The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 362: Douglas Brunt—Don't Forget the Footnotes

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

The New York Times bestselling author and podcaster discusses great writing, the power of storytelling, his newest book, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, and how he solved a 110-year-old whodunnit.  

Hey guys, guess who? Spoiler alert, it's me, Mike Rowe. With another episode of the way I heard it, specifically episode number 362, this one is called Don't Forget the Footnotes with our new and good friend, Doug Brunt. Chuck, do I sound as bad outside of my head as I do inside of my head? I can only imagine how it sounds inside your head. But outside your head, I can hear a little congestion, but it's not terribly bad. I'm not one to make excuses, friends, but I will right now.

I'm filled with a weird mix of day quill, some lingering NyQuil, some afrin, which is extraordinary, and some noble Tennessee whiskey, which is, I'm not advising any of this. I'm just saying that a lot of pharmacology had to come together to keep this cold at bay for an hour or so, as I had the conversation you're about to hear. already, Chuck, it's slipping into oblivion as the drugs wear off. Was it a good conversation? It sure seemed like it when it was happening. I thought it was a great conversation. I knew it was going to be the book that this guy has written is just stellar, just a really, really good read. It's a mystery. It's a history.

It's a history book that's got mystery to it, and I was shocked by the ending. Yeah. It's terrific. It's called The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel. Very mysterious. He's terribly German. He's very German. And Doug Brunt is just a great writer. This is his third or fourth book. If you haven't picked up the other ones, you should give them all a deep dive. Yes, Chuck is telling me it's the fourth.

You're holding up four fingers, so I assume that's what you mean. It is his fourth book. It's good. I got it. I gave my copy to my dad right away because I knew he was going to like it. But you will learn in this book, among other things, that very, very few human beings have ever walked the planet who had a bigger impact on the environment and the species than this guy, Rudolph Diesel, who most people, they not only don't know

he exists, they think of him with a small D, thanks to all of the signs and all of the filling stations. But the odyssey with which the diesel engine was created is extraordinary, and the mystery that surrounded this man, sudden disappeared. was headline news and would have been for months and months, but for the fact that the first world war broke out and everybody stopped paying attention. And so what you really have here is a question along the lines of, what do you think would happen tomorrow if Elon Musk went missing today? Just disappeared off the face of the earth.

No ransom note, no body, nothing. So you've got one of the most important inventors in the history of inventors here today and gone tomorrow. And nobody has ever figured out what happened to him. But Douglas Brunt has. And he's written this story that plays as a terrific who done it as well as a history book for people who don't read history books. There is everything to love about this book, including the fact that what fun to talk to this guy. I love it when authors, you know, show up without a giant stick up their butts and are willing to have a few laughs. And share a cocktail.

I was just going to say, not only was he willing to share a few laughs, he went with your encouragement, he ran off and got a little hooch to come back and imbibe with us. That was great. We didn't make a big deal about the fact that he's married to Megan Kelly, but he is. And I always point that out. Megan Kelly, Chuck. You may have seen her. Megan Kelly. Right.

Didn't she do an episode on this podcast? She did. She did. And I've done one or two on hers. And she's had a pretty great career too. These two together, what a terrific couple. She had a big part in the book, turning out the way it did. We'll get to all that in the chat you're about to hear.

I love the fact that Doug cares deeply about footnotes. I do too. And the footnotes in this book are better than many books. They're terrific. You're going to love it. The Mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel with Douglas Brunt right after this. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth?

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And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mike. That's netsuite.com. My granddad's whiskey is down here in my office in case of emergencies. So I may actually pour myself a snort. If you want to get something, by all means, feel free. Unfortunately, that might take me too.

I'm over in this, like, our guest studio. So it'd probably take me a good few minutes to leave this thing and then go over there and then come back. Well, you know what? The name of your podcast is dedicated. I mean, it would show a certain dedication. But no, don't do that. No, no, don't do it. I mean, really, it's, although, what is it, 530 over there, right?

Where are you, New York? Yeah, 530. Yeah, we're in Connecticut. I mean, it's laid out. You know what? Yeah. Go get something. All right.

All right. I'll be right back. I'll see you here in a minute. Fantastic. What could possibly go wrong? Okay. Nothing, man. Are you kidding?

We'll play some elevator music and wait for Doug Brunt to come back with his choice of mature. Oh, man. I really am, dude. I am hopped up. I just took, I took three daiguals and two shots of aphron. Oh, the aphron, man. That's the stuff. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. I haven't had it in years. I haven't had it since I got my nose fixed. I haven't needed it, but I just wanted to try and open it up a little bit more. And it is just... Are you going to have a snorted whiskey? Do you have a glass? Because I think you're going to have to... Do I have a glass? Yeah. I'm going to go get something. Yeah, you might as well.

If all the cool kids are doing it. Yeah, they are. Well, this is the first on the way I heard it. If you're still listening to this, I'm looking at my monitor and I'm alone. guest, Doug Brunt, has gone off to get something to drink and my producer, Chuck Klaus Meyer, has done the same. I'm sitting here under the influence of any number of medications and I have a bottle of Noble nearby. So yeah, it just seems like the right thing to do on a, what is today? God, it's a Monday. Well, that tells you all you need to know, really. A Monday. You think I'm going to leave any of this in? I think you will. I think you're going to put some elevator music under it. Of course. Okay, I'm back.

Yes, you are. Well done. What'd you bring? This is a gift from Jack Carr. Do you know who he is? Oh, yeah. I love Jack Car. He's been on this podcast.

Yeah, a terminal list. So he sent me a bottle of Jack Car Warrior Proof whiskey. Wow. So he came on my show as well a little while ago. That's not intimidating at all. You've got to be tough to get this stuff down. Warrior proof. I guess that's clever.

I mean... He's got all kinds of stuff. He's got hats and t-shirts and... Those Navy SEALs, man, they know what they're doing. They've got, like, Jocko, he's got his protein powder. These guys are thriving out there. Yeah, they are. Well, you know, Plymouth Gin had the Navy proof, wasn't it?

Oh, I love Plymouth gin. That's good stuff, too. So let's start there and then. Why do you love Plymouth gin? Of all the Jins to choose, I can tell you why I love it. You know, I'm not that picky. I don't mean to say, like, it's Plymouth or go home. But, you know, Hendricks, they're all pretty good.

but someone recommended it once, and I just had it in a martini, like a very dry martini with a twist. So you're really just drinking mostly the gin. And it was great. Yeah. Well, I started drinking it probably 20 years ago, maybe 25,

when I stumbled across my favorite, fictitious character of all time. Regular listeners will be bored of the story, but as a writer, I'm sure you've stumbled across John D. McDonald in your travels. I have not read him, but I know. Well, his big novel, I think he wrote something called condominium back in the 70s. He wrote Cape Fear.

