Douglas Brunt, THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF RUDOLF DIESEL: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
[0:06]This 30 minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 days
[0:12]a year for about 30 minutes.
[0:15]I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction
[0:20]and memoir.
[0:21]Our books are already out now.
[0:23]You can check it out on zippybooks.com.
[0:26]And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle
[0:31]features.
[0:32]That's at zippymag.com.
[0:33]We have classes.
[0:34]It's a B-Classist.com.
[0:36]And I recently opened a book store in LA called Zippy's bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue
[0:43]at 11th Street in San Monica.
[0:45]I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings.
[0:49]But this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018.
[0:54]And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing.
[0:57]Enjoy.
[1:03]Douglas Brent is the author of the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel, genius, power, and deception
[1:09]on the eve of World War I.
[1:11]He is also the New York Times best-selling author of Ghost of Manhattan, The Means, Trophy
[1:16]Sun, and now the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel.
[1:19]He is the host of the top-rated Sirius XM author podcast dedicated with Doug Brent, a Philadelphia
[1:25]native.
[1:26]He lives in Connecticut with his wife and three children.
[1:29]And by the way, Doug and I work together at Idilab in New York after I transferred from
[1:34]the Pasadena office back in, oh my gosh, maybe 1999, 2000, and he was one of the first
[1:40]people.
[1:41]I met at that job.
[1:42]And now here it is, what, 22 years later, 23 years later, very funny.
[1:46]Welcome, Doug.
[1:47]Thanks so much for coming on Mom.
[1:48]Still don't have time to read books.
[1:49]To discuss the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel, genius, power, and deception on the eve
[1:54]of World War I.
[1:55]Ziggy, thanks for having me.
[1:58]Oh, please.
[1:59]Thank you.
[2:00]And so funny after all these years at Idilab back in the day, rolling around in our
[2:05]Aaron chairs or whatever.
[2:06]But anyway, here we are.
[2:07]I know what the wooden boards is our desks and that totally open concept.
[2:11]We were early with the open concept office design I think.
[2:13]Yes, very early.
[2:15]No privacy at all.
[2:16]Lots of phone conversations.
[2:18]Three zoom, Aaron.
[2:19]Anyway, okay.
[2:21]You wrote about in the beginning of this book, how you stumbled upon this topic when you
[2:25]were dealing with your own boat and all of that.
[2:28]Tell listeners about where you got the inspiration for the book.
[2:31]And then all the research you must have done that went into it and why you feel like
[2:36]Rudolph Diesel is one to be remembered.
[2:39]And I just found this to be utterly fascinating.
[2:42]Oh, thanks.
[2:43]You're right.
[2:44]I get stumbled into it in the luckiest of ways.
[2:46]And it's just this incredible piece of history that's been paved over for reasons that
[2:51]I discussed in the book.
[2:52]You understand why it's been paved over.
[2:54]I have, I'm a novelist traditionally, as I've written a few novels.
[2:59]And years ago, I bought this old boat and I was talking to the guy at the boat yard.
[3:04]What should I do?
[3:05]Because it was, you know, needed some work and had these old gasoline engines in it and
[3:08]he said, well, the first thing you ought to do is to re-power this to Diesel.
[3:12]And like most of your listeners, seven years ago, I didn't know anything about Diesel,
[3:16]I thought, you know, it's an engine.
[3:18]What's the difference between diesel and anything else?
[3:20]And he went on this whole rant of why marine diesel in particular is the way to go.
[3:26]Zero percent of boat fires happen with diesel.
[3:29]All fires are from gasoline engines.
[3:32]The gasoline is fumey and very flammable and gasoline engines start with a spark.
[3:37]Diesel does not.
[3:38]And fuel it, efficiency is three or four times better with diesel.
[3:42]So I did re-power with diesel.
[3:43]And then I was working on ideas for the next novel and I was clicking around the internet
[3:47]and came across this list of mysterious disappearances at sea.
[3:52]And on the list was Rudolph Diesel, who had disappeared in 1913 on the eve of World
[3:57]War I.
[3:58]So I was like, wow, I wonder if Rudolph Diesel has any connection to these diesel engines
[4:02]that I just bought.
[4:04]And of course, I clicked through and it does.
[4:05]He is the inventor of the diesel engine and was this enormous global celebrity at the
[4:10]time in 1913.
