#482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram.

spk_0 A messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people.

spk_0 Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship.

spk_0 For this, he has faced pressure from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on Earth.

spk_0 In the face of this immense pressure, he has always held his ground, continuously fighting to protect user privacy and a freedom of all of us humans to communicate with each other.

spk_0 I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him, and can definitively say that he is one of the most principled and fearless humans I've ever met.

spk_0 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, ascetic life he's known for.

spk_0 No alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise, including a crazy amount of daily pull ups and push ups. No phone, except occasion of test telegram features and so on.

spk_0 Yes, he is 100% that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me.

spk_0 I'm grateful for it, and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend.

spk_0 This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical about freedom, life, human nature and the nature of government bureaucracies.

spk_0 And it is also in parts super technical, because to me, it is 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.

spk_0 Just like the meme of the Simpsons did at first, you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case, telegram did at first.

spk_0 So we discuss it all from the Kafka-esque situation he's in the midst of in France, to the rollercoaster of his life and career, to his philosophy on technology, freedom and human condition.

spk_0 And by the way, while this entire conversation is in English, we make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in multiple languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, French and Hindi.

spk_0 If this is of interest to you, you will need to head over to the Lex Friedman channel on YouTube, or you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking audio track, and then selecting the language you prefer.

spk_0 Here we only provide the original English version.

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spk_0 You've been an advocate for freedom for many years, writing that you should be ready to risk everything for freedom.

spk_0 What were some influences and insights that help you arrive at this value of human freedom?

spk_0 I get to experience the difference between a society with freedom and society without freedom pretty early in life.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Even for a four or five year old kid it was obvious. Like you can't experience all the toys, the ice cream sorts, the cartoons in the Soviet Union that you can access in Italy.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 You also wrote, so both the Virginia Djenik translates to freedom matters more than money. How do you prevent these values for freedom being corrupted by money, by people with influence, by people with power?

spk_0 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 is nothing more left to be afraid of.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Do you contemplate your mortality? Anything 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.

spk_0 But when you approach it rationally, you leave and then you die. There is 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?

spk_0 Or it's much more enjoyable to forget about this and leave 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.

spk_0 Yeah, remembering that death exists makes you deeply feel every moment that you do get.

spk_0 That's why I love reminding myself that I can die any day. In many ways, you live a pretty stoke 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 It's a short term pleasure. Isn't worth your future. Let's talk about it each one of these alcohol. What's been your philosophy behind that?

spk_0 That one is quite easy. When I was 11 years old, my biochemistry teacher, he gave me this book here, it was called the Illusion of Paradise.

spk_0 In there, he would describe the biological and chemical processes that happen in your body once you consume this or that substance.

spk_0 It was mainly related to illegal drugs, but alcohol was one of these addictive substances that he covered.

spk_0 It turns out that when you drink alcohol, the thing that happens is that your brain cells become paralyzed. They become literally zombies.

spk_0 And then next day, sometimes after the party is over, some of your brain cells die and never get to normal.

spk_0 So think about it. 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.

spk_0 Anyways, it's a poison that will let in our body. But by way of advice, what advice would you give to people who consider not drinking?

spk_0 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, to party, to drink so you can socialize.

spk_0 So what advice would you give to them? A lot of people who imagine having a social life without alcohol?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 There's something that some fear you're not ready to confront. And you have to address this fear.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Fix the underlying problem, which is usually at the very bottom is always going to be fear.

spk_0 And 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?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 But it works only temporarily. And then you have to pay the debt with interest.

spk_0 So what do you do? I mean, you've been a lot of gatherings, a lot of parties. Is there some challenges to saying no? For me not at all.

spk_0 I've been always ready to stand my ground and say no when I feel something's not right.

spk_0 And it's extraordinary how easily we humans are affected by what we perceive as majority.

spk_0 Because nobody, since ancient times, since million years ago, wants to be left out by the tribe.

spk_0 We are scared that we won't become accepted anymore, which thousands of years ago meant we're going to starve to death.

spk_0 So we have to consciously fight this inclination to be agreeable with everything that the majority imposes on you.

spk_0 Because it's quite clear that many things that the majority and many activities the majority is engaging in are not bringing you any good.

spk_0 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 at the fear.

spk_0 That's the fear. And it's quite irrational if you think about it. It was something that made a lot of sense 20,000 years ago.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And you don't get to become outstanding at some point in your life.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Differentally. 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.

spk_0 And the niche being different than anything that anybody else is doing. Can you explain that a little bit more?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 But if you're doing something that everybody else is doing anyway, what's the value of it?

spk_0 Now it sounds easier than it is done to do something that nobody else is doing because we humans is surrounded by all kinds of information which makes us want to copy what we are perceiving.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And it's not that difficult to do that. You have to just remain consistent because nobody else is trying to do that.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Yeah, the majority of the population becomes slaves to the AI recommender systems. Yeah, I driven recommender systems. And so the content everybody's fed is the same thing and we all become the same.

spk_0 On that point, one of the different things you do is you don't use a phone, except occasionally to test telegram features.

spk_0 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 social media. So can you describe your philosophy behind that?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 When I finally got it to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls. I was always in an airplane mode or mute. I hated the idea of being disturbed.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And what I should be thinking about to set up here on agenda and the phone gets in your way.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 You want to choose what kind of stuff you let inside your mind.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 How often do you find quiet times to just think and focus deeply on work without any distractions?

spk_0 You mentioned to me that you value quiet mornings.

spk_0 Yes. So the thing I'm trying to do, I try to allocate as much time as possible for sleep.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And some people hated this. You have to take a sleeping pill, but I never take pills. I love this moment.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 That's my favorite time of the day. Sometimes I go, I wake up, I go take a shower, still without the phone.

spk_0 Beautiful ideas can come to you while you're doing your morning exercise, your morning routine without a phone.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Same is true in a way if you've been consuming news from social media late at night.

spk_0 But then how do you define what is important and what you really want to become in life?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 So you definitely try to avoid digital devices for as many hours as possible in the morning.

spk_0 Just to have the quiet thinking time plus the crazy monster push-ups.

spk_0 I know it's kind of counterintuitive because I found it once at the largest social networks in the world after which I found it the second largest messaging app in the world.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And then how can you run this thing if you're constantly bored by all kinds of information, most of which is irrelevant to the success of what you're trying to build?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 But 99% of people aren't.

spk_0 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 ties of history will turn.

spk_0 But in reality, most things will not turn the ties of history. And so I guess our challenge is to figure out what is the timeless thing.

spk_0 What is the thing that's happening today is still going to be true in 10, 20 years.

spk_0 And from that, decide what you're going to do. And that's very difficult on social media, because everybody's outraged.

spk_0 The news of the day, whatever the quarrel is, that's the thing that everyone thinks the world will end because of this thing.

spk_0 And then another thing happens the next day.

spk_0 And they're trying to influence your emotions.

spk_0 Yeah. That's how you get into trouble, because you can be forced to make conclusions that are not in your best interest.

spk_0 I've seen you be once again quite stoic about your emotions. You ever get angry, you ever get lonely, you ever get sad, they're all a culture of human emotion.

spk_0 And what do you do that? We make difficult decisions.

spk_0 I'm a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience emotions. Some of them are not very pleasant.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Self-discipline is particularly important because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Maybe when I was a teenager. But one of the reasons for that is I start doing things. I identify the problem.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And people often make this mistake thinking, oh, I should just have some rest and then regain energy. This is not how it works.

spk_0 You gain energy by doing something. So you start doing something then it happens. You feel motivated. You feel inspired.

spk_0 And then ultimately you do something else, a little bit more. A little bit more. And in a few years, you may end up achieving great things.

spk_0 That's the thing that people really confuse. If you're stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really don't want to do anything, do something.

spk_0 Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel. Not feel and then do.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Then you come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write a paragraph. This is pretty obvious and it's not a secret.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And this is one of them.

spk_0 We've been working out every single day. You have been working out for many years.

spk_0 It's pretty intensively. So I think a lot of people would love to know what's your perfect daily workout regimen.

spk_0 Let's say on a daily on a weekly basis.

spk_0 I do 300 pushups and 300 squats every morning. And in addition to that, I go to the gym normally five, six times a week, spending between one and two hours every day.

spk_0 So pushups and squats are still a big part of your routine.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Because you don't want to do this pushups and the morning, most of the days squats are particularly boring. They're not that hard.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 When I can, I also take a nice bath because it's another exercise of self discipline.

spk_0 I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self discipline.

spk_0 Not your biceps or your pecs or anything else.

spk_0 Because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.

spk_0 Everything else becomes easy. We should mention I went with you to Banya.

spk_0 And I think it's fair to say you're nuts.

spk_0 In terms of how much you can handle. And I didn't even see the worst of it.

spk_0 Can you just speak to your crazy escapades in the Banya? What value do you get from it?

spk_0 So both the heat and the cold.

spk_0 I don't know if it's crazy. I think it's quite natural and normal by this time.

spk_0 But maybe I could just get used to it.

spk_0 So Banya is this extreme kind of sauna, practiced by Eastern Europeans.

spk_0 But it is done in a way that maximizes heat.

spk_0 And they also use all kind of herbs and branches.

spk_0 It's a much more holistic and natural experience.

spk_0 Then a mystery part of it is you get the cold punch.

spk_0 And then you go back.

spk_0 And again, this is one of those things that maybe in the moment is not always that pleasant,

spk_0 particularly if you go to extreme temperatures.

spk_0 You don't feel great. I don't always feel great.

spk_0 But this feeling is passing. It's only a few minutes.

spk_0 Same with the ice bath.

spk_0 You have to suffer a bit.

spk_0 And then you get to feel great for hours and days after.

spk_0 What's more, it gives you this long-term health benefits.

spk_0 In a way, you can look at it as alcohol in reverse.

spk_0 Alcohol will give you this short, fleeting pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours.

spk_0 But then you will be paying for it with long-term negative consequences.

spk_0 I'd rather do banhia in ice bath.

spk_0 We swim the length of a large lake in France a couple of times.

spk_0 Can you talk through why you value these multi-hour swims?

spk_0 I left swimming for hours.

spk_0 The longest time swam was five and a half hours in Finland.

spk_0 It was quite cold. I got lost in the process.

spk_0 Barely could find my way back.

spk_0 But the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after.

spk_0 You're shaking a little bit. You feel great after.

spk_0 You cross a huge lake and I cross many lakes.

spk_0 Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake.

spk_0 And every time you feel this achievement, which makes you happy,

spk_0 makes you feel strong.

spk_0 And then you're more ready to other challenges.

spk_0 And of course, when you know you're going to start a journey that will last a few hours,

spk_0 you're reluctant to do it.

spk_0 But you swim for ten minutes and then for twenty minutes and then for thirty minutes.

spk_0 And teaches you these incredible patience that I think is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life.

spk_0 And it's pretty meditative lake versus ocean.

spk_0 Yes, and you don't have to go too fast.

spk_0 You can be slow when you enjoy the moment.

spk_0 Until you get lost and it's five and a half hours.

spk_0 Is your panic like if you're going to be able to find the shore or find joy out?

spk_0 Not really.

spk_0 I'm a reasonably stress-resuelent person.

spk_0 I didn't panic at that moment.

spk_0 And there were worse swims that had that were shorter but involved accidents.

spk_0 And you know about some of them.

spk_0 So that wasn't the worst by far.

spk_0 But an important thing about swimming and physical activity in general is that it makes your mind clear.

spk_0 And your thinking process is becoming more efficient.

spk_0 Because at the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen,

spk_0 how hard can push through blood to our brain?

spk_0 How can you make this go faster?

spk_0 Or how do you make your lungs more efficient?

spk_0 How do you make your heart more efficient in doing that?

spk_0 Physical activity is the only way.

spk_0 I know of.

spk_0 So it's not just staying healthy or trying to look good.

spk_0 But it's also being productive.

spk_0 It's also being stress-resuelent.

spk_0 All of this quality is unnecessary.

spk_0 If you want to run a large company, if you want to start a company.

spk_0 I'm surprised when I started doing this more than 10 years ago that more CEOs didn't engage in sports.

spk_0 The situation changed in the last several years, which is great.

spk_0 Because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago, there was this stereotype that if you're strong,

spk_0 you must be not very smart and vice versa.

spk_0 Which is a complete lunacy.

spk_0 Very often, these two things go together.

spk_0 So for you working as not just by staying healthy, it's actually valuable for the work that you do.

spk_0 As a tech leader, as an engineer, as a technologist.

spk_0 Oh yes.

spk_0 When I can't train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping on me.

spk_0 So even in situations when I am constrained, I can't go to gym.

spk_0 I would just keep doing pushups.

spk_0 I just keep doing squats.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 I mean, that's the cool thing about body weight exercise.

spk_0 You can just do it anywhere.

spk_0 You can just pop off 50 or 100 pushups before meeting.

spk_0 I don't, don't you feel weird when you have a day without physical activity?

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 If I go a day without doing pushups at the very minimum, that's a shitty day.

spk_0 And if you can do pullups, it's even better.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 I gotta ask you about your diet too.

spk_0 No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda, intermittent fasting, sometimes once a day,

spk_0 only sometimes a couple of times a day.

spk_0 Also, take me to your philosophy on the no sugar or no, no soda, just clean food.

spk_0 Well, sugar is pretty easy because it's addictive.

spk_0 The more you consume sugar, the more you want it, the hungry you get.

spk_0 So, if you want to stay efficient and healthy, why consume processed sugar?

spk_0 It will just end up snacking all the time.

spk_0 Intermittent fasting, so eating only within six hours and not eating for 18 hours every day,

spk_0 also brings structure into your day and into your eating habits.

spk_0 So, you don't crave sugar anymore because you know if you eat sugar and then you're enabled to snack,

spk_0 you're just punishing yourself.

spk_0 I read a few books on longevity, I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is

spk_0 harmful.

spk_0 No, I'm not militant about sugar.

spk_0 You can eat berries, fruit, if you feel you buddy needs it.

spk_0 But it's not true to think it's necessary to consume sweet things, not for children, not for adults.

spk_0 Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20 years ago because I just felt heavy every time I had it.

spk_0 So, I guess it's insidious.

spk_0 My metabolism, my digestive system isn't agreeing with this kind of food.

spk_0 So, I normally eat seafood, of all kinds, and vegetables.

spk_0 This is the basic source of calories for me.

spk_0 Yeah, and like all things you said short term pleasure isn't worth your future.

spk_0 So, a lot of things we all know, the alcohol is destructive to the body, tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar.

spk_0 But society puts that on you, makes it very difficult to avoid.

spk_0 So, I guess it all boils down to the discipline.

spk_0 Yes, and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you're experiencing.

spk_0 If you're experiencing a headache, one solution would be to take a pill, and then the headache disappears.

spk_0 What this pill would actually do in most cases, it would mute the consequence.

spk_0 You're feeling of pain, it's a pain killer.

spk_0 It will not eliminate the root cause.

spk_0 So, you have to ask yourself, what is it that's causing this headache?

spk_0 Do I need to drink some water?

spk_0 Is the air quality here bad?

spk_0 Do I need to start getting more sleep?

spk_0 Is there something wrong with people around me?

spk_0 They're stressing me out.

spk_0 There must be some reason why you're experiencing a headache.

spk_0 But if you take a pill, you're not removing this reason.

spk_0 You're actually making it worse.

spk_0 Because this harmful factor is still there.

spk_0 It's like you're piloting a helicopter.

spk_0 And there's some red signals and red lamps start to blink, and it starts producing bad, unpleasant noise.

spk_0 What would you do?

spk_0 You would try to figure out the cause and eliminate it.

spk_0 Maybe there's some bounty next to you and you have to avoid it.

spk_0 Or you take a hammer and smash the signal.

spk_0 I think we could ask this quite obvious.

spk_0 So, why are we constantly doing this regardless?

spk_0 Oh, because everybody else is doing it.

spk_0 Because there's a whole industry trying to persuade you that this is the right thing to do.

spk_0 So, it's incredibly important to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.

spk_0 So, you generally try to avoid all pills, all pharmaceutical products.

spk_0 Yes, I've been staying away from all of that since I became an adult.

spk_0 When you're a teenager, your mom would typically say,

spk_0 we need to take this pill, otherwise the world collapses.

spk_0 Once I became a grown-up, I said, no, I don't think that the producers of pill are incentivized in the right way.

spk_0 They are not really interested in eliminating the root of the problem.

spk_0 They would rather have me dependent on the pills they're producing, so that I could buy them forever.

spk_0 And then I also realized, no, I'm not saying that you should never take pills.

spk_0 There are obviously some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example.

spk_0 So, I'm not suggesting we go back to the middle ages.

spk_0 But what I'm saying is we overuse pills.

spk_0 Yes, it's always good to study deeply understanding incentives under which the world operates.

spk_0 So, you don't get swept up into the forces that operate under these incentives.

spk_0 And Big Pharma is certainly one of them.

spk_0 Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive to keep the problem going versus solving the problem.

spk_0 That's wise.

spk_0 This is something I practice every day.

spk_0 I read some piece of news and I ask myself,

spk_0 who benefits from me reading this?

spk_0 Then you can end up coming to this conclusion that maybe 95% of things we've read in the news have been written and published.

spk_0 Because somebody wanted you to buy some product, support some political clause, fight some war, donate some money.

spk_0 This does something that would benefit other people.

spk_0 And this is not a problem to support causes that you truly believe in,

spk_0 as long as it was your intentional choice.

spk_0 And you're not being manipulated into fighting other people's wars.

spk_0 And that takes us back to the original thing we started talking about, which is freedom.

spk_0 One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from

spk_0 the influences, the forces that manipulate you.

spk_0 That's really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet,

spk_0 when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind you have to disconnect yourself.

spk_0 It would be very proactive understanding what the biases, what the incentives are,

spk_0 so you can think clearly, independently and objectively.

spk_0 And again, it ties back with restraint from alcohol.

spk_0 Because if you mind this clouded, how can you analyze yourself?

spk_0 You will always be dependent on opinions of others.

spk_0 You will always follow the mainstream.

spk_0 And whatever the authorities or whoever in charge will tell you,

spk_0 you believe it because you don't have a tool of your own to rely on,

spk_0 to come to your own conclusions.

spk_0 I have to ask you, this is something that came up, you don't watch porn.

spk_0 I don't think I've heard you talk about this before.

spk_0 What's the philosophy behind not watching porn?

spk_0 There's a lot of people that talk about porn in general having a very negative effect

spk_0 on young men, on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality,

spk_0 and how they get into relationships and all that kind of stuff.

spk_0 So what's your philosophy and not consuming porn?

spk_0 I don't watch porn because I just feel it's a surrogate,

spk_0 a substitute for a real thing that is not history in my life.

spk_0 If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy, some inspiration

spk_0 to a fleeting moment of pleasure.

spk_0 It doesn't make sense.

spk_0 And in any case, as I said, it's not the real thing.

spk_0 So as long as you can access the real thing, you don't need to watch porn.

spk_0 But then if you can't access the real thing, you shoot them to watch porn as well.

spk_0 Because it means there's some deficiency in your life, some problem that you have to overcome.

spk_0 Yeah, analyze the underlying cause.

spk_0 And again, this goes back to the theme of investing in a long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure.

spk_0 There's a theme to the way you approach life.

spk_0 I try to be strategic.

spk_0 I try to act under assumption that I'm not going to die in one hour from now.

spk_0 And I'm going to stick around for a bit.

spk_0 Despite the fact that we are all mortal.

spk_0 So why would I exchange the mid and long term for the short term?

spk_0 Doesn't make any sense.

spk_0 Quick pause, bathroom break.

spk_0 Yeah, let's take a break.

spk_0 All right, we took a break and now we're back.

spk_0 I got to ask you about telegram, the company.