He was real big on the pulps, you know, but his claim to fame is the Travis McGee Mysteries. And Travis McGee is this boat bum, you know, who basically solves crimes and lives off of the grid and among many other things. He lives on a boat called the Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game, thanks to that very hand. And he drinks Plymouth gin.

And the way he describes, it, Doug. I mean, this is in the style of Elmore Leonard and, you know, the great pulp writers. And he's just always, usually after getting the crap knocked out of him, he draws a hot bath and he slides into it. And he puts a little sherry over the ice and a Tom Collins glass and then he flicks it out. And then he pours in the freezing cold Plymouth gin and the ice cracks. And he sits back and he sips on it. And ye shall be restored. Oh, that sounds good. It sounded. You just put me in the mood to go read a good novel like that.

Well, you did the same for me not long ago. Thanks to this thing, you were talking to one of my favorite authors. And you mentioned the Gold Coast. And I just grabbed it off the shelf because you said it was the novel that made you wanted to start writing. And that is so funny to me because for me, it was the novel that made me realize I was never going to be Nelson DeMille. I should probably stay in my lane.

Why did that thing resonate with you so much? I think the way I put it in the episode you're describing there is I want to make people feel the way that novel made me feel. And it just transported me to these characters. It's a little bit different from his other work. And we all aspire to do what Nelson did there. And the way he created those characters and the scene, it just was transporting. Every time you picked up that book, it brought you into that world, it made you feel something. I'd be seeing people later telling about scenes from the book or funny witticisms in it and observations of human

And life, like, you really were getting it on so many levels because he has various stude observations of human nature in the book as well. Obviously, the great ones can do this in their sleep. But it's so hard to do to really make you like a protagonist and to make you to miss her or him to pick up a book, not to see what's going to happen next necessarily, but to see how your friend is doing. that's what McDonald did for me with Travis McGee. That's what DeMille did with John Corey in particular. But this wasn't a John Corey novel, Chuck. You should read this. It's called the Gold Coast.

I mean, for me, Doug, it was like a modern day great Gatsby. And in some ways, even better. I do hear it compared to that as well. And bigger, too. I mean, you're spending even more time with that character. And from the writer's perspective, it's really the same thing. When you choose a topic for a novel, it's like, this is who I'm going to be hanging around with for the next couple years. You know, these characters and this

story. And so I think authors, even more so than readers in some way, need to be pretty selective with what they take on. Because you're going to be hunkered down. I don't have a list of questions, but if I did, the first official one would probably be, are you sick of diesel yet? Because you've been living with him for a long time. And, you know, I wrote a book once. My mom's written a bunch. I always laugh with authors who usually, you know, away from a microphone, will confess that, yeah, you know, you dig in, you live with them, you write it, then you rewrite it, then you rewrite it again because writing's rewriting. And then when you finally get it where you want, you're done.

And except you're not, it's just started. Then you hop into the next phase. You know, I admire the man so much that I'm not. sick of him. But there were phases. You know, the copy edit phase when you're just going through, you know, the minutia and you've got to get every date right and everything, you know, it's just unbelievable. These copy editors who do this work are superhuman. I don't know how they do it. But there are phases that I was certainly ready to move on from. There were moments when I was working on that book where, without a doubt, I am the person alive on this planet who knows

the most about Rudolph Diesel at this point. I mean, I was in archives and reading everything for years and years. But there were moments when I could make a connection based on some little thing in an archive, something Churchill said or did that was, you know, within a week of something Diesel did. And it meant to me, it drew a connection in my story that almost knowing that someone else would pass that piece of information and would be interesting, but not a big deal. For me, it was a huge deal. And in those moments, those were the real joys of working on the book. I've joked, it's like the nerdy side of Indiana Jones, you know, when you discover like a piece of treasure like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, but it's also a new fact or a new, maybe not a fact,

but, you know, if you just immerse yourself in the biography of a person, right, that's fine. And lots of great writers have done that. But when you start to lay them atop one another, like Venn diagrams, and find connections that nobody had seen before, that's new. I mean, that's my favorite part of this book. And I don't know what you know about my misspent career writing, but I, in the style of Paul Harvey, have always been fascinated by these, learning something you didn't know about someone you do. I've tried for years to write in that style. That's how this podcast started. And your book is like the granddaddy of that. Because, I mean, it's a novel. It's a history book for people who don't read history books in sheep's clothing, really. It's a who done it when it comes down to.

it. So as a guy who's probably sick to death of talking about your own book, why don't you just make us give a damn about Rudolph, for starters, and then just kind of walk me through how it turned in to the obsession it clearly became? I stumbled on it. Like many of your listeners, seven years ago, I always thought diesel was a fuel option at the fueling station. I didn't think it was this other engine. I bought this boat around that time and it was an older or bigger boat. It needed to be fixed up. And I was talking to the guy about what I should do with the boat. And he said, well, the first thing you should do with a boat like this is get rid of these gasoline engines and replace them with diesels. I didn't know why. I just thought one engine was like any other. And he said, well,

100% of boat fires come from gasoline engines. Zero from diesel. You can take a lit match and drop it into a barrel of diesel fuel. Nothing will happen. It's not flammable. It has no fumes. And you get about three or four times the fuel efficiency. So on your tank of 200 gallons of fuel, you'll go three or four times as far. So I switched to diesels. And then I came across this like a year later. Because as you know, I'd previously written fiction. This is my first nonfiction book. And I came across this list of mysterious disappearances at sea. I was just Googling around looking for anything that might be interesting. And maybe David Graham was doing the same thing with a wager. You know, he came across this crazy shipwreck. It's, you know. And on this list,

though, was Rudolph diesel. I thought, well, maybe this is connected to my diesel engines that I just got. So I clicked on this link to learn about Diesel's disappearance at sea in 1913 just before World War I. And it was a crazy story. And on the face of it made no sense. You know, so as you were saying, the book is kind of a, it's a biography, but it's also a primer on turn of the century European diplomacy. It's a little bit of like an engines for dummies. And then it turns into in the end like this Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes kind of whodunit mystery. So to set up the mystery, in 1913, Rudolph Diesel is traveling across the North Sea on an overnight passenger ferry from Belgium to Great Britain.

And in the night, he disappears. And in the morning, he's supposed to meet his friends for breakfast at 6 a.m. He doesn't show. They hold the ship at sea and they search for Diesel and they can't find him anywhere. All they find is his hat and his coat neatly folded at the stern of the ship by the rail. So they put into sea and all the newspapers around the world from New York to London to Western Europe. Europe to Russia explode with this crazy disappearance because while we've kind of forgotten the man today, at that time, he was a huge celebrity. It would be like an Elon Musk type disappearing.