[4:11]And again, he's been kind of scrubbed from history.
[4:16]But when he disappeared in 1913, it was massive news around the world.
[4:20]The New York Times to all the papers in Europe and Russia and Asia were covering this
[4:24]crazy disappearance.
[4:26]And so that I went down to rabbit hole for five years and came back out with this book.
[4:31]Five years.
[4:33]Where did you even start?
[4:35]Which archives, I know you referenced a lot of books and things that had been written.
[4:39]But of course, you put together your own theory, which at the end is like, oh my gosh.
[4:44]Oh, wow.
[4:45]Like, of course, like this makes total sense.
[4:47]Where did you start?
[4:48]And what were some points in the research process where you had some light bulb moments
[4:52]and you were like so excited about it?
[4:54]Well, as a novelist, I initially was thinking I'd come at this from the angle of historical
[4:59]fiction.
[5:00]And well, you know, there's so little written about the guy, particularly in English
[5:04]language.
[5:05]There was not much to find.
[5:06]And I thought, well, I'll just fill in all the gaps.
[5:07]I had this sort of idea.
[5:08]It's almost like, you know, those paintings, they're all dots and you look at it.
[5:11]You look at it for long enough.
[5:12]You see a unicorn or something like that.
[5:15]It was like that.
[5:16]I just had read enough about this case.
[5:17]I became obsessed with it.
[5:18]And the more I read about the more it had a theory because the theories that have been accepted
[5:24]even in, in psychopedia Britannica, you know, that many people presume it was a suicide
[5:29]that he jumped off this ship.
[5:31]So the quick story is that Rudolph D. Salon September 29 was traveling from Belgium to England
[5:36]on an overnight passenger ferry.
[5:39]And in the night, he disappears.
[5:40]They hold the ship at sea and they search it.
[5:43]They can't find him.
[5:44]All they find is his hat and his coat along the promenade deck at the stern of the ship.
[5:48]And so they presume that it was suicide that he jumped over.
[5:51]And two other theories were that he was killed by either Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor
[5:57]of Germany or John Rockefeller and agents of big oil.
[6:02]And there are all these in-depth possible motives of why they might have done it.
[6:07]So I was exploring these theories and became obsessed with the case.
[6:11]And the more I unearthed, the more I realized this story actually needs to be told as non-fiction.
[6:17]It's not been done and I can do it.
[6:19]And so I initially found a lot of stuff and it's amazing research works so much differently
[6:23]now than it did a few decades ago.
[6:25]You know, I think you and I erupted the same agents where we would like, you know, scroll
[6:29]through microfiche, flat film and live therapies.
[6:32]And a lot of things have been scanned, old newspapers have been scanned and you can do
[6:36]a lot with keyword search, you still have to sort of narrow in on that.
[6:40]But I looked at, I was down in the New York Public Library in Midtown going through
[6:43]old newspaper articles because that two-week period after his disappearance, it was a flood
[6:49]of newspaper coverage.
[6:51]And then because World War I followed so closely on the heels of it and because there
[6:55]were manipulations in the media, it's never really gone, no one's already sort of gone
[6:59]back to try to reconcile all the conflicting reports in the media.
[7:03]So that was just a great starting place.
[7:04]But I found all kinds of facts that a person couldn't really go through these newspaper
[7:08]archives in an efficient way, even if you decades ago, so much has been uploaded.
[7:14]So I was able to do that level of research, which reinforced the theory and then I got
[7:18]into archives and throughout Europe and America and I actually reached out to my old high
[7:23]school, the buddy there who put me in touch with the German professor who then translated
[7:28]the reams of diaries and letters of diesel's own work out of archives in Germany.
[7:34]So it was like the geeky side of Indiana Jones, you're not the whip in the gun and the
[7:40]front of the shoulders, but the finding of some little piece of information that for most
[7:46]people would mean nothing but in the context of this story opens up enormous doors.
[7:51]I mean, it's just little pieces of treasure and those moments were so fun to discover.
[7:56]the letters in particular, I mean, Rudolph was so in love with his wife, it was so neat
[8:01]to even see like how dedicated, you know, down to the last letter.
[8:05]And even though we you have different interpretations of what he may have meant and everything.
[8:10]But just seeing how how that states stood the test of time.
[8:14]Yeah.
[8:15]Very good.
