The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.880 Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad for the Saad Truth. Today, I have a rarity on the show,

00:00:06.380 a novelist and a nonfiction author, Douglas Brunt. How are you doing, sir?

00:00:11.440 Great to be with you, Gad. Thanks for having me.

00:00:13.420 Oh, I'm so delighted to have you with me. Let me just read a very, very quick bio of

00:00:17.840 you and you could add anything that you think I might have missed. You're a New York Times

00:00:22.100 bestselling author and host of the Dedicated with Doug Brunt podcast, which I am honored

00:00:27.860 to be appearing on in about a month or two. No, two months, I think, in early December.

00:00:33.340 You have three previous novels, Ghosts of Manhattan in 2012, The Means in 2014, Trophy Sun in 2017,

00:00:41.720 and your current book, which came out in September, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. It's really a

00:00:49.740 historical book, so it's not a fiction book. Maybe we'll start with this one and then we'll

00:00:54.760 talk about how you actually create all these characters in your novels. Tell us about Diesel.

00:01:01.860 I must admit, just like your wife, people who don't know, it's Megyn Kelly. I listened to your

00:01:08.060 chat. All I knew about Diesel is that that's the thing that I shouldn't put in my car and it ended

00:01:15.260 there. So please teach us. That's right. So eight years ago, I was the same as you and most of your

00:01:21.680 listeners probably, misspelling diesel with a lowercase d, thinking it was maybe a fuel that

00:01:26.900 we're supposed to avoid for our cars. But you see it every day. It's at the fueling station,

00:01:32.360 it's on a truck, on a train. I bought a boat and it was an older boat and slightly larger. And the

00:01:39.140 guy at the boatyard was saying, well, the first thing you should do to fix this boat up is get

00:01:42.280 rid of these gasoline engines and put in diesels. And so I was saying, well, why? I didn't realize it was

00:01:47.340 a different kind of engine. So he launched into this thing saying that 100% of boat fires come

00:01:52.660 from gasoline engines, zero from diesel. The fuel is completely stable. There are no fumes. You can

00:01:57.840 drop a lit match into a barrel of diesel fuel and nothing happens. Plus you get three or four times

00:02:02.720 the fuel efficiency. So on your 200 gallon tank of fuel, you'll go three or four times as far.

00:02:07.740 So I repowered with diesels. And then about a year later, as you say, I've previously written a few

00:02:12.880 novels. And I was searching around for ideas that might get me going on a novel. And I was just

00:02:17.900 clicking around the internet and I came across this list of mysterious disappearances at sea.

00:02:22.360 And on the list was Rudolph Diesel. I didn't know there was a man behind the diesel engine. I just

00:02:26.640 thought it was just some sort of, you know, not proper noun. So I click on this and it tells this

00:02:32.340 crazy story, true story of Rudolph Diesel. Back in 1913, on the eve of World War I, he's traveling from

00:02:39.980 Belgium to Great Britain on an overnight passenger ferry. And as he's crossing the North Sea, in the

00:02:45.440 night, he disappears. And so he's supposed to meet his two traveling companions for breakfast. He

00:02:50.100 doesn't show up. They hold the ship at sea. They do a search. All they find are his hat and his coat

00:02:55.620 folded at the stern of the ship by the rail, seeming to mark where he's jumped overboard. And so the

00:03:00.820 presumption is suicide. But two other theories hit the newspapers because it's really hard to imagine

00:03:07.140 today, as we all don't even know, there is a person, Rudolph Diesel. But at the time he was

00:03:11.140 a huge global celebrity. It would be like Elon Musk disappearing today, just suddenly, you know,

00:03:15.800 hopped a flight to Nantucket and it was gone. At that level? At Elon Musk level?

