set the standard.

2:41:23 It was incredibly important back in the day,

2:41:25 and at the same time, we realized certain limitations of end-to-end encryption.

2:41:29 So within that design, that architecture,

2:41:35 you can't support very large chat communities with consistent,

2:41:43 persistent chat histories.

2:41:45 You can't support huge one-on-many channels.

2:41:48 You'd have issues with maintaining bots that have lots of incoming messages.

2:41:59 Multiple device support becomes tricky.

2:42:02 People will end up losing some of the documents they share,

2:42:06 so we also saw a lot of issues,

2:42:09 and we ended up having this sort of hybrid experience,

2:42:15 where depending on your use case and your requirements,

2:42:21 you can choose the level of encryption that we want to have.

2:42:27 So that's why you chose to go opt-in for end-to-end encryption.

2:42:31 So the trade-off there that you're describing is between,

2:42:34 for people who really care about

2:42:37 specific messages extreme privacy on those messages,

2:42:40 and usability, like being able to sync across multiple devices,

2:42:44 having groups that are 200,000 people.

2:42:47 So all of those features, that quality of life features,

2:42:52 there's a trade-off between those and end-to-end encryption.

2:42:56 So you lean towards letting users sort of enable end-to-end

2:43:00 encryption for cases when they want to be super secure.

2:43:04 Yes, and Secret Chats are not just end-to-end encrypted, you know.

2:43:07 There are certain limitations that are both their feature and a bug.

2:43:11 For example, you can't screenshot them.

2:43:14 You can't forward any document, any message from them,

2:43:18 which is not necessarily something you need when you're trying to get

2:43:25 some work done and you're just communicating with your team on a project.

2:43:31 So it became very clear to us that there are different needs here,

2:43:36 and if you try to combine both in one type of chat,

2:43:43 you will end up losing a lot of utility.

2:43:46 You know, we at Telegram, we don't use any collaboration tool for teamwork.

2:43:53 We use Telegram to build Telegram.

2:43:56 So we felt instantly when we were trying to switch to, say,

2:43:59 Secret Chats to share large documents and try to get work done,

2:44:06 it was just not adapted for it.

2:44:11 At the same time, if you were really paranoid,

2:44:15 you think, you know, "I don't wanna be screenshotted,

2:44:18 I don't wanna have any leaks, I don't even trust Telegram;

2:44:25 I only trust code," Secret Chats are the best option.

2:44:30 I believe it is the most secure means of communication today.

2:44:36 And we should say that there's a lot

2:44:38 of other aspects to this that are important.

2:44:40 For example, Telegram is the only app that has

2:44:43 open source reproducible builds for both Android and iOS.

2:44:47 Why is this important?

2:44:49 So, you need reproducible builds in order to verify

2:44:53 that the app really does what it claims,

2:44:57 really encrypts data in a way that it is described on its website.

2:45:04 For that, you need to make your apps open

2:45:09 source for any researchers to have a look at it.

2:45:14 So, Telegram has been open source since 2013.

2:45:20 Apps like WhatsApp have never been open source,

2:45:23 so you don't really know what they're

2:45:25 doing and how exactly they encrypt your messages.

2:45:29 What's important here, though,

2:45:32 is to understand whether the version of the app that you download from the app

2:45:38 store corresponds exactly to the source code that you can view on GitHub.

2:45:46 And for that, you need reproducible builds.

2:45:48 As you said, Telegram is the only popular messaging app that does that.

2:45:55 We allow people to make sure both on Android and iOS that the source

2:45:59 code of Telegram on GitHub and the app you're actually using is the same app.

2:46:05 I think it's incredibly important, not just to gain people's trust,

2:46:09 but just to stay transparent and open about it.

2:46:11 When I make this claim that Telegram's Secret

2:46:15 Chats are the most secure way of communicating,

2:46:20 I really mean it, because I haven't seen any fact contradicting this claim.

2:46:27 At least among the popular messaging apps, you say WhatsApp, Signal,

2:46:34 iMessage, none of them have reproducible builds on both iOS and Android.

2:46:42 None of them have, at least at the same level,

2:46:45 put so much effort into making sure that the algorithms

2:46:52 that you use in order to encrypt data

2:46:56 are not algorithms that have been handed to you

2:47:03 by some agency in order to create a honeypot.

2:47:12 At least from what I know about our competitors,

2:47:18 I don't think they went through the same process.

2:47:22 So, we should say that the entirety of the software

2:47:25 stack in Telegram is done from scratch internally to Telegram,

2:47:27 so we're talking about not just

2:47:29 the encryption but everything running on the servers.