[8:16]Such a romantic.
[8:17]Yeah.
[8:18]That their relationship really was a beautiful piece of the story.
[8:22]And he also was very forward looking in a way that he was able to see around corners
[8:27]from a technology perspective.
[8:29]Yes.
[8:30]You know, he was thinking about pollution and engine efficiency and energy independence.
[8:35]So, you know, one of his visions for the engine was that it would run on vegetable oil
[8:40]or peanut oil and that he could break up to fuel monopolies, not through a law like the
[8:45]Sherman antitrust act, but through his technology and that most nations have farmers, they
[8:50]can grow their own fuel.
[8:51]We don't need to run around fighting wars over that.
[8:53]Yep.
[8:54]Well, one thing that I found really interesting was just tracing his whole family history.
[8:58]Yes.
[8:59]And how he sort of came to be in his wife and their connections with Germany and Britain
[9:04]and everything.
[9:05]But then how his sort of intellectual mind worked when he started digging deep into the
[9:11]other alternatives for all of this and how you track the developments and, you know, the
[9:16]setbacks and the successes.
[9:19]And through doing that, we learned all of this stuff about history in general and the
[9:24]evolution.
[9:25]I mean, it's reminded me a little bit, except it was fiction.
[9:27]It's not all the way you cannot see because that was a novel.
[9:29]But there was another book around that time about the war between Edison.
[9:34]Oh, it just made a movie like the power war to come in.
[9:38]Yes.
[9:39]Yes.
[9:40]Yes.
[9:41]Anyway, like, because we, I mean, the sounds like so foolish to say, but we run around
[9:45]in our day to day lives and we don't take notice or even ask who the people are that
[9:49]we, whose names we throw around all the time.
[9:52]And all of those names are in your book and they become full on people, right?
[9:56]Edison and, you know, his relationship to alcohol and his wife.
[10:00]if they become full on living people,
[10:02]particularly the way that you write them.
[10:04]And so then like today's world
[10:06]suddenly looks a little bit different as a result.
[10:09]It does, that is one of the fun parts of the book.
[10:12]And I think as I do feature books,
[10:14]I want to stay in this period.
[10:15]It's quarter century before meeting up to World War One,
[10:18]which I refer to jokingly as Downton Abbey
[10:20]the early years prior to the war.
[10:22]When the world lived differently,
[10:24]there are all these royal courts throughout Europe
[10:26]and these empires and I've gone to meet it
[10:29]after World War One, I'm sure for the better.
[10:31]But there is a certain romance to it.
[10:33]And the characteristic is phenomenal.
[10:34]Like Adolfus Bush is another, as the engine came out,
[10:39]it was, the licensing model was that people would take
[10:43]the right to market and manufacture the engine
[10:45]by national territory.
[10:46]So Adolfus Bush, the founder of Anaxia Bush,
[10:49]had it from North America.
[10:51]And he learned so much about him.
[10:53]He was a diesel pioneer using it initially
[10:55]to power pumps for water and his breweries,
[10:59]but also built a separate business,
[11:01]building diesel engines for the US Navy
[11:03]and they're submarine fleet.
[11:04]It's just a charming period of time
[11:06]that sort of gilded age, time, and the Catholic characters
[11:09]really is so fascinating.
[11:10]It's not so different fundamentally
[11:13]to what's happening in technology today or even like if,
[11:16]and I feel like this would be akin to Elon Musk
[11:19]just like up and disappearing, right?
[11:21]At the time being such a big deal.
[11:23]But even, I don't know if you saw this movie
[11:25]about the invention of the Palm and about the Blackberry.
[11:28]Did you watch this movie?
[11:29]Like nobody watches this movie?
[11:31]No, I didn't see that one.
[11:32]It's really interesting, but it's all about
[11:33]the building of the Blackberry company and the founders
[11:36]and then what happens at the end when Apple unveils the iPhone
[11:40]and how they didn't see it coming
[11:42]and the rise and fall of Blackberry.
[11:44]But it's so interesting because we see these companies
[11:47]and how this repeats itself through entrepreneurial history,
[11:50]really, of what happens when regulation, yes,
[11:54]and of course it happens with oil and diesel
[11:58]and all of that too, like who gets preferential treatment
[12:01]and why from different governments.
[12:03]But then just like what you do
[12:04]and how do you continue to innovate
[12:06]and who ends up making it through?