00:03:20.320 Truly at that level. He was a global celebrity. It was the front page of the New York Times,

00:03:25.460 front page of the papers in London, all through Western Europe, even out to Russia. Headlines of

00:03:30.420 every newspaper that the great inventor has disappeared. And two theories of murder appeared. One was that

00:03:36.140 John Rockefeller may have murdered him or, you know, agents of big oil. And the other was that

00:03:41.400 Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, may have murdered him and sent his agents. Because he, 0.53

00:03:47.460 and we can get into this, but he represented an existential threat to both of those figures,

00:03:51.520 because his engine had, by 1913, emerged as a dominant power source for both industry and war.

00:03:58.720 So, so in the, in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm II, it's, it's a military threat. In the case of 0.85

00:04:07.580 Rockefeller, it's a pecuniary threat. You're going to affect the bottom line of my wallet. So we've got

00:04:14.900 suicide, we've got murder. I don't want you to give away any sort of giveaways. I want people to read

00:04:22.220 the book. But if you were to assign a points on a hundred as to which of suicide versus murder,

00:04:30.120 it's Kaiser, murder, it's Rockefeller. Where does the evidence stack up from what we know until you

00:04:38.400 came along? Well, if you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's suicide. And suicide has been the

00:04:44.280 presumption for the last century. And the crazy thing is that there are so many holes in that theory.

00:04:51.220 The one thing I do give away is that it wasn't suicide. As you go through the evidence that's

00:04:59.020 available now, it's so much easier to go back and do this sort of, what is really a circumstantial

00:05:04.680 case, but you can look at the newspaper reporting from the time. So much, you know, you can do what

00:05:09.460 I would call library research now with subscriptions to different databases. More is scanned every day.

00:05:14.480 I can look at every newspaper from every city around the world now from that era. It would have been

00:05:18.140 very hard to do that in 1930 and reconstruct this case. You'd have to actually go to the cities and

00:05:22.220 pull newspapers out of cabinets and things like that. So it's easier to do some of that research

00:05:27.100 now. But it very clearly was not a suicide. But I reconstruct that sort of quarter century leading

00:05:35.940 up to World War I. And it's a fascinating cast of characters, not only in the diesel story of where

00:05:42.140 the engine went around the world and who was using it, but also how he became such a threat to Kaiser

00:05:47.360 Wilhelm and to Rockefeller, because the diesel engine represented something totally new.

00:05:52.560 And that has any, I mean, I guess it's a officially it's an open case. I mean, is there,

00:05:58.660 or it's a cold case, I guess, a really, really super cold case. I mean, in terms of police.

00:06:04.440 Yes. Yeah. So I put together a theory of the case, that sort of a conclusion based on circumstantial

00:06:12.060 evidence, ran it by NYPD, former CIA, former FBI, and most tellingly, former British Intel,

00:06:19.000 and all came back saying, wow, a thousand percent, your conclusion, which I am not yet revealing here,

00:06:25.360 is correct. This has to be what happened.

00:06:28.900 So are there any descendants of diesel that are alive and with whom you might have spoken about

00:06:37.340 the case? I found two. One is Jean-Philippe Diesel. He lives in France, sort of in the corner,

00:06:44.300 like right on a German border there. And another was, he was sort of, he was descended from Diesel's

00:06:49.780 uncle. So, but, you know, last name Diesel and has followed the family history. And then a woman

00:06:55.580 who was descended from Rudolph Diesel's daughter, Hedy. And both are, you know, interested,

00:07:02.440 of course, in the family history. Both had just sort of assumed what was in the encyclopedia was

00:07:06.100 correct. So they were like, you know, thinking this is an incredible book and were thrilled to

00:07:12.160 read it. All their lives, they'd been thinking, you know, suicide was the, the, what the conclusion.

