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Lex Fridman Podcast

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

with Pavel Durov

Published October 1, 2025
View Show Notes

About This Episode

Lex Friedman interviews Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, about his philosophy on freedom, discipline, technology, and the design of secure, scalable messaging systems. Pavel describes his strict lifestyle, his refusal to compromise on user privacy under pressure from powerful governments, and the technical and organizational principles behind Telegram's lean but highly productive engineering team. They also discuss government overreach, Pavel's legal ordeal in France, earlier clashes with Russia and Iran, the economics and crypto ecosystem around Telegram, and broader reflections on human nature, education, abundance, and mortality.

Topics Covered

Free speech and censorship Data privacy and surveillance Entrepreneurship Blockchain technology Status and power dynamics Leadership and management Personal Development Smartphones and mobile technology Government corruption Online safety

Disclaimer: We provide independent summaries of podcasts and are not affiliated with or endorsed in any way by any podcast or creator. All podcast names and content are the property of their respective owners. The views and opinions expressed within the podcasts belong solely to the original hosts and guests and do not reflect the views or positions of Summapod.

Quick Takeaways

  • Pavel Durov grounds his life and business decisions in a strict commitment to freedom and privacy, repeatedly choosing principle over profit or safety.
  • He lives an ascetic, highly disciplined lifestyle, avoiding alcohol, drugs, sugar, pills, porn, and smartphone distraction to preserve mental clarity and self-discipline.
  • Telegram is built and operated by a remarkably small engineering team, relying on top-tier talent, heavy automation, and custom low-level infrastructure to scale securely to hundreds of millions of users.
  • Telegram's architecture and governance are designed so that no employee, government, or intelligence agency can access private user messages, and Pavel says he would rather exit markets or shut down than introduce backdoors.
  • Pavel describes extensive pressure and alleged political attempts to coerce censorship, including his arrest in France and requests to shut down political channels in countries like Moldova and Romania, all of which he says he refused.
  • He believes competition in education and business is essential for progress, criticizes overregulation and bureaucracy in Europe, and argues that suffocating entrepreneurship harms long-term prosperity.
  • Telegram monetizes through premium subscriptions, non-targeted ads, and a TON-based crypto ecosystem rather than exploiting personal data or addictive news feeds.
  • Pavel sees physical training, cold/heat exposure, and long swims as crucial for stress resilience and clear thinking, and he treats depression and stagnation as problems best solved by action.
  • He embraces ideas like manifestation and even quantum immortality as mental models for focusing effort and maintaining courage in the face of death and state power.
  • Both Pavel and Lex worry that abundance without purpose, as illustrated by the "mouse utopia" experiment, can erode social function and meaning, making self-imposed constraints and purpose crucial in an AI-driven future.

Podcast Notes

Introduction, Pavel's character, and themes of freedom and technology

Lex introduces Pavel Durov and Telegram

Telegram's scale and Pavel's reputation[0:00]
• Lex states that Pavel is the founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people.
• He describes Pavel as having spent his life fighting for freedom of speech and building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship.
• Lex notes that Pavel has faced pressure from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on Earth and has held his ground to protect user privacy and freedom.
Pavel's ascetic lifestyle as seen by Lex[0:49]
• Lex says he spent a few weeks with Pavel and confirms that Pavel does live the disciplined, ascetic life he's known for: no alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise.
• Pavel does a large number of daily pull-ups and push-ups, uses no phone except to test Telegram features, and so on.
• Lex says Pavel is "100% that guy" and calls the experience of hanging out with him inspiring.

Episode structure and languages

Philosophical and technical focus[1:31]
• Lex explains the conversation is partly philosophical (freedom, life, human nature, government bureaucracies) and partly super technical (Telegram's small team and rapid innovation).
Multi-language captions and audio tracks on YouTube[2:17]
• Lex notes that captions and voiceover audio tracks are available in multiple languages (Russian, Ukrainian, French, Hindi) on YouTube, while the podcast feed has only the original English.

Podcast identity mentioned

Lex names the show[10:51]
• Lex says "This is the Lex Friedman Podcast" and invites listeners to support it.

Pavel's core value: freedom, mortality, and fearlessness

Formative experiences that shaped Pavel's value of freedom

Experiencing Soviet Union vs. Italy as a child[11:47]
• Pavel says he was four when his family moved from the Soviet Union to northern Italy.
• He saw that a society without freedom lacked an abundance of opinions, ideas, goods, and services.
• As a 4-5-year-old, he noticed he couldn't experience the same toys, ice cream varieties, and cartoons in the Soviet Union as he could in Italy.
Contribution depends on freedom[12:25]
• Pavel realized that without freedom you also "don't get to contribute" to the abundance around you.

