"The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become. I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure."

In a rare and extensive interview, Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the billion-user messaging platform Telegram, sat down with the Lex Fridman Podcast for a conversation that spanned his core philosophies on freedom, the company’s unique engineering culture, and the explosive details of his 2024 arrest in France. Over several hours, Durov painted a picture of a leader unflinchingly committed to his principles, even in the face of immense pressure from some of the world’s most powerful governments.

The Philosophy of a Contrarian: Freedom, Discipline, and Mortality

From the outset, Durov framed his life’s work as a battle for freedom, a value he said was shaped by his early childhood experience moving from the Soviet Union to Italy. “Even for a four or five year old kid, it was obvious,” he stated, contrasting the lack of “opinions, of ideas, of goods, and services” in a society without freedom. This core belief, he explained, is defended by conquering two primary adversaries: “The biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed.”

Durov’s strategy for defeating fear is starkly stoic. When asked if he contemplates his own death, he replied, “Oh, yes.” He elaborated, “It’s worth living your life according to the principles that you believe in, even though this life can end up being shorter than a longer life, but lived in slavery.” This mindset, he argued, makes him immune to threats. “Worst case, they can kill you. But that brings us back to the first part of our discussion. There’s no point living your life in fear.”

This philosophy underpins a famously disciplined and ascetic lifestyle. Durov confirmed his “20 plus years of complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, pills, and illegal drugs,” stating bluntly, “Short-term pleasure isn’t worth your future.” He described alcohol’s effect with scientific precision, learned from a biochemistry book at age 11: “When you drink alcohol… your brain cells become paralyzed. They become literally zombies… 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? This sounds ridiculous.”

His advice for others is to confront the underlying issues that lead to substance use. “Very often, people are trying to escape something in their lives with alcohol… Your mind is trying to tell you something valuable, and instead of addressing it directly, you are flooding it in alcohol, which is sort of a spiritual painkiller, but works only temporarily, and then you have to pay the debt with interest.”

This contrarian approach extends to his daily habits. Durov famously avoids using a smartphone for anything other than testing Telegram, a practice he maintained during his weeks with Fridman. “I don’t think a phone is a necessary device,” he said. “I want to define what is important in my life. I don’t want other people or companies… telling me what is important today and what I should be thinking about.” He values quiet time, especially in the mornings, for deep thought, a practice he protects from digital intrusion. “If you open your phone first thing in the morning,” he warned, “what you end up being is a creature that is told what to think about for the rest of the day.”

The Arrest: A ‘Kafkaesque’ Saga in France

The conversation took a dramatic turn as Durov detailed his arrest at a Paris airport in August 2024. “I arrived in France… for a short two-day trip,” he recounted, “and then I see a dozen armed policemen greeting me and asking me to follow them.” He was read a list of “something like 15 serious crimes,” which he found “mind-boggling.”

The accusations, he explained, held him personally responsible for alleged crimes committed by some Telegram users—an unprecedented legal action against a tech leader. “No country, not even an authoritarian one, did that to any tech leader,” he stated. What followed was nearly four days in police custody in “a small room, no windows. Just a narrow bed made of concrete.”

Durov described the experience as a real-life version of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” highlighting the “absurdity” and the officials’ “very limited understanding, or should I say, even a lack of understanding… about how technology works, how encryption works, how social media work.” He argued that if the French government had a genuine issue, “there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram… the way every other country on this planet solves its problems.”

The legal ordeal is ongoing. Durov is under the purview of a French “investigative judge,” a system he finds opaque and “painfully slow.” Though his initial travel ban has been eased to allow travel to Dubai, he remains restricted.

Resisting State Pressure: The Romanian and Moldovan Elections

The arrest, Durov revealed, became a leverage point for political pressure. He was approached by the head of France’s foreign intelligence service, who asked him to censor Telegram channels in Romania that supported a conservative candidate ahead of a presidential election.

His response was uncompromising. “I said, ‘Look, if there is no violation of the rules of Telegram, which are quite clear, you can’t call to violence… we can’t do this. It would be political censorship.’” He recounted his direct message to the intelligence chief: “If you think that because I’m stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you’re very wrong. I would rather do the opposite every time.” Durov later publicly disclosed the entire conversation.

This was not an isolated incident. He described a similar request regarding channels in Moldova, where French intelligence acted as an intermediary. After Telegram took down a few channels that genuinely violated its rules, he received a shocking message. The French intelligence contact let him know “they talked to my judge… and told the judge good things about me, which I found very confusing, and in a way shocking, because these two matters have nothing in common.” The incident solidified his suspicion that the legal case was being used for political ends.

Durov’s resolve remains unshaken. “The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become,” he declared. “I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure… If you submit… you become broken inside. You become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.” He concluded with a stark hypothetical: “If they put me into prison for 20 years… I would rather starve myself to death and die there… than do something stupid.”

The Telegram Way: Lean Engineering and Uncompromising Privacy

Durov attributed Telegram’s rapid innovation to its radically lean structure, run by a core engineering team of about 40 people. “What we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn’t translate to quality of the product,” he explained. “In many cases, it’s the opposite.” He argued that large teams get bogged down in communication overhead, and idle employees “demotivate everybody else.”

By intentionally not allowing teams to hire more people, “they will be forced to automate things.” This philosophy has allowed Telegram to manage its massive infrastructure of nearly 100,000 servers with minimal human intervention. “Humans are attack vectors,” Durov noted. “If you have a distributed system that runs itself automatically, you have a chance at increasing the security and speed of your service.”

This ethos extends to his hiring process, which shuns traditional recruiting in favor of coding competitions. This allows him to identify top-tier talent and filter out those conditioned by what he sees as the inefficiencies of big tech. When asked why he wouldn’t hire from LinkedIn, he quipped, “Why would I even try to hire somebody… who worked at Google and other companies, is used to receiving a salary for nothing, is used to shifting responsibility and being stuck in endless meetings, and has very limited understanding of what Telegram stands for? It’s just crazy if you think about it.”

On privacy, Durov was adamant. He reiterated that Telegram’s architecture, with data encrypted and decryption keys split across multiple jurisdictions, makes it impossible for anyone—including employees—to access private user messages. “Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services,” he stated firmly. Should a government demand a backdoor, his stance is clear: “We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.” He also highlighted that Telegram is the only major messaging app with open-source, reproducible builds for both iOS and Android, allowing anyone to verify that the app’s code matches what is publicly available.

A Life on the Line: The 2018 Assassination Attempt

In one of the most stunning moments of the interview, Durov recounted what he believes was an assassination attempt by poisoning in the spring of 2018, a period when Telegram was under intense pressure from multiple governments. “That was the only instant in my life when I think I was dying,” he said. After returning to his rented home, he fell violently ill.

“I felt pain all over my body… I felt that functions of my body started to switch off. First, the eyesight and hearing, then I had difficulty breathing, everything accompanied by very acute pain.” He believed it was the end: “Yeah, this is it. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see anything. It was very painful.” He collapsed and woke up on the floor the next day, unable to walk for two weeks, with broken blood vessels all over his body.

Rather than instilling fear, Durov said the experience had the opposite effect. “Interestingly, not at all. If anything, I felt even more free after that… After you survive something like this, you feel like you’re living on bonus time. So in a way, you died a long time ago, and every new day you get is a gift.”