spk_0 I got to meet some of the brilliant engineers that work there.

spk_0 Telegram runs lean relative to other technology companies that achieve the scale that telegram does.

spk_0 It has very few employees.

spk_0 So how many people are on the core team?

spk_0 Let's say the core engineering team.

spk_0 The core engineering team is about 40 people.

spk_0 This includes backhand, frontend, designers, system administrators.

spk_0 Can you speak to the philosophy behind running a company with so few employees?

spk_0 Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate the quality of the product they produce.

spk_0 In many cases, it's the opposite.

spk_0 If you have too many people, they have to coordinate the efforts constantly communicate.

spk_0 And 90% of their time will be spent on coordinated the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other.

spk_0 The other problem with having too many employees is that

spk_0 some of them won't get enough work to do.

spk_0 And if they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence.

spk_0 They're still there, they're still getting the salary, but they don't do anything.

spk_0 And if they don't do anything more often than not, they will start trying to find their purpose elsewhere.

spk_0 Maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work, but by finding problems that don't exist within the team.

spk_0 And that can disrupt the team and the mood inside it even further.

spk_0 Also, when you intentionally don't allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them,

spk_0 they will be forced to automate things.

spk_0 In our case, we have tens of thousands of servers around the world, almost a hundred thousand distributed across

spk_0 several continents and data centers.

spk_0 If you try to manage this system manually without automation, you will probably end up hiring thousands of people, tens of thousands of people.

spk_0 But if you rely on algorithms and the team is forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it,

spk_0 then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient, and interestingly much more reliable as well.

spk_0 And more resilient to the changing geopolitics, to the changing technology, all of that.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 I suppose if you have people managing all of it, it becomes stale quickly.

spk_0 Yes, humans are attack factors.

spk_0 And if you have a distributed system that runs itself automatically, you have a chance at increasing the security of speed and speed of your service,

spk_0 this is what we did with Telegram, while also making it much more reliable.

spk_0 Because if some part of the network goes down, you can still switch to the other parts of it.

spk_0 One of the big ways you protect your privacy is that you store the data, the infrastructure side of Telegram, is distributed across many legal jurisdictions,

spk_0 with the decryption keys.

spk_0 So the encrypted in the cloud, the decryption keys are split and kept in different locations so that no single government or entity can access the data.

spk_0 Can you explain the strength of this approach?

spk_0 The way we designed Telegram is we never wanted to have any humans, any employees have any access to private messaging data.

spk_0 That's why since 2012, when we've been trying to come up with this design, we've always invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it.

spk_0 Like if you're high in employee or any of the existing employee, he can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users.

spk_0 And then of course we launched an encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations, so you still have to rely on an encrypted cloud.

spk_0 So an interesting engineering challenge was how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.

spk_0 So no employee can even access user messages.

spk_0 So that's the thing, you know we're talking about encryption, we're talking about privacy, we're talking about security, all these kinds of things.

spk_0 I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there's also misinformation is about private messages.

spk_0 So Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users.

spk_0 So you're saying employees never can access the private messages.

spk_0 Have any government or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?

spk_0 No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services.

spk_0 If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it's all encrypted.

spk_0 You can extract all the hard drives and analyze it, but you won't get anything.

spk_0 It's all encrypted in the way that it's unsyffable.

spk_0 That was very important for us.

spk_0 That's why we can say with confidence that hasn't been ever a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram.

spk_0 Not in terms of private messages, not in terms of say contact lists.

spk_0 Do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies?

spk_0 No. We design a system in a way that's impossible.

spk_0 We do require us to change the system and we won't do that because we made a promise to our users.

spk_0 We would draw the shut Telegram down in a certain country, then do that.

spk_0 So that's like one of the principles you operate on there is you go into protect user privacy.

spk_0 I think it's fundamental.

spk_0 Without the right to privacy, people can't feel fully free and protected.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 What, where do you find the strength and fearlessness to say no to everybody, including powerful intelligence agencies, including powerful governments, influential powerful people?

spk_0 I guess part of it is just me being me, I stood up for myself and for my value since I was a little kid.

spk_0 I was had issues with my teachers because I would point out their mistakes during classes.

spk_0 And at the end of the day, what's important is to remind yourself that you have nothing to lose.

spk_0 They can think they're blackmail you with something, they can threaten you with something, but what is it they really can really do to you?

spk_0 Like worst case, they can kill you, but that brings us back to the first part of our discussion.

spk_0 There is no point living your life in fear.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 You won't affect my lifestyle in any way, I will still be doing my push ups, you know.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Well go ahead and do that, we'll just quit this market, we won't operate there, it's not that important.

spk_0 They all think that somehow we profit from their citizens and if the only goal that companies have is extracting revenues and it's true, most of the companies like this, but there are projects like telegram, which are a bit different.

spk_0 And I'm not sure they realize that.

spk_0 So for you, the value of maintaining your integrity in relation to your principles is more important than anything else.

spk_0 And of course we should say that you also have full ability and control to do just that because you probably do own 100% of telegram.

spk_0 So there's no other anybody would say on this question.

spk_0 There are no shareholders, which is quite unique, very unique.

spk_0 I don't think there's anything even close to that in any major tech company.

spk_0 And this allows us to operate the way we operate, to build this project and maintain it based on certain fundamental principles, which by the way I think everybody believes in.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And it often starts with well meaning proposals, or we have to fight crime, we have to do that, we have to protect the children.

spk_0 But at the end of the day, the result is the same.

spk_0 People lose their right to such fundamental thing as privacy.

spk_0 They sometimes lose their right to express themselves to assemble.

spk_0 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 authoritative autocratic.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 They all justified it, with very reasonable sounding justifications, and then it came in stages gradually.

spk_0 And after a few years people would find themselves in a position when they help us, they can't protest, every message they sent is monitored, they can't assemble, it's over.

spk_0 So you see telegram is a place that people from all walks of life, from every nation, get of a place to speak their mind, have a voice.

spk_0 In the context, in the geopolitical context, you're mentioning that governments when they become autocratic naturally, is the way of the world, human nature and the nature of governments, they become more sensorious, they begin to censor.

spk_0 And always justifying it in their minds perhaps assuming that they're doing good.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And then where does it stop?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 We tend to go to extremes.

spk_0 I think you still consider yourself a libertarian.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And it's not always that someone 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.

spk_0 It just gradually happens that way.

spk_0 And the government is not some abstract notion. The government consists of people.

spk_0 And these people have goals.

spk_0 They would naturally be inclined to increase the level of influence, to have more support in it, to have more resources.

spk_0 And that's how you end up in an endless loop of every increasing taxes, every increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise and free speech.

spk_0 So you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.

spk_0 Ironically you don't have those limitations. You're supposed in all countries of which are considered to be free.

spk_0 It's supposed to be the constitution that protects everybody.

spk_0 But interestingly it doesn't work always this way. They are able to find very tricky phrases in order to cover out exceptions.

spk_0 And then the exception becomes the rule.

spk_0 On this topic, I'd love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in the August of last year in France.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 So it's tragic, but I think it speaks to the thing that we've been talking about.

spk_0 So maybe you can tell the full saga what happened. You arrive in France.

spk_0 I arrived in France last year in August just for a short, two-day trip.

spk_0 And then I see a dozen of armed policemen greeting me and asking me to follow them.

spk_0 They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I'm accused of.

spk_0 Which was mind boggling.

spk_0 At first I thought there must be some mistake.

spk_0 Then I realized there'd be serious.

spk_0 And they accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed with some users.

spk_0 And they think I should be responsible for this.

spk_0 Which again, like you said, it's nothing. It's something that never happened in the history of this planet.

spk_0 No country, not even an authoritarian one.

spk_0 Did that to any tech leader at least at this scale?

spk_0 There are good reasons for that because you're sacrificing a big part of your economic growth by sending these kind of messages.

spk_0 To the business and tech community.

spk_0 So they put me in a police car and I found myself in police custody.

spk_0 A small room, no windows.

spk_0 Just a narrow, bad, made of concrete.

spk_0 I spent four days there.

spk_0 In the process I had to answer some questions of the policemen that were interested in how Telegram operates.

spk_0 Most of it is public anyway.

spk_0 And I was struck by very limited understanding.

spk_0 Or should I say even lack of understanding on behalf of the people who initiated this investigation against me.

spk_0 About how technology works, how encryption works, how social media work.

spk_0 I mean, there's something darkly poetic about a tech founder of a platform where a billion people are communicating with each other.

spk_0 And you're on concrete, no pillow for days, no windows.

spk_0 It's like a book. I mean, it reminds me of a huge fan of Franz Kafka and he's written about the absurdity of these kinds of situations.

spk_0 Hence the Kafka-esque stories.

spk_0 There's a story literally about the situation he wrote.

spk_0 Perhaps predicted called the trial where a person is arrested for no reason that anybody can explain and is stuck in a judicial system for a long time.

spk_0 That nobody fascinatingly in that story, neither the person arrested nor the system, any individual member of the system itself fully understand what is happening.

spk_0 Nobody can truly answer the questions.

spk_0 And eventually the person, spoiler alert, is mentally broken by the whole system, which is what bureaucracy can do in its most absurd forms.

spk_0 It breaks the spirit, the human spirit, laden in all of us.

spk_0 That's negative side of bureaucracy.

spk_0 I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing.

spk_0 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 diplomat.

spk_0 The way every other country on this planet solves these problems, including with telegram, and we do thousands of times.

spk_0 Yeah, you have a nice page showing.

spk_0 This is kind of like details that most people don't really think about.

spk_0 But telegram is at the forefront of moderating CSAM and TERRAS groups.

spk_0 There's a nice page telegram.org slash moderation that shows just the incredible amount of groups and channels that are engaged in TERRAS activity and CSAM activity that are blocked, actively blocked, found, and blocked by telegram.

spk_0 So, and a lot of this work, like you said, because the automation is done with machine learning.

spk_0 Just the scales insane. This is stuff that most like noobs like me who are just chatting it up on telegram don't think about.

spk_0 But there's just like an immense number of people essentially doing things that violate the law on there and you have to find them immediately and catch it.

spk_0 I guess all platforms have to deal with it and telegram was doing a great job of dealing with that kind of content.

spk_0 And what you're saying is the French government had no idea.

spk_0 They even know what machine learning is.

spk_0 It's a concept that is challenging to explain to them.

spk_0 But I think they will learn much more about it by the end of this investigation.

spk_0 That's my hope.

spk_0 In any case, you're right.

spk_0 If you look at telegram with the fighting harmful content that is publicly distributed on our platform since 10 years ago,

spk_0 actually since the time we launched public channels on telegram.

spk_0 And since something like 8 years ago, we had daily transparency reports on how many channels

spk_0 related to child abuse or terrorist propaganda we take in down daily, every day we've taken maybe

spk_0 we'd take down hundreds of them.

spk_0 And if it include all kinds of content that we remove, all they count groups, channels, posts,

spk_0 that would amount to millions of pieces of content every week, hundreds of thousands every day.

spk_0 And then somebody would read the newspaper, get enraged because they would read something about child porn.

spk_0 And this is a subject that is very emotionally charged and start doing something not based on data

spk_0 and logical thinking and laws, but based on emotions driven from inaccurate input.

spk_0 Yeah, I think we should make pretty clear that there's no world, no reason that the French government should have arrested you.

spk_0 But here we are. That's the situation you're in.

spk_0 So to be clear, you have to show up in front of a judge.

spk_0 And all of this is beautifully absurd. It would be hilarious if it wasn't extremely serious.

spk_0 You have to show up in front of a judge every certain amount of time.

spk_0 And what does that experience like?

spk_0 In France, they have this role of investigative judge. And I think you have it in many other places in the world.

spk_0 It means I'm not on trial. I'm being investigated.

spk_0 And in France, it's not just the police or prosecutor asking me questions, it's a judge.

spk_0 Which in my experience is more like still a prosecutor, but it's called a judge.

spk_0 And that makes it harder to appeal.

spk_0 So if you're limited in, say, countries where you can travel, then to appeal that restriction will take you a lot of time.

spk_0 The investigation itself should have never been started.

spk_0 It's an absurd and harmful way of solving an issue as complicated as regulating social media.

spk_0 It's just the wrong tool.

spk_0 So we objected and appealed the investigation itself.

spk_0 We did last year, I believe.

spk_0 We are still not even given a hearing date for the appeal.

spk_0 Because the process is painful, it's slow.

spk_0 Not just for me, but for everybody.

spk_0 Which made me realize the system may be broken in many levels.

spk_0 Other entrepreneurs affected by the French test system telling me horror stories about their experiences.

spk_0 Were businesses got paralyzed by very unnecessary actions of investigative judges that ended up being unjustified and biased?

spk_0 And in the end, you can perhaps solve it when you reach a higher court and you'll get justice.

spk_0 But you lose a lot of time and energy in the process.

spk_0 So this is the only thing that is, I hope, different.

spk_0 And will be different in this case compared to the story you told from Kafka.

spk_0 I mean, but it does as Kafka describes, break a lot of people with time.

spk_0 So Wendy Hope, we should say that you were for a long time, not a lot of travel out of France.

spk_0 Now you can travel to Dubai.

spk_0 We're now in Dubai.

spk_0 Got to meet many of the people that work at Telegram.

spk_0 Telegram is headquartered in Dubai.

spk_0 But you're not allowed to travel anywhere else.

spk_0 Wendy, think you're coming to Texas to hang out with me over there.

spk_0 That's a hard question to answer because it doesn't depend on just my actions.

spk_0 I can just say this, I am patient.

spk_0 I will not let this limitation on my freedom dictate my actions.

spk_0 I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced first hand,

spk_0 what the absence of freedom feels like.

spk_0 Please do me this four days in police custody.

spk_0 We're in one of your, just stuck, unable to communicate with people.

spk_0 That are important to you.

spk_0 When you don't even know what's going on in the world, in relation to you personally.

spk_0 So I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future.

spk_0 I can't say that I'm pessimistic.

spk_0 I think we've been able to gradually remove most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August.

spk_0 If the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a back door or have way to access private user messages, what would you say to them?

spk_0 Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?

spk_0 Nothing.

spk_0 My response would be very clear.

spk_0 But it won't be very polite, so I'm not sure.

spk_0 It's good to say here.

spk_0 You're wearing a tie in.

spk_0 Yeah, there's a serious adult gentleman like program.

spk_0 Yeah, but that 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.

spk_0 And then of course other places use that as propaganda to attack you.

spk_0 You get attacked by every nation.

spk_0 So it's a difficult medium in which to operate.

spk_0 It's difficult to be you fighting for freedom, fighting to preserve people's privacy.

spk_0 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?

spk_0 If the French government just keeps wearing you down.

spk_0 I think the French government is losing this battle.

spk_0 This battle is wrong.

spk_0 The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defined I become.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 By approaching me and asking me to do things in other countries blocking certain channels,

spk_0 changing the way a children works.

spk_0 And not only I refused, I told the world about it.

spk_0 And I'm going to keep telling the world about every instance.

spk_0 Any government in this case in particular the French government tries to force me to do anything.

spk_0 And I would rather lose everything I have and yield to this pressure.

spk_0 Because if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and the file is rights of other people as well,

spk_0 you become broken inside.

spk_0 You become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.

spk_0 So I wouldn't do that.

spk_0 There are probably other people in the world that would consider that.

spk_0 But I don't care.

spk_0 Telegram disappears to something people don't understand, including in this intelligence services or governments.

spk_0 I don't care.

spk_0 I'll be fine.

spk_0 If they put me into prison for 20 years,

spk_0 which let's be clear, it's not something that I think is realistic.

spk_0 But let's just think about it as a hypothetical situation.

spk_0 I would rather starve myself to death and die there, reboot the whole game, then do something stupid.

spk_0 Let me ask you about an example of the thing you're talking about.

spk_0 Tell the saga of Telegram in the Romanian election.

spk_0 So I missed all this.

spk_0 You were still fighting to preserve the freedom of speech.

spk_0 What happened?

spk_0 And what were some of the decisions you had to make?

spk_0 So when I got stuck in France, I'm able to leave the country for a few months.

spk_0 I was offered to meet the head of state foreign intelligence services

spk_0 through a person I know quite well.

spk_0 It's actually well-known tech and supernory France.

spk_0 And he's well connected.

spk_0 And he said, this guy wants to meet you.

spk_0 I said, okay, fine.

spk_0 Let's do that.

spk_0 But I'm not promising anything.

spk_0 I took the meeting.

spk_0 And in this meeting,

spk_0 I was asked to restrict what I see as restriction of freedom of speech

spk_0 in Romania.

spk_0 I don't know if you followed the whole saga with the Romanian elections.

spk_0 They had a presidential elections last year.

spk_0 The results got cancelled.

spk_0 Now, Romania at that point when I had this meeting was preparing for a new presidential elections,

spk_0 the conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was supportive of.

spk_0 So they asked me whether I would be shutting down or ready to shut down channels on Telegram

spk_0 that supported the conservative candidate or protest against the pro-European candidates.

spk_0 So they called the guy they liked.

spk_0 I said, look, if there is no violation of the rules of Telegram, we should quite clear.

spk_0 You can't go to violence.

spk_0 But if it's a peaceful demonstration, if it's a peaceful debate,

spk_0 we can't do this.

spk_0 It's would be political censorship.

spk_0 We protected freedom of speech in many countries in the world,

spk_0 including in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in Middle East.

spk_0 We're not going to start engaging in censorship in Europe.

spk_0 No matter who is asking us.

spk_0 I was very clear to the guy who was the head of French intelligence.

spk_0 I said, if you think that because I'm stuck here,

spk_0 you can tell me what to do.

spk_0 You're very wrong.

spk_0 I would rather do the opposite every time.

spk_0 And in a way, that's what I did.

spk_0 I had a small debate with him about the morality of this whole thing.

spk_0 And then at certain point, just close the content of this entire conversation.

spk_0 Because I never signed an ND.

spk_0 I don't ever sign NDAs with any people like that.

spk_0 I want to be able to tell the world what's going on.

spk_0 And that's quite shocking to me that you would have people in the French government

spk_0 trying to get advantage of this situation.

spk_0 Of course, if they had nothing to do with the start of this investigation itself,

spk_0 and use it to reach their geopolitical or geopolitical goals,

spk_0 I consider it an attempt to humiliate myself personally

spk_0 and millions of telegram users collectively.

spk_0 And it's quite strange that the same agency asks us to do certain things in Moldova as well.

spk_0 Even before that, I think it was October or last year or September.

spk_0 I was arrested in Paris in late August.

spk_0 And then again, approached through an intermediary and asked,

spk_0 would you mind taking down some channels in Moldova because there is an election going on?

spk_0 And we were afraid there going to be some interference with this elections.

spk_0 Could you please connect with representatives of the government of Moldova and take care of it?