Freedom vs money and the enemies of freedom

Quote about freedom mattering more than money[12:33]
• Lex quotes Pavel: "freedom matters more than money" and asks how he prevents these values from being corrupted by money and power.
Fear and greed as main enemies[12:46]
• Pavel says the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed.
• He suggests imagining the worst thing that can happen and making oneself comfortable with it so there's nothing left to fear.
• He believes it's worth living according to one's principles even if it leads to a shorter life than a longer life "lived in slavery."

Contemplating mortality and overcoming fear of death

Rational view of death[13:37]
• Pavel acknowledges humans are biologically hard-coded to fear death, but says rationally you live and then you die, and "there's no such thing as your death in your life" because experience stops.
• He asks whether it's worth living a life full of fear of death versus living in a way that makes you immune to this fear while remembering death so that every day counts.

Discipline, substances, and information diet

Total abstinence from addictive substances

Statement of abstinence[14:55]
• Lex reads Pavel's post: his success and health are the result of 20+ years of complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal drugs.
• Pavel writes "Short-term pleasure isn't worth your future."
Biochemical reasoning against alcohol[15:07]
• At age 11, his biochemistry teacher gave him a book called "The Illusion of Paradise" describing biological and chemical processes from consuming addictive substances.
• The book explained that when you drink alcohol, brain cells crystallize, become "zombies," and some die permanently after the party.
• Pavel frames the brain as the most valuable tool for success and happiness and says destroying it for short-term pleasure is "ridiculous."
Advice for people who use alcohol socially[16:29]
• He advises being contrarian and setting your own rules instead of yielding to social pressure.
• He suggests that needing alcohol points to an underlying problem or fear, such as fear of approaching an attractive person, which should be addressed directly through practice.
• Pavel calls alcohol a "spiritual painkiller" that works temporarily and then forces you to "pay the debt with interest."

Conformity, fear of being an outsider, and competitive advantage

Fear of being excluded from the tribe[19:18]
• Pavel notes humans are extremely affected by what they perceive as the majority because historically being left out of the tribe meant death.
• He argues we must consciously fight this inclination because many majority activities bring no benefit.
Being different as a success strategy[19:24]
• He points out that if you do what everybody else is doing, you have no competitive advantage and won't become outstanding.
• He and Lex discuss the idea that one should find a niche, pursue mastery in it, and make sure it's different from what others are doing.

Curating information and rejecting phone addiction

Avoiding algorithmic feeds and AI recommender systems[22:24]
• Pavel warns that AI-based algorithmic feeds make users consume the same information, memes, and news as everyone else, eroding uniqueness and advantage.
• He recommends being proactive: define a goal/field, then actively search for information relevant to that field to become the world's #1 expert over time.
Philosophy of not using a phone[22:49]
• Pavel says he doesn't think a phone is a necessary device and recalls not having a mobile phone as a student.
• When he finally had a mobile phone, he kept it on airplane mode or mute and hated being disturbed.
• His philosophy: he wants to define what is important in his life instead of letting people or companies set his agenda via the phone.
• He sees the phone as a source of distraction and as guidance toward what to look at, which he wants to avoid in order to "quiet the mind."
Quiet mornings and thinking time[24:24]
• Pavel tries to allocate as much time as possible for sleep, sometimes 11-12 hours in bed, which includes lying awake thinking.
• He ignores advice to take sleeping pills and instead values the ideas that come to him lying in bed or during his phone-free morning routine.
• He says if you open your phone first thing, you'll be told what to think about for the rest of the day; similarly, late-night social media shapes your next day.

Emotions, action, self-discipline, and physical training

Handling negative emotions and avoiding depression

Responsibility to cope with emotions[28:54]
• Pavel says he is human and does feel unpleasant emotions but believes everyone has a responsibility to cope with and work through them.
• He emphasizes self-discipline as key to escaping loops of negativity and despair that can lead to depression.
Action precedes motivation[30:36]
• Pavel states he doesn't remember having depression in the last 20 years, partly because he identifies problems, sees solutions, and starts executing.
• He argues people mistakenly think they should rest to regain energy, but in his view you gain energy by doing something.
• He likens this to going to the gym when you don't feel like it; after starting, you often feel it was a good idea and become motivated.