00:07:18.320 Wow. So what is the process? I mean, we'll, we'll get into the creative process for your novels,

00:07:23.100 but even in the case of this book, as you said, there's, there's a lot of archival work that has

00:07:28.420 to go into weaving this incredibly intricate story. Walk us through the process of how one goes about

00:07:36.200 doing that. For the, for the nonfiction book, this was totally new to me. Usually when you sell

00:07:41.820 fiction, you write the full manuscript, you write almost the whole novel and then you sell it. And

00:07:47.780 actually these days you really do have to finish it up and maybe even work with a freelance editor,

00:07:52.220 but get in a pretty good shape before you try to sell it. And, you know, 20 years ago and the

00:07:56.700 publishing houses were a little bigger and more well staffed, they might acquire a novel that was

00:08:01.900 say 80% done and they would work with you and get it to a hundred percent. Now they've really

00:08:07.480 skinnied down their editorial staff. So when they acquire books, it's more like 98% of the way there

00:08:11.780 and they might, you know, finish it up with you. And many of those editors that were formerly in the

00:08:17.300 big houses are now independent freelance editors that work with, you know, young and up and coming

00:08:21.420 writers. But basically you write the book and you sell the book. What I learned in this process is

00:08:26.360 that's not how nonfiction works. In nonfiction, you sell a proposal and you're familiar with this.

00:08:31.840 There's maybe a sample chapter, there's a detailed outline of what you're going to do. There's a list

00:08:36.380 of the research that you have done and will continue to do. And the new information you'll present,

00:08:40.720 a list of competitive works and market, things like that. It's a standard

00:08:43.980 proposal format. It's roughly 30 pages or so. So I didn't know that. I worked with a new agent

00:08:50.840 who helped me go through the proposal structure, built out this proposal. And I'd been working on

00:08:55.140 the book for quite a while already because in the beginning I'd considered writing it as historical

00:08:59.480 fiction. And the more I did research, the more I developed a theory of the case and the more I

00:09:06.020 found things that were supporting that theory. And I realized there was almost nothing written about

00:09:10.560 Rudolph Diesel in the English language. There are two academic biographies, one from the 60s and one

00:09:15.480 from the 80s. Very little about him. So I realized I've got to tell this story for real. I've got to

00:09:21.540 do the nonfiction version of Accountant and do it and truly try to do justice to his legacy. So I went

00:09:26.980 through a very different process on the nonfiction side. With fiction in the past, I've always done a lot

00:09:32.540 of research for these books anyway, less archival. My three previous novels were all set roughly present

00:09:38.180 day. So a lot of the research I did there was primary research, interviewing folks.

00:09:43.460 My most recent novel, which came out called Trophy Sun, was about a tennis prodigy. And it was really

00:09:50.160 focused on our culture's new obsession with single sport specialization for early youth. If you're

00:10:00.000 seven years old and you're a good tennis player, that's what you do to the exclusion of almost

00:10:04.680 everything else. And tennis is very intense in that way. You get pulled out of mainstream schooling

00:10:08.920 and go down to some tennis academy if you're really promising. So for that, I interviewed James Blake

00:10:13.760 and John Isner and other great tennis players, many who went to the voluntary academies but never

00:10:17.780 cracked the top 500 as well, but now still exist in the orbit of tennis as a tennis coach or running the

00:10:24.820 rackets program at a club and things like that. So I love the research piece of it. That's always been a part

00:10:29.660 of what I've done for my novels. I think it helps get the story down with a little bit more force on

00:10:34.200 the page. If you have that knowledge, even it almost becomes instinctual. Just knowing you know

00:10:39.060 it helps you write it better. So I've enjoyed the research piece. But as you say, this is much more

00:10:43.460 archival. This is all 100 plus years ago. Do you have a preference in terms of the creative process?

00:10:49.900 I mean, you've only done one that is nonfiction, but having now done both genres,

00:10:54.200 you know, are you better suited for one or the other or both are exciting because they're so

00:10:59.500 different? Both exciting, but I prefer the nonfiction side. It was so fun to have these

00:11:06.480 moments where I'd be in archives and I would discover something that to anyone else would be

00:11:11.920 not that big a deal. But in the context of the story that I'm creating, it draws a connection that is

00:11:18.420 enormous. You know, Churchill is a huge figure in this book. Adolphus Bush, the founder of

00:11:24.140 Anheuser-Busch. He's a huge figure in this book. He was the American diesel pioneer. And you'd find

00:11:30.880 something, you know, Churchill said this two days after Rudolph Diesel said that. And it was meaningful.

