Lincoln Made Politics an Art. The Modern Presidency Made It a Superpower.

Asked who was the greatest American president, Jeremi Suri does not hesitate: Abraham Lincoln. He reaches for a story Tolstoy told from the Caucasus. Serving there, Tolstoy asked local peasants who was the greatest man in the world they had heard of. They said Lincoln, Suri recounts, because he gave voice to people who had none and turned politics into an art. Lincoln had two years of schooling, yet he mastered English well enough to help people imagine a different world. Presidents are at their best, Suri says, when they do more than manipulate institutions: when they help a public see a better one.

The voiceless were not only enslaved African Americans. Immigrants, and poor white men without land or slaves, were part of the same republican project. Lincoln himself had been one of those men. What he represented, Suri tells Lex Fridman, was *opportunity*: not getting rich, but being compensated for hard work and incentivized to do better work. That, in Suri’s reading, was the core of the nineteenth-century Republican Party and of the capitalism Lincoln wanted for everyone else. William Herndon, Lincoln’s partner, called him a little engine of ambition that would not stop. He taught himself to read and to be a lawyer, failed in business and in love, and kept going. American society offered him the chance to fail and try again. He wanted that chance for others.

The hunger, Suri thinks, was not mainly for power. It was for success, for leaving poverty, for control over his own life. Freedom for Lincoln did not mean the right to do anything you want. It meant the right to be secure from depending on someone else. In early letters he wrote that he hated being dependent on his father, a struggling farmer who, Lincoln felt, treated him like a slave on the farm. Some scholars trace his hatred of slavery to that experience. He wanted never to work for someone again, and he wanted every American, in a Jeffersonian sense, to own themselves and their future. Fridman calls it a sturdier definition than the abstract license to do anything. Suri agrees: even the freest person cannot control outcomes. Freedom is the chance to make the choices, rather than have someone make them for you.

Lincoln never read Carl von Clausewitz, Suri says, but he lived the same wisdom: everything is politics if you want to get anything done, including relationships. Politics means persuading, coercing, and encouraging people to do what they would not otherwise do. Lincoln was a master of that for two reasons. A hard life had taught him to read people and to spend a lot of time listening. Suri often tells people that the best leaders are the listeners, not the talkers. Second, Lincoln planned every move. He was thinking three, four, maybe five moves down the chessboard while others were still on move one or two. Fridman reaches for a fighting analogy: the early rounds of boxing or mixed martial arts are not the fight yet. They are the study of an opponent’s movement, looking for holes.

Fridman, reading about Hitler, keeps wondering what that man did alone in a room. Some leaders, he suspects, were more effective one-on-one than on the balcony. Suri’s answer is that you need both, and most leaders are better at one than the other. If you run a complex organization rather than a startup, with unions, boards, and rival constituencies, the one-on-one has to be excellent, because that is the day. The intangibles matter most. Lincoln’s skill, which Franklin Roosevelt also had, was storytelling. He was willing to argue, but he preferred to move you with a story that made you see your own position differently and disarmed you. Reagan did the same. Stalin, from what Suri has read, was a one-on-one storyteller too, though he does not want Lincoln compared to him.

The word for that effect, Suri says, is Max Weber’s: charisma, coined for prophets, a kind of magic. It can come from bearing or from words, but two things seem required. You have to size up the person across the table rather than walk in and read a brief. And it is interactive; it needs quickness of thought. Suri does not think Donald Trump is a deep thinker, but he is quick, and that quickness is a different skill from delivering a forty-five-minute analysis. Coupled with it is an instinct for what the other person worries about. Fridman recalls Stephen Schwarzman describing the method: ask enough questions to find the biggest problem in someone’s life, because that is what they actually care about. Most people never bother. Find it, and closeness follows, and then you can move them.

Americans talk as if “president” were a timeless noun. Suri has spent a career arguing that it is not. Lincoln would not recognize the office 150 years later, and George Washington would not have recognized Lincoln’s. A CEO today, he adds, would be unrecognizable to a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. He names three changes. First, presidents now speak to the public directly. They can use Twitter to circumvent every newspaper. Lincoln often had to write letters and wait for Horace Greeley to print them in the *New York Tribune*. There were not even many speaking opportunities. We feel the president in our lives, which is why we talk about him so much, and that creates a burden. Second, presidents live under a microscope. They are judged on behavior that is not policy-relevant, and those are often the judgments that actually decide elections.

