My Chat with Doug Brunt, Author of ”The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel” (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_602)
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Summary
In 1913, on the eve of World War I, a man named Rudolph Diesel was on a boat crossing the North Sea when he disappeared. His body was never found, and no theories have ever been found about what happened to him.
Transcript
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Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad for the Saad Truth. Today, I have a rarity on the show,
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a novelist and a nonfiction author, Douglas Brunt. How are you doing, sir?
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Great to be with you, Gad. Thanks for having me.
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Oh, I'm so delighted to have you with me. Let me just read a very, very quick bio of
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you and you could add anything that you think I might have missed. You're a New York Times
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bestselling author and host of the Dedicated with Doug Brunt podcast, which I am honored
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to be appearing on in about a month or two. No, two months, I think, in early December.
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You have three previous novels, Ghosts of Manhattan in 2012, The Means in 2014, Trophy Sun in 2017,
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and your current book, which came out in September, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. It's really a
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historical book, so it's not a fiction book. Maybe we'll start with this one and then we'll
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talk about how you actually create all these characters in your novels. Tell us about Diesel.
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I must admit, just like your wife, people who don't know, it's Megyn Kelly. I listened to your
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chat. All I knew about Diesel is that that's the thing that I shouldn't put in my car and it ended
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there. So please teach us. That's right. So eight years ago, I was the same as you and most of your
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listeners probably, misspelling diesel with a lowercase d, thinking it was maybe a fuel that
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we're supposed to avoid for our cars. But you see it every day. It's at the fueling station,
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it's on a truck, on a train. I bought a boat and it was an older boat and slightly larger. And the
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guy at the boatyard was saying, well, the first thing you should do to fix this boat up is get
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rid of these gasoline engines and put in diesels. And so I was saying, well, why? I didn't realize it was
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a different kind of engine. So he launched into this thing saying that 100% of boat fires come
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from gasoline engines, zero from diesel. The fuel is completely stable. There are no fumes. You can
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drop a lit match into a barrel of diesel fuel and nothing happens. Plus you get three or four times
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the fuel efficiency. So on your 200 gallon tank of fuel, you'll go three or four times as far.
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So I repowered with diesels. And then about a year later, as you say, I've previously written a few
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novels. And I was searching around for ideas that might get me going on a novel. And I was just
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clicking around the internet and I came across this list of mysterious disappearances at sea.
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And on the list was Rudolph Diesel. I didn't know there was a man behind the diesel engine. I just
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thought it was just some sort of, you know, not proper noun. So I click on this and it tells this
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crazy story, true story of Rudolph Diesel. Back in 1913, on the eve of World War I, he's traveling from
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Belgium to Great Britain on an overnight passenger ferry. And as he's crossing the North Sea, in the
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night, he disappears. And so he's supposed to meet his two traveling companions for breakfast. He
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doesn't show up. They hold the ship at sea. They do a search. All they find are his hat and his coat
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folded at the stern of the ship by the rail, seeming to mark where he's jumped overboard. And so the
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presumption is suicide. But two other theories hit the newspapers because it's really hard to imagine
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today, as we all don't even know, there is a person, Rudolph Diesel. But at the time he was
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a huge global celebrity. It would be like Elon Musk disappearing today, just suddenly, you know,
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hopped a flight to Nantucket and it was gone. At that level? At Elon Musk level?
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Truly at that level. He was a global celebrity. It was the front page of the New York Times,
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front page of the papers in London, all through Western Europe, even out to Russia. Headlines of
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every newspaper that the great inventor has disappeared. And two theories of murder appeared. One was that
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John Rockefeller may have murdered him or, you know, agents of big oil. And the other was that
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Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, may have murdered him and sent his agents. Because he,
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and we can get into this, but he represented an existential threat to both of those figures,
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because his engine had, by 1913, emerged as a dominant power source for both industry and war.
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So, so in the, in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm II, it's, it's a military threat. In the case of
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Rockefeller, it's a pecuniary threat. You're going to affect the bottom line of my wallet. So we've got
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suicide, we've got murder. I don't want you to give away any sort of giveaways. I want people to read
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the book. But if you were to assign a points on a hundred as to which of suicide versus murder,
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it's Kaiser, murder, it's Rockefeller. Where does the evidence stack up from what we know until you
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came along? Well, if you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's suicide. And suicide has been the
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presumption for the last century. And the crazy thing is that there are so many holes in that theory.
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The one thing I do give away is that it wasn't suicide. As you go through the evidence that's
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available now, it's so much easier to go back and do this sort of, what is really a circumstantial
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case, but you can look at the newspaper reporting from the time. So much, you know, you can do what
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I would call library research now with subscriptions to different databases. More is scanned every day.
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I can look at every newspaper from every city around the world now from that era. It would have been
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very hard to do that in 1930 and reconstruct this case. You'd have to actually go to the cities and
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pull newspapers out of cabinets and things like that. So it's easier to do some of that research
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now. But it very clearly was not a suicide. But I reconstruct that sort of quarter century leading
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up to World War I. And it's a fascinating cast of characters, not only in the diesel story of where
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the engine went around the world and who was using it, but also how he became such a threat to Kaiser
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Wilhelm and to Rockefeller, because the diesel engine represented something totally new.
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And that has any, I mean, I guess it's a officially it's an open case. I mean, is there,
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or it's a cold case, I guess, a really, really super cold case. I mean, in terms of police.
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Yes. Yeah. So I put together a theory of the case, that sort of a conclusion based on circumstantial
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evidence, ran it by NYPD, former CIA, former FBI, and most tellingly, former British Intel,
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and all came back saying, wow, a thousand percent, your conclusion, which I am not yet revealing here,
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So are there any descendants of diesel that are alive and with whom you might have spoken about
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the case? I found two. One is Jean-Philippe Diesel. He lives in France, sort of in the corner,
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like right on a German border there. And another was, he was sort of, he was descended from Diesel's
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uncle. So, but, you know, last name Diesel and has followed the family history. And then a woman
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who was descended from Rudolph Diesel's daughter, Hedy. And both are, you know, interested,
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of course, in the family history. Both had just sort of assumed what was in the encyclopedia was
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correct. So they were like, you know, thinking this is an incredible book and were thrilled to
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read it. All their lives, they'd been thinking, you know, suicide was the, the, what the conclusion.
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Wow. So what is the process? I mean, we'll, we'll get into the creative process for your novels,
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but even in the case of this book, as you said, there's, there's a lot of archival work that has
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to go into weaving this incredibly intricate story. Walk us through the process of how one goes about
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doing that. For the, for the nonfiction book, this was totally new to me. Usually when you sell
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fiction, you write the full manuscript, you write almost the whole novel and then you sell it. And
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actually these days you really do have to finish it up and maybe even work with a freelance editor,
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but get in a pretty good shape before you try to sell it. And, you know, 20 years ago and the
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publishing houses were a little bigger and more well staffed, they might acquire a novel that was
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say 80% done and they would work with you and get it to a hundred percent. Now they've really
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skinnied down their editorial staff. So when they acquire books, it's more like 98% of the way there
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and they might, you know, finish it up with you. And many of those editors that were formerly in the
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big houses are now independent freelance editors that work with, you know, young and up and coming
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writers. But basically you write the book and you sell the book. What I learned in this process is
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that's not how nonfiction works. In nonfiction, you sell a proposal and you're familiar with this.
