School of War - Ep 85: Antulio J. Echevarria on Jomini (New Makers of Modern Strategy #9)

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Antulio J. Echevarria, General Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research at the U.S. Army War College and a contributor to New Makers of Modern Strategy, joins the show to talk about one of the most influential military thinkers of the modern age, Antoine-Henri Jomini.  ▪️ Times      •    01:55 Introduction      •    02:22 Who was Jomini?     •    06:13 A charlatan?     •    08:57 Summary of the Art of War     •   11:50 Clausewitz vs Jomini      •    14:26 The center of gravity     •    16:03 Lines of operation     •    21:21 Regard for the enemy     •   24:44 Interpreting Napoleon      •   28:09 Mahan and Jomini     •    30:47 Air power    •   31:55 Clausewitz revival     •    34:02 Jomini today

For all of the attention paid these days to Klaus Fitts in American professional military education, the man with a stronger claim to have influenced the theory and practice of American warfighting was not Klaus Fitz, but a contemporary of his, Antoine Henri Jomeney, a Swiss who joined Napoleon's army and who later defected to the Allied cause, a controversial figure in his day who claimed to have captured and explained Napoleon's approach to war in his own writings. This claim does not stand up to the closest scrutiny, as we'll discuss today, but it is undeniable that Jominee left a lasting impression on militaries worldwide and, to the extent that his name is often omitted in discussions of present-day strategy and operations. It's because his most

important ideas took such deep hold that they long ago shrugged off any association with the man who had popularized them. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content, follow along on Instagram at School of War. Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted today to welcome Antulio Echeveria to the show. He's the MacArthur Chair of Research at the U.S. Army War College, had a long career in the U.S. Army before that. Author of numerous books and articles, and most recently a contributor to the Newmakers of Modern Strategy Volume, contributing the chapter on Jomini. Sir, thank you so much for joining the show. My pleasure. So I thought we could start with Jomini's career in life and a sort of broad discussion. of who he was. You know, we have Jomene and Klaus Fitz as the two great interpreters of the Napoleonic war as we had your co-contributor, Hugh Strawn on the program a few weeks ago to talk about Klausfits.

And Jomeney is the other side of this story. And I kind of have a suspicion that listeners will actually know less about Jomene than they'll know about Clausefitt. So I'll just start off. Who was this guy? Yeah. So Jomene, Swiss, Orne, and the middle-class family, you could have had a bright in undistinguished future in finance. His father and grandfather were previous mayors of the city of Payron where he was born. So they had already set up the groundwork in some ways, connections, so forth. So he could have gone that route in terms of years he was born and lived. He was born one year earlier in Closwood, so 1779. But he lives another 39 years longer, or 38 years longer than Clavis.

So he's 1869. So during that additional span of time, he's able to publish more, influence things, more change, or creatively cultivate his own personal history contributions to the Napoleonic and Russian militaries at the time. So unlike Clasmos, who would deny that opportunity, Germany exploits it to the open most. So just real quick, a couple of dates just so readers can, or listeners can orient. He publishes in 1804, Tweeties and Grand Tactics, and manages to get it in front of Marshal Ney, who then allegedly is impressed enough by it to add him to Ney's staff and in the contract basis. So a lot of the time, Germany is not officially part of the French Army.

It's kind of in the contract status. In many cases, really, just sort of a dispatch writer or a courier with increasing responsibilities. He's given a rank, staff colonel later on and so on. But almost like Progoshin and his little mutiny, it's almost like Germany begins these little fractures or instigates things in order to get the attention of those over him, his superiors, get him a raise or reneurial. negotiated contract. So even though this was an era in which, you know, popular militaries were being constructed and so on, it was also a lot of military expertise that was gained through the contract sort of system, people buying and buying talent and using that talent on

staff. And then people sometimes change sides when the fortunes of war were not going well. and he's joining he does do that in 1813 in the summer armistice. He does defect to the allies, leaves nay hanging, so to speak. And so he was later tried for doing that in absentia. It wasn't there. But in 1815 and 16, he was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Of course, that sentence was never really carried out. And the opponent later says, well, what would you expect of a Swiss,

among Frenchmen, right? Napoleon could get away with saying that because he was a course it can. So that's sort of paints a little bit of a maybe broad, maybe too broad picture of what it's like to be an outsider nationally and culturally on the staff that had had many personalities, all of whom were vying for recognition and renown and promotion and so on. I want to get into the substance of his thought here in a minute, but sticking with him personally first. It's impossible to miss, whether it's in your chapter, really any other contemporary or recent treatment of Jomene, there's a sense of distaste that authors have for him. The word charlatan gets thrown around a lot. I understand it was thrown around at the time.

