Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
37 published records
01 / preference
“Yes, because this way I can contribute to the progress of society. Or at least I like to think this way and this makes me happier.”
02 / belief
“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.”
03 / belief
“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.”
04 / belief
“After having spent many days with you, I learned of something that you’ve never talked about at the time, have not talked about to this day, that there was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018.”
05 / belief
“We enabled them to receive payments from the users through in-app purchase mechanism provided by Apple and Google, which I think was the first attempt of this kind, to allow that both on iOS and Android on a big platform so that third-party developers of mini apps, which are basically websites so deeply integrated into Telegram that you can’t tell whether they’re standalone or they’re part of the overall experience.”
06 / belief
“I think Telegram is still the only one allowing users to do that because you can include 100 of animated emoji in a message and they will be animated and it’ll be moving and your device won’t crash.”
07 / belief
“Another thing we’ve talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought.”
08 / belief
“Most NFTs are just ugly and they’re not based on any sophisticated technology. So what we did with Snoop’s gifts I think represents an example of beautiful, aesthetically pleasing and at the same time very accurate in terms of references to this specific artist’s biography mixture between art and technology, which I think is quite rare.”
09 / evaluation
“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.”
10 / belief
“I think we just talked to a guy a few days ago who left France and started a business here in Dubai and one of the reasons he had to leave France is that the government started an investigation on his company and they frozen his bank accounts and this investigation that involved taxes lasted for many, many years, I believe he said eight years.”
11 / belief
“You sometimes face this dilemma, what are you going to do, this very horrible thing or this also very horrible thing? So I think the right answer to this riddle is not to do any of these things.”
12 / belief
“I realized when you are trying to monetize social media platform in a way that is consistent with your values, you are forced to find ways that benefit your users, not exploit them.”
13 / belief
“I agree with you on the absurdity of this thing because if this was a good faith attempt to fix an issue, there were so many ways to reach out to Telegram, to reach out to me personally, voice their concerns, and solve any alleged problem in a way that is conventional and diplomatic the way every other country on this planet solves these problems, including with Telegram.”
14 / belief
“Actually, it’s one of the main traits of a successful entrepreneur, not agreeing with things. And every time somebody like Elon, but there’s no somebody like Elon, it’s just Elon, I think, at least from the entrepreneurs I know and I personally interacted with, he’s unique in the sense that he keeps launching new things, running them in parallel, and he doesn’t seem to be stretched too thin.”
15 / belief
“I think there is a lot of evidence proving that we are biologically wired to compete and establish our understanding of what our qualities are and talents are in relation to other people around us, and this is one of the ways society self-regulates.”
16 / belief
“First I really have to say for myself from I think millions, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe the entirety of Earth, thank you for putting your life on the line in those cases, I think freedom of speech is fundamental to the flourishing of humanity.”
17 / evaluation
“Now whenever you go to WhatsApp, Instagram direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal, it doesn’t matter, you would see exactly the same or pretty much similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk and innovate.”
18 / belief
“There’s a lot of attack vectors on user privacy and I think the most important, the last wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company, so it’s important to some degree for you to be out there to showing your true self.”
19 / commitment
“We are scared that we won’t become accepted anymore, which thousands of millions of years ago meant we’re going to starve to death. So we have to consciously fight this inclination to be agreeable with everything that the majority imposes on you because it’s quite clear that many things that the majority, many activities the majority is engaging in are not bringing you any good.”
20 / commitment
“Apple didn’t allow us to update Telegram in the app store saying for at least four weeks that we have to come to an agreement with Russia first who said it’s not possible. They said, “We will allow you to push your update for Telegram worldwide except for Russia.”
21 / belief
“I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there’s also misinformation, is about private messages.”
22 / belief
“At some point, we realized there are very few websites online that load faster than VK.”
23 / belief
“I think you mentioned to me one of the things he said was not to just speak of your principles, but to live them, to lead by example.”
24 / belief
“I think I was very lucky to be able to do that and to be able to get away with it in the end because, normally, if you keep challenging authorities, you just get kicked out of all schools and then you end up nowhere.”
25 / belief
“I think you still consider yourself a libertarian. There is something about government that always over time naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy.”
26 / belief
“I think Steve Jobs, Jony Ive talked about this, they would put so much love and effort in the design of everything, including things that weren’t visible in the initial pc, personal computers because they believe that you somehow through osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing and you’re absolutely right.”
27 / belief
“I tried to avoid it as well, but at a certain point I realized that me being too private, too secretive becomes a liability because it creates this void, this emptiness that people and organizations that don’t like Telegram very much are willing to fill with inaccurate information and they’re willing to spread the narratives about Telegram, which can result in strange situations, some of which we discussed earlier.”
28 / commitment
“TON is a blockchain technology that we initially developed in 2018 and 2019, and we started to develop it because we needed a blockchain platform to be integrated deeply into Telegram because we believe in blockchain.”
29 / evaluation
“There was no Telegram. So the government demanded that we take down the opposition groups of Navalny from VK that had hundreds of thousands of members and that were used to organize this protest.”
30 / evaluation
“In Iran, it was a little bit different because we realized it would’ve been too expensive to try to come up with all these IP addresses, and in addition, it was not clear whether we wouldn’t be in violation of the sanctions regime.”
31 / commitment
“Of course, because we would never use, for example, your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata or your activity data to target ads.”
32 / prediction
“One year and three months ahead they just started to test it. They rolled this out I think 2016, which is three years after us and the only reason I think the rest of the industry had to do it is because we set the standard.”
33 / preference
“I think I bought at the local maximum, it’s something like $700 per Bitcoin and I just threw a couple of millions there.”
34 / evaluation
“What you have as a result is high suicide rates, high unemployment, all the things and negative trends you see now in many countries which thought eliminating competition from their education system was a good idea. They still persist, they still think competition is a bad thing, they try to eliminate competition from their economy as well to an extent saying we are going to make sure the losers don’t lose and the winners don’t get too much but, as a result, they make their entire systems less competitive, their entire economies.”
35 / commitment
“Exactly. It’s one of the reasons why I’d like to think I’m an efficient project manager and product manager inside Telegram because I will not take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members.”
36 / commitment
“We designed a system in a way that’s impossible. It’ll require us to change the system and we won’t do that because we made a promise to our users.”
37 / commitment
“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.”