So it was the headline of all the newspapers of what had happened. The prevailing theory was suicide that he had jumped overboard, but there were also two theories of murder that he might have been murdered either by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, or John Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, founder of Standard Oil. And they each had their own reason. for doing it because the diesel engine presented this kind of revolutionary opportunity in business and in warfare. And you know this stuff. Maybe I'll just finish off this bit to set up the mystery. But the reason people pointed to Kaiser Wilhelms may be wanting to have committed this murder was that by 1913, the diesel engine had emerged as the only engine that could service a U-boat or a submarine.

kerosene and gasoline engines just wouldn't work. It didn't have the range. There were fires or explosions. But with a diesel engine, the submarine suddenly became this terrible offensive weapon. They could travel far out into sea lanes, control shipping, and military transports. And so every Navy of the major powers was scrambling for diesel power. But Rudolph Diesel was still the main expert. And you really needed him to sort of get across the exacting requirements of undersea travel. And the reason he was crossing the North Sea on that day in 1913 was to attend the groundbreaking ceremony. He was a founder and board director of a new diesel engine manufacturing company in Great Britain,

whose mandate it was to supply diesel engines for the Royal Navy's submarine program. So, of course, Kaiser Wilhelm would be like, hell no, that's not happening. Right. Rockefeller had a very different reason for viewing diesel as a threat, which was that diesel had been advocating that his engine could run on things other than petroleum-based fuels. He was promoting in America in 1912 that, you know, you have farm. You can grow your own fuel. His engine, he had won the 1900 Paris World's Fair on a diesel engine running peanut oil. He could run it on vegetable oil. He could run it on coal tar. He didn't need

petroleum. And he was saying, I can break the American fuel monopoly, and I don't need a law to do it. I can do it with the power of my technology. And, you know, this was a very vulnerable time for Rockefeller in 1913 because he had made all his money from the founding of Standard Oil in 1870 through to the end of the century in 1900. He made all his money on kerosene. He was really in the illuminations. He was really in the illumination business. Gasoline was actually a waste product that they would throw away. And by the turn of the century, though, Edison and others were developing better and better electric light bulbs. So the kerosene market was completely going away. The gasoline market had not yet started and really was not a sure thing that it even would. Good news for the whales,

as I recall. Exactly. Carosine, the electric light bulb was going to do to kerosene what kerosene had done to the whales, the whaling industry. Right. So, you know, Rockefeller was desperate. He needed engines to be burning gasoline. This book, as you know, is in my mind, fascinating little footnotes. Each is like a little treasure of an information, but in one of those, in 1905, New York City had a fleet of taxi cabs, and they were all electric. There was a charging station on Broadway and Times Square, and so anyway, it wasn't a given that we were going to be burning gasoline all this time, but Rockefeller found ways to ensure that we did, and diesel was a real threat to him at that time. In so many ways, the book just rhymes and hums with the headlines of today.

I mean, you mention Musk. And like, if you think about the obvious corollary would be the threat of, say, wind or solar or alternative energies on fossil fuels, right? And people will, and have always talked about that and will continue to, obviously, for decades. But I think of like the legacy media, and I think of the threat of social media and the impact of Twitter vis-a-vis Musk. And just this, like there's always an individual or two, if you go through history, who has his or her fingers around or on the pulse of something momentous. That's where the history comes alive. It should be noted, too, that he wasn't just discovered missing. you can't discover somebody missing.

You can discover his clothes neatly folded on the stern. His hat sat on top of it, like a man who undressed before throwing himself off the back. It wasn't crazy to think that he killed himself, and yet it made no sense because there was no indication that he was inclined to do such a thing. And then right in the midst of all of this confusion, as quickly as he's in the headlines,

he's knocked off the front pages because of, that pesky war to end all wars. And so begins the journey of his weird anonymity. Right. By the way, speaking of fuels, I just had a sip of this Jack Carr whiskey, which could definitely power something. My gosh, it's delicious. I tend to do this with an ice cube, which I didn't do this time. I normally do it as well. This is the barrel strength version of Noble, and it's got a wang to it as well, 121 proof. So it's just the thing for Afrin and Dake will combine. I'll let you know how things. That is going to knock your cold right out.

It's going to knock something out. Along with my soul. Hey, can I ask a question here about the, I know the sort of the battle for fuel, but why is it that we didn't go to diesel? Diesel engines will run longer. You know, it takes less fuel to go a greater distance. How did we wind up with gasoline over diesel? Do do, do, do, do do do do. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial.

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Well, Diesel still is the dominant power source. We use diesel for most things. A hundred percent of cargo ships are diesel. Trains throughout the 20th century were diesel, anything larger than a passenger car, diesel, every truck, every piece of heavy equipment, farm machinery, all that stuff is diesel. It does run in a form of petrol diesel. I mean, it is a derivative of crude oil in that sense. So Rockefeller kind of won in that way, and I can explain how that happened too. But on the engine front, Passenger cars, the difference between a diesel engine and a gasoline engine is it's much heavier, first of all. And the metal casting is a little bit more sophisticated and expensive to do, and the materials are a bit more expensive.

It's a high pressure engine, and so the development of it is a little bit more. And because it's heavier, it works better in environments that can support the weight, like a ship or a terrain. You know, those early cars, like the Ben's cars, you know, those look like big tricycles or so. and they had a half-horsepower engine and things like that. You couldn't mount a big diesel on those things and have it really work. So smaller passenger cars, particularly in those early days, were gas engines. Diesel, obviously, the technology has gotten better and better and better over the years, so you have more compact smaller engines.

But it is to this day a heavier engine. And in fact, just a couple years ago, two, three years ago, they were developing an outboard marine engine of diesel. And that was going to be a big thing because the efficiency would be great. And a lot of people like the user-friendlyness of outboard motor. as opposed to inboards. But in the end, it still was too heavy. It didn't go anywhere because it was heavier than the gas outboards.

So it's just big hunk of weight on the back of your boat. But isn't it weird, though? I mean, over the last hundred years or so with all of the advancements and metallurgy and so forth, why hasn't the weight of the engine come down? And if it did, to Chuck's point, what would that mean, practically speaking, for the automotive industry? It has come down, but I think the gasoline engines have come down and it can measure it way. So they remain lighter.

The performance of what a diesel needs to do, that high pressure to explode the fuel in the cylinder just requires more than gasoline does. So as it comes down, the gasoline engines have come down even more. They are still lighter. Okay. So diesel goes off the back of the boat, presumably. He's in the headlines. The world is perched on war. War breaks out.

