YouSaid · the spoken record

Pavel Durov

lines on the record: 212
first: 2025-10-01
most recent: 2025-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Now he's 20 or 21. He won in eight of these competitions. He seems to be really good in JavaScript and Android Java. And also C. Why not hire this person? Is some consistency there. And a lot of these people 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 Todrogram was pretty clear These competitions The closest experience What people will have when working at Telegram. So, for example, we want to implement certain very tricky animation and redesign to the profile page of.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy, I think a petition leads to progress. If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition? 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 selected the best, or if we are not certain. Because there's not enough data. To hire somebody, which is repeat the contest with another task. Get more data, get more winners, then repeat again, and at some point you realize, oh, actually this guy Has competed it in Tenawal contests since he was sixteen years old or fourteen year old.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“90% of cases is 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 disabilities, it's an insult. To work alongside someone Who is distracted and cannot go deep In the projects that they're responsible for”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, because the other thing that people don't realize is how motivating working with the 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 are asking their own questions. Keep lagging behind. And at a certain point, If you're an A play You get this dissatisfaction, this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential, accomplish what you are really meant to accomplish. Because of this person working next to you or pretending to work next to you. And by the way, in some cases, it's not because the person is lazy. Some cases The mental, the intellectual ability is not there. Not about experience. Most often it's about. Natural ability and persistence.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is so counterintuitive because In developing 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.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. To your point, I can recall a few instances in my career Firing an engineer actually resulted to an increase in productivity. Say you have 200 engineers building the app and then Just can't make it. They're not keeping up with the pace of the feature release schedule. You think I probably have to hire a third one, but then you notice that one of them was Is really weird Falling behind the schedule, complaining some of the time, doesn't assume responsibility. So, what do they just fire this person? And you fire this person. Few weeks, you realize you actually don't need any, you never needed the third engineer. The problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems he solved.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 multiplied by dozens of times by billion. Centuries millennia lost for humanity. Without any reason Other than just being sloppy.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As 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 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. If you hire somebody who is Maybe a little bit distracted, unexperienced. You may end up with inefficiencies in your code base that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses. And think about the responsibility”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember in 2009 I went to Silton Valley and I met Mark Zuckerberg the first time and some of the other Corey members of early Facebook. Remember, Facebook was just four or five years old Everybody kept asking me, How come even here in Silicon Valley, BK loads faster than Facebook? Everything seems Appear instantly on your website was the secret sauce. That was one of the things that made them very curious.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Large chunk of it, like for example, the search, the ad engine, because VK had a targeted ads, they built that. It was very efficient what they did. Eventually, the private messaging part. Public messages part. Some point we realized there are very few websites online that load faster than VK.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They put together the first customized data engine, which is far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcache because it Was first of all more specialized, more low level.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so at that stage, I could do the basic stuff. I could understand how I implement. Scalability into the code base, how I short my tables. The database where I include Memcast instead of direct. Request 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 PHP is not enough. I'll have to rewrite. Big part of your Data engines in C and C. Say, okay, let's do that. He inv Friend of his help him another absolute champion in World's programming contest. Twice in a”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then another one and another one. The database should be in a different server. Then you have to split the database into tables. Then you have to come up with a way to shard the tables using some criteria that would make sense that wouldn't break your user experience. When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen of servers, surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of the scaling aspect of it became impossible. I remember asking him to come back to help me with this thing. It's starting to be really big. Was worse is that since we became popular, somebody started to do DDoS attacks on us, as it always happens. And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK. And interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day, The DidoS attacks intens”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As for the stack, I started from PHP and MySQL, Debian Linux. But very soon I realized Need to optimize this. I started using memcached Apache servers were not enough anymore, we had to set up engine X, and my brother was still living in Germany, so he couldn't help me much for the first year of building BK. Sometimes I would manage to get through to him through a call I would use an old school phone to call him with wires. Said, 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 relent just myself. Having very little help When we started to grow fast and started to scale it Because the first You realize not one server is not enough. I need to buy another one.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, it's one of the reasons why I'd like to think I'm an efficient project manager. 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 these three days, three weeks what are you going to do the rest of the three weeks apart from these three days? And the team knows me, and that's why we are able today, Tildren, 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 time frame. So yes, that experience was invaluable.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Russia and then in Ukraine and then eventually in Belarus, in Kazakhstan and other countries where VK ended up 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 time, Almost a year, I was a single employee of the company. I was the back end engineer, the front end 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 the social networking platform.