Daily workout regimen and purpose of self-discipline exercises

Daily push-ups and squats[32:07]
• Pavel says he does 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning.
• In addition, he goes to the gym 5-6 times per week for 1-2 hours a day.
• He is unsure how much push-ups and squats change the body, but sees them as training self-discipline because they are boring and unpleasant in the morning.
Hot-cold exposure: banya and ice baths[33:38]
• Pavel describes banya as an extreme sauna tradition with maximized heat, herbs, branches, and necessary cold exposure.
• He sees both intense heat and ice baths as short-term suffering followed by feeling great for hours or days and long-term health benefits.
• He compares banya/ice bath to alcohol in reverse: instead of short pleasure and long-term negative consequences, it's short discomfort and long-term benefits.
Multi-hour lake swims and patience[35:30]
• Pavel enjoys swimming for hours; his longest swim was 5.5 hours in cold water in Finland where he got lost but made it back.
• He has swum across major lakes like Lake Geneva and Lake Zurich and feels strong and happy after such achievements.
• Starting a several-hour swim requires overcoming reluctance, but after 10-30 minutes he finds it meditative and it teaches "incredible patience."
Physical activity for brain performance and stress resilience[37:47]
• Pavel says physical activity clarifies the mind, as brain efficiency is limited by how much sugar and oxygen the heart and lungs can deliver.
• He sees training as not only for health or looks but also for productivity and stress resilience, especially for running or starting a large company.
• When he can't train, he feels stress creeping in and compensates by doing push-ups and squats even without gym access.

Diet, pills, and skepticism of incentives

No sugar, intermittent fasting, and longevity

Processed sugar and hunger[39:47]
• Pavel calls sugar addictive: the more you consume, the more you want, and the hungrier you get.
• He argues that eating processed sugar leads to constant snacking and inefficiency.
Intermittent fasting structure[40:24]
• He practices intermittent fasting by eating within a 6-hour window and not eating for 18 hours daily.
• This structure eliminates sugar cravings because snacking between meals is not allowed.
Reading on longevity and diet choices[40:54]
• Pavel says longevity books agree that sugar is harmful, though he isn't militant about natural sweets like berries and fruit.
• He stopped eating sugar about 20 years ago because he felt heavy whenever he had it; he attributes this to his individual metabolism and digestion.
• His typical diet is seafood of all kinds plus vegetables as primary calorie sources.

Avoiding pills and analyzing incentives in pharma and news

Pills as masking symptoms[42:00]
• Pavel describes most pills, like painkillers, as muting consequences (pain) without addressing root causes like dehydration, poor air, lack of sleep, or stressful people.
• He compares taking a pill to smashing a warning light in a helicopter instead of fixing the underlying problem.
General avoidance of pharmaceuticals[45:03]
• Since becoming an adult, Pavel has stayed away from all pills, saying producers are not incentivized to eliminate root problems but rather to make people dependent.
• He clarifies he is not saying never take pills; he acknowledges some diseases require antibiotics and says he is not advocating a return to the Middle Ages.
Asking who benefits from information[45:41]
• Pavel says he reads a piece of news and asks himself "who benefits from me reading this?"
• He concludes that perhaps 95% of news exists because someone wants you to buy a product, support a political cause, fight a war, or donate money.
• He distinguishes between supporting causes you truly believe in by choice versus being manipulated into fighting other people's wars.

Porn, surrogates, and long-term vs short-term pleasure

Why Pavel does not watch porn

Porn as a surrogate for the real thing[48:13]
• Pavel says he doesn't watch porn because it's a surrogate, a substitute for the real thing, and not necessary in his life.
• He believes porn forces you to exchange energy and inspiration for a fleeting moment of pleasure and that it's "not the real thing."
Porn as a signal of an underlying problem[48:58]
• He suggests that if someone can't access the real thing and turns to porn, it indicates some deficiency or problem in life that must be overcome.
• He connects this to his general theme of investing in long-term flourishing versus short-term pleasure.

