The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I by Douglas Brunt

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I by Douglas Brunt https://amzn.to/3QcSvVB INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The hidden history of one of the world’s greatest inventors, a man who disrupted the status quo and then disappeared into thin air on the eve of World War I—this book answers the hundred-year-old mystery of what really became of Rudolf Diesel. September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever. But Diesel never arrives at his destination. He vanishes during the night and headlines around the world wonder if it was an accident, suicide, or murder. After rising from an impoverished European childhood, Diesel had become a multi-millionaire with his powerful engine that does not require expensive petroleum-based fuel. In doing so, he became not only an international celebrity but also the enemy of two extremely powerful men: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world. The Kaiser wanted the engine to power a fleet of submarines that would finally allow him to challenge Great Britain’s Royal Navy. But Diesel had intended for his engine to be used for the betterment of mankind and refused to keep the technology out of the hands of the British or any other nation. For John D. Rockefeller, the engine was nothing less than an existential threat to his vast and lucrative oil empire. As electric lighting began to replace kerosene lamps, Rockefeller’s bottom line depended on the world’s growing thirst for gasoline to power its automobiles and industries. At the outset of this new age of electricity and oil, Europe stood on the precipice of war. Rudolf Diesel grew increasingly concerned about Germany’s rising nationalism and military spending. The inventor was on his way to London to establish a new company that would help Britain improve its failing submarine program when he disappeared. Now, New York Times bestselling author Douglas Brunt reopens the case and provides an astonishing new conclusion about Diesel’s fate. “Equal parts Walter Isaacson and Sherlock Holmes, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel yanks back the curtain on the greatest caper of the 20th century in this riveting history” (Jay Winik, New York Times bestselling author). About the author Until 2011, Douglas Brunt was CEO of Authentium, Inc. He now writes full time and lives in New York with his wife and three children. He is the author of New York Times Bestseller 'Ghosts of Manhattan' and 'The Means'. His third novel, 'Trophy Son', will be released May 30, 2017. You can lean more about Doug at www.douglasbrunt.comHere is a summary of the key points from the podcast conversation: Douglas Brunt is the author of the new book The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War One. It tells the story of Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, who disappeared mysteriously while traveling by ship in 1913. Diesel was a celebrity inventor at the time. His disappearance sparked speculation that he was murdered by powerful figures like John D. Rockefeller or Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had motives related to Diesel's inventions that threatened their business interests. Brunt became fascinated by the diesel engine and Rudolf Diesel's story when deciding to repower a boat he bought with diesel engines. He learned diesel engines are more efficient, stable, and safer than gasoline engines. In researching Diesel's life, Brunt found there was little written about him in English and the mystery around his disappearance was compelling. Though officially ruled a suicide, Brunt presents a theory of what really happened to Diesel backed up by intelligence experts.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The Chris Voss Show. Dot com. We just make up whatever on the end of it. I like it better that way. Thanks for tuning in to The Big Show, my family and friends. For 15 years, of course, we've been bringing you the most wonderful, smartest minds and improving your quality of life. While the news may be dreary some days, we bring you that shining light,

what they sometimes refer to as the Christmas glow, into your life. And then after you engage with the show, I mean, there's three to four episodes a day uh there's 10 to 15 20 new shows a week uh you just leave with the chris fosh show glow and everywhere you walk you have this aura of knowledge power and enlightenment and just brightness it sounds like a goddamn cult doesn't it but it's not but we do charge 10 no i'm just kidding what we do ask is very small. We ask you to further show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress

Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Foss, and Chris Foss One. Those are the only dues that we ask for, and maybe a first child, as long as they're a good child. So anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on this show. I just make it up as I go along every time. And he is going to be talking to us about his newest, hottest, coolest book and was very popular on the old number one bestseller there in the old on Amazon. You know, you may have heard of it. The book is entitled The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel's Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I. We all remember that.

The book came out September 19th, 2023. Douglas Brunt joins us on the show today. It's going to be fun to talk to him. Number one bestseller in World War I history. So this is going to be enlightening and probably funner than some of the other stuff that's going now, since we're working on world war three, I guess, at this point, Douglas Brown is a New York dives, bestselling author of ghosts of Manhattan, the means trophy son, and the mysterious case of Rudolph diesel and host of the top rated serious XM author podcast dedicated with Doug Brunt.