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And they sent us a list of channels and bots.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And we took them down, only few of them.

spk_0 The rest were okay.

spk_0 Then they said, thank you, I sent us another list of dozens of channels, many, many channels.

spk_0 We looked at these channels, we realized that there is no solid foundation to justify banning them.

spk_0 And we refused to do that.

spk_0 But interestingly enough, the French intelligence services that were asking us to do this in Moldova,

spk_0 let me know through their contact that after Telegram banned the few channels that were in violation of our rules in Moldova,

spk_0 they talked to my judge, the investigative judge in this investigation that has been started against me,

spk_0 and told the judge, could things about me?

spk_0 We have found very confusing and in a way shocking, because these two matters have nothing in common.

spk_0 Why would anyone talk to an investigative judge that is trying to find out where the Telegram did a good enough job

spk_0 in removing illegal content in France?

spk_0 What does Moldova have to do with it?

spk_0 I got very suspicious at that moment.

spk_0 Remember, it happened after we blocked a few channels that violated our rules.

spk_0 But before we refused to block a long list of other channels that were completely fine,

spk_0 which is people expressing political views, which I may not agree with, but it's still right to express them.

spk_0 Not extreme views, not views that call to violence.

spk_0 That was extremely alarming.

spk_0 That was a moment when I told myself that there may be more going on here that I initially thought.

spk_0 Initially I thought some people are confused about how technology works,

spk_0 and after this case in Moldova, I got much more suspicious.

spk_0 By the time that I had intelligence services, let me to ask about Romania

spk_0 to help them silence and conservative voices.

spk_0 In Romania, I was already wary of what can be going on next.

spk_0 Yes, so clearly this was a systematic attempt to pressure you to censor political voices

spk_0 that the French government doesn't agree with.

spk_0 We should say that you have fought for freedom of speech for left-wing groups and right-wing groups

spk_0 that really doesn't matter.

spk_0 You don't have a political affiliation, political ideology that you fight for,

spk_0 you're creating a platform that, as long as they don't call for violence,

spk_0 allows people from all walks of life, from all ideologies to speak their mind.

spk_0 That's the whole point.

spk_0 It happens to be conservative voices in the Romanian election that the French government went to censor

spk_0 because currently the French government leads left, but if you flip everything around

spk_0 and the government will be right-wing, you'll be fighting for against that share of left-wing voices.

spk_0 And you have in the past many times.

spk_0 Exactly.

spk_0 Ironically we received the request from the French police to take down a channel of far-left protesters on Telegram.

spk_0 In France, we refused to do that.

spk_0 We looked at the channel, peaceful protesters.

spk_0 It doesn't matter for us whether we're defending the freedom of speech of people leaning right or leaning left.

spk_0 During COVID, we were protecting activists that were organizing the Black Lives Matter events.

spk_0 And the other side, the protest against lockdowns,

spk_0 we protect everybody as long as they are not crossing the lines and not starting to call to violence or

spk_0 incite damage to public property.

spk_0 It's a fundamental right to assemble.

spk_0 It's interesting that people who haven't had this experience of living in countries that don't have freedoms

spk_0 don't always realize how dangerous it is to gradually compromise your values, your principles, your freedoms, your rights.

spk_0 They don't understand what's at stake.

spk_0 These things become slippery slope.

spk_0 For many years, including currently, have spoken very highly of France.

spk_0 You love French history, French culture.

spk_0 I think this situation, this historic wrong that's been done is put simply as just a gigantic PR mistake for France.

spk_0 There's no entrepreneur that sees that as far as to be the next part of the world, to create the next telegram,

spk_0 sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.

spk_0 There is no justification for this arrest.

spk_0 There's a misappocation of the law, all kinds of pressures, all kinds of behavior that seems politically motivated,

spk_0 all that kind of stuff, all the excessive regulation and the bureaucracy.

spk_0 A nightmare for entrepreneurs that dream to create something impactful and positive for the world.

spk_0 What do you think needs to be fixed about the French government, the French system, and then zooming out

spk_0 because you have to see similar kinds of things in Europe that could enable entrepreneurs that could reverse the trend that we seem to be seeing in Europe

spk_0 as becoming less and less friendly to entrepreneurs.

spk_0 What can be fixed, what should be fixed?

spk_0 I think the European society must decide where they want the ever increasing public sector to stop increasing.

spk_0 What they think should be the right size of government, because today if you take France for example,

spk_0 which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP.

spk_0 Maybe it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.

spk_0 So you have this disbalance 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.

spk_0 The startup field and my field, social media field has been affected by it immensely.

spk_0 There was one great startup in this realm in France in the last 10 years.

spk_0 It was a location-based social network.

spk_0 It was eventually sold to Snapchat, but before it was not sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell.

spk_0 I told him never sell.

spk_0 You have a great thing going.

spk_0 You have lots of users. You have organic traction in many countries.

spk_0 And the first of the kind of this kind of success story in France.

spk_0 But then he sold anyway in a couple of weeks.

spk_0 Later I met him. He was trying to do a new thing.

spk_0 I met him and I asked him, I was trying to understand what was wrong.

spk_0 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,

spk_0 trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris.

spk_0 And he did a great job by the way.

spk_0 But while he was trying to do that, he could also attack by some silly investigation, again, involving the data protection issues,

spk_0 which lasted forever and was gradually sucking blood of his team and his company, constant interrogations, disclosure requests.

spk_0 And this is a young company.

spk_0 It significantly increases the level of stress.

spk_0 And at some point, I think the pressure was too much.

spk_0 He decided to, I'm going to just sell it.

spk_0 Eventually it turned out that there was no issue.

spk_0 The investigation ended as far as I understand with no charges.

spk_0 But such investigations, they have a price. They have a cost.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Resulting and decreased economic growth, things won't change.

spk_0 I think we just talked to a guy a few days ago who left France and started a business here in Dubai.

spk_0 And one of the reasons he had to leave France is that the government started an investigation on his company and they frozen his bank accounts.

spk_0 And this investigation that involved taxes lasted for many, many years, I believe he said, eight years.

spk_0 And at the end of these eight years, the government reached to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong.

spk_0 His good, it's okay.

spk_0 In the meantime, his corporate bank accounts were frozen. His business died.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And now he's enriching this city, which we're in right now, with his great ideas in creativity.

spk_0 And by the way, having interacted with him, there's a fire in his eyes, the human spirit, the fuels entrepreneurship.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And that fires what fuels great nations, build, build, build, build new stuff, expand, all of that, and regulation suffocates that.

spk_0 You have to cherish this people.

spk_0 But I guess the French public was some part of the French public was misled.

spk_0 And I don't know when, maybe since the time of the French Revolution, to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow their enemies.

spk_0 They're the evil rich people that are the cause of all problems.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 In reality, there are a lot of these people that are starting such companies with fire in their eyes, as sacrificing their lives, their livelihood, their work in 20 hours a day,

spk_0 their experiencing immense stress in order to fulfill the vision and bring value and good to the society around them.

spk_0 They create jobs, they create great services, they create great goods, they make your country grow, they make your people proud.

spk_0 You have to cherish them.

spk_0 But what does the system do to them?

spk_0 It squeezes them out, because perhaps there was somebody in the tax authority that decided to advance their career, and perhaps it was too ambitious and not too smart.

spk_0 The company was destroyed.

spk_0 And now the same entrepreneur, by the way, who we talked to, is invited to come back to France.

spk_0 He's been offered really good terms.

spk_0 He said he's going to open this new venue on Champs-Elysées.

spk_0 We're going to give you the best location.

spk_0 We're going to fund part of it.

spk_0 Tax breaks.

spk_0 And he said, never.

spk_0 Just forget about this.

spk_0 It's impossible.

spk_0 I'm not coming back to France.

spk_0 He's traumatized by the experience.

spk_0 And he's French.

spk_0 He was born there.

spk_0 He's a French passport.

spk_0 So, nonetheless, 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.

spk_0 It's heartbreaking.

spk_0 Many of these nations, I appreciate the historic and the cultural value.

spk_0 And I hope Europe and France flourish.

spk_0 But this is not the components that are required for flourishing.

spk_0 Quick pause.

spk_0 I need a bathroom break.

spk_0 All right.

spk_0 We had some tea.

spk_0 We're back.

spk_0 Let's go back a bunch of years to the beginning.

spk_0 You mentioned you went to school with super intensive education.

spk_0 So, I thought it would be really interesting to look at some of the powerful aspects of that education.

spk_0 From the languages to the math.

spk_0 Can you actually describe some of the rigorous aspects of it and what you gained from it?

spk_0 The age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St. Petersburg where I lived.

spk_0 And we had to pass the rigorous test to get accepted.

spk_0 The idea behind the school was that if you try to squeeze as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager,

spk_0 making a focus on maths and foreign languages, then there will be some changes in the brain of the student.

spk_0 And that will allow the student to understand most other disciplines.

spk_0 But we had a class as a result that didn't have any single focus.

spk_0 It was very widespread across a lot of disciplines.

spk_0 You would have four foreign languages at least, including Latin, English, French, German.

spk_0 In addition, you can get ancient Greek.

spk_0 You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis of evolution psychology.

spk_0 The difference of this class is opposed to other classes in the same school, which was part of the St. Petersburg State University.

spk_0 And called academic gymnasium was that unlike other classes which were specialized in some single subject like physics,

spk_0 or maths or history, this one tried to get the best from all of the specialized classes and bring it into one curriculum.

spk_0 Since it was an experimental class, it wasn't possible to become a straight-A student to be excellent in all the subjects.

spk_0 It was considered crazy to even try.

spk_0 So, to assume nobody is able to handle it, you're just pushing the limits of the human mind for languages in parallel, math, evolution psychology, just overwhelming.

spk_0 The mind is see what happens.

spk_0 Yes, see what happens. It was an experiment.

spk_0 It wasn't the middle of the 90s.

spk_0 It was a educational system that wasn't regulated as much as it is today.

spk_0 It was in the middle between the two stages of the Russian history, the Soviet history and the modern Russian history of the 21st century.

spk_0 In any case, I learned a lot from that experience.

spk_0 First of all, why I got into the schools because I kept being kicked out from other schools.

spk_0 Challenging authority.

spk_0 I was good at all subjects, but not behavior.

spk_0 You know, we had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union in the early 90s.

spk_0 Perhaps they even have it today, I'm not sure.

spk_0 I was very bad at behavior.

spk_0 Always challenging the teachers, always pointing out their mistakes.

spk_0 By the way, that's not such a bad thing.

spk_0 Like, if you were looking back, there's some value to that, right?

spk_0 For young people, maybe respectfully, but challenge the authority, the wisdom of all, right?

spk_0 I think I was very lucky to be able to do that and to be able to get away with it in the end.

spk_0 Because normally, if you keep challenging authorities, you just get kicked out of all schools and then you end up nowhere.

spk_0 So I eventually got into a school where challenging teachers was not fully okay, but it was something that you could do.

spk_0 And then you would start a debate with the teacher.

spk_0 And normally, they would allow you to express your point of view.

spk_0 And then some objective truth may come out of it as a result.

spk_0 But at that point, I was pretty bored with my life.

spk_0 You know, every teenager gets to a point when they have this sort of existential crisis.

spk_0 What's the point of life?

spk_0 What am I even doing here?

spk_0 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 students and get an A or what we call five in the Russian system on every single subject.

spk_0 And that kept me busy for a while.

spk_0 It was incredibly difficult because you didn't have enough time.

spk_0 Even if you just started 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.

spk_0 So I ended up using the breaks between classes, but I get to the result I wanted to get to.

spk_0 I got the excellent mark in every subject.

spk_0 And that kept me happy for a while.

spk_0 What did you understand about an effective education system from studying for language at the same time, doing such a diversity?

spk_0 Like if you were to design an education system from scratch for young people, especially in the 21st century, what would that look like?

spk_0 You posted about the value of mathematics as a foundation for everything.

spk_0 Yeah, I still think math is essential.

spk_0 It's something that shapes your brain.

spk_0 It teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems in your smaller parts.

spk_0 Put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently.

spk_0 Try it again if it doesn't work.

spk_0 This is exactly the same skill you'll need in programming and project management and start it when you start your own company.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 That is extremely valuable.

spk_0 And of course, once you're a good at math, you can apply it in physics and engineering, encoding.

spk_0 And it's not surprising that most of the most successful tech founders in CEOs are very good at math and coding.

spk_0 Because ultimately it's the same mental skill that you rely on.

spk_0 But back then in the school, I realized something else as well.

spk_0 It's that competition is really important. Competition is key.

spk_0 This is what motivates a lot of teenagers when they're at school.

spk_0 If you remove competition out of the education system, you end up forcing kids to start competing elsewhere, for example, in video games.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 We don't want them to feel anxiety.

spk_0 So let's just get rid of all the public grading system, all these rankings of who won, who lost.

spk_0 We don't want any of that.

spk_0 And part of it is justified, but as a result, some kids lose interest.

spk_0 Yes, you eliminate the losers, but you end up eliminating the winners as well.

spk_0 And then if you are overprotective of the kids in that age, they grow up, graduate schools, universities.

spk_0 And they are still not prepared for real life, because real life is constant competition.

spk_0 For jobs, for promotions, for customers.

spk_0 And it's more brutal.

spk_0 What you have as a result is high suicide rates, high unemployment, all the things and negative trends you see now.

spk_0 In many countries which thought eliminating competition from the education system was a good idea.

spk_0 They still think competition is a bad thing, they try to eliminate competition from their economy as well to an extent.

spk_0 Saying we're going to make sure the losers don't lose.

spk_0 And the winners don't get too much.

spk_0 But as a result, they make their entire systems less competitive, their entire economies.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 So this is a hard choice any civilization has to make.

spk_0 We support competition understanding that eventually it leads to progress in science and technology and abundance for society at large.

spk_0 Or we remove competition thinking that somehow we can shield the future generations from the stress that competition inevitably causes.

spk_0 Yeah, I mean it's grounded in a good instinct of compassion.

spk_0 You don't want people who suck at a thing to feel pain, but it seems like struggle is a part of life either you do it earlier or you do it later.

spk_0 And it's true that such a good point that competition does seem to be a really powerful driver of skill development.

spk_0 Like you mentioned, pursue mastery.

spk_0 There's something in human nature that especially for young people.

spk_0 If you can compete at a thing, you're going to be really driven to get good at that thing.

spk_0 If you can direct that in the education system as China does as many as many issues like you mentioned do, then you're going to develop a lot of brilliant people, resilient people, people that are ready to create epic shit in the world.

spk_0 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 tell us are in relation to other people.

spk_0 And this is one of the ways society self regulates speed or competition.

spk_0 Your brother Nikolai, he's a mathematician programmer expert in cryptography.

spk_0 He has won the IMO International Mathematics Olympiad.

spk_0 He got gold medal three times.

spk_0 I see PC programming two times has two PhDs in mathematics.

spk_0 And you have worked together for many years creating incredible technologies that we've been talking about.

spk_0 So what have you learned about just life from your brother?

spk_0 Well, first of all, I must say I learned pretty much everything from my brother.

spk_0 Everything I know because when we were used to be kids, we slept in the same bedroom like beds, few feet away from each other.

spk_0 And I kept bugging him with questions.

spk_0 I asked him about dinosaurs and galaxies and black holes and Neanderthals.

spk_0 Everything I could think of, and he was my Wikipedia back in the time when we didn't have internet access.

spk_0 He's a unique progiger kid, probably one of a billion.

spk_0 He started reading at the age of three, I think, and he pretty fast got so advanced in maths.

spk_0 But by the age of six, he could already read really sophisticated books on astronomy.

spk_0 Sometimes when he did it in public places like passes or metro, my mom was criticized by people who were witnessing it.

spk_0 They would tell her why you're mocking your own kid with this serious book.

spk_0 It's obvious the kid can't understand everything there.

spk_0 It's too complicated.

spk_0 Even we don't understand anything there.

spk_0 There's some formulas.

spk_0 And he was already sucking in this knowledge.

spk_0 He just has this thirst for information.

spk_0 So he was the source of all kinds of great facts, useful things, inspiring things.

spk_0 He taught me pretty much everything I know.

spk_0 At the same time, he's incredibly modest and kind.

spk_0 And this is something I think a lot of people that think they're smart, but not generally intelligent, lack.

spk_0 More often than not, people who are truly intelligent, they're also kind and compassionate.

spk_0 And he is that.

spk_0 Definitely.

spk_0 You actually have been staying out of the public eye for the most part.

spk_0 You've done very few interviews.

spk_0 You're pretty low-key, but your brother isn't another level.

spk_0 He's been staying out of the public eye.

spk_0 What's behind that?

spk_0 Part of it is his natural modesty.

spk_0 He doesn't need to do it.

spk_0 He doesn't feel this urge to show off, brag about stuff.

spk_0 I tried to avoid it as well, but at a certain point I realized that me being too private, too secretive becomes a liability,

spk_0 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,

spk_0 and they're willing to spread the narratives about telegram.

spk_0 Which can result in strange situations, some of which we discussed earlier.

spk_0 For example, this French investigation.

spk_0 Yeah, I've gotten to know you more and more.

spk_0 There's a deep integrity to you that I think is good to show to the world.

spk_0 There's a lot of attack vectors on user privacy.

spk_0 I think the most important, the last wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company.

spk_0 It's important to some degree for you to be out there, to showing your true self.

spk_0 We should say that also you didn't mention, but your programmer from an early age, you started coding at 10.

spk_0 The first things you built are a video game at 11.

spk_0 Eventually, 10 years later, in 21, you programmed the initial versions of VK single-handedly.

spk_0 Can you talk to me about your programmer journey that led to the creation of VK?

spk_0 What was the VK stack?

spk_0 It was a PHP, mostly.

spk_0 How did you figure out how to program websites?

spk_0 All of that.

spk_0 I wasn't interested in probably websites at first.

spk_0 I didn't even have access to things during when I was 10 years old.

spk_0 But I liked video games.

spk_0 I didn't have enough of them.

spk_0 And the scarcity forced me to start building them, more computer games, just to play myself.

spk_0

spk_0 It's actually a interesting thing that we sometimes don't realize it, but scarcity leads to creativity.

spk_0 And one of the reasons you have so many people who love to code coming from the Soviet Union or other places,

spk_0 which didn't have much access to modern technology and more importantly modern entertainment,

spk_0 is that perhaps we were not so much distracted by all the abundance of different entertainment options,

spk_0 which is not to say it's bad to have those options.

spk_0 It's just a fact that we sometimes don't appreciate.

spk_0 So I started to build computer games.

spk_0 My brother would sometimes guide me, for example, I would create a turned based strategy.

spk_0 Of course, two-dimensional, by client three-dimensional, was too much for me.

spk_0 But it wasn't as sleek in terms of the scrolling FPS frames per second.

spk_0 And I asked my brother how to optimize it.

spk_0 He would guide me.

spk_0 And this kind of learning and training really shaped my coding skills when I was younger.

spk_0 And then I started to create video games for my classmates.

spk_0 When we played, for example, Tiktok, in an infinite field in my class during the breaks,

spk_0 you know, not Tiktok, but three in a row.

spk_0 This is about five in a row and an infotain field.

spk_0 This is a much more interesting game.

spk_0 And it gets quite complicated. If you keep playing it, my classmates used to love it.

spk_0 And some of my classmates were really smart in champions of math, Olympics,

spk_0 sons and daughters of professors at the university.

spk_0 And I decided, no, I want to win every single time.

spk_0 I don't know who's even a single time. So how do I win?

spk_0 I need to practice more.

spk_0 But how do I practice more? I need an opponent stronger than myself.

spk_0 So I coded this game so that I would play against the computer.

spk_0 And the computer would calculate, I think, four moves in advance to choose the optimal strategy.

spk_0 That wasn't enough. Four moves in advance, I would still win over it.

spk_0 If I tried to calculate five or six, it was too slow.

spk_0 So I asked my brother to help me out here.

spk_0 So he made this algorithm.

spk_0 Eventually, I trained myself to win every single time, even with the computer back then.

spk_0 We didn't have modern CPUs. And I could still retain some self confidence.

spk_0 We'd go back to school during breaks, play with my classmates.

spk_0 And soon, people started to lose interest.

spk_0 Not all my classmates wanted to play this game anymore.

spk_0 I killed the game.

spk_0 So after that, when I got into the same peer-reduced state university,

spk_0 it was quite boring just to study because it was too easy.

spk_0 So I thought, what can I do there?

spk_0 I created a website for the students of my faculty first.

spk_0 I organized the creation of digital answers to all exams and digitalist version of all lectures,

spk_0 which was something very unique back then.

spk_0 Remember, it was 25 years ago.

spk_0 I would put together a website where I would publish all these materials.

spk_0 And I pretty soon became super popular.

