- The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov,

founder and CEO of Telegram,

a messaging platform

actively used by over 1 billion people.

Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech,

building tools that protect human communication

from surveillance and censorship.

For this, he has faced pressure

from some of the most powerful governments

and organizations on earth.

In the face of this immense pressure,

he has always held his ground

continuously fighting to protect user privacy

and the freedom of all of us humans

to communicate with each other.

I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him

and can definitively say

that he's one of the most principled

and fearless humans I've ever met.

Plus, when I posted that I'm hanging out with Pavel,

a lot of people, fans of his,

wrote to me asking if he does in fact privately live

the disciplined aesthetic life he's known for,

no alcohol, stoic mindset,

strict diet and exercise,

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

no phone except to occasionally test Telegram features,

and so on.

Yes, he's 100% that guy,

which made the experience of hanging out with him

really inspiring to me.

I'm grateful for it,

and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend.

This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical

about freedom, life, human nature,

and the nature of government bureaucracies,

and it is also in part super technical,

because to me, it's fascinating

that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team

and yet is able to basically out-innovate

all of its competitors

with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features.

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

you consider all the features we know and love

in our communication apps,

in almost every case, Telegram did it first.

So we discuss it all,

from the Kafkaesque situation

he's in the midst of in France,

to the rollercoaster of his life and career,

to his philosophy on technology,

freedom, and the human condition.

And by the way, while this entire conversation

is in English,

we'll make captions and voiceover audio tracks

available in multiple languages,

including Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi.

On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks

by clicking the settings gear icon,

then clicking Audio track,

and then selecting the language you prefer.

Huge thank you once again to ElevenLabs

for their help with translation and dubbing

and with the bigger mission

of breaking down barriers that language creates.

They are truly one of the most remarkable companies

I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

This is the "Lex Fridman Podcast."

To support it,

please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Pavel Durov.

- You've been an advocate for freedom for many years, writing that you should be ready

to risk everything for freedom. What were some

influences and insights that helped you arrive at this value of human freedom?

- I get to experience the difference between a society with freedom and a

society without freedom pretty early in life. I was four years old

when my family moved from the Soviet Union to

northern Italy, and I could see that a society without freedom

cannot enjoy the abundance of opinions, of ideas, of goods,

and services. Even for a four or five year old kid, it was

obvious. That you can't experience all the

toys, the ice cream of sorts, the cartoons

in the Soviet Union that you could access in Italy. And then I got to realize

something even more important. You don't get to contribute

to this abundance without freedom. And at this point, it was pretty obvious to me.

- You also wrote, "Svoboda vazhne deneg." It translates to:

"Freedom matters more than money." How do you prevent these values for freedom

corrupted by money, by people with influence, by people with power?

- Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and

greed. So you make sure that they don't stand in your

way. If you imagine the worst thing that

can happen to you, and then make yourself be comfortable with

it, there's nothing more left to be afraid of. So you stand your ground,

and you remember that it's worth living your life according

to the principles that you believe in, even though this life can end up

being shorter than a longer life, but lived in slavery.

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

- Oh, yes.

- Are you afraid of it?

- In a way, you have to go against your instinct of

self-preservation. And it's not easy. We are all

biological beings hard-coded to be afraid of death. Nobody wants to die.

But when you approach it rationally, you live and then you

die. There's no such thing as your death in your

life. You stop experiencing life once you die.

So you have to ask yourself this question, "Is it worth living a

life full of fear of death?" Or, it's

much more enjoyable to forget about this and live your life

in a way that makes you immune to this fear, at the same time

remembering that death exists so that every day would count.

- Yeah. Remembering that death exists makes you deeply feel

every moment that you do get.

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

- In many ways you live a pretty stoic existence. I got a chance to

spend a couple of weeks with you. In many ways, you seek to

minimize the negative effects of the outside world on your

mind. You've written, quote,

"If you want to reach your full potential and maintain clarity of mind, stay

away from addictive substances. My success and health

are the result of 20 plus years of complete abstinence from

alcohol, tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal

drugs. Short-term pleasure isn't worth your

future." Let's talk about each one of these. Alcohol.

What's been your philosophy behind that?

- That one is quite easy. When I was 11 years old, my

biochemistry teacher, he gave me this book he wrote, it

was called The Illusion of Paradise. In there, he

would describe the biological and chemical processes that happen in your

body once you consume this or that substance. It was mainly related to

illegal drugs, but alcohol was one of these addictive substances that he

covered. So it turns out that when you drink alcohol, the thing that happens is that

your brain cells become paralyzed. They become literally

zombies. And then next day, some time after the party is over, some of your brain

cells die and never get to normal. So think about

this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your

journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term

pleasure? This sounds ridiculous.

- In many ways, it's a poison we let in our body. But by way of

advice, what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking? You know, a

lot of people use alcohol to enable them to have a vibrant social

life. There's a lot of pressures from society,

you know, at a party to drink so they can

socialize. So, what advice would you give to them,

To people who imagine having a social life without alcohol?

- Well, first of all, don't be afraid to be contrarian. Set your own rules.

Secondly, if you feel you need to drink, there must

be some problem you're trying to conceal. There's something that, some

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

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

get rid of this fear, approach her, practice, do it again and again. It's pretty

banal... but this advice works.

- Fix the underlying problem, which is usually at the very bottom is

always going to be fear. Work on that.

- I don't know. Very often, people are trying to escape something in their lives with

alcohol. What is it they're trying to escape? What is this

problem? You have to get to the bottom of it. Your mind is trying to tell you

something valuable, and instead of addressing it directly, you are

flooding it in alcohol, which is sort of a spiritual painkiller, but works

only temporarily, and then you have to pay the debt with interest.

- So, what do you do? I mean, you've been in a lot of gatherings, a lot of

parties. Is there some challenges to saying no?

- For me, not at all. I've been always ready to stand my ground and say no when I feel

something's not right. And it's extraordinary how easily

we humans are affected by what we perceive as majority, because nobody since ancient

times, since millions of years ago, wants to be left

out by the tribe. We are scared that we won't become accepted anymore, which

thousands or millions of years ago meant we're going to starve to

death. So, we have to consciously fight this inclination

to be agreeable with everything that the majority imposes on you, because

it's quite clear that many things that the

majority... in many activities the majority is engaging in

are not bringing you any good.

- So, that's another fear you have to face. Going into a party and

the fear of being the outcast at that party, of being different than

others at that party, at that social gathering in the crowd

of humans, be different. That's a fear.

- That's a fear, and it's quite irrational if you think about it.

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

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

you do the same thing everybody else around you is doing,

you don't have any competitive advantage, and you don't get to become outstanding

at some point in your life.

- Yeah, that's one of the things we talked about

sort of by way of advice is, if you want to be successful in life, you want to be

different.

- Definitely.

- And perhaps, I think you said you want to achieve

mastery at a niche, so find a niche at which you can

pursue with all your effort and achieve mastery,

and the niche being different than anything that

anybody else is doing. Can you explain that a little bit more?

- So, obviously, in order to contribute to the society

you're in, to the economy of the country you live

in, you have to do something that is valuable. But

if you're doing something that everybody else is doing anyway,

what's the value of it? Now, it sounds easier

than it is done to do something that nobody else is doing,

because we humans are surrounded by all kinds of information

which makes us want to copy what we are

perceiving. At the same time, there are so many areas which you can

explore that have nothing to do with the

information you receive on the daily basis. So, it's

extremely important to curate the information sources that you have,

so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left to

the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's

important, so that you end up consuming the same

information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody

else. But rather, you should be proactive. You should deliberately try to

set a goal an area that you want to explore, and then actively search

information that is relevant to this field, so that one day,

you can become the world's number one

expert in this field. And it's not quite... it's not that

difficult to do that. You have to

just remain consistent, because nobody else is trying to do

that. Everybody else is just reading the same news and discussing the same

news every day. But this way, they don't get to have a competitive advantage.

- Yeah. The majority of the population become slaves to the

AI recommender systems, AI-driven recommender systems, and so the

content everybody's fed is the same thing, and we all become the same.

On that point, one of the different things you do is you

don't use a phone, except occasionally to test Telegram

features. But I've been with you for two weeks. I haven't seen you use a

phone at all in the way that most people use a phone, like, for their

social media. So, can you describe your philosophy behind that?

- I don't think a phone is a necessary device. I

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

When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile

phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I

never used phone calls. I was always in airplane mode or mute. I hated the

idea of being disturbed. My philosophy here is pretty simple. I want to define

what is important in my life. I don't want other

people or companies, all kinds of organizations telling me what is

important today and what

I should be thinking about. Just set up your own agenda, and

the phone gets in your way.

- It provides distractions. It guides what you

should be looking at, what you will be looking at, so you don't want that. You want to

quiet the mind. You want to choose what kind of stuff you let inside your mind.

- Yes, because this way I can contribute

to the progress of society, or at least I like to think this way, and

this makes me happier.

- How often do you find quiet time to just think and focus deeply on

work without any distractions? You mentioned to me that you value quiet mornings.

- Yes. So the thing I'm trying to do, I try to allocate as much time as possible

for sleep. Now, even if I allocate, say, 11 or

12 hours for sleep, I won't sleep for 11 or 12 hours.

So what I end up doing is I end up

lying in bed thinking, and some people hate it. They

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

I love these moments. I get

so many brilliant ideas, or at least they seem brilliant to me at

the moment, while I'm lying in bed, either

late in the evening or early in the morning. That's my favorite time of the day.

Sometimes I wake up, I go take a shower, still without the

phone. Beautiful ideas can come to you

while you're doing your morning exercise, your

morning routine, without a phone. If you open your phone first thing in the morning,

what you end up being is a creature that is

told what to think about for the rest of the day. Same is true in a way if

you've been consuming news from social media late at night.

But then how do you define what is important and

what you really want to become in life? Now, I'm not saying

you have to completely stay away from all sources of

information, but take some time to think about what's really

important for you and what you want to change in this world.

- So you definitely try to avoid digital devices for as many hours as possible in the morning,

just to have the quiet thinking time? Plus the crazy amounts of

push-ups and squats.

- I know it's kind of counterintuitive because

I founded one of the largest social networks in the world, after which I

founded the second-largest messaging app in the world, and

you're supposed to be really connected. But the

conclusion you reach very early is that the more connected and

accessible you are, the less productive you are.

And then how can you run this thing if you're constantly

bombarded by all kinds of information, most of which is irrelevant to the success

of what you're trying to build? You know, the entire world can be fascinated

by a fight, a quarrel between the world's richest man and

the world's most powerful man. But for the vast majority of these people

following this saga, it's irrelevant. It won't change their lives.