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There's maybe a sample chapter, there's a detailed outline of what you're going to do. There's a list
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of the research that you have done and will continue to do. And the new information you'll present,
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a list of competitive works and market, things like that. It's a standard
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proposal format. It's roughly 30 pages or so. So I didn't know that. I worked with a new agent
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who helped me go through the proposal structure, built out this proposal. And I'd been working on
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the book for quite a while already because in the beginning I'd considered writing it as historical
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fiction. And the more I did research, the more I developed a theory of the case and the more I
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found things that were supporting that theory. And I realized there was almost nothing written about
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Rudolph Diesel in the English language. There are two academic biographies, one from the 60s and one
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from the 80s. Very little about him. So I realized I've got to tell this story for real. I've got to
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do the nonfiction version of Accountant and do it and truly try to do justice to his legacy. So I went
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through a very different process on the nonfiction side. With fiction in the past, I've always done a lot
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of research for these books anyway, less archival. My three previous novels were all set roughly present
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day. So a lot of the research I did there was primary research, interviewing folks.
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My most recent novel, which came out called Trophy Sun, was about a tennis prodigy. And it was really
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focused on our culture's new obsession with single sport specialization for early youth. If you're
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seven years old and you're a good tennis player, that's what you do to the exclusion of almost
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everything else. And tennis is very intense in that way. You get pulled out of mainstream schooling
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and go down to some tennis academy if you're really promising. So for that, I interviewed James Blake
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and John Isner and other great tennis players, many who went to the voluntary academies but never
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cracked the top 500 as well, but now still exist in the orbit of tennis as a tennis coach or running the
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rackets program at a club and things like that. So I love the research piece of it. That's always been a part
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of what I've done for my novels. I think it helps get the story down with a little bit more force on
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the page. If you have that knowledge, even it almost becomes instinctual. Just knowing you know
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it helps you write it better. So I've enjoyed the research piece. But as you say, this is much more
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archival. This is all 100 plus years ago. Do you have a preference in terms of the creative process?
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I mean, you've only done one that is nonfiction, but having now done both genres,
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you know, are you better suited for one or the other or both are exciting because they're so
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different? Both exciting, but I prefer the nonfiction side. It was so fun to have these
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moments where I'd be in archives and I would discover something that to anyone else would be
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not that big a deal. But in the context of the story that I'm creating, it draws a connection that is
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enormous. You know, Churchill is a huge figure in this book. Adolphus Bush, the founder of
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Anheuser-Busch. He's a huge figure in this book. He was the American diesel pioneer. And you'd find
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something, you know, Churchill said this two days after Rudolph Diesel said that. And it was meaningful.
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And it was like the nerd side of Indiana Jones, where you discover a little piece of treasure
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that is something you can share with the world in this book that is meaningful history.
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What explains the fact, I mean, in reading some of the blurbs for the book, I haven't yet had the
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chance to read the entire book, but in going through those blurbs, you know, I can't remember
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if it was you who mentioned it or it was part of the synopsis from the media kit that, you know,
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he should be standing along many of the illustrious other thinkers of that era, and yet he's somehow
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forgotten. And that right away reminded me of, so I'm, as you probably know, I'm an evolutionary
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psychologist. And so, of course, Charles Darwin holds a very special place in my heart. Yet
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Alfred Wallace, who independently came up with the theory of evolution, is a little asterisk footnote.
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And there are historical reasons for why that might be the case. So in your case, what explains why
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Diesel is so unknown to most people and that only two academic biographies exist of his life?
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Yeah. The story of why his history has been paved over this last century is somewhat explained by
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the element of the caper in the book. And so I'll go back to 1913. The reason Kaiser Wilhelm
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found him to be such a threat is that by 1913, the diesel engine had emerged as the only engine that
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could power a submarine or U-boat. And gasoline and kerosene engines wouldn't work. They were spark
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ignition. They were flammable. There were constant boat fires. You didn't have the range to get a
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submarine out into open waters and control sea lanes. But with the diesel engine, all that changed.
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And suddenly the submarine became a terrifying offensive weapon. And this was at the peak of the
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Anglo-German naval arms race. And so suddenly every naval, every Navy of the major powers is scrambling
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for diesel expertise. And Rudolf Diesel, because the engine is still fairly young, he only introduced it
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in 1897. He's still the main guy that can help you use the diesel engine for these exacting
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requirements of undersea travel. So they all need diesel. And the reason he was crossing the North
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Sea in September of 1913 is he was going to Great Britain to be the board director and co-founder of a
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diesel engine manufacturing company, a brand new one whose mandate it was to build diesels for the
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Royal Navy submarine fleet at the height of these tensions and on the brink of war. So that would be seen
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as treasonous by Kaiser Wilhelm. The reason Rockefeller found him to be such a threat is
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diesel had been advocating that the diesel engine run on fuels other than petroleum.
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He had won 13 years before he had won the world's fair in Paris in 1900 on a, with a diesel engine
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running peanut oil. And in 1912, he had traveled through America saying, I can break the American
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fuel monopoly and I don't need a law to do it. I don't need the Sherman antitrust act. I can do it with
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the power of my technology because it was very flexible with regard to fuels or vegetable oil,
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peanut oil, coal tar. And he was saying, if we have farmers, we can grow our own fuel. We don't
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need to be beholden to the oil trusts or areas of the world where there's petroleum in the ground.
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And that's still true today. Willie Nelson was on a tour 15 years ago, traveling around his,
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his tour bus on a diesel engine running recycled kitchen grease. So the diesel engine remains very
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flexible with regard to fuels. And it's crazy. The deficit of appreciation for, for diesel in
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these days, as you say, like, why is he not up there with the Wright brothers and Marconi and Edison
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and Bell? It's because it's partly explained because the presumption of suicide. And then the other is the,
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the element of the caper that comes in this book. And when you get to the conclusion of what happened
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to diesel, you'll sort of understand this piece. But one quick thing I can, there's like sort of a
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bit I do at this point, you know, on book tour, you can pull the string on my back and I, and I tell
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the thing, but imagine a piece of fruit grown in a tropical region. Every piece of heavy machinery and
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farm equipment used to grow that fruit is diesel powered. The fruit then gets loaded onto a truck.
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Anything on the roads larger than a passenger car is diesel powered. It then goes down to port where
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a crane diesel powered loads it onto a cargo ship. A hundred percent of cargo ships on the oceans are
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diesel. Really like the only boats on the, on the water are these sort of outboard pleasure boats.