[12:07]I don't know, I find it absolutely fascinating.
[12:09]And as you say, there's a lot of that in here
[12:12]and standard oil plays a key role.
[12:14]And one of the reasons Rockefeller was such a suspect
[12:17]and had such a motive is Standard Oil was really
[12:19]on the ropes in 1930 because while Rockefeller
[12:22]was the richest man in the world already by that time,
[12:26]Standard Oil had made all their money through kerosene.
[12:28]They were really in the illumination business
[12:31]and lighting in the electric light bulb had come along
[12:33]and basically wiped out their prospects.
[12:36]Gasoline for all those decades had been a nuisance product
[12:39]that they would throw away.
[12:41]And then suddenly the combustion engine comes along
[12:44]and can run on gasoline and they have a lifeline
[12:46]except that diesel is potentially there to say,
[12:48]no, we don't need gasoline
[12:49]to run on vegetable oil.
[12:51]Amazing.
[12:52]One of my favorite parts is when you're going through
[12:55]your final conclusion and going back
[12:58]through different documents and how you said you found
[13:00]the Easter egg about 30 years.
[13:02]And you're like, maybe it's just me,
[13:03]but I think that's, I think that's what it was.
[13:05]LAUGHTER
[13:08]Were you just like so excited finding out all the stuff
[13:10]and being like, oh my God.
[13:12]You know, so when I was right, of course,
[13:14]I was seeing diesel everywhere.
[13:16]You know, he's just been under the surface all along
[13:19]around us everywhere.
[13:19]How I see diesel and it was, it was just yet another
[13:22]one of those moments, you know.
[13:24]Oh my gosh.
[13:25]So how you spent five years on it?
[13:28]How, what was the writing process like
[13:31]and how different was it from your fiction writing?
[13:35]It was a learning curve for me for sure
[13:37]and a very daunting one.
[13:39]Because as you know, when you sell a novel,
[13:42]you pretty much write the full manuscript
[13:43]and you sell the finished product
[13:45]or 95% finished and maybe you do a bit
[13:48]with your editor.
[13:49]And that's what I was used to.
[13:50]And, you know, unless you're a big name,
[13:51]you've earned two, three book deal or something like that.
[13:53]But with nonfiction, as I learned,
[13:55]you don't sell a finished book, you sell a proposal.
[13:58]And there's a very standard look for a proposal.
[14:00]It's roughly a 30 page document.
[14:02]There might be a sample chapter,
[14:03]but there's a cast of characters,
[14:05]discussion of the original research.
[14:06]You're gonna do a discussion of the competitive books
[14:09]in the market.
[14:11]So I learned from my agent how a proposal
[14:13]for a nonfiction book alert,
[14:14]who looks for the first time
[14:15]and worked through that,
[14:16]which was a very helpful process to me
[14:18]for me to think about structuring the book itself.
[14:21]But I've always done a lot of research
[14:23]for my novels as well.
[14:24]So the research piece,
[14:26]I have some background with and genuinely love doing.
[14:30]I miss working on this book.
[14:31]I would tell my wife and kids like,
[14:33]okay, I'm gonna go play with my imaginary friend,
[14:35]Rudolph Diesel for a little while.
[14:36]I'm like, disappeared in my office for a few hours.
[14:38]And I would tell enough stories to the family
[14:40]of the dinner table that he became
[14:42]this kind of three dimensional character in our own home.
[14:45]So I'm feeling his absence now,
[14:48]although I'm trying to get up talk about him,
[14:50]but I used to spend eight hours a day grinding away
[14:53]on his story and this investigation of what happened.
[14:57]Oh my gosh.
[14:58]So yeah.
[14:59]But one of the difference too,
[15:00]I guess quickly to know is that with fiction,
[15:01]I genuinely write by hand on yellow legal pads
[15:04]and then I type that in with non,
[15:06]and I try to stay away from the internet with nonfiction.
[15:09]I had, and I could do it anywhere.
[15:11]I can be on a plane or on a train or whatever.
[15:13]With the nonfiction writing,
[15:14]I had to sort of be in my spot.
[15:16]I had stacks of secondary research material around me.
[15:19]I do want to be on my laptop.
[15:20]I didn't write by hand at all.
[15:21]Everything was key then.