And in any case, they can't affect it, so it's a bit pointless. Of course, there are

people who are engaged in activities

that require them to be up-to-date of everything that's going

on, but 99% of people aren't.

- Yeah. The internet, social media presents to us drama

in such a way that we think it's the biggest thing in the world, the most important thing in

which the tides of history will turn when in reality, most things

will not turn the tides of history. And so, I guess our challenge

is to figure out what is the timeless thing? What is

the thing that's happening today that's still going to be true in 10, 20

years? And from that,

decide what you're going to do. And that's very difficult on social media

'cause everybody's outraged. The news of the day, whatever the quarrel is,

that's the thing that everyone thinks the world will end because

of this thing, and then another thing happens the next day.

- And they're trying to influence your emotions.

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

that are not in your best interest.

- I've seen you be, once again, quite stoic about your

emotions. Do you ever get angry? Do you ever get

lonely? You ever get sad? The rollercoaster of human

emotion. And what do you do with that? What do you make difficult decisions?

- I'm a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience

emotions, and some of them are not very pleasant. But I

believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us-

...to cope with these emotions and to learn to

work through them. Self-discipline is particularly

important, because without it, how can you overcome

this seemingly endless loop of negativity or

despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people? I normally never

have depression. I don't remember having depression in the last 20

years at least, maybe when I was a teenager. But one of the reasons for that is, I

start doing things. I identify the problem, I can see a solution, and I start

executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of

being worried about something, nothing's ever going to change.

And people often make this mistake, thinking, "Oh, I should just

have some rest and then regain energy." This is

not how it works. You gain energy by doing

something. So if you start doing something, then it happens. You

feel motivated, you feel inspired, and then ultimately you do

something else, a little bit more, a little bit more, and in a few years,

who knows, you may end up achieving great things.

- Yeah, that's the thing that people really confuse. If you're stuck

in a depressive cycle, even when you really,

really, really, really don't wanna do anything, just do

something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes

in the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.

- Exactly. And going to the gym is a good example.

There are many days when you don't want to start working

out, but you have to overcome this initial reluctance, and

then you get to a point that you enjoy it, and you think,

"Oh my God, it was such a good idea to come to the gym today." But

it's similar to pretty much every activity. You get to write some

code, write a small piece of code first, and

then you get inspired. Then you come up with more

ideas. You need to write a novel or just write the program.

This is pretty obvious, and

it's not a secret, but because we are bombarded with all kinds

of information that is not really important for us in terms of becoming

successful, we often forget the important things, and this is one of them.

- We've been working out every single day. You have been working out for many years

pretty intensively, so I think a lot of people would love to

know what's your perfect daily workout regimen,

let's say on a daily, on a weekly basis?

- I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning, and in

addition to that, I go to the gym normally five or six

times a week, spending between one and two hours every day.

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

- Yes, this is how I start my day. I'm not sure they

do a lot in terms of changing your body, but they're definitely a good way to

practice self-discipline,

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

Squats are particularly boring. They're not that

hard. They're just boring. But you overcome it, and then it's much easier to

start doing other things related to your work, for example. When I

can, I also take an ice bath because it's another exercise of

self-discipline. I think the main muscle you can exercise is this

muscle, the muscle of self-discipline. You know,

not your biceps or your pecs or anything else,

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

- Yeah, everything else becomes easy. We should mention, I went with you

to Banya, and I think it's fair to say you're nuts

in terms of how much you can handle, and I didn't

even see the worst of it. Can you just speak to your crazy escapades in the Banya,

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

- I don't know if it's crazy. I think it's quite natural and normal by this time.

But maybe I just got used to it. So Banya is this extreme kind of

sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans.

But it is done in a way that maximizes heat, and they also

use all kinds of herbs and branches, and it's a much more holistic and natural

experience. Then a necessary part of it is you get the cold

plunge, and then you go back. And

again, this is one of those things that maybe in the moment

is not always that pleasant, particularly if you go to extreme

temperatures. You don't feel great. I don't always

feel great, but this feeling is passing. It's only a few minutes.

Same with the ice bath. You have to suffer a bit,

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

What's more, it gives you these long-term health benefits. In a

way, you can look at it as alcohol in

reverse. Alcohol will give you this short, fleeting

pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours, but then you will be paying

for it with long-term negative consequences. I'd rather do Banya and ice bath.

- We swam the length of a large lake in France a couple times. Can you

talk through why you value these multi-hour swims?

- I love swimming for hours. The longest I swam was five and a half hours in

Finland, it was quite cold. I got lost in the process,

barely could find my way back. But

the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after. You're shaking a little

bit, but you feel great after. We cross a huge lake, and I cross many

lakes, Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake. And every time, you feel this achievement

which makes you happy, makes you feel strong, and then you're

more ready to other challenges. And of course, when you know you are going to start

a journey that will last a few hours, you're reluctant to do

it. But you swim for 10 minutes, and then for 20 minutes, and then for 30 minutes,

and it teaches you this incredible patience

that I think is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life.

- And it's pretty meditative, lake versus ocean.

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

- Until you get lost, and it's five and a half hours. Did you panic if you were

gonna be able to find the shore or find your way out?

- Not really. I'm a reasonably stress-resilient person. I didn't panic at that moment,

and there were worse swims I had that were shorter, but

involved accidents, and you know about some of them. So

that wasn't the worst by far. But an important thing

about swimming and physical activity in general is that it makes your mind clear,

and your thinking process is becoming more efficient. Because at the end

of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our

heart can push through blood to our brain. So how can you make

this go faster, or how do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you make

your heart more efficient in doing that? Physical activity is

the only way I know of. So it's not just staying healthy

or trying to look good. It's also being productive. It's also being

stress-resilient. All of these qualities

are necessary if you want to run a large company, if you want to start a company.

I'm surprised, when I started doing this

more than 10 years ago, that more CEOs didn't engage in sports.

The situation changed in the last several years, which is

great. Because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago, there was this stereotype

that if you were strong, you must be not very smart, and vice

versa, which is complete lunacy. Very often, these two things go together.

- So for you, working out is not just about staying healthy. It's actually valuable for the work that

you do as a tech leader, as an engineer, as a technologist?

- Oh, yes. When I can't train, I can instantly feel

that stress is creeping on me. Like...

So even in situations where I'm constrained, I can't go to the

gym, I just keep doing push-ups. I just keep doing squats.

- Yeah. I mean, that's the cool thing about bodyweight exercise, you

can just do it anywhere. You could just pop

off 50 or 100 push-ups before a meeting.

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

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

that's a shitty day.

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

- Yeah. I gotta ask you about your diet, too. No processed

sugar, no fast food, no soda, intermittent fasting sometimes

once a day only, sometimes a couple times a day. So take me

through your philosophy on the no sugar, no soda, just clean food.

- Well, sugar is pretty easy, because it's addictive.

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

So if you want to stay efficient and healthy,

why consume processed sugar? You'll just end up snacking all the time.

Intermittent fasting, eating only within six

hours or not eating for 18 hours every day also brings

structure into your day and into your eating habits, so you

don't crave sugar anymore. Because, you know, if you eat sugar and

then you're unable to snack, you're just punishing yourself. I read a few books on

longevity. I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is

harmful. Now, I'm not militant about sugar. You can eat berries, fruit, if you

feel your body needs it. But it's not true to think

it's necessary to consume sweet things, not for

children, not for adults. Red meat, I

stopped eating it about 20 years ago, because I just felt heavy

every time I had it. So I guess it's individual. It's my

metabolism, my digestive system isn't agreeing with this kind of

food. So I normally eat seafood of all kinds and vegetables. This is

the basic source of calories for me.

- Yeah, and like all things you said, short-term pleasure isn't

worth your future. So, a lot of things we all know, that alcohol is destructive to the

body, tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar. But society puts that on you, makes it

very difficult to avoid. So, I guess it all boils down to just discipline.

- Yes, and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you're

experiencing. If you're experiencing a headache, one solution would be to take

a pill, and then the headache disappears. What this pill would actually do, in most

cases, it would mute the consequence, your feeling of pain. It's a painkiller.

It will not eliminate the root cause, so you have to ask

yourself, "What is it that is causing this headache? Do I need to drink some

water? Is the air quality here bad? Do I need to start getting more

sleep? Is there something wrong with people around me

that are stressing me out?" There must be some reason why you're

experiencing a headache. But if you take a pill,

you're not removing this reason. You're actually making it worse, because this

harmful factor is still there. It's like you're piloting a helicopter,

and there are some red signals, some red lamps start to blink

and it starts producing bad, unpleasant

noise. What would you do? You would try to figure

out the cause and eliminate it. Maybe there is some

mountain next to you and you have to avoid it, or you take a hammer

and smash the signal.

I think the good answer is quite obvious. So, why are we constantly doing

this regardless? Well, because everybody else is doing it, because there's a whole

industry trying to persuade you that this is the right

thing to do. So it's incredibly important

to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.

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

- Yes. I've been staying away from all of that since

I became an adult. When you're a teenager, your mom would typically

say, "We need to take this pill, otherwise, you know, the world collapses."

Once I became a grown-up, I said, "No, I don't think that the producers of pills are

incentivized in the right way." They are not really interested in

eliminating the root of the problem. They would rather have me dependent on

the pills they're producing so that I could buy them

forever. And then I also realized... No, I'm not saying

that you should never take pills. There are obviously some diseases

that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example,

so I'm not suggesting we go back to the Middle Ages.

But what I'm saying is we overuse pills.

- Yeah, it's always good to study and deeply understand the incentives under which

the world operates

so that you don't get swept up into the forces that operate under these

incentives. And big pharma is certainly one of

them. Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive to keep the

problem going versus solving the problem. It's wise.

- Well, this is something I practice every day. I

read some piece of news, and I ask myself, "Who benefits from me reading this?"

then you can end up coming to this conclusion that

maybe 95% of things we read in the news have been written

and published because somebody wanted you to buy some product,

support some political cause, fight some war, donate some money, just do something

that would benefit other people. And this is not a problem

to support causes that you truly believe in, as

long as it was your intentional choice, and you're not being manipulated

into fighting other people's wars.

- And that takes us back to the original thing we started talking about, which is

freedom. One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to

remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That's really

important to realize. The content you

consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it

is designed to manipulate your mind, you have to disconnect yourself

and be very proactive, understanding what the bias is, what the incentives

are, so you can think clearly, independently, and objectively.

- And again, it ties back with restraint from alcohol.