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Anything bigger than that is diesel. So it goes across the oceans under diesel power, goes into a
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port, gets loaded onto a truck, onto a train from about 1960, 1950, 1960, every train in the world
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diesel powered gets low, you know, taken into a warehouse somewhere inland where very likely a
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power plant is diesel powered. Really nothing moves in our global economy without diesel. And that's to
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this day and the fundamental design of the engine, which is this high pressure engine, uh, is, is basically
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the same as what diesel introduced more than 120 years ago. Wow. What it from, uh, on the Greta Thunberg metric
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of green. And so for her not to be upset with us, does he score better on, on green and forgive my
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ignorance. I mean, short of knowing that these different, you know, uh, and energy producing
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machines, I know very little about this. How does it stand in terms of the green continuum?
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Well, I'll answer that in two time periods. So in 1913, it was extraordinary and, and pollution and
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efficiency were his, two of his main objectives. And efficiency was his number one objective.
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Pollution was his number two objective. And then there were these subsidiary benefits that,
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you know, like the cold start, it didn't, you didn't need to raise steam. So a military craft,
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you could just turn diesel on and off you go, as opposed to the steam ships of the day where you had to
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spend hours boiling water by, you know, burning coal and quote unquote, raising steam. So a military
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ship's like, all right, let's go. And then it's three hours later, they're still boiling water to
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get the ship going where it's easily just off you go. So I had huge military advantages, but efficiency
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and pollution were two of his main goals. And you can see it in the difference of the ships of the day.
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Like one of the visuals I paint in the, in the book is the, the movie Titanic, that famous Leonardo
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DiCaprio movie. And they, the camera goes down into the belly of the ship and you see these dozens
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and dozens of sweaty guys shoveling coal into a furnace, this orange, fiery hot, hot, hot furnace,
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which is basically boiling a vat of water. I mean, it's simple technology, like a pot on a stove.
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They're just boiling water. And then that creates steam to move the gears. That's the steam engine,
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but it also had a whole chimney furnace apparatus where the chimneys go up through the middle of the
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ship and blow those pillars of black smoke, partially burnt particles of coal into the atmosphere.
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The diesel didn't need any chimney apparatus at all. It just vented a minimal amount of exhaust
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out of vents out of the side of the ship. So for cargo, now you don't have these giant,
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you know, chimneys in the middle of your ship. You have just a clear deck of cargo of space for cargo
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for a battleship. Suddenly your, your guns, rather than being obstructed by giant chimneys on the deck
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can pivot to a 300 to any point on the horizon, a 360 degree. So for a military, again, it had
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advantages of really essentially doubling the power of your guns on the deck because they could,
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the guns could point anywhere as opposed to only half of the, half of the horizon.
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So in, in his day of 1913, pollution wise, it was a massive game changer. It was much cleaner
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than the steam engines. Today, diesel has taken some hits, but it, like there was a Volkswagen scandal,
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but they've, they've put in more filters that, that make it much more competitive in terms of
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exhaust and getting rid of the, the nitrous oxides and things, which were the problem with
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diesel before. So now it's actually very clean and it's still far more efficient than a gasoline
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engine. In fact, I think Cadillac has just announced that next year, all their SUVs are going
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to be diesel. And one of the things they're touting is it's the fuel efficiency is extraordinary
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over gasoline. So you get far more miles to the gallon. So why is it that the diesel engine is not
00:19:43.940
as widespread as it should be in regular cars, right? So, and before you answer that, just again,
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for the complete lay people who are watching, which I include myself, I know I'm probably the
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least mechanically inclined person in the world, which somehow seems emasculating. I should know how
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to do things, but I don't. I can, I can't even hang a curtain rod. So you're, you're in good company
00:20:06.220
here and you managed to attract a pretty desirable woman. And so have I. So you see guys, you could
00:20:10.940
not be a mechanic and still be attractive to the ladies, but okay. So the diff, so there is an
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engineering element, which makes the diesel engine more efficient, as you said, but the raw material
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that goes either into the diesel engine or the regular fuel injected engine of a car, is that
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different? What's the main difference and why don't we have more of the diesel engines in regular
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cars if it's so efficient? The difference is the, the sophistication of the engine and the weight of
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the engine. So in the early days, the early combustion engines that run gasoline and kerosene,
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again, flammable fuel, there's a spark ignition. Those were like half a horsepower, one or two
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horsepower. They're very weak engines and Benz would use them for his early motor cars that look
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like sort of a big tricycle, almost those early cars. Diesel sort of combined the best of the internal
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combustion auto cycle engines and the big steam engines. It had high torque, high horsepower.
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The early, even the early diesel engines could get into hundreds of horsepower. So they could do
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heavy load work with lots of torque, you know, for accelerating a truck with a heavy load and that
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sort of thing. But it was a harder and more expensive engine to build. It required superior metal
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casting, which in the early 1800s didn't even exist. I mean, in the James Watt days of the 1770s,
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those steam engines, in order to get seals on their pipes, they were using rope and leather and
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things. You can imagine how much pressure is lost with that. The way the diesel engine works
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is that it's a high pressure engine. So imagine a bicycle tire pump. And when you take the plunger
00:21:45.200
and you jam it down to force the air out into your tire, you know, over and over again, it builds heat.
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If you ever have pumped a few tires in a row, your bicycle tire pump feels a little bit hot.
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That's the idea of the diesel engine, only it's completely enclosed, doesn't let air leak into
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the tire pump. It's just an enclosed cylinder. And when you jam that plunger down, that highly
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compressed air creates heat. And at a thousand pounds per square inch, it's extremely hot.
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Then they inject the fuel and then the fuel explodes. So there's no spark, there's no fire
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until it's under extremely high pressure. But maintaining that pressure takes superior metal
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casting beyond what they use in a gasoline or kerosene type of engine. And so it's, it's better
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metal, more superior casting, but it also results in a heavier engine, which is why it was best suited
00:22:33.000
for trains and ships and, or, or inland stationary use where the weight was okay. You know, you couldn't
00:22:39.600
put it on some tiny little passenger car that, that really wouldn't support the weight.
00:22:43.860
What an amazing answer you gave, because now that explains to me why you see it on trucks,
00:22:50.700
but not on, because I've always wondered, but never thought much of it. Why is it that trucks
00:22:54.960
use diesel, but not cars? It's really a function of the, it works well with heavy machinery because
00:23:01.000
you can dilute its weight amongst the larger weight, hence trains, hence ships, hence trucks.