And so practically speaking, in terms of the narrative, and don't give anything away, for God's sakes, but what happens next? Well, in the war, where diesel, he had primarily been working since 1897 in Germany, and a number of companies were working very closely with him. So he had trained a number of engineers, and Germany really was in the lead in diesel manufacturing. Russia, ironically, was number two, the Nobel family in Russia, which is another amazing, fun side story to the book. The Swedes who emigrated to Russia to St. Petersburg, they basically discovered the Russian oil business, and they also were the leading engine manufacturer in all of

Russian, build all the engines for the Tsar's Navy. A number of people were already pretty well ahead in diesel expertise, but Great Britain, who had been trailing terribly in diesel expertise and a submarine program, did through the war achieve some remarkable strides with their submarine fleet. They didn't quite rival the Germans, but they did put some pretty good submarines out into the war effort. And yeah, you know, the diesel engine, it's a mystery. And again, I don't want to, as you said, I don't want to give away too much of what became of things after 1913. But throughout the century, the diesel engine has dominated. In World War II, this is another note in the book on D-Day, our landing on D-Day, 100 percent.

of the marine craft were running diesels at that time. And in terms of industry through the century, there's a little bit I can do. I mean, at this point, as you know, on Book Tour, you can sort of pull the string on your back

and you do your thing. But imagine a piece of fruit grown in a tropical region. 100% of the machinery, the farm equipment used to grow that fruit is powered by diesel. It gets loaded onto a truck. All trucks, 100% are diesel.

It gets driven down to a port where a crane, diesel-powered, it onto a cargo ship. 100% of cargo ships around the world are diesel. It goes across the oceans to another port, onto a truck, to a train through the 20th century, all trains. Diesel. Goes to an inland refrigerated warehouse where the power is likely from a plant operating diesel. In fact, these charging stations for the electric cars are generally right behind them. There's a diesel power plant powering the batteries to power the cars. I mean, it's kind of crazy, but diesel has completely powered, our global economy throughout the 20th century and really through to the present day. It's been our

dominant power source. And yet, put 100 people in a room or 1,000, and show of hands, right? First of all, how many people know the guy was even a guy who walked the earth? How many gas stations to this day still sell diesel with a small D as opposed to a Chevrolet or a Ford? We know. But a couple years ago, I came really close to selling a show called FOOT. It stood for people in history unappreciated in current times. And it was just going to be a look at men and women who did great things, important things. But for whatever reason, just got pushed to the side. Diesel would have to be near the top of the list. I can't think of anyone else who comes close. The fact that he's completely scrubbed from history.

Yeah, the deficit of appreciation, massive. He did a ton, and he's unknown, basically. I do love the description of your show. I mean, Diesel is such a perfect example of it. I've been referring to it, because you and I are very aligned on this thinking of what's fascinating to us, and I've been describing it to my editor as the iceberg theory of history. You know just enough. Like, you recognize the names and the settings and the places and some of the things that happen.

Like, you've got a real strong toehold, sometimes even more. Like, you might consider yourself a bit of an expert on pieces of it. But then you're only looking at, you know, as Hemingway says, those are the 10% and then the iceberg below the surface, like all this other stuff. And it's, in that sense, it's even more mind-blowing because you thought you knew it. And you thought you had a pretty good grasp of it. But then the 90% below the surface, you're just like, holy crap, I did not know these connections were there. I did not know this side of Winston Churchill or whatever it is.

And in the case of diesel, you know, you didn't even know as a guy. You know, in that case, you know, your toehold is really on other things. Like, you kind of knew the diesel engine. You passed the word diesel all the time. But you didn't know any of this other stuff. But even the diesel engine, you kind of think it's just an engine that burns a different kind of fuel. But that's not the case at all. It's compression, which blew my mind, you know.

I mean, you're right. This book, there's a part of this book that really is Engines for Dummies. And I'm the dummy who read it and went, wow, I had to. no idea that that's how it works. Before I dove in, I was the dummy too. I didn't even know it was really, I thought it was a different fuel. I didn't even know it was really a different engine. Right. It's like the biography channel collided with the producers of how it's made and then was handed to Agatha Christie's old editor. And really, it's hard, Doug, to just like put your book in a pre-existing category, which is why I like it so much. But, man, what a pain in the acid is to

promote it without screwing up the reveal. I gave it to my dad. dad three weeks ago, I went back to see him last week. First thing he does is screw up the ending for me because I hadn't finished it yet. Like, how do you promote a book? I guess we're doing it right now. But the best thing I can say to people is, look, I totally understand the bigger riddle here, which is how can you make history palpable in 2024? And not to people who are genuinely curious about history. We don't count. How can you do it for this generation? How can you do it for people who would otherwise be watching the cooking channel? And I think you've done it, man. And I think part of it is that you were genuinely curious about all of it. And that's really what I want to hear

from you about is the research process. Like what would have been like to write a book like this 40 years ago or 30 years ago before the internet. Much harder. Yeah, much harder. One quick thing, there's a line by Roger Kippling, which you may already know, which is, and I'm pretty close on this, if history were told in the form of stories, we would never forget. It's that great narrative nonfiction stuff.

Eric Larson's terrific at it. David Grand, terrific. They're sort of the category kings. Barbara Tuckman, going back to the 50s, she really pioneered so much of modern, narrative nonfiction, telling it in a novelistic way, but it's nonfiction. I mean, you're getting history, but you're just enraptured by it because you're really reading a great story. And in that sense, you do never forget it. It's such a neat trick. There's another author who I love called George

MacDonald Frazier, who wrote The Flashman Chronicles, which is the best historical fiction I've read. And it's just that delightful mix of political incorrectness with a historian. discerning eye to really tell the truth of a thing, but through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. Have you read any of his stuff, The Flashman Chronicles? I haven't. I'm going to have to get these recommendations from you. Well, for what it's worth. It's a little Forrest Gumpy, isn't it? He's kind of like Forrest Gump. Flashman is the classic Unreliable Narrator. First of all, he doesn't exist.