Talk about that side of his life. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's actually accurate. What I've been able to read, Liam, he was a narcissist, capital N, and always was able to construe the histories or the facts to his benefit. A self-promoter, it might be a less, you know, a more benign way of describing his personality, an intriguer, for sure. And someone who gets into gambling dust early in his career in life and has to flee ahead of the law, so to speak, and then eventually joins the French Army. And, but again, he's never really given a position of command. He says he craved that, you know, that was his drive. motive and so on. But it's hard to really believe that that was actually it. But he's a charlatan

in a way that he steals the principles and concepts of others, but without acknowledging them, of Ambulo, for example, he takes decisive points from him, and Henry Lloyd, he takes lines of communication and supply essentially, which are now today's lines of effort. In the long run, unfortunately, for us, I suppose, Germany is more successful. at influencing modern and postmodern military thinking, probably because the ideas are simple and are transferable, easily digestible by busy practitioners, policy practitioners, and military practitioners. So throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, and even now in the 21st century,

a line of communication and supply and decisive points, interior lines and exterior lines, all those things are talked about and used today and joint publications and throughout, you know, planning documents and so on. So in some ways, even though we talk about Klausowitz and we appreciate the sophistication of his work on war, it's Germany who has succeeded more, called the triumph of the essential or the basic, simple, or the complex or the sublime. And that's the nature of the business in some ways. The more complex or if two your theories are, the less likely they're going to influence policies and the military art or something like that. So, yeah, that was one of the more subtle parts of your argument that I really appreciated, which just as you say, for all the reverence

in which Claus Fitz is old and, you know, scholars spend their careers debating precisely how to interpret this or that aspect of his argument. Jomani, even if not by name exactly, is everywhere in today's military or at least at the forefront of how the military does business. So would it be summary of the art of war? Which one of his books would you go to to find sort of, you know, the summation of his thought or the best? Yeah, I think that would be it. That was the most popular one compiled in 1838. It has a lot of the additional earlier works, early ideas that he had taken.

I mean, in one way I say, you know, he stole or borrowed the ideas, but people didn't normally cite where they were getting ideas from unless somebody's really, really controversial, and then they might cite that person's name. So you could say that he helps bring those theories and principles forward into the modern era, whereas they might have fallen into historical obscurity for a while, and then maybe even discovered later or something like that. So that's also a way to describe his contributions as having rescued some of those theories from obscurity. and then because who reads who reads the works of henry lloyd or von biello these days either i mean it's

hard enough as you said to to find and get into the works of the germany but yeah the summary of the art of war would be various translations out there it was reprinted numerous times sometimes with an additional annex added or small parts small that were revised so it can get really confusing but there are some axes out there that describe each of the editions and some detail and allow you to identify what's new and what's not new and so forth. Can I ask this sort of a personal question, but you yourself, you've written numerous books on Klaus Fitts. How did you end up being the author of the Jomene chapter?

How did that shake out? Yeah, I don't know. It was just like how old brands just asked me. And I was like, surprised because I'd never really been a fan of Jomini, although I knew, you know, something about him, everything. So I know he was strong. I'd already gotten the Klausovus chapter. So I said, okay, fine. Now, it'll be a chance to understand it from a different angle in some ways. And also, you know, to talk a little bit about his foil. And though, and there's been some useful work that came out of King's College probably 10 years ago now that described some of the areas where they've overlapped. They weren't entirely literary or theoretical enemies. necessarily. Jomani does complain that there's nothing new in Klausvitz and that Klozboz argues that

the theory of war and principles of war are impossible then goes out and lays them out in his own book. So even after Klaus was had passed away and everything, Jomani is still embattled with him at a certain extent. But I would go with, I would start with that. Well, maybe this is a good way to get into the ideas themselves. So if we use Klaus Fitz as the foil here, you know, and he has his controlling idea of, you know, war being a function of policy or politics and any other controlling, you of course,

