Pavel Durov on his intense Soviet education | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St. Petersburg where I lived and you had to pass a rigorous test to get accepted. The idea behind the school was that if you try to squeeze as much information as possible into a brain of a teenager, making a focus on maths and foreign languages, then there will be some changes in the brain of the student that will allow the student to understand most other disciplines. But we had a class as a result that didn't have any single focus. It was very widespread across a lot of disciplines. You would have four foreign languages at least including Latin, English, French, German. In addition, you can get ancient Greek. You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis or evolutionary psychology. The difference of this class as opposed to other classes in the same school, which was part of the St. Petersburg State University and called academic gymnasium, was that unlike other classes which were specialized in some single subject like physics or maths or history, this one tried to get the best from all of the specialized classes and bring into one curriculum. Since it was an experimental class, it wasn't possible to become a straight-A student to be excellent in all the subjects.

Yes. See what happens. This was an experiment. Yeah. Yeah. And it was in the middle of the '90s, remember when Russia, particularly its educational system, wasn't regulated as much as it is today. It was in the middle between the two stages of the Russian history, the Soviet history, and the modern Russian history of the 21st century. In any case, I learned a lot from that experience. First of all, why I got into the school is because I kept being kicked out from other schools.

I was good at all subjects but not behavior. You know, we had this behavior grade in the Soviet Union and early '90s. Perhaps they even have it today. I'm not sure. I was very bad at behavior. Always challenging the teachers, always pointing out their mistakes.