He is a complete fiction of Frazier's mind, but he exists. in the center of every Victorian conflict through the age of the queen, like from 1845 through Kahnpau and Lucknow, all the Indian things. He's with Custer at the last stand. He's Zellig. He's everywhere. And he reports on all that he knows

because the construct of the novels is he's been promoted inexplicably through the ranks. he's ultimately a general who dies in his 90s and his diaries are found by an editor who brings them to life and starts writing these accounts. And you reminded me earlier when you talked about how to use a footnote right, how to really get an end note right. The end of each of these books is 30 or 40 pages of footnotes. And they were so convincing, Doug, when they came out in the early 70s, they were so convincing that they were so convincing that they were reviewed as historical works. There are actually works of fiction written by a historian,

but my God, they pull you in to a character who you miss when you're not around. It's funny. My editor and I have joked, this is not a saying of either of ours. I think it's largely out there, but one writer's footnote can be another writer's whole book. I think in this case, one of my own footnotes might be my own next book. There are a couple things. I'm kicking around, but I love this period of time, this quarter century leading up to World War I. It's really under explored, underwritten, because just as we were beginning to digest what the hell happened with that war to end all wars, as you called it, another one happened. And so we never kind of got our chance to figure it all out and hash it all. And so history has kind of neglected that

period of time. And I jokingly refer to it with my wife as Downton Abbey the early seasons, that hinge point, because World War II really was such a hinge point. Like we think about all the empires that collapse, the Ottoman, the Russian, the German, the Austrian, all these empires went away. Urbanization was already happening, but certainly got accelerated by World War I. The sort of feudal downtown abbey living went away. The world just changed a lot, right, in that hinge in history of World War I. And it's a fantastic period to explore. Our friend, Dan Carlin, talks a lot about this.

And, I mean, I think it's... It's stunning, Doug, the confusion today about what Europe was in that period, that alliance of empires, and that weird combination, again, of biography and humanity with place. The fact that Bismarck and the Queen are related in some way, right? I mean, all of these alliances, people, I think we'd be better and smarter today as a the bipedal species, if we understood in relatively recent memory just how intensely convoluted Diesel's world was. Yeah.

It's a crazy time. The shuffling of alliances throughout Europe. I mean, it was almost like a game of musical chairs. And then it's just like when that shot went off in Sarajevo, it's like, okay, well, this is how we lined up. So we'll fight this way, I guess. But five or ten years before or after, it might have been a very different looking thing. You know, the British were never that fond of the Russians, but they, you know, fought.

And in fact, in the Crimean War had fought against each other, you know, not long before. And so it's just weird how it all lined up that way. One of the other things, you know, getting aside, setting aside the political stuff, the science and the arts and the humanities developed so rapidly. The advent of the world's fair seemed to mark this crazy acceleration in our ability to, you know, with science and other things. So the cast of characters around it, you know, diesel's contemporaries were Marconi, Ford, Edison, the Wright brothers, Bell, Adolphus Bush, who actually plays a major role in this book, the founder of Anheiser Bush, and he had taken the exclusive diesel license for North America and built submarine diesels for the U.S. Navy. Chester Nimitz is a big diesel guy. It's just an amazing cast of characters. Lost a finger. Yeah. Lost his ring finger in a diesel engine. That's right. Nimitz. Yes, that's right. That's a great story.

So Chester Nimitz was sent to Germany in 1912, 13, to study diesel technology because he was going to come back and refit a bunch of U.S. Navy ships to diesel. And he was in Augsburg in Germany, and he got his finger caught in an engine. And the only thing that saved it was his class ring. But if you look at pictures of Chester Nimitz later in life or that wax mannequin of him in the victory in the Pacific exhibit, you see that he's missing the ring finger of his left hand. And that was due to his trip to Germany in 1913. Crazy.

He almost died right out here on San Francisco Bay years ago. He landed in an amphibious plane and they hit debris and flipped him over. The pilot drowned. Whoa. And he very nearly died too. I only know that because on dirty jobs, I found one of the boats that is still used here in the bay to pick up debris. There's a whole category of dirty jobs dedicated to keeping the San Francisco Bay clean, you know, after a tidal surge, whatever, docks break off and these big chunks of stuff float out there. Boat was called the raccoon, and they told me that story.

And there you go. Another weird little thing you stumble across, and suddenly you're making a TV show about a trash boat because a guy with nine fingers had a bad landing. We need some of that over here. That new boat I mentioned at the top of the show, where we were going to be. the U.S. Open from Connecticut down the, you know, you head down the Long Island Sound toward the East River toward the U.S. Open Center. And we passed like a telephone-sized pole in there. I mean, it was a total day-ender if we had hit that. Oh, yeah. But there's tons of that stuff floating around here. I'm glad there's someone out there getting that stuff out of the

water because it's really brutal. It's landmines. It's the iceberg you just described. You saw 10% of whatever that thing was, you know. So you actually bought a boat, Doug? You didn't didn't go with the old, I'm just going to find some friends with boats. No, we are boat owners. Oh my God. For better or worse, we've had it for about seven years. We did in fact, repowered a diesel. So if you go to my website, there's pictures of the boat and a diesel engine and I'm legit.

I own diesel, you know, backing this up. Dude, you'd better. You'd better. What's the name of your boat? Triumvirate, which is really named that. We have three kids, three kids. So it's sort of a reference to the power of our three kids. I guess it's better than a Medusa. Way better. Hey, you mentioned Churchill, and I wonder, I guess maybe I'm curious about the things you didn't think you were going to learn as you dove into this.

And if you could talk more about the way, like, did you learn something about Churchill that you didn't know, or Edison or the Wright brothers, or any of those other things that wound up propping the whole story up? I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company

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I was like, I didn't know anything. And you get this massive thrust with him, but there were all these supporting, scaffolding things of little revelations of all these other characters. With Churchill, I'd always thought of Churchill as sort of a World War II guy. You know, that's how we mainly remember him as saving the free world. But he, as a young man, did a ton of stuff.

The early Churchill years are fascinating. And he was like riding around South Africa, running from the boars, hiding in a mine, and, you know, escaping barely. And he played a huge role in World War I. He invented, so here's a fun little footnote for us, back on that theme. I don't know if you know where the word tank is. I guess if you read the book, you do now, but Churchill ran the Admiralty. He was first Lord of the Admiralty.

Actually, before both wars, World War I and World War II, he's responsible for preparing the Royal Navy for war. He has a young man for World War I. But he, as World War I was getting going, realized they needed some sort of land vehicle to deal with these trenches in the warfare. So he wanted to do like a land assault vehicle on treads and it didn't yet exist. The army wasn't really going for it. So he created this fictitious thing called the Landship Committee because he felt like we need to do this tank.

If no one else is going to do, I'm just going to do it, even though I'm the Navy guy. And so they started bringing in parts to experiment with building it in. And it was highly secret. So even the guards didn't know it was going on. And they'd bring in the parts. And they said they were building water tanks. So that sort of became like, oh, like tanks or what were building. And so in the end, the name stuck.

And that's what they called it. It was a tank. It was all because of Churchill's deception to hide the development of the thing. So there are tons of things I learned about Churchill like that in the book, and there were more on Bush, Adolphus Bush. You know, there were all these little quirky things that connected to the diesel story. Did I, maybe I'm misremembering, but didn't Churchill almost lose at all, like step away from the whole thing after Gallipoli? Gallipoli. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that was like, he was responsible for that jacked up amphibious assault. Yeah. That's exactly. It was early in the war around 1915. And he had, if they had done it the way he drew it up, it actually likely would have worked because apparently the Ottomans were almost out of the am. They had like three bullets left when they finally sort of like backed off a little bit. And then the Germans were able to come in and reinforce.

