Hero of Privacy: Pavel Durov
Lex Fridman interviewed Pavel Durov on his podcast and they spoke about a lot of topics from philosophy and purpose and life to governments and free speech and fear of death. If you look at Durov’s Wikipedia page you see he has 4 citizenships, including St Kitts & Nevis, a famous “I’m a citizen of the world” passport.
The founder of Telegram messaging app and VKontakte (social networking site more popular in Russia), Durov has been threatened by federal police, jailed and even poisoned, all because of his singular focus on protecting free speech. For those who don’t know, Telegram is the pioneer of end-to-end encrypted messaging (which is wild now to imagine a world without end-to-end encryption), protecting your messages from:
- bad actors
- political oppression
- haters
- etc
An example from this episode that stuck out at me was when he mentioned how groups and chats form on politically biased themes, clearly stating his app, Telegram, will not prevent this. And then he mentioned that the political other side does the same thing. Republicans, Democrats. Russians, Ukrainians. And in given situations, both sides, while complaining that the other side has no merit, agree that it’s better if they have the app to use.
He also told a story of Telegram in Iran, where the government worked overtime to shut it down, because if you’re a tyrannical government and you can’t control something, you smash it to pieces. But they couldn’t because as the known Telegram server IPs were being blocked by the government, private citizens in Iran were lining up to get paid by Telegram to set up private proxy servers so Telegram could continue to operate under the radar. The best and worst thing about technology is this: by design technological innovation will always be ahead of government regulation.
This episode is worth a listen.
Kafkas “A Hunger Artist”
Some books you read, you finish and realize that they definitely should’ve just been a blog post. Other times, you hear a simple book summary, and it’s profound in its summarized form. But you realize that if it were only ever in its summarized form, we’d never be talking about it today because it was the classic novel or classic literature that actually made the summary worth telling or the story worth summarizing in the first place. It’s only a summary worth remembering because of the iconic piece it became.
I had an epiphany when Pavel Durov mentioned in a recent interview the significance Kafka’s A Hunger Artist has in today’s attention economy. I realized that the novel explains in great detail a concept or idea that is important enough it gets written to the annals of human intellect. Then and only then, can the summary of such a work itself be profound.
Show and Tell
Are you smarter than a kindergartner? My son is in Pre-K and has to take a toy to school each week and show it to the class. Each toy must fit into a gallon-sized bag, and before revealing it, he gives three clues to the class to try and guess what it is. This one starts with a ‘C’.
- three colors
- two eyes
- three fins
Look for the answer in next week’s email!
Last week’s answer: Beluga!
Connecticut Pizza Trail
For those curious, Connecticut is the pizza capital of the US.
CTVisit.com released the CT Pizza Trail Map, a map of all the greatest pizza restaurants in the state. Fun fact: the guy who started Riko’s pizza used to be the pizza guy at Colony Grill, a famous Stamford-based pizza pub. He realized he had the secret sauce and went and started his own franchise business (Riko’s) making a similar style Hot Oil pizza in direct competition with Colony. I’m pretty sure those Riko’s franchises print money.
So check out that map – that’s a lot of pizza!