The WAY to WOW Shows
Guide Your Company Like Grant at Vicksburg
January 9, 2024
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[0:00] lessons from the military I'm your host Kevin bemel and we're here every Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time and we talk about business Doctrine the leadership and and philosophies of of great military personalities as as well as military history all by way of distilling from that lessons we can use in our businesses and professional careers and so uh today I'm I'm very happy to introduce you to um I what you described yourself as U my my my long

[0:37] lost brother I think right yeah a brother from another mother yeah yeah like like um remember um uh who uh twin sons of different mothers remember that was a album uh Tim weberg I think and Dan folberg or something like that that's a pretty old dude like I'm more a lead Zeppelin guy okay so my my my brother uh Josh joerger who um currently lives in Santa Barbara California which is we were talking about before we started the show is where I grew up um so we were you know I was talking about various streets and

[1:13] that sort of thing so uh it's it's a bit of a you know Nostalgia wave here as well so um Josh is is as I described him in some of the uh social media posts he's a um scholar on the career of ulyses srant the general and and and president um during the Civil War era in this country and and when I when I learned that about Josh I said I've got to have you on the show and have you talk about um us grants experience as as

[1:49] a both a a war and a political leader um and and and how can we apply that to the business world so um without you know any more Ado I'm gonna I'm gonna turn things over to Josh and and and let him talk about that he's he's got some fascinating ideas um Kevin you're are generous calling me a scholar of Grant I think it would be more apt to say I'm a fan of Grant okay uh and so uh I I think that I think there's incredible lessons to be learned from that guy way more than we

[2:24] could cover in this somebody should probably write a book not me um I I I want to focus on uh the Vicksburg campaign uh which Grant had and just by way of background uh where in the end of 1862 at this point grants had a couple of good successes in the west so he's come to the attention of leadership in Washington as a guy that can handle uh good offensive uh strategy but um militarily and politically it is a bad time at the end

[2:59] of 62 to uh Lincoln had just lost control of the House and Senate so the Republicans were out and they had a a Republican president but the Democrats were in the Democrats were arguing for hey look we're not really in this for uh as long as it takes as much money as it takes like Total War let's kind of seed the battle lines where we're at those there hadn't been really any significant um military military successes in uh 62 so Grant and and during this time um the um uh the US

[3:36] the federals had control of almost the whole Mississippi except for this little 50 mile stretch around uh the city of Vicksburg and and why Vicksburg was so important was that all of the resources that the Confederacy needed were moving from the west from Texas and Louisiana into the South so all the beef all of the salt all of the sugar all the Molasses the things that you need ultimately to feed the troops which is the only way to win a war came west to east and it went through Vicksburg and

[4:11] the problem with Vicksburg is most of the Mississippi is very low Delta area uh flood lands and at this Bend there's this like huge Tower of Earth so the the the uh the edges of the Mississippi and vixs have like 50 or 100 foot cliffs in front of them and they had put hundreds of guns up there so the uh uh the north couldn't get control of the uh the the rail line that crossed at Vicksburg

[4:46] which means they couldn't cut off the supply which means they couldn't beat the South until they got Vicksburg so that's that's where we are uh geopolitically uh geographically think of it this way if you imagine a clock VI BG is at the center of the clock where the hands are and uh six o'cl at the bottom is uh New Orleans and uh 12 o'clock at the top is Memphis Memphis is where uh the the North had their headquarters at the time so they're trying to get from 12 o'clock down to the center of the clock to take

[5:21] Vicksburg okay Lincoln says Grant I need you to do this it's a hard task uh you got to do it we're in deep trouble if we can't cut these guys off and politically I don't think I'm going to win the presidency in two years unless we start to get some momentum uh so Grant says okay let's get after it he grabs his uh right-hand guy Sherman and says Sherman here's what we're gonna do we're gonna split the Army you're going to go from like 10 o'clock on the clock towards the center towards Vicksburg I'm G to go from 2 o'l on the clock towards the center at

[5:57] Vicksburg and we're going we're going to get him in kind of pincer move so from the very beginning everything goes wrong uh Sherman goes down and attacks uh uh Vicksburg at a battle called Chickasaw Bayou and he gets his head handed to him it's swamp land he can't unload the transport troops it's raining uh the uh guys at Vicksburg got notice ahead of time that he was coming so they had all the guns and all the guys ready to kick his butt MH and Grant moving from 2 o'clock towards Vicksburg gets his supply lines