[15:22]And I was making little turns to the internet
[15:28]to look something up quickly or whatever.
[15:30]So it was a different, the mechanics of the writing
[15:32]were different as well.
[15:34]You write your novels by hand.
[15:36]That's wild.
[15:38]For those listening who aren't familiar with your novels,
[15:40]can you just describe them all
[15:42]and sort of even how you got into writing
[15:44]to begin with?
[15:45]Like what happened after idea lab
[15:47]for you to become a novelist?
[15:49]It's so fun to talk to you about this.
[15:50]Our perfectnial history is that overlap 20 some years ago.
[15:54]So from idea lab where you and I worked
[15:56]in around 99, 2000-ish, you started in LA
[15:59]and then came to New York, right?
[16:02]I was in New York only, although I made that trip
[16:04]to Pasadena one time, which was fun.
[16:07]From there, I joined a startup
[16:09]that was about three people in information security tech.
[16:13]And I became president and CEO of that,
[16:15]ran it for about 10 years and sold it 2011.
[16:18]In the last years that I was just so ground down
[16:20]and frustrated, there were some dynamics there
[16:23]where they were very challenging.
[16:24]I was traveling a ton and we had just had our second child.
[16:28]And my wife noticed your short tempered and burnt out.
[16:32]And maybe we should take a look at the long-term prospects
[16:36]of this situation by that time,
[16:39]because I've been traveling so much.
[16:40]I've always loved to read, I've always looked at Tinker
[16:43]with writing, but I never took any formal writing, training
[16:46]or an MFA or anything like that,
[16:47]but I've been takin' with a tinger of this idea for novel.
[16:50]And if you months later, I showed it to her,
[16:52]which is this very potentially awkward situation
[16:55]in a marriage because you know,
[16:57]about because you're other like,
[16:57]oh, so and so and so, and so, you're right,
[16:58]I've avoided that, but fortunately she liked it,
[17:02]encouraged me to get an agent
[17:04]and I was lucky to fairly quickly find one
[17:06]who also liked it and thought it needed a lot of work,
[17:08]but did that work for the agent?
[17:10]And then it was lucky to find a deal with SNS for the first book.
[17:13]So that one's called Ghost of Manhattan, set on Wall Street.
[17:16]It's really got a marriage, but it's set on Wall Street
[17:18]and the husband in the marriage is a traitor,
[17:20]fixed income traitor for Bear Stearns
[17:22]and talks about that bubble crash.
[17:24]The second one is called The Means
[17:25]and it's really political fiction.
[17:27]It explores the intersection of politics and media
[17:30]and follows the presidential campaign.
[17:31]It's thriller-ish, but sort of smart politics
[17:34]with a twist ending.
[17:35]And then the third is called Trophy Sun
[17:38]and that's about a young tennis prodigy
[17:41]and it really explores our achievement-obsessed culture,
[17:45]which is really not how you and I grew up.
[17:47]When you and I were coming home,
[17:48]our parents were like, be home by dinner
[17:50]and I'll ring the bell
[17:51]and but now everybody's scheduled with chess and sports
[17:53]and all these other things.
[17:55]And tennis is really the extreme end of that.
[17:57]So it explores a tennis prodigy going through that
[17:59]and on the research side,
[18:02]all these were much more contemporary.
[18:03]So for the tennis book I did interviews with John Isner
[18:05]and James Blake really helped out.
[18:08]And I always have found that a lot of research
[18:11]for fiction too helps you get it on the page
[18:13]in a more compelling and forceful way.
[18:16]So that kind of research on the diesel side,
[18:18]of course, no one's really living to do a lot of primary.
[18:22]Although I did find two of his descendants
[18:23]that I spoke with,
[18:25]but it was more on the secondary research archival side.
[18:28]Have you been watching the US Open?
[18:30]I have and have been loving it.
[18:32]The joke of a child for us story is great.
[18:35]Coco Gough is amazing,
[18:37]what an athlete she is and so composed.
[18:39]And so pre-thought for those folks,
[18:42]but really fun, love watching tennis.
[18:45]I went twice this year and just watching it.
[18:48]I was like drenched and I'm like,
[18:49]I cannot believe these players are doing operating
[18:52]on such an amazingly efficient body level
[18:56]in this extreme, hated, insane.
