Every battle that you read about in history is incredibly high stakes and more interesting than just about anything I've ever done.

I've never been in a situation where I've tacitly agreed that I was going to try to kill a bunch of other people and they were going to try to kill me and we'd try to make it sporting and it would be decisive.

That is a crazy thing. And throughout the centuries,

there have been a whole lot of times where the way things have gone down, people have ended up

in that situation. Wild. I mean, I just can't even imagine. Some of you listening to this have

been there, which is just crazy to me. But despite that acknowledgement, I think we still have to admit that some battles

were more of a historical turning point than other battles. There are some where you go back

and you look at it and you just think about how things turned out and the implications of, and you

know, dang, everything hinged on this one little thing, not just for that battle,

but for how the world worked out. I mean, you think about how touch and go the battle of Salamis was

when Xerxes invaded Athens. I mean, that was tight. The Athenians don't win that. Man, what does that mean?

That's got a huge domino effect for the rest of history. You think about the Battle of Tours in, what was that, 732 AD, between Charles Martel, the mayor of the palace and the Muslim Caliph, who was leading the invasion,

the Muslim invasion of Europe.

That battle happened right there at the line between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Western Europe, the Pyrenees Mountains.

And Martel won and checked the Muslim advance. But what if he didn't?

You think about the U.S. Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg, and you got the little rock outcropping on the one end, and a regiment from Maine has to hold that.

And if they fold, the North is going to lose the battle and lose the war.

And then what happens?

It's just wild.

You think about all the

britch showing up overnight to rescue their boys from the shores at Dunkirk. We've talked

about a lot of these battles before over the years chatting together, but there's some really

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