00:11:37.080 And it was like the nerd side of Indiana Jones, where you discover a little piece of treasure

00:11:41.840 that is something you can share with the world in this book that is meaningful history.

00:11:48.400 What explains the fact, I mean, in reading some of the blurbs for the book, I haven't yet had the

00:11:54.900 chance to read the entire book, but in going through those blurbs, you know, I can't remember

00:12:02.240 if it was you who mentioned it or it was part of the synopsis from the media kit that, you know,

00:12:07.600 he should be standing along many of the illustrious other thinkers of that era, and yet he's somehow

00:12:13.660 forgotten. And that right away reminded me of, so I'm, as you probably know, I'm an evolutionary

00:12:18.860 psychologist. And so, of course, Charles Darwin holds a very special place in my heart. Yet

00:12:23.420 Alfred Wallace, who independently came up with the theory of evolution, is a little asterisk footnote.

00:12:31.060 And there are historical reasons for why that might be the case. So in your case, what explains why

00:12:36.680 Diesel is so unknown to most people and that only two academic biographies exist of his life?

00:12:42.640 Yeah. The story of why his history has been paved over this last century is somewhat explained by

00:12:49.500 the element of the caper in the book. And so I'll go back to 1913. The reason Kaiser Wilhelm 0.88

00:12:55.920 found him to be such a threat is that by 1913, the diesel engine had emerged as the only engine that

00:13:01.740 could power a submarine or U-boat. And gasoline and kerosene engines wouldn't work. They were spark

00:13:07.180 ignition. They were flammable. There were constant boat fires. You didn't have the range to get a

00:13:10.920 submarine out into open waters and control sea lanes. But with the diesel engine, all that changed.

00:13:16.680 And suddenly the submarine became a terrifying offensive weapon. And this was at the peak of the

00:13:22.640 Anglo-German naval arms race. And so suddenly every naval, every Navy of the major powers is scrambling

00:13:30.640 for diesel expertise. And Rudolf Diesel, because the engine is still fairly young, he only introduced it

00:13:35.040 in 1897. He's still the main guy that can help you use the diesel engine for these exacting

00:13:40.620 requirements of undersea travel. So they all need diesel. And the reason he was crossing the North

00:13:46.460 Sea in September of 1913 is he was going to Great Britain to be the board director and co-founder of a

00:13:52.020 diesel engine manufacturing company, a brand new one whose mandate it was to build diesels for the

00:13:56.980 Royal Navy submarine fleet at the height of these tensions and on the brink of war. So that would be seen

00:14:02.800 as treasonous by Kaiser Wilhelm. The reason Rockefeller found him to be such a threat is

00:14:07.660 diesel had been advocating that the diesel engine run on fuels other than petroleum.

00:14:12.320 He had won 13 years before he had won the world's fair in Paris in 1900 on a, with a diesel engine

00:14:18.900 running peanut oil. And in 1912, he had traveled through America saying, I can break the American

00:14:25.480 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

00:14:30.280 the power of my technology because it was very flexible with regard to fuels or vegetable oil,

00:14:35.820 peanut oil, coal tar. And he was saying, if we have farmers, we can grow our own fuel. We don't

00:14:41.380 need to be beholden to the oil trusts or areas of the world where there's petroleum in the ground.