Because if your mind is clouded, how can you

analyze yourself? You'll always be dependent on opinions of others. You will

always follow the mainstream, and w-

then whatever the authorities or whoever in charge

will tell you, you'll believe it, because you don't have a tool

of your own to rely on to come to your own conclusions.

- I have to ask you, this is something that came up. You don't watch

porn. I don't think I've heard you talk about this before. What's the

philosophy behind not watching porn? You know, there's a lot of people that talk

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

on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality, and how

they get into relationships, and all that kind of stuff. So what's

your philosophy in not consuming porn?

- I don't watch porn because I just feel it's a

surrogate, a substitute for the real thing that

is not necessary in my life. If anything, it just forces

you to exchange some energy,

some inspiration, to a fleeting moment of pleasure. It doesn't

make sense. And i- in any case, as I

said, it's not the real thing. So as long as you

can access the real thing, you don't need to watch

porn. But then, if you can't access the real thing,

it's... you shouldn't watch porn as well, because it

means there's some deficiency in your life, some problem that you have to overcome.

- Yeah, analyze the underlying cause.

And again, this goes back to the theme of investing in a

long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure. There's a theme

to the way you approach life.

- I try to be strategic. I try to act

under the assumption that I'm not going to die in one hour from

now, and I'm going to stick around for a bit, despite

the fact that we are all mortal. So why would I

exchange the mid and long-term for the short-term? Doesn't make any sense.

- Quick pause, bathroom break.

- Yeah, let's take a break.

- All right, we took a break, and now we're back. I gotta ask you about Telegram,

the company. I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers that work there.

Telegram runs lean. Relative to other technology

companies that achieve the scale that Telegram does, it has very few employees.

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

- The core engineering team is about 40 people. This includes

backend, frontend designers, system administrators.

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

- Well, what we realized really early is that

quantity of employees doesn't translate to quality of the product they

produce. In many cases, it's the opposite.

If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly

communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on

coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other.

The other problem with having too many employees is that

some of them won't get enough work to do. And if

they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere

existence. They're still there, they're still getting the

salary, but they don't do anything. And if they don't do

anything, more often than not, they will start trying to

find their purpose elsewhere, maybe inside your team,

but not by doing productive work, but by finding problems that don't exist

within the team. And that can disrupt the team and

the mood inside it even further. Also, when you

intentionally don't allow some of your team members

to hire more people to help them, they will be forced to automate things. In

our case, you know, we have

tens of thousands of servers around the world, almost 100,000, distributed across

several continents and data centers. If you try to manage this system

manually without automation,

you will probably end up hiring thousands of people, tens of thousands of people.

But if you rely on algorithms and the team is forced to

put together algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more

scalable, and much more efficient, and interestingly, much more reliable as well.

- And more resilient to the changing geopolitics, to

the changing technology, all of that. Because if you automate

the distributed aspect of the data storage and all the

compute, then that's going to be resilient to everything the world throws at

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

- Yes. Humans are attack vectors. And if you have a distributed system

that runs itself automatically, you have a

a chance at increasing the security and speed of your service.

and speed of your service. This is what we did with Telegram,

while also making it much more

reliable. Because if some part of the network goes down,

can still switch to the other parts of it.

- Yeah. One of the big ways to protect user privacy

is that you store the data. The infrastructure side of Telegram

infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed across many legal jurisdictions

many legal jurisdictions with the decryption keys. So it's encrypted in the cloud,

keys. So it's encrypted in the cloud, the decryption keys are split

and kept in different locations so that no single government or entity

entity can access the data. Can you explain the strength of this approach?

- The way we designed Telegram is

we never wanted to have any humans, any employees have any access

to private messaging data. That's why since 2012, when we've been trying to come up with this design,

been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort

invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it.

into making sure that nobody can mess with it. Like if you hire an employee

employee or any of the existing employee, they can't break the system

they can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users.

access messages of users. And then of course, we launched end-to-end encrypted messaging

end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations,

but it has certain limitations, so you still have to rely on encrypted cloud. So an interesting

encrypted cloud. So an interesting

engineering challenge was how do you make sure that no point of failure can be created

that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside?

- So no employee can even access user messages. So that's the thing. You know, we talk about encryption,

thing. You know, we talk about encryption, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, all these kinds of things.

all these kinds of things. I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there's also

about which there's also misinformation, is about private messages. So Telegram is very, very protective

private messages. So Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users. So you're saying

saying employees never can access the private messages.

Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?

agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?

- No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone,

a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services.

including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center

data center locations, it's all encrypted. You can extract all the hard drives

and analyze it, but you won't get anything. It's all encrypted in a way that is undecipherable.

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

That was very important for us. That's why we can say with confidence

there hasn't been ever a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram.

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

- Do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user private messages

where you might share user private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies?

- No. We designed the system in a way that it's impossible.

impossible. It would require us to change the system, and we won't do that because we made a promise to our

and we won't do that because we made a promise to our

We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.

- So that's one of the principles you operate under: you're going to

protect user privacy.

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

and protected.

- I mean, this is a good place to ask. I'm sure you're pressured by all

kinds of people, all kinds of organizations to share

private data. Where do you find the strength

and the fearlessness to say no to everybody, including

powerful intelligence agencies, including powerful governments, influential powerful

people?

- I guess part of it is just me being me. I stood up

for myself and for my values since I was a little kid.

I had issues with my teachers because I would

point out their mistakes during classes. And at the end of

the day, what's important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose.

They can think they blackmail you with something, they can threaten you with something.

But what is it they really can do to you?

Worst case, they can kill you. But that brings us back to the first part of our discussion.

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

There's no point living your life in fear.

As for Telegram, it's incredibly successful. But if

we lose one market or two markets, or pretty much all of the markets,

I don't care that much. It won't affect me, it won't affect my lifestyle in any

way. I will still be doing my push-ups, you know? So...

You don't like encryption, you don't like privacy, you think you

should ban encryption in your country, like the European Union

is trying to do now for all the member states.

Well, go ahead and do that. We'll just quit this

market. We won't operate there. It's not that important. They all think that

somehow we profit from their citizens and the only goal tech companies have is

extracting revenues. And it's true, most tech companies are like this.

But there are projects like Telegram which are a bit

different. And I'm not sure they realize that.

- So for you, the value of maintaining your integrity

in relation to your principles is

more important than anything else. And of course, we should say

that you also have full ability and control to do just that because

you, Pavel Durov, own 100% of Telegram. So there's nobody else

with a say on this question.

- There are no shareholders, which is quite unique.

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

company.

- And this allows us to operate the way we operate.

build this project and maintain it based on certain

fundamental principles which, by the way, I think everybody believes in.

I think the right to privacy

is included in the constitution of most countries, at least most

Western countries. But it's still under attack

almost every week, and it often starts with

well-meaning proposals: "Oh, we have to fight crime.

We have to do that. We have to protect the children." But at the end of

the day, the result is the same. People lose their right

to such a fundamental thing as privacy. They sometimes lose their right

to express themselves, to assemble, and this is a slippery slope

that we witnessed in pretty much every autocratic

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

No dictator in the world ever said, "Let's just strip you away from your rights

because I want more power to myself and I

want you to be miserable." They all justified it

with very reasonable-sounding justifications, and then it came in stages, gradually.

And after a few years, people would find themselves in

a position when they're helpless. They can't protest. Every

message they send is monitored. They can't assemble. It's over.

- So you see Telegram as a place that people from all walks of

life, from every nation can have a place

to speak their mind, to have a voice. In the

context, in the geopolitical context that you're mentioning that governments

when they become autocratic, naturally it's the way of the

world, human nature and the nature of governments, they become more censorious.

They begin to censor, and always justifying it in their

minds perhaps assuming that they are doing good.

- Perhaps some of them assume they are doing good, but

interestingly, it always results in the state accumulating more power at the

expense of the individual. And then where does it stop? You know, we

humans are not very good at finding the right

balance, and in this case, the right balance between chaos

and order, between freedom and structure. We tend to go to extremes.

- I think you still consider yourself a libertarian. There is something about

government that always, over time, naturally builds a larger and larger

bureaucracy, and in that machine of bureaucracy, it

accumulates more and more power. And it's not always that some one individual

member of that bureaucracy

is the one that corrupts the initial principles on which the government was founded, but

just something over time, you forget. You begin to censor. You begin to limit

the freedoms of the individual, the ability of the individuals

to speak, to have a voice, to vote. It just gradually happens that way.

- And the government is not some abstract notion. The government

consists of people, and these people have goals. They would naturally be

inclined to increase their level of influence,

to have more subordinates, to have more resources,

and that's how you end up in an endless loop of, you know, ever-increasing

taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately just suffocates

free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you

do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the

government can increase its powers at the expense of

citizens. Ironically, you don't have those limitations.

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

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

but interestingly, it doesn't always work this way. They are able to find

very tricky phrasings in order to carve out exceptions,

and then the exception becomes the rule.

- On this topic,

I'd love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in

August of last year in France. I think I should say that

it's one of the worst overreaches of power I've seen as applied to a tech leader in

recent history, in all history.

So it's tragic, but I think speaks to the thing that we've

been talking about. So maybe can you tell the full

saga what happened? You arrive in France...

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

and then I see a dozen armed policemen greeting me and asking me to follow

them. They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I'm accused of,

which was mind-boggling. At first, I thought there must be some mistake. Then I

realized they're being serious,

and they're accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have

allegedly committed, or some users. And they think I should be responsible for this,

which again, like you said, is something that never happened in the history

of this planet. No country, not even an

authoritarian one, did that to any tech leader, at

least at this scale. There are good reasons for that, because you're sacrificing

a big part of your economic growth by sending these kinds of messages

to the business and tech community. So they put me in

a police car, and I found myself in police custody.

A small room, no windows. Just a narrow bed

made of concrete. I spent almost four days there.

In the process, I had to answer some questions of the

policemen. They were interested in how Telegram operates.

Most of it is public anyway, and I was struck by

very limited understanding, or should I say, even a lack of understanding

on behalf of the people who initiated this investigation against me about how

technology works, how encryption works, how social media work.

- I mean, there's something darkly poetic about a tech founder of a

platform where a billion people are communicating with each other, and

you're on concrete, no pillow, for days,

no windows. It's like a book. I mean, it reminds me, I'm a huge fan of Franz

Kafka, and he's written about the absurdity of these kinds of

situations, hence the Kafkaesque stories. There's a story

literally about the situation that he wrote, perhaps predicted,

called "The Trial," where a person is arrested for no

reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in the judicial

system for a long time. Fascinatingly, in that story, neither the person

arrested nor any individual member of the system itself

fully understands what is happening. Nobody can truly answer the questions,

and eventually the person, spoiler alert, is mentally broken

by the whole system, which is what bureaucracy can do in

its most absurd forms. It breaks the spirit, the human spirit latent in all of us.