[18:57]But anyway, I remember we read the means
[18:59]for this book club I was in,
[19:01]which is how I even learned
[19:02]you had become an author.
[19:03]So funny.
[19:04]Oh, fun.
[19:05]Well, again.
[19:06]Yeah.
[19:07]Okay, so for your next book, what are you thinking?
[19:09]Well, I'm not sure yet.
[19:12]And I will say though that I wanna stay in the same period
[19:16]that quarter century leading up to World War I.
[19:20]And it's funny, my editor and I had this joke
[19:21]that one writer's footnote could be another writer's whole book.
[19:25]You can grab that and just run.
[19:27]And so I think that in this case,
[19:30]one of my footnotes will be my own next book.
[19:34]So there's one story in there
[19:37]that is just sort of a footnote tangent right now,
[19:40]but I'm really fascinated by it.
[19:41]So it'll probably be the same period
[19:42]and have a connection to Diesel.
[19:45]So interesting.
[19:46]Wait and tell me about your podcast.
[19:47]The podcast is called dedicated.
[19:49]I do it in partnership with SiriusXM
[19:51]and talk to top writers and we begin each episode
[19:56]with the guest favorite cocktail,
[19:57]which I have some bartending background.
[20:00]So I fixed a cocktail right on set and we have a drink and sometimes two or three and by
[20:06]the end of the show were a little tipsy, but both sometimes make for the best episodes.
[20:11]And it's a lot of fun to talk about the latest work and also life and behind the scenes stuff.
[20:15]I mean, it's really fun. It's a chance some of these folks or people I've known for a long time
[20:20]and are good friends like Amor Tolz came on and he and I had a fun catch up and other people that
[20:24]I've never met before, like Jennifer Eganers or someone. So it's been really fun. It's a chance
[20:29]for me to do a little bit more socially. You know, I miss the idea that days and we have a team and
[20:34]talking. I do embrace my alone time and I love writing, but it's fun to tap into something else
[20:40]wants to want to. I love talking to authors as we're doing right now. This is like meta conversation
[20:45]talking about authors while talking to an author about talking to other authors. But no, I think
[20:50]it's almost like you prolong the fun experience of reading, but you like bring it into life in a
[20:56]sanctioned way or something that you couldn't just sit around reading all day.
[21:00]No, that's that's true. Yeah. And so I actually it gets me reading too. I have to your point
[21:05]and passion. I have people on. I always do read the books. Sometimes I've already, you know,
[21:09]read their books years ago, but yeah, it's up to my reading game quite a bit. I'm more at like
[21:14]two or three books a week where I used to be a half a book a week probably. Yeah, we learned how to
[21:20]read really quickly to read. I think it is like a muscle. You can get a little, there's only
[21:25]so fast I can go. I'm not sure not a very fast reader, but I'm probably a little faster now than I
[21:29]was. Wait and go back to this whole writing with your why right by hand and how did that start?
[21:34]I'm like, you're like the last person doing this. Maybe one or two. It's like me and Nelson
[21:40]DeMille. I think it might be the last two. But although, you know, Jennifer, I think it does a
[21:44]little bit by hand. She's sort of a hybrid. The reason for me though is purely because I'm a
[21:49]hunt and peck kind of guy. Like I type with two or three fingers per hand. So it's like a prize
[21:55]fighter. You know, your ability per pound is good. So my word paste per finger is not bad,
[22:01]but only type of about four or five fingers. And so I'm really slow and I can't keep up. And
[22:06]it also helps me to have it on the page where I can draw arrows and cross sounds and how that
[22:10]works better for the way that I think. And then it's not totally wasted because I'll take those
[22:14]yellow legal pads. I usually write in the morning. And then in the afternoon, I'll type it in.
[22:18]And that's a chance to kind of comb the hair of it a little bit as it as it goes in.
[22:24]Interesting. So who is exciting coming up on your podcast or who have you talked to lately that
[22:29]was really interesting or? Let's see. So season one wrapped and season two starts this month
[22:36]in September. Scott Toreau will be one of the first. He's terrific. And so fine. I learned a lot.
[22:41]I didn't realize he was a practicing attorney. Even after presumed innocent, he's this celebrity
[22:46]lawyer writer. And then he bought you a courtroom and litigate people like, oh my god, I'm
[22:50]litigating a guy for real. Or they're even a judge to be like, this is weird. Like,
[22:55]everybody I've got to sort of run this circus. Who else is coming on? Fiona Davis?
