#499 – Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a historian of the American Civil War.
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It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We've got Upwork for hiring quality freelancers, NetSuite for business management software, Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electrolytes, BetterHelp for mental health, and a new sponsor, Plaud. New as a sponsor, but I've been using them for a long time. It's the amazing AI-powered note-taking device, and of course, our friend, Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. Now, onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, be it coffee, feedback, hiring, whatever else, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go.
This episode is brought to you by Upwork, a platform I have used for many years to hire incredible freelancers to get stuff done. But it's not for just the individual use cases. If you're a business, you could do the same thing. You can hire freelancers that help you build, design and scale your business. They even have a special thing going on called Business Plus, that gives you access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork.
With their tooling, that's of course AI powered, allows you to shortlist the best talent. So aids in the whole high quality and fast searching of great candidates. I think there's very few things as important in life, as choosing the people you surround yourself with. And if you're a business owner, or you're part of a business, you're spending so many hours together with the team you work with. So it pays, it's worthwhile to invest in finding the best people. So you can enjoy life. Again, I think it's good for your sanity, it's good for productivity, but it legitimately is one of the biggest sources of happiness, which is doing hard shit with incredible people. Okay, and many of those people I have found on Upwork, so highly recommend visit them at upwork.com/lex right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com/lex.
This episode is brought to you by an old friend, NetSuite. They are introducing NetSuite Next, which is a huge architecture and user experience overhaul that quite understandably they're taking on. Given the incredible growth of the intelligence and the capabilities and the agentic side of all the AI systems. So a lot of businesses trust NetSuite to help them manage their business, financials, HR, inventory, all that kind of stuff. But that's a lot of data. And to be able to ask questions of all that data, integrate across all the different modules, NetSuite is very well positioned to do that well and to actually be a huge help to businesses of all sizes. So this is their take on it. They're, I believe, just launching it. It's a fresh new thing. NetSuite Next. Go check it out. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite for free. Go to netsuite.ai/lex. That's netsuite.ai/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store, thousands of integrations. Basically, you can do anything you want, whether you're selling shirts or more complicated products. Shopify is there for you at scale, delivers it super fast. Obviously, the engineering that I never shut up about is incredible. By the way, amongst a million other things, Shopify is a huge contributor to open-source. They've given back a large number of projects with insane amounts of stars on GitHub. Back to the community. Again, from the entry-level engineer to the very top with Toby, everybody loves engineering.
I love from the user perspective and just celebrator of human ingenuity and innovation. I love it when a company has so many incredible engineers and puts engineering first. If you want to go listen to on the programming language side, a true celebration of Ruby on Rails, which is a big part of the technical success of Shopify.
Go listen to my conversation that lasted for about 120 hours with DHH. So it's an excellent one. He too is one of the great software engineers and builders and designers of our time, and a great personality and a great human being.

**Gary Gallagher** (5:05)
All right.

**Lex Fridman** (5:05)
What was I saying? I signed up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all over the case. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today.
This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily delicious zero sugar electrolyte mix. I've brought it everywhere. I brought it to far away foreign lands when I had very little room for stuff to carry because all I had was a backpack and I was hitchhiking, lost in the world, uncertain of anything and everything, all at once, taking on the mystery and the smiles of strangers and the insane roller coaster of climate, the cold, the heat, fasting for sometimes longer than 24 hours, again, unknown. And when I finally get a chance to eat, I eat some strange things that I have no clue whether my stomach would even understand or even care to understand. Through all of that, there's element, my trusty friend element by my side. Anyway, get a free 8-count sample pack with any purchase. Let's try it at www.drinklmnt.com/lex.