spk_0 I opened a discussion forum there.

spk_0 In a few years, I expanded to the university with all of its other departments.

spk_0 And then to other universities, we ended up having tens of thousands of users,

spk_0 just as a student's portal.

spk_0 We had all kinds of social features there, friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs, all of it.

spk_0 It was quite successful.

spk_0 And after I graduated at the university,

spk_0 one of my ex-classmates from the school,

spk_0 which out to me, after reading about my successes in a newspaper,

spk_0 the main business newspaper of St. Petersburg,

spk_0 and he asked me, are you trying to build a Russian Facebook?

spk_0 I said, I'm not sure what's Facebook.

spk_0 So we met.

spk_0 Since he graduated at an American university two years before that, he showed me Facebook.

spk_0 I thought, well, I kind of already have all this technology,

spk_0 but it's valuable to know which elements I should get rid of,

spk_0 in order to scale this thing, and have millions of users.

spk_0 This is also something people don't appreciate,

spk_0 that sometimes in order to move forward, I have more success,

spk_0 you have to get rid of things, including technology.

spk_0 Getting rid of features is super important.

spk_0 Simplify both for scaling and for making it amenable to just growing the user base

spk_0 where people get it immediately.

spk_0 Yes, otherwise it's just to complicate it for the new user.

spk_0 The existing users will be happier, they'll be praising you,

spk_0 they'll be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated,

spk_0 so it's easy to lose track and get disoriented if you're only relying on the feedback of existing users.

spk_0 As a result, I started the website called VContact or VK.

spk_0 It means in touch in Russian.

spk_0 Initially to solve my own personal problem, I graduated the university that same year

spk_0 and I wanted to be in touch, remaining in touch with my ex-classments from the university,

spk_0 and the other fellow students.

spk_0 Of course, as a 20-year-old, I wanted to meet other people, including good-looking girls.

spk_0 I started to build it from scratch.

spk_0 For that one, I thought I'm not going to use any third-party libraries, modules,

spk_0 because I want to make it as efficient as possible.

spk_0 I was obsessing over every line of code.

spk_0 But then how do you start something that large?

spk_0 I didn't have any prior experience of quitting a project of the scale,

spk_0 which would involve everything.

spk_0 Before I would reuse some existing solutions,

spk_0 here I wanted to build from scratch, so I called my brother.

spk_0 He was a postdoc student in Germany at that time in the Max Planck University.

spk_0 I asked him, what should I start from?

spk_0 He told me to just build a module to authorize users.

spk_0 Not to log in, not even to sign out, just to log in.

spk_0 You can pre-populate the database with credentials and emails and passwords.

spk_0 It doesn't really matter.

spk_0 But once you see that you can type in your password, an email, and you're in,

spk_0 and it tells you hello using your name, then you will have a clear understanding

spk_0 where to go from there.

spk_0 Yeah, I mean, that's true.

spk_0 That's one of the best advice I've ever gotten in my life.

spk_0 It's, it worked perfectly by the way.

spk_0 I started to build it, and before I knew it, I would have their on the website,

spk_0 photo albums, private messages, this guest book we used to call the wall back on the K-A,

spk_0 and I guess in the early days of Facebook,

spk_0 we'd end up building something even more sophisticated than Facebook at the time,

spk_0 with more features.

spk_0 I had a girlfriend at the time, I asked her,

spk_0 we need to somehow come up with a database of all Russian schools and universities

spk_0 and departments and subdivisions.

spk_0 She did a great job trying to source all this information online,

spk_0 or sometimes writing emails to the university saying,

spk_0 which departments you have exactly at this point.

spk_0 We need to know or reaching out to the Department of Education,

spk_0 both in Russia and then in Ukraine and then eventually in Belarus and Kazakhstan

spk_0 and other countries where VK ended up to be the largest and most popular social network.

spk_0 So we did a few things that were quite unique at the time.

spk_0 And for the first,

spk_0 almost a year, I was a single employee of the company.

spk_0 I was the back end engineer, the front end engineer, the designer.

spk_0 I was the customer support officer.

spk_0 I was the marketing guy as well,

spk_0 coming up with all the wardings and the announcements,

spk_0 coming up with competitions to promote VK,

spk_0 which worked quite well.

spk_0 That was an incredible experience that gave me knowledge of every aspect

spk_0 of a social networking platform,

spk_0 also understanding of how much a single person can do.

spk_0 Exactly.

spk_0 It's one of the reasons why I'd like to think I'm an efficient project manager.

spk_0 And product manager inside Telegram,

spk_0 because I will not take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members.

spk_0 If somebody gives me,

spk_0 oh, I need three weeks to do that.

spk_0 I will reply, oh, I built the first version of VK in just two weeks.

spk_0 Why would you need three weeks?

spk_0 It seems like something you could make real in just three days.

spk_0 Three weeks, what are you going to do the rest of the three weeks apart from those three days?

spk_0 And the team knows me,

spk_0 and that's why we are able today to tell them to move at a very good pace of innovation every month.

spk_0 We're pushing several meaningful features.

spk_0 I think out competing everybody else in this industry,

spk_0 in terms of what you can do within the short time frame.

spk_0 So yes, that experience was invaluable.

spk_0 As for the stack,

spk_0 I started from PHP and MySQL,

spk_0 Debian Linux.

spk_0 But very soon I realized I need to optimize this.

spk_0 I started using Memcache, Apache servers were not enough anymore.

spk_0 We had to set up engine X.

spk_0 And my brother was still living in Germany,

spk_0 so he couldn't help me much for the first year of building VK.

spk_0 Sometimes I would manage to get through to him through a call.

spk_0 I would use an old school phone to call him with wires.

spk_0 I said, what do I do?

spk_0 How do I install this thing called engine X?

spk_0 I'm not a Linux guy.

spk_0 If he felt particularly kind that day,

spk_0 and not too busy,

spk_0 he would show me the way to do it or set it up himself.

spk_0 But for the most part I had to rely on just myself.

spk_0 Having him available helped

spk_0 when we started to grow fast and started to scale it.

spk_0 Because at first you realize one server is not enough.

spk_0 I need to buy another one.

spk_0 Then another one and another one.

spk_0 The database should be in it in a different server.

spk_0 Then you have to split the database into tables.

spk_0 Then you have to come up with a way to sharp the tables

spk_0 using some criteria that would make sense that wouldn't break your user experience.

spk_0 When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen of servers,

spk_0 surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of

spk_0 the scaling aspect of it became impossible.

spk_0 I remember asking him to come back.

spk_0 He said he needed to help me with this thing.

spk_0 It's starting to be really big.

spk_0 What was worse is that since we became popular,

spk_0 somebody started to do DDoS attacks on us.

spk_0 This always happens.

spk_0 Then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK

spk_0 and interestingly every time we had a negotiation day,

spk_0 did DDoS attacks intensified?

spk_0 We had to come up with a way to fight it.

spk_0 I remember having many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.

spk_0 That was your introduction to all kinds of bad actors.

spk_0 DDoS, business, then later you'd find out

spk_0 there's such a thing called politics and then later geopolitics.

spk_0 This is the initial stages.

spk_0 It's not just about creating cool stuff.

spk_0 Having to deal with, as you now have to deal with the telegram,

spk_0 is seize of bad actors trying to test the limits of the system,

spk_0 trying to break the system.

spk_0 Unfortunately, if we didn't have bad actors and pressure,

spk_0 it would be the best job ever.

spk_0 You just get to create.

spk_0 The help from your brother, like you mentioned,

spk_0 NGNX and Sharding the tables,

spk_0 some of the scaling issue is algorithmic nature.

spk_0 It's almost like theoretical computer science.

spk_0 It's not just about buying more computers,

spk_0 it's figuring out how to algorithmically

spk_0 make everything work extremely fast.

spk_0 Some of this is mathematics.

spk_0 Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.

spk_0 At that stage, I could do the basic stuff.

spk_0 I could understand how I implement scalability into the code base,

spk_0 how I short my tables in the database,

spk_0 where I include memcached instead of direct requests to the database.

spk_0 That was quite easy, because it was still PHP back in the day.

spk_0 When my brother got back from Germany, somewhere around 2008,

spk_0 I asked him, can we make it even more efficient?

spk_0 Can we make it super fast?

spk_0 At the same time, we would require fewer servers to maintain the load.

spk_0 He said, yes, but PHP is not enough.

spk_0 I have to rewrite a big part of your data engines in cnc++.

spk_0 Let's do that.

spk_0 He invited the friend of his help him another absolute champion

spk_0 in world's programming contest twice in a row.

spk_0 They put together the first customized data engine,

spk_0 which is far more efficient than just relying on mySQL and memcached,

spk_0 because it was, first of all, more specialized, more low-level.

spk_0 So they re-wrote in cc++?

spk_0 A large chunk of it, for example, the search, the ad engine,

spk_0 because VK had a target that adds the built-up.

spk_0 It was very efficient, but eventually the prior messaging part,

spk_0 the public messages part.

spk_0 At some point, we realized there are very few websites online

spk_0 that load faster than VK.

spk_0 Nice.

spk_0 I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley,

spk_0 and I met Mark Zuckerberg first time,

spk_0 and some of the other core team members of early Facebook.

spk_0 Remember, Facebook was just four or five years old,

spk_0 and everybody kept asking me,

spk_0 how come, even here in Silicon Valley, VK loads faster than Facebook?

spk_0 Everything seems to appear instantly on your website,

spk_0 was the secret sauce.

spk_0 There was one of the things that made them very curious.

spk_0 And that was always important to have very low latency,

spk_0 to make sure the thing loads,

spk_0 because that's one of the things Telegram is really known for,

spk_0 even non-crapic connections and all that kind of stuff

spk_0 just works extremely fast, everything is fast.

spk_0 As one of the core technological ideas,

spk_0 we prioritize speed.

spk_0 We think that people can notice the difference,

spk_0 even if it's just like 50 million milliseconds difference.

spk_0 The difference is subconscious.

spk_0 It also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive.

spk_0 I was also more efficient when it comes to the infrastructure, the expenses.

spk_0 Because if you code executes faster,

spk_0 it means you need fewer computational resources to run it.

spk_0 So there is no way you can lose in making things faster.

spk_0 And that's why we have always been very careful when hiring people.

spk_0 I would only hire a person if I'm ultimately certain

spk_0 is the best option.

spk_0 If you hire somebody who is maybe a little bit distracted,

spk_0 and experienced,

spk_0 you may end up with inefficiencies in your code base,

spk_0 the results and tens of millions of dollars of losses.

spk_0 And think about the responsibility.

spk_0 If we jump today from the VK days,

spk_0 Telegram is used by over a billion people.

spk_0 They open it dozens of times every day.

spk_0 Imagine the app opens with a slide delay, say,

spk_0 half a second delay,

spk_0 multiplied by dozens of times by a billion.

spk_0 It's centuries,

spk_0 millennia lost for humanity.

spk_0 Without any reason,

spk_0 other than just being sloppy.

spk_0 That is so important to understand.

spk_0 And so wise,

spk_0 that it's actually, if you're just a little bit careless as a developer,

spk_0 you can introduce inefficiencies that are going to be very difficult to track down.

spk_0 Because you don't know that it can be faster.

spk_0 Like the code doesn't scream at you saying this could be much faster.

spk_0 So you have to actually, as a craftsman,

spk_0 be very careful when you're writing a color.

spk_0 And always thinking,

spk_0 can this be done much more efficiently?

spk_0 And it can be tiny things because they all propagate throughout the code.

spk_0 And so there's a real cost in having a careless developer anywhere in the company.

spk_0 Because they can introduce that inefficiency

spk_0 and all the other developers won't know.

spk_0 They'll just assume it kind of has to be that way.

spk_0 And so there's a real responsibility for every single individual developer

spk_0 that's building any component of an app like Telegram

spk_0 to just always ask,

spk_0 can this be done more efficiently?

spk_0 Can this be done more simply?

spk_0 And that's like one of the most beautiful aspects,

spk_0 the art forms of programming.

spk_0 Oh, yes, because when you manage to discover a way to simplify things,

spk_0 make them more efficient,

spk_0 you feel incredibly happy and proud and accomplished.

spk_0 And to your point, I can recall a few instances in my career

spk_0 where firing an engineer actually resulted to an increase in productivity.

spk_0 You say you have two Android engineers building the app

spk_0 and then they just can't make it there,

spk_0 not keeping up with the pace of the real feature release schedule.

spk_0 And you think I probably have to hire a third one.

spk_0 But then you notice that one of them is really weird,

spk_0 falling behind this schedule, complaining some of the time,

spk_0 doesn't assume responsibility.

spk_0 And you ask, so whatever, just fire this person,

spk_0 and you fire this person.

spk_0 And a few weeks we realized you actually don't need

spk_0 and you never needed the third engineer.

spk_0 The problem was this guy who created more issues

spk_0 and more problems than he solved.

spk_0 That is so counterintuitive because in developing tech projects,

spk_0 we tend to think that you just throw more people into something

spk_0 and then things get solved miraculously by themselves,

spk_0 just because more people means more attention from them.

spk_0 That's again extremely powerful.

spk_0 Steve Jobs talked about A-Players and B-Players.

spk_0 And there's something that happens when you have B-Players,

spk_0 which is kind of like the folks you're talking about,

spk_0 introduced into a team that can somehow slow everybody down.

spk_0 They demotivate everybody.

spk_0 And it's very counterintuitive that you basically

spk_0 as part of the work of creating a great team

spk_0 is removing the B-Players.

spk_0 Not just hiring more in generally speaking.

spk_0 It's finding that A-Players quote unquote

spk_0 and removing the people that are slowing things down.

spk_0 Oh yes, because the other thing that people don't realize

spk_0 is how demotivating working with the B-Player is.

spk_0 Everybody can tell if the other person,

spk_0 the other engineer they're working with,

spk_0 is really competent.

spk_0 And if it's very visible, if the person is not competent,

spk_0 they are asking the wrong questions.

spk_0 They keep lagging behind.

spk_0 And at a certain point,

spk_0 if you're an A-Player,

spk_0 you get this dissatisfaction,

spk_0 this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential,

spk_0 accomplish what you are really meant to accomplish

spk_0 because of this person working next to you

spk_0 or pretending to work next to you.

spk_0 And by the way, in some cases it's not because the person is lazy.

spk_0 In some cases it's just

spk_0 the mental, the intellectual ability is not there.

spk_0 It's not about experience.

spk_0 Most often it's about

spk_0 natural ability and persistence.

spk_0 In 90% of cases it's just the inability to focus on one task

spk_0 for an extended period of time.

spk_0 Not everybody has this ability.

spk_0 So for people who do have this ability,

spk_0 it's an insult to work alongside someone

spk_0 who is distracted

spk_0 and can go deep

spk_0 in the projects that they are responsible for.

spk_0 What's on this small tangent?

spk_0 What's your hiring process?

spk_0 So you've shown,

spk_0 you've talked about how you use competitions often,

spk_0 coding competitions to hire, to find great engineers.

spk_0 What's your thinking behind that?

spk_0 Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy,

spk_0 I think, competition leads to progress.

spk_0 If you want to create an ideal process

spk_0 for selecting the most qualified people,

spk_0 for certain specific tasks you have in mind,

spk_0 what can be better than a competition?

spk_0 A coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company

spk_0 as an engineer or just wants to get some price money or validation

spk_0 can demonstrate their skills.

spk_0 And then we just select the best,

spk_0 or if we are not certain

spk_0 because there's not enough data to hire somebody,

spk_0 we just repeat the contest with another task,

spk_0 get more data, get more winners,

spk_0 then repeat again,

spk_0 and at some point you realize,

spk_0 actually this guy has competed in ten of our contests

spk_0 since he was 16 years old or 14 years old.

spk_0 Now he's 20 or 21.

spk_0 He won in eight of these competitions.

spk_0 He seems to be really good in JavaScript and Android Java

spk_0 and also C++.

spk_0 Why not hire this person?

spk_0 There's some consistency there.

spk_0 And a lot of these people

spk_0 they have never worked in a big company before,

spk_0 which is priceless because in a big company,

spk_0 people tend to shift responsibility.

spk_0 They have this shared responsibility

spk_0 where nobody fully understands

spk_0 who can take credit for a project,

spk_0 who can take blame for a project.

spk_0 Inside Totem was pretty clear.

spk_0 And these competitions are the closest experience

spk_0 to what people will have when working at Telegram.

spk_0 So for example, we want to implement

spk_0 certain very tricky animation and redesign

spk_0 to the profile page of the Telegram Android version.

spk_0 And the Android app,

spk_0 it's an open source app,

spk_0 anybody can take its code and play with it.

spk_0 So as a result,

spk_0 we would not just select the best person

spk_0 and hire this person,

spk_0 we would also select the best solution to the problem

spk_0 because we would not suggest

spk_0 the contestants to solve trivial problems.

spk_0 It's something that's valuable.

spk_0 It saves a lot of time for us during the development.

spk_0 And because I always had

spk_0 this large social media platforms

spk_0 which I could use to promote these competitions.

spk_0 Somehow both VK and Telegram

spk_0 were very popular among engineers

spk_0 and designers, other tech people.

spk_0 I had no issue to promote these contests

spk_0 and find the right people ever.

spk_0 And what can be better than

spk_0 for an employee of your company,

spk_0 of somebody who has been a user of it?

spk_0 If this person has no prior experience

spk_0 of using Telegram,

spk_0 their understanding would be very limited.

spk_0 Why would I even try to hire somebody

spk_0 from LinkedIn who worked at Google

spk_0 and other companies

spk_0 is used to receiving salary for nothing,

spk_0 is used to shift responsibility

spk_0 and being stuck in endless meetings.

spk_0 And have very limited understanding

spk_0 of what Telegram stands for.

spk_0 It's just crazy if you think about it.

spk_0 Yeah, but because of that,

spk_0 you have extremely selective and slow and hiring.

spk_0 So like,

spk_0 people really have to earn their spot.

spk_0 And as a result, I got a chance to sit in

spk_0 in one of the team meetings,

spk_0 where people discuss the different features

spk_0 that are being developed,

spk_0 the different ideas,

spk_0 some of which are the very cutting edge.

spk_0 And so you get to see behind the scenes

spk_0 how it's possible to have such a fast rate of idea generation.

spk_0 So you generate the idea you implement

spk_0 the prototype and then you eventually,

spk_0 it becomes an actual feature in the product.

spk_0 And so that's why you have this kind of half-hilarious,

spk_0 half-incredible fact that for many,

spk_0 as compared to WhatsApp and Signal,

spk_0 you've led the way in many other features.

spk_0 Many of the features we take for granted now,

spk_0 many of which we know and love,

spk_0 like the auto-delete timer.

spk_0 That was seven years ahead of any other messenger,

spk_0 message editing,

spk_0 replies,

spk_0 these are all like obvious things.

spk_0 I've even forgotten for some of them that Dave and,

spk_0 we're never part.

spk_0 I mean, I think auto-delete timer is a really brilliant idea.

spk_0 We implemented it in 2013 in the secret shots.

spk_0 It's funny thing about it is then when other apps started to copy it,

spk_0 like WhatsApp seven years after,

spk_0 and then Signal and some other of the apps,

spk_0 they initially even copied the exact timestamps.

spk_0 For example, if we had like one, three, and five seconds,

spk_0 they would also have one, three, and five seconds.

spk_0 Did try not to change it because they were not sure

spk_0 what was the magic sauce behind the signature.

spk_0 Ironically, it happens with many of these things.

spk_0 For example, when we designed how you reply to a message

spk_0 and you have a small snippet showing that you're replying to this message,

spk_0 and now you're typing your response,

spk_0 then there is a small snippet in the message itself

spk_0 that if you tap on it, highlights the original message you're replying to.