well, and feel free to rephrase that, any other ideas you would identify. How is it the Jomene? Where would we draw the distinctions before we start looking further? Yeah, I mean, one way I think of Clavis versus Jomene as Clauswitz ideas are focused more on, you know, defeating the enemy of center of gravity, for example. example is about the relationships between adversaries and allies and there's the particular dynamics that are created by those relationships. And within that series or network of relationships, there is a core that is holding those things together in some way and allowing it to be

useful in military sense. So going after that thing is one way to economize our forces and make sure that you're going out of something important that you're not being deceived into going after lesser objectives and wasting effort and all of that. Whereas Jomey's approach has been popularly called Making War on the Map and it's not too far off because the idea of decisive points, usually it's geographic, something geographic that terrain features have created, river crossings, mountain passes, perhaps transportation network, the hubs and so on. Going after seizing those things, using them to your advantage and denying them of your enemy is one way to apply the Jominian approach to warfare. So force-centric, for

Klauswitz, and terrain-centric for Jomene. Now, they did have ideas that overlapped as well. They weren't, if you sat them down today and got past the initial uncomfortableness and got them and both engaged in some sort of dialogue, you would find her, you know, they did agree, they would agree that, you know, that decisive points are important and so on. I think Jomani might have struggled to understand center of gravity. He tries to define it in some other ways that really work. His center of gravity is more a, the most decisive, decisive points would be one way to describe Jomini's approach to the center of gravity because he does try to take some of the

Klauswitzian ideas at later in the later volumes of summary of art of war and discuss them without giving any kind of reference to Klauswitz, of course. Can I ask? I mean, this is the Jolmini episode, not the Klauswitz episode, but I feel like listeners, it's relatively straightforward to understand, you know, a particular bridge as a quote-unquote decisive point and why that might factor heavily into your planning. That's a straightforward enough idea. What is the Klaus Vitsian center of gravity?

Yeah, so for me, partly what I mentioned already, but I tried to describe it as a focal point, something that can be a key leader, or it can be something that holds an alliance like NATO together. And so if you can knock out that thing or neutralize it in some way, then the advantage goes to you. Normally, in the way the cloud was laying it out, centers of gravity, if you can immobilize or neutralize them, can lead to catastrophic failure. or collapse on the part of the enemy. So often that is a bridge too far as far as our political objectives, particularly in a nuclear era. We don't want to go all the way to that point if the opponent has nuclear weapons as well,

because then what you end up doing, potentially triggering a nuclear exchange, and nobody really wants that. So in the era of limited wars, it was less useful to think about centers of gravity if they indeed would lead to some sort of catastrophic, If it collapse or a cascading series of events and so on, then you want to be very careful about when you select them and what you decide to target them with and so on.

Otherwise, you get a war that you didn't really bargain for. So that's how I try to lay it out for folks. Got it. So back to Germany. So how does this idea that, as you point out, has become just a sort of fatherless part of military lingo in terms of lines of effort? but the original lines of operation. What are those?

Why do they matter? Yeah, because the, so people like Henry Lloyd were, had discovered that in the long wars of those periods, supply was vital. And supply added more military punch at the Ford Edge or, you know, whatever your battle was going to be engaged in. So it was like a life's blood thing. The more you supply and material, you can. kept flowing forward, the stronger was almost like an artery, right, where blood is flowing

away from the heart or central area, capital, or heartland of your country, towards the adversary. And so it's not just the supply aspect, but also borders, communications, being able to understand what's actually happening, communications back and forth from the front and the capital at home and so forth. So that's a line of operation that usually need some sort of base of operation. Again, that's kind of the heart or central, the heart and central nervous system would be kind of together because your intelligence and orders flow along the same lines as your supplies do. So they really ban, you know, it was almost a revolution in thinking about warfare and war theories.

The fact of so much attention was shifted to logistics and the flow of supplies, how important that could be. And, of course, the American Way of War has been able to capitalize that on the late 20th century, well, mid-20th century onward, the whole logistical flow and so forth. Like Colin Gray says, the, or said, American Way of War has been logistically excellent for most of its existence as true. Not in the 19th century or early 20th century, but it certainly was. mid-20th and onward. So without those lines with vital lines being intact and protected, you can't really have successful operations. So the line of operation was that.