Third, the power is, in Suri’s word, inhuman. One person can deliver force anywhere on earth and assassinate people with remarkable accuracy. That scale is dangerous in a democracy, and it is something the founders 220 years ago would have had trouble conceiving. Fridman asks the blunt question: can a president order the assassination of a political enemy, or of someone framed as a terrorist? Suri does not treat it as a conspiracy. “I think it happens all the time.” That is how the United States has fought terrorism, by targeting individuals. They were not elected heads of state, but they had large followings. The killing of Osama bin Laden was an assassination operation, and the government takes out terrorist leaders every day. Lincoln, at the start of the Civil War, did not even have the power to bring men into the army. He had to ask governors, of Wisconsin and Massachusetts, to provide soldiers. Then, power was mobilization through speeches. Now it is direct action behind closed doors.

Critics say Barack Obama campaigned on pulling back and then expanded the military-industrial toolkit, including the war in Afghanistan. Fridman asks whether the responsibility sits with the man or with an office whose power is simply there to be taken. A lot of Suri’s research is aimed at that question, and his conclusion is uncomfortable: structure has a lot more effect on us than we like to admit. Circumstances and institutions drive behavior. He is quite certain Obama entered office committed to reducing overseas force and presidential war-making. As a trained lawyer he had a moral position on it, and he did withdraw from Iraq, taking criticism for it. Terrorism was still on the desk, and the usable tools were biased toward the military. It is much harder, as president, to get Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to agree with you than to send “these wonderful toys” and “these incredible soldiers.” Congress is always against you, yet no member wants to vote to starve soldiers already overseas. They will block a budget and threaten the debt ceiling. They will still fund the troops. Obama, on the fair criticism, did not resist pressures he also did not create.

Could a president change the local structure, Fridman asks: who gets hired, who gets the late-night conversation, how the calendar is built? Access is absolutely crucial, Suri agrees, and presidents have to be more strategic about it. They tend instead to react to crises, and every day has one. Reacting means you do not control the door. Beyond personnel, they have to invest in reforming the system itself. Should the National Security Council look the way it does? Should the military be this large, in this many places? The founders wanted a divided military; a unified Department of Defense is a post–World War II invention. The genius of the American system is that it is dynamic and has been adjusted. The frustration is that adjustment often waits until circumstances are so bad there is no choice. The president does have the power to shrink the Pentagon or leave a war. The American military, uniquely among large ones, is deferential. The way you reform it is not one deployment at a time. It is a strategic look at the whole toolbox: which tools to build up, which military tools to reduce.

Then Fridman asks the Joe Rogan question. If the government had alien spacecraft, would a president be told? Suri translates it into a historian’s problem: is the president at the center of information and power, or does the machine keep secrets? Leaders of any complex organization do not know everything. Machiavelli’s rule still holds. The most important thing a leader does is ask the right questions. You hire smart people for answers; you have to ask. If the president asks those responsible for the aliens, or for cyber operations against Russia, they will have to answer honestly. They will not always volunteer. The practical method is to keep people around who are not the usual policymakers, including academic experts, to suggest the questions that force information out. Mediocre leaders and those who protect them shield themselves from knowledge. That, Suri says, is part of how the United States used torture, a war crime, in the war on terror: George W. Bush at times did not ask, and people around him discouraged the questions. Reagan and Iran-Contra can be read the same way. Loyalists will shield you. People of integrity will pass the hard question up.

Among recent presidencies, the figure who most fascinates Suri is Bill Clinton, a man of enormous talent, enormous appetite, very little self-control, and extremes. Clinton does not only illustrate the office. He illustrates the society: American life is full of reservoirs of talent and creativity with a bright side and a dark side, and Clinton has both. Presidents, Suri suggests, are mirrors. We get the government we deserve and the leaders we deserve, and he wishes the country embraced that chaos more honestly. Fridman pushes the thought: the land mixes the corruption of capitalism with its beauty, the people who start from nothing with the Bernie Madoffs, and a Me Too archive of creeps. Holding presidents to a pedestal, he argues, forces fake politicians into office. Trump’s promise, whatever else one says, was authenticity, the opposite of the fake politician.