He wanted more ships and he also wanted land troops as well. And I think what they ended up doing was ships only, but no land troops. And in the end, the whole thing was blamed on him. It got, rather than getting up into the Dardanelles, they could have kind of gotten into the belly of Germany coming in south of them and put a quick end of the war was the hope. and they got bogged down and the Dardanelles. They mined it up and the British fleet. It all turned into this quagmire that there's a, I think a Mel Gibson movie about how bogged down and brutal it all got.

And he was blamed for it. So then he was kind of ousted and they call that his like years, what do they call it, his pasture years or something? But he basically had, you know, more than a decade of sort of being far from the center of power before he came back. I just think all that's so interesting. It's as interesting. I've read as much as I can find on Churchill, including the stuff he wrote mostly in bed.

The guy lay around in bed for hours every day. I love that. Economy of effort. Why sit when you can lie down? Why run when you can walk? Why walk when you can stand? We're also health conscious now. My wife and I were trying to, we're like, we've got to drink less, we've got to eat better. Churchill had like a bottle of champagne every night. He ate a ton. He lived until he's 95 years old. It's like, I don't know. We try to live better, but maybe it's just something else. It's all genetics. My favorite book on Churchill was written by Paul Johnson.

It was written an awful lot of stuff. That little one, right? It's a little one. That's it. It's super, super skinny. I mean, that's where I learned about the steady diet of cigars, a bottle of champagne, a day at a minimum, lying in bed until noon, conducting major decisions on the phone in bed. The guy sustained in bed.

Or from the bathtub, right? Like, he's like dictating from the bath. Yes. Yes, all the time. And you can see him just all corpulent and stretched out. But like, yeah. I remember him as sort of a poster child for something unhealthy. But in Johnson's book, there's this whole riff on the autopsy.

And the doctors were stunned. They couldn't understand how lungs from a 95-year-old man who smoked every day, they said they looked like a baby's lungs. His liver looked unused. His kid, like he had a constitution that didn't make sense for the body that he had or the way we remember him. Amazing. Yeah. All the things the doctors say are bad, you know, smoking, drinking, being overweight, and stress. I mean, he was off the charts on all four of those and lived in 95. Yeah. So the books behind you, which of them matter most? What do you go to, Doug? I mean, do you find yourself rereading a lot of stuff or are you always looking for the new thing? I'm generally going new and now just work-wise. So I started this podcast, as you referenced earlier, where Jack Carr was on and I'll hold up this delicious whiskey again. But I'm reading a lot. I read for every guest that comes on. I interview terrific authors.

And I always read at least one of their books when they come on. So that's a lot of my reading. And then I'm reading a ton of stuff for research already for the next book, which I won't say what it is exactly yet, but I'm putting together what I think will be, I'm putting a proposal together for what I think will be the next book in the same period of time, that quarter century and doing a lot of reading for that. So someone's telling me that they're like, you should do the book on that guy who died mysteriously, he invented an engine that could run on water. So I did look, there is a thing on this.

There's a Wikipedia entry for this guy who died mysteriously. He claims he built an engine that runs on water, but no one's been able to reproduce his work. So it seems a little sketchy, but, uh, you know where I read about that? Chuck, I said this to you the other day. There's a book by Irving Wallace, written years ago called The Word. And in classic Wallace style, it's a big, thick tome. But there's a something in it about something called the Riker Institute, which is made up, I think, but basically what they do is investigate inventions that have been deliberately quashed, like a breathable textile, right? Like identical to cotton, except it never wears out.

Or a synthetic tablet that is basically high octane that you can put into a tank of water and convert it into something that works in a combustion engine. All of these things supposedly invented but later squashed. Now, that's in a novel, but I wonder, I mean, it's hard to read that and imagine that some sort of planned obsolescence or something like it isn't happening everywhere. We look. Yeah, I mean, there are even shades of that in the diesel story where his engine was a threat. It was a superior engine, but it was not going to lead to good things for,

entrenched powerful businesses. So they were fighting, they were resisting it. They were resisting an advanced in technology that certainly was going to be better for people. Did it change the way you think at all about fossil fuels today? And I mean, not to make it political, but when you look across the landscape at what's going on with our relationship with energy as a people, did this in any way change? How you think about that? It did. It made me realize how much of what we accept today as a foregone, wasn't a foregone.

I mean, I referenced it a little bit earlier, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion in 1905 that gasoline was going to be our primary fuel for combustion engines through the century. It could very easily have been coal tar. In fact, there was this British journalist, W.T. Stead, it was a famous journalist. He actually died on the Titanic. Just a year before he died, he had written that diesel was the great magician of the world because he has quadrupled man's power over nature, meaning that his engine, because it's four times more efficient, we can make four times better use of what's available to us in nature, and that every coal plant was going to become a coking facility.

And when you take coal and go through the cooking process, you'd get coke, which is like a sort of a crusty, hard thing that can be used for heating, you know, burning coal gas, which is going to be used for fuel, and coal tar, which can be used in the diesel engine. His belief was that diesel had arrived and that it could burn on coal tar. And for certain countries like Great Britain or Germany, that had no oil, no crude oil, but they had plenty of coal in the ground, diesel was the future. We would just take our coal and we would go through the cooking process and coal tar would be the fuel for the diesel engine. And he was like, that's the future and that would be a balancing thing. we would then have to, you know, Churchill wouldn't have to go into the Middle East, into Persia and

acquire land and oil for his ships. We would just use coal tar. It's amazing how much of this stuff was unsettled 120 years ago, and we forget that what exists today didn't have to be that way. I mean, it's mind-boggling, honestly. Did you know which you were going to work on next before you were finished writing this one? I had three ideas. All three came out of this book, really? and one I'm just in love with right now. So I've got to do a little bit more research. I mean, there's a ton. There's definitely a great story there.

I just want like that cherry on top. You know, I want to find a couple of things. It'll be archival, you know, it's stuff I'm going to have to dig up, but I think it's going to be there. But if I can get a couple more kind of zingers to it, I've got another one that's just awesome. I can't wait. Is this your second or third or fourth?

Well, fourth overall, first nonfiction. Yeah, the other three are all novels. I've actually, I've got another way. Is it Ghost of Manhattan? Was that the first? Yes, that's my first book, 2012 first. So that was more about financial crisis, New York? Yeah, it's set in 0708.