Today we would call that, you know, the line of communication and supply, and they apply in land and see not so much in the air, although we do create air corridors. If we do see the operations properly, create an air corridor where air power can get through. and do what it needs to do. But when space is added into the equation,

I'm not sure what the impact will be on lines of operation just yet. That would be an interesting dimension to discuss. So that's part of it. But also the other dimension, lines of effort don't have to be physical. The idea of pacifying a village or creating or establishing rule of law in faraway territory and somewhere in Afghanistan or something like that. So there are steps of things that you need to do and establish a police force, for example, establish some sort of legitimacy amongst whoever's going to be in charge of the police force

and those sorts of things. So you can take that idea, which was originally very physical and about communications and supply, and now apply it as we have done in JP50 and talk about lines of effort and then track those various lines of effort across the diplomatic element of national power, informational, military, and economic, and so on. And then be able to coordinate your efforts and so on to try hopefully to achieve your objective. So there is, that's a, that's an influence and call it Eumenian because he does get credit for bringing it forward.

that will probably not go away for another, you know, century or so, I would think. People may think that, you know, Center of Gravity might get too complex, and people may forget about those or they may fall out of doctrine at some point, but I find it really hard to believe lines of operation and lines of effort will have the same fate. Yeah, there's just to, I guess, to stick with the modern expression of it, then, I mean, I've lived what you're describing. I'm familiar with the way in which operations are a, or a, strategy is divided up into these lines of effort.

I wonder if, in a way, it's inescapable, right? In a way, any military operation is going to have a series of checklists, right? Which I guess in a way is what we're talking about in the lines of effort conception as opposed to the original lines of operation. And you're going to, you're going to be stuff you're going to feel like you need to do and you're going to make a list of this stuff and then you're going to make sure you're doing it. You know, hold people accountable that's getting done. And in a weird way, and this is driving towards a question here,

the sort of pejorative way to talk about it would be to say that it almost happens with without regard to the enemy. That is to say, we're going to build a police force. We're going to, you know, do X, Y, and Z, and we'll be able to assess and track our progress. And if we do these things, the Taliban will be defeated in Afghanistan. And yet, of course, it's not what happened in real life. And I wonder, I mean, I hate to pin the American failure in Afghanistan on poor Germany, but, you know, is the way in which the enemy, sort of fails to be at the center of the lines of effort conversation a problem, or is it just how people misuse this?

Well, it's a little bit of both. I mean, that's a fair point because the problem with the map-centric approach, you know, very broad terms of Germany, is that the presence of the enemy is almost immaterial and what the enemy is trying to do. It's more about, you know, your geography and all of that. And the assumption that this decisive point is actually going to be decisive for you or for your foe, and so you better seize it first. And same thing, lines of effort, that if you do these steps, and oh, by the way, the

enemy at some point does get a vote, right? It may try to prevent you from doing that, but it's easy for the enemy to fall out of the equation, as it were, and for us to look at our elaborate schemes and plans and all of that as something that's going to work and put a lot of resources and faith into that. And so that is one of the disadvantages of a terrain-centric, I'll call it, approach to war as opposed to an enemy-centric one. And I would just sort of say this aloud, and you tell me if I'm on the right track here, but as they become more abstract, it's easier to make big mistakes, if that makes sense? So if we're talking about sort of physical lines of operation, you know, a particular bridge, it's sort of hard to argue. against its significance. I mean, I guess you can still have mistaken assumptions. Maybe the enemy has

bridging equipment or something like that, you know, but in general, like you can look at the map and say, yeah, that's probably going to be important. If we start, we start to sort of conceptualize about politics and how, you know, the rule of law works. And so we say, okay, we need a police force. And we're going to start building a police force. Well, it turns out you can't build a police force in this context without it being hopelessly corrupt. So actually you can be proceeding down your checklist and actually just making life worse for yourself, but you're misconstitutional. conceiving of how to pursue order, you know. Right. You can, you can tell I've spent some time, not thinking about show many, but thinking about this side of things. You know, I just, it seems,

