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

Pavel Durov: When I was 11 years old, my biochemistry teacher, he gave me this book he wrote. It was called The Illusion of Paradise. And there he would describe the biological and chemical processes that happen in your body once you consume this or that substance. It was mainly related to illegal drugs, but alcohol was one of these addictive substances that he covered. So it turns out that when you drink alcohol, the thing that happens is that your brain cells become paralyzed. They become literally zombies. And then next day, sometime after the party is over, some of your brain cells die and never get to normal. So think about this. If your brain is this most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure?

Pavel Durov: If you're doing something that everybody else is doing anyway, what's the value of it? It sounds easier than it is done to do something that nobody else is doing, because we humans are surrounded by all kinds of information, which makes us want to copy what we are perceiving. At the same time, there are so many areas which you can explore that have nothing to do with the information you receive on a daily basis. So it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important, so that you end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else. But rather you should be proactive. You should deliberately try to set a goal, an area that you want to explore, and then actively search information that is relevant to this field so that one day you can become the world's number one expert in this field. And it's not quite, it's not that difficult to do that. You have to just remain consistent because nobody else is trying to do that. Everybody else is just reading the same news and discussing the same news every day.

Pavel Durov: What we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate the quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other. The other problem with having too many employees is that some of them won't get enough work to do. And if they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence. ... Also, when you intentionally don't allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them, they will be forced to automate things. In our case, we have 10s of thousands of servers around the world, almost 100,000, distributed across several continents and data centers. If you try to manage this system manually without automation, you will probably end up hiring thousands of people, 10s of thousands of people. But if you rely on algorithms and the team is forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient, and interestingly, much more reliable as well.

Pavel Durov: Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it's all encrypted. You can extract all the hard drives and analyze it, but you won't get anything. It's all encrypted in the way that is undecipherable. That was very important for us. That's why we can say with confidence there hasn't been ever a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram, not in terms of private messages, not in terms of, say, contact lists. ... We design a system in a way that's impossible. It will require us to change the system and we won't do that because we made a promise to our users. We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.