That's the negative side of bureaucracy.

- I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing, because if this was a

good faith attempt to fix an issue,

there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram,

to reach out to me personally, voice their concerns, and solve

any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic, the way every

other country on this planet solves its problems,

including with Telegram, and we did it dozens of times.

- Yeah, you have a nice page showing this. This is kind of like details that most

people don't really think about. But Telegram was at the forefront of

moderating CSAM and terrorist groups. There's a nice page, telegram.org/moderation,

that shows just the incredible amount of groups and

channels that are engaged in terrorist activity and CSAM

activity that are blocked, actively blocked, found and

blocked by Telegram. And a lot of this work, like you said, because of the automation

that's done with machine learning, just the scale is insane. This

is stuff that most noobs like me who are just chatting it up on Telegram don't

think about. But there's just an immense number of

people essentially doing things that violate the

law on there, and you have to find them immediately and catch it. I guess

all platforms have to deal with it, and Telegram was doing a great job of

dealing with that kind of content. And what you're saying is the French government

had no idea.

- Do they even know what machine learning is?

- It's a concept that is challenging to explain to them,

but I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this

investigation. That's my hope.

In any case, you're right. I mean, if you look at Telegram, we've been fighting

harmful content that is publicly distributed on our platform

since 10 years ago, actually, since the

time we launched public channels on Telegram. And since

something like eight years ago, we had daily transparency reports

on how many channels related to child abuse or terrorist propaganda

we've taken down daily. Every day, we've taken like, maybe hundreds of them.

And if you include all kinds of content that we remove, all the accounts,

groups, channels, posts, that would amount to

millions of pieces of content every week, hundreds of thousands every day.

And then somebody would read the newspaper, get enraged

because they would read something about child porn, and this is a subject that

is very emotionally charged, and start doing something not based on data

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

- Yeah, I think we should make it pretty clear that there's no world, no reason that the

French government should have arrested you, but here we are. That's the situation you're

in. So to be clear, you have to show up in front of a

judge. Now all of this is beautifully absurd. It would be hilarious if it wasn't

extremely serious. You have to show up in front of a judge

every certain amount of time. And what is that experience like?

- In France, they have this role of investigative judge. I don't think you have it

in many other places in the world. It means I'm not on trial,

I'm being investigated.

And in France, it's not just the police or prosecutor asking me

questions, it's a judge, which, in my experience, is more like

still a prosecutor, but it's called a judge, and that makes it harder to appeal. So

if you're limited in, say, countries where you can

travel, then to appeal that restriction will take you a lot of time.

The investigation itself should have never been started. It's an absurd and harmful

way of solving an issue as complicated as

regulating social media. It's just the wrong tool.

So we objected and appealed the investigation

itself. We did last year, I believe. We're still not even given

a hearing date for the appeal, because the process is painfully slow,

not just for me but for everybody, which made

me realize the system may be broken on many levels. You have

other entrepreneurs affected by the French justice system

telling me horror stories about their experiences, where businesses

got paralyzed by very unnecessary actions of investigative judges that ended

up being unjustified and biased. And in the end, you can perhaps solve it when

you reach a higher court

and you'll get justice, but you'll lose a lot of time and energy in the process.

So this is the only thing that is, I hope, different,

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

- I mean, but it does, as Kafka describes, break a lot of people

with time. So when do you hope... We should say that you were

for a long time not allowed to travel out of France. Now

you can travel to Dubai. We're now in Dubai. Got to

meet many of the people that work at Telegram.

Telegram is headquartered in Dubai. But you're not allowed to travel anywhere

else. When do you think you're coming to Texas to hang out with me over there?

- That's a hard question to answer because it doesn't depend on just my actions.

I can just say this: I am patient. I will not let this limitation on my

freedom dictate my actions. I will, if anything, double down on defending

freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like, at

least during those four days in police custody when you are stuck,

just stuck, unable to communicate with people

that are important to you. When you don't even know what's going on in the world

in relation to you personally. So I have no crystal ball that

would tell me the future. I can't say that I'm

pessimistic. I think we've been able to gradually remove

most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August.

- If the French government or the French intelligence agency

want to have a backdoor to access private user messages,

what would you say to them? Is there

anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?

- Nothing. My response would be very clear... but it

won't be very polite, so I'm not sure.

- It's good to say here.

- It's good to say because you're wearing a tie and-

- Yeah. This is a serious adult gentleman-like

program. But it is a concern that people have is when

you have so much pressure from governments, that over time, they'll

wear you down and you'll give in. And then, of course, other places

use that as propaganda, try to attack you. You get attacked by basically every nation.

So it's a difficult

medium in which to operate. It's difficult to be you, fighting for

freedom, fighting to preserve people's privacy. But is there something you could say

to reassure people that you're not going to sacrifice

any of the principles that you've just expressed? If the

French government just keeps wearing you down?

- I think the French government is losing this battle. This battle is wrong.

The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become.

And I think I have proven that in the last several

months, when there were attempts to use my situation, being stuck here in France, by

approaching me and asking me to do things

in other countries, blocking certain channels,

changing the way Telegram works. And not only I

refused, I told the world about it, and I'm going to keep telling the world

about every instance

any government, in this case, in particular, the French government,

tries to force me to do anything.

And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to

this pressure, because if you

submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally

wrong and violates the rights of other people as well,

you become broken inside. You become a shell of your former self

on a deep biological and spiritual level.

So, I wouldn't do that. There are probably other people in the world that would

consider that, but I don't care. Telegram disappears, too. Something people don't

understand, including in these intelligence services or governments. I don't

care. I'll be fine. If they put me into prison for 20 years,

which, let's be clear, it's not something that I think is realistic, but let's

just think about it as a hypothetical situation,

I would rather starve myself to death and die there, reboot the whole game,

than do something stupid.

- Let me ask you about an example of the thing you're talking about. Tell the saga of

Telegram in the Romanian election. So, amidst all

this, you are still fighting to preserve the freedom of

speech. What happened, and what were some of the decisions you had to make?

- So, when I got stuck in France, unable to leave the country for a few months, I was

offered to meet the head of state foreign intelligence services through a person I

know quite well. He's actually a

well-known tech entrepreneur in France, and he's well-connected, and he

said, "This guy wants to meet you." I said, "Okay, fine. Let's do that, but I'm

not promising anything." I took the meeting, and in this

meeting, I was asked to restrict what I see as restriction of freedom of

speech in Romania. I don't know if you follow the whole saga with the Romanian

elections. They had presidential elections last year.

The results were- got canceled.

Now, Romania, at that point when I had this meeting, was preparing for

a new presidential election. The conservative candidate was not somebody who

the French government was supportive of, so they asked me

whether I would be shutting down, or ready to shut down,

channels on Telegram that supported the conservative candidate, or protest

against the pro-European candidates, so they

called the guy they liked. I said, "Look,

if there is no violation of the rules of Telegram, which are quite

clear, you can't call to violence. But if it's a peaceful

demonstration, if it's a peaceful debate, we can't do this. It would be political

censorship. We protected freedom of speech in

many countries in the world, including in Asia, in Eastern

Europe, in the Middle East. We're not going to start engaging in censorship in

Europe, no matter who's asking

us." I was very clear to the guy who was the head of French intelligence.

I said, "If you think that because I'm stuck here, you can tell me what to

do, you're very wrong. I would rather do the opposite every

time." And in a way, that's what I did. I um... had a small debate with

him about the morality of this, this whole thing, and then

at a certain point, just disclosed the content of this

entire conversation, because I never signed an NDA. I don't ever sign

NDAs with any people like that. I want to be able to tell the world what's going on.

And that's quite shocking to me,

that you would have people in the French government trying to get an advantage

of this situation. Of course, if, you know, they had nothing

to do with the start of this investigation itself,

and use it to reach their political or geopolitical goals. I consider it

an attempt to humiliate myself personally and

millions of Telegram users collectively. And it's quite

strange that the same agency asked us to do certain things in Moldova as well.

do certain things in Moldova as well. So even before that, I

think it was October of last year, or September. I

was arrested in Paris in late August,

and then again approached through an intermediary, and asked, "Would you

mind taking down some channels in Moldova? Because there is an election going on,

and we're afraid there's going to be some interference with these elections.

Could you please connect with the representatives of the government of Moldova

and take care of it?" We said, "We're happy to take a look at it and see if

there is content there that is in violation of our rules." And they sent us a list

rules." And they sent us a list of channels and bots.

bots. Some of them were... So it was a very short list, and

some of these channels and bots were

in violation indeed of our rules, and we took them down, only a few of them.

The rest were okay. Then they said, "Thank you," and sent us another list of

dozens of channels, many, many channels.

We looked at these channels, we realized that there is no solid foundation

to justify banning them, and we refused to do that. But interestingly

enough, the French intelligence services that were asking us to do this in Moldova

let me know through their contact

that after Telegram banned the few channels that were in

violation of our rules in Moldova, they talked to my

judge, the investigative judge in this investigation that is

started, is has been started against me,

and told the judge good things about me, which I found very

confusing, and in a way shocking, because

these two matters have nothing in common. Why would

anyone talk to an investigative judge that is trying to find out whether Telegram

did a good enough job in

removing illegal content in France? What does Moldova have to do with it?

I got very suspicious at that moment. Remember, it happened after we

blocked a few channels that violated our rules, but

before we refused to block a long list of other channels

that were completely fine, which is people expressing political

views, which I may not agree with, but it's their right to express them.

Not extreme views, not views that call to violence.

That was extremely alarming. That was a moment when

I told myself that there may be more

going on here that I initially thought. Initially, I thought,

"Yeah, some people are confused about how technology works." And here,

after this case in Moldova,

I got much more suspicious. So by the time the head of intelligence

services met me to ask about Romania, to help them silencing conservative

voices in Romania, I was already wary of what could be going on next.

- Yeah, so clearly this was a systematic

attempt to pressure you to censor political voices that the French

government doesn't agree with. And we should say that you have fought for

freedom of speech for left-wing groups and right-wing groups, it really doesn't

matter. So it's not, you don't have a

political affiliation, political ideology that you fight for. You're

creating a platform that, as long as they don't call for violence, allows

people from all walks of life, from all ideologies to speak their mind. That's the whole

point. And it happens to be conservative voices in the Romanian

election that the French government wanted to censor, because currently the

French government leans left. But if you flip everything around

and the government would be right-wing, you'd be fighting against

censorship of left-wing voices. And you have in the past, many times.