[6:34] cut that are behind him so he's moving down and his entire uh supply lines at Holly spring get taken so he's got no communication with Sherman he's got no communication with Washington and he's got no food so adding to the complexity there's another General called uh McLaren who is a um a political appoint he was a Senator uh he was on the guys again he was a Democrat so he was against Lincoln he was the one saying ah look let's just settle this thing and draw a line in the sand let the South do

[7:09] its thing and he hated Grant and Grant hated him and so Grant's got a bad team he's out of communication with everybody uh it's the highest level of floods that there can be his right-hand guy Sherman just gets his butt kicked and it's right at the kickoff of the war this is December of uh 16 to mhm and I think one of the Lessons Learned for me uh in this is Grant decided look it it's going bad quickly and everyone was telling them pull back let's go back to Memphis this isn't going to work let's try it again

[7:44] in the summer and Grant says no I'm gonna go to the front because he was back in Memphis directing uh traffic and I I for me one of the great takeaways is when things get really bad the CEO has got to get his boots on and go to the front front line to figure out what the hell's going on here and start making uh tactical decisions usually the CEO is higher up making the Strategic high level things but there are times when for the good of the business for the good of the clients uh for the good of the force in the field the generals got to be on the front line kicking asss and

[8:19] taking names uh and I think that's grant grant was notoriously good at that that was his preference was to be at the front and I think that's certainly one of the reasons he was such a an incredibly successful CEO if you will the force in the field so it's it's interesting because um in in the um well it's not recent but last year the um uh Howard Schultz turned over as CEO of Starbucks to his replacement and and I I don't want to pronounce the fellow's

[8:54] name because I'll mangle it um but the first thing that his replacement did is he spent I think two or three months training as a barista and learning all about the day-to-day operations and what all of the Frontline people are doing so he could understand the problems because Starbucks had had some really bad problems they're still dealing with them yeah trying to get themselves back on track and uh you know to his credit he didn't you know sit in Seattle and just

[9:31] you know sort of dictate from here or there he literally rolled his sleeves up and he he went through the the same kind of training that a brand new Barista would go through and and and and and locations throughout the country so we could also get a sense of how are things different from kind of region to region yeah that's spot on another example is uh Elon Musk spins up the Giga Factory in Nevada they're not producing the units that they need to produce nobody can figure out why MH he he and his uh brother and cousin go there with cs and

[10:07] sleeping bags and sleep on the production floor for eight weeks and and are just like Relentless it's a 24-hour gnarly gig where Mo many CEOs uh forget how they got there and um uh might overd delegate uh and at the end of the day if if it's somebody else's if it's if you're responsible for the capital or you're responsible for the men you got to get dirty you gota go to the front and you got to make the decisions you can't you can't do it

[10:42] remotely okay so we got Grant and his crew it's in a mess it's it's the highest flood levels uh on record on the Mississippi by the way so we've got you've heard of the Mississippi Bayou so we've got the we've got the uh Mississippi River that goes from 12:00 to 6:00 from Illinois all the way down to Louisiana but it's not like a nice clean fat River it floods so there's about a hundred square miles that's underwater at this point so they're like walking on uh little raised levies uh there they're

[11:19] floating boats across things that used to be Fields it's gnarly but we finally get to the beginning of January and Grant and um uh McLaren and Sherman are all on the West Bank across from Vicksburg so they can finally see it finally after a month of slogging and a month of bad outcomes they get to where they're supposed to be and then it's like well how the hell are we going to take this place because we got 100 foot Bluffs with all of these guns and like we got to get across this enormous

[11:54] Waterway so Grant in his Memoirs uh talks about that's when we started to experiment so these guys did crazy things for four months one thing they they said is well maybe we can divert the Mississippi so they they started to cut a channel a mile along hoping that the Mississippi would go into this Channel and allow them to slip through the new channel that they cut so they could get south of Vicksburg and attack it from the south which was the weak point in the city so Grant had 4,000

[12:29] guys digging trenches and of course the guys at Vicksburg say look I can see what you're doing they line up their guns and they start killing all these guys as they're digging this one mile long trench so that didn't work then Grant sends a bunch of guys Way South a 100 miles south to try to find a river that will allow them to come north and get at Vicksburg uh that doesn't work they end up uh destroying a bunch of boats and a bunch of guys get malaria and it's a a thre Monon just horrible uh outcome they try it from the north uh on a battle

