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

The following is a conversation with Pavo Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over one billion people. Pavo 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 user 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 one hundred percent 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 at first, When you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case Telegram did it first.

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