- Exactly. Ironically, we received a request from the

French police to take down a channel of far-left protesters on Telegram

in France. We refused to do that. We looked at the channel, peaceful protesters.

It doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom of speech of people

leaning right or leaning left. During COVID, we were protecting

activists that were organizing the Black Lives Matter

events, and the other side, the protesters against

lockdowns. We protect everybody as long as they are

not crossing the lines and not starting to

call to violence or incite damage to public

property. It's a fundamental right to assemble. It's interesting that

people who haven't had this experience of living in countries

that don't have freedoms don't always realize

how dangerous it is to gradually compromise

your values, your principles, your freedoms, your rights,

because they don't understand what's at stake.

- Yeah, these things become a slippery slope. So for many,

many years, including currently, you have spoken very highly of France. You love

French history, French culture. I think this situation, this historic wrong that's

been done is simply just a gigantic PR mistake

for France. There's no entrepreneur that aspires to

be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this

and wants to operate in France after seeing this. There is

no justification for this arrest, there's a misapplication of the law, all

kinds of pressures, all kinds of

behavior that seems politically motivated, all that kind of stuff, all the excessive

regulation and bureaucracy. A nightmare for entrepreneurs that

dream to create something impactful and positive for the world. So what do

you think needs to be fixed about the French government, the French

system? And then zooming out, because you have seen similar kinds of things in

Europe that could enable entrepreneurs, that could

reverse the trend that we seem to be seeing in Europe

that is becoming less and less friendly to entrepreneurs.

What can be fixed? What should be fixed?

- I think the European society must decide where they want the ever-increasing

public sector to stop increasing, what they think

should be the right size of government. Because today, if you take France, for

example, which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but

public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP. It's

maybe as much or more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.

So you have this balance where you have many more

people representing the state as opposed to people trying to bring the country's

economy forward by creating great products and great companies.

The startup field, in my field, social media field, has been affected by it immensely.

There was one great startup in this realm in France in the last 10 years. It was

a location-based social network. It was eventually sold

to Snapchat, but before it was sold, the founder asked me

whether he should sell. I told him, "Never

sell. You have a great thing going. You have lots of users.

You have organic traction in many countries."

And the first of this kind of success story in France.

But then he sold anyway in a couple weeks. And later, I met

him, he's trying to do a new thing now. I met him and I asked him,

I was trying to understand what went wrong. And one of the things he told me about

is that while he was trying to run his company, you know, competing with Facebook,

Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from

investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris,

and he did a great job, by the way. But while he was trying to do that,

he got also attacked by some silly investigation, again involving data protection

issues, which lasted forever, and was gradually sucking the blood of

his team and his company, constant interrogations,

disclosure requests. And this is a young company.

It significantly increases the level of stress, and at some

point, I think the pressure was too much. He decided, "I'm going to just sell

it." Eventually, it turned out that

there was no issue. The investigation ended, as far as I understand,

with no charges. But such investigations, they have a price, they have a

cost. And unless the society realizes the cost

of projects, of companies, of startups

that are never created, or are sold to the United States at the very early

stage, or other countries, resulting in decreased economic growth,

things won't change. I think we just talked to a guy a few days ago

who left France and started a business here in Dubai, and one of the

reasons he had to leave France is that the government started an investigation

on his company, and they froze his bank accounts, and this investigation

that involved taxes lasted for many, many years. I believe he said eight

years. And at the end of these eight

years, the government reached the conclusion that there

was nothing wrong. "He's good. It's okay." In the meantime,

his corporate bank accounts were frozen. His business died.

The only reason why he was able

to retain sanity is because he moved to Dubai and started a new

company, which is incredibly successful, and now he's

enriching this city, which we're in right now, with his great ideas and creativity.

- And by the way, having interacted with him, there's like a

fire in his eyes, the human spirit that fuels

entrepreneurship. Whatever that is, he doesn't have to do. He's made a lot of

money. He probably doesn't have to do anything, but he still wants to create.

And that fire's what fuels great nations. Build, build, build,

build new stuff, expand, all of that, and regulation suffocates that.

- You have to cherish those people.

But I guess the French public, or some part of the French public, was

misled, and I don't know when, perhaps since

the time of the French Revolution, to believe

that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies. They're the evil rich people

that are the cause of all problems, as if only you could

make the rich share their ill-gotten wealth with the rest

of the population, then every problem will be magically

solved. In reality though, a lot of these people, that are

starting such companies with fire in their eyes, are

sacrificing their lives, their livelihood. They're working 20 hours

a day. They're experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill their vision

and bring value and good to the society around them. They

create jobs. They create great services. They create great

goods. They make your country grow. They make your people

proud. You have to cherish them. But

what does the system do to them? It squeezes them out, because, perhaps there

was somebody in the tax authority that decided to advance their career, and

perhaps, you know, was too ambitious and not too

smart, so as a result, the company was

destroyed. And now the same entrepreneur, by the way, who we

talked to, is invited to come back to France. He's

being offered really good terms. He said, "Are you gonna open this new

venue on the Champs-Élysées? We're gonna give you the best

location. We're gonna fund part of it, tax breaks."

And he said, "Never. Just forget about it."

"It's impossible. I'm not coming back to France."

He's traumatized by the experience, and he's French. He was

born there. He has a French passport. So,

unless things like this change, France will,

and the rest of Europe, will keep struggling with economic growth,

with budget deficits, with unemployment, and all the other relevant social and

economic metrics.

- Yeah, it's heartbreaking. As many of these nations, I

appreciate the historic and the cultural value, and I hope Europe

and France flourish, but these are not the components required for

flourishing. Quick pause, I need a bathroom break. All right, we had

some tea. We're back.

Let's go back a bunch of years to the beginning. You mentioned you went

to school with a super intensive education. So, I thought it'd be really

interesting to look at some of the powerful aspects of that

education, from the languages to the math. Can you actually

describe some of the rigorous aspects of it and what you gained from it?

- At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter

an experimental school in St. Petersburg where I

lived, and we had to pass a rigorous test to get accepted.

The idea behind the school was that if you try to squeeze as

much information as possible into a brain of a teenager,

making a focus on math and foreign languages, then there will be

some changes in the brain of the student that will

allow the student to understand most other disciplines. But we had a

class as a result that didn't have any single focus. It was

very widespread across a lot of disciplines.

You would have at least four foreign languages, including Latin, English, French,

German. In addition, you can get Ancient

Greek. You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis, evolutionary

psychology. The difference of this class as opposed to other classes in the

same school, which was part of the Saint Petersburg State University

and called Academic Gymnasium, was that

unlike other classes, which were specialized in some

single subject like physics or math or history, this one tried to get

the best from all of these specialized classes and bring it into

one curriculum. Since it was an experimental class, it

wasn't possible to become a straight-A student, to be excellent in all the

subjects. It was considered crazy to even try.

- So just assume nobody's able to handle it, you're just pushing the limits of the human

mind. Four languages in parallel, math,

evolutionary psychology, just overwhelming the mind and see what happens.

- Yes, see what happens. This was an experiment.

And it was in the middle of the '90s, remember, when

Russia, particularly its educational system, wasn't

regulated as much as it is today. It was

in the middle between the two stages of the Russian

history, the Soviet's history and the modern Russian history

of the 21st century. In any case, I learned a lot from that experience. First of

all, why I got into this course is because I kept being

kicked out from other schools.

- Challenging authority?

- I was good at all subjects, but not behavior, you know. We had this

behavior grade in the Soviet Union, in early

'90s. Perhaps they even have it today, I'm not

sure. I was very bad at behavior. Always

challenging the teachers, always pointing out their mistakes.

- By the way, that's not such a bad thing, right? Like, if you were looking

back, there's some value to that, right? For young people

to, maybe respectfully, but challenge the authority, the wisdom of old, right?

- I think I was very lucky to be able to do that

and to be able to get away with it in the end.

Because normally if you keep challenging authorities,

you just get kicked out of all schools, and then you end up

nowhere. So I eventually got into a school where

challenging teachers was not fully okay, but

it was something that you could do and then you would start a

debate with the teacher, and normally they would allow you to express your point of

view, and then some objective truth may come out of it as a result.

But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life, you

know? Every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of

existential crisis. What's the point of life? What am I even doing here?

At some point, I decided since I have to go to school anyway,

I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best

student and get an A, or what we called five in the Russian system,

on every single subject. And that kept me busy for a while.

It was incredibly difficult because you didn't have enough time.

Even if you just studied all the time,

not doing anything else, you didn't have any time left to prepare all the homework

tasks and get ready for all the tests. So I

ended up using the breaks between classes, but I got to

the result I wanted to get to. I got the excellent

mark in every subject, and that kept me happy for a while.

- What did you understand about

an effective education system from studying foreign languages at the same time,

doing such a diversity? Like, if you were to design an education system from scratch

for young people, especially in the 21st century, what would that look

like? You posted about the value of mathematics as a foundation for everything.

- Yeah, I still think math is essential. It's something that

shapes your brain. It teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big

problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently,

trying again if it doesn't work. And this is exactly the

same skill you need in programming,

in project management, and start it when you start your own company.

And it's one of the few subjects in school which encourages you to

develop your own thinking as opposed to rely on

what other people have to say and just repeating their opinions. That is extremely

valuable. And of course, once you're good at math, you can apply it in physics, in

engineering, in coding. And it's not surprising there that

most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at math and coding

because ultimately, it's the same mental skill that you rely on. But

back then in the school, I realized something else as well: it's that

competition is really important. Competition is key. This is what motivates a lot

of teenagers

when they're at school. And if you remove competition out of the education

system, you will end up forcing kids to start competing elsewhere, for

example, in video games.

It's a trend you see now in many countries, including in the West,

when well-meaning authorities or parents say, "We don't want our

kids to be too stressed. We don't want them to feel anxiety. So let's just get rid

of all the public grading system, all these

rankings of who won, who lost. We don't want any

of that." And part of it is justified, but as a result,

some kids lose interest. Yes, you

eliminate the losers, but you end up eliminating the winners as well.

And then if you're overprotective of the kids in that age, they grow up,

graduate schools or universities, and they are still not prepared for real

life because real life is constant competition for jobs, for promotions,

for customers, and it's more brutal. What you have as a result is

high suicide rates, high unemployment, all the

things and negative trends you see now in many

countries which thought eliminating competition from their education systems

was a good idea,

they still persist. They still think competition's a bad thing. They try to

eliminate competition from their economy as well to an extent, saying, "We're gonna

make sure the losers don't lose and the winners don't get too much."