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the best advice I've ever got in my life. It worked perfectly, by the way. I started to build it, and before I knew it I would have. There on the website four albums, private masters. Back on UK, and I guess in the early days of Facebook. Would end up building something even more sophisticated than Facebook at the time with more features. Had a girlfriend at the time. I asked her, We need to somehow come up with a Database of all Russian schools and universities and the departments and subdivisions. You did a great job trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing emails to university saying which departments you have exactly at this point. We need to know or which in out to the Department of Education.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I want to make it as efficient as possible. I was obsessing over every line of But then, how do you start something that large? I didn't have any prior experience of quitting 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. A postdoc student Germany at the time, in the Max Planck University and I asked him. Should I start from And he told me Just Module to authorize users Just to log in, you know. Not even to sign out, just to log in. Because you can prepopulate the database with credentials and emails and passwords doesn't really matter. But once you see that you can type in your password, an 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.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Otherwise, it's just too complicated for the new user. The existing users will be happy, they'll be praising you, they will be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated. It's easy And get disoriented. You're only relying on the feedback of existing users. As a result, I started the website called VContactia 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 the other fellow students. And of course, as a 20 year old, I wanted to meet other people, including good looking girls. So I started to build it from scratch. For that one, I thought I'm not going to use any third party. Libraries, modules.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is also something people don't appreciate. 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.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With all of its other departments, and then to other universities, we ended up having. Tens of thousands of users just as a student's portal. We had all kinds of social features there, friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs, all of it. Was quite successful After a graduate of 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 asked me, are you trying to build a Russian Facebook? I said, I'm not sure. Was Facebook? So we Since he graduated an American university two years before that, he showed me Facebook I thought, well, I can already have all this technology. Is valuable to know which elements I should get rid of. Order to scale this thing Have millions of users.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I could still retain some self-confidence. We 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. So after that, When I got into the scene in Petersburg State University, 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. Organized the creation of the Answers to all exams. And digitalized 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. Open the discussion forum there. In a few years, I expanded. The university”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classmates used to love it, and some of my classmates were really smart, you know, champions of Math Olympiads, sons and daughters of professors at the university. And I decided, no, I want to win every single time. I don't know rules 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. Choose the optimal strategy. Wasn't enough for more disadvantaged, 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 make this algorithm. Eventually Train myself to win every single time. Even with the computer back then”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My brother would sometimes guide me. For example, I would create Based strategy Course, two dimensional, baccalaureate, three dimensional is too much for me But it wasn't Sleek in terms of the scrolling FPS frames per second perimeter and ask my brother how to optimize it. He would guide me. Learning Training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger and then I started to create video games for my classmates. When we played, for example, Tic Tac-Toe on an infinite field in my class during the breaks, you know, not TikTok, the three in a row. This is about five in a row and an infinite field. This is a much more interesting game. And it gets quite complicated if you keep playing it.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't interested in probably websites at first. I didn't even have access to the internet when I was 10 years old. 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. Sexually an interesting thing that We sometimes don't realize it, but scarcity leads to creativity. One of the reasons you have so many people who love to. Coming from the Soviet Union or other places which didn't have much access to modern technology. And more importantly, modern entertainment is that 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”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Tildrum very much are willing to fill with an accurate information and they're willing to spread the narratives about telegram. Which can result in Strange situations Some of which we discussed earlier. Example, this French investigation”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metro. My mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it. They would tell her why 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's some formulas. He was already Sucking in this knowledge, he's just. Has this thirst for information. So he was the source of all kind of Great, fat, useful things, inspiring things. He told me pretty much everything I know. At the same time, he's incredibly modest. And kind. And this is something I think a lot of That think they're smart but not generally intelligent lack. More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they're also kind and compassionate.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I must say I learned pretty much everything from my brother, everything I know because when we were used to be kids, We slept in the same bedroom, like beds a few feet away from each other. I kept bugging him with questions 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 wherein we didn't have internet access as a unique prodigy kid, probably one of a billion. He started reading at the age of three, I think, and he pretty fast got so advanced in maths that by the age of six he could already read really sophisticated books on astronomy Sometimes when he did it in public places like buses or”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. This is one of the ways society self regulates.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. An abundance for the society at large. We remove competition thinking that somehow we can shield the future generations From distress That competition inevitably causes”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Graduate schools, 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 You have as a result of high suicide rates, high unemployment. The things and negative trends you see now, in many countries which thought eliminating competition from their education system was a good idea. Still persist, they still think competition is a bad thing. They try to eliminate competition from their economy as well to an extent saying we're gonna make sure the losers 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 Now struggling Keep up with China, with South Korea, with”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 end up Forcing kids to start competing elsewhere. For example, in video games. 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 this rankings of who won, who lost. We don't want any of that. And part of it is justified, but Some kids lose interest. Yes, you eliminate the losers, but you end up eliminating the winners as well. And then, if you're overprotective, Kids in that age they grow up.