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Pavel Durov

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2025-10-01
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2025-10-01
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  1. “Can definitely happen. As you said, there are certain indications there have been certain test attempts to partially ban it. Telegram is no longer accessible in parts of Russia such as Dagestan and will be incredibly sad if the Rash restores its attempts to ban telegram because currently Is been used by its population. For all kinds of purposes, not just personal communication or economic business activities But also it's Only platform which allows the Russian people to access independent sources of information. If you think about Media outlets such as BBC or any other Russian sources of information. Only accessible in Russia through Telegram. In the form of Telegram channels, their websites are banned, Some other social media, besides a band. And as you said, there are indications that Russia is planning to migrate.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “But it was the beginning of the end. It was clear that There's no way. I'm going to be allowed to run VK the way I wanted it to run. Was the moment I My backpack. And just started to Moved to the hotel And realized any day I can leave the country. I kept Running I started to design Telegram and assembling the team. But I knew my days in Russia were numbered.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Without betraying him, because in 2011 Remember what SAP was already there? I think they launched in 2009. It had zero encryption. Messages were plain text in transit, meaning that even your system administrator, let alone your carrier. Had access to your messages. Was only after Telegram started this push for encryption that this other apps suddenly remembered that privacy wasn't their DNA. WhatsApp founders famously stated, but it must have been a dormant gene in 2011. In 2011, there was no way. To send a message in a secure way. I also told myself if I'm going to survive this, I'm definitely launching a secure messaging app. Somehow it ended up not being too bad. I was summoned to the prosecutor. Answered some silly questions. Fewer questions that I had to answer. More recently in the French investigation case.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “But then I had armed policemen trying to get into my And I thought about many things at that moment. I asked myself. Do they make the right choice? And I came to the conclusion that I made the right choice. And they ask myself, What would be the next thing That would logically follow from this. And I realized. They're probably going Me in prison. So, what am I going to do about it? I asked myself. And I told myself I'm going to starve myself to death. It's something that probably many men have. They're ready to die for other people or certain principles they strongly believe in. Not alone here Guess Edward Snowden was ready to die as well Some other people like Assange. Also at that moment, I realized there is no way to communicate securely. I need to tell my brother what's going on, they are probably going after him. How do I tell him?”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The first of these instances was in December 2011. December 2011 you had this huge protest on the streets of Moscow. They didn't trust in the integrity of the election result to the state Duma in Russia. I remember 2011 I still lived in Russia. Running VK. There was no Telegram. The government demanded that we take down the The opposition groups of Navalny from VK that had Hundreds of thousands of members. That were used to organize this protest. They very publicly refused to do that. I just decided it's not the right thing to do. People have the right to assemble and I mocked the prosecutor who handed me that Demand. I put out a scan of it. Next to it A photo of a dog and a hoodie with its tongue out. And I said, This is my official response to the prosecutor's request to ban opposition groups. Was very funny at the moment.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Interested in If anything, I felt even more free after that. It wasn't the first time I thought I was going to die. Experience when I assumed Something bad is going to happen to me a few years before that. Also, in relation to my work. After you survived something like this, you feel like you're living on bonus time. So in a way, you died a long time ago. New day you get is a gift”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, this is it because I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see anything was very painful. I think it's over. I thought, well, I have had a good life. I managed to accomplish a few things. And then it collapsed on the floor, but I don't remember it. Because the pain covered everything I found myself The floor next day was already bright. And I couldn't stand up. I was super weak. I look at Blood vessels were broken all over my body. Something like this never happened to me. I couldn't walk for two weeks after. I stayed at my place and I decided not to tell most of my team about it because, again, I don't want them to worry. Was tough. That was”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “One hour after, when I was already in my bed, So I was living in law. Very bad. Felt All over my body. Tried to get up and. Go to the bathroom But while I was going there, I felt that functions of my body started to switch off first the eyesight and hearing. Then they had difficulty breathing Everything accompanied by Very acute pain. Hard stomach. Or blood vessels It's a difficult thing to explain But one thing I was certain about is, yeah, this is it.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, this is something I never talked about publicly because I didn't want people to freak out. Particularly at the time it was spring twenty eighteen. We were trying to raise funds for Ton, a blockchain project working with all kinds of VCs and investors In the meantime, we had a couple of countries trying to ban Telegram, so it wasn't exactly the best moment for me to start sharing anything related to my personal health. There was something that Hard to forget That I never fully have, I believe I have perfect health. I very rarely have headaches Bad I don't take pills because I don't have to take pills. And that was the only instant in my life when I think Was dying Came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented. I had this weird neighbor and he left something for me there wrong.