00:23:06.440
And even for passenger pleasure boat crafts recently, I think it was Johnson and Johnson or Mercury,
00:23:12.800
one of these outboard engine manufacturers for boats, for passenger boats was like, oh,
00:23:18.540
we're going to come up with an outboard diesel. And they even announced it, but then it turned out
00:23:22.260
it was too heavy, just didn't work as an outboard engine. This, you know, that amount of weight on
00:23:27.200
the back of the boat didn't work as it's, so it's still, it's a heavier engine. So it's best in
00:23:32.260
certain environments and not others. And why would you, so if, if it can use the kitchen grease and
00:23:38.380
the vegetable oil or peanut oil is the main reason why we don't do that, because you can't produce
00:23:46.140
that source in an industrial scale level that would be needed to power an economy. I mean,
00:23:51.640
is that the key obstacle? That's the obstacle. And that's what Rockefeller and the petroleum folks
00:23:56.760
made sure there was never a business case to build out that infrastructure. And there's one story
00:24:01.020
from Rockefeller's past that I can share to demonstrate that. So that one of the interesting
00:24:05.500
things about Rockefeller and standard oil generally is it was founded in 1870. By 1900, Rockefeller was
00:24:11.260
the richest man in the world. In those 30 years, they didn't sell gasoline. Gasoline was a waste
00:24:17.540
product that they would toss away. They were selling kerosene and Rockefeller was in the illumination
00:24:21.880
business. He was, he was a lighting guy, but then along comes the light bulb, the electric light bulb from
00:24:27.800
Edison and others, which threatens to do to Rockefeller, what Rockefeller had done to the
00:24:33.200
whaling industry. You know, basically I'm going to wipe out your market because the, the electric
00:24:37.140
light bulb really is just sort of superior technology. But back in the, in the lighting days of, of
00:24:41.240
Rockefeller, he wanted to get into the Chinese market. And in China for centuries and centuries,
00:24:46.480
they'd been using natural gas and oils for illumination. Rockefeller comes in with standard oil and
00:24:51.680
they give away these beautiful, gorgeous little kerosene lamps that are well-designed, give great
00:24:57.860
light and they're free. And he gets them all over the place and sells kerosene nice and cheaply.
00:25:03.140
Now everybody's saying, well, this is wonderful. I've got this free kerosene lamp. And then the price
00:25:07.280
of kerosene goes up. So he got his market addicted to his product. So it was a sort of a situation where
00:25:13.660
supply controlled demand. And he did the same with the gasoline combustion engine market.
00:25:19.340
He, he made sure gasoline was readily available and, and inexpensive and tried to supply it into
00:25:24.740
where areas where the internal combustion engine was, was developing like the automobile,
00:25:29.800
because it really was not a sure thing that petroleum and gasoline was going to be the fuel
00:25:36.080
of the 20th century. And in fact, another in, in this book, there are about a hundred little
00:25:42.040
footnotes in there. And this is something my editor and I wrestled over that because I used to have
00:25:46.440
about 300 and he's like, it's too much. And I get it. It's annoying. You sort of reading along.
00:25:49.980
Then you got to go down and read the foot and come back up. And so I wanted to get just enough to make
00:25:53.980
it like a little present to go down to the bottom of the page, something you'd sort of look forward
00:25:57.940
to. And in one of those is a fact that in 1905, New York city had a fleet of taxi cabs, hundreds of
00:26:04.500
taxi cabs, all electric. And there was a charging station on Broadway in times square in 1905. So we think
00:26:12.100
about these electric cars is this new fangled thing that Elon Musk is doing. No, it was going
00:26:16.520
on 120 years ago. And Edison and Ford were actually working together on an electric car.
00:26:21.940
They couldn't, couldn't sort of get the battery technology, right? And of course, Rockefeller
00:26:26.200
is also there saying, Hey, but this gasoline is right here and it's inexpensive. You can just do
00:26:30.100
the combustion engine. And as soon as they got the electric starter going, you know, cause you used
00:26:34.680
to have to sort of crank out the starter on these, on these gasoline cars, which nobody wanted to do.
00:26:38.600
And when they solved that problem, the gasoline car took off, the electric car just sort of went
00:26:42.520
by the wayside. Um, but it's, it's, it's, there are so many fascinating little nuggets of what was
00:26:48.540
going on in the world at this time. And, and as we get into the nuances of engine technology, which
00:26:52.920
we still is so little understood even 120 years later, but when you get into it, it, it makes so
00:26:58.160
much more of the century makes sense. Did you connect? I mean, earlier I asked you if you connected
00:27:02.640
with any of the descendants of, uh, uh, uh, diesel, did you connect with any descendants of Rockefeller
00:27:08.740
since he is a, an important, uh, character in the story?
00:27:13.240
I, I did not. I did not. I think his role to me was well understood and there was enough material
00:27:19.140
on that. I did not connect with Rockefeller descendants, but it'd be interesting to, to do
00:27:23.920
that and get their perspective on this. The way the book is set up, it's very, it, it, it does a lot
00:27:29.740
of things and I hope does them well. In part, it's a biography of Diesel. It's mini biographies
00:27:34.960
of Rockefeller and Kaiser Wilhelm II who are fascinating characters. I mean, Kaiser Wilhelm
00:27:38.720
II in particular is such a, you know, I, I have a slightly more sympathetic view of him just because
00:27:44.340
he was almost like a tortured child, but it's biographies of them. It's a, it's sort of an
00:27:49.260
Agatha Christie Sherlock Holmes who'd done it in terms of what happened to Diesel and, and the book does
00:27:55.260
crack the case, but it's also as we've, as we've sort of learned here, like a combustion engines for
00:28:00.180
dummies a little bit, as well as a, a mini primer on 19th century diplomacy, which I have to say, I love
00:28:06.840
the lead up to World War I as a, as something to study. I mean, it was a terrible catastrophic war, but
00:28:13.200
it's also after the war, it's almost as though people looked around like, why in the heck did we do
00:28:18.220
that? And it's much more nuanced than World War II in the sense that that had such a good and evil
00:28:23.140
element to it. Whereas World War I, you know, the French weren't exactly helpful in, in stopping
00:28:29.600
things. And it wasn't all Kaiser Wilhelm's fault, even though that's what we say in the Treaty of
00:28:34.600
Versailles, it was, it was far more nuanced. As is many, often the case with historical issues.
00:28:41.440
One of the things that really interests me about, I mean, the book, admittedly not having read it yet,
00:28:48.200
is that it occurs in a time period that is dear to my heart for several reasons. And here,
00:28:54.020
I hope this is not a throwing a curve ball at you, but so for example, I, okay, so there's the
00:28:58.480
Gilded Age. You know, I, I love Newport, Rhode Island, where you've got the Boulevard of Mansions,
00:29:04.380
where all of those rich industrialists, the Vanderbells and the Astors, and I don't know if
00:29:10.620
Rockefeller had a home there. That interests me because I study conspicuous consumption.
00:29:18.200
And the evolutionary roots of conspicuous consumption. And here comes Thornstein Veblen,
00:29:23.560
who wrote the theory of the leisure class, where he explained the mechanism of, you know,
00:29:28.320
why do people engage in these types of lavish conspicuous consumption, as would be the case
00:29:32.860
with the Rockefellers and so on. So there's that element. I'm also a huge fan of Art Nouveau and Art
00:29:38.660
Deco, which happened roughly around that period. Some of it is a bit after the time period of your book.