Telegram's team, architecture, and privacy guarantees

Small engineering team and philosophy of lean operations

Size and composition of core team[49:59]
• Pavel says the core engineering team is about 40 people, including backend, frontend, designers, and system administrators.
Why more employees can reduce product quality[50:28]
• He argues that the quantity of employees doesn't translate to product quality; often the opposite occurs as coordination overhead dominates time.
• In large teams, some people won't have enough work and may demotivate others or create internal problems instead of doing productive work.
Forced automation and self-managing infrastructure[51:53]
• Telegram has tens of thousands of servers across several continents and data centers, approaching around 100,000.
• By not allowing hiring sprees, the team is forced to automate management of this infrastructure, resulting in scalability, efficiency, and reliability.
• He notes that humans are attack vectors; a distributed system that runs itself algorithmically can be more secure and resilient.

Distributed architecture and privacy against governments

Encryption and separation of data and keys[53:53]
• Lex describes how Telegram distributes infrastructure and separates encrypted data from decryption keys so no single government or entity can access user data.
• Pavel says since 2012 they designed Telegram so that no humans or employees can access private messaging data.
• They invested effort so that even if an employee is malicious, they cannot break the system to access messages.
No access for employees or governments[54:14]
• Pavel states that Telegram has never shared a single private message with any government or intelligence service.
• He says if you access any server and its hard drives, everything is encrypted in a way that is undecipherable.
• He asserts there has never been a leak of private messages or contact lists from Telegram.
Principled refusal to introduce backdoors[58:44]
• Asked if Telegram might ever share private messages with governments in future, Pavel says "No" and states they designed the system to make that impossible without changing it.
• He says they would rather shut Telegram down in a given country than do that and emphasizes this is a promise to users.

Ownership structure and resistance to pressure

Full ownership and independence[59:49]
• Pavel owns 100% of Telegram; there are no other shareholders.
• He says this uniqueness among major tech companies allows Telegram to operate based on fundamental principles like privacy.
Willingness to leave markets[1:01:52]
• Pavel says if the EU bans encryption, Telegram will just leave the market rather than compromise; he says losing markets would not affect his lifestyle.
• He comments that many governments assume tech companies profit from their citizens, but Telegram is different from typical revenue-extracting tech firms.

Government overreach, French arrest, and censorship pressure

Arrest in France and Kafkaesque legal process

Arrest and accusations[1:05:09]
• In August of the previous year, Pavel arrived in France for a two-day trip and was met by about a dozen armed policemen.
• They read him a list of around 15 serious crimes he was accused of, essentially holding him responsible for alleged crimes committed by Telegram users.
Custody conditions and lack of understanding[1:07:52]
• He was put in police custody in a small room with no windows and a narrow concrete bed for almost four days.
• During questioning, he was struck by the lack of understanding among those who initiated the investigation about technology, encryption, and social media.
Investigative judge and slow appeals[1:10:17]
• In France, Pavel is under an investigative judge system: he is being investigated, not yet on trial.
• He says the process to appeal restrictions on his movement is painfully slow, and his appeal against the investigation has not even been given a hearing date.

Requests to censor political speech in Moldova and Romania

Moldova: selective channel takedowns and suspicious linkage[1:15:11]
• Pavel recounts that French intelligence contacted Telegram via an intermediary about Moldovan elections, asking to remove some channels and bots.
• Telegram reviewed a short list, removed only those clearly violating its rules, and refused to remove dozens of other political channels that did not violate rules.
• He says French intelligence told his investigative judge positive things about him after the initial removals, which he found alarming given the link between a foreign case and his French case.
Romania: refusal to suppress conservative voices[1:19:57]
• While stuck in France, Pavel met the head of the French foreign intelligence service, who asked him to restrict channels in Romania ahead of presidential elections.
• He says they wanted channels supporting a conservative candidate or protests against a pro-European candidate limited.
• Pavel refused, stating that unless there was a violation of Telegram rules like calls to violence, it would be political censorship.
• He later publicly disclosed this conversation, noting he never signs NDAs with such people so he can tell the world what's going on.

Commitment to not yield under pressure, even facing prison

Refusing backdoors and censorship demands[1:23:21]
• Pavel says every time governments attempted to use his constrained situation in France to ask for channel blocking or changes to Telegram, he not only refused but also told the world about it.
Extreme stance on imprisonment[1:26:49]
• Pavel says hypothetically, if he were imprisoned for 20 years, he would rather starve himself to death and "reboot the whole game" than do something stupid like violating users' rights.
• He believes that if you submit to pressure and do something fundamentally wrong, you become "broken inside," a shell of your former self.