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “In Iranian engineer could come up with a proxy server, distribute its address among users in Iran, and whoever connected through the proxy of this person would be able to see a pinned chat, an ad. Placed there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy. And this is how you can monetize your proxy. So it created this Resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem. And as a result, we kept millions or maybe tens of millions of Iranian users. Until this day, I think Togum was still banned in Iran. Day, but we probably have Something like 50 million people rely on Telegram from that country”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Magically 15 minutes to the time I was planning to remove Telegram from the Russian app store in order to proceed globally. Apple reached out to us. And said it's okay. Your update is approved. And we managed to Keep playing This hide and seek game with the sensor, bypassing censorship through digital resistance. In Iran it was a little bit different because we realized it would have been too expensive to try to Come up with all these IP addresses. And in addition, it was Not clear whether we wouldn't be in violation of the sanctions regime. So we did something else. We created an economic incentive for People who would set up proxy servers for Telegram Any person”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The old versions of Telegram Obsolete, some features that used to work stopped working, and users all over the world started to suffer. People that had nothing to do with Russia from other parts of the world experienced issues with Telegram. Was really serious, and I said to my team, you know what? 6 p.m. today. I think it was a Friday. Nothing changes and Apple doesn't allow us to. The version of Telegram through. Just forget about the Russian market. Let's keep going because the rest of the world is more important. It's sad, but what can we do?”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And at some point, I decided I have to make a statement. I have to say that Apple sided with the sensor. We're trying to do the right thing here, but Without Apple, we can't do much. People can't download your app anymore Published it in my channel The New York Times picked it up Picture of the protesters flying paper airplanes. Apple was criticized in the story, and I thought, well, that's Apple should probably Back to the right side of history here A way for one day In the meantime, since we've been unable to update Tilgrim for more than a month, Started to Fall apart because The new version of iOS came out. It made.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Our anti-censorship tools Biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple. Apple didn't allow us to Update Telegram in the App Store saying for at least four weeks that we have to come to an agreement with Russia first. We said it's not possible. Said we will allow you to push your update for Telegram worldwide except for Russia. didn't want to do that Almost lost help. At some point, I said, you know, maybe this is the only way. Maybe we should leave the Russian market. Stop allowing users from Russia to download the app, from the App Store, which would mean it's over. We helped organize certain protests in defense of Telegram and privacy and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow. There was hilarious people flying paper aeroplanes and”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “We set up this movement called Digital Resistance when system administrators and engineers all around the world both inside and outside Russia could set up their own proxy servers. And their own IP addresses for Telegram to rely on in order to bypass censorship. We ended up spending millions of dollars on that. The sensor got crazy there. There were bad IPRs and larger subnets of IP addresses than Huge subnets, which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country's infrastructure started to go down. Like people were trying to pay for groceries in the supermarkets and Nothing would work because the Russian sensor blocked too many IP addresses and some of the subnets were used to host Other unrelated services Even some Russian social networks and media got affected. Banks So they had Start being more selective in how they combat.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Starting in mid 2017 or late 2017 Russia demanded that telegram hands them the encryption keys. They thought these things exist something that would allow them to read messages of every person on telegram or at least every person on Telegram in Russia. We told them it's impossible. You have to ban us banish. This is what they ended up doing Spring 2018 And there was quite fun because We were trying to block our IP addresses, but we were prepared for that. And we came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones every time the sensor blocks our existing addresses. And then it was completely automated. We had millions of IP addresses would be burning through them.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So in 2018, Tilgram started to become popular. I think we had something like. 200 million users. And it increasingly became popular in places like Iran and Russia. Other countries were sometimes Have something to hide from the government. In Iran, people use Telgram to protest against the government. There these huge channels they will use to organize. And eventually the government couldn't keep up. Decided to ban Telegram. People would still keep using it though, using VPNs. Help the government Invested a lot in coming up with their own messaging app. They had several teams competing. The title of the nationally reigning messaging app. All these apps failed. People still prefer Telegram. Interesting Iran Telegram, but WhatsApp wasn't banned. Or at least they invent WhatsApp soon after. At the same time”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Will be a very bold statement, but I prove to be quite stress resilient. And it's not that you don't have fear. You can't have fear. You overcome this fear. I don't think there's anything At this point, it can happen to change the way I am.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think they're all equally, should be equally afraid of or equally not afraid of in a way. It's not that this intelligence service can kill you and the other can't kill you.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And it responded, but it overreacted. It ended up in eroding certain basic rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy, because the government always wants to increase its powers and the government always tries to do it at the expense of citizens. You have this situation when the cure is worse than the disease. I think it was incredibly brave to do what Edward did I didn't get to work with him. Whoever see him in person. Keep in touch, we sometimes communicate. We are not close. I still think what he did is laudable. Hope someday”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, the main lesson is not everything what it seems. Discover, and this is something I found quite shocking at the time, that a lot of people We thought Security and cryptography experts ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other. Promoting flawed encryption standards. You would end up discovering that. Your government that was supposed to be limited in how it can surveil its people. Actually, doesn't consider itself that limited. And that was very. Valuable for the world to understand. I guess it also can be a lesson demonstrating that we humans don't get the balance right. So 9-11. Situation when the government had to respond.