Fridman admits a romantic preference for presidents who were students of history, philosopher-kings whose words still travel. Is that taste, or does the job require it? Suri is biased as a historian, but he thinks it comes with the work. Every president he has studied had a serious interest in history; they just pursued it differently. Obama was bookish. So, in strange ways, was George W. Bush. George H.W. Bush was less academic, but he loved to talk to people, including historians. Ronald Reagan loved movies, which were his way into another time. The question underneath is historical even when the method is not: how has this society grown and changed, and how has that change made us who we are?

Suri makes the same claim about business. Reach a certain point in any career and you become a historian, because the formulas that got you there no longer answer the next decisions. Those decisions are about human nature and social change. History is the laboratory of human behavior. Fridman plays devil’s advocate: in engineering, history often feels like a brake. Suri splits the words. Antiquarianism is the desire to sit at Lincoln’s desk and hold the past as a talisman. History is the study of change over time. A historian should never say we have to do things as we did them. A historian should say we cannot: you cannot step in the same river twice. The useful warning to an engineer is not “don’t build it.” It is that the product will be used by people with prejudices, in an unequal society. Do not assume a social network will be used fairly, or that people will put only truthful things on it. That is not clinging to the past. It is using the past to inform the change you are already making.

Fridman has internalized the cliché that power corrupts, and that no one, including himself, should be trusted with too much of it. Then there is Washington, who seems to have given it away. Suri says that is the most important thing about him. Quoting the historian Garry Wills, he argues that Washington recognized you sometimes get more power by giving it up than by clutching every last piece. He gave up command at the end of the Revolution, then the presidency after two terms. He was ambitious. He also understood that his real currency was his standing as a disinterested statesman, and that the way to further that standing was to show he did not crave power. Many later presidents left after two terms even before the Constitution required it, for the same reason: their power was the power of being a statesman, not of remaining president.

Fridman sets Vladimir Putin next to that example. Family and friends in Russia, he says, still support him, and not only on social media. After the Soviet collapse, economic growth, and a country finding its feet, this would be the Washington hour: leave, let a democratic state form, and be remembered as a great leader of the twenty-first century. Suri names two reasons it is so hard. The trappings are seductive. In business you do not want to give up the private jet; in Putin’s case it is billions a year for himself and his friends. He would not be poor if he left. He would not get the new billions. Second, he has to worry about what happens next: trial, arrest, assassination. Washington left early enough to limit corruption and limit enemies. Putin has been in too long. Power corrupts; no one should have it for too long. That, Suri says, was one of the founders’ best insights: power is held for a short time as a fiduciary responsibility, not as something you own. Monarchy and aristocracy own power. A republic is not supposed to.

There is a point, Fridman says, Stalin at thirty years, Putin pushing those years, when you forget the person you were before you took power, and there is no going back. Suri’s general rule is that people should move jobs. It applies to CEOs. It is the startup founder who will not let go. Exceptions exist: Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin carried companies on their shoulders while everyone else doubted. Exceptions are not a model. Brin has already stepped back. Fridman finds the manner of it sad. Google’s original mission, making the world’s information accessible, is one of the most beautiful in business history; the shift from “don’t be evil” to a corporatized firm is a loss. Suri does not argue. History is about cycles, of lives and of organizations. Steve Jobs leaving Apple, a SpaceX or Tesla without Musk, would likely be more corporate and more stale. The American system of government has cycling built in, which is why it lasts. Democracies on this scale rarely reach a third century. That is a point of pride, and a reason to keep the house in order. The experiment is not inevitable.

Franklin Roosevelt’s distinctive power, in Suri’s study, was empathy. No leader he has read about connected with people so different from himself. Roosevelt came from the most elite family. He never had to work for a paycheck. As president he was still collecting an allowance from his mother. That man, Suri says, authentically felt the lives of some of the most destitute Americans. It was not propaganda. Saul Bellow, a Russian-Jewish immigrant growing up in Chicago, wrote that politicians all seemed to be stealing from them until he heard FDR and knew the president was speaking to him. Roosevelt was humble enough to try to understand people, and he had a talent for imagining himself in someone else’s shoes.

From the first hundred days, beginning with the fireside chats, he helped Americans see that they were in it together: common suffering, common mission, not a simple solution. The lesson Suri draws is practical. If you want to bring people together, do not offer a simple answer, because the moment you do you have a faction for it and a faction against it. Explain the problem, frame it, and give people a mission. In March 1933 the banking system was collapsing. Roosevelt took five minutes on the radio to explain that banks do not hold your money in a vault; they lend it. If you pull it out and stuff a mattress, you make things worse for yourself. Then he said he did not have a solution. He would send officers to examine the books, show the public those books, and ask people to put the money back. No ideology. A shared task. People who later disagreed with his policies, who disliked that he had Jews around him or a woman in the cabinet, still felt he cared. That feeling, Suri says, is what prepared them to know what it meant to be an American when they fought in Europe and Asia.