Entrepreneurship, Europe, and the burden of bureaucracy

Economic damage of French and European over-regulation

Public sector size and Soviet comparison[1:39:01]
• Pavel says public expenses in France are 58% of GDP, similar to or more than in the late-stage Soviet Union.
• He argues there's a disbalance between people representing the state and people driving the country's economy forward.
Examples of startups harmed by investigations[1:41:01]
• He recalls a successful French social network whose founder ended up selling early after years of a data-protection investigation that drained the team.
• He also mentions an entrepreneur whose accounts were frozen during an eight-year tax investigation that ended with no wrongdoing found, but his business died.
• That entrepreneur moved to Dubai, started a new very successful company, and now contributes to Dubai's economy instead of France's.

Education, competition, and his brother's influence

Experimental school and broad curriculum

Intense multi-discipline education[1:41:57]
• At age 11, Pavel entered an experimental school in St. Petersburg after a rigorous test.
• The class had a very broad curriculum: at least four foreign languages (Latin, English, French, German), plus options like Ancient Greek, biochemistry, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology.
• It aimed to overload students, especially in math and languages, to change their brains so they could understand most other disciplines.
Competition as motivator and risk of removing it[1:45:30]
• Pavel notes he decided to become a straight-A student in every subject, which was seen as nearly impossible; it kept him very busy.
• He argues competition is key in education; removing grading and rankings to reduce anxiety also removes winners and interest.
• He links overprotective education systems to later life problems: high suicide rates, unemployment, and unprepared graduates.

Brother Nikolai as intellectual and moral model

Learning everything from his brother[1:54:21]
• Pavel says he learned "pretty much everything" from his brother Nikolai, as they shared a bedroom and he constantly asked him questions.
• He describes Nikolai as a prodigy who started reading at age three and by six could read sophisticated astronomy books.
• He says truly intelligent people like his brother are often also kind and compassionate.

VK origins, coding philosophy, and hiring A players

Early programming and VK stack

Games driven by scarcity[2:04:01]
• Pavel started coding at 10, building video games because he didn't have enough to play, attributing creativity to scarcity.
• He built a tic-tac-toe-like game (five in a row on an infinite field) and coded an AI opponent calculating several moves ahead to train himself until he always won.
University portal and VK creation[2:08:53]
• In university, he built a student portal with digitalized exam answers, lectures, forums, profiles, photo albums, and blogs, which scaled to tens of thousands of users.
• An ex-classmate asked if he was building a Russian Facebook; at that time Pavel hadn't used Facebook, then studied it to learn which elements to drop for scalability.
• He started VK (VKontakte, "in touch" in Russian) in 2006 to stay connected with ex-classmates and meet new people, coding it from scratch and obsessing over every line.
Initial VK tech stack and scaling with help from Nikolai[2:14:32]
• VK began with PHP, MySQL, Debian Linux, later adding memcached and Nginx as load increased.
• Pavel was the sole employee for almost a year, handling backend, frontend, design, support, and marketing.
• As VK reached over a million users and a dozen servers, scaling and DDOS attacks forced him to ask Nikolai to return from Germany to rewrite core data engines in C/C++.
• Custom C/C++ engines replaced some MySQL/memcached functions for search, ad serving, private and public messaging, making VK extremely fast.
• In 2009, Silicon Valley people asked how VK loaded faster than Facebook even there; speed became a defining feature, later mirrored in Telegram.

Hiring via competitions and firing B players

Coding contests as hiring funnel[2:22:55]
• Pavel believes competition is the best way to select qualified people and runs many coding/design contests where winners solve real Telegram tasks.
• Repeated winners over years become clear candidates for hiring, often without prior big-company experience.
Impact of B players on team performance[2:26:32]
• He notes sometimes firing one underperforming engineer increases productivity more than hiring another, because B players create bugs, delays, and demotivate A players.
• He emphasizes that A players feel insulted and constrained when forced to work with distracted or less capable colleagues.

Design philosophy: speed, subtle joy, and encryption choices

UI/UX details and animations

Gradients, patterns, and subconscious feel[2:28:58]
• Telegram chat backgrounds use a 4-color moving gradient with a subtle vector pattern overlay designed to be pleasant but not distracting.
• Pavel says he examined several thousand variations for the default background and chose colors and shapes based on biological associations and mood.
Delete animation and performance constraints[2:32:37]
• The "Thanos snap" delete animation breaks a message into tens of thousands of particles that vanish like dust.
• He explains the technical challenge: deleting while surrounding messages move to close the gap, requiring full screen redraws on diverse hardware.
• He believes such subtle details, even if users don't consciously notice them, can inspire and uplift mood by a tiny percentage.