spk_0 It seems pretty obvious,

spk_0 but there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time,

spk_0 and we got this vertical line on the left,

spk_0 the other small things that are completely arbitrary.

spk_0 You can do it in a different way.

spk_0 But somehow the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution.

spk_0 Whenever you go to WhatsApp and student direct,

spk_0 Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Instagram, etc.

spk_0 you would see exactly the same or pretty much similar experience

spk_0 because nobody really wants to take the risk and innovate.

spk_0 If something works, why not just copy it?

spk_0 We should say that it's done extremely well.

spk_0 The vertical line and the highlighting.

spk_0 All of these are tiny little strokes of genius,

spk_0 highlighting the text in a certain way that,

spk_0 from a design perspective,

spk_0 makes it very clear that this part was written before

spk_0 and the thing under it is you reply.

spk_0 The distinction between the different formatting of the text.

spk_0 I mean, I know how much typography is an art form.

spk_0 There's a lot of interacting, graphic,

spk_0 artistic elements that I tell you that all have to play together extremely well.

spk_0 Like you pointed out to me,

spk_0 this is something that blew my mind,

spk_0 which is the background gradient of telegram,

spk_0 shifts, it changes,

spk_0 and it adjusts really nicely to the bubbles,

spk_0 the chat bubbles,

spk_0 and then there's like graphic elements on top of the gradient

spk_0 that are all interplayed together.

spk_0 So all of that has to work really nicely,

spk_0 without sacrificing clarity.

spk_0 Everything is just intuitive.

spk_0 That's very difficult to create.

spk_0 That is art,

spk_0 and on top of that, super fast.

spk_0 That's the hardest part.

spk_0 It's to make it look so that designers love it is one thing.

spk_0 The real challenge is make it look the way the designers love it

spk_0 and make it work on the weakest device as possible,

spk_0 the oldest, cheapest smartphones you can imagine.

spk_0 So if you take the moving gradients on the background of every telegram chat,

spk_0 this is something most people don't notice,

spk_0 but they can feel it.

spk_0 Yeah, they notice the subconscious there something like that.

spk_0 There is a pleasant feeling.

spk_0 There's a feeling, there's a pleasant feeling when you're reading a chat,

spk_0 and that's where the design contributes to that.

spk_0 I think a gradient really does.

spk_0 I really love that about telegram, the gradient.

spk_0 Not the technical thing you described, but the feeling of it.

spk_0 And then the technical aspect of creating that feeling is incredible.

spk_0 I could probably come up with all kinds of algorithms of rendering that gradient

spk_0 that's going to be super inefficient.

spk_0 And so doing that efficiently is like...

spk_0 Or efficient, but not too beautiful,

spk_0 because even doing something so trivial as a gradient

spk_0 can result in noticeable lines in the gradient that person can instantly say,

spk_0 oh no, it's not the right thing.

spk_0 So you can have to introduce certain randomness there.

spk_0 And then you have the gradient, but it's not enough.

spk_0 It's too plain.

spk_0 You want to have certain patterns as an overlay,

spk_0 but it should be simple enough not to distract you from the content,

spk_0 but it has to be entertaining enough to create a good feeling about the whole app.

spk_0 And another question, what kind of objects you want to include in this pattern?

spk_0 And how this pattern would work?

spk_0 Will it be based on pixels, or would it be vector-based,

spk_0 and would it be vector-based,

spk_0 so there will be instances with scalable and high quality.

spk_0 And then, I think for the default pattern and the default background,

spk_0 which is based on four colors,

spk_0 it's not a gradient based on two colors, it's four colors.

spk_0 And they're constantly shifting.

spk_0 I probably look through several thousand variations of that.

spk_0 Because it's such an important decision to make.

spk_0 It's the default, of course, you can change it.

spk_0 Actually, you can set up your own four colors for that.

spk_0 You can change it.

spk_0 No way.

spk_0 Yes, you can do it.

spk_0 And you want to rely on certain deeply hard-coded biological properties of the human mind.

spk_0 So, which color do you want to use?

spk_0 Is it going to be blue? Is it going to be yellow? Is it going to be green?

spk_0 Because each color has a different meaning in our brain.

spk_0 And what kind of objects you want to put there?

spk_0 Something from our childhood, something from nature,

spk_0 or something that can create a different kind of mood.

spk_0 And this is just one detail of the app.

spk_0 So there are many details.

spk_0 When you send a message, you are done typing a message.

spk_0 And then tap send.

spk_0 And then the message gradually appears in the chat.

spk_0 How does it happen?

spk_0 So you want the input field to slowly morph into the actual message.

spk_0 To the message, yeah.

spk_0 And you want this to be done regardless of the contents of the message.

spk_0 Because sometimes the width would be different.

spk_0 And sometimes you would be containing media or link preview or other stuff that will change the message bubble.

spk_0 So you go through countless different scenarios and make sure every one of them works great.

spk_0 Even if this message contains 4,000 characters.

spk_0 And then you look at all the platforms, iOS, Android, and all the old devices, all kinds of outdated operating systems.

spk_0 And the hardware and the cross the tool because you can have this really bad old phone,

spk_0 but using the newest operating system versions.

spk_0 So what do you do?

spk_0 What kind of bugs you get there?

spk_0 And then of course, the installation works on tablets as well.

spk_0 And now iOS version works on an iPad, which I love a lot.

spk_0 You have to understand that everything can be really big.

spk_0 So we can consume a lot of space and use green.

spk_0 And then it will trigger using more computational resources to render it.

spk_0 So there are a lot of nuances to it.

spk_0 But as long as you obsess over every small detail, at least every detail that really counts.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Going back to any other messaging app feels like a series downgrade.

spk_0 Yeah, I mean, there are so many really magical moments.

spk_0 Like for example, the way a message evaporates when you delete it.

spk_0 That is a really pleasant experience.

spk_0 Oh, yeah. And boy, was it hard to make?

spk_0 Particular Android.

spk_0 This is this Thanos snap effect, right?

spk_0 So the message is broken to tens of thousands particles, which go away like dust in the wind.

spk_0 It looks great, but it was so hard to make.

spk_0 Probably one of my favorite gooey graphical things.

spk_0 It's just art.

spk_0 It's pure art. It's incredible.

spk_0 So it's good to hear that it's been really fought over and thought through.

spk_0 It's extremely well done.

spk_0 No, you can't pull it off if you're not going deep in this.

spk_0 And then you don't want to distract people from their communication with all this additional animations.

spk_0 So you want them to be invisible in a way.

spk_0 They create the feeling, but they don't create distraction.

spk_0 Yes.

spk_0 And in order to do that, you have to overcome even more challenges.

spk_0 For example, you mentioned this deletion effect message evaporates.

spk_0 If you do the animation, if you show the animation first, and then the message that is preceding the mediality message that is going after the just delete message,

spk_0 move closer to each other, then it doesn't feel right.

spk_0 It feels too long, too imposing.

spk_0 So what you want to do is you want the message disappear while the message is around it, go closer to each other to feel the resulting gap.

spk_0 And then you imagine what it involves.

spk_0 Redrawing the entire screen.

spk_0 So on top of this very complicated animation, you have to think about things like which kind of messages were there before it after they just adds to complexity.

spk_0 And once again, all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems, all kinds of tablets, phones, desktop, all of that.

spk_0 But you know, once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense sense of pride.

spk_0 Because nobody is doing this.

spk_0 Nobody really cares.

spk_0 In a way, maybe they're right, not to care.

spk_0 Maybe nobody notices this.

spk_0 But there is something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected.

spk_0 Because I understand that every day tens of millions of people are on the world deleting messages.

spk_0 What kind of experience they get?

spk_0 Is this an experience that maybe even subconsciously inspires them and makes their hearts sing even a little bit?

spk_0 Fills them with joy, lightens up their mood, even a little bit by 0.001%.

spk_0 Or is it something that is just basic?

spk_0 And I think if we can bring some value in people's lives, even through these subtle details, we have to definitely invest our time in it.

spk_0 And some joy, not just sort of value, value, like productivity, but joy.

spk_0 I think Steve Jobs done the, I've talked about this.

spk_0 They will put so much love and effort in the design of everything, including things that weren't visible in the initial PC's personal computers.

spk_0 Because they believe that somehow, through osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing.

spk_0 And you're absolutely right.

spk_0 I mean, it's not about deleting messages.

spk_0 Like, I feel a little inkling of joy when I see that evaporation animation.

spk_0 It's just nice.

spk_0 I'm happier because of it.

spk_0 And like, so I feel that effort.

spk_0 And I think, you know, billion users feel that.

spk_0 People like when other people care.

spk_0 Yeah, yeah.

spk_0 Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

spk_0 And of course, there's the more sexy things like all the emojis and the stickers, the gifts, many of those are just their little like art pieces.

spk_0 That's again an intersection of art and technology.

spk_0 Because you look at the stickers which Dogon launched way before most of this other apps three years and eight months ahead.

spk_0 Yeah, yeah.

spk_0 What's up?

spk_0 Yes.

spk_0 But the stickers that what's happening, that's launching three years and eight months after.

spk_0 And we're not the first version was not really good because they just did regular gifts or web m videos.

spk_0 Which we're not based on vector graphics.

spk_0 What we did is vector animations.

spk_0 Each of the stickers is only several kilobytes.

spk_0 Sometimes maybe maximum twenty thirty kilobytes in size.

spk_0 But it says 180 frames.

spk_0 We were able to run them at 60 frames per second on all devices.

spk_0 And it's also a very challenging.

spk_0 Was a challenging thing to do.

spk_0 We had so much headache trying to make it work.

spk_0 Nobody even tried doing something like this before us because it's crazily difficult.

spk_0 But as a result, you have this fluid animations.

spk_0 Yeah, this really nice user experience.

spk_0 Somebody sends you a sticker.

spk_0 You don't have to wait for it to load because it's so lightweight.

spk_0 And it starts moving instantly.

spk_0 And then of course, it's not just engineering.

spk_0 You have to find designers that are able to create the stickers using vector graphics.

spk_0 Which means they based on curves described by formulas,

spk_0 not just created as photographs with pixels.

spk_0 But when you find this people, again, we did competitions.

spk_0 But it was not easy to assemble a team of artists.

spk_0 Slash artists, artists slash engineers, I would say,

spk_0 that are able to do something like this.

spk_0 This is a unique form of art.

spk_0 And this allowed us to do a revolution in stickers.

spk_0 Then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add into messages,

spk_0 custom animated emoji.

spk_0 I don't think anybody did that.

spk_0 I think ToggleM is still the only one allowing users to do that

spk_0 because you can include a hungry or animated emoji in a message.

spk_0 And they will be animated and they will be moving.

spk_0 And your device won't crash.

spk_0 It's probably unnecessary and crazy.

spk_0 But we think somewhere in this intersection of art and engineering,

spk_0 true quality is created.

spk_0 And then of course, more recently, we expanded into what we call ToggleM gifts,

spk_0 which are essentially blockchain based collectibles that you can demonstrate

spk_0 on your ToggleM profile so that they get social relevance.

spk_0 But you can also use them to congratulate your friends and close the one with

spk_0 their birthdays and other holidays.

spk_0 And that was received extremely well.

spk_0 Yeah, they can hold value, they can increase in value,

spk_0 you can trade them for that in that aspect.

spk_0 But Jimmy is still the vector graphics.

spk_0 And it's not just simple graphics.

spk_0 It's incredibly intricate graphics.

spk_0 So the vector makes it very efficient, but it also allows you to create

spk_0 maybe incentivizes the artist,

spk_0 enables them and incentivizes them to create super detailed intricate elements.

spk_0 And then the final result, like you would think, it wouldn't matter.

spk_0 But the final result has like a lot of stuff going on.

spk_0 And it allows you to do the scale on arbitrary devices.

spk_0 And now it's like this little...

spk_0 You know, usually gifts from like back in the day and still in meme form

spk_0 are low resolution.

spk_0 And so that decent... Usually people don't have put details and intricate art into it.

spk_0 But here with vector graphics, it's like like a million things going on.

spk_0 And it allows you to play with different animations.

spk_0 Like you showed me this thing where you send and you hold for a while on the send button.

spk_0 And so you can share with the person who sent a message to this animation

spk_0 that you've encoded.

spk_0 Like there's a bunch of stuff going on when they read the message.

spk_0 As we have a lot of features like that when we use this art to allow people to express themselves.

spk_0 And most people don't even know about these features.

spk_0 I didn't know about it. That was cool. That was cool.

spk_0 The other application of the same technology is reactions on Telegram.

spk_0 Because we made it a goal to make sure that people feel joy when they just send you a like.

spk_0 Something so trivial is just adding a like to a message.

spk_0 It should be an action that you want to perform again and again and again.

spk_0 So another feature is on the more serious size and tied an encryption.

spk_0 So you led the industry in that.

spk_0 It was launched one year and three months ahead.

spk_0 Can you speak to why you decided to add and end encryption?

spk_0 How you developed the encryption algorithm in the beginning?

spk_0 What was your thinking behind that?

spk_0 So at 2013 when we were launching Telegram.

spk_0 We were aware of the serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear.

spk_0 And we thought yes, we are designing this product in a way that is already extremely secure.

spk_0 But we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages.

spk_0 And we understood very clearly that a bunch of people who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust.

spk_0 So that's why we made Telegram open source.

spk_0 So all our apps have been open available on GitHub since 2013.

spk_0 And then we added an encryption in our secret chat which.

spk_0 What's app copied a few years after one year and three months ahead they just started to test it.

spk_0 They rolled it out I think 2016 which is.

spk_0 Three years after us and the only reason I think the rest of the industry had to do it is because.

spk_0 We said the standard.

spk_0 It was incredibly important back in the day and at the same time we realized certain limitations of end to encryption.

spk_0 So within that design that architecture account support very large chat communities with consistent persistent child histories.

spk_0 You can support huge one of many channels you'd have issues with maintaining.

spk_0 Bots that have lots of incoming messages.

spk_0 Multiple device support becomes tricky.

spk_0 People will end up losing some of the documents they share.

spk_0 So we also see so a lot of issues.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Encryption that we want to have so that's why chose to go opt in for end end encryption.

spk_0 So the trade off there the describing is between for people who really care about specific messages extreme privacy on those messages.

spk_0 And usability like being able to sink across multiple devices having groups that are 200,000 people.

spk_0 So all of those features that quality of life features is a trade off between those and entire encryption.

spk_0 So you lean towards letting users sort of enable and 10 encryption for cases when they want to be super secure.

spk_0 Yes and secret chat is not just enter and encrypted.

spk_0 There are certain limitations that are both their feature and the bug.

spk_0 For example, you can't screenshot them.

spk_0 You can't forward any document message from them.

spk_0 Which is not necessarily something you need when you are trying to get some work done and you're just communicating with your team on a project.

spk_0 So it became very clear to us that there are different needs here.

spk_0 And if you try to combine both in one type of chat, you will end up losing a lot of utility.

spk_0 We are telling them we don't use any collaboration tool for teamwork.

spk_0 We use telegram to build telegram.

spk_0 So we felt instantly when we were trying to switch to say secret chats to share large documents and try to get work done.

spk_0 It was just not adapted for it.

spk_0 At the same time, if you were really paranoid, you think, I don't want to be screen shoted.

spk_0 I don't want to have any leaks.

spk_0 I don't even trust telegram.

spk_0 I only trust code.

spk_0 Secret chats are the best option.

spk_0 I believe it is the most secure means of communication today.

spk_0 And we should say that there is a lot of other aspects to this that are important.

spk_0 For example, telegram is the only app that has open source reproducible bills for both Android and iOS.

spk_0 Why is this important?

spk_0 So you need to reproducible bills in order to verify that the app really does what it claims,

spk_0 really encrypts data in a way that it is described on its website.

spk_0 For that, you need to make your apps open source for any researchers to have a look at it.

spk_0 Telegram has been open source since 2013.

spk_0 Apps like WhatsApp have never been open source.

spk_0 So you don't really know what they're doing and how exactly they encrypt your messages.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And for that, you need reproducible bills.

spk_0 As you said, telegram is the only popular messaging app that does that.

spk_0 We allow people to make sure both Android and iOS that the source code of telegram on GitHub and the app you're actually using is the same app.

spk_0 I think it's incredibly important not just to gain people's trust but just to stay transparent and open about it.

spk_0 When I make this claim that telegram's secret chats are the most secure way of communicating, I really mean it because I haven't seen any fact contradicting this claim.

spk_0 At least among the popular messaging app, you say WhatsApp signal, iMessage.

spk_0 None of them have reproducible bills on both iOS and Android.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And not algorithms that have been handed to you by some agency in order to create a honeypot.

spk_0 At least from what I know about our competitors, I don't think they went through the same process.

spk_0 We should say that the entirety of the software stack and telegram is a tough scratch internally to telegram.

spk_0 We're talking about not just the encryption but everything running on the servers.

spk_0 The servers are built out, the hardware and the software are all done internally, which is one of the ways you reduce the attack surface on the entire stack that handles the messages.

spk_0 It does make it more secure because if Snowden's relations taught us anything is that very often open source tools, modules, libraries that they use by everybody ended up having certain flaws and security issues that make it so clear.

spk_0 It's also a way to make sure you're doing things the most efficient way possible.

spk_0 But it's extremely difficult to do that.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Web servers, entire programming languages.

spk_0 Because the programming language we use on the backhand to develop the API for the client apps is also entirely built by our team.

spk_0 So removing minimized in their reliance on open source libraries is extremely difficult.

spk_0 As most companies say they rely on open source libraries.

spk_0 Well, I wouldn't say we completely independent from that.

spk_0 We use Linux on the backhand. There's no way of avoiding it for us at the moment.

spk_0 But for the most part, we are much more self-reliant than most other apps.

spk_0 You mentioned AdWords Node. A long time ago you went to work together with him.

spk_0 Perhaps the share expertise to understand the full realm of what it takes to achieve cybersecurity.

spk_0 What do you make of his case? What lessons do you learn from what he has uncovered?

spk_0 And maybe even broadly, what impact does his work had on the world, do you think?

spk_0 Well, the main lesson is not everything what it seems.

spk_0 And you would discover, and this is something I found quite shocking at the time,

spk_0 that a lot of people who you thought were security and cryptography experts,

spk_0 ended up being agents of the NSA in one way or the other,

spk_0 promoting flawed encryption standards.

spk_0 You wouldn't end up discovering that your government was supposed to be limited in how it can surveil its people,

spk_0 actually doesn't consider itself that limited.

spk_0 And that was very valuable for the world to understand.

spk_0 I guess it also can be a lesson demonstrating that we humans don't get their balance right.

spk_0 So 9-11 created a situation when the government had to respond,

spk_0 and it responded, but it overreacted.

spk_0 It ended up in deroting certain basic rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy,

spk_0 because the government always wants to increase its powers,

spk_0 and the government always tries to do it at the expense of citizens.

spk_0 You have the situation when the cure is worse than the disease.

spk_0 I think it was incredibly brave to do what Edward did.

spk_0 I didn't get to work with him, whoever saw him in person,

spk_0 or we keep in touch, we sometimes communicate, but we're not close.

spk_0 I still, I think, what he did is lot of all.

spk_0 I hope someday we meet.

spk_0 You yourself have faced the full force of various governments, intelligence agencies.

spk_0 Is there any intelligence agency you're afraid of, any government you're afraid of?

spk_0 I think they're all equally, should be equally afraid of, or equally not afraid of.

spk_0 Anyway, it's not that this intelligence service can kill you and the other can't kill you.

spk_0 They all can kill you.

spk_0 I guess they all can kill me one way or the other.

spk_0 But it's a matter of whether I'm afraid of death.

spk_0 It goes back to the beginning of our conversation, I think, multiple times.

spk_0 So you're in general fearless in the face of the pressure.

