Speaker
Pavel Durov
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Telegram, used by over 1 billion people, is built and maintained by a core engineering team of roughly 40 people including backend, frontend, designers, and sysadmins.
Pavel Durov does 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning before going to the gym 5–6 times per week for 1–2 hours.
Telegram became profitable for the first time in 2024, generating over $500 million in annual premium subscription revenue alone from 15+ million paid subscribers.
Telegram has over 15 million paid premium subscribers paying roughly $4–5/month, contributing significant recurring revenue.
Durov estimates Telegram leaves approximately 80% of potential advertising revenue on the table by refusing to use personal user data for targeted ads.
Telegram's auto-delete timer feature, launched in 2013 in secret chats, was 7 years ahead of WhatsApp, which copied it along with the exact same timestamp options.
Telegram sold $12 million worth of Snoop Dogg digital gifts within 30 minutes of launch, demonstrating the massive commercial potential of the Telegram Gifts platform.
In spring 2018, Durov believes he was poisoned near his home, losing sight, hearing, and ability to breathe, collapsing on the floor and finding himself there the next morning, unable to walk for 2 weeks.
Despite Iran banning Telegram, approximately 50 million Iranians continue to use it via proxies and VPNs, aided by an incentive system Telegram created for proxy operators.
Telegram launched vector-based animated stickers 3 years and 8 months before WhatsApp, and WhatsApp's first version used inferior GIF/WebM formats rather than vector graphics.
France's public expenditures amount to approximately 58% of GDP, which Durov compared to or suggested may exceed the public spending levels of the Soviet Union in its final stages.
Telegram has never shared a single private user message with any government or intelligence agency since its founding, and the system is designed to make it technically impossible.
Russia banned Telegram in 2018 after demanding encryption keys, but Telegram's digital resistance tools kept the service accessible while the ban inadvertently took down Russian banks and social networks.
First Telegram gift collections initially sold for around $5 per item; those same items now trade at a minimum floor price of approximately $10,000 on secondary markets.
Following the launch of Telegram Gifts six months prior to this recording, the TON blockchain became either the largest or second-largest blockchain by daily NFT trading volumes.
Durov experienced the contrast between Soviet repression and Italian abundance as a 4-year-old, crystallizing his lifelong commitment to freedom. His armor: imagine the worst that can happen, make peace with it, and there's nothing left to fear.
Telegram serves over a billion users with a core engineering team of roughly 40 people. Durov's counterintuitive logic: more employees means more coordination overhead and more people inventing problems that don't exist. Forced leanness forces automation, and automation scales forever.
Telegram has never shared a single private message with any government or intelligence agency. The system is designed so that even Telegram employees cannot access user messages — extract every hard drive from every server globally, and you get nothing decipherable. If a country wants a backdoor, Durov's answer is two words he won't print.
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.
Russia demanded Telegram's encryption keys in 2017-18. When Telegram refused, Russia banned the app — and Telegram fought back with a 'Digital Resistance' campaign, burning through millions of IP addresses to stay online. The blowback: Russian banks and social networks went offline as collateral damage from the censor's own blocks.
Open source isn't enough — any app could publish code while shipping something different. Telegram is the only popular messaging app with reproducible builds on both iOS and Android, letting anyone verify that the source code on GitHub matches the exact binary you download. WhatsApp has never been open source at all.
Telegram hires almost exclusively through public coding competitions, tracking contestants as young as 14 who return across 10+ contests over years. The logic: why hire from LinkedIn people used to getting paid for doing nothing in Big Tech meetings? The best engineer is someone who has used Telegram obsessively and can rebuild it from first principles.
Telegram Gifts are blockchain-based collectibles that live next to your name in your Telegram profile — not lost in some isolated wallet. Snoop Dogg gifts sold $12 million worth in 30 minutes, and original collections that launched at $5 per item now have a floor price of $10,000. This is what happens when art, engineering, and social relevance collide at billion-user scale.
Durov explored the thought experiment of quantum immortality: if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, then every time you 'die', you only experience the branch of reality where you survive. There may be universes where Durov died in 2013 — but in this one, he's still here, and conscious experience can only ever find itself alive.
About 15 years ago, Durov began donating sperm to help couples struggling with fertility, eventually leading to an estimated 100+ biological children he has never met. He's since updated his will to treat all biological children equally — they're entitled to a share of his estate once they can establish DNA, but receive nothing during his lifetime to preserve their drive.
Lex Fridman delivers a moving reflection on Kafka's The Trial, arguing that its central horror — being held in the permanent looming possibility of a trial without ever facing one — maps precisely onto Durov's situation in France. Tyranny's final victory, Fridman concludes, is not when it kills you, but when it exhausts you into holding still for the knife.
Universe 25 gave mice unlimited food, water, and safety — and they went extinct anyway. Social roles eroded, reproduction crashed, and the collapse was irreversible. Durov sees parallels to human society: we evolved to overcome scarcity, and when there's nothing left to overcome, purpose collapses. This is the hidden danger of AI-driven abundance.
Nikolai Durov started reading at 3, was reading advanced astronomy books on buses at 6 (to the horror of onlookers), won IMO gold 3 times, ICPC twice, holds 2 math PhDs, and rewrote large chunks of VK's infrastructure in C and C++ to make it faster than Facebook. Pavel says he learned practically everything he knows from Nikolai.
Durov bought his first Bitcoin at around $700 in 2013 and ignored everyone who felt sorry for him when the price fell. He believes Bitcoin will eventually reach $1 million because governments keep printing money while Bitcoin has a fixed, predictable supply that eventually stops. He's funded his lifestyle from Bitcoin — not from Telegram.
At age 11, a biochemistry teacher gave Durov a book explaining what alcohol actually does to brain cells — paralyzes them, kills some permanently. If your brain is your most valuable tool, why destroy it for short-term pleasure? He's been alcohol-free for over 20 years since.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Health & Fitness 29%
- Society & Culture 29%
- Education 14%
- Government 14%
- Business 7%
- Technology 7%
Connections
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