He's a Philadelphia native and he lives in New York with his wife and three children. Welcome to the show, Douglas. How are you? Chris, you have the best show intro I've ever heard. Thank you. It's fantastic. Although it sets a very high bar for the guests. I don't know if I can make anybody's brain bleed today. Well, you know, that's what we do. It definitely sparks up our guests. Our guests will sit up a little bit higher.

Yeah, the pressure's on. Pressure's on. So thanks for coming on the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us a.com. Where do you want people to find you on the in-webs, please? Well, there's an author website that has a ton of old photos. The book is from the World War I era, and it's Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine.

There's tons of old photos from archives around the world at douglasbrunt.com. I'm on Instagram and Twitter, too. You'll find it. You're doing the gram. Give us a 30,000 overview of this book and what's inside. Well, as you mentioned, it was a New York

Times bestseller. Reviews call it the greatest caper of the 20th century. And I'll set it up for you. In 1913, on the eve of World War One, Rudolf Diesel, who invented the diesel engine, we know the word diesel, but not many people know there was a man behind this engine. And there's a reason that his history has really been scrubbed over these last hundred years. In 1913, on the eve of World War One, he disappeared disappeared he was traveling on an overnight passenger ferry from belgium to great britain on a on a steamship going across the north sea and in the night he

disappeared so in the morning he was supposed to meet his traveling companions for breakfast he didn't show up so they hold the ship at sea and they do a search they can't find anything except for his hat and his coat folded at the stern of the ship, seeming to mark where he had jumped overboard. So the prevailing theory at that time was suicide, but other theories emerged immediately because he was a huge celebrity at the time. I mentioned we sort of forgotten that the man existed in today's world, but in 1913, he was a global celebrity. It'd be like Elon Musk was traveling to Nantucket on a flight and then just disappeared. Wow. Headlines around the world, the headlines of the New York Times, the papers all through England, Western Europe out to Russia were speculating on his disappearance.

And there were two theories of murder. One was that Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, had murdered him. The other was that John Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and at that time richest man in the world, had murdered him. And they each had a motive. There's a reason why diesel was such an existential threat to each of them. And so the book sets up, it's sort of a biography of Diesel, the man. It explains a little bit about why the engine was so critical. To this day, diesel power still powers the world. Our global economy is run on diesel power. But as I explore the motives why each of them

had a reason to kill diesel, it kind of takes you into that pre-World War I sort of gilded age era where the cast of characters is phenomenal. It becomes a biography that turns into sort of like an Agatha Christie whodunit. Murder, you say?

I wish I could do that better. Isn't that the guy from 2020 uh so uh tell us a little bit more this rudolph diesel i didn't know i didn't ever really put together there was a guy who had invented the diesel engine i imagine somebody tried to do it but turns out it's a guy named diesel that's right yeah this the tit titular engine. So the reason why Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to, you know, found him to be a threat in 1913 is that by that time, really by 1908, 09, the Anglo-German arms race happening between Germany and Great Britain. And they're all turning to the submarine for their fleet. They realized suddenly this submarine weapon has become this horrifying and critical weapon for navies. So the navies of all the major powers are scrambling for diesel power to build their submarine fleets. The reason diesel was crossing the North Sea on that night in September of 1913 was he was co-founder and board director of a new diesel engine manufacturing company

based in Great Britain. Diesel was a German guy based in Great Britain, whose mandate it was to build submarine diesels for Great Britain's Royal Navy and Churchill, who was running the Royal Navy at that time. So you can understand why Wilhelm was thinking, hell no, that's not going to happen. We're not going to have our greatest inventor travel across the North Sea to go help out the British Navy.

So that would be viewed as treasonous for Kaiser Wilhelm. So that's why he leapt into the headlines as a murder suspect. For Rockefeller, the reason was very different because Diesel, he had just come back from a trip to America in 1912, where he was advocating that he could run all the power in America on vegetable oil. He was saying, you don't need petroleum. You can, you can, you know, you have a farmers, you can grow your own fuel. We don't need to be beholden to areas of the world where there's petroleum in the ground.