But as a result, they make their entire systems less

competitive, their entire economies. Some of them in Europe

are now struggling to keep up with China, with South

Korea, with Singapore, with Japan, and other places

where the education system was based on ruthless competition. So this is a hard

choice any civilization has to make.

We support competition, understanding that eventually it leads to

progress in science and technology and abundance for society at large.

Or we remove competition thinking that somehow we can shield the future generations

from the stress that competition inevitably causes.

- Yeah, I mean, it's grounded in a good instinct of compassion. You don't want people

who are, who suck at a thing to feel pain, but it seems like

struggle is a part of life. Either you do it early or you do it later.

And it's true, that's such a good point that competition does

seem to be a really powerful driver of skill

development, like you mentioned, pursuing mastery.

There's something in human nature that, especially for young

people, if you can compete at a thing, you're gonna be really driven to

get good at that thing. If you can direct that in the education system as China does, as

many, as many nations like you mentioned do, then you're going to

develop a lot of brilliant people, resilient people, people that

are ready to create epic stuff in the world.

- I think there is a lot of evidence proving that we are biologically

wired to compete and establish our understanding of

what our qualities are and talents are in relation to other people around us.

And this is one of the ways society self-regulates.

- Speaking of competition, your brother, Nikolai,

he's a mathematician, programmer, expert in cryptography. He has won the IMO,

International Mathematics Olympiad. He got gold medal three

times, ICPC Programming two times, has two PhDs in mathematics.

And you have worked together for many years, creating incredible

technologies that we've been talking about. So what have you learned about

just life from your brother?

- Well, first of all, I must say I learned pretty much

everything from my brother, everything I know. Because when we used to be kids,

we slept in the same bedroom, like beds a few feet away from each other.

and I kept bugging him with questions. I would ask him about dinosaurs and

galaxies and black holes and Neanderthals,

everything I could think of, and he was my Wikipedia

back in the time when we didn't have internet access. He's a

unique prodigy kid, probably one in a billion.

He started reading at the age of three, I think, and

he pretty fast got so advanced in math that

by the age of six, he could already read really sophisticated

books on astronomy. Sometimes when he did it in public places like

buses or metro, my mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it.

They would tell her, "Why are you mocking your own kid with this

serious book? It's obvious the kid can't understand

everything there. It's too complicated. Even we don't understand anything there.

There are some formulas." And he was already

sucking in this knowledge. He just has this thirst for

information. So, he was the source of all kinds of

great facts, useful things, inspiring things.

He taught me pretty much everything I know. At the same

time, he is incredibly modest and kind, and this is

something I think a lot of people

that think they're smart but not genuinely intelligent, lack.

More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they're also kind

and compassionate.

- And he is that.

- Definitely.

- You actually have been staying out of the public eye for the most part. You've done very

few interviews. You're pretty low-key. But your brother is on

another level. He's been staying out of the public eye. What's behind that?

- Part of it is his natural modesty. He doesn't need to do it.

He doesn't feel this urge to show off, brag about stuff.

I tried to avoid it as well, but at a certain point, I realized that

me being too private, too secretive,

becomes a liability because it creates this void, this emptiness that

people and organizations that don't like Telegram very much are willing to fill

with inaccurate information, and they're willing to spread narratives

about Telegram, which can result in

strange situations, some of which we discussed earlier,

for example, this French investigation.

- Yeah. I've gotten to know you more and more, and there's a deep

integrity to you that I think is good to show to the

world. There's a lot of attack vectors on user privacy, and I

think the most important, the last

wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company.

So it's important to some degree for you to be out there, showing your true self.

So we should say that also you didn't mention, but you're a programmer

From an early age, you started coding at 10. First things you

built were a video game at 11, and then

eventually 10 years later, at 21, you programmed the initial versions of

VK single-handedly. Can you talk to me about your programming

journey that led to the creation of VK? What was the VK

stack? Was it PHP mostly? How did you figure out how to program websites,

all of that?

- I wasn't interested in programming websites at first. I didn't even have access to

the internet when I was 10 years old. But I liked video

games. I didn't have enough of them, and the scarcity forced me to start

building them, more computer games just to play myself.

It's actually an interesting thing that

we sometimes don't realize it, but scarcity leads to

creativity, and one of the reasons you have so many people who love to

code coming from the Soviet Union or other places which

didn't have much access to modern technology, and more importantly, modern

entertainment, is that perhaps we were not so much distracted by all this abundance

of different entertainment options, which is not to say it's bad to

have those options. It's just a fact

that we sometimes don't appreciate. So I started to build computer games.

My brother would sometimes guide me. For example, I would create this turn-based

strategy, of course two-dimensional. Back then, three-dimensional was too much for

me. But it wasn't as slick in terms of the scrolling FPS, frames per second,

parameter, and asked my brother how to optimize it.

He would guide me, and this kind of learning and

training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger. Then I started to

create video games for my classmates. When we

played, for example, tic-tac-toe on an infinite field in

my class during the breaks, you know, and not tic-tac-toe, the three in a row.

This was a bit five in a row, and an infinite field.

This is a much more interesting game,

and it gets quite complicated if you keep playing

it. My classmates used to love it, and some of my

classmates were really smart, you know, champions of math

Olympians, sons and daughters of professors at the

university, and I decided, "No, I want to win every single time."

I don't want to lose even a single time, so how do I win? I need to practice

more. But how do I practice more? I need an opponent stronger than

myself. So, I coded this game so that I would

play against the computer, and the computer would

calculate, I think, four moves in advance to choose the optimal

strategy. That wasn't enough, four moves

in advance. I would still win over it. If I tried to

calculate five or six, it was too slow. So, I asked my brother, "Help

me out here." So, he made this algorithm. Eventually, I

trained myself to win every single time, even with the computer back

then. We didn't have modern CPUs and I could still retain some

self-confidence. I would go back to school during breaks, play with my classmates, and

soon people started to lose interest. None of my classmates wanted

to play this game anymore. I killed the game. There's no- So after that, when I

got into St. Petersburg State University,

it was quite boring just to study because it was too easy.

So, I thought, "What can I do there?" I created a website for the

students of my faculty first. I organized the creation of digital

answers to all exams and a digitized version of all lectures, which was

something very unique back then. Remember, it was 25 years ago.

I would put together a website where I would

publish all these materials, and pretty soon it became super popular.

I opened a discussion forum there. In a few years, I expanded

to the university with all of its other

departments, and then to other universities. We ended up having

tens of thousands of users just as a student support tool. We had all kinds of

social features there: friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs, all of it. It was

quite successful, and after I graduated the university,

one of my ex-classmates from the school

reached out to me after reading about my successes in

a newspaper, the main business newspaper of St.

Petersburg, and he asked me, "Are you trying to build

a Russian Facebook?" I said, "I'm not sure. What's Facebook?" So, we

met. He, since he graduated in American

university two years before that, he showed me Facebook. I thought,

"Well, I kind of already have all of this technology, but it's valuable to know

which elements I should get rid of in order to scale this thing

and have millions of users." This is also something people don't appreciate that

sometimes in order to move forward and have more success, you have to

get rid of things, including technology. Getting rid of features is super important.

- Simplify, both for scaling and for making it

amenable to just growing the user base where people get it immediately.

- Yes. Otherwise, it's just too complicated for the new user. The

existing users will be happy. They'll be praising you. They'll

be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated. So, it's easy to

lose track and get disoriented if you are only relying on the feedback of existing

users. As a result, I started the website called Vkontakte, or

VK. It means "in touch" in Russian. Initially to

solve my own personal problem, I graduated the

university that same year and I wanted to be in touch, remain in

touch with my ex-classmates from the university and other fellow students. And of course, as a 20-year-old,

other fellow students. And of course, as a 20-year-old,

I wanted to meet other people, including good-looking girls.

So, I started to build it from scratch. For that one

I thought, "I'm not going to use any third-party libraries,

modules because I want to make it as efficient as possible." I was obsessing

over every line of code. But then how

do you start something that large? Like, I didn't have any

prior experience of creating a project of that scale, which would involve

everything. Before, I would reuse some existing

solutions. Here, I wanted to build from scratch, so I called my brother.

He was a postdoc student in Germany at the

time in the Max Planck University, and I asked him,

"What should I start from?" And he told me, "Just build

a module to authorize users." Just not a way to log in, you know?

Not even to sign up, just to log in,

because you can pre-populate the database with credentials and emails

and passwords. It doesn't really matter, but once you see that you can

type in your password and email and you're in, and it tells you "hello"

using your name. Then you will have a clear understanding where to go from there.

- Yeah, I mean, that's true.

- That's one of the best advice I've ever got in my life.

It worked perfectly, by the way. I started to build it and before I knew it,

there on that website, photo albums, private

messages. This guest book we used to call "the wall"

back on VK and, I guess, in the early days of Facebook,

we ended up building something even more sophisticated

than Facebook at the time, with more

features. I had a girlfriend at the time, I asked her, "We need to

somehow come up with a database of all Russian schools and

universities and their departments and subdivisions." She did a great job

trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing

emails to universities saying, "Which departments do you have

exactly at this point? We need to know," or

reaching out to the Department of Education,

both in Russia and then in Ukraine, and then

eventually in Belarus, in Kazakhstan, and other countries where VK ended up

to be the largest and most popular social network. So we did a few things that were

quite unique at the time, and for the first almost a year, I was the single

employee of the company. I was the backend engineer, the frontend

engineer, the designer. I was the customer support officer.

I was the marketing guy as well, coming

up with all the wordings and the announcements,

coming up with competitions to promote

VK, which worked quite well. That was an incredible experience that

gave me knowledge of every aspect of a social networking platform.

- Also, an understanding of how much a single person can do.

- Exactly. It's one of the reasons why I like to think I'm an

efficient project manager and product manager inside Telegram, because

I will not take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members. If somebody

gives me, "Oh, I need three weeks to do that." I would reply, "Well, I

built the first version of VK in just two weeks. Why would you need three

weeks? It seems like something you could

make real in just three days. Three weeks? What are you

going to do the rest of the three weeks apart from those three days?"