[13:04] called the yazu pass or Moon Lake where they say well there's this big lake that's six miles long and that links to a river that's 15 miles long and that links to another River that's 20 miles long and if we can get all the way down all this series of rivers we can get at Vicksburg from 3 o'clock going towards Vicksburg from the west or from the East going west so they're slogging around all trying all of these different things and Grant says in his Memoirs I didn't think any of these things would work but if one of them worked then we would take advantage of it but he was he was okay

[13:40] with starting a campaign without a plan and saying we're just gonna experiment and learn from uh our experimentation and be okay with failure and that's the only way to crack the impossible code of how the hell do you take the Gibralter of the Mississippi uh so I think that's an important lesson learned is that sometimes in leadership in businesses we get overly linear and we write our business plan for 2024 and if one thing goes wrong it's like oh crap it's not going to work rather than look success is about pivoting we we have to be

[14:16] willing to to say hey student body left and it might work it might not work but do it within reasonable bounds rather than be bound by the the business plan that we wrote two years ago yeah you know it's it's it's interesting I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about a of all things a candle company I think they're based in Ohio um I I believe they're called aen and they have a shortage of workers as as a lot of businesses do and so their their plan is to replace workers with automation with robots or whatever

[14:53] but the RO they can't figure out how to get the robots to straighten the Wicks and the C candle which I guess is an important part of making candles because otherwise they get buried in the wax or whatever right right um and and the the robots you know they'll they they break the the jars to the can all this kind of stuff and I'm I'm reading this article I'm thinking to myself there's got to be a different way to approach this you know instead of trying to make the automation match humans we why don't you figure out a way

[15:28] to re refigure the manufacturing of your product to do what robots can do right right and and so I've been toying with the idea of sending the CEO of the company an email saying why don't you build a different kind of Wick that can stand up to the wax being poured in and maybe it's coated with something that after the wax you know is in there hot it sort of it sort of melts away the outer coating on the the wick in a way that the Wick's St is still standing up you don't have to worry about you know having anybody straighten

[16:04] it let alone a robot or you know like try something different than what you're doing they've been trying to get these robots to work now I guess for like a year or something yeah it doesn't work you know it's sort of like trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is CRA the definition of insanity right yeah yeah I think a great uh modern example of the freedom to experiment is Jeff Bezos in Amazon um he had a in his annual letter to shareholders I think it was 2018 it was all about wandering he calls it

[16:39] which is really experimentation and saying look we're never going to be great unless we give latitude to each other to take wild bets and fail and expect we're going to fail at them oh obviously within constraints we're not going to bet the farm on any of these experiments like Grant didn't bet the form but he just he said look we're not we're not just going to attack Vicksburg straight on we have to figure out a way around but we don't know what the way around is yet so we got to have four or five irons in the fire um and I I think Bezos is an an extraordinary recent

[17:14] example of hey you know what we got all these servers running with our computers uh to sell stuff online maybe somebody else would like to use our computers so why don't we do Amazon web services and gez we got all these eyeballs on Prime watching TV and you know buying stuff from us what if we did ads and and right now those experiments are like multi-billion dollar multi hundred billion dollar Revenue experiments that on their own would be extraordinary businesses but you never get there if you don't have a CEO that says hey I'm open to crazy

[17:50] ideas if you give me a crazy idea I'll give you some resources modest appropriate within the context of risk but let's push it well what you and I don't know is all the experiments that failed right right because the winners write the history uh but I'd love to hear what Bezos experiments were that they wasted you know hundreds of billions of dollars and it didn't work out uh yeah but yeah experimentation uh is the only way to get great breakthrough because the current way isn't working period end of sentence full stop okay so we got Grant

[18:25] we got the Army they're slogging around doing crazy experiment none of them are working uh until uh nature kind of helped him out things started to dry out he said okay finally we're on the west side of the Mississippi we could March our army South 50 miles there's still it's still a lot of wet area but at least we can get the troops uh down south below the Mississippi but we can't get our troops across the Mississippi to the east so what are we going to do so he they pull this Hail Mary where he marches like

[19:01] 70,000 guys south of Vicksburg but they're on the wrong side of the freeway and he sends the gunboats right down in front of the guns of Vicksburg and the and the uh the gunboats are pulling um equipment and supplies and they say Damn the Torpedoes we're going for it couple of gunboats get blasted but they make the gunboats make it all the way south and so now he's got what he wants he's got his army South of Vicksburg and he's got the troop transports that can take them across the Mississippi to Vicksburg and he finally gets everyone uh on the on the right