00:29:44.060
I love the Vienna Circle, which again, is slightly after your book. Can you comment on that? There
00:29:50.820
seems to be, at least in my mind, a set of philosophical, aesthetic, scientific movements
00:29:58.120
from roughly 1880 to roughly 1930. That is really, truly unique. Any thoughts on that?
00:30:06.480
Yeah. One of the fascinating things, and so Diesel's last year there was 1913. He's in Munich for that.
00:30:13.540
Also happening in Munich at that time was Jung and Freud are together for a psychiatric convention,
00:30:19.480
which is the last time they were seen together. Pablo Picasso came in for an art exhibition in 1913.
00:30:26.300
And meanwhile, just down the road, Adolf Hitler was in Munich in 1913, selling little watercolor
00:30:31.480
paintings to pay for his sausage and beer. Wow. You gave me goosebumps. That's incredible. Yeah. Wow.
00:30:34.620
All in 1913 in a little, I mean, Munich is not even that big. It's like 100, 200,000 people at that
00:30:39.780
time. And that's where Diesel spent his last summer before he disappeared. It's a fascinating
00:30:46.820
period of time. I call it, I jokingly refer to it here with my family as the Downton Abbey,
00:30:52.840
the early seasons in those years prior to World War I, when the world lived in such a different way.
00:30:58.360
Think of all the empires that crumbled as a part of World War I. It was the Ottoman Empire,
00:31:02.880
the Austrian Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire, all gone, all moving more toward more
00:31:07.520
Western democratic constitutional government systems. Urbanization was already happening,
00:31:13.460
of course, but World War I really accelerated a lot of that. So we're less in sort of this futile
00:31:18.160
rural situation. And of course, the progress of science, as you say, it's really embodied in the
00:31:27.500
advent of the World's Fair. I think the first one was like in the 1850s or early 1860s,
00:31:32.020
where we're celebrating this crazy acceleration of progress that we're seeing, where we've got
00:31:37.240
aluminum all of a sudden, photography and flight with rigid dirigibles.
00:31:44.600
Just an incredible amount of new stuff happening with technology and the arts and the sciences that
00:31:50.540
we developed the World's Fair to celebrate it all.
00:31:52.880
And I was going to say that exactly to what you just said, it's not as though it was only
00:31:57.480
in science. Gustav Klimt is my favorite painter. He's also in that period. So it's as if there was
00:32:03.740
something in the water that made people across many different domains uniquely creative and out
00:32:10.540
of the box thinkers. All right, next question. And there'll be, excuse me, there'll be a little
00:32:16.800
self-reference there. I'm assuming people are knocking at your door for the movie rights.
00:32:24.840
You could talk about that. And if there is a dashing, handsome, supremely wise character,
00:32:32.580
I presume that I will be approached to play that lead.
00:32:35.660
I was just going to say, we need to get you in touch with my producer after the show to make
00:32:43.860
But seriously, are there, I mean, this has to be, I mean, as I was thinking about, you know,
00:32:48.260
I was thinking about our interview, I was thinking this guy must be having people knocking down his
00:32:52.980
door with movie offers at this point. I mean, can you talk about any of it?
00:32:57.320
Yeah. I mean, there's not too much to say other than we, I had, there is an option agreement
00:33:01.760
in place for film to TV, film and TV rights, book to film. But of course, you know, there are a
00:33:08.360
million steps along that. That's the first step. So we've, we've taken the first step, which is
00:33:11.880
great. And the book's only out, you know, a couple of weeks. So that's great. And I'm rooting for
00:33:16.500
that. And of course, I, in my mind, I do imagine the various Gadsads of the world who could play
00:33:21.980
Diesel or other characters. I mean, there's so many great characters.
00:33:24.700
Oh, so I'm the guy who dies. I see. I see. That's, I'm going to, I'm going to count that as an
00:33:29.660
anti-Semitic attack right there. Well, don't, don't, don't presume death. Don't presume
00:33:34.780
death. That may not be the case. But I mean, so in, in Russia, the way that the license for
00:33:42.220
the diesel engine worked was the same as it was sort of a dominant theory of business at that time,
00:33:46.680
which was to license the exclusive rights to manufacture and market the technology by national
00:33:51.320
territory. So in Russia, the people who took the diesel license were the Nobel family.
00:33:55.740
So Alfred Nobel, that we know from dynamite fame and the prizes, had two older brothers,
00:34:02.200
Ludwig and Robert, who founded the Russian oil industry. They were much more well-known and much
00:34:07.420
more rich even than Alfred, his two older brothers. And so Ludwig's son, Emmanuel, took the diesel
00:34:13.500
license for Russia and they used it to pump oil from their fields and to power ships. And they built
00:34:18.560
engines for the czar's navy and things like that. In America, as I said, it was Adolphus Bush who used it
00:34:23.500
to pump water in his breweries and power refrigeration, but he also had a separate business
00:34:27.900
building submarine diesels for the U.S. Navy. And he even tried to hire Chester Nimitz, who became a
00:34:33.860
diesel expert in 1912. And of course was a, you know, a famous submarine commander of the U.S. Navy.
00:34:40.860
There is a, isn't there an aircraft carrier named Nimitz?
00:34:46.320
Nimitz, yeah, yep, yep. And if you, so there's a sort of museum thing called Victory in the Pacific and it
00:34:53.000
has Nimitz, sort of like a wax figure of Chester Nimitz. And in it, you can see him, he's signing papers at a
00:34:58.320
desk and he's missing the ring finger of his left hand. And the reason is because in 1912, he was in
00:35:04.880
Augsburg, Germany, visiting diesel and diesel manufacturing plants. And he got his finger
00:35:11.220
caught in an engine and it ripped his, his finger off. But that's, that all sort of ties into the
00:35:16.160
diesel story as well. Unbelievable. Actually, you know, as I was preparing for this chat, my, my wife
00:35:24.900
and I listened in the car to your chat with your wife on her show. And she looked at me, this is high
00:35:31.460
praise because my, I mean, my wife reads, but she's not an incredibly voracious reader. She said,
00:35:36.080
I think I'm going to read Doug's book. So that's, that's high praise right there to get someone who's
00:35:40.600
not a big reader to say, I want to read this book. You can't get much higher praise than that. So thank
00:35:45.200
you for that. Okay. What I'd like to do for the next few minutes, if we can, is, you know, I've got
00:35:50.900
this very successful author on who has done both genre fiction and nonfiction. Maybe we could talk
00:35:57.740
about what are, you know, some best practices that you could offer for aspiring authors, because,
00:36:04.860
you know, almost everybody feels as though, Hey, you know, I'm a good storyteller. I I'd love to be
00:36:10.780
an author. If you even watch movies, I haven't done the, I can't confirm this quantifiably, but
00:36:17.020
anecdotally, it seems that every movie has some character in it, who is an author or an editor or
00:36:23.800
something in the publishing house. So it's a very romantic profession, but as we both know,
00:36:29.100
very few authors become successful. Tell us, walk us through what are some absolute lessons that a
00:36:35.720
aspiring author must have in order to be successful.
