The most powerful intelligence agency | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman

📅 Oct 10, 2025 Lex Clips 11 MIN 63635 VIEWS 11 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS

Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship... Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/cv934... See below for guest bio, links, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. GUEST BIO: Pavel Durov is the founder and CEO of Telegram. CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPI...

Questions asked in this interview

0:03Is there any intelligence agency you're afraid of? Any government you're afraid of?
1:15Can you take me through that saga in 2018?

Interviewer 0:03 ↗

You yourself have faced the full force of various governments, intelligence agencies. Is there any intelligence agency you're afraid of? Any government you're afraid of?

Pavel Durov 0:19 ↗

I think they're all equally should be equally afraid of or equally not afraid of in a way. It's not that this intelligence service can kill you and the other can't kill you. They all can kill you. I guess they all can kill me one way or the other, but it's a matter of whether I'm afraid of death.

Interviewer 0:38 ↗

This goes back to the beginning of our conversation, I think, multiple times. So, you're in general fearless in the face of the pressure.

Pavel Durov 0:46 ↗

That would be a very bold statement, but I proved to be quite stress resilient. And it's not that you don't have fear. You can have fear but you overcome this fear. I don't think there is anything at this point that can happen to change the way I am.

Interviewer 1:15 ↗

So you went through a lot from 2011 to 2014, government pressure that you refused to give into that led you to create Telegram and let go of VK. And then in 2018, Russia and Iran decided to ban Telegram. That was another example of pressure. Can you take me through that saga in 2018?

6 more exchanges in this transcript

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX

APA

Durov, P. (2025, October 10). The most powerful intelligence agency | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman [Interview transcript]. Lex Clips. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1028733/

MLA

Pavel Durov. "The most powerful intelligence agency | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman." Lex Clips, 10 Oct. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1028733/.

BibTeX

@misc{durov2025_1028733,
  author       = {Pavel Durov},
  title        = {The most powerful intelligence agency | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, Lex Clips. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2025},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1028733/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}

▶

Key Quotes (2)

“In 2018, Telegram started to become popular. I think we had something like 200 million users. And it increasingly became popular in places like Iran and Russia and other countries where sometimes people have something to hide from the government.”

▶ 1:42

“We created an economic incentive for people who would set up proxy servers for Telegram. Any person, say an Iranian engineer, could come up with a proxy server, distribute its address among users in Iran and whoever connected through the proxy of this person would be able to see a pinned chat, an ad placed there by the system administrator, the owner of the proxy. And this is how you can monetize ”

▶ 9:54

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About Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, has spoken at the Oslo Freedom Forum and other events about what he describes as the erosion of personal freedoms in Western countries. He has argued that governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the European Commission are using child protection as a pretext for measures that he says are actually aimed at controlling political speech online. Durov cited a submission by the British government to the High Court of England, which he quoted as stating that the "main part of the Online Safety Act was aimed at capturing large platforms with significant influence over public discourse." He also claimed that thousands of people are arrested annually in the UK for social media posts and that in Germany, insulting a politician online can lead to a prison sentence of up to three years. Durov has also discussed his own detention in Paris, where he said he was interrogated for nearly three days. He recounted that a translator present during the interrogation told him she felt "like the Soviet Union is catching up with me." He has warned that with the rise of AI, if privacy rights are surrendered, "every message that you send will be monitored, will be analyzed, every draft, every thought, every idea will be scored, every relationship will be mapped." Durov has further argued that government attempts to ban Telegram in Russia and Iran failed, as the majority of the population in those countries still uses the platform via VPNs, and he suggested that forcing teenagers to use VPNs exposes them to greater dangers.

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