[23:01]Oh yeah, I love her. And then last season, I really just had some great folks on David to
[23:07]cover me came on and Rick Springfield, who have both written novels and nonfiction stuff,
[23:12]Lee Child, who I love and is terrific. Nelson DeMille, anymore, told Jess Walter, who wrote beautiful
[23:17]ruins. Anna Quinlan came on. Love Anna. Really, really good stuff. Awesome. Amazing. We should
[23:24]like team up and do like a powerhouse. We got to, you know what, I'll do the Bart's ending. We'll
[23:29]co-host. And that would be fun. We should, we should come up. That would be fun. I don't know,
[23:36]we know which, the April spritzes or something. I don't usually make this. Okay, well, what advice
[23:43]do you have for aspiring authors? You know, the best advice I can give is I actually got this
[23:48]advice from this friend years ago. I hadn't written anything yet, but I had this idea
[23:54]because I had finished the Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille. And when I finished it, I thought,
[23:58]I want to make people feel the way this novel made me feel. I just love that book and
[24:02]remains one of my favorites. And I had an idea for a book and I was just sort of not getting
[24:08]going on it, which I think is an issue for a lot of people. And I was at this event with this guy.
[24:13]It was a songwriter. And I was telling them about it. And he was sort of half listening, you know,
[24:19]and I'm like, well, what do you think it goes? Just start writing. And then he like pounds the second
[24:24]half of this gin and tonic and walks off. And thought nothing of it. But for me, it was like, you
[24:29]know, he moved on to the bar, got his another gin and tonic. And that, but I was left standing,
[24:33]like, I kind of just have to start writing. And it was advice I probably heard 100 times before,
[24:37]but somehow in that moment, I heard it and it got in. And the next day I did do something about it.
[24:43]And I started just started writing an outline. And sometimes that's the easiest way to get in. It's
[24:48]for me, you know, like, Lee Child doesn't outline, anymore tolls obsessive outline, or he has
[24:54]drafts of his outline. I think outlining is a great step for me just to get started, just to get
[24:58]the motors, you know, moving. And so I started the outline, which is far easier to start than the
[25:03]first sense of page one. And then from there, it didn't look back. So I think the best advice is the
[25:09]most simple advice, which you may or may not hear this time, but maybe you'll hear it one time
[25:14]just start writing. Amazing. Love it. Great. Well, the last question I have is like, now that we
[25:19]have this new alternate theory to history, what do we do with that? Where does it go? Like, how do
[25:25]you get it into the encyclopedia of botanica? Like, how do you rewrite history at this time?
[25:29]I am hoping that through your podcast, and you get in the word out here, that encyclopedia
[25:34]botanica is listening. But I think that this will get, my hope is this will get some coverage.
[25:41]I mean, the deficit of appreciation for Rudolph Diesel is massive. Of course, you know,
[25:46]the engine. I mean, and one of the things is, to this day, it still powers the global economy.
[25:51]And imagine a tropical fruit growing in some, you know, some region around the equator,
[25:58]all the farm equipment used to grow at diesel powered. It gets loaded onto a truck.
[26:02]Anything large in my passenger car, diesel powered, a crane, diesel powered loads of
[26:06]onto a cargo ship, all cargo ships, diesel goes across the ocean, unloaded truck onto a train,
[26:13]a hundred percent of trains are diesel powered. Nothing moves without diesel more than 120 years
[26:18]later. And so the engine is sort of firmly established as, you know, the most important power source
[26:27]of the last century and remains our most important power source. But the appreciation of the man
[26:32]is just completely absent. And there's actually a photo on my website that has this little
[26:36]plaque of his home where he was born in Paris. He was an, you know, he had immigrated from Germany,
[26:41]was born in Paris. And there's like graffiti around it. And it's just this sad little thing. And so
[26:46]I hope that this book will put him up there with Ford and Tesla and Edison and others where he belongs.
[26:54]Amazing. Well, congratulations. And yeah, congrats. It was great.
[26:59]Oh, baby. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks a lot. All right. Okay. Bye, Doug.
[27:05]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to
[27:10]follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Also sign up for
[27:15]my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom
[27:20]every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[27:25]And thank you to morning moon productions for providing this fantastic intro and
[27:29]now trim music.