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Published · transcript-backed

Pavel Durov: commitment

1 Oct 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #482 – Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature

“I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like at least during these four days in police custody when you are just stuck, unable to communicate with people that are important to you, when you don’t even know what’s going on in the world in relation to you personally.”

— Pavel Durov

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Pavel Durov
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
commitment
Recorded
1 Oct 2025
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…I mean, but it does as Kafka describes break a lot of people with time. So, we should say that you’re for a long time not allowed to travel out of France. Now you can travel to Dubai. We’re now in Dubai, got to meet many of the people that work at Telegram. Telegram is headquartered in Dubai, but you’re not allowed to travel anywhere else. When do you think you’re coming to Texas to hang out with me over there? That’s a hard question to answer because it doesn’t depend on just my actions. I can just say this, I’m patient. I will not let this limitation on my freedom dictate my actions. I will, if anything, double down on defending freedoms because I experienced firsthand what the absence of freedom feels like at least during these four days in police custody when you are just stuck, unable to communicate with people that are important to you, when you don’t even know what’s going on in the world in relation to you personally. So, I have no crystal ball that would tell me the future. I can’t say that I am pessimistic. I think we’ve been able to gradually remove most of the restrictions initially imposed on my freedom last August. If the French government or the French intelligence agency want to have a back door or want to access private user messages, what would you say to them? Is there anything they can do to get access to the private user messages?…

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