spk_0 There will be a very bold statement, but I proved to be quite stressed, resilient.

spk_0 And it's not that you don't have fear. You can't have fear, but you overcome this fear.

spk_0 I don't think there is anything at this point that can happen to change the way I am.

spk_0 So you went through a lot from 2011 to 2014, government pressure that you refused to give into that led you to create telegram.

spk_0 And let go of VK.

spk_0 And then in 2018, Russia and Iran decided to ban telegram.

spk_0 That was another example of pressure.

spk_0 Can you take me through that saga in 2018?

spk_0 So in 2018, telegram started to become popular.

spk_0 I think we had something like 200 million users.

spk_0 And it increasingly became popular in places like Iran and Russia.

spk_0 And now that countries were sometimes people have something to hide from the government.

spk_0 In Iran, people used telegrams to protest against the government.

spk_0 And that is huge channels that they would use to organize the protests.

spk_0 And eventually the government couldn't keep up.

spk_0 They decided to ban telegram.

spk_0 People would still keep using it though using VPNs.

spk_0 It didn't help.

spk_0 The government invested a lot in coming up with their own messaging app.

spk_0 They had several teams competing for the title of the nationally reigning messaging app.

spk_0 All this apps failed.

spk_0 People still prefer telegram.

spk_0 Interestingly, Iran banned telegram, but WhatsApp wasn't banned.

spk_0 Or at least they banned WhatsApp soon after.

spk_0 At the same time, starting in mid 2017 or late 2017, Russia demanded that telegram hands them the encryption keys.

spk_0 They thought these things exist, something that would allow them to read messages of every person on telegram.

spk_0 Or at least every person on telegram in Russia.

spk_0 And we told them it's impossible if you have to ban us, ban us.

spk_0 And this is what they ended up doing in spring 2018.

spk_0 And there was quite fun because they were trying to block our IP addresses.

spk_0 But we were prepared for that.

spk_0 And we came up with this technology that allowed us to rotate IP addresses, replacing them with new ones.

spk_0 Every time the sensor blocks our existing addresses.

spk_0 And then it was completely automated.

spk_0 We had millions of IP addresses.

spk_0 We would be burning through them.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And their own IP addresses for children to rely on in order to bypass censorship.

spk_0 We ended up spending millions of dollars on that.

spk_0 And as a result, the sensor got crazy there.

spk_0 There were ban IP addresses and largest subnets of IP addresses and huge subnets which resulted in a weird situation where parts of the country's infrastructure started to go down.

spk_0 People were trying to pay for groceries and the supermarkets and nothing would work because the Russian sensor blocked too many IP addresses.

spk_0 And some of the subnets were used to host other unrelated services.

spk_0 Even some Russian social networks and media got affected.

spk_0 Banks.

spk_0 So they had to start being more selective in how they combat our anti-sensorship tools.

spk_0 The biggest resistance we got at the time was from Apple.

spk_0 Apple didn't allow us to update telegram in the App Store saying for at least four weeks that we have to

spk_0 come to an agreement with Russia first.

spk_0 We said it's not possible.

spk_0 They said we will allow you to push your update for telegram worldwide except for Russia.

spk_0 We didn't want to do that.

spk_0 It almost was help.

spk_0 At some point I said, maybe this is the only way.

spk_0 Maybe we should leave the Russian market.

spk_0 Stop allowing users from Russia to download the app from the App Store which should mean it's over.

spk_0 We helped organize certain protests in defense of telegram and privacy and freedom of speech in 2018 in Moscow.

spk_0 There was hilarious people flying paper airplanes.

spk_0 I saw that.

spk_0 At some point I decided I have to make a statement.

spk_0 I have to say that Apple sided with the sensor.

spk_0 We are trying to do the right thing here but without Apple we can't do much.

spk_0 People can't download your app anymore.

spk_0 I published it in my channel and then New York Times picked it up with the picture of the protesters flying paper airplanes.

spk_0 Apple was criticized in the story and I thought well Apple should probably come back to the right side of history here.

spk_0 I waited for one day and two days.

spk_0 In the meantime since we have been unable to update telegram for more than a month, it started to fall apart.

spk_0 The new version of iOS came out and it made the old versions of telegram obsolete.

spk_0 Some features that used to work stopped working and users all over the world started to suffer.

spk_0 People that had nothing to do with Russia from other parts of the world experienced issues with telegram.

spk_0 It was really serious and I said to my team, you know what?

spk_0 If by 6 pm today I think it was the Friday.

spk_0 Nothing changes and Apple doesn't allow us to push the version of telegram through.

spk_0 Let's just forget about the Russian market.

spk_0 Let's keep going because the rest of the world is more important.

spk_0 It's sad but what can we do?

spk_0 Which by the way removes all the people that want to protest, all the people that want to talk in Russia and removes their ability to have a voice in the most popular messaging app in that part of the world.

spk_0 Yes, magically 15 minutes to the time I was planning to remove telegram from the Russian app store in order to proceed globally.

spk_0 Apple reached out to us and said it's okay.

spk_0 Your update is approved and we managed to keep playing this hide and seek game with the sensor by pass and censorship through digital resistance.

spk_0 In Iran it was a little bit different because we realized it would have been too expensive to try to come up with all this IP addresses.

spk_0 And in addition it was not clear whether we wouldn't be in violation of the sanctions regime.

spk_0 So we did something else.

spk_0 We created an economic incentive for people who would set up proxy servers for telegram.

spk_0 Any person, say an Iranian engineer could come up with a proxy server, distribute its address among users in Iran.

spk_0 And whoever connected through the proxy of this person would be able to see a pinned chat and add place there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy.

spk_0 And this is how you can monetize the proxy.

spk_0 So we created this market which resulted in Iranians fixing their own problem.

spk_0 And as a result we kept millions or maybe tens of millions of Iranian users up until this day I think telegram is still banned in Iran today.

spk_0 But we probably have something like 50 million people who rely on telegram from that country.

spk_0 So the people find a way around people find a way around.

spk_0 That's ingenious. That's really great to hear.

spk_0 I have to ask you about this after having spent many days with you.

spk_0 I learned of something that you've never talked about.

spk_0 At the time I have not talked about to this day that there was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018.

spk_0 I think to me it showed the seriousness of this fight to uphold the freedom of speech for everyone.

spk_0 For all people of Earth that you're doing, I have to say it would mean a lot to me if you tell me this story.

spk_0 Well this is something I never talked about publicly because I didn't want people to freak out.

spk_0 Particularly at the time it was spring 2018.

spk_0 We were trying to raise funds for Tom blockchain project working with all kinds of VCs and investors.

spk_0 In the meantime we had a couple of countries trying to ban telegram.

spk_0 So it was exactly the best moment for me to start sharing anything related to my personal health.

spk_0 But that was something that is hard to forget.

spk_0 I never fully believe I have perfect health.

spk_0 I very rarely have headaches or bad cough.

spk_0 I don't take pills because I don't have to take pills.

spk_0 And that was the only instant in my life when I think I was dying.

spk_0 I came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented, had this weird neighbor.

spk_0 He left something for me there around the door.

spk_0 And one hour after when I was already in my bed, I was living alone, I felt very bad.

spk_0 I felt pain all over my body.

spk_0 I tried to get up and go to the bathroom.

spk_0 But while I was going there, I felt that my body started to switch off.

spk_0 First the eyesight and hearing.

spk_0 Then I had difficulty breathing.

spk_0 Everything accompanied by very acute pain.

spk_0 Heart, stomach or blood vessels.

spk_0 It was a difficult thing to explain.

spk_0 But one thing I was certain about is, yeah, this is it.

spk_0 You say you're going to die.

spk_0 Yeah, this is it because I couldn't breathe.

spk_0 I couldn't see anything who was very painful.

spk_0 I think it's over.

spk_0 I thought, well, I had a good life.

spk_0 I managed to accomplish a few things.

spk_0 And then it collapsed on the floor, but I don't remember it because the pain covered everything.

spk_0 I found myself on the floor the next day.

spk_0 It was already bright.

spk_0 And I couldn't stand up.

spk_0 I was super weak.

spk_0 I looked at my arms, my body.

spk_0 Blood vessels were broken all over my body.

spk_0 Something like this never happened to me.

spk_0 I couldn't walk for two weeks after.

spk_0 I stayed at my place.

spk_0 I decided not to tell most of my team about it because, again, I didn't want them to worry.

spk_0 But it was tough.

spk_0 Did that make you afraid of the road you're walking?

spk_0 Meaning all the governments, all the intelligence agencies, all the people, like we mentioned,

spk_0 it's like you're playing a video game.

spk_0 You started with VK where you're just trying to build a thing that scales.

spk_0 And all of a sudden you find out there's DDoS attacks attacking the security, the integrity of the infrastructure.

spk_0 And then you realize there's politics and then you realize there's geopolitics.

spk_0 And all of these forces are interested in controlling channels of communication.

spk_0 And you're just a curious guy who created a platform for everybody on the earth to talk.

spk_0 And also, you realize there's a lot of people attacking you.

spk_0 How did that change your view that make you more scared of the world?

spk_0 Interesting, not at all.

spk_0 If anything, I felt even more free after that.

spk_0 It wasn't the first time I thought I was going to die.

spk_0 I had an experience when I assumed something bad is going to happen to me a few years before that.

spk_0 Also in relation to my work.

spk_0 But after you survived something like this, you feel like you're living on the bonus time.

spk_0 So in a way you died a long time ago.

spk_0 And every new day you get is a gift.

spk_0 Is a bonus?

spk_0 Yes.

spk_0 And the first time you're referring to is that what that have to do with the complexity that was happening with the pressure from the government on VK.

spk_0 And then you had to figure out the increasing pressure and yet to figure out what to do.

spk_0 And you understood that you're losing control of VK at that moment.

spk_0 The first of this instance was in December 2011.

spk_0 December 2011, you had this huge protest on the streets of Moscow.

spk_0 They didn't trust in the integrity of the election results to the state Duma in Russia.

spk_0 And remember 2011, I still lived in Russia running VK. There was no telegram.

spk_0 So the government demanded that we take down the position groups of Navalny from VK that had hundreds of thousands of members and that were used to organize this protest.

spk_0 And I have very publicly refused to do that.

spk_0 I just decided it's not the right thing to do.

spk_0 People have the right to assemble and they mocked the prosecutor who handed me that demand.

spk_0 They put out a scan of it.

spk_0 And next to it, a photo of a dog and a hoodie with it, it's done out.

spk_0 And I said, this is my official response to the Prosecutors' Congress to ban the position groups.

spk_0 It was very funny at the moment.

spk_0 But then I had armed policemen trying to get into my apartment.

spk_0 And I thought about many things at that moment.

spk_0 I asked myself, did I make the right choice?

spk_0 And I came to the conclusion that I made the right choice.

spk_0 And I asked myself, what would be the next thing that would logically follow from this?

spk_0 And I realized they're probably going to put me in prison.

spk_0 So what am I going to do about it?

spk_0 I asked myself.

spk_0 And I told myself, I'm going to starve myself to death.

spk_0 It's something that probably many men have.

spk_0 They're ready to die for other people or certain principles they strongly believe in.

spk_0 I'm not alone here.

spk_0 I guess Edward Snowland was ready to die as well.

spk_0 Was it one of the people like a son?

spk_0 Also at that moment I realized there's no way to communicate securely.

spk_0 I need to tell my brother was going on.

spk_0 They're probably going off to him.

spk_0 How do I tell him?

spk_0 Without betraying him.

spk_0 Because in 2011, remember what SAP was already there.

spk_0 I think they launched it in 2009.

spk_0 But it had zero encryption.

spk_0 All messages were plain text and transit.

spk_0 Meaning that even your system administrator, let alone your carrier, had access to your messages.

spk_0 It was only after telegram started this push for encryption that this other apps subtly remember that

spk_0 it probably wasn't their DNA as what SAP founders famously stated.

spk_0 But it must have been a dormant gene in 2011.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 In 2011, there was no way to send a message in secure way.

spk_0 And I also told myself, if I'm going to survive this, I'm definitely launching a secure messaging app.

spk_0 Somehow, it ended up not being too bad.

spk_0 I was summoned to the prosecutor.

spk_0 Answered some silly questions.

spk_0 Fewer questions that I had to answer more recently in the French investigation case.

spk_0 But it was the beginning of the end.

spk_0 It was clear that there's no way I'm going to be allowed to run VK the way I wanted it to run.

spk_0 That was the moment I backed my backpack and just started to wait.

spk_0 They moved to hotel and realized any day I can leave the country.

spk_0 I kept running VK.

spk_0 I started the design telegram and assembling the team.

spk_0 But I knew my days in Russia were numbered.

spk_0 First, I really have to say for myself, from I think millions, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe the entirety of Earth, thank you for putting your life in the line in those cases.

spk_0 I think freedom of speech is fundamental to the flourishing of humanity.

spk_0 It depends on people willing to put everything on the line for their principles.

spk_0 Thank you.

spk_0 Quick pause.

spk_0 I need a bathroom break.

spk_0 We're back.

spk_0 Once again, we had a super long day and the fact that you had spent many hours with me.

spk_0 Thank you for powering through.

spk_0 We got this.

spk_0 It's already late at night.

spk_0 Thanks for doing this.

spk_0 Okay.

spk_0 So there is increasing indication, I think, from things I've seen online that Russia is considering banning telegram.

spk_0 First of all, do you think this might happen and what effect do you think this might have on humanity?

spk_0 In general, what do you think about this?

spk_0 You can definitely happen.

spk_0 As you said, there are certain indications.

spk_0 There have been certain test attempts to partially ban it.

spk_0 Telegram is no longer accessible in parts of Russia, such as Dagestan.

spk_0 It will be incredibly sad if Russia restores its attempts to ban telegram because currently it's been used by its population.

spk_0 For all kinds of purposes, not just personal communication or economic business activities.

spk_0 But also it's the only platform which allows the Russian people to access independent sources of information.

spk_0 If you think about media outlets such as BBC or any other non-Russian source of information,

spk_0 they're only accessible in Russia through telegram in the form of telegram channels.

spk_0 The websites are banned, some other social media sites are banned.

spk_0 And as you said, there are indications that Russia is planning to migrate users from existing messaging apps,

spk_0 such as WhatsApp and Telegram to their own homegrown tool, which would of course be fully transparent to the government,

spk_0 and wouldn't allow voices independent from the government to express themselves.

spk_0 It's certainly an alarming trend.

spk_0 We see these attempts in countries that are not famous for protecting freedom of speech,

spk_0 but also increasingly in countries that have been known to protect freedoms.

spk_0 And this creates this vicious circle because in a way European countries try to fight freedom of speech under pretext that sound legitimate,

spk_0 such as combating misinformation or election interference.

spk_0 They create precedence and they legitimize restrictions to freedom of speech which then in turn be used by authoritarian regimes.

spk_0 And they would say in places like China or Iran that they're not doing anything different.

spk_0 It's a norm now through strict voices that don't go in line with the mainstream narrative.

spk_0 That's sad because one of the things that makes our life interesting is this abundance of different viewpoints of different people that we get to experience.

spk_0 We limit the freedom of people. You inevitably disillumerate economic growth, level of happiness, the way people can contribute to the society,

spk_0 the way people can express themselves. I personally think it would be a huge mistake to ban a tool like Telegram.

spk_0 In any country, particularly large countries such as Russia, because the Russian people are incredibly talented and resilient people.

spk_0 They are among the first to start utilizing some of these recent innovations that Telegram implements.

spk_0 They are the early adopters. I say them, also the Americans, perhaps other people from Eastern Europe like Ukrainians and South East Asians,

spk_0 they're among the first people to start using any new addition that we launch.

spk_0 They're incredibly hungry for innovation.

spk_0 All that said, as part of the propaganda, there's a tax on you all over the place. There's misinformation.

spk_0 I've read a bunch of things that are, I think, in a systematic way lying about you, lying about Telegram, from all angles.

spk_0 Why do you get a tax so much by everybody?

spk_0 We're protecting freedom of speech. It's not a way to make a little friends.

spk_0 Because you would inevitably find yourself in a situation where you would be protecting the freedom of the opposition to the current government in any country to express themselves.

spk_0 Then the initial reaction and a very basic instinctive reaction of any government would be to say,

spk_0 that our opposition shouldn't be trusted and allowed to express themselves because they're actually our agents of some foreign rival, a geopolitical force that wants to destroy our country.

spk_0 This is something that every authoritarian regime in history used.

spk_0 You take Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, Maoist China, they always use the same trick that say we need to limit your freedom of speech because these people who are masquerading as a position are actually the agents of this other country that wants to take over.

spk_0 That's why dear citizens forget about their freedoms.

spk_0 Now increasingly you see similar attempts in three countries.

spk_0 The initial instinct from President Macron's team when they're confronted with some footage.

spk_0 For example, the footage of his wife slapping him would be to say it's all fake, Russian imagery, something that is inaccurate, something that is misinformation or interference.

spk_0 And then when they are confronted with more information they have to refine the narrative.

spk_0 So when you find yourself in a situation that you're running this platform like Telegram and then you protect the freedom to express ideas that don't go in line with the mainstream narrative, you often find yourself in this crossfire.

spk_0 When the forces in power will say that you must be working with some foreign government that they don't like inevitably they would say that if you're protecting this voices it's not right.

spk_0 They love you when you're protecting the freedom of speech in a country that is far from them or better yet in a country that is their geopolitical rival.

spk_0 It's depressing for that but then to have this bipolar attitude when you do the same in their own country and say no, no, no, no, no, we loved you for protecting freedom of speech but not here.

spk_0 Not in my backyard.

spk_0 We don't need it here. We're all right. We have free press.

spk_0 And then you will find yourself in this weird spot that Ukrainians say you work for the Russians, the Russians say you work for the Ukrainians.

spk_0 And all this kiss of rena is something that we had to deal with for some time.

spk_0 It's a very easy way to attack you. At some point you don't understand where it is coming from.

spk_0 Is it all competitors?

spk_0 It must give credit to all competitors if it's their invention to launch these kind of rumors because at a certain point they must have realized they can't compete technologically on the product side.

spk_0 So they must do something like this or it's just governments launching this rumors trying to discredit the platform trying to scare the citizens away from it because they understand that their power and grip of their own country is in danger.

spk_0 As long as they allow a pro freedom platform to operate.

spk_0 And through all of this we should say over and over that you are simply preserving the freedom of speech for all people of earth no matter what they believe.

spk_0 As long as they don't call for violence and as long as they're not doing some of the criminal activity that we discussed including terrorists organizing but other than that doesn't matter what they believe left wing or right wing.

spk_0 You're just preserving their freedom of speech. You think people of Ukraine, people of Russia and people of Iran, people of all over the world understand that despite the propaganda against you.

spk_0 I think people are smart.

spk_0 Every time I meet somebody from one of these countries you mentioned in real life people recognized me in the street say here in Dubai.

spk_0 They come over.

spk_0 They seem incredibly grateful and understanding.

spk_0 The propaganda in each of these countries would tell them a number of things but they learned to discount it.

spk_0 That's why there is so happy that the tell them this is because the way they can understand the world around them is to receive conflicting mutually exclusive viewpoints from the world.

spk_0 Sources that hate each other and try to understand what really is true because there is no such thing as an unbiased source of information.

spk_0 When the war in Ukraine started in 2022 I instantly realized that the world is going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides.

spk_0 I didn't want to tell them to be used as a tool for war and I said and I posted it publicly.

spk_0 I suggested maybe we should just suspend the activity of all politics related channels in both countries for the time of the war.

spk_0 Maybe we shouldn't have channels in these two countries.

spk_0 And then interestingly people from both countries revolted against this.

spk_0 They told me what people in Ukraine and in Russia that I don't get to babysit them and decide for them what sources of information that they have to be granted.