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Does make it more secure. If Snowden's relations taught us anything, is that very often Open source tools, modules, libraries. I use by everybody. Ended up having certain flaws and security issues. Make yourself too vulnerable, it's also a way Make sure you're doing things the most efficient way possible. But it's extremely difficult to do that. You really have to have exceptional talent in your team to achieve this level of thoroughness, to go to a low level of coding that allows you to recreate from scratch database engines. Web servers, entire programming languages. Because the programming language we use on the backend. Develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “You said Tilgrim was the only popular messaging app that does that. We allow people to make sure both on Android and iOS that the source code of Telegram on GitHub and the app you're actually using is the same app. I think it's incredibly important, not just to gain people's trust, but just to stay transparent and open about it. When I make this claim that Togum's secret chats are the most secure. Way of communicating, I really mean it, because I haven't seen An effect contradicting this claim. At least among the popular messaging app, you say WhatsApp signal i message none of them have reproducible bills on both iRS and Android. None of them had at least at the same level put so much effort. Into making sure that Algorithms that you use in order to encrypt data. Not algorithms that have been handed to you. By some agency”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So, you need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims, really encrypts data. In a way that is described on its website For that, you need to make your apps open source. For any researchers to have a look at it. The Telegram has been open source since 2013 Apps like WhatsApp have never been open source, so you don't really know what they're doing and how exactly they encrypt your messages. What's important here though is to understand whether the version of the app that you download from the App Store Corresponds exactly to the source code that you can view on GitHub. And for that, you need reproducible builds.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Adapted for it. At the same time, if you were really paranoid, you think I don't want to be screenshotted. I don't want to have any leagues. I don't even trust Telegram. I only trust code. Secret chats are the best option. I believe it is the most secure means of communication today”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And secret chats are not just end to end encrypted. There are certain limitations that are both the feature and the bug. For example, you can't screenshot them. You can't afford any... Document any message from them Which is not necessarily something you need when you're Trying to get some work done and you're just communicating with your team on a project. So it became very clear to us that there are different needs here. And if you try to combine both in one type of chat, you will end up losing a lot of utility. We are Telgrom, we don't use any... Collaboration tool for teamwork. We use Telegram to build Telegram. So we felt instantly when we were trying to switch to, say, secret chats to Share large documents and try to get work done. It was just not.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Was incredibly important back in the day, and at the same time, we realized certain limitations of end to encryption. So within that Design that architecture, you can't support. Very large chat communities with consistent, persistent chat histories, you can support. Huge one of many channels, you'd have issues with maintaining Bots that have lots of incoming messages. Multiple device support becomes tricky. People will end up losing some of the documents they share. So we also see soiler issues and we ended up having this sort of Hybrid Experience where depending on your use case and your requirements, you can choose the level of. Encryption that we want to have.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So at twenty thirteen when we were launching Telegram, We were aware of Serious issue with privacy That Edward Snowden made very clear And we thought, yes, we're designing this product in a way that is. Already extremely secure, but we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages. And we understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust. So that's why we made Tilgroom open source so all our apps have been Open available on GitHub since 2013. Then we added into an encryption in our secret chats which WhatsApp copied a few years after one year and three months ahead, they just started to test it. They rolled it out, I think, 2016, which is... Three years after us, and the only reason I think the rest of the industry had to do it is because. Set the stand”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “As we have a lot of features like that when we use this art to allow people to express themselves. And most people don't even know about these features.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “And then, of course, more recently, we expanded into what we call Telegram gifts, which are essentially blockchain-based collectibles that you can demonstrate on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance, but you can also use them to congratulate your friends and close the one Birthdays and other holiday And that was received extremely well”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “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 need competitions, but it was not easy to assemble a team of artists slash artists slash engineers, I would say, that are able to do something. 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 Togum is still the only one allowing users to do that because you can include 100 of animated emoji in a message and there 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”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “What we did is vector animations. Each of these stickers is only several kilobytes, sometimes maybe maximum 20, 30 kilobytes in size, but it is 180 frames. We were able to run the 60 frames per second on all devices. And it's also very challenging. What's a challenging thing to do? We had so much headache trying to make it work. Nobody even tried doing 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 these stickers using”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Ahead of WhatsApp, yes. But the stickers that WhatsApp ended up launching three years and eight months after were not the first version was not really good because they just did regular GIFs or WebM videos. Which were not based on vector graphics”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “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.