Book · recommended on 3 episodes
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
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Leo Tolstoy
Find it on AmazonAffiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
This book by Leo Tolstoy has come up 3 times on Lex Fridman. 3 of those mentions were genuine on-air recommendations, not just passing references. The people who brought it up: Dan Houser, Fiona Hill, guest. The earliest mention we indexed is from 2021-04-30 and the most recent from 2025-10-31. Every occurrence below links to the episode page and to the exact second it was said on YouTube.
“War and Peace is one of the best novels written in Russian, I would argue.”— Dan Houser
The guest here is Dan Houser: Legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and lead writer behind the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series. He has since founded a new company, Absurdventures, building new worlds across books, comics, audio, and games. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser on creating GTA and Red Dead Redemption, the craft of storytelling in games, and his new studio Absurdventures.
“I'd read War and Peace and you know I'd love the book actually I mean particularly the you know the story parts of it”— Fiona Hill
The guest here is Fiona Hill: Presidential adviser and foreign-policy expert specializing in Russia, who served the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations and testified in Trump's first impeachment. She rose from a coal-mining town in northeast England to the White House. Russia scholar Fiona Hill unpacks Putin's psychology, the road to the Ukraine war, the nuclear threat, and the case for nonpartisan governance.
“i'm very moved by tolstoy's war and peace i assign that every year to my students that's a big big book”— guest
The guest here is Jeremi Suri: Jeremi Suri is a historian at UT Austin who studies modern American history with a focus on presidents and individuals who wield power. He has written books on the changing presidency and on Henry Kissinger. Historian Jeremi Suri unpacks how American presidential power evolved from Lincoln to today, and why structure shapes leaders more than we admit.
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