spk_0 They had grown ups that can make these decisions for themselves.

spk_0 They understand that there is a lot of propaganda.

spk_0 They learn to see through this propaganda.

spk_0 They learn to be able to tell truth from lie.

spk_0 And in this time of war it was particularly valuable for them to receive as much information as possible because their relatives, their friends were getting affected and still getting affected.

spk_0 They want to understand what was going on.

spk_0 At that moment I realized people are smart, people get it.

spk_0 People can see through it.

spk_0 If you ask most people in any of these countries do you agree that access to telegram should be restricted for whatever reason they would say no?

spk_0 They hunger to have a voice.

spk_0 They need a voice and they need a place to share their opinion securely.

spk_0 I have to ask in the question of leadership in the Leap Point interview the journalist said that you're often compared to Elon Musk.

spk_0 And you highlighted some interesting nuances around that that you're quite different that Elon runs several companies and once while you only run one and Elon can lean more on the emotional side while you deliberated.

spk_0 Can you expand on this?

spk_0 Also there's an interesting point that he made that everybody's weakness is also a strength that everybody's strength is also a weakness.

spk_0 There's a dual nature to all our characteristics.

spk_0 So on the topic of Elon what have you learned from his style of leadership?

spk_0 What do you respect about him?

spk_0 First of all I don't think there is such thing as a negative personal trade.

spk_0 In most cases our bad traits and our good traits are the same trade or at least have the same source.

spk_0 Of course there are some extreme examples but I'd say 99% of people if you analyze the character their bravery can be seen in recklessness and others.

spk_0 Depending on circumstances you would see exactly the same personality trade and it will be either a good thing or a bad thing.

spk_0 Because humanity is perfect as a whole and each of us is different for a reason.

spk_0 We have evolved to be different to complement each other's abilities so that together we're invincible.

spk_0 And even if you take a person as complicated as Elon I believe that certain traits that Elon demonstrates that people criticize about him.

spk_0 Also the sources of his strength.

spk_0 For example his emotionality is derived from the fact that he cares about issues deeply.

spk_0 And he's willing to start as many wars and as many fights as it takes to change the world and the direction that he thinks is right.

spk_0 He also seems to be able to extract motivation from this war isn't personal conflicts.

spk_0 Which is again not something to be underestimated.

spk_0 At a certain point in life of a successful entrepreneur the question of motivation starts to be the primary question.

spk_0 If we are talking about the richest person in the world and the most famous entrepreneur in the world they have to wonder how does he motivate himself.

spk_0 And if starting a war on X debating certain issues or becoming personal with other CEOs criticizing them.

spk_0 If this activity is help Elon to innovate and start new projects he should be doing more of it.

spk_0 There's nothing wrong in being non-agreable.

spk_0 Actually it's one of the main traits of a successful entrepreneur not to agree with things.

spk_0 And every time somebody like Elon but there's no somebody like Elon, he's just Elon.

spk_0 I think at least from the entrepreneur's eye now and I personally interacted with his unique in the sense that he keeps launching new things, running them in parallel.

spk_0 And he doesn't seem to be stretched to thin.

spk_0 Well some people think he is but he manages to still demonstrate success in all of most of his endeavors.

spk_0 So again you can criticize Elon for being emotional but will he be the same person without this? I doubt that.

spk_0 And the incredible team he's motivated to. There's an element of that which you've spoken about the team at Telegram.

spk_0 You know assembling a team of A players as we've talked about is a skill in itself.

spk_0 And that's also a big part of the leaders that we've discussed.

spk_0 It's like what judged in part by the team you assemble.

spk_0 And one of the necessary character features to enable that is to be ready to be unpleasant.

spk_0 You have to be ready to insult some people if they work is inferior.

spk_0 You have to be ready to fire them without remorse.

spk_0 So in order to be an efficient, a great entrepreneur and enrich the world of innovations.

spk_0 You have to do unpleasant things. Most people will shy away from it.

spk_0 And in a certain sense, entrepreneurs sacrifice their peace of mind in order to contribute to the world around them.

spk_0 And Elon is a great example of that.

spk_0 I have to ask you about the big picture Telegram.

spk_0 We've already talked about the fact that you own 100% of it.

spk_0 And there's a lot of on the business side of it, the business structure Telegram is fascinating.

spk_0 You've invested 100, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of your money.

spk_0 As far as I know you take a salary of what, one dollar.

spk_0 One dear, one third of that.

spk_0 One third of a dollar.

spk_0 And in 2024 is the first time Telegram was profitable.

spk_0 So one of the interesting questions is here that we could talk for many hours about.

spk_0 But I'd love to get a high view picture.

spk_0 You've left what I understand, what I think is a huge amount of money on the table by sticking to your principles.

spk_0 For example, not doing advertisement that's based on user private data, which basically every social media company does.

spk_0 So the only advertisement that Telegram does is based on channels and groups based on the topic, not the private data of the individuals.

spk_0 And the other thing is, which is also gangster and incredible, is you don't do a newsfeed, which is the most addictive and engagement inducing an adjunct.

spk_0 The aspect of social media, which feeds the very kind of addictive downside of the internet, the distraction, the engagement drama farming aspect that we've talked about in the very beginning, that you try to resist.

spk_0 That you think is damaging the human mind at scale.

spk_0 So anyway, that's just speaking to the fact that you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

spk_0 So how the hell are you able to be profitable?

spk_0 What are the ways Telegram makes money?

spk_0 Yeah, we had to innovate a lot in order to reach a point where we are profitable without having to resort to do these business activities, involving exploiting personal data of users.

spk_0 Something that most of our competitors do.

spk_0 Because money has never been the primary goal, please not for me.

spk_0 When I sold the remaining share of my first company, I had to do it below market price because I didn't leave Russia completely without any pressures.

spk_0 I reinvested the vast majority of everything in Telegram.

spk_0 Telegram is an operation that is losing money for me personally.

spk_0 I didn't extract more from Telegram than I invested in it.

spk_0 I never sold a single share.

spk_0 But I also didn't want to sell Telegram, so how do you reach a point when you're profitable without sacrificing your values?

spk_0 One of the ideas we explored was a subscription model, but only for certain additional features.

spk_0 We wanted to keep all the existing features free and just add more business-related tools or tools for advanced users that they would have to pay for, say, $4 or $5 a month.

spk_0 It was quite unprecedented at the time.

spk_0 It wasn't considered a viable option for messaging apps to do that.

spk_0 We launched the Premium subscriptions for Telegram in 2022, and now we have over 15 million paid subscribers.

spk_0 This is some very significant recurring revenue.

spk_0 We would receive more than half a billion dollars from Premium subscriptions alone this year, and it's growing fast.

spk_0 For that, we had to innovate a lot. We included over 50 different features into the Premium package.

spk_0 How do you make an app that is already more powerful than any other messaging app on the market?

spk_0 Even more useful so that people would be ready to pay for this extra. That wasn't easy. That took a lot of effort.

spk_0 You constantly add features.

spk_0 It's actually a fun to watch, just the rate of adding and some of them are subtle like the updates to improvements, expansions of polls, for example.

spk_0 You keep improving the existing features and adding new ones. Every time when you add a new feature, you don't want to clutter their app.

spk_0 Some way they're not in your way, they're invisible.

spk_0 It's not an easy thing to do, and most of the features may be not even known to the majority of our users, but when you need them they're there.

spk_0 So Premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they're context-based, not targeted.

spk_0 Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we're not already ready to engage in all this practice, exporting personal data.

spk_0 Just to be clear, targeted ads is what most social media companies, most tech companies that do any kinds of advertisement do, and that's the kind of advertisement that uses personal data from users.

spk_0 Just to clarify, at least at 80% there's a lot of money.

spk_0 Of course, because we would never use, for example, your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata, reactivity data to target ads.

spk_0 It's sad that it became synonymous with the internet industry, this kind of exploitation.

spk_0 But we are happy with the fact that we managed to make Telegram profitable despite that.

spk_0 We're also experimenting a lot with blockchain-based technologies, with the first app to allow people to directly own their username or their digital identities, using smart contracts and NFTs,

spk_0 removing Telegram from the picture.

spk_0 For example, Telegram can not confiscate your username from you. It's impossible.

spk_0 We do a lot of things related to the ecosystem of Telegram. We have a thriving mini-app platform, millions of mini-app developers launching their own bots and applications.

spk_0 So a lot of people are making millions of dollars on the Telegram platform.

spk_0 Yes, we enabled them to receive payments from the users through in-app purchase mechanism provided by Apple and Google, which I think was the first attempt of this kind.

spk_0 To allow that both on iOS and Android and on a big platform, so that third-party developers of mini-apps, which are basically websites, so deeply integrated into Telegram, that you can't tell whether they're standalone or they're part of their overall experience.

spk_0 And by providing this payment option, we were able to extract a commission from these transactions, but it's a very low commission presently, it's 5%.

spk_0 So we are greedy here, who want people to succeed in building these tools for our users. We understand that many apps bring us users.

spk_0 The more users we have, the more successful and relevant Telegram becomes. We need third-party developers.

spk_0 I think at this point Telegram gives developers by far the most powerful tools to create.

spk_0 Plus there's a BOD API, and I mean you have to tell me about the TONE blockchain and the crypto ecosystem available through Telegram.

spk_0 So what is TONE, aka the Open Network blockchain?

spk_0 TONE is blockchain technology that we initially developed in 2018 and 2019.

spk_0 And we started to develop it because we needed a blockchain platform to be integrated deeply into Telegram because we believe in blockchain.

spk_0 We think it's one of the technologies to enable freedom.

spk_0 But at the time, if you look at Bitcoin, if you look at Ethereum, they were not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users would create.

spk_0 And I asked my brother, can we create a blockchain platform that would be inherently scalable so that no matter how many users or transactions there are, it would split into smaller pieces which we call shortchains and would still process all transactions.

spk_0 And he thought for a few days and said, yes, it's possible but it's not easy.

spk_0 And we started building it. We ended up succeeding in developing that technology but we couldn't release it because the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States was unhappy with the way the fund raised for TONE was conducted.

spk_0 So we had to abandon the project and the open source community to cover, luckily because we constantly conducted those contests for third party developers, there was a thriving community around TONE, which now stood for the open network as opposed to its prior name Telegram Open Network.

spk_0 And so this project got eventually launched without our direct involvement.

spk_0 And it's thriving now because everything we do, like I said, this blockchain-based tokenized, user names, Telegram accounts are all based on TONE and it's smart contracts.

spk_0 It's the only way for third party developers and creators to withdraw the funds that they earn through our revenue sharing programs.

spk_0 For example, with channel owners, we do a 50-50 split of ad revenues.

spk_0 It's also the only way to transact on Telegram, for example, if you want to buy ads on Telegram, you should use TONE.

spk_0 All the new things we launched, for example, let's say, gifts that we mentioned earlier, which you can define as a reinvented socially relevant NFT integrated into a billion user ecosystem.

spk_0 But at the same time, available on-chain, transferable, which you can own directly, also based on TONE.

spk_0 Incredibly fast-growing space, we only launched them half a year ago.

spk_0 And now as a result of this Telegram gift, TONE has become, I think the largest of the second largest blockchain,

spk_0 in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.

spk_0 So, yeah, like you mentioned, it is a layer 1 technology as opposed to being built on top of the theorem of Bitcoin, and it's able to achieve the scale and the speed of transactions that's needed for something like Telegram.

spk_0 And like you also mentioned, the gifts you recently launched some Snoop Dogg gifts.

spk_0 Is there going to be some other celebrities in the pipeline?

spk_0 Yeah, I'm a big fan of Snoop, and that's why when they reach out, they suggest to do something together, say, let's launch some Snoop related gifts, and it was really fun.

spk_0 And we managed to sell 12 million worth of gifts within 30 minutes.

spk_0 Oh, there you go. I even got a view, but yeah.

spk_0 After this, we have many requests from many really high-profile influencers that in a way are lining up.

spk_0 So, from my perspective as a fan, it's just interesting to see what kind of art you create for a, and you kind of celebrity's athletes musicians, because like the Snoop gifts are all just like going back to our previous conversation.

spk_0 It's a beautiful piece of art that encapsulates certain memes, certain aspects of Snoop that everybody knows, these cultural icons that he represents.

spk_0 That's cool. That's just, and the detail, the incredible detail of the art of the individual gifts is just incredible.

spk_0 And each of these gifts is scalable because it's vector-based.

spk_0 It references certain points and snoops, creative biography.

spk_0 And each of them has countless different versions. We had to create over 50 distinctive versions of each.

spk_0 And then each individual piece is unique because it also has unique backgrounds, unique icon, and the background.

spk_0 It's something that we reinvented because we didn't like the old school and iftees.

spk_0 First of all, they were not relevant socially because, okay, you have an ante where do you demonstrate it?

spk_0 The telegram gift is there next to your name. It's part of your digital identity on telegram, and then you can create collections of gifts and show it off on your profile page.

spk_0 But it also, the other thing that we wanted to reinvent is this static part of it, most of the iftees are just ugly.

spk_0 And they're not based on any sophisticated technology.

spk_0 So what we did with Snoop's gifts, I think represents an example of beautiful things.

spk_0 It's very helpful, aesthetically pleasing, and at the same time very accurate in terms of references to this specific artist's biography mixture between art and technology, which I think is quite rare.

spk_0 I'm quite proud of it. I think it's a new trend, a new phenomenon. It's only half a year old.

spk_0 So let's see where it goes. We're going to select our next influencer or artist to be part of it.

spk_0 Hey, listen, I'm really proud. I got a new gift next to my name, and I figured out that you can add even more by pinning them. It's like a cool little art icon.

spk_0 We didn't expect it, by the way. We just had a lot of fun launching these things, and then we realized that one of the first collections we showed we sold each piece at something like five dollars.

spk_0 And then the minimum price of any items in these collections currently is something like $10,000.

spk_0 And it keeps going up.

spk_0 So I was quite surprised with the reception. I realized when you are trying to monetize social media platform in a way that is consistent with your values, you're forced to find ways that benefit.

spk_0 You're users, not exploit them. People love these gifts. People love the fact that they can congratulate a person close to them with something valuable and at the same time something beautiful.

spk_0 Also, some people make a business out of it, which is funny. They resell these gifts, and we recently met a guy who earned several million dollars just from buying and selling gifts.

spk_0 It's a real market. It's just something that he did in a few months. And last year when we launched many new features for the mini apps on Telegram, and the payments options for them and the other monetization options.

spk_0 The same guy earned $12 million from mini apps. And I know several people selling the hotel, I earned $10 million, $3 million, just in a matter of months, single handedly. Sometimes they would have a team of two, three people.

spk_0 So whenever I hear stories from people who were able to build businesses on top of Telegram, this makes me incredibly proud.

spk_0 Many apps include games, they include tools, services of any kind. It's an app within the ecosystem of Telegram.

spk_0 Let me ask you about crypto in general. So you've been an early supporter of crypto currencies, Bitcoin. You've bought in to Bitcoin early on. You kept buying. Maybe you could speak to the reason why you kept buying Bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin will go to a million dollars? Do you think it'll keep increasing? And Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies.

spk_0 How is the big believer in Bitcoin since more or less the start of it? I got to buy my first few thousand of Bitcoin in 2013 and I didn't care much. I think I bought it at the local maximum. It's something like $700 for Bitcoin. And they just threw a couple of millions there.

spk_0 And a lot of people after Bitcoin later next year went down, somewhere close to 300 to 200 started to express their sympathy to me. They say, you're a prooffeller. You made this horrible mistake investing in this new thing but don't feel bad about it. We still have some respect for you.

spk_0 And I might respond to them, but I don't care. I'm not going to sell it. I believe in this thing. I think this is the way money should work. Nobody can confiscate your Bitcoin from you. Nobody can censor you for political reasons.

spk_0 This is the ultimate means of exchange. And again, I'm now talking about Bitcoin, but it relates to cryptocurrencies in general.

spk_0 So I have been able to fund my lifestyle, so to say from my Bitcoin investment. Some people think if I'm able to rent nice locations or fly private, it's because I somehow extract extract money from Telegram.

spk_0 Like I said, Telegram is money losing operation for me personally. Bitcoin is something that allowed me to stay afloat.

spk_0 And I believe it will come to a point where Bitcoin is worth $1 million. Just look at the trends. The governments keep bringing money like no tomorrow. Nobody's bringing Bitcoin. There's a predictable inflation and then it stops. It's a certain point.

spk_0 Bitcoin is here to stay. All the fiat currencies remains to be seen.

spk_0 Let me ask you a deeply philosophical serious question. In your first Tucker interview, you had two interesting chairs in the background. I think they reference a now legendary meme.

spk_0 The choice is Piquitachone, what is the philosophical wisdom in the dilemma that these two chairs present? Have you had to face the dilemma yourself personally?

spk_0 Not this exact dilemma. I think this is a riddle that people have to face in Russian prisons.

spk_0 And metaphorically, it's describing all the situations where you presented a choice between two suboptimal options.

spk_0 When you're running a big business or when you're running a large country, it is similar. You sometimes face this dilemma. What are you going to do?

spk_0 This very horrible thing or this also very horrible thing.

spk_0 So I think the right answer to this riddle is not to do any of these things.

spk_0 Reframe the question. Design a solution that turns a disadvantage in the advantage and then use it to cope with the other side of the problem.

spk_0 Do you know the answer to that riddle?

spk_0 No, somebody in the internet said, don't go to a dog where they use it to be a pro.

spk_0 Basically, try to avoid the situation where such the dilemma is present themselves or there is no right answer.

spk_0 This is one of the ways to answer this question. If you got to a tricky situation that probably earlier you made a certain mistake.

spk_0 You fucked up already. It should have been avoided. But the other quite creative answer to this question is that you take the sharp objects from one of the chairs or the spikes.

spk_0 And then they use them to cut off the objects from the other chair. And you know what objects I'm talking about.

spk_0 It's a very engineering solution. I'm glad somebody came up with that.

spk_0 I believe this is the right answer. We are often being manipulated by politicians, by corporate leaders, to make a choice from two suboptimal options.

spk_0 And then when we are forced to make this choice and we make this choice, it's almost as if it's something that we have to assume responsibility for.

spk_0 I don't think we should be buying into that.

spk_0 Okay, and this theme of absurdity and ridiculousness. There's an object here that appeared in...

spk_0 Not many people seem to have noticed this. People should go watch your excellent conversation in the Oslo Freedom Forum behind you.

spk_0 I'm no archaeologist. I believe this is a... how should I put it?

spk_0 A walrus penis bone. And it was behind you. You told me that you brought it with you to France and back to Dubai.

spk_0 I assume it brings you luck of some sort. Why did you bring it with you everywhere?

spk_0 Is it kind of like an American that have a wishbone? Is it just a large wishbone?

spk_0 It's a wishbone bringing you luck. And I should also point out that just like with telegram with the art, there's tiny little walruses.

spk_0 And thanks to you, I had to also find out that a lot of mammals have a bone inside their penis.

spk_0 The evolutionary advantage, I guess, of having a bone is quite obvious. It actually raises the question of why humans don't have a actual bone inside their penis.

spk_0 A lot of questions there.

spk_0 That's a very interesting subject. The reason I have this is because a tribe that is almost gone and extinct inside Birian Mongolia called the Venki.

spk_0 Past me, this gift from them. Normally, there would craft something like this only for their most respected leaders.

spk_0 It is supposed to be a token of their appreciation for bravery, courage, leadership.

spk_0 Ironically, it also translates in a very specific way into the Russian language.

spk_0 In Russian walruses, penis means something a bit funny, which is often used to describe nothing.

spk_0 So, for example, if you've been requested by say, certain government or a certain business partner to provide something you that you're not willing to provide,

spk_0 you can just politely have this penis bone in the background while you're doing the video call.

spk_0 And hope that they would...