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I still think math is essential. It's something that shapes your brain. 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 This is exactly the same skill you need in programming, in project management. When you start your own company. And it's one of the few subjects at 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. Is extremely valuable. And of course, once you're good at math, He can apply In physics and engineering, in coding. And it's not surprising that most of the most successful tech founders and CEOs are very good at math and coding. Because ultimately, it's the same. Skill that you rely on.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might as well try to do something impossible and become the best students and get an A or what we call 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. If you just study it all the time 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 get to the result I wanted to get to. I got the excellent. Mark in every subject. And that kept me happy for a while.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 through. 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. Every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis. What's the point of life? Am I even doing here Some point they decided Since I have to go to school anyway”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was good at all subjects, but not behavior. We had this. Behavior grade in the Soviet Union and 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.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Soviets' 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 the school is because. Kept being kicked out from other schools.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference of this class as opposed to other classes in the same school, which was part of the scene in 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 The best from all of these specialized classes and bring 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 subject Is always considered crazy to even try.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 this call was that if you try to Squeeze as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager. Making a focus on math 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 four foreign languages at least, including Latin, English, French, German. In addition, you can get ancient Greek. You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now the same entrepreneur, by the way, who we talk to is invited to go come back to France. He's being offered really good terms. He said you're going to open this new venue on Chands d'Eze. We're going to give you the best location. We're going to fund part of it. Breaks, and he said, Never just forget about this. It's impossible. I'm not coming back to France. He is traumatized by the experience, and he's French. He was born there. He's 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”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In reality, though, a lot of these people that are starting such companies with fire in their eyes are sacrificing their lives, the livelihood, they work in twenty hours a day, they're experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill the 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? Squeezes them out. Because perhaps there was somebody in the Authority that decided to advance their career and perhaps, you know, was too ambitious and not too smart. So as a result, a company was destroyed.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to cherish these 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, the evil rich people that Are the cause of all problems 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.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we just talk 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 Involved taxes lasted for many, many years. I believe he said eight years. And at the end of these eight years, Government reached to 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 Retain sanity is because he moved to Dubai and started a new company which is incredibly successful and now Enriching this city, which we're in right now, With his great ideas and creativity”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he did a great job, by the way. But while he was trying to do that He could also attack Some Investigation again involving the data protection issues. Which lasted forever and was gradually sucking blood of his team and his company constantly. Interrogations. Disclosure requests. 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 to, I'm gonna just sell it. Eventually turned out that. 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 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. Won't change”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was one great startup in this realm in France in the last 10 years. It was a location-based social network, 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 success story in France. But then he sold anyway in a couple of weeks. And later I met him, he's trying to do a new thing. Now I met him and I asked him, I was trying to understand what went wrong. And one of the things he told me about Is that while he was trying to run his company, competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the European society must They want the ever increasing. Public sector to stop increasing They think 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, Public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP. Maybe as much more than in the later 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 Startup field and my field, social media field has been affected by it immensely.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Ironically, we received the request from the French police to take down a channel of far-left protesters on Telegram. France. Refused to do that. We looked at the channel, peaceful protesters. Doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom of speech of people leaning right or leaning right. During COVID, we were protecting Activists that were organizing the Black Lives Merum. And the other side, the protesters against lockdowns. We product everybody as long as they are. Not crossing the lines and not starting to Call to violence or Inside damage to public property. It's a fundamental right to assemble. Interesting that People who haven't had this experience of living in countries that don't have freedoms. Always realize. How dangerous it is To gradually compromise.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get much more suspicious. So by the time that Head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania. Help them silencing conservative voices in Romania. I was. Ready Of what can be going on next.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in a way, shocking because these two matters have nothing in common. Why would anyone talk to 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? 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. Some people are confused about how technology works.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 send us another list of dozens of channels, many, many channels. 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, French intelligence services We're asking us. Do this in Moldova. Let me know Through their contact After Telegram banned the few channels that were in violation of our rules in Moldova, They talk to my judge, the investigative judge in this investigation that has been started against me. And told the judge good things about me, which I found very confusing.”
2025-10-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source