it seems very easy to fall into, I guess my strict claim is it would be easier to fall into error, the more abstract and sort of political, small people, political, your lines of effort. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point because it's really, or as college would be dealing more with living forces and you know many more static, not really forces, but accidents or circumstances of the situation, geographic or otherwise. But it would be great to have a blending of the two so that in some ways we're not forgetting that the enemy's actions can change the what's really actually important on the battlefield or in the theater of operations. And it would be good for us to adjust as well to that. So if there were some way to do,

maximize, optimize both approaches so that we don't forget. It's almost like having a, you know, devil's advocate with you while you're drawing out your lines of effort and so on, as who says, okay, well, what happens if, and you're not just dealing with enemy forces, it's living forces because also your allies and partners may have some, they have certainly have a role to play, but they may see their role differently than you do, which complicates your development of your lines of effort and so on. But that's a great point. So, yeah.

So just to take things back to the start of the 19th century here, was Klaus Fitz a better interpreter Napoleon, or was he sort of similarly idiosyncratic, maybe less dishonest than Jomene, but using Napoleon to see his own thing as opposed to purely interpreting Napoleon? Who has the better take on the point? Yeah, so they look at it very differently. The Prussian reformers saw a friend. French model is something they wanted to emulate. In other words, they saw the monarchy slash emperor

and the French army and the citizenry, the French citizenry, as essentially fused together and cooperating and generating kind of a synergy, if you will, those three elements all working together. And, you know, historical research later, we find a lot more frictions within the citizenry and within, you know, among generals and the army and Napoleon versus marshals and so on, but that was kind of invisible to the Prussians who saw their own situation a lot more fractured, fragmented. So they wanted the king to arm the citizenry, basically, and bring it into the army so that the army could leverage that sort of primordial power or hatred of the the enemy and so on to infuse the army with the passions of the populace because it was disinterested.

It was a big gap between the Prussian monarchy and its system of laws, the Prussian military, and the Prussian citizens. It was worse than ambivalence when the cloutlysses, they were just disinterested in what happened to the crown and or the army. They wanted to change that and bring it together. So they saw in the French Napoleonic model a way to go about bringing those three elements together. In some ways,

what the Clavutzi and Trinity is about. We assume that all the elements are supposed to be kind of at odds, or it's a mistranslation from earlier version of the Howard and Parade, they called it a paradoxical Trinity, but it's not necessarily paradoxical. The Prussians

saw it as more cohesive than not. Whereas, you know, Zomani is looking at the Napoleonic model differently, and he sees it in some ways through a geometric and physical lens than Klaus and Reformers are. So they're looking at more. Metaphysical is probably too strong a word to use,

but it's the whole idea of geist, the German word geist, the spirit of conflict, the spirit of animating an entire nation's, in arms, defending yourself. So you're stronger on the defense than in the attack in this kind of situation. So hopefully that makes sense, but that should draw out a pretty sharp distinction, I think, between those different ways of looking at it. So we spoke for a while about influence, Germany's influence in the present day in the 21st century. But he had, you know,

very significant impacts in the 19th and 20th centuries as well. And one place I wanted to ask you about was Alfred Mahan, who we had a, we had an episode on the show a few weeks ago, devoted to Mahan and the foundations of geopolitics. How does Jomani sort of speak to Mahan? Yeah. So Mahan sees in Jomene's summary of the art of war a foundation for military science, essentially. Military science in this period is very positivistic. In other words, there's knowledge out there that can be known and can be applied.

And one way to do that was to divine, through induction and deduction, the essential principles you need to establish a theory. That held true whether you were talking military, you were talking economics, sociology, all those things. It's a very positivistic approach to understanding the world around you. And Mahonda tries to apply that approach, inductive reasoning and deductive, and then the synthetic, I didn't quite call it, a synthetic was more comparative.