[19:38] side of the uh of the battle now this whole thing took a month to get from where across Vicksburg doing the experiment we're now going to move uh uh almost 100,000 Guys South with all of the logistics all of the equipment all of the resources and the Army is so big that they they have they break it into three parts and have different generals moving the troops down so everyone's going to be out of communication for 30 days with each other and they don't have enough supplies and they're not sure

[20:13] about how successful this running of the uh Vicksburg guns is going to be and Grant writes this absolutely incredible set of instructions to all the guys before kickoff he's basically we're not going to see each other for 30 days and there's a lot of things that can go wrong and we're going to be out of communication with each other and he writes the special order 110 which is included in his Memoirs and I when I was reading it I'm like holy cow this guy nailed every contingency if this then that if this then that if that then this and so he outlined the whole thing for

[20:49] his guys assuming I'm not going to be able to talk to any of them for 30 days and they're going to be in a really stressful military environment very risky and so I think one of the things that a great leader does is they communicate in writing the if thens and sets the parameters on look you're going to find yourself in hairy situations and I want to rehearse those with you ahead of time and communicate with you what my expectations are so that there aren't a lot of guesswork you know that you know the first principles you know the

[21:25] objective that we're going for we want to be south of viburg on the Eastern side of the Mississippi got it guys that's what we're going for and there may be 15 things that go wrong in this and I'm going to outline every one of those 15 things and every one of the contingencies of those 15 things and and it was being a guy that does a lot of writing I I was struck with man this guy freaking nailed it he could imagine the process and the outcome and he equipped his leaders to have flexibility within uh appropriate guard rails with with first principles uh in

[22:02] it so I I I think being able to communicate in writing to your team what the outcome is and what the process is to get to that outcome and what things are non-negotiable and what things are free to make your decision you figure it out you're empowered to lead towards the outcome yeah I mean it it it's amazing because nowadays there's all kinds of software to do that and everything but you we're talking 150 over 150 years ago right yeah to to be able to hold all that in his head yeah yeah and and at

[22:38] the end of the day I don't think any software can anticipate the contingencies right it it takes somebody that's been on the battle lines that's got his butt kicked that has had failures to anticipate the failures that his team would have and to preemptively anticipate those and give them give them guidance on what to do in response to these things like he was going into details on the distance between uh hospitals that they will need along the line and how to collect forage resources because they were going for 30 days and they had 10 days worth of food so he said here's

[23:15] what you got to do you gotta have this is how you're going to collect food from the people around here's what you're not going to do here's what you are going to do here's where the hospital should be here's what happens when your horses get sick like it was gnarly the level of detail it goes to uh in this order so uh writing get your writing right yeah wow so then uh I I think I like reading um annual reports from there there are a couple of guys that write extraordinarily good annual reports for their sh shareholders one's

[23:51] Warren Buffett like if you just read Warren Buffett's annual reports you should be awarded in NBA at the end uh and Jeff Bezos also does that right writes really really tight uh annual reports to shareholders letters to shareholders lot A lot can be learned from successful leaders and how they communicate in writing to their teams okay so we finally get south of Vicksburg we're about 50 miles south of Vicksburg we finally get all of the guys on the east side of the Mississippi so

[24:26] vickburg is in trouble now now um and everyone thinks okay this is easy we're going to go straight North up the Mississippi and we're gonna attack Vicksburg from the south and we're gonna we're gonna get him we finally got him trapped and that's what pton who is in charge of Vicksburg is thinking that's what Sherman who's in ch in charge of a third of this military division is thinking and of course Grant says no we're not going to do that because that's what everyone's going to expect and so what Grant does is if you're on the clock uh slightly south of the center of the dial he goes straight East

[25:03] instead of North to Vicksburg he goes east to Jackson Mississippi the the state capital and he does that and and this march by the way is about a 100 mile march to go East with no supplies in enemy territory where he can't communicate with his other divisions or Washington and the reason he does that is he says look they know that we're going to go north that's the right thing to do I'm going east because they won't expect it and by going east what I'm going to do is cut off their supply line because Vicksburg was getting troops

[25:38] moving from the East towards the West to Vicksburg from three o'clock Jackson to vickburg at the cent center of the dial so Grant takes off uh moving towards the east with his army he takes Jackson Mississippi he fights five battles in like 10 days these are gnarly campaigns uh starting at Port Gibson he just gets over the Mississippi he's got a fight just to get a beach head he then goes to the Battle of Raymond as he's fighting towards uh three o'clock towards Jackson he fights at Jackson Mississippi takes the state capital Burns it and then