Is the country too divided now for that? Social networks, Suri thinks, may be revealing a split more than creating it, and a pandemic plus job loss is already a form of common suffering. He reads President Biden as trying the Roosevelt method: do not let opponents in Congress capture you; go over their heads; empathize with dislocation; offer things people can do together. Infrastructure is the model. Roosevelt built Hoover Dam, which turned the lights on for a young Lyndon Johnson outside Austin, poured money into roads that Eisenhower later continued as the interstate system, and through the WPA built thousands of schools and planted trees. You do not have to be a Democrat or a Republican to want better infrastructure in your town, or a job building it. Fridman confesses that he liked Biden less the more he heard him speak, and cannot say why, which bothers him as an engineer. Suri’s reply is that the presidency is an art. It is aesthetic, feeling, emotion, the thing centuries of effort have failed to engineer. Biden’s job is to find the words that say what people already feel. When someone does that, they feel empowered. That is the work.

Fridman asks whether FDR could have stopped Hitler, or at least done more, given how weak Germany looked through much of the 1930s. Suri thinks Roosevelt had a sense of what was coming, though not the enormity of the Holocaust, which was in part beyond imagination. As early as 1934, people he respected told him Hitler was dangerous. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a friend at the Council on Foreign Relations, met Hitler that year and came back saying the man would cause a war. They saw it. Roosevelt had two problems. The American public was deeply isolationist, the Depression had reinforced that, and he actually had to break the law in the late 1930s to support the Allies. He also had a New Deal at home he did not want to jeopardize. Second, there were no allies ready to invest. Britain was committed to appeasement, France as well, and the Soviet government was cooperating in the remilitarization of Germany.

The criticism Suri is willing to make is sharper once the United States was in the war: Roosevelt did not do enough to stop the killing of Jews. By 1944 the United States had air superiority and could have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz and other camps, which might have saved as many as a million people. Why didn’t he insist? In part he wanted every resource used to win the war, and he did not want to be accused of fighting it for Jews. Suri also thinks it fair to say he cared less about Jews and East Europeans than about people of his own Dutch ancestry and from Western Europe. The same logic, Suri says, explains the internment of Japanese Americans: a horrible war crime by this heroic president, 120,000 citizens stripped of freedom without necessity. Empathy has an in-group. We still apply care for suffering unequally, including to atrocities in China. One job of a president, Suri and Fridman agree, is to rise above the inclination to protect only the inner circle.

Henry Kissinger fascinates Suri because the arc is almost implausible. He arrives as a German-Jewish immigrant at fifteen, speaking no English, and within years he is shaping foreign policy at the height of American power, never elected, often reviled, including in antisemitic terms, and also made more attractive by his exoticism. Nelson Rockefeller wanted him around as a patron because he wanted a really smart Jew. Suri calls Kissinger a “policy Jew”: in early-modern Europe every king wanted a Jew to manage his banking; in the second half of the twentieth century, many American presidents wanted a Jew to manage international affairs. What they actually needed was internationalism, cosmopolitanism, languages, historical knowledge, and networks. Thirty or forty years earlier such a figure was unthinkable in a country run by WASP elites. After World War II, rebuilding Europe and negotiating with the Soviet Union required knowledge the old establishment did not have. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Texas, and others expanded international study, brought in people who would never have been there, trained them, and enlisted them in the Cold War. Kissinger is a bellwether of that opening.

The family left the Nuremberg area in the fall of 1938, just before Kristallnacht, and came to New York. He cleaned brushes in a factory and went to public high school. After Pearl Harbor he joined the army, received citizenship, and was sent to South Carolina, out of a kosher home for the first time, “to eat ham for Uncle Sam.” At about twenty, barely speaking English, he went back to Germany in an elite counter-intelligence role because the army needed German speakers who understood the society and, as Jews, could be trusted not to be pro-Nazi. He was one of many. In New York and later at Harvard he still faced discrimination, including a Jewish-only dorm, while occupying an elite policy post that built a network for life. Fritz Kraemer became a sponsor in the emerging Pentagon world and by the early 1950s was sending him to comment on Korea. His book on nuclear weapons was put in Eisenhower’s hands. Fridman hears Forrest Gump in the luck. Suri agrees you can only get lucky so many times. Kissinger has an eye for power, an obsession Suri thinks is unhealthy.

