Lex Fridman Podcast

Podbit · Lex Fridman Podcast

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

Explore episode Oct 1, 2025
True Crime
The 2018 Poisoning: Durov Thought He Was Going to Die

#482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, P… · Oct 1, 2025 True Crime

In spring 2018, Durov came home to find something left by a strange neighbor near his door. An hour later, he was losing his eyesight, hearing, and ability to breathe — collapsing on the floor in acute pain across his entire body. He woke up the next morning unable to stand, blood vessels broken across his skin, unable to walk for two weeks. He never went public because he didn't want to alarm his team.

7m 40s

Where this was said

Poisoning

At 3:08:20 · chapter starts 3:07:33

This is the most dramatic disclosure in the episode. In spring 2018, Durov returned to his rented townhouse to find something left by a strange neighbor near his door. Within an hour of being in his apartment, he began to feel severe pain throughout his body, then lost his eyesight, then his hearing, then his ability to breathe normally — an experience he describes as systems shutting off one by one. He collapsed on the floor. He has no memory of falling. He woke up the next morning, still on the floor, unable to stand, with blood vessels broken across his arms and body. He could not walk for two weeks. He told almost no one on his team, not wanting to alarm them. He thought he was dying, and in that moment, he concluded he had had a good life and accomplished something meaningful. His response to this experience, counterintuitively, was to feel freer rather than more afraid — another expression of his core philosophy that confronting mortality head-on neutralizes its power to constrain behavior. He then traces this back to December 2011, when he publicly defied a Russian prosecutor's demand to shut down Navalny's opposition groups on VK — posting the demand alongside a photo of a dog in a hoodie with tongue out as his 'official response.' Armed police showed up at his apartment. He decided then that if arrested, he would rather starve himself to death than compromise. That was the moment he began secretly designing Telegram, waiting for the right moment to leave Russia.

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