P.S. We’re now breaking down the answers at the end of each edition, so you get a little more insight.

In October 1962, the world was about one bad decision away from becoming a radioactive wasteland. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in full swing. The United States had discovered Soviet nukes in Cuba, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were staring each other down, and everyone on Earth was living on borrowed time.

What most people do not realize is that the closest we ever came to global nuclear war did not happen in the White House or the Kremlin. It happened underwater, in the sweltering belly of a Soviet submarine, with one man standing between civilization and armageddon. His name was Vasili Arkhipov, and he is arguably the most important dude you have never heard of.

Arkhipov was the second-in-command aboard a Soviet B-59 submarine lurking near Cuba. Conditions inside were brutal. Temperatures climbed above 100 degrees, the crew had not surfaced in days, and they were cut off from Moscow. To make things worse, U.S. Navy ships were dropping practice depth charges near them, trying to force the sub to come up.

From the Soviet perspective, it felt like war had already started. The crew thought they were under attack, and in the chaos, the captain wanted to retaliate. And here is the kicker: this submarine carried a nuclear torpedo. Not a regular torpedo. A nuclear one.

Launching it would have meant striking U.S. ships. The United States would have immediately assumed a Soviet nuclear strike was underway. The logical response would have been a full nuclear counterattack. Within hours, cities across the world could have been flattened.

Most Soviet subs required just the captain’s approval to launch a weapon. The B-59 was different. It needed the captain, the political officer, and the second-in-command to all agree. That meant Vasili Arkhipov had veto power.

The captain and the political officer both said yes. They believed the war had already begun, so why not fight back. Arkhipov stood alone and said no. He argued there was no proof that nuclear war had started, that the Americans were only trying to signal them, not destroy them. He refused to authorize the launch.

It was one of the highest-stakes moments in human history. Three men in a boiling hot submarine debating whether to end the world. Two votes for yes. One vote for no. Arkhipov carried the day. The nuclear torpedo stayed in its tube, and the sub eventually surfaced without firing.

Think about it. Every mushroom cloud you have ever seen in a Cold War documentary, every nuclear apocalypse movie you have ever watched, all of that was sitting in the palm of this man’s hand. Arkhipov had every reason to cave. His captain was furious. His crew was exhausted. He was being pressured from all sides.

Instead, he trusted his instincts and stopped the launch. That single decision kept millions of people alive. Entire cities were spared because one guy in a submarine decided to take a deep breath and say, “let’s hold off.”

Arkhipov was not celebrated as a hero. He returned to the Soviet Union and received no public recognition. His act of restraint was buried in secrecy, and his name was mostly unknown in the West until the 1990s when classified documents finally came to light.

Meanwhile, we have statues and films about generals, presidents, and astronauts. But the man who probably saved the world by refusing to push a button barely got a footnote in history class.

The story of Vasili Arkhipov is a reminder that sometimes the most important leadership is not about charging forward. It is about restraint. It is about being the one person in the room willing to stop, question the panic, and risk being unpopular for the sake of everyone else.

Arkhipov never fired a shot, never gave a rousing speech, never won an election. He just had the guts to say no.

If you ever need perspective, think about Arkhipov. The next time you are stressed about whether to send a risky text or take a new job, remember that at least you are not deciding whether to end humanity.

So here is your conversation starter for the week: If you had been in that submarine, sweating through your uniform with the captain screaming at you, would you have had the guts to say no?

At 29,031.7 feet, Everest already sits on top of the world. But here’s the wild part: it’s still climbing. The whole thing started about 50 million years ago when the Indian tectonic plate rammed into the Eurasian plate. That collision gave us the Himalayas, and those plates are still grinding away. The end result is Everest creeping up about 4 millimeters every year.

The catch is it is not all steady gains. Earthquakes have the potential to shave pieces off, while wind, snow, and ice are constantly chipping at it. After the 2015 quake in Nepal, scientists even wondered if Everest had shrunk before fresh measurements cleared things up. So the tallest mountain on Earth lives in this weird tug-of-war, getting pushed up by geology while being sanded back down by nature.

This week’s song is Away from the Sun by Three Doors Down. It is not the fist-pumping, stadium-ready rock they are usually known for. It is slower, heavier, and feels more like the soundtrack to one of those days when you cannot quite shake the fog. The lyrics hit on that feeling of being stuck and trying to climb your way out, and the delivery makes it sound honest instead of dramatic.

Most people think of Kryptonite when they hear Three Doors Down, but this one is worth a revisit. It is not about saving the world, it is about reminding yourself that even if you are buried for a while, you can still get back up into the light.

Give it a listen 👇

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Test of the nuclear weapon “Small Boy” in Nevada - July 1962.

In July 1962, the U.S. set off a nuclear device called “Small Boy” in the Nevada desert. The name makes it sound harmless, but the test was part of a serious effort to figure out how nuclear weapons could be used in real combat. Unlike the massive bombs designed to level cities, this one was built to be smaller, more tactical, and potentially dropped right into a battlefield. It was just one of dozens of experiments during the Cold War.