Stickers, animated emoji, and vector art

Vector-based stickers vs traditional GIFs[2:36:27]
• Telegram launched animated vector stickers years before competitors; each is only several kilobytes, runs at 60 fps, and loads instantly.
• They had to find rare artists who can work with vector graphics, combining art and engineering to achieve fluid animations.
Custom animated emoji and reactions[2:39:09]
• Telegram allows up to 100 animated emoji in a message that animate smoothly without crashing devices, something Pavel believes other apps don't offer.
• He says they designed reactions so that even adding a like should be an action you want to perform again and again.

End-to-end encryption, secret chats, and reproducible builds

Hybrid model: secret chats vs cloud chats[2:46:46]
• Telegram added end-to-end encryption via secret chats in 2013, motivated by Edward Snowden's revelations.
• Secret chats disallow screenshots and forwarding, making them excellent for paranoid or ultra-private use but less suited for teamwork and large channels.
• Pavel explains they chose a hybrid approach: encrypted cloud chats for usability and secret chats for maximum security.
Open source and reproducible builds[2:52:59]
• All Telegram apps have been open source on GitHub since 2013; by contrast he says WhatsApp has never been open source.
• Telegram supports reproducible builds on both Android and iOS, so anyone can verify the binaries match the published source code.
• Pavel claims that among popular messaging apps, Telegram's secret chats are the most secure way of communicating that he has seen.
Custom backend stack and minimal open-source dependencies[2:57:16]
• Telegram developed custom database engines, web servers, and even a programming language for backend APIs, to avoid vulnerabilities and maximize efficiency.
• They still rely on Linux but aim to be much more self-reliant than most apps.

Clashes with Russia and Iran, poisoning attempt, and origin of Telegram

2018 bans in Iran and Russia

Iranian ban and user-run proxies[3:00:20]
• In Iran, Telegram was used for protests; the government banned it and tried to promote national alternatives, but users still preferred Telegram via VPNs.
• Telegram introduced an economic incentive: users could run proxy servers that displayed pinned chats (ads) to connected users, allowing proxy operators to monetize.
• Pavel estimates Telegram may still have around 50 million users in Iran despite the ongoing ban.
Russian demand for encryption keys and ban[3:06:37]
• In 2017-2018, Russian authorities demanded Telegram hand over encryption keys for Russian users.
• Pavel told them it's impossible; when Russia banned Telegram, Telegram responded with automated IP-rotation and a "digital resistance" movement of proxies.
• Russian censors blocked huge IP subnets, causing collateral damage to banks, social networks, and parts of the country's infrastructure.

Apple's role during Russian censorship

App Store block and public pressure[3:12:12]
• Apple refused Telegram updates for over a month, saying Telegram must first agree with Russia; they offered to allow updates worldwide except Russia.
• Pavel did not want to abandon Russian users; he publicly criticized Apple and described protests with paper airplanes in Moscow.
• As Telegram began breaking on iOS due to the lack of updates, he considered dropping Russia from the App Store, but 15 minutes before his self-imposed deadline Apple approved the update globally.

Assassination attempt by suspected poisoning

2018 sudden collapse and symptoms[5:18:40]
• In spring 2018, while raising funds and amid bans in some countries, Pavel experienced a severe health crisis he believes was an assassination attempt via poisoning.
• He recalls coming home, noticing a "weird neighbor" had left something at his door, and about an hour later feeling intense body pain.
• As he walked to the bathroom, his functions began shutting down: first eyesight, then hearing, then breathing, all with acute pain in heart, stomach, and blood vessels.
• He thought "this is it" and collapsed; he woke up on the floor the next day with broken blood vessels all over his body and couldn't walk for two weeks.
Effect on his fear of death[5:28:55]
• Pavel says he never falls ill and this was the only time he felt he was dying.
• Surviving made him feel like he's living on "bonus time" and that he had died long ago, so every new day is a gift.

2011 Russian protests, VK, and birth of Telegram idea

Refusal to censor opposition on VK[5:31:10]
• In December 2011, during protests over Duma elections, Russian authorities demanded VK remove opposition groups (linked to Navalny) used to organize protests.
• Pavel publicly refused and mocked the prosecutor by posting a scan of the demand next to a photo of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue out.
• Armed policemen later tried to enter his apartment; he expected to be imprisoned and decided he would starve himself to death rather than yield.
Lack of secure communication and decision to build Telegram[5:36:20]
• He recalls there was no secure messaging in 2011: WhatsApp had zero encryption and messages were plain text in transit.
• He needed to warn his brother without exposing him and realized he had to build a secure messaging app if he survived.
• He started designing Telegram and assembling a team while still running VK, knowing his days in Russia were numbered.

