Here's my 4 hour conversation with Pavel Durov (
@durov), founder and CEO of Telegram. This was one of the most fascinating and powerful conversations I've ever had in my life.
We discuss everything from his philosophy on freedom to government bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, human nature, mathematics, encryption, great engineering & design, education, family, and his philosophy on life.
It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). It is translated and dubbed into Russian, Ukrainian, French, and Hindi.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
3:07 - Philosophy of freedom
6:15 - No alcohol
14:20 - No phone
20:16 - Discipline
41:28 - Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics
56:50 - Arrest in France
1:13:01 - Romanian elections
1:23:56 - Power and corruption
1:33:29 - Intense education
1:45:29 - Nikolai Durov
1:49:58 - Programming and video games
1:54:11 - VK origins & engineering
2:11:24 - Hiring a great team
2:20:40 - Telegram engineering & design
2:39:42 - Encryption
2:44:39 - Open source
2:49:26 - Edward Snowden
2:51:58 - Intelligence agencies
2:53:10 - Iran and Russia government pressure
2:56:19 - Apple
3:03:16 - Poisoning
3:29:28 - Elon Musk
3:35:31 - Money
3:44:23 - TON
3:54:13 - Bitcoin
3:57:12 - Two chairs dilemma
4:03:52 - Children
4:15:02 - Father
4:19:33 - Quantum immortality
4:26:05 - Kafka