Why the obsession? Suri has an explanation Kissinger does not like, and that Suri still thinks is right. Kissinger saw what happens when you have no power. His father had been a respected *Gymnasium* teacher of German classics, a status close to a professor, and fled into a life as a postal carrier. His mother opened a catering business in New York. His grandparents were killed by the Nazis. He learned how perilous it is to be without power. Trauma, Suri notes, is hard to talk about; a combat veteran who freely offers the story can be the one you doubt. Fridman recognizes the pattern in his own complicated relationship with his father, including regret after putting that relationship on a podcast. The career-making work, in Suri’s account, was a 1950s network: an “international seminar” at Harvard, a summer class nobody there cared about, into which Kissinger invited rising intellectuals from around the world and then used the web forever after.

Two sets of actions made Kissinger’s reputation. One was the opening to China: taking control of policy without the formal authority, then building a relationship with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai that had been unthinkable four or five years earlier. Nixon was central; Kissinger was the mover. This was a country where anticommunism was intense, and where American soldiers had died at the hands of Chinese forces in Korea and Vietnam. He opened the door anyway. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War he became the lead negotiator among Israelis, Egyptians, and others, made the United States the dominant outside power in the Middle East, and pushed the Soviet Union to the margin, a benefit in the 1970s and 1980s that also led into later trouble. For Kissinger, realpolitik meant focusing on power centers and manipulating them for American interests. He was a multilateralist, putting the United States at the center of talks among the strong, and paying little attention to places that could not project power. Human-rights critics attack him for treating much of Africa and Latin America as unimportant.

The strategy, Suri says, is classical, going back to Thucydides and Herodotus, and has two elements. First, figure out your allies and build webs so they help you acquire what you want. Herodotus’s Greeks beat a larger Persia because Spartans, Athenians, and others could work together and leverage resources. For Kissinger that made Western Europe, Japan, Israel, and Egypt crucial: surrogates, brother states, tight connections, joint control of resources. Second, do not go to war with your adversary; do everything to limit that adversary’s power. Some of that is containment, the spine of Cold War policy. Some of it is negotiation, which is what détente was. Kissinger spent more time negotiating with Soviet and Chinese leaders than any other American foreign-policy maker, aiming to cap a nuclear arms race the United States was ahead in, playing to strength. Military force is a tool. War is not an end. It is a way to get economic, political, and geographic access.

How did he build the relationships? Suri calls him the ultimate kiss-up. Stanley Kubrick, he recalls, used the nickname. Kissinger had a gift for learning what you wanted and showing he could give you more of it. He flattered Leonid Brezhnev. He told Mao he was the greatest leader of the twentieth century. It sounds like nonsense; it was serious work, feeding egos. The other half was efficacy. Nixon suspected him of stealing the limelight and hated that Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, but he needed the man who got things done. Suri describes the bond as almost gangster: boss, I will do this, and do not forget I am doing it for you. Kissinger never won office, so he always needed the powerful to let him act, and he was skilled at making the decision feel like yours. His memos look like a menu of options. In fact there is only one. On loyalty he is not the inner-circle romantic. He backstabs and is self-serving, yet he makes himself so useful that Nixon, knowing this, still needs him. Interviews with him were hard. Suri sat through a dozen informal lunches years ago and found him enormously charming and enormously obnoxious, unwilling to admit mistake, fragile under criticism. When Suri told the *New York Times* that documents of Kissinger saying ugly things about Jews in Russia were accurate, Kissinger called and literally yelled. Asked in one interview what guiding ideals sat behind the policies, Kissinger said he was not prepared to share that. Suri does not think Kissinger lacked an answer. He thinks the use of power had departed so far from the ideals that saying them out loud would have sounded hypocritical.

Zoomed out, does civilization advance by realism or by idealism? Suri leans idealistic, more so in his forties and after more historical work. His criticism of Kissinger is that realpolitik becomes self-defeating: you run to keep power and forget why, and then use power in ways that undermine what you care about. It is the parent who fills the child’s calendar with violin and basketball until the child’s life is wrecked, having started from a wish to help. Hans Morgenthau called the missing piece purpose. Purpose has to drive you. It need not be airy. Suri believes deeply in democracy as an ideal that will never look like Athens, and that should still drive policy, while remaining realistic enough to know you will not build that democracy in Afghanistan tomorrow. Fridman asks whether this is again the corrupting nature of power: nobody holds it long before serving power itself. Suri thinks that is exactly right, which is why the founders’ design, power as a short trust, still matters.