Business model, TON ecosystem, and crypto beliefs

Profitability without targeting personal data

Premium subscriptions and feature set[62:13:27]
• Pavel invested his own money into Telegram, takes a tiny salary (about one-third of a dollar), and notes Telegram became profitable in 2024.
• They launched Telegram Premium in 2022, keeping all existing features free and adding over 50 extra features for advanced and business users.
• Telegram now has over 15 million paid subscribers and expects more than half a billion dollars in recurring revenue from Premium alone this year.
Context-based ads and low-fee mini app economy[63:33:00]
• Telegram runs ads that are context-based (by channel and topic) rather than targeted using personal or behavioral data, which Pavel says leaves about 80% of potential value on the table.
• Telegram's mini app platform allows developers to run apps inside Telegram, accept payments via Apple/Google IAP, and Telegram charges only a 5% commission.

TON blockchain and on-chain assets like gifts and usernames

Origin of TON and SEC conflict[64:41:00]
• Telegram built TON in 2018-2019 as a scalable layer-one blockchain because Bitcoin and Ethereum couldn't handle Telegram-scale traffic.
• The SEC objected to how funds for TON were raised, so Telegram abandoned the project; the open-source community continued it as "the open network."
Integration of TON into Telegram products[65:29:00]
• Telegram issues tokenized usernames and accounts via TON smart contracts; Telegram itself cannot confiscate these names.
• Purchasing Telegram ads and withdrawing ad revenue shares (50-50 split with channel owners) are done using TON.
Telegram gifts as reinvented NFTs[65:53:00]
• Telegram gifts are blockchain-based collectibles displayed on profiles, tradeable on-chain, and used to congratulate others; they hold and can gain value.
• Pavel describes Snoop Dogg gifts that sold for $12 million within 30 minutes and says TON is now among the top blockchains by daily NFT trading volume.
• He notes many early gifts sold for a few dollars now have minimum prices around $10,000, and some users have made millions trading gifts and building mini apps.

Bitcoin holdings and view on its future

Personal bitcoin investment and lifestyle funding[67:30:00]
• Pavel bought his first few thousand bitcoins in 2013 at around $700 each, investing a couple of million dollars and holding even as the price dropped.
• He says he has funded his personal lifestyle from bitcoin investments, not from extracting money from Telegram.
Prediction of bitcoin reaching $1 million[68:06:20]
• Pavel believes bitcoin will reach $1 million, citing governments' tendency to print fiat money while bitcoin has predictable issuance and a cap.

Family, sperm donation, abundance, and manifestation

Children, sperm donation, and inheritance

Number of kids and sperm donation rationale[70:03:00]
• Pavel says he does not know exactly how many biological children he has because about 15 years ago he became a sperm donor.
• Initially he helped a friend and his wife who had fertility issues and preferred a known donor they respected, then helped more couples.
Treating all biological children equally in his will[70:30:00]
• While working on his will, he decided not to distinguish between naturally conceived children and donor-conceived children; any who establish shared DNA will be entitled to a share of his estate.
• He also decided they should only receive money after a few decades, to avoid paralyzing their motivation with early abundance.
• He notes that dividing his wealth among more than a hundred descendants makes each share smaller, though still many millions by public estimates.

Mouse paradise (Universe 25) and dangers of abundance

Summary of the mouse experiment and social collapse[71:45:00]
• Lex summarizes John B. Calhoun's Universe 25 experiment where mice in a resource-abundant environment initially thrived then developed social dysfunction and went extinct.
Pavel's takeaway about scarcity and meaning[72:10:00]
• Pavel says humans evolved to overcome scarcity and that self-imposed restrictions are important to preserve purpose and meaning.
• He grew up poor with a second-hand jacket and parents struggling financially, which created priorities and forced development of character and skills.
• He warns that in a world where one has everything, "why do anything?" and notes that in the mouse experiment, social dysfunction becomes contagious and leads to extinction.