So that's what's fundamentally different about the diesel engine is that it runs on heavy oils. It can run on peanut oil. He won the 1900 Paris World's Fair on a diesel engine running peanut oil, vegetable oil, or coal tar. And he was saying, he said to the newspapers in 1912, in America, I can break the American fuel monopoly, and I don't need a law to do it. I don't need the Sherman Antitrust Act. I can do it through the power of this technology. So the diesel engine was a threat to Standard Oil and Rockefeller. Wow.

I mean, this is pretty interesting. You've written lots of books. What drew you to this story? What sparked it for you? Part of it, it sort of gets to what I was just saying about the fuel. So I bought an old boat like eight years ago, and it was a slightly larger boat, old, needed to be fixed up. And I was in the boatyard with a guy who runs the boatyard, and I was saying, you know, what do you think boat old needed to be fixed up and i was in the boat yard with a

guy who runs the boat yard and i'm saying you know what do you think i should do to fix this up and he said well the first thing you should do for a boat like this is repower these these engines from gasoline to diesels and i was like most people maybe many of your listeners who just thought diesel that's like the other fuel i see at the fueling station right like it's not a whole other engine the more expensive one right well. Well, these days, yeah. And he said, diesel is a fundamentally different engine. You can take a barrel of diesel fuel, drop a lit match into it, and nothing will happen. The fuel is completely stable.

There are no fumes. 100% of boat fires come from gasoline engines, zero from diesel. It's just a different engine. So it doesn't rely on spark ignition. It's a high pressure engine. Not to get geeky on the tech here, but the way it works is it's almost like a bicycle pump. You know, you jam down the plunger and it pumps the air out. Well, in a closed cylinder, that's not sending air into a bike tire, just a completely closed cylinder. If you jam down the plunger, which is basically the piston of the engine, it compresses the air into a tiny,

tiny space. And that compression creates heat. So that's how the diesel engine works. It's a simple thing. It just compresses the air. When the air is highly, highly compressed, it gets very hot, and then the fuel is introduced, and then it explodes and drives the piston back out. So there's no spark, and it's totally stable fuel with no fumes. Yeah, probably good on a submarine or a boat because, you know, you don't want to...

Exactly, fumes, no boat fire. Which is ironic because you're surrounded by water. I mean, you'd think if you got in trouble with fire, you'd have water, but technically it's not a good place to be. Yeah, or breathing the fumes when you're. Yeah. But the other thing about diesel is it's four times more efficient. Oh, really? So you can go, you know, on your 200-gallon fuel tank on your boat, you can go four times as far.

Wow. You know, I've owned boats before, and there's an old joke about boats and motorcycles the two best days you have when you own a motorcycle or a boat the day you buy one the day you sell it there's another raunchier one about planes and boats and things like that whether you rent or not so we won't tell that one because it's uh okay well uh well it's offline everybody won't tell that one. Okay. It's offline. Everybody will have to Google that one. There we go. Something like that.

Is the cow and milk joke for renting and buying? Is it similar? Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right. I think I got it right through there. I've heard that one movie too.

So tell us a little bit more about yourself so the audience can get to know you better people of buying and hearing from the authors tell us a little about you and your journey and and what got you down these road writing these books and doing your uh serious xm radio show etc sir always a big reader not always a big writer i would hobby around with it and never really thought it was a career that i could have. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know anybody who collected a check writing. So I loved it, though. And I was, you know, you know, more shy, you know, in the summers and everyone's running around. It was a rainy day in the summer. I was kind of happy. I'm like, oh, great. I'll like sit inside and read a book. I have excuse to do it.

And after college, I got into a business career and I was running a tech firm and I was traveling around a lot for that. And I would, of course, read on the planes and things like that. And at one point, it was just after I read Nelson DeMille's The Gold Coast. And Nelson is one of my favorite authors. And I read this book and I had this thought, I want to make people feel the way this book made me feel. I had this weird idea for a novel. And so I just started it. Although even still, I wasn't thinking this was a novel that anyone maybe outside my wife and even her would ever see. It was just sort of to tool around on the planes and in the terminals waiting for planes

and things like that. So I finished it. I was like, I was actually feeling pretty good about it. Maybe I'm crazy and I have no objectivity, but I think it's good. So I did let my wife read it. She goes, no, this is actually really good. I'm enjoying it. So got an agent and, you know, long story short, agent into my first publishing deal, sold the company and then have been writing since.