00:36:39.380
That is a fantastic question. And there are so many different answers for it. As you know,
00:36:43.460
I had, and you're coming on my show dedicated soon. I have award-winning, the top authors in the world
00:36:48.400
come on and every, you ask that question, everyone gives a slightly different answer, but there are
00:36:52.000
certain things I can tell you that I think really are helpful. If you want to start putting, you
00:36:57.880
know, pen to page. One is I do outline. I'm an obsessive outliner. I'll have drafts of my outline
00:37:05.620
and there are others who don't lead child does not outline a more tolls obsessive outliner. But for me,
00:37:12.580
it really helps stare down that blank page. If you have written pages of an outline where there's no
00:37:18.940
pressure, it's easy to sort of jot a few things down or lines of dialogue out of sequence or a
00:37:23.440
scene, you know, is going to happen, even though it's three quarters through the book, just write
00:37:26.180
it out of order. It doesn't matter. And then you just stick that in like, oh, that's chapter 17 and
00:37:30.660
tuck it into your outline, but you've gotten something down. You've gotten the sort of, you've
00:37:34.520
greased the skids a little bit. So I think outline is a great way to get going and just sort of get the
00:37:40.580
motor running. I, with my fiction, I it's, here's a strange difference for me with fiction. I write
00:37:47.800
by hand. I have a yellow legal pad and it helps me to, it feels more creative, just be able to draw
00:37:53.320
lines or scratch things or move it around without being on the computer. And I can do it anywhere.
00:37:58.420
I can do it in an Uber, on a plane, in a cafe. Any of that is good. In fact, a little bit of background
00:38:03.820
noise is kind of good for me with nonfiction though. I need to be at my desk. I'm surrounded by
00:38:09.720
stacks of secondary resource materials. I actually, where with fiction, I don't want an internet
00:38:15.600
connection. With nonfiction, I need it because there might be a scene where Rudolph is, you know,
00:38:21.460
and this actually is a scene. He's walking across a bridge in London in 1870 as a young boy. And I'm
00:38:28.980
like, well, what does a gas lamp look like in 1870 on a bridge? You know, so I want to do like little
00:38:33.600
quick hits of tangential research. So it's nice to just have a, you know, an internet connection where I
00:38:38.460
can just find little things out that support the book and, and make it real and get those little
00:38:44.780
details right. I find doing research always does help, even if you're writing fiction,
00:38:51.000
just to make sure you get the scene right. I know many writers, Joseph Cannon has written a number of
00:38:57.500
Cold War era books set in Germany. So he goes to Berlin, even though he's decades removed from the
00:39:03.520
timing of his book, just walking those streets helps him get it with more force on the page when
00:39:09.220
he writes it. I think it's nice to have a regular habit. I tend to drop the kids at school, come home,
00:39:15.940
have coffee, sit down and write from maybe nine to noon. I don't think you need to write more than
00:39:20.040
three hours, but then the rest of the day is not just, you know, cocktails. I do editing or other
00:39:26.380
research or, you know, even outside reading. I think if you're going to write the, uh, you need
00:39:33.180
to read a lot and you need to write a lot. And I'll just tell one quick story of a, of another
00:39:36.980
guest who came on Diana Gabaldon, who wrote the Outlander series, the terrific books made into the
00:39:42.240
series on the TV series on Showtime. And so she'd be on set because she goes to the set a lot for
00:39:47.180
where they, they make the show and the actors would come over to her and say, love the books. How do you
00:39:51.080
do it? It's like such a mystery. Please like, tell me, give me some advice on how to do it.
00:39:56.120
And she'll say, well, you know, before anything, the price of admission is you have, you just have
00:40:00.700
to write. So here's what you do every day. I want you to write for 15 minutes. Could be a letter,
00:40:07.200
could be a shopping list, whatever it is, but for 15 minutes every day for two weeks, right. And then
00:40:14.400
at the end of two weeks, come back and talk to me and we'll, we'll, we'll do the next step, but that's
00:40:19.040
the first step. So you may already have guessed what happens from here. They never come back at
00:40:25.040
the end of two weeks. No one's been able to do it. So, you know, the number one thing is if you
00:40:28.960
embrace some alone time, if you enjoy the process of writing anything, but be it a diary, a letter
00:40:34.240
or whatever, you're more than half the way there. Yeah. Beautiful answers. Uh, I mean, in my case,
00:40:40.260
I also like to, so you said, I write from nine to 12. Uh, I also try to achieve some minimal number
00:40:49.780
of words per day. I know this sounds, it's not very romantic, but you, you know, you need grit
00:40:56.980
and discipline. I mean, and of course, you know, this one, if you're going to get a big book advance,
00:41:02.100
uh, you know, there is a gun to your head from your publisher saying, you better get me that book
00:41:06.460
by such and such date. And if you lead busy lives, just the fact it becomes very easy. Well,
00:41:13.020
today I can't really work on it because I'm teaching two classes and then I've got meetings
00:41:17.200
with these graduate students, and then I've got to apply for this grant. And then I got to do this
00:41:21.220
editorial stuff. And then I have to talk to Doug Brunt. And so, uh, well, maybe today I won't work,
00:41:27.760
but then there's as many valid reasons tomorrow why I'm also busy. So no matter what, and this is not a
00:41:34.960
very romantic prescription, but it's a very important one, you have to have the discipline
00:41:39.660
to say, as you said, just right. And so, you know, I could be suffering from bronchitis. I'm
00:41:45.940
going to meet my minimal daily output. Now, sometimes it fluctuates. Sometimes I I'm very
00:41:51.060
productive and I, I might go off on a thing where I produce a thousand words that day. Other days,
00:41:56.080
I've got to do a lot of a priori research. It's only going to end up being 200 words, but I have a
00:42:00.900
certain set of markers in my head of where I need to be. And the unfolding story, if not,
00:42:06.600
I could never turn the book around in time. Is that similar for you? Yes. Yes. And if you can
00:42:12.500
treat that time as sort of sacrosanct, it almost becomes like exercise. You know, if you are in the
00:42:16.820
habit of exercising six days a week or seven days a week, and then you miss three days, you feel a
00:42:21.700
little off. Like, Oh, something's not right. I need to go exercise. And your body has come to crave
00:42:25.960
it and want it. And I think it's the same here. I know many writers who are in the habit of writing
00:42:30.520
every day. And if for whatever reason, they're traveling on book tour or something, they haven't
00:42:33.960
written for a few days. They feel a little off. They're sort of walking around kind of antsy and
00:42:37.960
they, they come to want it. Now, I also know writers, again, this is every writer's different.