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense. Sense of pride because nobody is doing this. Nobody really cares. In a way, maybe they're right not to care. Maybe nobody notices this, but there's something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected because I understand that every day tens of millions of people around the world deleting messages. Kind of experience they get? Is this an experience that maybe even subconsciously inspires them? And makes their hearts sing even a little bit. Them with joy, lightens up their mood even a little bit by zero point zero zero one percent. Or is it something that is just basic? And I think if we can Bring some value in people's lives. Through these subtle details We have to definitely invest our time in it.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And in order to do that, 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 modulated message that is going after the just deleted message move closer to each other, then it doesn't feel right. It feels too long too imposing. So what you want to do is you want the message disappear while the messages around it go closer to each other to fill the resulting gap. And then you imagine what it involves redrawing the entire screen. So on top of this very complicated animation You have to think about things like which kind of messages were. There before, after. Just adds to complexity”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “No, you can't pull it off if you're not. Going deep in this. And then you don't want to distract people from. Their communication with all these additional animations. So you want them to be invisible.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Oh, yeah. And boy, was it hard to make, particular. This Thanos snap effect, right? So the message is broken to tens of thousands particles which go away like dust in the wind. It looks great, but it was so hard to make.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Shall love it locked. You have to understand that everything can be really big so it can consumerous 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. 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 Serious downgr”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “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, all kinds of outdated. Operating systems. The hardware, and you cross the tool because you can have this really bad old phone, but using the newest operating system versions, what do you do? Kind of bugs you get there. And then, of course, since Telegram works As well, and our iOS version works on an iPad.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “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? Going to be blue? Is it going to be yellow? Is it going to be green? Because each color has a different meaning in our brain. 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 mode. 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 Slowly morph into the actual message.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “And then I think for the default pattern and the default background, which is based on four colors, it's not a gradient based on two colors. It's four colors. And they're constantly shifting. I probably look through several thousand variations of that. Is this such an important decision to make? It's the default. Of course, you can change it. Actually, you can set up your own four colors for that. You can change it.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Efficient, but not too beautiful because Even doing something so trivial as a gradient can result in noticeable lines in the gradient that person can instantly say, oh no, it's not the right thing, so you can have to introduce certain randomness there. And then you have the gradient, but it's not enough. It's too plaint. You want to have certain pattern as an overlay, but it should be simple enough not to distract you from the content, but it has to be entertaining enough to create a good feeling about the whole app. And another question, what kind of Objects you want to include in this pattern and how this pattern would work will be Based on pixels Would it be vector based and would it be vector based so they will be influenced with scalable and high quality?”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “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 desire is love it and make it work on the weakest device as possible, oldest, cheapest smartphones you can imagine. If you take the moving gradient on the background of every Telegram chat, this is something most people don't notice, but they can feel it.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “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 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 this 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 whenever you go to WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger signal, it doesn't matter, you would see exactly the same or pretty much similar”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Implemented in 2013 in a secret chat. Funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it, like WhatsApp seven years after, and then signaling some other of these apps. They initially even copied the exact timestamps. So, for example, if we had like one, three, and five seconds, they would also have one, three, and five seconds He tried not to change it because they were not sure what was the magic sauce behind the scene.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “An employee of your company, of somebody who has been a user of it. This person has no prior experience of using Telegram, their understanding would be very limited. Why would I even try to hire somebody from LinkedIn who Worked at Google and other companies. Is used to receiving salary for nothing. Used to shift responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings. Very limited understanding of what Tilgram stands for. Just crazy if you think about it.”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Tilgrim's Android version, and the Android app, it's an open source app, anybody can take its code and play with it. So as a result, we would not just select the best person and hire this person, we would also select the best solution to the problem because we would not suggest the contestants to solve trivial problems. It's something that's valuable. It saves a lot of time for us in terms of development. And because I always had this large social media platforms which I could use to promote these competitions, Somehow both Viquet and Telegram were very popular among engineers and designers, other tech people I had no issue to promote these contests and find the right people ever. Can be better than”

    2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source