2:47:33 So the servers are built out,

2:47:35 the hardware and the software are all done internally,

2:47:37 which is one of the ways you reduce the attack

2:47:40 surface on the entire stack that handles the messages.

2:47:45 It does make it more secure,

2:47:49 because if Snowden's revelations taught us anything,

2:47:54 is that very often open source tools,

2:47:58 modules, libraries that are used by everybody

2:48:04 ended up having certain flaws and security issues.

2:48:09 that make software vulnerable.

2:48:10 It's also a way to make sure

2:48:14 you're doing things the most efficient way possible.

2:48:21 But it's extremely difficult to do that.

2:48:23 You really have to have exceptional talent

2:48:26 on your team to achieve this level of thoroughness,

2:48:32 to go to a low level of coding

2:48:35 that allows you to recreate from scratch database engines,

2:48:41 web servers, entire programming languages.

2:48:47 Because the programming language we use on the backend to develop

2:48:54 the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.

2:49:01 Yeah, so minimizing reliance on open source libraries is extremely difficult,

2:49:04 as most companies, they rely on open source libraries.

2:49:10 Well, I wouldn't say we're completely independent from that.

2:49:13 We use Linux on the backend.

2:49:14 There's no way of avoiding it for us at the moment.

2:49:17 But for the most part, we are much more self-reliant than most other apps.

2:49:27 You mentioned Edward Snowden.

2:49:28 A long time ago, you wanted to work together with him,

2:49:31 perhaps to share expertise to understand the full realm of this...

2:49:38 of what it takes to achieve cybersecurity.

2:49:40 What do you make of his case?

2:49:42 What lessons do you learn from what he has uncovered, and maybe even broadly,

2:49:48 what impact has his work had on the world, do you think?

2:49:53 Well, the main lesson is not everything is what it seems.

2:49:57 As you would discover,

2:50:00 and this is something that I found quite shocking at the time,

2:50:05 that a lot of people who you thought were security and cryptography experts

2:50:16 ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other,

2:50:22 promoting flawed encryption standards.

2:50:24 You would end up discovering that your government that was supposed to be

2:50:34 limited in how it can surveil its

2:50:36 people actually doesn't consider itself that limited.

2:50:41 And that was very valuable for the world to understand.

2:50:50 I guess it also can be a lesson

2:50:53 demonstrating that we humans don't get the balance right.

2:50:58 So 9/11 created a situation when the government had to respond,

2:51:06 and it responded, but it overreacted.

2:51:10 It ended up eroding certain basic rights and freedoms,

2:51:14 including the right to privacy,

2:51:16 because the government always wants to increase its powers,

2:51:20 and the government always tries to do it at the expense of citizens.

2:51:25 You have this situation when the cure is worse than the disease.

2:51:32 And I think it was incredibly brave to do what Edward did.

2:51:37 I didn't get to work with him or ever see him in person.

2:51:44 We keep in touch, we sometimes communicate, but we're not close.

2:51:52 I still think what he did is laudable.

2:51:57 I hope someday we'll meet.

2:51:59 You yourself have faced the full force of various governments,

2:52:06 intelligence agencies.

2:52:10 Is there any intelligence agency you're afraid of?

2:52:13 Any government you're afraid of?

2:52:15 I think they should all be equally afraid of, or equally not afraid of in a way.

2:52:21 It's not that this intelligence service can

2:52:24 kill you and the other can't kill you.

2:52:26 They all can kill you?

2:52:27 I guess they all can kill me one way or the other,

2:52:31 but it's a matter of whether I'm afraid of death.

2:52:34 This goes back to the beginning of our conversation, I think, multiple times.

2:52:37 So you're in general fearless in the face of the pressure.

2:52:42 That would be a very bold statement, but I proved to be quite stress resilient.

2:52:46 And it's not that you don't have fear.

2:52:49 You can have fear, but you overcome this fear.

2:52:55 I don't think there is anything at this point

2:53:05 that can happen to change the way I am.

2:53:11 So you went through a lot from 2011 to 2014,

2:53:15 government pressure that you refused to give in to that led

2:53:19 you to create Telegram and let go of VK.

2:53:24 And then in 2018, Russia and Iran decided to ban Telegram.

2:53:31 That was another example of pressure.

2:53:33 Can you take me through that saga in 2018?

2:53:38 So in 2018, Telegram started to become popular.