00:42:42.460
Some, some writers will procrastinate as much as possible. And, you know, they have to drag
00:42:47.420
themselves over there, but I'm not one of those. I, I run to my desk. It's, it's fun, creative alone time,
00:42:53.980
which I enjoy. I, I really, I value that, that time of the day.
00:42:58.780
Well, so I'm going to link what you just said about creativity or the process of creating to,
00:43:04.840
and forgive the, the, the self plug. So in my, in my latest book, the happiness book, which
00:43:09.140
hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about on your show. I talk about early in the, in, in the book
00:43:14.080
about, you know, the two most consequential decisions that you'll make that either will impart
00:43:18.040
great happiness or great misery upon you, choosing the right spouse, choosing the right
00:43:22.420
profession. When I'm talking about choosing the right profession, I argue that all other things
00:43:26.800
equal a job that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse is one that's going to grant you
00:43:34.200
access to purpose and meaning just by definition of the creative act. So I could be a chef. I could
00:43:39.340
be a standup comic. I could be a, you know, a screenwriter or a professor, all of these, while
00:43:46.680
they're very, very different domain domains of, of excellence, they share one thing. You're
00:43:52.060
creating an architect creates a bridge and that process is really magical. So the idea for me
00:43:58.020
of one day opening up my laptop, opening that word document, there isn't a single letter that has been
00:44:06.260
struck yet on that thing. And then magically through the magic of the creative impulse, 12 months, 14,
00:44:15.020
16 months later, I pressed the send button to the publisher. That's unbelievable to me, even as
00:44:22.440
someone who was a seasoned author. So maybe you could talk a bit about, because you said, I just
00:44:26.780
love to go to my desk on alone time and create. Is this something that is just innate? Some of us have
00:44:32.820
that creative impulse more than others, or is this something that could be fostered and nurtured?
00:44:36.980
I, that, that is a great question. I think, uh, by the way, I'm loving your book and I did not
00:44:43.760
realize that sad S-A-A-D in Arabic means happiness and prosperity. I was destined to write this book.
00:44:51.800
The great reveals and twists and turns you don't see coming. Um, I, I think it's, uh, it's probably a
00:44:58.420
bit of both. I mean, I, I've had a number of authors on whose parents were authors or writers, or,
00:45:04.420
you know, so you're, you sort of see it and you realize, oh my gosh, that could actually be
00:45:08.060
a job. Like to the idea that writing could be something that is a career and you can actually
00:45:14.300
endeavor to it. So some people, it, it gets a little bit back to the, if you see it, you can be
00:45:19.040
it type of thing. Um, cause some people, I think it would just never occur to them like, oh, I'll write
00:45:23.200
a book, you know, even though they have, and then their creativity just gets expressed in other ways.
00:45:27.380
Um, and I do think also that some of it is, it's almost, I probably it's around that 50, 50 thing
00:45:36.380
in which you talk about the genetic, uh, forces behind happiness. Generally, like some people
00:45:42.640
are born with a happy disposition as you are. And so the genetic makeup of happiness could be about
00:45:48.500
50% and the rest is, you know, what happens to you after you're born? It could be, I think it's
00:45:54.520
probably somewhere in there in terms of creativity and writing as well. You might've hit the number.
00:45:59.360
Yeah, that, that, that makes sense to me. So what about then? So, you know, one of the things that I,
00:46:04.880
I, I, I truly never watch American Idol, but the only time that I'll ever watch it as a psychologist
00:46:10.340
is in the early process where people are grossly overconfident about their abilities as a singer.
00:46:18.500
Right. So, I mean, they, they, their singing is really an affront to human decency, but yet they're
00:46:24.460
shocked. You sound like Megan referring to me now.
00:46:31.460
Right. And so, and I find that very interesting because it's, it's, it's so fascinating to see
00:46:36.020
how poorly self-calibrated people are about their abilities. What do you mean? I thought I am like
00:46:41.040
Barry White and Mariah Carey. My mother told me that I'm a great singer. And so the reason I'm talking
00:46:46.180
about all that is because the same overconfidence trap can happen for aspiring authors in that it
00:46:54.300
seems as though it's approachable, right? I mean, singing doesn't seem like it's such a thing. I just
00:47:00.280
opened my mouth and I think I could be just as good as Mariah Carey. No, you can't. Right. Whereas
00:47:06.000
other things, there does seem to be a barrier to entry. I mean, it's very few people overestimate
00:47:11.960
their ability to be linebackers in the NFL, because that seems to require a set of skills,
00:47:18.820
a physical reality that many people don't have. And so people don't overestimate their ability to be
00:47:24.820
NFL linebackers, but to be an author or a singer, it seems like, yeah, I think I could do it. So how do
00:47:32.020
we navigate through the conundrum of, yes, you can do it. Anybody can be anything, but also being
00:47:39.740
sufficiently calibrated to say, look, I just don't think you have the ability to have the good
00:47:46.340
mechanics of writing or to be a good storyteller out of the game. How do we navigate through that?
00:47:52.600
That's great. And our current culture or the coddling culture that we have now is certainly
00:47:56.540
not helping. In your example of the linebacker, for most people, that would just be staring you
00:48:00.800
right in the face. You go out there one time, you get knocked in your back and you say, okay,
00:48:03.740
that's not for me. I can't do that. But things that are much more subjective and well,
00:48:08.540
it's all a matter of opinion. I think that's where you need some good people around you.
00:48:15.040
I joke with Megan, who is my first and early reader. I'd much rather hear it from her than
00:48:19.680
from the New York Times if something's not good. And she is unsparing in both her praise and her
00:48:28.720
criticism. If something's not good, she'll tell me. And that's what love is. You get it both ways.