It's about that financial meltdown, the real estate, with all those credit default swap derivatives that just blew everything up. It's really largely about a marriage, but the husband in the marriage is a bond salesman for Bear Stearns, which no longer exists. as a result of all that. So it gets with sort of the push and pull of having a loving marriage in that environment,

which is just less wacky today, but still a little wacky and very wacky at those times in terms of the entertainment side of the business. Not too surprising, then, that the Gold Coast looms so large in your, you know, so influential. I mean, right? That book is really a love story

in a lot of ways about a thing in New York that is really no one. longer there. The Gold Coast is pretty much gone, which is also interesting in this book, too, right? When you think about the fall of empires and the fall of aristocracy and so forth, that's what DeMille is kind of writing about, you know, 90 years later. There's a fun, full circle story to my first novel, Ghost of Manhattan and Nelson DeMille in the Gold Coast, because the book came out in 2012, and as I have said, it was, Gold Coast was the the last book I read before I wrote that first book. And I got a phone call after the book had been

out. I'd already kind of done the tour and I was trying to get going on the next one. But I got a phone call saying, hey, would you like to come to the Union League club in New York? Because we do this little book fair. And I run it and I was riding the train in from Bronxville into the city and someone was laughing at a book and I went over to see what it was. And it was your book, Ossie Manhattan, and the person raved about it. So we'd like to invite you to this fair. So that sounds great. have a bunch of their members come in. You sell like 50 books or something. And she said, oh, and by the way, it's sponsored by Nelson DeMille. He puts the whole thing on. I'm like, what? I'm so there. And so it starts with a cocktail party at four o'clock. I of course

made a B-line for Nelson. I told him the whole story about the, they like four bourbons later. You know, we've wrapped up a thing. There's a dinner afterwards. He and I are late night there. You know, he's become a great friend and mentor. And so now, you know, I've known him pretty well since 2012, we get together periodically for drinks and catch up. I mean, I don't have to tell you this, but you know how insanely remarkable that is. For an author like you, who now is doing it, right, your four in, to A, be able to make a friendship with one of the true greats like DeMille, but more importantly, host a podcast where you get to bring in great writers and just talk about the thing you love.

I mean, that's a... People spend a lot of space trying to figure out how to make us a virtuous circle like that. You appear to have done it. Well, I am loving doing the podcast. I have to say it because it's a nice way to get me out of my little writing bunker. You know, writing is a solitary thing. It's what you're doing is so fun and great and engaging. I mean, you must be so mentally engaged all the time.

You know, you're curious and observant and you get to have that be part of your professional life too. and this dedicated show is great for me because I get to get out and talk to people and meet new people or see old friends in some cases in that way. It's a nice side hustle, I guess. Yeah, well, I don't know which one's the side hustle at this point, but I was just going to say, you're going to wake up one day and go, that tail is wagging the dog. Look at this. How did this happen? And I've probably an ineligent transition, but fans of this podcast, love your wife. She's been on here before, and I've been on her show. And they would, kill me if I at least didn't ask what role Megan has played over the years and what kind of

impact she's had on you, not as a wife or as a newscast or as a lawyer, but as a writer. How do you guys work together vis-a-vis your books? She's great. We review each other's work. We're our greatest sort of mutual support system because in the end, it's all storytelling. Whether you're writing fiction, whether you're writing nonfiction, whether you're doing your show, whether you're doing her show. I mean, she has writers on her show.

She writes her own stuff. She's, in fact, right now, she's writing her own debate questions for the Alabama debate. But it's all storytelling. There's an arc to everything, whether it's an interview or whatever. So her instincts for all of that are phenomenal, as you know. And she reads my books,

and she is unsparing. But as I'd say, I'd rather hear it from her than from the New York Times. You know, she'll cross stuff out and say, boring and big red letters or have really helpful suggestions and stuff like that. So she's great. She's terrific. She's really, she's the first read. I would say she's probably the first read in the last read, really. I mean, she's in there for all that. I really don't like to show things until I finished a completed draft. I like to get that far along and then have someone give me a good look. What's the rewriting thing like for you? Gladwell talks about it in terms of Picasso and Cézon,

right Picasso who the second he was finished he put down his brushes and he sold the painting Cézan stories of him showing up at people's homes who would purchase his paintings to keep working on them he could never let it go he was the da Vinci type apparently da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa around with him all his life you know like decades he just couldn't let the thing go yeah you know I've actually got better at the editing so actually even starting soon of that I'm a relentless outliner I outline dozens and douges, if not more than 100 pages, and I will have drafts of my outline. And then I, you know, I stay, it's not a rigid thing. It's flexible. And then I have to

update. As I get into the book, I have to update the outline because I see I've made decisions. They're going to take me in a slightly different way. And so, but my outline is kind of a living document. And I really rely on it, particularly in the nonfiction side. And then the editing is also pretty relentless. I mean, I do a lot of drafts. It's not even like go back and just repay over one big edit. It's just constant editing, as you know, you sort of comb the hair out, chapter by chapter. And then you have an idea of like, oh, I need to change that. So it's just, it's all a living document forever, you know, it just goes on and on. And that's before I get to my editor who then just kicks my butt up and down for more edits and, you know. Yeah. Well, how do you

know when you're done? Does it go click? Like, oh, okay, we're done, or do you just hit your deadline? It's almost like when the gun is to my head going click, like, I've had enough. I can't take any more. there also has to be like a level of satisfaction like you kind of know like i think i've got it you know i think this all works because otherwise you're sort of like you can feel when it's not like this was a really hard book to write because it was doing so many different things you're following the kaiser then rockefeller then diesel then you're back and so the connective tissue between those things needed to be logical and make sense and the one hard rule i had was chronology is your friend just stay with chronology when in doubt you mean like a timeline

I didn't want to go 1870 to 1910 back to 1880, that kind of thing. Like, I was following three people, but I kind of brought them all along year by year. Yeah. Did you know the end of the book before you wrote it? Yes. Or did you discover it while you were writing. I mean, really early on, I almost wrote this as historical fiction. I almost did like a novel.

I was like, there's almost nothing written about the guy in the English language. I'm like, well, maybe I'll just sort of make up the dialogue. I've got the sort of structure of a story here of, you know, what happened. and I'll just, you know, it doesn't have to be nonfiction or history book. I'll just tell a story based on it. And then I realized I got to do it as nonfiction. I mean, because I did. It's almost like, do you know those paintings where it's gibberish,

but then you stare at it for a few minutes and all of a sudden you see, oh my God, it's the spaceship or whatever. Like I had been on this thing for so long, and then I had a vision of like, it's that. I see it so clearly. And then when I had that as like the hypothesis, every bit of research I did in the Churchill archives, everything I found was like, oh my God, it's all lining up around this.

