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

- The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov,

founder and CEO of Telegram,

a messaging platform

actively used by over 1 billion people.

Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech,

building tools that protect human communication

from surveillance and censorship.

For this, he has faced pressure

from some of the most powerful governments

and organizations on earth.

In the face of this immense pressure,

he has always held his ground

continuously fighting to protect user privacy

and the freedom of all of us humans

to communicate with each other.

I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him

and can definitively say

that he's one of the most principled

and fearless humans I've ever met.

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

a lot of people, fans of his,

wrote to me asking if he does in fact privately live

the disciplined aesthetic life he's known for,

no alcohol, stoic mindset,

strict diet and exercise,

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

no phone except to occasionally test Telegram features,

and so on.

Yes, he's 100% that guy,

which made the experience of hanging out with him

really inspiring to me.

I'm grateful for it,

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

This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical

about freedom, life, human nature,

and the nature of government bureaucracies,

and it is also in part super technical,

because to me, it's fascinating

that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team

and yet is able to basically out-innovate

all of its competitors

with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features.

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

you consider all the features we know and love

in our communication apps,

in almost every case, Telegram did it first.

So we discuss it all,

from the Kafkaesque situation

he's in the midst of in France,

to the rollercoaster of his life and career,

to his philosophy on technology,

freedom, and the human condition.

And by the way, while this entire conversation

is in English,

we'll make captions and voiceover audio tracks

available in multiple languages,

including Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi.

On YouTube, you can switch between language audio tracks

by clicking the settings gear icon,

then clicking Audio track,

and then selecting the language you prefer.

Huge thank you once again to ElevenLabs

for their help with translation and dubbing

and with the bigger mission

of breaking down barriers that language creates.

They are truly one of the most remarkable companies

I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

This is the "Lex Fridman Podcast."

To support it,

please check out our sponsors in the description.

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

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

to risk everything for freedom. What were some

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

- I 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