So we're bringing together the historical observations, your induction, your deduction, and then you take their knowledge to a higher level, essentially, a level that can be applied. So what Mahan does is use Jomani and the three key principles in Jomene's book, which are concentration, decision by battle, and offensive action, and applies them to naval warfare and advocates for building naval strategy around those three principles, as it were, to establish a profession, a profession needed a scientific, foundation. And at those days, all the way from the 1880s to about 20, 1920 or so, that was the

foundation that people used to establish their particular discipline. Again, economics and sociology, all those budding sciences were based on a positivistic approach to knowledge, understanding the world around you, so forth. So that continues to the mid-20th century. And we get into falsifiable hypotheses and so on. So it's a different approach after that. But at this time, Germany is perfectly the book. And it's so simple and it's about principles and their application on. It's perfect for Mahan to use.

And so you get credit from bringing those ideas into the 20th century for American naval strategists and theorists. And trying to establish a naval science, if you will. And then you cite airport. power as well. You say in your in your chapter, you talk about his impact on Billy Mitchell and then later Curtis LeMay. If you think about the American air campaign in World War II, it's, you know, it's successful as part of a broader whole. I mean, whatever else we might say about it. So, you know, what could be so wrong if it's leading, if Schoomene's thought is leading to outcomes like that? Right. And so that's the thing. Mitchell picks up the same approach, the positive approach for

air power and it goes in through World War II and all of that. Then there's a massive revolution because nuclear weapons mean that it may not be a good idea to take offensive action in all cases and to seek out decision by battle and to concentrate. Those are not things you necessarily want to do if there's a risk going to nuclear level of exchange. So people like Brody are arguing for a revolution in military principles. So the first principles come under assault in 1950, 1960, and Brody is dismissing him and basically kind of ridiculing the military thinking up to that point for being so instinctive and reactive, impulsive, rather than reflective and actually doing real

strategies, so on. So anyway, not to get too far away from Germany and all, but it is part of the second and third order effects of his influence. Well, I'm going to get two more questions. The first one is going to get us even a little further way, which is where does the Klaus Fitz revival come into this? Is it with the dawn of the nuclear age in the discussion of limited versus unlimited war? Or is it a little later? So just a little bit later because what happens is Brody is one of those who discovers the value of Cloud was one of the particular arguments that war needs to be subjected to political control, political influence, political objectives, and so on. And Brody takes it one step further and says those

objectives need to be, A, about deterrence, or B, about limited wars, limited wars that are consensual. In other words, the difference between a limited war and the early 19th century when you didn't have all the resources necessarily did later, the mass industrial warfare and so on, the consensual that you and your adversary would agree to only go so far in the warfare, you know, often proxy type wars or whatever, that you wouldn't, you wouldn't go for the jugular and then provoke nuclear escalation. So there was an implied consent in, it's like the Schelling's bargaining model, but instead of the explicit bargains, you have tacit bargaining that's going on.

And that's where clubs goes back into the picture because Brody discovers him and is asked to come on board by Howard and Parade for that remarkable historical volume that they put together. And Brody, the client is taking money for it. And he says he wants to do it for sort of the glory of the task itself and because of the message, you know. So last question is you're at the U.S. Army War College. You've taught there for many years. Is the work of the War College? Is the work of American professional military education more broadly?

Jomanian, Klaus Wittsian, both, neither. Where do we shake out these things? Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit of both. but I think both Germany and Cloudless are probably losing ground, partly because it's so difficult to understand Clauswitz. So there goes, again, the triumph of the essential over the sublime. So that is one aspect of it.

And a lot of people don't see where Clauswitz is relevant to regular warfare and that sort of thing, which is a mistake, not to see that connection, but nonetheless, that's the more popular view that there's no real relevance there. And they're searching for something a little more recent, something has not 200-something years old, 20-30 years old, to use as a way forward for regular warfare and so on. So that's part of it. The other is that the name, Jomene, he's lost ground in many ways because his name is not necessarily associated with lines of effort and, you know, decisive points it is, but not explicitly anymore. So that connection is gone. And so they don't see

Germany as being necessarily relevant to the kinds of wars that we've had to fight all the way up to February 24, 2022, when now major war among major modern powers is underway and we have to approach it with a different, you know, the regular war is a dimension of that, but it's not the full dimension by any means. It's not the largest dimension by any means. And Tullia at Cheveria, MacArthur, Chair of Research at the U.S. Army War College, contributor to the new makers of Modern Strategy Volume. I've learned a ton over the course of this conversation. I'm very grateful for you making the time. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.