2:53:41 I think we had something like 200 million users,

2:53:47 and it increasingly became popular in places like Iran and Russia,

2:53:56 and other countries where sometimes people

2:54:03 have something to hide from the government.

2:54:07 In Iran, people used Telegram to protest against the government.

2:54:13 They had these huge channels that would use to organize the protests,

2:54:23 and eventually the government couldn't keep up.

2:54:26 They decided to ban Telegram.

2:54:30 People would still keep using it, though, using VPNs.

2:54:34 It didn't help.

2:54:36 The government invested a lot in coming up with their own messaging app.

2:54:45 They had several teams competing for the title

2:54:49 of the national Iranian messaging app.

2:54:53 All these apps failed.

2:54:55 People still preferred Telegram.

2:54:57 Interestingly, Iran banned Telegram, but WhatsApp wasn't banned,

2:55:02 or at least they unbanned WhatsApp soon after.

2:55:06 At the same time, starting in mid-2017 or late-2017,

2:55:13 Russia demanded that Telegram hand them the encryption keys.

2:55:19 They thought these things exist,

2:55:22 something that would allow them to read messages of every person on Telegram,

2:55:27 or at least every person on Telegram in Russia.

2:55:30 And we told them, "That's impossible.

2:55:33 If you have to ban us,

2:55:36 ban us." And this is what they ended up doing in spring 2018.

2:55:46 And that was quite fun because they were trying to block our IP addresses,

2:55:52 but we were prepared for that, and we came up

2:55:57 with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses,

2:56:01 replacing them with new ones every

2:56:05 time the censor blocks our existing addresses.

2:56:10 And then it was completely automated.

2:56:13 We had millions of IP addresses.

2:56:17 We would be burning through them.

2:56:19 We set up this movement called digital resistance

2:56:24 when system administrators and engineers all around the world,

2:56:29 both inside and outside Russia,

2:56:30 could set up their own proxy servers and their own IP

2:56:34 addresses for Telegram to rely on in order to bypass censorship.

2:56:40 We ended up spending, I think, millions of dollars on that.

2:56:46 And as a result, the censor got crazy there.

2:56:50 They would ban IP addresses and larger subnets of IP addresses then.

2:56:57 Huge subnets which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country's

2:57:03 infrastructure started to Like people were trying

2:57:06 to pay for groceries in the supermarkets,

2:57:10 and nothing would work because the Russian censor blocked too many IP addresses.

2:57:17 And some of the subnets were used to host other unrelated services.

2:57:24 Even some Russian social networks and media got affected, banks.

2:57:32 So they had to start being more

2:57:34 selective in how they combat our anti-censorship tools.

2:57:39 The biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple.

2:57:45 Apple didn't allow us to update Telegram in their App Store,

2:57:53 saying for at least four weeks that we

2:57:57 have to come to an agreement with Russia first.

2:58:01 We said, "It's not possible." They said,

2:58:04 "We will allow you to push your update for Telegram worldwide,

2:58:10 except for Russia." We didn't want to do that.

2:58:15 Almost lost hope.

2:58:16 You know, at some point I said, "You know, maybe this is the only way.

2:58:22 Maybe we should leave the Russian market.

2:58:25 Stop allowing users from Russia to download the app from the App Store,

2:58:29 which would mean it's over." We helped organize certain protests in defense

2:58:38 of Telegram and privacy and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow.

2:58:42 There were hilarious people flying paper airplanes.

2:58:47 I saw that.

2:58:50 And at some point, I decided, "I have to make a statement.

2:58:52 I have to say that Apple sided with the censor."

2:58:56 That we are trying to do the right thing here,

2:59:00 but without Apple we can't do much,

2:59:06 'cause people can't download your app anymore.

2:59:13 I published it in my channel and then the New York Times

2:59:16 picked it up with the picture of the protestors flying paper airplanes.

2:59:22 Apple was criticized in that story, and I thought, "Well,

2:59:29 Apple should probably come back to the right side of history

2:59:35 here." And I waited for one day and two days.

2:59:39 In the meantime, since we've been unable

2:59:42 to update Telegram for more than a month,

2:59:46 it started to fall apart because the new version of iOS came out,

2:59:57 and it made the old versions of Telegram obsolete.

3:00:02 Some features that used to work stopped working

3:00:05 and users all over the world started to suffer.

3:00:08 Like, people that had nothing to do with Russia from other parts of the world,

3:00:15 experienced issues with Telegram.

3:00:20 So it was really serious, and I said to my team, "You know what?