But it was a big transformation for me to go from running a company and having a team and a board and customers and investors and, you know, busy day, lots of meetings and lots of all the employees and all that noise to then going yeah, to no noise, to then sitting in my room, you know, with my imaginary friends instead of real friends and writing. And so I, that's kind of the beginnings of the podcast. So that was sort of like a happy accident. I was, I had met some other friends through writer festivals and things like that.

So I got to know a group of writers and then set up sort of like a monthly get together where we'd have ranks and, and talk about books and, you know, do sort of turn it into a book club for authors, writers who drink. Sure. And so it's a cool book club it's like lee child was in it

nelson demille and harlan coban oh wow and so we had a great group and i was telling a friend of mine who works at serious hexam about he's like man this should be a show you should just do this we'd put that on air and so that's what the show dedicated is uh each show begins with the guest favorite cocktail and so I fixed the cocktail. And, you know, we've had like Lee try out. I'm like, Lee, what are we going to have? He's like, I drink either black coffee or champagne. You pick it.

So we had champagne, Nelson DeMille with scotch. You know, we've had martinis and Negronis and Manhattans and all sorts of stuff. And so I fixed it right there. Sometimes we have two or three drunks. So by the end of the show, we're pretty buzzed up getting into the good stuff. But you hear all about their writing process. And I've been through it a few times myself so I can ask some of the right questions. And it's kind of a safe place to talk about

some of the good things and the frustrating things. And it's a fun show. I'm going to have to check it out and subscribe to it. I'm glad I met you. I listened to the stern the howard stern as it were um he's still kicking it over there at the serious xm and the big wheel that's for sure yeah i remember when he was on the radio that's how old i am jesus christ i remember when he took over the philly market where i grew up from john de bella it was the john morning zoo

in philly and then howard came in and kind of took over. There you go. So in the story, you've done three novels, and so this one is a nonfiction, correct? Right. Let me just flip over where you're like, guys, screw this novel business. I'm just, I'm not, not that you've said that, but just like, fuck novels. I'm doing a nonfiction, eh? Well, it was an interesting switch i have loved writing novels as well but when i got into this story i realized there's almost nothing written

about rudolph diesel in the english language there's one biography from the 60s one from the 80s both were kind of academic and i was totally drawn in by this weird mystery you know the like if you look it up in the encyclopedia britannica it says suicide but the more i read about it the more there were it made no sense that it was suicide it just seemed like a lot of holes in that and the two murder theories like that didn't totally line up either so when i first started out with it i was thinking i'll write historical fiction and i'll stay with the novel as a format because there was so little i'm like well i'll just make up the dialogue and i've got this sort of scaffolding of a story. Yeah. And I'll do historical fiction sort of based on. And then I got into some archives and I found more and more material.

And I had a theory of what happened in the case. And so you'll find that in this book, I solve what happened to Diesel. Do you really? The book explains what actually happened. And I won't spoil it, but I will say this much. It wasn't suicide. Wow. I spent five years in archives around europe

and america and presented my theory of the case to a number of former cia former fbi former nypd and also most importantly former british intel they all came back a thousand but they were like my god a thousand percent this is exactly what happened the amount of circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and of course the case this is more than 110 years ago that he disappeared. Like it was almost exactly 110. It's like 110 in a couple of weeks. Was he trying to get out of a bad marriage by faking his death? You know, the weird thing is...

That's what I did on all five of mine. For a German engineer type, he's like crazy romantic. He has these amazing letters to his wife and his kids and he's kind of like a poet as well. That's too bad. I hate guys like that. No, I'm just kidding. He can do it all. He was the Renaissance guy.

He sounds really talented and if he's top of his game, there's no reason. If you're looking at the intrigue of World war one and so it sounds like you've discovered something it almost plays like a novel but you know what's the old saying about life truth is stranger than fiction yeah yeah rudyard kipling has this great line that if history were taught in stories nobody would ever forget it and that's why these books like er Larson, if you read Splendid and the Vile, or what's the one he wrote about that mass murder in the Chicago World's Fair.

So Eric Larson, David Grand, these guys, The Killers of the Flower Moon is the David Grand book that's out as a movie now with DiCaprio. Yeah, I'm trying to decide if I should go see that. I probably will. I don't know how the reviews are going. I've been waiting. I haven't seen the movie yet,

but I know David Grand as a writer is is terrific it's this narrative non-fiction so non-fiction told in a novelistic way but it is it's all history you know it's all yeah all real and it's a great way to to learn and to take in a story i think yeah the only problem is these days anytime i see leonardo dicaprio on the screen i'm like where's his 25 year olds who are these old people that line this old chick he's hanging out with she's got to be 26 yeah yeah exactly that's been a little long in the tooth there it's like uh mcconaughey in that movie you know he keeps getting older and they keep staying the same age pretty much or brad pitt when he does that benjamin buttons movie where he goes the opposite way i

don't know i never saw that movie um but he does great movies um yeah i'll probably check it out i think uh isn't it uh martin scorsese there did that movie or is it yes yeah yeah that's right in fact we just had um martin scorsese uh royalty on last week uh i I was a fan of the movie, and I went back and saw all of Martin Scorsese's movies back to his mom in the original ones. And we had on one of the gentlemen who was the investor and co-producer, I think co-director of Mean Streets on last week. So we're like in a whole Martin Scorsese in a whole martin scorsese sort of thing how many is he done how many movies uh i don't know i don't know i don't think he knows because there was the 80s where he did the cocaine era as he calls it so i'm not sure if he does i just saw a headline about that it was you know like de niro but you know that whole crew was was kind of

yeah pretty hard in the 80s you can't count the irishman because that was awful anyway they should never have done what they did with the thing. But that's just my opinion, what I can say. So let's get back to your book because that's what we're here to pitch. Now, I didn't know this guy also invented the ice cube, which is kind of interesting. This guy was like a little Einstein going on. He was, yeah.

So he grew up poor. They were Germanic. So before, in 1850, his parents moved from Germany to Paris. And he was born in 1858. In 1870, there was the Franco-Prussian War. So this was even before Germany existed. At that time, Germany was 39 different tribes, like Prussia, Bavaria, Hanover. They all got together, declared war on France.

The Diesels, who were living in Paris, basically got kicked out of France because the Germans are coming. So anyone who's Germanic is out of here. So they're refugees. They moved to London with just the shirts on their back, penniless. They weren't rich to begin with at all. His dad was a bookbinder. And then they moved to London in that hackney quarter of London that was the same setting of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. And he's there at the same age as Oliver Twist. He's 12 years old, moves in there, and sees like the worst of the Industrial Revolution. Kids marched off into factories with no ventilation, not going to school, you know, terrible conditions.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Somebody's got to do the work, I guess. I have some Gen Zers that could be involved in that. I'm just kidding. So he sees that sort of ugly side of London, but then gets a break where he moves to Germany to get an education. And within 10 years, he's sort of inhabiting these revered engineering circles where he works for this guy, Charles von Linde, who was a refrigeration pioneer.

So that's why he was working in refrigeration and with ammonia gases to power refrigeration. And through his time there, came up with a patent for the ice cube. So ice, of course, was already invented. Refrigeration existed. But he created a potable, like a drinkable ice cube that you could serve in a restaurant. Wow. It's hard to think that, you know, there used to be a time where you didn't have refrigeration and you didn't have these sort

of things. I mean, if you wanted ice, you had to like live in Minnesota or something and go down to the lake, you know, to put something in your scotch. So that's, you know, one of the weird things I learned about the book is that's why Anheuser- is founded where it is in in uh missouri near the river where there are a ton of caves for cold storage oh really they'll just keep things down the caves where could store a little longer in the very early days like pre-settlement we just had one of the uh anhyzer bush royalty sons or grandsons whatever you know down the lineage on the show for his recent book about uh anheuser-busch that's interesting and uh it he also you you've written uh we have here the bushes acquired the exclusive north america rights to

diesel engine and use the engine to pump water yeah breweries adolphus bush founder van has bush is a huge character that the cast of characters is amazing. It's got the Nobels in Russia and Churchill plays a big role. But Adolphus Bush was, you know, in those days you would license out the exclusive rights to manufacture and market the diesel engine by national territory. So the guy who had the exclusive rights for diesel in North America was Adolphus Bush, who used it to power the water pumps in his breweries and power refrigeration. He also had a separate business building diesels for the U.S. Navy submarine program. And in 1912, he tried to hire Chester Nimitz to come work for the Bush companies. Oh, wow.

And Nimitz turned it down to stay with the Navy and, of course, went on to have an amazing career in the Navy. Yeah, they named a couple of ships after him, I think. Well, at least one. Gave him a few stars on his sleeve. Yeah, there you go. There you go. But yeah, Bush is a totally fascinating character and uh i actually just got a text adolphus bush the fourth uh so we just gave him the book as a gift so he's he's uh reading diesel now oh there you go there you go

i don't know which you had on the show but uh which bush did we have on the show he just published a book uh kind of about the whole history, front to back of the Bush family. And let's see who it was. If I can pull it up really quick here. It was Billy Bush. So I'm not sure which ones of this. I don't even know what's right. It was wonderful.

It was very wonderful. This is really interesting. Like I'm learning so much about diesel. Like I'm going to be thinking about this every time I go to the pump. wonderful um this is really interesting like i'm learning so much about diesel like i'm gonna be thinking about this every time i go to the pump and it sounds like the characters in your book are just extraordinary of some of the who's who of everybody went during that time so i think that just makes it more intriguing and you don't even have to make up these characters these are already you know all right there yeah he had a great meeting with thomas edison

the weird thing about it as well is that as much as we were familiar with the word, but people kind of lose track of what it's meant over the last hundred years, too. And there's this quick bit I can do that sort of demonstrates why diesel has been so important and remains so important today. If you imagine a piece of fruit grown in a tropical region, every piece of heavy machinery and farm equipment used to grow the fruit is powered by diesel. It gets loaded onto a truck. Anything larger than a passenger car that's on the road is diesel. It goes down to the port where a crane, diesel powered, loads it onto a cargo ship. 100% of cargo ships around the world, every cargo ship is diesel. It goes across the oceans, unloaded onto a truck, onto a train. Since the 1950s, pretty much every train around the world was diesel.

Yeah. And then it goes into some warehouse for storage where likely nearby some inland power plant is diesel-powered. So even to this day, it's all diesel. And the fundamental concept of the engine remains the same, that high-pressure cylinder compression engine. Did him and his family get royalties on any of this stuff? I mean, it seems like they missed the boat or something.

That's kind of a... That's one of the weird things. He was a millionaire. Bush paid him, I think, a million marks for the license plus percentage of the company. And he was a millionaire when he died. But then there's all this murky information about how he'd gone bankrupt, where there were bad investments. And so there was speculation in the newspapers. The period after he disappears for two weeks, the

newspapers around the world are going crazy for the story. And stories start coming into the press that he had gone bankrupt through bad investments or whatever. But there's no, when you go back to look at the research, although there are stories of that and biographers talk about that, the biographers all admit there's actually no evidence of the bankruptcy no one can reconstruct his financial situation at the time so it's that's sort of part of the murky mystery of it all of what was so weird about the weeks after his disappearance maybe he maybe he bought bitcoin at the top in a crash that could have been it and you actually sit down with uh you consult with police detectives,

foreign members of the CIA and UK Special Forces, and go over some unexamined evidence that you discovered. That must have been pretty cool to dig through all this research. It was. Yeah, it was so fun. It's why, in the end, I really have preferred writing nonfiction over the fiction, because there's this exploration or you're mining for information. Whenever you find something that to most people, it might be not,

it would seem like nothing at all, but when you're making connections here and it explains something or sheds light on the case in a new way, it was like a Eureka moment of finding a little piece of gold. You know, it's sort of like the nerd side of Indiana Jones when you find something really cool like that. Yeah. So that was a lot of fun i missed working on the book well i mean you can you always got big too um the i don't know you can i don't know where you go

from there but you could run it this is interesting too he once remarked to the american press in 1912 that he would like to see the diesel engines run on butter for fuel. What the hell? I guess it can. Yeah. So even to this day, like basically he was saying vegetable oil really, but yeah.

Yeah. So even like, I guess 15 years ago or so, Willie Nelson was out on tour and his bus that of course is diesel powered and he was running it on recycled kitchen grease, basically vegetable oil. So the diesel engine is still able to do that. That's not really what happened. It's what diesel was, what Rudolph diesel was advocating in 1912 and in that period.

But what ultimately happened is it can also run on a form of petroleum diesel, something distilled from rock oil. And that's mainly what diesel runs on to this day. But that's not what he was advocating. And that's why he was a threat to Rockefeller. And Standard Oil, it's weird. At that time, it wasn't really a foregone conclusion that the 20th century would be running on petroleum and gasoline. And one of the things that I note in this book, there are a few footnotes in the book, like 50 throughout, and each one is sort

of like this weird little cool nugget of information. But in 1905, the New York City, New York City had a fleet of taxis, hundreds of taxis, all electric cars. There was a charging station on Broadway in Times Square. And Ford and Edison were working on electric cars. So these days we think of, well, this newfangled electric car thing that Elon Musk is doing. That was going on 120 years ago. Holy crap. And so Rockefeller's fighting that too because all his money really came from in that period of the founding of Standard Oil

in 1870 to 1900. He became the richest man in the world, but he was selling kerosene. Rockefeller was really in the illumination business. Yeah. In that 30-year period, they were throwing the gasoline away. It was a waste product.

They were refining the oil out of the ground for kerosene. Wow. After lighting. And then the electric light bulb came out which threatened to do to rockefeller what rockefeller had done to the whaling industry you know we used to do whale blubber for illumination yeah i still do then the light then the light bulb came along and wiped that out so he's looking for a new market and that's why the diesel engine because he's now saying well we've got this combustion engine in cars. That's going to be great for me. And then diesel comes along saying,

yeah, but we don't need petroleum for these engines. Yeah, it's crazy. And so this sets the stage for, you know, what their interest is with diesel and maybe some foul play, I think as they like to say in the movies. You know, are you sure that Willie Nelson is running his bus on vegetable oil? Because is marijuana a vegetable?

Maybe he's got some hemp seed oil. That could probably work in there. Hemp seed oil. I can see him doing that. He's like, yeah, yeah, the marijuana. We're not smoking this. We're putting it in the tank. Right, right. We're stopping wars this way. We're putting it in the tank. Right, right.

We're stopping wars this way. We're just going to drive around in hemp seed oil. I didn't know he had a bus. I thought he just kind of floated everywhere. But God bless Willie Nelson. So this is super exciting. This sounds like a great book. It probably reads like a novel, but it's a true story.

That's right. Yeah, and so I just signed the option agreement. So it really, it has a very cinematic feel. So, you know, lots of options get signed and go nowhere, but hopefully it'll find its way to the screen in one form or another.

There you go. Get that Titanic guy. I forget his name, but you know, maybe, maybe he can do that. You know, then you can have Leonardo DiCaprio on it and he can,

I don't know he could be the guy who uh the the diesel guy he could be decent sure yeah james cameron and dicaprio that'd be a good team is he married to somebody less than younger than 25 and then in the real life anyway uh like the leonardo caprio jokes um so uh final thoughts as we go out and pitch on the book doug just to get people to pick it up. Well, as reviews have said, it's the greatest caper of the 20th century, but it really does shed

new light on your understanding of the last 120 years. I call it sort of like the iceberg theory of history. The cast of characters, you'll know so many of these people, but you won't know them like this. There's a whole other side to these people like Churchill, Nimitz, Edison, Adolphus Bush. It's all names you know, but it's a story you don't know with these sort of hidden forces of history that have really

shaped the world as we live in it today. So much of it resonates today. Many of these issues have come back full circle. Wow. These are the things I love about history, what shapes the arc of it and how things turn out or pan out or play out because of the different push and pulls through history. So this should be pretty exciting. Give us your dot coms, Doug, one more time so people can find you on the interwebs douglasbrunt.com is the main author website instagram is douglas underscore brunt and twitter is at doug brunt d-o-u-g-b-r-u-n-t there you go uh and thank you very much for coming on man we really appreciate this is fun my pleasure chris thank you so much thank you and uh thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss,

or amazon.com, Fortress Chris Foss. You can order up the book. It's not Amazon, Fortress Chris Foss. I'm just making up stuff. It's called The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel, Genius,

Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I. I've been accused of that too, by the way, on Fridays. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to linkedin.com, Fort accused of that too, by the way, on Fridays. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to linkedin.com for just Chris Foss

youtube.com for just Chris Foss and Chris Foss one on the tickety-tockety. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time.