How do you know when a country that likes to see itself as the good guys has lost the plot? What separates a just war from a war crime? Kissinger is accused in some circles of being a war criminal; Suri argues in his book that he is not, which is not the same as saying he never misused force. Drawing on Michael Walzer, Suri defines a just war as one whose purpose is just and whose means kill as few people as necessary: proportionality. The drive to the end often self-justifies means that go well beyond it. That is how the war on terror produced torture. The first lesson he gives military decision-makers is to remember the purpose and ask whether the tools, just because you have them, are the right ones. The harder follow-up: are the things I am doing in this war helping or hurting the reason I went in? There came a point when counterterror was creating more terrorists. That is when you stop. Afghanistan is the same logic stretched over twenty years and more than two trillion dollars, and it is not doing well. Suri uses an investor’s sentence: you may like the company; after two decades of throwing money in, it is time to get out. The harder skill is leaving earlier. You have to ask whether the evidence shows improvement, and you cannot see it from inside. Heisenberg applies: looking changes the thing. You need other observers. Generals are patriotic and hard-working and not generally lying. They are too close. They always think they can do better.

Teaching the Cold War to undergraduates born after 9/11, Suri’s first job is to explain why people were so afraid of communism. For them the Soviet collapse is as remote as World War II was for his generation. Americans in the 1950s believed communists would infiltrate their society; after Castro in 1959 they feared Latin America would follow; the fear was married to nuclear weapons and to an economic anxiety, Khrushchev promising to catch Britain in five years and then the United States. The Cold War, in Suri’s telling, was the United States defending a capitalist world order against a serious challenger that offered another way of organizing private property, enterprise, and life. It was a struggle between two systems, two promoted ways of life, not merely two nuclear arsenals. The Soviet Union never actually lived communism, but Stalin tried to go there, Khrushchev believed, and Gorbachev thought he could reform his way back toward a Leninist original. Liberal capitalism proved more enduring. Suri’s students now ask about wasted resources, opportunity costs, other countries’ health systems, and race, and they are less willing to see a bipolar world: China is more complicated, as are postcolonial states in Africa and Latin America.

Is America sliding into communism because it has forgotten the twentieth century? Suri is impatient. There is no communism in the United States, there never has been, and there certainly is not now. Even the farthest left young people he observes do not understand what communism is. Americans are raised in the vernacular of private property, and if you believe in private property you do not believe in communism. Bernie Sanders–style socialism is a different argument, and some of it harks back to what actually won the Cold War. The New Deal and the Cold War state spent historic sums propping up business and unions, on infrastructure, schools, and Social Security. Social democracy, Suri argues, can be compatible with capitalism; the live debate is how much. Cold War capitalism also presumed you paid taxes to support the project. Making money was fine; the more you made, the more you paid; marginal rates were the highest in American history. Doing things on deficit spending is a post–Cold War habit. Fridman takes the individualism into guns: in conversations with Russian family, American gun culture sounds like a declaration of the individual’s worth, even a stupid freedom. Suri adds a dark footnote. American individualism makes evils different, usually smaller, and often private: lynching, a bad police officer, rather than a state machine. The productive argument is not guns or no guns. It is the boundary of “self-defense.” Does it include a bazooka, or weapons designed for a battlefield to mass-kill? That is a different claim from a handgun. Most mass shootings use the latter category of weapon. The Constitution speaks of a well-regulated militia; the framers’ “arms” meant a capacity to defend yourself, not to kill as many people as you want.

If alien graduate students study this era after the civilization is gone, what will they remember? Suri has no doubt: the last twenty to thirty years of rapid technological innovation, the creation of a virtual universe, an origin moment, from playing below the rim to above it. The pandemic pushed the shift further. Some in-person life will return; the world in which every meeting required a flight will not. Biotechnology belongs on the same list. The speed of producing and distributing vaccines is a triumph, light-speed compared with 1918 or even 1980, and it is heartbreaking, both men agree, that politicization stole the chance to celebrate it. In the long arc it will look less political. The negative they will point to is the failure, so far, to manage the living space of the planet. Suri is an optimist that later decades will do better. Fridman is more worried about biotech weapons than about the rest, and more excited by artificial intelligence in that new digital space and by a return to space exploration, a magic the Cold War once funded and that Musk and others have revived.