And, you know, the team knows me, and that's why

we are able, today at Telegram, to move at a very good

pace of innovation every month. We're pushing

several meaningful features, I think, out-competing everybody else in this

industry in terms of what you can do

within a short timeframe. So yes, that experience was

invaluable. As for the stack, I started from

PHP and MySQL, Debian Linux, but very soon I

realized I needed to optimize this. I started using

Memcached. Apache servers were not enough anymore. We had to set up NGINX,

and my brother was still living in Germany, so he couldn't help me much

for the first year of building VK. Sometimes I would manage to get through

to him through a call. I would use an old-school phone to call him with wires

and say, "What do I do? How do I install this thing called NGINX? I'm not a

Linux guy." If he felt

particularly kind that day and not too busy, he would show me the way to do it

or set it up himself, but for the most part, I had to rely on just myself.

Having him there, though, helped when we started to grow fast and scale

it, because at first

you realize, "Right now, one server is not enough. I need to buy another one,

then another one and another one. The database should

be in a different server. Then you have to

split the database into tables. Then you have to come up with a

way to shard the tables using some

criteria that would make sense, that wouldn't break your user

experience. When we got to over a million

users and beyond, a dozen servers surviving

without the input from my brother in terms of taking

care of the scaling aspect of it, became impossible. I remember asking him to come

back. I said, "You need to help me with this thing. It's starting

to be really big." What was worse is that

since we became popular, somebody started to

do DDoS attacks on us, as it always happens.

- Right.

- And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK.

And interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day, the DDoS attacks

intensified. So we had to come up with a way to

fight it. I remember having many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.

- So that was your introduction to all kinds of bad actors, DDoS,

business. Then later you'd find out there's such a thing called politics,

and then later geopolitics. But this is the initial stages. That it's not just

about creating cool stuff. It's having to deal with,

as you now have to deal with with Telegram, is seas of bad

actors trying to test the limits of the system, trying to break the system.

- Unfortunately, if we didn't have bad actors and pressure,

it would be the best job ever. You just get to create.

- Yeah. Yeah. And so the help from

your brother, like you mentioned, NGINX and sharding the tables, some of the scaling

issue is algorithmic in nature. It's almost like theoretical computer

science. So it's not just about, like, buying more computers. It's figuring

out how to algorithmically make everything work extremely fast. So some of it is

mathematics. Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.

- Yeah, so at that stage I could do the basic stuff. I could

understand how I implement scalability into the codebase, how I sharded my tables

in the database, where I include Memcached instead of direct

requests to the database. That was quite easy

because it was still PHP back in the day. When my brother got back

from Germany somewhere around 2008,

I asked him, "Can we make it even more efficient? Can we make it

super fast, and at the same time so that we would require even

fewer servers to maintain the load?" And he said, "Yes, but, you know,

PHP is not enough. I'll have to rewrite a big part of your

data engines in C and C++. I said, "Okay, let's do that." He invited

a friend of his to help him, another absolute champion in world's

programming contest twice in a row, and they

they put together the first customized data engine, which

was far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcached, because it

was, first of all, more specialized, more low level.

- So they rewrote it in C, C++?

- A large chunk of it, like, for example, the search, the

ad engine, because VK had targeted ads. They built

that. It was, it was very efficient what they did. Eventually

the private messaging part, the public messages part.

At some point, we realized there are very few websites online that load faster than

VK.

- Nice.

- I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley

and I met Mark Zuckerberg the first time and some of the other core team members of,

of early Facebook. Remember, Facebook was just

four or five years old then. And everybody kept asking

me, "How come even here in Silicon Valley, VK loads

faster than Facebook? Everything seems to

appear instantly on your website. What's the secret

sauce?" It was one of the things that made them very curious.

- And that was always important to you to have very low latency to make sure the thing loads

and... because that's one of the things Telegram is really known for. Even on

crappy connections and all that kind of stuff, it just works extremely fast. Everything is

fast.

- It's one of the core technological ideas. We prioritize

speed. We think that people can notice

the difference even if it's just, like, 50 millisecond

difference. The difference is subconscious. It also allows us not just to be faster

and more responsive, but also more efficient when it comes to

the infrastructure, the expenses,

because if your code executes faster, it means you need fewer

computational resources to run it. So there is no

way you can lose in making things faster, and that's why we have

always been very careful when hiring people. I would only hire a person if

I'm ultimately certain it's the best option. Because if you hire somebody who is

maybe a little bit distracted, inexperienced, you may end up with

inefficiencies in your codebase that results in tens of

millions of dollars of losses. And think about the

responsibility. If we jump to today from the VK days, Telegram is used by

over a billion people. They open it dozens of times every day.

Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say half a

second delay. Multiply it by dozens of times by a billion. It's...

centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason

other than just being sloppy.

- That is so important to understand and so wise,

that if you're just a little bit careless as a developer,

you can introduce inefficiencies that are going to be very difficult to track

down, because you don't know that it can be faster. The code doesn't

scream at you, saying, "This could be much faster." So you have to actually, as

a craftsman, be very careful when you're writing the code

and always thinking, "Can this be done much more efficiently?" And it can

be tiny things, because they all propagate throughout the

code. And so there's a real cost in having a

careless developer anywhere in the company.

Because they can introduce that inefficiency, and all the other developers won't

know. They'll just assume it kind of has to be that way. And so

there's a real responsibility for every single individual developer that's

building any component of an app like Telegram

to just always ask, you know, "Can this be done more

efficiently? Can this be done more simply?" And

that's like one of the most beautiful aspects, the art forms of programming, right?

- Oh, yes, because when you manage to discover

a way to simplify things, make them more efficient, you feel incredibly happy.

...and proud and accomplished. And to your point, I

can recall a few instances in my career when

firing an engineer actually resulted in an increase in

productivity. Let's say you have 200 engineers building the app, and then

just... they just can't make it. They're not keeping up with

the pace of the feature release schedule, and

you think, "I probably have to hire a third one." But then you

notice that one of them is really weird, falling behind the schedule, complaining

some of the time, doesn't assume responsibility.

And you ask, "So what if I just fire this person?" And you fire this

person. In a few weeks, you realize you

actually don't need, I mean, you never needed the third engineer.

The problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems than he solved.

That is so counterintuitive because, you know, in developing

tech projects we tend to think that you just throw more people into

something and then things get solved miraculously by themselves just because

more people means more attention from them. No.

- That's, again, extremely powerful. The you know, Steve Jobs talked about A

players and B players, and there's something that happens when you have

B players, which is kind of like the folks you're talking about,

introduced into a team. They can somehow slow everybody down. They

demotivate everybody. And it's very counterintuitive.

They basically... Part of the work of creating a great team

is removing the B players. It's not just hiring

more in generally speaking. It's finding the A players,

quote unquote, and removing the people that are slowing things down.

- Oh, yes, because the other thing that people don't realize is how

demotivating working with a B player is.

Everybody can tell if the other person, the other engineer they're working with

is really competent. And it's very visible if

the person is not comfortable, they're asking the wrong questions,

they keep lagging behind. And at a certain point

if you're an A player, you get this dissatisfaction, this feeling that you are not

able to realize your full potential, accomplish what

you're really meant to accomplish because of this person

working next to you or pretending to work next to you.

And, by the way, in some cases it's not because the person's

lazy. In some cases it's just, you know, their mental, their intellectual

ability is not there. It's not about experience. Most often it's about

natural ability and persistence. In 90% of cases, it's just the inability to

focus on one task for an extended period of time. Not everybody has this ability.

So for people who do have this ability, it's an insult to work alongside someone

who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they're responsible for.

- What's on this small tangent, what's your hiring

process? You've shown, you've talked about

how you use competitions often, coding competitions, to hire, to find great

engineers. What- what's your thinking behind that?

- Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy. I

think competition leads to progress. If you want to create

an ideal process to- for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific

tasks you have in mind. What can be better than a

competition? A coding contest where

everybody who wants to join your company as an engineer, or just wants to get

some prize money or validation, can demonstrate their skills,

and then we just select the best. Or if we are not

certain because there's not enough data

to hire somebody, we just repeat the contest with another task,

get more data, get more winners. Then

repeat again. At some point, you realize, "Oh, actually, this guy

has competed in 10 of our contests since he was 16 years old, or 14 year old.

Now he's 20 or 21. He won in eight of these

competitions. He seems to be really good in JavaScript, in Android Java, and also

C++. Why not hire this person?

There's some consistency there. And a lot of these people, they have never worked in

a big company before, which is priceless. Because in a big company,

people tend to shift responsibility. They have this shared

responsibility wherein nobody fully understands

who can take credit for a project, who can take blame for a project.

Inside Telegram, it's pretty clear, and these competitions are

the closest experience to what people will have when working at Telegram.

So for example, we want to implement some very tricky

animation and redesign to our profile page of the Telegram

Android version. And the Android app, it's an open-source app. Anybody can take its

code and play with it. So as a result, we would

not just select the best person and hire this

person, we would also select the best solution to the problem, because we would

not suggest the contestants to solve trivial

problems. It's something that's valuable, it saves a lot of time

for us in terms of development. And because I always

had these large social media platforms which

I could use to promote these competitions...

...somehow both VK and Telegram were very popular among engineers

and designers, other tech people.

I had no issue to promote this contest and find the

right people, ever. And what can be better than

for an employee of your company, somebody who has been a user of

it? If this person has no prior experience

of using Telegram, their understanding would be very

limited. Why would I even try to hire somebody from LinkedIn who

worked at Google and other companies, is used to receiving a salary for nothing,

is used to shifting responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings,

and has very limited understanding of what Telegram stands for?

It's just crazy if you think about it.

- Yeah, and then because of that, you're extremely selective and slow

in hiring. So the people really have to

earn their spot. And as a result, I got a chance to sit in

one of the team meetings where people discuss the different

features that are being developed, the different ideas, some of which are at the very

cutting edge. So you get to see behind the scenes how it's possible to

have such a fast rate of

idea generation. So you generate the idea, you implement the prototype and

then eventually it becomes an actual

feature in the product. And so that's why you have this kind of half-hilarious,

half-incredible fact that for many as compared to WhatsApp and

Signal, you've led the way in many other features. Many of the features we take

for granted now, many of which we know and love, like the auto-delete timer.

That was seven years ahead of any other messenger. Message editing,

replies, these are all obvious things you...

I've even forgotten for some of them that they were never part.

I mean, I think the auto-delete timer is a really brilliant idea.

- We implemented it in 2013 in the secret

chats. The funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy

it, like WhatsApp seven years after, and then Signal and some other apps,

they initially even copied the exact

timestamps. So for example, if we had like one, three, and five seconds, they would

also have one, three, and five seconds.

They tried not to change it because they were not sure

what was the magic sauce behind the feature.

And ironically, it happens with many of these things.