It's the only thing that makes sense. That was when I was for sure, this has to be nonfiction. And it required a lot more research. It required, I went back to my high school and found the German teacher who translated reams of material from German to English for me. So it was a big effort, but it all really, for me, paid off. I have to say, without giving anything away,

And I think I wrote this to you. I think I wrote you the day that I finished the book that I gasped out loud when I got to the place where the mystery is revealed. And I was like, holy cow, because I did not see it coming. And I just thought, wow, the way you set everything up, it's just beautiful. This really is a whodunit that is worth the ride. And my dad sends his regards. He's 91 as if two days ago.

and this is going into his book club. Well, it's next on the list. They've got a bunch of others, but they're going to fast track it because he was a history teacher. And I gave this to him because I just knew he would love it. And sure enough, he must have called me half a dozen times over the course of reading.

It's just going, hey, did you know that? You know, and so, like, no, that I didn't, but just don't tell me the end. I'm thrilled his book club is doing it. I'd be happy to, if he does Zoom's, I'd be happy to zoom in there and say hello when they do it. Wow. The average age is 120, Doug. So if you do that, that I'm going to record the whole thing, because I think that is something,

I think it's something your wife would probably feature on one of her episodes. It is that much fun to watch. It's an extraordinary assemblage, like a thousand years of experience among 10 dudes. That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, if you do it, you'll be repeating yourself a lot because. And you'll be talking real well. If they are even able to log in, I'll be amazed.

I can barely do it. Yeah, I get help logging in half the time. Final thought, man. I don't want to keep you forever, but something struck me about you were just, like the enthusiasm of this book fair, the idea of a book fair. I want people to better understand what that is,

but I also thought it was interesting that you talked about the World's Fair as such a moment. such a really important global thing. I see that as micro and macro, right? Like the world's fair, people don't quite understand how important that was, I think, to innovation and civilization. In the same way that people might not be able to appreciate

the importance of a book fair, a much smaller thing, but so important for authors to come together and weigh and measure and drink and laugh and criticize and, right? I mean, somehow or another, if you could stitch that together in a way that helps us land the plane, I'd be obliged. It would be fun. And the truth is, every author would love it and appreciate it because we do have these solitary careers. And it's not easy to get out and find each other. There are big fairs that happen annually. There's the Miami Book Fair. There's one in Frankfurt and Texas. But even those things are a big hodgepodge. You're running around and speaker tracks and things like that. There isn't really a social place.

to do it. And I actually talked to my publisher about it once. I'm like, I went to S&S. Simon & Schuster. I said, you guys should have like a salon type thing for lack of a better word. Just get everybody who's in your house together and just throw a cocktail party. We meet each other. Yeah. And, you know, wasn't in the budget, I guess, but it hasn't really happened. But I think that something like that would be great. So I'll take that on. That's my next thing. Awesome. Awesome. And then bring the World's Fair back because that hasn't happened in decades, right? I mean... Yeah, when was the last? You know, it's kind of like divvied up. You have like CES, the consumer electronics show. It's gotten sort of like splintered, I guess. Neesh. That's such a great point.

It's hard to call that one niche. It like takes over Las Vegas. It's like so massive. But I think if you had a World's Fair that like covered all of industry and science and health, you know, that would take up all of Connecticut. And no, not the global economic form. Not that thing. I'm talking something, something more egalitarian, something where, you know, inventors are welcome. I don't know if I'm broke. Oh, there we go. Now you're fine. Yeah, you froze for a second.

I just thought that warrior proof had really done its magic. And that's, it has. Good old Jack. That's great. He's on your show. Was it annoying at all to you that the guy only ever wanted to be two things? And did them both? And did them both.

Well. Yeah, like really well. I mean, I found that a little tire. some honestly. Well, he's probably going to come up with a third pretty soon, and then he'll hit that out of the park, too. Of course. No, he was terrific, ma'am. The Plymouth gin, that's where he got the, what did he call it, warrior strength?

Because the Plymouth gin is Navy Strength. Navy Strength. He's a Navy SEAL. And by the way, I got a fact check you, Mike. Travis McGee drank Boodles gin. You conflated the two. No, I didn't. He went to Bootles after Plymouth was discontinued.

The original Plymouth gin with the ship. on the side. It's a terribly British gin. And McDonald wrote from 64 up through 86. So when he got into the early 70s, McGee couldn't find his Plymouth. So he went to his bootles. And is that right? Okay. Not bad then. No, I don't screw around with. So somebody resurrected the brand there. I'm doing what I can. I picked it up. I was in North Carolina and I saw it. They didn't have Plymouth, but they had bootles. And I picked it up. And I was like, I really like. this and it's not that expensive. It's cheap and it's good.

All right, so your mission, folks, whether you accept it or not, is to pick up the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel. Spoiler alert. Don't wreck it for anybody. But if you love a good story, a good read, if you're curious about biography and history, you're going to love this.

And, study show, if you sip a little bootles or a little Plymouth, the page turning will go even faster. So do that. Doug, did I miss anything? Oh, we should listen to your podcast, which is called Dedicated. Dedicated. Yeah.

Oh, and read Gold Coast, which is also good. Also great. Yeah. And maybe Terminalist by Jack Carr, and then we've probably touched all the bases. Good. George McDonald-Frasier, Flashman, one of the greatest, I think, historical fiction pieces you're going to find. And, of course, John D. McDonald and Travis McGee. Yeah, that probably does it.

And the Megan Kelly show. Maybe Barbara Tucker. The way I heard it by Marlowe. Marksukman is also great. Very solid. Very solid. If I can ever return the favor, Doug, I'm at your disposal. I did write a book once. It's not very good, but people seem to like it. You can read it in about 10 minutes. I would love that. I'm going to take you up on that, please. And if we were to do it in person, would that be in New York? Is that typically where you are most of the time or Connecticut? Yes. Next time you're passing through, let me know we'll book a date.

Are you coming through any time that you know of? Nothing on the calendar, but I'm sure January, February. I'll be there. That would be perfect. Let's do it. You can't really do whatever it is. I pretend to do and not go to New York from time to time. Let's go through the whole schedule right now. You know what, Chuck, you do that. Just everybody get out your calendar and while we're saying goodbye. I'm going to get some day, Will.

Have another snort of Noble. Just to see what happens. Maybe a little more aphrine, just because I'm curious at this point to see how it all shakes out. You've been awfully generous, Doug. I appreciate it. Good luck. I'm assuming sales are booming still because they're really. reviews are everybody loves it, blah, blah, blah.

Sales are doing well. I think word of mouth and reviews are keeping sales in a pretty good place. So hopefully we can keep that rolling through the holidays. Good. Well, like Jack Carr, I'm envious of your talent and your success. Please come back anytime. Likewise. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. You bet. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't. But won't you please? Won't you please pretty bum's cry? Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please pretty. It is who is so...

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