Suri’s favorite novel is Thomas Mann’s *Buddenbrooks*, a Lübeck family’s rise and fall across the nineteenth century, a reflection on cycles, the limits of human agency, and the need to adjust to circumstances. He assigns *War and Peace* every year because Tolstoy attacks the fantasy that a Napoleon, or the little Napoleons we all think we are, can rule the world. Language, for a historian, is not optional. Suri learned French in high school, Russian in college, and German in graduate school for research. His mother’s side is Russian-Jewish, though the elders he met spoke Yiddish. English has no formal “you”; Russian has *вы* and *ты*, German *Sie* and *du*. That absence tells you something about Americans, as Germany’s wider scientific vocabulary tells you something about German culture. Language is an artifact of a culture, and a fossil of it. Americans, he says, are bad at teaching foreign languages. If you have never learned one, you have closed yourself off from a kind of empathy, because you have trained your brain to see the world one way. Words never translate one to one. *До свидания* is not really “goodbye.” Lived experience, in the current phrase, is forced on you by another language: the same thing, perceived entirely otherwise. Fridman jokes that the first lesson in Russian is a lot of vodka. Suri says it is otherwise very difficult.

His advice to talented young people is twofold, and the first is counterintuitive. Do not pick a profession because you think you know what will pay in twenty years. You do not. *The Graduate* sent Dustin Hoffman to plastics; parents now send bright students to business school. If you are passionate about business, go. Do not begin from a forecast. Find what you love, because passion and talent usually overlap, and if you do the work well people will pay you. That is how capitalism actually works, whether the craft is violin, engineering, or poetry. You may not become a billionaire; that involves other things. You will find a way to be paid. Second, start building networks at the very beginning, before the job, and mean real relationships, not a follower count. Podcasts, he likes, open a space: two strangers who heard the same episode can talk. Do not collect people you think will be powerful. Collect people you find interesting, because interesting people do interesting things. Every successful person he knows had a key moment that arrived through someone known for some other reason. Fridman adds commitment: life is finite, and choosing one passion is letting the others go. Suri agrees, and laughs at students who want three majors. Three majors is no major. Whatever you do, even a small thing, do it as well as you can. His children are tired of hearing it. If you wash dishes, be the best person washing dishes. You are building a culture of excellence in yourself. Fridman, who can find joy in Google Fiber installation, says mastery of supposedly menial work is more joyful, not less, and that people with fire in their eyes gather around it. Entrepreneurs get in trouble, Suri adds, when they are in it only for the money.

Suri’s grandmother Emily, child of immigrants from Russia and Poland, never went to college and lived to 102. Her proudest day, he thinks, was when he did. She treated everyone with respect, knew every bus driver in town, remembered birthdays, and taught him that no matter how high you fly, the person closest to the ground matters, and you treat that person as you treat the billionaire on the podium. She lived it. He thinks of it at least once a week, because busyness makes you short with people who cannot help or harm you right now. Authenticity is visible. Everyone is nice to the clerk when they want to get ahead in the line for a driver’s license. Are you nice when you do not need them? People notice, and it has a ripple even when nobody is watching. The other lesson: she was not well educated and was extremely smart. Suri believes in higher education and in PhDs. He also warns that the credentialed, their egos fed by accomplishment, can be the least educated in the way of the world, and the least curious. Wisdom comes from curiosity, and a doctorate can get in the way of it.

Does a historian ever get an answer to why? Suri asks all the time and does not have one. Every period he has studied, people smarter than we are have struggled with it and reached no firm conclusion except this: meaning is what you make of it. Decide what you want to care about, and make that the meaning of your life. Fridman, looking at evolutionary biology, feels a thread, a direction, a stumbling in the dark that might still arrive somewhere. Suri hopes so. What he can observe is that we want our families to do better, and family need not be biological. Humanity is moving, slowly and messily, toward a larger world community that would include all biological life and eventually artificial life as well. Fridman extends Emily’s rule to robots: treat AI systems well even when they are not very intelligent, because one day they might be. Suri takes that as a humanist’s position. We should think now about the behavior patterns we want with these new forms of life, for their sake and so we do not misuse them. They started with Lincoln and ended with robots. Suri calls it the perfect conversation.