spk_0 Through osmosis, figure out the deep message. It is an indirect rebellion.

spk_0 By the way, in the form of Soviet Union, there was...

spk_0 In a lot of places throughout history, some of the rebellion had to take this kind of symbolic metaphoric form through poetry, through children's stories.

spk_0 It's the beauty of human language and art that we're able to do that. Say, FU, to whatever forces that try to overpower us.

spk_0 We say FU, through poetry, through art, and sometimes through rather large walruses penis bone.

spk_0 Carried by what appears to be either a happy sumo wrestler or a cat of some sort.

spk_0 They asked a lot of questions about this walruses penis bone in the airport.

spk_0 Both here in the UAE and in France, they are always very interested in this thing.

spk_0 There seems to be some confusion over how many kids you have.

spk_0 It's often said to be over 100. Can you explain how many kids you have?

spk_0 The truthful answer to this question is, I don't really know how many biological kids that have exactly.

spk_0 Because there's a certain point in my life, about 15 years ago, I decided that it was a good idea to be a sperm donor.

spk_0 Initially, a friend of mine asked me to help because they were trying to have a baby with his wife and experience certain health issues that I'd prevented them to do the natural way.

spk_0 We told me we don't want to just rely on some random anonymous genetic material.

spk_0 We want somebody we know and respect to be the biological father of our kid.

spk_0 And I said, you got to be kidding me.

spk_0 It sounds ridiculous. What I've been talking about.

spk_0 But then I realized it's actually a serious issue.

spk_0 And they were not the only couple struggling with that.

spk_0 So eventually, I got persuaded into doing more of it.

spk_0 I can't say I'm incredibly proud of that, but I think it was the right thing to do.

spk_0 Pretty good at the time when I thought, okay, I probably don't have much time on this planet.

spk_0 Left.

spk_0 Things are getting trickier and trickier.

spk_0 So if I can help some couples have babies, let's do it.

spk_0 And then more recently, when I was working on my well, I realized that I shouldn't make a distinction between the kids conceived naturally.

spk_0 And the kids who are just my biological kids that I've never seen.

spk_0 As long as they can establish their shared DNA with me,

spk_0 someday, maybe in 30 years from now, they have to be entitled for a share of my state after I'm gone.

spk_0 And that made a lot of noise in the news for some reason.

spk_0 People get very excited by this kind of news.

spk_0 I got a lot of messages from people claiming they're my kids.

spk_0 I got a lot of requests from people asking me to adopt them.

spk_0 The memes were priceless, but understanding that, no, it's not a thing that most people do.

spk_0 I don't see anything wrong with it.

spk_0 Anything I think more people should be donating sperm.

spk_0 So you should say, like, the 100 plus kids is from that, and you also have naturally conceived kids.

spk_0 And it was a pretty bold decision to, from a financial perspective, to treat them all equally.

spk_0 And also, quite interesting was that you kind of said that they don't receive any money for the first few decades of their life.

spk_0 Can you describe that thinking?

spk_0 Yeah, I think over abundance,

spk_0 paralyzes motivation and willpower.

spk_0 It's extremely harmful, particularly for young boys to grow up in an environment where they can be proud

spk_0 not of their own achievements, but of their father's achievements or their father's wealth.

spk_0 This removes the incentive to work on developing their own skills, removes the incentive to study to work.

spk_0 So I thought if they're going to have this money,

spk_0 it should be something that they would only get when they're already adult.

spk_0 It's still risky, but one of the reasons I decided it makes more sense to divide this huge wealth

spk_0 that I'm likely to live behind among a hundred or more than a hundred people

spk_0 is that it won't be too much for every single descendant.

spk_0 But at the same time, some people did the calculation.

spk_0 It's still many, many millions of dollars for each child.

spk_0 So I'm not sure it helps too much.

spk_0 On the top of abundance offline, we had a lot of fascinating philosophical discussions,

spk_0 one of which was about the mouse paradise experiment, also known as Universe 25.

spk_0 It's an experiment from the 1960s and early 70s conducted by ethylogist John B. Calhoun.

spk_0 We can talk about this one for hours, also, I'm sure.

spk_0 But it was an experiment with a few hundreds of individual mice compartments.

spk_0 They provided them with unlimited food, water, nesting, no predator-stable temperatures,

spk_0 frequent cleaning, basically the definition of a button as far as mice go.

spk_0 The interesting aspect of this experiment is that at first the population doubled,

spk_0 it grew very quickly, but then it leveled off, and certain really negative social things started happening.

spk_0 Like mothers neglecting to kill their young, violent attacks on hypersexual activity became widespread.

spk_0 Some quote-unquote beautiful ones, largely inactive, well-groomed mice withdrew,

spk_0 refusing to mate or interact.

spk_0 So all of these kind of societal qualities that we see as negative for the functioning of a society

spk_0 started to emerge because of the abundance.

spk_0 And finally, the collapse.

spk_0 The reproduction rates crashed, social dysfunction spread to the next generation,

spk_0 and eventually just went extinct.

spk_0 It didn't just plummet to a low level, it plummeted steadily to zero,

spk_0 despite the fact that there was ongoing resource abundance.

spk_0 As the description states, the last mice died surrounded by untouched food and water.

spk_0 So, I mean, there's deep wisdom to that about abundance.

spk_0 It seems you've mentioned this in different contexts throughout this conversation.

spk_0 It seems like scarcity.

spk_0 It seems like constraints.

spk_0 It seems like nonabundance is essential for human flourishing, which is a counterintuitive notion.

spk_0 It's true for mice, and I think it's probably true for humans too.

spk_0 We have evolved to overcome scarcity.

spk_0 Almost by definition, there has never been such things as infinite amount of food or entertainment in our lives before now.

spk_0 We seem as a species to lose our ability to identify purpose in the world where you have everything,

spk_0 and everything loses its meaning.

spk_0 Restrictions are important, I think, though they should be coming from within.

spk_0 It should be self-restriction rather than restriction in order to create purpose and meaning in life.

spk_0 In a way, I was lucky in a very counterintuitive way, because I grew up poor.

spk_0 I didn't have money when I was a teenager.

spk_0 I had the same jacket for years, which was bought on a second-hand marketplace.

spk_0 My father wouldn't receive his salary as a university professor for months,

spk_0 because the Russian state was almost bankrupt back then.

spk_0 My mom had to juggle two jobs to take care of us.

spk_0 It was not easy, but it also created purpose and created meaning.

spk_0 It created priorities.

spk_0 It allowed us to focus on things that mattered,

spk_0 allowed us to develop our character and intellectual abilities.

spk_0 Now, if we had everything, why do we do anything?

spk_0 This mice suffered societal collapse that was irreversible,

spk_0 and this is not an accident.

spk_0 This kind of experiment has been repeated countless times.

spk_0 At a certain point, social dysfunction and the erosion of social roles becomes contagious.

spk_0 The society gradually degrades into a chaotic collection of individuals unable to take care of the next generation,

spk_0 or even to produce the next generation.

spk_0 It goes extinct.

spk_0 It's fascinating because we're creating technologies,

spk_0 and this is what AI is proposing to our future generations,

spk_0 as a problem to solve, which is AI may very well create abundance.

spk_0 We will be like these mice, potentially.

spk_0 Whether it's AI or other kinds of technologies that increase and give more and more to all of us,

spk_0 and it is a thing that is good, decreasing amount of suffering in the world,

spk_0 and increasing the quality of life.

spk_0 But as we reach towards that abundance, the fabric that connects us,

spk_0 rooted in our biology that's developed by evolution,

spk_0 might create a real challenge for us.

spk_0 We should find the right balance between chaos and order,

spk_0 between self-restriction and freedom for creativity.

spk_0 Your father recently celebrated his 80th birthday.

spk_0 You had a conversation with him.

spk_0 He gave you some life advice.

spk_0 I think you mentioned to me one of the things he said was not to just speak of your principles,

spk_0 but to live them, to lead by example.

spk_0 I think this is something you already do well.

spk_0 Maybe can you speak to what you've learned about life from your father?

spk_0 Maybe some of the lessons he told you on in the conversation you've had with him.

spk_0 I'm incredibly lucky to have my father, his person who wrote countless books on ancient Rome

spk_0 and ancient Roman literature, dozens of scientific papers,

spk_0 and I always remember him working.

spk_0 He would be busy typing his books and articles and an old-school typewriter

spk_0 back in the late 80s, early 90s.

spk_0 He was relentless.

spk_0 The example he said to myself and my brother was priceless.

spk_0 Some people make this mistake of thinking that you're going to instill the right principles

spk_0 in the future generations or in the kids by saying things to them.

spk_0 But kids are smart.

spk_0 They discount words.

spk_0 They look at the actions.

spk_0 So observing our father was a big lesson by itself.

spk_0 It wasn't necessary for him to say anything to us.

spk_0 At the same time, he was incredibly patient, emotionally resilient.

spk_0 My mom, a great woman, incredibly smart, highly educated.

spk_0 But she would sometimes try to test the patience of my father

spk_0 and straight-rooted in our biology.

spk_0 There's an evolutionary explanation for that.

spk_0 Women sometimes tend to do that.

spk_0 And he demonstrated incredible patience all the time.

spk_0 He told me recently, you shouldn't give the wrong example to the people around you

spk_0 and in particular to your kids because you can do the right thing nine times out of ten.

spk_0 But you make a mistake once and they will instantly copy it.

spk_0 If you're telling your kids not to use a smartphone, but you're using a smartphone all the time yourself

spk_0 and coming up with all kinds of sophisticated brilliant explanations

spk_0 why they shouldn't be using a smartphone.

spk_0 It won't land.

spk_0 It's bound to fail.

spk_0 So you lead by example and there are other numerous lessons,

spk_0 staying positive, looking at the bright side, never despair, be honest.

spk_0 And you know, he told me last time I spoke to him that AI can have consciousness,

spk_0 can be creative, but it cannot have conscience in a way, it cannot be moral.

spk_0 It cannot have deeply rooted principles, can have integrity in the meaning that we understand it as human beings.

spk_0 I love the fact that you're talking to your eight-year-old father and you're talking about AGI

spk_0 and the difference between human, the human spirit, human nature

spk_0 and what AGI AI is able to achieve in conscience is the thing that humans have,

spk_0 the ability to know the right from wrong.

spk_0 This is the lesson that he gave me.

spk_0 One of my goals in life has never to support him.

spk_0 Another thing we've talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic,

spk_0 is the power of the mind, power of thought.

spk_0 Do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it,

spk_0 by manifesting it into being? What do you think?

spk_0 There are many explanations why it works.

spk_0 One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident

spk_0 does allow you to achieve the things you want to achieve.

spk_0 It's very hard to believe though that you can just manifest things into being

spk_0 without applying effort in the direction that seems to be logical.

spk_0 Maybe some people exist that can just sit on a bank of a river

spk_0 and materialize things by the power of their thought.

spk_0 But I'm not sure in one of these people, I always found it more easy to believe

spk_0 that if you couple this optimism and faith with logical action,

spk_0 then it is bound to be successful.

spk_0 Prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus thinking about the thing.

spk_0 Oh yes, over many, many, many days, it is possible to imagine our world

spk_0 as a high dimensional universe where humans have the ability to navigate through it

spk_0 with the power of belief, which is coupled with positive emotion and logical thinking.

spk_0 But we are getting into an esoteric realm.

spk_0 We don't have any proof of that.

spk_0 But we also know that we probably at this point haven't discovered even 1% about this universe.

spk_0 I agree with you fully and I like what you said in a way you were thinking about it.

spk_0 You've told me before that maybe there's a way that would effort and with a focused mind you can shape.

spk_0 You can morph the sort of landscape of probabilities around you.

spk_0 It's a nice way to visualize it, that somehow our effort and our focus changes the things that are likely and less likely.

spk_0 And by focusing on it we make those things more and more likely.

spk_0 At least as an estimate, as a kind of field that we throw our thoughts and our actions change that field.

spk_0 And then there's 8 billion of us doing so.

spk_0 And together there's this collective intelligence that creates the world we see around us, like the mice.

spk_0 And like you said, us as a humanity together are perfect.

spk_0 I like that you said that.

spk_0 I admire your belief in the fact that we get to experience this together because it's not obvious.

spk_0 Maybe each of us experiences its own or her own universe.

spk_0 And maybe every second the universe puts into a billion of different universes and everything that can happen happens.

spk_0 And there's a universe where say I died in 2013.

spk_0 Maybe every time I die I actually get to shift to a parallel universe when I don't die.

spk_0 And then it keeps going.

spk_0 And at certain points which use this quantum immortality when we're 1000 years old.

spk_0 But a lot of people from other versions of reality think we're long gone.

spk_0 Yeah, this is something you explain to me, the idea of quantum immortality which is a thought experiment which I find deeply fascinating.

spk_0 People should look into it.

spk_0 Which is very crisp, clean consequence of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that we as conscious beings can't experience our death.

spk_0 You can only, as we branch into these many worlds only the living consciousnesses get to experience it.

spk_0 So in some sense, yeah, there's many universes if we're to seriously take the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

spk_0 There's many universes where you died many times, especially you.

spk_0 And I'm glad we're in the universe where we get to share the table with this impressive bone, a little humor and a lot of serious topics covered today.

spk_0 Once again, I can't say enough, I'm a giant thank you for me and a giant thank you from hundreds of millions of people that follow your work for you fighting for the freedom of all of us to speak and creating a platform where we can do so.

spk_0 And thank you so much for talking to them brother.

spk_0 It's been an honor getting to know you and to be able to call you a friend.

spk_0 Thank you for saying that.

spk_0 I'm also incredibly grateful to you and to the fact that it happened to be in this version of reality when I haven't died at least yet.

spk_0 And hopefully we'll get to spend more fun moments in the years to come together.

spk_0 Thank you.

spk_0 Thank you for listening to this conversation with Paul Wooddoorov to support this podcast.

spk_0 Please check out our sponsors in the description.

spk_0 And now let me try to articulate some things I've been thinking about.

spk_0 If you'd like to submit questions or topics like this for me to talk about in the future, go to lexfreedman.com slash AMA.

spk_0 I'd like to use this opportunity to talk about Franz Kafka one of my favorite writers.

spk_0 The reason he has been on my mind is that his work, the trial and the case of Paul Wooddoorov in France has, let's say, eerie parallels both metaphorically and literally.

spk_0 Of course, the trial is a work of fiction, but I think it is often useful to go to this real world of literature, even of the over the top dystopian variety like 1984, animal farm, brave new world, the trial, the castle, and my morphesis,

spk_0 even the plague by Albert Camus, all to but understand our real world and the destructive paths we have the potential to go down together, which also hopefully helps us understand how to avoid doing so.

spk_0 So let me zoom out and speak about Franz Kafka, who was he?

spk_0 He was an insurance clerk who wrote at night. He died young and almost completely unknown, and he asked for his manuscripts to be burned.

spk_0 Luckily for us, his friend Max Broad refused to do so, giving us the work of what I consider to be one of 20th century's greatest writers.

spk_0 In his work, Kafka wrote about the cold machine-like reduction of humus decays files through the labyrinth of institutional power.

spk_0 He wrote about an individual's feeling of guilt even when a crime has not been committed, or more generally he wrote about the feeling of anxiety that is part of the human condition in our modern chaotic world.

spk_0 His writing style was to use short, declared ascetic to describe the surreal and absurd, and in so doing, effectively I think, convey the feeling of an experience versus simply describing the experience.

spk_0 For example, famously, his work The Metamorphosis opens with the following lines.

spk_0 As Gregor Samza awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a gigantic insect.

spk_0 He was lying in his heart, armor plated back, and when he lifted his head a little, he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff, arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep him positioned, and was about to slide off completely.

spk_0 His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

spk_0 Kafka, I think, effectively uses this image of being transformed into a giant bug stuck on his back to convey a feeling of helplessness and uselessness to his family, to his job, to society.

spk_0 The feeling of being a burden to everyone, dehumanized, alienated, and abandoned. The feeling of being only temporarily valued as long as he served some function for his job or for his family, and quickly discarded otherwise.

spk_0 I will probably talk about this work in more depth at another time, because it is so haunting, and I think it is such a profound description of the burden of existence in modern society for many people.

spk_0 But here, let me talk about another of his work, The Trial.

spk_0 In this novel, the main character Joseph K. is a successful bank officer, and he is arrested on his birthday for an unspecified crime by a kind of amorphous court whose authorities everywhere and nowhere.

spk_0 He navigates a labyrinth-like legal system where everyone knows about his case, but no one can really explain it.

spk_0 The so-called Trial never actually occurs in any conventional sense, instead Joseph K's entire life becomes the proceedings leading up to the trial.

spk_0 In a sense, the trial is the state of being accused itself, a permanent condition rather than a singular event.

spk_0 Kafka's genius in this work was to show that modern institutions don't need to hold trials. They just need to hold you in the permanent looming possibility of one.

spk_0 Public attention to this case is both positive and negative, because Joseph K. is feeling of constantly being judged by people around him.

spk_0 This wears at his mind, and his psychological well-being begins to deteriorate.

spk_0 In a sense, the trial doesn't need to convict him. The internal psychological turmoil and the external social scrutiny performs the conviction and the eventual execution.

spk_0 When exactly one year after his arrest, Joseph K. is visited by two men who walk him courteously through the city to an abandoned quarry and stab him in the heart without Joseph K resisting.

spk_0 To me, the trial shows that tyranny's final victory isn't when it kills you, but when you hold still for the knife, not because you're forced, but because you've been exhausted into submission.

spk_0 Once again, it is a haunting story of the solusness of bureaucracy in its suffocation of the human spirit.

spk_0 I highly recommend this short book, and I'll probably talk about it even more in the future.

spk_0 I don't think it's especially useful for me to speak tiny parallels between the trial and Paula D'Arth's case, because after all, the trial is a work of fiction.

spk_0 But on a positive note, let me report that as far as I saw, Paula has maintained optimism and a general positive outlook throughout this whole process.

spk_0 What I always fear in such cases is that a bureaucratic system can wear people down, exhaust them into serendry.

spk_0 I saw none of that with Paula. I don't think he knows how to give up or give in, no matter how much pressure he's under.

spk_0 Again, this is truly inspiring to me.

spk_0 Also, now that we're talking about it, let me mention some other of Kafka's work that was moving to me.

spk_0 The castle has similar description as the trial does of the absurd inaccessibility of those in authority of the Nightmare's bureaucracy.

spk_0 The character in the castle is also named K, both bureaucracies operate through exhaustion and list deferrals, procedures, waiting rooms.

spk_0 Again, highly relevant to modern times.

spk_0 I can also highly recommend Kafka's in the penal colony and hunger artist.

spk_0 Both are too interesting and weird to explain in depth here.

spk_0 But let me say the hunger artist is a story that I think is relevant to our modern day attention economy, where so many people want to be famous.

spk_0 It tells the story of, let's say, professional faster, who performs starvation in a cage as entertainment.

spk_0 And he slowly loses his audience to new spectacles, so much so that eventually when he starves himself to death,

spk_0 nobody cares.

spk_0 Kafka's work is heavy.

spk_0 It serves as a warning for the Nightmare that civilization can become.

spk_0 And yet, I think it is also source of optimism.

spk_0 Because when we can recognize elements of our own world in Kafka's stories, when we can see elements of our institutions in the trial or in the castle,

spk_0 when we can see ourselves in Gregor Somsa, we're not just diagnosing the disease, we're proving that we're still human, and why is enough to see it and name it.

spk_0 Kafka gave us the goal to resist against such systems that tried to dehumanize us, and to ensure the individual freedom and the human spirit keep flourishing.

spk_0 I think it will. I have faith in us humans. I love you all.

spk_0 I love you all.

#482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power &#038; Human Nature

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#482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature