The Megyn Kelly Show - The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, and How Reading Helps You Think, with Doug Brunt | Ep. 630

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Doug Brunt, best-selling author of the new book, "The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel," to discuss the mystery at the center of his book, a brief synopsis of who Rudolf Diesel is and his impact on our world today, whether Diesel committed suicide or was murdered, the suspects for who could have mudered Diesel, how authorities identified his body, the devastating impact of his death, his legacy today the difference between writing and selling a fiction vs. non-fiction book, the support and feedback from peers (and Megyn), Meryl Gordon’s book “Mrs. Astor Regrets” and her disappointment with Anderson Cooper for referencing her work throughout his new book, the ethics of citing sources vs. doing your own book research, Doug's life growing up, the different personalities of their kids, where love of books came, and more.More from Doug Brunt: https://douglasbrunt.com Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, we're taking a little break from the news cycle for a conversation with someone I've had on this show once before and have talked about many more times, Doug Brunt. Doug is the host of the Sirius XM podcast Dedicated with Doug Brunt and the best-selling author of several books. And he is out with his first nonfiction book today titled The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel, Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I. He is also, as you probably know by now, my husband. And he's here right next to me in studio for the full show. Negative dings

on credit reports happen to all sorts of people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Understanding the credit landscape can be extremely difficult, and spending the time to dispute and repair these so-called dings can be a full-time job. Good luck to you if you have kids or a nine-to-five job. For starters, you have to deal with three separate credit bureaus. It can be a massive headache. It's also a common misconception that people with poor credit scores are just those who simply don't pay their credit card bills. These can be very hardworking people who are negatively affected by divorce, identity theft, medical debt, student loans, and just don't have the time or are too overwhelmed to fix it.

But if you do not address negative credit items, they can haunt you for years to come. And when it counts the most, like when you're trying to get a mortgage at a competitive rate. And we know that being relegated to the status of renter versus homeowner can be a huge obstacle people face when trying to move their family up in economic class over the course of their lifetime. Well, the good news is that our new sponsor, Lexington Law, would like to help. Go to lexingtonlaw.com and start today with a free consultation and review. Tell them Megan sent you at lexingtonlaw.com. I'm excited to bring this to you because I lived this firsthand. Honey, welcome to the show. Great. In a new studio and everything. This is awesome. I know. This is exciting, right? Like you helped build this studio kind of, like not with your hands. I remember, you know, it's just the studs

and the walls. We saw it from the very beginning. I know it's it's cool to be in here, right? It's kind of just fun to have this as an offshoot of our whole life. Yeah. OK, this is not we're dedicated to shot, however. You've got a separate secret studio for my own gig going there. Yeah. But on Doug's show, Dedicated, you should know that he does make cocktails. And I did this with David Zweig. You made us cocktails because I don't know why, because we decided that I should have a signature drink if I'm having a guest in studio. So you've made martinis again today, which we will bust out momentarily. But first, let's just kick it off. I want to get right into the book because it's truly amazing. It's getting incredible reviews. I say that not just because I'm his wife. Yes, I'm his wife, but I, I would

tell you the truth. If it stunk, I probably just wouldn't promote it. Um, and all the reviews have been absolutely stunning. I'll just give the audience a flavor. Uh, publishers weekly calls it a thrilling investigation runs audacious yet surprisingly tenable theory makes for a wildly enjoyable outing. Kirkus said the author's interest in history and politics shines through on his well-researched, engaging book. Fascinating. A worthy read. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review as well. I could go on and I will throughout this podcast, but I'll just give one more. Zibby Owens, who hosts Moms Don't Have Time to Read books. She's great. And she's also the author of bookends. She said a riveting, impressive, history changing book. Could not put it down. Gasped at the conclusion. Diesel is in the History Hall of Fame. OK, so take us back. September 29th, 1913. Where are we? North Sea. Explain where that is and why anybody should care about a man named Rudolf Diesel who was on a boat back then. Okay, so September 29th, 1913, Rudolf Diesel is traveling from Belgium to Great Britain on an

overnight passenger ferry across the North Sea, which is the body of water leading as you go south to the English Channel, basically separating Western Europe from the British Isles. And he's traveling allegedly with two companions. They have dinner in the evening and they make plans to meet in the morning. And in the morning, he's gone. He's disappeared overnight. And so they hold the ship at sea. They search the ship and all they find are his hat and his coat neatly folded by the rail at the stern of the ship, and he's gone. And so at this time, it's hard to imagine now because the history of Diesel has really been paved over in the last century. But at that time in 1913, it would be like Elon Musk suddenly disappearing off a ship. So headlines of newspapers in New York, all throughout Western Europe and in Russia are

splashed with headlines about Diesel's disappearance. And they follow it. They stay on the beat for weeks and weeks and weeks. And, you know, it was impossible that it was just an accidental fall. It was a windless, calm night. The seas were calm. So that was dismissed. Nor would, and you put this out in the book, nor would an accident result in his hat and coping neatly folded. Right. What a weird little prop to sort of mark where he went over. So the prevailing theory, what to this day is in the Encyclopedia Britannica is suicide,

that he jumped off the ship in the night. But there were two other theories that emerged having to do with murder. And one was that Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, sent agents to kill him. The other was that Rockefeller or agents of big oil had sent, you know, like a Pinkerton detective thug to kill him. And both had motive to do it. Both viewed Diesel and his engine as an existential threat, which kind of sets up the murder mystery caper of the book. All right.

Let me pause you there because many in the audience at this point may be saying, who the hell is Rudolph Diesel? Because I always say, because Doug is very superstitious about writing his books, about sharing anything. He doesn't want any, our best friends, he'd just be like, yeah, something around World War I. That was it. But I knew, of course, it was always going to be about this guy named Rudolph Diesel. And when we first heard about Diesel, it just was amazing to me because literally everybody in this audience sees his name probably every day at a minimum every week at the gas station and elsewhere. And most people have no idea it's actually a man. So, you know, we, you set up sort of the caper, the mystery around him, and we'll get into it in more detail. But Rudolph Diesel, he was an inventor.

He was a guy whose name we should know as well as we know names like Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, it should be up there with Tesla, Edison, Ford. And as I realized getting the book, I've been misspelling Diesel with a lowercase d all this time. When's the last time you saw Ford with a lowercase f? And I should say that I'm guarded with my book information early days, partly out of superstition and partly out of like social preservation. Because if I tell everybody about this book and then I see them two years later, like whatever happened to that book you were talking about? Oh, it was a piece of crap. Never went anywhere. I couldn't get it to work. So it avoids awkward social situations if it is a piece of crap and doesn't go anywhere. It creates them too, as our best friends are like, you don't trust me with the information.

You think I'm going to steal your book? But he was a very important inventor in that time. So this was mid-industrial revolution, and we're in the steam age. So the way, actually, it was your suggestion to sort of paint this vivid picture in the book of what it was like by drawing on that scene from the movie Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio. That scene when they go down into the belly of the ship and you see dozens and dozens of, you know, men, sweaty backs, shoveling coal into these orange fiery furnaces. Tons of coal, rooms full of coal used to power a ship. It goes into a furnace that just burns the coal to heat a big vat of water. I mean, literally the same concept as a pot on a stove.

It's just fire to heat water to create steam. The steam pressure then turns the gears of the engine. I mean, it's just crazy rudimentary technology. This is the way it used to be done. Diesel saw this and recognized there was a better way to do it. We've actually queued up that clip just so the audience can be reminded of what Doug's talking about. This is the way it used to be done before a man named Rudolph Diesel. Okay, so keep going. That's great. I didn't know you had that. This is what a first class operation this is. I didn't know you had that. What a first-class operation this is.

I could have saved all those words. Yeah, so the diesel engine comes along, and it's way more compact. There's no furnace. There's no vat of water. There's no chimney apparatus to get that huge amount of smog and smoke and partially burnt particles of coal out of the ship. The diesel engine just draws liquid fuel automatically down from a tank. So you don't need dozens and dozens of men shoveling coal. You don't need to feed them on the ship or give them a place to sleep or have a room full of coal to do it. And then still island hop to get more coal for the ship so you can circum

navigate the globe. The fuel efficiency of the diesel engine is such that you can circum navigate the globe without stopping for fuel even once. That's amazing. And none of these guys shoveling coal in. So it's way more compact. And diesel's initial idea was that it would be a power source for rural economies. His father was a bookbinder and worked with leather goods. And that was in an age where a steam engine was the size of his whole shop. So he had no power source. His hope was that it could be used for woodworking and dentistry and other small businesses out in rural areas

and alleviate some of the labors that were born by men and women in the industrial age. And we're going to get into Diesel's background in more detail in just a bit, but just sticking with sort of the crux of the book, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. And we went back and forth on the title many, many times. Do you want to tell them what the earlier title was,

which you liked, but I was like, it's too focused on a certain word. Yeah. Yeah. So my editor and I, and you and I had many conversations about the title. It was sort of a working title all the way along. And we're like, we're going to figure this out over a bottle of wine one of these days. And then we had Engines and Empires, which was- Which every man loved. Yeah, every man loved. And my editor and I loved it. We thought that was the one. And then in the 11th hour, I was traveling in California or something. I get a call from my editor and he's like, hey, I just had this pitch meeting at S&S. I mean, the book is done. He's pitching it to the team to get everybody supportive internal at Simon & Schuster and educating the sales force on this book coming

down the pipeline. And Jonathan Karp, the CEO, was in there as well. And he said, it was a great meeting. Everybody loves the book. We're all really supportive. It's exciting, except the title. I'm like, what? We're revisiting the title now? Like we're about to have galleys. And he said, well, you know, Diesel should be in the title. And, you know, it's a mystery. It's really a caper. I mean, one of the reviews calls it the greatest caper of the 20th century. And so they wanted to capture that in the title. So we, and, you know, I'm not going to get in the way of the sales team. If they want the mysterious case of Rudolph diesel, they can have it. So we switched. See, this is why I love the sales team at Simon and Schuster, because this is how, what brought me to the book as much as I love engines. Um,

I was like, okay. And if anything, I'm responsible for shortening the parts about the engines. But I think we also like pressed to, to make it clearer, you know, I'm sort of Doug's, I'm just going to tell the audience a quick story. I recently asked Abigail to go back and get my high school transcript. I just kind of want to kind of want to see like how, how, how, I don't think it was very good, but I don't think it was terrible. So let's go back and take a look at it. It was horrible. It was absolutely terrible. And so I said to Doug, I would show it to you, but I think you'd be stuck asking yourself, what did I marry? And, but the one thing I'm good at, though it's not apparently testing in school

is taking large amounts of information and condensing them into small digestible bits. You're even better at that than I am. You are. You've taken such complex matters in this book, and you revised it over and over and over again until you got to the point where it's easy for anyone to understand engines and empires. Anybody could read. But what I was loving about the book was the mystery. It is a mystery. It is about a caper. And as some of these reviews are pointing out, I'll quote Lee Child. It has a conclusion worthy of James Bond. It is unputdownable, says Brad Thor. That's how I felt, too, because once you fall in love with Diesel, you have to know what happened to him. Once you realize he did not commit suicide, you cannot rest until you know what happened that night. And then when you learn what happened, it really is jaw-dropping.

And I don't want to say more than it wasn't suicide. But you kind of say that. You are the best at taking complex stuff and making it digestible. But the book does do a lot of different things and I think does it well, but it's in part a biography of this man. It's in part mini biographies of the prime suspects in the murder investigation, Wilhelm and Rockefeller.

It's a primer on 19th century diplomacy and that gilded age. It's sort of the decades leading up to World War I, which is like the Downton Abbey, the early years, which was a time before that hinge in history of World War I in which we lived totally differently before and after the war. And it's also a bit of a combustion engines for dummies book. I mean, you have to understand why diesel and most people that era and even today don't understand why it's such a fundamentally different engine and why it completely changed the game. And believe it or not, even for the ladies out there, sorry to be a sexist pig, it is interesting. And we'll talk about why it's so special and why it's used on all these Navy

vessels and virtually like every vessel on the sea, practically still to this day, not to mention the larger ones on the road. There are really good reasons for it, which I never even, I never even knew that diesel was an engine. I saw it as a gasoline, some sort of gasoline at that, you know, it's like I always drove a smaller car. It wasn't relevant to me. The big trucks would go to the diesel. I would go to the regular, get the unleaded. Right. But it's an engine and it's an engine created by a really special man whose name we don't know for a reason. All right. But I'm tabling that too, because I want to get through. I want to stay on the mystery of it. So you say it up front, you have a couple of main suspects on a possible murder theory. And this is part of what's fun about the book, because if you want to take in

history as I do, especially 20th century history, it's the best. But without feeling like you're in a class, you know, a feeling like you're hearing it through a story. That's what I love about this book and other books like this, where you can hear a fun story or fun mystery, but it's set, as you say, in the Gilded Age with this cast of characters whose names you know. And one of those names that becomes very important is Rockefeller. So talk about him for a minute. Rockefeller at the time of the disappearance was the richest man in the world. He had founded Standard Oil in 1870. And in the years from 1870 to the turn of the century, he and Standard Oil came to dominate the petroleum industry.

The interesting thing about it is he was really in the illumination business. At that time, they distilled the petroleum, the rock oil out of the ground for kerosene. And the gasoline was this useless byproduct that they would throw away. So he was in the illumination business selling, you know, kerosene lamps. And he had basically demolished the whaling industry because we had previously used whale blubber for illumination. And then by the turn of the century, the electric light bulb came along. Edison and others were developing a new form of illumination that was going to do to Standard Oil what Standard Oil had done to the whaling industry. So in the early 1900s, the prospects for Standard Oil were pretty grim. He had lost

his main source of revenue, and he was vulnerable to where he was going to be finding markets for petroleum going forward. So he needed the internal combustion engine running gasoline to be his new market. And diesel was a threat to that because he did not need gasoline or petroleum of any kind. He could run his engine. He won the Paris World's Fair in 1900 on a diesel engine running nut oil. And he was advocating that every nation with agriculture can just grow its own fuel. You don't need petroleum at all. And in 1912, on a trip through America, he said, 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 to do it. I can do it through the power of this diesel technology.

It's amazing. So John D. Rockefeller viewed him as a threat, as an existential threat. Yeah. And he was not a nice man. Right. I mean, like some of the stories in the book, the earlier version had like all these stories about him. But what's what landed in the final version is powerful enough. He was not somebody you'd want to have tea with and piss him off. kind of did with the combustion engine on gasoline, but he wanted to get China using his kerosene product. So he floods the market with free kerosene lamps. And the people in China had previously used natural gas or oils for illumination for centuries and centuries. But he comes along with this fancy, good looking, free kerosene lamp and cheap kerosene. And so everyone starts adopting the kerosene lamp and using kerosene around China. And then the price slowly goes up and he's got the market sort of addicted to his product. It's a case of the

supply sort of controlling the demand side of it. And that's what he needed to have happen with the combustion engine. So he has cheap gasoline. He allows it to be easily acquired by people and wants adoption of gasoline burning engines as opposed to diesel. And amazingly, the diesel engine today mainly does run on a form of petrodiesel. We are burning crude oil in the diesel engine today, although that was not Rudolph Diesel's initial intention. That's one of the questions I had, which was, if he started it on vegetable oil, why aren't we filling our tanks with vegetable? Why isn't that semi-truck in front of me at the gas station filling it up with vegetable oil? Diesel fuel

and diesel engines have sort of a bad rap. It's just as big a polluter as the regular. So what happened? I mean, in short, it's the same concept of what happened in China with the kerosene lamp. Rockefeller made sure that gasoline was readily available or a form of petrodiesel was readily available because it would take an enormous amount of infrastructure to have the agricultural business and the refining business to generate enough vegetable or nut oil to power all the engines of the world. But it can't be done. But it can't be done. And in fact, 15 years ago or so, Willie Nelson was out on tour on his tour bus with a diesel engine running recycled kitchen grease. So that can happen with diesels today. And Willie Nelson

is running around saying, hey, we can grow our own fuel here. We don't need to run around fighting a war for it. Think about that. Like you really could do it if you were so inclined. You could grow, you get a diesel engine, you could grow what, corn? I don't know. How would you? I think probably corn or, I mean, can be nuts. It could also also come from coal. The coking process with coal creates coke, which is a fuel that's sometimes used for heating in Australia. It's more common. Coal gas and tar, coal tar. And that it's like a thick, sludgy tar from coal. And that is a great diesel fuel. That's what he was advocating because around, you know, getting to the World War I era stuff, Great Britain, Germany did not have petroleum in the ground. And they're all freaking out because we're moving toward an oil economy.

Churchill is freaking out trying to figure out where they're going to get oil and he starts prospecting in the Middle East. But Diesel was saying, you guys have plenty of coal in the ground. You have all the fuel you need. Just you turn into, you know, gas plants and you do the cooking process and you have coal tar to power every energy need you have. All right. So the Rockefellers are looking at this guy, Diesel, this German guy, and we'll get into his background again, but thinking we don't like it. This is a serious problem. And there was something called the Ludlow Massacre, but the Rockefellers, they hurt some people on their way up. It wasn't like a gentle rise.

They did. There were a couple of agencies. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is the most famous of them, but there's also Baldwin-Felts. And in this era of strikes, they often acted as sort of the paramilitary wing of big business, whether it's steel or tobacco or sugar or oil. And Rockefeller, the Ludlow Massacre you mentioned was in Ludlow, Colorado. The strikers, they wanted better, better conditions for that. They wanted the eight hour work week and various other things. And so they went on work, sorry, work day. And so they had gone on strike and in came the Baldwin Feltz detective agency. And it ultimately ended in a, a, an enormous gunfight and a fire where about, I think 30 in total strikers and family members were killed.

So if you wanted the eight-hour workday, that was not going to go over well with Rockefeller. And he fought tough. I think this is important to know just because you need to understand the ruthlessness of the characters who were involved and why it's not completely implausible. Because if you think about comparing you know, comparing diesel again to like Elon Musk, if he were to disappear tomorrow and we were talking about the likely suspects, it would be just absurd to think about, you know, one of our major power brokers killing off Elon Musk. You know, like Mark Zuckerberg, they're going to have their stupid little fight at the Coliseum. But that was all in good fun. This would be this the equivalent of saying, you know, Mark Zuckerberg killed off Elon Musk. But in this particular case, the Mark Zuckerberg of our story actually was extremely ruthless, the Rockefeller family and John D. Rockefeller, and didn't get that money easily.

That's why he vaulted right. The Ludlow massacre actually happened in 1913. It was over a period of months, but it was concurrent with Diesel's disappearance. And so you can draw the straight line of why he wound up in the newspaper headlines. Yeah. Why was he on the short list? Yeah. So then here, this brings us to one of the fights that Doug and I have had about the book from the beginning.

The second big suspect and his name was? Kaiser Wilhelm II, originally of Prussia. Okay. Would you like to explain why we've been arguing over that? She's like, nobody knows what Prussia is. Stop saying Prussia. You're going to just confuse everyone. I'm right.

I know I'm right. In the 1870s, Germany as the state that we've come to know it in the 20th century did not yet exist. It was 39 different kingdoms and states and tribes and things like that. See, I went to public school. I don't remember ever really being taught that. So it was not always Germany. It was a bunch of different sort of regions. And one of them was Prussia. Prussia. And so Berlin is inside the kingdom of Prussia. Rudolf was from Bavaria. Munich is inside

the kingdom of Bavaria. So they had, you know, they were all Germanic in origin, but they were different in their appeal. Prussia was much more the militaristic, clipped speech and clicking the heels, sort of military pomp and circumstance of the Germans, whereas Bavaria was more of the artistic and science side of the Germans. But they fought together. That's Rudolf's place. And that's Rudolf's place. They fought together in the Franco-Prussian War.

At the end of that war in 1871, all of the German tribes, kingdom states, whatever, united in the German state as we have come to know it under really Prussian leadership. So the Kaiser was, which is the emperor, was Prussian in origin while Rudolf was Bavarian. And this guy, Kaiser Wilhelm, was very interesting. Like the physical problems that he had, the family he came from. Can you talk about him a little bit? He's an interesting character in the book. He was the favorite grandson of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. So the bloodlines between Germany and Great Britain were the same. And he visited her all the time. It was his favorite grandmother. Queen Victoria's oldest daughter was his mother. She had married a German prince. And so that's how the line got going over to Germany.

But the weird thing is, if you look at the, you know, the 15 years leading up before World War I, it was far more likely that Germany and Great Britain could be fighting together. Great Britain and France had been at war for centuries and centuries. Nobody really liked the Russians. It was almost like a game of musical chairs. But the key thing that was going on at that time was a time of heightened nationalism, heightened militarism. And there was a naval arms race, the German Anglo naval arms race. Germany was growing leaps and bounds. Their industry was growing. And they felt that in order to feed their growing industry, they needed an imperial structure. They needed colonies around the world to bring natural resources back to the homeland. And in fairness, Great Britain had a huge imperial structure. They had many colonies around the world. So did France and Italy and others did. So Germany, in order to do this, though, felt they needed a strong navy. And Great Britain,

as this island nation, they had been dominating the seas ever since the time of defeating Napoleon in like 1815. Great Britain controlled the seas. But Germany wanted to have a strong navy, so that was a threat. And you had this really cutthroat naval arms race. And that drove a lot of the diplomatic complications of that era.

And Diesel was right in the middle of it. So Diesel becomes highly relevant because he's Bavarian, you know, complications of that era. And diesel was right in the middle of it. So diesel becomes highly relevant because he's Bavarian, meaning German, and should technically be loyal to Kaiser Wilhelm and should be, you know, providing his engine to all of them. But why was he on that boat crossing the North Sea on the night he disappeared? That is a great question. He's on his way because he is co-founder and board director of a new diesel engine manufacturing company in Great Britain, whose mandate it is to build diesel engines for the Royal Navy submarine program. For the Brits. For the Brits. And at this time, the diesel engine had emerged as the only option for the submarine

or the U-boat. Gasoline, certainly the steam engine's not gonna work. Gasoline and kerosene engines did not work. Didn't have the range. They were too fumey. They had spark ignition. There were constant boat fires. But with a diesel engine, you had four times the range of other options.

So you could get out into the open sea lanes and control the oceans. There were no boat fires. It was a very reliable, high torque engine that worked for the submarine. It was the only way to have a submarine fleet that would be worth anything. And so the navies of every major power were scrambling for diesel expertise, and the engine was still young. In 1913, it really had only become applied in, like, 1901, 02.

And so to make it work for the exacting requirements of underwater use, you still really needed to tap into the creator, Rudolph himself. And so actually the cover of the book is a World War I era submarine. Let's hold it up so people can see it. I love it. It's absolutely beautiful. Keep going. What were you saying? The cover of the book?

It's a World War I era submarine just surfacing. So it kind of brings the dark and stormy World War I stuff. But that's why Kaiser Wilhelm was so upset. He wanted to keep that technology in country and certainly to go right across the North Sea. I mean, it's only like 500 or 600 miles from Berlin. He's over in Great Britain building a diesel engine manufacturing company to help the Royal Navy. It's a no. it's a no. It's a no. Yeah.

To quote Carrie and Britt, it's a no. Yeah. So you can see why Kaiser Wilhelm did not want that alliance, did not want diesel going over there. You can see why John D. Rockefeller did not want diesel's rise to fame to consider to continue any more than it already had. And you can see why accident smelled like a complete lie, given the facts around the seas that night and his hat and his coat and all that.

So where does that leave us? Well, we're going to take a break and we'll be right back. He's not going to do the big reveal on this show because we want you to buy the book, The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel. But there's much, much more to discuss and you're going to love it. So stay with us. More with Doug ahead. My guest today, Doug Brunt, author of the brand new book, The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel. Happens to be my husband as well. So thrilled to be bringing him and this book to you today. I keep wanting to call it a novel. It's not a novel. This is your first work of nonfiction. Before we get to any of that nonsense, let's have a cocktail. Yes, I've been dying. So we're doing the, we decided that the signature drink of our new studio is the martini, which is all you should

need to say because we looked this up. I did. If you just say a martini, they should serve you gin with a twist. That's the martini. And if you want any alterations after that, then you start to specify, I want a vodka instead, or I want it to be dirty, et cetera. But I love, this is underrated. This is the classic martini.

It's so good. Cheers, honey. Cheers. To the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel. Oh, that is tasty. That is good. What kind of gin is that? Bar Hill gin distilled in Vermont.

Oh, is that the Chris Bejelian? That's right. Oh, very nice. So actually I should take a moment to plug Doug's podcast, which is called Dedicated with Doug Brunt. It's really good. And on his podcast today,

author Chris Bejelian, who did The Flight Attendant, among other great works, interviews Doug on Dedicated. And this is one of their things is Doug always gets the favorite cocktail of a well-known author. And then we've actually discovered some fun drinks that way. Yeah, some great ones. The French 75.

That was Leigh Bardugo. I love the French 75. What's in that? You always make it when we have it at home. It's gin and champagne and lemon juice, I think, are like the main things. I don't know. There's something very festive about the French 70. It just feels like a level up.

And it's actually named after a World War I French artillery gun. So there you go. It all comes together. This is how we spend our evenings trying out new people's. And I should say, I mean, this is a little awkward, but on last week's debut, cause he's just now in season two of, of dedicated, he, he premiered with our friend, Meryl Gordon, who we both love. And she's an extremely accomplished author. I mean, she is the real deal. And she made a bunch of news because she had some criticism for someone, even though I hate everybody in the

mainstream media, for the most part, we both like Anderson Cooper. Yeah, I'm fond of Anderson. Yeah, he's a nice guy. But he did something in his new book that is a little questionable, and Meryl made some news on it. Yes. He cited her book 39 times. So they both wrote a book on the Astors. Meryl's was mainly on Brooke Astor, but she's 105 years old, so it covers 100 years of the Astor family. Mrs. Astor Regrets. Mrs. Astor Regrets. And it's a terrific book. Meryl's written a number of books in that kind of genre, one on Bunny Mellon. And anyway, Anderson wrote a book about the Astor family in follow-up to his book on the Vanderbilt family, of which he's one. And in the book, he also has a co-writer. I can't remember her name, but he has a co-writer. And in Anderson's book, he cited Merrill's book 39 times in 31 pages, which is a lot.

It's a lot to lean on one source. It's not plagiarism, but it's considered, as I heard somebody say, it's not honorable. Yeah, yeah. So nothing illegal about it. It's just kind of lazy. So you, Catherine, how is the, you know, and, and the other complaint that Merrill had was most of these people are living. I mean, Anderson interviews people for a business. He ought to get out there and call them up and have the interviews himself and do some original research

rather than completely rely on all of her. Many were personal anecdotes through her process of doing these interviews she did 230 interviews whereas apparently anderson did one and so you know you just don't want to rehash someone else's work right it's one thing to sort of cite it a few times as like a definitive treatise but it's quite another to just kind of copy it and keep citing it and yeah because the thing is he's a lot more famous than merrill and. And if he gets a, you know, book to film offer or so on because he is a Vanderbilt, because he's Anderson Cooper, where does that leave Meryl, who wrote this amazing book with so much elbow grease into it? She should definitely be recognized in some serious way. But in any event, that's. She was rightly upset. Yeah.

And she, Meryl is not a complainer. She is in no way. My God. I mean, for her to have even said that, I think it caught you by surprise. Um, so in any event, team Meryl, and by the way, her book too, Mrs. Astor regrets is a great read. Uh, I just listened to the audio on it. Cause you know, that's how I like to consume my books, but let's spend a minute on the research because you like Meryl, I mean like the number of interviews you did, the number of resources that you had to tap into. Your guy was,

he lived a hundred years ago, so it was hard for you to do first-person interviews. But you did so much research. There are so many footnotes in the book to reflect the vast array of sourcing that went into this book. Yeah. Yeah. I actually did find two living descendants of Rudolph Diesel. That alone was hard to sort of unearth those two. That was really sweet. Yeah. But tons of research. I mean, I was in archives, you know, just down the rabbit hole for almost a period of five years. And some of it was during COVID. And so I had to make these remote relationships with people inside the archive who could copy and scan things and send it to me. But there are some great resources in Germany, Great Britain, and even here in the U.S.

Because, you know, getting back to the cast of characters of the Gilded Age story that we have here, the person who took the exclusive license to manufacture and market the diesel engine in North America was Adolphus Bush, the founder of Anheuser-Busch. We call them Tranheuser-Busch on this show. Well, you know, he'd be rolling over about all the stuff going on in the last few years. He would not approve of the direction. No, he would not. Adolphus, I don't think anyone in the Bush family is really keen on what's happening. But he was this great pioneer.

You know, he pioneered the first refrigerated freight trains for brewery and beer distribution, which is why they became the national beer. They could ship it around. And he used the diesel engine initially to pump water in his breweries and to power refrigeration. But he also had a separate business building diesels for the U.S. Navy and the submarine fleet. But anyway, back to the research. It was fascinating stuff. And it was like finding, you know, because it was old, it was 100 years plus, going back even to his early days, you'd find something in an archive. And out of the context of this story, it wouldn't mean much at all.

But then you'd, in the context of it, and I think right now, I know more about Rudolf Diesel than anyone on the planet. And I'd find some piece of paper. And I'd think, oh my gosh, he said this like the day before Churchill said that or something. And you'd draw the connections and it would be a piece of treasure. You know, it's just incredible to find these things and piece it all together. And the research is different now, too. I spent, you know, eons in newspaper archives in a way that you never could 100 years ago

or even 40 years ago, because many of these old newspapers, you know, back in the years right after his disappearance, you know, 1920, to go compare newspaper articles from Germany and Great Britain and America britain and america and try and piece it all together would be so hard they're like sitting in a cabinet somewhere but now many of these things have been scanned and so you can do you know what i would call library research just sitting in your chair on a computer and you can go through scanned archives of old newspapers with keyword searching and other things and you can compare and and sleuth some of this stuff out.

So it was a lot of fun. And then of course we had our trip to Paris where we found diesel's childhood home. Everybody's first of all, all our friends, we go with our friends to Paris, all our friends are going out. They're like, okay, we're going to go shopping. We're going to get Chanel bags. We're going to go see the Eiffel tower. I went to an engine museum. Yeah. I was at an engine museum. People, you are a good sport. Like, honey, I've got a great plan. We could go. And then it was like, so I actually brought this in case we, in case it came up. It's in the third around his mom. I don't know if people can see this, but this is a very cool museum. And as you can justify it had like old hairdryers and typewriters and it's a technical museum. I'm only pretending to complain because it was actually very cool what they had in there. Like the very first telephones. I mean, sadly, it was like stuff

that we grew up with now. That's how old we're getting. And the only other people there were like third graders from schools, French schools in Paris around us. You know, it's like us in a third grade trip, but really cool stuff. And had one of the earliest diesel engines, had old airplanes, I mean, really, really cool stuff. Yeah. And we did see his childhood home, but it was kind of sad. That reflects the deficit of appreciation for Rudolph Diesel as much as anything. So we go by the address of his old home and we're like, I wonder what will be there. And there's a plaque on a wall. It's above your eyelines. You could

easily just pass right underneath it. It's a foot by a foot. And it just says, this is the childhood home of Rudolph Diesel. And all around it is graffiti and stickers on the wall. I mean, and this is the guy whose engine power, it's the most important power source over the last hundred years in the world and continues to be our most important power source. When you consider a piece of fruit grown in a tropical region, all of the farm equipment used to grow that fruit is diesel powered. It gets loaded onto a truck. Anything larger than a passenger car, and a third of the passenger cars also, is diesel powered. It goes down to port where a crane, diesel powered, loads it onto a cargo ship. 100% of cargo ships. I think there's one Russian nuclear cargo ship that doesn't really work well.

Cargo ships are all diesel powered. It goes across the oceans into a port, back onto another truck, to a train. Almost all trains are diesel powered and have been through the 20th century. So nothing moves without the diesel engine. It completely powers our global economy. We wouldn't look anywhere near what we look like today without diesel. And all he has is like the one little foot by foot plaque. It's sad. And honestly, like one intrepid author slash reporter, investigative reporter. That's what you've been these past few years who took the time to actually look into this guy.

That's one of the mysteries is why? Why? Why did he not only die, but his legacy was absolutely wiped out. It was like his name should not be spoken to the point where, as you point out, we both came into this thinking Diesel was not a proper.. We didn't understand it was a man's name. And there's there are reasons behind that, which the book thoroughly explores. But before we move off of the research, there were some unbelievable Intel sources, which have been very intriguing. And when Doug would dig deep on the intel sources,

we would have dinner and drinks like these and just like our minds would be blown as we started to learn more and more. I don't, so none of this is in the book because I don't know what to say about it other than I don't exactly have it. But I spoke with members of the CIA, of police detectives, FBI, and also people who have

worked in British intelligence at very high levels and connected to the people whose job it was to look at documents as they're released from the 50-year rule. This stuff is going to be under wraps for 50 years, but now it's going to come up and be open for public consumption, but we need to redact things that go to sources and methods. So the person who redacts. And so this guy that I came to know, who's the former British Intel would call me, he's like, mate, you've stored up a hornet's nest. You know, like everyone's, you know, I think you've got something, but you know, they can't let it out and everyone's, you know, freaking out and, but you know, you've got it. And, and and so I like, well, get me something like some document that I can show. And so frustratingly, it never gets exciting, but exciting. And it's always good just to find out if you're on the right path or not, you know, and it's not wasn't you didn't rely on any of this for the book.

But as an outside lean, it's always good to have somebody there saying, keep going. It's like your deep throat. Yeah. And there are people cited in the book from the intelligence community, both U.S. and British, who say this is exactly what happened. But I don't have like the smoking gun out of some archives saying, you know, here's what you need to know. Doug solved the mystery. The mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel is far less mysterious. Thanks to Doug Brunt and this book. And you watch it unfold with your very eyes and you can decide for yourself whether he's got it. But there's absolutely no other conclusion than the one you reach. I mean, it's a circumstantial case, but as you know, and from Kelly's court, you know, most murders are solved as circumstantial cases. It's very rare to have a murder case where there's a witness that says, I saw the knife go in

and he did it and, you know, case closed. And by the way, the witness testimony in those things is the most unreliable of evidence pieces anyway. In addition, though, there is some in the newspaper recording, there are several eyewitnesses who weigh in on the case. So there actually is some eyewitness testimony in here that conflicts with the accepted Encyclopedia Britannica conclusion. Well, that's what's so, part of what makes it so hard to solve, even though you've solved it, which is like the misdirection was appearing in a couple of different places. Like you're getting a different story

from the guys Rudolph Diesel was on the boat with versus the newspaper headlines versus people who knew Diesel. And then we've skipped over what happened 10 days after September 29th, 1913, because keep in mind the day after he went missing, he was missing. It was like, where's Mr. Diesel? What happened to Mr. Musk? Right. He's gone. Right. And then it was worldwide headlines. And then 10 days later, what happened?

Yeah. So the New York times, all the papers through Britain, Germany are on the beat daily with updates on, you know, the board meeting of that company. He was coming over to great Britain to co-found and be a director of. They had their board meeting without him. And so there were updates in the news from those guys too. 10 days later though, there's a pilot steamer, a little steamship that's meant to sort of patrol the coast along Holland, the Netherlands.

That's another one I don't like. Where the Dutch live. Why is it called the Netherlands and Holland? It makes no sense. Keep going. And so it's a Dutch steamer and it finds a corpse floating in the water along, it's the shelled river empties into the North Sea.

So in the estuary where the river meets the North Sea, so it's along the European coast, they find this body floating in the water. And apparently it's very stormy. And so they managed to pull it alongside and rifle through the pockets where they find four things. But they mysteriously and suspiciously throw the body back into the waves and just keep the four things, which is not the. You recover the body. You give the family a burial and you get the body back. And so when the Titanic went down, they were searching the seas for weeks, you know, not even finding bodies, but still searching. And not necessarily searching for the most famous man in America or in the world, not just America. Right. They may not have known it was diesel, but they did remark that the clothes were, you know, were finely dressed.

It was a finely dressed corpse, you know, and they found these things. So anyway, they come back to port with the four items and someone at least knew quickly enough that it could be Diesel because they call his son over from Germany to the Netherlands to look at these four things. And they're personally identifying also kind of like weirdly personal identifying, but you know, it's his, uh, his pill, an enameled pill box where he kept his medications and eyeglasses and things like that. So he says, yes, this is definitely my dad, Rudolph Diesel's stuff. So that must be the body. But they don't have a body. There's never a body in evidence.

There's never a body. And he never did have a proper burial at all. Right. Yeah. I mean, like, okay, so that's the son comes over to say, yes, those are my dad's things. And then, you know, the fact that we're talking about how it's a, what's the subtitle there? Like, uh, read the genius power and deception on the eve of world war one on the eve of

world war one becomes rather relevant to why the digging doesn't necessarily continue. And he doesn't stay on the front page of the newspaper. I mean, world war one, I think 39 or 40 countries declare war, 40 million casualties. It just wiped everything else off the front page. And then, you know, to my earlier research point, you know, who's going to go back and figure out who was reporting what in which country on which day and try to reconcile all the conflicting reporting in the two weeks after his disappearance. But he basically got, he got wiped from history. And then I think, you know, in addition to the reasons explored in the book about why that could have been on top of that, because it was suicide, there's just something about that that's forgettable. Like you just,

you know, so, you know, I think, as I said before, the deficit of appreciation for what he accomplished and what he's done over, you know, what his engine has done over the last 120 years. What was the, when did World War I start? 1914. So like the Sarajevo assassination was in July and by August 2nd or 3rd, Great Britain was in and then it was, you know, it was on. Yeah. So it was less than a year later. Yeah.

So yeah, exactly. And the tensions were rising. And that, of course, would have taken over the front page of any newspaper, bouncing off any theories being discussed about why this very famous man went missing. And yeah, you're right. Then there's this sort of the thought of, well, if it's a suicide, who wants to spend time on that? And there is some evidence that you discuss in the book that Diesel might have had some sadness, some depression. It wasn't like all rainbows and unicorns in his life.

Yeah, he had stress. I mean, there was a normal, he introduced the engine in 1897. And from 1897 until 1901, that was almost as stressful as the time when he was building the prototype because now it was out in market. He had all these people paying him,

Adolphus Bush paid him a million marks for the rights to the engine. And he was getting money like that. The Nobel family took the exclusive license. I believe we call it Nobel. That's what Karine Jean-Pierre has told me. The Nobles. Oh God, is that?

Yeah, my head down on diesel. I didn't even know that. But- The Nobel Prize, that's what she calls it. You've heard that sound by Karine Jean-Pierre, the Nobel Prize. Sorry, I digress. So Alfred Nobel of dynamite fame

had two older brothers. And incredibly, this is another situation where the history has been scrubbed a bit because he had two older brothers who were more successful, more famous at the time. They founded the Russian oil industry. I mean, it's incredible. And in addition to having one of the largest oil empires in the world that rivaled, and at the time, 1904, it was even bigger than standard oil. They also had a, uh, munitions and engineering company that built engines. So they

took the license for the diesel engine and they built it to power pumps for their oil fields and also to build chips for the czar. Right. But, uh, they're not suspects. No, but they were, they're just sort of in that whole you know that ilk but so diesel had a lot to worry about in the book chronicles like he wasn't the happy and he didn't have the happiest child my god to you know i'm i'm understating it yeah but he really didn't have a very good childhood which i do want to talk about because his background is one of my favorite things about the book yeah i'll save that till we come back after the break because it's a longer discussion um but let me get to a little bit more of the positive reviews because I want to ask you

because these are household names. Have a drink while you read. Have a drink. Yes. All right. I want to do, let's see. Hold on. We've got, oh, well, here's Jay Winnick.

Okay. New York Times bestselling author of 1944 FDR and the year that changed history. Equal parts Walter Isaacson and Sherlock Holmes. The mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel yanks back the curtain on the greatest caper of the 20th century in this riveting history. I mean, the names of the people who have weighed in on this, Duggar, even our friend Dan Abrams, who, you know, Dan's not usually that flowery in his language, but he wrote a page

turning crime thriller that also delivers a significant new understanding of the forces that shaped the outcome of world war one and beyond this fascinating story told in the most vivid fashion about a name. So many recognize has been missed by true crime aficionados and historians alike until now, an important addition to 20th century history thanks dan that that's the thing is like i know you felt the pressure of being a newfound historian but you took it very very seriously and you consumed information like a hoover you were just a like a rumba when it came to world war history and everything around it i mean and i always have been around that uh that period i've always loved that and read everything

I could find about it. And I've always done a lot of research, even for my novels. You know, that's something that people have noticed. They had that same gift in that they would give you an understanding of a certain thing, even though the novel itself was fiction, you'd come to understand the financial crisis better or the world of competitive athletics better or politics. Yeah. And I think it can come down to the page with more force if you've really done the research to make it true to life, even in fiction. And of course, in this case, and I love that review from Jay Winnick, the equal parts Isaacson and Sherlock Holmes, because it has a very Sherlock Holmes feel. I mean, it even gets the era correctly. It's like that Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes feel because it really is an investigation in the end. And you provide sort of the evidence as we go and the reader's sort of coming to a natural conclusion. And then when you see how Doug lands it, you're like, oh my God, I'm going to agree with Zibi Owens and what she said here. Hold on. I loved hers. Yeah. She said, couldn't put it down,

gasped at the conclusion. You will gasp at the conclusion too. And he will love that you spent the time on it. All right. So let's talk about Rudolf Diesel, because if you know his background, it becomes no mystery to you, notwithstanding the name of the book, how he wound up inventing such an important thing. He tells us how he, where he was born and how he was raised. Cause we talked about his time in Paris, but we've already told the audience he was Bavarian or German. So explain. So parents from Germany, they emigrated from Paris to Paris in 1850. He's born in 1858. In 1870, anyone Germanic is kicked out of Paris because of the Franco-Prussian War. So they run penniless, like just the shirts on their back because there's rioting mobs and looting going on in Paris. they take a ship over to London. So he arrives in London in 1870 and lives in the exact same neighborhood as the setting of Charles Dickens'

Oliver Twist. So if you can imagine that movie, that's where he lives. And he's there at the same age as the title character, Oliver Twist. He's 12 years old, living in this in tenement housing in the guts of the Industrial Revolution. And when he's there, he's there for only about nine months. When he's there, there's this scene that becomes family lore in the Diesel family, because his son writes a family biography that includes the story that Rudolph used to tell. He was crossing the London Bridge, and he's looking across the city of London, which really is the heart and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. And everywhere he looks, there's steam and smog rising from factories and the city of London, which really is the heart and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And everywhere he looks, there's steam and smog rising from factories and ships and

cranes and things like that. I was talking with Charlie Cook at National Review about it. He's like, it's like Mordor. It's like Frodo looking over Mordor to go Tolkien, which I told him I was going to steal that, but I credit him. By the way, Charles C.W. Cook says he feels like this book was written for him. He absolutely loved it. He was raving, but keep going. We had a great discussion about it. And so that's where he lives. And that makes an indelible impression on Rudolph.

And he has this moment of thinking, I can maybe do something better. He was already spending his years back in Paris looking at these old steam machines and things in the technical museum that we talked about. And has an idea that maybe it can be better. And he wants to build a power source for his dad's rural business, like a woodworking shop or leatherworking shops and things like that. So that becomes one of his motivations. He soon after gets this sort of lifeline from a distant relative back in Germany. Big time. It was like some uncle or some long lost whatever who takes him, just him out of all the kids, right back to go to this special school there. Yeah. I mean, in a little bit, it's like the unspoken misogyny of the time because his sister was very smart and a very talented pianist, but he gets this offer to go to a trade school in Augsburg, Germany,

which is the family's hometown of origin, and to study there with his uncle, who is also a math teacher at the school. And he just hits it. Everyone knew he was a pretty smart, bright kid. But he goes there and he works like a desperate guy, knowing that if he doesn't make it happen here, he's going back to the London tenement housing. And so he also has that sort of hardworking ethic of those, you know, Germanic people, not to make huge generalizations, but it's a known thing of that sort of Swabian way. They were very hardworking and humble, and he just worked his butt off. And within 10 years, he's inhabiting the most revered circles of German engineers. But prior to that, when he was still with his mom and dad,

like where did his love of the arts come from? Because he was also creative and artistic and kind of beautiful in addition to this hard science side of him. Far more from the mom's side. She was a governess working in Paris, also from Germany originally. And back then a governess was a little bit different from what we think of today as like, you know, daycare. They were really

charged with, you know, of a wealthy family. They would put the child's entire education into the hands of a governess. So they would teach music and language and art and other things. And so she was a very smart, cultured woman who was very into the arts and music. So she taught him an appreciation of, you know, physical art, sculpture and paintings, but also taught him music. And so she was a very smart, cultured woman who was very into the arts and music. So she taught him an appreciation of, you know, physical art, sculpture and paintings, but also taught him music. And he was a very gifted piano player himself and his letter. So he had this, it was also part of the time that engineers had felt that they should have this dual role of engineer and social theorist who could think through the ways that their innovations would be applied in society, I mean, and for the betterment of society. So he was a social theorist on top of his work as sort of a pencil on paper, scratching out numbers engineer. But he also wrote beautiful letters

to his wife and his sister. Martha. Martha. Martha Diesel. She's the wife. And he was deeply in love with her, which is another piece of evidence in the book as to why you do not believe this was a suicide. He was, I mean, this is actually kind of fun. Speaking of your research and your process, you had to go get those lovely, you got your hands on the love letters

and you had to go get them translated because they were in German. Yeah, yeah. So I reached out to a friend at my old high school who put me in touch with a German teacher there who then translated reams and reams of amazing stuff out of the archives. These diaries he had, one from each of his two trips to America, one in 1904 and one in 1912, where there are some hilarious observations,

letters, professional documents, documents related to his research. So I just had troves of treasure to go through there. He was a romantic. He loved his wife. He loved his research. So I just had troves of treasure to go through there. He was a romantic. He loved his wife. He loved his children. And it was kind of a surprising turn only because his dad seems kind of like an asshole. Sorry. His dad was very hard.

It was tough love from his dad. There's a story when he was young that they were walking, they took a walk in Paris back in the early days. He was probably only eight or so. And they had just seen something very disturbing. There was a corpse hanging from a tree, a suicide. And so they're walking along this hill and his dad shoves him and he falls down the hill into this mucky pond at the bottom of the hill. He gets up and he's like, what was that all about? And they're onlookers looking at, you know, why this guy had shoved

his son down. And his dad told him it was a lesson about? And they're onlookers looking at, you know, why this guy had shoved his son down. And his dad told him it was a lesson in the hard knocks life had in store. Wow. I guess who am I to judge? They were growing up in a different time and he did need to prepare him for some hard moments in life. Am I the only one thinking about what you did to Thatcher at our pool right now? That, you know, I had not put those two together. But I say, even though i did it you were really

behind i was 100 the person who orchestrated it yeah so our son thatcher we had a swimming pool and we had this crazy fence around it so you know he was only i think four i don't know yeah so we had a fence that no one could get through and it's just this giant fence around the pool which we were dying to get rid of because it's a real pain but we didn't want thatcher to have a problem we needed it was a safety thing and so we decided were dying to get rid of because it's a real pain, but we didn't want Thatcher to have a problem. It was a safety thing. And so we decided we'd only get rid of the fence if Thatcher could get out of the pool having been fully clothed and gone in by surprise as though he slipped. Because he would only go in with his swimmies and his goggles and he had to be perfectly ready for the swimming. And you wouldn't be if you

falled in accidentally. Keep going. So he's walking along in his sneakers, fully dressed. And I snuck up behind him, just grabbed him in the armpits and like tossed him right into the deep end. And he did get himself out, no problem. But he was pissed.

I mean, he didn't forgive me for so long. I felt so bad. I know, even though it was my fault. But then you made it up to him. Yes, I think ice cream and video games triple scoop yeah which he but you know what then we got rid of that hideous black fence because we knew he could handle it just in case he fell into that pool without a little little diesel here too yeah just a touch just a tad where we needed it um so he meets martha he falls in love and then

how many kids did he have three and eugen is the one who went and identified the remains here's another funny part of the research it's it's eugen and i'm talking to someone in the the deutsch's museum over and over again about eugen eugen eugen and i can almost feel through the phone she's like wincing as i say it she's like i know like the fourth one's like it's eugen eugen i'm like oh i've been pronouncing it wrong all this time so, it's Eugen. Eugen. I'm like, oh, I've been pronouncing it wrong all this time. So apparently it's Eugen Diesel, but it's spelled as though if you're speak English, it's spelled as though it's Eugen. Okay. And you get to know about the kids. You get to know about the wife and the love, but those letters, as you just referenced, also reflect a real appreciation for the United States of America, where he visited twice. Talk about that. He went in 1904 and 1912.

And when he first went, he was just appalled at the poor state of the infrastructure in these cities. He came from Paris, where by 1900, there was a subway. There were underground sewers big enough to row a boat through, a city made of stone and marble that could house a million people. And he goes to these cities in America that would spring up almost overnight and almost everything was made of wood, you know, like, and actually another interesting thing on that in Great Britain, where there was coal everywhere, their whole rail system really ran on coal.

They'd burn coal in the steam engines to drive the trains. In America, they burned wood. Wood was everywhere. They just chop it down and that's what they used to power the trains. The early rails were burning wood for fuel. But all the cities were made of wood. And the number one fear of America at that time, you see the newspapers or old diaries and letters, the number one fear was fire. So everywhere you go, there's vats of water or metal staircases going out the second floor window of a house.

And even still, whole neighborhoods would just burn up all the time. It was just so commonplace. Our eating habits were amazing to him, like canned fruits. He was like, first of all, that's disgusting that you're eating fruit out of cans. Typical European. And ice cream. He's like, my God, these Americans, they eat ice cream at every meal, sometimes twice in a meal. Like, he couldn't get over that. But he also loved the opportunity that America presented. Back in Europe, all the roadways are made over the ancient pathways of the Romans. And so you sort of have to fit what's

there. Whereas in America, it's like, you get to start from scratch. Put the roads wherever you want it, wherever it makes the most sense. And he loved the meritocracy of it. He loved that our leaders and our great thinkers were humble, and he felt that that humbleness in our leaders would beget humbleness throughout the people. You can see us now. And he also, he did not like the class system in Europe and how rigid the class system was, how focused they were on that. In America, it didn't exist. I mean, we've kind of developed a weird little class system of our own these days wherein the Yale lawyer marries another Yale lawyer, and we have this sort of intellectual thing that seems to

happen, and there's a lot of writing on that. But it doesn't compare to what Europe was like in that regard. So he felt like it was more hopeful for a guy like him. Yeah. And he recognized that America was bound to be a great power. Many recognized in 1912 that America was certainly an up and comer, but he he felt America was going to be the dominant superpower. And not everyone felt that way in 1912. By the end of World War One, people are thinking, oh, well, maybe America. But but it was obvious to him he really was a genius. Yeah. And he met and hung out with another genius, one of our own, Thomas Edison, which is it's just so kind of delicious. Remember, we went to Paris and we saw that, you know, on the top of the Eiffel Tower, wasn't that?

Yes. Edison was up there with Eiffel. Yeah, it was Eiffel, Gustav Eiffel with Thomas Edison. I told the audience this when we got back. I didn't know that there was this like little mock up of Gustav Eiffel's apartment at the top of the Eiffel Tower. But there is anybody can go up there and see it. And the person he's depicted with, because he actually did meet him up there, was Thomas Edison, who got around

because he spent time with Rudolf Diesel stateside too. Yeah, it's another indication of what a massive celebrity Diesel was at the time because Edison was his sort of counterpart in being a huge thing. But there was this famous journalism in Great Britain at the time, W.T. Stead, he called himself the Pope of journalism or something like that. But he had just written in 1912, he actually died on the Titanic, this guy Stead, but he had written

that diesel was the genius of our time, that he had basically revolutionized power, that by the diesel engine basically quadrupled mankind's ability to generate power from natural resources. Winston Churchill had looked at a brand new cargo ship running diesel power. And because of what the diesel engine meant for it, you didn't have smokestacks. It was just the diesel engine not releasing giant smog through furnaces. It didn't need coal. It basically transformed merchant marine shipping. So he toured this first diesel ship in 1912 and called it the greatest maritime masterpiece of the century because of diesel and Edison. So Diesel goes to visit Edison in 1912 and they have this hilarious meeting. And in fairness to Edison, I have only Diesel's

accounting of it. They didn't exactly get along. Edison didn't drink. Diesel enjoys some wine here and there. He also enjoyed the distinction that all of Edison's inventions were power consuming, the phonograph and other things, whereas Diesel's invention was power producing. So I think that was a distinction that he kind of enjoyed. It's a very it's of world history. And the World's Fair is fun to look back on. I mean, you've read a few books about the World's Fairs that are set in and around the World's Fair. You love that Eric Larson book, right? The Devil in the White City, is that what it was? The Chicago World's Fair. Had me read that one. And I only read fiction if Doug gives it to me.

Otherwise, I'm neck deep in news. And the way you set up what happened at the World Fair is kind of cool. I mean, so this kid, I guess before we get to that, let's just finish up how he went from the kid who got the opportunity from the uncle back in Germany at this special school where his beautiful brain was really expanded and had opportunity to Diesel, who invented the engine. Let's talk about those years. He does so well at that trade school that it's noticed up in Munich. So at that time, he's in Augsburg. It's noticed in Munich, which is a short train ride away. He's offered a scholarship to go to university in Munich. And there, Germany by this time is really the hotbed of engineering.

In the past, it's been France and England. And now Germany is sort of coming on. And so they're brilliant engineering minds there. He studies under Carl von Lind at the university, who's a pioneer in refrigeration. Also chocolate. Different Linde, I think. I think. And then so he ends up, he graduates top of his class again, takes it. He works for Linde then in Paris in refrigeration. So it's still thermodynamics. It's still connected to a combustion engine.

He's still working with gases as fuels and things like that. But even though he's managing a plant for Lind, he's still working this side project of his idea. Because when he was in class with Lind, he was looking at the history of steam engines. If you go back to James Watt in the 1770s, which is really the beginning of steam technology as an industrial application. What did he do? What did Watt do?

Watt built the first... So steam technology has existed even since the ancient Egyptians. They would use steam power to sort of move heavy doors and things. But Watt developed the first engine that could be applied in commercial use. And if you look at a unit of fuel, the James Watt steam engine could get about 2% of energy out of a unit of fuel. But back then, the metallurgy was so rudimentary. They were getting seals on pipes with rope and leather and things. Like, imagine how much heat and pressure is lost with that.

By the time diesel's around 100 plus years later in the 1880s, the metallurgy is much better. You can have tighter metal castings to maintain pressure and heat. So he's looking at, and by the time he's in school, it's like engines are getting like six to eight percent efficiency. But he's still like, this is crazy low. And why are we even using water as the intermediary substance? Why are we heating water to have steam move it?

Like, let's do internal combustion. This is hope. And so while working for Lynn through the 1880s and into 1891, he's sort of working the side hustle. But 1891, he moves to Berlin, and he and Lind kind of break up. Lind loves him and supports him and advocates for him, but recognizes, like, you're not going to work for me. You're going to go do your own thing, and helps him find partners in Krupp, which is a huge German arms manufacturer, and Messina Fabrique Augsburg. So they become his partners. From 92 to 97, he's building a prototype.

97, he announces it. But those first years are a little rough because it kind of goes into market maybe sooner than it should. But by 1902, he's humming, and he's got an engine out there that everybody wants. And so it was the 1900 World's Fair where he exhibited it in Paris? Yeah, so the 1900 World's Fair, he wins the first grand prize for his diesel engine running nut oil. Wow, that's amazing. I mean, to win first prize before it's fully cooked, right?

It's like still kind of in the beta phase a little bit. So he wins the whole thing. So that, I mean, that would at that time make him an international celebrity in and of itself. That got a lot of attention, particularly because some folks in the Navy began to realize that, this is sort of a geeky thing, but the initial engines were stationary and vertical. So the piston would go up and down. And then they realized for a ship, we can go horizontal and it won't go pounding against the hull of the ship. It's going to go sideways. So he then has a horizontal version of the engine that works for marine applications. And then, you know, France was actually very early in using it on barges, like shallow draft barges that would go through their

canal systems were some of the first diesel engines on the water. And now you point out it's in virtually every vessel, everything like on the ocean, engines on the water. And now you point out it's in virtually every vessel. Everything. Like on the ocean. Yeah. Maybe not the smaller ones. Yeah, like an 18-foot Boston Whaler that has a gas-powered outboard engine.

But bigger boats, any big fishing trawler, any big cargo vessel. I mean, some military craft and submarines these days are nuclear-powered, but every large ship that you see on the surface is really diesel. The rule is diesel. And there's a reason for that. It's diesel. I know I always say diesel, but it's diesel. I've learned that in listening to you with like a soft desk. There's a reason for that. And this is what brings us to you writing this book.

We both had no idea who diesel was, that diesel was a he, a man at all, a person. Like I said, just sought the name of the gas station and moved right on. But then was it 2015 that we bought our boat? I think that's right. 2015. We bought this boat. We decided to name it Triumvirate because that means a powerful three. And we thought that would be a sort of sweet message for our children. Used to mean powerful three men, males.

And then we, you know, it's been modernized right uh because we have a daughter too in any event so we buy this boat and tell the story of what happened oh nice got that photo yeah so i figured you want a beauty shot of the boat you know it's doug's girlfriend yeah yeah so i got some nice ones up for you so it's an older boat and i was talking to a guy at the boat yard about what we should do to fix it up and he said well the first thing you should do is repower these old gasoline engines for diesel and you know like you and I and probably most listeners at that time had no idea it was a different engine in some way I'm like well why diesel and he launched into his thing that a hundred percent of boat fires come from gasoline engines none from diesel you'll get four times

the range on this 200 gallon fuel tank You can go four times as far. The fuel is stable. It doesn't have fumes. It doesn't even work on spark ignition. And you can take a lit match and drop it into a vat of diesel fuel. Nothing will happen. So we were powered to diesel. And it was only a few years later, less than that. A couple of years later, I was in between novels. And one of the things I sometimes do then is just goof around on the internet and follow threads for different things and stories to find interesting stuff that might give me an idea on something.

And I came across this list of mysterious disappearances at sea. And on the list was Rudolph Diesel. And I'm thinking, wow, I wonder if it has some connection to these new diesels we just bought. Yeah. And then I clicked on the thing, September 29, 1913, diesels on the North Sea. And off we go. It really is ironic if you think that this is the guy who's powering virtually all the vessels that are on the sea right now. And his disappearance began allegedly at sea, right?

It's like there's sort of a, I don't know, it's kind of perfect if you think about it. So you came to this idea. I was there. I witnessed it during the pandemic. We were out in Montana where we'd gone for spring break. And then like the rest of the world, everything shut down. And we were like, well, we're just going to stay here. We're not going back to New York City in the middle of this thing. So we stayed in Montana. You'd been toying around with the idea. You'd been doing some deep dives on it, thinking this could make a great idea for a book. And it was the first nonfiction because you've written fiction before. You wrote Ghost of

Manhattan, which is an absolutely beautiful novel about this one man struggling to save his soul in the midst of the financial crisis and the financial world down on Wall Street. I love, love, love Ghost of Manhattan, followed by The Means. And we'll put some pictures up of us celebrating the birth of these books because when you get the hardcover before it hits publicly, like today's your pub day, it's so fun. So we got Ghost of Manhattan. That's when you became an author. Then you got The Means, which is politics and media meeting. And that's got another jaw-dropping ending.

And then Trophy Son, which is about what we're doing to our children in athletics. And it's set against a fictional story, but it gets into a real issue. Um, and then you decided to do nonfiction because of, you talked about the boat and so on and so forth. So just describe how different it was to get a nonfiction book deal. What went into it? What was different in applying for, you know, or seeking publication agreements and then what was different thereafter? Yeah, it's, it's a totally different process. And as you say, I had been toying with the idea even before the pandemic, and I was thinking about doing it as historical fiction. And I'd even written some drafts and done a lot of research, but there's so little on the English language about Rudolph Diesel. And I was like, oh, I'll just make up

the dialogue and it'll be, you know, make it happen. But then I found more stuff and I had a clear vision of what it could be as a nonfiction book. And so I decided to do it as nonfiction when we were out in Montana. And it is a totally different publishing process. On the novel side with fiction writing, you tend to write the whole book. You have a manuscript, you submit it, and it's probably 95% of the way done. You might do some polishing with your editor, but what you sell is a finished book for the most part, a finished first draft pretty much. On the nonfiction side, it's very different. You don't sell a finished book for the most part, a finished first draft pretty much. On the nonfiction side, it's very different. You don't sell a finished book. You sell a proposal. And there's a standard look for proposals. It's roughly a 30-page document. There's a very detailed chapter

outline. There's usually a sample chapter so they can get a sense of the writing. There's a discussion of books in market and a discussion of the cast of characters. And so there are all these elements that go into a book proposal for nonfiction, which I didn't even know about. So I had a new agent on the nonfiction side kind of coach me through, here's what we need. And a lot of it was done because I had done so much writing about it when I was initially thinking of it as a historical fiction book. So put that together with my agent and then, you know, did it. And again, this is all during COVID. So I haven't even sat in a room with

many of these people. We're doing like, it was all Zoom. It's just crazy. You're trying to get museums in Germany to answer your calls in the midst of the pandemic. It's like nothing's open. Yeah. It was nuts. I mean, some people would go in, but no one other than an employee could go in these archives and even the employees weren't going in very much. I mean, some people would go in, but no one other than an employee could go in these archives. And even the employees weren't going in very much. But yeah, so finished the proposal and sent it around. Held the whole auction over Zoom. Normally you sort of meet editors and then they participate in an auction.

But all the editor meetings were over Zoom. Was very happy to have the book land with Peter Borland at S&S, who's a terrific editor who I knew only by reputation prior. He's great with this era, and he's a huge believer in the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel. Yeah. Big, big believer. He's been very helpful, I have to say. Like, he's great. He challenges you.

I think I'm your first reader, right? Your first reader, number one, and most trusted feedback, particularly on like what, you know, what's losing the reader. You know, you got, no, you got to bring it back over here. You know, you're great with that. Peter was very helpful in particular with structure because the book needs to follow the diesel thrust. But they're like, one thing I've gotten a lot of feedback in is the footnotes. There are so many little gems of information that can bring the era to life and, and give you some extra perspective, but you can't have too many of it because it's kind of a pain in the neck to be like reading, reading, reading, and then go down to the footnote and then back up. That's annoying. So they have to be special.

I wanted to have only the ones in there that made you kind of look forward to the footnote. And I would say over the past three and a half years from the day you cut that deal to now, pub day, we've kind of fallen in love with Rudolph Diesel. He's become a real character in our lives. We talk about him. Yeah. Even the kids, they all know elements of the case and what happened and what he did, his letters to his wife and the many sides of his life. And he is this three-dimensional person walking around the house. I kind of miss working on the book. I mean, as much as I'm excited to talk about it, I'm sad that it's past the phase of spending,

you know, eight hours a day with Rudolph. Yes, I remember this is how I felt after Ghost of Manhattan published. Nick Farmer was the protagonist in this book. And I've been begging you since you published that in 2012, right? I think to write a follow-up to that book. I want Nick Farmer to live again.

And, you know, Rudolph Diesel, you've covered it. So, I mean, he will not live again, though he kind of does thanks to you. There, there hasn't been a, you know, a spate of books coming out about Rudolph Diesel. You know, you're one of the first to really do a deep dive into this really important man. And what kind of contact has there been from his descendants or anybody who's connected with him or anybody who knows about him? There's a man and a woman, and the woman was descended from Rudolph's daughter. And she actually came over to America, it was Connecticut for a period of time, and spoke to her briefly. But she didn't have like troves of information. It was long enough ago that she didn't really have any papers or big perspective on, you

know, the disappearance. But she did talk about him and the family lore. And that was a lot of fun. And then there was a man who lives in France. And I think he's actually not even a direct line of Diesel. It was like Diesel's uncle. He comes off of that line, but his last name is Diesel, Jean-Philippe Diesel. And, uh, he works in healthcare and he actually had done some of his own sleuthing around Europe. So he pointed me to an archive that I had not yet been in touch with in Denmark. Um,

and one in the Netherlands and, um And that had some great old photos. I must have been so happy to find out somebody's actually doing a deep dive. Yeah. I just mailed him a book. So he should get that any day. So now, I mean, here we are, I mean, I guess four years after you first started kicking this around and the book is born, Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. What's your takeaway on him? I know you care about him. I know you respect him. But, you know, for the listeners at home, what kind of guy was he?

He was ahead of his time in a lot of ways. He didn't consider himself a German or a Frenchman. He had all this, he had Slavic roots. He'd lived in Paris. He lived in London. He had German background, but he considered himself sort of a man of the world, like in terms of his, you know, where he belonged in a time of really heightened nationalism and militarism.

So he was in general peaceful. He was looking for peaceful applications of the engine. But he recognized that military strength was an important thing. His life was really bookended by European wars. And it was in an era of social Darwinism, which everyone... It was a popular construct at that time to think that it was not only okay to invade a weaker neighbor, it was a moral obligation. If you're the stronger society, you should go invade and take them over and make them more like you. It was that social progress would evolve in the way biological progress did. So social Darwinism meant like survival of the fittest, and it's a moral obligation to actually go do it. He did not

believe in that. He was more peaceful, but he believed in a military to kind of ward that off. And he just, I don't know, this is where I sip the martini because I'm going to take a little pause. And think about your friend. But do you think he'd be proud of what has been done with his engine today? The vegetable oil is kind of not a thing. That was the terrible. It's definitely been militarized a lot. Yeah. I mean, the submarine was the first terrible stealth weapon in history, you know, because the submarine technology enabled by diesel came about at about the same time as the first really functional torpedoes came about.

So suddenly you have this terrible weapon on the seas. And it contributed more toward centralization, economic centralization and urbanization, which he was also against. So all the things that he set out to do with the engine, the opposite happened. The power source for rural economies turned out to be more Tesla's electric motor, not the diesel engine. So that was this great irony of his life that his vision turned out to be kind of flipped upside down. But I mean, my God, if he were alive today and actually getting royalties on his invention, he would make Elon Musk look like nothing.

I mean, he would be clearly the richest man in the world. We're going to talk about Doug's background, about whether this is going to be made into a movie, and we're going to take your calls next. Let's just talk about your background, honey, because, um, I know it, but if you were a normal author coming on to talk about your book, I'd be asking about it. Uh, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a psychiatrist and a well-educated mom who was helping him and taking care of you four at the office. They met at the office, right? She was- That's right. Yeah, she was working at the Philadelphia Institute, and he would go there for research and then kept going there for research and going there for research, and

pretty soon they were dating and then married. Runs in the family, the urge to research. Yeah. So you're the third, sorry, you're the, yeah, you're the third of four. Hello. You're the third of four, but they were kind of more're the third of four. Hello. You're the third of four. But they're kind of more in two groupings because it went Diane, Bill. And then how many years? And then six and a half years. And then me. And then your younger brother, Ken.

Yeah. And you're you're tight with your siblings. I mean, especially like you and Ken, who's only two years apart. He was just here for a visit. Yeah. He and I went to high school together, college together. And so, you know, countless, you know, memories together. And yeah, just here for a visit. So but one of the sweet things about you know, countless, you know, memories together and, uh, yeah,

just here for a visit. So, but one of the sweet things about you, I'm, I hope that our listeners, our viewers are thinking, my God, Doug is so intelligent. He's so articulate. He's, you know, he spins a story so well, but you, for the first 12 years of your life, basically didn't speak. Well, it wasn't that, uh, crippling, but yeah, I was very shy. I was actually just telling this story to somebody else because we were talking about summertime and enjoying the beach and the sand and all that. And I was like the one kid down at the beach who like on a rainy day was like kind of happy, like, oh, because there was this little library I used to love to go to to read. And, you know, so I was a little bit of a nerd and mama's boy that way.

And then I had friends who loved to play Dungeons and Dragons. So on those rainy days, I would go down there and play Dungeons and Dragons, which kind of reinforces the nerd theory here. But yeah, pretty shy. And, you know, that kind of lasted. I'm to this day more of an introvert than an extrovert. So things like this, you know, take my energy rather than, you know, I'm not like feeding on a moment like this. It's like taking some work. This is a good word to all parents out there.

Then came the moment with sweet Will Tucker. I love Will Tucker. I will always be grateful to Will Tucker, even though I wasn't there when it happened, but I've met him since. Can you tell the story? Yeah, so from K to six, I went to this Quaker school, Haverford Friends School. And my best friend from K all the way through is Will Tucker. And I can't remember, it was probably third grade or something like that. But when it came to recess, I was, you know, again, shy.

So I'd sit on the sidelines and I wouldn't play and be like, come on, Doug, play. And, and, uh, but I didn't want to, I was too nervous to do it or, or whatever. And one day Will came over and like, kind of just made me do it. He's like, come on, let's go. It's going to be really fun. I want you to do it. And so I did. And I think we were playing soccer or something like that and had fun. You know, I turned out to be okay at it and had fun and continued to do it. So that was actually a big step in me, like at least getting off the sidelines a little bit. Yes. He literally got you off the sidelines and onto the playing field. My God, it's like a metaphor for life, but it was the beginning of you speaking and making friends and becoming the

Doug Brunt who we're talking to today. It, it only takes one, right? You only need the one friend really in life at all. And then to help you like put yourself out there a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we talk about that with our kids who I would say, um, our eldest, I would say is more reserved. He's not shy, but he's more reserved, more like you. Then there's Yardley who's big personality. He's our bull. And then there's Thatcher who's like super giggly and fun. He's our youngest. Yeah. It's amazing how different they each are, isn't it? Their own thing going. And it's like nothing. I mean, it's not like they're eight years apart. I mean, we've been roughly the same for the three of them. They have each other. So I guess that's different. Yates had nobody else. And then Yardley had Yates and then Thatcher

had Yards and Yates, but you know, they all, it's like in there, it's in there, in their mix. Well, that's one great thing about your career now as a writer is it allows you to have great time with them. And without that setup, I couldn't be doing what I'm doing either. You know, it's like that our balance has worked out perfectly. Um, wait, we're getting some calls. I want to get to, Oh, Felix is right here in Connecticut. Like we are Felix. Hi, thanks for calling. What's your question? Hi Megan. Um, I knew nothing about diesel and I love history and I can't wait drive us into war. And maybe he could talk about a back story about, you know,

how the sinking of Lusitania and how the British really, and Winston Churchill, drew us into World War I and how his interconnection. Wait, wait, that's enough. I can't remember it all because Doug doesn't have headphones on. So I'm going to have to repeat what you just said, Felix. Thank you. My memory's not as long term as I'd like it to be. So he's asking about whether this is sort of the beginning of the military industrial

complex and the sinking of the Lusitania by the Brits. And does that play in at all? Like, just because didn't you look at the Lusitania a little bit and some of those early big ships going down? You know, so that happened after the Lusitania, I think it was 1915. And Eric Larson wrote a great book on that called Dead Wake. The co-opting of technology for military use has always been around. And one great example I can give of that is the exhibit we saw at this museum.

It had Cougnot's steam car in it. So it was a very early, like sort of James Watt era version of steam technology. It was, it looked like a giant teapot and then a, like a tricycle with a giant teatop. But the thing was, you know, what you saw is 25 feet long, 30 feet long. And the whole thing weighs about three tons. It moves about two miles an hour. And so it was, you know, this guy, Cougnot, had developed it maybe for agriculture, for farming. And then the king of France, Louis, says, we're going to take this thing. So he gets it and wants to use it to haul cannon and, you know, really heavy loads. And the thing kind of went out of control at one point and crashed into a wall and destroyed this huge wall.

So it really didn't get used much. And again, it was so inefficient, like this giant steam pod. And so it wound up in this museum. But that was another example of societies like Germany and France at that time under King Louis, where they found technology and like, this is for the military. Let's bring it in. So diesel was in the beginning of that. It's been going on, I think, probably throughout history. But all I'll say is, Felix, you're onto something. Read the book. That's all I'm going to say. Certain things get illuminated that are right up your alley in the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel. Let's go to Julie in Pennsylvania. Hi, Julie. I'll repeat your question since I told Doug he didn't have to wear the headphones because they were

uncomfortable. Oh, it's kind of not a question. It's just, um, a comment and a kudos. I listen to you every day. I love you so much, Megan. And I appreciate you. And when you talked about Doug's podcast, it got me excited last year. So I've listened to everyone. Um, my daughter, I told my daughter's a writer. She listens to it as well. I just wanted to tell him how much I liked it. We just really love it here. And also how excited I am to read his book. I love fiction. I love history. I love historical fiction. I'm excited that he's decided on a nonfiction subject this time. You are so sweet. Thank you. So Julie is from Pennsylvania, your home state, the Commonwealth.

Go Eagles. And she listens to our show every day. And then she heard you promote Dedicated, your podcast, when you came on, I think it was October of last year, 2022? Launched in October, yeah. And what was it, 437? Number 437, if you want to listen to that, where we talk about how we met, how we got married, all that fun stuff, and his podcast. And now her daughter, who's a writer, is listening to it as well, and they love it. They haven't missed an episode. Oh, great. She can't wait to buy The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Bezos. Thank you. You're so sweet. Let's go to John in New York,

our old stomping ground. We've moved from New York to Connecticut now, and I highly recommend that, John. But what's on your mind? Hey, Megan, it's such a pleasure talking to you. Just a shout out real quick. I went to the Forestry College in Syracuse, so we were on the same campus at some point. Oh, nice. He went to Syracuse University's College of Forestry. That was like one of their best schools. I'm like, well, mine.

No, mine was fine, too. No disrespect to Polly's. But listen, again, your podcast is is phenomenal my wife and i listen to it every day it's it's a joy and through your podcast um i was introduced to doug's podcast which is also an awesome uh program so i i thank you for that i just i wanted to ask doug what what the what is the best way to get his book and And if there's any chance of getting an autographed copy of that. Oh, so nice. I love that question, John.

So he is a huge fan of mine and also of yours. He's heard of me. He knows who I am. And he's been listening to Dedicated. And we went to college together, kind of. And he wants to know what's the best way of getting a copy. Like, this is an important point. Hopefully the listeners are wondering about this.

What's the best way we can help you get on the New York Times bestseller list? Because I want to tell the audience out there, you can buy your way onto that list. So like there's a way you can do, you'll see the little asterisk on somebody's name saying bulk sales. That means somebody bought their way onto the list. That would mean Doug and I, we have some resources.

We could go buy his way into the list. We're not going to do that. It's bullshit. It's fake. And you should always be suspicious if you see something on that list that's got that asterisk. So we are not doing that. What we're trying to do is get the word out so that people will love it and experience it firsthand and hopefully get you on the list. Even though we don't love the New York Times overall, the list still helps sells books and it still is an honor to be on there. So how can he help you and where should he buy it? Well, I mean, I love the independent bookstores too.

So if there's one in your town or, you know, I think that would be the first step. Go to your local bookstore is great. You know, all sales count. Yeah, but all sales, like Amazon's fine. Yeah. I mean, you know, the book's out now, but pre-sales, you know, if you're thinking about other authors, pre-sales are great. So it gets listed on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, other places. So anything you buy prior to week one counts in week one. So that's a great way if you want to support other authors, I'm, I'm into week one, anywhere you buy it is great. So as we're waiting for other callers, after Will Tucker, God bless him, got you out of

your shell and onto the field, it turned out you were athletically inclined. You've always been amazing at athletics. You almost played college baseball. You were great at tennis. That was depicted in the movie Bombshell, which we already discussed in your last appearance. Doug was not a huge fan of Charlize Theron. And then you wound up at duke university by the way can you believe what's happened to duke university i mean like they're like the wokest of the woke now yes yeah it's disappointing yeah

isn't it yeah it's very sad we don't know where to send our children it's basically hillsdale or liberty of or barry weiss's new college of austin that's it that's all we've got or homeschool oh gcu we could go to gcu.edu Grand Canyon. But like the options are very, very limited. So you go to, hopefully it's turning around, you know,

but even before you got to Duke, you went to Haverford, which is sort of a private boys, it is a private boys school in a, in a suburban Philadelphia area. And I think that's sort of where your love of books came, like deep, deep love of books, right? You had your, Oh, Captain, my captain moment from dead,

dead poet society. I mean, one of the things about Haverford, which is the first thing I think you and I both look for in a school for our kids is they teach the kids how to write. It's the most important thing. Like good writing means clear thinking. And, and then that shows up in everything you do. And I did have a couple of English professors there who were just amazing. Barry Berg, who's passed away, was my favorite. He was just my favorite teacher in school and taught a love of literature, reading and also teaching how to write well. You should give me a list of the books for people to read because I don't read anywhere nearly as much as you do because I'm just so tired by the end of the day and I've read so much news. But people are always asking for a great list. That's a good idea. I'll put something on my website,

like the books I've read and recommend. I'll do that. Is it douglasbrunt.com or douglasbrunt.com? Douglas Brunt.com. By the way, on that website, there's some great archival photos of Diesel. In the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel, there are a few photos in the insert, but on my website, there are troves. You can look at Diesel's mansion that he built in Munich. The ships of the era that were diesel-powered, the first ones, it's just amazing stuff. Are any of our personal pictures, like our trips on there?

Yes, actually the picture of us in Paris when we first look at the plaque outside his home that we talked about, pictures from inside the museum that we've talked about. Yeah. All right, let's get another caller in. Sue down in Florida. Hi, Sue.

What's on your mind? Hi, Megan. Super excited. Great show as always. Loved, loved, loved the interview. Thank you so much for bringing this new author on board. I know it's not new to you, new to me. I already bought the book.

As soon as I heard the first half, I went ahead and ordered it online. So super excited, super excited to give us a gift. Love history and just the stories, like you said, the stories behind it. If you can read it like a novel or it makes it more interesting. So super exciting. And, you know, we need people that are doing research and going to the libraries and really doing this. So super exciting. Best of luck to both of you guys and keep it going. Thank you. God bless you too. So she's offering a word of encouragement saying she's already ordered the book. Thanks to the interview today. And that, uh, she loves consuming her history this way. I feel the same, like where you don't, you don't really have to work for it. You know what I mean? Just kind of seeps in. Like we learned about the whole Prussia thing. So I'll make a book recommendation right now, an author

recommendation. Barbara Tuchman is like, she is such a good, she's passed away. She was such a great writer. And she is one of the first to start writing in this novelistic way, narrative nonfiction. So it's their history books, but she wrote the Zimmerman telegram, which is amazing. The guns of August, the proud tower. All right,

wait, I've got to interrupt you because I want to get this last caller in. Cause we don't have a lot of time, but Lauren in Canada has an important question. I love her question because you'll see why. Hi, Lauren, what's your question?

Hey, my question is, well, good morning to both of you. Will the book be out on in audible form? Ah, the audio book. I love the audio audio book not only is it coming out in audio but scott brick the golden voice is doing the audio i mean he's just there are people who follow who read books just because he reads them he's got a great voice and he's a great guy but he did it scott brick aka the golden voice that was not an

easy get normally like this guy's very, very expensive. And, you know, I mean, he'd be doing well, but I was going to say like a Scott Turow book, which, by the way, Scott Turow is your next guest on Dedicated. It drops on Tuesday. So subscribe. But he reads the book, which is such a great get. And it's such like a big book. Like I said, the old title of Engines and Empires. He's the right guy to read it. His voice is melefluous. You would listen to him read you the phone book. And reading this book is such a lovely bonus.

So check him out. Duggar, thanks for coming on. This was awesome. Cheers. Cheers to you too, babe. Love you, honey. Good luck with it. Love you too.

And thanks to all of our audience too. too honestly like very grateful to you for helping us you know be able to do this right to have the studio and bring you our show and bring you doug's show though it's from his studio and uh in the book right it's like i hope you understand how much we rely on you how much we value you doug feels the same i know you read all the reviews that they drop on your dedicated podcast yeah yes yeah Yes. Yeah. Oh, and book reviews. I read all reviews. I'm kind of like too obsessed with it. And now and now becomes the kind of fun slash sad period where Doug checks his book ranking

every day. So if you could just go ahead and buy a copy or 10 of The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel, that would make Doug super happy because as much as we love Anderson Cooper, we want Doug to top him on the list. Sorry not to make him the theme. Duggar, thanks again. Thank you. All right.

Great. Don't forget, if you read the book, go get the book, Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel by Douglas Brunt. And if you read the book, tell me what you think. I'd love to hear from you. Email me directly, Megan, M-E-G-Y-N, at megankelly.com. And check out megankelly.com for behind-the-scenes content. I actually just gave my producers a bunch of pictures of yours truly and Doug that we had never posted before. And so you can check that out. You might enjoy it. And while you're there,

you can sign up for our American News Minute email. It comes out every Friday. We're getting such great feedback on it, and our numbers are going way up, so people are clearly enjoying it. Tomorrow, we turn back to the news with National Review Day plus Dan Bongino later this week. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.