What Pavel Durov told Lex Fridman in a four-hour conversation

Pavel Durov gave his most extensive interview to date, a four-hour conversation with American podcaster Lex Fridman.

In it, he shared his personal principles, spoke about Telegram’s management philosophy, and for the first time publicly described an attempt on his life. We watched it for you and pulled out the highlights.

Smartphone: “I don’t think a phone is a necessary device”

Durov admitted he only picks up a phone when testing new Telegram features. As a child and even during university, he never had a mobile. When he finally got one, he barely used it — most of the time it was in airplane mode or on silent.

“I hated the idea of being disturbed,” he said. Today, the Telegram founder prefers to “define what is important in my life” rather than follow someone else’s agenda.

Alcohol: “it’s ridiculous”

At the age of 11, Durov’s biochemistry teacher gave him a book called The Illusion of Paradise, which described the biological processes that occur in the body when consuming alcohol and other substances. That experience shaped his lifelong attitude toward harmful habits.

He explained that when a person drinks alcohol, a process of paralysis occurs in brain cells: “they become literally zombies.” As a result, some of these cells die and never regenerate. “If your brain is the most valuable tool you have in your journey to success and happiness, why would you destroy this tool for short-term pleasure?” he concluded.

Self-discipline: 300 squats a day

The Telegram founder’s daily routine includes 300 push-ups and 300 squats. He also trains in the gym 5–6 times a week. For him, it’s not about appearance but discipline:

I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline.

Durov also noted that strict routines help him psychologically: “don’t remember having depression in the last 20 years at least.”

Team: “quantity doesn’t translate into quality”

According to Durov, Telegram’s core engineering team consists of just around 40 people. “Quantity of employees doesn’t translate into the quality of the product,” he explained.

Larger companies, he said, spend too much time on “coordinating the small pieces of work they’re responsible for between each other.” And along with that, there inevitably appear employees who “don’t get enough work to do” and eventually “disrupt the team.”

At Telegram, the opposite approach applies: deliberately limiting headcount, which forces engineers to automate. Today, the messenger manages almost 100,000 servers across several continents — a scale that would otherwise require tens of thousands of staff. According to Durov, this approach not only makes Telegram efficient and scalable, but also more resilient to geopolitical shifts.

Privacy: “never shared a single private message”

Durov emphasized that Telegram’s architecture is designed so that no one in the world can read users’ private messages. Data is stored on servers worldwide in encrypted form. Even if someone seized a hard drive from a data center, they would only see encrypted fragments. He noted that in the entire history of Telegram, there has not been a single data leak.

He added: “Telegram never shared a single private message with anyone, including government and intelligence services.” If authorities demand access, he said, he would rather shut Telegram down in that country.

Nikolai Durov: “he was my Wikipedia”

Pavel said that his brother Nikolai had an enormous influence on his education. “When we used to be kids, we slept in the same bedroom, and I kept bugging him with questions. I would ask him about dinosaurs, and galaxies, and black holes, and Neanderthals.  

According to Durov, “he’s a unique prodigy kid, probably one in a billion.” From an early age, Nikolai devoured books that often seemed incomprehensible even to adults.

Programming: “scarcity leads to creativity”

According to Durov, programming did not attract him at first. He only got access to the Internet at the age of ten, and with few video games available, he had to invent his own ideas. “Scarcity leads to creativity,” he says. That same lack of resources, in his view, explains why so many programmers came from the former Soviet Union.

Poisoning: “I think I was dying”

Fridman reminded Durov about the poisoning incident: “There was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018.”

According to Durov, it happened in the spring of that year, when several countries were blocking Telegram and the team was raising funds for TON. “It wasn’t the best moment for me to start sharing anything related to my personal health,” he explained. Normally, he feels perfectly healthy. But that night was different: “I think I was dying.”

It began after a “weird neighbor” left something at the door of a rented townhouse. An hour later, he felt severe pain throughout his body. His muscles stopped responding, his vision and hearing blurred, and breathing became difficult. The worst pain struck his heart, stomach, and blood vessels. He collapsed on the floor, certain he would die. The next morning, he was too weak to walk and remained that way for two weeks.

But afterward, he said he felt even freer:

Interest, not at all. I felt even more free after that. It wasn’t the first time I thought I was going to die. I had an experience when I assumed something bad was going to happen to me a few years before that, also in relation to my work. But 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.

The Two Chairs: “reframe the question”

Durov also explained the meaning of the popular “two chairs dilemma” (one of which has sharp spikes).

Durov explained that the riddle is a metaphor for being forced to choose between two bad options. In his view, the right move is not to pick either one. “Not to do any of these things. Reframe the question. Design a solution that turns disadvantage into an advantage,” he said.

As a practical illustration, he suggested a literal trick: "take the sharp objects from one of the chairs (the spikes) and use them to cut off the objects from the other chair."