00:48:33.260
And so you do need that. Now that said, of course, there are people who've gone to MFA classes where
00:48:40.360
the teacher said, I'm sorry, you don't have what it takes. And you fast forward 10 years and they're
00:48:45.000
winning a Pulitzer for fiction. Like Jennifer Regan was in a MFA class and the teacher thought she
00:48:50.420
really didn't have that much potential. And then Jennifer Regan is on a Pulitzer Prize winning tour
00:48:55.040
for a visit from the Goon Squad. So, you know, you do have to have some resilience and some thick
00:48:59.720
skin. But then in the end, you also need to be real about it. And I think some of that it can become
00:49:08.200
self-selecting because people have to pay their bills ultimately. And so if, you know, that may
00:49:13.260
select you right out of the process. If you find that your fiction writing isn't paying the rent,
00:49:17.260
you might you might be forced to, you know, get out into something where there's more in your zone of
00:49:22.460
genius. Yeah. I mean, can you, can you mention again, what was the name of the author that you
00:49:27.040
just mentioned? The one who had been told in her MFA class, who was that? Jennifer Egan. Okay. So I
00:49:32.600
have a similar section in, I don't know if you, I don't, maybe you didn't get that far in the book yet
00:49:37.600
where I'm talking about grit, resilience, anti-fragility of failure. And so I have a whole
00:49:42.320
section where I take a bunch of, you know, some of the goats, the greatest of all time in different
00:49:47.200
domains. Michael Jordan rejected from his high school basketball team, sophomore,
00:49:52.460
Steven Spielberg rejected not once, not twice, but three times from the USC film school. Lionel
00:50:00.540
Messi, greatest player of all time, told that you're not going to be a professional soccer
00:50:04.480
player. You're too small and frail. Zinedine Zidane, who's the greatest French soccer player
00:50:09.160
of all time, rejected by the Algerian coach. He could have played either for France or for Algeria
00:50:14.920
by, by ancestry. And the Algerian coach looked at him and said, this guy is too slow. He's not going
00:50:20.340
to make it. He's a world cup winner. And so again, to our earlier point, yes, the, you know,
00:50:25.540
the idea of, Oh, or JK Rowling being rejected by every single publisher until the one that doesn't
00:50:30.760
reject her. So it's such a tough needle to thread because on the one hand, you do want to promote
00:50:36.820
the idea of resilience and keep going, but you also have to have the ability to have the self-calibration
00:50:45.420
to say, I think I've received enough feedback. Now I'm 52. I'm still waiting tables that maybe I
00:50:51.560
need to get off that train. And it's not easy to know when is the right point to do what.
00:50:57.120
I think true self-awareness is one of the greatest gifts anyone can have. Megan is,
00:51:02.300
is extraordinary at that. She knows what she's good at. She knows what she's not. Her self-belief
00:51:06.700
behind that, that estimation is unflappable. You know, if she knows she's good at it, she'll,
00:51:13.300
she'll stay in there. And if she knows she's not, she's like, yeah, that's not for me. And
00:51:17.300
she'll quickly move on. But she, she's probably the most self-aware person I know. Well, it's an
00:51:23.580
extraordinary gift. It really is. And by the way, the, the Delphic maxim, know thyself has survived
00:51:30.460
for thousands of years, precisely for that. Right. I don't like the, a lot of, you know, you know,
00:51:35.760
current gurus will offer you all sorts of prescriptions of how to live life that are incredibly
00:51:42.920
intricate and, you know, right. Walk three times, then take a three second meditation thing,
00:51:48.520
then look to the left. And because research has found that it reduces your cortisol levels by 7%
00:51:53.940
bullshit. The really important prescriptions are those that are like the Delphic maxim,
00:51:59.040
know thyself. It sounds simple, but it's profoundly deep precisely because it's exactly,
00:52:05.460
as you said about Megan, there's not, there's no greater gift than to know what, you know,
00:52:09.720
what you don't know. One of the things I say that why I'm, I knock on wood, uncancellable is because
00:52:16.500
I'd like to think that I also thread that needle really well. When I walk into a room to debate
00:52:21.280
someone on a topic that I'm, I'm knowledgeable about, and I've done my homework, good luck to you
00:52:26.360
if you want to debate me. But on the other hand, you could ask me a million questions where I'll say,
00:52:30.080
Hey Doug, that's a fantastic question. It's above my pay grade. I know very little about this.
00:52:33.600
I don't bullshit my way out of something and being calibrated about what I'm good at and not good at
00:52:39.600
allows me to always maintain the trust of the audience because I never falter or fail because
00:52:46.460
when I don't know, I just say, I don't know. I don't wing it. Yeah. I think that's, and that
00:52:50.760
exactly said that builds trust and you come across as, as genuine. And, and it's also great to hear a
00:52:57.700
professor who's, who's written all these books, you know, to say, I'm not done learning. There's lots
00:53:01.540
of stuff I don't know. And I'm, I'm, I would love to hear from people who know it. So then I'll know
00:53:05.400
it. It's, it's a great way to go through life. Can I tell you something? I mean, you can't see
00:53:09.760
the rest of my study here, but I'm surrounded by a gigantic personal library of books, probably,
00:53:15.940
you know, 10 times the number of books that are behind you. And one of the greatest stressors in
00:53:21.220
my life is when I walk in every day in my study. And I know that there's at least 400 unbelievable
00:53:27.260
books that I've yet to read. So there's all this juicy, incredible knowledge out there that's not
00:53:33.700
in here. And that of course makes me, it makes me compelled to, to read more, but it also grounds me
00:53:40.860
in that I know how little I know of what there is to know. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I try it. The ones
00:53:46.860
that go on the shelf. Generally I've read, there are a few gifts or things that I know I'm going to
00:53:50.480
read, but it's, I, it's a tough process to get on the shelf in my, in my office. You probably,
00:53:55.540
you're probably sent books to, you know, get blurbed and things like that all the time that
00:53:58.680
find their way on there that you haven't read yet. Indeed. Uh, all right. Any projects that
00:54:04.280
you're working on, you know, beyond what we've been talking about that you'd like to mention
00:54:10.320
here, promote or plug, please take it away. Well, the, the one thing I'll say that the podcast
00:54:16.060
takes up a fair amount of time interviewing a number of great authors coming up yourself included.
00:54:20.220
And, uh, the other thing I'll say about my next book project is there's a funny saying
00:54:26.400
that my editor and I have bandied about, which is that sometimes one author's footnote can
00:54:31.480
become another author's whole book. And in my case, I think one of my own footnotes will
00:54:36.620
become my own next books. I want to stay in this time period, this quarter century before
00:54:41.080
world war one. And I found an interesting story that I think is similar to diesel and that it's
00:54:46.680
like this hidden history. It's people, you know, but you, you only knew a percentage or
00:54:51.200
so. And there's a whole revelation behind that, that has connections to people throughout
00:54:56.540
the world that diesel, you know, there's a huge connection to Winston Churchill and the
00:55:01.100
world leaders of the time and Adolphus Bush and the Nobel family and all of these things
00:55:04.840
sort of weave in together in this crazy tale. And I, I, uh, another, this other one won't
00:55:11.920
really solve a, you know, a murder, murder or missing persons case, but it will, it will delve
00:55:17.080
into that hidden history element that the diesel book does. Now, now I feel like you've thrown a
00:55:21.960
challenge for me to go through every footnote and try to guess who it is. So if you, if you start
00:55:28.360
seeing DMS from me on your Twitter, in your Twitter, uh, account, I'm probably going to be
00:55:34.280
trying to guess who that might be. Hey, Doug, what a pleasure to have you. I can't wait to hopefully
00:55:38.840
meet you in person soon. Uh, and by that, I mean both you and your lovely wife, and hopefully
00:55:43.480
I will be coming with my wife. Uh, but, uh, real honor to have you on, please stay on the line
00:55:49.720
so we could say goodbye offline properly. Real delight to have you on. Cheers.
00:55:53.540
Well, the honor was mine. Thank you. Thank you, sir.