Manifestation, effort, and quantum immortality

Manifestation coupled with logical action[74:42:00]
• Pavel says many agree that setting goals, staying positive, and confident aids achievement, but he finds it hard to believe pure thought manifests outcomes without effort.
• He prefers a model where optimism and faith are combined with logical action in a chosen direction.
Quantum immortality thought experiment[75:34:00]
• Pavel speculates that in a many-worlds universe, each time he "dies" he may shift to a parallel universe where he doesn't, leading eventually to "quantum immortality."
• He jokes that in some universes he died in 2013, but he's glad to be in the one where he is still alive and sharing a table with Lex and a walrus bone.

Father's influence and closing reflections

Father as role model of work and patience

Work ethic and leading by example[73:33:00]
• Pavel's father wrote numerous books and papers on Ancient Rome and literature, and Pavel always remembers him working on a typewriter.
• His father recently told him not just to speak of principles but to live them, as children discount words and watch actions.

Lex's Kafka epilogue relating "The Trial" to Pavel's case

Franz Kafka's life and themes[76:07:00]
• Lex describes Kafka as an insurance clerk who wrote at night, died young and unknown, and whose work was preserved by his friend Max Brod despite Kafka's request to burn the manuscripts.
• Kafka wrote about dehumanizing bureaucracy, guilt without clear crime, and anxiety of modern life, using simple sentences to describe surreal situations.
Summary of "The Trial" and relevance[77:03:00]
• In "The Trial", Joseph K is arrested on his birthday for an unspecified crime by an amorphous court; his life becomes a perpetual pre-trial state without a conventional trial.
• Lex notes Kafka's insight that modern institutions don't need to hold trials, only to hold individuals in a permanent looming possibility of one.
• He says tyranny's final victory isn't when it kills you but when you hold still for the knife due to exhaustion and submission.
Optimism about human capacity to resist dehumanization[78:18:00]
• Lex interprets Kafka's work as a warning about what civilization can become but also as evidence that recognizing these patterns means we're still human and wise enough to resist.
• He concludes by expressing faith in humans and saying "I love you all."

Lessons Learned

Actionable insights and wisdom you can apply to your business, career, and personal life.

1

Building a life or business on clear principles is only sustainable if you accept the worst-case consequences in advance and decide that integrity is worth more than comfort, money, or safety.

Reflection Questions:

  • • What principle in your life do you claim to value, but haven't yet decided you're willing to suffer for?
  • • How might your decisions change if you clearly visualized the worst realistic consequence of sticking to your values and chose to accept it?
  • • What is one concrete boundary you can set this month that aligns your actions more tightly with your stated principles?
2

Action precedes motivation: you rarely feel like doing hard things at first, but starting small creates momentum, energy, and clarity that no amount of passive reflection can replace.

Reflection Questions:

  • • In what area of your life are you currently waiting to "feel ready" before taking action, and what is one tiny step you could take today instead?
  • • How could you design a daily starter ritual (like Pavel's morning push-ups) that forces you to move before your mind has a chance to negotiate?
  • • Which current problem could you treat as an experiment: act first in a small way for one week and then honestly assess how your motivation changed?
3

In complex systems-teams, infrastructure, or even personal information diets-quality and focus almost always beat quantity; adding more people, features, or inputs often introduces friction, vulnerabilities, and hidden costs.

Reflection Questions:

  • • Where in your work or life have you assumed that "more" (people, tools, content) is the answer, and what frictions has that created?
  • • How might your output improve if you ruthlessly removed one distracting tool, person, or information source from your daily environment?
  • • What is one critical system you rely on (team, process, or habit) that you could simplify this quarter to make it more robust and easier to manage?
4

To preserve cognitive freedom in an age of algorithmic feeds and state pressure, you must actively curate what enters your mind and continuously ask who benefits from the information you're consuming.

Reflection Questions:

  • • When you scroll news or social media, how often do you pause to ask who gains from you seeing this and feeling this way?
  • • What specific boundaries around phone and media use could you introduce in the morning and evening to give yourself more original thinking time?
  • • Which single information source could you stop consuming for 30 days as an experiment to see how it affects your mood, focus, and worldview?
5

Abundance without purpose erodes resilience and meaning; imposing voluntary constraints on comfort, consumption, and ease can keep your "mental muscles" sharp in a world that increasingly offers effortless alternatives.

Reflection Questions:

  • • In what areas of your life has comfort started to reduce your drive to grow or contribute?
  • • How could you introduce one deliberate constraint-on spending, entertainment, or convenience-that would force you to exercise creativity and discipline?
  • • What challenging physical, intellectual, or creative project could you commit to over the next six months to counteract the pull toward passive comfort?

Episode Summary - Notes by River

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