Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship...
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Pavel Durov is the founder and CEO of Telegram.
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EPI...
Questions asked in this interview
4
0:03Can you explain the strength of this approach?
2:07Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?
3:08Do you see in the future a possible scenario where you might share user private messages with governments or with intelligence agencies?
3:48What, where do you find the strength and the fearlessness to say no to everybody, including powerful intelligence agencies, including powerful governments, influential, powerful people?
Yeah, one of the big ways you protect user privacy is that you store the data. The infrastructure side of Telegram is distributed across many legal jurisdictions with the decryption keys. So it's encrypted in the cloud. The decryption keys are split and kept in different locations so that no single government or entity can access the data. Can you explain the strength of this approach?
The way we designed Telegram is we never wanted to have any humans, any employees, have any access to private messaging data. That's why since 2012, when we've been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it. Like if you hire an employee or any of the existing employees, they can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users. And then of course we launched encrypted messaging that is even more protected, but it has certain limitations. So you still have to rely on encrypted cloud. So an interesting engineering challenge was how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.
So no employee can even access user messages. So that's the thing, you know, we talk about encryption, we talk about privacy, we talk about security, all these kinds of things. I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there's also misinformation, is about private messages. So Telegram is very, very protective of the private messages of users. So you're saying employees never can access the private messages.
Have any governments or intelligence agencies ever accessed private user messages in the past?
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 a way that is undecipherable. That was very important for us. That's why we can say with confidence there hasn't ever been a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram, not in terms of private messages, not in terms of contact lists.
No, we designed the system in a way that's impossible. It would 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.
I mean, this is a good, good place to ask. I'm sure you're pressured by all kinds of people, all kinds of organizations to share private data. What, where do you find the strength and the fearlessness to say no to everybody, including powerful intelligence agencies, including powerful governments, influential, powerful people?
9 more exchanges in this transcript
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Durov, P. (2025, October 7). Telegram vs Intelligence Agencies: We'll never give in | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman [Interview transcript]. Lex Clips. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1084653/
MLA
Pavel Durov. "Telegram vs Intelligence Agencies: We'll never give in | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman." Lex Clips, 7 Oct. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1084653/.
BibTeX
@misc{durov2025_1084653,
author = {Pavel Durov},
title = {Telegram vs Intelligence Agencies: We'll never give in | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Lex Clips. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1084653/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