[26:14] starts fighting West towards Vicksburg uh Battle of champion Hill they called it the hill of death it was just a brutal gnarly campaign and then the battle of the Black River so this is in 17 days he fights battles no communication with Washington and uh no uh supplies because they're in the enemy's territory Sherman his best right-hand guy says You're crazy you're voluntarily going into the place that our enemy would have fought for a year to get you to that place and Grant's response was look I'm

[26:51] going to fight where they're not I'm I'm going to attack them where they're not uh and I think uh you know that was that book maybe 20 years ago the blue ocean that talked about if you are developing a business or a service you have to go where your competition isn't because that's where the unserved market is if you just go straight up to Vicksburg the way everybody does it you're just making uh another widget that everyone's got tons of versions of that widget everyone knows what you're going to do it's not going to differentiate you in the market so we're going to do a student body left and go in a direction that nobody

[27:26] expects us to go and that that willingness to not not accept the obvious path to success but to be willing to consider the unanticipated path to success is actually the thing that's the most determinative of mass of success yeah so I think the best example of that that I can think of is Walt Disney so um when after he his first break through character as as probably most people know was M was Mickey Mouse who recently

[28:02] at the early versions of him anyway recently fell into public domain and Mickey Mouse was so successful that his Bankers wanted him to continue making Mickey Mouse cartoons right right more Mouse more mice more mice I was like the the joke and and he decided no he wanted to make um this uh cartoon about skeletons dancing in a um you know Cemetery at at midnight and it was called the skeleton's dance and and the bankers were like why do you want to do

[28:38] this stick with with what what everybody's expecting you to do and and and wal was like no because that's I mean we'll do more Micky Mouse cartoons but but he he knew that you would you would burn yourself out by doing the same thing over and over again and what's so interesting is if you look at the Walt Disney Company today one of the biggest problems I think they have is they bought these these big franchises like the Marvel Comics you know universe and they've been making all of these big time you

[29:14] know um super um hero movies and and and the revenue from them is just declining because they've saturated the market finally I think uh you know Robert Iger has acknowledged that they they've made a mistake they did the same thing with the the Star Wars franchise is you can't keep making the same stuff over and over again you have to be willing to change things up and and go in a direction that you know your your customers or your clients um they may not even realize they want it until they see it yeah yeah

[29:49] Steve Jobs is another example right Apple makes computers that's what they do they make awesome computers they're really userfriendly and then he says we're getting into the phone business and everyone's like the phone business why are we getting in the what do we know about phones and then the phone business leads to the iPod business which leads to the music business it's like holy crap that's a blue ocean that everyone expected Apple to go to Vicksburg everyone expected Apple to just make another version of the uh Mac and they said now we we have an entirely different idea of how success can be

[30:24] made and it isn't the thing that you always that that we typ cast in we're going to do something different and and Grant did that routinely in his battles okay so bottom of the Mississippi or or below Vicksburg we go student body uh East and get Jackson and then fight our way back to Vicksburg now we have The Siege of Vicksburg we've locked it down nobody can get out it's going to be a bad scene we're here for two months uh there's all sorts of horrible attacks on Vicksburg there's these incredible mining operations where they're digging

[30:59] underneath the walls of Vicksburg and putting thousands of pounds of dynamite and blowing up the walls it's like a Siege Warfare is a gnarly thing what what is striking to me about The Siege of Vicksburg is the siege of vickburg is not what Grant's natural inclination was what Grant did what he was brilliant at was uh maneuver Warfare moving his troops to a place where the enemy was and getting around the corner and attacking him from the side so movement is what made Grant great and at the Battle of Vicksburg Grant had to become

[31:35] somebody that he wasn't naturally good at which is a Siege Warfare guy a whole new set of tactics that Grant has never done before other than when he was a lieutenant in the the Mexican-American War and they have The Siege at Mexico City but uh like he had never LED troops on a on a Siege like this but he understood look I got to do something that I'm not comfortable doing in order to win this battle I have to take the hat off that comes most natural to me and put on a hat that isn't and he seamlessly moved into a general of uh

[32:13] maneuvering arms to a a Siege General and they ended up succeeding July 3D Vicksburg Falls uh day before Battle of Gettysburg uh is won and in one and fourth of Ju lie everyone stoked about it and and it turns the direction of the war because Grant was able to change who he was in response to the environment and I think I think many Business Leaders it's uncomfortable to become somebody that we're not naturally inclined to but the great leaders are able to take off the shell that made