00:14:47.160 And that's still true today. Willie Nelson was on a tour 15 years ago, traveling around his,

00:14:51.920 his tour bus on a diesel engine running recycled kitchen grease. So the diesel engine remains very

00:14:59.760 flexible with regard to fuels. And it's crazy. The deficit of appreciation for, for diesel in

00:15:06.360 these days, as you say, like, why is he not up there with the Wright brothers and Marconi and Edison

00:15:10.000 and Bell? It's because it's partly explained because the presumption of suicide. And then the other is the,

00:15:18.300 the element of the caper that comes in this book. And when you get to the conclusion of what happened

00:15:23.940 to diesel, you'll sort of understand this piece. But one quick thing I can, there's like sort of a

00:15:30.060 bit I do at this point, you know, on book tour, you can pull the string on my back and I, and I tell

00:15:34.420 the thing, but imagine a piece of fruit grown in a tropical region. Every piece of heavy machinery and

00:15:42.460 farm equipment used to grow that fruit is diesel powered. The fruit then gets loaded onto a truck.

00:15:47.500 Anything on the roads larger than a passenger car is diesel powered. It then goes down to port where

00:15:53.700 a crane diesel powered loads it onto a cargo ship. A hundred percent of cargo ships on the oceans are

00:15:59.680 diesel. Really like the only boats on the, on the water are these sort of outboard pleasure boats.

00:16:04.240 Anything bigger than that is diesel. So it goes across the oceans under diesel power, goes into a

00:16:09.160 port, gets loaded onto a truck, onto a train from about 1960, 1950, 1960, every train in the world

00:16:15.780 diesel powered gets low, you know, taken into a warehouse somewhere inland where very likely a

00:16:22.340 power plant is diesel powered. Really nothing moves in our global economy without diesel. And that's to

00:16:27.420 this day and the fundamental design of the engine, which is this high pressure engine, uh, is, is basically

00:16:35.660 the same as what diesel introduced more than 120 years ago. Wow. What it from, uh, on the Greta Thunberg metric

00:16:43.940 of green. And so for her not to be upset with us, does he score better on, on green and forgive my

00:16:51.380 ignorance. I mean, short of knowing that these different, you know, uh, and energy producing

00:16:57.080 machines, I know very little about this. How does it stand in terms of the green continuum?

00:17:03.880 Well, I'll answer that in two time periods. So in 1913, it was extraordinary and, and pollution and

00:17:10.360 efficiency were his, two of his main objectives. And efficiency was his number one objective.

00:17:16.060 Pollution was his number two objective. And then there were these subsidiary benefits that,

00:17:19.660 you know, like the cold start, it didn't, you didn't need to raise steam. So a military craft,

00:17:23.280 you could just turn diesel on and off you go, as opposed to the steam ships of the day where you had to

00:17:28.280 spend hours boiling water by, you know, burning coal and quote unquote, raising steam. So a military

00:17:35.060 ship's like, all right, let's go. And then it's three hours later, they're still boiling water to

00:17:38.440 get the ship going where it's easily just off you go. So I had huge military advantages, but efficiency

00:17:43.480 and pollution were two of his main goals. And you can see it in the difference of the ships of the day.

00:17:49.080 Like one of the visuals I paint in the, in the book is the, the movie Titanic, that famous Leonardo

00:17:56.260 DiCaprio movie. And they, the camera goes down into the belly of the ship and you see these dozens

00:18:01.080 and dozens of sweaty guys shoveling coal into a furnace, this orange, fiery hot, hot, hot furnace,

00:18:06.300 which is basically boiling a vat of water. I mean, it's simple technology, like a pot on a stove.

00:18:10.620 They're just boiling water. And then that creates steam to move the gears. That's the steam engine,

00:18:15.080 but it also had a whole chimney furnace apparatus where the chimneys go up through the middle of the

00:18:20.560 ship and blow those pillars of black smoke, partially burnt particles of coal into the atmosphere.

