Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…And the government is not some abstract notion. The government consists of people and these people have goals. They would naturally be inclined to increase the level of influence, to have more subordinates, to have more resources. That’s how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens. Ironically, you don’t have those limitations. You’re supposed in all countries, which are considered to be free. It’s supposed to be the constitution that protects everybody, but interestingly, it doesn’t work always this way. They are able to find very tricky phrasings in order to carve out exceptions and then the exception becomes the rule. On this topic, I’d love to talk to you about the recent saga of you being arrested in the August of last year in France. I think I should say that it’s one of the worst overreaches of power I’ve seen as applied to a tech leader in recent history, in all history. So, it’s tragic, but I think speaks to the thing that we’ve been talking about. So, maybe can you tell the full saga what happened? You arrived in France. I arrived in France last year in August just for a short two-day trip and then I see a dozen of armed policemen greeting me and asked me to follow them. They read me a list of something like 15 serious crimes that I’m accused of, which was mind-boggling. At first, I thought there must be some mistake. Then I realized they’re being serious and they’re accusing me of all possible crimes that the users of Telegram have allegedly committed or some users and they think I should be responsible for this, which again, like you said, it’s something that never happened in the history of this planet. No country, not even an authoritarian one did that to any tech leader, at least at this scale. There are good reasons for that because you are sacrificing a big part of your economic growth by sending these messages to the business and tech community. So, they put me in a police car and I found myself in police custody. Small room, no windows, just a narrow bed made of concrete. I spent almost four days there. In the process, I had to answer some questions of the policemen. They were interested in how Telegram operates. Most of it is public anyway, and I was struck by very limited understanding or should I say even lack of understanding on behalf of the people who initiated this investigation against me by how technology works, how encryption works, how social media work.…

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