[32:49] them successful and put on uh a new set of armor that is not does not come naturally to them say look I got to do it for the good of the troops uh and they figure it out so a lot of business coaches this this has a been a I think a more recent thing um they will they they will preach well you need to play to your strengths so what you're good at just sort of double down on that right um and that's what's going to bring you success and while I I think there's perhaps some validity there the problem is is what do

[33:26] you when when your strength is just not the right you know arrow in the quiver right so you drive the business into the ground or you retire and it's like well what if I'm not ready what what what if the business needs me uh what if I don't have a number two Lieutenant that's good at Siege Warfare yeah I got to be a big boy and adult and figure this out even though it's not my natural inclination yeah yeah I mean you again you see this a lot with Founders right the the sort of yeah right founder trap right and they can't transition into being the kind of

[34:04] managers that a company needs once it's pass its founding stage and and is becoming more mature and I always think that's that's that's kind of sad because yeah you would think you would want to see your baby grow up mature yeah you know and go on to yeah there's more work to do uh Bill Gates Bill Gates did that successfully he was not naturally a leader of men Mark Zuckerberg has done it he's not naturally a leader of men uh but but it is the exception to the rule right there is a thing there is a Founders trap and there's a reason that there's a Founders trap and I think it's

[34:39] I think it's a lack of humility on the founders part to say uh I was good I ran the Baton I got my money it's time for me to bail rather than saying look I have a duty and responsibility to be some become something that I'm not naturally good at I'll I'll surround myself with a team I'll I'll have a number number two like Sherman that's good and that can complement my weaknesses but at the end of the day I was given command of this thing and I'm going to fight it out until I'm relieved of command yeah yeah so that's just that's Vicksburg that's just one campaign of Grants many campaigns that in this six

[35:16] Monon period guy there's so much we can learn about leadership from what he did uh or maybe he's an example of leadership principles that apply everywhere uh and we just can see it in the military context yeah well and and and you know I think not just leadership right well I guess maybe personal growth is a perhaps is a form of self leadership I guess you could call it but but right there's I think there's a lot of there's lessons Beyond um leadership for us there about how we we need to be

[35:51] as as as human beings yeah um one of the one of the things you mentioned that that I um I I I think was is is very powerful is again we hear a lot from um leadership coaches about you you have to delegate you have to delegate and and that's true because a lot of leaders they're their Achilles heel is they won't let go right but but I think you rightly pointed out what we need to do is not delegate delegate delegate it's understand how much needs

[36:26] to be delated when we need to delegate what are the boundaries on that delegation so people understand the um the the situation in which they're operating and can do so effectively um without having to worry that either they're they're going to cross some boundary that they're not they didn't really know existed or that they you know don't have enough authority to you know to get done the task that's been set for them and that's a more complex uh thing to do than just

[37:02] delegating y yep uh war is hard and uh running a business is hard uh and there there is cost and pain in both uh certainly more in war than in business but uh yeah there there are awesome awesome principles and lessons to be learned by by being a student of war and and finding the application uh in in our day-to-day yeah for sure well we're we've gone a little bit overtime here but I I I wanted to finish this out this this was just fantastic um I'm gonna have I'm

[37:37] gonna have to maybe make you a regular feature have you come in periodically as long as long as we stick with Grant I'm good maybe maybe we'll do Napoleon but mostly Grant okay well you know what um Grant had a a long and illustrious career yeah right um and one of these days I might have I might have to get you to talk about you know how did his drinking get him to be a more effective leader right right right because you know there's the famous uh um quote from Lincoln where they were complaining about you know um

[38:13] uh Grant being drunk and and Lincoln said something along lines of well find out what he's drinking so I can send it to the rest of my commanders exactly [Laughter] exactly well Josh thank you so much that that was really really terrific I appreciate it I'm just going to wrap things up here and and we'll we'll I'll take us off live and we can wrap up uh one-on-one so folks thank you very much for tuning in I I really appreciate it I I what what a treat it was to have Josh on the show today so I just want to remind you that tomorrow at 10: am

[38:49] Pacific time is my show business lessons from the military that'll wrap things up for this week and then next week we start again on Monday at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time with trust and Estates weekly so um that's that's our lineup and and of course 7 days from today we'll be back with the the next edition of business lessons from the military so I thank you very much for tuning in wishing you a wonderful rest of the day and signing off as I always do Marie darling you're my bell especially since you come from the south all the best folks