3:00:23 If by 6:00 PM today," I think it was a Friday,

3:00:29 "nothing changes and Apple doesn't allow us

3:00:32 to push the version of Telegram through,

3:00:35 let's just forget about the Russian market.

3:00:38 Let's keep going because the rest of the world

3:00:40 is more important." It's sad, but what can we do?

3:00:44 Which, by the way, removes all the people that want to protest,

3:00:47 all the people that want to talk in Russia,

3:00:49 it removes their ability to have a voice in the most

3:00:52 popular messaging app in that part of the world.

3:00:56 Yes.

3:00:56 Magically, 15 minutes to the time I was planning to remove

3:01:01 Telegram from the Russian App Store in order to proceed globally,

3:01:05 Apple reached out to us and said, "It's okay.

3:01:12 Your update is approved." And we managed to keep playing.

3:01:21 this hide and seek game with the censor,

3:01:25 bypassing censorship through digital resistance.

3:01:28 In Iran, it was a little bit different because we realized it would've

3:01:35 been too expensive to try to come up with all those IP addresses.

3:01:41 And in addition, it was not clear whether

3:01:46 we wouldn't be in violation of the sanctions regime, so we did something else.

3:01:52 We created an economic incentive for people

3:01:57 who would set up proxy servers for Telegram.

3:02:01 Any person, say an Iranian engineer, could come up with a proxy server,

3:02:09 distribute its address among users in Iran,

3:02:13 and whoever connected through the proxy of this person

3:02:19 would be able to see a pinned chat,

3:02:22 an ad placed there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy.

3:02:28 And this is how you can monetize your proxy, so it created this market,

3:02:38 which resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem and as a result,

3:02:47 we kept millions, or maybe tens of millions, of Iranian users.

3:02:53 Up until this day, I think Telegram is still banned in Iran today,

3:02:59 but we probably have something like 50

3:03:04 million people relying on Telegram from that country.

3:03:08 So the people find a way around?

3:03:10 People find a way around.

3:03:12 That's ingenious.

3:03:13 That's really great to hear.

3:03:17 I have to ask you about this.

3:03:19 After having spent many days with you,

3:03:20 I learned of something that you've never talked about at the time,

3:03:26 have not talked about to this day,

3:03:29 that there was an assassination attempt on you

3:03:32 using what appears to be poisoning in 2018.

3:03:36 I think to me, it showed the seriousness

3:03:39 of this fight to uphold the freedom of speech for everyone,

3:03:45 for all people of Earth that you're doing.

3:03:49 I have to say, it would mean a lot to me if you tell me this story.

3:03:55 Well, this is something I never talked about

3:03:57 publicly because I didn't want people to freak out, particularly at the time.

3:04:04 It was spring 2018.

3:04:09 We were trying to raise funds for TON,

3:04:13 a blockchain project, working with all kinds of VCs and investors.

3:04:19 In the meantime, we had a couple of countries trying to ban Telegram,

3:04:26 so it wasn't exactly the best moment for me

3:04:29 to start sharing anything related to my personal health.

3:04:35 But that was something that is hard to forget.

3:04:43 I never felt ill.

3:04:45 I believe I have perfect health.

3:04:47 I very rarely have headaches or bad cough.

3:04:52 I don't take pills because I don't have to take pills,

3:04:57 and that was the only instant in my life when I think I was dying.

3:05:04 I came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented.

3:05:10 I had this weird neighbor and he left something for me there around the door.

3:05:20 And one hour after, when I was already in my bed,

3:05:25 so I was living alone, I felt very bad.

3:05:31 I felt pain all over my body.

3:05:37 I tried to get up and go to the bathroom.

3:05:46 But while I was going there,

3:05:49 I felt that functions of my body started to switch off.

3:05:54 First, the eyesight and hearing, then I had difficulty breathing,

3:06:01 everything accompanied by very acute pain, heart, stomach, all blood vessels.

3:06:17 It was...

3:06:18 It's a difficult thing to explain,

3:06:21 but one thing I was certain about is, yeah, this is it.

3:06:25 You thought you were gonna die?

3:06:26 Yeah.

3:06:27 This is it, because I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see anything.

3:06:30 It was very painful.

3:06:32 I think it's over.

3:06:34 I thought, well, I have had a good life.

3:06:37 I managed to accomplish a few...

3:06:39 accomplish a few things.

3:06:42 And then I collapsed on the floor,

3:06:44 but I don't remember it, because the pain covered everything.

3:06:51 I found myself on the floor next day.

3:06:57 It was already bright.

3:07:00 And I couldn't stand up.