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

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people. Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship. For this, he has faced pressure from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on earth. In the face of this immense pressure, he has always held his ground, continuously fighting to protect use of privacy and the freedom of all of us humans to communicate with each other. I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him and can definitively say that he's one of the most principled and fearless humans I've ever met. Plus, when I posted that I'm hanging out with Pavel, a lot of people, fans of his, wrote to me asking if he does, in fact, privately live the disciplined, ascetic life he's known for. No alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise, including a crazy amount of daily pull ups and push ups. No phone except to occasionally test telegram features and so on. Yes, he is 100% that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me. I'm grateful for it and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend. This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical about freedom, life, human nature and the nature of government bureaucracies. And it is also in 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. Just like the meme of The Simpsons did it first, when you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case, Telegram did it first. So we discuss it all, from the Kafkaesque situation he's in the midst of in France, to the roller coaster of his life and career, to his philosophy on technology, freedom and the human condition. And by the way, while this entire conversation is in English, we make captions and voiceover audio tracks available in multiple languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, French and Hindi. If this is of interest to you, you will need to head over to the Lex Fridman channel on YouTube, where you can switch between language audio tracks by clicking the settings gear icon, then clicking audio track and then selecting the language you prefer. Here we only provide the original English version. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Miro for team collaboration, Masterclass for learning, Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, Fin for customer service AI agents, Element for electrolytes, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Miro. It's an online collaborative whiteboard platform. You know, like for brainstorming ideas together with your team, except on the interwebs. They have this space called the Innovation Workspace that blends AI and humans, human creativity, to develop ideas. So this is for multiple people, so it enables teams to brainstorm, prototype and iterate fast on the ideas. I think a really big part of a successful team is being able to brainstorm. Each individual person in a self-modulated way is coming up with ideas, but then those ideas are put into the same kind of system where they can be integrated, and the tension between those ideas can develop even better ideas, and so you go and go and go and constantly improve. So I think Miro is a really nice platform for that brainstorming process. Help your teams develop great ideas into results with Miro. Go to miro.com to find out how. That's miro.com.
This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, and they're a new class called the Power Playbook, How to Win at Work. It's actually a masterclass by a super strong and popular professor from Stanford, Jeff Feffer. He has a lot of excellent lectures and books that study power, and this masterclass is a sort of an applied study of power. It provides a playbook that breaks down the rules of power and teaches you ways how they can be applied in the workplace. It's like the Game of Thrones, but in the 21st century. Capitalist system. There you go. It's basic communication, body language, all that kind of stuff, how to position yourself so that you get a promotion, figuring out how to be influential. I started listening to this Master Class, and it's excellent. I highly recommend. It's called The Power Playbook, How to Win at Work. And it became available on August 21st, so you should be able to get it now. And you can get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/lex. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Uplift Desk, the very desk I'm behind right now. And I have many, many more of them in this whole place. And I have several of them in the podcast room. In fact, four. And in that very room that you can see on camera, those desks have brought me a lot of happiness, both in the standing desk position and in the sitting position. I mean, it's just really, really excellent product, really excellent company. Brings a smile to my face every time I think about them. They have never disappointed in their customer service, in the large selection of products that they provide. There's like some ridiculously insane number of possible desk combinations you could choose from. The look, the size, all the different characteristics you can pick. I've been a fan for a long, long time, long before they were a sponsor. And when they became a sponsor, that's like a dream come true. So please go support them. So they continue being a sponsor because it's really cool when a product over the top definitively has made me happy for many years and they also are a sponsor. Go to upliftodesk.com/lex and use code Lex to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, a 15 year warranty and an extra discount off your entire order. That's upiftdesk.com/lex.