For example, when we design how you reply to a message, and you have a small snippet

showing that you're replying to this message and now you're typing your

response, then there is a small snippet in the message itself

that, well, if you tap on it, highlights the original message

you're replying to. Seems pretty obvious. But there are

certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time, and

we got this vertical line on the left, and all these other

small things that are completely arbitrary, right? You can do it in a different

way. But somehow, the entire industry ended up

copying exactly that solution, so now wherever you go,

WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal, it

doesn't matter, you would see exactly the same or pretty much

similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk

and innovate. If something works, why not just copy it?

- Yeah, but we should say that it's done extremely well. The vertical line and the

highlighting, I mean, all of these are tiny little strokes of genius

by highlighting the text in a certain way that, from a design

perspective, makes it very clear that

this part was written before and the thing under it is your

reply. The distinction between the different formatting of the text. I mean, there's

a... listen, I know how much typography is an art form. There's a lot of interacting

graphic artistic elements inside Telegram that all have to play together extremely

well. Like you pointed out to me, there's this thing that just blew my

mind, which is the background gradient of Telegram shifts. It changes

and it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles, the chat bubbles, and then there's like

graphic elements on top of the gradient that all interplay together. So

all of that has to work really nicely without sacrificing

clarity. Everything is just intuitive. That's very

difficult to create. That is art. And on top of that, it's super fast.

- That's the hardest part. To make it look so that designers love

it is one thing. The real challenge is make

it look the way the designers love it and make it

work on the weakest device as possible, the oldest,

cheapest smartphones you can imagine. So if

you take the moving gradient on the background of

every Telegram chat, this is something most people

don't notice, but they can feel it.

- Yeah, yeah. They notice it subconsciously or something like that. There is a pleasant

feeling. There's a feeling, there's a pleasant

feeling when you're reading a chat and that's

where the design contributes to that. I think a

gradient really does. I really love that about Telegram, the

gradient. Not the technical thing you described, but the feeling of it.

And then the technical aspect of creating that feeling is

incredible. I could probably come up with all kinds of algorithms of

rendering that gradient that's going to be super inefficient.

And so doing that efficiently is like...

- Or efficient, but not too beautiful, because-

- Right.

- ...even doing something so trivial as a gradient can result

in noticeable lines in the gradient. The

person can instantly say, "Oh, no, it's not the right thing." So you have to

introduce certain randomness there

and then you have the gradient, but it's not enough. It's too plain. You want

to have certain pattern as an overlay, but it

should be simple enough not to distract you from the content,

but it has to be entertaining enough to create a good feeling about

the whole app. And another question, what kind of objects

you want to include in this pattern? And how would this pattern work? Will it be

based on pixels or would it be vector-based? And would it be vector-based

so they will be infinitely scalable and high quality?

And then, I think for the default pattern and the default

background, which is based on four colors. It's not a gradient based on two

colors; it's four colors, and they're constantly shifting. I probably looked through

several thousand variations of them

because this is such an important decision to make. It's the default back. Of course, you can change

it. Actually, you can set up your own four colors for that. You can change it.

- No way. Really?

- Yes. You can do it. And you want to rely on certain

deeply hard-coded biological properties of the

human mind, right? So which color do you want to

use? Is it gonna be blue? Is it gonna be yellow? Is

it going to be green? Because each color has a

different meaning in our brain. And what kind of objects

you want to put there. Something from

our childhood, something from nature, or something that

can create a different kind of mood. And this is just one detail of the

app. So there are many details. When you send a

message, you are done typing a message, and you then tap send

and then the message gradually appears in the chat. How does it happen? So you want

the input field to slowly morph into the actual message.

- To the message, yeah.

- And, and you want this to be done regardless of the

contents of the message, because sometimes the width would be different, sometimes it

would be containing media or a link preview or other stuff that will change

the message bubble. So you go through countless different

scenarios and make sure every one of them works

great, even if this message contains 4,000 characters. And then you

look at all the platforms: iOS, Android, and all the old devices

of all kinds of outdated operating systems

and the hardware and you cross the two because you can have this really

bad old phone but using the newest operating

system version, so what do you do? What kind of bugs do you get there?

And then, of course, since Telegram works on tablets as

well, and our iOS version works on an iPad,

which I love a lot. You have to understand that

everything can be really big, so it can consume a lot of space on your screen.

and then it will trigger using more computational resources to render it. So,

there are a lot of nuances to it, but as long as you obsess over every small detail,

at least every detail that really counts, you can get to a

user experience. If you're really used to Telegram, if you've been a

regular user for at least a few weeks, going back to any other messaging app feels

like a serious downgrade.

- Yeah, I mean, there are so many really magical moments. Like, for example,

the way a message evaporates when you delete it. That is a really pleasant

experience.

- Oh, yeah. And boy,

was it hard to make, particularly on Android? This is this Thanos

snap effect, right? So, the message is broken into

tens of thousands of particles which go away like dust

in the wind. It looks great, but it was so hard to make.

- probably one of my favorite GUI graphical things. It's just art. It's

it's pure art. It's incredible. So, it's good to hear that it's been

really thought over and thought through, because it's extremely well done.

- No, you can't pull it off if you're not

going deep into this. And then you don't want to distract people from

their communication with all this

additional information, so you want them to be invisible in a way.

- They create the feeling, but they don't create distraction.

- Yes, and in order to do that, you have to overcome even more

challenges. For example, you mentioned this deletion

effect: message evaporates. If you do the animation,

if you show the animation first, and then the message that

is preceding the deleted message that is going after the just deleted

message moves closer to each other, then it doesn't feel right. It feels

too long, too imposing. So, what you want to do is you want the message to disappear

while the messages around it go closer to each other to fill the resulting gap.

And then you imagine what that involves,

redrawing the entire screen. So, on top of this very complicated animation,

you have to think about things like which kind of messages were

there before it, after. That just adds to complexity.

- And once again, on all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems, all kinds

of tablets, phones, desktop, all of that.

- But, you know, once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense

sense of pride because nobody's doing this.

Nobody really cares. In a way, maybe they're right not to care. Maybe nobody notices

this. But there is something about it that feels

wrong when such things are neglected because I understand that every

day, tens of millions of people around the world are deleting messages.

What kind of experience do they get?

Is this an experience that maybe even subconsciously inspires them

and makes their heart sing even a little bit,

fills them with joy, lightens up their mood even a little bit by 0.001%?

Or is it something that is just basic? And I think if we can

bring some value into people's lives, even through

these subtle details, we have to definitely invest our time in it.

- And some joy, not just sort of value, value like productivity, but

joy. I think Steve Jobs, Jony Ive talked about this. They would

put so much love and effort into the design of everything,

including things that weren't visible in the initial PCs, personal computers,

because they believe that somehow through

osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the

designers put into the thing, and you're absolutely right. I mean,

it's not about deleting messages. I feel a little

inkling of joy when I see that evaporation animation. It's just nice.

I'm happier because of it, and so I feel that effort, and I

think, you know, a billion users feel that.

- People like when other people care.

- Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what it

is. And of course, there are the more sexy things like all the

emojis and the stickers, the GIFs. Many of those are just little art pieces.

- That's, again, an intersection of art and technology because you look at the

stickers, which Telegram launched way before most of these other apps.

- Three years and eight months ahead.

- Ahead of WhatsApp, yes.

But the stickers that WhatsApp ended up launching three years and

eight months after, the first version was not really

good because they just did regular GIFs or WebM videos, which were

not based on vector graphics.

What we did is vector animations. Each of these stickers is only

several kilobytes, sometimes maybe a maximum of 20, 30 kilobytes

in size. But it's 180 frames. We were able to run them at 60 frames per

second on all devices. And it's also very

challenging. It was a challenging thing to do. We had so much headache

trying to make it work. Nobody even tried to do anything like this

before us because it's crazily difficult. But as a result, you have these fluid

animations, you have this really nice user experience. Somebody sends

you a sticker, you don't have to wait for it to load because it's so lightweight

and it starts moving instantly. And then of course, it's not just

engineering. You have to find designers that are able to create the stickers

using vector graphics, which means they're based on

curves described by formulas, not just created

as photographs with pixels. Where do you find these

people? Again, we did competitions but it was not easy to assemble a team

of artists, slash engineers, I would say, that are able to do something like

engineers I would say that are able to do something like

this. This is a unique form of art. And this allowed us to

do a revolution in stickers, then another revolution

in animated emoji that you can add into messages,

custom animated emoji. I don't think anybody did that. I think Telegram is

still the only one allowing users to do that because you can

include a hundred of animated emoji in a message

and they will be animated and they will be moving and your device won't crash.

It's probably unnecessary and crazy but we think somewhere in this

intersection of art and engineering true

quality is created and then of course more recently

we expanded into what we call Telegram GeMs.

which are essentially blockchain based collectibles that

you can demonstrate on your Telegram profile so that they

get social relevance but you can also use them to congratulate your

friends and close ones with their birthdays and other holidays

and that was received extremely well.

- Yeah, they can hold value, they can increase in value, you could trade them for that in that aspect, but

to me, still the... The vector graphics, and it's not just simple graphics, it's

incredibly intricate graphics so the vector makes it very

efficient but it also allows you to create, maybe it incentivizes the artist,

enables them, incentivizes them to create super detailed intricate

elements and then the final result like you would think it wouldn't matter but the final

result has like a lot of stuff going on and it's, and it allows you to

scale on arbitrary devices and not, now it's like this

little... you know like usually GIFs from like back in the day and still in

meme form are low resolution and so usually people don't put details and

intricate art into it but here with vector graphics it's

like, like a million things going on and it allows you to play with different

animations like you showed me this thing where you send and you

hold for a while on the send button and so

you can share with the person you sent a message to this

animation that you've encoded. Like there's a bunch of stuff going on when they read the

message.

- Yes, we have a lot of features like that when we use

this art to allow people to express themselves.

and most people don't even know about these features.

- I didn't know about it. That was cool. That was cool.

- The other application of the same technology is reactions on

Telegram because we made it a goal to make sure that

people feel joy when they just send you a like. Something so trivial

as just adding a like to a message should be an action that you

want to perform again and again and again.

- So another feature is on the more serious side is end-to-end encryption. So

you led the industry in that. It was

launched one year and three months ahead. Can you speak

to why you decided to add end-to-end encryption, how you

developed the current encryption algorithm in the beginning? What was your thinking behind

that?

- So in 2013 when we were launching Telegram,

we were aware of the serious issue with privacy

that Edward Snowden made very clear.

And we thought, yes, we are designing this product in a way that is

already extremely secure, but we want to make

sure that not even we can access user messages.