00:18:26.260 The diesel didn't need any chimney apparatus at all. It just vented a minimal amount of exhaust

00:18:30.320 out of vents out of the side of the ship. So for cargo, now you don't have these giant,

00:18:34.620 you know, chimneys in the middle of your ship. You have just a clear deck of cargo of space for cargo

00:18:39.520 for a battleship. Suddenly your, your guns, rather than being obstructed by giant chimneys on the deck

00:18:45.220 can pivot to a 300 to any point on the horizon, a 360 degree. So for a military, again, it had

00:18:51.080 advantages of really essentially doubling the power of your guns on the deck because they could,

00:18:56.200 the guns could point anywhere as opposed to only half of the, half of the horizon.

00:19:00.560 So in, in his day of 1913, pollution wise, it was a massive game changer. It was much cleaner

00:19:06.760 than the steam engines. Today, diesel has taken some hits, but it, like there was a Volkswagen scandal,

00:19:13.960 but they've, they've put in more filters that, that make it much more competitive in terms of

00:19:19.400 exhaust and getting rid of the, the nitrous oxides and things, which were the problem with

00:19:23.220 diesel before. So now it's actually very clean and it's still far more efficient than a gasoline

00:19:28.520 engine. In fact, I think Cadillac has just announced that next year, all their SUVs are going

00:19:33.080 to be diesel. And one of the things they're touting is it's the fuel efficiency is extraordinary

00:19:37.340 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,

00:19:50.740 for the complete lay people who are watching, which I include myself, I know I'm probably the

00:19:55.560 least mechanically inclined person in the world, which somehow seems emasculating. I should know how

00:20:01.340 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

00:20:15.940 engineering element, which makes the diesel engine more efficient, as you said, but the raw material

00:20:21.880 that goes either into the diesel engine or the regular fuel injected engine of a car, is that

00:20:29.040 different? What's the main difference and why don't we have more of the diesel engines in regular

00:20:33.840 cars if it's so efficient? The difference is the, the sophistication of the engine and the weight of

00:20:41.480 the engine. So in the early days, the early combustion engines that run gasoline and kerosene,

00:20:46.800 again, flammable fuel, there's a spark ignition. Those were like half a horsepower, one or two

00:20:52.460 horsepower. They're very weak engines and Benz would use them for his early motor cars that look

00:20:57.100 like sort of a big tricycle, almost those early cars. Diesel sort of combined the best of the internal

00:21:02.760 combustion auto cycle engines and the big steam engines. It had high torque, high horsepower.

00:21:09.500 The early, even the early diesel engines could get into hundreds of horsepower. So they could do

00:21:13.340 heavy load work with lots of torque, you know, for accelerating a truck with a heavy load and that

00:21:19.180 sort of thing. But it was a harder and more expensive engine to build. It required superior metal

00:21:24.560 casting, which in the early 1800s didn't even exist. I mean, in the James Watt days of the 1770s,

00:21:30.440 those steam engines, in order to get seals on their pipes, they were using rope and leather and

00:21:35.200 things. You can imagine how much pressure is lost with that. The way the diesel engine works

00:21:39.320 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.

00:21:50.380 If you ever have pumped a few tires in a row, your bicycle tire pump feels a little bit hot.

00:21:54.360 That's the idea of the diesel engine, only it's completely enclosed, doesn't let air leak into

00:21:58.380 the tire pump. It's just an enclosed cylinder. And when you jam that plunger down, that highly

00:22:04.020 compressed air creates heat. And at a thousand pounds per square inch, it's extremely hot.

00:22:09.080 Then they inject the fuel and then the fuel explodes. So there's no spark, there's no fire

00:22:13.480 until it's under extremely high pressure. But maintaining that pressure takes superior metal

00:22:20.240 casting beyond what they use in a gasoline or kerosene type of engine. And so it's, it's better

00:22:27.460 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 0.97

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

00:32:40.740 sure you're, you know, you're called in.

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.

00:46:27.680 Is that in your singing abilities, you mean?

00:46:30.300 Yes, exactly.

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 1.00

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 0.50

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 0.98

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, 0.97

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.

My Chat with Doug Brunt, Author of ”The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel” (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_602)

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